April 10, 2008
The Room
The Room is an episodic novel I am writing. The first five episodes have been published at Combat, the Literary Expression of Battlefield Touchstones, an online labor of necessity and love by a man committed to exploring the psychological impact of warfare. http://www.combat.ws/
The names of the stories, found by a search of the Combat site, are:
Outside the Door
Cliché
BRB
A Second Opinion
The Big O
They begin an exploration of the impact of torture on the people in a society that condones the practice. A single instance in “the room” in the war zone leads to other rooms until we arrive by a very circuitous route at “the room” where torture was authorized in the first place.
Fiction seems to be the right place to explore issues that once found their way into Islands in the Clickstream. I have published thirty stories in the past few years. Coming up next are: “The Man Who Hadn’t Disappeared” in Karamu, a literary magazine published at Eastern Illinois University (http://www.eiu.edu/~english/karamu/index.html), and “Silent Emergent, Doubly Dark,” in an anthology to be published in November in London, Subtle Edens: The Elastic Book of Slipstream. http://www.elasticpress.com/
Allen Ashley, the editor of Subtle Edens, wrote: “The story is gripping and fascinating. Your narrator's three off-world trips raise questions of science, philosophy, religion, consciousness, reality and much more.”
And did that ever delight me! Why? Because he got it! He knew what I was doing! What more can any writer want?
Well ... a writer might want to find a publisher interested in a collection of all this published short fiction called More Than a Dream: Stories of Flesh and the Spirit (many of which can be found at www.thiemeworks.com), or a writer might want to find a publisher interested in looking at The Room. If you happen to be one, married to one, live next door to one, or know one, let me know ... publishing in the digital age is a little tricky. We are all trying to figure out how best to get our writing, music, films, and other digital creations into the world. The old models are breaking down and the new ones are not yet clear. Maybe they’re slouching into outer space to be born. And more people seem to be writing these days than reading. The Indiana Review noted, “We receive more than 10,000 submissions a year, yet our subscriber list is less than 500.” Only subsidies keep them alive. The rest of us are heading to the Web.
Posted by Thieme at 11:19 PM | Comments (0)
Hexen
Hexen is more than a game - it’s an exploration by London artist Suzanne Treister of military technologies for psychological warfare. In 1995 she created a fictional alter ego, Rosalind Brodsky, a delusional time traveler who believes herself to be working at the Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality (IMATI) in the twenty-first century.
Now Treister is updating HEXEN2039 and charting more of Brodsky's scientific research towards the development of new mind control technologies for the British Military. This work uncovers or constructs links between conspiracy theories, occult groups, Chernobyl, witchcraft, the US film industry, British Intelligence agencies, Soviet brainwashing, behavior control experiments of the US Army and recent practices of its Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (PSYOP), in light of alarming new research in contemporary neuroscience.
The Science Museum of London sent Treister and art critic Richard Grayson to Milwaukee to videotape interviews with me on those subjects. She thought my book review of Jonathan Moreno’s “Mind War” indicated a kindred spirit. And it did. She uses the interviews to anchor her project in the (more or less) present day.
See www.hexen2039.net and http://ensemble.va.com.au/tableau/suzy/TT_ResearchProjects/index.html)
for more about Hexen
see http://www.kunstverein-langenhagen.de/treister/index.html - to see a gallery opening of some of Treister’s work in Germany that includes a fourteen minute video loop from our interviews.
Posted by Thieme at 11:17 PM | Comments (0)
Happy Birthday Albert Einstein!
I recently presented a keynote address for a Relativity Week conference in Philadelphia, sponsored by InterNetwork Defense, the dojo for Cyber Kung Fu. I was asked to use the concepts of relativity theory to illuminate emergent geopolitical structures. I don’t know if I did that, but here is the late-night presentation – which Larry Greenblatt, sensei of Cyber Kung Fu, titled “Relativity and the Art of War.”
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7974899741310825107
There are other good talks at the google link, too, and Larry is at www.internetworkdefense.com.
Posted by Thieme at 11:16 PM | Comments (0)
Quiet American
Quiet American at http://www.quietamerican.org/ is a good place to take a break. It’s a wonderful repository of sound art and found sound by Aaron Ximm, a technology entrepreneur from S P Controls, http://www.spcontrols.com/.
Quiet American hosts discography, field recordings, and one minute vacations. It wins lots of recognition and people from all over the world come to find magical, mysterious, immersive sites of sound, precisely layered in unexpected wondrous ways.
Posted by Thieme at 11:13 PM | Comments (0)