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I'd talked to my adviser who recommended a 10 page short story to go along with my submission to become a grad student for my MA in English & American Literature. His supposition and my reading was wrong; it's a 10 page academic paper, which is actually just fine with me. I spent about 5 hours researching on and off on Tuesday using source links from Wikipedia re: Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. Today I brought Pattern Recognition and Discipline and Punish. I'm writing on Gibson's use of isolation and community as it works with the themes of these two newer works; close enough in theme to cyberpunk without the trappings that we'd now regard as hokey, works with the focus away from 'genre literature' that the department is keeping away from on the graduate level while retaining modern sensibilities. Themes of isolation, dealing with a modern world where it's possible to retain a sense of community to a group of people you've never met in person from anywhere in the world.
yada yada yada. I really feel like Gibson's works captures these themes excellently. For all that he's writing a thriller or a piece about post-cyberpunk technofetishism, it's really about community.
I think. I will absolutely be yammering on about this.
It was busy earlier today, so instead of working, I just surfed the net for horror stories. RPG.net is/was on a Zalgo kick. He comes, ect, et cetra. Zalgo interests me only slightly. It suffers from a case of trying way to hard, like when someone tries to use slang but doesn't understand emphasis or context. I'm not going to crowd this post with text and links today, but I was thinking about it a bit. Sometimes I get a call with dead air. I imagine, just for a moment, that the silence will be broken with anything - sobbing, screaming, anything that shouldn't be there. Hanging up the phone, there's no little recourse.
If you were living your life, and something demonstrates some uncanny reality, it's still there to deal with. The hungry dead, voices on the line, images on your set, disjointed reflections in the mirror. No matter how terrible, the rest of life never goes away. Much horror ends with death after revelation. This prevents having to reconcile the new world with the old one.
yada yada yada. I really feel like Gibson's works captures these themes excellently. For all that he's writing a thriller or a piece about post-cyberpunk technofetishism, it's really about community.
I think. I will absolutely be yammering on about this.
It was busy earlier today, so instead of working, I just surfed the net for horror stories. RPG.net is/was on a Zalgo kick. He comes, ect, et cetra. Zalgo interests me only slightly. It suffers from a case of trying way to hard, like when someone tries to use slang but doesn't understand emphasis or context. I'm not going to crowd this post with text and links today, but I was thinking about it a bit. Sometimes I get a call with dead air. I imagine, just for a moment, that the silence will be broken with anything - sobbing, screaming, anything that shouldn't be there. Hanging up the phone, there's no little recourse.
If you were living your life, and something demonstrates some uncanny reality, it's still there to deal with. The hungry dead, voices on the line, images on your set, disjointed reflections in the mirror. No matter how terrible, the rest of life never goes away. Much horror ends with death after revelation. This prevents having to reconcile the new world with the old one.
