Raqs Media Collective

This is from a novel, "The Ragged Trousered Phillanthropists" by Robert Tressel. First published in Great Britain by Grant Richards, 1914, and Lawrence & Wishart, 1955. Tressel is his pen name, from the trestle table, part of the basic equipment of house painters and sign writers. It's a novel which is introduced with Tressel's lines: "this work which must be done or I will die in the work house". He submitted it to several publishers, but because it was handwritten, the publishers returned it without reading it. The book wasn't published till three years after his death - he died at 40 of tuberculosis - but hasn't been out of print since.

The novel is about a group of painters and decorators, and their families, in Hastings (Mugsborough), around 1906.

This extract is from page 46.

[thanks to Shveta for finding and sharing it.]

to think about past and future: (reminding of angels and farces)

McLuhan quotation:

"The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look
at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
Suburbia lives imaginatively in Bonanza-land."

(The Medium is the Massage, 1967)

"The role of the forger, of the unknown maker of unauthenticated goods, is emblematic of electronic culture. And when the forger is done honor for his craft and no longer reviled for his acquisitiveness, the arts will have become a truly integral part of our civilization."

Rummaging in wikipedia, and think that these make for a good perspective on doing and thinking:

Meaghan Morris, from King Kong and the Human Fly

"de Certeau's move from summit to street involves a troubling reinscription of a theory/practice opposition - semantically projected as 'high' versus 'low' (elite versus 'popular', 'mastery' versus 'resistance'), 'static' versus 'dynamic' ('structure' versus 'history', 'metanarrative' versus 'story'), 'seeing' versus 'doing' ('control' versus 'creativity', and 'power' versus 'know-how') - which actually blocks the possibility of walking away at all. In fact, de certeau's visit to the World Trade Center is a way of mapping all over again the 'grid' of binary oppositions within which so much of the debate about structuralism was conducted."