Just as Le Blogue Berube was becoming one with the GNF, two big themes emerged in the blogs I read most regularly--what I've called elsewhere Blogging While Academic and what I'll call here Blogging the Apocalypse--both of which I tend to think of as tributes to Floating Head Professor and efforts to theorize the WAAGNFNP.
For those with way too much time on their hands, or better things to do that can stand being put off just a little bit longer, or who just may want to stage a suitable Party intervention, High, Low & in-between provides a nice summary as of 1/20/07, which Rough Theory rightly praises, The Kugelmass Episodes promisingly responds to, and I cite doesn't-quite-cite, which prompts questions from the modestly-named The Weblog and gives pas au-dela a needed opening to not pass up a chance to go go go Blanchot on her (and to think I didn't know what "il y a" meant during my second grad school language exam). The Xenofiles ignores the entire discussion yet manages an excellent sequel to a 1985 Louise Erdrich essay.
Since I am nothing if not a fabulous procrastinator, here are the funnest results of a little search I did to track the progress of The Unofficial Carnival of the Blogocalypse outside the realm of cultural theory. If you're interested in radical ecology, check out adaptivereuse.net or The Fourth World--or both, for the cognitive dissonance. If ponies are more your style, check out the YouTube link to Moral Orel's improvement on My Little Ponies in Bridlepath (which, so far as I can tell, has no connection to The Poor Man Institute or their now-concluded 2006 Wingnut Awards). Oh, and even though Jamais Cascio created an Eschatological Taxonomy, I'm linking to Warren Ellis's Apocalypse Scale link, because he's Warren fucking Ellis, dammit, and now he's on the blogroll, too. And even Bud may be getting in on the act. Because nothing sells like the GNF, baby!
[Update: Baltimore's Radio Station for New and Significant Music has come up with the most predictable top 10 Songs of the Apocalypse imaginable. Surely the WAAGNFNP can do better! Clearly there is an aching need for GNF 101: Welcome to the End of the World. This summer course gets us started, but there's so much more to be read/seen/heard. Are we being nihilistic--or annihilistic--enough?]
10 comments:
the most predictable top 10 Songs of the Apocalypse imaginable.
Here is a great list from Conelrad: All things atomic, a website of great general interest to the WAAGNFNP.
Includes Jesus is God's Atomic Bomb among other classics.
And two more "predictable" ones:
Timbuk3's
The Future's So Bright I Gotta Wear ShadesI
and Gloria Gaynor's defiantly politically incorrect anthem I Will Survive.
Unfortunately, I'm way too busy to explore all those obviously very cool links just now. Bummer.
New job starts tomorrow, tons to do today. Well wishes and encouragement most welcome.
And for some more good apocalyptic stuff, head over to the Valve for Joseph Kugelmas' two-parter on The Poem And The Apocalypse.
JPS, thanks, but Josef K cross-posted that Valve piece from his blog, of the Woody Allen title, which was in the original version of this post, unlike Adam Kotsko's (and others') Weblog link, which I added after I double dared him and his commenters to put their in-jokes up against ours. Just to set the record straight on my lax update notification practice here!
I'm putting Josef K's sequel that JPS mentions above in the body and then letting this thing go!
TC,
Sometime sonn (I hope) I will get a chance to go through the links above. There certainly is something in the seeming appeal of the apocalyptic recently, it seems to bespreading like a fast fiery thing.
OK, finally got through a lot of the links. Quite interesting.
I was glad to see the course includes Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. For the most part it is one of the most "gentle" apocalyptic renderings around. (The main character is conveniently out-of-the-way for the horrific die off.)
My favorite passage from it puts things in perspective:
The Great Disaster! Ish had not thought of those words for a long time. Now they seemed to have lost meaning. Those people who had died then would now be dead anyway, from mere passage of time. Now it seemed to make little difference whther they had all died in one year, or slowly over many years. And as for the loss of civilization - about that too he had long doubted.
And here are several more songs for the Blogocalypse:
WWIII from "Root Boy Slim and the Sex Change Band" (and Root Boy was apparently a frat brother of George W's at Yale.) Wish I had the lyrics - a few snippets I recall:
lookin' for a place to plug in my TV
When I finally realized it was World War III
...
Where the hell was Jesus when we need him now?
He was down in Mississippi, buying a mule and a plow
Although not expressly apocalyptic, John Cale's Mercenaries (Ready For War) does evoke the sentiment, and has the arresting intro:
Mercenaries, abuseless, disunited, unfaithful
They have never enough to keep them in a battle
Other than a meager wage
Which is just about enough to make them wanna kill for you
But not enough to make them wanna die for ya
Finally, though certainly not from source with my politics, here are some SHTF/EOTWAWKI tunes (Shit hits the fan/End of the world as we know it.)
LA Brain Train joins in the fun!
You know, I was going to delete the last post as comment spam, but now that I think of it, no, never mind, it wasn't life insurance spam, after all. Deleted!
You know, I have better things to do with my time than delete postmodern real estate spam: "for all realtors and signs of any nature," indeed!
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