Posts Tagged ‘modernity’
Thursday Afternoon Links!
* Mark Z. Danielewski has written a pilot for a potential House of Leaves TV series. It’s good! The question of adapting the novel wound up being a minor subtheme in our discussion of the book in my summer grad class last month, so I was gratified to actually get to see the script — and directly incorporating the novel into the storyworld of the TV series seems like an intriguing solution to the book’s basic unfilmability. I think I hope someone makes it!
* I haven’t had a chance to see Ant-Man and the Wasp yet, so I’m gratified someone went ahead and wrote my triennial rant about franchise fictions and narrative closure on my behalf.
* Texas Studies in Literature and Language has a special issue on Wes Anderson.
* CFP for the SFRA guaranteed panel at ASLE 19. ASLE 19 (in Davis, CA) is a week after the planned dates for SFRA 19 in Hawaii, so if you’re going to the West Coast anyway it could be almost like a two-for-one…
* The second issue of Fantastika Journal is now available.
* That the things that gave my life meaning growing up have all become vectors for recruitment to misogynistic and white nationalist hate groups is the bitterest surprise of my middle age. That and Trump. Two bitterest surprises.
* Nominations Are Open for the 2018 Brittle Paper Awards.
* Ken Liu Presents Broken Stars, A New Anthology of Chinese Short Speculative Fiction.
* The Fall of Wisconsin. How to win Wisconsin back.
* Shakespeare in the state parks.
* The Self-Helpification of Academe: How feel-good nostrums cover up the university’s cruelty.
* Another piece on searching for work outside academia.
* Professor Faces Fraud Charges for False Job Offer. Reading the confession letter just makes me cringe.
* His University Asked Him to Build an Emoji-Themed Parade Float. Then It Fired Him.
* Why Donald Trump Nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Brett Kavanaugh Will Mean Challenging Times For Environmental Laws. The Vice Report. The Coming Era of Forced Abortions. The end of net neutrality. The imperial presidency 2.0. Trump’s Supreme Court Pick Could Spell a Fresh Hell for Workers’ Rights. Brett Kavanaugh Ruled Against Workers When No One Else Did. The issue with Kavanaugh is that he seems completely reactionary, bouncing from one indefensible position to another, without applying any judgment whatsoever. Liberal media in full effect. The Liberal Case for Kavanaugh Is Complete Crap. He’s a very normal Republican pick — that’s the problem. Establishment Extremist. What’s coming. It’s bad y’all. Someone investigate precisely how this deal was made and what the terms were. And from the archives: The Three Alitos.
* The Supreme Court: still bad.
* Capitalism is ruining science. The Business Veto: The demise of social democracy shows the precariousness of any project of reform under capitalism.
* Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras.
* Technoleviathan: China, Silicon Valley, and the rise of the global surveillance state. How Artificial Intelligence Will Reshape the Global Order.
* Silicon Valley Is Bending Over Backward to Cater to the Far Right.
* How Silicon Valley Fuels an Informal Caste System. Rule-Making as Structural Violence: From a Taxi to Uber Economy in San Francisco.
* Former Obama Officials Are Riding Out The Trump Years By Cashing In.
* The end of NATO. ‘They Will Die in Tallinn’: Estonia Girds for War With Russia.
* Trump is set to separate more than 200,000 U.S.-born children from their parents. Trump’s Office of Refugee Resettlement Is Budgeting for a Surge in Child Separations. ‘Don’t You Know That We Hate You People?’ ICE is lawless, racial profiling edition. Where Cities and Counties Are Detaining Immigrants. Pregnant Women Say They Miscarried In Immigration Detention And Didn’t Get The Care They Needed. Government Told Immigrant Parents to Pay for DNA Tests to Get Kids Back, Advocate Says. As Migrant Families Are Reunited, Some Children Don’t Recognize Their Mothers. Deported after Trump order, Central Americans grieve for lost children. ‘What if I lose her forever?’ Undocumented Grover Beach mother deported despite community rallying in her support. Facing a Tuesday deadline to reunite about 100 migrant toddlers with their parents, feds say they’ve reunited 2. Inside The Courts Where Some Immigrants Plead Guilty Without Knowing What’s Happening. Now they’re coming for grandmas.
* Woman arrested in assault of 91-year-old Mexican man who was told to ‘go back to your country.’
* There’s been a spate of violent far-right extremism since the 2016 election.
* If you’re anti- antifa, that must mean…
* It’s Not Civil Disobedience if You Ask for Permission.
* Liberalism, legitimacy, and loving the Parkland kids.
* Why Marx’s Capital Still Matters.
* Nixon’s $7B carbon tax forms centerpiece of energy agenda.
* The Industrial Age May Have Actually Been Kind of a Bad Idea.
* An interview with Julia Salazar. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, In Her Own Words. Cynthia Nixon: I’m a democratic socialist. Meanwhile our old pal Joe Crowley looks like he’s trying to get away with something.
* We Should Embrace the Ambiguity of the 14th Amendment.
* Alan Dershowitz is ALL IN on Trump. But he’s not the only person with some truly around-the-bend ideas of what lawsuits can do.
* Weird science: Girls sometimes inherit almost two full sets of their dad’s genes, which seems to cause rare cancers.
* An Arkansas man complained about police abuse. Then town officials ruined his life.
* Did… did Milwaukee write this?
* Jeff Bezos Is Now $50 Billion Richer Than Anyone Else on Earth.
