Posts Tagged ‘The Year of the Flood’
Where to See Me at #MLA14
188. New Approaches to Science Fiction Criticism
Thursday, 9 January, 7:00–8:15 p.m., McHenry, Chicago Marriott
Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Science Fiction and Utopian and Fantastic Literature
Presiding: Rebekah Sheldon, Indiana Univ.–Purdue Univ., Indianapolis
1. “If This Goes On: Science Fiction, Planetary Crisis, and the Ecological Humanities,” Gerry Canavan, Marquette Univ.
2. “Living in the Future: Science Fiction’s Queer Cultural Politics,” Alexis Lothian, Indiana Univ. of Pennsylvania
3. “Gauging Speculative Physics: Ontological Reading as Critical Practice in Fictions of Science,”Clarissa Ai Ling Lee, Duke Univ.
4. “Jumping the Shark, Jumping the Page,” Jamie Skye Bianco, New York Univ.
411. Margaret Atwood’s Recent Work
Friday, 10 January, 5:15–6:30 p.m., O’Hare, Chicago Marriott
Program arranged by the Margaret Atwood Society
Presiding: Karma Waltonen, Univ. of California, Davis
Speakers: Gerry Canavan, Marquette Univ.; Rebecca Evans, Duke Univ.;Lauren J. Lacey, Edgewood Coll.; Debrah K. Raschke, Southeast Missouri State Univ.; Katherine V. Snyder, Univ. of California, Berkeley; Margrit Talpalaru, Univ. of Alberta
A Whole Lot of Sunday Night Links
* SNL wins a game: Djesus Uncrossed.
* Batman should never have revealed his secret identity.
* Dan Harmon explains his Joseph-Campbell-influenced theory of the “story circle,” in a few posts: 1 2 3 4 5 6
* The politics of the Papal Conclave are fascinating.
* Pope Benedict XVI’s leaked documents show fractured Vatican full of rivalries. Pope blesses thousands at Vatican as details of ailments emerge.
As early as this April, Yale plans to welcome a training center for interrogators to its campus.
The center’s primary goal would be to coach U.S. Special Forces on interviewing tactics designed to detect lies. Charles Morgan III, a professor of psychiatry who will head the project, calls these tactics “people skills.” These techniques would be honed using New Haven’s immigrant community as subjects.
* Cooper Union will probably not be free anymore.
* Roopika Risam on breaking the silence of the job search.
* Freddie deBoer: I’ve been making the case (again and again and again) that the constantly-expressed notion that we’ll have full employment if people are just smart and go into STEM fields is empirically indefensible. Adam Kotsko: What is education actually for?
* Margaret Atwood teases Maddaddam:
“Maddaddam begins where The Year of the Flood finishes and goes on from there,” she says. “It explores what happens when the conventional humans and the new creations find themselves in the same space. You can see that there might be some cultural misunderstandings.”
* Comics explained: the backstory of Rachel Summers. It couldn’t be simpler!
* Aaron Bady on Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s In the House of the Interpreter.
* The New York Times profiles flood management technology in the Netherlands.
* Could our universe be located within the interior of a wormhole which itself is part of a black hole that lies within a much larger universe? And that universe is on the back of an even larger turtle…
* Forest Whitaker Accused of Shoplifting, Frisked at Upper West Side Deli.
* Obama says kill the penny. He would say that. He hates capitalism.
* Equal Opportunity, Our National Myth.
* Kidding on the square: another National Review blogger calls for the repeal of the 19th Amendment.
* Gasp! Deregulation May Not Have Lowered Air Fares After All.
* The phenomenology of solitary confinement.
* Surveying self-confessed rapists.
* How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity.
* Data-crunching the Internet Adult Film Database.
* Data-crunching the Lord of the Rings.
* The Internet has finally developed impermanence technology.
* And Iceland might ban Internet porn.
Halla Gunnarsdóttir, an adviser to the interior minister, explains the country’s anti-smut rationale to The Guardian:
“We are a progressive, liberal society when it comes to nudity, to sexual relations, so our approach is not anti-sex but anti-violence. This is about children and gender equality, not about limiting free speech…”
This is Iceland, after all. Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir is the first openly lesbian government head in the world. It’s already illegal to print and distribute porn within the country, and since 2010, strip clubs have been prohibited as well…
Atwood, Lethem, Robinson
I’m part of the year-end Independent Weekly “What Our Writers Are Reading” feature this week, with capsule reviews of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Galileo’s Dream. Here’s the takeaway ‘graph from the Robinson review:
In both genre and mainstream literary fiction, America’s vision of its future has been dominated for decades by dystopia and apocalypse. Robinson is perhaps the last, best utopian in American letters, unapologetically crafting in his novels visions of the better world that he believes can still emerge, through struggle, out of this one. Individual lives, he writes in The Years of Rice and Salt, always end with the tragedy of death; it’s only in the long history of collective struggle, over lifetimes, that we can hope to find the possibility of comedy, of happy endings. (As Martin Luther King put the same idea: “The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.”) The first principle for Robinson, King and any other citizen of Utopia is not just the belief that a better future is possible but the conviction that the dream of the future can help us save the present; in the two-millennial span and twisting grandfather paradoxes of Galileo’s Dream, that political and philosophical commitment is made, for the first time in Robinson’s long career, spellbindingly literal.
Thursday!
Thursday!
* I’ll be posting this year as a HASTAC Scholar at the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboatory. My first post is about status update activism of the sort that is all over your Facebook newsfeed today.
* Speaking of health care, Olympia Snowe now runs your health care.
* LRB makes an impressively desperate bid for my attention with Fredric Jameson’s review of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood alongside reviews of Inglourious Basterds and Inherent Vice.
* Madoff-mania: The SEC—which he claims he was shortlisted to chair (!)— now admits it badly mishandled multiple investigations of his company. Still more here.
* Kevin Carey nicely notes the difficulty inherent to blogging about a book you’re two-thirds through with. Another post or two on Infinite Jest soon. The total collapse of blogging at A Supposedly Fun Blog is one of the great disappointments of Infinite Summer, I think.
* Hiding adjuncts so the U.S. News rankings can’t find them. Meanwhile, this year’s Washington Monthly undergraduate rankings leave Duke out of the Top 25.
* So you’ve invented a board game. (via)
* 68 Sci-Fi Sites to See in the U.S.
* And Gawker declares the Michael Cera backlash has officially begun.
Le Guin v. Atwood
Ursula K. Le Guin reviews Margaret Atwood’s quasi-sequel to Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and refuses to let her pretend what she’s writing isn’t science fiction.
Gerry Canavan 