Sousveillance redux.
This essentially humorous column by Matt Smith has been taken quasi-seriously by John Gilmore and is kicking up a ruckus among the usual suspects. —Myself, I think one participant nailed it when he pointed out that the profound discomfort people are feeling at the idea of posting Poindexter’s personal information is precisely the point.
In related news, Salon has managed to interview a number of computer scientists who, facing the prospect of fat DARPA contracts, nonetheless manage to see some merit in the idea of a Total Information Awareness program. (It’s premium content, so if you don’t have a subscription, click through the little Mercedes commercial for your free daily pass.)
Jeffrey “Frankly, I don’t see any other way for us to survive as a civilization” Ullman, a database expert from Stanford, wrote a rambling piece on Islamic fascists and fundamentalists and warring on terror in the days after 911, including the difference between terrorism and state-sanctioned warfare (terrorists can’t parade their weaponry, a la missiles trooped up and down Red Square back in the day) and a story about the time Osama bin Laden’s nephew dissed his nephew at some toney Eastern college. Salon nipped this quote as a rallying cry of the pro-TIA faction:
Modern technology has given criminals and terrorists many new and deadly options. Just about the only defensive weapon to come out of the developments of the past 50 years is information technology: our ability to learn electronically what evils are being planned. If we use it wisely, we can keep our personal freedom, yet use information effectively against its enemies.
Sounds breathtaking, doesn’t it. We can learn what evils are being planned.
Well, no. We can create massive databases of seemingly trivial information and use it to search for patterns and act or not act on what we find. But how do we know what patterns presage evil? How do we differentiate them from ordinary, everyday activities that fit the (ominously unspecified) pattern? How do we deal with the innocent lives that will be disrupted and possibly ruined by false positives? —There will be false positives. To quote some sobering numbers from Bobby Gladd, a statistician who’s kicked up a ruckus about false positives in the War on Drugs: a pipe-dream TIA that’s 99.9% accurate would still finger 240,000 innocent people. Surely a little disruption in our everyday lives is worth preventing another tragedy, supporters will say; this logic would also have us ban automobiles. More to the point: think of the waste of time and effort on the part of the good folks at the Department of Homeland Security, running down false positives spat out by a clunky, unwieldy database running search algorithms we’re still in the process of, you know. Tweaking.
And hell: how do we define “evil” in the first place? Wave the hand of Potter Stewart over the whole mess and merely know it when we see it? You might want to talk to Greens, nuns and peace activists who’ve tried to catch a plane the past few months before you blithely sign off on someone else’s definition of what it is exactly we’re looking for and trying to stop.
It would be lovely, wouldn’t it? A system that could scan all this trivia and unfailingly find these patterns and bring them to our attention, protecting us from the Bad Stuff before it happens. But putting this system, with its insanely broad sweep, under the control of a secretive branch of the government with a nakedly partisan agenda and the ability to re-write the definition of the thing it’s looking for—
It’s not just un-democratic, un-American, un-free and irresponsible. It’s staggeringly stupid.
(We could, I suppose, call Poindexter, and ask him what he thinks about the abyss gazing back…)
The word for today is:
Sousveillance. —Via Plastic.
It’s a beautiful word and a timely concept and I think David Brin would approve, but I also think it’s only going to work if people come out in droves, cameras in hand, snapping away to prove the point: we have nothing to hide, and we are worried. So enough with the unreasonable, already. —Does that mean that I’ll be out there with them, digital camera in hand, doing my part to swell a trickle into droves? Well, I worry, you know, about safety in numbers and tragic misunderstandings too individuated to make the evening news and the wild-assed hair-trigger assumptions to which some of us seem too ready and willing to leap, these days. So. Um. Ask me later?
Anyway and as it is, I think these guys have a better shot at making a point without massively multiplayer civil disrespect. So jot down sousveillance and keep it in mind, but maybe pencil another word in next to it: agitprop.
Here’s your handbasket, what’s your hurry?
Today is World AIDS Day, which means those of us who like our activism wired, typed, and indirect can hook up with Link and Think. —Myself, I can think of no better one-stop links resource than MetaFilter, who’s doing one of their daily specials to get the word out. For instance, it’s where I found this sobering column from Joseph Riverson, which lays out some decidedly cold equations on what the next hundred years could look like; equations that are a staggering testament to the short-sighted, bone-headed, arrogant stupidity of which we’re capable. Makes me want to pick up a copy of And the Band Played On and start beating people about the head and shoulders with it. Various members of the Bush administration, to start...
