Zombieeeeeeeeees!
Postmodern ironic horror lit is going through something of a Zombie Renaissance right now. I'm going to come right out and admit I find it mystifying. I don't find zombies compelling. I never have. Now, part of it is that I'm not a big horror fan, whether it's horror movies or horror lit. But even so, there are horror tropes I find far more compelling than zombies. Vampires, for instance. I am not and likely never will be a fan of Anne Rice or Stephanie Meyer, but it seems like there's a lot more to vampires than zombies. Same goes for werewolves, things that crawl out of meteorites, and Lovecraftian horrors. They all seem like they have more storytelling possibilities than corpses that stagger about at one mile an hour looking for tasty gray matter to eat.
That said, there is one specific sub-genre of zombie stories that I find compelling: zombies who have died, been zombified, but somehow keep their wits about them, know they're zombies, and are the same person they were before zombification. And they still have free will. I guess it's because it somehow speaks to my fear of being struck down in my prime by a terminal illness or a terrible physical disability. But I'm sure most people have the same fear, and yet the self-aware zombie with free will doesn't seem to be a terribly common zombie trope. TV Tropes has no mention of this particular subclass of zombie, although they go into a respectable amount of detail on zombie classification.
As I've mentioned, I'm not all that into horror, but I've got some knowledge of the genre through my addiction to podcast fiction. Here are the instances of sentient, self-aware zombies that I've come across:
My Friend Is a Lesbian Zombie by Eugie Foster, on Escape Pod. I love that title. It's been a long time since I listened, so I'm blanking on the details, but I remember the title character is realistically freaked out to find she's a zombie (instead of being all blase about it) and if I remember right, they get a happy ending by pumping her full of antifreeze.
The Skull-Faced Boy by David Barr Kirtley, on Pseudopod. A horde of zombies is organizing themselves into battle formation to march on the living, and the viewpoint character is freaked out. Even though he's also a zombie.
American Nightmare by Lilah Wild, on Well Told Tales. As the Zombie Uprising commences, a high schooler freshly killed in an accident gets revenge on those who wronged her. Then she seeks out her still-living best friend, who kills her (for good). This is treated as a semi-happy ending: If she was fated to be killed, at least it was by her best friend.
And finally, in the realm of novel-length fiction, Neil Gaiman's American Gods has a major character who is clearly an intelligent, self-aware zombie, although the actual "Z" word is only used once, for ironic effect. The protagonist's wife Laura, after losing her life in an undignified manner, dedicates her undead days to crisscrossing the country killing bad guys who stand in her widower's way.
No matter how happy they might have been while alive, once they're zombies it's usually taken for granted that they're better off dead (and not moving). Two of the four examples above ended with the zombie character being permanently rendered an unfeeling, unmoving corpse, and in the context of the stories it's accepted as a Good Thing.
And of course, once you're a zombie, there's no going back to being a living human. At one point in American Gods, Laura drinks a potion that restores her, but all it does is revert her to pristine zombie condition; afterwards her decomposition starts all over again just like before.
That's why I find the idea of intelligent zombies who know who they are to be so wonderfully horrifying. How come we don't see more of them in fiction?
Monday, August 31, 2009
Monday, August 17, 2009
Saturday Morning Cartoons
Every week Tor.com presents two animated short films as its Saturday Morning Cartoon series. And every week I am impressed by the extremely and consistently high quality.
Some of the more recent computer-animated ones are startlingly well-animated - as good as a Pixar short or better in terms of technical quality, but not always meant to appeal to the mass audience Pixar depends on. I'll admit that at first I was provincial enough to be somewhat surprised at such technical accomplishment coming from French or German production companies I'd never heard of, but I'm over that now.
Some shorts are several years or decades old, but beautifully made.
Some of the more recent computer-animated ones are startlingly well-animated - as good as a Pixar short or better in terms of technical quality, but not always meant to appeal to the mass audience Pixar depends on. I'll admit that at first I was provincial enough to be somewhat surprised at such technical accomplishment coming from French or German production companies I'd never heard of, but I'm over that now.
Some shorts are several years or decades old, but beautifully made.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Clifford D. Simak
I've finished a collection of ten Clifford D. Simak short stories that I picked up at a local used bookstore. Simak was a science fiction author of approximately the same era as Asimov and Heinlein. He never quite broke into the top echelon of popular SF writers, but he's still reasonably well-known among fans of the genre, at least those who read widely. I'd never read him before picking up this collection, but his name was familiar to me.
On the cover of the paperback there is a beautiful painting of a spaceship landing in an alien desert. An immense rock formation rises in the background, topped with a futuristic metallic city of spires. It's a gorgeous scene, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with any of the short stories, most of which take place in Wisconsin.
"Madness from Mars" was published in 1939 and deals with the aftereffects of the first Earth spaceship to return from Mars (there were three previous ships to Mars, but they never came back). We learn in the third paragraph that it's a scientific impossibility to communicate by radio over interplanetary distances; this is treated as the same sort of obvious immutable physical fact as there being no air in space.
So it's only natural that people on Earth are mighty interested in what they're going to learn when the spaceship makes its triumphal landing in a Midwestern field. As he waits nervously, we hear Dr. Stephen Gilmer, director of the Interplanetary Communications Research Commission, exclaim between puffs on his cigar: "I hope they found something. This trip cost us a million bucks."
Wow. Sending a five-man spaceship to Mars and bringing it back to Earth costs one million dollars. Mr. Gilmer is right to be worried about his commission's enormous investment.
As it turns out, the five-man crew has murdered each other on the way back to Earth, and the only life form remaining on the ship is a captured Martian who resembles a large Tribble. Scientists converge to study the fluffy beast. Bloody carnage ensues.
