Gerhard > Recent Status Updates

We get killers and violent men and puppies and kids, all in the same package...

I think at one point she asked us, ‘Do you have research?’ And of course we had the same research as Dan Brown, we just didn’t steal it word for word like he did!

Cometh the hour, cometh the man; such times call for a champion such as Frank Black. “He’s not another James Bond—he’s the opposite of James Bond—and he’s not a Partridge family. There is a reality to it so, yes, there’s a place for Frank Black in the twenty-first century, and I think there is room for a guy like me doing it!”

Frank Black remains a figure of hope. In the third millennium, Henriksen suggests, the wave of violence and strife forecast by Carter’s Millennium has become tidal. We need his greatest hero now more than ever.

In the final analysis, Millennium is not about these monsters; it is about our response to the monsters. I have often likened the series and its first season, serial killer conceit to Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek (1966-69). There, each week, the starship Enterprise visited another alien world and saw the crew’s values reflected, challenged, and often affirmed by the planet or civilization of the week.

The millennium has come and gone. America’s fin de siècle is over, but the battle against the “thousand points of darkness” is still being waged.

‘‘Things’’ don’t preexist; they are agentially enacted and become determinately bounded and propertied within phenomena. Outside of particular agential intra-actions, ‘‘words’’ and ‘‘things’’ are indeterminate. Matter is therefore not to be understood as a property of things but, like discursive practices, must be understood in more dynamic and productive terms—in terms of intra-activity.

Underneath Danny’s chatter was a man who loved life. It was true when Bill had first met him and it was true now. Stick Danny in a hospital waiting room and everyone felt better. Stand him naked on the pedestal at a drawing class and everyone was more talented.

“Ah, it’s just nostalgia,” Bill said with a dismissive wave of the hand. “First sign of dementia.”

'Language has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately every ‘‘thing’’—even materiality—is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation.'


Wow. I am gobsmacked. So 'science' is Barad's answer to 'true' representationalism? [Given 'science' is framed through language.]

“God,” Jonah meekly replied. “He told us to draw god so I did.”
“Yeah, naked,” Jack said with a smirk.
“Of course naked!” Zoey said in Jonah’s defense. “What’s god going to wear, anyway? Armani?”

After his session on the Renaissance, he’d been inundated with nudes. Sometimes hilarious and sometimes accomplished, they formed much of his collection. But he limited hanging the explicit ones to his bedroom. Although out to everyone he met, Pierre wasn’t comfortable with cocks on the wall. He was old school in that way, too.

The sex had been a one-off, they’d claimed. It had just happened and wouldn’t happen again. Bill had found the common front unnerving. Not Pierre. He was old school in that way. He found it perfectly natural. ‘Four guys under one roof. Bound to happen’, he’d said at the time.

“What do I call you?” he said to the thing’s back. “Medley? Me? Unute 2? Franken-B, like Keever? I know, Frankenstein was the scientist not the monster, blah blah. I’ve always been both. Which means you have too, right? How come you’re here? What was it got you up?”

The Life Project had been born of the Glad Project, which was a development of the You’re OK! Project, which was begotten of a merger of refugees from Keep Light and the Yes Group.

I argue that what hampered the evolution and proliferation of Nigerian SF in the twentieth-century was the reliance on the paradigm of ‘writing back’ that dominated postcolonial theory and the approach of many critics and writers towards contemporary Nigerian literature.

B had sometimes, over the centuries, pursued research into subjects that did not naturally light a spark in him—among his seventeen PhDs were those in accountancy, land economy, and food science—but there were other skills at which he had only ever acquired adequate expertise.

Sixty winters gone. Stranger came, fought a bear. Penis torn off. The man’s. This is it (another grew where it had been). I have kept it in honey.

I will argue that a diffractive mode of analysis can be helpful in this regard if we learn to tune our analytical instruments (that is our diffraction apparatuses) in a way that is suffciently attentive to the details of the phenomenon we want to understand.

As Donna Haraway suggests, diffraction can serve as a useful counter-point to reflection: both are optical phenomena, but whereas the metaphor of reflection reflects the themes of mirroring and sameness, diffraction is marked by patterns of difference.

Images or representations are not snapshots or depic-tions of what awaits us but rather condensations or traces of multiple prac-tices of engagement.

To many scientists as well as science studies scholars, the theories of semiotics and deconstruction, which call into ques-tion the assumed congruity of signifier and signified, insisting on the intrin-sic arbitrariness of the sign or representation, seem to be the ultimate in linguistic narcissism.

To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence.

By the twenty-first century, the capitalist revolution had arrived almost everywhere and impacted virtually all spheres of life. Expansive and radical, it remains the most consequential revolution in world history.

What right had mere humans, evolved fifteen hundred light years away, to meddle so much with this remote, exotic chunk of the universe?

‘To the pit. This is a rebellion. An uprising of the slaves. Where else? So, you ready? What are you waiting for, a round of applause? Come on …’

‘Why must we be left stranded on dreary copies of the home world, the original Earth? Oh, we evolved there, it represents a point of plausibility in that regard. But what other worlds might support us, worlds out there in parameter space that might do the job of an Earth, but better?’

As the world’s most influential neoliberal, Friedrich Hayek, put it in 1981: “I personally prefer a liberal dictator to a democratic government lacking liberalism.”

Attacking the giant bureaucratic machine of the university, Berkeley students pronounced that “I will not be folded, spindled, or mutilated,” a play on the Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate punch cards that fed data into computers at the time.

Not only did the golden years end, but so did the whole order of industrial capitalism that had risen since the 1870s. The 1970s were no mere blip—they were an epochal break in capitalism’s history.