inchoatia

The Five Most Conservative Pynchon Novels

2012-02-02T20:45:00.002-05:00

(CF here and here.)

I wrote this some time ago (December 30, 2009, per the date stamp), but then I forgot about it. I just came across it again, so I figured why not toss it up here? And you know, I will bet you real money that if I were wholly devoid of shame, I could, with very minimal revision, get the National Review to publish it fer serious.

V.
In the Whole Sick Crew, we see a shocking object lesson in what happens when traditional conservative family values are abandoned. In the character of Herbert Stencil, we see good, traditional, hard work personified. Does Stencil whine to the government to help him with his quest for V.? No! He pulls himself up by his bootstraps and calls on the old-fashioned values of self-reliance!

The Crying of Lot 49

Oedipa Maas is a strong, self-proclaimed Republican--like Sarah Palin! The breakup of her marriage is shown to have been caused by permissive, liberal drug culture. As the focus on the work of Richard Wharfinger demonstrates, dead white males have something to offer us, in spite of what liberal academic relativists would tell you.

Gravity's Rainbow

Oberst Enzian--working to prevent abortions among his people so as to avoid tribal suicide. A powerful pro-life statement! Nazis are shown to be bad, demonstrating moral clarity, which liberals, of course, lack. The rocket limericks demonstrate the value of military hardware. Slothrop's fragmentation shows what happens to people in a world where liberal values run rampant.

Vineland

The failure of the hippie movement is depicted, as is the fundamental instability of these anti-establishment peaceniks. Frenesi's behavior shows what happens when Family Values are abandoned. The lengths to which our heroic troops are forced to go to to win the War on Drugs are vividly dramatized.

Mason & Dixon

America is shown to be a wild, stable, chaotic place full of things like werebeavers and enormous vegetables. It's up to our intrepid, white heroes, representative of Western Civilization, to bring some order to the area.

Duck Comics: "That Missing Candelabra"

2012-01-29T23:10:00.000-05:00

Don't miss this one, ya big jerk.

Not shy enough, if anything.

2012-01-25T23:44:00.000-05:00

If there's one thing I like, it's when people add complete nonsense to wikipedia pages and it doesn't get corrected because nobody cares enough. I happily happened across this, f'rinstance, from the entry on extremely minor new-wave band Kajagoogoo:

I especially like that "citation needed"--as if some editor thought, well, it's somewhat plausible that Trent Reznor was almost a member of Kajagoogoo, but we need proof. Hopefully, someone will write an article about Reznor that, drawing on the wikipedia page, repeats this claim, and then wikipedia can cite it as evidence, and the circle of life can continue.

Awesome Test Post.

2012-01-19T00:23:00.005-05:00

Stupid Test post.

It sucks.

"The Untold Death of Defeat"

2012-01-17T20:13:00.002-05:00

This is a little round-table story thing I did in eighth grade with my friend Zac and some other kid; I don't remember who, but I suspect that he or she may not have been on quite the same wavelength as we were.

Zac: There was once a demon who had a keen talent. Its name was Defeat. It had the power to kill anyone instantly by shouting its name. Truly Defeat was a tough competitor, but believe it or not, Defeat was defeated. This is how it happened.

Me: one day, a brave pair of heroes came down to the underworld where the demon lived. One was a brave warrior, the other a mighty wizard. The warrior attacked the demon. It yelled his name, but the wizard used a spell to reflect the defeat, and the demon was killed. But then, a huge army of demons came and attacked them!

???: The attack lasted days and days. Nothing exciting was happening.

Duck Comics: "Scrooge's Second Childhood"

2012-01-14T01:23:00.000-05:00

I am quite sure that this is eight billion times more than anyone else has ever written about this obscure old story.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Psychopath

2012-01-12T22:57:00.005-05:00

Here's a little passage from my files. I wrote it when I was ten, in response to god-knows-what assignment. Probably something about a guy receiving a mysterious package, since that detail has nothing to do with anything else. All spelling/grammatical issues are courtesy of my young self, as is the question of how I wrote this without being institutionalized.

Lethal Injection
Once upon a time, there was a handsome college student, who one day, received a package. Inside was a six pack of hypodermic needles. He would have wondered what it was for, but he had more important things to worry about. His wife was acting weird. She was always receiving math papers, doing them, and mailing them out, along with valentines. This got the handsome college student so angry that he went to Little white cat’s highly addictive alcohol and asked for a bottle of the strongest licour he had. At home, he got his wife so drunk, that he could inject arsenic into her vains, killing her. Then dusted off his own fingerprints and put hers on it, so when the police came, they thout she had comitted suicide!

Fun anecdote: the most useful class I ever had in high school was Typing. That shit really stuck and has been a boon to me ever since. But it was kind of easy, really, and I would usually get done with the lessons far ahead of time--at which point I would be bored and start writing random idiotic little stories and other assorted gibberish. Anyway, one day I got called to the counselor's office. The counselor (Mr. Stackhouse, who was a pretty good guy as I recall; give him credit) kept asking me all these questions about how I was doing and how my life was and I really had no idea of what the deal was until he showed me the sheet of paper that I'd done the previous day's typing exercise on (we were using electric typewriters), on which I had written, among other things, "life is meaningless," which is no doubt how I felt as I waited for that damned bell to ring. Fair enough; I probably would have reported such a thing to the counselor too. I suppose the above isn't as obvious a cry for help as this was, but still. It 's certainly something. You wonder what sort of themes Dexter Morgan wrote when he was small.

God didn't build himself that throne. For that, he needed football players.

2012-01-09T15:20:00.001-05:00

I thought last night's Denver-Pittsburgh game was awesome. Sure, the god-botherer is an irritating twerp, but I'll take him over the rapist any day.

Now, a lot of people get--justifiably--exasperated by these grandiose displays of religiosity. It is extremely unlikely that any God who's other than a ridiculous cartoon cares about football games, they note. Right enough, even leaving aside the fact that Tebow and others like him are egregiously violating Matthew 6:5. I see no reason to believe that Tebow isn't genuinely devout in some sense, but the fact that he feels the need to make public displays of this devoutness whenever the opportunity arises indicates that this devoutness is inextricably tangled up with extreme egoïsm.

But here's the thing about getting down on one knee or pointing at the sky after a touchdown: why exactly are you doing it? I think that people assume they're saying something like "Dear Jesus, thank you for making sure my wide receiver was open, and thank you for guiding the ball into his hands." And if that's the case, it's obviously risible. But it seems like a more logical assumption would be that it's something like "thank you lord for being with me and helping me to obtain the physical abilities necessary to make that play," which seems theologically unproblematic to me. I'm sure that someone who reads more sports media than I do could look at statements by various players over the years to determine whether the rhetoric tends to support this or not, but the idea that football games are won by literal divine intervention does indeed seem so risible that I think it's only fair to give these guys the benefit of the doubt unless they make it explicit exactly what they mean.

Duck Comics: "The Secret of Atlantis"

2012-01-04T23:26:00.001-05:00

A duck-comics giant died yesterday, so we pay tribute by covering one of his stories.

Annals of Horrible Douchebags

2011-12-29T17:33:00.001-05:00

(Quotes are from this fascinating yet appalling article, which isn't available online to non-subscribers.)

Have you ever thought to yourself, of high-powered college football, "you know, I like the idea of players being encouraged to neglect academics in order to break their bodies in the very slim hopes of becoming NFL players--but the problem is, there aren't enough fourteen-year-olds doing this?" Well, if you have, Horrible Douchebag Ken Halloy has got your back:

"There was this big uproar, about kids being exploited and so forth," Halloy said, of his initial efforts to promote high-school events. "Next thing you know, ESPN's trying to televise the games, using that as a marketing tool, because you've got guys that are in the recruiting business. So they want to put on games that feature top players. And then you had an uproar about that--saying 'ESPN is exploiting blah blah blah blah blah.'" Halloy has the boyish face and the glinting blue eyes of a born salesman. "The beauty of ESPN, for me, is that they can take something seemingly radical and turn it mainstream. That's exactly what happened with high school football. ESPN has mainstreamed it. ESPN can buy anything. Schools are so desperate for money these days they can't say no."

Any rhetoricians out there know the Greek term for refuting an opposing argument via "blah blah blah?" A less-horrible douchebag might have, I dunno, tried to soft-peddle the awfulness a little, but that would have implied the presents of a conscience, however degraded. That's what's great about being a sociopath in America today: there's no need to justify yourself in anything other than financial terms! "Cash-strapped schools will have no choice but to participate in our exploitive scheme! Isn't that great?!?" It sure is, you horrible douchebag. It sure is.

He described his vision of the future, perhaps a decade from now, involving high-school bowl series, with regional post-season games occurring during the week between Christmas and New Year's Day. He was certain that the audience already existed. Offshore-gambling sites had been issuing point spreads for noteworthy high school contests since August. "If Don Bosco played St. Thomas Aquinas on December 23rd or 28th, on national television, those ratings would be as good as the Sun Bowl, in El Paso, Texas," he said. "I don't think there's any question that it's going to happen, and, again, what's going to drive it is money. The high-school associations are going to get their hands in that kitty."

And you know what? The horrible douchebag is almost certainly right! God bless America!

J.-K. Huysmans, En rade (1887)

2011-12-29T01:58:00.000-05:00

I read Huysmans' most famous work, the anti-novel Against Nature (À rebours, 1884), when I was in college. It wasn't for a class; I was just obsessed with nineteenth-century French literature at the time. What can I say? The book concerns one Jean Des Esseintes, the last scion of a decayed noble family, who gets bored and disgusted with the world and thus decides to hole himself up in the family château to escape human society, as one does. The bulk of the book consists of lengthy catalogues of the art and literature and whatnot that he's brought with him, interspersed with his various efforts at amusing himself, macabre flashbacks, and dream sequences. In the end, this lifestyle proves too unhealthy, and he is compelled, reluctantly, to return to society.

This book blew my tiny mind. You wouldn't necessarily expect to be enthralled by a long list of early Christian philosophy that you have little interest in, but somehow the effect of the whole was really hypnotic. Granted, this was probably in part due to a sort of perverse wish-fulfillment thing that appealed to my more misanthropic tendencies, but regardless, it was just super-cool. So I followed it up by reading his later novel, The Damned (La Bas, 1891--and yes, that translation of the title is pure sensationalism). I don't actually remember it all that well, as I was much less enthralled by it than Against Nature. It's about a guy writing a biography of infamous child murderer (…is there any other kind?) Gilles de Rais who gets involved with Satanism. There's a depiction of a black mass at the end that might have been shocking in the nineteenth century. I didn't dislike the book, but the fact that I didn't love it means that I did not proceed to read this here other Huysmans novel which I had purchased, Becalmed (En rade,--also translated as Stranded, which is more exact, but the other title seems more evocative and thematically appropriate).

But, on a whim, I recently picked it up and gave it a go, and hey, I've gotta say, it's a pretty interesting piece of deviltry. It's about a fellow named Jacques Marles who, having had financial problems in Paris, retreats with his wife Louise into the country, to live in an old château of which her aunt and uncle are caretakers.

As per usual with Huysmans, not a whole lot happens here. The book is all about entropy: the decay of the natural landscape; of the primitive, atavistic peasants; of Jacques' mental state; of his wife, who is suffering from some mysterious wasting illness; and of his relationship with her. All of these things are described in somewhat gruesomely-detailed fashion--and there's your novel.

There are also three dream sequences, emphasizing the disorder of Jacques' mind and the entire milieu. The most memorable of these is one in which, with no warning or transition of any kind, he and his wife are suddenly on the moon--but not a fantastic moon; an arid, real-world moon with no air on which consequently they can't talk. They just wander around, taking in the geographic features, and noting that, in spite of what you'd expect from many of these features' names, they're completely sterile; there's nothing lush or Earth-like about them. I believe that Mishima read Huysmans, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that this sequence was his inspiration for calling his final tetralogy the Sea of Fertility.

The dreams aren't the only fantastic parts; there's also a morbidly funny bit where Jacques imagines how, with the aid of science, ptomaine could be used to flavor food and thus people could eat their ancestors as a special treat. If I have one criticism of the book, it's that it could have used more along those lines. Huysmans obviously had a very idiosyncratic sensibility, and a bit more of the surreal would not have come amiss. In the introduction to my edition of the book, there's a quote in which he accepts criticisms of it and asserts that it would've been better if he'd gone with his original idea of strictly alternating between "real" daytime chapters and nighttime dream chapters. That might've been a bit of overkill, but it sure woulda been something.

Later, Huysmans converted to Catholicism and wrote a number of novels about this (featuring the guy from La Bas, no less). They seem to be fairly well-regarded, but I dunno--it's difficult for me to imagine how a writer this willfully perverse could possibly not be literarily neutered by religion. Maybe one of these days I'll give this later material a look and find out.

Upton Sinclair, Mountain City (1930)

2011-12-14T00:08:00.004-05:00

Hmm. This novel concerns one Jed Rusher, who grows up an impoverished farm-boy, with an unbreakable determination to get rich come hell or high water so he doesn't have to be at the mercy of economic fluctuations. It's a perfectly believable motivation, and goes a good way towards explaining this country's general amorality: when you have a system that's designed to fuck over the great majority of its subjects (or "citizens," if you laughingly prefer), you strip away the ethical frameworks not just of the plutocrats, but everyone else too.

It's an interesting novel because it's the first I've read from Sinclair with an unsympathetic protagonist. Here's how Jed starts his fortune: he's able to go to college because of his sister's ironclad determination, and while there he wrangles his way into a job as attendant to a fabulously wealthy speculator who had become an invalid. His granddaughter, Lulu Belle, comes in to visit him; she's fourteen years old, but she's been kept utterly sheltered her entire life, so she has no idea about anything. She's very upset because her parents have taken away her dolls, on the basis that she's outgrown such childish things. If only I could have a real baby, like my cousin, she says to Jed, nobody could take it away from me. How do people get babies? This flusters the hell out of Jed, who mumbles his apologies and leaves, but upon reflection, it occurs to him, hey, I know! If I were to tell her where babies come from, and then impregnate her, they'd have to let her marry me, and I'd be part of this super-rich family! And he's all prepared to go through with this brilliant scheme, until he learns that he has been preëmpted by a boy from her own social group, leaving him to say oh, well, if you DO get pregnant, be sure to tell me and I'll help you.

Mirabile dictu, this comes to pass, and she writes him a letter telling him, and he puts his new scheme in motion: he blusters his way into her family's house, making her mother let him see her by threatening to tell the papers, and getting her to drop the idea of getting a discreet abortion for her daughter with appallingly insincere expressions of moral outrage that would do today's anti-woman brigade proud; then, when he sees Lulu Belle, he does the classic psychopath thing of isolating her by emphasizing how everyone's against her but him, and gets her to agree to run off and secretly marry him, having ascertained that the worst that can happen if it's revealed that they lied about her age is a small fine.

And then indeed in short order everyone does accept him. So yay Jed! But while the money he marries into helps, he makes his real fortune via oil prospecting, and the scenes of him inspecting fields and bribing officials might as well have been copied straight from Sinclair's earlier Oil! (1927).

From this, you might think that the novel would be luridly fascinating, but it's really not. The awful business with his child-bride is the clear highlight. After that, he just settles in to being a kind of generically corrupt oil tycoon. Naturally, the idea of being rich just so he doesn't have to live a hard life quickly goes by the wayside, as he throws himself full-time into stock manipulation and the like. As with Oil! it would be hard to call this an advocacy novel, exactly, like Sinclair's earlier works; it really just shows all this corruption in action and lets you draw your own conclusions.

All this goes on for a LONG time; looking back, it's sort of hard to see how this was possibly enough to sustain a three-hundred-twenty-page novel (and densely-packed pages, too--it would probably be closer to five hundred in a contemporary edition). There's a whole lot of nothing here. Towards the end, Jed gets an anonymous tip-off that his wife is cheating on him, and one is briefly seized with the hope that the book's going to suddenly turn into Othello, which would just be gloriously loopy. But no such luck; she just confesses her indiscretions and they separate rather amicably, after which he keeps doing his thing. It's an obvious analogue for capitalism, which doesn't really have climaxes, but just keeps on keeping on. Not a particularly satisfying conclusion, though. Maybe if it had been written by the other Sinclair, Lewis, it might have worked better.

I'm trying to read a whole bunch of Upton Sinclair because it pleases me to do so, but this isn't a great book. The aforementioned Oil! is far better. The closest thing to a sympathetic character is Lulu Belle's grandfather, who holds socialist ideals while cynically profiting from the system to rub it in people's faces what bullshit it all is, but that's about it, and Jed just isn't much of a character at all--again, maybe in a representative way, but that doesn't make for great fiction. He has occasional very brief intimations of some sort of social conscience, but it goes without saying that those are quashed quickly enough. I was driven largely by curiosity about where the hell all this was leading. Nowhere in particular, it turns out.

But to end on a positive note, one thing I do like is Sinclair's fastidious insistence on putting quotation marks around any turn of phrase that strikes him as suspiciously colloquial; eg, "all that would be more or less dangerous, but even bolder things had been 'gotten away with' by able lawyers with rich clients 'in a jam.'" Maybe I'll try to start incorporating that into my own writing.

Duck Comics: Holiday Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Marathon

2011-12-07T19:06:00.003-05:00

Details here. I'm not going to post a link here every day, 'cause that would get monotonous, but long story short, there's going to be a new post every day from tomorrow through Christmas, so check 'em out if you want to.

Test

2011-12-07T02:26:00.006-05:00

LeftLeftLeftLeft Left LeftLeftLeftLeftLeft RightRightRightRight Right RightRightRightRight

Perfect!

Huh?

China Miéville, King Rat (1998)

2011-12-07T00:03:00.002-05:00

So there's this guy named Saul who comes home to visit his father, only said father has been mysteriously killed. He gets taken in by the cops, but a mysterious man calling himself King Rat breaks him out, and it turns out--this isn't *much* of a spoiler--that Saul himself is, in fact, part-rat. So he has to acclimate himself to this while a demonic Pied Piper tries to kill him.