Despite the opportunities for making snarky comments, I have to say the story's reasonably well-written, especially considering 1930s science fiction didn't exactly set the highest bar for literary excellence. The reveal of why horrific acts of violence follow the big furball around is well done and weirdly moving.
Despite the spaceship to Mars and the references to spaceflight between the Earth and the Moon having been routine for many decades, I got the distinct feeling that the story actually took place in 1939. Not some vague future as imagined from 1939, but 1939 itself. As if the first man on the moon in the story's internal chronology was a Victorian-era explorer who flew there in a Jules Verne-designed spacecraft in 1880.
"The Sitters" is the third story in the collection, and right there on page 57, for the first time in the book, a woman has a line of dialogue.
Now, I can't say this is entirely Mr. Simak's fault; in his genre, in that era, writers consistently forgot that humanity actually consists of two sexes. Most male SF writers of that era (which is almost synonymous with "most SF writers of that era") got better about it as the 20th century wore on. It's quite charming to read the original Foundation stories today and see the young Isaac Asimov very gradually come to realize he could write female characters, too.
That said, I feel like I ought to point out that I can't find a single compelling female character anywhere in the ten stories that make up this collection. Most Simak protagonists are fiercely independent male loners who keep even their closest acquaintances at a respectful distance. Women float in and out of their lives, but are essentially irrelevant.
"A Death in the House" is the quintessential Simak story, if this collection is a good representative sample of the man's career as a whole. An alien crashes its spaceship on the property of a crusty old Wisconsin farmer. The farmer attempts to nurse it back to health, but its injuries are too great; the alien dies. Determined to give it a proper burial, the farmer tries to have the alien corpse interred in a human cemetery, but he is rebuffed. So he gives the alien a simple burial on his own property. Word gets around, and curious folk start turning up asking questions; the farmer chases them off with a shotgun. A bizarre plant grows where the alien had been buried; a pod grows big, bursts open, and the alien pops out, fully regenerated. Farmer and alien, although they do not speak each others' language, work together to rebuild the spaceship; the farmer sacrifices greatly to help his new friend, and the alien repays him before leaving Earth behind forever.
"Final Gentleman" strikes me as two stories in one, somewhat uneasily combined. A well-known writer approaches retirement, and becomes aware that certain aspects of his life have been a delusion forced upon him in order that he may be the influential writer that the Powers That Be feel he must be, so as to set the proper societal ripples in motion. The Powers That Be turn out to be a massively powerful AI, and the creature that maintains it while disguised as an ordinary human.
I was attracted to the idea of a writer who had unconsciously reinvented himself so thoroughly that large swathes of his life story were utterly false. But the deception seemed unnecessarily elaborate. It's meant to be significant that the fancy car the protagonist drives is actually somewhat shabby, the fine restaurant where he usually dines is actually a run-down diner, and his upper-class apartment is actually rather run-down. But he really is a well-known and well-respected writer, and he really does count a powerful U.S. Senator as one of his close friends and confidants. Our hero could if he wanted to drive a genuinely luxurious car and live in fine comfort. Wouldn't it be easier for his manipulators to have him live in high style in Real Life, so less deception would be needed?
And when it's implied that the reason for the whole charade is so that a line our hero writes convinces the Senator that he should, indeed, take the job of Secretary of State at this critical moment in history... well, it seems like quite the Rube Goldberg plan.
"Day of Truce": Gangs of mischievous suburban children have become such a nuisance to property owners who want the damn kids off their lawn that there's been an arms race between the two sides that has led to self-respecting suburban homes becoming fortresses protected by electrified fences, moats, and lethal booby traps. The kids, for their part, employ catapults and bombs to break down the defenses. Deaths are common.
I was mildly surprised to see this story was published in 1963, which I always thought of as the waning end of the innocent "Leave it to Beaver" era of American suburbia. I need to learn to overcome such false impressions.
On the cover of the paperback there is a beautiful painting of a spaceship landing in an alien desert. An immense rock formation rises in the background, topped with a futuristic metallic city of spires. It's a gorgeous scene, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with any of the short stories, most of which take place in Wisconsin.
"Madness from Mars" was published in 1939 and deals with the aftereffects of the first Earth spaceship to return from Mars (there were three previous ships to Mars, but they never came back). We learn in the third paragraph that it's a scientific impossibility to communicate by radio over interplanetary distances; this is treated as the same sort of obvious immutable physical fact as there being no air in space.
So it's only natural that people on Earth are mighty interested in what they're going to learn when the spaceship makes its triumphal landing in a Midwestern field. As he waits nervously, we hear Dr. Stephen Gilmer, director of the Interplanetary Communications Research Commission, exclaim between puffs on his cigar: "I hope they found something. This trip cost us a million bucks."
Wow. Sending a five-man spaceship to Mars and bringing it back to Earth costs one million dollars. Mr. Gilmer is right to be worried about his commission's enormous investment.
As it turns out, the five-man crew has murdered each other on the way back to Earth, and the only life form remaining on the ship is a captured Martian who resembles a large Tribble. Scientists converge to study the fluffy beast. Bloody carnage ensues.
Despite the opportunities for making snarky comments, I have to say the story's reasonably well-written, especially considering 1930s science fiction didn't exactly set the highest bar for literary excellence. The reveal of why horrific acts of violence follow the big furball around is well done and weirdly moving.
Despite the spaceship to Mars and the references to spaceflight between the Earth and the Moon having been routine for many decades, I got the distinct feeling that the story actually took place in 1939. Not some vague future as imagined from 1939, but 1939 itself. As if the first man on the moon in the story's internal chronology was a Victorian-era explorer who flew there in a Jules Verne-designed spacecraft in 1880.
