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.
Earlier, a pair of men wearing powdered wigs finished their cigarillos and parted ways.
I'm standing in the spot they had occupied. One pair of feet head north, towards the business district. The other pair trail across the street and into a laundromat.
If any of this is true, perhaps the mandated medications doled out to me are thinning. Still, I may well be dreaming this, or else hallucinating. Backwards City looks green at this time of night.
In more science news, Backwards City Department of Arachnid Research in conjunction with the "country" of Canada, has found interesting results in its newest research. Backwards City: Our Science is Realer than your Science.
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Spooky Action at a Distance
Official Release: Backwards City Office of Information
Non-state-sanctioned scientists in Backwards City have been spreading propaganda in the name of insurgent political actors. Be aware, citizens, that this pseudo-science will not stand. In the case of linked particles, it has been "proven" by these scientists that a change in the state of one particle will result in the instanteous change of state to its brother-particle, even when the particles are separated by many miles. This is nonsense. Information cannot not travel faster than the speed of light. Please be aware that any persons or parties discussing this theory will be arrested under penalty of penetrative death.
Spooky Action at a Distance does not exist. Citizens are advised to put this nonsense out of their minds.
Graffiti (Considered Possibly Revolutionary, Deemed Certainly Dangerous by the BCPD) Found in the Green District of the Backwards City
Note: These were recorded by an unknown Romani historian in a Wal-Mart-purchased notebook emblazoned with the Roman visage of a pre-plastic-surgery Ashley Simpson, just days prior to the Backwards City Counsel-Council ordered palimpsest-conceit of 5/13/07.These slogans have since been banned (under punishment of penetrative death) by order of the Hon. Drummond Drumberrt, Mayor of Backwards City (formerly Backwards City Chancellor of the Cloacal Exchequer), and the order is closely enforced by the Special Forces of the Backwards City Police Department, who were trained by close viewings of secreted advertisements for the fetishizingly carnivorous Hardee’s ½ pound “Thick Burgers” and all-male snuff films, combined with frequent caged combat involving (“only” as the official BC documents read) mammals and prisoners, and a daily nutritional supplement of a pill of which the advertising reads only “Steroids for the Soul!”On the manicured lawn of the BCPD Academy there is a recently sculpted (commissioned on 9/11/06 and constructed with lasers rather than chisels) marble statue of a maddened Hon. Drummond Drumberrt (modeled on the Greek figure of the doubting and authoritarian Adeimantus) standing ultimately living, if not argumentatively victorious, above the corpse of Socrates.The inscription reads: “’It looks, then, as if we shall have to control story-tellers on this topic too.We must ask the poets to stop giving their gloomy account of the after-life, which is both untrue and unsuitable to produce a fighting spirit, and make them speak more favorably of it.’ [Plato, “Education: The First Stage].”The City Backwards ruling edict, hence emblazoned in proud Gothic lettering (with all according serifs) in palimpsestic lieu of all Possibly Revolutionary and Certainly Dangerous graffiti is taken out of context from the same (heavily redacted in the City that is Backwards) text: “’It will be for the rulers of our city, then, to use falsehood in dealing with citizen or enemy for the good of the State; no one else must do so.;” [Ibid.]
The list of banned slogans is as follows:
Never stopping is not fast enough.
Crying gets us wet.
Always looking back so we don’t have to see what we hit next.
Running through the river when it starts to rain.
Don’t you want oblivion?
Empty hearts and broken bottles.
Hell is loveless and sober.
Love means never having to say it’s too loud.
Hearts on sleeves and guns on hips, with steeled eyes and toes-- these are miles my legs may cover.
The following materials have been deemed seditious. Any citizens of Backwards City found to possess, view, or otherwise entertain these materials will face penetrative death.
10:00 am: Arab with eyepatch and no facial hair purchased five cups of macchiato at Cafe Alreves. Arab met with two albino women, dressed all in black. Arab left the vicinity. Payment for the drinks was left upon the table. Solid gold bar, approximately 30 cm in length.
11:00 am: Attempted to follow suspicious man to next destination. Dead end alleyway off Hind Street. Suspect vanished. Translucent liquid, best described as plasma, was the only trace of him.
11:20 am: Became afflicted with incapicitating headache. Returned to station for medical attention. Much trouble finding the station. The street signs are different? Do not remember "Fore Street" but seemed unable to leave it. Walked four blocks only to find "Fore Street" again. Full of vacant lots. Windy, strange green tinge to the sky.
12:30 pm: Arrived at station. Fell asleep in sickbay. Awoke to sound of wind and found I had somehow been transported back to "Fore Street." Stood, realizing I was in one of the vacant lots. Broken bottles. Plastic bags. Empty boxes. Black dog stared silently across the way. On a personal note, sirs, I am becoming worried.
The night shift at the factory is becoming a great burden for me. Ever since I moved to Backwards City and started at the Gearbone Foundry, I have rarely had a moment where I felt fully alive. There is a constant soreness in my muscles and a scratching in my throat. But these I accept as a badge, the ache of any worker trying to buy his bread and send monies home to his family. In fact, when I grew up on the farm, I often carried these pains upon me, and they seemed to be filled with an echo of sweetness. No, the pains now are different, and the thrum of the factory bleeds through my skull even when I am not there. The worst is what is happening to my eyes; I see flashes of light and color, and images seem to me more jagged and distorted. The statue of the Magistrate in the City Square, which seemed to me at first the very pinnacle of progress and civilization, now looks like a jagged old stone, indistinct, faceless, colorless. As I was walking through the Square to work just last night (and this, dearest Uncle, you must never share with a living soul) I seemed to see a most impossible sight. The crows that circle the statue were, how do I say this without the implication of my own lunacy; they all flew forwards uncle. All of them, circling headfirst, and splitting the air with their beaks. I felt terrified and ecstatic. Something is happening. Happening to me, and, dare I even write it, happening to all of Backwards City...
Oh people, the dogs of the poor in these Backwards ghettos have stopped their mewling. No barking. Something's afoot. Certainly-- afoot. Make no mistake, we are coming with gears and wrenches, devices O'plenty. If you are reading this, we admit we've left the underground radio controls and committed ourselves to future deeds with you in mind. We may be labeled, festooned, done up as "Editors," but this formality is set in place to divert our most serious intention. Vanguard, hazardous operations of aesthetic kinetics, we wish to impart our world on your heads. Backwards City is stirring. Continue checking this frequency on Sundays and Wednesdays for communiques. [End dictation]
The big announcement is here, and it's this: I'm leaving Backwards City. All the founding editors are; the younger generation has risen up and is taking over, as it always does. We've been driven out. We're hiding in the hinterlands. We're an editorial board in exile.
Backwards City #6 will be our last issue; #7 and on will be all theirs.
In the coming days, they'll start to introduce themselves. Rest assured, they are awesome.
Part of giving up Backwards City means giving up this blog. But I'm not giving up blogging altogether; I'm going to keep on doing something like the same old thing at gerrycanavan.blogspot.com, which I hope you'll all add to your regular rotation.
But stick around here, too. Strange and wonderful things start happening at noon tomorrow.
...it's the blogiversary post of the year. There were a lot of different directions I might have gone with this one—but in the end I have to go with The Show (with Ze Frank). Even though it started slightly before May '06, there's no question Ze was the best of the Web just about every day this year.
With the latest price increase, the Post Office has effectively done away with Media Mail—it's gone up 54 cents a magazine and is now only two cents less than regular parcel post, making it worthless. Small magazines and presses will be pretty hurt by this. I know it hurts us.
I spent nearly all of July driving back and forth between Greensboro and Durham, and nearly all of August trying and failing to make myself well-read for grad school. Let's take a look.
Any trilogy falls apart in the third act, which brings us today to Blogiversary 3, a stroll down memory lane in the third year of Backwards City...this time with a firm, manageable limit of five links a month.
In a year in which this ceased more than ever to be a group blog, we'll start, as we always do, with May, following the final post of Blogiversary 2, last year's post of the year.
...who found that a pretty lackluster Sopranos? Obviously, [The Event] was major—but for the climax of nearly a decade of narrative possibility, the episode struck me as basically perfunctory. I'm not complaining about the contrivance of [The Event] itself, though obviously I wasn't very happy about that either. Rather, what most troubles me about the episode is the lack of continuity with seven years of history; all these events seemed to be happening in complete isolation, rather than at the tail end of the long and detailed story we've been watching all this time.
I don't know; it really left me cold.
That so much of such a crucial episode focused on a random character we'd never seen before didn't help matters.
Since rewatching the first half of season six I've become a fan of the Kevin Finnerty arc, so I was glad for the callback in the final instant of the episode—but exactly what sort of epiphany is Tony meant to have had in this peyote-fueled daze? What did he suddenly "get," and what does it have to do with [The Event]?
After five weeks of confidence in Chase's ability to end this series, I'm suddenly very worried.
Then there's the dialogue. At some point since Underworld, and indeed for large stretches of that, DeLillo's characters started to speak like characters in a Don DeLillo novel, ie like no one else on earth. The effect is carried to extremes here, with almost every character disgorging stale profundities in what sounds like a comedy Mitteleuropean accent. "To feel dangerously alive, this was a quality you associated with your father," says Leanne's mother. "Wood and graphite. Materials from the earth. We respect this about a pencil," Leanne controversially informs her son. So it goes on.
Some depressing statistics from this month's Harper's Index:
* Minimum number of different books sold in the U.S. last year, as tracked by Nielsen BookScan: 1,446,000 * Number of these that sold fewer that 99 copies: 1,123,000 * Number that sold more than 100,000: 483
Something's gone wrong.
There's also a shrill-but-sobering polemic from Garret Keizer about the ways in which the politics of global warming tends to operate along the fantasy that the technocratic status quo we currently enjoy can somehow be indefinitely maintained at no biospheric or human-ethical cost—taking particular aim at carbon offsets, as well as how environmental rhetoric can crowd out issues of poverty and distributive justice. It's not online yet, but here's a quote from the end that gets both the point and the tone across:
It is not enough to acknowledge that global warming exists; we also need to ask what global warming means. Surely one thing it means is that a culture that has as its highest aim the avoidance of anything remotely resembling physical work must change its life. If you want an inconvenient truth, there it is: that the very notion of convenience upon which our civilization rests is a lie that is killing us. And if you want to see how quickly green can turn yellow, make mention of that abundant, renewable fuel source whose chief emission is human sweat.
...To put that as succinctly as possible, the days of paradise for a few are drawing to a close. The game of finding someone else in some convenient misery to fight our wars, pull our rickshaws, and serve as the offset for our every filthy indulgence is just about up. It is either Earth for all of us or hell for most of us. Those are the terms, those have always been the terms, and any approach to climate change that begins on those terms can count me as a loyal partisan. Otherwise, don't expect me to get overly excited as to which side of a golf-course heart attack shows the affluent, the educated, the suburban, and the wired a world much hotter than the one they were banking on.
The thing about 28 Weeks Later is that it isn't the movie they wanted to make. They wanted to make a movie called 28 Minutes Later about the initial Rage epidemic and the subsequent destruction of British society. But for some reason they felt this movie wouldn't fly—so instead they crafted a fairly implausible scenario in which Britain begins to be repopulated by the American military a scant six months after the initial outbreak, establishing that 15,000 British refugees are now living on a rebuilt Isle of Dogs in London in relative comfort, with running water and electricity. The epidemic is over, and they're all perfectly safe, except they aren't, and the whole thing goes to shit again.
Although 28 Weeks Later gropes for a Romeroesque politics with some early references to the Green Zone and other gestures towards the occupation of Iraq, it never really gets there—the film is mostly about running away from zombies. In that respect it's almost precisely as good as the first one. But all the same it feels as though an opportunity to up the ante has been missed.
One of the books I've been working my way through so far this summer is Jameson's Signatures of the Visible, his book on film, which is brilliant, of course. I found what's probably my favorite essay from the book online, on Kubrick in general and The Shining in particular (written in 1981). Here's a taste:
If you believe that such production must always presuppose the sustaining existence, behind it, of a community (whether identified or not, whether conscious of itself or on the contrary about to achieve such consciousness by means of the very cultural expression which testifies, ex post facto, to its having been there in the first place), then it is clear why "Jack" has nothing to say: even the family unit of which he is a part has been reduced to a kind of stark isolation, the coexistence of three random individuals who henceforth represent nothing beyond themselves, and those very relations with each other thus called (violently) in question. Meanwhile, whatever possibility this particular family might have had, in the social space of the city, of developing some collective solidarity with other people of similar marginalized circumstances is henceforth itself foreclosed by the absolute isolation of the great hotel in winter. Only the telepathic fellow ship of the child, as it strikes a link with the motif of the black community, offers some fantasmatic figure or larger social relation ships.
