High summer is rolling in to Kansas City. The weather is hot, and I am again working day in, day out to water trees so that there will one day be enough shade around here. Can’t do anything about the humidity, though: we’re just going to have to live with it feeling like we’re nestled deep in Pantagruel’s armpit. Reading in a cool room, though, is just about the best thing in the world.
Read MoreI first encountered the song “Lungs” by Townes Van Zandt about a decade ago. It’s the musical sting at the end of the seventh episode of the first season of HBO’s True Detective, a show we watch annually in the spring. It seems to have little to do with the content of the scene, but the vibe is immaculate.
Read MoreThis is explicitly a function of nostalgia, but it is nostalgia had second-hand, where the original object is eerily absent, decontextualized and beginning to run down like William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, where the original recordings were physically destroyed in the process of transferring them over.
Read MoreThe problem, though, is that these tools will remain cheap, and will continue to be so even deep into their derangement. The people generating cognitive poison for children up above spend almost no money and almost as little time on their work. They can repeat this process hundreds of times in the space it takes a legitimate children’s book to be made. It produces garbage, but the margins are incredibly friendly. Why do six months of work that involves thought and skilled labor if you can just spend the same period of time churning out digital slop for the same payout?
Read MoreRereading it in preparation for the class, I was struck by a simple but surprisingly deep question: what does it mean for something to be haunted? Not on the surface, but as part of a deeper cultural question. What does it make sense to think of as being haunted?
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