User:Anville

On Creativity

DRUMMOND: Ever been in love, Hornbeck?

HORNBECK: Only with the sound of my own words, thank God.

—Inherit the Wind (1960)

All my other projects have turned into vast time sinks; consequently, I am putting myself on voluntary Wikileave without pay. I hope to be back by April 2005 or so.

Sweet zombie Jesus! I'm back, and early too. Not in any grand way, mind you, but I have a little free time now. I just have to balance my Wikifying with a big stack of biophysics and the presentation I have to prepare for the next American Physical Society meeting. Woo hoo, life is grand!

Anville 13:34, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Articles I have abused

The following is a list of articles which I have edited in (what I believe to be) significant ways.

• Brave New World
• Breakfast of Champions
• Calvin and Hobbes
• A Clockwork Orange
• Cyberpunk
• D-brane
• Dead White Males
• Evidence (Asimov)
• Falstaff
• Fictional chemical substances
• Gathering Blue
• The Giver
• The Hidden Curriculum
• King Lear
• Kurt Vonnegut
• The Last Question
• List of fictional cities
• List of fictional companies
• Liouville's theorem (Hamiltonian)
• Lolita
• Messenger (novel)
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Multivac
• Neutrino
• Nambu-Goto action
• Omnipotence paradox
• Pale Fire
• Postcyberpunk
• The Sirens of Titan
• String theory
• Supersymmetry
• Supersymmetric quantum mechanics
• Supernova
• Tachyon
• That Thou art Mindful of Him
• Three Laws of Robotics
• Transmetropolitan
• The Truman Show

...and there are probably a couple more besides.

I categorically deny ever having touched Postmodernism. The edit history and talk pages may claim otherwise, but I was never there. In particular, I never wrote the following, and anyone who says I did is a scurrilous lier.

The cartoonist Bill Watterson argues a similar point in his comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. His six-year-old protagonist often claims that his snowmen and school-notebook doodles are "avant-garde", backing up his contention with prose similar to that which Sokal generated. Once, Calvin pencils a book report entitled, "The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: a Study in Psychic Transrelational Gender Modes". Displaying his creation to his friend Hobbes, he smugly remarks, "Academia, here I come!" These strips and others of note are reprinted in The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book (1995), in which Watterson explains that his "art criticism" was derived from published postmodern rhetoric, with minimal changes.

See, if I had written that, I would certainly not have forgotten to mention the strip where Calvin explicitly announces that he is a postmodernist. Walking through the woods with Hobbes, he muses, "The hard part for us avant-garde post-modern artists is deciding whether or not to embrace commercialism." (The strip is reproduced on page 59 of Deranged Killer Mutant Monster Snow Goons!) Of course, Calvin decides to take the plunge into the commercial world, not that he reaps much profit from it.

Licence to shill

In the spirit of giving, I agree to multi-license all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below: