Strange Imaginary Play
RND/ consider super subjective, untold stories from the UK Amiga Demoscene underground – a forthcoming report from theorist-for-hire Robert What, chronicling the dreamy feel of retro computing
Example ebook cover:
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// how to play big science
RND/ to consider a satirical remix combo: first, “How to make it in the art world (help me, I’m poor)” in the mode of a hallucinatory spectrum
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Secondly, “The Death Of Jeff Koons” (via Mike Coppola / Getty) in bleak, red rust tones
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[Jeff Koons] couldn’t carve his name on a tree
– Art Critic Robert Hughes, American Visions documentary, 1997
RND/ to consider a mildly apocalyptic digital art Diptych entitled “Suburb”
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few of us now recall that perilous summer. what began as a game, a harmless pastime, quickly took a turn toward the serious and obsessive, which none of us tried to resist. after all, we were young. we were fourteen and fifteen, scornful of childhood, remote from the world of stern and ludicrous adults. we were bored, we were restless, we longed to be seized by any whim or passion and follow it to the farthest reaches of our natures. we wanted to live—to die—to burst into flame—to be transformed into angels or explosions. only the mundane offended us, as if we secretly feared it was our destiny. by late afternoon our muscles ached, our eyelids grew heavy with obscure desires. and so we dreamed and did nothing, for what was there to do, played ping-pong and went to the beach, loafed in backyards, slept late into the morning—and always we craved adventures so extreme we could never imagine them.
in the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen.
the game began innocently and spread like a dark rumor.
– dangerous laughter by steven millhauser
RND/ to consider that, maybe here (right now) Blogging is dead
– A screenshot of a dead blog, as seen from some warm distant shore in old quiet Mexico – a faded polaroid memory of a place never seen
In Mexico your wishes have a dream power. When you want to see someone, he turns up
― Junky
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// how to play big science
RND/ a synthetic experimental laboratory scenario in which the mere existence of monthly Writer’s Forum Magazine (writing tips, seasoned authors, the publishing industry, interesting contents, prizes and more) is viewed as representative of the ongoing undeath of UK literature – feels stuffed to overflowing with violently mediocre, pale skinned middle class prose, perfectly calculated by teams of gently aging grammar fetishists with soft hands smelling of grandma’s lavender never to offend those who regularly partake in Reader’s Digest – part of a vast and empire spanning network where infinitely more dead end avenues for malignantly useless literary self aggrandizement exist than writers – an absurdist ‘scheme for full employment’ of endless B.S jobs and profoundly un-profoundly bad andor feeble advice for [their unconscious notion of] inherently dreadful, self-compromised and nice, safe writers, who take their over-bred mutt for windy walks on the common and effortlessly ignore Mr. Fluffkins taking a polite wormy text dump while they privately try to come to existential terms with the complexity of bringing neatly together the two lead dull dramatic arcs bubbling over in their latest forthcoming four part Amazon slush pile sensation – that next big literary breakthrough leading to fame and fortune and an interview spot on Radio 4 after Prayers On Sunday
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Not that being involved in literature and the world of words whether at the so-called professional or amateur level somehow inherently involves the sordid business or attitude of vanity publishing – not everyone who takes fingertip to keyboard is ‘waiting to be discovered’, especially not as the next J.K Bloody Rowling – rather the widespread literary undercurrent pulsing throughout the UK as symbolic of the common dream of a better society in which everyone does nothing but freely create as their spirits wish, and labels used for selling it no longer exist
In which it seems the only thing Writer’s Forum Magazine actually champions is the business of selling the synthetic illusion of fame and fortune to those who actually live for the dream of the literary beach beneath the cobblestones, the greater secret Borgean library existing behind the vile middle of the road bookshelves of Waterstones and the tepid fair cynically dumped on them by predatory publishers, who only ever really cared about ‘what sells’ and hardly ever about the existence of any actual human meaning and importance within their flaccid middling class paperbacks
Perhaps it’s not good literature and ‘good writing’ people want or need – especially not as carefully defined and professionally polished by the useless word churning industry / culture of publishing (a true Golgafrinchian activity) – but revolutionary Meaning; a philosophical axe to the lizardly neck of the nearest soul frozen publisher
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// how to play big science