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To From: Chris Kraus (excerpts) I am going to tell you my history. The nightmare of history weighs on the brains of the living, Karl Marx, 1848. On my web browser, history goes back two weeks. This history includes, but is not necessarily limited to: Alt Amazon Bmezin Cca Coldsteel Epinions Extremerestraints Faqs Frontlist Listserv Objectivistcentre Piercingmagic Primalurge Southwest Sparacus-school Superpages Tatttoos-about Urbanprimitive Whitepages As you demonstrate, the absolute dominance of electronic communication has trumped that old postmodernist doubt that one can ever speak of a "we." Online we are equallly weightless, displaced, deranged and confused. There is too much information, we lose the drift, information speaks only to information. This is not schizophrenia, it is a paranoid fantasy of total control. The internet is the great leveler. Baudrillard says: The ecstasy of communication. The interesting thing about your blog is that it exists as itself only when read electronically. Blogs aren't manuscripts. There is this thing that happens to human organisms when we go online. Our heart rates speed up; a certain part of the brain is drawn into the current; we are plugged in, to a trance-state. Reading, I wonder why you are channeling the Black Tarantula 'zines of the late Kathy Acker. Acker's 'zine were typewritten, mimeographed, later on xeroxed, and distributed by mail. Still later, they were published as "literature". Faithful, even successful, I feel like your story has nothing to tell me until I log on to the blog and everything radiates. Disguised as disturbed adolescent In your story, everything happens through navigation; your glorious adolescence, your attempt to seep through the cracks of the web; you are everywhere (nowhere) as you 'storm the reality studio' (Burroughs). Your blog is perpetual, it happens over and over again. It is key to the present. x, Chris ----------------------- Chris Kraus is a writer based in New York and Los Angeles. Her most recent book is Torpor published by Semiotext(e). |
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Read Patterson's work here. |