Digital Sextant : Sailing the Virtual Seas

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much

The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession
by Allison Hoover Bartlett; read by Judith Brackley

Bartlett chronicles the world of rare and antique book collecting through the eyes of two men deeply embedded in it. The first, John Gilkey, is an unrepentant con man who stole hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of rare books from dealers all over the country, mostly through credit card fraud. The second, Ken Sanders, was the chief of security for the American Book Dealers’ Association, and the prime mover in the force that caught up with Gilkey. It’s an interesting story that asks why a man would steal these books not for financial gain, but for the collection itself.

A few thoughts:

Bartlett worries throughout the book about the ethics of spending so much time with a thief, of learning some of his secrets that might allow him to be prosecuted, and of the impression she gives to others in hanging out with him. But she never backs away from the stark depiction of him as an unrepentant thief, and it does her credit.
The book spends a lot of time on the culture of book collecting and its attendant addiction, bibliomania. Apparently, the desire to collect ancient and rare books has been thriving for centuries. I can completely understand the desire to get more books, and more after that. As a man with well over 2000 books in my basement, I suffer from the same mania myself, perhaps. Thank goodness I don’t aspire to have first editions or rare books, at least not much.
It’s distressing how easily Gilkey is able to steal from these shops, but often they bring it upon themselves with the relatively lax security they use–often taking phone orders and never asking to see the card, for instance. At the same time, it seems like the credit card company should bear SOME of the blame if the card comes back as fraudulent when the charge went through the first time around.
The tales of Ken Sanders’ efforts to catch Gilkey are pretty darn interesting, though one would like them to be a bit more satisfying in the end–so few of the books Gilkey stole have been recovered, the tale doesn’t end with the justice we’d hope to see.
I suppose it’s the similar subject and narrative style, but this book reminded me a lot of This Book is Overdue! by Marilyn Johnson, the book about how librarians and cybrarians are saving us all. In essence, the only connection between these two books is the fact that they’re about people who love books, but it was enough that I spent my entire reading convinced that Barlett was the author of both books.

Overall, it’s a decent read. It’s not quite as intense as the subtitle would make it seem, and there’s relatively little in the way of cloak-and-dagger excitement. But if you collect books or find yourself wishing you had a shelf full of dusty tomes, this might be your kind of tale.

2012 01 27 Digital Sextant Audio
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A Quick Lesson in Commodity Fetishism

Lap Tray

For time or convenience or bad parenting, I let my children watch television while they eat breakfast in the morning. They do so from the couch, using plastic dinner trays that we purchased after they broke the nice Target ones with wooden legs. Despite the fact that we ordered two identical lap trays, the ones that arrived have a distinctly different amount of “sparkle.” Namely, one is very sparkly, one is not.

This causes no end of grief, as the children have decided the sparkly tray is more valuable than the non-sparkly one, and thus have a fight over it every morning. In trying to rationalize Avery into accepting that there’s no difference in use value of the trays, I had an epiphany that what we’re dealing with is commodity fetishism and sibling rivalry at its core: it matters not whether the thing I have is useful, it matters whether we can both agree that it’s better than the one you have.

Avery reasons that she should get the tray every morning, since Finn eats lunch at home and often uses it then. I suggested that it doesn’t matter what Finn does at lunch, that she sharing should take into account the chance they each had to use the tray. After all, she got to eat hot lunch at school and he did not.

“But Daddy,” she moaned, “Finn doesn’t go to school.”

I can see this same conversation happening again when she’s fourteen instead of six, only instead of a lap tray it will be a $200 pair of jeans with lime green stripes and a word across the ass. Lord help me.

2012 01 26 Digital Sextant Ethics
How things work
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There’s no stopping them now!

In honor of my Zombies in Popular Media course, this month’s featured photos are all from Messiah of Evil, a mediocre zombie film with lovely mise-en-scene.

