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Rob Swigart has been a journalist, a research affiliate at the Institute for the Future, a technical writer for Apple Computer, designer and writer of several computer games, secretary of the board of the Electronic Literature Organization, and is the author of nine novels, the latest of which is Xibalba Gate, A Novel of the Classic Maya. An interactive novel, Portal, was published in 1986 on computer disk and two years later in ‘hard copy’. Rob Swigart has been a journalist, a research affiliate at the Institute for the Future, a technical writer for Apple Computer, designer and writer of […]
the hypertext murder case “Hypertext is dead – ” declared Markku Eskelinen at Digital Arts and Culture ’99 in Atlanta. “Cybertext killed it.” No doubt, interesting hypertext poetry and fiction remains to be written, but – if we consider hypertext as a category that defines a special, valid space for authorship and criticism of computerized works of writing – Eskelinen is clearly right. The hypertext corpus has been produced; if it is to be resurrected, it will only be as part of a patchwork that includes other types of literary machines. One viable category today, perhaps the most interesting one […]
I. The Planet Killers Elizabeth Kolbert throws up her hands at the end of her three-part New Yorker investigative series on the whys and wherefores of global warming: “It may seem impossible to imagine that a technological society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing” (63). I’ve been thinking for some time about this notion of choice: that we could choose self-destruction is a datum in great need of explanation by anyone who styles himself an ecocritic. The resources of poetry and literature and art are not particularly […]
A recording of searing, unrelenting pain sounds has just started screaming on this page. Perhaps you have not noticed. Perhaps, like me, all sounds are painful to you and you routinely turn off the volume to live in silence (Colucci 2021). Or you are hard of hearing. Or your computer is malfunctioning. Perhaps, then, as you are now reading this in silence, you are wondering what signifiers you are missing—what clues are going unheard. Are the sounds vital to convey the full meaning of the piece? Is this piece like r(a/u)pture music where you see the multi-modal words converge—the rap […]
Having been here once here now once again. -Magdalena, Twilight, A Symphony To repeat evidently implies resemblance, yet can we speak of resemblance unless there is difference? -Peter Brooks I was sitting on my screened porch in the afternoon sunshine, cocktail in hand, the LCD screen of my laptop casting a pleasant glare in my face. I had, for whatever reason, decided that my reading of Michael Joyce’s latest hypertext fiction had come to a resting point, and it was time to mull over some recent criticism. Scanning through some online articles, my keyboard fearing for its life as my […]
It only takes a glance at the cover to get a feel for where Loss Pequeño Glazier’s new book is headed. The cover art for Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries first looks like a typographic jumble (an image of the cover is available at the book’s online appendix). Grey lines of text – mostly HTML code and Unix commands – run down the right side of the cover, immediately signifying “computerness.” The main title of the book is printed in a red X-shaped pattern that is overlaid on top of the light gray text. The top portion of the […]
From the outset, electronic textuality has been promoted through a kind of academic version of a hacker ethos. Just as hackers proclaim that “information wants to be free” and computers will democratize the world, proponents have celebrated electronic textuality for bursting out of the strictures imposed by print, and theorized its role in undermining hierarchies in the university and culture at large. This ethos has been grounded in an epistemology which has remained relatively implicit and therefore unquestioned. One finds an underlying sense in hypertext theory that electronic textuality is somehow more “natural,” more inherently suited to the human mind. […]
Artist Eduardo Kac writes on the attractions of the hologram as a malleable, fluid, and elastic medium for poetic expression. Experimental poetry followed many directions in several countries in the twentieth century. Each new direction attempted to address the historical, cultural, and often political needs of its own time. Between 1978 and 1982 I worked with countless experimental poetic styles, trying to develop my own direction. I explored traditional versification, recitation, body-based performance, visual poetry, graffiti, collage, typography, color, object-poems, sound, and a number of other possibilities. As a result of this relentless experimentation, I felt on the one hand […]
