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We need to get out of the persuasion business and start getting into the magic business, or the catalysis business, or the magnetizing business, or whatever you want to call it. Using reason isn’t wrong. But with objects this huge, this massively distributed, this counterintuitive, this transdimensional, it’s not enough simply to use art as candy coating on top of facts. We can’t just be in the PR business. Percy Shelley put it beautifully when he wrote, “We lack the creative faculty to imagine that which we know.” That was back in 1820, and it’s only gotten worse. Consider the heavy hydrocarbons that subtend the soil of the Lago Agrio oil field in Ecuador, a black fudge hyperobject that oozes into drinking water, with unknown and under-studied mutagenic and carcinogenic effects. We do not need to keep on parsing the data like Chevron, the defendants in the lawsuit on behalf of the people affected by the contaminated soil. Such parsing of data would be using the very same tactic as the gigantic corporation, the strategy of producing endless maps and graphs.

Morton via edsu

Landscape in fiction is never just background, or you’re wasting your opportunities. Let the landscape do as much of the work of informing the reader of your intentions as possible. Entangle your ideas & meanings with the setting. Fold them into one another.

M John Harrison

“In the real world, nothing happens at the right place at the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that.”

Mark Twain

“Faced with any reality, we are no longer of one piece”

– Edward Dorn

• Dormitory: Dirty Room
• Evangelist: Evil’s Agent
• Desperation: A Rope Ends It
• The Morse Code: Here Come Dots
• Slot Machines: Cash Lost in ‘em
• Animosity: Is No Amity
• Mother-in-law: Woman Hitler
• Snooze Alarms: Alas! No More Z’s
• Alec Guinness: Genuine Class
• Semolina: Is No Meal
• The Public Art Galleries: Large Picture Halls, I Bet
• A Decimal Point: I’m a Dot in Place
• The Earthquakes: That Queer Shake
• Eleven plus two: Twelve plus one
• Contradiction: Accord not in it

In the age of information overload, the ultimate luxury is meaning and context. On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it is so valuable,” he told Steve Wozniak in 1984. “The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

– Stewart Brand