Speculative Fiction

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2008-09-29T20:09:00.001-04:00

... slowly being dismantled.

Feel free to visit at Dialogic or Bluegrass Film Society

Books Worth Reading: What is Speculative Fiction?

2008-07-05T17:25:00.001-04:00

(Courtesy of Darwin's Orphans)

What is Speculative Fiction?
Books Worth Reading

The kind of fiction I like to read the most, and that I tend to focus on here, falls under the broad umbrella of “speculative fiction.” I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the traditional genre labels of science fiction, fantasy and horror. The definitions that are most often applied to these genres seem so limiting, and they leave out a wide swath of really great books.

All three of these genres have one thing in common: The stories concern elements that do not exist in the so-called real world. In other words, they speculate about what might be possible but, in our everyday experience, isn’t.

In science fiction, the speculations must be grounded in the principles of science; they might not be possible now, but someday they could be, which is why science fiction is often set on future Earth or on another planet. The subjects of science fiction are space travel, dimensional travel, time travel, post-apocalyptic societies and technological innovations.

In fantasy, however, the speculations are usually based on magic and the supernatural. These speculations must follow rules, but they are not the rules of science. Generally, fantasy stories take place in imagined worlds (but not necessarily another planet) or on a fictional historical Earth.

Horror, on the other hand, most often takes place in the present day, in the world in which we live. But it introduces a fantastic or supernatural element, usually a monster of some kind. Horror also differs from fantasy in that it, by definition, should be frightening and dark.

But what about fiction that doesn’t fit neatly into one of these three categories? For instance, where would Neil Gaiman’s American Gods be classified? It is set in the modern-day world, but with its cast of mythical gods, it shades more toward fantasy than horror, although it does have horrific elements. Or what about David Mitchell’s excellent novel Cloud Atlas? This experimental novel is set in several different times, in the past, present and future, including a post-apocalyptic society. But it doesn’t read like traditional science fiction.

To Read the Rest of the Post

Cory Doctorow (archive)

2008-07-05T15:32:00.003-04:00

Ongoing:

Boing Boing

Craphound

Electronic Frontier Foundation

2008:

A.V. Club interview

SciFiDimensions: Cory Doctorow on Little Brother

2006:

Cory Doctorow: "I, Row-Boat" (Flurb: 2006); "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" (Jim Baen's Universe: 2006)

SciFiDimensions: Cory Doctorow

2008-07-05T15:11:00.007-04:00

(This interview is jammed with intelligent speculation about growing police states and terror hysteria. Doctorow is also a spokesperson for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Doctorow is also one of the greatest examples of the creative commons ethos. I just picked up this book for my nephew ;)

SciFiDimensions

Cory Doctorow - Interview with the author of the new young adult science fiction novel Little Brother (April 2008 from Tor Books). In addition to being a freelance journalist and copyright/ technology advocate, Doctorow is one of the co-editors of BoingBoing, one of the most popular blogs on the internet. His personal website is Craphound.

To Listen to the Episode

More:

SciFiDimensions: Review of Little Brother

Boing Boing TV: Make Your Own Little Brother How-To Video

BBC Radio: Pirates

2008-07-04T11:12:00.002-04:00

Pirates
BBC Radio: World Service Documentaries

Part One
Nick Rankin takes a journey through history looking at pirates past, present and future.

Part Two
Nick Rankin travels to Africa to find out how modern day pirates are ruling the high seas.

Part Three
Nick Rankin explores the world of intellectual piracy - the stealing of ideas.

To Listen to the Episodes

Jeff Vandermeer Interview of Paul Barnett aka John Grant: Science Has Been Corrupted

2008-07-04T11:01:00.001-04:00

John Grant and Paul Barnett Agree: Science Has Been Corrupted
by Jeff Vandermeer
Clarkesworld Magazine

...

How did you come to write Corrupted Science?

The book grew naturally out of a previous nonfiction book of mine, Discarded Science (2006). The earlier book was concerned with notions and hypotheses which over the centuries science had, as it were, deposited by the wayside — from the flat earth to the music of the spheres to Creationism, the luminiferous aether, and beyond. While I was writing it, it became apparent to me that there was a qualitative difference between those notions that were wrong simply because of people's lack of information — their position along scientific history's timeline, in effect — and those that were wrong because people were deliberately making them wrong.

To take a single example, when Ptolemy maintained that the Earth was the center of the universe, this was because he didn't know any better: it was a reasonably logical guess considering the state of knowledge in his day. Centuries later, however, when Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo had shown there was a much better explanation for the behavior of the heavens and the Roman Catholic Church was trying to suppress that better explanation, the Vatican was guilty of deliberately corrupting science. The motivation in this instance was a doctrinal one — much like the motivation for most Creationists/IDers today, now I come to think of it. Of course, there have been lots of other motives that have led people — both scientists and non-scientists — to corrupt human knowledge. Personal gain is an obvious one, as is self-deception, but the various ideological motives clearly are likely to have far wider-scale effects. Just think for a moment of the bad anthropology that was used to justify the Nazis' attempted genocide of "lesser races".

So the subject of the corruption of science seemed to me to be an important one.

...

What would you really like readers to take away from the book?

That the corruption of science, being more truly phrased as the corruption of human knowledge, is IMPORTANT.

We all suffer whenever someone indulges in the wholesale falsification or suppression of knowledge. The most serious suppression of knowledge at the moment is in connection with global warming, where media and corrupt or just plain dimwitted politicians have conspired in the idiotic pretense that there's still debate within the scientific community about the reality. There ain't. There's debate about some of the details, but the only dissent within the climatological community about the reality of global warming is from a handful of mavericks. All power to those mavericks, but their rather noisy existence doesn't imply that the climatological community is riven with doubt.

Because of the media/political pretense, the most important player in the quest to ameliorate the complete hell that's facing our children and grandchildren, the USA, has done almost completely nothing for what may very well have been the crux years — those years in which something could have been done to stave off the worst.

I thought at least the current crop of US presidential hopefuls had cottoned on to the urgency of the need to take action. Now I discover that two of them — McCain and Clinton — are proposing a "holiday" from gas taxes this summer, to encourage consumers to drive more miles than they might otherwise do — i.e., to add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. It's hard to imagine quite how imbecilic one must be to imagine this could be a good thing.

But it's not just at the political level that seeking to corrupt others' knowledge is a dangerous and indeed criminal act. As I say, it affects all of us. Look at a whole list of cases where drug companies have suppressed knowledge of harmful side-effects some of their products can display. I could go on almost indefinitely!

To Read the Entire Interview

Adventures in SF Publishing: Dan Simmons on The Terror

2008-07-04T10:25:00.001-04:00

(Lexington doesn't have a cool independent genre bookstore that I can browse on slow days. I like the aesthetic experience of picking up various new books and leisurely deciding on one that I think will be good. Back in San Diego where I grew up that store was Mysterious Galaxy and imagine my surprise when not too long ago I found out that some of their booksellers produce a SF podcast show. Next week I will be back in my homeland and I will definitely make a trip to this independent bookseller and later on the same trip I will be in Portland, OR so I can stop by Powells [again, imagine my surprise when opening my union benefit package yesterday and finding that it includes a discount benefits from this bookseller]! Now, if I can somehow manage to stop by San Francisco's City Lights Books... As for the interview below, Dan Simmons is a powerful, literate writer--I recommend listening to the fascinating historical inspirations that led to his writing The Terror)

Dan Simmons
Adventures in SF Publishing

To Listen to the Episode

Todd Gitlin: Eight Strategies We Use to Navigate the Ceaseless Flood of Media

2008-07-03T18:01:00.001-04:00

The Fan develops a visceral, emotional attachment to certain genres or celebrities. This attachment requires a choice (I'll pay attention to New Wave and ignore folk music), and it leads to membership in a community of connoisseurs, or believers.

Where the fan works by affirmation, the Content Critic works by aversion. He is on the lookout for all of the crappy songs and biased news, all the ways in which the media fail politically and aesthetically. If the content of the media could somehow be improved, the world would too.

The Paranoid believes that They are programming Us. Television (the usual culprit) is an addiction, a hypnotic agent. If we are at a loss, drifting or suffering, it must be because They--the Government, the Liberal Media, the Media Monopoly, the Zionist Occupation Government--are pushing the buttons. Though it is extreme, paranoia is a warped version of legitimate fear.

The Exhibitionist glories in media exposure--the cast of MTV's The Real World, the painted spectators holding NBC signs at sports events, those who broadcast their intimate lives via 24/7 webcam. Commanding the attention of spectators, the exhibitionist achieves some exemption from the anonymity of the torrent, some power apparently without risk. But because this power is risk-free, it is trivial.

The Ironist knows that media are nothing but weightless contrivances, so she surfs with ease and without committment, amused and aamused to be amused. She can enjoy the spectacle on two levels--as a faux-naive fan (who always liked the smile of that faded star) and as a knowing insider (who knows that the faded star started touring again because she was broke). The media have adopted, or co-opted, the ironist's style, with the glorification of kitsch and ads that wink knowingly while they continue to pitch.

The Culture Jammer, like the critic, believes that images are power. The difference is that he will directly attack those images, defacing or refacing them. In order to redistribute power he's an active transmitter rather than a passive receiver. Whether he's hacking into a corporate site or unfurling anti-consumer banners in the Mall of America, offense has become the jammer's defense.

The Secessionist knows that media steal our time, and therefore our lives and human capacities. Because the media are beyond reform, she does not bother to displace, jam, supplement, or critique them. She rations television, planning one day to get rid of it, and abstains from cell phones and e-mail whenever possible. She knows how the media can seduce if you let your guard down.

Because the media are politically pacifying, life-throttling, mind-sapping, even physically damaging, the Abolitionist refuses to accept their existence as a good argument for their continued existence. Only one valid question about the media torrent remains: How do you launch the revolution to dry it up?

(Source for this is Adbusters July/August 2002)

Watching the Directors: Terry Gilliam

2008-07-03T16:59:00.001-04:00

Terry Gilliam
Watching the Directors

Terry Gilliam has an identifiable aesthetic and a constant thematic affection that floats through all his movies - films like Brazil, 12 Monkeys and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. To discuss such a weighty filmmaker, we are joined by Duke Senter from the Degree of Separation podcast and veteran of the Tarantino and Kubrick episodes. So sit back and enjoy the mammoth episode with an extra 30 minutes of discussion that the studio wanted to cut and mangle, just like they did with Baron Munchausen.

To Listen to the Episode

David Brin: "Star Wars" despots vs. "Star Trek" populists

2008-07-01T12:29:00.001-04:00

(From way back in 1999, but I still think Brin's response to Lucas' mythos is relevant to our current situation.)

"Star Wars" despots vs. "Star Trek" populists: Why is George Lucas peddling an elitist, anti-democratic agenda under the guise of escapist fun?
By David Brin
Salon

Well, I boycotted "Episode I: The Phantom Menace" -- for an entire week.

Why? What's to boycott? Isn't "Star Wars" good old fashioned sci-fi? Harmless fun? Some people call it "eye candy" -- a chance to drop back into childhood and punt your adult cares away for two hours, dwelling in a lavish universe where good and evil are vividly drawn, without all the inconvenient counterpoint distinctions that clutter daily life.

Got a problem? Cleave it with a light saber! Wouldn't you love -- just once in your life -- to dive a fast little ship into your worst enemy's stronghold and set off a chain reaction, blowing up the whole megillah from within its rotten core while you streak away to safety at the speed of light? (It's such a nifty notion that it happens in three out of four "Star Wars" flicks.)

Anyway, I make a good living writing science-fiction novels and movies. So "Star Wars" ought to be a great busman's holiday, right?

One of the problems with so-called light entertainment today is that somehow, amid all the gaudy special effects, people tend to lose track of simple things, like story and meaning. They stop noticing the moral lessons the director is trying to push. Yet these things matter.

By now it's grown clear that George Lucas has an agenda, one that he takes very seriously. After four "Star Wars" films, alarm bells should have gone off, even among those who don't look for morals in movies. When the chief feature distinguishing "good" from "evil" is how pretty the characters are, it's a clue that maybe the whole saga deserves a second look.

Just what bill of goods are we being sold, between the frames?

* Elites have an inherent right to arbitrary rule; common citizens needn't be consulted. They may only choose which elite to follow.

* "Good" elites should act on their subjective whims, without evidence, argument or accountability.

* Any amount of sin can be forgiven if you are important enough.

* True leaders are born. It's genetic. The right to rule is inherited.

* Justified human emotions can turn a good person evil.

That is just the beginning of a long list of "moral" lessons relentlessly pushed by "Star Wars." Lessons that starkly differentiate this saga from others that seem superficially similar, like "Star Trek." (We'll take a much closer look at some stark divergences between these two sci-fi universes below.)

Above all, I never cared for the whole Nietzschian Ubermensch thing: the notion -- pervading a great many myths and legends -- that a good yarn has to be about demigods who are bigger, badder and better than normal folk by several orders of magnitude. It's an ancient storytelling tradition based on abiding contempt for the masses -- one that I find odious in the works of A.E. Van Vogt, E.E. Smith, L. Ron Hubbard and wherever you witness slanlike super-beings deciding the fate of billions without ever pausing to consider their wishes.

Wow, you say. If I feel that strongly about this, why just a week-long boycott? Why see the latest "Star Wars" film at all?

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Bradley Denton: "Sergeant Chip"

2008-06-30T14:32:00.002-04:00

The 2005 Theodor Sturgeon Award winning short story explores the usage of animals in war and how the development of the warrior's moral code would play out for a much more honest creature:

Sgt. Chip

Bradley Denton's Website

To the Best of Our Knowledge: Apocalyptic Fiction

2008-06-30T14:02:00.001-04:00

Apocalyptic Fiction
To the Best of Our Knowledge

SEGMENT 1:

After Kevin Brockmeier reads an excerpt from his "Brief History of the Dead," Jim Fleming talks with Justin Taylor, editor of "The Apocalypse Reader," a collection of 34 short stories abut the end of the world. Taylor says writers have always been fascinated by the subject. ... Also, Anne Strainchamps talks with Kevin Brockmeier about his novel which concerns the dead who have not yet passed from living memory.

SEGMENT 2:

Lydia Millet tells Steve Paulson that she lives in the middle of a national park outside Tucson, Arizona, and is always mindful that she is encroaching on the space of the wild creatures when she drives her car. Her novel is called "How the Dead Dream" and considers the current human impact on animals to be apocalyptic in scope. We also hear excerpts from Millet's novel, cited by the National Book Critics Circle as one of the ten best of the year.

SEGMENT 3:

Scott Westerfeld writes wildly popular post-apocalyptic and dystopian science fiction for teenagers. He's the author of the "Peeps" series about parasite-positive vampires, as well as "Uglies" and "Pretties," who live in a world where plastic surgery is compulsory. Westerfeld tells Anne Strainchamps the idea for thee stories came from a friend's experience with a dentist in Los Angeles.

To Listen to the Episode

Studio 360: The Big Gondry

2008-06-30T13:16:00.001-04:00

The Big Gondry
Studio 360 (WNYC: New York)
Host: Kurt Andersen

Inspired by his [recent] film "Be Kind Rewind," director Michel Gondry created a special exhibit of movie sets at the Deitch Projects art gallery in New York, where people can walk in and make their own movies. So Studio 360's Michele Siegel gathered her co-workers to remake The Coen brothers cult hit, "The Big Lebowski" -- starring Kurt in the title role.

To Listen to the Episode

CFP: Exploding Genre (Deadline: December 20th, 2008)

2008-06-28T14:12:00.001-04:00

CFP: Exploding Genre

Call for Papers
Exploding Genre
Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture
Deadline: 20th December 2008
Submission Guidelines

Genre has undergone radical transformations since the advent of a media society, in which popular texts are not so much literary but visual. Narrative studies of genre, such as John Cawelti's Six-Gun Mystique (1970) and Darko Suvin's Metamorphoses of Science-Fiction (1979), were quickly overturned by an increasing interest in cinematic, televisual, visual and digital textualities. Studies of different and interrelated media superceded the structuralist interest in narrative. Increasingly generic identity was conceived of as modal, or adaptable between media, consumed and produced by differently situated groups of readers, cultures and audiences.

Genre became differentiated from within itself, no longer identical but constituted at the interface of various media and readers. It was assembled from other genres, a combination of overlapping, discontinuous tropes that played ironically with its own established forms. Postmodernism had broken with both the neo-classicism of the New Criticism and with a historically minded structuralism to produce a new critical view of genre, one that fostered the emergence of hybrid and self-conscious fictions between media. Its readers were no longer seen as isolated but, in their engagement with multiple practices of interpretation, were recognized in distinct communities. Studies like Janice Radway's Reading the Romance: Women, Romance and Popular Fiction (1991) and Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992) explored new ways of looking at popular texts within their contexts.

It is with a view to addressing these changes that this issue of Reconstruction will investigate the function of genre in theory and fictions alike. Papers are sought that address the fragmented state of genre theory, spread as it is across studies of new and old media, fan and reading communities, narrative and visual theory. We are interested in the function of genre in different medias, such as comics and games. Why has genre persisted in this age of multi-modal expressions? What makes it tick, travel across media, to return and coalesce in new and old forms of narrative, visuality and intertextuality?

We envisage papers covering a variety of theoretical / discursive positions, including:
- feminist theory
- queer theory
- postcolonial theory
- convergent/transformative media
- new cultural histories
- ludology

Please send completed essays, multimedial performances, etc. to Helen Merrick and Darren Jorgensen at exp.genre_at_gmail.com by 20th December, 2008. We are happy to consider abstracts and proposals prior to this date. Publication is expected in the third quarter of 2009.

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture (ISSN: 1547-4348) is an innovative online cultural studies journal dedicated to fostering an intellectual community composed of scholars and their audience, granting them all the ability to share thoughts and opinions on the most important and influential work in contemporary interdisciplinary studies. Reconstruction publishes one open issue and three themed issues quarterly. Reconstruction is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography.

Consciousness (Archive)

2008-06-24T15:54:00.002-04:00

(under construction)

2003:

Gary Lachman: On Henri Bergson's Theory of the Mind and Cosmic Consciousness

2002:

David Lodge: Consciousness and the Novel

David Lodge: Consciousness and the Novel

2008-06-24T15:50:00.001-04:00

Even the physicist James Trefil concedes that "no matter how my brain works, no matter how much interplay there is between my brain and my body, one single fact remains... I am aware of a self that looks out at the world from somewhere inside my skull... this is not simply an observation, but the central datum with which every theory of consciousness has to grapple. In the end the theory has to go from the firing of neurons to this essential perception."

When Sutherland said that nothing worth reading had been written about consciousness he was articulating a rather dismissive judgment of published work in the professional field of psychology, but unintentionally he was dismissing the entire corpus of the world's literature - because literature is a record of human consciousness, the richest and most comprehensive we have. Lyric poetry is arguably man's most successful effort to describe qualia. The novel is arguably man's most successful effort to describe the experience of individual human beings moving through space and time.

There are some thinkers in cognitive science, or on the fringes of it, who have acknowledged as much. Noam Chomsky, for instance, has said: "It is quite possible... that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology." The reason is that science tries to formulate general explanatory laws which apply universally, which were in operation before they were discovered, and which would have been discovered sooner or later by somebody.

Works of literature describe in the guise of fiction the dense specificity of personal experience, which is always unique, because each of us has a slightly or very different personal history, modifying every new experience we have; and the creation of literary texts recapitulates this uniqueness (that is to say, Jane Austen's Emma , for example, could not have been written by anybody else, and never will be written by anyone else again, but an experiment demonstrating the second law of thermodynamics is and must be repeatable by any competent scientist).

Rest of the Excerpt

Fernando Pessoa: The Book of Disquiet

2008-06-24T15:34:00.000-04:00

"Everything is what we are, and everything will be, for those who come after us in the diversity of time, what we will have intensely imagined--what we, that is, by embodying our imagination, will have actually been. The Grand, tarnished panorama of History amounts, as I see it, to a flow of interpretations, a confused consensus of unreliable accounts. The novelist is all of us, and we narrate whenever we see, because seeing is complex like everything."
--Fernando Pessoa, "The Book of Disquiet" (Ch. 27)

Pessoa is not usually considered a major existentialist write, but for me he typifies the self-reflective questioning and writing of existentialism:

More about Pessoa

Dana Stevens: A Movie Only a Spartan Could Love

2008-06-20T15:43:00.001-04:00

(From when it was originally released. Courtesy of Stephen Groening.)

A Movie Only a Spartan Could Love: The battle epic 300.
by Dana Stevens
Slate

If 300, the new battle epic based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, had been made in Germany in the mid-1930s, it would be studied today alongside The Eternal Jew as a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total war. Since it's a product of the post-ideological, post-Xbox 21st century, 300 will instead be talked about as a technical achievement, the next blip on the increasingly blurry line between movies and video games.

To Read the Rest of the Review

Raymond Federman: THE REAL BEGINS WHERE THE SPECTACLE ENDS

2008-06-18T16:08:00.000-04:00

THE REAL BEGINS WHERE THE SPECTACLE ENDS
(a manifesto of sorts)

Si la littérature est le silence des significations, c'est en vérité la prison dont tous les occupants veulent s'évader.
Georges Bataille

What are the forms of representing the world that today parade before us? The cynical or frivolous precipitation of the spectacular, the triviality of trash-TV or the obscene tautologies of TV docudrama into which the real subsides without a trace. Now, and without any doubt more than ever, the derealizing flux of media images runs away with our powers of discernment, our conscience, our lives, and of course our writing. It forces us to surrender to what can only be called, in a strict sense, the fabulous and seductive grasp of spectacle. It bars us from a simplified representation of the real. It educates us in the dazed distrust of what is there in front of our eyes -- those eyes that have been overfed with icons. But despite our embittered submission to the charm of these icons, despite our willing servitude to the spectacle, we know very well that it is all false, that it is nothing but a theater of shadows that exhausts our sense of the real in its emptiness, and teaches us nothing, nothing but a mythology custom-made for a new breed of savages.

