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 3rd Annual Backwards City Contest Closes in Two Weeks!
Submissions for Backwards City #6 are now officially closed. But our contest deadline is still two weeks away. Click below for all the details, and good luck! 2007 Fiction Contest (Top Prize: $500 and publication in Backwards City #6) 2007 Poetry Contest (Top Prize: $500 and publication in Backwards City #6) 2007 Poetry Chapbook Contest (Top Prize: $300 and twenty-five copies of your printed chapbook)
Whose Name Sounds Like a Small-Circulation Poetry Magazine
Anthony Lane, who hates everything, hates Spider-Man 3. It's not like you won't see it anyway.
If “Spider-Man 3” is a shambles, that’s because it makes the rules up as it goes along. By the end, for instance, Sandman has become the size of an office block, each swinging fist as big as a truck, his personality reduced to brutishness. I half expected him to come after Spider-Man and Mary Jane carrying a gigantic bucket and spade. By what criterion did he grow so mountainous? Is he like a Transformer, or more like a genie? The fact is that if the fantastical is to flourish it must lay down the conditions of its magic and abide by them; otherwise, we feel cheated. (Tolkien knew this better than anyone.) Some viewers will take the New Goblin, whose name sounds like a small-circulation poetry magazine, to be a vessel of unnatural forces, while others will see him, when he fires up his rocket-powered skateboard, as a rich kid with too many toys. That’s the problem with this third installment of the franchise: not that it’s running out of ideas, or lifting them too slavishly from the original comic, but that it lunges at them with an infantile lack of grace, throwing money at one special effect after another and praying—or calculating—that some of them will fly.
On the heels of the massive success of the Buffy Season Eight comic, Joss Whedon will be putting out a twelve-issue miniseries of the storyline for the planned sixth season of Angel. I'm actually more excited about this than I am about Buffy Season Eight. It's a good time to be a huge nerd.
Lenin's Tomb has a lengthy review of Mark Ames's Going Postal prompted by the Virginia Tech shootings. What he writes doesn't actually seem to have much to do with what happened in Virginia, based on what we've heard about it so far—but it does begin to explain why events like Columbine and workplace shootings happen.
As has been repeatedly pointed out, no successful profile of a typical school shooter has yet been devised. Good students, bad students, wealthy ones, poor ones, ones from stable familes, others from broken homes... there's no archetype. This is because, as Ames puts it, "It isn't the office or schoolyard shooters who need to be profiled - they can't be. It is the workplaces and schools that need to be profiled". Now, this bit is rather crucial. I quote verbatim from his list of characteristics to watch for:
complaints about bullying go unpunished by an administration that supports the cruel social structure;
antiseptic corridors and overhead fluourescent lights reminiscent of a mid-sized airports;
rampant moral hypocrisy that promotes the most two-faced, mean, and shallow students to the top of the pecking order; and
maximally stressed parents push their kids to achieve higher and higher scores.
The second point, to avoid misunderstanding, is serious. The dispiriting, uglified surroundings provide an important experiential backdrop for the bullying and hypocrisy and stress. But of course, the main points here are the competitive social structure and the parents' eagerness to ensure children succeed within it. The school is a training ground for the workplace, inculcating the kind of discipline and habits that one will be constant throughout one's life. Most waking hours, at least five days a week, will be spent in competition with one's peers, and the assholes will always rise to the top if they weren't there to begin with. Bullying will be overlooked or tacitly condoned by people who sympathise with the bullies and find it difficult to manage their subordinates without them. They call it 'hazing', apparently, and its often meted out in a formal fashion along socioeconomic lines, sometimes by sororities and fraternities. It's defended as a bit of fun, or as a means to inculcate respect: on the contrary, it is often quite serious and generates fear and mistrust. Aside from the formal 'hazing', there are asshole teachers who will emotionally humiliate students in the name of discipline, and the usual ritual drudgery and idiocy that goes on the minutiae. Many of the most miserable, demeaning things that can happen at work can happen at school, and anyone who remembers their school years knows that it seems to matter a great deal more at that age, and it seems to last forever, even if its only a few years.
