Zombies and cannibals.
Posted: May 5, 2012 Filed under: Ephemera | Tags: cannibals, dissertation, filth, movies, racism, violence, zombies 2 Comments »Let’s begin this post with an exercise. Take a moment, and try to bite a chunk out of your forearm. I’ll wait.
I’m going to guess that you couldn’t do it—if you actually tried, that is. I certainly couldn’t (and, for the record, I’ve tried on more than one occasion). But it’s a certain kind of couldn’t: what we might loosely call a psychological or instinctive couldn’t—our lizard brains prevent us.
I’m after a different kind of couldn’t: I’m curious whether or not it is physically, physiologically possible for a human being—say, a thirty-year-old male with reasonably well-preserved teeth—to bite into and tear a chunk off of another living human being’s limbs or torso. The biting-my-own-arm experiment is really unhelpful in answering this question: sure, I coud bite my arm harder than I’m willing to bite it, but I have no way of judging if that extra force would be sufficient to puncture and tear human skin and muscle.
Why am I interested in this question, you might be wondering? Zombies, that’s why.
I’m currently working on a paper—and by “working on” I mean “I wrote and submitted an abstract to a conference and I’m not writing anything else until I hear if it was accepted”—…a paper about the connection between zombies and late-early-modern (1650-1800) European representations of cannibals. One of the things I’m interested in is tracing a genealogical path between the two—someday maybe I’ll write a post about that. Right now, I’m interested in teeth:
Gnarly-ass zombie teeth. They don’t look capable of chewing on a raw steak, which I’m guessing—but only guessing—is easier than chewing on tasty (again: guessing) human flesh. The point is that her teeth are prominent—like, say, this dude’s teeth:
Pointy damn teeth, and the defining feature of the photograph. Without the filed teeth, the photograph is something else, something less memorable: the teeth make the man.
I’m not sure I have a point yet, except to point out that teeth are perhaps the defining feature of both cannibals and zombies. The defining action of both is, of course, that they eat people; and, certainly, other physical features are more prominent—zombies are more or less decayed, cannibals are “black” (in the sense that they aren’t “white”). Both of those markers are external, on the skin, difficult if not impossible to conceal—but the teeth can be hidden until the moment of biting.
There’s something to that: think of the scene in The Fellowship of the Ring (the film) when Bilbo, old and decrepit, sees the Ring in Frodo’s possession and suddenly lunges at him—no, don’t think about it, watch it: scary teeth! I’m sure I could find examples in, I don’t know, Alien or any adaptation of Dracula ever made. The teeth are revealed at the moment when the threat is revealed as a threat: or, rather, the revelation of scary (read “pointy”) teeth is what reveals the bearer of the pointy teeth as a threat—one that is about to attempt to eat whoever it is that’s just seen those scary teeth.
Hopefully my abstract will be accepted, and I’ll have an excuse to keeping fleshing this out—and we can all ponder together whether or not human teeth are capable of what zombie teeth do, and why that might be important.
Day 215: Welcome a new life.
Posted: August 4, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: advice, disappointment, disasters, life, music, sadness, zombies Leave a comment »I’ve linked to the Census Bureau’s population clock before: you have to reload the page to get new numbers, but this one updates as you watch, which is cool, but also a bit disturbing.
If I wanted to go into it, this would be the time to discuss the unsustainability of our current population growth curve, and the ever-increasing likelihood of some sort of catastrophic collapse in which most of the population dies, and what this has to do with late-20th and early-21st century apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fictions … I don’t really want to, though, because it’s depressing to think about. Also it’s late, and I’ve had a few bourbons, and I have to get up early and dig post-holes and put posts in them and put concrete around the posts in the morning.
So.
I’m going to take the easy way out, and offer someone else’s advice: “wear sunscreen,” &c.
I’ll make a few additions, also borrowed, but from other sources:
Life is hard, and then you die. It is the fate of all living organisms to become food for other living organisms. Death and destruction. Smoke if you’ve got ‘em. Alcohol doesn’t make life worth living, but it helps sometimes. All you need is love. Shit flows downhill, and payday’s on Friday. The Dude abides.
