(no subject)

[pearwaldorf]

I'm of half a mind to unsubscribe from every RSS feed I have that doesn't bring me cute animals, bookshelves, or food. Everything is fucked and I don't want to hear about it anymore.

Haruki Murakami wrote an article for the NY Times about reality A and reality B, where B is the one where 9/11 never happened:

Then we can’t help but notice that the world of Reality B appears to be realer and more rational than the world of Reality A. To put it in different terms, we are living a world that has an even lower level of reality than the unreal world. What can we possibly call this if not “chaos”?

What kind of meaning can fiction have in an age like this? What kind of purpose can it serve? In an age when reality is insufficiently real, how much reality can a fictional story possess?

And then we come to the first volume of Transmetropolitan, where an intrepid journalist reports upon the atrocities committed by a monolithic government, and goes "oh shit" when it turns out that people actually care that things are happening. The real-world version of that involves "kettling" children as young as 14, where they pen them up like criminals, denying them food and water for daring to suggest that tripling school fees might, y'know, fuck their lives and deny them further opportunities in life.

Things were supposed to be more awesome than fiction, goddamn it. Where's the good mirror universe? Because there has to be a world better than this.

Comments

[silveradept]

Things are more awe-some than fiction, it's just that we've been looking at the wrong fiction. I think we're mostly the red-shifted world of Fringe, except that we have the landscape of the blue one. And we lack the whole world-collapsing problems.

[kaptainvon]

I sometimes wonder if it's always been like that, and it's only recently that we've thought about narrative enough to realise.

I also sometimes wonder if rationality is real.

Hail Eris... I guess.

[goodconceited.livejournal.com]

I am really mostly in a state of stunned silence and don't really have much to say on this, as I think I need a few to absorb it all, but I wanted to say thank you for sharing.

A happy dog icon is the closest thing I have to the cute animal RSS feed, but there y'go.