Back to the Island: Live Together, Die Alone

Posted on September 9, 2014 by awtraughber

It’s difficult to believe what LOST would’ve been like without Jack.  The show’s creators originally planned to kill the character off in the pilot.  In the end, though, Jack was the real through-line for many of us.

Season One of LOST was all about the people: the seemingly random collection of people, not in a coffee shop or bar or neighborhood, but on a plane and crashed on an island where refusing to learn to live together meant a painful end for everybody. This speech was one of Jack’s finest moments.

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Google and a God Named Theuth

Posted on September 8, 2014 by awtraughber

From Michael Harris’s The End of Absence:

In Plato’s Phaedrus, we hear Socrates describing how a king from Egypt called Thamus informed the god Theuth that the phonetic alphabet was not so great a gift. The god was particularly chuffed about this new technology, which he delivered to poor, illiterate humans, bragging that writing would make the memories of Egyptians more powerful and that it would super-charge their wit. King Thamus shrewdly replies:

O most ingenious Theuth . . . this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.

Was there ever a finer description of Google?

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Back to the Island: Ten Years of LOST

Posted on September 2, 2014 by awtraughber

This month marks the tenth anniversary of the premiere of LOST.  It was ten years ago September 22 that ABC premiered the Hawaii-based show down on the beach in Waikiki.  The rest, for many of us, is history (and alternate history, as the case may be).  For the occasion, I thought I’d try watching the series again.  Here’s one of my favorite scene’s from the show’s two-part pilot.

I think my appreciation for this moment comes from watching everything Joss Whedon has made over the last ten years.  This scene, which involves the mysterious “smoke monster,” feels like something out of the Whedon playbook: the group shot.  I love how the camera moves, starting with individuals and pairs, and how it catches people in the background.  This feels like the first time that we see the cast as anything like a “team.”  It may be one of the only times, really.  From this point on, it’s “a few characters here, a few characters there.”  In the end, it all comes back to this group, on the other side of mystery.

I’ve got a few clips from season one to revisit, but nothing like a moment from every episode.  If you’re a fan of the series, hopefully this will be a nice call-back for you.  If you’ve never seen it before, you should give it a try.  Season one is almost perfect.  Part of that is because the sci-fi elements weren’t too prevalent so early on.  It really is about the characters, the survivors of Oceanic flight 815, and how they learn to live with what they know of themselves on an island and around people that they don’t know at all.

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Into Dalek-ness

Posted on August 29, 2014 by awtraughber

It took a good while before the Daleks were brought back full-strength in the Doctor Who reboot a few years ago.  If memory serves, we only got one in the first season.  Looks like we’re getting one again  . . . this time as early as this weekend’s second episode.  Here’s a clip from “Into the Dalek.”

 

Welcome to a world where “morality is malfunction” and where Clara is a “carer.”  Hope it’s fun.

Doctor Who airs Saturday nights on BBC America.

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Everything a Rorshach Test

Posted on August 28, 2014 by awtraughber

Rorschach from usyd.eduI recently started following the blog of Rod Dreher, which is its own story (and one I will get to next week).  A few days ago he passed on the thoughts of Brian Kaller, who grew up “next door” to Ferguson and now lives out of the country.  An excerpt:

I live in rural Ireland these days, and can’t vouch for what’s happening on the ground in Ferguson right now; I’m reading the same Rashomon-style reports on the internet like everyone else. As someone who knows the neighborhood and the city, though, I can tell that pundits around the world, left and right, are seeing in this tragedy whatever they want to see. Black activists see police racism, libertarians see a failure of big government, liberals see a need for better social policies, law-and-order conservatives for more … you get the idea. Whoever you are, this tragedy just proves you were right all along. And when the violence in this St. Louis suburb dies down, Americans of all political stripes might walk away having learned all the wrong lessons.

What’s true of big-picture politics is probably true of small-picture politics.  It’s the result of the “opinionization” of contemporary culture.  Everything is a Rorshach test.  Sit in a meeting where decisions are made, listen to adults trying to interpret basic information.  Somehow, almost unnoticed, everyone’s pet peeve or pet project becomes suddenly relevant.  We say our part and pat ourselves on the back and move no closer to real resolution.

I’d like to think I’m above this kind of behavior, but I know that I’m not.  It’s hard not to when everything seems to be at stake all of the time.  What would a better way look like, and it existed, would we even be able to see it?

You can read the full essay here.  And you can read Rod Dreher’s gloss here.

 

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Goodbye to Goodbye? Michael Harris on Absence

Posted on August 27, 2014 by awtraughber

This past weekend I came across Michael Harris’s The End of Absence.  It’s an interesting read, often summing up and building off of the thoughts of other books I’ve read about technology and culture over the last couple of years.  What makes Harris’s take different is his challenge to those of us who have lived on both sides of the internet’s existence, what we do with the lack of “lack” in an internet-driven world (because we are all on all the time).  His question and comment:

. . . if we work hard enough to understand this massive game changer, and then name the parts of the new game we want to go along with and the parts we don’t, can we then pack along some critical aspect of our earlier lives that those technologies would otherwise strip from us? . . . If we’re the last people in history to know life before the internet, we are also the only ones who will ever speak, as it were, both languages.

Here’s a short video of Harris from The Rotman School about “engineering absence.”  Some interesting thoughts, for sure.

 

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The Day of the (Different) Doctor

Posted on August 26, 2014 by awtraughber

Capaldi as the DoctorBreath deep, because the air is strangely fresh in the newest series of Doctor Who.

At least that’s my take on it after watching the premiere of the new season at the theater.  I’m glad I waited this time around, as it made everything much more immediate.  While the episode had many of the traits of modern Who, it also had a risky sensibility that I liked.

