As I’ve been thinking about a lot quite recently, it seems that there is a multiplication of risk projections, and they are tied together in a kind of disaster ecology, but nuclear war (let alone war in general, below) does not appear to be part of the eschatological imagination of the present. Enjoy.
So, it looks like the time has come when late-90s–early-00s hardcore is hitting the archival stage. I picked up the quite excellent Building a Better Robot: 10 Years of the Mr. Roboto Project, which, to my mind, reads like a mini handbook to quite a bit of the hardcore/indie scene of the first part of the last decade. Even though I experienced it in Tucson, Pgh doesn’t really seem that far away. . . .
Mr. Al Burian is revolving in the same orbit in his review, “Nicely Dressed Noise,” of the hyperarchival Touchable Sound: A Collection of 7-inch Records from the USA. (Is this is the state of hardcore? needing to emphasize how it is now just an entry into the[/our own personal] archive? Could be worse. They could be mashing up Drive Like Jehu. Oh, wait.)
There is a blog that seriously just shows bookshelves. It is called Bookshelf Porn. Ah, bookshelves. A sample.
And nukes: one “minute” closer to the end of the world, and “How to Get a Nuclear Bomb” by William Langewiesche over at The Atlantic from December of 2006.
A new poem of mine, “Two Parts of a Parallax Gap,” just went up in the second issue of Flywheel. This is one of my more footnote-happy poems, and is a bit of a beast. Thanks to Dave Keaton and the editors for publishing it. Check it out.
Wow, check out the 25 most beautiful university libraries in the world over at flavorwire. Wow. My univ. library at Pitt, well, let’s just say it didn’t make the list by a long shot. A sample.
Katie Rophie over at Slate discusses David Foster Wallace’s syllabi: “The Extraordinary Syllabi of David Foster Wallace: What His Lesson Plans Teach us About How to Live.”
The New York Times‘ Julie Bosman informs us that Mark Z. Danielewksi is going to publish a 27 volume serialized novel, The Familiar, appearing every three months beginning in 2014. I wonder how long each volume will be. . . . Also, an interesting interview w/ Danielewski.
From Inside Higher Ed: report finds literary research an inefficient use of university money according to Marc Bousquet, in his article from The Minnesota Review, “We Work.”
George Orwell on the nuclear bomb.
And a pretty great nuclear bibliography.
I’ve been testing out DC’s New 52, now and then wandering down to the comic shop, and today I wondered why the hell I hadn’t picked up the first three issues of The Fury of Firestorm: The Nuclear Men. The book is written by Ethan Van Sciver and Gail Simone, drawn by Yildiray Cinar, in what sometimes looks to be watercolor, and it is crazily nuclear.
Um. Here is the premise: Some corporation, who supposedly runs the world, is after the missing “Firestorm Protocol.” Unbeknownst to the kinda deepish highschool quarterback in who knows USA, the kid who just so happens to have written a fairly scathing article about the jock in the highschool newspaper, who also happens to be a genius level nerd, has been given the missing protocol by its creator as the result of a private msg board. So when the jock confronts the nerd in the library, and they go out in the hallway to settle it, and the evil corporation (who probably isn’t all that evil, I mean, they are chasing the power to become a nuclear man perhaps so it doesn’t fall into the “wrong hands”) attacks to retrieve it, and to save their lives own lives, the nerd and the jock become Firestorm!? And are able, with their powers combined, to create Fury, a big Power Ranger unleashed by their anger at one another!? And their primary conflict has already been drawn along racial lines. And the nerd is black. It is very promising right now in terms of narrative trajectory. Oh yeah. Firestorms’ powers? So far they seem to be able to turn guns into flowers. And shoot nuclear fire from their hands.
At a certain level it almost doesn’t matter, because this is all really an excuse to post these gorgeous covers. It makes me wanna start a band called The Fury of Firestorm. Oh yeah, and there’s a bunch about the SuperCollider.
Edward Docx (sounds like a pseudonym) just wrote a piece, “Postmodernism is Dead,” over at Prospect.
At Nature, Eugenie Samuel Reich reports on a major breakthrough in quantum physics. “But the new paper, by a trio of physicists led by Matthew Pusey at Imperial College London, presents a theorem showing that if a quantum wavefunction were purely a statistical tool, then even quantum states that are unconnected across space and time would be able to communicate with each other. As that seems very unlikely to be true, the researchers conclude that the wavefunction must be physically real after all.”
“Why are Apocalyptic Narratives So Popular?” Why, I don’t know. . . .
Occupy Wall Street Archival Destruction.
My colleague Adriana Ramirez is having her students blog for her class “Narrative and Technology: We Might Be Gadgets.” The class just got done playing World of Warcraft (Blizzard: 2004-2011), and I had the great privilege to deliver a guest lecture a few days ago. Check out the blog here.
America’s growing anti-intellectualism.
And a nice discussion of the archival “Etymology” and “Extracts” section of Moby-Dick (which I’m teaching right now).
From one of the rare moments Pynchon addresses his own work:
My reading at the time also included many Victorians, allowing World War I in my imagination to assume the shape of that attractive nuisance so dear to adolescent minds, the apocalyptic showdown.
I don’t mean to make light of this. Our common nightmare The Bomb [note the capitalization] is in there too. It was bad enough in ’59 and is much worse now, as the level of danger has continued to grow. There was never anything subliminal about it, then or now. Except for that succession of the criminally insane who have enjoyed power since 1945, including the power to do something about it, most of the rest of us poor sheep [the preterite] have always been stuck with simple, standard fear. I think we all have tried to deal with this slow escalation of our helplessness and terror in the few ways open to us, from not thinking about it to going crazy from it. Somewhere on this spectrum of impotence is writing fiction about it–occasionally, as here, offset to a more colorful time and place. (Thomas Pynchon, “Introduction” in Slow Learner [New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1984], 18-19.)
Seriously, check it out here.
The Hyperarchival Parallax 