Wax Banks

Jay-Z is not yet the Dave Eggers of hip-hop.

"With the same sword they knight you / They go and goodnight you / See Martin, see Malcolm / See Biggie, see Pac, see success and its outcome / See Jesus, see Judas / See Caesar, see Brutus / See, success is like suicide...Now the question is / Is to have had and lost / Better than not having at all? Because dawg: 'I'm just waiting 'til the shine wears off...'"

This passage - from Jay-Z's guest spot on Coldplay's 'Lost+' remix track - is what's known among New Yorker types as an 'echt Jay-Z flourish,' which I do not mean as a compliment. The idea that Jay-Z is hip-hop's best MC has been common currency for the better part of a decade, but it's never been believable. Hell, let's go along with the stupid charade and restrict our c consideration to commercial acts: in a world containing Gift of Gab, Eminem, Mos Def, Outkast (both halves), Latyrx (as a unit), Nas, Lauryn Hill, Black Thought, and Boots Riley - never mind cats like Aceyalone or Q-Tip or Kool Keith(!!) or even the infuriating trickster Kanye West - Jay-Z has to come bowing and scraping just to get into the top half-dozen. He's got skill and arguably taste, sure, but his sole subject of interest is his own adolescent messianic complex. And that disqualifies Mr Sean Carter from top MC honours.

If Dave Eggers had followed his moving, messy, ferociously sentimental A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius with a half-dozen books in which complained at ever-increasing length that no one understood how difficult his life was even though he was the baddest and the richest - and indeed wrote a second and a third memoir insisting that he was finished writing and everyone was really, really gonna miss him when he stopped - but then was back on Entertainment Tonight a year later - Eggers would be a fucking laughingstock, and rightly so. Jay-Z is inexplicably still taken seriously by 'critics' despite having pulled this juvenile shit time and again. Now, Eggers has Jay-Z's technical skill, his energy, his hunger to collaborate, and his (admirable!) willingness to mentor. But unlike our Yet Another Self-Proclaimed 'Best Rapper Alive,' Eggers keeps challenging himself with increasingly esoteric (and increasingly powerful) projects in an ever-widening circle of colleagues and collaborators.

In other words, Dave Eggers managed to grow up. He got past himself, which was no small task. Mr Beyoncé has been churning out the same tired cliché psychobabble for half a decade, piling indigestible sentimental treacle atop misogynist bile atop vacuous self-justification and self-admiration. He's under the impression that he's intrinsically interesting; he's wrong.

'If you can't accept that / Your whole perspective is wack / Maybe you'll love me when I fade to black.' But he's never faded, never seriously entertained the possibility of doing so. He's a prolonged-adolescent narcissist with more money than ambition. That he's avoided Kanye's pathetic drunken self-parody is creditable, but Jay-Z's too childishly self-serious to pull off Kanye's frat-boy pranks (never mind the far more subversive boundary-crossing of Andre 3000).

The worst thing about this? Jay-Z's smart as hell. He could be doing something other than preening and boasting and whining and spouting the same dull money-sucks cautionary tales in song after song. If he wanted to, he could put aside his own self-love and self-loathing and status fixation and get on with making music about the world beyond the window of his SUV. But he's not even trying. His big mould-breaking album of this decade was American Gangster, for Christ's sake.

Jay-Z needs to get on the phone to Billy Martin or DJ Spooky or TV on the Radio or ?uestlove or John Zorn or Andrew Bird or the Pet Shop Boys or Elvis Costello or Fiona Apple or the Flaming Lips or even Trey Anastasio (remember that Jay-Z sat in with Phish in Brooklyn in 2004) and explode himself for once. Find a new idea, which these folks have in spades.[**] Jay needs to put his verbal talent and metrical dexterity to work on the story of another human being. He needs any new story to tell. Why? Because we need storytellers and musicians with ambition, persistence, skill, and honesty, and if Mr Sean Carter wasn't moonlighting as a fashionista businessman he'd be a fine source of all those things and more. Why not? Stranger, finer things have happened.

* * *

[**] I'm dead serious about all of the above, except possibly the inscrutable genius Andrew Bird. But they are, as you can see, mostly white rock'n'roll dudes. My hipster parochialism shouldn't surprise you, but it does bother me. Not enough to do anything about it, mind you, just enough that I have to footnote the thing. I do think a Jay-Z/John Zorn collaboration would be awesome - the JZ initials match is a good omen, no? - and when they want to, Medeski Martin & Wood have the 'best hip-hop producers on earth' trophy waiting for them. But these pairings hold cultural significance for me because I'm a stodgy little white nerd. They're not particularly transgressive, I know. To be clear, I don't want Jay-Z to stop cutting tracks about dimwitted consumerist hedonism and start documenting life in the suburbs of Houston. I just want to know whether he can even do it. Easier prescribed than pursued, as the narrowness of my suggestions makes clear.

Worse problems I or you might have.

Having finished M. John Harrison's beloved space-opera-with-an-asterisk Light I now face the question of what to read next. I fear this choice. Like any high-school tenor I blend and double first and only then (or thereby) proclaim, so whatever I read will end up swamping what I think of as 'my voice.' One 'easy' answer: Pynchon, whom I know better than to allow myself to imitate. (Left to its own devices, the spider in your hair will get the hell out of there and onto solid ground, as you'd refrain from fistfighting a battleship. Some fights you can call in advance.)

On the other hand I feel the usual unsupportable compulsion to finish more books This Very Month, but I've got no quick reads in the Queue. All I have are my secondhand Britishisms and ongoing mirror-stage preoccupations and this creeping story idea that's snuck in through some triple-locked carefully-monitored doors this week with mischief on its mind. Replacement, even. As I'm enamored of my self-image I'll do my best to sabotage it in the planning stages; if I am an expert at anything at all, then I...

Or, ooh, Stanislaw Lem? Should I try reading Dostoevsky for the first time? I've always had it easy, you know. I was a bottle baby, didn't even need to pick one nipple or the other. So this is all terribly, terribly tiring. Good thing too; I'm up early tomorrow. G'night.

[Oh, and/but how was Light? It was frustrating, then absorbing, then rapturous. Is that the right word? I can't help feeling he'd want me to find the right word - not least because once Harrison has found the word he wants, he flogs it until it's music. I'm scared of my own reflection so I do the opposite, which comes out the same - the way 7C6 and 7C1 are equal, but one is mean.]

Books to read while blog posts grow in your fur.

(The title is, of course, a Cosma Shalizi hat-tip.)

Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe. This was the first novel I'd read in a long, long time - this summer, I think - and I couldn't enjoy it until I realized how horribly, bitterly ironic the whole thing is meant to be. Then I could push through. The book burned a hole in my head. If I had actually enjoyed anything about it other than its ideas I'd recommend it wholeheartedly; as it is, it feels like an Admirable Important Book You Should Read Some Weekend. Does that make me a philistine?

Howard Dean's Prescription for Real Health Care Reform. Succinct, pleasant, a bit anticlimactic after (1) Dean's thrilling talk in Harvard and (2) every other thing we've read about health care this year. My wife and I were reading this to one another before bed for about a week. Can I confess something? It put her to sleep on more than one occasion. Politics, baby.

A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole. For 3/4 of the story I wanted to kill Ignatius Reilly; and then, in a flash - on page 333, at Dorian's party - I wanted to comfort him. And then the Reillys' horrid neighbour told Mr Levy her story, the one about Ignatius's dog, and (quite against my will) I actually got a little misty. And then Ignatius was riding away from the house, and:

He stared gratefully at...the pigtail that swung innocently at his knee. Gratefully. How ironic, Ignatius thought. Taking the pigtail in one of his paws, he pressed it warmly to his wet moustache.

He's still a bastard of course. So many of us are. I think (and have been thinking) that this is one of the finest stories I've read. What a ride. I wish I knew what the heck a 'Yat' accent sounded like though.

Next: either one of the Dying Earth stories, Darkmans by Nicola Barker, (finally) The Echo Maker, or - why not? - 2666. Then again, there is this damned copy of Salt sitting on the nighttable. Can I tell you something? I hate pocket paperbacks. I know, it's probably just cultural disdain. But I don't like the form factor. The cramped pages. I wanna see the words stretching out before my eyes, pages a foot wide. My hands are aging too quickly for mass-market paperbacks.

[Update: Nope. It's M. John Harrison's Light, and now that I've made peace with the bleak misogyny of the thing (this won the Tiptree award? Do I not understand the purpose of the award?) the last 100 pages are just kicking my ass. Plus: trade paperback! I does what I wants when I wants it, chump(s).]

Scattered, spoilery thoughts on Felix Gilman's excellent novel Thunderer.

Thunderer had me on page 4:

Countless painters decide to capture the Bird's image. It'll test their art. [...] Later, no one will even be able to agree what kind of bird it is. Some see a storm of bright feathers; others only the graceful motion of its wings. Little more than a sense of easy, invincible speed remains. A dozen minds conceive abstract new schools of painting to capture the moment.

You can imagine the last sentence (or rather, some immense distended version of it dripping with vile ichors and dark intimations best turned from with all speed, etc.) jutting from a Lovecraft story, but in Gilman's story it's a rational worldbuilding component: the passage of the Bird and its fellow deities really does change minds in that way. The city of Ararat, the central character of Thunderer, is as irrational as can be, but Gilman's offhand bits of description and microhistory always make sense; he knows how to maintain the 'vivid continuous dream' of good fiction. In this regard the novel is a complete success. Ararat has been showing up in my own dreams this week. I've been there and wish to go back.

What happened there is another, more ambivalent matter. [Spoilers damn you!] Thunderer picks up steam as it goes and ends with several vivid scenes, but they're out of proportion with the buildup; the climactic confrontation begins on page 425 of 437, and feels like a formality. The plot is patchy and unevenly paced and apportioned. One of the main characters, the scholar Holbach, is held up for most of the novel by several characters as a font of knowledge and possibility, but his eventual uselessness seems less like a clever irony than like a mishandled narrative thread. Another, the black-clad Captain Arlandes, doesn't do a single interesting thing after the first hundred pages, but just floats around waiting for Gilman to symbolically redeploy him in the final chapters. The protagonist Arjun's great quest gives the book its structure and ostensible central mystery, but his 'advancement' in the story consists of (1) getting superpowers and (2) apparently learning nothing.

I understand that this description of Arjun misses one of the points of the story - he lives a very full, exciting life in this book, with or without the involvement of Ararat's gods, and while not advancing in his preexisting quest he finishes a couple of others through ingenuity and dedication - but the Thunderer's plotting lacks the neatness and imagination of his worldbuilding.

The book has plenty of things on its mind that Gilman never quite follows through on, for whatever reason(s). Interesting suggestions about religion and politics are made; brief vivid parallels to current events are drawn; astonishing feats of narrative telescopy are performed; a mature sexual relationship is ably rendered; a feral, almost inhuman Peter Pan (the book's most interesting and truly otherworldly character) swoops in to save the day several times; and in the end, as several critics have pointed out, it's the city's survival that matters. Which seems a bit...cheap, in a way. It's tiring to get wrapped up in the story of a half-dozen people and a city only to find that the fates of the half-dozen are just incidentally or symbolically important.

I know I made similar complaints about Last Call, which was less vivid, more plotty, and ultimately less successful than Thunderer. But Gilman's treatment of human psychology is more believable and complicated than Powers's, and even as his characters morph from people to icons they retain the reader's interest, or in any case they held mine - which can't be said for 3/4 of Last Call's quartet at book's end. (Among Powers's surviving characters, only Arky stays human - and that poor bastard didn't even have a plot to follow.) I don't mean to dwell on Thunderer's inconsistent characterization and plotting in this review; it's just more immediately rewarding to point to what isn't perfect in the book than to rhapsodize about what is, viz., Ararat itself.

Fantasy cities have a certain appeal, starting with: they allow us to generalize (or more diplomatically 'universalize') without offending actual existing socioeconomic groups or being bound by the dramatic inadequacies of mere history. Plus there's something appealing to a certain kind of reader/writer about schematic creations like Ararat (or New Crobuzon or Gaiman's London or Powers's Vegas): a good fantasy city turns the entire world into a multiplication table, cyclical, algorithmically generated, easy to interpret. As busy as life but with none of the complex terror of talking to other human beings. And the big win for readers: everything corresponds to a straightforward System of Meaning. The neighborhood lines are bright and their identities clear, the organic process of urban development and variegation follows some abstract Plan, and - inevitably - there's some magical character who can traverse the city in unnatural ways, taking in its unnaturally sharp angles and artificially concentrated smells and inhumanly bright colours and producing perfect understanding.

(The archetypal modern urban decoder is of course Sherlock Holmes; Ararat even loosely fits Holmes's turn-of-the-century time period. Ararat's Perfect Urbanite-Semiotician is Arjun the (naturally) outsider, who learns to travel through time and space by listening very carefully to music. He's the wide-eyed focus character who strides, then slouches, then phases through the city searching (at least nominally) for his people's lost god, the Voice.)

The appeal of such a character isn't hard to understand: industrial cities are complicated and unnatural, their straight lines and mechanical sounds forbidding, their mere scale alienating and soul-deadening. They look like circuit boards, and deliver the same electric shock to the unwary. It's nice to imagine people with the ability to leap from building to building in a single bound (Jack) or step directly from one neighborhood to another (Arjun and Shay) or drop out of one life/career and into the next (Defour) or concoct a Book of All Things (Holbach and Nicolas) or see the full expanse of the city all at once (Arlandes and the Thunderer itself). Gilman's achievement in Thunderer is to build a city that can contain all these characters/types yet still remain vibrant and complex, organic and believable, a truly living thing. Gilman manages to deliver both a complex urban ecosystem and a set of unifying (comforting) fantasy premises and tropes without losing the wonder in either. I admire his work in Thunderer; it's lively but clear, and never dull. If it were more shapely I'd call it a great fantasy novel.

[Summary damn you!] The language of Felix Gilman's Thunderer is sprightly and clever; his characters are more 'neato' than 'deep,' but the story flows, and complicates, and satisfies. Gilman is better here at establishing ideas and situations than at plumbing their depths, but this is (was) his first novel, and that capacity will come in time, I've no doubt. In the meantime the sheer inventiveness of Thunderer is enough to recommend it, which I do without reservation. This is a hell of a first novel.

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale.

Stayed up late last night to read the second half of The Handmaid's Tale. What exquisite writing! I worried at first that the politics of the book would be narrowed and hardened by polemic, but the characterizations are unfailingly generous and rich; unexpected kindness and connection and 'predictable' vileness all flow seamlessly together, and none of the narrative-present-time human elements are jarring. Some of the language is dated, of course, as are the assumptions about the role of consumer technology, and Atwood's version of a nativist-religious-reactionary revolution is the thinnest element of the book. But the implausible aspects of the Tale's future history nonetheless serve their purpose; what comes after the rickety bridging-fiction of the coup is emotionally airtight (however provisional or limited as political prediction).

