Wax Banks

Dave Sim on superheroes.

Dave Sim from way back:

I see the superhero as a specific personality which is not dependent on the cosmetics of the tights and whatnot. It's the complete outsider who adjusts to his "outsiderness" by developing an over-inflated self-opinion. To me, that's the way the Roach character works. It's interesting to bring someone in who is completely clueless but thinks everything is related to them. The world revolves around them.

[...]

They've so dominated the medium for 50 years. I wasn't here for the first 18 years that Superman was around. And that's well worth looking back at. Why did that endure? Why did something that's so... if you look at the seminal point, ÔSuperman' was used extensively in the popular vocabulary because of the Nazis. Jerry Siegel grabbed this word and said "Yes! A comic book about Superman." And then his next trip to the well is to do the Spectre. And it's like "Yeah, that's another word going around; the spectre of war. Superman. Geez. That's kind of scary when you start to think of it." This environment where that endured in its context and in its own subtext without any kind of purge. It's one of the things that I don't think people look at with the 1954 clampdown on comics. Yeah, it was about horror and terror comics. But they were talking about superhero comics, too. "Let's not have these God-like guys. It's a little disturbing that it's 1950 and my kid's still talking about Superman. The only time I heard about Superman was when Adolf Hitler was talking about Supermen." Captain America! We'll make our own Superman. "America's Superman can beat Nazi Superman." No, we fought this war to put the idea of Superman into retirement.

Sim is one of my favourite artists ever, in any medium; and I say that in full knowledge of the abhorrent, hopelessly naive things he thinks about most people on earth (and says just a couple pages down in this interview). He's been a great inspiration to me, not just in his singleminded devotion to his craft but in his teaching impulse -- and I really do think that with all its faults, for all its eventual moral repugnance, Cerebus is the Great Work of the comics medium so far. Whatever that means.

Anyway, neat quote, I thought.

He's probably spelled 'library' with one L again, poor bastard.

The quite good joke that leads off the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – in which Arthur Dent’s house is destroyed to make way for a bypass, but he’s not around to see it because he’s fleeing Earth, which is being destroyed to make way for a (hyperspace) bypass – deepens by degrees throughout the first four volumes of the series, until it attains a kind of comic grandeur. A quick overview:

• In the first volume, we start with the aforementioned good (but simple) joke on mindless bureaucracy. The planet is blown up, and the earthlings’ protests come too late – the plans have been on display at Alpha Centauri for decades. But it gets better: Earth wasn’t even a planet, it was a computer designed to find the Ultimate Question, destroyed at the moment of readout. Life on Earth was just part of a computer program.
• In the second volume (Restaurant) we find out that (1) Arthur has the Question in his brain, (2) it’s not even the right question, and (3) the reason for this cockup is that the simple peaceful cave-mammals populating prehistoric Earth were killed off by a bunch of idiot telephone sanitizers and management executives judged too stupid for their own planet. Earth was, it turns out, a backwater’s backwater. And by the way, the Vogons were actually hired by Zaphod’s analyst – who didn’t want the Ultimate Question interfering with his business. Even that cosmic conspiracy is absolutely petty in motivation. (And the whole thing might take place in Zarniwoop’s literal ‘pocket’ universe anyhow. Adams was fearless about tossing out his premises…)
• Then we get to Life &c. – in which we revisit Earth but just twenty pages or so at the beginning and another five or ten at the end, where we encounter one bloody clusterfuck after another, mostly revolving around the Ashes, which (I’m told) are something to do with cricket, which is what Englishmen play when they find baseball too fast-moving and stress-inducing. Earth – basically a floating calculator populated by stumbling morons, our hero included – is a bit player in the great drama of Krikkit. Arthur and Ford hang around long enough to be annoyed, and Arthur asks to be dropped off elsewhere.
• But in So Long and Thanks, he comes back – and meets Fenchurch, the crazy woman who figured out the answer to the Earth’s many problems on the first page of the first volume. They have a bit of sex on the wing of a plane and end up leaving Earth anyway. The series’s recurring nostalgia object isn’t, in the end, worth the trouble. There are other matters to attend to anyhow – the laughing truth-teller and God’s last message to His creation among them.
• I can’t remember Mostly Harmless but I’m sure it’s nice. There’s food in it, and some jokes about TV.

One extraordinary thing about this series of increasingly Weird treatments of Earth and its fate – too big to be a comic ‘runner’ but so lightly handled that it’s easy to miss its centrality to the (ahem) trilogy’s (ahem) philosophy – is that Douglas Adams kept finding new ways to tell grand jokes about the true nature of the human race and its beautiful, broken planet. The bit about the mice would’ve been a fine topper to the initial gag, but the Golgafrincham sequence manages to strip away its sentimentality while achieving real emotional resonance – we killed what was true and good about the Earth long before the Vogons justifiably did us in.

The contemptuous ease with which various beings (mice, Vogons, Halfrunt, the galactic judiciary, Disaster Area’s stage crew) kill off or otherwise terrorize various other beings (usually Arthur and his companions, but also the entire population of Earth, the telepathy-stricken inhabitants of Belcerebon, Prostetnic Jeltz’s crew, the billiards-ball planet in Ford’s story, et al.) is the blackest joke in the whole series. Of course in Adams’s ass-over-other-bits Darwinian cosmos, this is the nature of life, universe, everything. Which makes his ‘true’-nature-of-Earth revelations all the more bleak: they follow an emotional line straight toward dissipation and despair, and Arthur can only respond with an exhausted shrug.

Here’s one of Adams’s bleakest interpolated narratives, in full:

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is an indispensable companion to all those who are keen to make sense of life in an infinitely complex and confusing Universe, for though it cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters, it does at least make the reassuring claim, that where it is inaccurate it is at least definitively inaccurate. In cases of major discrepancy it’s always reality that’s got it wrong.

This was the gist of the notice. It said “The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.”

This has led to some interesting consequences. For instance, when the Editors of the Guide were sued by the families of those who had died as a result of taking the entry on the planet Tralal literally (it said “Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts often make a very good meal for visiting tourists” instead of “Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts often make a very good meal of visiting tourists”), they claimed that the first version of the sentence was the more aesthetically pleasing, summoned a qualified poet to testify under oath that beauty was truth, truth beauty and hoped thereby to prove that the guilty party in this case was Life itself for failing to be either beautiful or true. The judges concurred, and in a moving speech held that Life itself was in contempt of court, and duly confiscated it from all those there present before going off to enjoy a pleasant evening’s ultragolf.

The entire Hitchhiker’s Guide universe runs just like that. The destruction of Earth in chapter 1 of the first book fits this pitch-black comic mood perfectly, but it’s also a comfortingly benign event at the time, because it seems so utterly out of measure with readers’ expectations. After all, England runs more or less the same way, is the obvious satiric point, but it’s all more civilized in a way, isn’t it? There’s contempt and then there’s contempt, right?

Well. By the end of the series, in an ironic ‘triumph’ of worldbuilding, Adams has lifted up Earth – or rather the various mutually-contradictory Earths – to the status of full participation in the carnival of malice and cruelty and offhand, even accidental, genocide which is his (nonetheless quite funny) titular Galaxy.

The only consistently nice, earnest, curious creature in the whole series is a mattress, which flollops around in a swamp.

A Monster Calls (Patrick Ness, 2011).

I read this 'YA novel' in a single 90-minute gulp before bed last night. It's lovely and I very much enjoyed it (thanks Norah). I'll note, almost as an afterthought (I forget things like this), that the illustrations are a dark delight.

[SPOILERS FOLLOW for a story worth reading unspoiled.]

* * *

I feel churlish picking on Ness for this, but the climax is frustrating, and throws an uncomfortable light on the rest of the book. A Monster Calls is, after all, about a single mother dying, and her son Conor's complex ambivalence about her impending death -- he knows she won't survive her cancer and his dark secret is that he wants it to be over even so. In his recurring nightmare, his secret, (he thinks) he can save his mother from falling to her death, but he lets her go -- he lets her die. The climax of the book is Ness's rendering of Conor's nightmare, and his confession to the Monster that he wishes for the dying to end, for death to come.

But.

The words 'die' and 'death' don't appear in the book. The words 'It's not your fault' do, of course. This strikes me as an evasion, and a mistake.

Ness retreats from his (strong) rendering of Conor's limited perspective only to make speeches through the Monster, and that's a mistake too. What's missing from the book is a clear picture of what the other characters are going through; after all, that's the thing that no teenage reader is going to understand on his own, but it's the real story, even the cosmic one: Conor's isn't the only life here, but it's the only one Ness focuses on.

The story is divided between somewhat didactic (and in one instance weirdly tonally mismeasured) scenes at Conor's school, somewhat incomplete scenes with Conor's father and grandmother (a fascinating character who deserves, but doesn't get, a moment of revelation comparable to Conor's), and the Monster's evocative stories, which are the best part of the book. Indeed, the novel is a little stiff until the Monster tells his first tale; Ness takes obvious pleasure in the Monster's Entish voice, and the tales themselves are evocative and meaningfully ambivalent.

Each of the three tales contains more wisdom than the novel as a whole, I think -- if that's even possible.

After my own mother died I spent a long time -- years -- seeking comfort and withdrawing from the world, which is knowledge (which is experience). My 'healing process' was slowed by my own insistence, and various people's ready agreement, that it was in fact a discrete process, and that its focus was pain or suffering.

People die. Death isn't special. There's no one to blame; blame is a fiction. It's comfort.

What I needed, in order to 'heal,' was knowledge: to realize that I wasn't the center of the 'story,' that it had no center. My mom's death was pointless. Yours will be too.

Conor's grandmother buries her only daughter. Conor's dad isn't there for his ex-wife's death. These stories are as much a part of Conor's life as his own suffering.

Why do we comfort ourselves by fixating on our pain, when pain is part of something larger? Why are we quick to narrow our vision at those moments of deepest transformation?

I don't think my 'youth' was or is a good excuse for my selfishness.

* * *

These things I'm saying feel ugly even as I say them. Conor is a kid and his story is meant to provide solace for young people trying to understand the emptiness of death. But I can't help thinking that the truth of dying -- its physicality, its inevitability, its nothingness, how small a thing death is -- isn't a problem to be solved. It is the solution. The problem, I've come to believe, is that we make other people's deaths about us, and avoid the mounting evidence that nothing in the world is about us. Not even mom dying. Especially not that.

It seems to me that A Monster Calls is part of a true story, but by its partiality it implies something false. The stories it doesn't tell, the ones Ness skillfully alludes to in the Monster's tales and the grandmother's story but is unwilling, for some reason, to tell outright...those stories belong in this book too. I wish they were here.

Three books lately read.

Right Ho, Jeeves (P.G. Wodehouse): Gussie’s prize-giving at Market Snodbury is as perfect as everyone said it would be, but – this is one of the worst confessions I’ve ever had to make – by the time I got around to it, after all those weeks of not finding time to read and all those months of reading elsewhere about the perfection that is Gussie’s damned prize-giving, I was too worn out by anticipation to fully enjoy the thing itself. Wodehouse is the greatest comic writer I’ve ever encountered, without question. But I read this one at the wrong time.

Weirdly, I miss Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, which is surely a ‘lesser’ novel by some measures, but is suffused by a warmth and tenderness that Code of the Woosters and Right Ho seem to lack.

I have a bunch more to read of Bertie and Jeeves, and I look forward to it, but I have other things on my mind at present. Alas. I love those two fellows.

* * *

The Book of Genesis (God, h/t King James): Astonishing, ridiculous, perverse, deeply Weird, familiar, new. Why have I never read any KJV before? By the time Joseph got his coat I was tired out, but the early chapters were an exhilarating experience. Such a density of Strangeness! Completely daft and not a bit reprehensible, frankly, but so is Cerebus and that’s the best comic ever made, so…

I plan to read the whole KJV this year, which may be difficult, given what else is on my plate. I speak of –

* * *

The Solitudes (John Crowley; v.1 of Aegypt): I’m not sure what to say.

Little, Big is one of the best novels I’ve ever read, the truest and most welcoming, but I have no desire to have written it, if that makes sense; I’m joyful and content that someone else has had those thoughts and made music of them. The Solitudes, on the other hand, has nearly killed me – it’s (retroactively?) become, or been revealed as, the novel I dreamed of writing, reflecting back everything I’m lately interested in, all in Crowley’s achingly beautiful prose. I feel like there’s no longer any point to me thinking the things I think, because Crowley’s already thought and written them, and I’ll never have his skill.

Kind of a pain in the ass. But good.

I wrote to an ex-something, last year, to tell her (out of the blue) that Little, Big was the novel she didn’t know she’d been waiting all her life to read. She’s a Mark Helprin fan, and I hoped Little, Big would rid her of her affection for Helprin’s ‘look at all this beautiful beauty’ stuff that’s enough to give you diabetes.

The Solitudes is the novel I’ve spent the last 15 years learning how to read. I would’ve flipped for its formal ingenuity in college, but I wouldn’t have understood it at all back then. This was the rightest moment to read it.

Pierce Moffett is a berk but I do look forward to the rest of his story.

* * *

Get the joke right!

[Deleted a whole post, replaced it with this.]

If you lead off your book by clumsily misquoting Douglas Adams like so...

'THE ANSWER TO LIFE, THE UNIVERSE, AND EVERYTHING'

...and you don't get why the words 'the question of' need to be in there to make the joke work, then you'd better be prepared to work hard to win back all your credibility with those who care about comic writing.

One key difference between God and King Lear...

...is that outside of the imaginative world of King Lear -- outside of the contract with Shakespeare and his performers which guides our experience of the play and the events it depicts -- no one actually thinks King Lear is a factual account of being in the world. It feels that way for a while, but as spectators at a drama we maintain a dual awareness that the events are both real-to-us and factually-incorrect, strictly speaking; the status of Jewish/Christian Scripture is such that readers/listeners accord it radically different ontological status.

That said, the Biblical God is a lot like a 'literary character,' and it's good to appreciate the ways believers relate to him both literarily and historically, all at once, complexly, with their full humanity intact. It's OK to think wrong things. It's good to feel deeply, even about nonsense.

But still: 'this kind of thing happens, it feels this way' is one good thing. 'This happened exactly this way so join our church' is straight bullshit.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, radio series (LP reissue), by Douglas Adams et al.: a quick review and a general point.

I first read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books in elementary school, on my friend Scott’s recommendation. I think he’d heard about the books from his older brother Sean; over the few years of our friendship I got a lot of my cultural learnin’ from Scott/Sean. (Good stuff too: Depeche Mode, Zork, Talisman, the Avalon Hill Civilization, Paul Simon’s Graceland, early Chili Peppers…)

Over the years I reread the first three volumes of the increasingly inaccurately named Guide trilogy many, many times. (I read So Long and Thanks for All the Fish only twice, and Mostly Harmless just once, though I imagine I’d think more of its daddy-anxiety material now.) I also listened many, many, many, manymanymany times to a cassette of the Restaurant radio series – or rather, its LP rerelease, which abbreviates the radio show’s second storyline into an hourlong, headlong Magrathea > Milliway’s > sunship > B-Ark story of unusual-for-Adams structural cleanliness and utterly-typical-for-Adams comic density. The LP rerelease is actually a brand-new performance by the cast, from a revised version of the original radio scripts.

The performance is better by far than the original, with much stronger production, and I heartily recommend it to any DNA fan. For aforementioned personal reasons I’ll always consider it the definitive Restaurant recording, though like any right-thinking person I dearly love Zaphod’s trip to the Frogstar and Marvin’s duel to the death with the battle tank at Guide HQ, and have read those sections of the Restaurant novel more times than I can count.

God I love these stories. God Gosh I miss Douglas Adams.

* * *

Anyhow I just want to make a quick point about the Hitchhiker’s Guide stories: the remarkable business of Adams’s fictional universe – its crowded urban vibe, the way Adams piles up incidental details through Guide entries and interpolated vignettes, always with a dead eye for his ongoing satirical project – invariably gives way, at peak narrative moments, to a powerful sparseness which not only serves his original narrative form (linked comic sketches for a handful of actors) but reflects Adams’s deeper concerns, which would find clearest expression in Last Chance to See.

Think of the moments of unexpected (but always totally earned) emotional seriousness and weight in the Guide trilogy: the songs of Krikkit, Ford’s look at the bartender near Arthur’s house, Marvin’s death, the factory floor on Magrathea, Ford and Arthur and the Scrabble pieces, Arthur and Fenchurch on the airplane’s wing, Arthur and Thor, Marvin’s hilariously sad monologue in the Milliway’s carpark (‘After that I went into a bit of a decline…’ is perfect), Zaphod on the Frogstar(!), and – of course – Zaphod, Trillian, and Zarniwoop visiting the man with the cat.

Almost without exception, they’re moments of stillness and isolation amidst a great deal of very effective background bustle. At these peak moments, the characters are afforded a sense of their own smallness, which less crushing than freeing – these are moments of taking responsibility. (The Total Perspective Vortex is a literalization of this two-sided revelation, though with Zaphod around you have to play for laffs, of course.) Indeed, one of the lovelier narrative arcs in the trilogy is Arthur’s slow journey from unhappy connectedness to melancholy contentment – learning to accept the immensity of the universe and his own essential aloneness in it. (By the end he’s done with all the other characters, isn’t he? Except Random, I suppose.)

The end of the Restaurant radio show has Ford and Arthur accepting, with characteristic good humour, the futility of trying to help prehistoric Earth’s cavemen: they’ve lost the evolutionary race, and humanity will evolve thereafter from the useless bloody loonies on the Golgafrincham B Ark, the telephone sanitizers and management executives and hairdressers and documentary filmmakers and insurance salesmen. The moderns. In one of the radio show’s deft little running gags, Ford relates a wild story (billiards this time); Arthur asks where he heard it, and Ford says it’s from the Guide. Arthur is totally underwhelmed. ‘Oh, that thing,’ I think he says. Nothing special. Just a travel book, after all, and the real human race is slowly, sadly wiped out all around them.

And Louis Armstrong sings ‘What a Wonderful World.’

