when good books go bad (or bad books go good?)

Today I was waiting in line at a coffee kiosk with a very tall pile of books which prominently had a copy of Pacific Edge with a garish science fiction cover on top. The guy behind me in the line was sussing out my books and commented that it looked like I had some for business and some for pleasure. When I responded 'nope, all business!' he was utterly confused - and all 'Kim Stanley Robinson, what?'. I can't tell if he was horrified or impressed, but it just goes to show the tenuous spot that SF holds in the canon, I guess.

FUTURE-CAT!!!

Pacific Edge available

Finally!! There were troubles with access and other things too ghastly to mention, but it's now on the WebCT site.

Kim Stanley Robinson environmental hero of the year

Time magazine recently named KSR one of its heroes of the environment for 2008.

I adore Oliver Morton, who wrote this article for Time. He has also written a wonderful book called Mapping Mars about humanity's ongoing fascination with the red planet (maybe even or especially as a site for utopian dreaming and visions?).

Following on from Peter's comment about rounding out the semester with a happy book, I would particularly like to highlight the line Morton writes here: "Life is lessened if the imagination fails to offer futures we can envision better than any past".

One of the points that Morton makes in Mapping Mars is that Robinson's writing is often a form of restitution or atonement for the mistakes that we have made in the past - particularly in his rewriting of the Western American landscape.

While Robinson has moments of beautiful prose (especially when writing about encounters with nature in the tradition of Gary Snyder etc) - unfortunately, sometimes his writing is also more second rate.

But he will always remain an ideas man and visionary. His books are definitely filled with soaring optimism.

New Australia, anyone?

This is great, does anyone know anything else about this? Why Paraguay?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Australia

"New Australia was a utopian socialist settlement in Paraguay founded by the Australian New Australian Movement. The colony was officially founded on 28 September 1893 as Colonia Nueva Australia and comprised 238 adults and children".

Arrrrrrgh.

In my utopia there will be no leaf-blowers.

Damn these motorized phalloi. Damn them.

Truman Show and Philip K Dick

I am equally surprised, pleased and weirded out by the discovery that The Truman Show was partly inspired by the Philip K. Dick novel Time Out of Joint.

But the more I think about it, the more Truman's surreal experience of a reality so real and safe and perfect that it can't possible be real is pure PKD.

Utopian Jukebox.

So, I’m going to break the litmus test and talk solely from anecdote. But no-one has to read this entry so I won’t feel so bad about it.

I think the pub jukebox is the utopian object par excellence. I mean it embodies all the tension that goes into the formation of utopia and its inevitable (Black Mass?) fall into dystopia.

The jukebox exists as a means to egocentric projection over a social system: it offers us a way to drag up those lost moments of the past that we hold dearly (Guns n Roses, for me, which may negate the royal we I use in this entry) so as to project them over those who inhabit the Townie at 3am of a Saturday morning. We program our desire into the machine – a political act if ever there was one – and so teleology presents itself: we are now progressing towards Paradise (City).

However, the utopian desire becomes all consuming and our ambitions callous: we realize that o-so-totalitarian button beneath the machine that only the bouncer knew of hitherto (like buying arms off the U.S., I guess). With this we sabotage the desires of others who are, now, adversaries: we don’t want to listen to Pearl Jam, to That Godawful Umbrella Song, or to Bon Jovi. We press the button (there’s something Cold War about this, I think) and the dreams of others’ come to a swift and unceremonious end.

Then our three songs come on, Welcome to the Jungle, Paradise City, and November Rain. Some patrons get into it – screaming at the tops of their lungs, our Leninist vanguard – while others look unimpressed. These others are, effectively, in the aural gulag our utopia has created: the musical slums.



I want to keep running with this into a jukebox war but, alas, THESIS and I’ve likely lost whatever cred I had with this post.

A Short History of Progress

Has anyone read Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress?

As I said in class, I was really conflicted when reading Oryx and Crake - basically because I expected Margaret Atwood to be fairly didactic (an unsympathetic assumption on my part), and instead found her to be detached and difficult to place on any particular moral or ethical compass.

I did find Crake's character fascinating, because of his single mindedness in finding an elegant solution to what he felt were the world's problems. I remember two big rants about the development of agriculture - one by Crake and one by the housemates of one of Jimmy's girlfriends at Martha Graham - which ended in a horrifying image of the world's population just crawling around in giant tubes, feeding upon randomly selected and processed members of their own 'community' through smaller tubes. Another example of simply existing, not living?

A year after Oryx and Crake was written, Ronald Wright also presented the development of agriculture as one of the causes of unchecked progress, and thinking about this I started entertaining the idea of what Ronald Wright and Crake would be like in conversation at a dinner party (except for the fact that Crake would always be very circumspect about what his actual plans were) - how would he (or Jared Diamond, or Alan Weisman) react to Crake's project and final solution.

