I'm giving some thought to reprising my "horror"-themed Composition syllabus next semester, and I know for a fact that I'll be doing a guest lecture on Shaun of the Dead... somehow I can see myself drawing a version of this up on the board:
(From the Wikipedia article on the Uncanny Valley, apparently a phenomenon debated among roboticists and CGI dorks.)
It'll be a hell of a lot easier to teach the uncanny with this diagram than it will be to attempt to teach the Freud essay from which the term derives: although the Freud is interesting and historically important, it spends a lot of time developing a read of an E. T. A. Hoffmann story from 1816 ("Der Sandmann"), which is not exactly a cultural reference that most eighteen-year-olds have at the ready.
(Interestingly, neither the Uncanny Valley page nor the E. T. A. Hoffmann page in Wikipedia contains mention of Freud, and the Freud page doesn't contain mention of Freud's theory of the uncanny. A rare Wikipedia blind spot?)
Stylus Magazine just published a long interview that Scott McKeating did with Chris and I (as Number None), largely focusing on our album Urmerica, released around this time last year.
Those of you who are curious can follow the link, but I was pretty pleased with this particular exchange, in which I manage to semi-seriously use the word "aura":
Scott: Are you believers that a recorded sound holds elements of meaning beyond the actual sound? For example, would an abattoir field recording contain elements of absolute horror that weren’t audible?
JB: When we were on tour this March I asked Carlo Steegen (of Hardline Elephants) what was the last piece of music he heard that scared him. He told me about Bob Ostertag's recording of a boy digging a grave for his father, who has been killed by the El Salvadorian National Guard; digging sounds, crying, and a buzzing fly. This recording is available as a free download on Ostertag's site, by the way, if you want to freak yourself out. Even further along these lines we have John Duncan's notorious recording of himself having sex with a corpse. The contexts here are quite horrific—they generate negative energy that seems adequately described by the term 'aura.' As for how much of that "aura" can be transferred to the listener via the process of recording, that's anybody's guess. I think most people who engage in the practice of magic would say that, yes, recording technology is going to capture some of that aura and will in fact replicate it in playback. This can also be thought about using Bruno Latour's theory of the 'anthropological matrix,' which describes the way in which indigenous people tend to conceptualise their tools and their interpersonal relationships and their natural world as part of a hybridised, organically bound web. I think it's possible to talk about recording technology as something that works as a part of that web. In short, I believe that a sound has a power and a recorded sound in playback maintains that power."
As some of readers of this blog probably know, in my "spare time" I help to run an experimental record label, Rebis. We just released a new batch of stuff, so I thought I'd plug it here...
First up we have Autumn Engines, a collection of lo-fi netherworld drones from Hasan Gaylani and Ben Jones, aka the mysterious Jazzfinger. With help from Ben Wilkinson and Sarah Sullivan, these guys have been summoning up hypnotic smolder-patterns for a decade now, documented mostly on a stream of European CD-Rs, cassette- and vinyl-only releases. If you've been unable to track these things down, or turned off by the esoteric formats, Autumn Engines (their debut stateside CD release) should work as a great introduction to a band that Aquarius Records calls "totally breathtaking" and that Wire journalist David Keenan calls "one of the best free / avant / drone / primitive groups in the UK." $14 postpaid... and if you want a free taste, check out the tasty MP3 of their track "Dreams Cast Shadows," available on our sounds page.
In other exciting news, we're also taking this summer as an opportunity to launch our new Rebis imprint, Whitened Sepulchre, dedicated to reissuing and preserving key recordings of the New Electronic Sublime. We're kicking things off with a reissue of "...Ascends the Sky", an out-of-print gem from cosmic improv masters My Cat Is An Alien. Originally released in 2001 as CD-R, "...Ascends the Sky" presages the vast sonic nebulae now familiar to MCIAA fans, but those same fans may be surprised by the way the disc moves through more warm or tuneful regions, evoking surprising associations like Spiderland-era Slint, or Tim Buckley's Lorca or Starsailor albums. $14 postpaid.
And finally, a few copies of Lichfields arrived in the mail from Norway recently... Lichfields is a cassette-only Number None release out on Gold Soundz in a limited edition of 50. The Gold Soundz folks are already sold out, so we're willing to part with two or three out of our stash. The Volcanic Tongue folks (who also have a few copies) say Lichfields' three tracks are "beautifully static forms that morph into whatever kind of star-cluster you wanna dip into it." Sounds good to us. $10; and when they go, they're gone. Order through this page...
I'm new to this whole "embed a YouTube clip in your blog/journal" thing, but I thought that a clip of Johnny Cash on Sesame Street performing a self-parody called "Don't Take Your Ones to Town" was probably worth it.
Here's another screenshot of the Excel file that keeps track of the characters in the new novel. Chaps. 1-10, characters A-H showing:
I've also been fooling around (in Illustrator) with some ways of visualizing the character network. Here's one attempt at visualizing the whole thing:
And this is a different visualization of a smaller segment of the overall network:
Thanks to CJO for help on that last one.
I'm nearing the midpoint of the first draft, although I'm also mired in the weird abyss of self-doubt that seems to lurk at the center of every creative project: the place where I'm asking myself who, if anyone, will actually want to read this thing? Is it any good or am I just fucking around? Am I headed down a dead end? Is it worth it to forge on, or would I be better off pausing and taking the time to radically rework the earlier sections? The part of the week that wasn't spent helping people load things into boxes and storage containers was mostly spent reading the prose of writers who are way better than I am (John McPhee, Deborah Eisenberg) and trying, trying, trying not to completely succumb to despair.
