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Our class's virtual, speculative mad sceintist labratory--

"Trading Futures"

Technology and Speculation in the Political Imagination

Engineer's Bookstore

748 Marietta Street NW, Atlanta, GA, 30318

GuidelinesForEssays.doc

Addendum: A few extra things to keep in mind for the compare/contrast essays

Table of Contents

Resources for Unit 1. Material Speculations
1. Readings for Unit 1:
Resources for Unit 2. Clockwork Alternatives
1. Readings for Unit 2:
Resources for Unit 3. Uncanny Futures
1. Readings for Unit 3:
Films for the Semester

History of Longitude (determining place through time)

Problem of Longitude

Marine Chronometer

BBC Article on the Chronophage

Resources for Unit 1. Material Speculations

images courtesy of wiki commons. Click for more information on the technology of stock tickers

Feel free to explore The Vintage Stock Ticker webpage for more images of stock ticker machines throughout the years.

Quotes from Wall Street [emphais added]:

Gekko-- "The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed in all of its forms-- greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge-- has marked the upward surge of mandkind; and greed-- you mark my words-- will not only save Teldar Paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA." [APPLAUSE. Scene ends with Frank Sinatra's "Fly Me to the Moon," themesong for the movie. "Fly me to the moon/take me to the stars/ Let me see what Spring is like on Jupiter and Mars...."]

Bud--"When does it all end? How many yachts can you water ski behind? How much is enough?"

Gekko-- "It's not a question of enough; it's a zero-sum game: somebody wins, somebody loses. Money itself isn't lost or made, it's simply

transferred from one perception to another, like magic. [...] The illusion has become real, and the more real it becomes, the more desperate they want

it. Capitalism at its finest."

Bud-- "How much is enough, Gordon?"

Gekko-- "The richest one percent of this country owns half our county's wealth-- five trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds

comes from inheritance-- interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons-- and what I do-- stock and real estate speculation. It's bullshit.

You got 90% of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing; I own. We make the rules, pal: the news, war, peace, famine,

upheaval, the price of a paperclip. We pick that rabit out of a hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. You're not naive

enough to think we're living in a democracy, are you?"

Quotes from Devil in the White City [emphasis added]:

"Holmes was charming and gracious, but something about him made Belknap uneasy. He could not have defined it. Indeed, for the next several decades alienists and their sucessors would find themselves hard-pressed to describe with any precision what it was about men like Holmes that could cause them to seem warm and ingratiating but also telegraph the vague sense that some important element of humanness was missing. At first alienists described this condition as 'moral insanity' and those who exhibited the disorder as 'moral imbeciles.' They later adopted the term 'psychopath,' used in the lay press as early as 1885 in William Stead's Pall Mall Gazette, which described it as a 'new malady' and stated, 'Beside his own person and his own interests, nothing is sacred to the psychopath.' Half a century later, in his path-breaking book The Mask of Sanity, Dr. Hervey Cleckley described the prototypical psychopath as 'a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly. . . . So perfect is his reproduction of a whole and a normal man that no one who examines him in a clinical setting can point out in scientific or objective terms why, or how, he is not real'" (Larson 87-8).

Readings for Unit 1:

Burton Bledstein. "Space and Words." Available at GT Library Course Reserves (search under instructor last name, pulldown 'Reynolds').

Ella Dixon: My Flirtations (1893) pp 171-185.

Allan Trachtenberg. Selction from "The Incorporation of America."

Robert Rydell. Introduction to "The Reason Why the Colored American is not at the World's Columbian Exhibition."

World's Columbian Exposition-- a virtual tour.

Resources for Unit 2. Clockwork Alternatives

Images of Grasshopper Escapement and various chronometers from the wikicommons.

Feel free to visit and explore The Steampunk Lab, an online community of Steampunk afficienados, for more ideas.

Or visit Science Fiction novelist Cory Doctorow's Steampunk blog.

Stanford University's Encycolapedia discussion of the history of Preformationism versus Epigenesis

Quote from Cecelia Tichi's _Shifting Gears_

Wells's "journalistic account of the dynamos of the Niagra Falls Power Company is filled with possibilities for symbolic development. Wells, traveling in the United States to record the American scene in 1905, saw the dynamos as human 'will made visible, thought translated into easy and commanding things.' They are 'starkly powerful . . . noble masses of machinery, huge black slumbering monsters, great sleeping tops that engender irresistible forces in their sleep.' 'They sprang,' says Wells, 'armed like Minerva, from serene and speculative, foreseeing and endeavouring brains. First was the word and then these powers.' Wells's dynamos rest in 'cloistered quiet' and from 'an empire,' yet are 'the heart of a living body'" (quoted in Tichi 162-3).

From Bill Borwn's "Science Fiction, the World's Fair, and the Prosthetics of Empire"

"The Master Mind [...] can finally help us, like The Steam Man, to redescribe the emergence of modern science fiction in America. For despite the genre's depiction of a postprosthetic empire, the genre is of course fundamentally prosthetic, imaginatively repairing the damaged body, the fragmented body, the separated head and hand. The monumental male these texts produce is a body without scars, a body on which history is not written but erased, a body without memory" (155).