2012 01 25 Digital Sextant Living Dead
Nerdistry
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That feeling that you know for certain

One of the callers to Episode 743 of The Atheist Experience last week inquired whether the hosts would endorse belief in God that was not rational, but made sense. When Martin and Russell dug into the concept a bit, the caller tried to make an analogy with love or music, things people feel but can’t rationalize. They rightly excluded those analogies on the grounds that God must really exist or not — love and music are opinions, not fact. At some level, whether or not it can be proved, religion is a question of fact.

"Patterns in Old Stone" by Steve-h

One of the other callers suggested that the feeling of knowing God is real plays a big part in how people engage with their faith–but as you’ll remember from On Being Certain, the “feeling of knowing” is an emotion that has nothing to do with actual knowledge. It’s actually really misleading, especially on big complex questions.

In David Cross’ book, I Drink for a Reason, he makes incredulous arguments about religious faith based on the reactions of common sense. Laying out the tenets of the early Mormon story, for instance, it’s easy to see why people not raised in the faith find them unbelievable. Cross’ point is that the tenets of all the big world faiths are equally nonsensical — they’re just older and often more firmly rooted in the foundations of our current cultures.

As I was pondering Ken from Popehat’s question about corporate free speech last week, I had to wrestle with the balance between what I feel I know — that excessive corporate speech is unfair BUT the 18January media blackout is fair — and what I can understand ethically. I think our immediate response to things is an important piece of the puzzle, but we mustn’t confuse gut reaction with ethical knowledge.

As modern people struggling with questions of faith and ethics today, one thing to ask ourselves is how much of what we know comes from rational understanding, and how much comes from the “feeling of knowing” that gives us faith in our source texts? And if we’ve come to understand that the feeling of knowing is not a reliable judge of reality, how can we proceed in an honest way?

2012 01 24 Digital Sextant How things work
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Half-Empty

Half Empty

written and narrated by David Rakoff

David Rakoff is one of those writers whose every word makes me wish I were a better writer. He dashes similes across the page with Raymond Chandler’s gusto, and his reading voice is downright heavenly. The only thing one can complain about is that the cost of his erudition must be speed, as he publishes far less than the other writers I put in his category: your Sarah Vowells, your David Sedarises, and so on. That said, Half Empty is another triumph. Some thoughts:

While Rakoff skewers everything from neo-Nazi humor to cancer survivor language with the same dry, self-loathing wit that we’ve come to love, I didn’t find this book as funny as Don’t Get Too Comfortable. I suppose it’s hard to write a funny book when one is going through one’s second bout with bad-odds cancer. That said, his cancer essay at the end of the book is stunning.
I am also quite enamored of his paean to thoughtful intellectualism written about the U.S. reaction to 9/11. Rakoff blends an amusing bit of self depreciating humor into the discussion of our country’s anti-intellectual “kill ‘em all” mentality in the months following the attack on the World Trade Center. He makes his way into the discussion via a scientific article that suggested pessimistic people are just as effective at all the key kinds of thinking as optimists are, so we should have listened to the pessimists who said things like “Maybe they won’t greet us as liberators.” Sarcasm works wonders.
The essay “Juicy” focuses on Rakoff’s experience as a short, easily confided-in man who had become more and more depressed at the way gossip so easily became schadenfreude, and how little his own efforts to stem the tide of delight in others’ misery offered.

It’s hard to find much more to say, except that I can’t get enough of his writing style, his quick turn of phrase that reveals the thing we’d been avoiding acknowledging about ourselves.

2012 01 23 Digital Sextant Audio
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2012-01-22 Tweets

Interesting post re: sexism and racism. http://t.co/Xvy9P8KH #
SOPA is dead, for now. YAY!!!! http://t.co/UZ7qGtFx #
Trading emails with your boss at 7:11am on a Saturday morning: #theprofessorlife #

2012 01 22 Digital Sextant tweets Comments (0) Permalink

One week down

"Reader" by h.koppeldaney

It’s the first week of a new semester here at Columbia College Chicago. I’ve got a heavier load than usual — three twice-a-week classes, two that meet on Mondays and Wednesdays and one that meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays (online). Here’s a snapshot of the work we’re doing in the classes:

