Dear Friends, Due to unfortunate considerations of time and cost, Backwards City is no longer a print journal. However, we will maintain our presence on the web that, however meager, we hope you might enjoy.
It is not easy to be a professional Democrat in 2006. Out of power for six years and widely damned as out of intellectual steam, the party is regarded in nearly every political precinct and publication as a chronic invalid, doomed to obsolescence even though nearly all the stars are in alignment for a national rejection of all things Bush. When others aren't kicking the Democrats, they are more than happy to kick themselves. The former Clinton hands Rahm Emanuel, now a hard-charging Democratic congressman from Illinois, and Bruce Reed, the president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, set the defensive tone of their election-year policy manifesto by quoting the Beckett-inflected soliloquy of Ross Perot's ticket mate, Admiral James Stockdale, from the vice-presidential debate of 1992: "Who am I? Why am I here?" These days the Democrats would seem to have fewer answers to such existential questions than the sadly disoriented Stockdale did.
George Bush and Al Gore meet in the squared circle for the championship title. It's a back-and-forth match. Gore gains the upper hand and hits his finishing move, the Global Warmer. But, as Gore goes for the cover, William "the Chief" Rehnquist rushes to the ring carrying a steel chair. With the referee distracted by Laura Bush, Rehnquist knocks Gore over the head with the chair. Bush goes for the cover and wins the belt. The show ends with an incredulous announcer screaming, "George W. Bush is champion, but I don't know if he deserves it!"
On the day the Republicans abolished one of the foundational principles of democracy, the 700-year-old writ of habeas corpus, in a cynical attempt to polarize the electorate for a few weeks before the election, it's hard to believe that a Republican said or did something even stupider. But thankfully, Trent Lott provides.
Lott went on to say he has difficulty understanding the motivations behind the violence in Iraq.
"It's hard for Americans, all of us, including me, to understand what's wrong with these people," he said. "Why do they kill people of other religions because of religion? Why do they hate the Israeli's and despise their right to exist? Why do they hate each other? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me."
Tonight in film theory we watched possibly the best documentary I've ever seen, Ken Loach's classic Cathy Come Home. Both YouTube and Google Video failed me, but I did find some clips. Netflix came up dry too. Dig it out if you can find it.
Superhero comics have been around since Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer ruled the back lot, but only recently has Hollywood realized the natural connection between superhero comics and movies. It’s not just that both are simultaneously visual and verbal media; that formal connection would apply equally to the “serious” graphic novels and sequential art that want nothing to do with crime fighters in form- fitting outfits. Cinema isn’t just a good medium for translating graphic novels. It’s specifically a good medium for superheroes. On a fundamental, emotional level, superheroes, whether in print or on film, serve the same function for their audience as Golden Age movie stars did for theirs: they create glamour. Via A&L Daily.
Seniors at UC Berkeley, the nation's premier public university, got an F in their basic knowledge of American history, government and politics in a new national survey, and students at Stanford University didn't do much better, getting a D.
...
Other poor performers in the study were Yale, Duke [Editor's Note: Go Blue Devils], Brown and Cornell universities. Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore was the tail-ender behind Cal, ranking 50th. The No. 1 ranking went to unpretentious Rhodes College in Memphis.
So what is the Bible? RD: It's a collection of documents written by people in the first millennium B.C., like any other tribal mythology attempting to make sense of the world. All tribes have them, they're all different. This happens to be the Jewish one. And the New Testament? RD: The New Testament is a modification which has come to us because of the invention of Christianity by St. Paul in the first century. And the accounts of the miracles are nonsense are they? RD: Surely, yes. I mean-- The Virgin Birth? Yes. The Resurrection? Yes, they're all-- The Ascension? Yes. All nonsense?
* Kottke has still more The Wire links. This show is really getting a lot of buzz lately. The first disc of season one is still sitting on my table; I think tonight's the night I crack it open.
We've been getting a lot of fiction and poetry submissions this time around. But we've had almost no comics submissions. We want to see the things you make.
Somewhere in my surfing tonight I stumbled across this interview with Douglas Adams and The American Atheist, c. 1999.
DNA: ...I don’t accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me “Well, you haven’t been there, have you? You haven’t seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid” - then I can’t even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we’d got, and we’ve now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don’t think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don’t think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.
