...genre fiction doesn’t exist in contradistinction to literature merely because of stale language, secondhand insights, or hackneyed plots. The larger difference is a failure or—less judgmentally—a simple setting-aside of the moral imagination. The literary novel illuminates moral problems (including sometimes those that are also political problems) at the expense of sentimental consolation, while genre fiction typically offers consolation at the expense of illumination. It doesn’t alter this proposition that science fiction and especially crime novels sometimes traffic in the idea that all people are at bottom equally evil and all history in the end equally nightmarish, since this sort of nihilism moots moral judgment altogether and is therefore its own kind of consolation.

Other people quicker on the trigger have already covered much of the necessary ground on Benjamin Kunkel's provocative but incredibly frustrating Dissent piece on "Dystopia and the End of Politics." What's good about this article is largely masked by Kunkel's strange decision to rehearse for the millionth time the high/low culture divide in the context of works (Children of Men, Oryx & Crake) that plainly obliterate it. (Just for starters: In what sense is the father of The Road best described as a primarily instrumental character? The Road is not a perfect book, but that is not among its flaws. And so it goes through the entire essay; in nearly all cases Kunkel's classification of a work as science fiction inevitably determines the discovery of its asserted essential generic flaws.) Kunkel briefly pretends to take SF seriously so that his later refusal to take it seriously will carry more rhetorical weight—but he never means it, and his contempt for SF is palpable, and annoying, throughout.

I'm also not fond of arguments of the form "All X are essentially Y. Here are my three examples." Kunkel, in contrast, appears very fond of such arguments.

All that said, when Kunkel does get down to business and takes dystopian and apocalyptic fiction seriously, he does rather good work, worth quoting at length:

In short, the contemporary apocalypse pits family values against the cannibal universe—the good guys versus the bad guys, in McCarthy’s unironic terms. And so, with the end of civilization, the age-old conflict between sexual love (eros) and love of one’s neighbor (caritas) also disappears; and the grown-up Jesus’ exhortation to his followers that they leave their families if they wish to pursue righteousness is as little remembered as among Christian fundamentalists today. No one pauses to reflect that in our civilization, pre-collapse, it was invariably the defense of the individual household that justified a nation’s warlike international posture or its profligate use of energy. Nuclear war might be averted, went the insipid Sting hit of the late cold war, if the Russians love their children too. But if global warming is not arrested, it will be because we (and the Russians) want for our children everything we have and more.

To be as schematic as possible: in the neoliberal dystopia a totally commodified world transforms would-be lovers into commodities themselves and in this way destroys the possibility of love. In the neoliberal apocalypse, on the other hand, the wreck of civilization reveals the inherent depravity of mankind (excepting one’s loved ones) and ratifies the truth that the family is a haven in a heartless world. Both the neoliberal dystopia and the neoliberal apocalypse defend love and individuality against the forces threatening to crush them; the difference is that the clone novel sticks up for humanity from the standpoint of an implied or explicit critique of neoliberalism, while the apocalypse narrative (whether in prose or on film) tends to reflect the default creed of neoliberalism, according to which kindness may flourish in private life but the outside world remains now and forever a scene of vicious but inevitable competition.

That's a good and interesting binary absolutely worth thinking about. It's just too bad he felt like he had to take a shower afterwards. And worse that he had to let us know he was going to take the shower after, that he was about to take the shower, really, just as soon as he stopped writing, because obviously he felt as dirty writing about SF as we must have felt reading about it.

If artists depend on angst and unrest to fuel their creative fire, then at least in one sense the 43rd presidency has been a blessing. Eight years is an eternity in the life of a culture, and when we look back on an era, we do it through pinholes: a movie here, a book there. What will stand out, decades from now, as the singular emblems of this moment in history? Newsweek asked its cultural critics to pick the one work in their field that they believe exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush.

Battlestar Galactica
American Idol
Jeff Koons’s Hanging Heart
The Corrections
Black Hawk Down
Cohen’s Borat
Green Day’s American Idiot
Far Away
Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life

Battlestar is a decent if limited pick, and Idol a fairly inspired one, though not for the reasons given—but the exclusion of The Wire is simply criminal, not to mention Sopranos and Deadwood, and (yes) 24. For film, it might actually be The Dark Knight, or else There Will Be Blood. (Maybe Children of Men?) For books—surely the hardest category—it's probably The Road, for a few reasons. I'm too illiterate in music to even begin to answer: the best I could manage would be a half-serious suggestion of Gnarls Barkley, or else just name a Springsteen album because that's how I roll.

Via The Chutry Experiment, who points (among other things) to the unforgivable omission of viral video.

GoogleLitTrips.com has helpful Google Earth maps of the routes taken by the characters of various literary texts, especially to helpful to persons like myself who will be teaching The Road in a couple weeks.

* The latest culturemonkey post is all about monkeys. More culturemonkey coming over the next few days. (See, we didn't forget about it.)

* The Rake does what the Rake does best, tearing Nick Hornby a new one over his failure to read.

* The Village Voice talks Diary of the Dead.

* Projection Booth reviews the full cut of Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof.

* Paul Krugman is blogging. The free world rejoices. Thesis from the inaugural post:

For now, though, the important thing is to realize that the story of modern America is, in large part, the story of the fall and rise of inequality.

Filming Cormac McCarthy's The Road, at McSweeney's.

Will need good sound bites for trailer. Maybe at one point son is sad about something stupid and father says, "It's not the end of the world!" Then son gives him ironic look. Love it.

"My book deal ruined my life!" Dude, I'll take it off your hands for you. Free of charge.

SFSignal links to an interview with Firefly's Summer Glau, now a big bad Terminator on TV's incredibly ill-conceived The Sarah Connor Chronicles. They've also got yet another Flickr set of classic sci-fi book covers.

Remeber the Cormac-McCarthy-on-Oprah post from Tuesday? Now you can live the magic yourself—MetaFilter explains how. (I saw in the thread that the next Oprah's Book Club choice is Middlesex. Really? That book is awful, even by Oprah's Book Club standards.)

Greenland loves global warming. So I guess that's where we're all moving, then.

Black Garterbelt, the successor blog to Rake's Progress, has amazingly in-depth coverage of Cormac McCarthy's appearance on Oprah, for your reading pleasure:

In most any other context, I'd be all for ridiculing this:

This book really affected me. It actually made me cry in yoga class even 2 days after reading it.

Spoken from the belly of the Oprah Consciousness, however, it strikes me as oddly meaningful. The (upper-middle class) bathos reads as honesty; it's an embarrassing statement to make, but we'd all surely embarrass ourselves similarly if we let go and truly tapped into the kind of pure, pants-wetting Hobbsian undercurrent that courses beneath The Road (and the rest of McCarthy).

At the very least, exposing the readership to The Road, where bad things happen to the helpless good, serves to combat the pervasive odiousness of The Secret.

If you haven't yet, you really need to read it, Oprah's-Book-Club sticker aside.