Rule No. 1.
Not to be a kill-joy, but rule no. 1 in any online community is this: Do not feed the trolls.
They crawl out of the woodwork, these trolls, to say things intended only to stir up trouble. They want you to get angry. They want you to fly off the handle. They love it when you go off in a high dudgeon at great length and with furious vituperation. They don’t care what you say, how clearly you hold the moral high ground, how you raze their pathetic arguments to the foundations and salt the very earth they stand on. They just know if they say something outrageous, they’ll get attention, and when the current furor dies down, they’ll just say something outrageous again. Moreso, maybe. Try to top themselves. (You remember your T.A. for Tots? It’s a classic case of confusing Warm Fuzzies and Cold Pricklies. If the PC Police didn’t exist, they’d have to invent them—wait a minute—)
So: in case you hadn’t figured it out: Ben Shapiro is a stone-cold troll. —For fuck’s sake, Jerry Falwell apologized for saying this shit. (Whether he really meant it in his heart is between him and his God and immaterial to the matter at hand.)
It’s become hip in certain circles to refer to “the Virgin Ben” when dealing with Shapiro—mostly because of how he spun this lifestyle squib. —This is a classic case of feeding the troll. It’s not so much red meat as the Goblin Queen’s appropriately righteous indignation, but running gags like “the Virgin Ben” will feed his persecution complex and give him enough of a crusader’s high to keep him going for weeks on end. (Why, if he’s lucky enough, maybe he’ll break out of the blogosphere and get his own Working For Change profile.)
Of course: online, if you don’t feed the trolls, they eventually go away. Not entirely—we will always have trolls with us—but it’s possible to maintain a civil discourse over and around them, through them and past them; if you can’t resist, if you give in to temptation and the troll gets what the troll wants, well. You can always ban IP numbers.
Out here in the real world, if you don’t feed the trolls, the Heritage Foundation will still give them columns.
Life is unfair. Dammit.
Do the good work. Do the substantive work. Speak truth to power and all that jazz; turn over what rocks you can and tell everyone what you find there. Take responsibility for your news and hold accountable the official voices who are supposed to bring it to you. When the chattering classes swallow unquestioned the latest bile from entertainers like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, demand better. (Because trolls who get others to agree with them are the most dangerous trolls of all.) But Ben Shapiro? The Virgin Ben? Come on.
I mean, it’s like kicking a puppy. You know?
Going to the Show.
Dwight Meredith has announced the winners of the 2002 Koufax Awards; hearty congrats to old friend Barry for the richly deserved Best Design Southpaw. Read through the whole list and follow every link: the winners deserve it, every one, and the nominees all gave them good hard runs for the money.
But now that a game’s been pitched intra-league, as it were, to extend the metaphor (conceit?), it’s time to head up to the Show. Maybe the 2003 Bloggies could signal the eruption of the left-wing grassroots mediasphere.
Hey. A kid can dream.
Further reason for Derbyshire & Co. to despair.
You won’t find Henriette Cecile Beigh and Andrea Yoshiko Uehara on the new “Celebrations” page of The Oregonian, but someday you might find them in the history books. That’s because Rita and Andi are transgender trailblazers. Born 55 years ago as Henry Charles Beigh and Andrew Iwao Uehara, they are, perhaps, the only same-sex couple to become legally married in the state of Oregon, a feat accomplished during the brief time that Andrew had become Andi and Henry had not yet become Rita. They even have the certificate to prove it.
Of course, there’s also the dentist who has very good reasons for the state not to cut funding for dental care for the 400,000 poorest adult Oregonians, and the community activist (and black single mother!) who says, “That’s all great and wonderful, but the point I’m trying to make is, you work at a social-service program, but the only people of color are the janitors. You work with all black people, but yet you don’t have any people of color in your personal life. How serious are you about your fight to change things?” —So those National Review bigots pundits could take their pick, really.
A taste of things to come,
or, A cheap shot.
Nassau County, I think, provides a so-ghastly-it’s-funny microcosm of what happens when incompetent, crony capitalist Republicans leave fiscal prudence to tax-and-spend Democrats.
An American institution that deserves to be honored.
Thanks to Kevin, I’ve now got a quote that pretty much sums up my reaction to Charles Rangel’s (D-NY) proposition to bring back the draft:
Assume that all governments lie. Do not accept the idea that the violence of war can be justified by claiming to prevent a larger violence. Understand that all war is a war against children, and therefore can not be justified, whatever the reason.
—Howard Zinn, historian
In other words, I’m much closer to TalkLeft than Daily Kos. —Or, as Utah Phillips puts it (rather, as Utah tells us Tom Scribner put it):
Well they’d roust him out; he would hobble down the hall, pick up the receiver of the phone, swear at whoever was on the other end for being exhumed from his room, and I’d finally say, “Tom, Tom!”—this was on my nickel—“Tom, slow down a minute! It’s Utah, I got a question for ya.”
