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Archive for September, 2006

Cult of the Microbe King

Who would have thought this humble pest would someday take a seat beside the likes of David Copperfield or Martin Chuzzlewit, as The King of the Microbes.

One of the most startling events for fans of Charles Dickens this past year has been the recent discovery of an unpublished manuscript, The King of the Microbes. It’s authorship is still controversial, due to it’s peculiar subject matter, but some scholars say it’s nothing new, and argue that Dickens made numerous references to it in his diaries and letters although, until now, everyone assumed it never became more than just an idea.

Published for the first time after being written over a hundred years ago, Charles Dickens’ strangest work has become an instant cult classic.

A noted scholar on Dickens’ work has responded with total disbelief, “Charles Dickens never wrote anything remotely like this sort of science fiction novel. They didn’t even know about microbes when he was alive. It’s ridiculous, not even one of his contemporaries could have written it.”

Tracing the life of Jim, a microbe, the novel describes his impoverished beginnings and subsequent separation from his family at the tender age of 8, when he’s sent to a large industrial center to earn money to help support his family back home.

Exploited by the factory owners and earning nothing but a meager ration of gruel each day for his work, Jim uses his organizational talents and sincere charm to lead a labour revolt that eventually grows into something of a revolution ending with him being crowned as their king.

Standard Oliver Twistian fare, excusing the revolutionary theme, but this all takes place on the microscopic level and there’s none of the happy, plump and playfully named humans which the readers of other works by Charles Dickens would expect. In fact, there aren’t any people at all, and his best friend is named “Zorax.”

Download parameter file “crown09b.ink”

The prestigious Royal Institute for Victorian Literature said, “It’s obviously Dickens’ work. While he never actually quotes from it, he mentions a work, Microbe Town profusely in his diaries and letters, a few of which are to his publisher, who for some reason seems uninterested in it. Perhaps it wasn’t finished, although most of Dickens’ works were originally published as a continuous series of magazine installments. I rather suspect Dickens was uncomfortable with it and died before he could make up his mind to have it published.”

Still only available in hard cover, and elaborately illustrated, The King of the Microbes has completely sold out it’s first, and rather short, printing run. Copyright issues have blocked publication in the United States as the estate of Charles Dickens has said that since the manuscript was never published, it’s not in the public domain yet, unlike the rest of Dickens’ work, and therefore they still hold the copyright.

Borderbooks, a U.S. publishing house in New York, says it intends to publish the work since they say they have an exclusive contract with someone they claim to be the real, and currently “living” author. The real “Charles Dickens” who wrote the book they say is an american who uses “Charles Dickens” as a pen name and was something of a drifter who previously worked as a microbiologist and has been an avid fan of the original victorian writer all his life.

This american microbiologist apparently was intrigued by the references the original Dickens made to the unknown work, Microbe Town, and set out to write the novel that he thought the real Dickens would have made.

The mysterious writer has so far been unavailable for comment and, according to his publisher, was last seen “dressed up like the Ghost of Christmas Past on a motorcycle he bought with his advance money, seriously drunk, and intending to head out to California, with a surf board tied to the back rest of his motorcycle and promising to write a sequel along the way that he’d drop in the mail when he got there…”

Alright. That’s too much. I should have stopped before I got to the motorcycle, or the drifter.

Anyhow, I thought these processed Inkblot Kaos images would fit in just perfectly with such a novel, The King of the Microbes. Should it ever be written. Or discovered. Or whatever.
 

Tiffany Lamp Gone Bad

He played the Balalaika

He played the Balalaika… then ate it!

I wasn’t quite sure what to do, so I clapped.

He wasn’t finished yet.

Everyone in the alien dinner theater scowled at me while he started again, from the beginning.

I couldn’t see why this guy was such a big celebrity on this planet.

Until he started to sing. It was the most amazing performance I’d ever heard.

But the local aliens at my table weren’t too impressed. “Anyone with two heads can sing harmony like that,” they muttered.
 

Who’s That Tramping Over Our Blog?

Periodically, blog housekeeping issues arise that need to be clarified.

Orbit Trap is not an online community. We’re a blog. In a very real sense, we are like a publishing house. We reserve the right to choose what we will and will not publish. We do not exclude public opinion. Comments are welcome, and we do not shy away from controversy, but we do expect all remarks to be civil and respectful. We will not tolerate trolls or hand our blog over to them for use as their private platform. Trolls, of course, have the freedom to set up their own blogs and rail away at us 24-7 if they wish.

