Critical Apprehensions & Intemperate Discourses

Kip Manley, proprietor

Avast.

Just a quick note, in case y’all don’t pay much attention to the “Commentations” box in yon left sidebar: The Poet, one of the deejays for The Crystal Ship pirate radio station (1982 – 1984), has posted a neat little oral history of their piracy as a comment to an old post on Portland’s own Subterradio, and pirate (harrumph: “micropower”) radio in general. Check it out.

So here’s another one up for the Crystal Ship, and the PRA, and Free Radio Berkeley and Subterradio, and Liberation Radio, Radio Free Radio, the Voice of Laryngitis, the Crooked Man, WGHP (With God’s Help, Peace) and the Voice of the Purple Pumpkin, Secret Mountain Laboratory, the Voice of Voyager, Radio Ganymede, the Voice of FUBAR (Federation of Unlicensed Broadcasters on AM Radio), and WUMS (We’re Unknown Mysterious Station, perhaps the longest-lived pirate ever, who broadcast from 1925 – 1948, and whose equipment, upon retiring, was requested by both the Ohio Historical Society and the Smithsonian).

—Filed 7834 days ago to Indulgences; Comments.

Smoke; mirrors.

We will continue to differentiate ourselves from the industry by:

• Delivering value propositions that target end-user appearance and industrial [commodity] markets worldwide using our consultative selling approach;

• Focusing on product and service (customer value differentiation) to maximize margins;

• Building and maintaining inter-functional coordination between facilities, functions and customers to create and deliver value proposition requirements.

—key points from a marketing strategy for a [commodity] corporation

The word /smoke/ refers to a portion of content segmentation which we will conventionally designate as «smoke». At this point, we have three alternatives, whether intensional or extensional: (a) «smoke» connotes «fire» on the basis of an encyclopedia-like representation which takes into account metonymic relationships of effect-to-cause (a case grammar accounting for “actants” like Cause or Agent can represent rather well this sort of meaning postulate); (b) the sentence /there is smoke/ expresses as its content the proposition «there is smoke» which, always by virtue of an underlying encyclopedic representation including frames or scripts (see 3.2 of this book), suggests as a reasonable inference «there is fire» (notice that we are still at an intensional level, since the possibility of the inference is coded among the properties of smoke, independently of any actual world experience); (c) in a process of reference to states of the actual world the proposition «there is smoke», on the grounds of the aforementioned meaning postulates, leads to the indexical proposition «therefore here is fire», to be evaluated in terms of truth values.

—Umberto Eco, “1.7. The Stoics”
from Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

—Filed 7835 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comments.

Biff, pow, yadda yadda.

A good first effort, Mr. McGrath; I particularly like the group shot of some of comics’ eminences grises. There’s a couple of nuggets of genuine insight. Well done. Definitely a step up from “Bang! Zowie!”

But there’s still room for improvement:

• Your opening, for instance: the question of declining or expanding literacy is complicated enough at the present moment that fashioning from whole cloth a poetry-like decline of the novel in favor of comics makes you look a wee bit poltroonish. Also, if you’re going to cite highbrows that claim comics are “perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit,” do be so good as to name them and quote them directly. Otherwise, the brickbats we’d throw at them for snobbish provincialism and sloppy sloganeering will end up aimed at you, instead.

• Also, try to be a bit more au courant in your examples. I think the last Broom Hilda collection was printed in the mid-’70s? Your point is taken, and could as easily have been made with Foxtrot, or Zippy the Pinhead. (We’ll let the manga punt slide: authorities within the industry can’t wrap their brains around this phenomenon, either, so expecting more from a source like the New York Times is, perhaps, unfair.)

• If you’re going to set up an equivalence between “graphic novels” and “‘literary novels’ in the mainstream publishing world” (scare quotes sic), take care that later quotes don’t directly undermine your point.

• Regarding the “minor flowering of serious comic books in the mid-80’s”:

  But the movement failed to take hold, in large part because there weren’t enough other books on the same level.

  This is, without a doubt, the single most breathtakingly heartbreaking summation of the comics industry’s boom and bust that I have ever read.

• Kudos for noting Watchmen was drawn by Dave Gibbons. Points deducted for failing to note that From Hell was drawn by Eddie Campbell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was drawn by Kevin O’Neill, and Lost Girls was drawn by Melinda Gebbie.

• Have you seen many Persian miniatures? Have you seen the art for Persepolis?

• “Many practitioners of the form” do not prefer the term “comix.” Art Spiegelman prefers the term “comix.” The man deserves our respect and admiration, but there are limits.

• His name is Scott McCloud. Will Eisner is the cartoonist who prefers “sequential art.” You mention neither Eisner nor Jules Feiffer, nor their seminal comics A Contract With God or Tantrum. This is inexcusable. Failing to note McCloud’s Understanding Comics is less of a crime—you’re dealing with the literature itself rather than the criticism of that literature (stop trying to join split hairs, you in the back)—but it is suggested that you arrange to have read a copy before next tackling this subject.

• The graphic novel is a man’s world, by and large, though there are several important female artists (not just [Marjane] Satrapi, but also Lynda Barry, Julie Doucet and Debbie Drechsler). And to a considerable extent it is a place of longing, loss, sexual frustration, loneliness and alienation—a landscape very similar, in other words, to that of so much prose fiction.

  This is a worthwhile insight, unless I’m misreading “the landscape” when I apply to it the conditions noted throughout the paragraph, and not merely those ascribed directly to “a place.”

