That's what I was saying re: the "postmodern" authors a while back. They'd already nailed what we think of as the effects of the internet decades before it really became a thing. I dunno that there's anyone since Pynchon, Burroughs, Gaddis, DeLillo etc who's described it better than they did.

This is how McLuhan describes the sensitive artist. Able to anticipate and articulate the transformations coming down the line
 

version

Well-known member
This is how McLuhan describes the sensitive artist. Able to anticipate and articulate the transformations coming down the line
It might not even be that. I remember reading an interview with DeLillo where he was quizzed on his famed prescience and he said he just paid attention to what was going on at the time. He didn't predict the 07/08 financial crisis with Cosmopolis, he was writing about the dot-com bubble. He didn't predict 9/11 with Mao II. He was paying attention to terror attacks in places like Lebanon.

It's the same thing Luka was saying about having some distance and the point made in that Richard Powers interview I posted re: human beings perceiving time as rapid movements against stable backgrounds. If you take a step back and just observe, you can see more clearly. The things people don't see until later were happening around them. They were just so caught up they didn't notice.
 
I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
I advise against reading 1000 Years of Non-Linear History on public transport.
Once I was reading Ficciones on the patio of a restaurant and a guy came up to me and asked what it was about. I mumbled something about the uncertainty of reality and he goes- 'you know whats all reality?' and pulls out a bible. Before long hes yelling 'DO YOU HAVE A BIBLE? DO I NEED TO GIVE YOU A BIBLE?' while I try to dissociate into a plate of carne guisada
 
which isn't necessarily being mystic meg its maybe being more finely tuned or sensitive to, disturbed by, cybernetic processes and then using your imagination to extrapolate on these subtle changes you pick up
 

woops

is not like other people
Once I was reading Ficciones on the patio of a restaurant and a guy came up to me and asked what it was about. I mumbled something about the uncertainty of reality and he goes- 'you know whats all reality?' and pulls out a bible. Before long hes yelling 'DO YOU HAVE A BIBLE? DO I NEED TO GIVE YOU A BIBLE?' while I try to dissociate into a plate of carne guisada
i would of said it's about knife fights
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I'm reading master and commander. I had planned to finally read the turn of the screw, this being Halloween, but I doubt I'll get round to it now.
TToTS is a great little story if you can get past James's hideously tortured prose.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I picked up Roadside Picnic today... introduction by Ursula Le Guin interestingly enough. She draws comparisons between Roadside Picnic and Lem's Solaris but she doesn't mention Tarkovsky at all, maybe intro was written before the films.
 
