Literature
There is an interesting way in which emergency recordings can tune people in to ambient poetics. Consider, for instance, one comment in the Times article concerning the air traffic control tapes from US Airways Flight 1549's water landing in the Hudson River last month:
This description of the recording evokes synaesthesia: the "long dead space" is in fact no more and no less than silence; the "suspense" that 'grips' the listener is felt in a bodily way; the visuality of "reading" is both called attention to by the quotation marks and yet put under erasure by the "just"; finally, the comment is temperature-controlled by the "cool pilot." Many senses are fused together in this heavily mediated recording of a feeling of a recording...a recording that, finally, is meant at some level to communicate an actually felt experience in a 'real time' of the past.
Writing lesson: While "just reading" may be insufficient for feeling the liveliness of language, perhaps writing?which necessarily rereads?is a way to "capture the tension" that always surrounds communication.
- Runway 1
In my forthcoming book The End of Airports I touch briefly on David Foster Wallace's airport scenes, primarily in relation to the themes of seating and weather. But I missed an important airport instance, which a former student (thanks, Weldon)...
- Two Ways Of Looking At Emergency Slides
This gem just arrived in the mail: An Air France A380 emergency briefing card, and some airport haiku, from my awesome & inspiring architect cousin, Emily White! One haiku reads: Passenger paradeMysterious upper deckWho is sitting there? In other...
- On Videogames & Memories
I recently wrote an Amazon review of Ian Bogost's sprightly new book How to Do Things with Videogames. I want to extend that review here in order to think through some related things. This book's form makes it incredibly accessible and inviting:...
- On Crashing: An Inquiry Of Fragments
We chose this plane because we didn?t know that It would become the subject Of a poem. To us poetry is ludicrous, As if telling a hawk he has talons. ?Mark Yakich, ?Last Flight out of a State of Mind? A recent article from the Times reports that the...
- I'm Still Here...sorta.
I sincerely apologize for the inconsistent lack of posts this month although my absence is largely in part due to settling back into college life again and working extra hours at my dead-end job. Talk about hectic! The first couple of weeks have gone...
Literature
Emergency/Poetics
There is an interesting way in which emergency recordings can tune people in to ambient poetics. Consider, for instance, one comment in the Times article concerning the air traffic control tapes from US Airways Flight 1549's water landing in the Hudson River last month:
For a recording with so many long dead spaces, the suspense is oddly gripping. Just reading the transcript doesn?t capture the tension surrounding ?we?re gonna be in the Hudson? and ?radar contact is lost?.
That was one cool pilot.
This description of the recording evokes synaesthesia: the "long dead space" is in fact no more and no less than silence; the "suspense" that 'grips' the listener is felt in a bodily way; the visuality of "reading" is both called attention to by the quotation marks and yet put under erasure by the "just"; finally, the comment is temperature-controlled by the "cool pilot." Many senses are fused together in this heavily mediated recording of a feeling of a recording...a recording that, finally, is meant at some level to communicate an actually felt experience in a 'real time' of the past.
Writing lesson: While "just reading" may be insufficient for feeling the liveliness of language, perhaps writing?which necessarily rereads?is a way to "capture the tension" that always surrounds communication.
- Runway 1
In my forthcoming book The End of Airports I touch briefly on David Foster Wallace's airport scenes, primarily in relation to the themes of seating and weather. But I missed an important airport instance, which a former student (thanks, Weldon)...
- Two Ways Of Looking At Emergency Slides
This gem just arrived in the mail: An Air France A380 emergency briefing card, and some airport haiku, from my awesome & inspiring architect cousin, Emily White! One haiku reads: Passenger paradeMysterious upper deckWho is sitting there? In other...
- On Videogames & Memories
I recently wrote an Amazon review of Ian Bogost's sprightly new book How to Do Things with Videogames. I want to extend that review here in order to think through some related things. This book's form makes it incredibly accessible and inviting:...
- On Crashing: An Inquiry Of Fragments
We chose this plane because we didn?t know that It would become the subject Of a poem. To us poetry is ludicrous, As if telling a hawk he has talons. ?Mark Yakich, ?Last Flight out of a State of Mind? A recent article from the Times reports that the...
- I'm Still Here...sorta.
I sincerely apologize for the inconsistent lack of posts this month although my absence is largely in part due to settling back into college life again and working extra hours at my dead-end job. Talk about hectic! The first couple of weeks have gone...