Posts Tagged ‘paranoia’
Happy Valentine’s Day Links!
* Very excited to welcome Adam Kotsko to Marquette later this week for his talk “Animated Nihilism: Rick and Morty, BoJack Horseman and the Strange Fate of the Adult Cartoon.”
* There was a nice interview with me at the ArchivesAWARE! site, kicking off a new series on Archives and Audiences.
* SFRA Review #323 is out! Check out the details on the upcoming SFRA conference in Milwaukee.
* CFP: The Journal of Dracula Studies. CFP: Žižek Studies special issue on “Žižek: What Went Wrong?”
* The Simpsons: What Went Wrong?
* The Problem With Annihilation’s Messy Release.
* Fantastic Beasts and What Could Have Been. They’re really not nailing this.
* Kim Stanley Robinson: The Radical Philosophy Interview.
KSR: Capitalism is still very feudal in its distribution of wealth. One of the great triumphs of Marxist historiography is to describe accurately the transition from feudalism to capitalism, why it happened and the differences. At a presentation I once gave with Jameson, I said something like capitalism is just feudalism liquidified. In the break he said, ‘Kim, it’s actually a big accomplishment for Marxists to be able to describe the change from feudalism to capitalism.’ I then brought up something he had taught me, Raymond Williams’s concept of the residual and the emergent, and said, ‘but there’s a lot more residual than people have imagined.’ That’s one of the only times I saw Fred startled by something I said. Although I think there’s an exchange of ideas between us, mainly he’s the teacher, I’m the student. He’s explained things that I never would have understood, and I treasure him for that. So it was nice to see him think, ‘Mmm, that’s an interesting thought.’
The residuals out of feudalism would be the power gradient and the actual concentration of wealth per se. In the feudal period, kings might not even have been as proportionally rich as top executives are now in relation to the poor. And if peasants weren’t murdered by passing soldiers, they were living with their food source at hand and working a somewhat decent human life. That isn’t largely true now of the dispossessed. So, capitalism is like feudalism in that, but worse.
* The Good Place and Divine Justice. Meet the Philosophers Who Give ‘The Good Place’ Its Scholarly Bona Fides. TV’s Dystopia Boom. Breakfast and Groundhog Day. Rod Serling: human rights activist as science fiction showrunner. Why the Culture wins. Netflix created a monster with its Cloverfield stunt, and Altered Carbon won’t be the last victim. Reproductive Futurism and Its (Dis)contents. Why I barely read SF these days. Against dystopia.
* My Butch Lesbian Mom, Bruce Springsteen.
* The Sublimated Grief of the Left Behind. How Academe Breeds Resentment. International Grad Students’ Interest in American Higher Ed Marks First Decline in 14 Years. Columbia University Gets In Bed with Trump. I’m a Stanford professor accused of being a terrorist. McCarthyism is back. How Hard Do Professors Work? Shameless and Hypocrisy at the MLA. And meanwhile, on the Singularity beat: Teaching assistant robots will reinvent academia. Universities in the Age of AI.
* Humanities Grads Gainfully Employed and Happy.
* White Supremacists Are Targeting College Students ‘Like Never Before.’
* The Olympic hero for our time.
* To U.S. Border Patrol, the Canadian border is 100 miles wide. A good overview of how Trump’s ICE differs, and doesn’t, from Obama’s; the major distinction seems to be empowering street-level officer to make policy-level determinations about enforcement. A Short, Brutal History of ICE. ICE Wants to Be an Intelligence Agency Under Trump. ICE Grants Stay To Arizona Father Whose 5-Year-Old Son Is Battling Cancer. Kansas chemistry instructor arrested by ICE while taking his daughter to school. ICE detains man at traffic court after DACA status expires, then frees him after outcry. Public Defenders Walk Out Of Bronx Courthouse After College Student Detained By ICE. Cuban immigrant awaiting removal dies in ICE custody. Green card veteran facing deportation starts hunger strike. Trump administration considered testing “abortion reversal” on unwilling prisoner. Give all immigrants the right to vote.
* Know your police rape loopholes.
