Al-"square"-eity! A minor change really, Teresa Carmody replaces Eddie Izzard who is a bit shambolic bless him and has been doing films.
Lol Coxhill - Leader of the Shadow Shadow Cabinet
Gordon Brown MP - Shadow Shadow Chancellor
Frances Kruk - Shadow Shadow Foreign Secretary
Mark E. Smith - Shadow Shadow Home Secretary
Prof Peter Singer - Chairman of the Counterpower
Sarah Maple - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Justice
China Meivelle - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Health
Prof Chantal Mouffe - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government
Alan Moore - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Defence
Alice Mahon MP - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Dr Esther Leslie - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families
George Monbiot - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change
Sharon Borthwick - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Transport
Stewart Lee - Shadow Shadow Leader of the House of Commons
Prof Angela Davis - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions
Charlie Brooker - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
Paul Sutton - Shadow Secretary of State for Wales
Prof Roger Scruton - Shadow Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
Milan Rai - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for International Development
Miranda July - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform
Teresa Carmody - Shadow Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury
Dr Eric Griffiths - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills
Dec - Shadow Shadow Minister for Housing
President Barack Obama - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland
Steve Aylett - Shadow Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland
George Galloway MP - Shadow Shadow Minister of State for Europe
Sarah Haskins - Chief Whip
Tuesday, 12 May 2009
Saturday, 9 May 2009
Dudgeon & Dragons
Hurrah, the dialectic of the mock heroic and the middle classes has just done another little Aufhebung-fart with the arrival of Chore Wars! "Chore Wars lets you claim experience points for household chores. By getting other people in your house or workplace to sign up to the site, you can assign experience point rewards to individual tasks and chores, and see how quickly each of you levels up."
As Jeff Hilson once wrote, "fun is not the only fun." Of course this is only the first step. Next I require advanced VR interfaces, such that feathers dusters seem to me vorpal swords, dust bunnies become beholder cubs etc.
The benign quasi-Matrix effect approach obv.
You think that the bodily affect of housework are the wrong microfoundations for the molar behaviours of swords & sorcery (at least, satisfying roleplaying with proper characters, and an inkling of New Weird in the air - WE ARE IN A POST-LACUNA, PART 1 ERA HERE PEOPLE!).
I say: to a point yes, but what if production as a whole were taken as the base? I.e. your virtual quests are coordinated with those of millions of others to ensure that all the goods and services society decides it needs (including those decisions!) get produced. Across the realm, individuals flow in and out of different factories and homes and HQs, subjectively pestering drows and rust monsters, objectively, a coercionless synthesis of the action manifold.
You may argue, not everyone likes RPGs; some people prefer real time strategy or first person shooters or Chelsea FC or love, well those people suck. They are hostis humani generis.
Reading between the lines, the Complex Terrain Laboratory want me to hunt down and kill Miss Jill Louise Starr, so in a way it's already begun. How many XP is a troll worth again? (While we're at it, who will rid me of this troublesome Jamie Oliver, also Poppy etc. to be on the safe side). Burning Angel's Chapel and Dane Cross have already conducted promising pornographic research into the intersection of fantasy and fantasy, roleplaying and roleplaying, and oui, of hard and wet. To label this "not work-safe" would rather beg the question! And as Herbert Marcuse points out:
"[T]he sociologist-observer [...] speaks of 'the growth of a strong in-group feeling in each crew' and quotes one worker as stating: 'All in all we are in the swing of things . . .' [...] The phrase admirably expresses the change in mechanized enslavement: things swing rather than oppress, and they swing the human instrument -- not only its body but also its mind and even its soul. A remark by Sartre illuminates the process: 'Aux premiers temps des machines semi-automatiques, des enquêtes ont montré que les ouvrières spécialisées se laissaient aller, en travaillant, à une rêverie d'ordre sexuel, elles se rapellaient la chambre, le lit, la nuit, tout ce qui ne concerne que la personne dans la solitude du couple fermé sur soi. Mais c'est la machine en elle qui rêvait de caresses . . .'"
As Jeff Hilson once wrote, "fun is not the only fun." Of course this is only the first step. Next I require advanced VR interfaces, such that feathers dusters seem to me vorpal swords, dust bunnies become beholder cubs etc.
The benign quasi-Matrix effect approach obv.
You think that the bodily affect of housework are the wrong microfoundations for the molar behaviours of swords & sorcery (at least, satisfying roleplaying with proper characters, and an inkling of New Weird in the air - WE ARE IN A POST-LACUNA, PART 1 ERA HERE PEOPLE!).
