This weekend I attended a really fascinating lecture titled Speaking of Paradoxes which was presented by philosophy professor Graham Priest and hosted by the New York City Skeptics. Priest began by positing the following scenario: “Suppose you have professor Smith, and he’s completely at odds with Professor Brown down the hall. Smith tells all his students not to listen to anything that Brown says, and to emphasize the point he writes on his blackboard ‘Everything written on the blackboard in Room 33 is false!’ But Professor Smith has made a mistake. Actually he’s the one lecturing in Room 33.” So is the statement “Everything written on the board in Room 33 is false” a true or false statement? If it’s true then it’s false in which case it’s true in which case it’s false, etc. This is a classic conundrum called the Liar Paradox which has bedeviled philosophers for thousands of years.

The foundations of logic in Western philosophy were laid by Aristotle, who argued that all propositions must logically be either true or false. If a statement isn’t true then it must be false and if it isn’t false then it must be true. For a statement to be both true and false is a contradiction, and contradictions are impossible in formal logic, therefore if a line of reasoning leads to a contradiction, there must be something wrong with the line of reasoning. But in all the years that philosophers have been arguing about the Liar Paradox, no one’s ever come up with a problem in the line of reasoning, so maybe, Priest argues, what we have to do is question Aristotle’s Law of Non-Contradiction itself. This is apparently a somewhat heretical notion. But despite its long pedigree, Priest argues that Aristotle’s defense of the law is actually pretty flimsy, resting as it does on the presumption that if a statement such as “A and not A” is true, then it follows that anything is true. Priest argues that this is nonsensical.

Instead of dividing all statements into “true” and “false,” he proposes a grid consisting of “true,” “false,” “true and false,” and “neither true nor false.” Apparently some ancient Buddhists played around with this idea for a few centuries before ultimately abandoning it — regrettably, in Priest’s view. No matter how hard you shove, Liar Paradox arguments such as “this statement is false” just aren’t going to fit into either the “true” or “false” categories, but “true and false” seems like a pretty good fit for it (or maybe “neither true nor false”).

He also discussed a number of other classic paradoxes, such as: Are there fewer even numbers than there are numbers total? Common sense would seem to say yes — that there are half as many even numbers as numbers total — but then, aren’t there an infinite number of even numbers and an infinite number of numbers total, and doesn’t infinity = infinity? There’s also Zeno’s Paradox — Before you can get to point A, don’t you first have to pass through a point halfway between where you’re standing and point A? And before you can get halfway to the halfway mark, don’t you first have to pass through a point halfway there? And before that don’t you have to pass through a point halfway there? And isn’t it possible to keep iterating this process infinitely, and so how is it possible to move at all, if there’s an infinitely expanding set of tasks you must accomplish before you can get anywhere? These ones Priest indicated have been settled.

One that hasn’t been settled apparently is this: It seems sensible to say that one nanosecond in a person’s maturation process can never make such a dramatic difference that it would be sensible to call that person a “child” at one instant and then an “adult” one nanosecond later. So take a small child and fast forward time one nanosecond and ask, “Is this person still a child?” Yes, according to the principle established above — one nanosecond just can’t make that much difference. The problem is, you can keep repeating that process and by that same seemingly firm logic the “child” will never become an “adult,” even if the compounded nanoseconds add up to seventy years.

Really cool, thought-provoking stuff. Anyway, these lectures are all recorded and are eventually made available online, if anyone’s interested.

So since I’ll be appearing next month as a putative zombie expert, I figured I should actually sit down and watch some of the zombie movies that have come out in the last few years:

Quarantine: This one is fantastic. It’s the American remake of a Spanish film called REC (which I haven’t seen). It’s basically Cloverfield in a zombie-infested apartment building. As with Cloverfield, you sort of have to suspend disbelief a bit when the camera always happens to be present and pointed in the right direction whenever anything important to the plot goes down — this sometimes makes the movie feel more like an amusement park ride than cinema verite. It’s an intense movie though, and is notable for its unusually long and well-done setup in which we really get to know and identify with the principal characters. This one’s a must-see for zombie fans.

