Critical Apprehensions & Intemperate Discourses

Kip Manley, proprietor

Smiling because what else is there to do.

“A broken heart won’t get you much further than a cold heart” is what John Cale’s singing, and Brian Eno’s chanting “Been there, done that; been there don’t wanna go back,” which is pretty much the best thing I can think of for a Tuesday that feels like a Monday. “A bad plan is better than no plan,” is what Gary Kasparov said, and I guess the shock and awe worked in the end if not quite in the manner advertised; I’m still shocked and awestruck at how we have no plan, no plan at all. (We’re going to Syria next! No, we aren’t! And I’m terrified it’s both, or maybe neither, and no one, not a single person on this earth, will know until it actually, you know, happens. Or doesn’t.) —So I turn from thinking globally to locally and discover that, of two of the tax proposals being considered by our legislature to stanch the hemmorrhaging of our laughable budget (a sidenote: is it hemmorrhaging when the blood’s pooled around your ankles and rising?), one of them would set Mark Hemstreet up as a tinpot dictator, and the other would obliterate one of the few thriving local industries left, one uniquely suited to the current Zeitgeist (links courtesy The Oregon Blog, whose own links are bloggered at the moment; scroll to entries for 11 April and 14 April).

So.

Hey, had you heard we’re hiring cut-rate rapists and militant missionaries to go in and rebuild Iraq from the dust up on the cheap?

You had?

Well.

Kevin’s strip this week made me smile and in a good way, too. Small triumphs, I guess. So there’s that.

—Also, Wes Anderson’s going to start filming a new movie in September. Starring Bill Murray. As a French oceanographer.

So there’s that, too. And Holly Cole’s doing her honkytonkish cover of “The Heart of Saturday Night,” now, which, well.

I think I need more coffee.

And then Ray Davis made three.

—Filed 8292 days ago to Squawkbox; Comments [2].

The estrane.

[A piece of fiction as world-building exercise. Cross-posted to Anamnesis.]

The sky was yellow. The air was heavy and smelled of rain. I was sitting on the woman’s porch writing a letter to the boy who’d stayed behind in Evangeline. The screen door opened with a ragged croak and the woman stepped out to the porch steps, sniffing. She dusted flour from her fingers and went out into the yard to take down the laundry. Her son’s shirts snapped in the wind, struck a brilliant white by the last of the sunlight. There was a burst of flute-song from an unseen pipe. She stopped, stood still, her wife’s dress the color of turmeric heavily damp in her hands. They came over the hill then, one two many of them, under the lowering oak.

The first was pale and wore a dirty sheepskin vest. He carried a flute in one hand. With his other he drew a long skinny knife from a sheath bound to his bare thigh. Behind him a girl carried a tambur like a small club. Her hair was matted with blood from an old wound. The man capering behind her, eyes wide, arms dangling, wore filthy dungarees and a tall black formal hat. A tarnished trumpet flopped loosely in one hand.

The woman did not move as the boy with the knife slunk up to her. He reached out for the heavy orange dress in her hands. No, she said then. One of them yipped. The boy tugged at the dress. Please don’t, she said. He waved his knife in her face. She flinched. —Stop that, said someone, loudly.

Under the tree stood the tuner.

He wore a pack on his back that towered a foot or two above his frizzled head. As he stepped out from under the tree pots tied to the bottom of the pack clanked hollowly.

Stop it, he said. Let her alone.

The boy with the knife whined. The grey-skinned woman in the striped singlet sang a harsh mocking seven-note phrase. I set my letter aside and stood up.

Storm, said the tuner. Blowing in. Could we borrow your roof awhile?

The woman looked up at me. There were seven of them, all told. Her wife was gone with the truck. Her sons wouldn’t be back for another ten days. No one else was staying at her house, not that late in the season.

Yes, she said.

The rain was loud. Gusting winds dumped rattling loads of it that drowned out the low mutter of far-off thunder. The woman whose house it was sat at the kitchen table shelling peas, dropping them into an orange bowl, the shells into a plain metal can half-filled with polchassa stems, coffee grounds, eggshells, olio husks. The boy in the sheepskin vest sat across from her, grinning, tugging at his half-hearted erection.

The youngest of them, an adolescent girl, leaned against the icebox. She wore grimy yellow socks and a single kneepad that might once have been white, and breathed a tuneless rill in and out of the ocarina she wore on a string about her neck. The grey-skinned woman in the striped singlet sat at her feet, rocking back and forth. The wide-eyed man did tricks with his hat, sweeping it off his head and sending it tripping back up along his arm, knocking it off with a seemingly clumsy finger that caught it and spun it like a ring. He began to hum a deep, maddeningly rhythmic line, the same note pulsed six times, bottoming out suddenly, returning to hit a note midway between them and over and over again above the drumming rain. I would later learn that it was one of his contentment-songs. The grey-skinned woman began to rock a little faster, keeping time with the wide-eyed man. She started to chatter some fast-paced sing-song nonsense that tugged the girl’s ocarina after it, turning her breathy rills into a hesitant, repetitive tune. The boy at the table looked at the woman who was still intently shelling peas. He looked at me, still stroking himself absently, lifting one hand to chew at his thumbnail. Abada, he said, very clearly, and then he wiped both hands on his knees and picked up his flute from the table and began to play.

I sat there on the floor of the woman’s kitchen, listening, my pen unnoticed in my hand, the letter to the boy in Evangeline forgotten in my lap.

The girl with the scabbed hair nudged my hip with her foot. Hey, she said. I looked up at her. She waved her tambur at me. Hey, she said. She nudged me again.

Can you tune it? said the tuner.

He stood in the doorway of the kitchen sipping from a clay bottle of the woman’s homebrew. The music around us had ebbed away. The grey-skinned woman’s chatter was ragged, meaningless. The girl’s ocarina tootled randomly. The boy’s flute squeaked and shrieked as he blew angrily into it, his fingers twitching along its clattering keys. Only the wide-eyed man kept humming his eight-note contentment-song, his hat still dancing in his hands. The girl with the wound on her head squatted before me, holding out the tambur. I said to the tuner that I didn’t know. He shrugged.

The rain’s fury had since passed. I took the tambur. Its twelve strings seemed sound, but made a sour, nasal jangle when I strummed them.

Tune it, she said.

I looked up at her, startled. Tune it, she said again. The wound on the side of her head glistened a little in the electric light. It was an ugly puckered red around the edges that I could see. The dried mat of blood was a dull dead patch of black in her glossy black hair. The tuner hummed something almost to himself, too quickly for me to catch. They all began to laugh, all of them. The grey-skinned woman looking up at the young girl who bit her lower lip and giggled. The wide-eyed man barking pounding one hard heel on the linoleum. The angry boy leaping up from his chair, looking me directly in my eyes, shooting his laughs at me from his belly like stones. Then spinning around and stomping past the biggest of them, the quiet shaggy one who smiled into his beard, stomping past him to the back door and throwing it open and leaping out into the gentling rain.

