Papers by Lindsey Freeman
Flugschriften, 2019
It is best to happen upon the Cabazon Dinosaurs on an American road trip, something immense and w... more It is best to happen upon the Cabazon Dinosaurs on an American road trip, something immense and wanting–where out there on the road you can start to feel cinematic, like the music you are listening to and the scenes you are witnessing through the windshield matter a little more than before, when the dream pop of Still Corners on the car stereo starts to feel metaphorical and a DeLorean on a tow truck becomes allegorical.
Feelings of Structure: Explorations in Affect, 2019
Robyn O'Neil produces epic works of art in the contemporary age with a mechanical pencil. Since 2... more Robyn O'Neil produces epic works of art in the contemporary age with a mechanical pencil. Since 2002 she has created catastrophes on a miniature scale through a series of drawings of natural disasters and severe landscapes populated by a few majestically drawn animals and hundreds of small male figures dressed in identical black sweatsuits. in contrast to the clumsy and awkward tiny human figures, the animals, at home in the natural world are large and impressively beautiful.
New Writing The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, 2019
In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin writes of 'the deepest connection between weather and bor... more In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin writes of 'the deepest connection between weather and boredom.' How strange, he thinks, for the cosmos to bore us. For Benjamin, boredom can be a desirable state, a haven for the dream bird, as we learn in his essay on the Russian writer Nikolai Leskov, 'The Storyteller.' But we also know from the same essay that the slightest rustling of leaves can drive the dream bird away: and we know from experience that changes in the weather often produce disturbances — to our thinking, and to our daily activities. In The Arcades Project, minor characters are always acting in terms of the weather, ducking in from the streets of Paris to avoid getting wet by taking refuge in the arcades. Or, more dramatically, there is the story Benjamin tells of the Englishman who wakes up and, enraged by the weather, shoots himself. In this collection of vignettes inspired by Benjamin, I show how the weather works as a force — particularly in Vancouver, the rainy city where I live — by shaping or providing the opportunity for actions like: dreaming, kissing, shopping, thinking, and writing.
International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 2013
International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 2009
Understanding the processes by which individuals and groups remember or forget the past has been ... more Understanding the processes by which individuals and groups remember or forget the past has been a concern for centuries. However, over the past three decades, the study of memory has become an increasingly popular topic for scholarly inquiry. This surge in memory research has greatly contributed to the way in which we consider a broad range of issues from the most basic biological and cellular encoding and retrieval systems to the ways in which political and cultural systems facilitate the remembering or silencing of historical events. As a result, the concept of “memory” is now studied and taught across a wide range of academic disciplines from the natural and social sciences, the humanities, and the arts. In addition, the past three decades have witnessed an increase in the number of texts, scholarly journals, conferences, students, and practitioners interested in the understanding and function of memory. Of particular interest are burgeoning attempts among memory scholars seeking t ...
Special Issue of Memory Studies on Memory | Materiality | Sensuality (January 2016, vol. 9.1)
In lieu of an abstract:
Is there such a cleavage between the “scientific” and the “artistic”? Is... more In lieu of an abstract:
Is there such a cleavage between the “scientific” and the “artistic”? Isn’t every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn’t there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?
— James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
While at first glance, snow globes might seem trite or trivial objects, on closer reflection, the... more While at first glance, snow globes might seem trite or trivial objects, on closer reflection, they are revealed to be symbolic realms that provide clues to the desires, dreams, nightmares, and memories of the cultures that produce them. When we consider snow globes as products and reflections of the social world and the individual's place within it, it is not surprising that some artists and designers use these objects to depict some of the darker sides of contemporary life. Considered in this essay are snow globes of catastrophe, representing loss and malevolence, which trouble the notion of snow globes as comforting keepsakes. Here, I argue for a reading of snow globes as oneiric and mnemonic gadgets that magnify our human dramas and disasters, induce memory, melancholy, and nostalgia, and allow us to see our fears and our nightmares more clearly, exposing the relationships between matter and memory, objects and persons. Everything is strange. Things are huge and very small. .. We are giants, lying here, who can make forests quiver. —Virginia Woolf, The Waves (2000). When the gigantic is ignored, fails to mesmerize, or threatens to overwhelm us completely, we turn to miniature. This turn provides on the one hand, for a jolt in perception that allows us to feel large and in control, in order to become temporary tyrants, to be gentle, or to mock. On the other hand, on encountering a miniature (Figure 1), it is impossible not to mentally shrink your own body and to place this abbreviated version of yourself in its landscape. There is something appealing in this shift in experience—vertigo of time and space—but also something frightening. When we encounter worlds in miniature, we become simultaneously aware of our strength and our vulnerability, and the ease with which we can pass between the two states. Recently, there has been a new wave of artists and designers who have begun to experiment with the creation of miniature disasters to heighten these sensibilities. They do so by creating a certain type of tiny catastrophe, those captured inside of snow globes. These projects attempt to play on but also to remove the kitsch from their choice of material; these are works of sincerity. If winks are made in their designs, they are conspiratorial winks, not idle gestures.
In On Hashish, Walter Benjamin writes that he would " like to write something that comes from thi... more In On Hashish, Walter Benjamin writes that he would " like to write something that comes from things the way wine comes from grapes. " Here I try a similar project by squeezing things from my past that have been fermented over time with memory to show the intoxication of an atomic childhood. I take as the starting point objects and spaces from my experiences in and around the atomic city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which may or may not be shared by others who encountered atomic Appalachia. Stretching beyond my own experience, I seek to add to the growing body of thinking about the connections between materiality and memory by adding the atomic as a dynamic example of matter's vibrancy.
In a 1993 essay, literary theorist Peter Stallybrass movingly described how his recently deceased... more In a 1993 essay, literary theorist Peter Stallybrass movingly described how his recently deceased friend Allon White had finally returned to his memory after countless futile attempts to bring him back. While in the process of mourning, Stallybrass' tireless efforts to actively invoke memories of Allon paradoxically created more distance rather than less. If anything was made present through the stories that Stallybrass told to remember his friend, it was his absence. The moment in which Allon finally " returned " to him was a much less deliberate affair: while wearing a hand-sewn jacket the two had both worn throughout their friendship, Stallybrass finally felt he had reunited with his friend through the physicality of the object they shared. Much more than a mere representation of Allon, the jacket, for a brief moment, became Allon, He was there in the wrinkles of the elbows, wrinkles which in the technical jargon of sewing are called " memory " ; he was there in the stains at the very bottom of the jacket; he was there in the smell of the armpits. (Stallybrass 1993: 36) Stallybrass' story is emotionally powerful and conceptually productive because it allows us to break down the artificial binaries between mind and matter when dealing with the complex processes and practices of memory. It refutes the idea that " memory [is] about minds rather than things " (Stallybrass, 1993: 47), and proposes instead that we rarely remember through ideas only, but rather through our encounters with things, and through embodiments and disembodiments collected in material traces and objects.
Podcasts by Lindsey Freeman
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Papers by Lindsey Freeman
Is there such a cleavage between the “scientific” and the “artistic”? Isn’t every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn’t there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?
— James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Podcasts by Lindsey Freeman
http://wunc.org/post/tracking-southern-subcultures#stream/0
Is there such a cleavage between the “scientific” and the “artistic”? Isn’t every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn’t there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?
— James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
http://wunc.org/post/tracking-southern-subcultures#stream/0