Comments on: Braindump: Atemporality and Memory http://www.paulboccaccio.com/blog/2010/03/02/braindump-atemporality-and-memory/ I love writing, and books, and writing books. Tue, 29 Nov 2011 08:58:16 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: Edward Gauvin http://www.paulboccaccio.com/blog/2010/03/02/braindump-atemporality-and-memory/comment-page-1/#comment-3767 Edward Gauvin Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:27:19 +0000 http://www.paulboccaccio.com/blog/?p=490#comment-3767 OK, so your musings really have nothing to do with Sterling’s except using, as a jumping-off point, another meaning of a word he also happens to use. I like Sterling’s piece, thanks for pointing it out. It's very specific in its challenges and strategies, though I’d argue some of the latter are leftovers from the postmodern project he claims is finished (doesn't postmodernity encompass mashups, lost futures, multi-author collaborative art, and recuperating forms of history?). He is, as you note, talking about atemporality with regard to a received history of ideas, and not actual atemporality: stepping outside causality and sequence. (I like “shimmying out of time”… it seems to paint time as a glowing hose tube top our undressing makes wiggle, or a fluorescent hula hoop as captured by a long exposure in a dark room. But really to shimmy out of time might be to shuffle off this mortal coil.) This reminds me of the conversation we had while driving through snowy rural PA about the difficulty of visualizing descriptions of “standing outside time and seeing it all at once.” Similarly, I have trouble concretizing your concept of a “collective remembering self,” though perhaps it's the mythic beast you're trying to trap with your experimental novel structure? What other duties, in your mind, does becoming a human neuron entail, since evidently merely passing stories on to one another isn’t enough? OK, so your musings really have nothing to do with Sterling’s except using, as a jumping-off point, another meaning of a word he also happens to use. I like Sterling’s piece, thanks for pointing it out. It’s very specific in its challenges and strategies, though I’d argue some of the latter are leftovers from the postmodern project he claims is finished (doesn’t postmodernity encompass mashups, lost futures, multi-author collaborative art, and recuperating forms of history?). He is, as you note, talking about atemporality with regard to a received history of ideas, and not actual atemporality: stepping outside causality and sequence.

(I like “shimmying out of time”… it seems to paint time as a glowing hose tube top our undressing makes wiggle, or a fluorescent hula hoop as captured by a long exposure in a dark room. But really to shimmy out of time might be to shuffle off this mortal coil.)

This reminds me of the conversation we had while driving through snowy rural PA about the difficulty of visualizing descriptions of “standing outside time and seeing it all at once.” Similarly, I have trouble concretizing your concept of a “collective remembering self,” though perhaps it’s the mythic beast you’re trying to trap with your experimental novel structure? What other duties, in your mind, does becoming a human neuron entail, since evidently merely passing stories on to one another isn’t enough?

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