Well? said the tuner to me.

The young girl blew a note into her ocarina. She blew it again. I plucked the lowest pair of the twelve, tightened the over-and-under pegs, plucked them again, sweetening them to match each other with the young girl’s ocarina. The girl with the wound on her head lay down on the floor in front of me, on her side, pillowing her head on one arm folded like a wing.

When the rain stopped I told the woman whose house it was that I would be leaving with the estrane. I asked her for the balance of the cash that I had paid up front. She frowned. Outside in her yard the wide-eyed man began to play his trumpet, fast blatting little runs of notes that never went where they were going.

It’s not, she said, chewing the words slowly, my concern that you are not to stay the entire time you’ve paid for.

I see, I said.

So I don’t think, she began to say.

I see, I said.

Her wife drove up as we were leaving, the hard white lights of the truck catching us at the edge of the polchassa patch. The tuner strode on into the copse beyond. The rest stood still looking back at the house. As the woman’s wife shut off the engine, killing the lights, the biggest of them, the quiet shaggy one, lurched forward suddenly, throwing his arms wide. Roaring. The woman whose house it was stood on the porch, peering out into the darkness at where we were. Her wife stood by the truck in a yellow dress and black rubber boots, one hand still on the truck’s ladder. The engine tocked and gurgled once in the silence.

Bitch! I yelled then. Thieves!

The woman did not move from the porch. Her wife looked up at her. I might have said something else, I’m not sure what, but the boy in the sheepskin vest shoved my shoulder, knocking me off-balance. The rest of them were ghosting off after the receding clatter of the tuner’s pots into the copse and beyond.

For the next hour or so as we picked our way between the little farms that littered the valley floor the boy would erupt with surprising bursts of laughter. Thieves, he would say, stretching the word into meaninglessness. Thee thee theeeef theeeeefs! The wide-eyed man hummed a hypnotically rolling eight-note marching-song.

There were glorious sunsets that year. Late the next afternoon we stopped, the estrane, the tuner, and I, up under the heavy rock ridges grey as stormclouds that beetled the southeast end of the valley. A chill darkness hunkered somewhere behind us, but we lazed on warm rocks in a pool of orange light. Above us the day-blue sky spilled into a lavender marbled with violent orange. Long cloud-fingers rippled like wet sand at low tide hung over us from the north. Strange colors chased their bellies, yellows and reds and oranges like fresh paint, piercing greens, blues like ice, greys like some rare smoke. The girl with the wound on her head sat behind me on the same rock and leaned back against me. At midday, resting by a stream far below, I had taken her hand and led her to a calm, sunstruck pool where I carefully washed the old blood out of her hair. She flinched, and jerked her head, and yelled, and leaped away from me, her feet splashing. I stood there patiently with my sponge in my hand. She would always come back and lay her cool cheek against my open palm. Fresh blood still seeped from the gash when I was done, but only a little. I cut the tail from one of my cleaner shirts and gave it to her to hold against it. Better than nothing. A few hours later, climbing the knees of the ridge, I noticed she’d already lost it.

As the sun set she cradled her tambur and strummed three lofting chords. It was out of tune again, but the jangle was pleasant, somehow. She found two pairs bent into a weird new discord and worried at them.

Hey, said the tuner. He was doing something to the intricate valves in the guts of the wide-eyed man’s trumpet, but he was looking up and out. He pointed west with the jerry-rigged pick in his hand. Hey, he said. Quiet. Ships.

I didn’t see them at first. And then I spotted one, so far away it hung immobile in the fiery sky, and then another, and then a dozen: like grains of pepper, like grit caught in the smokey calluses of the cloud-fingers. A wing of them coming south with the clouds.

The girl with the wound on her head turned the sweetly sour notes into a thrumming rhythmic line that spread out like a floor for dancing. The biggest of them, his shaggy hair stubbornly blue even in this lurid light, began to slap the stone in front of him, striking a sharply popping tattoo. The boy in the sheepskin vest leaped to his feet and he and the young girl sent their pipes skirling madly after each other, fluting runs too urgent to bother with melody. Hey, said the tuner. Cut it out. The wide-eyed man reach up and snatched his trumpet from the tuner’s hands, bounding out to the edge of a stubby pier of rock. He lifted the horn and blew one long loud note into the sunset. The other estrane churned along beneath him. He lowered the trumpet. With one swift jerk he yanked the tall black hat from his head and sent it sailing out over the valley. Then he began to play.

It grew colder. The green washed out of the sky. The oranges cooled to reds and purples. The lavender bled away. The tuner stood then, said something, fuck this, you’re all idiots, go to hell, I don’t know. He spat. Took up his pack as the big one grinned at him, hands popping against his chest, his thighs under his big coat, the rock in front of him, rolling the clatter of the tuner’s pots into his drumming. The tuner stalked out of that little pool of dying light up towards the dark cleft in the rock. The boy with the sheepskin vest pulled his flute from his mouth and threw back his head and howled at the far-off, immobile ships.

We did not light a fire. The tuner clipped a little light to his collar and shone it on a bundle of thick rubbery felt which he unwrapped. Inside was a soft brick of quivering fatty stuff, greyly translucent in the white light, like old ice. He cut slices each as thick as a finger and passed them around. As he tossed me a slice, gelid and moist, already spotted with dark floury dust, he asked me if I had ever been to Cabester. I told him I had not. The stuff smelled like everything else this close to the battlefield: arid, harsh, like cold truck fuel, like shredded metal. The wide-eyed man laid his slice flat on his palm and slapped his hands together, then held it up. It jerked and twisted a little, pinched between his thumb and fingers, shivers of luminescence chasing across it. The grey-skinned woman slapped hers and wolfed it down almost at once. The girl with the wound on her head clapped her hands together twice then pressed the slice tightly between them and held it up before her nose and mouth, closing her eyes. The boy in the sheepskin vest slapped his slice against his upper arm and tossed it into the air. I began to smell something faint, something slick and warm, like frying oil. The young girl shivered and burrowed closer to my side, trying to wind my blanket more tightly about herself. I had already learned to plant the opposite corners under my foot and my pack to keep her from pulling it completely off us. She didn’t take a slice.

In Cabester, said the tuner, there is a festival. The Cloghogow. Estrane who play there and play well are given toys and trinkets, metal coin, meat, vitamin pills. I slapped my slice of the stuff between my hands and nearly dropped it as it instantly began to heat up. Then you could actually cook something in those pots, I said. I closed my hands about the stuff and let it shiver against my skin.

New instruments also, said the tuner. And warm clothing. Winter’s on its way.

So maybe you should head south, I said.

