Fairwell, Amporn’s

Despite our colds, last night we went Amporn’s Thai Restaurant on their last night of operation. Amporn’s opened in Elloree about 8 years ago, with Amporn and Earl Appleby at the helm. Amporn was from Thailand, he from small town South Carolina (Eutawville, I want to say, but maybe only because I like saying Eutawville; try it and you’ll see why). The wait staff included their pretty daughter (who was about college age when it opened, so must be in her thirties now), and a fellow who is the neighbor of a friend of mine, out Columbia road (over the years, I learned and forgot the names of these latter two). At least once a week, and sometimes at lunch, Amporn’s brother filled in as cook. This was a true family operation.
"Thai food" I asked when my wife spotted the restaurant on a ride through town.
"Thai food!"
"Thai food?"
"That was my first reaction, too."
Thai food is not exactly what South Carolina is known for. It’s not much like American Chinese food, which does pretty well locally, it’s nothing like fried chicken, which does pretty well everywhere, and it is certainly not barbecue. Barbecue is a South Carolina favorite. It splits the population, between mustard and tomato based sauces, and every restaurant, every stand, has a loyal tribe of customer, its own diaspora. When my pharmacist was going to Savannah a few years ago, he packed a few extra bottles of Duke’s Barbecue sauce from Elloree. I had barely noted the store’s existence until a Jiffy Lube mechanic was taking my information. "You must go to Duke’s, huh?" he said.
I said no, I usually came right here, to Jiffy Lube.
"No, Duke’s."
"Oh, Duke’s!"
"Barbecue!"
"Yeah! Duke’s Barbecue, right there on the corner. I pass it every day," I told him. Then I admitted I’d never gone there. Some people have the barbecue taste gene, and some of us don’t.
We were at Amporn’s the second week they were open for dinner. We had the place to ourselves. My wife ordered a Thai curry. "That there is pretty spicy," Earl warned her. "Some folks who come don't know that."
I don’t think anyone else came in that night. When I ordered wine, he asked if I wanted red or white, and I said white, he brought out the bottle of Almaden and poured me a glass. Before we left, I asked Earl how business was going. "We were packed last weekend," he assured me. That had been the week of the Elloree Trials, the once a year horse race held on a race track in Elloree, and probably the biggest weekend of the year for most Elloree businesses.
"I hope you catch on," I said.
"We plan to be patient. This is something my wife has always wanted to do."
"Well, we’ll talk it up," my wife assured him.
And she did. She dragged several generations of Trinidadian students to Amporn’s, on the theory (which proved itself accurate) that people who have learned to like one kind of Curry would learn to like another. She talked it up to friends and colleagues. Twice we met colleagues out there, and both times thought that this is something we should do more often, though the fact of it being twenty-two miles from where we work really made that more inconvenient than a smallish, friendly number like twenty-two at first suggests. One woman, a seasoned traveller, told her flatly, "Oh I don’t eat that kind of thing," which was exactly the reaction we were afraid more people would have.
Folks everywhere have their own preferences about stuff. It clarifies and simplifies things to say I like this but not that. Mustard barbecue, not tomato. Spaghetti but not Pasta. Fried rice, but not Thai food. Folks who live in small towns have also had less chance to challenge those preferences, at least beyond a narrow range of choices, and are very happy to have achieved the kind of clarity that affords, thank you very much. When I was in college, I tried to emulate this kind of clarity of thought, mostly because I am from a small town and had none of the wordly sophistication I saw in my peers. But it’s not me. I’m stuck with experimentation in my tastes and preferences: "I wonder what would happen if..."
Again, open experimentation is not exactly the local motto. In point of fact, the state motto is "Dum Spiro Spero," which is Latin, so who knows what it really means, but seems to have something to with a disgraced former Vice-President of the United States. This is clearly in need of an update. I've seen as a suggestion (written by me) "Deep fried, barbecue, or grits"; though it has never been brought to a vote, it would look snazzy on a state flag, and more to the point expresses (in English) a genuine local attitude, one which would seem to preclude the fiscal health of an Amporn's Thai Restaurant. As we headed back on a biweekly basis to work our way through their menu, and usually found an empty or almost empty restaurant, we would discuss among ourselves the possibility of a small section of American favorites: steak, chicken, spaghetti. It never happened.
Then two things happened. Amporns was voted as having the best deserts in Orangeburg County by the readership of Times and Democrat. This was well earned. She served homemade ice cream, so this was certainly a worthy choice, but I suspect there was co-ordinated campaign behind it. And a few months later, we went to Amporn’s on Valentines Day and were told, and got the last seats in the house.
Afterwards, it was hard to introduce people to Amporn’s. If they lived in Orangeburg, they probably knew it.
Last night, when were there, we were among the few people who didn’t sound like Orangeburg in their voices.
Is this important? It is for me. I’ll never be from Orangeburg, though in a year I’ll have lived in this county longer than I’ve lived anyplace else in my life. Likewise, I’ll never be from Elloree; though I’ve lived in the town much, much longer than I lived in any other town, I only recently have developed the insider’s view of the place that I had of the town I went to high school in. For, not the least attraction to Amporn’s was its essential inessentiality. It was Thai but it was South Carolina, and it was home. Before it opened, the only restaurant we could decided, on impulse, to eat at on a Wednesday or Saturday night, was in Santee. While a good, family restaurant, it is the type of steakhouse that you find all over America. Amporn’s was unique, it was 3.5 miles from our home, and it belonged in Elloree no more, and no less, than we did.

Kudos to...

Fantasy Magazine for a three part round table discussion on people of color in fantasy literature, the problems with the way it has usually been done (what are Orcs, anyway?), and some insights. Part 3 has a list of books you should read, but for the complete interview, start here.

More Who Speak

The most remarkable aspect of the Dr. Who series 3 is the introduction of Freema Agyeman as Martha Jones, and the underdevelopment of the same. People of color have a small enough position within the world of televised science fiction that it is worth asking what, if anything, the producers are or were hoping to do with the not-a-couple coupling of The Doctor with Martha.

True, for the past two years, they had also featured an inter-racial relationship between Rose Tyler and her boyfriend Mickey, but that relationship was never really explored, except as something that did NOT tie Rose down. Mickey was the doctor-NOT, parochial, tentative, and undereducated, a symbol of Rose’s working class roots. Towards the end of the second season, they seemed to feel bad for not having created a character for the actor to play, and so gave him a bit of an arc; at the point he became interesting, though, he disappeared, along with Rose.
When they introduced Martha at the beginning of season 3, they also introduced a series of possibilities, most of which have so far been unrealized. Martha is a doctor in training herself, so potentially the most substantial companion the Doctor has had in quite some time;–here was someone who might be able to do more than get kidnapped and rescued. Also, they introduced a family of strivers, so here was a chance to explore the world of black, upwardly mobile Britain.

Instead, though, the actress, or the writers, or directors fell in love with the actress’s smile. She has, I must say, a very pretty smile, but I kept waiting for scenes in which she could put her medical expertise to meaningful use. I waited in vain. Worse, the meatiest acting role she was given was as a (drumroll please) domestic servant to the Doctor’s amnesiac in the two parter where he has convinced himself he’s human.

I have a suspicion about all of this. I suspect the season was in large measure outlined, that scripts were in development, before they knew who the doctor’s companion was going to be. The other option, of course, is that the season flew by before they got to know her. It is also likely that the actress is simply not a very good actress, or is dealing with directors who don’t know how to direct. "Okay, big smile. Now look pouty. Pouty some more. Now smile. Beautiful."

At any rate, they tried to make up for this in the last two episodes, by bringing Martha back to London, introducing her family, and making her the domestic savior of her family. I wonder how aware they are of the melodramatic history of Black women as domestic saviors? Within the universe of typologies, it’s a fairly positive one, so I’ll only not my objection that the trauma her family is forced to endure of having been The Master’s domestic servants for a year is culturally loaded one, that the ending suggests that it brings them together, but that three seconds of thoughtful analysis would suggest the togetherness forged by this shared trauma of captivity would almost certainly fail when exposed to the strain of everyday life. (Who wants to live everyday with someone who reminds you of your darkest hour?)

("You do know," a voice from the back of the peanut gallery asks, "that this is a tv show?" Yes, but a thoughtful tv show, one which respects its viewers’ intelligence and which plays with and against convention, which is why I’m writing about it.)

