The cause is you, Mr. and Mrs. Yesterday, you, with your forked tongues.
I really gotta stop eavesdropping on the hellsite. If I did, I’d never have to deal with the tsuris stirred up by this centrist jackass, who’s anyways never not on his bullshit:
And oh, he goes ahead and walks it all back with another tweet, oh, I don’t mean denying climate change, or going antivax, or denying the results of any elections, or standing up for antisemitism, or believing anyone in Hollywood is a pedophilic monster, no no, and we can all agree that these are all the basic benchmarks of being a basically decent human being, and Lord knows we’d all like to get older without losing our decency. But of course what this centrist jackass neglects to mention is his shining example of why it’s okay didn’t only hobnob with Reagan when things got to the point that they got, but also with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and Jim Bakker and but also John Birch Society conspiracy-monger Wllard Cleon Skousen, which is exactly and precisely how you fucking get to antivax and antisemitism and denying elections and terminating the fucking Constitution and believing Comet Ping Pong has a goddamn fucking basement. —But we don’t even have to do that much barely minimal research: this centrist jackass’s okay point that he wants to fucking normalize is betraying everything you ever said you stood for to support Ronald God damn Reagan, the singular fucking Jonbar hinge that swung us all of us, every one, from everything we could’ve maybe might’ve had to what we’re fucking stuck with now.
Ronald fucking Reagan.
It’s a poisonously seductive notion, that we must become more conservative as we age, that as we acquire things, stuff, stability, position, power, privilege, we must necessarily crouch and grasp to hold, maintain, conserve. Because we can, we might, we should also acquire knowledge, perspective, empathy, experience, possibility, as we get older, all of which, each of which, militates against conservatism qua fucking Ronald fucking Reagan fucking conservatism.
So, I mean, basically, fuck this centrist jackass, is my point.
There can be only one—and yet:
“Akerman’s extraordinary qualities as a filmmaker made the film the phenomenon it was and is, but the sense of unrepeatability is rooted in the 1970s and in the consciousness and the possibilities associated with feminism and the avant garde. Jeanne Dielman remains, to my mind, the outstanding film of that particular conjuncture of radical politics and radical æsthetics. However, the film raises an issue that is hard to articulate: how the energy and creative demands of a political movement interact with the energy and creativity of an individual; when, that is, someone touches, and then draws on, a nerve of urgency beyond the sum of his or her parts, the product is more exemplary than personal, more transcendent than subjective.” —Laura Mulvey
If the basilisk sees its reflection within 30 ft. of it in bright light, it mistakes itself for a rival and targets itself with its gaze.
Mike Hoye wrote a charming takedown of the implications of and actual use cases for “effective altruism,” soi-so-very-disingenuously-disant, and I call it to your attention for that, but also for his description of the more abstruse theology behind the ideology:
It’s what you’d end up with if you started with Scientology and replaced “thetans” with “dollars.”
I expect you all to be doing your part to immortalize it.
As to that theology: it’s as grubby and grasping as you’d expect, a premillennialism that dispenses with any need to give an inconvenient shit about the here and now in favor of the serenely happy could-be maybes of literally trillions of one-day someday others—an imaginary euphoria so massively vast that a billionth of a percentage point of the chance that it might come to pass outweighs whatever petty sun-dried raisins might float in the head of whomever’s life is spent in the grindingly horrible labor necessary to build the device that calculates it. The whole affair’s suffused with an overwhelming, overweening aroma of three-in-the-morning dorm-room debate, and it took me a moment to realize the déjà I kept vuing as I read along:
Effective altruism is nothing more than Roko’s basilisk.
Oh, some of the rough edges have been smoothed away, some of the bullshit wiped off: we’ve lost the time-travel and the tortured clones and the games of Prisoner’s Dilemma you’re supposedly playing with yourself; we’ve traded a bizarrely psychotic omnipotent future-AI supremely concerned with what we are doing here and now to bring it someday about for a future of trillions of happy intelligences happily skipping about endless holodecks of fun and adventure that can only someday be brought about by what we’re doing here and now—but that’s just the sort of renovation you’d do to weaponize the notion into a nostrum you could sell to tech-addled billionaires. One can’t help but be (disgusted, but) impressed.
