TAI-E3156 - Approaches to Writing, Lecture, 25.4.2022-23.5.2022

I chose Keller Easterling's book Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014). I find its concepts and approaches to looking at city landscape and global systems such as ISO management standards thoroughly thought-provoking, especially in her way of managing to gather planet-wide networks and systems like mobile data into a writing style which cascades into multiple fields of research. 

I love how this text embraces boredom, repetition and being unoriginal and manages to present them as something totally fascinating - "unboring boredom", as he calls it.

This text also has a special place in my heart as it was the first one to introduce me to more experimetal and conceptual writing and totally opened up my mind about what texts can contain and how they should/could be read:

"In the same vein, as I said before, I don't expect you to even read my books cover to cover. It's for that reason I like the idea that you can know each of my books in one sentence. For instance, there's the book of every word I spoke for a week unedited. Or the book of every move my body made over the course of a day, a process so dry and tedious that I had to get drunk halfway though the day in order to make it to the end. Or my most recent book, Day, in which I retyped a day's copy of the New York Times and published it as a 900 page book. Now you know what I do without ever having to have read a word of it."

It's also, in its dry way, a very funny text.

https://writing.upenn.edu/library/Goldsmith-Kenny_Being-Boring.html