KESKEN KAIKEN

#109

2009-09-30T02:01:00.002+03:00

It won’t be called the avant-garde. It will be referred to by various names, all of them precise, like “the society for touching lightly the forearms of another” or “a tendency toward making chains of half-rhymes in a circle with one’s friends.”

- Anne Boyer's wonderful manifesto (?) The Provisional Avant-Garde is at HTMLGiant - and I thought it had disappeared from the world! <3

#108

2009-09-28T00:42:00.003+03:00

Many of us have gathered in the cul de sac of satire. We’ve gotten pretty good at it. Unfortunately, satire seems less and less viable and powerful, and our decades-long immersion in irony has made conviction alien and meaning slippery. There is a kind of satire that seems to be making fun of everything and standing for nothing. In this way it can seem adolescent and moralistic and overly simplistic (not unlike the political novels of the 1920s and ’30s).

- Chris Bachelder on satire, Upton Sinclair, and building a poetics of engagement

#107

2009-09-27T20:28:00.003+03:00

1. self-institution rather than institutional critique

2. promiscuity rather than opposition
3. "The kitchen, the bed, the living room made up our anything-but-sterile laboratories. Dreams, unhappiness, rage were all over the architecture"
4. revive a meritocracy of affect
5. poets are architects
6. replace economic logic with poetic logic
7. OPEN SOURCE CASH

- Anne Boyer's primer for poets (I am copying this link for link because sometimes Boyer takes her best posts off the net)

#106

2009-04-29T00:55:00.003+03:00

-- today, there is a great deal of good poetry that is not being read. To think about contemporary (...) poetry, with any attempt at comprehensiveness and seriousness, brings a writer in contact with a range of controversies germane to literary study (...) in virtually all areas of such study. The criticism of contemporary poetry is usually given over either to aesthetically dominated judgmental reviews (mainly short blurbs of praise written by peer-poets implicated in the literary/ professional networks they are asked to judge) or to an academically sanctioned (mis)application of current critical theory to canonically (and professionally) acceptable extended readings of "major" contemporary poets.

- Hank Lazer in "The Politics of Form and Poetry's Other Subjects: Reading Contemporary American Poetry" - applies to criticism everywhere, I'd say

#105

2009-04-24T14:32:00.005+03:00

The Frozen moments School of Comics "treats the medium as a collection of still images strung together for maximum effect (...) careful to maintain the illusion that the reader is looking in on the panels, not participating in them". These "drawings, once trapped in panels, become images designed to signal “drama” or “suspense” to the reader (...) frozen moments of interchangeable plots told with (...) gestural ink lines".

- Dan Nadel in Comics Comics #1 on Wally Wood's 22 panels (pictur'd above); one can't, obviously, with my obsessions, not connect this with OuBaPian constraints, Polti's 36 situations (or with all the other "universal plot" -(pseudo)theories), or with other poetic forms & recipes, ancient, early and late modern; cause it's all the same, guys, Vorsprung durch Technik...

#104

2009-04-24T14:06:00.004+03:00

In these innovative panels and pages, Kirby would Photostat his artwork over a photograph (sometimes in black and white, sometimes colorized or tinted) to create a collage unlike anything else seen in Marvel comics. At their best the photomontages approached a realistic 3D; even when they visually failed (usually due to the relatively poor printing processes of the period) they were still bold visual experiments.

- keep getting stuck on comics these days, but here's the Bully Says blog on Kirby's photomontage, something I'd noticed but somehow hadn't noticed - but a great conversation on Comix Scholars drew my attention to how Kirby's work parallels the "renaissance" of collage at the time

#103

2009-03-10T01:04:00.002+02:00

Nah, I'm just, like, this guy who commuted to idea space when he went to work every day. Guys like us, we kinda farm idea space for produce. They call us imagineers.

- Alan Moore's tribute to Jack Kirby from Supreme: The Return #6 - and, man...that's who I wanna be when I grow up, the guy who "commutes to idea space when he goes to work every day"...

#102

2009-03-10T01:02:00.003+02:00

In the end, the ‘conspiracy theory’ view of history seemed to me a desperate, almost sad, attempt to enchant the mechanized modern world with a little mystery and meaning. The idea that someone, somewhere, is in charge and has a plan, or a spaceship, is a comforting one but it seems to me a secular version of faith in God.

- Grant Morrison on The Invisibles and a lot more

#101

2009-01-20T18:48:00.002+02:00

When today's avant-guard no longer swims against the tide but is funded by the Deutsche Bank and rubs shoulders with oligarchs and billionaires, we have to find a new language for the tactics and meaning of these freedom fighters... Embarrassingly the Kandinsky Prize has proved to be nothing but a plaything of the new elite, another part of the system.

- via Sign & Sight, Peter György on the Deutsche Bank-sponsored Kandinsky Prize being awarded to the ultra-nationalist Russian artist Aexei Belyaev-Gintovt

#100

2009-01-14T15:05:00.012+02:00

What would happen if scientists were able to modify human beings using either genetic manipulation or cybernetics? How would those discoveries be utilized?

- Zak Edwards on Transhuman #1 - the old adage by Stan Lee: "With great power comes great responsibility"; but with great power also comes inhumanity; the horrific evolutionary leap beyond anything that is recognizable as human. Did it begin in 1982 with Moore's Marvelman (or Miracleman, after the copyright change)? It's certainly already starting to bloom in 1986, in the midst of Watchmen's thatcherite political noir in the character of Doctor Manhattan, the "inhuman" superbeing whose actions we cannot understand; and it's full blown in Morrison's Overman from Animal Man #23 (1990, pictured above), Zenith and The Invisibles, (1987 and 1994 respectively), the visionary mixing of Lovecraft, Crowley and The Illuminatus Trilogy with posthuman themes of evolutionary change. It's certainly continued strong in Ellis's The Authority, Black Summer, No Hero, and Millar's Wanted, Ultimates & War Heroes, even if it's toned down in favor of wide-screen death & entrails action and pseudo-political commentary on vigilantism. But what's interesting about this development is its connection with the old 20th century motifs of supernatural horror. In Transhuman by Jonathan Hickman (the new "mock-comicumentary" (?) about, well, transhumanism in the future) the "new humans" are revealed as enhanced chimpanzees who will take over the earth from us regular humans; an ironic twist which, in one image, ends and renews the central theme of supernatural horror: in the new millenium it's not the dark abyss of racial devolution that scares us, but the dawn of the new gods, who might not be human at all; the radiant singularity of technological progress. But I mean, who knows, after the next ice age (to come back to the Captain Marvel family), it could be rats who evolve past us, as in Shazam #21 (vol.3, 1975)

#99

2009-01-14T14:46:00.002+02:00

And, worst of all, we have seen once-noble races turn savage and warlike with the passing of time! A fate which your OWN foolish breed seems headed for!

