flotsam

For some reason, LI's comments section isn't showing all comments. Here's a comment from Mr. Rojas, the Naked Gaze blogger, re the last two posts:

"Roger,
This also ties back in nicely with Derrida's "Specters of Marx" theme, in the sense that it was precisely the development of artificial light during the nineteenth century which revolutionized the possibilities for the creation of ghostly apparitions (through projections, etc.), thereby informing, perhaps, Marx's fascination with spectrality."

LI's far flung correspondent, Mr. T., sent us a nice anecdote about his own reading/lighting experiment:

"I speculated at one point that it might be best to read things like The Brothers Karamazov and The Kreutzer Sonata and The Idiot by candlelight. What was this? This was a hope for purity, for a pure moment, a hope to encounter the author, that so much dead flesh, that foreign language, that religion....all of that that was not in the room in which I read. Could I approximate an over-coming of every distance by light? Could I set a condition, a space, where time might be trammeled? Ah, tried I did, and I am glad that I was so dissappointed, that I have forgoten what I read on those nights, but that I have remembered the effort."

Also, LCC has a nice post up about the Grid -- something we would like to get into at another time. One way of reading Gravity's Rainbow is to read it as the secret history of the Grid -- and we all, I hope, remember the Byron the Bulb section in Gravity's Rainbow, which clues the reader into the Phoebus, the international light bulb cartel, the engineering of techno forms of the grid experimenting with pathways later traveled by corporate power, penetrations of privacy that eventually reconfigure the whole notion of privacy, of what is and isn't for sale.