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Paula Modersohn-Becker, Bouquet of wildflowers, 1906.
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Still from Eric Roehmer's La Collectonneuse (1967).
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EFFECTS: What’s a vibe?
PELI: A vibe is an intuitive representation of a language that is suitable for the compressed representation of a field of phenomena bound by a structural affinity that expresses a shared generative process.
From "VIBE COHERENCE: An Interview with Peli Grietzer," Effects Journal.
Rachel Cusk, Transit.
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“What’s it called,” Dale said, “when you have one of those bloody great blinding flashes of insight that changes the way you look at things?”
I said I wasn’t sure: a few different words sprang to mind.
Dale twitched his paintbrush irritably.
“It’s something to do with a road,” he said.
Road to Damascus, I said.
“I had a road to Damascus moment,” he said. “Last New Year’s Eve, of all times. I bloody hate New Year’s. That was part of it, realizing that I bloody hated New Year’s Eve.”
Rachel Cusk, Transit.
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One of the things I hate, I mean that I fucking detest in books, is when people have revelations. Who ever really has a revelation? And when people do have revelations, they’re always completely risible. And when they have them, they should be portrayed as risible, and they need to be skewered because the whole concept of revelation is absurd.
Adrian Nathan West interviewed by Jamie Richards at The Rumpus, 2/7/2022.
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I thought that some of it was true and some it was not, but the real truth was how such things allowed someone to talk about you, or what you had done or why you did it, in a way that unraveled your character into distinct traits. It made you seem readable to them, or to yourself, which could feel like a revelation.
Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow.
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Making up dystopias is often just a process of outsourcing. It reassures certain people that the bad scenario is fiction, and that it’s happening somewhere else in space or time. It’s no accident that aesthetics of dystopia often happen to resemble news depictions of the developing world. A lot of dystopian fiction is kind of an imagined prophylactic for the privileged—the idea being that if we could just anticipate it, maybe we can prevent it or control it.
Elvia Wilk, in conversation with Clare L. Evans and Leon Dische Becker for Broadcast.
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The Earth is littered with phone masts, the sky dotted with satellites, and our beautiful opposable thumbs are ruining themselves, scrolling away, all so that people can share thoughts on groceries, social media trends, total strangers worth insulting, and the latest annoying acronym. Never has there been such a universal admission of the imbecility of the human species. And to accommodate this inane babble, the internet now consumes much of the electricity on Earth and semiconductor plants drink up all the water—water that should be reserved for nicer plants like redwoods, bluebells, buttercups, and marijuana.
Lucy Ellman, "My Study Hates Your Study." The Baffler, March 2022.
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How does your head look to your eyes? Well, I'll tell you. It looks like what you see out in front of you because all that you see out in front of you is how you feel inside your head. It is easy enough to stand still; the difficulty is to walk without touching the ground. Why do you feel so heavy? It isn't just a matter of gravitation and weight; it is that you feel that you are carrying your body around. Common speech expresses this all the time—life is a drag, I feel I am just dragging myself around, my body is a burden to me. To whom? To whom, that's the question. You see? And when there is nobody left for whom the body can be a burden, the body isn't a burden, but so long as you fight it, it is. It's like saying, you know, to feel the feelings—it is a redundant expression.
