The phone books are here! The phone books are here! Er, uh, I mean—the Suspicious Anatomy book launch is here! My first book! Check it:

Not since Galen’s De Elementis has been set in ink a single compendium of medicological knowledge so extensive & practicably useful as SUSPICIOUS ANATOMY Workbook No. 15: The Human Cranius. Having intrinsic value to all persons—piratical, mysterious, upright, or otherwise—The Human Cranius is a PEERLESS GEM of uncanny truth. If you are a living human, you should make frequent, unabashed forays into this field guide to your hideous secondary body—the cranius, an organ-matrix & carnival of fangs which is trying to destroy you even as you read this sentence…

From the genre-chainsawing minds of the Hollow Earth Society (Ethan Gould and, moi, Wythe Marschall) comes “the definitive guide to the horrifying world inside you”—finally available in lush, illustrated paperback!

In the tradition of John Hodgman, David Cronenberg, and H. P. Lovecraft, The Human Cranius explores an alternative anatomy at once mesmerizing and deeply unsettling. Gould and Marschall ask: What do we know about our own bodies? The answer: Very little…

In many ways, the art and human studies of modernity have given us the keys to our unconscious minds, but have left entirely to dry science (fixing plumbing, testing drugs) the workings of our bodies. What does it feel like to have guts? To face disease, age, mutation—in short, a self that is not only not whole but not even on its own side?

The SUSPICIOUS ANATOMY series seeks to address these physio–psychomological imbalances by producing, for your benefit, the entire unconscious of the body, the shadow-self, in words and elaborate images.

The official Human Cranius book launch, at Observatory Room in Brooklyn, will feature a lecture, medicological film snippets, and a live human dissection. Join us!

I think the idea here is to show you what the fonts look like laid out in newspaper headlines, &c. (And a truly lovely Q, no doubt.) But, as a potential buyer of type, I would be way more into reading the Dadaist poesy of the catalogue than ever ordering anything. Exhibits A through Zed, or approaching Zed, anyway:

That’s right, with OLD AMAZING TYPE, you can print stories about scandalous FRENCHMEN who cause MAIDEN SMILES—or tell the tales of FEARLESS YOUNG ROMANS hunting DELICIOUS ducks, with unconventionally fabricked backs…

Or go the Lovecraftian route and reveal the horrors of modernity—mechanized, occult practises; the stuff of hill-witches, complicated by disjointed phraseology and discontinuity (Lovecraft meets slam poetry meets Foucault meets W. C. Williams)—

Or just ogle NUMEROUS WOMEN—you can do that, too, with OLD AMAZING TYPE—

“Bird & club?” Whatever—you have so many options with OLD AMAZING TYPE! You can play a wacky instrument! Publish a book! Or tame a graceful beast and travel the open roads:

Or you could simply be amazed by the—

“Yo, girl—you brisk as hell…” I can hear the comeback of the saucy adjective already. (Or do I think “saucy” due to “brisket?”)

We will never know what these headlines meant to the printers who flipped past them daily. We no longer possess OLD AMAZING TYPE and so must invent its NEW SPECTACULAR equivalent, or else be satisfied with the cuttings above and their numerous physical cognates—rusted neon signs unfolding down to trash from the eaves of Gowanus warehouses and Williamsburg confectionary plants… phonography needles buried in the withered flanks of long-dead upscale haberdasher’s assistants who never could remember to look down before sitting on their settees after changing the record… curled playing cards, guides to whist… a list of copperplate fonts, its raw leather face cracking to reveal a red, card backing beneath, and some dead man’s ex libris looking down through the dark pages of the long-closed book, contemplating those NUMEROUS BRISK Dames and delicious mallards, their stockings, their stuffed livers…

Or, to say it another way: OLD AMAZING TYPE is amazing. I R inspired.

Picking up where I left off (literature-as-fractal), more on my survey of literature after the Enlightenment, the Fractal Rainbow:

What is a rainbow? To paraphrase Wikipedia:

A rainbow is an optical and meteorological phenomenon that causes a spectrum of light to appear in the sky when the Sun shines onto droplets of moisture in the Earth’s atmosphere. They take the form of a multicolored arc, with red on the outer part of the arch and violet on the inner section of the arch.

A rainbow spans a continuous spectrum of colours; the discrete bands are an artifact of human colour vision. The most commonly cited and remembered sequence, in English, is Newton’s sevenfold: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, popularly memorized the mnemonic ROY G BIV.