* All 12 Thai Boys Successfully Rescued from Cave after Third Dangerous Mission. The only person unhappy is Elon.
* WHO’s Language on Breastfeeding Really Is Flawed. This was our experience with breastfeeding for sure; I’m sure it’s great for a lot of people but we needed formula as a supplement from the first night on. That said, the corporate forces that promote formula over breastfeeding are utterly gross.
* When the relationship status truly is complicated.
* Scotland’s official plan if the Loch Ness Monster is found.
* Japan and the stay-at-home dad.
* Reality Winner and the espionage act.
* My Best Friend Lost His Life to the Gig Economy.
* When your child reveals sexual abuse from your parent.
* The Socialist Case for School Integration.
* Your town tomorrow: Kure residents cut off from outside world due to flooding.
* I knew wearing a tie was making me stupid.
* Bad subtitling is a daily problem for deaf viewers.
* How swimming pools became a flashpoint of racial tension in America.
* California brings emissions down below 1990 levels. But it’s not all good news.
* Feminist Apparel CEO Fires Entire Staff After They Learn He’s An Admitted Sexual Abuser. RIP, Papa John.
* There is too much uncertainty in sports; even if you bribe the officials, something unaccounted for could still cause the “wrong” result. It can be a bad idea to gather large crowds opposed to your team (and, by extension, your dictatorship). During Franco’s rule, Barcelona FC’s stadium was the only place the Catalans could wave their flag and sing their songs. Dictators are better off with tyranny and oppression. Football is for people who can accept a loss.
* David Graeber’s new book argues that many of us are toiling in dummy jobs with no ostensible purpose. Any poll will show you he has a point. But his thesis is built on scant evidence and dubious claims of a ruling class conspiring to keep us busy. Bullshit jobs exist not due to orchestrated oppression but because of something altogether simpler: bad managers.
* An even tougher review of a book that seems like a big step down from Debt.
* The SAT, constantly innovating new ways to make teenagers unhappy.
* Through such characters, Muluneh’s work explores the layered psychic realms of blackness and womanhood that the African-American science fiction writer Octavia Butler, whom she cites as a major influence, explored through her otherworldly prose. In the process, Muluneh’s work has helped reorient the way black women are perceived. “As women, especially as African women,” Muluneh said, “we forget—and the world forgets—our positioning in history and religion and culture.”
* And amusing ourselves to death: 12 theme parks where the danger is real.
Infinite Monday Links! Just Keep Scrolling!
* Podcast report! Everyone is listening to every episode of Hello, from the Magic Tavern one after another pretty much nonstop. My favorite one so far.
* My book Octavia E. Butler has a preview page at University of Illinois Press. Get your pre-orders in now!
* From the archives! That thing I wrote about the first season of Kimmy Schmidt. I’ve been pretty unimpressed with the second season, alas, and some of the things I wrote back then seem to point to why.
* You know, after reading this I think I hate the humanities too.
* CFP: 4th edition of “Games and Literary Theory” in Krakow, Poland (Nov 18-20).
* Black Holes: Afro-Pessimism, Blackness and the Discourses of Modernity.
* And you thought you felt bad about your pedagogy already: Are Colleges Too Obsessed With Smartness?
“When the entire system of higher education gives favored status to the smartest students, even average students are denied equal opportunities,” he writes. “If colleges were instead to be judged on what they added to each student’s talents and capacities, then applicants at every level of academic preparation might be equally valued.”
* Administrators at the University of Beirut seem to have blocked an appointment for Steven Salaita.
* University maladministration can never fail, it can only be failed.
* 272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?
* Cornell Continues to Receive Scrutiny Over Job Ad.
* Philosophers who work outside of academia – Part 3: Transferrable skills and concrete advice.
* UC Davis spent thousands to scrub pepper-spray references from Internet. The University of Public Relations.
* President Obama to Forgive Nearly 400,000 Disabled Americans’ Federal Student Loans.
* Vatican conference urges end to doctrine of ‘just wars.’
* Behind the Scenes at the Met.
* The Librarian Who Saved Timbuktu’s Cultural Treasures From al Qaeda.
* Huge, if true: Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems. Why Are Voters Angry? It’s the 1099 Economy, Stupid.
* A $15 minimum wage is too high and that’s great.
* Mississippi Jails Are Losing Inmates, And Local Officials Are ‘Devastated’ By The Loss Of Revenue.
* Special pleading alert! No, DC Should Not Become The 51st State. Here’s A Quick History Lesson To Remind You Why.
* A(other) New Map for America.
* This Former College President Spent 2 Years in Prison. Here’s What He Learned. The answer will shock you!
* How Not to Audit the Pentagon.
* You could almost forget this, as the term fizzles into a bunch of sagging 4-4 ties and improbable unanimous decisions, but if Antonin Scalia had lived until July the docket was full of poisoned pills and silent time bombs that would have exploded in President Obama’s face this summer. Until and unless we reckon with what might have been at the high court this term, it’s impossible to understand why there will be no hearings for Judge Garland. GOP senators aren’t just angry about losing Justice Scalia’s seat. They are angry because the court as the weapon of choice to screw the president has been taken from them, and they want it back.
* A Huge Portion of Greenland Started Melting This Week. This Is Why the Great Barrier Reef Is Dying. If only someone had known!
* New UN report finds almost no industry profitable if environmental costs were included.
