Know what you know you don’t know.
It’s one of those paradoxes that help make this such an interesting time: collectively, we know more than ever before; the facts at our fingertips double and redouble at a faster and faster pace, yet ignorance—appallingly smug, triumphal, aggressive—brazenly, stubbornly keeps up. Neal Gabler indulges in hyperbole when he calls the Bush administration a “medieval presidency,” but it’s judicious hyperbole. There’s a blatant disregard for facts (which are bunk and “stupid things”) that get in the way of truth (which you just, you know. Know). Call it an all-too-human turning away from the terrifying spectre of the things we know that we don’t know getting bigger and bigger every year, clinging to signals of our own devising, when signals grow so thick and furious we can’t begin to tell them from the noise. Call it an all-too-mendacious embrace of post-modernism at its slippery worst by a fatherly crew that self-righteously claims to know best. —But you can’t deny it’s true.
Well. I suppose you could. Rather the point, really.
So I commend this post over at The Early Days of a Better Nation to your attention. You might not agree with the conclusions reached by some of these struggling (and ex-) creationists, and you might think the drive to reconcile the Bible and science is doomed from the start, but I’d like to hope you’d be moved by anyone’s honest attempts to seek out the stuff they know they don’t know, to aggressively take in as many facts as they can find and hold their truths up against them and see what they can make of the mess.
Ne raillons pas les fous; leur folie dure plus longtemps que la nôtre… Voilà toute la differénce.
It’s not a perfect match. Then, what is? —But it’s well known, the love the Norquist-Rovian axis has for Mark Hanna and William McKinley and that golden Gilded Age of yore, and dire prognostications as to what the world will look like if they get their way (nasty, brutish, and Darwinistic) doubtless fueled the savage glee which attended a recent viewing of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd (George Hearn, Angela Lansbury, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 1982). “There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit and it’s filled with people who are filled with shit…” Yeah! you think. And Sweeney’s just the person to do something about it!
Um.
But it’s important, you know, not just to look to your own nightmares, but also the other side’s dreams. (Accepting for just this one quick moment the arrant fiction of a monolithic “other” “side.”) What sugar plums dance in Karl Rove’s head when he lays it on a 550–thread-count silk-and-cotton pillow? I couldn’t begin to guess with accuracy. But I can go searching for biographical information on Robert W. Chambers (in an unrelated matter) and stumble over the text online of perhaps his most famous story, “The Repairer of Reputations,” part of the King in Yellow sequence, regarding the effect that a rather disreputable play (“The King in Yellow”) has on those who read it:
If I had not caught a glimpse of the opening words in the second act I should never have finished it, but as I stooped to pick it up, my eyes became riveted to the open page, and with a cry of terror, or perhaps it was of joy so poignant that I suffered in every nerve, I snatched the thing out of the coals and crept shaking to my bedroom, where I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled with a horror which at times assails me yet. This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men’s thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the Lake of Hali, and my mind will wear forever the memory of the Pallid Mask.
But we were talking about dreams, and not dire prognostications. —This is standard stuff, 19th c. metafiction and pulpy Edwardian horror, all coy unspeakables and things seen in a glass, darkly, and indeed, Lovecraft swiped quite a bit from Chambers, who was (though this is not saying that much) the better writer. (Lovecraft was the better storyteller, and this made all the difference. —We later learn what became of the author of this play:
“I only remember the excitement it created and the denunciations from pulpit and press. I believe the author shot himself after bringing forth this monstrosity, didn’t he?”
“I understand he is still alive,” I answered.
“That’s probably true,” he muttered; “bullets couldn’t kill a fiend like that.”
(O! What author wouldn’t kill for this immortality?)
Dreams, then: Chambers launches “The Repairer of Reputations” with a utopian vision to be troubled by the undercurrents he roils to its surface with that infamous, unseen play, and whether it’s a deeply personal idea of utopia, a carefully constructed utopia of people whose politics he wishes to disparage, or a utopia slapped together from random memes plucked from the Zeitgeist, I couldn’t tell you—nor does it matter. For it is definitely a utopian vision of a 1920 to come, a clean and shining 1920 on a hill, as seen from Gilded 1895:
Toward the end of the year 1920 the government of the United States had practically completed the programme adopted during the last months of President Winthrop’s administration. The country was apparently tranquil. Everybody knows how the Tariff and Labor questions were settled. The war with Germany, incident on that country’s seizure of the Samoan Islands, had left no visible scars upon the republic, and the temporary occupation of Norfolk by the invading army had been forgotten in the joy over repeated naval victories and the subsequent ridiculous plight of General Von Gartenlaube’s forces in the State of New Jersey. The Cuban and Hawaiian investments had paid one hundred per cent., and the territory of Samoa was well worth its cost as a coaling station. The country was in a superb state of defense. Every coast city had been well supplied with land fortifications; the army, under the parental eye of the general staff, organized according to the Prussian system, had been increased to three hundred thousand men, with a territorial reserve of a million; and six magnificent squadrons of cruisers and battle-ships patrolled the six stations of the navigable seas, leaving a steam reserve amply fitted to control home waters. The gentlemen from the West had at last been constrained to acknowledge that a college for the training of diplomats was a necessary as law schools are for the training of barristers; consequently we were no longer represented abroad by incompetent patriots. The nation was prosperous. Chicago, for a moment paralyzed after a second great fire, had risen from its ruins, white and imperial, and more beautiful than the white city which had been built for its plaything in 1893. Everywhere good architecture was replacing bad, and even in New York a sudden craving for decency had swept away a great portion of the existing horrors. Streets had been widened, properly paved, and lighted, trees had been planted, squares laid out, elevated structures demolished, and underground roads built to replace them. The new government buildings and barracks were fine bits of architecture, and the long system of stone quays which completely surrounded the island had been turned into parks, which proved a godsend to the population. The subsidizing of the state theatre and state opera brought its own reward. The United States National Academy of Design was much like European institutions of the same kind. Nobody envied the Secretary of Fine Arts either his cabinet position or his portfolio. The Secretary of Forestry and Game Preservation had a much easier time, thanks to the new system of National Mounted Police. We had profited well by the latest treaties with France and England; the exclusion of foreign-born Jews as a measure of national self-preservation, the settlement of the new independent negro state of Suanee, the checking of immigration, the new laws concerning naturalization, and the gradual centralization of power in the executive all contributed to national calm and prosperity. When the government solved the Indian problem and squadrons of Indian cavalry scouts in native costume were substituted for the pitiable organizations tacked on to the tail of skeletonized regiments by the former Secretary of War, the nation drew a long sigh of relief. When, after the colossal Congress of Religions, bigotry and intolerance were laid in their graves, and kindness and charity began to draw warring sects together, many thought the millennium had arrived, at least in the new world, which, after all, is a world by itself.
But self-preservation is the first law, and the United States had to look on in helpless sorrow as Germany, Italy, Spain, and Belgium writhed in the throes of anarchy, while Russia, watching from the Caucasus, stooped and bound them one by one.
No, it’s not a perfect match; one doubts Norquist’s America would have a Secretary of Fine Arts, and we all know what Rove’s cadre thinks of being represented abroad by other than incompetent patriots. But it is a glimpse of the roots of the light at the end of the tunnel through which some seem determined to drive us.
Information wants to be free, fine—but art isn’t information.
Clay Shirky, an information and technology guru who’s written some really interesting and insightful stuff, has a mad-on against micropayments. For whatever reason, he doesn’t like the idea of charging users a small amount for content delivered over the web—his essay, “The Case Against Micropayments,” has been the go-to piece since it was written in 2000 for the camp that insists information wants to be free, and paying for content over something as immediate as the web will never work. Of course, no workable micropayment system has emerged since then—certainly nothing to match the grandiose dreams of 1998—so there’s been no need to say anything more on the subject.
