Wax Banks

Thinking of reading the 'Fifty Shades' trilogy? Don't!

Its problems include but are not limited to:

• Utterly juvenile depiction of D/s relationship
• Lost-style trauma-psych backstory nonsense
• Horrific dialogue, description
• Miserable, repetitive sex
• 'Commentary' on Twilight's self-abnegating abuse-fetishism that swerves right into pure, unadulterated, unself-conscious self-abnegating abuse-fetishism -- this is the really bad part, the unforgivable part, the part where an ostensibly grown woman (a mom!) wrote yet another novel about how it's OK if some bastard works out his trust issues by destroying your life, as long as he's hot hot hot and (by the way) super-rich and secretly the nicest most caring little snuggly-bear Secret Victim in all the land
• Oh, and she can't write American English for shit

Why are these bottom-scraping shitbrained books popular? For the same reason adults read Twilight.

Good for 'E.L. James' for making a buck off her self-published novel -- and for turning it into millions of gullible-publisher dollars, a fine scam -- but folks, please spare yourself the agony. If it's pornos you're after, stop by Good Vibrations; they've got plenty of this stuff around, only not (all) shit.

Three books lately read.

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

* * *

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

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

Kind of a pain in the ass. But good.

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

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

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

* * *

Little, Big : Aegypt :: Hobbit : LotR?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christianity is not a mythology of Christ.

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

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

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

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

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

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

First bit. Second bit.

Now then:

Permit me to quote myself for a moment:

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

'That's not it,' I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

* * *

THE END.

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

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

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

* * *

Let's talk briefly about mystery stories.

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

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

OK, but:

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

* * *

So what are three main male characters' compulsions?

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

* * *

(to be continued)

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

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

Adam Roberts's From Outer Space!

Rich Puchalsky sez of ARRR's work:

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

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

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

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

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

But!

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

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

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

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

(to be continued)

Declare by Tim Powers.

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

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

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

Shall we?

* * *

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

Well, he's not Pynchon.

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joshi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christ, I don't recognize myself anymore!

I just read a column by someone who has dubbed herself the 'Teafaerie,' over at Erowid, and GOD HELP ME right now I think it's kind of fantastic. It's about sex and psychedelics, and it is a fine piece of writing, and ends with a kick, so there you have it. Go on.

While you read, I'll sit here thinking about what in the world could have happened to me, that I am who (what?) I evidently am. Then I'll see what I can do about this awesome capacity for judgment and negativity that I've come to identify with my Self. Fun, huh.

'An altogether wonderful extravaganza?' Really? We can't just say 'A good book' and donate the remaining W's and Z's to the poor (in, one supposes, Poland)?

I finished Tim Powers's The Anubis Gates, the second half of which displays the same shortcomings (settings that are more map than territory, thin characters, hamfisted obtrusive literalizations of his painstakingly worked-out symbolic structure, extra-thin female characters) and strengths (lightning-quick action, clockwork plotting, gnarly chronological trickery) as Last Call. The Anubis Gates is a more tightly-conceived novel than the other; for one thing, you don't have any characters twiddling their thumbs Very Suggestively for the entire duration of the story, thank God. But for all Powers's obvious imaginative gifts and attention to detail, there's a Potemkin-village quality to both books. They seem not to take place in their ostensible geographic settings at all, but rather onstage in front of deftly painted scrims and marvelous bits of lofted scenery. The Las Vegas of Last Call never felt real to me; Powers's London is better, but it feels like a tourist's description, and his Cairo is dreadfully thin.

But the book's defense is simple: there's Just Enough Setting for Power's plotting purposes, so why complain? That's a fair point, I suppose. Still, a paragraph of setting info that boils down to 'There's a river, call it the Thames if you like, and within two pages something's gonna happen on it' feels an awful lot like a roleplaying game setting rather than the work of a novelist who's won praise for 'us[ing] historical characters, events, and places with absolute verismo.' (Check out the jacket copy!) Powers's settings aren't rich or evocative, they're useful. Yet another lesson I need to hurry up and learn.

All this said, it's an exhilarating novel, just like Last Call. Pity, then, that in the last ten pages I was sickened by another instance of Powers's 'man with handily dead wife/plot device is paired off by Destiny with handily plot-ensnared Pretty Girl whom he hardly even knows; metaphor for midlife rebirth duly noted' endings. 100% pure goddamn boy's-fantasy claptrap. For such an impeccably assembled story, The Anubis Gates complains a startling number of failures of taste and/or nerve. There's an awful lot of research and plotwork on display here - but is display really the most interesting way to handle such things?

Well. I had a very fine time. What can you do.

I guess I'll read Declare next, or some Lovecraft; then maybe The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst, and...well, maybe it'll finally be time for Crowley's Aegypt. Ken Hite, you have completely taken over my to-read stack, thanks a lot.

Oh that's me.

Today - well yesterday, as we'll see later - I posted a short thingamajig implicitly warning against calling things (texts) 'boring,' but only last week a game review of mine went up at rpg.net, whose very first sentence reads:

The new D&D Fortune Cards semi-randomly add thuddingly boring mechanical boons to 4e combat.

Damn, I even italicized it.

* * *

One of the things I like about blogging is its irresponsibility: if you're all excited about the 'quality' of your own writing, and have a tendency to navel-gaze, but don't want to be held to definitive statements of belief, this is an ideal form. Andrew Sullivan, for instance, has made a lucrative career out of - depending on your perspective - either (1) spittle-flecked outbursts and self-righteous declarations, pitched in a histrionic countertenor, leavened with juuuuuuuust enough self-conscious hedging and doubling-back to seem respectable to liberals desperate to be seen enjoying a conservative's writing, or (2) transparent ongoing broadcast of his unguarded thoughts, both critical and self-critical, in a tone that allows him to capture the emotional content of each political moment while leaving room for consideration, revision, and sober self-collection in repose. Indeed Sullivan is the archetypal political blogger (not only because he was one of the first): a well-connected dilettante with an instantly recognizable 'style' and a willingness to say whatever he feels like, comfortable in the knowledge that his contract with the Atlantic (now the Daily Beast) assures him of a paycheck whether or not he has the foggiest idea what he's talking about.

I read his site religiously (ahem) but he holds many disgusting opinions - and his much-vaunted self-consciousness only goes so far. His fashionably platitudinous 'true faith is doubt' schtick does not extend to doubt about the existence of gods, of course, for instance.

* * *

Having (unexpectedly) said this, I've gotta say, I really do find the D&D 4e Fortune Cards boring - they add nothing to the game - and I really do think boredom is a function (responsibility) of the bored person, not the boring thing. I hold these two ideas in unpleasant tension. Hell, I'm uncomfortable with both those statements! Same thing with my atheism, in a way: I find the very idea of 'God' not only unbelievable but embarrassing, an obviously convenient fiction, but I do pray every night in Spanish. I can't sleep properly without doing so. Or do I mean I just won't? Perhaps it's filial piety that gets me. Well: surely I don't hold on to some superstition about 'dishonoring my mother's memory,' right? That wouldn't be a good reason to pray.

Then again, only an ignoramus expects people's reasons to be 'good.'

I hold contradictory ideas - opinions - about plenty of things. No surprise there. But I've also written down hundreds of thousands of words on this website, most of them half-baked and self-contradictory and tentative. And (another weird contradiction) I want to make a life out of leaving words behind. Well: I have.

* * *

Maybe a million words, even? That doesn't seem likely, but does anything? Really now.

* * *

I mean at first all I wanted to do was show you I noticed my hypocrisy. But then there's this whole other way of going about it where I say I'm not a hypocrite, or else everyone is, and BTW Andrew Sullivan sucks but I like him, yeah! So why admit anything at all? And then I'm wondering if being generous toward 'boring' artifacts suggests or implies that I should be generous toward 'hypocrites,' especially where private fears (e.g. I'm the boring one) are concerned, especially when I'm the hypocrite, you feel me? But obviously I am both wasting your time and desperately trying to be worth it, which is to say In Progress, or more succinctly Living.

