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24 April 2009

we got to get out of this place / if it's the last thing we ever do / we got to get out of this place / girl there's a better place for me and you

patfromch hat geschrieben:

I wonder what William Campbell would have said if Robert Heinlein or Asimov or one of the other classic SF writers of the 40s or 50s would have come up with a manuscript of a short story where artificial intelligence beats a human Go player in a virtual reality for Astounding Magazine. I really do. Cant decide if he would have embraced the idea or sent out a rejecton slip though. For the kids nowdays this is almost normal, for us who can still remember when computers used tapes and command lines this is almost magic. Or SF come true.

Hell, maybe I should try this Second Life thingy, maybe I bump into a virtual William Gibson or Bruce Sterling. I bet they are p.o.for not coming up with a concept like that in one of their stories.

================

Nicht so schnell.

( <-- this is a Robot Job, does it have the same sense as "Not so fast"? )

Before you Free-Dive into the bowels of Virtual Reality, first go back and re-read THIS

There are other Other Worlds.

"Kiss of the Spider Woman" (El beso de la mujer araña, by Manuel Puig) tells of a World as far from This Nasty Planet as Vleeptron via the Zeta Beam, as mathematics and the Platonic Objects, as Alice's Wonderland: The Land of Memory and Dreams. Movie (der Kuß der Spinnenfrau) rocks, too. (der Spinnenfrau is Sonia Braga, which is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.)

An entire professional baseball league, all its players, managers, owners, and fans, takes place inside the skull of one guy who really loves baseball: "The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop." Each night when J. Henry Waugh, an accountant, comes home from work, the baseball league comes to life again, and everything that happens in every inning of every game to every player is determined by a throw of dice. The novel is by Robert Coover, who also wrote "The Origin of the Brunists."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bonjour!
Talking about Manuel Puig: maybe the blogg www.manuelpuig.blogspot.com will interest you!
I posted some interviews he made during 1968 and 1992. He was a complete GENIUS!
All these articles are part of the first multimedia-biography on CD-ROM about Puig: „Manuel Puig: Una aproximación biográfica". Buenos Aires 2008. ISBN 978-987-05-4332-9

More information and distribution via : www.manuelpuig.com

lots of saludos
Gerd

Vleeptron Dude said...

Hola y Wie gehts Gerd --

Well, the first question to ask one of the world's leading authorities on Manuel Puig is:

Did you like the movie? Did it do justice to Puig's roman?

(I liked it a lot.)

During the first Gulf War, I was arrested at the nearby Air Force Base to protest the war, and about 50 of the Usual Suspects (Buddhists, Quakers, college students, Catholic nuns) and I were handcuffed on a schoolbus and waited for about 4 hours to be taken to jail.

The college students passed the time by quizzing each other about South American authors. I thought I was pretty smart. But I knew NOTHING compared to how much they know about South American authors. (Most of them were students at Hampshire College in Massachusetts.)

I'm sure every roman by Puig is in a good English translation (which is lucky for me, my espan~ol sux). What are your favorite books by Puig?

I very much enjoyed your blog MISSING ... but where are los Gatos Perdidos??? (We like dogs, but we live with 3 cats.)

Do you like Allende's "La casa de los espíritus" / "The House of the Spirits"?

Yesterday or the day before I posted my love for Astor Piazzolla ... he alone is enough to make me want to go to Buenas Aires someday, to hear live performances of Nuevo Tango and the bandoneon.

Please keep reading VleeptronZ and please send us news about Argentina, BA, Tierra del Fuego, and the imminent invasion of los castores. We don't get much news about Argentina here.

Thanks, I will read much more about Puig now!

Bob