General

There is a lot that is remarkable about Gene Wolf’s Book Of The New Sun tetralogy, but surely one of the most arresting bits (for me at least) comes in the conclusion of the first book where the narrator, a torturer by trade, compares his new-found role as author to the job of executioner which is his in real life. For him, the author is like an executioner. The crowd at a public beheading is like a book’s audience — each member wanting a spectacle. The urge to write, on the other hand, is like the judge: satisfied not by the show but simply completion of the act. The people who bribe the executioner to make the beheading quick and painless — or sloppy and excruciating — are the literary forms and genres that stand at the back of the author, informing and shaping the nature of his performance. And the executioner?

It is not enough for him to earn praise from all. It is not enough, even, for him to perform his function in a way he knows to be entrely creditable and in keeping with the teaching of his master and the ancient traditions. In addition to all this, if he is to feel full satisfaction at the moment when Time lifts his own severed head by the hair, he must add to the execution some feature however small that is entirely own and that he will never repeat. Only thus can he feel himself a free artist.

Here’s an advanced mathetmatical concept which even the late lamented Leuschke.org would approve of: The Hasselhoff Recursion.

It’s this sort of thing that makes me think maybe I haven’t given Baudrillard the time he deserves.

(file this under ‘yet another book I don’t have time to write’)

The prequel to Georg Simmel’s monumental epic Philosophie des Geld, this intricately detailed history of nineteenth century Berlin is a must for anyone truly interested in the fantastically imagined world of fin de siecle German social thought. Starting from Simmel’s attempt to purchase cabbage at a local shop from an employee he didn’t know, this startling meditation on the nature of anonymity and desire in an East German metropolis comes to a thundering climax when Elves and Men became estranged by the Dark Lord Morgoth’s lust for the Silmarils, pure and powerful magic jewels. Even Weber’s timely work on the political economy of Junker latifundia cannot defeat Morgoth, but the War of Wrath finally brings down the Dark Lord. Peace reigns until Ferdinand Toennies recovers the Rings of Power and sets the stage for the events told in the On Social Differentiation. This is epic Theory at its finest, thrillingly read and gloriously unabridged.

I am most definitely not one of those people who use their blog to wail and nash their teeth about how awful it is to go to graduate school and get a job as a professor. I’ve never liked these blogs for a number of reasons which I won’t get into here because, well, it involves saying Not Nice things about the characters of the people who write them. But I was talking to a friend lately who does read these blogs and asked me why I did get into the academy.

My usual answer is that I’m a failed child actor – which is true. I applied to both conservatories and universities when I graduted from the arts-intensive highschool I graduated from. There were many reasons why I didn’t pursue acting, but one of the biggest ones was that I felt that life as an actor was simply too random to pursue. You could be good at acting and still never attain success – or even a paycheck. Not only is the entire industry composed of personal networks you basically have to infiltrate, but given the number of actors out there, you could fail to get a job if you were not exactly physically what people had in mind – there are always twenty people out there who are an iota thinner (or fatter) than you, whose dimples are slightly more centered (or off center) than yours. It would be a crazy industry to work in if you actually felt that your skill and talents as an actor ought somehow be linked to a rewarding lifestyle. And in the final accounting – that’s all it offered you: lifestyle. Becaue trust me, you don’t get rich being an actor.

*ahem* so let me get this straight – I decided that it was somehow saner to give up being an actor and go on the academic job market?

It seems to me that these days that trying to make it as a professer is looking more and more like trying to make it as an actor. The enormous oversupply, the rhetoric of individual virtuosity in an industry riddled with old boy networks, the arbitrary and short ‘audition’ process. In my experience, universities frequently don’t even bother to send out rejection letters anymore – the only thing you ever hear from a potential employer is if you’ve got a call back, and often their time schedules for a job talk – and their coordination for that job talk – is as harried and disheveled as the average broadway show three months out from opening. The only thing that’s missing is the casting coach – or maybe someone’s just not telling me something.

How to the lives and job prospects of artists compare with those of the proffesoriate?

