Bogotissimo!

Haunted libraries throughout the US

From The Art Neswpaper: Speculation in young artists is over, and the smaller dealers will be hurt the most

And at the Telegraph:

That said, the top end of the sales, the best supported until now, looked no less immune to the downturn than the lower end, and other million-pound-plus pictures by Bacon, Freud, Richter and Warhol found no buyers.

The global financial crisis may have changed the art market, but for many there could be a positive result. As the art critic Robert Hughes so effectively argued in his television programme The Mona Lisa Curse, the appreciation of art has become too tainted by its association with bloated values.

Art insurers, at least, can now have a happy time readjusting those values - though to what extent might not become apparent until after the more important auctions in New York next month.

always been a fan (L) (via pinktentacle)

“without records” - YCAM Otomo Yoshihide / ENSEMBLES from YCAMArchives on Vimeo.

PhD dissertation on how interfaces that give away too much information might be counter-productive - the “paradox of the guided user”

Everyone is linking this around, even far outside the Data Visualisation circles, so I’ll try not to be redundant. But let’s look at this one map, of books published / country:

Afaik, this is not averaged by population, which would make an even more eurocentric (and far-east-centric, except for China) map than this one already is. Not to be disingenuous, I’m surprised things haven’t changed so much on that front afterall.

I feel more and more of late that all the snobs might be correct, and we - we in Brazil, all excited over “Contemporary American Literature” and shit - are just distracted by the glitter of a second-rate tautological insularity. Quantity does not equate quality, sure. But how many of us can claim knowledge of what really is happening in the old continent and the east, beyond the handful of widely-publicized cliché authors? Maybe it’s my wishful thinking, but: things can’t be so bad that Dave Eggers actually has any relevance in World Literature whatsoever. Please say it isn’t so.

Mamihlapinatapai (a veces escrita incorrectamente como mamihlapinatapei) es una palabra del idioma de los indios yámanas de Tierra del Fuego, listada en el Libro Guinness de los Récords como la “palabra más sucinta del mundo”, y es considerada como uno de los términos más difíciles para traducir. Describe “una mirada entre dos personas, cada una de las cuales espera que la otra comience una acción que ambos desean pero que ninguno se anima a iniciar”.

(found in ehqcd, who also found it elsewhere)

I bought The Recognitions from a used book store. Sometimes these books are, like advertised, as new; sometimes they contain charming sidenotes and scribbles. Mine had, next to a line of Wyatt Gwyon (in the context of discussing his relationship), one of these interesting sidenotes, written with a yellow-marker pen. It read:

“BULLSHIT!!!”

I took this and other telling signs left by the yellow-marker reader (and by the blue-marker reader, who I suspect was the same person, though there is room for controversy) to speculate what this person was like, and, in a curly, roundabout way, review The Rec elsewhere.

The Recognitions is one of my favourite books, but I’ll admit that it is, how shall we put it, rather uncompromising. This has kept away the ruckus surrounding other writers of long, ambitious novels, but it takes its burden on the reader, and sometimes it is quite a burden. There is, for example, the infamous 80-page long party scene everyone complains about, and I too had a hard time slogging through it (and believe me, I have been to my share of terrible parties). Wyatt Mason, in Harpers Magazine, has decided to share with us one of the notes he made in this scene:

—-

In the Guardian:

Since its inception, e-lit has been struggling to free itself from its generic limitations and now seems to be on the verge of doing so. At long last. Although interesting, its early manifestations were hardly groundbreaking. Collaborative narratives are as old as literature itself. Generative poetry simply adds a technological twist to Tzara’s hat trick, the surrealists’ automatic writing or Burroughs’ cut-ups. Interactive fiction has its roots in Cervantes and Sterne. Hypertexts seldom improve on gamebooks like the famous Choose Your Own Adventure series, let alone BS Johnson’s infamous novel-in-a-box. Besides, if you really want to add sound and pictures to words, why not make a film?

So far, the brave new world of digital literature has been largely anti-climatic. Meade himself confides that he is yet to be “seized by a digital fiction that is utterly compelling”. I can but concur. Technology - the very stuff e-lit is made of - has also turned out to be its Achilles heel. The slow switch to broadband limits its potential audience, e-readers are only adapted to conventional texts - and when was the last time you curled up in bed with a hypertext? In spite of all this, Amerika may well be on to something when he claims that we are witnessing the emergence of a “digitally-processed intermedia art” in which literature and all the other arts are being “remixed into yet other forms still not fully developed”. My feeling is that these “other forms” will have less and less to do with literature. Perhaps e-lit is already dead?

This kinda nailed my concerns about e-lit: sure, the earlier experiments were still clumsy, expanding on modernist strategies or unskillfully recycling the easier recipes of post-modernism. But then the second wave came, and the incipient bud of electronic literature found itself devoured by Media Art folks, realizing text is one among many other possible media. (Which by the way I argue it isn’t: textuality is something more basic and encompassing.)

Of course all literature is, in a sense, meta-linguistic: usually tacitly, in the form of an imperative of honesty. But there is a key difference between textual Media Art, or Media Art about text, and literature; it is difficult to spell out, but it is akin to the distance between Andrei Tarkovsky and Bill Viola. The novelty and the challenges of the new medium steal the scene, and because of this we stray away from engaging with the literary tradition and remembering what’s specific to literature as an art form. In Brazil, we have nigh endured 50 years of “concrete poetry,” which was actually lousy media-art-about-text disguised as literature, and it pretty much ruled universities for a big portion of that time: so trust us, by now most of us can tell the difference. Readers such as the author of the Guardian post can, too, hence their disappointment.

(Need I point this out? I’m all for media art and all that, I even practice the stuff. And the times ask for a revision of what we know about text, and for careful study of what is changing on that front. The ground is moving beneath our feet, and moving ground demands accounting for. But I am also growing weary of this false, throwing baby away with tub-water dilemma. Drawing this distinction is as difficult as it is easy to topple it down; but does anyone honestly think this is not one worth making?)