Brain, Stick, Amoeba: Attempts at Self-Cure

From Academia is Killing My Friends:

#78 

An academic from another university once told the grad students in my program that we should treasure every moment of our time here, because he’d never seen a department with such positive and supportive interpersonal relationships. I’m entering my fifth year now, and his statement has proven true time and time again. My advisor, my committee members, even our faculty in other subdisciplines - everyone has been wonderful to me. I feel so much better for having had them in my life.  

Knowing this makes me even more ashamed of how much I am struggling. I know they would be supportive if I told them about my mental health problems, my socioeconomic problems, my loneliness and isolation. But I couldn’t bear the thought of letting them down. So instead I buy scalpels and cut patterns into my chest, take lit cigarettes and apply them to my arms, binge copiously on food and vomit it up before bedtime. Knowing how much they do care about me is the only thing keeping me from suicide. And that thought shames me most of all - because I don’t know what I’m going to do when I finally finish and have to learn, first hand, the other side of what that academic was talking about.    

Exploring the Los Angeles SF & F Society Archive

I can't stop perusing this photograph archive, even though I have no personal connection to any of it. I know none of these people. But there's something ghostly/grossly appealing about looking through moments in other people's lives (which is why the Internet K-Hole [nsfw] is, in my opinion at least, one of the best blogs around).

All following images taken from Dik Daniel's photos available on the LASF&FS website.

Harangue for Revolutionaries

After Henry Rollins.

Some images like glass shards embedded in the fleshy reptilian part of your brain:

Fuck Slipstream

The other day I was procrastinating in a library and leafing through the Science Fiction Studies March 2011 issue on “slipstream” fiction. It prompted the following rant.

I have a theory: the creation of “slipstream” fiction as a genre is simply the effect of the middle-brow encountering modernism.

That’s right, I just insulted something by calling it “middle-brow” because apparently it’s still the 1960s.

Team Godzilla, forever. 

Let me begin by saying that I agree with critics who see the rise of cyberpunk as a fundamentally conservative movement within the history of science fiction: a way to recenter the genre around white men again after the emergence of feminist s.f. in the 1970s. And, of course, cyberpunk established late consumer capitalism as the singularly acceptable form of social/economic organization (because so realism!! much tough!! no nonsense! wow!!1!1!) after s.f. began turning to questions of culture, language and the organization of human societies in the 1960s/70s. In other words, cyberpunk is a turn away from when the social sciences became part of the “science” in science fiction. (And “slipstream” might be the domestication of these culturally critical forces through coding anti-realism as alterity.) The cyberpunk Bruce Sterling, who coined the term “slipstream” in 1989, also wrote in that year “We See Things Differently,” a future-war story as xenophobic as theoriginal future-war story by Georges Tomkyns Chesney. For those who haven’t read it, the logic of Sterling’s story is basically: the U.S. is populated by ignorant, oblivious subjects who uncritically stereotype Middle-Eastern Muslims, and these Muslims are far more complex and self-aware than these stereotypes, but under all these complex layers Muslims still embody every single characteristic of that stereotype, and are therefore all the more dangerous for their duplicity. Cleverly: “how dare you stereotype me as a religious fundamentalist terrorist” is the disguise of the religious fundamentalist terrorist; we cannot trust their superficial Westernization. The story is a complex interrogation of the logic of contemporary cultural representation, hahaha, but in the end it is also a clever defense of American myopia and a subtle defense of racism through its disavowal.

Foucault: On the Government of the Living, Jan. 9, 1980

I am incredibly excited to read the translation of Foucault’s 1979-1980 Collège de France lectures, On the Government of the Living, which looks like it will be published later in 2014. It is the lecture series that follows The Birth of Biopolitics which, along with the previous Security, Territory, Population, has been very important for my own work. I am so looking forward to this book, in fact, that when it came time to learn a second foreign language, I chose to learn French by translating its first chapter. I have decided to put my translation up here in case anyone else is interested. Please, please, please, please be warned: this is how I learned French, it is a very amateur piece of translation. It’s also a bit hasty; what I did, essentially, was to translate it word for word, then I went back and revised it to sound more natural. It’s going to sound uneven, oscillating between a very formal tone (it’s just what happens when one follows the labyrinthine French constructions) and a very casual conversational tone that comes from a mixture of Foucault’s own spoken language and my inept and hasty revisions.