Gets me every time. A moment of perfect love for all living things, turned sideways a bit, with a ‘comic’ story of planetary genocide nested within another ‘comic’ story of planetary genocide (and ecocide, per the colonists’ mad tree-burning deflationary fiscal policy), sung with a sigh rather than a belly laugh. Ultimately the Guide isn’t about hijinks in a crowded galaxy that’s a merciless riff on the awfulness of modern ‘civilized’ life – or not just that, anyway. Not really. Deep down it’s about escaping, not even into space, but into the feeling that space affords. The matter is distance, and smallness.

Our yellow sun is close enough, important enough, to beat down on us, to beam, to burn. A ball of angry light with no mystery to it. Other stars must be content to hide during the day and be (barely) visible only at night – and to us they seem like tiny pinpoints, formless. Kind of pathetic, really.

But they twinkle.

What a wonderful world.

Miss you Adams.

Collected worlds of...

[An excerpt from my current big project, whence came also the Sasquatch thing a while back. Dedicated respectfully to A.R.R.R.R. Roberts, an obvious Bilbo Baggins manqué, who bears no resemblance to anyone in this piece, my hand to God, except in terms of one coincidental isophony -- and Englishness, of course. Oh, oh, dude's got Englishness coming out his ass.]

* * *

Collected worlds (complete with scholarly annotations) of authors famed for what the donnish corpse with the tobacco pipe called ‘subcreation’: chief among them Dandrel’s horrible but influential Helion trilogy (Apogee, Perigee, Anapsis). God I spent so many hours wishing I could live there. The interstellar-travel-by-giant-solar-trampoline conceit was more or less the cognitive soundtrack to my ages 13–15. Play and dissipation. So much wanting to believe that swashes would in the spacegoing future still be buckled, planks (airlocks, probably) nervously walked (or the equivalent) by those richly deserving of such mistreatment – or heroes sure suuuuuure c’mon c’mon! to make it Outta This Scrape in one piece. Back then there was this growing idea that outer space was at once a solved problem, ready to fade from dream to waking like a Christmas present turned out to be socks, and an increasingly distant/inaccessible bureaucratic zone, cowboys being replaced by factory farms, except the cowboys were never actually real, not in my lifetime anyhow. Machines all the way down. Nah. That tentative/reckless phase of early space exploration was done by the time I popped out. Or in, I guess.

So in order to get at the shared pre-Sputnik awe and aspiration of limitless space, indeed the recognition or belief that a place could still somewhere exist which was limitlessness itself, a dark principle, well ironically enough you had to turn back the clock a little. Big-time thing with kids all throughout history, probably: realizing first that time passes, then finding a way to escape into a new present which was the past’s future, today what shouldabeen. You dreamed of being an astronaut, but always as somebody’s angry libertarian writer grandpa had imagined it: the spacesuits less marshmallow, more race car; rocket ships like big sleek motorcycles, or just nuclear-powered flying cocks pretty much (because of course that – the implied parallel term, ahem – was the other forbidding limitless void to focus on, back then, after you’d learned that babies come from there but before you really internalized that holy shit babies really actually come from there; and maybe that’s the moment Cthulhu awakens?); laser guns actual guns, instead of…

Come to think of it, that was the worst part. The further along time went, the harder it was to convince ourselves that we’d be able to defend against whatever Inevitable Menace might rear up out of the frigid wastes to, not eat us probably, but digest, or cognitively-scramble, madden, suffocate, poison, freeze, unmake us…the way grief manifested in those days was I was never going to geta laser gun because by that point it’d be utterly pointless. You didn’t need one to deal with your fellow man, and even low-slung hip-holstered laser pistols (such as F.R. Dandrel’s interplanetary gunslinger Tubby Crozan might wear) would be no match for bacteria that turned flesh to slime, or movies so entertaining that to look at them was to will yourself suddenly toward death by consumption (by consuming – just looking into the staticky whatever it was supposed to be, forever). Fuck grownup literature. And fuck the Department of the Galactic Interior or whatever for spending all its astronaut time making minute adjustments to the lenses of telescopes, as if slightly clearer pictures of nebulae were some kind of substitute for the immensity, impersonality, the divinity of the frontier. It was UN-AMERICAN.

Tubby Crozan comes in for it hard in the footnotes, is one of the additional childhood-beshittenings awaiting the grownup SF fan here. The greatest of all mechanical-engineers–9th-class-turned-pistol-packing-mercenaries, the first man to make a solar trampoline jump in just a suit (not even a ship! the unmitigated gall, the titanic fucking balls on that guy!)…and all editor Avram U.N. Robers wants to talk about is ‘Crozan, a too-obvious Heinlein manqué, comes close at times but never quite breaks with the dreary juvenile misogyny of his author, not to mention his thinly-veiled SFnal homage-referent; the lasting popularity of the Helion cycle is testament to the guilelessness and vivacity of Dandrel’s prose and his just-left-of-the-familiar plotting rather than any psychological insight. Like C.S. Leavis’s Hornea books, Dandrel’s novels grow more difficult to like as their readers grow older; though perhaps – like reactionary family members sinking into familiar, almost comforting gesture, thereby losing their power to wound – for the very same reason they grow easier to love.’

Robers won an award for the annotated edition, not a big deal award but enough to feel good about being, at death’s door, a SF scholar of all things; and it’s hard to separate gratitude for his hard, revelatory biographical work (Dandrel collected butterflies but refused to kill them, adding them to his library only after they’d died natural deaths in captivity?!) from frustration at the characteristically British is-it-really-ironic-after-all-these-centuries snippy melancholy which pervades his scholarly work. Robers (an obvious Franklin C. Kitzis manqué if you must know) deserves his reputation, though perhaps we can with a wink-n-nudge admit to one another, right here and now, that that’s not meant solely as a compliment. Fa!

…

Oh, shit. Damn. That felt good. I can’t tell you how much I hate Frank Kitzis. And no, it’s not because he dated one of my grad school professors for a while and was cheating on her either before, during, or after the worst of all time guest lecture he gave in our SF-and-feminism class, which I think he actually had the stones to call ‘Criminal, Liminal, Subliminal: something something something Rosetti something something rape.’ I liked that class well enough for most of its run, but maybe it’s testament to every thinking human being’s overall feelings about grad school in the humanities – so long, fuckers – that that really is all I can remember of the talk’s title. And nothing whatsoever of the content. Kitzis had fashion hair, you know? The kind you’re supposed to look at and maybe notice without recognizing outwardly that you’re noticing it, like Wow that guy’s got Cool hair, it’s just messy, but then it’s only hours later you’re supposed to realize that he must’ve spent ten minutes and five dollars in product (people just call it ‘product’ now) to get his hair into that ‘artful’ dishevelment, only my curse – talk about First World Problems so to speak! – is that I always notice the time/’product’ costs of hairstyles right in the moment. Right there in that instant. Or like how someone’s courier bag is brand new but he’s walking around like he’s King Hardcore Biker of Bikerville, complete with the clip-in shoes and everything, but also brand-new sunglasses that he takes off super carefully because while he wants you to think he doesn’t care about the money, He cares. About. The Money. Wouldn’t you? That’s why they call it money.

Or how all the pronouns are ‘he’ and all the metaphors are balls this and stones that, and there’s some racism maybe, plus weird nationalism? And who actually thinks it’s awesome that spaceships look like dicks? I notice that stuff too. But since they severed my corpus callosum in the course of an otherwise routine cranial probe, prefatory to my first Saturn trip (boooooooring!), even when I see my worst impulses as if secondhand, even in moments of what pre-AI cultures called ‘self-awareness,’ I’m powerless to prevent such heedless action.

And you know what?

‘I’m a man,’ Crozan said, and aimed the laser blaster at Freia’s heart. ‘You’re a monster,’ she replied. Her eyes were defiant but she shrank back. Crozan laughed then. ‘A distinction without a difference, Your Highness.’ He pulled the trigger, and as warm blood splashed his handsome face – her blood, his lover’s blood, royal blood – he found that he could not stop laughing. He laughed and laughed, and in his triumph he grew larger, and darker, and more joyful…

I’m a monster.

Sample of Crowley's Little, Big audiobook; and James Ellroy, alas.

Heard it. Oh, no. I couldn't hear Crowley read the book on tape. Maybe live, to hear him experience the thing as we the listeners did; maybe that way. But judging from the sample, the audiobook is like so many others: it takes an unusually fluid, heightened-naturalistic text -- one that rings just right in the ear, nicely balancing flights of lyrical (and specifically literary) fantasy with the easy syncopations of American English as she is spoke -- and makes it into A Reading. Hard articulated T's between words, words proceeding at a sliiiiightly unnatural andante.

I hate to 'hear books,' but I like to hear stories told from books, as if from prompts. To me, the best audiobooks capture that energy -- particularly variation in tempo and dynamics. Jim Dale is one of the masters, no question. Hitchens too (he developed a writerly voice that more or less was his speaking voice -- no mean feat, whichever way the arrow points). I saw James Ellroy speak at MIT once, and he read aloud from one of his later, more 'telegraphic' books. ABSOLUTE BULLSHIT. It was...wrong, in a way I could never put my finger on. I've never been so forcefully reminded that the Author isn't the god of the text -- and more to the point, that folks who write for a living shouldn't be expected to be master vocal performers too...

I bow at Crowley's feet but I couldn't listen to his Little, Big. Maybe not anyone's, come to think of it. And that's me for you. Maybe you could though? And bless you, if so.

Little, Big : Aegypt :: Hobbit : LotR?

Per ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR's recent (wonderful) post about The Hobbit and its welcome, welcoming lightness of spirit:

Does John Crowley's Little, Big relate to his later, longer, darker Aegypt roughly as The Hobbit relates to Lord of the Rings? I'm thinking specifically of the way Little, Big plays its Secret History line for wonder laced with a kind of Old World[*] melancholy, while Aegypt, which like LotR is written against a Great War (WWI-WWII in Tolkien's case, the cultural revolutions of the 60s-70s in Crowley's), grounds its more cosmic/cosmological topics in a bittersweet depiction of modern life lived among the wreckage of the past's unfulfilled (or neglected) promises. Great Wars left as unfinished business, leaving behind cultural and mythological fragmentation for the survivors...

Plus there's something Shire-like about the Faraway Hills -- right down to the name.

While we're on the topic: It's eerie how closely my reading interests these last few years track with Aegypt's subject matter, and with Crowley's ongoing interest more generally. Even more than Pynchon, he's the author I've been waiting for, for many years; or maybe I've been preparing, for some time, to be the reader Aegypt expects, or just prefers. I'm disappointed with how much of myself I see in Pierce Moffett, as he's a bit of an asshole (in this first volume) and I like to pretend I'm not.

I wonder whether Crowley has read much Charles Fort -- whose own take on 'damned thoughts' also tracks, in some ways, with what I read as Crowley's depiction of lost worldviews as alternate, arguably more 'magical' worlds. Though of course Crowley writes as a generous skeptic who's presumably taken his LSD, while near as I can tell, Fort's madness didn't ever have a welcoming alternative social context to fit into. And I'm not sure how he'd feel about modern 'Forteanism'...

[*] L,B and The Hobbit are in some sense fairy tales about Britain, or British-myth-come-to-America in Crowley's case, whereas the respective longer stories seem to be, at some level(s), about the destructiveness and confusion of revolutionary change and the passing of eutopia, on a continental-European scale in fact. Gotta come back to that when I'm much further into Aegypt.

An essential misunderstanding about story, Buffy edition.

The editor of the Buffy comics at Dark Horse, Scott Allie, recently did an interview about Angel+Faith #5. It included this exchange:

AndrewCrossett: I have a question about the "zompires" and the mechanics by which they are created. In Buffy #3, Willow says "When someone becomes a vampire, a demon possesses their dead body. But without the Seed, demons can't pass into this world. The demon has to possess the vampire's body from another dimension." I took the last sentence to be Willow clarifying that [...]

So, could you clarify the real explanation behind the zompires (at least insofar as the characters understand it at this point)?

Scott: [...] This season has also led to a lot of conversation about the metaphysics of the demon/vampire/human connection, and we have some varying theories. Joss doesn't want it nailed down in a scientific kind of way, so we try to make sure that what we do loosely works within a few differing ideas for the metaphysics of it. We think that giving the readers something to ponder in terms of the nature of these characters is more interesting than explaining it. [my emphasis --wa.]

I once referred to Allie as a 'glorified project manager' rubber-stamping Whedon's scripts and getting a shitload of free publicity for what seemed to be other people's work, and that was unfair and small-minded of me. He did write the second most incoherent arc of Buffy Season 8, so he has more to apologize for than enjoying secondhand Whedon publicity; but it was still a totally inappropriate comment which embarrasses me greatly.

But this answer is straight amateur-hour bullshit -- a writerly failing rather than a publicity-tour faux pas -- and he's made this mistake often enough that I'm starting to get embarrassed for him too.

Ambiguity is not ambivalence. (Cognate: complication is not complexity.) How many times must I and everyone else with half a brain say it? Incoherent plots are not the same as complex thematics; multiple explanations for a plot device are not the same as multiple moral frames for a story. JESUS CHRIST!

If you can't make 'there's a demon inside you and it wars with your human self for control over your actions' resonant without making a half-assed mystery out of the logistics because you can't be bothered to finish building the world your employers licensed, you're in the wrong business. Whedon handwaves his metaphysics all the time; he's infamous for it, in fact. But he never handwaves the meanings of his stories; he never misunderstands 'open to interpretation' as 'we don't have to work out super basic plot details.' Simple plots, complex stories. That's Joss's strong suit.

Y'know where the Dark Horse Buffy comics went badly off the rails last year? When the story called for one of Whedon's patented 'here's the big unbelievably-thematically-freighted plot cliché which we'll spend the rest of the story complicating' moments (Glory is a god, Buffy curses Angel, Buffy 'came back wrong,' Faith 'turns evil'), and the best the writing staff could do -- unbelievably -- was 'the universe did it; it's fate.' (I can't even bear to explain what this means; just typing out that offensive shit will lower my IQ by a good 30 points.) It felt like Whedon simply let the story get away from him for the rest of Season 8 -- indeed, in interviews he's given the impression that the offending plot-shit wasn't actually his idea, though he's justly taken the blame for the comic's incoherence.

That was an example of complication, rather than complexity, of storytelling weighing down the tale. Instead of making a clear, strong plot choice for the audience to interpret however it liked, Whedon/Allie/Meltzer made a half-assed plot choice without really committing to it, which robbed the rest of the season of almost every drop of its moral weight. As a result, what should've been one of the most tragic events in the 14-year(!) Buffy story made absolutely no sense -- and was robbed of so much of its impact -- in Allie's telling of it.

Too much plot 'cleverness,' too much business, not enough story. That ended up being the unexpected problem with Season 8. And this 'zompires' silliness sure seems to be more of the same. Joss is partly to blame, yes. But the TV series sure didn't have this problem...

* * *

As much as anything, my frustration here comes from the knowledge that -- perhaps, perhaps -- the Buffyverse is running out of steam again, because it's once again lost its prime mover. Season 4 of the original show was an enjoyable mess, a recovery period during which the writers searched for a way to write the Scooby Gang, who had been clearly written as unjustly burdened adolescents through the show's first three years, as adults. Whedon had planned to tell 'high school is hell' stories on Buffy, and the show had to shift gears, somewhat uncomfortably, before it could become a story about accepting the selflessness and entry into real community that so much constitute adulthood. (Marti Noxon's knack for depicting burgeoning eroticism and heartbreak helped the show move into its triumphant second season, and she was instrumental in guiding the series through seasons 5-7.)

The last three seasons of the show were explicitly about the deepest nature of the Slayer (mythos and character), but they were even more about the expansion and overflow of personal and group identity: Buffy joins the world, main characters drift apart and reconstitute themselves, families grow and are reimagined (remember the episode 'Family'!), destinies are grappled with and ultimately rejected, and private moralities are explored in a grey zone way way way beyond the simple 'Slayer good, demons bad' rules of the early episodes and seasons. The finale of the TV series showed Buffy simply blowing up the entire premise of the show -- the Slayer mythology itself -- and in the process giving away her birthright...so as to become a whole person, without it. ('Cookies,' in the parlance of the series finale.) The story had come to a natural ending and exhausted itself.

Then the comic began. And suddenly Buffy was...a supporting character in her own book. The mythos came back in the clumsiest way imaginable: a plot as old as the universe, by which a Slayer/supervillain teamup was preordained so as to bring into existence a magicless world and...oh fuck it, it's still too stupid; the point is, the nature of the Slayer was trivialized instead of deepened by the 'Twilight' plot. The comic was burdened, in the end, by a lot of conspiratorial gobbledygook, which wasn't enough to hide the fact that the story -- the characters, their development, the play of actual human desire -- had been lost.

I have no idea whether 'Season 9' will be any good. But it's clear from the first couple of issues that one of Whedon's key storytelling ingredients -- a dead-simple premise which ramifies and signifies in an ever-expanding assortment of (usually painful) ways -- is still missing, or deeply buried in plot mess. 'Magic has left the world' just doesn't feel personal; the 'Twilight' thing still doesn't make sense to me; Spike flying around with a spaceship full of bugs feels like a bad joke; the Xander/Dawn pairing isn't desperately necessary (it's just...limp). It's all business.

That's a sign of a faltering story: business. (For a show consisting entirely, solely of business, see Lost or the laster seasons of Galactica -- two promising shows that crawled right up their own respective assholes double quick.)

* * *

Or maybe the problem is I just don't care about comics anymore. 20 pages a month? Are you kidding me? Give me Dave Sim or BKV or even 100 Bullets, but it's just not working for Buffy. Or rather, for me. I'm the problem.

Nagging nighttime thought re: art and consciousness.

One of the main purposes (or in more neutral language, uses) of art seems to be programmed psychotropism: art permits the artist to arrange thoughts at a distance. Some art forms permit the artist only coarse-grained control over the Other's mind; a painting, for instance, might resonate with its viewer for a long time, but that resonance is highly personal and associative, even if the painting's subject matter (and the artist's aim in presenting it) is quite clear. Poetry works similarly, by evocation and association.

