Stats, innit. Delighted that at least one person found their way here by searching for the word “pharotekton” which I quoted in my review of China Miéville’s excellent Embassytown.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,400 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 40 trips to carry that many people.
As far as I can tell, every time Rhode Island indie band The Low Anthem plays London, some dude in the crowd shouts this. And he’s right. Since the night I was listening to NPR online and heard Ben Knox Miller’s ethereal voice on “Charlie Darwin”, I have been enchanted by their singing, their myriad instruments and gorgeous lyrics. Tonight I was listening to their latest album, Smart Flesh, and was once more blown away by these lyrics from “Golden Cattle”:
As the blind lead the blind
Through the darkness of freedom
Who writes the songs
We all will be singing?
Do check them out if you haven’t already.
With heartfelt apologies to Slavoj Žižek - I don’t really know what he’d do…
What Would Slavoj Žižek Do?
(sung to the tune of What Would Brian Boitano Do? from the South Park Movie)
What would Slavoj Žižek do
If he was here right now,
He’d quote Lacan
Like a die-hard fan,
That’s what Slavoj Žižek’d do.
When Slavoj Žižek was on the TV,
In a big debate,
They said “We think he’s the smartest here,
And we don’t look so great.”
When Slavoj Žižek was in a film,
Laying down the law,
He showed us all how he stores his clothes,
In a kitchen drawer.
So what would Slavoj Žižek do
If he were here today?
He’d say Blah, Blah a time or two,
That’s what Slavoj Žižek’d do.
I want these capitalists to flee,
They are stunting all our lon-gev-it-y.
And I just want Nick Clegg
To stop enabling the Tories.
For schools I’ll be an activist, too,
‘Cause that’s what Slavoj Žižek would do.
And what would Slavoj Žižek do,
He’d call all the radicals in town,
And tell them to unite for true,
That’s what Slavoj Žižek would do.
If Slavoj Žižek could travel through time,
To the year 2007,
He’d say that Wall Street is, My God,
Biggest Bullshit in the world.
And when Slavoj Žižek wrote a book,
He beat up Kung-Fu Panda.
’cause Slavoj Žižek doesn’t take shit from Hol-ly-wo-od
So lets all get together,
And unite to stop the banks,
And we will save the NHS too,
’cause that’s what Slavoj Žižek’d do.
And we will save the NHS too,
’cause that’s what Slavoj Žižek’d do,
That’s what Slavoj Žižek’d do.
With what greediness are the miraculous accounts of travellers received, their descriptions of sea and land monsters, their relations of wonderful adventures, strange men, and uncouth manners?
David Hume, On Miracles
Pharotekton. It’s here, like a long-awaited message in a bottle. Embassytown.
Like all Miéville’s fiction, Embassytown is filled with ideas that are so mind-bending that they’re literally, for me, anyway, unforgettable. I tend to think of them as “things that make you go, whoa.” Armada, from The Scar, is one – an ocean-going state made up of conjoined ships. Say what you like about literary fiction, it is inevitably the creations of “genre” writers that have this effect on me, as though the initial reading of the text is just the beginning of an ongoing dialogue.
I am a huge admirer of American writer Richard Ford (you know you’re a fan when you drive a Suzuki Rascal, that glorified cracker tin on wheels, alone on unfamiliar roads through fog to hear an author read, in Swindon). But I can’t, in all honesty, say that I find myself, after the fact, pondering bits of The Sportswriter or Independence Day, although they are beautiful works in some of the finest prose I’ve ever encountered.
No, my daydreams are of Armada, cactacae and living buildings. In Embassytown, Miéville gives us new constructs to ponder. The most important is Language, speech produced by two alien mouths at once, consisting of similes. The outcome of the story hinges on a cultural shift in language and thought, and Miéville creates from this, seemingly against the odds, an ending that is gripping, poignant and convincing.
It’s not just the ideas, but the words, that linger and resonate. Inspired word combinations and neologisms are one of the great pleasures of reading Miéville. There are echoes of Dambudzo Marechera, the Zimbabwean writer Miéville spoke about in a Guardian Books podcast. Marechera, in Mindblast, writes:
“grapewrath moon”
“timewhite voice”
Miéville gives the narrator of Embassytown, Avice Benner Cho, neologisms that deftly, unobtrusively elucidate the futureworld Miéville has built on Arieka, words like “shiftparents”, “biorigged” and “artminds”.
The similes that make up Language, without which the Ariekene Hosts cannot speak or comprehend, are also evocative:
“it’s like the stone that was split and put together again”
If, at this point, you wonder whether the rarefied air of linguistic theory is far removed from our contemporary situation, fear not. I read much of Embassytown during the several days in which the Obama White House struggled to define, to speak, what they had just done in Abbottabad. To put it in Ariekene terms (which I couldn’t help doing):
“we’re like the country that brought the criminal to justice”
No, wait.
“we’re like the country that shot the armed criminal who used the woman as a human shield”
Try it again.
“we’re like the country that shot the unarmed criminal because it decided to”
Miéville, by setting Embassytown in the far future, has a bit of fun deciding which cultural commentators will still be read and mentioned by Avice – among these, tellingly, is George Lakoff.
There is also humour in Embassytown. Miéville affectionately pokes fun at academic conferences in the scene where Avice meets her third husband Scile. One of the funniest lines in the book will definitely live on in our house – I knew this the minute I read it. EzRa is trying to find out what’s the matter with the Hosts, who are behaving strangely:
“Has something happened to make you suboptimal?”
Embassytown is a cracking story that clearly works on multiple levels. The imperial power that maintains Arieka as a colony is named Bremen, like the one-time Hanseatic League mercantile power. The original Bremen at one point changed their calendar. One of the Ambassadors is named BenTham. I can’t but see the unhinged behaviour of the Host addicts as a wry comment on fans, desperate for the next fix, yet polite:
“Is there a possibility that ChiNa might speak again about the Remade?”
There is much more to investigate here. I can only urge you to read Embassytown and find out for yourself what it’s like.
Anyone who didn’t see a problem with Obama taking advice from Larry Summers on how to fix the economy he (Summers) helped screw up needs to read this quote from “The Price of Everything”, a new book by Eduardo Porter:
“Nearly two decades ago, when he was chief economist of the World Bank, Lawrence Summers, President Barack Obama’s former top economic adviser, signed his name to a memo suggesting it would make sense for rich countries to export their garbage to poor ones. Because wages are lower in poor countries, he said, they would suffer a lesser loss if workers got sick or died. “I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that,” it said. Moreover, pollution mattered less in a poor country with other problems: “The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand.”
Words fail me.
Thanks to boingboing for the post on the book.
Let’s be honest, it’s hard to be upbeat this year. Everything that makes us a civilized and caring society is under threat. The marvel that is the free Internet may be crippled later this week. Usually I suggest a donation to a charity that directly helps people, animals, or both, but this year, because unfettered communication underlies everything, I am suggesting that if you enjoyed the calendar and want to show your appreciation, consider supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who are fighting the good fight to keep the Internet the amazing open resource that it is.
And a little more cheese: here we have, in the background, some Brillat-Savarin, and in the foreground, a delicious Livarot.
Happy Christmas one and all!
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