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.
SAVAGE: And God, who is the center of this monotheistic religion, has said, "Oh, you don't worship me anymore? Oh, you don't like me anymore? Oh, I don't exist anymore? Really? All right, I'm going to show you boys in Hollywood and you girls in New York City that I do exist. But since you're very hard-headed, stiff-necked people, and you don't really believe that I exist because you've gotten away with everything you've done all your life without any repercussions, I'm going to show you I exist in a way that you can't believe." Down came the World Trade Center towers. That was God speaking.
It's almost as if the right wing were finally completely unraveling.
Before and after every close election, politicians and pundits proclaim: The dead are voting, foreigners are voting, people are voting twice. On closer examination, though, most such allegations don't pan out.
Arts&Letters Daily links to the Atlantic Monthly's review of College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Co-Eds, Then and Now, about the history of women's colleges, coeducation, and of course the sex.
A new study shows that unless the Democrats self-destruct, they could walk into the White House in '08 -- and might hold it for years.At Salon. There's more at Crooked Timber, which opines:
On the other hand, Republican support is contracting to a base of about 25 per cent of the population whose views are getting more extreme, not merely because moderate conservatives are peeling off to become Independents, but also because of the party’s success in constructing a parallel universe of news sources, thinktanks, blogs, pseudo-scientists and so on, which has led to the core becoming more tightly committed to an extremist ideology.
And also:
I’ll end with one stat that ought to worry any Republicans who think sticking with the Rove strategy is a good idea. According to the Pew study, members of Gen Y (18-30) are about as likely to be atheists/agnostics (19 per cent) as Republicans (no age group breakdown, but it must be less than the 25 per cent for all voters given low party identification in this age group).
AICN links to the first post-season-finale interview with Ron Moore, creator of Battlestar Galactica. Find out if [CENSORED] is really back, and if those [CENSORED] [CENSORED] are really [CENSORED] like they think.
His faith that a unified theory of all the fields exists went back to his childhood sense that “something deeply hidden had to be behind things,” a something that would evince itself in an encompassing theory of elegant simplicity. Isaacson tells us: “On one of the many occasions when Einstein declared that God would not play dice, it was Bohr”—the physicist Niels Bohr—“who countered with the famous rejoinder: Einstein, stop telling God what to do!” God, sometimes identified as “the Almighty” or “the Old One” (der Alte) frequently cropped up in Einstein’s utterances, although, after a brief period of “deep religiousness” at the age of twelve, he firmly distanced himself from organized religion. In a collection of statements published in English as “The World As I See It,” there is this on “The Religiousness of Science”:
The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation.…His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire.
Over the last 30 years or so, we've ended up with this vast collection of comics, mostly horror comics or claiming to be, involving devils, demons, angels and God. For a long time, religion in comics was, um, sacrosanct, and what there tended to be of it was either winking "miracle" stories (very popular around Xmas) or transliterated into humanist terms - "good" beats "evil" - and it was all tied in with various other "pro-social" tenets: the policeman is always your friend, the government never lies to you, do whatever your parents tell you, anyone can grow up to be president, etc. Existence as a series of clear cut, reductionist morality tales. There are still a few people, mostly inside the business, who think that's what comics should be. Blame Marvel for what's come since, sort of. As the Comics Code weakened and "horror heroes" were seen to be the company's new bread and butter in the '70s (it didn't quite work out that way, but at least the trend lasted long enough to give us "the world's first Jewish monster hero," since Jewish monsters were certainly what everyone had been clamoring for) Marvel steered clear of God (except for a literal deus ex machine cameo by Jesus) but, leaving devil stand-ins Mephisto for "godly" heroes like Thor and the Silver Surfer and Satannish (I guess he was only sort of like Satan) for Dr. Strange, invoked The Devil himself as a villain in GHOST RIDER. Which led to series starring the Prince Of Evil's hitherto unsuspected half-human offspring, SON OF SATAN, and his more evil sister, Satana. Not that Marvel was the first publisher to go this route, not quite, but it was the highest profile.