"The Sitters" is the third story in the collection, and right there on page 57, for the first time in the book, a woman has a line of dialogue.
Now, I can't say this is entirely Mr. Simak's fault; in his genre, in that era, writers consistently forgot that humanity actually consists of two sexes. Most male SF writers of that era (which is almost synonymous with "most SF writers of that era") got better about it as the 20th century wore on. It's quite charming to read the original Foundation stories today and see the young Isaac Asimov very gradually come to realize he could write female characters, too.
That said, I feel like I ought to point out that I can't find a single compelling female character anywhere in the ten stories that make up this collection. Most Simak protagonists are fiercely independent male loners who keep even their closest acquaintances at a respectful distance. Women float in and out of their lives, but are essentially irrelevant.
"A Death in the House" is the quintessential Simak story, if this collection is a good representative sample of the man's career as a whole. An alien crashes its spaceship on the property of a crusty old Wisconsin farmer. The farmer attempts to nurse it back to health, but its injuries are too great; the alien dies. Determined to give it a proper burial, the farmer tries to have the alien corpse interred in a human cemetery, but he is rebuffed. So he gives the alien a simple burial on his own property. Word gets around, and curious folk start turning up asking questions; the farmer chases them off with a shotgun. A bizarre plant grows where the alien had been buried; a pod grows big, bursts open, and the alien pops out, fully regenerated. Farmer and alien, although they do not speak each others' language, work together to rebuild the spaceship; the farmer sacrifices greatly to help his new friend, and the alien repays him before leaving Earth behind forever.
"Final Gentleman" strikes me as two stories in one, somewhat uneasily combined. A well-known writer approaches retirement, and becomes aware that certain aspects of his life have been a delusion forced upon him in order that he may be the influential writer that the Powers That Be feel he must be, so as to set the proper societal ripples in motion. The Powers That Be turn out to be a massively powerful AI, and the creature that maintains it while disguised as an ordinary human.
I was attracted to the idea of a writer who had unconsciously reinvented himself so thoroughly that large swathes of his life story were utterly false. But the deception seemed unnecessarily elaborate. It's meant to be significant that the fancy car the protagonist drives is actually somewhat shabby, the fine restaurant where he usually dines is actually a run-down diner, and his upper-class apartment is actually rather run-down. But he really is a well-known and well-respected writer, and he really does count a powerful U.S. Senator as one of his close friends and confidants. Our hero could if he wanted to drive a genuinely luxurious car and live in fine comfort. Wouldn't it be easier for his manipulators to have him live in high style in Real Life, so less deception would be needed?
And when it's implied that the reason for the whole charade is so that a line our hero writes convinces the Senator that he should, indeed, take the job of Secretary of State at this critical moment in history... well, it seems like quite the Rube Goldberg plan.
"Day of Truce": Gangs of mischievous suburban children have become such a nuisance to property owners who want the damn kids off their lawn that there's been an arms race between the two sides that has led to self-respecting suburban homes becoming fortresses protected by electrified fences, moats, and lethal booby traps. The kids, for their part, employ catapults and bombs to break down the defenses. Deaths are common.
I was mildly surprised to see this story was published in 1963, which I always thought of as the waning end of the innocent "Leave it to Beaver" era of American suburbia. I need to learn to overcome such false impressions.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Canadian, please
I'm an American citizen and I've only ever had an American passport, but long ago in the distant past, I used to be Canadian. I was born in Hamilton and spent much of my early childhood in New Brunswick.
I think I can still get myself a Canadian passport if I really want one. My fiance - wife from September of next year - thinks it would be cool if I got my slumbering Canadian citizenship validated. Shall I go for it, and become a citizen of all of North America north of the Rio Grande*?
* Except St. Pierre and Miquelon. Regrettably.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
American Gods
I've finished Neil Gaiman's American Gods.
There was a lot of urination in that book. Lots of scenes of characters peeing. Both indoors and outdoors, both male and female. And it seems right. The myths that Gaiman mined do not shy away from descriptions of bodily functions.
I'm going to admit that I'm not a long-time Gaiman fan. I know he's got legions of adoring fans, but I've never read his graphic novels. A few years back I read Neverwhere. It was interesting enough, and it held my attention, but it didn't make a tremendous impression on me. More like "Eh, that was nice."
American Gods, on the other hand, while it took roughly a hundred pages to really draw me in, once it got going it had me securely in its grip. And when I finished, I felt sublime awe at what Gaiman had created. He crafted a world and characters that seem much bigger than the novel's four-hundred-and-some-odd pages. Now I know why the man's got himself such legions of fans.
Gaiman, this British guy, came over to the US and focused on flyover country - he took Wisconsin and downstate Illinois and rural Georgia and made it an improbably believable setting for larger-than-life myths, and he did it without ever taking the role of the educated foreigner pouring out condescension for the American midwest. I liked that - I respected that.
Anyway, yeah, I liked it, and if Gaiman ever finds this post by searching for his name, congrats on winning the Hugo for The Graveyard Book a couple of hours ago.
There was a lot of urination in that book. Lots of scenes of characters peeing. Both indoors and outdoors, both male and female. And it seems right. The myths that Gaiman mined do not shy away from descriptions of bodily functions.
I'm going to admit that I'm not a long-time Gaiman fan. I know he's got legions of adoring fans, but I've never read his graphic novels. A few years back I read Neverwhere. It was interesting enough, and it held my attention, but it didn't make a tremendous impression on me. More like "Eh, that was nice."
