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Category Archives: research
I don’t wish to know that.
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
Long Story
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.
Leeches in Creation Mythology
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.
God Save the King
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.
Image CC-BY-NC-ND by squaregraph
Potsmaster
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
Portal
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
Grinding and Grinding
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.)
Internet2
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
Botany
There may be a day in the far distant future when one could scramble over a junk yard heap and find some kind of scavenger bot… The first will most likely be more like a plant than animal. Collecting them will start out as a kid’s hobby…