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Photograph of the cover of Lene Henningsen’s “Atomar” (Atomic Scars).
Photograph of physical copies of Lene Henningsen’s “Atomar” (Atomic Scars) and “Weiss-Manettis forudsigelse” (The Weiss-Manetti Prediction) on a window sill with a small porcelain cat overlooking them.
Photograph of page 41 of Lene Henningsen’s “Weiss-Manettis forudsigelse” (The Weiss-Manetti Prediction) with the following text: – When we are able to store and manipulate electrons in a controlled way, without their entangled state collapsing (our work with potential wells has shown promising results in this direction), we will have a system that is capable of existing in a myriad of states at the same time. – All of these states will evolve as a myriad of calculations or conclusions that run in parallel. By forcing (i.e. measuring) the system, it can change from being in a superposition¹ of all these states, to being in only one of them. Following these conclusions, we can predict that since the state the system ends up in is not deterministically set, but driven by probabilities, we have the basis for creating something with an intelligence and creativity comparable to that of the human. (R. Weiss and E. Manetti)
Photograph of a page from Lene Henningsen’s “Atomar” (Atomic Scars) with the following words (in Danish) spread out across the page: Wanderer in the sun paying attention to detail the dusty grey sole of the shoe leather skin black eyes the movement of the tongue dragging me over earth’s crust somewhere in my thoughts about you no life is average worn-out illusions are just so disturbingly normal I touch a picture with feelings so pasty that they fold between the fingers here or here skin and fur I can calmly and quietly with a feather animal and human stumble over the stones pick up a sun temple and say thank you for the name deeply under your sky that moves me

It’s been a great pleasure to finally have physical copies of Lene Henningsen’s Atomar and Weiss-Manettis forudsigelse in my hands. The Weiss-Manetti Prediction, my translation of the novel, is now also available via Maggies Mill.

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24/ The ‘Future Book’ Is Here, but It’s Not What We Expected
www.wired.com/story/future-book-is-here-but-not-what-we-expected/

101 Words – 100

South Africa still has bookstores. I never seem to make much use of them in Copenhagen, but everytime I visit South Africa a trip to Exclusive Books tells a little about how the country is changing. It is there that I picked up Carapace 23 and Anjie Krog’s Begging to be Black. This time round it was Breyten Breytenbach’s Parool / Parole I chanced across. I heard him talk at WITS circa 1990. Now, starting with the first of this collection of speeches, given in the year in which I was born, I’m having to get used to reading Afrikaans once again.

101 Words – 060

A tale of two books:

Craig Mod, in his inimitable style, writes of his return, after years around the Kindle, to the physical book. Valuable insights on the still closed land of ebooks, and a cautionary note on how precisely the advantages of digital volumes have been sadly neglected.

From another angle, Thomas Basbøll gets enthusiastic about leaving the frames offered by the physical structure of the book behind:

Writing stops being “between covers”. Every page takes up a position equidistant to the reality it is a part of. A book is a thing. A site, by contrast, is a place.