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Friday, March 31, 2006

What Michael Chabon Learned in Workshop
The true scarcity we face is of practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are, but who find value in this knowledge, and even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared. You bring your little story to the workshop, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t; and then you’re gone, and it’s time for somebody else to have the floor. At MichaelChabon.com, via Bookslut.
Kavalier and Clay Movie
According to Chabon himself, "pre-pre-production" has begun on the film adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel with Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot, The Hours) on board to direct. No roles have yet been cast. Why am I picturing Heath Ledger as Kavalier, Jake Gylenhaal as Sam Clay, and Michelle Williams as their sort of shared wife?

I'm open to the idea of this book as a film, and hearing what Chabon has said about the process of writing the script it sounds like a lot of the filler and fat can finally be trimmed. Still, my immediate reaction is not anticipation. I'm loath to say this about one of my favorite contemporary writers, but K and C was (let's be honest) a bit overrated.

I'd much rather see The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which Chabon says is being shopped around with a screenplay by the guy who did Dodge Ball.
Katy Bar the Door!: Backwards City Submissions Closing on March 31
Coinciding with the close of our contest, we'll be closing all Backwards City submissions as of today, March 31, while we catch up on our obscenely backed-up slushpile. We'll take anything postmarked from today to about a week from now for Backwards City #4, but beyond that, it won't be read. We need to catch up and this is the only way to do it.

Watch the blog and the Web site for news of submissions reopening, as well as for the details on our first theme issue, Backwards City #5!
Firestorm
Alan Kistler's latest comics profile at Monitor Duty is all about Firestorm, a character introduced in the 1970s DC Explosion/Implosion that Dial B for Blog just got done talking about. I've never known much about Firestorm but now I'm quite interested. Click the [+/-] for the basic setup.
Stein and Ronnie were over-powered and knocked out. They were left next to the reactor, with the bomb lying beside them. Moments later, Ronnie woke up just seconds before the bomb went off. The explosion breached the reactor and caused an atomic blast.

You’d think these two men would be goners due to the whole atomization/disintegration thing that happens when a human being is caught in ground zero of such a blast. But instead, the nuclear energies somehow fused them into a new being of incredible power, a glowing being of atomic energy with flaming hair. What’s more, he heard Prof. Stein’s consciousness in the back of his mind. Stein seemed almost unreasonably calm considering the situation. He even had enough poise to explain to Ronnie that the young man was the dominant persona of the matrix that made up their composite being because Ronnie had been the only one conscious during the blast.

Ronnie realized that this new fused body he now inhabited had quite a few abilities. He could fly and had great strength and resiliency. He could emit energy blasts from his hands (which he called his “fusion blasts”) and alter his molecular state to become intangible. He could phase through solid matter. And most interestingly, he could perceive atomic structures and manipulate inorganic matter as a result.

...

Whenever he saw there was trouble, Ronnie would duck into a corner and will himself to become Firestorm. There would be a flash of light and he would be in his super-hero body. And wherever Martin Stein was at that time, he’d simple vanish away as he was transported to wherever Ronnie was, forced to join in the fusion. Stein was a valuable ally to Ronnie when they were combined into Firestorm. Thanks to Stein’s vast scientific knowledge, Ronnie was able to use his transmutation powers very effectively as the professor told him how to alter and combine inorganic matter to achieve desired affects. But each time they separated, Stein would have no memory of what he’d been doing for the past several minutes or hours and had no idea why he’d randomly woken up somewhere else with Ronnie Raymond close by.
Thursday, March 30, 2006

Best New American Science and Nature Writing 2005
SnarkMarket has links to each of the essays in Best New American Science and Nature Writing 2005. Some great articles here; you could spend all day browsing. Also via Cynical-C.
Top 87 Bad Predictions about the Future
A great list -- just watch out for the passion.com ads. Via Cynical-C.
'The Left May Be Dead, Joe, but Fear and Hatred of the Left Will Never Die. It's an American Passion.'
-U.S., pg. 232

U.S.! is a more than worthy successor to New-Stories-from-the-South-anthologized Backwards City #2 contributor Chris Bachelder's debut novel, the excellent and shamefully neglected Bear v. Shark. It even makes use of one of Bear v. Shark's peripheral characters, the Last Folksinger, in a way that is more than a little Vonnegutesque.

If you're a regular reader of the blog you already know the basic plot: in a world not entirely unlike ours, filled with comfortable and complacent people not particularly interested in thinking about the plight of people worse off than they are, author and activist Upton Sinclair is continuously reborn and just as continuously re-assassinated. He writes book after book, political novel after political novel, but no one ever listens; his works are ignored while his killers are national heroes.

Can you see where Bachelder is going with this?

And it's good.
50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers
An equal opportunity hatefest. Even Mike Piazza isn't safe. All I can say is that they picked the wrong Egan. (via Bookslut)
Wednesday, March 29, 2006

The Meaning of Mariah
In this week's issue of the New Yorker, the music critic with the most mercurial taste of anyone I've ever encountered, Sasha Frere-Jones, explains the importance of Mariah Carey in the history of pop music. Within a year or two, it's quite probable she'll break the Beatles' record for most #1 songs by an artist under 40, but rather than simply rationalizing her popularity, Frere-Jones actually finds evidence of Carey's influence on music, evidence of talent, evidence of...craftsmanship? You betcha. Interesting stuff that won't (don't worry) produce any cravings to buy the music in question.
'There was a time when there was no religion on this planet, and now there is lots of it. Why?'
The New Yorker reviews Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell.
Caricatures by André Carrilho
Click here. Via Drawn!
Growin' Up
This is an obituary for the generation gap. It is a story about 40-year-old men and women who look, talk, act, and dress like people who are 22 years old. It’s not about a fad but about a phenomenon that looks to be permanent. It’s about the hedge-fund guy in Park Slope with the chunky square glasses, brown rock T-shirt, slight paunch, expensive jeans, Puma sneakers, and shoulder-slung messenger bag, with two kids squirming over his lap like itchy chimps at the Tea Lounge on Sunday morning. It’s about the mom in the low-slung Sevens and ankle boots and vaguely Berlin-art-scene blouse with the $800 stroller and the TV-screen-size Olsen-twins sunglasses perched on her head walking through Bryant Park listening to Death Cab for Cutie on her Nano.
'The Disposable American'
A new book argues that layoff culture has hurt the American economy far more than it has helped. Reviewed in the New York Times. Via my mom.
Futurism
Kevin Kelly (author of '90s science classic Out of Control) speculates on the future at Edge. Behold, triple-blind experiments! Behold, Wikiscience! (via)
Hitler's Girlfriend
A book all about Eva Braun is reviewed at the Times Online. Via A&L Daily.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006

The Mistake by the Lake
There's some scandalous a-doin's going on at my fair alma mater, Case Western Reserve Purple Monkey Dishwasher University. Earlier this month the faculty cast a no-confidence vote in the president and the provost over administrative and financial missteps, which has now resulted int the university president's resignation. Google News can fill you in, if university politics is your bag.
'The Job of the American Film Critic is Complicated by the Fact that Virtually All Americans Regard Themselves as Astute Judges of Movies'
Salon has a good article up about the history of film criticm today.
It's All Over
"Arrested Development" creator Mitch Hurwitz says he will not be continuing with the series, throwing a major -- likely fatal -- monkey wrench into attempts to keep the Emmy-winning laffer alive for a fourth season. So says Variety. This stinks.
What Reality TV Is
The Smoking Gun has a copy of the "story idea" casting sheet for the new season of ABC's Extreme Makeover: Housing Edition.
We are open to any and ALL story ideas and are especially looking for the following:
* Extraordinary Mom/Dad recently diagnosed with ALS
* Family who has child w/ PROGERIA (aka "little old man disease")
* Congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis, referred to as CIPA by the few people who know about it. (There are 17 known cases in U.S. - let me know if one is in your town!) This is where kids cannot feel any physical pain.
* Muscular Dystrophy Child - Amazing kid who is changing people's views about MD
* MADD/Drunk Driving - Family turns tragedy into triumph after losing a child to drunk driving
* Family who has multiple children w/ Down Syndrome (either adopted or biological)
* Amazing/loved Mom or Dad diagnosed with melanoma / skin cancer
* Home Invasion - family robbed, house messed up (vandalized) - kids fear safety in their own home now
* Victims of hate crime in own home. Family's house victim of arson or severely vandalized.
Monday, March 27, 2006

Nastiness in The New Yorker
Jeff over at Expect Alternations has noticed something strange in this week's New Yorker: Shouts & Murmurs seems to be directly inspired by, and nastily mocking, January's sad "Prairie Fire" piece about the suicide of teenage prodigy Brendenn Bremmer (blogged here).

I can't remember ever seeing the New Yorker eat its own in this way.
24Blogging: Remember When Events Occurred In Real Time?
Now Chloe can come up with complete dossier on a lead in less than five minutes of looking.

Tonight's show, while exciting I guess, really highlighted some of the structural problems inherent in 24. For all their talk of plotting out the season in advance this time, once again they obviously haven't. How much contrivance can we accept before people start to turn their backs on this show?
1921-2006
Stanislaw Lem has died. Metafilter has your memorial thread.
Just a Reminder: This Is the Last Week to Enter the Second Annual Backwards City Literary Award or Chapbook Contests
Entries must be received or postmarked by Friday, March 31. Full guidelines are available online at the Web site, as well as online submission instructions. The entry fee of $15, which can be paid through PayPal, includes a copy of Backwards City #3 and #4.

Thanks, and good luck!
Unleashing Your Inner Modernist
At the Washington Post. Via Bookninja.
Sunday, March 26, 2006

Sopraneys 6.3
Great episode. One of the best in a long time, I thought. (6.1 was also in the running for one-of-the-best-in-a-long-time, but I think this one was better. Definitely funnier.) So far only 6.2 has been a disappointment.

Every character's neurosis was on display tonight. And although the preview makes it clear that Tony's fine, the last few minutes made me almost willing to accept a brain-damaged-Tony as a conclusion for the series. Really good.
The Big Question
If you were a first-time homebuyer, would you buy a home right now? Specifically, would you buy in Chapel Hill, NC?

Of course what I'm really looking for here is someone who can tell the future and can promise me we won't lose money if we buy a condo or townhome this summer (or, alternatively, can promise me we'll make a boatload more if we just wait a year).
Twelve Reasons for the Death of Small and Independent Book Stores
At the Web site of Boston's Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop, whose brick-and-mortar store is now defunct. You may notice that "their own failure to adapt to changing times" is conspicuously absent -- but aside from that, it's a good list that details the many ways the book industry has changed for the worse.
The Only Interesting Garfield Cartoon, Ever
October 23, 1989: Garfield awakes from his usual nap in a bleak future where Jon and Odie have vanished and his home has been abandoned. This storyline lasts a week and then the strip goes back to being neither funny nor interesting again.
Saturday, March 25, 2006

A Serial Killer Explains the Distinctions Between Literary Terms
At McSweeney's.
Dr. Strangelove
I hadn't watched it since I was 16. Public service announcement: It's really good.
Orbox B
The sequel to one of the world's most addictive Flash games, Orbox. (via Jay Is Games)
Stevie
This morning Jaimee and I watched Stevie, a slice-of-horror documentary that makes Capturing the Friedmans [blogged] look tame. The filmmaker, Steve James, briefly volunteered to be a Big Brother to Stevie when he was in college ten years ago. After graduating, James completely lost contact with Stevie until he reestablished contact in the hope of filming a feel-good documentary about it.

James was unprepared for what he would find. In addition to the usual deprivations of extreme rural poverty, Stevie's childhood abandonment at the hands of every authority figure in his life (including, notably, the filmmaker himself) has turned him into a selfish, violent sociopath. When he first makes contact with Stevie as an adult, the meeting spooks James badly enough that he doesn't contact Stevie again for two years. When he returns, Stevie is in jail, accused of molesting his eight-year-old cousin.

Stevie is a tragic portrait both of his family's and community's failure to make Stevie into a stable adult, as well as a frightening portrait of the sad result. It's hard to watch, but it's good. And, like Capturing the Friedmans, it raises important issues about an filmmaker's responsibility towards his or her subject. This movie is deeply exploitative in a number of important and discomfitting ways, not least among them: Why is this movie being made at all? What give James to right to use the suffering of Stevie and his family for his own benefit?

Netflix
The Woman Who Remembers Everything
McGaugh's journey through an intellectual purgatory began six years ago when a woman now known only as AJ wrote him a letter detailing her astonishing ability to remember with remarkable clarity even trivial events that happened decades ago.
Friday, March 24, 2006

DotQuest
If you've ever wondered what Pac-Man would be like as a text adventure, here is your chance to find out.
Worst Vacation Ever
The ship my family took that cruise on last year had a pretty massive fire. The fire may or may not have consumed the staterooms we stayed in. It's lucky more people weren't hurt; only one person died and eleven were injured.
Fancy Pants Adventures: The Game
Check out World 1 of one of the better Flash implementations I've ever seen. The stick-figure aesthetic is great, and the pants -- fantastic. (via Jay is Games. Also: Levers.)
Early Review of Pixar's Cars
I was skeptical of the Cars concept, but it sounds good. The lesson is, never doubt Pixar.
Intellectually Pretentious Video Games
An amusing photoshop contest at Something Awful. Via the good people at Gravity Lens.
Who Owns the Internet?
Ben Worthen wants to show you.
Thursday, March 23, 2006

SameGame
I probably spent half my sophomore year at college playing a version of this game. (via JayIsGames)
Rereading The Baby Sitter's Club
This is important critical work. (via Bookslut)
What Dick Cheney Requires
The Smoking Gun has acquired a copy of Dick Cheney's requirements for hotel suites when he travels.
The document is provided to hotels where Cheney will be bunking and lists how the Republican pol's "Downtime Suite" needs to be outfitted. While the vice president's requests are pretty modest (no extract-the-brown-M&M demands here), Cheney does like his suite at a comfy 68 degrees. And, of course, all the televisions need to be preset to the Fox News Channel (what, you thought he was a Lifetime devotee?). Decaf coffee should be ready upon his arrival along with four cans of caffeine-free Diet Sprite. And when Cheney is traveling with his wife Lynne, the second family's suite needs an additional two bottles of sparkling water. Mrs. Cheney's H2O should be either Calistoga or, curiously, Perrier, a favored beverage of French terrorism appeasers.
Dumb: The Game
Free puzzle warehouse complete with world-ranking system. Via MeFi.
A Tale of Two Baltars
SyFyPortal compares the Baltar of the original Battlestar Galactica with his contemporary equivalent. Warning: contains spoilers for the last episode of season two. (via Gravity Lens)
Don't Shoot the Puppy
Just one of the many anti-games at www.rrrrthats5rs.com. (via Waxy)
Wednesday, March 22, 2006

"Poem For The Twenty-First Century Gatekeeper" at Verse Daily
Clay Matthews's poem from Backwards City #3 is up at VerseDaily.com. They've been very kind to us there. We love them.
Paperback Originals
Even critically acclaimed literary novels often have a short shelf life in hardcover, with one-half to three-quarters of the books shipped to stores often being returned to the publisher, unsold.

That has a growing number of publishing companies, from smaller houses like Grove/Atlantic to giants like Random House, adopting a different business model, offering books by lesser-known authors only as "paperback originals," forgoing the higher profits afforded by publishing a book in hardcover for a chance at attracting more buyers and a more sustained shelf life.
Honestly, I don't see the appeal of hardcovers anyway. They're bulky, expensive, and look stupid on my shelf next to all those paperbacks. Good riddance. (via Tom)
Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Large Buttocks Are Pleasing to Me, Nor Am I Able to Lie Concerning This Matter
The Six Mix-a-Lot classic, translated to Latin. Reminds me of my friend Adam J. Pelleschi's senior Latin project, translating ABBA's "Dancing Queen." (via Cynical-C)
Science Finally Proves It: Whiny, Pathetic Losers Grow Up to Be Conservatives
In the 1960s Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality. The kids' personalities were rated at the time by teachers and assistants who had known them for months. There's no reason to think political bias skewed the ratings — the investigators were not looking at political orientation back then. Even if they had been, it's unlikely that 3- and 4-year-olds would have had much idea about their political leanings.

A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity.

The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests.
Why, Sometimes I've Believed As Many As Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast
Two new books purport to explain the evolutionary origins of human religion. Salon and the Times of London review.
Now It Can Be Told
New York Magazine has an interesting piece on 9/11 conspiracy theories. These are everywhere you look on the 'net. Every time one gets shot down, two more arise in its place.
Saying he was in New York “to debunk the outrageous myth . . . the absurd fairy tale” that the tragic events of September 11, 2001, were the work of nineteen fanatics with box cutters sent by a bearded man in a cave, the 60-year-old Tarpley projected a slide designated “State-Sponsored False Flag Terrorism,” depicting a Venn diagram of three interconnected circles.

Circle one was labeled patsies, comprising “dupes,” “useful idiots,” “fanatics,” “provocateurs,” and “Oswalds.” Included here were the demonized bin Laden and alleged lead hijacker Mohammad Atta. The second ring, marked MOLES, contained “government officials loyal to the invisible government,” such as Paul Wolfowitz, Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and, of course, George W. Bush. The third circle, PROFESSIONAL KILLERS, encompassed “technicians,” “CIA special forces,” “old boys”—the unnamed ones who did the dirty work and kept their mouths shut.
(via A&L Daily)
Most-Owned Library Books
If the number of libraries stocking a book is any indication of its world-historical aesthetic value, then congratulations Mr. Jim Davis: Garfield is for the ages. (via BookNinja)
Monday, March 20, 2006

How to Survive the Coming Apocalypse
An AskMetafilter special report in three parts. (via MeTa)
Man Severs Own Penis, Throws It at Officers
That's really the headline.

Via my old friend Shankar D, as always your source for castration and Gummi-Bear-theme-song news.
Adultescents
You say you're more concerned with the plight of the crested shelduck than a flock of latte-guzzling boomerang kids? The authors are aware that their premise goes against the accepted stereotype of spoiled "adultescents" who would rather sponge off their parents than get a real job. Their contention is that the postponement of adulthood may have more to do with socioeconomic conditions than with an epidemic of thumb-sucking fecklessness. Via A&L Daily.
Sunday, March 19, 2006

Words of Wisdom
"In baiting a mousetrap with cheese, always leave room for the mouse."

-Saki, Zen Calendar 2006
A Blogge
Geoffery Chaucer's blog. Featuring the popular feature Aske Chaucere. (via Bookninja)
Saturday, March 18, 2006

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers


My once and future rooomate Dr. Brent passed the word on The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, a movie I probably would never have rented without his recommendation (despite being a fan of Strangeglove). It's great. Really great. Maybe one of the best biographical films of all time, even.

Jennie T was eating it up.
Welcome Back
Welcome Back, Kotter: The Movie. Why, God, why? Ice Cube in the starring role is just the tip of this WTF-iceberg.
This Is Going to End Badly
Created by Adam de la Peña, Todd James and Peter Girardi — all alumni of the ribald Comedy Central puppet series "Crank Yankers" — "Minoriteam" is a provocative animated show that sends up bigotry.

But it's not like they're trafficking in juvenile racist stereotypes themselves:
The team's leader, Dr. Wang, is an Asian, wheelchair-bound mathematical genius with a freakishly large brain. He speaks with a heavy Chinese accent and is in the laundry business.

Non-Stop is the alter ego of Dave Raj, an Indian, former professional skateboarder turned convenience store clerk who is incapable of being killed by firearms. After having been shot 235 times during various attempted robberies, his skin is saturated with lead, which serves as a bulletproof armor of sorts; when necessary, his skateboard morphs into a flying carpet.

Landon K. Dutton, a black man awkwardly teaching women's studies at Male University, turns into Fasto, the world's fastest man. His extreme rage propels him to travel at breakneck speeds. When not fighting crime he spends his time "studying" the opposite sex; during one episode, it takes him only seconds to satisfy a roomful of Thai prostitutes.

Richard Escartin, a Mexican oil baron, trades his tailored suits and silk ties for a giant sombrero and a leaf blower when he becomes El Jefe, Minoriteam's hardest working member. El Jefe's blower is no ordinary garden tool. It can suck and blow with deadly force and rip holes through time and space. His kryptonite? Tequila. "I think a lot of people can relate to that," Mr. de la Peña said.
Don't miss the slideshow, which includes such informative captions as The creators have braced themselves for negative feedback. Surely someone will be uncomfortable watching a Jewish superhero get aroused while chasing a giant glowing nickel, they said. At right: Racist Frankenstein. That concept's actually pretty funny.
Friday, March 17, 2006

V for Vendetta
Well, *I* didn't think it was an incoherent mess. In my opinion it actually follows the book fairly closely; it's hard for me to see what Alan Moore is so upset about, other than his personal blood feud with DC. The only really startling omission I noticed is that the movie rather downplays the book's implication that Evey is the new V (and the cop the new Evey). (It also steals one of the prominent closing shots pretty flagrantly from Fight Club, for what it's worth.)

The Shadow Galaxy shrine is still the best V for Vendetta site on the Web. Do all your V reading there.
Sushi Samurai
Making sushi is harder than you think. [Flash]
Remembering Octavia Butler
Octavia Butler often described herself as an outsider, but within science fiction she was loved as an insider, someone who was a fan first and came to s.f. writing as an enthusiastic reader. She said many times in many interviews that she began to write science fiction at age 12, having seen the movie "Devil Girl From Mars" and been convinced that she could tell a better story than that.
Karen Joy Fowler remembers Octavia Butler at Salon.
I Only Read It for the Articles
The New Yorker this week has, somewhat unbelievably, an illuminating essay on the history of the Playboy centerfold. Illuminating, of course, not just in what it says about Playboy but also what it says about the culture that both feeds and consumes it.
Not surprisingly, however, many of the Playmates, once they passed their twenties, fell back into regular life. One is a dental hygienist for dogs and cats, two are cops, one taught creative writing at the City University of New York. Several have become artists. Miss September 1998 is a “traditional Aztec dancer”; Judy Tyler, Miss January 1966, creates “Fronds by Judea—original art from palm trees.” Miss July 1999 is making “hip-hop action sports videos” with her boyfriend. “I want to be taken seriously,” she says, “because I intend to be a good producer one day.” Quite a few of the ex-Playmates, in keeping with the book’s insistent claim of normality, list their families as their sole and beloved project. At the same time, the text is very forthcoming about how many divorces these women have had, and how a number of them are no longer eager to have a man in the house. Several Playmates have found God. Debra Jo Fondren, the gorgeous Miss September 1977, who now does temporary secretarial work, reports that she finally stopped participating in Playboy promotions. There was “too much emphasis on sex,” she explains.
Thursday, March 16, 2006

How Not to Commit Suicide
A public service announcement. (via MetaFilter)
Your Tax Dollars at Work
The America-haters over at DeviantArt have created a poster visually detailing where our tax money goes, with a focus on just how much goes towards the military. (via Boing Boing)



This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

--Notorious America-hater Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 17, 1961
We Blew It
Over at Salon they're on a doomsday kick, reviewing Kevin Phillips's American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, which argues that the America empire "experiment" is doomed, while Mike Davis counters that it's actually the entire planet turning into one giant slum.
Make a List, Check It Twice
Americablog is making the definitive list of every stupid thing Bush has done since being elected. And it needs your help. Via Cynical-C.
VerseDaily Unhorsed
Backwards City #3 scores another poem of the day over at VerseDaily. Today the poem in question is Gibson Fay-LeBlanc's "Rider Unhorsed." It's good stuff.
How to Tell Someone They Smell
Forbes explains.
Indigo Kids
Just be glad they hadn't thought of this yet when you were a kid.
"Do you know what an indigo child is?" a man onscreen asked a group of firefighters. None of them had a clue. On came the doctors in white lab coats, the Chinese scientists, the clairvoyants, the wild-haired psychics and the bearded New Age gurus. These people were experts on the subject.

"We're watching humans evolve," explained one. "Just like we've evolved to now we have an opposable thumb, we're witnessing the human species evolve into a telepathic creature."

All over the world, these experts explained, a new breed of children is emerging who can read minds, predict the future and bend silverware through sheer brainpower. These kids, called indigo children, are surrounded by a blue aura, hence the name, and believed by some to be reincarnated beings. Disruptive, impatient and easily bored, indigos are commonly diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and then medicated until they stop seeing angels. If they are nurtured correctly, however, they will save the world.

"They are our future," said another expert, a clairvoyant named Phil Gruber. "And they are here to simply usher in a new golden age where love will triumph."
This whole ridiculous concept was mentioned in that sad New Yorker article about the gifted Nebraskan kid who killed himself, not too long ago.
Real Good, Fake Bad
Why do we place so much aesthetic value on authenticity in art?
Name the Biggest Number You Can Think Of
You have fifteen seconds. Using standard math notation, English words, or both, name a single whole number -— not an infinity —- on a blank index card. Be precise enough for any reasonable modern mathematician to determine exactly what number you’ve named, by consulting only your card and, if necessary, the published literature.
Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Another Alan Moore Interview
At Mile High Comics. I'm quite looking forward to the release of V for Vendetta this weekend.

UPDATE: Thanks to J.T. for pointing me to the New Yorker's review, which indicates that perhaps I shouldn't be looking forward to it after all:
V for Vendetta, a dunderheaded pop fantasia that celebrates terrorism and destruction, is perhaps the ultimate example of how a project with modest origins becomes a media monster.

...

The country “doesn’t need a building,” V says. “It needs an idea.” Yes, but “Vendetta” doesn’t have any ideas, except for a misbegotten belief in cleansing acts of violence. How strangely doth pop make its murderous way, as V might say. The quarter-century-old disgruntled fantasies of two English comic-book artists, amplified by a powerful movie company, and ambushed by history, wind up yielding a disastrous muddle.
Justice (Part 1)
The first part of a three-part essay on Siegel and Shuster's creation of Superman is up at Comic Book Resources:
The murder of Mitchell Siegel will never be solved. Still, the greater mystery in regards to pop culture concerns the effect of this senseless killing on his young son, Jerry. How deep was Jerry's sense of outrage when he dedicated his life to truth and justice in co-creating the world's most legendary fictional hero?
At right: the original Superman shield. (via Gravity Lens)
And a Few More
Three of these are from A&L Daily, one is from Bookslut.
* On the friendship between Van Gogh and Gauguin.
* On the difference between criticizing Wal-Mart and criticizing America.
* More on the happy hatred between Duke and UNC. This is suddenly very important to me.
* On the "baby gap" between liberals and conservatives.
Thirty Years of The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins looks back.
A teacher reproachfully wrote that a pupil had come to him in tears after reading the same book, because it had persuaded her that life was empty and purposeless. But if something is true, no amount of wishful thinking can undo it. As I went on to write, “Presumably there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but do any of us really tie our life’s hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don’t; not if we are sane. Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions. To accuse science of robbing life of the warmth that makes it worth living is so preposterously mistaken, so diametrically opposite to my own feelings and those of most working scientists, I am almost driven to the despair of which I am wrongly suspected.”
Good Lord, This Can Happen?
Slate explains what to do when your eyeball pops out of its socket.
Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Check It Out, We're On Verse Daily
Debbie Urbanski's poem from Backwards City Review #3, "The Circus Woman Who Is Discussing Somebody Else's Idea of Temptation," is on the Verse Daily Web site today. Her other poem from the issue is on our Web site.
Ask McSweeney's Internet Tendency
What would your ideal fantasy-baseball lineup be if you had to create it using only characters from classic Nintendo video games? Via Kottke.
No Whammy No Whammy No Whammy Stop
Peter Tomarken, the host of Press Your Luck, has died.
Monday, March 13, 2006

In the Future Everyone Is a Vegetarian
Another confirmed U.S. case of mad cow disease, this time in Alabama. Thanks to Neil, who eats only chicken.
A Good Week to Talk to the Reclusive
DeLillo is interviewed about his new play, Love Lies Bleeding, which, unless I'm mistaken, takes its name from a classic Elton John song off Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

I can watch a football game and I'll hear things that others don't quite seem to get right away. One thing I noticed watching football is that some announcers have a tendency to use a player's first and last names. All the time, regardless of the situation. No matter how fast they are talking. It's never Manning,it's never Eli. It's Eli Manning. And there are players with enormously long names, like Troy Polamalu, who plays for the Steelers, and the guy will always say both names.

Isn't DeLillo a lot like Seinfeld (with an abiding appreciation for the apocalyptic, of course)?

Via Bookslut
Talk about Orwellian
Many people remember reading George Orwell's "Animal Farm" in high school or college, with its chilling finale in which the farm animals looked back and forth at the tyrannical pigs and the exploitative human farmers but found it "impossible to say which was which."

That ending was altered in the 1955 animated version, which removed the humans, leaving only the nasty pigs. Another example of Hollywood butchering great literature? Yes, but in this case the film's secret producer was the Central Intelligence Agency.
(via Bookninja)
Annie Get Your Gun
The people connected with Brokeback Mountain, including me, hoped that, having been nominated for eight Academy awards, it would get Best Picture as it had at the funny, lively Independent Spirit awards the day before. (If you are looking for smart judging based on merit, skip the Academy Awards next year and pay attention to the Independent Spirit choices.) We should have known conservative heffalump academy voters would have rather different ideas of what was stirring contemporary culture. Roughly 6,000 film industry voters, most in the Los Angeles area, many living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest-homes, out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city, decide which films are good. And rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of Trash - excuse me - Crash a few weeks before the ballot deadline. Next year we can look to the awards for controversial themes on the punishment of adulterers with a branding iron in the shape of the letter A, runaway slaves, and the debate over free silver.
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
Good book. I quite enjoyed it. Like many memoirs -- hell, like many books -- it seemed to run out of steam a bit before the ending, but the setup of the author meeting his deadbeat, borderline psychotic father at a homeless shelter grabs one's attention, and Flynn's childhood and young adulthood stories are interesting enough to make the story work. Glad I bought it on a whim from the W.W. Norton booth at AWP.
Sunday, March 12, 2006

The Important Questions
AskMetafilter: How long would it take before a zombie's muscles were no longer functional?
Sopraneys 6.1
Good season opener, and [incredibly minor, obvious-when-you-think-about-it spoiler for next episode] it'll be nice to get the obligatory dream episode out of the way early this season [/spoiler].

I wonder if Gino's inheritance/rat storyline was an abbreviated version of what they intended to do with Robert Funaro's character back when they briefly made him a regular back in season there. Additionally, for once a Sopranos anticlimax amused me rather than pissing me off; having Ray Curto the rat drop dead after all those years of waiting to see what would come of it (nothing, apparently) was just funny to me. Also, who on Tony's crew isn't a rat?

[potential spoiler] Speaking of Sopranos anticlimaxes, there's a rumor going around that the Russian from Pine Barrens will finally be back this year. Furio too. I'll believe it when I see it.

PS: Note to self: Hanging yourself is brutal. Don't do it.
Match Point
I liked it. I'm actually fairly surprised it didn't get more Oscar love, as it was certainly better than Crash, and certainly in the same ballpark as Brokeback.

Despite a good script, some of the actors strained with the material in parts, especially Scarlett Johansson, whose portrayal I found fairly excruciating in the first half of the movie. (She was better in the second.) The intertext with such things as opera and Greek tragedy and Crime and Punishment was quite nice, however, and the movie throws you some nice curveballs here and there (though it borrows perhaps a bit too heavily from an earlier Allen picture, Crimes and Misdemeanors).

Overall, it's a perfectly cromulent Woody Allen movie. Go ahead and see it.
Alan Moore on Hollywood/Satan
But if Mr.Moore had his way today, his name would no longer appear on almost any of the graphic novels with which he is most closely associated. "I don't want anythingmore to do with these works," he said in a recent telephone interview, "because they were stolen from me — knowingly stolen from me."

Moore is interviewed at length at the New York Times. He discusses, among other things, his disdain for Hollywood and DC, the company who will never ever ever return to him the rights to his most famous and beloved works. Sounds a lot like the reason Prince changed his name to the much ridiculed symbol in the early 90s. But Moore has simply asked that his name, rather than be changed, be removed entirely from the forthcoming V for Vendetta film credits.
Jaimeeblogging Returns!: The Secret Asian Jersey Kinky Ha-Ha (and Humor in Poetry)
After attending a discussion at AWP about comedy in poetry, I ask: Who is fuming over our lost, "serious" art? (I have one former teacher in mind.) Why is humorous poetry not taken seriously? What is supposedly wrong with it?

One panelist suggested it is because we are modeled on the lyric, the Shakespeare, and so humorous poetry is not in the examples we are taught -- in the category of great poetry, we don't have any humorous examples of poetry. Another panelist made a joke about the girl with big breasts in high school - though I forget now the logic of his answer. (Is this because I didn't take his joke answer seriously? Actually, I think its logic is richer and more complex to transform into a serious direct memory than a straightforward answer would have been.)

The problem is there are imbeciles and egoists who skim too quickly the surface of a poem, see its humorous content, and fail to look any further -- fail to admit that humor is an emotion, humor is moving and expressive, and humor is largely intellectual. Even a quote from a previously linked article in Contemporary Poetry Review irked me:
Poetry is capable of the most subtle perception and the most civilized thought, if only a poet takes himself and the art seriously enough to achieve them.
This quote could have come from the mouth of the aforementioned stodgy old white-haired white male former professor of mine. I would slightly alter this quote to say "Comedy in poetry is capable of the most subtle perception and the most civilized thought, if only a poet takes her role (though not necessarily herself) and the art seriously enough to achieve them."

In the large ballroom reading, Tony Hoagland began with a joke: Isn't it amazing that we can fit so many people with such large inner lives into this one room? Take yourself and your own large inner life too seriously and you fail to see the statement's humor --  but if you laugh, you're laughing at a most civilized, serious thought, as something inside you cringes a little.
Saturday, March 11, 2006

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City*
Two, actually. Due to an unprecedented display of incompetence on the part of United Airlines, the three of us are marooned here in Austin until Monday night. We'll drown our sorrows in our free king-size hotel suites, one free roundtrip ticket each, and a near-infinity of complimentary $10 Denny's vouchers.

--
*The book I'm currently reading. Austin's actually a fairly cool city, given that it's in Texas and that large swaths of the city are spookily empty until after 7 pm. We could barely find an open pizza place.
Holy Crap
This can happen?
A motorist was trapped in his car driving at almost 130mph for 60 miles after the accelerator jammed.
How to Write Good
Apparently it's easier than you think.
1. Buy a National Geographic magazine. Page through it and select a setting. Look at the photos to help you create vivid descriptions.

2. Your novel should have two main characters C1 and C2 (a man and a woman) and two secondary characters C3 and C4 (also a man and a woman). C1 should fall in love with C2 during the course of the book, or, if already in love, their love should deepen. A subliminal attraction should also exist between C1 and C4 to increase tension. Character C1 should have a special skill that will help him (or her) solve problems presented in the book.

3. At some point in the book, C1 and C2 should show a physical expression of their attraction, such as exhibited by holding hands or kissing.
(via BookNinja)
Creating Buzz
Last night Jaimee came up with a foolproof plan to send Tom out to create a little buzz around the Bookfair, Tobias-Fünke-style:
That Backwards City is some kind of something! Boy, this Backwards City is all anybody's ever talking about! So sick and tired of hearing about how brilliant that Backwards City is! Overrated!
It's times like this when it's a good thing we have a David-Cross lookalike on staff.
But Since Most People Are Not Doing That
There's a good interview with my favorite controversial ethicist, Peter Singer, in February's issue of The Believer, but only an excerpt is available online. Here's the administrative summary:
Bad priorities:
Supporting the theater while people don’t have drinking water
Eating meat when we can nourish ourselves without it
Driving large cars when they may prevent foreigners from growing food in a stable climate
Protecting embryos but starting wars
Why the Beatles Matter
At Commentary. Via A&L Daily.
Hoagland/Nye
Another great thing I was dragged kicking and screaming and whining to tonight was the Tony Hoagland / Naomi Shihab Nye reading, which wound up being one of the best readings I've ever attended hands-down. Both poets were fantastic and funny and clever and wonderful, but what made the event really magical was the poor, beleagured closed-captionist, whose tragic efforts to keep up with the frenetic pace of the poems will stick with everybody in attendance for a long time.

I was going to infringe twice on Mr. Hoagland's copyrights tonight, but his fantastic piece on too-much metaphor, "What Do You Mean When You Say She Looked At You Like A Motel Looking At A Highway?", isn't in What Narcissism Means to Me (which, incidentally, you should buy immediately, along with Ms. Nye's -- I did), and "America" is already available online at American Poetry Review. So there will be zero charges of copyright infringement leveled against the BCR this evening.

