So once again, here’s the current primary-source list for my post-apocalyptic and dystopian novels course (now titled “Coming of Age at the End of the World”). I dropped 1984, but reread The Giver this week — it really is the archetypal YA dystopian, Christ imagery and abrupt ending and all.

The Giver, Lois Lowry
Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban
The Knife of Never Letting Go, Patrick Ness
The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
Battle Royale, Koushun Takami (film)
Feed, M. T. Anderson
How I Live Now, Meg Rosoff
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
Moon, Duncan Jones (film)

I’m trying to nail down the book list so that I can submit it to the Wooster college bookstore, but I’m stuck on one final decision — whether to take out The Knife of Never Letting Go, which pairs with Riddley Walker, and swap The Parable of the Sower into its place. There are elements of TKoNLG that I’d really like to discuss, the book’s engagement with gender and masculinity being the most obvious, and I wish Parable were a little shorter (and better edited). But I think the scope of Butler’s book matches up better with the scope of Hoban’s, and I’m leaning toward including it instead. Thoughts? Opinions?

Really what I need is another month in the course so I could teach TKoNLG along with His Dark Materials (and not just because they both have knives in their titles).

This is possibly the best thing I’ve found on the internet lately, and I’m not even saying that because Alcestis is included in it: the Hipster Book Club’s holiday gift guide. Ten pages of quirky, funny book recommendations, with categories from “Geek Love” to “Ladies’ Choice” to “General Fiction.” If you want to buy books for people this holiday season but you haven’t been satisfied by the best of lists at the Times and etc., go here. You will find things to give, and you will also add many things to your own to-be-read list.

In other book news, Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden has been adapted for the screen — this interview with the screenwriter dances delicately around the question of how to adapt the work’s sex scenes, and in fact the whole relationship between the main character and his wife, given what it has been taken to suggest about Hemingway’s own relationships with women.

Speaking of adaptation: I’m not even much of a Sherlock fan, and Graham Moore’s The Sherlockian sounds like great fun.

And finally, if you need something pretty to look at, here’s the trailer for Terrence Malick’s next movie, The Tree of Life. It looks… exactly like a Terrence Malick movie. Which is more than I can say for most films.

On Twitter today, I saw an approving link to Alexis Madrigal’s response to Zadie Smith’s fine essay on Facebook and The Social Network (which I wrote about a little while ago). The title of Madrigal’s piece mentions literary writers and social media, and I’m always up for thinky writing about those things, so I spent some time reading it tonight when I really ought to have been dissertating. There are some assertions in the first part of the essay I disagree with, such as:

When professional writers, especially ones trained in the literary arts, see horrifically bad writing online, they recoil. All their training about the value of diverse (or, you know, heteroglossic) societies and the equality of classes goes flying out the window.

I’d like to see some evidence in support of the breadth of this generalization, and I’m not sure I agree, either, with some of the ways that Madrigal characterizes Smith’s arguments. (There are a few comments on the essay that point out the fact that Smith was reviewing Lanier’s book, not just citing it a lot.) But still, interesting stuff.

Then I got to the middle of the essay, and my head kind of exploded.

This middle section begins with a reasonable-sounding statement about the effects of fame on the way people engage with online communities:

Last idea: Smith is a celebrity, so she can’t and won’t ever have a normal social media presence. She could never just start a Twitter feed to post links to random stuff, nor a Facebook page where she receives updates on her niece. For example, this is what she wonders about the future Internet.

“Maybe it will be like an intensified version of the Internet I already live in, where ads for dental services stalk me from pillar to post and I am continually urged to buy my own books.” [in Madrigal's post, the last phrase of this is italicized]

I don’t quite buy the main claim Madrigal’s making here — of course a celebrity’s non-anonymous experiences on the internet will differ from the average person’s, but celebrities can still create anonymous Twitter accounts, or use their own named accounts, say, the way Margaret Atwood uses hers (mostly to post links to random stuff, in fact).  Still, fair enough — the quote from Smith’s essay shows that her experience of the internet is influenced by her literary fame.

Then Madrigal begins describing his own memories of Smith’s physical presence. Apparently he was a student of hers, and wants to reminisce at length about the effect her physical presence had on him (and his fellow college students, of course):

While other writing professors seemed to go out of their way to seem kind, Smith was detached and aloof. It made her almost impossibly attractive to the undergraduate population, male and female alike. She was a wonder. It is not surprising that she has to remain a mystery, lest the world drain her blood looking for her essence. We would shamble towards her — online or off — to feed. Her true location must remain secret.