A show like Dr. Who brings a black woman into the role "lead supporting actress" to make a very specific statement. Whatever else they may have intended, a central biracial partnership says, in the language of television, "cosmopolitan"; the character they created is cosmopolitan–educated, not narrowly defined by race or class, interested in the wider world. Cosmopolitan is good, kind of proto-post-human. It’s no excuse for shallow.

###

Martha Jones has her own MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/marthajonesuk. She had 3600 + friends when I checked it, including on Dalek. Wikipedia has a pretty good article laying out the issues that fans and producers have discussed regariding this character. Check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Jones

FOUND

This post created a bit on an uproar in FOUND magazine (www.foundmagazine.com) because it turns out that it has been previously posted on the web. So what. What I like about it is the weird way the elephant calls attention to the abstract nature of the exam question. What is a frictionless ramp? What is that 3 KG object doing hovering at the top of it? Even before the elephant, it represents the un self-aware kind of weirdness Lewis Carroll made fun of in his Alice books. I'd like to think the Oxford Don, Charles Dodgson would have found some merit in the logical doodlings; more likely, though, these are the kind of doodlings the undiscipline Oxford student Dodgson would have resorted to on an exam he was unprepared for.

All the Hooey Here in Whoville

Two weeks ago, I started watching the Dr. Who Series 3, which Netflix has been sending me in the mail; I finished watching last night. All the multi part episodes made it hard to swallow in small bites. The temptation to slurp it down in large gulps was too strong. So while the Christmas episode will be running on BBC any day, kicking off Series 4 for Americans able to stream it through the web, I’ll be Who-less for another year.

It was another good season.

Let’s look at the things that are key to the considerations of this blog (or at least were when I started it): cyborgs and the post-human. I wanted to hug the producers with almost every episode for at least taking these considerations seriously. Let me repeat my first principles: that cyborgism speaks to human relatedness, that cyborgism is proximate and contingent, that it is symbol of strength, and that it stands in contrast to the "back to Eden" myth of essential humanism. On all of these issues, the TV show took the safe, easy route of preferring essentialised humanism to Cyborg relatedness. (Even the Doctor’s relation to the TARDIS is occassionally presented as questionable, though that was more true in Series 1 when it made Billie Piper a Goddess for a brief period).

Throughout the run of Dr. Who, there’s been a recurring theme in the use of the Daleks wherein the Daleks represent Superego and Dr. Who – somewhat uncomfortably– is the spokesguy for the Id. Part of this seems to be a basic conundrum of the problems of creating bad guys. You can imagine the conversation around the writer’s table:

"I don’t get it. Why do these metal R2D2 thingies want to exterminate humankind?"
"Um–because humans are weak?"

Doesn’t make sense unless the metal thingies are complete anal retentive freaks. That makes the Doctor kind of a world hopping inter-species head shrink trying to free the libido. "Tell me again how you feel about your smelting pot."

Regardless of whether it makes sense, the newer series have played with the idea of the Doctor as being whipped through the world by an out of control Id that he himself barely understands. Consider the maniacal grin he flashes whenever he offers his female a sidekick a trip to the wildside of time. In the Tom Baker days (as I remember it) he was kind of intergalactic fix-it man. That still seems to be how he sees himself, but most of the things he fixes turn out to have been caused by him careening through time like an out of control Ariel.

I'm down with that; self-delusion among the over educated is something I have, eh, witnessed from time to time.

The two episodes which did the most with the "Doctor" persona were the "family of blood" episodes (two parts) which show him having trapped himself in the early 20th century without his memory, to avoid a family which is chasing him. As the human version of the Doctor realizes who he really is, he starts to weep, asking "what kind of man is this Doctor?" Just barely glimpsed is a very humanist interrogation of the doctor as someone who has repressed his own Id (the human professor has fallen in love) and therefore is whipped erratically by the principle of the return of the repressed.

Be that as it may, he plot forces him to become his true self: from the terms of his alter ego, this is a tragedy (because he has lost touch with human scaled human values, such as the possibility of a stable loving relationship). From the terms of the series, it is comedy because OUR doctor, the Peter Pan who won’t grow up even though he is hundreds of years old, has been restored.
This IS a post human identity: contingent, proximate (which is to say, in no way an ideal version of the human self).

What the family does, though, the Master undoes.

The last three episodes, in which the Doctor catches up with the Master where he has been exiled as the Professor at the end of time were far and away the best episodes of the third series. Let’s take it from the top: The "Professor" the Doctor first meets (his memory has been erased through the same mechanism the Doctor used to temporarily erase his own) is a LOT like the Doctor of the 60's and 70's: an older, futzy professor with a bright, adoring companion (of a very foreign species).

In earlier decades, the "Master" was indicated by a dark goatee. I like the fact that when he regenerates himself he turns into...Tony Blair (or an actor playing a character designed to resemble Tony Blair). That is to say, he turns into a politician who has been constructed by an evil genius to be appear to be all things to all people. Good! He turns the Doctor into an old man; painful, but good.

Then, at the end of a year, with Martha (who escaped a year earlier) watching on the telly, he turns the Doctor into Yoda.

I wish I were making that up.

Then it turns out that Martha Jones has been spending a year walking the earth to get the whole human race to pray to or for the Doctor at the same precise moment–which they do–which (Holy Mother...) regenerates him.

Can you say Deus Ex Machina? "Day-uus–ecks mack–un–ah"

Still, it’s sci-fi, we can allow for Deus like machinations from time to time. And I mean, just because he gets all glowy doesn’t mean he’s "literally" (as my students might say) a figure of Christ.

Of course, when he wrestles foe to the ground and says "I forgive you" it sort of does.
No wonder the old sot doesn’t regenerate himself when his blonde squeeze shoots him.

Even so, even if it’s the weakest part, that’s not the most interesting thing about this episode. No, the most interesting thing is the appearance the nasty little metal spheres the Master has created. There are something like 3 billion of these he drops on the earth, and they go beyond the usual kind of "heartless metal evil" devices. These devices are snide, occasionally stupid, and downright offensive. Why? Because each one them contains the remains of a human rescued from the end of time.

Again, it’s the show’s absolute humanist perspective which cannot allow, not even for a second, that human consciousness could adapt to this new way of being which is grotesque on the face of it? Why not? Because it’s grotesque on the face of it! It’s like a person being confined to a wheelchair, or only being able to communicate with his eyelids: just plain gross, and anyone who would live that way must be evil.

It’s interesting exactly because the character at the center is himself cyborgian, defined by his relationship to his living TARDIS, dependent for emotional support on intense relationships with beings from another species.

Even though I don’t like the direction they are thinking, I DO like the fact that show is thinking.

With Apologies to NPR...

This I Believe.

I believe in proportion, one scoop of coffee to two cups of water,
And that coffee is better at waking you up than alcohol is at relaxing you,
And that either can rob you of a good night's sleep.

I believe in turning problems over to God,
Even though I doubt he exists, and
That He will help me, although
He has the same doubts about me.

I believe that running uphill is good training for running uphill,
And something very similar about running hard on quarter mile tracks.

You can probably guess what I believe about lifting heavy objects in the gym.

I believe that people who say they believe that money can't buy happiness
Should subject that belief to an honest test;
Send me your money and let me try, while your try without it;
Let's see who has more success.

I am willing to set up a special research account for this purpose.

I believe that this is a good time to buy telecom stocks, but I no longer believe
That Cisco will make me rich.

(Back to the money/happiness thing: For the right sum,
I am even willing to write the results up
For submission to a peer reviewed journal, which, believe me,
Is a lot of work.)

I believe that true love is worth the wait, unless you happen to be waiting,
In which case the temptation to lie to yourself is irresistable;
Then heaven help you both.

I believe in the Now, in Life on Life's Terms, in Just for Today
Though last week, when I wasn't sleeping well (too much caffeine, I think)
These beliefs were impossible.

I believe that for a list poem to be of any value, it has to go on a little bit too long.

I believe that I may not know what my most important beliefs are until I stop believing them,
After which I'll be too despondent, enlightened, or dead to accept that they matter.

But I believe in belief: the clear ice
Of my teenaged certitude that doubt
Was the answer, the only answer to the industrial cement walls
Of God, Religion, War;
That this shifting iceberg would be my fundament
For questioning everything and
Eventually, indeed, itself.

House of Dreams

This is a construction site I pass every day on my way into work (that's the front of my car at the bottom of the image). The man has been working on it for more than a year. For a while it was just a foundation. Than a bare frame. Then he added the roof. For the past week, I've had a few rough lines from a poem in my head as I pass. The last line was an accident. Precious, but I'm keeping it.

