Log: Curation

I've meant to write (and I always mean to write) about our arrival to Bath—which has been truly revitalizing and has offered some harmonious continuity to our time in Devon and Selgars Mill.

However, I have been occupied in the pruning and clipping of previous Comma Directory entries that, over time, seem to have grown unwieldy, outgrowing the categories and sub-categories we have plotted them into. It has taken me some time, and it has got me thinking.

Curatorship is a topic that has long interested me, and it has become more and more pertinent in navigating the complexities we encounter—growing complexities—many would say, as the world grows more and more complex with AI, a changing climate, the threat of war. But I would say, instead, that complexity was already here all along. It could been found in the simplicity of a leaf that photosynthesizes or the star that twinkles in the night sky.

Hence, there is a "primal" need to curate, or categorize, or simplify. These actions are not strictly synonymous, but tightly bound to each other. I think, at least.

The issue with trying to place an infinitely complex experience of existence into neat categories has long been discussed within science, philosophy, technology, art. Our representations of the world are limited, and that is precisely why they are meaningful. By placing limits, which is to say prioritizing some facets of existence over others, we voice a point of view. This is why diversity of representations is so important—but it doesn't mean that limits themselves are "bad." Without limits, without the brain's ability to curate the complexity of each passing moment, decision-making, survival, meaningful and directed action would all perhaps be impossible. It is known, after all, that the "infinite" choice of streaming platforms, food delivery, and dating apps can often be debilitating and paralyzing. As can be the "infinite" flow of news and social media posts.

And these choice-laden systems do not even begin to approach the true complexity of how our planetary systems operate, not to say the universe.

All of this to say, I have been toying around with The Comma Directory's Concepts, Media, and Travel pages. I have been questioning whether having a "Design" category is too broad, and what the difference between design and other creative practices is. And, should sub-categories be included into multiple categories or restricted to a single one? It might not help that lately Marc has been reading the book, What Design Can’t Do: Essays on Design and Disillusion.

Ultimately, what are these categories for? Which in the end is the same as asking: what is The Comma Directory for? Developing a system for categorizing main ideas and themes is at the heart of our founding concept. It is a work in progress, and in a sense, it always will be. The categories will always overlap in some ways that are perhaps uncomfortable, and maybe there will also be some gaps that are hard to fill. Imprecisions.

I can imagine that many may consider that AI is particularly well-suited for this task, with its powered up pattern-recognition. Feed it the texts and have it spit out a systematization that, with the right prompting, could be "better" than anything that we can produce manually. Less time consuming, too. Why not? Maybe, while it is at it, it can also generate the entries and the images.

If making "sense" of the everyday complexities that bombard us is one of the most important functions of our brains, if our ability to make purposeful decisions has to do with our brain's ability to curate, to pick and choose, to categorize and, therefore, judge—then the work we do manually at The Comma Directory is profoundly rooted in what it means to think. In our vibes-bent era peopled with all sorts of energies and traumas, "feeling" feels much more fashionable than "thinking." And while I find modern, postmodern, and contemporary critiques of rationality to be very important, I echo Camus in saying that, while I acknowledge the many limitations of "reasoning", I do not deny "reasoning" in it of itself. And I do not want to automate away the very mental processes that constitute reasoning, and which I perceive to be very closely linked to my own agency and liberty. Not to say that intuition and feeling do not play an essential role, a role that is perhaps more closely tied to reasoning than traditional dualist conceptions of thought allow.

Ultimately, when I sit down to edit, reorganize, redefine, and recategorize, it is almost like I can feel changes starting to blossom from within, in real time, as I focus and tinker with our little website. I feel new questions begin to emerge, ideas begin to form, old ideas begin to transform. Maybe that is also why this entry is growing so much more longer than I anticipated.

There is a pleasure too that comes with all this thinking, of feeling yourself being transformed by interacting with a challenge and all the difficult questions it brings with, even when you do not fully succeed (which is often the case). The pleasure I derive from the curation and restructuring of The Comma Directory is also akin to the pleasure of moving to a new home, finding the nooks and crannies in which different little aspects of life can fit into. Here, the washing, there, the books. It is as much the art of adjusting the space to our lives as our lives to the space. Which is why it has been very fitting to work on The Comma Directory's categorization system at the same time as we have been settling into Bath and creating our short-term home here.