Not many people read poetry. Not many people spend time looking at paintings.

It's hard to share your neighbour's precise reaction to a poem or painting.

A novelist, on the other hand, can achieve very fine-grained control over the step-by-step alteration (excuse me, Prof. Austin: alternation) of the Other's consciousness. She controls the pace of presentation/encounter, the emotional context and content of each scene, and -- through sheer repetition and acculturation -- even, to some extent, the private linguistic framework within which the reader-Other will (must!) encounter the events depicted in the text.

My mentor Prof. Thorburn always said that 'Great novels teach us how to read them.' One way of understanding that not-quite-transparent claim is in the terms I'm suggesting here: by the time you reach the last page of a 500-page novel, your reading-consciousness has been subjected to a very specific series of remote-control instructions from the author, and that specificity of effect-dictation can't be matched by any other art form.

Dramatic performance comes close, long-form serial entertainment (e.g. TV shows) even closer; but our social-cognitive and emotional-processing apparatus has a lot more free reign to interpret events onstage or onscreen. They're people up there, after all.

But literary characters don't come to us as people. Not quite. Not like dramatic characters, whose medium of existence is human action, however abstract/formal. Epic poetry has some of the same quality, but its allusive/metaphorical qualities induce a certain lossiness of info-encoding.

The novel is one of the great innovations ever achieved by mankind, because it allows for an astonishingly high-fidelity transfer of enormous amounts of information, whose key function is to programmatically alter the consciousness of the reader, creating an impression not just of events-in-line but of meaning-creating-meaning. A painting can take you to an imaginary place; a poem can create a synthetic feeling; a dramatic performance can communicate a social moment. What the novel transmits, above all -- its informational payload -- is structured time: not just an explanation of how the universe works, but a fully functional example of an artificial universe.

I make no such claim regarding blog posts, though.

OK, hopefully I can sleep now.

Code of the Woosters (P.G. Wodehouse, 1938).

I read Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit and Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves quite quickly, but was forced by fate to take a long time with this one -- which is too bad. It's the best of the three by some measures (colder, I think, less affectionate, and deadlier), but one of its great strengths is the sheer breeziness of the prose, which wants to be taken in great gulps.

I've never read such perfect comedy as the Jeeves stories, excepting arguably Wilde's Earnest (ur-Wodehouse?), which is written with a more audible snarl and is therefore presumably 'greater' but, for me at least, less purely pleasurable. (There's no one in Earnest I actually like, not even a bit; whereas I love Bertie and Jeeves, and Aunt Dahlia, and Gussie and Stiffy and Stinker and Madeline and even Sir Watkyn Bassett the deplorable ex-magistrate.) My previous gold standard for written comedy was Douglas Adams, but the extraordinary lightness of Wodehouse's writing has helped me put a name to the weird tension within Adams's writing, which seemed to come from the encroachment of his Very Serious Ideas onto his fictional worlds. (Hence the surprising seriousness and even leadenness of the Dirk Gently books, compared to the Guide.)

I admire Wodehouse's commitment to the integrity of his fictional world, and his embrace of Bertie Wooster himself -- I don't think Bertie is ever ironized in the text (beyond the worldwide ironies which cast, say, Anatole's meals as more significant than a month in jail), and Wodehouse is careful not to rob Bertie of his sympathetic humanity for a laugh. It's generous, humane work.

I'm in awe of him.

Next stop, inshallah: Aegypt. For realsies this time.

#notsocomplicated

Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker articles are basically retweets. He's not a deep thinker; he's a collector. No wonder business whores love his stuff. They're collectors too. He collects concepts, they collect money.

Oh, and he collects money.

Alas, Gladwell is not restricted to 140 characters.

Initial reaction to the first 200+ pages of Sex at Dawn.

The data in this book, fascinating and counterhegemonic as it is, could just as easily have been marshaled to support a book arguing, say, this:

'Monogamy is arguably the oldest extant human cultural tradition - nearly as old as agriculture or the stationary village. Its utility to technologically-minded humans is difficult to measure, but the astonishing productivity and exploration of monogamous societies certainly suggests that monogamy has been immensely useful.

'In the last 100 years, however, cultural traditions like monogamy and monotheism have come under intense scrutiny and challenge, and like monotheism, monogamy would seem to be on the wane in the modern world - or at the very least, undergoing a catastrophic transformation in which fundamentalist monogamies and emergent "non-state" alternatives compete for resources, just like their equivalent theisms.

'We dismantle the "biological" arguments for human monogamy, while recognizing its totally self-evident status as sensible cultural/behavioral adaptation, and tentatively suggest modifications to human monogamous practices, including relaxation of the strictures of monogamy itself.'

But of course that book wouldn't sell. Instead they've written a scattershot, snide, airily generalizing, unfunny, self-important book: well-researched, I believe, but filled to the brim with dipshit rhetorical questions and insinuations. It's not an argument for the utility of polyamory - it's a collection of evidence for that argument.

The book's rendering of evolution strikes me as cartoonish. In particular I'm appalled by the authors' disregard for the evolutionary importance of self-organizing optimizations like monogamy, and for their thuddingly 'biological' (and oddly deterministic) treatment of human sexuality. Their dim view of marriage is also a hackneyed Euro-cliché - how bohemian to carry on and on about the stultification and soul-deadness awaiting anyone stupid enough to explore a single long-term sexual relationship!

I need to think more about this (and to finish the book). I see why polyamorists are so excited about the book, though: as if modern polyamory were a return to an ecstatic Eden - excuse me, a savannah - of sexual-intentional purity, more 'natural' than modern monogamy. Blah, blah, blah.

Something tells me A General Theory of Love would be a tremendously useful corrective to this book's overreach, even as Sex at Dawn is a vital corrective to the overreaching lunacy of fashionable ev-psych.

* * *

And I have to set off this comment: the authors imply that clerical child-rape is a result of sexual repression - i.e. if those priests had only been allowed to fuck adult women/men they would never have raped those boys. This view is contemptible, and I desperately hope they're not so vile as to believe it. A child molester isn't picking children as targets for abuse from the societal leftovers after being denied grownup sex. If celibacy the only (or main) problem behind clerical child-rape, why isn't there an epidemic of Catholic priests impregnating their parish secretaries?

The book isn't that bad, on the whole. I hope I've mistaken their intent.

Wanna buy a book?

Specifically, would you like to buy a book of my writing, most of it new-to-all, pretty much right away?

EVEN MORE SPECIFICALLY, would you like to send me $12 for a right'n'proper locally-printed copy of THIS BOOK?

YES: That is Falsehoods, Concerns by yours truly. YES!

The book contains the following 220 180 pages of PURE 100% MAGIQUE:

• A house, a bay (oceans, curtains, scalar incomprehension)
• There is a shiny brass lamp nearby. (dungeons, Watergate, Floyd Collins, terrors)
• Little Smoo goes to the library (marital friction, children, Galatea 2.2)
• Pregnancy, possibility (sex, swollen uteri/bellies)
• 'In the tomb...' (live music taping, media archaeology, inappropriate titles)
• Kids today. (nerd gaming, obvious stylistic ripoff of David Mamet)
• light is growing brighter now (...)
• love/hate (the difference between them)
• Muddlemind (memory, identity, unknowingly rewriting other people's movies)
• No flash, no fuss (ATHEISM IS BORING! THANK GOD!)
• There are no teenagers (possibly the titular claim is incorrect?)
• Classroom logics (I get so, so, so angry about classrooms!)
• FIXING YOU (excerpts) (my greatest achievement - original semifiction!)
• Panoply (more original semifiction!)
• Five ('I fall in love too easily')
• Nails (I pull mine)
• Hillary Clinton (this one took it out of me)
• Fraud (obvious stylistic ripoff of DFW)
• Notes on 'In a Silent Way' (seriously, just figure out for yourself what this is about)
• Fun-Loving High School Kids! (zany fiction about high schoolers! and mass murder!)
• The Going Concern (bits and bobs about, among other things, love)
• Amen (more stuff about love, you feel me?)

Hey, I'll ship you a copy anywhere in the U.S. for $12. Multiple copies, internat'l shipping, that sort of thing - we'll figure something out.

My address is waxbanks@gmail.com. Drop a line and we will make this happen to your mind; once I've got a sense for the number of copies we'll need, I'll email you with info on PAYOLA and SHIPPING-OLA.

Tell your friends! They stand to benefit most from this kind of brain-rearranging wisdom/nonsense.

Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves (P.G. Wodehouse, 1962).

This Bertie and Jeeves book, my second, was probably better than my first (Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit), but now that I expect Wodehouse's absolute mastery of character, voice, and staging, I'm in that strange position I'm in with, say, the Beatles - Revolver will remain near-perfect for all time, a source of great joy and comfort, but it can only surprise you so many times.

But I'm trying to live without the need for joyful experiences to be surprising atop all else. Day by day it gets easier.

The set-pieces in this volume are stronger than those in Feudal Spirit - particularly the scene with Basset, Bertie, and the awful dog, and Bertie's lengthy sojourn behind the sofa, which ends with a jaw-dropping sequence in which Wodehouse illustrates the passage of an enormous amount of time and action solely through overheard dialogue, faithfully recorded by our humble n., Wooster. Jeeves has a nicely active role in this one, compared to Feudal S., which gives Wodehouse plenty of chances to depict Bertie's great love and admiration for Jeeves. Masterful as Bertie's narration is, what stays with me is the warm glow that fills the pages whenever Jeeves shimmers into the room. (What a fine word choice is 'shimmer,' capturing both Bertie's relief and sincere longing, on one hand, and Wodehouse's own acknowledgement of Jeeves's plot function - essentially a bottled genie - on the other.)

In a sense, Jeeves is Bertie's (our) ideal teacher: patient, kind, strict without being bullheaded, sly but never mean, authoritative but egoless. If the relationship weren't complicated by Jeeves's status as manservant gentleman's gentleman (and the very male, if not quite masculine, nature of Bertie's various pursuits), we could well imagine Bertie and Jeeves as an innocent young 19th century girl and her doting, wizened minder.

Of course it's a love story, as so many novels of mens' shenanigans are; and it's a sad commentary on our fallen age that we lack a modern language to describe that vital love. ('Homosocial' is graceless and clinical, while 'homosexual' is merely[?] incorrect.)

[Upon further reflection, I'd like to clarify this: Bertie hardly exudes heterosexuality either. My dismissal of a homosexual-erotic reading of the Jeeves/Bertie relationship stems from the fact that their obvious affection seems to lack any sexual component, unless of course you think there's always a sexual/erotic component to appreciation of great beauty. I dunno about that. Rather, I think J. and B. take care of one another with an awareness of self-interest - Jeeves is a tricksy fellow, after all - but without feeling threatened by one another. Bertie's love and admiration for Jeeves involve no posturing at all; they simply divide their domains of authority, join their interests, and act at all times with care for one another. That's love, but it's got nothing to do with sex. Bertie describes Jeeves as 'shimmering' into the room - but not as a desire-object. Jeeves is an angel, a djinn taking human form; Bertie is a holy Fool. (Remember your Major Arcana! The Fool is immortal precisely because he steps off the ledge into thin air, never looks down, and so never enters into a fatal contract with gravity.) Together they're...well, they're perfect together. Which description applies much more readily to Lennon and McCartney (or to Fry and Laurie!) than to Romeo and Juliet...]

Well. I love these books and could listen to Bertie carry on all day, but it's time to take a swing at the next book. Since my collection is still boxed up - Christ! - I'm confined to the local library's holdings. Next up, therefore: selections from McGinn's The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism. My life overflows, as is no doubt obvious, with 'fun.'

A vision.

Tell me a story.

In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.

Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.

The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.

Tell me a story of deep delight.

--Robert Penn Warren, 'Audubon: A Vision'

First impressions of The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick.

1. The ending, in which PKD's 'Hitler won' fiction and The Grasshopper's 'Britain won' inner-fiction - along with Tagomi's vision, which may well be our own world? - all coexist in a kind of alt-historical superposition, isn't the 'meaning' of the book, nor its solution. It's an explicit allegory for the previous 200+ pages, which enact the same dynamic implicitly.

2. After all, we know the world of High Castle is 'fiction' - a world in which Americans speak with stilted movie-Japanese diction and have learned, over a couple of decades, to live with Japanese/Nazi occupation. Tagomi's vision in the park is the most extraordinary material in the book, but until then PKD's great achievement in High Castle is the creation of a world in which complex, small-scale interpersonal drama in Occupied America is presented both schematically and with ragged emotional intensity. This outer story, PKD's depiction of the Japanese/Nazi occupation with both empathetic intimacy and an unexpectedly subtle irony, is an impressive humanistic feat. And a literary one: alt-histories generate intense force by virtue of their ironic distance from our world, but Dick never hits the 'different but the same' button too hard. It's a restrained book.

3. It's also a clumsy one. Dick's dialogue is at times absolutely abominable. Well, what can you do.

3.5. It's also, particularly in its latter chapters, a shockingly funny book.

4. The point is, PKD gives us believable inner lives of Japanese occupiers, Nazi double agents, and American resistant-collaborators (Childan). He's less good with Juliana Frink, but the emotional richness of the book never falters. It's an enveloping world: desperate and harrowing.

5. The authentic/fake/historicity/relativism thematic stuff doesn't much matter much to me as Theory of History. I imagine its main importance to PKD (and its appeal to me) is private, emotional: the book climaxes with Tagomi's vision, a very funny and very familiar depiction of Tagomi's struggle to yield to a dream-state, the transition between worlds in which intellectual scaffolding gives way to a state of total immersion. The book is ambiguous, or rather ambivalent, about whether Tagomi is granted a vision of the 'Real' or of an also-present Possibility, and that ambivalence is precisely its Magical character - its psychedelic quality, if you like.

6. The bit in the Castle seems like a misfire, and the Oracle's 'revelation' feels unnecessary to me, except to generate a neat bit of schemata: generate a negative image of our world ('Hitler won') then shift it laterally in some small way while flipping the colours again, so instead of 'we beat Hitler' you get 'Britain beat Hitler'; yes that shift opens up an interesting conceptual space, but ultimately that space is less important than Inner Life in America Under Japanese Occupation, at least to me...

7. ...but what marks this as a SF novel, maybe, is that the concept remains important to the end, and the climax resolves the concept rather than its emotional content. I was left not really caring about Juliana Frink at all, who is after all (as a plot point in heels rather than a fully-embodied story-person) living in the plot rather than its deep story, its inner story. I cared about Tagomi, the visionary-hero in a way, the put-upon company man.

8. And that's what gets you, ultimately. The Japanese Trade Mission representative, the occupier, the condescending goddamn Jap, is where my heart goes. That's an extraordinary thing, a great achievement, but not primarily an intellectual one. You follow?

Laugh 'til you're grey in the face.

"To choose order over disorder, or disorder over order, is to accept a trip composed of both the creative and the destructive. But to choose the creative over the destructive is an all-creative trip composed of both order and disorder." --Malaclypse the Younger

Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (P.G. Wodehouse, 1954).

My first Wodehouse but (I vow) not my last. The prose is perfect. To the extent that the claim is reasonable at all, I mean it literally: there are no errors, misjudgments, or failures of craft to speak of in 231 pages of writing. Nor even a momentary lapse or break in the extraordinary narrative voice. I've never read a piece of writing so perfectly formed. There's barely a plot to speak of, of course, despite the crowd of 'plot events' to be found; the pleasure comes from the characters, who are sympathetic grotesques, and from the voice, that voice! Wooster!

What to do? I was asking myself. It seemed to me that the prudent course, if I wished to preserve a valued spine intact, would be to climb aboard the two-seater first thing in the morning and ho for the open spaces. To remain in statu quo would, it was clear, involve a distasteful nippiness on my part, for only by the most unremitting activity could I hope to elude Stilton and foil his sinister aims. I would be compelled, I saw, to spend a substantial portion of my time flying like a youthful hart or roe over the hills where spices grow, as I remembered having heard Jeeves once put it, and the Woosters resent having to sink to the level of harts and roes, whether juvenile or getting on in years. We have our pride.

The pleasure of inhabiting, for a while, a mind totally incapable of correlating or even making basic sense of its contents - the pleasure, in other words, of absolute guilelessness by proxy, of sweet sympathy and fretfulness without consequence; of a way of life in which worry is replaced by a kind of gauzy half-awareness. Wooster's verbal resources are vast (I love his weird command of American cliché) but there's no force to his speech, no imposition. Every single word passes by at the same idle half-speed. The story strolls.

As a kid I considered Douglas Adams the (my) gold standard of comedy; the Guide is still cherished Scripture to me. But it's brain-work without question - the nervewracking Pythonesque topology of DNA's sentences is half the fun. There are jokes in the Guide that take dozens or hundreds of pages to pay off. The effect of this structural involution is an impression of seemingly limitless complexity and dynamism: Adams's universe might come from sketch comedy, but it feels crowded with complicatedly-interrelatedly events and implications and sentient anthropomorphic mattresses and such. The key word is complex: DNA's proper subject was the inflationary (physical and mental) universe, ideas banging bigly. (Pardon me.)

The effect of Bertie's narration is to flatten every hierarchy and establish all of his misremembered poetry, wistful Jeeves-longing, aunt-horror, and dimwitted status unconsciousness as equally central: Wooster's world is completely flat, which is to say at every level equally complicatedly alive, which is to say Wooster's world is without status. That's the kicker. A story ostensibly concerned with trivial matters of status-consciousness, which sends up the world of the English country house (vanished now if it ever existed), does us the great favour of showing us a world in which all relationships can be, in a way, tidily symmetrical...with Wooster and Jeeves the fine-man-in-two-bodies, the attractive fantasy. Your Bertie will get you into lovely trouble, and your Jeeves will pluck you out, and there's always more.

It is bliss.

Stations of the Tide (Michael Swanwick, 1991): quickish response.

