So, I guess Google has created some sort of mega-meta-archive, the “Google Cultural Institute,” an archive of stuff that is in museums (i.e. archives), and when I go to the front page, the two featured archives are the “Hiroshima Peace Museum” and the “Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum.” Sometimes this is just too easy. Nukes and archives. Bombs and museums. Hyperarchival realism.
Economist and former dean at Princeton Christina Paxson has written an interesting article for the New Republic, “The Economic Case for Saving the Humanities.” Therein she asks if the humanities are “worth it” economically and argues that
support for the humanities is more than worth it. It is essential. . . . It is really important we get this right. A mountain of empirical evidence indicates a growing inequality in our society. There is no better way to check this trend than to invest in education. And there is no better way to invest in education than to invest fairly, giving attention to all disciplines and short shrift to none.
Even though many of us may take Paxson’s argument wholly for granted already–that those of us who think about the issue a bit realize that of course the humanities have significant bearing on economics–the threats to the humanities largely boil down to their perceived lack of economic viability. If this perception can be combated, we may see other criticisms fall away.
Today’s sentencing of Bradley Manning to 35 years in prison has provoked considerable outrage. Birgitta Jónsdóttir addresses this nicely in her piece for The Guardian, “Bradley Manning’s Sentence: 35 Years for Exposing the Truth.”
And Rob Goodman has a very compelling piece on “dystopian narcissism” for The Chronicle of Higher Education titled, “The Comforts of the Apocalypse.” Dystopian narcissism is the selfish belief that your time, your civilization, your world is somehow unique in its proximity to the end times, to the disaster, to the apocalypse. As Goodman writes: “We’re virtually guaranteed to witness the end of nothing except our lives, and the present, far from fulfilling anything, is mainly distinguished by being the one piece of time with us in it.” I’ve been saying this for years. (Though perhaps the Doomsday Argument would disagree, as perhaps would Nick Bostrom [here and here and here and here] .)
Here are .pdfs of syllabi for classes I will be teaching this fall at the University of Pittsburgh:
Reading Poetry (ENGLIT 0315)–“American Poeisis: Imagining the Twentieth Century”
Introduction to Critical Reading (ENGLIT 0500)–“Light and Darkness in the Twentieth Century”
Narrative and Technology (ENGLIT 0399)–“Narrating Nuclear, Information, and Biological Technology”
And my Narrative and Technology students will be keeping a class blog. Check it out here.
As the publication date of Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, The Bleeding Edge is only now a month away (17 September 2013), I thought I might post a number of links previewing it.
Slate has a few brief comments on Pynchon, but more importantly, the first page of the novel, which features a wonderful description of early-2000s New York.
J.K. Trotter wrote a fairly extended piece for the Atlantic in June, “Thomas Pynchon Returns to New York, Where He’s Always Been.”
Library Journal has a brief preview, as does The Examiner.
The New Yorker celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of V. (1963).
There is what appears to be the first review of the novel (though I’m skeptical).
A panel at MLA 2014 has already been announced that will discuss Bleeding Edge.
And even Grantland is in on the hype.
I myself will be putting in my pre-order any day now.
For further info on Pynchon, see the always wonderful thomaspynchon.com, Spermatikos Logos, and the Pynchon wiki.
Serena Golden has an interview at The Chronicle of Higher Education with the authors of Zombies in the Academy: Living Death of Higher Education, Andrew Whelan, Ruth Walker, and Christopher Moore. She writes:
The book’s contributors find zombies lurking around every corner: students concerned solely with getting through and making the grade; faculty members deadened by the corporatization of the university and the erosion of traditional faculty jobs; systems and processes within the university that have long since outlived their original purpose but that endlessly perpetuate themselves. What does it mean, the editors wonder, if the zombie apocalypse has already taken place, and we are living — or undead — within it?