So, what's changed on here? New sub-categories have appeared, emerging from nearly a year's worth of writing and living, which is exactly what we hoped for from the start. I have also re-arranged some major categories within Concepts. For example, "Writing" has become "Creation", to cover a broader range of creative acts that we engage with. Thanks to Marc, each entry has its own page now, and can be accessed via the little square next to the location. Within media, there is some restructuring ongoing related to each "media" type. While we started with just "Books" and "Film", now we have "Articles & Essays", "Lectures", and "Websites". I am working on new ways of displaying a growing list of favorites, and hopefully implement a Reading Journal and a Film Journal. The new "Reviews" sections will include scattered thoughts on the different media types, rather than reviews in the strict sense of the word. I feel joyful about what The Comma Directory has grown into so far, and what it can grow to be with some continued care and attention.

- Andrea

As AI slop begins to become omnipresent, curation and support will be more important than ever. I think we can carry this anxiety that our artistic efforts will cease to exist if we are replaced by machines.

Here is the thing though: if we collectively decide not to let that happen, it won't. If we continue to buy art and support endeavors we believe in, those endeavors can continue to be.

That's why I think that, today, it is more important than ever to support compelling independent projects and to promote them. That way, we can build the society that we want: one in which artists can thrive without having to resort to tools that go against their ethics.

Recently, I've made an effort to end many of my subscriptions, for example Spotify, and then spend that money instead on artistic, tech, or social projects that speak to me. That does limit my access to popular media, but at least I am more mindful about what I consume.

Recently, Andrea and I booked tickets to go to South Africa. In various Bantu languages, there exists the term ubuntu, which roughly translates to I am because we are. I am excited to learn more about this idea when we are there. For now, the definition I found online really speaks to me, ubuntu "encompasses the interdependence of humans on one another and the acknowledgment of one's responsibility to their fellow humans and the world around them" (Wikipedia). I think the philosophy that underpins ubuntu may be very relevant to face the questions and challenges of our times.

-Marc

Around the time we first began to build Comma Directory, I acquired a little notebook which I wrote about in my very first post: "The Small Bibliographic Log" from the independent Colombian press, Rey Naranjo. Almost eight months later, the log is now filled to the brim with the readings and thoughts that have accompanied me from Colombia to Cyprus to Sweden to France, and finally, to England.

To commemorate the completion of my first pequeña bitácora bibliográfica, I have picked out a selection of quotes, some of them I have had to dig out of the tight corners that I stuffed them into as I ran out of space on the page. And so, ...

"Recuerdo que [...] escribía sobre toda la superficie del papel, sin respetar ningún margen. Eso me daba la sensación de llenar completamente un vacío".
– Mario Bellatin, El libro uruguayo de los muertos

"At the end of my patient reconstruction, I had before me a kind of lesser library, a symbol of the greater, vanished one: a library made up of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books."
– Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

« Nous voyons ces filets, leur beauté, leur appartenance tout à la fois à la liberté et à la capacité de capturer, oui capturer. »
– Franklin Arellano & Julia Bejarano López, Entretierras

"Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia's inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long."
– Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

"What is the consciousness of guilt but the arena floor rushing up to meet the falling trapeze artist? Without it, a bullet becomes a tourist flying without responsibility through the air."
– Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

« Est-il aucun moment
Qui vous puisse assurer d'un second seulement ? »
– Jean de La Fontaine, Fables Choisies

« Il faut sinon se moquer, en tout cas se méfier de bâtisseurs d'avenir. Surtout quand pour bâtir l'avenir des hommes à naître, ils ont besoin de faire mourir les hommes vivants. L'homme n'est la matière première que de sa propre vie. »
– Jean Gino, Refus d'obéissance

"Whatever he did allowed him to be told [...] that he indeed existed, that he was not, as he had always dreaded, a figment of his own imagination, or of God's imagination, who disappeared when the lights went out."
– Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

