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Two kinds of knowledge are needed to unlock fragment B3 of Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno. One comes from learning Smart’s life and career, the sad circumstances of the poem’s composition, its implied antiphonal structure and a scintillating range of biblical, classical and contemporary allusions.
The other? From time spent in the company of a cat.
I understand the reasoning behind MSNBC’s rebroadcasting the live NBC coverage of six years ago. The crass rationale is that CNN did it (albeit via streaming) last year, and they had to wait until this year to copycat. Less crass is that after an orgy of replays, the footage was locked away for years, and the chaotic and war-fogged reporting was superseded by a more coherent narrative to suit what followed. Enough time has passed, perhaps, to recall the confusion.
That they repeated that repeat after dark makes less sense. The broken verisimilitude, for some odd reason, makes it feel crass. Or perhaps it exposes the innate crassness of the re-enactment.
In this RadioLab segment, artist David McDermott talks about his attempt to live an Edwardian existence in 21st-century Dublin. His decision when young to step back, soak up the memories of much older people — ‘I felt like they knew something I didn’t know’ — and let the bleeding edge vanish over the horizon is likely to prick the curiosity of anyone neck-deep in technological gore:
In terms of time, I do believe that we can travel in time. I’m not talking to you about actual time-travel. I’m trying to talk in practical terms that anyone can participate in, I call it, ‘time experimentation’.
All moments in time are ever-present and coexisting, he asserts: all that’s needed is a conscious choice to step into one. Escapist and contrived it may be, but in some respects our choice of place and space and engagements (and even dress) is a temporal choice, albeit one in finer gradations, like the adjustments of a clock before the railways.
All of which is backstory to this AskMefi question.
A more scatterdash followup to the previous, based on a few related discussions and responses.
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It feels almost arrogant to start a blog by essentially saying everything you know is wrong. Oh well. The long-form title ought to be:
‘Seek permission, not forgiveness: why the web’s fundamental axioms break down when data gets personal’
but that’s a title built for an academic paper, not a blog post.