It was the first to face the logistical problems of inserting concrete Judeo-Christian figures (as opposed to standard Judeo-Christian mores) into what was until then pretty much a liberal humanist (even pantheonic) fictional universe. It was never a comfortable fit. It's the curse of theology that you can insert God without inserting the Devil, but not the other way around: you stick Old Nick in there, you're automatically talking about the Big Guy In The Sky as well. Later companies were mostly able to dodge Marvel's problem mainly by dodging the whole liberal humanist thing altogether, pumping out story after story of humanity beset, knowingly or otherwise, in a war between angelic and demonic forces. Throw in a popular perception by the late '90s that "grim'n'gritty" is where it's at, and suddenly there are slews of comics embodying the Chaos! Comics approach: the demonic forces are the protagonists, or, more often, a usually highly buxom demonic protagonist rebelling against Satan or a stand-in as Satan rebelled against all that's good and holy. Demonic protagonists are exceptionally useful when the focus is on guts and bloodshed, and it's in this context that issues of creative freedom are shallowly, probably unwittingly, reflected in what amounts to tales of Luciferian rebellion.
* Slate profiles the gone-much-too-soon Show (with Ze Frank), with links to some classics. I'm still very sad to see it go; whatever it is, I hope his next project is as visible (and as awesome) as The Show was.
* The Guardian's done a rather poor impersonation of Wired's incredible Hemingway-inspired six-word-story thing. Will Self's did make me laugh: "Pain, unutterable pain, stertorous exhalation. Death."
* Welcome to Walden Pond, Fifth Avenue style. Isabella’s parents, Colin Beavan, 43, a writer of historical nonfiction, and Michelle Conlin, 39, a senior writer at Business Week, are four months into a yearlong lifestyle experiment they call No Impact. Its rules are evolving, as Mr. Beavan will tell you, but to date include eating only food (organically) grown within a 250-mile radius of Manhattan; (mostly) no shopping for anything except said food; producing no trash (except compost, see above); using no paper; and, most intriguingly, using no carbon-fueled transportation.
* Via MeFi, pre-suicide video from the Heaven's Gate cultists. Lucky for me these popped up when they did; they've given me a great topic for one of my final papers.
* Salon talks to Ron Moore about the upcoming season finale of Battlestar Galactica.
What's an example where that process really worked well for you?
In this season's finale, I decided on the fly to give Laura her cancer back. It's been bubbling in the back of my mind for a while. When we cured her cancer in the second season, I knew I didn't want that to be a permanent thing. I knew at some point I wanted to bring it back, because we'd changed her character in a way I wasn't happy with. But it wasn't until I was sitting down doing a rewrite of the finale that I decided this is the moment, let's do it. Tigh losing his eye was done in the same way. I was writing the teaser for the season opener and I decided on the fly that Tigh's lost an eye. That became a huge thing for the character and shifted a lot of things in the show. It just worked.
And when did this method not work so well?
We'd developed a whole story line this season about a colony called the Sagitarions, and they were going to be an issue in the trial of [former president] Gaius Baltar. During the missing year on New Caprica, when Baltar was president, a massacre had taken place among the people from this one colony that had isolated themselves from the rest of the people. It was this long intricate back story built into a lot of the previous episodes of the show and it just didn't work. And I basically decided to throw it out while I was writing the finale, on the spur of the moment. We then had to go back into previous episodes and take that out, reshooting and re-editing. Some of those episodes suffered from that decision. It was important because it saved the finale and made it much stronger, but certain episodes in the second half of the third season are weaker as a result of that.
I don't know how much the Sagitarion thing really mattered, but he's right overall: the second half of this season has been quite disappointing. For whatever reason the switch from mini-season to regular-sized season seems not to have agreed with them—and I think not having the whole thing planned out from the beginning is finally starting to catch up with the creators. But I still have some cautious hope for the future; if the spoilers I've seen for tomorrow's episode are true, the creators are still not afraid to completely overturn everything we thought we knew.
