Gabbler Recommends – Page 39 – Further Annotations

Appreciation post:

Posted on March 27, 2016March 27, 2016 by blablablaandgabbler

I, Gabbler, previously recommended season 2 of Daredevil, but forgot to mention my thoughts on Foggy and Karen (the two main mere mortals in this series).

Karen grows a lot more in this season, reflecting off of the Punisher in a way that shows she’s really a badass lawbreaking crime stopper. You only got a taste of that badassery in season 1; but here, the Punisher would be a poorer character without her. While it still sucks that she’s used to prop up male characters, it feels more like he propped up her despite the (likely) true intent of the writers. But I’ll stop assuming.

Foggy is still a barfy goody-goody who “cares too much” about his friends, to the point where when he finally gets enough of Matt’s crap you’re like Thank God! He has a backbone. He’s a much better character when he’s moping about and no longer happy-go-lucky. You want Matt to include him in on the secrets. You wonder why he doesn’t.

I’m still holding out for less Foggy face-time in season 3. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name – singular) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, goodreads, and Vulcan’s shit list.]

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GABBLER RECOMMENDS: Daredevil Season 2 (of course)

Posted on March 25, 2016March 27, 2016 by blablablaandgabbler

While at times the characters got too chatty and analytical (making the pace dip), this season was still just as good as season one. At times I felt like I didn’t entirely know what was going on, maybe because I wasn’t paying close enough attention. I could barely remember Nobu from the first season, so that tells you I need to rewatch some parts…

Scott Glenn is still a jarring actor to watch as Stick, missing punchlines by a hair so that it takes you out of the story. But you still forgive him, as his role in the story arc starts to make more sense (cue Elektra–AKA dear little “Ellie” in this series).

Jon Bernthal as the Punisher was a good choice, though his lines were a bit too melodramatic and used to fluff up the time (“I miss my family sooooooooo much”–that kind of thing. We get it). Elektra’s lines, too, were a bit over the top. She comes off as as an intelligent, calculating woman until the writers have her open her mouth. She asks Matt with childlike panic “Do you still love me?” after killing someone he tells her not to and I cringed–perhaps the delivery was just a bit too off to make that line work as something she’d say aloud. It’s as if the writers couldn’t decide whether or not her childhood trauma would keep her childish.

When Matt Murdock is cleaning blood off of Stick’s lips with precision, you can see his eyes following his own finger. HOW DOES HE KNOW THERE IS BLOOD ON HIS FACE HE CAN’T HEAR IT. But I can make excuses for it; Maybe Stick told him where the blood was, whatever.

The climax and wrap-up went too quickly–another problem with the pace. It was also, perhaps, too neat: the Punisher’s storyline twist was a bit too intricate and tidy for me–I had to resist rolling my eyes.

But all of these finger-waggings aside, I find myself still making excuses for the show. They’re little nit-pickings that I happily overlook. I just hope the writers and producers read this and are reminded not to get too sloppy, now.

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GABBLER RECOMMENDS: What it takes to be a cyborg

Posted on March 12, 2016March 12, 2016 by blablablaandgabbler

‘”Cyborg” is a loaded and attention-grabbing term, bearing associations from sci-fi novels and Hollywood, and whether it’s an entirely accurate label for these activities is up for debate. Some commentators broaden the definition to include anyone who uses artificial devices, such as computer screens or iPhones. Others prefer to narrow it. As early as 2003, in an article entitled “Cyborg morals, cyborg values, cyborg ethics,” Kevin Warwick, the professor who pioneered the cyborg movement in the academic sphere, described ‘cyborgs’ as being only those entities formed by a “human, machine brain/nervous system coupling”—essentially “a human whose nervous system is linked to a computer.”

