Clips and collected ideas from a life of reading on- and off-screen

Dec 5, 2015

Cultural technology

The age of information technology had dominated most of the ’90s, and I predicted that the age of cultural technology would come next. S.M. Entertainment and I see culture as a type of technology. But cultural technology is much more exquisite and complex than information technology.

Lee Soo-Man to John Seabrook, “Factory Girls”

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Mar 1, 2016

Things are clearly not to be trusted

And that’s how it is with the rest of Buster’s universe. Things are clearly not to be trusted. The chair will collapse, the plank will hit you in the face, the gun will misfire, the car will die on the railroad tracks, the boat will sink, the balloon will escape…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Dec 5, 2015

On changing the world

To think continuously about changing the world is to spend your life looking at what is bad in it. To be attached to the world is to be attached to the world as it is, and not for any reason, because reasons can always be countered. To consider the world from first principles, to think…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Jan 2, 2016

So much more than the world could offer

When we pick up our newspaper at breakfast, we expect — we even demand — that it bring us momentous events since the night before. We turn on the car radio as we drive to work and expect “news” to have occurred since the morning newspaper went to press…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Dec 5, 2015

Virtuous/virtual

For all the fascination with bodies, our current technology is arguably exacerbating our carnal alienation. While offering us enormous freedoms of fantasy and encounter, digital eros may also be removing us further from the flesh. Pornography, for example, is now an industry worth tens of billions…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Feb 29, 2016

Telecom Year Zero

Literature more or less begins with an account of a signal crossing space — to be precise, with an account of the network along which this signal travels. In Act 1 of Aeschylus’ “Agamemnon” (458 B.C.), Clytemnestra appears outside her palace, supposedly to announce the news that Troy has fallen…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Feb 13, 2016

Keys vs. combinations

[T]he law has always drawn a distinction between objects and what’s in your brain. And even though the key to a lock and a series of numbers that’s the combination to a combination lock are functionally the same thing, the law draws a distinction and says that under the Fifth Amendment you…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Jan 7, 2016

The origins of Dymaxion

Fuller’s favorite neologism, “dymaxion,” was concocted purely for
public relations. When Marshall Field’s displayed his model house, it
wanted a catchy label, so it hired a consultant, who fashioned
“dymaxion” out of bits of “dynamic,” “maximum,” and “ion.” Fuller was so
taken with the…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Dec 6, 2015

Where stories come from

The tension is between finding ever more detail about atomic structure, and the story. It could be the equivalent of somebody looking at an old film, and realizing that the film came from a projector, and discovering that there is an image in the projector, and that it’s made of…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Feb 27, 2016

The postmodern attitude

I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her “I love you madly,” because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a…

About

Quote Unquote

Clips and collected ideas from a life of reading on- and off-screen

More information

Followers

Elsewhere