Something that actually exists

been a busy bee so you had been graced with brevity for a few days. Making up for it here. Apologies in advance.

at new class, this week's topic - Facts. Reality. Truth.
So this whole blip is true aside one thing. See if you can spot it.

I enclose some worthwhile worm holes if you are so inclined.

The book cover I blipped is from
Europeana : a brief history of the twentieth century by Patrik Ourednick
(in a world of fixating co-incidences also a very good archive of digitised European artefacts)

We've been looking at the role of facts in experimental fiction (the word faction is rightfully banned on grounds of just being annoying and smug). We had a few sample texts, This is not a novel David Marston, Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, Sven Lindqvist, Milan Kundera, Georgi Gospodinov, W.G. Sebald etc.. but on account of being mid-way through Ulysses and a lot on at the moment, I only got through this one.

Europeana is a morbid trial-like account of the 20th Century based entirely on facts. They often start noteworthy and build to extreme crescendo's of cruelty. Difficult reading in parts but an interesting comment on our tendency towards an epigrammatic history of tokenistic truths, and the side roads and pathways ploughed up in the name of progress. There are curious capitalised notes in the margins like neon meme's flashing for easier absorption; such as "NEW MAN" and "MAN'S OPTIMIZATION" for example. There's no real plot or story, but the narrator is a more than a little dead pan; "it was important to..", "it was said that", and succinctly slices into the next travesty with a simple "..and.." . Over and over the phrase "learn lessons.." is repeated, but we never do. From the frivolous to the awful (calculations on how many political prisoners it would take to fertilise a Stalinist acre or make soap) our enduring positivism comes under pretty hefty attack. Even the innocuous leads us towards destruction it seems.

While I've learned that the Barbie doll may well be fulfilling the subconscious sexual urges of female children for a penis and that a concentration camp Barbie came out in 1986, I've also learned that nerve gas was banned in 1899, 1907, 1922, 1925, 1946, 1954, 1972, 1990 and 1992.

Forgive the extended quotation, better to show not tell

"one great disapointment of the twentieth century was that compulsory schooling and technological progress and scholarship and culture did not result in better or more caring people as was strongly believed in the nineteenth century, and that lots of killers and torturers and mass murderers were art lovers and listened to opera and went to exhibitions and wrote poetry and studied the humanities and medicine etc.. And among philosophers the opinion increasingly spread that the twentieth century had marked the end of the era of humanism and a new era had commenced, which they called post-humanism, as it was not yet clear how to define it. Historians and philosophers said that humanism had been a culture of writing, which enabled society to be governed like a literary community, and that with the advent of radio in 1918 and television after 1945 this was no longer true. And that biotechnology had dealt humanism it's death blow. And some said that this was all right, that humanism had been an enormous delusion in the history of human thinking...... and that biotechnology provided a new opportunity for man's optimisation.. but more and more people considered responsibility as out of date and that in reality it had already been replaced by efficiency and expediency. And the new man would not be responsible but be efficient. Efficiency was part of the natural order of things. whereas responsibility was a humanist invention and an alibi for inefficiency"

With typical hopeless human pluck I am hoping the slant back towards a more literary society on the on-line world will help..

later we write up little exercises based on random facts
Someone chose the fact that some animals (goats, hippo's and octopus) have rectangular pupils. I chose the fact that surgeons often add the extra kidney in without removing the other failed organs. And someone else yet again that the phrase "pulling one's leg" comes from helping your hanging relative to a quicker exit, but no-one really knows when it started to be used in a humorous fashion.

And of course it was another fantastic day at work.