• Many more are set in the slacker world—the skanky Washington Heights neighborhood of Doucet’s My New York Diary, the coffee-shop Portland and East Village sublet of David Chelsea in Love, the diners, card shops and apartment complexes of Adrian Tomine’s West Coast—where people are always hooking up and breaking up and feeling both shy and lousy. It’s the pictorial equivalent of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity.

  This, on the other hand, is cheap and pandering. (Also, see above re: au courant.)

• Not every graphic novelist—to wed ourselves momentarily to the terminology out of necessity—has drawn stories about their masturbation, excessive or otherwise. (What works as a one-off joke should not be stretched into a paragraphs-long case study.)

• Ghost World the comic was, indeed, better than Ghost World the movie. (It’s surprising how many people get that one wrong.)

• Become more attuned to the ironies within your own work: on the one hand, you have highbrows sniffing at comics as “perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit”; on the other, you speak with graphic novelists (still wed) who describe their art as “an incredibly inefficient way to tell a story,” and note of their working process:

  “It involved maybe 8 to 10 seconds of actual narrative time,” he said. “But it took me three days to do it, of 12 hours a day. And I’m thinking any writer would go through this passage in eight minutes of work. And I think: Why am I doing this? Is the payoff to have the illusion of something actually happening before your eyes really worth it? I find it’s a constant struggle and a source of great pain for me, especially the last day when I’m inking the strip. I think, Why, why am I doing this? Whole years go by now that I can barely account for. I’m not even being facetious.”

• You have your reasons, yes, or rather there are reasons why it probably never occurred to you; nonetheless, I’m feeling parochial, and so I will dock you for not mentioning Grant Morrison when you name-check Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman.

• Given the context, you don’t need to explain what “a fair cop” means.

• Your point re: Blankets is well-taken, although you make precisely the same point a paragraph later, re: Adrian Tomine.

• Excepting (the astounding, the amazing, the incredible) Joe Sacco and Joe Sacco alone from your single paragraph summation of the strengths and weaknesses of the graphic novel makes you seem parochial, as if you’ve only read the books you’ve mentioned in this piece. It also lends too much emphasis to Sacco-as-exception, which is a recurring theme. The narrative that emerges—R. Crumb, social outcast and chronic masturbator, revives comics as a niche form of self-expression; many cartoonists who follow in his footsteps are also social outcasts and chronic masturbators; Joe Sacco is a well-spoken cartoonist with a comendable panoply of social skills; comics as a medium (or is it graphic novels as an idom? Or genre? Sloppy!), as practiced by these social outcasts, is not well-suited to lyricism or strong emotion, and does not take itself seriously (look at all those wanking jokes!); it therefore follows that only the comics of Joe Sacco, smooth, confident, jet-setting journalist that he is, are capable of proving this rule—this is just plain ugly, and detracts from the value of what has gone before.

• Admit it: you only read City of Glass because Paul Auster wrote the prose novel.

—Filed 7836 days ago to Sequentualities; Comments [8].

Defending marriage.

One of the reasons maybe why I’ve been quieter than usual of late is Creeping Disaffection. When Multnomah County first began granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples (including a number of friends and acquaintances of mine), I said something not unlike the following:

It’s brilliantly savvy theatre—every marriage solemnized in this blazing spotlight (as opposed to the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, that have been solemnized in Unitarian and MCC congregations and liberal synagogues and in the sitting rooms of bed and breakfasts and barefoot on the beach; wherever straights have gotten married, gays and lesbians have as well, for all you did to manage not to see them)—every marriage on the sidewalk outside the county offices in the rain with a news camera present puts a human face on this (thus far) largely abstract battle.

Gays and lesbians are an invisible majority, after all; the only time most of the country has to see them is acting up in sitcoms, or on the news, where every year the coverage of the pride parade skips over the gay police officers and the gay librarians and the gay government clerks and the gay senior citizens and the straight allies and zooms straight for the freakshow eyebite: the drag queen in the feather boa, the bare-breasted diesel dyke. (To trade in unfortunately broad stereotypes, which they do, of course; ignoring the obvious benefits these individuals bring to the world, which we shall take as read: we’re all choir here, for the most part, and this is going on too long already.) —Instead, the media has to focus on long lines of people just like everybody else lining up around the block for the same rights and the same dignity enjoyed by everybody else. Professionals and parents, besotted college students head over heels and sober old folks seeking recognition for half a century together, all of them just like everybody else, except—gay. (Meanwhile, in the background, a scattered handful of protesters behind yellow police tape holds up hateful signs. Radio pundits scream incoherently about intangibles, pushing buttons that don’t work as well as they used to. Respected conservative pundits in the field tell us we must oppress these people because gay sex is so much better than straight sex. It’s like heroin. No, really!)

(Which is why I’m not yet that worried about backlash this fall: Oregon is bigger than that, honest it is, and if the sky hasn’t fallen in because of same-sex marriages, we’ll leave well enough alone. —Always reserving the right to be bitterly disappointed, of course.)

Good thing I reserved that right. Oregon is not only not bigger than that, we’re downright petty little shits:

Not to be cynical or anything, but we’ve always sort of assumed that should the initiative to constitutionally outlaw same-sex marriage in Oregon get onto the November ballot, it was all over. Well, it seems that this afternoon anti-marriage forces submitted a record number of signatures:

Backers of a ban on gay marriage turned in more than 244,000 signatures Wednesday to place the issue before Oregon voters this fall. It was twice the number needed and the highest number of signatures ever submitted for an initiative measure in Oregon.