He smiled. The stuff was mushy and melted to a sludgy slick on my tongue. It tasted of nothing at all but left a vague astringency at the back of my throat. I gobbled it down. The girl with the wound on her head squatted beside me and tugged at my blanket. I lifted it and she crawled into my lap. The young girl whined. I had given my other blanket to the grey-skinned woman, who now curled up tightly within it, wriggling it up over her nose and ears until only her tufted hair could be seen. The boy in the sheepskin vest pulled out his flute but did not put it to his lips. He began stalking the darkness about all of us, grunting, waving it in the air. The wide-eyed man sat down in front of the biggest of them who rolled his coat about them both as they lay down together. The wide-eyed man breathed out a single phrase of slurry, sleepy music, another contentment-song. Hey, said the tuner, reaching up to grab the boy’s wrist. The boy glared down at him as the tuner carefully pried his flute from his hands. Have you ever crossed a battlefield before? he asked. From his pack he pulled two pairs of needled pliers. One of them was held together with a thick wad of black tape. In the sharp white spot of his collar light he used them to pick at the wire hinges that held the flute’s keys half open.

Yes, I said. With a guide.

There are no guides for estrane, said the tuner. In my lap the girl with the wound on her head had shifted a little and her hands under the blanket plucked at her tambur, unraveling the same chord over and over again. The boy, his fists tucked under his sheepskin vest, muttered something harsh and guttural, kicking rocks. We, said the tuner, holding up the flute with one hand, shining his light on his work, do not need guides. You can tune.

The girl with the wound on her head had nibbled her chord down to one note plucked slowly. Both strings just enough out of tune to make richly sour sounds. I suppose, I said.

Can you sing?

Not too well, I said.

The tuner smiled again. We’ll see, he said. He reached up and laid a hand on the angry boy’s bony elbow. The boy started. The tuner held up his flute and the boy snatched it and ran away, up to the broken slope of scree beside the huge boulder that overlooked our little campsite.

We could have lit a fire, said the tuner, listening to the rocks tumble and clatter from the boy’s feet. Wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference. How’s she doing?

I looked down at the girl with the wound on her head, who had stopped picking at her note. Her eyes had finally closed. She snored, softly. The young girl curled up at my side reached out with one hand to almost touch the cleaned wound. Her skin still chilly against my arm.

The grey dust of the battlefield slouched down and away from the other side of those ridges under a high white sky. On the far side across the desiccated corpse of an old river looped along the floor of it could just be made out a thin haze of yellow and brown—old grass, burnt half dead by the relentless end-of-summer sun, but still the only thing alive that we could see before us. All the rest was grey dust and broken rock, a sharper, darker grey, marred with streaks of clean jet black and chalky white.

It took us three days and nights to cross. Some time in the cold thin afternoon of the third day the boy in the sheepskin vest left us curled in our blankets in shallow ditches dug by the wind. We found him that evening, an hour after we set out. He lay curled on his side in the dust. His skin was cold. Dust clotted his closed eyelids and caked in the corners of his face. The young girl squatted and tugged at his sheepskin vest. The wide-eyed man helped her, wrenching the boy’s arms up and back so she could work the vest off them without ripping it.

The tuner shuffled away from our little knot, his eyes on the dust. The wide-eyed man looked up from the boy’s body, his trumpet dangling from one hand like an afterthought. He lifted it to his lips, then, and held it there a moment, but lowered it without playing anything. The tuner stooped suddenly some ten or fifteen meters away and picked up the boy’s flute. He jerked to his feet, yelling at the rest of us. Go on, he shouted. Sing! Play! Do you want the soldiers to find us? —The silence I had not heard until he shouted was startling and terribly clear. I could hear the dust squeaking as the breeze rubbed it. The grey-skinned woman wrapped in my blanket began to chatter something, but it was jagged, harsh. Out of place. She stopped. The tuner stalked back toward us. Behind him the last fiery arc of the sun was curling under the horizon. The dead white sky had filled itself with all the colors the battlefield had leached out of the world, the reds and oranges, the yellows and blues, pure colors, powerful colors boiled up into the sky by some arcane distillation. Spread there like great flags turning to look a moment at the oncoming night before hurrying away to somewhere else. The tuner spat harsh squally notes from the dead boy’s flute. —Come on! he said, shaking the flute at us. Keep walking! Keep singing! Move!

But it was not until the boy’s body had been swallowed up behind us by the starlit dust that the biggest of them began once more to clap his hands along with his rolling, clockwork gait.

It had started there at the very edge of the battlefield. The biggest of them drew a great breath into his chest and sent it booming out in great deep notes that rolled out over the dust before us. The grey-skinned woman’s glossolaly chattered after him. Startled, I looked at the tuner, who shrugged. The young girl clutching my other blanket tightly about her lifted her ocarina to her mouth and blew random fluttering notes. The girl with the wound on her head hummed after, her tambur dangling from the strap I’d made out of a bit of rope. Aren’t you worried about them hearing us? I said to the tuner. He grabbed my arm and pulled me down to squat with him there on the edge of the dust. It’s not the hearing, he told me. Not here. Not now. The boy in the sheepskin vest marched past, his sing-song muttering under the hums and whistles and slapped beats. There’s nothing out there, the tuner told me, nothing to keep the soldiers from smelling our thoughts. So we have to hide them away. Can you sing?

The wide-eyed man spinning his trumpet around one finger began to sing then, and the boy in the sheepskin vest lifted his flute and together his flute and the wide-eyed man’s voice went looking for and found a song, a simple song, a nursery song, a losing, hiding, lost song, and they sent it billowing out into the darkening air about us. And we could not hear the dust squeak beneath our feet and we could not feel the cold bite of the wind and we did not mark the stars as they wheeled so slowly above our heads until the sky turned grey and yellow and even a little white and green at the edges of it and we found ourselves sinking into the dust, throats raw, lips caked, heads swimming, eyes gritted, legs shaking, arms inexplicably sore. A bottle of water was passed around. No one could muster the energy to take more than a sip. Some hours later, long before sunset, the tuner began cutting slices of the fatty stuff. Already singing, we took it from him. Walking on through the dust, we slapped them to life and ate them, singing.

For three days and three nights I sang that song. There was nothing in my world but dust and that song, the thoughtless song, the walking song, the endless I-am-not-here lost song. I can’t tell you what that song sounded like.

I don’t know if the girl with the wound on her head ever played her tambur along with it. I don’t think the wide-eyed man ever sounded his trumpet as we crossed the battlefield, but I can’t say. I have no idea if the song sounded different without the boy’s angry mutterings, his bursts of flute-song. I never heard the tuner sing, though. I know that. I never heard him play the boy’s flute himself as we walked. His eyes I remember never looked at us. They looked at the dust, the horizon, the harshly hazed sky, full of tense white light that would just before nightfall relax its hold on all its so many colors. His eyes never stayed put.

Some mornings I wake up and know that I have been hearing it again, just before I woke. Some days when I walk down the boulevard here, when I move through the medina on a rainy weekend afternoon when it is deserted, everyone inside with their coffee and radios, sometimes the way my legs are moving, the way my arms feel will make me realize that I am remembering something, but by the time I figure out that it is the sound of that song I will have forgotten it again.

I think sometimes that the reason I am still here and not somewhere else is because of those almost-moments. I can’t leave until I remember the song because here is where I’ve come closest to bringing it back.