Listen to the voices of many of the best writers of the English language. These uncut, behind-the-scenes interviews were the foundation of Don Swaim's long-running CBS Radio show, Book Beat. Via SF Signal.
What shit. If I ever remember who gave me the impression this movie was good, they're gonna pay. Listen: If you're going to try and replicate the ending of The Usual Suspects, the least you can do is be quick about it. The "big reveal" at the end of this movie takes 7 hours.
What is the shape of things as Vermont's new Center for Cartoon Studies enters its second year? The Comics Reporter interviews the founders of the place Ezra totally should have gone instead of Seattle.
It's the format. An old post from Wet Asphalt with a lot of good thoughts about why so many literary magazines are bad and how we might make them better.
My point here certainly isn't that literary magazines should stop publishing unknowns. Rather, literary magazines need to require a lower entry cost in time and money to make it easier for readers to take a chance on them. Because that's what we're doing when we buy a magazine of short stories and poetry by writers we've never heard of: taking a chance. The editors of literary magazines need to start recognizing that, stop blaming the readers, and realize whose fault it is that their magazines aren't worth the risk.
'It's That Preoccupation with Literary Postmodernism That Either Endears Readers to Danielewski or Turns Them Off Completely'
The L.A. Times profiles Mark Z. Danielewsi, author of the longest (and maybe the best) book I ever read in a single, endless Saturday, House of Leaves. His new book, Only Revolutions, is out now. (via Bookslut)
He says so in Entertainment Weekly. I didn't even read this article, because I'm just about to settle in to watch the first three seasons and I want to go in cold.
Would you believe I'd never seen Jaws in its entirety until tonight? Well, it's sad but true. I watched it in preparation for my film class tomorrow. Onward to 1976!
Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy? Why have they so little to say about Iraq, about Lebanon, or about reports of a planned attack on Iran? Why has the administration’s sustained attack on civil liberties and international law aroused so little opposition or anger from those who used to care most about these things? Why, in short, has the liberal intelligentsia of the United States in recent years kept its head safely below the parapet?
* Meanwhile, Mark Engler in Salon says nonviolence sucks. I feel like killing him for saying that.
George Orwell was never much for pacifists. He wrote of his nonviolent political adversaries during World War II: If they "imagine that one can somehow 'overcome' the German army by lying on one's back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen." To Mohandas Gandhi, his Indian contemporary and fellow anti-imperialist, he accorded only a grudging and critical respect. Yet because he viewed many pacifists as specialists in evading unpleasant truths, Orwell did admire Gandhi's unflinching honesty with regard to the Holocaust: When asked about resistance to the Nazis, Gandhi argued that the Jews should have prepared en masse to sacrifice their lives in nonviolence -- something Orwell regarded as "collective suicide" -- in order to "[arouse] the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence."
No doubt Orwell would have been skeptical of the contentions advanced by author Mark Kurlansky in his new primer, "Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea." Compared with the standard histories offered in American public education, these arguments can safely be described as contrarian: "The case can be made that it was not the American Revolution that secured independence from Britain," Kurlansky writes; "it was not the Civil War that freed the slaves; and World War II did not save the Jews."
For what it's worth, here's a dissenting view. The trouble here, of course, is the writer's not-quite-stated suggestion that if only it could be proven that the boys went to fight for the Taliban, then they would have deserved it.
Four actors who play al-Qaida suspects in a British movie that won a prestigious prize were detained by the police at Luton airport as they returned from the Berlin Film Festival and questioned under anti-terror laws, alongside two of the former terrorism suspects they play on screen.
...
In a statement, Rizwan Ahmed said police swore at him and asked if he had become an actor to further the Islamic cause. He said he was at first denied access to a lawyer and was questioned about his views on the Iraq war by a policewoman. "She asked me whether I intended to do more documentary films, specifically more political ones like The Road to Guantánamo. She asked 'Did you become an actor mainly to do films like this, to publicise the struggles of Muslims?'"
The appearance in name and approximate drawn likeness, either as a 'supporting character' or more forthright personna, of the auction's 'winner' in an upcoming comic strip by the author/cartoonist, to appear sometime before the end of 2008 in serial (probably newspaper) form, and later to be reprinted in collected form at an unspecified, and probably quite alarmingly later, date.
