Kottman had scheduled, at that very moment, and previously, a lunch appointment with his mother. He regretted his submission to her demand that they must meet at once to discuss an urgent matter. For then and always Kottman regretted his regret, for he knew regret, futile though not, an impoverished way of thought, of thinking, of true reminiscence radically elsewhere. Kottman had nothing to reminiscence about whatsoever when it came to maternal material. This too he regretted so he was staring out the window. Why all these cars lined the block he would never know. Certainly he could inquire, leave…
And so he was, motionless in the dark room, resembling imperially one-third microsecond from-to original refraction plus ten centiseconds hence retinal annihilation, in the virtuality of the not-yet flickering monitored projection, representing a colossal marble representation of Argus Panoptes, a watchman in the ossuary of the columbarium within a canvased catacomb standing watch over the dead going to die, the real approaching desertion. By him this procession proceeded. Darkness set upon the beings gathered there by being. What radiance remained enframed him in the vertigo of its drawing withdrawal. Dark light shimmered. Perhaps it was the windswept curtain. …
One way to solve an encrypted message, if we know its language, is to find a different plaintext of the same language … and then we count the occurrences of each letter … Then we look at the cipher text we want to solve and we also classify its symbols … until we account for all symbols of the cryptogram we want to solve. (On Extracting Obscured Correspondence, 850 AD)
Wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself — in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity — is so much…
The coronavirus and the black lives matter movement share intimate connections that transcend their virtuality, coalescing into a twin outbreak, a so-called twindemic. One virtual process constituting the coronavirus includes mass hysteria: psychological contagion codified by means of social media, other virtual technologies, for example the virus itself, and the gamut of institutional apparatuses and power networks composing contemporary capitalist reproduction. One virtual process codifying the black lives matter movement includes in part the virtual reproduction of a different mass hysteria: intoxicating civil disobedience and its discontents, the latter of whom include highly normalized white Americans, suburban and soon-to-be-suburban white…
When the coronavirus announced itself locally in angelic tones through the designated (social) media outlets, hundreds of thousands of households hoarding more than $200,000 per year, almost all white and fragile, just not self-identified, fled their homes to second homes, familial, owned, rented, while essential (the endurance of presence, not whatness) sacrificial lambs — regretful immigrants in delivery and food service, really? until when? how grateful the white folk always are inspired by their gratitude self-help— for whom physical workspaces will never turn plannedly obsolescent, until they do, marched on, armed with novel orders. A new day reigned. Though it…
