the mind under the bridge

he calls himself “seth edenbaum” and “d. ghirlandio” though i don’t think either is his name (her name? my instincts say no, but a mask is a mask is mask…); he may be an artist; this may just be a disguise

he’s been banned as a troll from crooked timber (tho i suspect he’s posting once more, under yet another name): on his own blog he’s furious, frustrated, isolated, relentlessly suspicious, oddly and unexpectedly generous… and consistently fascinating, because of rather than despite the cryptic incompleteness of his posted thoughts, on politics and art, reason and imagination and the self-absorbed rent-seeking intellectual classes:

“One of the many mistakes of the 2oth century was to imagine it might be possible to know without doubt which of our creations would avoid obsolescence. An art or society of ideas, a dream of scientific socialism or of the morality of technological progress, all are predicated on the same assumption, that modernity could mean infallibility, as if a cursory reading of Freud could render one immune to the effects of the unconscious. Such confidence doesn’t work now any more than it did 80 years ago. It doesn’t work for Donald Rumsfeld, or Steve Jobs, any more than it did for Lenin or Le Corbusier.”

pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør in The Brown Wedge • 7 Comments

FT Word Threat Level Pandemic Watch

Yes yes, swine flu. We are all wearing masks and batmanning the barricades against piggy pox. The news is all a flutter and how will we survive with the panicked prognostications of all major news outlets.

However the vectors of the spread of a disease are nothing over the spread of jokes, memes and neologisms. So here are a couple of case studies for you to keep your eye out for.

A) WINE FLU: This would be an example of a joke disease which will burn out very quickly once everyone has heard it, but if Have I Got News For You or The News Quiz get it quick enough will get an OK laugh. The basic formulation is as follows:
“I woke up this morning with nausea and splitting headache. I think it might be Wine Flu”
Do you see? Its a play on words mistaking Swine Flu (actual disease) with Wine Flu, a made up term referring to a hangover.

THREAT LEVEL: High. Its a pretty simple joke after all. Luckily it should burn out by this time next week.
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Pete Baran in FT / Proven By Science / The Brown Wedge • 2 Comments

mornington crescent

aka web 4.0

pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør in FT / Pumpkin Publog / The Brown Wedge • No Comments

No Guru, No Method, No Teacher

I am writing a piece for a market research mag on the current “hottest thinkers” that industry people like to namecheck. Inevitably many of these people are as much derided as loved, so I decided to ‘crowdsource’ a list of the most overpraised intellectuals, using Twitter and LJ. Here it is, and YOU can decide on the worst intellectual of all using the power of votes. (You get 3 each).

A couple of people were excluded for not fitting any reasonable definition of intellectual, and a couple more were excluded for being dead (also, if I’d put Ayn Rand in it would have been a one-horse race). Otherwise what you see is everyone nominated. So: VOTE! (For up to three people)

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Tom in FT / The Brown Wedge • 27 Comments

SF Writers: Stanislaw Lem

Lem was a Polish SF writer, occupying a strange place within the genre. He despised most SF (Dick was the only American SF writer he admired – an opinion that was not remotely reciprocated) for its vacuity and shallowness, which accurately implies the seriousness and philosophical bent of his own work.

His most famous novel is Solaris, made into a great film (the Tarkovsky version is my favourite science fiction movie) and later a decent one. It concerns a first contact with aliens: the distinct idea behind most of Lem’s several approaches to this standard SF trope is that Lem believed communication with an alien mind, or comprehension of it, would be all but impossible. more »

Martin Skidmore in The Brown Wedge • 7 Comments

Everything Starts With A Swastika

I’d like to propose a science historian’s version of Godwin’s Law: a historical conversation is over when a technology gets linked back to the Nazis in an effort to make it sound a bit sinister.

Actually it doesn’t have to be the Nazis. It could be Stalin, or the US military. The basic formula is the same:

“How many of the millions who use [x] every day of their lives realise that its story began in a secret research program in Nazi Germany…”

I spotted this pattern when I saw it three times in a couple of days. more »

Tom in FT / Proven By Science / The Brown Wedge • 5 Comments

Crime Writers: Jim Thompson

I like a writer who defies real comparison with anyone else in their genre. The closest to Jim Thompson would be Dostoyevsky, I think, except Thompson is far bleaker, far more negative about human nature. He’s also a stranger and more experimental writer. This is particularly surprising, given that his work was published far from any locus of critical acclaim: he wrote for crime pulps, and for cheap paperback novel publication.

You may have seen one or two films of his work: The Grifters was a fine adaptation of one of his last really strong works (his great years run from the start of the ’50s to the mid-’60s), whereas both versions of The Getaway graft on a lame happy ending. The actual ending is the most scary and depressing piece of writing I’ve ever read, creating a caged existence of constant terror.
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Martin Skidmore in The Brown Wedge • 2 Comments

SF Writers: Samuel Delany

It’s hard to know where to start with Delany. He’s not really been much within SF for a long time, and my favourite novel by him (and probably by anyone), while published as SF, mostly isn’t. Still, he started in the field, writing extraordinary works blending poetry, space opera and philosophy in a way that is very representative of the transitions the new wave brought about in the ’60s. If I had to choose the cleverest person ever to write SF, he’d be my nomination.

A good example of the early SF might be Babel-17 (1966), a novel where the threat from alien invaders is not in any sense physical: it’s their language. It changes the minds of anyone that it touches. We get spacecrafts and their crews, but these are not at all military or heroic in style – the characters are outsiders and poets and the like. The effect of the language embodies the Sapir-Whorf theory of linguistics, that language affects our perception and interpretation of the world, and a reaction against Chomsky’s ideas (much the more favoured at this time) that language is functional and natural. This approach to SF was new. more »

Martin Skidmore in The Brown Wedge • 6 Comments

Crime Writers: Lawrence Block

I like a good series character in my crime fiction, and no one has offered us more of these than Block, and they cover a range of styles.

Matthew Scudder (16 novels) is a private eye in NYC, whose best friend is a hardened criminal. The novels vary in tone and story, some tough to the point of brutality, but morality is always complex, and Scudder being a recovering alcoholic plays a big part. These are worth reading in order, mostly, because the character does develop (including getting married, eventually).

Bernie Rhodenbarr (10 novels) is a professional burglar who also runs a bookshop. more »

Martin Skidmore in The Brown Wedge • 2 Comments

Hauntography: The Mezzotint

To read the story, click here; to read about our ‘hauntography’ project, click here.

“See that space between the panels? That’s what comics aficionados have named “The Gutter!” And despite its unceremonious title, the gutter plays host to much of the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics! Here in the limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea.”

– Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics

A ghost story about a picture that comes to life might or might not be frightening. “The Mezzotint” isn’t one. It’s a ghost story about a picture that turns into a comic strip, and as McCloud says, it draws its fear from what’s happening – or what might be happening – from one frame to the next. more »

Tom in FT / The Brown Wedge • 8 Comments