Game: Ask the Person Below You

[Pompey Bum]

It's hard to say. There is a Jackson Pollack at the Boston MFA called "Troubled Queen" that I am very fond of. But it's probably at my limit for real appreciation. (I don't think I would have cared for "Totally Bonkers Queen"). But a limit for appreciation is not the same as a limit for tolerance. I smile patiently a lot of conceptual art without really having much use for it. A few years ago, an art student walked through an airport with a fake bomb strapped to her (I think it was) chest as a conceptual art project. That crossed a line for me.

Should Stalinist-era art be conserved?

[Lykren]

Why not, maybe we'll come to like some of it.

I have a friend who is sexually aroused by really avant garde theater and installation pieces.

Do you think science is approaching the truth?

[Pike Bishop]

Science is always approaching the physical truth and always proving itself insufficient for determining ethical and aesthetic truth.

What will be the next new genre of literature? Will it build on or break away from postmodern literature?

[Lykren]

I think it'll confuse (purposefully) the notions of building on and breaking away with former traditions. Though maybe that's just called postmodernism. I don't know, the label 'postmodernism' is either too vague or I really don't get it.

If science is always approaching the physical truth, but never, by implication, reaching it, how can we say it's even approaching it? Like what is the reference point it is approaching but never reaching.

[Clopin]

I... don't know?

Given the enormous market demand when do you think we will see safe and reliable products, treatments or surgeries to;

1. Enlarge penises
2. Regrow hair
3. Lose weight without dieting or exercising

?

[Lykren]

I don't know either, but I want to. I think its approach is an illusion but I would waver if you pinned me down.

1. 2100
2. 2040
3. 2025

Is androgyny cool or sexy?

[North Star]

We can never say that science has 'reached its goal', but when scientists find new things, our scientific knowledge increases. The reference point would be a state where mankind knows everything about all matter that makes up our universe, how it interacts, and how worlds and living things have developed, and exactly how they work. And what was before the Big Bang. Oh, and man will have mastered cold fusion

What will happen to popular and art music in the next 20 years?



E: No.

[Lykren]

Nothing much, besides ceaseless rapid change.

Do you listen to music while reading?

[Pike Bishop]

I think it'll confuse (purposefully) the notions of building on and breaking away with former traditions. Though maybe that's just called postmodernism. I don't know, the label 'postmodernism' is either too vague or I really don't get it.

If science is always approaching the physical truth, but never, by implication, reaching it, how can we say it's even approaching it? Like what is the reference point it is approaching but never reaching.

We can say we're approaching it because the universe is spatially and temporally finite and we learn more about that finitude every day...bit by bit it erases the Kantian sublime. As to postmodernism; it's not a vague concept, though it is often misunderstood. It's a branch of modernist literature that particularly resists narrative, character, or thematic closure. An excellent Top Ten Primer would be:

Gravity's Rainbow, New York Trilogy, Beloved, Neuromancer, Barthelme's The Dead Father, McCarthy's The Crossing, O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away, Ozick's The Messiah of Stockholm, Stephenson's Snow Crash, and most Robbe-Grillet novels.

If you want to read scholarly texts on the subject: McHale's Postmodernist Fiction, and Constructing Postmodernism, as well as Linda Hutcheon's A Poetics of Postmodernism are all excellent.

[Pike Bishop]

Nothing much, besides ceaseless rapid change.

Do you listen to music while reading?

All the time

What is the best film adaptation of a novel you have enjoyed?

[Lykren]

You are clearly more learned than I. But I still don't see how 'resists closure' is not part of a larger movement to merely 're-define closure.' That is, wouldn't the patterns of non-closure become a form of closure? It seems to me it is the world that resists closure, and we who struggle to adapt.

the universe is spatially and temporally finite

Sorry to ask dumb questions, but how can one know this?

edit: Solaris, Tarkovsky's version.

[North Star]

Nothing much, besides ceaseless rapid change.

Do you listen to music while reading?

Yes, although it depends on what I'm reading - and what I'm listening. If either requires more concentration, then no.

[Pike Bishop]

You are clearly more learned than I. But I still don't see how 'resists closure' is not part of a larger movement to merely 're-define closure.' That is, wouldn't the patterns of non-closure become a form of closure? It seems to me it is the world that resists closure, and we who struggle to adapt.

No, resisting closure is not re-defining closure or else everything would become closure and nothing closure. The term would become redundant and useless.

[North Star]

We can say we're approaching it because the universe is spatially and temporally finite and we learn more about that finitude every day...bit by bit it erases the Kantian sublime.

Except space is expanding. But, in any case, the universe isn't writing any new laws.

[Lykren]

No, resisting closure is not re-defining closure or else everything would become closure and nothing closure. The term would become redundant and useless.

I think I was unclear, sorry. I meant, regardless of what the artist perceives their intent to be, aren't they subject to an impulse towards order and finality? So that the apparent tendency to reject closure is rather an unconscious decision to follow (adapt to) the world's curve and change?