Non Fungible Jokes

I made a joke on twitter the other day about NFTs and Keats and a friend asked for a translation. I went for a walk and thought about it and realized I had more thoughts than fit in a tweet so here we are.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as I understand them are digital artifacts that point or refer to something else (a work of art, potentially a concept). Similarly, there’s a way of thinking about language where words are arbitrary “tokens” that refer or point to the actual things we’re talking about.

Poetry, and especially metaphor, mess with the literal version of this way of thinking about language because it uses language in intentionally ambiguous ways. One example of this is Keats’ poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” which concludes:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,–that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
from John Keats “Ode on a Grecian Urn“

There are several literary theoretical approaches that have tried to adopt the systematic rigor of mathematics and apply it to the study of literature and human society. I associate this sort of thinking to the varieties of techno-utopianism we see from time to time (e.g., we’re gonna build a city with blockchain!)

Opposed to that impulse is one that says we can never arrive at an all-encompassing system and will always have to make due with incomplete and uncertain systems (and maybe that’s a good thing). Going back to Keats, he wrote in a letter to his brothers about “Negative Capability” which he described as being “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” and

Suggested listening: Hard Drive by Cassandra Jenkins

From “How Do You Like the Underworld”

Some say to settle for winter.
But they have read way to much Rilke
he is very dead, and his problems
though cosmic did not include
the round earth becoming hotter.
– from “How Do You Like the Underworld” by Matthew Zapruder

De Rerum Natura

“As hounds that range the hills often smell out the lairs of wild beasts screened in thickets, when once they have got on the right trail, so in such questions one thing will lead on to another, till you can succeed by yourself in tracking down the truth to its lurking places and dragging it forth.”
Lucretius tr. Ronald Latham

Vampire Weekend

I’m sitting around gradually recovering from the flu and listening to new songs from Vampire Weekend. One of the songs, Harmony Hall, “interpolates” (as the word apparently is) a song from their previous album.

It’s a different world now. I remember discovering Vampire Weekend via a blog post on Caleb Crain’s blog “Steamboats are Ruining Everything”. Plenty of folks have eulogized the death of the blogging culture of the early 2000s so whatever. But there was something cool about finding those nooks and crannies of the internet. Not the big-name stuff but the back corners where folks wrote with varying levels of pretension about things they actually knew about and there wasn’t really any money in it.

The thing I miss the most, and it’s impossible to tell whether this was a factor of the era or a being-in-your-20s thing, was how much there was to discover in the world. Not just on the internet but corners of history, literature, etc. not covered in school.

Anyhow:

From Cosmicomics

“…And on top of that, we were always bumping against the Z’zu family’s household goods: camp beds, mattresses, baskets; these Z’zus, if you weren’t careful, with the excuse that they were a large family, would begin to act as if they were the only ones in the world: they even wanted to hang lines across our point to dry their washing.

“But the others also had wronged the Z’zus, to begin with, by calling them ‘immigrants,’ on the pretext that, since the others had been there first, the Z’zus had come later. This was mere unfounded prejudice–that seems obvious to me–because neither before nor after existed, nor any place to immigrate from, but there were those who insisted that the concept of ‘immigrant’ could be understood in the abstract, outside of space and time.

“It was what you might call a narrow-minded attitude, our outlook at that time, very petty. The fault of the environment in which we had been reared. An attitude that, basically, has remained in all of us, mind you: it keeps cropping up even today, if two of us happen to meet–at the bus stop, in a movie house, at an international dentists’ convention–and start reminiscing about the old days….”

from “All at One Point” in Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino (tr. William Weaver)

Bombadil

Several years ago some sort of recommendation from Spotify introduced me to the band Bombadil out of North Carolina. I’ve been listening to them off and on ever since and finally, last Sunday, I had the chance to see them play live at 7th Street Entry.

Turns out, they’re really good live.