View current page
...more recent posts
Science fiction/fabulist/slipstream/magic realist author A. A. Attanasio is beginning a new novel and letting readers look over his shoulder on his blog. He tucks the announcement into a longish post about a trip into the mountains of his native Hawaii, in the company of three elderly men who repair ancient shrines in the peaks, and the great-grandnephew of one of them, a young Marine who lost part of a leg in Fallujah:
The Marine shrugs. Clambering up the side of the colossal boulder and scouting from the top, he spies a cliff, which he believes we can climb to higher ground. I warn him that those trails are good for goats not people. He dismisses me and lumbers off into the fern maze. I would prefer to stay put and wait for the stonemovers to find us. But I can't let a friend's relative wander alone aimlessly, even though I have no idea where we are, and so the double leads me deeper into Adam's dream, a trance walk darkening toward nightmare.This open writing project will be a treat and it's entirely possible a new form of literature will start to emerge, just as art and music are changing with the advent of more porous boundaries among creator, consumer, and distributor. Few are better suited to the attempt than this writer with a strong posthuman thread in his fiction. His books to date (Radix, Centuries, Last Legends of Earth and others) are mind-expanding and there's no reason his blog can't be the same as he delves into this narrative.
Strenuously and repeatedly, I silently wish I had stayed home. This, of course, is the timeless desire to remain unborn and in the womb, the original (but not final) destination of the itinerant hero. Night descends before we find our way out of the grotto, and we crawl into our sleeping bags, pull up our mosquito cowls, and submit to the uterine regression of sleep and dreams.
On the way to dreamland, I work out some of the ideas for "Otherlight." The science inspiring the fiction is genetic amplification. Not long ago, I read about a genome wonder that entailed the inoculation of human DNA snippets (that code for color vision) directly into the eyeballs of color blind mice and monkeys and that immediately endowed these animals with color vision! The researchers were amazed at how quickly the recipient nervous systems went from b&w to color -- and that got me fantasizing about genetic transformations that could instantly add different senses, new ones, with a science fictional bent, like seeing other dimensions, parallel worlds ... and then not just seeing but interacting with and adventuring in alien universes. DNA in 10-space!
War Nerd:
What cracked me up is the way [neocon apologist Victor Davis] Hanson uses the spike in oil prices to prove we meant well: "What did these rare Americans not fight for? Oil, for one thing. The price skyrocketed after they went in."link not meant to endorse every excess of the Nerd's unPC writing, but his frankness is refreshing.
Now that's real underclassman-level logic: if we didn't manage to grab Iraq's oil fields, then we must never have wanted to.
Applying that to the Hitler example, Vic's take on the Eastern Front would be, "What was Operation Barbarossa not designed to do? Conquer Russia, for one thing. By 1945, Germany had actually lost massive chunks of territory, so clearly a land-grab was the last thing on Hitler's mind."
David Szafranski, installation view from a recent show in Montmartre, Paris, with Trish Nickell.
Click on image for larger view. Szafranki's allover, iterative ideas and feeling for pattern excel, and he also knows his way around the materiality of painting--how to use surface accidents proactively, etc. The work is confident but unpretentious, employing glue, spraypaint, and the flocking-like substance normally used to denote grass on architectural models (the dark parts of these).
artists unknown
older posts...