Sidebar: I hate 'in process' as a substitute for 'in progress.' Yet I insist that 'good,' the whole big implied telos of (or at least pretense for) progress, is in many cases an empty word. Fa! Also, don't say telos unless you absolutely need to.

* * *

...

* * *

It's tomorrow; or tomorrow has become today, or today is now waiting for tomorrow to catch up in the backward progression of vanishing days, or - well, whatever. I just read an article about a man who spent nearly thirty years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. Let's be more specific: a man was misidentified by two children as their kidnapper and rapist, and was locked up in a concrete cell with a toilet and sink and bed, and nearly as long as I've been alive he sat in the cell being called a rapist. They let him out not long ago on the strength of DNA testing. You ask whether 'progress' is real? Yes it is. Not without cost. The article itself was middling though. I wanted to give myself to the story but it kept oscillating unsteadily between the Flat Macho Magazine Voice you get in every fucking Esquire article, on one hand, and weird snatches of African-American dialect and slang. The subhead said 'This is what it's like to spend nearly thirty years in prison for something you didn't do,' but the article was less that than 'This is what it's like to write about the worst things human beings do to one another, almost entirely without emotional evocation or seriousness.' I'm being mean.

I was not bored, in case you're wondering. Just confused and disappointed. Well. But when you're disappointed you back off and reorient yourself with respect to what's happening now, which in this case is I Am Thinking About This Article. The experience of reading it is gone. Now I can allow other objects in the field to gravitate toward this new body: why, for instance, do we insist on writing about Men's Problems in a voice like this? Who thinks this is the optimal tonal/gestural language for dealing with the evil that is our justice system's 20th-century history?

Ray becomes his own jailhouse lawyer, pro se. He asks the governor of Ohio for a commutation. He petitions the federal district court for a writ of habeas corpus. He applies to the sentencing judge for early release.

Denied. Denied. Denied.

After seven years, he is moved to lower-security facilities at the Marion Correctional Institution.

At the twelve-year mark, he sees the parole board in person.

Denied.

Two years later, he is moved to a minimum-security prison at Grafton, Ohio, and eight years after that he moves to the Grafton Farm. Most of the inmates at the farm are allowed to work outside. Some can even drive into town themselves. As a convicted child molester, Ray cannot leave the facility unsupervised. He has a similar problem with the mandatory courses he's supposed to take: Because he refuses to stand up in group and admit he is a child molester, he is not allowed to participate.

Years pass. He sees a couple guys have heart attacks. He sees a few guys get killed — they're lying there bleeding, you know, you just keep moving. He sees beat-downs, beefs, hassles, rapes. He watches a cellie die slowly of a heart blockage — a decent older man who'd shot a guy for messing with his daughter. Towler is locked down in solitary twice. The first, a ninety-day stint, follows a routine shakedown: His cellie has a shiv fashioned from a spoon he bullied Towler into bringing back from the kitchen. The second stint follows the death of his mother, in 1984. He is allowed to go to the funeral; he wears shackles. When he returns, he asks to be put in solitary — he just wants to be alone. Over the years, most of the prisons in which he is housed are far from home — one is on the border with Kentucky. After the funeral, the only relative who visits is his sister Deborah.

The boldfaced italicized text is not just frustrating but offensive to me. 'Years pass,' for Christ's sake? The entire point of the article is supposed to be what the passing of years feels like. But here we are. What is the thing's name, its stated purpose and unique identifier, and but then What does it give you? What actually comes of the experience? Does this failure have a directionality? I mean: is there an essential difference between carrying on too long or saying too much, on the one hand, overflowing, and on the other hand quitting without doing the job?

Am I allowed to be bored in the second case? What am I asking you for?

* * *

All these questions but I wanna pass them off like I'm making a point. Not that I'd know in any definitive way what that'd consist of. Sometimes I think the only thing I can possibly do is bring you close to something (I think) splendid and give you a minute to take it in, become newly-thinking. Maybe watch you and work as hard as I can to imagine what you're thinking and how we must be seeing each other. So we can get outside our Selves and just be in the presence of the splendid thing. Maybe 'sublime' lives in the experience of giving rather than the order that is revealed. In which case, Would you say I've spent maybe too much time ironing out flaws in my English grammar and maybe too little time, I don't know, talking to people in bright sun? Downhill skiing aside new-to-me mountains?

See, there's an example. It took me like a minute to write that last sentence because I was fixating on the word 'aside,' specifically on its possible use as a preposition meaning 'on the side of.' I don't want the sense of beside - skiing beside a mountain would be an affront to the mountain, dig? - and abreast seems wrong too. And I worry, as well, about things like 'if I say "but abreast seems..." then I don't need a "too" after the word "wrong."' OK, maybe you're bored now. But I gotta believe you would've felt the energy of the words, their action, whether or not I'd interrupted (1) this blog post (2) your day (3) every last waking goddamn thought I've had this last twenty-four fucking hours years to tell you these things.

Aaaaaaaaaand now I'm boring myself.

* * *

Maybe I really just wanted to look like the kind of guy who recognizes his mistakes and wants to talk to you about them. A Nice Guy, smart, self-conscious, observant, all that stuff. Hopefully these qualities endear me to you. How's it working. Has this been a waste of time.

Cerebus.

It's the highwater mark for comics as an art form, whatever that means, and Dave Sim is the field's most broadly talented creator: near the top for cartooning, writing, long-form structure, polyphony, mimicry; and unquestionably the best comics letterer and maybe layout guy. No other comic touches Cerebus for stylistic breadth, thematic recklessness, psychedelic-literary rapture. Sure it's misogynist, and 289/290 is (as Rilstone puts it) barking, but just you try writing/drawing something as powerful as the Eye in Minds, Cerebus's death, Curly's stroke, or the vision of Jaka hanged. Sim and Gerhard are heroes. Obviously mad too. That's the price.

Two things about Ta-Nehisi Coates.

[Started this a little more than a year ago. Added two sentences today and here it is. I've nothing to add today.]

1) He is a spectacular writer and an admirably honest man.

1.5) Even better: he's gonna be even better someday.

2) This -

My Moms once busted my lip after I tried to literally look down on her. I was 13 and had recently grown taller than her, and thus thought I could intimidate her. Heh. I was left singing that old Ice Cube riff, "With a right-left, right-left your toothless\And then you say godddamn they ruthless." My Moms came up in the projects and used to walk miles to school, and miles to church. She spent her summers in the country down on the Eastern Shore. She was raised by Negroes who did not play, and she took the lesson.

This is hard for a lot of people to hear, but in my family, in my neighborhood, and in my community this is what part of what parenting meant. If you weren't feeling the edge of the sword on your ass, then you were responding to the possibility of it. One thing I learned, while touring for my book, was that a lot of people consider this to be child abuse. It really was news to me and ultimately unthinkable. Almost everyone I'd ever known had come up the same way. My book editor would joke, while reading, the manuscript about his grandmother coming up from the South and making him go search for a switch. In Harlem.

Which isn't to say I, or people who came up like me, are without a critique. I smacked my son's hand until he was four. And then spanked him until he was seven. Most of this was about him sucking his teeth at his mother, or some such. We're done with that now, and at least in my presence, he doesn't exhibit that kind of disrespect. When he's staying with my people in Baltimore he doesn't earn any immunity, and he's subject to the same threat of the sword as his cousins. I get the argument against corporal punishment. But there's something elemental in me, that recoils at modern parenting. I was on the train the other day and watched a kid repeatedly say to his father, "Daddy, you're a jerk." Wow. I confess that my immediate thought was, "that kid need his ass whipped."

