Tag: imagination

Trying out the “Good Reads” site. Here's a review I wrote t'other day.

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Gerald's Party (Coover, Robert) Gerald’s Party by Robert Coover

My review


rating: 2 of 5 stars
Coover takes a minimally interesting premise–a cocktail party right out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting as the setting for a send up of the classic Agatha Christie “closed room” mystery–and beats it to death. I guess the meta-joke is that just as the hellish party is inescapable and goes on forever, the book is inescapable and goes on forever. Fortunately, however, the book is escapable– you have only to stop reading.

Certainly Coover deserves some style points for verbal skill and unrestrained imagination. The book is finely crafted, in the sense of the interlocking stories & themes, the literary allusions & wordplay, etc, etc.

But it’s pointless and ugly. Why would I want to read a thirty page “joke” about a stopped toilet and skating over a vomit-covered floor? How much necrophilia is “enough” for one avante-guard novel?
It might have been an interesting and perhaps disturbing story at 50 pages. But at more than 300 pages, it’s just a bore.
View all my reviews.

Hat's-off to Ken (and treats on the tube)

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I’ve written before about my belief that we’re inexorably entering — and some of us resisting — a paradigm shift in how humans think of information, imagination, creativity, freedom, and non-real property. So I was unexpectedly delighted to receive this letter to all of the university’s Division of Information Technology staff, from our new (heh heh) interim CIO, Ken Frazier. (Below the fold.)

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It Doesn't Have To Be Physical

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My wife recently made this video about our fight to stop a high-voltage power line proposed in our neighborhood. It was a lot of work.

She put copies onto DVDs with nice printed labels for distribution. I would have thought that seeing the physical product would give us a sense of completion and having accomplished something. It was nice, but it didn’t quite close the effort.

Then we uploaded the bits to Google Video and waited for review before it was accessible. And waited. And waited. And then one day we just checked to see if it was up. Bingo! We watched it over and over again. I was struck by how much greater the sense of accomplishment in seeing the video up on Google, available for world-wide viewing.

This is the new distribution. This is the Age of Imagination.

Inventing the Future: information as a game

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I’ve written before about how I’d like to never be forced to enter a name into Croquet. A consequence of achieving this is that you wouldn’t often need a keyboard. (A keyboard can be incredibly useful. I’m not proposing banishment. I just want to be able to get along without it. Also, there’s still access to legacy apps with their textual forms that need to be filled out.)

Croquet is built on the Squeak platform. This weekend I discovered that the older PlayStation II has an Ethernet adapter, the new one has it built in, that there’s a guy porting Squeak to the PS2, and that Croquet’s own Andreas Raab has demonstrated in the past that Squeak can be ported to the PS2. I’d sure love to have game boxes be Croquet information appliances.

Now add to that the ability to create content from within the Croquet environment itself, and think of kids creating their own connected persistent worlds. Screw the “information age”, it’s the “age of imagination”.

At C5, Croquet anchorman David Smith laid out a vision of Croquet running on an iPod-sized device connected to a heads-up display in your eyeglasses. (Never mind that by then, most folks who need vision correction will have laser surgery rather than glasses.) Noting that the basic technologies needed for this already exist today, and the pace of development and adoption over, say 20 years (c.f. the Apple Macintosh and what it has wrought), David feels comfortable looking at this sort of technology horizon. I’d like to see Croquet on a PS2 be a step in that direction.