The latest example: Rome, which I wasn't able to see when it first aired, but did catch up with over spring break. As is to be expected from an HBO series, it's quite good; I'm definitely looking forward to the DVD release of season two.
The cultural anxiety that led to the creation of this show is almost palpable: it's the '00s here in George Bush's America and we're worried about the fall of the Republic, we're worried about Empire. And we should be worried, because republics fall, that's what they do—and in our case it isn't even a Pompey or a Caesar or an Octavian or even a Titus Pullo that threatens us, only Cheney, Rove, and a whole host of "loyal Bushies." That they were winning so handily for so long, and are only just now beginning to be beaten back, and it isn't over yet: rarely has the subtext for a work of art been so inescapable or obvious.
"If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator," Bush joked.
* LRB on Climate Change: The problem with ‘balance’ is partly a problem with the way science is reported. ‘Balance’ works, sort of, as a way of discussing politics in a two-party system. (Though it has to be said that the remorseless polarisation, whereby I say yah because you said boo, is one main reason for the decreased interest in party politics.) Since the climate debate has been polarised on left-right lines in the US, it has seemed appropriate to the media to treat it as a polarised issue, one on which there are two schools of thought, which, in respect of the science, it isn’t: there is one school of thought, and a few nutters. (Parenthetically, it’s not too hard to imagine a world in which the conservative parties were more in favour of conservation, and environmentalism in general was a cause of the right. David Cameron is clearly trying to remake this connection in the UK, in the belief that this is the main issue where he can clearly and definitively distinguish himself from New Labour. The option isn’t available to the Republicans, since they abandoned science in favour of the Christianist right and the environment in favour of Big Oil, which may be one reason why, notwithstanding the shift in the evidence, a poll of Congressional Republicans found that only 13 per cent of them thought it ‘proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the earth is warming because of man-made problems’.) The way the issue is reported reflects the fact that there are people who want to believe in global warming, and wanted to do so right from the start, before the evidence had accumulated to the point where it was no longer an issue of belief. Similarly, there are plenty of people who did not want to believe in man-made global warming, and who are continuing to refuse to believe in it even though the balance of the evidence has changed. But we can’t afford to be distracted from the factual position either by the people who want it to be true or the people who want it not to be, and there is an urgent requirement in the public arena for the issue to be considered now as one of plain fact.
* The back cover of History of Madness contains a series of hyperbolic hymns of praise to its virtues. Paul Rabinow calls the book “one of the major works of the twentieth century”; Ronnie Laing hails it as “intellectually rigorous”; and Nikolas Rose rejoices that “Now, at last, English-speaking readers can have access to the depth of scholarship that underpins Foucault’s analysis”. Indeed they can, and one hopes that they will read the text attentively and intelligently, and will learn some salutary lessons. One of those lessons might be amusing, if it had no effect on people’s lives: the ease with which history can be distorted, facts ignored, the claims of human reason disparaged and dismissed, by someone sufficiently cynical and shameless, and willing to trust in the ignorance and the credulity of his customers.Somebody hates Foucault.
In North America and in Europe, we are living now, I think it fair to say, in a period of reaction. In the arts, it takes the form of a bullying reaction against the high modernist achievement, which is thought to be too difficult, too demanding of audiences, not accessible (or "user-friendly") enough. And in politics, it takes the form of a dismissal of all attempts to measure public life by what are disparaged as mere ideals.
In the modern era, the call for a return to realism in the arts often goes hand in hand with the strengthening of cynical realism in political discourse.
The greatest offense now, in matters both of the arts and of culture generally, not to mention political life, is to seem to be upholding some better, more exigent standard, which is attacked, both from the left and the right, as either naive or (a new banner for the philistines) "elitist".
Barring another freak snowstorm I'll be back in Durham tomorrow. In the meantime, here's a tiny spot of self-promotion: an article I wrote for the Independent this week about a proposed eco-friendly apartment complex in Chapel Hill.
