I wrote an essay for the mighty, magma-hot EPOCH about how the destruction of Pompeii is a prototype of the disaster movie. It's an archaeological approach to the disaster genre from 13th century frescoes via Romantic painting to "Independence Day", "Dante's Peak", "Titanic", and Vesuvius symbolism in "Journey to Italy" and "The Sopranos". By the end, it turns out, unsurprisingly, that the disaster was in us the whole time. I've posted it here in full so you can all see @leonardvernhet 's extraordinary page design. @roughversion knew instinctively that I'd be right for this and, as ever, gave me the freedom to keep on digging: an antiquarianism of the right-here-right-now. EPOCH issue 4 is out now. In a time when publishing is in so much trouble and magazines are closing every month, it's a last stand for publications that look great and have banging articles, that here of the mighty Vulcan sing, the god with skill inventive that makes anvils ring...🌋🛸🆘🚀📼📖🔥🛸
@epoch.review
Creative Direction: @leonardvernhet
Editor-in-chief: @roughversion
Fashion Direction: @marcgoehring
Head of Production: @lb_rmb
Instagram, foaming all bubblesome with such feculent foulnesses. Fie! Away! It annoys me. I won't, however, pretend to be superior by not using it and then smugly telling everyone about how I don't use it (my students caught me out there). Rather, I'll focus all my powers of ressentiment on ignoring peoples' posts from Venice or Basel or wherever - which people either openly enjoy but pretend to have to not enjoy because bad taste not to, or, neither better nor worse, pretend to enjoy but actually don't but then struggle to admit it - and promoting my own much more wholesome stuff. I'm really into country living. Also, I'm planning some online courses. One will be about the history of technology, cultural forms, and criticism: specifically, what we can learn about how things are now from critical approaches to now-obsolete technological forms (especially television, where the whole critical genre known as "television studies" is a vital part of the fossil record of media archaeology), and how we can hone our critical skills even if we can't do much to change things. Let me know in the comments if you're interested.
I know I say this all the time, but I think it's really funny how, in the UK, we've all got used not just to advertising being visible just about anywhere it can be squeezed - that's been the norm for about a century and a half or more by now and there's hardly any use in mentioning it, let alone complaining - but something else a little harder to explain. It's how we tend to have advertising directed at us while we're doing the very thing the advertising suggests we should do, having the idea of the experience sold to us after we've already made our rational consumer choice, so we're already having it. It's very prominent in, say, shopping centres and retail parks and crumbling pedestrianised high streets, where you'll see, say, a picture of a pretty model with luminous hair eating, say, a sandwich in an advertising hoard covering up the empty unit that used to have a place that sold sandwiches that you, using your rational consumer mind, would have chosen to buy a sandwich from; but now you're just looking at the empty husk of the sandwich-experience-that-could-have-been while eating another (totally different) sandwich you've bought from a rival chain; at the same time the imagery tells you that buying this type of sandwich is a culinary delight, the Meal Deal as ambrosia, as lordly feast, as a goose chopped up for the poor of Clerkenwell at Christmas, hand-delivered by Patrick Stewart in a topcoat and tails on behalf of the Galactic Federation #sandwiches
William Blake asked whether Christ, in ancient time, ever used his feet (human and divine to the same peppermint-smelling extent, unless you're a neo-Nestorian heretic, which you probably should be) to walk upon England's mountains green. He didn't, however, say anything about spending your Easter holidays, the fresh air carrying still a crisp wintry tang, in alleyways and car parks and bus shelters, smoking Dorchester Superkings like a leather skinned middle aged Benidormian expat and listening to pirate copies of Korn and Killswitch Engage and - here's a really obscure one for people my age - *Number One Son* CDs: too young to go to the pub, too broke to do much else, too unsophisticated to be tolerated by the staff in the local Starbucks for more than the minimum statutory slurping time (as per the Coffee Chain Slurping Act 1998). He should have. The wartorn landscape of Blair's Britain made me, and lives on in my heart.
This sucks. @maschu_maschu has been on this spot on the corner of Neubaugasse and Lindengasse in Vienna's 7th district - these days very "hip", though this wasn't always so - for over 20 years. It was good. I was a big fan of their falafel bowls (good salad selection and a generous supply of sweet potato fries). During the summer the whole left hand side had a covered seating area next to the little cooling water sprays the city puts out, a welcome refuge from the insane heat (unexpected if you're not used to it, or the sub-Carpathian basin more generally). Boom and bust is just part of life in a market economy. It closed down just after the new year. This new hoarding went up a week or two ago. None of this is the problem. The bigger issue, for me at least, is how every week this place becomes a little more like London was 15 or so years ago, only that private equity (I assume this is how this Swiss trainer company has become so successful in recent years) is even more prominent than it was back then. A big part of Vienna's charm, and which made for a welcome escape from London, is that it's been resistant to change, with many things about it coming across as not just uncannily retro but outright démodé (and thus delightfully kitsch, or, to use a Spanish word I recently discovered, "cursi"). There's a hoary old cliché that, when the apocalypse comes, it's good to be in Vienna because everything happens 15 years late. This is true. What I find disappointing, and ultimately vulgar, however, is the Viennese public's taste for things that are already worn out elsewhere, treating them as if they're new and glamorous, while failing to appreciate what they already have, which is often really good and valuable in its own right anyway. It's a pathology of affluence. I take it as a sign of how spoiled they've been, but they're unable to see it. It's like how older people are glued to their screens, but people of my age are increasingly abandoning their devices. I'm sure many of my Instagram followers would hate the proprietor of this place for his nationality and may even be glad to see him gone for this reason. I won't.