It was late on the third night, near to morning, when the ship found us.

I stumbled out of the song and fell to my knees in the dust. The wide-eyed man—perhaps?—was singing something that faltered, fell away like the hands of the biggest of them dangling from his stilled wrists as we all looked up into the utterly starless sky. It was not silent, though. The air was filled with something too regular to be called noise, too heavy to be called quiet, too much everywhere at once to be coming from anywhere at all. The dust under my hands was vibrating, ghosting into the air, a soft fog about our toes and ankles. I felt queasy. A dull ache began in my eardrums and spread to my skull, my jaw, my chest.

The lights came on.

The ship filled the sky, the size of a city, and spots of blue-white light in lines like great avenues crisscrossing its belly flickered to life. We stood in a blue-white haze of drifting dust, our many shadows small and indistinct. A kilometer north of us or so and hundreds of meters above a pregnant ball the size of a stadium slowly began to turn, adding a grinding basso thrum to the whelming sound about us and within us. It was a gun, I think. Someone moved, then—the grey-skinned woman threw wide her hands, threw back her head. Her mouth hung open beneath her open eyes. Her throat and jaw jerked and trembled. She was howling.

The lights about the gun changed colors. Some flickered to green, some blue ones sparked, smaller, brighter, some long lines of neon yellow chased the base of the ball. Red lights flashed one at a time crawling down the curve of the ball toward its tip at the very bottom of the ship. All of us were howling, I think. I could not hear. I couldn’t hear anything but the smothering cocoon of sound from the ship itself.

We all looked down at the same time.

Whatever it was that came out of the gun lit the battlefield until the dust itself was white. Our shadows jerked madly as it flashed and snapped above us.

Somewhere far away as the light died there was a roar. Something fell.

One by one the avenues crisscrossing the belly of that ship went dark as it began to climb into the sky above us. The stars came out again from behind its receding edges. The emptiness about us had been stretched so closely to some breaking point by the size of it and the noise that still rang and thrummed in our ears, our blood, our trembling muscles. I spat something tasteless, thick, the color of water and watched it darken the grey dust, clump it to a wet greenish black, and realized then that the sun must be rising. We looked up and there before us in the light not a hundred meters away were the first brown leaves of dead baked grass.

When we got to Cabester everyone was already dancing.

There was a crowd of them milling about the square beneath the big electric clock. They’d clap their hands above their heads and move about with long, loping steps that changed direction with sudden, exaggerated swivels of their hips. They were out of step with the jouncing beat being squeezed out of the little red crate the small dark boy held aloft, as if the dances they danced were meant for other songs. They didn’t seem to mind.

The music was thin and scratchy, loud but somehow also far away. It jangled and bounced and someone was singing words that made sense until I tried to put them together. It all came from a round speaker there on the side of the crate that wasn’t much bigger than someone’s head. A radio, someone said. The biggest of them laughed and clapped along, there at the edge of the dancing crowd. The wide-eyed man lifted his trumpet and bounced it along with the music, suddenly sent a blatting run out to play with it, but the song ended suddenly as he played. Someone from the radio said something loudly and very quickly about liberation and the freedom of music and then a new song began, full of different jangles and thumps. The crowd cheered and laughed. The wide-eyed man lowered his trumpet, frowning. They were all dancing still, much the same. The grey-skinned woman hummed a sharp little eight-note phrase and then began throwing some of her clattering nonsense syllables together in nervous scats.

No one seemed to notice them, standing there.

The tuner pots clattering led us to a dark hall he remembered from the last time they’d been to Cabester. There was a radio there, too, playing much the same music, and men with white shirts and glossy mustaches dancing together without touching. The tuner asked the host of the hall what it was. A radio, said the host. The latest thing. A caravan brought them from Evangeline.

The soldiers won’t like this, the tuner said.

The soldiers have come and gone, said the host. The ships won’t be back for another year.

What about the festival? asked the tuner.

This is the festival, cried the host, and the dancing men all cheered.

When the pink and orange streetlights began to flicker to life we were all, the tuner, the estrane, and I, in an open-air cafe in the middle of the main boulevard. There was a counter where the keeper sold brown bottles to people who sat on stools and drank. On the counter was a radio, loud and fast and blue. The tuner still wearing his pack with the pots clattering leaned over the bar and told the keeper that the estrane would play music for metal coin, for vitamin pills and instruments, for food. The keeper shrugged. I already have a radio, he said.

What is that? asked the tuner. What music is that?

Who knows? said the keeper. It’s old music. Centuries old. Out of the air. The keeper fluttered his hands in the air as if to catch at notes. The biggest of them, wrapped in his coat, began turning in circles, stepping in time to the jouncing, humming tunelessly. The wide-eyed man kept running his hands through his matted hair, one then the other, tossing his trumpet back and forth. The young girl in the filthy sheepskin vest pressed herself up against me, tugging at my pack, until I reached into it and pulled out a blanket she could cover herself with. Some of the people on the stools were staring.

The blue radio was on a corner of the long counter. The tuner shrugged out of his pack and dropped it to the floor. He put a worn banknote on the counter, faded and rubbed to a furry smoothness like an old map, and pointed to the cooler behind the counter. The keeper swept up the note and fetched him a fresh brown bottle. The tuner drank half of it in one gulping swallow, set the bottle quite deliberately on the counter, walked down to the end of it, picked up the radio, and threw it to the floor.

There was a squawking burst of noise, but the music didn’t stop. The tuner picked up the radio again as a voice came out of it saying very rapidly something about the power of the old music and the liberation of the airwaves. The tuner brought the radio down hard against the edge of the counter. There was a crack and the new song dissolved in a hissing rush of thin white noise. Jagged bits of plastic spattered to the floor. Again, and again, until it broke open in a spray of colored wires and thin green beaded cards. The speaker lolled out of the shattered case, a flat brown cone of cardboard held by a thick black cord. The tuner dropped the radio to the floor. Well? he said.

Get out, said the keeper.

Well? said the tuner. Play!

The grey-skinned woman walked out of the open-air cafe, squeezing between a truck and a sedan parked there at the edge of the mostly empty boulevard. After a moment the wide-eyed man followed her out into the street.

Come back! said the tuner. The biggest of them shuffled over to the remains of the radio and prodded them with his battered boot. People were setting their bottles down on the floor or the counter and leaving as the keeper said again, get out, get out of here, you’re scaring my customers. The girl with the wound on her head slumped to the floor by the tuner’s pack. Well? said the tuner. The young girl looked up at me, pulled at my sleeve, mine, as the tuner said again, well? What are you waiting for?

I told the young girl she could keep the blanket. She bit her lip.

The tuner was the only one of them I ever saw again, though he wasn’t a tuner, not anymore. I walked past him without realizing who it was and by the time I did and made my way back through the noontide crowds, he was gone.