House of Dreams

Scratching dreams into the into the land is vexatious.

The music of saws, the percussion of thoom against thwang,

Such a paltry symphony against the motor roar,

The deeper room, room, room that delights in undermining

These matchstick bulwarks.

We've seen what happens to homes around here.
The farm house between the pecan trees
Replaced by a triple wide.
The white cottage beneath the huge old willow,
(Out near where Bonnie lives)
Left unpainted for one year too many, bulldozed under the next,
The grave markers behind left standing,
A choir without a church.

And that house behind the kudzu with the old man still in it--
Don't get me started on that.

Sit a moment, Marlboro in hand,
Straw hat against the sun; makeThe workman's scowl, consider
The plum line, the toothless smile of
The empty facade, the deep furrows, still raw
Though dug into the earth a decade earlier.
Then cut a board, nail a shingle, carry a brick.

I, too, have dreams I can't fulfill or abandon,
That demand the intimate service of hand crafting,
And though you hide it, I see,
As you pack up early, your joy
Knowing it still needs a little more work.

Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and the Post-Human

A recent article in Newsday by Wallace Matthews is typical of how the press is treating Barry Bonds. "Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, forever linked by a single word. Cheater."

This despite the fact that they are accused of using steroids were steroids were not banned by baseball. Ergo, though they may be liars, they were not cheaters. Why has there been such a rush to condemn?

Had he said "Bonehead," I might have agreed with him, since neither man has a reputation for being congenial.

I want to try for some perspective here. First, I take it as a fact of history that both men, and most of the great athletes of their times, used steroids. I also think it is pretty clear that if neither man had ever used them, they would have still been among the greatest players in the game, since they were both established greats at the time that they are accused of using steroids. What we have are athletes facing the downward tail of their peak years, trying to extend their peak productivity.

Is not that what a professional athlete is supposed to do? But never mind that, that's not really what I'm trying to get at. Let me circle around and come back...

When Tommy John, the pitcher for whom a certain kind of reconstructive surgery is now named, was facing the end of his career, he used to joke, "My arm is only three (five, seven) years old." My point is that he had access to developments in modern medicine, and took full use of them to extend his career. It is not seen as the same thing, because he faced coming back from an injury; but most accounts have it that Bonds (and Andy Petite) both used performance enhancers as a way of getting back after an injury. Where then the meaningful difference?

But I'm still not getting where I want to go. I need to dig back further. Much further.

The history of Baseball is the history of American Modernism. Some accounts have it beginning during the civil war (the war that introduced gas warfare and war dead photos), but it achieves its popularity in the 1880's. Despite the pastoral imagery that is always associated with it ("ducks on a pond" "elysian fields," etc.) it is eminently an urban game--witness the homes of the original franchises (Boston, Chicago, Cincinatti, New York, etc). My point is that from the start, it is about both urban growth and the pastoral, the way parks in general are. Let me push this a little further: baseball is game about ambivalence towards the future and manufactured dreams of the past.

What do I mean? This: When Babe Ruth revolutionized the game, he was widely chided. A Newspaper editorialized that by swinging for home runs, he would sacrifice his batting average. Ty Cobb, who well into the Ruth era was considered the best player in baseball, for two days in a row made a conscious effort to his for home runs--successfully--then went back to his high avwerage style, to prove that he could hit for power, but chose not to.

Ring Lardner, who wrote what some consider the best baseball novel every, "You know me, Al," thought that Ruth had ruined baseball, and that he, Lardner, had wasted his talents writing about it.

Of course, we don't remember the Ruth era today through the eyes of Lardner or Cobb. We remember one of the great men of baseball, who defined an era. The old archetypes that were defining to these men have lost meaning to us. Who wouldn't prefer a game with more give and take between offence and pitching?

To make a similar point: We hold onto the mythology of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier at the risk of forgetting that the color barrier he broke was only about 40 years old when he broke it. It was a creation of the twentieth century. Modernity didn't break down the barrier; it erected it.

Now we're finally getting close to my point. When Keith Hernandez, Willie Wilson, and a dozen others were punished for using cocaine back some 20 years ago, sports writers preached the high moral road. "I hope Hernandez can live with himself the next time some kid goes flying out the window on speed," Dick Young of the NY Daily News wrote.

Why? Did Dick Young think Keith Heranandez sold drugs to teenagers? Or that teenagers did not do drugs before Keith Hernandez?

Here then is my point: Baseball has always constructed for itself a humanism, BASED ON LIES, DISTORTIONS, AND FABRICATIONS, which it then PRETENDS to accept as the "truth." Even though, for the most part, everyone knows it is a fabrication.

Roger Maris supposedly had an asterisk next to his single season record because he played in something like four more games than Ruth when he set his record. Now fans (read: fatuous sports writers) supposedly want an asterisk next to Bonds' single season and all time record.

To imply that BUT for the introduction of steroids the game would have stayed the same from 61 to 2001? That training regimens, ball parks, strategy, culture changed nothing meaningful?

If you inject steroids into someone and supplement that with correct training, you will make him (usally him) stronger than his would otherwise be. That has huge advantages to a baseball player, and some disadvantages which can become huge if it leads to a career threatening injury (as it often has). So what. So does training a ball player to hit for power (instead of average), and to work the count (instead of swinging away), the big changes in baseball culture that Bonds took full advantage of before he ever took steroids.

Humanism is a trope which defines itself through exclusion; and exclusion specifically of the post human (power, color, drugs, in sequence, in baseball).

What'd I say?

The so-called bailout of those struggling--or about to struggle--with steep increases in their mortgage payments announced by the Bush administration today--I'd post a link here, but why bother?--seems to me to follow the pattern I outlined in my last post. Save the predators from gorging on their prey.

Let me look at it another way.

They are dealing with it as a public health problem in the food supply. If the swine flu (remember the swine flu scare of the 70's?) breaks out among the swine in Akron, Ohio, well, the sooner Akron swine are slaughtered, the better; we're not going to try to save them. But if the swine in Columbus are perfectly healthy, we need to protect those swine for later consumption. And there's no point in worrying about the swine in Maine, who have sensible 30 year notes. (Remember the punch line to the old joke: "A pig that good you eat one leg at a time." )

The Bush administration is trying to innoculate the swine in Harrisburg and Erie and Columbus to protect the midwest vampires from the swine flu.

Only it won't work. The midwest vampire capitalists are going to see those sick little piggies in Akron and think, they can't run fast, why shouldn't I eat them? --Because that's how capital thinks. The flu will spread--has spread--throughout the real estate market, and they'll find themselves unable to eat--or even feed--many of the healthy swine.

To drop the metaphor, I'm implying that a tightening of credit and a glut of subprime repossessed homes on the market will spoil the market for good homes.

This will lead to homeowners whose credit could be salvaged losing their homes.

We've seen these cycles before, in the 80's, and less dramatically in the 90's. It'll take years for the market to fully recover. It will take The Motley Fool pointing out that over a 30 year period, the SP 500 outperforms real estate by 120% (or some crap like that), and Real Estate becoming the dirty word that "tech stock" was in 2002. And then the recovery will only have begun.

As Marvin the Robot might have said, I'm depressed just talking about it.

Life, don't talk to me about life.

"Capital is dead labour, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour"

This quote is famously from Karl Marx, Capital, Vol I, part iii, Chapt 10. Let me quote a bit more:

"Capital is dead labour, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him. If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist The capitalist then takes his stand on the law of the exchange of commodities. He, like all other buyers, seeks to get the greatest possible benefit out of the use-value of his commodity. Suddenly the voice of the labourer, which had been stifled in the storm and stress of the process of production, rises"

I was thinking about this in regard to the mortgage crisis. Mortgage foreclosures were up again October, 2007, doubling from 2006, up a bit from September, down a smidge from August 2007, but on pace to produce economic devastation in hundreds of thousands of lives (see http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22011114/). What I find interesting is the way Marx elides smoothly from "capital" to "capitalist," a shift which no doubt made complete sense at the time. Here's what Marx could have completey anticipated: our governments response to this crisis has been to try to find ways of saving of saving the predators from the prey.

I remember years ago an ecologist at UC Santa Cruz claiming that it was a myth that predators control prey; it is much more true that a population of prey control the growth of predators. Predators, living high on the food chain, occupy an ecologically fragile niche. If something happens to the rabbits the fox feeds on--or to the vegies the rabbits feed on--the foxes die off because the rabbits become fewer and harder to find. The rabbits will recover; the foxes may not.