I think that’s a key part of her negative experience of Facebook. She trailed her beauty and brilliance with her, and experienced Facebook with their full weight pressing on her fingers and behind her eyes. Yet, it is precisely in the uniqueness of her experience of Facebook that shows that her fears will not be realized.

I’m hoping this is tongue-in-cheek — the vampire/zombie metaphors must be, but the second paragraph seems entirely earnest. Tonally, it’s weird and frankly a little creepy, and it makes it hard for me to accept the reach for poeticism at the end of the essay. I was still stuck back in the middle of the piece, trapped with poor Zadie Smith and her shambling horde of admiring students, who speak with authority about how her aloof beauty must make her feel.

And here’s my main question: what, precisely, does the author’s memory of Smith’s ineffable allure have to do with Smith’s arguments about social media? She’s too beautiful and mysterious to interact with social media the way the rest of us do? It’s hard for her to reach the keyboard from all the way up there on that pedestal? Seriously?

I know the context is different, but I couldn’t help thinking of Kate Beaton’s recent request that (links go to a series of Twitter posts) fans stop expressing their appreciation for female comics creators by offering marriage, sexual favors, etc., even in jest. Her body/looks/femininity, she pointed out, have absolutely nothing to do with her talent as an artist, and there are plenty of lovely compliments fans could give that don’t figure her as a sexual object. Predictably, Beaton got a lot of heat from fans for making this request. Many of them seemed to assume that she didn’t understand that the fans offering to have her babies “weren’t serious” or were just trying to be nice. And while I could see how her response might have seemed like an overreaction if it were prompted by one compliment of that sort, I’m guessing it’s the accumulation and repetition that led her to speak up about it on Twitter, in hopes that fans would think about what compliments like that actually communicated to her and choose to say something else.

I wish Madrigal could have made a similar choice and responded to Smith’s essay — to her ideas — without bringing her, physically, into the argument.

Zadie Smith’s essay on The Social Network, Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg in the NYRB is smart, surprising, and well worth reading. Especially this bit, in which she speculates about Zuckerberg’s actual motivations (given that the invented dramatic motivations the film ascribes to him don’t seem very accurate):

Maybe it’s not mysterious and he’s just playing the long game, holding out: not a billion dollars but a hundred billion dollars. Or is it possible he just loves programming? No doubt the filmmakers considered this option, but you can see their dilemma: how to convey the pleasure of programming—if such a pleasure exists—in a way that is both cinematic and comprehensible? Movies are notoriously bad at showing the pleasures and rigors of art-making, even when the medium is familiar.

I’m not a programmer, though I’m hoping to teach myself some Ruby this year. But I’d love to see a movie that could actually depict the pleasures of programming. It doesn’t say much for Hollywood that the most earnest attempt at this so far was probably Hackers. (Wendell Pierce was in Hackers? Seriously? I must’ve been distracted by Angelina Jolie, though who wasn’t.)

But this part of Smith’s essay strikes the closest to home for me, at least, and perhaps for other people who live on the internet:

Shouldn’t we struggle against Facebook? Everything in it is reduced to the size of its founder. Blue, because it turns out Zuckerberg is red-green color-blind. “Blue is the richest color for me—I can see all of blue.” Poking, because that’s what shy boys do to girls they are scared to talk to. Preoccupied with personal trivia, because Mark Zuckerberg thinks the exchange of personal trivia is what “friendship” is. A Mark Zuckerberg Production indeed! We were going to live online. It was going to be extraordinary. Yet what kind of living is this? Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn’t it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?

I’ll admit to never having figured out how to use Facebook in a way that makes me happy. I’m on it, I get sent messages through it by friends who use it more than I do, and I’ve been added by a lot of people from my high school. My page is pretty spare and I don’t add a lot of personal information to it. I’m sort of glad it’s there, glad to be connected in that small way to people I haven’t seen for years. Every once in a while I go on and leave comments and look at other people’s photos, but I don’t live on it the way I know many of my students do. It’s not my home on the internet. (Oddly enough, I feel much more comfortable with Twitter, probably because it isn’t really a social network.) Then again, I haven’t deleted my page, either, or whatever not-quite-as-permanent equivalent of deletion Facebook allows these days. I guess I’m all right with continuing to drift in the Facebook exurbs.

More links:

• Heartening news from a school board election in Minneapolis (via Haddayr Copley-Woods).
• A fascinating interview with Audrey Niffenegger.

The last two weeks of the fiction class I’m teaching are essentially solid workshop. We’ve had a few breaks to discuss general questions about writing and one very good discussion about “Hills Like White Elephants” (including a bit of a digression re: absinthe, the legality and appeal thereof), but it’s almost all student fiction at this point. We have one week left and they’re going strong; I’m really pleased.