When the zombies happen, stay the fuck out of the cities.
Rock over London; rock on, Chicago.
Day 213: Surveillance special!
Posted: August 2, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: bullshit, civility, economics, money, violence, zombies Leave a comment »“Stage a crime in front of a back-alley security camera and see if anyone comes to the rescue.”
There must be a few back alleys somewhere in this town, but I don’t think any of them have security cameras. Even if they did, they would be useless: cameras in public places aren’t about making us safer, they’re about making us think we’re safer — about the illusion of safety.
Nobody is watching the feed from those cameras. It’s probably recorded and stored, so that it can be accessed and watched in the event that something prosecutable happens — but that watching happens after the fact, not in real-time. Go into a large retail establishment, though — the kind with far more overhead cameras than helpful employees — and you can be pretty damn sure someone is watching the camera feeds, at least most of the time. And why? Because there’s money involved, money to be lost if someone isn’t watching.
Surveilling an entire city — or even just the “high risk” parts of a city — in order to prevent crime simply isn’t cost-effective; not even fucking close. Making people think the whole city is being surveilled — turning the city into a Panopticon — might make some people feel safer, but it probably actually makes them less safe.
Let’s say I mug somebody in an alley that has a security camera. A week goes by, I don’t get arrested. I mug someone else, in another alley with a camera. I don’t get arrested. I talk to my colleagues, at the monthly meeting of muggers and malcontents, and it turns out that lots of muggings happen in front of cameras — and only, I don’t know, 2 muggings out of 100 that occur in front of a camera result in an arrest. I don’t have to know who Jeremy Bentham was to figure out that the cameras are bullshit.
Now let’s say I’m an oblivious middle class bougie who had a few too many $2 PBRs at the local dive, and I’m wandering home, drunk, and decide to take a shortcut down the sort of alley that people get mugged in — but there are cameras, and I know how Jeremy Bentham was, alright, because I read about him in college — and so I feel safe, because there are cameras, and the feeling of safety (and the beer) make me complacent and unobservant — and I get the shit beaten out of me, and my wallet and iPhone stolen.
Here’s my point: even if I could find a back alley surveillance camera in this town, and I went to stage a crime in front of it to see if the police would show up — I already know that the police wouldn’t show up, and I’d probably get attacked and robbed by actual criminals while I was pretending to be one. That didn’t sound like fun, which is why I stayed home, drank vermouth (I’m out of bourbon), and watched The Walking Dead.
Cameras don’t help in a zombie apocalypse either.
Day 146: Famous last words: prepare yours ahead of time.
Posted: May 26, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: animals, disasters, paranormal activity, sadness, violence, words, zombies Leave a comment »I am going to be eaten by zombies.
It’s the year 2047, and I’m not as young as I used to be. Shit, I’ll be 65 for most of 2047 – the part I survive, that is – and 65 is fucking old during a zombie apocalypse.
Anyway. This zombies-walking-the-earth thing has been going on for a few years, and we’re surviving pretty well: we’ve got a fortress-commune going, out in a rural area, with good walls and hedges and ha-has and whatnot. We grow our own food, we raise some livestock, and we all get along pretty well, which is pretty good, considering that there are fifty-odd of us. We keep our heads down, and the zombies – and the roving motorcycle gangs – leave us alone.
That changes, though. A wandering pack – drove? horde? herd? what do you call a group of zombies? – a wandering whatever of zombies finds our commune. They can’t get in, but the incessant wailing attracts other zombies, and soon we’ve got a veritable army of the undead at our gates, and it just keeps getting bigger.
We discuss ways to kill them. Nuking them from orbit isn’t an option. Fire’s a possibility, except we’re likely to torch ourselves, too. Blow them up? Feed them poisoned livestock? Hope they go away? None of these sound like good plans.
We could lure them away. There’s a crater a few miles away – long story – and if we can get them into it, we can burn them before they can get back out. It’s a good idea, with one significant flaw: it’s a suicide mission.