He spoke that workers’ shorthand, that sort of slices the fat off of any kind of argument. One time I said over the phone, “Tom, I’m in a debate over here at the Unitarian Church on bringing back the military draft; they’re going to try to bring back the military draft so I’m debating it. Now, you tell me what you think.”
Well, there was a long pause. Then the voice come back at me over the wires. “Nnuh. When I started in the forest, most of my workmates was Scandahoovians: Norwegians, Danes, Finns, Swedes. Most of ’em left the old country fleeing conscription to fight another dumb European war. Yeah, the wealth of the West was built on the backs of draft dodgers. It’s an American institution—deserves to be honored.”
And yet, the dog still hunts—
Had a weird experience over a year ago or so, watching television: one of those commercials came on. You know. A cross-section of America in natural light, looking with simple, quiet pride directly into the camera’s slow-mo pan, a subdued but stirring “America the Beautiful” jangling sweetly under an earnest voice-over. Thing of it was, I was arrested, sat up, jaw dropped, my shrivelled little heart growing three sizes all at once. Because what the voice-over was saying was this:
I believe there’s a reason we are born with free will.
And I have a strong will to decide what’s best for my body, my mind, and my life.
I believe in myself.
In my intelligence, my integrity, my judgement.
And I accept full responsibility for the decisions I make.
I believe in my right to choose—without interrogations, without indignities, without violence.
I believe that’s one of the founding principles of our country.
And I believe that right is being threatened.
The greatest of human freedoms is choice.
And I believe no one has the right to take that freedom away.
And I thought to myself, damn. Propaganda works. —Of course, the choir always likes to be preached to, but still. It felt good, you know?
I had another of those moments, just now. We’re lounging around, doing a note-taking, idea-sketching, Thai-take-out-snarfing, muscat-drinking, Pym’s-nibbling day, with videos, the Spouse and I. There’s a La Femme Nikita marathon on Oxygen!, and while neither of us ever got into the show, it’s a fine enough thing to have on in the background between flicks. Anyway. Commercial break, and here’s a simple little commercial from Familyplanet, telling us there’s a difference between hope and despair, and that there’s hope yet for a future where people around the world can have the tools and the knowledge they need in their own hands to plan for the families they want, to enable them to negotiate one of the contingencies of life, and not be at its mercy.
And I had another one of those weird, unsettling, moments where I agreed wholeheartedly with what a commercial was telling me.
I mean: if it really were as bad as some say, don’t you think the choir would be preached to just a little more often? —Or maybe we’re just playing it cagey. Trying not to tip our hand. Is that it?
My God, the hair.
Barry, of course, weighed in with his two cents about the Haberdashery, and the evanescent, delicately necessary threadworks of artistic communities; now Jenn’s written up her own account of what it was like and how it all came together, Back in the Day.
With pictures.
What’s frightening is most of that hair is still around today. Be warned.
Bonus: Amy’s put in an appearance, in the comments to my original post; get thee a blog too, woman. And: if you lean on Sara, she might just post those Clarion ’91 photos. —This nostalgia kick could get to be a trend.
Roots.
I need to talk to my folks more at some point or another about this stuff; I trust vaguely that notes have been gathered and compiled in loose files somewhere, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that most of the family lore is in the memories stored in one head or another and yet to be written down in any but the most cursory form. (My father’s been on a geneological kick off and on—he tracked down a church in the Czech republic in a village where one branch or another of the ur-Manleys springs from—but my father’s office is, to put it charitably, a godawful mess.)
—And it’s families lore, isn’t it. Not “family lore.” Looking back into one’s ancestry is like looking upriver at all the many and various tributaries—rivers, riverlets, streams, creeks, cricks, branches, springs, trickles, washes and wets—that all could have been the proximate source of this or that molecule of water floating past you. You can pretend to follow one main track back in time, say this is the river, and the rest feed into it, but that’s a construct. It privileges one set at the expense of others. It’s families, not family. Bloodlines a-plenty, not a single, magisterial bloodline stretching back in time like the Mississippi.
But I digress.
Roots on my father’s side: mostly on the western and more hardscrabble edge of the Appalachians: Alabama, western Georgia. I know we had some folks in Winston County, who voted to secede from the Confederacy when the Confederacy seceded from the Union; Dad likes to say that folks in Winston County were too poor to own slaves and didn’t give a good God damn about states’ rights and just wanted to be left alone with their moonshine, so. —Of course, there’s also a Cherokee (or half-Cherokee) who served in the Confederate Army as a scout.
Which, apparently, qualifies me for this.
Though—aside from my own personal misgivings (which are legion), there’s the small matter of the Wiggin on my mother’s side who served with Sherman on his famous March. We have his cavalry saber somewhere in one of the closets of my parents’ house. That Wiggin unpacked his carpet bags and married into a family (families) come down in time and station from the mighty Middletons—genuine Southern plantation aristocracy of the rice variety, there on the South Carolina coast, where Gullah is still spoken by basket-weaving women on the street corners of Charleston, where society matrons still archly refer to “The Late, Great Unpleasantness.” (“War Between the States” being a vulgar term, you see.) We’ve visited the plantation, which is now a carefully maintained park; we had a feast of steamed oysters and pork in the old kitchen and heard ghost stories about the family crypt. —One of the Middletons, as is often pointed out, signed the Declaration of Independence. His grandson signed the Ordinance of Secession.