- is fucked. Not the fact of hitting kids, which is complicated, but the affectionate internalization of this circular logic of violence. Or, no: not violence but bad, stupid pedagogy. Hitting kids is the bluntest teaching method imaginable, and for that reason it's useful in some situations ('Don't touch that very dangerous thing!') and absolutely wrong in some situations ('Don't try to make me feel small in order to get what you want; it will not work'). Spanking and hand-slapping are largely symbolic violent acts - I remember most spanking as a warning rather than a punishment - and I understand why they're useful. Shorthand! (Literally.) But motherfuckers do not put the switch to a child because they're interested in communication - and so they hurt the child's chances of growing into an adult who is interested in (and skilled at) communication. Sometimes it turns out OK (cf. Ta-Nehisi Coates?).

Mostly it doesn't.

What Coates calls 'elemental' is 'habitual.' That's something worth pursuing later, maybe?

In keeping with her longstanding personal tradition, Semi-Noted Columnist Laura Miller fails to deliver on the easiest column assignment of all time.

I can't even be bothered to link to her article, it's so bad. 'Surprise.'

Laura Miller has a column in Salon lamenting NaNoWriMo this week. You needn't read it. It's boilerplate: 'These people aren't real writers, it's a stunt, there are no readers left anyway, why isn't there a celebration of readers, I AM A READER, CELEBRATE ME, why didn't anyone buy my book?'

Miller has always been prone to idiocy, but I get extra annoyed when a middling writer wastes a chance to talk about fascinating topics (fandom culture, writing-as-therapy, wholly noncommercial creativity, teen literary production, etc.) and instead babbles on about savages ruining her fun.

Laura: please, please, please do the bare minimum to educate yourself about your column topics before opening your mouth.

Previous generations had 'The Conference of the Birds.' My generation has 'Twitter.' My generation, by the way, if anyone was wondering, is rubbish.

I am horrified.

I was just reading online comments about the 8/12 Phish show in Deer Creek (strong show, tremendous Meatstick > Mango pairing) and realized that every website I've looked at this week has represented a conscious choice not to read Little, Big. Only I didn't think of it in terms of reading a book. My innerwords were:

'I could be there, but I choose to remain here.'

John Crowley has described Little, Big in part as an 'impertinent' attempt to write a novel like 'Joyce's Ulysses and Thomas Pynchon's V. and Vladimir Nabokov's Ada.' As for whether he succeeded, I'm tempted to say that's up to the critics, but of course such judgment falls to the Reader, and in my official Readerly capacity I'm happy to say you should read and find out. (Executive summary: oh yes, yes he did.)

I don't think of Little, Big as a book anymore. It's become a place, a Geography(!), and along with Ulysses and Riddley Walker and The Whole Sort of Pynchonian Trip it's a good enough embodiment of my literary ideal, which is to say, my becoming-dream, the consciousness I desperately wish to enter, to be forever occupied by. I wish I could see the way these stories see.

But I took a few minutes to read over comments about the Phish show (check out the slightly-extended 'Cars Trucks Buses' in the first set), and pulled over to share this post with you, haha, and I'm not sure what's next. I'm never sure, and usually I'm dealing anyhow with what's now so it doesn't bother me. But today I've noticed, and am horrified.

Come you lost Atoms to your Centre draw,
And be the Eternal Mirror that you saw:
Rays that have wander'd into Darkness wide
Return and back into your Sun subside

Well, I can't really blame my shortcomings on my generation. Maybe my parents', though? Yeah, that's the ticket.

What promise.

BIRTH OF LOVE

Season late, day late, sun just down, and the sky
Cold gunmetal but with a wash of live rose, and she,
From water the color of sky except where
Her motion has fractured it to shivering splinters of silver,
Rises. Stands on the raw grass. Against
The new-curdling night of spruces, nakedness
Glimmers and, at bosom and flank, drips
With fluent silver. The man,

Some ten strokes out, but now hanging
Motionless in the gunmetal water, feet
Cold with the coldness of depth, all
History dissolving from him, is
Nothing but an eye. Is an eye only. Sees

The body that is marked by his use, and Time’s,
Rise, and in the abrupt and unsustaining element of air,
Sway, lean, grapple the pond-bank. Sees
How, with that posture of female awkwardness that is,
And is the stab of, suddenly perceived grace, breasts bulge down in
The pure curve of their weight and buttocks
Moon up and, in swelling unity,
Are silver and glimmer. Then

The body is erect, she is herself, whatever
Self she may be, and with an end of the towel grasped in each hand,
Slowly draws it back and forth across back and buttocks, but
With face lifted toward the high sky, where
The over-wash of rose color now fails. Fails, though no star
Yet throbs there. The towel, forgotten,
Does not move now. The gaze
Remains fixed on the sky. The body,

Profiled against the darkness of spruces, seems
To draw to itself, and condense in its whiteness, what light
In the sky yet lingers or, from
The metallic and abstract severity of water, lifts. The body,
With the towel now trailing loose from one hand, is
A white stalk from which the face flowers gravely toward the high sky.
This moment is non-sequential and absolute, and admits
Of no definition, for it
Subsumes all other, and sequential, moments, by which
Definition might be possible. The woman,

Face yet raised, wraps,
With a motion as though standing in sleep,
The towel about her body, under her breasts, and,
Holding it there hieratic as lost Egypt and erect,
Moves up the path that, stair-steep, winds
Into the clamber and tangle of growth. Beyond
The lattice of dusk-dripping leaves, whiteness
Dimly glimmers, goes. Glimmers and is gone, and the man,

Suspended in his darkling medium, stares
Upward where, though not visible, he knows
She moves, and in his heart he cries out that, if only
He had such strength, he would put his hand forth
And maintain it over her to guard, in all
Her out-goings and in-comings, from whatever
Inclemency of sky or slur of the world’s weather
Might ever be. In his heart
he cries out. Above

Height of the spruce-night and heave of the far mountain, he sees
The first star pulse into being. It gleams there.

I do not know what promise it makes him.

--Robert Penn Warren

Self-organization and natural selection.

If, as the poets say, each thing is every thing, then no matter where you feel like going, someone has already gotten there first - but if you're feeling waggish you're more than welcome to believe that it was (in any case) you. True freedom is trivial by definition:

I like to compare evolution to weaving of a great tapestry. The strong unyielding warp of this tapestry is formed by the essential nature of elementary non- living matter, and the way in which this matter has been brought together in the evolution of our planet. In building this warp the second law of thermodynamics has played a predominant role. The multicolored woof which forms the detail of the tapestry I like to think of a having been woven onto the warp principally by mutation and natural selection. While the warp establishes the dimensions and supports the whole, it is the woof that most intrigues the aesthetic sense of the student of organic evolution, showing as it does the beauty and variety of fitness of organisms to their environment. But why should we pay so little attention to the warp, which is after all a basic part of the whole structure? Perhaps the analogy would be more complete if something were introduced that is occasionally seen in textiles – the active participation of the warp in the pattern itself. Only then, I think, does one grasp the full significance of the analogy.

--Harold Blum

Good day, honey(s).

Witness.

Go read Roger Ebert right now.

Charity.

¹Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

²And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

³And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

⁴Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,

⁵Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;

⁶Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;

⁷Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

⁸Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

⁹For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.

¹⁰But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

¹¹When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

¹²For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

¹³And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. (1 Corinthians 13:1-13, King James Version)

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.

Bill Simmons makes me want to care about things.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am proud of the Boston Sports Guy.

I can’t wait to see what happens to KG, Kobe, T-Mac, Carmelo, Howard and others when they finish with basketball. These guys have been mini-corporations and basketball machines since the age of eighteen. What will they do? What will be important to them? When I was researching my book, one thing that blew me away was how brilliant the guys from the fifties and sixties were. Not as players, as people. Oscar Robertson, Bill Russell, Elgin Baylor, Jerry West, Bob Cousy, Wilt Chamberlain…these were thoughtful, well-rounded human beings who cared deeply about not just their sport, but about their place in society and (in the case of the black guys) their stature during such a tumultuous time. Everyone knows about Russell’s eleven rings, but did you know about everything he did to advance the cause of African-Americans? Everyone knows about Oscar’s triple doubles, but did you know that he filed the lawsuit that paved the way for a real players union and free agency? These were truly great men and the N.B.A. just wouldn’t be where it is if that wasn’t the case.