I’m now officially over the hump of my insane period of presenting humungous amounts of papers. As a result, I have absolutely no idea what to do with my free time. It’s quite a relief actually. And so I present you with the following:

1. “The Puritans felt a compelling duty to employ government to punish sinners, lest the colonists provoke God by tolerating sin in their midst. Drawing upon Old Testament as well as the Engish common law, the Puritan colonized criminalized immorality, including breaking the Sabbath, worshipping idols, blaspheming the name of God, and practicing magic. The most sensational cases involved male sex with animals. In 1642 the New Haven authorities suspected George Spencer of bestiality when a sow bore a piglet that carried his resemblance. he confessed and they hanged both Spencer and the unfortunate sow. New Haven also tried, convicted, and executed the unfortunately named Thomas Hogg for the same crime” – Alan Taylor, American Colonies

2. Do you realize what would happen if American electoral politics followed the plot of Dune? Al Gore III would flee the United States to the Middle East, where he would take over Al Qaida, raise a guerilla army and get addicted to morphine. Then George Bush would personally attend the US military campaign in Afghanistan to defeat Al Gore III. Except that Al Gore III would secretly use a nuclear device to defeat the Americans, capture Bush, and then marry Jenna Bush in order to secure his new stanglehold over the US government. Then he’d force everyone to convert to Islam.

3. “The cultural production of futurity is inevitably inscribed within a complex set of political and economic structures” is just a snarky overly academic way of avoiding saying “Cause they have no budget for costumes” when someone asks “why do people in the future always seem to be wearing pajamas?”

As I work on the revised, publishable version of my Copyright and Taboo paper, I continue to be amazed at how incredible the world is. For instance, for the paper I ran through the economic indicators for Everquest and Papua New Guinea using Ted’s paper on the Cyberian Frontier and the PNG 1998 Human Development Report. As it turns out, people living in Everquest make more money than Papua New Guineans. Hell – Everquest is making more money than Papua New Guinea! (basically) I can’t tell which I find more fascinating, that it’s true, or that the comparison can be done.

My long weekend in New York was a lot of fun as well. My Very Important Talk At A Major University was well received, although it could have gone better. Many of the people I hoped would attend had to cancel when half a squadron of Y-Wing pilots came down with the flu and they had to scramble to come up with replacements for an emergency counter-attack against Remnant forces stationed off of one of the moons of Nar Shaada. Also I saw the John Currin exhibit at the Whitney, which was kewl.

Perhaps the best part of the trip came when we went to the Met, where they had a massive Bhutan Tiger exhibit installed in one of the enormous open-air halls on the third floor. As I am sure you know, the Tiger is the national animal of Bhutan because Guru Rinpoche – the Buddhist monk who created the theocractic state that ruled Bhutan for five hundred years – first arrived on the back of a tiger that flew from India to Bhutan. It’s a great story, of course, but you only really realize how awe-inspiring these tigers are until you watch them in full flight. We liked watching them so much that we even stayed for feeding time, when they hoisted a guy in a cage up into the air and he started spraying blood around and waving bits of yak. It was like those ’shark attack’ specials, but with tigers instead of sharks and air instead of water.

If you don’t get a chance to see them in New York, don’t worry. The National Zoo of Bhutan is well-known for being remarkably impoverished – their entire collection consists of three yaks, a herd of ducks, and seven hundred and thirty six flying tigers. As a result, the collection is simultaneously boring and extremely dangerous. They are attempting to establish active ties with other zoos for exchange programs to broaden their collection. So if you are lucky there might be some flying tigers coming to a zoo near you. Even if your hometown zoo doesn’t have any cool animals to trade for – don’t worry! While we consider flying tigers to be spectacularly exotic, the Bhutanese think of them as nothing more than a reason to make sure that children playing outside in high-visibility conditions are not left unattended. On the other hand, they would go nuts for a Racoon or even a few Flamingos and would trade like, a ton of tigers just to get a decent sized Gila Monster. So keep an eye out at your local zoo – and remember: No Hats With Meat Allowed In The Exhibit.

