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Steve Bosserman

How Gaston Bachelard gave the emotions of home a philosophy - Gillian Darley | Aeon Essays - 0 views

  • As Foucault said of Bachelard a few years later, his characteristic approach was to avoid all defined hierarchies, any universal judgments: ‘He plays against his own culture with his own culture.’ He stood apart, separating himself from the mainstream, finding cracks, dissonances, minor phenomena that he could make his own. Poetry of every description was his raw material.
  • Indoors, in The Poetics of Space, the journey into intimacy is neatly evoked by drawers, cupboards, wardrobes and above all locks, although he warns, somewhat testily, against their use as gratuitous metaphors (and he is strongly averse to the idea of habit).
  • The wellbeing of the warm animal (or human) protected in its nest or cocoon or cottage from the bad weather raging outside is a primitive sense of refuge that we can all share, adult or child. The appeal of a safe haven translates into domestic architecture with such features as the accommodating Arts and Crafts inglenook, seats close by the fire, Frank Lloyd Wright’s enduring penchant for an immense fireplace buried at the core of a house, or even, a favourite 1960s touch, the conversation pit – with or without its trademark shagpile carpet.
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  • Late in life, Auden wrote a set of 15 verses titled Thanksgiving for a Habitat (1960-1964). They were a celebration of domestic contentment in his Austrian cottage, and were structured around the rooms of the house, including ‘the Cave of Meaning’ (his study), the cellar, the attic, and his bedroom ‘the Cave of Nakedness’. In the title poem he ends, happily, writing of ‘a place I may go both in and out of’.
  • The ‘cupboardness’ of children’s play areas; a library tucked beneath some stairs; a universe of emotions in the corner
  • In his neat phrase ‘reading a room’, Bachelard encouraged readers to think of some place in their own past: ‘You have unlocked a door to daydreaming.’
Steve Bosserman

A radio play about radio that became the first fake-news story | Aeon Essays - 0 views

  • The broadcast has become an origin story of fake news and technological anxiety in the United States, and its tentacled aliens watch when we talk of fake news today. Then, as now, the worry over whether the news can be believed was a proxy for something else entirely – fear of the new technologies that brought it. Scholars have convincingly questioned the scale of the 1938 panic. Everybody loves a good story – especially the newspapers threatened by radio news, the social scientists seeking a claim to relevance, and Welles, great ham that he was. Firsthand accounts attest that some listeners did panic, but many more did not. Why, then, did millions more find the panic so easy to believe these past 80 years?
  • In that decade, radio became more trusted than newspapers. The reasons had to do partially with the unique characteristics of the medium – its intimacy and ability to put you on the spot to hear as an event unfolded without a reporting gap in which craven newspapermen could insert their own slant. It also had to do with the trueness of the sounds that radio reproduced.
  • In November, three days after the War of the Worlds broadcast, Dorothy Thompson, a syndicated columnist and radio reporter, published an oft-cited piece in response, entitled ‘Mr Welles and Mass Delusion’, in which she argued that the broadcast suggested American susceptibility to foreign propaganda:All unwittingly Mr Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre of the Air have made one of the most fascinating and important demonstrations of all time. They have proved that a few effective voices, accompanied by sound effects, can so convince masses of people of a totally unreasonable, completely fantastic proposition as to create nationwide panic … If people can be frightened out of their wits by mythical men from Mars, they can be frightened into fanaticism by the fears of Reds, or convinced that America is in the hands of 60 families, or aroused to revenge against any minority, or terrorised into subservience to leadership because of any imaginable menace.
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  • The new trajectory changed news from an informative tool to an expressive one, and upended older reader-to-journalist relationships that looked almost more like a student-to-teacher relationship, albeit one entered into by choice. Though readers could always share stories, social media propelled the act. Readers can share stories because they feel true, and lend those stories emotional rather than factual force.
  • There are plenty of reasons the fake news concern of today does not exactly parallel the War of the Worlds story– among them, the fact that a large part of the modern worry is the degree to which lone actors can create the illusion of legitimacy online. But as with War of the Worlds, any individual piece of fake news – like the false story that Pope Francis endorsed President Trump – is not the only concern.More than the news, we fear the technology that transmits it. The quintessential Martians are those ways of knowing that are enabled by our new machines, threatening to make the solid world make-believe once more.
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