But first they read. Danticat picked an excerpt from her story "Ghosts," in which an aspiring radio journalist dreams of starting a program on his violence-wracked Haiti neighborhood. She read,

He would open with a discussion of how many people in Bel Air had lost limbs. Then he would go from limbs to souls, to the number of people who had lost family-siblings, parents, children-and friends. These were the real ghosts, he would say, the phantom limbs, phantom minds, phantom loves that haunt us, because they were used, then abandoned, because they were desolate, because they were violent, because they were merciless, because they were out of choices, because they did not want to be driven away, because they were poor.

Diaz (author of Drown and The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) read from a personal essay about his dad, and it's a testament to his command of both humor and pain that his father's favorite insult — "when you grow up, I am going to find you in an alley somewhere, and I am going to shoot you" — got a huge laugh. After they finished reading, and after a discussion of their long-standing friendship (which Danticat said was about "more life things than writing things"), a listener asked Diaz about the science fiction references in Oscar Wao. Diaz said he'd been pilloried in the mainstream nerd press (only sort of an oxymoron) in a way that smacked of racism. He then made a point about scifi that doesn't get made often enough:

If it wasn't for people of color's experiences and women's experiences, the genre wouldn't exist.

Scifi frequently gets portrayed as a refuge for socially awkward white boys, but everything from Isaac Asimov to Battlestar Galactica is permeated with issues of otherness, or, as Diaz puts it, "questions of alien contact." Stories of new worlds and interspecies warfare can be a way of representing the experiences of immigrants — or of people whose bodies, for reasons of race or gender or size or shape or ability — don't conform to the established norm. People who write about scifi are starting to accept this — female science fiction and fantasy writers are getting more attention, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay brought the related issue of sexual orientation in superhero comics to the fore. But the nerd backlash against Oscar Wao shows how eager some marginalized groups are to marginalize others, especially in the literary world, and how jealously (and dumbly) geeks sometimes guard their geek fiefdoms against those who could be allies.

Despite his experience with the nerd police, Diaz also advanced the somewhat debatable point that reading teaches compassion. He said reading a book was "one of the clearest ways to come into communion with another subjectivity," and that, moreover, the process of writing forced him to be a better person. "When I come up short as a writer," he added, "there's always a shortcoming in my character." Danticat responded that becoming a mother (that's her and her daughter above) had changed her as a writer — "when your life is layered in a certain way," she said, "you have more in your soul to go to." She got in a little dig at the Hemingway school of "life experience," in which the way to broaden yourself as a writer is to "go shoot animals," and her words were a powerful response to the idea that women can't both have families and make great art. But does making great art really require you to be a good person? And does it make good people of those who consume it?

Later in the conversation, Diaz said, "this life makes it so difficult to engage in civic- and justice-minded projects." By "this life," I assumed he meant American life, with its relative comfort and its myriad distractions, but it's also true that a life spent writing fiction — or reading it — invites escape into fictional worlds. I'm not a fan of the notion, popular when I was in grad school, that the best writers are assholes and the best fiction speaks to what is most evil in the reader's soul — both because I think it's a limiting view of literature and because, as a writer, I like having friends. And I believe that reading and writing do teach a willingness to explore other kinds of lives. But they also teach absorption in the mind and not in the world, and while this isn't always a bad thing, it doesn't necessarily lead to social change. Of the racist new Dominican Constitution and of injustice the world over, Diaz said, "everybody in every place in every way they can has to find a way to resist." And while reading fiction is many things, it's not (at least in America) active resistance.

New Yorker Festival [Official Site]
Ghosts [New Yorker]

MEGAN: Good morning, and thanks for waking up on a holiday-for-normal-people to do this...

KAY: Not a problem. I got in late last night, but oh man, so much to talk about this morning: Sarah Palin probably wasn't properly vetted, another hurricane is going to slam New Orleans (probably), and the Republicans went ahead and canceled the Bush/Cheny duo at the convention today because of it.

MEGAN: I have to say, I do find it ever-so-slightly ironic that a hurricane is fucking up the Republican convention in Minnesota, in no small part after that right-wing pastor for Focus on the Family called for torrential, once-in-a-lifetime rain to fuck up Obama's speech and prove who the God candidate really was. Guess we know who God is rooting for, after all, going and reminding everyone how Bush and Cheney fucked up in NOLA...

KAY: Oh yeah, careful though, this guy had to apologize for joking that God was on the Democrats' side.

MEGAN: As far as I'm concerned, they started it. Also, I don't actually believe that God probably gives a shit.

