I'm pleased to announce I'll be co-editing an issue of American Literature next year on science fiction, fantasy, and myth. Here's the CFP; the deadline is May 31, 2010.

American Literature (Duke University Press)
Special Issue on SF, Fantasy, and Myth
http://www.duke.edu/~gc24/americanliterature.html

DEADLINE: 31 May 2010

More than one commentator has mentioned that science fiction as a form is where theological narrative went after Paradise Lost, and this is undoubtedly true…The form is often used as a way of acting out the consequences of a theological doctrine….Extraterrestrials have taken the place of angels, demons, fairies and saints, though it must be said that this last group is now making a comeback.
—Margaret Atwood, “Why We Need Science Fiction”

Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science fiction is the improbable made possible.
—Rod Serling

In this work I am attempting to create a new mythology for the space age. I feel that the old mythologies are definitely broken down and not adequate at the present time.
—William Burroughs (on the Nova trilogy)

From revolutions in communications technology and transportation to encounters with space travelers and aliens, from leaps in human evolution to new dimensions of existence, from creation stories of the past to speculations about the future, science fiction, fantasy, and myth have variously captured the far reaches of the human imagination, making the familiar strange and the strange inevitable. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it is fascinating to watch the rapid innovations in science and technology overtake their fictional anticipation and to return to our most speculative and fantastical literature to see how perceptively it anticipated the social and geopolitical transformations—and challenges—these innovations would inspire. We can, moreover, look through these fictions and recognize in them a prolonged engagement not just with the transient social anxieties of their individual moments, but also with the timeless drama of human contact with the divine, the transcendent, the otherworldly, and the sublime.

This special issue brings together these genres with their divergent but intersecting histories and asks why they might be particularly relevant to study in the contemporary moment. While science fiction has garnered increasing attention in recent years in the academy (and increasing recognition in mainstream publications), the status of fantasy is even more controversial—and the line between them itself a subject of debate. Myth, by contrast, has long been a source of scholarly fascination, although the term typically emerges in the study of American literatures in its pejorative sense. Yet, myth plays a seminal role in the genres of science fiction and fantasy, so much so that science fiction and fantasy can arguably exceed the category of genre to contribute to what William Burroughs calls “a new mythology for the space age.” The issue seeks to move past the definitional debates—beyond, for example, determining the distinction between science fiction and fantasy or the precise definition of myth—to explore broadly the relationship of these genres and modes (individually or in combination) to American literatures and cultures. How, for example, might a focus on science fiction, fantasy, and/or myth change our understanding of literary history? Of literary engagements with scientific and technological innovations as well as with the most pressing political concerns of the moment? How might we use these literary forms to understand genre as a historical repository? The role of mythology in modern culture? What social and geopolitical conditions might produce a genre or mode—or perhaps a critical category that newly classifies certain literary conventions as genres? What themes or questions surface when we read more canonical works through the lens of science fiction, fantasy or myth? Conversely, what happens to these categories when we take seriously, as scholars such as H. Bruce Franklin have done, their early appearance in American literary history? This issue will explore the insights that emerge when we consider the various imaginative engagements that characterize science fiction, fantasy, and myth as central concerns of American literary history and cultural production.

Special issue editors: Priscilla Wald and Gerry Canavan. Submissions of 11,000 words or less (including endnotes) should be submitted electronically at www.editorialmanager.com/al/default.asp by 31 May 2010. When choosing a submission type, select “Special Issue.” Please contact us at 919-684-3948 or am-lit@duke.edu if you need assistance with the submission process. Please direct other questions to Priscilla Wald (pwald@duke.edu) or Gerry Canavan (gerry.canavan@duke.edu).

As you can see it's a little bit hectic this week. A few links:

* I've got another review in the Indy this week, this one about an upcoming fiction anthology on bad breakups.

* Five things you didn't know about District 9.

The District 9 alien homes were actually shot in a recently evacuated area of impoverished housing. The homes you see the aliens getting evicted from were homes that humans had recently been kicked out of, for real.

