Tag: imperialism

What year is it?!

First up, I’ll mention a short story of mine called “A Brief History of Materialism,” now up at Issue 3 of SPILLOVER MAGAZINE.

I’m very grateful that my last two publications ran on significant holidays, namely 4/20 and 5/1.

In truth, I haven’t written a jot of creative fiction in quite some time, what with all these book reviews and newsletter editions in May (and taking a break from the latter to catch up on the former). “Materialism” had actually been written quite some time ago…

The beginning of summer also included a special visit to the Cooper Hewitt Museum. They were exhibiting W. E. B. Du Bois’s statistical graphics designed for the 1900 world’s fair in Paris. Some of the plots were digital reproductions, but others were THE original deal, watercolor on aging cardboard. The blue pigment in the bullseye graph truly packs a punch.

If there was one main takeaway from this data for me, it was that America was still largely agricultural even at the beginning of the 1900s.

But honestly? The biggest impression on this trip might have come from the building itself. The Carnegie Mansion is simply an amazing structure to be in. It was designed for the industrial magnate’s family at the end of the 19th century, and built in the style of contemporaneous country houses in England; I guess it would be the kind of place in which Virginia Woolf would have been hanging out.

In the last seven years of apartment-hopping in New York and Brooklyn, I was moved by what it was like to dwell within a building that is solid, not shitty. Upon entering the imposing manor across the avenue from Central Park, you go up a few steps into an elevated foyer area. The parquet floor and the immaculate detailing of the sconce-work, as well as the tiling of the greenhouse area, left indelible impressions in my dreams, in which I wandered an expansive structure.

As for media reviews and criticism, that business is thoroughly underway. For the amazing Full Stop review section, I got to write about the latest novel in translation from Silent BFF António Lobo Antunes. He is no stranger to Second Slope and the Silent Friends project.

And there’s a couple more of these review pieces where that came from up the pipeline…

Seriously: translated literature has been going nuts in the last ten months. I am greedily trying to cover as much of it as I can. It’s not every season one faces two different translations of Proust and Wittgenstein coming to market at the same time.

I feel the need to very briefly discuss two biggie-budget movies that are raking in box office returns. Nolan’s OPPENHEIMER and Rajamouli’s RRR from last year have some striking similarities.

Both are 3-hour epics, and both are structured around a motif of Fire and Water.

RRR is a buddy flick about two guys who are diametrical opposites in many respects. Ram is cultivated, suave, on a secret mission, and a precision fighter. Like fire, he burns a straight path to his target. Bheem is from a tribal background, is loyal, sensitive, great with kids, and relies on sheer brawler power and his power–lifter physique. Ram cares about politics; Bheem cares about people. A revolution succeeds only when both are in play.

RRR plasters the fire-and-water idea everywhere in a thoughtful way: fire on the oil slick, water becoming steam, firelight glistening in droplets of water flung from a spear taking flight. The title cards that masala films typically have for the stars’ intros are transformed here into THE FIRE and THE WATER. Will opposites negate each other? Or can they transform into something new and higher—in the figure of two men piggybacking through a prison escape sequence like a six-limbed battle mech?

OPPENHEIMER begins with raindrops on a puddle. Young C. Murphy scrutinizes the propagating ripples. This film treats the theoretical physicist-cum-weapons project director as a kind of prophet—someone receiving intense visions of extremely concentrated knowledge. Such “premonitions” include views of horrendously massive nuclear fireballs triggering “atmospheric ignition.” We view the Burning of the Earth from space, a global wall of fire crossing the continents and oceans with the coming night; the shot with Göransson’s musical score actually feels beautiful and serene.

Cilian Murphy, whose face carried this picture, is in a sense envisioning the two types of apocalypse (“no more water, but fire next time”). Water and Fire in western cultures are two possible means of purification. The end of the world? Perhaps, but not if you’re a Marxist. But it’s certainly the end of his world, the end of a time when science, and in particular the new, seemingly probabilistic world of quantum mechanics, was attuned to nature.

Haven’t seen BARBIE yet, unfortunately. Though it looks like Gerwig has secured her spot as the successor to Nolan’s old position in the Warner Bros. stable. I did play with Barbie dolls, at my cousins’ house or on play dates with girl classmates, and I thought nothing of it in youth. It was the sort of thing that, once I’d grown out of it, I never reflected back on my relationship to it or what it means for pop culture. It just never interested my core.

Now, GUNDAM, on the other hand…

The toys pictured above are NOT the blogger’s

Science Fiction immersion

Here follow some notes on the SF I read over the late summer, in reverse chronological order of publication.