* How not to die in America. I Had to Bury My 26-Year-Old Son Because He Couldn’t Afford Insulin. Texas Woman Dies Because She Couldn’t Afford $116 Copay. What Aetna did here might not even be illegal.
* America: (Still) Not a Democracy. That’s not to say things still can’t get worse.
* In the richest country in human history.
* FEMA Contract Called for 30 Million Meals for Puerto Ricans. 50,000 Were Delivered.
* Even the Democrats (still) won’t talk about climate change. Democrats’ ‘Resistance’ to Trump Is Eroding, and So Are Their Poll Numbers. What Happened To The Democratic Wave?
* A map of the world after four degrees of warming. There’s even more good news below the map!
* An Urgent Crisis of Leadership, Climate, and Water is Unfolding in South Africa.
* And in Kentucky: Sometimes they get no water. Other times just a trickle. Often, they say, their water is so discolored it resembles milk or Kool-Aid or beer.
* Just six months from victory in Afghanistan.
* Fitness tracking app Strava gives away location of secret US army bases. Podcast listeners are the advertising holy grail. A Driver’s Suicide Reveals the Dark Side of the Gig Economy. slavery.amazon.com. Whole Foods as Amazon Hell. What Amazon Does to Poor Cities.
* I’m the Wife of a Former N.F.L. Player. Football Destroyed His Mind. Concussion Protocol.
* Here’s Everything We Used to Know About Han Solo’s Early Years. A Primer on All Things Wakanda.
* Arizona Man Sells His $6.5 Million Ranch Because Of Constant, Violent Alien Attacks.
* Supercut of Instagram travel photo clichés. Photos of Total Strangers Pretending to Be in Serious Relationships.
* Why is Civilization 5 still more popular than Civilization 6?
* The arc of history is long, but Hot sauce king Billy Mitchell is in danger of having his Donkey Kong records stripped away.
* Why Woody Allen hasn’t been toppled by the #MeToo reckoning — yet. This Is Why Uma Thurman Is Angry.
* Suicide and the opioid epidemic.
* Cancel student debt and grow the economy. Let’s Stop Normalizing Student Debt.
* College compiles first-ever index of slaves and their enslavers in NY. Slavery and the American University.
* Nation of Second Changes: Stories of people who received a pardon from Barack Obama.
* The Alt-Right Is Killing People.
* The Median Young Family Has Nearly Zero Wealth.
* Why Antonio Gramsci is the Marxist thinker for our times.
* I call it my brand: Marxism as Organized Sarcasm.
* Worf’s Dad Is Repeatedly Disgraced When Predictive Text Writes Star Trek: The Next Generation.
* Nintendo’s new cardboard extensions for Switch are blowing users away.
* Can’t stop the signal: here come the Firefly novels.
* ‘Speaking’ orca is further proof they shouldn’t be kept captive.
* The mutant crayfish that ate Europe.
* And this guy gets it: Nigel, the world’s loneliest bird, dies next to the concrete decoy he loved.
Monday Morning Links!
* A personal announcement: I’ll be the Vice President of the Science Fiction Research Association for the next three years. Thanks for the vote of confidence!
* CFP: “Purple Reign: An interdisciplinary conference on the life and legacy of Prince.”
* Huge, if true: Reading Literature Won’t Give You Superpowers. And meanwhile: What’s Wrong With Literary Studies? Some scholars think the field has become cynical and paranoid. Only some?
* Use Data to Make a Strong Case for the Humanities.
* They did it: Army Corps of Engineers Statement Regarding the Dakota Access Pipeline. More from Vox.
* Is there any branch of literature so insecure, so uncertain of its own status, as science fiction?
* Inside the world of Chinese science fiction, with “Three Body Problem” translator Ken Liu.
* Marquette in the ne– oh come on.
* Dan Harmon’s story circle at YouTube.
* Trouble in the Heartland: Listening to Springsteen in Wisconsin in 1979.
