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Archive for January, 2009

23 Jan

Last week, a knock on my door signalled the arrival of a book I’ve been expecting for some time: the grandly titled ‘Has Man a Function in Universe?’, part of a series of books, curated by artist Gavin Wade, based on the Strategic Questions asked by Buckminster Fuller, who said:

It is my working assumption that the following 40 questions must be definitely answered before we may realistically discuss our respective philosophies and grand strategies.

My interest in the book comes from the artist Neil Chapman‘s seemingly chance encounter with an essay I wrote for my MA course about the Oulipo group. Printing out that essay on green paper, Chapman has chopped it up (it was made up of a number of free-floating paragraphs), and then integrated some of my text into the sections of the book produced by him. Rather chuffed about the whole thing, I am.

(Strategic Questions website here.)

 

20 Jan

 
 

15 Jan

When confronted with so much strife on a daily basis, it’s sometimes reassuring to discover that the most familiar items of everyday life can be potential portals to other worlds. For example, surely you can’t help but be heartened by yesterday’s news that drinking too much coffee makes you see ghosts.

 

12 Jan

Blogging has never been a daily habit for me, but the gaps between posts on this site are now kind of ridiculous. Um. That is all. I guess I’ve just fallen out of the habit, is all. Doubtless, more will be forthcoming once I find my blogging voice again. In the meantime, I recommend this New Yorker profile of a long-distance trucker who has (apparently accurately) deduced the inner components of the atomic bombs dropped over Japan at the end of the Second World War. Interesting for its portrayal of obsession, and for its interesting details about the bomb – I didn’t really know about the ‘gun mechanism’, for example.