Posts Tagged ‘Benjamin Kunkel’
February 28 Links! All the Links You Need for February 28
* Science Fiction Film and Television 10.1 is out, with articles on the suburban fantastic, the work of art in the age of the superhero, utopian film, review essays on The Martian and Terminator: Genysis, and my article on apocalyptic children’s literature. At long last, the world can discover why The Lorax is actually bad…
* My Octavia Butler book was discussed on the most recent episode of GribCast, on Parable of the Sower. (They start talking about me about 59ish minutes in, and especially around 1:30.) Meanwhile, later this spring: Octavia E. Butler’s Archive on View for First Time.
* If you knew our friend Nina Riggs, here is the donation page for John and the boys. And here’s the Amazon page for her book, which comes out this June.
* Instrumentalizing Earthseed.
* Fast Forward #289 – Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson.
* CFP: “Crips In Space: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Futurism.” And there’s still one day to submit to the SF exec group’s guaranteed MLA 2018 session on Satire and Science Fiction in Dystopian Times.
* Presenting the Nebula finalists.
* Inside the Brutal World of Comedy Open Mikes.
* The Melancholy of Don Bluth.
* Comics studies comes of age.
* Purging Iowa’s universities. The Campus Free Speech Battle You’re Not Seeing.
* How Trump’s campaign staffers tried to keep him off Twitter. In Trump’s Volleys, Echoes of Alex Jones’s Conspiracy Theories. Asylum seekers take a cold journey to Manitoba via Trump’s America. We Are Living In the Second Chapter of the Worst-Case Scenario. How to lose a constitutional democracy. Silence of the hacks. Trump’s Tlön. The Trumpocene. Untranslatable. Neurosyphilis?
* We can imagine a person slowly becoming aware that he is the subject of catastrophe.
* Hear Something About An Immigration Raid? Here’s How To Safely Report It. On ICE. Is ICE Out of Control? ICE detainee with brain tumor removed from hospital. Deportation ruses. What It’s Like to Be a Teen Living in an Immigration Detention Center. Ten Hours in Houston. Abolish ICE.
* On the Milo Bus With the Lost Boys of America’s New Right. 4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump.
* On the deep state. Ditching the deep state. The Deep State, the Media, and the Crisis of Legitimacy.
Indeed, both sides are equally illegitimate on the popular level. Both sides are pushing agendas with no constituency. No one outside a small hardcore of party insiders and hack pundits wants either “smart” technocracy or nihilistic faux-libertarianism. The Democrats have been electorally devastated, but the Republicans are in the awkward position of being given the keys to the kingdom and yet realizing that they are advocating things that no one wants. They probably will push through more of their destructive idiocy, just because that’s who they are, but it’s mainly happening because they’ve set up the system so that it’s nearly impossible for them to get voted out — an interesting counterpoint to the other major institutional structures (the Deep State and news media) that we absolutely can’t vote out of office.
The only rallying point for genuine popular legitimacy right now is a desire to remove Trump and, in the meantime, humiliate and impede him as much as possible. And I’ll be clear: those are goals I share. The danger is settling for that goal, in such a way as to finally close the door on democratic accountability altogether.
* On North Carolina’s Moral Mondays.
* Space news! Nearby Star Hosts 7 Earth-Size Planets. SpaceX plans to send two people around the Moon. Mars needs lawyers!
* The Relevance of Biopunk Science Fiction.
* Like domesticity, segregation had to be invented.
* Do voter identification laws suppress minority voting? Yes. We did the research. The Trump Administration’s Lies About Voter Fraud Will Lead to Massive Voter Suppression.
* Income inequality and advertising. That link is probably the good news.
* Guys I think the FBI might be bad.
* Even Trump’s fake terror arrests are worse.
* Anyway we’re all going to die. And pretty soon!
* Rule by algorithm. An Algorithm Is Replacing Bail Hearings in New Jersey.
* Why facts don’t change our minds.
* Visiting the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
* The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens.
