Metafilter has an interesting (though a little biased) thread with a good collection of links about the current NYU grad student strike.

Speaking as a once-and-future impoverished grad student: Fight the power, stick it to the man, we shall overcome.

A pretty abominable review of Watchmen at Slate, rescued from "Worst. Review. Ever." honors only by the sneaking suspicion that the author isn't entirely on the level:

Whether you take this self-reflexivity as evidence of a newfound sophistication on behalf of the comic book, or as self-hatred tricked out as superiority—that old adolescent standby—is up to you. Watchmen was unquestionably a landmark work, a masterpiece, even. Before Moore came along, comic books were not generally in the habit of quoting Nietzsche, or scrambling their time schemes, or berating their heroes for their crypto-fascist politics, or their readers for reading them. It was Moore's slightly self-negating triumph to have allowed it to do so. But did the comic book have to "grow up"? The last time I looked, the only ones reading Ulysses and quoting Nietzsche were teenagers. No adult has time for aesthetic "difficulty" or "self-consciousness." Life is too short. Frankly, we'd much rather be watching The Incredibles.

"Books are hard?" Surely you can't be serious.

I'm really looking forward to teaching an all-comics course one of these years, and you can bet that when I do Watchmen will be near the top of the syllabus. (via)

The Mystery of the Umbrella Man. Lone-Gunmanist John McAdams has a more skeptical take.

LEGO Cthulhu. [.mov] (via Cynical-C)

This one in cartoon form, and originally from the Boston Globe. It comes in both official and non-official flavors. (via Drawn!)

The Gotham Gazette talks up Jonathan Lethem on books, race, genre fiction, and gentrification -- but mostly this interview is all about New York. There is an interesting tidbit on his next novel, though:

...I’ve spent awhile writing about Brooklyn and superheroes and, kind of, detectives.

I wanted to stop with all of that at once, and so I just wrote a novel that has no fantastic element—no superhero or talking animal of any kind—that also has no Brooklyn in it—it’s not set in New York; it’s set in Los Angeles. If you’ll notice, the last books all, in a way, have parenthood in common. There’s always fathers and sons in these books, and, if you read Motherless Brooklyn, it’s sort of about adopted fathers and adopted sons. But, I wanted to throw that out, so there’s no children and parents. The characters in this novel are all twenty-somethings living in Los Angeles, trying to start a rock band. It’s quite a silly book, in comparison to Fortress; it’s a romantic comedy.

Hmm. (That's a hmm expressing both "intrigued anticipation" and "muted skepticism.") Well, we'll see. I've liked everything else he's done. (via TEV)

Alongside the coming two cent price hike, the USPS is giving nerds a little love with a new series of DC Comics commemorative stamps. (via MetaFilter)

Still no word on a cure.

The Italian scientists found far higher levels of NGF in the blood of 58 people who had recently fallen madly in love than in that of a group of singles and people in long-term relationships.

But after a year with the same lover, the quantity of the 'love molecule' in their blood had fallen to the same level as that of the other groups.

Surgeons in France have carried out the first face transplant.

on an upcoming episode of The Simpsons. The Los Angeles Times chats with the Pulitzer Prize-winner and National Book Award-winner as well as Tom Wolfe and Gore Vidal, who also guest star in an episode where Lisa discovers Bukowski-like talents in Moe the bartender. Hilarity ensues.

I haven't watched The Simpsons since the early 90s, but it's always really funny when people summarize it for me.

I teach at a University that does not trust its lecturers to choose their own textbooks, which sent me pillaging the New Yorker's online database of stories in late July, an act not far removed from slush-pile wading, as any non-Alice Munro, non-William Trevor fan can attest. Two stories from 2004, however, stand out as classics of the form, and since Michael Chabon didn't select them for Houghton Mifflin's Best American New Yorker Stories 2005 collection, I think I'll use my first blogging opportunity (thanks, guys) to nominate them for my own anthology of 2004's best stories. Jhumpa Lahiri's Hell-Heaven is actually more satisfying than any of the stories from her Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, and I mean that as nothing but a compliment. Judy Budnitz's Miracle, too, deserves inclusion in an anthology of classic short fiction, whatever the year.

Okay, they're a year and a half old, but so are all the stories in Best American. And if you want something newer, check out this week's issue for a completely enthralling, fascinating profile of Matthew Carter, the world's most famous (hold your breath) typographer. The long-form profile is perhaps the most reliably worthwhile feature of this flawed but still relevant magazine. There is an entire world of thought and philosophy contained in typeface, more pertinent to writers and the content of our work than we could ever imagine. But it's only in the print edition. Sorry.

So for my very first BCR blog post (thanks, BCRians, for believing what your blog lacks is more knitting-related content!), I'm going to toss up a softball: one of my all-time--nay, my all-time--favorite Harper's reading, shamelessly copied directly from that classic mag, oh so many years ago. Whatever this dude is doing today, I wish him much success. (And by "dude," I mean Daniel Nussbaum. Not, you know, Oedipus.)

OEDIPUS, KING OF THE ROAD
By Daniel Nussbaum. Nussbaum has retold the story of Oedipus using 154 of the more than 1 million personalized license plates registered with the California Motor Vehicles Bureau. This story is one of thirteen that Nussbaum has compiled in PL8SPK, a collection that includes retellings of the Book of Genesis, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Andy Warhol's Diaries.

ONCEPON ATIME LONGAGO IN THEBES IMKING. OEDIPUS DAKING. LUVMYMRS. LUVMYKIDS. THEBENS THINK OEDDY ISCOOL. NOPROBS.
OKAY MAYBE THEREZZ 1LITL1. MOTHER WHERERU? WHEREAT MYDAD? NOCALLZ NEVER. HAVENOT ACLUE. INMYMND IWNDER WHOAMI? IMUST FINDEM.

JO MYWIFE GOES, "OED DONT USEE? WERHAPI NOW LETITB." I GO "NOWAY. IAMBOSS. DONTU TELLME MY LIFE. INEED MYMOM. II WILL FINDHER. FIND BOTHOF THEM."

SOI START SEEKING DATRUTH ABOUT WHO IAM. ITGOEZ ULTRAAA SLOWE. THE SPHYNXES RIDDLE WAS ACINCH BUT NOTTHIZ.

SUDNLEE WE HEAR SHOCKNG NEWS. WHEN IWASA TINY1 THISGR8 4SEER SED IWOOD OFFMY ROYAL OLDMAN THEN MARREE MY MAMA. SICKO RUBBISH, NESTPAS? WHOWHO COUDBE SOGONE? STIL MOMNDAD SENT MEEEEE AWAY. MEE ABABI AWAAAY.

NOWWWWW GETTHIZ. MANY MOONS GOBY. IMET THISGUY ON A TRIP. WEDOO RUMBLE. WHOKNEW? ILEFTMY POP ONE DEDMAN. UGET DAFOTO. MAJR TSURIS. JOJO MYHONEE, MY SQEEZ, MYLAMBY, MIAMOR, MYCUTEE. JOJOY IZZ MY MOMMY.