I was born in Sheffield, Alabama, and after about six months was moved to Richmond, Virginia, where I laid down my first memories. (The first one I can date with any assurance: in the car, pulling up the driveway of the smaller house, as someone on the radio noted it was the one-year anniversary of the Watergate break-ins. I have earlier memories, but none I can place with such precision.) When I was—five? six?—we moved to Arak, Iran, where I spent a year and a half in the small American school for the families of engineers working on a couple of projects for the Shah, reading Tintin comics and Boys’ Own Adventure stories from Britain. By 1976 we were back in the States, in North Carolina; in 1978, I saw Las Guerras de las Galaxias in Caracas, long, agonizing months after all my friends back in the States had seen it. When I went to the Breckenridge County Spelling Bee in Kentucky (sixth grade), I lost on the first round because I spelled parlor p-a-r-l-o-u-r.
All those British adventure stories, you see. (My brother-in-law, who’s from somewhere south of London and who gets asked from time to time—no lie—if he was in that band, is a professor of history who specializes with a kind of grim glee in the antebellum South. Go figure.)
I was born in the South, and did a lot of growing up there, but if you tried to cram my roots into a box conveniently labelled Southerner, it would be a hard fit. I’d be a hard fit. I don’t talk Southern. (Though I’m noticing more and more of my father’s turns of phrase popping up in my conversation. Shorn of the accent, but.) I don’t write Southern. (Though it’s a fine enough business for them that do.) I didn’t grow up thinking Southern. (Then, who does?) —Yet I am a Southerner.
What else could I be?
For all that I haven’t spent more than two weeks at a time south of the Mason-Dixon since 1985.
Getting on the bus last night, there was, at the back, a tall man in a long black trenchcoat and a black leather cowboy hat. On the hat in the middle was a buckle: the Confederate battle flag in all its starry, barry glory.
You see them, from time to time, here in Portland (one of the whitest major cities in America). Mostly in the windows of pickup trucks, or muddied SUVs. (Do they think like pickup truck people? Like people who go off-roading?) For all that this is the furthest north I’ve ever lived.
Seeing that flag makes me think of a lot of things: alternate histories (those damn cigars!) and the romance of vanishing chivalry and brutal, dehumanizing hatred and appalling, sugar-coated ignorance and The Dukes of Hazard and a satisfyingly juvenile fuck you! to the powers that be and gun racks and cowboy hats and For Us By Us and redneck frat boys and my brother driving carriages in the background of the upcoming Cold Mountain movie and red dirt and pine needles and the Smokey Mountains at dawn (Bat Cave, North Carolina and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee) and hey, remember that guy who clocked me outside of the pool where I worked as a lifeguard? I’d kicked him out for roughhousing, six foot mumble, two hundred some odd pounds, me a skinny white sophomore in high school, and when I was climbing into the car of the friend who was driving me home this guy comes out of nowhere and grabs me and yells and punches me, and Shark, my boss (a hair under six feet but more of it muscle), pulls him off, and we went to the police, and it turned out he had a number of previous convictions for assault (also battery), enough so that when I stood in front of a judge and swore that yes, this man attacked me, and he stood up and said he had, and he was sorry, when they led him away, a black man two or three years older than me with a kid (possibly two, the cops were unsure) out of wedlock (as they say), it was to a jail outside of Columbia for a six-month sentence; I think of that, too, and I also think of the basket women in Charleston pretending to hide from tourists’ cameras as if their souls would be stolen (until you offer them five bucks, or ten) and I think of what Gullah sounds like and how much I enjoyed those steamed oysters. And maybe in one way or another that flag “stands for” all of these things, for me if not for every Southerner; this is, after all, my heritage. Or some small part of it.
But the flag also stands for this. It always has.
And whether the guy in the back of the bus wants it to or not, it always will.
Ludafisk.
If you give a man a Fisk, you’re an insufferable asshole, but if you teach a man to Fisk, you’ve created a whole new asshole.
I suppose this was the immediate impetus, but I’m shall we say reluctant to ascribe to the piece any recognition beyond that which it’s already gotten, and anyway, it’s merely a catalyst which has set off a chain reaction prompting me to try and synthesize some half-formed, vague ideas kicked loose by Barry’s discussion thread on pornography and some (very) recent reading on Russian magic and some speculatin’ on the nature of Gödel’s Theorem, which I’ll doubtless take as far out of context as poor old Schrödinger’s Cat . (Someone keep Professor Hawking away from the gun cabinet, please?)