That this is an experience with at least some widespread purchase is evident in the subterranean sympathy for the mass murderers. The support of some young people wasn't restricted to Klebold and Karris. When Andy Williams, a lower middle class student attending an upper class college in the fading Republican town of Santee, decided to wipe out many of his classmates, within weeks there were attempted and actual 'copycat' massacres. So far from the Pump Up the Volume fantasy, these kids don't solve all their problems by learning to express themselves through pirate radio stations, and sincerely talking through all of their problems. They implode or explode. The implication of the phrase 'copycat' is that people really want to be like the hick serial killers and destroy their own lives in the process, so that someone who doesn't matter will say they were cool. That's a cheap and lazy excuse for analysis. But, precisely as the slave revolts in the workplace often involve explicit or implicit reference to previous revolts, the example of others provides an interpretive framework, and a 'way forward'.
Openly gay, experimental filmmaker Todd Haynes burst upon the scene two years after his graduation from Brown University with his now-infamous 43-minute cult treasure "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story" (1987). Seizing upon the inspired gimmick of using Barbie and Ken dolls to sympathetically recount the story of the pop star's death from anorexia, he spent months making miniature dishes, chairs, costumes, Kleenex and Ex-Lax boxes, and Carpenters' records to create the film's intricate, doll-size mise-en-scene. The result was both audacious and accomplished as the dolls seemingly ceased to be dolls leaving the audience weeping for the tragic singer.
And just for Tim, who I know can't resist the siren song of Internet flash games no matter how many papers he has to write, here's P.O.D.: Planetary Orbital Defense. Via JayIsGames.
Some kind of dark alien parasite seems to be taking over vast swathes of the entertainment realm. Previously sunny and harmless areas of pop culture are gradually being cast into shadow, as if a giant pair of Ray-Bans is being lowered over the world. We've got dark sitcoms, dark reality TV, dark comedies, dark thrillers, dark genres of music, ultra-darker-than-black horror movies, and when a masked black-metal group from Finland wins the Eurovision Song Contest, it's surely time to sound the dark alarm?
I had a surprisingly productive day, so here come some unexpected pre-Monday posts. First up: an amusing list of contronyms, words that are self-antonyms. (Thanks Steve)
R. Vu sends some thoughts on Go vs. chess from Deleuze and Guattari:
Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the State apparatus in the context of the theory of games. Let us take chess and Go, from the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with a relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game?s form of interiority. Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function: "It" makes a move. "It" could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very different in the two cases. Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary?s pieces: their functioning is structural. On the other hand, a Go piece has only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so diachronically only). Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war, with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology. —A Thousand Plateaus, 352
If you're uninitiated, you can learn to play Go at the Interactive Way to Go, or here at Sensei's Library; you'd be a fool not to. I'm on the International Go Server using PandaEgg from time to time, though not as often as I would like—email me at gerry@backwardscity.net for my handle.
I stole this from Tim W.'s Facebook page. That guy loves James Joyce more than anyone.
"As an artist I am against every state. Of course I must recognize it, since indeed in all my dealings I come into contact with its institutions. The state is concentric, man is eccentric. Thence arises an eternal struggle. The monk, the bachelor, and the anarchist are in the same category. Naturally I cant approve of the act of the revolutionary who tosses a bomb in a theatre to destroy the king and his children. On the other hand, have those states behaved any better which have drowned the world in a blood-bath?" -Joyce, letter of 1918
Part of the JayIsGames "Grow" competition, Jelly Fusion is a nice way to procrastinate when you've still got two papers you have no interest in finishing. The "Eureka!" feeling you get after you've figured out level 2 is well worth the time it takes to do it.
Unremarkable but adequate lighting; expressionless decor and dinnerware; floor plan designed to the last detail by management engineers; innocuous background music at low volume; staff meticulously trained to deal with customers by the book: “Welcome to Denny’s.” Everything about the restaurant is anonymous and interchangeable. And almost every seat is filled.
Preface by Christopher Tolkien For more than 30 years I have been wondering what to do with my father's unfinished ramblings. But then the Lord of the Rings movies did very well, so I decided to cash in.
This time, let's take up a serious issue: the stupid and defeatist idea that poetry, especially modern or contemporary poetry, ought to be less "difficult." Should poets write in ways that are more genial, simple, and folksy, like the now-unreadable work of Edgar Guest (1888-1959)? Guest's Heap o' Livin' sold more than a million copies (in the days when a million copies was a lot), and he had his own weekly radio show. But Guest's popularity is history, while every day people still read the peculiar, demanding poems of Guest's approximate contemporaries Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens. People still read the poems of Moore and Stevens because they don't wear out, because they surprise and entice us—and maybe, in part, because they are difficult?