* Checking in with SMBC: The Problem of Good. The Path of a Hero. How to Solve a Physics Problem. On the Etiology of Fuckers. Paging r/DaystromInstitute. Solving Sophie’s Choice. Gifts from God. And now to insult my core demographic. And that’s why I invented cancer. Don’t you dare stop scrolling, not now, not ever.
* The radical argument of the New Oxford Shakespeare.
* The Rise and Fall of the Socialist Party of America. After more than a half-century in the wilderness, the socialist left reemerges in America.
* Teen suicide attempts fell as same-sex marriage became legal.
* The ACLU sues Milwaukee over stop-and-frisk.
* The last days of Standing Rock.
* ‘Alternative’ Education: Using Charter Schools to Hide Dropouts and Game the System.
* Now Arizona has responded with a new — and some say bizarre — solution to this quandary: Death row inmates can bring their own execution drugs. The state’s manual for execution procedures, which was revised last month, says attorneys of death row inmates, or others acting on their behalf, can obtain pentobarbital or sodium Pentothal and give them to the state to ensure a smooth execution.
* And I say $100/day is too good for ’em!
* Scientists Say They’ve Discovered a Hidden Continent Under New Zealand. Probably ought to invade just to be on the safe side.
* Huge, if true: Millennials aren’t destroying society — they’re on the front lines against the forces that are.
* Fighting Gerrymandering With Geometry.
* Radical feminism finds a way.
* This is what Earth will look like if when we melt all the ice. Is It Okay to Enjoy the Warm Winters of Climate Change? Milwaukee temperature hits 66 degrees, shatters record. Wednesday marks 67 consecutive days since the City of Chicago logged an inch of snow.
* This interview with Peter Singer makes it very hard to see his work as anything but horrifyingly eugenic. What seemed to begin several decades ago as a thought experiment about animal intelligence has shifted into very disturbing ableism.
* In an age without heroes, there was the Boss.
* In search of Forrest Fenn’s treasure.
* I hate this more than the discovery that the Death Star flaw was engineered. I don’t like much of this either. Bring back the old EU!
* 20 Brutally Hilarious Comics For People Who Like Dark Humour. You had me at hello!
* What Are the Chances? Success in the Arts in the 21st Century.
* Zombie cities of the Chinese Rust Belt.
* The nation’s only deaf men’s college basketball team, on the verge of its first March Madness. Meanwhile, UVM is undefeated.
* And you can’t fool me: this one was already a Black Mirror episode.
Weekend Links!
* Call for applications: 2014—15 Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship.
* So Paul Di Filippo really liked Green Planets.
* Explaining Tuition Hikes at the University of Michigan. Construction Not Instruction: Bonds and Buildings at the Public University. 5 Links Between Higher Education and the Prison Industry.
* On trigger warnings and who gets to count.
* Journey to the Centre of Google Earth.
* The Lion King: A short history of Disney-fascism.
But the emotional trauma that Disney tries its damnedest to induce in young children is only the spadework for the ugly principles it feels it must implant in each new generation. Although the film takes place in an imaginary jungle, THE LION KING really expounds the Law of the Schoolyard: only the strong and the beautiful triumph, and the powerless survive only by serving the strong. As Disney sees it, children must not only acknowledge the supremacy of those born privileged and violent, the children must love them. The young must gaze in hushed veneration at the princely predators who stand ready to harvest the labor and flesh of their subjects. They must learn to giggle at the hopeless scampering of weak and stubby creatures as they dodge the jaws of their overlords. They must accept that true friendship means flattering those who would otherwise feast on their entrails.
* Climate denialism and the Outer Banks. These time-lapse maps show how much hotter the USA will be when you’re old.
* Was the U.S. Robbed Against Portugal? It Depends on What Time Means.
* You got your class-based analysis in my intersectionality NO you got your intersectionality in my class-based analysis
* Another exciting week of Good SCOTUS, Bad SCOTUS.
* Kunkel reviews Piketty. The circle is complete.
* Title Now Everybody Sue Everybody: expulsion and sexual assault at IHE.