On the present and future of hypertext poetics (circa 1997). When a lifeline of words is dangled for an instant before meaning about to go under, or when some desperate insight pulls a knife on language, what happens next is poetry – that extraordinary product of extreme circumstances in which every verbal action has to count. A line of poetry is a walk along a high ledge, and one false word can mean a plunge to the prosaic parking lot below. Nothing less than “the best words in the best order,” to quote Coleridge’s no-nonsense definition of the art form, […]
From Zukofsky’s “A” to Powers’ Goldbug Variations, in search of a social ecology of the self-discursive text. Prelude In what follows, I compare the work of a (very much alive) novelist with that of a (very much dead) poet. Specifically, I compare a recent (long) novel to a not-so-recent (long) poem. In doing so, I read what some will call “content” across two distinct literary genres. My reason for reading Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations over and against Louis Zukofsky’s “A” is to help bring into clearer focus why we might do well to turn more of our critical […]
De Witt Douglas Kilgore reviews Technoscience and Cyberculture. Almost forty years ago C.P. Snow set the terms for a struggle between science and the humanities which yet shows little sign of resolution. In the mid-1950s Snow found that scientific and literary intellectuals lived in two cultures, watching each other with either “frozen smiles” or “hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding.” By 1963 he discerned the emergence of a third culture in the universities of the United States as American academies strove to bring together the disarticulated halves of the intellectual culture. Subsequent events suggest that his […]
Apologies: This is not a ‘balanced’ review of the Hypertext ’97 conference, but only, as Ted Nelson would put it, one particular, packaged, ‘point of view’. I haven’t named all the names I should have or even many and I have not explicitly acknowledged the herculean efforts of the many organizers. Readers are referred to the full published conference proceedings, The Eighth ACM Conference on Hypertext, edited by Mark Bernstein, Leslie Carr, and Casper Osterbye (New York: ACM, 1997). My perspective is that of a practitioner of literary cybertext. This piece was written quickly as a draft towards a (probably […]
Considering hypertext as a subset of cybertexts, Markku Eskelinen offers seven examples of how to implement Espen Aarseth’s seven-fold typology. Still, what would theory be worth if it were not also good for inventing practice? – Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited introduction There’s at least one serious downside to Espen Aarseth’s cybertext theory: reviewed by Nick Montfort in ebr winter 00/01 it puts, or is very capable of putting, an end to hype in the rapidly expanding field of digital textuality, where it seems there are always newcomers who can’t make a living without fashionable exaggerations and homebred buzzwords (like […]
New media in a book, metafiction in hypertext: the printed book, as yet, is the more hospitable medium. (The New Media Reader; Figurski at Findhorn on Acid.) 1 If there is a bound codex that writers of hypertext and new media artists have been waiting for, The New Media Reader is it. In its 823 pages the editors sample the work of a stunning array of writers, designers, programmers, scientists, and artists. Italo Calvino and Robert Coover stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Jan L. Bordewjik and Ben van Kaam, authors of “Towards a New Classification of Tele-Information Services” and, for less surprising […]
Jim Rosenberg sends a shot of grammar straight across the bow of Nick Montfort’s controversial Cybertext review, adding volume to a volley already in progress Nick Montfort’s review of Espen Aarseth’s book Cybertext, “Cybertext Killed the Hypertext Star,” ebr 11, has much to say about cybertext which is useful. I have found the concept of cybertext to be a useful generalization of hypertext and many other forms of electronic writing, and have taken to using the term a good deal myself. I’m not sure I disagree with Montfort on the fundamentals of cybertext. However, Montfort’s essay contains numerous assertions on […]
One “is no longer maintaining a public online presence” (as if you could ever really be “present” on the Web). The other blogs away like it’s going out of style (and some can only hope). The first time I used the word blog I was walking through a park long ago and I needed a word to describe what I had just stepped in. At their worst, weblogs promise to be reality television’s revenge on literature; at their best, they are a digital art form that promises to keep us extraordinarily human. I intend to keep my mind open. And […]
Stuart Moulthrop re-opens the debate on the “electronic book” and its continued marginalization vis-a vis print. Dear Editors: Praise to Dave Ciccoricco for a thoughtful, comprehensive, and notably open-minded essay on the contours of “contour” and other vicissitudes of Joyce-Bolter-Bernstein hypertext. I welcome an account that gives both eros and engineering their due; and for all the iconography of cairns and monuments, I’m glad to read something that isn’t a premature death notice. I do take friendly objection to one point the author makes in closing, citing my opposition to the concept of “electronic books.” Mr. Ciccoricco writes: “Clearly, ‘electronic […]
