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.
This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics tend to feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or $12.5 million spent every hour on the Iraq war. Also via MeFi.
* Bookslut alerts me that there's apparently some kind of dispute going on between religion and science. David P. Barash has details on the peace talks at richarddawkins.net.
This is a devastating, frustrating, infuriating, utterly powerful movie: sometimes very hard to watch, but necessary all the same. I was quite surprised (and pleased) by its apoliticality, at least with regard to electoral politics; although the federal government rightly bears the brunt of it, Lee's holy anger is leveled at all levels of government and all political actors regardless of party affiliation. It's classism and racism that we are primary concerned with here, the everyday bigotry and lack of caring that was turned against Katrina's victims just as soon as we'd failed them.
I sometimes wonder whether it's Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, Operation Enduring Freedom, or the tsunami that will come to be seen as the formative disaster of our time. I suppose the tragedy is that it's all of them.
Gilliam came nearest to inventing his own country with Brazil (1985), one of the key political films of the late 20th century. Brazil is one of the great political films, an extraordinary mixture of Fellini and Kafka, with a complex force of synthesized images, which belongs to Gilliam alone. A meek, distinctly nonglamorous secretary is taking dictation through earphones. She types up everything she hears in the next room. In the course of time, the viewer of the film deduces that she is compiling an endless transcript of what a victim is saying in a torture chamber. Even if he screams it, she types it up as if he has merely said it. She herself says nothing, and her face betrays no emotion as the words quietly take form. Her boss, the torturer, is played by Michael Palin in the full, sweet spate of his bland niceness. This is the ne plus ultra of torture as an everyday activity. The torture surgery contributes one of the most brain-curdling of the film's many disturbing themes (still revealing their subtleties on a third and fourth viewing). The suggestion seems to be that a torturer need be no more sinister than your doctor. (via the Rake)
If you've been trying to reach us by email to editors@backwardscity.net, we're having some trouble. (Well, Yahoo is. I have so few good things to say about them.)
If you sent us an email in the last few days, and never heard back, please resend to backwardscity@gmail.com. Things should be in working order again soon...
YouTube has a couple of clips from the film Jaimee and I watched today, Marjoe, the life story of Marjoe Gortner, who was recruited as a Pentecostal minister at the age of 4 and then, at 28, after a crisis of conscience, exposed the tricks and money-making techniques in a self-loathing 1972 Academy-Award-winning documentary. Here's an interview, but watch the film: it's as good a look at the spectacle and theatrics of preaching as any I've seen.
Our Netflix queue has been on quite a '70s tear lately: we also rented The U.S. vs. John Lennon, a fantastically charming look at the former Beatle's involvement in the peace movement—no YouTube clips, but here's the trailer—as well as Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst.
Every college junior's favorite philosopher, Douglas Hofstadter, has a new book about the nature of consciousness: I Am a Strange Loop. Scientific American has the review.
Another provocative Žižek essay via his most-devoted American disciple, R. Vu—this one against (of all things) liberal tolerance/political correctness, and with one hell of a great title.
On today's market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol... And the list goes on: what about virtual sex as sex without sex, the Colin Powell doctrine of warfare with no casualties (on our side, of course) as warfare without warfare, the contemporary redefinition of politics as the art of expert administration as politics without politics, up to today's tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of Other deprived of its Otherness (the idealized Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach to reality, while features like wife beating remain out of sight...)? Along the same lines, what the Politically Correct tolerance is giving us is a decaffeinated belief: a belief which does not hurt anyone and does not fully commit even ourselves.
Everything is permitted to today's hedonistic Last Man - you can enjoy everything, BUT deprived of its substance which makes it dangerous. This is why Lacan was right to turn around Dostoyevski's well-known motto: "If God doesn't exist, everything is prohibited!" God is dead, we live in a permissive universe, you should strive for pleasures and happiness — but, in order to have a life full of happiness and pleasures, you should avoid dangerous excesses, be fit, live a healthy life, not harass others... so everything is prohibited if it is not deprived of its substance, and you end up leading a totally regulated life. And the opposite also holds: if there is God, then everything is permitted — to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, as the instruments of His will.