I mean, Jiminy flippin’ Cricket: the post in which Roko first introduced the damned thing is titled Solutions to the Altruist’s Burden: the Quantum Billionaire Trick.
—It’s a cold comfort (most of our comforts are chilly, these days), but it’s worth noting that the basilisk is one of the dumber monsters in the D&D bestiary, with an Intelligence of 2. It helps to explain why Zuckerberg’s burning Facebook to the ground for a metaverse nobody wants, here and now: someday, maybe, trillions of legless avatars might blissfully revere his name.
Every billionaire is a policy failure. Every billionaire is a weapon of mass destruction. Every billionaire is history’s greatest monster. Every billionaire is an injury to the world. Every billionaire is an affront to God. Every billionaire must be taxed out of existence.
Good citizens are the riches of a city.
That’s what’s engraved at the base of Skidmore Fountain, at the direction of C.E.S. Wood, who had the fountain designed by his good friend Olin Warner, and it’s unclear to me if that’s something he (Wood) was known for having said, and chose to memorialize, or merely an epigram composed for the purpose; it doesn’t so much matter. The saying’s firmly fixed, to him, to the city, to history, to the fountain, to us, so much so that when it came time for me to stage a political debate in the epic, in the storied civic temple of the City Club of Portland, I made sure to build the victor’s rebuttal around that very motto:
(Said fictional debate, and I mention this, I indulge in this detail, because it will turn out to have been somewhat germane, is between the candidates for mayor, the one of them our smoothly corporate cipher, the challenger, who’s not so much based on as representing the place and role in the political firmament of former mayor Sam Adams, and Sam Adams is the label of a once microbrewery gone successfully corporate, and so the challenger’s named Killian, since Killian’s is the label of another microbrewery, ditto; his opponent, the older skool incumbent, rather more directly based on also-former mayor Vera Katz, is, of course, named Beagle, and so.)
—Anyway. So much for the riches of a city.
City Council Passes $27 Million Budget Package to Fund Homeless Encampment Plan
Portland City Council voted 3 – 0 Wednesday morning to approve a controversial budget package that lays the groundwork for a plan to criminalize street camping and build mass encampments to hold unhoused Portlanders by 2024. Both city commissioners Carmen Rubio and Jo Ann Hardesty were absent for the morning’s vote. (According to council staff, Hardesty is on a planned vacation and Rubio is out sick.)
The details of the “mass encampments” the plan speaks of are somewhat in flux: ranging from holding a thousand people each (that version would’ve been maintained by National Guard “security specialists”) to maybe a hundred each, at the start, let’s see; the most generous reading of the plan in its current state would be enough to hold 750 people, total.
The most recent point-in-time count of those experiencing homelessness in the TriMet area? 6,633 people, on the night of January 26, 2022.
I suppose providing some “official” place to camp for ten percent of the people affected counts as just about the equivalent of a Band-aid® in dealing with a homelessness problem?
—Of course, the mass encampments aren’t really there to provide official places to put anyone. The camps are there to provide a fig leaf to allow for the most important provision of the plan: the criminalization of unsanctioned street camping. —In 2019, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of Martin v. Boise, in which the Ninth Circuit found it was a violation of the Eight Amendment to jail, fine, or cite individuals for doing what they could not otherwise avoid doing: if a city does not provide places for those without homes to sleep, it cannot persecute them for sleeping without a home.
But hey, the City of Portland can now say. We’ve got these camps, or will, soon enough. You have legally sanctioned options you’re electing not to exercise; we may now criminalize your behavior. So! GO—MOVE—SHIFT—
This ghastly disaster was yeeted from the public sphere back in February, when it was originally trial-ballooned in a blue-sky memo by none other than said former mayor Sam Adams, now a top aide to our current mayor, Ted Wheeler: “a plan to end the need for unsanctioned camping,” he said, but also, “This is not a proposal, this isn’t even a plan,” and “This is Sam Adams putting concepts out there, looking for discussion.”