And such writing, my god...the last sentence of section IX is a little stylistic fillip that occurs nowhere else in the novel; it's so beautiful I had to stop reading, if you know what I mean. The second half of the book is sprinkled with gorgeous, unexpected turns like that: flashbacks emerging almost undetected from present-time narration; imagined snatches of dialogue (e.g. Offred's vision of the Wives denigrating Janine); the instantly convincing reconstruction of Moira's narration. The book gets funnier, livelier, more sensual as it goes; the dusty opening chapters give way to fond memories, sexual longing, frank acceptance, and - finally - moments of rapture. I'm jealous of Atwood's skill. It's not just that every character is a complex human being; the writing itself evolves slowly from Offred's grim reportage (oh how very honest her justified cynicism seems) to the dangerous, intoxicating vulnerability of the final movements. The passages about love (after Jezebel's) are too true and honest to bear; Atwood's decision to follow them with the Salvaging is perhaps cruel but surely correct.

Offred is a real person. What higher praise is there for her creator?

I'm a little out of sorts today, and not just because of the book itself. Between Last Call and Atwood's novel, I've now read more novels (two) in the last three weeks than in any three month period since college. The purpose of confession is explicitness, so: I'm embarrassed, angry, worried about being exposed as a liar and hypocrite and poseur. I'm also hopeful (which is even more embarrassing). Maybe I'm learning how to read again. Wouldn't that be nice.

One other thing. Agi kept saying that The Handmaid's Tale was a 'hopeful' book, and through the first 150 pages I thought she was speaking ironically, playing a nasty trick. She was right though, as usual. Gents: listen to your wives.

[Surprise, surprise: Mary McCarthy's NYTimes review from 1986. I'm confused by her dismissal of the characterization; perhaps she couldn't tell Nick and Luke apart, but I knew them on sight, and I found the Commander (Fred) vivid and terrifying. This seems somewhat more accurate: 'At the same time, the Republic of Gilead itself, whatever in it that is not a projection, is insufficiently imagined.' But then the specifics of Gilead aren't the point. Offred's emotions, her desires, the constant (un)welcome return of her memories, the contortions required by her circumstances and the hardening ideas around her: all these things are instantly recognizable. The satiric target of The Handmaid's Tale isn't one particular religious/political movement or moment, but rather the dark desires given rein by fundamentalism, political or religious. Things would never happen quite this way; if they did, though, this is how they would feel. These are the choices we (would) face. Correct and true are not the same thing of course.]

Despair.

I started reading The Handmaid's Tale last night. I only made it through 75 pages and already I wish I were dead. My lady tells me it's a 'story of hope,' but she keeps saying it with this smile that makes me think I'm being set up for a fall. Alas. Click the image to see what I've been up to lately.

Milestoned.

Handed in what should be the first draft of a completed manuscript today. I have some administrative matters to attend to today and need to get started rewriting quite quickly, but since this project has been my summer's main focus, I feel at the moment as if I deserve a strong drink. I'll settle for a brief shower, as I neglected my morning ablutions and consequently stink like a fucking wet dog. Reader(s), you have my best wishes.

(p.s. I feel a little foolish pissing on Last Call like I did last night. The man's a beloved modern fantasist, after all, and plenty of people call it his best book. I just can't shake the feeling that, for all its imagistic potency and narrative drive, there's something the book completely failed to do, and it's got something to do with just-plain-people...)

Tim Powers, Last Call.

Tim Powers's Last Call comes highly recommended, but after finishing it tonight I can't shake a feeling of tremendous disappointment and frustration. It's not a bad book; indeed it starts beautifully, improves and accelerates throughout its first few hundred pages, and ends 'satisfyingly,' as it's supposed to. The trouble is that for all its no doubt richly-imagined goings-on and Powers's obvious intelligence and gnarly imagination, nothing much happens in Last Call. Familiar symbols (the Tarot, the Fisher King, the mythology of Vegas gambling and the poker table, bits of The Waste Land) are deployed enthusiastically, knotty plotlines proceed according to the familiar contours of those symbols, and at the 'exciting' climax the symbols (excuse me, characters) meet in symbolic conflicts devoid of emotional power. The book moves so briskly that you don't notice that it's not actually a thriller - each of its scenes seems to refer to a scene from a parallel novel, in which actual human stakes are played for in an actual world by actual humans, rather than elements in a Tarot-themed Gantt chart.

It is, in short, a neat idea (a few of them, really) stretched out over half a thousand pages. It's a heck of a story, and when 'THE END' comes it turns out not to have been much at all.

(I kept thinking of American Gods. Do not take that as a compliment.)

The good parts - Crane's early suffering over the fate of his wife, Dondi's apology, the Mandelbrot man, the slam-bang opening section, the regular appearance of steaming cups of coffee and cold beers - are just right, and pieces of the book will stick with me, I suspect. But with one exception the characters in the book never quite rise to the level of people. The relationship between Diana and Scott is wish-fulfillment and (when you think about it) a bit gross, and both characters get less interesting as the story progresses; the depiction of Scott's alcoholism is utterly facile; Dondi is a sentimental caricature but only that, and the thinness of his cruel backstory feels contemptuous on Powers's part; Arky spends most of the novel dicking around offstage in a plotline that has no interest beyond its dorm-room-bullshit-session premise, and his arc is engaging but far too handy to get invested in; Nardie is like a stock character beamed in from some other story; and Leon fulfills none of his initial promise, vanishing behind a twirling villain-moustache for most of the book.

Of all the characters, only the old man Ozzie is as neat-o as the book's symbolic register, and the book is weirdly muted in its treatment of him and his fate. I don't think that's a matter of noir aesthetics; rather, I imagine that Powers (like so many of his readers and critics!) was so enamored of the meaning of his story, its mythological referents, that he forgot to make the story itself matter. And we didn't mind - after all, who can complain about Weird Fantasy that flatters the allusion seekers and conspiracy fans in the audience? Some of the allusions and mythic parallels are so blunt they're offensive - when one character eats a thin white poker chip at a moment of transformational crisis, is it really necessary to have another character moan, 'Christ'? And should we pretend not to notice when the exact same thing happens a dozen pages later, with a bloody wound in the side immediately followed by a blasphemous 'Jesus!' outburst? I half want to assume that Powers's tastelessness in those passages is an ironic wink rather than a failure of nerve and style.

But I couldn't put the book down. It's exhilarating, and a few moments are breathtaking. But it feels, in the end, a little bit pointless. One Amazon reviewer unwittingly hit the nail on the head: 'One character is destined to play the Fool card in the drama and manifests as a homeless man who lives in special "boxes" all throughout Vegas.' Yes, I thought, that describes Dondi's storyline perfectly. I realized only after a moment that the reviewer meant only to describe Dondi's premise. And...and most of the jokes are puns. And without their symbolic parallels most of the events are meaningless or just not there at all. And the last 100 pages are a weirdly-paced mess, the beautiful coda marred by needless exposition and a saggy anticlimax that made the previous few hundred pages seem like much ado about nothing much. And, yeah, I couldn't put the book down. I feel like a fool for caring about 500 pages of notes for the Greatest Dark Magical Fantasy Novel Ever Written About Vegas, which Tim Powers slyly published in the guise of a novel. What a smart man he is.

Worldbuilding is storytelling: complication, complexity, and micronarratives.

My recent obsessions taken to a 3,500-word extreme! Go read (and if you're an RPG nerd, you should be following Philippe's blog anyhow).

Food.

Of course I find food obsessives ridiculous. Never moreso than when they're borrowing affective postures from their literary betters:

So, clearly, decent food can be had at more than reasonable prices [at the Cheesecake Factory], but it takes some careful choosing on a menu with more than 200 offerings. The biggest drawback is the mall-like atmosphere, a sense of faux everything that is perhaps inevitable in any large chain. The fact that any of the 146 CFs around the country can put out this astonishing variety of food is an impressive work of corporate organization and efficiency. But I left feeling sad, and not sure why. I think, on reflection it was because of the sense that what we'd just experienced was simply a company responding to the demands of America, and the demands of America were helping us to take our food one step backward rather than one step forward, and I don't think we have time for backward steps.

Well, no, but if you're worrying about how no one makes 'slow food' anymore and don't give a shit that doctors are all about hair-trigger optional C-sections - or you were as interested in the importance of Twitter during the recent Iranian uprising as you were in a democratic goddamn uprising in a nearly-nuclear theocracy run by imbeciles and lunatics - then your worry about 'backward steps' comes off as a little goddamn precious. Does 'faux everything' make our world worse? Yes it does. Is the availability of cheap tasty food at the shopping mall really the worst possible case? Nope. Does your Overwhelming Sadness at the availability of an unbelievable variety of (mass-produced freeze-dried sensually-denuded) cheap food in the suburbs seem like a gross luxury, given that the suburbs themselves are so complexly mind-warping that the Cheesecake Factory doesn't even crack the list of the Top 50 Things Worthy of Scrutiny About This Fucked Living Arrangement? Yes it does.

And you know what? The Cheesecake Factory sucks, just like lamely recreating the first scene from the film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to promote your basic-cable TV guest appearance sucks. Just like Hollywood sucks generally, and massive income inequality sucks, and mosquitoes and designer clothes suck, and the bourgeois food-tourism that passes for 'adventure' TV sucks. Plus it sucks extra that David Foster Wallace is dead, John Coltrane is dead, Robert Altman is dead, and we have to go on pretending that weeping into your tastefully-arrayed miniscule portion of honey-glazed whatever counts as having an existential crisis.

Keep writing, Mr Ruhlman. You take it seriously and ask new things of yourself and I admire that (a great deal) (but only that).

Keep preening, foodies everywhere.

The fallout is bad but it's bomb I'm afraid of.

This is how you review the written word!!

Dig it.

For Sherv et (maybe) al.: Hite on Lovecraft.

C'thulhu fhtagn.

I finally read 'The Call of Cthulhu,' Lovecraft's 1926 introduction of the great squidheaded dragon creature. I'd never read any Lovecraft before, but am interested in the new Trail of Cthulhu game (by Ken Hite, the best prose writer in games) and wanted to investigate the source.

I'm having trouble writing these sentences because of what that story just did to my mind. Not the story, actually - the writing. The structure is fantastic: the narrator tells about his uncle's interviews with a cop who narrates his interrogation of a cultist who relates a dark history, then pop back out to the narrator relating the deathbed ravings of a Norwegian ship captain...Lovecraft uses, at arguably a lower level of sophistication than his High Modernist contemporaries, wild narrative trickery for devious epistemological and imaginative purposes. Of course there are more adjectives and adverbs in there than anything this side of a junior high fantasist's diary entries, but when the narrator gets going and the cadence elevates, sentence structures begin inverting in a vile mockery of High speech - damn, it's just wonderful stuff. A great yarn. The end of the story is anticlimactic as it must be: a proper description of Cthulhu is either the longest string of adjectives in the history of English prose or (as it is here) an insistent looking-away from a horror which the narrator insists - ya gotta trust me on this one, no seriously, believe me - is just Too Awful To Speak Of. Which, in a story as fantastically verbose as this one, is a hell of a claim to make, and while Lovecraft's imagination was no doubt up to it, his rhetorical skills maybe weren't. Which isn't actually a strike against the man - no one else could describe Cthulhu either.

The architectural splendour and histrionic prose of 'Call of Cthulhu' invigorate me but the piece isn't particularly horrifying - with two exceptions, one of them subtler than the other. Lovecraft mentions the non-Euclidean geometry of R'lyeh a couple of times, but his descriptions of it are a mixed bag - the great door is a wondrous image, but the, um, obtuse angle that shoulda been acute is just silly. House of Leaves does that subject right. The curious bat-creatures in the Louisiana swamp, on the other hand, are a throwaway detail, which HPL leaves unresolved at story's end. The brief passage in which Old Castro insists that the Cult's killings were the work of something else is the most chilling in the whole story - if 'Call of Cthulhu' weren't so carefully, hysterically overwritten I'd call it tasteful restraint on Lovecraft's part.

Then again, Lovecraft's literary excesses are part of his appeal. On Hite's advice I'm reading 'The Colour Out of Space' next, maybe tonight, and I confess that I'm looking forward to it. More than anything I want to read his famed creepy-Massachusetts tales, of which 'The Colour' is allegedly the finest. Show me something close to home, HPL. In any case I'm excited to keep reading, one of the few feelings of pure pleasure available to me now in the same form in which I encountered it as a boy. Proof again of forces in the universe which outlast mere men, I guess.

Late: Eagleton on The God Delusion.

This is how you slaughter an intellectual out of his depth:

These are not just the views of an enraged atheist. They are the opinions of a readily identifiable kind of English middle-class liberal rationalist. Reading Dawkins, who occasionally writes as though ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness’ is a mighty funny way to describe a Grecian urn, one can be reasonably certain that he would not be Europe’s greatest enthusiast for Foucault, psychoanalysis, agitprop, Dadaism, anarchism or separatist feminism. All of these phenomena, one imagines, would be as distasteful to his brisk, bloodless rationality as the virgin birth. Yet one can of course be an atheist and a fervent fan of them all. His God-hating, then, is by no means simply the view of a scientist admirably cleansed of prejudice. It belongs to a specific cultural context. One would not expect to muster many votes for either anarchism or the virgin birth in North Oxford.

[...]

It thus comes as no surprise that Dawkins turns out to be an old-fashioned Hegelian when it comes to global politics, believing in a zeitgeist (his own term) involving ever increasing progress, with just the occasional ‘reversal’. ‘The whole wave,’ he rhapsodises in the finest Whiggish manner, ‘keeps moving.’ There are, he generously concedes, ‘local and temporary setbacks’ like the present US government – as though that regime were an electoral aberration, rather than the harbinger of a drastic transformation of the world order that we will probably have to live with for as long as we can foresee. Dawkins, by contrast, believes, in his Herbert Spencerish way, that ‘the progressive trend is unmistakable and it will continue.’ So there we are, then: we have it from the mouth of Mr Public Science himself that aside from a few local, temporary hiccups like ecological disasters, famine, ethnic wars and nuclear wastelands, History is perpetually on the up.

Apart from the occasional perfunctory gesture to ‘sophisticated’ religious believers, Dawkins tends to see religion and fundamentalist religion as one and the same. This is not only grotesquely false; it is also a device to outflank any more reflective kind of faith by implying that it belongs to the coterie and not to the mass. The huge numbers of believers who hold something like the theology I outlined above can thus be conveniently lumped with rednecks who murder abortionists and malign homosexuals. As far as such outrages go, however, The God Delusion does a very fine job indeed. The two most deadly texts on the planet, apart perhaps from Donald Rumsfeld’s emails, are the Bible and the Koran; and Dawkins, as one the best of liberals as well as one of the worst, has done a magnificent job over the years of speaking out against that particular strain of psychopathology known as fundamentalism, whether Texan or Taliban. He is right to repudiate the brand of mealy-mouthed liberalism which believes that one has to respect other people’s silly or obnoxious ideas just because they are other people’s. In its admirably angry way, The God Delusion argues that the status of atheists in the US is nowadays about the same as that of gays fifty years ago. The book is full of vivid vignettes of the sheer horrors of religion, fundamentalist or otherwise. Nearly 50 per cent of Americans believe that a glorious Second Coming is imminent, and some of them are doing their damnedest to bring it about. But Dawkins could have told us all this without being so appallingly bitchy about those of his scientific colleagues who disagree with him, and without being so theologically illiterate. He might also have avoided being the second most frequently mentioned individual in his book – if you count God as an individual.