Rainbows inspire metaphor. Wordsworth’s 1802 poem “My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold” begins:

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!

The Newtonian deconstruction of the rainbow is said to have provoked John Keats to lament in his 1820 poem “Lamia:”

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow

In contrast to this, here’s Richard Dawkins talking about his book Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder:

My title is from Keats, who believed that Newton had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colours. Keats could hardly have been more wrong, and my aim is to guide all who are tempted by a similar view, towards the opposite conclusion. Science is, or ought to be, the inspiration for great poetry.

For my part, literature is a rainbow in composition, in content. Literature is a continuous spectrum of texts (non-arbitrary groups of signs). The discrete genres and movements within the spectrum are artifacts of human vision. Genre distinctions exist for us when we look for them. They are information we put into texts. Without us, the texts are simply texts.

The point here is: We read the texts. Reading is a verb. We compose texts by reading. Reading is not about taking information out. The information never leaves the text. You put your reading into the text, classifying it, applauding or despising it. You are in control.

But regardless of how you or I read at this moment, literature is out there, a continuous, ongoing emergence of complexity from the arbitrary world of signs—things we say, things we mean, pictures we draw, ideas we have, sounds, feelings.

These signs emerge, writer by writer, into texts that emerge, year by year and day by day, into broader bands whose total complexity is history, literature, science, language, our ability to think these thoughts, in English.

The point is: Literature is something big that we make, all the time, by reading and by writing.

Lamia, by Draper.

For the “World’s Longest Literary Remix,” I translated a portion of Horatio Alger’s Joe’s Luck: Always Wide Awake (p. 127-8) into the universe of Great Cthulhu—of Shub-Niggurath, and the fungoid crab-miners from Yuggoth (which we call “Pluto”), which crab-miners so indelicately iced poor Mr. Henry W. Akeley of the hills north of Brattleboro, VT—at least as far as “The Whisperer In Darkness” would have us believe…

Where Alger writes of bears, I confound said lumbering pickinick-basket loving mammals with/into Lovecraft’s shoggoths, which are surely some of his more signature (and more terrifying) beasts—great expandable pools of eyes, hyper-intelligent, driven insane by millions of years of servitude to other inhuman races, then by millennia of demi-torpor in the pits of Antarctica, or forgotten New England barns…

I can almost write that I’m not sure whether Alger’s libertarian vision for America or Lovecraft’s materialist/maltheist vision for the cosmos is the more terrifying—but Lovecraft, neurotic and evil as he was, always wins. There’s something in his fiction that is enduringly disturbing, no matter how often it’s tackled and lauded and dismissed and revived, the way Sappho is enduringly romantic, or A Tribe Called Quest enduringly playful–relaxing.

I just finished the masterful Against the World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq (pron. “well-beck;” the linked PDF is an old draft, to give the uninitiated a taste; I strongly recommend buying the Believer edition), which should be read and reread by anyone interested in instilling fiction with terror, esp. that Lovecraftian ur-terror, gnostic madness, that matches, then entirely out-does the vicissitudes of real life.

(Houellebecq on the ethic of the master terror-teller: “Attack the story like a radiant suicide, utter the great NO to life without weakness; then you will see a magnificent cathedral, and your senses, vectors of unutterable derangement, will map out an integral delirium that will be lost in the unnameable architecture of time.”)

Props to the GalleyCat crew for organizing the remix.

A shoggoth, more cuddly than the stories would have us imagine, and with far fewer eyes…

Rap covers, more than rock covers, allow for the voice to take full prominence. The music is the same, pure karaoke. The orchestra is empty, and the great singer alone prevails. Or, in this case, the highly adaptive Mighty Mos Def brings his inexplicable magnetism—his jazzy nonchalance? his smiley-ness in the face of everything?—to the masked world of DOOM and Danger Mouse, two stars both less street and less pop than Def, but perhaps more engaging, at least for me.

DOOM raps the way Lovecraft writes: Both could give a fuck who’s paying attention. Both deny the real, without reason, without ideology, and proceed from there to construct a new, iller real—Sur-real. Imagination somehow frees these writers to face real terrors, to use the lingo of science to question our reliance on it, our devotion toward futurity in the face of an amazingly fucked up past.

