Picnic Comma Lightning: The Experience of Reality in the Twenty-First Century
Laurence Scottamazon.com
Picnic Comma Lightning: The Experience of Reality in the Twenty-First Century
The cause is given curtly, mid-sentence: ‘(picnic, lightning)’ and, after a paragraph of tender analogies about his dim recollections of her, she is never mentioned again. This bracketed tragedy is an instant shorthand for Humbert’s sensibility: his ruthless irony and black humour, a flippancy whose source is an inscrutable mix of callousness and p
... See moreLaurence Scott • Picnic Comma Lightning: The Experience of Reality in the Twenty-First Century
as science digs deeper into the innermost realities of the universe, objective truth seems to break down. The concept in quantum mechanics that particles can behave as either particles or waves, depending on how they are observed, reveals a mixed metaphor hidden at the centre of our physical world.
Laurence Scott • Picnic Comma Lightning: The Experience of Reality in the Twenty-First Century
What’s more, the ability to tell a good story is the surest sign of social success. People in their community would most ‘like to live with’ a storyteller.
Laurence Scott • Picnic Comma Lightning: The Experience of Reality in the Twenty-First Century
Aaker gives the personal example of her father convincing his children that family day-trips would really be fun by calling them ‘Special Days’, and this very name made them more memorable than poor mum’s more interesting, but unbranded outings. This ‘branding’ gives the impression of a contained experience to something that might otherwise be forg
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I’m not going to discuss VR and AR innovations beyond the irony that, as they try to replicate and improve upon reality, we’re growing more and more dubious that there is such a thing as reality to begin with.
Laurence Scott • Picnic Comma Lightning: The Experience of Reality in the Twenty-First Century
the status quo will magically dismantle itself’. Intentionally or not, the rhetoric of these movements echoes the famous activist Audre Lorde’s maxim of resistance, ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’
Laurence Scott • Picnic Comma Lightning: The Experience of Reality in the Twenty-First Century
The parentheses are an attempt at housing the unimaginable, barricading the horror from the rest of life. They make a little fortification in the middle of Humbert’s narration.
Laurence Scott • Picnic Comma Lightning: The Experience of Reality in the Twenty-First Century
in place, by stories. ‘The universe is made of stories,/not of atoms.’ So wrote the poet Muriel Rukeyser
Laurence Scott • Picnic Comma Lightning: The Experience of Reality in the Twenty-First Century
Death runs like radioactive iodine through your sense of reality, allowing this reality to be looked at in high contrast, its structures glowing.