Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer, editor, and multimedia
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| August 5, 2007 - August 11, 2007 »
August 3, 2007
The Wilson Quarterly this month has a special section devoted to "Women in Charge." In a piece called "A Woman's World" (subscribers only), writer Sara Sklaroff does some serious reporting -- for example, quizzing the anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday, of the University of Pennsylvania, on what life is like in one of the world's few matrilineal societies, the Minangkabau people of Indonesia.
Sklaroff's summary:
Decisions are made by consensus, and the Minangkabau keep one another in line by enforcing their custom of acting for the common good. Each sex has its own, well-defined realm. Men perform starring roles in religion and governance (though clearly within a domain constructed by women), while women are leaders in culture, education, and ceremony -- and "hold the keys to the rice house," making the important economic decisions.
More fun is Sklaroff's mental experiment of imagining how things would look if our own society suddenly -- or over a few decades -- switched over to the Minangkabau model ... if we went matrilineal.
It will certainly be a nicer place to live -- more attractive, friendlier, and much, much cleaner. You'll be able to find a decent bathroom wherever you go. Delicious, high-quality salads will be sold everywhere -- not the wilted, uninspired packages grudgingly offered at corner delis or Starbucks, but fresh, innovative compositions that will make dieting a snap.
This will be a woman's world, and men will have to learn to fit in. Industrial design will be based on an average woman's size, not a man's, so men will have to squeeze themselves into public bus seats and crouch down to reach items on supermarket shelves. Standard portion sizes at restaurants will be smaller; those who wish to eat more (usually men) will have to pay more. Other pricing schemes that currently favor men will be reversed: Dry cleaning and haircuts, for example, will conform to a flat-fee system.
Anyone else have any thoughts about how U.S. society would change were it suddenly "feminized"?
The Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2007
Posted by Christopher Shea at 05:36 PM
August 2, 2007
Here.
Photo by Flickr user Diversey
Via Boing Boing.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:27 PM
August 2, 2007
In Foreign Affairs, Walter Russell Mead reviews "That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present," by Robert and Isabelle Tombs. We all have a basic understanding of the stereotypical differences between the two lands, of course, but Mead says the Tombs’s book upends some of the familiar clichés:
In the eighteenth century, for example, English country-house food was often considered as good as what the French ate, and French verdicts on English food were much more mixed than they would later become. There are even signs of English influence on French cuisine. What no less an authority than Roland Barthes has described as “the alimentary sign of Frenchness," le steack-frites, was brought to Paris by Wellington’s victorious army.
Mead’s kicker: "'French fries' could in fact be called 'freedom fries' without committing violence to the historical record." (Presumably because Wellington saved the French from a dictator’s rule.)
This man knew his Anglo-French history
Another surprising (to me) tidbit, gleaned from the Tombs’s book:
The founder of modern Parisian couture, who also popularized the term 'chic' and was largely responsible for the establishment of Paris as the center of the world’s fashion industry, was Charles Frederick Worth, an Englishman.
A Worth creation: The "Dutch Tulips Gown," ca. 1889
Posted by Christopher Shea at 11:35 AM
August 2, 2007
In his July 30 review of "Sunshine," Danny Boyle's new science-fiction movie about a group of astronauts on a mission to jump-start our dying sun, the New Yorker's Anthony Lane has only one positive thing to say. The "oxygen garden" tended by Michelle Yeoh at the heart of the spaceship is, Lane raves,
a lovely invention on the part of Boyle, the screenwriter, Alex Garland, and the production designer, Mark Tildesley. Having last ganged together on "28 Days Later," a brisk resuscitation of the zombie genre, they are obviously hoping to give the solar system the same kind of makeover. "Star Wars" showed us clean and rustless spacecraft, "Alien" muscled in with dank and dripping ones, and now "Sunshine" catches the mood with verdancy....
Now, I realize that it's New Yorker house style for a writer to pretend to know everything about whatever subject he or she has been assigned. And I'm not quarreling with the snarky review -- I haven't seen the movie, and it's probably just as bad as Lane says. But the New Yorker has slipped up badly this time. They should be embarrassed!