American Gods, on the other hand, while it took roughly a hundred pages to really draw me in, once it got going it had me securely in its grip. And when I finished, I felt sublime awe at what Gaiman had created. He crafted a world and characters that seem much bigger than the novel's four-hundred-and-some-odd pages. Now I know why the man's got himself such legions of fans.
Gaiman, this British guy, came over to the US and focused on flyover country - he took Wisconsin and downstate Illinois and rural Georgia and made it an improbably believable setting for larger-than-life myths, and he did it without ever taking the role of the educated foreigner pouring out condescension for the American midwest. I liked that - I respected that.
Anyway, yeah, I liked it, and if Gaiman ever finds this post by searching for his name, congrats on winning the Hugo for The Graveyard Book a couple of hours ago.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
The Future of IT
Charles Stross has some smart comments up on the near future of computing. Nominally it's all about the future of gaming, but really it's all about computer technology in general between now and, say, 2030.
But his essay on the future of IT makes me all excited and optimistic about human progress again.
Previously, when I thought of Stross' nonfictional speculation about the future, I thought of his essay on precisely why space colonization will probably never be affordable and feasible for large numbers of people. It depressed me, as I'm sure it depressed lots of people who grew up on good old-fashioned space-oriented science fiction. Especially since the bastard is probably right about everything.For the past few years I've been trying to write science fiction about the near future, and in particular about the future of information technology. I've got a degree in computer science from 1990, which makes me a bit like an aerospace engineer from the class of '37, but I'm not going to let that stop me.
But his essay on the future of IT makes me all excited and optimistic about human progress again.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
The new Star Trek
I just saw the new Star Trek. My immediate reactions, arranged in order from least geeky to most geeky:
- My god, they actually got Karl Urban to channel DeForest Kelley's ghost. That was one of the most freakishly uncanny imitations I've ever seen.
- Presumably Starfleet engineers are eventually going to upgrade from the bridge design in this movie to the bridge design in the original Star Trek. That amuses me to no end.
- The movie declared its creative sources very clearly by making lots of references to the original series and the movies, and more or less ignoring all other Trek. Uhura orders a Cardassian drink at that bar in Iowa, and other than that I didn't notice even one unambiguously TNG-era-or-after reference.
- OK, I agree with everyone who says Nero was an ineffective villain. What annoys me is that his insanity was his only motivation for going out and being evil. What would a rational person have done in his place after being thrown back in time? A rational person would fly his butt over to Romulus, tell them everything he knows, and get Romulan scientists and engineers working on how they're going to stop this natural disaster from swallowing their planet over a century hence. Instead of this, Nero just bellows in rage, sulks for 25 years, and then blows up Vulcan. How'd he get his crew to go along with this "plan"?
- Even by Star Trek standards, that was some magnificently silly science. Especially during the two minutes or so that Old Spock is info-dumping his story into Kirk's brain. And I liked how, when Spock was watching Vulcan's destruction from the surface of that ice planet, Vulcan looked bigger in the sky than Earth is from the Moon. Evidently everything's really close together in that region of space.
- I think they changed the rules for how stardates work. I'm not certain, but I think in this movie stardates reflected real Earth dates in Trek's internal chronology. Fine with me. Trek stardates have always been nonsensical and incomprehensible.
Overall I really enjoyed the movie, although I got the feeling it works better if you think of it as a really well-produced bit of fan-fiction. And there's nothing wrong with that.
- My god, they actually got Karl Urban to channel DeForest Kelley's ghost. That was one of the most freakishly uncanny imitations I've ever seen.
- Presumably Starfleet engineers are eventually going to upgrade from the bridge design in this movie to the bridge design in the original Star Trek. That amuses me to no end.
- The movie declared its creative sources very clearly by making lots of references to the original series and the movies, and more or less ignoring all other Trek. Uhura orders a Cardassian drink at that bar in Iowa, and other than that I didn't notice even one unambiguously TNG-era-or-after reference.
- OK, I agree with everyone who says Nero was an ineffective villain. What annoys me is that his insanity was his only motivation for going out and being evil. What would a rational person have done in his place after being thrown back in time? A rational person would fly his butt over to Romulus, tell them everything he knows, and get Romulan scientists and engineers working on how they're going to stop this natural disaster from swallowing their planet over a century hence. Instead of this, Nero just bellows in rage, sulks for 25 years, and then blows up Vulcan. How'd he get his crew to go along with this "plan"?
- Even by Star Trek standards, that was some magnificently silly science. Especially during the two minutes or so that Old Spock is info-dumping his story into Kirk's brain. And I liked how, when Spock was watching Vulcan's destruction from the surface of that ice planet, Vulcan looked bigger in the sky than Earth is from the Moon. Evidently everything's really close together in that region of space.
- I think they changed the rules for how stardates work. I'm not certain, but I think in this movie stardates reflected real Earth dates in Trek's internal chronology. Fine with me. Trek stardates have always been nonsensical and incomprehensible.
Overall I really enjoyed the movie, although I got the feeling it works better if you think of it as a really well-produced bit of fan-fiction. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Scopin' out the Ivory Tower
I'm 29 years old. Back when I graduated from university at age 22, I figured I'd be off to grad school in just a few short years. I took the GRE, knowing that the scores would last for five years, and I was sure I would use them.
Now it's seven years later. I wouldn't say I've been vegetating all this time, but I haven't made any steps toward graduate school either. Part of it is a fear of crippling debt. But part of it is my inability to figure out what, exactly, I would study - and my not being sure what good the degree would do me, anyway.