I say: to a point yes, but what if production as a whole were taken as the base? I.e. your virtual quests are coordinated with those of millions of others to ensure that all the goods and services society decides it needs (including those decisions!) get produced. Across the realm, individuals flow in and out of different factories and homes and HQs, subjectively pestering drows and rust monsters, objectively, a coercionless synthesis of the action manifold.
You may argue, not everyone likes RPGs; some people prefer real time strategy or first person shooters or Chelsea FC or love, well those people suck. They are hostis humani generis.
Reading between the lines, the Complex Terrain Laboratory want me to hunt down and kill Miss Jill Louise Starr, so in a way it's already begun. How many XP is a troll worth again? (While we're at it, who will rid me of this troublesome Jamie Oliver, also Poppy etc. to be on the safe side). Burning Angel's Chapel and Dane Cross have already conducted promising pornographic research into the intersection of fantasy and fantasy, roleplaying and roleplaying, and oui, of hard and wet. To label this "not work-safe" would rather beg the question! And as Herbert Marcuse points out:
"[T]he sociologist-observer [...] speaks of 'the growth of a strong in-group feeling in each crew' and quotes one worker as stating: 'All in all we are in the swing of things . . .' [...] The phrase admirably expresses the change in mechanized enslavement: things swing rather than oppress, and they swing the human instrument -- not only its body but also its mind and even its soul. A remark by Sartre illuminates the process: 'Aux premiers temps des machines semi-automatiques, des enquêtes ont montré que les ouvrières spécialisées se laissaient aller, en travaillant, à une rêverie d'ordre sexuel, elles se rapellaient la chambre, le lit, la nuit, tout ce qui ne concerne que la personne dans la solitude du couple fermé sur soi. Mais c'est la machine en elle qui rêvait de caresses . . .'"
Saturday, 2 May 2009
Swine!
Triply topical, the lovely, lovely, lovely Geoff Manaugh has a fascinating post about Ballard, zombies & swine flu!
"You could even reverse the game's moral order and require players to create the ideal city for disease transmission: whoever kills off their entire game's population in the shortest period of time wins. The all-time winner infects the world in less than a second."
Room for Manaughvre!
"You could even reverse the game's moral order and require players to create the ideal city for disease transmission: whoever kills off their entire game's population in the shortest period of time wins. The all-time winner infects the world in less than a second."
Room for Manaughvre!
Some people who are NOT dead!
I hope The Guardian publish Harry Gilonis's lovely, lovely, lovely letter (below, sans the indents! I don't know how to do them, sorry Maggie!!)! Or at least Sean Bonney's lovely, lovely, lovely mandate (on his blog!)!
***
Dear Sirs,
Without remotely wanting to take any of the lustre off the poisoned chalice which Carol Ann Duffy has just accepted, can I take issue with Mark Brown and Patrick Wintour's weird assertion that she "consistently pushes the limits of form and language"? Ms Duffy is, as befits someone doing her new job, an extremely competent poet working within a self-defined "mainstream" which occupies perhaps an octave of a wide keyboard. Even mainstream poets know, really, that there's a lot more going on than what they are doing - as, of course, do avant-guardists; why must we pretend that this isn't so? If your journalists - or literary staff - don't know this, they should perhaps work a bit harder. ("Investigative" is I think the term?)
I could name dozens, if not hundreds, of UK poets who actually are consistently pushing the limits of form and language, but it would be more useful to invite your readers to decide for themselves:
Peel of Heather -
Omit Not
The New Moon its
clamoured sevens its
Boned
Sea-Saw Chambers
Nor the mind
Swung on Hooves, Vexed on Hinges
Ain.Do.Tri.Car.Cush.Shay.
COCKEREL'S
SHUNTING FLIGHT
to a dance
to a Horse
(Horses we kept)
= = = = =
Full moon. Her carriage brings her home. I see
her every movement in my head ... Undressing,
taking off her jewels, her slim hand reaching
for the case, slipping naked into bed, the way
she always does ... And I lie here awake,
knowing the pearls are cooling even now
in the room where my mistress sleeps. All night
I feel their absence and I burn.
= = = =
Both of these have pleasures to offer; but the former, which is NOT by Ms Duffy but by Maggie O'Sullivan, actually does do something new both formally and linguistically. There's little in the former (Ms Duffy's most famous poem, I should think) that hasn't been done - often with more zip and brio - in English poetry from Wyat on. To say this is not to downgrade Ms Duffy's work, but to state a factual truth - part of journalism's job, I always thought.
There's a good sampling or work in print and audio form from many more form-pushers at http://www.archiveofthenow.com/, which it might be kind to draw to your readers' attention. It might also be helpful to Messrs Brown and Wintour, come 2019.