::
update— Again via MeFi: delfuego posts a link to the first mention of AIDS on Usenet.
The truth is out there.
E, Nev. —The truth about Area 51 has finally been laid bare.
—via the irrepressible Daze Reader. (Hey. People Magazine did name Rumsfeld the sexiest Cabinet member...)
Two pennies for Potter.
So Chris Suellentrop slags Harry Potter a couple-three weeks ago, and blogging’s still in a tizzy. Lessee: Kieran Healy sorta found it interesting; Glenn Reynolds disagreed, and said Potter and George W. have a lot in common; Mark Kleiman rather effectively disagreed with Suellentrop, Healy, and Reynolds, though Healy disagreed with aspects of Kleiman’s disagreement; Barry Deutsch brought up the overarching subtext (or is that too mixed a turn of phrase?) of egalitarianism and free will versus the predetermination of one’s heritage that runs through the books; Sisyphus Shrugged thought Rowling’s pretty much put paid to the notion of predetermination; Deutsch said no, she hasn’t, dammit; Sisyphus challenged him to a duel; and Kevin Raybould thought a) the original piece was satire and b) at the expense of George W., thereby managing the neat trick of agreeing with both Suellentrop and Reynolds, albeit snarkily, and Kleiman agreed with Raybould.
Got all that?
Good.
Me, I think Suellentrop’s bit was a lightweight joke tossed off on a coffee break and, as is usual with professionally generated content on the web these days, not worthy of the amateur discussions it’s arguably sparked. Since I’m not an habitué of Slate (it crashes Mozilla 1.1 on my iBook without fail—funny, that), I first heard about it via a discussion over on Plastic, which focussed (fruitlessly, for the most part) on who’s the better moral agent, Harry Potter or Frodo (who’s stronger: Superman or the Hulk?), with a soupçon of the usual anti-intellectual refrain: “Why do all these critics have to spoil stuff by reeeeeading it? It’s just a freakin’ kids’ book!” But the Plastic discussion did call to my attention this older Slate piece, which insists the Harry Potter books are a repudiation of Thatcherism (and is as cheeky as Suellentrop’s, since it cites this essay in support—which posits Potter as a [Harold Macmillan and Iain McLeod] Tory, and Draco Malfoy as [delightfully] Harry Flashman); it also brought up this book, which argues that the Potter books glorify “that apex of class privilege, the English public school.” (Given that—as a Yank—most of my notions of English public schools involve books in which characters say things like “But just turn over for a moment, Jimmy, and let us have a look at your bottom. I’ve rather a fancy for nice bottoms,” this line of argument threatens rather rapidly to end up in places I don’t want to go.)
I just want to add two points to the Potter hootenanny: the first being something Michael Chabon said, in a Salon interview about his (fantastic) new book, Summerland, which I think gets at the resentment of Harry that simmers under Suellentrop’s fluff piece, and those who take it more seriously than not, what with the moral luck and the free will and the predestination and all. I’ll snip the relevant passage and exercise my Fair Usage rights:
I have a lot of respect for what J.K. Rowling’s done in her books. They’re very pleasurable and enjoyable, but if I had a criticism of them it would be that Harry is too good and too talented too quickly and seems to take to the idea that he’s the special one too easily. It’s always about Harry winning. That’s what he does again and again, and if he ever gets into trouble it’s not because he’s weak or ineffectual and not up to the task, it’s because his opponents are so evil, or someone betrays him so he doesn’t stand a chance. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t imagine that character because it’s not enough my own experience of childhood.
Would Harry be more likeable (or less prone to prompt such a backlash) if he were weaker? If he were to fuck up once in a while? Are his troubles never the result of his own failing, primarily? Are there always mitigating rationales and extenuating circumstances in the narrative to excuse him from (or at least temper his) self-loathing? —I don’t think the answer’s a simple, binary yes-or-no, and I think Potter-philes and -phobes could each split hairs six ways from Sunday to prove the other’s full of fewmets, but I myself am going to come provisionally down on the side of yes, but. (I still like the kid. And the books. A lot. The movies, not so much. But.)
That said, let’s wipe Harry and blood and moral luck and free will off the table for a minute. There’s a character whose absence from any discussion of Rowling’s morality is sorely felt; who must be given his due if we’re to get a handle on the bigger picture in which these choices (or predestined events) occur. I’m speaking, of course, of Severus Snape. (Sisyphus Shrugged has alluded to theories regarding the parallels between Snape and Harry; I for one can’t wait to hear them.)