Read, as they say, the whole thing. You don't even have to care about basketball. It's just kinda that good.

Gladwell and Goliath and blah blah blah.

Got bored, read the latest from Malcolm 'in the middle' Gladwell: an unbearably laboured metaphor about David vs Goliath. He's waving at something interesting but not quite getting there. The idea is that as long as Goliath plays by Goliath's rules, he has to lose, because the game is built for Goliath. Gladwell doesn't take the poetic step, the spiritual one, because he can't, because he's a business writer instead of a cultural critic or poet: he ends with Goliath wondering whether he's really a giant, but the real lesson is that 'giant' is a made-up category, and it does not connote. It means only size, and entails certain abilities, but strengths and weaknesses are entirely context-dependent. They describe interactions, relationships. 'Giant' is about identity. When you think the game is one thing, a still-life, you cease to look at it truly, as a realm of interactions. As process, movement. Basic zen, of course, and also basic games theory.

Naturally Gladwell has an interest in keeping things low-key; that seems to be his temperament, but it's also one of his audience's major demands. So there's almost nothing to the article - just the straightforward observation that the only way to win the written game is usually not to play. Which is a teenage insight. 'Why don't people understand this simple thing?' he asks. Partly because he's describing, essentially, games - war, basketball, single combat. One-on-one contests. And of course his characterization of basketball is exactly as simplistic as his characterization of social networks, war, scientific research, university admissions, single combat...halfway-decent basketball teams are trained on how to beat the full-court press, and the energy of grown men flows quite differently from that of teenage girls; Gladwell's usual Tiny Little Bit of Insight doesn't even scale within the narrow domain he's discussing. Never mind that the purpose of basketball isn't, ultimately, to determine superiority - it's a symbol, a dance. He admits this in his piece, yet doesn't understand why it matters! And so his usual Big Central Metaphor is even more strained than usual, which is why the piece's language is so fucking amateurish and inelegant.

Gladwell's pop-psych tidbits and half-digested snippets of overheard math and social theory are as they've ever been: undeniably intelligent, unbearably self-satisfied, anything but courageous. He's an ad man, and bless him for taking his job seriously, but they're only ads - selling lifestyle poses and cocktail-party conversation-starters. Gimme a break.

Why, despite the near-constant fury he provokes in me and others, I still read Andrew Sullivan.

From Johann Hari's profile:

With the scenery of conservatism collapsing all around, Sullivan was one of the first major [umm... --wa.] champions of Barack Obama as a future president. He found his temperament—empirical, doubtful, discursive—immediately congenial. This brought yet more howls of betrayal from the right. But now Obama has won, will Sullivan’s Obamaphilia clash with his small-state conservatism, as Obama embarks on a programme of big-government Keynesian reflation?

This question cuts to an unacknowledged tension in Sullivan’s thought that has lain dormant since his Oxford days. Oakeshott believed we should be sceptical of all human institutions—including markets. He savaged Hayek’s market fundamentalist bible, “The Road to Serfdom”, as another rationalist delusion. He saw it as a utopian plan to end planning, yet another argument that a perfect system could be found, this time in markets. Sullivan’s scepticism, by contrast, has been lop-sided. He is highly sceptical of the capacity of governments to act, but he has often presented markets as close to infallible, if left undistorted by government action.

This belief has been at the core of the left-wing writer Naomi Klein’s criticisms of Sullivan. She says: “Where is this ideal capitalism of which [he] speaks? It reminds me of people on the very far left who, where when you present them with evidence of the real-world application of their ideology, say, ‘That doesn’t count, that was a distortion.’ Well, where’s the real version?”

When I ask Sullivan about this, he says: “It’s very hard to be a consistent Oakeshottian, to not let dogmas creep in. Perhaps my belief in markets has become like that. Over the next few years, in my blog and writing, I’m going to be thinking this through.” It seems he can imagine reasoning himself to a more Obama-friendly pro-intervention viewpoint—surely provoking yet more cries of betrayal from conservatives.

He believes his greatest future conflicts will centre on religion—the topic of his next book. He learned his Catholicism as an altar boy in East Grinstead. For him it is a sacramental religion, all about smell and sight and touch. Ritual is at its core, because “ritual has no point beyond itself. Only ritual can approximate the ineffability of the divine, enact its truth while not purporting to explain or capture it.”

Read the (cleverly titled) whole thing.

Notre Dame, Obama.

To read The Corner you'd think contraception and abortion rights had something to do with something or other called 'the human soul.' You'd also think a teenage virgin named 'Mary' gave birth to a walking Jewish god-being named 'Jesus,' and that aforementioned Jesus thought that emergency contraception and abortion and (!!!!) embryonic stem-cell harvesting were Big Time Sins, whatever 'Sins' meant. And you might - to read this bizarre little weblog - shiver to hear of Notre Dame University's big time donors withdrawing their financial support from the school because of the school's decision to invite Barack Obama to give their 2009 commencement address. National Review Online's symposium on this topic - 'Should the University of Notre Dame honor our most anti-life president?' - contains exciting statements like this:

The word “perfidy” derives from the Latin “perfidus,” that is, “faithless” or “detrimental to faith”; it is also synonymous with “treachery,” or “violation of allegiance or trust.” The University of Notre Dame’s decision to honor President Obama as its commencement speaker in May is perfidious and treacherous in the extreme.

President Obama has zealously moved in his first weeks in office to carry out the most radical anti-life, un-Christian agenda of any American president...

It's all very thrilling, very serious. Unfortunately these 'criticisms' are so stupid that one hardly knows how to respond without embarrassing oneself by association. The successor to the warmongering mock-Christian hypocrite Bush is a 'radical anti-life, un-Christian' zealot? Or check out this sweetness:

[I]t is an outrage for a Catholic university to provide a stamp of approval to someone who just last week wrote the death warrant for millions of embryonic human beings, the most recent of a long line of anti-life acts. Obama’s pro-abortionist extremism relegates a whole class of human beings — unborn human beings — to the status of mere sub-personal objects...

Well, yes. The infinite category of 'unborn human beings,' extended to include newly-fertilized eggs, renders the (admittedly and alas) finite category of actual human beings meaningless, robs it of any actionable scale or sense or character. But never mind (il)logic, just stay at your lab bench: to speak of the 'dignity' and 'rights' of a collection of a hundred cells is so loopy, so arbitrary, so utterly dependent on base antiscientific mysticism, that you kind of want to let more run-of-the-mill stupidity like the following just roll on past -

Obama is also receiving a Doctor of Laws degree from Notre Dame. “Laws” — as in the things he tried to prevent in the Illinois legislature on the matter of protecting infants who survived abortion? The Notre Dame Observer today posts its Sunday interview with Fr. John Jenkins, the school’s president. It is titled “Jenkins: Obama 'honored' University by accepting.” I’m sure that’s just how Mary (a.k.a. Notre Dame) is feeling right now.

- to keep from losing your mind. 'Mary' the 'mother of the church,' who was assumed into heaven and apparently had a permeable hymen and the world's luckiest ovaries and so forth, is of course a fictional character; Mary the (sure!) historical mother of Jesus is a desiccated corpse who does not, in all probability, intercede in the deliberations of Our Lord on behalf of faithful petitioners, and talking about her feelings is sub-Sporting News rhetorical gasbaggery. (I always hated The Sporting News out of some totally irrational Sports Illustrated partisanship. Talk about religious zealotry.)

As in the New Testament, the craziest shit gets saved for last:

This is a highly cynical act, contemptuous of the Church’s prophetic voice in civil society and wagering that there will be no retribution. If a midwestern school seeks attention by granting Mr. Obama an honorary doctorate in law, the next logical step would be to grant Judas Iscariot posthumously an honorary doctorate in business administration.

Yes. Barack Obama, constitutional law professor and firm Christian, is to the study of law as Judas Iscariot, betrayer of Jesus and the central villain in the central morality play in Western culture, is to MBA programs.

