SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK. “ARCHITECTURAL PARALLAX; SPANDRELS AND OTHER PHENOMENA OF CLASS PUGGLE: ŽIŽEK writes about architecture and plucks his usual strings. The highlight for me was this:

On the southern side of the demilitarized zone that divides North from South Korea, the South Koreans built a unique visitor’s site: a theater building with a large screen-like window in front, opening up onto the North. The spectacle people observe when they take seats and look through the window is reality itself (or, rather, a kind of “desert of the real”): the barren demilitarized zone with walls etc., and, beyond, a glimpse of North Korea. As if to comply with the fiction, North Korea has built in front of this theater a pure fake, a model village with beautiful houses; in the evening, the lights in all the houses are turned on at the same time, people area given good dresses and are obliged to take a stroll every evening… a barren zone is given a fantasmatic status, elevated into a spectacle, solely by being enframed.

Bruce Sterling at SXSW: The GrinderBot has audio of Bruce Sterling speaking at some sort of conference. Their pull quote:

People on Tumblr are not livestock trapped in the datamines of the Stacks

He also talks about the death of the novel. Which is, well, it reminds me of the footnote to a paper . . .

Kathleen Fitzpatrick discusses at length the fears of print writers—especially young white male writers—that the novel is about to become obsolete. She interprets their fear symptomatically, seeing it as a move to claim the cachet of being an at-risk minority while still occupying a hegemonic position; see Kathleen Fitzpatrick, The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (Nashville, 2006), chap. 1. Nevertheless, the evidence that a number of writers do fear the obsolescence of the print novel is overwhelming.

Traumas of Code, N. Katherine Hayles: That footnote was to this paper, which was fascinating.

Sarah Zurhellen describes it as:

“In “Traumas of Code” Hayles asserts that “trauma has structural affinities with code” because “code, performing as the interface between humans and programmable media, functions in the contemporary cultural Imaginary as the shadowy double of the human-only language inflected and infected by its hidden presence” (Hayles 157).

I have the paper but don’t know if I can share it with you without getting someone else in trouble. (One of the best things about writing a novel is hearing from university professors who read it and have a bunch of stuff they think you’ll be interested in or that relates to the themes of your book. Oddly enough, they’re often right.) I can point you in its direction and recommend it. You can find part here.

EYES & EARS

Throw Sum 1′z from MutantLeafling on Vimeo.