* Now Keurig says it has found a solution. It is taking longer than it took for NASA to put a man on the moon, but in the coming months, the company will begin to sell K-Cups made of material that is easily recycled.
* Every Disney Song from Best to Worst. Glad we settled that!
* There never was a Bernie Sanders movement. Personally I blame Ben and Jerry.
* Why Democrats Must Embrace A Universal Child Allowance. Working moms have more successful daughters and more caring sons, Harvard Business School study says.
* The time Donald Trump’s empire took on a stubborn widow — and lost.
* I was a men’s rights activist.
* An oral history of Childrens Hospital.
* Behold, King Curry. A flashback.
* Remembering the Dungeons and Dragons Moral Panic.
* As I feared, the tide seems to have turned on Title IX. I continue to think the whole law is at risk if its supporters cannot find a way to frame and articulate the need for reform.
* It’s Time To Acknowledge How Important the Death Star is to Star Wars. I don’t know that I quite agree with this, but Rogue One does (seem to) point to a vision of the franchise that isn’t so heavily dependent on the Jedi.
* Ben Affleck’s Solo Batman Movie Has a Huge Opportunity and One Big Problem. And while we’re at it, just one more beating up Batman v. Superman.
* Male chimpanzee Chacha screams after escaping from nearby Yagiyama Zoological Park as a man tries to capture him on the power lines at a residential area in Sendai, northern Japan.
* A Zookeeper Known as “The Tiger Whisperer” Was Killed by a Tiger.
* Journalist wants Obama’s ‘Game of Thrones’ screeners, so files a FOIA request for them.
* Ancient Peruvian Mystery Solved from Space.
* Alien ‘Wow!’ signal could be explained after almost 40 years.
* Could the Broadway smash ‘Hamilton’ help keep a woman’s face off the front of the $10 bill? Coming soon: Andrew Jackson: The Musical! PS: In 2030.
* Why Fans of Hamilton Should Be Delighted It’s Finally Stirring Criticism.
* New ABC show ‘Cleverman’ is about an Aboriginal superhero. Australian ABC, not US ABC, alas.
* Someone should have double-checked that math: Man Sentenced to 4 Years After Victim Says She Was Held Captive, Sexually Assaulted for a Decade.
* At Tampa Bay farm-to-table restaurants, you’re being fed fiction.
* Hawking’s Interstellar Starship Would Revolutionize the Search for Alien Life. What Will Make Interstellar Travel a Reality?
* And they said culture was dead!
* As a wise man once said, you don’t exist.
* Controversial Illustrations By Polish Artist Reveal The Darker Side Of Modern Society.
* Foreskin doesn’t make a man more “sensitive,” study finds.
* Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. The Black Radical Tragic : Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution. LARoB v. Shakespeare.
* Are Humans Definitely Smarter Than Apes?
* Have creepy professors ruined the independent study forever?
* If you want a vision of the future.
* And I didn’t know him as well as others, but we’ll all miss Srinivas Aravamudan. Some details on the Aravamudan fund.
Playing Monday Catch-Up Links
* Jaimee finally has a webpage! You can see all her online poems here.
* Announcing the Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities.
* Reminder: Mullen fellowship applications are due April 1.
* Relativism: The spontaneous ideology of the undergraduate.
* The trolley and the psychopath.
* Tired of the same old dystopias? Randomized Dystopia suggests a right that your fictional tyranny could deny its citizens!
* What if we educated and designed for resistance, through iterative performance and play?
* A good start: The University of Phoenix has lost half its students in the last five years.
* I began pursuing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Michigan in the Fall of 2006. My incoming cohort had nine students–seven in English Language and Literature, two in English and Women’s Studies. When we entered the program, all of us aspired to the tenure-track. The last of us just defended her dissertation this January, making ours the first cohort in several years with a 100% completion rate. Nine years out, only one of us has a tenure track professorship.
* #altac: Northeastern University seeks an intellectually nimble, entrepreneurial, explode-the-boundaries thinker to join the Office of the President as Special Assistant for Presidential Strategy & Initiatives. This job ad truly is a transcendent parody of our age, down to the shameless sucking up to the president of the university that constitutes 2/3 of the text.
* Budget cuts kill The Dictionary of American Regional English.
* The Long, Ugly History of Racism at American Universities.
* I Saw My Admissions Files Before Yale Destroyed Them.
* Confessions of a Harvard Gatekeeper.
* The Unmanageable University.
* What NYU Pays Its Top Earners, And What Most Of Your Professors Make.
* “There is no point in having that chat as long as the system is mismanaged,” said Steven Cohen, president of the Congress of Connecticut Community Colleges, which represents most faculty. Cohen pointed to central office costs that are rising as faculty numbers decline.
* The war against humanities at Britain’s universities.
* On NYU and the future of graduate student unionism.
* I teach philosophy at Columbia. But some of my best students are inmates.
* Why Is So Much of Our Discussion of Higher Ed Driven by Elite Institutions?
* It’s Time to End Tuition at Public Universities—and Abolish Student Debt.
* Following up on the future of rhetoric and composition. I also liked this one from Freddie: “It’s that mass contigency– the dramatic rise of at-risk academic labor like adjuncts and grad students– that creates the conditions that Cooke laments on campus. In the past, when a far higher portion of college courses were taught by tenured professors, those who taught college courses had much less reason to fear reprisals from undergraduates.”