…

Cyborgian implantation activities take place outside the clinic or hospital, as a sort of parallel to standardised medical experimentation. There is a keen desire to win over public support, which might explain the mob of journalists at the Dusseldorf event, who almost outnumbered the public. Österlund is clear: “We’re not going to work on sick people. That’s up to the medical industry,” he explains. “But we’re upgrading healthy people so that they can predict health issues. That’s definitely going to be the future.”

The concept of enhancement is what distinguishes cyborgism from other medical implantation, or from the ordinary fact of having to wear corrective glasses. This is not about therapeutics or repair, but about augmenting human senses beyond the norm. Despite the distinct gap between cyborg implants and clinical medicine, Cannon does think that they could fruitfully interact. “I think that a lot of time you have people in academia who are squeamish,” he accepts. “But as a result of medicine being the only people allowed to experiment, that has bound our hands and stymied research for a really long time. Well, we’re talking about being able to choose to participate in these experiments as perfectly healthy people and really investigate what’s possible. It allows us to move with an alacrity that science and medicine cannot in its current state.”

…

Legally, cyborgism falls into a nebulous category, neither regulated nor forbidden by law. In the UK, because the devices have no therapeutic value, doctors who carry out implant procedures potentially open themselves to legal risks, according to one GP, Dr Zoe Norris, who says most doctors would view the procedures as being purely cosmetic and therefore landing closer to the desks of their plastic surgeon colleagues. A spokeswoman for the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons said that the organisation isn’t aware of a plastic surgeon implanting any such device. Nurses and technicians, she said, would be sufficiently well-equipped to carry out these fairly simple procedures, with only larger devices possibly requiring a surgeon. It therefore falls to the hands of tattoo and body modification artists to conduct the procedures or, in one case I heard of, a veterinarian (the grey-suited man who implanted Michael’s magnet at the fair was a tattoo artist). The UK’s House of Commons has produced a document that sets out the legislation, health guidance, consumer law and training relating to tattooing and body piercing—without mentioning chip implants or magnets in particular. The guidelines note that “contrary to popular belief, there is no formal minimum qualification for tattooists and body piercers.”’

[Via]

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GABBLER RECOMMENDS: How Has the MFA Changed the Contemporary Novel?

Posted on March 11, 2016 by blablablaandgabbler

“The rise of the MFA has changed how both writers and people in general talk about creativity. The debate has shifted from whether creativity could be taught to how well it can be taught and whether it should be taught. The stakes are real: Creative writing has become a big business—it’s estimated that it currently contributes more than $200 million a year in revenue to universities in the U.S.

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Whether you valorize the Romantic ideal of the lonely, humble artist or the neo-liberal belief that education can solve any problem, the MFA has become a kind of Rorschach test for how writers and critics feel about creativity, where it comes from, and how best to nurture it.

… There has to be something that makes them different, and those differences, according to the vigor and tenacity of critics’ claims, ought to be recognizable. As Mark McGurl, the author of the sweeping history of the MFA, The Program Era, writes, creative writing programs “obviously” teach writers how to become a specific “creative type.” Or as Chad Harbach has argued more recently in his popular essay “MFA vs. NYC,” “the university now rivals, if it hasn’t surpassed, New York as the economic center of the literary fiction world.” If there are indeed “two literary cultures” in Harbach’s words, we should be able to detect it.

…But when we refined our tests to look at how race factors into the results, we found the opposite to be true. We took each separate body of work—books by MFA writers and books by non-MFA writers—and compared all of the writers in each individual corpus along the metrics of diction, style, and theme we describe above. For both corpora, we expected white and non-white writers to group together in clusters, and we anticipated that non-white writers would especially group together in the MFA corpus (authors like Tayari Jones, Chieh Chieng, and Daniel Alarcon). But we found no such thing. Again, based on diction, theme, and syntax, these two groups, in both MFA and non-MFA writing, are impossible to distinguish.

…

So it seems to us that the MFA doesn’t merit many of the hyperbolic claims about its impact on literature. $200 million per year, after all, is a high price to pay for very little measurable impact.”