This is Miéville's first novel, and the difference gulf between it and Perdido Street Station is quite remarkable; you never would have guessed from this relatively simple story what lay ahead. Aside from questions of scope, the writing itself seems somewhat less adroit, though it stopped bothering me pretty quickly; part of the issue may be that the opening trope--guy suddenly finding out that he and the world are dramatically different than he had imagined, first disbelieving, then accepting--is so well-worn that it must be very difficult to do well. I sort of feel like authors must think "yes yes, shock, disbelief, let's just take that as a given and move on, shall we?"

The book certainly has its moments. One aspect I particularly liked was the effort to make being a rat seem like a genuinely alien thing. There's a part soon after Saul's been rescued where King Rat goes, okay, let's eat, and roots through the trash to find some thrown-away foodstuffs. Saul is, as you'd expect, horrified, but KR asks him: when was the last time you threw up? and he realizes that, in fact he doesn't experience nausea, and once he's accepted that he's not in fact disgusted by the idea of eating garbage, he's fine--as you would be, when you think about it. Very clever. Also, there's one pretty exciting chase sequence, and the ending is rather grippingly macabre, albeit not so much that I would call the book as a whole a "horror" novel, as the fact that it was short-listed for this here Bram Stoker Prize would seem to indicate. Finally, the whole thing has a cool, mostly-upbeat conclusion: given that Miéville was even younger than when he wrote Perdido Street Station, I was bracing myself for the same sort of forced grimness that somewhat marred that book, but no, nothing like that, and the novel benefits from it.

Still, it would be hard to call King Rat exactly a great novel. A lot of it is pretty flat, and there are a few parts that are simply underdeveloped. In addition to King Rat, there's also a king of birds and one of spiders, but their narratives, particularly that of the bird, are just half-baked and peter out most unsatisfactorily. And the most (theoretically) interesting thing in the book--Saul's relationship with King Rat--is not given nearly the attention it deserves.

Hey, there's nothing to be ashamed of here; most people only wish they could write a first novel this good. It's not quite one for the ages, though.

Commercials We Hate, volume umpty-billion

2011-12-04T22:38:00.002-05:00

It's this fucking microsoft commercial where the kid is giving his parents a powerpoint presentation about how he needs a dog, and his parents are charmed by this and thus, there is a dog, but then the husband tries to do a presentation about why he should be allowed to play golf on Sunday and the wife just shakes her head and he immediately shuffles off.

Now, the main action of this commercial is no great shakes; the faux-clever precociousness of the kid's presentation is less endearing than was evidently presumed. But man alive, that ending. Now, god forbid I should be like those "men's rights" assholes who fulminate about how any commercial where a man is humorously made fun of or made to eat his cheerios or whatever is an instance of horrible, omnipresent oppression and therefore let's all be as misogynistic as possible to make up for it. But look, people: what's wrong with the guy playing golf on Sundays if he likes playing golf? The only legitimate objection would be if he were using golf as a tool to help him be emotionally distant--but in that case, this marriage has problems that are not going to be solved by attacking the symptoms like that.

And if that's not the case, then he really needs to explain to his wife, "hey, marriage requires mutual concessions. I love you, but as you knew when you married me, I'm also an avid golfer, and I'm not going to be happy if I'm never allowed to play. So we are going to have to reach a mutually-acceptable compromise; if we can't do that, there will be big problems down the road, and not just because of golf, either."

But the ending makes it pretty clear that this isn't going to happen; that he's resigned himself to this situation. Which means that there are two possibilities: either at some point he's just going to explode, with horrible consequences for everybody; or else he's just going to keep on endlessly sublimating his frustration and anger, becoming ever-more withdrawn and bitter and making things ever-more miserable for his family until all this repression literally kills him.

And the fact that none of this even occurred to the makers of the commercial--that they just mindlessly drew on lazy comic-strip gender tropes to create what they thought it was a cute, funny, family scenario--just endlessly rubs me the wrong way. Is a lame thirty-second spot worth this level of scrutiny? YES. I demand that bullshit like this not be made, end of story.

Duck Comics: "City of Golden Roofs"

2011-12-04T03:48:00.001-05:00

Enjoy. Or not, as the spirit moves you.

In the gleaming corridor of the fifty-first floor, the money can be made if you really want some more.

2011-12-02T21:41:00.002-05:00

This is late I know, but, for the record: wingnuts fulminate about the War on, I shit you not, Black Friday. Seems some libruls somewhere said something bad about mindless consumerism, so obviously that can't stand. And apparently, there's something called "Small Business Saturday" where you're supposed to patronize small businesses, which apparently Obama said something positive about, so it's also necessary for them to take a day out of their busy schedule of praising small businesses to the heavens to explain how small businesses fucking suck and should all be destroyed. It really is all stimulus-response with these guys. No higher brain function.

I probably don't have to say that I absolutely fucking loath the very idea of this day. I try my best not to feel disgust for the mobs of humanity rioting for the opportunity to snag a two-dollar waffle iron--tell myself that they're only playing their proscribed role in a diseased society--but lord knows it's hard.

I have a friend who works in retail. He told me that his store opened at six on Friday, and they did not get as much business as they like, and this was because--or management determined that it was because--they didn't open early enough (I saw ads for places opening at midnight, or even the night before). So next year, they're gonna open in the middle of the night.

So to sum up: the Thanksgivings of retail workers will be ever-more ruined by their employers making them come in before the holiday's even over. The Thanksgivings of other people will be ever-more ruined as they are compelled to go along with this insidious bullshit. It's a pretty perfect example of the way late capitalism undermines anything that isn't strictly regimented according to the dictates of the market. Looked at in those terms, it's not just foolish and stressful to go shopping on Black Friday--it's actively immoral. Not that I blame people who do (well, I try not to anyway); they're just part of an immoral system. But if you're even a tiny bit self-aware about this stuff, you have no justification.

(And yeah, I could've used a quote from Flogging Molly's "Black Friday Rule" in that title there, but it just seemed too obvious. Same reason that the movie Drive does not feature the Cars song "Drive.")

Dexter (2006-3947)

2011-11-29T02:42:00.015-05:00

This has big spoilers for various seasons of Dexter. If you haven't seen the show, I might recommend watching the first two before reading it--but no more.

Here's the thing about Dexter--the show about The World's Most Lovable Serial Killer that's just winding down its sixth season: the first season is actually really good. It's a tight, suspenseful package, and it does a surprisingly good job of maintaining its central contradiction: that the main character, in spite of (in theory) being an affectless sociopath, is still mostly sympathetic. Part of this is down to decent writing, and part of it to Michael C. Hall's impressive performance in the part. It's somewhat on the morally queasy side: the show's somewhat half-assed conceit is that Dexter has this "code," see, that his foster dad taught him so he could serial kill and also be a functioning member of society (...okay, so it sounds insane/idiotic when I say it like that) where he only kills Bad People who have escaped justice, necessary no doubt if he's not going to be completely unsympathetic, but the result is that the audience gets to cheer along with his gruesome murders without feeling morally implicated. Still, the fact that we react to it as we do raises interesting questions, and I do not think the show was un-self-aware of what it was doing.

The second season is also pretty good. It's more or less in the same vein, but it's still addictive watching. There's a big sign of trouble ahead, however, which is that it stumbles very badly at the end. See, when Dexter's not killing people he's a forensic analyst with the Miami MPD. None of his colleagues--who, let's face it, are none too bright--suspects his extracurricular activities except for the one guy, Doakes, who's super-suspicious for no very clear reason. So at the end of the season, through various contrivances, Doakes knows Dexter's secret, and Dexter has him trapped in this backwoods cabin, and now the idea is SHIT, what to do? The only way out is to kill him, but that violates the code of only killing Bad People. SHIT SHIT SHIT. Well, "what to do" turns out to be "nothing, because Dexter's crazy quasi-girlfriend blows up the cabin, killing Doakes and leaving Dexter conveniently unimplicated, and then he kills her, so it's all good! Hooray! Really just a terribly cowardly instance of punch-pulling, and it foreshadows the show's stubborn, cash-motivated unwillingness to move away from the status quo even a tiny bit.

The drop-off in quality after season two is really breathtaking, for so many reasons. First, the level of tension drops considerably, as there's very little sense that Dexter's ever been in any danger of getting caught. Second--and this I find kind of repulsive--they considerably tone down the character. In previous seasons, we never actually see any of his kills, but they're quite clearly extremely gruesome, involving power tools and everything nearby getting soaked in blood. This was necessary because it drove home the point that, yeah, these are Bad People, but the fact remains that there is something seriously broken in this guy that you're rooting for, and maybe there's something wrong with you for doing as much. That's gone. The tradition has always been for Dexter to catch victims and tie them down in a special "kill room" before doing the deed, but now instead of doing anything especially gruesome, he just rather genteelly stabs them. Also, any notion of him lacking emotion is completely out the window, as the show goes out of its way to make him more likable. Some people--dumb people--have tried to make the argument that, oh ho, this is character development, which is really laughable bullshit. If you want to have the guy become less evil, okay, but that would have to involve him either curtailing his serial-killing activities or at the very least questioning their morality in some way. This never happens, because the show wants him to be liked so that people will watch so that money can be made. So they do all this song-and-dance about his Darkness to try to seem "edgy," but it's all insulting bullshit, because they utterly lack the courage of their supposed convictions in that regard.

Another awful thing the show does at this point is start to devote a whole fuckload of time to Dexter's coworkers (this stuff was also in the first few seasons to an extent, and it was bad there too, but it was limited, and the Dexter stuff was good enough to carry the show). It is impossible to overstate how utterly, absolutely, violently uninteresting these people are, and yet the show includes these absolutely fucking interminable soap-opera-y plot threads about them. There's no rhyme or reason for this shit. It contributes in no way to the show, and has very little to do with its central conceit. It's obviously just making time, and it is fucking awful. Whenever a scene without Dexter in it comes on, you can safely wander away to check your email, make a sandwich, rub one out, whatever, and know you're not missing anything that anyone could possibly care about. And yet, the shit keeps coming. It's just perverse, is what it is.

People say that the fourth season is a return to form. They say this because of John Lithgow's role as the heavy. When they say this, they are lying to you, and they're not your real friends. No, this season is just as bad as the previous one. Getting Lithgow was an inspired casting decision, but as always at this point in the show's life, the writing is for shit, and as such, the character is very poorly-written. So he has this really bizarre killing pattern, okay. And then, in an early episode, you see him with his family, and he's totally kind and loving and an all-around Great Guy, and you think, okay, this could be interesting. But then in later episodes, they completely throw that idea out: he's a toweringly insane psychopath to his family; they all hate him and want him dead. Some people justify this by saying, of the previous material, "yes, but that's what psychopaths are like; they can be all nice and charming and stuff one moment and then horrible the next." This might be a valid argument if they ever brought back the "nice" version, even momentarily, but they don't. It's really apparent that at some point somebody realized, shit, if this fellow really is a genuinely good guy aside from the odd murder, it might give Dexter pause before killing him, and if he went through with it (and he has to go through with it), he'll seem less sympathetic. So forget that! Can't have anything tarnishing the image of our Serial-Killing Superhero!

So basically, it's complete bullshit. The season's conclusion is, I suppose, interesting, if somewhat logistically dubious: turns out that before Dexter killed off Lithgow, Lithgow had murdered Dexter's wife, Rita. Not that she was ever much of a character, but it's still enough to take you at least a little bit aback, and threatened to in some way shake up the status quo.

I jest, of course. Within a few episodes into season five, everything's worked out and everyone's pretty much over it. This seems to be the season that everyone really hates, but I dunno…no, it's not "good" by any reasonable metric, but the plot--involving a woman who'd been gang-raped by this crazy rape/murder cult and may be damaged in a way similar to Dexter--certainly had the potential to lead to something interesting. Of course, it never really does, but she's still a surprisingly compelling character for someone introduced at this stage of the game. Let's just say I was more engaged than I had been with the previous two season, which is damning with faint praise and certainly no reason to slog through to this point.

Especially because, holy shit this current season--which has three goddamn episodes to go--is epically horrible. No, the previous three season weren't good, but this is the first time the show has actually made me angry with its egregious stupidity. Let me just give one example: this season featured Mos Def, playing this reformed killer, Brother Sam, who's now a devout Christian who works as a mechanic and employs other ex-cons to help them get back on their feet and right with god, and yeah, he's kind of a magical negro, but that is really the least of our problems here. Point is, Dexter falls in with him, and there's a lot of half-assed talk about faith and stuff, and he starts to like the guy, but then OH FUCK, he gets shot! He's in the hospital at death's door, and the police think they've got the killer, but oh no, Dexter realizes, the real killer is this guy that Sam had been nurturing! So he goes to see Sam at his deathbed and says "I know who did this and I'll get that motherfucker," but Sam goes, "no! You have to forgive him! Faith! Gah!" and then dies. And Dexter's all dammit, but he determines to have a go at this forgiveness thing. So he has a talk with the guy and tells him what's going on and that he's not going to do anything to him but he should turn himself in and the guy starts in with this fucking ridiculous "BWAHAHA NO ONE CAN GET ME NOW I TOTALLY GOT AWAY WITH THAT MURDER THIS FUCKING ROCKS!!!11" so, big surprise, Dexter kills him after all. And this apparently means that he has Embraced Darkness, 'cause now his dead serial-killing brother from season one shows up. Did I mention that the normal thing on the show is for Dexter's dead father to show up for really clunky, obvious character exposition? Well, now the brother's here, 'cause he's, like, evil and stuff, just like Dexter's apparently now all, like, evil and stuff, in spite of the fact that this killing is no different than his jillions of previous murders. If the guy had been genuinely repentant and Dexter had killed him anyway: that would have been a sort of gutsy thing. But noooo…this show is utterly gutless, so they want us to simultaneously feel that this murder was justified and believe that it somehow represents something especially Evil. Goddamnit, show, I hate you so much. Oh, and then he goes on a crazy road trip with his ghost brother, but then at the end Ghost Dad is back, and the whole idea of him going over to the Dark Side is abandoned because, as I said, the show is desperate to avoid upsetting the status quo in any way.

Okay, one more thing: this season also has by far the worst villains of the series. This time it's Colin Hanks and Edward James Olmos as these crazy messianic Christians who do murders in such a way as to stage scenes from Revelation. Only Olmos is actually dead, and Hanks is just crazy. This has been telegraphed right from the beginning, with nobody else ever seeing Olmos or interacting with him in any way. And yet…apparently the show was trying to pretend that this was some kind of big secret, and in last night's episode there was this hilarious Big Reveal, where Dexter--who had been under the impression that Gellar was Totes Real, because apparently at this point he's as dumb as the writers--finds Olmos' body in an icebox, and then the Captain-Obvious voiceover kicks in: "Gellar's been dead the whole time!" And as if that weren't enough: "Travis killed all those people!" The show is widely known for its terrible, redundant voiceovers, but that may well be a new low. At this point, the show has gone beyond being a bad show. It lacks even a minimum baseline level of competence; it's almost impossible to believe that someone thought this was good enough. Not that different from Saved by the Bell, really, except that this show at least features one competent actor.

So the question remains: why in god's name am I still watching this show? I feel like this might mean I'm as damaged as Dexter is, because really, what other excuse could there possibly be? Well, I think I'm justified in having watched season three, given the quality of the first two. And then everyone said--lying bastards that they are--that season four was all great. And given the Shocking Twist at the end of season four, it was natural to want to see what came next. And as I said, I was at least mildly engaged with season five, so what the hell, six it is. Though for the record, I've been dulling the pain this time by limiting myself to half-watching while playing Dragon Quest IX. This ain't The Wire; full concentration is decidedly not necessary. I suppose I'll probably continue half-watching into the future, too, if only to marvel at how terrible it's become, but good lord. I think HBO has created this illusion that because a show is on premium cable and characters can say "fuck" it's necessarily a higher class of thing than shows on network television. Right here we have Exhibit A that this is far from the case.

Juxtaposed without comment.

2011-11-27T19:51:00.005-05:00

"I wonder why it is," said Hal. "There seems to be so much of that nasty element in our Western City politics."
Adelaide answered--it was one of the curious and unforeseen consequences of woman suffrage, or rather of woman suffrage granted too early, without the women having had to work for it, and develop intelligence and public spirit. "Men don't pay much attention to scandals," she said, "but when you're dealing with women voters, there's nothing pays so well as a nasty story."
--Upton Sinclair, The Coal War

"Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free nigger there from Ohio -- a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain't a man in that town that's got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane -- the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? They said he was a p'fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain't the wust. They said he could vote when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was 'lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn't too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they'd let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I'll never vote agin. Them's the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me -- I'll never vote agin as long as I live."
--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Duck Comics: "Turkey Trouble"

2011-11-24T11:46:00.001-05:00

HO HO HO! MEEEEERRRRRRY THANKSGIVING!

Who Whatrich?

2011-11-01T01:45:00.003-04:00

Fuckin' Robocall from Unrepentant Shithead Newt Gingrich about how failed European socialist policies blah blah I want to be your next president. Man, what an unrepentant shithead. I know I just said that, but it bears repeating. I do take a certain comfort in knowing the following: it doesn't matter what you "want," you unrepentant shithead, because you are not going to be my next president or anyone else's. I enjoy imagining the impotent frustration that he would feel if he knew that I--who follow politics in a fairly morbidly-obsessive fashion--had, prior to this call, been pretty sure that he had dropped out of the race months ago. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. Go peddle your unrepentant shitheadedness elsewhere, you unrepentant shithead.

Duck Comics: "The Poorest Duck in Duckburg"

2011-10-31T13:06:00.002-04:00

Halloween edition of DCR, naturally.

You gotta do what? I gotta believe!

2011-10-30T01:20:00.001-04:00

Man, thanks to this stupid fucking Anonymous movie, the stupid fucking Shakespeare-authorship conspiracy theorists are getting new publicity for their stupid fucking ideas. Granted, most of that publicity consists of scorn being heaped upon them, but I feel like when it comes to stupid fucking ideas like this, no publicity is bad publicity. As with creationism, trutherism, birtherism, climate-change denialism, et al, engaging just gives them an increased sense of legitimacy (and how fucking perfect is it that the Oxfordian who pops up in comments to the AVClub review is also a proud truther?).

