Posts Tagged ‘fiction’
Saturday Morning Links!
* Really exciting new anthology I just heard about: Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation.
* CFP: Station Eleven and Twenty-First-Century Writing.
* CFP: The Literature of the Anthropcene.
* CFP: The International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts 2017.
* After Columbia: Deans often feign surprise at graduate student complaints, and claim not to notice the thousands petitioning them every semester. An n+1 roundtable on the recent NLRB decision.
* Monsters and Mythical Creatures of Higher Education.
* Just can’t win: Diversity training and mandates seem to have a backlash effect.
* Ghosts of White People Past: Witnessing White Flight From an Asian Ethnoburb.
* The New York Times interviews N.K. Jemisin, the first black writer to win a Hugo.
* A history of little people in Hollywood.
* Still, if he ends up with 7 percent of the vote — as we’d expect based upon history and the current polls — the Libertarian Party will qualify for federal campaign funding in 2020, and Johnson will claim the highest share of the vote of any non-major party nominee in 20 years.
* Who works for the workers? Unions and bureaucracy in America.
* If you ever hope to imagine hell, come to a prison, and I’ll show you what hell is like.
* The Strange Reason Nearly Every Film Ends by Saying It’s Fiction (You Guessed It: Rasputin!).
* But as Coulter let slip, the rightwing pundit class is on the verge of losing its long-term hold on the actual conduct of politics on the ground. In other words, the conservative media elite is in precisely the same structural position that the nascent forces of the new right sketched out for the great liberal media conspiracy circa 1972: assiduously manufacturing consent to an audience that was rapidly moving on to other grand political narratives. That, comrades Hannity and Coulter, is what we cranky leftwing culture critics call the cunning of history.
* Meanwhile: Republicans Are Already Planning How to Ruin a Hillary Clinton Presidency.
* Protesting too much: HAARP’s new owner holds open house to prove facility ‘is not capable of mind control.’
* Secret origins of the Choco Taco.
* And an intriguing BET science fiction web series about slavery and time travel very few people seem to have known about (I didn’t!): Send Me. Thanks to Ayana Jamieson for the tip!
Get June Started Right with June Links
* CFP for the first issue of Fantastika Journal.
* David Higgins reviews Paradoxa 27: The Futures Industry.
* This Is What Extinction Sounds Like.
* “Society doesn’t need a 21-year-old who is a sixth century historian.”
* So here’s my question: if this is all so “common sense” and “modest” then why do you have to lie so much about process and intentions? Why are people who drone on about “accountability” for others allowed to act without any accountability to the institutions they are supposed to represent?
Where genre is concerned, this means that our goal is no longer to define a genre, but to find a model that can reproduce the judgments made by particular historical observers. For instance, adjectives of size (“huge,” “gigantic,” but also “tiny”) are among the most reliable textual clues that a book will be called science fiction. Few people would define science fiction as a meditation on size, but it turns out that works categorized as science fiction (by certain sources) do spend a lot of time talking about the topic.
[whispers] Well, my dissertation and book-when-I-finally-get-around-to-massively-revising-it does define science fiction as a meditation on size…
* Bonus Ted Underwood content! The Real Problem with Distant Reading.
* In response to McGurl’s call we intend to create a digital database along with a visualization tool that can be used to map the professional itineraries and social networks of everyone who ever studied or taught creative writing at Iowa since the Workshop’s inception to the present date.
* Duke University enters hotel business with $62 million project. You know, nonprofit for educational purposes.
* University Of Akron President Resigns After Financial Controversies.
* Is It Time for Universities to Get Out of the Hospital Business?
* …if you take up these old positions about what a higher education in the humanities should involve, you end up dancing with some very conservative people. I found myself in very strange company when I began to hold out for education, not as a credentialising process, but what I think of as encouragement for the revolutionary force of individual curiosity–pursued without limit.
* On some campuses, a dogmatic form of identity politics clearly has taken hold. But what’s too often missing from this picture is the very thing that opponents of political correctness so often decry: a sense of proportion and judgment, and an awareness that what transpires on the radical edges of elite universities is not always an accurate barometer of what’s happening in the wider world.