Well, it's 6am and I can barely focus my eyes; and it's comforting, in a way, that I'm not the only one who can't see straight. I mean it's not super comforting or anything.

Oh, check it out!

I never tire of making extraordinarily beautiful things for you, Reader(s). 'Christ our light!' 'Light of Christ!' (Hey, I'm stately and plump too, though without a bathrobe or shaving bowl. Mockeries of the Mass - loving, I assure you, in this case - are within the ambit of this blog.)

[Extra laughable bonus fun time for reader(s)! That unbelievable grotesque Victor Davis Hanson sez: Forget Halliburton, Enron, etc. — AIG is the metaphor of our new century. Yes, Vicki. By all means let us forget Halliburton and Enron and 'etc.' By all means! Because what possible use could memories of the Bush era be in this, our dark collectivist future? No use at all, baby. You fucking troglodytic hack.]

We torture.

Read now. Keep a punching bag handy - and perhaps a box of tissues. And the phone number of your Congressman.

Lizza on Emanuel.

Emanuel's apparently a bit of an obnoxious cunt - sidebar: not the first overcompensating little nerd to decide he needs to live that way - and even lazy head-in-the-sand types like me remember how important he apparently was to the Dem's charmingly craven capitulation to Bush et al. on nearly every issue of any importance these last few years. Lizza, who wrote a very mixed profile of Obama last year (with an equally noxious editorial stance not even cursorily veiled), has a hagiography of Emanuel in the latest New Yorker.

Greenwald hands them both their balls.

Obama and race.

Interesting stuff from Ambinder:

In the winter of 2007, the [Obama] campaign entered a bidding war with the Clinton campaign over the endorsement of State Senator Darrell Jackson, the pastor of one of the largest congregations in South Carolina. The Obama campaign offered him a $5,000-per-month retainer, and Jackson said he would soon endorse him.

That's only half the paragraph. I got to this point and felt a pain in my stomach. 'Hypocritical assholes,' I thought. This is exactly the shit I want none of from my president.

Then the rest of the paragraph:

But then he sent word that the Clinton campaign was offering a more lucrative contract, implying, at least to the Obama team, that he would endorse Obama only if they would tender a more generous offer. Through his deputy campaign manager, Obama refused. It would be the last time that Obama negotiated with black pastors this way. (Jackson endorsed Clinton.)

Heh. Indeed.

A few weeks before the general election, aides to Anthony Evans, the pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas and an influential radio talk-show host, contacted the Obama campaign and laid out a political battle plan. Evans would mobilize 300,000 volunteers and dispatch 72 church vans to battleground states on Election Day. He would touch more than 2 million voters. All he needed was $5million to pay for it. The Obama campaign thanked him and said no. Evans threatened to go public with the refusal. The Obama campaign pointed to examples of other black leaders who had confronted Obama in public, and invited Evans, in essence, to bring it on. (Evans apologized the day after the election.) [UPDATE!! Ambinder sent email to everyone who linked to this story - admirable and cool - which you can find on the article's webpage.]

Nearly everyone who aspires to lead thousands and millions is a conman. I forget this. I like Barack Obama, and I trust him. He surprises me. He also angers me but I don't mind being angered by intelligent people acting with what looks like integrity. He doesn't tend condescend or pander. I like that.

I'm glad that Mister Bush is gone away, lawd lawd, I'm glad that Mister Bush is gone.

Hall of Justice.

I don't know whether I linked to this before. If not: go, go.

Attic and elsewhere.

All items listed above belong in the world
In which all things are continuous,
And are parts of the original dream which
I am now trying to discover the logic of. This
Is the process whereby the pain of the past in its pastness
May be converted into the future tense

Of joy.

--Robert Penn Warren, 'I am Dreaming of a White Christmas...'

The original dream.

[10]
Clerks now go home, night watchmen wake up, and the heart
Of the taxi-driver, just coming on shift,
Leaps with hope.

All is not in vain.

Old men come out from the hard-core movies.

They wish they had waited till later.

They stand on the pavement and stare up at the sky.

Their drawers are drying stiff  at the crotch, and

The sky dies wide. The sky

Is far above the first hysteria of neon.

Soon they will want to go and get something to eat.

Meanwhile, down the big sluice of Broadway,

The steel logs jerk and plunge

Until caught in the rip, snarl, and eddy here before my face.

A mounted policeman sits a bay gelding. The rump

Of the animal gleams expensively. The policeman

Is some sort of dago. His jowls are swart.

His eyes are bright with seeing.

He is as beautiful as a law of chemistry.

-- Robert Penn Warren, 'I Am Dreaming of a White Christmas: The Natural History of a Vision'

My kind of crazy!

Please try to comprehend: the new Focus on the Family mailer, 'Letter from 2012 in Obama's America.'

Best piece of sci-fi you'll read all week!

More crying in public.

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

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.

Obama: revolutionary?

This week's New Yorker profile of Barack Obama makes for interesting reading. It presents a history of Obama's political career, emphasis on Chicago machine politics and his supposedly Machiavellian outlook. The facts are entertaining, not particularly worrying or surprising; certain allegations are to my mind unseemly or outright stupid, like the (unseemly) claim that Obama picked his church for political reasons (which allegation, to my mind, involves a misunderstanding of the social role of Christian churches, particularly in Obama's neighborhood and social circle(s)).

Then there's the article's editorial stance, which is - to my mind - both inappropriate and likely incorrect:

Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them. When he was a community organizer, he channelled his work through Chicago’s churches, because they were the main bases of power on the South Side. He was an agnostic when he started, and the work led him to become a practicing Christian. At Harvard, he won the presidency of the Law Review by appealing to the conservatives on the selection panel. In Springfield, rather than challenge the Old Guard Democratic leaders, Obama built a mutually beneficial relationship with them. “You have the power to make a United States senator,” he told Emil Jones in 2003. In his downtime, he played poker with lobbyists and Republican lawmakers. In Washington, he has been a cautious senator and, when he arrived, made a point of not defining himself as an opponent of the Iraq war.

Like many politicians, Obama is paradoxical. He is by nature an incrementalist, yet he has laid out an ambitious first-term agenda (energy independence, universal health care, withdrawal from Iraq). He campaigns on reforming a broken political process, yet he has always played politics by the rules as they exist, not as he would like them to exist. He runs as an outsider, but he has succeeded by mastering the inside game. He is ideologically a man of the left, but at times he has been genuinely deferential to core philosophical insights of the right. [My emphasis --wgh]

The implicit claim that Obama is 'more of the same,' a machine politician interested in power above all, isn't strongly supported by the facts in the article, nor is the nastier suggestion that Obama's shrewdness is analogous to that of the hucksters and grandstanders he's come up with. Check out this passage:

Ivory Mitchell, who for twenty years has been the chairman of the local ward organization in Obama’s neighborhood — considered the most important Democratic organization on the South Side — was one of Obama’s earliest backers. Today, he says, “All the work we did to help him get where he finally ended up, he didn’t seem too appreciative.” A year ago, Mitchell became a delegate for Hillary Clinton.

Writer Ryan Lizza clearly wants to paint this as a shortcoming of Obama, a deficit of gratitude or sympathy; I read it as the carping of a political operator angered by the refusal of his Party's guy to shower him with power. 'Appreciative' in this context doesn't mean 'made laws that benefit us,' it means 'scratched our back.' But the majority of comments in the article have this form - the piece is centrally about resentment. Obama has pissed off political operators in Chicago and beyond, at least in part by his refusal to play a traditional game of favours and compromise (choosing instead a nontraditional game of very public exhortations to ideological compromise, about which more later). Lizza's diagnosis, implicit and explicit, is that this makes Obama more compromised, less trustworthy, more an example of politics-as-she-is-played. But an equally plausible reading, and a far less wearisome one, is that Obama's political identity is something far more complex than a power-grabbing sellout.