Planet Terror: The title led me to expect something more science fictional, but this is a pretty standard self-spoofing horror movie, a la Feast. It’s maniacally tasteless, melodramatic, and silly. It has a scattering of Quentin Tarantino-esque flourishes that raise it marginally above the norm, and Rose McGowan’s machinegun leg is kind of cool. It’s okay for what it is, I guess, but you’re not missing anything if you skip it.

Dead Snow: This is a Norweigan zombie movie (with subtitles) about med students on a ski vacation who inadvertently awaken a horde of Nazi zombies left over from World War II. The Norweigan setting and characters were kind of interesting, and the most effective part of the movie is the story about the German occupation. When the zombies actually attack, the movie gets pretty stupid. It tries for a Shaun of the Dead-style humor/horror combo, but I thought the humor fell pretty flat and merely sucked away whatever tension the movie might have succeeded in creating. Silly, over-the-top gross-out stuff doesn’t do much for me, and that’s really all this movie has to offer. The final act increasingly comes to feel like some kids out in the woods fooling around with a camera, and the Nazi zombies don’t act any different from non-Nazi zombies, which renders the whole conceit sort of beside the point. I think this movie might have been interesting if it had dealt — even in passing — with some of the themes raised by the dark history of German occupation, but really its only ambition is to find new ways to use intestines for slapstick comedy.

A short interview with me just went live over at the website for The Living Dead 2. Here’s a sample:

Was this story a particularly challenging one to write? If so, how?

It was, yes. This is the first sequel I’ve written, and it’s hard. I have a lot more perspective now on why movie sequels are often so terrible. A sequel has to make sense and be enjoyable whether or not you’re familiar with the original story, and has to stay true to the established characters without just repeating what came before. For a long time I was stuck, since by the end of “The Skull-Faced Boy” the conflicts and agendas of the characters are all pretty much on the table, and I wasn’t sure how to maintain tension carrying things forward. My big break came when I considered creating a new main character, Park, whose agenda and relationships to the existing characters would be completely fresh. And so as not to repeat myself, I made him completely different from my original protagonist, Jack. Jack is an ordinary young man, sensitive, kind of a doormat type, whereas Park is a very, very dangerous soldier.

A few interesting topics that have appeared lately on the Skeptoid podcast:

Did Stalin secretly attempt to engineer an army of human-ape hybrids? Are such hybrids even possible?

Do certain martial arts masters have the ability to paralyze or kill with the lightest of touches?

Did Jewish slaves build the Egyptian pyramids, as described in the Bible?

Does the Myers-Briggs Personality Test, which assigns ratings such as INFP, have any validity?

Are performances of Macbeth cursed because Shakespeare used actual witches’ incantations that he took from King James’ treatise Demonology?

(We interviewed Brian Dunning of Skeptoid for Episode 5 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.)

John Joseph Adams and I just recorded a quick 12-minute Q&A about The Living Dead 2. This interview also appears on this week’s installment of the StarShipSofa podcast.

So I just watched this movie I’d never heard of called Pandorum, because it’s a free download on Netflix, despite the fact that it’s only got a 28% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes, and it actually wasn’t half bad, I thought. It’s basically The Descent in outer space. I don’t know what’s up with all the haters — I’d give this movie at least a 50 or 60 easy, and there are so few decent horror/sf films that come out that you just can’t be that picky.

