id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
ca-5092	Khatchadourian, Lori	Life Extempore: Trials of Ruination in the Twilight Zone of Soviet Industry	2022		.htm	text/html	11803	602	55	In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, extempore (in English), from the Latin ex tempore—literally meaning “out of time”—could refer to practices of everyday life; ‘life extempore’ in this obsolete sense meant a life in which decisions were made in the moment, in accordance with the needs of the present, with little preparation.1 I want to dust off this anachronism and tinker with its semantic scope because I think that with a little work, it can condense the distinct temporal dispositions and improvisational practices of the former Soviet proletariat whose livlihoods depend on revaluing the persistent material world of decommissioned Soviet factories. Unlike industrial ruins in the West, decommissioned Soviet factories are not places abandoned by the “systemic operation” of capital’s boom-and-bust cycles (González-Ruibal 2019, 32); rather, they constitute sites of destruction on which capitalism has been parasitically feeding.	cache/ca-5092.htm	txt/ca-5092.txt