What is it about these people that makes them so particularly enraging? The noxious classism is obviously a big part of it (in our current political climate especially) but not the only part. I think it also has something to do with the fact that they're so fucking smug about the fragments of wishful-thinking non-evidence that they're able to muster up in support of their argument. They try to create the impression that they're interested in debate, but they're not; there is absolutely nothing anyone can say that will disabuse them of the idea that they're right, unlike all you sheeple out there, maaaaan.

I guess another big part of it is the total contempt for history that they display. At least with birthers and truthers, there's a clear political motive for them thinking what they think (not that that makes them any less misguided-at-best). Whereas the anti-Stratfordians just want to fuck around with history because they can and it satisfies their petty prejudices. Sometimes people ask: why does this matter? They're arguing about stuff that happened hundreds of years ago that has no clear connection to anything that's going on today. That, however, is the same attitude that allows winger theocrats to do what they do; to pick out an assortment of misleading facts, factoids, and out-and-out falsehoods in order to create the impression that, eg, America's founders supported their particular brand of totalitarian dominionism. Same methodology in either case. Furthermore, our inability to engage with history (wherever you want to say it comes from) has a lot to do with why our overlords are able to revoke workers' rights that many people fought and died to secure; why they're increasingly able to strip away women's right to bodily autonomy; why they're able to get away with starting obviously fraudulent, unprovoked, unwinnable wars; and so on.

And from a literary standpoint, it's also the rather obvious point that few of them actually care about the work in question from a literary standpoint. They're not reading Shakespeare to read Shakespeare; they're combing through it like cryptologists trying to find nonexistent "clues" to crack some sorta code. Mine you, that leaves mysterious how no less a personage than Derek Jacobi could buy into this. He builds a career on the man's work and then kicks him in the face. Nice, guy.

You know what I'm really reminded of? Those obviously-guilty-as-sin witnesses in Phoenix Wright games, who, once you expose their first lie, always immediately leap to something different, which you then have to disprove in turn, and so on. How they can get away with this is just one of those delightful idiosyncrasies of the law in Ace-Attorney-Land. The difference, of course, is that with the anti-Shakespeare people, you will never, ever reach the end, and they have no compunctions about returning to earlier claims that you've just disproven. Actually, come to think of it, I guess that's how all conspiracy theorists operate. I still like the simile, though!

I understand--or think I understand--the appeal of conspiracy theories. There's something undeniably cool about feeling like you're ferreting out secret truth under the "official" truth. Putting pieces together, like a badass detective, to reveal what "They" don't want you to know. Certainly, our government does not go out of its way to demonstrate that it is not capable of big cover-ups and such. But, really now, you're devaluing actual mendacity when you latch onto this transparent nonsense, and it has real consequences, so stop doing it.

Here's a site that patiently debunks anti-Stratfordian claims, in case anyone was sincerely confused. Here's an instructive post and comments thread in which you can see their techniques in action. Here's a fun article by Ron Rosenbaum savaging the movie and associated bullshit.

Mouse Comics: "The Great Orphanage Robbery"

2011-10-27T02:05:00.002-04:00

A longish entry, to commemorate the new Gottfredson book.

Exciting Announcement!

2011-10-19T00:20:00.002-04:00

Depending on your definition of "exciting," perhaps. But the fact remains, Duck Cartoons Revue is embarking on a new, albeit somewhat predictable, project: Darkwing Duck! Rejoice!

Duck Comics: "The Gab-Muffer"

2011-10-18T02:26:00.002-04:00

Just some Gyro zaniness from the master himself.

Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906)

2011-10-16T03:12:00.000-04:00

Probably gonna run into trouble if you try to write about Upton Sinclair and then it is revealed that you haven't read The Jungle, right? Still, while it may be the one Sinclair novel that anyone knows about and the only one consistently in print, I'm a bit curious as to how many people in this day and age have actually read it, as opposed to just being peripherally aware of it. I have the impression that it's sometimes assigned in high school, but it sure wasn't ever to me, and I'd say it's actually a fair bit longer than just about anything that was.

Anyway, The Jungle. You know the plot, maybe: a Lithuanian immigrant, Jurgis, and his family come to Chicago where they get jobs, mostly involving meat packing, and are steadily ground down by the remorseless forces of capital. Then he learns about socialism. The end. It's more effective than I thought it would be, based on those coal mining novels, I'll tell you that much. The march of unrelenting misery is kind of predictable but it has its impact. There's not much in the way of context for why things are as they are; this, the book shares with the coal novels, as well as characters that are constructed more to be acted upon than to act. I think these are flaws in terms of the book's overall effectiveness, but not fatal ones. And sometimes you come across a bluntly effective passage, like so:

…then [the man] set some one else at a different job, and he showed the lad how to place a lard-can every time the empty arm of the remorseless machine came to him; and so was decided the place in the universe of little Stanislovas, and his destiny till the end of his days. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, it was fated that he should stand upon a certain square foot of floor from seven in the morning until noon, and again from half-past twelve till half past five, making never a motion and thinking never a thought, save for the setting of lard-cans.

BUT HE NEVER WHINES ABOUT IT OR BLAMES WALL STREET FOR HIS PROBLEMS! HE IS THE FIFTY-THREE PERCENT!

Not that I wasn't aware of this stuff in the abstract, but for all their faults, I do feel as though these books are giving me a more concrete picture of the hellish sort of world our Mighty Leaders are so eager to return us to. For that reason, I think they should be more widely read.

However, whatever praise you want to give the book, it's impossible not to notice that it badly loses its focus once Jurgis's wife and son have died and he goes off on his own. First he tries his luck as a hobo; then he comes back to the city and there are some bits where he tries to get work in several different unsafe factories, but it doesn't feel like Sinclair's heart is quite in it, compared to the meat-packing sections. There's a most peculiar interlude in which he falls in with a drunken, upper-class fop straight out of the Drones Club (even his name, Freddie Jones, has a Wodehousian flavor). It's possible that this is just meant to stoke further class outrage, but I have the sneaking suspicion that it's actually meant to be funny. Finally, he turns to crime, and Sinclair does a pretty half-assed job of showing his conflicting emotions during this period (ie, just enough to let you know he's supposed to have conflicting emotions, but no more).

For all that this section meanders, though, I have to admit I found it more engaging than what had come before--its sheer unpredictability was more interesting than the previous section, which was very predictable. It would be hard to argue that it's very effective as propaganda, however.

And finally, socialism! Conveniently enough, Jurgis just happens to get a job with a totally awesome socialist boss, from which to lecture the masses. Whee. And his story sort of breaks up and fades away in a flurry of monologues and dialogues about socialism in a way that vaguely reminds me of Slothrop's dissolution in Gravity's Rainbow. The very last part features Sinclair's attempt at envisioning what an ideal socialist future would look like; it's not wholly convincing, but fuck--how could it possibly be worse than what we've got now? It's a bit unfortunate, though, that Sinclair was so enthusiastic about fad diets and such. Not that this stuff plays a huge role in the novel, but when part of your utopian future involves people learning a special technique to obtain more nutrition from food through more effective chewing…well, you're not exactly inspiring confidence.

The real lesson to be learned from The Jungle, however, is this: people are self-centered jerks. And I'm not talking about the captains of industry; they're beneath contempt, of course, but really now: as you know, probably, the novel's descriptions of meat packing inspired the Pure Food and Drug Act. And yes, these descriptions are really, really disgusting, but the book is not about food sanitation, and there is just no way that anyone could possibly imagine that it was. These passages make up a very small portion of the whole, all told, and they're obviously there to illustrate the general sociopathy of the companies so as to emphasize how horrible they are in their treatment of workers. But does anyone care about that? NO. Because they're not us. Instead, let's fixate on this tiny portion of the novel that affects us personally and throw out the rest. It's held up as this exemplar of how a novel can make a difference, like Uncle Tom's Cabin, but you'd think that the very particular, limited nature of this difference would be more a source of embarrassment to us than anything else.

Happy Ending

2011-10-12T15:16:00.001-04:00

So anyway, after defeating the evil monsters, they lived happily ever after. I am not even joking. You probably think I mean "they lived long, happy lives together" but "long" simply doesn't cover it. They lived forever. Eternally. The world changed, and sometimes it got worse, but they always got through it okay, and anyway, mostly it got better; all the bad climate-change things we were expecting were averted, because we got rid of all the republicans and other corporation-beholden creatures and elected sane people who totally fixed the environment and also fixed all income inequality and other social injustice and it was really great and it stayed like that forever. It was totally awesome and they never were any less in love and they never experienced the ravages of age or anything. I know it's hard for you to imagine, but that's how it happened. Sometimes they went to sweet amusement parks and went on badass roller coasters. Sometimes they went to nature preserves and checked out the cool animals. One time, they got to see a baby rhinoceros. In the wild. The mother saw them, but she didn't attack them. The baby came right up to them to check them out. It was super-cute. Anyway, things like that just kept on happening and as I say, they went on forever, and if you're worried that eventually the Sun would go supernova and wipe out all life on earth, and that even if they didn't die 'til then, that would get them, rest assured: that didn't happen. Although sometimes they would get in a sweet spaceship and visit other worlds, which were also awesome places to live, and they saw all sorts of wondrous and sublime things. And you know what else didn't happen? The universe did not collapse into a singularity. Man, you should've been there. It was great.

Quick Breaking Bad admission

2011-10-11T02:10:00.001-04:00

I have no choice to concede that I was wrong, wrong, wrong in my previously-stated assumptions about Breaking Bad. I don't mind, because Vince Gilligan is awesome and the finale worked and was really kind of amazing. I will maintain, however, that my previously stated belief vis-à-vis the poison was a reasonable one, as I'm still pretty sure that the show has not previously elided events in this way.

Duck Comics: "The Curse of Flabbergé"

2011-10-08T01:08:00.001-04:00

To commemorate my finishing up Ducktales, here's a Ducktales comic. A really weird Ducktales comic.

On Fantasy Miscegenation

2011-10-06T16:57:00.006-04:00

Dungeons & Dragons has half-elves (half-elf, half human, that is). This makes a certain amount of sense, since it's easy to imagine elves being sexually attractive to both men and women. I mean, isn't that basically the definition of elves? "Like humans, but sexier?"

There are also half-orcs, which is somewhat harder to imagine, since very few people are sexually attracted to green pig-people, and the reverse, one would assume, would also be true. I think this idea runs on a vaguely racist/misogynist trope of, well, of course those savage, sexually-insatiable orcs are attracted to Our Women, and of course they're going to rape them given half a chance. I don't think there are too many half-orc characters who are presented as coming from consensual unions, or ones in which the mother is the orc. According to the all-knowing Wikipedia, half-orcs were at one point temporarily eliminated "as part of a wide attempt by TSR to remove controversial topics from D&D," whatever that may mean exactly. Citation Needed, however, so take that as you will.

There are no half-dwarves, and this makes sense, because it's hard to imagine most people being attracted to fantasy dwarves (obviously, this has nothing to do with real-life dwarfs, who are something else entirely) (note that I'm making sweeping generalizations here--that last statement is definitively not true--and no doubt in some sourcebook somewhere you can find all the things I'm claiming you can't find--but they're certainly not anywhere near as standardized/widespread as half-elves). But why not half-dwarves/half-gnomes? Dwarves and gnomes are supposed to be related to each other, even, so you'd think it would be only natural that there would be inter-racial unions. For that matter, why not half-dwarf or -gnome/halflings? Halflings may not be related to either, but you'd think the relationship would be analogous to that between elves and humans. But these things just don't seem to exist.

You could say that this is because we need humans to identify with, so other-race hybrids are beside the point; it's the same reason that science fiction almost always features humans or at least characters who are essentially human. But that doesn't really pan out, given that there are all kinds of crazy non-human PCs in various permutations of D&D, from goblins to giant bugs. I dunno. I suppose it's not a big deal, but it does seem to bespeak a certain lack of imagination on the part of the designers.

The worst of messes become successes. Occasionally.

2011-10-04T23:40:00.003-04:00

Hey, I haven't been publicizing it over here, 'cause that would've gotten old fast, but my ongoing quest to watch every episode of Ducktales has finally reached its exciting conclusion. Check it out, if you like old cartoons of wildly varying quality.

Duck Comics: "Diner Sore"

2011-10-03T22:40:00.001-04:00

A serious double-you tee eff sort of story.

If you've gotta break...

2011-10-03T22:19:00.002-04:00

This post is not going to be meaningful to anyone who doesn't watch Breaking Bad, and in any case, there are BIG SPOILERS. The optimum course of action, if you haven't seen the show, is to bloody well get on that, starting at the beginning--not a good idea to try to jump in midway.

Last night was the penultimate episode of this season of Breaking Bad. Ooh! The big question of the night is: who poisoned Jesse's girlfriend's son, Brock? Jesse sees that the cigarette containing a capsule of ricin, with which he had been meant to kill Gus, is missing, and immediately assumes that Walter must have somehow does this, in order to get revenge after their earlier argument; Walter convinces him that, in fact, it was Gus who somehow effected the poisoning, to frame him and to break the last bounds of loyalty that Jesse feels.

It's hard to say. None of the possibilities seem to be especially feasible, given the time frame; I haven't got a clue how the writers are going to resolve this--but hey, it's Breaking Bad. It hasn't let me down yet, so I'll assume they have their shit together until proven otherwise. But I am baffled by all the people in comments to the AVClub review who are convinced that Walt is the guilty party, or at least a prime suspect. Obviously, I can't say anything for sure, but if that turns out to be the case, I will be seriously disappointed in the show.

I'm agnostic as to the question of whether Walt would be capable of such a thing. Still, while I wouldn't swear to it, I'd say probably not. Yes, he let Jesse's junkie girlfriend die, and yes, he ordered Jesse to murder Gale, but those people were both actual threats to him, even if in Gale's case it was inadvertently so. Not that this "justifies" their deaths, but we're so deep into the swamp here that at this point there really isn't any morally "right" decision that doesn't involve getting the hell out period, in which case we have no show. But so anyway, they were existential threats, whereas Brock's just a harmless kid.

But more to the point, that just isn't how the show has worked up to this point. Walt is basically the viewpoint character. Correct me if I'm forgetting something, but I don't think the show has ever hidden crucial actions on his part from the audience for extended periods before. If they started now, it would feel like they were breaking the rules, and not in any canny, "okay now they have expectations so we'll consciously dash them in a very precise way" way, more in a "here's an easy, cheap way to get a rise out of them" way. And this show is just better than that, dammit.

Upton Sinclair, The Coal War (1976)

2011-09-30T12:26:00.001-04:00

It occurs to me that out of all the books I've read--okay, let's qualify that: all the published works of fiction--this may well be the single least-read (and in that statement I include my dad's first novel, which at least warranted a paperback edition). The book was posthumously published in 1976, and who, I ask you, in 1976, is going to want to read a newly-published (by an academic press, no less) book about labor disputes from the teens? Hard to imagine much of anyone but Sinclair scholars (a breed that may or may not actually exist) and the odd labor historian (the normal labor historian could not be reached for comment). I only read it for dissertation purposes.

Some background: this is a sequel to Sinclair's 1917 novel King Coal, which was published in a timely fashion. That book is about the son of a coal magnate, Hal Warner, who goes to work incognito as a laborer to see what the coal mines are actually like in practice, for the workers; you will be shocked to discover that the answer is "not so pleasant." He becomes a labor activist. And that's about what happens. The Coal War continues his exploits, leading up to a fictional equivalent of the Ludlow Massacre. Originally, these two were one, but Sinclair's editor asked him to axe the second half on the basis that it wasn't very novelistic or entertaining or anything. So Sinclair reworked King Coal as suggested, making it more novelistic and planning to follow it up with the less novelistic Coal War.

His editor was totally right. The sequel wasn't published in Sinclair's lifetime, partly because interest in such labor disputes, insofar as it ever existed, was waning as the country got involved in the first World War; and partly because, um, it's kinda bad. Not that King Coal is any great shakes either, but there's really no comparison. The earlier book is a Bildungsroman of sorts. Not a great one, but it has an easily-discernible structure, and an actual dramatic arc. Whereas the later book is, indeed, hardly a novel at all: it consists mainly of an interchangeable series of scenes of outrages committed against workers.

Digression: working conditions in coal mines at the time (in Colorado and elsewhere) were truly unbelievable. You would be thrown out for breathing a word about unionization. When there was a strike, strikebreakers who spoke little or no English would be dragooned into the mines and kept as, essentially, slaves. Workers were paid by the weight of coal they mined, and you would be cheated out of a substantial percentage your earnings literally all the time. There was a law that mines had to employ a checkweighman--a guy to monitor loads of coal to make sure everyone was getting paid for what they mined--but this was never done, and miners who requested one would be thrown out. Laws regarding safety regulations were never followed, frequently resulting in horrible mine disasters for which no one was held accountable. You couldn't legally be paid in scrip redeemable at company stores, but you would be, and they would always jack up prices, because they had a complete monopoly. Bosses would regularly rob, beat, and even kill workers, and they would never ever be convicted of anything, because if anyone even went to trial, it would be before a jury hand-picked by the company. Government was entirely in said companies' pocket. In the novel, the governor of Colorado is contemptuously referred to by company operatives as "our little cowboy governor." Surely that's a little bit of artistic license on Sinclair's part, you think. Nope! The lengthy introduction--which chronicles all this stuff with extensive citations, in case you were doubting--includes a letter from a mine operative calling him exactly that. I highly recommend that inhabitants of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, and Texas take up the habit. I thought, when I first encountered it in Against the Day, that the "death special"--an armor-plated car with a mounted machine gun that was used to terrorize miners--was a flight of postmodern fancy. Again, nope! The novel and introduction both confirm it as an actual thing that the company did. I suppose that's one strategy: when your level of evil gets sufficiently cartoonish, fewer people are actually going to believe it of you. And remember, kids: these are the conditions that our brave leaders--often quite explicitly--want to return us to.

