Wax Banks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Monster Calls (Patrick Ness, 2011).

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

[SPOILERS FOLLOW for a story worth reading unspoiled.]

* * *

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

But.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

Three books lately read.

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

* * *

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

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

Kind of a pain in the ass. But good.

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

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

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

* * *

Get the joke right!

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

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

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

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

Noticing; or, One form Seasonal Affective Disorder can take.

In winter I start to experience lust as always-already thwarted -- not by winter clothing (c'mon) but by my own inward-retreating lethargy or self-protectiveness or body shame or something. I don't look at women on the street in the same way as in spring.

I expect porn websites do brisk business in winter.

(I do gaze longingly at my wife in winter, of course, because I'm still stupid in love with her; and because my desire for my wife, this galaxy of needs, is a hell of lot more complex than the anyway-reductive notion of 'physical attraction.' But my lethargy and retreat and shame do bear directly on our relationship in other ways (see below).)

When the weather breaks I feel more confident, permit myself to look at other people with confidence, and my own confidence invests them with some new energy: I trust in (my perception of?) their beauty. Something like that. Maybe I just enjoy the pull. The force all living beings exert, myself included.

Cambridge is getting some stunningly nice weather at the moment. I'm reminded that a 'new look' for springtime isn't about your appearance, it's about literally looking anew at the human beings around you.

So this isn't actually about lust; lust is just an example of the feelings which I stop second-guessing when the sun comes out. One of the disorders I experience in winter is loss of trust. The sun returns, trust is restored, and I feel attractive -- attraction -- again. Gravity is symmetrical, duh.

Brief Buffy-nerd note about 'Seeing Red,' specifically that awful scene.

Attention conservation notice: [Don't read if you don't care about Buffy. Don't read if you really care about Buffy but haven't seen Season Six. Read if you are, like me, a big-ass Buffy nerd.]

From a Whedonesque discussion:

I actually also did get the powerless bit out of Spike's scene, though I think a lot of people probably didn't. But as a man, it immediatly comes across as very violent, which makes it a lot more shocking than if it had been a woman trying to get with a man. That's why I hated that scene so much.

Semi-relatedly:

One interesting thing about the Spike-Buffy relationship is the way the two characters move between seeing each other as categories (monster, Slayer) and treating one another as people ('...you treat me like a man, and that's...'). The attempted rape in 'Seeing Red' is awful on its own (human) terms, but as the characters are also larger-than-life figures, that symbolic dimension stays present: in that scene, Spike is misapprehending his own nature and the nature of their relationship, and -- maddeningly -- backsliding in the way he sees Buffy. He loses his sense of her as a young woman in pain (which he achieves in e.g. the final scene of 'Fool for Love,' and the Glory-tortures-Spike episode 'Intervention').

That's one thing that makes the end of 'Intervention' so interesting: Buffy's heartfelt kiss and thanks feel like she's seeing Spike both as a man who was turned into a monster, and a monster rising to the moral status of a man. Like everything else about that final act of Season Five, it's shot through with all this ambivalence and not-quite-rightness -- after all, there's no way they can actually win against Glory, that's always pretty clear, and earlier in the episode Buffy's gotten the 'death is your gift' speech, which has just accelerated her ongoing collapse.

All of Season Six is as exhausted-feeling as that last movement of Season Five, 'Seeing Red' not least. That feeling that all the characters -- and the show itself -- are running on fumes. (I suppose that's why you need yet more Sarah McLachlan.) The bathroom scene in 'Seeing Red' is just one more example, in a season full of them, of a character mistaking life's tendency to continue for a need for more drama. (That's one thing I hate about the 'Andrew and Jonathan like big gestures and big stories' explanation of those characters: it's not that they like dramatic gestures as such, it's that they're shit scared of just being who they are, because they hate their 'selves.' For sad, obvious reasons, I guess.)

Anyhow my contribution to the actual discussion under...discussion...is that when, in 'Touched' (7x20), Spike tells Buffy 'You're the one,' he doesn't just mean the Slayer, and he doesn't just mean the love of his (after)life. He means both: a whole person. Just Buffy, Buffy as she complicatedly is. Y'know, cookie dough and all that.

Throughout Season Six, though, Spike swings from one understanding of her to another, and Buffy in her desperate depression does the same. They see each other wrong. Everyone does, in Season Six. But at that point there've been moments -- in 'The Gift,' 'Intervention,' 'Fool for Love,' etc. -- where it could've gone another way. Season Six is about backsliding and evasion and shortcuts and falling-into-mere-category, which is (if anything is) a sin.

Horrible as the attempted rape is in itself, it's part of a less shocking but maybe more deeply unsettling season-long pattern.

Anyhow, I never thought the scene in question lacked for compelling subtext, but I hadn't tried to word it together until just now.

the bit about the dragon

From the thing I'm working on:

There's a dragon. Dozens of them, actually, but one Boss dragon named Cocoa plays a central role in this story, as in so many others. Cocoa says to the mayor of Casterbridge, 'I could use a live goat for my lunch today.'

The mayor (Ashley, age 9) says, 'I don't like goats!'

Cocoa says, 'No one does.'

Ashley says, 'I have a pebble with the Virgin Mary's face on it! My auntie Ai-ris gave it to me.'

Cocoa says, 'Who?'

'Ai-ris!'

'No, I mean who's the Virgin Mary? Or rather, given the nature of this world, aren't there quite a lot of those?'

'You're funny!'

Cocoa blushes, then gathers himself. He will not be dissuaded from his task today. 'Give me a goat.'

'Goats smell like a bathroom!' says the mayor.

'Yes,' says Cocoa.

'Do you want to play horsey ride?' says Ashley. Her smile is radiant. She is a career politician.

'Certainly,' says Cocoa, 'so long as we pick up that goat first. I am hungry.'

'OK. Climb on my back and we'll fly over there!' says the mayor of Casterbridge.

Cocoa does so, and they pretend-fly over to the Goat Store. The trip takes five months, because it is miles away and Cocoa weighs a hundred tons and Ashley is nine years old. Cocoa dies on the way. So does Ashley. The entire population of Casterbridge is shattered by this turn of events, though no one can say it's entirely unexpected -- Ashley was prone to that kind of vote-getting stunt, the local gossips and newspaper pundits say (after a respectful silence).

The bigger deal, as far as the local nerd population is concerned, is that with Cocoa out of the picture, due to the absolutely insaaaaaane federal law about using real dragons only, getting a proper D&D game together is now a giant! pain! in the ass! Not least compared to, say, the equally strict laws around 'Monkey in the Middle,' which (given the explosive growth in sugarchimp population that occurs exactly nine months after the local Sugar-Mart gets restocked) don't really pose anywhere near the kind of problem for hardcore gamers that the whole dragon thing does.

an adventure

we had an adventure today

oh really? what happened?

well we went out for sushi

damn i hate sushi

you don't travel enough. afterward

what do you mean i don't travel enough?

afterward we were driving back

from where?

the valley

shit you drove to the valley just for sushi? there's that great place down on fifth and balencia

jose's?

yeah

JOSE'S SUSHI AND TATTOO PARLOR? seriously

what

so anyway afterward we were driving back

how'd you go

the mclaren

traffic?

nah it's a bye week

oh shit yeah

like i was saying for god's sake driving back and kimiko was driving and we HIT this guy

WHAT

no he was ok and everything

seriously

the cops came and he left in an ambulance. we didn't hit him hard

with your car you didn't hit him hard

i don't think he had broken bones

were you going like five miles an hour

we just didn't hit him hard

or like SIX

listen

how do you hit someone softly with a car

can i finish?

wait is this why you didn't RETURN my CALLS?

yeah that's what i'm trying to tell you, we clipped this guy and i was holding my phone with the window open and kimiko like SLAMMED on the brakes and we skidded

oh you lost your phone

not only did i lose it it nailed kimiko on the head THEN i lost it, so i had to drive the rest of the way

what

because SHE got a concussion out of the deal

oh that's why she didn't return my calls either

no i think that has more to do with not liking you

c'mon

she says you're racist about asians

French parents are superior? But then what exactly do French parents produce?

My wonderful wife forwarded me this WSJ excerpt from Pamela Druckerman's forthcoming anti-Chua text, Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting. The broad argument: French parents are more comfortable setting boundaries for their children, so everything is better there.

Except, of course, it's not. From the article:

Rest assured, I certainly don't suffer from a pro-France bias. Au contraire, I'm not even sure that I like living here. I certainly don't want my kids growing up to become sniffy Parisians.

There are a lot of things wrong with Druckerman's article: the bourgeois myopia, the cheesy stereotyping of American parents, the pathetic cod-Gladwellian namechecking (she brings on Walter Mischel, inventor of the 'marshmallow test,' to assert that he's never studied French children but his 'impression' is the same as hers(!!)), and especially Druckerman's dead stupid one-sentence dismissal of the deeply entrenched differences in governmental support of childrearing families between France and the U.S.

She even talks (elsewhere in the book) about how awesome it is that French women put on less weight when pregnant than American women do. Of all the tired-ass clichés...

But the deepest problem with the piece is in the paragraph I quoted -- or rather, the question it raises and doesn't even try to answer: if Druckerman doesn't want to raise French kids who turn someday into Frenchmen, why does she have such a hard-on for French parenting? Where does she think Frenchmen come from, exactly?

Turns out the answer is hidden at the end of the piece, and it's got precious little to do with her children:

After about 10 minutes, Leo stopped trying to leave altogether. He seemed to forget about the gate and just played in the sandbox with the other kids. Soon Frédérique and I were chatting, with our legs stretched out in front of us. I was shocked that Leo suddenly viewed me as an authority figure.

What Druckerman wants, of course, is just this: to be seen differently; to sit around chatting her legs stretched out in front of her. To not be 'just' a mom. The real Pamela Druckerman is the woman having a chat at the playground, after all.

What she envies is that French parents -- the ones she sits around chatting with at playgrounds, anyhow -- feel no guilt about putting themselves first.

How do you say 'Fuck off, Seymour, mommy needs her merlot now' in French, I wonder?

Why don't geeks seem happy during/after arguments?

Here's part of a theory I'm working up. It is incomplete, provisional, and probably totally screwy somehow. THAT SAID:

'Geek culture' is built to facilitate social interaction between folks who have (certain) problems with emotional understanding and communication. Structured socializing (RPGs, cons, (video) game culture) is big here.

You'll note that geeks famously argue angrily 'til they're blue in the face about the pettiest pop-culture bullshit on earth -- which edition of D&D or Star Trek is the best, did Han shoot first, what exactly is Joyce's 'word known to all men,' is Tony Soprano dead, who's the metalest metal band of all, do Harry and Snape belong together forever, etc. One possible explanation for this annoying phenomenon is that geeks line up this way (w/r/t such irrelevant questions) so they can have the experience of being on a team without the trauma of being picked (last). In other words: affinity groups consisting solely of sharing an opinion.

That's part of why you hear so much affectless bickering in your local nerd store (or online forum): the point isn't to win, the point is to assert membership in a group when other forms of assertion are inaccessible.

NOW OK, BUT LOOK: 'neurotypical' folks do the same thing, right? NOT QUITE. The key difference is that people in/of the social mainstream are able to maintain memberships in social groups whose binding material is vulnerability, empathy, and/or public affection. (Let's leave the weird formalism of organized polyamory alone for the time being.)

People who for some reason have been impeded in their attempts to join groups who actually share and risk things -- by internal or external forces/circumstances -- will associate themselves compensatorily along 'ideological' lines.

Hence: Team Edward. (14-year-olds are socially-maladapted by definition, because our society can't handle puberty.) Hence: down-the-ticket voters. Hence: soccer hooligans.

If someone's in an affinity group whose main characteristic seems to be that the members are constantly at each other's throats (rather than that largely-irrelevant official business draws people together to agree broadly, and then to share experiences/feelings, e.g. the MLA or the NRA) then something is being compensated for, and some social fact is being avoided (or going unrecognized).

(I count myself among the uglies, here, and I have juuuuuust enough wit to hate it, but no more.)

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

And Louis Armstrong sings ‘What a Wonderful World.’

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

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

But they twinkle.

What a wonderful world.

Miss you Adams.

A moment for Sasha Laxton.

'Gender-neutral' parenting -- i.e. a posture and policy of nonintervention in a child's experiments with social roles -- is a reasonable practice, or set of practices; at the minimum it can serve as a counterweight to the pathological limitations on sex roles found in (American) adult society. I have no great problem with gender roles as such; insofar as they're social/cultural conventions which amplify sex-linked traits and behaviours, I feel I should act neutrally toward them too. And defend against any intrusion on what I see as best practices, of course -- even if I surrender in the end.

I have a replica WWII GI's map case in olive canvas with a stiff cardboard back; it's the most convenient shoulder bag I've ever had. I refer to it as my purse, and get the occasional strange look for doing so. But it's a pretty butch bag all the same. I take this as a very very very small example of acknowledging the usual boundaries, tweaking them a bit, and going about my business such that my own convenience and comfort are kept high, even if productivity remains at a minimum. I also acknowledge that I get a giggle out of calling it a purse -- but I also explain, more often than is necessary, the super-masculine origins of the bag. Perhaps this is overcompensation in two opposing directions: an unstable equilibrium. Well, I'm not perfect. You?

Sasha Laxton is a five-year-old male. His parents claim to have kept his sex secret for five years. Now he's entered school, and they've publicly revealed that 'he's a boy.'

Here's a picture. Here's a TIME story about some backlash. Here's a quote from Sasha's mother:

“Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?” Laxton told her local news outlet, Cambridge News. “It affects what they wear and what they can play with, and that shapes the kind of person that they become.”

I'm sure Laxton has done a lot of thinking about the nature of her/their experiment. I don't wish to engage in amateur psychology. And I do understand the progressive passion for replacement gender norms which are more just, or perhaps just differently unjust, than the ones we've got going today. So I want to point out two small things:

• This is not 'gender-free' or indeed 'gender-neutral' parenting. It is indeed explicitly interventionist in a ploddingly conventional way:

  Sasha dresses in clothes he likes -- be it a hand-me-downs from his sister or his brother. The big no-no's are hyper-masculine outfits like skull-print shirts and cargo pants. In one photo, sent to friends and family, Sasha's dressed in a shiny pink girl's swimsuit. "Children like sparkly things," says Beck. "And if someone thought Sasha was a girl because he was wearing a pink swimming costume, then what effect would that have?"

  Good idea, bad idea, doesn't matter: whatever her experiment was meant to accomplish in the beginning, she's cocked it up. Sasha knows what 'hyper-masculine' clothes are -- 'skull-print shirts and cargo pants.' Which of course 'affects what [he wears] and what [he] can play with, and that shapes the kind of person that [he becomes.' His parents -- by all press accounts his mom -- gave him a totally run-of-the-mill gender stereotype as a reference point and said YOU MAY NOT BE THAT. Good choice, bad choice, doesn't matter: now the kid thinks 'avoiding stereotypes' means not wearing traditional boys' clothing.

  The hypocrisy is important. The kid won't be five forever, and someday he'll learn about stereotypes and gender roles and the nature of sexual difference from someone other than his mom and dad. He'll still carry big lessons about the joy of not worrying whether you're doing what everyone else is -- but he'll also carry a lesson, bigger than it may seem at first, about choosing the right stereotypes to please the grownups who made him think he could choose freely...

• Look here:

  So is she hoping that dressing Sasha in pink will change anything? “Yes. If it just made one person think: ‘No, I won’t put that frilly dress on her because it’s a bit silly’ or: ‘Yeah, if he really likes that doll, then that’s OK,’ then that would be really brilliant.

  “All I want to do is make people think a bit.”

  And will she mind if Sasha grows up to be a butch rugby player or, indeed, a hairdresser?

  “I just want him to fulfil his potential, and I wouldn’t push him in any direction,” says Beck.

  “As long as he has good relationships and good friends, then nothing else matters, does it? What’s more important than being happy, and making other people happy? It’s all that matters.” [my emphasis --wa]

  Whatever sentiments Beck is trying to express, these quotes make me...uneasy, to say the very least. I hope you see why: the emphasis on (other) people 'think[ing] a bit,' the weird equation of not pushing a child with 'fulfilling his potential,' the silly idea that frilly dresses are themselves inherently silly -- like cargo pants and skull shirts, presumably, only Sasha seems to be encouraged to wear the dresses and forbidden from wearing the other stuff. (I'll note too that the not-so-faintly condescending tone of the interview just pisses me off.)

The interview isn't about Sasha, it's about Beck Laxton -- just as the furor over Amy Chua's frankly abusive parenting style (like her contemptibly self-serving bestselling account of it) was all about Amy Chua. Fine, fine, that's the media for you.

But consider: if Beck Laxton had taken any other approach to gender norms, and been this self-righteous about it, and given such incoherent justification to the press, and picked such weirdly specific issues to take a stand about ('ruched sleeves and scalloped collar?' seriously?), but not in the name of 'gender stereotypes' -- how would you receive the article? Would her politics be more interesting and important than, say, her hypocrisy?