Webster’s defines Fisking as—well, no, it doesn’t, not yet. But definitions are out there; most seem to cite the Volokh Conspiracy, so let’s do the same (by way of the Neo-libertarian News Portal):
The term refers to Robert Fisk, a journalist who wrote some rather foolish anti-war stuff, and who in particular wrote a story in which he (1) recounted how he was beaten by some anti-American Afghan refugees, and (2) thought they were morally right for doing so. Hence many pro-war blogs — most famously, InstaPundit—often use the term “Fisking” figuratively to mean a thorough and forceful verbal beating of an anti-war, possibly anti-American, commentator who has richly earned this figurative beating through his words. Good Fisking tends to be (or at least aim[s] to be) quite logical, and often quotes the other article in detail, interspersing criticisms with the original article’s text.
A thorough, forceful (if figurative) beating, then, that tends to or at least aims to be logical, administered to someone for something they said. And I like my humor neck-snappingly bleak, so it is with a small grim smile that I appreciate the aptness of taking one’s inspiration from an account of a thorough, forceful, illogical beating administered by an angry mob to someone erroneously assumed to be an agent or a symbol of that which is evil or bad or harmful—or at the very least of that which is pissing them off that particular day. —And, like Fisk, I am not without my sympathy. Even as I scratch my head at trying to parse the “logic” in refuting a citation of Gandhi’s life’s work by pointing out the man was assassinated. (“And look what happened to him.” “Oh! Jolly good show! ’it ’im again! ’it ’im again!”)
But I come not to Fisk a Fisking. —Not because I think Fisking is wrong, no. Not because I curl my lip in a disdainful sneer at figurative beatings, or recoil from the taste of blood on my rhetorical jackboots. Nor because I’m tired, and think it’s a futile endeavor, akin to Canute spitting into the oncoming tide—I am, and I do, but that’s not why I’m not Fisking a Fisking today. No.
It’s because it’s so damned easy.
My Christmas present to myself this year was The Bathhouse at Midnight, W.F. Ryan’s monumentally descriptive survey of (as the subtitle puts it) magic in Russia. In his introduction, he lays out the intended scope of the book (which, as noted, is monumental), discussing the problems one encounters when one sets out to write about the history of magic in Russia, and one must figure out what it is one means when one says “history,” “magic,” and “Russia.” How does one account for the differences between written and oral traditions—especially when the border is as permeable as it is in Russian history? What bits of all those many and varied regions stretching across 11 time zones that we (or some of us) have at one point or another called “Russia” do you include, and what do you leave out? What is magic? How do you know it when you see it? How can you differentiate it from assumptions of divine intervention, or folkloric tradition, or religious ceremony? (Do you need such differentiations in the first place?) —The most interesting of these definitional problems is figuring out what magic is, of course, or at least coming to a vague agreement as to the particulars of what we’ll call magic for the course of the book. Ryan never quite comes out and offers a firm definition of his own (beyond the general impression that he’ll be more inclusive than not—a fine and worthy goal, in this case), but he does summarize some interesting definitions along the way: Magic is an alternative to religion, the other side of its coin, a corruption of it, parasitic to religion, a deviation from spiritual or social norms, or (charitably) a semiotic system of oppositions to religion. That form of religious deviance whereby individual or social goals are sought by means alternate to those normally sanctioned by the dominant religious institution. Magic’s goals are overwhelmingly the expression of personal desires for sex, power, wealth, revenge, relief from sickness or protection from harm; religions usually have social, ethical, spiritual, and numinous aspects that transcend individual ambition. But as Ryan puts it (and I’ll quote directly now, rather than tightly paraphrase): “Most attempts to come to terms with the sameness or distinctness of concepts of magic and religion suffer to some extent… almost all can be made to fit the evidence at most points, and almost all break down at some points in specific cases.” Each definition is a useful enough tool in and of itself, for doing what it is it does, but each breaks down somewhere or another. The tool is to be used when needed and set aside when not; definitions should always (strive to) be descriptive, not prescriptive. The map is not the thing mapped. This is important to keep in mind, because, to quote Gábor Klaniczay (and to drag this digression back onto the ostensible topic of Fisking):
The wide array of theoretical explanatory tools and comparative sets stands in puzzling contrast to the ease with which each general proposition can be contradicted.
Call it Klaniczay’s Corollary to Gödel’s Theorem and keep it in mind; we’re off on another digression.
—Samuel Delany has written (most notably in “Politics of Paraliterary Criticism” in Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary, and thank God John still has my copy, or I’d start quoting at length and we’d never get out of here) that one of the central problems with sympathetic attempts to seriously critique paraliterary stuff like comics or SF is that they almost always start with an attempt to define the thing to be critiqued. Delany’s point is that genres are impossible to define, because they are social constructs, highly permeable categories highly fluid both from day to day and person to person. One can never delineate with any degree of precision the necessary and sufficient conditions that make SF SF, or comics comics; therefore, attempting to define them is futile from the start. Also, it lends a déclassé air of pseudo-science to one’s criticism, as if one has such a distrust of one’s material that one must appeal to a nominally neutral definition as an argument from authority. (Webster’s defines SF as…) So quit stinkin’ up the joint, kid; you’re embarrassing me.
