Tag Archives: literature

God & Technology (Philip K. Dick)

Posted on February 6, 2013 by zjb

A double surprise, the appearance of God in Katherine Hayle’s How We Became Posthuman as well as the appearance of same in Philp K. Dick, of cyber-punk sci-fi fame. The place of God in Dick’s imaginative universe makes perfect sense. … Continue reading →

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Bees of the Invisible (Rilke)

Posted on January 28, 2013 by zjb

At the threshold between visibility and invisibility, earthly life and spiritual vistas, here’s Rilke in the famous 1925 letter to his Polish translator, Witold Von Hulewicz, about the material transformation of object-things into invisible form and, then back again, into … Continue reading →

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(Flow) I Am (Rilke) Sonnets to Orpheus

Posted on January 27, 2013 by zjb

Rilke is the poet of the Information Age, art nouveau its design culture. There’s no better articulation of the tensions between subjects, objecthood and mass. What is the status of the individual subjectivity in a world constituted as constant flux? … Continue reading →

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Digital Humanities — Digital Poiesis (Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality

Posted on January 3, 2013 by zjb

When I was first asked to respond on a panel run about Digital Humanities (DH), it was my first assumption that DH constitutes the technical operations such as data storage and access, and statistical crunching. That was the impression I … Continue reading →

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Song of Songs (Totality of Torah) (Kabbalah & Aesthetic Judaism)

Posted on December 30, 2012 by zjb

(E.M. Lilien, E.M. “Das Stille Lied”, from Das Buch Juda: Gesaenge by Börries Freiherr von Münchhausen) What’s more important, law or poetry? I used to think that Torah is law. And I used to think you were supposed to think … Continue reading →

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(Religion &) LSD (Allen Ginsberg)

Posted on December 22, 2012 by zjb

My mom clipped me an essay in the New Yorker by Zadie Smith about Joni Mitchell with reference to Abraham, Isaac, and Kierkegaard. The essay reflects on this thing called literary taste, and the kinds of shifts to which it … Continue reading →

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Revelation Angel Fabrication (Kafka)

Posted on December 3, 2012 by zjb

Did this ever happen to you? Sitting in a small room, narrow street outside, constant moving about inside, attending and attending to every intense detail, resting, a haphazard glance, combining sensation and perception  as things start to quicken and to … Continue reading →

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Kafka Judaism (Diaries)

Posted on December 3, 2012 by zjb

In the Complete Stories, all those strange animals are Jews, the radiance is mystical, the traditions are Jewish.  But how can I convince you? Bound to each other and to decrepit traditions that continue to bind and to animate, they … Continue reading →

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(Radiance) (Possibility) (Religion) Kafka Complete Stories

Posted on November 30, 2012 by zjb

I was sort of expecting to find it, and there it was: religion in Kafka. What I did not expect to find was modal possibility, meaning that “the religious” in Kafka’s stories is bound up with possibility. Bear in mind … Continue reading →

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Tradition (Obsolete Technology) (Kafka Complete Stories) (Judaism)

Posted on November 29, 2012 by zjb

In a story by Kafka, tradition takes shape as a machinic thing, an obsolete technology against or out of sorts with the modern grain that continues to function, sort of. Tradition is like the piecemeal construction that is “The Great … Continue reading →

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