It is however precisely in such a situation that the drive towards community, the longing for collectivity, the envy of other, achieved collectivities, emerges with all force of a return of the repressed: and this is finally, I think, what The Shining is all about. Where to search for this "knowable community," to which, even excluded, the fantasy of collective relations might attach itself? It is surely not to be found in the managerial bureaucracy of the hotel itself, as multinational and standardized as a bedroom community or a motel chain; nor can it any longer take seriously the departing vacationers of the current holiday season, on their way home to their own privatized dwelling places. It only has one direction to go, into the past; and this is the moment at which Kubrick's rewriting of his novelistic original takes on its power as an articulated and intelligible symbolic act.
Also in R. Vu news: Black Book, the Paul Verhoeven movie he pushed for us to see tonight, turned out to be quite good. The movie takes place in Holland during the Nazi Occupation, focusing on the various compromises one Jewish woman makes in her role as part of the Resistance. Visually, the film is perfectly realized, and even the movie's flaws (mostly clustering around ludicrous plot twists and infinite double-crosses) were in their own way perversely enjoyable. I don't think I've ever seen a movie pack so much content into its final ten seconds—there's a plot twist and then a lovely thematic reversal in the very last instant.
Wikipedia has a surprisingly detailed page on the film, if you're interested. How would have guessed the maker of Robocop, Total Recall, and Hollow Man had this in there?
I took Matt Yglesias's advice and bought Mark Waid's Empire, perhaps the definitive supervillain story. (Imagine a world in which Dr. Doom wins. That's basically the situation here.) I'm a bit surprised it isn't better known—it's a hell of a good read, just a cut below classics like Watchman or The Dark Knight Returns.
It's been a good week for comics; yesterday I borrowed a bunch of trade paperbacks from R. Vu and dove in. First up was Batman: Year One, which was also excellent.
Someday I'll probably read a real book again. For now I'm not sweating it.
* Longtime readers know that I'm not much of a "law and order" guy, but one thing that does tend to flip the "Oh my god, hang them all" switch in my reptilian brain is listening to a pedophile brag about what he's done. Which is what makes Deliver Us From Evil so completely disturbing. The central figure in this documentary about the Catholic Church's long cover-up of pedophile priests is now walking free in Ireland, allowing him to speak frankly to the camera about his past. He occasionally gestures towards guilt and periodically makes brief references to the fact that he's destroyed many lives—but by and large he seems totally self-involved and unrepentant. This is an incredibly shocking and heart-wrenching film, probably doubly so if you grew up Catholic.
* Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock? is also quite good, I think—it's something of an art history mystery concerning the discovery of a possible Pollock by a dumpster-diving truck driver in a thrift store in Texas. As is usual in these sorts of things, the academic establishment comes off quite badly, completely ignoring all manner of scientific and forensic evidence in favor of their gut feelings about what a Pollock looks like.
* Inside Deep Throat is also pretty interesting, though it's only been a few days and I can hardly remember anything from the movie that I didn't know before I watched it. (Except that Deep Throat had a plot. I had no idea!) If nothing else it's worth seeing for yourself just how far we've backslid into puritanism over the last thirty years—not that Deep Throat is some lost feminist treasure, but simply that our cultural attitudes towards sex remain completely #$&%ed up.
* Notes on a Scandal and The Queen, two worthy movies from Oscar season, have just come out on DVD. Blood Diamond was good too, and just about our last best hope of ever getting people to stop buying diamonds. The prize, though, surely goes to Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, which is genuinely excellent.
Mundane science fiction is a sub-section of science fiction. It focuses on stories set on or near the Earth, with a believable use of technology and science as it exists at the time the story is written. Via this Metafilter thread about various science-fiction improbabilities.
They believe somewhere in the north, beyond the pole, is a world that is the double of this world, called Msunia Kusta. Every living Mandaean has a double there, and all the Mandaeans of the past live there, with plenty of food and music and cool breezes. No one ever speaks there, for everyone knows what everyone else wants to say.
