Culture

The FX TV series American Horror Story presents an intriguing portrait of America in the new millennium through the distorting lens of the Gothic mode. Essentially a haunted house story, the series (now 2/3 into its first season) refuses to play by the rules or adhere to the mythology of the sub-genre.

Not far from where I grew up there's a tiny park, at its centerpiece is a misshapen lump of corroding metal.  For years I could never decide whether the lump was a modern art installation or just a large piece of refuse that the town simply refused to collect.  Years later I learned that it in fact was a piece of the USS Maine, a United States battleship which blew up in the harbor of Havana, Cuba in 1896.  The destruction of a US Navy warship in a foreign port was as shocking to the citizens of end-of-the-century America as the terrorist attacks of 9/11 would be just over one hundred years later; the Maine would go on to serve as the causus belli<

When I first received the invitation to participate in Writers in Motion 2011, a project of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, I jumped at the opportunity to be involved in another IWP undertaking.

Soon after President Barack Obama announced the death of terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden late Sunday night, a crowd began to gather outside of the White House. At first it was small group of a few dozen people, perhaps the amount you would expect on the streets of Washington DC at midnight on a Sunday. But soon their numbers swelled into the thousands, united in a joyous celebration that the symbol of evil that had haunted the American psyche for a decade was no more. Similar celebrations broke out in New York City - site of the worst portion of Bin Laden’s  9/11 attacks - Los Angeles and other American cities as well.

Recently I was struck by the similarities underlying dystopic visions found in a novel first published in 1953, and another released this year. In both Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, the future America is an illiterate country. Americans are not only illiterate in both of these bleak futures, but they are illiterate (unwittingly or not, it’s difficult to say) as a result of their own design.

Last Monday, Yahoo pulled the plug on their once-popular GeoCities network.  If you surfed the web in the late 1990s, then you probably visited your share of GeoCities sites, a big part of the reason Yahoo paid $3 billion for GeoCities back in 1999 (GeoCities were once the third most-popular Web destination).  The idea of GeoCities was that individual sites were grouped by theme into virtual “cities” – for example, Wall Street was the “city” for business-themed pages – it was a forerunner to the social networking sites that would eventually replace it.

The media in Russia won a rare victory on Tuesday when a judge in a Moscow courtroom struck down the claim of Josef Stalin’s grandson, Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, that the newspaper Novaya Gazeta had damaged Stalin's “honor and dignity” by claiming in April that the former Soviet leader was, among other things, “a bloodthirsty cannibal” for ordering numerous purges of his enemies, both real and imagined (“Stalin” by the way, was the nom de guerre of Iosef Dzhugashvili, and means “steel” in Russian). Grandson Yevgeny was suing Novaya Gazeta for libel on behalf of the memory of his grandfather.