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Volume I Issue 6 |
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Linkage: A Travelogue [For this issue's Linkage Department, we feature Mike Nicolella's notes from an exploration of the web in all its hyperlinked glory. He begins with London, ennui and/or John Cleese, then on to Karl Marx's dark side. His journey enters the analog world for one or two "links" and then, securely back in the virtual, explores two of Marx's progeny and their mindgames before heading for outer space and art history. All in a day's surf. Ed.] In its Books section found through the link on the left of their page this site http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/ features a complaint about ennui and John Cleese written by his unauthorized biographer, and also an article about Karl Marx's bad habits. (Due to the ongoing state of change online, these articles are now found by using the Search feature of thislondon. ) The Marx piece, a review of a book, warrants some attention. He was a notorious roustabout, drunkard, and scoundrel, who took advantage of Friedrich Engels's friendship, upsetting contemporary scholars. A stop at the fourth annual Bad Writing Contest saw me offline, frustrated because I could only get through the first prize winner, having actually read some Althusser http://www.cybereditions.com/aldaily/bwc.htm. As Dr. Butler has it in those pages, we live in a brave and new world. Hmm. On a bus home I meet a friend who works for one of the more endearingly anachronistic magazines in New York City - I tell you as a friend that Lewis Lapham doesn't use a manual typewriter, but writes in longhand which he then has transcribed. My friend asks me who invented the Internet. As I understand it, I tell her, it was devised by military strategists who needed a communications system too pervasive to be eradicated. Since World War I military strategy and research apparently have been the engine of manufacturing economies. I predict that foreign policy is the most crucial and neglected issue of this election season. The promise of the technology research that has survived the arms race remains to be seen. Back online, I find the National Security Archive http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/ which has fascinating access to research and documents about international political history in the twentieth century. The site is linked to the Cold War International History Project http://cwihp.si.edu/default.htm where there is a Virtual Library with hundreds of letters, documents, and scholarly papers about international political conflict in post-WWI history. Passages about the Cuban Missile Crisis (Anatomy of a Controversy: Anatoly F. Dobrynin's Meeting with Robert F. Kennedy, Saturday, 27 October 1962, by Jim Hershberg) and about Intelligence and Deception (Spy Vs. Spy: The KGB vs. The CIA, 1960-1962, by Vladislav M. Zubok), for example, revolve around the obscure motivations of people within governments rapidly fostering tremendous information and weaponry systems. At this website appear the paranoia and terror of the Soviet military elite during the escalation of the arms race, the obvious farce of a CIA plot to make Castro's beard fall off, and a good amount of information that is quite subtly enjoyable. In Khrushchev vs. Mao: A Preliminary Sketch of the Role of Personality in the Sino-Soviet Split, William Taubman dares to ask, "But what was it about Mao that so irritated Khrushchev? Was Mao's ability to provoke him exceptional, or was Khrushchev in general easily provoked?" A fascinating tale of Mao and Nikita at the swimming pool together ensues. Summing up the situation (Mao swam laps, Krushchev needed an inner-tube and stayed in the shallow end) the author quotes a Dr. Li: "The Chairman was deliberately playing the role of emperor, treating Khrushchev like the barbarian come to pay tribute. It was a way," Mao told me on the way back to Beidaihe, "of 'sticking a needle up his ass.'" Matters escalate: Taubman writes, "When Mao tried to convince him that the USSR should respond to an American attack by retreating beyond the Urals and holding out until the Chinese entered the war, Khrushchev was not only appalled by the idea itself, he was upset that he couldn't tell whether the Chinese leader was being serious." I had no idea that this sort of thing was still going on in this century. Looking ahead to the next, a trip to Moonbeam Enterprise and The Lunar Travel Agency http://www.dreamweaverstudios.com/moonbeam/moon.htm disappoints all hopes for passage to the dark side of the moon, flag in hand http://www.northeastflags.com/ Technology innovations increasingly favor civic life and human congress. Meanwhile there seems to be an historic surplus of opinion on all things imaginable. A frequent criticism of the art world http://www.brooklynart.org/ holds that there is no new idea, no new material that breeds new techniques, no new way to defrock proselytizers. That there is no new Duchamp reinventing the wheel http://www.marcelduchamp.org/, no new Picasso digesting art history http://www.club-internet.fr/picasso/homepage.html, no new Warhol abandoning it http://www.clpgh.org/warhol/ I sense a general feeling that the wealth of communications capabilities begs for inspired application. Michael Gabriel Nicolella is obsessed with mountain biking, Tim O'Brien's fiction, and travel. |
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