Prevented him from translating this: “Stercus asini comedunt mulieres Salernitanae in crispellis et dant viris suis ut melius retineant sperma et sic concipitant” (History of Magic and Experimental Science Vol. 1, 741).
Such innocent, agathokakological times.
According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: “I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat.”
In 1926 the Politburo in Moscow passed the request to the Academy of Science with the order to build a “living war machine”. The order came at a time when the Soviet Union was embarked on a crusade to turn the world upside down, with social engineering seen as a partner to industrialisation: new cities, architecture, and a new egalitarian society were being created.
Nick Montfort, who wrote the (or at least “a”) book on interactive fiction, has recently released Book and Volume, which is set in nTopia, has allusions ranging from Pynchon to Gygax, and feels very PKD–I mean that neutrally. My discussion is going to include some mild spoilers.
I should begin by noting that I’m not sure that I’ve finished the game in terms of achieving the optimal or at least all of the potential outcomes. You are a resident of a community apparently created by a large corporation on a desert plateau. The city exists roughly on a five-by-seven grid and has apartment complexes, a museum, hospitals, police stations, a Starbucks on just about every corner (including three surrounding the “independent” coffee shop) and lots of retail. You work as a sysadmin, sort of. The computers have buttons you can either push or hold. You interact with your laptop by “USE"ing it. Everything that you buy is deducted from your banking account via a chip in your pager, where you receive the periodic instructions that tell you what to do for the day.
During yet another break from grading, I watched the Paul Schrader-directed version of the Exorcist prequel. As you may know, the studio execs thought Schrader’s film so commerically unviable that they hired another director to jazz it up for the release with the screaming and the demonic hyenas, nyeagh. I actually tried watching that version earlier this year and could not.
I found myself curious about Schrader’s Calvinism and his take on the film’s events here, though he didn’t write the script, and, as the indifferent-sounding director’s commentary makes clear, was brought in on the project after John Frankenheimer could not longer work on it. How many films involving the paranormal in some way open with a Nazi-flashback? X-Men is the only other one I can think of right away, though I’m sure there must be others.
Last night, taking a break from grading a set of papers on utopia, progress, and technology, I stopped to watch The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I remember some bad-sounding buzz about this on the internets, and went in expecting to be disappointed. I wasn’t, though. Tim seems to resemble Douglas Adams quite a bit, and I always pictured Arthur Dent as looking like his jacket photo. Versatile Sam Rockwell’s presidential impersonation was not, as the Village Voice review reminds us, terribly subversive; but I found it amusing nontheless. I’d would have liked a nod at the Babel Fish puzzle from the Infocom game, myself, and Marvin should have been clunkier.
The most famous paragraph in “bad writing discussions”:
Theodor Haecker was rightfully alarmed by the fact that the semicolon is dying out; this told him that no one can write a period, a sentence containing several balanced clauses, any more. Part of this incapacity is the fear of page-long paragraphs, a fear created by the marketplace–by the consumer who does not want to tax himself and to whom first editors and then writers accommodated for the sake of their incomes, until finally they invented ideologies for their own accommodation, like lucidity, objectivity, and concise precision. Language and subject matter cannot be kept separate in this process. The sacrifice of the period leaves the idea short of breath. Prose is reduced to the “protocol sentence,” the darling of the logical positivists, to a mere recording of facts, and when syntax and punctuation relinquish the right to articulate and shape the facts, to critique them, language is getting ready to capitulate to what merely exists, even before thought has time to perform this capitulation eagerly on its own for the second time. It starts with the loss of a semicolon; it ends with the ratification of imbecility by a reasonableness purged of all admixtures. (Adorno, “Punctuation Marks.” Notes on Literature. Vol. 2. [Columbia UP, 1991], 95.)
From Roger Luckhurst’s The Invention of Telepathy:
William Stead and Cecil Rhodes plotted a secret society throughout the 1890s that would use Rhodes’ diamond wealth to foster the idea of a worldwide Anglo-Saxon confederation (124)
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Stead, who agitated against Parnell (128), seems to have had an interesting career. I look forward to reading his The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes to learn more about this. Conan Doyle published in 1926, a magic year, a two-volume History of Spiritualism. I would have liked to have seen more discussion of the growth of statistical science and telepathy, a subject treated admirably by Ian Hacking in an article available via my citeulike list in Luckhurst’s book; but it was a consistently interesting read. Did you know that Peirce had special interest in the “insight of females” (72)? And “odalic” is used more times than you’re probably accustomed to. Also, James Strachey came to Freud via a footnote of F. W. H. Myers'.
Provocative article by Michael Lewis, of Moneyball fame, in this week’s NYT Mag about Texas Tech’s Mike Leach and his offensive schemes, which sound as if they make Spurrier’s, about which I heard a little in Gainesville over the years, sound as inventive as “run up the middle three times and punt.” The article almost makes me want to watch college football again, even.
“[Galen] disputes the assertion of Epicurus–one by which some of his followers failed to be guided–that there is no benefit to health in Aphrodite, and contends that at certain intervals and in certain individuals and circumstances sexual intercourse is beneficial” (History of Magic and Experimental Science Vol. I, 141).
On an unrelated topic, what famous book about masturbation uses the following remark by Nietzsche as one of its many epigrams–all but one (from La Rouchefoucauld) also from Nietzsche?
I want to tell you about three things.
“Agrippa was not unfamiliar with inns; on the contrary, he frequented them willingly and a few small stones were sufficient to pay his bills because, as Del Rio says, he gave them the appearance of good money in the eyes of the landlord. This time, however, he had lost his magic powers and was abandoned by all except his dog. Realizing that the end was drawing near, Agrippa himself grew tired of even this last, faithful companion, and brusquely cast him away. Giovio gives his exact words: ‘Get away, damned beast, you have who brought me to utter damnation!’ The meaning of the anecdote is clear: the dog, which was of course black, was no less than the incarnation of the devil. As soon as his victim came to his senses and realized the damnation brought him by his companion, the pet ran and plunged headlong into the River Saone, splashing and giving off sulphurous fumes.”