* Well, that seems fine: GOP rep: Trump has ‘extra-constitutional’ view of presidency. Donald Trump risks China rift with Taiwan call. BREAKING: US President-elect Trump told Rodrigo Duterte that Philippines was conducting its drug war “the right way.” That’s bad. Trump’s education pick says reform can ‘advance God’s Kingdom.’ What the Nazis were doing was not describing what was true, but what would have to be true to justify what they planned to do next. A People’s History of the Third Reich: How Great Man theory allows us to abdicate collective responsibility. Facts are stupid things: Here’s Where Donald Trump Gets His News. Trump and the coming failed state. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Now Is The Time To Talk About What We Are Actually Talking About. Another visit from the goon squad. Trump and the Bush Legacy.
* New SPLC reports reveal alarming pattern of hate incidents and bullying across country since election. Note the category just labeled “Trump — general.”
* Identity politics and the alt-right.
* Premised on the possibilities of political struggle, here was the Douglass Option: “a party in the Southern States among the poor.”
* Seems like this guy is Trump’s very worst pick, clearing a very tough field:
During a tense gathering of senior officials at an off-site retreat, he gave the assembled group a taste of his leadership philosophy, according to one person who attended the meeting and insisted on anonymity to discuss classified matters. Mr. Flynn said that the first thing everyone needed to know was that he was always right. His staff would know they were right, he said, when their views melded to his. The room fell silent, as employees processed the lecture from their new boss.
Flynn also helped promulgate the “Pizzagate” hoax that nearly led to a mass shooting today.
* Google, democracy and the truth about internet search.
* Steve Bannon, on the other hand, is winning me over.
* It’s true that racism is a powerful and durable force in our politics. But it is also true that Donald Trump is an incompetent clown who ran an amateurish campaign rife with mistakes. The Democrats should have won this election in a landslide. They did not, and there is no nobility or reassurance for them in a narrow loss in the electoral college or a win in the popular vote. And continuing to insist that a Donald Trump win was either some kind of strange fluke or completely inevitable is a recipe for repeated defeat.
* When the Democrats didn’t like monopolies. On not going high when they go low.
* Can the good parts of Obamacare survive Trump?
* Friedman just got finished telling us that a black elephant is half black swan, and half elephant in the room that will inevitably become a black swan. But now that half-swan, half swan-within-an-elephant is being contrasted with a black swan: in the near future, things that are really black elephants will be misidentified as black swans.
* Understanding survivorship bias.
* Podcast idea of the week: Like Random Trek, but for Rod Serling.
* Which Famous Actor Hustled Chess Games in New York City?
* What does elephant taste like?
* Here’s Why You Should Be Watching Netflix’s Brazilian Sci-Fi Series 3%. And on the SF kick: Aaron Bady explains Westworld.
* …there is no reason to assume Uber’s obliteration of local competition across the planet will create a sustainable business in the long term. Costs are costs, even if you’re a monopoly. As long as people have cheaper alternatives (public transport, legs), they will defect if the break-even price is higher than their inconvenience tolerance threshold.
* Trump could face the ‘biggest trial of the century’ — over climate change. But really, show’s over, folks.
* The trans brain and gender dysphoria.
* This is brilliant and I’m shocked it took the good guys this long to figure it out.
* Kazuo Ishiguro on the coming race of super clones. Never Let Me Go 2: The Revenge.
* Every villain is the hero of their own story.
* And this is pretty much my actual teaching philosophy.
Tuesday Afternoon Links!
* Public showings of the Tolkien Manuscripts at Marquette, 2016-2017.
* Don’t Panic, But There’s An Asteroid Right Over There.
* Why is the keynote speech such a train wreck at most academic conferences?
* Because it’s that time of year again: my two-part piece from Inside Higher Ed from a few years back on entering the academic job market as an ABD, 1, 2. But of course:
* How to Do a Better Job of Searching for Diversity.
* How could anyone think graduate students shouldn’t have a Plan B?
* Great teaching document: Some Notes on How to Ask a Good Question about Theory That Will Provoke Conversation and Further Discussion from Your Colleagues.
* And more: Making a classroom discussion an actual discussion.
* Trump: graft :: Clinton : paranoia.
* And marrying the last two links: One in Six Eligible Voters Has a Disability.
* “Debate” and the end of the public sphere.
* Let history be our judge: Pepe the Frog, an explainer.
* If Hillary Had to Drop Out, Here’s How a New Democratic Candidate Would be Chosen. Former DNC chairman calls for Clinton contingency plan.
