Cross-posted to my social software blog… I don’t normally write personal posts. But last night, during one of those proverbial late-night-staring-at-the-ceiling attempts to sweep the cobwebs from the corners of my mind in order to prepare it for rest, I had what felt like a small-to-middling realization. I remembered realizing, out on the playa one night at Burning Man, that…
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The Social Engine that Drives Review Sites
I just posted this to my social software blog, but thought I should cross post it here also. Social Interaction Design Guide: The Social Engine that Drives Review Sites 2007, pdf, 16 pages. NEW! A Social Interaction Design guide to the social engine and engineering of user motivation and participation on review sites. This lighter-than-usual white paper looks at the…
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Children of Paradise: Pynchon’s Against the Day
For a book that travels so far and wide, the traveling itself is strangely told. Places are not separated by the distances, at least not distances crossed. Vehicles, whose retinue includes airships, navy destroyers disguised as passenger ships, manned torpedoes that buzz Venetian canals like vespas sawing through water on two-stroke fashion engines (Ciao! Ciao!), camels, horses, eagles (is that…
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Gilles Deleuze on film, in Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
I was flipping through Deleuze’s books on cinema this morning, with cinema, not literature, on my mind. But this just leapt out at me. We know that there’s a connecting line between Thomas Pynchon and Gilles Deleuze. And Against The Day, like his previous novels, is at times incredibly cinematic (in a sort of impossible way). So check these passages…
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Did Thomas Pynchon write Against the Day by playing Solitaire?
I’ve been posting details at our Pynchon blog on a weird reading of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day as a card game, or set of card games, in which the book’s characters are unaware that they’re playing cards. At 700 pages in I’m beginning to think the book might be a single card game, and not several, and I’m suspecting…
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I wager a key to Thomas Pynchon’s "Against the Day"
I’m willing to bet that Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon, is a multi-faceted card game, in which a deck of cards is taken out for play, by people in different places and times, playing different games (each with its own rules). And that our main characters only come into the light when they are played. Two layers of agency…
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24 Premieres in the Oblong Office…
24, featuring Jack Bauer, Episodes 1 & 2 White House, Oval Office… 24 has just ended on its first cliffhanger of the season. The Pres and pressman Stony No and VP of Vice sit amidst the baked rubble of broken pretzels… Pres: I want everyone in the Situation Room!… We have a situation. VP: How’d I look? Pres: Huh? Now…
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Planes and Lines in Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon
Against the Day is organized like A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It is constructed of planes and surfaces, each a continuum of either space or time. These planes intersect, as do the novel’s subplots and concepts, through a series of dots or plot points connected by narrative arcs, each a line of flight, each borne on…
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Thomas Pynchon Against the Day: the play of surfaces
I’ve decided to read Against the Day as a multi-dimensional inter-narrative of coinciding realities in differentiated time and space. There are simply too many references to the Big Bang, to altered states of consciousness, alternate realities, to versions of history that could have been, to the inaccuracies, refractions, distortions, and bias introdcced by instruments of mediation, observation, recording, and communication.…
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Channeling Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, Burning Man, and the Matrix
There has been enough on Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon, to indicate the extreme likelihood that his latest work can be read in more ways than one. There is a debate, if a Wiki entry may be called a debate, a monolog, or hypothesis, or heck, a wiki entry, concerning the shadows dropped behind the title of the book…