When some cactuses die, they leave intricate brittle skeletons like these behind on the desert landscape. Formerly covered in lush cactusflowers and strands of sinew and spine, they’re nothing now but hollow skeletons of their former selves — hollow, and full of holes.In this way, we’re no different from cactuses. We strand our personalities over the most brittle of psychological structures, we spin stories of our selves over the hollow inner emptiness within us, we cultivate our cactusflowery fictions as if to hide from that existential emptiness — because without them, who are we? Who are we without our fictions, and who are you? What are your own fictions, what are the tales you tell and retell of yourself, the fictions which become stronger with every retelling, the fictions which become you?It’s all fiction, when it comes down to it. And if it’s all fiction, then so is any prescriptive spelling by which ‘cactuses’ ought to be ‘cacti’.

When some cactuses die, they leave intricate brittle skeletons like these behind on the desert landscape. Formerly covered in lush cactusflowers and strands of sinew and spine, they’re nothing now but hollow skeletons of their former selves — hollow, and full of holes.In this way, we’re no different from cactuses. We strand our personalities over the most brittle of psychological structures, we spin stories of our selves over the hollow inner emptiness within us, we cultivate our cactusflowery fictions as if to hide from that existential emptiness — because without them, who are we? Who are we without our fictions, and who are you? What are your own fictions, what are the tales you tell and retell of yourself, the fictions which become stronger with every retelling, the fictions which become you?It’s all fiction, when it comes down to it. And if it’s all fiction, then so is any prescriptive spelling by which ‘cactuses’ ought to be ‘cacti’.

Image from an ad in National Geographic magazine, October 1940:

A man of smallish stature, Andy Ish is the kind of guy who would keep tumbleweeds as pets — so it’s something of a surprise that he comes from Texas. There’s something of a regional rivalry between New Mexico and Texas — half of New Mexico becomes Texas’s playground in summer, when Texans come to vacation in the mountain highlands here — and there are those in New Mexico who complain of the Texans, who complain of the stench of cattle across the border, the grizzlestench smell of Texas. But the image of this map pretty-damn-accurately reflects a Texan’s Texas-sized view of the world — Texas, with it’s Texas-sized tits and fries!Personally, I’d like to think that the magnifying glass in this image is being to sizzle and scorch Texas like it’s just an innocent ant under a kid’s magnifying glass, magnifrying it.

Image from an ad in National Geographic magazine, October 1940:

A man of smallish stature, Andy Ish is the kind of guy who would keep tumbleweeds as pets — so it’s something of a surprise that he comes from Texas. There’s something of a regional rivalry between New Mexico and Texas — half of New Mexico becomes Texas’s playground in summer, when Texans come to vacation in the mountain highlands here — and there are those in New Mexico who complain of the Texans, who complain of the stench of cattle across the border, the grizzlestench smell of Texas. But the image of this map pretty-damn-accurately reflects a Texan’s Texas-sized view of the world — Texas, with it’s Texas-sized tits and fries!Personally, I’d like to think that the magnifying glass in this image is being to sizzle and scorch Texas like it’s just an innocent ant under a kid’s magnifying glass, magnifrying it.

Image from A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System: Switching Technology (1925-1975):

Imagine such a cultural theorist in the desert, with his AT&T equipment — vintage 1930s equipment, we’re talking analog, not digital — imagine some such experiment where he’s measuring some constant related to the West itself. Imagine this cultural theorist with his Walter Benjamin-style mustache, perched over his equipment, like he’s about to come to some grand cultural conclusion. But then you realize that he’s a cultural theorist measuring this cultural constant in the desert, someplace free of any human habitation, free of even the tumbleweeds. It’s existential that way, and in the final reductive analysis, it isn’t even the West which he’s measuring, it isn’t even certain that it’s possible to measure the West in any vintage cutting-edge experiment of the sort Michelson & Morley once used to disprove the ether. Existentially and otherwise, it’s just a man in the desert.

Image from A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System: Switching Technology (1925-1975):

Imagine such a cultural theorist in the desert, with his AT&T equipment — vintage 1930s equipment, we’re talking analog, not digital — imagine some such experiment where he’s measuring some constant related to the West itself. Imagine this cultural theorist with his Walter Benjamin-style mustache, perched over his equipment, like he’s about to come to some grand cultural conclusion. But then you realize that he’s a cultural theorist measuring this cultural constant in the desert, someplace free of any human habitation, free of even the tumbleweeds. It’s existential that way, and in the final reductive analysis, it isn’t even the West which he’s measuring, it isn’t even certain that it’s possible to measure the West in any vintage cutting-edge experiment of the sort Michelson & Morley once used to disprove the ether. Existentially and otherwise, it’s just a man in the desert.