I will, however, reproduce my favorite stanzas from the latter poem.
...
And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

"I was listening to the cries of the past,
when I should have been listening to the cries of the future"

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable
Or what kind of nightmare it might be

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

Even while others are drowning underneath you
And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

And yet it seems to be your own hand
Which turns the volume higher?
Great night.
So That's Why They Call It Bat City
I was skeptical at first, but the most impressive sight to see in Austin really is the incredible colony of Mexican free-tailed bats living under the Congress Avenue bridge. Watching hundreds of thousands of bats suddenly fly off at sunset is nearly life-changing.
Friday, March 10, 2006

On Young Poets
The first in a series at Contemporary Poetry Review.
Live-Action Zelda
Goofy.
Realism Owns You
So says James Wood:
Realism, seen broadly, cannot be a genre; instead, it makes other forms of fiction seem like subgenres. For realism teaches everyone else; it schools its own truants: it is what allows magical realism, hysterical realism, fantasy, science fiction, even thrillers, to exist. Realism is nothing like as naive as its many opponents charge; almost all the great 20th-century realist novels also reflect on their own making, and are full of artifice. But it may be an impossible ideal, whereby the writer has to act as if the available novelistic methods are continually about to turn into mere convention—into "realism" as Roland Barthes or even as Rick Moody would understand it—and so has to try to outwit that inevitable ageing. The realist writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional.
(via Bookninja)
'In Some Ways, Art History Is Like an Episode of The Sopranos'
Revising Janson's History of Art at the New York Times. Among other things, Whistler's Mother has been booted from the new edition, making it no longer art. Via Jaimee, via my mom.
Thursday, March 09, 2006

AWPblogging
I'm the world's worst event blogger, as I habitually get distracted by ephemera and never actually get around to discussing the event itself. A few tables down the Bookfair row, however, the staff of The Sycamore Review is doing a fine job of blogging AWP as it happens. Check it out. They've got an original-recipe blog, too.
By the Way, If You're Wondering What I'll Be Doing Next Year
I'll be studying in the Program in Literature at Duke Unpatriotic University. [WARNING: The second link is to a sloppy hit piece by a right-wing propaganda organ. Use only as recommended. Do not take it seriously. I assure you, Duke University professors are not plotting either world domination or the overthrow of the U.S. government. Yet.]
Top 10 Video Game Villains
Check out the fairly flawed list. Leaving out Mother Brain is just poor thinking; leaving out Ganon is inexcusable.
Another Daniel Dennett Religion Editorial
At the Telegraph.
If somebody wants to put a sticker on my new book, saying it presents a theory, not a fact, I would happily concur. Caution, it should say. Assuming these propositions are true without further research could lead to calamitous results. But I would insist that we also put the stickers on any books or articles that maintain or presuppose that religion is the lifeboat of the world, which we dare not upset. I argue that the proposition that God exists is not even a theory. That assertion is so prodigiously ambiguous that it expresses, at best, an unorganised set of dozens or hundreds - or billions - of quite different possible theories, most of them disqualified as theories in any case, because they are systematically immune to confirmation or disconfirmation.
India's Superchildren
A school in India is reportedly teaching its students to use both their hands to write on different subjects simultaneously.

...

Principal Virangat Sharma said: "All the children here can write on different subjects and in different languages.

"Not just that, these children can use both their hands to write in two different languages on two different subjects at the same time."
(via Bookninja)
Die Hipsters Die!, or, On the Experimental Origins of the Flash Mob
I'm a bit late on this by internet hipster standards, but Harper's Online is serializing Bill Wasik's very interesting essay from its latest issue on the not-entirely-in-earnest origins of the "flash mob," which Wasik invented more or less as a test to see what sorts of silly things he could get hipsters to do for no good reason. It turns out to be rather a lot; the conformist impulse is alive and well in Hipstertown.

Parts 1 through 3 are up so far; two parts remain. It's quite good. My favorite passage has been the discussion of Stanley Milgram in Part 2:
When a British art magazine asked me who, among artists past or present, had most influenced the flash-mob project, I named Stanley Milgram—the social psychologist best known for his authority experiments, in which he induced average Americans to give seemingly fatal shocks to strangers. As it happens, I later discovered that Milgram himself did a project much like a flash mob, in which a “stimulus crowd” of his confederates, varying in number from one to fifteen, stopped on a busy Manhattan sidewalk and all at once looked up to the same sixth-floor window. The results can be seen in Figure 4, a chart from his paper “Note on the Drawing Power of Crowds of Different Size.”

Stanley Milgram deserves recognition, I believe, as one of the crucial artists of the preceding century. Consider his crowd experiment, which, it must be admitted, is fairly thin gruel as science: everyone knows that such an effect would be observed, and what value is there in quantifying it? No, the value of this experiment is entirely in its performance, the unadorned audacity of it, a small crowd in simple unison bucking the city's flow—a Fluxus-style “happening” but without the blinkered optimism, and in that respect closer, perhaps, to a Ray Johnson “nothing.” Milgram's crowd study was far less explanatory than it was expressive, serving as an elegant metaphor for conformism while adding little to our scientific understanding of who conforms or why.
On an unrelated note, the current issue of Harper's also has a long article by Celia Farber that is the first AIDS denialist piece I can recall seeing in a mainstream outlet. You can't read the article without buying the magazine, but you can read the angry responses for free.

I wish I knew the science better so I could make a more informed judgment about the merits of the AIDS denial movement. The article seemed very persuasive, but of course deceptive anti-science rhetoric usually is. It can sometimes be very hard for a layperson to draw a line between "reasoned, intelligent criticism of the mainstream scientific community" and "crank pseudoscience." UPDATE: Just noticed Jess at Bookslut has a good roundup of key links in the Harper's-AIDS-denialism controversy.
The Writers' Conference Has Wireless
...so I'll be checking in every so often. Our primary task is hawking Backwards City memorabilia in the Bookfair, but there's opportunity for periodic escape. Jaimee and Tom are at a panel discussion on formal innovation in poetry as we speak.
Wednesday, March 08, 2006

The Cure for the Second-Novel Blues
Just write your first novel again:
When Maile Meloy's first novel, Liars and Saints, a multi-generational saga of a dysfunctional Catholic family, was published in 2004, critics admired in it what some described as "domestic realism": Meloy's authentic ear for the voices of her characters, and the sharply realistic detail she brought to her tale of infidelity, incest, deceit and guilt.

It was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005, and Richard and Judy's decision to promote the book as a summer read propelled it into the bestseller lists. Readers may find its sequel, then, a surprise: A Family Daughter casts the first book in a totally different light, suggesting it was not the "real" version of events after all. Instead, Liars and Saints is portrayed as a novelised version of what happens in the second book.

Meloy came up with the idea after drawing a blank while trying to find a new subject. She decided to turn to what she knew best - the characters of her first book and the process of writing a novel. She was, she says, aiming "to fill in the space around" Liars and Saints, but at the same time striving to ensure that the new book worked on its own terms.
Hey, it was good enough for Orson Scott Card. (via Bookninja)
Salon Books Is Your Source For
eugenics
reality-as-computer
sanitary pads
Dadaism and the American Midwest
Finally, a reason to like Kansas? This is from the newest Harper's:
From a proclamation issued December 27, 2005, by Dennis Highberger, mayor of Lawrence, Kansas, which calls itself the "City of the Arts." The thirteen days of commemoration were chosen by rolling dice and picking numbers out of a hat.