One of the most fascinating podcasts I’ve discovered in the last few years is The Bible Geek, hosted by Robert M. Price. Price recently mentioned on his show that his family is in some financial difficulty and could use whatever support listeners can provide, so I figured now was as good a time as any to mention his show:

One thing that makes this show so fascinating is that I’m never quite sure how much of it — if any — to believe, as Price cheerfully admits that his views are well outside the mainstream of Biblical scholarship. He’s a really interesting, quirky guy. He was raised as a hardcore fundamentalist and attended seminary, and at some point decided that the Bible was purely a product of human society and became an atheist, but he still goes to church, just because he enjoys it, and still loves talking about the Bible (and his enthusiasm is obvious), and he often puts out hours of show every week. He’s also a prominent writer and editor of Lovecraftian fiction and criticism, and has a great love of old grade-B science fiction movies, as evidenced by the titles of some of his books, such as The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man.

Price was a member of the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars who convened in order to analyze the Gospels and separate the real history from the mythological gloss. (They received an enormous amount of publicity at the time for their method of voting on the veracity of Bible verses using colored beads.) At the outset of the project, Price had assumed, along with the rest, that there was some strata of historical data in the Gospels, and that all one had to do was strip away all the material that had plainly been lifted from earlier stories or had plainly been added in later, and the reliable history would stand revealed. As the project progressed, the group was stunned to discover just how much material could be shown to be non-historical. At this point, as Price tells it, the more conservative participants became uncomfortable with the whole endeavor and shut the project down. Price now believes that essentially nothing about the life of Jesus can be shown to be historically verifiable — there may have been a historical Jesus, but if so no convincing evidence of this fact remains. This is what has put him on the outs with mainstream scholarship. According to Price, none of the extra-Biblical references to Jesus that have turned up really prove much. Tacitus and Josephus are both writing decades after Jesus would have lived, and Josephus seems to have been tampered with by later authors. (Josephus was a Jew, but the one passage that mentions Jesus — and which seems to have been randomly inserted into the text — seems to have been written by a Christian.) And Tacitus is merely reporting on what the Christians of his day believed to be the story of Jesus — there’s no implication that Tacitus is vouching for the accuracy of those beliefs, or that he would have any way of knowing anyway.

Anyway, regardless of whether you think Price is right or wrong, his ideas are weirdly fascinating, particularly for fantasy fans. One idea he’s talked about on the show is the Gnostic belief that our world was created by an incompetent godlike being called the Demiurge, and that the reason our world is so messed up is because this being botched the job so badly. On this view, Jesus had come as an emissary of the true creator God, to deliver a message along the lines of, “Management is aware of your concerns and is taking steps to remedy the situation.” The Second Coming, in their view, would have been the true creator God coming in to clean up the mess. In the Bible as we know it, Goliath is described as being nine feet tall — truly a giant. But in an earlier version of the story found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Goliath is described as being merely six feet tall — still unusually large in the ancient world, but a lot more believable. Clearly, sort of like the time your grandfather caught that fish, the story grew with the telling. When early Christians were spreading their religion, they encountered a lot of pushback from pagans who pointed out that the stories and rituals surrounding Jesus were totally ripped off from long-standing stories and rituals surrounding Osiris, Dionysus, etc. Early church fathers like Justin Martyr had an explanation for this: Satan, knowing that Jesus would come, had pre-emptively founded a whole bunch of fake religions with similar stories and rituals in order to confuse people once the real deal came along. I really can’t say what I’m more in awe of there — the ingenuity or the chutzpah.

The Bible Geek is particularly interesting for writers because you’re talking about extremely close readings of stories that have been rewritten and rewritten and rewritten by countless hands over centuries. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such detailed analysis of how and why a story might be edited, and how you can take a close look at a story and make reasonable inferences about what the previous drafts must have looked like, and what got moved where, and what’s clearly a piece of an earlier version that just doesn’t fit anymore. One thing that happens a lot in the Bible is that communities will get separated and their versions of a particular story will start to diverge, and then when those peoples unite again they feel obligated to maintain both versions as separate events, which is why you’ll often see the same basic sequence of events repeating itself. (One example is that there are two slightly different versions of the loaves and the fishes miracle. The second time, the apostles are just as confused and astounded as they were the first time, which doesn’t make sense. Obviously it’s two different versions of the same story.)

