ok what should I write about themewise what would you write about if you were to do a PhD people I'm clueless I just want to throw myself at this get out of the 9-to-5 hell pick up my problematic fetishistic affair with words and move in my favourite colder clime that still gives chills in the month of July I only need a topic A new problem And a bit of luck

"All these jobs and all this shopping: a society of total but invisible control, this impersonal grid that reaches deep down into the wet stuff of your brain and tugs you around by the desires. It’s not just the size of the place, although that is, obviously, terrifying: ten trillion neat bungalows slotted into ten trillion rectangular lots, stretching into Orange County and over the curvature of the Earth. What’s really unsettling about Los Angeles is how, from the air, it doesn’t really look like a city at all. That endless regular grid, with all those human bodies filed away; the bright specks shuttling along the avenues and onto the freeways: the sense of an enormous contraption, a massively complicated abacus with ordinary lives as its moving parts, flows of money and traffic and consumer goods and fame, zapping through logic gates, calculating—well, what? Once you’ve seen the city like that, it’s hard to be fully comfortable in whatever little bit of it you find yourself inhabiting. Here’s your nice house, here are your nice flowers, but you’re like Kelvin at the end of Solaris, living pleasantly on the surface of an alien star." —Sam Kriss, Infinite America

"Everything is permitted, but nothing is possible"

"Like the notoriously short cycles of financial markets and digital media, the contemporary public sphere spasmodically convulses without ever crystallizing into durable infrastructure. Hyperpolitics would be unthinkable without a particular set of social preconditions. Sociologically, it is rooted in a society in which exit options abound and citizens find it easy to move from one institution to another. Just as employment has become more precarious in the postindustrial era, abandoning a family, a relationship, a party, or a circle of friends is a much less demanding process than it was in Weber's time. Temporally, such ease of exit produces a society in which all dimensions of life are subject to short-term logics; friendships, marriages, jobs and political commitments are compressed into ever-shorter time frames. The life-worlds of the online are the primary environment for this sort of de-institutionalized, impermanent engagement, offering repertoires of social expression that require little to no long-term obligation." —Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics

I didn't appreciate last year's fabulous shiny unemployed summer as much as I should have

"In the movie, dealing sleep takes a clear toll on Memo’s body. His eyesight quickly deteriorates. A group of grizzled sleep-dealer workers who Memo meets around a hillside fire have gone completely blind. It’s as if their eyes couldn’t even register light if they had the chance. And it’s as if, by spending his life confined to remote vision, Memo’s eyes will become unable to adjust back to the “reality” in which he lives—as if the disjuncture is too great for the mind to bear, as if his body becomes just another worn-out machine in need of spare parts." —Elvia Wilk, Against the Clock: Remote Work, Stolen Sleep, and the Limits of Extraction

She is the Gallery Girl. I know what that's about. I was the Gallery Girl. I tried To like it. It was important To pretend to be interested in being near artists and art As though proximity were tantamount To metonymy, which it isn't, not in real Life. What's metonymy In real life. You rub up Against something; some of its Truth and incompleteness Is transfered onto you; You carry it around n Your body. Maybe. Art. That fussed Trite shit rich people buy. When I worked upstairs From where Emma works I was afraid of what it meant To exist alongside somebody Else's idea of art. My heart Was breaking. I never got good At affecting the blank expression Of truly contemporary beauty. —Ariana Reines, Coeur De Lion