Posts Tagged ‘you don't exist’
Quittin’ Time Links
* Canamania 2016: Just another reminder that Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (out now!) and Octavia E. Butler (out this November!) appear this year.
* And speaking of Octavia: a previously lost interview from 1995 has resurfaced.
* Call for Papers: Disability and Superheroes.
* A landmark special issue of Extrapolation (if I do say so myself) on Indigenous Futurisms, ed. by Grace Dillon, Michael Levy, and John Rieder.
* The Managerial University: A Failed Experiment.
* How Janelle Monáe turned Harriet Tubman’s legacy into an Afrofuturist sci-fi epic.
* “Culturally and geographically, EMU football will simply never succeed from an attendance and financial standpoint,” faculty member Howard Bunsis, who helped prepare the report, said in a presentation to the Board of Regents on Friday. “It is a losing proposition – always has been, and always will be. We hardly raise any money for football, and our attendance is the lowest in the country. Some of you believe that we are close to succeeding, if we just throw more money at the situation. This proposition is insane.“
* Eleven Theses for the Bernie Sanders Generation.
* Wrongthink watch: The Tools of Campus Activists Are Being Turned Against Them. When Slogans Replace Arguments.
* “Literature about medicine may be all that can save us.”
* …but marketplace feminism has simply embraced a mediagenic vision of leadership, most notoriously in the new women’s conference industry, where, Zeisler writes, attendees can “access and sell a certain kind of female power at a comfortable distance from the less individualistic and far less glamorous reality of the majority of women.” These conferences come with a hefty price tag to hear inspiring celebrities and CEOs’ tales about bootstrapping their way to the top and kicking sexism in the rear in stiletto heels. It’s a vision that, she notes, “erases the presence of anyone who isn’t empowered in the most crucial sense of the word—financially…” Feminism, Inc. is big business.
* Global warming has made the weather better for most in U.S. — but don’t get used to it, study says. But it’s not all bad news: Chicago is better poised to survive climate change than New York or LA .
* Living Near A Highway Is Terrible For Your Health. 1 In 10 Americans Do It.
* Too good to check: Tabloid says it has proof: Ted Cruz’s father is mystery man in Lee Harvey Oswald photo.
* Suicide Rates Are Up, But the Most Obvious Explanations Are Probably All Wrong.
* The Arctic Suicides: It’s Not The Dark That Kills You. Milwaukee suicide rates lower than rest of US.
* Study of exceptionally healthy old people fails to trace their well-being to specific genes.
* The Rise of Pirate Libraries.
* A Scientific Guide to the Fantastical Predators in Game of Thrones.
* Abolish Neil deGrasse Tyson. But he’s got the right idea here.
* Is there God after Prince? The rejected Simpsons script Conan O’Brien wrote for Prince. Musician’s secret vault reportedly contains ‘thousands’ of unreleased songs. Prince and Springsteen duet, one night only. Springsteen covers “Purple Rain.”
* Companies are becoming adept at identifying wealthy customers and marketing to them, creating a money-based caste system. No! It can’t be! That’s impossible!
* EVE Online Could Become a Television Show. I’d watch at least a few!
* How does a porn parody get made? And elsewhere on the porn beat: Child Porn Is Being Hidden in Legal Porn Sites and It Could Land You in Trouble.
* The new Doctor Who companion has been announced and I’m already annoyed because [felled by assassin’s bullet]
* You Should All Be Reading These Criminally Underrated Comics Right Now.
* Twilight of the New York Times.
* Clean, safe, and too cheap to meter.
* Chernobyl as an Event: Thirty Years After.
* I never should have agreed to appear on the cover of American Legion Magazine.
* Will America’s Worst Wildfire Disaster Happen in New Jersey?
* Kurt Vonnegut, Our Reluctant, Agnostic, Hippy Guru. I taught Galápagos for the first time in years this month and fell in love with it all over again — and I’m presenting on it at a meeting of the Vonnegut Society at ALA in May.
* I’ve been saying it for years: Oxford Scientist Confirms Starting Work, School before 10 AM is Torture.
* Kids Play in Backyard While Mom Does Dishes. An Investigation Ensues.
* Marijuana is kosher for Passover, leading rabbi rules.
* Snitchr.
* Definitely evidence of galactic civilization watch: A Dozen Black Holes Are Mysteriously Spewing Energy In the Same Direction.
* But maybe everything dies someday comes back: Ecto Cooler returns.
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.
Sunday Night Lights
* The Wrong Side of the Heart: this weekend’s dose of vintage movie poster greatness.
* AskMetaFilter has all the huge-nerd podcasts I crave.
* Dr. Metzinger first proposes his thesis: there is no such thing as the self. The subjective sense of being a conscious person – the sense of being a self that is distinct from the body and present in a single, unified reality – is not a separate, coherent brain function but rather the result of many different systems running at the same time. I was telling you people this years ago!
* Four lesser-known members of the Fantastic Four. I’d never even heard of She-Thing.
* Pension war update: “…public employees and their dominance of blue states is going to be the biggest issue in this country for the next several years.”
* Marco Roth vs. the “neuronovel.”
