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.
The comments of the last post lead us to Jonathan Lethem's new Promiscuous Materials Project, which is work of his that he's (sort of) releasing into the public domain for adaptation and appropriation by other artists.
Announcing the Third Backwards City Literary Awards
If you'll look to your left, you'll see that the third Backwards City writing contest has just begun. The top prize is $500, and includes publication in Backwards City #6, coming next fall. As always, the entry-fee of $15 includes a year's subscription or the winning chapbook. Fiction Contest Poetry Contest Poetry Chapbook Contest The deadline for entries is May 15, 2007; click the links or the image for full details. We're looking forward to reading you.
In other Backwards City awesomeness news, our fifth issue is at the printer and will be back in time for its debut alongside Jennifer Chapis's incredible chapbook The Beekeeper's Departure at AWP. I can't talk this issue up highly enough. It's got George Singleton. It's got a BookNinja. It's got comics that will make your head explode. It's fantastic. I know you all are already subscribers -- but if your subscription isn't current, better renew it before you miss out.
“I would suggest moving back,” Bush said as he climbed into the cab of a massive D-10 tractor during his visit to a Caterpillar factory today. “I’m about to crank this sucker up.” Newsweek notes, “As the engine roared to life, White House staffers tried to steer the press corps to safety, but when the tractor lurched forward, they too were forced to scramble for safety. ‘Get out of the way!’ a news photographer yelled. ‘I think he might run us over!’ said another. … Even the Secret Service got involved, as one agent began yelling at reporters to get clear of the tractor. Watching the chaos below, Bush looked out the tractor’s window and laughed, steering the massive machine into the spot where most of the press corps had been positioned.”
This incident reminds me of Jerry Seinfeld's joke about elderly drivers backing out of the driveway without looking for oncoming cars (and which I often say to myself): I'm old. I've lived my life. I'm backing up. In case you're wondering, Caterpillar factories unfortunately do not make caterpillars that, one day, will turn into butterflies. They just make tractors.
Since the Beginning of Time Man Has Yearned to Destroy the Sun
The US wants the world's scientists to develop technology to block sunlight as a last-ditch way to halt global warming. Oh lord. MetaFilter has some much-needed mockery. And let's give a big hand to The Simpsons, who called it a decade in advance.
We Will Sacrifice Our Blood and Bodies to Put an End to Your Dreams, and What is Coming Is Even Worse
It's possible I'm just really, really tired, but it seems to me that John Stewart was in perfect form talking about the State of the Union the other day. Watch the whole thing.
I've been meaning to put in a plug for This Film Is Not Yet Rated, last year's documentary about the MPAA's "voluntary" rating system. As cultural criticism goes, this isn't especially far-reaching or ambitious—it's certainly not anything resembling a call to action—but I think the simplicity of the subject matter has a lot to do with the movie's charm. MPAA ratings are so much a part of everyday life we hardly notice them—but it turns out that when we take the time to look at them we discover some very strange things.
In particular, I can't recall anything aimed at a general audience that so effortlessly lays out our cultural hang-ups about sexuality in general and female sexuality in particular. Despite (maybe because of) the naughty bits, it'd be great in the classroom.
* The reinvention of the "boys' own adventure" genre for the 21st century seems to have taken the media by storm. It has the hazy glow of nostalgia for a simpler world, a world where everyone knew their place in the white, male playground. Problem is, that world no longer exists, if it ever did, and in reinventing the ripping yarn genre (whose most enduring example is Biggles), some of the problems of the original have reappeared. Beneath the surface are racial tension and xenophobia, cultural traits that were institutionalised during the colonial era.
Canadian raising is a phonetic phenomenon that occurs in varieties of the English language, especially Canadian English, in which diphthongs are "raised" before voiceless consonants (e.g., [p], [t], [k], [s], [f]). For example, IPA /aɪ/ (the vowel of "eye") and /aʊ/ (the vowel of "loud") become [əɪ] and [əʊ], respectively, the /a/ component of the diphthong going from a low vowel to schwa ([ə]). As [əʊ] is an allophone of /oʊ/ (as in "road") in many other dialects, the (mainly Eastern) Canadian pronunciation of "about the house" may sound like "a boat the hoas" to non-Canadians. Some stand-up and situation comedians exaggerate this to "aboot the hoos" for comic effect.
It is important that these exaggerated pronunciations, such as "a boat the hoas", are usually only apparent to people without Canadian raising. They represent an attempt to imperfectly approximate the sounds they hear with sounds available in their own dialects. Because this approximation is imperfect, individuals who do speak with Canadian raising will frequently be baffled by reports that they are saying "a boat".