YEGODS WHYMEE? YMEYYME? LIFSUX. IAMBAD, IAMBADD, IMSOBAD. STOPNOW THISS HEDAKE. THIS FLESH DUZ STINK. ITZ 2MUCH PAYNE 4ONE2C. TAKEGOD MYEYES!
AIEEEEE!
Harper's Magazine/June 2000

The BBC has the longlist. It's probably safe for work, 'cause it's the BBC, but keep in mind I've never had a job where my internet activity was monitored. (via MeFi)

Fan Tan by Marlon Brando and Donald Cammell (William Heinemann)

In a moment Annie was on his side, Madame Lai was like a plant growing over him, and her little fist (holding the biggest black pearl) was up his asshole planting the pearl in the most appreciated place.

"Oh, Lord," he cried out. "I'm a-comin'!"

She could not answer. It is the one drawback of fellatio as conscientious as hers that it eliminates the chance for small talk and poetry alike.

He's been here for years. Welcome J.T. to the blog! We have no idea how he feels about sushi. He loves good writers. He loves PClem. We all do.

The Christian Science Monitor takes on the best fiction 2005.

Likewise, the Globe and Mail's 100 best.

C.S. Lewis didn't like the idea of a Narnia film. "Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare," he wrote.

"This is a great time to be editing a magazine," he said. "There is a global war on terror, a war in Iraq and we have a presidential administration that is collapsing. And we don't seem to have any politicians that know what to do about it. It is a very interesting time for Harper's." Harper's has a new editor.

In my day, we called it conjuring the Buddha. The Always Amusing Euphemism Generator.

(via via via)

Let's change the world. (via Cynical-C)

Check it out, Backwards City has a new blogger! Say hello to Casey. She's read everything, and she likes sushi. Plus she can put the burn on PClem like nobody's business. These are good things.

No one was left who could remember how it had happened, and the world had fallen into darkness. At least no one who would do anything. No one who would oppose the robots. No one who would challenge their power. Or so Dr. Wiley believed...

Mega-Man: The Rock Opera. With story summary and sample tracks.

(via MetaFilter)

UPDATE: See also: The Complete History of Mega-Man. (via Slashdot) Wikipedia can also educate you on this important cultural figure.

Best and worst cookbooks from The Village Voice. Topping the list: The Accidental Vegetarian.

At Powell's Books, Christopher Hitchens reviews The Annotated Lolita, while barely mentioning either the annotator or his annotations. He does, however, mention Reading Lolita in Tehran, which I haven't read but want to (and which my mother says is excellent). (via)

Eye Level: The Smithsonian American Art Museum's new blog.

...from the Sunday Times

...from the Guardian

Aeon Flux. At AskMe.

All about Kafka in the Washington Post. (via)

One day in the summer of 1950, a frustrated Nabokov carried the rough draft of what would eventually become Lolita out to the incinerator behind his rented home just downhill from Collegetown. Although the story of a 37-year-old European intellectual named Humbert Humbert and his obsession with a pubescent girl had been ruminating in his mind for years, Nabokov became discouraged with his new novel. Plagued by technical difficulties in writing and facing the start of another consuming semester of teaching at Cornell University, he decided, with his characteristic flare of drama, to send the project up in a puff of smoke.

Nabokov's wife, Véra, stopped him before the flames could lick up the "light of my life, fire of my loins" and advised him to reconsider. That quiet backyard near Collegetown played host to a pivotal moment in American letters; Nabokov did not burn the manuscript, but went on to write most of Lolita in Ithaca. He realized, as he notes in the afterward of Lolita, "the ghost of the destroyed book would haunt my files for the rest of my life."

(via The Elegant Variation)

Western civilization has reached its logical conclusion: dueling corporate logos. Round one has sixteen matchups. (via Gravity Lens)

Fun little timewaster. [Flash]

From Superman V to Superman Returns. The whole thing started in 1987. Here's an excerpt from the Kevin Smith portion of the tragedy:

First off, Smith was taken aback when Peters asked him, in all sincerity, "‘Kal-El’? Who’s this ‘Kal-El’ guy you keep mentioning in the script?" Then the insanity really started to take over. Peters demanded that Superman be stripped of his red and blue suit, arguing that the suit was "too pink, too f@ggy." WB also demanded that Superman undergo a costume change, even ordering Smith to describe the soon-to-be-trashed red and blue duds as being "‘90s-style." So Smith was forced to have Superman ditch his red and blues (which he grudgingly deemed "‘90s-style") early on in the script and switch over to the black and silver suit from the "death of" story as his permanent gear (ironically mirroring Poirier’s earlier script). Peters also hated the FX in the 1978 Superman film with Chris Reeve, so he wanted to get rid of Superman’s ability to fly. So Smith tried to get around this by portraying Superman as a red blur while in flight, creating a sonic boom every time he took off (he took this from The Dark Knight Returns). Peters then told Smith to have Brainiac fight polar bears at the Fortress of Solitude, demanding that the film be wall-to-wall action. Smith thought it was a stupid idea, so Peters said, "Then have Brainiac fight Superman’s bodyguards!" Smith responded, "Why the hell would Superman need bodyguards?" Peters wouldn’t let up, so Smith caved in and had Brainiac fight the polar bears. Then Peters demanded that Brainiac give Luthor a hostile space dog as a gift, arguing that the movie needed a cuddly Chewbacca character that could be turned into a toy. Then, after watching Chasing Amy, Peters liked the gay black character in the film so much that he ordered Smith to make Brainiac’s robot servant L-Ron gay, asserting that the film needed a gay R2-D2 with attitude.

Why is it so hard for these people to make a good Superman movie? He's a bleedin' icon. (via MeFi)

Timeline of the history of the English language.

Genre authors weigh in.

Science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together
--Ray Bradbury

... science fiction "is the myth-making principle of human nature today."
--Lester Del Ray

A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content.
--Theodore Sturgeon

If anyone were to force me to make a thumbnail description of the differences between SF and fantasy, I think I would say that SF looks towards an imaginary future, while fantasy, by and large, looks towards an imaginary past. Both can be entertaining. Both can possibly be, perhaps sometimes actually are, even inspiring. But as we can't change the past, and can't avoid changing the future, only one of them can be real.
Pohlemic, SFC, May 1992
--Frederik Pohl

Cleveland's finest municpal landmark is being restored. (High five: Brent)

The Dark Complex, the huge sequel to previous Flash masterpiece The Dark Room.

Via Metafilter, via jayisgames, your best internet gaming blog now that Little Fluffy has stopped updating again. Their "recommended" bar has some real gems.

So what are the great biopics? Gandhi. Malcolm X. My Left Foot. Goodfellas. Raging Bull. These, for sure. But what else? The People vs. Larry Flynt? Kinsey? Braveheart? JFK? Rudy? Schindler's List? What makes for a truly great biopic?

In any event: Walk the Line may not be one of the greatest biopics of all time, but I'm here to tell you, it's pretty damn good. Check it out.

The history of the twentieth century, as tracked by changes to Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever between 1963 and 1991.

I learned to read on this book. I had no idea how ideological it was.

At Flickr. Via Drawn!