Oh, and fuck John D. Rockefeller, who had no problem with any of this, in spite of being fully goddamned aware. Oh, now you want to be a philanthropist? No, fuck you. There were thousands and thousands of people that you could have given dignified lives*. Instead, you crushed, maimed, and killed them, causing untold levels of misery. Because you wanted more more more. If you had a soul, you sold it, and it doesn't make a goddamn bit of difference how many foundations you endow (the same applies to Andrew Carnegie (seriously, I'm embarrassed to have a degree from his school) and all the rest, of course).

*I mean okay it would still have been alienated labor, but, I think it's fair to say, there are degrees.

--

(But remember, the rich are just naturally better than everyone else. Productive class! Job creators! Sundry other bullshit!)

END OF DIGRESSION.

So anyway, yes, conditions were terrible on an almost unfathomable level, and Sinclair definitely did his research. But the novel's just not good. It is, I regret to say, incredibly monotonous. The miners are constructed as victims and nothing but, which makes the whole thing read somewhat like a long, detailed analysis of how it's BAD BAD BAD to kick orphaned puppies. And not just labrador puppies, either. I'm talking about all kinds of puppies, from corgis to Weimaraners to Egyptian hounds and even Bichons Frises! Also dachshunds, great danes, and akitas. Do you get the picture? I can you some more breeds that it's bad to kick, if you like. No, no--no need! Message received! But there's just precious little real emotional impact. I mean okay okay, it's somewhat shocking when children who have been presences throughout both books are abruptly murdered, but that's a pretty cheap shock right there. If ever there were a novel to validate Georg Lukács' criticism that "naturalistic" writers are unable to create real, rounded characters, this is it. Part of the problem is that, aside from a few of the main ones, all the characters are closely based on real people, and thus Sinclair felt constrained from giving them any real, invented inner lives (not that he's that great at that anyway; even the wholly fictional characters ain't much--and that's kind of odd, because novels that he wrote before and after this both do a substantially better job in that regard).

It's kind of a relief, therefore, when the novel chooses to devote space to other stuff. Ol' Hal has a fiancée, Jessie Arthur, from his own social class, you see. But he meets a fiery Oirish miner's daughter in the camps, Mary Burke, and there are sparks, and oh no what should he do? This is left unresolved in King Coal, but everyone will be glad to know that here it's put to rest. But in a weirdly problematic way: Jessie doesn't know about conditions in mining camps, and she doesn't care to know; Hal's activism drives her crazy. It seems obvious all the way through that this is an extremely bad match, and finally, here, he tells her, hey, this isn't working out. Which it isn't. And she begs him and so on, but he sticks to his guns, although the situation remains slightly open. What can I do? she says. Like Jesus says, he tells her: give away your possessions and follow me. Then, he goes and suggests marriage to Mary. But she ain't so sure about this--she'd thrown herself at him in the earlier novel and been rejected, and she's not totally certain that this inter-class relationship would work. So she tells him to go and think about it for a few days. And in the interim, Jessie comes and tells him, she's done what he said, she's left her family, because she looooooves him so much etc. And then he's done; they get married. Now…leave aside the sexism inherent here--he can do this from higher principles; she can only do it from emotions--there also seems to be something a little on the reactionary side here: Hal's from a class, and he has to stay in it. The author of the introduction (fellow named John Graham, whose name is too common to be findable online) suggests that this is indicative of Hal's ambivalent allegiances; maybe that's the idea, but in practice, there's precious little that's ambivalent about them, and being married to Jessie doesn't appear to temper them in any way--though it's impossible to imagine how, in the real world, this could work out in the long term. It's just this kind of confused, anticlimactic confusion to the whole affair.

So do I recommend this book? Not really, but I do recommend the following passage, which made me laugh pretty darned hard, because I am twelve years old:

The little Welshwoman had nothing to do with the parade, so she claimed. . . . "Move on!" one of the troopers had commanded her, and she replied--somewhat indiscreetly, perhaps--"I don't have to." Whereupon he seized her, twisted her arm behind her back, and beat her with his fist. "Shame! Shame!" cried the spectators; and Mrs. David assailed him with a new and ferocious weapon, her muff. (251)

Oh, Upton.

Man can kill and man can drink and man can take a whore

2011-09-26T21:30:00.001-04:00

You may have seen these miller lite commercials--certainly you have if you watch football and foolishly don't mute the commercials. They always involve some dude's asshole friends upbraiding him for bringing Generic-Brand Beer instead of the clearly much more awesomer miller lite. "That's the second unmanly thing you've done today," they say, and then there's a flashback to him doing some exaggerated thing that is deemed overly feminine or possibly gay.

I'm not disturbed by the ludicrous assertion that miller lite has "more taste;" that's just de rigueur. What does bother me is that I don't think I've ever seen another set of commercials that's quite so nakedly aimed at huge douchebags and no one else, and furthermore was also quite clearly made by huge douchebags.

Hey, it's a sizable demographic, no doubt. It doesn't stop me from wanting to inflict violence on the people who thought it was a good idea, though. You could say the fact that they did is just a side effect of late capitalism than one of its main depredations, but it all goes together, I think: the fact that we normalize this sort of behavior probably makes us more likely to be okay--or at least, not not-okay enough to roll out the guillotines--with bankers looting the country and whatnot.

Still, it is useful in a diagnostic sense: when watching these commercials, do you:

A. Laugh
B. Want, to whatever degree, to drink miller lite
C. Shout, "fuck you, faggot--bud lite is way better!?"

If you answered "yes" to any of these, then--and I'm sorry to have to be the one to tell you this--there is a ninety percent chance that you are, in fact, a huge douchebag. I would try to come up with some helpful advice for you, but if you qualify here, you're obviously not gonna be looking for advice. You'll be composing a dubiously-spelt message questioning my masculinity and/or asserting that you could beat me in a fistfight. It's a conundrum to which medical science, thusfar, has no answer.

Duck Comics: "Birds of a Fethry"

2011-09-24T23:52:00.002-04:00

Fethry "Week" staggers forward, rapidly losing large amounts of blood and starting to hallucinate.

Could you please answer me one simple question?

2011-09-24T00:22:00.003-04:00

Why do Republicans always have to be such fucking dirtbags?

(But hey, on the bright side, on the Scale o' Vomitousness, I suppose booing a gay soldier is marginally less nauseating than cheering Perry's murder record or uninsured people dying. Great job, guys!)

I often ask myself--I've asked it on this blog from time to time--what makes wingers the way they are, and no doubt there are complex sociological reasons, but sometimes it just gets so, so tiring, and I just want them to fucking stop. So, in my faux-naïve way (to be distinguished from those many times when I'm actually naïve), I have to ask: really, people? Is it that fucking hard to be minimally decent human beings? YES. Besides which, being decent human beings doesn't piss off teh librulz effectively, so fuck it. It's probably true that I'm hyperbolizing when I call you "sociopaths," and yet you keep doing your utmost to demonstrate that I'm not by evincing no capacity whatsoever for shame. Gosh.

(Can you even conceive of the mind-bending horror that will be their convention next year? Kristallnacht for Kidz!)

There are millions of these people, and millions more who may not cheer but nonetheless don't care and they all vote and oh my are we ever fucked.

Check it out: two Schwarzenegger references in one post!

2011-09-13T18:18:00.002-04:00

Over here, we have a helpful summation of wingers' festive 9/11 celebrations, which, as always, mainly consisted of vituperations against democrats, libruls, socialists, whatever for being insufficiently enthused about murdering a-rabs. Why, those people simply can't be reasoned with! They're barbarians! The only solution is to show them the true meaning of civilization by crushing them, seeing them driven before us, and hearing the lamentation of their women!

Unrelated: audience at gop debate cheers Perry's kill count; audience at other gop debate cheers letting the uninsured die.

Actually, come to think of it, the wingers kind of have a point with their 9/11 stuff: no, not about socialists or libruls or democrats in general, but congressional democrats and the Obama administration, at least, have shown themselves to be only too willing to talk to and "compromise" with...well, with a psychopathic death cult that can't be bargained with; can't be reasoned with; doesn't feel pity, remorse, or fear; and that absolutely will not stop, ever, until this country is dead.

...

2011-09-11T23:20:00.001-04:00

Where Were You When They Built the Ladder to Heaven? from nofknsht on Vimeo.

Duck Comics: "Ducky Date"

2011-09-10T00:23:00.001-04:00

Fethry Week marches grimly onward.

Mike Mignola & John Byrne, Hellboy: Seed of Destruction (1994)

2011-09-08T23:26:00.004-04:00

This thing was just sorta sitting around, so I read it during the commercial breaks of the first half of the NFL season opener (and wrote this review during the commercial breaks of the second half--how's that for fast turnaround?). From The Internet™, I learn that it's in fact the first Hellboy serial, so I didn't miss any previous context or anything like that.

The idea is that, in the waning days of World War II, Occult Nazis (that's the worst kind!) summoned a demon to help them out with the war effort, but allied people got to him first, and so, fifty years later, he's a force for good. Present-day, and the guy who instigated the original project is up to his old shenanigans, trying to get Hellboy to help him out with summoning a big, Cthulhu-esque squid thing.

I feel like I don't have as much to say about this as perhaps I should. I found it to be mostly entertaining, though not that substantial (I find Robert Bloch's hyperbolic introduction a bit eyebrow-raising). Hellboy himself is an appealing enough character, and I was glad to see that he's not overly self-consciously edgy or EXTREEEME!!!! which is something you kind of expect to see from a comic about a demon-y superhero-y guy published in 1994. The fight scenes were reasonably exciting.

Still, there's not all that much to the story, really. The mystery of What's Going On is dispelled pretty early in the proceedings, and while the business with the evil dude and the demons is potentially interesting, it's not really that well-developed, and evil dude is defeated in a deus-ex-machina-ish way. I do like the fact that, even though his identity is pretty immediately obvious to anyone with the most rudimentary sort of historical awareness, it's never actually stated, which would've been on the intelligence-insulting side.

Hellboy's teammates aren't all that well-developed either, though that's something that could easily be remedied in later stories. Still, I don't think I'll be reading them unless I find them lying around--I won't say this first thing was bad or nothin', but even though it ends by setting up more to come, I'm not burning with a desire to find out what happens next, or what the deal is with Hellboy's past. I do feel a vague sort of desire--more like a velleity, really--to see the movies, but that's about all.

Still, it filled the commercial breaks.

Cancel My Subscription to the Resurrection

2011-09-08T17:35:00.001-04:00

Every time I get another goddamn email from Barack Obama's mailing list, I hit "unsubscribe," and every time I send an incrementally more enraged "message" (ha--as if anyone possibly reads that shit) along with it. But do the emails stop? They do not. Christ--it's bad enough that I'm probably going to end up disgusting myself by voting for the fucker; now I'm also supposed to actually listen to his vapid, self-justifying bullshit? Fuck that noise.

To be fair (if "fair" is the word I'm looking for) this is far more likely a technical problem than active dickery. But is the fact that the President of the United States is unable to conduct a mailing list with the same level of technical competence we've come to expect from porn spammers really especially comforting? I submit that it is not.

Duck Comics: "Donald's Buzzin' Cousin"

2011-09-07T21:22:00.002-04:00

Fethry Week continues. To what end? None can say.

Duck Comics: "The Health Nut"

2011-09-03T23:36:00.002-04:00

It's Fethry Week at Duck Comics Revue! Even if I'm not totally certain what that means!

New Zombie-Oriented Chick Tract

2011-09-02T16:08:00.005-04:00

CF.

But alas, it's only a dream--oh Jack, you shameless tease.

Actually, it turns out they're the dreaded Metaphor Zombies. You know THAT guy's a blast at parties.

Also featuring this awesome bit of theology:

I dunno...that sounds at least ghost-ish. I don't think "inability to sit on thrones" is what most people really associate with ghosts.

Another tract where I'm not wholly certain someone's not fucking with us.

What to the Ev Comics: "The Comic Book Crooks"

2011-08-28T01:04:00.001-04:00

We are back.

M. John Harrison, Viriconium (2005)

2011-08-24T00:25:00.004-04:00

This omnibus actually consists of four books: the novels The Pastel City (1971), A Storm of Wings (1980), and In Viriconium (1982); and the short-story collection Viriconium Nights. If you think I read it entirely because of China Miéville's recommendation, allow me to present you with a symbolic--and entirely worthless in literal terms--prize.

Miéville's blurb here--that Harrison's failure to win a Nobel Prize demonstrates the bankruptcy--bankruptcy, I say!--of the literary establishment--seems a tad hyperbolic to me. I mean really now, if the failure of Borges to win hadn't already demonstrated that, ain't nothin' gonna. Still, these are some pretty darned impressive pieces of work.

The Pastel City is actually a fairly straightforward thing. I can easily describe the plot, and this description might well put you to sleep: the king is dead, and his insurgent niece is rising up against his daughter, the rightful queen; therefore, the only option is for surviving members of the king's élite force to get the band back together and show everyone what's what. And that is about that. Still, even here you can see Harrison's descriptive skill, and there's a sense of pervasive entropy--that the world is winding down--throughout that gives the novel more resonance than it might have. This isn't exactly like Miéville, but the influence on the latter author is obvious: there's a strong sense of ancient, mysterious worlds lurking here, the difference being that in Miéville you don't get the impression that they're necessarily unknowable, whereas here that's the whole point. There are deliberately-unanswered questions about what this world is, exactly; from the use of occasional phrases in foreign languages, as well as the odd familiar name, we are given to believe that it has something to do with the "real" world, but nothing is made clear.

A Storm of Wings is fairly unproblematic as a sequel to The Pastel City, eighty years later--that is, there's nothing in the book that contradicts the previous volume, as far as I can see--but wow, is it ever a lot weirder. This time, it's not really clear what the "quest" is per se--weird things keep happening, often involving insect imagery, and some characters--most of them haunted by an inability to remember or conceptualize the past, in one way or another--go north. And some of them come back. Things happen. There's only so much I can say without moving into spoiler territory, but this is really fascinatingly bizarre stuff. The only real criticism I might have is that the ending…well, it kinda explains things. In a weird way, no doubt, but I think the book was more effective leaving this shit completely inexplicable.

What made Harrison return to this world (if you want to call it that) with such a vengeance after a nine-year hiatus? And, more to the point, did he have In Viriconium in mind while writing A Storm of Wings? Because this is where he reaches escape velocity: you cannot even begin to reconcile this with the previous novels; it's its own, really indescribable thing. "Surrealist" might be the (admittedly fairly obvious) word you would go with. Here's, well, here's basically what happens: there's a portrait painter, Ashlyme, who is obsessed with an artist named Audsley King who is supposedly the greatest in her age; unfortunately, she is living in the "low city," a place currently suffering a "plague," of sorts, which seems to be more a sort of existential lassitude than anything else. He's obsessed with the idea that he has to get her out of there before she succumbs, but she won't go. Meanwhile, there are these two guys called the Barley Brothers messing around the city; they don't seem to do much of anything beyond childish pranks and sundry petty larcenies, but they are nonetheless felt in some vague way to be demiurges of a sort. And there's an insane dwarf called "The Grand Cairo" who is supposedly working for the Barley Brothers in some unspecified capacity and who gets Ashlyme, unwillingly, involved in his…stuff. That's about all I can say, really; it's clearly a novel to some extent about artistic responsibility and integrity; in his introduction to the book, Neil Gaiman perceptively notes that, looked at in a certain way, you can see it as a rewrite of The Pastel City, but basically, I've never read a fantasy novel like this, and that's a damn good thing: Harrison casually flits away from the imaginatively-stultified mire that is contemporary fantasy. Real literary stuff.

Viriconium Nights, a collection of seven short stories, is basically more of the same, and goes even further towards making damn well sure that nobody try to construct all this as one coherent "world:" characters from past novels appear in different and contradictory roles, and even the name of the city is inconsistent; in this story it's "Urconium," in that one "Virik." Naturally, it's a heterogenous bunch; some, like "The Lamia & Lord Cromis" and the (almost-)title story, are comparatively straightforward (note that "comparatively" is doing a LOT of work in that sentence); some, like "Strange Great Sins" and "The Dancer from the Dance" are more abstruse, and "The Luck in the Head" is seriously the most inexplicable fucking thing I have ever read in my entire life. It ends with "A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium," which breaks down the barrier between that world and this once and for all; I realize the phrase "quietly devastating" is a little hackneyed, but I know no better descriptor for it.

So yeah, this book is absolutely recommended, for itself and also to remind you what fantasy can be like when it's unfettered by banal, restrictive ideas about elves and orcs.

Update to Below

2011-08-20T14:59:00.003-04:00

No, they don't literally pledge to stab you in the throat, not while campaigning, at least; they use gauzy words and phrases about "freedumb" and "Making America Great Again.™" If you want to know what they're going to do, you have to look at their actual, written platforms or what they've done in the past, or at least pay attention to the literal meanings of their words, and who has time to do that? Certainly not the media! 'Course, this same media is more than happy to also wage pitched class warfare when called for, so we're going in circles here. Really, it seems like the only logical answer is that a good percentage of Americans are cryogenically frozen most of the year, only thawed out come November, a concentrated blast of campaign commercials featuring American flags and candidates with hard hats on talking to construction workers* piped into their brains, hustled off to the voting booths, and stuck back into deepfreeze. Seriously: nothing else makes sense.

*"You fool! This footage shows the senator talking to the Village People! Now we'll have to reshoot the entire ad!"

Once there was class war but not any longer, 'cause baby we are all bourgeois now...

2011-08-20T02:15:00.005-04:00

So there is this Daily Show clip (part one, part two) that does a good job of taking apart all the bullshit right-wing rhetoric we hear about the importance of simultaneous deficit reduction and tax cuts for the rich. Not that it should be any sort of revelation to anyone that alleged concern about the deficit is invariably just a smokescreen for the real agenda--slashing any program that helps the non-rich and funneling that money to our porcine plutocrats--but it's still nice to see it crystalized. It's funny, too, though it's admittedly a little hard to laugh through the blinding rage.

