The day we saved Awkwardness?

I received a follow-up e-mail from my publisher yesterday afternoon saying that the mass e-mail I’d received about pulping the excess U.S. stock of Awkwardness (along with other titles for which they had a lot of extra copies laying around) was inaccurate. They do periodically pulp excess stock, but the e-mail made it sound like an automatic process. In reality, they choose on a case-by-case basis, and I would imagine that thanks to the outpouring of support for Awkwardness — still available for sale, by the way (Amazon: US, UK; Book Depository)! — over the past couple days, it will most likely not be among those heading for the shredder. (For instance, I was checking the Amazon rankings every couple hours to get a feel for whether people were buying copies, and it appeared that Amazon received an additional shipment of copies in response to the number of purchases, i.e., it went from “only 2 copies available” to “only 19 copies available.”)

Thanks very much to all those who bought a copy and passed around my post.

How they actually should have ended House

I used to be a dedicated viewer of House. I wrote an article on House’s ethical stance, and he serves as my final and most redemptive example in Why We Love Sociopaths (which I feel obligated to remind you is available for sale). I stopped watching this season, though, and didn’t even watch the series finale (Wiki summary), which sounds like it was an utter abomination.

The writers have always been caught between two impulses. On the one hand, the “pure concept” of House is centered on his pathological enjoyment of medical puzzles. That’s what’s truly redemptive about the character. On the other hand, they seem to have wanted to give their audience some kind of “redemption narrative” where House winds up happy in some recognizable way. Sometimes it’s been a happiness of normality, sometimes a happiness of hedonism — but there’s always some perceived tension between the medical puzzles and “happiness.” They can’t choose in favor of “happiness” mid-series, because that would ruin the point of the show. In the finale, though, they made their choice: House has to give up his puzzles for happiness, which in this case apparently means spending as much time as possible with Wilson before he dies of cancer, after having faked his own death such that he can never practice medicine again. (Presumably this was their best option on the “happiness” side of the ledger since the contract dispute with Lisa Edelstein forced them to write Cuddy out of the show.)

Here’s how House would have ended if it had the courage of its convictions. We’d see House having a conversation with Wilson, where Wilson says something in the course of his amateur psychoanalysis that triggers a random realization for House. We see the look of satisfaction on House’s face as he abruptly turns to leave, and then — fade to black.

Your last chance? Awkward…

As near as I can tell, Awkwardness is on the verge of going out of print, at least in the US. I’ve been offered a 90% discount to buy as many copies as I want, after which they will be pulping the majority of the copies they have on hand. Presumably ebooks will be available forever, but on the off chance that you’ve been meaning to buy a copy and haven’t gotten around to it, you should probably do so now (Amazon: US, UK; Book Depository). (I don’t have plans to buy up substantial numbers to sell through the blog or anything, because I figure that is pretty well tapped out at this point.)

Spoiler Alert Thursday: Mad Men, Christmas Waltz

Wait, what?

Thoughts on Sergio Chejfec’s My Two Worlds

Rather than review Sergio Chejfec’s novel My Two Worlds, I want to reflect instead on who should read it.

Parks and long walks separate me from time and install me in a different dimension, an alternate one , obviously compatible with the true one, shall we say, or in any case, with the regular one, isolated and at times autonomous as it may be. (75-76)

First & foremost, they should be walkers, for whom each step taken is also one lost — a taking that makes no lasting claim & a loss that is never so final. Their destinations are familiar for their being so incomprehensibly foreign — for every recognition and remembrance they find, of which they try to take hold, proves eventually too heavy with significance, and slips the grip of its proper naming.

Generally, when I walk I look down. The ground is one of the most revealing indicators of the present condition; it is more eloquent in its damages, its deterioration, its unevenness, and irregularities of all sorts. I’m referring to urban as well as rural ground, difficult or congenial. And I’m specifically referring to the ground of paths, to ground altered by humans in general, because ground in the abstract, the ground of the world, speaks different, near-incomprehensible languages. (29)

Second & just as important, these readers should be sitters, who in arresting their forward motion detain, that is, somehow confine, the expansiveness of the moment — who, in those moments of cornering knowledge find themselves seized by a certain unknowing.

But what amazed me was that even though I could see them all on the far side of the fountain, beyond my companion and myself, I heard them as if their voices came from behind us, from where we were actually seated. Perhaps this was another effect of the place or, more precisely, of the mist created by the jets of water, which dissolved present time and distorted space; or it could have been a consequence of the symmetry. The present: until that afternoon I had rarely noticed the confused , and at times inconsistent, meaning of this word, to which we should add the sense of ambiguity it often possess. . . . (59-60)

Monday Movies Wishes We Had an AK-47

Roger Brown is a corporate headhunter with a penchant for interviewing his clients about their art collections and their dogs. Establishing an absence of the latter, he makes arrangements to send them on job interviews so he can steal the former. He’s good at it, though not as good as he thinks; the cautious criminal conceals a deeply insecure man, who believes he’s too short for his Scandinavian goddess wife, who will only stay with him so long as he can buy her baubles with his illicit heist windfalls.