Writing for New Media – this is a hybrid course exploring the rhetoric of new media. We’re reading Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus and some McLuhan, as well as some writing about ARGs. It’s a course I’ve taught before in several versions, but the challenge this time around is that it’s meeting twice a week, once in an online form. Our three threads of inquiry:
- What are the ways new rhetorical forms can help us understand how writing in the digital age changes our perspective?
- How does the digital landscape change the nature of intellectual property?
- How can the digital age facilitate new kinds of collaborative large-scale projects, and what challenges do we face in executing same?
Writing and Rhetoric 2 – Once again, I’m asking students to do a critical walking piece inspired by Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation and W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn. We’ll be focusing on Chicago as a space, and looking at the historical nature of the spaces around us.
First-Year Seminar – this ethics and art course is meant to get students thinking about the nature of college and art and ethics. My course is structured around Frankenstein this time around, using the pre-designated divisions of family, community, and world to shape our approach.

I overheard one of our GTAs talking to the faculty advisor, saying she was having trouble bringing confidence to the classroom, and I wanted to remind her that such is my experience every term. After eight years in this job, I’m certainly able to marshal a lot of material to spin an interesting story for students, but I find that my teaching works best if I’m introducing new material each time. I’ll leave you with PZ Myers‘ take on new semesters:

All you professors out there know the existential dread associated with the start of a new term — you’ve only just now cleared away most of the accumulated drudgery of the last term, and now here comes a new one, with all of the work associated with that. And you’re sitting there now with your sets of syllabi, each with dates locked in that represent fresh inundations of exams to grade and papers to read. You’re standing on the shore looking out at the maelstrom, bracing yourself to swim into the heart of it, where you will be buffeted and swirled about and at the end of it, spat out onto another shore to face another in the next term. (Pharyngula)

Sounds about right, except the storm that spits me out usually has zombies in it.

2012 01 21 Digital Sextant Humor
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In which I may change my mind… perhaps

My early instinct against the Citizens United decision revolves around the idea that corporate influence in politics is frustrating and corrupting. I think we’re all on the same page there — the fact that lobbyists and campaign contributions play such a huge role in government decision making bothers me to no end. And the Citizens United decision seemed to make it worse. My thinking seemed straightforward to me, at the time: unfettered spending puts even more power in the hands of the people with lots of money, and removes “regular people” from the equation even more quickly.

And then came the January 18th media blackout, a protest by numerous internet companies against the SOPA/PIPA bills, which was decried by the MPAA/RIAA as an abuse of power. Being an advocate of free speech and internet freedom in particular, I am firmly against SOPA/PIPA, so I approved, and saw right through the MPAA whine about abuse of power (as if the ability to turn off websites without judicial oversight wouldn’t ALSO be abuse of power).

But Ken over at Popehat asks the challenging question: should those business entities have had a right to engage in SOPA/PIPA protests like they did? If so, what is the source of that right, and by what mechanism is it vindicated? It’s a great post that you should go read. I’ll wait.

"Free Speech Zone" by jutta @ Flickr

My initial thought is YES!, of course they should! But this leads to the bigger question of whether all corporations should have unfettered free speech or not, and demands that I understand the ethics behind my opinion of it. So I thought I’d meditate on that question bloggily for a bit.

First, a quick summary of the scope of Ken’s question:

If corporations have no First Ammendment rights, why can’t they be punished for the blackout?
Political process hasn’t been good at stopping governmental overreach (see WAR ON DRUGS)
Government won’t been even handed in suppressing corporate speech, if given the opportunity
We use corporations to express our speech, so if gv’t can suppress corporations, they can suppress speec

I’m inclined to study the difference between the SOPA/PIPA protest and other causes toward which I’m favorably inclined — let’s say National Healthcare. In both cases, I’m inclined to say the corporation CAN spend to make their case. Imagine some sort of media event where the health care industry intervened in some way (without endangering peoples’ lives) to protest the national health care bill. I can’t find an ethical ground to say this should be disallowed (nor am I inclined to).

