[a website for the Editor and Narrator of the Circo del Herrero series]
That time we explained the Automatons in THE AUTOMATION, 2014.
“In ancient mythology, Hephaestus/Vulcan created robotic helpmates of animal, human, and monster form. Daedalus created some too, but they were never as dope-ass divine, probably. Probably.
Anyways, there were a few – about ten – of such god-forged creations that didn’t make it into classical mythology (they’re old, but not THAT old). That’s why there’s a new modern epic devoted to them here“.
“The thing is, for all its conceptual complexity — for all of the surprise twists and third-act reversals, for all of the high-concept premises and alarming escalations, Black Mirror’s messages are usually pretty simple. Cell phones? Bad. Reality shows? Bad. Social media? Really bad. Politics as entertainment? Definitely bad, but not ultimately as disturbing as entertainment-style justice. Oh, sure, the setup and the execution of those ideas is impressive, but the show’s primary crutch is too often that it uses thought-provoking and fascinating foundations in order to reach the simplest, most alarmist possible conclusion about a variety of technological innovations.
…
In general, Black Mirror’s box of magic tricks is just that — a set of admittedly impressive narrative tricks that don’t result in much of substance.” [Via]
#TwilightZoneIsStillNumberOne
[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name – singular) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, goodreads, and Vulcan’s shit list.]
“Latin literature was already self-conscious when Ennius described Homer appearing to him in a dream and declaring that his soul was now in Ennius’ body… And indeed Latin authors produced from their self-awareness some of their most fascinating effects. There is a charm in the sense of belatedness, the interplay of tradition and the original talent, an author’s exploration of his relationship with the literature of the past. But this laid trap into which some Roman writers, and rather more modern scholars, were to fall: there was a risk of literature becoming more about literature than about life, and even of being pleased when that occurred. We should perhaps be surprised that so many Latin writers succeed in overcoming that danger. ” – Classical Literature, Richard Jenkyns, 2016.
“So the Iliad is not in fact the story of the Trojan War, but of one short episode within its ten-year length. After Homer, the work was divided into twenty-four books. Books 2 and 23 of the Iliad cover a period of only three days; the first and last books extend the whole action to a few weeks. Such expansiveness seem to make Wagner feel terse; yet Matthew Arnold, poet and critic, famously described Homer as ’eminently rapid’. This is true in two senses. Although the grand narrative unfolds across an immense distance, the battle scenes are multiplicity of small incidents; there is no lingering. The speeches too are fast and forceful; the longest of them, Achilles’ explosion in Book 9, is furious in its pace….” – Classical Literature, Richard Jenkyns, 2016.
‘Ever since Aestheticism’s mantra of art for art’s sake, capital-A Art has kept its distance from the taint of money, even though they have always been attached by what the critic Clement Greenberg once called “an umbilical cord of gold.” The canonization of an artistic masterpiece often goes hand in hand with its removal as a commodity from the market. In the hallowed halls of a national museum, artworks become sacred and exceptional. We want to believe that something as universally appreciated as a Michelangelo or as privately meaningful as a family heirloom is “priceless,” but the market is as blind to aesthetics as it is to sentimental value.’ [Via]