Unattainable

Electro Sine Trap Tentacles of Terror

It’s been ages now since ants took over the Earth, but they still enjoy reliving the old battles.

“One small step for an ant, one giant leap for all insects.” Conquering the humans was the defining moment in the civilization of the ants.

When they read what we wrote about them in textbooks, they weren’t insulted. “Look how the mighty have fallen!” they roared with joy.

Every year on Veteran’s Day (for ants) they re-enact the great battles and tell their children and grandchildren about the Revolution.

“Son, the history books will tell you that the 214th Leaf Cutter Division captured Washington. But by the time they got there it was just me and few other guys. Beat but not beaten.”

“Just me, a few guys and our Electro Sine Trap Tentacles of Terror!“

“Boy, tell your children and your grandchildren, if the humans ever come back from their holes in the ground, just let ‘em have it with the Electro Sine Trap Tentacles of Terror. Those babies will fry ‘em where they stand!”
 

I walked with Warhol

Hey, how about it? Is this the Campbell Soup Cans of fractals or what?

Anyhow, Andy told me, and no one else knows this, that he’s taken all his talent and everything he’s ever learned about art and put it into a single photoshop filter.

And he gave it to me, on a diskette.

I’d post it for download, but I promised I wouldn’t, or else I’d lose all my super-powers.

A long time ago when I was in university I wanted to learn Spanish because I was going to go to Mexico for two months in the summer. Being exceptionally lazy when it comes to learning languages, or anything else mathematical, I checked out, started to study, and gave up on, a number of Spanish grammars.

I was in the public library looking for a different kind of Spanish textbook when I found a hardcover one with no dust jacket from the 1950′s illustrated with small line art drawings. Each little ink sketch was signed, “A. Warhola.”

I laughed. It had to be Andy Warhol. In fact, I figured he was a little embarassed with putting his real name on these trivial illustrations so he contemptously wrote his last name “Warhola.”

Years later, when I began to read about things, I was surprised to find out that Warhola was actually his real name from the beginning, and he dropped the “a” off the end later on so it wouldn’t sound so…

I never finished reading the book about Andy Warhol. I don’t know what the reason was. A lot of people have altered their names to make them sound more or less of something. I’ll bet there’s even been someone with the last name Warhol who’s added an “a” and changed it to Warhola.

Here’s the original before “warholization” occurred, made in Inkblot Kaos.

Download parameter file “fan23.ink”

Which is better? The Warhol or the Warhola?

Actually, the effect is just the uscomic.8bf thing with the darkness slider moved to the lighter end of the range, the image inverted and the hue moved about half way around the spectrum. But maybe that’s all Andy Warhol ever did when he made his famous stuff.

Of course he would have had to do it the hard, old-fashioned way.
 

Mandelbrot Among the Gypsies

Cut-up is performed by taking a finished and fully linear text (printed on paper) and cutting it in pieces with a few or single words on each piece. The resulting pieces are then rearranged into a new text. The rearranging work often result in surprisingly innovative new phrases. A common way is to cut a sheet in four rectangular sections, rearranging them, and then typing down the mingled prose while compensating for the haphazard word breaks by improvising and innovating along the way.

Science’s insights concerning turbulence might help us to describe traits common to the poetry of volatile (rather than fixed) form…Just as fractal science analyzed the ground between chaos and Euclidean order, fractal poetics could explore the field between gibberish and traditional forms. It could describe and make visible a third space: the non-binary in-between.

At first, Fulton’s theory sounds promising. A real departure from organic theories of poetry, it could help to privilege a new kind of poetry, a hyper-repetitive or incremental poetry perhaps analogous to the fugue — a structure Fulton mentions in her essay, “To Organize a Waterfall” — that might approximate the not-quite and both chaotic and self-similar — “[a] self-similar mechanism is, formally speaking, a kind of cascade, with each stage creating details smaller than those of the preceding stages” — aspects of the fractal. The fractal, one could say, replaces the paradigm of the musical score with the paradigm of the loop.

[...]

The trouble with Fulton’s theory is that none of this happens. Instead, Fulton makes a mess of things, bleeding her potentially interesting theory dry by turning it into at best a lightweight surrealism or at worst a trite descriptive tool.