KAY: But this whole thing reminds me of the guy in your office, you know, the slacker who comes in late and doesn't do his job, but then when evaluations roll around suddenly he's on time and makes a big show of getting his stuff done early.

MEGAN: Like, if S/He did, S/He wouldn't punish the Gulf Coast for it, right? We are living in the post-Genesis world.

KAY: Wait, we are? Shit, I was scheduled to sacrifice a goat for having my period later ...

MEGAN: I mean, when was the last time you heard Phil Collins?

KAY: Possibly in the elevator.

MEGAN: Anyway, I also love how McCain is all, "this is no time to play politics!" but already did a campaign stop there. Oh, wait, "assessment tour."

KAY: Right, and his new VP pick has such an awesome record on the environment. Know what will fix this problem? More drilling in Alaska!

MEGAN: Wait! John McCain told me that drilling here and drilling now will fix everything! How dare you suggest it won't!

KAY: Totally. And she thinks the "jury's still out" on global warming. Tell that to Gustav.

MEGAN: Well, like, the jury is still out. Civilization as we know it hasn't ended due to catastrophic environmental degradation, making it look like something out of Mad Max or Tank Girl or Waterworld or The Postman. And perhaps if Hollywood keeps Kevin Costner from ever starring in a scifi movie again, it never will.

KAY: That's one of the many things we need to do to protect America.

MEGAN: The other thing I wanted to touch on was Carly Fiorina's statement that women are smarter than to vote on choice.

The Democratic party has done a disservice to women by trying to hold women hostage to the issue of Roe v. Wade. The truth is the most important issue to women, all the polls say this, is the economy. Women are not single issue voters.

Because this is something I feel marginally guilty about. I don't want to be a single-issue voter, but when the issue is control over my body, I'm afraid my uterus beats out my brain, like usual. So, really, it's the Republican Party that is holding me hostage with it's no-abortion-not-ever-you-dirty-slut platform.

KAY: So true. I mean, it's a good thing we have Carly Fiorina to remind us of that.

MEGAN: I'm glad she has such obvious faith in my reasoning and intellect.

KAY: Of course, women simply can't be trusted to make rational decisions. The Republicans obviously thought they'd trick women by picking a woman as VP nominee. That way our little lady brains would make us think she's the same as Hillary Clinton. And, you know, we always vote with our vaginas.

MEGAN: I mean, I don't want to deny here that I make bad choices with my vagina. My vagina has made several poor decisions in my lifetime. But one thing it is pretty darn good at is distinguishing between people. And so my vagina knows that Sarah Palin is not Hillary Clinton, and my brain knows that even better.

KAY: Right? Well, here's hoping that this poll is right and women will remain skeptical and not be deceived by her "hockey mom" status and accent (which I personally find adorable and you'll probably hear in St. Paul this week).

MEGAN: I like accents! I find it strange when people ask about mine because it's such a strange mish-mash of all the places I've lived — I'll bet you've heard me break out a "wicked" or two when I've been drinking. But we definitely shouldn't dismiss the idea that people will vote for McCain because he brought her on the ticket. Obama needs to make a compelling case that voting for a woman like Sarah Palin, given her politics, is not a vote for women like Hillary Clinton's young mother in Ohio (or was it Iowa?) dying in childbirth because she didn't have insurance. Points like that need to be hammered home again and again. Plus, more pictures of polar bears. Obama should've totally visited Knut when he was in Berlin.

KAY: Everybody loves polar bears!

MEGAN: Except, apparently, Sarah Palin, oil companies and Stephen Colbert.

KAY: Right, well, at least Stephen Colbert's excuse is that he loves nothing more than himself. What's Sarah Palin's excuse? (Man, we love to hate Sarah Palin today.)

MEGAN: I believe that would be the Alaskan Permanent Fund. You know, the checks every Alaskan resident receives from the Alaskan government for allowing the oil companies to drill here, drill now?

KAY: Someone should really make a youtube video staring Palin with "drill here, drill now, everywhere you gotta drill ..." Maybe Will.i.am will go negative.

MEGAN: I'm recommending Fatboy Slim's Right Here, Right Now.

KAY: Get to work, Internet minions!

The Washington Post:

Viewed without skepticism, "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" is a taut, well-acted, thoughtfully organized, not very scary, not very hard to figure out serial-killer mystery revolving around two 40-something adults with trust issues. They still drive a Taurus, and their adventure takes place over a few gray, snowy days in NoVa and WeVa. (British Columbia, once again, reprises its "X-Files" role as a wet, overcast Anywhere.) Described thusly, the movie sounds like a low-budget yawner from an off night at Sundance.