'It's Almost Impossible to Go onto Someone's MySpace Page Now and Not Find a Reference to The Big Lebowski'
Movies go on to have lives completely unrelated to the numbers and kudos by which we obsessively judge them when they're in the spotlight. We're so busy declaring the weekend box office winners and losers -- and letting the Oscars and other awards create some sort of official merit hierarchy -- that we easily forget that time renders many of these verdicts meaningless.
Three weeks into the Sopranos, it seems to me that they're fairly blatantly signing each episode with an iconic shot from the Godfather saga. Last week it was the famous baptism scene from One; the week before that, it was repeated shots of a fishing boat on a lake (Two). This week's closing shot of Junior in the wheelchair was reminiscent enough of the last shot of Three to make me certain there's some sort of pattern at work. But what, as the feller says, does it mean?
Also, since when does Tony have a gambling problem? That was the one vice he always definitely didn't have.
(UPDATE: Scanning the Television Without Pity thread on the episode I see I should have been paying closer attention, and if I had I might have noticed the Tony caressing his tomatoes like Don Corleone, the street hit, and the Moe Green eyeball shot homage as well.)
People with this problem suddenly and unexpectedly take leave of their usual physical surroundings and embark on a journey that can last as little as a few hours or as long as several months. During the fugue state, individuals completely lose their identity, later assuming a new one. They don’t know their real names or anything about their former lives, and they do not recognize friends or family. They may not even remember how they got to where they are. Via MeFi.
Keith Uhlich (fer) and Matt Zoller Seitz (agin) talk Tarantino. Like most of you, I'm fer, and it's probably no surprise that I think Uhlich easily has the upper hand here. For instance, I think this is a great way and possibly the right way to understand Tarantino:
KU: Reservoir Dogs I count as a big influence in my life. It was the movie that sort of shocked me into wanting to be a critic. To further my spiritual-religious descriptor: I recently re-watched all of Tarantino's work and they seemed like an old school preacher talking at you, really preaching with fire and brimstone.
MZS: Reservoir Dogs? Really?
KU: Yes. Absolutely. And not just Reservoir Dogs -- the whole body of work has to me a revival tent, old-school-religious feel: in its sanguine nature, in its passion and enthusiasm, and also in its more troubling aspects.
Via Vu, who judging from his email feels much the same way (and who also still owes the Internet a post on Grindhouse).
The idea of the novel as contradictory, double-dealing, and secretive, the secret agent of literature, is matched in all these critical commentaries by an equally strong idea of the novel as multifarious, polymorphous, expansive, and superfluous, the behemoth of literature. For the prose of the world to be turned into the world of prose, superfluity, spilling-over, and generous abundance are called for. These critics show how even the most formal and aesthetically stringent of novelists also have appetites for excess. A.S. Byatt on Balzac eloquently celebrates his "manic inclusiveness." One critic of Ulysses describes it as investing in "an ideal of exhaustiveness." John Mullan points up the "sheer energy" in Philip Roth's rhetorical strategies of "amplification": "You say something, and then you say it again in a different way." In all the generalizations about the novel, it's the places where the critics take on the stuff, the prosaic detail, the thinginess of fiction, "the clutter of life," that most speak to this reader: how the summer heat of Ian McEwan's Atonement infiltrates the plot, the forceful presence of meals in Dickens, Catherine and Heathcliff's sharing their clothes in childhood as a mark of their indivisibility, "ordinary things" interrupting the visionary dream of the traveler in Mrs. Dalloway.
Often, in reading fiction, or reading about it, one comes on the idea of a journey: a worn path, a day's walking through a city, a quest, a progress, a journey through time, with deviations and stoppages—at its most extreme, a journey into the coffin, or a description of one's own death. It is permissible to think about characters in novels as people, and it is not necessarily sentimental or naive to think about what might happen to them after we stop reading—since the novel, as Mullan observes, "is a genre that would have us believe that its characters might have a life beyond its pages." In the New York Review of Books.
A lot of litmags call themselves contemporary, but Backwards City Review is one of the few that truly feels like a product of the 21st century. It's not just the alt comics and offbeat fiction, but the awareness that literature and art can, indeed, be fun.