So when would I be inclined to limit corporate spending on speech? Let’s consider direct electioneering. I’m inclined to limit advertising expenditures from big corporations to influence elections. But again, I don’t think Google should be prohibited from running truthful ads against MPAA schills running on a “censor the web” platform, as long as the funding of those commercials is clear.

Perhaps two pieces of that last bit is the watershed for me: truth and transparency. Of course, it should be illegal to run false ads, but cherry-picking quotes allows for any manner of ads that are technically true without being truthful. But the bigger issue is transparency. I’m inclined to say that all funding should be directly revealed, that when you watch a Citizens United commercial, you should be able to go on the web (or ideally, freeze the last second of the ad) and see who contributed the money that made the ad. But that’s also part of the current rules.

So in the end, I can’t find a test case where I can defend the 18 January blackout without also defending unfettered spending for ads by my philosophical enemy, and I must say that I support the Citizens United decision, as odious as its potential results are. Thus, we continue down the difficult road of finding ethical solutions to complex problems.

2012 01 20 Digital Sextant Copyfight
Ethics
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Any Human Heart

by William Boyd

Logan Mountstuart lived an incredible life, spanning the era from just before the first World War until the middle of the 1980s. He kept journals off and on throughout his life, chronicling his experiences as a writer, an adventurer, a lover, and a gatabout. This novel collects those journals and creates a chronicle of his adventures. (Just in case I’m being too cryptic, he’s fictional.) A few thoughts:

In some ways, the novel reads like Forrest Gump if the protagonist were an upper-class British intellectual instead of an earnest if slightly slow Southerner. Over the course of the novel Logan, who runs in art and literary circles because of his class and his literary aspirations, meets numerous literary and artistic giants, passing through their lives as a n embodiment of a certain kind of wealth-born ennui. He meets Virginia Woolf, Jackson Pollock, the Prince of Wales who abdicated the throne, Picasso, Hemingway, and Ian Fleming, to name a few.
Yet another novel in which the main character grows into someone better (as we all hope we do, I suppose) but who makes a vicious fool of himself early on. In this case, infidelity seems built into Logan’s bones, and he practices it all the time, except for his brief marriage to the one woman he truly loved. This makes him, for me, a pretty dislikable character, and while I come to like him, warts and all, by the end of the book, I wouldn’t have finished it if it hadn’t been a gift. That said, I’m glad to have read it and thought it was well-done overall.
The literature and art in the novel feel well out of my range, I’m afraid. Boyd tosses around art and literature references with a familiarity and obscurity I couldn’t only match in reference to Star Wars or Titanic lore. I particularly liked the sequence in New York, when Logan was running an art gallery.
I can’t say I understand the title entirely, but I’d say the complexity of the character is what makes the novel work. Just as with any human heart, Logan finds himself driven by different forces at different moments, taken by temptation of lust or alcohol, and ultimately left only with his thoughts and the fruit born by the seeds he planted for both good and ill.

Any Human Heart is a fine life-spanning novel, one that gives depth of feeling and verve to the human condition. It’s not the sort of book I usually choose to read, but it has a lot of payoff despite its slow-burn build.

2012 01 19 Digital Sextant Books I Read Comments (0) Permalink

Stop SOPA and PROTECT-IP

I’ve written about this before, and if I had more time (beginning of the semester morass), I’d do the whole blackout thing. Instead, you’ll have to settle for this.

Please, please contact your Congress-person to protest the awful SOPA and PROTECT-IP laws.

2012 01 18 Digital Sextant Copyfight
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Sophisticants, unite! (Mid 90s edition)

Looking for Richard and Cold Comfort Farm

We subscribed to HBO for a few months last year so we could watch Game of Thrones and True Blood. While we did so, I ~~taped~~ recorded several movies on our TiVO to watch later. While preparing a Christmas gift for the kids last month, I had occasion to stay up late and finish two of them that I’d been holding on to for some time.

