Bat, Bean, Beam

The social dead

2013-05-21T00:59:00.002+12:00

Simon Sellars has a new tumblr. Yahoo! now has Tumblr. Simon’s tumblr is about social media death. His previous (and continuing) project was an exploration of the works of JG Ballard. Ballard wrote often about characters unmoored from society dying a slow, inner death. Yahoo! killed Geocities, the Web’s first social media platform. The social dead zone isn’t a liminal zone. It

A theoretical critique of and practical answer to the problem of too much writing on the internet

2013-05-13T23:59:00.000+12:00

The deity

2013-05-07T00:09:00.002+12:00

When Andreotti dies, they'll remove the black box from his hump and we'll finally know how it all went. (Beppe Grillo) The history of post-War Italy is the story of one long, uninterrupted conspiracy. From May 1st 1947, when a commando taking orders from gangster Salvatore Giuliano opened fire on a peaceful Labour Day demonstration at Portella della Ginestra, Sicily, through to the

The death party

2013-04-29T22:59:00.000+12:00

Originally posted at Overland They took his body into the city in the evening of the 28th of April, but it was well past midnight by the time they passed all the roadblocks and reached the particular square they had chosen as their destination. There they unloaded all of the bodies – eighteen in total – and arranged them in the forecourt of the petrol station. Then they stood guard, waiting

The reader

2013-04-22T23:59:00.001+12:00

In the future – that is to say, the present – if you’re reading a book and you pause too long to reflect on a passage, the book will time out, and the page will be replaced by a picture. Perhaps this one. The book has changed aspect. It has been reorganised. You may of course wake up your device and access it again in short order. But something has happened in the meantime. The device has

To Save Everything, Click Here

2013-04-15T23:59:00.000+12:00

If you follow this blog you would have heard me talk about the urgent need for strong, popular and accessible critiques of internet ideology, even as I documented attempts that either misfired or proved far worse than the target. Now I’m almost entirely certain that he wouldn’t be flattered by the comparison, but I think that in Evgeny Morozov we may have finally found the Neil Postman for

The space you take up

2013-04-09T00:35:00.002+12:00

I’m not a big man. Not slim by any means, but not huge either. Therefore I fit the standard range of human-sized things. Clothes and cars and seats on trains and planes: I can get into those. My father was obese and I know a little bit of the everyday difficulties he faced, but it’s hard to know what it’s like without first-hand knowledge. The closest I’ve come is on long-haul flights. Last

The painted library

2013-04-01T23:59:00.000+13:00

Originally posted at Overland I hold in my hands a cheap, ugly edition of every book in existence. At least that’s what it feels like. An ebook reader is like a portal, a word repository. It’s the world’s literature no longer bound by time and space. So when I finally got one, six months ago, I thought it might help me to make my reading more current, which is something I often tell

Of grandmothers and beneficiaries

2013-03-25T23:59:00.000+13:00

It's such a curious creature, the modern grandmother. It was not something she herself did – bearing children – that defines her, but the fact that some of her children have borne children of their own. Yet she stands in some ways even more than the mother for the moral as well as material continuation of the species. The grandmother is a model of virtue, the transmitter of matrilineal

Idea for a movie in which aliens invade the Earth and fix the economy

2013-03-18T23:59:00.000+13:00

Idea for a movie in which aliens invade the Earth and fix the economy. I haven’t decided how they’re going to do it yet. Maybe they’ll practice capitalism with an inhuman face: turn up at the meetings of the G8, the ECB and the Federal Reserve wielding powerful lasers; seize control of the banking system, start printing money and erase all debt. Or else they’ll introduce Marsism and

Corporate memory

2013-03-11T23:59:00.000+13:00

In the end, they decided to ask him nicely. Would the former chief executive of one of the country’s largest state-owned enterprises kindly come and talk to a parliamentary committee on how he managed to bankrupt said company, please sir? It would have been rude to compel him, even though the committee was empowered to do so. Besides, the committee chairman reckons the former chief executive

Turn off your computers

2013-03-04T23:59:00.000+13:00

I am not sure that this has quite sunk in yet, so I’m going to say it one more time, slowly. At the national election held in Italy last week, a party that is less than three years old gained over 8 million votes, equivalent to one quarter of all votes cast. This party didn’t pay for a single advertisement on television or in the print media. None of its members appeared on television or gave

Symbols

2013-02-26T01:02:00.002+13:00

There is an election going on in Italy as I write, and this is how it works: you present your ID card to the returning officer and receive your folded-up ballot paper, which looks to be of normal size. Then you go into the booth and proceed to open it. You unfold it once, twice, three times. Then four. Five. Six. The paper at this point occupies the entire booth and it’s not even fully open

The art of war

2013-02-18T23:59:00.000+13:00

There are images that just aren’t right. This one, for instance: ‘Unfaithful Kiss’ – photographer Paolo Puopolo’s contribution to this year’s Female Students’ Calendar – portrays an Israeli and a Palestinian woman making up and making out even as they bear the physical marks of the hatred between their peoples. The 2013 edition of old calendar is called ‘Onerace’ (just like that, all one

We Must Eat!

