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Tron Dog (A Delightful Thing!)

I’m in the midst a pretty crazy week.  Deadlines galore!  Not sure if there’s time for actual writing, but I always have time to share delightful stuff.  Like Tron Dog.

Tron Dog by Julia Segal - juliasegal.tumblr.com

The link.

It’s 2010 and I’m Still Not Vacationing on the Moon

This Slate article about Omni magazine reminded me of just how influential that publication was to me as a kid.  Along with this 1982 book, The Kids’ Whole Future Catalog, which I used to read and read and re-read, Omni inspired my pre-tween dreams about the future, and helped to offset my anxieties about nuclear war.  (I grew up in the shadow of NORAD and Cheyenne Mountain, so I spent a pretty unhealthy chunk of time calculating my survival odds after seeing The Day After on television.)  Robots, space vacations, and technological solutions to poverty and inequality: these were the subjects of my dreams about 2010.  It’s a year laden with so much sci-fi meaning.  This is the year we’re supposed to make contact, yo.

Being a few days away from 2010 feels all sorts of mixed up.  Our dreams of the future from twenty years ago just seem really silly now, even as I think many of us are actually pretty disappointed (if not because we don’t have robot housecleaners than because we still – unbelievably – haven’t prioritized finding and implementing solutions to things like poverty and climate change).  And yet, this ever-increasing digital world we are living in feels pretty dang amazing. So, at the end of this year, I’m thinking a lot about past-future hopes, present disappointments, and the magic of my lived reality.

Compounding all of this is a general feeling of elation that we’re leaving behind the aughts, or the zips, or the zeroes, or whatever we want to call this last decade.  Yes, I know that the new decade won’t officially start until 2011.  But I don’t really want to slog through another year of the 2000s.  Most people I know don’t really want to, either.   (Some of my friends have, in fact, declared the 2000s The Worst Decade Ever, although I don’t feel entitled to make that judgement.)  The catalog of horrors feels almost endless: Bush, 9-11, evangelicalism, torture, class divisions, the worsening state of public education, wars on two fronts, the swelling of the prison population, natural disasters exacerbated by climate issues… Blarg, blarg, blarg, and BLARG.  When I stood on the National Mall and watched Barack Obama deliver his inaugural speech at the beginning of this year, I experienced as much relief as I did hope.  Finally, it seemed, someone had the courage to tell us that there are no good and fast answers to our problems, but that it is our job to undertake the difficult task of making meaningful change, anyway.  That commitment is what really gives me hope, after all.

So as much as I don’t have dreams anymore about my life on Saturn (yes, it has rings, so it MUST be the best planet), I also don’t have any illusions that life in this new decade will be that much easier or better.  As Buckaroo Banzai, that pivotal figure from the world of early 1980s cult sci-fi said, “No matter where you go, there you are.”

So here we are.  And it feels good to hit the reset button (even symbolically) and start a new decade (even if it’s not really) and get started with the hard work of reinventing our present and re-imagining our future.  I’m elated about this!  And I hope you are, too.  So let’s make and achieve some big goals, and let’s do some real good in the universe.

Happy New Year, readers and friends!

In 2009: Many Syllables, Many Sparks

I’m lucky to have two great book clubs in my life that prompt me to read a couple of novels every month.  (Even though I love to read, I get busy and brainfried and often find myself diving for a DVD before a book at the end of a long day.  So I’m grateful for a happy accountability to book club discussions.)  I find equal pleasure in Good Books and airy treasures that remind me why I fell in love with reading in the first place.  It’s so good, this reading.  So in the the spirit of all the (slightly obnoxious but addictive) year-end listmaking, I thought I would make a few notes about what I loved reading this year.

Without a doubt, the best new(ish) book I read this year was Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen.  It’s rather an understatement to say that I was impressed and moved by this novel, which is a meditation on time, identity and love, all wrapped up in meteorology, and written by a woman of about my age.  (And that summary doesn’t really do justice to the novel.  Please just read it.)  I experienced a similar intellectual reaction to I am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett.  These two books practically had me hopping around my apartment with hooray to talk about them.

I added a bunch of novels to my “I Can’t Believe It’s Taken Me So Long To Read This Incredible Thing” list: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon; Watership Down by Richard Adams (okay, so it doesn’t quite qualify as “incredible,” but it did make me think big thoughts about rabbits,  John Hurt, and Bunnies & Burrows all Spring); and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith.  I was especially taken with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, not just because it’s one of the best coming-of-age stories I’ve ever read, but also because I live in Williamsburg and it was delightful to re-imagine my familiar blocks in Smith’s turn-of-the-century story.

In the  sci-fi universe, I finally got around to reading Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which made me give a cosmic, jovial punch in the arm to hard science fiction.  I normally steer clear of you, classic hard sci-fi, but this novel was a surprisingly charming and humane representative.  It was a year of re-reading in sci-fi, too.  I took a second look at Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, appreciating all the more how it anticipated so much of our modern social media world, and I spent a few good days re-visiting The Female Man by Joanna Russ.  I read and wrote about The Female Man in my teens, and finishing the book for the first time was the moment when I decided (even though I’d been deciding all along) that I was a feminist (in fact, that I had to be a feminist).  Reading it twenty years later, it’s not quite as revolutionary, but it has become more revelatory for me.  In the new weird universe, Brian Francis Slattery’s Liberation killed me with awesome both times I read it this year.

I spent a fair bit of time with short stories this year, too.  Belle Boggs’ “Homecoming“ was a stand-out among contemporary selections.  Shirley Jackson’s “The Summer People” is a rad, economical little story that reminded me 1.) of why I should never stay on in a vacation town after Labor Day, and 2.) why Shirley Jackson does creepyawesome like no other author.  And I think that E. M. Forster’s 1909 story “The Machine Stops“ actually flabbergasted me with its vision about the role of technology in the future (despite its dystopian-as-all-heck outlook, it’s fairly spot-on in a lot of ways about the way we are living our lives right now).

And (of course, of course) there are more!  But I’m really interested in what you’ve read this past year, and what you think I should be reading in the next.

Please comment or drop me a line with some suggestions, dear readers!

Oh, and I’ve included a bonus book club PowerPoint presentation after the jump, too, if you’re interested… ok

Women, Boldly Going Nowhere: The Remasculinization of Star Trek

Star Trek, which is being released on DVD and Blu-Ray today, was an official sponsor of Sunday Night Football this past weekend.  E. was watching the game, and I was putzing around online, but when we heard that official endorsement, we both stopped and said, “Whoah!”

Star Trek sponsoring the NFL.  It looks like J. J. Abrams’ re-branding of the science fiction franchise is complete.  Star Trek has been remasculinized.  It’s too bad that women lose out in the bargain.

(Minor spoilers ahead.)

ok