Snape, then.
Oh, he’s an asshole, all right. (You can hear it in his very name: Ssssseverus Sssssnape.) He’s mean and he’s rude and he’s spiteful and unjust, and he unfairly favors the students of his own house over the others. He plays favorites and abuses his power to punish those he dislikes and he holds a baseless, irrational grudge against Harry because of a long-ago schoolboy rivalry. Snape is a Slytherin, through and through; he’d never quibble over the means to his ends, and God only knows what he did to earn that Dark Mark on his forearm.
Of course, one could as easily say he merely protects his charges from the perhaps justified but nonetheless pernicious prejudices of other houses, and that when his Slytherins disappoint him, he can be has dangerously spiteful to them as he is to Our Heroes; one could observe that Professor McGonagall is similarly unfair in the protection and advancement of her Gryffindors—if not in the same fashion, or degree, well, the crime’s still something both are guilty of.
But all this smacks of moral relativism—which, I understand, is treason in this time of war.
So what are Snape’s ends, towards which he will use any means? (Mr. Vidal wishes to remind us that “there are no ends, only means.” Mr. Vidal is being a troublemaker again—could someone kindly show him the door?) —There is in this Potterverse a fully functioning society of wizards that allows them to live their lives, exercise their powers, explore their world, interact with each other to shape and mold that society, and pass along what they’ve learned to the next generation, with safeguards in place to keep from distressing the (overwhelming) majority of lumpen Muggles (“freaking the mundanes,” as we put it in college). That society is facing a threat it only barely withstood once before: the magical power and revolutionary ideas of one Voldemort, née Tom Malvolo Riddle, who is not content to keep the wizarding world safe from Muggles’ prying eyes, but would, instead, subjugate the Muggle world to the power of the few but mighty wizards—under his enlightened rule, of course. Standing against this threat? Folks like Dumbeldore, McGonagall, Hagrid, Sirius Black—and Snape.
They have their disagreements. They argue, Snape and Sirius and Dumbeldore, and even fight over where this society of wizards should be going, and what exactly they ought to be passing on to the next generation (and how)—but they all recognize the greater good of that society; they all understand the need to maintain some sort of framework within which they can tussle over their differences.
But we haven’t really dealt with the moral relativism. After all, the argument could be made that this is merely a struggle between two ruling paradigms; over whose vision of the wizarding society will reign supreme. The only reason to like Snape by this logic is because his proximate ends—maintaining the status quo—happen to synch up with those of our nominal heroes: the pampered jock, undeserving beneficiary of dollops of moral luck, his assorted sidekicks and hangers-on, and the white-bearded patriarch sitting at this very apex of class privilege. The characters the writer wants us to like. Snape—pallid, mean, spiteful, unjust Snape—merely shines, a little, in their reflected flattering light; this is no more a sound moral basis for judgement than watery tarts handing out swords.
Luckily, John Rawls is there in the clench.
The wizarding society, as we’ve seen, is unfair. It’s unjust. You can cheat and exploit others and do the wrong thing and still get ahead (in fact, sometimes it seems you must do so, a little, to advance at all). It’s far from perfect. It is, in fact, ripe for some sort of revolution—which is just what Voldemort is offering. But: I can’t think of anyone sane who could from Rawls’s original position choose Voldemort’s ideal over the wizarding world as it is, warts and all. Voldemort is trying to destroy that world—the framework within which the others have their disagreements—but he has nothing more waiting to replace it than “Full bloods only!” and “Loyalty to me!” He doesn’t even bother to cloak his ideology in Marxist world-saving rhetoric or distract the masses with stunningly stage-managed rallies; the best he can do is some lame-ass Skull-and-Crossbones sheets-in-the-graveyard games. Initiation ceremonies for the frat-boy elite. Lucius Malfoy and Wormtail and the other Death Eaters aren’t out to save the world, or make it a better place; they’re out for their own aggrandizement and profit. —Dumbeldore and McGonagall and Hagrid and Sirius and even, young as they are, Harry and Hermione and Ron, all see however dimly that greater good. They’ve all at least given some thought to that original position, if not quite in those terms, and in their own halting, stumbling ways, are working towards their own idea of a better world for all, or most, or at least a goodly chunk. And Snape, though he might have been tempted by Voldemort in the past, sees that greater good as well. And is doing some dicedly dangerous stuff to fight for it.
