sturgeon’s law (slight return)

Adam “Experimental History” Mastroianni : Guys who work in bike shops like to joke about bicycle-shaped objects—sure, that mass-produced hunk of metal and plastic has a seat, pedals, wheels, and handlebars, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bike. When the materials are so cheap and the construction is so slapdash, it deserves another name entirely.This terminology comes in handy, because it turns out there are also movie-shaped objects and book-shaped objects, art-shaped objects and thought-shaped objects. Just because a series of pictures flickered across the screen and the credits followed, that doesn’t mean it was a movie. Just because it’s printed out and bound in cardboard, that doesn’t mean it’s a book. There is an additional essence that is necessary to turn something from the shape of a thing into the actual thing, and the difference between having and lacking that essence is the difference between a corpse and a person. Adam Mastroianni…