wisb-Guardian-Express

No long introductions necessary.  The following are all of Pixar's feature films in order from favorite to least favorite.  I've grouped the films into degrees of "great" for a specific reason:  almost all of Pixar's films are good by any measure.

Note:  I have left Brave off the list because I have no seen it yet.  I cannot possibly judge a film I have not seen, now can I?  I'll edit this list in the future.

I've been re-watching X-Files lately and it dawned on me how strange the world looked back then. For example, in one of the 1st season episodes ("E.B.E."), Scully walks right into an airport terminal and purchases two tickets (one with her credit card and one with cash). The desk lady says to her "You can catch your plane right over there," pointing to the actual gate at which Scully would board her plane.

Think about that for a moment. When was the last time you could do that in an airport? Granted, some of you are older than I am, so you have better memories of the pre-9/11 world. I, however, didn't do a lot of flying pre-2001 because I was a) not quite an adult yet, and b) not financially well off (by that I mean my mother didn't have a lot of money, as we spent part of my youth on welfare
and the rest as lower middle class). So while I have some memories of flying pre-2001, more of my flight memories take place after.

For me, then, seeing someone waltz into an airport, do something fishy, and then get pointed to their gate without having to go through a giant x-ray machine or without TSA agents staring them down is a little bizarre. That world doesn't exist anymore (and in a somewhat ironic way, it's the exact world Mulder and Scully were fighting against...only their "terrorists" were aliens and their agents, not human beings with a political/religious agenda of destruction). I'm not even sure that world can _ever_ exist again. How could it? The world Mulder and Scully fought in died on 9/11 (one of my professors actually sees the end of the collapse of the Soviet Union and 9/11 as two rupture points in U.S. history, framing, I would argue, a long-not-quite-decade of utopian thinking).

Has anyone else had this experience? You're watching some show from the 90s or whenever and realized that things are different. Not because the cars are from a different era or they have strange hair or use different slang, and so on and so forth, but because the ideological landscape is almost alien.

I wonder what the world of film will look like in 20 years...

My "The Dystopian Tradition and American Anxiety" syllabus is finalized and submitted to the English department for approval.  Good news, no?  In the meantime, I'd like to share the reading list for this course, just so everyone can see what I've assigned for these poor little undergrads to read.  There are still a few gaps, which I will mention at the end.  If you have any suggestions for historically relevant essays and the like to fill those gaps, please let me know in the comments.

Here it is:

Novels
The Gold Coast by Kim Stanley Robinson
Make Room, Make Room! by Harry Harrison
The Iron Heel by Jack London
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
The Female Man by Joanna Russ

Short Stories
"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin
"The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster
"The Calorie Man" by Paolo Bacigalupi
"Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut (with a screening of 2081)
"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson
"Bloodchild" by Octavia Butler
"I have No Mouth and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison
"The Funeral" by Kate Wilhelm
"A Sojourn in the City of Amalgamation" by Oliver Bolokitten (excerpts)

Historical Documents
"Evidence against the views of the abolitionists:  consisting of physical and moral proofs of the natural inferiority of the Negroes" by Richard H. Colfax (1833)
"Overpopulation Threatens World" by Ralph Segman
"Overpopulation Called Deadlier Killer Than A-Bomb" by Unknown
"Monsanto's Harvest of Fear" by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele
President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address
"Interview w/ Noam Chomsky" conducted by David Barsamian (excerpts)
"Profits of War:  The Fruits of the Permanent Military-Industrial Complex" by William Hartung

Critical Readings
"Theses on Dystopia 2001" by Darko Suvin
"Introduction:  Dystopia and Histories" by Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan
"New Maps of Hell" by Tom Moylan (excerpts)
"The Dystopian Turn" by Tom Moylan (excerpts)

The Gaps
Historical readings I need:

• An anti-socialism propaganda piece from pre-1909
• A reading on nuclear war fears (such as a newspaper article articulating the terror of nuclear war); alternatively, a really good short film about the nuclear scare / red scare would be great (from the era, mind you)
• A reading on the fear of AI

Readers of this blog, or folks randomly appearing on the home page, will notice that my last post was on Oct. 8th.  That's a long time not to post so much as an update.  Surely I must have a good reason, right?

Actually, I do.  The last month has been one of the heaviest work periods of the semester, in part because October is the month of midterms.  Since I am a teacher, that means I've been grading papers for the past three weeks.  My grading pile only recently dropped below 100 papers (excepting in-class writing, which doesn't take as much time as essays and response papers).

But that's not all I've been up to.  This semester is also the last time I will ever take a graduate-level course, which means I made the conscious choice to ask for the one course I knew would load me with a lot of reading and writing work (this professor happens to be on my committee).  Throw in podcasting duties, personal life nonsense, the paper on the film adaptation of Cloud Atlas I have been working on, and other miscellaneous stuff like voting, etc. and you'll have a good idea why blogging has taken a side track for the time being.  In all honesty, I am probably working close to 80 hours a week, on average, which includes prepping for seminar, prepping lectures for five classes, grading papers for five classes, and so on and so forth.  Let it never be said that we teacher people don't work our asses off.

That said, I am not quitting.  Quite the contrary.  November is a considerably lighter month, since there are numerous holidays and the like here in the States.  I just wanted everyone to know that I didn't disappear into the night.

On that note, how is everyone doing?