berglarized

Thursday, February 6, 2014

July: I just passed a monk and so the peacetime is in full effect

you were never very good at caring for me, he said.

she said: “it really has always been about whether you are being cared for and how much.”

man in need of mothering seeks fatherless friend.

Abelton does a nice job of using minimal text and maximal multimedia. I might add some alpha-ed black background to the text, but to each their own.

I also like the arrow teasing content “below the fold”

…reading papers and manuscripts is one thing. Looking through someone’s e-mail is quite another, and the feeling of creepiness and voyeurism that overcame me as I sat with Gonzalez struggled with the unstoppable curiosity that I feel about Sontag’s life. To read someone’s e-mail is to see her thinking and talking in real time. If most e-mails are not interesting (“The car will pick you up at 7:30 if that’s ok xxx”), others reveal unexpected qualities that are delightful to discover. (Who would have suspected, for example, that Sontag sent e-mails with the subject heading “Whassup?”) One sees Sontag, who had so many friends, elated to be in such easy touch with them (“I’m catching the e-mail fever!”); one sees the insatiably lonely writer reaching out to people she hardly knew and inviting them to pay a call. In their reactions, one reads their bemusement, how hesitant they were to bother the icon, with her fearsome reputation.

With the software available today, the biographer who strives to put himself in the position of his subject is faced with new conundrums. One of the most intriguing tools that Gonzalez deploys is a program called MUSE, which can search an e-mail database and map the writer’s feelings with uncanny accuracy. You can see categories such as “medical,” “angry,” and “congratulations”; you can see, on a graph, what percentage of the time in May, 2001, for example, Sontag was happy or sad or upset.

As I was marvelling at this technology, I wondered how I would feel if someone searched my e-mail and revealed that I uttered an average of three hundred and twenty-one bitchy remarks per month, and that my weekly horniness index ranged from 34.492 per cent to 56.297 per cent. Should we, simply because we can, boil down human emotions and lives in this way? Would Sontag have wanted her life analyzed like this? Would anyone?

Benjamin Moser on Sontag’s “implacable archives.” (via snpsnpsnp)

Relationships change over time spent online. Where I used to want to know everything about someone I loved, I now want to know only what he or she tells me. Anything I find out about that someone, from someone else, I rule inadmissible. In Tao Lin’s new novel, Taipei, his protagonist meets a girl and spends hours searching Facebook for any photos she might have untagged of herself. Reading this, I sympathized, and thought he had doomed his interest. It seemed unfair – both of and to Lin’s character – to not see her as she wanted to look.

me in the summer on Miranda July’s email project. Thought of it reading this. (via snpsnpsnp)

I can relate. I spent my first real relationship this way—not listening to what other people said, wanting his idea of himself to be the only one that I received. But the messages were mixed and in the end I could have used some help to discern them. These days I’m not sure which way is right.
Perhaps looking for someone’s untagged photos is akin to finding candid snapshots of someone when they’re unaware a photo is being taken, where—as Jennifer Egan once put it—you see how someone really looks.

snpsnpsnp:

Interviewer: Do you think people understand you?
Bresson: I don’t know if they understand me, but is the issue here the film or me? If its the film, I think - I’d rather people feel a film before understanding it. I’d rather feelings arise before intellect.

mein kampf

I’d rather feelings arise before intellect.