On September 25, 2005, in a startling speech at the University of Toronto that caught the attention of mainstream newspapers and magazines, Paul Hellyer, Canada’s Defence Minister from 1963-67 under Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Prime Minister Lester Pearson, publicly stated: "UFOs, are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head."

And it gets weirder:

He stated, "The Bush administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide."

And weirder still:

Hellyer’s speech ended with a standing ovation.

Paul Hellyer joins a long list of government officials and former astronauts who suffer from dementia know about the aliens.

Rest in peace, Mr. Miyagi.

Would you believe I'd never seen Gandhi before tonight? It's true. What a great movie. Rent it. Buy it. Do whatever you have to do to see it.

Click here. Definitely on my list of places to see before I die.

Via Metafilter, an interesting article from the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly which argues that religious and supernatural beliefs arise from a misfire in babies' cognitive systems. Republished without permission on a public bulletin board. NOTE: You should not click this link. Instead you should run out at your earliest opportunity to a newsstand and purchase the current issue of The Atlantic.

Here is the argument in a nutshell:

Understanding of the physical world and understanding of the social world can be seen as akin to two distinct computers in a baby's brain, running separate programs and performing separate tasks. The understandings develop at different rates: the social one emerges somewhat later than the physical one. They evolved at different points in our prehistory; our physical understanding is shared by many species, whereas our social understanding is a relatively recent adaptation, and in some regards might be uniquely human.
...
Babies have two systems that work in a cold-bloodedly rational way to help them anticipate and understand—and, when they get older, to manipulate—physical and social entities. In other words, both these systems are biological adaptations that give human beings a badly needed head start in dealing with objects and people. But these systems go awry in two important ways that are the foundations of religion. First, we perceive the world of objects as essentially separate from the world of minds, making it possible for us to envision soulless bodies and bodiless souls. This helps explain why we believe in gods and an afterlife. Second, as we will see, our system of social understanding overshoots, inferring goals and desires where none exist. This makes us animists and creationists.

I've always been very attracted to the idea that religion conveys certain evolutionary advantages (group identity, strong hierarchy, existential comfort, even perhaps the mere willingness to reproduce at all) to religious groups over non-religious groups. Dawkins, for his part, is infamous for thinking that religions are little more than viruses of the mind (more here and everywhere). It's heady stuff, wherever the truth lies.

In Hollywood, there's a studio price and an indie price. There's a two-tiered system in place. On the studio side, the top movie stars cost $20 million against a share of the gross, and the top directors command $10 million (unless you're Peter Jackson coming off "The Lord of the Rings").

Movie stars know the rules today: Sucker the studios into paying your price and go to the indies for the quality parts that will sustain your career. (via A&L Daily)

"A study of baldness is a study of human nature." So says Kevin Baldwin, author of Bald!: From Hairless Heroes to Comic Combovers.

My mother's father was as bald as the baldest thing you can think of. So if common baldness myths are to be believed, I'm doomed.

A teenage boy has been meditating in a Nepalese jungle for six months, and thousands have flocked to see him, with some believing he is the reincarnation of Buddha, police and media said Wednesday.

How could Buddha be back? I thought he achieved enlightenment and thus liberated himself from the cycle of birth and rebirth. I thought that was the whole point.

Perhaps this is just the difference between "popular religion" and "theology."

Now AICN is saying (on rather thin evidence, but a man can dream) that Spike, Ripper, and Illyria may be three in a series of direct-to-DVD movies from the Buffyverse. Marti Noxon is one source:

"There are serious discussions going on about bringing some of the characters back and making a few movies that will go straight to DVD, but they will certainly be the quality they have always been," Noxon said in an interview.

Anthony Stewart Head is another. We'll see. As long-time readers can attest, I've been hurt before.

Three decades after bursting into pool halls and living rooms, video games are taking a place in academia. A handful of relatively obscure vocational schools have long taught basic game programming. But in the last few years a small but growing cadre of well-known universities, from the University of Southern California to the University of Central Florida, have started formal programs in game design and the academic study of video games as a slice of contemporary culture.

Traditionalists in both education and the video game industry pooh-pooh the trend, calling it a bald bid by colleges to cash in on a fad. But others believe that video games - which already rival movie tickets in sales - are poised to become one of the dominant media of the new century. (via Slashdot)

From all over:

The New York Times's 100 Notable Books of the Year. No real surprises here, though Maureen Dowd's book probably doesn't belong on the list. I guess working for the Times has its advantages.

I really would have liked to have seen Chris Ware's most recent book on the list, which is certainly my choice for book of the year. It certainly doesn't fit nicely into the fiction/nonfiction false dichotomy, though.

An interview with New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman. The hidden secret to breaking through the slushpile is at last revealed within this interview; you just have to find it.

Anthony Lane on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

It is directed by Mike Newell, who does a more coherent job than his predecessors; they tended to linger over the early setups and then scramble toward a confusing climax, whereas Newell measures out the magic with some aplomb. Still, he cannot do much about the slightly tired sadism that is creeping into the cracks of the Potter franchise.

This guy can take anything down a peg. You've got to respect that.

An interesting L.A. Times profile of the man behind the first four Harry Potter screenplays.

On the road with Jean Baudrillard. Fantastic literary snapshot from Talk of the Town.

After he read, Baudrillard expanded on his theme. “We say that Disneyland is not, of course, the sanctuary of the imagination, but Disneyland as hyperreal world masks the fact that all America is hyperreal, all America is Disneyland,” he said. “And the same for art. The art scene is but a scene, or obscene”—he paused for chuckles from the audience—“mask for the reality that all the world is trans-aestheticized. We have no more to do with art as such, as an exceptional form. Now the banal reality has become aestheticized, all reality is trans-aestheticized, and that is the very problem. Art was a form, and then it became more and more no more a form but a value, an aesthetic value, and so we come from art to aesthetics—it’s something very, very different. And as art becomes aesthetics it joins with reality, it joins with the banality of reality. Because all reality becomes aesthetical, too, then it’s a total confusion between art and reality, and the result of this confusion is hyperreality. But, in this sense, there is no more radical difference between art and realism. And this is the very end of art. As form.”

Exactly.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 2:07 PM  |

Like something out of a Judith Butler text about gender performance, the fa'afafine of Samoa are boys that are raised and culturally treated as if they were girls -- basically the mirror image of the sworn virgins of Albania. It's amazing stuff; our friend Su, a former Peace Corps worker who was stationed in Samoa, was telling us all about it last night. (She also had some very interesting things to say about the tension between indigenous Samoan religious beliefs, which are publically denied but privately practiced, and the nation's newer Christian beliefs, which are publically practiced but privately denied. Maybe I'll get into this another time. Best of all was Su's discussion of the Samoan word "maloo," which, like "aloha," means everything.)

Google, needless to say, has more.

