Bogotissimo!

Bookseller buys stash of books from old lady, whose husband had recently passed away. Arriving home, he checks the material and finds hollowed-out books packed with pornographic polaroids of said deceased husband and what must have been his lovers. Uncertain what to do with such treasure, he asks the Internet.

(Apropos: I had seen a step-by-step guide to assemble hollowed-out books some time ago somehwere on the Internets. I don’t remember where, though, and I doubt I have the manual skills to pull it off decently. Are they difficult to come by? What are the secret mercadolivre keywords?)

ennead: Nine gods tangle in lust, they reach with long arms into the mineshaft where Persephone has fled their gifts: Circ, god of the never ending; Zero, everything; Grid, architect of mazes; Point, ethereal sky; Merge, mother of long distances; Stop, who can’t; After, where all things begin; Line, overseer of the past tense; and Curve, god of detour. They share a liver and a singular, booming voice, but they won’t abide this nine-way split for a woman who smells like Jack Daniels and cigarettes. Heaven’s hair is on fire; on the ground, it is snowing.

in: (NON) sense for to from Eva Hesse, a lexicon by Carrie Meadows.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Paid for by Stride Gum, this guy traveled to 42 countries and danced a silly dance in each one of them.

“I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” - Mark Twain

(I wrote a post about Jane Austen a few years back. I hope people at the time recognized it was parodic in style, trying to mimic the insufferable naiveté that usually follows the topic.)

J R Carpenters In Absentia.

via chekhov’s mistress: an interview with steven moore, Gaddis scholar and advocate of the maximalist, experimental novel.

ST: Since it’s not yet published, could you summarize the thesis of your work in progress?

SM: It’s that the experimental, artsy novel that [reviewer Dale] Peck and others feel began with Ulysses actually began thousands of years ago, and that today’s experimentalists are continuing in that venerable tradition. The conventional, realistic novel that dominates the best-seller lists today is a very late development in the long history of the novel, not the novel’s default setting. So I begin at the beginning—ancient Egypt, “The Tale of Sinuhe” (c. 1950 BCE)—and show that all early fiction writers were innovative, making up the rules as they went along. At early stages in every culture’s history, literary theorists like Aristotle in Greece (and his counterparts in India and China) established rules and expectations for poetry and drama, but ignored prose fiction. Consequently, novelists were free to do whatever the hell they wanted, so I survey the results from around the world up to the year 1600 (right before Don Quixote, 1605). That’s where my Volume 1 ends, which is circulating among publishers right now. Volume 2 will begin with Cervantes and end with the most interesting novel of 2012.

(…)

I couldn’t help but detect some laziness as well; some people don’t want to “work” at reading a novel (or listening to a complex opera, or watching a film with subtitles, etc). I said earlier I liked a challenge; many people obviously don’t, or not when it comes to novels. I got the sense from these critics that they feel the novel is a democratic, middle-class genre that anyone should be able to enjoy, and that these experimentalists were betraying the novel (and their readers) by trying to turn it into something (high art) it was never intended to be. (In music, punks reacted the same way in the 1970s after progressive, virtuosic rock bands turned pop music into something they felt it was never intended to be.) But only since the 18th-century were novels written for the benefit of average readers; for the 2000 years before that, novels were written and read by scholars and aristocrats, for the most part. These critics seemed to be unaware of the novel’s decidedly elitist roots, so that’s the history I decided to tell in my work in progress.

Bloomsday’s so tacky!

In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a “réseau,” which might be translated as “network” — or arguably, “web.”

(…)

Since there was no such thing as electronic data storage in the 1920s, Otlet had to invent it. He started writing at length about the possibility of electronic media storage, culminating in a 1934 book, “Monde,” where he laid out his vision of a “mechanical, collective brain” that would house all the world’s information, made readily accessible over a global telecommunications network.

—

meanwhile, at modernmechanix (light of my life, fire of my loins): color television in 1929.

via The Art of the Prank: Jason Kronenwald makes portraits of blondes. His medium: chewed gum on plywood. (link 1, link 2)

via Pink Tentacle: in a department store in Shinjuku, a mural of Astroboy made of Tokyo metro tickets. Btw, Pink Tentacle is not calling this a mosaic; this is “pixel-art”. Original post.

via The Syntax of Things.

Alec Niedenthal, 17 year-old, writes in a letter to the NYT:

Don’t worry; we’re working on it. You’ve heard it straight from the tropical mouth of a teenager who is entirely conscientious of the metamorphoses in ideas, principles (or lack thereof) and influences being undergone by your Youth right under your collective noses: the next Great American Novel will come not from Pynchon, Wallace, DeLillo (he’s already had his turn anyway) or any other of your literary heroes.

It will spring from the iMac-fettered keyboards of the young, challenging, Facebook-and-MySpace-addled minds that you have so hastily jettisoned as literary jetsam, from those who see and comprehend, still to the delirious ignorance of the villainous Powers That Be, incalculable brands of grade-A terror being perpetrated unabashedly both by those whom we trust and those whom we loathe.

Took words out of my mouth. As for his list, Pynchon already wrote the Great American Novel, it’s too much to want him write the next one. Delillo was never “Great American Novel” material; and Foster Wallace, 36-year-old-child-prodigy of the form as he will always be, is constantly sabotaged and held back in the middle grounds by his heartbreaking immaturity - and now the Zeitgeist is already leaving him behind. I’m looking forward to Mr. Niedenthal to live up to what he says.

via pink tentacle.

Scientists have genetically tweaked E. coli bacteria to create simple computers capable of solving a classic math puzzle, commonly called the “Burnt Pancake Problem.”