Until BitPass. This simple system, still in its beta test, is gathering steam and making noise, so Shirky has updated his stance with an essay entitled “Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content.” Here’s the entirety of his argument against BitPass:
BitPass will fail, as FirstVirtual, Cybercoin, Millicent, Digicash, Internet Dollar, Pay2See, and many others have in the decade since Digital Silk Road, the paper that helped launch interest in micropayments. These systems didn’t fail because of poor implementation; they failed because the trend towards freely offered content is an epochal change, to which micropayments are a pointless response.
The failure of BitPass is not terribly interesting in itself. What is interesting is the way the failure of micropayments, both past and future, illustrates the depth and importance of putting publishing tools in the hands of individuals. In the face of a force this large, user-pays schemes can’t simply be restored through minor tinkering with payment systems, because they don’t address the cause of that change—a huge increase the power and reach of the individual creator.
He then goes on to say some interesting and insightful things about blogs and news, but almost nothing at all about art, and artists, and the power of fandom.
Shirky’s argument fails ultimately because he seems to see an audience’s need for art as a hole that can be filled by any old content: and if you can fill it with free content, why on earth would you pay? Sure, blogs will (rarely) be important enough to inspire their audience to plop down a dime for every entry—but a Firefly fan isn’t going to just as happily sit down and watch Fastlane just because they want some entertainment on a Friday night.
Luckily, Scott McCloud and Joey Manley are both there in the clench, with eloquent, powerful rebuttals. Dirk Deppey says he’ll have something to say on Monday. —But I’ve got to go to work at my day job right now, so that’s all you’re going to get from me at the moment.
Rising again.
Can we add “Utterly incompetent” to Fox’s new motto of “Wholly without merit”? I’m talking about the entertainment division, here, not the news division—though Lord knows there’s hardly been a difference, really. (Surely the only value derived from the Fox News Channel is a jagged, adrenaline-laden form of entertainment? Calisthenics for one’s rage? Like being chased by a pit-bull on one’s morning jog…) —After a couple of years of pre-empting Futurama at the drop of a second-string quarterback’s helmet, running new episodes unannounced in the dead of summer, at a 7 pm (or was it 7.30? No, wait, it’s 7 again. I think) timeslot that fit it about as well as its usual companion show, King of the Hill (a fine enough show in its own right, but what was the rationale? That they’re both cartoons?), after showing it so infrequently that the final season was stretched out over two broadcast years, Fox finally decided Futurama just wasn’t going to cut it. So they canned it.
The Cartoon Network picked it up. Showed reruns at the same time on a regular day. Promoted it. It’s a huge hit for them. Re-runs on TNT ain’t doing too shabby either. The DVDs are selling like hotcakes. “I think we came in ninth place twice in the past few weeks on just a random rerun at 11 pm on Cartoon Network,” said executive producer David Cohen to TV Guide recently. “And this is including broadcast TV. It’s astounding what a little promotion and regular airing will do for you. Maybe Fox is feeling a twang of remorse. Hopefully.”
Perhaps moreso, now that the Firefly movie is good to go.
Sci fi (and I use the Ellisonian bête-noir advisedly) is in a slump on television right now; westerns (horse-operas? oaters?) are non-existant. So the times perhaps weren’t auspicious for a sci-fi–western hybrid, for all that it came from the pen of (little director’s viewfinder-thingie of?) fanboy god Joss Whedon. Nonetheless, that’s precisely what Fox put out last year: and then they shelved the original pilot, ordering Whedon and his partner Tim Minear to whip out a Great Train Robbery riff instead, over a long weekend; then they proceeded to pre-empt episodes at the drop of a baseball glove, showed them out of order, skimped on promotion, and when they decided the ratings just weren’t impressive enough, they killed it with three finished episodes yet to air.
Firefly has since become a hit in Canada and England (and Mexico, and Denmark, and Australia, and South Africa, and…). The DVD collection of all 14 filmed episodes hasn’t officially gone on the market, but available pre-orders have sold out at Amazon—where it was apparently no. 3 on the sales ranking chart for a while. And there is the aforementioned movie deal. Over at Universal, instead of Fox. Cue Nelson-esque “Haw haw!”
I’m of two minds on the subject. On the one hand: yay. Firefly was just about the best SF television had produced in, well, a hell of a long time—only Farscape can give it a run for its money, but it took Farscape a year to hit its stride, and Firefly only got 11 (aired) episodes. (Deep Space 9—far and away the best of the Treks—had trouble sustaining runs of good shows, and only occasionally hit Firefly’s mark, much less the mark of Firefly’s potential. —Being unable to stomach wooden acting and leaden Arthurian parallels, yr. humble correspondent cannot adequately assess Babylon 5’s impact. Though he will allow as how those two alien ambassador guys had their moments.) The look of the show was a bracing mix of soleil noir—sort of what The Fifth Element was trying to do to Blade Runner—spaghetti-lite western, and Alien’s lived-in industrial æsthetic. Whedon’s ear for dialogue (and, by extension, that of his usual stable of thoroughbreds) proved as adept at folksy westernisms (in space!) as it had at his patented whip-smart teenspeak. And the ensemble cast did an impressive job of keeping the nine main characters and their interwoven relationships sharp and clear. (Unless, of course, muzzy ambiguity was called for. Which it was.) The episode “Ariel” was an engagingly messy look at betrayal and its consequences; “Objects in Space” had some truly impressive stream-of-consciousness treatments of murky psionic powers (or madness?); “Out of Gas” is just triumphant; and that pilot Fox shelved, casting a pall of doom about the whole enterprise before it ever got out of the gate—I already said something about the best SF television has produced?
But at the same time, I worry that it’s a television idea, not a movie idea. For all that the details weren’t carefully worked out—were there hundreds of colonizable planets circling a single star? Or hundreds of star systems with a never-specified faster-than-light drive?—it was a world to be explored. The ship itself was a world: those nine interwoven characters require a broad canvas to have some give and take; someone is going to get short shrift in a mere feature-length movie. And Whedon was edging up, in his usually sneaky, self-deprecatory, junk-culture kick-ass way, to a Really Big Idea.
Whedon has cited in a number of interviews the effect his professor Richard Slotkin had on him at Wesleyan, and Slotkin’s book, Regeneration Through Violence. With Firefly, I think he was starting to play directly with those ideas in an edgily dicey manner. —Set 500 years in the future, the show’s political setting was a none-too-subtle recreation of our own post-Civil War Reconstruction: the Alliance of rich, industrialized central or core worlds had fought a war to quell the rebellious, rural, economically disadvantaged outer planets. The rebel “brown coats” had been put down, the frontier overwhelmed, the Union cemented, and now all our heroes can do is scrape by from job to job, keeping a low profile. It’s a standard western setting, troped up into the future, yes—but that doesn’t account for the chill that went down my spine when, in the (second) pilot, as our heroes engineer their last-minute getaway, Mal (the captain of the ship, a former rebel who still defiantly wears his brown coat), smiles and tosses a bon mot at the villains of the set-piece: “Oh,” he says, “we will rise again.”
Jesus, I thought. Does Whedon know what he’s playing with here?
After all, playing by the rules of the metaphor, Mal maps onto the Confederacy—the rebellious, rural, economically disadvantaged butternut-coats that lost. And he’s stubborn, proud, independent, self-reliant, a rugged, gun-totin’ he-man, whose moral gut regularly outvoted the niceties of his ethics, and who nicely filled out a tight pair of pants. He is, in many ways, the sort of ideal idolized by reactionaries and conservatives, and his beloved brown-coat rebellion was everything the neo-Confederates claim of the poor, put-upon, honorable South.
“Oh,” he says. “We will rise again.”
But! Mal was also rather explicitly something of an antihero. Whedon calls his politics “reactionary”—oh, heck, at the risk of derailing my sputtering argument, let me quote him at length:
Mal’s politics are very reactionary and “Big government is bad” and “Don’t interfere with my life.” And sometimes he’s wrong—because sometimes the Alliance is America, this beautiful shining light of democracy. But sometimes the Alliance is America in Vietnam: we have a lot of petty politics, we are way out of our league and we have no right to control these people. And yet! Sometimes the Alliance is America in Nazi Germany. And Mal can’t see that, because he was a Vietnamese.
