One exam down links.

* Soundtrack for The Cloud Photographers, the Wes Anderson film Wes Anderson never made. I love this.

* Show us your birth certificate, Joe. Put the ID back in BIDEN.

* All your High Holy days belong to Glenn Beck.

* If Environmentalists Made Star Wars. This is early promotion for END:CIV, the film that asks: "If your homeland was invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air, and contaminated the food supply, would you resist?"

* Also in environmental news: the Yes Men distributed a fake version of the New York Post that actually had factual information inside of it today.

* Doing it wrong: Immigrants’ advocates have been complaining for months now that the Obama administration is cracking down hard on illegal immigration while doing nothing to help legalize their situations and create a workable immigration system.

* “This fellow is a man in his thirties,” he said, “a research physicist with us out here. As far as I can tell, he’s perfectly normal in every way except for a lot of crazy ideas about living part of the time in another world–on another planet. Washington sent him out to do a key job, and until a few weeks ago he was going great guns. But lately he’s out of contact with the work so much and for so long that something’s got to he done about it.” Isn't this the plot of Adam Strange? (via MeFi and Boing Boing).

* And from the Onion: 'George W. Bush Chuckles To Self Upon Thinking About How He Was President Of The United States For Almost A Decade.'

Four more. Thanks to some Facebookers for the links.

* Exact date of Odysseus's return from Troy pinpointed. With this crucial question settled, no one need read The Odyssey ever again.

* How to write about Africa.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African’s cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it — because you care.

Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.

* Congratulations to Morgan Ross, winner of the Harper's Ferry "Worst Love Poem" contest.

Your legs
undulate like two jellyfish tentacles,
moving freely in the ocean
that is your upper lip.

* A slave in Jefferson Davis's house was a Union spy. Great story. Dibs on the movie rights to this.

Workers in Chicago have occupied a closing Republic Windows & Doors factory demanding $1.5 million in severance and vacation pay they are are owed by management. Via Vu as a followup to this morning's post about the "Occupy, Resist, Produce" movement in Argentina—two out of three, Chicago...

Yah, and War is Peace, etc. Douchebag! Duke's own traxus40 takes on and takes down the recent Žižek LRB article, which overnight has been linked by every academic blogger on the Internets.

This piece by catmint is pretty helpful I think in understanding Zizek’s style, and why if you let him hypnotize you he can seem mysteriously (thus also deniably) convincing. Especially in this latest thing, in which he has the nerve to open with a list of the various Left types, setting them against that vampiric creature ‘capitalism.’ Reading Jung’s Man and His Symbols, catmint calls the aesthetic ‘creative taxonomy.’

...

It’s only significant because of the sheer audacity and shamelessness of the performance. Political theory, however, is always at risk of becoming-Zizek in the course of any simple application of philosophy to politics. In achieving absolute immanence with his particular melange of Hegel and Lacan (a point I situate shortly after the publication of The Parallax View), Zizek can now serve for other intellectual commentators exactly as he intends Chavez to serve for The Left. The court jester. The fun house mirror. Bearer of our worst impulses. To his credit, I am almost ready to believe this is intentional.

I'll be reinstalling Windows today after catching some sort of virus from the Duke network. (A week or so ago I accidentally left a shared folder writable while working at the library, and I've been paying for it ever since.) So there probably won't be too many posts today.

Here's a few quick links, though, to tide us all over for the next few hours:

* The writer's strike has a blog.

* Kugelmass calls Žižek and his recent LRB article an embarrassment. I'm a little bit on the fence on this question. As far as I can tell, Žižek is right insofar as the politics of failure resistance clearly have failed—but perhaps (contra Žižek) we must make them work again rather than just calling the whole thing off. Here's Kugelmass:

Each of these posts manifests a remarkable faith in Zizek, as though these questions have answers, or at least as though what is unclear now may become lucid shortly. It is as though one is speaking about a brilliant, sometimes reticent friend. In the relative desert of American politics, when connections between politics and philosophy are so difficult to find, I have also thought of Zizek that way. But enough is enough. Solidarity is wasted on egotistical delusion, and so is the gentle work of asking questions. Let us ask each other these same questions: do we support the consolidation of power in Venezuela? Do we see evidence of resignation on the Left? Do our anxieties about power leave us paralyzed? As for Slavoj Zizek, his very headlines have become unconscious, unsettling echoes of the slogans in 1984. Let us part ways with him until he once again becomes sane, and faithful to the unfinished work of philosophy, rather than to his besetting fantasies of a vanguard capable of putting a point on his arrogance.

* Via Bookninja, a judge in New York has ruled what makes a poem.

“A poem sometimes possesses rhyme or meter, though this is not necessary,” Keenan wrote. “A poem is typically free from the usual rules of grammar, punctuation and capitalization.” In a footnote, he cited testimony that before “World War Two, a poem almost always had rhyme or meter.” Now, “the popular definition of poem has become much more lenient.”

* And, finally, a brief history of the Mario Brothers. If that's not enough for you, Slate's Chris Suellentrop pays homage to the lost sequel of Super Mario Brothers.

See you in a few glorious hours.

Žižek: "Resistance Is Surrender," in the London Review of Books. In a nutshell:

One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism is indestructible. Marx compared it to a vampire, and one of the salient points of comparison now appears to be that vampires always rise up again after being stabbed to death. Even Mao’s attempt, in the Cultural Revolution, to wipe out the traces of capitalism, ended up in its triumphant return.

...

The lesson here is that the truly subversive thing is not to insist on ‘infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfil. Since they know that we know it, such an ‘infinitely demanding’ attitude presents no problem for those in power: ‘So wonderful that, with your critical demands, you remind us what kind of world we would all like to live in. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, where we have to make do with what is possible.’ The thing to do is, on the contrary, to bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands, which can’t be met with the same excuse.