Art Arrives Ambiguously
By Brad Fruhauff
A car near my home displays a bumper sticker reading, “Art Saves Lives” – a far from self-evident claim, and one that begs the question of its accuracy. Usually “art” gets attention nowadays when it strikes us as more harmful than helpful to community life. Consider, for instance, the elephant-dung madonna debacle in New York a few years back. What often becomes evident at such times is how far we’ve disintegrated as a community, how little we can agree upon a set of values by which to live together.
Sentient Warrior Butterflies and the Nearsighted Academics who Collect and Mislabel Them Like So Many Common Moths
By Daniel Hengeveld
Review of:
Littlewood, Ian. The Idea Of Japan – Western Images, Western Myths. Ivan R. Dee: 1996. 212pp.
I think that most who have an academic interest in Japanese history and culture have read quite a few books that purport to reveal the idiosyncrasies and contradictions of Japanese culture. We’ve probably all heard that “everything is backwards – from grammatical structure to the side of the street they drive on”, and witnessed undergrad Asian Studies profs hold forth at length on the “differentness” of Japan.
This is not one of those books, and it is not written by one of those professors.
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Omikron and Simulacra
By Matthew Rubinstein
In a world shaped by the mainstream media where advertisement has permeated every facet of communication, it could be said that the final paranoid delusion is that of an individual living in a consumerist paradise who suddenly starts to suspect that the world he lives in is spectacle staged to convince him that he lives in a real world. The penetration of consumerist ideology and commercial advertisement into all forms of media works to shape and reshape the desires and realities of those who buy product in an act of perpetual entrapment. Instead of actively co-creating our own experiences, we have allowed our worlds to be societically constructed. This counterfeit reality that we passively consume evinces the hyperreal nature of our current existence. In this world of simulacra we accept prepackaged concepts as signs of authentic experience. The American consumerist hyper-reality is constructed through our acceptance of these images as truth.
Selections From Our Microfiche Web Archive
By Daniel Hengeveld
Here, gentle reader, is our brief guide to the inimitable thicket of information on our World Wide Web. It will appear regularly on these pages, like a vitamin supplement for your Curiousity. Without further ado:
Read more for Critical Thinking, Writing For The Web, SF Xenolinguistics, ChangeThis.com, and Visual Music at MOCA
Comment [1]
Writing from the Self
By Brad Fruhauff
Writing, for L’Engle, is an activity proceeding from the whole person, meaning from the part of you of which you are conscious, the part of you of which you only glimpse in dreams, and any number of external constituents of the self ranging from friends to books to God. Hence her “reflections” about writing as a person of faith wander widely over a great many theological and aesthetic topics and occasionally feel entirely tangential. But that’s part of the point: the writer, the artist, creates from a nexus of resources that reach far beyond the immediately obvious, e.g. imagination and craft. Therefore, if you want a book on how to write, reach for Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. This is a book about the writer.
Comment [1]
Are We Communicating?
By Tim Kelley
Review of An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise by John R. Pierce Published by Dover Publications, Inc., 1980, 286 pages
An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise does a wonderful job of introducing the basic concepts and applications of information theory which is, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,”2 the title of the seminal paper for information theory, written by Claude E. Shannon. Shannon, however, is only one half of the equation of information theory. His work details how to send a message most efficiently given a noisy channel. The other question of information theory is determining a signal given interfering noise. This question was solved simultaneously in America by Norbert Wiener and in Russia by Andrey Kolmogorov.
Comment [2]
Get A Handle On Your Mind
By Daniel Hengeveld
All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value. – Carl Sagan
The quote that precedes this article becomes more and more relevant to daily living with the dizzying expansion of easily accessible databases full of potentially useful information and meta-information. A “digital native” trying to both manage the torrent of data and relate it to his or her life can easily lose perspective and drown in a thousand lifetimes worth of useless information.
'Remember your love for Ilyushechka!': Dostoevsky and Salvation by Memory
By Brad Fruhauff
How can one speak of The Brothers Karamazov but impetuously and with passion? For a Karamazov is by his very nature impetuous and passionate, and this translation, already fifteen years old, imbues this novel, already over one hundred years old, with all the wildness and fullness of a ‘Karamazovian’ rapture that certainly could not be lost on a reader with any mite of real human feeling left in his or her soul (is that Karamazovian enough?).
Comment [4]
How to Change the World
By Tim Kelley
Review of
Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals by Saul D. Alinsky
Published by Random House, 1971, 196 pages
Saul Alinsky describes Rules for Radicals as an instructional manual for Have-nots to take power from the Haves to realize the democratic dream. Alinsky writes with the authority of four decades of successfully organizing communities for change. He proposes the book as neither ideological nor dogmatic; but educational, tempering impotent emotion to effective, calculating action. In attempting to impart the methods of his success to a new generation he examines some important, often discomforting, qualities of human nature.
Comment [2]
The Modern Golem
By Tim Kelley
Review of
Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine by Norbert Wiener
Published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1961, 212 pages.
Cybernetics: or control and communication in the Animal and the Machine, by Norbert Wiener is intended to be a minimally mathematical introduction to the expansive field of Cybernetics. As John R. Pierce writes in, An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals, and Noise, “…each of the many fields that Wiener drew into cybernetics has a considerable scope in itself. It would take many thousands of words to explain the history, content, and prospects of any one of them” (209). Wiener, however, defines it as the interdisciplinary, “…boundary regions of science.” The title is quite apt though, for Cybernetics includes all fields that deal with control and communication in both animals and machines, with the goal of constructing a simulacrum of the animals, implemented in the machines, and then, completing the circle, utilized by the animals.
Comment [5]