* Democrats are the worst, Daily Show edition.
* Hillary Clinton 2016 and the Folly of the Left-Flank Push.
* If you or any other speculator on my body and rights, wish to know how I regard my rights, they need but come here and lay their hands on me to enslave me. Did you think to terrify me by presenting the alternative to give my money to you, or give my body to Slavery? Then let me say to you, that I meet the proposition with unutterable scorn and contempt.
* The Star Wars museum is coming to Chicago.
* People aren’t worried about robots, they’re worried about who owns the robots.
* A New Bike Lane That Could Save Lives and Make Cycling More Popular.
* “You express amazement at my statement that ‘civilized’ men try to justify their looting, butchering and plundering by claiming that these things are done in the interests of art, progress and culture. That this simple statement of fact should cause surprise, amazes me in return.”
* What could go wrong? Missouri School Districts Start Training Teachers To Carry Concealed Weapons In Classroom.
* Former College Basketball Player Sues NCAA Over Concussions.
* ‘Think They Got Killed?’ 1964, L.B.J. and Three Civil Rights Icons.
* When Rambo was going to fight werewolves.
* Here comes Pacific Rim 2. Plus a cartoon! But we still live in a vale of tears.
* The 20 Most WTF Magical Items in Dungeons & Dragons.
* Free at last: Oakland to decriminalize pinball.
* Kill Bill as an 8-bit video game.
Tuesday Links!
* One last bit of self-promotion for my Octavia Butler series at LARoB, reviewing the forthcoming eBook Unexpected Stories and the never-to-be-a-book Parable of the Trickster.
* Meanwhile, my new best friend Levar Burton says Octavia Butler is the writer he most wishes he’d met.
* John Oliver for/against the World Cup. Five Thirty Eight’s World Cup Predictions. How to Nerd Out about Soccer. The World Cup and the Corporatization of Soccer.
* An itinerary is by no means the only thing required for setting out on a trip. And the itinerary will change along the way. But for a deliberate departure from capitalism, rather than a blind flight, a preliminary itinerary will be necessary. Whatever we think of the term communism, the crossroads Marx and Engels glimpsed in the Manifesto is coming more clearly into view: either a left alternative to capitalism or “the common ruin of the contending classes”.
* The Church of Science Fiction.
* As horrific as recent mass killings have been, the idea of a slide into ongoing domestic terrorism is just nightmarish.
* Meanwhile: War Gear Flows to Police Departments.
* Dads Want To Spend Time With Their New Children, If Only We’d Give Them Paid Leave.
* Leaving Homeless Person On The Streets: $31,065. Giving Them Housing: $10,051.
* The Prison-Industrial Complex and Orange Is the New Black.
* Temple University is investigating an ethics complaint that two of its professors did not properly disclose funding from the private prison industry for their research on the cost of incarceration.
* Grad Students Could Win Big as Obama Slashes Debt Payments. Understanding the CBO’s bullshitting about how the government doesn’t make money on student loans. Lawsuits and the end of the NCAA. College’s inequality disgrace: Millionaire university presidents and indebted students. In the Near Future, Only Very Wealthy Colleges Will Have English Departments. Yes, the Humanities Are Struggling, but They Will Endure. And Now We Know I’ll Never Be MLA President.
* Emily Bazelon covers the Title IX crisis in American colleges. Taekwondo Is Great but Not the Solution to Campus Rape. U. of Oregon Student Who Alleged Rape by Athletes Writes Open Letter. And then there’s George.
* Jezebel covers Wikipedia’s internal fighting over #YesAllWomen.
* How to drive through all 48 of the contiguous United States in 113 hours.
* The unbearable sadness of Milwaukee tourism videos.
* I thought this was genuinely stunning even by Fox’s already low standards: Fox News Guest Launches Race-Based Attack On Neil deGrasse Tyson.
* Waffle House Forces Waitress To Return $1,000 Tip.
* “The way US immigration laws operate is absurd.”
