NINE - NOTHING IS HIDDEN - ONLY UNDISCOVERED

Published by Reblogs - Credits in Posts,


I immediately continued browsing that entire 302.2 folder. Most were empty other than 302.201, which I'll get back to, but when I got to 302.23 I realized I had struck gold. In this directory, which, if I recall correctly is categorized hierarchically like this:

Social Sciences > Social Interaction > Communication Media (Means of communication) > Motion pictures, radio, television.
(I remind you of my lifelong obsession with the Dewey system since that wonderful day in fifth grade when I first heard of it.)

This directory had several Gigabytes of content, too much to even summarize, but I'll tell you this much right off the bat: the things Emma had placed there were obviously central to some aspect of her project.
I can give you a few examples, but this is not in any particular order of amazingness, because every single one of these titles (mostly eBooks, PDF's and text documents, but in some instances, feature-length videos, pictures, film analysis focused on some very very specific shot in some film that had ever only been seen by maybe 114 people ever) I like . I like that very much. Details matter. Here are some of my delightful finds in this directory. There are literally thousands of ebooks in this directory. A random sampling of my favorites, by the titles, anyway:

    • The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event
    • Living with Star Trek: American Culture and the Star Trek Universe by Lincoln Geraghty
    • The Sound Bite Society: Television and the American Mind by Jeffrey Scheuer
    • The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century by Marshall McLuhan
    • Format & Anxiety: Paul Goodman Critiques the Media by Paul Goodman
    • Transmission: Theory and Practice for a New Television Aesthetics by Peter D'Agostino
    • McLuhan and Baudrillard : the masters of implosion
    • The Ideological Octopus by Justin Lewis
    • The Play Theory of Mass Communication by William Stephenson
    • What Philosophy Wants from Images by David Norman Rodowick
    • The Place of the Audience: Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption by Mark Jancovich
    • The Semiotics of Subtitling by Zoé De Linde
    • The Evil Eye. The Unacceptable Face of Television. by Guy Lyon Playfair
    • Prime Time Law Enforcement: Crime Show Viewing and Attitudes Toward Justice System by James M. Carlson
    • Gutenberg's Fingerprint: Paper, Pixels and the Lasting Impression of Books by Merilyn Simonds
    • The Greek media in World War I and its aftermath by Georgia Eglezou
    • Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies by Noam Chomsky
    • Dictionary of Symbolism: Cultural Icons and the Meanings Behind Them by Hans Biedermann
    • Fuck This Book by Bodhi Oser
    • Les nouveaux chiens de garde by Serge Halimi

There was also a txt file titled Mchluhan_excerpt.txt so I gather this is from some Marshall McLuhan text. Here it is verbatim:
" . . . Whereas they are trying to talk about the perception of non-literate people in terms of literate experience, Professor von Bekesy chooses to begin his discussion of acoustical space on its own terms. As one proficient in auditory spaces, he is keenly aware of the difficulty of talking about the "space of hearing."
Interesting.
I keep browsing the 302.2 directory, and there under 302.23 I see one that I can't help but immediately open. When I clicked on it, I did notice it had a strange icon, but it loaded as a normal pdf. It was called 'Charlie - The Man Who Lied to His Laptop'. When I close the document after a few minutes of browsing The screen turns blue with a yellow sigil in the center -- very bright light -- and the computer shuts down. I mentioned that strange icon because, well, as it turns out, it's an executable file.
A virus? No, Emma wouldn't ever let that happen. She's way too scrupulous for that.
I turn it back on and after it boots up, a video begins to play on the screen. It's about five minutes, and it begins with a shot of Emma, looking stern, but dressed up in corporate cosplay of some kind. But after a few seconds of holding that facial expression, Emma laughs, smiles and says,

"Charlie! If you're watching this video, you have proven yourself!
There were only three possible files that you could have clicked on to bring you to a message from me. You found the most obvious one, but it was still good work. You'll need to find the other two. I'll give you a clue to help you get started:
"Sometimes when you need it the most
You'll receive crucial help from your host
but this one was just for your training;
two more hidden files are remaining.
Your task is to find them, THEN boast.
"In a moment or two I'll reboot
You're outstanding, my Little Recruit!
Just follow your mind
Imagine, and find
A cognitive map of your route.
"Finitione , meus discipulus
pay attention to detail; be scrupulous.
Esoteric's not "hidden";
there's no knowledge forbidden
to the two crystal balls of Humunculus."
What. The Fuck. Was that? All of that. What just even happened?

That whole experience was quite an emotional roller coaster, and I had to try and reprocess what all just happened to make sense of it. Had Emma baited me? Obviously so, but I know and trust her enough to delight in the journey she is taking me on. I feel pretty certain that there will be some moral lesson, or new skill, or some personal growth she's going to try to lead me through, and even though that's predictable, what's NOT predictable is exactly what it is that I'll be learning from all of this. That in itself is what makes this interesting to me.
Suddenly the movie Adaptation comes to mind; the film by Charlie Kaufman. At first he endeavors to write a story that has, essentially, no plot. He proposes his idea of a plotless story because "nothing happens" in the world that Kaufman's Charlie (not me) imagines for this non-story.
Responding after a pause, the seminar's presenter, Robert McKee, an expert screenwriter and famously inspiring teacher. He's not a fan of plotless stories, as you can tell from this inspiring (and admittedly sprawling) quote, which I almost got as a tattoo, but then when I sobered up I was glad I didn't attempt it:

"Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day. There's genocide, war, corruption.
Every fucking day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else.
Every fucking day, someone, somewhere takes a conscious decision to destroy someone else.
People find love, people lose it.
For Christ's sake, a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church.
Someone goes hungry.
Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman.
If you can't find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don't know crap about life!
. . . And why the FUCK are you wasting my two precious hours with your movie? I don't have any use for it! I don't have any bloody use for it!"

That whole quote is adaptable to the concept of one's everyday story. If your world feels mundane or depressing, writers might tell you that it is an aesthetic or modal choice. What they are really saying is that it's 'genre',


and Emma and I were putting a hit out on genre.






and in this journey, it would seem for now that
I'd get the top hat;
Emma'd get the fangs.