My father makes his living in academia. He's been a professor for as long as I have been alive, and to be honest, I figured for a long time I would pursue a similar career path. Growing up, my family seemed perfectly comfortable on his salary alone. He seemed to have plenty of free time, and when he was working he was nerdily immersing himself in topics he found interesting. I can do a lot worse for myself.
But I'm terrified of actually trying to break into academia. Once I had a tenure-track position it might be pleasant enough for me, but I've heard too many horror stories about the job market for academics and the difficulties of actually getting a decent job somewhere.
In the New York Times, Mark C. Taylor summarizes why I feel scared:
But, as an indictment of today's American academia, I agreed with most of it - and with his recommendations. Of course academics should specialize, but let's not do it to excess. I suspect one reason why some of today's celebrity intellectuals - like Jared Diamond, Daniel Dennett, and Nassim Taleb - got to be popular is that they can combine and synthesize learning across very different disciplines. This appeals to someone who is intellectually curious about the world and doesn't see everything neatly compartmentalized into categories such as "biology" and "history" and "linguistics".
It's hard to say exactly why, but somehow Taylor's article makes me feel better about academia as a possible career. Maybe it's that his piece's very existence is evidence that there is a shift going on. If I were to start a career in newspapers right now, I would of course do so in the knowledge that one major era in the history of newspapers is ending right now and a new era is beginning - and pretending otherwise would bring me no benefit. I think a similar shift is in the cards for universities. Maybe it won't be as traumatic as what's happening to newspapers (or maybe it will) but I will have to be just as aware of it.
(As an aside, lately I've been reading Neal Stephenson's novel Anathem, whose main characters are the equivalent of academic professor-types in an alternate not-quite-Earth. I'm not saying I want to go live in a concent on Arbre, but I must admit that it's kindled some wistfulness for a life of reading and learning.)
Now it's seven years later. I wouldn't say I've been vegetating all this time, but I haven't made any steps toward graduate school either. Part of it is a fear of crippling debt. But part of it is my inability to figure out what, exactly, I would study - and my not being sure what good the degree would do me, anyway.
My father makes his living in academia. He's been a professor for as long as I have been alive, and to be honest, I figured for a long time I would pursue a similar career path. Growing up, my family seemed perfectly comfortable on his salary alone. He seemed to have plenty of free time, and when he was working he was nerdily immersing himself in topics he found interesting. I can do a lot worse for myself.
But I'm terrified of actually trying to break into academia. Once I had a tenure-track position it might be pleasant enough for me, but I've heard too many horror stories about the job market for academics and the difficulties of actually getting a decent job somewhere.
In the New York Times, Mark C. Taylor summarizes why I feel scared:
GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).His entire article is well worth reading. Unlike him, it makes me very happy to know that I live in a world where, somewhere, a person is making it his job to write about "how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations."
But, as an indictment of today's American academia, I agreed with most of it - and with his recommendations. Of course academics should specialize, but let's not do it to excess. I suspect one reason why some of today's celebrity intellectuals - like Jared Diamond, Daniel Dennett, and Nassim Taleb - got to be popular is that they can combine and synthesize learning across very different disciplines. This appeals to someone who is intellectually curious about the world and doesn't see everything neatly compartmentalized into categories such as "biology" and "history" and "linguistics".
It's hard to say exactly why, but somehow Taylor's article makes me feel better about academia as a possible career. Maybe it's that his piece's very existence is evidence that there is a shift going on. If I were to start a career in newspapers right now, I would of course do so in the knowledge that one major era in the history of newspapers is ending right now and a new era is beginning - and pretending otherwise would bring me no benefit. I think a similar shift is in the cards for universities. Maybe it won't be as traumatic as what's happening to newspapers (or maybe it will) but I will have to be just as aware of it.
(As an aside, lately I've been reading Neal Stephenson's novel Anathem, whose main characters are the equivalent of academic professor-types in an alternate not-quite-Earth. I'm not saying I want to go live in a concent on Arbre, but I must admit that it's kindled some wistfulness for a life of reading and learning.)
Monday, February 16, 2009
Rather a lazy bumper sticker
I saw a bumper sticker today that said:
I assume Katrina refers to the hurricane. Baldacci is our Governor (I'm in Maine).
Either there's a reference or a play on words here that I don't get, or this is a pretty lazy attempt at a smart-ass political bumper sticker.
Katrina barely affected Maine. Baldacci had nothing to do with Katrina. And I've been running this bumper sticker through my mind and I can't think of any way punning or wordplay could be involved.
I mean, you might as well say:
Or:
Or why not just dispense with any attempt at being a smart-ass and just slap a bumper sticker on your car that says:
Seems like it wouldn't be any less witty.
TWO DISASTERS
KATRINA AND BALDACCI
I assume Katrina refers to the hurricane. Baldacci is our Governor (I'm in Maine).
Either there's a reference or a play on words here that I don't get, or this is a pretty lazy attempt at a smart-ass political bumper sticker.
Katrina barely affected Maine. Baldacci had nothing to do with Katrina. And I've been running this bumper sticker through my mind and I can't think of any way punning or wordplay could be involved.
I mean, you might as well say:
TWO BAD THINGS
DIABETES AND PELOSI
Or:
TWO THINGS THAT HURT
CATAPULTS AND SARAH PALIN
Or why not just dispense with any attempt at being a smart-ass and just slap a bumper sticker on your car that says:
I DON'T LIKE BALDACCI
Seems like it wouldn't be any less witty.
...and I'm back in the States
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Big trip
On Saturday we leave on our jaunt from Taipei to Singapore to India (Karnataka and Kerala) to Egypt (Cairo and Luxor) to the USA and back to Taipei (on February 25). For the first time in my life I will have crossed every line of longitude.
