Berfrois

February 2018

Privileging Your Checks

Privileging Your Checks

I am team-teaching a course on the later Wittgenstein this semester with a somewhat skeptical but radically open-minded philosopher.

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Are ‘you’ just inside your skin or is your smartphone part of you?

Are ‘you’ just inside your skin or is your smartphone part of you?

Your phone ‘knows’ whom you speak to, when you speak to them, what you said, where you have been, your purchases, photos, biometric data, even your notes to yourself – and all this dating back years...

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Salt to Sprinkle on the Meat

Salt to Sprinkle on the Meat

The presence of the political in Ashbery is not negligible, and those who would say so are not reading his work very carefully...

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As Vast as Space and as Timeless as Infinity

As Vast as Space and as Timeless as Infinity

The planet has been knocked off its elliptical orbit and overheats as it hurtles toward the sun; the night ceases to exist, oil paintings melt, the sidewalks in New York are hot enough to fry an egg on...

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You’re Interested in New Zealand

You’re Interested in New Zealand

If you’re interested in the end of the world, you’re interested in New Zealand. If you’re interested in how our current cultural anxieties...

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They Didn’t Know Any Women

They Didn’t Know Any Women

Beware the callow misfit who becomes part of the ruling class; rather than disrupt the social order that excluded him, he might just reap its spoils for himself.

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Drinking at the Ladbroke Arms

Drinking at the Ladbroke Arms

The Ladbroke Arms, Notting Hill. Photograph by Ewan Munro. From London Review of Books: The Ladbroke Arms is a pub in Notting Hill known for years as the policemen’s pub. The explanation is obvious: over the road is the local police station. Two decades ago, if you went for a drink...

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Russell Bennetts and Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism

Russell Bennetts and Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism

Glitch Feminism is about modes of experimentation beginning online before entering the world. The house of gender needs to be dismantled...

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Joe Linker: Read Surfing

Joe Linker: Read Surfing

What is it about the predicament of digital writing and reading that has so many literary provocateurs abuzz? “Mies van der Rohe said, ‘The least is the most.’..

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Getting Lost in Narrative Virtuality by Will Luers

Getting Lost in Narrative Virtuality by Will Luers

“Getting lost” in a work of fiction is a conventional expression that speaks to the immersive power of narrative...

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Everybody Draw the Dinosaur

Everybody Draw the Dinosaur

What colour was a Tyrannosaurus rex? How did an Archaeopteryx court a mate? And how do you paint the visual likeness of something no human eye...

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Colin Raff: Slivers, Torpid

Colin Raff: Slivers, Torpid

Here the story shifts focus to Grunduline, who, having sung an air describing her flight from the convent, arrives in Vadtstul to find her groom-to-be embracing her mother...

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It is a Melancholy Conversation that hath no sound…

It is a Melancholy Conversation that hath no sound…

It is said, That Silence a great virtue: It is true, in a Sick person’s chamber, that loves no noise; or at the dead time of night; or at lunchtimes that natural rest

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One generation’s subversion is the next generation’s marketing plan…

One generation’s subversion is the next generation’s marketing plan…

In an essay on The Face published in Dick Hebdige’s 1988 book, “Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things,” which Gorman quotes...

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Jay Aquinas Thompson: Re-Reading Jose Perez Beduya

Jay Aquinas Thompson: Re-Reading Jose Perez Beduya

The five-year-old poetry book can be a lonely thing. After a hoped-for hothouse blossoming of critical conversation dies down and the book is no longer taught...

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Candidates

Candidates

In accessible and engaging prose, historian Ellen Fitzpatrick chronicles the political careers of three women who attempted to ascend to the American presidency.

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Some Degree of Voting

Some Degree of Voting

On 21 June 1908, half a million people gathered in Hyde Park to celebrate “Women’s Sunday”. There were 30 brass bands, bugles and 20 platforms...

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Ed Simon: When Books Read You

Ed Simon: When Books Read You

Towards the end of 1642, or possibly the beginning of 1643, but either way in the midst of a miserable winter of civil war, King Charles I found himself...

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