Somewhere over the font problems
Way up high,
Attack ships are on fire
Off the shoulder of Orion.
Somewhere over the font problems
BEHIND YOU!
And the android that dares to dream
Will kill a rabbit too.
Someday I’ll wish upon a star
And wake up where mushroom clouds are
BEHIND YOU!
Where c-beams glitter in the dark
Away above Tannhäuser Gate
That’s where you’ll find my funky hairdo.
Somewhere over the font problems
Time to die,
All those WTF moments will be lost in time
Like tears in rain.
@Fred: that’s from 1975, before he really got started. I mean, Griemas? Nobody’s used that since Structuralism was hip, around the same time as Tudor Crisps and bri-nylon bedsheets. Postmodernism was later, and was a rebellion against this kind of bafflegab (at least, originally, until Jameson got hold of it)This is rather refreshingly old-school (as was his recent effort in the London Review of Books http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n17/fredric-jameson/in-hyperspace) compared to the drivel that came after Donna Haraway. No, you need to read early 90s papers on ‘Neuromancer’ to get the full horror of maladroit application of Theory without having read the book. At least FJ has some idea who Van Vogt was…
This young man clearly lost his arms – maybe he was born without them, maybe he had a bad accident, I don’t know – and received, in their stead, some cheap bargain-bin replacements. The fact that the world’s in ruins probably explains it. That must be why he needs a rabbit to pull around his transportation, and also his hopeful glance towards that ship – maybe they can give him better arms.
‘The Tag Wizard’s voluminous work can be seen as falling into various distinct thematic groups or cycles: there is, for instance, the early Ostensive cycle (‘hunk’, ‘damsel’), the Baen-borne cycle (e.g., ‘explosions’, ‘cleavage’), a relatively short pre-post-Body Electric Cycle (of which the best effort is undoubtedly I Sing the Body Electric), and, of course, the late ‘It’s Alive’ cycle which includes his most striking tags, ‘Sir Mix-a-Lot’ and ‘Smirky McSmug’. In such a view, ‘skulls-a-poppin” can be assigned to a small but crucial middle group of Server Crash tags, along with its less successful-companion piece, ‘Space Sheep is Not Amused’.’
@TW: ‘Ting’ is subjective construct of culture, or rather, ‘proto-culture’, driven autonomously yet heuristically by a Hegelian pseudo-obscurantist impulse of the collective. 😉
Well, I thought there was a sort of automatic GSS group censoring whenever anybody got a bit too high into the ozone and started spouting theory. I used to imagine Foucalt turning in his virtual grave whenever the totalizing power of groupthink suppressed the urge to theorize (deploying verbal assault weapons like “high brow,” and “Mr./Ms. Snooty’). So it is refreshing to see this spate of neoposthypermodernist pseudo dialectic. Since it is always already over, I suspect there is little harm done.
And I’ve never been impressed by Sokal’s hoax. It’s like the art teacher who hates abstract art so during a class where he’s showing slides he slips one in that just a photograph of his palette and after having the class discuss this “painting” he starts to guffaw and says—”It’s just my palette! This proves all abstract art is junk.”
It only proves that someone is an a-hole. Sorry for the long post.
@B. Chiclitz – Well personally I rather enjoyed the Sokal hoax. Unlike the modern art palette, Sokal has laced his article with innumerable inside physics jokes that any “peer-reviewed” journal should have caught. Perhaps they should have had a physics grad student on staff to read it.
@Bibliomancer—points well taken. There is no denying that the journal editors were idiots, and deserved what thy got. It just bugs me that a bunch of other idiots used Sokal’s success to support a particularly unpleasant version of “knownothingism,” like that art teacher who thought he’d proved definitively that all abstract art was a scam (BTW, that’s a true story, and it occurred at a certain Jesuit college back in the mid-70s).
Now that “Get Me Off Your . . . Mailing List” essay—that’s deep, bro (and really funny).