Looking for Richard Cold Comfort Farm

Looking for Richard is a documentary made by Al Pacino, meant to help make Richard III more accessible by documenting the process of learning the play from an actor’s perspective. Cold Comfort Farm is a comedy about an elite socialite who spends several months living with distant relatives on a grim bit of land in the British boonies. They have a lot in common.

At their heart, both movies are about how high-brow intellectual stuff can be great for “regular” people. This is the overt story in CCF, in which Flora’s educated, modern ways bring changes to everyone in the farm. Of course, it helps that Flora is an eminently ethical woman who works to help people but doesn’t seem to have the “I’m right because I’m well-educated” attitude, at least overtly. Looking for Richard wrestles with that oldest of Lit. Prof questions: why does the average person dislike Shakespeare so much? It features lots of interviews with people on the streets of New York, rappin with Al Pacino about how much they don’t like Shakespeare, or they like him but have never seen a play.
Both films also feature tons of people you know and have seen in other movies. Richard focuses on Al Pacino, but along the way we see the 1996 incarnations of Alec Baldwin, Kevin Spacey, Kevin Kline, Winona Ryder, Kenneth Branaugh, James Earl Jones (these last two weren’t actually in Pacino’s play, they were just talking about Shakespeare). Cold Comfort Farm, as with many productions from the British isles, samples from a relatively small pool of actors who would later be recognizable, including Kate Beckinsdale, Joanna Lumley, Stephen Fry, Rufus Sewell, and Ian McKellen.
Clothing becomes a distinct marker of sophistication in each film, with both films featuring some people missing teeth or wearing bedraggled clothes.
The films deal with pretentiousness in different ways. Cold Comfort Farm‘s protagonist aspires to be a novelist, and seeks to spend time among her less-fortunate relatives to supply life-experiences for her novel. As the story proceeds, Emma-like, she comes to realize that interacting with people will help her grow more than observing them will. Richard III wrestles with two kinds of pretentiousness: first, there’s the inherent problem of trying to get the word out about high literature. On one hand, it’s a noble endeavor that seeks to share knowledge and delight. On the other hand, it presumes to tell people the culture they like isn’t good, and that this culture is better, a task always fraught with landmines of arrogance. The film also focuses on the actor’s craft, which produces an amazing product but often looks pretty self-absorbed to those of us who don’t pursue it. There’s a scene where Pacino and his director talk through a key sequence of Richard’s death, and Pacino plays out the death scene on the steps of a church (or some other marble-fronted building in New York). I couldn’t help but think that if I saw them doing that on the street, I’d be pretty turned off.

Finally, the fact that I enjoyed both films reflects my own changing perspective, I think. I’d heard about Looking for Richard when it came out, but despite the fact that Richard 3 is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, I never sought it out as I did other films of the plays. I wasn’t interested in the teaching aspect of the film. Cold Comfort Farm I went so far as to rent, but turned off after a few minutes, unwilling to engage with the story. Fifteen years later, however, I’m easily able to engage with and enjoy both.

2012 01 17 Digital Sextant Double Reviews
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Dreams

First, in case you haven’t heard it in a while:

A few quick thoughts on Martin Luther King Jr. Day:

Rev. Emily Gage gave a stirring talk (literally — she got an ovation, something my normally staid congregation does not do) about the nature of Dr. King’s legacy and our obligation to it today. While the overt racism of the pre-1960s has mostly passed, we still must remain vigilant against institutional racism and other kinds of discrimination endemic in our society. In particular, she mentioned how a small movement to boycott Girl Scout cookies has emerged because the Girl Scouts have decided in favor of allowing transgendered children to participate. She said she’ll happily buy even more Thin Mints now.
Columbia College Chicago has a tradition of being racially diverse, but minority students are feeling more and more disenfranchised, as we continue to struggle hiring minority faculty and making the classroom a safe and welcoming place to be. I worry about how my own white privilege might blind me to places where I bring a Caucasian-centered perspective to the classroom.
Teaching and living in a much more diverse place than I grew up, I see the ways culture and economics inform race relations in our country. The more time I spend here, the more ashamed I am of our country’s unjust approach to public education–by funding education through local taxes only, the wealthy get good schools and the poor get shitty ones, and middle-ground communities like mine see a cultural divide as middle-class and wealthy students go to private schools leaving the low-income students in schools with no support or funding, and without the mix of cultures and attitudes toward education that can make all the difference. It seems like the end result often means children are now judged by the contents of their wallet rather than the content of their character.
I also struggle with how to help my children understand the history of race relations in this country, and to do my best to eliminate as many biases as I can from the way they’re raised. Such is the challenge of the 21st century.

