blacksundae

Mother Jones:

There is perhaps no more fitting backdrop for a production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot—whose main characters, Didi and Gogo, spend two acts waiting for a man who never arrives—than New Orleans, where some residents died waiting for rescue after Katrina struck and others still have yet to see their neighborhoods rebuilt.

Earlier this month, the Classical Theatre of Harlem, together with Creative Time, a New York-based art collective, wrapped up a two-week run of Beckett’s most renowned work with a final production in the Gentilly neighborhood. The play’s organizers had to turn people away the weekend before, when Didi and Gogo did their waiting in the still-decimated Lower Ninth Ward.

Read on. [via MeFi]

AP:

A Roman Catholic school board in Ontario ordered the popular fantasy book “The Golden Compass” taken off library shelves at dozens of schools Thursday after receiving a complaint about the author referring to himself as an atheist.

Similar concerns prompted a Catholic organization in the U.S. to urge parents to boycott a movie version of the book starring Nicole Kidman.

The board for Catholic schools in Ontario’s Halton region said a complaint was lodged after British author Philip Pullman stated in an interview that he is an atheist.

Read on. Notice the book, which is at the very least dismissive of Christianity, doesn’t seem to be an issue here. Publically saying that you are an atheist is enough to get your book pulled from shelves. I expect better from the Canadians.

In the U.S., the Catholic League has criticized Pullman’s trilogy for bashing Christianity and promoting atheism.

Shocking! Disgusting! How dare a book advocate a philosphical position! Next I bet Pullman will invade foreign lands and force the people there to “convert” to atheism at the end of a sword.

The New York Magazine “Vulture” Blog has a review:

In transforming the 338-word story of Where the Wild Things Are into a 111-page screenplay, Eggers and Jonze have fleshed out the story not, unexpectedly, with wild plot developments, and not, thankfully, with densely packed pop-fiction references. Instead Where the Wild Things Are is filled with richly imagined psychological detail, and the screenplay for this live-action film simply becomes a longer and more moving version of what Maurice Sendak’s book has always been at heart: a book about a lonely boy leaving the emotional terrain of boyhood behind.

Read on. [via Kottke]

Dinesh D’Souza and William Gibson on the same shelf at Longs.

The Prague Post:

Made of the skins of about 160 animals — some say donkeys, others say calves — the manuscript measures a king-size 90 x 50 x 22 centimeters (roughly 36 x 20 x 9 inches) and weighs 75 kilos (165 pounds), requiring two people to lift it.

According to the National Library’s Web site (www.nkp.cz), legend holds that a monk was sentenced to be buried alive for a breach in Benedictine conduct. In order to forgo his punishment, he agreed to make the most magnificent book the world had ever seen in honor of his brotherhood. The catch was that he was given just one night to complete this Herculean task.

Around midnight, the monk realized he would not be able to finish by daylight, so he invoked the devil to help him, selling his soul in the process. As a tribute to his helper, the monk included a quirky image of the devil within the manuscript, thus giving the book its nickname.

The real story of the Codex Gigas is not fully known, but no less intriguing.

Read on. This is via an excelent MetaFilter post that also includes a link to high-res images of the book in its entirety.

Some say donkey, some say calves… I say, “Bound in human flesh and inked in human blood.”

Geoff Ryman:

We want FTL interstellar travel with no more inconvenience than a tour of duty on an aircraft carrier. Mom can ring us up from 30,000 light years away to have a real-time conversation about why we haven’t married yet. She’s still alive when we get back home. Everything is recognizable, comfortable. In Star Trek, we get to the stars without having to change.

Mass market SF doesn’t imagine how different interstellar flight will make us. And I don’t mean the usual posthuman stuff. I mean different culturally. I mean getting back home to find 200 years have passed and that everything we loved and believed in is gone. Yes, some SF has done just that, notably The Forever War. So why isn’t the space pilot coming back from the distant past an SF stereotype? Answer: because that’s not what the SF wants.

Big SF, the stuff that sells hugely or is found in movies, is not really about the future; we know that. It’s also not about the present, though that’s our excuse when people point out that SF couldn’t predict its way of a public restroom. SF, especially mainstream commercial SF, copies the past onto the future, to make it comfortably entertaining. The future will be just like the more exciting parts of the past only with better toys. Perhaps that’s because so many people now fear the future, rather than welcome it as a wonderland of possibility.

