Category Archives: Uncategorized

Tables, Tools, Tasks

Posted on March 9, 2015 by Francois Lachance

Donald Knuth’s Turing Award lecture, “Computer Programming as an Art” (1974) Well, it’s true, not all programming tasks are going to be fun. Consider the “trapped housewife,,” who has to clean off the same table every day: there’s not room … Continue reading →

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Querying and Queering Digital Humanities

Posted on March 7, 2015 by Francois Lachance

A seriously engaging tour de force. “Why Are the Digital Humanities So Straight?” by Edmond Y. Chang in Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities edited by Dorothy Kim, Adeline Koh It is described as “An essay in the form of … Continue reading →

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Three Assumptions

Posted on March 4, 2015 by Francois Lachance

little lessons … These days, those phones in our pockets are changing our minds and hearts because they offer us three gratifying fantasies. One, that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; two, that we will … Continue reading →

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In A Previous Life I Was a Crème Caramel

Posted on February 28, 2015 by Francois Lachance

Brooks Haxton, translator Fragments: the collected wisdom of Heraclitus 17 Pythagoras may well have been the deepest in his learning of all men. And still he claimed to recollect details of former lives, being in one a cucumber and one … Continue reading →

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Cascades and Corrections

Posted on February 25, 2015 by Francois Lachance

Patti Smith from “notebook” in Early Work 1970-1979 [after a number of lines exploring what it means to be american] Freedom is a waterfall, is pacing linoleum till dawn, is the right to write the wrong words. and I done … Continue reading →

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Style and Obscure Necessity

Posted on February 24, 2015 by Francois Lachance

Neither, nor, but nevertheless … necessity. Style is a matter of bending and transforming language so as to create the personae and the contest or game for those singular ideas for which there preexist neither the words nor the story, … Continue reading →

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Pro-retro

Posted on February 22, 2015 by Francois Lachance

From an interview in Surface Magazine: What’s the future if we can’t learn from the past? Sébastien Léon, artist, designer and sound sculptor This was set as an either/or question: Remember or forget? Remember. What’s the future if we can’t … Continue reading →

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The Elegance of Refusing Closure

Posted on February 21, 2015 by Francois Lachance

Charlie Mackesy ends or rather relaunches the imagination sous rature in The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse with this gentle reminder: the end look how far we’ve come what makes this so serene is the pen work … Continue reading →

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Small Numbers Fuel Vast Imaginings

Posted on February 19, 2015 by Francois Lachance

Magic number 20 more or less … Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. … Continue reading →

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Festival of Fire

Posted on February 11, 2015 by Francois Lachance

At the end of the sequence comes the section with the title-giving anecdote. My erasure. The fire read my books, turning and curling the pages, blackening their edges, folding back the sheets as if inviting me into bed. The splayed … Continue reading →

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