That said: why is the media covering the story? Whose side are the news media always on?

Lost some steam here, sorry.

Seeing without seeing.

Fixating: not fixing one's attention, but rather fixing the object of our attention, making it a center for our perception and conception, unmoving. Dead. We can no longer relate to it dynamically. To fixate on a person is to turn him or her into an abstract category or cluster of qualities: make another into an Other.

'Take a step back' is one of the most important pieces of advice one human can give to another; it's nearly impossible to follow when it matters most. If you're not fixating on a person as a feature of your private narrative, you're responding to a being-in-full. You're living for real, in other words. Wouldn't that be nice?

an argument approached.

[notes from a project abandoned but not forever.]

the self misperceives itself (as eternal, coherent, unique, centre of the world, etc.). this central misapprehension and distortion is ‘allegorized’ or mirrored in every arena of our experience:

• essentiality/essentialism (‘dogs are essentially different from cats’ is only a thumbnail for ‘dogs and cats can’t interbreed due to interactions at a level (macromolecular) we couldn’t even perceive until the 19th century’)
• narcissism of small differences (nationalism, racism, etc.)
• behavioural intertia/addiction (bad habits are a damaging abstraction of experience; we fall into patterns without even perceiving them, and relinquish the ability to monitor our own behaviour)
• myopia continuing even after we know of it (stubborn resistance even to knowledge we already possess!)
• causal scale (look for problems’ causes at the problems’ site and scale – related to essentialism, e.g. ‘racial/culural differences must be due to race, which maps to skin colour, so look for skin colour first’)

it’s vital to understand the distortion that is the coherent ‘self’ in order to perceive the true relations of things without demanding comfort (e.g. in egocentric religious myths). life without lies will NOT reduce to life without fiction – when we understand what fiction does (allow for emotional/cognitive action at a distance, consciousness-alternation in other words, via a complex symbolic compression/encoding scheme) we will be prepared to experience it lovingly in its time and place, while not wrongly demanding fiction’s distorting/abstracting comfort in places like, say, the nightly news, or a tense conversation with family, or the concept of ‘true love.’

this mode of ‘scale-free thinking’ leads to an understanding of the purposes of the Self’s fictionalization, and sheds light on one of the most crucial ideas ever conceived by humans: sustainability. this term is more potent than is generally understood.

consider (in a goofy semi-related thread maybe): is the myth of santa claus sustainable? no. (eventually all kids figure it out, or are told.) does it hurt when we let go of it? yes. is the hurt a long-term problem? we don’t know. (no one’s ever studied the psychology of the santa claus myth, that i know of.) the fiction of santa claus scaffolds a complex belief system about the magical nature of life – but is that metaphor (‘magic’) necessary to perceive the beauty and, yes, ‘magic’ of the mere natural world? of mathematical equations and scientific concepts? of fiction in general? i’m not sure, but i doubt it.

in any case the point of the santa claus example is that LOTS of cultural myths are like that: as soon as the kid cares one way or another about finding out the truth, the kid’ll find out, and great pain and anxiety will result. (your parents lied to you for years, after all, about something as basic as ‘where good feelings and presents at christmas come from.’) but it really does take years – kids WANT to believe in santa claus. the myth is comforting: among other things, santa will never run out of presents. but mommy and daddy might…

ironically, the unsustainable myth of santa claus is in part a myth about sustainability itself: about the possibility of an experience, a force, a story, existing outside of time. santa claus invests the year-end holiday season with glorious anticipation. it amplifies feelings. but what if those feelings could be arrived at another way? what if the snow and cold were enough? the lights, sledding, decorating trees? what if the rituals of year’s end could function autonomously?

without lies underpinning them, i mean.

the Self demands the lies and retreats into ritual.

Collected worlds of...

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

And you know what?

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

I’m a monster.

Snobbery.

[Wrote this a while back. Deleted names and links; the post's point isn't ultimately about the specific writer in question.]

A fella whose best writing I continue to greatly value reviews a gamebook:

I'll admit that I was quite prepared to dislike [this book]. Being a big fan of Westerns, I tend to be more than a little snobby about the way the genre is so often misused and caricatured, especially in crossovers with other genres. And while a post-apocalyptic setting is a very good fit for Western themes and esthetics, I was nevertheless apprehensive. I've seen too many poorly executed Western-influenced creations not to assume the worst.

(My emphasis.)

I see and SAY this kind of bullshit all the time, and it deserves to be called out. This is childish nonsense and he should be embarrassed by it.

Snobbery about Westerns has nothing whatsoever to do with Westerns. It happens because you are (or in this case, because the writer is) a snob.

This stance is willfully ignorant because he cares about the 'correct' way of doing a genre, and anyone with a basic understanding of how literary genre works knows that this brand of ignorance springs from private anxieties rather than the text-system itself, but he's smart enough and educated enough to know that -- to know better;

It's self-regarding, because he spends breath preemptively defending what is a totally personal, idiosyncratic, indeed possessive feeling about 'Westerns,' which is a matter of ego rather than critical analysis;

Reactionary because he's railed time and time again about 'revisionist' understanding of 'classic' texts -- his particular hobbyhorse is interpretive deviation from the letter and spirit of the original Dungeons & Dragons rules and, weirdly, Gary Gygax's private intentions -- and because, in this particular case, he's also an unabashed cultural reactionary, expressing next to nothing but contempt for 'new-fangled' cultural texts. (re: Westerns, he is particularly bothered by Firefly -- you can probably guess why.) Preserving the past for the future is not the same thing as fetishizing pastness.

Throw in some acute status-consciousness -- he was a young nerd apparently raised, if his religious callouts and bits of churchly Latin are any indication, in a hierarchical cultural environment -- and you've got some pretty conventional snobbery in a man old enough to know better.

Millions of people enjoy Westerns without feeling the need to apply private criteria to determine whether they're WESTERN ENOUGH. These people have a healthy relationship to the pleasure of viewing/reading these stories, even if they persist in ignorance about the history and source texts of the genre. Ignorance isn't much of a sin. Willful ignorance is.

I'm a snob about plenty of things, and I HATE IT. It is a failing to be addressed -- to grow out of.

One of the many differences between him and me is that I don't try to pass off my snobbery as an inevitable result of really really caring about things. It's pure ego, I know just enough to know it (arguably nothing more!), and I wish to be able to overcome that adolescent insecurity. If you go into a reading/viewing experience expecting -- i.e. WANTING -- to hate it, in order that your prejudices will be confirmed, you and you alone have fucked yourself up.

This writer isn't an idiot -- quite the contrary, he's a damned fine writer when he surpasses himself. But snobbery is a problem, maybe one of his biggest problems as a critic, and it saddens me (and pisses me off) to see it. His fans and regular readers don't mind, of course -- and that's an even bigger problem, which presumably no one needs me to explain.

Little, Big : Aegypt :: Hobbit : LotR?

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

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

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

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

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

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

An essential misunderstanding about story, Buffy edition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

Nagging nighttime thought re: art and consciousness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I make no such claim regarding blog posts, though.

OK, hopefully I can sleep now.

Oh Sunday.

Pain of the past in its pastness. Today I'm thinking about...I don't know what. Nothing really. In the car with Feliks sleeping in the backseat and inside the apartment (a few feet away) Agi and the organizer lady, Erin, just a couple years out of college, are getting the place ready for deleading. I miss my parents. My mom is nine years dead. My dad is old, alive, warm, slowing down, far away, a good man I've never known quite how to emulate. He feels in a language I don't know. Mystery to me since I was young though I've long known I was meant (meant!) to come up like him, good and strong and sure. A straight-backed man bent only by time and care. He hasn't lied or wormed his way around, ever. Nothing to hide. He is a good man and I worry that we've never understood each other; or not worry: I mourn. Early to be mourning. He is a living man and good and true, wants nothing but love for his sons. But I fall into the solecism -- or I mean solipsism, I guess -- of mourning.

Meanwhile we're all sick. I feel old. But small and young -- old, I mean, before my time, unearned. Which is to say weak. I mean I'm sorry I've never undertaken to make myself into the strong straightforward man I was to have been. Wheels spinning against inner wheels. I have to go indirect to get to things. To what I think I want (am 'meant') to say.

I got a fine education but I suppose it's done now, in the formal sense. Though learning continues thank god. My brother asked me, back in middle school or high school, to exchange books with him. I suggested 'Dune' and he gave me 'A Tale of Two Cities.' More than 15 years ago. And I never did read it. Never did read a single word of Dickens in my whole life.

All the ways I've hidden from my family. Meeting them always far less than halfway.

Hitchens died at the Anderson center in Houston. My mom went there for examinations when she first found out -- was finding out? was living with the discovery that? -- she had cancer. Today we go to a bed & breakfast up the street where we'll stay for a few days. Then to see my in-laws near Denver. The apartment will be full of poison dust for a few days. I wrote maybe 47,000 words worth of a new manuscript in November. I had to stop writing just before the 30th, and haven't taken it up since.

I'm never able to talk about my family, or death, or my friends, or even just time's passage, without talking too about writing.

It is not my job, I realize. It's how I think. Wasn't always but there you have it.

I don't know what I did before I wrote.

I might have a job for spring semester after all. Then we'll be able to afford day care for Feliks. I'm unusually well-suited to this job and would be happy to have it. All the more reason for things not to work out: I haven't earned that kind of happiness, have I? It's a 'writing job': actually, I'd be teaching writing to bright technically-minded college students. Almost a dream.

I am preoccupied with the people I've been.

I never say 'men.'

Well what sort of man am I. Sitting here in the car sickly, my boy is sleeping in the backseat. I don't know that I respect myself. I used to piss in the kitchen sink so as not to wake our son walking up the stairs. After a while it stopped being a problem -- walking noise I mean -- but I took a while longer to stop pissing in the sink. I'd gotten used to it. So much easier than going all the way to the bathroom upstairs. Now we live in a one-story apartment and the floor outside the bedroom is squeaky all over again, but I've unlearned my shortcut. I thought of it as generous. But I walk on by him now and feel civilized pissing in the toilet. I didn't used to think of it as any big thing. Maybe that's a small win. For me, I guess? Or Western civilization?

I quite like it, you know. The West. Absolutely devastating to authentic self-knowledge, but it's alright.

This week my brother finally disposed of a gigantic sombrero he bought in Texas. He took a long train trip with my mom. I was in college, or maybe grad school. Perhaps they were going to the Anderson center even then. Maybe she was given a schedule at that time, pertaining to the order in which her internal organs would be crippled and destroyed by cancer. First your DNA turns against you, as I understand it, babbling in a new language, mutated -- apoptosis undone too -- so that the logomaniacal babble can no longer be stopped even by death; and your immortal cells band together and grow into a tight-knit community which eats you. Maybe they put the schedule on a nicely-formatted spreadsheet for my mom to peruse while she died by degrees. Your colon, charmingly, to begin; and later on your lungs. Quiet your beautiful voice and steal your cultured appetite. All your learning. No sleep and no rest. Forget how to read. Here is a sombrero for your boy to wear at the train station while carrying all the suitcases. He looks so small surrounded by those bags and you will die long before your time.

Your eldest son will not watch every moment of your collapse and disintegration because he will be 'living it up' in Boston. Too far to quickly drive. Please do not again ask what he plans to do with his graduate degree in video games. He will later fly home on a 'bereavement fare,' though, saving a substantial amount of money on that one-way plane ticket. The world revolves around a dying star. He isn't thrifty but he's not the fool he seems. He'll know he's failed.

If I could only tell you how much I hate myself for not being part of my mom's last years on earth, for not working to preserve and restore and join our shared family body. If I could quiet down long enough to breathe in simple facts like All Things Pass.

The first time I meditated I nearly cried at the realization that I wasn't alone in the office building where I sat. Think of that so tiny thing. That it could mean so much to a man. Not to be alone in a city of millions!

I could be a better friend to my brother. Really I could. We disagree on so much. I told him to 'piss off' two days ago on the phone and he hung up on me. No talking since.

I guess I'm saying this to him. Hello Come back. Or to her, I guess. Come back hello I love you in spite of myself.

Phish 11/21/97, Hampton VA.

I’m an unapologetic Fall ’97 booster, fanboy, partisan, evangelist, and myopic egotist – i.e. I insist that Fall ’97 is the best of all Phish tours, partly because it’s my favourite…though I also insist that it’s my favourite because it’s the best (see above re: ‘myopia’ and ‘egotism’).

But some things are worth going crazy over.

(The following is occasioned, of course, by the long-awaited official SBD release of November 21 to 23, 1997.)

The fandom responded ecstatically to the tour at the time, as you’d expect; among other things it represented a sea change in how the band approached show structure (never mind the pornographic music itself) – some folks were convinced that ‘there [were] no first sets anymore,’ and given that this show kicks off with a 20-minute funk workout, it’s easy to see why. Time has been kind to the tour as well. With the benefit of hindsight we can see how Fall ’97 began a darkly generative period for the band (their imaginative freedom nightblooming even as their technical command and professionalism began to falter amidst a rapidly decaying backstage/fan scene), while representing a historic peak of possibility and intensity. With only a couple of exceptions, the band was just absolutely there every single night, taking song after song to deep dangerous places.

It was a good time to be a Phish fan.

The best jams of 2011 – R’n’R at the Gorge, the Tahoe Light, the brilliant ‘elements’ set at UIC – seemed to draw some of the same dark energy that powered Phish’s late 90s music: layered textures, intricate polyrhythms, effortless group interplay, soaring ambient passages, guitars put to unholy new uses, keyboards much abused, drums caressed and then shattered. Above all, the music flows now almost as it did then, with extraordinary patience and organic inevitability.

But what’s missing from Phish 2011 is the black ice that became their premillennial music’s center: cool austerity of early ‘cow funk,’ anxious chaotic ‘space jams,’ the scary quality it had. (Hear the way Izabella comes roaring out of 12/6/97’s fog like an angry undead stowaway, or the teeth-gnashing mania of the Hartford Char0 > 2001. A lotta Hendrix in the air, then.)

For all the expansiveness and ambition of the band’s Fall ’97 work, the tour feels All of a Piece; it all belongs together, the maniacal Hampton/Winston-Salem stuff and the knives-in-blacklight Worcester jamming and the retro-dufus-turned-pornstar goodtimes in Dayton and the astral lullabies in Utah and, and, and oh those sorcerous goings-on and splashings-crashward in Auburn Hills (cloudpiercing peak of a deepwater volcanic island). The same can’t so much be said of the new music; ironically, as the band’s palette has grown to include more lived-in sounds (and whatever eerily the goddamn ‘storage shed’ jamming is, when it eerily ever is), they’ve lost the glasseyed focus of back-in-the-day. They might sound like any number of great bands these days, even Zeppelin a bit when the moon’s right, but there was something harrowing and deeply pleasurable about knowing (walking into a familiar room, strangers at close quarters in the dark) that the approach was gonna be, ready set go, THE METERS AND PINK FLOYD ARE TRAPPED TOGETHER FOREVER ON A DERELICT SPACESHIP ALL ECHOES AND GHOSTS AND ALONE AND THEY ARE SAVED FROM COLD DEATH ONLY BY THE WEIRD COSMIC FAVOUR OF PLUNGING SLOWLY INTO AN OCTARINE SUN, GAINING SPEED, FALLING, HOLD ON…

To the matter at hand.

Emotional Rescue isn’t a great choice of cover beyond its novelty/comedy value – the jokey falsetto and sparse texture wear thin some time before the jam starts – and the jam does feel like a show-opening warmup, which of course it is. But 17 minutes of shambolic Phish funk (climaxing in a transitional few minutes of lovely dark ambience) is a fine easygoing thing, regardless. And it leads into a very nice Split, for which we supplicants are naturally thankful.

Et cetera et cetera, and Caspian (a tune tailor-made for smoky indoor-venue AUDs, by the way) is a strange but appropriate choice for a first set closer: excellent version here, particularly Trey’s digital-delay offering to Hades in lieu of those closing rock chords from the album, which…

1. fondly recalls the beloved 12/31/95 Mike’s, and…
2. helpfully signals to the crowd that we are setting our course for darker night in Set II.

The show’s back half kicks off seven consecutive must-hear sets (next breather: 11/28 I). During Ghost the players bail on that song’s basic funk patterns in favour of a haunting spare passage typical of Fall ’97: minimalist assembly, assured group rhythm work, and a patient crescendo and sighing wavebreak into a wry, spry midtempo jog at the outro. 1997 is THE year for Ghost, but this performance trades its standard snap/pop/wah funk for something moodier and more meaningful.

Then yeah, a true segue arrow before AC/DC Bag, and get ready for this Bag. Less decisive and authoritative than the canonical 12/30/97 version, but also less linear, the 11/21 Bag takes a few minutes for somewhat clumsy I-IV thrashing (a climax too early, it seems) before settling into a deadly take on the introductory PYITE groove. Fishman slides over to the ride cymbal, Page leaps onto piano, Trey sprinkles some space-jam fairy dust over everyone, and suddenly we’re working a slightly ambivalent variation on that I-IV, posing as Triumph while whispering Collapse, Dissolve…and after a twinkling ambient passage, we return to ambivalence: minor-melancholy rock clatter and swerve, Page’s piano diagonals zagging at everyone else’s zig, or I guess vice versa. 25 minutes of top-shelf Phish, and another true segue into Slave.

