Posts Tagged ‘Roberto Bolaño’
Tuesday Afternoon Links
* A new page at Marquette: a $96 million residence hall development.
* And then there’s that old page.
* There’s more than one way to brand a college. Like at least three or four.
* No-confidence vote by UW faculty passes overwhelmingly.
* Scientists Find New Earthlike Planets, Kim Stanley Robinson Imagines Living There.
* “Why Is Westeros So Fucked Up?” “In conclusion, Game of Thrones is a franchise of contrasts.”
For the television series, it’s more complicated. The crucial question is this: How do you take a story that’s written as a deliberate repudiation of 1990s fantasy norms and make it work, twenty years later, with an audience that didn’t necessarily grow up with Terry Brooks and Robert Jordan novels? The story is generally strong enough that it’s managed to survive and thrive; the failures of the Starks are not just reversals of fantasy convention but overall storytelling convention. But the longer the series goes, the less able it is to draw upon such clear subversions.
* Don DeLillo’s back and I’m pretty excited about Zero K.
* Hamilton, the musical you may be tired of hearing about because it is literally impossible to get tickets to see it until 2047, made Tony history Tuesday morning, scoring a record-breaking 16 nominations.
* It’s Illegal to Possess or Distribute This Huge Number.
* Photo Essay: Fracking Communities.
* Lead Water Pipes in 1900 Caused Higher Crime Rates in 1920. More Evidence for Lead Poisoning as Key Crime Driver.
* Coyote $21,000 in debt after wandering through university campus.
* Does Viewing Pornography Reduce Marital Quality Over Time? Evidence from Longitudinal Data.
* google it should have been steph curry truth
* Jessica Jones season two is doomed watch: Trouble On The Set Of Jessica Jones Season One Was Calmed By David Tennant.
* You just can’t win: After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight.
* High school football player faces 70 criminal charges for yearbook picture prank.
* “Poet & Vagabond”: Roberto Bolaño’s business card.
* Like the lady said: the goal should be a society without classes! Fights on planes 400% more likely when there’s a first class section.
* Here’s yet another surprise David Bowie left for us on Backstar.
* Famous last words watch: Republicans have a massive electoral map problem that has nothing to do with Donald Trump.
* Society of synthetic linguists explain to court, in Klingon, why Klingon shouldn’t be copyrightable.
* And if you want a vision of the future, imagine increasingly disappointing Star Trek (2009) sequels every three years, forever.
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!
Links
Links for Wednesday.
* First-gen Sierra adventure games in your browser. Your childhood says come back home, all is forgiven.
* The setup for this Flash Forward show seems pretty good, but man do I wish Brannon Braga weren’t involved.
* McSweeney’s has the syllabus for “ENG 371WR: Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era.”
* Long-time Republican strategist declares defeat in NY-20, while Norm Coleman presses on in the courts with his unique metaphysical argument that he is the only logically possible winner in the Minnesota Senate race.
* Roberto Bolaño, 2666, and the Ciudad Juárez murders.
* What happens when you “run government like a business.”
* I don’t agree with everything Amanda Marcotte has to say about prostitution here, but she’s certainly right about Eliot Spitzer; it’s completely insane to me that some people actually seem willing to give the guy another chance.
* The best article about the “sexting” crisis you’re likely to read.
He then told the parents and teens to line up if they wanted to view the photos, which were printed out onto index cards. As the 17-year-old who took semi-nude self-portraits waited in line, she realized that Mr. Skumanick and other investigators had viewed the pictures. When the adults began to crowd around Mr. Skumanick, the 17-year-old worried they could see her photo and recalls she said, “I think the worst punishment is knowing that all you old guys saw me naked. I just think you guys are all just perverts.”
If your laws allow people to be charged with distributing child pornography for sending other people naked pictures of themselves, you need some new laws.
* Nate Silver thinks the libertarians are taking over the Republican Party. That would certainly be a huge improvement, as long as we’re not just talking about glibertarians.
* The headline reads, “Obama keeps prosecutions on the table.”
End of the Year Lists
Jaimee and I both have capsule reviews in the Indy‘s end-of-the-year booklist. I wrote about Bolaño and Jaimee about Aravind Adiga’s Booker-Prize winning The White Tiger, but here’s Jaimee on the book everyone’s talking about.
Goodnight Bush
By Erich Origen and Gan Golan
Little, Brown & CompanyMany a child may be fooled by the cover of this “unauthorized parody” of the classic children’s story Goodnight Moon; upon closer inspection, however, the cover of Goodnight Bush, by Erich Origen and Gan Golan, portrays a nightmare world of factory smokestacks, oil drilling and Florida 2000 ballots roasting on an open fire.
Accompanied by a simple text in a rhyming series of good nights (“Goodnight Constitution, goodnight evolution”), it is with a careful eye one must read the pictures full of visual puns. We are led into a child’s room, Little Georgie about to go to bed in his flight-cadet jammies. Lines of cocaine are on one nightstand, My Pet Goat on the other, surrounded by the dollhouse White House, little soldier men, the fox, the rocking chair, the blocks, the ballots and “a quiet Dick Cheney whispering hush.” Is that yellow cake that sits on the bedside table or is that a slice of the American dream in the form of apple pie? As the story progresses, the toys move and change to document another facet of the Bush years: another grievance, another mistake, another disaster.
If this book has a moment in time, it is now. George Bush’s legacy is bandied about on political talk shows and is soon to be stamped into history books, and here is a tiny sardonic snapshot that captures all that went wrong; it is only here, in a child’s world, where we can laugh at the worst that has happened in a kind of catharsis. The book ends with both good and bad goodbyes: “Goodnight Earth? Goodnight heir? Goodnight failures everywhere.” As a large percentage of the country looks forward to a New Year and a new administration, this clever little book is worth a look. —Jaimee Hills
Gerry Canavan 