Hello! This week’s is a short digest: I have just a few links I want to share with you because it’s been so cold and snowy here that I’ve done pretty much nothing except for work, make sauerkraut, bake bread, and read. It feels like I’m living a peasant lifestyle. Up with the sun, sleep with the dark, eat pickled veg, look outside and hope for the snow to stop. Has it been like this for you too?
1. Good tweet (sorry it’s so tall)
2. Been listening to this Savile set from last February
and thinking about the times I last-minute decided to stay home instead of going out.
It’s a very good high-energy mix, and I have a soft spot for good hearted people that respond to their ID requests on SoundCloud. Savile is great.
3. Literacy of the Fingers
Beth Tilston challenges a false dichotomy between being a “doer” and a “thinker” in favor of a more independent and self-sustaining hybrid of both. A pleasant description of how working with your hands is what it’s like to not be in charge. A material sense. A description of handiwork as cultivating a skill of “problem-finding” — working out the boundaries of the object to fill in the information on your own.
Dancing back and forth between dough and words, dough and words, it strikes me that these two practices – baking and writing – have a great deal in common. The focus needed is the same, the observation and attention needed are the same, the uncertainty of outcome is the same, the frustrations of not getting it quite right are the same. I wonder whether perhaps all practice, whether intellectual or practical, has something in common.
Maybe I just need to turn this newsletter into an all-that-is-embodied-appreciation newsletter.
But why can’t the hand-worker also be a thinker? And is our mind really the only site of intelligence? Do our bodies, and the things they are capable of, not have an intelligence of their own?
4. Made sauerkraut with my mom’s help
Before I had even read the Tilston essay, I was on a Zoom call with my mom as we both chopped cabbage and grated carrots and sandwiched layers of bay leaf and peppercorn in-between, thinking about how much of her knowledge was implicit and captured in phrases like “squish it down until it feels right” that can’t be written down very easily. I cut my cabbage too big because I forgot what “the right size” ought to look like.
5. Did you know that the creator of BuzzFeed published a paper in undergrad on an Anti-Oedipus breakdown of the excesses of capitalism
I didn’t, but it looks like his ideas about perverting consumer society have been fermenting for a while. So it makes sense. But it was still a bit of a surprise.
The viewer is encouraged to identify with cops, thieves, surfers, businessmen, princes, paupers, house wives, and athletes, to name but a few. Indeed, on MTV all of these characters may make an appearance in the course of a two minute video. Newspapers, movies, billboards, and video games also offer a stunning array of images. Not only does each of these mediums contain a surprisingly varied image-repertoire, but a late capitalist subject may encounter all of these mediums in a single day.
Jonah Peretti writes that as capitalism metastasizes, it necessarily creates newer and more fragmented micro-identities for people to self-identify by, providing ripe marketable and commodifiable material. The bottom line:
I assert that the increasingly rapid rate at which images are distributed and consumed in late capitalism necessitates a corresponding increase in the rate that individuals assume and shed identities. Because advertisements link identity with the need to purchase products, the acceleration of visual culture promotes the hyper-consumption associated with late capitalism.
Related:
6. Find of the week: abandoned ice cream
Just a big Baskin cup of abandoned cookies and cream. It was so cold it wasn’t melting. Who knows how long it was there for! It was gone when I passed by the same spot on my way home 30 minutes later.
That’s it for this week, my galentines and valentines. Hope you get to enjoy some indulgent fruits and chocolates this weekend. I’ll do my best to, for the both of us if I have to. If you made it this far and for some reason are still not subscribed, consider it:
In any case, I’ll still be here,
Yours fermenting,
N