* Rule-Breaking Iceland Completes Its Miracle Economic Escape.
* Middle Eastern Writers Find Refuge in the Dystopian Novel.
* Which City Has the Most Unpredictable Weather? Of course Milwaukee makes the top-ten for major metropolitan areas.
* It’s 2016. Why is anyone still keeping elephants in circuses?
* How rich does a black criminal have to be to get treated like a white one?
* Vindicated! A new meta analysis in Perspectives in Psychological Science looked at 33 studies on the relationship between deliberate practice and athletic achievement, and found that practice just doesn’t matter that much.
* 11 History Books You Should Read Before Writing Your Military SF Novel.
* On Early Science Fiction and the Medieval.
* Careerism and totalitarianism.
Genocide, she insisted, is work. If it is to be done, people must be hired and paid; if it is to be done well, they must be supervised and promoted.
Progressive racism is how racism is enacted by being denied: how racism is heard as a blow to the reputation of an organisation as being progressive. We can detect the same mechanism happening in political movements: when anti-racism becomes part of an identity for progressive whites, racism is either re-located in a body over there (the racist) or understood as a blow to self-reputation of individuals for being progressive. This term “progressive whites” comes from Ruth Frankenberg important work on whiteness studies. She argues that focusing on whiteness purely in negative terms can “leaves progressive whites apparently without any genealogy” (1993, 232). Kincheloe and Steinberg in their work on whiteness studies write of “the necessity of creating a positive, proud, attractive antiracist white identity” (1998, 34). Indeed, the most astonishing aspect of this list of adjectives (positive, proud, attractive, antiracist) is that antiracism then becomes just another white attribute in a chain: indeed, anti-racism may even provide the conditions for a new discourse of white pride.
* When we peel back its progressive pedagogical covering, the teaching-tool defense is embodied in unequal reasoning. It is embodied in racist logic: our national inability to value the same, to reason the same, to think the same for different racial groups.
* What effects has “ban the box” had so far? Two new working papers suggest that, as economic theory predicts, “ban the box” policies increase racial disparities in employment outcomes. So disheartening.
* Shady accounting underpins Trump’s wealth. No! I won’t believe it!
* What’s the Matter with San Francisco: How Silicon Valley’s Ideology Has Ruined a Great City.
* Well, the establishment’s also pretty bored by literary work that deals with our treatment of the rest of being — you know, other animals, the rest of life on Earth, the creatures beyond the man-apes. Like the tragedy of how our men treat our women, the tragic way humans treat nonhumans is still, to many U.S. fiction arbiters, also irrelevant as a conversation, often dismissed as a boutique topic that’s the fodder of cranks and tree huggers. Women and the rest of species in existence: two flaming badges of uncool.
* Harambe launches a thousand thinkpieces.
* The Black Film Canon: The 50 greatest movies by black directors.
* Jessica Valenti: my life as a ‘sex object.’
* How an industry helps Chinese students cheat their way into and through U.S. colleges.
* Nearly half of young black men in Chicago out of work, out of school. All told, over that same 14-year stretch, Chicago’s black population decreased by an estimated 200,000 residents, or nearly 19 percent. Illinois now has the highest unemployment rate in the United States.
* AP FACT CHECK: Clinton misstates key facts in email episode. Hillary Clinton vs. Herself. Hillary Clinton Remains the Most Likely 45th President of the United States.
* After Being Called Out, Trump Hastily Donates the Veterans’ Aid Money He Said He’d Already Donated. Meet David French: the random dude off the street Bill Kristol decided will save America from Trump.
* This is good fun but pretty seriously slanders Magneto and the Joker.
* The Republicans’ Military Budget Could Make Every Homeless Person In America A Millionaire.
* The Male Gaze in a Math Book.
* Coming from Pixar, 2022: Swarm of bees follows woman’s car for two days to rescue their queen.
* The paralogisms of pure dismissal.
* Fandom Is Broken. A Retort. I’m mostly just impressed with how hard I nailed it.