Joel Felix listens in on Postmodern Culture’s privatization debate. The Pitch Postmodern Culture , the gray old lady of electronic discourse just a link away from ebr and all other web-based journals, I emphasize this non-geographical proximity for several reasons: Web-based journals and e-zines are subjected to the same economic and rhetorical laws by nature of their material (or, non-material, as this case entails) expression. Internet based forums for “critical inquiry” (whether from ebr, PMC, C-Theory, Salon, Suck) may differ in content/rhetorical modes (academic/peer-reviewed or expressly public sphere/ political or simply parodic/sarcastic), yet are materially examples of electronic discourse. What […]
Introduction: LudologyA concept introduced to computer game studies by Gonzalo Frasca in 1998.and Narratology It is relatively stress-free to write about computer games, as nothing too much has been said yet, and almost anything goes. The situation is pretty much the same in what comes to writing about games and gaming in general. The sad fact, with alarming cumulative consequences, is that they are under-theorized; there are Huizinga (1950), Caillois (1979), Ehrmann (1969), and Sutton-Smith (1997, Avedon and Sutton-Smith 1971) of course, and libraries full of board-game studies, in addition to game theory and bits and pieces of philosophy — […]
Hypertext Fiction and Its Critics Although games, visual art, and textual experiments had long been areas of academic research, the first artistically convincing explorations of literary computing appeared in the late 1980s. It was only in these years that computers became sufficiently commonplace that a computational creation could realistically hope to find an audience. Of equal importance was the gradual acceptance of Ted Nelson’s thesis (Nelson 1976) that computers could be tools for artistic expression, for even in 1982 the title of Nelson’s Literary Machines was meant to shock and surprise. The final and critical step, first taken by an […]
Vannevar Bush wanted his Memex to intercept and capture the neural circuits of the stenographer who could reduce his words to a phonetic code on the fly, whose encoding practice was encompassed by her body. As an electronic poet, I want to do the same thing, not from the position of Bush, outside the device, but from the position of the stenographer, attached to it. In her body, words moved through her as she moved, a fluent circuit of meaning that she hosted, instigated, permitted, understood, explored, and enjoyed. Bush exhibited some justified fear as to whether her practice would […]
Praise for the body art of Camille Utterback, and commentary on controls. Early on in the feature film Superman, reporter and professional victim Lois Lane falls from a helicopter dangling from the roof of a New York skyscraper. Plummeting to her certain death, she is rescued in mid-air by Superman (aka: a man made of steel [and, for all we know, in some instances, of bits and bytes]), in his first appearance both in Metropolis and in the film. Such is his innate tenderness and his fine-tuning as a deus ex machina that he alters his ascending velocity to her […]
You have to admire the conceit of a book that wishes to, and in a post-something moment so adroitly, reflexively become that which it cannot be. In First Person we have an object that preserves the fetish of the book by being a book, yet like all recent books in this branch of the humanities can only maintain and insist on its status as the privileged vehicle of knowledge by becoming a desirable object in its own right. Gone are the Guttenberg days of protestant print, simple black on white. Our books now have become designerly, beautiful to view and […]
Clocking in at five-hundred eight-five pages, the gosh-darn-it, point-no-fingers and name-no-names stance of The 9/11 Commission Report subverts its own purported mission. But if you want to know why 3,000 plus Americans were murdered on their way to work three summers ago – and why our government still doesn’t get it – a recent study by the prolific Islamic scholar Malise Ruthven asks us to try out some of the following random propositions: Jesus Christ was the first-ever corporate body. The machismo of the 9/11 hijackers was inspired in part by a cheesy American action-adventure film, starring Kurt Russell, called […]
“Oboyoboy just when we’d wrung the last nostalgia from that Desert Storm, by golly WE GET TO DO IT AGAIN!” From the node, “Balanced Coverage,” in Victory Garden (1991). One of the many narrative voices of Victory Garden comments derisively here on the “media men” who are “just about falling over themselves with crisis-lust,” unsated by the fact that they have just broadcast a war with the highest quality production values in history. The speaker refers to the dual crises of Hurricane Bob and the Moscow coup in August of 1991, but the reference may just as well be to […]