The last dozen years or so have seen the emergence of a new strain within the Anglo-American novel. What has been variously referred to as the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel—the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind—has transformed itself into the neurological novel, wherein the mind becomes the brain. Since 1997, readers have encountered, in rough chronological order, Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (de Clérambault’s syndrome, complete with an appended case history by a fictional “presiding psychiatrist” and a useful bibliography), Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (Tourette’s syndrome), Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (autism), Richard Powers’s The Echomaker (facial agnosia, Capgras syndrome), McEwan again with Saturday (Huntington’s disease, as diagnosed by the neurosurgeon protagonist), Atmospheric Disturbances (Capgras syndrome again) by a medical school graduate, Rivka Galchen, and John Wray’s Lowboy (paranoid schizophrenia). And these are just a selection of recently published titles in “literary fiction.” There are also many recent genre novels, mostly thrillers, of amnesia, bipolar disorder, and multiple personality disorder. As young writers in Balzac walk around Paris pitching historical novels with titles like The Archer of Charles IX, in imitation of Walter Scott, today an aspiring novelist might seek his subject matter in a neglected corner or along some new frontier of neurology.
Via MeFi, which also links to the Jonah Lehrer’s response.
* And what Harlan Ellison makes, the world takes. Also via MeFi.
Infinite Jest #8: Brains, Rats, Happiness, and the Problem of Atheism
The spoiler line sometimes makes it difficult to write these Infinite Summer posts; the thoughts for this one have been percolating for a few weeks but we were never quite where I wanted to be in the book before discussing them. Like Daryl Houston, a lot of my thoughts on this second reading of Infinite Jest are crystalizing around the Steeply/Marathe discussions of the Entertainment, which now seem to me to be organization points for many of the book’s broader philosophical themes.
One of the major existential problems being confronted in IJ is the tragedy of embodied consciousness. It’s laid out explicitly for us in this week’s section beginning on 470, which discusses the (real-life) experiments surrounding the discovery of the p-terminal in the brain:
‘Older’s earliest subjects were rats, and the results were apparently sobering. The Nu—the Canadians found that if they rigged an auto-stimulation lever, the rat would press the lever to stimulate his p-terminal over and over, thousands of times an hour, over and over, ignoring food and female rats in heat, completely fixated on the lever’s stimulation, day and night, stopping only when the rat finally died of dehydration or simple fatigue.”
That pleasure resides inside the brain is, of course, the materialist nexus that links the MacGuffin-like search for the Entertainment with DFW’s ruminations on the nature of addiction—both hypertrophic stimulations of the pleasure center that cause abject misery and death.
Scientific materialism sticks a dagger through the heart of humanism, a spike in all our brains. If we are (just) brains, then we are (mere) machines. Highly, indescribably complex machines, sure, but machines. And this can only be understood as a deeply dehumanizing loss for a culture that is so steeped in its own sense of spiritual exceptionalism. It is the ultimate reduction in status. The things that make us feel human—love, music, passion, art—now threaten to recede to nothing after a century of materialist triumph, replaced instead with raw mammalian instinct: a new vision of the human as oversized rat running a maze to pull a lever and get a treat.
Atheism, which is necessarily materialist, necessarily carries with it the bleak and terrible suspicion that you might not even exist in any meaningful sense—a suspicion that, if we are lucky, we don’t find ourselves dwelling on for all that much of the time. It’s this baseline existential dread that fuels our contemporary anxieties about Pavlovian behaviorism, brainwashing, pharmacological happiness, and soulless bodysnatchers—concepts which threaten us with frightening dehumanization only insofar as we admit they have us pegged.
Isn’t happiness-in-a-tube still happiness? Why not chemically synthesize love? Are not the bodysnatched content, better at being us than we are, with none of our squishy excess?
Why not watch the Entertainment?
It’s the sublime terror at the Nothing at the core of our existence that plagues Gately whenever he tries to get his hands around the Higher Power demanded by AA (see 443 [on which, Daryl notes, Gately feels like a rat] and 467). Wallace, in the oft-quoted Kenyon commencement speech, seems to really believe that belief in some sort of Higher Power is necessary for any sense of fulfillment, though he tries to leave the details as open as AA does:
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it J. C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some intangible set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap meaning in life—then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already—it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, cliches, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power—you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
For Wallace, the only way out of the trap of embodied consciousness—of being a rat pulling its pleasure lever—is to reassert the existence of transcendent value not as a matter of proven epistemic certainty but as a radical and rational choice against basic human frailty. The speech goes on:
Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.
Of course the tragedy informing all our readings this summer is that DFW didn’t make it to 50. He died when he was 46. And when we read Infinite Jest I think we must do so with the recognition that we have lost the infinite thing and it is not coming back. I don’t equate this recognition with unconsciousness or automatism—because the sad truth is that even when you set out to worship transcendence you cannot escape the fear that the thing you worship is actually tiny, and a lie, and just inside your head. I don’t think we can just fool ourselves into living as though God had never died; I don’t think we can play pretend. As an atheist in that nihilistic Gately sense—as someone who does not worship and cannot believe, not even as a life-saving performative choice—it seems to me the terrible first step is to face things as they are, in all their unhappy finitude. The miracle of life comes not just despite this, but out of it.