- Uatu the Watcher in Fantastic Four #13, v.1, where FF fight Red Ghost and his cosmic-ray enhanced mind-controlled orangutangs - wrap your head around that cold-war metaphor: nuke-scare interlaced with ape-scare (i.e. the dark abyss of racial devolution)

#98

2009-01-03T19:05:00.004+02:00

Tandis que la vie palpitait dans les Ténèbres, féroce ou peureuse, ruée aux fêtes et aux batailles de l'Amour ou de de la Nourriture, une pensée vint s'y joindre. À la rive du fleuve, au rebord d'un roc solitaire, une silhouette sortit de la Caverne des Hommes. Elle se tint immobile, taciturne, attentive aussi, les yeux parfois levés vers l'étoile du Levant. Quelque rêve vague, quelque ébauche d'esthétique astrale, préoccupait le veilleur, moins rares chez ces ancêtres de l'Art qu'en maintes populations historiques.

- J.H. Rosny the elder, Scènes préhistoriques, 1888, a prehistoric man looks at the stars and feels no fear; Rosny, the father of French-language science fiction, whose prehistoric characters aren't afraid of time or space, & whose astronauts (a word he invented) are no xenophobes

#97

2008-12-30T02:48:00.001+02:00

Older media have largely abandoned the idea that difficulty is a virtue; if I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable. It’s a bit of an irony that difficulty thrives in the newest medium of all – and it’s not by accident, either. One of the most common complaints regular gamers make in reviewing new offerings is that they are too easy. (It would be nice if a little bit of that leaked over into the book world.)

- John Lanchester in LRB on why gaming exists under the radar of general culture

#96

2008-12-21T01:58:00.005+02:00

-- though the area of the unknown has been steadily contracting for thousands of years, an infinite reservoir of mystery still engulfs most of the outer cosmos. . . .men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars. . . .a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the dæmons of unplumbed space.

- Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927); the suspension of disbelief meets the dark abyss of time and the abyssal depths of psychoanalysis

#95

2008-12-21T01:43:00.002+02:00

[Giordano] Bruno made the world so infinite that [he posits] as many worlds as there are fixed stars. . . .so that to somebody on the Dog Star (as, for instance, one of the Cynocephals of Lucian) the world would appear from there just as the fixed stars appear to us from our world. . . .This very cogitation carries with it I don't know what secret, hidden horror; indeed one finds oneself wandering in this immensity, to which are denied limits and center and therefore also all determinate places.

- Johannes Kepler, De stella nova in pede Serpentarii (1606). Quoted in Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957; see #94); also, the reference to Lucian's fantasy beings

#94

2008-12-21T01:40:00.002+02:00

There is a single general space, a single vast immensity which we may freely call Void: in it are innumerable globes like this on which we live and grow; this space we declare to be infinite, since neither reason, convenience, sense-perception nor nature assign to it a limit. For there is no reason, nor defect of nature's gifts, either of active or passive power, to hinder the existence of other worlds throughout space, which is identical in natural character with our own space, that is everywhere filled with matter or at least ether.

- Giordano Bruno, De l’infinito universo e mondi (1584). Quoted in Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957)

#93

2008-12-21T00:04:00.003+02:00

For some time I accepted the visions as natural, even though I had never before been an extravagant dreamer. Many of the vague anomalies, I argued, must have come from trivial sources too numerous to track down; while others seemed to reflect a common text book knowledge of the plants and other conditions of the primitive world of a hundred and fifty million years ago - the world of the Permian or Triassic age.

- Lovecraft, The Shadow Out of Time (1936), an exemplary instance of the transformation of "a common text book knowledge" of "primeval times" into supernatural horror

#92

2008-12-20T23:47:00.005+02:00

She comes! the Cloud compelling Pow'r, behold! / With Night Primaeval, and with Chaos old. / Lo! the great Anarch's ancient reign restor'd, / Light dies before her uncreating word: / As one by one, at dread Medea's strain, / The sickning Stars fade off the a'thereal plain; / As Argus' eyes, by Hermes wand opprest, / Clos'd one by one to everlasting rest; / Thus at her felt approach, and secret might, / Art after Art goes out, and all is Night.

- Pope, Dunciad, Book IV, ll.337-346, the 1729 edition; can a comic poem initiate the usage of "primaeval" in the sense of supernatural horror?

#91

2008-12-20T22:52:00.005+02:00

Far away, all unknown, beyond the range of mortal minds, scarce to be approached by the gods, is a cavern of immense age, hoary mother of the years, her vast breast at once the cradle and the tomb of time. A serpent surrounds this cave, engulfing everything with slow but all-devouring jaws; never ceases the glint of his green scales. His mouth devours the back-bending tail as with silent movement he traces his own beginning. Before the entrance sits Nature, guardian of the threshold, of age immense yet ever lovely, around whom throng and flit spirits on every side.

- Claudian, On Stilicho's Consulship, II, 424ll.; the beginning of the "conspicuously irrelevant" extended digression on the goddess Natura's cavern, which C.S. Lewis (in The Allegory of Love) claimed is one of the first moments in "the liberation of fantasy from its allegorical justification"

#90

2008-12-20T19:51:00.007+02:00

CHAPTER XVIII

WHAT ARE THOSE STARS WHICH ARE CALLED THE DIOSCURI, THE TWINS, OR CASTOR AND POLLUX?

Xenophanes says that those which appear as stars in the tops of ships are little clouds brilliant by their peculiar motion. Metrodorus, that the eyes of frighted and astonished people emit those lights which are called the Twins.

- Plutarch, Sentiments Concerning Nature with which Philosophers Were Delighted, Book II - a marvellous collection of prose poems from the first century A.D.; should be read alongside something like Cortázar's Historias de cronopios y de famas or Ben Marcus's The Age of Wire and String for the full estrangement-effect to work. Some links to his Morals.

#89

2008-12-18T19:49:00.008+02:00

A doom-laden, Death Metal myth for the wonderful world of Fina(ncia)l Crisis/Eco-breakdown/Terror Trauma we all have to live in.

- Grant Morrison on his DC Comics Ragnarok, Final Crisis

#88

2008-12-18T19:37:00.003+02:00

No more briar pipes. Their makers, in Saint-Claude, have stopped work until they are paid better.

"If my candidate loses, I will kill myself," M. Bellavoine, of Fresquienne, Seine-Inferieure, had declared. He killed himself.

A thunderstorm interrupted the celebration in Orléans in honor of Joan of Arc and the 477th anniversary of the defeat of the English.

In the course of a heated political discussion in Propriano, Corsica, two men were killed and two wounded.

- excerpts, via David Chirot, from Nouvelles en Trois Lignes by Félix Fénéon (1861 - 1944), French anarchist, gallerist and art-critic, and the original text-message novelist; and a contemporary adaptation of his technique

#87

2008-12-18T19:27:00.005+02:00

Far be it from me to say that in more elemental times such things could not have been. The condition belongs to the geologic age - the great birth and growth of the world, when natural forces ran riot, when the struggle for existence was so savage that no vitality which was not founded in a gigantic form could have even a possibility of survival. That such a time existed, we have evidences in geology, but there only; we can never expect proofs such as this age demands. We can only imagine or surmise such things - or such conditions and such forces as overcame them.