This is what I remember: his hair had grown long and matted, and he had lost his pack, his coat, he had long since lost everything but a pair of ragged coveralls and the dead boy’s flute, which he held in one hand and did not play. I don’t think the girl who shook the empty cup at passersby was the girl who’d had a wound on her head. She did not have a tambur.

There were glorious sunsets that year. I later heard from someone that it was because one of the soldiers’ great ships had gone down somewhere else, to the west, over past Menkil maybe. It had been shot down by another of those ships, they said, and it burned for fourteen, fifteen months, and the smoke filled the sky with those colors. I have not been able to confirm this, though, and by the time I was deep within my first winter here, the sky had turned mostly grey again, with only an occasional blue day, and the sunsets were nothing much to speak of.

Author’s note.

As my character in Becca’s game is only now coming to realize he might have a self to express, I don’t imagine I’ll be posting anything from his point of view any time soon. Instead, I thought I’d do pieces, or at least a piece, describing things he’d seen and been involved with from other perspectives. The first to elbow their way to the front were the estrane (also ostraine, estraney, strahna), with whom he spent some time before ending up haphazardly in Evangeline. (I would not recommend them as a “player character race.” Those who are so inclined are hereby invited, however, to do up packages in GURPS or the Window or whatever system strikes their fancy.) If you’ve read your Paul Park you’ll doubtless realize what a bad job I’ve done of filing the serial numbers off his antinomials and biters, and profuse apologies are owed; if you’ve read your William Vollmann, you probably won’t hear much of an echo in this, but the first scene was sparked by a glimpse from a Mexican train of “laundry under a tree in a sunken space” in “Spare Parts,” and the tenor overall has something to do with The Atlas, I guess, so.

—Filed 8294 days ago to Indulgences; .

When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall.

It’s one of those images that stick with you: Hypatia, pagan philosopher, dragged from her lofty chariot through the streets of Alexandria, her flesh cut from her body with oyster shells, burned to death as the last vestige of idolatry. She was accounted by some as not merely a librarian at the great Library of Alexandria, but its head librarian; the last head librarian; her death is therefore accounted by some as the end of that great era.

By some. We’re pretty sure she was murdered, but the oyster shells while a nice touch are not so certain, and as to whether she was the head librarian, well. It makes for a nice story. And the burning of the Library itself? We’re not even too sure about who did that, or when, or how. It went, we know that—it was there, unquestionably, and now it isn’t, and people got upset about it. But not enough of the record survives to tell us for sure what happened to it.

The same problem threatens to inconvenience future generations: video tape degrades, after all, and links rot; digitial media is upgraded willy nill without taking the time to bring everything from the past with us—what will you do with that 8-inch floppy disk, grampaw? And, paradoxically, there is too much information: too many stories flying around, written and told too many different ways. Who knows how what is happening here and now will end up being told in a thousand years?

Which is why it is incumbent upon all of us to engrave these words somewhere and kept them in that peculiar taboo state, untouchable and safe, where the sacred meets the profane:

The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it’s the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, “My goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?”

So that when our children, and our children’s children, and their children besides, ask, “Who destroyed the treasures of the Fertile Crescent? Who let the golden harp of Sumer slip through his fingers? The cuneiform tablets and the copper shoes? Who pledged to do his best not to war on the earliest history of humanity, and failed to keep his pledge? Who destroyed the history and the heritage of the people he tried to save, thus fueling the very hate from which he hoped to save them?” we can smile sorrowfully at them and say, “Donald Rumsfeld,” and then, demurely, spit, to rinse the foul taste of his name from our mouths.

Is it possible there were that many vases in the whole country?

—Some will frame this as a moral dilemma and yes, if you were to ask me, point blank, would I save the person or the Picasso from a burning building, I’d rather see RAWA live and thrive than save a hundred ancient statues of the Buddha, any day. But RAWA’s not exactly thriving these days, either, and anyway, the dilemma’s a false one. It’s more like this: if you plan to set fire to a museum to smoke out a madman, are you morally obligated to arrange to save as many paintings as possible? When you saw the bough off the tree, should you not try your best to catch the cradle?

Well?

The Jews ambushed the Christians, and the Christians slaughtered the pagans with oyster shells and fire. Cæsar didn’t give a fuck how he got his outnumbered force out of Dodge and torched the city to cover his escape. ’Amr bin Aas, who conquered Egypt to prove that he was a better general than Khalid ibn Walid, is supposed to have been asked what he would do to secure the scrolls and codices of the great Library; he is supposed to have said:

If these writings of the Greeks agree with the book of God, they are useless, and need not be preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious, and ought to be destroyed.

But that’s apocryphal. Especially the bit about him burning the scrolls and codices to heat his bathwater for six months. —The irreparable destruction of the irreplaceable cradle of civilization is not apocryphal, for all that it is not burning up our television screens. The blood and the oil and the hypocrisy are not apocryphal. The seven billion dollars for capping nonexistent oil fires is very real, and the monumental stupidity and colossal ignorance preen openly before the press.

Is it possible there were that many vases in the whole country?

—Filed 8294 days ago to Squawkbox; Comments [5].

Which way will the stone age vote swing?

Ever since the principles of our own social order have become a matter of sustained debate, there has been a persistent tendency to invoke the First Man to settle our disputes for us… It is not entirely clear why Early Man should possess such authority over our choices. Suppose that archaeologists digging up a very early site, found a well-preserved copy of the original Social Contract: should we feel bound by it terms, and proceed to declare all current statue law which was incompatible with it to be null and void?

—A great quote from Ernest Gellner’s Plough, Sword, and Book, which I will now keep close in my quote file thanks to a cheeky rant from John railing against utter and complete crap. (Though I think he’d agree with me that the study of psychoceramics itself, properly undertaken, can prove if not entirely edifying then at least entertaining.)

—Filed 8296 days ago to Poprocks; Comments [7].

Flexible fetishry.

Just going on record as agreeing with the eminently sensible Ampersand (and thus, by extension, former housemate and all-around mensch, Chas.): heterosexuality (or homosexuality) is best viewed as something of a fetish. —Some indulge in it to a greater degree than others, and some not at all, but it’s basically a means of fixing and focusing one’s desire—something we all do, of course, with this or that (hair color, body size, race and ethnicity, a way of laughing or telling shaggy-dog stories, that thing they do with their wallet chains), for reasons both hardwired (genetically and culturally) and whimsically contingent. —The sex (or gender, depending) of the object(s) of one’s desire(s) is just one more way of focussing, hieghtening, discriminating. (As in taste. Do keep up.) —Do note also that this is not so much a present verity (such things being rather tied to cultural standards and outlooks, and the culture at large being rather, shall we say, hung up on certain issues) as it is an ought-to-be (and given some of those hang-ups I’d agree provisionally that it is better as an end than its promulgation in the here and now is as a means to that end); keep in mind heteroflexibility and its (admittedly) thorny obverse, and always, always take the claims of evolutionary psychologists with a shaker or two of salt.

