Saturday Waffling (July 16th, 2016)
Well, history continues to happen and to be shit. So does editing and writing, though that’s less shit – the next Last War in Albion chapter is actually almost done with the main text. And I just got the last bit of copyediting back from Jane, so I can finish typesetting Volume 1.
Anyway, I mostly want to use today’s Waffling to plug Noah Berlatsky’s latest, an essay collection entitled Fecund Horror: Slashers, Rape/Revenge, Women in Prison, Zombies, and Other Exploitation Dreck. Noah’s a friend of the blog (we podcasted about Wonder Woman a bit ago) and one of the best critics out there, and I’ve been enjoying the hell out of the book, which takes the tired “trashy exploitation films have something interesting to say” angle and finds fresh new life in it, suggesting that the genre works by “looking wrong” at the world, and that this is a generative and, well, fecund angle to take. It’s a delightfully odd collection, hitting obvious things like I Spit On Your Grave and also totally weird things – the title essay culminates in an enthusiastic paen to the subversive potential of a piece of erotica about wasps that lay mind-controlling eggs in people’s brains. It’s on Amazon here, and worth a look if weird trashy cinema is your thing.
As for discussion, getting back to the appallingly rapid pace of history in 2016, in amidst all the news stories that are (deservedly) getting coverage like Brexit, Black Lives Matter, Trump, the Nice attacks, the coup attempt in Turkey, and whatever fucking awful thing has no doubt happened in the couple hours between my queuing this and it posting, what news are you wishing were getting more attention? What’s interesting and underdiscussed in the world?
July 16, 2016 @ 10:10 am
Net neutrality in Europe appears to not been discussed. Open letter from Tim Berners-Lee, Barbara Van Schewick & Larry Lessig, the public consultancy period ends July 18th.
http://webfoundation.org/2016/07/four-days-to-save-the-open-internet-in-europe-an-open-letter/
The Royal Society published a paper on cyber security, which given our new PM’s enthusiastic stance on surveillance in her former role more people should be aware of:
https://royalsociety.org/~/media/policy/projects/cybersecurity-research/cybersecurity-research-report.pdf
(but then again, they’re experts, so what do they know?)
July 16, 2016 @ 2:22 pm
In Indiana we now have two major candidates who have dropped out for a party replacement. Mike Pence (so he could be the VP pick) and Baron Hill (who dropped out so Evan Bayh could run again). Its strange to say the least, and a lot of people are wondering if their primaries even really mattered.
July 16, 2016 @ 3:42 pm
Climate change
July 16, 2016 @ 11:32 pm
Indeed. Slow and insidious, measures to stop it easily disrupted by political shenanigans. Tory party in UK looks like it’s heading further rightwards and hence may start winding back from Cameron’s position. US politics dominated by other issues – serious and immediate ones. World politics dominated by events in Middle East. Yet underneath it climate change is still going on and 2016 likely to be another record year.
https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2016/07/16/trying-not-to-forget-climate-change-amid-the-chaos-of-2016/
July 17, 2016 @ 8:18 am
Whilst certainly not on the scale of the traumatic events that have been engulfing the rest of the world, I’ve been mainly interested in the world of Australian politics. We’ve just had an election, where the ruling Liberal-National coalition, led by Malcolm Turnbull, (a generally centre-right party that occasionally threatens to go full right wing) just managed to eke out a slender victory after a vast array of gaffes, mainly related to the fact that their leader was Tony Abbott for far too long a time. Where this gets interesting, however, is that they have now completely lost control of the upper house of the Australian parliament, meaning that to get any meaningful things done, they’ll have to negotiate with either the opposition Labor Party, the Australian Greens, or a combination of independents including the One Nation party, which is about as right wing and nationalistic as the name suggests. Combining the already tense situation with the fact that certain hard right members of the Liberal party are constantly threatening to resign, over claims that the party’s not right wing enough for them, and it’s looking likely that we’re in for a very interesting couple of years over the next Australian parliament.
July 17, 2016 @ 1:51 pm
May we live in interesting times…. like the next three years!
July 17, 2016 @ 1:52 pm
That was supposed to be a reply to Tom Bowyer