Posts by Kracklite
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Isn't it? The gift that keeps on giving. I particularly love the repetition of
verified fact
followed by wild speculation. I'm waiting for "It might have been an evil robot that looked just like GWB, but was programmed by the Grey reptile aliens from Zeta Reticuli acting in concert with the Bilderbergers."
Well, indeed it might be.
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I cannot live in cities because of the noise
I'm fortunate myself in finding a corner of Aro Valley that has nothing louder than Kaka and Tui in the morning.
pathetic eh?
On the contrary, it sounds like you've crafted the life to suit your soul.
disability ‘issues’ rather than the more exciting ‘affairs’
Useful bureaucratese... "issues" are static, requiring no immediate action, "affairs" are dynamic, requiring continuing action and engagement.
Some say William Gibson merely perfected cyberpunk
My theory of literary origins is that it's a waste of time to look at the "first" of anythging, but to look at the point/horizon where an old category is less useful than a new one. Arguably, Frankenstein is the first science fiction novel (so saith Brian Aldiss), but it can still be covered by the moniker "gothic" - it's when we get to Wells' "scientific romances" ( a term he used, which itself was used by someone whose name I forget to denote speculative essays as much as fiction), that "gothic" certainly no longer suffices.
Art in general may have its celebrity revolutionaries, but really, any new movement draws on deep and diverse roots. My PhD supervisor, Brian Opie, credits Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths with the conceptual invention of hypertext, and I can see why. Cyberpunk itself owes a lot to the pulp fiction of Dashiel Hammet, Raymond Chandler and so on in its tone as well as all of the technical papers that were coming out of MIT as well as the innovations of Gates, Jobs and Wozniak (Wells himself explored through fiction the implications of the lectures by Huxley that he attended). True revolutions are syntheses. In my not very humble opinion (but I've got the letters after my name, so there, pthbbbt!).
BTW, loving Zero History right now. One forgets just how drolly funny Gibson can be.
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OTOH, the neurotypical spectrum seems to me to run from this:
through this:
to this:
Agree on the smells, plus noises, plus lights, people randomly entering my space… most of the day is like living inside a pinball machine, so I’m rarely out of doors without sunglasses an iPod to tone it down and give it a bit of structure… but I love social interaction of teaching – I just get peopled out by the end of the day and consider a weekend ruined if I have to talk to anyone.
I’d suggest watching the superb Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould to anyone who wants to know about AS, or listening to his CBC documentaries such as The Idea of North. He died before AS entered the DSM IV, but he’s pretty much AS’s poster boy. I have my suspicions about Stanley Kubrick too…
Unfortunately, someone who I had to work with (and won’t work with again), who supposedly has letters after their name and should know better, decided that I had “issues” that I was imposing on them. I think I hate the term “issues” as much as I hate “going forward.”
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Was it something that I/S said?
T'was.
Here, I've poured you another one :)
Evil! Evil!
It was lovely to meet you.
...Reshiprocally ... hic
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To amend, as I missed the edit deadline…
Lie Down with dogs, get up with fleas.
More seriously, I don’t find that merely amusing, I find it sinister. Moral fundamentalism allows no compromise, no grappling with the issues of the real world where we are all compromised. If all judgments are absolute, who cannot be condemned?
To insinuate that those who took Fulbright scholarships and the like were willingly cogniscant of the moral corruption of the US and, rather than forego their venal ambitions, they willingly took a demon lover rather than decide that despite the flaws of the host nation, the institutions involved had aims that were at least in part idealistic and thus worthy of support is… naive at best. I could say worse. Maybe I could say that it’s the equivalent of a sweeping essentialism that construes absolutely everything American as being tainted by association, and those who associate themselves with it as being similarly corrupt.
This sort of essentialism suggests something indistinguishable from a word beginning with “r” and ending in “ism”.
No, I’m too mellow, I won’t drag the heavy mass of the rest of that word out from its pit.
("Out, damned spot!", I hear)
(See what Scotch does? It makes me pompously grandiloquent and self-important. Keep me away from it!)
“Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas” does indeed clarify things and remove ambiguity, but alas, in the wrong way; it backfires because it’s obviously a lazy, judgmental essentialism. One needn’t think about the complexity and tensions within American society because there is an easy slogan available that removes the need for thought. Yes, one can say that noble aims have been co-opted to corrupt purposes, but does that negate entirely the nobility of those initial aims? Were they a lie from their very origin? Can not any good be achieved by dealing with nobly-intended institutions in a flawed regime in order to perpetuate the noble? Is everything “American” irredeemable then because it is American?
I know plenty of Americans who have to live with a system they do not like. Should they emigrate? Where? How? Should they head to the hills and live on lentils? Will that be enough? If they do not, are they corrupt and evil hypocrites?
Admiral Gorshkov said, pragmatically paraphrasing Voltaire, “Better is the enemy of the good enough”, meaning that systems that could actually be fielded under the exigencies of (cold) wartime were better than any number of paper studies (to digress, this is something that NASA has forgotten in an example that we should all observe, leading to its nickname, the “Need Another Study Agency”, and so, almost forty-two years after Apollo 11, they can’t get out of low Earth orbit). Gorshkov got results: he made the Soviet navy a real force for good or ill, but for his aims at least.
Demanding perfection and nothing but perfection is not only a path to futility; I suggest that it’s a betrayal, establishing a fantasy as a tiny oasis, nay, a mirage amidst corruption versus real incremental gains in the long term.
Thus spake Kracklite, the tipsy Fabian.
P.S. You know, I could have been much more succinct just by referring to the People’s Front of Judea.
P.P.S. Giovanni does cut rather a profile indeed. Very much the up-and-coming senator in a black and scarlet interpretation of the white and purple, I thought.
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Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas
Kevin Bacon must be the nexus of all evil on earth.
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Joe Wylie,
banality-induced nausea
It was called ennui, or sometimes spleen before the existentialists got their hands on it. Absinthe is usually prescribed. It's either that or bloody Sartre.
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Paul Williams,
Kiwiblog’s as bad which is why maybe we should all heed Russell’s plea?
Agree, and I’m optimistic that aided by the fundamental good will of this community, it will happen/is happening.
Kiwiblog was never anything other than a sewer, but I did, once have higher expectations of The Standard, which I’ve abandoned. Lynn Prentice has definitely not covered himself with glory in his handling of a correspondent who has dared to argue that rape is in fact rather a serious matter versus others who think that even shouting “No, stop!” still somehow constitutes consent and makes it no more than “bad sex” or the one who insinuates that the charges are part of a Jewish plot and calls for the stalking and persecution of the complainants. Ugh.
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Russell Brown,
Playing Pollyanna here perhaps, but it could be worse - people here are angry, but there is a general conciliatory will.
I had a look at... I know, I got what I deserved... T' Standard. Vile, truly vile; I need brain bleach.
I was going to add a couple of quotes, but it would be in bad taste. God only knows what Trotter's come up with... (that was rhetorical - I don't want to know)
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And...