Max Guy > Recent Status Updates

Trying to read the book like a story—imagining a narrative unfold—helps to devise online lessons in multimedia art. Another concept Schafer apparently had was the idea of “schizophonia” that sounds had been split what creates them. Now I’m just imagining our phones and other recording devices replacing a human as the audience, and thinking of how to integrate field recordings into remote lessons.

This portion feels somewhat comical…

Perverse

I’ve been using the word epigraphic when I mean epigrammatic. Part 2 of the book, Heisenberg descends into madness. Hard to walk away from the story.

Still insufferable

Never mind, there are plenty of epigraphic passages and prose. The Heart of the Heart chapter is quite the yarn spun. Grappling with the valorizing of genius and mental illness a bit, but I’m not sure if that’s what is happening here. After all, I’m not certain that is what happened with Schwarzschild in the previous chapter. Creative non fiction has really triumphed in the last half decade, huh?

I noticed myself looking for something prophetic in part 2, something epigraphic. I think there might be something in the paragraph between pages 48 and 49 where Alfred Schwarzschild anticipates a genius who can understand the intricacies of cosmology.

I’m finding this story and its characters insufferable. This is the narrative where Modan has really pushed me to the limit! And that’s easy: it’s the book where Modan narrates contemporary Zionism and Zionists within an international context, the complicity of nations and patrons, and the sorts of characters that can emerge.

So far so good. Each time I read it I tuck my bookmark on some random page, where I then stop.

Part 1, Prussian Blue, was solid. It read like a piece of prose, I guess since it’s creative non-fiction. Would be a great complement to Amy Sillman’s essay/lecture on color in Faux Pas.

Early on I wrote on my index card “who was Ernst Casirer, and how far can I get into ‘Ways of Worldmaking’ without reading about him or knowing? Will Nelson Goodman tell me?”

Evidently I needn’t know much about him, but my book’s previous owner might have had the same question, having underlined a number of Casirer-related details.

Precise writing. Helpful to know the term “Art World” as I read.

Never thought about math as a way of modeling things, and maybe that was the problem…

So far so good. One a personal note the text is very affirming of the random smatterings of philosophy, aesthetics, and more that I’ve read in the last 15 years or so. So far Lamarre does a great job of reconciling thinkers such as Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, Kittler, Deleuze. Perhaps these aren’t all a far reach from one another but he’s using these authors to discuss the Pokémon craze…

I’m not reading this linearly—despite its chronological ordering that doesn’t seem the point. Reading these I get the sense that she’s experimenting with a specific prosody and the limits to what it can convey. I get the sense that so much poetry today, which emulates the way her writing exists on a page, forgets verse in favor of typography. Utopia is great, so is Failures in Infinitives—later work.

I’m actually reading g the Penguin Classics edition with Ulinka Rublack commentary. I appreciate the tour of Medieval Germany and Switzerland so far. Had revisited this book really to collage some of its pages and since I’d just visited Basel, where Holbein’s career took off, and which is home to his famous “Dead Christ.”

Popped on to say: many typos in this book.