...I am disturbed by the continued reference to existentialism as a pessimistic, negative philosophy. It is often considered such. Only a few weeks ago I heard a radio commentator declare that the "nothing really matters" lyric from Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" was truly "existential." And I still hear pundits and some of my university colleagues decry existentialism as the source of our nihilistic gloom, the reason why our students don't vote and why they experiment with dangerous drugs. I listen to such comments with a mix of amusement and horror because I like existentialism and I think that existentialism, not pessimism, is what America needs right now. [via A&L Daily]
I understand that the logic of the show essentially demands it, given Jack's history of amazing superpowers, but nonetheless I think it's more than a little silly that the person behind all the evil of the last few years is [spoiler if you didn't see tonight's episode]
At least three dozen sea turtles are getting a little vacation under heat lamps in this spring-break capital after being rescued from an arctic blast that caused the water temperature in an arm of the Gulf of Mexico to plummet 18 degrees in 48 hours.
The cold-blooded animals were left comatose by the rapid temperature drop this week in the shallow bay where the young turtles feed.
The whole thing is great, but Colbert's first, unbelievable line in his interview with Bill O'Reilly made me laugh harder than I have in months:
I have a restraining order against John Stewart. He is not allowed in the building... The man is a sexual predator. That's why I had to leave, Bill. You have no idea what that's like.
Is there anything that makes me more smug or self-satisfied than when my visceral revulsion for eating meat takes on the sheen of a supremely ethical act? And that's not me talking, that's science.
Going veg provides more bang for your buck than driving a Prius. Plus, that bang comes a lot faster. The Prius cuts emissions of carbon dioxide, which spreads its warming effect slowly over a century. A big chunk of the problem with farmed animals, on the other hand, is methane, a gas which cycles out of the atmosphere in just a decade. That means less meat consumption quickly translates into a cooler planet.
Not just a cooler planet, also a cleaner one. Animal agriculture accounts for most of the water consumed in this country, emits two-thirds of the world's acid-rain-causing ammonia, and it the world's largest source of water pollution--killing entire river and marine ecosystems, destroying coral reefs, and of course, making people sick. Try to imagine the prodigious volumes of manure churned out by modern American farms: 5 million tons a day, more than a hundred times that of the human population, and far more than our land can possibly absorb. The acres and acres of cesspools stretching over much of our countryside, polluting the air and contaminating our water, make the Exxon Valdez oil spill look minor in comparison. All of which we can fix surprisingly easily, just by putting down our chicken wings and reaching for a veggie burger.
Children of Men needed to be 45 seconds shorter, in precisely the same way that Spielberg should have cut half an hour from the end of A.I. The movie goes from being great to being merely very very good in the miniscule amount of time it takes to dispel an image of perfect ambiguity.
Now, it's still very very good. You should see it. It does many things right and only a handful of things wrong.
Screenhead has a list of the world's most unfilmable novels, with Ulysses topping the list. I'd love to see an adaptation of 100 Years of Solitude, actually. (via Cynical-C)
Spoiler alert. I tried not to give anything away, but it's hard to be subtle about the least subtle show on TV.
If you're wondering why I haven't said anything about the season premiere of 24 yet, it's because I'm still trying to decide what I think of it. The level of plot contrivance already seems to quite a bit higher than in previous years (and 24 has always been a pretty contrivance-heavy show)—the majority of the action so far has been people doing very ill-considered things because "We have no other choice" and "We're running out of time." Always silly, it's veering a bit close to unforgivably silly, and we're only on episode four.
And I was very unhappy to see ______ go out like a chump, completely unnecessarily, and completely out of what little character had. (As my friend Ryan put it in an email: "Anytime you have a debate with Jack over ethics shit always goes down that makes him kill you.")
On the positive side, though, I was quite pleased with shift of the show to an uglier, more dystopian America, and particularly with the MacGuffin finally MacGuffining. It opens up some new interesting spaces for stories they haven't done yet, and anyway, it's about time something finally MacGuffined on this show.
Britain and France talked about a "union" in the 1950s, even discussing the possibility of the Queen becoming the French head of state, it was reported today.
On September 10 1956, Guy Mollet, the then French prime minister, came to London to discuss the possibility of a merger between the two countries with his British counterpart, Sir Anthony Eden, according to declassified papers from the National Archives, uncovered by the BBC.
...
When Mr Mollet's request for a union failed, he quickly responded with another plan - that France be allowed to join the British commonwealth - which was said to have been met more warmly by Sir Anthony.
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant 'Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."
We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you no forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.
