The Mean Kitty Song

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qit3ALTelOo

The Memory of Whiteness

and Science in the Capital Series:  40 Signs of Rain; 50 Degrees Below; and 60 Days and Counting

are artworks of fiction by UCSD alum Kim Stanley Robinson.  A month or two back, he was a guest speaker at UCSC but his works will outlive him.  Major themes are ecological sustainability, Buddhism, ecological ethics, politics, technology, feral community living, etc.  The Memory of Whiteness deals with ethical issues surrounding the creation and preservation of a one-man-orchestra piece of technology someplace in the future, sometime in the solar system. If you read one of these books, you will not be sorry. They all apply to the issues of this class, and are great reads.  They take the issues into the level of art. Just as in history, they now often advise reading historical novels, here novels have value too.

Why Starwars is not as good an opera as Star Trek

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK-oJJaMjoM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4XhdAhbGiM&NR=1

My 5-year-old LOVES Nyan cat and thinks the only thing better would be the 39 hour version—so much for becoming

On Lingis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJpz92BUGzI&feature=related

“A woman riding a horse surges with its impulses, while the horse’s pace incorporates her shifts and pulls.  The movement of her body extend speed and retardation and the feel the thrill of speed and the soothing decompression of slowing down.  These movements extend neither toward a result nor a development.  They are figures of the repetition of compulsion; we stroke a calf each night on the farm, we ride a horse though the woods with the utterly noncumulative of orgasm.”

On Death of the Author

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z4m4lnjxkY

no words. may not even be his own song.