Your stoner friend pointed this out years ago, and it probably blew your mind: Zombies are symbols for Western culture's blind adherence to the consumer economy. [Inhale, pass.] It's true, man! Think about it: They stagger around mindlessly, consuming everything they come across, as if the world is totally normal even though it's collapsing all around them. [Exhale, cough.] George Romero made this rich metaphor totally overt with Dawn of the Dead, which was set in a frickin' shopping mall, for Christ's sake! Anyway, that's why zombies became so popular over the last decade—consumer culture is out of control, and the zombies are, like, our twisted reflection.
All due respect to your friend—I took a film appreciation class once and it totally changed my life, too—but the stoned commentary about zombies being a commentary on our culture is more of a commentary on the shallowness of cultural commentary itself.
You know what the zombies in Colson Whitehead's new novel, Zone One, symbolize?
Dead people.
Go read the whole review, if you're interested, and then go to the reading tonight. It's free.
2. Kelly Link and Gavin Grant read at University Book Store tonight. They publish books together as Small Beer Press, and their mission statement—publish weird fiction and promote that fiction on the quality of its language and the strength of its ideas—sounds an awful lot like the future to me. Other publishers would pigeonhole novels into literary, horror, or science fiction categories; at Small Beer, they’re just good. (It probably helps that Link is an excellent writer of short weird fiction in her own right.) This is a rare and welcome opportunity to look behind the scenes of one of the best publishers in the nation today.
3. If you're into non-fiction tonight, your best bet is at Town Hall, where Max and Whit Alexander are reading. Max and Whit Alexander. The Alexanders are from Ghana. Max is the author of Bright Lights,No City: An African Adventure on Bad Roads with a Brother and a Very Weird Business Plan.
4. Everything else happening tonight, this week, this month, and for the next few months is in the readings calendar.
