I didn’t get this until a few days ago, and I first read this story while an undergraduate, and have had a very battered second hand paperback in my possession for almost as long. The book is called Solo: Women on Women Alone edited by Linda and Leo Hamalian, and the story is 6:27 pm by Joyce Carol Oates. It is a series of timed snapshots of a day in the life of a divorced hairdresser with a young son by an ex she wishes never to see again, against whom she has an injuction. She has heard her ex is back in town; she gets silent phone calls. In their introduction, the editors interpret it as a story of struggle with hope of survival, and I accepted that reading until I realised – The last entry is 6:25 pm. She has just convinced herself that her son was staring at nothing in the entrance to their apartment, that there is no one there. But the title is 6:27 pm.
Author Archives: Alison
Beyond the Blue Screen of Death
… lies the fluorescent Navajo tweed of complete crogglement. This I discovered by forging onwards through repeated “this program has performed an illegal operation and will shut down” messages, to blue-screen-of-death with registry errors, to black screen with error boxes, to the point at which even an attempt to log onto my work PC produced a succession of blue and black screens – and finally a screen that consisted of the top 1/4 vertical green and blue bars with an interweaving of other colours of the type that bottom market fashion purveyors like to convince people are “in”, and the lower 3/4 vertical hot pink/purple bars with some of the same interweaving, which gradually gave way to bare bars. I’m sure with the addition of LSD – or maybe jet lag – it would have been fascinating. (Have you ever noticed that the pattern on the carpet in Vancouver airport creeps.) At which point even the IT people gave up, came over, looked, worked and eventually gave me an new-to-me computer.
How do I love Windows, let me count the ways …
Guilty pleasures
In one of those perfect conjunctions of story and audience, I was a twentysomething postdoc in Boston at the time of Beauty and the Beast, which for the unitiated centered on the star-crossed fantasy romance between a crimefighting female DA and a leonine ‘prince’ of an underground utopia. I was hooked, both by the fantasy elements and by the romance, and was rather glad that I moved to the UK before the writers and producers (who included the estimable George RR Martin) had a bizarre brainstorm in the third season and tipped the story into a spiral of tragedy and violence. A number of writers had the same reaction, and in their fan fiction ignored the third season entirely, rewrote the third season, or incorporated the third season – and the new female lead – into their plots, as collected on-line at The Beauty and the Beast Reading Chamber. As always with fanfic, its quality is variable but at its best, it is very good indeed, particularly in the sequence of stories by Edith Crowe, whose writing is naturalistic, tender and in places very funny.
Postmodernism, science and creationism
“For a generation now, the academic left has been engaged in a war against science as we know it: propagating the notion that science is an inherently Western concept, that it is culturally perspectival, but most of all, after Werner Heisenberg, that it is an imperfect and thoroughly flawed ‘discourse’.” … Patrick West’s argument is that the postmodernist insistance that “there is no such thing as truth; there is only interpretation”, and their readiness to interpret the (sexy) metaphors of uncertainty, chaos and relativity as the reality, while disregarding the mathematical and theoretical underpinnings of all of those, have led to an erosion of understanding of the absolutes of science. Add to that the various political movements – of varying degrees of self-servingness and idealism – trying to qualify or undermine the actual or perceived supremacy of science in our culture, and there are a number of converging philosophies and fields of thought arguing that science is just another belief-system. Add to that the fact that, although technology may be privileged, science actually isn’t – or there would not be such wisespread innumeracy and scientific illiteracy as there is – and, to paraphrase the very famous line, we’ve got a problem.
The teaching of evolution
Last months’ Scientific American had an article on the teaching of evolution in US schools. Highly variable, and in places – actually, in some unlikely places – appalling. I have no idea what Canada is like. I suspect, unhappily, that it may be akin to the liberal states, prepared to sacrifice science to social and cultural inclusiveness. (You can tell I’m in the 37% who are of the opinion that creationism does not deserve any mention in a science class, can’t you … which by the way may be a minority but is not a small number.)
Last line: “Many who are indifferent to conservative theology give creationism some support, perhaps because, as mathematician Norman Levitt of Rutgers University suggests, the subject of evolution provokes anxiety about the nature of human existence, an anxiety that antievolutionists use to promote creationist ideas.” Note that whose anxiety is never said. Evolution is quite clear about the nature of human existance. People just don’t care for its interpretation. It doesn’t just knock God off his plinth, it knocks man off his pedestal. It raises questions. People who wish to control – others beliefs or freedoms, or the natural world – are threatened by questions.