Some parts of this version took me way too long.  Like the photoshop pop-ups, esp. the one about Sado-anarchism (look for it)

I can’t tell if this looks cool or if it looks hopelessly amateurish.  Layout/visual feedback would be appricated.

It starts here: http://www.pinkoscopies.org/jed/An%20Ahistory%20of%20Violence/Cover.html 

I uploaded a .zip of it here  for Sturgeon: http://www.pinkoscopies.org/jed/ 

so i submitted that essay that most of you have read to some online lit mags (starting with the one you suggested, JP). The first one to get back to me was www.bigbridge.org (check it out now). I like their site, and have been working with them. They want to put it under the “war papers” section, which you can find by going to features. They liked it as a pdf: cinematic essay . But I’ve showed it to some people in that form, and everyone skips over the text boxes, which I regard as a vital part of the piece. And it’s sort of lame to have a piece on an online lit mag as a .pdf that you have to download. So I made an HTML piece out of it. Thanks to Tyler’s help, you can see it here:

http://www.pinkoscopies.org/jed/Documents/1..html

Wait, but before you click on that, let me ask you for some help with feedback. I have time to make this better. And I want help with ideas about how to make it visually/spatially more interesting.

Pretty much what I’ve heard over and over about this peice is that it just doesn’t quite make it: it’s either too much or not enough to be too much. THis is what the guy at the lit mag said:

” ” True violence is ahistorical, it happens every day, and it leaves an unsightly stain upon the carpet. Not a rupture in time, but a continuity. Houses shield thousands of battered and bruised families, molested and beaten, from public view. Prisons have drains on the floor to drink the blood. ”

During this paragraph I think I want to see something that contrasts or heightens it not as illustration but as juxtaposition. Specifically I question the last line as being a little over the top but then if it were juxtaposed with something that was very different than that, like something to do with something that “drains”, like a quote about what we do each day in an everday way that suggests our capacity to ignore or perpetuate violence, like shopping at the mall.

This is a very dumb recommendation on my part but I am trying to accelerate the reference and broaden the scope of the reference so it does not seem “over the top” or “melodramatic”. Often this can be done by going even further over the top. What I am saying is to not take my comments as fact or specific direction but as a way of distancing yourself from your own position so as to possibly expand your position. Does this make sense?”

The answer was, no, that doesn’t make sense, but of course I pretended that it did, or tried to say it tactfully. It made sense for an analysis of the first paragraph, but I had trouble generalizing it to the rest of the piece.

I know that JP has comments on this essay that I haven’t seen yet, too.

I don’t know when this has to be done by.

The version on the .pdf isn’t the same text as the version on the html.

So basically this shit’s just all over the place right now.

Help me come up with a title ?  With no other ideas, I’ll call it “true violence is ahistorical”.  Lame, huh?

I just finished reading a play entitled “R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots).” It was written by a Czech in 1920 (premiered Prague, 1921), obviously just after World War I and the Russian Revolution. The play coined the term “robot,” derived from robota, the Czech word for “drudgery” or “servitude” (according to Wikipedia - I just online translated it, and it came up as “treadmill”…). It’s really an interesting read - a bit romantically overdramatized in parts, but that’s often tongue-in-cheek, a reflection of the typically sardonic Czech humor. The characters are also somewhat bumbling, which again is an old Czech character type (see “The Good Soldier Švejk“). The most interesting tie to Czech narrative culture, however, is the similarity between R.U.R. and the old Prague legend of the Golem, which is somewhat of a precursor to Frankenstein’s monster. The play is definitely worth reading, as it foreshadows (if not having directly inspired) so much of modern science-fiction (the play was in fact the first made-for-TV sci-fi movie, when it was produced by the BBC in the ’40’s). And what’s more, like the best science-fiction, it melds the past and the future to construct a very pertinent and surprisingly prescient contemporary social critique.