It reminded me of Neuromancer, actually, in the sheer density and efficiency of its storytelling; Swanwick never pauses for 'infodumps,' never gives in to ostentation (neither prosewise nor in his worldbuilding), and manages to keep the 'plot' humming along even during the heady, slightly awkward magic-erotic interludes. The Tempest-frame never intrudes, nor does the (perhaps less obvious) Christ parallel; and Swanwick's great feat of the imagination, the Puzzle Palace, is both vividly alive yet startlingly thinly described, which is to say perfectly evoked: fantastic. It has a dream's Weird logic but also a heavy materiality, not least in its depiction of mere humans merely living. It's logical, magical, human, alien, and (wonder!) a tightly organized, lightning-quick read in which nothing is obfuscated (but nothing's simple either).

I have a great deal of respect for this book; I can't recommend it highly enough.

yesterday freewrite warmup.

[The initial subject here is Finnegans Wake. For 'allways,' read both 'always' and 'in all ways/directions.']

rifling through the wake as through a burnt-out memory attic or grandmother's vault or safe or the home of a deposed king; or walking slowly hallway by allways through a museum corridors opening up to exhibitionisms aplenty. it gets into your wording like riddley but you knew that. it makes old ideas calamitatiously anew. noob i mean newborn. it makes ideas borne-again i mean to say you have to hold them. what but what. what but you open up a book and it is a consciousness machine. you are a consciousness machining it is a nother mechanism attaches to you inside outwise. human brains and literary minds interoperate. genre is part of the API of literary mind-melting i mean melding i mean to say magic exists and its language is Once Upon a Trembling.

hard to pull back from that oceanic language unnerving. to bricks and periods and colons. pull back the view the camera widens the words walking about lose focus dissolve into the sea again. up close you see the bacterial music of it. exactings at the paleoatomic scale old notions new forms. the formlessness that total surrender permits. what words are for is giving structure to time that might otherwise pass inchoate in the interstices i mean through the bodies i mean among the desires of human separated beings. strange estrangement. i mean i mean you are writing your way into a state of alltogetherness ideally. but what if you cant.

we all know magic exists because it scares us. i mean to say the fear is real and what else can there be. ??? question but what else must be in order for this life to be this life, to match our expectings? fearfully we make fire. fearful make words for fire, watch burn, we wish for words for the working of fire into the cells of living things; wish for a straightforwardness of cause to accommodate our infinitude of question. i mean we'd like to think we wouldn't ask questions have no answers.

fear of magic is fair, is fireful speech. our trembling invests the words with potent power. precisely the confliction of what can not possibly against the collapsing layered border surface of what we clearly perceive clearly. that interspace, that innerworld. thereby we come to believe in what we make. magic is there because there is magic because we made that place for that thing. i was saying last night able to isn't the premise for doing. doing is the journey to being able to able being. i mean to say the acting that is the body the world is not the consequence of the being that is readiness. we are ready when we act in becoming. you can't readily move you movingly be. you are made not was. you are making. magic is maybe the realizing of the act that hides behind being. it is to see be as do. but if that seeing is magic, if the saying is its operation Magical Words i mean to say if the spellcasting is to see the die has been cast, if it is Acceptance --

i think magic is true living, an end to self-deception. but then the self is the deception. but to see yourself as merely seeing, to feel the presence i mean the presents i mean the presentness i mean that-the-present-is-all-that-allways-is; to do as totality, in authentic presentness -- there you miraculously are. there you truly are. true things are miraculous. nothing is miraculous. see but both ways are; both are ways of being; allways find every expression.

no but every language is constraint. yes but every language is pattern which is expansion. pattern multiplies what it orders; pattern is collision. you think you are repeating as if an old idea. no but you are yes, you yes are, yes you are singing the oldest song. magical is taking up old songs as responsibilities laid by. merely to allways be everything. please it is only chance. there is no shame in a universe in which all things are all things and nothing can be held against anything because everything being is allways acting. the one thing that can fill up the universe and deny nothing is Song.

Lovecraft's 'cosmicism': another quick take.

For Lovecraft's 'cosmicism' to attain full flower, he'd have had to give up his (meta)fictional conceit of Ancient Races Lying Dormant - it's a philosophical copout. If your supposed philosophical point is that humanity is insignificant, it's enough to pit man against Nature, or Thermodynamics, or Chance...but that wasn't Lovecraft's point; or at least that wasn't where his heart resided. His emotional connection to his 'cosmicist' philosophy must be located in his obsessive return to his mythology of malign forces from Beyond. In other words, while 'The Call of Cthulhu' is a brilliant work of fiction in its own right, I'd say 'The Dunwich Horror' is closer to the center of Lovecraft's imaginarium, because its stakes are more accessibly human. Its horror might be invisible, but it can at least be directly felt.

Critics' dogged insistence on HPL's writing as 'cosmic horror' obscures the fact that it's horrific only to the extent that it happens to human beings - which is of course the opposite of 'cosmicism' if you take it halfway seriously, wuntcha say?

Christianity is not a mythology of Christ.

[I seem to have written this poorly. The point of the following is just that the details of God's 'character', His true 'nature,' are not important; what's important are the lives that people lead in His service. That's what I mean by a 'human mythology.' Christianity is a mythology for human beings to live inside, not a set of stories about superheroes. This is not an attack on the myth of a deity - there are plenty of those already.]

The 'character' of Yahweh is theologically and practically irrelevant. It's an interesting literary question (He is, after all, a literary creation!) but to occupy yourself with the 'true nature' of the Biblical God is to misunderstand its purpose. 'God' is to Christianity as vampires are to Buffy the Vampire Slayer: an inconsistently articulated metaphysical/metaphorical premise for a human mythology. The details can vary from week to week so long as emotional continuity and integrity are preserved. (Hence the meaninglessness of Biblical dietary prescriptions and sodomy laws.)

The story of Christ isn't a biography, it's an allegory - after all he didn't 'raise the dead,' nor did he 'turn water into wine.' As Jesus and early Christians reread Jewish myth/history as allegory, so the various Christian cults/churches reread Jesus as allegory.

One of the main characters on Buffy was given multiple birthdates; they don't conflict in any dramatically meaningful sense, so what difference does it make?

The only people who care about that stuff are fans; they are a blight on the body which would give itself over otherwise to ecstasy.

Adam Roberts, Yellow Blue Tibia (2009): Third response; really the third part of a long response that's actually taken me weeks to formulate. No, not 'formulate.' I mean 'expel.' This is how it ends, folks: THE BIG FINISH.

First bit. Second bit.

Now then:

Permit me to quote myself for a moment:

The interesting thing about ghosts is that (1) they're not real but (2) we've built immensely powerful belief/practice structures around them and (3) those structures become autonomous from the original claimed belief and no longer require dogmatic belief in the existence of ghosts. The experience of 'seeing a ghost' is absolutely real, but that doesn't mean it's an encounter with The Spirits of the Dead or any such thing. And yet, and yet...

UFOs - excuse me, 'alien spacecraft visiting earth' - are almost certainly not real. Can we all agree to that? There's no compelling evidence that visitors from another planet/dimension/realityline have ever visited earth. Same goes for fairies, deities, sentient dinosaur-accountants, books that change their contents every time we look at them, 900-year-old Jews, or really memorable and heartbreaking puddings.

Yet we some believe. The question 'Are aliens real?' isn't particularly interesting; we can't answer it now, we're really not likely to ever answer it at all, the answer's probably NO anyhow, and either way it really shouldn't affect our day-to-day lives one iota. (What if there are Martians gadding about on the next planet over? Unless they have nefarious plans for us, aren't we likely to just keep on fiddling with our iPads and ignoring our children? Isn't that in fact the most sensible thing to do from our perspective, if not necessarily our kids'? Westerners can't be bothered to learn about alternative ways of life from the fucking Buddhists, what makes you think we'd pay any attention to Martian wise men?) (Or is the point only to co-opt Martian musical traditions for young white pop stars?)

Better to concentrate on the effects of insistence upon incorrect claims, or 'belief in "false" things.' Doubly interesting given the increasingly shrill ongoing debate about the place of atheism in a slowly-coalescing global culture that's probably gonna have to grow up and get pretty seriously pluralist soon, despite the maybe-impossibility of pluralism in a belief-sphere as complex as 'are "gods" real?' which, c'mon, no, that's totally ridiculous; though now you mention it mine aren't half as ridiculous as yours...

* * *

There's an early scene in Yellow Blue Tibia where Skvorecky, compulsive ironist, finds himself lecturing to a room full of UFOlogists who interpret his repeated insistence on aliens' nonexistence as sly avoidance of the appearance of dissension; i.e. they take him for a staunch, brave believer. The scene is funny and almost physically uncomfortable:

'There are no such things' I enunciated clearly, 'as UFOs.'

A murmur went from table to table, but not of dissension, or outrage, but rather of dawning comprehension. Somebody clapped.

'No,' I said, becoming annoyed. 'You are deliberately misunderstanding me. Do not transpose my negatives for positives. I am not speaking ironically, or in code; I am stating a simple truth.'

'The truth is simple,' somebody boomed, from the back of the cellar. 'It is the attempt to cover up the truth that is complicated! That cover-up forces complications upon us!'

'That's not it,' I said.

'Well said, Comrade Skvorecky,' said somebody else. 'No! -- we must hold fast to the dialectical! We must negate the official version!'

Things get more ridiculous from there: a 'squeaky penetrating voice' carries on about rectum-probing (ahem) and so forth. It's a good short scene, nicely capturing the queasy feeling of hopelessly incompatible belief-systems colliding, with a frisson of isn't-Soviet-life-weird for the Western reader. Totalitarianism is daft: check (funnily).

But YBT isn't actually about late-stage Communism; rather, it deploys familiar 'satire on totalitarian society' elements in service of a story that's less 'about' than around its thematic Stuff. Maybe that's a little of Kincaid's point, or Rich's: ARRRRRR's busy intertextuality isn't meant to support a unitary narrative, it's supposed to produce 'a kind of conceptual disorientation of the familiar' (Skvorecky's description of SF), which the bookish among us (professors of English lit, say, or SF critics) will find both comfortingly familiar and uncomfortably stuffed - plus some third thing, which let's call 'Lyotard's pomo sublime,' just for kicks. Making a home in Dislocation.

(That last isn't a bad description of 'falling in love,' I think. Which is one of the stories in YBT, of course, though I never quite felt it.)

YBT presents several forms of self-contradictory or 'magical' thinking, which are ultimately metaphorized in the 'realityline' explain-o-dump in the last chapter. Maybe I'm being too hard on that section; the finale is, after all, a depiction of one variety of Rapture, so it kinda has to come at the end, or rather the end has to come after the explain-o-dump. Skvorecky sees the nature of all things, which is Possibility, and is made keenly aware of the existence of the Great Big Supernatural; so he's crazy from then on, you might say, because his thinking-frame can't be mapped onto everyone else's. His private time is out of joint, though from his perspective ours is; cursed spite, everyone thinks his novel is a memoir. The I'm crazy/everyone else is crazy shift is nicely handled; the final page, 'Radiation in that sense' and so forth, is actually sweet.

But the Dora-Skvorecky 'love story' isn't a depiction of a growing romance so much as a metaphorical rendition of love as, simultaneously, endless possibility and inescapable destiny: wild swingy orbits that collapse in time onto one another. Crash. In a book where hyperliteralism is comedy and irony is trustworthy and synopsis is sinister, where everyone seems to be repeating half-remembered lines from one of a dozen different other novels from which they've been beamed (radiation in that sense?), I found it hard to take the love story seriously. 'True love' is, on top of everything else, a dangerous myth: like UFOs, lots of people claim it's real and will always be real and is the realest real YES but then they just one day grow out of it, or fuck their boss or something. Plus while love-amidst-totalitarianism is mere reality for the poor saps living under a Lunatic Regime, it's become for us coddled westerners a handy metaphor for the heroism of romance, which I've got my doubts about.

Dora the spherical cultist deforms spacetime in order to provide an a narrative image shaped just like our image of true love; that's at least one too many abstraction layers for me, sorry.

* * *

Yet Skvorecky is a human being: the best thing about Yellow Blue Tibia. Wonderful.

* * *

I guess what I'm saying here, or trying to say, is that YBT spends much of its runtime in a state of maddening epistemological betweenness, artfully depicted (as when Coyne is/isn't killed by a UFO, or the incompetent cop manages to dialecticalize his own self(!) by synthesizing Good and Bad cops into just a Scared Guy); but working against the novel's generative uncertainty is the attraction (inevitability?) of definition, such that the last few pages give us concrete answers to The Alien Question, plus a bowtied love story, so that even as Skvorecky says 'I did see a UFO...at the same time -- I didn't,' the fictional suspension that's carried through the novel finally gives in, and we did, after all, read a book in which The Alien Question is answered in the inventive-affirmative. A new kind of Yes to an old sort of question.

All of which makes for a satisfyingly unsatisfying novel, whether you've gone in looking for a linear narrative about Soviet SF writers or have somehow convinced yourself, as I somehow did, that forty thousand realitylines could be left open at story's end, unwoven, uncollapsed. ARRRR's depiction of rapturous all-seeing ('My feelings were of wonder'?!?!) doesn't quite spin me up to wobbling whirling velocities of psychedelic spin; not for nothing did the first part of this 'review' refer to his 'bone-dry conceptualism.'

The best part of Yellow Blue Tibia, for me, was the feeling that it might not have to end at all, that forty thousand threads might just run out, fragile and frayed like poetry (or love?), and be seen in retrospect flapping in the (meta)fictional breeze. That idea of multiplicity. The best part lasted almost to the very end. Not bad.

I quite liked the book. It's a strange, oddly-shaped, idiosyncratically-paced thing. Have I even talked yet about the interregnum in what might be heaven? Stalin is there and confesses that he's not a human being. It's like opening a fortune cookie and finding a 100-line lyric poem in the middle. Maybe the best part of the book, though that contradicts the previous paragraph. The best part of the book (third try) is its Strangeness, which is achieved through setting, character, plot, and above all (this being, I'm told, a novel by ARRRRRRRR) High Concept, of which some people claim he is 'the king.' Hell of a thing to be king of! It's also a funny book. Best part of the whole thing, except for the other best parts.

* * *

THE END.

............OR IS IT

Adam Roberts, Yellow Blue Tibia (2009): Second response, though 'response' is getting less accurate with each passing moment as we veer into Riffing-Land.

When last we left our hero, he was handwaving furiously in order to keep from having to 'evaluate' the book that Kim Stanley Robinson, whose books are coincidentally-I'm-sure shelved right next to Adam Roberts's in your local bookstore's SF ghetto, rather noisily said Shoulda Won the Booker the other year. We join our hero in the middle of a new, only tangentially-related waving of hands, though we will unceremoniously pop out of the blogpost-frame at a moment of peak (forgive me) HANS-WAVING...

* * *

Let's talk briefly about mystery stories.

At one level Yellow Blue Tibia is a bit of a secret-gov't-shadiness thriller - a conspiracy novel you might say, *nudgenudgewinkwink* - complete with KGB kidnappings, basement interrogations, murder most foul, Scientologists with hidden motives, alt-historical Soviet nogoodniks. It shares a central mystery with other conspiracy tales: Who's really pulling the strings? And for all ARRRRRR's genre-expectation-manipulation shenanigans (it's an action movie starring a geriatric SF writer! it's a love story starring a perfectly spherical lady Scientologist!), he really does answer the central question in the end, after a fact. Admittedly the Big Reveal is offered up almost grudgingly, but it's there in the last chapter: aliens are real, and the SF writers were 'inspired' to craft an 'unbelievable' future history that came kinda 'true': a provisionally fictional reality-attractor. And of course Love, Love, Love has spun things a bit off course, as it will.

As one hopes will happen with one's mystery stories, Yellow Blue Tibia answers its questions fairly and unexpectedly.

OK, but:

The aesthetic success of a mystery, its positive completeness, requires the final discharge of energy whose slow buildup is (arguably, or for some readers; for me at least) the genre's key pleasure. I like a strong answer, but if the question is generative enough - if it ramifies, variegates, fractalizes, or just goes ass-up Raymond Chandler-style - then I'd almost rather not come to the end at all. It almost isn't worth finding out who killed Laura Palmer. You'd rather not know how The Rock ended up in two places at once in the Southland. Tyler Durden's a lot more interesting in tandem with his other half than as abstract villain. It's not important to know the 'truth' about the central event in Jose Chung's From Outer Space! - so long as you want to know and can live into the ambiguity.

The Usual Suspects is perfect-of-its-kind, but when was the last time you rewatched it? Its purpose is to be encountered for the first time only. It's not a world to live in.

For the last 100 pages of Yellow Blue Tibia I found myself hoping that ARRRRRRRRR would find a way to duck his generic responsibility to the suspense tale and keep his comic tale suggestively open-ended (though after Saltykov died I was upset enough to accept the end one way or another - points to ARRRR, damn it). I wanted a version of the 'Jose Chung's' story. After all, the ultimate explanation for the UFO phenomenon is, y'know, 'self-perpetuating myth system' crossed with 'media self-feeding' with a dose of military-industrial paranoia (not for nothing are so many UFO sightings essentially intrusions of the mechanical (imaginary) Other on rural landscapes). No aliens, we all get that, right? So I was hoping that ARRRRR's fiction wouldn't close in on itself, explanation-wise - that what's true in our banal hors-texte, i.e. magical beliefs and miraculous material fact, would hold in the novel's world as well.

But OK: it's a book about a SF writer who crafts a 'realityline' in which aliens are real and (lo; behold) aliens are 'real,' more or less, go SF writers(!); it's like an inversion of Douglas Adams's 'Somebody Else's Problem' field where you start to see the spaceships the minute you realize they're there. Or something. I wanted YBT to make a didactic point about magical thinking and 'bisociation,' and to do so in a Weird way in keeping with the 300 pages of Weirdness preceding, but ARRRRRRR@*%^ was instead building up a sly joke about fiction-making in the wordcraft/worldcraft sense. Formal fictioneering. And so his fiction stuck to the form. There was an Everything is Revealed ending and everything, in which some things were revealed.

