Category: Stories, Language & Media

  • Richard Rorty on Radicalism, Liberalism, and Poetic Language

    I was very impressed reading something that Richard Rorty wrote about revolutionaries in his essay “The Contingency of Community” ( in the book “Contingency, irony, and solidarity”). Rorty argues very cogently for a kind of “impossible” deconstructive synthesis of radicalism and liberalism.

  • “Twelve Monkeys” (film), by Alan N. Shapiro

    In a time of momentous and accelerated changes (for example, in a few brief decades we are dismantling a book culture which took centuries to construct), it is a great comfort to know that time travel will soon be available to bring us back to critical junctures in case we made a mistake.

  • “Groundhog Day” (film), by Alan N. Shapiro

    In most movies and television series about time travel, a temporal displacement system still under construction (usually at the cutting edge of research in theoretical physics) has gone haywire. In the TV series Time Tunnel (1966-67), the Pentagon is about to cut off financial support for a top-secret time travel project operating underground.

  • “Desperate Living” (film): John Waters’ Science Fiction Dystopia, by Alan N. Shapiro

    Maybe it was the mono sound of my budget-priced video recorder, which the salesperson at Saturn Hansa had dubbed the ‘Trabant’ (der Trabi, das Symbol eines verschwundenen Landes, the symbol of a disappeared country, hat heute längst Kultstatus erreicht, has long since attained cult status) of VCRs.

  • “Jurassic Park” (film): Newman Eaten by a Dilophosaurus, by Alan N. Shapiro

    Steven Spielberg’s stated goal for the film Jurassic Park (1993) is to achieve what he calls “total realism.” He wants to make cinema coincide with the real. This is a symptomatic fantasy that Jean Baudrillard diagnoses in The Evil Demon of Images as “cinema attempting to abolish itself in the absolute of reality.”