It's all about echoes this break. First I read Jonathan Lethem's very worthy As She Climbed Across the Table, while neither my favorite work of his overall or even my favorite work of his early sci-fi period, is quite admirable. The basic story is the creation of a baby universe that thereafter won't go away like it's supposed to, called Lack by its creators because of its strange lack of any physical characteristics besides a seemingly random, potentially conscious tendency to prefer some things over others. It doesn't really read like a Philip K. Dick story, because Lethem's a better writer, and because Lethem is more concerned with human emotion than Dick -- but in many ways it feels like one, particularly in the novel's final, schizophrenic pages.

Next in the queue was Haruki Murakami's first collection, The Elephant Vanishes. I'm going to borrow a little bit from my friend Eric here, a fellow Go fanatic who recently described Italo Calvino as "a 9-dan writer," 9-dan being the highest ranking possible in Go. Murakami is unquestionably a 9-dan writer. I've loved every story of his I've read, including every single story in The Elephant Vanishes. There's that exhilaration you feel when you first discover your next new favorite author, the next person you want/need to be a completist of. That's me and Murakami right now. It's young literary love.

These stories are all over the map in terms of realism and surrealism, all over the map in terms of narrative voice, all over the map in terms of tone and metaphor and energy. It doesn't matter. They're all good.

Echoes, I said at the top of the post. I may be the only one who feels this way, but I hear the strongest echo of Raymond Carver in so many of these stories, particularly of "Cathedral," that wonderful transition at the end from alienation to communion. I don't know if Murakami's read any Carver, either in English or in Japanese translation -- and I suppose it's possible that it's actually the translator who's read a lot of Carver, if indeed there's really even any Carver in the mix at all.

It doesn't really matter how the echo got there. Of course it's there. That Carver feeling of essential loneliness, but still having faint hope for the possibility of connection, is probably the defining emotional state of our times.

Next up: It's Superman!, Thomas De Haven's literary exploration of the early years of the Depression-era Man of Steel. (Thanks to Patrick and Casey for my copy.)

Off to Wilmington for the holiday. I'll still be blogging, but maybe not as much. In my absence, consider the paradoxical nature of a national holiday celebrating peaceful coexistence with a people our nation later exterminated.

Here's where we're stopping to eat on the way. I haven't eaten all day in anticipation.

A Dictionary of Comicbook Words on Historical Principles. Based on the Latest Conclusions of the Most Dubious Wordologists & Comprising Many Hundreds of New Words which Modern Literature, Science & Philosophy have Neglected to Acknowledge as True, Proper & Useful Terms & Which Have Never Before Been Published in Any Lexicon. (via MeFi)

See also: Yyaaaargggg! and Japanese Sound Effects and What They Mean.

(1) Mildly Depressed People More Perceptive Than Others. Surprisingly, people with mild depression are actually more tuned into the feelings of others than those who aren’t depressed, a team of Queen’s psychologists has discovered.

(2) People with schizophrenia may be well attuned to spotting visual illusions, a study suggests. Despite experiencing hallucinations as part of their condition, schizophrenic volunteers to a study were better able to spot "real" visions than others.

Beautiful collection of Tolkien-inspired art. Pictured: "Sam Enters Mordor Alone," the haunting cliffhanger at the end of The Two Towers and my vote for the very best moment regrettably left out of the movies.

Some other personal favorites:

"At the Foot of Mount Doom"

"The End of the Age"

"The Wrath of the Ents"

"The Balrog"

"A Song in the Trollsaws"

"Aulë Prepares to Destroy His Children"

"One Morning Long Ago"

But they're all good.

(via Cynical-C, which incidentally is also linking to a rather interesting blog post about Einstein's brain)

In less annoying Kurt Vonnegut news, Yankee Pot Roast has a nice little McSweeney's-style tribute to him up today. It's the second-best Kurt Vonnegut tribute I've seen this month. Also, he does not support the terrorists.

Bob Dylan's college poetry sells for $78,000. Let's just say he got better.

The phantom time hypothesis is a theory developed by Heribert Illig which suggests that the Early Middle Ages (614–911 CE) never occurred, meaning that all artifacts attributed to this time period were from other times, and all historical figures were outright fabrications. [via Gravity Lens.]

I heartily endorse this theory or product.

Instapundit and the rest of the right-wing nutosphere have already latched onto this idiotic 'Vonnegut Supports The Terrorists' meme, so I might as well mention it.

Listen: Vonnegut does not support terrorism. He's a pacifist, you idiots.

The confusion deliberate misrepresentation is coming from an interview he recently gave to an Australian newspaper (a Murdoch paper, naturally). David Nason in The Australian alleges:

But in discussing his views with The Weekend Australian, Vonnegut said it was "sweet and honourable" to die for what you believe in, and rejected the idea that terrorists were motivated by twisted religious beliefs.

As MetaFilter explains at length, for starters the writer of the hit piece didn't realize Vonnegut was quoting a well-known antiwar poem:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori -- it is sweet and right to die for one's country. That's the old lie. Get it? And the longer interview makes it perfectly clear that this is Vonnegut's intended meaning:

There's a long pause before Vonnegut speaks again: "It is sweet and noble - sweet and honourable I guess it is - to die for what you believe in."

For an encore, the writer goes out of his way to misrepresent Vonnegut on basically everything and takes him at his word when he's quite obviously playing around. (Again, compare the newswire piece to the longer interview and see for yourself; even Nason recognizes that Vonnegut's amusing himself and not actually defending suicide bombers.) A person wouldn't have to have actually read one of Vonnegut's books to get this distinction; just having ever heard of Kurt Vonnegut ought to have been sufficient.

He's a black humorist for Christ's sake. What do you think black humor is?

Finally Nason just accuses Vonnegut of suffering from dementia. All in all it's a real home run for journalism.

George Szirtes on poetry in The Guardian. Via Bookninja.

Here are two propositions.

1. Poets are ordinary people with a special love and distrust of language.

2. Poetry is not a pretty way of saying something straight, but the straightest way of saying something complex.

It is in fact vital to love and distrust language. It is absolutely vital to tell truths that catch something of the complex polyphonic music of what happens. Someone has got to do it. It is poetry's unique task to say exactly what it means by singing it and dancing it, by carving some crystalline pattern on the thin, cold surface of language, thereby keeping language audible and usable. That is its straightness. That is its legislation.

Jorge Luis Borge's classic story in hypertext.

Here it is in normal text.

American Atheists interviews the late, great Douglas Adams.

AMERICAN ATHEISTS: Mr. Adams, you have been described as a “radical Atheist.” Is this accurate?

DNA: Yes. I think I use the term radical rather loosely, just for emphasis. If you describe yourself as “Atheist,” some people will say, “Don’t you mean ‘Agnostic’?” I have to reply that I really do mean Atheist. I really do not believe that there is a god - in fact I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one. It’s easier to say that I am a radical Atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it’s an opinion I hold seriously. It’s funny how many people are genuinely surprised to hear a view expressed so strongly. In England we seem to have drifted from vague wishy-washy Anglicanism to vague wishy-washy Agnosticism - both of which I think betoken a desire not to have to think about things too much.

People will then often say “But surely it’s better to remain an Agnostic just in case?” This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I’ve been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I think I would chose not to worship him anyway.)

