Slow Muse

“When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless […]

The Golden Record consists of 115 analog-encoded photographs, greetings in 55 languages, a 12-minute montage of sounds on Earth and 90 minutes of music. J Marshall – Tribaleye Images / Alamy I am admittedly enamored with the idea that things possess dimensions that can’t be seen. Artists are particularly drawn to this idea, but I was […]

At a time when things feel particularly frayed and fragile, finding a place of clarity and comfort is hard. Frequent reference has been made to the haunting the lines of W. B. Yeats’s 1919 poem, Second Coming: “The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” Every […]

Paula Vogel wrote the play, How I Learned to Drive, by staying up all night for two weeks. She had secured a theater residency in Juneau, but unforeseen circumstances caused her to arrive empty handed. As a result, she was highly aware of an obligation to produce something quickly. The long days of sunlight, the […]

Kurt Vonnegut was famous for his conviction that all stories conform to very defined narrative shapes. He liked to chart out each storyline’s trajectory—he had about eight of them–and gave them names like “Man in Hole” and “Boy Meets Girl.” And now AI has demonstrated that these fundamental story forms are indeed legit–identifiable, indelible, ubiquitous. […]

“A cartographic conception is very distinct from the archaeological conception… The latter establishes a profound link between the unconscious and memory: it is a memorial, commemorative, or monumental conception…Maps, on the contrary, are superimposed in such a way that each map finds itself modified in the following map, rather than finding its origin in the […]