So I wrote a jokey Mundane Manifesto. It said let’s play this serious game. Let’s agree: no FTL, no FTL communications, no time travel, no aliens in the flesh, no immortality, no telepathy, no parallel universe, no magic wands. Let’s see if something new comes out of it.

Read on. It’s an interesting speech, although I disagree with him on the value of interstellar travel, and his last line destroys whatever chance he had of getting across to his target audience. Anyway, it’s basically Dogme 95 for SF lit. Not necessarily my cup of tea, but food for thought. [via Futurismic]

UPDATE: I cross-posted this to MetaFilter, and it led to a really wonderful discussion. Be sure to check it out.

The code is cracked.

And for anyone who thought a simple message was being transmitted by the rotating disks atop the Adobe tower in downtown San Jose, boy, were you wrong.

The message of San Jose Semaphore is the entire text of the Thomas Pynchon book, “The Crying of Lot 49.”

Read on. [via]

The New Orleans Public Library now offers downloads of audiobooks and eBooks, via OverDrive, which apparently has library “partners” from New York to Los Angeles. Download stuff from NOPL here, if you have an NOPL library card. This is apparently funded by the New Orleans Public Library Foundation, according to a nola.com blog post.

One of the drawbacks? Not for iPod. Per OverDrive:

Our audio titles use Windows Media DRM copyright protection technology from Microsoft Corporation. Unfortunately the iPod does not currently support copyright-protected Windows Media Audio (.wma) and video (.wmv) files. OverDrive, along with hundreds of online music and audio book providers, is hopeful that Apple and Microsoft can reach an agreement that would enable support for Microsoft-based copyright-protected materials on the iPod. To repeat, OverDrive would love nothing more than to provide content for your iPod. We urge you to contact Apple and request that they open the iPod to other copy-protected formats or license their propriety copy-protection method to third-party vendors.

Now, I’m bored to exhaustion by the whole DRM issue, so I’ve lost track of whether this falls under “it’s Steve’s fault” or “it’s the (rest of the) establishment’s fault.” I do know, however, that the whole Greater New Orleans FreeNet / NOPL on-line history starting in the early 1990s has been of hard core digi-nerds who had to be hauled kicking and screaming into the Windows era, for chrissakes, and who wouldn’t be caught dead writing any code that might be readable by an Apple product.

My only coherent thought about this is that perhaps one of NOPL’s branches with its own independent Web site could provide, if only through a raw link, access to one or more of the free audiobook services… which are compatible with that obscure “iPod” device.

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!*

I’m not sure what to think about J.J. Abrams’ new mystery project, code-named Cloverfield, or 01-18-08 after the presumed release date. The trailer is pretty neat, and I’m always in favor of a new horror/SF/monster flick, but the whole viral marketing thing is really starting to piss me off. Don’t give me fake Japanese juice companies, give me a fucking title!

Anyway, according to a friend of mine, the scuttlebutt in the effects industry is that Cloverfield is actually about the rise of Cthulhu! Evidently the release date is important in the Lovecraft Mythos. Don’t ask me. I haven’t read “Call of Cthulhu” in years, but consider me interested. I’m late to the party on this, and it’s very likely bullshit, but nothing gets me more giggly than the idea of a big budget Lovecraft film.

*Man, I wish Cthuvian words were acceptable in Scrabble.

Farah Mendlesohn gave me her new SF anthology, and I’m wondering what to send her in return when she’s hauled away to the Tower of London. A loaf of dwarf bread with a file in it, perhaps. To think that this self-confessed criminal once lived just up the road from Langford HQ in Reading!

Farah’s book, with a suicide-belted superhero on the cover, is called Glorifying Terrorism (http://rackstrawpress.nfshost.com). It plays the dangerous game of mocking our political masters for creating another lunatic thoughtcrime with the 2006 Terrorism Act.

Read on. See also:

With international terrorist networks still in the news, it’s worth remembering that SF is full of dubious bomb-throwing characters — often presented as heroes. Shocking! Which recently reissued favourites will be banned when the Home Secretary gets around to removing our remaining civil liberties?

For example, Gully Foyle in Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination chucks a home-made bomb at the docked spaceship Vorga, for passing him by when he was marooned in space. However, Foyle soon realizes his revenge should be against the Vorga officers who gave and obeyed the fatal command, and he abandons bombs in favour of conventional murder, rape and torture. “Not really our problem, then,” said an anti-terrorist spokesman.

[via Making Light]