(via that same Penn Jillette MetaFilter thread)

Space Cadets, which hits British television screens next month, is the latest ambitious experiment in 'reality TV'. The show's organizers have rigged a Hollywood space-shuttle set with all the sights, sounds and shakes of a genuine space flight. But, unbeknownst to the participants, the craft will never leave the ground.

Somebody's going to lose it when they find out the truth. Many people are speculating that the show will also involve some sort of shuttle-disaster hoax or a disaster-on-Earth hoax for added cruelty.

Reality TV appeals to the basest, worst attributes of humanity. Who wins has always been beside the point; the 'fun' is in terrorizing and mocking the losers. The only innovation here is that they've found away to eliminate the time-wasting "winner" from the equation, while also causing maximal embarrassment for the losers. Result: Ratings and profit. Reality TV sucks.

I believe that there is no God. I'm beyond Atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy -- you can't prove a negative, so there's no work to do. You can't prove that there isn't an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again. Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word "elephant" includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire?

You can listen and read at npr.org. (via Cynical-C and MetaFilter and all those heathen places)

Heh-heh. He said ass.

Sometimes reviewers try too hard to be clever. This is one of those times. (also via Bookslut)

On the train ride between Cork and Dublin yesterday, we came up with a list comparing rock bands/artists to writers.

A fine idea, but the execution is wildly flawed. Bruce = Norman Mailer? The Flaming Lips = Shel Silverstein? Marvin Gaye = Maya Angelou? Some of these I just can't abide.

Even the Bob Dylan = Ernest Hemingway, while flattering to both, makes no particular sense on close examination. Bruce is significantly more Hemingwayesque than Dylan, isn't he? I think I'd match Dylan with Walt Whitman, much moreso than Queen -- but that's just off the top of my head.

Some are better. Vonnegut = Hendrix make some amount of sense, The Clash = Hunter S. Thompson too. The Rolling Stones really do = Charles Dickens. I'm even somewhat willing to go along with the The Beatles = Roald Dahl comparison. But overall I'm outraged. (via Bookslut)

...has been cancelled. At Salon.

In fact, there is no war on Christmas. What there is, rather, is a burgeoning myth of a war on Christmas, assembled out of old reactionary tropes, urban legends, exaggerated anecdotes and increasingly organized hostility to the American Civil Liberties Union. It's a myth that can be self-fulfilling, as school board members and local politicians believe the false conservative claim that they can't celebrate Christmas without getting sued by the ACLU and thus jettison beloved traditions, enraging citizens and perpetuating a potent culture-war meme. This in turn furthers the myth of an anti-Christmas conspiracy.

Sixty years ago on Sunday, the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial got under way to bring leading Nazis to justice. Whitney Harris was one of the principle figures for the prosecution. Spiegel Online spoke with him about Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, the emotional scars left behind by the trial, and the United States of today. (via A&L Daily)

The Lucifer Project. This is a documentation and study of the feasibility of creating a sustainable fusion reaction from an initial fission reaction on Saturn caused by a significant quantity of Plutonium-238 being inserted deep into the atmosphere. A fusion-ignited Saturn-sun would be the key to creating a human-habitable area on Titan.

It's more than a bit tinfoilhattish, insofar as it believes NASA is already trying to do this. Also it thinks the Freemasons are involved. Also it got the idea from a Arthur C. Clarke novel. (via MeFi)

Bruce Springsteen was famously "born in the USA," but Senate Republicans have blocked an effor to honor the Boss.

*Now* they've gone too far.

Post title comes from the Boss's introduction to "Nebraska" from his excellent appearance on VH1 Storytellers (blogged). Via Jennie T at Rock Static.

In recent years, however, certain eminent contrarians - most notably Fredric Jameson, author of the seminal ''Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" (1991) and Russell Jacoby, author most recently of ''The End of Utopia" (1999) and ''Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age" (2005)-have lamented the wholesale abandonment of such utopian ideas of the left as the abolition of property, the triumph of solidarity, and the end of racism and sexism.

...

Borrowing Sartre's slogan, coined after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, about being neither communist nor anticommunist but ''anti-anticommunist," Jameson suggests we give ''anti-anti-utopianism" a try. In his latest book, ''Archaeologies of the Future," just published by Verso, he invites us to explore an overlooked canon of anti-anti-utopian narratives that some, to echo Niebuhr, might find embarrassingly adolescent: offbeat science fiction novels of the 1960s and '70s.

Jameson, a professor of comparative literature at Duke, isn't talking about ''Star Trek" novelizations. Because of the Cold War emphasis on dystopias, Cold War writers like Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Samuel R. Delany had to find radical new ways to express their inexpressible hopes about the future, claims Jameson. At this moment of neoliberal triumphalism, he suggests, we should take these writers seriously - even if their ideas are packaged inside lurid paperbacks. (via Boing Boing, which has more)

Aside from a hand-drawn picture of the Colosseum we purchased from a street vendor in Rome and a boatload of postcards and photos, a copy of If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (blogged just this week) was pretty much my one souveneir from our incredible honeymoon this summer. (Now I just have to teach myself Italian so I can read it.)

How great, then, to see one of my all-time literary heroes praised by another of my all-time literary heroes in the The New York Times Sunday Book Review this weekend. Here's the crux of Lethem's piece:

Italo Calvino never wrote a bad book. Yet an author of such diffusion, without a single, encompassing magnum opus to embrace (some readers will argue for "Invisible Cities," but that ineffably lovely book shows too narrow a range of Calvino's effects, too little of his omnivorous exuberance) needs a beginner's entry point, as well, perhaps, as a compendium to point toward posterity. Does it seem sacrilegious to propose a fat volume called "The Best of Calvino"? Does it seem to do violence to choose from linked pieces, or from books long since enshrined in reader's hearts in their present, inviolate state?

It's an idea I both love and hate. Whatever helps introduce readers to Calvino is, of course, a good thing.

But part of me feels as though we should leave Calvino sacrosant, give the uninitiated a copy of If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Invisible Cities, or (my choice for most unfairly neglected Calvino title) Mr. Palomar, and let them find their way from there. It was good enough for the rest of us, wasn't it? It'll be good enough for them.

(Thanks, J.T.!)

The British literary scholar, Christian apologist, and children’s-book author C. S. Lewis is one of two figures—Churchill is the other—whose reputation in Britain is so different from their reputation in America that we might as well be talking about two (or is that four?) different men. A god to the right in America, Churchill is admired in England but hardly beatified—more often thought of as a willful man of sporadic accomplishment who was at last called upon to do the one thing in life that he was capable of doing supremely well. In America, Lewis is a figure who has been incised on stained glass—truly: there’s a stained-glass window with Lewis in it in a church in Monrovia, California—and remains, for the more intellectual and literate reaches of conservative religiosity, a saint revered and revealed, particularly in such books as “The Problem of Pain” and “The Screwtape Letters.” In England, he is commonly regarded as a slightly embarrassing polemicist, who made joke-vicar broadcasts on the BBC, but who also happened to write a few very good books about late-medieval poetry and inspire several good students.

