British author Steve Aylett’s writing has been described as “dreampunk,” “slipstream,” “bizarro,” “cyberpunk,” and “new weird,” among other things. I once wordily described it as follows: “He breaks down the myriad structures of the day, rearranges them into heretofore unseen configurations, and then describes the action along all-new interstices.” His books, which usually get stuck… Continue reading Steve Aylett: Vernacular Homicide
Afterword, by David Markson by [Name of Author] (Inside the Castle, 2025) is an odd little book at best. David Markson, one of my all-time favorite authors, passed away in 2010, so I was confused, but intrigued. Clearly Markson had not written a new book, so someone was channeling him. I love this particularly postmodern… Continue reading Afterword: An Interview with [Name of Author]
McKenzie Wark opens her book Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (Verso, 2019) with an epigraph from Kathy Acker: “Post-capitalists’ general strategy right now is to render language (all that which signifies) abstract therefore easily manipulable.”1 Acker goes on, in her book, Literal Madness, In the case of language and of economy the signified… Continue reading Capitalist Surrealism
To declare something as posthuman is to draw a line between what is human and something that is not. In Nietzsche’s Posthumanism (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), Edgar Landgraf proposes Nietzsche’s “overhuman” (Übermensch) as well as the cyborg as shorthands for the posthuman. He quotes Bernard Stiegler, who, summarizing French paleontologist André Leroi-Gourhan’s prehistorical research,… Continue reading Reaching Nietzsche
“For the first time in history it is now possible to take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. Only ten years ago the ‘more with less’ technology reached the point where this could be done. All humanity now has the option to become enduringly successful.” Buckminster Fuller Though… Continue reading Gaming the Change: Douglas Rushkoff’s ‘Survival of the Richest’
