"I lost my language. Now I have to start over. Beep beep. Make a sound. Any sound. Is that me? I think so. I'll get the hang of this. In a century or so. Always feels like the first time. Am I right?"
US: amazon.com/dp/B0GWDY5QLL
UK: amazon.co.uk/dp/B0GWDY5QLL
FR: amazon.fr/dp/B0GWDY5QLL
A short pulp(ish) microfiction (1338 words) called THE MACHINE LORDS OF PRAGUE is a sort of test flight for a return to plot-driven (?) SF... we'll see how long this phase lasts 🤣... NETFLIX, DM if interested... it is the story of errant knight Sir Mojmír in deep space
www.amazon.com/dp/B0GLQKVPLQ
A new volume of lo-fi anti-memoir from @rgvasicek.bsky.social !
Yes... the computer... the computer is open... buzzing... thinking...
UK: www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0GDPCQQD9
ES: www.amazon.es/dp/B0GDPCQQD9
US: www.amazon.com/dp/B0GDPCQQD9
FR: www.amazon.fr/dp/B0GDPCQQD9
DE: www.amazon.de/dp/B0GDPCQQD9
PL: www.amazon.pl/dp/B0GDPCQQD9
Further adventures in lo-fi samizdat in 2K26...
I wander from Vinohrady into neighboring Žižkov. The novelist in Prague is a dangerous creature. No morality. No allegiance. A hooligan. A vampire of the underground. I lurk at the center of a labyrinth.
www.amazon.com/dp/B0GDPCQQD9
If you think the novel is dead... it really really is. Sort of.
"In this constellation, the novel survives not as a living organism but as a machine-for-the-undead."
David Vichnar on "Necromodernist Architectures in Contemporary Writing" in 3:AM mag
www.3ammagazine.com/3am/necromod...
“the billions of words that buzzed in my ears rarely unsettled me by what people wanted them to mean; as to all those words I myself uttered to others, I always felt they were distinct from my thinking—for they became unchanging.”
If you didn't think THE COMBINATIONS was difficult enough in English, the Czech translation is reputedly coming soon (only 10 years in the making!)
"What is a diary in this century? An archive of live combat with the self? Aphorisms? Notations? Small detonations of clarity? A mind making a flank attack on its own habits?"
expatpress.com/my-affair-wi...
"The collision of vasicek's increasingly desperate human voice with siratori's cold, inhuman code enacts the Beckettian themes of linguistic failure, entropy, and the struggle for meaning against aphasic silence..."
note.com/kenjisirator...
Pretty soon you are paying a hundred bucks a month to carry around a telephone.
Freedom, they call it.
You pay to be surveilled.
We never escape the Iron Curtain.
Not really.
Agents everywhere…
r.g. vašíček [ @rgvasicek.bsky.social ]
machine elf
sweatdrenchedpress.webador.co.uk/order-1/mach...
The fictions of Nobel laureate László Krasznahorkai are the latest in a rich tradition of allegorical speculation that can be traced back to the ruined visions of Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett.
László Krasznahorkai’s universe | Jared Marcel Pollen
engelsbergideas.com/notebook/las...
The Prague Microfestival recently uploaded videos of poetry performances from October 2K24 & 2K23 by Jaromír Typlt & Marek Torčík & Ansgar Allen & Dirk Huelstrunk & Martin Piekar & Julie Morissy & Aifric Mac Aodha & R.G. Vasicek & Radoslaw Jurzak & Filip Klega & Ondřej Hrabal & Tobias Ryan & more!
Excerpts from the Prague underground... 404 ERROR & AUGENBLICK... the portal opens... the future infiltrates...
It was unscripted.
It was messy.
It was loud.
It was dark.
It was sexual.
It was happening all in the moment.
It is a refuge and a hub.
The whole space develops a character of its own…
A Meaning in Every Room
a video document of Prague Microfestival 2024
www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXfs...
A super lo-fi samizdat thanks to Tom Bowden for arrogantly recommending the 2K25 Prague-NYC quartet!
i am a machine poet
EDGE-OF-THE-CONSTRUCT
WRITER
AMERIKA: A SORT OF PSEUDOREALITY
www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/202...
Late Summer Fun Reading! Mostly Everything, plus Loosened Death Rays! Walking with the Wind! The Ways of Paradise! Machine Poetry!
@mcsweeneys.net @fantagraphics.bsky.social @rgvasicek.bsky.social @archipelagobooks.bsky.social @fitzcarraldoeds.bsky.social www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/202...
Something is in the pipeline...
youtube.com/clip/UgkxMNR...
Q. & A. with RGV about “lo-fi samizdat” & the Prague underground as Tom Bowden arrogantly recommends AUGENBLICK!
www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/202...
"This 'parentless book,' whose protagonist, seemingly both a ghost in the machine and a body of living matter, is in the process of writing a (non)book, presumably, the very book we are given to read, is a direct product of an age where parents have been superseded by algorithms...." -Ondřej Polák
The Big Blow-up left huge radioactive sores (the graves of cities) all over the face of the Earth. In time, from some of the women who had been near these shunned areas, the first totally hairless babies began to be born: "Baldies" with a new and terrifying difference: the Baldies were telepathic!
Who knew?... Giamatti & Colbert know a thing or 2 about SF... Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Henry Kuttner, A.E. van Vogt, L. Sprague de Camp, Jack Vance, & Cordwainer Smith
![I've Never Read a Book Like Crash [100 Book Challenge #3-4]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:o2hsdg7eevkr3wgn6dacv6it/bafkreiar42yakcxumm66b57s3tmsox6j5knkgretcryh2xqkuqb4o3cpcy)
"For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.”
-J.G. Ballard, Crash
Bookpilled gets crushed by CRASH 🚗🚗🚗
youtu.be/1LsjOAOaohE?...
"If literature once promised transcendence, ROBOT ROBOT offers immanence to collapse. The writer becomes a vector. The text, a contaminated zone. The reader, a laboratory rat in a semiotics. 'We are forgetting machines.'" -Kenji Siratori
Kenji Siratori on ROBOT ROBOT: “The fucking is a platform. The utterances that occur mid-act—"Do you like that?" "Come & become"—are not speech acts in the classical sense but executable mood-tags within a linguistic operating system."
US: amazon.com/dp/B0CZLD3VVC
UK: amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CZLD3VVC
"Since the end of the Cold War, Sovietisation has been displaced by Americanisation on a truly global scale (& anyone who quibbles with that need only speak the sacred word “tariff” aloud thrice to summon the evil genie from its ether)."
🤟⚡️🔥✨