But the world is far more complex, far more chaotic, far more confusing, far more inaccessible than the false images we are offered daily. And the experiences that create the world for us are far more complex, chaotic, confused and confusing than THEY think. By THEY, I mean those who falsify OUR WORLD for us. OUR WORLD -- the one we as writers deal with everyday -- is a static-filled screen, a fuzzy image agitated by emotions a hundred times more voluptuous, but also a hundred times more painful than those THEY are trying to make us feel. Even the quickest move on the remote control cannot relieve us of the vertiginous bombardment of information to which the world subjects us. Its space is infinitely more profound, more decentered, more polymorphous. And the time which we spend in its flow never aligns itself according to the monochrome scenarios that supposedly symbolizes its passage.

How to react? How to reply? How to write today the world in which we live and write? How are we to symbolize differently and more truly (I did not say, more realistically, but more truly) our experience of the world? It will most certainly not be in the mode of an easy, facile, positive literature written in an industrial high-tech prose, it will not be a literature which has sold out to the Spectacle whose rich territory it wants to enter by any means, by compromise or by prostitution, but especially through simplistic cynicism, or with an ostentatious kitsch. This pseudo-literature, which is becoming more and more drab, more and more banal and predictable, more and more insignificant, functions beyond the pale of our anguish and desire.

When literature ceases to understand the world and accepts the crisis of representation in which it functions, it becomes mere entertainment, it becomes part of the Spectacle.

What is the antidote to this unreflexive and lazy precipitation of what still pretends to be literature? It is the kind of writing that resists the recuperation of itself into distorted or false figures and images. The kind of literature we need now is the kind that will systematically erode and dissipate the setting of the Spectacle, frustrate the expectation of its positive beginning, middle, and end, and cheap resolution. This kind of writing will be at the same time frugal and denuded, but rhetorically complex, so that it can seize the world in a new way. This kind of writing must create a space of resistance to the alienated devotion to images -- to the refining and undermining of the world by images. This kind of writing should be like an ironic free tense within the opacity of the Spectacle.

Anyone who persists in doing literature without acceding to the fact that doing literature can only be an intra-worldly diversion, a career path, a subjective confession, anyone who does not assent to the idea that literature can have no possible social impact, is today urgently confronted with the lacerating questions? What end does it serve? What good is it? What meaning, in the world and for the world, can the pursuit of this activity have? An activity that society has definitely marginalized, an activity reduced to a sort of deliciously and pleasantly outmoded form of survival, an activity performed beyond the bounds of serious self-reflection.

When literature becomes a surplus of culture, a supplement of culture, it can no longer call itself literature. When fiction becomes a product which can be bought in supermarkets next to the tomatoes, then it no longer deserves to be called literature, or even to be created.

But now one must ask, is it possible for fiction, for the serious writers of fiction (I assume there are still a few writers among us who think of themselves as serious writers) -- is it possible for these writers to escape the generalized recuperation that is taking place in the marketplace of books? Is it possible for fiction to survive the kind of reduction, the kind of banalization that mass media imposes on contemporary culture? Is it possible for fiction to escape the way publicity and advertising ingest and digest culture? Is it possible for fiction to survive the hypnosis of marketing, the sweet boredom of consensus, the cellophane wrapping of thinking, the commercialization of desire? In other words, can fiction escape conformity and banality and yet play a role in our society, have a place in our society? And finally, are there still people out there willing to turn their backs on the SPECTACLE and find time to write and read works of fiction? These are urgent questions that demand immediate answers.

Copyright © 1996 Raymond Federman
Posting

John Fea: Celebrating the "Seussentennial"

2008-06-18T13:58:00.002-04:00

Celebrating the "Seussentennial"
By John Fea
History News Service

...

Who?

While most of us have probably never heard of Theodor Geisel, we know his work well. Writing under the name "Dr. Seuss" (Seuss was his middle name), Geisel unveiled to millions of children the values that have defined the human experience. Random House, the publisher of most of his books, has proclaimed 2004 the "Seussentennial," a year-long commemoration of Geisel's work.

Geisel's books have expanded our imagination, encouraged our sense of self-worth and challenged us to make the world and our local communities better places. They've also reminded us that the ideals of freedom, individualism and liberty have always existed in tension with community, restraint and personal sacrifice.

Born in Springfield, Mass., Geisel spent most of his life living and writing from his home in a remodeled naval observation tower in La Jolla, Calif. He and his first wife, Helen, did not have children (Geisel once said that he did not particularly enjoy being around children), but his books, filled with bold colors, exotic characters and wacky story lines, made him the 20th century's most popular children's author.

Geisel claimed that he rarely wrote with a particular social or political agenda in mind, and anyone familiar with the whimsical silliness of his works would agree. In fact, 27 publishers rejected his first book, "And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street," because it didn't contain a moral message.

But even as he tried to avoid writing morality tales, much of Geisel's work reflected his commitment to human values. During World War II, well before Dr. Seuss became a national icon, Geisel was producing editorial cartoons for the pages of the New York tabloid PM that criticized American isolationism as well as racial discrimination in the hiring of defense workers.

Until his death in 1991, Geisel wrote children's fiction that reflected such views. For example, "Yertle the Turtle," the story of a turtle name Mack who stages the overthrow of an expansionist king named Yertle, reminds us of similar revolutions in the past that have toppled tyranny. "Oh, the Places You'll Go!" reads like a sermon on self-improvement and mobility -- two defining characteristics of modern life. He provides a lesson against racial discrimination in "The Sneetches," while "The Cat in the Hat," the book that won Geisel international fame, challenges the conformist tendencies of middle-class suburbia.

Seuss was also willing to be more straightforward in his social commentary. "The Butter Battle Book" is a stinging criticism of the nuclear arms race, and "The Lorax" alerts us to the environmental consequences of capitalism.

Like many of the rest of us today, Geisel struggled to balance a common sense faith in personal rights with a commitment to the public good. He seemed to realize that individualism, while essential to any democratic society, was often not sufficient to sustain the kind of community needed for a republic to survive.

The ever-popular "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" tells the story of the sinister creature who believes he can steal happiness from the "Whos down in Whoville" by depriving them of their Christmas presents. While the Whos certainly have a right as citizens and individuals to fulfill their holiday wants and desires with consumer products, in the end they teach the Grinch (and us) that true happiness comes from being part of something larger than one's self.

And who can forget the adventures of Horton, the kindly elephant who counters the greed, selfishness and laziness of the world around him by displaying trustworthiness, loyalty and patience amid difficult trials? Even as Horton persistently informs us in "Horton Hears a Who" that "a person's a person no matter how small," he also reminds us that the individual rights of personhood are often secured by the sacrifice of others.

A belief in personal self-betterment, as celebrated in "Oh, the Places You'll Go!," can easily degenerate into crass self-indulgence. Such is the case with the Once-ler, the greedy capitalist of "The Lorax" who, in his quest to leave home for better pastures, ends up destroying the environment through his pursuit of industrial wealth. Similarly, when we're "off to great places . . . off and away . . ." we're often going there at the expense of the local communities we leave behind. When self-improvement and pursuits of happiness are defined entirely by social and geographic mobility, Dr. Seuss reminds us, we can never truly care for natural and human places, as the Lorax or the Whos challenge us to do.

It's precisely because of these long-standing tensions between individualism and community that the writings of Theodor Geisel have had enduring appeal. For more than 60 years children and their parents have been reminded what it means to be a good person, citizen and friend. Dr. Seuss remains a window into the deepest convictions and paradoxes of human life. We can only hope that his books will continue to help children of all ages make sense of themselves and their obligations to society.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

John Fea teaches history at Messiah College in Grantham, Penna., and is a writer for the History News Service.

Article Link

Gregory Sholette: Disciplining The Avant-Garde, The United States versus The Critical Art Ensemble

2008-06-18T09:56:00.003-04:00

Disciplining The Avant-Garde, The United States versus The Critical Art Ensemble
by Gregory Sholette
NeMe

It has been three and one half years since President George W. Bush proclaimed, “you’re either with us or against us.” Since that time the neo-liberal ‘revolution’ has undergone a re-Balkanization in the United States. Gone is the ideology of fluidity and openness that presided over the post-Cold War years and in its place comes a new nationalist spirit complete with rising trade tariffs and a variety of seemingly expedient security measures that have evolved into a new way of life. From no-fly lists to ubiquitous public surveillance, from severe visa and immigration restrictions to the fingerprinting of tourists, ‘bunker America’ is replacing the fantasy of globalization. Even unilateral military action is justified as a preemptive defense of the homeland. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is offered Pax Americana, a sanctimonious sop revealing perhaps what was at stake all along, nothing less than global supremacy. Less well known at home, however, thanks to guilt-free ‘happy’ news and embedded reporting, is the targeted suspension of habeas corpus and mass cataloging of thousands of Islamic, Middle Eastern, or North African people inside the country. Thousands of individuals have been detained without trial, others deported, and some have been sent abroad into ‘extra-juridical’ zones within Pakistan and Syria where human rights do not stand in the way of extreme interrogation methods.

It comes as no surprise therefore that those who publicly question aspects of the new, homeland-security state apparatus also find themselves victims of government investigation and intimidation. While certainly not on par with disappearances and torture, scores of artists, journalists and academics, including several high school students, have been questioned recently about alleged anti-American activities by a variety of Federal and local law-enforcement officials. In at least one case, the one that concerns this essay, the U.S. government is aggressively seeking to portray a group of contemporary artists known for their politically provocative, yet legal and Constitutionally protected art, as a full-blown terrorist threat to the national security.

Since 11 September 2001, the FBI and the Secret Service have interrogated gallery curators in Chicago and Dallas for displaying images they deemed suspicious; accused a Nevada man of “borderline terrorism” because he had a bumper sticker that read “KING GEORGE – Off With His Head”; detained and questioned a Colorado highschool principle for permitting students to sing the Bob Dylan tune Masters of war during a public performance; and the culture-jamming group AdBusters were questioned by government agents over a flag-like billboard they installed in Times Square. Secret Service agents even prevented two teachers from attending a Bush rally because they wore t-shirts printed with the words “Protect our civil liberties.” The atmosphere of enhanced public security has apparently also emboldened some local law enforcement to disregard this very advice. Police in Albany arrested a man for wearing a peace sign on his T-Shirt; a young man was arrested outside an Armed Forces Career Center in Boston for dressing up as a U.S. torture victim in Iraq; six men were arrested in Pennsylvania for creating an Abu Ghraib-style human pyramid as the President’s motorcade drove past; and in August 2004 during the Republican National Convention the New York Police Department went so far as to take thousands of people into custody, holding them long past the legal twenty-four-hour limit in appalling conditions at a concrete and steel pier on the Hudson River.

Probing callsfrom Federal agents to university administrators have added to a chilling climate of suspicion within academia already apprehensive over Congressional debates about alleged anti-American curricula and over student groups like the ultra-conservative Campus Watch, who openly stake out ‘liberal’ instructors in order to document their so-called Left bias. Professors at universities in New Mexico, Houston, Urbana-Champaign, South Florida, Upstate New York and even Columbia University in New York City have discovered that raising questions about U.S. policy, about Israel, about 911 and homeland security inside the classroom can bring on disciplinary action and even dismissal. Regrettably, several university museum directors at Arizona State University, the City Museum of Washington, and Ohio University have gone so far as to actively self-censor their own exhibitions by removing socially critical work or by adding art that reflects a ‘conservative ‘ point of view. Meanwhile, the firing of several prize-winning journalists effectively demonstrates that challenging Bush administration policy even from within mainstream media can have considerable consequences.

Incomplete Installation by Critical Art Ensemble in The Interventionists exhibition at MASS MoCA, June 2004: note that most of the work was already in the custody of the FBI.The most alarming of these cases so far is certainly the U.S. Attorney General William Hochel’s unrelenting investigation of artist Steven Kurtz and his former colleague, Professor Robert Ferrell. Kurtz is a professor of art at the University of Buffalo in New York. He is also a co-founder of the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), an artists’ collective that dates from 1986 which has become known for its multi-media projects splicing Brechtian pedagogy onto the comedic diligence of a Mr. Wizard. Donning white lab coats and assuming the personae of amateur scientists, they arm themselves with highschool lab equipment as well as common household supplies and groceries in order to demystify, or more to the point, democratize the increasingly privatized worlds of science, technology and information networks. These often-playful routines contrast with the serious intent and analytical approach of the group’s numerous books and manifestos. In Electronic Civil Disturbance, CAE celebrates anti-corporate, ‘slacker’ Ludditism and in Digital Resistance they provide plans for making graffiti-writing robots and reprogramming Nintendo games so that children will gain “the means to bring about a situation in which a process of broad spectrum invention, discovery, and criticality can occur” (page 139). Whether in a museum, an international conference, on the street or in print, the CAE’s work unvaryingly aims to inform, entertain and demonstrate the value of public knowledge.

For the past several years the group has focused attention on what they see as the misuse of biotechnology by private corporations operating outside the realm of democratic, public debate. CAE’s tactical response is what they term, ‘Fuzzy Biological Sabotage’ or FBS, a type of sophisticated, prank that uses harmless biological agents including plants, insects, reptiles and even microorganisms to operate in the gray, in-between spaces as yet unregulated by institutional regimes. In 2002 the group demonstrated one form of FBS in the project Contestational Biology, which was developed in conjunction with artists Beatriz de Costa and Claire Pentecost and installed at the Corcoran Art Gallery in Washington DC. Contestational Biology consisted of an ‘amateur’ scientific experiment that ‘reverse engineered’ samples of the Monsanto Corporation’s Round-Up Ready corn, canola and soy products, three of the many genetically modified organisms rapidly being integrated into modern agriculture industry. The ultimate goal of the installation, however, was to raise public awareness about the sweeping privatization of the human food supply by directly contesting Monsanto’s right to create and patent customized life forms for corporate profit.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Critical Theory/Art (Archive)

2008-06-18T09:48:00.005-04:00

Ongoing:

Critical Art Ensemble

Ubu Web: Archive of Text, Sound and Images

2008:

David Brin: "Star Wars" despots vs. "Star Trek" populists

Francois Cusset: State of Literary Theory

2006:

Gregory Sholette: Disciplining The Avant-Garde, The United States versus The Critical Art Ensemble

2004:

John Fea: Celebrating the Seussentennial

1996:

Raymond Federman: The Real Begins Where the Spectacle Ends

Science (Archive)

2008-06-18T09:28:00.002-04:00

2008:

Jeff Vandermeer Interview of Paul Barnett aka John Grant: Science Has Been Corrupted

In Our Time: The Multiverse

Natalie Angier: Curriculum Designed to Unite Art and Science

In Our Time: The Multiverse

2008-06-18T09:26:00.001-04:00

The Multiverse
Host: Melvyn Bragg
In Our Time (BBC Radio)

If you look up the word ‘universe’ in the Oxford English Dictionary you will find the following definition:

“The whole of created or existing things regarded collectively; all things (including the earth, the heavens, and all the phenomena of space) considered as constituting a systematic whole.”

That sounds fairly comprehensive as a description of everything, but for an increasing number of physicists and cosmologists the universe is not enough. They talk of a multiverse – literally many universes – to explain aspects of their theory, the character of the universe and the riddle of our existence within it. Indeed, compared to the scope and complexity of the multiverse, the whole of our known reality may be as a speck of sand upon a beach.

But what might a multiverse be like, why are physicists and cosmologists increasingly interested in it and is it really scientific to discuss the existence of universes we may never know anything about?

Contributors

Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society and Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge

Fay Dowker, Reader in Theoretical Physics at Imperial College

Bernard Carr, Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at Queen Mary, University of London

To Listen to the Episode

Michael Benton: Review of E.L. Doctorow's City of God

2008-06-17T18:57:00.002-04:00

City of God may have an experimental beginning that can be frustrating for some readers... don't worry though as you travel into the narrative landscape it slowly pulls together threads of meaning that create an evolving state of awareness, by page 50 you are recognizing clear patterns and by pages 80-90 you have the names of the main characters down. Don't let this frustrate you, this book is not a Bic Mac designed to be hastily gobbled down, rather, it is a sumptous feast for the senses and soul, a fulfilling meal designed to feed the spirit.

It tackles the big issues of the 20th Century and creates a dazzling array of voices to bring this historical moment of the century's end to dramatic life. It is so searing when it hits on all engines, the descriptions of the city are very powerful bringing a sense of the majestic aliveness of urban life and its chaotic sensory effect. The portrayals of the past through a World War II Jewish ghetto and a young boy's experiences are soul-shattering. The relationship of the main characters in the New York present are vivid and real...

The last 100 pages are a powerful literary experience of the continuing importance of religion in our society, while also providing a no holds barred critique of the reactionary traditions that try to stop us from evolving as humans and as spiritual beings (in a very subtle storytelling manner).

If this sounds interesting you might also be interested in Black Elk Speaks, Nothing Sacred by Douglas Rushkoff, The Concept of the Foreign by Rebecca Saunders, The Infinite Conversation by Maurice Blanchot, and The Cunning of History by Richard Rubenstein ... I read these books near the time I was reading "City of God" and they all speak to the need for new modes of interpersonal human relations or a new spirituality for a changing world.

Ubu Web: Archive of Text, Sound and Images

2008-06-17T17:37:00.001-04:00

(An unbelievable Internet site. This is a dream come true for researchers of the history of avant-garde or cutting-edge creative expressions. I'm serious this has to be seen to be believed. One of my favorite sites, I honor the Ubu Web collective and collaborators as true intellectual and creative visionaries!)

Ubu Web

Concrete poetry's utopian pan-internationalist bent was clearly articulated by Max Bense in 1965 when he stated, "…concrete poetry does not separate languages; it unites them; it combines them. It is this part of its linguistic intention that makes concrete poetry the first international poetical movement." Its ideogrammatic self-contained, exportable, universally accessible content mirrors the utopian pan-linguistic dreams of cross-platform efforts on today's Internet; Adobe's PDF (portable document format) and Sun System's Java programming language each strive for similarly universal comprehension. The pioneers of concrete poetry could only dream of the now-standard tools used to make language move and morph, stream and scream, distributed worldwide instantaneously at little cost.

Essentially a gift economy, poetry is the perfect space to practice utopian politics. Freed from profit-making constraints or cumbersome fabrication considerations, information can literally "be free": on UbuWeb, we give it away and have been doing so since 1996. We publish in full color for pennies. We receive submissions Monday morning and publish them Monday afternoon. UbuWeb's work never goes "out of print." UbuWeb is a never-ending work in progress: many hands are continually building it on many platforms.

UbuWeb has no need for money, funding or backers. Our web space is provided by an alliance of interests sympathetic to our vision. Donors with an excess of bandwidth contribute to our cause. All labour and editorial work is voluntary; no money changes hands. Totally independent from institutional support, UbuWeb is free from academic bureaucracy and its attendant infighting, which often results in compromised solutions; we have no one to please but ourselves.

UbuWeb posts much of its content without permission; we rip out-of-print LPs into sound files; we scan as many old books as we can get our hands on; we post essays as fast as we can OCR them. UbuWeb is an unlimited resource with unlimited space to fill. It is in this way that the site has grown to encompass hundreds of artists, hundreds of gigabytes of sound files, books, texts and videos.

Sounds like a marginal situation? Hardly. We've won many prestigious internet awards and are acknowledged web-wide as the definitive source for Visual, Concrete + Sound Poetry. UbuWeb is on the syllabus of countless schools; we've gotten queries from Ph.D. candidates seeking information to third-graders researching a paper on concrete poetry. UbuWeb embodies an unstable community, neither vertical nor horizontal but rather a Deleuzian nomadic model: a 4-dimensional space simultaneously expanding and contracting in every direction, growing "rhizomatically" with ever-increasing unpredictability and uncanniness.

-The Editors

Francois Cusset: THE STATE OF LITERARY THEORY

2008-06-11T12:48:00.001-04:00

THE STATE OF LITERARY THEORY: French Theory's American Adventures
By FRANÇOIS CUSSET
Chronicle of Higher Education

Why still bother with theory, French or otherwise? It would take a true rhetorical talent to convince anyone today, even an academic humanist who hasn't left his or her campus for years, that theory and the many debates surrounding it can have any impact, say, on technological change, the leisure industry, the state of Western democracy, or global geopolitics — or on the run-up to the next presidential election, for that matter. In other words, isn't it simply too late to still be speaking about French theory and its role in the intellectual life of the United States today?

The word "today" conjures up a mix of collective panic and historical changes, an utterly confused, postcommunist, postcolonial age of global civil war and absolute entertainment, religious terrorism and state terrorism — the age of a new type of empire unsure as to who its real enemies are and how to identify, much less absorb, its "citizens." In such an unsettling present, one wonders if there is anything left to expect from this weird textual object known as theory, born between the two world wars or in the crazy 1970s, depending on historical accounts, but definable today as a strange breed of American academic market rules, French (and more generally Continental) detachable concepts, campus-based identity politics, and trendy pop culture. It seems to many observers that the gap between real-life politics and theory's guerrillas is much too wide already, after 30 years of academic fever, for the two worlds to even speak a common language. Or for a possible use of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, or even Jacques Derrida to shed some light on today's global disorders — even when Foucault's genealogy of "biopolitics," Deleuze's comments on our "societies of control," and Derrida's concept of "unconditional hospitality," all coined more than two decades ago, appear to be exactly addressing our contemporary situation.

This tendency to relegate theory to a leisurely time when "reality" wasn't a problem (but did such a time ever exist, even before September 11, 2001?), and to call for more urgent issues to be raised today than just theoretical ones, is where old-style liberals, or even Marxists and neoconservative watchdogs, converge. They agree that theory is perilous today, or at best just patently useless, much as the West German federal police and the East German political police agreed that Foucault was dangerous or useless enough to deserve being arrested twice during his visit to the two sides of Berlin in 1978. That is exactly the kind of consensus that should be tirelessly questioned until it no longer holds, today no less than 30 years ago.

For in fact, theory and activism do converge today. They do so in certain new forms of social activism, within a new generation of readers on both sides of the ocean who manage to think and write in the lines of these authors, but always away from their intimidating shadows. New uses of theory's major texts are possible today, even necessary, beyond the age-old uncertainty over theory and praxis as two distinct moments, in favor of what Deleuze and Félix Guattari would call "theoretical practice" — a real practical approach to theory.