Slave, as you’d expect after the foregoing 50 minutes of music, is devastating. Well, it’s a 1997 Slave; the mycological languour of late–90s Phish was well suited to tunes like this one.

More Stones to close, of course. They’ve always killed on Loving Cup. And is there a better, more coherent long-form composition in Phish’s catalogue than Guyute? Pure prog mayhem in the encore. Nice.

…

11/22 gets the press, 11/23 gets the ‘underrated masterpiece’ tag, and of these now-forever-conjoined triplets, 11/21 is the li’l sibling with – hey whaddaya know – some earth-shaking powers of its own. I think you can pass on this first set without feeling TOO bad, if you really don’t think you can spare that hour of your life, but that’s a swell half-hour you’re missing at the opener, and a ringading Caspian to close. The second set, meanwhile, is as good as Fall 1997’s usual, which is to say it’s a solid hour of deadly focused improvisation, favouring eventide melancholy and dissolution, crescendi desperately imploding or exhausting themselves in gouts of terminal noise, minimalist funk with a mischievous dancing step and slow poison on its blade, visible in the right kind of dark…

Ego-costumes aside, in the end it doesn’t matter whether Fall ’97 is the ‘best’ Phish tour. (One hopes the best is yet to come, right? What kind of person doesn’t hold that hope, or pretends not to?) Those are fun arguments to have, but it’s all just circles around imaginary selves, signs that read No Trespass: there’s no place for borders like those when the music begins. I’ll say instead, quite confidently, that on these nights 14 years ago, Phish reached the windblown jagged top of one peak, bringing thousands along with them; several other peaks would follow, as several had come before, but this one had a Weird light, and everyone why got up there saw something extraordinary. And would you believe it: it’s still there. Might I recommend heading up alone some night. Go on: follow the strange glow that won’t fade. The dark will keep you warm.

How to be a hack.

John Gruber:

Apple’s location brouhaha wasn’t even about GPS data — it was only a cache of cell tower locations. The problem isn’t that the news media aren’t sensationalizing this Carrier IQ story. The problem is that they would if it involved Apple.

No. The problem is that Carrier IQ is shady as hell and Android continues to be a bad bet for a mobile phone, overall, for lots of reasons. This story has nothing to do with Apple. Of course, the wonder of Apple is how Gruber sees everything tech-related (he also likes boring website minimalism-by-numbers, Stanley Kubrick, the Yankees, and whatever his Deck Ad Network stablemate Jason Kottke is linking to).

Gruber's claim is an embarrassment, but it's of a piece with his recent, very sharp decline in quality. He is losing perspective as he becomes another tech-'news' hack.

A few words about writer-me.

My name is Wally. I generally post online as Wax Banks. It is a college nickname.

I am 32 years old. I live in Cambridge. I have been married for three+ years.

My full-time job is taking care of our son. He is a toddler.

Prior to shifting to full-time parenthood, I was a writer, editor, and occasional teacher and tutor.

I write. Many of my developed skills are writing-related. Since I finished graduate school I have produced a very large, very scattered body of work, which I sometimes forget to think of as 'work.' But it is that, and I am proud of some of the products and much of the process.

I have written essays, short stories, novels, screenplays, novel-length mock self-help books, monstrous collections of intertwined short fictions, and of course 'blog posts' - the latter a category large enough to encompass almost all the others, though I usually stick to essayish bits here.

When I have been able to commit myself to it I have preferred to spend all day writing, but that is of course impossible at present. I have been partly successful at overcoming my resentments about enormous changes that parenthood has made in my life. Being a father is the best, the happiest, the hardest thing I have ever done, and the joy it brings me far outweighs the frustration I feel at not being able to focus on writing.

Though I have not been paid for writing or editing since last year, I still tend to think of myself as 'writing for a living,' and I hope to return to making money with my work in the near future.

I am a father, a husband, and a writer, in that order. I am happy with this state of things; it is a conversation.

Social media and the danger of dramatic adequacy.

The trouble with social media - or rather, one key trouble among many - is that they encourage us to think about the lives of our ‘friends’ (online connections) as elements in our own private info-experience, our ‘stream’; and because we are steeped in the norms of melodrama and other entertainments, we therefore tend (naturally) to think of online lives as ‘dramatic.’ Indeed, we may even perceive them as dramatically adequate, i.e. a digital acquaintance’s troubles will filter through to us not as the emotionally overdetermined mundane that is mere physical life, but as a structured consciousness-manipulation like, say, a TV show.

It makes sense that we would misunderstand our social connections this way. We already apply the logic of dramatic viewership to politics, criminal justice, sports, war, mourning, aging, all of human history…

The difference between, say, the real world and MTV’s The Real World (and its descendants, from Jersey Shore to Nancy Grace) always was and is simply this: life is always continuation, disappointment, deferral, mere action. Life is not significant - drama is a redaction and manipulation of life in which events are depicted precisely and solely because of their meaning, the lessons they impart. (All drama is at some level didactic, necessarily and neutrally so.) What happens in our world just…happens. We interpret it, to be sure, we narrativize and dramatize it for ourselves and for one another, but most of us aren’t stupid or deluded enough to think that day-to-day life is staged for the purpose of revealing significance.

Except that I’m wrong - most human beings are just that deluded. (The delusion is called ‘religion.’)

Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk are dangerous to the social fabric in the same way so-called ‘reality television’ is - indeed, the same way horserace news coverage of (partisan) politics is dangerous to the body politic. These forms encourage us, in subtle ways and otherwise, to imagine our lives as fitting a dramatic structure. It’s obvious how, say, FOX/MSNBC politicking does so, but Facebook is just as much a theatre, a representational matrix, a set of sharp constraints on its hundreds of millions of users’ communicative input and output.

If you’ve ever seen an online argument (in a blog comments thread, say) blow up quickly and suddenly into a ‘flame war,’ you can understand the dangers of anonymity and the nonexistence of ‘empathy at a distance.’ But the problem extends to ‘social media’ networks as well. When interpersonal interactions occur in a form/forum that blocks empathy - when the events of a ‘friend’s’ life come to you in the form of a typo-ridden public news ticker rather than as a social occasion, simply cutting off the biological feedback loop by which humans regulate one another’s emotions[1] and integrate unspeakable or unimaginable experience - we are denied the chance to utilize our incredibly rich emotional sensorium and processing power, our unique mammalian ability to take part in the mechanism of regulation and communication called love.

Social networks don’t transmit love - only infatuation. We relate to our online ‘friends’ the way we relate TV characters, via dramatic mediation.

If you’ve ever talked about ‘other people’s dramas,’ you’ve done what almost every human being does without even thinking about it: you’ve reduced another person’s complex lived experience to the status of narrative for your benefit. Social networks contribute to the misconception that the important thing about the events of our lives is what they mean (to us), rather than the mere fact that they have occurred.

This misconception, this lie, is one of the root causes of human unhappiness. So what.

---

1. 
   See the extraordinary book A General Theory of Love for a moving and accessible treatment of the ‘limbic system’ and the neurobiology of love.  ↩
   

They live!!

Thumbnail world:

• 1862 At the battle of Glorieta, New Mexico, which marks the end of the Confederate effort to conquer the southwest/western US, reports of ‘giant man-apes’ in the mountains spread among Confederate soldiers. The reports eerily echo ancient Taos Indian myths of giant mountain-dwelling cannibals. The rebels speak of the creatures with fear; popular reports (no doubt spiked with racial animus over the status of slavery in the Union) have them fighting for the North. Confederate mythology later puts the USA’s victory down to smallpox and travel-attrition among CSA troops.
• Late 1862 Sightings of ‘large brown bears walking about on hindlegs’ are reported in newspapers as far east as Tennessee.
• Christmas 1862 A small warband of Sasquatch, armed with shaped stones, approach a Union garrison in the Rocky Mountains. Hostilities are narrowly averted when a Union scout is able to make out snatches of English in the Sasquatch’s speech.
• 1863 A regiment of Sasquatch troops, helmeted in bone and wielded 70lb qaurterstaves, takes part in the successful Union siege of Vicksburg.
• 1865 Two Sasquatch are awarded posthumous Medals of Honour by President Johnson. The field of modern identity politics is born.
• 1870s Growing numbers of Sasquatch, integrating with remarkable (though still limited) success into rural life, are employed by local law-enforcement agencies in roles from labourer to (infamously) Federal marshal. Sixty Sasquatch enter employment with the Pinkertons Detective Agency.
• 1882 After a bloody and somewhat ambiguous incident involving a group of schoolchildren and a rabid dog, a Sasquatch is lynched in Huntsville, Alabama.
• 1884 Sasquatch Rebellion.

The Hierophant.

Naturally you'd have to obscure the banal Euro-Catholic origins of the tarot with a few well-chosen name-changes and substitutions, chief among them the exoticization of the Pope, who's now the Hierophant. high priest of something-or-other (which is crucially nothing-in-particular). The Pope represents institutional power and knowledge, sure, but the success of the papacy over the last 2,000 years reminds us that the 'boss==God' formulation is a crucial strategy for ensuring employee loyalty. The Pope commands an army of followers hundreds of millions strong, with an officer corps trained to believe in (or at least act under the provision of) papal infallibility. As a step on the path from Fool-as-credulous-idiot to Fool-as-Buddha, then, the Pope (and to a lesser extent Waite's Hierophant) represents the Problem of Obedience, of Dogma.

He holds the key to the greatest repository of exoteric learning on earth but the cost of entry is a pledge that no wise Fool would consent to make.

* * *

'Exoteric,' I say, as opposed to the esoteric wisdom held by (or which holds) the High Priestess, the Witch-Woman. In a sense the Pope is the public face of a secret Church; as the Church's purpose is to bring churchgoers to wisdom, and wisdom comes only through devotion and a kind of scholarship of the soul (to be in one's every act a student of Truth, that sort of thing), the Hierophant is less a symbol of secret wisdom attained than the earthly administrator of the machines by which the group can act toward wisdom.

The inner Church, its secret corps, is necessarily built on solitude, personal reflection, release-from-structure. The Pope is structure. The High Priestess is the secret, the Hierophant its keeper. Which, if you're rejecting the simple man-above-woman ordering of these first few trumps, might be an ornamentation or allegory of the simple truth that we (observers of the human/universal condition) can readily grasp the shape of 'esoteric knowledge' with pre-human faculties 'beneath' high-level mentation or consciousness, but inquiring into the order of all things as socially-embedded humans means pulling apart complex relations which obfuscate as much as they reveal.

In other words, Churches raise awareness of the fact or possibility of Wisdom, but they make its attainment more difficult. Some churches more than others, you feel me?

'Pulling apart complex relations' shouldn't necessarily put you in mind of things like deconstructionism or critical interrogation either - those are just specific (FALLEN) instances of a general practice of seeing-anew; insofar as our academies reduce them to algorithms for generating, say, interchangeable conference papers and dissertations rather than private experiences of the well-beyond-the-goddamn-dissertative, they're actually the opposite of wisdom. Which maybe just means 'Don't go to grad school if you want to be happy,' though of course plenty of people go to grad school precisely because they don't actually know (or won't accept) what makes them happy, so maybe you don't need me to say this stuff!

Crowley goes on at characteristic length and obfuscatory strangeness about this card, more or less embodying the unbelievably annoying secreter-than-thou side of esoteric inquiry, in which quantity rather than luminance is the key measure of the worth of information:

The card is referred to Taurus; therefore the Throne of the Hierophant is surrounded by elephants, which are of the nature of Taurus; and he is actually seated upon a bull. Around him are the four beasts or Kerubs, one in each corner of the card; for these are the guardians of every shrine. But the main reference is to the particular arcanum which is the principal business, the essential, of all magical work; the uniting of the microcosm with the macrocosm. Accordingly, the oriel is diaphanous; before the Manifestor of the Mystery is a hexagram representing the macrocosm. In its centre is a pentagram, representing a dancing male child. This symbolizes the law of the new Aeon of the Child Horns, which has supplanted that Aeon of the "Dying God" which governed the world for two thousand years. Before him is the woman girt with a sword; she represents the Scarlet Woman in the hierarchy of the new Aeon. This symbolism is further carried out in the oriel where, behind the phallic headdress, the rose of five petals is in blossom.

None of this strikes me as terribly meaningful or interesting, which is to say (parochially) that I don't get the sense that this description of 'magical' inquiry is correct; there's no flash of illumination or immediate connection, which even the most eso- of esoterica should provide. Waite and Crowley both use their glosses of the Hierophant (in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot and The Book of Thoth, respectively) as chances to put in a little dig at the Catholic Church and Christianity more broadly, but only Crowley (who seems to have had a better time, in general, than Waite) provides an alternate frame of reference - the 'Aeon of the Child Horns,' which is a load of cod-Viconian/Hegelian bollocks but at least kind of a cute image.

Better to start simple, leaving aside Waite's pedantry and Crowley's grandstanding, with this: the Thoth deck gives us the image of Churchly authority (over thought and deed) complicated or even overturned by a new way of being. Dissolution of barriers to knowledge. Authority overcome. Waite-Smith has stone columns and a raised hand in blessing, but no true blessing is his to confer. He's just a manager. (You can tell he doesn't have any real power: the only folks lined up to receive his favours are...his employees.)

False knowledge. Seeing the Self - i.e. one's private universal meaning - in borrowed terms.

'When you speak the master's words, you think the master's thoughts.'

* * *

The 'Fey Tarot' Hierophant ('The Wisest') speaks to me: a little gnome seated on an hourglass, working his way down a scroll full of whatever-it-is (a tiny shopping list?), with a great red dragon in watchful repose at his feet.

The dragon is his friend, his pet. I'm sure he'd say so. They'd both say so, I bet, dragon's eyes twinkling, gnome wearily.

He's going to eat that little gnome motherfucker the moment he gets even the slightest bit hungry or ornery or just bored. Maybe the gnome realizes this. But he goes on studying his shopping list, and for the moment he can call himself Master. (Maybe something D&D-ish, like 'Dragon Lord.')(!!)

But he's lunch, soon enough. Mark my words.

'The trick is not to mind it.'

'The Wisest' of the Fey is a critique of the Hierophant/Pope tradition of the tarot.

I mean a continuation.

I mean a critique. Is there a difference, really? The severest critique is just to speak the truth, but as we're all implicated in the timely thrown-forwardness of each other's of being-in-the-world (thanks Buddha/Heidegger!), part of every statement of The Really Real is that, alas, shit is partly my fault too. The gnome is perfectly happy for the moment. He has a dragon for heaven's sake. It's going to eat him, but until then is any gnome even a zillionth as totally fantastic as The Wisest Gnome?

So either he's a rube who's about to be kibble or he's a Zen-Gnome-master with a dragon watching his back, or both. I don't know which at this moment. There's my attempt at truth-telling for the day, if you like.

* * *

It's important to remember that the Hierophant is trumped directly by The Lovers. That's not an arbitrary decision on the part of the original tarot designers. You might say the Hierophant's job is precisely to be trumped, to reveal the mere temporarily of earthly power. Such an old institution can't ever make something new - and if The Lovers have a single great work before them (which with so many bloody Popes busily, monomaniacally interfere), it is making someone new. (Making you new, if you like to love.)

Love doesn't conquer all. We die, it's 'bad,' dust to dust with or without you. But I'd prefer your hungry mouth to the dragon's. In any case we're more likely to find release - by which I mean Wisdom - there.

When a single product defines an industry/hobby, strange things happen when that product falls off.

Fragmentation of an industry/hobby makes for weird times for customers/users. Specifically it induces a generational divide between users.

Right now, 'tablet computer' (in the public's eye) means 'iPad.' That'll be true for a few more years, because no other tech company can control quality and cost like Apple, and that's not going to change without mind-bogglingly large flows of cash money. In a few years, though, when a single competently-made viable alternative to the iPad exists, users won't just face a 'which do I buy?' choice, they'll face a conceptual shift. Right now (unless you're looking at netbooks, which pretty much no one is) you don't even really need to think about the iPad's features - either you want that basic kind of device or not. In five years you'll need to break down the iPad into its components, affordances, specific features, which produces a wave of weird feeling. It strips the magic from the device. The 'cool' is gone.

Folks hate to lose their store-bought cool.

For 30 years, 'roleplaying game' basically meant Dungeons & Dragons. It didn't matter what that game was good or bad at - either you wanted to sit down and tell stories over dice rolls, or not. Sure, other (better) games existed, but until Vampire came out in the 90's, no one entered the hobby just to play those games, and those numbers were never ever big anyway.

Now there are better, reasonably well-publicized alternatives to D&D. (If you like stories, you should be playing Fiasco or Baron Munchausen or Mouse Guard.) The ongoing identity crisis starts here: for the first time in the hobby's history, gamers/buyers need to think hard about what, exactly, a game like D&D actually does. The answer turns out to be: 'not what we thought.' Its shoddy genre-emulation has given way to a strange involution of playstyle and narrative focus - since the millennium, D&D has been solely about D&D - and the whole idea that RPGs emulate genres has changed the way gamers think about the experience of play.