* Researchers at the Karadag Nature Reserve, in Feodosia, Russia, recorded two Black Sea bottlenose dolphins, called Yasha and Yana, talking to each other in a pool. They found that each dolphin would listen to a sentence of pulses without interruption, before replying.
* Ancient Black Astronauts and Extraterrestrial Jihads: Islamic Science Fiction as Urban Mythology.
* Getting Restless At The Head Of The Class.
* CFP: this xkcd.
* Demystifying the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
* Going viral this week: extinction illusions.
* In search of the universal language.
* Reported Concussions in Youth Soccer Soar a Mere 1,600 Percent in 25 Years, According to Study.
* Nice work if you can get it: Wells Fargo won’t claw back $125m retirement bonus from exec who oversaw 2m frauds.
* Sexting in the seventh grade.
* Colin Kaepernick’s Protest Is Working.
* How the sugar industry has distorted health science for more than 50 years.
* Stories that should be more exciting than they are: We Were Wrong About Where the Moon Came From!
* I read Jason Shiga’s Demon as a crowdfunder — it’s great. Check out the first volume when it comes to print next month.
* Special providence: Catfish Falls From The Sky, Hits Woman In The Face.
* The organizing economic metaphor of all of Against Everything is artificial scarcity. The concept usually refers to the way that monopolistic sellers exploit their excessive market power to restrict supply so they can raise prices. Greif’s view is more capacious and idiosyncratic: He describes a culture where the affluent, at sea in a world of abundance, engage in the elaborate restriction of their own demand (to kitsch diners, ethnic food, inappropriately youthful sexual partners). This turns what could be unfussy gratification into resource-intensive performance. On one level, this is about making a technically meaningless life more diverting, but it also gives our atomized selves the comfort of belonging. It serves to differentiate “people like me” from those other, worse people—those without access to the most current information, say, or simply the economic means to act on it. What gives n+1’s economistic turn its authority and novelty is the way Greif and his colleagues show that the market is not, as someone like Gary Becker had it, a bazaar untainted by sinister, irrational notions (discrimination, exploitation, class prejudice), but a site where those things are given free play under cover of neutral utility-maximizing exchange. They have taught us to speak the softer insights of theory (with its sensitivity to symbolic difference and its hermeneutics of suspicion) in the hardheaded but incantatory vernacular of the powerful.
* The New Yorker remembers the Wilmington coup of 1898.
* And I’m catching up late, but man oh man, Bojack Horseman is a good show.
Tuesday Morning Links!
* Marquette University, with a generous grant from the Templeton Religion Trust, is pleased to announce a request for proposals on the topics of “The Self, Motivation, and Virtue,” Approximately ten research proposals at $190,000 each will be funded through this initiative. The grant competition has four primary aims…
* If you’re going to MLA and are a graduate student or contingent faculty member, don’t forget to apply for travel support.
* We are ruled by maniacs: West Virginia Plans To Frack Beneath Ohio River, Which Supplies Drinking Water To Millions.
* The Great Death: Earth lost 50% of its wildlife in the past 40 years, says WWF.
* California’s Ongoing Drought Linked To Climate Change.
* Perhaps the job market news isn’t so bad, and graduates are right to think college mostly worked for them. Arum and Roksa then turn to the high share of young graduates still living with their parents. At 40 percent, it’s twice the rate of the 1960s. Another third of recent graduates live with friends, and 70 percent of young graduates get some money from their families — as do 75 percent of all 18-25 year olds. But again, is this really the fault of college? Further, how do we know that these living situations are bad? Are these graduates really adrift, or are they showing self-discipline by cutting expenses in a bad economy? There is one clear tie to college: we know that this generation is servicing students debt of a size that their parents can barely imagine, and that this may be dampening home buying. We also know that the reigning “new economy business model” promises them neither job security nor stable income growth. So rather than missing the “markers of adulthood,” these cautious at-home students are more likely hitting them. They are the markers of Great Recession adulthood — house sharing, public transportation, deferred buying, and reliance on family.
* The Score: Why Prisons Thrive Even When Budgets Shrink.