“That idea would never fly with us,” said City Commissioner Carmen Rubio at the time, “and if true, I hope that would be a nonstarter for the mayor.” And City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty said, “Based on what has been reported, this half-baked plan is a nonstarter.”
Welp, elections have consequences, and so it would appear does a national pre-election campaign of screaming fearmongering as regards CRIME and the need for LAW AND ORDER; that which was roundly shouted down in February is officially if hastily proposed in October and approved, with preliminary funding, by a 3 – 0 vote of our five-member council, in November. “These resolutions do not criminalize homelessness,” insisted City Commissioner Dan Ryan, who, along with Commissioner Mingus Mapps and Mayor Ted Wheeler, voted for the plan, and of course, he’s right; they merely criminalize homelessness anywhere he’d otherwise have to see it.
But that 27 million dollars has to come from somewhere. The budget as approved cuts (among other line items) 8 million dollars from the city’s allotment to the Joint Office of Homeless Services, and threatens to cut another 7 million more. Gutting the JOHS threatens shelters that currently provide a couple-hundred beds and rent-assistance programs that support another fourteen hundred or so people not currently experiencing homelessness.
Oh, well. Guess we’re going to need a bigger mass encampment.
Yes, Portland has an issue with homelessness. Not unlike every other city in the country. Yes, one might even refer to it as chronic. The solution is simplicity itself: you give people homes. An answer so self-evident should not require proof, but it has been proven, over and over again, from Houston to Finland: housing comes first. But our good citizens, or at least the ones currently in office, are criminally stunted in their political imaginations; our riches in that regard are, sadly, depleted. Salt & Straw is threatening to leave downtown, for God’s sake! We must be seen to be doing something. Once it’s swept away, out of sight, and business has returned to what we might remember as having been normal, then we can turn our meagre attentions to the longer term. You’ll see.
But. Until then—
Six hundred thousand words and counting.
A brief note on the appearance of the fortieth novelette, this week and next, over at the city; we’ve launched into Next Thing I Know, and are coming up fast (I hope) on Ain’t That Some Shit. —As the tagline runs: “In which forensics are seen to, and a beloved companion, a gift is given, and a window restored, portions are measured, and measures will be taken.”
In Memison, one must try the fish.
An exquisite little jewel of a review from M. John Harrison of a book that doesn’t exist so much in the particular, but very much in the aggregate; he comes at recent preoccupations hereabouts from other angles very much appreciated.
How it started / How it’s going;
or, The ratchet.
You might recall that Andy Ngo, fascist provocateur and inspiration to multiple mass shooters, fancies himself (when he isn’t gleefully ordering the suspension of leftist accounts on Twitter) as something of a journalist: why, he’s even written himself a book! —Here’s how Powell’s wrote it up in their online catalog just a couple short years ago, when it was first released:
Unmasked by Andy Ngo came to us through an automatic data feed via one of our long-term and respected publishers, Hachette Book Group. We list the majority of their catalogue automatically, as do many other independent and larger retailers. We have a similar arrangement with other publishers.
This book will not be on our store shelves, and we will not promote it. That said, it will remain in our online catalogue. We carry books that we find anywhere from simply distasteful or badly written, to execrable, as well as those that we treasure. We believe it is the work of bookselling to do so.
And, well, here’s how Powell’s now writes up the revised edition, with its brand new afterword from the author:
In this #1 national bestseller, a journalist who’s been attacked by Antifa writes a deeply researched and reported account of the group’s history and tactics.
When Andy Ngo was attacked in the streets by Antifa in the summer of 2019, most people assumed it was an isolated incident. But those who’d been following Ngo’s reporting in outlets like the New York Post and Quillette knew that the attack was only the latest in a long line of crimes perpetrated by Antifa.
In Unmasked, Andy Ngo tells the story of this violent extremist movement from the very beginning. He includes interviews with former followers of the group, people who’ve been attacked by them, and incorporates stories from his own life. This book contains a trove of documents obtained by the author, published for the first time ever.
In conclusion, fuck Powell’s.
Meanwhile, in fascist Twitter.
