Debbie Foster
@dafinor
Debbie Foster
@dafinor
For me, as for Proust, writing is an attempt to put into language what the world is like from where I stand in it. The language doesn't exist before the attempt begins; it's the attempt itself that conjures the language into existence. One doesn't need to have published anything to recognize that feeling. One needs only to be human. But to be a
... See moreLong before the modernists, Whitman integrated found text and ready-made language into a revolutionary formulation of artistic production that anticipates much of what is exciting about modern and postmodern art.
That direct engagement with the self, with no fear of shame or abandonment, no struggling to please others, is what makes isolation feel restorative and generative when it creates the conditions for solitude. In other words, stories we create with ourselves, for ourselves, can be a way of redeeming loneliness. It's when we hit the limits of the
... See moreMy journalist brain turned on. The light in the waiting room started to take on texture. Background sounds moved into the foreground, demanded engrossment. I felt close to something, the way some days when the air was cold and the sun was bright, I felt more alive. My mom used to describe these kinds of days as baking-soda days—when everything was
... See moreWhen we do not know what we should hope for, we can hope to learn.
The legend of Theseus and the Minotaur is full of imagery and incident that lends itself to psychoanalytic interpretation: the minotaur - half man, half animal - embodies the essential conflict between ego and id; the labyrinth, which coincidentally resembles the sulci of the cortex, suggests the complexities of the mind. In 1927, Freud told an
... See moreLife is Cheap The brain is constantly trying to automate processes, thereby dispelling them from consciousness; in this way its work will be completed faster, more effectively and at a lower metabolic level. Consciousness, on the other hand, is slow, subject to error and ‘expensive’.
Current LLMs are simply not equipped with the memory systems needed to form a durable impression of the user, which would allow them to explicitly personalize content to suit our views or tastes.
as of early 2024
After years of feeling that way, it was strange to wake up and read a poem every day, and to feel I had grown intimate with it, tender with its idiosyncrasies of form and rhythm. For four or five weeks this went on, the poem becoming as falsely natural as a piercing, a foreign body fitted snugly into the internal and external material of my life.