* The media warns readers about violent pimps stealing girls from malls, but most victims’ stories are very different. I know this because I was a teen trafficking victim, and my experience reflects much of the research that’s been done with trafficking victims.
* The rise of the noncompete clause.
* A Brief History of the Gendered Pronoun in English. In defense of the singular “they.”
* Yes, Nixon Scuttled the Vietnam Peace Talks.
* If We’re Lucky, There’s Going to Be a Clone High Movie–IN MY PANTS.
* Review getting picked up: five stars.
* And 4°C only sounds like no big deal.
‘Dystopia and the End of Politics’
…genre fiction doesn’t exist in contradistinction to literature merely because of stale language, secondhand insights, or hackneyed plots. The larger difference is a failure or—less judgmentally—a simple setting-aside of the moral imagination. The literary novel illuminates moral problems (including sometimes those that are also political problems) at the expense of sentimental consolation, while genre fiction typically offers consolation at the expense of illumination. It doesn’t alter this proposition that science fiction and especially crime novels sometimes traffic in the idea that all people are at bottom equally evil and all history in the end equally nightmarish, since this sort of nihilism moots moral judgment altogether and is therefore its own kind of consolation.
Other people quicker on the trigger have already covered much of the necessary ground on Benjamin Kunkel’s provocative but incredibly frustrating Dissent piece on “Dystopia and the End of Politics.” What’s good about this article is largely masked by Kunkel’s strange decision to rehearse for the millionth time the high/low culture divide in the context of works (Children of Men, Oryx & Crake) that plainly obliterate it. (Just for starters: In what sense is the father of The Road best described as a primarily instrumental character? The Road is not a perfect book, but that is not among its flaws. And so it goes through the entire essay; in nearly all cases Kunkel’s classification of a work as science fiction inevitably determines the discovery of its asserted essential generic flaws.) Kunkel briefly pretends to take SF seriously so that his later refusal to take it seriously will carry more rhetorical weight—but he never means it, and his contempt for SF is palpable, and annoying, throughout.
I’m also not fond of arguments of the form “All X are essentially Y. Here are my three examples.” Kunkel, in contrast, appears very fond of such arguments.
All that said, when Kunkel does get down to business and takes dystopian and apocalyptic fiction seriously, he does rather good work, worth quoting at length:
In short, the contemporary apocalypse pits family values against the cannibal universe—the good guys versus the bad guys, in McCarthy’s unironic terms. And so, with the end of civilization, the age-old conflict between sexual love (eros) and love of one’s neighbor (caritas) also disappears; and the grown-up Jesus’ exhortation to his followers that they leave their families if they wish to pursue righteousness is as little remembered as among Christian fundamentalists today. No one pauses to reflect that in our civilization, pre-collapse, it was invariably the defense of the individual household that justified a nation’s warlike international posture or its profligate use of energy. Nuclear war might be averted, went the insipid Sting hit of the late cold war, if the Russians love their children too. But if global warming is not arrested, it will be because we (and the Russians) want for our children everything we have and more.
To be as schematic as possible: in the neoliberal dystopia a totally commodified world transforms would-be lovers into commodities themselves and in this way destroys the possibility of love. In the neoliberal apocalypse, on the other hand, the wreck of civilization reveals the inherent depravity of mankind (excepting one’s loved ones) and ratifies the truth that the family is a haven in a heartless world. Both the neoliberal dystopia and the neoliberal apocalypse defend love and individuality against the forces threatening to crush them; the difference is that the clone novel sticks up for humanity from the standpoint of an implied or explicit critique of neoliberalism, while the apocalypse narrative (whether in prose or on film) tends to reflect the default creed of neoliberalism, according to which kindness may flourish in private life but the outside world remains now and forever a scene of vicious but inevitable competition.
That’s a good and interesting binary absolutely worth thinking about. It’s just too bad he felt like he had to take a shower afterwards. And worse that he had to let us know he was going to take the shower after, that he was about to take the shower, really, just as soon as he stopped writing, because obviously he felt as dirty writing about SF as we must have felt reading about it.
Gerry Canavan 