The Propaganda Remix Project.  Some of these are fantastic.

Spent much of yesterday re-reading Philip K. Dick‘s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—though I was re-reading it in this groovy mass-market edition with the fabulous movie tie-in cover art, which is so thoroughly tied into the movie that the title has in fact been changed to Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick).  Love those parentheses.

There’s been all kinds of analysis done on the film’s melding of past and future—a post-apocalyptic L.A. dressed up in 1940s clothing, a sort of noir-punk aesthetic.  But the passage of time has done something weirdly similar to the book, I think, which is set in what is now our too-near future (2021, to be exact) but deeply trapped in the ethos of the 1950s.  Much of this time-disjuncture revolves around the workings of the offices of the future.  One can hardly fault Dick for having failed to imagine the ways that the computer would transform the workplace of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but for a moment so filled with revolutionary possibilities as the late 1960s were, Dick betrays a surprising lack of imagination about the office politics of the future.  Sure, Deckard getting his predecessor’s notes on the andys he’s hunting on “carbon flimsies” surprised me for a moment, but I was even more taken aback to rediscover that the San Francisco police department’s second-string bounty hunter has his own secretary.  Who’s an incorrigible gossip.  Who refers to him as “Mr. Deckard.” Who places his vidphone calls for him.  I kept half-expecting him to take a client out for a three-martini lunch and then phone to let the wife know he’d be bringing the chief home for dinner.

The whole weird office-politics thing began to make a little more sense for me, though, when I found this audiobook version, read by Matthew Modine and Calista Flockhart.  What makes that make sense, I’m not sure.  But a universe that contains both Dick and Ally McBeal seems at least internally coherent.

It’s the first day of classes here at the College Just South of the Hill, and we’re all settling down with piles of books and crisp new notebooks.  I’m hoping, this semester, to get some mileage out of those classes here in the land of Obsolescence; you can keep up with the readings yourself by checking out the Academic Belatedness link over there on the right.

So the good news is that we’ve got a clean slate, a new semester, and we’re all pretty caffeinated and rarin’ to go.  The downside, however, is that for the foreseeable future, all the reading I’m going to be doing will be re-reading.  Honestly, when folks hear I teach contemporary fiction, they inevitably ask me whether I’ve read something I invariably haven’t, because they just don’t realize that I spend the bulk of my career reading the same 50 books over and over and over.  (And over.)

This re-reading feels like a particular loss right now, as I’ve spent the last couple of months both catching up on some things that came out last year and even reading a few things that have yet to be released.  One will hit the shelves tomorrow, as it turns out.  One will be released next month.  One not until April.  I’ve resisted writing about them to this point, being uncertain about the possible reviewerly embargoes on the texts.  For the moment, however, I’ll bid my new reading adieu by making these few (ever-so-veiled) comments:

Each is in differing respects a departure from the novelist’s earlier work.

One brings to fruition two strains visible in the background of much of that earlier work, resulting in a novel of a scope and a sensitivity and a lyricism that one might be tempted to call transcendent.

One shows its author leaving aside the whiz-bang concerns of the past—or the future—in favor of a real engagement with the present.

One recapitulates the process of its author’s career, redeploying many of his earlier work’s set pieces and tropes, but does so with the effect of dismantling that earlier work, suggesting the very different world we live in now.

Why doesn’t Booknotes sound more like this?  (Via Bookslut.)

[UPDATE:  Crap.  And here I thought I was asking a question that was snarky but at least original.  Note to self:  read all the way to end of blog entry before blogging in.]

Or, why the Democrats keep shifting rightward in defiance of Marxist theory.  With pointed analysis from “the sociologist Jennifer Lopez.” (Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

I have in the last few days finished reading Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory, and find myself itching to talk about it.  This deeply demented little novel was published nearly 20 years ago, but just fell into my path recently.  I need advice from Banks fans—where to from here?

I’m also sort of wondering whether I’m a complete idiot for not having seen the ending coming.  I mean, I knew something was up—it was all just a little too pointedly odd—but I didn’t know what.  And once I read the end, it all seemed so obvious that I was stunned I hadn’t been painfully aware of the truth about Frank all along.

For those of you who haven’t read the novel, I’m working really hard here on not giving it away.  But go read it, quick, and come back and talk to me.  I’ll be waiting.

Am happily running the public beta of Apple’s very own browser, Safari.  It’s got that groovy brushed-metal iInterface that grace all the hippest iApps, even despite its absence of iNess. It’s light-years faster than IE5, which was released for the Mac approximately a decade ago.  And—as open-source supportive as I am—it’s far less clunky than Mozilla.  Plus, did I mention its brushed-metal interface?

I am, however, reserving judgment on Apple’s release of Keynote, the presentation software announced, in a head-spinning display of self-reflexivity, in Steve Jobs’s MacWorld keynote yesterday.  On the one hand, if one must do presentations accompanied by what we used to call “visual aids,” how much better to create them in an environment not engineered by the Dark Side.  On the other hand, what the world needs now is not a happily Apple-y PowerPoint, but less PowerPoint.  Somebody, please, persuade me that Keynote will be a force for good in this world.

William Gibson has a blog.

*Salza, Giuseppe.  “Interview with William Gibson.”

2002 ended with a lurch:  My flight back west was hung up in Houston for 3 hours due to storms, and so arrived at 1:15 am on December 31, rather than 10:15 pm, Dec. 30.  Waited for suitcase, grabbed cab, gave directions to difficult-to-find residence.  Which was suspiciously dark.  The short of it:  construction work necessitating the turning-off of electrical power, which I’d assured would be done no later than 4 pm, Dec. 30, was not done.  I was powerless.

So:  it was late, I was exhausted, and the best option seemed to feel one’s way bedward and collapse therein, and sort out the pieces by the light of the too-soon rising sun.

Except:  the smoke detector above that bed, disconcerted by the lack of power running to it, was beeping.  Loudly.  Once a minute.  Loudly and invisibly, and neck-breakingly overhead.

So:  plan B.  Feel one’s way downstairs, rifle through one’s suitcase for toiletry kit and pajamas, and drive to hotel for night.

Except:  the car remained in a parking lot on the south end of campus, whence I drove to meet the airport shuttle at 4 am, Dec. 18.

So:  2 am, Dec. 31, walk across deserted campus to car, drive to hotel, check in and get blissful night’s sleep.

Except:  hotel’s computer system was down, necessitating a 15 to 30 minute wait in the lobby for a room, and the use of one’s full faculties to avoid bursting into exhausted and defeated tears.

So:  finally got room, presented hotel bill to maintenance on return to campus, was gratified to find power was finally restored, spent very subdued New Year’s Eve over great Thai dinner, cheap champagne, and Dick Clark, before returning home to collapse exhaustedly into one’s own silent bed.

Except:  power outage resulted somehow in shut-down of hot water heater.

I give.  Here’s wishing everyone a peaceful, silent, well-lit, and warm 2003.