Margaret Atwood on Brave New World | Books "O brave new world, that has such people in't!" - Miranda, in Shakespeare's The Tempest, on first sighting the shipwrecked courtiers In the latter half of the 20th century, two visionary books cast their shadows over our futures. One was George Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its horrific vision of a brutal, mind-controlling totalitarian state - a book that gave us Big Brother and thoughtcrime and newspeak and the memory hole and the torture palace called the Ministry of Love and the discouraging spectacle of a boot grinding into the human face forever. Which template would win, we wondered. During the cold war, Nineteen Eighty-Four seemed to have the edge. That picture changed, too, with the attack on New York's twin towers in 2001. On the other hand, Brave New World hasn't gone away. Would it be possible for both of these futures - the hard and the soft - to exist at the same time, in the same place? I first read Brave New World in the early 1950s, when I was 14.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (etext) Chapter One A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY. The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. "And this," said the Director opening the door, "is the Fertilizing Room." Bent over their instruments, three hundred Fertilizers were plunged, as the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning entered the room, in the scarcely breathing silence, the absent-minded, soliloquizing hum or whistle, of absorbed concentration. Meanwhile, it was a privilege. Responds by budding. Mr.
What Would Aldous Huxley Make of the Way We Consume Media and Popular Culture? Pornography, however, is a term that would have no meaning in Huxley’s “World State” — or, rather, its meaning would be the reverse of the one it has now. This is in keeping with the sexual topsy-turviness of Huxley’s dystopia, which turns all our taboos inside out. In “Brave New World,” the most obscene word, the one that has the power to make people blush and flee the room, is “mother.” When we talk about “Brave New World,” we usually have in mind the novel’s vision of a society stratified by scientific means into predestined castes — the handsome, intelligent Alphas lording it over the moronic, undersized Epsilons. What has come true in “Brave New World,” to a much larger extent, is the liberation of sexuality. For Huxley, who was born when Queen Victoria was on the throne, sexual freedom was inevitably going to translate into emotional shallowness. But “Brave New World” was wrong about the essentials.
The Handmaid's Tale (wiki) The Handmaid's Tale won the 1985 Governor General's Award and the first Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987; it was also nominated for the 1986 Nebula Award, the 1986 Booker Prize, and the 1987 Prometheus Award. It has been adapted for the cinema, radio, opera, and stage. Plot summary[edit] The Handmaid's Tale is set in the near future in the Republic of Gilead, a theocratic military dictatorship formed within the borders of what was formerly the United States of America. Beginning with a staged terrorist attack (blamed on Islamic extremist terrorists) that kills the President and most of Congress, a movement calling itself the "Sons of Jacob" launches a revolution and suspends the United States Constitution under the pretext of restoring order. The story is presented from the point of view of a woman called Offred (literally Of-Fred). The Commander is a high-ranking official in Gilead. After Offred's initial meeting with Nick, they begin to rendezvous more frequently. Characters[edit]
Ironie et g nocide dans Les Bienveillantes de Jonathan Littell 1De prime abord, il serait difficile de soutenir qu’un livre évoquant de manière extrêmement réaliste l’extermination des Juifs par les forces nazies pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale appartient au champ de la littérature ironique. 2De fait, le roman de Littell est un livre extrêmement sérieux quant à sa conception, s’il faut en croire les nombreux témoignages de l’auteur lui-même, qui a insisté à plusieurs reprises sur les multiples lectures et voyages qui ont été les siens en amont de l’écriture. Les détracteurs de l’ouvrage insistent même sur l’impression que l’on a parfois de fiches de travail mal digérées et comme passées telles quelles dans le roman. Je ne voulais surtout pas écrire ce qu’on appelle un roman historique, faire de ces événements un décor de théâtre devant lequel faire évoluer mes personnages. 2 3Affirmation qui active d’emblée l’idée qu’il est difficile de rendre compte du réel –a fortiori d’un tel réel – dans une œuvre fictive. Hélas non !
Dacru.be - Belgian psytrance label For Your Processing 6th January 2018 Video with 7 notes (via littleblackbox on Vimeo) This is a controller that explores how to interact with realtime graphics in Processing. With this little box, the aim is to find more tactile, playful and straightforward ways of interaction with graphics during live sessions. Read more about the project here: Source: vimeo.com 6th January 2018 Video with 3 notes Brad Tober at Processing Community Day 2017 day.processing.org/ Brad Tober is a designer, educator, and researcher whose work explores the potential of emerging code-based and interactive visual communication technologies, with the objective of identifying and investigating their relationships to design practice and pedagogy. (via Brad Tober - Processing Community Day 2017 on Vimeo) Source: vimeo.com 6th January 2018 Video reblogged from Notational with 2 notes notational: Playing with pixels. 6th January 2018 Video reblogged from Notational with 3 notes sasj:
L'art d'avoir toujours raison- Schopenhauer.doc