dematerialisation in literature

catalog

Well-known member
If you think about it though it makes sense - the constant rewards our brains are giving us just for refreshing dissensus, seeing a new post, replying, quoting, getting "ta's...

vs. sitting down with your phone switched off, opening to page 1 of a 500 page slab of a book which may or may not be the most boring book ever written.

NO CONTEST

yeah its low level dopamine rewards innit. whereas what craner is doing is truly admirable because it will pay dividends for years to come. whereas me now, typing this, the reward is very ephemeral
 

version

Well-known member
i have noticed this tendency, when anything vaguely big gun is raised. a load of people (i'm including myself) pile in with opinions, but after a page or so, it becomes very clear that no one has read the said big gun, then it descends into general chat. i mean, its like the pub innit. we're not writing books here

that's all too true, a lamentable lack of homework being done.

also i am always looking for the lazy way out - "give us your top 10 books craner and tell me everything about them so i don't have to read them!" "version tell me what basic channels are good!"

that is like quite a good definition of the internet

If you think about it though it makes sense - the constant rewards our brains are giving us just for refreshing dissensus, seeing a new post, replying, quoting, getting "ta's...

vs. sitting down with your phone switched off, opening to page 1 of a 500 page slab of a book which may or may not be the most boring book ever written.

NO CONTEST

Yeah, this is just the internet. It rewards you for having an opinion so you're encouraged to have an opinion on everything. You can see it all the time on Reddit. Someone will make a thread like "Paramedics, what's the craziest thing you've seen whilst at work?" and basically every response will be someone like "Not a paramedic, but my sister's husband is and he... ".
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It's boring to say it but the Internet has changed our minds.

I was going to say "Destroyed" but that supposes that there's something inherently superior about the old way of thinking. Who's to say that? Maybe people are much better at thinking in a different way now.

But novels belong to a bygone world.
 
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catalog

Well-known member
we could all do with some enforced isolation from the internet, then we might make something good. i'm gonna write to bojo and ask him if he can cut wifi off on the next pandemic
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
It's interesting that when we were growing up and for some time before the novel was seen as an important and worthy art-form that we were supposed to engage with to be a good person. But early on it was seen as a kind of childish diversion for wasters - I reckon at one time it was like the GTA of its day. Didn't one king try to bang novels cos people weren't spending enough time on bow and arrow practice or something?
 

catalog

Well-known member
but yeah i think you are definitely right rich.

unrelated, but on a similar tip, in the portico library in manchester (=old victorian members library, now a sort of gents club that does events and nice cakes), the biggest category of stuff was called 'polite literature' which was basically as it sounds ie would not offend your sensibilities and was suitable to take home. presumably the other categories (cant remember what they were, but. iguess science and history), were not considered polite
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I wonder if a new group of authors will come along at some point and make novels cool again?

All rebellious and shocking. Hard to imagine what would shock anyone anymore, though. I guess that's why the alt-right have monopolised it, cos the shocking thing now is to reject liberalism/progressivism.
 

version

Well-known member
When Lonnie gets a smartphone for the first time, the text in the book splits into two columns. You put a staggering amount of work into this: not just the main action on the left but the increasingly crazy stream of rolling news on the right...
Eighteen months to do that right-hand column! It was the only way I could think to capture the experience of diffuse attention and distraction. It’s not going to work for everyone. My original draft actually meant to rewire your brain: those [right-hand] columns were completely relevant and you had to work out whether to read the whole left-hand side and go back, or whether to read left and right across every page, breaking the experience of the narrative. Now you can skim it or ignore it and stay on the left-hand column; that was an editorial suggestion which I think worked very well. It’s been a nightmare, the pagination: one comma in the first of those columns would throw off 200 pages. Everyone is quite happy to see the fucking thing published!
 

luka

Well-known member
the page is a primative screen. mcluhan says literacy allows us to detatch for the first time. cool objective view of the facts.
 

luka

Well-known member
“Don't listen to Hassan i Sabbah," they will tell you. "He wants to take your body and all pleasures of the body away from you. Listen to us. We are serving The Garden of Delights Immortality Cosmic Consciousness The Best Ever In Drug Kicks. And love love love in slop buckets. How does that sound to you boys? Better than Hassan i Sabbah and his cold windy bodiless rock? Right?"

At the immediate risk of finding myself the most unpopular character of all fiction—and history is fiction—I must say this:

"Bring together state of news—Inquire onward from state to doer—Who monopolized Immortality? Who monopolized Cosmic Consciousness? Who monopolized Love Sex and Dream? Who monopolized Life Time and Fortune? Who took from you what is yours? Now they will give it all back? Did they ever give anything away for nothing? Did they ever give any more than they had to give? Did they not always take back what they gave when possible and it always was? Listen: Their Garden Of Delights is a terminal sewer—I have been at some pains to map this area of terminal sewage in the so called pornographic sections of Naked Lunch and Soft Machine—Their Immortality Cosmic Consciousness and Love is second-run grade-B shit—Their drugs are poison designed to beam in Orgasm Death and Nova Ovens—Stay out of the Garden of Delights—It is a man-eating trap that ends in green goo—Throw back their ersatz Immortality—It will fall apart before you can get out of The Big Store—Flush their drug kicks down the drain—They are poisoning and monopolizing the hallucinogen drugs—learn to make it without any chemical corn—All that they offer is a screen to cover retreat from the colony they have so disgracefully mismanaged. To cover travel arrangements so they will never have to pay the constituents they have betrayed and sold out. Once these arrangements are complete they will blow the place up behind them.”
― William S. Burroughs, Nova Express
 

luka

Well-known member
the word and dematerialisation go hand in hand in a sense as the word creates environments, creates emotional, physiological responses etc out of thin air. puts you in that sweltering hotel room, venetian blinds drawn and ceiling fan churning the air.
 

luka

Well-known member
all of which is prefigured by the imagination and preminently by dream. do you know the feeling of missing a step in your dream and the body pulls back suddenly? not seeing the curb before you walk off it.
 

luka

Well-known member
there is a dematerialised body that is steered through the dematerial worlds. it is called the sugar glider.
 

luka

Well-known member
puppets of the scripts. jumping jellybeans.
the planes fracture. become multiple. the sky
is no longer a continuous integrated space
birds disappear, fly into adjacent dimensions,
as if words fell through
a / slit
in the page.

the sugar glider.
green light behind the eyelids
soar through
that other space. what wizard wheeze
what wonder-working, what whirling, wizard work!
 

luka

Well-known member
the material world is subject to time but information is, in a very real sense, outside of time. many of Shakespeare's sonnets refer to this magical reality.
 
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