I volunteer. I’m the oldest one in the commune, and I’m going to be a burden on everyone else sooner rather than later. This is a good way to go, a valiant and honorable way. Some people protest, but just for show: nobody else wants to do it, and nobody can think of a better plan.
We manage to get an old jeep running; it probably won’t run for long, and it doesn’t want to go much above 20 mph, but that’s enough. We kill a goat, strap it to the back, and slit its throat: to leave a trail for the zombies. They’ll follow me, down into the crater. I’ll have a flamethrower and a half-dozen grenades, and none of them will get out alive (not that they’re really alive to begin with).
As I’m leaving, someone says to me: “What if it doesn’t work? We’ve heard rumors that the zeds are developing intelligence.”
“Don’t worry,” I say, patting my flamethrower. “I’ll give them something to chew on.”
Day 144: Men-only day.
Posted: May 24, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: batman, bodily functions, food, friends, star trek, work, zombies 1 Comment »
Really, this is “Do manly things day” – and, as always, the suggestions the Book gives are less than compelling. Pee on a wall? I pee in my compost pile every day. Fill a shopping cart with nothing but beer? The distributor makes a stop at my house. Leave the seat up? That’s just inconsiderate, if you share a toilet with a woman – and being inconsiderate isn’t manly.
So I followed the Book’s instructions and did manly things today, and it was awesome.
I got my son dressed and delivered to school – because ensuring the survival of your offspring and the propagation of your genetic code is, really, the manliest thing there is.
I did some yard work. Then I went to the hardware store, and then I did some more yard work. I had beer with lunch, and lunch was baked beans out of a can. I didn’t actually eat them out of the can, because my daughter put them in a saucepan to warm them up – but I did eat them out of the saucepan, with the giant spoon she’d used to stir them. Then I cleaned my kitchen.
Because peeing outside isn’t a big deal, I took a shit outside – a big, nasty, smelly shit. …I really have no idea why I wrote that, because it’s not even true, and who wants to read that kind of thing? I’m going to leave it, though. Why not?
I went to the gym this afternoon to “pump iron” with my “bro” – and let me tell you, that iron didn’t know which way was up when we got done with it. Even manlier: I biked to the gym, a whole seven miles from my house. Seven miles isn’t actually that far, and each leg was more painful than it should have been. It was actually a bit humbling, but that’s okay: humility is also manly.
I made a fucking roast for dinner. I cut up onions for it, and didn’t cry. I cooked it in an entire bottle of wine, and drank a second bottle while I was cooking it – and I drank it straight from the bottle.
…I think that’s it. I took a shower? I washed the dishes? I watched the rain?
Close enough. Now I’m going to watch Dawn of the Dead – for science!
Follow-up: Day 137: Does cheese really give you nightmares? YES.
Posted: May 18, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: animals, dreams, hedgehogs, lucid dreaming, murder, roadkill, violence, zombies Leave a comment »Well, that was … uh … a pretty bizarre dream.
I was driving, somewhere wooded, at night, on a two-lane highway. I hit a small animal – maybe I’d already hit it when the dream started, and was stopping the car? – anyway, it was dead, and I was stopping, for some reason, to look at it. It was a fucking hedgehog, and it was dead, except it wasn’t dead. It was undead. A zombie. A fucking zombie hedgehog.
I ran. Then I was up in some sort of tower in the woods, like a wooden lookout tower or the sort of thing deer-hunters use; I was up on a ladder trimming trees yesterday, maybe that had something to do with it? Anyway, I was up in this tower-thing, it was dawn, and the forest floor was crawling with zombie hedgehogs. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Saw some zombie squirrels, some zombie rabbits. Zombie people, too, all milling about around the tower. None of them seemed interested in me, which was good, because I had no way to defend myself.
No food or water, either, though, which would mean having to leave at some point. Thought to myself: this is probably a dream; reach behind yourself and grab a rifle and a machete.
Didn’t work.
