Discovering strange little poetic moments on the Web

I've done something delightful to my browser. Michael Day, an artist whose work I esteem in great measure, has put together an exhibit through Add-Art. Add-Art utilizes a firefox plug-in to replace all web ad content with art. Lovely.


Michael Day, Filter 5

So, for instance, yesterday, when I was looking up the last lines of "The Dead," I saw this:



I've noticed that having the ad content replaced changes the quality of the way I read on-line. It's more still; there are fewer moments in which I feel tugged in ten directions.

I've written a small bit of text to go along with the exhibition, which you can read here or here.

sometimes it's just hard for words

by Katie Taylor

It's been happening for about a month now, this disconcerting sense that I am losing my easy grasp on whatever fibers those are that connect my intended meaning with the expression of it that follows.

I am constantly doubting that anything I say or write makes sense. Emails and conversations are littered with "Does that make sense?" and "I'm not expressing it well" and "Do you understand what I'm trying to say?" And people respond "yes" or "no" or "I think so," but it doesn't leave me feeling any more assured that I've felted language and meaning together properly.



And another disconnection: I know this happens—I understand it intellectually. I've written about it, language dissolving when experience bursts its seams. Think about Toni Morrison in those school primer passages in The Bluest Eye. Think about Finnegan's Wake or Septimus Smith. Think about The New York Trilogy.

But I find more and more as I accumulate experiences that intellectual understanding does not prepare you for experiencing things during whatever present in which they occur. They're separate forms of knowing.


by Fay Ku

I was reminded the other day of the concept of the un-thought known. It's a term from psychoanalysis (if I understand it correctly) that refers to the knowledge a child accumulates that is never consciously given to her and that she doesn't knowingly receive. It's not a kind of knowledge that we can take stock of and it functions extralingually.

I keep hoping that maybe knowledge works a bit like a hybrid engine, with one part kicking in for the other when necessary. Maybe my un-thought known is picking up the slack these days.