Dollhouse
A few quick Dollhouse reflections in light of tonight’s “season” finale. Spoilers below, naturally.
* All in all the Alpha plotline was fairly disappointing, my appreciation for Alan Tudyk aside. It reduced a little too neatly to a run-of-the-mill serial-killer plotline when there seemed to be much, much more potential there. I’m not calling network interference, necessarily, but things seemed rushed and a little undercooked. Joss fumbled this one.
(UPDATE: To be more precise, he fumbled the plotline in almost exactly the same way he fumbled the Adam and First Evil storylines on Buffy. The composite event—which shouldn’t have been caused by a mechanical malfunction—should have made Alpha actually Godlike. Alpha’s portrayal in this episode ruins almost everything about what was interesting about the character to begin with. It’s also somewhat inconsistent with the way the event had been portrayed in earlier episodes, especially with regard to Topher and Adele’s puzzlement over how it happened—which is not to suggest Dollhouse has a particularly good record on the consistency front in any case.)
* Called the Fred situation last week, though I was hoping she’d known she was a Doll all along. I think the character had significantly more potential that way—though it’s interesting to think that she was just set up to be the hero of the second season, the Dollhouse’s only self-aware victim and the audience’s new clearest focal point for narrative identification.
* Which also makes her a pretty good candidate for season two’s Big Bad.
* Neil and I spent a lot of time last week talking about Dr. Saunders and whether or not her Dollness suggests that the Dollhouse is able to do direct editing/programming of memories (“imprint code”), as opposed to a fuzzier, less exact approach (“imprint soup”). (I’d always assumed imprint code, and that most of the characters would turn out to have been modified in some way or another; Neil was more skeptical.) At first glance, this episode suggests they can edit directly—but the more I think about it it seems more likely that every Dr. Saunders is a Doll.
UPDATE: Though the fact that Fred/Saunders remembers a version of the Alpha attack that explains her scars may shift the balance back towards direct editing / imprint coding again.
* Is Victor really gone? He was one of the best actors on the show, that’s just not possible.
* It
willwould be interesting to see whether Mellie is really released. I’m also curious what deal Ballard signed; “I’m nobody” suggests he agreed to do the rest of her service as a Doll, whereas I think most people were expecting he’d be hired as a handler.* Since the Dollhouse’s contracts aren’t legal, of course, there’s no reason not to have your cake and eat it too. Once Ballard is enslaved, bring Madeline back in for a treatment.
* It also remains the case that you’d want every employee to be a Doll, all things being equal; see Dr. Saunders above. Why would they even let Dominics, Boyds, and Tophers in the door, when they can cook up compliant and perfectly loyal substitutes in-house? One possible answer to this might have to do with the exact nature of the Doll programs; if they’re imprint-soups as opposed to imprint-codes, maybe there are structural limits to how long they can be used before the personality imprint goes bad or breaks down.
* Echo/ED remains, by far, the least interesting thing about this show. I was really hoping they’d kill off the Caroline wedge so at least something interesting would happen there.
* Well, that’s a little unfair; apropos of the Great Transporter Debate this episode makes it a little hard to see how the process of being “wiped” isn’t itself necessarily death. If we accept that continuity of consciousness is required for metaphysical identity—and we wave our hands at things like sleep for just a moment—then it would seem to be the case that “Caroline” can be hypothetically restored after her five years are up and she’s hypothetically released from her contract. But it’s equally clear that the person who wakes up in Chrissy Seaver’s body is not metaphysically identical to the original Caroline. So how can the one revival result in a “real” resurrection and the other in a “false” one? What’s the difference between “copy” and “restore”? It could only be Ballard’s “soul,” which, like Topher, I scoff at. So it seems to me that when you’re switched off, that’s it, you’re dead, which has some pretty serious implications for comas, head injury, amnesia, insanity, aging, sleep, and just about everything else having to do with what we naively believe consciousness is.
*Hope you noticed and enjoyed the brief Firefly shout-out as much as I did. Take that, Fox. (UPDATE: Missed at first the Angel bit about souls in jars—it was a double shoutout to both his unjustly canceled shows…)
Sadly, despite the hopes of all good nerds, that’s probably it for Dollhouse. But “Epitaph One” comes out with the DVD this July, and there’s even rumors today that Joss might spin-off that into a new show. Because spin-offs of failed one-season flops are so very common.
Lucky for Me I Minored in Transporter Metaphysics
Speaking of Star Trek, the Poli-Sci-Fi Radio podcast got deep into the weeds this week on Dollhouse, The Prestige, clone “immortality,” and how the transporter on Star Trek is a fax machine that shreds its input when it’s done with it. (Bill has more on his home blog.)
Having spent a good portion of my childhood working out the metaphysical implications of such technology, I myself was moved to comment. As someone with a well-documented and simply unhealthy fear of death, I must admit that the consciousness-as-Ship-of-Theseus direction these discussions invariably take is both the only possible solution to the problem as well as a clear ontological horror in its own right.
Gerry Canavan 