- Sir Nathaniel de Salis of Doom Tower in Bram Stoker's The Lair of the White Worm explains the conditions of possibility of "primaeval monsters"; anything is possible "in Earths long order" as Hardy says

#86

2008-12-18T19:21:00.007+02:00

-- was there ever / A time of such quality, since or before, / In that hill's story? To one mind never, / Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore, / By thousands more. // Primaeval rocks form the road's steep border, / And much have they faced there, first and last, / Of the transitory in Earth's long order; / But what they record in colour and cast / Is - that we two passed. // And to me, though Time's unflinching rigour, / In mindless rote, has ruled from sight / The substance now, one phantom figure / Remains on the slope, as when that night / Saw us alight.

- Thomas Hardy, "At Castle Boterel" muses on the primaeval; compare with Pascal's fear of the infinite or the geological sensibility of Sir Nathaniel de Salis; the mid-nineteenth century "dark abyss of time"

#85

2008-12-18T19:05:00.005+02:00

#206: "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me." #207: "How many kingdoms know us not!" #208: "Why is my knowledge limited? Why my stature? Why my life to one hundred years rather than to a thousand? What reason has nature had for giving me such, and for choosing this number rather than another in the infinity of those from which there is no more reason to choose one than another, trying nothing else?"

- compare the constant fear of the infinite in Pascal's Pensées and originating themes of supernatural horror & fantasy

#84

2008-12-18T18:44:00.005+02:00

If we do not believe in old-fashioned stories and theories about ghosts, we are nevertheless obliged to recognize today that we are ghosts of ourselves - and utterly incomprehensible. The mystery of the universe is now weighing upon us, becoming heavier and heavier, more and more awful, as our knowledge expands, and it is especially a ghostly mystery.

- Lafcadio Hearn in "The Value of the Supernatural in Fiction" on the Anglo-Saxon (his word) idea of the "ghostly", on dreams as the reservoir of the ghostly, and a 4-part theory of nightmare horror: 1) supernatural mesmerism, 2) the experience of terrible and unnatural appearances, 3) the final struggle, 4) the touch as climax of horror

#83

2008-12-18T17:59:00.003+02:00

For though these novels seem far apart, their authors are curiously similar. Similar age, similar class, one went to Oxford, the other Cambridge, both are by now a part of the publishing mainstream, share a fondness for cricket, and are subject to a typically British class/race anxiety that has left its residue. A flashback-inclined Freudian might conjure up the image of two brilliant young men, straight out of college, both eager to write the Novel of the Future, who discover, to their great dismay, that the authenticity baton (which is, of course, entirely phony) has been passed on. Passed to women, to those of color, to people of different sexualities, to people from far-off, war-torn places.

- Zadie Smith on Tom McCarthy's Remainder and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland

#82

2008-12-18T17:48:00.002+02:00

I mortally hate all air of flattery, which is the cause that I naturally fall into a shy, rough, and crude way of speaking, that, to such as do not know me, may seem a little to relish of disdain. I honour those most to whom I show the least honour, and where my soul moves with the greatest cheerfulness, I easily forget the ceremonies of look and gesture, and offer myself faintly and bluntly to them to whom I am the most devoted: methinks they should read it in my heart, and that the expression of my words does but injure the love I have conceived within.

- Montaigne on letter-writing, Essays, Chapter XXXIX, "A Consideration Upon Cicero"

#81

2008-12-18T17:21:00.002+02:00

I have no good word to say for the cultivation of automatic writing as the model of literary composition; I doubt whether these moments can be cultivated by the writer; but he to whom this happens assuredly has the sensation of being a vehicle rather than a maker. No masterpiece can be produced whole by such means; but neither does even the higher form of religious inspiration suffice for the religious life; even the most exalted mystic must return to the world, and use his reason to employ the results of his experience in daily life.

- T.S.Eliot, preface to Pascal's Pensées

#80

2008-12-18T16:25:00.005+02:00

When I was a tadpole and you were a fish / In the Paleozoic time, / And side by side on the ebbing tide, / We sprawled through the ooze and slime, / Or skittered with many a caudal flip, / Through the depths of the Cambrian fen, / My heart was rife with the joy of life, / For I loved you even then.

- Langdon Smith, Evolution (1909)

#79

2008-12-18T16:23:00.001+02:00

If there ever was indeed a "politics of poetic form" that political point has been more than made. It has been paddled around to death and is now choking off the poetry, or at least focus on the poetry. The assumption is that creating controversy creates interest. In the case of contemporary poetry, the reverse is happening. Instead of making the poetry scene vibrant, it is making it soggy. The arguments are not snappy, they are stale.

- Nick Piombino 20th of September this year

#78

2008-08-19T18:16:00.002+03:00

Bilbo Bagshot: I once punched a guy out for saying that "Hawk the Slayer" was rubbish.
Tim Bisley: Good for you.
Bilbo Bagshot: Yeah, thanks. But that's not the point, Tim. The point is I was defending the fantasy genre with terminal intensity, when what I should have said was "Dad, you're right, but let's give Krull a try and we'll discuss it later."

- Spaced is wonderful, especially Bilbo Bagshot, a riff on The Comic Book Guy - but Spaced is better then The Simpsons; so watch them while you can - and don't forget Krull

#77

2008-08-04T16:25:00.001+03:00

Apple Computer Inc. is incorporated as Mount Nyiragongo erupts in eastern Zaire and scientists identify a previously unknown bacterium as the cause of the mysterious Legionnaires' disease. Snow falls in Miami, Florida, the Soviet Union launches Soyuz 24, a 20.2-kg lobster is caught off Nova Scotia, Pavarotti stars in a complete production of Puccini's La Boheme, Pierre Elliot Trudeau does a pirouette behind the back of Elizabeth II, Queen of Canada, a hooded person shoots at the police, Star Wars opens in cinemas, a coup takes place in Seychelles, Roy Sullivan is struck by lightning for the 7th time, Australian rock group INXS is formed, INTERPOL issues a resolution against the piracy of video tapes, Bing Crosby died of heart attack, the European Patent Institute is founded, 2060 Chiron, first of the outer solar system asteroids known as Centaurs, is discovered by Charlie Kowal, first three nodes of the ARPAnet are connected, in what would eventually become the Internet, and Jean-Bédel Bokassa, president of the Central African Republic, crowns himself Emperor.

- the year 1977

#76

2008-08-04T15:58:00.003+03:00

Penny: Sometimes people are layered like that. There's something totally different underneath than what's on the surface.
Billy: And sometimes there's a third, even deeper, level, and that one is the same as the top, surface one.
Penny: Huh?
Billy: Like the pie. So you gonna see him again?
Penny: I think I will.
Billy: Oh.
Penny: Billy?
Billy: Yeah?
Penny: You're driving the spork into your leg.
Billy: So I am. Hilarious!