10. Juliana Spahr blog-post that includes her list of "Writing of the Last 10 Years that is Not About Poetry but that Poets Should be Reading Anyway Because It Might Change What They Are Writing About"
I'm remaking my syllabus for this fall semester, throwing a lot of old stuff out. This makes room for some new stuff.
Usually I show a movie once or twice during the semester, a way to break up the monotony of lecturing and to give us a hefty chunk of material to talk about / pick apart. This year, it looks like the movie slot will line up neatly with the unit on persuasive strategies. So what I'm looking for, then, is a movie that is overtly designed to make an argument. This probably means a documentary, since, although all fictional films convey a certain ideology, they don't usually do so by making use of traditional modes of argumentation.
I've thought about some of the Michael Moore films, with the most didactic of the bunch probably being Fahrenheit 9/11. This would allow for some interesting discussion, such as talking about why Moore used some strategies that some commentators have called out (accurately, to my mind) as racist... it would also allow me to draw upon a thoughtful body of secondary literature about the film (I'm thinking particularly of this astute piece at N+1). But I'm wary of Fahrenheit 9/11 for two reasons.
One, its overall argument seems oddly diffuse. Exactly what is Fahrenheit 9/11 arguing? "Bush is bad" obviously is the broadest banner being flown here, but, beyond that, "the 2000 election was stolen" and "the Iraq war is/was a bad idea" seem to get more-or-less equal attention, with the James Bath/House of Saud stuff forming a third distinct axis. Taking each of these individually is a task that I could maybe walk my students through, but I'd ultimately prefer something that was more focused.
The second concern, of course, is that Michael Moore now serves so strongly as a representative of "the Left" and the film is so markedly anti-Bush that I'd worry that including his film in a syllabus would automatically alienate the more conservative students. I could frame it, of course, by saying that screening the film isn't an endorsement of Moore's argument, but merely a way to provide us with a handy example of polemic—if students thought that some of Moore's arguments were fallacious, manipulative, or unfair (some are), that would be useful to look at in a discussion of effective vs. ineffective rhetorical strategies. But perhaps this argument is glib: I'd look cautiously at an instructor who screened something like Islam: What the West Needs to Know and made the same argument.
Something like An Inconvenient Truth seems better: the argument is more coherent and singular, and although Gore is obviously a partisan figure (and the movie contains a partisan message), the argument is less easy to dismiss as mere "bashing." But I doubt it'll make it out on DVD in the next five months. (Aside: the alternate Inconvenient Truth trailer featuring Futurama's Bender is worth a viewing.)
A movie like Supersize Me is possibly even better, given that the topic is not one that will easily slot into a standard left/right dichotomy (for students). I haven't seen it, unfortunately, so I'm not sure how much the movie relies on tools of traditional argumentation. I'm also a little irked by the underlying fat-phobic message, which I'd just as soon avoid.
Any other suggestions for movies that are overtly didactic?
Sorry things have been so quiet over here in blogland lately. I've been writing a lot elsewhere, mostly in the form of steady progess on the Novel of Adequacy (currently titled Meanwhile, although that might change). I just wrapped up Chapter Nine, and the chart has been complicating pleasingly. I'm working on a few other visualizations of the book's network; expect them to appear here if I ever finish them.
In other news, still broke, which means I've been continuing to churn through summer reading. Who wants capsule reviews?
Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World by Jack Goldsmith & Tim Wu This book lucidly debunks the notion that the Internet inherently possesses territorial independence or extra-legality, mostly by clearly laying out various ways that governments can (and do) enact enforceable restrictions upon Internet content and behavior. Recommended.
Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness by Chris Kraus A curious book, collecting essays which straddle the line between art review and memoir of alienation (book club question: is Kraus' BDSM practice a cure or a symptom?). The institutional critique is sharp, the observations on LA are witty / bleak, and the overall grimness is leavened by Kraus' obvious yearning for meaningful human interconnection (and art that can express it). Bracing, enticing.
Demonology by Rick Moody A frustratingly uneven collection, containing one story which I'd consider to be a modern classic ('Demonology') and one story so torturously overwritten as to be unreadable ('Pan's Fair Throng'). Sometimes I found myself suppressing the feeling that these stories exist primarily as an excuse to showboat, that they're really more about Moody as a stylist than they are about the people they are ostensibly about. In this way the book ends up reminding me of the Coen Brothers movies: inventive, flashy, often entertaining, but with little sense of human urgency.
Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, by Steven Johnson Breezy book making what essentially amounts to a three-point argument: that video games engage mental skills such as problem-solving and pattern recognition, that a lot of contemporary TV indulges in fairly complex narrative strategies, and that online discourse rewards writing skills and in-depth thinking. I'm pretty sympathetic to these arguments, so the book's conclusions felt a bit foregone to me, although certain examples felt freshly cogent (the diagrams of character networks in a show like 24, for instance).
On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt This slim volume attempts to develop a theory which will position bullshit in the framework of moral philosophy, and along the way answers questions like: how does bullshit differ from the lie? A blast to read, although I disagree with almost every major conclusion Frankfurt makes (with the anti-postmodernism argument that closes the book being particularly unwelcome).
I might write up a more thorough critique of the Frankfurt at some point, we'll have to see. And, despite the fact that I finished the Moody book only under some (self-imposed) duress, my interest in literary fiction does seem to have re-awakened after the slumber of the last few years. Consequently, I'm looking for recommendations: use the comments link down there if you want to plug anything.
