-Frank Herbert
"In 1966, we would have to save up money secretly by selling drugs, and then hitchhike to London, and then go around Soho that night looking for a porno shop that might have a William Burroughs book in it by mistake, and then buy that book. But in that journey, all the time we’d find people who would let us sleep on their floor, or we’d talk to them about what they did or where they’d been, and maybe make friends with them, and we’d find all these other places we’d never knew existed, or we’d meet people while we were hitchhiking and we’d hear their stories…Do you think it’s the same journey on the Internet?"
-Genesis P. Orridge
Blaise's tcj post brought to my mind something I've been thinking about a lot lately. It's not a very new idea, but it's hitting me hard right now. In our current culture that's moving toward a seamless expectation/delivery mode, what are we losing? Burroughs wrote about addiction and control. When you have the ability to control when you receive pleasure, the pleasure loses its value, and you get stuck in this endless circuit of ramping up the stiumli to satisfy the craving you've created. The advantage of physical objects is that you must find them, interact with them in a physical world that will confound your expectations and surprise you with serendipity. For instance, I had to search (nonlinearly, in the pre-Google way computers can't) through some books to find my copy of "God Emporer of Dune" to get the above quote, and I came across another book by Herbert I'd been meaning to re-read for a while. And even as I thumbed through my copy of God Emporer, the tactile sensation of the pages and the tangibility of the space between pages lent something to the book that listening to it in audio form lacked. Is this Romanticism? Am I a slave to my historical context? I'm not sure, but I know that I'm scared of the deterministic mechanism underlying the easy satisfaction of what I think I want.
13 comments:
I am slave to my body.
to JO: respect
to anon: the body is a tomb
all is a tomb
Everything in moderation
some thoughts...
i feel anxious about my own sexual energy, which seems entirely irrational and untrustworthy.
i feel anxious over physical things, and owning them, and feeling responsible for them.
the internet offers simulated sex without the possibility of pregnancy or relationships.
relationships are great and so are books
are you equating sex with reading?
the printed word = the held hand?????
fear is the mind killah
I realized recently that there are few people I actually care about being truly emotionally invested in; so many folks I love to have as acquaintances and colleagues, meeting up at shows and events, but would probably kill if we had to be roommates.
The immediacy of something like facebook allows for that kind of surface kinship, rarely anything beyond "we like the same movies" (which can lead to potentially damaging real life interactions later on, to be sure). There are so many people I cite as friends due to mutual art interests that I've never met in real life, does the internet make us falsely congenial? Is this bad?
My job is this hyper-social, performative type of thing where I interact with lots of the same people on a regular basis. I have to compartmentalize myself and show a version of "me" to these people so that we can get along well together. And it doesn't feel very false to me. I really like a lot of these folks, but I wouldn't talk to almost any of them about my art, nor would I want to spend much time with them outside of my work. It's like growing up in a small town, I think - everyone "knows" everyone, but they keep parts of themselves private and have to avoid other people a lot.
Both sex and books have corporeal and virtual forms. It's possible that sex with another person can be more satisfying and mysterious than doing it with yourself, looking at precisely what turns you on online.
gianna michaels
Yes, as it turns out real life is still worthwhile.
They still haven't invented an e-Beer, so until then fuck the internet.
felt physical pain last night, felt helpless and closed off, re my body, thought about this blog post
felt physical pain last night, felt helpless and closed off, re my body, thought about this blog post
Kam Sut esplained
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