(no subject)
The semester is... technically done? I guess? Not exactly technically; I still have to turn in final grades. But all the other stuff is in, with the exception of a few stragglers. So far I've had minimal bitching about grades. Grading 60 7-10 page papers in less than 48 hours wasn't as painful as I was afraid it would be. I'm dealing.
Writing isn't pounding along at the pace I usually prefer but I'm dealing with that too.
I did finally collect/repost what is probably my favorite thing that I've ever written for Cyborgology--and it got tweeted about by Bruce Sterling again, which kind of made me squirm with delight/embarrassment. It's here: The Atemporality of “Ruin Porn”: The Carcass & the Ghost
We can and should understand abandoned places as atemporal spaces in and of themselves - they are physical spaces in which the experience of linear time breaks down. Through the experience of the space, explorers and photographers (and blends of the two) break out of a conventional experience of the present and into a space where the artifacts of history feel at once fresh and new, and ancient and decayed. Imagination is key to the atemporal experience of these places: One can exist in an abandoned, ruined space and see shards of a dead past on which one can construct a live imagining - who were the people who lived and worked here? What were their lives like? What were their stories? What happened to them? What happened to them in these spaces?
Imagining along these lines explicitly carries one forward into the future; it’s at this point that the construction of the unruined past becomes the imagining of the ruined future. Ruins serve as a kind of spatial memento mori for people embedded in a culture marked by production and consumption (and prosumption) of the new and by the invisibility of the discarded: They are gentle reminders of our own transience. They lead us to questions just as the imagining of the past did: What will our contemporary structures look like in fifty years? In a hundred? Who will remember us? Who will stand in our abandoned spaces and wonder about us? We can imagine these things because they suggest an end without really being an ending - there is always, after all, someone else to look and wonder, comfortingly embodied in ourselves.
And then last night I tried cosmic nails and I think it actually came out okay for a first attempt:
And I've decided that I need to think of my dissertation as a book as opposed to a really fucking long paper and I already feel more excited about it.
And tonight I don't have much to do besides read fic/the novel in progress and watch Angel and tag.
So basically life doesn't suck right now. Let's keep that rolling, shall we?
This entry was originally posted (with
comments) at my Dreamwidth.
Writing isn't pounding along at the pace I usually prefer but I'm dealing with that too.
I did finally collect/repost what is probably my favorite thing that I've ever written for Cyborgology--and it got tweeted about by Bruce Sterling again, which kind of made me squirm with delight/embarrassment. It's here: The Atemporality of “Ruin Porn”: The Carcass & the Ghost
We can and should understand abandoned places as atemporal spaces in and of themselves - they are physical spaces in which the experience of linear time breaks down. Through the experience of the space, explorers and photographers (and blends of the two) break out of a conventional experience of the present and into a space where the artifacts of history feel at once fresh and new, and ancient and decayed. Imagination is key to the atemporal experience of these places: One can exist in an abandoned, ruined space and see shards of a dead past on which one can construct a live imagining - who were the people who lived and worked here? What were their lives like? What were their stories? What happened to them? What happened to them in these spaces?
Imagining along these lines explicitly carries one forward into the future; it’s at this point that the construction of the unruined past becomes the imagining of the ruined future. Ruins serve as a kind of spatial memento mori for people embedded in a culture marked by production and consumption (and prosumption) of the new and by the invisibility of the discarded: They are gentle reminders of our own transience. They lead us to questions just as the imagining of the past did: What will our contemporary structures look like in fifty years? In a hundred? Who will remember us? Who will stand in our abandoned spaces and wonder about us? We can imagine these things because they suggest an end without really being an ending - there is always, after all, someone else to look and wonder, comfortingly embodied in ourselves.
And then last night I tried cosmic nails and I think it actually came out okay for a first attempt:
And I've decided that I need to think of my dissertation as a book as opposed to a really fucking long paper and I already feel more excited about it.
And tonight I don't have much to do besides read fic/the novel in progress and watch Angel and tag.
So basically life doesn't suck right now. Let's keep that rolling, shall we?
This entry was originally posted (with
comments) at my Dreamwidth.