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Scared Straight
Carol Stabile reviews Our Stolen Future.
Since the publication of Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters in 1926, the genre of “scientific detective” stories has enjoyed a quiet but consistent level of popularity. Typically, these stories have functioned as celebrations of (or ideological guarantors for) the virtues of the scientific enterprise. This genre, however, properly belongs to an earlier era in the twinned history of science and industrialization: an era armed with certainty, rationality, and faith in scientific progress.
tye042 - 05.10.2017 - 14:50
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Canadian Jeremiad
Andrew McMurry reviews John Livingstone’s Rogue Primate: An exploration of human domestication.
During the central Canadian summer many are drawn to what is known as “cottage country,” a region of lakes and rivers, shield-rock and trees that belts the near-north of the Windsor-Toronto-Montreal corridor. On any July week-end the road- and water-ways of this bucolic district are crammed with eager recreants, speeding toward the natural beauty and repose which, as a result, now exists mostly in memory. In the vicinity of a large provincial “wilderness” area, Algonquin Park, I recently passed some leisurely sunsets observing what has become a rather common sight in those parts: a pair of loons, bobbing and diving in a lake made turbulent by the twilight passages of innumerable jet-skis and power boats. Their haunting calls bounced around the bay, competing with the full-throated roar of outboards and, once, the thunder of a float-plane taking off right over their heads.
tye042 - 05.10.2017 - 14:59
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Post-Wankery: A Review of Infinite Jest
Piotr Siemion discusses Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s second but surely not definitive novel, just out in a bulging paperback after its last year’s loud and clear hardback thump, looks very much like a whale. It is immense, awe-inspiring, plus it contains tons of undigested matter. Because few serious novels get written these days, it also looks suspiciously like an elephant, of the white variety. It instantly brings to mind all those mammoth playful novels of the American sixties and seventies. For those of us who were only very tentatively around during the first Woodstock, the “encyclopedic” novels of that time were as thick as Tom Clancy’s current chivalry romances but on the average one billion times more dense than Clancy, and like neutron stars, not much of a company for readers who were not rocket scientists during their business hours.
tye042 - 05.10.2017 - 15:17
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Joseph McElroy: fathoming the field
Toward a definition of a postmodern genre: the field-novel.
“And the field was him,” a sentence in Plus, a novel by Joseph McElroy, warrants an inquiry into field and the novel. The novelty of McElroy’s fiction grows from the attempt to use the structure of a novel as itself a field, presenting actions which occur within fields. He displays field as aesthetic structure, and field as content of aesthetic structure. So within the novel, events which occur within a field can also be seen as themselves constituting a field. In both field as structure and as content, the hero is intelligible as a region of a field, not as a sphere or core of individuality which passes through a field in fulfillment of a destiny.
tye042 - 17.10.2017 - 15:24
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Attractions Around Mount St. Helens
Joseph McElroy shares field notes and reflections from Mount St. Helens.
Nearly two decades after the great eruption of May, 1980, a slow, remarkable regrowth of flora as well as a massive human involvement feed back to me old questions about the ecological order and our place in it. “A mountain bounces back,” I read; Mt. St. Helens has struggled “to be born again.” That’s not it, I think, but I am moved by the reappearance of plants and trees and animals and fish at Mt. St. Helens - the symbiotic reaching out of fungus filaments to plants roots deep beneath the volcanic ash, the herd of Roosevelt’s elk returning to feed on grass sprouting from the earth of an apparently unwelcoming ashy, silica-infused but now media-hyped “miraculous mudslide.” This blast equal to 2500 Hiroshimas the environment did, not us. But what is the environment? I search the abstracts of some of the more than 500 vineyard-laboring, exact, and specialized field studies that have provided “an excellent baseline for tracking ecosystem reassembly here.”
tye042 - 17.10.2017 - 15:37
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Restoring Dora Marsden
Michael Wutz reviews Bruce Clarke’s Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science
Dora Marsden was not a madwoman in the attic. When she and her female compatriots climbed down from the attic of the Southport Empire theater on 3 December 1909 to disrupt a public appearance by Winston Churchill, she did so as a freewoman agitating for universal suffrage and gender equality. Soon she was to edit a short-lived journal by the same name, the Freewoman, to be renamed and reconceived as the New Freewoman and, eventually, the Egoist - three journals that were to have a formative impact on the literary and artistic configuration of modernism. Bruce Clarke retraces Marsden’s wide-ranging but hitherto largely unacknowledged influence on her modernist contemporaries and, in the spirit of revisionary literary and cultural criticism, seeks to correct “a tradition of misinformation” (4) that has led to a monolithic and largely masculinist construction of modern literature.
tye042 - 18.10.2017 - 13:56
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Joseph McElroy: fathoming the field
Toward a definition of a postmodern genre: the field-novel.
“And the field was him,” a sentence in Plus, a novel by Joseph McElroy, warrants an inquiry into field and the novel. The novelty of McElroy’s fiction grows from the attempt to use the structure of a novel as itself a field, presenting actions which occur within fields. He displays field as aesthetic structure, and field as content of aesthetic structure. So within the novel, events which occur within a field can also be seen as themselves constituting a field. In both field as structure and as content, the hero is intelligible as a region of a field, not as a sphere or core of individuality which passes through a field in fulfillment of a destiny.
tye042 - 03.11.2017 - 15:30
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Attractions Around Mount St. Helens
Joseph McElroy shares field notes and reflections from Mount St. Helens.
tye042 - 03.11.2017 - 17:17
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Who Am We?
Who Am We?
Davin Heckman - 27.04.2018 - 15:15
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Hyperdrama and virtual development: notes on creating new hyperdrama in cyberspace
Deemer explaining hyperdrama through his own experience as a hypertext and hyperdrama author, specifically walking through the process of developing a one act hyperdrama in Santiego. Subtitles used are “What is hyperdrama?”, “The problems of hyperdrama”, “Enter Santiago”, “A creative process in Cyberspace”, and “Hyperdrama and syberspace”.
Heidi Haugsdal Kvinge - 28.09.2021 - 14:37