The colors on the blog have changed, which can only mean one thing: a new issue of Backwards City is back from the printers and in the mail to our many beloved subscribers.
(Some of you out there let your subscriptions lapse after issue 4—and you know who you are. Don't worry; this can be easily remedied, and you'll be forgiven in time.)
I don't want to hurt the other issues' feelings, so I won't tell you about how great this issue is, or that it has George Singleton in it, and a Bookninja, or that Frog Comics makes me laugh every single time I read it, or anything else. Officially I love all the issues equally. Let's leave it at that.
Details about how to order the first Backwards City Chapbook will be on the blog and Web site soon, as well as (hopefully) more-regular blogging from me...
In my reading for class this week I stumbled across this Žižek essay from May 2002. As a very early examination of the War of Terror, I have to say it's held up pretty freaking well.
This is another aspect of the new global order: we no longer have wars in the old sense of a conflict between sovereign states in which certain rules apply (to do with the treatment of prisoners, the prohibition of certain weapons etc). Two types of conflict remain: struggles between groups of homo sacer - 'ethnic-religious conflicts' which violate the rules of universal human rights, do not count as wars proper, and call for a 'humanitarian pacifist' intervention on the part of the Western powers - and direct attacks on the US or other representatives of the new global order, in which case, again, we do not have wars proper, but merely 'unlawful combatants' resisting the forces of universal order. In this second case, one cannot even imagine a neutral humanitarian organisation like the Red Cross mediating between the warring parties, organising an exchange of prisoners and so on, because one side in the conflict - the US-dominated global force - has already assumed the role of the Red Cross, in that it does not perceive itself as one of the warring sides, but as a mediating agent of peace and global order, crushing rebellion and, simultaneously, providing humanitarian aid to the 'local population'.
This weird 'coincidence of opposites' reached its peak when, a few months ago, Harald Nesvik, a right-wing member of the Norwegian Parliament, proposed George W. Bush and Tony Blair as candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize, citing their decisive role in the 'war on terror'. Thus the Orwellian motto 'War is Peace' finally becomes reality, and military action against the Taliban can be presented as a way to guarantee the safe delivery of humanitarian aid. We no longer have an opposition between war and humanitarian aid: the same intervention can function at both levels simultaneously. The toppling of the Taliban regime is presented as part of the strategy to help the Afghan people oppressed by the Taliban; as Tony Blair said, we may have to bomb the Taliban in order to secure food transportation and distribution. Perhaps the ultimate image of the 'local population' as homo sacer is that of the American war plane flying above Afghanistan: one can never be sure whether it will be dropping bombs or food parcels.
Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology Is Indistinguishable from Magic
MetaFilter this morning links to exactly the sort of Popular Science article that used to give me hope that we could invent our way out of the coming enviro-energy apocalypse after all.
At Nerve, via Bookslut. I've read embarrassingly few of these, but I guess that's what lists like this are for. My favorite from the list may not surprise longtime readers:
Planetary by Warren Ellis Put simply, Planetary is about the weight of our collective history and humanity realizing its potential. And it's about comics. Elijah Snow, like a select number of other unique individuals in Warren Ellis' world of Planetary, was born at midnight on January 1st, 1900. In 1999, he is part of a group that scours the world, documenting the strange and preserving it, an archaeologist of the twentieth century itself. There's a great deal more to say about the book itself, but it's one of the very few on this list that giving away even a hint would ruin the joy of reading it. — JC
Last week's New York Times Sunday Magazine had an interesting five-page article on lethal injection. Might be eye-opening, especially if there are any readers of this blog who think lethal injection is in any way a good idea.