Finally, I recently realized that you could do an IMDB search for Characters in Movies. I know that my family has a long and distinguished career in show-biz, but I’ve never seen a lot of the films they were in. IMDB tells me that 82 male Mastersons and 28 female Mastersons have appeared on screen – although a lot of those are duplicates since my great-great uncle Bat and my sister Linda are each listed a ton of times. Unfortunately, cousin Sabrina’s college misadventures are all-too-accurately detailed in “Confessions of Sorority Girls”. All I can say is, my Netflix Cue just doubled in length.

Everytime that I think “this is it – crunch time,” things get more and more hectic. I’m working on a Very Important Talk at Columbia for the end of this week, as well as trying to meet a publication deadline for February 1. This wouldn’t be so bad, except for the fact that the first project involves turning a forty word paper into a twenty word oral presentation, while the second involves turning a 2500 word paper into a 4000 paper! The cognitive dissonance of trying to cut cut cut for four hours straight and then add add add for the next three makes my head want to burst into very small, fruit-flavored pieces. (I don’t know why I imagine them to be fruit-flavored, but I do).

I’ve also been seized by a recent and inexplicable desire to do a blog post which features Reuters headlines rewritten to 1) have a happy ending and 2) involve magic cheese. For example:

REUTUERS Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – A fifteen story office building caught fire in the heart of Kuala Lumpur’s downtown financial district late this afternoon. While firemen and emergency personnel were quick to respond, workers on floors 8-15 were trapped by the rapidly growing blaze. Luckily, the hapless employees were able to consume enormous wedges of magic cheese, which made them invulnerable to flame and allowed them to escape unharmed. There were no fatalities, although seventeen employees on lower floors unable to eat the cheese were taken the hospital and treated for smoke inhalation.

REUTERS Graniteville, New Hampshire – Campaigning in the final hours before the New Hampshire primary has grown increasingly hectic. Candidates criss-crossed the state in a last-minute attempt to sway swing voters. Meanwhile, the President traveled to Arkansas today to make a public appearence with French President Jacques Chirac in one of his rare trips abroad. At a photo-op in Little Rock, Mr. Bush was given a slice of Brie which glowed with a faerie-like, magical green aura. After considerable hesitation, Mr. Bush consumed the chees. In his public comments, Mr. Bush departed from his planned address on medical liability reform to speak off-the-cuff on a variety of domestic and international issues. “The invasion of Iraq was ill-conceived and probably illegal under international law,” said Mr. Bush, “and I deeply regret it – especially now that it is transparently clear that Iraq had no connection with 9/11 and lacked weapons of mass destruction. I suppose if my administration were truly committed to preventing human rights violations, we would have more strongly supported an armed UN presence on the ground in Liberia. And anyway, why are we putting the future of our children in jeopardy by running up a national deficit when fifteen percent of our own citizens lack health coverage? This entire thing seems totally crazy to me now.”

REUTERS Bem, Iran – Months after an earthquake devastated the historic city of Bem, Iran, international aid organizations charged with finding housing for disaster victims is reporting unusual success. A mysterious unidentified group known only as “Section Thirteen” has been distributing food stuffs to refugees with remarkable positive effects. “Bem is on a high desert plateau, and at night the freezing winds threaten the very life of my children,” said Abdullah Hamid, whose family of twelve was left homeless by the quake, “but the cheese – it warms us, and gives us the strength to go on. ‘Nshallah, my six year old’s new found superhuman strength will enable to build a new home soon.”

etc. etc.

Meanwhile – how much lamb stock does one man need? At times it seems even an infinite amount of pint containers are not enough to allow me to safely freeze the mess of potage that is all that remains of my latest dinner party. Alas, even the insanely stinky (and hence magic) cheese that filled my guests’ head full of prolepsis is now exhausted. The duck stock from the Peking Duck left me with a ducky taste in my mouth and a keen desire to Not Eat Duck For A While. Will I be turned off of lamb forever? Egads.

Don’t. Stop. Writing.

Is it good? Is it intelligent? Is it even coherent? Who cares! Keep. Writing.

Have you ever woken up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night and sat bolt upright in bed thinking: Didn’t Sally Falk Moore already say this? Who cares? Keep. Writing.