For Roger, meeting Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who plays Jamie Lannister in Game of Thrones) comes as both opportunity and crisis.

I am Larry David: Gay Marriage and “Julia” Ad edition

I am so tired of talking about gay marriage.  Maybe it’s the crowds I surf, maybe I am a pretentious elitist with the luxury of thinking about such issues critically, maybe it’s the denominational identity I have chosen, maybe it’s the denominational heritage I have been forced out of and later abandoned myself.  But I’m so tired of the conversation.  So here I go again on it.

I was in Washington, DC, at the Children, Youth, and a New Kind of Christianity conference when President Obama announced his safe and disengenuous endorsement of gay marriage as a response to the North Carolina amendment passed just hours before.  There was an air of excitement around the conference, who were getting texts and tweets trickling in about the news on their $300 iPhones, and a few talks in the conference were on such radical ideas as acknowledging that gay people are in your community, and if they dare to show up in your church for some reason, you should welcome their children, etc.  Instead of peeing myself with excitement or sweating on the upper lip as these Reformed mainlers and wannabe hipster emergents were doing at the conference, I do what I always do, which is listen to the crazy people who host right-wing radio to hear what the Other Side is thinking, and the immediate response was “President Obama is making a non-issue an issue.  President Obama is using this issue as a smokescreen to avoid talking about his record.”  Is this really the best conservatives can come up with, to claim that the President keeps bringing the issue up while celebrating their own legislation being passed in North Carolina?

In the last couple of months I have been in some fairly involved conversations with church based or faith based groups about gay marriage.  People don’t believe me when I say that I am honestly tired of talking about it.  Folks think I have something to hide about it by just being tired of talking about it.  Yet here I am, to repeat, talking about it more.

Assymetrical warfare

As we’ve discussed before, I’m no expert in the practicalities of politics. Yet I find the response to the Occupy protests absolutely baffling, just on a practical level. The police are routinely responding as though the Occupy people are a guerilla group trying to stage a coup — and as though they have a better than even chance of succeeding if the police don’t put their all into the counter-attack.

It’s well known that people who are convinced they are in the right are strengthened in their convictions when they are persecuted. It’s also well known that the best way to pacify opposition is to give in to at least some demands. The Occupy movement famously doesn’t have any explicit demands, other than their implicit demand to be allowed to protest — so why not try to domesticate them by simply giving them a defined place where they’re allowed to have their encampment? Even as recently as the Iraq War, there were the officially sanctioned “free speech zones” that seemed to give people an adequate release valve to make them feel like they’d protested, after which the protest movement shrank to negligible proportions. Or if that doesn’t work, why not make some token gesture toward social justice — cutting the police budget by 1% and putting the money toward schools or something? Or in the extreme case, why not, you know, actually punish a particularly brutal perpetrator of police violence?

There are so many peaceful options here — why has the universal response been such hugely disproportionate and even ridiculous violence?

Zizek on Why We Love Sociopaths

Via @MrTeacup, I learned that Zizek recently concluded one of his public lectures with a summary and endorsement of my book Why We Love Sociopaths. You can watch it here (embedding is disabled, but the link skips straight to the revelant part).

This is obviously one of the coolest things that’s ever happened to me. And what better way to celebrate than to buy the book (Amazon: US, UK; Book Depository)?

What will we do with all those cows?

Whenever people discuss issues like vegetarianism, my tendency is always to think in terms of how one could systematize or universalize it. For instance, granted that veganism is the most desirable diet (due to environmental sustainability, ethical concerns, better health, or whatever other reason), what would it look like if we made it mandatory and redesigned the entire food production system around it?

The first question I have is what ideas people have put forth in terms of “winding down” animal domestication. For instance, there are some breeds of various domesticated animals that simply cannot survive in the wild — they’re bred to produce the maximum amount of meat or milk and they can’t do much else. Would they be subject to further breeding or genetic modification to make them viable in the wild, would that breed be allowed to die out, or what other solution would there be? Similarly, would it be a realistic goal for all of these breeds of animals to return to their pre-human forms and live in the wild, or would we instead be obligated to continue caring for them insofar as we in a certain way “created” them in their current form?

Many readers know much more about these topics and debates than me — what are the basic proposals out there, if any? Do any seem to you to be more workable, desirable, etc.?