While there of course will be challenges to the initiative, the signature-gathering process, and the validity of signatures, the proposal needs only 100,840 valis signatures to qualify. That more than twice that number were submitted virtually guarantees that voters this Fall will have the option of enshrining discrimination and unequal protection into the Oregon Constitution.

Oh, there’s been good news since then, and one can always hop up on a soapbox and unleash a hail of thundering invective—and there’s nothing like stupid, heartless, thoughtless bigotry to fuel some truly inspired mockery. But it’s sound and fury in the face of implacable fear and ignorance, which will enshrine bigotry in our constitution and strip (largely theoretical, yes, but) rights from neighbors, friends, family members. And the certain knowledge that this is nothing but a freakshow reflex, a thrumming of nausea through the body politic that will pass and leave its fervent supporters and ridiculous logic clinging to the liner of the dustbin of history is cold comfort; it’s hard to look forward to yet another Measure 14 at some point in the years to come that will strip this foulness away (and we will pat ourselves on the back once more: isn’t great we’re so much better than we used to be?) when what we want is decency now, goddammit.

When I’m directly engaging whatever it is I’ve chosen as the Other Side of the Moment, I’ve lately been trying hard to keep Tarantino 25:17 in mind: I try, real hard, to be the shepherd. (Not least because it means I’m actually the tyranny of evil men, and the Other Side of the Moment is weak; we all need our power fantasies.) —It’s hard to make the Other Side of the Moment see the light when you’re sneering at them, and this is why 90% of all internet punditry is less useful than a hill of beans (at least you can eat the beans). But when it comes to the anti–same-sex–marriage crew, I’ve got nothing but a sneer. (I take some little solace in the fact that folks much better than I have lost their patience on this score—and quite eloquently, to boot.)

Now, if you’re a snowball that’s somehow chanced upon this particular hell, and you for whatever reason can’t countenance same-sex marriage, well, I’ll apologize for my sneer; I’m craven enough in my convictions to feel badly about doing it to your face. But you’re backing the wrong play, morally, historically, pragmatically—if you really want to defend marriage, for God’s sake, it makes much more sense to throw your weight behind something like this—

Stigmatize adultery. Roll back no-fault divorce. Rail against quickies, planned at midnight for a 1 a.m. wedding. I’ll still fight you tooth and nail, but at least I could have some little respect.

(Defend marriage? You pathetic, deluded fools. Same-sex couples have been getting married all around you for decades, and they’ll keep on doing it, long after you’ve passed your little amendment. Men will kiss their husbands as you clap yourselves on the back, and wives will continue to feed each other cake, whether you will it or no. They’ve always had the love and the cherish and the honor, and the recognition of their friends and family, and nothing you can do will take that from them. Nothing. All you’ll manage to do is rewrite the tax code. Make it more of a grinding hassle to deal with insurance and wills. Keep loving families apart at times of illness and accident and death. Condemn children to needless, nightmarish legal quagmires. You will tarnish all our rings, and when we open our mouths to take our vows, we will taste ashes. —In order to save marriage, you will destroy it. Fools.)

—Filed 7837 days ago to Squawkbox; Comments [10].

All this and ego, too!

It’s a miracle traditional American comics get made at all (and still with the same characters they’ve had since the fucking Boer War or something. Mister Terrific! How can these things still exist? What monstrous act of love and will keeps a comics ‘universe’ alive for so long, against the odds?). They’re the last bastion of something, that’s for sure, but it’s hard to imagine them, through the compound eyes of future eons, as anything other than a curious example of primitive, hand-drawn ‘virtual reality’ technologies. Most of the people who do this kind of work, do it out of love, like the love you’d show to an ailing friend.

That’d be Grant Morrison, and this helps explain why he’s on my shortlist of all-time favorite comics writers ever.

—Filed 7841 days ago to Sequentualities; .

Revolver (six).

“I don’t have any whisky,” may be a fact but it is not a truth.

—William Seward Burroughs

Where were we?

Adam Roberts wrote a good book badly, or at least wrote a book that wasn’t the sort of book I’d wanted to read, and thought it was. Hagen, son of Alberich, pointed out a couple of ravens to Siegfried, and when Siegfried turned to follow their flight, Hagen stabbed him in the back with a spear. Roberts, in the guise of one Kurt Soldan, managed rather thoroughly to misunderstand not only the point but also the particulars of Schrödinger’s cat. Shocked and awed by their defeat at the hands of the French and British and Americans, humiliated and demoralized by the crushing cavils of the Treaty of Versailles, various disparate elements of German society enthusiastically took up the image of the heroic German soldier, stabbed in the back by dastardly November criminals: trade unionists, communists, Jews, liberals. (General Erich Ludendorff sneered, “I have asked His Excellency to now bring those circles to power which we have to thank for coming so far. We will therefore now bring those gentlemen into the ministries. They can now make the peace which has to be made. They can eat the soup which they have prepared for us!”) Incensed at the defacement of a Time magazine cover, Cerdipity drew a cartoon which showed a Democratic peacenik running away after having stabbed an American soldier in the back. (Journalist Joel Engel sneered, “Someday, though, a populace provoked by the left’s constant fire-breathing may look for a dragon slayer who won’t go quite so easily.”) Soured by the world as it is, humming those lines Morrison stole from Morrisey—“There is another world. There is a better world. There must be”—I picked up a book by Adam Roberts and was profoundly disappointed right from the get-go, so I sat down and tried to figure out why. What was I looking for? What was I missing?

I swear to God there was a there in that the last time I looked.

