The BBC has posted a special section regarding the 200th anniversary of Britain’s abolition of the slave trade, to be commemorated this Sunday, March 25th:
Nigerian poet Tolu Ogunlesi has written a poem for the BBC’s Weekend Network Africa programme to commemorate the passing of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act.
They are taking poetry submissions here.
A selection of them will be posted below and broadcast on BBC Network Africa.
I thought the one by Bill Taunton was pretty clever.
Here’s a brilliant concept that puts a light-emitting computer-controlled projector to display images on the dark tunnel walls of a subway. Instead of staring at the empty space, passengers can watch movies of fish swimming, sharks, and other nature scenes. I’m sure someone will want to use this concept to monetize the space but in the meantime it raises all sorts of interesting security and illustrative/aesthetic questions.
Moving Canvas, Project Parasite (35MB mov)
Just in case (pun intended) you don’t want to watch the movie, here’s a brief (pun intended, again!) overview of the project.
1) the artist(s) assemble a simple mobile projector:
2) they mount it conspicuously to a subway car:
3) the box displays cool images into the dark:
4) the box is removed:
They did do some basic phrases, but it’s hard to tell if there was any poetry…
Perhaps for a strictly practical application they could project a city map with the subway’s current progress, or at least the upcoming station name.
Someone also just pointed out to me that this is similar to work done in the US by Improv Everywhere.
I love this description of poetry by the famous Science Fiction author Dan Simmons:
I don’t think I’ve ever seen it commented on, but there’s a great affinity between writing poetry and SF. As with poetry, quality speculative fiction demands great skill with language and invites linguistic invention. As with poetry, good SF delves deep into metaphor while sliding lightly on the surface of its own joy of telling. As with poetry, quality SF demands a much greater collaboration on the part of the reader — a greater sensitivity to detail, word-meaning, texture, and nuance, as well as a greater involvement in ferreting out meaning.
My favorite commentator on things literary — Harold Bloom — has said that the common element to all great literature, from Homer and Shakespeare and Goethe through Emily Dickinson to Mark Twain — is an ineffable quality of “strangeness.” By that he doesn’t mean deliberate post-modern weirdness or Ken Kesey wonkiness, but rather an indescribable, out-of-its-own-time, deep-to-the-literary-marrow differentness that great prose and poetry carries in itself and conveys to successive generations. It tends to mix the sacred and the profane, the profound and the entertaining, in a way that helps us to redefine ourselves and our cultures. The most ambitious of speculative fiction has a taste of that delicious strangeness, for both the writer and the reader.
Yeah, Bloom is definitely an insightful thinker on things literary. I often wonder about his hypothesis that the bible was just inspired writing and was never meant to be the basis for dogma.
Number two has been discovered! Their main page now reads:
Only two remote holes in the default install, in more than 10 years!
According to Core it seems like you have to be on the same network or on IPv6 to exploit the hole, so the slow adoption of IPv6 actually works in their favor to mitigate the risk. A patch has been released already and there is also a workaround.