2013-02-12T00:21:00.000+13:00

It’s a little over a century since obesity was invented, and an even shorter span of time – beginning at the end of the second World War – since it has started its gradual rise into one of the defining conditions of our time. Steeped as most developed countries are nowadays in the talk of epidemic, it can be tempting to forget not only that undernourishment still affects billions worldwide,

Phantom time

2013-02-05T00:37:00.001+13:00

The past is disappearing. We used to know the past but not the future. This is changing. We need a new theory of time. (Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis) Two hundred and ninety-seven years: from 614 to 911 CE. Three whole chapters of my high school medieval history book. Gone. The whole of European history between these dates is a hoax perpetrated by the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III with the help

Between worlds

2013-01-28T23:59:00.000+13:00

Is there a standard temperature at which they keep airports? I have it at two and a half degrees too hot. My head’s full of soup. When I move it from side to side, the soup sloshes around and my temples hurt. We take off and lots of children cry in unison because their ears hurt. Not all of the parents have figured out the cause and so a couple is trying to reason with theirs. At one

The back of the shelf

2013-01-21T23:59:00.000+13:00

I really shouldn’t be blogging. Not this week. And I certainly won’t blog about how much emptying a house is akin to emptying a life. They’ve been days full of heartache, and most of it isn’t even mine. But there have also been some lighter moments and some happier discoveries. Things we hadn’t so much forgotten about as erased from memory to the point of making us doubt they ever belonged to

First last impressions

2013-01-14T23:59:00.000+13:00

Five grey days without a breath of wind or a drop of rain. Five days of a chill that radiates inwards, soaking the bones. On the third day the sun nearly broke through. On the sixth day, it rained. I left the New Zealand summer for this. Yet it is not entirely inappropriate that I should have come home at this particular time of the year for what is almost certainly the last time, at least

'It's a map of the world'

2013-01-07T23:59:00.000+13:00

During our brief family holiday in Hawke’s Bay, we drove up Te Mata Peak and looked down on Hastings and out to the sea. ‘It’s a map of the world,’ Ambrose exclaimed. He was right. A map is a vantage point. You climb a tree or the top of a hill and look down on a territory that you think you know intimately only to find that it looks different, is different. A new set of spatial

37 things you should hoard

2012-12-17T23:59:00.001+13:00

Consumerism is as much about acquiring stuff as it is about acquiring stuff that other people don’t have. In our advanced industrial age this sometimes involves cultivating elaborate illusions of scarcity. Take the people who queue outside of Apple Stores ahead of the release of a new iPhone. They don’t do it because a slavish obeisance to this ritual is proof of the fact that they ‘think

Another Skyfall review

2012-12-10T23:59:00.000+13:00

Then I understood that I am the world. But the world - it isn’t me. Although, at the same time, I am the world. But the world isn’t me. But I am the world. But the world isn’t me. But I am the world. But the world isn’t me. But I am the world. And then I didn’t think any further. (Daniil Charms, 1930) I am the world See my gun. Drive my car. Drink my beer. Wear these clothes. My name is

We are in a book

2012-12-04T00:31:00.002+13:00

There is a little exercise that you can do if you have children: go through their shelves and count how many of their books deal in an overt way with what a book is and how books work. This includes all lift-the-flap books, all pop-up books and tactile books and books featuring physical contraptions or gimmicks, as well as the vast metafictional literature that introduces and at the same time

The weariness of the satyr

2012-11-27T00:51:00.000+13:00

Originally posted at Overland. If it were made into a film or a play, it would have to begin near the end: from the parties that were held in the weeks and days before the trial, when the girls tried to grab the last of the money and favours whilst talking privately about him with open, at times ferocious disrespect, calling him a ‘flaccid arse’ and other things. ‘He’ was at this time the

Leaving Middle-earth

2012-11-19T23:59:00.002+13:00

First it was rugby and the America’s Cup, and sometimes Katherine Mansfield and Jane Campion (thank you very much). Then The Lord of the Rings came along and it became the thing that people knew about New Zealand. That, and that it was a place of great natural beauty. It’s funny what people know about other nations. ‘If they commit suicide and the king rides a bicycle, it’s Sweden.’ I think