1. Italo Calvino's "Cybernetics and Ghosts" (1967) is still the best thing that I have ever read on the subject of computers. I taught it today: "The power of modern literature lies in its willingness to give a voice to what has remained unexpressed in the social or individual unconscious: this is the gauntlet it throws down time and again. The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts. Dreams of progress and reason are haunted by nightmares."
2. Currently working on an online museum piece about the pile of books written to help Christians understand Harry Potter properly (coming soon), I have been trying to figure out what to do with various medium sized heaps of information. Sometimes there is too much to ignore, but without either a coherent source or telos. It can happen for all sorts of reasons. Maybe it has been fished in by a search engine, or just because information has collected around some single issue which energized a couple dozen people to publish in places where a movement is impossible. Here, for instance, are a bunch of Pope Benedict XVIs.
3. I am posting this here, really, because though I want to get back to work, I also want to leave a record which will let me use some interesting online devices as divination tools:
a) Cliche generator
b) Theotech generator (with everything else generators as well)
c) Queneau's 100,000,000,000,000 surrealist sonnets.
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