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✖ Via PhilipKDick.com: Letter to Jeff Walker at The Ladd Company - October 11, 1981

“The author shares his enthusiasm for the upcoming release of “Blade Runner” with the production company.”

“Philip K. Dick wrote this letter after seeing his first glimpse of Blade Runner in a television segment. To the best of the family’s knowledge, this letter has never been previously released to the public.”

Philipkdick.com is Philip K. Dick official web site:

“On behalf of Philip K. Dick’s children, welcome to the Official Philip K. Dick website. We endeavor to create a venue for new readers, as well as a valuable resource for the loyal fans who have enjoyed his works for years. It is a work in progress, but one nevertheless that we hope you will find useful, and also truly enjoy.”(more)

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DFW copy of Borges: A Life by Edwin Will

First page handwritten draft of Infinite

DFW copy of Players by Don DeLillo

✖ Via David Foster Wallace Archive at The Harry Ransom Center

“The Wallace materials are being processed and organized and will be available to researchers and the public in fall 2010. Some items from the archive can be viewed at www.hrc.utexas.edu/dfw, and a selection of materials will be on display in the Ransom Center’s lobby through April 9. High-resolution press images from the collection are available.” (more)

There’s a good overview of the archive and its story in the last edition of The New Yorker (subscription may be needed for full access).

David Foster Wallace is the author of Infinite Jest (1996). He died in 2008. Learn more about him on Wikipedia. Kottke has some suggestions for those who are planning to read The Infinite Jest.

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An empirical test of ideas proposed by Martin Heidegger shows the great German philosopher to be correct: Everyday tools really do become part of ourselves. The findings come from a deceptively simple study of people using a computer mouse rigged to malfunction. The resulting disruption in attention wasn’t superficial. It seemingly extended to the very roots of cognition. “The person and the various parts of their brain and the mouse and the monitor are so tightly intertwined that they’re just one thing,” said Anthony Chemero, a cognitive scientist at Franklin & Marshall College. “The tool isn’t separate from you. It’s part of you.” Chemero’s experiment, published March 9 in Public Library of Science, was designed to test one of Heidegger’s fundamental concepts: that people don’t notice familiar, functional tools, but instead “see through” them to a task at hand, for precisely the same reasons that one doesn’t think of one’s fingers while tying shoelaces. The tools are us.

✖ Via Wired Science: “Your Computer Really Is a Part of You” by Brandon Keim, March 9, 2010

The study “A Demonstration of the Transition from Ready-to-Hand to Unready-to-Hand” by Dobromir G. Dotov, Lin Nie, Anthony Chemero is available online (PDF).

The “fondamental concept” to which Chemero is referring is the concept of “readiness-to-hand”. Heidegger explains this concept in section 15 of his book Being and Time : “The Being of the Entities Encountered in the Environment” (see Google Books). To understand this concept, one can get help from Wikipedia, from an online Glossary of Terms in Being and Time (edited by Roderick Munday, last updated in March 2009) and from Dean Heckles’ blog (Heckle “is a social–cognitive scientist and a PhD student at Stanford” and he specifically chose to name his blog… “Ready-to-hand” : great introduction to the concept if you’re into technology or communication or media studies).

For a good overview of what’s at stakes today when it comes to our relationship to technology, one should read the “General Introduction” of the first book of the Technics and Time trilogy by Bernard Stiegler. The book has been translated from French by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. The “General Introduction” which run from page 1 to 18 is available via Google Books.

Previously on Skandalon: cognition and media ecology.

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Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.

✖ Via Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, tr. Sheila Faria Glaser, University of Michigan Press, [1981]1995, p. 1 [full pdf]

Baudrillard is quoting a very (very) short story by Jorge Luis Borges “On Exactitude in Science” or “On Rigor in Science”. Learn more about it on Wikipedia and read one of its English translation.

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✖ Via Beastness by David Jaclin (self-published, 2009). Cover illustration by Antoine Corbineau

Read an excerpt from the book (in French). Buy the book online. Check out David’s blog 10 Secondes Tigre.

“Beastness” is the contraction of “fitness” (in a biological sense) and “beast”. It’s the name David Jaclin gave to the evolution of the relationship’s economy (“business”) bonding humans and animals since the dawn of time to the present day.

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technology book author terror terrorism bomb car

✖ Via Buda’s Wagon. A Brief History of the Car Bomb by Mike Davis, New York: Verso, 2007 [Amazon]

From the publisher’s website:

“On a September day in 1920, an angry Italian anarchist named Mario Buda exploded a horse-drawn wagon filled with dynamite and iron scrap near New York’s Wall Street, killing 40 people. Since Buda’s prototype the car bomb has evolved into a “poor man’s air force,” a generic weapon of mass destruction that now craters cities from Bombay to Oklahoma City.

In this gripping and disturbing history, Mike Davis traces its worldwide use and development, in the process exposing the role of state intelligence agencies—particularly those of the United States, Israel, India, and Pakistan—in globalizing urban terrorist techniques. Davis argues that it is the incessant impact of car bombs, rather than the more apocalyptic threats of nuclear or bio-terrorism, that is changing cities and urban lifestyles, as privileged centers of power increasingly surround themselves with “rings of steel” against a weapon that nevertheless seems impossible to defeat.” (more)

This book won the Lannan Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Read a short review of the book.

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✖ Via Tom Gauld: 186. Evil Author

Check his new official website (made with indexhibit).

Previously on Skandalon

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art poster design animal illustration illustrator man monster revenge book author classic water sea boat violence lost

✖ Via KN | Kitsune Noir: “KN/PC Presents: Inside Look at Mark Weaver”

Poster design by Mark Weaver inspired by the book Moby Dick by Herman Melville (1851). The poster was designed for the Kitsune Noir Poster Club.

Follow the link to read an interview with Cody Hoyt about his creative process.

Previously on Skandalon : Mark Weaver, Kitsune Noir

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Broadbent: … I find the world quite good enough for me - rather a jolly place, in fact.
Keegan (looking at him with quiet wonder): You are satisfied?
Broadbent: As a reasonable man, yes. I see no evils in the world - except of course, natural evils - that cannot be remedied by freedom, self-government and English institutions. I think so, not because I am an Englishman, but as a matter of common sense.
Keegan: You feel at home in the world then?
Broadbent: Of course, Don’t you?
Keegan (from the very depths of his nature): No.

✖ Via John Bull’s Other Island by Bernard Shaw, 1904, Act IV §ii.

This is the epigraph for Colin Wilson’s 1956 book The Oustider [Amazon]. I first learn about Wilsom’s book via Another Nickel In The Machine

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An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.

✖ Via Aldous Huxley, quoted in Discovering Evolutionary Ecology: Bringing Together Ecology And Evolution (2006) by Peter J. Mayhew, p. 24

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