In preparation for my first trip to India I have read up the remaining pieces of Indian fiction on our bookshelves. An Obedient Father by Akhil Sharma, the story of a corrupt low-level official in Delhi, is a difficult and often disgusting book to read. I've read short fiction with disgustingly unlikeable protagonists, but An Obedient Father is the first full-length novel I've read with such a unpleasant first-person narrator. Sharma makes it readable by making you feel pity for the main character, even though you'll never like him.
Like Rohinton Mistry and Manil Suri, Sharma's fiction depicts Indian society warts and all - particularly the warts. That's good for me. Helps me be prepared for what I'm likely to see. I've been to developing countries (Indonesia and the Philippines), but I've never seen the sort of large-scale poverty I've heard I should be prepared for.
Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala won the Booker Prize in 1975. It's about a British woman who comes to India to learn the story of a relative of hers who eloped with a local ruler back in the 1920s. Jhabvala married into Indian society rather than being born into it, so she can look at India with a knowledgable foreigner's eye.
In Beautiful Disguises by Rajeev Balasubraman is the story of a girl from a small town in Karnataka who travels to The City (never named, but I assume it's Mumbai) to seek her fame and fortune. I enjoyed this book quite a bit. The main character (whose name we never learn) is immensely likeable. Balasubraman felt the need to invent a cartoony female antagonist who seems an amalgam of every Disney villainess, from Snow White's Evil Stepmother to Cruella de Vil. At first this annoyed me a bit, but then I figured it fit the book's dreamy, we're-all-characters-in-the-movies tone.
As for the actual logistics of getting around India, I'm leaving that to Rough Guide and Jenna's knowledge of the place. Should be fun.
In preparation for my first trip to India I have read up the remaining pieces of Indian fiction on our bookshelves. An Obedient Father by Akhil Sharma, the story of a corrupt low-level official in Delhi, is a difficult and often disgusting book to read. I've read short fiction with disgustingly unlikeable protagonists, but An Obedient Father is the first full-length novel I've read with such a unpleasant first-person narrator. Sharma makes it readable by making you feel pity for the main character, even though you'll never like him.
Like Rohinton Mistry and Manil Suri, Sharma's fiction depicts Indian society warts and all - particularly the warts. That's good for me. Helps me be prepared for what I'm likely to see. I've been to developing countries (Indonesia and the Philippines), but I've never seen the sort of large-scale poverty I've heard I should be prepared for.
Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala won the Booker Prize in 1975. It's about a British woman who comes to India to learn the story of a relative of hers who eloped with a local ruler back in the 1920s. Jhabvala married into Indian society rather than being born into it, so she can look at India with a knowledgable foreigner's eye.
In Beautiful Disguises by Rajeev Balasubraman is the story of a girl from a small town in Karnataka who travels to The City (never named, but I assume it's Mumbai) to seek her fame and fortune. I enjoyed this book quite a bit. The main character (whose name we never learn) is immensely likeable. Balasubraman felt the need to invent a cartoony female antagonist who seems an amalgam of every Disney villainess, from Snow White's Evil Stepmother to Cruella de Vil. At first this annoyed me a bit, but then I figured it fit the book's dreamy, we're-all-characters-in-the-movies tone.
As for the actual logistics of getting around India, I'm leaving that to Rough Guide and Jenna's knowledge of the place. Should be fun.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Questions for the Explainer
Slate's Explainer column has dug through the bag of questions they never answered in 2008. Good fun.
When and why did the Communist Chinese change the name of their capital "PEKING" to Bazging? Sorry, I don't know how it is spelled. Thank you.
There are many opportunities for snark here (c'mon, "Bazging"?) but I just can't get beyond the fact that, with all the places to find information online, this person asked Slate a Wikipedia question. One might as well ask the Explainer what year Brazil became independent, or who was Prime Minister of Canada before Brian Mulroney.
If one gets a personal e-mail from a very famous or important person, such as the president, or the queen of England, or the Pope, or Paul McCartney, can that e-mail have monetary value? I guess not. It's just an electronic transmission on a screen. There's no original. There's no way to buy or sell it. Seems a shame tho.
I hate to be pedantic, but I'm not sure it counts as a "question" if you answer it immediately in the same paragraph. It's a shame; I'm intrigued and I can see a near-future SF short story exploring the idea.
I live in Washington, D.C., and we have very long escalators coming out of the Metro. If I grabbed the handrail when I first step onto the escalator and did not let go until I was at the top, my body would be almost prostrate across the steps. As I go higher on the escalator, I have to readjust the hand that is grabbing the rubber handrail. Why can't the companies that make escalators sync the steps and the handrails so that they go the same speed?
I lived in DC for a couple of years. This is absolutely true!! Escalators here in Taipei don't work that way. OK, this is another question I genuinely want answered.
How did early man deal with growing toe and fingernails?
Early man did not sit in an office all day long. Early man had to run around barefoot outside and find food with his hands. Early man scoffs at you and your delicate sense of personal hygiene.
If someone with DNA from the Stone Age were born today, would they be normal?
There are two ways to answer this question. The reasonable scientific answer would be to point out that the Stone Age was a really, really long period of time; it began at whatever point you want to arbitrarily designate as the beginning of the human race, and in some parts of the world it hasn't actually ended yet. If you create a child today with Homo erectus DNA (in some sort of unholy anthropological version of Jurassic Park), you're going to have yourself a poor kid who's going to be a freakish curiosity his whole life. But if you create a child who's got the DNA of the guys who created cave paintings in France, you'll have yourself a perfectly normal kid. The other way to answer this question is to refer to the excellent 1987 documentary The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones, in which actual Stone Age physiology can be compared directly with modern human beings.
