WBURG Becomes WBURG/Global

So here I am over 15,000 miles1 from Williamsburg, sitting in the sultry heat in my new backyard, watching my kid smash ice cubes on the sidewalk. I’m thinking: Looks like grey NYC slush.

Can’t say I’m exactly nostalgic for New York because NYC is still happening inside me. It’s more like my previous and present lives are running parallel, or are stratified. Listen - you can’t spend 23 years in a place like Brooklyn and leave it behind. No way—Plus, I’m on the phone with NYC often.

So. How to continue to live in more than one place at a time? Can it really be done?

The plan is to transform WBURG into WBURG/Global and continue to keep in touch with the ’burg (and surrounds) by covering the arts and community-related issues in Brooklyn, same as ever:

In this issue, projects and articles focus on Williamsburg, Manhattan, New Orleans, L.A. and Brisbane, Australia.

Add in to the mix WBURG/Global’s new web designer, Ed Coghlan, who is working on a re-design, and the future promises WBURG/Global’s readership a fresh, new forum for arts and community issues around the world… with the same informed, personal, outside-the-norm approach as always.

The second step in my plan is this: I’m putting the question out to the WBURG/Global community—

Do many of you live in more than one locale? How does this affect your thoughts and feelings, your physical state? This could comprise commuting between more than one physical location, or perhaps, working in the studio alone (within the locale of your imagination), and having to bridge the gap between the imagination and the outside world. Maybe you consider spending a lot of time on the Internet—in cyberspace—as a splitting of your consciousness into more than one site. The pleasure of reading a novel or poem can transport you so intensely that you carry your emotional
experience of the literature into your everyday life. And of course, don’t forget TV, memories and dreaming2…

The 85th anniversary of the full publication of Joyce’s Ulysses is February 2nd (Joyce’s birthday), just two days from when I am writing this. Ulysses is revered and cherished as the literary source from which all no-holes-barred, simultaneously presented internal dialogue/external description writing has emanated. What would James Joyce make of the additional impacts of electronic media on language, consciousness and emotions?

Joyce wrote:
“Mr. Bloom ate his strips of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of disgust pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese. Sips of his wine soothed his palate. Not logwood that. Tastes fuller this weather with the chill off.”3

Just think about it—how many sites do our minds create or inhabit in the course of a day? How does this shape our experience and our future as a species, particularly with so much global travel and Internet activity? How does all this crossing over and back from one “think” to another create our individual sets of longings and desires? For instance, I’ve found that since I’ve moved here that I no longer feel like I come from anywhere… a bit like a woman without a country… and I don’t dislike the feeling.

I am surely not a neuroscientist or an evolutionary biologist. Nor, for that matter, am I a novelist. Still, I’ve got plenty of observations and ideas about the subject. How about you?

Hopefully, some of you will find this question thought provoking— or one you’ve already been hashing over during long plane flights on your intercontinental journeys…

Please email your responses by using this link: send a letter to the editor. I’ll present all responses (which can be made in text, image and/or sound) as a project that will soon grow into a blog for WBURG/Global’s readership.

1 24,140 kilometres

2 For more about understanding the crossover from dreamthink to realitythink, as well as dreaming’s role in evolution, see a discussion between the filmmaker Michel Gondry and neurophysiologist Robert Stickgold at http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/the-seed-salon/, or pick up a back-issue of SEED magazine, November/December 2006.

3James Joyce, Ulysses (Penguin Books, London), p. 142, 1986.

Carol Schwarzman is the editor of this website. She is a painter and writer who has recently relocated from New York to Brisbane, Australia. She is a lecturer in Design History and Creative Theory at Design College Australia.