(Draco? Draco Malfoy? Well, he’s still young. Kids have a hard time seeing past themselves and their immediate circumstances; coming to recognize something like that original position—if not necessarily in those terms—is a pretty good benchmark for growing up. Harry’s starting to; Draco hasn’t yet, and that’s the big difference between the two of them, I think. There’s still time for Draco. Not that I have high hopes.)
Geeze. Ramble much? I could just as easily have pointed out that Snape fulfills the role of the Honorable Villain: you know, in the comic books, when Spidey has to team up with Doc Oc so their powers combined might defeat the truly alien evil that threatens their status quo, that daily round of relatively inconsequential fisticuffs and snappy banter. “We’ve got to work together to defeat it!” “Make no mistake, Spider-fool. This changes nothing between us. We are still mortal foes!” —Actually, that’s a lousy example. But you get my meaning. Right?
And if that’s not enough, we could go back to Snape’s protective instinct, and the care he takes of his Slytherin charges, the bulwark he presents against the slings and arrows of prejudicial others—including the author, Rowling herself, who insists on describing all Slytherins as thuggish and ugly and mean, shows their every action in the worst possible light, and gives them names like Millicent Bulstrode and Severus Snape and Crabbe and Goyle and Draco frickin’ Malfoy. It’s hard not to feel at least some grudging admiration for a character willing to stand up to his own author, and who does so with such panache that she herself can’t help but recognize how perversely honorable—how queerly cool—he really is.
Aw, heck. Maybe it’s just I have a thing for redemption stories; I’m a sucker for a guy with dark hooded eyes wrestling his own worst instincts on an ill-fated quest to make some sort of amends. We don’t know even now if he’ll pull it off.
But it’s going to be one hell of a show.
—Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Alan Rickman’s a hottie.
Better late than never.
A friend from South Africa passes this bit of old news along.
Desperately seeking perspective.
It’s when you’re chuckling mordantly over an English translation of a Russian tabloid article outing (as secretly straight) one half of a Europop faux-lesbian teen idol duo (currently on the verge of a phonetic American breakthrough) that you realize—
Well, I’m not sure what. But I think in the end it’s more funny than anything else.
Accolades, and a chance to join forces with Bob Barr; also, something of a mission statement.
I don’t see this blog-thing as being a political blog necessarily. I mean, I do try to be PC (politically conscious, that is; “political correctness” is and always has been the shoddiest of straw men), and since I tend to hold more often than not that the personal is political—or was that the other way ’round?—I can’t help but write politically, even when what I’m nattering on about appears to be nothing more than what was on Buffy last night or the sound of Robyn Hitchcock’s guitar. (Or so I’d like to think.) —Cutting through the fog of hazy equivocations: I don’t intend to write primarily about politics, or political ramifications per se; for one thing, so many other people do it much better than I ever could, having as they do patience for such things as facts, reason, and rigorously constructed arguments (I have this weakness for glib misstatements, and tend to start ranting incoherently when allowed to go on too long. Ask anyone) and anyway and more to the point: I just have more fun over here in my corner as a gadfly, raconteur, and freelance paraliterary critic. So.
The political nature of the last couple of posts, then, I blame entirely on the pernicious influence of Barry and his ilk. Alas, a Blog is essential reading—and I’m not just saying that because I’ve known him for holy fuck fifteen years; his blogroll alone is worth keeping onscreen as an endless source of coffee-break–wasting diversions. (Leaving aside his voracious intellect, wicked sense of humor, and all the pretty pictures.)
From that blogroll, then, a new favorite: Jeralyn Merritt’s TalkLeft, an excellent argosy of “crime-related political and injustice news,” whether it’s riffing on what it was that Law & Order guy said, or contemplating the appalling microcosm found within Tabitha Pollack’s terribly contingent release. So, from TalkLeft: a link to the ACLU’s faxblast to President Bush that’ll let you speak out against the odiously un-American Total Information Awareness program. Join former Congressman and perennial right-wing nutcase Bob Barr in fighting the good fight for justice and freedom and the right to enjoy Mom’s apple pie in private.
See? Another descent into glib raillery. Sigh…
To the barricades, lucky duckies!
To a person earning $12,000, the Journal argues, paying 4 percent in federal income tax is notenough to get his or her blood boiling with tax rage. … [A]s fewer and fewer people are responsible for paying more and more of all taxes, the constituency for tax cutting, much less for tax reform, is eroding. Workers who pay little or no taxes can hardly be expected to care about tax relief for everybody else. They are also that much more detached from recognizing the costs of government.