Included in the extensive hearing transcripts of various lethal-injection challenges around the country are stories of inmates, like one in Ohio, raising his head in the middle of his own execution to say, “It’s not working.” In Alabama, officials at one point said they would execute an inmate who had compromised veins by placing an IV in the saphenous vein in his arm; that vein is actually in the leg. In an important case in California — the state with the most prisoners on death row — investigations have revealed inadequate execution conditions comparable to those in Missouri, in addition to alarming problems with an incompetent execution team. As these various court proceedings were unfolding, corrections officials in Starke, Fla., executed Angel Diaz by lethal injection on Dec. 13, 2006. But because the execution team punctured the veins in Diaz’s arms when putting in the intravenous catheters, forcing the drugs into the soft tissue instead, Diaz grimaced for as long as 26 minutes, suffering from 11-inch and 12-inch chemical burns on his left and right arms respectively, and took 34 minutes to die. Two days later, after the details of Diaz’s execution were reported in the media and it became clear that he was almost certainly not anesthetized for the procedure, Gov. Jeb Bush put a ban on all executions in Florida. That same afternoon in California, Judge Jeremy Fogel of the U.S. District Court issued a long-awaited ruling declaring the state’s lethal-injection protocol unconstitutional.
A few sparse details on the perpetually delayed Watchmen move, which now looks as though it might actually happen after all. Via AICN, which also reminds us that 24 is two hours long tonight.
By the Way, I'm Sorry I've Been Too Busy Lately to Blog Properly Zen
It is said that there are seventeen hundred koans. Actually, there are as many koans in life as there are individuals, and each individual's life is nothing but koans. —Koryu Osaka
How can you come to know yourself? Never by thinking, always by doing. Try to do your duty, and you'll know right away what you amount to. And what is your duty? Whatever the day calls for. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Going forward is a matter of ordinariness. —Zen saying
The Emperor's chief carpenter, Ch'ing, once made a music stand so perfect that all who solved it marveled. When Lu asked him to reveal the mystery of his art, Chi'ing demurred, saying, "No mystery, your highness, though there is something. When I am about to make such a stand, I first reduce my mind to absolute quiet. Three days in this condition and I am oblivious to any reward to be gained. Five days, and I am oblivious to any fame to be acquired. Seven days, and I become unconscious of my four limbs and body. Then, with no thought of the Court in mind, all my skill concentrated and all disturbing elements gone, I go into the forest to search for a suitable tree. It contains the stand in my mind's eye, and then I set to work." —Chuang-Tzu
In these things there is a deep meaning, but if we try to express it, we forget the words. —Toenmei
This book originated as an intriguing suggestion by Mark Jacobs, a U.S. foreign service officer with our State Department staff who also happens to be a working novelist. If we were to ask a contemporary group of American poets, novelists, critics, and historians what it means to be an American writer, Jacobs proposed, the results could illuminate in an interesting way certain America values -- freedom, diversity, democracy -- that may not be well understood in all parts of the world.
In the spirit of trying an experiment, that is what we did. Choosing 15 writers who have attained a certain stature for their work, with the group as a whole reflecting the considerable diversity of American writing today, we commissioned each to write an essay. The assignment: In what sense do you see yourself as an American writer? (via MeFi)
* Also via Bookslut, a bizarre interview with Grant Morrison in which he posits that George Bush is, to paraphrase The Big Lebowski, the deluded meglomaniac for his time and place.
A pair of human skeletons lie in an eternal embrace at an Neolithic archaeological dig site near Mantova, Italy, in this photo released February 6, 2007. Via MeFi.
Michael Dirda reviews Milan Kundera's new book, The Curtain. Is this what he's been printing in The New Yorker lately? If so, I haven't been terribly impressed.
The United States remains, for the moment, the most powerful nation in history, but it faces a violent contradiction between its long republican tradition and its more recent imperial ambitions.
The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.
Several factors, however, indicate that this course will be a brief one, which most likely will end in economic and political collapse.
* The New Yorker has a profile up of Joe Lieberman whose title alone is worth the steep price of having to think about Joe Lieberman: "The Lorax."
* Joss Whedon is off Wonder Woman, and the Absorbacon couldn't be happier. I'm happy too, because now I don't have to go see Wonder Woman. Okay, okay, I probably will anyway.