I've been looking for a good article to post about the weirdness with birds lately, but this MetaFilter post will have to do for now. While driving home from New Jersey at the end of the December Jaimee and I saw a flock of thousands upon thousands of birds fly over I-95. It was like nothing I'd ever seen before: maybe the closest thing to sublimity I've ever witnessed personally. Since then we've seen weirdly Hitchcockian flocks every so often, including just the other day, when a hundred or so stopped in our neighborhood for an hour. I've been wondering if it's just confirmation bias or if the warm weather really has interfered with the normal migratory patterns. Whatever's going on, you know it isn't good.
Just a reminder that in addition to the sixth season premiere of 24 tonight (an increasingly regrettable show from which I cannot look away), there is also the American debut of the second series of Ricky Gervais's Extras on HBO. Warning: very minor spoilers ahead, including two embedded YouTube clips.
Things have changed a bit from the first series. Instead of continuing to be merely a background player, Gervais's character has somehow lucked his way into the starring role on a BBC sitcom he has created, When the Whistle Blows. However, interference from the studio has corrupted Andy's vision into a laugh-tracked, banal disaster and leaves Andy himself trapped in a Satrean hell.
And here's the second promised clip, from David Bowie's episode (the second), which expresses the theme of the six episodes in a musical nutshell. The guest stars are great this time around, by the way; even better than in the first season, I thought.
Following what risks becoming Gervais and Merchant's formula, the first season sets up the characters and the premise and the second season sticks the knife in, stripping away all promise and all hope. After initially being put off a bit by the second series of The Office I've come to the conclusion that it's actually the best of the series or the specials, precisely because such vast stretches of the destruction of David Brent are so difficult to watch. (Certainly it's among the best three hours of television ever aired.) I seem to feel the same way about Extras series two—some of this you can't even laugh at. You just don't want to watch.
A great piece of fiction can demand that you acknowledge the reality of its wildest proposition, no matter how alien it may be to you. It can also force you to concede the radical otherness lurking within things that appear most familiar. This is why the talented reader understands George Saunders to be as much a realist as Tolstoy, Henry James as much an experimentalist as George Perec. Great styles represent the interface of "world" and "I", and the very notion of such an interface being different in kind and quality from your own is where the power of fiction resides. Writers fail us when that interface is tailored to our needs, when it panders to the generalities of its day, when it offers us a world it knows we will accept having already seen it on the television. Bad writing does nothing, changes nothing, educates no emotions, rewires no inner circuitry - we close its covers with the same metaphysical confidence in the universality of our own interface as we did when we opened it. But great writing - great writing forces you to submit to its vision. You spend the morning reading Chekhov and in the afternoon, walking through your neighbourhood, the world has turned Chekhovian; the waitress in the cafe offers a non-sequitur, a dog dances in the street.
Proof that a movie can be dumb as hell and still pretty smart, Mike Judge's Idiocracy is a surprisingly sharp satire on the sad state of American popular culture.
The basic plot is this: Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph are accidentally sent 1,000 years into the future, where after a millenium of selection pressure against intelligence the human race has evolved into a society of idiots.
If you've never heard of it, you're not alone: for some reason the studio decided to completely bury it. Which is too bad. It's not like it would have changed the world or anything, but Idiocracy is a solid (if very flawed) piece of work, and deserved a wide release.
My expectations were completely in the basement on this one, but it won me over, and it made me laugh.
But, why, after five years, is there no conclusion to the situation at Guantanamo? For how long will fathers, mothers, wives, siblings and children cry for their imprisoned loved ones? For how long will my daughter have to ask about my return? The answers can only be found with the fair-minded people of America.
I would rather die than stay here forever, and I have tried to commit suicide many times. The purpose of Guantanamo is to destroy people, and I have been destroyed. I am hopeless because our voices are not heard from the depths of the detention center.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will allow companies to sell ads inside plastic bins whose sole purpose so far has been to move passengers' shoes, cellphones and other belongings through X-ray machines. (via Cynical-C)
Fortunately, before coming to Tattoine, R2 had already arranged transport, which is waiting at Mos Eisley, under the command of the Rebellion's other chief field agent and espionage asset. Chewbacca.
20 years earlier, Chewbacca was second in command of the defence of his planet. He's there in the tactical conferences and there on the front lines and is a personal friend of Yoda's. When he needed reliable people to join the embryonic Alliance, who else would Yoda turn to but his old friend from Kashykk? Given his background, there is no way that Chewie would spend the crucial years of the rebellion as the second-in-command to (sorry Han) a low-level smuggler. Unless it's his cover. In fact, Chewie is a top-line spy and flies what is in many ways the Rebellion's best ship.