(harmless aside: it really bugs me the way journalists will start sentences with “scientists believe” or “scientists did this or that.”)

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An Error in the Code (via MeFi), a story about Lesch-Nyham syndrome, a genetic disease that will make its sufferers bite off their own fingers, poke their own eyes, insult people around them and harm themselves in all sorts of ways as though possessed - all the while feeling utterly terrified over what they are doing.

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Regine from wmmna writes up on Roger Shimomura, whom we had linked a few posts below.

Biggest Drawing in the World a hoax, wired has it.

I maintain my initial response to it: real or not, drawing a self-portrait in this medium (GPS on world) is so conceptually lame.

Word on the street is that it’s actually marketing (”viral” or somesuch). Which would explain the sterility of the whole enterprise.

This guy is for real, though: Walk the Line

Pac-Txt!

You awaken in a large complex, slightly disoriented. Glowing dots hover mouth level near you in every direction. Off in the distance you hear the faint howling of what you can only imagine must be some sort of ghost or several ghosts.

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Choose your own Adventure: Pong

Map, by Aram Bartholl

weezer sucks.

at the new york press

(…) I took my first stab at being a fake nerd when I was seventeen, roughly three years after I initiated my effort not to be a real nerd. I bought a pair of black Elvis Costello/Malcolm X glasses. I cut my hair from a bass-player volcano to a midlength floppy mushroom shape. I was supposed to be an attractive parody of my old self. For being a fake nerd, like being a white Negro, can be a way of putting even more distance between yourself and the object of your imitation than there was before. In the imagination of the fake nerd, the nerd is attractive because he is unaffected, untrendy to the point of primitivism, a kind of inert noble savage. Going through life making the exertion of affecting noble savagery makes you feel even less a noble savage than you did before. Being a fake nerd leaves you less of a nerd. Which is why it’s an excellent strategy for former nerds. You can both acknowledge your past (obeying the teenage principle of don’t-reinvent-yourself-or-we’ll-call-you-a-poser) and distance yourself from it (I am so indisputably un-nerdy I can wear accessories and even pants that are nerdy and not be a nerd). This is why when you go to a party full of young music studio engineers, or arts journalists, or book editors, you look around and see a fake nerd uniform (bulky glasses, floppy hair, sweaters, low-top canvas sneakers useless for athletic activity).

You hear fake nerd conversation. It follows a model. You bring up an “obsession” or “total fascination” with a purportedly unfashionable subject. “I am such a dork about old Hawaiian slide guitar. I actually have every King Benny record. I’ve so got a problem.” “Dude, you want to hit In-N-Out burger? I basically live on their Protein Burgers when I’m in LA.”

This is a way of whipping out cultural capital, but not in the same way as leaving guests in the living room to retrieve a hollowbody guitar or a first edition of To The Lighthouse. The Gretsch and the Woolf say, “I am creative and educated, so I have an understanding of the blues and the Bloomsbury Group.” The Hawaiian slide recordings and the In-N-Out Burger, which are both low-end consumer products, say, “I love the things I love because I am guided by some untamed voice within me that causes me to have random obsessions. I will follow my individualized obsessions, not trends, and be transparent about those obsessions, even when those obsessions tell me to like things widely considered ugly and cheap.” It’s the cultural capital of quirk.

(…)

It’s also just barely possible to think you make a statement about gender when you work a fake nerd look. While nerds, as everybody knows, tend to be male more often than female, dressing like a nerd rejects conventional ideas about what a hunky young man looks like. Since conventional notions of what makes a young man look handsome are so bound up with conveying power and wealth and the capacity for punching somebody out, making yourself look like a nerd on purpose is a gesture that says, “I renounce the privilege of being a young swinging dick.” At the very least, it’s a refusal to make your outfit a monument to your own authority. For a woman, dressing up as fake nerd is a refusal of plumage. In an androgynous paradise where adults of both sexes look like enlarged spelling-bee champions, it’s easy to forget for a moment, or even an entire night of drinking beer, that privilege is unevenly distributed between genders. At least, it’s easy if you’re male.

Instruction Set

Write code that takes the three parameters named “complexity”, “intensity” and “disorder”, and makes something you deem appropriate in your medium of choice. Each parameter should take a floating point value from 0 up to 1.

The previous proposition is conceptually even more challenging:

“Composition 1960 #10″ by La Monte Young consists of the single instruction “draw a straight line and follow it”. A fitting minimal starting point to instructionset. Please contribute your implementations.

“Take yourself for example Phallicity - what social mobility do you have as a blood elf priest?” - Karl Marx (lvl 72 dwarf) asks me, in WTF? - “Your class position is pre-determined for you from day one, as soon as you gain entry to this world.” The rhetorics and educational effort ranged from the very boring to the hilarious, as my elf priestess (I didn’t try playing with the dwarf) battled the phallocrats.

Makibishi Comic - takes forever to load, then you play for 2 minutes and it takes forever to load again. Gameplay is also itself very slow: but simmer down, turn IM clients off, and enjoy the creative puzzles and the pretty, pretty graphics.

Faith Fighter, a fight game (in the classic style of sf2) whose characters are Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Ganesha, Budai, God, and a seventh, surprise character. Gameplay is weak, but the special attacks (”turn the other cheek!” “holy cross!” “karma wheel!”) had me laughing for a few hours here.

Aaron Koblin had 10 thousand people on the Internet draw sheep facing left for him; this guy is asking people to draw prostitutes. Go and add your own. ^^

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elsewhere: My Lonesome Cowboy (yeah, that sculpture) has been sold for 15.2 million. Not quite a fat lady’s painting, but hey.