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?

(Disclaimer:  If you are easily offended by the proper spelling of the words hinted at in my title, then do not read beyond this point.)

As a postcolonial scholar, I've become familiar with what Homi Bhabha calls the "ambiguity of colonial discourse."  In short, Bhabha suggests that colonialism attempts to recreate indigenous minds/bodies in the image of the colonizer, but only to an indeterminate line that allows the colonizer to differentiate itself from the "other," since its existence as "colonizer" requires an opposite from which to draw its identity.  Within that ambiguity, Bhabha argues, is where the indigenous can launch a different kind of resistance.

I've often wondered if this same idea might apply to words like "nigger" or "bitch" (and their various spellings).  While I won't call myself a feminist scholar or race historian, it seems to me that it is within the realm of possibility that women or people of color could reclaim the words previously used against them by a particular dominant group.  Otherwise, I'd have to look at a site like Smart Bitches, Trashy Books with a certain degree of contempt.  Likewise, I'd have to view any use of the word "nigger" by people of color as inherently derogatory, even if within a particular cultural context, it means exactly the opposite.  Are some of these instances moments of resistance / reversal / reclamation?  How do we know?

That's where I want to leave it.  A wide open question for the general public to explore.  So have at it!

Several weeks ago, I taught William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying in my Survey in American Literature course. Of all the texts I've taught since the summer before last (when I started teaching literature courses), this one may have been the most difficult.  For those unfamiliar with the book, it is told almost exclusively in a stream of consciousness manner, spanning across more perspectives than you can count on a single hand, each one intensely personal and subjective.  The plot, insofar as it has one, follows the Bundren family as they make their journey to the birthplace of their deceased mother so that they might bury her there.  In other words, As I Lay Dying is a "dark" book that isn't so much a story as a radical de-centering of experience -- multiple minds, multiple experiences, and multiple reactions.

But the book itself is not what I want to talk about today; rather, it serves as the context.  What I
want to talk about is skulls.  At some point at the end of our discussions of Faulkner's novel, my students managed to get us onto the subject of "darkness" (tonal).  Specifically, they were comparing Faulkner's As I Lay Dying to Nathanael West's "Miss Lonelyhearts," both of which have been described as dark comedies.  My students didn't quite agree with this, noting that much of the thematic content of As I Lay Dying is difficult to make fun of even when a comic genius is involved (I'm paraphrasing their arguments, of course).  "Miss Lonelyhearts," however, seemed rather amusing in retrospect.  They thought that while much of the story hadn't seemed funny when they were reading it, West's narrative had, in fact, grown on them.  I suspect part of this has to do with exposure to Faulkner, which is such a contrast to West that it's hard to fully argue that "Miss Lonelyhearts" isn't at least half funny.

It was at this point that my one and only Russian student matter-of-factly stated, "When I was a kid, we used to play with the skulls of dead Germans."  I can't recall the exact context in which these words were spoken, unfortunately.  What interests me about this announcement isn't whether it makes sense in my recollection of events, but rather how it was stated:  as if there is nothing strange about playing with dead German skulls.  In subsequent conversations with this student, she provided considerable detail of the catacombs in which she and her friends would play (somewhere in the Eastern edge of what was Soviet Bloc territory -- I cannot recall where at the moment).  Apparently these bones and skulls were left there after the war; nobody bothered to pick them up and bury them (or do whatever you do with the bones of dead Germans).  And so, my Russian student grew up playing with the skulls of dead Germans.

Think about that for a minute.  Imagine what it must have been like growing up in a world in which playing with dead German skulls is just plain normal.  A hard world to imagine, no?

Excuse me while I file this in one of the weirdest teaching experiences I've ever had, right alongside the time one of my students said that whenever they thought of me, they imagined me as the woman being chased by the werewolf in Michael Jackson's "Thriller."  (Among other weird moments, of course.)

Somewhere in Thailand, a mind-controlled ant climbs a tree.  She moves in jerks and starts, her body no longer her own.  Alone, she staggers to the underside of a leaf, and bites the thick central stem.  Her jaw locks.  Her chitin bulges and bursts.  A long gray tendril rises from within, unfurls to three times her length, and pops to release a cloud of spores.  Away on the breeze the spores float, to possess any other ants unlucky enough to remain within the blast radius.

The fungus is called Ophiocordyceps camponoti-balzani.  The fungus infects an ant, takes over the victim’s brain, forces it to move to a high place near other ants--a place where spores will spread--and explodes.

That’s real.

If you work for a corporation or a non-profit, you’re part of a functionally immortal entity whose life is governed by laws more theological than biological—a being that draws strength from desire,
faith, and sacrifice.  When corporations emerged in the High Middle Ages, jurists compared them to angels: immortal, immaterial, mighty.  And every angel is terrifying.

That’s real, too.

You read these words on a screen lit by lightning, which we harnessed either by burning hundred-million-year-old plants and plankton (and a few dinosaurs), by wrestling rivers like Achilles, by binding the wind or the shifting tide or sunlight or subterranean fire.  Building your screen required labors that would make Hercules blanch.

How can we tell stories about that kind of world?  A world that’s not straightforward, a world with diversities of wonder, justice, injustice, horror, majesty, and sheer scale to beggar the wildest opium dreams?

We can tell some stories by zooming in.  The earth seems flat to most human beings, most of the time.  Newtonian physics works fine for objects about the size of people, moving at people speeds.  A character who calls her former lover to console him after his father’s death doesn’t need to think about cellular towers, satellites, digital audio, or call routing, let alone the Chinese mine that produced the rare earths used to make the phone (and the people who worked there).  By focusing on dramatic structures of everyday life and emotional politics that haven’t changed much since Murasaki wrote Genji, a storyteller can avoid much of reality’s weirdness.

Or the teller can embrace the strange.  Break open the common surface of our lives and expose the machinery beneath.  Show characters who engage with the mad mess of their setting, who are elevated by it or ground to dust or both.  Pull out elements of our daily weird, hold them to the light, and watch them spark.

Some people accuse fantastic literature--science fiction, fantasy, horror, and all their permutations--of escapism.  And sure, some of us come to genre tales for the rich fantasy lives, for the grand open vistas and the capital-E Evils which Must Be Stopped.  But I think the richness of the genre lies in confrontationalism, not escapism: its ability to address the fundamental strangeness of the natural world, and the world we’ve built, and the world being built around us.  The freedom to tell stories out of this world can offer the freedom to name more precisely the world where we live.

And that world is wild, and needs naming.