(Who, me? For the record? Something of a fetish for the opposite sex, indeed, though not so it’s a requirement or anything, and we could spend some time drawing distinctions between actual people and pop culture totems and icons and one’s [my?] differing responses thereto, but we’d get bogged down in stupid discussions of the putative male visual response and endless Schroedinger’s cat-like arguments on what’s a “real” measure of whatever it is we’re trying to measure. —And anyway, I could start throwing up lenses of gender and further confuse the issue: brusque men with small wrists and pungent senses of humor dandied up just this side of effeminate; butch femme women [as opposed, you see, to femme butches] with short unblond hair and little truck with lipstick [odd, to think I’ve forgotten what lipstick tastes like], and you could if you wanted impose the one on the other to see what similarities bleed through, or if a difference [even here] yet vives, but none of it explains the year and a half I spent in my youth enthralled to my best friend’s sister, as gawky tall as I was in her bare feet, with heavy ringletted curls of golden hair cascading down to the small of her back. There’s your “type,” yes, and then there’s the people you fall for, and one must never mistake the map for the thing mapped.)

—Filed 8296 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comments [1].

Ax(e)minster and other inconsequentialities.

The post office downtown has closed. And even though it isn’t the same thing (at all) as the ugly concrete barricades blocking the former parking circle in front of the Edith Green – Wendell Wyatt Federal Building, a makeshift solution to a problem we will always have with us (until we decide otherwise), they’re still signs of the same dam’ thing: that my own personal slice of civic life, the convenience? the dignity? the pride, perhaps, the civic pride of being able to walk a couple of blocks from my office and buy some dam’ postage stamps from what was once the oldest post office in continual operation west of the Mississippi (yes, convenience, too. But a convenience altogether different than being able to buy said stamps at the local supermarket), that my civic life is less important than five parking spaces for 9th Circuit judges; that the desire to be seen doing something quick and dirty and starvation cheap and ultimately utterly ineffectual against a form of terrorism (rental trucks and fertilizer bombs; plastique, if you’ve got militia connections with disgruntled servicefolks, perhaps) that, outside of Ann Coulter columns, is so 1995, that this pissant little gesture (a stroke of a pen, and a dozen concrete barricades, ugly protowalls shaped like long caltrops, like these are the things you cut slices from to make the riprap tumbled at the bottom of commercial jetties, are dumped haphazardly a set distance from the foundation of the building, no cars or trucks closer than this, please) is more important than any pride one might take in appearances, in what tries to pass these days for an agora. At least Napoleon III had the gumption to rebuild the entire frickin’ city, you know?

Slapdash. —This is what I think of, walking down the sidewalk between the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (Portland Branch) and more of those dam’ barricades.

I’m reading a collection of short stories by Gary Lutz and I like them well enough. He has a flair for sentences that loop unexpectedly, nouns verbified and adjectivals adverbed not for mere ugly convenience (à la businessprech) but for a much more immediate and nebulous effect, and when it works (“I’d awelessly faked my way through a Midwestern graduate school with a dissertation two hundred and eighty-seven clawing, suffixy pages long, all of it embezzled from leaky monographs”) it works quite well indeed, and when it doesn’t (“Every night we let sleep reinflict upon us its formulary and useless terrors. Come morning, it was usually argued that we were out of place, and a map was once again pencilly roughed out”) it doesn’t so much, and though “Street Map of the Continent,” say, leaves a chill wind blowing down your spine, overall it’s mostly grey little anti-epiphanics, straitlaced recountings of the unreasonable reasons behind obsessive peregrinations that end up going nowhere much; things done not because they are done but because the words that make up the telling of them conjure interesting, evanescent new flavors in your mouth. He’s a po-faced absurdist in the same basic school (I’d say; you might say different) as Kelly Link and Ray Vukevich, but Lutz’s insistence on naturalism (thus far) anchors him, greys him, sends him spinning away from oddball presque vu into obsessive, nattering retreat, but that’s just me tagging him for not doing what he isn’t doing, not for not doing what he’s doing well, which he does do. Still. Link’s witches and Vukevich’s spacesuits end up paradoxically making their stories more open, more universal, more—more. Real(ish) people reacting appropriately (if one could ever designate what is apropos in such circumstances) to impossible stimuli, rather than people not so real(ish) because they react inappropriately (if at all) to quotidian stimuli—phones that don’t ring, dead-end jobs, that annoying neighbor in the apartment just above you. (Schizophrenia and neurosis, isn’t it?)

But I’m being hard on Lutz, whom as I said I like. Quite. Has an evident love for words and a way with sentences, a sort of brusque chivalry, at once antique and outlandish. —Even if his much-vaunted clarity isn’t, much.

Jenn’s put up some of the first entries in her Explications, some of the world-building elements behind the scenes of Dicebox which (ahem) I’ve had a hand in. One of which I’d mostly forgotten between the writing of it and now: the review of the soap opera to which Griffen is addicted, Forever Between the Light and the Dark. —And aside from the particular point I want to make about Axeminster is the sheer delight I had in coming up with the details: if you want to know what my ur-entertainment is, it’s pretty much this: an anime-bright never-ending steampunk spicepunk glitterpunk Bollywood musical soap opera. Baby, I am so there.

But. Axeminster, Adelaide. The “Axeminster” comes from MacGuyver, of all places, which neither the Spouse nor I had ever watched before. —You have to understand how we get work done, sometimes, especially in the winter: bundled up on the couch, her at the one end, me at the other, under the same afghan (and, if especially cold, a comforter, perhaps), a cat on this lap or that (the other, not so sociable, watching us dreamily from the ottoman), our respective laptops (hers snow, mine tangerine) on tray tables before us (or maybe she’s got the sketchbook, the pencils, the kneaded erasers, and is constantly asking me to hold my hand thus, to laugh so, to turn my head and smile and hold it, just for a moment, there, thanks). The television’s on more often than not, more as hearth than actual focus of attention: flashing color and flickering noise to distract the bits of the brain that would otherwise get in the way of the words you’re writing or the lines you’re drawing with a lot of hemming and hawing and second-guessing. And one of those nights the channel surfing had stopped for one reason or another on TV Land, there at the top of our expanded basic cable dial, where we found an episode of MacGuyver. Maybe it was the opening with the nuclear plant somewhere in the Middle East being MacGuyvered that hooked us, I dunno. But it turned out to be an appallingly amateurish show with those weird, washed-out ’80s TV colors and a terribly hackneyed plot. The fun came from D’Mitch Davis’s portrayal of laconic hitman Axminster, out to get Our Hero—or rather, from the way he was portrayed: a black man nattily dressed in safari-ish gear standing in the back of a jeep bossing a posse of white men in full-on camo-and-safety-orange hunting togs who’d relay the most obvious exposition to him in hastily deferential tones: “He’s just been shot, Axminster!” “Nobody’s here, Axminster!” “It’s coming from over there, Axminster!”—And all of those painfully obvious voiceovers slapped onto location shots filmed MOS and shoehorned into the narrative. The giggles got positively Pavlovian.