The oxygen garden in "Sunshine"
For one thing, Boyle and Garland, neither of whom has ever had an original idea (not that this is a bad thing; it's OK to update and improve upon somebody else's original ideas), obviously lifted the garden-in-space from the the 1972 SF thriller "Silent Running," in which Bruce Dern works on a spaceship harboring Earth's last nature reserves. When he's ordered to jettison his beloved forests and return home, Dern mutinies and murders his fellow crew members. Come to think of it, the "Sunshine" garden is probably a Tarantino-esque homage to "Silent Running."*
A still from "Silent Running"
For another thing, who could possibly equate "Star Wars" with clean and rustless spacecraft? The design of science fiction movies was almost entirely sleek and streamlined until 1977, when the "used universe" of George Lucas's "Star Wars" gave us patched and recycled technologies and spaceships. Now everybody does it. I'm not claiming that Lucas was an original thinker, either. (He's proudly owned up to cobbling together the plot of "Star Wars" from the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa, the "Flash Gordon" serials, and Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces," not to mention Laurel and Hardy movies, Howard Hawks's "Red River," Tod Browning's "Freaks," you name it. And I've also heard that the lived-in, broken-down look of "Star Wars" was ripped off from "Valerian," the popular Franco-Belgian science-fiction comic first published in 1967.) But come on, Lane, do your homework!
OTHER STUFF I'VE WRITTEN ABOUT SCIENCE FICTION: "The Slacktivism of Richard Linklater" | "Black Iron Prison" | "Back to Utopia" | "In a Perfect World" | "Journeys to the Center" | "Climate of Fear" | "Pulp Affection"
* UPDATE: OK, it turns out I'm absolutely right, about Boyle's (self-confessed) lack of originality and also the "oxygen garden." I've just Googled "Danny Boyle" and "Silent Running" and came across the following exchange, from a July 16 interview in Sci Fi Weekly:
SFW: In a film like this you sort of almost necessarily find yourself repeating things that have been done before. There's always a mysterious signal, an emergency spacewalk, an explosive decompression. How do you make a movie like this without falling into a cliche?
BOYLE: I would say... you're right. There are a limited amount of things that you can do in these stories, and they do tend to resemble each other a bit.... We have this journey to the sun, which was the original thing which hasn't been done. Astonishingly, to our amazement we couldn't find [a film]. It hasn't really been done. And it seems like the most extraordinary journey you could ever make as a human being, you know, to travel to the source of life, really. And so you hope that that will give you enough to actually maintain the freshness of it, even if some of the ingredients that you come across during it inevitably are familiar. Like what you said, an emergency decompression of the ship.... There are similarities to other films, for sure.
SFW: Was the 1972 Bruce Dern space movie 'Silent Running' one of your influences?
BOYLE: That's another one, yeah. That's obviously a big one, the oxygen garden and everything. That kind of stuff.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Thanks, Boing Boing and Edward Champion, for linking to this post! And thanks, Boing Boing and Edward Champion readers, for alerting me about anything else Lane screwed up in his review, or about other examples of movie gardens-on-spaceships, or other "used universe" precursors.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 09:28 AM
August 1, 2007
Sao Paulo, July 18, 2007
"Slow down, slow down, slow down!"
"I can't, I can't!"
"Turn, turn, turn! Oh no!"
At a congressional hearing in Brazil today, the transcript of pilots' final exchanges before a commercial jet overshot the runway at Sao Paulo's Congonhas airport in July, hit buildings, and exploded -- killing some 200 people -- was read into the record. That's an excerpt from the transcript, above.*
Safety investigators have already recovered the jet's cockpit voice recorder (CVR), which is where the transcript comes from, and presumably they are also carefully studying another "black box," too: the jet's flight data recorder (FDR), which records the operating data from a plane's systems, via sensors wired to switches in the cockpit, among other places.
OK, my grasp on the technology of FDRs is shaky. But now I've got an angle on black-box theory, thanks to "Babbage's Apparatus: Toward an Archaeology of the Black Box," an essay in the current issue of Grey Room, a quarterly journal devoted to the theorization of modern and contemporary architecture, art, media, and politics.
According to Greg Siegel, an assistant professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara, the black box has its origins in a "self-registering apparatus" for railroad trains -- a steampunk FDR, if you will, that made use of self-inking pens connected mechanically to different parts of a railway carriage, a spring-driven clock, and a thousand-foot-long roll of paper.
The apparatus was dreamed up in 1839 by the English mathematician/engineer Charles Babbage (one of the great ancestral figures of computing) in order to provide railways with "incorruptible witnesses of the immediate antecedents of any catastrophe." If the train crashed, that is, one could discern from Babbage's apparatus the train's rate of speed and force of traction, not to mention "vertical, lateral, and terminal vibrations."