The New Yorker has a really good piece on C.S. Lewis this week. The best and most interesting segment is this one:

The emotional power of the book, as every sensitive child has known, diminishes as the religious part intensifies. The most explicitly religious part of his myth is the most strenuously, and the least successfully, allegorized. Aslan the lion, the Christ symbol, who has exasperated generations of freethinking parents and delighted generations of worried Anglicans, is, after all, a very weird symbol for that famous carpenter’s son—not just an un-Christian but in many ways an anti-Christian figure.

When “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” (magical title!) opens, four children who have been sent to the countryside discover an enchanted land on the other side of an old wardrobe; this is Narnia, and it has been enslaved by a White Witch, who has turned the country to eternal winter. The talking animals who live in Narnia wait desperately for the return of Aslan, the lion-king, who might restore their freedom. At last, Aslan returns. Beautiful and brave and instantly attractive, he has a deep voice and a commanding presence, obviously kingly. The White Witch conspires to have him killed, and succeeds, in part because of the children’s errors. Miraculously, he returns to life, liberates Narnia, and returns the land to spring.

Yet a central point of the Gospel story is that Jesus is not the lion of the faith but the lamb of God, while his other symbolic animal is, specifically, the lowly and bedraggled donkey. The moral force of the Christian story is that the lions are all on the other side. If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible—a donkey who reëmerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotees, as the king of all creation—now, that would be a Christian allegory. A powerful lion, starting life at the top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth.

Minesweeper on a torus. [Java] Via Geekpress.

Dial B for Blog! on The Many Faces of Krypto the Superdog and Radioactive Man

Comic Book Resources on the difference between art and craft (via Gravity Lens)

The book editor of the L.A. Times on the latest Lost tie-in: a novel supposedly written by one of Oceanic 815's dead passengers.

The Boston Globe on The Norton Anthology of Children's Literature.

Salon.com on Canongate Books's new myths series (which starts out strong with Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad and Jeanette Winterson's Weight) and why myths still matter.

Counting down to January 20, 2009.

It's pretty good, actually. It probably isn't as good as The Prisoner of Azkaban, but Goblet of Fire was a much more difficult book to adapt. Rest assured it's worth seeing and that you will enjoy yourself in the process. Now, allow me to nitpick for the remainder of this post.

Because of the length and relative complexity of the source material, the movie feels very episodic -- we jump around from plot point to plot point without a lot of unity or connection between bits. And a few of these episodes last a little too long, the Yule Dance sequence probably being the best example. (Emma Watson does a very good job at the very end of this sequence, though, almost justifying its length.)

It would have been nearly impossible to depict a Voldemort that would have satisfied everybody, but they certainly didn't. The movie Voldemort doesn't have the awe-inspiring presence he needs to have, either before or after his revivial -- this just doesn't seem like someone Who Must Not Be Named. Perhaps this is something they can work on for Order of the Phoenix.

On the plus side, contrary to early reports, the new Dumbledore wasn't as bad as he was in the third movie. I still miss the old Dumbledore, though.

Brendan Gleeson puts everyone to shame as Mad-Eye Moody; he's fantastic.

Aside from the above-mentioned pacing issues, the movie flows fairly well to a climax that really leaves you anxious for #5 and #6, the best books in the series and the movies I'm most looking forward to. Unlike the more hardcore fans I wasn't bothered by the plot changes and eliminations, mostly because I read the book so long ago I hardly remembered some of the finer points until Jaimee and Jennifer reminded me. I was actually surprised that I remembered several of Rowling's turns of phrase so exactly, particularly in the final graveyard scene; perhaps she's a better writer than I give her credit.

On the other hand, many of the movie's least satisfying moments and logical problems stem not from directorial decision but from the bizarre contortions of Rowling's imaginary world. Never before have Neil's complaints about Harry Potter sports been more apropos -- the winner of the first two pointless events in the Triwizard Tournament gains a fifteen-second head start in the third.

Other things make even less sense. The teachers' concerns about Harry entering the tournament, for instance, are completely undercut by the apparent willingness of these same teachers to purposefully risk other students' lives in the second event. (And if those lives weren't really at risk, then there's no reason why Harry should be rewarded for his attempt to save more than one. In fact there's no reason to use real people at all.) In the first event, what safeguards were in place to protect the crowd from the dragons? Seemingly none.

Likewise, it must be said that wizarding technology is absurdly inefficient. (Yes, I know it's a kid's book. Even so.)

So go see it for yourself.

The New York Post explains.

We've already got tickets for tonight's 9 o'clock show, so I'll let you know after if the changes are really as problematic as all that. I liked the last movie quite a bit, so I've decided to hate this one on principle, sight unseen.*

--
* I'm kidding.*

--
* Not actually kidding.

Who even knew there were 100 Canadian books? That's practically one for each Canadian. Just kidding, Canada. I love you guys. (via Bookslut, which gets in a zinger of its own)

The new Born to Run rerelease gets a perfect 10.0 from PitchforkMedia. I can't wait to get my hands on mine. (Thanks, Rock Static!)

Thank Jesus.

Holla Back NYC gives New Yorkers the right to Holla Back at street harassers. Whether you're commuting, lunching, partying, dancing, walking, chilling, drinking, or sunning, you have the right to feel safe, confident, and sexy, without being the object of some dickwad's fantasy. So stop walkin' on and Holla Back!

Holla Holla Back NYC, where harassers get their chance to rebut, is still forthcoming.

The WPA's Federal Art Project put money in the pockets of the unemployed, brought the avant-garde into small-town America, and started an aesthetic revolution.

(via RaShOmoN)

...Churck Norris
...Vin Diesel
...Mr. T
...Metafilter

They are all true.

Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits.

Seemingly every blank-cassette style ever sold. Some of these actually bring back memories. (via the second-greatest blog of all time, Rock Static)

As is well known, I'm officially ranked as the worst pool player of all time* -- but this Flash pool-shot game is pretty fun. Shoot the red balls and the other balls in alternate succession. Mouse sets the angle, holding down left-click sets the power. (via Metafilter)

UPDATE: Here's one from the same people that's more straight-up pool.
--
* This is 100% true. The only time I ever win at pool is when my opponent, usually Neil, scratches on the 8-ball, or occasionally on the break. Happily, my win-loss record is about 50/50.

Via Cynical-C, the truth is out there.

The 14 books of the Oz series are: 1) The Wizard of Oz, 2) The Land of Oz, 3) Ozma of Oz, 4) Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, 5) The Road to Oz, 6) The Emerald City of Oz, 7) The Patchwork Girl of Oz, 8) Tik-tok of Oz, 9) The Scarecrow of Oz, 10) Rinkitink in Oz, 11) The Lost Princess of Oz, 12) The Tinman Woodsman of Oz, 13) The Magic of Oz, 14) Glinda of Oz. These books are still being sold, and are being read to children who are being programmed with trauma-based total mind control.

By the way, Alice in Wonderland and Lord of the Rings are also Illuminati-related brainwashers. Just FYI.

At LA Weekly, also via Bookslut. Action Comics #1 tops the list, naturally.

Having soundly defeated all his blogging critics, Steve Almond turns the fire of his righteous fury on a random student who wrote him an email.