We might think that Americans are eager to celebrate talented young people who can thumb their noses at the older generation and thus exorcise the lingering resentment so many harbor from being graded and evaluated in the classroom. But what American Idol reveals instead is a veritable hunger for realistic evaluation. Time and time again, contestants in the early episodes of this year's season whine obviously off key and then insist they are highly talented — in spite of the judges' protestations. Most of those kids have not learned how to sing, but they have mastered the self-esteem and "attitude" so valued in our culture. The persistent dynamic of these episodes is expertise putting down untalented braggadocio.
It's been a while since I posted anything on the day-to-day scandals of the Bush administration, but this U.S. Attorneys situation seems to have serious legs. (Surely this will be the thing that...) Talking Points Memo, as usual, is indispensible. There's also some useful details in the MetaFilter thread.
"What killed Captain America was not a sniper's bullet," writes Ari Emanuel in the Huffington Post, a popular liberal blog. "In reality it was the toxic state of Mr Bush and Cheney's America. It's hard to be a star-spangled Super Soldier these days. Given the lip-service-only support this administration gives our troops, the patriotic hero would have to fight evil with a substandard red, white and blue shield, and be stop-lossed into an endless tour of duty."
* Jonathan Lethem's just givin' it away: "On May 15th I’ll give away a free option on the film rights to my novel You Don’t Love Me Yet to a selected filmmaker."
What makes McCain's conversion all the more tragic is that it's plainly not working. He has spent the last three years plotting to make himself the candidate of the GOP establishment that he once attacked. But, as the Wall Street Journal reported, "2008 is shaping up as the worst presidential year in three decades to be the candidate of the Republican establishment."
His career since then has indeed resembled a certain famous Jedi. He began as a crusader for justice. Soon he realized that he needed to acquire more power in order to accomplish his noble goals. But over time, his pursuit of power became the goal itself, and by the end he lost his capacity to differentiate between right and wrong.
This is not Luke Skywalker here. This is Luke Skywalker's father. But at least Darth Vader attained his position before the Death Star exploded.
Proponents of neurolaw say that neuroscientific evidence will have a large impact not only on questions of guilt and punishment but also on the detection of lies and hidden bias, and on the prediction of future criminal behavior. At the same time, skeptics fear that the use of brain-scanning technology as a kind of super mind-reading device will threaten our privacy and mental freedom, leading some to call for the legal system to respond with a new concept of “cognitive liberty.”
"This is the story. This is the whole play. This is how it's going to affect people. The science is one thing. This is how it affects me, you and the person next door," said University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver.
Amazing documentary (which many of you have probably already seen—I'm late to the game here) which uses found civil-defense and army footage (and only that: no narration) to construct an incredibly disheartening history of America and the nuclear bomb. Here's an article about the making, here's a fan site, and here's one of the old "Duck and Cover" movies that it uses—all of which should tide you over until it comes from Netflix.
I don’t want to be a professional. I’m not in the Directors Guild; I don’t want to be. I like holding on to my amateur status. I wanted to be a professional in all the right ways, but I didn’t want it ever to be a job. I even asked: “Would I die for Jackie Brown?” I would have died for Reservoir Dogs. I would have died getting a shot for Pulp Fiction. I don’t know if I would have died, would have thrown myself into that kind of harm’s way, for Jackie Brown, and that scared me a little bit. I think the reason was that that film was based on a novel; it wasn’t an original thing, born from me. Whether it’s hardship or ruin, or hardship or good times, or happy or sad, or profitable or destitute — whatever the deal is, you go down the road today, and maybe your rewards are today, or maybe your rewards will be tomorrow, or maybe in another life, but you’re going your own way.
It is hardly surprising that lots of rich kids go to America's richest colleges. It has always been so. But today's students are richer on average than their predecessors. Between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s, in a sample of eleven prestigious colleges, the percentage of students from families in the bottom quartile of national family income remained roughly steady— around 10 percent. During the same period the percentage of students from the top quartile rose sharply, from a little more than one third to fully half. If the upscale shops and restaurants near campus are any indication, the trend has continued if not accelerated. And if the sample is broadened to include the top 150 colleges, the percentage of students from the bottom quartile drops to 3 percent. In short, there are very few poor students at America's top colleges, and a large and growing number of rich ones.