But then, how to stick to such theoretical practices when the United States is under direct attack? One of the saddest things about the immediate post-9/11 climate in the United States' public space, beyond blind patriotism and a frustrated virility willing to retaliate as soon as possible, was surely the intellectual field's deliberate powerlessness. After decades of rhetorically questioning the imperialistic West, deconstructing America's power, and demonizing the first world's neocolonialism, the various radicals bred in academic quarters stood still, mute and shocked. In the aftermath of the attacks on New York City and Washington, most of these brilliant campus radicals didn't have much to say about George W. Bush, Iraq, terror, national pride, and global democracy, apart from a distant feeling of horror and disarray. Whereas liberals of all sorts in Europe or Asia did expect some sort of awakening from their North American counterparts, or a new inspiration to come from the belly of the beast, perhaps a new tone on American campuses for times of emergency, what they witnessed was mostly self-criticism and a sense of uselessness.

When touring campuses right after 9/11, I was astounded to discover that the dominant feeling in academe was one of desperate impossibility, complete with guilt and resentment. Yesterday's tenured radicals were now writing sophisticated articles just to make a note of the insuperable gap between the world and the text, theory and "reality," intellectual leisure and the new state of global emergency. Just when theory was precisely challenged to speak out beyond self-reflection and lead to other issues inseparable from today's situation — the issues of capitalism and its new social forms, of the media and their industrial production of fear, of the exhausting of the rhetorics of promise as political horizon — academic experts again limited theory to a specialized debate.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Annalee Newitz: Using Sci-Fi to Change the World

2008-06-09T12:29:00.003-04:00

(How come this is the first time I have heard anything about L. Timmel Duchamp's geopolitical SF series?)

Using Sci-Fi to Change the World
By Annalee Newitz
AlterNet

Every year in late May, several thousand people descend on Madison, Wis., to create an alternate universe. Some want to build a galaxy-size civilization packed with humans and aliens who build massive halo worlds orbiting stars. Others are obsessed with what they'll do when what remains of humanity is left to survive in the barren landscape left after Earth has been destroyed by nukes, pollution, epidemics, nanotech wipeouts, or some combination of all four. Still others live parts of their lives as if there were a special world for wizards hidden in the folds of our own reality.

They come to Madison for WisCon, a science-fiction convention unlike most I've ever attended. Sure, the participants are all interested in the same alien worlds as the thronging crowds that go to the popular Atlanta event Dragon*Con or the media circus known as Comic-Con. But they rarely carry light sabers or argue about continuity errors in Babylon 5. Instead, they carry armloads of books and want to talk politics.

WisCon is the United States' only feminist sci-fi convention, but since it was founded more than two decades ago, the event has grown to be much more than that. Feminism is still a strong component of the con, and many panels are devoted to the work of women writers or issues like sexism in comic books. But the con is also devoted to progressive politics, antiracism, and the ways speculative literature can change the future. This year there was a terrific panel about the fake multiculturalism of Star Trek and Heroes, as well as a discussion about geopolitical themes in experimental writer Timmel Duchamp's five-novel, near-future Marq'ssan series.

While most science fiction cons feature things like sneak-preview footage of the next special effects blockbuster or appearances by the cast of Joss "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" Whedon's new series Dollhouse, WisCon's highlights run toward the bookish. We all crammed inside one of the hotel meeting rooms to be part of a tea party thrown by the critically-acclaimed indie SF Web zine Strange Horizons, then later we listened to several lightning readings at a stately beer bash thrown by old school SF book publisher Tor.

To Read the Rest of the Article

Gary Lachman: On Henri Bergson's Theory of the Mind and Cosmic Consciousness

2008-06-05T15:57:00.004-04:00

Bergson developed his radical ideas about the role of consciousness and the brain into a complete evolutionary theory, presented in Creative Evolution (1907), his most widely known work. He accepted Darwin's by-then triumphant idea that the organic forms of the present had evolved out of much earlier forms over long periods of time. But like many other thinkers, Bergson was unsympathetic to the strict determinist interpretation of evolution that had gained scientific support and popular credence. In its place he offered a vision of a creative impulse, the elan vital or life force, penetrating matter and driving evolution to higher forms of complexity and freedom. Bergson did, however, borrow one idea from Darwin's later interpreters. For Darwin, evolution proceeds through chance mutations that prove successful in the struggle to survive; such beneficial adaptations give an organism an advantage over its competitors. For Darwin's followers, the mind itself was just such an adaptation and evolved a s a useful tool for dealing with the demands of the environment. The intellect, then, was a strictly practical device, and its use was solely limited to dealing with the necessities of staying alive. One imminently useful way of doing this was to "carve" out of the seamless flow of experience, seemingly solid, discrete, and stable objects occupying an extended space. It would be most helpful in the struggle for suvival to recognize out of the "blooming, buzzing confusion" the tiger about to pounce on you, or the antelope you wish to eat. The difference between this kind of consciousness and a cosmic consciousness, open to the influx of the whole, is evident. The brain's function then, for Bergson, was to act as a "reducing valve," limiting the amount of "reality" entering conciousness. As he wrote in 1911, "The brain is the organ of attention to life," and the part it plays is that of "shutting out from consciousness all that is of no practical interest to us."

Cosmic consciousness, then, can be seen as a perception of the world not limited by or filtered through the brain. And a s most of us are compelled to "deal with" the world most of the time, it is clear why incidences of cosmic consciousness are rare. Yet one drawback to the brain's highly efficient ability to focus on necessities is that it "falsifies" reality, which, as Bergson earlier argued, is in truth a continuing flow of experience. The mind constantly takes snapshots, as it were, of reality, which enables it to orient itself admist the flux. The problem is that science, which takes the most comprehensive snapshots, makes the mistake of confusing photographs with reality itself.

We would, it seems, be left in a situation in which we are highly successful at dealing with the world, at the cost of losing contact with its reality. But, as Bergson argued in his essay "An Introduction to Metaphysics" (1903), the mind has another means of "knowing," aside from the rational intellect. This, he argued, was intuition. Just as we have an immediate, irreducible awareness of our own inner states, through intuition we have access to the "inside of the world. And that inside, Bergson argued, was the elan vital. Through drawing back from our habitual gesture of "dealing" with the world, we can, as Edward Carpenter experienced, discover a kind of consciousness in which subject and object--we and the world--are "one." This consciousness, Bergson argues is not necessarily associated with the brain. He argues that we perceive "virtually" much more than what actually reaches our conscious awareness. This would make sense, since that awareness is subject to the highly efficient editing procedures of the brain, which limits the amount of input coming to it through the senses. The whole past, for example, Bergson believed "still exists, ... is still present to consciousness in such a manner that, to have the revelation of it, consciousness has no need to go out of itself. ... It has but to remove an obstacle, to withdraw a veil." Such insights are the foundation of Marcel Proust's immense nove Remembrance of Things Past, perhaps the most determined effort to put Bergson's ideas into practice.

Lachman, Gary. A Secret History of Consciousness. Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 2003: 22-23.

Michael Saler: The rise of fan fiction and comic book culture

2008-06-05T14:52:00.004-04:00

(Courtesy of Neil Easterbrook)

The rise of fan fiction and comic book culture: From book-burning and prohibition to Pulitzer Prizes and prestige
by Michael Saler
The Times Literary Supplement

"When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun.” This infamous statement of Nazi sentiment is not limited to Fascists: many critics become combative when discussing culture. They prefer to patrol boundaries rather than venture into the no-man’s-land of hybridity. In the 1950s, for example, C. P. Snow posited a hostile stand-off between the “Two Cultures” of the arts and sciences, ignoring important qualifications to his stark antithesis – including over a century’s worth of science fiction since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Similarly, recent discussions of “culture wars” and the “clash of civilizations” have a martial tone and apparently clear parameters. On closer inspection, however, the combatants wear a variety of uniforms. If culture is often war by other means, we are finally witnessing a truce in one longstanding conflict: that between so-called elite and mass cultures.

Skirmishes do continue. Like Japanese soldiers fighting the Second World War long after it ended, some still draw a cordon sanitaire around “literature” to protect it from “genre”, regardless of how closely the two commingle. Jeanette Winterson proclaims “I hate science fiction”, even though her recent The Stone Gods includes robots and a post-apocalyptic future. Certain critics still insist that Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize primarily for The Golden Notebook (1962), even though this Guest of Honor at the 1987 World Science Fiction Convention considers her futurist “Canopus in Argus” novels “to be some of my best work”. (David Langford gleefully tracks anti-genre comments at http://news.ansible.co.uk)

But critics of genre are increasingly counter-balanced by prominent proponents and practitioners, including Haruki Murakami, David Mitchell, Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Lethem and Junot Diaz. The Library of America has published elegant editions of authors who only two generations ago gave libraries across America pause, H. P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick. Genre films and books are no longer a minority interest. They top the bestseller lists and popularity polls: we are all geeks now. The establishment’s disdain for genre, and the populists’ suspicion of experimental techniques, are largely things of the past. Generations weaned on cultures “high” and “low” have become the producers and arbiters of the arts, enabled by the expansion of the internet since the early 1990s. (Even the “establishment” is being overtaken by the less euphonious but more democratic “blogosphere”.) Two eminent figures in the effort to reconcile mass entertainment with intellectual respectability, the music critic David Hajdu and the novelist Michael Chabon, have taken stock of the irrational intolerance faced by genre artists in the past. Neither overtly celebrates today’s relative catholicity of taste – battles remain to be fought – but the simultaneous publication of their works reflects a broader cultural turning point.

Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague is a thoroughly researched, engagingly written account of a modern witch-hunt: the public hysteria over horror and crime comics in the United States during the early 1950s. Many of these were excessive in their gratuitous depictions of violence, as Hajdu admits, but the reaction to them was even more extreme. Schools and churches organized public burnings of comics, when Nazi book-burnings were still a recent memory; laws were passed to prohibit sales; publishers were forced out of business and artists lost their livelihood. The industry responded to the outcry by creating a self-censoring body whose code was so restrictive that comics lost their vitality and much of their audience.

At first glance, this sad episode of censorship and paranoia seems to coincide with the chilling climate fostered by McCarthyism. There were clear overlaps: the panic was promoted by Dr Fredric Wertham who, like Joseph McCarthy, found a cause that would bring him the national attention he craved. Wertham’s scientific credentials in psychiatry seemed to legitimate his specious claim that comic books caused juvenile delinquency, and made oracular his pronouncement that “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic book industry”. His Seduction of the Innocent (1954) led parents to believe that Superman promoted Fascism, Batman and Robin homosexuality, and Wonder Woman sadomasochism. (Wertham wasn’t entirely wrong about the last: Wonder Woman enjoyed using her “golden lasso” and “bracelets of submission” on villains; her creator, William Moulton Marston, claimed she “satisfies the subconscious, elaborately disguised desire of males to be mastered by a woman who loves them”.) Politicians, such as Senator Estes Kefauver, joined Wertham in order to advance their careers.

Hajdu notes these similarities, but argues that while McCarthyism represented anti-elitism, the crusade against comics was “anti-anti-elitism, a campaign by protectors of rarefied ideals of literacy, sophistication, and virtue to rein in the practitioners of a wild, homegrown form of vernacular American expression”. American elites had deemed comics a debased form of expression since the emergence of newspaper comic-strips in the late nineteenth century. This new art, created largely for and about immigrants, engaged in deliberate self-parody that baffled establishment critics. Charges of illiteracy and bad taste continued to be levelled at the nascent comic book industry of the 1930s, as it employed outsiders – immigrants, women, minorities and iconoclasts. Comics were largely created by “cultural insurgents” who exploited the creative licence of a new art form with few rules and little critical oversight.

Link to Read the Rest of the Review Essay

Animation Archive

2008-06-04T14:59:00.001-04:00

Reconstruction 8.2: Cartoons

British Film Institute: Animation Timeline

Reconstruction 8.2: Cartoons

2008-06-04T14:53:00.001-04:00

(Our new issue is now available)

Reconstruction 8.2: Cartoons

Cartoons Issue Publication Announcement
Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture is proud to announce the publication of Vol. 8, No. 2, 2008: Cartoons, guest edited by Davin Heckman. Featured in the issue:

* Davin Heckman, "Suspended Animation: Meditations on the Time and Space of the Moving Image"

* Ngwarsungu Chiwengo, "Memory, Ideology, and Exile: J. M Kibushi's Mwana Mboka"

* Joanne Knowles, "The Simpsons and the Nuclear Family"

* Sean Chadwell, "Technological Determinism and the Poisoned Apple: The Case of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs"

* Paul Ward, "Animated realities: the animated film, documentary, realism"

* Laurie Cubbison, "Not just for children's television: Anime and the changing editing practices of American television networks"

* Matthew Diebler, "'Thank Goodness He-Man Showed Up': Hypermasculine Cultural Posturing and the Token Women of 80s Animated Action Teams"

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture (ISSN: 1547-4348) is an innovative cultural studies journal dedicated to fostering an intellectual community composed of scholars and their audience, granting them all the ability to share thoughts and opinions on the most important and influential work in contemporary interdisciplinary studies. Reconstruction publishes one open issue and three themed issues quarterly.

Reconstruction is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography.

Reconstruction continuously accepts submissions for its annual open issue, and is now accepting submissions for the following upcoming themed issues:

* The Avant-Garde as Critical Practice (August 15, 2008)

Please consult Submission Guidelines for all submission requirements, and Call for Papers for individual CFP requirements and guest editor contact information.

Reconstruction is always interested in proposals for future themed issues. If interested in proposing a themed issue, please consult FAQ for Prospective Guest Editors and contact Reconstruction Managing Editor for further information.

All submissions and submission queries should be written care of reconstruction.submissions_at_gmail.com.

Ian McEwan: The Day of Judgment

2008-06-03T16:45:00.001-04:00

The day of judgment
by Ian McEwan
Guardian

End-time thinking - the belief in a world purified by catastrophe - could once be dismissed as a harmless remnant of a more superstitious age. But with the rise of religious fundamentalism, prophets of apocalypse have become a new and very real danger.

...

Still the Book of Revelation, the final book of the Bible, and perhaps its most bizarre, certainly one of its most lurid, remains important in the United States, just as it once was in medieval Europe. The book is also known as the Apocalypse - and we should be clear about the meaning of this word, which is derived from the Greek word for revelation. Apocalypse, which has become synonymous with "catastrophe", actually refers to the literary form in which an individual describes what has been revealed to him by a supernatural being. There was a long Jewish tradition of prophecy, and there were hundreds, if not thousands of seers like John of Patmos between the second century BC and the first century AD. Many other Christian apocalypses were deprived of canonical authority in the second century AD. Revelation most likely survived because its author was confused with John, the Beloved Disciple. It is interesting to speculate how different medieval European history, and indeed the history of religion in Europe and the United States, would have been if the Book of Revelation had also failed, as it nearly did, to be retained in the Bible we now know.

The scholarly consensus dates Revelation to AD95 or 96. Little is known of its author beyond the fact that he is certainly not the apostle John. The occasion of writing appears to be the persecution of Christians under the Roman emperor Domitian. Only a generation before, the Romans had sacked the Second Temple in Jerusalem and are, therefore, identified with the Babylonians who had destroyed the First Temple centuries earlier. The general purpose quite likely was to give hope and consolation to the faithful in the certainty that their tribulations would end, that the Kingdom of God would prevail. Ever since the influential 12th-century historian Joachim of Fiore, Revelation has been seen, within various traditions of gathering complexity and divergence, as an overview of human history whose last stage we are now in; alternatively, and this is especially relevant to the postwar United States, as an account purely of those last days. For centuries, within the Protestant tradition, the anti-Christ was identified with the Pope, or with the Catholic Church in general. In recent decades, the honour has been bestowed on the Soviet Union, the European Union, or secularism and atheists. For many millennial dispensationalists, international peacemakers, who risk delaying the final struggle by sowing concord among nations - the United Nations, along with the World Council of Churches - have been seen as Satanic forces.

The cast or contents of Revelation in its contemporary representations has all the colourful gaudiness of a children's computer fantasy game - earthquakes and fires, thundering horses and their riders, angels blasting away on trumpets, magic vials, Jezebel, a red dragon and other mythical beasts, and a scarlet woman. Another familiar aspect is the potency of numbers - seven each of seals, heads of beasts, candlesticks, stars, lamps, trumpets, angels and vials; then four riders, four beasts with seven heads, ten horns, ten crowns, four and twenty elders, twelve tribes with twelve thousand members ... and finally, most resonantly, spawning 19 centuries of dark tomfoolery, "Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast; for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred, three score and six." To many minds, 666 bristles with significance. The internet is stuffed with tremulous speculation about supermarket barcodes, implanted chips, numerical codes for the names of world leaders. However, the oldest known record of this famous verse, from the Oxyrhynchus site, gives the number as 616, as does the Zurich Bible. I have the impression that any number would do. One senses in the arithmetic of prophecy the yearnings of a systematising mind, bereft of the experimental scientific underpinnings that were to give such human tendencies their rich expression many centuries later. Astrology gives a similar impression of numerical obsession operating within a senseless void.

But Revelation has endured in an age of technology and scepticism. Not many works of literature, not even the Odyssey of Homer, can boast such wide appeal over such an expanse of time. One celebrated case of this rugged durability is that of William Miller, the 19th-century farmer who became a prophet and made a set of intricate calculations, based on a line in verse 14 of the Book of Daniel: "unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed." Counting for various reasons this utterance to date from 457BC, and understanding one prophetic day to be the equivalent of a year, Miller came to the conclusion that the last of days would occur in 1843. Some of Miller's followers refined the calculations further to October 22. After nothing happened on that day, the year was quickly revised to 1844, to take into account the year zero. The faithful Millerites gathered in their thousands to wait. One may not share the beliefs, but it is quite possible to understand the mortifying disenchantment. One eyewitness wrote:

[We] confidently expected to see Jesus Christ and all the holy angels with him ... and that our trials and sufferings with our earthly pilgrimage would close and we should be caught up to meet our coming Lord ... and thus we looked for our coming Lord until the bell tolled twelve at midnight. The day had then passed and our disappointment became a certainty. Our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before. It seemed that the loss of all our earthly friends could have been no comparison. We wept, and wept, till the day dawned.

One means of dealing with the disillusionment was to give it a title - the Great Disappointment - duly capitalised. More importantly, according to Kenneth Newport's impressive account of the Waco siege, the very next day after the Disappointment, one Millerite leader in Port Gibson, New York, by the name of Hiram Edson had a vision as he walked along, a sudden revelation that "the cleansing of the sanctuary" referred to events not on earth, but in heaven. Jesus had taken his place in the heavenly holy of holies. The date had been right all along, it was simply the place they had got wrong. This "masterstroke", as Newport calls it, this "theological lifeline" removed the whole affair into a realm immune to disproof. The Great Disappointment was explained, and many Millerites were drawn, with hope still strong in their hearts, into the beginnings of the Seventh Day Adventist movement - which was to become one of the most successful churches in the United States.

In passing, I note the connections between this church and the medieval sects that Cohn describes - the strong emphasis on the Book of Revelation, the looming proximity of the end, the strict division between the faithful remnant who keep the Sabbath, and those who join the ranks of the "fallen", of the anti-Christ, identified with the Pope whose title, Vicarius Filii Dei (vicar of the son of God) apparently has a numerical value of 666. I mention Hiram Edson's morning-after masterstroke to illustrate the adaptability and resilience of end-time thought. For centuries now, it has regarded the end as "soon" - if not next week, then within a year or two. The end has not come, and yet no one is discomfited for long. New prophets, and soon, a new generation, set about the calculations, and always manage to find the end looming within their own lifetime. The million sellers like Hal Lindsey predicted the end of the world all through the seventies, eighties and nineties - and today, business has never been better. There is a hunger for this news, and perhaps we glimpse here something in our nature, something of our deeply held notions of time, and our own insignificance against the intimidating vastness of eternity, or the age of the universe - on the human scale there is little difference. We have need of a plot, a narrative to shore up our irrelevance in the flow of things.

In The Sense of an Ending , Frank Kermode proposes that the enduring quality, the vitality of the Book of Revelation suggests a "consonance with our more naive requirements of fiction". We are born, as we will die, in the middle of things, in the "middest". To make sense of our span, we need what he calls "fictive concords with origins and ends. 'The End', in the grand sense, as we imagine it, will reflect our irreducibly intermediary expectations." What could grant us more meaning against the abyss of time than to identify our own personal demise with the purifying annihilation of all that is. Kermode quotes with approval from Wallace Stevens - "the imagination is always at the end of an era". Even our notions of decadence contain the hopes of renewal; the religious minded, as well as the most secular, looked on the transition to the year 2000 as inescapably significant, even if all the atheists did was to party a little harder

To Read the Entire Essay

Harlan Ellison Archive

2008-06-02T17:38:00.002-04:00

Studio 360 Interview (2008)

Harlan Ellison Videos

Studio 360: Harlan Ellison Interview

2008-06-02T17:25:00.002-04:00

Harlan Ellison Interview
Host: Kurt Anderson
Studio 360 (WNYC)

Over the last 50 years, he's written hundreds of short stories ("A Boy and His Dog"), several novels and movies and worked on TV shows like "The Man From UNCLE," the original Star Trek, and "The Outer Limits." But don't call him a science-fiction author: Ellison says he's the heir to Edgar Allan Poe and Jorge-Luis Borges. Kurt asks Ellison about his brash reputation and about the new documentary about him called "Dreams With Sharp Teeth."

To Listen to the Interview

Michael Dirda: A biography of the world's most famous sex manual

2008-06-02T12:28:00.006-04:00

Review of THE BOOK OF LOVE: The Story of the KamasutraBy James McConnachie
A biography of the world's most famous sex manual
By Michael Dirda
Washington Post

Years ago, a bunch of us were sitting around drinking when I heard a friend murmur two sentences I have never forgotten. "You know, guys, sex is the greatest thing in the world." He paused and we were all about to nod in agreement. He was, after all, a noted and knowledgeable ladies' man. Unexpectedly, though, he then added, with infinite wistfulness: "But it's just not that great."

There, in that gulf between the reality and the dream, lies the domain of pornography, the sex industry and the masturbatory fantasy -- of Viagra and the midlife crisis. Our Western myths of love are seldom about fulfillment; they are all about yearning. In Plato's Symposium we are told that the gods divided the original ball-like human beings in two, and that we consequently spend our lives searching for the other half who will complete us. So-called romantic love, which first blossomed in 12th-century France, revels in passion delayed, forbidden or otherwise thwarted. Its real theme is desire.