I am quoting her because her sentiments reflect, in a refreshingly unfiltered way, the posture of the Religious Right when it comes to abortion. And because I'd like to understand why a virtual stranger would accuse me of being a baby killer.

Too long has the country gone without Almond's voice of reason in the abortion debate. This was an essay that needed to be written. (via Bookslut)

Neat. Includes wicked animations of flight activity as the day goes on.



(also via Candleblog)

Timeline for the movie Primer, previously blogged here. Contains spoilers, obviously. Don't click the link unless you've already seen the movie. You have been warned. (via email from Bill at Candleblog)

Tim Goodman of the San Francisco Chronicle offers a carrot of faint hope to the nation's four million broken-hearted Arrested Development fans. Two carrots, actually.

Q: Can anything be done to save the show?

A: Yeah, find some Nielsen friends and start watching when the show returns to finish its run Dec. 5.

Other than that, not much. But listen, there are people inside Fox who adamantly believe (perhaps foolishly) that a miracle could happen. And here's the scenario for that: No freshman series is a bona fide hit, and shows like "Stacked" are tanking. Come May, when Entertainment President Peter Ligouri assembles his executives and puts the pieces together for next season's schedule, he just may look down the bench at "Arrested Development" and decide to keep it as a gem that can be shifted to a better night (DVD sales and Emmy lustre helping to offset the dire ratings).

...

Q: What are the chances someone else will pick up the series and save it?

A: Not good. "Arrested Development" would be a lovely addition to HBO, but the pay cable channel has said it will take no one's "sloppy seconds." Given the poor ratings and expensive per-episode price tag, no network or basic cable channel is likely to make a play for it. However, there is an intriguing rumor of a suitor: Showtime.

This idea actually makes sense. Showtime has been making great strides in its programming department, but the audience is still lacking. A name series that might prompt die-hard fans (are there any other kind left for "AD"?) to subscribe would be an enticing option. The idea is that "AD" might pair well with "Weeds." And no matter how you get it -- by developing it yourself or snatching it fully built off the discard pile -- a great series is a great series, period.

I said it was faint hope. But it's still hope.

Seasons 1 and 2 are still on sale for $32 total at Amazon. DVD sales brought back Family Guy and Futurama -- so if you've been on the fence about buying the seasons or if you've never watched the show, today is your day to do your part to save television's finest half-hour program.

Consider it a belated birthday present for me. (In fairness, you didn't get me anything.) Trust me, you'll be glad you did.

Kurt Amacker has some thoughts. (via Gravity Lens)

Seriously, I’m not trying to piss on Bob Kane, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, or Siegel and Shuster or any of those guys. They wrote the folklore of the 20th century and spawned worlds and characters I love. Unfortunately, they did so in an industry that didn’t respect its own product as literature....

Rising sea levels caused by global warming could shrink New Jersey by up to 3 percent in the next 100 years, U.S. scientists warned on Wednesday.

For a limited time you can buy both seasons of Arrested Development from Amazon for just $31.94 total. Put both in your cart to get the special price.

They're either burning off copies of a now-cancelled show, or else trying to boost DVD sales to attract the attention of another network. Either way it's a steal for the greatest sitcom of all time.

(Thanks, SlickDeals!)

His portfolio is online, and it's amazing. Drawn! rightly points out that it's impossible to pick just one favorite. Don't miss the LEGO handgun, a monster/dinosaur attack, Tom Christopher shaking his moneymaker on the moon, and what Americans look like on the inside. Pictured left: the hauntingly evocative "Galaxy Video" (click to enlarge).

Told Entirely in Emoticons. (via Bookslut. Perhaps even better is the Daily Garfield Digest feature from the Yankee Pot Roast main page.)

Submitted for your approval. [video]

When the Beagle set sail from Plymouth for the south Atlantic in 1831, with Darwin in the charge of Captain Robert Fitzroy, it was also taking three young Patagonian Indians home after a bizarre social experiment.

Last night, while Jaimee was grading papers, I watched what my old friend Adam J. Pelleschi calls "the platinum standard of time paradox movies," Primer, absolutely the most impressive movie ever made for under $7,000.

It's good, though I'm still trying to work out exactly what happened and how exactly it all makes sense. I watched it on my laptop screen while playing a little Go, and when it was done I immediately turned on the Director's Commentary and watched it through again.

I don't know how else to comment on it without ruining stuff, so I won't. But check it out, especially if time travel is your bag.

PrimerMovie.com Forums
IMDB
Netflix
Amazon

It's that time of year again.

HAMLET
Get thee to a nunn'ry: why wouldst thou be a breeder of
sinners? I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could
accuse me of such things that it were better my mother
had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful,
ambitious; with more offences at my beck than I have
thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape,
or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I
do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves,
all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery.

Terri Gross interviews Bruce on NPR. (via Shankar)

In the New York Times.

Using a camera modified with the tubes from a security camera so he could shoot in low light - sometimes just the light of the meters on the control-room console - Mr. Rebo captured an exhausted-looking but determined Mr. Springsteen, dissatisfied with the sound and calling for endless retakes. Yet when Mr. Springsteen got behind a microphone to sing "Jungleland," he had clearly thought through every dramatic inflection, from whisper to howl.

Mr. Springsteen invited Mr. Landau, a rock journalist who had proclaimed Mr. Springsteen "rock and roll future,"to the recording sessions, and Mr. Landau started offering advice. He convinced Mr. Springsteen to leave Blauvelt and move to a first-class recording studio, the Record Plant in Manhattan, where the album was finished.In "Wings for Wheels," Mr. Springsteen describes the album as the most theatrical songwriting of his career. He says he strove to make the songs cinematic, complete with scene-setting introductions, larger-than-life characters and atmospheric interludes. "The initial lyric would have been like a bad B picture," he observes. "The end product was supposed to be like a good B picture imbued with a certain spiritual thing."

The album (needless to say, the greatest of all time) was rereleased as a three CD/DVD set today. Shankar got a preview at the Springsteen symposium and he's still catatonic. (Hat tip: J.T.)

Four Decades of Realism.



(via Monkeyfilter)

'My First Literary Crush.' Terrible name, as the Rake says, but interesting content. Sam Lipsyte wins the prize:

Sam Lipsyte, author, Home Land
Simulations by Jean Baudrillard. It was the mid-1980s and this book could get you laid. Plus, reading about hyperreality was a great hangover cure.

George Saunders, Harold Bloom, Eric Alterman, ESPN's Bill Simmons, and Nicholson Baker also make appearances. (Ten bucks if you can guess what Bloom said.)

So you're dying to know: what was my first literary crush in college?

Gerry Canavan, author, nothing
Middle school belong to Douglas Adams, and high school belonged to Kurt Vonnegut -- but my first few years of college belonged entirely to Italo Calvino, whose If on a Winter's Night a Traveler I first read in Jean Barbaret's introductory comparative literature course the spring of my freshman year at Case, and which blew out the back of my skull. I'm still recovering.

