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Published last year, Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep begins with the effect of digital culture on our sense of time. A world that is always “on”—the irony of “sleep” mode is that it avoids turning off a device—entices or requires humans to be the same. Gradually, we comply: we get less and less rest every night, we rise to check phones or tablets in the wee hours, we pretend work is leisure as we run the hamster wheel of social-media clicks. For Crary, a professor of art history, the life of digital timelessness manifests the most basic and inexorable drive of capitalism, which would shrink whatever is not producing or consuming. Sleep occupies that vanishing margin. Sleep does not want to be productive. “Sleep,” Crary writes, “poses the idea of a human need and interval of time that cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability.”

Crary’s book therefore looks back seriously to a premodern vision of the quotidian, based on repetitive cycles of rest and rising—those spirals that Scheherazade wove into art. But this is not reactionary. Crary wants to reset our clocks, not turn them back. His most valuable insight is that the sheer fact of sleep can be a deliberate choice—a political choice. It could be a mode of resistance.

Sleep as Resistance by Siobhan Phillips
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[gallery] simongoode:

Poster Poem (Le-Circus)

Ian Hamilton Finlay, 1964

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[gallery] ensalada-de-lengua-de-pajaritos:

Jacques Tati ad nauseam (watch the original scene).
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[gallery] thingsmagazine:

Japanese book plates, 1970s

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[gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19817”]

thingsmagazine:

Fantastic Mr Fox, 1970
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[gallery] erikkwakkel:

Charming

This papyrus sheet contains two love charms. While over 1400 years old, the charms are, well, charming. The top part of the sheet instructs the user how to get a good singing voice - and who wouldn’t want that? Certain words had to be written in a chalice, which apparently worked miracles to the voice. The second charm is more in line with what we would expect a person activating a charm to pursue: a woman’s heart. Again words needed to be written down, this time on a sheet of tin, after which the writing had to be buried at the woman’s door. Such charms were deemed powerful; powerful enough to have them written down on expensive material, possibly by a third - professional - party. I can’t help thinking of this pair as plan A and B: if the singing failed, a potent alternative was to secure the desired woman’s heart. Success guaranteed.

Pic: New Haven, Beinecke Library, Call Number P.CtYBR inv. 1791 (Coptic, Egypt, 6th or 7th century): source of the image and more information. Here is another papyrus love charm.

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When Shakespeare lamented the “bare ruined choirs” of the destroyed monasteries in sonnet 73 he was not necessarily signalling his opposition to Henry VIII’s brutal reforms or secretly recording his sympathy for the Catholic underground. Rather, he was expressing his dismay at the fracturing of late-medieval Christendom, a traumatic division that horrified Catholics and Protestants alike.
What kind of God did Shakespeare believe in? Was he? Or was he simply employing an astonishingly original double metaphor, in which old age (“That time of year thou mayest in me behold”) is figured as a bare tree, which is then itself figured as “bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang”? How in the world could you confidently conclude from this that Shakespeare “was expressing his dismay at the fracturing of late-medieval Christendom”? The poem expresses dismay at old age, of that we can be sure — though not even that Shakespeare was writing about his own old age: the poem’s speaker may be a fiction — but we don’t have any reason to think that Shakespeare even had any opinions about “late-medieval Christendom.” Note that the writer doesn’t even consider the possibility that if the phrase “bare ruined choirs” expresses any feelings of Shakespeare’s own it could refer to the loss of beautiful architecture, not “Christendom.”

My point is just this: how hard it is even for people who are warning against reading too much into Shakespeare not to read too much into Shakespeare.

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[gallery] Centre for Material Texts: “At the centre of the exhibition were two truly extraordinary stitched texts … by a woman called Lorina Bulwer, who was an inmate in the ‘lunatic wing’ of the Great Yarmouth workhouse for several years at the beginning of the twentieth century. During her time there, Bulwer covered each of these three-metre lengths with densely embroidered text in which she expressed feelings of anger and frustration. Both pieces are made up of brightly coloured cotton fabrics stitched together, with a wadded lining and a backing fabric, like a quilt. Each individual letter is stitched through all of these layers. Writing in the first person, Bulwer offers a torturous working-out of her own identity. She is obsessed by names and places, frequently referring to herself by name, as well as other people, including her own relations, members of the Royal family (she claims to be ‘Princess Victoria’s daughter’), and various towns and places in the East of England.”

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Streamlining

For the last few months I’ve been experimenting with various blog and blog-like options for online writing and linking. None of them are perfect, which I suppose won’t be news to anyone.

For a while I thought I needed to post to my own site, on the “own your turf” principle. So I started transitioning away from this tumblelog and towards that space. But posting to a WordPress site, especially if you’re posting anything other than text, is far clunkier than posting to a tumblelog; and since I am not hosting the site on my own server, I’m still dependent on other people to keep my blog up and my data safe. Also, while I don’t have many readers here at More than 95 Theses, there are people who’ve been following me here for quite some time and have told me that they miss my posts when I go quiet here.

So I’m just going to perform regular downloads of my Tumblr data — using SiteSucker, a fine app — and do my posting here.

As you can see by looking at the sidebar, I have other online projects as well — the Gospel of the Trees site and the Book of Common Prayer tumblelog — and those will remain available, though I don’t expect to add any more to them. That is, I’m going to treat them as substantially complete projects. If I ever happen to update them, I’ll announce new posts on Twitter.

I will continue to post to Text Patterns when I have something substantive to say on the topics that blog considers. Everything else will be posted here.

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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Mi9RHv1SS4?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=187]

Archguitarists Peter Blanchette and Elliot Gibbons performing J.S. Bach’s Prelude 15, from the 2nd book of the Well-Tempered Clavier. Northampton Center for the Arts, March, 2013

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)