The Mooresie

Bookninja » Subvirtualism: The Surrealists’ love child, immaculately conceived

As you may note, these techniques no longer affront common conceptions of reality. In fact, they’ve become reality – the currency of our culture, the shared vocabulary of our consumer society:

* Odd juxtapositions and subconscious drives? Advertisers have long mastered such techniques and moods, employing them to sell a whole array of consumer products – everything from bottled water to toilet water to toilet paper.
* Automatic, unedited writing? The embrace of democratic possibilities in art, regardless of expertise? Try a blog. Try ten-thousand, if you like.
* The spread of associations across a wide field of play? That essentially describes the dynamics of the web.
* Collaborative creations? Well, the Wiki has become the new Exquisite Corpse. Unfortunately, most Wikis feel more like diddling with the dead than daring to risk through language.

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Despite the violence done to the form of Surrealism, the deeper thrust remains within a new group of contemporary writers. Like the Surrealists, these writers are driven by the need to crack open the fissures in accepted reality, thereby making us see the dynamics of self and society; the need – not to shout or rail or talk incessantly – but to growl from the landscape of the true, as they perceive it. These contemporary writers are responding to the political, scientific, and cultural tone of their time. Now, however, that tone resounds within and from the virtual nature of our society.

The Believer – A Blaze in the North American Sky

A common mistake made by the uninitiated listener is to conflate death metal and black metal. I’ve been at a few parties or dinners or whatever where someone has asked me to describe the difference between the two. To answer involves me trying to explain a blast beat, followed by vocal impressions of a death-metal vocalist (low, deep, guttural growling) vs. a black-metal vocalist (usually higher, wispy, wraithlike, and screeched).

(via Boing Boing)

(via f13)

Toshiba has developed a new class of micro size Nuclear Reactors that is designed to power individual apartment buildings or city blocks. The new reactor, which is only 20 feet by 6 feet, could change everything for small remote communities, small businesses or even a group of neighbors who are fed up with the power companies and want more control over their energy needs.

On not winning the Nobel Prize

I am sure that everyone here, making a speech will know that moment when the faces you are looking at are blank. Your listeners cannot hear what you are saying: there are no images in their minds to match what you are telling them. In this case, of a school standing in dust clouds, where water is short, and where, at the end of term, a just killed goat cooked in a great pot is the end of term treat.

Is it really so impossible for them to imagine such bare poverty?

I do my best. They are polite.

I’m pretty sure of this lot there will be some who will win prizes.