* Baby abandoned at SF State now one of its grads.
* Quitting Your Job to Pursue Your Passion is Bullshit.
* Hyperattention and hyperdistraction.
* Not a Review of Neoreaction a Basilisk. I for one welcome our artificially intelligent overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted writer and educator, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground zinc caves.
* Make Bayesianism Work for You.
* A Renegade Muscles In on Mister Softee’s Turf.
“Let me tell you about this business,” Adam Vega, a thickly muscled, heavily tattooed Mister Softee man who works the upper reaches of the Upper East Side and East Harlem, said on Wednesday. “Every truck has a bat inside.”
* A Fascinating Video Essay Explores the Key Reason Why Calvin and Hobbes Remains So Beloved Today.
* This is a little old, but DC has basically gone ahead and made it real, so…
* David Mitchell buries latest manuscript for a hundred years.
* Algorithms: The Future That Already Happened.
* Judith Butler on the Value of the Humanities and Why We Read.
* Time to panic about Rogue One.
* I still can’t believe The Cursed Child is a real thing. Even photographs can’t convince me.
* [somberly drags FerrisBueller.privilege.Salon.docx to the trash can]
* Business Of Disaster: Insurance Firms Profited $400 Million After Sandy.
* Over a third of coral is dead in parts of the Great Barrier Reef, scientists say.
* And to imagine the ocean of the future: picture a writhing mass of unkillable tentacles, forever.
Happy Birthday Connor Links!
My son is being born today, so the posting will probably be sporadic even by summer standards. Sorry! And hooray!
* FindingEstella from @amplify285 is an awesome Octavia Butler Archives Tumblr.
* NASA: ‘Our plan is to colonize Mars.’ Well, then, let’s go!
* Breaking: The Constitution is a shell game.
* Why Physicists Are Saying Consciousness Is A State Of Matter, Like a Solid, A Liquid Or A Gas.
* This fantasy has survived the 1980s, of course, even as the action genre that spawned RoboCop has faded. Meanwhile, the market fundamentalism and “tough-on-crime” rhetoric that the film makes fun of, still relatively novel in 1987, have today become normalized. The idea of redemptive violence—mass incarceration, a heavily armed police force—is now so deeply embedded in our political culture that we may no longer be able to see it well enough to mock it. RoboCop is thus both more dated and more current than ever. Its critical edge comes from a pessimistic vision of the future that is getting closer all the time.
* If social and labor movements are to break out of this cycle, it will have to mean an actual break to the left of the Democratic Party. Or not?
* Politics in Times of Anxiety.
* Is soccer finally becoming a mainstream TV sport in America? These charts say yes.
* Bazillionaires! They’re just like us!
* Sherlock Holmes is officially out of copyright. Start your slashes!
* Podcast of the week: Rachel and Miles x-Plain the X-Men.
* Danger Close: The Iraq War in American Fiction. Almost certainly a factor in the prevalence of Iraq War stories being (1) science fictional (2) set in narrative situations that recast us as the victims of our own invasion.
* US v. Portugal: It was the worst. See you Thursday.
* And Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has your improved Turing Test.
All Your Weekend Links at No Cost to You
* The great Gabriel García Márquez has died. The Paris Review interview. Autumn of the Patriarch, Forgetting to Live.
In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That’s the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.
* Earthseed as New-Age transreligion.
* I asked William Pannapacker how to responsibly advise students who want to go to graduate school in the humanities. He said you can’t.
* UNC’s New Grading System Could Show What That ‘A’ Is Really Worth. Tentatively, this seems like a good improvement on the existing system, though I’m not in love with the administration’s “now we can finally catch unscrupulous faculty!” line.
* Supposedly we’re supposed to be outraged by Snowden not infiltrating the Putin government and leaking details about his massive surveillance state apparatus. Or something. I can’t make heads or tails of it to be honest.
* In defense of edited collections.
* Harvard Accused Of Retaliating Against Professor Who Defended Sexual Assault Survivors.
* Rape culture and athletics at FSU.
