Feline Escapades

The Peripheral. William Gibson.

Voice being piped from within. A bone voice.

It made dragging your fingernails across a chalkboard seem like stroking a kitten.
A kitten with claws of course. And this test run of a cognitive bundle implant that produces art world jargon.
West's oeuvre obliquely propels the viewer through an elaborately finite set of iterations, skeins of carnal memory manifesting an exquisite tenderness, but delimited by our mythologies of the real, of body. It isn't about who we are now, but about who we would be, the other.
Designed to make you want to scratch — and fitting for describing an artist who gets tattoos and collects flayed epidermis to exhibit the narratives captured by those very tattoos. Quite the coup to produce the discursive inflections of a neoprimitivist curator with just the right dose of bafflement and believability.

I have been quoting these in reverse order from their appearance in the novel. All the better to sharpen a set of claws on this take on periodization and historical awareness.
Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.
Of course the character listening to this states having no idea how anything could be otherwise. The kitten has grown into a Cheshire cat.

And so for day 1457
09.12.2010