But time and my attention are not unlimited. Both are finite.

So I’ve got to make choices about what gets the time and attention that I do t need to invest in work or parenting…

I’m going to assume you (whoever you are) are experiencing your own version of this, and that you too are frustrated by it.

This post is my attempt to express a form of solidarity with you.

-N

The word monster has its etymological roots in the Latin monstrare and French montrer: to show or make apparent.

The association that came to me as I read this is that we all have a monster inside of us; we are all capable of monstrous things (i.e., under the right circumstances, anyone can become a monster).

Psychoanalysis is a lot of different things. One of the ways I’d describe it is a way to try to get to know the monster inside of us.

Content: 
I talk about 

• The Weather 
• Buying books and then reading them... or... as is more likely, not reading them. 
• WWE Elimination Chamber
• [S][J][P] - Surplus Jouissance Projects. 

Referenced: 

• WWE
• Elimination Chamber 2024
• Peacock

INTRO:
It has been too long since I last made a QTS. Here is episode 013.

REFERENCED: 

• Cyberpunk genre
• These dino eggs from Lakeshroe Learning
• Joe Frank
• Anne Carson's Grief Lessons: four Plays by Euripides (Amazon)

My then girlfriend (now wife) had lived in Miniapplious and still knew lots of people there that she wanted to see. Given that I was going, and she liked being around me, and I liked being around her, we decided it would be a good idea to go together.

While we were there, we went to a bookstore. She bought something but would not let me see what it was because it was a gift for my birthday, which was not far away.

When my birthday arrived, I finally saw what she had bought. It was the book Float by Anne Carson. This was the first Anne Carson I had ever read, but I've been hooked on her work since.

Here is an example of Carson's style.

I'd like to give you a sense of Carson's style, and I found something that I think does the job.

The story gets really interesting and oddly funny around the 9:55 mark. But you have to listen to everything before that for the humor to work.

Coming soon:

I plan to do more blogging about Anne Carson over the next week.

One night, when I was leaving, I started my car, and the radio was tuned to 91.5 WBEZ, the local NPR station. I heard a deep voice speaking in a deadpan manner. I turn it up. I can't believe what I'm hearing. It is amazing. I'd never heard anything like this on the radio, and now, all these years later, I still haven't.

It was the voice of Joe Frank (Wikipedia, YouTube, Soundcloud).

It has been years since I listened to or even thought about Joe Frank. But, as I was trying to put my youngest kid to sleep, I remembered him.

Examples

After my kid was sleeping, I found a few examples of Joe's work, and I'd like to share them with you.

More?

Joe Frank died at 79 in 2018, but most of his work has been preserved. I found that you can get a membership to joe frank dot com for

• $12.99 a month
• $29.99 for three months
• $99.99 for a year

And have the ability to stream everything. I'm considering getting the three months or a-year membership now.

1. READING (short): I posted about the beautiful email newsletter, The Convivial Society, written by L.M. Sacasas, a few times this week. Here is a short description from TCS's About page:

The Convivial Society is a newsletter exploring the relationship between technology and society. It’s grounded in the history and philosophy of technology, with more than a sprinkling of media ecology. No hot takes, only shamelessly deliberate considerations of the meaning of technology for human experience.

2. READING (long): I've been reading the book Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman. I was drawn to it because Warren Ellis referees to it rather often, and I like Ellis's work. The book is a... Hmm... I don't really know what to call it. I was going to say "study," but I don't think that's right. Perhaps a reflection on the work of the artist Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who would make lots of things very fast.

From RWF's Wikipedia page:

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (German: [ˈʁaɪnɐ ˈvɛʁnɐ ˈfasbɪndɐ] ^ⓘ; 31 May 1945 – 10 June 1982), sometimes credited as R. W. Fassbinder,^[1] was a German filmmaker, actor, and dramatist. He is widely regarded as one of the major figures and catalysts of the New German Cinema movement. Versatile and prolific, his over 40 films span a variety of genres, most frequently blending elements of Hollywood melodrama with social criticism and avant-garde techniques.^[2] His films, according to him, explored "the exploitability of feelings".^[3][4] His work was deeply rooted in post-war German culture: the aftermath of Nazism, the German economic miracle, and the terror of the Red Army Faction. He worked with a company of actors and technicians who frequently appeared in his projects.

From the description of the Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors on Amazon:

Melodrama, biography, cold war thriller, drug memoir, essay in fragments, and mystery, Thousands of Mirrors is cult critic Ian Penman’s long-awaited first full-length book: a kaleidoscopic study of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Written over a short period "in the spirit" of RWF, who would often get films made in a matter of weeks or months, Thousands of Mirrors presents the filmmaker as Penman’s equivalent of what Baudelaire was to Benjamin: an urban poet in the turbulent, seeds-sown, messy era just before everything changed. Beautifully written and extraordinarily compelling, echoing the fragmentary works of Roland Barthes and Emil Cioran, Eduardo Galeano and Alexander Kluge, this story has everything: sex, drugs, art, the city, cinema, and revolution

3. WATCHING: I've been watching the Apple TV+ show Criminal Record. When I saw that Peter Capaldi was in this, I knew I'd watch it, because Capaldi is one of my favorite actors today. The (first?) eight-episode season will wrap up this week on Wednesday. If you like gritty stories with moral ambiguity, this show would be right up your alley. Below is a video to give you a sense of the series.

4. LISTENING: This new album, Weird Faith, by Madi Diaz (Apple Music, Spotify), showed up in the new music section of my Apple Music app this week. I started to listen to it while doing random things, and I found that after just a little bit, I had stopped doing the other things and started to pay serious attention to the music and the words in the songs. I used one of the songs from it in my Monday Mix-Tape (Apple Music, Spotify).