I just noticed that Ronald Wright is talking tonight at the Seymour Theatre about his new book.

Gursky and Code 46

Andreas Gursky. Shanghai. 2000.

Chromogenic colour print. (280 x 200 cm)

The artworks of the artist Andreas Gursky have long been an interest of mine. Gursky's work, it has been written, "is a sophisticated art of unembellished observation. It is thanks to the artfulness of Gursky's fictions that we recognise his world as our own." I recall similar comments being made in first class of the semester.

But I decided to post this image simply because of the coincidence that Gursky exhibited this artwork only a few years prior to the release of Code 46. And, to let you know, if Gursky's work is or becomes an interest, that they are doing a retrospective of his work at the NGV (International) in Melbourne in November. 

Utopia Australis

This is essentially a plug for something I just read which sounds really, really cool. There's a panel taking place at a conference I'm speaking at (and am trying to convince people to come along to, despite the distance) which seems very relevant to this course of ours. The details are below, and it's taking place at www.csaa2008.curtin.edu.au which, as Bruce suggested last Friday (or was it Jenn?), will be very Mad Max. Academia: Beyond Thunderdome.

A question which comes to mind and which I don't think we canvas on the course is this: what about Australia utopianism? What utopian social dreams and or nightmares bear the little kangaroo in a triangle?

Looking at the city of Sydney from a distance -- I'm thinking from my home, far north -- and at night makes it look like an un/hyper-real non-place, floating on the horizon. For me this is social dreaming at its best: if, as Jameson claims, utopian visions include those of the past, and modify and correct them, should the same apply to our geography? Does this mean that, due to uneven development, Australia has what we might call temporal geography or, rather, geographical temporality? What are the utopian times and spaces in Australia, our island about a non-existent sea?

Woop Woop! The Black Stump (and its beyond)! The Gold Coast!

These vague questions brought to you by the letter A, Steve Muecke's No Road (Bitumen All the Way), my being sick of thesis, and the concept of teleology (a favorite, I hear).

Peace out, cool cats.

Imagining the Great Southern Land: Utopia, Dystopia and Science Fiction

Convenor: Professor Andrew Milner

The three panel members are co-investigators in a Discovery Project, Imagining the Great Southern Land: Utopia, Dystopia and Science Fiction, which has been funded by the ARC with $A 185,711 in 2007, $A 196,065 in 2008 and $A 178,317 in 2009. Their project is a critical-historical appraisal of utopianism in Australian literature, architecture and popular culture (especially science fiction). It examines the ways Australia has been used as the setting, and sometimes as the inspiration, for imaginings of a significantly better or worse society than that in which the authors lived. Its special academic significance is in its use of a wide range of disciplinary approaches to analyse the specificity of Australian utopian traditions. This kind of interdisciplinarity was precisely what was intended by the early founders of Cultural Studies (Hoggart, Thompson, Williams). The panel will address the findings of the research project, especially what they show about how Australian utopian traditions were shaped by, and in turn helped to shape, real political and social developments.

Contributors

Professor Ian Buchanan

Ian Buchanan is Professor of Critical Theory at Cardiff University. He is a former President of the CSAA and Partner Investigator for the Imagining the Great Southern Land project. His recent publications include Fredric Jameson: Live Theory (2006) and Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism (2007).

Professor Verity Burgmann

Verity Burgmann is Professor of Political Science at the University of Melbourne. She is Chief Investigator for the Imagining the Great Southern Land project. Her recent publications include Unions and the Environment (2002) and Power, Profit and Protest: Australian Social Movements and Globalisation (2003).

Professor Andrew Milner

Andrew Milner is Professor of Cultural Studies at Monash University. He is principal Chief Investigator for the Imagining the Great Southern Land project. His recent publications include Literature, Culture and Society (2005) and Imagining the Future: Utopia and Dystopia (2007).

Pacific Edge to borrow

Hi, apologies in advance for such a Zizek and Fukuyama-less post...
does anyone have a copy of Pacific Edge I could borrow? There doesn't seem to be one in the Fish or my local library, and with uni drawing to a close I am already excited about purchasing NON-uni related books for once, so am refusing to buy this one...

Speaking of Stealing Cars Being Bad...

That was such a delightful segue into something I mentioned to Dr. Marks that I would try and provide. This is just a taste of GTA:SA, the game under discussion, again in our last class.



This scene is more splodey than it is violent, but I shied away from any real depictions of violence.

I promise I will post things of more academical scholarly type interest at some point, but for anyone that's interested in interactive games as utopic and hasn't played any, here is a taste.

Incidentally, if anyone is also interested in following up on gamers and gaming, and doesn't have access to a console I am more than happy to hand over my PS2 and a couple of example games for a week or so, or for that matter bring it to class.