Auguste Comte and the followers of positivism would most likely disagree, but I think it’s fair to say that current consensus is that the discourse of the sciences can make no more persuasive claim to be the sole voice of the True or the Real than did the discourses of theology or metaphysics. As much as anyone’s critique of scientific positivism, Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical analyses of the history and philosophy of the sciences, particularly The Order of Things, effectively put an end to science’s claim to speak with a pure objectivity. Whether you agree with Foucault’s arbitrary approach to […]
The Cheshire cat is a particularly apt metaphor for the elusive prize that in Paul Gilory’s Against Race, at least, is called pragmatic planetary humanism: the recognition that fundamental corporeal fragility can serve to promote a sense of heterogeneous species unity. The nature of the cat is ambiguous. It is neither friend nor foe but possibly both, or neither, or something else altogether. The cat never communicates meaning directly; only ever speaking in riddles and puns. The cat is always and never a tangible presence: just at the moment when it appears to be most vulnerable to capture, it vanishes […]
I’ll start here in a manner typical of responses to optimism: it would be nice to think that the ever-increasing technological facilitation of communication, along with the commodification of deeper and deeper territories of the lifeworld, might bring about a more widespread, immanent, and intimate form of democracy. Certainly it doesn’t feel this way. In the small world of higher education, for example, more intensive commodification, the breakdown of the curriculum into discretely purchased credit hours, has transformed intellectuals into mini-CEOs. The withdrawal of modern-era public funds accompanying the decline of the welfare state has produced among administrators, and increasingly […]
Karim A. Remtulla asks to what degree postfeminism is identical with hactivism? This piece is intended as a further discussion of Carolyn Guertin’s “From Cyborgs to Hacktivists: Postfeminist Disobedience and Virtual Communities” (2005). Guertin contends that, “In the cyberfeminist corner of the postfeminist universe girl gamers like Brenda Laurel and Mary Flanagan immediately spring to mind; so too do techno-performers like Laurie Anderson and Coco Fusco, and new media artists like Mez or Olia Lialina, but the most important and distinctive Web-native postfeminist form is, I would argue, hacktivism.” This statement, for me, warrants some further exploration. Firstly, Guertin does […]
I will allow my title to be misleading. I do not intend to respond directly to Francis Raven’s review beyond a few remarks at the outset of this note. At the risk of being blunt, and in the interests of avoiding beating around the bush: Francis Raven entirely misses the point of Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. He does not in any way address what Lessig argues is the book’s point, what I understand to be perhaps the most significant issue facing American and global culture […]
Marie-Laure Ryan has perhaps done more to extend narrative theory in light of digital media than any other critic to date. In one sense, this is all the more reason to scrutinize the works that constitute her prolific contribution to a field growing in both size and sophistication. Scrutiny is exactly what the reviewers of Ryan’s Narrative as Virtual Reality provide and the reviewers do identify points of imprecision in the organization and presentation of the categories upon which the study is built. The review, however, manifests a degree of imprecision itself, which motivates my own response. The review is […]
Everything that happens, happens now. Projects in development bring forward past publications, in ‘gatherings’ that ebr‘s editors create each time a new ‘thread’ is introduced. At the moment (Fall 2006) we anticipate the appearance of a print volume, Fiction’s Present, edited by Jeffrey Dileo and longtime ebr contributor, R. M. Berry. And with that ‘longtime,’ we recall what is by now a substantial set of ebr essays by Berry and numerous other writers of fiction. These essays, collected now under the thread title, Fictions Present, reaffirm the ‘presentist’ bias in electronic publishing and in ebr particularly, since our non-periodical, continuous […]
Before 1973, if you had said something like “games are a storytelling medium,” just about anyone would have looked at you as if you were mad – and anyone knowledgeable about games would have assumed you knew nothing about them. Before 1973, the world had essentially four game styles: classic board games, classic card games, mass-market commercial board games, and the board wargame. None of these had any noticeable connection to story: There is no story in chess, bridge, Monopoly, or Afrika Korps. But in the early 1970s, two things happened: Will Crowther’s computer game adventure Colossal Cave,The date of […]