—via Slate. Also, the Washington Post. (Seeing as how I don’t subscribe to the Journal and all, I can’t link to it directly.) You just can’t make this stuff up, folks.
Now that’s Homeland Security.
Via MetaFilter, the stirring tale of the Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency (1868-1975). (Includes an all-too-brief overview of long-forgotten Agency-inspired television programs.)
Fret not at the irresponsibility of the current administration in neglecting so grave a threat to our homeland: this agency emeritus is recruting. Find out how you might fit in.
Hypocrisy.
I’m starting to think that when it comes to such programs as Total Information Awareness, supporters must be able to pass the following litmus test:
Would you support the same power in the hands of a Democratic administration?
I imagine very few would. Certainly, as then-Senator Ashcroft makes very, very clear in this article written back in October 1997, our current Attorney General would fail miserably.
But while it’s well and good (and funny, in a black, auto-Schadenfreudeian sense) to scoff at the hypocrisy of the hands-off, smaller-government, conservative right wing currently in power, there’s a deeper and more troubling lesson to be drawn: attacks of this nature on the Bill of Rights and our civil liberties aren’t so much a problem of right (or left); they’re a problem of people in power. “The Democrats have not been strong on civil and constitutional rights,” says Jeralyn Merritt. “The Clinton administration, which we admire for other accomplishments, was terrible in these areas.” (She expands on it hereabouts, but be sure to click through to her 1996 article.) —After all, Bush initially opposed the draconian barrel of pork he just signed into being; it was Congressional Democrats who pressured him into (so enthusiastically) picking it up and running with it.
That said, it’s worth noting the nine nays on Homeland Security:
Ted Kennedy, D-Massachusetts; Paul Sarbanes, D-Maryland; Jim Jeffords, I-Vermont; Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii; Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii; Robert Byrd, D-West Virginia; Carl Levin, D-Michigan; Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, D-South Carolina; and Russ Feingold, D-Wisconsin.
Are your Senators on the list? You might want to let ’em know how you feel about that…
The fruits of Serendip.
In the course of looking for a snarky quote on Lessing’s Canopus in Argos: Archives for an earlier squib (not that I’ve read it myself, mind; though I enjoyed The Good Terrorist lo these many years ago, I’ve yet to go through a serious Lessing phase, much as I haven’t gone through the Russians, or Dick; anyway, Canopus is famously held to be monumentally turgid in some circles, and I’m getting rather off-topic here) I stumbled over an interview with Thomas Disch, in which I learned the following (we join a conversation on his kids’ books already in progress):
TD: Yes, and others. And others still in the works. I’ll tell you one of my favorite ideas that I haven’t found a taker for yet—maybe there’s a publisher out there who wants me to write it for them—a book specifically for young girls titled So You Want To Be The Pope. It would resemble a career guide, explaining that, well, yes, nowadays girls aren’t yet allowed to be the Pope, but so many other barriers have fallen: so here is your plan for how to set about becoming the first female Pope. A perfectly serious book on the subject, that would talk about the history of the papacy. . . [laughs]
DH: I can see why some publishers might be a little wary.
TD: . . .and talk to a sensible, ambitious, idealistic young girl who would want to be the Pope. I think it would be a wonderful book.
Well, hell. I’d buy it in a heartbeat. —Until then, we should maybe add it to the Invisible Library..?
There are two kinds of books in this world.
So I find this book on the science fiction shelves of a middlin’ bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina, and my interest is immediately piqued. (Look at the cover. Does that look like science fiction to you?) (And yes: that sort of snap judgment does indeed kick over a can of worms. Nasty, divisive business, those genres. But: think of “science fiction” less as a much-maligned, ghettoized idiom whose ability to address the human condition with a much wider than usual array of metaphor and imagery has been grotesquely overlooked by narrow-minded Philistines, and more as a commercial classification which overworked booksellers use to quickly categorize product for easy sales—think of it like that, and you’ll see what I mean when I say a book like this on those shelves in a store like that is going to catch your eye.) (I mean, geeze, next thing you know you’ll be putting Canopus in Argos in between Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser and Harpy’s Flight.) (Actually, Powell’s shelves half of Canopus in Literature and half in Science Fiction/Fantasy. Which doubles your chances of stumbling across it, I guess, but makes it a bit difficult to pick up the whole set at one go.)
Where was I?