- Dr. Horrible has (or is) an interesting theory of the human psyche, about villains, about the causes of violence, the internalization of the material conditions of our lives

#75

2008-07-01T17:29:00.003+03:00

#74

2008-06-05T22:21:00.004+03:00

#73

2008-06-03T20:14:00.005+03:00

I mean, I am a traditionalist. I am quite conservative. I’ve read Baudrillard, but Plato said it all. The idea of the simulacra being a copy without an original, which is Baudrillard’s big selling point - it’s in the Sophist by Plato. Lots of people described Remainder as a very postmodern book, because there is this guy reenacting very stylized moments in a bid for authenticity, and in the postmodern era, they say, we don’t have authenticity. But I was thinking as much of Don Quixote, the first novel, or one of the first novels, which is exactly the same. It is about a guy feeling inauthentic in 1605 and in a bid to acquire, to accede to authenticity, he reenacts moments from penny novels, the kind of TV of its day. So I think you have to be a bit careful about this cult of newness, the idea that somehow, post-about-1962, we’re suddenly postmodern - It just ain’t so. There’s always a precedent.

- Tom McCarthy interviewed in The Believer

#72

2008-05-15T23:32:00.002+03:00

I worry that in the course of evolution we created a philosophical divide with exploration, choice, and consequence on one side and goals, scores, and balance on the other. I’m not sure the two sides are equally vital for producing unique, relevant works. Are we so hooked on the escapist fantasy of an uncomplicated life, of reverting to the safety of childhood, that no other games should be made? Have we explored alternatives? How can we make a game about something personal and organic, like human relationships, if we insist on goals and scores? What kind of relationships would we portray?

- Randy Smith gets inspired by Ultima V but you can see applications across the board

#71

2008-04-20T00:46:00.002+03:00

While aficionados of Theory regarded individual works and their authors as, say, manifestations of the properties of texts, of their interaction with other texts and with the structures of power, neuroscience groupies reduce the reading and writing of literature to brain events that are common to every action in ordinary human life, and, in some cases, in ordinary non-human animal life. For this reason – and also because it is wrong about literature, overstates the understanding that comes from neuroscience and represents a grotesquely reductionist attitude to humanity – neuroaesthetics must be challenged.

- Raymond Tallis, damn near spot on

#70

2008-04-07T23:36:00.006+03:00

To witness the disease of any human understanding, however feeble, is distressing; but the spectacle of an able mind reduced to a state of insanity is of course ten times more afflicting. It is with such sorrow as this that we have contemplated the case of Mr. John Keats... The Phrenzy of the "Poems" was bad enough in its way; but it did not alarm us half so seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable drivelling idiocy of "Endymion".

- John Gibson Lockhart in Blackwood's magazine, August 1818; the famous criticism of Keats's Endymion; nights like this I often come back to Keats, killed by depression, paranoia, poison or the cockney-killers' criticism, or all, it's the same, & I think: even if the rhetoric's changed, the institution is still sick to the core

#69

2008-04-06T02:54:00.003+03:00

Jack [Kirby] and Joe [Simon] were virtually the whole staff [of Timely Comics]. Jack sat at a table behind a big cigar and he was drawing. Joe stood up behind another big cigar, and he would ask Jack, 'Are you comfortable? Do you want some more ink? Is your brush okay? Is the pencil all right?' And then Joe would go out and yell at me for a while, and that was the way we spent our days. I was a gofer. I'd go for the coffee, for the broom, for Jack's cigars. They also let me write some copy.

- Stan Lee, quoted in Mark Evanier's Kirby: King of Comics

#68

2008-04-06T02:43:00.003+03:00

I felt, with a certainty not entirely bereft of a feeling of sorrow, that neither in the coming year nor in the following nor in all the years of this my life shall I write a book, whether in English or in Latin. . . .because the language in which I might be able not only to write but to think is neither Latin nor English, neither Italian nor Spanish, but a language none of whose words is known to me, a language in which inanimate things speak to me and wherein I may one day have to justify myself before an unknown judge.

- Hugo von Hofmannstahl, The Letter of Lord Chandos

#67

2008-04-05T19:47:00.002+03:00

It's so hard to choose just one awesome moment from 1982's Megaforce to feature. There's the Persis Khambatta battle simulator sequence, the "Endless Love"-tinged skydiving sequence, and most of all, the 20 minute battle between tanks, airplanes, motorcycles and dune buggies, where the motorcycles have anti-tank rocket launchers.

- io9 on Megaforce

#66

2008-04-05T19:28:00.000+03:00

Like I said, the reason we initially do comics, and the energy we find to do it in our adolescence, is not the same as that required once we're adults. There's a progressive tendency to slide by the wayside that you tend generally to not notice when it's happening. It's important to remain aware of this. If not, there's a great risk of becoming depressed.

- Lewis Trondheim

#65

2008-04-05T12:44:00.004+03:00

[Like the] European avant-garde of the 1950s and '60s. . . .Rihm's artistry also seeks to breathe the air of other planets and proudly stake out terra incognita. It does so, however, not by breaking new ground in technical or systematic extremes, but by probing unexplored territories in the stubbornly unsystematic world of emotions; one might even call it an emotional avant-garde.

- Andante article on German composer Wolfgang Rihm; why is the passion of avantgarde art so hard to experience by its critics as other than hysteria or crazed neofilia? maybe because they lack a common vocabulary of emotion? or is it just a question of framing? or do we even live in the same umwelt? and why is curiosity perceived as a threat?

#64

2008-04-05T12:02:00.005+03:00

Creon: "But disobedience is the worst of evils. . . .Therefore we must support the cause of order, and in no wise suffer a woman to worst us. Better to fall from power, if we must, by a man's hand; then we should not be called weaker than a woman." -- On adult bullies: "If power and control are central to the existence of an organization, bullying and denial about the existence of bullying may be central to the stability of the organization."

- what is a poetry scene if not a festering pit of gatekeepers, constant critics, and two-headed snakes? but is it their fault? to understand why Creon, in Sophocles' Antigone, is a type of "stressed, impulsive or unintentional bully" (the kind that pops up when "an institution is undergoing confusing, disorienting changes") is to start understanding how an economy of scarcity (a zero-sum, cutthroat competition) makes good wo/men turn bad

#63

2008-03-26T17:09:00.005+02:00

The story of invulnerable half-man, half-ape superwarriors with divine forcefields, superior intelligence and martial yoga-energy powers; summoned extra-dimensional weaponry; ecological catastrophies that worry even the alien superbeings called "gods"; a hero that wields a saber of light and nuclear homing arrows, and "represents the Supreme Masculine Introversial Force"; a princess that "represents our poor lost individual introversial nature"; enemies so much like the ravaging Ravanas of our day; and sublime meditations on the meaning of war and violence echoing the best of our own notions...

- an epic for those under the epoch of kali yuga, the Srimad Valmiki Ramayana, sloka after sloka, sargas after sargas, has it all, and more

#62

2008-03-25T13:15:00.001+02:00

-- I think it makes. . . .sense to view cultural capital as an expropriated form of something real and inherently desirable: aesthetic pleasure, a surplus of pleasure that has no direct utility for the purposes of survival or reproduction. This surplus pleasure is to cultural capital what surplus labor is to economic capital. . . .It is not an ideological hallucination. Without aesthetic use value, there can be no cultural exchange value. Most people will not pay to be poked in the eye with a stick, no matter how scarce the supply of sticks becomes.