Of course, had this graffiti artist come to my class on Derrida, they'd know that "deconstruct" is not an active verb or an imperative. All one would have to do to deconstruct the ego is look at, say, Freud's own contradictory statements, tracing and contrasting the internal relationships between what he wrote at different times, allowing the idea to deconstruct itself, ultimately changing nothing about it, instead of intervening from the outside with some imaginary deconstructionists' toolkit. Still funny, though. This bit of Vienna's 18th District is basically, if there's a London equivalent - and there isn't and can't be because places are just what they are due to their own internal history and development and texture in the present and don't and can't and won't translate in this way - Hampstead; the sort of place that will likely have more people who not only understand what a therapeutic relationship is, but have some familiarity with the very idea of deconstruction, not that they should or would even need to change anything about their egos, or any of the circumstances that have shaped them. It's really nice round there.
I'm having a really nice time. One of the ideas I have for an online class is the history of revolutions - political ones, scientific ones, Copernican ones, social ones, revolutions in thinking and feeling and seeing - from the mid-17th century to today. Maybe. What do you reckon? In any case, these three are part of research I'm doing for a text that has much more to do with politics than art, not that I didn't always do that in one way or another: it's about what it means to be a "Selbstdenker": to think for yourself, independently, autonomously. The Havel-Michnik book was edited and translated by the wonderful @elzbietamatynia - she mentioned it a few times when she taught me, but it's taken me this long to track down a copy (second-hand, dustjacketless, but in great nick). The exchange called "An Account of Our Victories, an Accounting of Our Freedom" from October 2003 is especially good.
The gravestones in the churchyard had pictures. Many of the young men born in the 1910s-20s were in full Wehrmacht military regalia, even when they died in the 1960s. That's just something you have to get used to in these parts. I'll make judgements without being "judgemental". Of course, this far eastern part of South Tyrol is far more Austrian than "Italian". Italianness becomes more obvious the further west and south you go, regardless of what car license plates and people's passports say. Wherever you go and whoever the people are or say they are, identity is pretty much always provisional and relative and almost always incomplete. Whenever we'd go on family holidays to France, for example, getting the Dover-Calais ferry and then driving further south (a typical summer pursuit for middle income Englishers, I'd discover as an adult), my father would shout "LA FRANCE PROFOND", ironically enunciating, once we'd passed through Normandy. Strong opinion: Italy - proper, unalloyed, "real" Italy, "L'ITALIA PROFONDO", if there is one - can only really start at Rovereto, when you're still in the state of Trentino but there are no traces of German influence left in how the places look or how the people speak. You see it on the autostrada because the landscape shifts and there are increasing numbers of flat-bed trucks with piggies sticking their little snouts from the slats, and you can see it from the train because churches stop having onion domes after Trentino, where the first thing you see when you get the bus south is an autonomist social centre decked out in black and red anarcho-communist flags.
This is a "Café vienés": a Viennese coffee - technically an "Einspänner" - as approximated by the people of another capital once run by dribbling funhouse-mirror-faced Habsburgs. Where Vienna is a provincial capital, one jewel in a shattered imperial crown, Madrid feels much more like an empire's metropolitan centre, where the huge buildings are on long boulevards. And where Vienna has imported lots of its working class from the post-communist and once-wartorn parts of its old empire, Madrid has taken them from the poorer parts of the Hispanophonic world (maybe mostly Mexico and Peru? Hard for me to say). ¡LIBERTAD! ¿Quién al ver esto no empuña un fusil para aplastar al fascismo destructor? Grabad en vuestro pecho estra consignor: "If I can shoot rabbits then I can shoot fascists".
I have many wishes. One of them is for an office: a room of one's own. Skipping from library to library is fine, and working in cafes is OK too. But I'd like to be able to make my own choices all the way down. My essay is due in a week. It's about what we can learn about things today from now-dated pieces of writing about a now-seemingly-obsolete technology. I call this approach an "antiquarianism of the right-here-right-now".
Velvet frock-coated waltzers that we are, @julia_taschler and I saw this on Zieglergasse. We agreed, as lovers, that it must be an omen, a portent, Aphrodite's fateful song ringing in the streets, put there just for us by some bouncing cherub on this day of all days. But neither of us could decide on the deepest layers of its symbolic content, perhaps because it seemed too good to be true, and partly because we're just reclusive Millennials more concerned with the kind of tomato sauce we buy (always @muttipomodorode ). We're illiterate to allegory, unable to read the Book of the World, the seraphic song of love almost inaudible to us. So I took a photo, promised to tag her on @instagram , and then we went to @caferitter #valentines #love #pomodoro
My students don't realise - and how could they - that they're guinea pigs for my experiments that eventually become essays. This one started as a 3 hour class at @kunstunilinz in the summer. You'll see where it ends up. Not pictured: Aristotle, David Foster Wallace, other Raymond Williams books. Slightly annoyed that the building housing @literaturhaus_wien is being refurbished, so they have a new intercom, etc. I want Vienna to stay forever frozen in 1987 and will fight you to the death if you try and change it #writer #research #television #internet #bookstagram