And there’s the world Mal and his crew and fellow travelers play in, where the folksy talk is peppered with Cantonese slang. Women work as mechanics and fight in wars. The frontier isn’t romantic; it’s hardscrabble, nasty and brutal. The Alliance isn’t Evil, just banal, mostly—and what conflict and oppression we see is driven not by race or religion or (admittedly homogenized) ethnicity, but class and economics, pure and simple.
Whatever it is that’s going to rise again, it sure as hell doesn’t look like the neo-Confederate dreams of the South.
The last batch of westerns—Peckinpah, Leone, et al (and yes, I know morally ambiguous began with John Ford, at least; let’s keep this simple)—rather famously took the straight-shooting archetype of the morally upright western hero: the cowboy, the marshal—and turned his independence and integrity and self-reliance rather firmly inside-out. And that was a good and even necessary thing to do, and anyway it made some kick-ass movies. But in savaging the happy macho myths America had told itself back in the 1950s, in trying to cut away the swaggering pride and racism and cocksure aggrandizement that landed us in Vietnam, among other things, we went too far. Hokey as it might seem, there was a baby in that bathwater. And what I think Whedon was doing with his SF western was very deliberately walking up to the other side of the kulturkampf and taking their idea of a good man—the independence, the self-reliance, the folksy charm, the integrity (cited more in breach than practice by the Other Side, whose idea of self-reliance means I got mine, screw you—but I grow partisan, I digress)—he was taking that idea of a good person, a person capable of doing good things, and giving it back to us.
And that sort of dramaturgical working is big enough you want the long wide canvas of a TV show, you know? Not so much two hours at the multiplex. Which is why I worry.
(On the other other hand, the relative luxury of a filming schedule, as opposed to the hurry-up-and-on-to-the-next-week schedule of television production, could prove a boon; I’m keen to see what Whedon can do when he really stretches himself.)
There was more, but it’s late. I was going to point out the episode where Mal fights the duel for Inara’s honor on the planet with the swords and the courtly manners and the genteel chivalry and how that plays into all of this, but it deals with the weak point of Inara and my brain’s muzzy, and anyway the ep while zippy and fun wasn’t one of Jane Espenson’s finer moments. So I’ll end with a smattering of links: here’s the Nielsen site. It’s hard to say what part the noted deficiencies in their methodology might have played in undercounting Firefly’s audience; they weren’t facing a language barrier, after all. But there are stations revolting, and viewers as well, fed up with the damage wrought by the admitted shortcomings of their monopolistic methodology. (Yr. humble correspondent had at one point considered a comparison of the beleaguered television fan, unable to watch the shows she loves, with the beleaguered voter, unable to vote for the candidate she needs. This will, perhaps, be left for another day.) —And I’ve saved the best for last: here’s Tim Minear, executive producer, writer, and director, who months ago posted a brusquely moving elegy about the last days of filming the show.
Anyway. It’s late. I’m for bed.
Looking forward to collecting what would be recollected later.
How could I have forgotten where to find that marginal note? Because I am a dolt, that’s how.
(I wonder, Van, why you are doing your best to transform our poetical and unique past into a dirty farce? Honestly, Van! Oh, I am honest, that’s how it went. I wasn’t sure of my ground, hence the sauciness and the simper. Ah, parlez pour vous: I, dear, can affirm that those famous fingertips up your Africa and to the edge of the world came considerably later when I knew the itinerary by heart. Sorry, no—if people remembered the same they would not be different people. That’s-how-it-went. But we are not “different”! Think and dream are the same in French. Think of the douceur, Van! Oh, I am thinking of it, of course, I am—it was all douceur, my child, my rhyme. That’s better, said Ada.)
Context is everything (“p. 120. parlez pour vous: speak for yourself,” offers Vivian Darkbloom). —Speaking of which, I shall now remedy the grave disservice of failing to note the delicious synchrony of wood s lot marking Diane di Prima’s birthday scant days after I picked up Memoirs of a Beatnik on a (prurient) whim. There’s frequent delicious synchronies to be found at wood s lot; this is but the latest, which leads us to di Prima’s website, and leads me to add One Too Like Thee to my list of Phantom Books to be Tripped Over Someday if I’m Lucky. (And one does get lucky: why, look! From a year-old number of the Nutmeg Point District Mail:
UNHISTORY AT LAST!
Tor Books will publish Adventures in Unhistory. The last book published during Avram Davidson’s lifetime will once again be available for the edification and pleasure of readers. Not a month goes by but your editor receives multiple inquries from would-be readers, collectors, librarians, and even booksellers seeking what has become a genuine rara avis among recently published books.
Further details, including publication date, will be announced as they become known.
(And though said details have yet to forthcome, this mere hint of an announcement is itself enough to kindle hope in a breast long since inured to stoney disappointment. My breath is yet bated, if not wholly held.)
So: to repair this divarication, I’ll return for a moment to Ada, or Ardor and note an instance of prior art, to be found on p. 86 (“strapontin: folding seat in front,” offers Darkbloom) of the Vintage International trade paperback edition:
Being unfamiliar with the itinerary of sun and shade in the clearing, he had left his bicycle to endure the blazing beams for at least three hours. Ada mounted it, uttered a yelp of pain, almost fell off, googled, recovered—and the rear tire burst with a comic bang.
Well. Okay. Maybe not. But still.
I (sometimes) write like a girl!
or, Shameless self-promotion.
It’s a fun little tool, the Gender Genie. Rich (of Brain Squeezings) took the algorithm developed by by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict an author’s gender, and turned it into a webapp (available here, but also here). (The algorithm itself is almost embarrassingly simple.)
Results? When I write about webcomics and cartoonists, I’m a girl. When I reminisce about college (and not so much Robyn Hitchcock), I’m a girl. When I rant, though, about war or the aftereffects of war (as for instances), I’m a guy. Unless I’m ranting about Ann Coulter, in which case I’m (just barely) a girl. But my fiction—my art; the word games nearest and dearest my heart—well, I’m a guy. Pretty much astoundingly so.
The algorithm tries (simply) to calculate the “involvedness” and “informationalness” of a text. Women, you see, write involvedly—texts that show interaction between the speaker/writer and the listener/reader; men, on the other hand, tend to indicate or specify the things they write about. (I’m not entirely certain why that’s an other hand, but I’m summarizing a paper I’ve only just skimmed, and being cheeky to boot.) The basic flags are based on statistical analyses of texts drawn from the British National Corpus—texts from the BNC have already been labeled for genre, and each word is tagged as belonging to one of their recognized 76 parts of speech. 123 male documents—excuse me, texts generated by men—and 123 texts generated by women were used; these included 179 nonfiction pieces, drawn from the realms of natural science, applied science, social science, world affairs, commerce, the arts, belief/thought, and leisure. Average length was just above 42,000 words, for a total of 25 million words; no single author wrote more than six of the 246 texts.
[Ed. note— My summary of the number of documents chosen is staggeringly wrong, as anyone who paused and took up a calculator could easily see. Please open the comments thread for further discussion by those more numerate than myself. The theory that follows, then, does not obtain as a criticism of the assumptions underlying the algorithm, which nonetheless continues not to live up to projections. Ah, well.]
In other words, I don’t doubt the analysis Koppel and Argamon performed is an accurate enough description of 25 million words of British English as it was used in the 20th century—reflecting the broad usage patterns of male and female speakers and writers. —But you’d think maybe something a little less narrowly focussed might be studied before proclaiming it a universal prescriptor. Eh?