- Charles Rzepka in "The Feel of Not to Feel it" (PMLA 116.5 [October 2001], 1422-1431)

#61

2008-03-23T22:59:00.006+02:00

The next war will be the most frightful carnival of destruction that the world has ever seen; but what would it be like if I were to give one of the nations of Europe the power of raining death and desolation on its enemies from the skies! No, no! Such a power, if used at all, should only be used against and not for the despotisms that afflict the earth with the curse of war!

- Richard Arnold, the inventor of the aeroplane & subsequent world-dominator in George Griffith's The Angel of the Revolution (1893), a scientific romance in which the evil genius is an anarcho-socialist hero - take that, William Morris, you pansy

#60

2008-03-23T22:52:00.004+02:00

She fixed her eyes upon the face of Varney with a shudder. There could be no mistake. It was the same which, with the strange, glassy looking eyes, had glared upon her on that awful night of the storm when she was visited by the vampyre. And Varney returned that gaze unflinchingly. There was a hideous and strange contortion of his face now as he said,—

"You are beautiful."

- Varney the Vampyre, a mid-Victorian penny dreadful

#59

2008-03-21T00:43:00.010+02:00

"Experimentalism" isn't the problem & the true margins of poetry haven't been addressed: how the true unacknowledged legislators are feeling incongruous & difficult emotions like guilty rage, sentimental irony & a banal sublime; improper naivety; embarrassed overemotionality & vulgar excess; & the flashing Google ad that winks: "Depression Cured in 3 Min - 3 Minutes to Joy without Depression Find Your Depression Facts Here" & that line tells you more about the world than all the tired metaphors ever did.

- emo thoughts after Nuori Voima 1/08, a "margins & experimentalism" issue

#58

2008-03-20T23:22:00.003+02:00

Emo poetry is something that can be defined as emotionally provocative poetry. Emo poetry often talks about. . . .suicidal thoughts, painful experiences, anger inspiring events. . . .This doesn’t mean that all Emo poetry is suicidal, and it doesn’t mean that all Emo kids are suicidal. It is just another emotion that can be expressed through poetry.

- Emo Corner on Emo: "the subculture of fake personalities"; the missing link between depression and conspicuous consumption? Is this psycho-allergic alienation from emotion a post-60s thing or was Byron emo, too?

#57

2008-03-18T12:48:00.005+02:00

"Cables that carry the life / To the cities we build / Threads that link diamonds of life / To the satanic mills" (Machine Messiah) -- "Like dumping your longtime girlfriend, meeting someone else but your heart is not quite in it and you know it's inevitable that you will go back regardless is a way to describe this departure from more "traditional" sounding Yes. A curious album."

- reviewers didn't like it, but Blake-alluding Trevor Horn sang Buggles songs (better sound here; probably the best Yes cover, even better than the Paul Simon one) with Yes and made one of the best Yes albums ever (right there with Fragile, Close to the Edge and Relayer); also, the Yessongs concert channel

#56

2008-03-18T12:37:00.003+02:00

Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men.

- Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises; Mats Gustaffson, the Slayer of Jazz

#55

2008-03-18T11:59:00.006+02:00

Are you excited about an as yet unpublished novel or poetry collection? So excited that you already have the proofs downloaded in pdf, since you know the publisher and hang out with him in pubs? Have you stayed up reading messageboards and blog comments until it's morning and the good people go to work? Have you thrown a book aside disappointed because "That's not the way you are supposed to write surrealist poetry" or because "Googling has made the work of poets seem inconsequential"? Do you wear an anorak? Do you get angry and verbally abusive when people don't "get" Kenneth Goldsmith's brilliance? And do you think there's nothing at all wrong with this kind of behavior? If you do, then odds are you're a fanboi.

- the poetry subculture is just like any other subculture; and a Thomas Pynchon conference is just like Comic-Con

#54

2008-03-18T02:46:00.003+02:00

With regard to poetry in general, I am convinced, the more I think of it, that he and all of us - Scott, Southey, Wordsworth, Moore, Cambell, I, - are all in the wrong, one as much as another; that we are upon a wrong revolutionary poetical system, or systems, not worth a damn in itself, and from which none but Rogers and Crabbe are free; and that the present and next generations will finally be of this opinion. I am the more confirmed in this by having lately gone over some of our classics, particularly Pope, whom I tried in this way - I took Moore's poems and my own and some others, and went over them side by side with Pope's, and I was really astonished (I ought not to have been so) and mortified at the ineffable distance in point of sense, harmony, effect, and even Imagination, passion, and Invention, between the little Queen Anne's man, and us of the Lower Empire. Depend upon it, it is all Horace then, and Claudian now, among us; and if I had to begin again, I would model myself accordingly. Crabbe's the man, but he has got a coarse and impracticable subject, and Rogers, the Grandfather of living Poetry, is retired upon half-pay, (I don't mean as a Banker),

- George Gordon, Lord Byron, 1817, in a letter to John Murray, re: #53, I had to quote the whole thing;"Rogers" is Samuel Rogers, incidentally

#53

2008-03-18T02:31:00.003+02:00

Be wisely gay and innocently vain; / While serious souls are by their fears undone, / Blow sportive bladders in the beamy sun, / And call them worlds! and bid the greatest show / More radiant colours in their worlds below: / Then, as they break, the slaves of care reprove, / And tell them, Such are all the toys they love.

- the genius loci of the library in George Crabbe's The Library (1781); as Byron told Murray in 1817, ‘Crabbe's the man'; people should read more Crabbe

#52

2008-03-18T01:49:00.004+02:00

But irony, in addition to having the capacity to be deprecatory and/or sarcastic, can also be joyous (raucous, hilarious-expressive of an affirmation) or sentimental. I mean sentimental here in a positive sense - as a positive term. I am interested in the 18th century notion of sentiment or sensibility - as an affirmation of a capacity for full emotional experience of the world.

- Lyn Hejinian echoing Jerome J. McGann on sentimental poetry; and John Dolan on the poetic occasion; cf. the "return" of the lyric

#51

2008-03-17T23:32:00.008+02:00

"Western dance begins with its feet firmly planted on the ground whereas butoh begins with a dance wherein the dancer tries in vain to find his feet." "We should be afraid! The reason that we suffer from anxiety is that we are unable to live with our fear. . . . The dancer, through the butoh spirit, confronts the origins of his fears: a dance which crawls towards the bowel of the earth. I do not believe this is possible with European dance.""Butoh is a corpse standing straight up in a desperate bid for life."