* The latest hints from the White House suggest that they have finally realized that Republicans are not negotiating in good faith and that Democrats will have to go it alone. This, combined with the fervor over the no-public-option trial balloon and the subsequent back-peddling, are good reason for optimism. Here's one way it might happen.

* 'Whole Foods under financial pressure.'

* Quentin Tarantino, Socrates in a dive bar.

Two book reviews from my household in the Indy this week: my review of Master of War: Blackwater USA's Erik Prince and the Business of War and Jaimee's review of Fred Chappell's latest book of poems, Shadow Box.

In a related sidebar, Lisa Sorg asks: "What's the difference between Daniel Boyd and Blackwater's Erik Prince?"

Wednesday afternoon links 2!

* Wikipedia's Rorschach cheat sheet. My contempt for the discipline of psychology really got in the way of my reading this article; I kept thinking, "Wait, people actually take Rorschach tests seriously?"

* For more information on my feelings about the Rorschach test see the story I published in Five Fingers Review #23 (now defunct). Note: I'm not sure this issue ever actually materialized. I never got a copy.

* Two takes on how to improve your teaching: restructure your expectations about college composition and teach naked.

* If I'm reading this article correctly, M&Ms cure spinal injury.

* The only rule at Fox News is that there are no rules.

* NPR considers the uncanny intelligence of crows. Via MeFi, which has more in the comments, including video of crows exploiting traffic patterns in Tokyo to crack nuts.

The blog Infinite Thought beat me to the punch in announcing the publication of Polygraph 21: Study, Students, Universities, which contains a short book review by me of the indispensable Marc Bousquet's indispensable How the University Works that concerns in part university endowments in the wake of the financial crisis. Here's a bit from the beginning of my review:

Bousquet begins with a pointed rejection of the Lapsarian myth-making that typically characterizes discussions about what has happened to the University in recent decades, a notion that due to pernicious external influence or betrayal from within the purity of the University has somehow been corrupted. Bousquet’s University is not the victim of late capitalism; it is its agent. As Bousquet puts it: “Late capitalism doesn’t just happen to the university; the university makes late capitalism happen.” An analysis of the student as already a worker forms an important part of this picture, as we will see—but it is worth taking a moment to simply peruse Bousquet’s prodigious list of intersections between university capital and late capitalism writ large:

apparel sales; sports marketing; corporate-financed research, curriculum, endowment, and building; job training; direct financial investment via portfolios, pensions, and cooperative venture; the production and enclosure of intellectual property; the selection of vendors for books, information technology, soda pop, and construction; the purchase and provision of nonstandard labor; and so forth.

That’s an awful lot being monetized at “not-for-profit” institutions. And most of these functions have little or nothing to do with humanistic paeans to the “value” of a liberal education or the fantasy of the pure pursuit of knowledge for its own sake; in fact, the intellectual mission of the University rapidly recedes into the background as a type of side business, if not, indeed, a kind of hobby. There’s more truth than we might at first admit to the truistic assertion that NYU (to pick for a moment on the corporate entity responsible, among other things, for the publication and distribution of Bousquet’s critique) is a real-estate trust running a college for tax purposes.

Wednesday!

* I have a review in the Indy this week of Lucas Hilderbrand's Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright. Keywords: copyright Constitution Buffy pornography Superstar Mystery Science Theater 3000.

* Cases for and against Buffy without Joss.

* Sarah Connor creator: I won't be back.

* Some days I think Marvel just doesn't get women. Via MeFi.

* theauteurs.com: Streaming video of Criterion Collection films. (via Vu)

* And the year of Senatorial madness shows no sign of ending: Joe Sestak intends to unseat Arlen and Burris's scumbaggery is caught on tape.

More!

* Summer book reviews from both me and Jaimee in the Independent.

* As ubiquitous as pollution has become in the industrialized West, it remains largely invisible. That is not the case elsewhere in the world.