This matters way, way, way less than the iPad question, but it helps to illustrate the shift that cultural objects/formations take - in D&D's case, from 'that thing teenage boys do with dice' to 'that one heroic-fantasy game.' There's no longer anything ineffable about it in the public's eye.

What's lost is religious content.

The Emperor.

Most tarot decks don't seem to know what to do with this guy - maybe because his role is so straightforward. We'll see how we do.

Waite-Smith seats him on a granite throne on, apparently, Mars. Rams' heads adorn the throne. In his hand an ankh, though it's also tau and...well, I'll let Mr Waite handle the basics here:

He has a form of the Crux ansata for his sceptre and a globe in his left hand. He is a crowned monarch--commanding, stately, seated on a throne, the arms of which axe fronted by rams' heads. He is executive and realization, the power of this world, here clothed with the highest of its natural attributes. He is occasionally represented as seated on a cubic stone, which, however, confuses some of the issues. He is the virile power, to which the Empress responds, and in this sense is he who seeks to remove the Veil of Isis; yet she remains virgo intacta.

So he's great angry rugged penile authority, and the rock chair is no doubt giving him hemorrhoids. Red robes to complete the alchemical dyad with the Empress. Armoured under his official duds. A globe in hand. ('He's got the whole world,' you might say or sing, 'in his...')

He's also supposed to be a symbol of pure intellect, though how you'd get that from the Waite-Smith card I'm not sure. Snazzy hat though.

Crowley's Thoth deck makes one brilliant maneuver, crossing the Emperor's legs, which - in addition to making tau a central visual element, thereby freeing up the sceptre for another ram's-head insertion - links the Emperor to the Hanged Man (XII) and sets off a whole mess of interesting symbolic/narrative resonances. Start with the simple stuff: you live or die at the pleasure of worldly powers beyond control or accountability, beyond even comprehension (as the world gets bigger). But submission to authority can produce new understandings - every rube who's ever caught a cold or had a dog die wants to tell you hardship equals wisdom, and if you can ride with a smile, well...

One of our most famous pop culture Emperors, a certain Palpatine (a/k/a Sith Lord Darth Sidious), can serve a clarifying role here: his right-hand man (Darth Vader) and his nemesis, Vader's son Luke, are strong enough to band together and knock the old man off - but to do so would create a power vacuum which they would be forced to fill. Neat little political allegory, revolutionaries and regicides tending to want the throne for themselves, but the spiritual allegory is to do with the act of violence itself. Their journey (to redemption in Vader's case, to adulthood and wise stillness in Luke's) must involve both Palpatine's death and the rejection of any principle of violent revenge or cruelty.

Vader does kill the guy - allowing his son's Foolish journey to continue at the cost of his own life - but he does so out of late-blooming familial love. A principle of all-unity, which is (after all) what The Force, George Lucas's pop-tao, is meant to symbolize.

The Emperor literally rules the world(s) - but he's not the world. His power is abstract, like the intellect, like the state, and whatever its offices and equipment, it can not undergo transformation. (Palpatine's body remained ruined and sick despite his bruited 'power over life and death.')

That's the meaning of the state - as opposed to, say, a 'movement.' There's a political allegory for you.

* * *

The whole point of the Emperor, you might say, is that he embodies a fixed idea. Whether intellectual or governmental, he's a principle of Order. That's a dangerous thing: sure, with a long lever and a fixed point you might move the earth, but you're just as likely to break something. The lever itself, or something more valuable. The earth even.

Martial prowess (checked out the metal pants and boots!), focus, readiness. But not flexibility nor transformation. Of course the Golden Dawn folks would want to bring in Alchemical Wedding-type imagery, hence the red/white business and marriage of elemental opposites business.

Plus: the Hierophant might be the one who oversees the Priestess's work - maybe he sent her off to that island to do her, hmm, revelating - but the parcel of land has to be granted by the Emperor. His authority is 'lower' than the Pope's, but he can bring the hammer down pretty fast. Or indeed the tau-cross. Still, the Fool should have an easier time avoiding the Emperor's goons, on account of their uniforms (and clanging metal pants/boots). The Pope's harder to get around, because his fingers are invisible. The 'masculine principle' is easy to see: look for the uncomfortable dick-metaphor jutting up into the conceptual air.

The 'Occupy Wall St' movement is much in the news lately. Its purpose is 'demonstration' in the popular sense: showing the world how the thing - democracy - is done. The protestors haven't presented in writing a vision of what they want done to the U.S., which bothers the smart set, but the reason they haven't done so is that the demonstration is the vision. So many have given up any hope of being a meaningful or valued part of the American nation (except at tax time); the Occupation literally embodies hope, and anger, and an upwelling of authentic emotion. A rejection of fixity and despair, not in word but in new being.

Being otherwise.

The enemy at the moment is the State, not just the corrupt and increasingly insane U.S. government but its semi-official financial services arm on Wall Street. The State is all that the Occupation rejects and refutes: immobility, abstraction, obsessive accumulation, self-preserving elitism, a dehumanizing distance from the American body itself - the people, all people. The opposite of the State is of course the Movement: not just a dynamic organization but dynamism itself, change that brings change. The Occupation models a self-regulating flow of resources, human and material.

If you show the Emperor you can live without him, you have power to ask him to try to live with you - and what an ally he could be.

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

-- 'The Curse of Greyface and the Introduction of Negativism, Principia Discordia

Alchemical marriage of incompatible orders remaking each the self and each the other: you don't need a hammer (godly or otherwise) to bring down a mountain, just a slow steady rain and time. Nice thing about raindrops is they don't give a damn one way or the other about falling, nor about wetness, nor the oceans where they breed nor the clouds where they gather (which they become, which in falling they unmake). The rain will always wear away the mountain.

Remember, remember...

The Empress.

This one gets autobiographical, a bit. * * *

Part of a sequence of four portraits of earthly authority (priestess/empress/emperor/hierophant), the Empress sits in a field of golden stalks in a flower-print robe on a pillowed settee, a flowing stream behind. Clad in white upon red velvet, ready for the alchemical wedding with the red-robed white-bearded Emperor. She's even got a heart-shaped stone bearing the symbol of Venus, for heaven's sake. Any rube can read this one: fertility, sensuality, feminine languor, all that jazz.

The Waite-Smith deck has her slender and fair, crowned with stars (her tiara overgrown too with flowering plants?). Along with the Emperor she forms the inner, secular pair of the four-card portrait run, both of them trumped by the Pope/Hierophant. So far so canonically early-20C mythohistorical.

* * *

Modern renderings often take the fertility symbolism further along toward literalism, by necessity - the average city-dwelling tarot reader/querent probably hasn't set foot in a wheat field in years, never mind mulled over the seasonal/menstrual symbolic parallel. So you get pregnant Goddess types with flowing hair and garlands of flowers, or nursing mothers looking out of the card with bizarrely come-hither looks. ('Baby' translates directly to 'control' in microcultures where motherhood is the only way to get male respect on female terms.)

Aleister Crowley's Book of Thoth, meanwhile, glosses Frieda Harris's gorgeous watercolour art like this:

With regard to the Pelican, its full symbolism is only available to Initiates of the Fifth degree of the O.T.O. In general terms, the meaning may be suggested by identifying the Pelican herself with the Great Mother and her offspring, with the Daughter in the formula of Tetragrammaton. It is because the daughter is the daughter of her mother that she can be raised to her throne. In other language, there is a continuity of life, an inheritance of blood, which binds all forms of Nature together. There is no break between light and darkness. Natura non facit saltum. If these considerations were fully understood, it would become possible to reconcile the Quantum theory with the Electro-magnetic equations.

There are many, many, many ways in which I want to be nothing at all like Aleister Crowley. But when he gets going, prosewise, no one can touch him. The archetypal occultist, in some ways, trading his sense for visionary poetry, then whirling his way back through ironic self-awareness to something mirroring sense, darkened and distorted.

Anyhow the Book of Thoth is a load of bollocks, but what a read. Alas, no one's putting out new work in Crowley's mode anymore. The language of Tarot-interpretation (and -extrapolation or -narrativization) is, like most 'spiritual' writing, more straightforwardly autobiographical now; 'psychology' has been absorbed into our pop-thought idioms while the various esoteric/mystical traditions have been passively, and in some cases actively, put aside. There are plenty of Magical Thinking brotherhoods - ever been to a political convention, or hung out with hardcore sports fans? - but the fetish for systematization and taxonomy, for encyclopedic knowledge-gathering and -correlation, has largely passed.

You can have the Book of Thoth or Google, but not both. Even if Google just links you to the monomaniacs, the Browsing and Delving urges are distinct - i.e. you can only take pleasure-as-an-end from one of those activities at a time, I think, and if Google is always everywhere, well...

Part of the appeal of the Waite-Smith deck, for me, is the lovely simplicity of the art. The faces resemble those of standard-deck court cards, the proportions straight out of classical statuary, the colours unnaturally simple. (Some say 'garish'; I say 'faintly otherworldly,' and recall a certain lyric about 'the sky was yellow / and the sun was blue'...) Other decks have more technically accomplished art, to be sure, but tarot artists seem to be unusually prone to zealous overreach; there's a lot of stuff in the average tarot card. This is a well-intentioned pain, the idea being to give the reader lots of material to work with, but the end result being visual clutter, which affects the experience directly at its point of initiation.

Rule one of visual art: get the visuals right!

I actually prefer Smith's pip cards (non-trumps), which tend to be more austere and less worked-over, to her beautiful but comparatively busy Major Arcana. The 'mood' of the Waite-Smith deck speaks to me.

Oh, I just remembered why.

* * *

I bought my Waite-Smith deck at a store called 'Bell Book and Candle' in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1993 or so, hanging out one afternoon with an unbearably beautiful girl whom I'd met at the National Spelling Bee. (Many nice friendship stories begin this way, with a great beauty and a Caribbean island and the Spelling Bee, but in the history of mankind not a single sexy story has included the words 'Spelling Bee.')

I recognized the bell/book/candle symbolism from one of the Zork games. I never did get the hang of tarot reading. It didn't accomplish anything for me so I put the deck aside, lost the book I'd bought with it, and only pulled the cards out again in 2003, while teaching at Tufts. I'd discovered the brilliant tarot-themed 1987 puzzle game, The Fool's Errand, whose villain (I'm reminded) was the High Priestess. There was something about the image of a happy-go-lucky rube wandering alone in a world of strange but solvable puzzles that appealed to me. Go figure.

I went for the cards again a few years later, after picking up a copy of the startling, darkly inspiring urban-fantastic Deviant Moon deck as writerly inspiration. I preferred the Deviant Moon deck to the Waite-Smith, as a visual art object, but the old deck still struck me as complete in a sense. You might describe the difference this way: the Deviant Moon deck, brilliant as it is, looks like a concerted attempt to capture a coherent aesthetic, a little steampunkish, dark, surreal, co-opting Odd(tm) imagery (like old headstones and asylum chimneys).

The Waite-Smith deck looks like someone's travel notebook of another universe, complete unto itself, not even Strange on its own terms...and haunted. Melancholy. Quiet.

That quiet always sang to me; I realized recently that I stayed away from the cards not because they were boring, but because their seeming inactivity was precisely what unnerved me about them. An eldritch quality - like British medieval folksongs about frolicking on the heath, which turn out to be about the Black Death.

Pastoral disquiet. That's it.

* * *

The Waite-Smith Empress isn't disquieting though. She just looks bored. Because the Major Arcana don't erupt into magical oddity and celestial glory until about the halfway point, the Empress just has to sit there are symbolize, basically, herself. Even Waite sounds bored in the Pictorial Key:

She is above all things universal fecundity and the outer sense of the Word. This is obvious, because there is no direct message which has been given to man like that which is borne by woman; but she does not herself carry its interpretation.

Snooze.

Maybe if the weather was nicer today I'd be more...up. Though I can blame the Waite-Smith cards for that too: even their sun doesn't really look sunny! Talk about melancholy, half the Waite-Smith figures look like they're trying to go about their business and remembering that a close friend died last month.

* * *

I never did get in touch with her after that, nor her with me. I'd have to look up her name, even.

And you know what? It wasn't the Spelling Bee where we met, and it wasn't 1993. It was 1995 and we met in Baltimore, her name was...Christ, was it Annalicia? Did I wear shorts and feign confidence? Did she laugh about me on the phone with her friends afterward, or never mention me again?

And yet I'm absolutely certain of the name of the occult store, Bell Book & Candle. It's still there. Lonely Planet says it 'pulls in the vacation crowd.'

The Empress doesn't care one way or the other what's going on, and the Emperor looks pissed off. Yeah, that's pretty much how I remember it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

Wanna buy a book?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The High Priestess.

The image of the earth-mother-goddess is central to a lot of New Age mythology, hence the attraction of this figure today, but the High Priestess has another, more straightforwardly formal role: she twins or mirrors the Hierophant and the Magician, the former by her role as religious leader (though the Priestess focuses worship and knowledge in a somewhat non-priestly way), the latter by her 'guarding the Mystery' posture. The Waite-Smith Priestess is seated between the pillars Boaz and Jachin, straight out of the Temple of Solomon, but that's not of much interest to secular readers; neither is the now-familiar Egyptian drag, nor the cross, nor the sephiroth beyond, except as Generic Religious Such-and-Such for Good Measure.

In the Marseilles deck she's a straight-up female pope, i.e. Pope Joan - the one who snuck in under false pretenses, penetrating (in a nice image-inversion) the theretofore exclusively male Catholic mystery-cult and inadvertently dropkicking the whole 'papal infallibility' schtick.

Indeed, the 'High Priestess' name seems to be an 18th century solution to the problem of earlier tarot decks depicting a female Pope. Folks do get touchy about their religious iconography, modern occult/New Age types not least among them. That's part of the appeal of the nondenominational 'High Priestess' name: it cancels out the reader's private religious baggage, leaving a Choose-Your-Own-Inner-Adventure activity behind. Which is part of the point, you might say; though you might again say otherwise. If the tarot is an autoanalytic tool, better (I guess) that the card float free of religious-historical specificity; on the other hand, no one complains about the Kabbalah nonsense the way they complain about the Catholic nonsense.

Which is to say, the tarot is embedded in a set of interlinked historical discourses, continuities, and controversies, and knowing about them can only help.

So maybe I should reconsider my dismissiveness and antipathy toward the Egyptohebraichristianity of the whole thing.

I love this version, which features THE POMEGRANATE VULVA OF KNOWLEDGE, complete with hoot owl.

Actually I love everything about this version of the Priestess trump, from the surprise-filled 'Tarot of the New Vision.' The solemnity and nocturnal/oceanic vibe of the Waite-Smith card remain, but the praying women 'backstage' nicely invert any 'power behind the throne' image: they're not skulking, they're in deep ritual devotion. Wild birds, ripe fruit, the moon, the sea, nuns, waves lapping on a lonely beach: the priestess's job is to sit quietly and know, and to offer aid to petitioners. Bit of the Virgin Mary in there. From memory, Catholic boy, take it away:

'Remember, o most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession was left unaided. Inspired with this confidence I fly unto thee, o virgin of virgins, my Mother. To thee I come, before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful. O mother of the Word incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in thy mercy hear and answer me, AMEN.'

And so a little of the ol' pagan flavour emerges from the ol' Catholic image-structure; we forget that part of what pissed off the Protestants was Marian/saint worship, the may-as-well-call-it polytheism that makes Catholicism such a nice fit in Latin America...

Behind every strong woman there are...more strong women.

* * *

Alright, so she's the Tree of Life and so forth. (Vulva!) Keeper of the Temple. (Vulva!) Smith paints her robes ocean blue, soft folds falling, foaming wavelike. (Vulva!) Pomegranates (vulva!) decorate her soft curtain (vulva!) which conceals the mystery between two pillars. (Vulva!)

There's a theme here but I'm not sure what it is.

* * *

The Priestess kicks off the run of portrait trumps: first (least?) in a line, you might say. Robert Place's tripartite trumps schema seats the Priestess in a group of four ordered earthly powers (papess/queen/king/pope), which are very early stages/obstacles between the Fool and his apotheosis. (Is there a Dante's Divine Tarot, with earthly figures populating hell, symbolic transformations populating Purgatory, and celestial matters marking the way through Paradise?)

In most renderings she's all alone, waiting to dispense wisdom like a supporting character in a video adventure game. The Gaian Tarot deck extrapolates the Priestess's role to 'women's wisdom' in a pretty straightforward way; I'm reminded, or prompted to think regardless of the facts, that the wizened old crone/young priestess combination has a certain cachet that old/young male dyads aren't usually afforded. I have a sense that combination old/young male characters don't usually appear in myths, that it's one or the other, but mythical women are age-switching this way all the time. Is that true? I can't remember, can only feel it, but I wouldn't be surprised to find I feel it wrong...