* Late last year I started a series called “The Thick Blue Line,” based on documented, widespread, and ongoing police impunity in the United States. At the end of each month (here are the first, second, and third installments) I compiled national “no charges against police officer” cases verbatim from reported incidents.
* How to read Star Wars, by way of David Fincher: I always thought of Star Wars as the story of two slaves [C-3PO and R2-D2] who go from owner to owner, witnessing their masters’ folly, the ultimate folly of man… I thought it was an interesting idea in the first two, but it’s kind of gone by Return Of The Jedi.
* The sad decline of Barack Obama, American exceptionalism edition.
* Paranoia and the Zimmermans.
* Neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us.
* German universities are now tuition-free again. “Only the super-rich benefit from the fees and loans system, in which 17-year-olds must sign up for massive debts in adulthood.”
* Student Organizing, Student Government, and the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
* UMass police helped keep student’s addiction secret. Crazy story.
* The Hidden Costs of E-books at University Libraries. I hate this trend.
* Steven Salaita: U. of I. destroyed my career.
* BREAKING: the banks regulate the regulators, not the other way around.
* BREAKING: North Carolina Governor Doubts Value of Some Degrees.
* DC Comics still aggressively making it impossible to support anything they do.
* ‘Time-Outs’ Are Hurting Your Child. Well, that was the last thing that wasn’t.
* The CIA Still Redacts How Much It Paid for PCs in 1987.
* Teachers are among the most dedicated, passionate and hardworking professionals – a few of the qualities that make the best Uber partner drivers.
* Movie quotes by way of iOS 8.
* Confessions of a former internet troll. It used to be about the art, apparently.
* Data in everything: Statistician Creates Model To Predict What’s Next In Game Of Thrones.
* And Jon Hamm will be on the Black Mirror Christmas special, which is the best news I’ve heard in years.
Evening Links
* World saved from Zack Snyder Star Wars movie.
* But it was too late for the Atlantic, powerless before Tom Cruise’s superpowers.
* 2013 in franchise science fiction, from io9. Only Brad Bird’s 1952 can save us now.
* New York Times already hyping Ender’s Game.
* The best companion says she won’t be back for Who‘s 50th.
* The Disneyland of paranoia. See also McSweeney’s:
First, they came for unregulated handguns in the possession of citizens with violent criminal records, and I said, “You know, that sounds reasonable. Someone with a violent criminal record has probably lost his or her right to possess a handgun. So, yeah, sounds good.”
Then they came to require background checks, gun licenses, and regular gun safety courses, and I said, “All of this sounds fine to me. Guns are dangerous, and we regulate every other dangerous product. So, really, whatever you want to do on this is also fine.”
Then they came for my assault rifle, and I said, “Assault rifles? You should have started with assault rifles. You’re doing this backwards. But OK, of course you can have my assault rifle. Why do I need an assault rifle?”
Then they came to guarantee mental health care to everyone, because our treatment of our most vulnerable citizens is a measure of our dignity as a society, and I said, “This one is obvious. In fact, I can’t believe we HAVEN’T been guaranteeing mental health care for everyone who needs it. Let’s get going on this.”
* And just one political link: The high price of being single in America.
All the Midweek Links There Are
* My media empire: I have a piece on climate change and science fiction in the new New Inquiry issue on weather, which has gone out to subscribers but isn’t online yet. I’ll let you know when you can read it, though for a mere $2 you could read it this very minute.
* “It’s one of those situations where everybody says it’s an issue but the people who have the most influence and the most ability to do something about it are not acting on it,” said Gary Rhoades, professor of higher education at the University of Arizona’s Center for the Study of Higher Education and director of the Center for the Future of Higher Education, a virtual think tank supported by faculty and labor groups. He called the adjunct issue a “widely acknowledged challenge” with deep, interwoven roots – many of which pit administrative prerogatives against labor concerns and educational outcomes.
* IRS Says Colleges Must Be ‘Reasonable’ When Calculating Adjuncts’ Work Hours. What if the adjuncts shrugged?
* Yesterday marked the 202th anniversary of the largest slave revolt in US history.
* Game of the day: run from Michel Foucault. Do not become enamored of power.