“Dick’s work transcends the opposition between the subjective and the objective, and thereby confronts the dilemma which in one way or another characterizes all modern literature of any consequence: the intolerable and yet unavoidable choice between a literature of the self and a language of some impersonal exteriority, between the subjectivism of private languages and case histories, or some nostalgia for the objective that leads outside the realm of individual or existential experience into some reassuringly stable place of common sense and statistics.”
I was going to write that and then this bloke went and took the words right out of my mouth!
I feel so shallow and dumb reading all these guys talking about my favority writer in such a deep and intellectual way… I only read Dick ‘cos he writes these cool horror scenes, and gadgets that talk funny, and stuff!
Ironic that the character depicted on the cover of a Dick book is sorely lacking in that area. Trying to compensate by strangling a rabbit just isn’t the same.
Or is it just unfortunate?
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December 17th, 2015 at 12:04 pm
Brian May did some modeling in college before he took up guitar and changed history.
December 17th, 2015 at 12:31 pm
Watership Down 2: Burning Like Fire.
December 17th, 2015 at 12:38 pm
The post-nuclear war wasteland is fortunately wheelchair accessible.
December 17th, 2015 at 12:42 pm
Somewhere over the font problems
Way up high,
Attack ships are on fire
Off the shoulder of Orion.
Somewhere over the font problems
BEHIND YOU!
And the android that dares to dream
Will kill a rabbit too.
Someday I’ll wish upon a star
And wake up where mushroom clouds are
BEHIND YOU!
Where c-beams glitter in the dark
Away above Tannhäuser Gate
That’s where you’ll find my funky hairdo.
Somewhere over the font problems
Time to die,
All those WTF moments will be lost in time
Like tears in rain.
December 17th, 2015 at 1:15 pm
Hey, while you’re in the blender, can you whip me up a smoothie?
December 17th, 2015 at 1:23 pm
Marxist egghead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredric_Jameson
Marxist egghead reviews book.
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/jameson5art.htm
I’ll let this review stand as my commentary on this cover.
December 17th, 2015 at 1:47 pm
@fred – An insightful review obviously written by the Postmodernism Generator.
The Postmodernism Generator web page generates a random postmodernist article each time it is loaded.
December 17th, 2015 at 1:53 pm
I wonder why the illustrator passed over the option of depicting the nose-flute playing rat.
December 17th, 2015 at 5:07 pm
The world lay in ruins—but there was still enough of it left to run the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile.
December 17th, 2015 at 5:26 pm
@Fred: that’s from 1975, before he really got started. I mean, Griemas? Nobody’s used that since Structuralism was hip, around the same time as Tudor Crisps and bri-nylon bedsheets. Postmodernism was later, and was a rebellion against this kind of bafflegab (at least, originally, until Jameson got hold of it)This is rather refreshingly old-school (as was his recent effort in the London Review of Books http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n17/fredric-jameson/in-hyperspace) compared to the drivel that came after Donna Haraway. No, you need to read early 90s papers on ‘Neuromancer’ to get the full horror of maladroit application of Theory without having read the book. At least FJ has some idea who Van Vogt was…
December 17th, 2015 at 5:28 pm
And ten comments in but nobody’s mentioned Kevin Keegan.
December 17th, 2015 at 6:34 pm
This young man clearly lost his arms – maybe he was born without them, maybe he had a bad accident, I don’t know – and received, in their stead, some cheap bargain-bin replacements. The fact that the world’s in ruins probably explains it. That must be why he needs a rabbit to pull around his transportation, and also his hopeful glance towards that ship – maybe they can give him better arms.
December 17th, 2015 at 7:10 pm
@Tat Wood: Spot the ball?
December 17th, 2015 at 7:39 pm
@fred: Hm.
‘The Tag Wizard’s voluminous work can be seen as falling into various distinct thematic groups or cycles: there is, for instance, the early Ostensive cycle (‘hunk’, ‘damsel’), the Baen-borne cycle (e.g., ‘explosions’, ‘cleavage’), a relatively short pre-post-Body Electric Cycle (of which the best effort is undoubtedly I Sing the Body Electric), and, of course, the late ‘It’s Alive’ cycle which includes his most striking tags, ‘Sir Mix-a-Lot’ and ‘Smirky McSmug’. In such a view, ‘skulls-a-poppin” can be assigned to a small but crucial middle group of Server Crash tags, along with its less successful-companion piece, ‘Space Sheep is Not Amused’.’