The Priestess is a worldly figure, a repository of some power. The King and Queen get theirs from royal heredity, wealth, a mercenary army; the Pope is appointed by God (kidding!); but the Sacerdotisa has to sit alone on a beach (or a Delphic cliff-cave) inhaling hallucinogenic fumes and devoting herself to the esoteric, the divine. Threshold of revelation and all that.

(The role of High Priestess in Angels in America is split, ironically-appropriately, between a young married woman and an old crone: Harper and Mother Pitt share Average Joe Pitt, and act to restore some balance in the wake of his departure. Mother Pitt comes back down after her orgasmic ascension, though; I can't remember whether Harper ever returns to earth. Maybe she just gets on a plane? Mustn't they land, in time? But why?)

The Bechdel rule applies to the tarot deck: it's not serious unless two women talk about something other than the Fool's Journey. Well, there you go: Three of Cups in Waite-Smith, check. I like that the New Vision deck restores an interpersonal dynamic to the Priestess. You can imagine the three women taking turns as Priestess, like the guardians of the Temple of Offler the Crocodile God...

* * *

In the last hours of my wife's labour with our son, I'd have sworn that there were 10,000 years of women gathered in the room with us. It was a holy feeling, and such oceanic feeling, not its (imaginary) referent, is what the card depicts: the Priestess isn't hiding anything from the petitioning Fool; rather, he needs to understand that her wisdom resides precisely in her acts of devotion and community. The women who guard the temple are the secret. To be a servant, even when alone. You can't possess a Mystery.

You come into possession, or rather it comes into you, through submission. The first step is not-willing-to-remain; what stronger symbol, for a young male Fool, than a woman whose authority matter-of-factly disrespects the border between the sacred and the profane?

So come back, finally, to the Asia-drag, the Hebraic mumbo-jumbo: they're there precisely to signify ideational wildness, the long-forgotten and -overlooked tributaries that once fed the river that is Approved Faith. The tarot's value is secular, I insist, but the cards emerge from an extremely Catholic 15th century culture, and were refined by Waite et al. at the turn of the 20th century in England. The iconic polyphony of the cards is part of what matters, not because the crescent and star trigger a specific memory or opinion in you, but because they yank your symbol-reading out of any simplistic religious course. Everybody else's god-ideas are as wrong as yours, and as scary; but there she is on the shore, and she sees something. The moon, if nothing else. But then when did you last look, really look, at the moon?

If it were a carburetor or a glass of 7-Up you'd still have to answer the same question. When did you last look hard, and why not since then? Once you authentically give a damn, you're...well, you're still a Fool, but oh the places you'll go...

Liz Lemon is a frumpy character played by an attractive (to you?) actress. There! How hard was that?

Because Sady Doyle's essay about class and the 'We Are the 99%' movement her anxieties about her upbringing has been making the rounds, I was thinking about (and then reread) her '13 Ways of Looking at Liz Lemon' piece, which in addition to having a title that signifies to the Educated Reader exactly what intellectual circle the Educated R. is about to enter, is a decent bit of media/cultural criticism wrapped around a gigantic, embarrassing-if-the-universe-were-actually-just, Media Studies 101-level misunderstanding.

The title of this post should clear everything up for the interested reader. Just as Dustin Hoffman is neither autistic nor a cross-dresser nor a dental torture victim, just as Sarah Michelle Gellar has slain precious few vampires in her life, just as Geoffrey Rush is not a classical pianist (nor a pirate!), just as Brad Pitt is not a daft environmental terrorist, Tina Fey is not a frumpy comedy writer! LIZ LEMON IS NOT TINA FEY, she is a fictional character, and TINA FEY PLAYS HER ON TELEVISION.

Which is to say, Doyle's anxiety about Tina Fey's character/creation, Liz Lemon, wouldn't just disappear if she stopped eliding this difference, but then at least she (Doyle) would be able to other, perhaps more abstract but at least less dodgy matters, like this:

WHEN a comedic type (e.g. the Liz Lemon type) evolves at a different rate or in a different direction from the prevailing cultural winds, the audience's relationships to that type will undergo transformation under tension; afterward the type can still serve its purpose, illuminating relationships and releasing anxiety, but maybe our responsibilities change too. THEREFORE it's reasonable - important - to ask what work the Liz Lemon character, with her roots in 1960s stories about women entering the workforce (e.g. The Mary Tyler Moore Show) and earlier status/degradation texts like I Love Lucy, is doing in our culture right now, and MOST IMPORTANTLY I THINK find ways to revel in the great pleasures of these women's comedic work while keeping a sharp eye out, not for transgression and that-over-which-we-are-obligated-politically-to-become-persnickety, but for the next incredible thing. WHICH IS PERHAPS the long way 'round to saying, Pissing on your competitor for cultural oxygen doesn't further your cause. The culture wars aren't actually wars; you don't win by shooting the other guy.

The Magician.

Above his head the lemniscate; in his hand a candle burning at both ends (wand + flame); on the table before him the ceremonial offices of the magician: cup, pentacle (coin), wand, sword. Flowers bloom all around, red roses and white lilies. His robes alchemical red and white. The first of the major arcana; as avatar of the querent or reader he stands for the pursuit of wisdom - illumination from above dispersed below, per Waite's own reading - but the medieval Marseilles deck, Waite's model, casts the magician as a conman, a fraud: false knowledge as obstacle to the soul-development whose attainment is the goal of the narrative embedded in the major arcana.

Crowley and Waite have a young Magus: the Fool cleaned up and reporting for duty. A cartomantic Mary Sue story. Crowley actually gives us three Magi, ranging in aspect from the foolish acolyte to the wise all-but-god in Eastern drag.[*]

Note that Crowley calls the young Magus by his old name: the Juggler.

The tarot is generally lumped in with 'occult' matter: UFOs, spontaneous combustion, the Illuminated Seers, all that. But while plenty of New Age pantheist narcissists follow Waite, Crowley, and the rest down a rabbit hole of self-referential hokum, a tarot deck differs in nature and purpose from, say, a David Icke book: whatever the aesthetic value of a given deck, the tarot is an actually-existing tool that works best without any magical or fortune-telling baggage. Indeed, it deserves to be taken seriously as a narrative/experiential medium, a channel for solitaire image-play and story/worldbuilding.

But then there's the Magician. Which means there's Magic in there somewhere, and the trouble with magic is that no one can agree on what it is, how it works, or how seriously to take it. Which is a problem, because nearly everyone who's ever lived has believed in magic.

* * *

Assume the Magician can't do anything with that wand but point it at things and look silly. Assume the robes are just a costume, the flowers need watering, the sword is dull, and the cup is empty - or bears the faint tang of noontime wine. (Just enough to loosen me up, is all. Enough to soothe the nerves a bit...) And no, he doesn't have the infinity symbol floating over his bean.

What's left, when you strip any 'supernatural' elements from the scene? The pursuit of hidden knowledge through ritual devotions and the systematic alteration of consciousness. The machinery of self-dissolution and -expansion. (But I repeat myself.)

Y'know, the motto of Aleister Crowley's church was:

THE METHOD OF SCIENCE - THE AIM OF RELIGION

The modern tarot community retains some of the old spiritualist gobbledygook but pretty much none of the obsessive inverse-theological esoteric rigour. Even trustworthy historian/designer Robert Place allows his sober-minded Tarot: History, Symbolism, Interpretation to devolve into lunacy about the Higher Soul interceding through the cards. (Of course Place also cuts Aleister Crowley and his influential and popular Thoth deck from the book entirely, probably out of spite; that should've clued me in to the silliness to come...) Place's book is dead solid on matters like the western European origins of the tarot and its roots in popular media like the medieval trionfi, but his card-by-card exegesis of the Waite-Smith deck can't hope to compare to Waite's mock-intellectual carryings-on, never mind Crowley's own visionary weirdness.

Of course the more historical detail you offer, the more comparative perspective, the clearer it becomes that the tarot is just a deck of cards with four symbolically-freighted suits and an allegorical parade of trumps, not a conduit to Aetherial XYZ or what have you.

Maddeningly, the tarot community exists quite happily on the fringes of narcissistic/palliative (vs generative, exploratory) unreason. But insofar as occult such-and-so provides any entrance to wisdom, it's through the smart occultists' ironic self-reflection. Waite's Magician is deadly serious but young; Crowley's might not know what he's getting into but he's totally immersed in it already, smiling because of what's to come. The Deviant Moon deck smartly gives us an old-fashioned jester - 'the juggler' indeed - with Crowley's several-armed cod-Hindu look, still uniting the four spheres of magical inquiry but clad in makeup and a jester's cap. (And there's an audience behind him, isn't there? Or are those shadows all his?) Only the Waite-Smith treatment is wholly earnest, and even then Patricia Colman Smith's drawn figure has a bit of a smile to him. Hard not to think it's coming at someone's expense. None of the New Age's syrupy earnestness here.

What occult scholars had/have going for them is an appreciation for the immensity of the past; the Revealed World is wider than their own skulls, which is more than can be said for the Aquarian comfort game (or its paranoid mirror image, the conspiracy that's invariably out to get YOU, of all people). If magic is gonna stay halfway magical, it's got to do more than make you feel good - or bad.

That's one lesson to be taken from the various tarot Magi: whether as developmental stage (Crowley), self-congratulatory arrest (Waite-Smith), or bitter joke (Deviant Moon), the Magician's purpose is to establish a feeling of Strangeness, of possibility, which can only be realized through concentration - immersion. You're going to have to change track: that's the warning. No point telling the Fool, who can fly, after all. But the Magus, the first figure in the allegory of the trumps (Crowley's Atu, the major arcana), demands a shift in perspective which can only come through intense, unself-conscious attention. No fear of looking stupid in those alchemist's robes. No shame is delighting in the jester's trickery. No modesty about appearing nude up in (metaphorical) outer space. Are you Mercury or not, for heaven's sake?

Or without the mythological freight: would you like to see an old trick anew? They've been pretending to cast spells for millennia now, after all, but everyone knows that magic never works; so why in the world would they bother? If so-called magic doesn't accomplish anything, then what's it for?

The Magus says: some folks do this for a living, did you ever wonder how? Or why?

Which is the point of the entire exercise. Wondering how and why. Just wondering. The tarot can't fill you with information - there is none - but any genuinely 'divinatory' act affords us the opportunity to ask the universe something in a Weird posture. There's nothing to take seriously, but if you try to take it (not yourself but your self's willfully bizarre opposite) seriously, you win: you transform, if nothing else, into a questioner. The method of science, the aim of religion.

On the other hand, it's only a deck of cards. This is pure, arrant nonsense. We're dead serious about silly things here. What do you suppose that will accomplish? Well: why do you ask?

[*] Clarification: The three Magi actually include two preliminary drafts rejected by Crowley, included in posthumous issues of the Thoth deck.

The Fool.

He'll do for a start.

A young man walks beside a cliff. Fancifully dressed, holding a white rose in one hand and a satchel and walking stick in the other. Feather in his cap. He's high up in the mountains; the sky is yellow, like his boots, and the sun is white. A small white dog nips playfully at his heels.

The Fool: the zeroth card. Beneath numbering, if you like, or maybe beyond it. Or the zero is (let's leap) half a whole story - two Fools side by side would turn zero into infinity, right? But then we'd have to come back to the Fool at the end of our work, and wouldn't it defeat our purpose to end up back at the zero?

Well. Depends on our purpose, I imagine.

The fool who follows him

If he knew the danger he was in, he wouldn't step so close to that cliff; on the other hand, not knowing, his dangerous path affords him an extraordinary view, which more prudent folks might never experience. You'd think the dog would tell him what's going on, but unless my perspective is all screwed up (who's isn't?), the dog is even closer to falling than the Fool...

...and we should note, here, that while the Waite-Smith deck contains plenty of dancing or running figures (even the hobbled beggar on the five of pentacles), the Fool seems to be taking fairly measured steps. He's not cavorting, in Smith's rendering, he's just out for a nice relaxing walk. Y'know: on top of the world.

My poor fool is hanged

The same fella ends up in some trouble, if you ask me, when we get to major arcana XII. That's what comes of rushing in, Fool. But as usual the cards resist simple moralizing: the Hanged Man doesn't look too upset about his plight. Same unkempt hair, similar goofy outfit. He's lost his dog friend, unfortunately - maybe Fido jumped off the edge, forgot to fall, and ended up on a different mountainside altogether? - but the Hanged Man has gained, among other things, a halo. Trade outer peace for inner? Why not.

Part of the suggestive power of the Waite-Smith cards is their eerie silence: you half expect a mournful flute melody to be the only sound accompanying many of the images, and even kinetic images like the Tower (major arcana XVI) have a terrible moving-stillness to them, as if frozen in stone. Robert Place (hereafter RMP) notes the Golden Dawn's use of the white rose to symbolize 'silence and rebirth'; I don't think Lear's fool picked a rose before climbing into his garbage can to disappear (only for Samuel Beckett to put him to work again, 350 years later), but I well remember his prophetic farewell, and the unexplained and disconcerting silence that followed his divination.

I wonder what Smith's Fool is hearing, up on the mountain. Hey fella: if anyone hands you a couple of stone tablets, save yourself some trouble, and dance the other way. Holiness is lightness, as you well know (or will find out, either pre- or post-Hanging), but messenger for authority is a mug's game.

Still and all, I wonder. A strong breeze might blow him right off the cliff, him and his little dog too; or else give him a funny idea. The Fool's job is to speak truth, after all, and it has to come from somewhere. I wish there were a second card, the zero's twin, final Fool, walking on a storm-blasted Heath behind a bent and broken old man; the latterly fool would have the same spring but lessened, the same stick but laden, the same rose but wilted; and his smile would have faded. In its place: knowledge of the dark. (Knowing better, first of all, than to turn away the sun.) Not to be too literal-minded, here of all places(!), but that darkling wanderer would make thuddingly clear what the 'narrative' arcana depict: a Fool's training in Foolishness.

Another zero isn't zero: each circle's every turn takes time, which is the name of all stories.

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.'

Sample topics for games of Lexicon.

(Explanation.)

'Changes in Boston social scene after the Undeath'

'Unexplained phenomena at Camden Moonbase, 2040-2042'

'Atlantean border skirmishes'

'Interviews with the last of Hitler's psychics'

'Ghosts in contemporary politics'

'Eyewitness accounts of the haunting at Mornington Crescent'

'Report on incident in SFI A-life mesh, 5/5/08'

'Rudolf the Talking Dog: political implications'

'Fermilab wormhole results explained'

'Report on the making of the "human autopsy" video by X'valairr, Imperial Archivist'

'Untitled 1' will do.

Thinking about (but not listening to) Vampire Weekend this morning, for some reason. The memory of the idea of their music playing in a club; or else the idea of the memory. Creepy: all those 30-year-old hipsters dancing to knockoff Afro-pop made by 18-year-old prep schoolers. Maybe the whole point of forming the band was So The Older Kids Will Like Us. But then when did a 30-year-old turn into a kid? Thinking back, I wonder (conversely) when I turned into an adult. My instinct is to say 'When we decided to have a baby,' or 'When we got married.' But shouldn't the answer be 'When I went off to college on my own' or thereabouts? I seemingly spent my 20's fucking and attending funerals; isn't that 'grownup stuff'?

Trying to synthesize years' worth of data regarding a particular observation: I rarely see well-off folks walking down the street yelling into phones or at other people on the street. What I take to be 'working-class types,' though, it happens all the time. Heavyset women in tracksuits with penciled-on eyebrows and heavily hairsprayed bangs telling their boyfriends DON'T CALL ME AGAIN I HATE YOU I'LL CALL YOU over cheapass cell phones.

Did I say 'types'? Do I say that? I do.

My baby is up and crawling about, throwing his rattle-blocks on the ground. His version of 'throwing' does not inspire Major League dreams. Not that I'd ever actually have those. He can be a doctor instead if he wants.

Key difference between Deadwood and McCabe and Mrs Miller; i.e. between real liberalism and (ironic-)conservatism.

In McCabe, the building and growth of the town serves as counterpoint to the main action, which is the private struggle of the title characters. The two stories parallel and illuminate one another, but the town - the church - is always a symbol in the background of the film. The story comes down to two characters, and the town is an element in that story.

On Deadwood, the characters start out trying to escape this or that, as McCabe does in the film, but their story is the story of the town itself, and vice versa; the social fabric is foregrounded at all times. Swearengen, the most complex character on the show, is also the central element of the town of Deadwood itself, the greater community body - yet he willfully subsumes himself in that body in the second and third seasons. Every character who thrives on Deadwood does so by entering into the fellowship that is the town. Writer David Milch makes no distinction between the stories of the characters and the story of Deadwood itself.

In this regard, Deadwood is the more radical political/moral text: where McCabe ironizes and subverts the tropes of the film western (disreputable outsider comes to frontier town to seek fortune, battles Big Money Back East), Deadwood rejects the film western's premises outright; this rejection is symbolically enacted with the murder of Wild Bill Hickock in the show's fourth episode. He isn't the West, he's the 'western,' the media fantasy of the lone gunslinger, and he dies alone as he must.

