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Saturday, March 31, 2007

Stats to Make Me Sad
Via Vu, my bleak future.
Friday, March 30, 2007

Big Day for Talk Radio
On the same day Rush Limbaugh called 72% of Americans "blithering idiots," Michael Savage called 9/11 the work of God:
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.
20 Questions with Ron Moore
Do you already know who the fifth cylon of the final five is? If so, have you already left us some clues?

Yes and yes.
Thursday, March 29, 2007

Street Level
I have a short article in the Indy this week about the new show at the Nasher, which is awesome, incidentally.
Voter Fraud Is a Fraud
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.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Which Philip K. Dick Story Are We In Today?
The blog of blogs. Feels like Ubik to me—but it always does.
Co-eds
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.
If I Could Start Again
I was going to put up this infantile Kermit the Frog "Hurt" cover from MetaFilter, but then I looked at the Johnny Cash video and decided to put it up instead.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

I Speak for the Trees


(via)
'How Bush Helped the GOP Commit Suicide'
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).
Jumping the Shark Watchtower
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.
Monday, March 26, 2007

Monday Does Not Play Dice
* L.A. Times: 'Novelists have been feeling downright apocalyptic -- what's behind all the gloom?'

* John Updatedike reviews a new biography of Albert Einstein.
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.
*The Children of Húrin is a new Tolkien story completed by Tolkien's son. It's more or less a sequel to The Silmarillion, so smart money is to stay away.

* How to get that first novel published. Well, get to it!
Sunday, March 25, 2007

Get Rid of God
...in comics. Via Gravity Lens.
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.
The Fifth Seal
From a class, an interesting article about the Waco disaster, arguing that there were other ways the stand-off might have ended.
Saturday, March 24, 2007

If Saturday Were a Sandwich
* 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."

* America's prisons are broken.

* A brief history of virginity.

* 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.

* Also in Salon: talkin' copyright with Jonathan Lethem.
Friday, March 23, 2007

Losing Venice
A new floodgate system should protect the city from high tides—unless climate change interferes.
Before I Became a Vegetarian I Seriously Loved McDonald's Chicken Nuggets
Turns out the secret ingredient is butane.
Thursday, March 22, 2007

HBO Almost Never Makes a Bad Show
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.
Thursday Septuple Threat!
* Great Flickr set of '50s pulp sci-fi covers.

* Rudy Guiliani: Hegelian.

* 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 100-Year-Old Photo Blog.

* 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.

* Heaven's Gate, Ten Years On.

* A Treatise on Monkey Morality.
First/Second Day of Spring Zen
No underrobes,
  bare ass exposed—
    gust of spring wind.

—Buson

Some days I'm very fond of my Zen Calendar.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Nerd Crack
Cynical-C has a post to concept art from the Star Wars movies by Ralph McQuarrie.

A New Hope
The Empire Strikes Back
Return of the Jedi

For All Those Who Love Language
A short scene from Pulp Fiction rendered entirely in type. Via Drawn! And you know it's not safe for work, mother-fletcher.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Correction, There Goes Your Week
Dotville.
Tower Defense
There goes your Wednesday.
So When I Saw Those Iraqi Kids, I Said, "Those Are My Brothers," and They Were
I'm sure all the John W. and Joan Edie Celebrity Lectures are good, but I've only listened to the the Kurt Vonnegut one (1992) so far, and I can assure you, it is great. The man is my hero. Thank Bookslut for the link.
Totally 100% Trend
Check out this Chris Ware animated short for Showtime's new This American Life.
The Little Fat Man with the Pug-Nosed Face
Gervais and Merchant have decided to end Extras with a hour-long special instead of a third-season. Good move, I think; the second season was as good as the show was ever likely to be.
In Soviet Russia, Rabbithole Is Down You
* Alice in Soviet Russia.

* Minor characters on parade.