But for the Western imagination, the East has long represented an escape from this pervasive sexual unhappiness. Baudelaire spoke of tropic realms of "luxe, calme et volupté"; Hawaii and Tahiti once beckoned as Edens of innocent voluptuousness. From the 18th century on, the Orient, in general, seemed a perfumed garden, offering the tender attentions of geishas, bare-breasted island girls and pretty boys. Here, amid erotic graciousness, the darkness of sin was unknown. And yet, even this scented, sensual wonderland turned out to have its guide, its bible: The Kamasutra, sometimes subtitled "The Hindu Art of Love."

The title alone summons visions of exceedingly ambitious sexual postures. Yet the real Kamasutra is even more fascinating than its myth. In his "biography" of this Sanskrit classic, James McConnachie starts by exploring the philosophical and historical background of its 3rd-century text. "Kama" is the Sanskrit word for sexual pleasure or delight; a "sutra" is "a scholarly treatise designed to compress knowledge into a series of pithy maxims." The Kamasutra itself is a work of consolidation or reclamation, since its author, Vatsyayana, tells us that he was building on seven earlier treatises about love (all now lost). It was intended "to be a contribution to the great scientific project of the era: the composition of authoritative studies of all aspects of human behaviour and understanding." Other treatises were devoted to dharma -- a word associated with law, justice, duty and principle -- and artha, which covered worldly success.

Under the Gupta dynasty, 3rd-century India developed a highly aesthetic urban culture, and Vatsyayana's intended readers were young men about town, who frequented the theater, practiced the arts and lived playboy lives devoted to pleasure. His treatise (or shastra) is divided into seven "books." In Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar's 2002 translation, these are: General Observations, Sex, Virgins, Wives, Other Men's Wives, Courtesans, and Erotic Esoterica. Full of details from contemporary life, The Kamasutra is highly dramatic and has been likened to an extended play. It also strives to establish sex as a humane activity, a cultivated art that rejects both confining Buddhist morality and unchecked sexual aggression.

In the notorious Book Two, Vatsyayana describes 64 kama-kalas, or ways to make love. Surprisingly, these are not 64 positions, notes McConnachie, "but simply a kind of grand total of the categories into which Vatsyayana divides the different moods and modes of lovemaking. Theorists, Vatsyayana says, divide sex into eight different topics, namely 'embracing, kissing, scratching, biting, the positions, moaning, the woman playing the man's part, and oral sex.' As each of these modes of sex is supposed to have eight different particular manifestations, there are thus sixty-four ways in which a man or woman could be said to be having sex in its broadest sense." But, as McConnachie emphasizes, "the kama-kalas are not just tools for successful love making," they also "lie at the heart of what constitutes an educated man."

To Read the Rest of the Review

To the Best of Our Knowledge: Plagiarism

2008-06-02T12:11:00.001-04:00

Plagiarism
To the Best of Our Knowledge
Host: Steve Paulson

SEGMENT 1:

Author Jonathan Lethem talks to Jim Fleming about his "Harper's" Magazine essay, "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism." As the subtitle indicates, Jonathan Lethem appropriated the words of many authors to cover the subject of plagiarism, although he provides full attribution of his sources at the end of the essay. Also, Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid) talks to Anne Strainchamps about his book, "Rhythm Science," and how the art of music sampling relates to plagiarism. We also hear a DJ Spooky/TTBOOK interview mashup.

SEGMENT 2:

The Honorable Richard A. Posner is a Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh District. He's also a prolific author. His most recent book is called "The Little Book of Plagiarism." Posner talked to Steve Paulson about the history and ethics of plagiarism.

SEGMENT 3:

Journalist Malcolm Gladwell talks to Steve Paulson about how the words from one of his stories for "The New Yorker" ended up on Broadway and how this made him change his attitude about plagiarism.

To Listen to the Episode

Natalie Angier: Curriculum Designed to Unite Art and Science

2008-06-02T12:09:00.001-04:00

Curriculum Designed to Unite Art and Science
By NATALIE ANGIER
New York Times

...

To illustrate how the New Humanities approach to scholarship might work, Dr. Heywood cited her own recent investigations into the complex symbolism of the wolf, a topic inspired by a pet of hers that was seven-eighths wolf. “He was completely different from a dog,” she said. “He was terrified of things in the human environment that dogs are perfectly at ease with, like the swishing sound of a jogging suit, or somebody wearing a hat, and he kept his reserve with people, even me.”

Dr. Heywood began studying the association between wolves and nature, and how people’s attitudes toward one might affect their regard for the other. “In the standard humanities approach, you compile and interpret images of wolves from folkloric history, and you analyze previously published texts about wolves,” and that’s pretty much it, Dr. Heywood said. Seeking a more full-bodied understanding, she delved into the scientific literature, studying wolf ecology, biology and evolution. She worked with Dr. Wilson and others to design a survey to gauge people’s responses to three images of a wolf: one of a classic beautiful wolf, another of a hunter holding a dead wolf, the third of a snarling, aggressive wolf.

It’s an implicit association test, designed to gauge subliminal attitudes by measuring latency of response between exposure to an image on a screen and the pressing of a button next to words like beautiful, frightening, good, wrong.

“These firsthand responses give me more to work with in understanding how people read wolves, as opposed to seeing things through other filters and published texts,” Dr. Heywood said.

Combining some of her early survey results with the wealth of wolf imagery culled from cultures around the world, Dr. Heywood finds preliminary support for the provocative hypothesis that humans and wolves may have co-evolved.

“They were competing predators that occupied the same ecological niche as we did,” she said, “but it’s possible that we learned some of our social and hunting behaviors from them as well.” Hence, our deeply conflicted feelings toward wolves — as the nurturing mother to Romulus and Remus, as the vicious trickster disguised as Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother.

In designing the New Humanities initiative, Dr. Wilson is determined to avoid romanticizing science or presenting it as the ultimate arbiter of meaning, as other would-be integrationists and ardent Darwinists have done.

“You can study music, dance, narrative storytelling and artmaking scientifically, and you can conclude that yes, they’re deeply biologically driven, they’re essential to our species, but there would still be something missing,” he said, “and that thing is an appreciation for the work itself, a true understanding of its meaning in its culture and context.”

To Read the Entire Article

Charlie Kaufman Archive

2008-05-30T15:18:00.002-04:00

Matt Noller: Review of Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman)

Charlie Kaufman: “Maybe you have the one thought that’ll change everything for me."

Matt Noller: Review of Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman)

2008-05-30T15:12:00.002-04:00

Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman)
Reviewed by: Matt Noller
The House Next Door

It doesn’t matter how big a Kaufman devotee you are, how many times you’ve seen Being John Malkovich or Adaptation or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It doesn’t matter what you’ve read or heard about Synecdoche, New York, his directorial debut, because nothing could possibly prepare you for the overwhelming mindfuckery on display. It is easily Kaufman’s most ambitious project, which means that it is easily one of the most ambitious films I’ve ever seen. The role of the artist in society; coming to terms with death, God and fate; and the importance of escaping from the trap of solipsism in order to connect with others are among the most prominent themes, but they are far from the only ones. The sheer depth and complexity of the ideas Kaufman is out to explore here is mind-boggling.

Obviously, Synecdoche, New York is not an easy film, or a clean one. The first twenty minutes or so are relatively straight-forward, all things considered, as they detail the day-to-day life of a theatre director named Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his wife Adele (Catherine Keener). When Caden’s health begins to deteriorate in strange and grotesque ways (the possibilities of these sicknesses being all in his head or being meant as a literalization of his fear of death seem quite likely), Adele takes his daughter to Berlin for a week-long trip. They never come home, and as the film becomes increasingly focused on Caden’s mental state, things like temporal and narrative cohesion start to feel like a distant memory.

To Read the Rest of this Review and Reviews of More Films Premiering at Cannes

Hester Prynne: Sinner, Victim, Object, Winner

2008-05-29T14:06:00.000-04:00

Hester Prynne: Sinner, Victim, Object, Winner
by Andrea Seabrook
In Character (NPR)

Hester Prynne, protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne's masterwork The Scarlet Letter, is among the first and most important female protagonists in American literature. She's the embodiment of deep contradictions: bad and beautiful, holy and sinful, conventional and radical.

At first glance, Hester may seem more victim than heroine. The adultery she committed when her husband was thought lost at sea leads Boston's Puritan authorities to brand her with the bright red "A" of the title. She's forced to stand in shame before the mass of Puritan citizens, enduring their stares, their whispers and their contempt. In the self-righteous eyes of the townspeople, she is the ultimate example of sin.

Hester Prynne is also the object of a cruel and shadowy love triangle between herself, her minister lover Arthur Dimmesdale, and her husband, now called Roger Chillingworth.

"The drama is really the drama of the patriarchial society's need to control female sexuality in the most basic way," says Evan Carton, literature professor at the University of Texas at Austin. "This classic male anxiety: How do you know for sure whether your baby is yours? If you don't know if your woman and your child are actually yours, then you have no control over property, no control over social order, no control over anything — and that's the deep radical challenge that Hester presents to this society."

America was in the midst of a growing feminist movement when Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter. Professor Jamie Barlowe, of the University of Toledo, says that Hawthorne — living in Salem, Boston and later Concord, Mass. — "was very, very aware of the growing feminist insurgence. Women's rights were a part of the cultural conversation."

The first women's-rights convention at Seneca Falls, N.Y., was held in 1848, two years before The Scarlet Letter was published. Strong women like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were gathering other women to talk about science, politics, and ideas. For the first time in America, women were challenging the firmly established male patriarchy. Hester Prynne can be seen as Hawthorne's literary contemplation of what happens when women break cultural bounds and gain personal power.

To read the rest of the introduction and to listen to the episode and to hear excerpts from The Scarlet Letter

Barbara Pell: "Should Christians Read Dirty Books"

2008-05-29T12:05:00.003-04:00

I was once told that some naturalistic scenes in a contemporary novel that particularly offended me were moderate compared to the scenes of human squalor and hopelessness witnessed by my friend, who was a public health nurse in a city slum. She implied that if I could get out of my ivory tower and my middle-class suburban community and experience the degradation and suffering of the majority of the world’s people, if only through the realism of a modern novel, maybe I could begin to understand what the nurses and social workers and street missions were trying to do in a society where one couldn’t run away from the consequences of human sin and need simply by closing the covers of a book.

Quoted by the Christian film critic Jeffrey Overstreet (62) who follows it up by stating "If we are shocked by something as common as a spoken obscenity, it may reveal more about our distance from people in need than it does about the person who blurted out such coarse language" (63).:

The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Betrayal of Judas

2008-05-29T11:29:00.001-04:00

The Betrayal of Judas: Did a 'dream team' of biblical scholars mislead millions?
By THOMAS BARTLETT
The Chronicle of Higher Education

Marvin Meyer was eating breakfast when his cellphone buzzed. Meyer, a professor of religious studies at Chapman University, has a mostly gray beard and an athletic build left over from his basketball days. His friends call him "the Velvet Hammer" for his mild demeanor. He's a nice guy.

The voice on the other end belonged to a representative of the National Geographic Society. They were working on a project and wanted his help.

"That's very interesting," he remembers saying. "What do you have in mind?"

"We can't tell you," was the reply.

That was not the answer he expected.

"Let me see if I understand this," Meyer said. "You'd like me to agree to do a project with you, but you won't tell me what that project is. Is that right?"

"Exactly."

He would have to sign a nondisclosure agreement first — which, in the end, he agreed to do. Not long afterward, Meyer found himself locked in an office in Washington, with a desk, a pile of dictionaries and lexicons, and one of the most sought-after religious texts in recent history, the Gospel of Judas. For a week he worked almost nonstop on the 26-page text, translating the Coptic, an ancient Egyptian language written with Greek letters, into English. As he translated, a startling portrait of Judas Iscariot emerged. This was not the reviled traitor who betrayed Jesus with a kiss. This was the trusted disciple, the close confidant, the friend. This was a revelation.

When the Gospel of Judas was unveiled at a news conference in April 2006, it made headlines around the world — with nearly all of those articles touting the new and improved Judas. "In Ancient Document, Judas, Minus the Betrayal," read the headline in The New York Times. The British paper The Guardian called it "a radical makeover for one of the worst reputations in history." A documentary that aired a few days later on National Geographic's cable channel also pushed the Judas-as-hero theme. The premiere attracted four million viewers, making it the second-highest-rated program in the channel's history, behind only a documentary on September 11.

But almost immediately, other scholars began to take issue with the interpretation of Meyer and the rest of the National Geographic team. They didn't see a good Judas at all. In fact, this Judas seemed more evil than ever. Those early voices of dissent have since grown into a chorus, some of whom argue that National Geographic's handling of the project amounts to scholarly malpractice. It's a perfect example, critics argue, of what can happen when commercial considerations are allowed to ride roughshod over careful research. What's more, the controversy has strained friendships in this small community of religion scholars — causing some on both sides of the argument to feel, in a word, betrayed.

To Read the Rest of the Article

Patrick Smith on "Freddie vs. Jason: Depictions of Community in Horror Films" (5/29)

2008-05-28T14:44:00.000-04:00

(Message from Danny Mayer.)

Come one, come all to hear Patrick Smith speak at Al's Bar tomorrow
(Thursday) from 6:00-7:30(ish).

Patrick Smith on Freddie vs. Jason: Depictions of Community in Horror Films.

Next week is the last of the Slightly North of Center public talks.
Michael Marchman will be giving that talk on Geographies of Global
Capitalism and Resistance.

Bring friends. Tell friends.

danny

In Our Time: King Lear

2008-05-27T18:20:00.000-04:00

King Lear
In Our Time (BBC)
Host: Melvyn Bragg

Around the turn of 1606, a group of London theatre-goers braved the plague to take in a new play by the well-known impresario, Mr William Shakespeare. Packed into the Globe Theatre, they were treated to a tale of violence, hatred and betrayal so upsetting that it languished among Shakespeare’s less popular plays until re-written with a happy ending.

The play was King Lear – a drama on the folly of age, the cruelty of families and the futility of ambition, set amidst the wilderness of Ancient Britain. A place where, as the Duke of Albany declares in the play, “Humanity must perforce prey on itself, Like monsters of the deep.”

But why did Shakespeare take a story from the deep history of Britain and make it so shockingly his own and when, from the Civil War to the Second World War, did this powerful and confusing tragedy emerge as Shakespeare’s greatest?

Contributors

Jonathan Bate, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick

Katherine Duncan-Jones, Tutorial Fellow in English at Somerville College, Oxford

Catherine Belsey, Research Professor in English at the University of Wales, Swansea

To Listen to the Episode

War (Archive)

2008-05-19T13:01:00.002-04:00

2008:

John Cusack: Outsourced Warfare Represents a "Radical, Dangerous, Disgusting Ideology"

Life During Wartime; America's Chemically Modified 21st Century Soldiers

2005:

Bradley Denton: "Sgt. Chip"

John Cusack: Outsourced Warfare Represents a "Radical, Dangerous, Disgusting Ideology"

2008-05-19T12:58:00.002-04:00

(This film looks good and Cusack's interview is refreshing... The entire interview is highly recommended!)

John Cusack: Outsourced Warfare Represents a "Radical, Dangerous, Disgusting Ideology"
Interviewed by Joshua Holland
AlterNet

John Cusack's new film, War, Inc., is set in a fictionalized Iraq. It's a funny film. It might have been tough to watch if it weren't, given the level of destruction that five years of occupation have wrought on the real country.

Cusack, along with co-writers Mark Leyner and Jeremy Pikser, offer up a dystopian vision of the future of privatized warfare set in "Turaqistan," a presumably oil-rich country that, if it really existed, would surely be somewhere that most Americans couldn't find on a map.

The film's humor rests on very real and demonstrably disastrous trends in neoconservative foreign policy of recent years -- a lethal war of choice and profit, the dismantling of states and plundering of their resources, a profound cultural insensitivity, lack of accountability and reckless disregard for easily-predicted consequences -- which are then pushed to the absurd.

In Iraq, journalists are embedded with troops and tour Potemkin villages to demonstrate progress; in Turaqistan, they're given virtual-reality tours of combat without leaving the cozy confines of "Emerald City," War, Inc.'s version of Baghdad's Green Zone. In Iraq, contractors like Halliburton have squeezed billions out of the treasury for substandard work that has left the country's infrastructure decimated; Turaqistan is wholly-managed by the Halliburton-esque Tamerlane corporation, and the tanks that patrol the country's burned-out streets are covered with NASCAR-style logos for everything from Popeye's Chicken to Golden Palace online gambling.

Fans of the underground classic Grosse Pointe Blank will find much that is familiar. Cusack plays a conflicted killer -- this time a lethal assassin -- an extreme kind of corporate fixer -- whom Tamarlane dispatches to far-flung locales whenever someone of influence threatens the company's bottom line. The film has the same kind of sardonic and referential humor, and employs the same over-the-top ultra-violence pushed to comic extremes. Joan Cusack, in a role reminiscent of the one she played in Grosse Pointe Blank, again steals the show with her few minutes of screen time.

With sharp writing and strong performances by Marisa Tomei, Hilary Duff and Ben Kingsley, War, Inc. is provocative and satisfying. But it may have failed in one notable regard. Turaqistan, for all its insanity, is not all that much crazier than the reality of post-invasion Iraq; a week after the film arrived at AlterNet's office, and with mortars raining down in Baghdad's heavily-fortified Green Zone, a Los Angeles-based company announced that it's planning to build a Disney-like skateboard- and theme-park in Baghdad. Never mind that most Iraqi kids have never seen a skateboard -- a spokesperson for the company promised that a shipment of free boards would arrive in Iraq before the park's opening.

AlterNet caught up with John Cusack recently to discuss the inspirations for his film.

Joshua Holland: Tell me a little bit about your new project.

John Cusack: Well, we thought of it as an incendiary political cartoon that would hopefully put America's current imperial adventures in Iraq into a kind of a larger context. And maybe put a different lens on what privatization means; what this plan has been and what it's been like when people try to privatize the very core things it means to be a state. And what it means to spread an ideology like that across the globe.

There are 180,000 contractors in Iraq and about 160,000 troops, right? And if one just takes that trend to its logical conclusion, well that's where "War, Inc." is set. It takes place at a time in the near future when warfare us an entirely corporate affair.

Holland: As a political nerd, it struck me as a highly referential film. I felt like your character, to some extent, was loosely patterned maybe on John Perkins, who wrote Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

Cusack: You know, that book came out when we were already making the film, I believe. And I know we were writing it when Naomi Klein's groundbreaking piece called "Baghdad Year Zero" came out in Harper's. She's a journalist I've always greatly admired and respected. And then as we were making the movie, she was writing the Shock Doctrine. I remember being aware of it while we were writing it. And I remember talking about it. But you know, this character was also based on [former U.S. Envoy to Iraq] Paul Bremer flying in while Baghdad was still burning and literally ruling by Fiat. Sitting down in Saddam's old palace and banging out 50 or 60 new laws that would allow 100 percent foreign ownership of previously state-owned industry by these outside corporations. And he was running around in those Brooks Brothers suits and the military boots when he did it.

To Read the Rest of the Interview and to Watch a Trailer for the Film

"Time to Go Home" by Michael Franti and Spearhead

Religion/Spirituality (Archive)

2008-05-19T12:28:00.006-04:00

2008:

In Our Time: Greek Myths

Fernando Pessoa: The Book of Disquiet

Michael Benton: Review of E.L. Doctorow's City of God

Barbara Pell: "Should Christians Read Dirty Books"

The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Betrayal of Judas

Eileen Jones: Sugarpuff Christian Propaganda Dressed Up As a Dark Children's Movie

Stephen Pfohl: Left Behind--Religion, Technology, and Flight from the Flesh

2004:

John Powers: Passion Show

Eileen Jones: Sugarpuff Christian Propaganda Dressed Up As a Dark Children's Movie

2008-05-19T12:25:00.001-04:00

Prince Caspian: Sugarpuff Christian Propaganda Dressed Up As a Dark Children's Movie
By Eileen Jones
AlterNet

The second film in the Chronicles of Narnia franchise, Prince Caspian, is so big, so long, so slow, so stilted, so cheesy, so pumped full of phony-looking CGI that there's nothing to stop it from making a billion dollars. Because, God help us, this is the gelatinous form the fantasy genre has taken in the past few decades and now everyone has learned to love it, the way we learned to love Spam and Jello and many other products that hold a pre-molded shape for mysterious reasons we don't want to go into.

You'll read other reviews claiming that, compared to the first film, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), this one is dark and maybe even disturbing for the hordes of kids worldwide who will flock to see it. Don't you believe it. This film is dark the way pearl grey would seem dark if you lived in the Land of Blinding Whiteness. Prince Caspian earns its PG rating through bloodless war, reversible deaths, tiresome moral preachiness, and the cutest, blandest kid heroes ever assembled.

These kids are the four Pevensie siblings of C.S. Lewis' famous children's classics, London youngsters who periodically slip off to the magical world of Narnia to lead epic lives. Here's how you tell them apart: Peter (William Moseley) is now in his sullen teen years and scowls all the time; Susan (Anna Popplewell) shoots a mean arrow and has the poutiest red lips of the four, which is saying a lot; Edmund (Scandar Keynes) has the most upstanding hair; and Lucy (Georgie Henley) is the small, pious girl forever reminding the others to worship the giant holy lion Aslan (voiced by Liam Neeson) that nobody can see but her since he was martyred in the last war.

At the end of the first film, the kids had been crowned young kings and queens in honor of their leadership in defeating the forces of the magnificently evil White Witch (Tilda Swinton). As the sequel begins, they are one year older and very bored when they're transported back again to Narnia via the enchanted London tube (also Harry Potter's main mode of travel to the world of magic). However, in Narnia it's centuries later, and the castle in which the children were crowned is now an ancient ruin. The Narnians, a motley assortment of dwarves, centaurs, minotaurs, gryphons, talking animals, feisty trees, et.al., have been driven into hiding by the cruel tyranny of the Telmarines, led by the usurper King Miraz, played by Sergio Castellitto. (The wicked Telmarines are clearly Spaniards, by the way, probably for reasons having to do with C.S. Lewis' willingness to hold a permanent grudge against all former foes of dear old England) The Narnians, reunited with the Pevensie children, pin their hopes on the rightful heir to the throne, young Telmarine Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes) to unite and restore the kingdom.

