Dictionary...

The only dictionary worth reading when you feel cynical....."Project for a Glossary of the Twentieth Century", by J.G. Ballard - (I especially like the one about "bodybuilding"...)


Zipper
This small but astute machine has found an elegant way of restraining and rediscovering all the lost enchantments of the flesh.

Telephone
A shrine to the desperate hope that one day the world will listen to us.

Genocide
The economies of mass production applied to self-disgust.

Robotics
The moral degradation of the Machine.

Money
The original digital clock.

Fashion
A recognition that nature has endowed us with one skin too few, and that a fully sentinent being should wear its nervous system externally.

Fear of the Future
I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: Boring. And that's my one fear:..that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.

Epidemology
Catastrophe theory in slow motion.

Automobile
All the millions of cars on this planet are stationary, and their apparent motion constitutes mankind's greatest collective dream.

Bodybuilding
Asexual masturbation, in which the entire musculature simulates a piece of erectile tissue. But orgasm seems indefinitely delayed.

Pasolini
Sociopath as saint.

Abortion
Do-it-yourself genocide.

Modernism
The Gothic of the information age.

Food
Our delight in food is rooted in our immense relish at the thought that, prospectively, we are eating ourselves.

PC's
Perhaps unwisely, the brain is subcontracting many of its core functions, creating a series of branch economies that may one day amalgamate and mount a management buy-out.

Furniture and Industrial Design
Our furniture constitutes an external constellation of our skin areas and body postures. It's curious that the least imaginative forms of furniture has been the bed.

Forensics
On the autopsy table, science and pornography meet and fuse.

Apollo Mission
The first demonstration, arranged for our benifit by the machine, of the dispensability of man.

Alcoholism
The great appeal of alcoholism, and the reason why it will never be eliminated, is that it provides an opportunity for honourable or even heroic failure.

Schizophrenia
To the sane, always the most glamorous of mental diseases, since it seems to represent the insane's idea of the normal.

Science Fiction
The body's dream of becoming a machine.

Criminal Science
The anatomizing of illicit desire, more exciting than desire itself.