It’s strange to feel September coming and not be preparing to teach or take classes. I do have a couple of interviews in the works, so expect more Alcestis-related posts here soon. And, of course, I have links:

• An interview with Jeffrey Kurland, the costume designer for Inception.
• A promo site for Inception with a mock-up manual for the PASIV device used to sedate dreamers.
• One of the most bizarre things I’ve read in a while: an account of the oral history and mythology of South African prison gangs.
• A new book on surprising Greek and Roman cultural practices, including Alexander the Great’s request to be embalmed in honey after death.
• A historical mystery about the disappearance of Joseph Force Crater, a New York State Supreme Court judge, in 1930.

I went to see Inception for a second time, in an IMAX theatre. Several things happened:

• I enjoyed it more this time than the first time. It really is a lovely-looking movie.
• I got to hear an even larger audience of people sigh frustratedly in unison at the final scene. I still don’t get this, by the way — once you see the REDACTED SPOILER THING, how can you not know what Nolan is going to do with that scene?
• I traumatized myself by thinking about what it would be like to watch Mysterious Skin in IMAX. (Giant hands on Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s skinny chest!) We watched that for the first time this week, and I’ll admit that I don’t understand its good reviews, either, much as I adore JGL; talk about movies structured as if they’re setting up surprising reveals when they aren’t.

I still don’t think Inception is a perfect masterpiece or even much of a mystery, but I’ve enjoyed thinking about it. If you also enjoy thinking about it, you might be interested to know that Hans Zimmer’s score is based on a slowed-down sample of the Edith Piaf song that’s so important to the dreamers (via Merrie Haskell). This is extra interesting to me because the Crystal Castles song that I mentioned in my last Inception post — “Violent Dreams,” the one that Zimmer’s score reminded me of — is also based on a slowed-down sample of a different song (Stina Nordenstam’s “A Walk in the Park”), as I discovered when I was googling it after seeing the movie the first time. Intriguing that the auditory landscape of dreams is slowed-down music, and that somehow my brain recognized that before I knew that Zimmer’s score or the Crystal Castles song had used that technique.

Other interesting (and spoilery) Inception links: the one about Cobb’s wedding ring, and the one with a bingo card for Christopher Nolan movies.

This week, my students are workshopping their first pieces of fiction (and doing an excellent job of it). After a week and a half of class every day, I think we’re all starting to realize that an intensive summer fiction workshop will, in fact, be intensive. For all of us. But with judicious applications of cookies and porcupines that think they’re dogs, I think we’ll manage just fine.

Anyway, I’m afraid it’s links all the way down today:

• Via Gwynne Garfinkle, this recap of a Readercon panel about New England horror that I so wish I could’ve attended. Killingly is New England gothic, I think, rather than horror, but after reading The Passage I’m more willing to think of horror as something that sneaks into many other genres. (I don’t have a blog category for Killingly stuff! This must be remedied at once.)
• Fabulous illustrations of characters from The Wire (though Snoop’s the only woman represented so far; odd). I like Freamon’s the best, but then I usually like Freamon best. (Via David Schwartz on Twitter.)
• Susana Daniel’s essay in Slate about the purgatorial decade she spent writing and not writing her first novel.
• The most charming interview with Bill Murray, who rarely gives them. It concludes with the interviewer asking Murray about the rumor that he likes to sneak up behind people in NYC, cover their eyes with his hands, and ask, “Guess who?” Murray’s answer: “[long pause] I know. I know, I know, I know. I’ve heard about that from a lot of people. A lot of people. I don’t know what to say. There’s probably a really appropriate thing to say. Something exactly and just perfectly right. [long beat, and then he breaks into a huge grin] But by God, it sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Just so crazy and unlikely and unusual?”

My first week of teaching is over! Or sort of over — my students just turned in their first assignments, so I’ll be reading those this weekend. We spent most of this week reading and discussing published short fiction and we begin workshopping their own work on Monday.

I am very sleepy this morning, not least because T. talked me into attending the midnight showing of Inception with him on Thursday night. Vaguely spoilery reaction below — skip if you’re not into that kind of thing. Non-spoilery reaction: it’s fun and you should see it.

Beyond that, I think A. O. Scott’s review is right on:

… though there is a lot to see in “Inception,” there is nothing that counts as genuine vision. Mr. Nolan’s idea of the mind is too literal, too logical, too rule-bound to allow the full measure of madness — the risk of real confusion, of delirium, of ineffable ambiguity — that this subject requires. The unconscious, as Freud (and Hitchcock, and a lot of other great filmmakers) knew, is a supremely unruly place, a maze of inadmissible desires, scrambled secrets, jokes and fears. If Mr. Nolan can’t quite reach this place, that may be because his access is blocked by the very medium he deploys with such skill.