Just. Keep. Writing. More. Words.

A text – any text – confronts you as a foreign object. As such (for some wierd intangible reason) it is strangely susceptible to modification. To freeze something inside of yourself is difficult or impossible if, like most humans, you’ve got a belly full of ideas. To see it on the page is to surveil something external, something that can be shaped. Cutting it is not amputation. Augmentation is not implantation. When you modify it, you no longer modify yourself.

Despite the strange intellectual discomfort that is the caesarian section that is the first draft, we all must do it. Only he ripped untimely from his mother’s womb, after all, can defeat MacBeth.

So the syllables slip out, word counts are exceeded, logic o’erblown, ’til you wake up the next morning and trudge into work, only to watch the spaghetti of your thoughts become unruly twisting black lines on the pages that begrudgingly pour out of the laster printer.

But don’t worry – in the next draft you’re going to make Birnham woods come to Dunsinane. Because that’s the kind of superhero you are, hey?

1. Academics are to documentaries as big-hearted women are to worthless men: they dream they can ‘change them for the better’, but both are disappointed with equal frequency.

2. Despite Amazon.com’s protests to the contrary, I strongly suspect that other customers who added ‘A Papua New Guinea Politicle Chronicle 1967-199′ to their wish list did not also purchase ‘I am trying to break your heart – a film about Wilco’.

3. Straight talk on 1st world environmentalists and 4th world indigenous types from Simon and Martha: “[Indigenous] frustration at the lack of sustainable yet lucrative (and easy) alternatives to logging [tropical rain forests] is not infrequently directed at NGOs charted with finding community-based solutions to this dillemma… the environmental rationale for seeking an alternative to logging is expounded by foreigners who, in the eyes of villagers, are not only already fabulously wealthy but typically come from countries that have already logged most of their forests…”

4. Sven Hedin was a Nazi.

5. The next topic of AHATPOLS Expanded Universe fandom once AHATPOLS is complete? Let me put it this way: Bjork. Mjolnir. Foucault. Ambi.

6. Idea for a blog entry: riff off of the fact that I find erudition hot. Do take off of iconic 80s movie “wierd science” but instead of creating British Supermodel I make a female incarnation (presumably slavic) of Google and take her out on a date – she doesn’t just know when the Berliner Dom was constructed, she can give you driving directions and a map at the drop of the hat. Ask her “do you know Naz?” she responds “Naz is a photographic genius. Naz is on vacation. Naz is in a historical preservation district. Naz is…” We end up at my place and there’s a whole humourous “Xander miscasts a love spell” sort of scene, but ultimately at the end of the day I realize that although nothing make a woman more beautiful in the eyes of a man than a keen interest in nineteenth century German philhellenism some hottie baroque sopranos are too good to give up.

7. Books on my desk after two hours of writing my dissertation:
Globalization and Culture Change in the Pacific Islands
Political Decentralization in a New State: the Experience of Provincial Government in Papua New Guinea (Harry’s essay is GREAT)
Papua New Guinea: People, Politics and History Since 1975, Fully Revised Edition
A Papua New Guinea Politicle Chronicle 1967-1991
In Search of the Serpent’s Skin: The Story of the Porgera Gold Project (go Glenn!)

The human-computer mindmeld is now complete. It took me about three seconds to realize the power of this fully armed and operational battlestation.

via The Mentat Cowboy

While I’ve felt the Onion has slid in quality of late, I do have to say it is terrifying how the terrifyingly acrruate their recent account of tribesmen guilted into attended friend’s bounrdary dance is. Some of the words are Huli, I believe manda is in fact Engan for wig, and they mention cordyline! The dancers look to be from the Western Highlands, though. And of course these days in PNG when people go to a dance they pick up a six pack and go to a disco and get down to the latest top forty hit.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Megawati Sukarnoputri lately. As far as I know, the last person to successfully name themselves after a unit of power specialized in turning into consumer electronics and fighting Optimus Prime. I think I will name my first child Kilojoule. Kilojoule Gyorgy Golub.

Oh yes.