Then I was down among the zombies, punching the people-zombies, and stomping on the animal-zombies. There was a lot of crunching. I think the animal-zombies I stomped might have had cheese in them, or internal organs that looked like cheese? It kind of made me want to vomit, in the dream, and I’m not sure if dream-vomiting is like dream-pissing, where you also do it with your actual body, and not just your dream body. Fortunately, I didn’t have to find out: I was rescued from the zombies by a diminutive Jedi. Turned out to be Jack, who’d woken up and wanted to wake me up, too – so I took him back to bed, and sat with him for a bit, and now I’m writing this.
I don’t think I ever want to eat cheese again, and going back to sleep is not really an option. Time to have a cup of coffee and go to the grocery store.
Day 137: Does cheese really give you nightmares?
Posted: May 17, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: dreams, food, swedish chef, zombies Leave a comment »“Find out by eating 100 oz. of one of the following and recording your dreams.”
First of all: 100 ounces of cheese is six and a quarter pounds of cheese. As I said with the chocolate, I can’t eat that much of anything in one sitting, and I doubt I could get even a pound of cheese down in a day. (Although the right cheese, on the right day…)
I did eat some cheese, however. According to the Book, Danish Blue produces nightmares about zombies – and zombies sounded better than some of the other options, which included vampires, castration, falling, hell, and “general sweatiness.”
I didn’t manage to procure any Danish Blue – actually, I didn’t procure any cheese at all – but my brother-in-law and his wife came over for dinner, and brought blue cheese with them, and I ate some of it. Not six pounds, but a lot more than I normally eat, which is none.
I’ll let you know in the morning how it went.
Day 131: Defy hierarchy.
Posted: May 11, 2011 Filed under: Politics, The Book | Tags: academia, bastards, books, open letters, violence, zombies Leave a comment »
When Robinson Crusoe found himself alone on an uninhabited island, he quickly declared himself king, lord, emperor of all he surveyed. He had no subjects for two and a half decades, but he was still the king, dammit.
He eventually acquired a savage – plucked from the jaws of death cannibals – and, a few years later, a Spaniard. He sent the Spaniard off in search of other subjects, and then skipped town when an English ship happened by his island. He quickly took command of the vessel – though he let the former captain pretend to still be in charge – and left a few mutineers behind with a letter for the Spaniard. Then they all sailed back to England.
Even though he was absolutely alone, Crusoe couldn’t resist putting himself at the top of a hierarchy. It’s human nature: we want a pecking order, we want someone to be the alpha male, we have to know who the leader of the pack is, we want other animal metaphors.
In general, people defy hierarchies with the goal – reasonable or otherwise – of instituting a new hierarchy with themselves at the top. This is why we have coups and revolutions and hostile takeovers and homeowners associations and office politics and aggressive salespeople and dudes who talk too loud at the coffeeshop about whatever the fuck it is they’re talking about.
This sort of defiance is directed toward the current system, the current hierarchy – sometimes justifiably, certainly – but it doesn’t call in to question the coercive and power-hungry nature of hierarchical systems as such. This sort of defiance seeks to replace, not to dismantle. Even when the defiers talk about dismantling, it is always with the unspoken assumption that something new will be built from the wreckage of the old.
A true defiance of hierarchy requires a rejection of power, a rejection of position and advantage and benefit – it requires a rejection of action itself. It requires one to say, with Bartleby, “I would prefer not to” – and to then walk away, and not give a fuck about the consequences.
Because there are always consequences: one doesn’t just defy a particular hierarchy, or a particular representative of a particular hierarchy; rather, one defies all particular hierarchies, and Hierarchy itself, in defying one of them. What you do to the least of these…
Hierarchy does not like to be defied. It will break you, and put you back in line, if there’s enough of you left to stand in a line. The only way to keep from being broken is to be utterly passive: like water, like the Tao, like Bartleby. Yield and overcome.
Of course, you have to sleep in your office, eat nothing but peanuts and stale cookies, and wear the same shirt all the time in order to pull this off – so, maybe not worth it?
Day 95: Learn how to recognize the aliens among us.
Posted: April 5, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: animals, disapproval, travel, violence, zombies 2 Comments »Dead eyes. Closed mouth. Flaring nostrils. Kill them with axes and fire.