Since I was noodling the Forever Between review while half-watching it, the producer became Adelaide Axeminster. —All of which I’d promptly forgotten, utterly, until Jenn asked me to give the piece one more once-over last night before uploading them.

So.

For some reason, there’s a connection in the back of my brain, nebulous and inexplicable but unquestionably there: on the one hand, the difference noted above between Link and Lutz, between schizophrenia and neurosis (as it perhaps were); on the other, the fact that I react to “Full of Grace” almost entirely because of the way it was used at the very end of Buffy’s second-season finale (which was on FX not too long ago; I was cooking dinner, the Spouse taking a post-work bath, and we’ve seen this ep a dozen times, easily, but the commercial break ends at 10 till the hour and here comes the fourth act, Buffy striding down that dawnlit street with a bare sword in her hand, Xander crashing out of the woods with a rock and a lie, and the pasta water’s boiling but it doesn’t matter; the sword fight is thrilling but clumsy—Boreanaz’s stunt double has a completely different hairline, and it’s as-ever painfully obvious when it’s Gellar and when it’s Sophia Crawford—and it doesn’t matter; the dialogue hasn’t aged well in spots and the acting especially at the end with the Scooby Gang standing around hands in their pockets and bandages on their heads is, again, clumsy, and it just doesn’t matter; the Spouse is out of her bath book in hand in her red robe in the TV room dripping and it doesn’t matter, because out of all this somehow the alchemy still works its magic a dozen times over now; it’s still ten of the most shattering minutes ever on a TV show, my God; Whedon teases us with the Worst Possible Ending and then shockingly ups the ante; Buffy kisses Angel one last time and then plunges the sword into him and the look on Gellar’s face as the music crashes to the ground and out of the wreckage crawls Sarah McLachlan’s voice, the winter here is cold, and bitter…), and yet I react to Poe’s “Amazed” for almost entirely inexplicable personal reasons (which won’t stop me from giving it that old college try: it’s the maze, of course, amazing, ha, but it’s the moment when—the song has climbed up out of its nice-enough but still quotidian verse-chorus-verse into an endlessly lifting bridge that’s churning with this undeniable washing waltz of a rhythm—and then the bass and the drums drop out leaving only her voice and the melody carried by I-don’t-know-what, strings, synthesizers, it doesn’t matter, there’s a guitar in there pretending to be a sitar, I think, but so what, the words carried along willy-nill in that waltz: And here by the ocean the sky’s full of leaves, and what they can tell you depends on what you believe… and that’s it; I’m standing on a beach somewhere, the air is cold and full of water and salt and the sound of the waves, endlessly—), and yet—and yet, these two songs, two very different reasons, but the feeling itself is the same, the same: that swooping swelling presque vu that demands attention, that you stop and hold yourself motionless and let it happen to you until it’s past, it’s over, you’re done. And then.

I’m sorry. What was I saying?

—Filed 8298 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comments [1].

No means no.
Separation means separation.
Uniter means not dividing.
This means war.

I want my country back.

I don’t want to listen to fundamentalist preachers anymore.

—Filed 8298 days ago to Squawkbox; Comments [3].

A half-satisfied cat being better than none.

Moved mostly to post a couple of searches on which Google (and thus by extension this whole mighty interweb-thingie) failed me today. First, the Multnomah County Library has in storage a book with the tantalizing title: History of remarkable conspiracies connected with European history, during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, by Lawson, John Parker, d. 1852. But it’s in, as noted, storage, and anyway the library is closed on Mondays (thanks ever so much, Mr. Sizemore), so I couldn’t go on my lunch break to figure out whether or not I can pry it out of their hands for a week or so. But! Google would help! And instantly, to boot! Surely a book about so tantalizing a topic will have been read by someone somewhere, and thus naturally enough nattered on about on some obscure webpage. —I’ll at least have a better idea as to whether or not Mr. Lawson’s tome is worth the prying. But even the simplest variation of the title turns up bupkes, and John Parker Lawson, d. 1852 or not, fares little better.

Hmpf.

Second: enjoying immensely The Sword and the Centuries, by Alfred Hutton, FSA—he quotes primary sources extensively, is proving a wealth of delicious trivia about points of honor and fighting with long sharp sticks, and has that wonderful tang to his voice, that admixture of florid vocabulary and dry understatement that makes me weak in the knees. I mean, he uses words like supersticerie—

Well. Google turns up nothing, and the editors of the OED apparently hadn’t read Sword by 1971. —The meaning is clear enough from context:

A certain Gounellieu, a great favourite of the King, had incurred his hatred, and that justly, because this Gounellieu had killed, as it was said, with supersticery and foul advantage, a young brother of his…

...we have seen how various acts of “supersticerie” arose—how a wicked-minded man, feeling sure that his adversary was honest, would appear on the field with a good strong coat of mail concealed under his shirt…

Breaking the word and scrying its entrails helps, too (of course): super and sistere, to stand above, cf. intersices and superstition. Supersticerie does have a supernatural component, given the number of charms duellists would tuck about their person for a chance at that scant edge (and the vociferousness with which they then had to proclaim before God and King or Duke or Marshal they had done no such thing); and so one who depends upon such supersticery (as opposed, say, to mail coats hidden under shirts, or paying one’s buddies to waylay one’s opponent on the way to the duelling ground—also incidents of supersticery) is, of course, a bit superstitious. I like the quality of its movement in logic-space: appealing to extra-legal recourse is, in a sense, standing above the fray. And I like its linkage with another obsolete variant on super-sistere, which the OED had tumbled to in 1971: superstitie, the power of survival. —“The people are the many waters, he turn’d their froth and fome into pearls, and wearied all weathers with an unimpaired Superstitie.”

So there’s my contribution to the interweb-thingie, this week; give it a few days, and the next time someone goes hunting via Google for “supersticerie,” they’ll get something of an answer. One out of two ain’t bad.

But I’m still curious as hell about Lawson’s 150-year-old conspiracy theories. Anyone? Anyone?

—Filed 8300 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comments [7].

Mission creep.

I need a new word. If it’s war that’s hell, what on earth can we call this that will do it justice?

UMM QASR, Iraq – The US military came up with a solution yesterday for the penniless people of this port town begging for water: Sell it.

Despite general mayhem at distribution points—including knife fights—the Army has struck a hasty agreement with local Iraqis to expedite distribution of water to the roughly 40,000 living here.

Under the deal, the military will provide water free to locals with access to tanker trucks, who then will be allowed to sell the water for a “reasonable” fee.

“We’re permitting them to charge a small fee for water,” said Army Col. David Bassert.

“This provides them with an incentive to hustle and to work,” said Bassert, an assistant commander with the 354th Civil Affairs Brigade.

He said he could not suggest what constitutes a reasonable fee and did not know what the truckers were charging. He said the tradition here of haggling at markets would help the system work.

“People know when they’re being gouged—we’ll deal with it,” Bassert said.

Especially when the largest potential employer is hanging signs like this:

Tucked in the classifieds of national Indian dailies on Wednesday was an advertisement that could further alienate the Muslim community from the United States.