Like a safety inspector poring over a downed jet's black box, Siegel interrogates Babbage's apparatus -- which wasn't put into use, incidentally, for over a century -- until it spills the beans. What does Siegel discover? Transportation-data recorders, past and present, are tools employed by a sinister-sounding "forensic-scientific rationality and imaginary" in order to "render visible, analyzable, and explicable the physical dynamics of inauspicious chance, to fix the forces of ruinous contingency...."
In other words, those of us who might be inclined to see plane and train crashes as evidence that the "normative rationality" that's made our industrialized, capitalist social order possible is not flawless (and therefore not natural, inevitable, eternal) are reassured -- again and again -- by black boxes, whose very existence is a declaration that normative rationality will surmount every disruption. So... back to business as usual! Nothing to see here, people.
This may also explain why we morbidly enjoy reading CVR transcripts. The very fact that we can find out what the pilots' last words were ("Oh no!") reassures us that there's nothing scary about flying -- and, by extension, our accelerated modern life.
* As of this writing, nobody is saying exactly what went wrong, but according to my friend Patrick Smith, a Somerville-based commercial pilot who writes Salon's popular "Ask the Pilot" column, the problem may have had something to do with the smooth runways at Congonhas.
"Most runways are laterally cut by thousands of evenly spaced grooves, which help drain water and improve traction," Smith explained in a recent column. But Congonhas's runways are smooth, for some reason, so there's a substantially increased danger of hydroplaning. Add in a mechanical failure of some kind -- apparently the jet's thrust reverser was disabled, or an engine throttle was in the wrong position -- and you've got a recipe for disaster.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 09:06 PM
August 1, 2007
There's a funny juxtaposition of images in the first page of a Boston.com photo gallery of "secret spaces" in the Boston area. The pair of images seems to suggest (to me, anyway) that there's a fabulous stained-glass mapparium inside the State House dome. Check it out:
How great would that be?
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:54 PM
August 1, 2007
"What is the latest -- i.e., most recent -- example you know of an academic's first book where, in the acknowledgments, the author thanks his wife ... for typing and retyping the manuscript with great patience, forbearance, accuracy, and so on?"
Kieran Healy, an assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona, asked this question on Sunday at the scholarly group blog Crooked Timber, where he is a regular contributor. Why did he ask?
Because until recently, according to Healy, a "busily typing wife" was a fixture in the acknowledgments to academics' first books. "But no longer. How precisely, I wonder, can her extinction be dated?"
Typing wives still existed a decade ago, noted one Crooked Timber reader, pointing to the acknowledgments of "Measure Theory," a 1997 analysis and probability theory textbook by Donald L. Cohen. ("Finally, I thank my wife, Linda, for typing and providing editorial advice on the manuscript, for helping with the proofreading," etc.)
Nobody, so far, has spotted any post-1997 typing wives. But one reader has reported a sighting (from the acknowledgments of a 2001 book titled "Through the Eyes of Innocents: Children Witness of World War II") of that rarest of rare birds: the typing husband.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 01:44 PM
July 31, 2007
Brainiac readers are already familiar with the essays and criticism of Scott McLemee, who writes the Intellectual Affairs column for Inside Higher Ed, and who blogs at Quick Study, Crooked Timber, and Cliopatria. But what does he look like, you ask? If he were a "Simpsons" cartoon character, he claims, he'd look like this:
.PNG)
And if McLemee were a "South Park" character? He says he'd look like this:
Aren't you glad you asked? Now if we could just find out what he'd look like if he were a "Krazy Kat" character, we'd be in business.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:59 PM
July 30, 2007
Ed Champion, whose blog Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant was prominently mentioned in an Ideas essay about literary blogging and America's literary culture yesterday, has the following to say about the Swedish director, who died today at 89.
Bergman was as literary a filmmaker as you could get -- the likes of which we won't see again for some time. It is as if Ibsen or Strindberg has died. And his absence leaves a staggering void that not even twenty filmmakers could fill.
The publicity photo, above, from Bergman's "Persona," was a favorite at the offices of Hermenaut, a journal I used to publish. Once, we even hired two young women who were near-identical twins to recreate this shot for a Hermenaut publicity photo.
We weren't mocking Bergman, though, despite the fact that his brand of anguished existentialism -- on display in "The Seventh Seal," "Wild Strawberries," and "The Virgin Spring," for example -- went out of fashion around the time the Beatles recorded "Sgt. Pepper." In the spirit of Woody Allen, whose movies often pay tribute to Bergman's talent and vision while simultaneously signaling an ironic distance from Bergman's concerns, our "Persona" gag was the kind of mixed message that we soulful, engagé postmodernists are forced -- like it or not -- to send.
Farväl, Ingmar!
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 01:10 PM
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