Books

Per recent posts, I’m teaching “Philo and Film” this semester, with a focus on sf film. Here’s more of that, if you like that sort of thing. [click to continue…]

Erik over at The Monkey Cage points me towards the excellent Better Book Titles, where you can find numerous contemporary and classic works slightly altered in a way that the title is more informative about their actual content. In closing he says,

If you can do anything like this with a political science book, I’d consider putting it on the Cage.

So what he’s looking for are titles that better convey the core of the argument of academic monographs. Like this.

Of course, we shouldn’t just pick on the famous. So, below the fold, one a bit closer to home.

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When I signed the contract with Princeton UP for Zombie Economics, I read the section covering movie rights, and had fun chatting about which of my friends would be best suited to play Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium, Trickle Down (yes, yes, I know!) and so on. Then I found out that Freakonomics actually has been made into a movie, and of course, I wanted the same. But, even in the century of the mashup, it doesn’t seem likely that a polemical economics text could be made watchable just by adding zombies (though I thought the mash worked pretty well in print).

Instead, how about starting with a standard comic-horror zombie movie, then making the apocalyptic zombie-generating event a financial-economic crisis? That seemed much more promising, and I starting working out the treatment in my head. All was going well until I realized that I was stealing all my best ideas from Charlie Stross. I emailed Charlie, and he said to go right ahead, so I thought at least it would be fun for a blog post.

Over the fold some of the scenes I’ve sketched so far – feel free to make suggestions which I will then feel free to steal in the unlikely event that this goes any further
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Well, things have been quiet around my house lately, except of course for the whole-house water filter that exploded two weeks ago while Janet and I were at the movies, drenching the basement with four inches of water (750 gallons, we learned from the nice young man whose powerful machines drained our house).  The water had just gotten within reach of the bottom of the spines of the books in one bookcase (does a book have a coccyx?), leaving a row of thinkers from Marshall Berman to Harold Bloom shrieking for help and drawing their knees up to their chests.  And of course Jamie lost a lot of stuff — Beatles books, art books, crayons, writing pads, pretty much anything that was on the floor (and there were many things on the floor).  But at least it was clean water, not like <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2008/01/06/slow-parade/”>last time</a>.  So there’s that.

And now that I’ve spent the weekend putting together new shelving and storage devices and tidying up in general, it’s time to pick a fight!  This time I’m over at the National Humanities Center blog, <a href=”http://onthehuman.org/2011/01/humans-disabilities-humanities/”>On the Human</a>, complaining about bioethicists.  For example (from a discussion of Jonathan Glover’s book Choosing Children:  Genes, Disability, and Design):

This then is yet another version of the classic “trolley problem,” in which we are asked to decide whether it is better that people with X disability not be born at all (because the prospective mothers wait two months and have different children altogether) while some people with X disability go “uncured” in utero, or better that people with X disability be “cured” in utero while others are born with the disability because their mothers went untreated.I suppose this is the stuff of which bioethical debates are made, but may I be so rude as to point out that there is no such trolley? This thought experiment may be all well and good if the object is to ask people about the moral difference between foregoing a pregnancy that will result in a fetus with disabilities and treating a disabled fetus in utero (and miraculously “curing” it!). But it does not correspond to any imaginable scenario in the world we inhabit. (And there’s more: because, perhaps, “a disability is harder to bear if you know that people could have prevented it but chose not to do so,” [Derek] Parfit adds that “we assume that those born with the disability do not know they could have been spared it” [48]. Why not assume instead that those born with the disability are given a pony on their fifth birthday?) There simply are no known genetic conditions that present prospective parents with this kind of decision….

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He’s been “subbing over at Ta-Nehisi Coates”:http://www.theatlantic.com/ta-nehisi-coates for the last few days. Which reminds me that I’ve been meaning to post reviews of both _Gentlemen of the Road_ (aka: Jews with Swords!) and his lovely _Maps and Legends_ for at least two years.
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As DD mentions below, I’m dealing at long distance with floods in my hometown of Brisbane. But there’s nothing to be done now until the waters recede, so I’m going ahead with some planned events in Washington DC, plugging Zombie Economics, and this time I’m giving CT readers in the area at least a little notice. The events are:

World Bank Thursday lunchtime

and

Politics and Prose Friday evening

Provoked by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Matthew Yglesias ponders the difficulty adapting Gatsby, in the face of the looming 3D threat.

I agree this seems like a problem. But I think an awful lot of it has to do with the fact that Gatsby is basically crap, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why everyone disagrees with me about this. Yglesias quotes a typical bit:

Or consider: “some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away.” How is it that Nick know for certain that Eckelburg isn’t practicing in Queens any longer but is unsure as to whether he’s moved or died?

I can answer that one. Fitzgerald is a bad writer.

Let me illustrate, by way of offering advice to aspiring 3D directors:

Usually her voice came over the wire as something fresh and cool, as if a divot from a green golf-links had come sailing in at the office window, but this morning it seemed harsh and dry.