* There is certainly an important and urgent conversation to be had about academic freedom and whether that is being constrained by trigger warnings and the like, but the discourse of students’ self-infantilization misdirects us from the larger picture. That, I think, is definitely not a story of student-initiated “cocooning,” but rather the transformation of the category of “student” into “consumer” and “future donor.”
* How Sweet Briar’s Board Decided to Close the College. But don’t worry, there’s a plan: Faculty Propose Sweet Briar Shift Focus to STEM.
* Law School Dean Average Tenure Is 2.78 Years, An All-Time Low.
* #disrupt morality: “America’s business community recognized a long time ago that discrimination, in all its forms, is bad for business.”
* 3 Cops Caught On Tape Brutally Beating Unarmed Michigan Man With No Apparent Provocation. Private Prison Operator Set To Rake In $17 Million With New 400-Bed Detention Center. Teen Was Kept In Solitary Confinement For 143 Days Before Even Facing Trial. Inside America’s Toughest Federal Prison.
* What are your chances of going to prison?
* Dollars, Death and the LAPD.
The officers sued the LAPD for discrimination for keeping them in desk jobs. Last week a jury awarded them $4 million. In other words, the refusal to let them go back to the streets to shoot more people is, in the eyes of our court system, worth more than four times as much as the life of an innocent man. Much more than that when you consider that they drew and continue to draw near six figure salaries for sitting at a desk.
* The Radical Humaneness of Norway’s Halden Prison.
* UN erects memorial to victims of transatlantic slave trade.
* World’s most honest headline watch: Wall Street welcomes expected Chuck Schumer promotion.
* Antarctica Recorded Hotter Temperatures Than They’ve Ever Seen This Week.
* Framing China as an environmental villain only serves to excuse American inaction.
* Even with California deep in drought, the federal agency hasn’t assessed the impacts of the bottled water business on springs and streams in two watersheds that sustain sensitive habitats in the national forest. The lack of oversight is symptomatic of a Forest Service limited by tight budgets and focused on other issues, and of a regulatory system in California that allows the bottled water industry to operate with little independent tracking of the potential toll on the environment.
* Too Bad, That Rumor About A New Star Trek TV Show Is Absolutely False. But it’s not all bad news: they may have tricked Idris Elba into playing a Klingon.
* The True Story of Pretty Woman’s Original Dark Ending.
* The Deadly Global War for Sand.
* SMBC vs. the Rebus. And vs. modernity.
* I Started Milwaukee’s Epic Bloody Mary Garnish Wars.
* Photographer Johan Bävman documents the world of dads and their babies in a country where fathers are encouraged to take a generous amount of paternity leave.
* Dean Smith Willed $200 to Each of His Former Players to ‘Enjoy a Dinner Out.’ You’ll never believe what happened next. But!
* Teaching human evolution at the University of Kentucky.
* We Should Be Able To Detect Spaceships Moving Near The Speed Of Light.
* Snowpiercer forever: Russia unveils plan for superhighway from London to Alaska.
* Kapow! Attack of the feminist superheroes.
* The future is now: Miles Morales and Kamala Khan join the female Thor and Captain “The Falcon” America as Avengers post-Secret Wars.
* Things Marvel Needs to Think About for the Black Panther Movie.
* Marxists Internet Archive: Subjects: Arts: Literature: Children’s Literature.
* Ruins found in remote Argentinian jungle ‘may be secret Nazi hideout.’
* 15 Secrets Hiding in the World of Game of Thrones.
* Listen to part of Carlin’s Summerfest 1972 show — before he got arrested.
* This 19th Century ‘Stench Map’ Shows How Smells Reshaped New York City.
* The ethics of playing to lose.
* And make mine del Toro:
You say horror is inherently political. How so?
Much like fairy tales, there are two facets of horror. One is pro-institution, which is the most reprehensible type of fairy tale: Don’t wander into the woods, and always obey your parents. The other type of fairy tale is completely anarchic and antiestablishment.
Weekend Links!
* But at least one line in the tax form gives pause: The college lost roughly $4-million in investment income compared with the previous year, for unknown reasons. That year the college posted a deficit of $3-million, compared with a $325,000 deficit the previous year. I certainly hope someone follows up on that little oddity.
* Of course, it’s not entirely insane: How Larry Summers lost Harvard $1.8 billion.
* Academia and the Advance of African Science Fiction.
* SimCity, homelessness, and utopia.
It seems we all now live in a Magnasanti whose governing algorithm is to capture all work and play and turn them not only into commodities but also into data, and to subordinate all praxis to the rule of exchange. Any data that undermines the premise that this can go on and on for 50,000 years, has to be turned into non-data. If there’s work and play to be done, then, it’s inside the gamespace that is now the world. Is there a way that this gamespace could be the material with which to build another one?
* Parenting and the Profession: Don’t Expect Much When You’re Expecting.
* Higher Education and the Promise of Insurgent Public Memory.
While the post-9/11 attacks have taken an even more dangerous turn, higher education is still a site of intense struggle, but it is fair to say the right wing is winning. The success of the financial elite in waging this war can be measured not only by the rise in the stranglehold of neoliberal policies over higher education, the increasing corporatization of the university, the evisceration of full-time, tenured jobs for faculty, the dumbing down of the curriculum, the view of students as customers, and the growing influence of the military-industrial-academic complex in the service of the financial elite, but also in the erasing of public memory. Memory is no longer insurgent; that is, it has been erased as a critical educational and political optic for moral witnessing, testimony and civic courage. On the contrary, it is either being cleansed or erased by the new apologists for the status quo who urge people to love the United States, which means giving up any sense of counter memory, interrogation of dominant narratives or retrieval of lost histories of struggle.