"¡Morir, Dios mío, morir así tísica a los veintitrés años, al comenzar a vivir, sin haber conocido el amor [...] morir sin haber realizado la obra soñada, que salvará el nombre del olvido; morir dejando al mundo sin haber satisfecho las millones de curiosidades, de deseos, de ambiciones [...]"
– José Asunción Silva, De sobremesa

"Pienso, antes de ponerme polvos
que aún no he comenzado
y ya estoy por terminar".
– María Mercedes Carranza, El oficio de vivir

« Elle rêvait aux palmiers droits et flexibles, et à la jeune fille qu'elle avait été. »
– Albert Camus, L'exile et le royaume

"I think here I will leave you. It has come to seem
there is no perfect ending.
Indeed, there are infinite endings.
Or perhaps, once on begins,
there are only endings."
– Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

"I shall soon enter this broad desert, perfectly level and boundless, where the truly pious heart succumbs in bliss. I shall sink into the divine shadow, in a dumb silence and an ineffable union. And in this sinking, all equality and all inequality shall be lost [...] I shall fall into the silent and uninhabited divinity, where there is no work and no image."
– Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

"In the midst of the word he was trying to say;
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away—
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see."
– Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark

- Andrea

When the world appears to be pregnant with possibility, I take it as an invitation to embark upon a journey. Or, when I embark on a new journey, the world often appears to suddenly be pregnant with possibility, such as it appears to me now, after some recent day trips to Paris. But even after returning to the rolling muddy hills of the Yonne, I continue to be restless, yearning to visit and revisit as I have just done at the Palais-Royal, the courtyard of the Louvre, the narrow roads from Opera to Châtelet and the Centre Pompidou.

Wandering up and down the streets of a beloved city brings me a quiet but intense joy, akin to the feelings evoked by my favorite books, films, images, music. And so, I decided to embark on another journey, but this time through my memory, the internet, and some ink.

It has resulted in maps and constellations of those special works of art that move me and renew my gaze. Perhaps these are the transcendental feelings that others find in religion, ritual, patriotism, and/or mind-altering substances. I guess this could be a creative ritual of sorts, but I find the language around ritual and transcendence to have become so tired lately.

So, here is a brief inventory of my eclectic mental re-collections of sights, sounds, and feelings.

Books

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Le Diable au corps by Raymond Radiguet
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
La muerte de Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes
Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
Faithful and Virtuous Night by Louise Glück

Music

"The Wuthering Heights" by Sakamoto Ryuichi
"Amore" and "Solitude" by Sakamoto Ryuichi
"The Girl - Theme" by Trevor Duncan
"Yumeji's Theme" by Umebayashi Shigeru
"Romeo and Juliet" by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
"Overture" and "Metempsychosis" by Zhao Jiping
"Blackstar" and "Station to Station" by David Bowie

Film

Les Quatre Cents Coups by François Truffaut
Raise the Red Lantern by Zhang Yimou
Russian Ark by Aleksandr Sokurov
2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrik
La jetée by Chris Marker
In The Mood for Love by Wong Kar Wai
L'Ascenseur pour l'échafaud by Louis Malle
Hiroshima mon amour by Alain Resnais
La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc by Carl Theodor Dreyer
The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman

And More

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes by Simon Flesser & Simongo

- Andrea

I have begun using recutils to build a database of what I have read, watched and also for storing references on how to do things.

The tool has a decent amount of utilities for querying data and its simple formatting means that even if recutils one day stops working, it would be trivial for me to build my own replacement.

The usage becomes simple. To find all FreeBSD specific information, I can simply run the recsel -q freebsd ~/refs.rec and I will find all my Freebsd related references. I made an alias of it so I just have to type refs freebsd.

- Marc

Comma.directory will be built over time by composing together many small log entries. Each log entry contains observations, events, and thoughts that we label.These log entries will be the building blocks for a directory of concepts, which we will categorize for easier navigation.

When entering the page of a concept through the directory, the log entries that led up to the idea would show up and and, if the idea feels more fully explored, it might also contain a summary or conclusion.

- Marc