* Another great rundown of science fiction in China. Via io9.
* zunguzungu is gathering notes towards a canon of post-9/11 literature. I contributed Wells Tower’s “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned,” as well as the inevitable science fictional treatments: Battlestar Galactica, District 9, Nolan’s Batman…
* Warmest Year On Record Received Cool Climate Coverage. It’s so hot in Australia they’ve had to add a new color to the weather map.
* This paper uses annual variation in temperature and precipitation over the past 50 years to examine the impact of climatic changes on economic activity throughout the world. We find three primary results. First, higher temperatures substantially reduce economic growth in poor countries but have little effect in rich countries. Second, higher temperatures appear to reduce growth rates in poor countries, rather than just the level of output. Third, higher temperatures have wide-ranging effects in poor nations, reducing agricultural output, industrial output, and aggregate investment, and increasing political instability. Analysis of decade or longer climate shifts also shows substantial negative effects on growth in poor countries. Should future impacts of climate change mirror these historical effects, the negative impact on poor countries may be substantial.
* The Seven Lady Godivas: Dr. Seuss’s Little-Known “Adult” Book of Nudes.
* io9 celebrates the classic tabletop role-playing game Paranoia.
* The American Prospect considers the legal hyperformalism the GOP has embraced in the face of longterm demographic crisis and declining real power.
What all these efforts have in common is that they are all perfectly legal, and yet they all violate the norms of how American politics had been practiced for decades or even for centuries. All of them exploit some loophole in the law or the Constitution to give Republicans some immediate advantage in the basic ground rules of how political issues are contested.
* National Geographic’s photographs of 2012.
* The great moral question of our time: On heckling.
* The Superhero Delusion: How Superhero Movies created the Sad Perfect Badass Messiah, and what that says about America.
* Installing the blue whale at the American Museum of Natural History.
* Science catches up to what the poets always knew: Our perception of time changes with age, but it also depends on our emotional state. Research is steadily improving our understanding of the brain circuits that control this sense, opening the way for new forms of treatment, particularly for Parkinson’s disease.
* Debating that rape viral infrographic.
* Great moments in advertising: the UC spends $4.3 million to attract a single student.
* The forever war on women: Under Obama, a Skew Toward Male Appointees.
* And Mitch Hurwitz teases the new Arrested Development. I am…optimistic?
Weekend Links – 2
* Stories from Newtown: Victoria Soto. Dawn Hochsprung.
* Tactical Reality: the new gun culture.
* From the reclaimuc archives: The police state in Europe vs. the police state in the US.
* A Modest Proposal for the Reform of Academe.
* Democratic Senator Compares Private Student Loans To Dickens-Era Of Debt Prisons.
* Report: Humanity Has Overshot The Earth’s Biocapacity.
* And the average age at which people reach the lowest point of happiness in their lives in various countries. I feel pretty certain mine is and will always be 31, but then I’ve always been an outlier.
Tuesday!
* The headline reads, “Babies can understand what you’re saying at just 6 months old.”
* The headline reads, “Israeli scientists develop prototype of Geordi’s Star Trek VISOR.”
* Scandalous contrarianism: Josiah Bartlet Was A Mediocre President.
* Fair Labor Association Begins Inspections of Foxconn.
“We believe that workers everywhere have the right to a safe and fair work environment, which is why we’ve asked the FLA to independently assess the performance of our largest suppliers,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “The inspections now underway are unprecedented in the electronics industry, both in scale and scope, and we appreciate the FLA agreeing to take the unusual step of identifying the factories in their reports.”
* And the FBI says paying cash for coffee is a sign of terrorist intent. Yeah, that checks out.
Friday!
* In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building, the CIA is following tweets — up to 5 million a day. At the agency’s Open Source Center, a team known affectionately as the ‘vengeful librarians’ also pores over Facebook, newspapers, TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms — anything overseas that anyone can access and contribute to openly.
* It was linked in the Adam Kotsko post from earlier, but it’s worth promoting on its own merits: Nobody Cares about Property Damage.