The review singles out "Against Specificity" for praise, one of my favorite stories we've posted, and judging from an email I received in my mailbox today, a favorite of readers, too:
I have been pressing my copy of Issue #5 on anyone who I think will give it back, mostly on account of Douglas Watson's "Against Specificity," my new favorite story.
It seems like more Watson is what the world needs at this grave hour. Will you please publish more Watson?
An enjoyable fragment from Walter Benjamin, written in 1921 (though it could have been last week).
A religion may be discerned in capitalism—that is to say, capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers. The proof of the religious structure of capitalism—not merely, as Weber believes, as a formation condition by religion, but as an essentially religious phenomenon—would still lead even today to the folly of an endless universal polemic. We cannot draw closed the net in which we are caught. Later on, however, we shall be able to gain an overview of it.
Nevertheless, even at the present moment it is possible to distinguish three aspects of this religious structure of capitalism. In the first place, capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed. In capitalism, things have a meaning only in their relationship to the cult; capitalism has no specific body of dogma, no theology. It is from this point of view that utilitarianism acquires its religious overtones. This concretization of cult is connected with a second feature of capitalism: the permanence of the cult. Capitalism is the celebration of a cult sans rêve et sans merci (without dream or mercy). There are no "weekdays." There is no day that is not a feast day, in the terrible sense that all its sacred pomp is unfolded before us; each day commands the utter fealty of each worshipper. And third, the cult makes guilt pervasive. Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement. In this respect, this religious system is caught up in the headlong rush of a larger movement. A vast sense of guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal, to hammer it into the conscious mind, so as once and for all to include God in the system of guilt and thereby awaken in him an interest in the process of atonement. This atonement cannot then be expected from the cult itself, or from the reformation of this religion (which would need to be able to have recourse to some stable element in it), or even from the complete renouncement of this religion. The nature of the religious movement which is capitalism entails endurance right to the end, to the point where God, too, finally takes on the entire burden of guilt, to the point where the universe has been taken over by that despair which is actually its secret hope. Capitalism is entirely without precedent, in that it is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction. It is the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation. God's transcendence is at an end. But he is not dead; he has been incorporated into human existence. This passage of the planet "Human" through the house of despair in the absolute loneliness of his trajectory is the ethos that Nietzsche defined. This man is the superman, the first to recognize the religion of capitalism and begin to bring it to fulfillment. Its fourth feature is that its God must be hidden from it and may be addressed only when his guilt is at its zenith. The cult is celebrated before an unmatured deity; every idea, every conception of it offends against the secret of this immaturity.
Freud's theory, too, belongs to the hegemony of the priests of this cult. its conception is capitalist through and through. By virtue of a profound analogy, which has still to be illuminated, what has been repressed, the idea of sin, is capital itself, which pays interest on the hell of the unconscious.
The paradigm of capitalist religious thought is magnificently formulated in Nietzsche's philosophy. The idea of the superman transposes the apocalyptic "leap" not into conversion, atonement, purification, and penance, but into an apparently steady, though in the final analysis explosive and discontinuous intensification. For this reason, intensification and development in the sense of non facit saltum are incompatible. The superman is the man who has arrived where he is without changing his ways; he is historical man who has grown up right through the sky. This breaking open of the heavens by an intensified humanity that was and is characfterized (even for Nietzsche himself) by guilt in a religious sense was anticipated by Nietzsche. Marx is a similar case: the capitalism that refuses to change course becomes socialism by means of the simple and compound interest that are functions of Schuld (consider the demonic ambiguity of this word).
Capitalism is a religion of pure cult, without dogma.
Capitalism has developed as a parasite of Christianity in the West (this must be shown not just in the case of Calvinism, but in the other orthodox Christian churches), until it reached the point where Christianity's history is essentially that of its parasite—that is to say, of capitalism.
There's more, but it's fractured, and not very coherent. So I'll stop here. It's good junk.
Because isn't knowing all the trivia the whole point of seeing Grindhouse?
