Interesting note over at Stan Apps' blog about image and reification in Lukacs.

"Image" is actually central to Lukacs' literary criticism, in that the issue of realism and artist reflection, a la Hamlet, is described as an "image." He does embrace that visual metaphor. In his Marxist aesthetics, reification in realism is the result of a certain kind of mirroring, specifically realism that doesn’t engage the social and economic processes behind the details, that doesn't have any kind of dialectic behind it. He consistently returns to the visual language when talking about what he thinks the realism of dialectical materialism should be in art: the never ending dialectic of appearance and reality, often approached as confronting contradictions. He actually says that fantastic writing does this quite effectively and that the free play of imagination and unrestrained fantasy are fully compatible with Marxist ideas of "realism". He's totally into E.T.A. Hoffmann and the fantastical writings of Balzac.

Solemnity is a sign of fraud.

ask the audience / / lynch mob

World War IV lasted five days....

Why does the image of Carol Channing fill me with dread?

The idea that poetry is good for a person & should be choked down like a horse pill is ridiculous.

Tried to fry an egg, broke the yoke no joke.

The Ted Williams cryogenic decapitation tuna fish baseball incident is strangely close to the plot of Phillip K. Dick's Ubik... if you could still talk to the frozen head that is.

It also brings to mind the ancient tradition of preserving the severed head of the tribe leader in Jullian Jaynes' The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which is closer in some ways to the Phillip K. Dick concept of the continuation of consciousness and communication after death, with the hallucinated voice from the king's head telling you what to do.

The fact that the "bat" was actually a wrench naturally calls to mind Chtcheglov's 1953 Fourmulary for a New Urbanism:

We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That’s lost. We know how to read every promise in faces — the latest stage of morphology. The poetry of the billboards lasted twenty years. We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards, the latest state of humor and poetry.

So it must be that in this incident the potential for an expanded definition -- a potentially revolutionary super-proletariat that would include anyone who is bored -- would find a certain kind of illustration. It certainly demonstrates the lengths one has to go to overcome boredom -- which now necessitates batting practice with the frozen, decapitated heads of major baseball figures.

Turns out that Flarf makes you smarter.