Let me try again: you’re watching television, and this commercial comes on. There’s a guy sitting in a chair. He’s obviously uncomfortable. Something’s poking at him. He shifts and squirms and reaches down, under the cushion, tugging and pulling until something rips free. He holds it up. It’s that tag: “Do not remove under penalty of law.” SWAT cops burst suddenly through his windows, kick his door in, hold guns on him, bellow his rights at him through a megaphone as he desperately swallows the tag. (I think it was for a chocolate bar. There’s another one which stars those Wallace and Gromit sheep.)

Does it bug you when you remember those tags actually say “Under penalty of law, this tag not to be removed except by consumer”? That they were first put in place to assure the squirming guy that the cushion in question was fresh off the lot, never previously owned, that it was stuffed with specific stuffing? That somehow the meaning of that tag has slipped and shifted from consumer protection to Brazilian harrassment?

And sure, everybody knows that curiosity killed the cat. But: did you also know that satisfaction brought it back? —Imagine two playgrounds, alike in every particular but one: in the first playground, only the first line is allowed. In the second, the entire couplet. Can you chart the resulting differences?

And Siegfried was an arrogant, hubristic ass, a rapist, a murderer, a thief, and his death was necessary to help wash away the curse on the treasure of the Nibelungen and return love to the world, yet look at him now: an heroic soldier, a knight of the realm, the realm itself, struck down in its prime by those who ought to have supported it, our last hope of greatness thrown away by treacherous fifth columnists who should have known better. —And only a dancing Wu Li master would try to insist on the literal ambiguity of Schrödinger’s cat: you can turn an experiment into a metaphor, but you can’t take the gedanken out of the experiment.

And yet—what about Schrödinger’s Knight?

The PCs encounter a knight in an inn. There is a chance of the knight being killed in a combat which erupts at this location. If the knight survives the battle and gets into a conversation with the PCs, then they learn that he is X and they get to hear his story.

If, on the other hand, the knight is killed in the battle, then he is not X, but Y, a messenger carrying a letter for X. In this case, the PCs can learn the same information by finding the letter that Y was carrying on his person.

I think that it might have been Mark Wallace, who in a discussion of this plot technique referred to the knight as “Schroedinger’s Knight.” The reasoning, of course, is that until the in-game events unfold, it is impossible to say whether he is X or Y; until the battle takes place and the PC’s relationship to this character is established, he is effectively both X and Y.

All models are wrong. Some are useful.

It’s not getting Schrödinger’s cat wrong that wrecked Stone for me, any more than it’s a seeming ignorance of the dolchstoßlegende that wrecks Cerdipity’s cartoon. Getting things wrong is what we do, after all, and sometimes we do it brilliantly. Meanings shift, stories change: signifiers point ever and always to nothing but other signifiers. If people remembered the same they would not be different people.

And that’s what’s wrong with Stone. The world within those pages is what it is: all signifiers point to thuddingly designated signifieds. In that world, there is only one model, useful or not: the map is the thing mapped. (And thus difficult to fold.) —I’d wanted a labyrinth; I got a tree. I want an encyclopedia; this is a dictionary.

That it is a stunted tree, a mealy dictionary, is a much less shattering disappointment.

—Oh, he also uses “alright” and says things like “It matched the intense yearning of my heart too closely. But then again, I reasoned, it would not be hard to determine that such might be my dream,” and he says things like “To kill so many people! People, true, I had never met before, and whom therefore didn’t truly exist, but nonetheless!” and there’s his thing for noses. But this is stupid stuff.

Until next time, ponder this: why should we cheer when Stephen Hawking reaches for his gun, but hiss and boo when Hermann Göring releases the safety-catch on his Browning?

—Filed 7841 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comments [2].

Some context.

Oh, hey: if you’re swinging by from the Willamette Week story, and you’re wondering about the tersely cryptic excerpt, well, here; and here’s the reason why my desk is groaning today:

He was very afraid, very alone. He had the thinnest arms I had ever seen. His whole body trembled. His wrists were so thin we couldn’t put handcuffs on him. As I saw him for the first time and led him to the interrogation, I felt sorry. The interrogation specialists threw water over him and put him into a car, drove him around through the extremely cold night. Afterwards, they covered him with mud and showed him to his imprisoned father, on whom they’d tried other interrogation methods.

They hadn’t been able to get him to speak, though. The interrogation specialists told me that after the father saw his son in this condition, his heart was broken, he started crying, and he promised to tell them anything they wanted.

—Sgt. Samuel Provance, 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion

Of course, I don’t know why I’m so angry today. We’ve known we were capable of this particular damnation for over a year now.

(This is, indeed, more of a literary blog than anything else, I suppose. But what passes for politics these days has a nasty habit of getting in the way.)

—Filed 7841 days ago to Indulgences; Comments [4].

IOKIYAR.

Republicans in the House took more than 140 hours of testimony to investigate whether the Clinton White House misused its holiday card database but less than five hours of testimony regarding how the Bush administration treated Iraqi detainees.

—“Free Pass From Congress,” Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Cal.)

—Filed 7841 days ago to Squawkbox; Comments [1].

Forward, ho!

Do be sure to take the time to thank the fine, fine folks at Move America Forward, purveyors of astroturf since sometime earlier this month: without their hype and handwringing, it’s doubtful Fahrenheit 9/11 would have done nearly so well as it did. Aces, guys! Couldn’t have done it without you!

So. What to do for an encore?