Eagleton got me through my first Literary Theory class in college, and remains one of the most entertaining Big Brains in the Big Talk. I think I'll read his new book at some point. Anyhow, there that is.

Scary.

Stephen Gammell scared me maybe more than any single person as a child.

He illustrated these.

I'm not the only one he's frightened.

The monsters who make their living off my nightmare-induced screams thank him for funding their retirements.

Real American heroes.

(Where by 'real American heroes' I mean 'hateful fucking vermin.')

[To clarify: While I'm willing to believe, for thrills, that there's a principled case against gay marriage that doesn't begin with either 'Same-sex fuckers shouldn't raise children' (which is ridiculous[*]) or 'Gay = disgusting' (which is contemptible), I don't think I've ever heard such an argument. I'd love to.]

[*] (...not least because of the enormous number of bi- and homosexuals ably raising kids already.)

How not to betray your characters.

[My inability to live up to the following precepts is my own weakness, and I hope this piece can stand on its own merits. Or fall, if it must, on their lack. Small personal victory: I cut all the italics/emphasis save one instance. No small thing for me.]

* * *

Your characters aren't real but the audience has to believe in them. 'Guy doesn't come on the lot lest he wants to buy' - if they're reading your book then they trust and expect you to convince them, to invite them into the fantasy. Honour that offering by investing in your characters and granting them humanity so as not to damage the continuous dream of the story.

Human voices emerge from and manifest the same will as human actions - speech acts always intend and (consciously and unconsciously) accomplish multiple aims, transmitting information in various modes: gestural, tonal, situational, semantic, syntactic, etc. A line of dialogue does constitute part of a scene, which is intended by the author to have a total effect; on the other hand, to the extent that we relate to characters as imaginary people, we interpret their actions and utterances as social maneuvers, using our rich built-in social-analytic mental apparatus. Words aren't simply words, so we shouldn't evaluate our characters' dialogue in primarily verbal terms. Anyone can write a snappy one-liner or a couplet, but good dialogue enacts a complex drama far beneath its verbal surface. People (and characters) worry us when their motivations seem simplistic or monomaniacal (cf. church, politics, etc.); we expect human complexity and texture. That worry breeds cynicism, and takes us out of the dream.

We must see our characters in two ways: as they might see themselves, and as their friends/coworkers/enemies/shrinks/family might see them. (Allegory and schemata are separate matters.) We must allow ourselves honesty in evaluating them - playing no favourites - and must also give ourselves to the internal logic of character motivations and self-perception. Every human sees himself as protagonist; the key to believable characters is to write them, every single one without exception, as if the scene were about them. Not to say every bit player should be giving monologues, only that none of our characters have are believably human unless all their surroundings are faithfully and humanely rendered.

The polemicist's first commandment is: give the strongest possible version of your opponents' arguments. The same goes for novelists and storytellers, so often tempted to focus their attention on the inner lives of precious protagonists - half of them author proxies of course - at the expense of the 'supporting' cast which is the source and proving ground of the hero's humanity. (Simple exercise: rewrite each scene from the point of view of a supporting character. The difference between new and old versions measures the expansion of the author's empathy.)

'Believable characters' is shorthand for the author refusing to impose the simplification and distortion of abstract schemata on her characters - and preserving the full complexity of their intentions. A believable action is one that manifests a recognizable will.

What's next, of course, is ventriloquism - the 'voice' part of character voice. This is largely a matter of listening to other human beings and learning the verbal constructions unique to communities; straightforward transcription and analysis exercises can help. But once the rhythms of a dialect or argot are mastered, there remains the interesting problem, the great work: capturing nuances of intention. And so we move again from listening to the characters, on one hand, to thinking and desiring as them. Sympathy is comforting and valuable (it is, in several senses of the word, critical) but empathy - messy, ambivalent, terrifying, communal, transformative - is the goal and the motive force of great art.

We best honour our characters and stories - and more importantly our readers - by rendering faithfully the complex interplay of character intentions, (self-)perception, circumstance, and limitation: by recognizing the complex and contradictory humanity of all people, and telling stories that afford readers the same recognition and honour their humanity in turn.

Another piece of some other piece of something, I dunno, big.

When he thinks about who's held his head crying or after-hours pleasured shuddering, or whose hands were granted permission to roam about during phone conversations, board games, homemade dinners, who had been allowed the rest, restfulness, that gift - 'Feel free,' how terribly far reaching a thing - when he musicks their names in the back of the back of his head or imagines a parade of their shadowed faces as he remembers them, laughing/scolding/inscrutable/inexpressible/betrayed, names a secret code ciphering scents, soft hair of inner forearm, accidental tooth scrape upon most worrisome of skin out of pure infectious (well not infectious) enthusiasm, whoopsy daisy: well, it only takes a moment to wonder I wonder whether she thinks about this sort of thing,, comes unbidden the countermelody to memory, his perfectly natural need (however foolish and wasted no doubt) to set this stone of self in a band of something precious, time in a ring, with (by the way) respect to which topologically speaking it's like it's not even there. Only it's not 'whether she thinks' so much as, battling, defensive, 'whether they...' He wants to think that they do, is terrified of the idea, hopes they don't, needs to confirm one way or the other, wouldn't know what to do with confirmation in any case, would you? cultural paranoia of such storied vintage you don't just uncork drink and be done with - how inconvenient to be round and rounding inside your skull with on the inside lane letterforms reading 'I'm not her first' and the next lane over clearly, helpfully, 'I'm in second place,' and after this many laps at this terrible speed you don't make a distinction. 'I'd like to lose myself in you,' etc., which surprises no one at all: hey if I were you I'd wanna be doing something else too. Other than running in circles. He needed there to be a they.

Fellas get all stupid and honest in the few moments after they, er, arrive, and males of a certain sort know to treat their every utterance over the next few minutes as the equivalent of the, oh how tawdry, 'drunk dial': ill-advised, dangerous, best left for a more controlled environment. Well the deeper mistake being of course that there's no such thing, but post-coitus you want not to have to worry about deconstructing false binaries on account of there's cleanup to do, probably the music seems to loud now, maybe the desk lamp fell over during the fracas, you're noticing your fat rolls or this pimple inside your ear is hurting and must be huge, damn; also he's as mentioned gone completely stupid, there's nothing stupider than saying 'I want exactly this,' the very end of mystery, i.e. not knowing what's going on really, i.e. the meaning of love as generally understood. It's been, what, two years now, once a week or a day he thinks Should I go? but at the moment is moving too fast to need to answer. i.e. He'll keep rolling even if he stops pedaling, so why not roll? The other deep mistake being the idea that one prefers, lovewise, to begin the best thing rather than continuing the good thing. 'Best' is nonsense, 'begin' is nonsense, and Guin knows all this, which only makes it all the more galling. If she were naïve about these things he'd have an excuse for hesitation disgust terror, or if she were cynical he'd have something to run from, 'self-preservation,' but she simply knows, tries, is liquid. He wants solid ground. Another of those things you've seen in movies.

If you feel you're drowning don't climb out of the sea, turn into a fish. Isn't that how evolution works?

They go for Sunday brunch at a bar/café with the menu charming and affected up on an actual chalkboard, a periodic table of the (one supposes the joke goes) food elements, and he can't tell whether he hates the food because he failed chemistry in college, or the food is just bad, too much rosemary in the seared potatoes or something. Seared? Something. Guin says she's noticed he's been down lately, apologizes for being down her own self. Whatever 'down' means on someone so levelheaded, which he makes the mistake of saying, not knowing what he means by it. She looks hurt. He thinks that five years ago - was it? - he came here with a woman who was thinner, laughed more, louder in bed, taller (was she taller? couldn't've been), more...more of something he insisted upon insisting it was natural that he wanted more of. She'd smelled like a night of sex and rock songs about world peace, and - we don't see colours we see edges, borders, know blue because we know green's nearby - he'd thought about calling her lately. Thought about thinking about it. Wondering I wonder does she think like this? I wonder when she'll realize what I am. Awfully certain such a thing would happen. 'And for her part?' For her part she was looking into him and thinking she didn't have the energy to help him when he got like this. 'Like this' being all over his face. Comparing her to things. They'd fought the previous night about whether to go on 'dates,' she'd been tired from an unplanned Saturday afternoon at work and had been glad to stay in with a glass of maybe wine and just the evening, and she'd told him to head out with friends if he wanted. She: Whether or not alone I'd like to be home. He: Whether or not at home she wants to be alone. Eeeeeverything's a goddamn judgment, apparently. At work she'd had to spend two hours with one of the interns, who'd turned out to be a good deal more interesting than she'd expected - an Army brat who'd lived in the United Arab Emirates for a while, fluent in Arabic, and a hell of a graphic designer as it happened, a nice enough guy but kind of an arrogant prick - she didn't think the one rendered the other impossible - and of course our lad had had a difficult time with this, the acid stab of jealousy leaching from the deep hollow of his stomach. Practically out of obligation, not a feeling he wanted to have or could even explain. 'You never want to go out!' 'What are you talking about? We went out last Tuesday -' 'Because I forced you!' Grinning: 'I think you have that backward actually.' Heating up: 'God damn it Guin, don't laugh about this -' etc., etc., etc. When what she felt, was Really Thinking down deep, was Why don't I spend more time really helping people? Thinking in passing of the day they met, though not of meeting, and how connected she'd felt, what the sun had looked like struggling up for the morning, strangers giving encouraging hugs and meaning them at the school where she'd given freely of time, unembarrassed. And how Teen Dream had said 'He might be the championship fuck of all time and fun to have around at parties but if you can't make breakfast and clean the living room together without it turning into super melodrama then spare yourself the trouble and just reread Clan of the Cave Bear instead.' T.D. who seemed to make him nervous somehow, who didn't seem to want anything from him. Heh. Maybe that was it. He did exactly what he was asked to. When things were going to total bullshit she'd been excited by the prospect. Or comforted. Relaxed. Or, hmm, relaxed enough to get excited. She thought back to, was it three years ago? The other guy had been a little taller and a complete waste of effort - though not of time. The time had been fine. Two distinctly different things. He'd kissed like he'd never heard of it before.

See, because the end is written at the beginning, right? If you just know how to look for it. Right?

She orders her eggs scrambled, he says she always gets fried, she says she feels like a change, he flips upside-down and into preservation mode, Everything Must Be Held Onto, which is to just not look at anything anymore. She rubs her thumb where she just got a paper cut while idling through the wine and beer list, pointless really, and sees the inside of his head clearly, right through the back of his eyes. Everything's gone cobalt blue inside his skull like an undergrad lighting designer's idea of a jazz club and her look of concern or empathy just irritates him. Because it confuses him. Because how could she see into him when he's such a marvelous unfathomable mystery? And she presses her hand down on top of his, palm facing down and warmward, a foreign gesture he thinks; his style is to slip his hand under hers palm upfacing and clasp hers, this comforting-hand-on-top shit just feels like the university chaplain delivering bad news and then leaving rather than listening to you cry for hours and days and days. All the while she's trying to figure out how they can make themselves known each to the other so as to keep for as long as possible balance. He wanted to go on dates but didn't really have anything in particular. She's wanted to stay home because she wanted to be home, and staying was the best way to go about it, all things considered. But he also didn't want to leave her alone at home. Why ever not. Do you think I'd forget about you. Hell, he'd even rather stay home angry than go out wondering. And yet, aahhh, she's the one ended up giving him the 'It's OK' backrub, mull that over a second if you like, her hands warm fingers patient the occasional kiss to the jutting spinetop bone at the base of his neck like she'd reached the highest step of a ladder and took a beat to enjoy the view, a grateful breath, but his shoulders were so goddamn tense it just hurt. Even the kiss kind of hurt.

Take this and you'll be happy. Really.

Of course the value of advice isn't its correctness but its usefulness. When it comes to happiness and how to attain it, the correct advice tends to be useless and the useful advice tends to be ignored. What produces lasting happiness? Exertion in the name of what we believe in, i.e. the world we imagine and the world we inhabit syncing up. How do we produce this state? With great difficulty. No one wants to hear advice like that, which is why we scoff or laugh to hear it: 'How do you get to Carnegie Hall?' 'Practice.' If you think the best possible life is idling on a beach and you find a way to idle on a beach all the time, you'll be happy - unless you were wrong about it being a good life. (The only way to know is to do it.) If you realize that your strength is in making music, commit yourself to improving your skills, and find a way to make a decent living playing for people, then you might not always be satisfied - that's the fast lane to producing bad music - and you might not always like where you are but you'll be happy with what you're doing. This is called 'fulfillment,' which is lasting happiness.

Everything always changes; pinning your happiness to your location (your state), rather than what you're doing with it, is a recipe for disillusionment.

Well if it's so simple, why are there so many self-help books? Shouldn't one be enough? Aah, but this is to misunderstand the purpose of the 'self-help' literature, which isn't to expand your capability or deepen your activity but to improve your mood. 'I saw results right away!' No. In the history of mankind that's never, ever been true. Meaningful change characterizes processes. When you quit smoking you have an easier time walking up stairs, sure, but the important thing isn't that symptom, it's the fact that your lungs are no longer being poisoned. The real growth and change occurs over time, a process you can't see.

Ever fall in love? Lemme guess: you realized one day you were in love, and if you can point to 'the moment it happened,' all you're doing is indicating a point in your personal narrative that has particular meaning or resonance for you now. This whole idea of 'love at first sight' is nonsense: we made it up so the inscrutable process of deepening interdependence could make sense to us. We see not essences but edges, contrasts.

We notice that we're happy and we weren't, so something must've changed, whatever could it be? But we're simply at another stage in each of a million ongoing processes.

There's no such thing as a 'nice personality' because personalities aren't real. We 'are' what we can see and sense, our actions aggregated and labeled at a given moment. Which is why it's always 'the quiet one' who shoots up the post office: there are no 'quiet ones,' only people keeping quiet. They always have their reasons.

Trying to identify a 'personality type' is like trying to dampen only part of a sponge: there's a process always underway, homeostasis, changing without moving. You can't see it but that doesn't unmake the change. Balance and stillness aren't the same thing. Self-help is about stopping, but happiness is balance. Ever ride a bicycle? Gear it too high and you'll find it hard to move the thing, too low and you'll pedal the chain right off the gears. Get good at it and your unconscious aim will be not fixed velocity but steady cadence, meaning you better figure out that gearshift, rookie. Same as in a car: if it shakes when you shift you're not smooth enough. 'Correct' and 'smooth' are different things and you'll figure out which one comes first.

We ask ourselves 'Am I happy?' but are just hiding from the real question, the only question: 'What the hell am I doing?' And don't lie, now. 'It's only a one-time thing' is a self-deceptive pep talk; 'I am cheating on my wife' is a statement of fact. 'Is this the right job?' can't be answered but 'Do I think this work is worthwhile?' sure can, and the answer points toward a course of action. You're hard-pressed to know whether you've written a worthwhile novel - but 'How can I make the next one better?' moves you forward, however painful it may be to contemplate. (Of course there's the danger of wanting to rush to the next project without completing this one - irresponsibility in a literal sense. Resist it.) The worth of the work doesn't inhere in you or it. Give it away and keep moving. We stop breathing otherwise.

