http://chronolect.com writes, reads history, listens to hip hop, never gets enough sleep Tue, 18 Jan 2011 18:31:26 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en RETROFUTUROLOGY How the Past Saw the Present // How the Present Sees the Future Steam Piano image courtesy Adrian Agredo. OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, January 28, 8 PM ON VIEW: Friday, January 28 – Friday, March 5, 2011 HOURS: Thursdays & Fridays 3–6 PM, Saturdays & Sundays 12–6 PM Observatory is pleased ... http://chronolect.com/archives/985 RETROFUTUROLOGY "How the Past Saw the Present // How the Present Sees the Future" A group show of visual art at Observatory, Brooklyn, curated by the Hollow Earth Society, Ethan Gould & Wythe Marschall, Founding Colonels The imagination (as a productive faculty of cognition) is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second ... http://chronolect.com/archives/976 Fellow Observer Pam Grossman presents a talk on the grotesque that sounds rad: The Grotesque In Art: A Discussion With Dr. Nancy Hightower *Please note, this event will be taking place at the ISE Cultural Center in Manhattan: 555 Broadway between Prince and Spring.  Press buzzer for entrance and proceed to basement ... http://chronolect.com/archives/967 First, inhale this Surreal vision of Full House-era "fun," ritualistic/orgiastic mastication, overconsumption, and, uh, mozzarella: Tasty. Now—with no pants on but plenty of flow, Die Antwoord are everyone's favorite post-genre quasi-hip hop sex-obsessed musical... act? Are they an act a la bunraku? (The "real man" behind the Ninja is visibly, ... http://chronolect.com/archives/959 Check out this short essay on the question of self as posed by V. S. Ramachandran, one of my favorite writer–scientists (along with, recently, Carl Elliott). In the post: morality and dystopia. Some Rama-sentences I admire: ...Maybe the solution to the problem of the self won’t be a straightforward empirical one. It ... http://chronolect.com/archives/950 Anti-philosopher, literary critic, and erotica-obsessed overall word-genius Georges Bataille is a shadow-name, a name at the edges of theory. For every twenty references to a Derrida or a Foucault, there is but one to Bataille... I'm trying to read everything he wrote this year, and it's going swimmingly. He immediately ... http://chronolect.com/archives/947 The collective names for animals are rad. Perhaps approaching the same order of rad-ness are the terms for animals' homes, which vary from the common pig pen to these jams, my favorites: Ants live in a formicary, or mound The badger digs a sett The mole, for some reason, gets a fortress Otters ... http://chronolect.com/archives/942 Some caveman named Carl Paladino wants to be governor of New York but recently said in a Brooklyn speech/hate act: "I don't want them [my children] brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option—it isn't." (His speech apparently also included the line, "There is nothing to be proud ... http://chronolect.com/archives/938 Inspiration is a strange beast, and it comes shambling out of the shadows of the strangest nooks (books, movie posters, coronas of a women's hair on the subway, long quiet moments in street, in the rain, &c.). Recently I find myself more and more drawn to/inspired by animals, what animals are. ... http://chronolect.com/archives/933 I wrote this post ages ago but never published it. Presumably it is unfinished. Presumably, however, all small meditations are the comprehensible unfinished eggs of longer meditations, the "compleat" meditations that dwell in our heads and keep us up at night. When I finally have time to write them all ... http://chronolect.com/archives/480 Read them today! Or whenever! The poems concern: The minotaur, a poetical figure combining the bull (Bos taurus) and the man (Homo sapiens sapiens). Extinct animals we have only recently discovered. And now must mourn. I wrote these poems in the spring and sat on them for a while, meditating on loss and the ... http://chronolect.com/archives/926 Read the review on The Outlet. Part of my ongoing series on novellas (thanks as ever to New Directions and NYRB). In this review: Nazis Scooby-Doo The amazing Jakov Lind Cannibalism Ahab "Chronotrope: All of Europe’s madness... unleashed in a half-decade, the monster slouching out of modernity, not just towards Bethlehem but towards every quiet ... http://chronolect.com/archives/923 (Because I do not watch football...) But I did make this dope-ass logo: And my team = THE BROOKLYN SNAKES. YEAAAH! http://chronolect.com/archives/882