Well, for one thing, team up with jilted Disney to promote a feelgood counterdoc: America’s Heart & Soul, “featuring an original song by John Mellencamp.” —“One of the most inspired and inspiring movies ever made,” says Jim Svejda, a graduate of the Pat Collins school of film criticism. Oh, but I’m being cynical again: America’s Heart & Soul looks like nothing more sinister than a thoroughly inoffensive dollop of feelgood pap: a long-form Chevy truck commerical; a tossed salad of mostly iceberg lettuce with a little cilantro to jazz it up. And I’m sure Svejda is a nice-enough guy. It’s Move America Forward’s puffery that’s a hoot and a half:

Those who oppose the War on Terror have the mouthpiece of the mainstream media to disseminate their propaganda to the entire nation in an almost unchallenged effort. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week it is bash America, bash the military and bash the Bush administration.

So, of course, the only option you have to get your scrappy but beleaguered point of view across in this rigged marketplace of ideas is to team up with the parent corporation of one of the Big Four broadcast networks.

Move America Forward is also (quite) proud that it continues in the footsteps of McCarthy and Birch by hounding and harrassing a scientist guilty of nothing but being the target of an hysterical government lynch mob.

Once you’ve hit the news in a negative light, it’ll stay with you forever, no matter what happens to the contrary. Even if a federal judge in a court of law apologizes to you on behalf of the government.

Witness the strange dust-up in the state Capitol these past several days after a former legislator, Howard Kaloogian, got wind that a group of Asian-American legislators were getting ready to honor Wen Ho Lee with their first ``Profile in Courage’’ award Monday.

Kaloogian took umbrage that “a former accused spy’’ was being honored by “Democratic leaders’’ and shot off e-mails on behalf of his newly formed “Move America Forward’’ organization. The group was launched last week to rally support for the administration’s war against terrorism. He accused the California Asian Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus of violating its oath to “defend against foreign and domestic enemies.’’

Lee, you may remember, was the Los Alamos scientist fingered by the Clinton administration in 1999 for supposedly leaking key nuclear secrets to the Chinese government. He was fired, his name was leaked to the New York Times and the spy case was all over the news. He spent nine months in prison, shackled in leg irons, as the government’s case slowly came apart. Fifty-eight of the 59 original counts—none of them espionage—were dropped and Lee pleaded guilty to a single charge of mishandling nuclear secrets.

Federal District Court Judge James A. Parker took the unusual step of apologizing to Lee and excoriating the executive branch for bringing its enormous power to bear on a case it mishandled: “They have embarrassed our entire nation and each of us who is a citizen of it.’’

That was four years ago. Sad case, upended lives, a career ruined. But settled. Really.

The Asian Pacific Islander caucus, which is holding a policy summit with community leaders from around the state, chose to honor Lee because of his perseverance in the ordeal and the way he had galvanized Chinese-Americans and Asian-American civil rights groups.

As part of the honor, the caucus planned a legislative resolution, along with a routine five-minute presentation on the Assembly floor, a courtesy routinely extended on a legislator’s request.

Republican legislators, nonetheless, threatened to oppose the resolution. The caucus canceled plans for the Assembly presentation and moved it to Monday’s dinner.

Class act, these folks. —Hey, Kaloogian? Go fuck yourself, would you?

(By golly, I do feel better!)

—Filed 7849 days ago to Squawkbox; .

Ding, dong, the—well, a—okay, one of many wicked witches is dead—

COPA bought the farm.

My knee-jerk absolutist First Amendment freedom of speech über alles motherfucker happydance is muted just a smidge by the disquieting notion that this was yet another 5-4 split, and the underlying rationale seems to be well, heck, Congress could have spent time and money promoting (even mandating) dumbass internet filters instead of walling up everything we don’t like behind dumbass credit-card gates and age screens. But nonetheless: a stupid stupid stupid law went down in flames, and Justice Breyer is downright plaintive in his dissent:

“What has happened to the constructive discourse between our courts and our legislatures that is an integral and admirable part of the constitutional design?” Breyer asked, using phrases that Kennedy had used in another case. “Congress passed the current statute in response to the Court’s decision in Reno. . .Congress read Reno with care. . .It incorporated language from the Court’s precedents. . .What else was Congress supposed to do?”

Ultimately frustrated himself, Breyer declared that the Court may have denied Congress legislative leeway to pass laws in this area. He suggested that, if the Court means to say that nothing Congress could do would be sufficient, “then the Court should say so clearly.”

Well, I’d like to think the Constitution did that already, but see above re: First Amendment freedom of speech über alles motherfucker. I’m willing to admit I might have a little dogma in my eye.

Also: the inestimable Eugene Volokh notes a possible slippage in the meaning of “prurience.”

Oh, never mind: it wasn’t struck down, just kicked back for another freakin’ trial. —Boy, do I feel stupid with these happydancin’ shoes on.

—Filed 7849 days ago to Squawkbox; Comments [4].

Seduction of the innocent.

Local cartoonist Steve Lieber actively recruits the youth of today into the dank cult of comics. (Also, the cartoonist agenda.)

Not-quite-so-local cartoonist Erika Moen, one of today’s youth, is tragically already lost. (She’s even doing a signing.)

Gaudy nightstepper Jim Henley provides a cautionary tale from the mouldering longboxes of yore. (Nor does Jeff Parker escape the collective popconsciousness unscathed.)

—Filed 7850 days ago to Sequentualities; .

Related words.

