threads cut from the net today

[alice wellintown]

some stuff you all might enjoy reading:

Peace,

Alices' in Wonderaunts

Filmmakers are pushing hard against, and sometimes dispensing with,
storytelling conventions, and audiences seem willing to follow them.
The chief film critics of The New York Times, Manohla Dargis and A. O.
Scott, consider this experimental turn.
Arts & Leisure When Do We ‘Get It’? Films Dispense With Storytelling
Conventions

see NY Times

Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist? appears at this peculiar moment
of our cultural and intellectual history as a reminder that the quest
for foundational truths is not only a supremely human activity but
also one that brings us, if not absolute truth (which may be
unknowable), at least better and better approximations of the truth.
Such approximations offer the possibility of a restored consensus that
allows for passionate disagreements within reasonable and civil
bounds. But only the possibility. The complexity of the new
philosophical and scientific thinking poses demands on attention,
imagination, and concentration to which our fast-moving media are
hardly conducive.
Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story, By Jim Holt, Liveright

see American Scholar
http://theamericanscholar.org/questions-of-being/

also in AS, Pronouns:  A young psycholinguist confesses her strong
attraction to pronouns
http://theamericanscholar.org/they-get-to-me/

The Curse of Warholism
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/110175/the-curse-warholism#

Seeing the light: Ed Boyden's tools for brain hackers
http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/11/features/seeing-the-light?page=all

The Mannequins Will Be Watching You
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/the-mannequins-will-be-watching-you/265482/

Berlin in the Golden Twenties
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/spiegel-series-on-berlin-history-the-golden-twenties-a-866383.html

The Diseased Language of Mo Yan

The “hallucinatory realism” mentioned in the citation is a phrase that
brings to mind James Wood’s brilliant coinage of “hysterical realism,”
referring to the works of Salman Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo,
David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, and their fellow maximizing
novelists. As Wood says, “Hysterical realism is not exactly magical
realism, but magical realism’s next stop. It is characterised by a
fear of silence. This kind of realism is a perpetual motion machine
that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. Stories and
sub-stories sprout on every page. There is a pursuit of vitality at
all costs” (The Guardian, October 5, 2001).
http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2012-fall/selections/anna-sun-656342/

Is “hallucinatory realism” the next, improved step of “hysterical realism”?