There’s also the fact that correlations seem to be ignored utterly. It’s gender that’s the determinant, not the intended audience, not the school of writing, not the function to which it will be put. As a for instance: presume that texts written in the fields of natural science, applied science and commerce all require a higher degree than average of specificity, indicativeness, informativity. (A safe enough presumption.) Further presume, as one notes that the texts are drawn from those written or spoken in British English in the 20th century, that the sometimes extreme gender prejudice of that benighted age has resulted in the majority of those more specific, indicative, informational texts having been written by men—because women were disproportionately denied opportunities to advance in the fields of natural science, applied science, or commerce; their informativity isn’t represented in the sample not because they were women, but because they were Shakespeare’s sisters. —It’s far from settled, but that no attempt is made to correct for this sort of bias makes the prescriptive power of the algorithm and its underlying assumptions highly suspect. When coupled with the relatively tiny, focussed sample, it’s pretty much useless.
After all, my pieces on webcomics are about groups and relationships and schools of cartoonists, and so, involved; the bit on college is a memoir, and so personal, and so vague and unspecific and relational; political rants need to be specific and, one would hope, full of informativity (unless, it seems, they’re about Ann Coulter); and my fiction—at least, the two pieces cited, which, though one is first person and one is third person, both try for a specific, declarative, one doesn’t want to say clear or lucid or limpid or muscular (gack) style, but—well. Fiction is fiction.
Or is what’s between our legs more important to the shapes our words might take than the purposes to which we intend to put them?
(Overall, the Gender Genie’s running 60/40 in favor of Bzzt! I’m sorry. Try again—though I hasten to point out it’s an unscientific, self-reporting survey. Additional data points: the Spouse writes like a girl—even when she’s writing about strippers. Hmm.)
Shibboleths.
Kevin Drum has a good, if snarky, policy:
Personally, I would refuse to be baited by the kind of person who refers to paper notes as “fiat currency,” but hey—it’s Eugene’s blog and he can do what he likes.
“Fiat currency” is one of those buzz words—buzz terms, I suppose—that does, indeed, signal a certain je ne sais quois. The person using it is being persnicketily specific, to the point of spoiling for a fight: usually, about the gold standard. (Which would you rather have in your bank account: gold, or green cheese?) —Which reminds me of “valuta” (which seems much less buzzy these days), a term I recall from that portion of my youth spent poring over the pages of Robert Heinlein’s Expanded Universe, trying to glean The Truth. It’s sort of the obverse of fiat currency—rather than value imposed by government fiat, it’s value demanded by citizen fiat, usually that of cranky old men convinced the gummint’s stealing ’em blind. (They bite down on the gold coins you give them—they know the taste of gold, you see.) They also tend to refer to “the franchise”—at least, the cranky old men in my mind’s eye do, the ones so heavily influenced by Heinlein, and I really should stop making fun: while they might have quaint ideas about valuation, and a curious semantic failure when it comes to how government works, and for whom, they would be raising holy hell about crap like this, and holy hell is precisely what we need, right now. Of course, they’d turn right around and try to limit the franchise to those who can solve quadratic equations, or who own real property in fee simple, or give you a number of votes in proportion to the amount you’ve paid in taxes, but that’s a fight we can pick once we’re done putting a stop to this black-box nonsense.
There’s another phrase set rattling by this late-night influx of cranky old men with gold under their mattresses: “blood and treasure.” At first glance, it feels and smells like another one of those cranky old men shibboleths: blood and treasure, what we have paid and spilt, a measure of what’s owed to us. It’s got a nice Founding Fathers ring to it—the Monroe Doctrine, of course:
The political system of the allied powers is essentially different, in this respect, from that of America. This difference proceeds from that which exists in their respective governments. And to the defence of our own, which has been achieved by the loss of so much blood and treasure, and matured by the wisdom of their most enlightened citizens, and under which we have enjoyed unexampled felicity, this whole nation is devoted.
Which most likely cribbed it from John Adams:
July 1776 will be the most memorable Epoch in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with shews, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other, this time forward, forever more.
You will think me transported with enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost US to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these states. Yet through all the Gloom, I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see the End is more than worth all the means. And that Posterity will triumph in those days of transaction, even though we should rue it…which I trust in G-d we shall not.
Or maybe George Washington:
Shall a few designing men, for their own aggrandizement, and to gratify their own avarice, overset the goodly fabric we have been rearing at the expense of so much time, blood, and treasure? And shall we at last become victims of our own lust of gain?
What’s weird, and a little spooky, to me is that of all the references to “blood and treasure” that Google can find—7,930, as of 10.30 pm or so, Pacific Daylight Savings Time, August 6, 2003—3,250 of them also include the word “Iraq.” Almost half. —And while it’s not that surprising that almost half the references to blood and treasure found on the internet would refer to by far the largest and most active theatre of war in the internet age, and more than a few of those references are the sort of true-blue conservative, libertarian, isolationist, anti-imperialist, anti-preëmptive war stuff you’d expect from these cranky old men, still: there’s Colin Powell, referring to the price in blood and the price in treasure paid by the members of the Coalition of the Willing; there’s Richard Armitage, talking about the expenditure of blood and treasure; there’s the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talking about how it was us that put blood and treasure on the line for the people of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Perhaps there’s something in the water?
Of course, all of this blood and treasure makes me think of pirates. Which is maybe not the image this meme ought to conjure for maximum effectiveness in this particular case, but I’m a lost cause. (Blood? Treasure? Isn’t it more honest to make your purchases as you go, with sweat and valuta?) Thinking of pirates, of course, makes me think of Johnny Depp, and would you look how far afield I’ve strayed?
I should maybe just point you to this book on the art of money me and the Spouse picked up the other night. It’s true: American currency is ugly; the other currencies of the world are far more beautiful. More beautiful, even, than buttery, auric gold. —If we paid them with pretty fiat currency, that comes in rainbow colors and has those shiny anti-counterfeit strips, maybe then those cranky old men would stop writing letters to the editor?
Nah. The 7-11 would still refuse to take anything higher than a twenty. Where’s the justice, I ask? Where?
Essay question.
Please secure your copy of Suzanne Vega’s debut album, Suzanne Vega, and cue up the eighth track. Play the song through once, paying particular attention to the lyrics. (Those who have lent their copy to a friend and never got it back, or who realized too late it was in the glove compartment of the beater donated to save someone’s kidney, or who’ve left it at the office, or—God forbid—never owned a copy, are hereby directed to this handy crib sheet of the lyrics in question.)
Now. Take up your blue books and your No. 2 pencils—or open up the comments box and fire up your keyboard—and answer the following:
Who is the more sympathetic, the queen? Or the soldier? And why?
Remember: neatness counts, but panache counts more. And while there are no wrong answers, there is most certainly a right one. Or why else ask the bloody question?
A night at the movies.
I dithered over what to call this: “What we’re fighting for,” perhaps, or “Which side are you on,” or “The Family or the Sygn,” perhaps (again)—but all that’s reductive and simplistic and combative and decreasing the Us and increasing the Them and that’s not the point. —Though if I had alluded to Delany with that last title, I could have gotten in my dig at that study about conservative thought that’s mostly been (rightly) blasted, by pointing out how much more simply it could have been stated—has already been stated—
[A]ll human attempts to deal with death [fall] into two categories of injunctions: (1) Live life moment by moment as intensely as possible, even to the moment of one’s dying. (2) Concentrate only on what is truly eternal—time, space, or whatever hypermedium they are inscribed in—and ignore all the illusory trivialities presented by the accident of the senses, unto birth and death itself. . . . For each adherent the other is the pit of error and sin.
But what this is about, really, is a movie. One we just got done watching. An ambling, amiable epic: Le Destin, or Destiny, or Al Massir, written and directed by Youssef Chahine. It’s a loose historical about what might have happened when the Caliph Mansur banished the philosopher Abu Al-Walid Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Muhammad Ibn Rushd, or Averroës, for the crime of insisting that faith and reason did not need to be reconciled, as they did not conflict. Most of the plot swirls around the machinations of the fundamentalist cult promulgated by suave courtier Sheikh Riad and the attempts bumbling and not so by Averroës’ friends and family to see to it that his books—his commentaries on Aristotle and The Republic, his Tahafut Al-Tahafut, his Kitab fasl al-maqal—might be copied and smuggled into libraries in Languedoc and Cairo and out of danger from pyres and fanatics. Plus: beautiful scenery, great architecture, a cast full of eye-candy, bouts of derring-do, and song and dance numbers.