I remember thinking, sure, fine, except those rabbits who get starved and eaten.

This seems to be the creed behind the Federal Government's response to this problem: we need to protect the banks from being poisoned by the bad blood they've been feeding on. The poor will always be with us; protect those ecologically sensitive vampire capitalists!

The fed is cutting rates. The treasury wants to give the holder's of ARM's the option to not reset those rates. Why not let them continue to foreclose on the poor bastards? Because banks and other financial institutions are getting stuck with houses they can't sell.

Lowering interest rates eases up credit. What does this lead to? Inflation. In essence, a falling dollar and higher interest rates are a hidden tax paid by everyone (which will be paid in higher gasoline prices, for a starter; we know what that leads to) to protect bankers from bad loans.

Is another approach possible? Sure! Federally insured low interest loans made directly to homeowners. Forget about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the accounting challenged federally mandated corporations which buy and sell these loans. They got us into this mess, and they can deal with their own problems. They people we need to help first are homeowners.

Fred Saberhagen did it first.

Fred Saberhagen did it first.
Before Anne Rice and Interview with a Vampire, long before Elizabeth Koskova’s The Historian, there was Fred Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape. Published in 1975 (A year before Rice’s novel) Saberhagen, who died this past summer, was among the first in the wave of writers chronicling (in book after book after book) good guy vampires.
I’m sure it was an original idea when he thought of it.

I finally read it recently. It could be a lot worse.

Clearly Saberhagen is having fun with Stoker’s writing. When all is said and done, Stoker is a mediocre writer, and his plot has holes the size of Romania in it, which Saberhagen exploits. The chief plot hole is his ignorance of blood type. When Van Helsing performs blood transfusions, he does so completely ignoring blood typology, despite the fact that this was emerging medical knowledge in the late 19th century that the character would have been abreast of. Saberhagen’s conclusion? Van Helsing was a superstitious dolt who killed Lucy through his ignorance, while Dracula was trying to save her. His transformation of her into the “bloofer lady” was a last ditch effort to save her life.

Another plot hole in the original: If it has taken centuries for Dracula to figure out how to get from Transylvania to England, how much of a threat could he really be?

And after all the care Van Helsing takes to make sure that Lucy’s dead body remains dead, how is it that Dracula is dispatched with a Bowie knife? Obviously, he was faking.

The framing device of the novel is that Dracula is offering this revision to the great-great grandson of Jonathon and Mina. At times, though, he apparently reads directly from well known account, to offer his version of events. It’s a strange effect. Basically, we’re reading one novel which is critically commenting on another. I find that kind of thing fun, novelist as critic, but, well, Saberhagen was no John Gardner. It ends with an opening for a sequel (Mina is about to be reborn as the undead), and I gather Mr. Saberhagen wrote many more.

As a revisionist work, it reflects the revisionist spirit of the mid 1970’s, the era of the Eagles, Disco, and EST—a bloodless era, if you will, in popular culture. Interesting that the revision avoids any thoughtful examination of the racial paradigm that Dracula represents (i.e., the ancient aristocracy coming back to feed off the blood of the Bourgeoisie .


More on Bionic Woman

I’m starting to like Michelle Ryan. The wittiest thing they have done with her is to allow her
(in episode 5) to “affect” an accent similar to the actress’s natural speaking voice. The problem is that it is unlikely that the character Jaime Sommers would be able to do this, and now her affected American accent sounds flat by comparison.
I think the director wanted to make a statement that it’s Michelle Ryan’s series, not Katie Sackhoff’s.

I gather that three more episodes are completed. Then, who knows? It’s not a ratings winner, and with the writer’s strike begun, there may be long layover. I doubt NBC will let it die just yet.

Buffie the Bionic Bartending Brunette

Okay, my title is clearly unfair, implying as it does the new “Bionic Woman” is tapping into the creativity of Joss Wheedon in a slightly dishonorable fashion. After all, Buffy is a blonde, superpowered young woman with a bratty teenage sister and an evil brunette counterpart [Faith, who of course was merely misunderstood]. The "Bionic Woman" is a brunette superpowered young young woman with a bratty teenage sister and blonde evil counterpart. How could anyone mistake the two?

And when the hell is Spike going to show up and and eat that annoying sister?

I originally titled this simply "Buffie the Bionic Bartender," but anyone can see at a glance that the Jaime Sommers who walks through the first episode of the reimagined "Bionic Woman" is no bartender. No, she's a substitute teacher who is also a subsitute bartender. It's been years since I spent much time in a bar, so maybe things have changed, but I can't ever remember a bartender who didn't affect a certain detached breeziness or coziness or, at least, personality. None of that is evident in this Jamie Sommers. She tends bar with all the realism a substitute host on Saturday Night Live-- trying to sell a skit she didn't "get" to begin with.

I was looking forward to this series. I still am.







Visually, it's gorgeous. The dark sets are well designed and well lit. The production crew must have watched “Blade Runner” like a zillion times, and they paid attention. That's something.



Against all odds, the shadowy military organization that has rebuilt Jamie Sommers is played with respect. These producers have obviously learned the lessons of "Stargate" and "Battlestar: Galactica," that most military folks who have not sold their souls to a guy named "Bush" are intelligent and capable, and to portray them as unintuituive, two dimensional cartoonish buffoons is an insult to buffoons everywhere--not to mention to the viewers.








And then there's that evil blonde who stole the show. I knew Katie Sackhoff could act--her version of "Starbuck" is clearly one of the five or six best characters on Battlestar: Galactica--but damn, girl, where did you get them chops? And why you been hiding them?

It's very clear that Sackhoff knows what she's about. She's the original Bionic Woman, i.e., she's Lindsay Wagner, the REAL Jaime Sommers, and she's PISSED to find that she's the victim of bionic identity theft. Happily, the title of the series, "Bionic Woman," is ambiguous enough that sometime in Februay '08, the producers can kill off the putative lead played by Michelle Ryan [I already have a name for that episode: "Intel Inside"].
After that, the series can become the story of a bionic lesbian who cruises karaoke clubs and sings the HELL out of Melissa Etheridge songs. Damn, there's a show I'd like to see!



SPEAKING OF RIPPING OFF JOSS WHEEDON: I also watched the program called something like "Angel sans Humor" (aka "Moonlight"). Gee, where did they get the idea of using an interview with a vampire as a framing device? And that sleep inducing voice over--how'd they come up with that? The ingenuity of these hollywood types never ceases to amaze me.

I would like this show to succeed. I don't see why it should. There's a fundamental lack of commitment where it's soul ought to be.

What the Joss Wheedon understands, and the producers of Battlestar Galactica, and the Bionic Woman understand is that shows like this have to make a commitment to their viewers. Not to ratings at all cost (which they are not going to get) but to fans. The show has to practically scream, We'll be for you if you'll be for us, regardless of who else watches. Angel, Buffy, Battlestar, and even this first episode of Bionic Woman seem to have that kind of commitment to the ideal of commitment. I don't see any hint of that in acting, the writing, or the standard tv action flick direction on Moonlight.

There is one nice twist. Sophia Myles, who apparently I should recognize but don't from Underworld, plays a reporter who our vampire hero saved as a young child and has been looking after since. I like where this could go. The conflicts that someone he sees as a daughter is going to be looking at him as (presumably) an attractive man. If they don't shrink from this or sensationalize it, they have opened a possibility of real thought. Would an immortal feel feel it was wrong to have sex with a woman he has mentored since she was a child? Why or why not?

Let's see.

Is the “Post” in “Posthuman” the Same “Post” as the “Post” in “Postmodern,” “Post-colonial,” “Post-feminist,” or even “Post-gender”?

Yes, yes, yes, and I don’t know, but probably.

My title is a take on an Anthony Appiah essay which asks, "Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial” (Critical Inquiry Winter 1991). His answer is, in a word, no. “Postmodernism” assumes modernity with all its problems (i.e., the belief in the uniqueness of the present day, not to mention rampant commodification of every damn thing), and wants to get over it, or at least get over worrying about it. The “Post-colonial” condition is one of trying to catch up to the modern. The post-colonial world can’t really afford the luxury of simply dumping every thing that colonialization brought (western languages, western parliaments, western hospitals, western schools) and starting over. On the other hand, it can’t simply accept it all.