“I do not know with what weapons
World War III will be fought,
but World War IV will be fought
with sticks and stones.”
Albert Einstein
-1-
Words, sentences, numbers, distance to destination.
The man touched the button and his seat moved from its upright position. He found himself staring up at the nearest of the small screens located just below the overhead bin, words and numbers changing with the progress of the flight. Altitude, air temperature, speed, time of arrival. He wanted to sleep but kept on looking.
Heure à Paris. Heure à London.
“Look,” he said, and the woman nodded faintly but kept on writing in a little blue notebook.
He began to recite the words and numbers aloud because it made no sense, it had no effect, if he simply noted the changing details only to lose each one instantly in the twin drones of mind and aircraft.
“Okay. Altitude thirty-three thousand and two feet. Nice and precise,” he said. “Température extérieure minus fifty-eight C.”
He paused, waiting for her to say Celsius, but she looked at the notebook on the tray table in front of her and then thought a while before continuing to write.
“Okay. Time in New York twelve fifty-five. Doesn’t say a.m. or p.m. Not that we have to be told.”
Sleep was the point. He needed to sleep. But the words and numbers kept coming.
“Arrival time sixteen thirty-two. Speed four seventy-one m.p.h. Time to destination three thirty-four.”
“I’m thinking back to the main course,” she said. “I’m also thinking about the champagne with cranberry juice.”
“But you didn’t order it.”
“Seemed pretentious. But I’m looking forward to the scones later in the flight.”
She was talking and writing simultaneously.
“I like to pronounce the word properly,” she said. “An abbreviated letter o. As in scot or trot. Or is it scone as in moan?”
He was watching her write. Was she writing what she was saying, what they were both saying?
She said, “Celsius. Cap C. It was someone’s name. Can’t recall his first name.”
“Okay. What about vitesse. What does vitesse mean?”
“I’m thinking about Celsius and his work on the centigrade measurement.”
“Then there’s Fahrenheit.”
“Him too.”
“What does vitesse mean?”
“What?”
“Vitesse.”
“Vitesse. Speed,” she said.
“Vitesse. Seven hundred forty-eight k per hour.”
His name was Jim Kripps. But for all the hours of this flight, his name was his seat number. This was the rooted procedure, his own, in accordance with the number stamped on his boarding pass.
“He was Swedish,” she said.
“Who?”
“Mr. Celsius.”
“Did you sneak a look at your phone?”
“You know how these things happen.”
“They come swimming out of deep memory. And when the man’s first name comes your way, I will begin to feel the pressure.”
“What pressure?”
“To produce Mr. Fahrenheit’s first name.”
She said, “Go back to your sky-high screen.”
“This flight. All the long flights. All the hours. Deeper than boredom.”
“Activate your tablet. Watch a movie.”
“I feel like talking. No headphone. We both feel like talking.”
“No earbuds,” she said. “Talk and write.”
She was Jim’s wife, dark-skinned, Tessa Berens, Caribbean-European-Asian origins, a poet whose work appeared often in literary journals. She also spent time, online, as an editor with an advisory group that answered questions from subscribers on subjects ranging from hearing loss to bodily equilibrium to dementia.
Here, in the air, much of what the couple said to each other seemed to be a function of some automated process, remarks generated by the nature of airline travel itself. None of the ramblings of people in rooms, in restaurants, where major motion is stilled by gravity, talk free-floating. All these hours over oceans or vast landmasses, sentences trimmed, sort of self-encased, passengers, pilots, cabin attendants, every word forgotten the moment the plane sets down on the tarmac and begins to taxi endlessly toward an unoccupied jetway.
He alone would remember some of it, he thought, middle of the night, in bed, images of sleeping people bundled into airline blankets, looking dead, the tall attendant asking if she could refill his wineglass, flight ending, seatbelt sign going off, the sense of release, passengers standing in the aisles, waiting, attendants at the exit, all their thank-yous and nodding heads, the million-mile smiles.
“Find a movie. Watch a movie.”
“I’m too sleepy. Distance to destination, one thousand six hundred and one miles. Time in London eighteen o four. Speed four hundred sixty-five m.p.h. I’m reading whatever appears. Durée du vol three forty-five.”
She said, “What time is the game?”
“Six-thirty kickoff.”
“Do we get home in time?”
“Didn’t I read it off the screen? Arrival time whatever whatever.”
“We land in Newark, don’t forget.”
The game. In another life she might be interested. The flight. She wanted to be where she was going without this intermediate episode. Does anyone like long flights? She clearly was not anyone.
“Heure à Paris nineteen o eight,” he said. “Heure à London eighteen o eight. Speed four hundred sixty-three m.p.h. We just lost two miles per hour.”
“Okay I’ll tell you what I’m writing. Simple. Some of the things we saw.”
“In what language?”
“Elementary English. The cow jumped over the moon.”
“We have pamphlets, booklets, entire volumes.”
“I need to see it in my handwriting, perhaps twenty years from now, if I’m still alive, and find some missing element, something I don’t see right now, if we’re all still alive, twenty years, ten years.”
“Filling time. There’s also that.”
“Filling time. Being boring. Living life.”
“Okay. Température extérieure minus fifty-seven F,” he said. “I’m doing my best to pronounce elementary French. Distance to destination one thousand five hundred seventy-eight miles. We should have contacted the car service.”
“We’ll jump in a taxi.”
“All these people, a flight like this. They have cars waiting. The huge scramble at the exits. They know exactly where to go.”
“They checked their baggage, most of them, some of them. We did not. Our advantage.”
“Time in London eighteen eleven. Arrival time sixteen thirty-two. That was the last arrival time. Reassuring, I guess. Time in Paris nineteen eleven. Altitude thirty-three thousand and three feet. Durée du vol three sixteen.”
Saying the words and numbers, speaking, detailing, allowed these indicators to live a while, officially noted, or voluntarily noted—the audible scan, he thought, of where and when.
She said, “Close your eyes.”
“Okay. Speed four hundred seventy-six miles per hour. Time to destination.”
She was right, let’s not check our bags, we can squeeze them into the overhead. He watched the screen and thought about the game, briefly, forgetting who the Titans were playing.
Arrival time sixteen thirty. Température extérieure minus forty-seven C. Time in Paris twenty thirteen. Altitude thirty-four thousand and two feet. He liked the two feet. Definitely worth noting. Outside air temperature minus fifty-three F. Distance de parcours.
The Seahawks, of course.
Kripps was a tall man’s name and he was tall, yes, but noncommittally so, and had no trouble meeting his need to be nondescript. He was not a proud head bobbing above a crowd but a hunched figure blessed by anonymity.
Then he thought back to the boarding process, all passengers seated finally, meal soon to appear, warm wet towels for the hands, toothbrush, toothpaste, socks, water bottle, pillow to go with the blanket.
Did he feel an element of shame in the presence of these features? They’d decided to fly business class despite the expense because the cramped space in tourist on a long flight was a challenge they wanted to avoid this one time.
Eye mask, face moisturizer, the cart with wines and liquors that an attendant pushes along the aisle now and then.
He watched the dangling screen and what he felt was the nudge of dumb indulgence. He thought of himself as strictly tourist. Planes, trains, restaurants. He never wanted to be well-dressed. It seemed the handiwork of a fraudulent second self. Man in the mirror, how impressed he is by the trimness of his image.
“Which was the rainy day?” she said.
“You’re noting the rainy day in your book of memories. The rainy day, immortalized. The whole point of a holiday is to live it outstandingly. You’ve said this to me. To keep the high points in mind, the vivid moments and hours. The long walks, the great meals, the wine bars, the nightlife.”
He wasn’t listening to what he was saying because he knew it was stale air.
“Jardin du Luxembourg, Ile de la Cité, Notre-Dame, crippled but living. Centre Pompidou. I still have the ticket stub.”
“I need to know the rainy day. It’s a question of looking at the notes years from now and seeing the precision, the detail.”
“You can’t help yourself.”
“I don’t want to help myself,” she said. “All I want to do is get home and look at a blank wall.”
“Time to destination one hour twenty-six. I’ll tell you what I can’t remember. The name of this airline. Two weeks ago, starting out, different airline, no bilingual screen.”
“But you’re happy about the screen. You like your screen.”
“It helps me hide from the noise.”
Everything predetermined, a long flight, what we think and say, our immersion in a single sustained overtone, the engine roar, how we accept the need to accommodate it, keep it tolerable even if it isn’t.
A seat that adapts to the passenger’s wish for a massage.
“Speaking of remember. I remember now,” she said.
“What?”
“Came out of nowhere. Anders.”
“Anders.”
“The first name of Mr. Celsius.”
“Anders,” he said.
“Anders Celsius.”
 