THE GONE WORLD by Tom Sweterlitsch

In this cosmic horror mystery with time travel, Navy SEALs can go as far forward in time in space-faring submarines as they like, and return to their launch points. But they can’t go backward from the present. Meanwhile, an insane apocalyptic event—like END OF EVANGELION meets EVENT HORIZON, particles of alien cancer infesting everyone on earth—is moving backwards through time. Every time they peak into the future, it happens sooner. We follow Moss, a crimes investigator for the Navy as well as a time travelling astronaut. She gets called into a homicide scene. A whole family was massacred. The suspect is the father, a veteran of the time travel program, and a man who should be MIA. It’s a pulp horror-thriller as screened through a Christopher Nolan greywater filter. 

Cosmic horror and crime have already been successfully married in TRUE DETECTIVE; fusing that result with time travel rules would inevitably be a lot. Through some quantum mechanics technobabble, the submarines can travel to a possible world, that is, the future timeline they visit is only a possibility from the state of the present time. But once these travellers return to the present, this furnished future world instantly vanishes. This leads to some astronauts being held captive in the future, never to return, by people who would prefer not to wink out of existence. This idea seems like a reconciliation of the two interpretations of quantum physics, uncertainty vs. many worlds. But it is certainly the most literal way to present philosophical solipsism: should I be destroyed (or removed to another point in time) the world disappears with me.

All in all, pretty forgettable, but I did read up till the end!

RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA by Arthur C. Clarke

Clarke’s dry technical reporting works for me in a way that Asimov’s doesn’t. The prelude with meteorites is enjoyable in itself. Clarke’s pro South African apartheid politics don’t mar this story the way they are in the 2001 sequels. And only one cosmic boys’ club passage about the distractions of women’s tits in zero g went into grating territory. The highlight concept is the use of enhanced primates on spaceships to do menial tasks, super chimpanzees, or simps. Sex onboard is somewhat discouraged to avoid favoritism among the crew, “but apart from this, the only rule regulating shipboard sx was ‘So long as you don’t do it in the corridors and frighten the simps.’” Did the Ramans really have no plastic arts or culture, or did it simply go unnoticed? Or had Raman society evolved beyond the need for such services to society? As ideological reflections, art works already have an aspect of class utilitarianism; is the movement beyond art one toward a “pure” utilitarian society?

THE DREAMING JEWELS by Theodore Sturgeon

It’s Sturgeon, so you know the prose is going to be beautiful and lively while still delivering an action-packed pulpy story. “They caught the kid doing something disgusting out under the bleachers at the high-school stadium and he was sent home from the grammar school across the street.” After a scene of hysteria and abuse that will only seem over the top to people who weren’t raised by narcissists, young Horty runs away and joins up with some carnies (and becomes a girl named Hortense). Here’s the antagonist of the story. Their “boss,” is Pierre Monetre the “Maneater.”

Pierre Monetre worked for a while with subversive groups. It was of no importance to him which group, or what it stood for, as long as its aim was to tear down the current structure of the majority. He did not confine this to politics, but also did what he could to introduce modern non-objective art into traditional galleries, agitated for atonal music in string quartets, poured beef-extract on the serving tables of a vegetarian restaurant, and made a score of other stupid, petty rebellion—rebellions for their own sake always, having nothing to do with the worth of any art or music or food-taboos.

WAR WITH THE NEWTS by Karel Čapek

Karel Čapek is simply the best, and I honestly don’t have much to say about this pitch-black comedy (in which the newts organize and burrow under New Orleans with explosives and sink the city), except that it’s funny from the beginning all the way to the end when the narrator basically starts arguing with himself over the meaning of the whole thing, of the nature of speculative fiction. This 1930s novel is in part a send-up of the whole genre of imperialist adventure writing. The reflections of the businessmen who organize the exploitation of the humanoid newts reflect a certain transformation in their work: “I could even say it is a sign from fate (says industrial magnate G.H. Bondy) that our excellent friend and captain, J. van Toch, left us just at this time. Our romantic, beautiful—I could even say absurd—trading in pearls was always closely connected with him. I consider this to be the closing chapter in our business; it had its, so to speak, exotic charm, but it was never suitable for modern times.” And later: “I am sorry to be closing this chapter, the chapter we might call the van Toch era; an era in which we made use of the child-like and adventurous side that we all have.” The transition from the “van Toch era” to the present is, in other words, that from the liberal competitive epoch of capitalism to modern imperialism, from when industrial capitalists were heroes in the struggle against feudalist monarchism, to when they are bad from top to bottom. “We’ll no longer be doing it in the style of captain van Toch with his adventurous tales of pearls and treasure but by the tried and tested means of honest toil.”