Lizza asserts that Obama is committed to accommodating the existing political power structure, choosing to see his private fundraising, his principled (i.e. reflective) anti-Iraq-War position, and the role of religious faith in his life as merely political. But I think this cynicism about Obama says more about Ryan Lizza than the politician in question. Unless Obama is running a decades-long scam on the American people and Lizza is the man who's uncovered it (prefigured by the nattering twit David Brooks), we're better off reading Obama's positions, his relentless insistence on outreach to Republicans and the reformation of Democratic politics - away from interest-group identity politics and gutless capitulation, toward the restoration of the social safety net through community action and recognition of shared economic interest - as far more consequential, exciting, even (yes) revolutionary than the Democrats could have hoped for.

My brother is a good deal more conservative than me, but he feels no love for the Republicans; (sort of) like Heidegger, he wants to burn them to save them. I think Barack Obama feels sorta the same way - about the Democrats. If you measure him against machine politicians, if you have no frame of reference other than the purely (cynically) political, then of course you'll evaluate him in those terms. Maybe you'll find him wanting, or despicable, or bright, or more or less OK. But from reading his writing, listening to his speeches, and watching the way he's handled both the passive-aggressive political media and his colleagues in the Democratic Party, I'm able to see him as both a savvy political operator (he's smarter than his critics) and an unusual sort of Democrat.

More importantly, I see 'not a knee-jerk antiwar Dem' not as 'centrist' (what the hell does that word mean anyhow? 'Wouldn't make a donation,' maybe?) but as 'considered.' As I've written elsewhere, I see Obama's public-funding reversal as fully in line with a commitment to campaign-finance reform. And I see in Obama a man with no patience for traditional 'liberal' pieties, trained as an academic but without an academic's self-satisfaction, used to street-level politics but wishing to enact massive change through incremental means. That's what disappoints me about Lizza's article, which is ultimately thin and indulges in embarrassing editorializing unsupported by its reporting: Lizza is so committed to his 'He's not the hero I thought he was!' loss-of-innocence narrative that he dismisses the possibility that Obama really is pursuing revolutionary changes in American culture. And he (Lizza) does so because, like so many in the press/pundit corps, he seems to need to read Obama in terms of Party identity and political process. The cynicism of recent Obama coverage is neither unprecedented nor out of character for our lamentable national press corps; it's remarkable only in the degree to which it may finally be misplaced.

Letting go.

We say things like, “Mommy is dead now and so we are sad.” But mostly, we talk about vacuums.

This is a simple, beautiful piece of writing. Brava, Sarah.

Spencer said, “You. Understand. Ethan.”

I find over and over that the things I 'know' I only feel - or perhaps only want. Hell, maybe I'm only becoming aware now that there's a distinction to be made. I read the other day that Zen practice is the effort to abandon not the Self, really (because there's no such thing), but rather the categories of selfhood, 'I-Me-Mine.' To think beyond subject, not by not thinking, but by becoming aware-beyond-subjectivity; in other words, Zen is the pursuit of objective experience.

“You’re a good boy, Spencer,” Ethan said. “You’re a good boy.”

Maybe there's nothing more perverse than seeing death - objective experience in common if such a thing ever is or was available to laypeople - as about survivors, or survival. But that's me in a nutshell: if you're gone, what matters is that I'm here. Indeed it matters more than ever. That might be who I am and I don't know whether that's alright. Well it's alright for now; time to play frisbee in the park. What difference does it make to a stone.

But Christ, what a lovely piece of writing.

Milch, Milch, Milch, Milch, Milch!!

Go yeah go!

[Update: His next project is a show about NYC cops in the early Seventies, during the Black Liberation Army's cop assassinations, developed with NYPD Blue producer Bill Clark. The videos at the bottom of the page duplicate the content of the podcasts above, but the second link is an extraordinary discussion of religion and art, building to Milch's goals in creating John From Cincinnati and the presentation of the episode six sermon (the show's greatest moment; maybe Milch's greatest moment). Sidenote: he used to work as a script doctor on features?!]

Can be combative.

Welcome to fucking Boatmurdered.

(After you've read the introduction and gotten a handle on what the hell this is, you can skip ahead, if you're that sort of jerk, to StarkRavingMad's updates. Deadwood fans will especially dig his style.)

Up, Simba.

Like this fella, I was moved recently to revisit David Foster Wallace's report for Rolling Stone on one week of John McCain's 2000 primary campaign, 'Up, Simba.' (You can buy it online, but really you should buy his recent book of essays, Consider the Lobster.) And again like Mr Hallberg, I was put in mind of Obama and Clinton, analogous to McCain and Bush in so many ways, the former a 'straight-talking' insurgent against the party establishment whose ambition is shadowed by his narrative of genuineness, the latter the anointed establishment candidate, accused not unfairly of carpetbagging, the product of big donors, whose authenticity the press both encourages us to doubt and yet isn't allowed to openly question.

Wallace's essay, as Hallberg puts it, has something of a 'Generation-Y affect,' sure. But Wallace has always used his own (believable) earnestness as a bulwark against his tendency to get caught up in geeky details and ironic derision and cultured distrust, and that style serves him well in 'Up, Simba,' since the objects of his analysis - the authenticity of John McCain, his campaign, and voters' engagement with those two different-but-inseparable things - are just so convoluted and hypermediated that any authoritative declarations from DFW would just feed into the cynicism he's so worried about. The final echt-Wallace paragraph brings home his point in a now-familiar style:

But if you, like poor old Rolling Stone, have come to a point on the Trail where you've started fearing your own cynicism almost as much as you fear your own credulity and the salesmen who feed on it, you may find your thoughts returning again and again to a certain dark and box-sized cell in a certain Hilton half a world and three careers away, to the torture and fear and offer of release and a certain Young Voter named McCain's refusal to violate a Code. There were no techs' cameras in that box, no aides or consultants, no paradoxes or gray areas; nothing to sell. There was just one guy and whatever in his character sustained him. This is a huge deal. In your mind, that Hoa Lo box becomes sort of a special dressing room with a star on the door, the private place behind the stage where one imagines "the real John McCain" still lives. And but now the paradox here is that this box that makes John McCain "real" is, by definition, locked. Impenetrable. Nobody gets in or out. This is huge, too; you should keep it in mind. It is why, however many behind-the-scenes pencils get put on the case, a "profile" of John McCain is going to be just that: one side, exterior, split and diffracted by so many lenses there's way more than one man to see. Salesman or leader or neither or both, the final paradox - the really tiny central one, way down deep inside all the other campaign puzzles' spinning boxes and squares that layer McCain - is that whether he's truly "for real" now depends less on what is in his heart than on what might be in yours. Try to stay awake.

That last sentence isn't meant to be haughty or disdainful; it's a warning shot well-intentioned. You should read Wallace's piece, which is long and in places utterly boring, and which in the final analysis is probably the single best thing ever written about John McCain.

Then you should think about Barack Obama and his one million campaign donors, and the fact that the 1996 election saw the lowest Young Voter turnout in history, while the 2008 election will probably be decided by the highest.

* * *

Let's not talk too much about Obama here; I'd like to think more deeply about the questions Wallace's essay raises - for several pages at a time it seems to be nothing but questions - and I'm not ready for the self-analysis that such an exercise would require. Nor maybe do I have time for it since I'm not the genius DFW is. But let's say this:

McCain's Y2K candidacy was a rebuke to eight years of Democratic leadership, yes, but also to the awesome corruption and partisanship indulged in by the Republican Congress, climaxing with the ludicrous impeachment proceedings - in which, by the way, John McCain voted 'yes' on impeachment, twice. McCain's rapid ascendancy had a lot to do with the moral squalor of the Clinton White House, but plenty to do with the awesome incompetence and falseness of George W. Bush, who was neither a Texan nor a warrior nor a shrewd businessman nor a conservative in any meaningful sense, yet who campaigned as the Shining Example of each of those traits, and 'compassionate' to boot.

McCain is running this year as a strange hybrid - partly a revision of Bush's policies, partly a repudiation of his manner. Forced to rely on the Republican machine, and facing an insurgency of his own (in the ridiculous Mike Huckabee), McCain can't run as the maverick; his Republicanism is too visible and he's counting on GOP votes to keep things close in November.