The photo of a statue, above, right of a "Man on a Bicycle" is one Appiah cites, because it was chosen by James Baldwin for an exhibition, as embodying the disparate genealogoy of the post-colonial world.

Think of Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain,” which was a urinal entered into an exhibit (under the pseudonym “R. Mutt”; photo above, left). The timing is not quite right (1917), but the spirit is: this is the type of gesture that would become common among the post-moderns. Contrast that with the need for potable water and sanitary discharge throughout much of the “post colonial” world, and you get a sense of the gulf which separates these movements.

But the “post-“ is becoming increasingly more similar.

Increasingly, what we mean when we use this prefix is that we’re going to take what we want from the term we are prefixing, and leave the rest. Cultural context be damned. The post-feminist (supposedly) is tired of fighting for women’s rights, and wants to assume them, and then do whatever the hell he or she wants. Think of Terry MacMillan’s characters. They are not necessarily happy with their lot in life, but they are more interested in playing the deck of cards dealt them than in changing the world (note: many of her characters have a meaningful social engagement, but it is usually first and foremost another social outlet for them).

Think of Maureen Dowd salivating over George W. Bush. If you have the stomach…

I’ve never figured out what post-gender means. I think it refers to the idea that gender still defines us, we still think in terms of gender, even though we know that humans can’t really be defined that way.

The post humanist isn’t free to denounce all of the values of humanism (education, self-care, etc.) but must try to extricate these things from the racist, classist, sexist ideologies that underpinned them. We understand that because the genetics which gave life to an idea are imperfect, yet the idea (education, etc.) can take on a life of its own, independent of its parentage.

Reading Patricia J. Williams while Listening to Rabkin on Wells

Every now and then, the habit I have of engaging two or more books at once pays off. For the last few weeks, I've been reading Open House by Patricia J. Williams, and listening to a series of lectures on science fiction from the Teaching Company. I know Patricia Williams mainly through her articles in The Nation which, frankly, have not really said anything new to me in over a year. It is not even that I disagree with her, though of course sometimes I do; it is that her columns don't surprise me. Happily, this book, which is sort of a miscellany of family, personal, African American, and political history is full of surprises.

The best surprise is that Williams has not lost the ability to write strikingly good prose. Reading it, one gets the sense of that all of the startling metaphors and juxtapositions which the constraints of a bi weekly column squeeze out of her newsprint fair have found rich soil and taken root; at one point she even critiques one of her colleague’s reversion to a rationalistic legalese in a broad discussion of, among other things, extinction. Her descriptions of the food, night skies, cement stoops, mudpies, and fireflies of her Boston childhood enrich the writing, not by weaving a flannel shawl of nostalgia over the past, but by forcing the counterpoints to emerge between the past and the Manhattan concrete life she and her son inhabit.

She has a lot to say about the prospects for improving the human species. Towards the end, she declares that she doesn’t want to be sound like a luddite, but the history of biological “progress” –eugenics, Tuskegee experiments, etc.--has not been terribly good for black folks over the years. But that’s not what I particularly want to reference here.

One of her essays deal with the malleability of racial definition. Let me quote from a version of it she has posted on the web (http://ichrp.org/paper_files/112_w_06.pdf.)

In courts throughout the South, the borderline statuses of the “enslaved white” and the “passing black” were methodically examined, defined and reduced to stereotypes that endure to this day. Putatively enslaved whites came mostly from the ranks of “poor whites,”whom the common law generally disparaged as those with coarse features and bad manners; in contrast, “passing” blacks were those with “fine” features and deceptively good manners.



In the 1835 South Carolina case of State v. Cantey, the judge observed that, despite an ambiguous appearance, “it may be well and proper, that a man of worth, honesty, industry and respectability, should have the rank of a white man, while a vagabond of the same degree of blood should be confined to the inferior caste.” And in an 1845 trial litigating the whiteness of one Sally Miller, a Louisiana judge cited Miller’s “moral power and weight, and influence. An influence, which I contend no one but a white woman could possibly raise up and control — an influence as inconsistent with the nature of an African, as it would be with the nature of a Yahoo.”

I encountered these remarkable legal opinions equating whiteness with manners and moral rectitude a day after hearing a speaker talking about the crisis in black, male education. Young black men have no role models. They think being a man is defined by how many women they’ve been with, that being a father means inseminating a woman, not raising a child. We need to teach them to hitch their pants up and take their hats off.

Of course I am summarizing, somewhat unfairly, a speaker who had more to say, and has an impressive record of accomplishment, but what I am NOT being unfair about is his linking of middle class manners (pants, hat) with morality. Young people and the very privileged (think Jenna and George W.) are often shielded from the fact that their actions have moral consequences for which they are responsible, and be painfully slow to learn that lesson. But taking your hat off in class is not even the first step in learning that process.

A day or two later, I listened to a lecture on H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, from “Masterpieces of the Imaginative Mind” by Eric Rabkin. The novel, you will recall, is about animals Dr. Moreau has changed into something like humans through his own biotechnology. Rabkin finds in the “Sayers of the Law” chapter, in which the transformed animals learn to act like men, an analogue for British colonial brainwashing of colonial subjects.

Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to eat Fish or Flesh; that is The Law. Are we not Men?
Not to claw the Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?

My point is that “manhood” – as in the case of the speaker I referred to earlier – is being defined by adherence to an arbitrary code of conduct, just as “whiteness” was in the cases Williams referred to.

I am not going to deny that there is economic value in learning and conforming to prevailing social mores just because they happen to be the prevailing and social mores. But I am going to deny that any substantial change for the better will ever come of that.

Cyborgs are "Proximate and Contingent." Pass it on.

Let me explain what I mean when I say that cyborg relations are always proximate and contingent.

First let me give some examples of cyborgian relations:

An athlete on steroids.
An athlete on blood pressure meds.
An accident
survivor with an artificial leg.
A wheelchair bound news reporter.
A commuter.
The civil rights coalition of the early 60’s.

Numbers 3 and 4 are perhaps the most obvious, and 1 and 2 are a logical extension, since they merely entail a different form of advanced technology. Let me focus on the last two.

The civil rights coalition of the early 60’s was an odd conflagration of old lefties from the 30’s (Pete Seeger’s friends), MLK and his followers, the NAACP and their members, black radicals and their followers, Jews, and middle-class white kids who believed in the idealism of the GI generation, i.e., their parents. The poster children for this has always been Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, three young civil rights workers, two Jewish, one Black, who were murdered in 1964. The story of discrimination waged against Jews is very different from that waged against Blacks, but there existed a clear commonality of interest in opposing all forms of discrimination.

What happened to this coalition? The Arab/Isreali war of 1967, for one. As a group, Ameican Jews backed Isreal in great numbers. African Americans—owing in part to the Nation of Islam movement, but not only—were much more likely to see Isreal as an aggressive, imperialistic force.

I don’t know if this schism could have been avoided. I do know that the coalition was proximate and contingent, not forged around a “naturalized” identity.

By contrast, when black women, in the seventies and eighties, often began to see that their interests didn’t always rest in supporting the political/social/economic interests of black men or white women, they were criticized, ostracized (and critical OF) those groups, precisely because they weren’t backing their “natural” allies. No identity has been more technologically created than that of “Black American,” to the extent that it is often considered as a “natural” identity.

Most commuter’s probably don’t see themselves as cyborgs. I do.

This year, 2007, we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, that book which celebrated the power of the automobile, by featuring a new American archetype, the cyborgian centaur--half man, half car. “See the USA in your Chevrolet,” the post WWII generation was told, and we did!-- Or they did, I wasn't there. You want to be in Denver instead of NYC? In four days you’re there. Mexico City? No problem. San Francisco? Three more days.

“It’s not just your car, it’s your freedom,” my generation was told, and not without honesty. Thanks to my car, I live in a small, rural area surrounded by farms, though my work has nothing to do with farming. I have almost 1.5 acres, and next to me is a tiny, tiny pond that attracts all kinds of pleasant wildlife.

Thanks to our cars, millions of Americans live miles from their work, to a notable increase in their individual quality of life. This is a fulfillment of the man/technology promise. And the blowback has been incalculable.

 Every ten years, our roads kill a population roughly that of Miami, Florida, or Oakland, CA.
 The infrastructure of our cities has been neglected.
 Public transportation is woefully neglected.
 The infrastructure of our country is decaying. It is simply too large to maintain; witness the bridge collapse in Minnesota. Bridges collapse every week.
 We are a nation addicted to gas and oil.
 Are foreign policy adventures as a nation have been driven by the need to secure access to oil.