—Irresistable, in other words. (Movie Madness has a copy. [I should maybe have called this “A night in front of the VCR,” but it doesn’t have the same allusive panache.] I’d bet Scarecrow in Seattle does. It’s distributed stateside by New Yorker Films, so you’ve got a shot elsewhere, too.)
And yes, it’s long, and meandering, and heavy-handed, and digressive, and thuddingly obvious, and it doesn’t matter. The flick is “unusual even for a Western film in its espousal of liberal values,” as this review put it, and that’s true (sad, but). And there’s the unavoidable echoes and appalling ironies rung off the here and now—all unforeseen, from this, to this—that will leave you in the mood to ask cheekily leading questions like What are we fighting for, anyway? and Whose side are you on? Why do we mourn the burning of a book? Why must reason and faith be at odds? Why must there only be one side to every story? What is truth, anyway, and can you ask that question without washing your hands of it?
But I’m just getting silly. Of course you can. And it was a good movie; highly recommended. Soaringly achingly delicious Arabic orchestral pop. And I did mention the eye-candy?
—I should maybe just leave you with the thoughts of national treasure Ray Davis and get the heck to bed already.
So I’m more or less back.
Actually, it’s a toss-up: on the one hand, there was the jubilant chaos of the impromptu party on the little mezzanine balcony overlooking the lobby of the Embassy Suites: Jenn on the floor happily sketching away with Patrick Farley; various Pants Pressers littering couches and chairs hastily assembled into ad hoc conversational nooks: Jen Wang’s sprawled in Derek Kirk Kim’s lap for a photo, Erika Moen’s actually off in search of food, Vera Brosgol just stole my seersucker, I’ve got no idea where Clio Chiang went, and Bill Mudron and Dylan Meconis and Phil and I are trying to figure out this wacky Hamlet game Phil bought the last time he was in Oberlin. I’d drawn the ending where all the kids had to end up out of Denmark and safe, and my first step is getting Ophelia into a nunnery (go!); Phil decides Claudius is going to try to execute Gertrude in the first act (it didn’t work); Bill just wants Hamlet and Lærtes to fight, dammit (how do you solve a problem like Lærtes?); and I never did figure out what Dylan was up to. Craig Thompson stops by, but he can’t stay, and Justine Shaw’s been there all along, and I think that was Cat Garza, and was Indigo Kelleigh there for a bit, or am I confusing this whole merry mess with that first night at Dick’s? I’ve lost track. I’m trying to get Hamlet to France. —When Vera and Erika and Lori Matsumoto and a couple of other people return with hors d’oeuvres and pitchers of beer and Coke it turns out one of the writers of Pirates of the Caribbean is picking up the tab. Over there, smiling quietly, there’s Scott McCloud and Ivy McCloud and Larry Marder, and you know what? This is all their fault, really. In far more ways than one.
But the next day: the next day, Phil grabs me out of the booth Jenn’s sharing with Chris and he drags me halfway across the con floor until we find what passes for a quiet place—one side of a round table under Frank Quitely’s enormous poster of the Endless, in the concession block behind New Line’s schizoid, bloodsoaked forest—half massive shrine to The Lord of the Rings, half creepy recreation of that summer camp where Jason slaughtered so many promiscuous teens. (Apparently, Jason’s fighting Freddy in a movie later this year, which explains as much as anything can why that portly wizard and his vinyl-wrapped slave girl are both sporting bloody make-up furrows on the left sides of their faces.) —Across the table from me some kids are sorting their Yu Gi Oh! decks; up on the balcony three or four sunglassed Agent Smiths are surveilling the con floor, their hands on their earpieces. Phil drops a portable CD player and some headphones in my lap and says, “Play tracks 6, 12, and 18. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.” And so I do, and it’s a voice from way back when, Steve Espinola singing about googols in a way that some might denigrate as “mere” wit, as “only” clever wordplay, as if somehow they’ve missed the deep melancholy, as if they’ve forgotten language is the only game in town. So I close my eyes and shut out the smell of spilled mustard and listen to Steve sing about desperately needing to indulge in jubilant, merry chaos through the streets of Manhattan to wipe the tombstones out of the corners of his eyes, and I take my first deep breath in days.
The rest was mostly sex and death with the occasional comic book. Sex and death? Badges of, representations of, icons and eidolons: thrills not sought but sketched, gestured at, pointed to. Consumed. Colliding most often in the prevalent image, inked, airbrushed, modelled in Photoshop, of a sword-wielding, gun-toting woman, her thighs bared, her face either set in a grim rictus or a feral grin—but splintered and scattered throughout: post-pubescent boys in black Punisher T-shirts, fake 9 mils in their hands, browse blood-drenched Champions of Hell comic books while the booth proprietor snatches up his digital camera to zoom in for a close-up of the angel’s ass as she totters by on her six-inch Lucite heels; under her fluffy white wings (held up by an uncomfortable-looking armature of PVC piping), you’ll note she’s wearing her lacy G-string outside her hip-hugging translucent white tights. —Sex and death, and we can tut over the booth bimbettes in their slutty schoolgirl costumes and the swords and the guns and the white boy leers, we can ponder the wisdom of the woman wearing a decent-enough recreation of conquistador plate in the muggy San Diego heat, we can goggle at the tall thin guy in nothing but white socks, Keds, and his boyhood Spider-man Underoos, but we’re missing the point: it’s thrills. Not sex, but the thrill of desiring, and being desired. Not death, but the thrill of danger nimbly avoided in the nick of the last minute, and death cheekily mocked. Or as close as we can safely get, mind. Images, signs, and symbols; icons and eidolons; imagos and half-remembered fevre dreams. Other thrills are easier to realize more directly: the thrill of recognition (“I’ve been reading Bruno since 1996!”), the thrill of brushing fame (being growled at by Lou Ferrigno, and did Angelina Jolie ever fly in by helicopter?), the thrill of hanging out with your peers in your chosen art and the thrill of dropping names (though I never did meet Neil, sigh), the thrills of giddily sudden, Proustian nostalgia and cognitive dissonance, the thrill of finally tracking down the CD with that song that comes at the very end of Cowboy Bebop, the thrill when you realize this new comic really is as good as everyone’s saying it is (Blankets, that is—much like the same thrill when you first read Stuck Rubber Baby), the thrill of finding a brand-new comic or TV show or movie or game or idea—a brand new world—to fall into. To lose yourself in. We may be (however briefly) discussing the state of the comics blogosphere with Dirk Deppey, picking up Tria marker techniques, or dishing the current state of a micropayment beta test (quite healthy, apparently)—but we’re also hunting for the NeiA_7 soundtrack and peering in wonder at giant Japanese robots and when we giggle at the stormtroopers and Starfleet officers facing off for a minute in the middle of a crowded aisle, it’s as much in delight as it is—what? Scorn? Superciliousness? There but for the grace of God? —To pretend that our reasons for being here have nothing in common with whatever it was that brought that woman here in her G-string and angel’s wings would be—dishonest. For all that our respective cups of tea aren’t to each other’s liking.
Thrill-seeking we will always have with us. Comics—like gaming, like cartoons, like (to a lesser extent) movies—make up a potent toolkit for limning the signs and symbols of things too dangerous to confront directly, but nontheless desired deeply (and in many cases dangerous because so deeply desired). Comics allow us to harvest these thrills by brushing up against their illusions. There’s other things comics do well, quite well indeed—the unparalleled intimacy of what is essentially a handwritten note from the artist directly to you makes them ideal for memoir and autobiography, clefed or otherwise: Maus, Stuck Rubber Baby, One! Hundred! Demons!, Blankets, Eddie Campbell’s Alec MacGarry stuff, Derek Kirk Kim, etc. and so forth. And that’s just one of the other things. But it’s the thrills that pull at us (all of us) the most strongly, whether it’s a wittily sophisticated recontextualization or a crude depth charge. Giggle in shock, and tut and frown and look on with concern—there’s a lot to worry about in those nubile half-naked angels of mayhem, those armored robot zombie berserkers. But think back to 1986, or 1990, even 1995 or 1998, and look at what else is going on now, how radically comics are opening up old-fashioned assumptions of what thrills are sought out, and who’s allowed to seek them. It’s not without its problems; hell no. Nothing’s ever perfect. We’re dealing with desire, after all, and desire’s inherently destabilizing. But it’s opening up to let more people in, and that’s as close to a definition of progress as I can come at the moment.