* Mitt Romney is a tool. A huge tool.

* "ICE does not keep records on cases in which detainees claim to be US citizens." Via MeFi.

* Everyone is reading Infinite Jest this summer. Are you? I really didn't like it the first time through, but DFW died and made me sad, so maybe I'll give it another shot.

* And, as always, morality is impossible without God.

Satisfactory Comics honors me with some Doodle Penance after a Google Search for "dan clowes -canavan -daleks -ghostwriter -scooby -grantbridge" brings what I can only imagine was a very disappointed searcher to their site.

There's a story here somewhere, possibly involving my ghostwriting Dan Clowes's issue of Scooby Doo vs. the Daleks. But perhaps I've said too much.

Two articles in the Independent on nuclear energy this week, one by Sue Sturgis on the thirtieth anniversary of Three Mile Island and the other by me on the future of nuclear power both nationally and in North Carolina.

I've got another book review in the Indy this week, this one of Dalton Conley's Elsewhere, U.S.A.

Just in case you missed it—I've buried the posts—I had photos from our spot on the Mall yesterday here and here, with a write-up for Durham's Independent Weekly here.

My Indy piece on the inauguration is already up. Here's another take in the same issue from Matt Saldana.

They call me Jerry Two-Times because I say everything twice.

Jerry Canavan, a Duke graduate student who was waiting for the train with his wife, Jaimee Hills, also volunteered for Obama, canvassing in North and South Carolina.

"It just feels like starting over," Canavan said of Obama's election. "It's just been an unending series of disasters since we started paying attention to politics, so this just feels like starting over."

Canavan and Hills, who works at the Regulator Bookshop in Durham, will be staying in Arlington, Va., with a friend.

"We're just going to walk over the bridge from Arlington and see how far we can get," Hills said.

I finally broke down and signed up for Twitter. The link is in the sidebar for when this happens to you.

Jaimee and I have the cover story in the Independent this week with our long, loooong-promised article on Peak Oil and alternative energy in North Carolina.

Late notice, but I'll be on the Poli-Sci-Fi Radio podcast again this week, sometime around the 5 PM hour.

I'm painfully busy for the next few days, but for now here's my interview with Alan Weisman about his bestselling book The World Without Us, which I've talked about a few times before. He's reading at the Regulator here in town next Tuesday night.

This was not the first time Weisman had examined nature's resilience in the absence, nor near-absence, of humans. Glausiusz approached Weisman because she had been struck by an essay he wrote for Harper's Magazine in 1994, "Journey Through a Doomed Land: Exploring Chernobyl's Still-Deadly Ruins," chronicling his Ford Foundation-funded trip to Chernobyl and the discovery of a deeply damaged ecosystem that was, astoundingly, already in recovery. Rather than apocalyptic, that essay emerged for Glausiusz as a powerfully hopeful, even optimistic look at the resilience of the Earth, of nature itself.

Weisman remembers the trip well: "You'd go into these places [near Chernobyl], and there'd be bountiful crops and plants, huge mushrooms and rhubarb everywhere. It was wonderful—until you turn on the Geiger counter."

Weisman says the same strange beauty can be found in such places as the Ninth Ward in New Orleans, where a recent photo shoot in USA Today revealed cars covered by moss and flowerbeds, or in the abandoned, prairie-like regions of shrinking post-industrial cities like Detroit. It's the same attitude he brings to The World Without Us, which he is always careful to describe as a kind of anti-apocalypse. The sudden disappearance of humans reveals not only the scope of the damage we've done to the planet, but also the speed with which the planet could bounce back, if we'd only let it.

That episode of Poli-Sci-Fi Radio I guested on is now online. I come on about halfway through the show, and in twenty or thirty minutes there's only two or three things I regret saying. A new record!

My media empire continues its slow takeover of the Research Triangle with an unprecedented two articles in this week's Independent, one reviewing a recent book on civil rights landmarks in the South and the other taking a look inside the Ron Paul Revolution.