Still, it’s nice to see Mos bring DOOM back to planet earth here. The silly mask, the faux-Asian smock, the unpracticed eliding of a few key DOOM throwaways (which elision only heightens the effect of the great couplets like “[caesura] Slip like Freudian, / you first and last step to playin yourself like accordion”)—all these only add to the mystery of the original.

DOOM, like Lovecraft, creates the basis of a new mythology within his medium, a new blend or mode of story, bravado, self-deprecation, Gothic body-signs (”This one he wrote in cold blood with a toothpick”), and scathing material objectivity about, well, the human predicament—doom.

Well-written as well as immaculately said…

This spring, I was asked to teach a survey of literature from 1800 to today at Brooklyn College, but I didn’t want to teach a survey class with a boring title (nothing with the words “vista,” “perspective,” “lens,” “examining,” “investigating,” “tradition,” &c.). I also wanted an arbitrary organizing mechanism, something simple and flexible.

So I settled on a title, the Fractal Rainbow—literature as fractal, recursive; literature as a continuous spectrum of voices, blending into new voices, organized by period and style but each individual, a thousand strokes of light on the back of an eyeball—and on color-in-the-text’s-title as guiding sine qua non.

I would teach, I thought, “The Black Cat” and White Jacket and Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West and The Bluest Eye and “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Maybe The Green Child (but it proved too dang difficult to procure copies of this under-loved Surreal novel).

All this grand literary painting left me with a problem, however. At some point I would have to define in more detail what I meant by “the fractal rainbow.” Sure, it sounds like a Dream Theater concert DVD, or an anime I wouldn’t want to watch. But I like it, in part for its flatly fantastic(al) sonic quality (”frac” and the long vowels of rain, dream vowels), in part because it presents a puzzle.

Each person encountering the phrase has to test it against what they think it may mean, arriving somewhere unexpected. The phrase itself has a fractal quality of depth-plumbing leading not to an answer, but to more depths to be plumbed.

In a few posts, I’ll outline some of my ideas about the intersections of fractals, rainbows, and fiction.

To start off, what is a fractal?

These videos tell the story sans words.

For words, I paraphrase Wikipedia:

A fractal is “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is a reduced-size copy of the whole,” a property called self-similarity. Roots of mathematical interest in fractals can be traced back to the late 19th Century; however, the term “fractal” was coined by Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975 and was derived from the Latin fractus meaning “broken” or “fractured.” A mathematical fractal is based on an equation that undergoes iteration, a form of feedback based on recursion.

A fractal often has the following features:

• It has a fine structure at arbitrarily small scales: It can be analyzed at the macro, meso, and micro levels.
• It is too irregular to be easily described in traditional Euclidean geometric language.
• It is self-similar (at least approximately or stochastically).
• It has a simple and recursive definition.

>> More fractal video, the “Classic Newton.”

>> Fractal math.

Deleuze-heads out there can already guess at what I mean when I say that literature is fractal. Elements at the lowest levels reverberate or straightforwardly recur at the levels of consciousness and even at whole-text levels—via paratext, the marketing of the fiction, the criticism and controversies and biographies and hagiographies surrounding it.

Look at the whiteness of the whale: It’s discussed openly, consciously; it recurs in imagery again and again; it pallors everything over, at the word-level, with the paleness of death, so all blanks and snowblind positivisms in Moby-Dick and even retroactively in White Jacket become the wall, the wall Ahab or any gnostic must somehow strike through… the whoosh of waves, white birds’ wails, winging harpoons whanging into whaleflesh, song of wind, wide openness, the hypnotizing whiteness of the sun, which is blindness. The term and chromatic qualia and death-signifier recur differently at each level, as whole chapters, as running motifs, and then as sentences, thoughts, and then as unconscious bits.

It’s not enough to teach the meso-level story; the text should be shown to be truly fractal.

Read the review on The Outlet (Electric Literature’s blog).

Bad Nature, a novella about translating for Elvis in a Mexico City dive bars, is mesmerizing. Javier Marías is a force of compact, darkly humor. I wish I’d known about him earlier, and I wish I could read his work in Spanish.

Self-grievance aside, I’m happy Electric has both introduced me to Marías and offered to publish my thoughts on novellas, novella-writing, and novella-tasting on their blog. Channeling the spirits of Deleuze and Guattari, I approach a novella as a meditation on an incident (”What happened?”), a freeing-out-of short story which strays into philosophy while reining itself in enough to prevent a freezing-into novel.

My list of novellas and quasi-novellas is already too long to tear through before the summer’s out. My mood is, in a word, psychednessitude.