Meanwhile, Democrat voters face their own version of the McCain2K choice: Obama is running as a rebuke to both president Bush and the feckless Democratic Congress, which has aided and abetted every single step of Bush's political forced march, to war, misbegotten tax cuts, and grotesque entitlement expansion. Obama gets to be both not-a-Republican and not-another-Democrat, and he's lucky that his main opponent this year is in a literal sense running as dynastic successor. (Al Gore would have made things interesting.)

But following Wallace, we should observe this: in both 2000 and 2008, Young Voters have been faced with a choice they can't be expected to fully understand, because the terms in which the campaigns have been conducted are old terms, the metaphors invoked by the pundit corps are borrowed from JFK, and an 18-year-old Young Voter - hell, most 25-year-olds - can't remember a time before Gennifer Flowers, before James Carville, before HillaryCare. Obama and McCain have appealed rhetorically to a golden age before Spin Rooms and push-polling, but for many voters (most Young Voters), those times are fantasy. They may well be fictions made up by campaign consultants, for all we know.

I remember a little of the 1988 Presidential election; in our mock election at my elementary school in Texas, more than 90% of my 4th grade class went to George H. W. Bush (no surprise). I remember more clearly Clinton's ascendancy, and even more clearly how he staved off poor Bob Dole, how exciting it all seemed (I hated Clinton for no adult reason).

When Barack Obama talks about a 'different kind of politics,' I have to make it up in my head as I go along. And I do; and I believe it's possible, whatever it is.

In 'Up, Simba,' DFW talks about the difference between 'believing a candidate and believing in him.' I believe in Barack Obama, and I'm not sure why. I'm also not sure why I should be afraid of this belief, though I know I would counsel someone else against the slippery slope to messianism, etc. I trust in the possibility of productive, thoughtful bipartisanship even though the great moment of American political unanimity in my lifetime was the disastrous fallout from 9/11/01. I cheer for Barack Obama partly because in my lifetime I've never cheered for a Democrat. Ever. And I boo Hillary Clinton partly because she's a reminder of who I have disliked and feared in the past. (No, not my mom. She was awesome.) At different times I've justified my vote for Obama as pragmatic, idealist, a gesture of racial integration, a post-racial gesture of assumption of equality, an indictment of the Clintons, and so forth. I know what I feel.

* * *

Yeah, see? That's what 'let's not talk too much about Obama here' looks like on a relaxed weekend with my fiancée monkey-laughing at blogs over at her desk. When I said we shouldn't shit around I was obviously shitting around. But there's a sequel to Wallace's essay yet to be written; the idea should be, roughly, What are Dems getting out of Obama? How is the party establishment hoping to play his election, and what happens to his candidacy now that he's (sort of) the presumptive nominee? And what is it like to be a Young Voter in this extremely consequential election, voting for someone who seems to be as Outsider-y as you can get, yet who would never ever have gotten this far without the intrinsically creepy mechanisms of modern-media politics, to which he's rhetorically opposed? And, and: What kind of political generation is arising from the very, very questionable feelings of agency and 'ownership' that Internet/distributed political financing and the constant blather of blogs seem to promise? There's reason to believe that Young Voters are more apathetic than they've ever been, across the board; what does it mean that they're rousing themselves to vote for this guy?

What do these assholes think this is, a game?

* * *

Well that ended up somewhere unexpected. As will we all, no doubt.

Fascinating interview with Damon Lindelof.

If you care at all about TV writing, go read this interview with showrunner Damon Lindelof, the main brain behind Lost. He went up in my esteem with this one, though his awesome knowledge of (and love for) television is balanced out by a certain rah-rah shallowness to some of his aesthetic choices - though if you watch the show, you already know the likely limits of the writers' empathy and insight. In particular, I'm surprised by his insistence that Season Four (and onward) represents a 'new paradigm' for the show's storytelling; while it does change the structure of the story, thus far this year it's the same shock endings, the same utterly shallow characterization, the same momentum-instead-of-emotional-believability choices, the same pulp clichés, the same wretchedly overwrought dialogue. (Unexpected bonus disappointment: Giacchino's scores this year have been bombastic and thuddingly boring.) 'New paradigm' or not, they're telling the story in the same register as before, and a change of structure is no doubt a hell of a lot more interesting to the writers than to the viewers. And it's all but irrelevant to the Big Story, in terms of meaning.

Lindelof has always seemed to grossly overestimate the show's depth. That doesn't change in this interview, but as usual, familiarity breeds tolerance. You begin to get a better sense of the man, which is educational.

Lester Bangs.

[Wrote this a while ago, meant to edit it, never got around to it.]

Lester Bangs described himself as follows, and Greil Marcus responded to it as follows in a posthumous collection of Bangs's stuff entitled Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (which belongs to Devin and now he lives in Chicago and so what next?):

"...I was fun, had a wild sense of humor, a truly unique and unpredictable individual, a performing rock'n'roll artist with a band of my own, perhaps a contender if not now then tomorrow for the title Best Writer in America (who was better? Bukowski? Burroughs? Hunter Thompson? Gimme a break. I was the best. I wrote almost nothing but record reviews, and not many of those..." He was half-kidding until the parenthesis began (he never closed it); then he was telling the truth. Perhaps what this book demands from a reader is a willingness to accept that the best writer in America could write almost nothing but record reviews.

Bangs was of course not the best writer in America, not even close, not in Pynchon's decade among others, and though Marcus's introduction is elsewhere comparatively restrained, his claims for Bangs (and his aesthetic superiority) are ludicrous. I first started wandering through this book maybe a year and a half ago, maybe two. There's great material in there, no question: the piece on The Clash is excellent, first-rate life-on-the-road-with-the-band stuff, and even if it's shot through with Bangs's characteristic subconscious fawning and faux-outsider half-ironic hipster jargon it's a strong and clear-eyed take on the band's world. (Praise all you want his angry attacks on what irritated him, what he liked and loved he absolutely deified, in a way that's never quite as boldly unembarrassed as they say, and there's a whininess to his mock-critical swagger that in the era of LiveJournal and 'Fugly' and lit-blogs is no longer any surprise at all. Lester Bangs would have been one of the great bloggers, and his occasional fundraising post would have been hilarious and insufferable all at once. You'd have unsubscribed from his RSS feed eventually, no question. Maybe after his 1,000th post was a fifteen-page single paragraph about Lou Reed. Maybe then.) But his record reviews weren't just steeped in the language of juvenile rock fandom, they were loopy quasi-mystical bleats from a young man (dead at 34, you know) who seemed to insist in his writing that knowing better and knowing more were the same thing, that listening to lots of bad music was 'training' in some way, who pathetically longed to be a rock star and tried to absorb rock by osmosis (the Lou Reed namedropping, the elbow-in-the-ribs referentiality, the whole standard-issue posture of 'I'm just a guy who owns some records' to leaven baked-and-fried dorm-room shit like 'Fact: Van Morrison was twenty-two - or twenty-three - years old when he made this record; there are lifetimes behind it. What Astral Weeks deals in are not facts but truths').

This isn't to say he wasn't a honey of a writer; goddamn, there are throwaway sentences scattered throughout Bangs's reviews and features that nearly deliver on his promise of music journalism 'based on the sound and language of rock'n'roll.' But this is also a writer who called Miles's raucous, sexy On the Corner 'bleak music...music from the other side of something I feel but I don't want to cross.' And then this is also a writer who simultaneously loved going to Stooges and Iggy Pop shows and was able to speak clearly about the utter stupid nihilism of Stooges and Iggy Pop shows - yet who insisted, pleaded, that he was somehow above the fray, maybe because he couldn't play the shit himself - who worshipped confrontational musicians yet had a soft spot for the three acoustic-guitar chords in forty minutes of Astral Weeks, who wrote dismissively in one review of people who use reductive terms like 'the fifties' and 'the sixties,' and on another referred (at the wise old age of twenty-nine fucking years old) to 'the explosion of psychedelic-militant folklore which was the sixties.' This isn't self-conscious contradiction-as-style, this is style as cloud cover for a scatterbrain writer with more feeling than sense (and surprisingly little by way of musical knowledge, for a professional music critic - though look at the idiots who've followed in his footsteps and know he's no worse than par).