It's all very plotty and ponderous. Director Andrew Adamson (the Shrek franchise) isn't exactly the surest hand in the West when it comes to mobilizing the troops for exciting action sequences. Luckily horses galloping are always beautiful to watch, and that helps the dragging pace of the battles a bit. But the entrancing White Witch who did so much to enliven the first film is sorely missed here. Tilda Swinton as the Witch makes only a brief appearance in Caspian, but she really knows how to goose up the stodgy proceedings of contemporary fantasy. With her odd-angled Renaissance-era face, her cold grandeur, her convincing battle-readiness and barbaric furs and sledge pulled by wolves, she was the perfect antidote to all the glutinous scenes with children learning to have unquestioning faith in a giant supremely-fake-looking lion. I spent the whole first film rooting for her.

There are a few other actors struggling valiantly to breathe life into the proceedings, including Peter Dinklage as the grumpy dwarf Trumpkin. But just the fact that he is a grumpy dwarf shows you how hopelessly recycled all this fantasy material has gotten. In this genre by now, all dwarfs are grumpy, and all characters spend huge amounts of time staring off into space with awed expressions that are cut together with CGI effects meant to represent the things that awe them. All fantasy scores sound like John Williams on his most bathetic day, heavy on the triumphal horns and the celestial choir voices. Fantasy lands must now look like New Zealand. Fantasy talking animals must be voiced by stars like Eddie Izzard as the swordfighting mouse Reepicheep, who's a less amusing version of the swordfighting cat Puss-in-boots voiced by Antonio Banderas in Shrek II.

To Read the Rest of the Review

Andre Malraux/Human Nature/Dance, Monkey, Dance

2008-05-19T00:17:00.000-04:00

"The attempt to force human beings to despise themselves is what I call hell."

---Andre Malraux

Quoted by Frank in:

Dance, Monkey, Dance

Jeff Vandermeer Archive

2008-05-15T13:08:00.003-04:00

Jeff Vandermeer Interview of Paul Barnett aka John Grant: Science Has Been Corrupted

Adventure in Sci Fi: Interview about "The Situation"

Veniss Underground

Adventure in Sci Fi Publishing: Jeff Vandermeer on His New Novella "The Situation"

2008-05-15T13:00:00.003-04:00

#43: Jeff Vandermeer
Adventures in Sci Fi Publishing

To Listen to the Episode

Thinking Allowed: Superheroes

2008-05-12T13:41:00.002-04:00

SUPERHEROES
Host: Laurie Taylor
Thinking Allowed (BBC)

General fascination with the idea of a superhero is extraordinarily enduring. Superman, Batman and Spider-Man have survived translations from the comic page into a range of media and have somehow been able to adapt to social circumstances quite different to those which surrounded their original creation.

Laurie Taylor talks to cultural commentator Roz Kaveney about her study entitled Superheroes! Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Films; They are joined by Kim Newman, author of Cat People and Apocalypse Movies to discuss the enduring appeal of Superheroes.

To Listen to the Episode

Posthuman (Archive)

2008-05-08T12:46:00.004-04:00

(under construction)

2008:

Davin Heckman: Unraveling Identity

2004:

Jamie Smith-Windsor

2000:

Slavoj Zizek: No Sex, Please, We're Post-Human

1999:

N. Katherine Hayles: How We Became Posthuman

1998:

Critical art Ensemble: Flesh Machine--Cyborgs, Designer Babies, Eugenic Consciousness

1991:

Donna Haraway: The Cyborg Manifesto

Davin Heckman: Unraveling Identity

2008-05-08T12:44:00.001-04:00

Davin is a fellow member of the Reconstruction editorial collective and he just published A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day, from Duke University Press, 2008. I like the concept of the "Posthuman Bildungsroman" because it defines something that I find to be very disturbing and that needs to be addressed critically. It points toward the difficult situation of developing through interaction with multiple mediatized environments that are mutating us, while evading us, slipping in and out, we realize and then forget, consciousness and amnesia, slipping back to a primeval state or pushing forward to a posthuman singularity. Who are you--we remember Pete Townsend screaming drunkenly into the mirror [his lyrics, even if Daltrey sings them], now we scream at the "screen" who the fuck are "we" and listen to the mediatized voices scream back at us with a multitude of answers. The Posthuman Bildungsroman reaches back to hunting behaviors, only the landscape has changed and we are discovering what we are hunting in the process of hunting... or, we start out hunting what we know and get lost and forget just what it was we were hunting... a clearing opens and confusion steps into the vacated realm.

---------------------------------------------------

Unraveling Identity: Watching the Posthuman Bildungsroman
by Davin Heckman
C-Theory

...

The ambiguous nature of the Posthuman Bildungsroman comes to its clearest representation in A Scanner Darkly. Agent Fred is a narcotics officer living in deep cover amongst addicts under the name Bob Arctor. His cover is so deep that Agent Fred must always wear a disguise to conceal his identity, even from his colleagues. As part of his investigation, he must record the everyday activities of his household. To keep his cover intact, he must use the drug Substance D and file surveillance reports on himself along with everyone else. In order to succeed, he must convince both his friends and his employers that he is Bob Arctor. His addiction to Substance D only complicates things further, a substance which has a botanical name of Mors ontologica, or "ontological death." The primary side effect of Substance D dependency is a growing disconnect between the hemispheres of his brain and a resulting split in his subjectivity. Uncertain about his actions as Arctor, he must submit to the authority of police surveillance. Eventually, he loses his job over his covert activities and enters rehabilitation. In the New-Path rehabilitation program, he takes the name Bruce, and must undergo extensive behavior modification in order to destroy his former self and be rebuilt into a functional member of society - which, in the end, is revealed as part of a police plan to find the source of Substance D: New-Path's farm labor camps. By then, of course, Agent Fred/Bob Arctor has been fully replaced by Bruce, who can barely function and who would be unrecognizable to any of his former selves.

The common thread running through these films is the idea that a self that can be encoded, erased, and re-written. In spite of the specific characteristics of each film's protagonist, they share a common identity in that they are all cobbled together from the images, objects, and information that surround them. If an inner self or authentic identity exists at all, it is in the will to self-actualization vis-à-vis the material world. These characters personalize and give the blessing of "agency" to the surface of this process. Unlike a true Bildungsroman, culture in these films does not offer the means by which one can discover a deeper, more authentic self. In the case of Memento, the external datastream confounds and distorts the protagonist to the extent that his only hope of a self is to embrace a lie. In Minority Report, the protagonist manages to buck the system, even as the image itself remains true but misinterpreted. In Paycheck, the protagonist's possessions are ultimately the only markers of truth. All three protagonists strive frantically for self-discovery, but must rely on the world of commodities, media, and representation in absence of a centered self. To return to the roots of the genre, the protagonists resemble reality television stars in that their reality is produced before their very eyes. The Fred/Arctor/Bruce personality in A Scanner Darkly seems to have totally abandoned the possibility that a "self" exists at all.

For a better understanding of the genre, it is useful to consider Scott Bukatman's concept "terminal identity." Terminal identity is spawned by "terminal culture" (which plays with definitions of "terminal" as destination, interface, and demise). Developing a discussion initiated in Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto," Bukatman claims that the ambiguous postmodern self of contemporary popular culture is characterized by a "transcendence which is also always a surrender." [16] To paraphase, terminal identity is the subject position which can embrace the slick surfaces of the virtual without looking for something deeper. The terminal subject accepts the image at face value.

If we accept Bukatman's theory of terminal identity, then we might ask what sort of "coming of age" tale these films invoke. [17] Traditionally, we have had novels where "being" is uncovered: the first type being the traditional Bildungsroman, and the second type being those which exist in opposition to the genre -- incest genealogies of the gothic, the cracking of the mystery in the detective novel, or the radical revisions of science fiction -- all of which revel in the secrets of modern society.

The postmodern "coming of age" is radically different not just in its construction of identity through an assemblage of surfaces and images, but also in its ambiguous relationship with its purposes. The reality genre appears as a representation of what really is, but it also implies its own satire by exposing the flaws of "real people" and the flaws of "representations of real people." Hence the nearly instantaneous arrival of films like EdTV and The Truman Show. On the one hand, these shows reveal a scorn for mediation and a scorn for the bourgeois culture that they aim to police. On the other hand, they are pure forms of mediation and pure expressions of bourgeois values. The self becomes only the agent of its own destruction, saying "yes" to/by affirming reformatting and the installation of new operating systems.

Unlike the traditional Bildungsroman, whose countertype was the triumvirate of speculative genres aforementioned, the countertype to reality television is more essential in its critique. The two genres of reality television and its satire do not battle over the questions of Good and Evil; rather, they battle over the very existence of the self. In this way they resemble the gothic, the science fiction, and the detective story. But within these texts, there is fundamentally little difference between tales of disassembly and reassembly: they are equivalent processes of posthuman becoming.

The twist presented in these stories is not a discovery that pertains to some other; instead,it comes in the realization of who the protagonist has been all along. Where things get interesting is in the protagonists' utter mystery/uncertainty and befuddlement as to who they might be. Rather than wondering what is concealed beneath the surface, the characters themselves are pieced together from external cues, arriving at a subjective space that is not determined by an interior state, but by an assemblage of surrounding signs. Hence, Leonard's erroneous story is written on his skin. Anderton's story is edited into a coherent scheme which fits social knowledge about crime and deviance. Jenning's story is tucked into an assemblage of objects. Finally, Arctor's story is molded to fit the narrative of substance abuse, therapy, and law. If there is an inherent, internal knowledge of the essential self, these protagonists do not seem to know it/are unaware of it.

Unlike the traditional Bildungsroman, these tales do little to affirm the value of bourgeois society as an instrument of personal growth. Rather, they challenge the possibility of individual personal growth in favor of the outward signs of a coherent subjectivity and, in the process, call into question the validity of an atomistic self. This approach to externals affirms the conventional wisdom of what we know about postmodernism as an aesthetic that is preoccupied by surfaces and which eschews depth and interiority. It also confirms the assumptions of posthumanism, which suggest that the "person" is not simply the expression of an eternal, immutable state, but rather, is the point where discursive threads converge. Personal identity is an interpretation of culturally constructed notions of subjectivity.

To Read the Entire Essay

Richard K. Morgan: Market Forces (2004)

2008-05-07T18:59:00.004-04:00

(Just started Richard K. Morgan's novel Market Forces last night and could not put it down...)

"Society is, always has been and always will be a structure for the exploitation and oppression of the majority through systems of political force dictated by an élite, enforced by thugs, uniformed or not, and upheld by a willful ignorance and stupidity on the part of the very majority whom the system oppresses."

Richard K. Morgan interview Never Mind the Cyberpunks

Jessica Crawford: Gender Identity in Michael Blumlein's "The Brains of Rats"

2008-05-07T17:40:00.004-04:00

(Right after posting my student's essay I came across this fascinating NPR report: Alex Spigel: Two Families Grapple with Sons' Gender Preferences: Psychologists Take Radically Different Approaches in Therapy)

Jessica Crawford
Eng 230

Michael Blumlein’s The Brains of Rats revealed to me the complexities of gender definition. He explores biological, cultural, and historical differences in gender accompanied by his own opinions and experiences. The tone of this piece is clearly established in the opening paragraphs as he surprises the reader with information of Joan of Arc possibly having had testicular feminization genetically making her a man (1). This was unknown to me; it completely caught me off guard, and ultimately left me wanting to read more. If Blumlein was attempting to shake up the reader’s perception of gender the goal was certainly achieved. All my life Joan of Arc has been paraded as an example of a fierce female to be revered for her strength and moral compass, so this new information from Blumlein left me feeling quite uneasy. If in fact Joan of Arc was a man, would I still hold as much respect for him as I had previously? It is here that I realized the typical stereotypes of “male” and “female” are deeply embedded in my mind. Gender has always seemed very easily defined in my environment, so I knew this reading would prove to be a learning experience ultimately opening my eyes to the reality of all the complexities associated with gender.

Cultural definitions of gender have attempted to easily distinguish males and females. In the world I’ve grown up in you are either born with a vagina or penis and then raised a certain way based upon that. From the minute a baby is born their gender and future is predetermined for them. A girl is to wear pink, play with baby dolls, and act “ladylike” and less rugged. A boy is to wear blue, play sports, and is almost expected to have a tougher attitude and not appear “girly”. For instance a certain male professor of mine told a personal story of dressing in a dress for one day at a college campus and how the people around him viewed him as strange. It has just become a part of daily life for men and women to carry on different characteristics. Barrie Thorne states, “Children pick up the gender stereotypes that pervade books, songs, advertisements, television programs, and movies…In short, if boys and girls are different, they are not born but made that way” (2). These cultural definitions have been in place to make it easier to distinguish between male and female, but what if you are neither? What if you are living as a hermaphrodite or transsexual? What if you are someone trapped in a body with male genitalia wishing to be a female or vice versa? For example, Blumlein mentions Herculine Barbin who was born in 1838 as a female but felt as though she were a man so her sex was redesignated and she was given male civil status in 1860; but this was not accepted by those around her and she took her own life as a result (2).

Also, in As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As Girl, John Colapinto examines the decision Ron and Janet Reimer made to surgically alter their male son to a female after his circumcision procedure went horribly wrong. They based their decision on the idea that it would be an easier life for their child to live as a female because he would receive too much ridicule as a boy with malformed genitalia (Colapinto: 2001). That clearly shows how our society has not really opened up to the idea of struggles with gender identity. The battle between nature versus nurture still arises. Would it have been better for the Reimer’s to let their son remain a boy or was their choice of nurturing their child to become a girl a wiser choice? Our society has attempted to make gender a non-issue but I believe it has pushed all genders into separate corners forcing them to fit a certain mold. This has just caused much tension and misunderstanding among people who are all actually more similar than different.

Blumlein’s experience as a medical professional was evident throughout the piece as he talks about the biological aspects of males and females. Blumlein states, “The genes that determine sex lie on the twenty-third pair of chromosomes. They are composed of a finite and relatively short sequence of nucleic acids on the X chromosome and one on the Y” (4). He then goes on to compare the brains of rats to human brains. Through research, rats revealed certain tendencies between male and female rats when choosing either pure or heavily sweetened water but Blumlein sharply comments, “Sexual differences of the human brain exist, but they have been obscured by the profound evolution of this organ in the past half-million years. We have speech and foresight, consciousness and self-consciousness…In a language whose meaning we seem to share, we say we are different, but equal” (5). We see that there are differences biologically between male and female, but that does not mean we are a whole different species. Our bodies require the same needs and go through many of the same processes, yet it seems as though many cultures are afraid to accept the blurred lines between different genders. Blumlein, however, has fully embraced this ambiguity.

Blumlein openly shares his personal experiences of struggling with gender identity. He reveals his desires to experience the life of a woman. That was a bold move and I certainly have never read before of a male desiring to be female. There are many preconceived notions that a female is slightly weaker than a man, and there are certainly still people who believe men and women are not equal so why would any man want to come out and say “Yes I want to be a woman instead of a man”? Blumlein just went for it and decided to break out of the candy coated society we dwell in to reveal his doubts and struggles as a sexual man. Even his style of writing goes against what many would deem as acceptable writing when he delves into his sexual encounter with a man. “He took off his shirt and his pants and pulled my pants down…he kissed me hard and tongued me…he rolled me over, made me squat on my knees with my butt in the air…I was very dry and it hurt” (Blumlein, 17-18). This style of writing matched his content; controversial, but this is exactly what our society is in need of to better understand humanity. Issues relevant to the world we are living cannot just stay covered up and those people that do not fit into “male” or “female” should not be demoralized by the society’s desires just to keep things simple. We are very complex creatures and cannot just fit into two general categories of male and female. If someone feels trapped in the wrong body they should be able to choose a life they see as a better fit. Until we can all learn to tolerate all the differences that prevail among the human population these barriers between male, female, hermaphrodite, transgender, and transsexual will never break down.

Works Cited

Blumlein, Michael. “The Brains of Rats”. The Brains of Rats. New York: Dell, 1997. 1- 22.

Colapinto, John. As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As A Girl. Newy York: Harper Perennial, 2001.

Thorne, Barrie. Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993.

K.J. Bishop: The Etched City

2008-05-06T12:32:00.003-04:00

I've been literally wandering about searching for a good piece of fiction that would embrace my notions of the magic that the world can bring to the open senses (senses that haven't closed themselves off to the wonders of the world)... lately its been a disappointing literary derive through a series of authors who have no sense of style, wit or passion.

Last week, while strolling about downtown I wandered into Lexington's Central Library to see if they had anything that might distract me from the woes of the education profession in KY. In a moment of happenstance I had the good fortune to walk out with a copy of K.J. Bishop's first novel The Etched City (2003)... wow, it slowly wrapped around my brain, luring me deeper into the environs of the dreamlike landscape of Ashamoil and the separate adventures of the mercenary Gwynn and healer Raule (sort of intertwining, yet separated, male/female, dark/light, ouroborus/ying-yang)... and then there is the artist Beth Constanzin who may or may not be reshaping our shared reality (of the reader/writer/characters). This is a must read--potent and intoxicating, erotic and surreal, poetic and intelligent. This was her first novel? When does the next one come out?

Check out this excellent review of The Etched City in the UK newspaper The Guardian by another favorite author of mine, Michael Moorcock:

Landscape of Dreams

Also Fantastic Metropolis has an interview with K.J. Bishop:

Interview With KJ Bishop

Scott Webb: Robosexuals

2008-05-05T13:12:00.005-04:00

Scott Webb
ENG 230: Introduction to Literature

Robosexuals

Human sexuality is a basic human drive virtual from cradle to grave. But what about when that sexuality doesn't contain a human, or even sex? What are the possibilities when one's partner is not human but is rather a script, a program, or a machine? Is what results a harmless curiosity, or a threat to what it means to be human? What do we have today, and where are going?

Already, the Internet allows us increased opportunity to replace physical human relations with "virtual" human relations. We replace face to face human conversation with 'IM' based "chats" and rush to sexual conquest with cybersex. Improved technologies such as voice and video conferencing put us in more personal contact with one another (as opposed to a purely text based IM), but they are still abstractions; layers of technology standing between us and our partner(s).

But with anonymity being inherent to the very nature of the medium, there's no promise that the person on the other end is a person at all. Through this anonymity, technology allows us to interact with scripted partners that are programmed to respond to what we say. A well-known old example of this would be the program ELIZA, first written in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum (“ELIZA”). Programmed to mimic a Rogerian psychoanalyst, one could carry on limited conversations with ELIZA. While quite frustrating for use in cybersex, a program properly scripted thus could do a lot more, and to a limited degree, have. Already in chat rooms there are ad 'bots' which enter, pretending to be a cute 19/f/ca with pics and a webcam and definitely interested in some sexy chat--so long as you go to her webpage and sign-up (small monthly fee required).

Other programs further these abstractions by giving us a virtual world in which to explore our curiosities. The most popular and comprehensive of these is Linden Resarch’s Second Life®. Here users, controlling digital avatars, can interact with other users doing the same. The opportunities for sexual exploration have not been lost on the residents. Groups relating to bestiality, robot love, BDSM and a number of other fetishes have already sprung up. In the real world, one cannot indulge in their interest with have sex with a hermaphrodite robot with demon wings and a canine penis--or even know they had such an interest. In Second Life®, it becomes a possibility to role play it--complete with visuals. A user is limited only by their imaginations, and the medium. Whatever is possibility within the rules of the abstraction is possible for them (“Second Life”).

What must not be forgotten is what happens is indeed role play, and nothing more. One person is pretending to be the herm robot, or whatever character suits them, and another is pretending to be the other. That doesn't always have to be the case, though. It would not be too large of a leap to have a program controlling the avatar on the other end. The use of doing such is questionable, but not beyond the realm of what is possible even now.

As artificial intelligence and robotic engineering become more and more sophisticated, we will see a growth in the sex industry in this area as well. The abstractions of technology between human and human will end the requirement for another person--and end being abstractions. What starts as scripted programs on one's computer can easily be applied to a programmed robot. For many years science fiction has focused on the idea of sex and relationships involving man and machine. Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence: A.I. had "Gigolo Joe," an android designed to look like a male built for the purposes of sex (Spielberg). Steve De Jarnatt's Cherry 2000 also covered this. In Cherry 2000, Sam Treadwell is a supervisor at a local scrap plant, and is happily coupled with Cherry, his robot "wife." However, in a case of kitchen nookie gone awry, her circuits are fried and Sam is left missing his "love." Although offered his pick of many of this other models Sam is, as the local robot mechanic puts it, a romantic, and must have his Cherry 2000 model. Sam is forced to go into the lawless zones of the desert to find a new model, where instead he meets E. Johnson, a spunky redhead human that catches his heart (Jarnatt).

In this story, relationships in the city are marked by going to various clubs, previewing a woman's "demo" tapes, and then haggling with her lawyer over how long their "relationship" will take place, and what the terms (and price) will be. One might consider it little surprise that Sam prefers his obedient and doting Cherry (interestingly enough, when we first meet E. Johnson, she is wearing a shirt which says "Dignity," as if to put into writing the difference between her and the status quo of modern human relationships and robots) (Jarnatt). While Sam found what he really wanted was a meaningful relationship, one with a human, there's no reason plenty of other men (and women) might be satisfied with a robot. And that is perhaps the real question. Can one love a machine? We can love pets easily enough, and many develop strong affinities for their automobiles. The idea might be scoffed at by some, but is not necessarily beyond reason. In cyberspace, people can develop strong feelings for people they've never met. Just there being a real human on the other end doesn't have to be a big issue, as the facts of that person's existence might not be what they seem, and one's emotions are directed at both that which they cannot see and, ultimately, a lie.

One example of this involves the events surrounding Dr. Sanford Lewis, a psychiatrist who posed as a disabled bisexual woman in online chat rooms. Soon things got out of hand and the truth was discovered. Although the people were genuinely helped by the advice of Dr. Lewis (posing as a woman), they were greatly affected emotionally by the deception. It wasn't the deception in the online sexual role play that angered so many, but the trespassing into the woman’s mental space. Abstractions lay between the parties involved with the cybersex; the thoughts and feelings shared were real (Gray 136).