During this weekend's football playoff game in Green Bay, the temperature at kickoff was 0 degrees, and by the end of the game was -4 degrees. When players get injured in such weather, do they bother putting ice on the injury? Wouldn't that warm up the injury to 32 degrees?
I'm not sure of the science involved here. I'd like to point out, though, that ice can become much cooler than 32 degrees. 32 degrees is just the upper limit, beyond which it will melt. Also, which will make your hand freeze faster: leaving your hand exposed to cold air, or sticking your hand into a snowdrift?
Burma's dictator has a chestful of bullshit medals. What's up with that, Explainer?
I like this question. Compare Burma's dictator with North Korea's Kim Jong-il, who wears the drabbest clothing ever seen on an evil dictator (assuming he hasn't died already). Someone should do a study of dictators' dress styles. I suspect the main fault line lies between (noninally) Communist and non-Communist regimes.
Can men eat the Activia yogurt that is advertised exclusively to the modern woman in khakis? Will it have the same internal regulatory effects on the male system that are promised for the female bowels? If not, why not?
I am a man and I have eaten Activia yogurt religiously for the past year. My bowels have never been more regular, although I do menstruate.
Can an average person not in politics get a pardon from the president of the United States? (Possession of forged instrument, October of 1989.)
Can you see what I'm doing? I'm making the "rubbing coins between thumb and forefinger" gesture.
Please explain the method of formation and origin of black holes. Are they located at the Bermuda Triangle area and why there?
The question that launched a hundred made-for-cable sci-fi movies.
Who made up the rule that if you wore a shirt all day, went home, and washed it, you can't wear it the next day?
This law was passed by Congress in the fall of 1882 and signed by Chester A. Arthur in the Oval Office.
Hi, I am Anna. I am only 11 years old! My friend told me about this black hole, and I have gotten really scared. I don't want to die! I thought if it didn't happen today, it wasn't going to happen. I did not know nothing about it happening in Spring! I find it unfair that scientists are making a machine that could possibly destroy the entire human race. Me and my friends have cried about the black hole, and I find it really upsetting. There has been barely nothing about it on the news. I am so nervous. I just think I am too young to die—is there any way we could stop it happening?
I'm leaning towards the assumption that "Anna" is male, a physics major, about 21 years old, thinks this letter is the funniest thing ever, and wrote it while helplessly giggling. I also assume "Anna" is referring to CERN's Large Hadron Collider.
Now, as I understand it, the scientists at CERN are trying to create a black hole in order to drop the Earth into a wormhole which will enable us to access parallel Earths at earlier stages of chronological development, enabling us to revisit bygone periods of our history. For example, a temporal assassin can kill Hitler while he is still a struggling artist in pre-WW1 Vienna, thus preventing the rise of Nazi Germany and saving the Jews who would have died in Holocaust.
I am 79 years old. I bring this up first to help explain my question. In the late 1930s or early 1940s, I was looking through an old stack of Life magazines, and there was a picture of an old couple sitting on the porch of a cabin (or shack) up in the mountains somewhere in Appalachia, with the notation: "The King and Queen of America?" The small article with the picture stated that if George Washington had become king of the U.S., these two would (under the usual custom) be our king and queen. I have thought of this from time to time, even doubted it. (It might have been part of the propaganda of the time, the Depression years, that we were all equal, etc.) I am dimly aware that George Washington had brothers, and that it is possible that the descent is known. As I remember, it was a lovely picture, the old couple looking out over a valley, with mist, and smoking their corncob pipes. Can you find the picture? Can you tell me whether there was truth in the assertion?
I love this idea. I have no idea how much truth there might be in it. But it inspired me to go to Wikipedia to look up:
The current German Kaiser. He's 32 years old.
The current Tsar of Russia? There are two claimants, this lady and this elderly gentleman.
The King of Italy is apparently a rather infamous figure in his homeland.
Ever wondered about the heir to the throne of the Qing Dynasty in China? I get the feeling he's led a relatively modest life. Living in the PRC, you can't blame him.
The French throne has lots of claimants, thanks to the multitude of royal houses they had in the 1800s. There's this guy if you're a fan of the House of Orleans; there's also this guy for you Bourbon fans. And of course there's a head of the Bonaparte dynasty.
Is it just me, or do all national anthems the world over, no matter how rich and exotic the culture, seem to sound like European marching-band music? Wouldn't one expect China's national anthem be more "plinky"? Shouldn't Iraq's national anthem sound a little more "Arab-y"?
I hope they pick this one to answer, because I've noticed the same thing. Years ago I had an Encarta encyclopedia on CD-ROM which let me listen to every country's national anthem, and they all sounded disappointingly similar.When and why did the Communist Chinese change the name of their capital "PEKING" to Bazging? Sorry, I don't know how it is spelled. Thank you.
There are many opportunities for snark here (c'mon, "Bazging"?) but I just can't get beyond the fact that, with all the places to find information online, this person asked Slate a Wikipedia question. One might as well ask the Explainer what year Brazil became independent, or who was Prime Minister of Canada before Brian Mulroney.
If one gets a personal e-mail from a very famous or important person, such as the president, or the queen of England, or the Pope, or Paul McCartney, can that e-mail have monetary value? I guess not. It's just an electronic transmission on a screen. There's no original. There's no way to buy or sell it. Seems a shame tho.
I hate to be pedantic, but I'm not sure it counts as a "question" if you answer it immediately in the same paragraph. It's a shame; I'm intrigued and I can see a near-future SF short story exploring the idea.
