welcome to my bower

erlebnis and erfahrung

photo credit: Ben Adams

I am interested in machine learning and Marxism. I also paint, and now I would like to write a little bit, mostly for myself.

Some of you may know me by a different name online, on Twitter for example. I had designs to start a blog all the way back in 2022 but simply never got around to it. At that time the goal was, to rework Alan Wall’s reflections on Walter Benjamin in the Fortnightly Review, to be “as engrossed in the materiality of writing as in the materiality of [twenty-first century] image production”, the latter of which for me takes the form of painting as well, wherein I am interested in those places where human and machine vision meet.

I have never really been a blogger but I have received good responses to writing I’ve done for friends’ outlets in the past, and I have been heartened by the recent blogging exploits of other awesome and dope friends. I hope to whip some old drafts into shape, mostly writing I had started around that time and never got to share. Unfortunately I think a number of them have somewhat died on the vine, particularly writing I did about Palestine before fall of 2023—and I did write a lot about it before—but I will do my best. It will be fun, I think, because I did like some of it at the time and wanted to put it out there, pure riffing, unresearched, my passing fancies.

For example: I really liked Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz, or at least what little I could remember of it, having read it on-and-off while falling asleep in bed over the course of more than two years, or at least the idea of it, of being an onanistic novel, a satire of the phenomenology of world creation, the mental process of constructing some sort of semantic frame for parsing experience. It’s not just because I had at some point in my life (from the ages of 14-22) thought that I would become a professional cosmologist. Grombowicz’s protagonist discovers that the secret life of the adult male patriarch is one of “chronic, secret masturbation (the creation of private, obsessive, cosmos).” It’s like, I don’t know, staring at a curtain pattern in the darkened nurse’s office as a child or a bit of spackle on the wall long enough until it enlarges, becomes something ordered, concrete, fixed and inscribed into the rigidity of cosmological creation. This act of obsessive self-pleasuring meaning-making, isn’t that what blogging is all about?

What to expect:

• Writing that on occasion engages with the field of academic geography (which I currently find myself in);

• commentary on what I’ve been reading, held together with loose conceptual threads;

• my own megalomania.

The title of this post (and my Bluesky handle) is borne out of my admiration for the satin bowerbird. I hope to be like a bowerbird, collecting little bits of intellectual, increasingly plastic trash. I hope these little frissons of thought are exciting or entertaining to you.