We saw it tonight, incidentally. I enjoyed it a lot—I went in expecting it to be too self-indulgent, but it turned out to be just self-indulgent enough. If you can handle the gross-out zombie madness of Planet Terror, there are some great laughs to be had throughout both it and Death Proof. And who among us would have suspected the KillBilliverse would end in a zombie apocalypse? If the Michael Parks character is any guide, it does—well, either that or a minor incident involving vampires.
I don't care if it's a huge bomb, if you like Tarantino, it's worth seeing.
Why didn't I do all this work over the course of the semester? I seem to recall intending to do so.
To attain Zen enlightenment, it is not necessary to give up family life, quit your job, become a vegetarian, practice asceticism and flee to a quiet place, or go into a ghost cave of dead Zen to entertain subjective imaginings. —Ta-hui
Vonnegut was either the last representative of a certain American literary tradition (radical and socialist and Biblical and truly democratic, one that includes Emerson and Whitman and Dreiser and Dos Passos and Steinbeck) or—I prefer this version—a prophet of an entirely new tradition, the advance man for a forthcoming, reinvented, post-Iraq America dedicated not to filling its coffers and retaining its advantage and pummeling prospective competitors and spreading our great pigs-at-a-trough model of democracy, but rather to (humbly) using our wealth and power and creativity to lift up the weak and sick and poor, among us and far from us.
...and by all accounts he deserves it. I've been looking forward to reading this book all semester; with the end finally in sight, I just took it out of the library. I'll let you know how it is.
In our artificial market, therefore, social influence played as large a role in determining the market share of successful songs as differences in quality. It’s a simple result to state, but it has a surprisingly deep consequence. Because the long-run success of a song depends so sensitively on the decisions of a few early-arriving individuals, whose choices are subsequently amplified and eventually locked in by the cumulative-advantage process, and because the particular individuals who play this important role are chosen randomly and may make different decisions from one moment to the next, the resulting unpredictably is inherent to the nature of the market. It cannot be eliminated either by accumulating more information — about people or songs — or by developing fancier prediction algorithms, any more than you can repeatedly roll sixes no matter how carefully you try to throw the die.
Too much writing to do. But because it's been a while, and because you've all been so good, and because some of you may never have seen it in the first place, here for your continued critical pleasure is the finest cultural achievement of this or any age, Hurra Torpedo's "Total Eclipse of the Heart." I'll see you Monday.
Interviewer: What did you think of Vonnegut’s attitude towards his characters (in Breakfast of Champions)?
PKD: Disgusting and an abomination. I think that that book is an incredible drying up of the liquid sack of life in the veins of a person like a dead tree…that’s what I think. I also love Kurt Vonnegut.
Breakfast of Champions was never popular in the Canavan household, either; neither my father or I really cared for it. I should read it again.
* One of the lesser-known consequences of Kurt Vonnegut's passing has been an explosion of interest in Backwards City #1. Our site has been getting tons of hits—I just had to buy more bandwidth to keep it up.
I put up a birthday post in 2005 with a ton of Vonnegut links, which is as good a memorial as I can provide right now.
This is a terrible day.
“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music." —Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a County
"And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, 'Kurt is up in heaven now.' That's my favorite joke." —Kurt Vonnegut, the same.
Why has there not been more agitation for a series based on the miniseries The Lost Room? Now on DVD, it aired on the Sci-Fi Channel in December, and various quibbles aside it's actually pretty good. There are any number of directions a series could go; I'd favor an Twilight-Zone-style anthology series with some overarching mythology thrown in periodically as a hook. (Sci-Fi Channel, call me. I work cheap.)
If you're a big dork, as I undoubtedly am, give it a shot—and once you've seen it, you can pour over the list of Objects.
The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time. Get into a fistfight, put your mind on the strategy of the fight, and you will not feel the other fellow's punches. —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
If you want to ask where the flowers comes from, even the God of spring doesn't know. —Zen Saying
One who understands truth is wu-nien (without thought), wu-i (without memory), and wu-chao (without attachment). —Hui-Neng
If a man understands the Tao in the morning, it is well with him even when he dies in the evening. —Confucius
The path of the enlightened one leaves no track—it is like the path of birds in the sky. —The Buddha
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake. —Wallace Stevens
* Alex Rosenberg has a new book called Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology, arguing towards a return to biological (and, really, physicochemical) determinisism. The American Scientist (via A&L Daily) has a skeptical review. If you're interested, Rosenberg recently gave a series of lectures on Darwinism on Duke's campus, which have since been podcasted; I don't think you need a Duke login to listen.