I haven’t mentioned carbon emissions, the loss of farmland that has been paved over, or the steady decline of songbirds to feral cats who follow humans to the country, but you get my point, or. It is not population growth that has presented these problems. It is the lack of population density, and lack of planning. Without cheap abundant automobiles, some of these problems never raise to the level of problem (though obviously others would rise up).

For the majority of Americans, owning a car is preferable to not owning one. Progress is measurable! For a society as a whole, though, some lesser reliance on the personal automobile would have clear advantages.


***
One of the sillier ideas on the “quiz” that I responded to in my last post was the idea of transferring human consciousness into a machine.

Let’s consider for a moment what in the real world that might mean..

Let’s say we created a machine that can fool us into thinking it is human by reliably passing the “turing test.” What would this mean? That we have a machine that can fool us into thinking it is human by reliably passing the “turing test.” When you IM with it, you can’t tell if you’re talking to a machine or teenager.

Let’s further suppose that the software exists to make it mimic me or mimic you, or mimic John Wayne in terms of thought. What have really done? We’ve created a machine that can mimic you or me or John Wayne, in some way.

The illusion wouldn’t have to be very deep to be convincing. A few phrases would do it.

The idea of uploading your consciousness into a supercomputer is absurd. Your thoughts are embodied. They exist in you, in your brain, in your body. With a few drugs, though, I could easily convince you that you are having an out of body experience. Give me 30 million, and I’ll build a machine that can talk just like you and promise to keep it alive. Think about the possibilities! I’ll have your estate paying me in perpetuity!


AT&T will probably start up a business offerering this service, then sell it to a European conglomerate. Apple will have the public trust, but Dell will offer a cheaper service. An entirely new arm of the FCC will grow up and later be merged departments from health, and human services and the FDA.

And it will all be a sham, regulations designed to promote the illusion that there is a legitimate service there to be regulated. But of course, you’ll be dead. All I have to do is keep a program running, and convince the courts that “it” “is” “you.”

What is a Cyborg Citizen?

I finally got ahold of James Hughes' Cyborg Citizen saturday. Barely began reading it when I came across his references to the Cyborg Democracy Blog. "Wow, they're way ahead of me!" I thought.

Briefly.

There is a sophisticated, thoughtful, and, so far as I have analyzed it, accurate map of the views of biopolitics across the spectrum. There is a rah-rah spirit I find incomplete.

But here's a paragraph from an essay by Hughes, Democratic Transhumanism 2.0 , posted on their site, which I like a Lot:

Today most bioethicists, informed by and contributing to the growing Luddite orientation in left-leaning arts and humanities faculties, start from the assumption that new biotechnologies are being developed in unethical ways by a rapacious medical-industrial complex, and will have myriad unpleasant consequences for society, especially for women and the powerless. Rather than emphasizing the liberty and autonomy of individuals who may want to adopt new technologies, or arguing for increased equitable access to new biotechnologies, balancing attention to the “right from” technology with attention to the “right to” technology, most bioethicists see it as their responsibility to slow the adoption of biotechnology altogether.

"Luddism" he accurately goes on to say, "is a political dead-end for progressive politics. Progressives must revive the techno-optimist tradition if they want to achieve the goals of furthering liberty, equality and solidarity."

Even so, I find the lingering belief in "humanism" and "progress" in this essay and on this site to be untheorized. Let me quote from a quiz they print, and my somewhat cranky responses:

Are you a "democratic transhumanist?"


Do you expect human progress to result from human accomplishment rather than divine intervention, grace, or redemption?
Either/or fallacy. Also argumentative mush. The belief in "human accomplishment" may be the problem. Certainly, "human progress" can only be a proximate measure.

Do you think it would be a good thing if people could live for hundreds of years or longer?
Can’t say. I would like to live 100+ years, but who can judge the "good"?

Do you believe that people have a right to use technology to extend their mental and physical (including reproductive) capacities and to improve their control over their own lives?
Yes

Do you think it would be a good thing if people could become many times more intelligent than they currently are?
How are you going to measure "intelligent"? What is some types of intelligence are counter-indicated with each other?

Would you consider having your mind uploaded to computers if it was the only way you could continue as a conscious person?
I would. I would also object to many people I know being so uploaded. And I do not consider that such an upload would continue "me" or do much other than to assuage my mortal fear of death. Basically, this is the Christian view of heaven reborn in with a techno-halo.

Do you think that by being generally open and embracing of new technology we have a better chance of turning it to our advantage than if we try to ban or prohibit it?
A somehwhat more sophisticated either/or fallacy.

Does your ethical code advocate the well-being of all sentient beings, whether in artificial intellects, humans, posthumans, or non- human animals?
Yes!

Should parents be able to have children through cloning once the technology is safe?
Assuming facts not in evidence. Cloning technology will be developed, I assume, and it will probably create some blowback that we don't now see.

Do you believe women should have the right to terminate their pregnancies?
Yes.

Do you DISAGREE with the idea that human genetic engineering is wrong because it is "playing God"?
"Playing God" is not a good idea. Human genetic engineering may or may not be.

Do you already consider yourself a "transhumanist?"
Never thought of it.

Yeses
Score your transhumanism
7-10
You are a transhumanist. Join the World Transhumanist Association and go forth to share the memes.
5-6
You are probably a transhumanist. Join the World Transhumanist Association and explore the memes.
2-4
You have some (trans)humanist tendencies. See transhumanism.org to nurture them.
0-1
You are not a transhumanist yet. But we can help. Consult transhumanism.org frequently.

If you are a transhumanist, let's see how politically progressive you are:
Do support these movements?

environmental protection
The burden of proof lies with those who don’t.

social democracy
Yes
"fair trade" (vs. neo-liberal globalization)
This is a faddish phrase I am slightly in favor of.

universal health care access through government provided insurance
Don’t get me started. Yes

workplace democracy, coops, trade union movement
Yes.

anti-racism
C'mon! Who today would admit to supporting racism?

world federalism, world government

Two different ideas. Both unproven. Probably bad.

feminism
I support!

gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender rights
I support!

strong social welfare state or guaranteed basic income
I wish the conditions existed to discuss this fully and accurately!

Add 1 point for each yes
# # #

Maybe they just lost me with the talk of "progress," but the history of that word when applied to human conditions usually means that hunter gatherers are "primitive," farms represent "cultured," and factories are "advanced." Basically, it comes with baggage, and without that baggage, it's meaningless.

My own take is that cyborg relationships are always contingent and proximate. So is progress. What appears to be progress from one perspective may later be seen as undoing, and vice versa.

I am not arguing for a radical relativism, but for a radical failable-ism. When the good is perceived, we need to pursue it, but with knowledge that it almost certainly was not God who revealed it.

Society of S: A Vampire Novel with Teeth (sans fangs)

Ever notice how little horror there is in most horror novels? Stephen King and Anne Rice both can creep me out, but Rice does it with the eroticism of her blood drinking scenes, and King does it by patiently launching me into the familiar, and but then reminding me of how frightening the familiar really is. At his best –Hearts in Atlantis, Carrie– it’s the familiar world (the sheer anger between Bobby and his single mother) that is most frightening.

Susan Hubbard’s Society of S is not a horror novel, though it is a vampire novel. Instead, it is a coming of age story, of a girl who also happens to be a vampire.

Every teenager at some point must have felt that she is a monster, or that members of her family are. What if it were true? This novel is a contemporary search for personal identity. Ariella Montero is a post-modern teenager who comes to suspect that her father may be a vampire;–but if he is, what does that make her? Like any contemporary teenager, she turns to the internet for answers, which of course open up new questions.
Ari’s relationship with her father is at the heart of the first part of this novel, and it’s a relationship that has been imagined fully and uniquely, so we get the sense of sitting in on someone’s living room. It is fun to listen in on Ariella and her father discussing the greats, as for instance Ariella goes from dismissing Poe to seeing depth in his writing, and then coming to believe that Poe himself may have been a vampire.

The writing throughout is terse, but suggestive of a wider world, like some of the best young adult fiction. (This is a compliment. Good YA writing is usually terse but emotionally resonant, suggestive of detail rather than fully described. There is none of the "fat" I have learned to expect in vampire novels. Every novel I’ve read by King or Rice would have profited from an editor willing to consign half of it to the eternal hellfire of delete.)

