Category: Stories, Language & Media

  • On the Sociology of Music, by Alan N. Shapiro and Chris Williams

    Here we make the first presentation of our ideas about the reality of popular music in contemporary society. But what is reality? What is the relationship between reality and mediality? Between reality and virtuality? Between reality and simulations? What is music in the context of our social system of consumer culture? These ideas about music…

  • Radical skepticism and the logic of Shakespeare’s artistry, by Robert Schneider

    Robert Schneider is the author of a very important book-length reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice called Shylock, The Roman (Pulpless.com, 2001). I find this book to be very important as a basis for investigating the relationship between Shakespeare and Star Trek as twin canonical texts of what universities call “Western Civ.” I publish…

  • Media theory: beyond the dualities of form and content, critical and enthusiastic, real and fake, by Alan N. Shapiro

    On January 26, 2012, I gave a lecture in the Speakers’ Series of the Centre for the Study of Theory, Culture and Politics at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. My topic was: “Media theory: beyond the dualities of form and content, critical and enthusiastic, real and fake.” Here are my lecture notes for this…

  • The Identity and Anxiety of Colonial Dublin in Joyce’s Dubliners, by James Shapiro

    The Identity and Anxiety of Colonial Dublin in Joyce’s Dubliners by James Shapiro (Editor’s Note: James Shapiro is a philosophy student at Boston University. He studied in Dublin during the Fall Semester 2010.) “Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely…

  • Morality in Europe Today

    “Morality in Europe today,” wrote Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, “is herd animal morality.” On April 22, 2010, there took place an extraordinary creative event in Dusseldorf, Germany – at the KIT (Kunst im Tunnel) art space – called “Morality in Europe Today” (Zeitgenössische Moralvorstellung in Europe). The event was curated and organized by Gertrud…

  • Star Trek: 20 Basic Principles

    Star Trek Basic Principle #1: Radical Uncertainty Captain’s Log, Supplemental: “We are seeing things that cannot possibly exist, yet they are undeniably real.” In its indeterminacy and paradox, the object discovers us. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle holds that the degrees of my knowing the position and speed of quantum particles are inversely proportional to each other,…

  • Halloween at Bayville Scream Park

    Bayville Scream Park, Bayville, Long Island, New York All photographs © Copyright 2010, Laura Mitchell The Car of the Past and Present Acquires Roadkill Trophies Hunt for the Mystic Gems at Tombstone Creek Bloodworth Haunted Mansion Uncle Needle’s Funhouse of Fear in 3D Temple Terror Curse of the Zombie Pirates Carnival of Wonders Evil in the…

  • Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance, by Alan N. Shapiro

    written by Alan N. Shapiro published by AVINUS Press ISBN-10: 3930064162 ISBN-13: 978-3930064168 Our society dreams of making Star Trek’s technologies real. University scientists, computer technologists and science fiction media fans strive to bring to fruition: · the transporter with quantum entanglement · interstellar space travel with faster-than-light speed · time travel with fabricated wormholes…

  • Journal Entry: The Void, by Mary Fox

    Journal Entry: The Void, by Mary Fox Introduction What follows is neither philosophical, nor academic. It is, however, both self-indulgent and self-referential, as a journal can only be. It presents no “truths” and it is peppered with inconsistencies and flaws, because I am. I began my journal in May of this year in an attempt…

  • Baudrillard’s Second Life, by René Capovin

    Baudrillard’s Second Life, by René Capovin translated from the Italian by Alan N. Shapiro (this is the draft of a translation that still needs some polishing) The Reality of Virtual Reality Fashion in the modern sense, according to E. Esposito, presupposes the becoming-autonomous of interaction, and is linked, in particular, to the communications of the mass…

  • Around the Town (a Sports Gambling story), part 1 of 4

    As they went inside Grand Central Station, Moe and Siggy saw more hurried commuters moving ahead with tunnel vision. Nobody wanted to look at the homeless. The bag ladies and street people would just put a damper on one’s day. Past the panhandlers and cup rattlers, the squeegee people, the sharks, and the Monte dealers,…

  • A Critique of the Idea of Neutral Language, by Marc Silver

    Arguing the Case: Language and Play in Argumentation by Marc Silver Over the past thirty years there has been an intense scrutiny brought to bear upon the ways in which various disciplines deploy rhetorical devices to “argue their case,” as well as to consolidate their identities and maintain them intact. In Arguing the Case: Language…

  • Nature: A Fragment, by Johann Wolfgang Goethe

    Gianna Maria Gatti: Rereading the reflections in which, at the end of the seventeenth century, Goethe voices his hymn to Nature, one acquires the sense of just how advanced is contemporary man in adding those ‘secrets’, in gaining access to that ‘forge’, in procuring those ‘powers’ which Goethe credits exclusively to the great artist Nature,…

  • The Klingon Language

    At the same time that many of the world’s languages are either out- right disappearing or imploding into deeper uncertainty and complexity, there is one new language which is currently experiencing rapid exponential growth in its number of speakers, and is the object of widespread fascination.

  • The Fate of Languages

    There are about six thousand living human languages spoken in the world today. Estimates by language catalogers of the number of existing languages vary by about 10%, since it depends upon how one defines what distinguishes a language from a dialect. The vast majority of Earth languages are in danger of imminent disappearance.