In both cases, the liberal position is based around a belief that we can control how we are perceived, and how the state (and its ideological apparatuses like the media) will respond to us. Or actually this could be put more strongly: the criticism reveals the liberal’s desperate need to be in control. The fact that protestors have very limited ability to prevent state crackdowns, and certainly individual protestors can do almost nothing, is scary, and it conflicts with deeply held liberal beliefs about how the state works, and how protesting can change it.
* Occupy Oakland contrarian watch: WSWS.
* The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has devised a bizarre plan for deploying its new XO-3 tablet. The organization plans to drop the touchscreen computers from helicopters near remote villages in developing countries. The devices will then be abandoned and left for the villagers to find, distribute, support, and use on their own.
* From Facebook: the fifty states of paranormal horror.
* And the chart of the day: American oligarchy.
The Adjustment Bureau
The Philip K. Dick short story “Adjustment Team” that inspired The Adjustment Bureau has already passed out of copyright, so you can read it here or here. I was talking about the film a bit on Facebook earlier tonight and was forced to admit that when it comes to PKD film adaptations my aesthetic judgments are simply unreliable: so help me, I like them all, even if they’re all bad.
The film version is essentially a by-the-numbers thriller, in which our heroes are chased by a sinister supernatural conspiracy that hides in plain sight. They are functionally omniscient; they can manipulate chance events; they can travel the city using ordinary doors as wormholes. It’s all stuff we’ve seen before. In this respect the film is a bowdlerization of the paranoid logic of Dick’s original, which (true to its science fictionalization of schizophrenia) has the conspiracy operating through much more oblique means:
The dog studied the house. The shades had been let up. The kitchen light was on. Beyond the lace curtains dim shapes could be seen, stirring around the table. A man and woman. They were drinking coffee.
“There they are,” the dog murmured. “The man, you say? He’s not going to be harmed, is he?”
“Of course not. But he must be at his office early. Usually he doesn’t leave until after nine. Today he must leave at eight-thirty. He must be within Sector T137 before the process begins, or he won’t be altered to coincide with the new adjustment.”
The dog sighed. “That means I have to summon.”
“Correct.” The Clerk checked his instruction sheet. “You’re to summon at precisely eight-fifteen. You’ve got that? Eight-fifteen. No later.”
“What will the eight-fifteen summons bring?”
The Clerk flipped open his instruction book, examining the code columns. “It will bring A Friend with a Car. To drive him to work early.” He closed the book and folded his arms, preparing to wait. “That way he’ll get to his office almost an hour ahead of time. Which is vital.”
In this way apparently disparate events are revealed to be intimately connected, once the dots have been connected and the paranoid totality has been grasped: the Clerk requires the dog’s bark at a precise moment to summon the Friend, and when the dog barks a minute late a life insurance salesman is summoned instead. As a result of this misstep Ed misses the Adjustment at his firm, discovering first the Adjustment Team reorganizing the office and later recognizing the subtle (and not-so-subtle) changes:
Ed said nothing. He advanced slowly into the inner office. The office had been gone over. He could tell. Things had been altered. Rearranged. Nothing obvious — nothing he could put his finger on. But he could tell.
Joe Kent greeted him uneasily. “What’s the matter, Ed? You look like a wild dog. Is something — ?”
Ed studied Joe. He was different. Not the same. What was it?
Joe’s face. It was a little fuller. His shirt was blue-striped. Joe never wore blue stripes. Ed examined Joe’s desk. He saw papers and accounts. The desk — it was too far to the right. And it was bigger. It wasn’t the same desk.
The picture on the wall. It wasn’t the same. It was a different picture entirely. And the things on top of the file cabinet — some were new, others were gone.
He looked back through the door. Now that he thought about it, Miss Evans’ hair was different, done a different way. And it was lighter.
In here, Mary, filing her nails, over by the window — she was taller, fuller. Her purse, lying on the desk in front of her — a red purse, red knit.
“You always. . . have that purse?” Ed demanded.
Mary glanced up. “What?”
“That purse. You always have that?”
Mary laughed. She smoothed her skirt coyly around her shapely thighs, her long lashes blinking modestly. “Why, Mr Fletcher. What do you mean?”