I'm the dope for wanting a kaleidoscope instead of YBT's self-referential satire.

* * *

It lags a tiny bit in the middle, during the funny but rather prolonged Saltykov bits.

* * *

So what are three main male characters' compulsions?

Saltykov, the cabbie, is compulsively literal. He insists on things as they merely are.

Skvorecky, the narrator, is compulsively ironic. He dodges over and over into things which are not - and of course as a writer of science-fictions he makes his living that way too.

Frenkel, the villain, is compulsively synoptic. He can't seem to stop explaining the Big Picture, even if he's always more abstract than he ought to be.

A XOR B - OR some third thing C. Thesis, antithesis, nemesis.

Or else Saltykov is a worldbuilder, Skvorecky a script doctor, Frenkel a goddamn producer.

* * *

Hans Vaihinger back in the day was all about a spectrum of fictionality: fiction--hypothesis--dogma. Ideas, said Hans, could slide back and forth in terms of...nah, not truth value, but relative truthiness y'might say. Dogma you refused to not believe. Fictions you knew to be false. Hypotheses had some give to them; they could be held provisionally true. Wolfgang Iser (one of the distant weird cold flickering possibly-chthonian stars in my longago grad school firmament) slapped that Ideational Spectrum into a theory of literary fiction as reader-writer gameplay...

...the point being that you read a novel and 'knew' it wasn't 'true,' but you nonetheless were able to accomplish some impressive stuff imaginatively by granting assertions-in-the-novel provisional truth: fictionality as cognitive scaffolding. Not true nor false but some third thing. There's a reason grad school makes people disgusted with mainstream politics. The grad thing is allllways about 'some third thing,' ideation without representation.

* * *

(to be continued)

Irrelevant update(s).

1. My Aegypt-reading has been delayed: I reserved Swanwick's Stations of the Tide at the library and wanna blast through it first. Should be quick.

Can't read Crowley distracted. It's a moral imperative.

2. First two chapters of Swanwick's book: golden. Weird, though, to read a book set in a high-tech spacefaring civilization, written between the advents of cable television and the WWW. Communications technology poses difficulties for the SF writer, just as cell phones make horror/mystery stories that much harder to write. (Buffy featured cell phone use in one episode, as I recall, and only then as a spoof...)

First response to Chthonian Stars, the new 'Lovecraft plus Traveller' RPG supplement.

Whaddawegot? Bad advice about theme and tone. Slipshod future history. Some misguided rule alterations. And all throughout the book, truly awful writing. From the 'Cultist' monster description, the flavour text:

It’s then you realize that this person is not right. There is something in their intensity, something in the madness hidden behind their eyes that speaks to fanaticism. At first, you’d thought it was for something normal, like the pop culture obsessions of most people, but the conversation has turned a dark corner and he is not showing signs of slowing.

Then, the smile turns evil and the wickedly-shaped knife comes out from hiding. He’s lost himself to the worship of something forgotten. Let’s hope there aren’t too many more around.

I don't like to call out 30something nerds who work their asses off to make things for themselves and their friends to love, but incompetent, slipshod, evidently lazy work shouldn't be rewarded. This book needs a copyedit so severe as to resemble a complete rewriting. For heaven's sake. Read this sentence, from the description of 'The Guardian' in one of the book's prebaked adventures:

During the first two rounds, the speed gains made by the creature make it slower than the characters, so it will use cover to evade them.

D'you see what's wrong there? 'The speed gains' do not 'make [the creature] slower than the characters.' That's a trivial error, and a competent editor should have caught it. Here's another stinker, from page 13, the Introduction:

It begins slowly. Colonists begin to notice unusual things throughout the solar system. Then people begin to disappear. Then entire settlements. Ships go missing.

Notice the problem there? The 'unusual things throughout the solar system' should be exemplified by subsequent sentences, not simply followed. Get it? Almost as bad, the language is flaccid. Here's a slight improvement:

It begins slowly. Reports of odd events filter in from the farthest reaches of the system. People disappear. Then entire settlements. Ships go missing.

The 'ships' bit is still anticlimactic, the opening is flabby and still mired in cliché, but at least it's not incorrect in addition to being unstylish. Throughout the book the prose is somehow both overwritten and undernourished - too wordy, not dense enough. Leaden. It needs rewriting.

This book has generated no small amount of excitement in the (OK, small) horror-SF-RPG nerd triangle, but the writing is so flat that I can't even bring myself to wonder whether the Big Awful Secrets (basically Lovecraft's cold semiscientific 'cosmicism' without the horror or wonder) are interesting or worthwhile - that is, the book is in its own way. Please, please, let's do better!!

Balance.

I have finally, finally, finally begun reading John Crowley's Aegypt quartet; to balance that choice out, maturity/intensity-wise, I'm going to spend the next two months listening solely to the early-90's college-rock semi-classic 'Hooch,' by Virginian jam band Everything.

If you haven't listened to the song lately, you should. It's a particularly pure example of late-20C hedo-moron stoner pop, one of the best (stupidest, simplest, emptiest, most embarrassing, most nakedly pleasurable) pop tunes of recent vintage. The lowest-common-musical-denominator saxophone solo in the middle is archetypal 'jam band' stuff in the Dave Matthews Band vein (though without Leroi Moore's obvious chops); that acoustic-guitar earworm is so addictive that it's easy to miss the actually tasteful electric-wah chords; the vocals couldn't possibly be more bland or pointless, yet the campfire singalong chorus manages to transcend every possible barrier to enjoyment: aesthetic, national, historical, sexual, perceptual, ontological. Oh my god, when the crash cymbal hits at the beginning of the final 'Let's get real' line I start to lose my brains a little bit and become Pure Relaxation.

Songs like 'Hooch' defy all aesthetic laws; they manage to perfectly capture a particular (lazy, debauched, lame) mood, an age (the Golden Age of psychedelia, i.e. age 19), a place (wherever you were when you first realized that girls with unshaven legs were rad; possibly 'the levee,' per the lyrics). 'Hooch' makes me think there's not a hell of a lot of point to having such endlessly worked-out opinions about Art. It's so, so bad. I enjoy it so, so much. Heaven save me from myself.

Adam Roberts, Yellow Blue Tibia (2009): First response.

I shall refer to the titular fellow as ARRR here, to avoid the Roberts/Adam question. Alternate, much better title for this post, which almost renders the following exercise pointless (not that the following exercise needs the help):

Adam Roberts's From Outer Space!

Rich Puchalsky sez of ARRR's work:

His novels seem to me to be characterized by a high degree of formal structure coupled with underdetermination of what that structure means.

Paul Kincaid sez, in the post that inspired Rich's post:

A novel can turn entirely inward into the world of its story, but satire must look outwards, must relate to something beyond the fiction. This need not be satire in our modern sense of biting attack, nevertheless, we do need to consider what is being satirized [in New Model Army]. I realized that it was the same thing that is being satirized in Swiftly and Yellow Blue Tibia, though it is more overt in those books: Roberts is satirizing science fiction.

I don't hold any particular brief for experimental/formalist fiction, and am not a 'science-fiction fan' by any stretch. Hmm. What's more, Yellow Blue Tibia is at one level a sly consideration of bisociation, about which subject I have highly informal but overdetermined opinions. ARRRRR's particular brand of bone-dry conceptualism makes me uneasy 'on the page' as it were (I'm a 'rapturous overflow' kinda guy in my literary preferences). And unfortunately someone told me YBT was...a love story, grrr...which led me to pay close attention to one of its least compelling components (from my perspective).

In other words, while I wasn't prepared to dislike this book, I was unprepared to like it, if that makes sense.

But!

I did like it - quite a lot. Well, that's the easy part. I can even give a first-order approximation of Why: it's funny (uproariously so in places); its good-humoured absurdism has a darkling tinge; its intertextuality serves a purpose beyond authorial dickwavery; ARRRR's alleged total disregard for worldbuilding niceties is rendered more or less irrelevant by the book's heady abstraction, unless you're well-versed in Russian/Soviet culture, in which case I imagine he's sorry, or not sorry, or some third thing; and for 95% of its running time, Yellow Blue Tibia possesses the rare and wonderful quality of rigorous, playful ambivalence - not just ambiguity but actual multiplicity of meaning, huzzah.

Must we quibble about the other 5%, known as 'the final chapter of the book?' Let's quibble about that 5% later then.

In any case, I can sorta say why I liked it. There you go. I can even articulate some complaints about it - over ARRR's characterization of Dora the Love Interest, the somewhat hyperextended Aspergers/OCD material, or the resolution/revelation, which seems somewhat epistemologically or in any case affectively out of tune with the rest of the book-as-I-read-it (i.e. the explanation opens up quantum-as-basically-magic timestreams within the novel even while closing down, with a resounding *thump* at the reader/novel interface, all the explanation-streams woven about the novel itself, i.e. after 300+ pages of marvelous funny/weird epistemology games, ARRRRRR has to declare the Fun Over, i.e. this is one place where I kinda wish I hadn't watched 'Jose Chung's From Outer Space' before writing this review on account of that show's extraordinary interpretive catholicism). That, too, seems important: to bitch about things. That's one of the things I do.

But I'm nervous about taking a swing at the book's 'meaning,' though I've got some notions, because (1) I'm out of practice at literary-A-means-B and (2) half my brain is anyway telling the other half: 'Hey, that ambivalence you're feeling might actually be the point, or the pleasure, or perhaps the locus of your pleasure, so calm down for Christ's sake.' But maybe that hemibrain is just covering for its embarrassment over (let's number things again, why not) (1) picking up right away on an 'A or B, no third thing' resonance with the book's (after all) USSR/dialectic subject matter, yet (2) feeling uncertain as to the didactic/argumentative point of such a resonance, or whether there even is one, or (one abstraction layer higher) whether there even should be. When the feeling of LOLing/head scratching partly at self/some other third cognitive thing was - after all - quite nice.

(to be continued)

Arturo Perez-Reverte, The Club Dumas (1993).

[Spoilers follow for what the jacket copy accurately describes as a 'beach book for intellectuals,' which I recommend only if you haven't seen its film adaptation.]

The trouble with reading this enjoyable book now is that I've long since seen Roman Polanski's atmospheric but ridiculous (and thin) film adaptation The Ninth Gate. I've also read my share of Umberto Eco, alas - and never did read The Three Musketeers, nor do I have any particular interest in it. Finally, I picked up the book in the first place because of its place of honour in the bibliography of Ken Hite's Bookhounds of London, which takes P-R's antiquarian-bibliomania-plus-black-magic thing several steps further than the novel itself.

So The Club Dumas has several strikes against it from the start: Polanski's movie spoils the Nine Doors mystery while revealing the Dumas subplot as an obtrusive cute-intertextual red herring; Foucault's Pendulum is less seedy and creepy than The Club Dumas, but it's got a better ending and vastly more implied secret history; The Three Musketeers is a big preoccupation for Perez-Reverte but it's never clear why one should care, other than for the thrill of allusion-spotting; and as mentioned, Hite's book ably steals most of this novel's thunder.

It's well-enough written - mostly brisk and surefooted plotwise, only occasionally belaboring the cod-numerological obvious, prone to agreeable amounts of syrupy sentimentality where women are concerned. Corso is a compelling character, though his flatness of affect grates by the end, especially at the end, where he seems not disagreeably/attractively mercenary but completely heedless; the kicker ending doesn't make that scene 'cool' in retrospect. The feel is everything, here, and it feels fine, but by the halfway mark I was ready to skip ahead to the end - and, incredibly, I did just that. 60 or 70 pages, whoosh, gone from view. I'm glad I saved myself the hour, but I'm glad I gave Perez-Reverte his, too.

I might have a look at the Captain Alatriste novels if no one stops me.

Bossypants (Tina Fey, 2011).

Everyone like me seems to have a crush on Tina Fey, but I don't. I get why they do, she's swell, but I don't share the feeling. I think reading Bossypants has helped me figure out why:

1) I never saw her on Weekend Update, which was apparently a Thing for male writer-nerds.

2) Her style of comedy mixes this slight didacticism that's so constant, and pitched just above comfortable frequency levels, that you want to say it's semi- or unconscious...but how could anything about this serious craftsman's craft be semi- or un- at this point? Her ironies are just a little more defensive and uncomfortable-with-self than I'm used to. That makes for nervy comedy (though 30 Rock is hit-and-miss, at best, in its topical seriousness) but over a couple hundred print pages it starts to sit badly. With me, I mean. Probably lots of people will eat this book up. I liked it. I liked reading it. I like Tina Fey well enough. I like her the way I liked the girls with good grades when I was in sixth grade and had the best grades, or thought I deserved to have the best grades because I was smartest (I'd heard) but I didn't work as hard as the girls, so they'd get 98's and I'd either get 100's or (when I didn't care) 88's. I like Tina Fey in a resentful way, or resent her affectionately; she makes me wonder what I'm doing wrong. Either way I don't have a crush. I wonder what I'm doing wrong.

Oh look at me I had an idea:

Some people break rules because they want you to notice the rules. Some people do it because they want you to notice them. I think maybe I'm not sure what kind of person Tina Fey is, but the idea I have is that I want to think she's the same as me, and she's the kind of person I think I am, but I'm not actually that guy, I'm the other guy, and my jittery handwavy self-consciousness is that other kind, the kind that if I ever admit to myself that's my thing I'll look in the mirror and just be like, 'You asshole!'

On the other hand maybe you do the right thing thinking you've got the right reason but you've got the 'wrong' one, but by acknowledging it it becomes right, in a way? See? And this sanitizes you and makes you OK for the world, and you go about your day making the world a touch more OK. On the other other hand, Tina Fey says that Lorne Michaels says that The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30. So then would I ever have had the whole self-accusatory moment in the mirror if I hadn't been checking to see whether I was Ready for My Closeup or whatever?

* * *

It's a library checkout, not a buy. So there you go.

Does making a fool of yourself count as making something of yourself? Hi?

Two sentences and more on Mitch Horowitz's Occult America, which I finished reading today.

1) It'd be a lot more important - though a much harder sell - if it were a history of ideas rather than a gallery of Compelling Personalities (Joseph Smith, Manly Hall, Blavatsky, Cayce, Pelley, et al.).

2) The last hundred pages are far, far, far less compelling than the rest, as Horowitz subtly (and not-so-subtly) shapes the narrative to separate what seem to be his own occult beliefs from less pleasant/respectable currents in the genealogy of American mystical thought.

* * *

Horowitz's book is a decent introduction to a particular strain of American Irrationalism, which isn't a bad name for our unofficial national religion: we 300 million are proudly and deeply credulous, shockingly historically ignorant, and hooked on a centuries-old mythology of American self-determination (darkened by the identity-instability of a migrant nation cut off from all its geo-historical sources). Horowitz is an engaging guide to the links between mid-19th century American mythohistorical prophetic writing (e.g. Smith's Mormonism), Spiritualist psychiana, the civic-minded narcissism of New Thought, and 20th century self-help culture from Norman Vincent Peale to the 'self-actualization' subgospels of the 'New Age.' And for occult trivia from Lincoln to the Beatles, it's a fine, easy, breezy read - even when Horowitz gives in to the urge to show off his research cred, as in the uncomfortably defensive and shallow 'occult+fascism' chapter.

But the book falls short as a critical work, mainly for reason #1 above: it's a widely-read enthusiast's anecdotal tour rather than an analytical work, long on 101-level introductions and disappointingly short on serious historical context. Its brief epilogue (on New Age thought) leaves a sour taste as a result. Here's the last page:

For all of its inroads into mainstream life, New Age became a term (and sometimes an epithet) that for many serious people connoted nothing more than a softheaded jumble of spiritual-therapeutic remedies or bromides. But the New Age did, in fact, have a core set of beliefs and a definable point of view. Most people, thought schools, or movements identifeed as New Age from the 1970s through the earlytwenty-first century shared these traits:

1. Belief in the therapeutic value of spiritual or religious ideas.
2. Belief in a mind-body connection in health.
3. Belief that human consciousness is evolving to higher stages.
4. Belief that thoughts, in some greater or lesser measure, determine reality.
5. Belief that spiritual understanding is available without allegiance to a specific religion or doctrine.

Most twenty-first-century Americans, whatever their background, would probably agree with a majority of those statements. To a very great degree, occult movements and personalities had introduced those ideas, in some of their most popular variants, into American life. Whether the occult changed America, or the other way around, certainly this much is clear: The encounter between America and occultism resulted in a vast reworking of arcane practices and beliefs from the Old World and the creation of a new spiritual culture. This new culture extolled religious egalitarianism and responded, perhaps more than any other movement in history, to the inner needs and search of the individual. At work and at church, on television and in bookstores, there was no avoiding it: Occult America had prevailed.

This slipshod question-begging gobbledygook retroactively imbues the whole book with an unpleasantly self-justificatory quality: in lieu of a historical argument about American integration of 'New Age' beliefs, Horowitz provides a brief laundry list of supposedly widespread beliefs - phrased so vaguely as to be meaningless - and uses this list to claim that even more vaguely defined 'occult' beliefs had 'prevailed' in the U.S.

Prevailed over what? Horowitz never does explain. The book's final movement is full of that kind of stuff: Horowitz's treatment of Carlos Castaneda involves (1) sensibly dismissing his factual claims as fabrication and (2) gushing over his books' value as 'allegories on [a] path' of 'religious or wisdom tradition. The resonances,' Horowitz breathily reports, 'could be remarkable.' At moments like this, the man's credulousness shows through, distorting his reportage, and it's hard to forget that the dude believes not only in ecumenical generosity but in the existence of leprechauns.