It seems I don't pay enough attention to wingnut rhetoric, though, because some of the clips actually managed to shock me. As far as the bits with pundits and politicians sobbing about how cruelly private-jet-owners are oppressed by anyone suggesting they could live with higher marginal tax rates (I can't decide whether these are crocodile tears or the real thing, nor which would be worse), well, no surprises there, I guess. The shamelessness might at some point have seemed shocking, but we're well beyond that. No, what really got me was the naked, seething contempt in which the poor (or the "poor," as the fux news graphic puts it, with their fancy refrigerators 'n' microwaves 'n' everything!) are held by these people. Have I ever seen the unspeakably ugly face of genuine class warfare exposed more fully and willingly? Sometimes it's hard to keep track of these things, but I'm inclined to say not. When that…creature…snarls, "it is all…out…WAR on the productive class of our society for the benefit of the moocher class?" The fact that people can un-self-consciously say such things in public--and the fact that their profound, white-supremacist-level indecency is not universally acknowledged by the public at large--is horrifying in the purest sense of the word. If the goal is to funnel all the money possible to the richest in society, and fucking over everyone else is just a side effect--that would be understandable, if still evil. And maybe that's all it was at one time--but now, as we see all-too-vividly, indifference has metastasized into something much more malignant. Indicative of a vestige of shame, no doubt--ie, if we admitted to ourselves that poor people are people too, we'd feel bad about what we're advocating, so let's comfort ourselves by refashioning them all as contemptible, worthless parasites. Oddly enough, this may actually be a case in which more sociopathy would be preferable, so we could at least avoid the sickening rhetoric--though that could be a "be careful what you wish for" thing: if these guys are this bad when they're not literally serial killers, imagine what they would agitate for if they were.

Residual shame or not, though, these are still bad people who deserve to have bad things happen to them. Instead of mewling piteously about it, they should be thanking whatever evil, twisted gods they believe in that 63.7% of poor people have satellite or cable TV--otherwise, without such idle amusements to keep the masses distracted and complacent, they'd be hanging from lampposts. 'Course, I'm more merciful than that. I think a blunt, karmic lesson in empathy would be in order: let these overpaid fux news motherfuckers subsist on minimum wage for a couple three years. Oh, and during this time, let's have them contract life-threatening diseases that are easy but very expensive to treat (I ain't THAT merciful). Should be relaxing--give 'em a chance to just kick back and "mooch" for a while. I mean Good lord. "Productive class?" "Moocher class?" Just so we're clear: minimum-wage dishwashers="moocher class." Fux news bloviators and Paris Hilton="productive class." People really think like that. They really, really do. You know how you sometimes think "Hollingsworth Hound" in Ruben Bolling's recurring "Lucky Ducky" strips is a bit of a caricature, and nobody would literally be like that? Well, joke's on you! I'm sure people like our "moocher class" fellow would read them and be absolutely infuriated by the way Lucky Ducky always gets all the breaks.

(As always, let's have an extra-big fuck-you-very-much to that infamous, child-murderer-idolizing sociopath Ayn Rand for making this sort of thing respectable--and also, incidentally, for making the word "moocher"--one of the goofiest words on record--a part of "serious" discourse. It would be like if in the debate over healthcare, people kept talking about what to do about "boo-boos." This is a sobering, cautionary object lesson as to what happens when you let crazy Russians write in English (Nabokov notwithstanding).)

The eternal question remains: how the heck did we GET to this state? You would think that a party that tells huge swaths of Americans to their face that it holds them in utter contempt and wants to hurt them as much as possible would, I dunno, not win elections? But that doesn't seem to be happening, does it? It's certainly a multifarious problem. The following are all factors:

1. The Democrats fail to offer a meaningful alternative (in spite of which, "I REFUSE to vote for the guy who's merely going to beat me unconscious and leave me for dead! I DEMAND the full BTK-killer treatment!" seems like an odd thing to say).
2. The media relentlessly frames issues in damaging ways (though given that the media is playing a big PART in telling poor people how much they suck ass...).
3. There's always someone doing worse than you, giving you someone of your own to look down on, and fostering the illusion that it's not you that your party hates; it is, eternally, those other people.
4. Gays!
5. Baby-killers!
6. Mooslims!
7. Mah guns!
8. Élitists like me who tell look down on people just because they repeatedly vote for politicians who pledge to stab them in the throat!

Of course, if people were rational, four through eight would immediately vanish, and three wouldn't play much of a part. It really makes you wonder: are we as a species just so fundamentally broken that tribal signifiers always win out over everything? A frightening thought. The arch of the universe bends towards justice they say, but I'm not sure "they" were familiar with America c. 2011.

Duck Comics: "Bird-Bothered Hero"

2011-08-13T22:47:00.000-04:00

The worst duck comic ever? Some people think so!

China Miéville, Looking for Jake (2005)

2011-08-13T00:59:00.000-04:00

And now, short stories, previously published in various venues, along with four new ones. One of the latter, "Jack," is set in Bas-Lag, and I don't think it's overly cynical to suggest that this was written specifically to increase the book's marketability. Not that it's a bad story: as you would immediately guess if you've read the novels, it's about the remade outlaw/folk hero Jack Half-a-Prayer, who plays a small role in Perdido Street Station and who is further explicated in Iron Council. It's not bad, with an interesting li'l revelation in the end that forces a reëvaluation of the whole, but it's not exactly essential or groundbreaking, either.

And that's how I'd describe most of these stories. There seems to be a basic problem here, which is that Miéville is fundamentally a maximalist, and his best novels gain their power through a heavy accretion of detail. The short story doesn't seem his ideal format. Not to say that "Reports of Certain Events in London" and "Familiar" aren't clever and cool in their own right, but I don't feel like they're very likely to have you bellowing HOLY SHIT!

What else can I say? "Entry Taken from a Medical Encyclopedia" is a nicely Borgesian treatment of a fantasy disease. "Go Between" is a fairly effective existential thing where the protagonist anonymously receives various mysterious items to deliver hither and yon, and starts to wonder whether these are having a positive, negative, or non-existent impact in the world. "Details" has a suitably creepy premise, though I can't help feeling it's not as effective as it could've been. Oh, and there's a little novella (previous published as its own thing, "The Tain" (nothing to do with the Irish epic poem), which has an interesting concept and makes you feel kind of guilty about looking in mirrors, though it doesn't, in the end, seem to amount to a great deal.

The best story here, rather easily I think, is "'Tis the Season," about a dystopian future in which Christmas and all its assorted trappings are trademarked by corporations, and you need a license to engage in seasonal festivities. It's uproariously funny, and surprisingly hopeful and upbeat for something you'd describe as dystopian; a refreshing change from Miéville's usual (justifiably) pessimistic depictions of government/corporate oppression. Real Christmas spirit!

Anyway, there are others. None of them are painful to read, though a few are pretty bland. And some of them are pretty decent. Not a major release by any stretch, though.

Duck Comics: Epic Duckfail

2011-08-07T16:03:00.001-04:00

Just a few ruminations about the unbelievably horrible, embarrassing death spasms of Boom's Disney license.

Bet you can't wait to vote for President Kill instead.

2011-08-03T15:37:00.002-04:00

Me: Man, FUCK Obama. Fuck him for agreeing with the Insane Clown Party about the necessity for "austerity," and fuck him for agreeing to cuts that are going to hurt and kill actual people in order to indulge his narcissistic delusion that he can reason with the ICP (fuck him for other stuff too, like extending our Middle Eastern wars, but let's try to stay focused for now). Maybe he can get them to vote for him in 2012, if they're so goddamn reasonable.

You: I agree with you that Obama is pretty awful, but if you're under the impression that the ICP candidate wouldn't be way the fuck worse, then you, my friend, are the insanely delusional one.

Me: You're right, and I'm not under that impression at all. President Bachmann would make the living envy the dead. But imagine being forced to choose between voting for one of two serial killers, only the one serial killer promises you he's going to serial-kill twenty percent fewer people, assuming he can get the real psychopaths to agree to a compromise. That's basically what we're dealing with here. Remember that bizarre would-be meme where wingnuts kept waving around this picture of Obama photoshopped as the Joker from The Dark Knight? Dimwitted though they are, they were bloody well right, though I don't imagine they thought it was because he was kowtowing to them excessively.

You: Look, man, I'm not arguing with you, and yeah, it really, really sucks to forced to make such a shitty choice, but the fact is, you're dancing around the central point, which is that it is a choice, with real consequences. No matter how colorful the similes get, that fact doesn't change.

Me: Yes, again, you're right. Here's my thing, though. I have accepted the fact that ain't nobody going to make any serious, meaningful steps towards putting my Marxist wet dreams into practice. I know this! But--although our current system is never going to be ideal--I've also accepted that within it, things can be better or they can be worse. And I would prefer better, even if that makes the aforementioned wet dreams even more remote. So let's say Obama is only making things a tiny, incremental bit better. Not ideal, but I'm voting for him, no question! Fuck, say he's not making anything better, but he's firmly preventing things from getting worse. I'm still there, most likely! But that's not what we're getting, is it? Yeah, we have the odd no-shit inevitability like DADT repeal, but as far as the larger economic issues go? All we can expect under Obama is for things to get worse somewhat more slowly. This country is an alcoholic, and until it hits rock bottom, it ain't gonna change. So why drag it out? Let's just get this bullshit over with.

You: I notice you failed to define what "rock bottom" entails. Not to get all Godwin-y on you, but…

Me: No, it's a fair point.

You: Is social democracy "worth" a Holocaust? I realize I'm being extreme here, but since we're speaking in murky hypotheticals, we can't ignore the possible negative outcomes. Maybe something good will come--with only a modicum of suffering--from the American Empire's final downfall. I can't say I like the odds, though.

Me: So it's "vote for Obama so that we can avert complete social meltdown for slightly longer, maybe." Very inspiring.

You: Hey, I'm not saying it's a good situation. In fact, it's an unbelievably terrible situation, but granted that we have no choice but to live in it, what can you do? Besides, who knows? It's not inconceivable that, in the meantime, some sort of genuinely progressive and effective politics will emerge from somewhere and save us from out idiot selves, and no, there's no need for us to rehearse all the many, many reasons why that's wildly unlikely--but Pandora's Box has been well and truly opened, and that Hope sitting there may not look like much, but it's all we've got.

Me: How about booze? We've also got some of that.

You: Yeah, that might be better.

China Miéville, The City & The City (2009)

2011-07-31T18:17:00.000-04:00

The idea is that there's this eastern European city-state that is in fact two city-states: Besźel and Ul Qoma occupy the same territory; it's left somewhat ambiguous to what extent this is a "magical" thing--ie, they're occupying different layers of existence--and to what extent it's a matter of willfully disregarding the "other" city. It's clearly some of both, and there are very strict punishments for people who don't respect the boundaries.

This is definitely more subtle than any other Miéville I've read to date, and the world-building is really kind of brilliant. Both cities are very palpable and real, and he stacks in real-world details with great aplomb. My favorite bit is where he quotes a passage about the archaic script of one of the cities, supposedly from Sterne's Sentimental Journey. That's just great. The business too with the "crosshatching"--the bits where the two cities connect up--is executed really well; I would describe it, at times, as haunting.

So what's the problem? Well…I'm sorry to say that all of this really great stuff turns out to be in service to a competently-executed but not terribly exciting murder mystery. I was really interested in the cultures and the reasons for this separation--not that I was looking for everything to be nailed down in a neat and discrete package, but the whole thing would seem to lend itself very well to some very interesting exploration into the nature of belief and nationalism and like that. No such luck, though: deeper ramifications, ultimately, are barely explored. Also, it has to be said, the least believable part of this world is "Breach," this invisible, omnipotent police force that exists mostly-invisibly and cracks down brutally on anyone breaking the separatist rules. The idea that such a thing could really have existed and remained impenetrable for thousands of years…mmph. This is one of those things that, again, could have been employed in a really interesting way but…wasn't.

So that's about that: in spite of being clearly a better novel than Kraken, in some ways The City & The City is actually more of a disappointment, as all the ingredients were there for something really fucking awesome, but that something never really comes to fruition. At the end I was left wondering: really? Is this all there is?

Duck Comics: "Ducktargnan and the Three Musketeers"

2011-07-30T15:12:00.000-04:00

The long-awaited(?) return of DCR is something slightly unusual.

China Miéville, Kraken (2010)

2011-07-27T13:32:00.004-04:00

"But this was not quite the right kraken apocalypse. That was the problem."

So what happens is, when a preserved giant squid suddenly mysteriously disappears from London's Natural History Museum, one of the curators, Billy Harlow, gets sucked into an underworld of eschatological cults (one of which worships squid), wizards, supernatural crime bosses, ancient spirits, and all this stuff.

I was really looking forward to this book--the AV Club review quoted on the cover describes it as "hands-down the most fun book he's written in years," which made it seemed perfect to take on vacation. Well, it certainly tries to be fun, but as it turns out, while it goes down easily enough, it's ultimately a pretty substantial disappointment.

I'll tell you what the problem is: the world that Miéville evokes here is very thin. The novel is crammed full of those crazy Miévillian details--some of which are quite cool, admittedly--but the setting is extremely half-baked (can you half-bake something "extremely?" Never mind). Kraken's London is nowhere near as vivid as the New Crobuzon of novels past; this huge whirl of action--much of it sort of indistinct--seems to take place in kind of a void. So what you have, really, is a big pile of icing with no cake. Kinda messy, sort of tasty at first, but pretty quickly you're feeling vaguely ill.

It's not just the setting, either. Miéville, it has been said, is better at setting than he is at characters, and while I'll not argue with that, I don't think it's a big problem in the Bas-Lag novels; the people inhabiting them aren't Proustian or anything, but they do the job. It's easy to care about and/or hate them.

In Kraken, though--man, I don't think I can even convey to you how utterly one-note all of the characters are…actually, granting them even one note sometimes seems to be pushing it a bit. They're here to propel this not-that-compelling story forward, and that is all they are there to do. One thing I noted here is that, as opposed to the Bas-Lag novels, there is no sex whatsoever. I'm not saying that's a problem in itself, but it is indicative, I think, of a general lack of concern with letting the people be people. For there to be sex, they would have to, you know, interact and have relationships and do human-type things and stuff. But no, there's none of that here, the result being that one of the major characters dies, it's impossible to feel much of anything.

I'll point out a few good bits: there are these villains, Goss and Subby, sort of invincible, out-of-time murder spirits, who are effectively frightening, though really now, if the way to beat them is as obvious as it turns out to be, it's hard to imagine they would've stuck around so long. There's a group called "Chaos Nazis," who operate around a chillingly logical permutation of national socialist ideology. And--just a little thing--I quite liked the idea of a little protective charm consisting of an ipod containing a little demon that sings his own childish renditions of songs you've put on it to help you out. Oh, and there's an okay ending twist that's hinted at well enough that you could conceivably guess it even though you pretty much definitely won't. I approve of that. There are other things here and there that I liked, though not nearly so much as in any of the previous Miéville novels I've read.

There's a potentially great novel nascent here, but that's all there is. There's nothing wrong with a certain amount of self-indulgence, but Miéville just doesn't put in the work necessary for a really satisfying or--contra that bafflingly over-positive AV Club review--fun read.

Great Moments In Important Clarification Dept: from the back cover, we learn that, according to Entertainment Weakly, "[China] Miéville, never predictable, lobs a grenade into the urban-fantasy genre, remaking it into wild comedy." I suppose if you were half asleep, you might've thought it was referring to Melville.

Duck Comics: "Darkest Africa"

2011-07-09T17:11:00.001-04:00

...for reasons that will become apparent if you read the entry.

What a drag it is getting old.

2011-07-05T22:25:00.003-04:00

In fantasy novels with non-human races, typically all of them are longer-lived than humans. Naturally, this is a Tolkien thing, which pretty much everyone seems to have adapted. If they aren't longer-lived, then they're assumed to have pretty much the same lifespan as humans. I don't think China Miéville specifies the life expectancy of any of his many Bas-Lag races, but if he does, I'm quite sure none are ever less than that of humans.

Why is this? Why NOT short-lived races? I mean, surely someone has done fantasy (or SF) along these lines, but it's certainly not the dominant thing. Several reasons, I think: first, because it lends to non-human races a mythic, legendary quality; we're just brief candles and like that, but they just go on and on. Second, because it provides a certain obscure comfort to imagine that while we're done after a century on the outside, there could be other people for whom that isn't so. There's a li'l wish fulfillment here, I think. And finally, and relatedly, the idea of people destined to die "young" is just discomfiting to us, even if it's not "young" for them. We have trouble conceptualizing that as anything other than a major bummer for them. We may not be able to conceptualize the other way either, but that's not important: we're pretty sure we'd like it, and that's all we need to know. This points out a certain laziness in our thinking.

I can only think of two examples of short-lived races (though, again, I'm sure there must be many more). First, there are the gnome-people in the third area of Quintet's SNES game Soul Blazer. If I recall correctly, they're only supposed to live a year or so (but they make the most of it!). Given that we're talking about an old, not-super-sophisticated videogame with a questionable translation, I think this is actually handled rather well. Second, there's Kes from Star Trek: Voyager, whose race was I think only supposed to live to ten or thereabouts. I don't remember anything even remotely interesting being done with that--certainly no real, sustained effort to imagine what such a thing might be like--but then, that could've been Voyager's tagline: "Never doing anything even remotely interesting."

Whatever Comics: "A Very Goofy King Midas"

2011-07-04T00:42:00.001-04:00

Believe it or not, this one's awesome.

China Miéville, Perdido Street Station (2000); The Scar (2002); Iron Council (2004)

2011-07-01T00:56:00.000-04:00

On vacation, I had Perdido Street Station with me; I had tossed it in with a bunch of other books just to be on the safe side. I'd had it lying around for a long time, but somehow I never had the wherewithal to actually give it a go, even though I'd heard good things about it. It was kind of thick and dense, and most fantasy--if you even want to dignify all these attenuated Tolkein-lites with the word--just bores the shit out of me. But anyway, having a few books left to choose from, I just sort of idly picked PSS up, deciding, okay, I'll just read the first chapter or so and see how it grabs me. I kept reading. I'm pretty sure I must've muttered "holy shit" at some point. Possibly even "holy fucking shit." And almost certainly "that is so goddamn cool" on a number of occasions. And the rest is history. I tore through it in record time and soon after quickly dispatched The Scar and Iron Council, Miéville's other two novels set in this world.