Ah, yes. Saw this book a year ago, finally just got around to picking it up, have now begun reading it, pure curiosity and no real expectations (though Anthony Burgess does go on about how it’s Scotland’s shattering work of fiction in the modern idiom), so it wasn’t until I got to this passage—
Lanark did not wish to be an artist but he felt increasingly the need to do some kind of work, and a writer needed only pen and paper to begin. Also he knew something about writing, for when wandering the city he had visited public libraries and read enough stories to know there were two kinds. One kind was a sort of written cinema, with plenty of action and hardly any thought. The other kind was about clever unhappy people, often authors themselves, who thought a lot but didn’t do very much. Lanark supposed a good author was more likely to write the second kind of book.
—that I smiled to myself and settled in; I’m in good hands with this one. (It gets rather rapidly weird and strange. Science fiction? No. But a dark fantasy, thus far. In the modern idiom, of course.)
Pardon my dust.
Also my tardinesses, as I pardon the tardinesses of others (ha). I’m walking around my brand new copy of Movable Type, kicking the tires and sniffing the new-blog smell; it’s a little naked right now, and off-the-rack, and my spanking new domain name (www.longstoryshortpier.com; do keep it in mind) still hasn’t propagated, so I’m forced to explicitly use the directory I’m piggybacking off the Spouse’s site, and I haven’t even put any links in over there yet, and the funny thing is that by the time most of you out there read this one or more of those things just won’t be true (knock wood). —Ah, ephemera.
Anyway. The content from my old hand-built journal has been re-entered herein, and flagged with categories I haven’t gotten around to organizing, so you can wander through the archives in a somewhat more orderly fashion and leave a comment if you like and even permalink, if you are so inclined. Otherwise, go read Dicebox, and remember that Barry’s a better man than I, and oh, I dunno. Leave a comment if you have an idea or a suggestion or a brickbat or something.
24 hours and 11 years.
In 12 hours we’ll probably be on final approach to San Diego.
In 24 hours, asleep on the floor of someone I haven’t met yet.
For about four or five hours in there, at least, I imagine we’ll be wandering around a very large room filled with 50,000 fans of various and sundry genre entertainment products, some of which can be called comics. That’ll begin in about 14 hours or so, I think. Give or take. We’ll do it again in about 36 hours. And again in about 60. And one more time—
Just over 11 years ago, I did two 24-hour comics. Not in a row. Between the first 24-hour comic and the second 24-hour comic, we sat huddled in a room around a black-and-white TV for hours and hours and watched news reporters duck and wince at loud noises against a fiery Middle Eastern night and talk about Scuds and American air strikes. We scribbled things on a couple of pages of a sketchbook, interlocking and interacting comics that were making black jokes about what was going on in front of us because what else could you do?
Scott McCloud invented 24-hour comics about 12 years ago. In about 14 or maybe 15 hours, Winter McCloud is going to kick my ass in Pokémon.
Barry is the only person who actually “owns” a piece of Kip Manley original art. It was a page from my first 24-hour comic. It hung on the wall of the room we shared in the apartment we were living in 11 years ago or so. It was an odd metafictional piece starring the first cartoon character I ever created. (The next time you’re around when Amy’s around, she’ll ask me to draw him for you. I guarantee that.) And I kind of liked it, even if I stole the whole “Bigby” thing shamelessly from Sarah, who has no home on the internet just yet. (Go read some of her chapters in Herschberg. They don’t suck.) And I did do a third 24-hour comic. It was my first attempt to come to grips with autobiography and love and sex and magic and not and pretty much the whole big snarling mass of What Happened at Oberlin. But since I didn’t finish the 24 pages in 24 hours, it doesn’t really count. (Barry and Paul and Jenn and I all did 24-hour comics at the same time in pretty much the same room, that time. And we were all on our third 24-hour comic. But Paul didn’t finish his in 24 hours, either. Barry and Jenn, who’d never finished within the time limit before, did.) This third round was maybe eight years ago? Nine? Whatever. Not too many people have done three 24-hour comics. There’s reasons.
But it’s the second one I did that I like the best. Barry kept telling me I should put it up on the web, why not. And Jenn, too. So thank them if you like, but blame me if you don’t. You will probably like it a little better if your monitor is set to 1025×760 or bigger. Mine’s set to 800×600, and I have to scroll up and down, and I didn’t mind so much myself, but it’s my comic. You might not be so patient.
I should have been asleep two hours ago. I probably won’t be asleep for another two hours, at least. We’re both waking up in about five and a half hours, give or take.