The whole book isn't this bad, thank god. Horowitz goes off the rails when discussing mid-20th century occult believers like Vice President Henry Wallace and 'mystic healer' Edgar Cayce, as part of his quiet book-length effort to demonstrate not just correlation but a straightforward causal relationship between occult beliefs and American progressivism/ecumenism (guess which is the cause). But the early material on Spiritualism and its discontents, and especially the link between early-20C self-help texts and loopy 'New Thought' pseudoscience/pseudophilosophy, is pure gold. The line from Peale's 'lemons into lemonade' cheeriness to our 'lemons into locally-grown organic lemonade' self-help culture is certainly important. And I bookmarked a whole mess of material about autodidacts, self-made huckster/loon/wisdom-adepts, and sui generis critico-poetic writers like Manly P. Hall (whose Secret Teachings of All Ages, which I picked up from the Cambridge Library on Horowitz's recommendation, really is every bit as comprehensively brilliant as it's made out to be). It's important to remember that every great creator, from Jesus to James Joyce, has had a bit of a larcenous touch - and Americans are unique only in the flavour of our celebrations of such generative poetic theft. We like being lied to - never moreso than by preachers.

[I wish Horowitz had spent time on the feedback loop between his favoured metaphysical claptrap and mainline American Protestantism - Billy Graham belongs in this book, without question. Imagine if our schoolchildren learned that kind of spiritual-historical context!]

But as enthusiastic as I was/am about Horowitz's well-presented early material, I can't recommend Occult America's back half (from the Henry Wallace chapter onward) as much more than an extensively annotated bibliography. In fact the book's list of sources is a wonderful thing, and it'd be a worthwhile project for someone to organize his list of primary references into a proper bibliography. Or - hey, it's the 21st century, right? - an amazon.com wishlist.

In short, it's a decent book, or 60% of one. But for a first course in American mythoi/metaphysics, you might be better off rewatching O Brother, Where Art Thou? and paying close attention to the lyrics...

One of the proudest moments of my young, nonnegligibly proud life...

...is recognizing the name of the author of Passport to Magonia among the characters in the X-Files(!) episode 'Jose Chung's From Outer Space,' which - believe me this is not an easy confession to make - is one of the most interesting episodes of TV I've ever laid eyes on. Yes! PROUD! Do you know what that book is about? I bet the Internet can tell you. MY HEAD IS A JUNIOR BRAIN INTERNET STORAGE CAPSULE HEAD!

I thought I didn't like this show.

The trouble with having a recreational interest in 'occult' or 'magical' thinking...

...is that the folks committed enough to produce the great body of Occult Literature today do not, for the most part, know when to stop, but they so often lack self-awareness about why they keep going. Reading Mitch Horowitz's Occult America - a breezy pop introduction to a particular strain of irrational/mystical thought in the American popular tradition - is a maddening experience for this very reason, among others.

Horowitz's book is a mishmash, and that's fine; it's an introductory text, after all. And to the extent that he has a thesis, it's a pleasantly obvious one ('occult belief is a vital part of the American identity'). But in talking about his work he's happy to go from 'Joseph Smith's apocalyptic/prophetic writing is part of an important American homebrew-religious tradition' to 'I think leprechauns are real and ouija boards connect us to another universe.' His catholic approach to the occult is good'n'proper, but his credulity is lamentable, and it bleeds into the book. (He's wrong about the sooper seekrit Masonic origins of the Great Seal, for one thing, and that's how he leads off the book!)

The book is free of the rapturous Weirdness of Charles Fort [indeed Fort's not even in the index!], because Horowitz doesn't (can't?) play the complex ironic-epistemological tonalities that were Fort's whole schtick. He's like a Disneyland tour guide slowly letting on, in unguarded asides, that he thinks Mickey is a real mouse.

[UPDATED the following w/r/t ARRR's strong point:]

The interesting thing about ghosts is that (1) they're not real but (2) we've built immensely powerful belief/practice structures around them and (3) those belief structures become autonomous from the original claimed belief and no longer require dogmatic belief in the existence of ghosts. The experience of 'seeing a ghost' is absolutely real, but that doesn't mean it's an encounter with The Spirits of the Dead or any such thing. And yet, and yet...

'And yet, and yet' is the essence of properly ironic Weirdness, and Horowitz's entertaining book is totally free of it. Siiiiigh.

The interesting Harry Potter Lexicon case.

In 2007, Harry Potter author Jo Rowling and her publishers (along with Warner Brothers, her thieving reptilian film-pimps) sued Steve Vander Ark and RDR Books in order to stop publication of the Harry Potter Lexicon - a print version of the website of the same name, which Rowling herself had used as a reference while writing the final volumes in the series. The judge ruled in Rowling's favour, and Vander Ark RDR eventually came out with a heavily-modified version of the Lexicon.

Rowling - whom I admire - offered several arguments against the Lexicon's publication, most of them (frankly) bullshit. She planned her own authoritative Encyclopedia, you see, and worried that the Lexicon would cut into its profits (which she naturally planned to give away). This claim strikes me as irrelevant; I'm surprised it was taken seriously anywhere but in the (ahem) court of popular (uninformed) opinion.

Anyhow: victory for the Rich Bad Guys, tough day for the Little Fan, right?

Not quite.

I admit to surprise and relief: the ruling is actually a careful defense of the 'fair use' copyright provision, an reassertion of the right of works like the print Lexicon to make use of copyrighted materials for reference/analysis purposes, and a further definition of the line between repurposing and regurgitation. (Much is made in the judge's decision of the thinness and inconsistency of the Lexicon's citations, which were deemed insufficiently 'scholarly.') Interesting stuff - not least in the peripheral detail that Warner Brothers apparently violated Vander Ark's copyright by stealing material from the Lexicon timeline!

The decision implies that it's inappropriate for a reference work to relate the entire plot of its source; this strikes me as a poor, or in any case vague, standard. That said, for nervous fans/creators these are the crucial passages of the decision:

The purpose of the Lexicon’s use of the Harry Potter series is transformative. Presumably, Rowling created the Harry Potter series for the expressive purpose of telling an entertaining and thought provoking story centered on the character Harry Potter and set in a magical world. The Lexicon, on the other hand, uses material from the series for the practical purpose of making information about the intricate world of Harry Potter readily accessible to readers in a reference guide. To fulfill this function, the Lexicon identifies more than 2,400 elements from the Harry Potter world, extracts and synthesizes fictional facts related to each element from all seven novels, and presents that information in a format that allows readers to access it quickly as they make their way through the series. Because it serves these reference purposes, rather than the entertainment or aesthetic purposes of the original works, the Lexicon’s use is transformative and does not supplant the objects of the Harry Potter works.

...

[D]espite Plaintiffs’ criticisms, the Lexicon occasionally does offer “new information, new aesthetics, new insights and understandings,” Castle Rock, 150 F.3d at 141 (internal quotation marks omitted), as to the themes and characters in the Harry Potter works. The Lexicon’s discussion of certain characters, while perhaps not rigorous analysis, contain some reflections on the character, observations of his or her nature, and examples of how that nature is exhibited in the story.

...

To fulfill its purpose as a reference guide to the Harry Potter works, it is reasonably necessary for the Lexicon to make considerable use of the original works.

...

[A] reference guide to the Harry Potter works is not a derivative work; competing with Rowling’s planned encyclopedia is therefore permissible. Notwithstanding Rowling’s public statements of her intention to publish her own encyclopedia, the market for reference guides to the Harry Potter works is not exclusively hers to exploit or license, no matter the commercial success attributable to the popularity of the original works.

(Cheekily, the judge uses Rowling's own praise for the site as evidence of its transformative/reference value.)

* * *

Let's change direction a bit.

The surprise here is that the finding in favour of the billionaire and her corporate pals seems like a blow for justice. (Among the infringed-upon works are Rowling's two short HP reference guides - which even the defendant agreed he'd substantially reproduced.) But between the lines of the decision is the uncomfortable fact that Rowling herself agreed to the usefulness and appropriateness of the Lexicon while it was 'just a website,' but once money - paper - was involved, the dogs were released. It's not the money angle that makes the affair uncomfortable (c'mon, what world do you think you're living in?), but rather the ad hoc sublegal order that sites like the online Lexicon exist in. Old-world media companies treat online networks like a dangerous frontier, happily accepting the necessity of digital fan networks - even infringement - for financial exploitation, but insisting on an increasingly uncomfortable distinction between those networks and the 'real world' of information-in-print-form.

This distinction is one of the ways media corporations perpetuate and profit from the persistent 'digital divide,' and reminds us of the best reason to transform our copyright laws: the accelerating digitalization of the modern world's information diet strips human beings of their vital physical connections (with one another and with their own histories), we need to be able to bring information freely in and out of the digital realm - to rephysicalize it, and ourselves.

In other words, I'm worried about legacy-media IP law not because it's usually inapplicable to digital media, but because the flow of physically-embodied information - the free movement of physical bodies, whether organic or textual or otherwise - is vital to the continued existence of our species. Which is to say I don't much care whether printed words are easier to read than onscreen words; I care about the experience of handing you a book and being part of your physical experience of it.

pleroma, hermetica, gnosis, et cetera.

In lieu of a review of M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart, which I finished in my now-traditional sitting spot in the parking lot of the Burger King off Route 28 near Union Square today (the air too cold for windows-down, the sun too bright for buttons-buttoned):

* * *

pleroma and so forth.

gnostic divinity. the unification of man and woman into some greater being, more complete, more capable. this seems clear to me; obvious. though i suppose the man/woman schema is a naive sexual predication: how could the ancient gnostics have known about the limbic system? it's so clear now that humans can't live separately from one another, though some are more able to regulate their thoughts/emotions than others. but computationally speaking ALONE you'd need (for real happiness) the capacities revealed by connection, by interface. 'interference' in the holographic sense: a pattern, exposed to light, reveals a literal (though i suppose we have to say 'virtual') new dimension. we reconstitute this additional dimension by looking into the play of light in the pattern. human beings pattern for one another and become each other's hidden dimension. i suppose i mean you reveal something that is the rejected or essential or just another part of me, and i for you, but then this thing exists yours-within-me, vice versa, and this dimension exists in the space between us, at our interface: we let light in to scatter in fragments (waves breaking upon seaworn stones, sounds variegating as they carom, baffled) and that is our capacity for illumination. not the world, see, except insofar as the world is the plane we define. our interweaving lines constitute a new space at angles we could never have perceived on our own.

parallax IS inventiveness of course, of a simple kind. love, i think, is holography: reality's new spline-curved z-axis irrupts from us. there are no straight lines in nature, except for the terminal fall of one object toward another. (but don't we simply fail to perceive perturbations at a distance? isn't it more right to say we curve toward the earth at last, rather than 'falling?')

i think the old teachers had it right: there is a new world you can make, it is a form of magic to give birth to this world, it exists in the erotic or confessional or confrontational or simply (not so simply) honest interstices between us, and its name is Love Truly Given. stars boil away in the cold but i think maybe the birth of an ascendant shared mind between two minds (do i mean 'making love?') is the wildest and most dangerous release of energy that possibly exist, because it can contain all others. i mean imagine. nothing can contain, only share. the world-between, the Innerworld, can only be given, not possessed. that's the difference between joy (which is love) and death.

* * *

hermetica and all that.

not puzzle-stories but a kind of cognitive recipe book. the esoteric tradition is about possessing (and exerting) a will-to-knowledge, which i suppose is easily enough perverted into a will-to-power. well nothing draws the bruised social misfits and maladapts quite like the promise of doing magic spells.

* * *

gnosis and other such.

self-knowledge as the highest goal of a human being. well you have to work with what you're given. we seem to have the strongest selves so it makes sense to build a faith around self-analysis. you might call zen 'peripheral gnosis': knowing your self without acknowledging its primacy or essentiality (which acknowledgement actually constitutes those things - zen is very much a philosophy of peaceful combat with the self).

we live in a world of objects but experience a universe of perceptions/interpretations. it makes no sense to begrudge that fact. but then self-knowledge will always be incomplete unless it's part of a greater body of knowledge of all things (perceptions, interpretations) and through all things. if you aren't complete unto yourself then your self-knowledge can't be complete either; by extending your self through the imaginative parallelization and exponentiation that is...well, i suppose it's love...by this extension you extend too your capacity for reflection, the fidelity of your self-image, which is the self! the self-image is the self-object, and it is available to us both in private reflection and through the imaginative gift of our loved ones.

when you love all things - seeing that you are inseparable from all things - then all things are revealed as aspects of your greater self, and you have that much more to work with, self-image-wise. you can be high on yourself but can never really love yourself until you live the fact that you'll live some and then die (and live no more).

the more freely you love, the more loved ones you have. that's not terribly complicated but we tend to choose otherwise.

Repost: Issue #0.

[Originally posted 5 Dec 2006. It's not exactly subtle but it wasn't until I wrote the thing that I noticed the depth of the parallelism between the guys I'm writing about and the guys I'm pretending to write about.]

Bunch of skinny Jewish guys - real nebbish types - out on the fringes, they're immigrants, they're feeling left out. Mayer and Goldwyn their names are not; we're talking about just tradesmen here. Just this bunch of friends and they're looking around and thinking, Well shit. Politically speaking times are not ideal, which for the Tribe has historically been something of an understatement. Has there ever been a good time to be Jewish? Everyone else has had a goddamn shot at ruling the world. We get books called How the Irish Saved Civilization, which has got to be the Special Olympics of civilization-saving at a certain level.

Anyhow, so these schmucks, they're looking out at the world and thinking, Y'know it's hard out there for a pimp Jew, know'm sayin'? You know what we need? We could use a good myth right about now. This is how bookish types see the world. Men of action, they see trouble on the horizon, Euro types with weapons and yellow stars and bold Teutonic noses or what-have-you, and they say, 'Ma, hand me my .45, I'm going hunting.' Only they drop the final 'g' in 'hunting' because that shit is tough. Nerds, not so much. Have you seen The Matrix? Lord of the Rings? Pootie Tang? These guys are thinking, Let's inspire our people. Hard times a-coming or whatever Bob Dylan says. We're looking at a longer, darker long dark night of the soul here, and the soul wasn't exactly sunbathing before. The old stories ain't cutting it. It's a new era, financially not so swell, hell maybe we can make our names this way. They get cracking.

And what do they cook up? The superhero. These guys pool their talents - a little text, a little art, some long story arcs, a few one-off adventures - and they're building this story around a character they can really believe in. Because they relate to him. Alien origins ('cosmopolitan' used to be an anti-Semitic slur, they say), secret identity since he can't let everyone know his true nature, he's this figure of mercy but basically he's got superpowers, right? And for once he's not using them to, like, obliterate everyone. He's saying let's keep law and order, right, and preserve this way of life (because it's so fucking great so far) but let's also inject a little love. We've got a working girl for a love interest, OK. The young disciple who wants to be Just Like the Hero. And Ma and Pa will be these real humble nothings, nobodies, because when you come from good stock it doesn't matter what you have, right? Only what you believe. Just typing it out I feel like an asshole, it's so silly. So this guy shows up in town ready to help everyone out and he's Sleeper-era Woody Allen, yeah? And then he starts performing miracles, really tossing them off, but he never forgets his mama. And you can check in later for more adventures. The best part is, these guys are taking these old archetypes that have existed for ages, they're going back into Scripture even, and basically writing a powered-up version of themselves into this pantheon of heroes.

It's the single greatest and least subtle Mary Sue fanfiction in the history of literature. All it needs is Captain Picard falling in love with the lead. (Of course Picard didn't exist then either.)

Of course they can call the individual stories whatever they want; they know ultimately they're gonna be more important when they're collected, that someday they'll have their own fanboys poring over every minute detail of the text, looking for concordances, trying to convince themselves that this 'foreshadowing' on page 15 wasn't just some kind of lucky accident at the printer's. So the short story arcs get individual names, so the collectors can talk about 'em and drum up enthusiasm. And the series? They need something catchy, a real trademark. I mean eventually you have to think in terms of sales. They go to the well and bring back, of all things, a scholarly term. Like something out of philosophy. Slap it on the cover in a bold font and you're good to go.

The tragedy is, these clever kids gave birth to a myth that emboldened generations of young kids through rough times. And they didn't see a goddamn cent of those residuals. Creators' rights? They hardly even existed at that point.

Poor, poor Matthew Mark Luke and John. That New Testament series wouldn't fly today of course - not enough straight-up tits-and-violence for DC or Marvel, too many loose plot threads - and honestly I don't think HR can even cut you a check if you don't have a last name. Their corporate overlords just take all the credit and leave the writers in the dist. You'd almost forget it all started out as just a goofy bit of nebbishes-winning-a-holy-war Old Testament fanfic, like NaNoWriMo for the children of Israel.

(Hey they didn't treat the Superman guys so well either, now that I think about it.)

Declare by Tim Powers.

Of the three Tim Powers novels I've now read, Declare is the best by a long shot: more fully inhabited and emotionally real than either Last Call or The Anubis Gates, with a less complex 'magic system' but set in a larger and more detailed world. Because of the centrality of two lead characters' Catholicism to the story - and presumably Powers's own imaginative sympathy with their concerns - Declare comes closer than those other two novels to feeling emotionally alive, helped along by its historical and conceptual proximity to our own time and place.

But it never quite does, because at day's end it's a Tim Powers magical-espionage novel and not, say, the Alan Furst espionage novel I perhaps foolishly, or at least jarringly in retrospect, read the day before starting Declare. Like the other two, it ends with a tidy victory for the clearly-defined Good Guys, a consoling marriage in the mode of the Elizabethan stage, and a strong, satisfying, transient feeling of I Suppose That's Done Then. Powers is rarely able to write transcendentally, it seems, and so must content himself with writing Well; his strengths lie in plotting and idea-association (imagine, for a moment, Tim Powers's Lost), but in Declare he loads his plot down with one spectacularly big idea - which appears to be, aah, Catholicism, with all that faith's symbolic complexity and vexed relationship to the material world - and it ends up weighing down what might have been a flawlessly executed spies-and-Weird-Stuff novel.

I recommend the book as another of Powers's master classes in plotting and dark urban-fantastic imagination, but with the usual reservations, which can't be discussed without spoilers. I recommend reading Adam Roberts's disappointed, annoyed review before proceeding, not least because the last section of this post jumps off from his remarks about conspiracy, lately a preoccupation of mine. The rest of the review is disjointed, sorry, but it does widen its scope about halfway through, and that material might be of interest to readers not otherwise concerned with Declare itself.

Shall we?

