Play and Games
In German, the two words are the same, or at least have the same root. “Spiel” is a game, and “spielen” is the verb — roughly “to spiel.” They’re two different words in English,...
Author: nannyrhops
This is Play
This is the title of an article (Stephen Nachmanovitch, New Literary History, Vol. 40, No. 1, Winter, 2009), pp. 1-24.) about play in general, but specifically about Gregory Bateson’s theoretical approach to it – involving...
Cultural Minimum
There are many thoughtful and suggestive definitions of “culture,” but I can’t remember any thoughts about the minimum. What is necessary and/or sufficient about a given set of circumstances for it to be rightly...
Family Lexicon
Before I learned of Ginzburg’s book, I used the phrase “family lexicon”(incorrectly, I think in retrospect) as the domain name for a website of family photographs. The project crashed and burned for the best...
The Rhythm of Writing
“His [Flusser’s] writing method evolved in the era of the portable manual typewriter, and he never changed it thereafter, despite the explosion of information technology through which he was to live and about which...
Flusser on Photography
This essay, “Out of Language: Photography as Translation” has been accepted for publication in the Routledge Companion to Photography Theory, only it isn’t clear when the volume will be in print. One of the editors thought it would be OK to share...