The Handmaid s Tale (etext) A chair, a table, a lamp. Above, on the white ceiling, a relief ornament in the shape of a wreath, and in the center of it a blank space, plastered over, like the place in a face where the eye has been taken out. There must have been a chandelier, once. They've removed anything you could tie a rope to. A window, two white curtains. Under the window, a window seat with a little cushion. On the wall above the chair, a picture, framed but with no glass: a print of flowers, blue irises, watercolor. Think of it as being in the army, said Aunt Lydia. A bed. So. But a chair, sunlight, flowers: these are not to be dismissed. The bell that measures time is ringing. I get up out of the chair, advance my feet into the sunlight, in their red shoes, flat-heeled to save the spine and not for dancing. The door of the room-not my room, I refuse to say my-is not locked. There remains a mirror, on the hall wall. Sometimes I listen outside closed doors, a thing I never would have done in the time before.
Margaret Atwood interview: 'Go three days without water and you don't have any human rights. Why? Because you're dead' | Books | The Observer It's 25 years since the publication of The Handmaid's Tale, her dystopic masterpiece, but Margaret Atwood firmly resists the suggestion that she might be an icon of Canadian literature. "What does that mean?" she counters in her distinctive prairie monotone, somewhere between a drone and a drawl. "I don't like being an icon." A thin ironic smile. "It invites iconoclasm. Now no one has ever dared suggest that Margaret Atwood, a famously scary and prodigiously gifted Canadian intellectual with nearly 50 books to her name – poetry, fiction, critical essays, books for children, radio and film scripts, anthologies and collections of short stories – would ever willingly make an idiot of herself in public. Mercer was right. She can come across as humourless and severe, but I think her deadpan manner is just the shell with which she protects her fierce, inquisitive intelligence. Next she was told she should collect "followers". Atwood has just turned 71. "Your writing is you," she says.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (etext) Chapter One A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY. The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. "And this," said the Director opening the door, "is the Fertilizing Room." Bent over their instruments, three hundred Fertilizers were plunged, as the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning entered the room, in the scarcely breathing silence, the absent-minded, soliloquizing hum or whistle, of absorbed concentration. "Just to give you a general idea," he would explain to them. "To-morrow," he would add, smiling at them with a slightly menacing geniality, "you'll be settling down to serious work. Meanwhile, it was a privilege. Tall and rather thin but upright, the Director advanced into the room. "Bokanovsky's Process," repeated the Director, and the students underlined the words in their little notebooks. Mr.
Overview (wiki) The utopia and its offshoot, the dystopia, are genres of literature that explore social and political structures. Utopian fiction is the creation of an ideal society, or utopia, as the setting for a novel. Dystopian fiction (sometimes referred to as apocalyptic literature) is the opposite: creation of an utterly horrible or degraded society that is generally headed to an irreversible oblivion, or dystopia.[1] Many novels combine both, often as a metaphor for the different directions humanity can take in its choices, ending up with one of two possible futures. Both utopias and dystopias are commonly found in science fiction and other speculative fiction genres, and arguably are by definition a type of speculative fiction. More than 400 utopian works were published prior to the year 1900 in the English language alone, with more than a thousand others during the twentieth century.[2] Subgenres[edit] Utopian fiction[edit] Dystopian fiction[edit] Combinations[edit] Ecotopian fiction[edit]
The Road The Road is a 2006 novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. It is a post-apocalyptic tale of a journey of a father and his young son over a period of several months, across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed most of civilization and, in the intervening years, almost all life on Earth. The novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006. Plot summary[edit] An unnamed father and his young son journey across a grim post-apocalyptic landscape, some years after an unspecified apocalypse has destroyed civilization and most life on Earth. Realizing they cannot survive the oncoming winter where they are, the father takes the boy south, along empty roads towards the sea, carrying their meager possessions in their knapsacks and in a supermarket cart. In the face of these obstacles, the man repeatedly reassures the boy that they are "the good guys" who are "carrying the fire". Film adaptation[edit]
Ironie et g nocide dans Les Bienveillantes de Jonathan Littell 1De prime abord, il serait difficile de soutenir qu’un livre évoquant de manière extrêmement réaliste l’extermination des Juifs par les forces nazies pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale appartient au champ de la littérature ironique. 2De fait, le roman de Littell est un livre extrêmement sérieux quant à sa conception, s’il faut en croire les nombreux témoignages de l’auteur lui-même, qui a insisté à plusieurs reprises sur les multiples lectures et voyages qui ont été les siens en amont de l’écriture. Les détracteurs de l’ouvrage insistent même sur l’impression que l’on a parfois de fiches de travail mal digérées et comme passées telles quelles dans le roman. Je ne voulais surtout pas écrire ce qu’on appelle un roman historique, faire de ces événements un décor de théâtre devant lequel faire évoluer mes personnages. 2 3Affirmation qui active d’emblée l’idée qu’il est difficile de rendre compte du réel –a fortiori d’un tel réel – dans une œuvre fictive. Hélas non !
