Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it's addressed to someone else
Oscar Wilde once quipped: “I love to talk about nothing. It’s the only thing I know anything about.”
Now, to find that screen/tree/wall I need to be looking at...
The blog’s most literal, direct referent is the worldwide credit crunch, and, more specifically, its effects on that Kentucky-sized, geyser-studded, frozen canary in the mineshaft: Iceland.
Iceland functions in the American imaginary as the more wild feminized sibling of Canada– strange, socialist, generally other.
This is as much a conversation with myself as anything– a conversation between me and the consciousness picking the cultural ephemera that sediment around the borders of this “nothing”– images and experience.
What also becomes clearer as I blog through this disaster are the unexpected intersections between my own childhood and how I’ve represented this event to myself- what I’ve chosen to see in it, what I cannot help but see in it.
The figure, as Blanchot has it, is the aspect of the disaster we identify with– that embodies a pre-existing choice that was made by me– that I made–that oriented me towards the world in ways that become more and more concrete as time passes.
The connections simply keep happening– in a way that is better than Magnolia or Memento– the two films that embody the sort of detective story I’m in the middle of allowing to speak to me.