SPOILER ALERT: here's the end

Martin Dekker up and down. Once again he stands and speaks, immersed in his nowhere stare.

“Time to stop, isn’t it? But I keep seeing the name. Einstein. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity causing riots in the streets or am I imagining this because it’s late and I haven’t slept and barely eaten and the people here with me are not listening to what I say. Einstein speaking beyond our current situation, which I’ve referred to as World War III. Einstein had no premonition concerning how this war would be fought but he made it clear that the next major conflict, World War IV, would be fought with sticks and stones. And the Special Theory, dated 1912, one hundred and ten years ago. Manuscript brown ink, unwatermarked paper and then the paper improves and the ink goes black. This is what I carry in my head, for better or bad or worse. What else? I need a shave. That’s what else. I need to look into a mirror and remind myself that it’s time for a shave. But if I leave this living room and walk into the lavatory, will I ever come back? Face in the mirror. Granular surveillance. Tech-dome. Two-factor verification. Gateway tracking. I can’t help myself. The terms surround me. I try to think sometimes in a prehistoric context. A flagstone image, a cave drawing. All these grainy shreds of our long human memory. And then Einstein. The exhilarating language. German, English. ‘Dependence of mass on energy.’ I want to walk with him across the Princeton campus. Saying nothing, silent. Two men walking.”
Then he says, “And the streets, these streets. I don’t have to go to the window. Crowds dispersed. Streets empty.”
This is what young Martin says, looking down into his parted fingers.
“The world is everything, the individual nothing. Do we all understand that?”
 
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