But here and now, ladies and gentlemen, what the hell: 24 pages drawn in 24 hours straight; my second ever 24-hour comic; an 11-year-old story that remains near and dear to my heart—
When you least expect it.
“You think so?” said Jenn.
“Eighty-five per cent,” I said, after a moment, and then the guy on stage we were talking about did this thing with his eyes and I knew. “Ninety-five,” I said, since it’s always a good thing to leave some room for error, even if (especially if) you’re known for this sort of thing.
See, when my birthday rolled around last year Jenn got me Mink Car and the McSweeney’s with They Might Be Giants doing the soundtrack and tickets to the show which would be at the Crystal Ballroom the very night I would turn 33. (Actually, I turned 33 at 11:11 AM EDT, but that’s neither here nor there.) —Unfortunately, due to some understandable delays in air travel, they didn’t make the show, and so the show was postponed until this past Friday. (And if it weren’t too late to urge you to go see They Might Be Giants in a ballroom where you can dance on air I’d do it—when they do “Clap Your Hands” off the new album and everybody starts pogoing in synch you get some amazing height, like off a trampoline or something, wow.)
But we weren’t talking about They Might Be Giants; we were talking about the opening act. Who were this guy with a guitar and this other guy, and they could sing and did some killer Everly-esque harmonizing and some physical comedy and if reviewers tend to say they do a Barenaked Ladies–Phish kind of thing, I’m afraid I’ll have to bow to their judgment; I don’t know from either referenced band. But I can tell you about snarky comedy that veers close to wet sentiment but skates the thin edge and comes back, and how if you’ve got the stones to do a rearrangement of “Don’t Let’s Start” when you’re opening for Johns Linnell and Flansburgh, you’d damn well better be able to pull it off like these guys did.
But it wasn’t even that we were talking about. “You think he’s the guy from Buffy,” said Jenn.
“Yeah,” I said. “The one without the guitar, I mean.”
And you know what?
It’s true. He do read wierd stuff (sic).
Steve Lieber cuts a magisterial figure in a silk dressing gown and a pair of pinstriped trousers from a bespoke morning suit. He’s bracketed top to bottom by flawless white spats and a leopard-skin fez, that indispensible Excelsior! of sartorial whimsy. “Come in, come in!” he booms, stirring a cup of coffee. “May I offer you anything? Coffee? Port? A cigar?”
“Oh, no,” I demur, stepping into the airy chambers of Mercury Studios as one of the black-clad assistants takes my jacket. (Yes, it’s a hot summer here in Portland. But one doesn’t make points with Mr. Steve Lieber by dressing down.) “I’m fine.”
“Are you certain? They’re Cuban…”
“Couldn’t possibly.”
“Well then. What can I do for you, Mister, ah—I’m dreadfully sorry—”
Oh, how charming! As if it’s his fault he doesn’t remember nobodies like me. “Kip Manley, sir. Freelance critic of the paraliterary. I wanted to speak to you about your upcoming column, for, ah—” And here was a dicey dilemma. How to refer to the (rather rudely named) site without risking a disruption of our delicate decorum? Luckily, discretion was close to hand with a deft dodge: “Kevin Smith’s movie and pop-culture periodical?”
“Ah, that rascally World Wide Web site, Movie Poop Shoot dot com,” said Lieber, his voice and genial smile suggesting that, while its declassé taste was not an habitual one on his tongue, he nonetheless revelled genteely in the Rabelaisian wit of this misbegotten moniker. He continued to stir his coffee. “An argosy of acerbic articulations on (and analyses of) the arcana of that glorious business we call genre entertainment. How wonderful that a movie’s nebulous marketing scheme could, like Pygmalion’s statue or Frankenstein’s monster, take on a life of its own and go forth, into the world, to do what good it can. And how pleased I am to be able to steer its course with my few humble suggestions.” His spoon clinks against the cup, a merry sound against the industrious hullaballoo of the studio all about us: I can just make out shy, retiring Paul Guinan before he ducks back into the echoing gut of a hollowed-out 1887 knock-off of a vintage Reade Electric Man, brought it at no little expense for vital artistic reference; that bearded man taking tea beneath the windows with Ron Randall is, yes, George Lucas, here I believe to confer on the finer points of Imperial starship chandlery for the forthcoming third and final film (I try not to gawk); and in yonder corner—but no: I was sworn to secrecy as to the nature of the project being got up to there, and its participants, else I’d drop such hints as would make the whole comics industry sit up and slaver. —And this is a quiet day at Mercury.
