Month: July 2022

Notes on Pumps: Sensibilities and Framing with Algorithmic Feedback

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“A sensibility is one of the hardest things to talk about.” So begins Sontag’s Notes on “Camp” in the 1964 Partisan Review. And what of the political anger and disillusionment across the United States and in the developed world? What of the gnawing desire towards superiority and control that accompanies authoritarian urges? What of the fear of loss of power to minority ethnic and religious groups? These may be the most discussed sociopolitical aspects of our modern political sensibility since Trump’s election in 2016 when a bitter, vindictive, hostile, crude, fat thug briefly took the reigns of America, then pushed and conspired to oppose the election of his successor.

What attracted his followers to him? I never encountered a George W. Bush fanatic during his presidency. Though not physically small, he talked about “compassionate conservatism” with a voice that hung in the upper register of middle pitches for men. He was neither sonorous nor mean. His eyebrows often had a look of surprise and self-doubt that was hinted at in claims he was a very reluctant candidate for president. I met people who voted for him but they seemed to accept him as an acceptable alternative to Gore or, later, to Kerry—not as a figure of passionate intrigue. Bush Jr. did receive a rally-around-the-flag effect that was based on circumstances that would later bring rebuke over the casus belli of the Iraq War. Similar sensibilities were true of the Obama years—there was a low positivity for him on the Left combined with a mildly deranged antagonism towards him on the Right.

Was the lack of Trump-like animating fanaticism due to the feeling that Bush Jr. was a compromise made to the electorate while Trump was, finally, a man who expressed the real hostility of those who vote Republican?… Read the rest

Entanglements: Short Works

Mark DavisLeave a comment

Entanglements, a collection of short works, arriving soonish. Here’s a short sample:

Winds

A change, shock, zig and zag, then over the ridge that defines the hollow kernel, down along the spines littered with ossified vegetative remains baked by two decades of raging sun, then out through the basin. The wind moves in a roll and pitch, carving into itself, boiling against eddies, temporarily subsuming into the evacuated cave left by its endless predecessors, and they are all an enduring chain, pulsing with the heat of the morning, craning through the galena wisps like a fan over these craggy peaks.

Across and above, passing in a trance of action, an outstretched hand reaches in petrified impotence from sand while the wind shifts around and through, a chasm through the adductor becomes a funnel and there is a spiraling motion down and across the craqueleur landscape of the palm. A blued barrel lurks powerless below. The wind shifts a few orthorhombic grains into the steel tunnel.

It will soon be buried completely, and no one will remember this ridge, the last stand, held out against inevitability as no war came, no dogs chased the quarry down, and the only evil was suppressing the vastness of loss. The wind was the endless enemy, and the heat that drives it, and the dying of the grasses, the forests—even the cacti—until Mars finally emerged, trapped as it had been beneath the carpet of life.

There will be a pause as evening rolls in, as shadows coil into the canyons, reaching in a crawl up the sandstone and granite walls, and the bubbling congregations of the wind settle into wisps and slow finally into the entropic well of night.… Read the rest