Pigment: Adrianople red, Alice blue, Arabian red, Argos brown, Bordeaux, Brunswick black, Brunswick blue, Burgundy, Capri blue, Cassel yellow, Chinese blue, Chinese white, Claude tint, Cologne brown, Columbian red, Congo rubine, Copenhagen blue, Dresden blue, Dutch orange, Egyptian green, English red, French blue, French gray, Gobelin blue, Goya, Guinea green, India pink, Indian red, Irish green, Janus green, Kelly green, Kendal green, Kildare green, Lincoln green, Majolica earth, Mars orange, Mars violet, Mexican red, Mitis green, Montpellier green, Nile green, Paris green, Paris yellow, Persian blue, Persian red, Pompeian blue, Prussian blue, Prussian red, Quaker green, Roman umber, Saint Benoit, Saxe blue, Saxony green, Schweinfurt green, Spanish green, Spanish ocher, Tanagra, Titian, Turkey red, Turkey umber, Tyrian purple, Vandyke red, Vienna green, Wedgwood blue, Wedgwood green, absinthe, acid yellow, acier, acorn, air brush, alabaster, alesan, alizarin brown, amber, amethyst, amidonaphthol red, aniline black, aniline blue, annatto, anthracene brown, anthragallol, antique brown, antique gold, apple green, apply paint, apricot, aqua green, aquamarine, arsenic yellow, art paper, ash, ash gray, aureolin, autumn leaf, avocado green, azo blue, azo-orange, azulene, azure, azurite blue, baby blue, barium sulfate, bat, bedaub, bedizen, begild, benzoazurine, beryl, beryl green, besmear, bice, biscuit, bister, blanc fixe, bleu celeste, blond, blue black, blue turquoise, bone black, bone brown, bottle green, bracken, bright rose, brush, brush on paint, buff, bunny brown, burgundy, burnt Roman ocher, burnt almond, burnt carmine, burnt ocher, burnt rose, burnt sienna, butter, cadet blue, cadmium orange, cadmium yellow, cafe noir, calamine blue, calcimine, camera lucida, camera obscura, canary, canvas, carbon black, cardinal, carmine, carnation, carnelian, carotene, celadon, cerulean, chalk, chamois, champagne, charcoal, chartreuse, chartreuse green, chartreuse tint, chartreuse yellow, chestnut, chrome, chrome black, chrome lemon, chrome orange, chrome oxide green, chrome red, chrome yellow, chromogen, chrysophenin, chrysoprase green, ciba blue, cinder gray, cinnabar, citron green, civette green, claret, clematis, cloud gray, coat, coat of paint, coating, cobalt, cobalt green, cochineal, coconut, color filter, color gelatin, colorant, coloring, copper, copper red, coptic, corbeau, cordovan, cornflower, cover, cramoisie, crash, crayon, cream, cresol red, crimson, crocus, crystal gray, cucumber green, cyan, cyanine blue, cypress green, dab, dahlia, damask, damson, dandelion, daub, dead leaf, dead-color, deep-dye, delft blue, dip, distemper, doeskin, double-dye, dove gray, drab, drawing paper, drawing pencil, drier, drop black, duck green, dun, dyestuff, easel, eggshell, emblazon, emerald, emeraude, enamel, engild, exterior paint, face, faded rose, fast-dye, fiesta, fir, fire red, fixative, flat coat, flat wash, flax, flesh, flesh color, flesh red, floor enamel, foliage brown, fox, fresco, fuchsia, fuchsine, gamboge, garter blue, gild, glauconite, glaucous, glaucous blue, glaucous gray, glaucous green, glaze, gloss, golden pheasant, grain, grape, grass green, green ocher, grege, ground, gun metal, hazel, helianthin, heliotrope, henna, holly green, honey, honey yellow, hyacinth, hyacinth red, illuminate, imbue, imperial purple, incarnadine, indigo, indigo white, infrared, ingrain, interior paint, iron gray, iron red, isamine blue, ivory, ivory black, jade, japan, jockey, jonquil, jouvence blue, lacquer, lake, lampblack, lapis lazuli blue, lavender, lavender blue, lay figure, lay on color, lead gray, leaf green, leather, lemon chrome, light red, lilac, liver brown, livid pink, lobster, madder, madder blue, madder crimson, madder lake, madder orange, madder pink, madder rose, madder yellow, magenta, maize, malachite green, mallow, mallow pink, mandarin, maple sugar, marigold, marine blue, maroon, massicot, maulstick, mauve, meadow brook, medium, melon, metanil yellow, methyl green, methyl orange, methyl yellow, methylene azure, methylene blue, mignonette, milori green, moleskin, monsignor, moonlight, moss green, mouse gray, mulberry, mummy, murrey, myrtle, naphthol yellow, navy, navy blue, negro, neutral tint, new blue, ocher brown, ocher orange, ocher red, oil yellow, old blue, old gold, old ivory, old red, olive, olive brown, olivesheen, opal gray, opaque color, orange chrome yellow, orange lead, orange madder, orange mineral, orange ocher, orchid, orchid rose, oriole, orpiment, orpiment red, otter brown, oxblood, oxide brown, paint, paintbrush, palette, palette knife, palladium red, pansy, pansy violet, parget, parrot green, partridge, pastel, patina green, pea green, peach, peachblossom pink, peacock blue, pearl, pearl gray, pebble, pelican, pencil, pepper-and-salt, philamot, phosphine, pigments, platinum, plum, plumbago gray, pompadour green, ponceau, pontiff purple, poppy, powder blue, powder gray, prime, prime coat, primer, priming, primrose, primuline yellow, puce, pumpkin, purple lake, purree, pyrethrum yellow, quince yellow, raisin, raw sienna, raw umber, realgar, realgar orange, red lead, red ocher, red pink, regal purple, reseda, resorcin dark brown, roan, roccellin, rose, rose pink, royal pink, royal purple, rubine, ruby, ruddle, russet, saffron, salmon, sand, sap green, scarlet madder, scratchboard, sea blue, sea-water green, seal, serpentine green, shadow, shamrock, shell pink, shellac, shocking pink, siccative, silver, sketchbook, sketchpad, sky blue, slop on paint, smalt, smear, smoke blue, smoke gray, snapdragon, solferino, spatula, spray gun, stammel, steel blue, steel gray, stil-de-grain yellow, stipple, straw, strawberry, stump, sulfur, sunflower yellow, suntan, tangerine, tartrazine, taupe, tawny, tea rose, tempera, tenne, terra cotta, terra sienna, terra umbra, terre-verte, thinner, tinct, tinction, tinge, toast, toluidine red, tone, topaz, transparent color, trypan blue, turpentine, turps, turquoise, ultramarine, umber, undercoat, undercoating, varnish, vehicle, verd gay, verdant green, verdet, verdigris, vermilionette, violet, viridian, viridine green, wash, wash coat, white lead, whitewash, wine, wine purple, woad, xanthene, xanthin, yellow madder, yellow ocher, zaffer, zinc orange, zinc oxide, zinc sulfide, zinc white.