People will complain (and already have) that "I Want to Believe" looks cheap and easy, barely rising to the level of a usual episode back when. Doubter that I am, I actually took it as a sweet bit of epilogue, made by and for adults. Even the show's "shippers" . . . may be surprised by how grown-up our paranormal sleuths have become. With simple sanity and lack of flash, Mulder and Scully make it clear: Our summer movies are part of a big conspiracy plot to trash our minds. I want to believe Mulder and Scully are correct.

Time:

A subtler anachronism is the seriousness with which Mulder and Scully take their work and themselves. On TV, Duchovny settled quickly into his role as an obsessive plodder; Anderson's gravity served as a rebuke to all the actresses her age who spoke in baby talk and aspired to nothing higher than Baywatch. The movie continues that dark, quiet tone, which means that today's moviegoers will have to forgo expectations of wisecracking heroes and snarling psychopaths, and to take seriously a couple of anguished folks who look and behave with the tired tenseness of anchors on C-SPAN.

USA Today:

For one thing, the Mulder-Scully chemistry seems to have evaporated. David Duchovny is still engagingly low-key as the truth-seeking Fox Mulder, while Gillian Anderson as Dana Scully seems to have become even more dour. Grounded in science, her doctor character was always serious, but she has lost some of what made her more human: passionate emotions and flashes of dry humor. There's a discernible lack of sparks during a bedroom scene. Sure, it's meant to be cozy rather than sexy, but it feels forced.

The Los AngelesTimes:

Scully, who now works as a surgeon at a Catholic hospital (Our Lady of Sorrows, nudge nudge), was always a wrestling act for Anderson, who had to fight against the character's morose, doubting-Thomas side, not to mention prosaic literary tendencies. Anderson loses the match here: Scully has ossified into one of the most humorless characters to suck the life out of a summer movie.

The New York Times:

That relationship still simmers, though at a reduced temperature. There’s nothing stirring the air between Mulder and Scully, who, having left the bureau, come across as unmoored and unfocused, even when they’re working on the outlandish criminal case that drags them back into the twilight zone. A similar lack of urgency characterizes the movie, which despite its yowling dogs, barking Russians, screaming women, swelling choral voices and moody cinematography by Bill Roe — which turns even dark blue a deeper shade of black — never finds a sustainable pulse. Mr. Carter knows how to grab your attention visually, but the amalgam of trashy thriller clichés that he has compiled with Frank Spotnitz, another series regular, creates its own deadening effect. It’s no wonder Mulder and Scully seem so diffident.

ReelViews:

The film's central "mystery" is painfully underdeveloped. The pedophile priest, in addition to being a walking cliché, adds little to the proceedings, and the revelation about what lies behind the kidnappings and murders is B-grade bad. The film musters a little tension toward the end, with Mulder in peril, but that's in stark contrast to the dull and tedious 90 minutes to precede it. One keeps waiting for I Want to Believe to shift into high gear, and it never does. Do we ever believe that the characters are in danger or that their "mission" means anything? No. The film feels like an excuse for nostalgia.

The actors don't seem to care, either. Duchovny is okay, and the film was apparently made largely because he made himself available for it, but the Mulder in this film is a lot more laid-back than his TV series counterpart. Gillian Anderson claims that it was difficult for her to re-discover the character after such a long layoff, and it shows. Scully is a shadow of what she once was. Most distressingly, where these two used to play brilliantly off one another, here they never mesh, even on those occasions when the screenplay allows them to share the screen. What's the point of a reunion if the characters are going to be kept apart so much? Amanda Peet has more scenes with Duchovny than Anderson does.

Slate:

The nefarious plot behind the agent's abduction is so far-fetched I'm itching to spoil it. But I'll limit myself to observing that, if ever I'm dying of a rare brain disease, I hope my surgeon won't go home and frantically Google treatment options, as Scully does at one key moment. (Couldn't she at least log on to Medscape?) The problem with the movie's semisupernatural crime plot, though, isn't that the resolution is completely outlandish; it's that the outlandishness is insufficiently grounded in pseudoscience. If you're going to posit stuff this crazy, you'd better have some solid-sounding bullshit to back it up.