Miéville's fantasy has absolutely nothing to do with Tolkien's, except possibly in the sense that it's self-consciously being nothing like Tolkien's. While I am not sufficiently widely-read in the genre to make absolute generalizations, it sure as shootin' seems to me that if you took Tolkien out of the equation, you'd also wipe out ninety percent of all contemporary fantasy (no comment on whether that would be a good or bad thing). Whereas it's easy to imagine these three novels existing in a Tolkien-free world. Which is not, of course, to say that they were conceived ex nihilo; Miéville acknowledges Mervyn Peake and M. John Harrison as influences, and I'm sure that--once again--someone better-versed in this stuff than me would be able to untangle the novel's roots.

But I would be surprised if anyone could find anything quite like this. First and foremost, Miéville sets out to amaze. What's great about him is that, while he's a Marxist with a PhD in economics who looks like a member of a post-apocalyptic street gang (actually, that's really just in the well-known photo in the back of PSS; he looks much less terrifying when he's smiling), although his novels are far from apolitical, he's never just out to lecture: he just plain likes awesome fantasy shit, and he has a hell of a fucking imagination. His city of New Crobuzon is one of the most thoroughly vivid and tactile fantasy cities you've ever seen, and he's able to brilliantly evoke huge, sprawling cultures and thousands of years of history in just a few words. From interviews I've read, I gather that, while he has some underlying history and whatnot worked out, it's certainly not obsessively systematic like Tolkien, but unlike certain writers we could name, he's absolutely brilliant at revealing by concealing--ie, giving you just enough to send your imagination into a mad frenzy. Which isn't to say that he doesn't also provide plenty of detail about those places, races, and cultural artifacts which are important to the stories. This shit boggles my mind. Seriously. Now, a few thoughts on each individual book.

Perdido Street Station

The protagonist, Isaac, is a human. His lover, Lin, is an anthropomorphic bug woman. The fact that Miéville can make this completely insane thing seem perfectly reasonable is a testament to his authorial power: a guy with the audacity to do something like that and the ability to pull it off is surely a rare thing.

The novel is very discursive; there are a lot of little side paths that don't necessarily contribute to the main plot (about which I'm trying not to say a lot, because revealing much more than what's on the back cover would spoil the fun); they're basically there because Miéville wanted to show you this awesome thing he thought of. And since most of the things he thinks of are indeed awesome (exception: "handlingers." Those are just dumb, and I can't believe he brought them back in Iron Council), that is not, to my mind, a problem. Fact remains, though, there are a few problems that manifest themselves, especially in the book's back half. First, there's the fact that the narrative--which had been fascinatingly unpredictable for the first three-four hundred pages--ultimately resolves itself into what is essentially a very long boss fight. Now that's not to say that there isn't some cool stuff going on here, but given the wild, unbounded imagination that gave birth to this world, this seems disappointingly prosaic, even if the bosses in question are quite terrifying. Second, there's the ending. Watch me discuss this without spoiling it: there are two unexpected things in the end. One of these is fascinating, and my only complaint is that it could've been explored in greater detail. But the other…well, you know how sometimes an author will force a happy ending where it doesn't belong, just 'cause? And you know how sometimes another author will do the opposite of that, on the basis that we can't have this be too ebullient, given that this is meant to be a Dark and Gritty novel? Yeah, that happens. And it strikes me as such an obvious mistake. I mean, yeah, okay, he was in his mid-twenties when he wrote the thing, give him a pass, but still. Bah. Oh, and thirdly, there are a few too many dei ex machinae, I think. But that's less of a big deal, ultimately.

The Scar

Naturally, the second novel lacks a bit of the shock-of-the-new that the first provided--but really, only a little. Miéville's imagination still goes to eleven in all sorts of awesome ways. It largely takes place at sea, and the evocations of fantastic marine life are just great. Also, none of the above-mentioned problems are in evidence, so hurrah for that. The novel is a bit less rambly than PSS, but the bits of the world that it reveals are just as fascinating; especially amazing is one of the races that Miéville introduces--his world is lousy with all sorts of different races--called the anophelii (I think I can say the name without giving away anything about them).

Some people have objected that, compared to Isaac, Bellis is not a very sympathetic protagonist, but I don't know about that--she's certainly a little on the cold side, but given the circumstances of her life, this seems fully justified. I had no problems with her. I also very much like the fact that the secondary-protagonist is a "remade;" there was no such character in PSS who had any sort of agency that we were able to see. Miéville is a very humane writer, and clearly eager to humanize everyone and destroy taboos of all sorts.

Oh, also, there's a truly hair-raising naval battle. Unlike some writers, Miéville understands that the way to do an engaging battle sequence is not by endless, obsessive battle choreography.

On balance, I'd say that The Scar is the strongest of the three.

Iron Council

Remember how Miéville is a Marxist? Well, this is his overtly political novel, directly engaging with issues of colonialism, labor activism (involving that ever-popular emblem of modernity, the railroad), and socialist utopianism. It's also a bit of a mess. Don't get me wrong! There's still a lot of really awesome shit here. In particular, the long, hundred-fifty-ish-page flashback sequence detailing the formation of the title thing is just brilliant; probably the best thing in any of these books. But the novel can't quite match it's own ambition, and in many places it comes across as a bit half-baked. For example, one of the main characters, Cutter, is gay (one of the main-ish characters in PSS was implied to be a lesbian, but that had no bearing on the story, whereas here, Miéville really jumps in with both feet). So you think, oh man, there's gonna be something about the intersection of queer sexuality and radical politics, and it's gonna be super interesting. But there's really not, and the whole thing goes nowhere. Part of the action is meant to be undergirded by his deep love for another of the main characters, but there's essentially no way to know why he feels the way he feels. It feels as if Miéville meant to do something more than he actually does. Also, there's a sort of parallel plot involving underground radicalism in New Crobuzon that just sort of peters out. And this business of the city being at war with another city-state kind of goes beyond mere half-bakedness. The whole last-minute business with the "Ambassador of Tesh" is just nonsensical.

Most of this only becomes evident after you're done with it, though; by and large, it's still super-awesome while you're reading. And I don't regret that reading for one minute; as I said: plenty of great stuff here. One of the characters, Judah (cf) is an expert at making golems, and never before have I felt so strongly that goddamnit--why can't magic be real? Cause that is so awesome, and I so badly want to be able to do it.

Miéville has said that he fully intends at some point to return to this world; he's just giving it a rest for now to prevent it from becoming played out, and to stretch his writerly wings. Which is an entirely respectable thing to do; still, you'd better believe that at such time as another Bas-Lag novel does come out, I will so be all over that shit.

In any case, if it's not clear I recommend these novels for kids of all ages. Well…maybe not all ages--they're pretty hard-R-rated--but if you can't handle them, you probably shouldn't be reading this blog, either. Shoo! Shoo! Oh, and once you're done, you can check out this interesting Miéville symposium on Crooked Timber, featuring a final post by the author himself.

Ann Lolter

2011-06-27T00:20:00.004-04:00

So I was just glancing at the bestseller list on the back of the local rag today, and I saw a new book by that Ann Coulter thing you used to hear so much about but who had not crossed my mind for god knows how long before I saw this book on the list. It's called Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America. Naturally, it appears to consist of the usual wingnut madlibs. When I saw it, I couldn't avoid a li'l fit of giggling; I mean, sure sure, dehumanizing opponents, bad, all that stuff, but the extremely literal interpretation of the "each title must use a scarier word than previous title" mandate is just plain funny, and the sheer absurdity of it (seriously--how can anyone possibly interview her with a straight face?) really accentuates the desperation to stay relevant--pushing fifty, not gonna be able to rely on the alleged good looks forever (this is the first one where she doesn't appear, in ludicrous attire, on the cover). Where can she possibly go from here? Given that all her titles are already basically schoolyard taunts, I'm thinking something along the lines of Dick Shit: Fuck Cock Liberal Poop would be a winner. Actually, a more realistic option--at least once she realizes that she's never again gonna be remotely relevant or acceptable in mainstream discourse and decides to just suck out whatever last bone marrow she can--would be racist, misogynist, and/or queerphobic slurs (you may recall her referring to Arabs as "ragheads" and calling John Edwards a "faggot," which really turned out to be pretty much the opposite of his problem, but never mind--she certainly doesn't). I don't doubt that she'd be willing to stoop that low, but I do question whether any publisher that wants to be thought of as even slightly respectable would be willing to go there. Heck, maybe the "poorly-mimeographed leaflets stapled to telephone poles" medium is her best bet.

Another thing I really like is that I only happened to stumble across this title by happenstance. Otherwise, I still wouldn't know about it--and checking wikipedia, I see that I hadn't heard of the last two either. I don't know if you remember this, but Coulter was quite the hot topic back when Slander and Treason came out--there was enraged sputtering everywhere, and many long, detailed page-by-page refutations of her lies. But now...nothin'. Her attempts to rile up the proles become less effective by the year I mean, the book still is a bestseller--due no doubt to bulk buying and bottom-feeding right-wing rags pawning off free copies to subscribers--but the fact remains: nobody cares. Not that plenty of unpleasant people haven't risen, dung-covered-phoenix-like, to take her place, but I do find her increased marginalization highly satisfying.

Still…I also feel a certain measure of horrified empathetic pity. Crazy, cynical, or both--who knows? But I just picture her in her twilight years, friendless, alone, and forgotten, confronted with the sum total of her contribution to the world: a dozen odd books that use lies to make people she doesn't know hate other people she doesn't know. What a devastating moment of self-awareness that would be. 'Course, maybe she'll never have it, and she'll go to her grave entirely content with her lot in life. Either way, seeing a human soul destroyed like that--however complicit she was in that destruction--is a terrible thing.

Yay New York

2011-06-25T03:55:00.002-04:00

I tend to be a little cynical about certain things, as you may have noticed; I cannot help but feel on some level that, as society is collapsing around us in all sorts of ways, gay marriage A. is such an inevitability, ultimately; and B. so totally fails to concretely address any of the problems that are going to make the world much, much worse in coming years; that it's not worth getting that excited about. But fuckin' eh, so many of our problems stem from us being utter horrible, hateful assholes to one another that I'm not gonna claim not to feel a certain frisson of excitement at anything that brings a little more love and happiness into the world, even if it's just nibbling at the margins. And, obviously, it's not really fair or, indeed, non-offensive for a lame straight guy like me to be dismissing major civil rights gains for people who are not me. So congrats, New York. And suck it, California--you need to get your act together.

Duck Comics: "The Starstruck Duck"

2011-06-22T23:01:00.001-04:00

Something of a milestone, albeit a rather melancholy one.

Soon to be a major motion picture, I fervently hope!

2011-06-18T16:19:00.000-04:00

Here is a sample sentence that OSX's dictionary widget gives for the word "bodacious:" "Those bodacious dudes have an excellent time playing games with death." Man, those guys sound awesome. I just hope, after they're done playing games with death, they give a small, expressionless nod and slightly adjust their sunglasses (which they're wearing inside at night, obviously). Really, if they did that, I'm tempted to say they could be almost as cool as Albert Wesker himself, if such a thing be possible. The mind reels.

Duck Comics: "The Mascot Mystery"

2011-06-18T00:41:00.001-04:00

Why don't you tell me 'bout the mascot dance? I wanna know about the mascot dance. Why don't you show me 'cause I've tried and I've tried and I'm still mystified; I can't do it anymore and I'm not satisfied.

Pixar Rankings!

2011-06-13T23:04:00.006-04:00

Hey, now that I've seen every Pixar film, let's rank them from best to worst, shall we? Does it say something about me that I have so much more to say about the ones at the bottom of the list? It sure does!

1. Up. Nuff said, really.

2. Toy Story 3. Has it EVER happened before that the third move in a series is also the best? Really immaculate with the most terrifying climax EVER in a kids' movie and that ending GOSH.

3. WALL-E. Man, when I first saw Wall-E, I thought it would be impossible to top, but here we are, which is kind of mind-boggling. It's true what everyone says: it loses a bit of momentum when it goes into space, but really not THAT much, and that first part is REALLY incredible. And the closing credits, man oh man.

4. Ratatouille. Really awesome stuff, but this is the first one in which I can detect a distinct flaw, to wit: if we're buying into the whole "anyone can cook" thing, how is it that, to all appearances, the main guy really CAN'T, ultimately? That's just weird.

5. The Incredibles. …but not as weird as the awful ending where it's apparently A-OKAY for the kid compete in races as long as he holds back and doesn't come in FIRST. Some people seem to think this is meant as an implicit critique. Not really buyin' that. But otherwise, it's a great film.

6. Toy Story. That's right, the first one. I think there's something to be said for simplicity, and this is totally fun and charming, even if a little rough around the edges.

7. A Bug's Life. I like this way more than I thought I would. The villain is great, and although the circus-bugs are played a bit too broadly for my taste, I got used to them quickly enough. And then it was all good.

8. Toy Story 2. I know a lot of people would think it odd to see this placed so far down. Don't get me wrong; I like it a lot, and "When Somebody Loved Me" is a really effective tear-jerker, but I feel there was a bit too much not-that-amusing dicking around, like the whole toy store segment and the nonsense with the generic Buzz Lightyear and Zod figures. And seriously, people, the toys driving an actual, real-world car? Hmph.

9. Cars. I didn't really expect to like Cars, but I have to admit: I liked Cars. No two ways about it. However, there's no denying that the world is really, really bizarre and not necessarily in a GOOD way; also, the character designs are, let's face it, kind of creepy. Plus, what with the upcoming sequel (which I'll be highly skeptical about until I see) and this made-for-TV Planes spin-off, it's looking like this could spell the end of Pixar's reign of awesome. Let's hope not.

10. Monsters Inc. Out of all the movies on this list, it's been the longest since I've seen this one, so I'm probably not the best judge, but I remember being seriously underwhelmed: this is the sort of thing that the much-fêted Pixar is doing? Really? More specifically, I found the whole monster-world economy too cute by half, frankly, and Billy Crystal gah. I probably would have liked it more had I been younger when I saw it, but Pixar films are meant to bridge such divides. Very much not hotly anticipating the sequel.

11. Finding Nemo. Yeah, I know this is gonna look like willful contrarianism, but I can't help it: this is the only Pixar movie that I just flat-out dislike. No, I'm not saying it's without merit (he magnanimously conceded), but the whole thing is pitched so, so broadly, and the extremely-allegedly-comic-relief sidekick fish with short-term memory problems is just non-stop horrifically, unbearably irritating, and she is all over the movie. Also, the idea of sharks in an AA analogue to learn to stop eating fish? What the hell are they supposed to eat, then? C'mon. There's suspension of disbelief, and then there's just stupidity. Though I'll grant you it would've been funny if they'd pledged to only devour humans instead. Perhaps the whole father-son thing should have resonated, but it just…didn't. I'm surprised that--checking wikipedia--it's only a hundred minutes, because it feels fucking endless.

Mouse Comics: "Mickey Mouse vs. Kat Nipp"

2011-06-10T21:58:00.002-04:00

Among other things, includes one of the most mind-bogglingly offensive bits in Disney comics!

The intersection of Disney comics and American naturalism

2011-06-02T21:00:00.003-04:00

Hey, are you aware that Volume One of Fantagraphics' reprinting of Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse comic strip is out now? NOW NOW NOW! This is an extremely momentous occasion, as anyone familiar with Disney comics knows. Even if you're not, I'd recommend picking it. Maybe you will be! And it's totally uncensored; the second continuity includes the semi-infamous "Mickey attempts suicide" sequence.

Anyway, I was reading through the first story, "Mickey Mouse in Death Valley," and I came across THIS:

Look familiar? Yup--aside from the fact that (obviously) no one dies, it's pretty much exactly the ending to Frank Norris's McTeague, down to the fact that both take place in Death Valley. There is no way this can be a coincidence. A very cool little homage.

Frank Herbert, Dune (1965)

2011-06-02T17:45:00.001-04:00

So here's the plot of Dune: there's this kid, Paul, who is the son of a duke and his concubine. He's way awesomer than everyone else, 'cause that's just the way it is. In the beginning, he has to take a super-hardcore test (the "gom jabbar") where he puts his hand in this thing that simulates huge amounts of pain, and if he takes it out, the test taker uses super-deadly poison to KILL HIM DEAD, and the absurdity of this is never acknowledged nor, quite obviously, recognized by the author. Anyway, for reasons that remain murky, pa's being transferred to this here desert planet that produces a rare condiment/drug that is super-duper hard to farm and important (but which seemingly everyone always pours all over their food), replacing the comically evil baron who is currently running things, and in addition to engaging in general killing-people-and-being-mean-type evil, is also fat and gay, so you just KNOW he's up to no good. But alas, the duke is betrayed and killed, and Paul and his ma are abandoned on the planet to die, on the ever-popular "we won't kill them ourselves--we'll just leave them where they're SURE to die bwahaha!" gambit. It will shock you to learn that their death does not occur (due, again, to Paul's just-'cause awesomeness). Instead, they team up with the nomadic desert natives, of whom Paul quickly becomes leader, 'cause what have I been TELLING you about him? There's also a LOT of politics, both from good and bad guys, none of which has the remotest relationship to the thrust of the action, such as it is. Oh, and speaking of pointless things, it is revealed to us, just as a sort of casual aside, that the evil baron is in fact Paul's grandfather. This has no effect on anything; I suppose Herbert just thought it would be kinda dramatic to stick it in there and just let it kind of dangle. Spoiler: it isn't. At any rate, the good guys beat the bad guys in a mostly-off-stage coup. The baron is killed via the same poison as in the aforementioned test, and the previously-asserted idea that the poison works absolutely instantaneously is contradicted, as he clearly lasts a good five-ten seconds. And then the good guys engage in a somewhat appalling bit of realpolitik that apparently isn't meant to make us hate them. THE END.