—Filed 7851 days ago to Poprocks; Comments [3].

But what I really want to do is direct.

I’d begin with a quote from the Diller Diaries, but I’ve long since lost my fanfold printouts, and nobody, but nobody, has it online anywhere. Shame on us; shame on us all. —I’d begin with an apology for the self-indulgent nature of this post—I’m going to be writing about (my) writing, after all (technical term: whingeing)—but it’s in the nature of blogs to be self-indulgent. If you gaze for long into a navel, the navel gazes also into you, yes yes, but meta-apology’s getting a tad ridiculous, don’t you think?

So all I have left is to, well, begin.

I mean, I was going to work on it last night. Settle in. Made another circuit of the Meier & Frank to fix some details in my head: those canister lights are only on the one particular floor, so the first image I’d had in mind as a conversational break—looking down the escalator at a slice of the chaos of the make-up counters on the first floor—wouldn’t work. The mannequins on the landing were as creepy as I’d remembered, but not in the way I’d remembered, and I’m still not necessarily happy with the creep: I need the opening image, I need the break in the rhythm, but do I need the note this particular image injects right up front, the hollow plastic eyesockets turned half-assedly into eyes with a few translucent strokes of brown watercolor to suggest lids and lashes? —Was pleased to note the specific style of dress I’d had in mind was actually available for sale; we’ll ignore the fact that it’s currently June, the scene in question is set in the middle of September, and I have no idea how seasonally sensitive this sort of designer dress is. For whatever reason, I got fixated on T-shirts: yes, they’re a sort of Dadaist Greek chorus, but I was suddenly hung up on the idea that the mannequins ought to wear a couple of “real,” “actual” T-shirts. Jotted down slogans seen here and there throughout the Misses section: “I’m a Leo! It’s all about me!” “Is it chicken or is it tuna?” “Artificial Respiration Training! (Cute boys only, please!)” “The center of attention.” Made note of a weird hall display in the landing of the closed-off floor: a glass case with a couple of fake topiaried shrubs inside, green flocking crumbling from old brown wicker frames, and lots of plaster? plastic? statues inside, including a nauseating little Cottingley fairy, all white butterfly wings and adorable turn-of-the-last-century Sunday dress, perched atop a plastic-plaster plinth, beneath which: a whole make-way-for-ducklings garden statuary set. Perfect! For what, though? They aren’t going up to housewares. There’s no reason for them to stop and stare at this halfway house. Tuck it away, for later, I suppose, next to the poisonous idea of otherkin, charitable satire thereof.

Home I hie myself, then. The laptop’s set up and plugged in. The notebook’s fished out of my bag and propped up on the corner of the desk. But there’s blogs to check, and the news; a couple of MP3s to download, and there’s that thing about Brokeback Mountain, that line about the sheep is too priceless to let slip, and I’d wanted to do something with the Mayday mystery, right? So sketch the one in quickly, fire up Photoshop for the other, but here’s Jenn, home from work, and then Bill, our current houseguest; time to heat up some dinner, and pour some wine, and we’re working our way through the Northern Exposure DVD, so there’s forty-five minutes or so while we’re eating and cleaning up, and then it’s back to the computer, but I have to finish massaging that 20 January ad and tweak the .gif and after I post it there’s the usual problem that the .blogbody CSS for hyperlinking supercedes the class override written directly into the a tag for no reason at all I can discern, which means the images have the distracting hyperlink line under them, so I see what I can do to fix that, and then we have to water the cat (old, hyperthyroid, kidney troubles, subcutaneous fluids) and feed the both of them and keep the one out of the other’s medicated bowl, and then, well, there’s more blogs to check up on, and news to read, and wow, is that the time?

(The whole time the notebook’s there on the corner of the desk, and I’m not looking at it, not at all, nossir.)

Half-past midnight I finally pack it in. I passed the first bit, there on the escalator. Got to the moment that Orlando kicks the door open and stopped it dead there in the middle of a sentence: “Orlando kicks” —Somebody once said, always leave off in the middle of a sentence. That way, you have somewhere to pick up right away when you get back to it. It doesn’t work any better than any other nostrum, but hey. Any snake-oil in a storm. (Somebody also once said, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns. Not that they have guns. Aheh.) I scrapped the found T-shirt slogans. Went with a Virgo variant on the Leo and a picture of Einstein with his Meyer-Briggs profile scribbled underneath it. Had to spend some time checking which is the most popular profile ascribed to Einstein, though. Of course.