I live in Washington, D.C., and we have very long escalators coming out of the Metro. If I grabbed the handrail when I first step onto the escalator and did not let go until I was at the top, my body would be almost prostrate across the steps. As I go higher on the escalator, I have to readjust the hand that is grabbing the rubber handrail. Why can't the companies that make escalators sync the steps and the handrails so that they go the same speed?
I lived in DC for a couple of years. This is absolutely true!! Escalators here in Taipei don't work that way. OK, this is another question I genuinely want answered.
How did early man deal with growing toe and fingernails?
Early man did not sit in an office all day long. Early man had to run around barefoot outside and find food with his hands. Early man scoffs at you and your delicate sense of personal hygiene.
If someone with DNA from the Stone Age were born today, would they be normal?
There are two ways to answer this question. The reasonable scientific answer would be to point out that the Stone Age was a really, really long period of time; it began at whatever point you want to arbitrarily designate as the beginning of the human race, and in some parts of the world it hasn't actually ended yet. If you create a child today with Homo erectus DNA (in some sort of unholy anthropological version of Jurassic Park), you're going to have yourself a poor kid who's going to be a freakish curiosity his whole life. But if you create a child who's got the DNA of the guys who created cave paintings in France, you'll have yourself a perfectly normal kid. The other way to answer this question is to refer to the excellent 1987 documentary The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones, in which actual Stone Age physiology can be compared directly with modern human beings.
During this weekend's football playoff game in Green Bay, the temperature at kickoff was 0 degrees, and by the end of the game was -4 degrees. When players get injured in such weather, do they bother putting ice on the injury? Wouldn't that warm up the injury to 32 degrees?
I'm not sure of the science involved here. I'd like to point out, though, that ice can become much cooler than 32 degrees. 32 degrees is just the upper limit, beyond which it will melt. Also, which will make your hand freeze faster: leaving your hand exposed to cold air, or sticking your hand into a snowdrift?
Burma's dictator has a chestful of bullshit medals. What's up with that, Explainer?
I like this question. Compare Burma's dictator with North Korea's Kim Jong-il, who wears the drabbest clothing ever seen on an evil dictator (assuming he hasn't died already). Someone should do a study of dictators' dress styles. I suspect the main fault line lies between (noninally) Communist and non-Communist regimes.
Can men eat the Activia yogurt that is advertised exclusively to the modern woman in khakis? Will it have the same internal regulatory effects on the male system that are promised for the female bowels? If not, why not?
I am a man and I have eaten Activia yogurt religiously for the past year. My bowels have never been more regular, although I do menstruate.
Can an average person not in politics get a pardon from the president of the United States? (Possession of forged instrument, October of 1989.)
Can you see what I'm doing? I'm making the "rubbing coins between thumb and forefinger" gesture.
Please explain the method of formation and origin of black holes. Are they located at the Bermuda Triangle area and why there?
The question that launched a hundred made-for-cable sci-fi movies.
Who made up the rule that if you wore a shirt all day, went home, and washed it, you can't wear it the next day?
This law was passed by Congress in the fall of 1882 and signed by Chester A. Arthur in the Oval Office.
Why don't humans have a mating season?
I think this is my favorite question of the lot of 'em.Hi, I am Anna. I am only 11 years old! My friend told me about this black hole, and I have gotten really scared. I don't want to die! I thought if it didn't happen today, it wasn't going to happen. I did not know nothing about it happening in Spring! I find it unfair that scientists are making a machine that could possibly destroy the entire human race. Me and my friends have cried about the black hole, and I find it really upsetting. There has been barely nothing about it on the news. I am so nervous. I just think I am too young to die—is there any way we could stop it happening?
I'm leaning towards the assumption that "Anna" is male, a physics major, about 21 years old, thinks this letter is the funniest thing ever, and wrote it while helplessly giggling. I also assume "Anna" is referring to CERN's Large Hadron Collider.
Now, as I understand it, the scientists at CERN are trying to create a black hole in order to drop the Earth into a wormhole which will enable us to access parallel Earths at earlier stages of chronological development, enabling us to revisit bygone periods of our history. For example, a temporal assassin can kill Hitler while he is still a struggling artist in pre-WW1 Vienna, thus preventing the rise of Nazi Germany and saving the Jews who would have died in Holocaust.
I am 79 years old. I bring this up first to help explain my question. In the late 1930s or early 1940s, I was looking through an old stack of Life magazines, and there was a picture of an old couple sitting on the porch of a cabin (or shack) up in the mountains somewhere in Appalachia, with the notation: "The King and Queen of America?" The small article with the picture stated that if George Washington had become king of the U.S., these two would (under the usual custom) be our king and queen. I have thought of this from time to time, even doubted it. (It might have been part of the propaganda of the time, the Depression years, that we were all equal, etc.) I am dimly aware that George Washington had brothers, and that it is possible that the descent is known. As I remember, it was a lovely picture, the old couple looking out over a valley, with mist, and smoking their corncob pipes. Can you find the picture? Can you tell me whether there was truth in the assertion?
I love this idea. I have no idea how much truth there might be in it. But it inspired me to go to Wikipedia to look up:
The current German Kaiser. He's 32 years old.
The current Tsar of Russia? There are two claimants, this lady and this elderly gentleman.
The King of Italy is apparently a rather infamous figure in his homeland.
Ever wondered about the heir to the throne of the Qing Dynasty in China? I get the feeling he's led a relatively modest life. Living in the PRC, you can't blame him.
The French throne has lots of claimants, thanks to the multitude of royal houses they had in the 1800s. There's this guy if you're a fan of the House of Orleans; there's also this guy for you Bourbon fans. And of course there's a head of the Bonaparte dynasty.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)