Makes you nuts: this talent, this zeal, this occasional self-awareness, indeed this deepening (accidentally it seems from the writing) self-awareness, this polemical fervor, applied to Iggy fucking Pop - and in his language, even. Lester Bangs could really write and he had things to say, and many of them disappoint me. Not everyone deserves the honor of disappointing someone like me, who really does after all want to love something new all the time. So yeah dead Lester, well enough done, Lester who thought he was in a church, dead Lester Bangs, who was basically a lucky nerd.

One of several problems with your stupid digital culture.

This post is a fairly standard 'not all people are cut out to be managers' rant-lite. John Gruber - who increasingly wants to be Jason Kottke[*], or at least get Kottke's web traffic, judging from his linking habits of late - linked to it today with no real comment. He apparently loved it. For a few seconds I couldn't figure out why - there's no particular insight, just...aah.

I can tell you why he loved it, folks. The two (understandable) fetishes of every Web/tech blogger: nomenclature and graphs, none strictly necessary of course. When I can rouse myself to give a shit about the world again, we'll talk more about this: the reign of a certain 'clean' design aesthetic online, the fetish for a certain kind of infographic, the substitution of 'staring at charts' for 'learning about information presentation' - the NaNoWrization of the Web. But yeah I just can't care right now, sorry. I mean have you ever gone grocery shopping at Trader Joe's the afternoon/evening before Thanksgiving? Friendly advice: bring an iPod, you're not gonna wanna deal with those yuppie motherfuckers. (The customers, that is; the staff at our local TJ's is unfailingly friendly and enthusiastic.)

[*] It kills me to say this. Gruber's one of my favourite bloggers, insightful and opinionated, and Kottke's site is...well, it's kind of pointless. It's a list of links with vacuous commentary. Gruber can do better. Not a coincidence of course: once he signed up for The Deck, his linking habits sort of...changed. I think.

No Country: bad for you?

[Cleaning out my unposted-article queue. I still haven't seen the film in question.]

I've yet to see No Country for Old Men, and I do plan to; after the insufferable Ladykillers and the very, very mixed Intolerable Cruelty, the Coens no longer have the get-out-of-jail-free card I gave them after the rapturous O Brother, but people are talking about their latest as a return to Blood Simple and Miller's Crossing form. I loved the former, was just fine with the latter, and am curious now.

But this powerful review by Jonathan Rosenbaum has me second-guessing. It begins with the best critique of Silence of the Lambs I've read:

One reason I tend to dislike movies about psycho killers is that I can't respond to them with the devotion I feel is expected of me. I'm too distracted by the abundance of these characters on-screen when they rarely appear in real life, and by how popular they seem to become whenever we're fighting a war. What is it about them that people find so exciting? Reviewing The Silence of the Lambs over 16 years ago, I was troubled by the way the thriller tapped into "irrational, mythical impulses that ultimately seem more theological than psychological," and how critics who loved it seemed "better equipped to regurgitate the myth than to analyze it."

I was especially bemused by the ready acceptance of Hannibal Lecter's supernatural powers — his ability to convince a hostile prisoner in an adjoining cell to swallow his own tongue, for instance, or to know precisely when and where to reach Clarice, the movie's heroine, on the phone. Anthony Hopkins's Oscar-winning performance may be stark and commanding, but it wouldn't have counted for beans if the audience hadn't already been predisposed to accept this murderer as some sort of divine presence.

The waves of love that went out to Lecter, epitomized by the five top Oscars the movie received in 1992, were a mix of giggly fascination, twisted affection, and outright awe for his absolute lack of remorse. This was during the first gulf war, a time when we were grappling with our own feelings about killing masses of people on a daily basis.

I think the wartime-saviour talk is stretching somewhat, but perhaps I just want to think that. Anyone who saw the stupid sequel Hannibal (especially in tandem with Michael Mann's nasty, unsettling Manhunter) knows that both author Thomas Harris and his film-adaptors instantly fell in love with Hannibal Lecter, specifically with the fantasy of his invincibility. Like the fawning critics and Academy voters, they loved that he was 'pure evil'; maybe they just loved that someone was. As good as Silence was, I've never unerstood the praise heaped upon it; it's a very strong suspense film, a police procedural with a fascinating abnormal-psych undercurrent, but (to take one example) I'd take the brutal wit of Memento over Anthony Hopkins's campy performance any day.

There's something about the critical reception of No Country, particularly Javier Bardem's performance as the villain, that's a little upsetting. But it's not unprecedented. Consider the hatred directed at the last several minutes of Psycho; the problem with that excruciating exposition isn't just that it needlessly clarifies a condition that could well have been intuited from the rest of the film, it's that it robs Norman Bates of his creepy ambiguity - which is to say, it takes his power away. The Judge, in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, may well be Satan inhabiting the body and life of a man, but that's another thing entirely - that's an abstraction that doesn't require psychology of any kind. What would be worrisome would be e.g. critics praising the Judge's familiarity and humanity. That's what we do with neat impenetrability (paging David Lynch): there are critics praising Bardem in No Country as having 'fully-rendered psychology,' but Rosenbaum sees something else:

What gives all of this a special kick is the way the killer commits murder without so much as a twitch, behavior we're clearly expected to regard with a certain amount of awe. Chigurh isn’t an intellectual like Hannibal Lecter, and he lacks his cosmopolitan sense of humor, but he slays many more innocent people. And except for a stray line toward the end of the film, when he briefly alludes to his own birth being occasioned by blind chance, there isn't a trace of psychological speculation about what makes him tick — only a passing remark by Carson Wells that he operates according to a twisted moral code of his own.

Emphasis mine. I love the film American Psycho, in part because I regard it as having very little to do with murder at all; the villains of the piece are clearly the vile bastards who surround the increasingly desperate killer Patrick Bateman. He's a fantasy figure, meant by his creator (Bret Easton Ellis) as a reminder of the tendency of pure evil to pop up at strange (and not so strange) times, yet in both book and film he gets an identifiable personality, which changes over time. At film's end he's 'won' in a sense, but Christian Bale plays him quite differently from how he began.

We know nothing about killing but what we've learned from authors who know very little about killing. And yet I don't consider William Burroughs any particular expert on the subject either. I'll listen to Tolkien when he describes the joy and horror of battle; he lived it. But it's important that we recognise that the smiling omnipotent killers that fill our big screens are cinematic effects; we're obsessed with them because they lend themselves readily to heightened drama, because they automatically raise the stakes - not because they help us understand anything at all. As William Goldman put it, ask the average schmo the most heroic thing he ever saw - a fireman running into a collapsing building to save a baby, say - and you're describing what our onscreen heroes do before breakfast. Our onscreen villains should in theory have gotten more complex over time, but we don't actually demand of them anything like realism. They're abstract forces, always have been. That's how we like our evil: something you can wake up from.

Oil! Oil! Oil!

This week in the LRB.

Two years ago on Kunstler.

He said that, it made me think this.

It seems to me that the intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and values in this country is one of the things that's gutted our generation. All the things that my parents said to me, like "It's really important not to lie." OK, check, got it. I nod at that but I really don't feel it. Until I get to be about 30 and I realize that if I lie to you, I also can't trust you. I feel that I'm in pain, I'm nervous, I'm lonely and I can't figure out why. Then I realize, "Oh, perhaps the way to deal with this is really not to lie."

Two reactions to being caught in a lie: 1) You lament your own lost trustworthiness. 2) You lament your lost trust in your victim. It seems to me that they lie on opposite sides of a great divide; you can tell a lot about a person, maybe, by which they settle down to. This is not a light I wish to turn on myself just yet.