Or more neatly: Swearengen on Deadwood also faces mercenaries from Back East, like McCabe himself does; but on Deadwood they're just a subplot, a minor thread in a narrative building not to his own transcendence or apotheosis but to the town's legal incorporation. He submits to a greater will; the town enters into a greater, more robust (but much less comfortable) order; the buildings going up all around him aren't symbols. They're buildings.

This difference stems from the TV/film difference in no small part. But it's also a matter of political focus. Deadwood both valorizes entrepreneurs and demonizes Big Business, yet its social ethos is all about the collective, the self-organizing workers, the orderly transition to civilization. Not only does Milch dismiss the libertarian fantasy of the West and its affiliated political pseudophilosophy, he rejects the fundamental premise underlying it (the sublime value and meaning of the Individual).

Or more briefly: Altman offers a melancholy vision of the Little Guy trying to get by and dying at the hands of Big Business, but Milch gives us a continuum between the two, and locates his key moral conflict elsewhere (the illusion of separateness versus holy union in the community body).

Or even more briefly: McCabe is a movie about a pimp and a whore, set in a lifelike western town. Deadwood is a show about God a town.

Phish in Denver CO, 4 September 2011.

OK, a brief experiment before we get to this wonderful show: grab your copy of the Jones Beach '09 Harry Hood - you do have one, right? - and listen again to the (inevitably disappointing) return to the I-V-IV jam after the blissful ambient passage. Note, in passing, how Fishman back then was aiming toward the kind of lightning-quick, frenetic wall-of-rhythm stuff he's doing now, but without his present insane level of chops. Note too Trey's much-maligned 'whale call' effect pedal. Aah, Phish 2009. How I don't really miss you anymore...

OK. Around 14:40 in the lovely SBD/AUD matrix recording floating out there (ahem), listen now to Trey's totally out-of-place insertion of 'Eastern' scalar runs in an otherwise conventional major-chords-all-over jam. Page tries to integrate Trey's statement into the texture of the jam but it's a weird fit, and what should've been a best-ever Hood weirdly kind of limps to the finish line.

What we didn't (couldn't!) know in 2009 was that THAT kind of playing - Trey's uncharacteristic (and clumsy, back then) harmonic experimentation, Page's instant responsiveness, the sheer density of the jam's texture, the awesome possibilities for tension/release latent in that kind of harmonic superposition - all that stuff was gonna blossom, in 2011, into the most interesting new Phish music since at least 1999, maybe even 1997. After the stunning ambient music the chaotichromatic stuff sounded like a flub...but it, not the free-floating bliss-space, was the future of Phish's jamming.

Part 2 of our experiment: grab your copy of the 8/15/11 UIC Light and fast-forward to the 4:10 mark (in the SBD). Check out how Trey's playing, over just a handful of choruses, swings from the majestic blues-inflected I-IV movement of the main Light jam, through some tense minor-scale passages, past a series of choppy figures, into a lightning-quick run beneath which PAGE MCCONNELL DOES THE COOLEST THING HE'S EVER DONE.

OK it's a small thing but let's take a breath, then a beat, and see what's happening here. Trey is playing a gnarly run that sounds like IIb or even a whole-tone scale a half-step offset from the usual Light key; Page responds by switching from I-IV-IV (the basic Light pattern) to I-IIb-Vb7, launching off from Trey's bluesy sustained third and chord-climbing even as Trey rockets skyward. It's not earth-shaking music, but the fact is, Phish don't play like this - or they didn't used to - and even if Page is secretly giving Trey a modulated I-IV to play with, it sounds so perfectly strange (and vice versa) that for a second it seems they can all of a sudden do anything they want to, again.

The whole thing takes four seconds. In just that much time Page and Trey blow open the sound of the whole jam. As if in celebration, Page hops onto the Hammond organ to fill the sky with Soaring! Technicolor! Noise! Mike, Fish, Trey, and Page get more and more noisy and tense and dissonant and FURIOUS - the light growing brighter, darker, deeper, more present, past and future in painful proximity like matched magnetic poles, the field strengthening...

At 5:40 or so the jam enters its next phase, a loping decrescendo above Fish's clanging cymbal pattern, and we can put down the phone at this point, moving on to 9/4/11. We just had to seed our listening first - to see how Trey's clumsy Jones Beach '09 maneuvers had mutated and matured in two years, how his bandmates were responding in new ways, how the off-kilter chromaticism Trey was reaching for had at last fully integrated into a Phish sound that had been, dare I say, a little predictable...

...

...and so OK here comes 9/4/11 Denver. But I'm not gonna talk about the patient Twist, the frightening 'storage shed' psychedelia in Piper, completely integrated 'plinko' section in this instant-classic Hood, thrilling Beatles/Guy Forget bustouts emerging from solid R'n'R and Ghost jams, funky Gin, or even how happy I am to hear this melodramatic but awesome version of Page's Halfway to the Moon. Nah, the hell with the usual happyhappy stuff. Let's just for a second talk about the Chalkdust that closes Set One.

OK. Preliminaries end at 2:40, at which point Trey begins his usual blues soloing, which stays 'inside the box' for just 30 seconds before he brings the volume down and starts a Stash-style tension/release routine. Nothing out of the ordinary for Chalkdust, really, and after a moment it's back to the usual stuff...but by 4:20 Page is rumbling low on the piano, throwing out new chords, Mike is acting a little silly down low, Trey starts with his minimalist patterns, Page is doing chromatic whoopsy-daysies up and down the keys...at 5:30 it's a lightning-quick 'Night in Tunisia' pattern from Trey and we're firmly into the Nü Tonalitas or Le Petit Dissonance whatever we pretentious jackasses want to call it...

Then SHIT at 6:30 the band pulls together for one of its patented 'Let Us All Climax Together Now' downbeats, only Cactus is NOT PLAYING BALL. And for a couple of choruses everything seems to hang together only barely, if at all, with Trey signaling Return and Mike responding with Maintain, Fishman bashing out Release, Page happily spraying Why Not over everything within reach of his (ahem) organ...

The end of the jam is such a colossal group orgasm that Trey manages to totally flub his entrance after the break, before nailing the final written lines. And instead of the grand set-ending major chord the song usually provides in this spot, Trey gives us a short, nasty dissonant minor-chord rogering at the outro, all industrial noises and weirdness, before a perfect unison hit to close things out.

It's not groundbreaking music; heck, no one aspect of this jam is unprecedented for Phish. It does come back periodically, as it must, to the bluesy peacocking that comprises 99% of all Chalkdust jams. But I'm not sure Phish have ever been able to integrate their melodic, harmonic, atmospheric, and stylistic ideas this well, this consistently, this effortlessly.

Yeah - I said 'ever,' as in, as perfect as Fall 1997 is in my mind, the density and well-roundedness of this music has no equal in Phish's gigantic live catalogue. How can I put this? I think they're playing now with a really unprecedented density of musical information, by which I mean that while they may still be drawing on templates they established a while back - particularly mid-90's spacy/spacious psychedelia, post-1996 funk, post-1997 ambient textures - the individual components are richer and more complex than they've ever been. The individual players' lines are certainly at peak intricacy and facility (excepting only Trey, arguably), but that's not all of it: there's just a palpable spirit of generosity and even bravery, which really brings up the level of all the music.

As if all four players trust themselves and one another so deeply, now, that they can throw out just not Weird and Stupid Ideas, nor Silly ones, nor deliberately Oppositional notions, but finally really Complex ideas...the obvious showcase in 2009-11 has been Light, with its involuted musical snarls and crosshatched tonalities, but jams like this Chalkdust show off just how much each player is offering the other four at all times.

I suspect it's a function of Mike's remarkable move to frontline prominence, but also Page's enormous gains in confidence and assertiveness (think of his leadership role in the Albany '09 Seven > Ghost!), and Trey's newfound directness and solo experimentalism. Not to mention Fish's restored chops, which are as good as they've ever been. (And by the late-90's he was one of the most skilled drummers anywhere.) But it's also a matter of the band having nothing to prove and no one to please but themselves. More and more, their best jams are starting to resemble their freewheeling soundchecks, where they've long experimented with sounds they were too reserved (in a weird way) to bring before the paying audience.

I imagine the (sometimes boring) Superball IX late-nite 'storage shed' jam was a turning point as well - a much-needed reminder of just how far we, the obsessives, are willing to follow Phish's experiments. They're bolder now then they've been in a long time...but their instincts for stage performance keep their experiments from the perversity of (say) their pre-1997 music.

My point here is that Phish have always been a fast-moving band, a brainy band, but having exhausted musical algebra they've moved into a realm where they can really PLAY with their many musical ideas: a deep ambient jam in Hood, a thunderous 'Endtroducing...' groove emerging from R'n'R, a self-devouring noise groove in Sneakin' Sally, chiming children's soundtrack music in Disease, dark rock'n'roll beats in the Waves outro, eerie chiming chords beneath Undermind, pure industrial noise drowning a funk jam in Light. And the crucial bit, the point I'm desperately trying to make, is that these deep experiments don't sound like experiments, nor accidents, nor exceptions...they're flowing seamlessly and joyfully from the textures of the songs themselves.

Every idea now seems copresent in a way it's simply never been. Phish 1997 could seemingly do anything they wanted do; Phish 2011 seem prepared to do everything, to allow all these musical possibilities not just to alternate or succeed one another (One Idea Per Minute) but to intermingle and cross-pollinate.

I'm so goddamn happy about this music right now. So excited to hear these men make such joyful and adult music. Maybe past the formalism and mere information I've been repeating these last N paragraphs, maybe THAT is the whole point of the thing. I wish most of all to tell you that it gives me joy, and I hope the same for you. In and through and with this music we've loved for such a long time, the ridiculous lot of us...to live so close to so rich and true a thing as this ever-growing music is a blessing, if that word means anything. This afternoon, at least, I'd like to believe that it does.

Or not, whatever. I mean it's just a concert review. Hey here's a summary DOWNLOAD THE SHOW ITS AWESOME U WILL LOVE IT THEY EVEN PLAYED A SOLID A- VERSION OF PIPER:):)

Else waxwhere / Where elsewax / WAX ELSEWHERE (whew): 'Unfamiliar Rooms' in Fiction Brigade, READ IT NOW GOSH DARN YOU.

A piece of 'flash fiction,' whatever that could possibly mean, by a certain Mr Wax Banks IF you can even believe sane parents would ever name their child that, appears in the premiere issue (congrats and yay!) of Fiction Brigade which is RIGHT HERE. Please have a look, and enjoy!

Phish @ Ian's Farm, 21 August 1987.

[Also posted at the phish.net.]

Let me admit a personal bias up front: I've never gotten much out of Phish's pre-1993 music. I used to keep a December '86 tape around (decent Whipping Post as I recall?) but I've never replaced it with mp3's, and don't really feel any need to. In fact I only half a tiny handful of pre-1993 tracks on my hard drive at all. I'm not really in a position, therefore, to judge this show relative to others of its time. (@SlavePhan has done a superb job of this anyhow.)

Phish were a different band in 1987 from the institution they've become - freer in some ways, endlessly curious, arrogant like young guys tend to be, funny, brash, quick on their feet, and most importantly *new*...not a lot of miles on them, emotionally or otherwise. (This was only their second show outside Vermont, remember.) It's interesting, I think, to compare their late-80's material to their more fully-developed early-/mid-90's style - to try and hear the throughlines running between their immature music and what came after.

The first thing I notice about this show (v0 mp3 from hoydog23's spreadsheet) is the *sound*: Page has to rely on his early electric instruments, particularly the Rhodes(?), which muddies the ensemble texture somewhat. Really underscores just how far they came as collective creators over the years - and how not-really-rock they were in those days.

Quite a nice AUD all things considered though!

There's also the matter of the vocals, which are (as they say) 'cringeworthy.' Not for technical reasons, really: the problem is that they sing the entire show out of the sides of their mouths, as it were. Most of the lyrics here are stupid or silly, the musicians know it, and - crucially - they're compelled to apologize, in a way, by ironizing or parodying the performance.

It's hard for me to focus on the music when the band is delivering the songs with a smirk; this is a problem throughout the show. The Curtain's climactic vocals are undercut by cheesy falsetto and childish screaming; Trey sings Wilson in a totally misbegotten rube's accent; Golgi, Camel Walk, McGrupp, and (of course) Sanity are sung with Trey's weird early mix of sincere goofiness and a dose of self-conscious embarrassment.

When I say there were a comedy-rock band in those days, this is part of what I mean. The songs were part of it, extraordinary as they were and are.

The jamming too. Maybe most of all.

Trey has spoken many times, over the years, about his/Phish's early improvisatory approach, which was always *supplementary* to his compositions: to have each band member play at all times as if part of a single Great Chord, with everyone's ears tuned to the vibrations of the preceding, diabolically complex written music. This has the major effect of always pulling the band toward ensemble order: four-bar and sixteen-bar phrases, hard group downbeats to resolve rhythmic suspensions, diverging from and then coalescing around the going chord (progression), thickening and lightening the rhythm bed in close concert with one another, and of course their famous ability to change dynamics as one. They play like a flock of birds, nominally leaderless, all as one.

But in the early days they didn't have the same level of responsiveness, nor the mature ability to sit with an idea and let it dictate its own expression and evolution. If you've read 'The Princess Bride' you know what I mean: when the boy Inigo challenges the six-fingered master swordsman to a duel, it's over quickly without any uncertainty as to the outcome, but for a few seconds the master is terrified, because even in that hopeless minute the boy's genius shines through. That's how Phish jammed in those days: impetuously and impatiently, able to provide thrills without ever sending your heart soaring.

Even their funk grooves had air quotes around them.

Just listen to this version of Funky Bitch, which @SlavePhan has singled out for praise. I don't hear anything particularly wonderful here, quite the contrary: Trey doesn't seem to know what to do with the blues, his clever ideas (like building tension with a plodding triplet line in his third-last chorus) cut against the groove instead of flowing from it, and there's no sexiness or swing at all in his playing. (In a song called FUNKY BITCH, for Christ's sake!) He sounds like a tourist in someone else's genre. They play so well, but...why?

Same category of thing happens in Harpua, where the rhythm patterns sound overstuffed and clunky like one of the old space-filling Hey exercises instead of, y'know, a groove; in the modes-by-numbers solo on Curtain With; in the gradual breakdown of the Camel Walk jam; in the rote nature of the Flat Free playing, which is the kind of thing Phish fans like me have (for years!) inexplicably cited as evidence of Phish's 'jazzier sound'; in the related weird practice of playing a haunting song like Swing Low Sweet Chariot as bright midtempo swing.

...

...but...

...

The good parts are stunning, as they tend to be with Phish, though in a different fashion from what latter-day fans (like me) would think of as normal.

The show's highlights reveal a band about to break through an invisible musical barrier into something extraordinary. At this point Trey's band had picked for themselves an interesting musical problem: how do you fully integrate true four-sided rock-idiom improvisation into these complex, formally ambitious compositions without descending into pure randomness.

Their solution has become famous: the 'Hey' exercises, the Oh Kee Pah ceremony, the 'become one chord' style, the democratic musical approach, the really unprecedented level of group *listening* that all four musicians demanded of each other. At this point in their history, though, after just a few years together, their solution was still more proof-of-concept than emotional wellspring. But even after a quarter-century, just hearing the concept proven is still a *thrilling* experience.

Indeed, *thrill* is the emotion Phish have always been able to share: their own, their fans', the sheer joy of musical communication. This first show at Ian's Farm is genuinely exciting, even to me: it overflows with promise.

The jam out of Clod, for instance, is a perfect demo of Phish's improvisatory approach. The ear-boggling intricacy of the composition carries over into rich group improv, which grows in complexity and intensity without losing the basic Clod sound. The Skin It Back jam sounds like an attempt to harness the energy of a Dead/Allmans (or Trey Band!) improvisation without the benefit of genre cues: an experiment in shaping new music at high speed from scratch, not as solo statement or remembered social experience, but as stochastic sonic architecture. The aim isn't 'beauty,' nor is it 'fun' exactly; it's a bit like a private musical algebra, all about balanced group *sound*...

All the music is very very *busy*, of course, as Phish's jams almost invariably tended to be prior to 1997; even the McGrupp > gnarly Stir It Up jam provides little space for relaxation. (Y'know, a couple of generations of players came up revering logorrheic genius John Coltrane, seeming to forget that his most important mentor was lyrical-minimalist genius Miles Davis...) Trey can't resist the urge to insert stupid pseudo-Rasta 'rapping' into the long long reggae jam, but the onset of David Bowie restores the band to a more familiar order, and the song journeys far from its moorings while keeping to Phish's comfortable 1970's jazz-lite jam-rock milieu. The competence on display is impressive as always, but more exciting is the way the band is starting to surrender to (ahem) a musical energy much larger and more organic than their own identities. At its best moments, the music stays busy but doesn't seem it: it gets 'tight-loose,' containing lots of musical information while still moving fluidly. The long third-set jams point in this direction, which the band would explore in the mid-90's.

