On the necessity of recording community narratives: “all communities tell stories about themselves, about the distinctive nature of their formation and achievements. These stories can have a powerful role in constituting our identities, and so in defining and sustaining our common life. But they are also subject to endless manipulation, for it will always be in the interests of the powerful — rulers and opinion-formers alike — that certain stories should be remembered, and in certain ways, and that other stories should be forgotten.”
On the stories April and Frank Wheeler told themselves
In “Revolutionary Road,” April and Frank Wheeler are a young married couple driven by ideas. The ideas they hold are of essence and forms, conceptions of things and states and realities that—for them—hold truth, greatness, and validity inherently within them. This essentialist thinking permeates the entire novel, as the couple desperately tries to avoid the [...]
On capturing the full scope of an evanescent vapor. With an audio recorder.
Language can invoke processual notions, instead of flattening concepts into static state-things. I know this because I read Heidegger. Somehow the experience of tracking hatch marks across paper takes on this rich and lush expansiveness, wherein history is also the future.