February 2011
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Week 8
Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey has been showing up everywhere of late. This might just be an artifact of my own online sphere: after all, the book was republished in early 2010, and originally published in 2007. Computational mythologies, an interview with the author, along with the reviews and this excerpt got me really curious about the book. But local bookstores don’t...
Niels Klim's Underground Travels →
It’s not exactly ancient Greece, but Niels Klim’s Underground Travels (1741), by the Dano-Norwegian author Ludvig Holberg, is one of the world’s first sci-fi novels and a pioneer of the “hollow Earth” genre. Sadly, Norwegian authors haven’t taken up the torch. The novel, originally published in Latin, is probably inspired by Gulliver’s Travels, and...
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Report from a Post-Religious World
I live in one of the least religious and most democratic states in the world. There is no separation between Church and State, and we are not a republic but a monarchy. Something appears wrong with this picture. It’s astonishing how history has completely decontextualized debates that were once deeply felt on the ground. Religious and political ideologies have been ripped out of the stream...
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Portrait of a small town (photo essay) →
This is the final edit of this project, I think. This edit is a lot tighter, and I’ve ratcheted up the storytelling. This project isn’t purely reactive, but it is partially a reaction to the way this region is usually portrayed to the outside world. You can’t expect a tourist brochure to be honest, but if you can’t, something needs to fill that void. I lived in this town...
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Week 7
Genius is fascinating, and none more so, perhaps, than that of the child prodigy. But what is it that makes some burn out, while others are stars that keep on shining? I keep returning to two individuals who perfectly exemplify the two extremes. One is William James Sidis, born in 1898. As a child, he was a guinea pig for his father’s eccentric theories about education. The other is Terence...
Use value →
This again? Oh yes. Looks like it’s time for another literary venue to decry “descriptivism” and bring some manners back into language. I could split this article into paragraphs, and attach to each one a refutation, because there’s hardly a single paragraph that doesn’t contain some sort of inaccuracy, but that wouldn’t be any fun. The problem here is the...
Human emotions as defined by Twitter
Love.
in the airrr
like drinking beer
a Strong word!!!
all that can’t leave behind.
never ugly. Joy.
mine
short-lived as it turns out to be another Nigerian based scam
what happens to us when we allow ourselves to recognize how good things really are
a decision.
an option.
Hate.
more lasting than dislike
the new love
a strong word, especially when you’re not giving a...
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Week 6
Robin Sloan imports some concepts from economics to describe the media landscape:
Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly...
Postmodern Travel →
Travel writer Pico Iyer has a lot to say about the globalized world and the cosmopolitan existence. This is an interview from 1996:
When I first became a travel writer and went to places like China and Japan and India, I realized that people have been visiting the temples of China and the gardens of Japan and the Mountains of India for hundreds of years and written wonderfully about it, but what...
Here’s a question that says either a lot or very little about you, depending on who’s doing the extrapolating, but that I nonetheless find interesting: when you’re old, would you rather be known as s/he was … or s/he did …?
Tumblr informed me that I’ve made three thousand posts on this blog. Three thousand. That’s a lot. I’ve settled into a rhythm, and that worries me. And who calls their site “Daily Meh”, really? That was always supposed to be temporary.
To keep it short, this site is now called Enthusiasms, and it’s now a .org. There’s a new design which might break any...
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“Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there –-...”
– Andy Warhol.
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Zoe Strauss, America
Zoe Strauss’s photographs of ugly people are photographs of ugly people. They’re not about inner beauty or other nebulous concepts. She masters the extremely delicate balancing act between, on the one hand, honesty towards the subject, and on the other, honesty towards the audience. If you show the ugly, or for that matter, the beautiful in a glowing light, you are in a sense lying to...
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Notes on the Linguistics of Jötunn
Certain landmasses, mountains and rock formations in the Northern hemisphere have long been suspected to be of not entirely natural origin; the weather and climate patterns required to produce them seem at odds with what we know about the climate and weather of the surrounding areas. After the discoveries in recent years of enormous humanoid skeletal remains on Svalbard, and of a sort of...
I have this nightmare sometimes where I kill a guy. It’s a different guy each time (always a guy), but the feeling is always the same. It is a slow, creeping realization that you have become a monster, an evil, and that you haven’t just snuffed out one guy’s life, you’ve ruined your own life, too. Those are the worst. Those are horrible. I spend the rest of the dream...
When I win the Nobel in literature for my entirely original take on the “disaffected youth” genre, it will be solely because of the verisimilitude underpinning the scene where the protagonist, cursing dramatic irony, vainly attempts to patch together his glasses with the same shitty Scotch tape he bought to make said spectacles sufficiently geeky for Halloween. The Hollywood version...
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January 2011
The robot lives in a tree with some chimpanzees... →
The robot lives in a tree with some chimpanzees. In the mornings he wakes from shutdown and hangs himself over a branch, exposing his solar panels to the rising sun. The chimpanzees engage in similar activity, dozing or quietly chewing for the first three hours of daylight.
The robot does not remember how he came to be in the forest. He finds this very frustrating. His memories since arriving in...