The machines of Kristoffer Myskja: Mysterious and a little bit funny (Apparatus #1). The videos themselves are serene and composed, more than just documentation.

Jan Vormann’s Dispatchwork (via Wooster Collective)

“Parasite is an independent projection-system that can be attached to subways and other trains with suction pads.” It’s a nice idea. I’d like to see actual footage, or better yet footage or work designed to be seen that way.

More Soon. See Disappointment and Tales of the Unexpected.

~

So much mention of coincidence in the interviews in The Emergence of Memory. I always think of coincidence in literature as a sort of deus ex machina. But the structure of Sebald’s work doesn’t require coincidence to hold it together. The coincidences that everyone talks about are more like a quiet illumination of connections that have always existed. They don’t, however, modify the construction of the narrative in any kind of an irreplaceable way. The narrative just seems to continue to find its own level, flowing around the connections. The narrator himself sometimes seems rocked by them, but often the impression they make on him is highly personal—concerning a birthday or a name. They feel like coincidences to the narrator, not necessarily to the reader. We understand why how the narrator might feel, but they aren’t personal to us…

I have a bunch of notes on the Ruth Franklin essay, but it is nearly impossible to make anything of them because I haven’t yet get got my hard copy of the book. Flipping through the broken electronic table of contents to try to figure out what on earth I meant is making me grind my teeth to a powder. In a real book I have a visual recollection of where ideas or sentences sit on the page or within the book. Here, ugh, all I do is crash the reader if I flip too fast. (Before I hear any more weeping and gnashing of teeth over how ebooks are too inexpensive,⁰¹ I would like to note that I have purchased exactly one ebook out of about forty in which the TOC or footnotes actually work, let alone the formatting. It’s mighty convenient to be able to carry around a little library in your pocket, but reading in this media is just that—a convenience, not yet a pleasure. Trying to flip through and recall a particular thought or idea is downright unpleasant. So I and a lot of other people I know buy duplicates of our favorites. Also—remember DRM? Everyone in my house who wants to read the same book has to purchase a copy. No used book purchases, no lending them out. And everyone knows that eventually we won’t own the books we’ve actually purchased. It’s only a matter of time and few changes of device and a few kinks in the system and boom, there goes everything. Nope, I think $9.99 is plenty for something so inevitably temporary and, at this point, so shoddily executed. Or to put it more politely, perhaps becuase of all that, we know we’re paying for an experience rather than an object, and our expectations of price reflect that.)