Thursday afternoon!

* It looks as if Fox will burn off what's left of Dollhouse in December. Bright side: Joss should then be free to start a beloved, long-running cable series next fall.

* A short story set in Iain M. Banks's Culture universe will be adapted for film. This could be good, though io9 is nervous.

* Viktor Mayer-Schonberger argues in a new book that the true problem of memory in the digital age is not preservation but remembering how to forget.

* And Grist says environmentalists may finally have the "big mo."

Tuesday night linkdump #3.

* Here comes the Dollhouse? 'Scientists Erase Painful Memories Without Drugs.'

* Both Inside Higher Ed and Barack Obama himself can declare victory alongside UNC.

* Even the National Review says it's time for Coleman to concede.

* Environmental reporters at The Washington Post hit back at George Will over the many inaccuracies in his climate change columns.

* More on the Morristown UFO hoax.

H.M., the famous amnesiac who had lived since 1953 without the ability to form new memories, has died.

Random linkfest.

* Coup in Canada! Somehow the Liberals and New Democrats finally managed to pull their heads out of their asses and kick Harper out.

* You had me at Planet of the Apes. Just don't screw it up this time. More at CHUD.

* Matt Yglesias: If you’re not following Shaq’s Twitter feed you’re not really living in the contemporary world. He’s moved us all the way to Web 4.0.

* Flight of the Conchords Season 2 is coming.

* Jon Stewart speaks truth to power MSNBC.

* Life with perfect memory.

D.D. Guttenplan plays Proust to his childhood memories of comic books in The Nation.

For a long time I used to go to bed early. Unbidden by my parents I'd hurry up the stairs to my room, turn out the light, burrow beneath the covers, reach under the bed for the flashlight and then, safe where I'd left it the night before, the latest issue of Superman or Batman. Proust can keep his madeleines. For me, nothing brings back that childhood sensation of safety, or the inky smell of clandestine pleasure, quite like Batman No. 166, "Two-Way Deathtrap!" in which the caped crime fighter, confiding the details of a nightmare to Robin, is overheard by a villain who proceeds to turn Batman's fevered dream into deadly reality. Or the next issue, No. 167, with "Zero Hour for Earth"--a "book-length spy-thriller" in which Batman jets off to fight the criminal organization Hydra.

At TPM, Paul Rieckhoff asks: "Seven Years Later: Why Is There Still A Hole at Ground Zero?" I actually wrote a little bit about this myself at the end of a paper on 9/11 for a class last year. Here were my thoughts.



Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop

Although I grew up forty miles from New York City, I was in Cleveland, Ohio, on September 11, 2001, finishing my senior year of college. From the time my father called to wake me and let me know about the first attack, I watched the news coverage nearly continuously. I remember, vividly, the chaos, the violence, and the uncertainty, but I also remember events which are no longer referenced, the phantom attacks: false reports of car bombs on New York Bridges and outside the State Department, threats and evacuations across the country reported once and then never mentioned again. In Cleveland, at least, it was initially reported that United 93 had crashed into Camp David; the anchor also told us that there were as many as 20 planes out of contact with the FAA still in the air and that any number of them—possibly all—could have been hijacked. One of the planes forced to land at Cleveland Hopkins airport was raided (on live TV), believed to have terrorists aboard; this was later revealed to have been entirely a false alarm.

In the face of so many reports, only four attacks becomes something like a relief—the violence of that day might have been so much worse. It might have never ended. And yet the deluge of phantom attacks, attacks which seemed to have happened but which never actually did, which like the collapse of the Towers themselves have been put under erasure, have left us for a long time with the foreboding sense that another attack is always just around the corner, that at any moment the world will again be shattered by terrible violence. We are waiting for the other shoe to drop. The Department of Homeland Security’s threat level is, after all, always “Elevated,” if not “High”; nightly news reports regale us with wild possibilities of where the terrorists might strike next, anything from blowing up the Hoover Dam to poisoning local gumball machines.*

This feeling of permanent, unmitigated existential threat may have diminished somewhat since September 11, but it has never really left us, and it feeds into the sensation of temporal loop caused by the day’s reconsumption as a spectacle. Though the attacks lasted only a few hours on one very devastating morning, on the level of the symbolic—on the level of spectacle—they remain ongoing and unending. This is why, I think, Freedom Tower, long scheduled to be built on the ruins of Ground Zero, remains unbuilt and perhaps in some real sense unbuildable. We remain deeply embedded in the singularity; although time passes, it cannot progress. More than anything else, this loss of temporal perspective, the foreshortening of memory itself, is the psychic cost of the refusal to come to terms with September 11, the cost of rebranding the shocking anti-spectacle of September 11 as the spectacle of “9/11” and consuming it anew, over and over again. On the level of the spectacle, the towers are always smoking; though we all saw it happen, we can never allow them to collapse.


--
* I’m partial to this story because it concerns the town next door to the town in which I grew up, and because it involves the most ludicrous potential terror attack I’ve heard of. Stories like this one have aired across the country since September 11—perhaps, somewhere or another, every single night.

Is Google making us stupid? (Via MeFi.) It's certainly true that in my daily life I find myself using a indexing logic to process most new information, remembering what I'll need so I can find It again if I need It rather than just remembering the thing itself. Just one example: I recently spent a few weeks aimlessly trying to retrieve the terms studium and punctum. Google searches describing what I remembered of the concepts were completely hopeless; unusual for me, I'd remembered bad keywords. It was only when I somehow dredged up the name of the theorist who coined them (Barthes) that my search became possible—and after that it over in fifteen seconds.

