Puck

Astronauts are apparently scoring dope while in orbit, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times:

A shuttle worker employed by United Space Alliance found a plastic bag with a white powder residue — later confirmed to be cocaine — in a shuttle processing hangar at Kennedy Space Center last week.

This raises an important question: from whom are the astronauts scoring? And, is the drug war being extended into near-Earth orbit? More, is the cocaine being scored in space and brought back to Earth in any way connected to the U.S.’s secret moon base so recently exposed? Additionally, why are the U.S. and Russia spatting over an “asteroid hit“? Just what is meant by the term “hit” in this content? Could the asteroid, in parallel with the moon being made of green cheese, be made of pure cocaine?

L. Timmel Duchamp wrote a great review of On Joanna Russ, the literary-critical anthology which I’m a part of.  The review just went up on Strange Horizons. Duchamp writes,

the realization struck me that the collection’s essays could be divided into those that, on the one hand, seek to smooth over Russ’s angry edges and those that, on the other, attend closely and carefully to all that is uncomfortable and challenging in Russ’s work. Such a division, however, would create so sharp a difference between critical approaches that I had to wonder: does recognition of the angry edges in Russ’s work matter? Ought critics to engage directly with them? Psychological experiments have shown that subjects more easily recognize anger in men’s faces than in women’s, confirming feminist observations that women’s anger is commonly treated as derisory, unnecessary, or unwarranted. What, then, is a (feminist) reader to make of a critic’s ignoring or patronizing of that anger?

I’m not sure Duchamp ever really answers that question in her review. Speaking for myself, I felt that Russ’s anger is at the core of her work, that it truly does matter, that her anger is what makes her work sing, and so I tried to honor it as well as I could. Her’s what Duchamp says about my piece:

The final piece in the book, Brian Charles Clark’s “The Narrative Topology of Resistance in the Fiction of Joanna Russ” is more a paean to Russ’s fiction than an essay. It leaps and soars over the (topological) surface of Russ’s fiction at speed, sampling literary and theoretical allusions even more promiscuously than Butler’s essay does, with manic energy and delight, never lighting on the surface for more than an instant. While Butler’s essay invokes Cixous’s style, Clark’s, never burdened by the gravid weight of critical pretension, actually emulates it. Clark’s essay serves as a coda, taking the book out on an appreciative—even ecstatic—note of Russ’s still-standing challenge.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s December ‘08 list of new words includes “ew” (as in “yuck”) and “podcast.” Ew joins

a large family of imitative words expressing disgust or aversion, ew takes its place, alongside ugh, ough, auh, yah, pew, faugh, and many more, on the list of words which have attempted to tackle the age-old problem of how to represent in print what are essentially inarticulate sounds. Even within the scope of this one entry, many different opinions prevail as to how one should spell ew, as the variants section shows: we have found examples of euuw, euuww, euw, euww, ew, and eww, plus instances in which even more “u”s or “w”s (or both) are pressed into service: as many as 6 “u”s or 16 “w”s have been sighted. Read the rest of this entry »

OK, people, let’s cut the crap. You’ve heard about the Bush Administration’s Big Idea: we’ll go “back to the Moon” within 10 years. Why? In order to build a base on the Moon that will serve as a jumping-off point for a “manned” (their sexist language, not mine) trip to Mars. Can we talk? If the U.S.–or anybody else, for that matter, wants to send a human’d flight to Mars, OK, that’s one thing. But why do it from the Moon? Why go all the way to the Moon–which takes 3 days and billions of dollars–to then take off for Mars? Read the rest of this entry »