A figure in the New York media-ecology circle whose apartment is, for these dialogues, a date and a place rather than a set of opinions: 1998, the first meeting between Cameron McEwen and Bob Dobbs. Dialogue 63 opens on Cameron's question of whether a new blog post reminds Bob of that conversation, and closes the loop by identifying the post's central structure as the thing he had tried and failed to say there.
Across the dialogues
Turns from a name in the media-ecology circle into the archive's origin site — the room where this dialogue's central argument was first attempted and did not land, which the session then spends two hours completing
Bob reads Cameron's emailed question aloud and mis-states its own date in the reading — the meeting was 1998, not thirty years back — which is the first sign that the episode being recalled belongs more to Cameron's memory than to Bob's.
"does this post remind you of our attempt at communication in Mark Stahlman's place more than 30 years ago? That was in 1998."
Twenty-five years later the failed conversation gets its content — what Cameron had been reaching for at Stahlman's was the visual/audile structure with tactile space as its slash, which makes the whole session a completed sentence rather than a new argument.
"And it was this that I tried to talk about with you when we were at Mark Stahlman's place."
Connections
Stahlman's New York apartment is where Cameron and Bob first met and first failed to understand each other, in 1998.