Random google image searching (for the Forced Entertainment project in progress Void Story) led me to this material on Dance Marathons.

“Fatigue brought them to a state resembling a coma, a state which seemed to offer relief from the soreness of the day’s travail. During these episodes, contestants hallucinated, became hysterical, had delusions of persecution … acted out daily rituals: they talked to an imaginary companion, grinned vacantly, and snatched objects from the air” (Calabria)

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Looking down on switzerland as the plane lands you see all the villages laid out in the diagram form, the snow paper, the streets, houses and forests a charcoal sketch, the pencil marks equal measures of pitch black heavy, vivid and precise, the black roads long marks scratched across the snow white land, lines made (formed) of lives or lives made of (made in) lines, and, as the plane gets lower still you see the animated figures of the swiss - complete silhouettes set loose against the complex backdrop - inked figures walking white fields to the treeline, running the border of a frozen lake, stood motionless at the edge of a street like shadows newly possessed of life and uncertain what to do with it, raising a featureless hand to a featureless face... all shape. Best of all as you glide towards the runway, on a field below a dog runs a line parallel but reverse to your own trajectory, a bounding pulsing muscle darkness, the clenching, stretching legs a perfect Muybridge passing by.

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Kate wrote:

it's all on snow mode round here so it looks like Breugel out the window - bulky hunched figures in black on white.

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Mark wrote:

The flu thing lingers but largely gone.
I told N. the farm cat milo was in fact a very small alien in a cat suit with a hidden zip. I also said I caught him once with his cat suit round his ankles having a wee. He was quite annoyed that I caught him. He also has a space ship somwhere on the farm that was in need of repairs, the location is something we re going to have to work on.
all the way thru this N. is saying are you true, but are you true and staring into my eyes from 1 inch away as if proximity would filter lies better.
he also asked me what I thought about god and what exactly does he do.
we are also going to find a wizard and bring all the people in a church yard back to life.
first tho, we are going to get the wizard to bring back king harold and get that pesky arrow out of his eye because it would be very sore

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Triggered by this line: "For the presidential election, he wrote two speeches: one for a victory, one for defeat" (in the Guardian from a piece here concerning Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau) I was thinking about alternative histories, esp in relation to speech-writing. Remembered this amazing text written by William Safire in 1969 as a speech for then US President Richard Nixon, a speech which would only have been delivered in the event that Apollo 13 astronauts were deemed unsaveable and destined to perish in space. The imagined future as a source for text. Rhetorical gearings-up for events which do not come to pass, textual rehearsals, shadows of futures that do not take place. A history of the world through what did not happen.

"Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace..."