Here’s an interesting interview with Jonathan Gottschall, adjunct assistant professor at Washington and Jefferson College, about his book Literature, Science, and a New Humanities, in which he argues for taking a more scientific approach to literary studies. On the problems with current methodology he says:

The idea you just identified — that what literary scholars do is go and hunt and peck around through texts for evidence that confirms their idea, no matter how far out their idea is — is the problem. If you do that, you will find evidence for your idea, no matter how weak your idea is. I say in the book that the problem with literary methodology is it’s never wrong … no determined literary critic has ever failed to find evidence for his preferred idea, so that’s a huge problem. If nothing can be wrong then nothing can be right.

And:

There’s this crippling reliance on the authority of gurus — on Freud and Lacan, Derrida, and so on. That is a bit of a scandal. It used to be that I would read papers, when I was in graduate school especially, and the first couple sentences would start with, “Jacques Derrida said, ‘There is nothing outside the text,’” and from that premise the whole argument is based, just upon what this guy said.

As an example of a more evidence-based approach, he cites his chapter The Heroine with a Thousand Faces, about using statistical analysis to evaluate claims about literature:

Feminist fairy tale scholars argue that there’s a lot of emphasis put on women’s beauty in Western fairy tales compared to men’s beauty, and little girls get the message — and it’s a damaging message — that in order to be valuable, in order to be the heroine in the story, you have to be beautiful. And they argue that that’s a cultural construct, it’s just made up, there’s no basis in human nature for that, it just comes out of certain historical elements of Western culture. Well, that’s an easy thing to test. What you do is you go and look at references to beauty in other folk and fairy tale traditions, and that’s what we did — we go all around the world, across centuries, across very, very diverse sorts of cultures … and you see it’s the same patterns pop up, and if the same patterns of gender and so forth keep popping up around the world, then it seems quite unlikely that all these different societies just happen to be culturally conditioning in the exact same way. If you find regularity across cultures in these variables then probably it has a basis in shared elements of human psychology. So for the beauty question we found that the feminists were right about Western culture — there are a lot more references to female attractiveness than male attractiveness in Western fairy tale collections, about 6 to 1 … but then if you look all around the world you find exactly the same pattern … and we’re able to check in female-edited collections versus male-edited collections and the patterns are still there. This does not seem to be a product of cultural conditioning.

Here are two pretty good songs that iTunes Genius turned up for me:

“Sweet Sweet Heartkiller” by Say Hi To Your Mom

 

“Lolita” by Elefant (NSFW)

Ha. Love this T-shirt. Words to live by.

It’s a little hard for me to believe that anyone reading this hasn’t already seen or isn’t already planning to see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, but just in case … go see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. And don’t take my word for it. Simon Pegg, a man of impeccable taste, also urges you attend.

Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated is out now on DVD. The film, a collaborative effort by 150 artists, completely remakes George Romero’s 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead using a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of artistic styles, from animation to puppets, and features as a bonus an hour-long zombie discussion panel moderated by me and including John Joseph Adams, zombie authors Jonathan Maberry and Kim Paffenroth, and producers Peter Gutierrez and Rob Hauschild.

Here’s a photo from the panel as well as a graphic novel treatment. And here’s a trailer for the movie.

Robert Kirkman’s graphic novel series The Walking Dead is a must-read, a wise and sensitive portrayal of the psychological toll that surviving a zombie apocalypse would exert — week after week, month after month, year after year. A trailer for the upcoming TV series has just been released. Also, check out Kirkman’s first ever prose fiction publication, “Alone, Together,” in The Living Dead 2.