Or else perhaps he may invent A better than the poet meant, As learned commentators view In Homer more than Homer knew. –Jonathan Swift, On Poetry: A Rhapsody One must be an inventor to read well. –Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar In a word, Gregory Ulmer has recommended heuretics. As the paradigm that we have come to know as “literacy” shifts to something else, which Ulmer calls “electracy,” heuretics is a readiness strategy. It is more than that, certainly. But from the start, I want to emphasize that heuretics is a way to prepare for writing in – both […]
1. These brief notes are offered in place of something longer and more fully considered, for which there will probably never be time. These days, reflection is a luxury in most working lives, and it comes particularly dear for those who work in cybertext, which can claim neither the high-cultural entitlements of literature nor the market appeal of video games, but subsists on the margins of those worlds, among others. Most who move in this edgy space are amateurs, obsessives, and/or academics, people driven by, if not to, distraction. We are always “of two minds,” as Michael Joyce (1975) put […]
Richard Powers and Tom LeClair have distinguished themselves as leaders in each of their respective fields. Powers has long been acknowledged as one of America’s best writers, receiving the 2006 National Book Award for his most recent work The Echo Maker. LeClair is held in high esteem as a critic who has championed difficult postmodern writers such as Don DeLillo and William Gaddis along with being an influential voice in establishing Powers’ reputation. He has also written four novels with his most recent work The Liquidators published in the summer of 2006. Powers and LeClair have a long history together, […]
Pax is, to say the least, a confusing text. But more than being about confusion, Pax is also a confused text, literary for sure, but not quite literature, negotiating some rather hazy boundaries between “literature and ludology” (Moulthrop 149). This is not meant as a criticism but rather an observation meant to focus on a central feature of the work, indeed its principle aesthetic qualities seem to derive from its confusing nature. Thus in order to engage Pax one should first recognize that any attempt to mount a critique of it or Moulthrop’s exegesis will necessarily be informed by this […]
Within the privileged zone that bears the demand to produce a book in the first place, nothing, one might say, brings one closer to what Jameson called the “commodity structure of academic intellectual life” than the task of filling out one’s publisher’s marketing questionnaire. Please describe, one is more or less importuned, in any of several standardized variations, what makes your book unique. Not what one’s book shares, as it inevitably does share, with all the work it builds on, and with which it is in present or proleptic dialogue, among its rival products – but rather what most clearly, […]
Sandy Baldwin investigates the manner in which a computer “ping trace” can be classified as a form of digital poetics, and discusses the underlying symbolic practices of both poesis and poetics that encompass coding and computation. An earlier version of this essay was given at the 2008 Electronic Literature Conference in Vancouver, WA. Thanks to all who listened and commented. “Only the imagination is real.” William Carlos Williams Hello Baghdad. Hosts are open, packets receiving. I’m in Iraq in milliseconds. But the DoD turns me back, their firewall refusing to echo, ending my request. I tell you the net is […]
Alice Bell (Sheffield Hallam), Astrid Ensslin (Bangor), Dave Ciccoricco (Otago), Hans Rustad (Hedmark), Jess Laccetti (Grant MacEwan) and Jessica Pressman (Yale) Introduction The sky was the color of a screen, churning code into a maelstrom. It blew through the Wheel of Sheffield, and we blinked amid the post-utopian flicker of hypertext theory and the fast shadows of the Late Age of Print. A viral meme circulated above us, growing, morphing, forming a cloud of tags: digital media—literary practice—literary study—reading—art—materiality. Below us were roots turning fields of promiscuous linkages into systems. Revolutions take time, some (read: Gutenberg) much more than others […]
Stuart Moulthrop uses the lessons of hypertext as both an analogy and an explanation for why hypertext and its criticism will stay in a “niche” – and why, despite Bell’s concern, that’s not such a bad thing. As the response of an author to his critic, addressed to “thee,” “implicitly dragging her into the niche with me,” this review also dramatizes the very productivity of such specialized, nodal encounters. Whirl around long enough on the event horizon of contemporary culture and you will find yourself apologizing to ghosts, speaking to persons who have quit the scene, copping to offenses no […]
Prologue: Life on Mars Narratives that require that their viewers fill in crucial elements take … complexity to a new level. To follow the narrative, you aren’t just asked to remember. You’re asked to analyze. This is the difference between intelligent shows, and shows that force you to be intelligent. (italics added) – Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You In episode one of the BBC police drama Life on Mars (2006 – 2007), our hero, Sam Tyler, walking through a busy street in Manchester, England, the Who’s “Baba O’Reilly” playing on the sound track, contemplates the show’s central […]