Potentially up next for the Outlet series: No Tomorrow (Point de lendemain; a long short story about sex, lies, innuendo, and levels of counter-innuendo), The Murderess (a brutal meditation on women, money, aging, and—naturally—murderizing), The Chrysalids (a post-apocalyptic American tale—perhaps too long to qualify, but too tempting to put down, now that I’ve started it—or really now that I’ve seen its future-primitive rainbow cover), and a “classic” classic by James.

In the mean time, pick up Marías (who is the king of Redonda) on the King (of whatever he was “the King” of). If so inspired, do a dance:

I love storms. I write about them sometimes, and recently I’ve been reading the innumerable horror stories of Rudyard Kipling*, whose loud, hot, ceaseless summer storms are as terrifying as ghosts.

Weather makes for fine and often surprising metaphor. Rain isn’t always sad**, and even being struck by lightning, as in Aira’s An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, isn’t always horrible, or its horror—the pain and scarring—has the potential (forgive my electrical pun) to make its victim all the more human.

My friend Stephen Aubrey (who edited Suspicious Anatomy) delves not only into what the weather can mean but also into the dangers of its interpretation in his acclaimed Dark Heart of Meteorology, which is soon going up for two more nights in New York.

If you haven’t seen Dark Heart, you should. And even if you caught the last run, I am assured by Mr. Aubrey that his play is now 50% different and 100% better***.

The relevant deetz:

June 21 & 28 • 8 p.m. • $10
Workshop Mainstage Theater • 312 W. 36th St. • 4th floor
Email assembly.theater@gmail.com for reservations

Directed by Jess Chayes • starring Richard Lovejoy
Produced by The Assembly**** & Theater of the Expendable

A précis:

Franklin Elijah White is traveling across the country on an increasingly quixotic and personal journey. Aided only by a slide projector and assorted meteorological equipment, he has a simple message: The weather is going to kill us all… Featuring a tour-de-force performance by Richard Lovejoy, The Dark Heart of Meteorology investigates the tensions between chaos and control and the intersection of the personal and the meteorological. [The Author adds—and the intersection of the romantic-ideal and the romantic-actual. Like the weather, love changes unpredictably and can set tall trees on fire...]

The show’s postcard, drawn by Suspicious Anatomy cocreator Ethan Gould:

Addenda:

*A storm of a different type hangs perpetually over Kipling’s oeuvre. But to hound the long-dead reporter for his Victorian chauvinism and occasional lack of spiritual generosity is only to miss out on so many truly lovely, harshly insightful stories—stories of spectral horses, clairvoyant Irish soldiers’ wives, midnight trips up sleepy, hundred-degree minarets, leper–temples, fated train rides, sociopathic kings, spent morphine needles, bedeviled hands of whist, and skin-tingling rains—rains that induce parasthesia, or “creepy causeless skin feeling” (thanks to my friend David for the definition of parasthesia)…

**Some are only happy when it rains. Some even choose to leave important items such as cakes out in the rain. Bizarre culinary practices aside, I love a good downpour, esp. when going to sleep.

***I made up the second number. But Mr. Aubrey did change the play significantly from its last run, and I’m an optimist.

****The Assembly = Stephen Aubrey, Edward Bauer, Ben Beckley, Jess Chayes, Nick Benacerraf and Emily Perkins.

It’s sometimes deflating to have an archnemesis who lobs only softballs. Ross Douthat, writing of a recent upsurge in popular conservative female politicos, ends with this faux-wise recommendation to us progs:

So however much heartburn Palin’s “mama grizzlies” give to those who associate feminism with the policies and prejudices of American liberalism, circa 1973, they should recognize their emergence for what it is: not a setback for the women’s movement, but a happy consequence of its victories.

Imagine for a moment that conservatives vote into power these “mama grizzlies”—women who want to make abortion illegal, fight against gay rights, and in general perpetuate the power of the moneyed 1% (white, male, Christian, decidedly non-feminist, &c.). For whom are the consequences happy? For Ross (white, male, &c.)? For conservative women who delude themselves that patriarchy offers some consolation to wives who play dutifully along?

Voting for conservative women isn’t necessarily “feminist.” Feminism implies a belief that women and men deserve the same rights. Voting for a liberal man who is actually a feminist is a better choice than voting for the socially conservative, anti-government grizzly-ladies of Mr. Douthat’s dreams. (And why vote purely on gender?—but that’s another topic.)