2012 01 16 Digital Sextant History
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2012-01-15 Tweets

Looking up "I Drink for a Reason" by David Cross, I discover that there's also a PERL programming book by David Cross. What a polymath! #
Toy Story: "Okay, I've got a plan. We'll have to break a few rules…" What are these rules and how do the toys discover them? #

2012 01 15 Digital Sextant tweets Comments (0) Permalink

RadioLab continues to rule

RadioLab's "The Bad Show"

RadioLab is always a treat, one of the most consistently excellent programs on the air (or the podcast, as I use it). But I was particularly impressed with this week’s episode, called “The Bad Show.” Abumrad and Krulwich explore why people do bad things, an what we should think about them. Here’s their description of the episode:

We begin with a chilling statistic: 91% of men, and 84% of women, have fantasized about killing someone. We take a look at one particular fantasy lurking behind these numbers, and wonder what this shadow world might tell us about ourselves and our neighbors. Then, we reconsider what Stanley Milgrim’s famous experiment really revealed about human nature (it’s both better and worse than we thought). Next, we meet a man who scrambles our notions of good and evil: chemist Fritz Haber, who won a Nobel Prize in 1918…around the same time officials in the US were calling him a war criminal. And we end with the story of a man who chased one of the most prolific serial killers in US history, then got a chance to ask him the question that had haunted him for years: why?

Go ahead and listen. Then when you’re done (or not, I’m not checking) come back and see what else I’ve got to say about it.

Othello and Iago

Okay. There are three main sub-stories and all of them are downright fascinating.

The Milgrim experiment:

The first explores the famous experiment where people (I’m sure you’ve heard of this) were willing to shock others on the request of a scientist. This has oft been used to show that people are meek sheep, but the RL producers reveal a different truth altogether. The show reveals what most reporters leave out — that when ordered to keep shocking people, volunteers refused, 100% of the time. Instead, the shocking occurred when the volunteers believed they were doing the right thing, even if it was the hard thing to do. In this case, they were helping science.

I listened to this piece on the same day that my zombie class talked about Nazis and zombies, so to hear the connection to the Nuremberg trials and its “I was following orders” defense was stunning. It goes to show how important ideology is to waging war (be it military or cultural), and how damaging bad ideology can be. Because even if someone believes an act is usually wrong, they may be willing to commit it if they believe they’re doing so for a just cause. I guess Milgrim suggested that in the ethical systems of many people, the ends justify the means.

Fritz Haber:

Here I am quibbling a little bit. RL explores this famous German scientist who invented both the nitrogen-extracting process that led to modern agriculture (“perhaps the most significant scientific discovery of them all”) and he invented and directed the first widescale use of poison gas in World War 1 (Chlorine gas at Ypres in 1915). At one point, Robert and Jad wonder whether Haber ends up as a “good” person or a “bad” person, and Jad suggests that the vast numbers of people Haber’s process had fed (literally billions) outweigh the hundreds or thousands he helped kill in the War, making him a good person. Robert disagreed.

As I listened, though, I couldn’t help but think of Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants, in which he argues that the technium–Kelly’s neologism for the vast system that perpetuates and expands technology–has an evolutionary force of its own which often leads to inevitable advances in science. Kelly’s premise suggests that if Haber hadn’t figured out how to pull nitrogen from the air or how to deploy chemical gas in large amounts, someone else would have. So for me, his “goodness” or “badness” cannot be judged by the ripple effect of his inventions, but rather by the personal actions he took. His personal efforts in poison-gas warfare far outweigh, for me, the ripple effect of his ammonia discovery.

