Read yesterday: Pickover, Clifford A. Computers and the Imagination: Visual Adventures beyond the Edge. (St. Martin’s: 1991). Hyperkinetic. Early sections on computer-generated mazes of interest, and the clear hand of A Perfect Vacuum and Imaginary Magnitude was visible later. Sedgwick, Mark. Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century. [...]
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“Dysentery in the ranks” (4.4). Combines foreshadowing and appealing ludicrousness. Read yesterday: Horsley, Lee. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. (Oxford: 2005). Where’s the Keeler? Bonfiglioni? Banville? Clarke, Lee. Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination. (Chicago: 2006). Thought that Posner’s book might have warranted a bit more discussion here. Phares, Walid. Future Jihad : Terrorist [...]
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I spend some time in my dissertation with the political and diplomatic history of interwar England and was pleased to have a[n] historian on my committee, who pointed out some overgeneralizations I was tending to make about the nature of the British right in the mid-twenties, among other things. So imagine my dismay when I [...]
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I’m very lazy about changing a CD in my car stereo unless I’m on a long drive. I think I once listened, as Clancy can attest, to Blonde on Blonde (mind you a scratched-copy with “Visions of Johanna”–the “all night long we sang that stupid song” from “Dr. Wu”–unplayable) for at least a month’s worth [...]
My contribution to the Moretti event: “Suppose at this juncture we were to state the blindingly obvious: that, whatever their other properties, literary texts do not possess genes” (59). So begins the “Perils of Analogy” section of Christopher Prendergast’s response* to Moretti. Notwithstanding the Paris Review interviews, it does seem difficult to maintain that literature [...]
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That’s the title of my course this semester. I’m thinking possibly of substituting Primer for eXistenZ. I think Primer‘s engagingly baffling, and it’s also one of the best movies about engineers qua engineers I’ve seen. I did ‘solve’ Rhem, and getting the bridge to rise is really just the start of it. Clancy bought me [...]
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Just caught a commercial for the Super Bowl on ABC with “Heartbreaker” in the background. You couldn’t really hear any of the lyrics, which is too bad: A ten year old girl on a street corner, Sticking needles in her arm. She died in the dirt of an alleyway, Her mother said she had no [...]
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Another tidbit from the Chronicle (still subscription): Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (Metropolitan, 2004), sketched out prevailing American narratives of class and the rhetoric of left and right. “The ways we’re encouraged to think about elites and elitism is the key to what’s wrong [...]
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I’ve announced the upcoming Valve book event on Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees, about which I’m excited. Also, Mark Bauerlein has an article (currently subscription) in the Chronicle about adolescent culture and the decline of literacy. In many ways, I think Bauerlein misses the mark here; but for now I just want to note that [...]
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I think foreign policy should definitely be taken out of men’s hands. Men should continue making machines, but women ought to decide which machines are being made. Women have far better sense. They would have never introduced the infernal internal combustion engine or any other of the evil machines. Most kitchen machines, for example, are [...]
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