Also, for you enjoyment, a sex orgy from WoW (that is, World of Worldcraft) the most popular online game in the world. Too nerdy for even a committed geekgrrl like myself, this game has become synonymous with perverted online sex play, interspersed with BATTLING OF TEH FOE! You may know if from the South Park episode... 'how can you kill that which has no life..."



WoW is about as dorky gamer as it gets, but keep in mind it has a population of over ten million world wide, with continuous reports of being the cause of ended marriages, madness, and more than one case of gamers dying while playing from lack of food, etc. It's an extraordinary phenonomen, and population wise far outweighs the much better known Second Life, as discussed in this cnet article:

http://news.cnet.com/Counting-the-real-Second-Life-population/2100-1043_3-6146943.html

Next time I will post something about Zizek and teleology, I sware ;P

The future of water and fun with reality television...

I know that we are not reading Pacific Edge until the end of the semester, but given the great deal of time Kim Stanley Robinson spends in the novel discussing water rights and use and the surrounding environmental and civic issues - tomorrow night's lecture by Maude Barlow at the Seymour Theatre Centre may be interesting for those who can make it (and have the $$$). KSR's work always seems to be concerned with the practicalities of ecotopias and it looks like this talk would outline some of the issues we face quite well.

Also, I got stuck knitting on the couch with a cat on my lap late last night (yes, I am such a nanna!) and due to my prone cat-trapped state and lack of proximity to the remote... endured an entire episode of World's Wildest Police Videos.

Because I was knitting, I wasn't watching - but was paying attention to the voiceover - and thanks to Mark's excellent analysis of Border Control last week I was now attuned to the giant STICK that the mediated voiceover was handing me with each car chase etc. It is a good thing that I had that kind man telling me that stealing a car is BAD and that I shouldn't do it, because I will get caught and my family will have to watch me be chased down, arrested and incarcerated. It is reassuring to know that the police are out there to protect me and stop me from getting into trouble!

The End of History, part 2

We've said a few things about Fukuyama and the (his?) 'end of history' in class, as well as the future of liberal democracy in the 21st Century (i.e. the Laclau and Mouffe articles from the first week). I just wanted to share a more recent article by Fukuyama:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/liberal-democracy-will-still-prevail/2008/08/27/1219516560192.html

According to Fukuyama,

"A critical issue that will shape the next era in world politics is whether gains in economic productivity will keep up with global demand for such basic commodities as oil, food and water. If they do not, we will enter a much more zero-sum, Malthusian world in which one country's gain will be another country's loss. A peaceful, democratic global order will be much more difficult to achieve. Growth will depend more on raw power and accidents of geography than on good institutions. And rising global inflation suggests that we have already moved a good way towards such a world."

It's worth a read if you have the chance.

Freud and Advertising

Here's the URL for the first installment of the documentary on Freud and advertising I mentioned in class:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3LSyck0YTE

Conspiracy theory or revelation? You be the judge.

Directed Advertising

Here is the youtube skit I mentioned today in class, for your collective perusal. I think it makes the point both effectively and comically.

How quickly the future dates

As I mentioned in class, last year's class on Snow Crash was far less enthusiastic than yesterday's. Not that the novel didn't have its defenders way back then, but the dominant view was that what seemed wildly futuristic in the early 1990s was now irredeemably passe. There were also serious problems, some students thought last year, with the cyberpunk genre: perhaps it, too, was passe, or at least aesthetically deficient. Sci fi, or speculative fiction (that obvious attempt to 'legitimise' the genre) has often suffered from the sense that it it might be brimming with ideas it tended to be poorly written, mass market-oriented, nerdyguycentric, and that projections were ridiculously out of whack with what actually happened. All of these have validity, but it strikes me that, in terms of the last criticism, a response could be that speculation should be seen less as prophecy than as heuristic tool, something to get us thinking in new ways. What we do as a result, or where that thinking takes us, is less important than that we are engaging in the process. The future in many ways is in our heads--if it dates quickly, the fault lies in our own imaginative deficiencies. Here endeth the lesson.

Truman Show Followup

A couple of ideas perhaps worth following up in terms of the film and utopias generally:

Why is the 1950s the go-to decade for Americans when they think of utopian worlds? Certainly it wasn't that good if you were black, for example, or 'liberal'. Clearly consumerism had a part to play, that rapid and unprecedented expansion in the goods available to ordinary people. By comparison with the 1930s and the war years, this was a time of new and undreamed of prosperity for many. As we discussed with Seahaven itself, the world was static, or seemed static, safe and 'controlled'. Prosperity and security: are they all we need? Do the majority of people prefer that to freedom?

The idea of Christof as Creator connects to notions of utopia and its relation to religion. For some theorists, utopias essentially are post-Englightment entities constructed by humans. But does religion, or something like, infiltrate all utopian dreaming. I leave the definition of 'religion' vague on purpose.