Information chips implanted in the brain. Electromagnetic pulse weapons. The middle classes becoming revolutionary, taking on the role of Marx's proletariat. The population of countries in the Middle East increasing by 132%, while Europe's drops as fertility falls. "Flashmobs" - groups rapidly mobilised by criminal gangs or terrorists groups.
This is the world in 30 years' time envisaged by a Ministry of Defence team responsible for painting a picture of the "future strategic context" likely to face Britain's armed forces. It includes an "analysis of the key risks and shocks". Rear Admiral Chris Parry, head of the MoD's Development, Concepts & Doctrine Centre which drew up the report, describes the assessments as "probability-based, rather than predictive". Via Lenin's Tomb, which has a link to the original report in PDF.
Last season's start was good too, of course. But hopefully they'll be able to keep this momentum for the last nine. I actually don't have much to say about it beyond "It was good"—my brain is almost completely fried—but it was in fact good. Onward to next week.
Just in time for Easter, here's a link to a provocative and eminently worthwhile talk from theorist Bruno Latour (later published under the title "Thou Shall Not Freeze-Frame") on a new way to think both religion and science outside either the tired notions of "culture war" or "nonoverlapping magisteria," which should benefit believers and non-believers alike:
To put it simply —but I hope not too provocatively: if, when hearing about religion, you direct your attention to the far away, the above, the supernatural, the infinite, the distant, the transcendent, the mysterious, the misty, the sublime, the eternal, chances are that you have not even begun to be sensitive to what religious talks tries to involve you in. Remember, I am using the template of love addressing, to speak of different sentences with the same spirit, the same regime of enunciation. In the same way as those love sentences should transform the listeners in being close and present or else are void, the ways of talking religion should bring the listener, and also the speaker, to the same closeness and to the same renewed sense of presence —or else they are worse than meaningless. If you are attracted to the distant, by religious matters, to the far away, the mysteriously encrypted, then you are gone, literally you are not with me, you remain absent minded. You make a lie of what I am giving you a chance to hear again tonight. Do you understand what I am saying? The way I am saying it? The Word tradition I am setting into motion again?
The first attempt at redirecting your attention is to make you aware of the pitfall of what I will call double-click communication. If you use such a bench mark to evaluate the quality of religious talk, they will become exactly as meaningless, empty, boring, repetitive as misaddressed love talks, and for the same reason, since they carry no messages, but transport, transform the messengers themselves, or fail. And yet, such is exactly the yardstick of double click communication: it wants us to believe that it is feasible to transport without any deformation whatsoever some accurate information about states of affairs which are not presently here. In most ordinary cases, what people have in mind when they ask ‘is this true?’, ‘does this correspond to a state of affair?’ is such a double click gesture allowing immediate access to information: tough luck, because this is also what gives the lie to ways of talking which are dearest to our heart. On the contrary, to disappoint the drive towards double click, to divert it, to break it, to subvert it, to render it impossible, is just what religious talks are after. They want to make sure that even the most absent minded, the most distant gazers are brought back to attention so that they don’t waste their time ignoring the call to conversion. To disappoint, first, to disappoint. “What has this generation in requesting a sign? No sign will be given to them!”
Transport of information without deformation is not, no it is not one of religious talks’ conditions of felicity. When the Virgin hears the angel Gabriel’s salutation, she is so utterly transformed, says the venerable story, that she becomes pregnant with the Saviour, rendered through her agency present again to the world. Surely this is not a case of double click communication! On the other hand, asking ‘who was Mary’, checking whether or not she was ‘really’ a Virgin, imagining pathway to impregnate her with spermatic rays, deciding whether Gabriel is male or female, these are double-click questions. They want you to abandon the present time and to direct your attention away from the meaning of the venerable story. These questions are not impious, nor even irrational, they are simply a category mistake. They are so irrelevant that no one has even to bother answering them. Not because they lead to unfathomable mysteries, but because their idiocy makes them generate uninteresting and utterly useless mysteries. They should be broken, interrupted, voided, ridiculed —and I will show later how this interruption has been systematically attempted in one of the Western Christian iconographic tradition. The only way to understand stories such as that of the Annunciation, is to repeat them, that is to utter again a Word which produces into the listener the same effect, namely which impregnates you, because it is you I am saluting, I am hailing tonight, with the same gift, the same present of renewed presence. Tonight I am your Gabriel! or else you don’t understand a word of what I am saying —and I am a fraud…
Statistically, the extreme conservatism of the traditionalists skews the picture of the community as a whole. In fact, "modernist" evangelicals—defined as those who go to church infrequently and don't hold to a literal interpretation of the Bible—have more liberal views on all issues, including abortion and gay rights, than the American population as a whole, but there are relatively very few of them. "Centrists," or those who fall somewhere in the theological middle and make up almost half of all evangelicals, are no more conservative than Americans generally except on abortion and gay rights, and even on these issues they are far more moderate than the traditionalists.[9] In other words, half of the evangelical population doesn't see eye to eye with the other half. In the future the division may become more acute because while the Christian right leaders have become more ambitious and more aggressive as a result of their victories, centrist leaders have, for the first time, begun to assert themselves.