Maybe you're scared to quit your job though you admit that you hate it; you don't know what life will be like without it. But ask yourself: is the important thing about this job having it or doing it? If the former, the job wastes your time, and you probably waste your employers'. The job you have should be the one you like to do, ideally the one you'd do for free. You don't find such positions, you make them.

In your belief that there's some precious aspect of your Self that won't survive a change in action or situation - in your cowardice - you are the cause of your unhappiness. How does the song go? 'Whatever will be will be / the future's not ours to see.' Which is to say we're fools for thinking we choose anything but our actions. A liar said, 'That depends on what the definition of "is" is.' Let's help the man out: mostly, Bill, the word means nothing at all.

There is a shiny brass lamp nearby.

[All this isn't about what it's about.]

If you want to understand contemporary fantasy gaming - and to a certain extent fantasy literature - it's important to remember that Dungeons & Dragons shares provenance with Zork (which is based on Crowther and Woods's Colossal Cave Adventure). The first version of D&D came out less than two years before Crowther's fantasy-free Mammoth Cave spelunking simulation; Don Woods's fantasy expansion (with elves and other silly bits) emerged about a year later, and the first Zork game took shape at MIT shortly thereafter. Lord of the Rings was published the 50's but burst into transatlantic college-campus popularity in the mid-60's, with the largest Tolkien fan groups founded in the late 60's and early 70's - just a single undergraduate cycle before Gygax/Arneson's D&D campaign entered print, and roughly one PhD's duration before the Troll appeared in the Colossal Cave.

Which is to say that D&D and Zork, two of the most influential (very) American games ever made, emerged at about the same time, in similar cultures, to explore a shared set of themes: excavating lost civilizations, living in a world where magic is dimly remembered (and possessed mainly by the Wrong Guys), burrowing into the earth for hidden treasure, mapping unexplored subterranean regions and charting their bizarre ecologies, and finding a way to make the nostalgic logic of Tolkien's grand novel playable. Zork (which I take as synecdoche for the whole Adventure/Colossal Cave/Dungeon/Zork lineage) was the solitary, melancholy version of what D&D offered to gaming groups, but the games are marked by shared activities (thieving and trouble-avoiding, mainly), shared humour (spoofing the purple prose of a legion of Tolkien imitators and the man himself - even if D&D has more of a midcentury pulp feel than a Tolkienesque literary/elegiac one), and most importantly shared geography.

To wit: the dungeon.

Of course D&D dungeons have nothing to do with dungeons as they'd previously appeared in literature and architecture; the Gygaxian 'dungeon' is half labyrinth, half warren, a system of tunnels linking rough-hewn chambers far beneath the ground, while the ol' donjon is a castle tower and the Middle English dungeon is just an underground prison cell. But the implementors at Infocom (Zork's creators) happily adopted Gygax's 'dungeon' usage, and the term now means what the bearded midwestern nerd Gary G. took it to mean: a castle in the stone. Indeed the word's meaning has expanded to encompass all manner of mythical underground territories since then. Zork's setting is the justly famous Great Underground Empire (a GUE populated by GRUEs, 'naturally'), complete with a subterranean sea, gazebos in inexplicable underground gardens, and even something like an aboveground underground, grassy and sunlit levels atop dark hidden levels atop even deeper place - an entire lost social/physical topology, its roof the surface of our earth.

Leave aside that early D&D maps look like crude hand-drawn mazes and the official Zork maps very strongly resemble workplace flowcharts; these two families of games and their millions of players revolve obsessively around, and wander daringly through, dimly-lit caves in the dirt. The characteristic shape of Gygax/Crowther/et al's dungeons is partly a mechanical choice - it was (is) a hell of a lot easier to simulate discrete play areas bounded by right-angled walls than to believably render, on a tabletop or in paragraph's detailed description, an open-ended variegated space to be zoomed into. Modern interactive fiction has come a long way from Zork's narrative/descriptive methods, but the standard mode of IF description is still the same as it was 35 years ago: You're in a room. Here's what you see. Here's what you can use. And D&D has always operated on more or less the same scale.

But this scale isn't just mechanical. Gygaxian dungeon rooms, in both narrative and visual/spatial terms, represent tight spots - and in terms of structuring an adventure, it makes sense to think in terms of choke points and (narrative) passages. Mammoth Cave, initial inspiration for what would become Zork, is a maze of twisty passages all (more or less) alike - some wide enough to drive a tank through, some too narrow for any but the tiniest adventurers. Each passage is a problem, clearly defined; each DEX roll represents a physical/narrative inflection point or turnabout. The physical map is the psychic territory. And it's dark as hell like the inside of a computer terminal (those black screens and glowing green text are still the only way to play Nethack and Zork), and you can point to the line of code or hairpin turn or (sigh) a roll of '1' on the damn d6 where things went wrong...

Well, but maybe you've read yer Sherlock Holmes and yer 'Purloined Letter,' and you're familiar with this idea of the detective/adventurer's mind as a secret, biological topology imposed on self-ordering and increasingly geometric world, human response to the spatial and imaginative logics of industry and urbanization - parallel to paleontology and geology's array of rational(-izing) responses to the accumulating evidence that there was another world before ours, with feathered lizards and predators the size of houses, and as of 1858 we'd found the entire skeleton of a great dead creature, monsters dwelled here...And maybe you can imagine a bunch of college students in an America dealing simultaneously with Vietnam, Watergate, and the crash and collapse of the countercultural dreams of the Sixties, another cycle of realization that Our Shared Foundation is more or less a fantasy itself: not just Nixon and his fellas but the long line of all-but-kings who've run us across and occasionally into the ground over the centuries.

Maybe you know that 'Lucy' - our 3.5-million-year-old grandma - was pulled from the earth in 1974 too.

Maybe you're a computer programmer or a tabletop wargamer, you dream in processes and data structures, and the algorithmic logic of the dungeon appeals to you. As does the idea of a world hidden from ours, from all eyes but yours - in which you can return to something like innocence, revelation negotiated step by (numbered, measured) step: one solved problem rewarded by one miraculous vista, or failure marked with a sinister laugh from an unseen side passage. And you can't think of a better way to describe how you feel to walk through your world than to reward inquiry like so: 'A hollow voice says, "Fool."'

And you felt most alone in crowds, most at home wedged between stone walls (or the inside of a pillow fort or treehouse, lamplit, reading or even writing secret stories all your own), master of the imaginary dungeon you overlaid atop the visible world. The parking lot next to your family's apartment building was emptied of shapes and climbing places and then dug up, and an office building went up there; or the tract of undeveloped land behind your childhood home in the subdivision is a golf course now, the grass well-kept but dead to you, unreal. Or you awoke one day to realize that in ten years you hadn't seen a starfield, would never meet anyone who remembered the frontier, had no relatives who remembered a time before machine guns and tanks.

You looked at a photograph of the Crystal Cave, stalactites like icicles made of trapped smoke or seeping sand and ooze, and wondered what it would be like to hide there, get lost, not come when called.

You maybe wondered who your neighbours would be. Whether their eyes glowed or their teeth clicked. And what would they eat, what secrets were they keeping. Goofy little kid making up stories, grow up for god's sake, but you always wondered: among the stone bones did a heart beat? And does its blood flow - and taste - like mine?

Going, going, Galt.

If you're friends with any of the idiots talking about 'going Galt' out of fear of the 'socialist' stimulus bill and budget, etc., point them this way. There are sensible reactions to the government's responses to the financial crisis - negative and positive - and then there's the other thing. This 'going Galt' shit is the other thing.

Updike and the Kid.

I hadn't read this in a while, but it really is an extraordinary piece of writing - if you are or ever have been any kind of baseball fan, John Updike's farewell to Ted Williams will tear you in half.

It may be that, compared to managers’ dreams such as Joe DiMaggio and the always helpful Stan Musial, Williams is an icy star. But of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is an essentially lonely game. No other player visible to my generation has concentrated within himself so much of the sport’s poignance, has so assiduously refined his natural skills, has so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy.

If you know your American mythology or ever loved a ballplayer as a child you already know how the story ends.

Disturbance in the Force.

Hints, tips: If someone tells you 'Oh your writing reminds me of Author X,' and you dimly remember that yeah, he did do something of this sort maybe, do not for the love of god go and spend half an hour reading about him before setting out on the day's writing work! There are enough holes in the road without your self-loathing and paranoia gouging another.

Self-fluffing: 12K in two days, including a new submission? If even a quarter of it is good stuff that's a fine, fine start to the week.

Next reading: A General Theory of Love by Lewis et al. Looks fascinating, went cheap.

Decline of the West.

Talking about movies: 'Did you see what I see?'

Talking about books: 'Can you imagine what I felt?'

The difference between the two is the end of consensus culture.

Gladwell's book sales are an outlier? Not really.

'Bestseller' status isn't a function of consumer sales, it's a function of warehouse sales (as is pretty widely known) - and warehouse sales seem to be at least in part a function of advertising outlay, which seems to correlate with author advance and so forth...meaning Malcolm Gladwell's own success isn't primarily a function of luck, it's a function of PR. Indeed it's 'surprisingly' deterministic given what a gol-durn crapshoot this whole human existence allegedly is.

Excitement!

While we're on the subject of Internet cranks, here's the dazzling Webster Tarpley, 9/11 truther among other things, from his book Barack Obama: The Unauthorized Biography:

We state emphatically here at the outset: Obama is a creature and puppet of finance capital and of the Wall Street bankers and investment bankers, as represented by the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberger Group, Council on Foreign Relations, Skull and Bones Society, Ford Foundation, and Chicago School of Friedmanite economics. The family business which Obama inherited from his mother (a Ford Foundation anthropologist and counterinsurgency operative who also worked for the World Bank and the US Agency for International Development) was to work for foundations. And this is what Obama has done in his life, working at various times for or with the Gamaliel Foundation, the Woods Fund, the Joyce Foundation, the Annenberg Foundation, and other foundations and entities which notoriously look to the Ford Foundation for guidance and leadership. Obama is best described as a foundation-bred counterinsurgent, that is to say an operative in the service of the US financier ruling class whose task it is to wreck and abort any positive outcomes that might be forthcoming from the political ferment which is shaking the globe, and above all from the deep political upsurge which is clearly at hand in this country.

Obama claims to be a uniter, but the simplest empirical survey will show that he is the most explosive divider seen in this country in decades, since he has succeeded in splitting both the Democratic Party and the US population in general according to the classic fault lines of white against black, black against Hispanic, black against Asian, black against Jewish, men against women, old against young, rich against poor. Having seen Obama accomplish all of this in less than a year and a half on the campaign trail, we can confidently predict that an Obama presidency would in all probability put the United States well on its way to civil war. Giving Obama and his financier controllers the White House would represent an act of national suicide for this country, with the most catastrophic implications for the world as a whole. This analysis is corroborated by the fact that Obama, alone among all the protagonists of the 2008 presidential contest, possesses either a postmodern fascist mass movement, or a very plausible facsimile thereof. These are the lemming legions who are not supporting a program of measures that the government might take, but who are hysterically loyal to and obsessed with Obama as a fantasy figure and charismatic savior – in other words, as an emerging fascist leader. As those who lived through Italy in 1922 and Germany in 1933 remind us in the writings they have left behind, there is simply no comparison between a normal, corrupt, bourgeois parliamentary regime and a fascist seizure of power.

[...]

The first instinct of most right-wingers is to look at Obama’s middle name of Hussein, and perhaps at his Moslem father and step-father and at his time in school in Indonesia, and announce that Obama is a Moslem. But this will hardly do. Obama’s father and step- father were united not by the Koran, but rather by their shared devotion to Johnny Walker, which increased as they got older. And if Obama himself were a secularized Moslem, so what? Voters have a right to know Obama’s religious history in full detail, but there is no religious test for office. But Obama is something very sinister indeed. Obama himself is either an atheist, or much more likely a Satanist of the apostate Jeremiah Wright-James Cone-black liberation theology school, a Christian heresy which places racist hatred instead of charity at the center of its edifice of faith. Wright is ultimately the high priest of a death cult. Obama is, more precisely, an existentialist fascist made of equal parts 1969 Weatherman race war theory and Frantz Fanon’s cult of violent Third World rebellion. This is what low-income blue collar voters in West Virginia have understood far better than all the effete snobs who profess postmodernism at Harvard. [my emphasis --wa.]

The section is entitled 'The Mendacity of Dope,' but I haven't been able to stop crying long enough to get to the part about drugs yet. It promises to be fascinating!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I did a Spotlight search on my machine for 'Trilateral.' The first hit was, you guessed it nerd boy, a page in a GURPS Illuminati. Second hit was Dictionary.app. Third hit, Tarpley's book. No fourth hit. (If there had been five I would never have posted this, of course.)

Michael Crichton.

There are books I come back to every few months, even today: DFW's first essay collection, Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett, David Milch's two TV-tie-in books (weird but true). When I was in grade school, my comfort books were Lord of the Rings, sure, but mainly Jurassic Park. I must have read it cover-to-cover more than a half-dozen times, and have read favourite passages many many more times than that. I first heard about the book in seventh grade - I think it was still in hardcover then, and it was talked about in a little science magazine that our Life Science teacher, Mr Hall, handed out in class. The book was perfect for me: brainy action, breathless suspense, dopey prose, cardboard characters, a socially-awkward scientist as the hero, and an insane climax involving, of all things, a babychild navigating VRML menus. (Plus a harrowing anticlimax, purely intellectual, cut from the film: the characters sneak into a velociraptor nest and find out the dinos want to...migrate! What a thrill.)

I loved everything about it. Plus, Crichton was artist-in-residence at MIT in the mid-90's; that made me want to go there all the more. I was weirdly proud to follow in his footsteps in that regard. Dorky? OK.

In high school I read a bunch of Crichton's other novels, and always had a soft spot for Sphere - indeed wrote stories based on it. (Fanfic? Say it ain't so.) In college that was it for him and me; I never picked up his work again after the disappointing Park sequel The Lost World (I was embarrassed for him when that book came out - even if its jacket copy is perfect). Somewhere along the line Crichton began to slide into something awful: I was too young to understand how racist Rising Sun is, how grotesque Disclosure's ball-breaking female lead is, but what I know about his last novels leads me to believe that they're embarrassing reactionary tales about the horrors of new tech and leftist antiscience. He followed a line.

Still, certain aesthetic categories I now understand in terms of the stories of my childhood, and Critchton's work looms large among my early favourite books. Crichton died today, aged 66 years. I'm sad to hear of his passing.

More crying in public.

'Getting to Know David Foster Wallace.' Go read now, now, now.

More bloggerly thinking-out-loud: pirate stories.

Of course Pirates of the Caribbean is nothing more than Star Wars with the 'space' in 'space pirate' cut for copyright reasons. Indeed, PotC has more in common with George Lucas's movie than even Firefly does - and Firefly was conceived of in explicitly Lucasian terms. (Nerdly clarification: Joss Whedon has described Firefly as the life of Han Solo if he hadn't picked up Luke and Ben at Mos Eisley.)[*] The basic plot of Pirates of the Caribbean puts a Romeo and Juliet twist on the story of Luke Skywalker: young kid runs off with (space) pirate after tragedy in his hometown, discovers that he has a sacred/tragic birthright that grants him neat-o powers; conscripted into pirate/hero duty, he and the older swashbuckler save the girl, and he avenges his father's fate by allowing him a dignified end. The coda of the third Pirates film is the most daring thing about that trilogy (besides Johnny Depp's ever-increasingly-hammy Keith Richards-inspired performance), and the original Star Wars trilogy has nothing to match it, though I'd argue (sigh) that the problematic prequels equal the PotC ending's structural neatness.

