MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

Tag: Thomas Pynchon

  • Monday is Committing Seppuku

    Monday, that starched white collar of the week, that joyless grindstone of productivity, was keeling over, not with a whimper, but with a ritualistic harakiri of epic proportions. The air, usually thick with stale coffee and regret, carried the tang of iron filings and existential dread. Was it the soul-crushing TPS reports, or the fluorescent lights humming a maddening Cold War spy tune?  It was…

  • Objective, Subjective and Asubjective

    We crave order, a map of the buzzing confusion we call existence. So we dream up these categories: objective, subjective, asubjective. Objective? Pure, unadulterated fact, cold and hard like a chrome thermometer. But is this “temperature” just another code word slapped on the writhing mess of the real? Sure, the reading might be objective, a…

  • Against the Day

    Pynchon, man, that dude throws a Molotov cocktail into the country club of proper English. Forget your Strunk & White, this ain’t your daddy’s prose. Pynchon, throws a Molotov cocktail into the cocktail party of proper English. Forget your white-glove grammar and your predictable sentence structures. This ain’t your momma’s book club. “Against the Day”…

  • Revisiting Vietnam

    Research Grant Proposal: Revisiting Vietnam: Exploring the Parapsychological Labyrinth of a Humphrey Triumph Over Nixon, Impeded by Kaleidoscopic Counterculture and Fellow Travelers in the Fog Authored by: Mortimer M. Muddle Sponsored by: Abstract: The specter of Vietnam looms large in the American psyche. This proposal seeks to revisit that pivotal moment in history, venturing into the…

  • 1984

    Forget dials and telescreens for a sec, man. Orwell wasn’t just serving up Big Brother’s boot on your face, he was carving reality with a rusty switchblade. This perpetual war, it’s like a roach motel for the Oceania proles. Stuck in a feedback loop of fear and propaganda, pumped full of manufactured enemies – Eurasia…

  • H to he who am the only one

    The message crawled across Peter Coyle’s retinas, a phosphorescent scar against the static of a dying cathode ray tube television. “H to He Who Am The Only One.” It wasn’t part of the usual late-night broadcast detritus – reruns of Cold War propaganda films bleeding into televangelist pleas for alms. This felt different, coded and…

  • Executables

    A tweet, man, a tweet. It’s like jamming a rogue cartridge into your neural socket and hitting boot-up. Like jamming a rogue AI straight into your limbic system, a self-replicating packet of manipulative code disguised as a pithy remark or a link to some nightmare memeplex. Each one a microburst of dopamine, a carefully crafted…

  • Inelegant Futures

    In likelier futures, where the trajectory of events bends not toward grandiose spectacle but toward the mundane grind, the intricate mechanisms that drive history reveal themselves as stupefying in their banality. Imagine, if you will, the vast, teeming complexities of bureaucratic machinery grinding away in some fluorescent-lit, windowless office in the bowels of a faceless…

  • Time Travel

    Bartholomew “Dutch” Doobin, a man whose name seemed perpetually on the verge of dissolving into a cough, stood there, knees wobbling like malfunctioning gyroscopes, at the “bottom” of the world. The air, a fistful of shattered diamonds, stung his lungs with each gasping breath. Below his crampons, the white expanse stretched, a canvas upon which…

  • The 52 Hertz Whale

    The Pacific stretched monolithic beneath a bruised twilight, an oil slick sheen reflecting the sodium glare of distant tankers. Below, in the cobalt fathoms, a solitary whale, its species a cypher, sang its mournful aria. At 52 Hertz, its call was a discordant shriek in the whale orchestra, a blues note in a symphony of…