Now that would work great in 3D! [click to continue…]

A stray note on the history of science fiction, in relation to theatrical absurdity qua independent but relatable phenomenon, via the intermediation of McGuffins, actual and potential, scientifical, metaphysical and occasionally fistical, and suchish chickenegg castings of shadows …

The note is: Beckett’s 1930 poem, “Whoroscope”, seems like an interesting work to think about.

It also seems worth chicking and eggsamining how Beckett and co. came close to satirizing, avant lalettre, Gernsback’s glorious goose egg of a golden coinage, ‘scientifiction‘. But I see that Gernsback actually proposed the term a few years earlier, in 1926. So that would be upsetting the eggcart before the chicken. And we wouldn’t want to do that o no.

Why am I thinking these thoughts? In part because I’m reading Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd [amazon] – on the iPad! It’s interesting. And it’s just what I wanted my iPad to do for me. Old good books re-released in inexpensive e-book format.

Couple quick thoughts about that. [click to continue…]

I like the fact that the engraving on Jim Woodring’s Nibbus Maximus is so clearly influenced by my own recent work (via boingboing): [click to continue…]

No, he doesn’t call them that. But here’s what he says:

I think you can be as outlandish as you want or as surreal as you want, as long as the characters are based in something real. You can put them in any situation or any reality as long as their reactions have something to do with humans beings and you’re focused on that element of it. I’m not interested in necessarily doing realistic things, obviously. I like fanciful stuff. But it can’t be just fanciful without people in it. Then it’s of no real interest. If you decide that people are turning into carrots or something as your story idea, then I think that I would have to figure out why that’s important to me as a person and why that story resonates in some way. Otherwise there’s no story. It’s just a gimmick. (10)

Quoted in Charlie Kaufman: Confessions of an Original Mind [amazon], by Doreen Alexander Child. (No, I don’t know whether it’s good. Just started.)

This isn’t the most incandescently brilliant theoretical formulation I’ve ever encountered, but … [click to continue…]

These aren’t exact new thoughts, but versions of them have been expressed hereabouts of late, and G. K. Chesterton puts them amusingly and very quotably. So I quote, again, from What’s Wrong With The World? Which I’ve decided is altogether more amusing than Orthodoxy, with longer stretches of complete sanity which, when that grows stale, is punctuated by protests against women’s suffrage and such. [click to continue…]

I got an iPad for X-Mas so – finally! – I can get in on this e-book thing. I bought Quiggin’s Zombie Economics. Also, Mieville’s Kraken. Now I’m thinking about writing: Krakenomics: How Really Big Things Can Drag Down You, And Everyone You Love, To The Very Bottom, And There’s Nothing You Can Do About It, Probably. “Chapter 1: Shit Creek and the Paddle – Learning To Love Learned Helplessness”. Or something like that. But I’m too lazy to write it, so you write it. Also, I haven’t even read the Mieville yet, so what do I know?

But I’m thinking about quoting our John in something I’m writing (yes, on Zizek). But I can’t footnote a Kindle edition. No pages. What will the world come to? Bibliography has gotten a bit old and odd in the head in the age of the internet, but the existence of pages themselves is kind of a watershed. On the one hand, there’s really no reason why a text that can be poured into a virtual vessel as easily as it can be inspirited into the corpse of a tree should have to have ‘pages’. Still, it’s traditional. Harumph. I suppose I’m going to have to use Amazon’s ‘search inside’ or Google Books and pretend I read the paper version, as a proper scholar would. Or just email John Q. and ask.

While we are on the subject of sf and various verb tenses and implied points in time at which it may be proper, or not, to locate narrative action, I see that the thrilling sequel to The Incredible Change-Bots is coming soon! Read the thrilling preview to the thrilling sequel while you await it’s release. Incredible Change-Bots 2: the Vengeful Return of the Broken! Or buy the original, which is reasonably priced (although it’s probably too late to buy it as a stocking-stuffer).

Two weeks ago I noted that G.K. Chesterton had written a novel that is, as it were, the limit case of sf. A futuristic exploration of the hypothesis that nothing much will change, scientifically. I just noticed that, in What’s Wrong With The World (1910), he offers a bit of theory on the subject.

The modern man no longer presents the memoirs of his great grandfather; but is engaged in writing a detailed and authoritative biography of his great-grandson. Instead of trembling before the specters of the dead, we shudder abjectly under the shadow of the babe unborn. This spirit is apparent everywhere, even to the creation of a form of futurist romance. Sir Walter Scott stands at the dawn of the nineteenth century for the novel of the past; Mr. H. G. Wells stands at the dawn of the twentieth century for the novel of the future. The old story, we know, was supposed to begin: “Late on a winter’s evening two horsemen might have been seen—.” The new story has to begin: “Late on a winter’s evening two aviators will be seen—.” The movement is not without its elements of charm; there is something spirited, if eccentric, in the sight of so many people fighting over again the fights that have not yet happened; of people still glowing with the memory of tomorrow morning. A man in advance of the age is a familiar phrase enough. An age in advance of the age is really rather odd.

It is amusing to imagine all sf novels written in the future tense, as if their authors were squabbling prophets.