December 17th, 2015 at 7:59 pm
@DSWBT – Your semidiotic theory is lacking some Ting!
December 17th, 2015 at 8:19 pm
@TW: ‘Ting’ is subjective construct of culture, or rather, ‘proto-culture’, driven autonomously yet heuristically by a Hegelian pseudo-obscurantist impulse of the collective. 😉
December 17th, 2015 at 9:19 pm
Well, I thought there was a sort of automatic GSS group censoring whenever anybody got a bit too high into the ozone and started spouting theory. I used to imagine Foucalt turning in his virtual grave whenever the totalizing power of groupthink suppressed the urge to theorize (deploying verbal assault weapons like “high brow,” and “Mr./Ms. Snooty’). So it is refreshing to see this spate of neoposthypermodernist pseudo dialectic. Since it is always already over, I suspect there is little harm done.
And I’ve never been impressed by Sokal’s hoax. It’s like the art teacher who hates abstract art so during a class where he’s showing slides he slips one in that just a photograph of his palette and after having the class discuss this “painting” he starts to guffaw and says—”It’s just my palette! This proves all abstract art is junk.”
It only proves that someone is an a-hole. Sorry for the long post.
December 17th, 2015 at 9:40 pm
@B. Chiclitz – Well personally I rather enjoyed the Sokal hoax. Unlike the modern art palette, Sokal has laced his article with innumerable inside physics jokes that any “peer-reviewed” journal should have caught. Perhaps they should have had a physics grad student on staff to read it.
Even funnier was the scam journal which accepted for publication the “Get me off your … mailing list” paper. Hard to top that howler.
December 17th, 2015 at 10:01 pm
@Bibliomancer—points well taken. There is no denying that the journal editors were idiots, and deserved what thy got. It just bugs me that a bunch of other idiots used Sokal’s success to support a particularly unpleasant version of “knownothingism,” like that art teacher who thought he’d proved definitively that all abstract art was a scam (BTW, that’s a true story, and it occurred at a certain Jesuit college back in the mid-70s).
Now that “Get Me Off Your . . . Mailing List” essay—that’s deep, bro (and really funny).
December 17th, 2015 at 10:16 pm
“Dick’s work transcends the opposition between the subjective and the objective, and thereby confronts the dilemma which in one way or another characterizes all modern literature of any consequence: the intolerable and yet unavoidable choice between a literature of the self and a language of some impersonal exteriority, between the subjectivism of private languages and case histories, or some nostalgia for the objective that leads outside the realm of individual or existential experience into some reassuringly stable place of common sense and statistics.”
I was going to write that and then this bloke went and took the words right out of my mouth!
December 17th, 2015 at 10:30 pm
@Tom Noir – Yes, Professor Jameson has quite an impressive mouthful of Dick.
December 17th, 2015 at 10:44 pm
@Tag Wizard – rimshot 🙂
December 17th, 2015 at 11:12 pm
Well, Dick and NUTS! go hand in hand. It doesn’t take a shot of Jameson to make one…appreciative. 🙂
December 18th, 2015 at 9:04 am
I feel so shallow and dumb reading all these guys talking about my favority writer in such a deep and intellectual way… I only read Dick ‘cos he writes these cool horror scenes, and gadgets that talk funny, and stuff!
December 18th, 2015 at 9:06 am
Dell SF Presents
CLASH OF THE FONTS
A Titanic In-Your-Face Printing Disaster That Shocked A Generation
December 30th, 2015 at 12:01 pm
Ironic that the character depicted on the cover of a Dick book is sorely lacking in that area. Trying to compensate by strangling a rabbit just isn’t the same.
Or is it just unfortunate?