Posts Tagged ‘zombies’
“Don’t be DIABOLICAL! Do not destroy the interest that your friends may have in this movie. Do not tell them what you have seen.”*…
From Dayten Rose, a brief history of the spoiler alert…
Serialized fiction emerged in the middle of the 19th century, in which writers could publish whole novels in weekly installments. Suddenly writers could string their audience along to a thrilling conclusion. They didn’t even need to have answers to the questions they were asking.
Wilkie Collins published his 1859 mystery The Woman in White over ten months in his friend Charles Dickens’ periodical. In a scene familiar to anyone who followed Breaking Bad as it aired, the sensation around Collins’ serial was such that at least one treasury chancellor cleared his social calendar to catch up.
When Collins finished the story and prepared for its release as a finished three-volume set, it occurred to him that anyone could come along and ruin the suspense. Namely, he worried about critics. What if they gave away the ending? What if, in failing to tell the whole story, they made him look bad?
He wrote to reviewers in the preface of the set asking to keep plot details to a minimum. Literary historian James Aaron Green identifies at least one reviewer who listened, writing:
“[we hope] there is no objection to an occasional hint, a dark allusion … to this mystery of mysteries, the [plot of] the Woman in White.”
Or, to detranslate from the magniloquent prolixity of Victorian prose: “Spoiler alert.”…
Preserving suspense: “███████ Alert,” from @DaytenRose in @readtedium, the wonderful newsletter by @ShortFormErnie.
* Promo blurb for the 1955 psychological thriller Les Diabolique
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As we keep a secret, we might send chilling birthday greetings to George Romero; he was born on this date in 1940. A filmmaker, writer, editor and actor who worked broadly in movies and television, he is best remembered for his Night of the Living Dead series of films about an imagined zombie apocalypse, which began with the 1968 film of the same name. Though he wasn’t the first creator of a Zombie film (see, e.g., I Walked with a Zombie), he is widely considered the “Father of the Zombie Film.”
How to prepare for a *real* emergency…
That readers are perusing this missive suggests that The Rapture did not in fact happen as advertised. But that humankind (well, the sinners among us anyway) dodged a bullet today doesn’t mean that the threat of Apocalypse isn’t real. Indeed, no less an authority than the CDC has weighed in with a Twitter Alert:
Of course, the Law of Unintended Consequences being what it is, this Tweet seems to have created one kind of disaster even as it attempted to ameliorate another: the response to the message– clicks through to the featured URL– immediately crashed the CDC’s servers.
Some semblance of normalcy has been recovered; readers can once more reach “Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse.”
As we reconcile ourselves to the fact that the Zombie craze may well last at least until after the release of Brad Pitt’s upcoming World War Z— and that’s not yet even in production, we might recall that on this date in 1972 Heathen! (an original musical with music and lyrics by Eaton Magoon, and book by Magoon and Sir Robert Helpmann) both opened and closed on Broadway.
Reanimating International Relations…
From Foreign Policy, an article by Daniel Drezner (professor of international politics at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, contributing editor to Foreign Policy, and author of the forthcoming Theories of International Politics and Zombies):
Night of the Living Wonks
Toward an international relations theory of zombies
There are many sources of fear in world politics — terrorist attacks, natural disasters, climate change, financial panic, nuclear proliferation, ethnic conflict, and so forth. Surveying the cultural zeitgeist, however, it is striking how an unnatural problem has become one of the fastest-growing concerns in international relations. I speak, of course, of zombies.
For our purposes, a zombie is defined as a reanimated being occupying a human corpse, with a strong desire to eat human flesh — the kind of ghoul that first appeared in George Romero’s 1968 classic, Night of the Living Dead, and which has been rapidly proliferating in popular culture in recent years (far upstaging its more passive cousins, the reanimated corpses of traditional West African and Haitian voodoo rituals). Because they can spread across borders and threaten states and civilizations, these zombies should command the attention of scholars and policymakers.
…
Read the full article– and a marvelously metaphorical article it is– here.
As we reassure ourselves that we with no brains needn’t fear their being eaten, we might recall that it is with this date in 622 that the Islamic calendar begins. As Wikipedia explains:
In 638, Abu-Musa al-Asha’ari, one of the officials of the second Caliph Umar in Basrah, complained about the absence of any dating system in the correspondence he received from Umar, making it difficult for him to determine which instructions were most recent. This report convinced Umar of the need to introduce a calendar system for Muslims. After debating the issue with his Counsellors, he decided to start the calendar with the date of Muhammad’s arrival at Madina tun Nabi (known as Yathrib, before Muhammad’s arrival).
The Islamic calendar numbering of the years thus began with the month of Muharram in the year of Muhammad’s arrival at the city of Medina. According to calculations, the first day of the first year corresponded to Friday, July 16, 622 (even though the actual emigration took place in September).
Because of the Hijra event, the calendar was named the Hijra calendar, and it’s dates distinguished by the suffix “AH.”
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