The New Republic:

The story unspools adequately from this premise, but rarely feels like more than a middling episode of the series extended to twice its usual length. In part this is thanks to series creator (and first-time feature director) Chris Carter, who repeatedly gets failing marks in How to Make a Movie 101. It's difficult, for instance, to follow even the basic geography of the film, which jumps back and forth between the rural West Virginia crime scene and Scully's hospital (are she and Mulder commuting?), and features a climactic chase in a city I assume was Richmond but may have been somewhere else. Worse, the coy are-they-or-aren't-they relationship between Mulder and Scully that was emphasized in the latter years of the series has progressed into something revealed so opaquely that it takes a good while to recognize what it is.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe is in no conventional sense a good movie. And yet, for fans of the series, it may be just good enough. There are moments of penetrating moodiness and horror; stabs at mystical profundity that don't miss too badly; some nice performances (especially by Connolly); and even an all-too-brief appearance by Mitch Pileggi's Walter Skinner. Most important, the chemistry between Duchovny and Anderson has lost little of its fizz, and it's nice to spend more time in their company, even as it's hard not to wish they could have found a better way to occupy themselves than wandering through such a shaggy retread. This latest, and presumably last, X-Files installment is not an unpleasant way to pass a couple of hours, provided you, too, want to believe. But you have to want it pretty badly.

So here's the thing: Rachel Moss seems like an intelligent, cool, normal person. What the fuck do such people really want with mocking the fats? Did I not get the memo about how fat-trolling burns calories? I have friends like this. Indie rock listening friends who preach tolerance and limiting their carbon intakes low and desiring change in government — and yeah, Moss is an Obama girl! — who nevertheless disdain fat people and for whom being relatively thin almost seems to be a conversational prerequisite. Because fat people remind them of the suburbs they so detested as hopelessly victimized youths? I guess. But isn't that just so boring? Yes. So boring I wouldn't bother posting about it, except for my fear that such people are totally going to turn into Republicans one day.

The Offending Post
Public Shaming [Amptoons]
The Dimensions Of Hypersurfaces

I wish this was the kind of world where say, 'Wow, I'd like to touch your breasts,' and people would understand that it's not a way of reducing you to a set of nipples and ignoring the rest of you, but rather a way of saying that I may not yet know your mind, but your body is beautiful.

We were standing in the hallway of ConFusion, about nine of us, and we all nodded. Then another friend spoke up.

"You can touch my boobs," she said to all of us in the hallway. "It's no big deal."

Now, you have to understand the way she said that, because it's the key to the whole project. The spirit of everything was formed within those nine words - and if she'd said them shyly, as though having her breasts touched by people was something to be endured or afraid of, the Open-Source Boob Project would have died aborning. But she didn't. Her words were loud and clearly audible to anyone who walked by, an offer made to friends and acquaintances alike.

Yet it wasn't a come-on, either. There wasn't that undertow of desperation of come on, touch me, I need you to validate my self-esteem and maybe we'll hook up later tonight. There was no promise of anything but a simple grope.

We all reached out in the hallway, hands and fingers extended, to get a handful. And lo, we touched her breasts - taking turns to put our hands on the creamy tops exposed through the sheer top she wore, cupping our palms to touch the clothed swell underneath, exploring thoroughly but briefly lest we cross the line from 'touching" to "unwanted heavy petting." They were awesome breasts, worthy of being touched.

Well, that didn't go over so well. Ferrett and his nerd cohorts were showered with outrage and mockery and virtual kicks in the balls and now he's apologized, saying what "works in a microcosm can't work in a macrocosm" and all sorts of stupid shit someone is surely saving for a screenplay on a GeekCon Rom Com about a booth babe who falls in love with a friendly hacker, because the Open Source Boob Project is seriously the funniest thing since Band Camp, unless you're the type to get offended by "double standards" or whatever, and we talked to someone who gets offended by that stuff (and also, has to actually attend science fiction conventions) and the only thing that offended her was that there were no rules for groping dudes. "I am a total repressed groper," she admitted. Me too, kinda! But um...that's what crowded bars in Williamsburg are for, right? Wait, forget I said that.

No No Ojou Chan!
Earlier: Elegy For A Booth Babe

What Is An io9? [io9]
Related: Gawker Blasts Into Sci-Fi With New Blog, I09 [Wired]
Gawker Media Gets Strung Out On Sci-Fi [NY Times]

Seriously, it's like when you see what you think is a mouse, but really it's a dog toy, and you're relieved for a minute but then you have to adjust to the fact that the dog toy is watching you masturbate and whatever. Which brings me to: what useful intelligence can you gather from a bunch of grainy video of some chick waving her hands yelping, "Ew! Get off! Fuck you!!" (And is it more sexist to say that, or that the CIA didn't think of that when they were developing these state-of-the-art intelligence gathering operations?)

Anyway, mostly the government swears it does not have its shit nearly together enough to deploy the robobugs for any actual useful purpose, which would explain what they are doing in my hair, antiwar rallies, etc. But over the next twenty years we bet the robobugs will build a damning case for why Wilmer Valderrama's ex-wife should get lots of alimony.

Dragonfly or Insect Spy? [Washington Post]