<<Let me begin by turning to Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude (2003). I'd like to begin at the end of this novel, with an image that Lethem offers up of an imaginative "middle space." Lethem's main character, Dylan Ebdus, has been kicked out of Camden College, and drives home with his father (Abraham) through a snow storm. Dylan puts on a Brian Eno tape, and feels comforted by the sense of space that it invokes: "the middle space [it] conjured and dwelled in, a bohemian demimonde, a hippie dream" (509). The adult Dylan goes on to reflect on this space as a precarious construction half-way between the utopian and the tough real world that he grew up in, a space of potential that allows one foot to remain in a private dream world, and one foot to rest in its historical moment:
We all pined for those middle spaces, those summer hours when Josephine Baker lay waste to Paris, when "Bothered Blue" peaked on the charts, when a teenaged Elvis, still dreaming of his own first session, sat in the Sun Studios watching the Prisonaires, when a top-to-bottom burner blazed through a subway station, renovating the world for an instant, when schoolyard turntables were powered by a cord run from a streetlamp, when juice just flowed. (510)
This space between dream and flow, between imaging a relationship and being jacked into an electrical grid, strikes me as a rearticulation of the fragile location that Appadurai describes, and which Critchley misses. This is an imaginative space of identification, where the outside world suddenly calls to you.>>
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"...My body isn't a temple so much as it's a littered-up roadside cross with fake flowers stuck to it." ~Oryx
"...he may know what he actually meant, but we certainly cannot. It's like some biblical quote pulled at random from Revelations and used to support Jesus wielding Colt 45s and riding a tyrannosaurus rex at the Final Battle, only much shorter and bilingual. Maybe." ~Govi
Spacey comes into the middle of a thread
Linear Mode