In a snub that will have Bob Dylan fans blowin' in the wind with rage, Simon Cowell has come out bashing the beloved folk legend as a dull singer who's not as talented as perky pop princess Kelly Clarkson. "Do I prefer Kelly Clarkson's music to Bob Dylan's? Yes. I've never bought a Dylan record. A singing poet? It just bores me to tears," Cowell tells February's Playboy. The acerbic "American Idol" judge adds: "I've got to tell you, if I had 10 Dylans in the final of 'American Idol,' we would not be getting 30 million viewers a week. I don't believe the Bob Dylans of this world would make 'American Idol' a better show."
American Zen Literary theory is running sideways, writing books, lecturing, referring to theology, psychology, and whatnot. Someone should stand up and smash the whole thing to pieces. —Nyogen Senzaki
As for the outside world, the artist critic is confronted by what he sees; but what he sees is primarily what he looks at. —André Malraux
We only know that our entire existence is forced into new paths and disrupted, that new circumstances, new joys and new sorrows await us, and that the unknown has its uncanny attractions, alluring and at the same time anguishing. — Heinrich Heine
I'm afraid I've got to eat a little bit of crow here. When the first season of Extras played on HBO, I carelessly threw around terms like "mediocre." I made this judgment after half-heartedly viewing about half the first episode before turning the TV off. Having now seen the whole season on DVD, I don't know what my problem was.* The show is actually hilarious.
The second season, built around Gervais's character's smash BBC sitcom When the Whistle Blows, starts this Sunday. Oh yes.
-- * I think I was hoping for it to be more like The Office than it could possibly have been. In particular, I had trouble accepting Gervais as the straight man rather than the stooge. I'm over it.
The position you represent has neither the intellectual nor the moral high ground you are so sure it occupies. Until literature departments take into account that humans are not just cultural or textual phenomena but something more complex, English and related disciplines will continue to be the laughingstock of the academic world that they have been for years because of their obscurantist dogmatism and their coddled and preening pseudo-radicalism. Until they listen to searching criticism of their doctrine, rather than dismissing it as the language of the devil, literature will continue to be betrayed in academe, and academic literary departments will continue to lose students and to isolate themselves from the intellectual advances of our time.
In May 2003, New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges gave the Commencement Address at Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois. During the speech students in the audience climbed the stage to disrupt him, and he was escorted out by the police before the ceremony concluded. Subsequently the president of the college apologized to students for having invited Hedges, and the New York Times sent Hedges a letter of reprimand. This is what Hedges said in Rockford. (Also via MeFi.)
...For me, the engine of the movement is deep economic and personal despair. A terrible distortion and deformation of American society, where tens of millions of people in this country feel completely disenfranchised, where their physical communities have been obliterated, whether that's in the Rust Belt in Ohio or these monstrous exurbs like Orange County, where there is no community. There are no community rituals, no community centers, often there are no sidewalks. People live in empty soulless houses and drive big empty cars on freeways to Los Angeles and sit in vast offices and then come home again. You can't deform your society to that extent, and you can't shunt people aside and rip away any kind of safety net, any kind of program that gives them hope, and not expect political consequences.
Via MeFi comes a very worthwhile interview at Salon with Chris Hedges, author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and a new book, American Fascism: The Christian Right and the War on America.
Doesn't it make sense for the Democrats to reach out to the huge number of evangelicals who aren't necessarily part of the religious right, but who may be sympathetic to some of its rhetoric? Couldn't those people be up for grabs?
I don't think they are up for grabs because they have been ushered into a non-reality-based belief system. This isn't a matter of, "This is one viewpoint, here's another." This is a world of magic and signs and miracles and wonders, and [on the other side] is the world you hate, the liberal society that has shunted you aside and thrust you into despair. The rage that is directed at those who go after the movement is the rage of those who fear deeply being pushed back into this despair, from which many of the people I interviewed feel they barely escaped. A lot of people talked about suicide attempts or thoughts of suicide -- these people really reached horrific levels of desperation. And now they believe that Jesus has a plan for them and intervenes in their life every day to protect them, and they can't give that up.
So in a way, the movement really has helped them.
Well, in same way unemployed workers in Weimar Germany were helped by becoming brownshirts, yes. It gave them a sense of purpose. Look, you could always tell in a refugee camp in Gaza when one of these kids joined Hamas, because suddenly they were clean, their djelleba was white, they walked with a sense of purpose. It was a very similar kind of conversion experience. If you go back and read [Arthur] Koestler and other writers on the Communist Party, you find the same thing.
