Friday, October 29, 2004

Beyond belief, really

An intelligent blog is the Synchronicity of Indeterminacy. The blogger combines a randomly selected image with an original one-minute short story inspired by the photo. Amusing and surreal juxtapositions result.


Posted by Hello

This is similar to what Robert Olen Butler has attempted in his new book of stories, Had A Good Time, where he pairs picture postcards he has collected over the years with some knocking good stories.


Hotel Touraine

This is where the people who have more money than brains put up. They pay about $100 per month for 2 rooms furnished when they could afford to have a nice home of their own. I had a job in this hotel last year. Worked there for a week. Saw lots of style, but don’t see as the people were any happier.

The internet is a data miner's treasure chest for serendipitous discovery.A humorous illustration of the relative worth of things comes from the Google translation of a French industrial report À propos de la liste des organisations d'employeurs de l'Observatoire européen des relations industrielles (EIRO)

By definition, the serendipity , of English serendipity , is faculty to make, by accident and/or sagacity, of the happy and unexpected discoveries and is thus, from the methodological point of view, an essential quality of surfing like search for information on the Fabric. Not moving back in front of the calembouresques forgeries, we will translate the English adjective corresponding serendipituous by the "serendispiritueux" doublet connoting the intoxication of the surfer who makes such lucky finds and "serendispirituel" characterizing the internautic serendipity by the often random virtuality - in spirit - of its hyperlinks.

The report itself is a weighty read of plastics industry websites.
surrealism

Surrealism has consistently provided us a guide through the seemingly chaotic cosmos, in a manner to enable interpretation, subjective though it might be. Originally, surrealism a la Andre Breton was an anti-artistic movement practised in opposition to the Morrocan war of the French colonials. Anti-artistic movements oftentimes become mainstream.Vive le difference!

John Amen's book of poems, Christening The Dancer has good poetry, while addressing serious personal themes. Thus the casual reader revels in the compact phrasature, while there are additional layers of meaning for those who choose to find them - a key function of surrealism.

a restless soldier in need of war,
I began murdering myself for a living.
...
Grief is leading me down
a dirt road of madness
toward an abandoned town called sanity.
My story is ripening like tomatoes in August.
...
How can a man pass through turnstiles and tollbooths,
put his signature to a thousand daily contracts,
and yet fail to learn his own name?


The world today layers an unbelievable Red Sox win over dark portents from a terrorist, and tops it off with a flu-shot cruise to Canada. In this context, a little creative license with postcards and stories seems mild. Rather, it the world itself, in V S Naipaul's words, Beyond Belief.

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