a REMpress reading tonight, Kettle's Yard Church (Cambridge), 8.00pm.
Should be the weekly highlight it usually is.
Another difference - page text or screen text - is in public domain
potential. With the screen, on a list like this one, the flick of a
finger is instant and irreversible promulgation. This is not in general
a remarkable readjustment, but becomes so when the person receiving your
note is a distant loved one; I who speak a word may call it back again
becomes a remorse-ridden wishfulness (like Swift's "grant her a repentance
that does not need to be repented": a retraction in the same medium is
similarly liable), mirrored by the other anxiety of a uniformly
represented (and so effaced) physical interaction - that is, I can see the
words you've typed, can know -your- fingers hit the keys, but cannot
(prior to any recognition of sense or content) identify those fingers in
the shapes that arrive to me. This creates - if the correspondent is a
loved one, and otherwise inaccessible - the staggered erotics of
identifying the most completely identifiable (because loved) signature, in
the most uniformly identical and depersonalised representation. Like
seeing the hands of a lover in the wallpaper he/she has put on a wall. An
utterly democratic, utterly available mode of display is made to bear the
sense that couldn't ever appear elsewhere, or from anyone else. This is
technically different from reading a friend's book (which, as object,
still has a musterable aura if only a fetishised one) because having read
the message on screen that will determine your whole day, you can simply
flick "N" and see another, from, say, orpheus, in the same unselected
characters, similarly scrollable and, similarly savable.
This makes for (literally) utopian communitarianism - all have equal
access, all are represented identically - and this is perhaps why it
leaves love-notes stranded, love being so bound to place.
A few thoughts,
Keston.
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