All about Aquaman at RetroCrush. I had no idea devoted Aquaman fanboys even existed. There's more Aquastory at Monitor Duty. (via Gravity Lens)

...abiogenesis
...the badness of Augusten Burroughs
...the 2004 election probably not being stolen
...dissociative identity disorder
...the truth (with jokes)

New Yorker covers, surrealism, hot toothpaste-on-toothbrush action, W, furniture porn.

The illustrations of Christoph Niemann.

Via RaShOmoN.

Did President Bush invade Iraq to get his hands on Ancient Sumerian UFO technology? Obviously. And you thought Stargate was just a TV show. (also)

The Rapture Index: the prophetic speedometer of end-time activity. (Via Monkeyfilter)

Haruki Murakami continues to justify my New Yorker subscription with this week's story, "The Year of Spaghetti." Although given that I'm reading this story online before my issue has even arrived, one might fairly conclude that the high cost of my subscription has not been justified at all. (via Rake's Progress)

Ten pages of glorious awfulness. And the winner is:



Ken.

(via PClem's other blog, Rock Static)

Scientologists don't like it if you leave. Even if you leave quietly. There is a saying adherents fondly quote: "The way out is the way through." Deep thoughts passed on by decade-dead megalomaniacal psychopath Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, in whose writings church followers find a labyrinth so complex, so full of elitist jargon and weird science that those trapped in it cannot see that the way out is the way through—the fucking door.

So, of course I had to join...

Via Boing Boing, it's Mark Ebner's classic 1996 exposé on the Church of Scientology and its extreme attempts to silence critics. I believe we've discussed Scientology before.

From the outtakes on the Arrested Development Searon Two DVD, David Cross's excellent rant [.mov] about the sorry state of Fox executives. (Here's a link to the Season One DVD set.)

I'm still holding out hope that HBO or FX or god-willing even the WB rescues us from a hellish Arrested Development-less future. It's up there with Seinfeld and the early Simpsons in terms of unparalleled greatness. We deserve more. (from Waxy)

Does Dorothy represent the spirit of America? Is the Scarecrow the American farmer, the Tin Man the American laborer, the Cowardly Lion William Jennings Bryant? Does the Yellow Brick Road represent the false path of the gold standard, does the Emerald City represent the worthless greenback, and do the ruby silver-in-the-book slippers represent the saving grace of the apparently far suprerior silver standard? Wikipedia has all you need to know. (via Cynical-C)

We were ten minutes south of San Clemente when the putrid green daisy walls of the van started closing in. I recall the fat four-eyed lesbian sweater girl saying something like "are you okay, Mr. Duke? We've got a mystery to solve..." when suddenly the gullet of the garish chartreuse steel beast began to spasm, as if a digestive track readying itself to vomit. I began clawing at my hamstrings and when I turned my head I was looking into the irridescent eyes of a grotesque animal screeching "Ruh Roh! Ruh Roh!" in a hoarse irritating dog-accented gibberish. That's when things began to turn weird.

At New York Magazine. They think Doctorow's the odds-on favorite, but I think Gaitskill's gonna walk away with it. I haven't read her book yet, though I have read Doctorow's -- and though Doctorow's has something to say I don't think it's in any sense the book of the year. Meanwhile Veronica seems to be generating a lot of buzz. (via Bookslut)

Wikipedia's list of cognitive biases. Bandwagoning is probably the most pernicious, followed closely by the previously blogged just-world phenomenon, but you can't count out confirmation bias, wishful thinking, and the gambler's fallacy either -- not to mention the dreaded Zeigarnik effect. Just this weekend my father and I had a very lengthy and rather unenlightening political exchange over precisely which one of us was suffering from belief perseverance. (It was him.) Via The Huge Entity.

Only Wikipedia knows for sure. (Via Largehearted Boy, which also has a number of interesting things to say about music and music blogging)

It won't be easy, but A User's Guide to Time Travel can help. It's all part of Wired's Super Powers Issue. Other articles include:

Being Invisible

The Antigravity Underground

8 Super Powers

Feminista!'s "100 Great 20th Century Works of Fiction by Women." It's in response to the Modern Library's comparatively phallocentric 100 Best.

...is paying for its next 12 graduating classes to go to college. Wow.

Superintendent Janice Brown announced the Kalamazoo Promise program Thursday night. An anonymous group of donors will pay tuition and fees for any Michigan institution of higher learning for the next 12 graduating classes...

Students who begin attending Kalamazoo public schools prior to tenth grade are eligible for the scholarship. The amount depends on how long the student has been enrolled. If the student has attended to Kalamazoo Public Schools from kindergarten through 12th grade, they will receive enough money to cover 100% of their college tuition.

(via MetaFilter)

Why the right was, and still is, so obsessed with Jane Fonda. Fantastic book review which explains not just the Fonda thing but rather a lot about how the country got to be in the sorry state it's in today. The short version: it's all Nixon's fault.

America was no longer fighting for anything palpable – let alone to contain China, the superpower with which Nixon had just, with great fanfare, established a friendship. The new rationale was entirely circular: we were fighting in order to protect those pows the war was creating. ‘Following the president’s lead,’ Jonathan Schell has written, ‘people began to speak as though the North Vietnamese had kidnapped 400 Americans and the United States had gone to war to retrieve them.’ The Eden this scenario presented to a guilty American conscience was too tempting to pass up – children began wearing bracelets with the names of pows stamped on them. Fonda was the Eve that threatened it.

And here's a figue you might recognize from contemporary America:

In 1973, the Maryland Legislature proposed what would have been the first bill of attainder in its history to ban Fonda from the state and grant the government power to seize all money made from her films. ‘I wouldn’t go so far as to execute her, but I think we should cut her tongue off,’ one legislator argued. The floodgates had been opened. The urinal stickers would not be far behind. Every time Nixon ratcheted down the US commitment to the war, he launched an attack on the people who called on him to ratchet down the commitment. Che Guevara spoke of creating a New Socialist Man. The president’s upright vanguardists in the Operation Homecoming travelling circus did a much more effective job of inventing a new sort of capitalist subject: New Republican Man, willing to believe anything to preserve some semblance of faith in American innocence.

In other words, a Bush voter, a connection Perlstein himself makes early in the article:

Last year, the Fonda cult allowed thousands, even millions of anguished veterans and their sympathisers to hold onto their shaky faith in American innocence, while acting as the conduit for the character assassination of the Democratic presidential candidate. ‘They’re the men who served with John Kerry in Vietnam,’ the announcer said in the notorious TV commercial produced by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. ‘And they’re the men who spent years in North Vietnamese prison camps. Tortured for refusing to confess what John Kerry accused them of . . . of being war criminals.’ The tropes come straight from the Fonda mythology. A doctored photograph was circulated (it showed up in several newspapers) showing Kerry on a speakers’ platform with Fonda. The picture was found to be a fake, but the association had already been planted. ‘[Jane Fonda:] John Kerry with Tits’: five syllables full of implications for the politics of gender, power and anxiety in America.

Definitely a good read, and much more balanced than my selective quoting would suggest -- while it's generally sympathetic to the anti-war movement, the ending in particular takes on the notion that Fonda herself is blameless in all this. Check out the whole thing. (Also via A&L Daily)