- Tatsumi Hijikata, founder of butoh; (Ohno's not on the same level, I think); I thought it was just another type of modernist, formalist pretense -- no, it's the dance of utter darkness, Murnau and Wigman, Artaud and Grotowski in Japan, but that's wrong, too; & I've a sense interpreters & followers add, dilute or formalize, & get it wrong

#50

2008-03-17T02:44:00.001+02:00

"Printers' manuals, tracts on typography, legal documents, and booksellers' autobiographies reveal that print workers conceived of their roles as central to the production of literature". . . .[whereas before] "there was no hard and fast qualitative distinction between what we would call authors and those who worked to produce printed volumes". . . ."the concept of author as proprietor of his or her intellectual property began to take hold in the mid-1700s, gradually eclipsing print workers' contributions to the process of textual creation."

- Lisa Maruca, The Work of Print

#49

2008-03-16T23:06:00.006+02:00

Richard Evans: "Players need “a clear mental model” of how the characters operate. . . .to believe the characters are deeper than they actually are, to believe in them as true characters." Andrew Stern: "Exposing the inner workings of NPCs can hamper players from believing in them as flesh-and-blood characters, since their artificiality is made so obvious." ----> Henry James: "What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?"; Alain Robbe-Grillet (on Beckett): "From beginning to end, the audience follows; it may lose countenance sometimes, but remains somehow compelled by these two beings, who do nothing, who say virtually nothing, who have no other quality than to be present." ----> Thomas Hobbes: "Metaphors, and senseless and ambiguous words are like ignes fatui; and reasoning upon them is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities; and their end, contention and sedition, or contempt." (Leviathan); Michel Foucault: "the positive unconscious of knowledge [the rules of concept formation, object definition, of theory-building] . . . .eludes the consciousness of the scientist" (The Order of Things, 1970, xi-xii);

- interesting parallels between Grand Text Auto debate on NPC transparency & "white/black box" UI; narratological debate on the functions & representation of fictional characters; Henry and Alain; the magic of metaphors

#48

2008-03-16T20:08:00.001+02:00

Wordsworth could be said to combine in his own writing the two strands I try to bring together in this series. His landscape opens up his talent to a genius of observation and perception and it also provides him with subjects, often the poorest and most wretched of men and women.

- Melvyn Bragg on WW as tv-star, sort of

#47

2008-03-15T19:11:00.004+02:00

Gabriel syntyi ja kasvoi Vammalassa. Jo lapsesta asti hän tiesi tulevansa poliisiksi, joka hänestä sitten tuli. Oltuaan poliisissa kaksi vuotta, hänet kutsuttiin salaiseen koulutus-keskukseen, jossa hänestä koulutettiin se joka hän on tänä päivänä.

- Finlander, the Finnish superhero, born and raised in the same town as me...ZOMFG!11oneone (@_@) -- also, Snowman-man (literally), apparently rents an apartment in Vammala...

#46

2008-03-15T17:20:00.008+02:00

"The core question of the superhero story might be phrased as What do we owe other people?" -- "comics writer Alan Moore said that he learned his morals from Superman. Superman presents right and wrong very clearly and distinctly. He uses his powers to help others and to stand up against powerful, selfish forces." -- "Good poetry is very, very difficult. And so is good pornography."

- Jim Henley's widely debated idea of superhero comics as a literature of ethics; this series of posts; the idea of literalizing the metaphor; compare with Moore

#45

2008-03-15T13:23:00.008+02:00

As "Superheroes are becoming more involved in ‘‘real world’’ scenarios that mirror the current political and social problems" (Jamie Hughes in JPC 39:4/2006) is it any wonder we find Madureira's mangaish "overly muscled, sexualized forms" caught in a gratuitous sex tape scandal, brother-sister incest, conjured dinosaurs, DNA-specific murder, this "comic written by a focus group of caffeinated eight-year olds"that "pushes unrealism past all bounds of necessity": "car crash reading for anyone with half an ounce of intelligence"?

- after Ellis and Millar made it the best title on the Ultimate line-up, Loeb in Ultimates 3 takes a different tack and makes the übermensch vulnerable to hiltonization in content and form - and the forum critics go nuts; do I hear a "Goddamn Batman"?

#44

2008-03-15T13:13:00.003+02:00

i don't read manga, can't stand it, & don't care for the 'mangaization' of American comics. there seems to be a definite trend toward more japanese influence as it pertains to the artwork. a good friend of mine who just sold his shop locally quit buying a booth at Megacon a few years back because it wasn't worth his time or effort. his comment? "they should rename it mangacon; too many toys & anime, not enough comics."

- random forum; Wired story; Shaman Warrior

#43

2008-03-14T21:45:00.001+02:00

For "British romantic poets. . . .appropriative behaviors that constitute plagiarism according to most agreed-upon definitions might pass unremarked if the plagiarist either was allied with or had power over the plagiarized poet. On the other hand, if the plagiarist opposed the plagiarized or had less power, accusations of plagiarism followed. Further, plagiarisms by allies and opponents alike led the poets to re-appropriate and amplify their textual materials in games of literary—and sometimes social and political—one-upmanship. In this limited sense, plagiarism helped make romantic literature."

- abstract for Michael Wiley's "Romantic Amplification: The Way of Plagiarism" in the new spring issue of ELH

#42

2008-03-14T13:30:00.005+02:00

"I believe that what is now called literary criticism is a form of Xeroxing," he gibes. "Tell me your theory and I'll tell you in advance what you'll say about any work of literature, especially those you haven't read."

- "Dirty Harry" Lentricchia, the Death of the Critic, the Man without Content, and the never-ending Culture Wars

#41

2008-03-14T12:12:00.003+02:00

One of the oddly positive effects of global warming is that it has given the world the opportunity to build a more comprehensive and inclusive economic model by forcing all of us to grapple with our impact on the natural environment. . . .If we find just one [new idea] that can beat the conventional economic measure of gross domestic product, and can quantify some of the basic services provided by rainforests and other natural ecosystems, it will more than pay for itself.

- Nature editorial believes markets can save forests; "product categories: save the planet..."

#40

2008-03-14T11:58:00.004+02:00

Do you like evil robots, green-skinned assassins, warrior sorcerers, human rockets and talking raccoons? Then have we got the comic for you!

- editor Bill Rosemann; ANNIHILATION: CONQUEST reaches its conclusion - some of the best Marvel has had to offer in a while, (and not least because of Adam Warlock's return); just proves it's a scifi context that makes superhero silliness entertaining

#39

2008-03-13T15:26:00.003+02:00

There are six sides to a cube, the numbers 1, 2, and 3, when added or multiplied together are equal to "6," and the sum of all the numbers from 1 to 36 arranged in a 6x6 magic square are equal to the number "666." The square is "magic" because the sum of any row, column, or diagonal is equal to the number "111."

- the number 36, the art of war, the magic square of the sun, oat brans, Albrecht Dürer, word and number puzzles & games, the Hindenberg, Krypton, the Tzadikim Nistarim, Nevada, Benjamin Franklin, the laws of human interaction, and Chinese poetry - what did I miss?

