The End of May
I concluded the month with a marathon read of World War Z. Yes, I did confess to completing an apocalyptic book about a zombie epidemic. It is important to note that this constituted consecutive books concerning a future return for Mother Rus to a medieval theocracy, that said, I'll take the prose of Vladimir Sorokin any day over that of Max Brooks. What Brooks does succeed with, is a sociological approach problem solving and what the effects of extensive depopulation would create for our world.
Otherwise I'm half way through David Albahari's Leeches and have struck into Sorokin's Ice Trilogy with very mixed reactions so far. The last two mornings have also witnessed some duly plugging away into Our mutual Friend.
Otherwise I'm half way through David Albahari's Leeches and have struck into Sorokin's Ice Trilogy with very mixed reactions so far. The last two mornings have also witnessed some duly plugging away into Our mutual Friend.
posted by jon faith at
9:26 AM
2 Comments:
Interesting - Brooks? World War Z? I admit that I would not have thought it for you. Your mention of a sociology and planetwide extensive depopulation makes for a succinct, and no less quickly trenchant for it, analysis in so far as I know Brook's work. The idea of Zombies and the pervasiveness of them throughout nearly all cultures in some kind has recently pushed my friend and your erstwhile (abortive?) electronic colleague, Robert Saunders, into a study of them from the perspective of the emerging academic field of cultural geopolitics (roughly the sort of thing I do I suppose, though my working "data" trends to the more traditional?). I did find his analysis of things as it related to the zombies in American (here meaning U.S. of course) culture interesting - he identified a trend in which in a few short years, with the fulcrum of see-saw being 9/11, zombies went from being mindless consumers and hence a commentary on ourselves to being mindless, invading, border-ignoring, transgressive (and not in the good way) Others that could never be us and we could never cotton to them either - a subtle shift in threat that nonetheless was substantial, moving from subsumation to decimation. No matter, but I wonder what Zizek would have to say about it?
And of course there is this from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention:
http://blogs.cdc.gov/publichealthmatters/2011/05/preparedness-101-zombie-apocalypse/
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