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Simon Taylor

Simon Taylor

https://orcid.org/0009-0008-6687-4647

on transcendental experience … after Mario Levrero

Mario Levrero begins The Luminous Novel… he is a writer from Uruguay, was. An unnecessary detail, perhaps. Alejandro Zambra, a writer I admire, Chilean, as it happens, or happened, like Bolaño, yet very unlike him, writes about Levrero that we cannot, we readers, we cannot hope to understand that mythical

matter in the raw, and god or simulationeer must be a monster, capable of near-infinitely sadistic cruelty: Iain M. Banks, the moral argument for their nonexistence, our existence.

You know there is a theory … that all that we experience as reality is just a simulation, a kind of hallucination that has been imposed upon us. … …how can we know that our own reality is the last, the final one? How do we know there is not still a

only

the old sensitive trees you see on the coast here they can make you believe life is sad gods in the forest a character's always he or she or they never it Levinas the French Jewish philosopher my friend, Alphonso Lingis, you can call me Al and when

to you of all people

harvest the leaves of grass harvest all things mottled, bare of charm how can you harvest that like anchors on the seafloor a luminous watery sky a wash a watered silk gather the wings of flies, ...I said, flies. I know what I said. yo, measure the beds... we have

grief, and a sense of loss…

we have to … no, we don’t. wake up? no, we don’t. and it is as if we are passing through a dream… pass through dreams passing through a dream… pass through gathering the images to us we want desire is like turbulence in our transit who has time

on shrinking

In, as part of, Claire Bishop’s original Artforum article, “The Digital Divide,” there appears a ‘media case study’ where Mark Dion says what he’s afraid of in the digital, as part of it. I talked about this in the lectures uploaded here. In a strange serendipity, Mark Dion

a note on Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” from lecture 7, Theory & Context

… Walter Benjamin is misunderstood in his essay of 1935 if it is thought he is referring to what is particular to an artwork, or to what is unique and singular in general: the reproduction he is referring to is not so much to do with the reproduction of an original