One-Days: A Meditation on Rot and Reparative Care
This past weekend, I knelt on the concrete pad outside the back door of my house, contemplating the apotropaic gaping face of the outdoor outlet, burned beyond reconciliation by a combination of faulty cordage and bad decisions from a prior resident of this lore-heavy property. The context of this agamic, unavailing stare-off was the reel…
Nine of Swords; Lord of Cruelty
In reading Rivers, I cannot shake the image of the Nine of Swords; the messenger of the Tarot to say that something is uneasy, or perhaps one has been “tossed around by world” (57). I believe a throughline in Rivers’ piece is that in the act of consensual attention, we take up a certain degree…
Critically unmoored (or learning from a Yorkie)
The Yorkie is smaller in height than an average blade of grass. To her, everything is supersized, bombastically large, critically unmoored. There is no context, no meaning to convention beyond raw joy. She is open to everything and closed to none, the natural enemy of the attention economy aside from that of tennis balls. I,…
Digital philia
We are the product of ancient philia, oriented to a discipline because of a certain affection, held lightly or tightly. We are brought together in communities because of habitus, destined paths we cannot circumvent. I’d argue that the draw to rhetoric, the most ancient of all habitus, is a special call indeed. So how does…
Lightly tracked, deck stacked
I often feel like we never had a prayer in winning the so-called battle against technology, and now we are rapidly headed towards the loss of the war: as we revel in the “confession boxes” of our smartphones and the digitization of faux lives online that are so much greener than our own in the…
Kaleidoscopic Databaseology: Making Meaning of Knowledge Haunted and Corporeal
This entry ponders the significance of database as an act of theory-making in two phases: database as fate and database as canon-making. The intention of this work is to extend the consideration of formation of knowledge in digital spaces as an active process influenced by the metaphysical, an interwoven academic lifemaking that penetrates into the…
For the plot
Cued up from Hayles (2007) and Folsom (2007) I find the ponderance of databases as carefully plotted but also as wildly human, as collateral to whims and unbidden fantasy, and somehow distillable down to a character, an avatar made of code and thought and poorly translatable emotion. Can databases be alive, not because of their…