If these experiences show us anything it is that people have a capacity to “love” and gain sexual pleasure by proxy, or through layers of abstraction. If we can get our kicks without a direct human component, can we get them from machines or, more specifically, robots?

Obviously the answer is yes, for some. Even if one did not have personal experience of such, the answer is in our language as we have words for this phenomenon. Agalmatophilia is an attraction to dolls, mannequins, statues and/or other related objects and can be applied, analogically to robots (“Agalmatophilia”). One need not even pry this deep for proof of our ability to sex it up with machines and enjoy it to; one look at the sex toy market be it dildos, vibrators or synthetic vaginas and blow-up dolls and they will have evidence enough.

What robotic, especially android, partners can offer are a mechanical, non-human humanoid body forms coupled with an artificial intelligence—a dildo that can hold you and talk to you about your day. ELIZA was programmed over 40 years ago and fooled some people who conversed with it into thinking it was a person (Franchi and Güzeldere par. 111). Imagine a system programmed today and uploaded into an android sex doll. Walla! Gigalo Joe and Cherry 2000 are at your service. Combine that with the recently developed technology that allows software to mimic any human voice and you have the chance to talk, and sex up, a deceased love one or a famous celebrity (or at least a robot with their voice). The crossover of emotions in such situations could be tremendous (Frank).

As android programming and physical engineering “progress,” so too will our confusion and inability to tell “them” apart from “us.” In A.I., David found himself (itself?) a captive at a local “Flesh Fest,” a gathering of neo-Luddites who destroyed androids because they resented their encroachment on humanity. In a scene closely resembling movie scenes set in the ancient Roman coliseum in which the crowd begs for mercy for a gladiator, David is spared this fate because his cries for help seemed too real. They thought he was a real boy (Spielberg).

Questions arise from this: What happens when a “couple” are married, yet one of them turns out to be an android? If someone “sleeps with” their own Gigalo Joe, are they cheating on their spouse? If it were a David model, would that be pedophilia, or a pet model bestiality? If one is able to, as unlikely though it may seem, conceive from or impregnate an android, what then? An incubator is a machine that acts as a womb for premature infants. What if that technology “improves” so drastically that the human womb need not be used altogether, similar to the hatching centers in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World?." If synthetic DNA and RNA can be developed to such a level as to create synthetic sperm or a synthetic egg so well that they might fertilize or be fertilized by their human component, what of the offspring?

Questions like this are tackled in the television series remake of Battlestar Galactica. In the series there are Cylons, which are robots created by humans to carry out specific tasks (like tools or appliances). Soon however, in a theme common to scifi stories involving robots, the Cylons gain an “awakening” and begin to have free will and enter into a war with the human race. The original, human designed Cylons have a very mechanical look, mechanical devices, but there are also Cylon designed units which appear human to such a degree that they’ve fooled humans. They have lived with them, made love with them, and are so accurate that they appear human even down to their very DNA. But they are programmed, and questions arise about what is free will and what is programming. Questions also arrive about sex with these human-like Cylon models as well as what is to become of the children when it is found that human and Cylon copulation and produce viable, hybrid offspring. (Eick and Moore).

Our science fiction authors and directors have been addressing these questions for many years, and there is a wealth of concocted situations to study over and reflect on. The questions we ask have special relevance because we are not merely dealing with imaginative science fiction, but more likely are preparing ourselves for what soon will be both amazing and terrifying science fact. As with many moral dilemmas, questions abound while answers remain elusive. So it is with our fictional characters, and so too it will be for us.

Works Cited

“Agalmatophilia.” Agalmatophilia - Definition of Agalmatophilia. 27 May 2007.

Artificial Intelligence: AI. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Perf. Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law. 2001. DVD. Dreamworks. 2001.

Battlestar Galactica. Prod. David Eick, Ronald D. Moore. Perf. Edward James Olmos,
Mary McDonnell, Jamie Bamber. British Sky Broadcasting. Burnaby, 2004.

Cherry 2000. Dir. Steve De Jarnatt. Perf. Melanie Griffith, David Andrews, Ben Johnson, Tim Thomerson. 1987. VHS. Orion Home Video, 1988.

“ELIZA.” FOLDOC: Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing. 9 September 1997

Frank, Robert H. “The Downside of Hearing Whoopi at the Mall.” New York Times. 7
August 2001. 29 April 2008.

Franchi, Stefano and Güzeldere, Güven. “Colorful Personalities.” Constructions of the Mind. Volume 4, Issue 2. 24 July 1995.

Gray, Chris. Cyborg Citizen. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. Cutchogue: Buccaneer Books, 1946.

Second Life. 2008. Linden Research Inc. 29 April 2009 .

Trevor Tremaine: Proposal for a Paper on Psychedelic Films

2008-05-05T13:04:00.001-04:00

I have discovered a kinship among many underground films, particularly those from the movement's advent in the late 60s/early 70s, in seeking to convey grand, metaphysical concepts, culled from all annals of culture--history, science, religion, art, you name it--via works that we may term 'psychedelic;' that is, a suitably flexible, free-associative narrative, and sensational, often inexplicable visuals. The 'acid allegory' genre I've proposed, then, would include the works of Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo, Sante Sangre, and particularly Holy Mountain), films by Czech feminist filmmaker Véra Chytilová (Daisies, The Fruit of Paradise), Fellini's rendering of Petronius's Satyricon, Sergei Paradjanov's The Color of Pomegranates, and E. Elias Merhige's Begotten (which I realize is from a different era, but could certainly be considered in this context). I also believe that many science fiction films fall into this category, particularly the French animated film Forbidden Planet, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and to some extent Tarkovsky's Solaris.

In my analysis, I will delineate in what way each film seeks to make sense of the world, and define some of their broader points and references. I will also provide some background on the culture(s) that gave birth to such a beast.

Stephen Pfohl: Left Behind--Religion, Technology, and Flight from the Flesh

2008-05-05T12:20:00.002-04:00

Left Behind: Religion, Technology, and Flight from the Flesh
by Stephen Pfohl
C-Theory (book)

...

One thing that has been going on in conservative evangelical culture is the so-called Left Behind phenomenon -- the publication and mass consumption of the best-selling Left Behind novels, authored by writers and political activists Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. Although marketed beneath the radar of most secular readers, the Left Behind series has already sold in the vicinity of an astounding 63 million copies. This represents an unprecedented and an enormously influential conservative Christian intervention into contemporary American (popular) culture. This essay explores the social genesis and impact of the Left Behind books, the social technologies they deploy, and their accompanying media offshoots. In so doing, I hope to shed modest light on key elements of the religious imagination mobilized for political purposes by supporters of George W. Bush and Republican Party organizers.

The Left Behind books appear at a fateful moment in history, a time in which the future of humankind is marked, not only by the promises and anxieties of far-reaching global social and technological changes, but also widespread personal and spiritual insecurities, stemming from vast global economic restructuring and amplified social inequality.[5] The soul-shattering anxieties of this age are for many people magnified by unprecedented waves of global migration, the omnipresent threat of brutal terrorism and preemptive warfare, a rapid-fire breakdown in traditional forms of family life and gender roles, and the penetration of the market into even the innermost sanctums of everyday life. Within, or against, or perhaps simply to make mythic meaning of this troubled historical landscape, the Left Behind novels have captivated millions upon millions of readers with a prophetic apocalyptic tale of biblical End Times and the vengeful second coming of Jesus Christ.

Like a heat-seeking rocket targeting the vicissitudes of the flesh, the Left Behind phenomenon is a vibrant talisman of a worldview channeling important aspects of America's dominant religious imagination of itself. Signs depicting the fears and fascinations of a bold New World Order of ultramodern culture and power are on display everywhere in the Left Behind books -- from terror and war in the Middle East, to paranoiac imaginings of mass death, total governmental control, and omnipresent technological surveillance. Stories of mesmeric manipulation by the electronic media, One-World corporate economic domination, reconfigurations of gender and sexuality, and struggles to save one's mortal soul are also woven into the novels that compose the twelve-volume Left Behind series.

To enter the world of Left Behind is to move perilously within the enchanted psycho-geography of America's dark and irrational religious second side. To read Left Behind is also to risk coming face-to-face with the violence of America's homegrown version of anti-modern extremism. Confronting the dangerous shadow side of American religious experience and practice is neither pleasant nor easy. It is, nevertheless, important that critical scholars undertake this challenge, if only to help put the brakes on a wide range of religiously-fueled technologies of exploitative empire-building -- new global technologies of power that march zealously under the banner of "God Bless America." In engaging with this essay, I invite you to join me in this task.

To Read the Entire Book

Ursula Le Guin Archive

2008-05-05T09:59:00.001-04:00

The Science Fiction of Ursula Le Guin (Science Fiction Studies special issue)

American SF and the Other (critical essay)

A Woman's Liberation (short story)

Ursula Le Guin: American SF and the Other

2008-05-05T09:55:00.002-04:00

"American SF and the Other"
by Ursula Le Guin
Science Fiction Studies 2.3 (1975)

...

If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself—as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation—you may hate it, or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.

You have, in fact, alienated yourself.

This tendency has been remarkably strong in American SF. The only social change presented by most SF has been towards authoritarianism, the domination of ignorant masses by a powerful elite—sometimes presented as a warning, but often quite complacently. Socialism is never considered as an alternative, and democracy is quite forgotten. Military virtues are taken as ethical ones. Wealth is assumed to be a righteous goal and a personal virtue. Competitive free-enterprise capitalism is the economic destiny of the entire Galaxy. In general, American SF has assumed a permanent hierarchy of superiors and inferiors, with rich, ambitious, aggressive males at the top, then a great gap, and then at the bottom the poor, the uneducated, the faceless masses, and all the women. The whole picture is, if I may say so, curiously "un-American." It is a perfect baboon patriarchy, with the Alpha Male on top, being respectfully groomed, from time to time, by his inferiors.

Is this speculation? is this imagination? is this extrapolation? I call it brainless regressivism.

I think it's time SF writers—and their readers!—stopped daydreaming about a return to the Age of Queen Victoria, and started thinking about the future. I would like to see the Baboon Ideal replaced by a little human idealism, and some serious consideration of such deeply radical, futuristic concepts as Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. And remember that about 53% of the Brotherhood of Man is the Sisterhood of Woman.

To Read the Entire Essay

Horror: The Cultural Significance of Fear

2008-05-03T14:04:00.000-04:00

From the introduction to The Exploration of Modern Monsters

A culture's monsters emblematically embody its most acute anxieties. Cultures create and ascribe meaning to monsters, endowing them with characteristics derived from their most deep-seated fears and taboos. The body of the monster, then, becomes the site of these cultural proscriptions, representing the taboos of the societies that spawn them: "the monster's body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy . . . , giving them life and an uncanny independence" (Cohen 4). A monster cannot be contained. A monster disobeys its master, overspills its margins, consumes its benefactors. We make scapegoats of our monsters, attributing to them our own misdeeds and faults while using them as vehicles for intergenerational transfers of taboos and morals.

The monster becomes a way of explaining the seemingly inexplicable. The humanoid form most monsters assume is our own-familiar yet unfamiliar-and transgressions performed by the monster reinforce its status as 'other:' "In its function as dialectical Other or third-term supplement, the monster is an incorporation of the
Outside, the Beyond-of all those loci that are rhetorically placed as distant but originate Within" (Cohen 7). A monster dwells on the fringes of what is culturally acceptable (Grendel). Banished to the physical and social hinterlands, he is also border guard (Minotaur). Whoever crosses into her realm has also transgressed, broken the taboo, courted contamination. The transgressor must then encounter the monster on his own terms.

Monsters of Childhood and Adolescence
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Baird, Robert. “Startle and the Film Threat Scene.” Images 3 (March 1997)

Farrow, Robert. “The Wicker Man: Games of Truth, Anthropology, and the Death of ‘Man.’” Metaphilm (June 20, 2005)

Gateward, Frances. “Daywalkin Night-Stalkin Bloodsuckas: Black Vampires in Contemporary Film.” Genders #40 (2004)

“The Golden-Age of Italian Horror: 1957-1979.” Images 5 (November 1997)

Gonder, Patrick. “Race, Gender and Terror: The Primitive in 1950s Horror Films.” Genders #40 (2004)

Guillory, Bradley P. “Stained Lens: Style as Cultural Signifier in Seventies Horror Films.” The Film Journal #10 (October 2004)

Hendershot, Cyndy. “Monster at the Soda Shop: Teenagers and Fifties Horror Films.” Images 10 (September 2001)

Hester-Williams, Kim D. “Neo Slaves: Slavery, Freedom, and African American Apotheosis in Candyman, The Matrix, and The Green Mile.” Genders #40 (2004)

“Independent Directors On Their Favorite Horror Classics.” Filmmaker Magazine (Summer 2000)

Jancovich, Mark. “General Introduction.” Horror: The Film Reader. ed. M. Jancovich. NY: Routledge, 2002: 1-19. {Excellent intro to horror as a genre, the history of horror genre criticism and the problems with genre criticism. Jancovich as always provides a general understanding while, at the same time, problematizing traditional assumptions.}

Karlyn, Katherine Rowe. “Scream, Popular Culture, and Feminism's Third Wave: ‘I'm Not My Mother’” Genders #39 (2003)

Levine, Michael. “A Fun Night Out: Horror and Other Pleasures of the Cinema.” Senses of Cinema 15 (July-August 2001)

Martin, Adrian. “Lady, Beware: Paths Through the Female Gothic.” Senses of Cinema 12 (February-March 2001)

McCrae, Scooter. “The Best Horror Films That America Doesn’t Want You To Know About.” Filmmaker Magazine (Summer 2000)

Niesel, Jeffrey. “The Horror of Everyday Life: Taxidermy, Aesthetics, and Consumption in Horror Films.” Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture 2.4 (1994)

Picart, Caroline Joan and Cecil Greek. “The Compulsion of Real/Reel Serial Killers and Vampires: Toward a Gothic Criminology.” Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture 10.1 (Winter 2003)

Porton, Richard. “Blue Collar Monsters: An Interview with George Romero.” Filmhaftet #119 (2002)

Russell, David J. “Monster Roundup: Reintegrating the Horror Genre.” Refiguring Film Genres: Theory and History. ed. Nick Browne. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998: 233-254. {Analysis and critique of past typologies of the horror genre, with an attempt at a more refined and inclusive system of mapping out horror genres. Good attempt that would be productive for the classroom.}

Sargeant, Jack. “The Baying of Pigs: Reflections on the New American Horror Film.” Senses of Cinema 15 (July-August 2001):

Schneider, Steven Jay. “Introduction: Psychoanalysis in/and/of the Horror Film.” Senses of Cinema 15 (July-August 2001)

---. “Murder as Art/The Art of Murder: Aestheticising Violence in Modern Cinematic Horror.” Intensities 3 (Spring 2003)

Scott, Ellen C. “The Horrors of Remembrance: The Altered Visual Aesthetic of Horror in Jonathan Demme’s Beloved.” Genders #40 (2004)

Stone, Bryan. “The Sanctification of Fear: Images of the Religious in Horror Films.” Journal of Religion & Film 5.2 (October 2001)

Totaro, Donato. “The Final Girl: A Few Thoughts on Feminism and Horror.” Offscreen (January 31, 2002)

Williams, Linda. “When Women Look: A Sequel.” Senses of Cinema 15 (July-August 2001)

Winokur, Mark. “Technologies of Race: Special Effects, Fetish, Film, and the Fifteenth Century.” Genders #40 (2004)

Wood, Robin. “What Lies Beneath.” Senses of Cinema 15 (July-August 2001)

Woodend, Dorothy. “World of Horror: In the Last Five Years the Public’s Appetite for Horror Movies Has Increased Exponentially.” AlterNet (February 2, 2004)

--------------------------------------------------------
FILMS:

American Nightmare: A Celebration of Films From Hollywood’s Golden Age of Fright. Directed Adam Simon. (2004: 73 minutes) {Interesting look at five groundbreaking horror films of the 60s/70s, in particular, how they were a product of their social and political era. This documentary is not a long view history of the genre, rather it is a snapshot of a moment. The focus is on George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, John Carpenter’s Halloween, Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left, Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre and David Cronenberg’s Shivers.}

McCrae, Scooter. “Exquisite Corpses.” Filmmaker Magazine (Summer 2000)

Apt Pupil (Bryan Singer) 1998: 112 minutes.

Francis, Patrick. “It’s Good to Be Bryan Singer.” MovieMaker 31 (December 1998)

Picart, Caroline Joan S. and Jason Gant McKahan. “Apt Pupil’s Misogyny, Homoeroticism and Homophobia: Sadomasochism and the Holocaust Film.” Jump Cut 45 (Fall 2002)

Blade II (Guillermo Del Toro) 2002: 117 minutes

Gateward, Frances. “Daywalkin Night-Stalkin Bloodsuckas: Black Vampires in Contemporary Film.” Genders #40 (2004)

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola) 1992: 127 minutes.

Humphries-Brooks, Stephenson. “The Body and Blood of Eternal UnDeath.” The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 6 (Spring 2004)

Cabin Fever (Eli Roth) 2002: 93 minutes.

Anonymous. “Cabin Fever.” Savage Cinema 5 (March 2005)

Ebert, Roger. “Cabin Fever.” Chicago Sun-Times (September 12, 2003)

Grove, David. “Low-Budget Horror Film a Career-Maker for First-Time Moviemaker: Eli Roth’s Much Anticipated Cabin Fever Brings Old Fashioned Terror Back to the Cinema.” MovieMaker 3.6 (2002)

Candyman (Bernard Rose) 1992: 98 minutes.

Ebert, Roger. “Candyman.” Chicago Sun-Times (October 16, 1992):

Hester-Williams, Kim D. “Neo Slaves: Slavery, Freedom, and African American Apotheosis in Candyman, The Matrix, and The Green Mile.” Genders #40 (2004)

The Cell (Tarsam Singh) 2000: 107 minutes.

Pater, John. “The Cell.” Journal of Religion & Film 4.2 (October 2000)

Constantine (Francis Lawrence) 2005: 121 minutes.

Ebert, Roger. “Constantine.” Chicago Sun-Times (February 18, 2005)

Dawn of the Dead (Zach Snyder) 2004: 110 minutes.

Frazer, Brendan. “Drivin and Cryin: Dawn of the Dead.” (2004)

Nigro, Tony. “When There’s No More Room in Hell: Zombies and Post-9/11 Horror.” Flak Magazine (2004)

Pinkerton, Nick. “Beyond the Return of the Mid-Afternoon of the Walking Zombie Part 3: Dawn of the Dead.” Reverse Shot (Spring 2004)

Day of the Dead (George Romero) 1985: 102 minutes.

Curnutte, Rick. “There’s No Magic: A Conversation with George Romero.” The Film Journal 10 (October 2004)

Harper, Stephen. “’They’re Us’: Representations of Women in George Romero’s Living Dead Series.” Intensities 3 (Spring 2003)

Lanzagorta, Marco. “The Dead Go Shopping: A Look Back at the ‘Dead’ Trilogy—with Its Mindless Mall-Obsessed Zombies—as Scathing Critique of American Consumer and Media Culture.” AlterNet (April 6, 2004)

Mayr, Friedrich. “DVD Review: Day of the Dead.” Synoptique 1 (March 1, 2004)

The Devil’s Rejects (Rob Zombie) 2005: 109 minutes

Ebert, Roger. “The Devil’s Rejects.” Chicago Sun-Times (July 22, 2005)

Frazer, Bryant. “On the Road Again: The Devil’s Rejects.” Deep Focus (July 21, 2005)

Event Horizon (Paul W.S. Anderson) 1997: 97 minutes.

Ebert, Roger. “Event Horizon.” Chicago Sun-Times (August 15, 1997):

Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn (Sam Raimi) 1987: 95 minutes.

Ebert, Roger. “Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn.” Chicago Sun-Times (April 10, 1987)

Frailty (Bill Paxton) 2002: 99 minutes.

Totaro, Donato. “Frailty: Timely Horror.” Offscreen (April 30, 2002)

From Hell (The Hughes Brothers) 2001: 122 minutes.

Frazer, Bryant. “Cute Couple: From Hell.” (2001)

Laurier, Joanne. “Infernal Relations of Rich and Poor: From Hell.” WSWS (November 21, 2001)

Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett) 2000: 108 minutes.

Williams, Linda Ruth. “Blood Sisters: Ginger Snaps Links Entry to Womanhood With Bloodlust and Violence.” Sight & Sound (June 2001)

Gothika (Mathieu Kassovitz and Thom Oliphant) 2003: 98 minutes.

Connell, Liam. “Malleus Gothifikarum: Psychiatrists are the New Inquistion in this Horror Tale of Church Dogma and State Power.” Metaphilm (October 4, 2004)

Habit (Larry Fessenden) 1997: 112 minutes.

Ebert, Roger. “Habit.” Chicago Sun-Times (March 21, 1997)

Hannibal (Ridley Scott) 2001: 131 minutes.

Frazer, Bryant. “Some Friends for Dinner: Hannibal.” (2001)

Mathijs, Ernest. “The ‘Wonderfully Scary Monster’ and the International Reception of Horror.” Kinoeye 2.19 (2002)

Thompson, David. “The Riddler Has His Day.” Sight and Sound (April 2001)

The Haunting (Jan de Bont) 1999: 113 minutes.

Rystrom, Gary. “The Haunting: Making You Hear the Bumps in the Night.” Film Sound (1999)

Hellraiser (Clive Barker) 1987: 94 minutes.

Ebert, Roger. “Hellraiser.” Chicago Sun-Times (September 18, 1987):

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (John McNaughton) 1986: 83 minutes.

McNaughton, John. “Touch of Evil.” The Guardian (April 25, 2003)

House of 1000 Corpses (Rob Zombie) 2003: 88 minutes.

Rivera, Mark A. “House of 1000 Corpses.” Savage Cinema 3 (October 2003):

In the Mouth of Madness (John Carpenter) 1995: 95 minutes.

Frazer, Bryant. “In the Mouth of Madness.” (1995)

Hays, Robert K., Rev. “In the Mouth of Madness.” Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture 3.2 (1995)

Land of the Dead (George Romero) 2005: 93 minutes.

