The fall 2012 issue of boundary 2 is now available online. It contains my article, “The Inverted Nuke in the Garden: Archival Emergence and Anti-Eschatology in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.” (Requires university access.) Here’s a link to the abstract.
In honor of the end of the world that (yet again) failed to occur today (here’s assuming I’m not jumping the gun on this one), a few disaster-related stuff that is real.
Talking Points Memo reports on the link b/t the Newton, Connecticut shooting and doomsday preppers. (And oh yeah, even though I’ve failed to watch it yet, there’s a whole show on the National Geographic channel devoted to this type of doomsday prepping.)
In Guernica, Joel Kovel and Quincy Saul talk about ecosocialism in “Apocalypse and Revelation Are the Same Word.”
And Steven Shaviro has a new essay, “Melancholia, or The Romantic Anti-Sublime,” in the new (free) online journal Sequence.
Enjoy the continuation of the world.
My good friend and former student, Dean Matthews, just started a blog: alloyalloyoxygen. His first post, on surveillance archives and other such things, is titled “The Sound Was Overwhelming: The Archival Nature of Criminal Technology.”
Quite the fail safe. io9 reports that “according to recently declassified documents made available by the U.S. National Security Archive, the United States had a contingency plan in effect where, in the event that the President went missing or was killed during an attack on the country, the military was instructed to launch an automatic and simultaneous ‘full nuclear response’ against both the Soviet Union and China. And it wasn’t until 1968 that the government under Lyndon Johnson repealed the directive.”
And, in other news, “Scientists Plan to Test to See if the Entire Universe is a Simulation.”
The most recent issue of Hot Metal Bridge, Pitt’s graduate-run literary journal, just went live. HMB is currently being edited by my good friend Jennifer Howard.
Kim Stanley Robinson, a master of imagining different geoengineering and terraforming projects in his novels, talks about the future in a short but poignant essay, “Earth: Under Repair, Forever.”
(The above is from The Atlantic‘s pretty astounding “2012: The Year in Photos.”)
Heather Havrilesky has an article published today on Vulture titled, “Why TV Apocalypses Are Really Wish-Fulfillment Fables.” There is some (psychoanalytic) ground being retread here, but I can’t help but smile at the following statements: “Cormac McCarthy’s The Road at first appears bereft of wishful thinking — that is, until you recognize that solitude and scorched horizons are this author’s ideal tromping ground”; and, referring to NBCs Revolution: “This is the apocalypse with a full-time stylist, on heavy antibiotics.”
It was reported on Monday that “[i]n a secret project recently discovered, the United States planned to blow up the moon with a nuclear bomb in the 1950s as a display of the country’s strength during the Cold War space race.” Yes. The US was legitimately planning on blowing up the moon. The. Moon. Take that moon.
James Atlas wrote a piece, “Is this the End?” in Sunday’s New York Times discussing narrative eschatology with regard to Sandy and rising oceans and the sustainability of NYC: “Last month’s ‘weather event’ should have taught us that. . . in 50 or 100 or 200 years, there’s a good chance that New York City will sink beneath the sea.”
(In his I think monthly column “Easy Chair”) Thomas Frank has an article on “the 2012 canon of doom” in December’s issue of Harper’s, titled (cleverly . . .) “Appetite for Destruction.”
I’m currently discussing DFW’s “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction”[1] with my freshman English class, and so of course it was quite appropriate that Christy Wampole just wrote an opinion piece in Saturday’s New York Times, “How to Live Without Irony.”
To address this issue, the Wikimedia Foundation is collaborating with JSTOR, a service of the not-for-profit organization ITHAKA, to provide 100 of the most active Wikipedia editors with free access to the complete archive collections on JSTOR, including more than 1,600 academic journals, primary source documents and other works. The authors who will receive accounts have collectively written more than 100,000 Wikipedia articles to date. Access to JSTOR, which is one of the most popular sources on English Wikipedia, will allow these editors to further fill in the gaps in the sum of all human knowledge.
And The New Yorker has a piece by Gary Marcus on “Ray Kurzweil’s Dubious New Theory of Mind.”
[1] There are two things to note about this link: 1) it links to a .pdf of the original Review of Contemporary Fiction piece from 1993, so is (perhaps) slightly different than its final appearance in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997), and 2) it is dedicated to “M.M. Karr” (Mary Karr), which takes on all sorts of different significances in the wake of Max’s biography of DFW.
The Hyperarchival Parallax 