I'll be happy to send a signed copy of the strip in which the person appears (which will likely be in the local weekly newspaper) but only on the proviso that the person in question doesn't get mad or otherwise grow to despise me if their likeness is construed as satirical, incorrect, unflattering or in any way unliterary. I'll do my best, however, to maintain veracity and allegiance to the general rules of propriety (unless, of course, the winner offends me, in which case he/she may appear as any variety of disagreeable and distasteful ruffian.) The winner should also realize that if his or her character ends up contributing significantly to the development of said story that the author/cartoonist cannot be held liable for any confusion, affront or life complication said appearance might subsequently engender.
The winning bidder will need to submit two relatively clear photographs along with the desired name. Via Boing Boing and Flog!
I can't say that anything has helped me make sense of the attacks. I suspect they were just what they felt like they were—namely, a reminder that chaos and hatred sometimes rear their heads and, temporarily, are ascendant. But one work of art that has helped me in a more general way is John Adams' symphonic work "On the Transmigration of Souls"; it has "helped" me in the sense that I've been able to use it, periodically and sacramentally, to move myself to tears remembering that day just as it was. Every time I listen to it, it re-attunes me to the real sadness of that day, the sense of ordinary lives suddenly and horribly interrupted. That, I'd say, is the real purpose of art: to sweep away the mold that conceptual and habitual thought allows to grow over even the most raw experience. And Adams does it—it's a great and courageous piece of music.
And ballsiest answer goes to Hanif Kureishi, who claims to have found wisdom and solace in a movie he himself wrote. Via Shankar, whose opinions on television are to be respected.
The veteran US art-rock group Yo La Tengo are famed for their encyclopedic knowledge of every kind of music under the sun. Matt Allen played Name That Tune with them to find out more.
There is one very simple thing that everyone can do to fix the food system. Don't buy factory-farm products.
Once, the animals we raised went out and gathered things we could not or would not eat. Cows ate grass, chickens pecked at worms or seeds. Now the animals are brought together and we grow food for them. We use synthetic fertilizers and oil-powered tractors to grow corn or soybeans. Then we truck it to the animals so they can eat it.
When we feed grains and soybeans to animals, we lose most of their nutritional value. The animals use it to keep their bodies warm and to develop bones and other body parts that we cannot eat. Pig farms use six pounds of grain for every pound of boneless meat we get from them. For cattle in feedlots, the ratio is 13:1. Even for chickens, the least inefficient factory-farmed meat, the ratio is 3:1.
Most Americans think the best thing they could do to cut their personal contributions to global warming is to swap their family car for a fuel-efficient hybrid like the Toyota Prius. Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin of the University of Chicago have calculated that typical meat-eating Americans would reduce their emissions even more if they switched to a vegan diet. Factory farming is not sustainable. It is also the biggest system of cruelty to animals ever devised. In the United States alone, every year nearly 10 billion animals live out their entire lives confined indoors. Hens are jammed into wire cages, five or six of them in a space that would be too small for even one hen to be able to spread her wings. Twenty thousand chickens are raised in a single shed, completely covering its floor. Pregnant sows are kept in crates too narrow for them to turn around, and too small for them to walk a few steps. Veal calves are similarly confined, and deliberately kept anemic.
This is not an ethically defensible system of food production. But in the United States--unlike in Europe--the political process seems powerless to constrain it. The best way to fight back is to stop buying its products. Going vegetarian is a good option, and going vegan, better still. But if you continue to eat animal products, at least boycott factory farms.
Obviously, I can't speak with any authority about the controversy surrounding the film's veracity, although I will say that a very strong air of fakiness is wafting from the entire thing. No, my problems aren't about whether the movie is true or false, it's that the movie is just bad; it's clichéd and repetitive and chronologically confused and incredibly self-important. Worse, presumably because of the close friendship between the director and his subject, it never gets the critical distance necessary to actually evaluate the nature of Bruce's condition.
And it's fake, too. Let's just be honest with ourselves about that. Whatever condition Doug Bruce actually has, it's been lost to the symptoms he is now enacting, whether that deception is deliberate or unconscious. Bruce plainly wants his story to be the inspiring (and highly commercial) story of a cynical man who suddenly sees the world through the idealism of a child, and he began working that angle from almost the very start of his situation. Maybe he's just forgotten the first million times they made that film.