No matter! The point is, Star Wars is a pirates movie, and a boys' adventure, and once that's clear you start to see structural homologies all over the place. Start with the lamentable Carnivále - identical in some respects to Star Wars, down to the numinous Force(s) the young predestined protagonist controls. Harry Potter is more or less the same story as well, which is also clarifying: these boy-meets-pirate movies are (when they're honest) always bittersweet, dealing as they do with the psychic cost of going off adventuring without the emotional protection of grownups' armour. (I never did read Treasure Island or the like, but I'm guessing yer lit-crit type could take this 'argument' in that direction. Plus, duh: Peter Pan.) And this is the place to mention The Princess Bride, which book and movie can be seen (maybe) as sly critical reflections on these themes - hell, Wesley the Farm Boy runs off to become a pirate and casts that duty off when he's ready to settle down, just like his predecessors. He's not just a pirate, within the story he's an already-fictional pirate - a tidy little metaphor if you please. And check out that framing story with the sad old man cluing the little kid in! (Obviously The Princess Bride is Lord Jim for impatient people.)

All these lost-innocence stories using a swashbuckling-pirates framework. Why's that? Because piracy means, almost literally, lawlessness; because ships at sea are their own moral universes (cf. that goddamn big whale book); because little boys are meant to want to run away, even as they're discouraged at every turn from actually doing so.

Inversions of this basic pirates-are-naughty-babysitters theme can be found in certain magical-land stories like Spirited Away, The Jungle Book (to an extent), et al. And, yes: war stories. Running off to join the army is the order-follower's version of the kid-raised-by-pirates story with a switch flipped: unlike the pirates, the army promises to take care of you and then fails (the Dread Pirate Roberts does it the other way around - 'Good work Wesley, I'll most likely kill you in the morning'). Vietnam stories: I didn't believe the goddamn pirates' promises when they took me in, and I knew better in the jungle than to believe them, but I'm still mad and I'm voting for George Bush. Fuck!

Well this is all a bit much and I want to get to other things. But this has been your free-associated hit-and-miss nonsense hour, Reader(s). Er, not 'hour.' However long it's been.

* * *

[*] Even nerdlier note: I suspect Whedon couldn't help himself - the grand arc of Firefly, compressed into the Serenity movie, is the process by which Han comes to realize he should in fact be helping Luke (River, the would-be rebels) out. Firefly was to have taken several years to get from Han abandoning Luke in the hangar on Yavin to 'Let's blow this thing and go home.' Joss didn't get a chance to tell the story at his pace, with his intended recentering, so he made something a hell of a lot closer to Star Wars itself. The most interesting moral switch-up in the Firefly universe might be the neat little triplet in the feature film, Serenity:

MAL: Hey, little one. Understand your part in all this?

RIVER: Do you?

MAL: (doubtful) This is what I do, darlin'. It's what I do.

...which is to say that the moral arc to watch out for in Star Wars isn't Luke's (which is growing up, and inevitable), it's Han's (which is reaching out, and quite optional).

Whores' Guild, blogosphere chapter (a/k/a 'Some excellent gaming blogs you should be reading').

[I know, it's not as perfect a name as '"Concerned Ladies of America West (C.L.A.W.)" East Coast Chapter,' but it'll have to do.]

I should note that the long D&D-n-sex post below was inspired by some recent nerdly blog-reading. If you're at all interested in roleplaying games from a player's, gamemaster's, writer's, or more abstract/theoretical point of view, you should definitely be looking at the following blogs, among others:

• The Chatty DM. Linked here, if memory serves, to read about Chatty's 'Kobold Love' project (housed at Chatty Studios): an open-source D&D adventure written for 4th edition, with an open call for other authors to develop analogous adventures for other systems. The charming hook: the PC's play kobolds, out to avenge the adventurers who keep wrecking their lives for no good reason. What inspired me about it was that he'd made his writerly pastime into something he could share with other gamers; Chatty recently parlayed that webgoing notoriety into a paying RPG-writing gig. And I was all like 'fuck that, I'm as good an unemployed writer as I know, I should...' and then I typed various things which at some point I'll share with you, Reader(s), whom I love but do not, ultimately, trust as far as I can throw you. Anyhow: have a look.
• Jonathan Drain. Heady writing about RPGs; start here if you have writerly predispositions (or preoccupations or, I suppose, fucked up self-image). His best post, to my eye, may be this one, 'The Invisible Dungeon' - a smart, bootstrappy way to think about system-agnostic adventure construction.
• Mike Mearls (also here). One of the lead designers on D&D 4e, and more or less a straight shooter re: the gaming industry (near as I can tell). Alas, his audio interviews reveal that he is a native speaker of Geek English with a Geek accent, which drives me up the wall - but then I am judgmental and my mom was an English-language snob and what can you do.
• Critical Hits. A series of podcast interviews and live-play recordings. (Oh I hate myself.) Plus reviews and such, but frankly you can take or leave those.
• Dungeon Mastering. Interesting collection of articles, with a helpful assortment of documents to get campaigns and such started - plus the biggest collections of free adventures and maps I've seen.
• Kobold Quarterly. The new Dragon magazine, by all accounts. Home of Wolfgang Baur of Open Design microfame. Open Design is a project to watch - spiritual successor to Dave Sim's self-publishing, among other things. Question: how big does your built-in audience have to be in order for you to make money writing as Baur now does, under a patronage model?
• Treasure Tables. Lovely.
• Gnome Stew. Even lovelier - system-agnostic GMing advice with a design-y bent.

And while we're at it, Reader(s), you may or may not know that among the occasional commenters at this site is a gentleman named Adam Roberts, who is British and therefore suspect in most ways but who is - had I only known this the day I jumped on him at The Valve for some silly thing I've now forgotten! - apparently one of the more highly-regarded writers of hard-SF of these, the Latter Days. Jesus Christ, one newspaper reviewer has said he possesses "perhaps the most untrammelled imagination in British fiction," which again - British, hence suspect - but honestly if someone said I had even 'perhaps the nicest hairshirt among pseudonymous Cambridge bloggers' I'd just keel over and die from an overdose of autoplotzing. ('Plotzing re: oneself' --wgh coinage)

I mention gentleman Roberts because you should read his stuff, critical and fictional (irritatingly, he's also a fine critic), and because...whenever he leaves a comment that can be interpreted as nice, I become uneasy, thinking that perhaps I'm being dissed in a dogwhistle sort of way audible only to other people who actually collected their grad school diplomas. Such is the depth of my feeling of inadequacy that I've closed comments on this post to keep you, whoever you is/are/would-have-your-friends-believe-you-to-be-in-the-plural-or-singular, to keep you from coddling me in any way. That's boldness. I'm a barbarian and I'm bold.

When I was a boy.

I read Lord of the Rings over the first month or so of my sophomore year of high school; I'd gotten it at a bookshop in Brighton, England, on a trip with my family (our first overseas). This painting was the cover image:

But the image was quite smartly cropped for the cover, with gold foil runes at the top and bottom borders, and it's been tinted - green tint and a grey feeling. The splash of white around the title is all the more visually effective as a result:

The book is one of my most prized possessions, as is the memory of reading it for the first time. I was bad about doing homework then - a problem I never quite overcame - and I'd spend evenings in my bed reading, eyes straining under the dim desk lamp (I needed reading glasses not long after). I remember reading the Helm's Deep sequence over and over; I could hear the thunder of hoofbeats on stone and earth, and could imagine Aragorn and Theoden riding splendidly out of the fortress cutting a swathe through the mass of orcs. I loved the pace of it, the idleness of the story in its first chapters; I read the preface, concerning Hobbits, on the train back to London the day I received the book (a gift from the parents), and that train ride constitutes perhaps my happiest memory of the trip. I don't think I looked up from the book even once in that time, yet Tolkien's book, of all books, seems in retrospect like a reasonable substitute for the real England - at least as seen through the window of a train car.

I miss the feel of Middle-Earth as I imagined it then; I'm sure I'll have trouble recapturing the faces I saw on that first reading, having now seen Peter Jackson's films several times. But I'd like to try sometime. It was fourteen years ago this autumn that I came back from Middle-Earth and I've always meant to return. I guess there's time. Seeing Gandalf approach through the rain and mist took me away from a moment. Love of any sort can do that, and there's room for all sorts of love.

Thinkin'.

"I'm very bright but I'm also terrified of coming off as someone who's very bright, because people who come off as very bright are buttholes." -DFW on Silverblatt's KCRW show, probably transcribed incorrectly by me today, John Coltrane's birthday, 2008.

Trane was born today years ago. If I keep producing text without genre or apparent form someone will notice. I tell myself all the time. I refuse to admit this when asked, of course, because there's nothing more grotesque than to be pathologically certain of your own importance and pathologically unable to confront your possible (likely) smallness in the eye of Everyone Else by simply being a human being, accountable for your actions, connected to others by your works, by the fruit of your labours. To retreat into a private world in which you're king, because you're unable to contemplate your own smallness in the Real World - which is to say, because you're unwilling to confront the smallness of others, thereby gaining the most basic perspective on the world - and hey, if that means you're quick to defend people when they denigrate themselves, cool, but what you're doing by hiding is the same sort of denigration, only worse, as you won't even let yourself be held accountable for your self-evaluation, like a congressional committee refusing to publish its findings before the election...but Trane was born today, and I think of him sitting in a darkened living room fingering notes on his saxophone with no mouthpiece in late at night, banned from out-loud practicing by the neighbours, or even by his sense of common decency - what a thing in a genius of his stature, bigness is to make room for small things - and then the next night, out of his world and the comfort of thoughts large enough to match his place and sense of place in the world and on to the bandstand, if you can just imagine it, to perform music that no one else had even heard much less played before, much less played in public, much less pursued relentlessly through all-night concerts and hourlong saxophone solos and recording sessions whenever he wanted them - Jesus what trust! - much less given freely to the world as part of a discipline that through its generosity became spiritual, and in 1967 without slowing down or retreating or second-guessing himself he died, Trane died, Trane is dead, and more than forty years on we're still discovering him and bringing him back to life with questions, merely mortal: What do we do? and How do we play? and How can we hear what you heard? and Did He speak to you? and of course Why did you go? Why, friend? And forty years on it's alright to say Please come back and finish singing, keep singing. As if the music fades when one voice drops out.

What form to fit this feeling in. What mode of speaking. What practice - rhetorical yes but even, taken out to illogical extremes, spiritual - what practice to pursue and by which to define oneself. And: to what imagined end? 'Never to be an adversary on small things,' Norman Rush, fine, which isn't just about love and marriage, rather a definition of faith, which is 'All things are of a piece' or something. And you might take that as license to say whatever shit comes to mind, and 'Hey I said it, you go figure it out,' but don't do that. One day my clarinet teacher taught me about the altissimo register, the way-up-there notes that look like flute music. You make these thin, clear notes by lifting one of the upper fingers on your left hand and overblowing, like setting up your tennis opponent to move back to center court and then smacking the ball to right where he was, it's called wrong-footing, and I've always thought of altissimo playing as somehow wrong-footing the sound itself, or the air. Snapping the wind tunnel within the clarinet like a leather rope. I see the sound that way. And for the longest time I hated it, couldn't get my mind around why you would trust this stuttering airflow to carry meaning for you down past warm fingertips to the bell of your horn and out to expectant ears, the audience's trust at stake. I couldn't even produce high D above the staff for days, embarrassing. Having convinced myself that there was a right and a wrong way to blow air through a wooden tube, and right and wrong sorts of pretty and fine and sexy and beautiful and all these other things I didn't in any case think I was. Trane lived there for ten minutes at a time, on the bandstand, as a gift, in faith, disciplined. I heard him do it, across years on a recording. The thing has to be found, and is separate; you learn and it becomes one with all; you learn and it finds its own meaning again; you learn, after a while, that the thing isn't the thing, and when you stop bending over the thing to peer at its shape you can step back and see that it's dancing, and not just for you. Well I did learn something, in time, but not everything, and so I'm writing about D-above-the-staff instead of what love is, but backing away we might charitably say that the wrong look at a dance doesn't unmake the dance. Which charity I hope I don't take for granted. Trane would have been eighty-two today instead of the forty he'll be forever. We honor his memory by honoring one another, and I hope that this is two paragraphs of that. Dance to what you hear now.

Devastated and lost.

McSweeney's remembers David Foster Wallace.

Kissing.

Success.

Jest.

We are short one more master.

May he find his way to the other shore.

Certain compulsions discussed.

[The following focuses even more tightly on my navel than usual. If that sort of thing is OK with you, then sure: you'll probably be OK with this sort of thing. From my perspective it needed saying. From yours there's no 'need,' really. Why try to scare you off? I'll feel less guilty if you just don't read the post than if you start doing so and abandon the thing. Ha! Like I'd know. But I will somehow know. That's modern tech, Reader(s). Love it.]

I realized only recently that I'm a compulsive shopper. I've long been aware of my inability to walk into a bookstore and walk out empty-handed, but this summer I began to think of this (ahem) charming disposition as something more sinister. At dinner last night a friend asked how much business I'd given the Harvard Book Store; offhand I quoted a number that seemed comically high to me, but on further reflection it may actually have been low, never mind the over-the-years outlay at Rodney's in Central Square, Davis Square's McIntyre & Moore, or the Coop at MIT and Harvard - where I used to make late-summer trips to pick at the assigned reading lists for classes I wasn't taking, in Literature (sure) but also Physics, Anthropology, Math, Biology...

(Side note on personal 'style': normally there would be an additional, melodramatic 'or' before 'Davis' in the preceding paragraph. An artifact of my staginess; it's for speaking. Deleting it took an effort of will, I tell you. Some compulsions are more benign than others but you find something new on the other side of any one of them.)

My bookshelves are overflowing with unfinished books, which is fine, but also plenty of books I'll likely never begin, which is not fine. e.g. A Barnes & Noble collected edition of Jane Austen's novels, hefty, sloppily designed, purchased on a trip several years ago as a palliative when I realized (via accusation?) that I hadn't read a woman's writing in years.[*] 'Straight to the top!' I vowed. Now it rests alongside an ancient Mark Helprin omnibus edition from the Quality Paperback Club (bought to assuage my guilt over not taking the recommendations of a former paramour), the millionth unfinished copy of Erewhon (reading list, anthropology), an assortment of 'great buys' from the nearby Salvation Army store (including The Lovely Bones and The Closing of the American Mind, both purchased, I suspect, under the auspices of a personal, aspirational Fairness Doctrine - The Lovely Bones being by all accounts the Sarah Palin of recent novels). I mean to read them, vow to read them, but I know I won't. I can go along with a lie knowing it's a lie - which makes me not a fine liar but an ideal gull.

This all extends to downloading. My music-acquisition model is associational and aspirational as well. (Oh it's a 'model' now?) The other day, for instance, I found myself downloading not one but three albums by The Hold Steady. Why? Because one song had rung my bell. In retrospect, after the muted pleasure of acquisition has faded, I realize that the song that excited me wasn't even by The Hold Steady; it's a Dirty Projectors tune, which for some fanciful reason I associate with the other band. And why am I listening to Dirty Projectors?