* The #AskEmmert Q&A Is Going Poorly.
* The theology of ethical consumerism.
* After comparing the average achievement of children whose parents regularly engage in each form of parental involvement to that of their counterparts whose parents do not, we found that most forms of parental involvement yielded no benefit to children’s test scores or grades, regardless of racial or ethnic background or socioeconomic standing. The zero point of most liberal (as opposed to leftist) interventions in poverty is that “merit” broadly defined is structured (a little) by genetic lottery and (a lot) by class position, which means that strategies for equality that are filtered through education and achievement will always just wind up replicating existing structures of power and existing privileges rather than disrupting them. I don’t see any answer for this problem beyond deliberate redistribution of wealth.
* The failure of desegregation.
* Study: People of color breathe air that is 38 percent more polluted than white people’s.
* The Nation reviews The Years of Living Dangerously.
* New York Times Admits It Agreed to ‘Gag Orders’ in Israel.
* A huge part of the function of Western media is producing and distributing state propaganda. Freddie has just a short recent list.
* American politics is a cesspool, New Jersey politics doubly so.
* Q will visit the Abramsverse.
* Here’s How Long That Teen Would Have to Pee in the Portland Reservoir to Make It Unsafe to Drink. But what’s 38 million gallons between friends?
* On writing disabilities in SF and fantasy. Doctor Who and the Women.
In the moments that follow, both the Doctor and his companion ask River why she didn’t just say her wrist was broken, and she explains – in this horrible, horrible moment – that the Doctor must be protected from knowing how much it hurts people to be around him; that humans must hide their weakness from him so that he will not feel upset.
* Third child as status symbol.
* Grad students unionize at UConn.
* Monsters walk among us: People who think they’re attractive tend to be more comfortable with economic inequality.
* The Last Golden Days of Marijuana Smuggling.
* They have come to the conclusion that God, / Requiring a heaven and a hell, didn’t need to / Plan two establishments: ‘X-Men’ Director Bryan Singer Accused of Sexually Assaulting Underage Boy. More details on the case at Boing Boing.
* I can’t remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you’re saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it’s not literally illegal to express.
* The arc of history is long, but it bends towards grandfather clauses that allow obscenities to continue for decades after they are banned.
* Inmates to strike in Alabama, declare prison is “running a slave empire.”
* The New York Times profiles the great Tatiana Maslany of Orphan Black.
* Actors laughing between takes.
* And let’s go ahead and put Krypton at the top of the list of places to invade next.
Monday Night Links
* Bernard Pollard doesn’t think the NFL will exist in 30 years… because it’s just becoming too darn safe.
* Wisconsin officials tout the UW Flexible Option as the first to offer multiple, competency-based bachelor’s degrees from a public university system. Officials encourage students to complete their education independently through online courses, which have grown in popularity through efforts by companies such as Coursera, edX and Udacity. No classroom time is required under the Wisconsin program except for clinical or practicum work for certain degrees.
* Also in local news: Milwaukee sheriff says the police won’t protect you, so get a gun.
* And again! Wisconsin’s Abortion Restrictions Deny Women The Right To Terminate A Pregnancy In Privacy.
* Presenting the quinoa backlash backlash.
* Thomas Friedman op-ed generator. Even better than the real thing.
* And with each new technology, the same hyperbole, the same evangelism. On-line education is great. MOOC is a wonderful concept. But most of the institutions in the world that are over 400 years old are universities and there is a reason for that. To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the impending demise of the traditional university may be much exaggerated.
* What Are Low-Ranked Graduate Programs Good For?
* New Arctic Death Spiral Feedback: Melt Ponds Cause Sea Ice To Melt More Rapidly.
* Big Surprise: Yet Another Ed Reform Turns Out to be Bogus.
* Ray Kurzweil Says We’re Going to Live Forever.
* MetaFilter has a post on the Maria Bamford Show.
Leavin’ on that Midnight Train Links
* Here comes the second act: Progressives Target GOP State Senators In WI With Recall Threat.
