Comments for the m john harrison blog

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02/15/12--10:06: Comment on on board the arc by durrell2012 (chan 2603903)

Will broadcast this news!


02/17/12--13:30: Comment on futile attempts at denial by Brendan (chan 2603903)

He wouldn't be interested in anything as unsubtle as dismemberment I think, Mike. More he'd sit on a pile of dirty clothes and suck his teeth occasionally while refusing to watch you as you slept.


02/17/12--14:01: Comment on futile attempts at denial by uzwi (chan 2603903)

Dismemberment ?


02/17/12--23:36: Comment on futile attempts at denial by Mike M (aka @Colewelle) (chan 2603903)

I rather like Scorched Edwardian, at least the first photograph of that piece. Our history in these Isles since about 1905 feels a bit like that. Harry is also appealing, if you like: the close-up in the third image reminds me of many a postgraduate in full flow after about the third pint (quite unaware that the bottom is dropping out of their world).


02/20/12--01:45: Comment on the dead speak by Brendan (chan 2603903)

There's a patina of hopelessness. That said, my mind shuts down whenever Philippe Petit is even brought into the ether, as his WTC walk has been fetishized beyond the point of gum-bleeding sanity in New York. There's art for you, after all. You do something which pisses most people off and amazes the rest. Then, after everything's torn down and the screaming stops, you've been made into just another obnoxious curio and there's not a goddamn thing you can do about it if you even want to.


02/20/12--02:00: Comment on the dead speak by uzwi (chan 2603903)

Better that than spend your life in Switzerland keeping safe from stuff that doesn't even threaten you. This is just bourgeois crap & a desperate striking out against the bars of a self-made cage. I don't really care what the media makes of Petit, or anyone else who does stuff. That's a wholly second or third stage process which has nothing to do with walking out along the wire, & I want nothing to do with it. It's just another way to absorb & make safe <em>a thing that was done</em>. All that fucking counts is <em>the thing that's done</em>, while it's being done, not the contemporary farmed divide between the thing that is done and the flaccid wall of discourse that promptly surrounds and defuses it. Absorb, discuss, soften, denature: no wonder we're stuffed & self-kettled. We're the fat people in <em>Wall-E</em>. We have literally forgotten how it feels to act.


02/20/12--04:28: Comment on the dead speak by Hakan Ozel (chan 2603903)

"self-kettled", "Messages of denial from the pooling global Switzerland of the mind."- wonderful phrases. I'm a regular Guardian CiF reader and there was without doubt a noticeable change in tone in the comments after the Times paywall went up. Comments now seem to be divided between reactionary fare from the migrated Times readers and the usual Guardianista attempts to outdo one another in world-weary ennui, scorn and ironic detachment.


02/20/12--10:16: Comment on the dead speak by Brendan (chan 2603903)

You're right, Mike. All I can say in my defense is that in New York anything having to do with the World Trade Center has been so totally subsumed that I find it extremely difficult to get to *the things that's done*, even in elements of my own life. But that's, perhaps, just an exaggeration of that "self-made cage" you're talking about.


02/21/12--02:53: Comment on in the mirror by benspencert (chan 2603903)

I just enjoyed reading In Autotelia. On a train to Euston, sat sharing a table with a stranger and we gently irritated each other with our papers, computers, phones and gestures. Funny that....


02/21/12--03:09: Comment on in the mirror by uzwi (chan 2603903)

Probably the maximum environment in which to read it, Ben.