Patricia wrote:
>http://cbs.marketwatch.com/archive/20000426/news/current/jokeday.htx
>
>This article is pretty funny
Funny ha ha or funny huh.
Lacking the usual long-range perspective, this news item neglects to
take into account how much we have already swerved from that exalted
state of self-reliant purity, the communal utopianism we periodically
re-seek. We have accepted so much already that just 50 years ago
would have been unforgivable, 100 years unthinkable. Project it into
50 years from now: all we need to do is eliminate the physical
interface -- the wiring -- and we'll again take these new tools for
granted.
When I was little (littler than I am now) I wanted a /machine/ which
would _read_ my thoughts or even brain waves. Somehow I was having
trouble with the usual stream of conscious expression -- early
language difficulties -- and I imagined this Ursula LeGuin-type dream
machine, only of waking thoughts. How much we lose to those
interstitial spaces, the cracks in the sofa.
Not that I want to sit at dinner or have a conversation (what's
that?) with someone on a cell phone, doing business or even 'just'
watching television, - there are spaces and times which demand full
immersion, -- but for the other times, the interstitial times, it's
nice to make the most of them. For people who work at jobs this is
even more important, as the interest-quotient and efficiency-experts
will point out. Though indeed I find daydreaming best on the ferry,
train or bus. And it's nice to just take a wandering walk. But that's
just me (and a few others), I'd like to have a visual record with
written annotations of thoughts let loose at various times. If I were
in business I suppose I'd create a list of projects and things to get
done, better yet the list would be my agent and do them for me.
So I'd get this printout of *thought dreams* and go back to the
studio to play with them or trade them with others. In the meantime,
I have scraps of the same and fill in the blanks with imaginings or
rationalities, by chance or determination. The computer's a lodestone.
Smash lodestones. It's so easy to stay away from them but so
difficult to turn one off.
Kathy Forer
http://3-4v.com/
"In this kind of a world," Peterson said, "absurd if you will,
possibilities nevertheless proliferate and escalate all around us and
there are opportunities for beginning again. I am a minor artist and
my dealer won't even display my work if he can help it but minor is
as minor does and lightning may strike even yet. Don't be reconciled.
Turn off your television sets," Peterson said, "cash in your life
insurance, indulge in a mindless optimism. Visit girls at dusk. Play
the guitar. How can you be alienated without ever having been
connected? Think back and remember how it was."
-- Donald Barthelme, A Shower of Gold, 1964
[Though one of my favorite passages, I have trouble with this quote.
Apparently Barthelme was being ironic in this story, a sendup of
absurdism. I don't see it though, it reads dead-on to me.]