1) Farhad, my surrogate older brother, insisted that I track them down, and I can't be disloyal to him;

2) They sound like the sort of band I'd like if I were rigorous in my affections (affectations?), at times coming off as an indie rock Phish with splashes of Queen and Peter Gabriel, who by the way let me tell you about Peter Gabriel: I'm happy to praise the man, maintain an affection for him, and can hardly bear to listen to more than a dozen of his songs, like a negative image of Bob Dylan, whom I dislike and indeed deem it important somehow to dislike, even though maybe a dozen of his songs constitute a reasonable argument for the sum and substance of the meaning of pop music. I took two courses at Johns Hopkins over a high school summer, and the last week of the program saw a dance for the high schoolers at which In Your Eyes played, and I stood outside the dance in the warm air with three or four goony fellas while someone smoked a cigarette and we looked at each other and insisted we didn't need to dance with girls to have a good time, but we also didn't leave until the song was over.

Same deal with the day on which I acquired a half-dozen albums by Loretta Lynn, Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, and Dolly Parton. This is music I should be listening to, good stuff, but it came from the impulse to like the music rather than, y'know, actually listen to it. I was already going through a high-frequency cycle of evaluation and disappointment halfway through the first verse of the first song. The object of my evaluation was my affection. Oh don't tell me this is all about 'the mystery of love' or somesuch nonsense.

Plus: let's not even start on the several burnt DVD's full of scanned comic books, roleplaying game and wargame rules, and concert footage of bands toward whom I feel mostly ambivalence - which are filling up both the study and the living room table.

It is, for whatever reason, not this way with movies. Maybe because they're expensive and a pain to download. And I hate clothes shopping, indeed hate just about every form of shopping that doesn't involve books or company.

So: to what extent, and in what way, does this compulsion to acquire media, more importantly to devour it and make it part of me, play into my self-identification as 'critic' (or just plain 'writer,' or 'storyteller')? Well I couldn't say, but then if I could say, this wouldn't be a blog, it'd be a novel.

* * *

I check my email compulsively too but we'll come back to that another day, because the knotty problem is that I don't actually respond to my email. Hell, I can't even respond to comments here - e.g. when I get what I take to be a sincere compliment, I'm paralyzed by the possibility that there's some ironic or deprecatory register to which I don't have access, that I'm not qualified to talk to the people I desperately want to talk to (or in any case am compelled to feel qualified to talk to, never mind actually building up my qualifications by e.g. doing the reading). And I feel sure that I'll be dismissed if I seek conversation by those I take to be my superiors or in any case elders. You might say 'that's just low self-esteem' but if the experience were anywhere near that simple, if it were one thing to feel like it's one thing to say, again: this would be a novel, not a blog.

You know something? I'm gonna print this out and give it to my therapist. But five'll get you ten I preempt any discussion of the article's substance by a prefatory 'offhand' suggestion that printing my writing for him is really a way of seeking approval from a (presumably!) benign surrogate who's never ever going to criticize its literary merit and is guaranteed to care about the content because he's paid to do so. I want to email him written prefaces to our weekly sessions but don't wish to impose on him, couldn't evaluate the wisdom of such a thing, and can't ask him whether that'd be alright because 'Um, is it OK if I email you this week?' brings back too many memories of instant-messaging girls in the computer clusters at MIT, striking up doomed typed conversations, self-effacing and self-sabotaging.

Thank God for my wife. On the other side of the compulsive need to say 'I love you' is the faith that you are loved. It needn't be a question seeking confirmation. It can be a register of the thing that opens you and opens for you, complete in itself. I am at rest: and when I say 'I love you' I say it restfully. Which only sounds like getting old. You fool.

Don't know why I'd end here but I will. If you didn't follow the asterisk when it appeared, your now-tonally-inappropriate anticlimax follows. Enjoy.

* * *

[*] Possibly not since taking classes on Virginia Woolf and Caryl Churchill, the latter of whom (on the page anyhow) could put you off all literature if you let your guard down. Light Shining on Buckinghamshire made me think I'd been shown a new universe, but by the second act of Top Girls and the (maybe) insufferable Cloud Nine I was ready to give up. (Loved the rhyming-verse 'city comedy' Serious Money though, what a surprise.) That Churchill was paired in a pomo theatre class with Tom Stoppard didn't help her standing in my mind: Stoppard's plays are like crack cocaine to me, even the pure philosophy-noir abstraction of Jumpers, and as he's gotten more sentimental I've found more to like in his writing, not less. The Shakespeare Ensemble kids had their usual orgasms over the game of Questions in R&G, but The Invention of Love is where my heart came to rest. Weirdly, Arcadia didn't arrest me the same way - maybe I'm skeptical about representations of science by decided nonscientists, maybe I resented that it was the play of his that I was mandated to like by fellow-travelers. But since none of this is an argument on merit anyhow, I needn't dig too deep.[**]

[**] Look at that long-ass footnote! Pure defensiveness: a little bit of aww-shucks erudition because I'm embarrassed about the number of unread books I own.

First impressions of Braid, at length.

A wise friend recommended the new, much-talked-about XBox360 game Braid the other day, so when the chance arose yesterday to give it a whirl at Farhad's place, I was intrigued. The talk goes like this: an impressionistic platformer even better than Portal, with truly innovative gameplay, beautiful art, and a haunting, poetic narrative underneath it all.

Alas, the talk is only partly correct.

[Spoilers follow. Summary: If you've got an XBox360, you absolutely should give Braid a whirl, but if you find yourself uninterested in the story or worse, don't worry - it's not you, it's the designer, in more ways than one.]

The gameplay in Braid is exciting and original: each level involves manipulating time in a different way, such that it's impossible to die or even permanently screw up. Throughout the game you have a literal rewind button that is central to solving most of your problems. One series of levels involves a ring that slows time only in its vicinity; one lets you rewind several seconds and send your shadow to play out the time that you rewound (letting you complete multiple tasks at once). The nastiest, cleverest section has time move forward when your character moves to the right, but backward when you move to the left; in-game tokens let you unmoor certain objects from the time stream so that they always move forward, and at full-speed, both you and the bad guys (more on them below). The effect is intoxicating and maddening. The music - which is pretty - scrubs back and forth as you go, which creates an eerie and oddly desolate atmosphere.

(Farhad points out that the aesthetics of the game may be inspired by the teenagers who make max-score and minimum-time runthrough videos for platformers - you can see them on YouTube. Many such videos splice together multiple takes and savegame edits - the equivalents of Braid's time-shifting. I suspect he's right.)

And the art...the background art looks like oils and watercolors and, though it's not terribly innovative at this point (there are plenty of Flash games that look better), it's lovely. The sprites are something else - more on those later.

The final level of the game begins with a slightly-incoherent cutscene. Then it's a timed race against an encroaching wall of fire that keeps you from meeting up with your lady love. You dash to the right and can't go back (a la the old-style platformers). When you reach level's end, you're inexplicably barred from reaching her to celebrate - and then the entire level plays in reverse, only instead of running backward as in your usual rewinds, you run forward (but in the direction you came from).

You retreat to the beginning of the level, and the cutscene plays in reverse. Then comes the game's 'big reveal.'

And here my troubles began.

First, the little problems: most of the puzzles in the game can be solved only one way; they're logic puzzles that happen to move, and the novelty and beauty of the time-shifting mechanisms elevate it perhaps out of proportion with its level of game-design craft. This isn't to disparage the gameplay - it's addictive and beautiful (and when was the last time you could pair those two words to talk about a platformer?), only to point out that the critics who call this 'Best Game Ever' are praising a three-hour-long logic puzzle dressed up as something else.

The character art (particularly the embarrassing representation of the princess) is just tacky, given the elegance of the background work; might be deliberate though. The tackiness stems from the game's primary visual influence: it's a parody of the original Super Mario Bros. game, complete with carnivorous plants springing from pipes, mushroom troopers, hard-to-reach powerups, and childish jokes riffing on 'Your princess is in another castle.' The sprites look like a teenager's tribute to Mario and the animation is simplistic, inelegant, and in places incomplete (watch Tim 'pick up' a key). It's not a good idea; it's also not clear why the designer thought this was a good idea. Presumably this is to link thematically with the game's story, which (unfortunately) we're coming to. Or perhaps he was so enamored of his neat game mechanics that he chose absolutely the most regressive childhood fantasy imaginable as his aesthetic starting-point? Or - maybe 'regression' is part of the point of the game? (This is to give him too much credit, I think. More on that in a moment.)

The game is short, quite so - literally three hours of fresh gameplay. I'd pay fifteen bucks for that, but not fifty, but that's to quibble over money and not quality. Still, at full price you're getting taken a bit.

Great as game, bad as art.

Here's the unfortunate thing about Braid:

It's broken up by long stretches of prose reading, which tells a story about...well, that's the big interpretive question. It's about a breakup, or maybe the creation of the atomic bomb, or maybe just a kid daydreaming about a girl in Manhattan, or - it could actually be a very short story about a child overthinking a game of Super Mario Bros..

And the writing is absolutely fucking awful.

There's an ongoing debate among gamer and game-critic types as to whether the text is supposed to be clunky, overwrought, solipsistic, and connected to the gameplay only by thin filaments of association (e.g. the carrying-on about memory and regret, plus a mechanic that lets you move time - yes, how very droll). Regardless, the text really is clunky, overwrought, and solipsistic:

He worked his ruler and his compass. He inferred. He deduced. He scrutinized the fall of an apple, the twisting of metal orbs hanging from a thread. He was searching for the Princess, and he would not stop until he found her, for he was hungry. He cut rats into pieces to examine their brains, implanted tungsten posts into the skulls of water-starved monkeys.

Ghostly, she stood in front of him and looked into his eyes. "I am here," she said. "I am here. I want to touch you." She pleaded: "Look at me! But he would not see her; he only knew hot to look at the outside of things.

Wait, here's some more!

The boy called for the girl to follow him, and he took her hand. He would protect her; they would make their way through this oppressive castle, fighting off the creatures made of smoke and doubt, escaping to a life of freedom,

The boy wanted to protect the girl. He held her hand, or put his arm around her shoulders in a walking embrace, to help her feel supported and close to him amid the impersonal throngs of Manhattan. They turned and made their way toward the Canal St. subway station, and he picked a path through the jostling crowd.

His arm weighed upon her shoulders, felt constrictive around her neck. "You're burdening me with your ridiculous need," she said. Or, she said: "You're going the wrong way and you're pulling me with you." In another time, another place, she said: "Stop yanking on my arm; you're hurting me!"

And...

The candy store. Everything he wanted was on the opposite side of that pane of glass. The store was decorated in bright colours, and the scents wafting out drove him crazy. He tried to rush for the door, or just get closer to the glass, but he couldn't. She held him back with great strength. Why would she hold him back? How might he break free of her grasp? He considered violence.

They had been here before on their daily walks. She didn't mind his screams and his shrieks, or the way he yanked painfully on her braid to make her stop. He was too little to know better.

She picked him up and hugged him: "No, baby", she said. He was shaking. She followed his gaze toward the treats sitting on pillows behind the glass: the chocolate bar and the magnetic monopole, the It-From-Bit and the Ethical Calculus; and so many other things, deeper inside. "Maybe when you're older, baby," she whispered, setting him back on his feet and leading him home, "Maybe when you're older."

Every day thereafter, as before, she always walked him on a route that passed in front of a candy store.

Every piece of text in the game is like this, which is written in a style called 'bad writing,' whether deliberately or not. What exactly is bad about it? The same thing that's bad about half the entries in NaNoWriMo, or everyone's first 'sexual coming of age' novel and indie rock album. It's not written for anyone but the designer, Jonathan Blow.

Here's Blow responding to criticisms of the game:

AVC: The game has been discussed extensively on the web, and I'm curious if you think people "get" it.

JB: There are some people who get the game, or at least significant parts of it. And there are some people who don't seem to really get the game. What's interesting is, as the author, you don't ever necessarily expect the audience to get the same thing out of an artwork that the author put in, right? But there are definitely highly significant things that I've put into the game that have very specific meanings to me, and looking around on message boards and forums, I've seen individual people find most or all of those pieces, and say, "I see this, you know, and here's what this means to me, etc." I haven't necessarily seen one person put it all together. It's a very, I would say actually a very complicated text, and the way it works with the gameplay and the puzzles is very complicated and subtle. And so I wouldn't even necessarily expect to see that yet. And frankly, my goal is not strictly to have most of the audience play the game and automatically understand [it].

And here's his most characteristic moment, from the same interview:

A long time ago, I used to write fiction, short stories mainly. And I reached a point where I had honed my style so that it wasn't totally atrocious, and I kind of knew what I was doing when writing, and then the question was just, "What do I write about now?" And I couldn't really find anything that I felt was important enough to write about. So I just kind of gave up on writing.

When you read comments like these, you know you're dealing with one of several things: some kind of spectrum disorder, crippling narcissism, outright lies, a total inability to introspect, or terminally stupidity (or some combination). Mr Blow is simply wrong about his own work: if he had honed his craft as a writer as he claims, readers would be getting things out of his writing. Yet the ponderous, insufficiently-edited text in the game displays 101-level failings: fanciful (i.e. merely personal) telescoping posing as concision; unnecessary repetition; 'the boy' and 'the girl' as your usual artlessly-deployed-childhood-image avatars (literally cartoons in the Scott McCloud sense); equally artless, stilted formalism ('He was searching for the Princess, and he would not stop until he found her, for he was hungry'); inconsistent point of view ('The boy wanted to protect the girl. He held her hand, or put his arm around her shoulders in a walking embrace, to help her feel supported and close to him amid the impersonal throngs of Manhattan') veering between cutesy kidspeak and boilerplate 20something editorial ('impersonal throngs of Manhattan').

Of course Blow gives the game away in his interview: 'But there are definitely highly significant things that I've put into the game that have very specific meanings to me, and looking around on message boards and forums, I've seen individual people find most or all of those pieces, and say, "I see this, you know, and here's what this means to me, etc."' He's struggling to deal with other people playing in his sandbox, and that's admirable, but thus far he's failing utterly at the task, retreating time and again into pure fancy, the arbitrary associations of private memory. Never more than in the text itself, which reeks of undigested personal impulses never converted into the gift of art.

Look:

One of my main interests in writing stories was in finding truth, like fundamental truths of the universe, or finding important things. But the problem is that writing isn’t a good venue for that. Because as I said, you can write anything the fuck you want down on a piece of paper, and as long as you're clever enough with your language, and your flow of logic from one sentence to the next – the better you are at those things, the more you can fool a reader into believing you. Even if what you’re writing down is total bullshit.

Blow claims that the repetitions and clunkiness of the writing serve a specific purpose; of course he's only asserted this and refuses (for whatever personal reasons) to speak in detail about the game's intended meaning(s). So we're left with the game itself, which plays like a dream (quite literally) and reads like a teenager's attempts at profundity, fading instantly on recollection, insisting childishly on connections instead of drawing them, mentioning memories instead of rendering them, playing at meaning instead of crafting it. I've played plenty of bad games and Braid definitely isn't one of them, but I'm startled by the irresponsibility of the thing: purely programmatic puzzles (tug on one thread and unravel the whole thing!); hermetic prose; a 'tribute' to old art that simply invokes its predecessor, expecting the invocation to stand in for meaningful comment. These are signs that an artist expects us to wonder at his work without him wondering, in turn, what we're up to, what we're thinking. Whether it works.