Which is not to say I agree wholly with Delany, or that there’s never a need for definitional thinking. Criticism can be cheekily likened to one of those blind folks with the elephant discoursing at length about what it is they’ve experienced, the immense fan-like quality of it (or the peculiarly prehensile, ropey nature, or the way it calls to mind thick, gnarled tree trunks), how that quality compares with what Foucault says about how it’s really a wall, and the thoughts set in motion by contemplating the differences and similarities of the ways we each perceive this thing we call “elephant.” It helps in this circumstance to articulate what you think you’ve experienced, and how, and why; it helps to say right off the bat what it is you think an “elephant” is. —But to mistake this articulation for a definition is to mistake a description for a prescription, a tool for a law, the map for the thing mapped. It is to believe you’re really talking about a fan, a rope, a tree trunk, a wall, and to forget we’re all trying to figure out what this thing called “elephant” is.
There’s another reason to eschew the definition in criticism (or polemicism): because definitions are by nature imperfect, theoretical explanatory tools that can with puzzling ease be contradicted in one or another of their particulars, because for any given axiomatic system there exists propositions that are either undecidable, or the axiomatic system itself is incomplete, well, it’s all too easy to poke holes in definitions. And it’s all too easy to mistake poking a hole in a definition for refuting someone’s argument; to say, “The tool you made that house with is imperfect, therefore the house is not worth my consideration.” (Which, no, is not what Audre Lorde meant.) —And even if the debate is entered into in good fun and good faith, it’s all too easy to get sidetracked arguing about the words one chooses to define the thing instead of coming to grips with the thing itself.
And Fisking is little more than poking holes in someone else’s definitions.
Each statement of the anti-war, anti-American speech to be Fisked is parsed as if it were a definition: of the speakers’ credo, his or her intentions, worldview, as a statement of what anti-war anti-Americans in general think. Any contradiction that can then be pulled from what the Fisker takes to be that credo or worldview, or those intentions, or any action from anyone counted as anti-war or anti-American, is then held aloft, trumpeted, crowed over as a critical flaw in the thinking of one’s target. See? A contradiction! See? The tool is imperfect! See? We don’t have to pay any attention to the house! —When in doubt, point out that Gandhi practiced non-violence. So did Martin Luther King, Jr. And they both got assassinated! See? Quod erat fuckin’ demonstrandum.
’it ’im again.
When we talk about—anything, at length, our own experiences, what we think those mean, morally, ethically, politically, critically, when we talk about the camps of feminism or vampire slaying television programs or whether or not we should go to Iraq to demonstrate a commitment to something as ridiculous as peace and as ludicrous as respect for human life, over beers at the bar or in our blogs or in peer-reviewed journals, we are, in a sense, describing our piece of the elephant. Comparing it with what other people have said about that elephant. And we can keep in mind the shortcomings of definitions (or decide that what I’ve laid out here is utter hogwash), but we can’t help but speak in them; and whenever we try to define what it is we mean when we talk about the elephant (whether it’s the one in the living room or the one that just did the loop-the-loop under the big top), we can’t help but define ourselves. Debate based on respect does its best to reach past those definitions, to look from the tools to the thing being built with them, to leap from the map to the thing mapped. It may miss, it may disagree, it may get it wrong, but it makes the attempt. And this takes work. It doesn’t come easy. (That’s why it’s usually a mark of respect.)
On the other hand, anyone at all can trumpet a contradiction. Anyone at all can complain about a tool. Anyone at all can kick, can lay into someone with the boots and fists of an angry mob, can crack open a cheek with a thrown rock. —Whether they aimed it logically or not.
Anyone can Fisk.
And that’s why I don’t. It’s déclassé.
Currently appearing elsewhere.
I should probably point out that this entry of Barry’s has generated a rather lively and puckish discussion, in which I take part (I do some of the puckish bits. You’ll have to click on the comments link at the bottom of the item yourself to get there, since it needs Java-whatsit to work). I should probably also point out that I should maybe go ahead and try to smack those various inchoate comments of mine into a more coherent screed for posting here (I style myself a freelance critic of the paraliterary; pornography is, like comics, like role-playing games, like cookbooks, like genre’d prose, like legal briefs, like cancelled SF-Western television shows—excuse me, televisual texts—paraliterary. So I should maybe write about this rather long story which all too often is given too short a pier)—but pontificating about anything without providing specific, personal examples is worse than useless, and getting into specific, personal examples when one’s topic is pornography is, well. Revelatory and embarrassing.
So.
(Yes, yes. Honesty and candor; candor and honesty. The irony is richly appreciated.)
What I have in common with Dylan Meconis.
We both, apparently, have a thing for unmitigated evil. —Or so says this.
—Who, you ask, is Dylan Meconis? Why, only one of the Four-Who-Must-Be-Named-For-Easier-Linking, recently added to the radar screen of Scott McCloud’s inestimably powerful links page: that’d be Vera Brosgol, Jen Wang, Erika Moen, and, well, Dylan; four scarily talented cartoonists just out of high school and looking for trouble—lock up your sons and daughters and step away from the Wacom Tablet.
