Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
A Morning Slidewalk Scene
Tuesday, April 24th, 2007
This guy comes up the block in a silver jumpsuit, and he’s thinking, I could move to one of those LaGrange orbitals. Plenty of jobs up there, and all kinds of relocation bonuses…
Another guy, older, coming the other way in a plaid jacket that totally clashes with the tattoo on his face, is remembering the cliffhanger ending from last night’s episode of /Urges/, playing it over and over in his mind. He seems to be more interested in the cutting remark that Lola just made to Charles, and less in the way the elevator is falling out of control.
A woman on the expresswalk is going over what she needs to do to clinch the Callazon deal — if she drops the renewal price by 3% and moves the upgrade window from five months to four… Biv in sales owes her a favor anyway. And if she lands this one, Robertson will have to promote her. He’ll have to, no matter what he thinks about clones — the bigot.
There’s silver jumpsuit guy again, going the other way, thinking: …or one of the undersea domes, lots of jobs there, too. And they have great schools — now that I’m pregnant, I can’t just think about myself. I’m sure I’ll get used to the damp eventually. They say it doesn’t feel as claustrophobic as it really is…
A woman passes by, wondering if she should stop off at this coffee shop or wait and just grab a cup from the machine in the lobby at the office, which tastes as good, but the foam’s always a little flat. She doesn’t stop.
A man with one of those biofeedback jackets glides by, mellow and smug. He’s thinking, yeah, it was expensive, but it looks just like my own hair, and with the foil lining, I don’t have to worry about those damn headhoppers anymore. My thoughts are my own!
Latte nearly comes out of my nose at that one. Like anyone cares what he gets up to when he goes virtual, even if he is stealing company linktime to do it. And I hope his real hair didn’t look like that.
You’re right, we should move on; we’ve been here like forty-five minutes. Even though nobody’s noticed, they might.
Wait — here comes that guy in the jumpsuit again.
A Brief History of Automatic Fiction
Wednesday, April 11th, 2007
Buenos Aires, dawn; streets quiet. A little cafe on the Calle Magdalena. Languages he doesn’t know — Spanish, English, Russian — conspire at other tables. At his: oversweet frothy coffee and a stained notepad.
He lets the notepad jot.
Automatic Fiction is the most useless of the arts; that’s part of its charm. A cloud of words on the page, caravan of sentences that almost seem to be getting somewhere, then don’t. Paragraph after paragraph absorbs the mind like music on edge of hearing. Forgotten as soon as read, leaving behind only a vague afterimage. Emotional pentimento.
AutoFictioneers rig algorithms to discourse, and they go. Plots unspool and branch. Characters multiply, recombine scene by scene. Detail and dialogue are elaborated by automata run on simple rules over vast numbers of iterations. The machine generates a new tale for every reader, every reading.
Words follow words while he watches pedestrians, trees, traffic.
Student loan from gtr WALLET, venture funds want dividends and for a loan there are many requirements and points you need to follow. He wants to make useless words. In rising economies, the newly comfortable see individuality as status, and want to be and to have what’s unique. Each their own story. In fading economies, midling classes want to stay ahead by keeping up, and want their own stories, too.,
Demand.
Vulture funds want to commodify his elusive and unrepeatable words. They’ve bet he’ll profit them, so he’s gone and will go — Niigata, Des Moines, Buenos Aires, Kinshasa, Adelaide, Urumchi, anywhere that’s somewhere else. Where he can do his work and be useless.
Fund managers, or their subcontractors, approach — his preprogrammed proximity agents sing warning — he snaps the notebook shut and stands to go — and the words are gone.
And so is he.