I’ve been ready for this for nearly two decades, ever since I first played Bart vs. the Space Mutants on my NES. That was skateboards and spray paint, not axes and fire, sure, and I don’t have the mutant-identifying-xray-glasses-”borrowed”-from-movie-They-Live, but still: I’m ready to kill me some aliens.
Where to find them, though? I’m glad you asked. Four days a week, I find myself surrounded by people who fit the above description – who look as though all their higher brain functions have ceased – who look one poke-with-a-sharp-stick away from trying to rip my esophagus from my throat in blind animal fury.
No, not my students, though that’s a good guess. No: all those people who, like me, commute by train in Dallas.
Now, before any of you get alarmed, I’m not – really, I’m not – going to start hacking my fellow commuters down indiscriminately. That would be irresponsible, I know that, and I’m not so axe-happy I can’t restrain myself. I can keep my shit together – I’m no Hudson.
Before I axe any of my fellow commuters, I will perform a rigorous series of tests to make sure that the passenger in question is, in fact, an extraterrestrial, and not just someone who hasn’t had enough coffee yet. Then – and only then – will I axe the alien. I feel confident this will not in any way alarm the other passengers – the human ones, anyway. If I axe-up an alien, and other passengers start freaking out, I think it’s safe to assume that they are also aliens – and so I can axe anyone who’s panicking without going through the lengthy interview process mentioned above. Right?
No?
Maybe I shouldn’t take my axe with me to campus tomorrow, then…
Day 90: Today help collapse a currency!
Posted: March 31, 2011 Filed under: Politics, The Book | Tags: anarchy, bartering, economics, money, movies, zombies 1 Comment »The currency in question is the Bangladeshi taka (৳) (not to be confused with Taaka). This is another one of those “let’s all work together” tasks: every Book owner was supposed to buy 100৳ sometime during 2004 – about $1.80 at the time – and sell them back on December 31, which would somehow cause the economy of Bangladesh to collapse.
Either nobody did it, or it didn’t work – Bangladesh’s economy is still functioning, and while the taka is worth less relative to the dollar than it was when the Book was published (then: $1 = 58৳, now: $1 = ~72৳), it’s not “not worth the paper it’s printed on.”
Which means, obviously, that I won’t be able to collapse the currency on my own, at least according to the Book’s methods – and even if I wanted to badly enough to figure something else out, the Book assures me that the IMF (whose agents look like Agent Smith but with a beard) will step in and thwart my efforts anyway. So why bother?
Really, collapsing just one currency is pointless. If you’re aiming for serious economic upheaval, you have do it like Tyler Durden and go all the way: collapse all the currencies. Brilliant!
The movie ends with – alright, spoiler alert, but Fight Club is over a decade old, and if you’ve never seen it, I’m not sure we can continue to be friends – the movie ends with Tyler’s plan actually happening, with the headquarters of banks and credit card companies and other financial institutions blowing up, so that there are no records of anybody’s debts or assets and everybody starts over. But what happens after that?
Honestly, I don’t think much would change. Sure, names and faces would change, the medium (or media) of exchange would change, but the structure of the economy would remain unchanged: a small group controls most of the wealth, both by possessing most of it and by regulating the ways ‘legitimate’ transactions can occur – and this control is, essentially, an amoral exercise of power.
The only good part of Romero’s Diary of the Dead is this section where the protagonists meet the ‘new bankers’ and get the ‘new’ economy explained (watch the last few minutes of this clip if you want some context – don’t waste your time watching the whole movie, because it’s awful – and really, only the first few minutes of the clip below are important – and also there’s some “shits” and “fucks” in the clip, so be warned – and, yeah, this is turning into a really long and unwieldy parenthetical note):
So. No reason to collapse a currency unless you’ve already got a hefty stockpile of guns, ammo, gasoline, batteries, booze, nonperishable foodstuffs, bottled water, whatever – and if you can afford to do that, you’re probably also doing well enough under the current economic system that you’re not in a rush to hasten its fall.
Looks like you’re alright for another day, Bangladesh. Who knows what tomorrow may bring? But today – today, your money is still good here. And by “here” I mean “there,” because nobody else takes takas.