There are a few French words I decided to include in brackets. They are words which are translated as knowledge [savoir/connaissance] and the truth [la vérité/ce vrai]. Since the word “vrai” can be a adjective as well as a noun, I have tried to translate the noun “vrai” as “true” (as in “the true”) but sometimes the preceding article is a demonstrative, in which case I have translated it as “truth” (because “this true” and “that true” doesn’t quite work in English). The difference between “savoir” and connaissance, and their importance for Foucault’s work, is fairly well known. Generally, it is taken that “savoir” means knowledge in a more abstract or general sense, whereas “connaissance” tends to imply familiarity, expertise, or recognition. You can find useful references to this distinction in the translation notes in all three volumes of the Essential Works of Michel Foucault series published by the New Press (edited by Paul Rabinow). I have followed the convention of the English translations of his Collège de France lectures in not translating raison d'Etat (the reason of the State).

Again, this is more of a personal translation exercise, so expect there to be awkward phrasings, unclear sections, and outright inaccuracies.

Micheal Whelan's cover for Asimov's Foundation's Edge

Michel Foucault's lecture January 9, 1980, Du Gouvernement des Vivants.

The historian Dion Cassius recounts the following story regarding the Roman emperor Septimius Severus who reigned, as you all know—well, as I myself have known since yesterday, at any rate—at the turn of the 2^nd and of the 3^rd century, between 193 and 211, I believe. Septimius Severus ordered the construction of a palace, and in this palace, of course, a great ceremonial room in which he gave audience, rendered his sentences, and distributed justice. And on the ceiling of this room in his palace, Septimius Severus had a representation of the sky painted, a representation of the starry sky, and it was not unimportant which sky, nor unimportant which stars, nor unimportant what position of celestial bodies were represented. He had the sky above his birth represented, the conjunction of stars which had presided over his birth and, consequently, over his destiny. Doing this—or rather having ordered this done—Septimius Severus had, of course, a certain number of very clear and explicit intentions which can be reconstructed easily enough. It was for him a matter of inscribing the conjectural and particular sentences which he rendered within the very system of the world, and of showing how the logos, which presided over the order of the world and which had presided over his birth, was the same as that which organized, founded and justified the sentences that he rendered. That which he said in a particular circumstance of the world, that which was said in a particular kairos as the Stoics would say, was precisely of the very order of things secured up there, once and for all. It was equally for him a matter of showing how his reign had been founded on the celestial bodies, that he, a soldier of Leptis Magna who had seized power by force and violence, had not seized power by mistake, nor by accident, nor by some plot of men, but the very necessity of the world had called him to the place where he was. And that which right could not establish—his reign, his seizure of power—the celestial bodies justified once and for all. Finally, third, it was a matter of showing in advance his own fortune, as emperor, and the extent to which it was inevitable, inaccessible in that that it was impossible for anyone—for some plotter, rival, or enemy that would be—to seize the throne which was shown by the celestial bodies to belong to him alone, against whom none in the future could prevail. His fortune was good, his fortune was secure—the past had indicated it—but for the future things were definitely sealed as well. Thus uncertain and particular acts, a past which had been made by chance and luck, a future which none could know, certainly, but which some would have been able to take advantage of in order to threaten the emperor: all of this had returned to necessity and must have been seen on the ceiling of the room where he rendered his sentences as truth [vérité]. What manifested itself here at the lowest level—I was going to say on the floor—as power actually could and must have been deciphered in the night sky.