* 158 Private Colleges Fail Government’s Financial-Responsibility Test.
* The gangsters of Ferguson. But even this is still not “proof!”
* The Ferguson PD is NOT medieval. It’s modern white supremacy.
* Judge who invented Ferguson’s debtor’s prisons owes $170K in tax.
* It’s Not Just the Drug War: Progressive narratives about what’s driving mass incarceration don’t quite add up.
* Sotomayor May Have Saved Obamacare.
* Designing The Grand Budapest Hotel with Marquette alum Adam Stockhausen.
* Why Is Milwaukee So Bad For Black People?
* “Rahm Emanuel pays the price for not pandering.” Why should the poor man be voted out of office just because his policies are horror-shows that no one likes?
* A corrupt politician from New Jersey? What will they think of next?
* Wow: Ringling Bros. Circus Will Stop Using Elephants By 2018.
* Cities Are Quietly Reviving A Jim Crow-Era Trick To Suppress Latino Votes.
* Hartford, CT says friends can’t room together unless some of them are servants.
* This Is What It’s Like To Go To Prison For Trolling.
* Brianna Wu vs. the Troll Army.
* Short film of the weekend: “Chronemics.”
* Gasp! Science proves men tend to be more narcissistic than women.
* The Time That Charles Babbage Tried To Summon The Devil.
* Mary Cain Is Growing Up Fast.
* Wellesley Will Admit Transgender Applicants. Planet Fitness Under Fire For Supporting Trans Woman, Kicking Out Transphobic Member. Students seeking to redesignate restrooms as “all gender” face harassment and police detention at UC Berkeley. US Army eases ban on transgender soldiers.
* The headline reads, “Decades of human waste have made Mount Everest a ‘fecal time bomb.’”
* Colonization: Venus better than Mars?
* On Iain M. Banks and the Video Game that Inspired Excession: Civilization.
* Get it together, Millennials! “Millennials like to spank their kids just as much as their parents did.”
* The Catholic Church Opposes the Death Penalty. Why Don’t White Catholics?
* What’s Next After “Right to Work”?
* David Graeber talks about his latest book, The Utopia of Rules.
* The Pigeon King and the Ponzi Scheme That Shook Canada.
* Conservative columnist can’t mourn Nimoy’s death because Spock reminds him of Obama. Is there nothing Obama can’t destroy?
* 9 Social Panics That Gripped America.
* How Unsafe Was Hillary Clinton’s Secret Staff Email System?
* To whatever extent Doctor Who series 8 was a bit rocky, it seems like it’s Jenna Coleman’s fault.
* Making teaching a miserable profession has had a completely unexpected effect.
* Why Are Liberals Resigned to Low Wages? What could explain it?
* Is Yik Yak The New Weapon Against Campus Rape Culture?
* Tilt-shift effect applied to Van Gogh paintings.
* They say we as a society are no longer capable of great things.
GREEN PLANETS Is Out Today!
The essays in Green Planets are predicated on the proposition that two hundred years of SF can help us collectively “think” this leap into futurity in the context of the epochal mass-extinction event called the Anthropocene (which the literary theorists more simply call “modernity”). SF is our culture’s vast, shared, polyvocal archive of the possible; from techno-utopias to apocalypses to ecotopian fortunate falls, it is thetransmedia genre of SF that has first attempted to articulate the sorts of systemic global changes that are imminent, or already happening, and begins to imagine what our transformed planet might eventually be like for those who will come to live on it. Especially taken in the context of escalating ecological catastrophe, in which each new season seems to bring with it some new and heretofore-unseen spectacular disaster, my coeditor’s well-known declaration that in the contemporary moment “the world has become a science fiction novel” has never seemed more true or more frightening. Indeed, such a notion suggests both politics and “realism” are now always “inside” science fiction, insofar as the world, as we experience its vertiginous technological and ecological flux, now more closely resembles SF than it does any historical realism…
Out today! Buy it at Amazon in paperback and Kindle! Here’s a table of contents.
Spring Break Monday Links
* Reaching My Autistic Son Through Disney. What a story. I bawled.
* Apocalyptic flooding scheduled for Wisconsin.
* Hampton, Florida, the little town so corrupt even the rest of Florida thinks it’s gone too far.
* Women run just a quarter of the biggest art museums in the United States and Canada, and they earn about a third less than their male counterparts, according to a report released on Friday by the Association of Art Museum Directors, a professional organization.
* The greatest secret of American manhood is: We are afraid of other men. Masculinity as Homophobia.
* Union research document says Obamacare will hasten income inequality. When job creators create lousy jobs.
* At best, job creation is merely an inadequate palliative for years of deep recession. At worst, it’s an active strategy for redirecting wealth upwards and further immiserating the working class. Quantify that.
* Not even climate change will kill off capitalism.
* Millennials in adulthood. Millennials and college degrees. The Self(ie) Generation. College Grads Taking Low-Wage Posts Displace Less Educated. Are Millennials different?
* Annals of Obama negotiating with himself.
* A theory of neoliberalism: Wages versus Assets.
* Democrats are really starting in with the surrender-to-hopelessness blitz EARLY this cycle. Meanwhile.