WHEREAS: Dadaism is an international tendency in art that seeks to change conventional attitudes and practices in aesthetics, society, and morality; and

WHEREAS: Dadaism may or may not have come into being in the summer of 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire at 1 Spiegelgasse in Zurich, Switzerland, with the participation of Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Emmy Hennings, Marcel and Georges Janco, Jean Arp, and Richard Huelsenbeck; and

WHEREAS: The central message of Dada is the realization that reason and anti-reason, sense and nonsense, design and chance, consciousness and unconsciousness, belong together as necessary parts of a whole; and

WHEREAS: Dada is a virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions; and

WHEREAS: zimzim urallala zimzim urallala zimzim zanzibar zimzalla zam;

NOW, THEREFORE, I, Dennis Highberger, Mayor of the City of Lawrence, Kansas, do hereby proclaim the days of February 4, March 28, April 1, July 15, August 2, August 7, August 16, August 26, September 18, September 22, October 1, October 17, and October 26, 2006, as "International Dadaism Month."
The Co-Op Had Internet
The Austin co-op Tom arranged for us to sleep at (at the incredible price of $10/day) is called Sasona House, which you can slyly investigate here. As you can see, it's got an internet connection, so to some extent my blogorrhea can continue unabated all week.

Having never experienced co-op life myself, I can say it definitely seems to have its appeals, though it also seems to be very catch-as-catch-can (which, to be fair, also has its appeals). A "frat house for hippies" is not far-off as a summary. I can't really imagine myself living a place like this for any length of time -- but we'll all be living in co-ops after technological society collapses.

This is absolutely the sort of place to make a beeline for when everything stops working. They'll take you in, give you some tofu, and teach you how to build a firepit from your Honda.
Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Gone AWPin', Really
We're off. Be back on Sunday.
Also, Bookslut Review U.S.!
Justin Taylor has what you need:
In Chris Bachelder's new novel, U.S.!, Upton Sinclair is the dark glass through which he sees. Equal parts troubling and funny, this book about the demise of the American Left and the increasingly Lear-like madness of the American Right is impressive and affecting, a deft mash-up of the real and the allegorical, the political and the pathetic (as in pathos, that is). U.S.! imagines an America where earnest muckraker and second-rate novelist Upton Sinclair is serially resurrected from the grave by a world that still needs him, only to be just as serially assassinated by that same world, which has no interest whatsoever in being told what it needs. Aided by a fragile, mostly broke, ever-shifting cadre of supporters (identifiable to one another primarily by their discreet red shovel tattoos), Sinclair travels the country preaching his gospel to both those with ears to hear; as well as those with mouths to heckle and fingers to squeeze triggers. He’s for socialism, temperance, abstinence, and the metric system. He makes points by using exclamation points. He thinks every social ill can be solved by writing a novel about it.
I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on this book.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Fratboy
At the Morning News.
Let’s go babe, you and I,
When the night’s straddling the sky
Like a passed-out drunk guy.
Let’s walk down frat row.
Yeah, let’s go
And remember our night in the HiHo Motel
And that wack restaurant with bad oysters. Hell!
Frat row that flows like a stream of spilt beer
When the keg is empty
To point us to the question…
But don’t ask “Where’s the other keg?”
I’d rather sit here and fondle your leg.

At the rager the chicks come and go
Talking about art or something, I don’t know...
(via Bookslut)
Gone AWPin'
Incidentally: you know how real life has been interfering with my very important blogging over the last few weeks? That's all going to change -- just as soon as I get back from AWP. Jaimee, Tom, and I will be gone till Sunday.

Blogging will be sporadic at best, and possibly nonexistent, depending on how easily I can acquire wireless internet access in Texas.
That's Some Tasty Springsteen
Another entry for the Greatest-Things-Ever file: I watched the other DVD from the Born to Run 30th Anniversary Rerelease tonight, the London Hammersmith Odeon show. Did my Jersey heart good to see it. I loved every second, even the bizarre, dirgelike rendition of "For You." Maybe especially that.
Monday, March 06, 2006

Blame Tony Curtis
Tom O'Neil tells us how Tony Curtis and his generation may be partially responsible for the win by that other movie.

One older academy member, an obviously disgusted Tony Curtis, told Fox News reporter Bill McCuddy that he had no intention of watching "Brokeback" and he knew lots of other academy members who felt the same way.
Looks like Curtis is still running away from what scared him in "Spartacus" when Crassus (Laurence Olivier) told his slave Antoninus (Curtis) with a sly smile that he likes both "snails and oysters." Antoninus, a somewhat effeminate poet, skeedattled out of there fast to sign up for Spartacus' manly rebelarmy.
Curtis' fury was the same thing I saw on lots of faces of academy voters when I asked them what film they chose for best pic. Most of the non-"Brokeback" respondees were obviously anti-"Brokeback" because, before they revealed that they opted for "Crash" or "Good Night, and Good Luck," they began their responsehuffily, saying, "Well, I'm not voting for 'Brokeback'!" No doubt some of them meant that they didn't feel the film was up to its hype, but it was obviousas heck that others had a problem with the whole gay thing.
Perhaps I've deluded myself so far thinking that those folks can't be homophobes. I just kept telling myself that they're probably thinking, "Oh, enough with all these gay persecution movies already!" But when you hear similar sentiment about a glut of Jewish persecution films, it doesn't seem to matterin the Oscar results.


O'Neil also rates Jon Stewart's Oscar-hosting performance a B-, going on to say he won't be asked back, but who knows; last year the immediate reception to Chris Rock was rather positive. Remember that? I bet Tony Curtis put in a call to the president of the Academy and, well...
Top 10 Strangest LEGO Creations
Neat list with photos at techeblog. The LEGO Volvo is pretty impressive.
What He Said
Kenneth Turan, of Crash's hometown newspaper, the L.A. Times, says it best.

More than any other of the nominated films, "Brokeback Mountain" was the one people told me they really didn't feel like seeing, didn't really get, didn'tunderstand the fuss over. Did I really like it, they wanted to know. Yes, I really did.
In the privacy of the voting booth, as many political candidates who've led in polls only to lose elections have found out, people are free to act out theunspoken fears and unconscious prejudices that they would never breathe to another soul, or, likely, acknowledge to themselves. And at least this year,that acting out doomed "Brokeback Mountain."
For Hollywood, as a whole laundry list of people announced from the podium Sunday night and a lengthy montage of clips tried to emphasize, is a liberalplace, a place that prides itself on its progressive agenda. If this were a year when voters had no other palatable options, they might have taken a deepbreath and voted for "Brokeback." This year, however, "Crash" was poised to be the spoiler.
I do not for one minute question the sincerity and integrity of the people who made "Crash," and I do not question their commitment to wanting a more equalsociety. But I do question the film they've made. It may be true, as producer Cathy Schulman said in accepting the Oscar for best picture, that this was"one of the most breathtaking and stunning maverick years in American history," but "Crash" is not an example of that.
I don't care how much trouble "Crash" had getting financing or getting people on board; the reality of this film, the reason it won the best picture Oscar,is that it is, at its core, a standard Hollywood movie, as manipulative and unrealistic as the day is long. And something more.
For "Crash's" biggest asset is its ability to give people a carload of those standard Hollywood satisfactions, but make them think they are seeing somethinggroundbreaking and daring. It is, in some ways, a feel-good film about racism, a film you could see and feel like a better person, a film that could makeyou believe that you had done your moral duty and examined your soul, when in fact you were just getting your buttons pushed and your preconceptions reconfirmed.
The Future
It's "Future" week over at Dial B for Blog. Today: Big Giant Heads. Tomorrow: Robots!
Sunday, March 05, 2006

Not As Gay As We Thought
I'll be on the lookout in tomorrow's papers for alternate explanations, but for the moment I can think of only one: we've seen the limits of Hollywood's tolerance. Brokeback's loss, coming from an institution whose liberalism and open-minded progressive ideals one takes for granted, is hitting me harder than the 2004 election, quite frankly. It's certainly more surprising. For a movie like Crash, whose critical reception was mixed to say the least, to win Best Picture over Brokeback Mountain (and Capote, too, for that matter) seems to be a statement stretching a little beyond aesthetics.
The Slippery Slope
Holland to allow infant euthanasia. Are we all Singerians now? As gut-wrenching a choice as this must be for people, I'll admit I do agree that sometimes it seems for the best.