I think I’ve been listening to that last Cowboy Bebop song too much already: “Everything is clearer now, life is just a dream, you know, that’s never ending… I’m ascending…” Whatever. —Look at it this way: the population of a middlin’-sized town came together in the massive barn of the San Diego Convention Center to create a space safe enough for those who want to dress up in Spider-man Underoos or a faux fox tail or a full-on Imperial Stormtrooper’s kit to do so. To flirt with, put on, play with all those eidolons of sex and death, trouble and desire. It’s appallingly geeky, embarrassing, hysterical, hypocritical, stupid, gorgeous, impressive, deadening, exhausting, enervating, infuriating, magical, dull, quotidian, cool, dorky, depressing, distressing, lame, and inherently subversive.
It’s just it doesn’t stop with the stuff you or I might want subverted. Caveat emptor.
If it’s comics you’re after, though, you might enjoy APE or SPX or MOCCANY more. Apples and oranges and kettles of fish of a different color.
(The runner-up? And a close one, too. Wasn’t even a night in San Diego. The night before we got there, in LA, we’re in the theater at the top of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Jenn and I, and Lori and Patrick and David Wilson, watching “Our Lady of the Sphere.” But before that—before that, Patrick had brought a tape of the old Isis show—remember Isis? And we watched a couple of episodes of that, howling with glee and disbelief at the acting and the costumes and the trite morals and the Filmation danger music that was beaten into the coils of my lizard brain so very long ago. Saturday morning madeleines. —It’s a deliriously enchanting place to visit, but would I want to live there?
(Do I have any choice?)
We are all pirates now.
Me, I’m perversely looking forward to catching Johnny Depp as he sashays through the Caribbean. I thought the Pirate Shop was great, even though we weren’t supposed to have been in there, and next APE I’m going to make sure we have time to poke and prod. I’m looking forward to Talk Like a Pirate Day.
It is, after all, because I’m a pirate; we are all pirates now.
(Then, Cory Doctorow wonders about, you know. The real pirates.
(Oh. Them.)
Something to keep in mind.
Often we grow impatient with epic poems. Too long, we feel—all those irrelevant interruptions, those additions, conventions, invocations, interpolations, those stories and speeches, catalog and dull history. But these are all part of the journey, the reader’s journey on his long way around. For just as there are epic poets, involved in the task of creating, and just as there are epic heroes, who labor to create, so also are there epic readers. And all those digressions and history and stretches of catalog, all those elements of the poem which image the vastness and variety of the real world, allow the epic poet to involve the epic reader in the meaning of the poem, which is the immense difficulty of getting there and the driving necessity to go. The great length of the epic, the vast meandering, is meant to communicate the laborious and perhaps futile effort of the hero and poet to master all the stuff of history and experience. For whether one is an epic protagonist caught in the massive world of contingency, or the epic poet trying to bring order from the chaos of mankind’s memories, or the epic reader trying to get through the long poem, in each case one is attempting to limit the seemingly limitless, striving to control and master the seemingly endless. The reader’s confrontation with the huge poem imitates the epic hero’s confrontation with his vast world, and in both cases man’s need for control and his need for completion are stretched to their utmost.
—A. Bartlett Giamatti, professor of English, President of Yale, and Commissioner of Baseball, in Play of Double Senses: Spenser’s Faerie Queene. And speaking of public intellectuals, isn’t something amiss when it seems quaint and old-fashioned, amusingly unlikely, perhaps inefficient, that a professor of English, President of Yale, and critic of epic poetry would also have been Commissioner of Baseball?
The not-entirely-safe-for-work players present:
Some drip has observed the reactions of 52 women and 38 men to two-minute snippets of pornographic films (interspersed with landscape photography as a control) and from this has come to the conclusion “that [straight] men tend to get excited by images of women, gay men are aroused at images of men—and women, well, they seem to like them both.”
Oh, for God’s sake.
It’s something of a parlor game these days to take down the shortcomings and absurd leaps of logic in “soft” science studies like this one. —A game that skirts perilously close to anti-intellectualism, yes, and one that depends on skimming and generalizing from puffed-up grant-grubbing attention-grabbing press releases rewritten by sensationalist editors trying to justify the Science section of the paper to the next quarterly budget review rather than actual, you know, studies, with footnotes and cites and such; it’s a parlor game, after all, and not to be taken seriously. But studies purporting to examine sex, gender, and sexuality are unbelievably ripe for this sort of take-down, this armchair quarterbacking, this huffing-and-puffing-and-Fisking-your-house-down moralizing. Sex and gender and sexuality are unbelievably important in how we define ourselves, after all, and for a lot of us in this unevenly distributed 21st century floating world, it’s contested to an unprecedented degree: how we define it, how it defines us, how others do both. We cherish our myths and received wisdoms, hold them closely, and fail to see how they blind and blinker our supposedly objective judgments. (As a not entirely fair example to J. Michael Bailey [whom I’ve already called a “drip,” so it’s a bit late for civility, I guess], I offer up this take-down of Eric Raymond’s inexplicably well-received but thoroughly amateur study of “bad porn” from a whiles back—as an example of the short-circuits of logic that creep into one’s supposedly objective investigations of one’s troubled desires.)
So. Let’s amuse ourselves by shredding Bailey’s study, since, after all, it purportedly challenges myths and received wisdoms that I myself hold dear.
The sample size, for one, is terribly tiny. 52 women; 38 men. —Not in and of itself a crippling factor, when dealing with, say, the measurement of a brute force—whether one’s aroused or not, for instance. The criteria for arousal have been carefully defined. It’s either there or it isn’t, right? So long as you’ve been scrupulous in your selection process to weed out any selection factors that might bias the results, and there’s a body of research to compare it with and the expectation that the study will be repeated to check its results, there’s no reason why one can’t speculate from such a small sample size.
But while arousal might be a brute force, the psychology behind it—what triggers it, and how, and how we react to it—is quicksilver slippery. What was done to link what was being measured—girth, or darkness (basically, increased blood flow to spongy tissues in both cases)—with the thing purportedly studied—the brain, and its construction of and reaction to the arousal? What was done to establish a benchmark between the male and female scales, to allow for accurate comparison? How were potential differences in physiology accounted for? (Hmm. Maybe we do need a larger sample…) A brief reference is made to transsexuals who took part. Why only male-to-female transsexuals? And how was that benchmark established and compared, and how were those physiological differences accounted for? And how many were tested?
Also, any such study that makes no mention of cultural factors is automatically not just suspect, but ridiculous. Ours (here in this unevenly distributed 21st century floating world) is a culture based rather heavily on the [straight] male gaze. It’s getting better, Lord knows, and hurrah for that, but. The default image of what is sexy and sexual is the female form. Women grow up and construct themselves and their sexualities in a cultural environment which lauds, applauds, and constantly hypes images of women as being sexy and sexual. Sexualized imagery of men is nonexistent, or carefully ghettoized—or sexualized in much more heavily coded and subtextual ways. Also, think of the relative levels of hostility in the culture at large to the ideas of male homosexuality versus female homosexuality; think lesbian chic and [straight] male fantasies; look to which sex is more likely to fall back on “gay panic” as a defense in assault cases. It’s not hard to construct alternate theories to explain the results of this study that don’t leap straight for the hardwiring of male and female brains.
