Audience as fiction

Drawing by Walter Ong from The Walter J. Ong Collection

Whereas the spoken word is part of present actuality, the written word normally is not. The writer, in isolation, constructs a role for his "audience" to play, and readers fictionalize themselves to correspond to the author's projection. The way readers fictionalize themselves shifts throughout literary history: Chaucer, Lyly, Nashe, Hemingway, and others furnish cases in point.

All writing, from scientific monograph to history, epistolary correspondence, and diary writing, fictionalizes its readers.

In oral performance, too, some fictionalizing of audience occurs, but in the live interaction between narrator and audience there is an existential relationship as well: the oral narrator modifies his story in accord with the real-not imagined-fatigue, enthusiasm, or other reactions of his listeners. Fictionalizing of audiences correlates with the use of masks or personae marking human communication generally, even with oneself. Lovers try to strip off all masks, and oral communication in a context of love can reduce masks to a minimum. In written communication and, a fortiori, print the masks are less removable.

from Walter Ong´s famous text, "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction" (PMLA, Vol. 90, No. 1 (Jan., 1975), JSOR)

Scott McCloud´s Right Number

Scott Mc Cloud has an interesting experimental "online graphic novella" called The Right Number.

The Right Number is a projected three-part online graphic novella about math, sex, obsession and phone numbers presented in an unusual zooming format.

This "zooming format" is promissing but the unusual motion may make some people a bit dizzy at first. The Right Number is a great little story about probability.

I was dead for millions of years...

I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me a bit.

Mark Twain (attributed: source unknown)

2 + 2 = 5

Cover by Germano Facetti

The New York Times, reported that hundreds of customers awoke to find that Amazon remotely deleted books that they'd earlier bought and downloaded. Apparently, the publisher determined that it should not offer those titles, so Amazon logged into Kindles, erased the books, and issued refunds. This was aptly compared to someone sneaking into your house, taking away your books, and leaving a stack of cash on the table. (found here)

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm were among the wiped books...

"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized." 1984, part 1, chapt 1.

Ask a toad what is beauty…

photo by Jason Cross. Kermit... the frog... ok, not a toad.

Ask a toad what is beauty… He will answer that it is a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, a large flat mouth, a yellow belly and a brown back.

Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1794

Filthy Gill

Filthy Gill
designed by Jack Gladstone & Dave Russell for Wallpaper´s Sex Issue.
Apparently these "Tart Cards", showing the sexy side of type, are the work of design students from St Bride Collage in London.

Loved the title... well, Eric Gill was pretty filthy =)

Whilst Gill was a deeply religious man, largely following the Roman Catholic faith, his beliefs and practices were by no means orthodox. His personal diaries describe his sexual activity in great detail including the fact that Gill sexually abused his own children, had an incestuous relationship with his sister and performed sexual acts on his dog. This aspect of Gill's life was little known until publication of the 1989 biography by Fiona MacCarthy. Robert Speaight's earlier biography mentioned none of it.

As the revelations about Gill's private life resonated, there was a reassessment of his personal and artistic achievement. As his recent biographer sums up: "After the initial shock, […] as Gill's history of adulteries, incest, and experimental connection with his dog became public knowledge in the late 1980s, the consequent reassessment of his life and art left his artistic reputation strengthened. Gill emerged as one of the twentieth century's strangest and most original controversialists, a sometimes infuriating, always arresting spokesman for man's continuing need of God in an increasingly materialistic civilization, and for intellectual vigour in an age of encroaching triviality. (Wikipedia)

We will buy your dreams... for 25 cents!

The Strange World of Your Dreams. In the 1950s, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon were able to convert reader-submitted dreams into great comic book stories.