* A rare sociological analysis of Federal Reserve policy confirms what many economists already knew: top central bank officials missed the oncoming crisis because they failed to make the connection between housing, the banking industry and the economy. I don’t know; my rule is never attribute to incompetence what can be adequately explained by soulless millionaires cynically cashing out.
* If you pirate a digital copy of The Triple Package, use the find and replace function. Find “successful cultural group” replace with “bourgeoisie” and then the book will become a coherent and honest provocation, rather than the triple package of neurosis, projection, and obfuscation that it really is.
* Maternal mortality rates are falling in every industrialised nation – except for the United States.
* The latest for the “every cop is a criminal” file.
* The latest for the “lolz you didn’t write the laws right” file.
* Do I read this right? An off-duty cop shot somebody and the other guy got charged with assault?
* The unrelenting gaze of the police never wavers in Milwaukee.
* Detroit Scam City: How The Red Wings Took Hockeytown For All It Had.
* de Blasio vs charters in NYC. How charter schools get students they want. In the great efforts they are expending to exclude the students that are the most difficult to educate, charter schools are lending more credence to my argument about the arrow of causation in our perception of school quality than I could ever generate.
* Mother Canada? Is that a thing? Displays of Canadian nationalism always seem off to me. Letting down the side, Canada.
* South by Southwest’s unpaid labor problem: Why it’s risking a class action lawsuit.
* Cartoonist Chris Ware on outsider art, reading aloud and the Common Core.
* I had no idea just disintegrating in midair was something that could just happen to planes. I wish I didn’t know it now.
* Wages for Sea World animals: Yes, California Can Really Ban Shamu, Legal Experts Say. Can’t they just argue exploiting whales and making their lives miserable is free speech? That’s how it works with humans.
* I was saying this weekend (1, 2, 3) that voting for Rand Paul is not as irrational as it might seem at first glance, given the unilateral powers the executive branch has in the U.S. and his stated opposition to the war on drugs and the war on terror. What’s interesting is that Rand Paul himself absolutely does not want me to hold this opinion.
* Can We Learn About Privacy From Porn Stars?
* 11 of the Weirdest Solutions to the Fermi Paradox.
* A brief history of nonsense.
* Too late! We already designed modern cities around it.
* Great walls to end tornadoes in our time? What could possibly go wrong?
* Truth and reconciliation in Guatemala.
* Towards White History Month.
In 2007, Gary Younge (he is an ally) suggested that what we all needed is a White History Month. Gary reminded us: “So much of Black History Month takes place in the passive voice. Leaders ‘get assassinated,’ patrons ‘are refused’ service, women ‘are ejected’ from public transport. So the objects of racism are many but the subjects few. In removing the instigators, the historians remove the agency and, in the final reckoning, the historical responsibility … There is no month when we get to talk about [James] Blake [the white busdriver challenged by Rosa Parks]; no opportunity to learn the fates of J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, who murdered Emmett Till; no time set aside to keep track of Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, whose false accusations of rape against the Scottsboro Boys sent five innocent young black men to jail. Wouldn’t everyone–particularly white people–benefit from becoming better acquainted with these histories?”
* And Rebecca Onion has a 1940s Board Game for French Kids Taught Tactics for Successful Colonialism.
Thursday Links
* 21st Century America summed up in a single headline: Why Is a Defense Contractor Paying for Sesame Street’s Parents-in-Jail Lesson?
* If Only This Goes On: science fiction and modernity in Russia.
* Intact fallout shelter discovered in California backyard. More links follow the image.
* Profit-Driven Surveillance and the Spectrum of Freedom. Bank robbery suspect wants NSA phone records for his defense.
* A friend on Facebook reminds me, in response to Walker’s latest, just how badly Wisconsin is malapportioned. Just crazy.
* Lucas and Spielberg announce film is dead. No, they’re not making another Indiana Jones; that’s really what they’re saying.
* California’s Online Education Bill SB 520 Passes Senate. You might know this better as the MOOC bill.
* The enemy within: Toddlers Killed More Americans Than Terrorists Did This Year.
* Science Has Discovered a New Human Body Part.
* And SCOTUS says human genes cannot be patented. The good guys win a game!
‘Climate Change Has Lost All Its Sci-Fi Tinge in My Lifetime and Is Now a Melancholy and Tiresome Reality’
Bruce Sterling: It’s just kind of a blunt reality that the fossil-fuel enterprise has done a regulatory capture of the entire planet, and we’re involved in a war for oil, and it’s the curse of oil, and it’s a war for a curse that’s endless and happening. You know, it gets boring running around being a Cassandra. Starting Earth Day in 1970 was a pretty late start considering the multicentury scope of this problem.
I will pass the rest of my lifetime in the shadow of climate change. It’s not about warning people in 2011, or trying to avert or defuse a misfortune. The wolf is beyond the door. The wolf is in the living room. This is the anthropocenic condition. This is how we live. This is force majeure. It’s here. It’s very obvious.
The Atrocity Exhibition
For sale: J.G. Ballard’s home. Warning: structure may be haunted by modernity’s ghosts. (Thanks Lindsey!)
Really, Wednesday Already?
* The 15 Worst Comics of the 2000s. The Mark Trail entry, while unexpected, is pretty amazing all by itself.
* “Avatar and the American Man-Child: ‘Don’t you want to be an Indian little boy?'” My piece, as well as SEK’s, gets mentioned.
