Father’s Day, Juneteenth 2022

Today two US holidays coincide: Juneteenth — long a commemoration of the 19th-century emancipation of enslaved African Americans that was not made an official US federal holiday until last year in 2021 — and Father’s Day — a more recent celebration started in the early 20th century, though recognized as a US federal holiday in … Read more

Eat Poop You Cat 2021

In 2018, our extended family played this game on New Year’s Eve and in 2021, we did it again, so I guess it’s a tradition now. Eat Poop You Cat, which some in our family call “The Drawing Game” is a variation of the game some call “Telephone”, where a message is passed from person … Read more

What difference does it make who is speaking?

Thanks to an ongoing discussion with @twigz that has now taken place over so many days and channels that I expect she’s ready to unfriend me (or worse), I’ve been thinking on the role of the author in networked digital culture and how it might be different from the established role of the author.

At the very end of his essay, What is an author?, Michel Foucault imagines a dramatic shift in the cultural role the author plays in the “modern” era that he so carefully lays out in the rest of the essay:

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W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn

As our inaugural book, we read W.G. Sebald‘s Rings of Saturn. Quotes [79-80] I suppose it is submerged memories that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a … Read more