Just came across the Toy Yoda story on Snopes.com. Man, that’s cold:

In 2001, 26-year-old Jodee Berry had bested the other servers at her restaurant in a competition to see who could sell the most beer in a month to that eatery’s customers, with the winner to receive a new “Toyota.” When the day came for her to be presented with her prize, Berry was led blindfolded to the restaurant’s parking lot to receive her award, but when the blindfold came off she was devastated to learn that the promised jackpot was not a Toyota automobile but rather a “toy Yoda,” a Star Wars doll. She quit her job and sued Gulf Coast Wings, Inc., the corporate owner of the restaurant, alleging breach of contract and fraudulent misrepresentation. In 2002 the suit was settled for an undisclosed amount of money, which one of the attorneys involved in the case said would enable her to go to the local car dealership and “pick out whatever type of Toyota she wants.”

I imagine the conversation went something like this: “Boss, winning a Toyota is one thing. This is totally different.” “No, no different. Only different in your mind.”

I just noticed that the biographical documentary Harlan Ellison: Dreams with Sharp Teeth (which I caught the premiere of back in 2007) is now an instant download on Netflix. If you haven’t seen it, it’s definitely worth checking out.

Just Say No was an action thriller movie my friends and I made in middle school. It turned into an never-ending project, and ultimately convinced me that I was happier working on prose fiction, where you don’t have to worry about crap like actors forgetting their lines, actors constantly glancing at the cameraman, actors being unavailable because their parents have taken them to Cape Cod for the weekend, and, most annoying of all, the family who owns the camera moving repeatedly in the course of making the movie.

If anyone cares, here’s the climactic finale, in which a pair of psychopathic drug dealers perform a home invasion and murder the only witness to their crimes, only to get caught up in a violent shootout with police.

Okay, so I’d never even heard of this movie Kick-Ass, but I just rented it on a whim and it was pretty epic. It’s got McLovin from Superbad and Nicolas Cage in his first role of the millennium that didn’t make me want to gouge my eyes out. Definitely not for anyone who dislikes graphic violence though.

Richard Dawkins questions the wisdom of faith schools in his new TV program Faith School Menace? There’s a constant effort in this country to force taxpayers to subsidize private religious education under the guise of “charter schools,” so it’s worth examining the disastrous effects this sort of thing has had in the UK. Faith schools in the UK have about 90% of their operating budgets paid for by taxpayers, but are free to discriminate on the basis of religion when it comes to admissions and hiring, and apparently have no real standards when it comes to teaching subjects like evolution and sex ed. Many parents are forced to switch churches, or fake religious beliefs altogether, in order to get their kids into a local school. In one appalling sequence, Dawkins discovers that every student at a Muslim faith school rejects evolution, and that the “science teacher” at the school is unable to explain how a scientist would answer the question, “If humans evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” — a question I’ve always regarded as the absolute gold standard of total stupidity. Dawkins also examines the role that faith schools have played in making the troubles in Northern Ireland into an endless, generations-long tragedy, because they ensure that children from Catholic and Protestant communities have no meaningful contact with each other. Much is made by proponents of faith schools of the right of parents to educate their children however they please, but Dawkins argues that children have rights too, such as the right to a balanced, broad-based education that gives them a fair chance to decide for themselves what religious beliefs, if any, they will hold.

Here are three interesting podcast interviews I’ve listened to lately:

KCRW interviews Christopher Nolan about Inception. Particularly interesting to me were his thoughts about using film techniques such as slow-motion as storytelling tools rather than mere stylistic gimmicks.

The Agony Column interviews Tim Powers. This will be familiar ground for most Tim Powers fans, but if you’ve never heard Tim discuss his fascinatingly quirky approach to writing a fantasy novel, this interview covers the topic pretty well.

Point of Inquiry interviews Alexander Zaitchek about Glenn Beck. Beck’s paranoid rants may be harebrained, but Beck is no fool, according to Zaitchek, who just wrote a book on him. Rather, Beck is cunning and sophisticated, a master at manipulating the media into giving him exactly what he wants — attention. Zaitchek also touches on Beck’s dark history, such as once getting drunk and phoning the wife of one of his radio rivals to mock her for her recent miscarriage.