#38

2008-03-13T14:58:00.004+02:00

"In 1935, Himmler contacted author Yrjö von Grönhagen, after seeing one of his articles about the Kalevala folklore, published in a Frankfurt newspaper." Grönhagen, "a handsome young Finnish nobleman who once auditioned for the cinema, roamed remote eastern Finland to record and film ancient magical rites"; "Himmler believed. . . .the ancient chants and incantations of Karela were Aryan or very similar.", "something of a comfort to Himmler in his final days."

- Yrjö von Grönhagen, the Finnish Indiana Jones

#37

2008-03-13T01:33:00.007+02:00

And thus gentle Reader, I desire you to beare with my rudenes, although that I haue written any thing that you may mislike of, for that some of them perhaps may seeme to bee but trifles and toyes, yet it may bee possible that some of them, if that it bee equallie considered of, may doo some pleasure vnto you.

- preface to William Bourne's book of military matters, "Inuentions or deuises. Very necessary for all generalles and captaines, or leaders of men as wel be sea as by land" (1578); cf. "trifles", attached to "inventions" bringing "pleasures", and "knowledge" that "brings forth toyes" (AS 18.9)

#36

2008-03-12T23:46:00.011+02:00

A new balade entituled as foloweth. To such as write in metres, I write of small matters an exhortation, by readyng of which, men may delite in such as be worthy commendation. My verse also it hath relation to such as print, that they doe it well, the better they shall their metres sell. And when we haue doen al that ever we can, let vs neuer seke prayse at the mouth of man.

- R.B., 1570, a broadside ballad, fashions "Metre" as an economic and political enterprise engaged in by both printers and poets, demands that printers use good paper and ink in order to bring in "pence", uses Horace and Chaucer as guide, and "is to broadside ballads what Philip Sidney is to poesie" (Smith 1999),

#35

2008-03-12T16:07:00.005+02:00

The night of the completion we held hands, her beauty making me forget that she was real, and so I closed my eyes and felt the warmth her body radiated, standing close to mine, and heard her vellum skin whisper against her uniform each time she'd move or shift her longingly-imagined weight...and oh, the smell of her, the Earl Grey scent beneath her arms, the jungle perfume where her thighs clung momentarily together; peeled apart as she stepped closer, and, with eyes still closed, I felt her glove against my cheek, felt something wet and strong push trustingly between my teeth which in the past have chewed through steel...

- in its Ancient Greek sense of the translation into human imagination of inhuman perfection, in its relentless reinterpretation of central cultural meanings through rhythmic language: this is why Miracleman stands as the greatest work of art within superhero comics: because it is poetry

#34

2008-03-12T01:48:00.006+02:00

It was lauded in the press: "A previously unknown work of the great British poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, has been discovered after a 36-year hunt." It was bought by the TLS: "--there is little doubt that the preponderance of evidence assembled in this magisterial edition falls heavily in favour of naming Coleridge as the anonymous translator of the Boosey volume".

- now Roger Paulin says: not even close, so definitely no cigar (link via Wim van Mierlo on the ESTS mailing list)

#33

2008-03-11T16:46:00.002+02:00

Superhero team-ups usually follow a specific structure. The heroes are usually following the same lead but come in from different angles. They clash if they don’t know each other well (or in some cases, like this one, because they do). After some sparring they get the bright idea to talk it out and team up. The villain, now more powerful than ever before, shows his hand and only the combined might of the heroes can put a stop to it. BAM!

- a review of The Authority: Prime #5 fails to consider the tradition of volatile personalities and in-fighting between superheroes (check out the nasty bickering of the early Avengers, or The Beast and Iceman getting into blows in the very first issue of X-Men), a tradition that has gained a new force recently; and what do you think that mirrors (duh)?; but I agree, the art by Darick Robertson sucks

#32

2008-03-11T16:17:00.003+02:00

The ebb and flow of time is proverbial, and the juggling of the heavens is ever evident and fully manifest. At times grief will strike amid transports of joy; sometimes in the depths of sorrow the face of hope will gleam. Similar is the course of the story here told.

- "Possibly one of the most important fantasy events of [last] year" (Locus magazine) was not The Kingkiller Chronicle but the age-old legends of the prophet Muhammad's uncle, Amir Hamza, Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction, now at last translated by Musharraf Ali Farooqi. It's getting some rather rave reviews and can be read here.

#31

2008-03-11T15:48:00.002+02:00

"How does one make money selling free copies? You need to sell things which can not be copied." Like trust, immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage and findability."These eight qualities require. . . .an understanding of how abundance breeds a sharing mindset, how generosity is a business model, how vital it has become to cultivate and nurture qualities that can't be replicated with a click of the mouse."

- Kevin Kelly, another Wired ingenue, makes the long tail wag Walter Benjamin's dog

#30

2008-03-11T15:46:00.003+02:00

Analyzing the layout of Wordsworth's poems apparently reveals that "the emergence of specific print mechanisms and their concomitant repression from consciousness gives us modern psychic structure, the psychological depth best described by psychoanalysis. The unconscious is structured, in other words, by print protocols, especially by those established in the late eighteenth century."

- some very exciting if necessarily abstruse findings by Laura Mandell in last year's last New Literary History

#29

2008-03-11T15:23:00.001+02:00

Ever wondered "if cross-dressing is not primarily about gender designation and placing women in a particular space in relation to patriarchal figures"? Or if "the distinction between financial and sexual transactions" is "completely meaningless in a desire-driven consumer culture"? And what about the fact that "no critical attention has been paid to how Shylock functions as a site wherein anxieties about the way capitalism and, in particular, usury affected national and religious identities"?

- check out the new issue of Early Modern Literary Studies online

#28

2008-03-11T15:13:00.001+02:00

Thoreau does not distinguish between facts and values, or between primary and secondary qualities, since he understands the universe as an organic whole in which mind and matter are inseparable. When we perceive sights, sounds, and textures, we are not standing as disembodied consciousness apart from a world of inanimate mechanisms; rather, we are sentient beings immersed in the sensory world, learning the “essential facts of life” only through “the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us” (Walden, II).

- the article on Henry David Thoreau in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has been "substantively revised" as of March 5, 2008.

#27

2008-03-11T12:58:00.004+02:00

"I am interested in how an unrepentant Stalinist/Maoist like Badiou has become the latest name of fashion for the "most advanced sector" (as Lenin would put it) of the younger post-avant." "I am interested in the thought of Mariategui and Lechin, true working class revolutionary heroes, yet unknown in U.S. circles; they make Badiou look like the Sorbonne pot-head he is."

- Kent Johnson. Homework for the interested: compare Mariategui's old indian problem and Badiou's new hypothesis.

#26

2008-03-11T02:32:00.006+02:00

Besides Shahram Nazeri (another idol of late), I hear it's Aynur Dogan who truly "lends a modern face to age-old Kurdish music. Her songs are epic stories and lamentations of a suppressed people and an expression of lived-through pain, a sort of oriental gospel music. The music is called "Dengbejen", shaped by Arabic, Mesopotamian and even Jewish influences."