The first two-dozen pages of Finnegans Wake amount to a crash course in Joycean reading; even the first page's puns are easily parsed (on one level), the geography of the story established, the HCE symbol deployed quite overtly, the basic mythic material held up for first perusal. 'Great literature teaches us how to read it,' my mentor would say. Braid - which isn't Finnegans Wake, though don't tell Mr Blow that - either refuses or fails to do so; I'm guessing it's the former. But refusal is a failure of sorts.

All of which wouldn't be such a big deal - certainly wouldn't merit this rush of wings - if the puzzle-solving in Braid weren't so enjoyable, the mood so pervasive. As you explore each level you're supposed to collect literal puzzle pieces; they form pretty, melancholy paintings, one(?) of which directly affects gameplay (cleverly so). What's good about the game is absolutely wonderful. As Farhad and I took turns playing the game, collecting each puzzle piece filled us with a sense of accomplishment and relief - the basic mechanic of gamer pleasure. Yet: I remember the image on one of the paintings (the first one). That's it. I remember the miserable text passages, and I remember thinking that the game's finale was clever but not affecting at all. I remember thinking, a little later, that 'All this has been done before,' which is an unnecessarily portentous way of saying that 'The protagonist is really the victimizer' is neither a new idea nor a terribly interesting one.

And yet here I was, wondering whether there was a new idea at the heart of a 2D-platformer's story and prose. The boy sat back. He looked out the window at the green leafy tree and the blue bird who had stopped singing. He wondered where she was, whether she was thinking of him. Whether it mattered.

She thought: '"Makes you think" and "Is good" aren't the same things.' At another time, in a place that was as well a memory, she thought: 'Couldn't you have just written "He needs a goddamn editor" and been done with it?'

Well, well. He needs a goddamn editor. Bit late for that, really - you want me to go backward and unwrite the whole post?

How to understand reading on the Internet vs. reading books.

If you don't know anything about sex, have never seen a naked person other than yourself, then the first time you look at pornography is a revelation. You see anatomy, interlocking shapes, configurations of desire, the expected progression of physical this-and-that.

It is, in short, a learning experience.

And after not too long it begins to make you stupid.

I believe we've talked about this before but this NYTimes article reminds me that the category error analogizing 'reading online' to 'reading books' persists; comparing article-browsing and fanfic-commenting to prolonged engagement with a novel is like comparing looking at a porn film to talking about sex with your lover(s) (or even doing the thing). The one is what attention-deficit babies think makes up the other.

Shiiiiit, I'm too busy getting married this weekend to care about saving this sorry goddamn civilization! Cry amongst yourselves!!!!

'Astonished, Ms. Pryde.'

Heck of a stretch for Joss Whedon: Dollhouse in production, his run on Runaways coming to a triumphant (if embarrassingly delayed) conclusion, and his Astonishing X-Men getting a giant-sized finale (complete with a great opening Spidey monologue). Did I tear up at that extraordinary splash panel at the close? I confess that I did. Even if I'd forgotten what the hell was going on back at the Breakworld, this series has been consistently good and sometimes perfect (as in the moment that gave this post its title), a clean self-contained arc that showcased Whedon's butch action-guy side to great effect - particularly at the last, when 'butch action guy' turned out to be half the solution to the world's problems.

What a clever message, that. This Whedon fellow may be on to something.

Harsh start; truth.

The GF says a 'harsh start' is a beginning to an argument that puts you immediately on the defensive: e.g. 'DO YOU EVEN KNOW HOW TO MAKE A SHOPPING LIST?!' She also says:

'There's a claim that women are responsible for most 'harsh starts,' but I believe that's because men are inferior. They need so much direction.'

And that's why I love her.

Hat tip to Ai-ris for bringing this truth into our lives.

And of course.

Happy Bloomsday, Reader(s). I spent the week eating with relish the inner organs of all manner of little critters (and some tofu!), which seemed a reasonable way of honoring the beloved dead. No books for me today. Not quite the season yet: wedding planning and all.

Josshole moment, if you please, for Melaka ('Mel'? 'Mal'?) Fray, and Joss's favourite themes.

The 'Lurks' in Fray are, of course, sprung from the same well as the Reavers in Firefly (as are Joss Whedon's future-archaism slang, like 'rutting,' and the Western flavour of the proceedings - 'They called it the cavalry'). Indeed, Melaka Fray has as much in common with Malcolm Reynolds as with Buffy Summers, down to the lust for battle and stupid fools-rush-in improvisatory tendencies and 'it's about the guy in the foxhole next to you' soldier sense. You might say Fray is a test run for some of the Firefly sensibility - not surprising, given that it sprang into being in 2001, during Season Five of Buffy, when that show was reaching its teen-apocalypse apex and Buffy (not coincidentally) was moving decisively into adulthood. With the future-Slayer comic, Whedon could deal with a character whose hardness was less constantly negotiated than Buffy's, which was surely a clarifying and liberating experience for Whedon - it is, after all, a terrific comic book. [Update: I left out the killer panel: Melaka's standoff with Icarus! The dropped scythe, then: 'Faith.' Basically it's a teaser for Firefly with Mal and River rolled into one. Hello Whedonesque types!]

There are a few throughlines like this in Joss's work; after all, Alien: Resurrection is in many ways a dry run for Firefly, as I outlined before:

A band of misfit smugglers tracking down a dangerous killer from the depths of space aboard the government spaceship on which they've been captured. A crotchety mercenary. A noble captain. A loving criminal couple - of which the husband is lost in the line of duty. A young girl with superpowers - who by the way is able, when she wants, to 'become' a spaceship - and who's as dangerous to the crew as to her enemies. A sentimentally-named starship. Folktales of earth that was.

Can you identify this Joss Whedon sci-fi story?

Of course both are heavily indebted to Star Wars too - Whedon has described Firefly as a series version of Act Two of Star Wars.

Whedon is the patron saint of a certain screen/comics tough-girls movement, as well he should be, but he also comes back to his non-feminist (or only implicitly feminist) hobbyhorses often. That's part of what makes it so easy to like him rather than just one or two of the things he's done: there's a certain way of structuring the world that gets ported from one of his tales to the next. Not just the typical American sitcom's surrogate-family structure, but a particular left-of-the-law outcast circle standing for the moral right (indeed the need) to be imperfect. Not just young people standing up for themselves, but young people realizing that they have to help peers above and below them on the status ladder stand up as well. Not just Big Hero Moments, but the repeated staging of the moment when power is given, and as often given up (check out the latest Buffy comic, the finale of Drew Goddard's arc, particularly the way Dracula's behaviour in the final fight surely prefigures a great sacrifice at the end of Season Eight). Not just a complex revulsion/worship toward childbirth - there's never been a happy birth on a Whedon show! - nor the usual generation-gap resentments, but a belief in the possibility of grownups and kids becoming more like one another through vocational interaction and apprenticeship, a belief (in other words) in continuity of experience, rather than the irritating streak of teen-exceptionalism that shoots through nostalgic depictions of adolescence.

Whedon isn't a lazy nostalgia peddler or even centrally a pulp writer; he's a hardheaded ethicist, and even a comic as outwardly ridiculous as Fray (futuristic criminal superhero fights demons!) is part of a rigorous and - here's the important bit - surprisingly consistent moral argument about the meaning of 'family' and the nature of 'maturity.' He can do silly pulp - see the funny, forgettable Sugar Shock for a reminder - but even his silliest big works are dead serious. I confess that I kind of love the guy.

Sound familiar?

From the NYTimes article on Scott McClellan's new tell-all White House memoir:

President Bush "convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment," and has engaged in "self-deception" to justify his political ends, Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary, writes in a critical new memoir about his years in the West Wing.

In addition, Mr. McClellan writes, the decision to invade Iraq was a "serious strategic blunder," and yet, in his view, it was not the biggest mistake the Bush White House made. That, he says, was "a decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed."

In other words: George Bush 'fakes it 'til he makes it.' Man's a dry drunk, that makes sense.

Obvious in retrospect.

Hillary Clinton is Hamlet (Hamlette?): playing bugnuts to keep other people off while she figures out the best way to kill a motherfucker. Of course after a while she'll have offed basically everyone around her, largely in unpremeditated fashion, because in addition to playing crazy she also by all accounts is a little touched; she's gonna end up dead, no question, and some Norwegian dude (Ed Begley Jr.?) is gonna end up running things. So clear once you see it.

(She's also Macbeth, which is ironic, given that she's obviously also Lady Macbeth.)

Just saw Juno.

I'd read the script and was...mixed on it.

I was...mixed on the film too.

The experiences were emotionally identical. Maybe that's all that needs to be said about the film - or about Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody, anyhow. (The actors were wonderful throughout.)

* * *

I know it's maybe unfair for a Paul Thomas Anderson fan - for someone whose favourite movie most days is Magnolia, for god's sake! - to say 'When you rely that much on your [sappy affected faux-childish] soundtrack to do your tonal heavy lifting, something's off,' but that was my first-order response.

To a first approximation Juno is a Mary Sue story built around an underwritten romance (how underwritten can such an overwritten relationship be, and yet, and yet?!), a wish-fulfillment family unit, and a dialogic register so addicting that the writer gave the same style of speech to every single goddamn character except two - the halfway-villain and the angelic adoptive mother-to-be (the film's most interesting character). I felt emotionally manipulated by every single second of the film; it seemed to want me to want the world to be more like it, when in fact I rather enjoy being able to distinguish human beings in part by how they speak, how they feel, the level of seriousness with which they approach their own world(s).

Did I cry during this film? Several times, yes. Then again I've cried reading Terry Pratchett novels so maybe I'm a sucker. Actually no let's not cheapen this moment: there are shots and lines in Juno that are just magical ('It ended with a chair'; the final shot at the hospital; the final line at the mall). But as with Little Miss Sunshine, another aggressively moody/uplifting 'little' film that didn't come close to living up to its hype, I finished watching Juno (and reading its screenplay) and immediately wished it had meant something. Hell, maybe it inspired me somewhat: I liked its attitude toward pregnancy...which isn't the same thing as the cavalier way it talks about pregnancy; the film was too in love with its own voice and style to articulate complex facts about the experience, but it did bring across the presence or fact of complicated emotions).

A friend - apropos of nothing, someone who's become more dear to me than I would have predicted even a year ago, and whose company (I realize) I enjoy way out of proportion with the commonality of our styles or interests, so here's to you, Penguin - told me today that I have 'intense opinions' about film. That's about the shape of it. I knew how Juno ended before I saw it, and it still sucked me in; throughout the experience I found myself resistant to the film's attempts to move me, its self-congratulatory cleverness, its manic dialogue, its insufferable tweeness. Unlike Rushmore, it didn't kick my ass in the end. I remember reading Gravity's Rainbow the summer after my - sophomore? junior? - year of college, and seeing myself in some kind of competition with Thomas Pynchon, trying to wrestle this awesome work of art to the ground, Jacob in the tent or something I tell you. I wouldn't even call it by name; I referred to the story (not the physical book!) as 'The Albatross.' I loved it more than you can possibly imagine. And in the end I won, which actually meant letting Pynchon dictate the emotional and formal and experiential terms. I had to let myself be myself in the world of the story. I'm not even sure what that means - it was a strange and difficult time for a lot of reasons, no matter which damn year it was.

Juno, Jason Reitman, Diablo Cody, even Ellen Page...they didn't win. They barely fought. They were too busy listening to themselves on tape, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and

Angel, 'After the Fall,' issue #6: the low point thus far.

They/we are talking about it at Whedonesque, if you have a yearning for gushing and some bile (from me).

My comments from the Whedonesque thread (so I'll have 'em):

* * *

Ugh.

Tell the truth: this was a dull issue. It may in fact have been bad, not bad-for-Angel but plain ol' not-actually-good. Lynch isn't a bad writer and when he's on he's on, but the first part of 'First Night' fell flat. I'd gotten my hopes up after reading Shadow Puppets and trying to relax and trust the story, but...ugh.

One of the problems is with length: most of the issue is barely story-sketches. The Fred/Illyria stuff recapitulates what we already know or have inferred from Lynch's (in retrospect admirably layered) buildup of that story; same with the metrically inconsistent Lorne piece, its heartwarming John Byrne art notwithstanding; Betta George certainly appears to be an ichthyoid Mary Sue and adds nothing to the tale thus far (remember that Gunn knocked him out as soon as he captured him, and his main role has been as audience for Gunn's big 'I'm a conflicted villain' breast-beating monologue); and as for Connor...

...Connor, it turns out, experiences his big must-help-save-the-world reawakening after the funny but superfluous restoration of memories he already had (c'mon Brian), then runs into a bunch of dimwitted interchangeable bad guys (most of the demons in Lynch's LA - um, Brian's, not David's, though I guess David's too now that I think about it - speak in the same 'comic' register, specifically a by now familiar ironic-stoner-literalist one, and it's getting boring), and turns out to have the internal monologue not of a conflicted demon-killing badass who's drowning in hormones and his own unique rage/serenity cocktail, but of a fucking chucklehead straight off the Saved by the Bell callsheet. His internal monologue has almost no emotional content to it, it feels like fanwank, a kind of loose metareflection on his narrative state. And his keen warrior sense prompts him to, er, crouch next to a parked car as an army walks by.

The Connor story isn't 'What is it like to be a kid dropped back into a dark hell that closely resembles his teenage years, and confronted anew with the fact that he has three fathers?' No, it's 'What would we love to see "Connor from the TV show Angel" do in the following plot situation?' Funny, sure, somewhat. But so far, meaningless.

I know this issue is supposed to be a lark and all (the poster and rhyming couplets kinda clued me in), but it's also supposed to be the canonical depiction of what was (and still is) the emotional high point of the entire Angel saga. I love comics, but just because there are panel borders on the page doesn't mean the story has to be a goddamn cartoon. Does that make sense?

None of this would bother me half as much if Goddard and Whedon (and Jeanty!!) weren't knocking it out of the park on the Buffy comic under Joss's direct supervision. The editorial oversight brings specificity. This book is lacking that. I know it's much, much easier to criticize than to create, and I enjoy writing this probably as little as you enjoy reading it, but fandom could mean discrimination (in the positive sense). And even with Brian posting actively in this forum, I'd feel worse if the only responses were gushing praise for just allowing us to see our oh-so-precious Fang Gang again. Joss Whedon's name is on the cover of this book and it should be better than it is.

* * *

Aah, but credit where due: the first pages of the Spike story were snappy and well-written. Even the on-a-dime turns (starting with 'I was ready to die for revenge and justice and glory and now I'm turning to a life of hedonism,' however short-lived) were believable. And I like the conceit of Spike thinking of himself as Fred/Illyria's protector - it'll be interesting to see how that turns out. But I'd much, much, much rather get back to the main story, and see Fred/Illyria integrate into the Gang as a whole. This issue didn't do justice to the cool setup Lynch has going.