I had the same reaction to the movie that Scott did — I really enjoyed it and admired the caper-plot machinery, but I felt slightly unsatisfied at the end. I think the problem is that the plot is designed, like just about all of Nolan’s plots, to turn on a series of reveals. Except that these reveals aren’t really surprising. You can see them coming from at least a few minutes away, if not more. T. and I were both perplexed at the critical habit of describing the movie as confusing or hard to follow — it’s complex but incredibly regular, and I don’t think I ever got confused about what was happening or where/when the action was occurring. (Roger Ebert’s review, which is very positive and definitely worth reading, does this a bit; he also points out, interestingly, that Nolan was working on this script while he filmed Memento. [Obligatory mention here of how much I enjoy Ebert's Twitter feed, if you aren't familiar with it!])  I found The Prestige‘s reveals more satisfying, and its moral sense more resonant, too. You would think that a movie that is explicitly about the very foundations of reality would have higher stakes than a movie about magicians, but it seems to me that Nolan might be better at approaching ethical questions sideways rather than head-on. (Do not get me started about the question of ethics in relation to the dreadful The Dark Knight.)

The other weakness of the movie, for me, was the lack of development of the relationships among the characters, especially in comparison to the character-driven drama of The Prestige. This is maybe a flaw inherent in the caper plot, though I think even Ocean’s 11 did a better job of creating real people to fill out its team (and there were, as you’ll note, eleven of them). I liked all the team members just fine — I think I will always adore Joseph Gordon-Levitt, even though I couldn’t get through (500) Days of Summer — but their interactions are shallow. The movie also wastes a chance to do something really interesting, which I won’t discuss much here because it would be super-spoilery, by eliding one large chunk of time that would have allowed it to investigate the relationship between DiCaprio’s character and Watanabe’s character, and to be weirder. I liked Marion Cotillard a lot, which was a nice change from Public Enemies in which she just seemed like a pretty but bizarre casting choice and reminded me that I really do want to see her Piaf movie. (Okay, one spoilery side note regarding her character: Nolan is really obsessed with giving his main male characters idealized wives who died in ways they may be culpable for.) And the movie also made me want to look up a few of the other actors, especially Tom Hardy, who is delightfully smirky.

In sum: not perfect, but it is a gorgeous movie. It will make you clutch the arm of the person sitting next to you, and it may make you think about it after it’s over. And if you have a partner who likes Crystal Castles, you will definitely be unable to get this song out of your head after the movie, as it’s very like the movie score in some ways:

I’ve been trying all week to write a post about why the film versions of Twilight and Eclipse are kind of avant garde — notice I claim nothing of the sort for New Moon — but I just can’t seem to finish it up and post it. Can it be that I’ve hit my limit for dissecting the cultural phenomenon that is Twilight? Does Edward Cullen like to eat bears? (This is still the funniest thing about the Twilight universe, by FAR.) Actually, I’m almost tempted to read the remaining Twilight books — I’ve only read the first — so that I can see if this theory about the movies holds true for them, too. That just might be a ridiculous amount of preparation for writing a blog entry, though.

There are a few other reasons for my lack of follow-through:

1. Migraine, yargh.
2. Dissertation chapter: the one I am almost done with and really wanted to finish before Monday.
3. Teaching prep for my class that starts Monday (hence the diss chapter deadline).

In fact, I need to be finishing up the section on Martha Fowke Sansom’s Clio right now. Which means it’s time for a few links and a promise to be back soon with more substantive thoughts — possibly even more substantive thoughts on topics not related to vampires or YA! Well, maybe not that last bit.

Links!

• Kate Elliott is smart about genre boundaries.
• N. K. Jemisin is smart about worldbuilding.
• What happened at the Folger Library when the Durham First Folio was recovered. Short answer: wackiness.
• An 80s-style credits sequence for Firefly. Oh dear.
• A deservedly superlative review of Winter’s Bone, which is pretty amazing.

Today, found this lovely blog about period dramas (with which, as my Netflix queue would show you, I am totally obsessed). One of the entries on the front page at the moment is a review of Alejandro Aménabar’s Agora, a film about Hypatia, the Alexandrian scholar of mathematics, philosophy and astronomy murdered by a mob in 415 AD. (Click here for a great image of Aménabar directing Weisz. So cool to see Egyptian wall murals with the colors intact!)

Here’s the trailer, on YouTube:

I’m really looking forward to this film — and if you have other recommendations for good period dramas, do share?