The trouble with the whole Four-Who-Must-Be-Named-For-Easier-Linking shtick (Fwoombuneffel?) is that there’s really six. Or that’s how I think of them, anyway: the Mostly Acquisitions crowd, the six cartoonists who with this 24-page $2.00 ashcan had put together maybe the neatest thing (aside from the Junko Mizuno postcards and the Eddie Campbell original) we’d picked up at the 2002 San Diego Comic Con: Brosgol and Moen and Meconis and Wang, yes, but also Bill Mudron and Kevin Hanna.
People at the con couldn’t stop talking about Mostly Acquisitions: “Have you seen the minicomic with the story about the girl who buys a vibrator?” they’d say. They were talking about Vera Brosgol’s story, “Babeland,” which is, well, a piece about a girl buying her first vibrator: marvellously expressive cartooning with a slyly subversive political kick. But they were all being lazy, referencing the the memorable high-concept hook, and giving unforgiveably short shrift to the rest. There’s Bill Mudron’s loopily obsessive pencil work (check out those plaids!), like one of Al Columbia’s apocryphal Merrie Melodies kicked loose in time. Erika Moen manages to channel Ellen Forney with cheeky assurance (for all that she was seven in ’90, not ’75. Added bonus: I now know what a GeoSafari is. The heart bleeds). Kevin Hanna’s appealing characters with their skinny lines and grey toning and expressive body language manage the neat trick of finding something compelling in the oeuvre of Michael Bay. And Dylan Meconis rounds it all off more than nicely with a beautifully oblique tone poem of hands and words. (There’s not enough poetry in comics, I think. Or is it vice versa? Maybe it’s vice versa.) (Jen Wang did the cover, which just means you have to go spend extra time yourself oohing and ahhing at her impressive command of spacing and timing, which are of course in comics the same thing.) —And this is not to say that there aren’t rough patches and places where an informed critic might suck his teeth and make That Face and say gently chiding things that can’t help but come across as patronizing, but that’s not important now, and that’s not what I’m on about here. (Of course, the fact that an informed critic might choose to gloss over these rough patches could itself be construed as patronizing, so let me just reiterate that it’s not important now and it’s not what I’m on about here.) It’s the joy this Kinko’d minicomic was steeped in, the sheer love of the medium radiating from it, a palpable zing that (with no small amount of craft) reached out and grabbed your collar and kicked you in the pants and goaded you in the ribs. Who the hell were these people? you asked yourself, because you had to. And more importantly: where the hell did they come from, out of nowhere like that?
Well, right here. Mostly. Head back to the Mostly Acquisitions homepage and scroll down to the list of contributors and note how each and every one of them has a LiveJournal. Now follow the various links and note how interconnected they’ve been, across dozens of states and thousands of miles: trading links and tips and posting art for critiquing (or just oohing and aahing) and arranging con trips and sharing their various audiences—hell, having and building audiences of their own by having a way to cheaply and quickly distribute their work far and wide, by the dozen or the thousand, next door or overseas…
Kids these days. —Let’s back up a decade or so. In and around Boston and Amherst (and New York City and northern New Jersey, the Monmouth County area), there’s four cartoonists who are ten years younger than they are right now, and when they go to cons in the New York area they usually end up hanging with Scott McCloud (ten years ditto), who’s doing a funky little black and white comic called Zot! After trawling for back issues of Byrne/Claremont X-Men and Star Wars (Marvel, not Dark Horse; y’all remember that funky green rabbit?) they’d all join Scott at a table at McDonald’s and he’d let fall extemporaneously a chunk of the science inside his head that would eventually become Understanding Comics. (Scott would demonstrate his passion for Naming Things for Easier Linking by dubbing this clique as variously the McDonald’s Club, the McDonald’s Supper Club, or [for obscure reasons] the Haberdashery.) —Heady times, heady times. They all had the religion, then, because Scott is a mighty evangelist for comics, and they did their own minicomics and traded them at cons and through the mail (this was before you had to differentiate it as snail-mail), and whenever they got together (at a con, or at someone or another’s apartment for a massive chips-and-funky-salsas party, say), the sketchbooks would come out and be passed around. Ooh, that’s nice, you maybe should have tried this, look, here’s how I did that. And they did 24-hour comics and collaborated on the occasional anthology and even put together some proposals and shipped them around, but the black-and-white boom they’d come of age with had blown away, and Eclipse was dead and Fantagraphics wasn’t biting and not one of the four of them was interested in doing the sort of chromium-plated super crap that passed for hot comics in those days, and it’s hard, doing your art when no one but your friends is looking (and them only now and again, when you can get together); harder when it’s something as laborious as comics, and as marginalized. And so one by one they slipped away, and Paul went back to music, and Amy went on to collage, and Barry went sort of sideways and eventually into political cartooning, and the only real evidence of this flurry of comics from back in the day is in a couple of boxes in this basement or that attic or underneath the bed.