Origins of Utopia ‘Still Ticking’: The story behind Stanley Kubrick’s ban on ‘A Clockwork Orange’ After its release in 1971, Stanley Kubrick’s film version of A Clockwork Orange was linked to a series of violent crimes. The first was the murder of a tramp by a 16-year-old youth; the second involved another 16-year-old youth who, dressed in the film’s distinctive gang uniform, stabbed a younger boy; the third was the brutal and horrific gang rape of a Dutch girl by a group of youths from Lancashire, as they sang “Singin’ in the Rain”. Sentencing the 16-year-old for assaulting a child, a judge described the attack part of a “horrible trend” prompted by “this wretched film”. Following death threats and warnings from the police over revenge attacks, Kubrick asked Warner Brothers to pull the film from its UK release. But banning the film didn’t have the desired effect, for when the film was eventually released in the UK on DVD, it led to another spate of copycat crimes, the most notorious of which, was the murder of a bar manager by a “Clockwork Orange gang”.
For Your Processing 6th January 2018 Video with 7 notes (via littleblackbox on Vimeo) This is a controller that explores how to interact with realtime graphics in Processing. With this little box, the aim is to find more tactile, playful and straightforward ways of interaction with graphics during live sessions. Read more about the project here: Source: vimeo.com 6th January 2018 Video with 3 notes Brad Tober at Processing Community Day 2017 day.processing.org/ Brad Tober is a designer, educator, and researcher whose work explores the potential of emerging code-based and interactive visual communication technologies, with the objective of identifying and investigating their relationships to design practice and pedagogy. (via Brad Tober - Processing Community Day 2017 on Vimeo) Source: vimeo.com 6th January 2018 Video reblogged from Notational with 2 notes notational: Playing with pixels. 6th January 2018 Video reblogged from Notational with 3 notes sasj:
Plato's Republic (wiki) Three interpretations of the Republic are presented; they are not exhaustive in their treatments of the work, but are examples of contemporary interpretation. In his A History of Western Philosophy (1945), Bertrand Russell identifies three parts to the Republic:[7] Books I–V: the eutopia portraying the ideal community and the education of the Guardians, parting from attempting to define justice;Books VI–VII: define “philosopher”, since philosophers are the ideal rulers of such a community;Books VIII–X: discuss the pros and cons of various practical forms of government. Francis Cornford, Kurt Hildebrandt (de), and Eric Voegelin contributed to an establishment of sub-divisions marked with special formulae in Greek: Prologue I.1. 327a—328b. I.2—I.5. 328b—331d. I.6—1.9. 331e—336a. I.10—1.24. 336b—354c. Introduction II.1—II.10. 357a—369b. Part I: Genesis and Order of the Polis II.11—II.16. 369b—376e. II.16—III.18. 376e—412b. III.19—IV.5. 412b—427c. IV.6—IV.19. 427c—445e. V.1—V.16. 449a—471c. P.
Dystopian Fiction; A Brief History Dystopian fiction has been around for a long time; interesting enough, it was an offshoot of utopian fiction which started growing in popularity in the 1900’s. I’m a little surprised that utopian fiction seemed to be the predominate genre but if you look at the history of dystopian literature you can see why. The spikes in popularity seems to have started from the lead up to the world war two and the cold war and then as a result of 9/11 and the war on terror. Escapist fiction; as a way to substitute the problems with the world with a more nightmarish world. I thought it might be nice to have a quick look at the genre over time and highlight some essential reads (which stick out to me) for people that haven’t experienced all the joys of this genre. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1921) A highly influential novel based on the authors experience of the two Russian revolutions (1905 and 1917) and the First World War. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932) Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)