Where the movie goes wrong, then, is in making the sociopathic immaturity of a spoiled Western brat into the ideal form for the child-human that it wants anti-modernity to be. After all, while even your Rousseauvians understand the noble savage as a contradiction of modernity, as a cleansing bath washing away its discontents, the Na’vi only confirm Sully’s most childish presumptions of privilege: their world turns out to be nothing but toys to play with, nothing but one long summer camp fantasy of being the fastest, bestest, most awesomest ninja-Indian ever, and then a big giant womb to hide in when it all gets to be a bit much. There are no consequences there, nothing you can do to make mommy stop loving you (though Lord how he tries!). Like toys and parents to a three-year old, it is unthinkable that they say no or exist without you, and all they can ever ask is that you play with them.
* Polls prove the American public hates and loves the Afghan War as it hates and loves itself.
* Peace, tolerance, due process, oh my: Conservatives discover Star Trek is a Utopia.
* Tarantino is reportedly writing a prequel to Inglourious Basterds. I feel almost entirely certainly this is a terrible idea, and may in the end prove that those of us who liked the movie were fooling ourselves about its depth all along.
* Select Criterion Collection films are now streaming on Netflix.
* Andrew Breitbart goes deep inside the anti-American conspiracy that is the White House Christmas tree. Not a hoax!
* FiveThirtyEight.com’s Most Valuable Democrats of 2009.
* And, via Chutry, a nice encapsulation of what blogging is for.
Here’s my single favorite thing about blogging: being able to educate oneself in public. Going through this process—trying to move forward, stumbling, groping, occasionally finding—in full view of the world does not always stroke one’s ego. Each week you find yourself writing not about what you know but about what you perhaps hope to learn from the process of watching, reading, and struggling to think through and articulate.
Infinite Summer #9: A Brief Comment on the Narcissism of Grad Students and My Own Arrested Adolescence
The salience of this particular moment fades a bit as we get further and further from Friday’s spoiler-line, but I feel compelled to comment briefly on the conversation between Marathe and Steeply that begins on page 638. How can I, or anyone who has chosen a life in academia, read this week’s material without feeling interpolated by it? How could any academic, would-be or otherwise, avoid asking him- or herself more than once just what it is that separates us from Steeply’s M*A*S*H-obsessed father beyond the razor-thin veneer of professional legitimacy? It’s my job, allegedly, to develop intricate and sometimes bizarre readings of pop-culture artifacts, which means it’s perfectly okay for me to (still) spend all my time reading science-fiction novels and watching science-fiction movies just like I did when I was twelve. Heck, I wouldn’t be doing my work if I didn’t! And if I can just trick somebody into paying me to do it I’ll never have to stop.
Herman Blume:What’s the secret, Max?
Max Fischer: The secret?
Herman Blume: Yeah, you seem to have it pretty figured out.
Max Fischer: The secret, I don’t know… I guess you’ve just gotta find something you love to do and then do it for the rest of your life. For me, it’s going to Rushmore.
Intellectually, of course, I’ve always been able to recognize the tragic irony of this exchange—Rushmore, you’ll remember, doesn’t offer a post-graduate year—but I wonder sometimes whether deep down I’ve ever really come to terms with it.
Is this addiction? Does pursuing a academic career studying literature and pop culture—a preoccupation which over the years has diverted me from any number of more financially lucrative pursuits—mark me as the writerly equivalent of a functional alcoholic? Do I even qualify as functional? And it occurs to me now, reading this section against not only my own life and those of my grad student associates but against the life of anyone who has ever been a “fan” of anything—anyone, that is, who can recognize themselves in the way Steeply’s father looked at M*A*S*H—that the danger DFW is highlighting is central to the construction of modern subjectivity. If everything is at least potentially bad for us—even/especially the things that give us pleasure, the things that make life appear to be worth living—just what is it we’re supposed to be doing? Where is the authentic, healthy, free life, if there was ever such a thing to begin with? When even the things we love conspire to destroy us, what is left?
Infinite Summer #7: Is ‘Infinite Jest’ Science Fiction?
There have been some interesting Infinite Summer posts about whether Infinite Jest “counts” as science fiction—see, for instance, these two at Infinite Tasks and this from Chris Forster)—so I thought it might be interesting to run through some of my standard classroom definitions of science fiction and see how the book shapes up. (My notes on this are older than the Wikipedia page and mostly cribbed from Fred Chappell, but most of these definitions appear there as well.)
To begin with, there are a few classic definitions it clearly doesn’t meet.
…a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.
—Hugo Gernsback
Versions of this notion of “scientific prophecy” pop up whenever science fiction is discussed, and Infinite Jest pretty clearly meets neither criteria; its speculations are philosophical, not scientific, and it is surely a satire, not some coherent futurism.
Another take:
Science fiction is a branch of fantasy identifiable by the fact that it eases the “willing suspension of disbelief” on the part of its readers by utilizing an atmosphere of scientific credibility for its imaginative speculations in physical science, space, time, social science, and philosophy.
—Sam Moskowitz
I would defy anyone to claim that their willing suspension of disbelief is not frequently and fatally challenged by the hyperbolic “hysterical realist” elements throughout IJ. “FREAK STATUE OF LIBERTY ACCIDENT KILLS FED ENGINEER: BRAVE MAN ON CRANE CRUSHED BY 5 TON CAST IRON BURGER” (398) is not a sentence calculated to brace a spirit of credulity.
Still another:
Science fiction is anything published as science fiction.