* * *

First, the anticlimax: Andrew Hale - the best of the three nearly interchangeable protagonists I've encountered in Powers's books by virtue of his private Catholic agon, which is clearly dear to Powers - kills the rebel angels on Ararat with mathematics, in the form of two shells full of buckshot. That's really it. The climactic 1963 Ararat ascent comes as a colossal letdown in the wake of the thrilling 1948 Ararat sequence, which - unlike the finale - effectively depicts the wild inhumanity of the djinn. ¡Cannibale! yells Elena from horseback, and it's the most human moment in any of the three Powers books I've read so far. Nothing like that in the 1963 sequence...just lots of pitons and axes and literally faceless commandoes climbing through an excruciatingly long narrative passage.

Which brings up a macro-concern with the book: though the Big Problem is the djinn (and specifically the captured djinn that is Russia's 'Guardian Angel'), the focus of the climax (and the long epilogue) is on Hale's relationship with his nemesis/twin Philby, and their notional relationship with Elena. So the great mind-melting conspiracy at the heart of the Cold War fades, throughout the book, into the background, while the supposedly romantic Andrew/Elena pairing and the damagingly symbolically-overloaded Andrew/Philby relationship come to the fore. Trouble is, Powers doesn't actually give Hale and Elena a relationship so much as symbolic proximity - she's the olive-skinned revolutionary romantic, he's the upright Englishman torn by love - and the longest interaction between Philby and Hale takes place over Yet Another Bloody High-Stakes Card Game...excuse me, two of those. The stakes of which represent another of Powers's moments of unself-conscious sexism, and which undercut the (ahem) cosmicism of the djinn plot to bad effect.

Elena is a big step up from the women in Last Call and (especially) The Anubis Gates - a sad total of three female characters between those two novels, as I recall - but ultimately she fades from ambivalent badass spy to weeping virginal madonna in Declare's most acutely disappointing narrative slip-up. Of course she diverts the helicopter rather than shoot Hale down. Of course she short-circuits the GRU brainwashing with a 'Hail Mary.' And of course she's deeply in love with a man she spent three months with, twenty years ago. Why not? The 'heroines' in Last Call and The Anubis Gates marry men they barely know at all; three months almost seems like a step up.

(Do women even bother reading these novels? Ever?)

* * *

The spycraft, meanwhile, might be well-drawn; I can't tell. It was detailed enough to carry me along, like the theatre-scrim London of Anubis, but after the much more detailed (yet less intricate) spywork of The Spies of Warsaw I was a little disappointed by the depictions of the Great Game here. Weary romanticism, yes, but bit more James Bond than I'd expected.

Then again, that's hardly the point of a Powers book. The sheer velocity of the story is astonishing: 600+ pocket book pages fly by in a wink. Powers's command of plot is a wonder to behold. So, as with the Coleridge/London/Cairo stuff in Anubis, I feel like a churl complaining about the tradecraft in Declare. If a 10% increase in detail cuts the velocity by 50%, it makes sense to leave it out.

* * *

Pity he couldn't have left out the 'gypsies,' though. Another distasteful holdover from Anubis. How can an author sharp enough to name his sorcerer 'Dr Romany' fall back on such contemptibly lazy 'gypsy' stereotypes? Why not have Hale take on a brigade of greasy wop soldiers for colour?

* * *

Lovecraft looms behind this story: the ironic Crucifixion at Dunwich, the damned Antarctica expedition, rendezvous in underground passages, long-lost alt-religious tomes, bargains with sanity-stealing powers from beyond, and of course the ultimate revelation - and temporary suppression - of Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. But Powers's Catholicism angles these elements toward the Manichean setup of the 'Mythos' revisionists like August Derleth, rather than the bitter 'cosmicism' of HPL himself. Hale blends bits of Henry Armitage with some of Le Carré's spies - with a little bit of Luke Skywalker (or is it Anakin? or is that Philby's role?) thrown in, destiny/powerwise. Hale takes Raymond Chandler's modern knight schtick to a thuddingly literal conclusion - naturally reciting bits of the Pater Noster at appropriate moments, in case we've missed the point.

OK, I've got to disagree with Adam Roberts on some stuff here:

Amongst the several things this book is saying are (for instance) that Communism is a fanatical quasi-religious cult for which its followers are actively eager to die; and that events recounted in the Bible (specifically Genesis) are literally true. To which I say: hmmm.

The implication here is that there's something fishily Right about the book's setup and, arguably, its payload.

I initially mistook his first claim; he's right, that is indeed how Powers portrays the Soviet spies. BUT. It's not Communism as such that they're willing to die for; the ones who head back to Moscow to be 'shown the truth' are those who've had contact with the Divine, and of course Russia's 'guardian angel' has presided over that nation since the 1880s, not the 1920's.

To the extent that Communism and Catholicism are opposed forces in Declare, it's not because they're ideologies, but rather incompatible mysteries. Attitudes toward the unknowable. After all, Stalin tries to purge the USSR of the acolytes of the djinn; what's on Ararat is out of his imaginative reach. Communism exerts a hold over its adherents in the book, sure, but no more than 'England' (abstractly and variously defined) does over Hale, Theodora, and their crowd. And the SOE boys do swear to kill their brothers if the Crown demands it.

So I suppose I disagree with Adam on the political content or allegorical nature of the various mysticisms (national, supernatural, etc.) at war in the story. Several reviewers have referred to the djinn as 'weapons,' but I didn't get that sense from the book at all - Powers isn't writing 'A Colder War' here (which in any case rightly treats those who'd weaponize Cthulhu as fools). Roberts isn't making that claim either. But by linking the content of the fantastic premise (holy texts are literally true, crosses and ankhs have superpowers, the USSR is empowered by a literal deal with a devil) to other, more transparently political conspiracist talk (9/11 as an inside job, etc.), I think Adam is politicizing what Powers might take for an ideologically neutral setup - the 'power of faith,' or 'willingness to open up to the divine,' or something like that, in a specifically Catholic flavour.

Yet the endpoint of all this imaginative wrestling with things-as-they-are is the beastly angelic choir on Ararat, and those who are initiated into their mysteries - Philby, Hale, Elena - get that way at the expense of their own humanity. ¡Cannibale! and all that, complicit in the massacre of the men on Ararat. The Bible might be literally true, in part, but Powers maps that setup (straight out of every historical fantasy story ever told, ever) onto a compelling bit of Weirdness, the ability of certain humans to tap into a hidden symbolic order through ritual action, even unwittingly, which is just too creepy to do anyone any good. In other words, Powers happily (guiltily? defensively?) rubs his Yahweh all over our Lovecraft, but he definitely doesn't do away with HPL's darkness.

Which makes the political dimension of the book less straightforward again. The English spies don't want to eliminate the djinn; like any other imperialists, they're happy to leave local (angelic) warlords set up all over the place, so long as (1) they only bug brown/yellow folks and (2) they don't help the Soviets. And the Soviets prop up Communism with an explicitly theistic magical bargain. (How post-ideological of them!) And the agencies that deal directly with the djinn are for the most part unwelcome in, or unacknowledged by, their own countries - the Prime Minister serves the SOE, not the other way around, and the GRU have to hide from the KGB...

The 'conspiracy' here, in other words, isn't about accumulating worldly power or propping up the human Elect. Mostly it's about maintaining the boundary between the Merely Physical and the Divine - no wonder the Berlin Wall is the site of one of the book's two best sequences. Powers does well with symbolically-overloaded action setpieces, and that's as overloaded as it gets. The 'shot that topples the Soviet empire' is fired on Mount Ararat in 1963, but by that point it hardly seems to be about the USSR at all - after all, we know who 'wins' that Cold War. The whole thing seems to be about working around the existence of the angels. The political stuff is a smokescreen for the Real Story, but in a very different way from, say, the government-toppling Illuminati myth (which encodes fears of Jews/Catholics/Masons/Others in an explicitly cultural-political narrative).

I think Powers both likes the shapeliness of this magical border-drawing and -crossing and -maintaining, and can't help injecting his story with his own experience of sensuous Catholicism. (The mention of a pipe organ chord at a crucial moment of angelic encounter was, for me, one of the richest moments in the book; as a once-upon-a-time Catholic 19-year-old who wept over his sexual 'sins' in a cathedral in New York City, I know/knew exactly what that painful clarity feels like. But then I'm an atheist who prays and might be afraid of ghosts, so...) But I don't think the symbolic layer here is meant to reduce to, or even primarily relate to, a real-world political order.

Powers's depiction of actual Communism is way, way, way too thin for that. He doesn't even bother making Moscow sinister; it's just exhausted, a citywide afterparty. Because, y'know, God's not there, or something, but they've got their ghul.

* * *

I loved Declare. Sort of. It annoyed me - particularly the shabby way Powers sets up Catholicism as a kind of substitute for religious Communism, which is structurally necessary in the book's symbolic register (and its notional 'characterological' register) but is really inadequate and silly as actual psychology - but I very literally couldn't put the book down for two days. I mean I carried it everywhere and opened it up at every spare moment. It took less than three days to read...with childcare taking up much of my time and attention.

As a piece of pulp fiction it's as good as can be.

And I guess that's my one-line 'review,' because why bother with the other stuff? It shouldn't win the Clarke award, absolutely not (isn't that for new books?), but I understand why people like it; if you don't want it to be anything but what all of Powers's novels seem to be, a machine for the delivery of flawlessly timed and plotted Cool Magical Ideas, it will hit you right in your pleasure center.

But that leaves the real point of Adam's review, which - once you sail by the bit where he makes it clear that he really, really didn't like the novel and it really, really shouldn't have been nominated for the Clarke award - is about conspiracy.

* * *

Before we get there, though, let's take one sentence to be deeply uncomfortable with Powers's few sore-thumb references to homosexuality - always, here, in the context of mind-violation and rape. Got it? Are we all annoyed and disappointed? OK, moving on then.

* * *

Declare is a novel of conspiracy, yes, but it isn't about conspiracy in the way, say, Foucault's Pendulum and Illuminatus! and The Crying of Lot 49 are. Those novels all depict and critique (the idea of) networks of secret organizations; Powers just has a fun time wheeling one out. (Indeed the second half of the book isn't a conspiracy story at all, it's a 'knight climbs mountain to defeat nemesis and save princess' story that happens to have spies in it.) That said, all Powers's 'secret history' novels seem to add up to a kind of consideration of the idea, or in any case an anatomy of his own relation to Secret Stuff, which can (to a certain extent) stand in for other conspiracists' ideas.

It seems to me that Powers is interested in his conspiracies only to the extent that they embody the idea of Something Else, Something Hidden, Something Darker and Greater Than Us. Yes, with all the capital letters. Whereas, say, Glenn Beck - to the extent that he is, apparently, a cynical carnival barker in addition to, obviously, a mentally-ill paranoiac - wants to do something with his conspiratorial talk, which is (don't let's let on that we know) take back the United States for its former social-hegemons, i.e. people who look and dress and talk and vote just like Glenn Beck. Powers has no more of that ambition than Lovecraft did; Yog-Sothothery is a shaggy-dog joke (they're not really real!) with a didactic edge (and humans are specks of space dust!), which is a tempting interpretation of e.g. the Tea Party's crowd-madness...but let's not fool ourselves with 'comfort.' They really mean it; Powers doesn't.

But then Powers also doesn't get into his own 'magical thinking' the way Pynchon/RAW/Shea/Eco do. He does channel the startling electric current that secret thinking can provide, but his subject in Declare is the encounter with the symbol-set itself; we know that the USSR crumbles and that Philby dies in 1988, so like Lovecraft, Powers is just trying to show us that moment of contact, a sense of how small is the world we see, compared to What Truly Is. (Not for nothing does Powers keep coming back to 'give him the truth' as ironic-Lovecraftian agentspeak for kill!) To me, the best tales/ideas of conspiracy promise endless multiplication of meaning and possibility; Powers just wants to send us up the mountain to shoot an angel or two, having shared in the chilly recognition that we aren't in control of it all. Of anything, really.

Good conspiracy-stuff is always about an unimaginable They, who remain distant, ineffable. Secular absent God, in a way. (Bob Dobbs, for instance. Though of course the SubGenius books are stupid and childish Conspiracy-stuff.) Powers sticks angels on earth and gives us math-bullets that can magically kill them, buying wonder on the cheap, a little.

That's maybe the most annoying thing about the book - its lack of ecstasy. Not just the difference between throwing up our hands (HPL) and putting up our dukes (Howard, Powers, etc.), but the way the plot-mechanical stuff and intrusive Catholicism of Declare keep undercutting the pleasure of the idea-tangle itself. It all gets solved at the end, with guns and prayers no less! Grr.

* * *

So what I'm coming around to saying, basically, is that novels of conspiracy are all about What if? Possibility, the not-yet-known, the slow revelation of secret forms among comforting formlessness. And for much of its length Declare is just that: 'adventurous expectancy,' in Lovecraft's term. For all that time it's a hell of a good adventure novel. Then Powers wraps it all up with a bow and attaches a card marked 'Yours in Christ,' and it's hard not to feel cheated - especially given the lingering sense of wonder attached to the djinn, the impossible strangeness of the angel that presides over the laying of the cornerstone in Berlin, the alien majesty of the 1948 Ararat revelation...it's not a failure, it's a disappointing choice. OK.

But political conspiracies are not actually about that. In the end, most real-world conspiratorial cabals are pretty simple - they have to be. The Illuminati-as-popularly-imagined, the X-Files group, the Satanic secret alt-Trilateral Commission, simply can't support their own weight in the real world's thin air.

Glenn Beck's conspiracies are complicated precisely because they're fake, but the conspiracies themselves are just justifications - no one watching his Worry Hour cares about their content or shape, only the reassurance that Our (White) (Right-Thinking) America Is Under Attack.

What separates his rants from, say, Gravity's Rainbow is that Pynchon wants to bring us to (1) apprehension of the depth at which things in the world are connected, not just politically, and (2) a kind of psychedelic rapture-of-release, a break with unitary mythologies. If it's All True, Man, then we're a lot less likely to be sucked into religious fervor for any interest group's One Truth; the connectedness is the trans-political point. (Remember the proximity of Pynchon's psychedelic-conspiratorial thinking and, say, Eastern mysticism; think of John Crowley too. Have you read Crowley's Hesse essay? Oh, you oughta. You gotta.)

In Declare, Powers has to split the difference between his Church's One True Program and his invocation of Lovecraft's crazy-making cosmic indifference; he leans churchwise in the end, but not right away.

Well, he's not Pynchon.

Magic, it seems to me, is one of Powers's real subjects: magic as (somewhat Lovecraftian) cosmic math, or cognitive self-modification, or historical escape (or deep historical connection)...and this is where the (let's call it) occult tradition's magical thinking can split decisively from the paranoids' conspiracy-schtick. By understanding magic as metaphorical - even when giving it concrete form in a fictional context - Powers and his fellows skip past the narrowness of the rube's magical thinking (I'll believe whatever takes the edge off this week) and move toward a kind of aesthetic appreciation of historical ways of being. The actual loonies, along with the cynical players who finance or imitate them, insist on historical ignorance, after all - a cascade of facts devoid of actual connection, resistant to any mapping to the mere lives of humans. So you get Atlantis and Reptoids and the Elders of Zion, instead of (respectively) the literary/didactic function of Atlantis, or the conceptually-difficult notions of evolution/fitness/chance that form humanity's mundane origin story, or the relentless persecution of Jews that requires Elders-of-Zion mythmaking...but if you dig guys like Charles Fort (not a conspiracist as such, far as I know, so much as a more general occultist) then you recognize the difference between the conspiracist-aesthete's rigorous, demanding suspension of disbelief and the paranoiac's monomaniacal insistence on One Story, However Complicated.

* * *

And it appears I've just argued that Alan Moore is not in fact as crazy as Dave Sim, despite my previous insistence to the contrary. Huh.

* * *

It seems to me that the difference between benign and malignant conspiracy-stuff is in the placement of the didactic emphasis: the former will happily rave about how Everything You Know Is Wrong, but the latter - the dangerous stuff, the cynical stuff - adds the rider that We Can Show You What's Really Going On, Trust Us. The difference between intellectual independence and ideological dependence, in other words.

Which is, curiously enough, one of the buried, problematic throughlines of Powers's book, one that seems to culminate in the two heroes happily deciding on Trust Us as a perfectly satisfactory endpoint. 'Grace, not magic,' Elena says, as she and Hale seemingly become invisible to the police in Red Square. It's the most jarring moment in a book that contains several of those.

Or as Gob Bluth would say, 'IT'S AN ILLUSION, MICHAEL. A TRICK IS SOMETHING A WHORE DOES FOR MONEY.' In the end, Powers seems to take pleasure in tricking us. Like Adam, I resent that. But I maintain that most of Declare is concerned not with the trick - with 'winning' over the audience - but with the illusion: the feeling of complicity and wonder and (in)credulity and anticipation and above all ecstatic purpose that is, after all, not only the point but the substance of magic itself.

Alan Furst, The Spies of Warsaw.

Wonderful. What else to say? Writing a spy novel (a 'thriller' of sorts) about attempts to prevent WWII in 1937 Warsaw is a tricky thing; Furst more than manages. The novel lacks a 'climax,' but it ends as it must; its plot's episodicity is neatly masked by a couple of running concerns (Adolf Hitler not least among them) and what seems a weird preoccupation with its hero's love affairs turns out to be an element of Furst's admirable humanism and civilization. It's a story of doomed romance, not just between Europeans but between good people and their nations: heroism is punished, love is weary, the sun sets on a way of living. It's a beautiful piece of work. A song.

One of our greatest fantasists and one of OUR WORST EVERYTHINGS.

John Crowley, grandmaster.
Wolf Blitzer, useful idiot.

WHICH, BY GOD, IS WHICH?!

Lovecraft's 'cosmicism' and other hypocrisies...

Consider this quote:

[T]he human race will disappear. Other races will appear and disappear in turn. The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars. Which will also disappear. Everything will disappear. And what human beings do is just as free of sense as the free motion of elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, feelings? Pure 'Victorian fictions'. Only egotism exists.