- quoting Crossing the Bridge; these stunning performances leave me dumbstruck, soiling myself from pure awe

#25

2008-03-11T01:01:00.003+02:00

"I discovered even when I was dancing in Paris that it was good to be scared. When I worked with choreographers like William Forsythe, I never knew where we were going. It was very exciting." She shapes a vivid little box with her hands then makes it disappear. "Although I liked tradition, I could never stay inside it."

- Sylvie Guillem, "the world's most celebrated ballerina"

#24

2008-03-11T00:11:00.005+02:00

It’s interesting to compare [Tolkien] to that other great outsider artist of the fantastic, Lovecraft. Though Lovecraft never saw war, he did see, quite clearly, the social chaos that the First World War ushered in. The ‘Great War’ was the most shattering event in Modernity’s conception of itself as a rational, humane system: the paradox is that Tolkien, who experienced that carnage first-hand, attempted to turn his back on the truth of post-traumatic Modernity, whereas Lovecraft was thousands of miles away from the heart of horror, but was a neurotically acute barometer of society’s psychic disorders.

- China Mieville in his response to the interesting and yet slightly uninventive* Crooked Timber seminar on his work
___
*compared to this

#23

2008-03-11T00:01:00.003+02:00

Don't forget about The New Wave Flatulance. And don't forget, this is a Movement, so stand back and throw me in a roll of paper. I got a work of marketing genius in the works. After the Post New Weird will come the Neo-Stale followed hard by a reaction to all this called The Old Half-Baked. Definitions will follow. Book shelf space will be cleared. Publishers will be hypnotized by it. Throngs of adherents will succumb. Ma, I'm on top o' the world!

- Jeffrey Ford didn't like labels in 2003, but check the New Weird archives for the backstory on how an old, old & old style got recontextualized to include Leena Krohn

#22

2008-03-10T23:35:00.002+02:00

Welcome to planet Earth, where, within a few years, we will all have been entrained to raise robot babies that we have designed to feel pain. Soon, they will reach their toddler years, powered by a vast array of monkeys wired up to the internet. We will send them out into the world, where they too will go on to the internet and show the world their chrome nipples and the sleek pink hatches of their robot vaginas before being shanked to death in motel rooms by vengeful, pregnant sea lions.

- Warren Ellis last year in the apparently defunct Suicide Girls column

#21

2008-03-10T22:24:00.003+02:00

You already know the end - the immense drama of the Lord Jestocost, seventh of his line, and how the catgirl C'mell initiated the vast conspiracy. But you do not know the beginning, how the first Jestocost got his name, because of the terror and inspiration which his mother, Lady Goroke, obtained from the famous reali-life drama of the dog-girl D'joan.

- Cordwainer Smith's vaudeville-cum-Gormenghast imagination still ahead of the genre-slush pack

#20

2008-03-10T20:04:00.002+02:00

Modern literature has become so thoroughly subjective, so introverted in its tendencies, so preoccupied with the anthropocentric, that it seems desirable for one genre, at least, to maintain what one might call a centrifugal impetus, to make "a gesture toward the infinite" rather than toward the human intestines.

- Clark Ashton Smith on tales of macrocosmic horror

#19

2008-03-10T16:20:00.003+02:00

During one of these conversations, my friend gave an appropriate name to a particular feeling that I have been having from time to time throughout my life. . . .My friend called it "existential terror." We talked quite a bit about what parents tell children to ward off death terror. My parents told me, "Yes, you will die, but hopefully a long time from now, so don't worry about it." The "long time from now" bit doesn't work forever, unfortunately, and I seemed to be feeling that pinch acutely as I turned 30.

- Jason Rohrer, maker of Passage, talks about Gravitation, a game about mania, melancholia, and the creative process

#18

2008-03-10T16:17:00.002+02:00

Similar to other bourgeoning art forms, there is a quickly growing body of recognized major works in video games. In addition, game designers have used the medium to tackle previously unsolvable artistic problems facing film and literature, linking the art of video games to the problems facing modernist film and literature.

- Aaron Smuts on video games as art

#17

2008-03-10T16:12:00.003+02:00

As game designers, we own more emotional bandwidth, we occupy more brain cycles, and we make more people happy than any other platform or content in the world. And if you don’t already believe that, if you don’t realize that we’ve already won, then you’re not paying attention to the staggering amount of time, energy, money and passion that gamers all over the world pour into our games every single day.

- Jane McGonigal's GDC rant

#16

2008-03-10T16:08:00.001+02:00

The game is based on a set of jigsaw like tiles, the images on each of which consist of some combination of land and sea. Each tile in the set has a unique combination of land, sea and tile shape. However the tiles differ from a normal jigsaw puzzle in that there is no single solution to the puzzle. Each time you play the game you will discover a different set of islands.

- Sagacity Games site for Sunda to Sahul, a hybrid puzzle/board game

#15

2008-03-10T16:01:00.002+02:00

FreakAngels started as one of those idle thoughts: what if the kids from the Midwich Cuckoos had grown up to become disaffected twentysomethings? I started making notes on the notion in spare time (which for me, these days, is the 15 minutes before I go to bed at four in the morning), and the thing started multiplying. After a couple of months, I had this massive sprawling thing with thirteen major characters that was clearly telling itself like a huge novel.

- Warren Ellis on FreakAngels, already up to episode 4

#14

2008-03-10T15:48:00.002+02:00

It's so easy to take the piss out of religion. I hate stuff that attacks the church. Not because the church doesn't need attacking, which it does in some cases, but because it's such an easy target. Stories that mock established religion in the present day is the last refuge of the mediocre. It was interesting thirty years ago and very brave a century ago, but now it's the most obvious and dull crutch.

- Mark Millar interviewed

#13

2008-03-10T15:24:00.008+02:00

Inside his suits, which were made of best chamois, were steel rods coupled with springs in such a way that when he stooped the springs were compressed sufficiently to propel him smartly through the air, aided by his bats' wings. How the sulphurous breath was contrived the author omitted to mention.

- E. S. Turner on the superpowers of Spring-Heeled Jack, a penny dreadful hero in the 1800s

#12

2008-03-10T15:17:00.006+02:00

"The man who holds the Book of Thoth," said Dr. Cairn, breaking the silence, "holds a power which should only belong to God. The creature who is known as Antony Ferrara, holds that book. . . . therefore you known now, as I have known long enough, with what manner of enemy we are fighting."

- Sax Rohmer, Brood of the Witch-Queen, reprinted by Dodo Press

#11

2008-03-10T15:06:00.003+02:00

The first time I ever played Dungeons & Dragons, I was six years old - books with great red demons on the cover that dared us to claim their riches, subtitled by this alien name Gygax. . . . What I learned [from them] was that books, some books, were swollen with power - and this power projected into the physical realm. Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes.

- Tycho laments the passing of Gygax

#10

2008-03-10T01:50:00.004+02:00

Those engaged in the constant turf wars with which the poetry world is rife might do well to recognize that their battles and mock-battles in tempestuous teapots are the direct result, indeed can accurately be described as symptoms, of the economy of scarcity. The energy expended in those gladiatorial contests might be more productively used elsewhere and to other ends, ends that might obviate the need for such catfights.

- Reginald Shepherd