Image from Astounding Stories, November 1937, from the story “Queen of the Skies”:

How to explain the 1930s preoccupation with cities in the sky? Looking back on the literature at the time, you would think that people got together in their backyards with their amateur telescopes and looked for such cities in orbit above, eternal cities with cloud pavilions and Flash Gordon spaceship finials in the radium-wrought sunlight above. Why this 1930s fascination with cities in the sky? Perhaps it had something to do with the total environment of the 1930s — why for example would Piet Zwart or other industrial designers of the era put speeding aeroplanes on cigarette boxes or beer bottles? It was the 1930s, after all! An era of optimal-esperant futurism when it wasn’t unreasonable for there to be cities in the sky after all, especially when you consider that the Great Depression and Dust Bowl-era winds raged on the earth below.

Image from Astounding Stories, November 1937, from the story “Queen of the Skies”:

How to explain the 1930s preoccupation with cities in the sky? Looking back on the literature at the time, you would think that people got together in their backyards with their amateur telescopes and looked for such cities in orbit above, eternal cities with cloud pavilions and Flash Gordon spaceship finials in the radium-wrought sunlight above. Why this 1930s fascination with cities in the sky? Perhaps it had something to do with the total environment of the 1930s — why for example would Piet Zwart or other industrial designers of the era put speeding aeroplanes on cigarette boxes or beer bottles? It was the 1930s, after all! An era of optimal-esperant futurism when it wasn’t unreasonable for there to be cities in the sky after all, especially when you consider that the Great Depression and Dust Bowl-era winds raged on the earth below.

The base illustration in this collage comes from the Hypnerotomachia of Poliphilo, a Renaissance text with many such images of temples and pyramids of absurd heights, shapes, and sizes. Likewise, the idea of a Ka Transmitter is equally absurd — a Ka Transmitter, as Ferris imagines it, being a kind of miles-tall tower capable of broadcasting his thoughts to the stars using vintage cutting-edge 1930s technology. But don’t all men and women incline to the stars at night, on their deathbeds? Don’t we all incline to the fantasy of outliving our weak chemical minds of meat & gristle and our apeshit-stuttering bodies & somehow lofting into space, surviving as beings of pure thought in the stars? No? Well, then give Ferris this fantasy at least. And you have to admit, while you’re fantasizing, that the New Mexican landscape would look a lot more epic if it were covered in lots of miles-high Ka Transmitters!The Hypnerotomachia of Poliphilo was innovative in its use of combining ancient and modern motifs in its illustrations — and so, it’s maybe fitting that I’ve collaged some AT&T schematics and a radio’s vacuum tube onto the illustration to suggest some strange neo-1930s science by which a man might broadcast his thoughts to the stars. Imagine that his thoughts are broadcast on a radio signal, heterodyned with that signal in the same way that illustrations from the Hypnerotomachia have ancient and modern motifs combined together. I call this heterodyning kind of combining “hypnotrophing” in Chapter 9. As for the use of the word “Ka”, it comes from Egyptian mythology; the Egyptians believed every person had a “Ka” or a double, and so they would make offerings in their funerary rites for a deceased person’s Ka as well. Chapter 9 has a funerary tone, so it’s only appropriate.Damn, but what is this? Deathbeds? Funerary rites? Apeshit-stuttering bodies? Weren’t there supposed to be more burritos and cowboys saying “Thanks, kemosabe” in The Western?

The base illustration in this collage comes from the Hypnerotomachia of Poliphilo, a Renaissance text with many such images of temples and pyramids of absurd heights, shapes, and sizes. Likewise, the idea of a Ka Transmitter is equally absurd — a Ka Transmitter, as Ferris imagines it, being a kind of miles-tall tower capable of broadcasting his thoughts to the stars using vintage cutting-edge 1930s technology. But don’t all men and women incline to the stars at night, on their deathbeds? Don’t we all incline to the fantasy of outliving our weak chemical minds of meat & gristle and our apeshit-stuttering bodies & somehow lofting into space, surviving as beings of pure thought in the stars? No? Well, then give Ferris this fantasy at least. And you have to admit, while you’re fantasizing, that the New Mexican landscape would look a lot more epic if it were covered in lots of miles-high Ka Transmitters!The Hypnerotomachia of Poliphilo was innovative in its use of combining ancient and modern motifs in its illustrations — and so, it’s maybe fitting that I’ve collaged some AT&T schematics and a radio’s vacuum tube onto the illustration to suggest some strange neo-1930s science by which a man might broadcast his thoughts to the stars. Imagine that his thoughts are broadcast on a radio signal, heterodyned with that signal in the same way that illustrations from the Hypnerotomachia have ancient and modern motifs combined together. I call this heterodyning kind of combining “hypnotrophing” in Chapter 9. As for the use of the word “Ka”, it comes from Egyptian mythology; the Egyptians believed every person had a “Ka” or a double, and so they would make offerings in their funerary rites for a deceased person’s Ka as well. Chapter 9 has a funerary tone, so it’s only appropriate.Damn, but what is this? Deathbeds? Funerary rites? Apeshit-stuttering bodies? Weren’t there supposed to be more burritos and cowboys saying “Thanks, kemosabe” in The Western?