One of the highlights of this month's Harper's is Eliot Weinberger's article on Mandaeism, a relatively obscure Semitic sect from southern Iraq. You can read the article online, but only if you already have a subscription (which you should, because it gives you access to the magazine's entire 150-year history).
Do You Think That Your Fathers Are Watching? That They Weigh You in Their Ledgerbook? There Is No Book and Your Fathers Are Dead in the Ground
In the last few years the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction has been very hit and miss, sometimes being awarded to excellent novels and just as often being awarded to very bad ones. This was a banner year for the Pulitzer, as well as for Oprah's Book Club: Cormac McCarthy's The Road is fantastic, keying into precisely the mix of premillennial anxiety and nihilistic angst that seems to best characterize the Bush years. For about twenty pages I wondered why it was a novel rather than a short story—then I stopped wondering. It's very good.
They began to come upon from time to time small cairns of rock by the roadside. They were signs in gypsy language, lost patterans. The first he'd seen in some while, common in the north, leading out of the looted and exhausted cities, hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead. By then all the stores of food have given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.
This season of The Sopranos has been by and large exceptional, with only last week's episode being especially weak. If I have a complaint, it's the usual one, which is that it's taken Chase far too long to get to where we now are. Both the AJ and the Chris plotlines from tonight's episode could have happened at any time over the last few years; they're only happening now because this is when production considerations have dictated the show must end.
Also, that murder was really sloppy, and [SPOILER] was a known business associate of [SPOILER] and had been seen giving him public beatings on at least two other occasions. Additionally, given the Hollywood rag-sheet angle, I think this is one murder that would definitely be in the news. I hope it's followed up on; I'd like to see this be the incident that leads to a wrap-up of [SPOILER]'s storyline, and possibly even give direction to the end of the show as a whole.
Verbotomy is about creating words. Every day we create a new definition and matching cartoon. Your challenge is to create a word -- a verboticism -- that matches the definition. After you create your verboticism, you can vote for other authors's words to help select the winning verboticism for the definition.
Sam Raimi Knew There Was Only One Way to Get Out of Doing Spider-Man 4
That's my theory, anyway. I haven't seen any review so far that does justice to just how bad Spider-Man 3 is. (Anthony Lane, of course, comes closest. He's right: the Sandman's creation is just about the movie's only good scene.)
Most of the problem is with Raimi's script, not with his directing—though there are definitely some very odd choices on that front as well.
With too many characters to cram into the movie and too many special-effects sequences to navigate aimlessly between, Raimi has no choice but to turn to random coincidence over and over again to drive the engine of his plot. The result is a muddled and astoundingly dull disaster, certainly the worst major superhero movie since Batman & Robin, if not Superman III.
Keep your happy memories of Doc Ock and stay home.
You should check out Judith Butler's review of Hannah Arendt's Jewish Writings in the London Review of Books.
‘You know the left think that I am conservative,’ Hannah Arendt once said, ‘and the conservatives think I am left or I am a maverick or God knows what. And I must say that I couldn’t care less. I don’t think the real questions of this century get any kind of illumination by this kind of thing.’ The Jewish Writings make the matter of her political affiliation no less easy to settle. In these editorials, essays and unfinished pieces, she seeks to underscore the political paradoxes of the nation-state. If the nation-state secures the rights of citizens, then surely it is a necessity; but if the nation-state relies on nationalism and invariably produces massive numbers of stateless people, it clearly needs to be opposed. If the nation-state is opposed, then what, if anything, serves as its alternative?
Today This Blog Celebrates the Glorious Return of Actual Content
* Instead of approaching the attack on the World Trade Center through parable, like Mr. Roth, or analogy, like Mr. Rushdie, or phantasmagoria, like Mr. Pynchon, Mr. DeLillo confronts it head-on, with graphic realism. The New York Sun reviews Falling Man, DeLillo's 9/11 novel, which I think we'll be hearing a lot about. (via A&L Daily)
* "2BR02B," an unanthologized story by Kurt Vonnegut, has found its way to Project Gutenberg. (Via MeFi)
* The Kugelmass Episodes has an interesting post up about contemporary problems in radicalization that will also help you catch up on all the big blog brouhaha surrounding Žižek and 300.