Till next time – Take care, but make those glorious mistakes.

-N

I don't recall ever feeling particularly English or British or Anglo Saxon or Celtic or whatever; this may have been partly the punkish, puckish spirit of the times, and partly a result of my own wildly dispersed, non-settled, non-linear childhood, which had nothing like a home town or immediate circle or anything like a secure sense of nationality.

he has homes, plural; which means there is no longer A Home.

Such early instability furnishes us with unreliable maps, which we later attempt to use as reliable guides to adult life, as we grow and develop, fail and succeed.

What effect might it have, using the cinema as a second home? Isn't this the relationship a lot of us had with films and music and TV? Especially if our actual homes were not places of especial verve or safety or routine. Cinema as the child's alternative nest.

But why did I like these, eh?

Something to ponder.

PRICKETT: Your pieces for NME are infamously full of references to French theory. Do you feel that you read more, or more widely, because you were reading as a writer or a fan and not as a student?

PENMAN: I think there was a time when the autodidactic was dignified, when it was something to be. Especially in working-class culture, I think, where there was a slight distrust of the academy—with good reason, because it can take the best out of people, it can produce very desiccated texts. I do think it takes some of the fun out of it, to have to read Foucault in order to write about Foucault in the language of Foucault or in the language of other people who write about Foucault. When I was reading all this stuff, a lot of it was just newly translated into English and it was at the bookstores in Soho, and I was reading whatever it was, Bataille, Lacan, Foucault, with the radio or the record player or the television on, drinking a beer. I was having fun with these texts, is the point. My theory days were never about yearning for anything academic, it was about how you could pick up a text and turn it around and see how the light reflects off of it, if you write not just about a Beckett book but how does it look if you apply it to this, or put this color over here, against a piece of pop music or something. That hadn’t been done so much back then. Now it’s become more popular, and sort of a terrible problem.

Penman is new to me, but I've started reading his book Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors. I want to know more about him, and I found this interview via a Duck Duck Go search.

The more accelerated our life becomes, the more we have to learn to select only the essential, to create our own repose and meditation islands within an uncluttered mental space.

I did not come across the text by reading Nin’s text. I found it in Warren Ellis’s Orbital Operations email newsletter.

Ellis comments, and I agree, that even though Nin wrote these words in 1968, they seem to fit the present circumstances of quotidian life in the here and now.

This ties to what I posted here regarding how information density affects how we experience time.

In The Enchantment of Modern Life, political theorist Jane Bennett argued that “the contemporary world retains the power to enchant humans and that humans can cultivate themselves so as to experience more of that effect.” “To be enchanted,” she wrote, “is to be struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and everyday.”

“Enchantment is something that we encounter, that hits us,” Bennett added, “but it is also a comportment that can be fostered through deliberate strategies.” Among those strategies, Bennett includes “honing sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things.” I think she is exactly right about this. While I wouldn’t ordinarily use the term “enchantment” to describe such a comportment or way of being in the world, it does suggest a useful line of analysis.

Reading this makes me want to check out The Enchantment of Modern Life by Jane Bennett. I’ll add it to my always remains stack of books I’d like to read.

As of today, I am setting up a reminder to post to this site DAILY. Yes, you read that right, DAILY. The posts don't have to be long or even particularly coherent, but they need to happen because I need to build a habit, a muscle memory of these things. Every day I see something cool or interesting, and I mostly set those things aside for inclusion here at some later date and then, more often than not, forget about them. Well NO MORE! Now, the idea is that those things will go up every day, maybe even more than once a day. Then, once a week, I can email out a distillation of the chaos to those who don't use the RSS feed.

This is what I've been attempting to do with my daily postings as well. I realize that a lot of them lack cohesion, or a central point. Often the posts are fragmentary.

Like Simpson, I'm using [S][J][P] as my public notebook or commonplace book.

Here’s an analogy for your consideration. Just as physical density bends time, so does information density bend the experience of time. (Disclaimer: I’m not a physicist and don’t pretend to understand general relativity.) What I’m trying to get at with this possibly suspect analogy is that when digital media compresses the amount of information we encounter during a given period of time, which is what I mean by information density, our sense of the passage of time gets weird. How long ago did something happen? What happened yesterday for that matter? In what order did a set of events happen? Are we just getting collectively worse at judging such matters? I’m not inclined to think so. Instead, I’d argue that this is an effect of information density in digital media environments, or, as it has been said, the medium is the message.

I like this metaphor a lot! It is simple and easy to understand. It also does what a good metaphor does best: comparing two things in a way that makes someone experience both things in a new and unexpected way.

Beyond being a good metaphor, what the post is getting at makes sense to me. The way gravity changes the way space-time works could be said for information density changing the way time is experienced by subjects today.

This is something that I suspect I’ll keep thinking about for a bit.

I’m trying something new — Sending out a short list of interesting things as we go into the weekend.

Three things that are cool

1. LISTENING: This episode ofThe Robcast titled My Leaf blower has a Turbo Button is wonderful! If you like it, you would also probably like the interview I did with Rob on InForm:Podcast.
2. READING: I just discovered the blog Walk Notes this week, and I’ve enjoyed reading it so much. A great example of quotidian rendered as beautiful.
3. WATCHING: the videos that writer/musician/artist/national treasure Patti Smith posts on her Substack are great. I seriously love watching them. Sometimes, I watch them multiple times because they are just so cool. Patti is 77 years old, and she lives a life that is full of curiosity and discovery. She is my personal role model when it comes to how to live and age well.
4. Watching (short): This instagram post is just funny.

If you like this email and would like it to become a regular occurrence, let me know.

Make glorious mistakes and all that.

-N