Also in the Atlantic, a classic Canavan hobbyhorse: traffic signs make us less safe.

A rather random assortment of links, even for me:

* How's life? Well, it's practically over, thank God. Cynical-C has another nice Vonnegut link: one of his last recorded television interviews, October 7, 2005. As you might expect, it's great. Here's an excerpt, and here's the rest.



* "The 'Problem of Evil' in Postwar Europe, Tony Judt's acceptance speech for the 2007 Hannah Arendt Prize. Via MeFi.

Today, the Shoah is a universal reference. The history of the Final Solution, or Nazism, or World War II is a required course in high school curriculums everywhere. Indeed, there are schools in the US and even Britain where such a course may be the only topic in modern European history that a child ever studies. There are now countless records and retellings and studies of the wartime extermination of the Jews of Europe: local monographs, philosophical essays, sociological and psychological investigations, memoirs, fictions, feature films, archives of interviews, and much else. Hannah Arendt's prophecy would seem to have come true: the history of the problem of evil has become a fundamental theme of European intellectual life.

So now everything is all right? Now that we have looked into the dark past, called it by its name, and sworn that it must never again be repeated? I am not so sure. Let me suggest five difficulties that arise from our contemporary preoccupation with the Shoah, with what every schoolchild now calls "the Holocaust"...

* Rules and quirks of baseball. As I've said in the past, rules and quirks are pretty much the only aspect of professional sports that can keep my interest, so this is the perfect link for me.

* Scientists have accidentally discovered a promising new technique for treating memory loss.

* Hillary Only Up By 12 Over Obama In New York? This would be amazing, but I find it a little hard to believe it's really that close.

* Also in political news: Obama wins the coveted Hulk Hogan endorsement.

A Dallas minister who marched with civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., said Monday's birthday observance holiday is an insult to his legacy.

The Rev. Peter Johnson, 62, director of the Texas operations for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, told The Dallas Morning News the holiday should be on April 4, the anniversary of the date King was assassinated.

"We have ignored the essence of his life and the horror of his death," said Johnson. "We've allowed white America to escape the guilt of his assassination and we've allowed black America to drift back into a coma."

Johnson said King is considered a martyr by many but said, if he were alive, he would be considered an agitator by many people, the newspaper said.

"We remember him with parades and galas and banquets, things that are really irrelevant and silly regarding Dr. King's legacy," he said. "If we really want to honor Dr. King, we should do something about people who live under bridges. That would be a great tribute."

Why, for all of us, out of all we have heard, seen, felt, in a lifetime, do certain images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others? The song of one bird, the leap of one fish, at a particular place and time, the scent of one flower, an old woman on a German mountain path, six ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night at a small French railway junction, where there was a water-mill: such memories may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depths of feeling into which we cannot peer.

In an excerpt from a new book, Craig Raine writes about literary attempts to understand and represent memory.

Random links before I get back to work:

* How America Lost the War on Drugs. In Rolling Stone.

* An astoundingly complete timeline of the Planets of the Apes universe. Via Cynical-C.

* A man who walked into a police station five years after he was presumed dead in a canoeing accident has told officers he has no memory of what happened to him. Either this guy is a zombie, Jesus, a clone, or he was kidnapped by aliens. There are no other possibilities. Via MeFi.

* Rudy Giuliani: The Security Candidate.

Jaimee and I don't host parties often, but we once had an after-reading party in Greensboro back in 2003 or 2004. The food was good, the conversation was good, a lot of good people came, and I daresay a good time was had by all. Maybe the best time was had by a friend of ours named Detlef, who spent much of the night scribbling cryptic notes on Post-its and stashing them around the house. I found a few the next morning, one in the freezer, another in the shower.

"I hid them everywhere. You'll be finding these things for the rest of your life," he told me.

We found a few more over the coming months, about ten or so, and after that things were pretty quiet. Every so often I'd be surprised: one inside the toilet tank, another at the bottom of a drawer or inside rarely used tupperware. When we moved, I found a few final stragglers in the furniture, including one inside the couch and another underneath a bookshelf.

None in the year and a half since, until today, when I randomly had occasion to pull my copy of A Brief History of Time off the bookshelf for the first time in years. The book flipped open to a random page.



That was flashback enough. Then I saw the inscription on the inside front cover. I'd totally forgotten where I'd gotten the book in the first place: ten years ago, on my 18th birthday, from a girl with whom (let's be charitable) Things Did Not Work Out. In her note she'd written a number of bold predictions about the importance and permanence of our friendship, predictions which not only pretty spectacularly failed to come to pass but which (given my memory of November 1998) may actually have been proven wrong within the next ten minutes.

So it's been a funny kind of morning.

What is a memory? The best that neuroscientists can do for the moment is this: A memory is a stored pattern of connections between neurons in the brain. There are about a hundred billion of those neurons, each of which can make perhaps 5,000 to 10,000 synaptic connections with other neurons, which makes a total of about five hundred trillion to a thousand trillion synapses in the average adult brain. By comparison there are only about 32 trillion bytes of information in the entire Library of Congress's print collection. Every sensation we remember, every thought we think, alters the connections within that vast network. Synapses are strengthened or weakened or formed anew. Our physical substance changes. Indeed, it is always changing, every moment, even as we sleep.