Serendipity Strikes Again

"Old friend, what are you looking for?
After those many years abroad you come
With images you tended
Under foreign skies
Far away from your own land."
-George Seferis

Behold, this is a purely personal blog- naturally unrelated to our media theory class...So... I was rearranging my bookshelf today (a tedious and mildly refreshing task) because my new roommate decided to "move stuff around." I have a fabulous and quite large bookshelf, it's divine and proudly spans the entire wall of my living room (yay Ikea). As I become unhealthily immersed in this activity I dawn upon, of all things, a book! No really, not just any silly and trite thing- but a book I didn't even realized I owned. Some time ago I decided my new favorite book of all time is, The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Neffinegger. It's a fabulous read and I recommend it to all of you! Through out the novel she quotes from another text, A.S. Byatt's Possession. I doted on these quotes, rather marveled in their alacrity and perfect complimentary value to the story. Consciously, I thought, Damn I really need to get that book of poetry (?) the author is quoting. Well guess what gem I found, lingering in unread peril, on my bookshelf? Jolly good for my instinctual obsession with collecting and shame on me for never having even turned the cover. I initially freaked out and began jumping around the living room with glee and then I snatched the book and inspected its content.

And yet, hence forth is the real kicker:A.S. Byatt is a literary critic! And NOT ONLY THAT--- one of her books, Angels and Insects, is the next in a series of sixteen readings for my other graduate class. I deem all of this serendipity, yet it must actually be my unconscious mind doing the work for me. Somewhere in the realm of my long-term memory I must have known this book existed on my glorious bookshelf, and somehow (unbeknownst to my waking self) my chaotic and annoyingly oblivious brain made the connection. Thus, flailing in my find revealed two things: mere luck of timing (in the sense that serendipitously I was propelled to rearrange my books) and a perfectly frightening example of the one truth in life...nothing is really an accident and all is meant to be. Well, maybe that's making the whole thing a little too deep, but so what! I am beaming with creative ingenuity. I honestly make it a point to pay attention to random shit. Most details go in one ear and out the other--so be it. I unconsciously displaced or forgot the name of the author of Angels and Insects. Ehh, maybe its all coincidence and me being a phenomenal jackass. Haha. To this I laugh, I still made the connection and all is right with the universe.

Meditating on Moulthrop

In trying to remember to not take the author, Stuart Moulthrop and his article too seriously, I found myself mesmerized by the intricate data in this paper. As I tried to discern both the complexity of the subject matter and Moulthrop's brain soup I somehow came to terms with his fictional postmodern paradise, Xanadu. With patience and fortitude I sifted through his techno-garble only to find the concept of Xanadu and Hyperreality all frightenly relevant and bewitching. I say bravo to Moulthrop for following the rigid guidelines of a critical paper while at the same time stepping far beyond the boundaries of conventional writing. What's more, his ability to implement an entirely new system of words and terms baffles me; I wonder how much longer society can stave off the vernacular use of such words like "populitism" and "hypotext."To begin with, Xanadu is a theoretical ideal (much like a techno-paradise or heaven) that paradoxically exists in the world of online omnipotence yet also remains a total myth, think urban legends of other dimensions and Utopia. Moulthrop challenges the reader to consider both the complete destruction or "implosion" of technology and the inevitabl evolution of communication through the "system" or in layman's terms: the web. According to Moulthrop the orgins of hyperreality stem from a false reasoning, a simulated reality in which we have all become all-too accustomed. Yet it is the hopeless and reckless abandonment of the past that will eventually propel us furhter forward into The Age of Technology and Perfection. Recently, I realized a severity and dominance of online jobs these days. The economy dives into torrents of poverty and despair yet the uprise in online companies and the boom of website-only functioning businesses ricochets with power and force throughout our suffering society. Is it a question of embracing the madness or holding fast to a dying form of communication, simple print based text? Moulthrop's Hyperreality has strange charateristics of not only a New World Order (which, of course is an antiquated term at this point) and religion. Realistically Moulthrop has indeed touched upon another scary concept involving online text and literature becoming something of its own "catechism." Technology certainly has the ability to morph into a new religion; or maybe it already has...Society's obsession with staying connected resembles a religious fervor and a collective passion reflected in the pages of the Old or New Testament. As we pray to the gods in cyberspace scholars and writers can take comfort that Hyperreality has not sacrificed old print and the book, but instead technology has merely changed the form by which we access our simple ways of communicaton. "Hypertext...[t]he end of the death of literature."