* In practice this meant that Wells, espousing the doctrine of free love, pursued women steadily and relentlessly for the whole of his adult life; the intensity of sexual renewal was his necessity, and he thought that neither he nor anyone else should do without it. Vivian Gornick has the secret life of H.G. Wells.
Emotion –your opponent is necessarily and invariably ‘excitable” “agitated’ “animated”; you, by contrast, are immobile, impassive, devoid of emotion - a computer imbued with consciousness. Entertaining - You find your opponent entertaining. His arguments are 'amusing', 'diverting' and so on, a kind of sport, which you have enjoyed. At some point, however, this becomes 'embarassing' and you should advise your opponent to retire before he humiliates himself. At all costs avoid suggesting you are seriously engaged with what he is saying.
Postmodern - use to refer to any jargon unfamiliar to you. Apparently the term has a more precise meaning, but this is only according to people who write in unfamiliar jargon and can therefore be safely ignored.
“Unwitting” – almost everything your opponent does is ‘unwitting’, eg revealing his real sympathies, confirming your argument, showing his true colours etc.
If You're Dependent on Government Money, Will You Become a Captive Dancing Bear?
The relationship between artists and the politically powerful has always been an uneasy one. Plato wanted poets kicked out of his ideal Republic because he felt they were immoral, but Genghis Khan valued them: He killed the aristocrats, rulers, and rich people in the towns he was sacking, but saved the artists, artisans, linguists, teachers and intellectuals, and put them to work in his Empire. Exiles or salaried Yes-men -- are these the choices?
You know your empire’s crumbling when it’s considered an achievement to pretend that you’ve halved the rate at which you’re adding to the massive mountain of debt you’ve already accumulated.
You know your empire’s crumbling when you trade your prior moral leadership on human rights issues for global disgust at your torture, ‘extraordinary rendition’ (a.k.a. kidnaping for torture) and the dismantling of nine centuries worth of civil liberties progress.
You know your empire’s crumbling when gays and immigrants are used as diversionary issues to keep people from thinking about the pillaging of their country and their wallets actually taking place. And it works.
You know your empire’s crumbling when people are getting more religious and less scientific, not the other way around.
You know your empire’s crumbling when your political leaders start to be chosen by dynastic rules of succession.
And you especially know your empire’s crumbling when the most idiotic child of one of the least accomplished leaders in its history is not only crowned as the next emperor, but is even revered for a time by most of the public as a great one.
I wonder if there's any movie that exposes the essentially loathsome character of the democratic process as well as Our Brand Is Crisis, which details the efforts of notorious asshole James Carville's consultancy group to elect Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada president of Bolivia. This is the apotheosis of politics-as-theater; any higher value or sense of purpose in the process has been completely evacuated, leaving behind only the ugly science of puppetmastery.
After a few episodes, Morgan "Supersize Me" Spurlock's reality show 30 Days starts to have a similarly disheartening effect. Here the focus is not on the manipulator of the masses but on the masses themselves; Spurlock finds the most closed-minded, uncritical individuals he can possibly find and puts them in a new social context for thirty days, thereby challenging their preconceptions about the world for what is apparently the very first time in their entire lives. It's not a bad show—quite the opposite, it's often quite engaging, particularly in the four episodes that aren't explicitly about biogtry—it's just hard to understand how basic human empathy and/or common sense can be in such disastrously short supply.
One of the nice things about my Contemporary Fiction class this semester is that I'm reading books I can actually recommend to people. I just finished Paul Auster's City of Glass, the first book in his New York Trilogy, having embarrassingly never read it before. I loved it, and sadly I'll probably read the other two books tomorrow instead of doing more productive things.
Coincidentally, I saw the other day at Bookninja that BookForum just profiled Auster as part of a pretty scathing review of his newest book. It's too bad. I always discover authors after they peak.
...which is good, because I would have absolutely have no time to blog about it. I'll be back sometime tomorrow; in the meantime, our third writing contest has just started, issue #5 is transcendently awesome and you should renew your subscription lest you miss it, &c.
We missed the premiere on 