And: to think one is measuring someone’s reactions to sex and arousal, the decisions they make in their lives dealing with and based on desires articulable and unacknowledged (“Since most women seem capable of sexual arousal to both sexes, why do they choose one or the other?” Bailey asked. “Probably, for reasons other than sexual arousal”), by measuring their reactions to porn, is, well, it’s easy to quantify, perhaps, but it’s also rather like drawing conclusions about the circumstances of people’s lives by noting their movie preferences. (“He likes buddy movie action comedies, so his life must be madcap, a little stressful, and replete with non-threatening homoerotic subtext.”) —And hey: what kind of porn was used? Soft-focus dimly lit red shoe erotica, or sweaty grindhouse hardcore? It does make a difference—after all, males are supposedly attracted solely to visual stimulus, while females supposedly require situation, character, and emotional interaction. Or was this bit of conventional wisdom not taken into account?
A lot of the answers to these questions are doubtless to be found in the more detailed write-up of the study. And just because we can construct alternate theories doesn’t mean we’ve invalidated Bailey’s theories; it just means we need to test and re-test, refine and come at it again, and compare and debate and compare some more. —However, his contretemps with the Washington Times demonstrates why this is unlikely. Studies of sex, gender, and sexuality, after all, deal with terribly important, hotly contested issues of self-definition. It’s no wonder people get all het up over them. But it’s no excuse to hide our heads in the sand and pretend we know everything already and there’s no use studying what turns us on, and why. Otherwise, we just end up with our cherished myths and received wisdoms reinforced by whatever soundbite memes break through our attention span, and horny frat boys get to use clippings like this to try to convince their girlfriends that really, she’d like a threesome if she’d just, you know, try it.
What it comes down to: and this is as much if not moreso on Lucio Guerrero’s shoulders as J. Michael Bailey’s; Bailey’s not entirely responsible for how the Sun-Times chooses to hype his study’s hype, but: the first line of the article is worthwhile, and says something about the research that we can accept at face value: “When it comes to watching pornographic movies, it appears women are less selective then men.”
After that?
Feh.
(Says me, with my cherished myths and received wisdoms clutched to my bosom. Fuck l’difference! Biology is not destiny! La la la I can’t hear you! —Your own mileage may, of course, vary.)
And you will know me by the peals of laughter.
Past the halfway mark in the new Potter (I’ve also been prepping a kitchen for priming and painting this week and prepping my office to put in a new ceiling, and there was that rented copy of Topkapi we had to watch, so I haven’t been lying around reading all day as I’d otherwise like to have been) (and oh, yeah, I’m not spilling much by way of beans, but if you haven’t yet dug in and want to remain hermetically spoiler-free, you might want to take a pass on this one), and I’ve been amusing myself by pondering: how on earth—given the spectre of leave-no-child-behind teaching-to-the-test education reform haunting the book, the problems caused by officious politicians too small for the task at hand running around doing something because being seen as doing something right now is better than taking the time to think about what it is you really ought to be doing and why, to say nothing of haring off after convenient “bad guys” that can be found and caught and dealt with rather than facing up to more difficult and inconvenient though much more dangerous antagonists, the running thread of Big Content journalism being co-opted as governmental propaganda, and the overarching threat of Voldemort’s ideas as regards wiping clean the wizarding world and drowning its ministries and education system in the bathtub—I’ve been amusing myself, see, in between turning pages with an enjoyable alacrity, by trying to suss out how, exactly, the usual suspects will get around to spinning this as Harry Bush. (George W. Potter, perhaps, for those of a less juvenile bent.)
It hit me, yesterday, as I was working my way through my second cup of coffee. Ladies and gentlemen of the various pundit watches, your assignment, should you choose to accept it: keep a weather-eye out for the first to take us liberal nattering nabobs of negativity, who insist that those pesky WMDs were never there, and this is a problem, and, hem hem, compare us with Dolores Jane Umbridge, Undersecretary to the Minister of Magic and High Inquisitor at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, asking impertinent questions at all the wrong moments and just generally getting in the way of George W. Potter and his plucky Coalition of the Phoenix, keeping them from Doing Whatever It Is That Needs Getting Done.
—Until then, back to Severus and the Order of Phoenix. —I mean, Harry. Yeah. (Snape does not yet seem too terribly incorporeal, Sam. And Julia: you still owe us some theorizing, unless I missed it. Pony up, would you?)
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern walk into a bar.
The two guys: and you should know that “guys” is being used in its gender-neutral sense. (It does have one, and that sense, I think, is growing. Saying “Oh, come on, guys,” to a mixed group is not unusual, and includes the girls as much as the boys. Encourage its neutrality, says I.) The two guys, then: a terribly common and terribly ancient trope. (One hesitates and in the end does not say universal, mostly because while one is sometimes cheeky, one isn’t stupid.) It’s more interesting when stuff is happening in a—story, shall we say—to be able to talk about it, banter, crack jokes, bitch and moan—and so it’s axiomatic that two characters are more interesting than one. (Three, however, is not necessarily better than two. Four gets downright muddled, unless handled with great skill.) And because we like to be able to tell the difference between A and B, apples and oranges, a hawk and a handsaw, it’s only natural that of these two the one should end up as foil to the other—and naturally enough, vice versa. This isn’t to say that the one must always be funny, and the other dour; one stolid, and one flighty; one cynical, and one earnest; one earthy, and one spiritual; one loud, and one quiet. This isn’t to say that there’s an ur-This and an ur-That to which all such pairings hearken. Merely that, of whatever thing(s) the storyteller (story?) chooses to kick around with the two guys, well, one of them will be on the one side; the other on the other. Just the way things fall out: dichotomy, you know?
Still: it’s fun to map this pair onto that and see what overlaps we find.
—I’m spurred to this line of thought by Molly and Griffen, the protagonists of the Spouse’s sci fi slice-o’-life picaresque. Which is, perhaps, self-indulgent—but if that surprises, hell. You probably shouldn’t be reading blogs. Anyway: Griffen, of course, is C3PO, which makes Molly R2D2. That means that Dan’s Molly, then, and Casey’s Griffen. Scully would be Dan, and Mulder Casey (I’m thinking less of essence than affect, mind); Ponch would be Mulder, and Jon would be Scully. I can never remember which is Starsky, and which Hutch, but Bo is Ponch and Luke is Jon, assuming Bo’s the blond one, and that means Dana’s Bo and Natalie’s Luke, though I don’t think hair color’s all that reliable as a flag of which is which. (Xena and Gabrielle don’t really work so well as two guys, but I don’t think that’s because of subtext. Please.)
And Guildenstern is clearly Griffen; Rosencrantz, indubitably Molly.
Jenn’s between chapters, so she’s let Barry come in and do a short story, “The Argument,” which will be running at Girlamatic for the next couple of weeks. Does this mean that we now have two sets of two guys—Barry’s, and Jenn’s—standing metafictionally at either side of a stage, spinning coins? Not so much, I don’t think. (Every conceit has to break down somewhere.) But I am amused—heartily—to note the extent to which Barry adores Molly. Dotes on her. Lavishes attention upon her. Jenn loves her ladies as equally as anyone can, but Molly’s quiet, stolid, earnest, earthy, and spiritual: she’s not the showboat Griffen is. (Though Molly’s the highlight of one of the more beautiful bits of drawing thus far.) Yet give Barry the reins, and there’s Griffen, perched on the arm of a sofa, in the background, and look how Molly shines.
Then, push comes to shove and we get down to cases, I’m a Griffen partisan. So of course I’m going to be struck by something like that.
You know what I mean?
À la recherche du temps perdu.