Calling on conservatives to vote for women because putting women in power is good for women… even though the conservative male-oriented wack American Right is not good for women… is a paradox… Just like supporting Obama because he’s level-headed in the face of adversity, then bashing him for being level-headed as soon as adversity arises. A boo and a hiss to Mr. Douthat and Mz. Maureen “Flippin-Floppin” Dowd.

Progress comes not from identity-based political chicanery (if you are like X, vote for X! even if you disagree with what X says!), nor from holding our leaders to impossible standards (be a cowboy! now be a lawyer! now be a messiah! now be a werewolf!?). True progress, if it exists, is probably slow to come and hard to recognize. I think we did recognize it when we voted for Mr. Obama. I think we recognize it increasingly when we have more prominent women on the Left and the Right. I agree with Mr. Douthat there.

But to say that hard-ass macho conservatives, whether men or women, are good for women and for our society, is to play Pinocchio:

Will it, dawg? Will it…?

“Peter Keefe, Creator of Cartoon ‘Voltron,’ Dies at 57.” An Honourable Badge Of Merit to Mr. Keefe, whose mash-up of Beast King Go-Lion and Armored Fleet Dairugger XV influenced my childhood in ways I will probably not understand until my last mortal breath is spent. Keefe brought giant man-animal-robot assemblages to the youth of America and so instigated, in his own way, the current Cyborg Era. (Or the Youtube Poop Era, you pick; see below…)

In the last week, I’ve been directed to enjoy not only Six Versions Of Blood Meridian by Zak Smith, Sean McCarthy, John Mejias, Craig Taylor, Shawn Cheng, and Matt Wiegle, but also One Drawing For Every Page Of Moby-Dick by Matt Kish. (Zak Smith also created Illustrations For Each Page Of Gravity’s Rainbow.)

Why these massifications of mass? Cormac McCarthy’s epic and Melville’s—upon which McCarthy’s is founded—are both highly visual, detailed, colorful, painterly works. Their stories (the authorized versions) are clear, even if their meanings will be debated for as long as humans are around to debate.

Ah, but here’s the genius of translation. Translation is not repetition for another audience, not performance, but re-creation, re-playing God.

Look at A Humument by Tom Phillips. Phillips admits the book out of whose guts his own visual-poetic masterpiece is painstakingly stitched is trash. He does not translate Mallock’s A Human Document, because that translation would be worse than unmoving; it would be offensive to a modern audience. Instead, he uses the field of signs of A Human Document to create an ongoing series of paintings, to tell new stories, to comment on the original, the author thereof, and the era that produced them both.

Or… he translates the book out of the book: Translates it into the painting; then out of the painting and into the multimedia product-event. A Humument has been published four times; you can buy prints of it from Phillips’s website; the book continues to grow, existing outside of time.

(Which iteration is definitive? This is the happy problem of Leaves of Grass, the bible, and all those classic unfinished texts, from The Castle to those last revisions of À la recherche du temps perdu, from Nabokov’s final emission to the unfinishable, shifting rhizomes of the internet—Wikipedia and its shadows [Uncyclopedia], any forum, the Atlas Obscura, this site…)

Two works I’ve written about here before also merge the media of “book” (word, story, argument, linearity, sound, consciousness-as-lighting-upon, abstraction and forms and modules of thoughts) and “art” (color, moment, muteness, instant all-comprehensibility, the unconscious-as-perceiving-everything, figuration and line and negative space).

What is Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini? Is it a book of “art” (a joke on us), or a “real” fictional encyclopedia (self-coherent, non-rules-breaking, so “realistic” as far as alien encyclopediae go)? Has the content of the Codex been translated from the alien, or into it? Can you articulate the distinction?

Book From The Sky by Xu Bing provides a final and I think highly molecular example. Xu made, over four years, a mesmerizing set of fake Chinese pictograms. They are technically ”devoid of semantic content” but so suggestive of content that these “pictures” of words serve as pseudo-words a la Serafini’s squiggles in the Codex, but moreso. (The Sky-words are made from elements which are real; Serafini’s squiggles can be examined at a microscopic level, but they yield if anything less meaning.)

Again, has Xu translated a book out of the infinite/infinitely strange heavens? Or has he translated human words into a higher form? Is the book so mesmerizing, for Chinese readers and non-Chinese readers alike, because it suggests we humans can never mean anything (the original title was An Analyzed Reflection of the End of This Century), or because we make meaning from everything, because we translate and transmediate everything?

