I'm the author of the novels Solip, Say, Cut, Map, The Country, and The City. I've also written the nonfiction books EarthBound and Eat the Flowers. I'm currently publishing my novel A Task via Kickstarter in order to have an hourlong conversation with each of its first thousand readers. For a decade I published books through Sator Press, and for a decade I acted in film and television; now I help students at St. John's College. More info: kenbaumann.com.
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The brilliant Noah Cicero and the brilliant Evan Lavender-Smith both have new books out. Check out (the long awaited) The Insurgent and (the massively praised) From Old Notebooks.
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1. David Peak talks with Sam Pink. Another clarifying prism.
2. A Field Guide to Occurrences of Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa in Infinite Jest
3. I may have mentioned this already, but I’ll mention it again: Dear Everybody–a brutal and gorgeous book–is now available in paperback. Or buy it from Powell’s.
25. From which we learn that (a) making correct predictions about the technology future is easy, and (b) writers should remember to put their predictions in suitably poetic language, so it’s easy to say they were right.
25. If we think of time as orthogonal to space, a stream-based, time-based Cybersphere is the traditional Internet flipped on its side in digital space-time. The traditional web-shaped Internet consists (in effect) of many flat panels chaotically connected. Instead of flat sites, where information is arranged in space, we want deep sites that are slices of time. When we look at such a site onscreen, it’s natural to imagine the past extending into (or beyond) the screen, and the future extending forward in front of the screen; the future flows towards the screen, into the screen and then deeper into the space beyond the screen.
26. The Internet is no topic like cellphones or videogame platforms or artificial intelligence; it’s a topic like education. It’s that big. Therefore beware: to become a teacher, master some topic you can teach; don’t go to Education School and master nothing. To work on the Internet, master some part of the Internet: engineering, software, computer science, communication theory; economics or business; literature or design. Don’t go to Internet School and master nothing. There are brilliant, admirable people at Internet institutes. But if these institutes have the same effect on the Internet that education schools have had on education, they will be a disaster.
Arianna Huffington: “Self expression is the new entertainment. We never used to question why people sit on the couch for seven hours a day watching bad TV. Nobody ever asked, ‘Why are they doing that for free?’ We need to celebrate [this desire to contribute for free] rather than question it.”
‘Thirty years’ editorial labours produce ‘more comprehensible’ Finnegans Wake’
a) What the hell.
b) Doing it wrong.
Leaving Imaginary Money on a Non-Existent Table
-a salient point from Merlin Mann.
“Kaiser TV”, 2008 by Fernando Bryce. Bronze (Kaiser Wilhelm II – bust), books, monitoring camera, screen, vitrine.
2. Dear Everybody–one of my favorite books; beautiful–is now available in paperback. Absolutely buy.
3. Homosexual economics, American Gigolo & Lacanian processes. Yeah.
Don’t skip.