All the texts provided on this website are free. If you enjoy them, please tell others.
Donating as little as $3 can help make more great literature, and ensure that I can keep providing it for free.
Donating as little as $3 can help make more great literature, and ensure that I can keep providing it for free.
FICTION
Help me project into your mind’s eye, an Emetic Zeit, a throw-up-time. A Hundred- year canker with everyone chewing on it, and fear and blight and spoilage spreading to Europe, to Ireland, to the many elsewheres outside Albion’s brain. There is a time-mind of forgotten doubt, for years of loathing and a sense of weakness in your knees and legs and upper arms, and an ache at the base of my skull. An abyss so deep in the time-mind. It makes my bowels crawl and my sphincter will loosen, so I can taste it in my mouth, and I feel deeply lonely. Dying England.
Worse, it is an ennui of soil and life. So let’s Kill England! I just want to get rid of it. So much. So, this time we’re talking about (incidentally, the 100 Years’ War, not that you would have known) is a time of selective amnesia, very spottily covered in the historiography. But important: the politics of the era bind together not only England’s domestic factions, but those of the continent. What we know presently of the Disappearing Era (the jouhatsu of an entire nation) comes from a vast aggregation of incidental sources as much as it comes from organized, deliberate attempts at historical writing... [read more...] |
ESSAYSDespite aspiring to a purely aesthetic “interactivity,” the puzzle possesses an essentially passive and literary nature. By this I mean, divide the medium of puzzles into its participants, and one finds: the puzzler, that is, the receptive party, who reads, ruminates on, and ultimately resolves (or abandons) the puzzle, and the author, who conceives of the puzzle, plots its mechanical course, and, if they are a good author, accounts for heuristics, the reader’s previous experience of puzzles, individual psychological differences, and so on. This, I suppose, is why I find myself assessing puzzles in the language of poetics.[1] The Puzzle may be less characteristically inclined toward semantic obfuscation, i.e. less inclined toward “poetic” language, but this merely qualifies it as belonging to the more communicative, and less experimental, part of literary media. Specifically, I find myself attracted to implementing poetics in the literary sense. Poetics does not exclude pictorial elements such as illustration, and may indeed rely on it for semantic purpouses, and yet gives primacy to semantics, as does the puzzle. Thus the puzzle shares a similar relationship to poetics as do literary media. It carries many of the attendant properties... [read more...]
|
More coming soon...