Indeed, for a couple of years Phish played seemingly effortless 'tight-loose' music every goddamn night, all night. Not in 1987 though.

Trey is a skillful melodicist but his solos usually stay away from traditional one-man 'here is what I feel' statements in favour of a sort of musical building-block approach: he's always trying to feed his playing back into the collective sound, the atmosphere, the groove. As much a rhythm player as a lead voice. That approach is already paying dividends at this early stage. The density and well-wrought quality of the jams is surprising; even if the band had yet to learn the value of space and sparseness, they were doing a lot of work in their own clattering early-maximalist style, led by Trey's fluent, voluble guitar playing.

But the fetish for musical order can get in the band's way at times. Quoting 'Tom Sawyer' in the middle of the Bowie jam makes sense given the patterns they're already playing, and that's exactly the kind of whole-cloth construction Trey delights in, but what difference does it make? Playing those off-time arpeggios later in the jam makes for a neat intervention, but hadn't 'Remain in Light' been out several years when this show was played? Weren't white minimalist art-rock nerds allowed to play music from and for the body at this point, rather than just the head?

It's still exciting, engaging music.

They say everyone's got 2,000 apprentice pages to work through before writing real poetry. This is apprentice work by Phish, even if their formal ambitions and extraordinary natural talents marked them as special from the start.

Yet you can't fault them for being who they are - now or then. The prickly brilliance on display at this show, in the third set especially (as (self-)conscious intention dissolves), would find its sensual and empathetic complements as time passed. It's certainly possible to take great pleasure in this music, as @SlavePhan obviously (and generously) does, but I find it a pleasant warmup to Phish's soul-searing mid-90's music, when the band's nervous edges and whipsmart self-referential intelligence started to take a back seat to a full exploration of their emotional palette.

All this said, I should listen next to some Amy's Farm stuff, which marks an intriguing creative midpoint between this band, barely old enough to drink, and the rock quartet that could bring a storm to Red Rocks and set off nuclear explosions night after night in 1993.

Thanks for spending time on this show, @SlavePhan - it's given me a lot to think about and I'm glad to have finally heard it, even if I'll never be a diehard 80's Phish fan.

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?

Twaddler/toppler: morning notes starring our 11-and-a-half-month-old baby, Feliks.

• I lie on the ground pretending to be unconscious because I'm a good and caring father. He crawls over to me and begins to poke me in the face with one of his wooden drumsticks. I get up before he has a chance to begin whacking me on the skull.
• He mounts a low Amazon.com box in order to climb to a slightly higher one; falling backward off the low box, he lands on one knee, then rises up en pointe (without the benefit of e.g. ballet shoes or professional dance training) and executes a sly leaping maneuver to get back on the low box. I grab him before he has a chance to mount the coffee table and destroy all our possessions.
• I challenge him to a duel, i.e. I grab one of his drumsticks and start whacking the drumstick he's holding. At first he is confused by the obvious stupidity of this activity. Then he shifts his drumstick from right hand to left and closes on me with a series of attacks learned from the master Thibault. I am driven back nearly to the edge of the Cliffs before realizing I can, in fact, simply reach over and pick him up or crush him like a grape. Sobered, exhilarated, flushed with battle, I surrender manfully.
• Places his drumstick gets caught during his solitaire game of 'Whack the puree-pouch lid around on the ground, hockey-puck-style, with my drumsticks while dad watches': his diaper, my underpants leg, folds in the blanket, eddies in the spacetime continuum.
• My, that is an enormous quantity of vomit, isn't it.
• My friend Farhad once proposed to write a rock opera setting the water-stealing backstory of Chinatown in outer space. Among the songs he listed 'Love Song of a Dying Robot.' What he does not know is that I've actually written and even recorded several versions of the song (and other songs from the cycle, including 'Space Ace' and a variety of asteroid-miner shanties) in the intervening years. I've never been happy with any of it. Sample lines:

  it takes these words ten minutes to reach you
  a million miles away
  longer still when you were in my arms
  dear, that's why today
  feels much like yesterday

  and of course

  oh, row, the sailor sings
  of polycarbon starship wings
  oh, row, the solar winds
  carry me across the galaxy

  now i'm going nowhere
  
  but there's nowhere else that i would rather be

  That sort of thing.

• We listen to parts of DJ Shadow's Endtroducing... and Feliks's actions take on a somewhat louche character. He plays with his outlandish Sassy foam-grippy-rattle-ball object, possibly the most psychedelic/seizure-inducing item I have ever seen in real earth life, with a kind of fin de siècle dissipation, as if biding time in the unlit corner of some cabaret waiting for the secret police to cancel not just the performance nor the fun, but the very idea of progress or continuance; as if aware that he can't stay a twaddler/toppler forever. His cynicism, if that's what it is, is elliptical. Or is it resolve? Or does he need a diaper change? I put on some Duran Duran to lighten the mood but it all feels very, very several-years-too-late...
• He attempts to climb onto the futon/couch. Mercifully, it's too high for him. He contents himself instead playing with my hospital ID bracelet, which I take away because it's probably the single least sanitary object in this impressively unsanitary apartment. Then he reaches for the nightmare toy, about which I will say nothing more at this time in case it reads my blog and decides, in retaliation, to steal my eyes while I sleep.
• He engages in good old fill'n'spill behaviour with his colour/shape blocks, with a twist - he only pulls the blocks out of their little pail in matching pairs (two orange stars, two green squares, two red triangles). I encourage this racist behaviour because of how I was brought up, in a rural area.
• Yay! Stackers!
• Yay! Affectlessly throwing all the stackers over the side of the playpen over and over and over again!
• I would do anything for him. Indeed, I suspect I will: the scariest thing about parenthood, which is to say in the right light the most joyful, is that twenty or forty years from now I'll remember sacrifices and transformations that today, 20 August 2011 in Cambridge, I couldn't possibly have imagined. I have no idea what he's becoming. I have no idea what I'm becoming.

  Meanwhile my wife catches up on sleep just offstage, which she desperately needs because as hard as I feel like I work, she works ten times harder, dies a thousand times when our son cries, is lifted up and lifts me up with each stumbling advance or strange detour he takes. She is the molten core; she's his light, and mine.

• Duran Duran do not have a limitless supply of great songs.

Phish at UIC, 15 August 2011.

[Originally posted to the phish.net.]

While this show doesn't go as deep as 8/15 or climb as high as 8/16, it's a strong finish to a consistently enjoyable tour of unpredictable 'jamminess,' which offered unquestionably the most exciting, promising music since Phish's return. Indeed, the UIC run is stronger and more interesting, wall-to-wall, than any three-show series since, what, Berkeley 2010? The third week of October 2010?

2004?

Expectations: unless you're what's apparently known as an 'it's all Hood' fan - damn, I'm learning new terms all the time these days - you probably either thrill to see that footnote-heavy setlist (quotes! teases! jokes! Buffalo Bill! Page's house!) or feel skeptical about a sub-4minute Ghost and a Makisupa/Sleep/BBill trifecta deep in the second set. Justified either way, given the band's recent history. But this music is up to the high standards set by the first two UIC concerts.

Lots of mustard on the Divided Sky(!), Gin, and Maze in the first, but the meat's in the second half as always.

Big Crosseyed to go, then a really weird effects-laden ambient bridge into No Quarter. What a well-chosen cover given Phish's current strengths...it serves as a rich dark/aggressive space for them to explore without submerging themselves in ice-cold 20-minute jams a la the late 90's, and the instrumental/rhythmic texture of it is unusual for them, partly under the vocals. Phish do enjoy playing parts...

Quick CrosseyedTimber, but after what seems to be the final chord Trey kicks back into a variation on the song's guitar rhythm, for 30 seconds of connective jamming just begging to be drawn out into a full-length exploration. This segues nicely into an unexpectedly beautiful Tweezer - one of those jams that sweetens its funk chords with a shot of major-key delicacy without tipping fully over into, say, 7/2/97 Stash-style Happy Anthems. Phish do this kind of polychromatic (polytonal) thing ALL THE TIME now, and it's a sure sign of newfound musical maturity and attentiveness. A lot of that comes from Mike's increased prominence, I think; he's able to suggest chords in his bass countermelodies and bounce new kinds of light off Trey's (let's simplify) blues-based playing.

After a lovely outro jam, Trey starts up a brief Caspian, which bounces along at a mezzoforte before a genuine guitar-led segue into the evening's highlight, Piper. They waste no time getting into spacious major-key jamming, but still find a way to quote Crosseyed on their way to a lightning-quick funk break and ambient bridge to Ghost. There's a LOT going on here! The amount of musical information in Phish's jams, for lack of a better phrase, has never been higher in all the time they've been playing together. When folks talk about a renaissance, a new peak for the band, this Piper is what they (we) mean. Less than nine minutes to cover all this musical ground? Ridiculous. Heartening.

Then it's into the abortive Ghost, about which I'm not sure what to say, other than - hey, it's the end of tour and Trey wanted to play a lot of different tunes. It's pretty much his band. I'd rather hear a long Ghost, but haven't they jammed enough this week? Do they owe us ten more minutes of race-to-the-peak nouveau-Ghost guitar rock?

So yadda yadda and then it's Antelope, which is Antelope, and yadda yadda three-song encore and you'll love it as long as you don't listen too closely to the 'Show of Life' lyrics. Kudos to Trey for such naked vocal performances, but that abysmal 'struggle and strife' line makes me want to sacrifice a copywriter to Odin or something.

So to review our review: fine first set, incredible run of tunes from Crosseyed through Piper, and the rest is just fun tour-closer material. And just so we're clear, the 'only good part of set 2' runs nearly an hour. Jesus, what more could you want?

This isn't the letdown of the UIC run, it's the capper. There's so much going on in every tune, so many little moments of humanity and empathy inside each jam, that even without a marquee long-form improvisation this show feels to me like a Must-Hear. The band is absolutely at a peak right now.

Trouble online, trouble behind.

I don't get along with people online, and that's the plain fact. It's taken me a while to be matter-of-fact about it, but there it is. I spent a bunch of time discussing the situation in therapy a couple years ago, but never did arrive at a satisfactory solution.

OK. The the problem goes deeper than incivility.

The summer after 10th grade (1995) I spent five weeks at Johns Hopkins, taking classes in the Pre-College Program. (It's different from the well-known precocious-child program, CTY.) I got my first C (in a stultifying molecular biology lecture) and worked hard to get a life-changing A (in a small, prescient 'Explorations in Text-Based Virtual Reality' humanities seminar). Both grades were portents, but I didn't understand them.

The focus of the seminar was MUD/MOO/MUSH culture - 'A Rape in Cyberspace,' Barlow's 'Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,' Neuromancer, some Bukatman, some Dery, that kind of thing. One of the requirements was to spend a bunch of time exploring the Diversity University MOO (moo.du.org:8888). I did. I also signed up for LambdaMOO (lambda.moo.mud.org:8888).

I'd never used the Internet before.

Some days I would get up, read the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog or my newly-purchased Principia Discordia for a while, then head over to the computer lab for a 12-hour stint in Lambda. I missed meals. I even missed class (see above re: 'my first C'). Tuition for the program came to $3,600 for five weeks. My dad mowed lawns to raise a few hundred dollars. A wonderful man in my hometown lent us the balance of the tuition and it took us a long while to pay him back; or else we never did.

I got some sun but not as much as I needed. I fell hard for a girl in the next dorm, who didn't notice me. Then I fell for someone with the username 'Sirena,' and that's one of the weirdest stories of my whole life, I think.

I learned to 'speak in public' on LambdaMOO but I learned plenty of other things as well; and I came to rely on it. When I went home at summer's end I felt totally disconnected from my hometown. I told myself and my family and even my couple of close friends that I just missed Baltimore, had a great time 'at college,' had never been around people who shared so many of my interests, just needed a little time to adjust. Junior year ahead, yay. That kind of thing. All of which was true, I suppose -

- but it occurs to me today, for the very first time, that as much as I missed the people and the school and the freedom, I was also going through withdrawal from the online world where my new self was being born. I mean that literally.

The term we're looking for is addiction, of course, more specifically a form of 'Internet addiction,' which in the late 90's was a subject of no small concern in the press and in academia.

You never hear about it now. Once everyone does some activity all day every day it's not an addiction, it's just 'part of life.' Like TV, or worrying about work, or hating the government.

* * *

I check my email several dozen times a day, yet I fail to respond in a timely fashion to friends and acquaintances. I may in fact be the worst correspondent I know. Yet I don't immediately forget about the 'need to respond': indeed, waves of anxiety about my Inbox full of unanswered emails continue to ripple for weeks and weeks. I am never, ever free of anxiety about these communications - but I avoid responding.

I've destroyed friendships - and strained family relationships - this way.

When I have spare time, I read websites and occasionally comment on them. Sometimes I do this even when I don't have spare time. Altogether I spend hours (hours!) a day looking at webpages and retaining almost nothing. I take no great pleasure from this activity. Indeed it has the dry sterility of pure compulsion, like pulling the arm of the slot machine.

I've posted to this blog more than 3,100 times since 29 September 2003. In that time I've been banned from one website, slunk away from several others, and stormed off several more. I get into fewer 'flame wars' than I used to, but it still happens. I still feel anxiety about websites I've 'stopped reading'; indeed, at the site where I've been banned, I continue to comment under a different name.

I feel contempt for such behaviour but haven't found a way to stop it, as yet.

Since 2009 I've posted upwards of 150 reviews to the phish.net - but I've only posted one or two since June, during which time I've posted 50 comments in discussion threads and in response to the admins' blog posts. I consciously avoided any such discussions until this summer. This correlation between 'chatting' online and posting more thought-out frontline pieces (reviews and articles) has held, in my case, for many years.

After building a (very very minor) reputation as a thoughtful writer at whedonesque.com, I've all but scuttled it by turning into a persnickety, ill-tempered commenter. Unsurprisingly, none of my posts have been featured there since I started commenting more regularly.

The term isn't brand dilution, but then what's the term? Would I be happier if I knew?

* * *

A longtime netizen (remember that term?) told me this when I was banned from phishthoughts.com (for 'trolling'):

You are a highly intelligent, very cerebral and I believe well meaning person but it seems that you have some form of internet Asperger's which makes it impossible for you to determine what is and is not socially acceptable in many circumstances online.

I wrote him a long email telling him, essentially, that he had no idea what he was talking about and I was perfectly justified in what I said about the site's owner and EVERYONE NEEDS TO THICKEN THE OLD SKIN, ETC., ETC. But I didn't send it. My wife approvingly refers to this kind of thing as de-escalation and always looks so relieved when I choose not to carry on such exchanges. The look on her face breaks my heart. I realize, at such moments, that I don't actually know how much damage I do to myself - or I won't acknowledge it, or (worst of all, and most likely) I've decided I need to hurt myself 'socially' in order to continue living as I am.

Last summer I wrote this:

I think we should purge the books and sell them, to alleviate my guilt (not a writer, not a devoted enough reader, nothing special...) and maybe recoup a bit of money. My wife thinks we should keep the books around[...] And dust them. I try to explain that life will stop and start over, better, if she'll just allow this one gesture; I mistake my self-indulgence for patience.

She evidently believes -- insists -- that life can't start or stop, can only continue, so we might allow ourselves to do the same. I imagine that our future must resemble my past. The books, I'm certain, are signs of my...well, my irresponsibility, profligacy, compulsions, status-consciousness. My individual failings, you might say. Don't I get the future I darkly deserve?

But what comes next is ours, not mine. `Mine' is just for comfort -- like the books. In our future[...]I'm glad my wife[...]made me keep the dreadful damned books way back when, and frustrated my urge to reduce our life to my story.

In grad school I went to a conference and met a young professor from some college out of sight/mind, and over the course of several joyful drunkening hours it became clear that we wanted to fuck each other, quite, but I was dating someone and she had to get back to her friends' house where she was staying, and in any case it would have been an absolutely colossal mistake, quite, but unforgivable? Who knows? Probably yes and deservedly so I'd say (were the situation reversed). Well. One of those stories I hold onto in which I 'miss an opportunity' to have a conventional 'good story' but still come close enough to some inner horizon that the light goes strange and new (or very old) things are revealed. So how bad a story can it really be, what I've got now? She was a Buffy fan too and I definitely should have called her when I was single, later. But I wasn't ever really single.

I mention it because, though I can't find the email she sent a few days later in response to my own message, I've memorized these phrases:

• 'maybe too smart for your own good'
• 'extremely socially awkward'

* * *

Shamefully, I often use 'Asperger's Syndrome' as a term of derision.

This is inappropriate and callous.

It would be, even if I were Oprah Winfrey.

* * *

Everyone wants his favourite band to also be The Very Best Band. This is really important to teenagers, who in this country have nothing else to do, but it stays important to nominal adults. Like me. Same for books/films of course. (Phish, Coltrane, James Joyce, Fight Club, etc.) Same for people, though I wouldn't know. I can't imagine what I'd be like if I didn't map my tastes on to the cosmic quality scale.