This is familiar stuff, and his decidedly non-cosmicist predispositions are peeking through.

'Feelings' are not 'Victorian fictions' any more than are any other complex sensing/processing interchanges. The word 'race' reveals an unseemly preoccupation on the part of (the hugely racist) Lovecraft, but it doesn't actually refer to anything here - if he weren't also fixating on his private fantasies of submission to cosmic domination he'd use a term like species. He goes on about 'icy' 'void' space, 'feeble light' and 'half-dead stars,' but an actual cosmicist would know that 'half-dead' is no more applicable or meaningful to a colossal spaceborne fusion reactor than 'vibrantly alive.'

He's misusing the term 'sense' as well - he wants to talk about the universe's underlying randomness, but he doesn't actually have the vocabulary to describe the nonrandom convergences possible given his 'free [particulate] motion,' so he recurs to a moralistic framework that's not indifferent so much as self-loathing.

S.T. Joshi and others have made much of Lovecraft's cosmicism (or 'mechanistic materialism' in Joshi's term, though 'mechanistic' is a poor choice of words), but there's nothing intrinsically interesting about it - nor is his insistence on the insignificance of absolutely everything entirely consistent with his literary emphasis on the acquisition of knowledge which makes the learner central to the greatest drama in all the universe...

And of course there's his complain about 'egotism,' which I'm wholly sympathetic to, but which rings particularly hollow given Lovecraft's evident horror at the idea of ego-dissolution. Lavinia Whately's ecstatic hilltop rites are just as disgusting, in his fiction, as Pickman's ghoulish bargain - and the ultimate horror, in his fiction, is the inability of the conscious mind to deal with the immensity and indifference of the cosmos - but why should the limitations of the mind be horrible or even worth commenting upon in a universe (indeed in a planetary hemisphere!) where Cthulhu slumbers? Talk about screwed up priorities!

Lovecraft's 'cosmicism,' in any case, feels less like a joyful (because truthful) expression of things-as-they-are than an intellectual's frustration with his private limitations. Duh, there's nothing special about humanity. Duh, we'll die. Check off those boxes, fine. Now why can't you enjoy yourself in the meantime, H.P.?!

Well: I bet he enjoyed writing fiction. Which would bring me back to the woeful limitations of Joshi's 'HPL was a philosopher who wrote stories to illustrate his philosophy' conception if, y'know, the cosmos weren't snickering at me for giving a damn about S.T. Joshi.

* * *

[Delayed summary follow-up.]

In other words, even if the eventual fate of man is to be nothing at all, why was Lovecraft so obsessed with this eventual fate - mankind's cosmic destiny, however bleak - instead of, y'know, anything else in the universe? Why react in horror to miscegenation, invasion, obliteration, transgression, or various hedge-magical indelicacies when everything else in the accidental universe sinks (or rises) to an exactly equivalent level of irrelevant tininess?

What's the big deal about Yog-Sothoth, in other words? He's gonna end up just as dead as we are. Why aren't all Cthulhu stories squamous romances, instead of squamous horror?

What's so weird about Lovecraft's Mythos? An authentic 'cosmicist' has other things to not worry about.

OK, a snippet of the Transmission.

'Our Revels Now Are Ended: The Tempest' by Ken Hite.

Click here for the PDF.

Introducing the Suppressed Transmission.

Of the 300+ Suppressed Transmission columns written by Ken Hite for Pyramid Magazine (online) between 1998 and 2008, only about 70 of the first 85 have been collected in two extensively-annotated omnibus print editions. Those volumes are superb, notwithstanding their clunky layout and horrible jacket copy. But the Transmission - the best thing about the magazine by a large margin - got much stronger as it went along: more evocative, more esoteric, more like a private fantasy-excursion rather than a worldbuilding advice column. Hite's columns on Shakespeare's 'occult dramaturgy,' for instance, are extraordinary, but hardly belong in a roleplaying game magazine; by the end of its run the Transmission was more that sort of thing than anything else.

Not for nothing did Hite close the run of the column with a speculative reading of The Tempest without any game-related material at all.

The 230+ other Transmissions (including the increasingly rhapsodic final 200) circulate on filesharing and BitTorrent sites in skeletal HTML format. They're unpleasant to read, like most old Web text. Today I finished assembling Every Single Damned (previously-uncollected) Column in to a 1,200-page printable PDF, courtesy of LaTeX. It's lovely on your laptop, beautiful on the iPad, and most at home on old-fashioned paper.

(Thank you Leslie Lamport, Donald Knuth, Peter Wilson, et al.)

...

No, I'm not gonna go violatin' copyright like that. C'mon!! At least not without Hite's permission (after all, the columns are already out there...). But I am willing to share the introductory essay I wrote for this private omnibus. Click-a you on the image (nice cover art, huh?) and enjoy. It's...well, it's the sort of thing I write. You're used to this stuff by now.

Jim Butcher, Storm Front: Volume One of The Dresden Files.

[This review is about as mixed as it gets. But the mean/disappointed/critical/teeth-gnashing bits are all up front.]

It's hard to dislike art that's as artless as Storm Front. The prose is best described as 'workmanlike': repetitious, schoolbook-simple, unpretentious but also devoid of even the slightest power of evocation or implication. The character of Harry Dresden starts out as a bundle of clichés (the hard-bitten soft-hearted private investigator with a checkered past, a scarred soul, and a disdainful cat he presumably stole from Elliot Gould) (plus magic spells) and 'deepens' along predictable lines: helping the tough/tender broads, getting beaten about the skull by assorted mooks, striding boldly down mean streets, struggling to make his rent, etc.

The plot of Storm Front holds no surprises; it's basic cranky-detective stuff (plus magic spells), and surprisingly little actually happens over the course of the book. The slow, steady accumulation of details about the magical world is Butcher's neatest trick - indeed it's my secret reason for bothering with this book in the first place - and Storm Front certainly gives the impression of being a Raymond Chandler plot-knockoff bolted to Butcher's intriguing private fantasy world; but because the writing is so...nothing-at-all, the peripheral worldbuilding bits (the White Council, the Nevernever, vampires, Butcher's emotions-plus-Latin magic system) don't have much charge. Morgan the Warden is a neat notion executed without even a hint of cleverness or verve. The White Council holds no menace or otherworldly spirit. The vampiress/madam seems borrowed. An entire magic-tinged gang war barely registers - indeed, is only mentioned in passing. The air spirit Bob is written in one of the book's two voices ('wiseacre'; the other one is 'stilted') and barely has time to register as a neato plot device. I can imagine Ken Hite reading this in a rising fury at all the low-hanging allusive/mythological fruit going unpicked...

It's all rushed and bobbled and I can't even tell whether the book is utterly cynical (Genre + Supernatural Schtick = Profit!) or just an earnest but inadequate piece of fiction. The Anubis Gates suffered from marked lack of humanity and depth, but its plotting was airtight, its magical worldbuilding extraordinary, and it overflowed with dark imagination; Storm Front seems like a well-intentioned, underachieving C+ by comparison.

It is Volume One of a projected Twenty Volumes, the 12th (or something) of which debuted at #2 on the NYT bestseller list. Ahem.

The scorpion is the secret, I think. 4/5 of the way through the book there's a scene with a magical scorpion-thing, two heroes handcuffed to one another, and the book's first clever use of magic; as expected, at the end of the chapter Harry comes out battered but Ready to Keep Fighting the Good Fight, etc.

He gets a moment of cornball triumph - premature, as it turns out, but genuine. For a second it looks like the professional sad sack might actually get to squeak out a victory (even though this was already certain in standard genre terms, never mind metatextually, i.e. this isn't the last volume of the Dresden Files...).

At that moment, Harry had me. A book that uses the word 'quirked' to describe the motion of a smile, not once but a half-dozen or more times, managed to win my total allegiance for its last few dozen pages. Had I been able to spare attention I'd have hated myself for being a sucker, but by that point I couldn't put the book (or rather the iBook) down. There's nothing particularly good about the book, but it really works. It doesn't fool around with significance, it just describes for a few hundred pages the testing and resolve of a single man (with magic spells). And by the end - right around when the paramedics arrive to take him and his companion out of the elevator, covered in scorpion corpse - Harry seems like a human being. Not deep, not particularly complicated. Not 'complex.' Just human. Which is to say, I saw him and cared.

The book's climax is practically camera instructions rather than anything more substantive - but during the walk up to the lakehouse, when Harry finally reveals what he sees when he opens his Third Eye (yep), Butcher finally lets loose with a flight of imaginative fancy. The vision of the lakehouse surrounded by malevolent spirits and roiling magical energy is the best passage of the whole book. (The subsequent broom joke is clever too - a skillful integration of character, plot, and Butcher's cheeseball humour.)

After Harry describes his use (or let's say acceptance) of the Sight, you find yourself - or I do - ready for more. Maybe not twenty volumes more, but something. At that point Butcher successfully creates the illusion of depth, and I'm damned if it isn't more or less worth it.

Not since the Dragonlance Legends Trilogy, back in eighth grade, have I taken such enjoyment from such a subpar book. Storm Front misfires in so many ways, over and over, but by some loopy alchemical miracle it just works, in the end. Not for 300 pages. Not even close. But for a while it works. There's something hiding behind this story. It might actually be the promise of better stories ahead. Oh, for heaven's sake.

The first 100 pages of the first Dresden Files book...

...are competent juvenile fiction badly in need of a dialogue polish and a Story Editor's worldbuilding check, shot through with an unpleasant masculine-conservative streak, maddeningly short on the kind of Eerie Otherness that made, say, Little, Big such a life-changing read. Fluff, in other words - not great detective writing, not great fantasy writing. But very enjoyable, with signs of real promise. Butcher has cheerfully talked about writing the first volume as a kind of cynical exercise in 'formulaic genre writing,' and the slipshod writing does show what he means.

Well, I hear the series gets a lot better. And I am, after all, doing my season-long 'learning about plot' reading course. (I'm presently reading Alan Fursts's The Spies of Warsaw as well. Incredible atmosphere.) So I'll stick with Butcher for the time being.

Relics from Arkham.

As a kid I read the book Relic, a 'technothriller' by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, later to be made into a terrible movie. I got into it in hardback at the Prendergast(!) Library in Jamestown, NY (which, to give you a sense of its richness and depth of selection, just added Face/Off to its DVD racks), long before it became a megaseller in paperback. Later on I read its sequel, Reliquary, which spins out from Jennifer Toth's The Mole People and is both less acutely frightening than the original (due to the first book's brilliant setting, NYC's fictitious but vivid Museum of Natural History) and more unsettling (the whole Mole People bit). Both books gave me years of nightmares; indeed I still can't think of the words 'fetid, goatish stench' without looking over my shoulder.

Which brings us to 'The Dunwich Horror,' and my realization that in addition to its status as guileful knockoff of Jurassic Park and Sherlock Holmes, Relic (along with its sequel, to a lesser extent) is a nice little Lovecraft pastiche as well. All the signifiers are there: dark alt-anthropology, the doomed Whittlesley(!) Expedition, unfathomable aboriginal carvings of lurking horrors, cargo cults, the endless reuse of phrases like 'fetid, goatish stench' (which means...?), the cast of determined but doomed museumfolk and scientists granted maddening views of the theretofore-unseen realm beyond their discipline's knowledge, hamfisted ethnic characterization, half-digested sciencespeak, intimations of the evolutionary irrelevance of man...cults of a dark god! unspeakable rituals! loony diary entries!

It's ALL THERE, Reader(s). Wish I'd been up on HPL 20 years ago.

Of course Relic and Reliquary (both of which I heartily recommend as feather-light nighttime reading for paranoiacs and museum nerds, despite their unbelievably shoddy prose) owe a lot more to Michael Crichton's novels than Lovecraft's - not least in that their Essential Problems are eventually solved with preternaturally effective gunplay and the concerted efforts of the NYPD, followed by an Ominous Ending telling of Scary Science to Come. And the nearly omnipotent Agent Pendergast is a decidedly un-Lovecraftian hero: Sherlock Holmes with a perfect pistol shot and not a single humanizing deficiency of character. (The Pendergast books are extremely efficient, effective competence porn.) More importantly, none of Lovecraft's significance is there. Relic is a beach book. But the signs, the signs...

Joshi.

Sunand Joshi's lifelong Lovecraft obsession, which is now his meal ticket, makes for both authoritative criticism and uncomfortable monomania, not to mention a certain embarrassing Biggest Fan Ever syndrome. Joshi essentially is the Lovecraft-scholarship industry, and while his (yes, this is the word) religious celebration of Lovecraft's cosmicism has certainly helped improve everyone's understanding of HPL's writing, his table-thumping insistence on Lovecraft's magnificence -- along with his idiosyncratic embrace of 'Lovecraft the philosopher' at the expense of Lovecraft the fictioneer -- has the unexpected effect of diminishing Lovecraft's primary achievement.

Plus there's an off-putting aroma of pissing contest in Joshi's writing, not to mention an overcompensatory academicism. From his intro to An Epicure of the Terrible:

There is now little need to rehearse the details of Lovecraft's posthumous resurrection: the attempts by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei to find a publisher for an omnibus of his tales; their founding of Arkham Hose when they failed in that enterprise; the emergence of a youthful band of enthusiasts in the growing fantasy fandom movement (blasted by Edmund Wilson as "on even a more infantile level than the Baker Street Irregulars and the cult of Sherlock Holmes" – he was probably right); the gradual dissemination of Lovecraft's stories in paperback, including an Armed Services edition; the periodic publication by Arkham House of volumes of tales, poems, essays, and miscellany from the forties to the sixties; the translation of Lovecraft into French and Spanish in the fifties, German, Italian, and Dutch in the sixties, and Japanese and the Scandinavian languages in the seventies; the stupendous popularity of the Beagle/Ballantine paperbacks in the seventies; the reprinting of minor works by the fan or specialty press in the seventies and eighties; and, finally, the republication of his collected fiction in textually correct editions from Arkham House under my editorship...

No, the lame hypocrisy of 'little need to rehearse' followed by a dry paragraph of history is not a joke. It's called 'private interests getting out of hand.' Not the first nor last such case with Joshi. From the notes to Joshi's definitive Penguin edition of 'The Dunwich Horror,' in reference to a mention of Wormius's 17th-century Necronomicon translation:

In [his essay] "History of the Necronomicon" HPL...makes the mistake of dating Olaus Wormius's Latin translation to 1228, when in fact Wormius (Ole Worm, 1588-1654) was a Danish doctor and scientist who lived in the seventeenth century and wrote treatises on Danish antiquities, medicine, and the philosopher's stone. HPL's error derives from an erroneous interpretation of a discussion of Wormius in Hugh Blair's Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (1763). See S.T. Joshi, "Lovecraft, Regner Lodbrog, and Olaus Wormius," Crypt of Cthulhu No. 89 (Eastertide 1995): 3-7.

Note carefully that this footnote has nothing whatsoever to do with the text at hand, which correctly dates Wormius's (fictional!) translation in passing. It is, rather, an advertisement for Joshi's scholarship. The man's made his career out of deifying and proselytizing for Lovecraft, and he exhibits all the admirable attention to detail and worrisome disproportion of focus that characterizes, say, a Snape/Harry shipper in Harry Potter fandom. He's smart and a decent writer, and he's been very good for Lovecraft, but his work makes me uncomfortable in much the same way as Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother; i.e., minimally, I feel like I'm listening in on someone who's learned to act more pleasant than he actually is. (Joshi's discussion of Lovecraft's marriage in the Penguin anthology intro is characteristically dead-eyed: its value in the narrative is solely that of transition between stages of HPL's literary career. Ugh.)

Well, so what. More important by far, I finished 'The Dunwich Horror' this morning: an extraordinary experience. I made the mistake of reading the first few pages alone in the house at night, and finished it in the car under a grey late-morning Cambridge sky. Perfect weather - particularly for a story that grotesquely mirrors and inverts the Crucifixion! More to say about it later, I guess.

Amy Chua addendum.

Another astonishing passage from the book:

Florence [Chua's mother-in-law] and I got along great for years—she introduced me to the world of modern art, and I used to love accompanying her to museum and gallery events—but we started having conflicts after Sophia was born. In fact, it was through butting heads with Florence that I first became aware of some of the deep differences between Chinese and (at least one variant of) Western parenting. Above all, Florence had taste. She was a connoisseur of art, food, and wine. She liked luxurious fabrics and dark chocolate. Whenever we returned from travels, she always asked the girls about the colors and smells they’d encountered. Another thing Florence had definite taste about was childhood. She believed that childhood should be full of spontaneity, freedom, discovery, and experience.

At Crystal Lake, Florence felt that her granddaughters should be able to swim, walk, and explore wherever they pleased. By contrast, I told them that if they stepped off our front porch, kidnappers would get them. I also told them that the deep parts of the lake had ferocious biting fish. I may have gone overboard, but sometimes being carefree means being careless. Once when Florence was babysitting for us at the lake, I came home to find two-year-old Sophia running around outside by herself with a pair of garden shears as large was she was. I snatched them furiously away. “She was going to cut some wildflowers,” Florence said wistfully.

The truth is I’m not good at enjoying life. It’s not one of my strengths. I keep a lot of to-do lists and hate massages and Caribbean vacations. Florence saw childhood as something fleeting to be enjoyed. I saw childhood as a training period, a time to build character and invest for the future. Florence always wanted just one full day to spend with each girl—she begged me for that. But I never had a full day for them to spare. The girls barely had time as it was to do their homework, speak Chinese with their tutor, and practice their instruments. [my emphasis --wa.]

* * *

The book is not ultimately about Amy Chua's 'parenting style.' It's definitely not a parenting manual. It's about her very serious emotional trauma, the nature of which she does not (intentionally) explore at all, and her resultant behavioral/emotional deformities (paranoia, lying, egotism, lack of impulse control, emotional abusiveness, etc.). That's why reading her book is so uncomfortable. She is not an idiot; apparently she's quite intelligent. Her inability to distinguish between analytical intelligence and actual social health is not the mark of a bad mother; it's the mark of a serious handicap.