Wednesday 6 May 2009

Kipple, and How it Threatens Us All.



My desk?- well, no, it's far too tidy.... I'd take a photo of my desk, but you can barely see it under computer, scanner, and piles of papers, and, um, junk. lots of stuff that somehow ends up on any horizontal surface around me.
Philip K. Dick, Author, science fiction writer, coined a word for the ever-growing volume of junk and clutter in our lives, "kipple", he called it.
He said that kipple reproduces, that if you don't manage to clear it up, get every little bit, before bedtime, that in the night it will propagate, I was going to say "inexorably", but it doesn't quite fit, however, as I love the word, I'm sneaking it in, like kipple.
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I might just acquire the desk in the pic.... There are several up in the attic at work. The really huge ones went to a guy who refurbishes them as ultra-modern workstations in antique exteriors, all gleaming beeswaxwd wood, leather.. and embedded computers...
I'd love to take one, steampunk it with old gauges, wavering ammeter needles, faintly glowing vacuum tubes, a keyboard from an early typewriter.....
Like something Jules Verne, H.G Wells, or Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's characters might have used, to communicate through the aether.

3 comments:

  1. Reminds me of the story of the young man seeking to make conversation with a girl at the library... "Do you like Kipling?" he asks.

    "Well", she replies, "I've never kippled, but if you're offering... I'm willing to try it".

    ReplyDelete
  2. i keep coming back to this post - i LOVE the word 'kipple' !! and the photo !!!

    i own a lot of stuff that apparently kipples nightly ...

    xxx
    rdm

    ReplyDelete
  3. I like your idea of getting your hands on a large vintage rolltop and steampunking it, while still managing to attach some computer things to it. I don't know why. It just appeals to me.

    ReplyDelete


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