Believe it or not, I'd never actually seen Soylent Green before tonight, though of course it's the sort of movie that you've always already seen just from hearing about it and seeing it parodied. What I never realized is that it was that way for the original viewers, too: the trailer gives away the entire plot, including the infamous twist ending.
I also have to admit, speaking as a vegetarian, that eating people doesn't seem all that much grosser to me than eating animals. And of course Soylent Green is made of people; what else is there to eat?
I also wanted to put in a quick plug for Once in a Lifetime, last year's documentary about the rise and fall of the North American Soccer League, specifically the New York Cosmos. It's great stuff. It even inspired me to start looking into Major League Soccer again, though unfortunately the league still hasn't come anywhere near North Carolina.
One of the better films we saw in my film theory class this semester was Ryan, an animated short dealing with the breakdown of animator Ryan Larkin. That's why I was so interested to see on Metafilter that Larkin is apparently no longer homeless and has begun working again. It's a belated happy ending for the very somber film, which you can watch for free through the greatness that is YouTube.
Continuing our whirlwind tour through Showtime's HBO-knockoffs, we watched the first season of Weeds today. All five hours: it was that kind of day. The verdict is, it's a good show. It owes quite a bit to both The Sopraneys and Six Feet Under—and, judging from what little I've seen, to Sex in the City as well—but never so much as to be unwatchable or even displeasing. If I were the show-runner, I probably would have turned the zaniness down a notch—but nevertheless I liked it. It's damn funny. Too bad I missed season two.
'What Seems to Confront Us Is a Plunge into Nihilism and Despair'
The New York Times considers free will. I don't know about all that, but I do know that if you haven't yet renewed your subscription to Backwards City Review, you really have no choice. The fifth issue comes out next month, and it's fantastic, including a story from no less a personage than George F'ing Singleton.
The FBI's file on former Chief Justice William Rehnquist — made public more than a year after his death — indicates the Nixon and Reagan administrations enlisted its help in blunting criticism of him during confirmation hearings.
The file also offers insight into the hallucinations and other symptoms of withdrawal that Rehnquist suffered when he was taken off a prescription painkiller in 1981. A doctor was cited as saying that Rehnquist, an associate justice of the Supreme Court at the time, tried to escape the hospital in his pajamas and imagined that the CIA was plotting against him.
Even more intriguing:
In one previously secret memo from 1971, an FBI official wrote, "No persons interviewed during our current or 1969 investigation furnished information bearing adversely on Rehnquist's morals or professional integrity; however ..." The next third of the page is blacked out, under the disclosure law's exception for matters of national security.
It's my good friend Neil Farbman's 28th birthday today. (Devotees may remember that he did a little guest-blogging around these parts a while back.) As Neil is known for nothing so much as his wisdom, here comes a few Farbman-flavored quotes from my brand-spanking-new, just-opened Little Calendar of Zen 2007.
There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. There's your answer. —Gertrude Stein
Three men happened to notice a fourth standing at the crest of a high hill and wondered what he was doing there. The first man said, "He must have lost his favorite animal." The second said, "No, he must be looking for his friend." The third said, "He is just enjoying the cool air up there." The three continued discussing and arguing until they reached the man on the hill. The first greeted the man and said, "O friend, have you lost your pet animal?" "No sir," answered the man, "I've not lost any." The second then asked in the man was looking for his friend, and again the man said no. The third man asked if the man was there enjoying the breeze. Again, he said no. Finally the three said, "What, then, are you standing here for?"
"I just stand," said the man. —Zen story
One day Chao-chou fell down in the snow, and called out, "Help! Help me up!" A monk came and lay down beside him. Chao-chou got up and walked away. —Zen mondo
Without leaving my house, I know the whole universe. —Lao-Tsu
One of the books I've been reading this week is Guy Delisle's Pyongyang, a really good read that was almost a great read. (You can read the first few pages at NPR here. ) It's the closest look you're ever likely to get at one of the most unique, disturbing, and bizarre locations on the planet, and completely indispensable on that ground alone. My single complaint about the book is its mean-spiritedness: Delisle's disdain for the North Korean government frequently spills over into disdain for its victims. It's not their fault they've been brainwashed by a corrupt, totalitarian regime in the world's most isolated country; isn't a little sympathy in order?
Proctor: All right, here's your last question. What was the cause of the Civil War? Apu: Actually, there were numerous causes. Aside from the obvious schism between the abolitionists and the anti-abolitionists, there were economic factors, both domestic and inter-- Proctor: Wait, wait... just say slavery. Apu: Slavery it is, sir.
* 