Yours sincerely,
Harry Gilonis
***
Dear Sirs,
Without remotely wanting to take any of the lustre off the poisoned chalice which Carol Ann Duffy has just accepted, can I take issue with Mark Brown and Patrick Wintour's weird assertion that she "consistently pushes the limits of form and language"? Ms Duffy is, as befits someone doing her new job, an extremely competent poet working within a self-defined "mainstream" which occupies perhaps an octave of a wide keyboard. Even mainstream poets know, really, that there's a lot more going on than what they are doing - as, of course, do avant-guardists; why must we pretend that this isn't so? If your journalists - or literary staff - don't know this, they should perhaps work a bit harder. ("Investigative" is I think the term?)
I could name dozens, if not hundreds, of UK poets who actually are consistently pushing the limits of form and language, but it would be more useful to invite your readers to decide for themselves:
Peel of Heather -
Omit Not
The New Moon its
clamoured sevens its
Boned
Sea-Saw Chambers
Nor the mind
Swung on Hooves, Vexed on Hinges
Ain.Do.Tri.Car.Cush.Shay.
COCKEREL'S
SHUNTING FLIGHT
to a dance
to a Horse
(Horses we kept)
= = = = =
Full moon. Her carriage brings her home. I see
her every movement in my head ... Undressing,
taking off her jewels, her slim hand reaching
for the case, slipping naked into bed, the way
she always does ... And I lie here awake,
knowing the pearls are cooling even now
in the room where my mistress sleeps. All night
I feel their absence and I burn.
= = = =
Both of these have pleasures to offer; but the former, which is NOT by Ms Duffy but by Maggie O'Sullivan, actually does do something new both formally and linguistically. There's little in the former (Ms Duffy's most famous poem, I should think) that hasn't been done - often with more zip and brio - in English poetry from Wyat on. To say this is not to downgrade Ms Duffy's work, but to state a factual truth - part of journalism's job, I always thought.
There's a good sampling or work in print and audio form from many more form-pushers at http://www.archiveofthenow.com/, which it might be kind to draw to your readers' attention. It might also be helpful to Messrs Brown and Wintour, come 2019.
Yours sincerely,
Harry Gilonis
Tuesday, 21 April 2009
Ballard
Lots of tributes to Ballard yesterday & today at Ballardian, including this one from Michael Moorcock.
Grief straight from the bucket
An old review, first published in Interzone 212 (Rick McGrath's fuller review is here).
Dominika Oramus, Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard.
Grave New World presents an ambitious and rich account of Ballard's ouevre, tracing a handful of themes (apocalyptic social implosion, war phantasmagoria, pathological boredom, the Death Drive, the dialectic between mental and physical landscapes) from The Wind from Nowhere, Ballard's 1961, strapped-for-cash brain fart debut, through his early science fiction in its various engagements with New Wave and other avant-garde contexts, his postmodern memoirs, all the way through the recent paranoid fables up to and including Kingdom Come (2006). Not unusually for a book foreshadowed by academic papers, there's a fair amount of repetition, but it's no bad thing -- it means you can generally dip in and pick up the thread fairly quickly.
Oramus has a go at jigsawing her chosen themes into the underlying & unifying core of Ballard's work. I query not whether she succeeds but why she bothers -- whether or not Ballard's work possesses deep invariances, it is certainly superficially various, and any sharp reader will be as interested in the variety as the core. More useful than those monopolising conclusions are the early chapters, which summarise major critical approaches to Ballard's work and supply potted introductions to the theorists who most inform it (Nietzsche, Spengler, Jung, Fukuyama . . . the list goes on!). Grave New World might have paid a little more attention, in this section, to the Marxist heritage of several theorists (Debord in particular comes across as Baudrillard's, sort of, squire), as well as to the ways their ideas have been received and challenged in recent years. "The represented world seems more real than the world outside of pictures" -- this supposed to be, like uh, a newsflash? In justice, Grave New World only wants truck with such theory for what it can illumine in Ballard's work, but here again the book misses a trick. Ballard is an extraordinary storyteller and poet (as soon as any study of him immures sufficient quotation, & Oramus does, that becomes clear). Inasmuch as Ballard's work also performs expositions and criticisms of contemporary Western society, it exists in the tension between, on the one hand, accuracy and lucidity, and on the other, what makes a good story. Taking it seriously should also mean trying to work out how true its ideas are; that means situating them in intellectual traditions in which they are unpopular.
Monday, 20 April 2009
J. G. Ballard: 1930-2009
Last night I heard (faintly, on the woman upstair's radio) that J. G. Ballard has died. Ballard wrote The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, Empire of the Sun and many brilliant others. In a way, the police killed him too.
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