[-empyre-] Welcome to April on -empyre- Interfacing COVID 19: the technologies of contagion, risk, and contamination

[Simon]

On 3/04/20 4:44 AM, Renate Ferro wrote:
> let us know how you are doing, how your own work is adapting to the COVID environment, and where you are writing from

Dear <<empyreans>>,

It is good to hear from Melinda and Christina. I was in this space of 
soft skin first I recall with a CRT monitor, Altavista search engine, 
public computer we'd installed at Cafe Brazil, before opening hours, 
scrabbling to put a few cogent words together, not to speak of ideas, 
and ending up with fugues, and in a fugal state, running up the roller 
door, pumping the coffee handles, for the first customers and playing 
International People's Gang really loud.

I'm thinking of the soft skin of bubbles how they froth and you can surf 
them--champagne for my real friends! we say after Francis Bacon in the 
surf. Real pain for my sham friends!--and I am in a bubble with my small 
family on a small island in the harbour of a bigger island of a small 
nation composed of several at the top of the Pacific, depending on which 
way you look at it, independent of which, wartime seems a poor analogy: 
from cognitive bubbles we seem to have softly segued into biopolitical 
froth. (I am writing about this at http://squarewhiteworld.com/ or is 
that from?)

Thank you Christina--the enigmas you have drawn on Sor Juana for are 
appropriate raw and saintly garments or winding cloths, unwinding.

Thank you Melinda for the gift of this space in the first place and for 
the time, as you write, it allows.

Best,

Simon