After her best (and only) friend is killed and reanimated as a vampire (who her father sends back to the grave), Ari leaves home in shock and heads south in search of her mother, who seems to have been the free spirit her father is not. When she has to defend herself on the road, she does so in a way that ends any question about her true nature.

The "Society of S" turns out to refer to one particular group of vampires, Sanguinists, who believe in living in harmony with humans. Her father is one such, and he lives on a blood substitute while he works on a biotech solution that will ease the craving. Tut the narrative suggests that there are many other sects, each with a different view of the proper moral and ethical codes for dealing with humans and other blood suckers, including those who, like the vamps in Blade, believe that humans should be grown as chattel. Ari’s father has been working for a company trying to find a biotech solution to the need for blood; her mother, when she shows up, has been searching for a naturalpathic direction. There is a lot of territory available a follow up, and maybe two or three after that.

The father-daughter relationship suggests comparison to Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian. That’s unfortunate. I came away from each chapter of Kostova’s compelling novel thinking, "Wow, this writer had a really good liberal arts education!" It’s a fully re-imagined tour-de-force reworking of the Dracula story. S has no such ambition. The novels it reminded me of more were Octavia Butler’s last novel, Fledgling and Charlaine Harris’s first Stookie Stackhouse novel, Dead until Dark, in that it’s the story of slowly awakening to a sense of self-in-the-world. This is the novel of a young person discovering herself for the first time, and I enjoyed discovering it with her.

Though I enjoyed this novel, I wasn’t going to blog about it at first, because I didn’t see the connection to the Post-Human. At its core, as I said above, "it is a coming of age story, of a girl... vampire."

Think about that.

The coming of age plot is a quintessentially humanistic plot. But of a vampire? And what about having to survive on a biotech solution? Or viewing humanity as farm animals? These are questions of posthumanity, of rethinking the nature of "human nature," of relying on prosthetic blood, of facing questions of extended life verging on immortality. I was involved by the "humanity" of the writing –a young person learning about art, herself, and society-- that I overlooked these themes.

Having seen them, I now want to see how the writer will develop the "can’t we all get along?" questions that come up when it becomes clear that Ari and her family were separated by and are united against social forces about human/vampire. (Note: In an interview at Burried. com, the author said that she was already working on the sequel, which would develop darker political themes. I’ll be watching.)

Are superheroes "posthuman"?

You would think so, wouldn’t you? I’m using "posthuman" to indicate a sensibility which accepts the artificial, inorganic, even the repugnant. Hopefully, it does not completely disdain the aesthetics of humanism–grace, depth, proportion, perspective, etc.–but it does not fetishize theses qualities when it encounters them, and it recognizes the explosive potential of their opposites –awkwardness, surface, obsession.

Superman–the superman I knew as a kid, who was not so different from superman of the 1940's–is, as I reckon, very much caught up in the discourse of the human, this despite being conceived of explicitly as "the man of tomorrow." He is fundamentally a man who fights to maintain order when is threatened; whose invulnerable body epitomizes an Apollonian ideal of manhood. Though an alien to this world, he is in no way alienated from it; born out of the despair of the depression, a time when many in America were touting the advantages of benign dictatorship, he is the aristocratic shadow of the blue collar Clark Kent, defending his land in the tradition of noblesse oblige. His project is fundamentally hygenic; as crime in a monarchy is an injury against the body of the king, so Superman extends the invulnerability of his body to protect social body. So yes, he certainly represents a version of the posthuman, but an elite, delimiting one.

Batman I’m not so sure of. The patrician Batman lampooned in the TV show of the 60's was, well, campy. Camp changes everything. His metamorphosis into "The Dark Knight" of the 1980's–machine gun wielding wildman–is almost certainly at least a symptom of the posthuman.

Wolverine certainly is an embodiment of the posthuman. His body, able to withstand virtually any bleeding, trauma, or opening, implicitly defies the connection between inner and outer; it represents a kind Dionysian ideal. Because of this genetic superpower, he has another one: the "adamantium" skeleton laced throughout his body, including retactable claws. He is a cyborg.

These and other like thoughts came to me as I reading Austin Grossman’s Soon I will be Invincible, a book I picked up for entertainment value, but which actually got me to thinking less than a third of the way through. Written in alternating chapters between a supervillain, Doctor Impossible, and Fatale, a new-to- the-superhero- game female cyborg created by a supersecret corporation (which turns out to have been one of Doctor Impossible’s front corporations that he forgot about for a time), Invincible is surprisingly true to the superhero/supervillain drama. Grossman himself is a graduate student (comp. lit, at Berkeley), and he manages to enliven his villain with the angst of a graduate student.

I’m reasonably sure the author is as aware as I am of Donna Haraway’s take on the Cyborg archetype. This made me look for added depth in the character of Fatale, which while not completely missing, is not really the point–she is the one serves as the reader’s reliable narrator, questions such as "what is a human?" and "what is a woman?" register on her consciousness, and she is very much a supporter of the idea of coalescing around shared interests that is at the core of Haraway’s social extension of the cyborg image. Nonethess, she is not the character who captures the reader’s attention. Dr. Impossible is.

Impossible’s story (we never learn his full name) draws mostly from Dr. Doom, with a little bit of the pathos of Lex Luthor. A science nerd, a sufferer of "malign hypercognition disorder" (brilliant touch!), he competed as an undergraduate with a football jock who somehow always managed to keep up with him in class, he designed an experiment with exotic energies that went horribly wrong. The result was the creation of CoreFire, who basically has the powers and mentality of Superman. Impossible himself gained some limited strength and reduced vulnerability, but nothing comparable. His raison d’etre is to humble CoreFire, a man he resents even for his ability to resist gravity "as if the rest of us had just buckled under."

The central premise of the novel is that CoreFire has disappeared. Following the Superman parallel, this suggests a land disowned by God or the King or both; a Justice League-like group of superheroes has reunited to find him, convinced that Impossible must be behind it. He wasn’t, but the interrogation of him gives him the opening to escape and try once more to take over the world.

This time, he’s convinced it will work, precisely as a gambling addict approaching an array of one-armed bandits must be convinced that this time will be different. The author treats the world domination commonplace of supervillainy with a degree of psychological depth, accepting the compulsion on its own terms. Doctor Impossible is smart enough to understand the frustrations that entail if he actually succeeded in ruling the universe, but he’s going to try. His elementary school teacher once told him he was a genius, and he’s still driven to prove that judgement right, to prove himself against the natural aristocrats of the world. In a drama peopled by an elite posthumanity, he is the voice of the marginalized human.

Even in his moment of triumph, as he is beating the re-emergent CoreFire senseless with a weapon he has rescued from a deceased supervillain, one of two he considered a friend, he triumph goes unacknowledged. He unmasks himself, to CoreFire’s complete bewilderment, before CoreFire’s super friends escape from their cages to beat him senseless. His victory goes almost completely unremarked.

I kept thinking as I read this is that it was not so different from reading the novelization of a real comic book. Better written, more depth, more background, but not significantly better than the best superhero comics; not quite on the level as something by Neil Gaiman, but that’s the neighborhood. This is no knock against him, rather an acknowledgement that the genre has grown up some.

Yes, I think superheroes are posthuman. But the posthuman is not necessarily "better." It IS a position of relative strength, but this novel reminds one of the pathos of the human.

Only slightly about Sookie Stackhouse...

I’ve read five of the Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire Mystery series, so there must be a lot in them I find compelling and likeable and there is. If I mainly wanted to comment on them in this post, I would point out that Shreveport and the surrounding area is 40%+ African-American, but that none of the major recurring characters in the series are. Off the top of my head, the most important African American character I can think of is the black man whose death in the second book, Dead in Dallas, gets going one of the two major plot lines (having to do with a private sex club). I would acknowledge that this represents the segregated reality of the rural south, in which neighborhood bars, such as Merlottes, tend to cater primarily to either a white or a black clientelle, but that the segregation is not all that complete. I would also acknowledge that white writers often have to tread carefully, because of the abysmal history American letters have in imagining the Africanistic resident, but that I think her novels would be richer if she would give it an earnest try.

I have no intention of stopping there, however. Give me a moment to get my cyberpodium out of my flash drive.

In the best and worst tradition of literary criticism, I’m going to throw out discussion of everything I like about the Sookie Stackhouse books–Sookie herself, her struggle with the hypermasculine subcultures that thrive in the rural south, the character Sam, and the dry, wry wit that infuses these novels–to focus a sec to look at a marginal consideration in her novels: race.