Cavanaugh, Tim. “Zombies of the World, Unite.” Reason (July 1, 2005)

Foundas, Scott. “Dead Director Rises Again: George Romero on Zombies, Politics and His Own Second Coming.” L.A. Weekly (June 24-30, 2005)

Fujiwara, Chris. “Aiming for the Head: Another Great Zombie Film From Romero.” The Boston Phoenix (July 1-7, 2005)

K.P. “Land of the Dead: America at Large.” Metaphilm (July 3, 2005)

Sheehan, Henry. “George Romero’s Land of the Dead.” (July 2005)

Lord of Illusions (Clive Barker) 1995: 121 minutes.

Ebert, Roger. “Lord of Illusions.” Chicago Sun-Times (August 25, 1995)

Near Dark (Kathryn Bigelow) 1987: 94 minutes.

Chaw, Walter. “Near Dark.” Film Freak Central

Ravenous (Antonia Bird) 1999: 100 minutes.

Berardinelli, James. “Ravenous.” Reel Views (1999)

Ebert, Roger. “Ravenous.” Chicago Sun-Times (March 19, 1999)

Return of the Living Dead (Dan O’Bannon) 1985: 91 minutes.

Ebert, Roger. “Return of the Living Dead.” Chicago Sun-Times (August 19, 1985)

The Ring (Gore Verbinski) 2002: 115 minutes.

Mitchell, Elvis. “Don’t Touch ‘Play’! It Could Be Fatal.” New York Times (October 18, 2002)

O’Hehir, Andrew. “The Ring: This clammy, creepy shocker brings the evil -- and the surrealist influence -- back to horror flicks.” Salon (October 18, 2002)

Saw (James Wan) 2004: 100 minutes.

Carter, David. “Saw.” Savage Cinema 5 (March 2005)

Ebert, Roger. “Saw.” Chicago Sun-Times (October 29, 2004)

Scream (Wes Craven) 1996: 111 minutes.

Frazer, Bryant. “Scream.” (1996)

Se7en (David Fincher) 1995: 127 minutes.

Frazer, Bryant. “Corrupt: Se7en.” (1995)

Hoover, Travis Mackenzie. “The Killer Inside: Cure Meets Se7en.” Reverse Shot (Summer 2005)

Lacey, Nick. Se7en. London: York Press, 2001.

LoBrutto, Vincent. “Defining Theme, Metaphor, and Character Through Color, Texture and Environmental Design: Se7en.” Becoming Film Literate: The Art and Craft of Motion Pictures. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005: 280-285.

The Shining (Stanley Kubrick) 1980: 143 minutes.

Shor, Francis. “Father Knows Beast: Patriarchal Rage and the Horror of Personality Film.” Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture 3.3 (1995)

Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright) 2004: 99 minutes.

Carroll, Bob. “War of the Stone Roses.” Reverse Shot (Autumn 2004)

Karnick, S.T. “Death Be Not Proud.” Tech Central Station (November 12, 2004)

The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme) 1991: 118 minutes.

Niesel, Jeffrey. “The Horror of Everyday Life: Taxidermy, Aesthetics, and Consumption in Horror Films.” Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture 2.4 (1994)

Sleepy Hollow (Tim Burton) 1999: 105 minutes.

Newman, Kim. “The Cage of Reason: Sleepy Hollow Revisits America’s First Monster, But Is It Really About the High-School Bully.” Sight and Sound (January 2000)

Plate, Brent S. “Sleepy Hollow.” Journal of Religion & Film 4.1 (April 2000)

Stigmata (Rupert Wainwright) 1999: 102 minutes.

Burke, Ron. “Stigmata.” Journal of Religion & Film 3.2 (October 1999)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Remake: Marcus Nispel) 2003: 98 minutes.

Totaro, Donato. “Texas Chainsaw Massacre Redux.” Offscreen (November 30, 2003)

Waldron-Mantgani, Ian. “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (remake).” UK Critic (December 13, 2003)

Wardrope, Todd. “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” The Dual Lens (November 3, 2003)

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Part II (Tobe Hooper) 1986: 111 minutes.

Niesel, Jeffrey. “The Horror of Everyday Life: Taxidermy, Aesthetics, and Consumption in Horror Films.” Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture 2.4 (1994)

Videodrome (David Cronenberg) 1982: 89 minutes.

Johnson, Gary. “David Cronenberg’s Videodrome.” Images (November 24, 2004)

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (Wes Craven) 1994: 112 minutes.

Ebert, Roger. “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.” Chicago Sun-Times (October 14, 1994)

Wrong Turn (Rob Schmidt) 2003: 84 minutes.

Pinkerton, Nick. “Wrong Turn.” Reverse Shot (Spring 2005)

Life During Wartime; America's Chemically Modified 21st Century Soldiers

2008-05-03T12:49:00.004-04:00

I remember reading Lucius Shepard's novella "R & R" in 1986 (later expanded into the 1987 novel Life During Wartime) and thinking how it was so far-fetched and fantastical. It was a hallucinatory tale of drug-modulated, technologically enhanced warriors of a dominant culture hunting down guerrilla resistance fighters in the jungles of Guatemala. More fantasy than fact? I guess not...

America's Chemically Modified 21st Century Soldiers
By Clayton Dach
Adbusters; Reposted at AlterNet

Armed with potent drugs and new technology, a dangerous breed of soldiers are being trained to fight America's future wars.

...

The Mediated Soldier

In the new model army, brute force and viscera are out. Cutting edge gadgetry, omniscient surveillance and precision long-distance termination is in. What motivates it all is the type of war we fear we'll be fighting.

On this, the strategists have spoken: with Iraq and Afghanistan as the testing grounds, the conflicts of the future will be guerrilla wars, open-ended, with no battle lines, no rules of engagement and ambivalent or openly hostile civilian populations in which any man, woman or child can turn combatant.

In breeding a future soldier for these future wars, we will inevitably leave behind the mere rectification of human weakness and enter into the realm of the superhuman. Glimpses of this realm have already become commonplace in the form of ceramic-Kevlar body armor and night-vision goggles -- wizardry that transforms squishy pink men into bullet-proof creatures of the night.

Such magic will continue apace under the auspices of dozens of military development initiatives across the globe, creating a species known variously as the Future Force Warrior by the U.S., FIST by the British Army, Félin by the French. All are merely the human components of broader visionary projects for what has been called "the army after next," the most noteworthy of which being the U.S. Army's Future Combat Systems. With a budget clocking in at $160 billion or so, FCS is not just one of history's most costly weapons programs; it is an all-encompassing modernization program, one that will usher in a total re-imagining of the armed forces. What FCS and its kin have imagined for soldiers is a battlefield experience increasingly mediated by technology, insulated in a cocoon of "force multipliers" -- military parlance for anything that allows you to accomplish more with fewer personnel. In concrete terms, that translates into an array of tools designed to enhance lethality and survivability: next-generation sidearms; headsets that provide live command and control, detailed geographic data and the ability to fire around corners; smart suits equipped with ultralight nanotech armor, micro-climate conditioning, real-time health monitoring and even automated medical care like CPR and drug delivery. Also on the docket are robotic exoskeletons that allow the soldiers wearing them to carry hundreds of pounds -- even while running -- without breaking a sweat, as well as handheld imaging equipment that grants the ability to see targets through walls.

None of these are sci-fi pipe dreams. The DARPA-developed Radar Scope is already in limited deployment, detecting human breathing through a foot of concrete on two AA batteries. Utah-based robotics company Sarcos is expected to deliver its prototype exoskeletons to the Army this year, at roughly the same time that many of the other Future Force Warrior components begin field testing. Full-scale production of a number of the systems is scheduled for early in the next decade.

The Absent Soldier

It is tempting to say that military technology is steadily transforming war into a video game. Yet there's a strange irony in the works: as the games claw themselves even closer to the look and feel of real, down-and-dirty warfare, real warfare is fluttering away into strategic and technological abstraction, effectively taking a step back from its own reality.

For all the PlayStation sexiness of the ultra lethal, force-multiplied warrior, the true fate of the in-the-flesh soldier is to vanish into the abstraction.

The explicit purpose of Future Combat Systems is to progressively supplement, to the point of ultimately displacing, the human soldier with a whole array of automated, autonomous and remote technologies -- things like unmanned surveillance drones, long-range and non-line-of-sight precision-guided munitions, and unmanned air and ground combat vehicles. Though the latter group may never look anything like Schwarzenegger minus skin, make no mistake that what we are talking about here is weaponized robots.

An oft-quoted U.S. Joint Forces Command study from 2003 (rather candidly titled Unmanned Effects: Taking the Human Out of the Loop) predicted that autonomous, networked robots -- faster and more lethal than human combatants -- could become the norm by 2025. That may prove overly confident, but a congressional mandate has already called for one-third of all U.S. military land vehicles to be unmanned by 2015, increasing to two-thirds by 2025.

If the idea of autonomous, homicidal robots dashing into troubled Third-World slums sends a major chill down your spine, you're certainly not alone. Well aware of the nightmarish optics, defense contractors and military brass alike have been presenting a united front, noting that this is about moving soldiers out of harm's way, not about deleting humans from the "kill chain" entirely.

While there is little doubt that protecting soldiers is the central motivation, shifting troops into a distant pixel-pushing role also performs a secondary purpose: it neatly removes obstacles for those looking to wage war overseas while expending as little of their domestic political capital as possible. You can call it a by-product, or you can call it an ulterior motive, depending upon how dismal your outlook is.

Whatever the reasons, as we lose ourselves in the lovely fantasy of sidestepping the maimed veterans and crying widows, we could be walking right into an even nastier pile of shit. During the bombing campaign that accompanied the 2003 coalition invasion of Iraq, satellite-guided munitions caused scores of accidental civilian deaths. If these people had perished at the barrel of coalition rifles, their deaths would have been called massacres; as it stands, they are mere technical glitches and failures of intelligence.

The moral here is straightforward: once the human presence in the kill chain is diluted, so too is accountability. The future's soldier could be one surrounded by an inveigling haze of pharmaceuticals, decision-making robots, errant bombs and faulty surveillance data; the only thing to emerge from this haze will be an exhilarating sense of our own guiltlessness. Alas, the populations against which we use our fancy toys are unlikely to share in the feeling.

To Read the Entire Article

May Day: Imagining a Better World

2008-05-01T09:00:00.005-04:00

(Celebrating this revolutionary, sexual and fertile day of celebration. Resistance is fertile!)

May Day, The Labor Day (American perspective on why it is important)

"Working Class Hero" by John Lennon

"Eyes On the Prize" by Mavis Staples

"99 and a 1/2" by Mavis Staples

School of the Seasons: Celebrating May Day A history of May Day that traces it back to the pagan celebration of sexuality and fertility through the early Christian reactionary attempt to associate it with Mary/chastity.

Michael Benton: Observations of The Digger Clans of the Alphane Mountains

2008-05-01T08:45:00.004-04:00

Observations of The Digger Clans of the Alphane Mountains (May 1, 2007)

I’m currently living with the Moonshine Clans of the Alphane Mountains. For the first few months, manic giggling greeted me whenever I mentioned my desire for answers ... the whispering behind my back almost broke my determination, but I hung in there until an elder Magi of the Clans began to take pity on this Lost Boy from the Western Lands. She claimed to have originally come from the City of the Red Night, where they teach their young that one cannnot seek “the” answer; instead they must expose themselves to the “multiplicity” of questions, for it is in the masking of “possible” questions that power rests upon, and the prying free of these nuggets from the earth’s moist grasp is the quest of the Clans of the Alphane Mountains.

The ancient Moonshine Magi cackled, swigged from her jug, and said, “This is where the neophytes can get in trouble.” She told me that when chasing these evasive questions the skillful seeker notices that the landscape shifts and reshapes each time a question is revealed. It seems that the Clans learned long ago that when one unearths a question revealing its essence, the disturbance of the surrounding landscape generally causes an accompanying re-veiling of surrounding questions. In fact, she warned that often eager groups of diggers, banded together for strength and safety, will bury smaller groups/individuals digging nearby. This is why the Diggers of the Moonshine Clans of the Alphane Mountains always stop and retrace their steps, reflecting on the pathway they are traveling, in order to re-cognize what disturbances their digging causes. The Magi seemed to derive much amusement from my comment that the Bushes that cover the western lands have long forbidden self-reflective contemplation in order to freeze traditional concepts and to fuel travel to the future-past.

I asked the Magi how the Diggers of the Moonshine Clans of the Alphane Mountains retain their reflective ability while unearthing large complex concepts and revealing troublesome questions. “How do they dream the impossible and imagine the unaskable?” The Magi leaned back and swigged from her jug and chuckled at my Western ignorance. She stared at me like an adder stares down a mouse and dared me to think upon it. After a long uncomfortable two days, I unkinked my frozen limbs. The emptying of my mind allowed me to recognize that the best way to build a hearty, enriching intellectual bouillabaise, is to blend it with (an)other body(ies) of knowledge. The Clans, following the wisdom of the Dispossessed, require all learners to travel to other realms (physical, spiritual, and mental) in order to experience different realities and to act as multi-conduit translators (within and without their clan).

It’s obvious that the Magi is still toying with me. Perhaps I still must quest for these answers on my own, perhaps I still must travel, perhaps I should look into the interstices of production for missing clues?

I screamed, “Please help me! What is a traveler to do when there is no map to guide me?” ... The Magi just cackled, “Foolish Lost Boy of the Western Lands, when will you learn that the quest is the journey and that as soon as you pin down an answer, it only means that you have reveiled other necessary questions — questions that must be once again revealed.”

Shaking and confused, I picked up a large jug of Alphane moonshine and stumbled into the forest to look for questions ...

Your fellow traveler,

Michael Benton

Zach Snyder Announces Film Contest for Upcoming Watchmen Film

2008-04-22T10:57:00.001-04:00

Check it Out Here

Alan Moore's 12 issue Watchmen (DC: 1986-1987) limited series was the only comic book to ever win a Hugo award.

The Sci Phi Show #50 - Atheism with Mike Resnick

2008-04-21T16:31:00.002-04:00

Atheism with Mike Resnick
The Sci Phi Show

In this episode of The Sci Phi Show I chat with Mike Resnick about his atheism and also about why he find religious people such interesting topics to write about.

To Listen to the Episode

Jeff VanderMeer's Veniss Underground (2004)

2008-04-20T17:30:00.003-04:00

I first came across Jeff VanderMeer's writings when we were published together in the Swami issue (#8) of formerly known as l'bourgeiozine. A founder of the zine and fan of the experimental writings collected in it, I decided to seek out one of his novels and picked up a copy of Veniss Underground (Prime Books, 2004).

Veniss Underground is narrated in three increasingly-longer parts, by three different characters. For me, each part as it depicts more of the increasingly surreal, environmentally wasted, drastically altered landscape and peoples of Veniss, is saved from complete nightmarishness, by the increasing emotional complexity and passion of each of the succeeding characters. This description is a poor substitute for Jeff VanderMeer's beautiful tale... it has a wonderful sense of the effect of environment on characters and some of the most realistic, impossible creatures (the leviathan is to incredible to believe, yet Jeff's descriptions made it real for me--completely blowing me away in the third part of the book) . The novel also provides intellectual stimulus around the issue of bio-genetics, responsibility of the artist/scientist, and includes engaging depictions of bio-constructs, such as genetically enhanced meerkats and ganeshas.

I'm looking forward to reading my copy of his earlier book City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris.

VanderMeer is also the Founder and Creative Director of The Ministry of Whimsy Press.

Apocalypse/Post-Apocalypse (Archive)

2008-04-20T16:51:00.004-04:00

2008:

To the Best of Our Knowledge: Apocalyptic Fiction

Ian McEwan: Day of Judgement

Stephen Pfohl: On the "Left Behind" Series

Gerry Canavan: The Past as Anti-Future

Thinking Allowed: Cultures of Apocalypse

Philosophy Bites: Stephen Mulhall on Film as Philosophy

2008-04-20T16:20:00.000-04:00

Stephen Mulhall on Film as Philosophy
Philosophy Bites

Can film be philosophy? Stephen Mulhall believes it can. Most philosophers who consider film focus on essential qualities of the cinematic medium, its reliance on photographic representation and montage, and so on. Mulhall has a very different approach. In this episode of Philosophy Bites he explains how the movie Bladerunner addresses philosophical themes.

To Listen to the Episode

Cory Doctorow: "I, Row-Boat" (Flurb: 2006); "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" (Jim Baen's Universe: 2006)

2008-04-08T14:09:00.005-04:00

(Student response to either/both of these short stories are due by 4/16/08)

On "I, Row-Boat":

Both stories are in this collection:

To read the story: Click Here

To listen to the story: Click Here

My first reaction when I read it a month ago:

Just when I thought my course long research and teaching of the history of Science Fiction short stories this semester was leaving me somewhat jaded... I came across Cory Doctorow's fascinating short story "I, Row-Boat" (2006), originally published in the first issue of Flurb, and which I found in Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection. Robbie the Row-Boat is one of my all-time favorite characters and Doctorow's story through it's vision of uniquely uplifted sentiences, AI avatars and downloaded humans gives us another opportunity to ponder the meaning of it all.

Then I popped online to do some research and I come across this report:

Constructing Life Creates Questions of Ethics
Talk of the Nation (NPR)

Scientists are getting closer to creating artificial life in the lab. But is society ready for custom-made organisms? Synthetic biology has the potential to dramatically change fields from agriculture to medicine to zoology. But how will society cope with the ability for a lone researcher to — for example — build a polio virus from scratch in a private lab?

Paul Rabinow, author of Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology, and Drew Endy, an MIT professor of biological engineering, talk with guest host Joe Palca about the promise and potential perils of synthetic biology. What protections need to be in place as research proceeds?

To Listen to the Episode

More on biotechnology

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On "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth":

Our copy is from:

I also noticed it is in my copy of this book:

Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse

for the audio fans: listen to it here

and if anyone is fluent in french you might want to read it in translation: French Fan-Translation

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More about Cory Doctorow:

Information want to be free—and so does writer Cory Doctorow, who celebrates the new technologies that will change science fiction forever (Interview in Sci Fi Weekly: 2006)

Tim O'Reilly: Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution (Cory Doctorow recommends this article and is also an advocate of Creative Commons)

Cory Doctorow and JT discuss copyright issues (Kottke.org: 2007)

Boing Boing Cory Doctorow co-edits this popular and important online journal.

Craphound Doctorow's personal website which includes this bio (scan down and check out the organizations he serves)

Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia (Well: 2001)

Wikipedia: Cory Doctorow

Microsoft Research DRM talk (Redmond, CA: 2004)

Video Talk About his Short Story Collection Overclocked

Also here:

Princess Mononoke/Mononoke-hime (Hayao Miyazaki: Japan, 1997

2008-04-07T10:12:00.002-04:00

(An archive for my ENG 282: International Film Studies students)

Princess Mononoke/Mononoke-hime (Hayao Miyazaki: Japan, 1997)

The Hayao Miyazaki Web (Fan-Based Websites)

Rotten Tomatoes: Archive of Reviews of Princess Mononoke

Wikipedia: Princess Mononoke (Highly recommended that you check out the discussion section in which issues of language and cultural translation are discussed. You get to the discussion section by clicking the discussion tab at the top of the post. This section is where people discuss possible problems and absences of wikipedia posts.)

CHANGING SAKÉ INTO WINE: Neil Gaiman on translating anime auteur Hayao Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke" into English

Wikipedia: Neil Gaiman I consider Neil Gaiman to be one of the most important contemporary speculative writers. His Sandman series which boldly reinterpreted traditional mythos for late-20th Century audiences is one of my favorite works of literature and the first comic series to win the World Fantasy Award.

Anime.com: Profile of Miyazaki and his films

Midnight Eye Interview of Miyazaki (2002) Midnight Eye is a leading online journal that covers Japanese cinema.

David Chute on Myazaki as an Eco-Fantasist (Film Comment: 1998)

Wikipedia: Anime

Sight and Sound: Animation Timeline

Kristin Thompson: Collection of Animation Essays

Julie Newcomb: Anime Guide (Green Cine: 2007)

Studio 360: Nikola Tesla--Strange Genius

2008-04-07T09:25:00.001-04:00

Nikola Tesla: Strange Genius
Studio 360 (PRI/WNYC)

Introducing Nikola Tesla

Part visionary, part mad scientist, and absolute genius, Tesla should be as famous as Edison – but he’s been largely forgotten. Kurt talks with Samantha Hunt about her new novel The Invention of Everything Else. Tesla is the protagonist, and despite the outlandish biographical details all through the book, there was very little she had to make up.

Episode also includes sections on:

Tesla vs. Edison
Transmit This
Tesla and Twain
Mr. Spock and Dr. Strangelove
The Death Ray
Wanted: Bold Thinkers
Garage Inventors
The Invention of Everything Else
Tesla in New York

To Listen to the Episode

"Maneki Neko" by Bruce Sterling

2008-04-01T16:40:00.002-04:00

(Student response deadline 4/7/8)

A Good Old Fashioned Future Bruce Sterling Collection that includes this story, but I got our copy from this book

The title refers to this Japanese icon Maneki Neko

For info about Bruce Sterling scan down to the previous post on his short story "Bicycle Repairman"

"Maneki Neko" is about a futuristic "gift economy" so it might help to have a discussion about this kind of economic system:

Wikipedia: Gift Economy

The prospect of a futuristic gift economy is a major theme in recent science fiction.

Recommended:

David Bollier: Cornucopia of the Commons (Yes! Magazine: 2001)

"Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland" by Gwyneth Jones (1996)

2008-03-30T19:33:00.004-04:00

(ENG 230 student responses due by 4/7/8)

For those that are unfamiliar Red Sonja was a fierce female warrior who was one of the few fighters that could challenge the barbarian Conan in Robert E. Howard's classic pulp sword and sorcery tales. Here is a recent painting of the character:

More examples of the character. The character from the beginning was a sexual fantasy for young males in that she would only give herself to the "man" who could defeat her physically in battle, but as can be seen from the images of the women that role-play as Red Sonja, she was also somewhat of a Xena-style prototype for the fantasy of the warrior-woman-who-kicks-butt.

Gwyneth Jones bibliography at Fantastic Fiction

This story was included on the James Tiptree Award's (for SF that explores and expands our understanding of gender issues) long list of fiction for 1996

Wikipedia: Gwyneth Jones

Gwyneth Jones website

Gwyneth Jones' Critical Essayss

String of Pearls: Sex and Horror Better Together?