The Green River Killer:

In the section on the green river killer, RL tells the story of Tom Jensen, one of the detectives who helped find and catch Gary Ridgeway, the “Green River Killer.” At one point, Jensen asks Ridgeway why he killed all these women. Jensen’s son, being interviewed for the RadioLab story, suggests that such questions are kind of like when Job asks God “Why did you let this happen?” Jensen thinks when we ask why serial killers do what they do, we’re also poking God, trying to get him to reveal himself.

Of course, for secularists, the problem of evil is one of the essential chinks in the armor of religion. Anyone who claims to represent or understand a kind and loving God must rationalize away (most infuriatingly with the “we can’t know his ways”) evil, or attribute it to the Devil, whom God presumably allows to conduct his business. For those concerned with this world, the Why question takes on a much more practical aspect: if we can understand something about the motives, the causes, the underlying network that leads someone to act like Ridgeway, perhaps we have a better chance of preventing such crimes from happening again or of stopping the next killer more quickly.

At the end of this marvelous episode, Jad hit us up for a donation and I pitched in my $10. Well worth it for this kind of amazing programming. Thanks, RadioLab!

2012 01 14 Digital Sextant Ethics
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Three kinds of zombies

I realized that I often refer to the three main kinds of zombie that I use to articulate the vagaries of the zombie genre, but I haven’t ever written a post explaining them. I thought that in honor of the last face-to-face meeting of my Zombies in Popular Media course, I would post a little summary for you, dear reader. Caviat: I am not the originator of these ideas, and I couldn’t conclusively tell you who first proposed these divisions. They’re commonly recognized, I think.

	Hollywood zombie	Voodoo zombie	Philosophical zombie
Key attributes	Actually undead, murderous, contagious, uncontrollable.	Possibly undead, usually controlled by voodoo magician (bocor), not contagious, often menacing.	Mindless but can pass as human, often with no internal affect, only as menacing as normal people usually are.
Causes	Space radiation, mysterious viral plague, demons, unknown	Voodoo practitioners, sometimes with drums, dancing, and often with powders.	Soul stealing, Body snatching, Aliens
Prime examples	Romero’s zombies from the …of the Living Dead series.	Somnambulent menaces from films before 1968, such as White Zombie or I Walked with a Zombie	Vacant-eyed people who make us question our humanity as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Big Questions	Often used as an allegory for menaces to society and human culture, sometimes as a way to understand our own foibles, also to explore death itself.	Concerned with post-colonial and race issues, first. Also engages in a kind of primitivist adoration of tribal culture/	Pushes us to try and understand our relationship to our bodies, the way we understand self and mind, and how we understand one another.
Fun facts	Their well-known lust for “brains” comes from the Return of the Living Dead series.	The Serpent and the Rainbow suggests toxic “voodoo powder” means these zombies might exist.	Proposed by philosophers as a way to think about the mind-body problem.
First/ Best movie	Night of the Living Dead Dawn of the Dead	White Zombie I Walked with a Zombie	Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Key variants, examples thereof	Humor: Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, Fido Fast zombies: 28 Days Later, Dawn of the Dead 2004	Demonic: Demons Hollywood/Voodoo hybrid: [REC], Zombi 2	A.I.: The Stepford Wives, Westworld Alien: Slither, Night of the Creeps

Of course, as the genre has involved, all three of these have melded. There are very few movies in the “Philosophical” category that don’t bridge into Hollywood, and there are many Hollywood zombie movies that use Voodoo as the cause of the outbreak.

We’ve also seen quite a few recent zombie movies that make the media itself a key element, if not the cause, of the zombie outbreak. Consider [REC], Quarantine, Pontypool. There’s also The Signal, which seems to be like “Pulse,” only instead of making people kill themselves, it makes them into zombies. Also consider Steven King’s Cell, in which cell phones zombify people.