I'm afraid the above description doesn't do the book justice, however--it's terrible in many ways that aren't directly plot-related. What it comes down to is this: Herbert is not a good writer. He has one good idea that would be really neat if he were a better writer (the desert planet itself and its ecosystems), and one idea that's potent enough that even HE can't screw it up TOO badly ("stillsuits," which preserve and reprocess all of one's water for reuse, really driving home how waterless the planet is), but he is simply incapable of presenting this world in an evocative or compelling way. He can't write action, either: you will note that the big upheavals in the book (the baron's coup, the baron's defeat) take place almost entirely off-page. "Tell don't show, and don't even TELL if you can possibly avoid it" appears to be Herbert's motto. Everything is incredibly vague and murky. We have these here desert nomads, but aside from them, there's no way to tell what life is even like on the planet ("Arrakis"). Are there towns? How do they work? How do the desert animals to which the book alludes function in a near-waterless environment? If Herbert knows, he ain't sayin.' But I'm pretty sure he doesn't know. And forget about the larger setting in which the book allegedly takes place: if the central planet is hazy, the universe might as well not exist for all that it's fleshed out. Oh, and also forget about the characters. Herbert appears to take great pride in depicting all this machiavellian scheming, but he sure doesn't show much interest in depicting characters who behave even slightly like real people or to whom the reader can relate in any way.

There's one scene in the novel that I thought was effective: it's when the ecologist has been left in the desert to die, and while doing so, he hallucinates a conversation with his father. Not that it wouldn't have been MORE effective in the hands of a better writer, but you really have to take what you can get with a book like this.

If this were just any bad, hacky fantasy novel (it's about as much "science fiction" as Star Wars is), then none of this would be here or there. But, as the cover notes, it is "the bestselling SF [sic] adventure of all time!" The inside cover copy confidently declares it "undoubtedly the grandest epic in science fiction." As you may have guessed, I have my doubts.

(It also won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, incidentally--just in case you were inclined to believe that those awards were indicators of quality).

It's just one of those things: how can you possibly rationalize the fact that jillions of otherwise intelligent people are so taken with a book that is quite clearly fucking terrible? It's a question that was hashed out--to no clear conclusion--in comments to Adam Roberts' reading of the Wheel of Time. But I'm gonna go the easy route, and just categorically state--and a dear friend of mine is a fan, so I say this with love in my heart--y'all are out of your frackin' minds.

In all seriousness, I'm pretty sure I know at least one (misguided) reason that people have for liking the book, and that is summed up by Arthur C. Clarke's comment on the back to the effect that he "know[s] of nothing comparable to it except The Lord of the Rings." Now, I'm no big LotR fan, but I know a grotesque injustice to Tolkien when I see one. I know why people make the comparison: it's because Herbert makes a big show of having all this supplementary information about his universe, as though it's something super spectacularly deep with years and years and years of accreted history and culture. There are appendices. But the thing is: none of this ever builds to anything meaningful. To give Tolkien his due, Middle Earth feels like a real place because he spent endless years obsessively building an organic world grounded in European mythology and folklore (and because, as enamored of his work as I'm not, he's a far better stylist than Herbert could ever hope to be, and thus is capable of actually depicting this world). Whereas while Herbert may have made a substantial time investment, his universe never feels like anything other than a bunch of crap inelegantly thrown together. It has a vaguely Middle Eastern theme (except when it doesn't), but it never feels real or comes to life in any meaningful way.

Take, for instance, the names that Herbert gives his characters. Tolkien's work was rooted in real linguistics, so his names generally feel plausible and well-situated within the world. There's a post or five to be written about the principles by which fantasy authors come up with names, but one that you should probably avoid is the "ungainly mixture of real names, vaguely plausible made-up names, and output from the random syllable generator" strategy. Otherwise, there is a very real danger that you might end up with names like "Paul Muad'Dib," "Thufir Hawat," "Gurney Halleck," "Duncan Idaho," "Wellington Yueh," "Gaius Helen Mohiam," and "Feyd-Rautha Rabban;" things that sound like the random gibberish that appears in the "from" fields of spam emails. The arbitrary nature of these names is not a purely aesthetic problem; it's hard enough to visualize--let alone feel anything about--these characters in the first place; when you're constantly stumbling over their ridiculous, opaque names, it becomes all the harder.

Or, hey, take this list of alleged syncretic religions:

The so-called ancient teachings--including those preserved by the Zensunni Wanderers from the first, second, and third Islamic movements; the Navachristianity of Chusuk, the Buddislamic Variants of the types dominant at Lankiveil and Sikun, the Blend Books of the Mahayana Lankavatara, the Zen Hekiganshu of III Delta Pavonis, the Tawrah and Talmudic Zabur surviving on Salusa Secundus, the pervasive Obeah Ritual, the Muadh Quran with its pure Ilm and Fiqh preserved among the pundi rice farmers of Caladan, the Hindu outcroppings found all through the universe in little pockets of insulated pyons, and finally, the Butlerian Jihad.

Gosh…can I write the bestselling SF adventure of all time if I mash together religious signifiers in absurd ways and toss in some alleged names of planets? I guess we're supposed to imagine that all this is the result of painstaking world-building, and that Herbert actually has very detailed ideas of what all these things are, but in fact it reads like what it quite obviously is: a bunch of thrown-together crap signifying nothing.

And it's not as if Herbert spent any more time than that thinking about things that are more central to the novel. Take the aforementioned "gom jabbar" (does it make SENSE to be constantly murdering people 'cause they failed this dopey test? And doesn't the death penalty actually provide a much greater incentive not to fail, thus making it a less accurate measure of one's real-world pain-withstanding abilities?). Or take that there "Butlerian Jihad." It may not be Herbert's fault that the name these days conjures up images of Judith Butler beheading fools who refuse to accept the instability of gender, but it certainly wouldn't be a felicitous name in any case. According to the "helpful" appendix, it is "the crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots begun in 201 B.G. and concluded in 108 B.G. Its chief commandment remains in the O.C.* Bible as 'Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.'" No, there's no explanation for why this event should have occurred; this lack is apparently, once again, meant to convey depth: Herbert could explain it if he wanted to! But he DOESN'T want to! But yeah: there are indeed no computers used in the novel, so presumably this "jihad" was entirely successful. Meaning that we have an entire spacefaring empire…without computers of any sort. Uh…yeah. There's some talk of pilots using the drug ("spice") to see slightly into the future and therefore (I infer) not NEEDING computers, but something this dubious probably wouldn't be convincing in any case, and certainly not when presented only in a few tossed-off remarks.

*"Orange Catholic." Don't even get me started. I keep wanting to read the 'C' as a 'G,' making it the "Original Gangsta Bible," which you have to admit would be way better.

And how 'bout the planet Arrakis itself? Since the spice comes from nowhere else, and it's necessary for space-flight, this is THE planet to control if you want political power. And yet…for, apparently, thousands of years, nobody was able to figure this out; hence, its fluctuating rule by a loose assortment of random nobles. Given the obsessive, tedious way that Herbert harps on political machinations that have nothing to do with the plot, you would think this would have occurred to him. But…not so much, as it turns out. Just in case you thought this was all a measure of, you know, authorial intelligence.

The first fifty or so pages I was thinking: huh. I really don't like this book. At page one-fifty or so, I was thinking: well, it may not be GOOD, but I'm sorta engaged; defeat and exile are always compelling, regardless of authorial skill, and I want to see what happens. At page two hundred or slightly further: huh--nothing interesting's gonna happen, is it? Soon after: WOW is this novel breathtakingly bad. Then: But I am still going to fucking well FINISH it, so I can write an excessively long and vicious blog post on the subject. Mission accomplished!

Let me conclude by quoting this bit from a funeral ceremony, which, as far as I can tell, is meant entirely to be taken straight:

"Jamis carried thirty-three liters and seven and three-thirty-seconds drachms of the tribe's water," Chani said. "I bless it now in the presence of a Sayyadina. Ekkeri-akairi, this is the water, fillissin-follasy of Paul-Muad'Dib! Kivi a-kavi, never the more, nakalas! Nakelas! to be measured and counted, ukair-an! by the heartbeats jan-jan-jan of our friend…Jamis.

Am I on Candid Camera here, or what? How can you people possibly take this remotely seriously?

Duck Comics: "Crown of the Mayas"

2011-05-30T22:01:00.001-04:00

As I said, we're back.

Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (1927)

2011-05-30T15:31:00.000-04:00

Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt is not a great book because of its satire of hypocritical bourgeois values and mindless civic boosterism. If you think that it is, you're WRONG! You FAIL the course! No, that stuff's all perfectly effectively done and sometimes funny, but what what really puts it a step above is the portrait of the title character himself. George F. Babbitt is entirely inculcated in this culture, but he has occasional moments of, if not quite self-awareness, then the sense that there's something wrong with his life and the world around him. In his relationship with his best friend, Paul Reisling, you can see a certain humanity shining through, even if the whole thing is couched in inanities, and his inchoate sort of rebellion is inspiring even in its incoherence. What I'm saying is, he's one of the great characters of American literature.

Elmer Gantry…not so much. He has no depths. He is a thoroughly despicable character from start to finish; casually using, discarding, and destroying anyone who gets in his way on the path to evangelical wealth and power. To the extent that I enjoyed the book, it was mostly because I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop: it seemed inevitable that, at some point, something was gonna happen to put Gantry's worldview in jeopardy or to force some sort of re-evaluation of something--but no dice. There are very occasional, tiny intimations that something along these lines could take place, but they never go anywhere at all. It seems like something's definitely going to happen when he falls in with Sharon Falconer, a charismatic, somewhat insane revivalist preacher. But then, after recording their exploits for a while, Lewis basically hits the reset button on the whole thing, and you wonder: what was the point of all that? The only conflict in the novel consists in the character encountering occasional setbacks in his road to glory. There's no internal conflict. Calling Gantry a "character" at all seems to be pushing it a bit. One sort of gets the impression that Lewis was afraid that if he went for nuance, readers might somehow miss the unmissable message, and said message was so important to him that he could take no chance of that happening.

For what it's worth, Lewis clearly isn't a big fan of religion in general, but it's really just religious hypocrisy he's after (though this hypocrisy, for him, is pretty much omni-present); there are a few sincerely religious figures in the novel presented sympathetically, and the occasional professional-atheist types who show up aren't too likable either.

Lewis definitely makes his point, I'll give him that, albeit with sledgehammer subtlety, and as a full-scale assault on organized religion, the novel was no doubt more shocking in its time than it is today. But while I'm broadly sympathetic to the message, it isn't exactly a complicated message, and I'm not sure how much value there is in having Lewis shout it in your ear over and over for five-hundred-odd pages.

Hey, I'm back.

2011-05-29T23:13:00.001-04:00

More nonsense soon, most likely.

Duck Comics: "To the Moon by Noon"

2011-05-11T21:40:00.000-04:00

We take a look at--alas!--what is likely to be one of Boom's final efforts.

The Progression of the Argument

2011-05-09T23:40:00.001-04:00

01. I did better than D work.

02. I need higher than a D to graduate.

03. I emailed you with EXCUSES on two out of the eleven times I was absent.

04. Tell me the dates I was absent.

05. I was NOT absent on all of those days!

06. Those absences shouldn't count against me.

07. For some of those days, I wasn't absent; I was just very, very late!

08. If I could've earned a C- by regularly attending class, then that's the grade I should GET!

09. My first paper was only a page and a half long because, as a business major, I'm only used to writing one-page memos; therefore, that F was unfair.

10. I can't control when I have car troubles!

11. I REALLY need to graduate!

12. To be honest, I was only half paying attention, because my other classes were more important.

13. Maybe if I'd KNOWN getting to class twenty minutes late would count against me, it wouldn't have HAPPENED over and over and over!

The long, tedious saga continues...

Practice makes perfect!

2011-05-09T00:36:00.001-04:00

Elmer's eloquence increased like an Autumn pumpkin. He went into the woods to practice. Once a small boy came up behind him, standing on a stump in a clearing, and upon being greeted with "I denounce the abominations of your lascivious and voluptuous, uh, abominations," he fled yelping, and never again was the same care-free youth.
--Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry

Art!

2011-05-08T22:51:00.004-04:00

I found an old notebook from my eleventh grade English class, in which I had inscribed the following deathless illustration:

Not quite as inexplicable as it may first seem; given that the figures appear to be on a raft, and given that we read Huckleberry Finn in eleventh grade, I'm guessing it's supposed to be the king and the duke practicing their interpretations of Shakespeare. The Sun is angry because (even predating SMB3) I've always found angry Suns funny. But what "no frarking" could possibly mean, I am at a total loss. If this is a reference to something in the book that I've forgotten, feel free to enlighten me.

Bonus: in this same notebook, I also drew this gentleman:

State of the Bible Tract Address

2011-05-04T23:12:00.016-04:00

The good news (get it? "good news?") is that I've come into possession of a fair few Bible tracts over the years. The bad news is, none of them have been Chick Tracts--either people give them to me; or I find them lying around, left by people trying to make converts--and I suppose this means I'm responsible for the people who went unsaved for lack of a tract because I took it to make fun of like the obnoxious librul élitist that I am.

But c'mon, people--you expect anyone to Accept Jesus™ based on some lame, off-brand tract? Actually, it's not the "off-brand" so much as it is the "lame." Batty and frequently incredibly offensive as they are, Chick tracts are rarely unmemorable, whereas the sort of thing you see more often is just gonna put you to sleep. Example:

Jeez--welcome to Snoozeville. And to add insult to injury, the church stamped its information over the name and address section, so you couldn't even send it back if it did cause you to get saved. Bah.

This one's a little better, for some definition of "better." They attempt to draw you in by promising something vaguely sexy…

…and then you open it, and GOOD GOD:

Just imagine for a moment how screamingly offended this tract's producers would be at the free availability (to children, no less!) of an image that gruesome that wasn't Christian-themed. Kind of a dick move, really. Here's the back, so you can finish the fun "Love Test:"

I'm struck by how completely contentless these things generally are--they're all about form rather than substance. Absolutely no indication here of what getting saved actually entails, behavior-wise, beyond saying the magic words.

Note also that URL: "www.FEARGOD.us." The focus on FEAR seems rather inimical to real belief, but it's impossible to gauge just how far the website takes this, because it's currently dead, and all that's left is that portal site featuring a woman with a backpack in a college-y environment who (this occurs to me every time I'm faced with this image, so I want to take this opportunity to tell the world) looks a lot like adult actress Ashlynn Brooke.

There IS a feargod.com, at which you can buy creepily bellicose Christian t-shirts from people trying to sound like they're really into death metal, but in a Christian way (here's one about how Jesus is probably going to murder you); I don't think this tract has anything to do with that, however. So...so much for "fear," I guess. I'm definitely down with that.

Here's a seasonal tract with a cheery Jack O'Lantern on the cover!

Inside and on the back, there is this:

Kudos, at any rate, for a consistent theme, but, while all these tracts do this to some extent, this one really serves as a textbook example of begging the question in its original, logical-fallacy sense. They may be substantially similar, but there's surely a difference between "hey, the Bible sez you should accept Jesus" and "inasmuch as the Bible is true, you must agree that you're wrong to believe X."

Finally, a particularly maladroit effort to reach out to The Kids:

The Kids like celebrities, right? And Devil Music? So these really hideous caricatures of dead musicians should be just what the doctor ordered! But…who's the guy in the lower left? You can more or less tell who the others are meant to be, but who's that one? Ronald Reagan? What the hell is he doing here? Our former Clown-in-Chief is in no way someone The Kids care about.

No, it's John Wayne. But the point stands, and in fact is even stronger, since Wayne probably has even less contemporary relevance. Why this bizarre odd man out? You couldn't come up with more than six dead rock stars? Well, more likely they couldn't come up with more than six that would be sufficiently easily-identifiable from half-assed caricatures. Sorry, Echo and the Bunnymen's Pete de Freitas!

Also note that, in their eagerness to quote from "American Pie," they accidentally (I assume!) imply that music can, in fact, save your mortal soul. Also, note this: "Jesus said, 'Whoever looks upon a woman to lust after her, has committed adultery already with her in his heart.' Have you ever looked with lust?" First, note that The Kids are pretty much endless fountains of nothing but lust, and telling them that they should knock it off is the most laughably futile warning in the history of everything. Second, note that the way this tract is trying to appeal to The Kids is by evincing knowledge of rock musicians of whom they are allegedly fans, and rock music, too, is to a very substantial degree an all-out celebration of lust--I mean, they include Jim Morrison, fercrissake, who was pretty much nothing but a personification of libidinal energies. What I'm trying to say is, this is a quite amazingly confused piece of work. As ever, reaching out to The Kids seems likely to be more alienating to them than regular, non-The-Kids-directed material would be. Also, the publishers have an incredibly hideous website.

I guess all I'm trying to say is: step it up, tract makers. You're never gonna unseat ChickCo like this.

Oh teacher are my lessons done I cannot do another one they laughed and laughed and said well child are your lessons done?

2011-05-03T02:27:00.003-04:00

So here's what happened: the student write me an email on Friday, saying that for his previous final paper idea--which was exploring some aspect of religious belief that has an impact on society--he just goshdarn was having trouble finding enough to say to fill up a whoppin' eight pages, so instead, how 'bout he writes his paper about this debate he saw somewhere about the relative merits of teachers' unions?

"What does this have to do with the assignment?" I responded, the assignment having been to make an argument in some way related--however tangentially--to some aspect of something we'd read over the course of the semester. "You said we could be creative!" he countered, having apparently interpreted "creative" as "having nothing to do with anything."

(Actually, I'm pretty sure that a clever student could have used the readings to come up with a justification for writing on this topic, in which case I would have applauded his ingenuity--but this was not that student.)

