Monday afternoon links.

* PopMatters says happy birthday to Godzilla.

* Literary studies is in crisis!! Still!!! But lucky for us there is a solution:

Literary studies should become more like the sciences. Literature professors should apply science's research methods, its theories, its statistical tools, and its insistence on hypothesis and proof. Instead of philosophical despair about the possibility of knowledge, they should embrace science's spirit of intellectual optimism. If they do, literary studies can be transformed into a discipline in which real understanding of literature and the human experience builds up along with all of the words.

* More good news from North Carolina: Liddy Dole is polling neck and neck with her challenger for November, Kay Hagan, and it's only May.

* And Obama's taken the lead in superdelegates, with signs indicating that Clinton may actually soon drop out...

A product of the bomb, yes surely. But far more than that Godzilla is a metaphor for the bomb, as the movie makes clear in almost every frame. This is not your parents' Godzilla, the 1956 recut with Raymond Burr inserted as American interlocutor, a paragon of western stoicism with his boxy suit and pipe held aloft like a talisman. The Japanese original is far darker and more seamless, a topical fantasy of uncommon power. It may not be a great film, but it is an important one, a surprisingly sombre meditation on means and ends, on when exactly the price of peace becomes too costly to pay.

The Guardian apparently gave away DVDs of the original 1954 Godzilla with yesterday's issue; at CommentIsFree, Christopher Orr explains why Gojira is not just another monster movie. Of course, most monster movies aren't "just another monster movie," either; in fact almost none of them are...