Of course, there were four. Jenn stuck it out. Which is not to say that the other three were fools or cowards or lacked some Bill Bennett morality-play virtue. This isn’t a parable, and Paul’s music is vivid and funky and beautiful and Amy’s collages are stunning and boggle the mind and Barry is pretty much a Jules Feiffer for our time. (Yes. I am well aware that Barry almost always uses the central technique of comics—juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence—to finesse the timing of his monologual political strips, so he is, indeed, doing comics; don’t muck up my lovely rhetorical point with niggling little facts, okay?) —But what Jenn really wanted to do could only be done in comics; comics was all she really wanted to do; and so she soldiered on (off and on) for ten years or so: ditching her color symbolism off the bat, because what publisher would spring for a color SF comic about female space hobos? Working on her inking, despite the ways in which it wrestled with her more textured, illustrative style. Trimming or padding each installment to fit the 24 pages mandated by the current market and 4-page printer’s signatures. Writing the first issue through four times over to make it fit and drawing it start to finish twice (and a couple more aborted attempts) and all of it in isolation. “The fact that Jenn Manley Lee isn’t making comics professionally today is proof positive that this industry is screwed up beyond repair,” said Scott McCloud once, but who knew? Who cared? Who else could see the work? Fantagraphics still wasn’t biting, and Dark Horse wouldn’t have been interested in the first place. Making copies down at the Kinko’s yourself is expensive, and lugging a portfolio full of artboard from one reader to the next gets tiring, after a while.
But on the web, none of this is a problem. Color? As easy and inexpensive to display as line art, or grayscale. Story or chapter or episode length? Whatever you can get away with. Content? Whatever you like: vampires and the French Revolution, or autobiographically contemplating life after high school over coffee, or reincarnating Anne Frank to fight vicious Moon Nazis, or creepily synchronous letters appearing out of nowhere in a creepy apartment, or the Chinese Zodiac come to life, or pop culture deconstruction and sexual angst. (Or, well, hobos in outer space. That are women.) Whatever you want: write it, draw it, scan it and upload it, then cheaply and quickly distribute it far and wide, by the dozen or the thousand, next door or overseas…
—The more astute among you will have noticed you can do much the same thing with collages and music and political cartoons.
Whatever my purpose in setting these various tops spinning, it isn’t to state that the web is the be-all and end-all, the Omega point, the One True Medium. Paper is still king. For all their LiveJournal notoriety, after all, it was Mostly Acquisitions—6 pieces of 8 1/2” x 11” paper xeroxed on both sides and folded in half and saddle stapled twice—that got them noticed at the 2002 San Diego Comic Con. (Of course, Jenn and I knew to be on the lookout for Mostly Acquisitions thanks to online links and email correspondence, but life is full of little ironies.) Nor is it to state that without the web, comics would soon enough have lost the sparks of the Six-Who-Must-Be-Named-For-Easier-Linking (Swoombuneffel. I think we’re on to something with that—); comics is a harsh mistress, after all, and there’s still plenty of time for one or another or most of them to go back or onwards or sideways and eventually into something else: Vera Brosgol to the harsher and even more demanding mistress of animation, say, or Bill Mudron to the relative respectability of online film (and genre television) criticism; Jen Wang could chuck it all tomorrow for film school and a groundbreaking series of diet soda commercials; Kevin Hanna could become a behind-the-scenes player in Big Content; Erika Moen could renounce the frivolity of comics for a lifetime of committed political activism; there’s still time for Dylan Meconis to become an ambitious multi-hyphenate with a knack for interesting new neuroses. Life is terribly contingent, especially for the (harrumph harrumph) young, and having done comics on the web and done them well doesn’t necessarily doom you to a life of juxtaposing pictorial and other images in deliberate, even narrative, sequences. (And it isn’t even the web necessarily that got them where they are; it’s also having come of age in comics at a time when Understanding Comics and the conversations it spawned are still ringing in the air, when the range of what comics are and can be is far richer than the spectrum from Claremont/Byrne X-Men to Marvel’s Star Wars, when Time has a comics critic and Dan Clowes has a movie. —The industry may be ailing, but the medium’s never been better, and yes, that has a lot to do with it, too.)
But—
I pick up Mostly Acquisitions and get that eat-my-dust oldtimers zing off it, the potential that tingles my fingers and makes me grin—
And I go online and look at how they’ve been able to share their work, and what they’ve said about it, the fanbases they’ve built and the names they’ve checked and the links they’ve shared, and I trace the network from Pittsburgh to Seattle to San Francisco to New York to mishmow to artstrumpet to fartsofire to covielle—
And I can’t help but wonder: what kind of comics would they have made, ten years ago, Paul and Jenn and Barry and Amy? If there’d been a world-wide web? —Also, cheap color scanners.
And I can’t help but ask: what kind of comics might they be making now?
But Christ, I’m nattering like it’s 1997 and Mondo 2000 and instant communities and gift economies and paradigm shifts and the paperless fucking office. The web? Change anything? You give people a way to talk to each other cheaply and easily and they’ll figure out the darndest things to do with it. This is news?
I mean, we all know what the web is really for: Who’s Your Secret Hogwarts Lover quizzes. ’Fess up, y’all.