Yun-Men held up his staff to the assembly and said: "My staff has been transformed into a dragon and it swallowed the universe. Mountains, rivers, the whole earth—where are they now? —Zen Koan
Breathing in, be one with your own breath. Breathing out, be one with your own breath. —Instructions on Sitting
sin and evil are not to be got rid of just blindly. look at the astringent persimmons! they turn into the sweet dried ones. —Zen Commentary
The mind that is free from itself—why should it look within? This introspection taught by Buddha only increases the obstruction. Things are originally one; why then should we endeavor to untie them? —Saikontan
Just being here, I am here, and the snow falls. —Issa
The transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing marks a decisive turning point. The first reflects a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notion of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates the era of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer a God to recognize his own, no longer a Last Judgment to separate the false from the true, the real from the artificial, as everything is already dead and resurrected in advance.
When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.
* Planet of Slums howls with figures. Copious examples drawn from around the globe are stacked up to illustrate a single point; comparative tables drive it home. This constant production of numbers – and a seamless access between continents – offers us the world as a single, intelligible place defined by the universal laws of accumulation and deprivation. Any sense that slum cultures and slum cities might have a specific character, beyond the common lot of misery, is tenuous. No book will give readers the impression of covering greater distances, even if they will feel by the end as though they’d been cooped up in a narrow, featureless room. Homogeneity, Davis would argue, is what late capitalism does: already a billion people live in roughly the same extraordinary way in roughly similar environments. Vast, contiguous slums are the habitat of the future for even larger numbers, yet the future looks more and more like it did the day before yesterday.All about slums.
Recovering from AWP, Jaimee and I devoted a good part of the last day and a half to watching Jean-Xavier de Lestrade's The Staircase, a documentary devoted that to other Durham legal debacle, the Michael Peterson murder trial. It's damn good. I won't say much about it because I imagine people will want to watch it, but if you already know the outcome, have already seen the film, or think you never will, there's some interestingcontroversy around the movie's bias. On this point I really have to agree; I'm usually fairly skeptical, and well-aware that everything I know about the case I learned from watching this movie—all the same, by the last episode I was behind Peterson's defense 100%.
'The Uselessness of Art, the Dreamlike Fantasizing, Baroque Impulse, the Mischievous Need to Make Things That Are Not Useful'
Longtime friend-of-the-BCR Jonathan Lethem hypes his new novel in the L.A. Times:
"You Don't Love Me Yet" is not going to teach you anything. It's not incisive about Los Angeles. It's not incisive about its characters because they don't have enough of a career, they're just wannabes. It's really only a book about language and life and the impulse to make art. It's about evoking feeling in the reader, I hope -- laughter, embarrassment, yearning.
* AICN points to this interesting Los Angeles Timesinterview with Joss Whedon promoting the upcoming Buffy: Season 8 comic, as well as some interviews from the cast and crew of Heroes, the geekiest (and possibly also the best) show on TV. I may be a nerd, but this upcoming five-years-in-the-future episode sounds awesome.
The July 31, 2006, piece on Wikipedia, “Know It All,” by Stacy Schiff, contained an interview with a Wikipedia site administrator and contributor called Essjay, whose responsibilities included handling disagreements about the accuracy of the site’s articles and taking action against users who violate site policy. He was described in the piece as “a tenured professor of religion at a private university” with “a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law.”
...Essjay now says that his real name is Ryan Jordan, that he is twenty-four and holds no advanced degrees, and that he has never taught. He was recently hired by Wikia—a for-profit company affiliated with Wikipedia—as a “community manager”; he continues to hold his Wikipedia positions. He did not answer a message we sent to him; Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikia and of Wikipedia, said of Essjay’s invented persona, “I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it.”
The latest example: 