I think books inspire pictures and music automatically, and vice versa. As I write, Deltron fades into Devendra Banhart, and I am surrounded by the postcards whose meanings (semantic, semiotic) I have forgotten but whose figures and negative spaces and limits and patterns call out to me to write a story about a pair of leopards who trade their spots with the clouds and so doom great blotches of sahel-grass to deadly shade…

My homies over at Electric Literature have done it again. In less than a year, they’ve become one of those sacred few “real” literary journals, pioneering how to make e-reading more friendly to literature pur sang: Their journal (5 great stories per quarter, $10 an issue) appears in print as well as on Amazon and Lulu, and via the Kindle and iPhone.

And now they’ve become the first literary publication on the iPad.

Granted, I don’t have an iPad and don’t intend to buy one. Between a Macbook and an iPhone*, I have all the computing power and mobility I want. (Probably too much: Multitasking is dangerous.) Mostly, all I want is to write about the Crusades and make inspirational hip hop graphics that are really just silly.

But the iPad app works on the iPhone and is free, so check it out.

Sayeth Scott and Andy:

Whether or not you go in for all the iPad hype, we found it’s a great way for us to feature everything Electric Literature does in one place. Our videos, audio, and imagery work together to enhance the reader’s experience without overpowering the literary content.

We designed the application from scratch, with the help of a young programmer who quit his job at Motorola and left Silicon Valley to study writing in New York.

(Read the press release for more.)

*Confession: I find reading books on the iPhone irritating. Weeks ago I started Wodehouse’s Little Nugget, purely based on its hilarious name, and have only made it a few pages in. The charm of paper is still obvious. Then again, the iPad is commandingly bigger than its telephonic cuz. More tests to be conducted, perhaps sans Wodehouse…

Regardless, props to EL for being available. However it is that we read, we should keep doing so. That Kool-Aid I drank long ago. Reading expands the world infinitely in all directions. It’s cheap. And it’s even maybe a little hip. At least, the possibility is there, humming with charge.

I may not agree with all of his reviews, but film critic A. O. Scott has some serious chops for metaphor, as illustrated in his take on Get Him to the Greek:

Mr. [Jonah] Hill, wide-eyed and anxious as ever, makes a fine visual and temperamental foil for Mr. [Russell] Brand. The two of them are like the Trylon and Perisphere of comedy. Mr. Brand, though hardly calm, is volatile in a cool, pseudo-self-aware, pointlessly articulate way, whereas Mr. Hill resembles one of those round cartoon bombs with a lighted fuse on top. He pleads, babbles, trembles, fulminates and—more than once—vomits, all with an expressiveness that is both alarming and strangely cute.

The Trylon and Perisphere are two of my favorite structures. Together, they served as the “Theme Center” of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Sayeth Wikipedia re: the Theme Center:

Connected to the 700 foot spire-shaped Trylon by what was at the time the world’s longest escalator, the Perisphere was a tremendous sphere, 180 feet in diameter. The sphere housed a diorama called “Democracity” which, in keeping with the fair’s theme “The World of Tomorrow,” depicted a utopian city-of-the-future. Democracity was viewed from above on a moving sidewalk, under movies displayed on the sides of the sphere. After exiting the Perisphere, visitors descended to ground level on the third element of the Theme Center, the Helicline, a 950-foot long spiral ramp that partially encircled the Perisphere.

Does that beat all, or does that not beat all? Good thing the world came together in 1939 and ushered in a long-lasting era of peace and democracy and wacky technological future-cities, instead of, oh I dunno, some of the worst crimes in history, a nuclear arms race, disco, &c.

But to return to Mr. Scott’s fabulous simile, yes, perhaps the rotund Mr. Hill is like the Perisphere, and the lanky-manic Mr. Brand much like the Trylon. My question is, who in Get Him to the Greek is Democracity? (Puffy?) And who the Helicline?

My further question is, why don’t we have no goddamn Trylon or Perisphere today? If Bloomberg wants a fourth term, he better get on the (peri)ball.

Naturally, I demand that—as we live not in boooring old Modernity but in POWERTHIRST-powered Fight Club- and Murakami Takashi-themed low-art/hi-art lofi wifi genetic-rhizomatic-iEverything Postmodernity—our new PostTrylon and PostPerisphere be more than meets the eye…