Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control

Abstract

book such as itself (which does not exist) and is thus, though expensive, essential reading for those who might learn, by a kind of osmosis, more about the science. When Alfred Jarry’s (anti-?) hero Dr. Faustroll (Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, written in 1898) set off in a sieve-like skiff across a psychogeographic sea, it was in the company of a bailiff and a dog(or arse-) faced baboon, Bosse-de-Nage. This latter could only say one thing: “Ha.” And it was not joking. We can choose to imagine that one ha is a parody of the other ha. Bosse-deNage could just have said “Ha,” but chose (or had) to say it twice. Umberto Eco wrote that “for the ultimate perfection of ’Pataphysics, it must be transformed from a science of imaginary solutions into a science of unimaginable solutions.” This as he knew is pataphysically improbable, a professional foul, but needed to be written. A fortiori the book under review. It has succeeded in demonstrating that the parody and the parodied are one, a useful, if one dare say so, contribution to pataphysical experience. QED. Ha!