The first of the ten Battlestar Galactica: The Resistance webisodes is up at scifi.com. The acting of the non-regular characters is a little off, but it's something.
The new season doesn't start until Oct. 6th, but you can get the second half of season 2 on DVD in two weeks. Don't watch the webisodes until you've seen the DVDs, of course -- in fact it's best if you forget you've even read this post.
'Charlie Brown Has Never Knowingly Taken Steroids'
DISTRICT ATTORNEY OTHMAR: Wah wah-wah wah, wah, wah wah-wah-wah wah?
CHARLIE BROWN: I'm sorry, sir, but I didn't knowingly lie to the grand jury.
D.A.: Wah-wah-wah-wah?
BROWN: I did not knowingly take steroids, sir. Period. Snoopy gave me something to make me throw harder, but he said it was flaxseed oil and vitamin drops. I was tired of having the ball hit back up the middle and all my clothes torn off.
D.A.: Wah wah wah-wah?
BROWN: He's my dog, sir. He said he got the stuff from Woodstock.
'Karl Never Hesitates, Is Never at a Loss for Words and Is Never Thrown by Gervais Cackling at Him Like a Demented Hen'
I don't know if anyone else out there is still listening to the Ricky Gervais podcast every week, now that you have to pay for it -- but I am, and I want to point out two moments this week that seem to be the best evidence yet that Karl is a fictional character. (Obviously I'm not the first person to think so.)
First, after a elaborate discussion about the plight of a plane-crash survivor, Karl commented that he wouldn't be bored in such a situation because "he'd have a lot of insects to watch" (an apparent reference to Karl's bizarre obsession with bugs this season). You can detect just a hint of irony in Karl's voice as he says this, and even possibly a very small laugh as he finishes his sentence.
Then at the end of the show Karl essentially breaks character entirely, making another comment requiring a capacity for ironic self-awareness that Karl (as he is normally presented) just isn't capable of:
GERVAIS: I hope you've enjoyed this half hour of drivel, I mean, some of the most stupid things ever said. It's like he's got contempt, now, for the world, like he doesn't care what comes out of his head.
KARL: Learning can be frustrating, can't it? Maybe I'm getting you thinking. Maybe on your way home today you'll going, 'Hmm, octopus with two heads.' And if you do that for five seconds, I've done my job.
I don't normally endorse wishful thinking, but I've always been very fond of the idea that we're sharing the planet with another sentient species. So this whole thing about dolphins not being as smart as previously reported makes me quite unreasonably angry. Science or no, I don't like it one bit. Via MeFi.
A three-day film festival next week here at Duke "about the people and countries that have been swept into the War on Terror." Should be good. If you're in the area, Screen/Society has the details (just scroll down).
A Broadmoor man who said he rescued more than 200 residents after commandeering a boat during the flood after Hurricane Katrina is being sued by the boat's owner for taking it "without receiving permission."
...by going back to the roots of American music, rediscovering what the critic Greil Marcus calls “the old weird America”, Bruce Springsteen will surely lead many — Americans and others all over the world — back to the glorious basics, to sounds and sentiments so old, pure and completely, eclectically American that their power is truly timeless.
For years the White Mountain Apache Nation has kept the secret within tribal boundaries. “We're not prone to easily talk to outsiders,” said spokeswoman Collette Altaha. “But there have been more sightings than ever before. It cannot be ignored any longer.”
What if the dinosaurs had survived? Or Hitler won in 1945? Or the aeroplane had been invented 1,000 years earlier? Would there even be life on earth if the moon had failed to form? Science fiction writer Stephen Baxter canvasses the possibilities.
A little alternate history in the Independent, via Gravity Lens.
Forget Everything You Thought You Knew About Submitting to Backwards City Review
I jumped the gun on email submissions, and the poets revolted. For the time being we're going to prefer snail-mail submissions for poetry but email submissions for prose. (For comics and art, we have no preference.) This confusing system should ensure that nobody gets submissions in the form they want.
It's September 1, so that means our fall reading period is now open. Check out the guidelines here. We're asking that people submit only once per reading period, and that you submit by email if at all possible. Other than that, have at it...
Hear me! In our future lives it will be hard to regain this precious human state, with all its privileges and freedoms. The moment of our death is impossible to predict. Who can say? Perhaps we will die tonight. -Shabkar