And in the latest in eschatology from the scientific front, Alexander Bolonkin and Joseph Friedlander have published a paper, “Explosion of the Sun,” which details how you could blow up the sun. A link to the abstract here and a link to the full paper here. Here is the abstract of the paper, which really needs to be quoted in full:
The Sun contains ~74% hydrogen by weight. The isotope hydrogen-1 (99.985% of hydrogen in nature) is a usable fuel for fusion thermonuclear reactions. This reaction runs slowly within the Sun because its temperature is low (relative to the needs of nuclear reactions). If we create higher temperature and density in a limited region of the solar interior, we may be able to produce self-supporting detonation thermonuclear reactions that spread to the full solar volume. This is analogous to the triggering mechanisms in a thermonuclear bomb. Conditions within the bomb can be optimized in a small area to initiate ignition, then spread to a larger area, allowing producing a hydrogen bomb of any power. In the case of the Sun certain targeting practices may greatly increase the chances of an artificial explosion of the Sun. This explosion would annihilate the Earth and the Solar System, as we know them today. The reader naturally asks: Why even contemplate such a horrible scenario? It is necessary because as thermonuclear and space technology spreads to even the least powerful nations in the centuries ahead, a dying dictator having thermonuclear missile weapons can pro[duce] (with some considerable mobilization of his military/industrial complex) an artificial explosion of the Sun and take into his grave the whole of humanity. It might take tens of thousands of people to make and launch the hardware, but only a very few need know the final targeting data of what might be otherwise a weapon purely thought of (within the dictator’s defense industry) as being built for peaceful, deterrent use. Those concerned about Man’s future must know about this possibility and create some protective system—or ascertain on theoretical grounds that it is entirely impossi[ble]. Humanity has fears, justified to greater or lesser degrees, about asteroids, warming of Earthly climate, extinctions, etc. which have very small probability. But all these would leave survivors—nobody thinks that the terrible annihilation of the Solar System would leave a single person alive. That explosion appears possible at the present time. In this paper is derived the “AB-Criterion” which shows conditions wherein the artificial explosion of Sun is possible. The author urges detailed investigation and proving or disproving of this rather horrifying possibility, so that it may be dismissed from mind—or defended against.[1]
The keywords for the paper also need to be quoted: Artificial Explosion of Sun; Annihilation of Solar System; Criterion of Nuclear Detonation; Nuclear Detonation Wave; Detonate Sun; Artificial Supernova.[2]
Didn’t we already think of such silly things like blowing up heavenly bodies? This is absurd.
A bunch of interesting stories today:
“Water Leaks on the Fukushima Plant Could Contaminate Entire Pacific Ocean.”
The Faces of Project Y: the security badges for those working on the Manhattan Project.
And in further news from the Orwellian security state: “Apple has patented a piece of technology which would allow government and police to block transmission of information, including video and photographs, from any public gathering or venue they deem ‘sensitive,’ and ‘protected from externalities.'”
The Atlantic has amazing time-lapse satellite images showing the massive changes to the human-built world. An archive of disaster.
And from The Chronicle of Higher Education: “The National Institutes of Health announced on Wednesday that it had reached an agreement to give the family of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951, some control over researchers’ access to the genomic data of cells derived from her tumor, according to The Wall Street Journal.”
Two interesting stories:
An NPR story on Daniel Ellsberg, “the military analyst who in 1971 leaked the top-secret Pentagon Papers detailing the history of U.S. policy in Vietnam.”
And for Reuters, John Shiffman and Kristina Cooke write, “U.S. Directs Agents to Cover Up Program Used to Investigate Americans”: “A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.”
To return to one of the main threads of this blog–all things nuclear–which has been going down slightly different paths over the past month, I give you the following excerpt from Devon Fredericksen’s interview with Terry Tempest Williams, activist and author of When Women Were Birds (2013), among many other books:
I believe the first time I found my voice was when I crossed the line at the Nevada Test Site in 1988. It was one year after my mother died. It was one year before my grandmother would die, and I found myself the matriarch of my family at thirty. With the death of my mother, grandmothers, and aunts—nine women in my family have all had mastectomies, seven are dead—you reach a point when you think, “What do I have to lose?” and you become fearless. When I crossed that line at the Nevada Test Site as an act of protest because the United States government was still testing nuclear bombs in the desert—it was a gesture on behalf of the Clan of the One-Breasted Women—my mother, my grandmothers, my aunts. And I didn’t do it alone. I was with hundreds of other women who had suffered losses in Utah as a result of atomic testing, as a result of our nuclear legacy in the West. I crossed that line with Jesuit priests, with Shoshone elders, with native people who had also lost lives because of the radiation fallout in the Shivwits’ lands.
The University of Oregon has opened a mockery of disinterested academic pursuits in the form of a “football complex.” If it wasn’t clear that football is the primary interest of certain academic institutions, it should be now. Greg Bishop for The New York Times writes about it in “Oregon Embraces ‘University of Nike’ Image.” A brief excerpt:
The Football Performance Center, which was unveiled publicly this week, is as much country club as football facility, potentially mistaken for a day spa, or an art gallery, or a sports history museum, or a spaceship — and is luxurious enough to make N.F.L. teams jealous. It is, more than anything, a testament to college football’s arms race, to the billions of dollars at stake and to the lengths that universities will go to field elite football programs.
And in related news, Alissa Quart reports for The Nation about the “neurohumanities,” in “Adventures in Neurohumanities.” We’re done for.
The Hyperarchival Parallax 