The thing that I liked most about the episode was its healthy self-awareness.  Moffatt knew he was doing something different from the get-go by casting an older Doctor, and he doesn’t dodge the issue.  The episode says a lot about what it means to know someone.  And almost every character in the episode gets a comment to that effect.  Not only that, but there are some nice references to older stories whose significance dawns on you even as it dawns on the Doctor.  And because it’s a callback, it doesn’t feel like an unnecessary retread.

Peter Capaldi feels like a natural at this.  He plays confidently-confused perfectly.  And while Clara isn’t my favorite companion, she definitely does things that no other companion in recent memory could do, and she does so amazingly.  Even the Paternoster Gang worked well for me in the episode, which was a nice surprise.

The question that always has to be asked, though, is whether or not the episode was scary.  No Daleks here.  No Weeping Angels in sight.  And yet the seen in the restaurant, once you realize what is going on, is quite creepy and effective.  I’m not even sure that the villain in the episode had a real name.  His visual, though, was brilliant.

BBC America definitely knows how to make fans happy.  As with the 50th Anniversary Special, the episode was book-ended by extra material.  And while the post-show “making of” video was enjoyable, it was the introduction by Strax that was brilliant.  In order to help the new viewer, Strax made a video blog about the various incarnations of the Doctor.  Lots of humor, lots of joking around about what made each Doctor unique (and laughable).  Hopefully it will show up online sometime.

I feel like I’ve said both too much and nothing at all.  I’m glad the Doctor is back.  And I’m glad that while he is himself, he is also something and someone different.  I think it will make for a wonderfully enjoyable season.

 

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A Different Kind of Sophomore Slump

Posted on August 25, 2014 by awtraughber

Last week I posted excerpts and a link to a “message to college freshmen.”  One of my favorite authors, James K. A. Smith, recently wrote his own “letter to college sophomores” that serves as a nice kind of sequel.  He takes a similar approach in terms of forthrightness but takes it to an interesting level of academic disposition:

It’s not just that you’re a year wiser; you carry the air of the newly enlightened. Your curiosity has hardened into a misplaced confidence; your desire to learn has turned into a penchant to pronounce, as if wisdom were a race to being the quickest debunker. You used to wonder about the social vision behind Philip Larkin’s poetry, or whether Thomas Aquinas’s notion of natural law could really work in a secular age, but now you seem more intent on unmasking “micro-aggressions” and detecting colonial prejudice in a canon that you increasingly disdain.

And:

Unlike during those first few months of freshman year, your thinking on almost any subject now is becoming easy to predict. The causes you’re passionate about, while not without merit, are almost clichéd. You seem less interested in mining the complexity of problems and more interested in making a hasty display of moral outrage and coming down on the correct side of any debate—because of course there’s only one right way to think.

Pendulum’s swing, for sure.  That’s definitely true for knowledge and our quest for it.  It’s something we all struggle with.  You can read the whole letter here.

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Waiting for a Different Doctor

Posted on August 23, 2014 by awtraughber

Big weekend for fans of Doctor Who.  It’s been months since we saw the quick flash  of Matt-Smith-into-Peter-Capaldi, which means its also an interesting weekend for Who fans.  It’s been some time since there’s been a dramatically older Doctor in the house, definitely since the show became such a popular show with a younger American demographic.  So I’m curious to see how much of a stand-in for all of those fans who just don’t know what to do with a dramatically different Doctor.

Meanwhile I’ll be doing my best to stay away from Saturday’s TV premiere so that I see it fresh at the theater Monday night.  I didn’t wait to see the fiftieth anniversary special, which I (slightly) regret.  I’m thinking that even if I stay away from the internet, someone in the line at the theater will say something to ruin the story for me.  Until then, here’s the trailer for the premiere: “Deep Breath.”

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Eggers’s ‘Fathers & Prophets,’ the Novel of Our Times?

Posted on August 22, 2014 by awtraughber

Your Fathers Where Are They?The title of Dave Eggers’s newest novel comes from early in the book of Zechariah, who spoke for God near the end of the time of exile.  “The LORD was very angry with our forefathers.  Therefore tell the people: This is what the LORD Almighty says: ‘Return to me,’ declares the LORD Almighty, ‘and I will return to you . . . Where are your forefathers now? And the prophets, do they live forever? But did not my words and my decrees, which I commanded my servants the prophets, overtake your forefathers?'” (New International Version)

Religious allusion aside, this is not the kind of book that you’d find at your local Christian bookstore.  And while it hasn’t gotten the critical acclaim as Eggers’s earlier works, I can’t help but think there’s something very right and important about it.  The novel is actually a continual dialogue between an estranged young man named Thomas and a selection of strangely significant people.  It’s is not an easy book to read: the language is coarse and the situation tricky.  And while it almost repeats the tinges of absurdity present in Eggers’s The Circle, it also repeats that novel’s timeliness.  The questions Thomas asks are hard questions, just like the answers they demand are difficult: questions about promises and culture, security and force,  trust and just how did things go wrong in early 21st-century America?  In many ways, the book reminds me of the energetic force of Eggers’s earlier works (though this time without the optimism).  In the end, the book is a kind of secular call to repentance, one a little closer-to-home than we are used to, I would imagine.

It’s a difficult book to recommend, as I imagine it is beyond the comfort zone of many of us (especially if we look to fiction to take us away from the problems of the world).  It could easily be seen as a political novel, which would also make it easy for some to write off.  If you’re interested in checking it out, the folks at Longreads have posted the first chapter online.  Be warned: the language is rough.  But I think Eggers is trying to articulate something, trying to through broad a real net in which to catch something of significance to those of us around in the late summer of 2014.  You can find that first chapter here.  Should you read it, let me know what you think.

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