* Hard to think of a better encapsulation of America’s warped priorities than the chart at right. More here.
* February 21, 2009: My working assumption has been that the GOP’s biggest names—Bobby Jindal, Mitt Romney, god-help-us Sarah Palin—would sit out 2012 to take on the winner of the open Democratic field in 2016. (I’ve actually thought for a while that 2012′s Bob Dole would be Newt Gingrich; someone who’ll lose handily but won’t get creamed.) Ladies and gentlemen, we’re halfway there: Newt Gingrich is running for president.
* Julianna Baggott on answering the illegal question in academic job interviews.
* Ron Rosenbaum on asking the forbidden question in nuclear silo training. (Thanks, Sam!)
* The study found that of those fellowship winners with white male dissertation advisers, 37 percent landed faculty jobs at research universities — jobs that many Ph.D.s want and that are very difficult these days for most to get. Of those who had all other dissertation advisers (white women, minority men or minority women), only 7 percent landed such jobs.
* New David Foster Wallace in the New Yorker.
Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boy’s goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body.
* Self-publishing in the age of the Kindle.
* The headline reads, “Can a group of scientists in California end the war on climate change?” But Grist offers some good reasons to be skeptical about the Berkeley Earth project.
* PhysOrg has an article detailing dozens of unethical medical experiments on nonconsenting human subjects in the U.S.
* That’ll fix everything: the Gates Foundation wants to raise class size to “spread around [the] effectiveness.” Sounds foolproof! (Thanks, Ben!)
* Beyond parody: Ohio Senate committee schedules unborn child as witness during upcoming abortion bill hearing.
* And RaShOmoN of course you had me at German science fiction covers.
‘Get a Real Degree’
To my mind, the real cause of shame here is the profession of writing, and it affects McGurl just as much as it does Carver and Oates. Literary writing is inherently elitist and impractical. It doesn’t directly cure disease, combat injustice, or make enough money, usually, to support philanthropic aims. Because writing is suspected to be narcissistic and wasteful, it must be ‘disciplined’ by the programme – as McGurl documents with a 1941 promotional photo of Paul Engle, then director of the Iowa workshop, seated at a desk with a typewriter and a large whip. (Engle’s only novel, McGurl observes, features a bedridden Iowan patriarch ‘surrounded by his collection of “whips of every kind”, including “racing whips”, “stiff buggy whips”, “cattle whips”, “riding crops” and one “endless bullwhip”’.) The workshop’s most famous mantras – ‘Murder your darlings,’ ‘Omit needless words,’ ‘Show, don’t tell’ – also betray a view of writing as self-indulgence, an excess to be painfully curbed in AA-type group sessions. Shame also explains the fetish of ‘craft’: an ostensibly legitimising technique, designed to recast writing as a workmanlike, perhaps even working-class skill, as opposed to something every no-good dilettante already knows how to do. Shame explains the cult of persecutedness, a strategy designed to legitimise literary production as social advocacy, and make White People feel better (Stuff White People Like #21: ‘Writers’ Workshops’).
As long as it views writing as shameful, the programme will not generate good books, except by accident. Pretending that literary production is a non-elite activity is both pointless and disingenuous.
‘Bullet in the Brain’
YouTube has a film version of “Bullet in the Brain,” the Tobias Wolff story I use in introductory fiction classes to show my students how a strong writer can subvert everything I’ve been teaching them about how stories work. (Big ups to PClem.)
Thursday Night Links
* I hadn’t heard Barry Hannah died. I never met him, but he was very much at the center of the Southern U.S. MFA scene. How sad.
* Students are striking in California again today, as anyone who is Facebook friends with my friend PJ knows very well. Good luck folks.
* Should soccer ban the paradinha?
* Actually existing media bias: As if by magic, reconciliation is suddenly “controversial.”
* Apocalypse soon: Arctic seabed methane stores destabilizing, venting. Climate Progress agrees it’s time to panic.
* A link somewhere took me back to Ze Frank’s Young Me / Now Me today, and it’s still one of the most compelling sites on the Internet.