Bookmark this.
The Progressive’s McCarthyism Watch, via Rittenhouse. Gonna be a long and interesting two years…
Boxing Day.
There’s this guy in Canada who insists that the perfect gift for Jenn would be for me to announce that I am giving up pornography. Instead, I think I’ll share some of my meager traffic with her, by pointing out that now that she’s got Movable Type up and running, I can link to her wonderful post about the last time she went to a strip club. (It was coincidentally enough my first. I got to find out what’s the cruellest song for anyone—male or female—to strip to: “Eleanor Rigby.” Ouch.)
In other Boxing Day news—but I should maybe first tell you about an email my mother sent me, several years ago. Back about ’95 or ’96, I think, when we had one email account for an entire household of college drop-outs (and a couple of graduates, yes yes) and I still remembered how to use Tin and Pine and whatnot. It was a simple email message: a hyperlink, and the words, “Oh really?” or something to that effect. The link was to an entry in the archive Oberlin had maintained of posts made to its intramural bulletin board, a limited Usenet-like forum called Infosys. Some bright young thing had put the archive on the web in those heady, early days, so that by clicking on this simple hyperlink, one was taken almost instantaneously to a post I’d made in—what, 1988? Thereabouts, anyway—about the best places on campus to have sex.
My mother, ladies and gentlemen. —The archive has since (thank God) vanished, a victim of limited bandwidth, perhaps, but the peculiar mixture of embarrassment (aw, geeze, Mom, close the door!) and sudden joy (she read something! That I wrote!) has stayed with me. (By the way: mostly braggadoccio and hearsay. In case you were wondering. Honest! It was!)
Now, we have our differences politically and otherwise that probably are not as great as we imagine (and our similarities, ditto) and we maybe don’t talk about them as much as we ought. Family. You know. So while I knew she knew about this blogthing (the link’s in my email sig, after all, shameless self-promoter that I am), I didn’t really know what she thought of it. Or even if she read it. Until I opened one of my packages from The Folks: The Tipping Point. And said to myself, “Aw, geeze, Mom, you read that mawkish thing?” and “She reads it! Wow!” all at once.
My father—you know, I think I will have some Utah Phillips waiting for him when he gets back from Spain. (See above re: differences, as well as similarities.)
And: I now have a lovely example of Arabic calligraphy (the alphabet, cunningly matted and framed) to add to my astrolabe, thanks to the Spouse; also, my mother-in-law (the lovely and talented Kathy Lee—take a bow) got me a cashmere sweater. “It’s the in thing, apparently,” she said. “Snuggly and comforting, since it was such a hard year for everyone.” She got Jenn one, too. —It’s the first cashmere sweater I’ve ever worn: it’s at once the lightest and the warmest sweater I have, and from now on I insist that all my winter garments be woven of the stuff.
Assuming, of course, that 2003 turns out somewhat less hard than 2002.
Apparently, pregnancy is a fact of life these days.
Granted, it’s a glaring example of that scourge of sound-bite journalism, the Ill-Defined Antecedent. Nonetheless, this quote from this article is instructive:
“As long as Midge is married, I don’t have a problem with it,” said Kristin Morris from Newport News. “It’s a fact of life these days.”
Since the first “it” is a reference to Midge’s (inexplicably controversial) pregnancy, and reading the second “it” as referring only to that specific blessed event (“Midge’s pregnancy is a fact of life these days”) is a wee bit psychotic, one is left with the assumption that what Kristin Morris of Newport News (who doesn’t, we should repeat, have a problem with married dolls having children) wanted to say was, “Pregnancy is a fact of life these days.” —One could, perhaps, make a further assumption or two: perhaps she meant “Children aged six and up being aware of pregnancy as a concept is a fact of life these days.”
Nonetheless: doesn’t it make you want to grab one of these upset parents, these frowningly concerned ministers, grab them by the shoulder, perhaps (not too threateningly), look them in the eyes, and say, quite forcefully, “You know—your generation did not invent sex.”
—via Ignatz
Because I’m still feeling ill and not up to any sort of heavy lifting and anyway the piece on webcomics isn’t quite done yet (and honest, Brett, I’m working on it)—but anyway, for now, another trifle:
Choose life. Choose a side. Choose a quest. Choose a fellowship. Choose a fucking big sword. Choose elven cloaks, horses, mallorns, and rings of power… choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are and why you’ve got to destroy the fucking thing. Choose sitting by a fire listening to mind-numbing, spirit-crushing ballads, stuffing fucking lembas into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable volcano, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats who left home with you. Choose a future. Choose life… But why would I want to do a thing like that?
Via Space Waitress, a collection of surprisingly better-than-not pastiches of you-know-what.
It’s a good reading, Charlie Brown.
Still smiling at this, which I found thanks to Sara Ryan’s weblog. —The question that immediately leaps to mind: would you rather use this deck to play a terribly archetypal game of 5-Card Nancy (I mean, Peanuts)? Or see a Nancy Tarot deck? (As yet non-existent. Collageurs and forgers take note!)