* One man's epic/futile quest to view every movie in the Criterion Collection. Today he fails to love Rushmore sufficiently. MeFi discusses, was there first.
Monday, March 19, 2007

'A-list actors shoot a quirky Hollywood film in Rajasthan'
India Today has some details about the next long-awaited Wes Anderson movie, The Darjeeling Limited.
TPM
The L.A. Times profiles the reigning monarch of Left Blogistan, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo.
Sunday, March 18, 2007

Why Novels
Via MeFi, an unpublished essay by Susan Sontag about the moral superiority of novels in a time of junk culture:
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".
Still Traveling
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.
Thursday, March 15, 2007

Travelllllllling
I'll post if I can, but have a nice long weekend.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007

American Idol and Pedagogy
Two great tastes...what?
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.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Stop the Insanity
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.
Thrilling Chapter Endings You May Use in Your Next Novel
Oh, McSweeney's.
"By the way," [PROTAGONIST] said with a knowing smile, "did I happen to mention that I'm black?"
Spring Break! Woo!
* Why Captain America had to die.
"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."
*Philip Pullman on the big-screen adaptation of The Golden Compass. (via Bookninja)

* 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."
Monday, March 12, 2007

Lethem
In the New Yorker.
The Partial Veto
This is amazing.
Spoiler Alert!
NBC's Heroes to completely, shamelessly, inexcusably rip off ... well, see for yourself if you want to know.
2007 Backwards City Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Star Wars Analogies
Jonathan Chait, L.A. Times.
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.
It's Spring Break, I Don't Care How Dumb It Is
"Stairway to Gilligan's Island." Via.

Sunday, March 11, 2007

Prefrontal Nudity
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.”

Via Metafilter, which also points us to a YouTube profile of our brave new Panopticon.
Dogs and Cats Dying Together
"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.
The Atomic Café
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.
Friday, March 09, 2007

Being Quentin Tarantino
Some days it's hard not to love the egomaniacial bastard.
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.
Losing Cap
Stephen Colbert remembers.



Also, Best 'Better Know a District' Ever. The last minute blew my mind.

Snaf U
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.
Unbreak My Ze
I can't believe there's only a week left in The Show.

Spring Break Is Here and I Hope It Never Zends
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

(Zen)
Thursday, March 08, 2007

Railing Against FemiMarxiDecons Who Destroy Literature and Everything Holy
Why critics and writers hate each other, and what we might do about it. Via PCEgan.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Steve Rogers, RIP
Captain America, felled by an assassin's bullet. MetaFilter remembers.
This Week in Poetry
Backwards City #5 gets a few mentions on Verse Daily: Amisha Patel for "Yet" and James Capozzi for "Country Album."
This Week in TV
This week in TV, 24 had its worst scene in history ("Don't tell anyone we tried to kill the president and we'll let you go." "Okay." "Okay, you're free.")—and I'm counting the cougar in that—while Battlestar Galactica went balls to the wall and SPOILERED the one SPOILER you'd never thought they'd SPOILER. Oh, and Edward James Olmos's skilled improvisation wound up destroying an extremely valuable borrowed museum prop. Whoopsies.
Tuesday, March 06, 2007

'We Need the Fuzziness of Imperfect Thinking to Function'
Jonathan Lethem talks to theoretical cosmologist Janna Levin.
The Desert of the Real
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.
Jean Baudrillard has died.
Monday, March 05, 2007

Your Bible Appears to Be Defective
Old and Busted: Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go [and] sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come [and] follow me.
New Hotness: Jesus was a millionaire.
Three More
* How to draw the world. Maps of the world drawn by relative consumption, wealth, and instability. At right: Toy imports.

* All about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

* 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.
Monday, Monday
* The New York Times has a "Must-Do" List to reverse the damage done to America by six years of Bushism. It's a start.

* Also in the Times: eleven pages on the evolutionary origins of God. But not everyone is happy about all this atheism.

* Michael Dirda gets his Gilgamesh on.

* And via Kottke, how many countries can you name in ten minutes? To be honest, I got bored after five.
The Staircase
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 interesting controversy 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%.
Sunday, March 04, 2007

'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.
(via blucarbnpinwheel)
'Disappearing without a Trace at a Rate We Can’t Even Measure Accurately'
I'm speaking, of course, of the bees.

Which reminds me: The winner of the Backwards City Chapbook Contest, The Beekeeper's Departure, is available now...





Sci-Fi Sunday
* AICN points to this interesting Los Angeles Times interview 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.

* 'Alien technology the best hope to save our planet'

* Not strictly sci-fi, but a second cousin: The New Yorker tackles Hollywood's new love of anti-narrative.

* And via Boing Boing, Steampunk Star Wars.
Friday, March 02, 2007

Out of Town
Most of the staff of Backwards City is in Hotlanta tonight, rocking AWP. Sit tight until Monday, Durham; I'll be back.
Thursday, March 01, 2007

Scandalpedia!
Wow:
EDITORS’ NOTE:

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.”
Via Metafilter.

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