Ed turned away. He knew. Even if she didn’t. She had been redone — changed: her purse, her clothes, her figure, everything about her. None of them knew — but him. His mind spun dizzily. They were all changed. All of them were different. They had all been remolded, recast. Subtly — but it was there.
The wastebasket. It was smaller, not the same. The window shades — white, not ivory. The wallpaper was not the same pattern. The lighting fixtures . . .
Endless, subtle changes.
Ed made his way back to the inner office. He lifted his hand and knocked on Douglas’s door.
“Come in.”
Ed pushed the door open. Nathan Douglas looked up impatiently. “Mr Douglas –” Ed began. He came into the room unsteadily — and stopped.
Douglas was not the same. Not at all. His whole office was changed: the rugs, the drapes. The desk was oak, not mahogany. And Douglas himself . . .
Douglas was younger, thinner. His hair, brown. His skin not so red. His face smoother. No wrinkles. Chin reshaped. Eyes green, not black. He was a different man. But still Douglas — a different Douglas. A different version!
Nothing in the film captures, or even approaches, the story’s wonderfully hallucinogenic sense that reality itself is slowly but surely breaking down…
This Is Why Your Parents Are Totally Crazy Now
I don’t think I’d ever actually watched a full segment of Glenn Beck before this morning. My god. My god.
Big Monday Links
* Lost Back to the Future audition tapes. You win this round, SNL.
* Then and Now with Goofus and Gallant.
* zunguzungu has some final thoughts on the Rally to Restore Sanity taking Andrew Sullivan’s glowing endorsement as his departure point.
Americans who want to emphasize that “politics isn’t all there is to life” are people who don’t feel very keenly the sting of injustice or the anxiety of uncertainty or the horror of what this country does in our name. When you lose your job because of politics, or can’t afford to go to school because of politics, or are denied full citizenship because of politics, or die because of politics, the idea that “politics isn’t all there is to life” will be cold comfort to you.
…
But what if, for example, you look out into the world and see not a basic normality of everyday justice and brotherhood and comity and happy cookies but, rather, a massively inequitable system getting both steadily worse and more deeply enmeshed into our everyday reality? An America which has, for example, rendered it normal to be conducting military operations in multiple theatres for no publicly acknowledged or agreed upon purpose? Where 10% unemployment is normal? Where immigrants are presumed guilty until documented innocent? What if you think things actually are completely fucked up?
* On not being obliged to vote Democrat. We voted last Thursday, straight ticket as always, but I confess I didn’t take much pleasure in it.
* What happens after Republicans win tomorrow? For one thing, Virginia’s climate witch-hunts will go national. Via Boing Boing.
* What happens after Republicans win tomorrow, Nevada edition: Angle victory means return of Yucca nuclear waste dump.
* Should the left try to use our democracy’s systemic biases towards military spending to drive a progressive spending agenda? Ezra and Matt take aff and neg. I give the decision to Ezra—let’s take our victories where we can get them.
* Corporate synergy, the Fox News way.
* UN Convention on Biodiversity: Climate-related geo-engineering activities [should not] take place until there is an adequate scientific basis on which to justify such activities and appropriate consideration of the associated risks for the environment and biodiversity and associated social, economic and cultural impacts.
* Cornell President David Skorton wants to save the humanities.
* How can this many colleges charge over $50,000 a year for tuition? That’s completely insane.
* From the campus newspaper: What’s Duke’s policy towards undocumented immigrants?
* Another great Strange Map: an alternate New York City with a filled-in East River where Manhattan and Brooklyn merge. Via Kottke.
* And rest in peace, Ginny Sack.
I’ve Got My Pipe Because We’re Going to Speak About Schoolish Kind of Things
In 2007, Beck, then the host of “Glenn Beck,” on CNN’s Headline News, brought to his show a John Birch Society spokesman named Sam Antonio, who warned of a government plot to abolish U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada, “and eventually all throughout the Americas.” Beck told Antonio, “When I was growing up, the John Birch Society—I thought they were a bunch of nuts.” But now, he said, “you guys are starting to make more and more sense to me.”
A secret history of Glenn Beck, by way of Robert Welch, Willard Cleon Skousen and the John Birch Society. From the New Yorker.