"Okay," sez I, not wanting to argue, "I don't want to argue. But know ye this:"--these may not have been my exact words--"I already know what this paper will look like, and it will look like this: you will recapitulate the arguments made in this debate. You will do this at great, page-chewing length. There will be no discernible original argument on your part. All that will happen is that you come down on one side or the other, or possibly in some lukewarm middle ground. You could surprise me and do something different"--[note: there was no way he was going to surprise me and do something different]--"but given the number of papers I've endured that do this exact thing--the thing that I am assiduously trying to steer students away from this semester--I would be surprised. And if this is the case, there is no way you will get a grade that is better than mediocre. And given your situation"--ie, he plagiarized the hell out of his last paper, and the only reason I didn't fail him for the entire class then and there is lack of moral fiber on my part, most likely--"you can't afford a mediocre grade. But with this as a proviso, I won't tell you you can't at least make a go at it." Send. Then, feeling kind of bad at having authorized him to do something he would fail at, even having warned him he would fail at it, I send another email giving him some advice for ways he could approach his original, less doomed-to-fail (although in his case…) paper idea. But I heard nothing back from him, so I had no idea what he was thinking.

Anyway, I got his paper today, and indeed it was about teachers' unions. And indeed it did exactly what I said it would do--so egregiously that it was almost like a parody of papers that do that, actually. He ate up space by quoting, at great length, participants in this debate, along with the occasional helpful "X makes a good point when he says…" type commentary. I mean good god, what was this young man possibly thinking? I mean yeah, okay, "not much." But even so: I tell you precisely what not to do and you--to all appearances--go out of your way to do exactly that? What exactly did you imagine would be the result of this? Is this like the time in ninth grade when we had to create leaf collections for biology class and my friend misread the list of "things not to do" as "things to do" and thereby failed quite spectacularly? Or what?

Oh, and also, he totally plagiarized the shit out of it--"introducing" the participants with large chunks of unattributed text grabbed straight from the debate's website. I'm capable of believing that this particular student was clueless enough to not even realize that he wasn't supposed to do this--hey, you'd be surprised, and given that he provided numerous quotes from this same website, it's even more inconceivable that he somehow thought I wouldn't notice (though, again...)--but that hardly matters. Fercrissake, this is College Writing II--how in god's name did someone like this ever get through College Writing I? Well, I guess I can't blame whoever passed him too much; I'm certainly also guilty of passing the odd student whom I definitely shouldn't have (this whole system is incredibly dysfunctional). But good lord. I suppose I'm actually grateful; the plagiarism means I can just say "you fail" without having to do any tedious number-crunching to show him exactly why he fails. But goddammit, I would be eight hundred percent happier if students would just refrain from being massively lazy and apathetic and dishonest. I mean, I'm not saying that I'm some sorta transcendently awesome teacher and that therefore I should never take any of the blame for student screw-ups--but sometimes things like this happen that shouldn't happen and wouldn't if there were even a nominal amount of giving-a-fuck on the part of the student. It is difficult not to wonder, on occasion, why I even bother.

Just another dead soldier

2011-05-02T20:52:00.004-04:00

Hey, listen, it's hard to feel upset about bin Laden's demise. He was a nasty piece of work, obviously. Still, here's a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. that a friend posted on facebook:

I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.

[UPDATE: I am not one hundred percent certain about the attribution of this, but if you can't trust a random person on facebook who got it from some other random person, whom can you trust?]

I can get behind that. And I cannot help but think that a populace that applauds governmental violence in one instance is more likely to applaud it in others. It might be one thing if the killing was actually likely to make any discernible difference in anything aside from helping Obama's reëlection campaign. But it's pretty much entirely symbolic. I certainly can't get pumped up over it.

Here's a picture of people celebrating the news (from here):

That makes me a little queasy, I have to say. I don't know that I necessarily want to live in a country in which this sort of reaction to this sort of news is widespread. I realize that probably rules out...well, every country in the world, but still.

That said, I'm only human, and the mean-spirited side of me can't help but find this pretty funny (via alicublog):

I'm lukewarm at best about Obama, but the capacity of an image like that to make wingnut heads explode is kinda priceless.

Duck Comics: "One Thin Dime"

2011-04-29T01:09:00.001-04:00

Kerpow!

Why the story was written

2011-04-25T20:10:00.001-04:00

Hilda placed her hands on Rebecca's head.

"The snow is coming," she said. "Soon it will be snow time. Together then as in other snow times. Drinking busthead 'round the fire. Truth is a locked room that we knock the lock off from time to time, and then board up again. Tomorrow you will hurt me, and I will inform you that you have done so, and so on and so on. To hell with it. Come, viridian friend, come and sup with me."

They sit down together. The pork with red cabbage steams before them. They speak quietly of the McKinley Administration, which is being revised by revisionist historians. The story ends. It was written for several reasons. Nine of them are secrets. The tenth is that one should never cease considering human love, which remains as grisly and golden as ever, no matter what is tattooed upon the warm tympanic page.
--Donald Barthelme, "Rebecca"

Duck Comics: "Donald Duck, Special Correspondent"

2011-04-24T23:04:00.000-04:00

This one's been a long time coming.

Duck Comics: Ultraheroes

2011-04-19T02:38:00.001-04:00

Duck Comics Revue gets vindictive.

Marx was skint but he had sense/Engels lent him the necessary pence

2011-04-18T21:24:00.003-04:00

Terry Eagleton's "In Praise of Marx," from the Chronicle of Higher Education, is a great, must-read essay. I'm not sure how you could read it and continue with the "grrr Marx evil" business that so many do. Well, you'll see how if you check the comments section: either don't bother reading it or very cursorily skim it and then present anti-Marxist objections that the article clearly outlines and debunks. No TIME for considering new information! We have a weltanschauung to maintain! Not saying there are no possible objections to be made here; Eagleton obviously has a point of view, and the fact that I mostly share this point of view does not mean that it is unassailable. Probably a thoughtful dissenter could raise counter-arguments that would at least require me to think! But there seem to be few who care to be thoughtful on this topic.

It's like I tell my students: sure, you can argue X, but you CANNOT, in so doing, pretend that objection Y doesn't exist. Of course, it's pretty unsurprising that so many of them have difficulty grasping this point, as our culture militates quite vigorously against the idea. I don't let them write gay marriage argumentation papers because there are no good arguments against gay marriage. Like reality, I have a Librul Bias™. However--well one might ask--if there are no good arguments against it, then why is it still illegal in so many states? And the answer is: because we typically prefer to believe things through sheer force of dogma than for any other reason. Of course, gay marriage isn't legal in most of the world, it's true; but A) we fancy ourselves an "advanced" nation, so it's really incumbent on us to get with the picture; and B) we have an AWFUL LOT of these things: taxes are always automatically bad, medical care HAS to be expensive, global warming and evolution are satanic hoaxes, the drug war makes sense, and so on. You may not believe these things, but the culture at large refuses to treat them with the derision they deserve. CAPITALISM IS TEH ROXXOR HOW DARE YOU QUESTION IT may not have any logical power, but it sure is deeply embedded in most of our brains.

This week, in Mallard Fillmore

2011-04-15T03:07:00.002-04:00

Now, you probably don't follow Mallard Fillmore, 'cause you're not dumb like me, but I think you should know that this week he's ranting about how the IRS is targeting him as retribution for bravely speaking TRUTH TO POWER by calling Obama a poopyhead. No lie. Assuming that there are a handful of deeply sad people who consider themselves "fans" of this comic, surely even they're gonna be able to see that their hero is a pathetic, paranoid drunk? 'Cause he's really laying it all there now, if he hadn't been before.

Hey guys, Let's Play NES Jeopardy!

2011-04-15T00:42:00.002-04:00

So you're familiar with the concept of a "Let's Play," are you not? Where you record yourself playing a videogame of some sort and provide commentary that may or may not be incisive. Yeah, well, that's what this is. With Jeopardy! For the NES! I'd sort of thinking it would be fun to do something like this for a while, but I was held back for two reasons. First, because I thought I'd have to get special equipment of some sort, but this turns out not to have been the case; my computer has everything necessary build-in. Sure, the sound quality could be better, but it's certainly adequate. And second, because I kind of suck at most videogames except some RPGs, and they aren't really very appropriate for the format. But then I realized, hey, game show ports exist! And some of them are fun! So, long story short, I recorded this and after not insignificant levels of wrangling, I cut it into three pieces and put it on the internet, and that is about that.

Whether you enjoy it or not depends on how much tolerance you have for my insane babbling, I suppose, but I found it very edifying to record, so I'll do some more in the future--for other versions of Jeopardy, for other game shows, and hey, maybe even some non-game-show content.

Let's Play NES Jeopardy!

Duck Comics: "Return of the Micro-Ducks"

2011-04-14T01:23:00.002-04:00

I'll have you know that this is the first 'R' entry on the index page. Too bad it doesn't go with a better comic.

Mouse Comics: "Sky Island"

2011-04-06T23:11:00.001-04:00

Your eyes do not deceive you! Do not adjust your set! Courtesy of David Gerstein's donation to the Red Cross, I bring you...a Mickey Mouse story. Shocking, but true!

Grant Morrison et al, All-Star Superman (2005-2008)

2011-04-04T01:29:00.010-04:00

There's a[n] [All-]Star [Super]man, waiting in the sky
He'd like to come and meet us, but he thinks he'd blow our minds;
There's a[n] [All-]star [Super]man, waiting in the sky,
He's told us not to blow it, 'cause he knows it's all worthwhile...

...and that's enough of that nonsense.

The first thing to be said about All-Star Superman: it is absolutely gorgeous. The contrast with the barely-adequate Dark Knight Returns is really quite shocking. I know, I know--different tools are more appropriate for different kinds of stories. And DKR probably wouldn't have worked with Frank Quitely's artwork and Jamie Grant's coloring. But it doesn't work anyway, as far as I'm concerned, so now we're right back where we started. So yeah: beautiful, restrained, evocative, sophisticated, and it provides an emotional heft that something cruder would not have done. Major kudos to that.

The second thing to be said about All-Star Superman: it is goofy as hell. Given that the overarching premise of the series is "Superman learns he's dying--now what?"--and given the rather sober art--I was sort of lulled into thinking it would not be goofy as hell, but goofy as hell it is. So, f'rinstance, in one chapter Superman gives Lois Lane a magic potion that lets her have superpowers for one day, and they're going to use them to fight lizardmen from the Earth's core, but then two random mythological superhero dudes, Atlas and Samson, show up and take out the lizards, and the two of them vie for Lois's affections. Then, a time-traveling sphinx appears 'cause they've stolen its magic artifact thing, and Superman has to answer a dopey riddle. Even the serious-ish chapter featuring the death of Kent's foster-father features goofy Supermen from the Future. Also, Krypto the Superdog*, 'cause why not?

*Wikipediain' around, I find that "Krypto had the distinction of belonging to not one but two organizations of super-animals: the 30th-century Legion of Super-Pets and the Space Canine Patrol Agents." As if that weren't delightful enough, the latter of these groups, I learn, has a "battle cry and sacred oath," which goes:

Big dog, big dog, bow, wow, wow!
We'll stop evil, now, now, now!

Don't get me wrong, though; once I got over the goofiness, I kind of enjoyed these shenanigans. My implicit assumption that this was all going to be some sort of austere, Nordic meditation on mortality was in retrospect kind of preposterous, and if it's this or Frank-Miller-ish "grittiness," I'm not going to have to think too hard about the choice. I understand that this is meant to evoke the goofier sort of silver-age heroics with a contemporary sensibility, and in that respect, All-Star Superman definitely succeeds. And, you know, I don't want to suggest that it's purely goofy. The story sometimes captures genuine Wonder, and there are parts--even amidst the goofiness (such as the one intelligent guy among the mindless creatures of the Bizzaro World where one segment takes place)--that really have emotional resonance. Also, the stone-cold viciousness of Lex Luthor is, for want of a better word, Cool. The book is not what I feel like my platonic ideal of a satisfying superhero story would look like (the jury's still out as to whether there IS anything resembling such a thing in the real world), but I can't deny its artistry.

However, I do think there's a fairly substantial problem with this work as a story qua story, which is also why I think recommending it to newcomers, as people so often do, is somewhat wrong-headed. All-Star Superman is fairly explicitly meant as a tribute to Superman: to the idea of the character and to the ethos behind him and his storied history. Which is fine--but what it means is that the story more often seems to just be gesturing in the direction of the characters and their adventures--paying tribute to their existence--than it is actually embodying these things. The signifier is overwhelming the signified, you might say. So you have the aforementioned Atlas and Samson, 'cause hey, look at the kind of silliness that superheroes got up to back in the day! There's no effort to really integrate them into the narrative in any organic way. Likewise, Krypto the Superdog; the various Supermen from the Future; a villain called "The Parasite;" Luthor's psychopathic niece*--I could go on. As a result, there's a somewhat superficial, greatest-hits-ish feel to the whole thing. Don't get me wrong--if you're a long-time Superman fan, I can easily see how this could be absolutely delightful; pure manna from heaven. But the fact remains, by the very nature of the project, there isn't any sort of deep, cohesive narrative to suck anyone in who hasn't already been indoctrinated. I don't think it's impossible that someone could write a story that simultaneously pays tribute to the character and is also deep and compelling in its own right. But it wouldn't be easy, and 'tain't no sin that Morrison didn't quite get there (I would humbly suggest that there are a few duck stories that manage this sort of thing, though I'll freely admit that my perspective is totally skewed).

*Mainly because I haven't got the first clue what context there is for this very specific over-the-top gothiness (none in the story itself, that's for sure), this to me is the funniest thing in the book:

Fact remains, though, while All-Star Superman certainly went down smoothly enough, I ultimately only found it entertaining in an incomplete, not-entirely-satisfying way.

Duck Comics: "Micro-Ducks from Outer Space"

2011-04-03T01:33:00.001-04:00

Again, for Japan. I rant about how much people like James Randi annoy me! Fun for the whole family!

Adlai Stevenson Comics Revue

2011-04-01T00:04:00.001-04:00

Duck Comics Revue moves in an exciting new direction!

Not-really-duck Comics: Mickey Mouse Annual 11

2011-03-31T22:31:00.002-04:00

Mickey Mouse channels Hannibal Lecter, Horace Horsecollar gets horribly dismembered, and Clarabelle Cow poses naked, in this officially licensed Disney product. Fun for the whole family!

Alphaville, Forever Young (1984)

2011-03-30T21:48:00.003-04:00

Back in the day, when I was trying to figure out what kind of music I liked, I had a book called Musichound Rock: The Essential Album Guide (it was an older edition than the one in the link). The idea here was that, instead of just evaluating each album by a given act in methodical fashion, there would be little blurbs on what to buy, what to buy next, what's just for diehards, and what to avoid. Everything else would just be listed in a list sans commentary. Looking back, it's hard to see what possible justification there could have been for this decision, aside from "this is easier for us 'cause we don't have to write as much." Oh, and also, 'cause it's a "hound," albums are rated in "bones," from five at the top to "woof!" at the bottom.

The bigger problem, though, was that they let people with serious chips on their shoulders regarding various artists review said artists' oeuvres, resulting in quite a number of entries displaying a quite shocking lack of professionalism. One act so dismissed was German synthpop band Alphaville. Holy shit that dude hated Alphaville. I wish I knew where the book was so I could quote from it. But I believe nothing got more than one point five "bones." And because, ooh, it's in A Book, it has an air of legitimacy to it (or so I thought in my younger, naïver days), so I sure wasn't listening to Alphaville back in the day, I'll tell you that much.

And that SUCKS, because how perfect is the band's first album, Forever Young? Pretty much completely perfect, is the answer. Pure bliss. Seriously, I know most people don't have the sort of eighties-synthpop fetish that I do, but regardless, what kind of awful, joyless individual could possibly dislike this? I mean, okay, as the genre goes, it doesn't have the icy grandeur of your Ultravoxes or the political chargedness of your Heavens 17--and yes, what with being written by a non-native-English speaker, some of the lyrics get a bit silly on occasion (though nothing all that egregious), but does any of this matter?

Not when the opening "A Victory of Love" is being the most awesome piece of melodrama you've ever heard--just when you think it can't go any higher--bam, higher, until it breaks into the glorious "she's playing with love" refrain. Or when the similarly-awesome single "Big in Japan"* comes on. Or when it's "Sounds like a Melody," which completely goes nuts (in an awesome say!) in the final, instrumental bit. Or when…well, when anything else is playing, really.

*Some guy on the internet claims that the fact that singer Marian Gold is straight indicates that the song is NOT about gay hustling, in spite of the lines "I will wait here for my man tonight" and "Pay--and I'll sleep by your side." What an odd mindset.

Jeez. Seriously. Every song here is great. Admittedly, I haven't had a lot of luck (to this date) with getting into the band's later albums, but this is gold. Screw you, Musichound! You've betrayed me for the last time!

Duck Comics: "The Beauty Business"

2011-03-28T01:57:00.000-04:00

More Japan relief stuff.

My fantastic dreams: part something in a series of something

2011-03-27T17:07:00.002-04:00

I was in some library, and I passed by some guy who was watching, on a computer screen, some fox-news-type blonde whining about racism against white people (one component of which being, I believe, that we're not "allowed" to say "nigger"). For some reason, I knew he was watching this not because he agreed with it, but just to see the latest right-wing outrage. I shouted "fuck--us poor white people!" and went on wherever I was going. But alas, a librarian--an older woman--came up to throw me out for saying "fuck;" I was also given to understand that I might be required to participate in future sting operations to catch other people who use Bad Language. She was not impressed that I was a grad student. So I started bellowing profanity, even though I knew I was just making it worse for myself, and made my departure.

Happy 110th Birthday to Carl Barks

2011-03-27T16:20:00.000-04:00

I feel like I should have some sort of special tribute, but really, I have an entire blog that is essentially a Barks tribute, so I think I'm covered. He's the reason we're all here. The fact that Google has not prepared a special logo for the occasion is a travesty.

Duck Comics: "Search for the Cuspidoria"

2011-03-27T02:11:00.000-04:00

More Japan stuff.

Duck Comics: "The Salmon Derby"

2011-03-24T23:26:00.001-04:00

For my dad's Japan donation.