The advertisement calls for applications from “non-Muslims only” for sundry jobs at the US base in northern Kuwait.

The US base “urgently requires” lift operators, store keepers, clerks, typists, security guards and drivers. The advertisement insists that the applicants, besides being non-Muslims, should speak English and be below 35.

Luckily, retired Army Lieutenant General Jay Garner is listening to the British and not the Americans.

Garner sought to gloss over what had become an increasingly angry US-British dispute on the direction and goals of the relief effort. The Americans wanted to jump-start a free-market economy by letting Iraqi contractors sell water at a modest profit to encourage private business in general.

But British officers were exasperated at what they viewed as a heavy-handed and unrealistic American attempt to impose supply-side economic theory on what is essentially a barter economy in the aftermath of dictatorship and war.

“We’re going to build on what the British have done,” Garner said, putting an end to the initial US approach that was enthusiastically outlined Monday by Army Col. David Bassert of the 354th Civil Affairs Brigade.

But I still need that new word. Greedracious? Backstabistick? A thick brown taste in the back of your throat, an acrid tang of decay, like you’re rotting from the inside? Jesus Mary Mother of God, what in the hell are you jumped-up morons thinking?

(Via Nathan Newman, with an assist from Steve Colbert.)

—Filed 8303 days ago to Squawkbox; Comments [3].

Remissal.

I would be remiss, that is, if I didn’t mention the Girlamatic launch in somewhat more detail. It’s the latest in the Modern Tales family of subscription-driven webcomics sites: a low, low monthly fee gets you a passel of strips updating weekly in a variety of new fresh flavors. —Girlamatic caused some little controversy when it was first announced; comics shouldn’t build its own ghettos, women don’t need special help, we should judge comics on their merits and not the gender of the cartoonists; that sort of thing. (Oddly enough, a great many of the skeptics, while feeling that congregating comics by the gender [or race, or ethnicity, or religion, or culture, perhaps] of the cartoonist or the [largely] intended audience was a mistake, did not feel that congregating comics by genre—science fiction, gag, autobiographical, pervert suit, etc.—was itself a similar error.) Well, now that Girlamatic has launched (and is no longer vaporware, mere fodder for messageboard speculation), it can be judged on its own merits.

I don’t think it comes off too terribly badly. The gravitas of Donna Barr, say (almost ridiculously self-indulgent, poorly scanned in spots, and in German to boot, but it is Donna Barr, so); the kickass one-two punch of Shaenon “Narbonic” Garrity and Vera “Cartooning Goddess” Brosgol (yes, that Vera Brosgol); Kris Dresen’s gorgeously drawn “Encounter Her”; I’ve read the first fit of The Stiff by Jason Thompson, and it’s going to creep the holy fuck out of you; I like what I’ve seen of Layla Lawlor’s Raven’s Children, so I’m curious to poke around in Kismet: Hunter’s Moon; Harley Sparx is apparently out to do some sort of shonen ai piss-take on Dante, so you know I’m in the front row with popcorn; Andre Richards brings the old skool minicomics vibe; Dylan Meconis (yes, that Dylan Meconis) is bringing Bite Me to the party; and while I can say nothing at all either pithy or penetrating about Lisa Jonte at the moment, she’s in heady company, is she not?

Which leaves us with two of the current roster as yet uncommented. First being Spike, and another of those whereinnahell-did-she-come-from moments. The woman has a gorgeous design sense (a curious shortcoming in comics as a whole) and draws like some unholy combination of Charles Burns and Chris Ware; check out her own website, for instance these beautiful little character studies, and then check back for more Lucas and Odessa. —The second as yet uncommented, of course, is the Spouse: and allow me to set aside any pretence of setting aside any pretence to objectivity, because I do think it’s clear enough without spousal bias that Jenn’s a sharp writer with an ear for witty dialogue, an excellent cartoonist in the illustratorly school, inspiringly cheeky in her symbol-games and pattern-making, with a yen for futures that are lived in and not just dreamed up. Add to which her gorgeous color sense and a world-building skill with perspective (a behind-the-scenes hint: David Chelsea’s Perspective! will teach you everything you need to know), and—well, Dicebox alone is worth a buck ninety-five a month. —Much less everything else, and more on the way.

But! Enough with the hype. We now return you to your regularly scheduled bitching and moaning.

—Filed 8304 days ago to Sequentualities; .

Has been constitutive of.

At the end of the day, this is maybe the worst crime I’m willing to charge junior professor and middleweight bloviator Nicholas De Genova with: a tendencious mangling of the written word out of unexamined habit that results in such no-duh sentences as:

In my brief presentation, I outlined a long history of US invasions, wars of conquest, military occupations, and colonization in order to establish that imperialism and white supremacy have been constitutive of US nation-state formation and US nationalism.

The remarks in question (“I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus”) led the New York Post to idly speculate on how cool it would be for the National Guard to take up once again the practice of opening fire on peacefully protesting fellow citizens. De Genova has since expounded on his “million Mogadishus” soundbite in the Columbia Daily Spectator (link gacked from Electrolite’s comments, though the Invisible Adjunct has more to say on the subject), and it’s pretty much what I thought; these sorts of clarion calls for clear moral lines—with little thought as to the very real effects on those (of racially subordinated and working class backgrounds, as he takes pains to point out) who must necessarily toe those clear moral lines; who are rarely, if ever, anyone remotely like the clarion caller him- or herself—this sort of stirring speechifying has always been and will ever be constitutive of rabble-rousing and moral thuggery on every side of any conceivable political divide. It’s as shocking to find in academia—red state or blue state—as gamblers in Casablanca. —Yes, sheltered narcissist De Genova is far too quick to urge others (from racially subordinated and working-class backgrounds, to boot) to step up to his plate, but when it comes to the difference between urging and actually being in a position to enforce a glitteringly beautiful, inhuman moral clarity, I reserve my ire and my disdain first and foremost for the enforcers, button-men and condottieri—and there’s a long line of zipless cakewalk neocons ahead of De Genova, let me tell you.

(And such powerful weapons my ire and disdain are, too. Each hair on my head stands upright, like spines, and each one is tipped with a fire-spark. One eye squeezes tighter than the eye of a needle; the other opens as wide as a goblet. My mouth opens and stretches to my ears, my lips peel back until all my teeth show and you can see straight down my gullet. All around my head the hero-halo spins and flashes like a falling star. —Just ask the Spouse.)

Anyway, best quote on the whole sordid mess comes from Scott Lynch, in those ever-lively comments at Electrolite:

The thing that hits me hardest in the gut about this stupid De Genova/Kent State “thought experiment” is that there are folks out there who seem to think (or are willing to suggest in “jest”) that Kent State was only a tragedy for the left. It’s a bit like suggesting that Pearl Harbor was a tragedy solely for Hawaiians.

Now: Geraldo Rivera. Shameless flack or traitorous hack?

—Filed 8305 days ago to Squawkbox; Comments [3].

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