* * *

Aah, but sidebar: 'Hope that's not taken outta context' is fanservice; it refers to the reader, not the character. In general Whedon's stories have steered clear of that kind of narrative pandering, which isn't always bad or out of place, but feels gratuitous in this book. Angel's story may take place in LA but it needn't have a Hollywood feel to it.

(Other instances: 'Dawn's in trouble. Must be Tuesday' is a riff on the let's-play-dressup nature of 'OMWF'; half of 'Tabula Rasa' has a fanservice quality but it's also genre-marked and so at least palatable; 'Storyteller' takes a similar tone, but grounds it firmly in Andrew's perspective. And so forth. There's never a moment in Whedon's own work when the characters merely articulate something on behalf of the fans, even if the reader/viewer can often count on some character - Spike, Cordy, Anya - to verbalize her questions. Again, this goes to the sense of doubled purpose that I've said is missing from the Angel comic right now. And it's never bothered me as much as in the latest issue.)

Iron rat!

Tony Stark, a/k/a Iron Man (of the Marvel comic book series and forthcoming film), entered MIT at age 15. OK, what nonsense, get past it.

Robert Downey Jr. plays Stark in this summer's flick.

In promotional stills from the film, let us celebrate that...he is wearing a Brass Rat.

Is it weird that this makes me really, really happy?

Latest Angel comic; tonal integration in writing; Joss Whedon yet again.

Gotta tell you, I'm close to giving up entirely on the Angel 'Season Six' miniseries. (It's called 'After the Fall' and is a ~12-issue mini, but it's been marketed as a shortened sixth season of the show, analogous to Whedon's full-blown 40-issue Buffy Season Eight.) Issue #5 was probably the best one yet (though the cliffhanger ending was totally oversold by IDW's breathless, inept marketing materials - not least since it was essentially spoiled in the goddamn Season Five DVD commentary). More on that in a minute: I read Brian Lynch's Spike: Shadow Puppets miniseries yesterday, and it was stronger than the Angel series; the wackiness of 'vampire fights ninja puppets in Tokyo' suits Lynch's incessant quippiness, which - in contrast to Whedon and his remarkable Buffy writing staff - never quite integrates the yuks with the Big Drama. Yes they exist in the same panel, but Lynch imbues his laughs with less drama, and his heavy moments with less levity, than Whedon fans are accustomed to in their TV and comics.

Still, to his credit, Lynch gets Spike's voice, and 90% gets Lorne's - whom Whedon and company established as a kind of Tragic Queen character, like someone out of Angels in America(!), a vibe that Lynch gets intermittently, but nails in Lorne's big confessional speech in the middle of the story. The story is paced well, and its second half is nonstop fun: Lynch seems to be more comfortable working in the slightly cartoonish register of Shadow Puppets, particularly with a puppet ensemble, than in the grim postapocalyptic world of Angel, where his writing sometimes plays as inappropriately broad.

[Separate complaint: IDW, please fire your fucking proofreaders/copyeditors. Shipping this many typos and homophone mistakes is unacceptable.]

Lynch's original characters in the Spike series are surprisingly effective; his demon lords in Angel have been pure cartoons, more like ongoing popcult spoofs than living characters, voices instead of lives. And 'Betta George,' the psychic fish, might be cute but he's no kind of character in Shadow Puppets anyhow; keeping him around is somewhat undisciplined storytelling. I haven't read Lynch's Spike: Asylum mini but I think I'll do so now; the two girls who aid Spike and Lorne in their quest are written with snap and affection, and the 'anti-hero-worship' of Spike is both funny and thematically sharp.

But the book's jokes about fanfic and 'official canon' (the most laboured bit in the entire book, which Lynch can't resist repeating several times) point to one of the main weaknesses of Lynch's extension of the Whedonverse: the characters simply don't feel lived-in. Lynch structured the Spike mini well, and he can ape most of Whedon's voices quite nicely, so he's a smart pick for the work on the comics-craft level, but there's a lack of emotional weight to the proceedings, particularly in the Angel series. [Spoilers ahead.] The big issue #3 reveal is that Angel's not a vampire anymore. This ought to be the biggest deal in the series, touching as it does upon the very core of the character, indeed the show's premise - but in issue #4 it was practically dispensed with, emotionally speaking, in a single page. Never mind how awkward the setup for the 'Let's deal with how I'm a human being now' dialogue between Angel and Wesley was, line to line; never mind that a great line like 'It's not hell because of where we are' is swamped by the hamfisted 'light blue Acura' and 'Well that was a short-lived excitement' bits on the next page; Angel is a goddamn human. This was the premise of Angel's best first-season episode, 'I Will Remember You,' and instead of conjuring up that story's ravishing melodrama, Lynch gives us an Angel who alternates between tonally disconnected comic bits ('See, this is what happens when we vent. People overhear, it's a whole thing') and hard-bitten Big Hero Voice-Over.

Just as the first issue of Buffy had a slightly awkward comic book terseness to it, which I suspect was left over from his Astonishing X-Men work, and which vanished altogether as Whedon settled back into the Scooby Gang's voices (see Buffy's lovely, nicely in-character 'exponentially prefixy' monologue in the second issue), the seams have frequently shown as Lynch has worked to integrate the vampire-noir and wacky-office-comedy and ironic-action-show registers of the Angelverse. I admire this work; when it succeeds, as with the Groosalugg's great lines in Angel #4, or Gunn's terrorism in the same issue, or Spike's triumphant return-to-form lines in Shadow Puppets ('Freakiest one in the room. By far. Wouldn't have it any other way'), his writing captures the bigger-than-life style of Angel and reminds me that it's OK, sometimes, to read a goddamn TV show tie-in comic book. But when it falls short - as with Angel's aroused babbling upon meeting Nina in issue #2, a generic moment totally out of step with Angel's generally strong monologue in the series - it falls well short.

The book is missing something. I think it's missing integration: Whedon's uncanny knack for flying across generic and stylistic borders in the space of a single line, his gift for keeping all the sad and all the funny and all the kinetic in play at once (and never showing us the merely mechanical). Lynch isn't a bad writer - far from it - and the book isn't bad. But it's not great, whereas the Buffy book has been mostly great, and for me the main difference rests in the different kinds of work each line or scene is doing, different registers being foregrounded at different moments rather than producing Whedon's seemingly-effortless emotional polyphony. Joss Whedon vowed never to do a 'Very Special Buffy'; we should remember that he never set out to make a 'Very Funny Angel' either. But from moment to moment, panel to panel, it seems that Lynch is mixing tones a little uneasily: I think he's working to tell a big serious story, to do homage to his inspiration, while also consciously jazzing things up with - forgive me - fucking laugh lines.

Right, consider this: Xander's climactic scene in 'The Zeppo,' one of the great Buffy episodes, a Season Three one-shot that illuminated Xander's role in the group, his hidden strengths, by sending him off on a solo adventure. The episode closes with Xander in the basement, looking across a literal ticking time bomb at a dead guy trying to blow up the school. Xander's got him trapped and is ready to let both of them die (maybe), and he's talking the guy into a saving them all. From the shooting script:

XANDER: I'm not leaving here until that thing is disarmed.

JACK: Then I guess you're not leaving.

Jack takes a series of mighty swings at Xander, who manages to block and duck the worst of it. Jack finally pins him against a wall, Katie [his knife] straining toward Xander's face.

JACK: I'm gonna carve you up and serve you with gravy. You piss me off, boy, you pay the price. First the eyes, then the tongue, then I'll break every one of your fingers --

XANDER: You gonna do all that in thirty eight seconds?

Jack spins to look at the clock - and in that moment Xander wrenches free and powerhouse-fists Jack into the opposite corner. Jack rises, dazed, glaring at his foe.

XANDER (cont'd): You're thinking, can I get by him? Get up the stairs, out of the building? Seconds ticking away, I don't love your chances.

JACK: You'll die too.

XANDER: Yeah, looks like. So I guess the question really is... who has less fear?

JACK: I ain't afraid to die. I'm dead.

XANDER: Yeah, but this is different. Blowed up isn't walking around and drinking with your buddies dead. It's 'little bits swept up by the janitor' dead, and I don't think you're ready for that.

JACK: Are you?

Beat. Jack. Xander. Clock.

XANDER (smiling calmly): I like the quiet.

'You gonna do all that in thirty-eight seconds?' That's not a joke, but it's an ironic undercutting of Jack's villain-of-the-week bluster. 'Swept up by the janitor' isn't a joke as such, but it's a funny line - and it raises the stakes, and it keeps Xander talking, a little nervously, a little heroically. This is a guy who always talks too much ('Sometimes I shouldn't use words,' he notes in the series finale), and yet he comes to that bittersweet final line, and in traditional Whedon fashion manages to both totally underplay the moment and make a deeply-felt, insightful statement about himself. It's a small line that does a lot of work.

'It's not hell because of where we are' is a line like that. But its punchiness is almost lost in the Angel comic, which can't seem to settle down, can't resolve its dialogic tendencies into a single voice.

And the thing is, I'm sure Lynch has his own voice, that in his own handpicked setting is probably very effective. Hell, I might seek out his zombie-frat comic; he seems like the kind of writer worth giving the benefit of the doubt to.

But I don't think he's nailing this one. Particularly given how strong the Buffy book is on every level (Joss's one-off issue #5 is one of the best things he's ever written, for my money), this comes as something of a disappointment. I think Lynch can do better, and with closer supervision this tonal uneasiness would be rectified and matched to its structural tightness. Writing on your own is a different thing from working stories out in the writers' room or at the hand of a master like Whedon, I recognize that. But I'm not sold on After the Fall. Well what can I tell you.

Sidebar though: One great thing about the Shadow Puppets book is that it contains some of Franco Urru's original pencil artwork; I find the art in the Angel series hamfisted, but Urru's pencils really breathe in a way the finished artwork (with its overwhelming blacks, (consciously) soul-deadening palette, and heavy linework) just doesn't. I'm totally spoiled, of course; as a new Brian Vaughan fanboy I immersed myself last year in Pia Guerra's landmark work on Y: The Last Man, after which Urru's comparatively inexpressive cartoon actors are a huge letdown. (The Buffy book, drawn by Georges Jeanty, is nearly comparable to Guerra's work in terms of facial expressivity, but Guerra drew women's faces like no comix penciler I've seen. Whedon is lucky that way, though: Cassaday on the Astonishing X-Men monthly draws Disney-level [or Dave Sim-level] faces.) Anyhow it's nice to know that the art team is working in a style rather than simply failing to capture the show's breadth of visual emotion. I wish it were otherwise in any case. (And I wish the women looked like women and not Comic Book Women, but leave it aside.)

OK enough of this. And you ought to know that of course I won't stop reading; I want to know what comes next, how they get out of this scrape. I'm a fanboy, Reader(s), and can't change. But I'm trying to grow as reader and writer while getting through this story, and this post is an effort in that direction. An admission (which, y'know, means both to cop to something, and to let in something new).

Fans, consumers, knowledge, conspiracy, satisfaction, inquiry, urgency, and the tiny little box.

Looked at an old, old unpublished post today and was taken with a notion.

Producers feel nothing - which liberates their productive energies (within the buy/sell circle, transactions get increasingly efficient and 'personalized' because exploitation can be ruthless).

Consumers know nothing - which liberates their imaginative energies (manifesting in increasingly complex relationships to that which is bought, and an imaginative knack for demanding new products). They come to respond 'intuitively' to new products and develop a codependent relationship with mere goods, into which incredible amounts of time and energy can be poured. Putting energy into a relationship is its own reward, accidentally, but it's also good for the communities of which the relationship is a component.

For 'communities' read 'fan communities' and such.

See, one big and/but largely unasked question facing Americans is, Why do we covet the irrelevant, the alienated, the obviously disposable? Not just 'Why is it all going faster,' but what are we getting out of our ever more self-aware festival of banality, 'consumer culture'? What's the deep-down satisfaction or network thereof in play? And it seems to me that the answer is: the more you know about buying, about how to fluently negotiate and fluidly navigate your increasingly hollow Culture Of Purchase, the less you have to wonder about anything else. They say 'constraint is creativity,' but on a broad societal level it's not so benign: lower the ceiling enough, bring the walls in closer, and your creative energies both fill up your space more easily, and amount to less, globally.

And I think we love that feeling. Every man the king of a castle approaching zero square feet. What's being peddled is the possibility of knowing your own worth perfectly (self-knowledge), in the form of monetary value or some other performance metric. The more statistics you have about yourself, the less you need to grapple with things that are unknowable. And you convince yourself you're exploring complexity, but in reality you're just not able to make calculations fast enough - you don't know what to do with the stats. Show the cheat sheet for a second-year undergrad physics midterm to a high schooler, and it sure looks complicated: lots of different symbols, the whole page covered in formulae, the promise of a total description of some as-yet unknown reality. Show it to the undergrad physics student and they know its true nature: it's only a prompt to remembering how to solve the problems, a set of tools.

But the high schooler doesn't mind - hell, if he's anything like I was in high school, he'll start looking for patterns and concordances, identifying visual symmetries, trying to figure out the schema. Feels great: the visual complexity alone is a pastime, as are the questions. And that turns into two things:

* The kid who sees that he doesn't know, what he doesn't know...and goes home to a physics textbook.

* The kid who convinces himself the patterns are enough - and who'll have a long life writing conspiracy webpages, or network TV pulp drama. Or, hey, a blog like this one.

Both kids are learning. The first kid finds a bigger space and takes more into himself in order to fill it. The second kid finds a smaller space - the satisfaction-structure of conspiracy, coincidence, numerology, of complication instead of complexity - and is satisfied already by how much closer he is to touching the walls.

* * *

The point of this is, or at least was in the opening paragraphs, that the 'creative energy' unleashed by certain kinds of capitalist engagement, on the buyer's side, is gratifying to buyers because of the sense of mastery it grants. It feels good to walk into a supermarket and pick the Neatest or Tastiest thing, to buy at the bookstore the Newest or Hottest novel, to get into the latest band Before Everyone Else. These things mark you as successful because you know something that other people don't know; you had money and made the right damn choice, and good on you. But this sense of mastery, this fluency of consumption, is valueless outside of the circle of production/consumption itself. What makes it worthwhile is knowing how to convert it to another realm of knowledge: how to take the lessons of buying and convert them into a force for making, to participate in microsocieties and open creative circles, to fall as far from the tree as you safely can. Not all information is ported with equal ease to other areas of human experience. 'Everything bad is good for you.' Well, only if you consider all information to be equally valuable, if you're addicted to monetization and its information analogues.

It's better to know everything, yes. That would be the goal, or one of them. But if you die knowing everything, having said nothing, you're worthless to everyone else. And some knowing makes it harder to speak - harder, even, to want to speak.

I believe that the only authentic way out of that circle is to invent in an atmosphere of urgent freedom. And that might lead you to God, or the great American video game, or to till the soil, or even to binding textbooks for a Copley Square publisher, hoping to help a kid somewhere. Hell, it might leave you scraping for subsistence-level wages, and my heart going out to you is cold goddamn comfort, I know. But the question goes for everyone. But What Would You Be If You Weren't So Busy Buying Things. What would we have made?

Why am I so worried about keeping up? And who with?

This is why I make the big bucks not so much, Reader(s). Freedom with no urgency! The very nature of blogs made clear.