Finished Woody Guthrie's autobiography, which was really cute. My reading slowed down a bit after that, but I just finished Non-Places: an introduction to Supermodernity by Marc Augé. It was pretty cool! It reminded me a lot about being in NJ Transit lol. The book came out in 1992 and I wonder if it could be seen as sort of a precursor to the content and discourse around liminal spacesthat became a thing in like 2010'ish. As concepts they're definitely not identical, but both contain a facination and skeptisim of spaces are earily lacking in identiy and often defined by transition.
If I had to sum up what's different about them it's that non-places have a much broader definition and they're more about how individuals interact with a space, in contrast to liminal spaces which are normally vacent except for the imagined specator (and sometimes a monster or something, but I'm pretty sure those interations are less popular because they miss the point). One thing about non-places is that they're supposed to be, or at least appear to be, ahistorical where I don't think that's the case with liminal spaces. Most liminal spaces play on nostalgia for malls, schools and shopping centers.
But I still think it's pretty easy to look at them as simmilar because, and I'm borrowing language from Mark Fisher's The Weird and Eerie here, they both evoke the eerie through showing absence where there should be presence. It's just a bit more abstract with non-places, but that almost makes it kind of more sinsiter. Maybe liminal spaces could be seen as a heightened expression of non-spaces, which people interact with on a daily (perhaps constant?) basis.
Apart from that I'm been pretty slow with reading. I've been taking these last few weeks of June pretty slow, so there's been a lot of very lazy things.
Been listening to a lot of Charli & Underscores in light brat summer, but also some really cool blog posts analysing them. Oh, also some Chappel Roan. I guess I'm lowkey in my NPC arc lol. Also finally in the home stretch with The Soprano's.
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