—Norman Spinrad
This is usually the last definition I offer my students in my introductory SF lecture, and the one I usually argue is the most important. SF is, as much as it is anything else, a discrete, recognizable set of consumer practices and preferences—and here, too, Infinite Jest is clearly not science fiction because it isn’t branded as science fiction in the marketplace nor is it consumed as science fiction by “science fiction fans.” IJ pulls in dollars under an entirely different brand, mainstream literary fiction—which is a perfectly cromulent brand, if that’s what you’re into, but it’s not SF.
So, then, 0 for 3. Not a great start. But there are other definitions of science fiction that do cast a strong light on Infinite Jest:
Science fiction is the search for definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mold.
—Brian Aldiss
Here science fiction collapses into a special category of existential literature, in which the SF aspects are merely the engine motivating the text’s more-central philosophical speculations. The science-fictional elements in Infinite Jest, it seems clear to me, are operating almost entirely on this level—each inventive speculation in the novel drives existential speculation about how we might be able to live in ultratechnological modernity in the shadow of the death of God. (Side question: is Infinite Jest “in the Gothic mold”? I’d have to pull out an entirely different set of quotes to discuss that question fully, but in its massive textual sprawl, its strong tendencies towards melodrama and hyperbolic excess, and its palpable atmosphere of both individual and familial tragedy I think we could have the start of a fairly strong case.)
We come now to the two definitions I use most commonly in my writing and teaching, which are (I concede) are completely in conflict with one another. But I think—I hope—it’s a productive tension. First is Darko Suvin, who inspired Fredric Jameson and most of the Utopian school of SF theorists I primarily read:
SF is, then, a literary genre or verbal construct whose necessary and sufficent conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment. —Darko Suvin
There’s a lot to pull out there, but the key words are “estrangement,” “cognition,” and “imaginative framework alternative.” What Suvin argues in his work is that the defining characteristic of science fiction is the pwower of defamiliarization that allows us to see our own world more clearly (and maybe for the first time), which is accomplished through the sort of intricate, even obsessive world-building confabulations SF is famous for. In particular, Suvin and his successors argue, SF expresses the desire for another kind of life, whether explicitly (as Utopian fiction) or implicitly (the desire for a plausible alterity expressed in negative in most dystopian, anti-Utopian, and apocalyptic fictions).
Infinite Jest, it seems to me, is pretty deep in the murky swamp that divides this sort of SF from more generic Utopian/dystopian political satire. The trouble for any Suvinian analysis of Infinite Jest, I think, comes in the unstable irony I was going on about earlier in the week; as Infinite Tasks lays out in detail, O.N.A.N.-ite politics is not in any sense a imaginative framework alternative to the present. It’s a series of gags. Wallace’s world-building just isn’t on the level. It’s no coincidence, to take but one example, that a close reading of DFW’s references to the Gentle administration and the start of Subsidized Time c. the year 2000 would seem to place the “Limbaugh administration” around the year of the novel’s composition in the mid-1990s, and therefore somehow impossibly concurrent with the Clinton administration that is also occasionally referenced. Infinite Jest is our cracked self-reflection, not another world.
And finally there’s Delany, who rejects political readings of SF in favor of a definition focused on wordplay, and really on the pleasure of the text itself:
In science fiction, “science”—i.e., sentences displaying verbal emblems of scientific discourses—is used to literalize the meanings of other sentences for use in the construction of the fictional foreground. Such sentences as “His world exploded,” or “She turned on her left side,” as they subsume the proper technological discourse (of economics and cosmology in one; of switching circuitry and prosthetic surgery in the other), leave the banality of the emotionally muzzy metaphor, abandon the triviality of insomniac tossings, and, through the labyrinth of technical possibility, become possible images of the impossible.
—Samuel Delany
This literary-linguistic pleasure, I think, is quite clearly a huge part of the pleasure of IJ for those of us who are enjoying it; the way in which, 400 pages in, we find ourselves now able to parse a sentence like this one:
All this until the erection of O.N.A.N. and the inception, in Clipperton’s eighteenth summer, of Subsidized Time, the advertised Year of the Whopper, when the U.S.T.A. became the O.N.A.N.T.A., and some Mexican systems analyst—who barely spoke English and had never once even fondled a ball and knew from exactly zilch except for crunching raw results-data—this guy stepped in as manager of the O.N.A.N.T.A. computer and ranking center in Forest Lawn NNY, and didn’t know enough not to treat Clipperton’s string of six major junior-tournament championships that spring as sanctioned and real. (431)
There is surely something Delany could recognize in this sentence and the subtle mental acrobatics required to make sense of it; if this isn’t quite science fiction, exactly, it seems to me it’s something very close.
The Places We Live
‘The Places Ee Live’: sounds and images of slums in Caracas, Nairobi, Jakarta, and Mumbai.
‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’
Certainly we ought to be discontented, we ought not simply to find out ways of making the best of a bad job, and yet if we kill all pleasure in the actual process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves? If a man cannot enjoy the return of spring, why should he be happy in a labour-saving Utopia? What will he do with the leisure that the machine will give him? I have always suspected that if our economic and political problems are ever really solved, life will become simpler instead of more complex, and that the sort of pleasure one gets from finding the first primrose will loom larger than the sort of pleasure one gets from eating an ice to the tune of a Wurlitzer. I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and — to return to my first instance — toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.
At any rate, spring is here, even in London N. 1, and they can’t stop you enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can’t. So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.
George Orwell, “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad,” 1946.
Gerry Canavan 