Now the problem is defining sometimes.
Cityscape
Cityscape is a SimCity-Grow hybrid that asks you to build the largest city possible. Via JayIsGames, which has a walkthrough when you get sick of screwing around.
To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever
Ed Cone reviews Will Blythe's new book on the Duke-UNC rivalry, To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever: A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting, and Occasionally Unbiased Account of the Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry in the News & Record. (Unrelatedly, he also links to an interesting look inside the Greensboro Netflix depot.)

UNC beat Duke last night, 83-76. But the important question, of course, is what this augurs for me personally in the graduate-school admissions game.
Sci-Fi in the Times Times 2
There's a new sci-fi books column called Across the Universe column, as well as a Science Fiction for the Ages reading list, with appearances by Dick's The Man in the High Castle, A Clockwork Orange, Watchmen, and one of the books I'm most excited to be teaching in my summer 2006 course, Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle.
Saturday, March 04, 2006

Freakishly Accurate Real-Life Simpsons Opening
Whoa.
Friday, March 03, 2006

I Am 8-Bit Returns
Last year's I Am 8-Bit video-game-nostalgia art show was a huge success, so it's back and better than ever. Via Drawn! Below: Dan Santat's "All Hail King Hippo."

Oscar Pool Advice
For anyone filling out an office ballot for Sunday's Academy Awards, there's no reason to blindly guess. Tom O'Neil and his cadre of informed prognosticators over at Gold Derby have all the information you need to make wise choices and give yourself a fighting chance against your geekier, Oscar-obsessed friends and coworkers.

According to his informal poll (surveying only 20 members of the 5000+ Academy, which he admits is far from scientific) Crash leads the voting with 9 votes to Brokeback's 7. I cannot fully articulate how much of a travesty it would be if Crash won. Notice I don't even say "if Brokeback lost." Crash is a well-acted but otherwise trite piece of didactic dogshit that makes I Am Sam look downright Modernistic. My outrage at its mere nomination has been renewed upon hearing Ebert and his cohort, whose apparent homophobia or retardation led him to say Brokeback should not have been nominated, have both proclaimed Crash the deserving best picture of 2005. I have not seen Munich, but from where I sit the only other film that deserves to stand beside Brokeback Mountain is Capote, and if it were any other year, which is to say any year not graced by the instantly classic performance of Heath Ledger, I'd be pulling hard for Mr. Hoffman. I am looking forward to see if he'll pay off his bet with Bennett Miller, which they made years ago: the first to win an Oscar has to bark his acceptance speech.
Slash Back
A fun little game for this freaky Friday. [Flash] (via MetaFilter)
Brokeback Mountain: Catch the Fever!
The bunnies over at Angry Alien Productions have.
Thursday, March 02, 2006

Sex and the Dead
Can you have a sex life in the afterlife? That's what Knight Ridder wants to know. (via Boing Boing)
If It Ain't Brokeback
Commenting on a pattern that has stretched at least as far as the BCR blog, Virginia Heffernan, the New York Times hippest critic (edging out Manohla Dargis by an immeasurable fraction of a hair), takes a fun look at the meaning of all those Brokeback mash-ups. Leslie Fiedler is mentioned alongside dialogue from Point Break and Michael Mann's Heat. Enough said.
Who Wants To Be A Superhero? Now Taking Applications
In nationwide open casting calls, potential heroes will arrive in costume to prove their mettle – revealing the true nature of their superhuman abilities and invoking the noble credos by which they live. From these thousands of hopefuls, Stan Lee will choose 11 lucky finalists to move into a secret lair and compete for the opportunity to become a real-life Superhero! (Via. This show was made for Ezra.)
Dungeons-and-Dragons-Themed Web Comics Are For Players
The Order of the Stick is maybe the single dorkiest thing I've ever spent half the day reading on the Internet. I am deeply, deeply ashamed. (via MetaFilter)
The Clock of the Long Now
Michael Chabon reports.
The Sex Pistols, strictly speaking, were right: there is no future, for you or for me. The future, by definition, does not exist. “The Future,” whether you capitalize it or not, is always just an idea, a proposal, a scenario, a sketch for a mad contraption that may or may not work. “The Future” is a story we tell, a narrative of hope, dread or wonder. And it’s a story that, for a while now, we’ve been pretty much living without.

Ten thousand years from now: can you imagine that day? Okay, but do you? Do you believe “the Future” is going to happen? If the Clock works the way that it’s supposed to do—if it lasts—do you believe there will be a human being around to witness, let alone mourn its passing, to appreciate its accomplishment, its faithfulness, its immense antiquity? What about five thousand years from now, or even five hundred? Can you extend the horizon of your expectations for our world, for our complex of civilizations and cultures, beyond the lifetime of your own children, of the next two or three generations? Can you even imagine the survival of the world beyond the present presidential administration?
(via Bookslut)
Spring Break and the Living's Easy
Goddamn, it's nice out today.
Today's Comic Kitsch
Steampunk Transformers and The Adventures of Ziggy Stardust, Superhero. (via Boing Boing)
Music and Lit
Rick Moody, John Darnielle, and Backwards City #3 contributor Jonathan Lethem square off in L.A. Weekly about the intersection of music and literature.
To get things started, we posed a kind of theological question: Does your taste in music mark you as a Dylanist or an Enoid? To translate from music geek into English: a Dylanist (after Bob Dylan) would be a hot-blooded, essentially literary explorer, while an Enoid (after producer and Roxy Music keyboardist Brian Eno) would be more concerned with the sonic challenges of texture, form and space.

JONATHAN LETHEM: Camden Joy once made me very happy by saying that if my collected writings were a band, they’d be Yo La Tengo, and that thrilled me because it felt right (if you grant that I’m as good as YLT). Like them, I’m openly aware of standing on the shoulders of giants. Like them, I make sporadic use of Dylanesque personal gestures and Enoesque (Enoid?) self-effacing experiments, but don’t lock down into either mode. The comparison felt like the most flattering one I could consent to. I mean, if someone called me the Dylan of novel writing I’d be flattered, but forced to shout back, “You’re a liar!”
(via both Bookninja and Bookslut, so you know it's good)
Wednesday, March 01, 2006

I Can't Drive 55
Google Video is hosting a video of some very self-satisfied college students stopping traffic around the perimeter in Atlanta by driving 55 mph in all four lanes. I think it was a protest of some sort. (via Waxy)
'The Human Embodiment of Wal-Mart'
The Arizona Republic covers the Oprah-haters. (via Bookslut, which also links to the Gawker's post of Emma Watson drinking a Corona. For shame, Hermione; for shame.)
Sidebar Update
I've updated the "Our Writers" portion of the linkbar with the blogs and Web sites of writers from our third issue. Check 'em out.
'Random Rules'
For the music lovers among us, the Onion's A.V. Club has a new "What are the first five songs that come up on your iPod's shuffle?" feature. This week: David Berman and David Cross, among others. (via Metafilter)
Escape to Obion
A Flash puzzle in four parts. Here's Part 1. (via MeFi, which has clues)

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