Right off the bat, I feel two immediate responses forming:

1. One is the sort of roll my eyes "there you go again" response. Geez, not everything is about race. It’s easy to complain about what a writer doesn’t do. No writer can do everything, especially while working in a genre related field. Why not look at what she does do?
2. But she does deal with figures of race, but she denaturalizes them. There are vampires, fairies, werecritters, and less common other supernaturals, who form coalitions and subcultures very much analogous to race.

From a critical perspective, the second is more compelling, since an argument that says "for once, would you just focus on the positive?" is unproductive. That is not to say it’s more or less correct. It is important to note, though, that the two arguments are mutually exclusive. If I want to argue that she deals inventively with race, why should I as a reader want to excuse the lack of a fully realized Africanistic presence in the day to day world? Why can’t the novels do both?

I think this points to a problem with current discussions on race. Let me draw this out for a moment, and then explain how it relates to the post-human.

Race and Humanism: A Digression
Race, as such, is in part a creation of the humanistic enterprise. To understand this, look at Thomas Jefferson, a founder of American humanism (he edited a version of the New Testament to cut all the miracles out of it, making less a religious than a humanist document). What does EVERYONE know about Jefferson these days?

1. He wrote the declaration of Indepence, which gave voice to the spirit of liberty that would find a home in the abolitionist movement: "All men are created equal..."
2. He kept slaves, believed in Negro inferiority, and tried to prove it in his Notes on the State of Virginia.

How can both things be true? Because the same spirit that wanted to improve humanity also saw it as important to recognize gradations of difference in quality between human communities. Humanism is in part a project of social hygiene.

To put this another way, the basis for racism and the opposition to it share a cultural ancestry. Now lets flashforward to the future. Two responses to the historical and continuing discourse on race in America.
1. Race is a myth, with no biological reality. We would all do well to ignore it.
2. Race is a social reality, silently embedded, throughout most of American history, in the concept of "American." We need to discuss race, because avoiding discussions of race devalues the experience of black Americans. (W.E.B. Dubois said it well a century ago, talking about growing up in a majority white culture: "One always feels this twoness, two warring souls, black and American, in one dark body...")
Deny the first, you open the door to fascism. Deny the second, you get policies whose effect (sometimes by design) is to limit economic and educational mobility to black people (I’m thinking of the June 2007 Supreme Court cases which seem to disallow considerations of race in the college admission process.)

Class: A Digression Digresses
In practical, political terms, one response (one I hope most colleges will be using) is to focus less on race than on class. If the goal is economic mobility, than we consider factors such as high performance in a low performing school, and relative performance compared against families of similar income levels. Offer help to enough poor people, and a disproportionate percent of the people helped are going to be African American. As a strategic response, I completely support this.

But what does this move signify? We are at the end of a 400 year period which sought to "naturalize" race lines. At the same time, class alignment has always been downplayed. In these terms, a coming together of diverse groups along shared class interests is a "cyborgian" construction.

Pointing out the shared affinity of folks along class lines is always interesting in American culture, in part because class is less visible in America than, for instance, race or gender. But I am unwilling to replace one kind of essentialism with another. But to "naturalize" it would to an extent to "essentialize" it.

(By the way, even assuming that colleges follow this route, I'll await some evidence that the students who are so recruited recognized in each other a sense of shared class interest. )

Enter the Cyborg.
I’ve covered this before on this blog. but Donna Haraway’s pre-eminent example of the social cyborg was the definition "Women of Color," one which cut across class and race lines to identify a common interest in reforming American institutions to be more inclusive.

Enter the Posthuman.
The human being is defined in humanistic discourse by his organic unity, his reflective nature, his progressive maturity. I could support this by citing Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis, but believe me, that would get tedious. –Maybe another day.
The posthuman is artificial, inorganic; he or she or it interupts the organic unity of the social body or social text.
Sookie Stackhouse is Posthuman
in her "freakish" abilities to violate the unity of other individuals; she is not a self-contained, unified entity; parts of those around her "leak" into her.
Vampires are Posthuman
at leasst in the Sookie Stackhouse novels, and most contemporary vampire novels, for mostly the same reasons as Sookie is. (Dracula is not post-human; he’s just an aristocratic monster.)

Here’s the point (and I do have one)....

The Posthuman (as I’m using it) is not utopian or essentialist. It is improvisatory, and provisional. It respects the idea of science and progress, but is as likely to lead to error, because it has no stranglehold on the truth. It allows for the recognition of class, sex, and race distinctions, devalues rigid alignment along these lines. This is a perspective we need to discuss race intelligently these days.

Therefore...
The Sookie Stackhouse series is not leading the way towards the posthuman, but it is participating in the evolution of same. Assuming a posthuman perspective (which believe me, does NOT come naturally to me) gives me a way of seeing what I like, and why, though I like Harris’ figures of race (vampirism, lycanthropy, etc.), I want more.

Things to like (or not) about Masters of SF.

Two things to like about Masters of Science Fiction, which premiered last night:
1) It reminds millions of TV viewers that SF is a written genre. It is not just about blowing up CGI robots onscreen; it can also be about blowing up cities on the page.
2) It returns the anthology format to the small screen.

One thing to like about the first episode, "A Clean Escape," which debuted last night: Judy Davis looks great at 50something. Perhaps a trifle too great to be a dying of cancer, but I’m almost willing to give them a pass on that. They DID try to show her as over-stressed and frayed, which is perhaps a television producer's understanding of "dying of late stage terminal cancer."

It’s been years since I read the story by John Kessel that it was based on. I remember it as being more elemental, focusing on the drama between doctor and patient, without the filler they threw in to stretch it out, and I’m almost certain there was no breakdown moment in which the amnesiac character played by Sam Waterston has a breakthrough moment, which he subsequently forgets.

(If this is a part of the original story, I repressed it, because it makes no sense. People who have suffered a brain trauma leading to loss of short term memory don’t suddenly retrieve lost memories only to forget them again.)

Normally, I think it’s not only unfair but downright silly to denigrate a work for not following its source material. TV, short stories, and movies are different genres. (Robert B. Parker once complained of the producers of Spencer for Hire turning down one of his scripts because it wasn’t about "their" Spencer, but they were right to do so.) By calling themselves Masters of Science Fiction, the producers created a problem for themselves, putting front and center that this is material adapted from "masters." Still, let’s pretend that this an episode called "A Doctor and a Patient In Search of Rod Serling or something Like Him," and judge it on its own merits.

I still don’t like the patient’s "breakthrough," in which he suddenly remembers who he is. Worse, I don’t like why they did it. This moment of regret, and the speech they gave Waterston, was in line with a few other changes they made to highlight the "relevance" of this story to the Bush pre-emptive war strategy and insensitivity to climate change.

Why did they make these changes? Because they think we’re all blithering idiots who wouldn’t "get it" if they didn’t spell it out in small words.

Seems to me that if that’s their attitude they should have played out the final therapy scene as a chase scene around the compound. Maybe they could have staged on it on Segway scooters! Judy Davis on her scooter, Waterston on his, while she fires shots. "How do you feel about your wife?" she shouts, then Blam! Then, when he hits his head, which everyone knows is how you cure amnesia on TV, she would stand over him and laugh maniacally. "I have you now! You thought you escaped. Ha, ha, ha." Then, Blam!, she shoots herself.

Only a slight improvement, but it might have helped.

I will tune in next week, just like I used to watch Space: 1999, because it wasn’t REALLY as bad as it could have been. A "D" is still passing.

Let me make a short attempt to relate this to the topic of this blog, post-humanism. One of humanism’s great themes is restoration of a lost self. That’s the return-to-Eden theme which is at the heart of psychoanalysis. This episode, "A Clean Escape," is about a loss that is irreparable. Unable to face that, it gives us a moment of restoration, to satisfy its humanist soul. Let me put this another way: this show is basically a drama about the complete loss of humanity, an irrevocable transition to new state of being. Our good doctor, Judy Davis, is absolutely unwilling to accept this loss. The president’s breakdown is summoned not by the logic of the therapy, which would disallow it, but by the logic of her own need for it (and the Hollywood desire for such a moment by George Bush). It also becomes the moment of her death: having enforced a return to a humanistic framework for one moment, she is unable and unwilling to accept its loss; ergo, her suicide, which in this case can be seen as an assertion of self over the circumstances of the world. Basically, this is an unwitting drama about humanism as nostalgic, resentful wish fulfillment.