* * *

The point being that there are two problems compounding one another: I compulsively fiddle about on the Internet, either getting into arguments or zoning out pretending to be interested in what Ezra Klein and Arthur Silber have to say about anything, but at the same time I have very serious trouble maintaining a civil tone and spirit of congeniality in online fora. I tend to monologue at people - ever notice how rarely I respond to the wonderful comments around here? When the conversation gets two-sided I lose control of something (maybe just the conversation), and I end up saying things I regret. 'Being misunderstood,' HORROR!, but more than that: no longer trying to understand the people I talking to. Not reaching out.

And that's where I am this morning. Worried, if you're wondering, that I'll slowly lose friends and alienate readers and never stop doing the things I most hate about myself. And - you must know this is deeply related - worried, too, that I'll never write freely because it will always be about me.

You want 100% employment? Assign every single citizen to border patrol. The true meaning of the nation-state right there, the geographic Self. OK, hold one guy back to make dinner I guess. One guy for laundry. And someone to make sure the cable bill gets paid.

My son will probably wake up soon, and my wife with him. The day will start. Real life will start. This...this is the shadow. If you walk toward the light it'll hide from your sight, but not as a favour: your shadow will follow you wherever you go.

The essential, explains-it-all difference between Phish and the Dead. You're welcome!

The home state of Phish's improvisatory music is order (or structure). They depart productively from it, and play against it, entering states of tense, nervewracking disorder. But they always want to resolve, to cohere. Their improvisatory structures (like the two chords of the 'Bowie' jam, with their many modal suggestions) are centers of gravity; that's why they can swing wildly away from them and return surefooted, time after time. Their improvisations are famously architectural and coherent, as are Trey Anastasio's unique full-band written arrangements. The flip side of this strength-in-order is that their experiments in purely Free jamming have rarely been wholly successful, though they've gotten much better at it over the last ~30 years. And for a long time they were afraid to be emotionally wild, preferring intellectual experimentation - at some cost to the overall musical vibe.

The home state of the Dead's improvisatory music was disorder. They were able, on unexpectedly rare occasions, to cohere into well-formed orders within their chaotic musics (cf. the 2/18/71 'Beautiful Jam'), but they were most comfortable in freeform musical spaces ('Dark Star,' 'The Other One,' 'Playing in the Band') because they were accustomed to listening to disorder. The flip side of this comfort-in-disorder is that their formal structures, particularly their practices of song-arrangement, were famously shambolic, inconsistent, and rarely ideally-expressed. Indeed, the Dead's strongest period of pure songwriting (the early 70's country-inflected Hunter/Garcia tunes) is marred by a serious lack of spit'n'polish in arrangement and performance.

Two key causes of this difference are the Dead's average lack of chops,[*] and Phish's early emotionally-withdrawn nerdiness - which respectively pushed the Dead toward expansive Free material and pushed Phish toward hermetically-sealed structures and musical comedy.

The arc of each band was in some ways different, though they shared a destination: the Dead relaxed down to their technical level while sharpening their attack on the forms they had mastered (early-70's knife-edge Free play, late-70's crystalline rhythmic pieces, sparkling joyful 80's worldbeats, ragged balladry throughout); Phish veered toward Talking Heads-style minimalism and sonic experimentation in the mid/late-90's to take themselves out of their heads, then embraced their rock heritage and (ironically) the Dead's naked emotionality in their most recent incarnation.

For the longest time it was enough to say that Phish couldn't do what the Dead did, and vice versa; for the first time, that's no longer entirely true. Phish have finally entered a phase where they can generate the kind of emotional intensity that the Dead naturally traded in. It's for another article/essay to deal with the complicated issue of how Phish's stylistic approach works in tension with this emotionality.

Anyhow there it is. Note that we're not talking about the two bands' respective decision-making approaches, the Dead's lack of a clear artistic vision-leader, Phish's totally different musical heritage, the roles of punk/prog/funk, etc. Another time.

* * *

[*] Lack of chops? Yes. Take out Garcia (with his idiosyncrasies), Kreutzmann (master), and Hart (master in a different domain, weird fit in some ways) and you have the following players: Lesh (very technically limited despite strong intuitive musicality), Weir (brilliant innovator despite technical shortcomings), and the various keyboardists, of whom only Hornsby could match Garcia step-for-step.

Obama's core political principle - the one that keeps getting him into trouble.

Obama obviously believes that the USA stands to gain more from joint GOP/Dem ownership of major policy shifts (like the highly conservative health care bill and the present misguided all-cuts budget plan(s)) than from unilateral progressive/Dem action. I believe he leans progressive in most of his political views, but he's made clear time and time again that in his mind, compromise - i.e. joint ownership, shared responsibility, shared accountability - trumps all other virtues of a policy plan/movement.

This is misguided only from a partisan viewpoint. Obama presumably wants to enact liberal proposals in general, but he seems more interested in presiding over a drawing-down of party-political forces. Not surprising from a guy who came of age politically during the disastrous post-Reagan economic-conservative experiment.

He doesn't betray progressives, folks. Sorry. He's given up on 'winning' ideologically. (Of course he wants to win reelection.) I think he's more interested in building a half-century of consensus than in what that consensus should actually consist of.

Shared destiny. Everyone whines about losing it. Obama actually seems to want to recommit to it. That makes him an enemy to partisans. Well - aren't there much worse things he might be?

Love and market corrections.

Seeking last night to explain my seeming negativity in response to friends' recounting of their newfound romantic/domestic hopes, I hit upon the following imperfect analogy:

The day-to-day hopefulness of people (particularly young people) in love relates to the systemic health of a relationship, its sustainability and integrity, the way the Dow Jones Industrial Average relates to the underlying strength of and productivity of the nation's economy: i.e. pretty much not at all.

When we're in love or just in hope - when we're pulling for a relationship to be something new and healthy, disregarding years of precedent because This Time Things Are Different - we tend to react strongly to daylong improvements, week-to-week healthy signs, small symbolic gestures or moments. Committed (at least rhetorically) to 'living in the now' or 'for the moment,' we devote ourselves in fact to the next moment, the promise of something swell just around the corner. We give full voice to our hopes and fears and think of ourselves as being at the center of something monumental.

But the Dow Jones has never been higher than when the American economy was going tits-up even as Wall Street raked in record profits; which is to say the soaring stock markets and financial-sector profits of the 90's were a lie agreed upon, a single number more reassuring than the many sets of complicated numbers recording the collapse of the industrial economy and the hollowing-out of the USA's basic material productivity. If you watch the day-to-day movement of the market you'll start seeing 'green shoots' and 'bear markets' even when the fundamentals are unchanged.

Romance is fun and trivially easy but you build your life on the fundamentals. 'He bought me a diamond ring' and 'The sex is great' and 'She's so awesome, she makes me forget my troubles' are single-day market upticks. But the market isn't the economy, as America's small investors have learned over and over to their chagrin these last 20 years. There are plenty of fundamental indicators, ready reflections of the true order of things, if you know where to look:

'Are you kidding me? We can't talk about that kind of thing.'

'At this point I've just given up. He won't clean the bedroom and I'm tired of asking.'

'He can be a real asshole sometimes, but I know that's not the real him.'

'What with the wedding planning and all, we just haven't had time to sit down and have the "do we want kids someday?" talk. I'm sure there'll be time later.'

* * *

The scary thing about a 'market correction' isn't just the vertigo of watching our money disappear hour by hour, it's the realization that the state of the market didn't actually reflect the state of the business concerns it ostensibly followed. Precipitous systemwide drops in stock prices theoretically increase the accuracy of the representation that is 'stock price,' bringing share prices in line with the actual economic prospects of their respective companies. And when prices creep up again, we call it a 'recovery' - and allow ourselves to live in/for the map while disregarding the territory.

Funnily enough, no one refers to stock market increases as 'corrections.'

* * *

Object/representation mismatches are big trouble in relationships. To address them after the fact is painful (the 'market correction,' so to speak). They are easily prevented, though, when both parties in a relationship work hard to foster an environment in which open, honest communication is the norm, and neither party is expected to perform reassurance solely to palliate the other.

I had other stuff to say but I'm feverish, dehydrated, dog tired, and unable to follow my own writing. This will have to do! HOPE THAT HELPS!!

Trying to get my head around the current U.S. political crisis; or, the nice thing about the Garden of Eden isn't supposed to be that you're all alone and don't have to care about anyone.

[Consider this a freewrite despite the capital letters and whatnot. I've been watching/hearing a lot of Fox News and have some anger that needs venting. There really is something sick about the current crisis in Washington - because it reveals that there's something sick about this country.]

The current debt limit crisis is the most surreal event in American politics in some time. Maybe since the Clinton impeachment. The basic issue - the unquestioned need for Congress to raise the debt limit so that the U.S. can meet its national financial obligations - has been made secondary to a high-stakes fight over the true natures of American conservatism and (to a lesser extent) liberalism. The long-predicted showdown between John Boehner and his 'Tea Party' caucus is happening at arguably the worst possible time; the Obama White House has shed its original economic advisory team and is apparently taking cues from campaign guru David Plouffe and his political team (shades of Karl Rove and his 'Mayberry Machiavellis'...); and the Democrats in Congress have shown, with few exceptions, just how much contempt they have for liberal principles. It's a very dark moment for America.

The basic outline of the situation is this: Boehner and his fellow old-fashioned corporate Republicans are facing insurrection from a 'conservative' caucus variously motivated by anti-Obama hatred, Randian pseudo-economic principles, and conventional political ambition. What might, in another year or under another President, have been a couple weeks of standard-grade posturing from the opposition party followed by pro forma raising of the debt limit has been seized upon by the Tea Party folks (exemplified by House Majority Leader Cantor) as a chance for a showdown over the budget deficit itself.

Boehner can't simply throw his anti-tax zealot constituency under the bus, much as he'd obviously like to - holding the debt limit hostage is probably the most anti-business move the Republicans have made in a long time - but Boehner also can't let Obama look good. He is, after all, a GOP machine man.

Meanwhile Obama, for his part, has decided to play up the situation for the benefit of the 'independent voter,' whoever that is. Instead of divorcing the debt limit and deficit issues, locating the deficit fight in the yearly budget process, the Democratic leadership has decided to allow the Republicans to renege on the promise to fund their own federal budget. What's more, Obama has decided to make the purely political (i.e. economically insensible) move of pushing for massive spending cuts instead of job creation.

Incredibly, he's not even standing firm on the matter of letting the Bush tax cuts expire - a quick route to several trillion dollars in revenue.

And Obama can't easily do the failsafe thing, i.e. invoke the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and simply raise the debt limit by fiat, because the same GOP that happily ceded ever-greater power to the imperial executive under George W. Bush is now preparing to run (presumably the dim technocrat Romney) in 2012 against the bogeyman of a power-mad socialist administration! Not that Obama hasn't been adding to the power of the executive himself, if not on the Cheney/Yoo scale...

Meanwhile former-Speaker Pelosi has offered a revenue-free plan (tied to ending the war in Afghanistan), Senate Minority Leader McConnell has put forth a plan that would allow several purely symbolic votes (living down to his earlier assertion that the GOP's #1 priority was to make Obama a one-term president rather than, say, to help right the U.S. economy), and unserious politicians like House Majority Leader Cantor have done their best to sabotage any kind of bipartisan negotiation.

(Cantor walked out of White House negotiations the instant he was asked to put up specific plans for cutting essential services and located revenue sources. While Boehner's cowardice is utterly conventional and expected, and it's even possible to feel sympathy for him in his fight against the Tea Party, Cantor's grandstanding has been absolutely contemptible, his ignorance shocking, and his arrogance not just dangerous but possibly treasonous. Boehner is just a selfish lying old hack, but at least he's tried at moments to resemble an adult; Cantor is a fucking cancer.)

The upshot of all this: a civil war in the Republican Party (Tea Party anarchists against old-line corporate hands) has turned a run-of-the-mill reminder of our baseline economic ill health into a possible global financial catastrophe, and Obama and the Democrats continue to negotiate with the Republicans as if the pretense of good faith hadn't been shredded ages ago.

* * *

What's most galling about the present situation is that the primary motivation behind the Republicans' unprecedented debt-limit intransigence is - wait for it - the Tea Party's apocalyptic xenophobia. Remember that the average Tea Partier is an old white person happily drawing on federal subsidies and services while bemoaning the moral weakness and federal-teat-suckling of liberals. For the Tea Party, these really are the End Times. There's a Kenyan in office, socialists in Congress, we're losing wars right and left (mainly left), the money has run out (THE GODDAMN MONEY HAS RUN OUT!!), and -

- most importantly -

- our economic situation in general can't be blamed on Obama or even the Democrats, at least not primarily, except to the extent that they were complicit with the criminal (and criminally irresponsible) administration that left office in 2008. Bush, Cheney, and their cronies shared a commitment not to fund their presidency, happily throwing out revenues and conjuring up a gigantic new subsidy (hi Medicare) for - wait for it - those same elderly medical patients now calling for Obama to be strung up. (Not an idle choice of image, that.)

The 'stimulus package' is a lot harder to complain about than the 'bailout,' which - after all - President Bush did sign. Our economy's been running on fumes for a long time now, and for all his frightening ignorance and denial, Bush may well have known it. That'd shed new light on his purely political approach to economic policy. And it also sets a large bloc of American voters squarely against both major parties, because their most cherished myth is being shattered by their leaders.

This is the end of American exceptionalism. Racism might have catalyzed the Tea Party's rage, pseudopopulist economic rhetoric might be its mode of expression, but the heart of the terror is the collapse of old-fashioned hegemony and privilege.

Consider the sheer complexity of the financial crisis, the murky nature of our various Middle Eastern wars, the ongoing crisis of anthropogenic clime change, epochal demographic shifts in the U.S., a sea change in public perception of African-Americans' role in the body politic, the dawning realization that our late-capitalist reliance on the financial sector closely resembles the crimes that put Bernie Madoff in the clink, the slowly rising post-9/11/01 awareness that not only isn't this a Christian world but we're not even a Christian country, the inescapable fact that the 'Drug War' (a war on a marginalized underclass) must now end, and the nauseating decline of America's material productivity and industrial robustness (how ya been, GM?). It's been a terrible decade for this country - Osama Bin Laden might well have patted himself on the back for this, but he just showed us where the hands had come to rest on the clock.

The debt limit fight shouldn't be happening at all. Nor should we be fighting now about austerity - the economic consensus is that job-creation and fiscal stimulus are needed, not 'belt-tightening' and pig-ignorant analogies to household budgets. The time for budget-balancing will have come when our unemployment is no longer approaching historic levels, when we're not deep in the lengthiest recession in modern American history. But these straightforward economic matters are lost on our angriest pseudopopulists.

Why should this surprise anyone? What we're seeing is denial, pure and simple: the four-sided fight between Boehner, the revanchist right wing, Obama, and the folks holding $14,000,000,000,000 of U.S. government debt was sparked off, and now approaches its catastrophic end, because the age of American hegemony is over, as is the age of whatever ideal type the Tea Party composites into.

In that regard, we really do need to look to Osama Bin Laden at this moment - to see that his primary contribution to American culture was to inject the terrifying knowledge that we can not hide from the world, that we're bound up in a shared global destiny (even with the globe itself) and can no longer think of our American identity as primary or transcendent or everlasting or God-given or immutable.

* * *

It's tempting to see the debt limit crisis as nothing more than a standoff over spending cuts and the appropriate level of taxation. That's certainly what it looks like, at a superficial level, and 'tax/spend liberals versus anti-tax conservatives' is a comforting, banal, helpfully meaningless frame for political action. The news media reinforce this misperception. My father-in-law watches Fox News, and while we've been staying at the in-laws' house this week I've heard lots of Republicans squawking about the world-historical necessity of making 'tough decisions' about lowering spending. (I haven't heard a single specific policy suggestion all week, but never mind.)

But we need to lift the debt ceiling today to pay for a budget passed by Republican leadership - and nobody was concerned about the borrowing limit those few months ago. Nobody! That's why Boehner looks so run down on TV: he didn't realize he'd be dealing with intra-party civil war at this point. (If D.C. scuttlebutt is to be believed, Boehner's compulsive drunkenness probably isn't helping. Sidebar: anyone who complains about Michelle Bachmann's migraine meds and doesn't mention the various drug addicts in Congress is a liar and an asshole, pure and simple.)

It's not the budget. It's not even the idea of the budget. It's the idea of America that's at stake - specifically the idea of 'our America.' Only 'America' has been abstracted away from the actual nation-state the word has historically referred to. Something else is going on; we mistake what these folks do if we see it as merely political.

The zealots of the church of 'no taxes' are now at war with the idea of a functioning democracy. They believe that ideological purity - which masks 'purity' of another kind - is more important than the U.S. meeting its financial obligations. They rely on the state's services but hate their own reliance, their inadequacy; they fetishize rugged individualism and the iconography of the frontier, of revolution - and they are willing to sabotage the operations of the state to turn their cinematic fantasies into live action.

There's a word for people who want to smash the state. But what do we call citizens who want to smash the state and insist that the state is favoured by God?

What happens if they're willing to do far more damage than we're able to fix?