On the Future of Gender

Aliens in the Fourth Dimension

Apocalypse Now

No Man’s Land: Feminised Landscapes in the Utopian Fiction Of Ursula Le Guin

About a Girl

Insanity: Flight Into Fantasy (PDF file)

She also recently published a collection of critical essays Deconstructing the Starship: Science, Fiction and Reality
-------------------------------------

Winning with a Bold Streak: An Interview with Gwyneth Jones (SF Site: 2005)

Gwyneth Jones: Magical Science (Locus: 2004)

"Bicycle Repairman" by Bruce Sterling (1996: Hugo Award Winner)

2008-03-30T19:32:00.003-04:00

(ENG 230 Student response deadline 4/7/8)

Fantastic Fiction bibliography

Wikipedia: Bruce Sterling

Wikipedia: Cyberpunk

The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier by Bruce Sterling This is an important non-fiction book that maps out part of the history of the subversive side of cyberculture and the paranoid response of the society of control. It also gives a history of the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (see below). I just listened to the entire book as a series of audio podcasts by Cory Doctorow (who we will be reading next week)-- link to audio podcast of Hacker Crackdown.

For a good contemporary cultural counterpoint that extends the call-to-resistance against the increasingly complex corporate colonization of everyday life by the society of control check out the Critical Art Ensemble

Mirroshades: Postmodern Archive Well conference inspired by the cyberpunk collection edited by Sterling:

Bruce Sterling is helping dream the future into existence (SciFi.com: 2006)

Cybergreen: Bruce Sterling on media, design, fiction, and the future (Reason: 2004)

Beyond the Beyond: Bruce Sterling's Weblog

Catscan Columns by Bruce Sterling These were published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation one of the leading civil rights defending free access and speech in the digital world. Wikipedia history of the EFF

Various Speeches and Videos by Sterling available on Youtube

Strange Horizon review of Ascendencies (2008: Retrospective collection of his best short fiction)

Bruce Sterling Online Index (Includes science columns, fiction, wired articles, speeches, videos and various projects available online)

``Free as Air, Free As Water, Free As Knowledge'' (Sterling's 1992 speech to the Library Information Technology Association in San Francisco)

A last thought from Bruce Sterling delivered in 1991 at the Computer Developers Conference in San Jose, CA (The Wonderful Power of Storytelling)

...

I don't think you can last by meeting the contemporary public taste, the taste from the last quarterly report. I don't think you can last by following demographics and carefully meeting expectations. I don't know many works of art that last that are condescending. I don't know many works of art that last that are deliberately stupid. You may be a geek, you may have geek written all over you; you should aim to be one geek they'll never forget. Don't aim to be civilized. Don't hope that straight people will keep you on as some kind of pet. To hell with them; they put you here. You should fully realize what society has made of you and take a terrible revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird and don't do it halfway, put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it. Have the artistic *courage* to recognize your own significance in culture!

Okay. Those of you into SF may recognize the classic rhetoric of cyberpunk here. Alienated punks, picking up computers, menacing society.... That's the cliched press story, but they miss the best half. Punk into cyber is interesting, but cyber into punk is way dread. I'm into technical people who attack pop culture. I'm into techies gone dingo, techies gone rogue -- not street punks picking up any glittery junk that happens to be within their reach -- but disciplined people, intelligent people, people with some technical skills and some rational thought, who can break out of the arid prison that this society sets for its engineers. People who are, and I quote, "dismayed by nearly every aspect of the world situation and aware on some nightmare level that the solutions to our problems will not come from the breed of dimwitted ad-men that we know as politicians." ...

That still smells like hope to me....

You don't get there by acculturating. Don't become a well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish. If you want to woo the muse of the odd, don't read Shakespeare. Read Webster's revenge plays. Don't read
Homer and Aristotle. Read Herodotus where he's off talking about Egyptian women having public sex with goats. If you want to read about myth don't read Joseph Campbell, read about convulsive religion, read about voodoo and the Millerites and the Munster Anabaptists. There are hundreds of years of extremities, there are vast legacies of mutants. There have always been geeks. There will always be geeks. Become the apotheosis of geek. Learn who your spiritual ancestors were. You didn't come here from nowhere. There are reasons why you're here. Learn those reasons. Learn about the stuff that was buried because it was too experimental or embarrassing or inexplicable or uncomfortable or dangerous.

Cyberculture (Archive of Resources)

2008-03-30T17:51:00.005-04:00

"Bicycle Repairman"/Bruce Sterling archive

Steven Shaviro: Cyberculture (Winter 2003 English 407 Course)

"The Unreal Estate Boom" by Julian Dibbel (Wired: 2003)

"Baud Girls and Cargo Cults: A Story About Celebrity, Community and Profane Illumination on the Web" by Thomas M. Senft (Originally published in World Wide Web: Myth, Metaphor, Magic Eds. Thomas Swiss and Andrew Herman. Routledge: 2000)

"A Rape in Cyberspace (Or TINYSOCIETY, and How to Make One)" by Julian Dibbel (Chapter One of My Tiny Life, 1998)

"The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: African American Critical Theory and Cyberculture" by Kalí Tal (Wired: 1996)

"Cyberselfish" by Paulina Borsook (Mother Jones: 1996)

Globalization (Archive of Theories)

2008-03-30T17:36:00.002-04:00

"Identity and Change in the Network Society": Interview of Manuel Castells (Conversations with History: 2001)

"Information Technology, Globalization and Social Development" by Manuel Castells (PDF file: 1999)

James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel: "Hacking Cyberpunk"

2008-03-30T16:48:00.004-04:00

(ENG 230 Student response deadline is 4/7/8)

Critical that introduces the collection:

Visit the links in the section "Speculative Theories/Criticism/Outlines" on the right side for more speculation about cyberculture.

"A Woman's Liberation" by Ursula Le Guin (1995: Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine)

2008-03-30T15:11:00.006-04:00

(ENG 230 Student response deadline 4/1/8)

Fantastic Fiction: Ursula Le Guin bibliography

Le Guin's Official Website

Breaking Into the Spell: Interview of Le Guin (Guernica: 2008)

Interview of Le Guin (Death Ray: 2007)

Ursula Le Guin: How the Sci Fi Channel wrecked my books (Slate: 2004)

Podcast Interview of Ursula Le guin (Studio 360: 2004)

Gwyneth Jones: Top 10 SF by Women Writers

Where Do You Get Your Ideas From: Le Guin Podcast (KUOW Seattle: 2002)

Richard D. Erlich: Coyote's Song--The Teaching Stories of Ursula Le Guin (Science Fiction Research Association [SFRA]: 2000)

Faith L. Justice: The award-winning creator of mythic worlds, and a master of metaphor, writes about people, animals and trees -- "nothing that is alien." (Salon: 2001)

Wikipedia: Ursula Le Guin

Wikipedia: Four Ways to Forgiveness (Collection in which "A Woman's Liberation" was first published in book form)

Le Guin discusses the differences between her science fiction and her more-realistic fiction (Bookworm: 1992)

"The Brains of Rats" by Michael Blumlein (1986: Originally published in Interzone)

2008-03-25T16:20:00.002-04:00

(ENG 230 student responses due by 3/31/08)

Your version of the story and Michael McDowell's introduction to the collection is from:

The short story "The Brains of Rats" was actually turned into a play. Here is the webpage and pictures from the production:

Play Version

Fantastic Fiction bibliography of Blumlein's Publications

Here is a recommended essay that explores the gender issues of the short story and may help you in comparing/contrasting it to the LeGuin (and other feminist writers we have read) short story:

Neil P. Baird: Defining/Redefining the Masculine "Other" in Science Fiction (2002: Strange Horizons)

Blumlein was included in this feature (also Lucius Shepard who we read earlier in the semester):

13 Contemporary Writers of Weird Horror

Blade Runner (Ridley Scott: USA, 1982/1992/2007)

2008-03-23T17:53:00.006-04:00

(ENG 230 Responses Due by 3/26/08)

IMDB Page on the Film

Wikipedia Page on the Film

Official Warner Brothers Website

Cupitt, Cathy. “Eyeballing the Simulacra: Desire and Vision in Blade Runner.” The Rhizome Factory (August 10, 2001)

Kozlovic, Anton Karl. “From Holy Aliens to Cyborg Saviours: Biblical Subtexts in Four Science Fiction Films.” Journal of Religion & Film 5.2 (October 2001)

Lightman, Herb A. and Richard Patterson. “Cinematography for Blade Runner.” (1982) American Cinematographer (Reprint: March 1999)

LoBrutto, Vincent. “Production Design: Blade Runner.” Becoming Film Literate: The Art and Craft of Motion Pictures. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005: 39-45.

Archive of Online Essays on Blade Runner

Wikipedia Page on Philip K. Dick

Wikipedia Page on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

The Official Philip K. Dick Website

Pat Murphy's "Rachel in Love" (First published in Asimov's Science Fiction, April 1987)

2008-03-23T17:14:00.004-04:00

(ENG 230 student response deadline: 3/26/08)

Read this story along with Joan Haran's critical essay "Simians, Cyborgs, and Women in 'Rachel in Love.'" They are both collected in

Pat Murphy's Website

Murphy's Bibliography at Internet Speculative Fiction Database

Pat Murphy: Illusion and Speculation (1991)

"Dr. Luther's Assistant" by Paul J. McAuley (1993)

2008-03-23T16:58:00.005-04:00

(ENG 230 Student Responses due by 3/26/08)

The story is from this collection:

A later thematically related novel (I liked the short story so much I picked this book up):

Paul McAuley's Website

Wikipedia Page on McAuley

Infinity Plus 2007 Interview

Writer/Critic Michael Swanwick's Profile of McAuley

McAuley Bibliography at Fantastic Fiction

Paul Di Fillippo: Short Stories from Babylon Sisters and Other Posthumans

2008-03-19T10:01:00.005-04:00

(Response deadline for ENG 230 students: 3/24/08)

Paul Di Filippo's Personal Website

Required readings from the collection Babylon Sisters and Other Posthumans(Prime Books, 2002: handed out in class and available outside my office)

"Stone Lives" (1985)
"A Short Course in Art Appreciation" (1988)
"Phylogenesis" (1989)

Di Filippo's page at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

2006 SciFi Dimensions Interview

2003 Locus Magazine Interview

2002 Strange Horizons Interview

Claude Lalumière: Playfully Perverting Consensus Reality: A Critical Chronology of Paul Di Filippo's Fiction (2002)

Thematically Related Sites:

Posthuman.com

Wikipedia: Posthuman (Human Evolution)

World Transhumanist Association

Katherine Hayles: Prologue to her book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics

Arthur C. Clarke: 1917 - 2008

2008-03-19T07:57:00.003-04:00

Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction author, dies at 90
By Gerald Jonas
International Herald Tribune

Arthur C. Clarke, a writer whose seamless blend of scientific expertise and poetic imagination helped usher in the space age, died Wednesday in Colombo, where he had lived since 1956. He was 90.

The author of almost 100 books, Clarke was an ardent promoter of the idea that humanity's destiny lay beyond the confines of Earth. It was a vision served most vividly by "2001: A Space Odyssey," the classic 1968 science-fiction film he created with the director Stanley Kubrick and the novel of the same title that he wrote as part of the project.

His work was also prophetic: His detailed forecast of telecommunications satellites in 1945 came more than a decade before the first orbital rocket flight.

Clarke's influence on public attitudes toward space was acknowledged by U.S. astronauts and Russian cosmonauts, by scientists like Carl Sagan and by movie and television producers. Gene Roddenberry credited Clarke's writings with encouraging him to pursue his "Star Trek" project in the face of indifference from television executives.

In his later years, after settling in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Clarke continued to bask in worldwide acclaim as both a scientific sage and the pre-eminent science fiction writer of the 20th century.

In 1998, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.

Clarke played down his success in foretelling a globe-spanning network of communication satellites. "No one can predict the future," he always maintained. But as a science fiction writer he could not resist drawing up timelines for what he called "possible futures." Far from displaying uncanny prescience, these conjectures mainly demonstrated his lifelong, and often disappointed, optimism about the peaceful uses of technology - from his calculation in 1945 that atomic-fueled rockets could be no more than 20 years away to his conviction in 1999 that "clean, safe power" from "cold fusion" would be commercially available in the first years of the new millennium.

To Read the Rest of the Obituary

Octavia Butler Archive

2008-03-18T13:13:00.003-04:00

Remembering Octavia Butler

Bat Segundo Interview

Octavia Butler

2008-03-18T13:07:00.000-04:00

Octavia Butler was a unique voice in SF. The "Xenogenesis" trilogy is one of my favorite set of books--it literally reprogrammed my mind when I read it--pushing me to think about alterity. Here is a comment on the trilogy, and her writing in general, from a Voices From the Gap biography:

Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago are the three novels that make up the Xenogenesis trilogy. These stories are about the near destruction of humankind through nuclear war and gene-swapping by extraterrestrials. The extraterrestials observe the humans as being hierarchical, which causes them to be prejudiced, and to have class divisions and conflict. These characteristics make it inevitable that mankind will eventually destroy itself without the aliens' help.

Octavia Butler has been well received by the critics. Burton Raffel had this to say about Xenogenesis: the reader is "initially drawn on by the utterly unexpected power and subtly complex intelligence of her extraordinary trilogy Xenogenesis, but sustained and even compelled by the rich dramatic textures, the profound psychological insights" (454). "Butler's work is both fascinating and highly unusual," Rosemary Stevenson writes; "character development, human relationships, and social concerns predominate over intergalactic hardware" (208).

"I'm not writing for some noble purpose, I just like telling a good story. If what I write about helps others understand this world we live in, so much the better for all of us," Octavia Butler told Robert McTyre. "Every story I write adds to me a little, changes me a little, forces me to reexamine an attitude or belief, causes me to research and learn, helps me to understand people and grow ... Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself" (Stevenson 210).

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Octavia Butler, 1947-2006: Sci-fi writer a gifted pioneer in white, male domain

Bibliography of her fiction and critical works

LiP Interview: Reinventing Our Heroes

NPR: Butler Speaking at the World Conference on Race/Interview with Scott Simon

Scifi.com audio production of her groundbreaking novel Kindred

The Bat Segundo Show Interview (also T.C. Boyle)

Michael Benton's review in Reconstruction of her last novel Fledgling

Democracy Now: Science Fiction Writer Octavia Butler on Race, Global Warming and Religion

Locus Interview: Persistence

Black America Web Obituary

Washington Post: Read Her Award Winning Story "Bloodchild"

Lady Vengeance (Chan-wook Park: Korea, 2005)

2008-03-17T10:31:00.001-04:00

Wed., 7:00pm at UK's William T. Young Library Auditorium

Trailer

George R.R. Martin Archive

2008-03-16T21:13:00.003-04:00

George R.R. Martin's Official Website

World Fantasy 2008 Interview

World Fantasy 2008: Interview with George R.R. Martin

2008-03-16T21:04:00.002-04:00

Interview with George R.R. Martin
World Fantasy Convention 2008
Host: Ryah

To Listen to the Interview

Webster Word of the Day: Speculate

2008-03-16T13:34:00.001-04:00

speculate \SPEK-yuh-layt\ verb

1 : to meditate on or ponder a subject : reflect *b : to think or theorize about something in which evidence is too slight for certainty to be reached

2 : to assume a business risk in hope of gain; especially : to buy or sell in expectation of profiting from market fluctuations

"Dr. Luther's Assistant" by Paul McAuley; "Club Thing" by Yoav

2008-03-16T11:20:00.005-04:00

I read McAuley's short story this morning in Pat Cadigan's edited collection The Ultimate Cyberpunk and the image of the blue-faced, genetically engineered fairies that have been liberated from their roles as meat-puppets in the red light district of Amsterdam is still haunting me as I try to work this morning. An appropriately haunting image on a dreary day as Spring Beak ends and the drudgery of the second-half of the semester looms before me.

As I started work I popped in my copy of Yoav's cd Charmed & Strange and "Club Thing" came on and my mind was sent off again (fantasizing about a literaghost ;) Dreaming rather than working...

StarShipSofa: 2007 BSFA Short Story Nominees (Audio Broadcasts)

2008-03-16T01:42:00.002-04:00

StarShipSofa has produced a real treat for science fiction fans with their audio productions of the 2007 BSFA Short Story nominees. All the nominees:

The Sledge Makers Daughter by Alastair Reynolds
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate by Ted Chiang
The Gift of Joy by Ian Whates
Lighting Out by Ken MacLeod
Terminal by Chaz Bencheley

Thanks Guys :)

BSFA 2007 Nominees

StarShipSofa

The Stars Are Projectors: A Modest Appreciation

2008-03-14T13:31:00.002-04:00

I haven't exactly figured what it is about Modest Mouse that has kept them playing on my stereo lately. First off they have these meaningless-meaningful lyrics. Example the first song on the CD Moon and Antartica is "3rd Planet":

Everything that keeps me together is falling apart/Ive got
This thing that I consider my only art of fucking people over.
My boss just quit the job says he's goin out to find blind
Spots and he'll do it.
The 3rd planet is sure that they're being watched by an
Eye in the sky that cant be stopped.
When you get to the promise land your gonna shake that
Eyes hand.
Your heart felt good it was drippin pitch and made of wood.
And your hands and knees felt cold and wet on the grass to me.
Outside naked, shiverin looking blue, from the cold
Sunlight that's reflected off the moon.
Baby cum angels fly around you reminding you we used
To be three and not just two.
And that's how the world began.
And that's how the world will end.
A 3rd had just been made and we were swimming in the
Water, didn't know then was it a son was it a daughter.
When it occurred to me that the animals are swimming
Around in the water in the oceans in our bodies and
Another had been found another ocean on the planet
Given that our blood is just like the atlantic.
And how.
The universe is shaped exactly like the earth if you go
Straight long enough you'll end up where you were.
Your heart felt good it was drippin pitch and made of wood.
And your hands and knees felt cold and wet on the grass to me.
Outside naked, shiverin looking blue, from the cold
Sunlight that's reflected off the moon.
Baby cum angels fly around you reminding you we used
To be three and not just two.
And that's how the world began.
And that's how the world will end.

The lyrics are meaningless in that they don't really make any real sense if you read them out loud as plain text, but when sung by Isaac Brock with the music (Brock, Eric Judy and Jeremiah Green) that hits my soul in the empty places, it shoots sparks through my brain causing me to reflect on the fractured landscapes (cultural, political and geographical) of my (our?) world. It speaks to my spiritual melancholy, provoking me to wonder at the awe of life and the pain of experience--back and forth, inside and outside. Did I mention the music? Achingly, aurally alluring, it allows me to reach some inner spaces and sends me aloft seeking some sense (sanity?). It speaks of despair, it speaks of hope, it speaks of rage, and it speaks of absurdity-this is the soundtrack of the wandering souls of our lost nation. Not those that have hopelessly lost their way and lost their reason, rather, those that are wandering alone asking questions and teasing out traces of meanings.

Once again, listening to this CD. A vision of apocalypse, indeed, but not the reactionary, conservative apocalypticism that fearfully pulls inward, building defenses against the other(s); instead, this is the outward recognition of personal and social devastation as happening, and in that moment of pain, the opportunity arises as a moment of becoming/transformation.

I came as ice, I came as a whore
I came as advice that came too short
I came as gold, I came as crap
I came clean and I came as a Rat

There is an ugliness and arrogance to some of the lyrics that can jar the careful listener that delves below the angular melodies, but its not a pointless, self-serving monologue, it seems directed, once again, outward in the hope of sparking a response and dialogue (even when Brock sings "I don't give a damn about you or this town"). This could be the plastic bag floating down the street in American Beauty telling us that there is more than meets the eye and that we should "look closer"... it could be the surreal, flickering light that speaks to you as you walk home alone from a nightclub, telling you that the comfort of the warm night is not a loss... it could be the haunting sounds you hear as you traipse through the woods while you wonder "how the world began"... it could be the ecstasy of being purely in the moment with your tribe, groovin and grinding... it could be the stranger that you want to approach and talk to in the desire to create a meaningful connection... it could be a lonely voice in the universe speaking questions to whatever may be out there.

"Does anybody know a way that a body could get away?"

Michael Benton

Paolo Bacigalupi Archive

2008-03-12T16:21:00.003-04:00

WindUpStories (Personal Website)

Damon Gambuto: Interview of Paolo Bacigalupi

Damon Gambuto: Interview of Paolo Bacigalupi

2008-03-12T15:50:00.003-04:00

(I recently purchased Bacigalupi's first collection Pump Six and Other Stories because of the buzz I was hearing about his futuristic vision regarding some of our more serious environmental issues. I'm just starting the book so I only read the first part of the interview below and will return later to read the rest after I have finished. The Wired Science website has a group of interesting science-related bloggers and Damon Gambuto has a regular Science Fiction Friday posting series.)

Interview of Paolo Bacigalupi
by Damon Gambuto
Wired Science (PBS)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

The Future and You: Catherine Asaro

2008-03-12T02:59:00.007-04:00

Interview of Catherine Asaro
The Future and You

Catherine Asaro describes her thoughts on the rise of nanotechnology, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, the ongoing feminization of civilization, and how non-lethal weapons might alter the nature of war.

...

Catherine Asaro is the author of 16 novels which have been described as a blend of hard science fiction, romance and space adventure. 11 of her novels belong to her Saga of the Skolian Empire. Her novel The Quantum Rose won the Nebula Award for Best Novel of 2001 and she is a three-time winner of the Romantic Times Book Club award for Best Science Fiction Novel.

From UCLA she received a Bachelors Degree in Chemistry. From Harvard she received a Masters in Physics and a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics.

She has done research at the University of Toronto in Canada, the Max Planck Institut für Astrophysik in Germany, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Her research involved using quantum theory to describe the behavior of atoms and molecules. She was a physics professor until 1990 when she established Molecudyne Research.

A former ballerina, she has performed with ballets and in musicals on both the east and west coast of the United States. In the 1980’s she was a principal dancer and artistic director of the Mainly Jazz Dancers and the Harvard University Ballet.

She has also published short stories, reviews, essays, and scientific papers in refereed academic journals. Her paper Complex Speeds and Special Relativity, which appeared in the April 1996 issue of The American Journal of Physics, forms the basis for some of the science in her novels.

To Listen to the Episode