There’s this smell—
Okay. So you’ve just eaten a bowl of Wheaties. And you’re in a hurry, you’ve got to get out the door and catch a bus to go to work. So you dump the bowl in the sink and make some half-assed promise to yourself to wash it when you get home. But you go out after work and there’s some beer or maybe you go to that place just up the street which has the Tom Waits which is basically a Manhattan made with Knob Creek and it’s blasphemous on a number of levels and pricey to boot, but who cares while you’re sipping it and admiring the shrine to the Unknown Gentleman Caller up there above the restrooms, but the point is there’s drinking and conviviality and you roll in late and wake up bleary and dash down some coffee because, you know, you have to catch the bus to go to work, and you’ve just barely got time to maybe catch a bagel on the way in, and then that night, let’s say it’s Friday night, you’re going out with some friends, maybe a video festival at somebody else’s place, and whether there’s booze or not doesn’t really matter but there is more conviviality, and you end up rolling in late again, so it’s Saturday morning after a cup of coffee before you’re ready to deal with the sink where you find that bowl you ate the Wheaties out of a couple of days before, and did I mention it’s summer and you don’t have air conditioning?
So you blow off the bowl and the rest of the dishes and head back into town, maybe go to Powell’s, there at the edge of Portland’s Pearl District, and this is back in 1998, by the way, or early 1999, when Anodyne was still hitting the streets and the Blitz-Weinhard brewery was cooking up a batch of Henry’s every couple of days—late nights or even some early afternoons you could wander through the streets of the Pearl accompanied by the musical clink of empty bottles shuttling at a mad pace along the conveyor belt that stretched over 11th (I think it was 11th) from one building to the next, and when the batch being brewed had hit just the right point in its zymurgic maturation, well, that whole little pocket of refabbed light-industrial and warehouses-becoming-lofts and hole-in-the-wall diners and nautical supply shops and the biggest used bookstore in the world would all pretty much smell like that dried-out faintly fermenting bowl you’d eaten the Wheaties from a couple of days before. (Cf. a half-eaten bag of Fritos; also, gym socks under certain difficult-to-reproduce conditions.)
Blitz-Weinhard is gone now. Henry’s is brewed in California somewhere, by Miller, and the old brewery buildings they didn’t tear down are being refitted as lofts and offices and upscale retail. They’re doing a better job of it than not—certainly, it’s a better world there than the one where Paul Allen replaces Memorial Coliseum with a fucking big-box retail park Jantzen Beach clone. There’s a grocery store downtown, now—pricey, and with a nasty labor-relations history, but they stock Bert Grant’s IPA and green wine, so color me conflicted—and if some of the new builds are ugly as sin, some of the refits are temptingly neo-urban hipster cozy—railroad lofts with reading lights shining cheerfully through hazy glass-brick walls opening onto loading docks, that sort of thing.
And the smell is gone. But.
Yes, it’s a story as old as real estate: as a city grows and its infrastructure improves, the transportation hubs and industrial nuclei can be shunted from points downtown to outlying campuses (in this case, various industrial parks heading up the Willamette River from Swan Island to Rivergate, at the confluence with the Columbia); the old warehouses and factories left behind close and decay, rent out dirt-cheap to artists and other disreputable bohemian types, and funky restaurants spring up and shut down and spring up again, galleries open, people start taking to its funky recycled industrial charm, the exposed brick and rusting I-beams and roads laid with railroad tracks so boxcars full of grain and bone meal can trundle through the streets at midnight making deliveries to the factories still manufacturing and the massive amounts of open square footage at low low monthly rates; somebody organizes a regular open gallery night, First Thursday of every month, the galleries get giddy, there’s cheap red wine and Ritz crackers a go-go, buskers start showing up, and there’s upscale galleries showing aggressively minimalist stuff in white white rooms cheek-by-jowl with scrappy low-rent award-winning photo studios and the just plain weird shit, like the art cars and that old warehouse that had the row of ratty theater seats sitting on the loading dock and the perpetual indie-rock band practicing in a loft somewhere upstairs (drums and bass echoing in the duct work, unseen guitars crunching to life and stuttering to a stop as the song stumbles and falls over and gets back up again) and the stuff, the stuff on the floors and the walls, light bulb sculptures and weird Da Vinci wing-things and giant canvasses like what Cy Twombly might have painted if Cy Twombly had been that stoner at the back of your junior high homeroom with the spiral-bound notebooks and that pen that clicks through four or five colors of ink. —You don’t want to know how much it costs to buy a condo in that warehouse now. Success raises rents, artists are replaced by boutiques, development money comes pouring in and if there’s a dot com boom that leads Wieden + Kennedy to relocate their offices smack in the middle of the whole shebang, it just exacerbates the process. And not to draw too deeply from the well of stereotype and cliché, but now there’s cell phones and sunglasses and lattés and valet parking for your SUV outside bars which still open on loading docks, and some of those old freight rail lines have been paved over because they were wrecking the suspensions of those SUVs. First Thursday is still a great walk, yes, and there’s loads of stuff yet to see and laugh at and be surprised by, and they still get the buskers and the sidewalk hustlers and the art cars. Heck, there’s even still a smell: William Pope.L has a branch of eRacism up at PICA, which involves paintings with peanut butter and mayonnaise, onions and pop tarts, a map made out of hotdogs, and a room full of liquor and stuffed animals. It’s been pretty rank walking past the ground floor of W+K these past few early summer weeks.
But it isn’t the same smell. —And there’s more missing: most of the local artists, for instance, who’ve chased cheap rents across the river to Northeast Alberta Street, where Last Thursday has something of the anarchic anything-goes vitality of First Thursdays gone by. Though not without doing some displacing themselves. —As old as real estate, then, and as cyclical as the seasons: though the first wave of boutiques in the Pearl District is starting to close now that the tide of dot com money has receded into memory, the second wave (more with the Thai restaurants and bank branches and less with the avant garde lighting solutions) is rolling in. And so (he said) it goes.
I was moved to sling these streams of consciousness about by the report in today’s Portland Tribune that the last freight rail car made its last delivery to pretty much the last working factory in the Pearl in the wee hours of Sunday morning: a cargo of pig, cow, and chicken carcasses for a bone and blood meal pet food factory. Cities change, and that’s good and that’s bad, and I’ve been living here for almost eight years—longer that I’ve ever lived in any one place before; perhaps that makes it all the more keen. There was something special about a downtown with an active industrial core intermixed with shops and offices and lofts. But that particular temp is now perdu; doff your hat as the rail car trundles by.
Just don’t wrinkle your nose too much. And watch out for the puddle of pig’s blood—that’ll be hosed down by tomorrow, never fear.
Let’s you and him fight.
It is at this point of anti-hierarchical anarchist debate that the correspondent from another football magazine chooses to ask Richard Essex if he is in charge. This really is the wrong question. Essex, kindly, lets it go and continues. “This is not just a case of scoring goals and it’s not just about footballing skills, other skills are required, too.”
Mainly, it seems, the skill to trick people from another team into thinking you are going to form an alliance with them. This is illustrated early on in proceedings when Jason Skeet of the AAA, calling for the ball, takes delivery of the pass and promptly scores in the goal of the side the pass came from. Embarassingly, this is the end that Goal is defending. More embarassingly, it is one of our representatives who has been so obviously and completely duped. Worse still, it’s me. It has taken a very short time to realise that with three sides playing one is going to be picked on. It is us.
That’s from a piece called “The Anarchist’s Ball,” an only slightly condescending description of the delightfully dotty game of three-sided soccer—rather, football. (Found while browsing Chris Bertram’s miraculously unbloggered blog.) Which puts me in mind of moopsball, for no particularly good reason—those adhering to the rules of moopsball as written by Gary Cohn (and, it must be admitted, as remembered by fallible me) would rather sniffily didain Richard Essex’s intrepidly interplanetary footballers; the sentiment, I imagine, would be rather heartily reciprocated. —Granted, the moopsballers would with their bicycles and Scadian armor and squeaky hammers probably eat the more gently anarchistic dissolvers of the homoerotic/homophobic bipolarity of two-sided games for lunch, but so what? Strength is for the weak, and easy travel to other planets always scores beaucoup style points in my book.
Oh—the comic book that mentioned moopsball was one or another incarnation of that venerable fan favorite, The Legion of Superheroes. Which, for some reason, ties it all up neatly for me in one strange and inarticulable pop-culture ball of thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