I guess the surprise is that some evangelicals know what Jesus (dirty hippie that he was) actually said.
Social critics often wonder about the increasing public indifference to crime, lechery and the debasement of everyday morality in all aspects of American life, advancing theories, conducting studies and generally dancing all around the problem. They should study fans of The Sopranos.
See also: The first time Tony Soprano talks to Dr. Melfi, he tells her that he always wanted to get in on something at the beginning. "I came too late for that, I know," Tony says. "But lately I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over." As Melfi acknowledges, it's a feeling that a lot of us share, and two years before Sept. 11, it was an eerily prescient statement.
* Salon reviewsGrindhouse says it's good. We'll see about that this weekend.
* Scientific Americanquantifies happiness: it turns out that the reason you aren't happy is because you were born unhappy, and no matter what you do you'll stay that way. Via A—L Daily.
* Also in brain science, the real cause of the Hatfield-McCoy feud: Von Hippel-Lindau disease, a genetic predisposition to irrational, violent rages. (via MeFi)
As mentioned earlier, I have serious reservations regarding how far Wes Anderson can take this twee-filmmaking before the rut is too worn to dig himself out, but to be honest, I just picked this up and haven’t read the damn thing yet. Let’s exchange notes later.
Watch it, man. You're talking about Wes.
An AICN review from an early screening (now mysteriously disappeared) was also disturbingly negative, calling the first half-hour funny and the last half-hour a mess, saying that ninety-minute movie felt like it was two and a half hours long.
However odd or fatalistic Oprah's choice may seem, the truth is that "The Road" is as captivating as anything McCarthy has ever written. That's not a qualitative judgment; it's a pragmatic one: You try reading a scary literary novel about the end of the world -- complete with ashen skies and marauding cannibals -- and just see if you're not loath to put it down.
One day a farmer's horse ran away. That evening his neighbors gather around to commiserate with the farmer over such bad luck. The farmer said, "May be." The next day the horse returned, followed by six wild horses. The neighbors couldn't believe the farmer's sudden good luck. The farmer said, "May be." The next day, while trying to ride one of the wild horses, the farmer's son was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors again commiserated over the father's bad luck, but all he said was, "May be." The day after that, army officers came through the village conscripting the oldest sons, but the farmer's son was rejected because of his broken leg. When the neighbors came toe say how fortunate everything turned out, the farmer said, "May be."
I've been busy enough with schoolwork that my Netflix consumption has gone way down. But I have watched a few movies lately. Quick reviews before I get back to work:
* I was introduced to the Canadian sitcom Trailer Park Boys by my mother and stepfather, who swore by it. I must admit, it's pretty funny—sort of a low-budget, low-brow The Office. I say give the first season a shot and see if you like it.
* The Weather Underground was pretty interesting, especially in light of a decade that has been increasingly reminiscent of the '60s (except for the lack of hope). It's also very sad, witnessing the speed with which idealism can be corrupted.
* Welcome to Durham, about gang violence here in my beloved town, was incredibly dull—and I live here. If I didn't live here I don't think I would have made it past the first ten minutes.
* Shortbus, on the other hand, I thought was pretty decent—certainly worth watching, if not exactly great. Know what you're getting into, though; while not a nudie picture, it certainly gives off the appearance of being one. If that's not your bag, baby, stay away.
Because isn't knowing all the 