In the second installment of a six-week discussion, contributors search for examples of Critical Code Studies “in the wild.” Instead of asking how code can be read critically, they examine how code is already being created and disputed by lawyers, programmers, and the general public. Editor’s Note: In the second installment of the discussion that took place in the summer of 2010, Jeremy Douglass leads the Critical Code Studies Working Group in exploring the practical challenges and constraints of reading code critically, with an emphasis on real-world examples. An introduction and overview for this week by Mark Marino and Max […]
Caroline Levine argues that Jason Mittell’s attempts to classify The Wire by genre results in “some slippery logic, some fruitful and provocative but not altogether persuasive argumentative moves in Mittell’s own game.” She suggests that examining the show through the lens of form – not genre – clarifies why it warrants comparisons with texts like Bleak House: both works attempt to represent the distinctly networked quality of urban social life. Jason Mittell’s provocative essay is exactly the kind of argument that is good to think with – it prompts a new alertness to facile and wooly assumptions. Mittell charges that […]
Colin Davis’ Critical Excess is an important book: examining, as the subtitle suggests, what Davis calls “overreading” or “over interpretation” in the critical practice of Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Žižek, and Cavell (but also Gadamer, Heidegger, and Lacan), it is a call for more textual analysis, for more attention to the page, for that thing our undergraduate students (and, perhaps, family and friends) accuse us of all too readily: reading too much into it. Typically, then, in my reading of Davis, I read too much into it, or I read too much around it, spending weeks at a time boning up […]
In a discussion of Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of information, N. Katherine Hayles writes, The theory makes a strong distinction between message and signal. Lacan to the contrary, a message does not always arrive at its destination. In information theoretic terms, no message is ever sent. What is sent is a signal. Only when the message is encoded as a signal for transmission through a medium—for example, when ink is printed on paper or when electrical pulses are sent racing along telegraph wires—does it assume material form. (18) It’s hard enough, for most literary scholars, to think about print and […]
In week five, Stephen Ramsay performed a live reading of a livecoding performance: in a video, he presented a spontaneous commentary over a screencast of Andrew Sorensen’s “Strange Places,” a piece Ramsay had never seen before. The screencast showed Sorensen using Impromptu, a LISP-based environment for musical performance that he had himself developed, to improvise a piece of music; Sorenson developed the piece’s musical themes by composing and editing code. The video allowed the audience to watch Sorenson write and edit his code in the Impromptu editor window. This presentation inspired a discussion that broke livecoding down into two overlapping […]
Introduction Creators of electronic literature are progressing toward a more pervasive employment of the “ludic” — of the spirit of play inhabiting not just the writing, and not just the programming, but both in an elaborate, symbiotic combination. The tradition of “ludic” writing is well-rehearsed in criticism of electronic literature, for example in the magisterial anthology The New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. The tradition starts somewhere with the Oulipo, a group of writers and mathematicians who sought to delete chance and subjectivity from their work by the employment of extreme constraints,George Perec, Raymond Queneau, Italo […]
“…with wonderful skill, he carved a figure, brilliantly, out of snow-white ivory, no mortal woman, and fell in love with his own creation.” —Ovid, The Metamorphoses, Book X “Criticism can talk, and all the arts are dumb. In painting, sculpture, or music it is easy enough to see that the art shows forth, but cannot say anything.” —Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism “Yes, it hurts being carved. The stone beyond the boundary of oneself is numb, but there always comes a time when the chisel or the point reaches down to where feeling begins, and strikes.” —Emily Short, “Galatea” Introduction […]
Since this is a paper about the computational context of literary writing, and to some extent poetry, I have invested heavily in metaphor, at least as far as the title is concerned. Taking key terms in no particular order: by end I mean not so much terminus as singularity or convergence of opposites, that defining, indefinable point where turn becomes return as one state gives way to another; from the imperative lift, I take both the sense of elevation or burdening (lift up) and appropriation (shoplifting); and by the numinous article this, I will eventually mean the inescapable subject of […]