Published on
March 13, 2010 in
research.
I was hunting for heartbeat samples for a notional musique concrète project, and under that rock I discovered a subculture of heart-sound, breath-sound and stomach-sound fetishists1. (This is what I ran into. I wasn’t curious enough to dig deeper.) I suppose intestinal pornography is more intimate than epidermal pornography?
Their interests appear to extend to EKG readouts, so for fictional purposes we can assume that they also extend to EEG’s and FMRI’s. Your hippocampal activity is TURNING ME ON!
1You’ll recall that Frank Zappa was arrested in San Bernardino for producing a pornographic audiotape. (link)
Image CC-BY by Vintage Collective
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Published on
January 18, 2010 in
research.
I have always viewed Gravity’s Rainbow as a big stack of comic books on a rainy afternoon: Buncha good stories in there.
You can view the Bible the same way: Buncha good stories about dozens of generations (43 according to luke 3:23:38, but there are lots of different canonical counts) of interrelated families, all the way back to jump.
That would be a decent way to compile a book of stories: Start 43 or so generations BCE, follow a matrilineal or patrilineal line, and tell one story per generation all the way up to the present: 150-ish stories, related by birth.
I haven’t ever cared much about writing stories set before 1200 CE, but maybe I should keep my eyes open for a way in.
Image CC-BY-NC-ND by Shemer.
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Published on
October 21, 2009 in
research.
My next Untold Tale is “The Red Leech.” Cursory leech-research turned up this astonishing post: Leeches in Creation Mythology
One of the post’s citations is this:
“then did he become a leech-like clot; then did (Allah) make and fashion (him) in due proportion. And of him He made two sexes, male and female.” (Quran 75: 37-39)
We commit his body to the ground; earth to earth; leeches to leeches, clots to clots.
Image CC-BY-NC-SA by Dave ®
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Published on
September 23, 2009 in
research.
The Pearly Kings and Queens are royalty I can get behind. Let no man call himself a king who does not make his own suit.
via Warren Ellis
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Published on
March 16, 2009 in
research.
While doing a little research for the radio-amateurs-in-Ethiopia book, I was blindsided by my next two books:
Sir Francis Walsingham ran a postal interception bureau with some cryptanalytic capability during the reign of Elizabeth I, but the technology was only slightly less advanced than men with shotguns, during World War I, who jammed pigeon post communications and intercepted the messages carried.
—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGINT_in_Modern_History
Image CC-BY-NC-SA by hugovk
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This passage describing pre-Napoleonic Cairo, from Geoff Manaugh’s review of Nina Burleigh’s book Mirage grabs me by the subconscious:
You knock two or three times — and then crawl through a small circular door in the middle of a brick wall that could just as easily have been the entrance to a building. And then you’re gone, hiking through a part of the city you’d never even heard of before.
I just can’t get enough of neighborhoods divided from one another by hobbit-doors. I’ll be spending a LOT of time in Imaginary Cairo for the foreseeable future.
Image CC-BY-NC by docman
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There’s a great thread up on grinding.be that mashes together skater culture, architecture and grinder culture. Go check it out!
(Skater image CC-BY-NC-ND by Ignacio Nuñez C.)
(Grinder Symbol copyright is probably held down by Avatar. Used here totally without permission, but go buy lots of Warren’s books.)
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Published on
January 12, 2009 in
research.
The pneumatic tube network relieved the saturated telegraph network, delivering physical messages across the city and to the suburbs faster and more reliably than the telegraph.
- Active Social Plastic, Pneumatic post in paris
Got that? Physical delivery via blowguns: faster and more reliable than electronic delivery.
Image CC-BY-SA by askpang
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Published on
November 12, 2008 in
research.
Just as I was wishing for such a thing, Appfrica came through with a list of ten Africa Tech blogs (complete with OPML file so you can subscribe to all ten at once.)
Thanks, Jonathan!
Graphic CC-BY Erik Hersman
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