Two-hundred twenty words, and that’s being generous.

(Hey, says the magpie. What about a paralitticism on Northern Exposure and utopia and reality TV? Arcadia, New Jerusalem, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World—)

Every day for years, Trollope reported in his “Autobiography,” he woke in darkness and wrote from 5:30 AM to 8:30 AM, with his watch in front of him. He required of himself two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour. If he finished one novel before eighty-thirty, he took out a fresh piece of paper and started the next. The writing session was followed, for a long stretch of time, by a day job with the postal service. Plus, he said, he always hunted at least twice a week. Under this regimen, he produced forty-nine novels in thirty-five years.

—Joan Acocella, “Blocked“

Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.

—Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography

The rules are simple: somebody calls you out, or you call somebody out. You pick a referee and a time and you each come up with a list of three words. The referee adds three more. When the appointed time arrives, you receive the total list of nine words. You have three hours to write a story using all nine. Go!

I managed six thousand words in three hours. Five hundred reasonably coherent words every quarter of an hour; as a genre exercise, it didn’t suck. And I was a wreck. Heart-racing, hands-shaking, couldn’t-shut-up bundle of neurotic energy. And even if the words were reasonably coherent and ended up altogether as something not worse than their totted-up sum, they were unmediated: a gormless rush of the me-est me, which usually ends up sounding like a Harlan Ellison huckster, hot under the collar—a sarcastic salesman unreeling the anecdote that’s supposed to help him close. (When I cool it off, it veers into a weird, dim echo of William Vollmann’s jiu-jitsued snark, which I like better, but, and anyway find much harder to hit.) (And maybe that’s why I impose so many rules, my own private Dogme, as if I could oulipo myself into somebody else.)

I can see how Trollope’s rate is possible. I just can’t imagine making a regular daily go of it.

(Besides, didn’t he write highfalutin’ fluff?)

(And? quoth the magpie. Isn’t that all you’re after?)

So three hundred words an hour, nine hundred words a day: this is much more conceivable. Isn’t it? It’s a serial, after all: a net serial. Eminently disposable. The words are there to get you from Point A to Point B and leave you panting for Point C to come; if they shine themselves along the way, that’s all well and good, but no agonizing allowed, bucko! Well-turned phrases be damned! You have a job to do, one you’ve done before, so suck it up and go. Point A: Point B. Begin.

(Those of you familiar with the art/craft dichotomy as, for instance, taken down by Delany in the aforementioned “Politics of Paraliterary Yadda-yadda” should start laughing now. It won’t make me feel any better about not having posted in two months—well, really, six months, and a dead computer’s good for only so much. —But I will grin sheepishly, I suppose, yeah yeah, and that’s better than nothing.)

The problem is that Point A and that Point B. Point A is usually not where you thought it was, and Point B ends up something else entirely, which can mess you up if you were dropping hints about Point C last time and now it isn’t. The words aren’t just the vehicle, after all: they’re journey and destination, too, and even if I see Point B in my head (a lightning flash: a pose, a line of dialogue, an emotional sense I feel in my bones just so—I close my eyes, I can taste it) I don’t have any idea what it really is until I write it down. Any critic approaching any work is one of several blind people trying to describe an elephant; a writer with a work in progress is one blind person, alone, with some blueprints for an elephant lot. They really ought to think twice before opening their yaps. (Violence: violence, and power, in the context of walking up to the groaning boards of fantasy’s eternal wedding feast, still laden with the cold meats from Tolkien’s funeral, and cheekily joining everyone else who’s trying to send the whole thing smashing to the ground just to hear what noise all that crockery will make, with little more than a crappy net serial, ha. Those of you familiar with the politics of genre ghettoization and the attendant shame and self-loathing and projection may now commence to chuckling heartily, ha ha. —But! Also: genderfuck, romance the way we wanted it done back in the day, those moments in pop songs when the bass and all of the drums except maybe a handclap suddenly drop out of the bridge leaving you hanging from a slender aching thread of melody waiting almost dreading the moment when the beat comes back, and the occasional sword fight.)

So I don’t necessarily know what any given Point B is, but I see those flashes of them, off in the distance: having gotten to this Point B, or that, is the entire point of starting off from A, after all. But you write and you write and you stop and you take a look at where you are, and it’s an utterly different Point B; the Point B you wanted is way over there, and here you are over here, except that suggests it’s the plot that’s changed, and it isn’t: those moments that make up the flash all depend on each other, and what went before, and if the words it takes to limn the image end up at odds with the words that need to be said, if what you’ve got onscreen when your hour’s up and the three hundred words have been laid in place don’t conjure what you felt in your bones, what you can still almost feel, not so strong, an echo overlaid by these horribly precise words all a quarter-turn off— I don’t have any idea what it really is until I write it down, but if the words end up betraying what I wanted it to be—? Where do I go? What do I do?

(Rewrite. Revise. —Oh, shut up. You’re missing the point.)

“I don’t like writing, I like having written.” Ha! I don’t like having written, either, most days. I like what I would have written, if. I like what I’m going to write.

Any day now.

Two thousand words! There. See?

Piece of cake.

So all I have left—

—Filed 7853 days ago to Indulgences; Comments [5].

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