“At any rate,” says Lieber, “if you’d care to step over to my workspace…” Stirring his coffee, he leads me to a sunlit corner laid with a hand-knotted Persian rug, defined by a pigeon-holed secretary desk to one side (quaintly archaic, its miniature writing-surface burdened with several precariously balanced stacks of leather bound books and brightly colored comics periodicals) and a sleekly modern, skeletal drawing table to the other (an ebony-and-teak tabouret, its dozens of drawers neatly shut, stands half under it like a faithful hound). A work table defines the third side, and it is here that Lieber pauses, looking a moment at the work of two black-clad assistants upon a sheet of bristol board, painted with black ink and strapped to a restraining frame. One of the assistants holds a bedraggled toothbrush, stiff with white paint, and shakes it at the board as if to admonish it for some imagined slight. “If you would,” says Lieber, holding out one hand and shaking back his rakishly unfastened French cuff. The assistant gladly surrenders the brush. “I think you’ll find,” says Lieber, holding the brush bristle-up and then whipping it with a subtle twist of his wrist, “that with white on black, a modified Wronski flip results in a more pleasingly scattered splatter. It’s just the thing for starfields—if a bit tiring for explosions. Here. Try it yourself.” The assistant takes up the brush again, and performs quite adequately. Lieber beams. “Now then,” he says, stirring his coffee. “Where were we?”
I should, perhaps, take this opportunity to steer the conversation back to our ostensible topic, but I’m distracted by the tantalizing mound of books. “Are these for upcoming projects?” I ask, picking up a much-loved copy of Eco’s Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language.
“Ah. I’ll be reading the chapter on symbol closely as part of my terminally in-progress response to McCloud’s Understanding Comics. While the semiotic dialect between signifier and signed is not the same thing as the closure of which McCloud speaks, there’s nonetheless a mischievous transference at play into which I wish to delve more fully. Plus,” he purses his lips, stirring his coffee, “there’s Dylan Horrocks’s piercingly trenchant Journal essay to take into consideration.” He sighs, stirring his coffee. “I’m afraid at this rate it shall be posthumously published, if ever.”
“And this?” I say, of a trade paperback edition of Anne Hollander’s Sex and Suits.
“Ah,” he sighs. “Don’t get me wrong. Wonderful book. But she has little to say on the subject of rep ties, about which I shall be doodling a little piece for Gentlemen’s Quarterly. I’m afraid the definitive history has yet to be written… Oh, and the Carter there—have you read Carter?”
“No,” I allow, momentarily spell-bound by the bizarre image on the cover, as provocative as the title: The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman.
“You must read Angela Carter. At any rate—and though it’s not officially hush-hush, I nonetheless really shouldn’t tell you—”
I perk up. He stirs his coffee a moment, drawing it out. Smiling.
“I’ve tentatively agreed to adapt that book for a publisher who as yet must remain nameless.”
“Excellent!” I cry, and then the next book in the stack catches my attention. “But Sex and Rockets?” I say, holding up the luridly jacketed hardcover. “Surely this is a bit lowbrow?”
“Not at all,” he says. “Work-product. It is the definitive biography of John Parsons, who made a brief appearance in the most recent issue of Alan Moore’s Promethea. I’m curious as to Parsons’ continued cachet as a black magician of some note when it’s quite clear from his own writings he wasn’t a terribly good one. A point I intend to make in my mostly favorable survey of the occultic history underlying that marvelous comic book—in an upcoming edition of my column, which is, I think, why you came to see me today?”
Indeed. Playtime is over. I pull out my notebook to begin the formal interview as he lifts his spoon from the coffee cup—it’s a delicate green cup, fragmented with delicate black lines, as if sketching an incipient fracture; Lieber will, in a moment, explain that it is a priceless example of the Japanese soma-yaki style. But at this moment he lifts the cup to his lips and sips. “Ah,” he says, smiling. “Just right.”
—But! Honesty compells me to admit that I have taken some few liberties with the truth. The “Wronski,” after all, is a quidditch maneuver, and those who know me will recognize that I loaned Mr. Lieber my own prized leopard-skin fez. As for the rest of it: oh, heck. Go read his damn column yourself and find out. It’s a hoot and a half, and if he isn’t really tackling obscure rocket-scientist magicians and surrealist erotomanic picaresques, well, he is writing about comics about bees and about non-linear road trip poetry and about skin-mites that live on Charles Darwin’s head, so I wasn’t too far off. Was I?