* Obama made his health care pitch to House progressives today, apparently pledging to return to the public option in the future. Raul Grijalva, who’d previously pledged to vote against the bill from the left, said he found the pitch “pretty compelling”—which is a very good sign.
* Currently watching: Tom Dowd and the Language of Music, about a research assistant on the Manhattan Project who went on to become the sound engineer and producer behind some of the best musicians of the 20th century. It’s great stuff.
The Death of the Literary Journal
Here at VQR we currently have more than ten times as many submitters each year as we have subscribers. And there’s very, very little overlap. We know—we’ve checked. More on what’s happened to American letters, and the American literary journal, at Mother Jones.
Another Massive Wednesday Linkdump
* Three-part interview at Hero Complex with Neill Blomkamp.
GB: There can be an interesting freedom in the restrictions, too, even though that sounds contradictory. If you look at “Jaws” and “Alien,” the limitations on the visual effects led to ingenuity and better films. And there are many films today that go wild with visual effects and it leads to entirely forgettable films.
NB: It’s so true. From a pure audience perspective, it may yield a more interesting result. Think of “Alien,” if they made it now you would probably get “Alien vs. Predator.”
Via MeFi, which also links to another Blomkamp short, Tempbot.
* Noah Sheldon photographs the degradation of Biosphere 2. Also via MeFi. More photos at BLDGBLOG.
* China Miéville is blogging a rejectamentalist manifesto.
* “The End of the Detroit Dream.”
* Infinite Summer 2 is coming: 2666 Spring.
* Democrats would gain 10 Senate seats by eliminating the filibuster.
* The Big Bang Theory vs. The Male Gaze.
* New Yorker fiction by the numbers.
The first thing we always look at is if the New Yorker is bringing new writers into the mix or sticking with its old standbys. Just 10 writers account for 82 (or 23%) of the 358 stories to appear over the last seven years. Just 18 writers account for 124 (or 35%) of the stories. The New Yorker is sometimes criticized for featuring the same writers again and again, but it appears to be getting better on this front. The 18 “standbys” noted above and listed below accounted for only 7 of the 49 stories published in 2009 (or 14%). On the flip side of this argument, 15 writers appeared in the New Yorker for the first time in 2009 (at least since 2003).
* Monkeys recognize bad grammar. But they still can’t spell.
* Andrew Sullivan has your charts of the day. 
It looks as though traditional economists have a strong optimism bias, which I try to balance with my fervent belief that the economy will catastrophically collapse on any given day.
* io9 considers the inevitable Lost reboot.
* I’m starting the new year with the sinking feeling that important opportunities are slipping from the nation’s grasp. Our collective consciousness tends to obsess indiscriminately over one or two issues — the would-be bomber on the flight into Detroit, the Tiger Woods saga — while enormous problems that should be engaged get short shrift.
….This is a society in deep, deep trouble and the fixes currently in the works are in no way adequate to the enormous challenges we’re facing.
So Yemen’s population has tripled since 1975 and will double again by 2035. Meanwhile, state revenue will decline to zero by 2017 and the capital city of Sanaa will run out of water by 2015 — partly because 40% of Sanaa’s water is pumped illegally in the outskirts to irrigate the qat crop.
* Goal of the week: Dempsey!
Tuesday Night Linkdump #2: College Edition
Tuesday Night Linkdump #2: College Edition.
* Via my friend Eric via The Believer, Donald Barthelme’s reading list. Joseph Campbell, Donald? Really?
* Facing fallen endowments and needier students, many colleges are looking more favorably on wealthier applicants as they make their admissions decisions this year. Meritocracy!
* A master’s degree is social media is actually not as stupid as everybody is pretending, Twitter-twittering aside.
* Four college majors that will still get you a job, even in today’s economy. Science fiction studies snubbed again.
* Nobody panic: MLA citation style has changed.
The Year in New Yorker Fiction
2008 in New Yorker fiction. I hardly ever read the fiction in the New Yorker anymore, as I find it increasingly tedious—so this is a nice checklist for what I’ve been missing. Via MeFi.
Gerry Canavan 