The reason they’re going so openly, distressingly hard (beyond what savagely infantile joy there is to be taken in the mere fact that they can) is because they are shook: they have come just this close to losing an ounce of ill-gotten privilege, and that fact alone has their mouths parched and their palms clammy and their guts in knots, their instincts rattled to the point they forget the thing to do in polite company is to hide who they truly are. They are terrified. —It’s a mean, cold comfort, perhaps, but take what of it you might; we have a long and ugly fight ahead.
I mean the matter that you read, my lord.
Matter matter matter, let’s see—we’ve moved, across town, from Ladd’s Addition to Rose City; we’re homeowners now, and again, which means we can paint the rooms the colors we’d like, but also means we have to strip and sand and sweep and repair and replace and prime and tape and paint and paint again, over and over for each different color, and, well. Time passes. You look up and wonder what you’ve accomplished and then you look around, and yes, but also yes, well...
As for words words words: as to written, and here you must imagine me sucking my teeth. I’ve got the fortieth novelette queued up and ready to go starting Monday, but that’s the only one I’ve written this year, and last year I managed to write most of five, and the discrepancy gnaws. I’d point to the work alluded to in the paragraph above, and the work associated with the day job (turns out, preparing for and supporting a federal criminal trial? Time-consuming), but work we will always have with us, and the work still needs to get done, and the forty-first isn’t at the moment coming any faster, and as for anything written around here, well...
But as to have read, have been reading, to be read: currently bouncing between two big books, each expansively large in their own particular idioms: on the one hand, I’ve decided instead of dipping in almost at random to sample this run of stanzas, or that, to work my way through the F--rie Queene from first line to last, drawing what dry amusement I might from the coincidence in age between myself when I finally started it (53) and Virginia Woolf, when she finally started it (53)—
The first essential is, of course, not to read The F--ry Queen. Put it off as long as possible. Grind out politics; absorb science; wallow in fiction; walk about London; observe the crowds; calculate the loss of life and limb; rub shoulders with the poor in markets; buy and sell; fix the mind firmly on the financial columns of the newspapers, weather; on the crops; on the fashions. At the mere mention of chivalry shiver and snigger; detest allegory; and then, when the whole being is red and brittle as sandstone in the sun, make a dash for The F--ry Queen and give yourself up to it.
—only to find myself at the end of the first 12 cantos looking up, blinking, as our avatar of Holinesse, that Redcrosse knight his own dam’ self, so happy in his ever-after with Una, his one true only, the only one true only, suddenly just ups and leaves her in the space of eight lines of iambic pentameter and a single alexandrine—and, I mean, I know why St. George leaves the personification of true religion to return to F--ry Lond, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how Spenser knew, or at least what Spenser knew, and wanted me as a reader to know, and it’s another of those weird bucks and hitches from out of time that keep kicking me loose from the poem and yet drawing me back all at once.
The other is Pynchon’s Against the Day, which if I were feeling glib I’d describe as Roszak’s Flicker meets Vollmann’s Bright and Risen Angels with a dash of let’s say Matewan; it’s like the reading and research I did back in the day for that never-to-be-realized mashup of Blavatsky and Lovecraft, Space: 1889 and the Difference Engine, all was homework for enjoying this—but such flippancy isn’t meet for any of the works in question. It’s baggy and shaggy and too much by half, I’m completely lost every time I slip back into it, but comfortably lost, reliably at sea, and the stew of language Pynchon and Spenser make when taken in alteration is heady indeed.
Heady, but thick, and slow-going, and see above re: work, and so these other books are piling up in the queue: John Ford’s last book, and Avram Davidson’s last Virgil Magus book, Mary Gentle’s Ash, the Moonday Letters and the Monkey’s Mask, the Underground Railroad and a half-dozen Queen’s Thieves, and that’s just the fiction, good Lord, there’s the White Mosque which isn’t even on my shelves yet, and Reading and Not Reading the F--rie Queene, which is, but, I mean, well...
As for what I have read, recently, well, I mean, there was Under the Pendulum Sun, which was fine insofar as it went, some lovely and divertingly weird imagery, but overall the book’s preoccupations weren’t my own, or rather weren’t what I would’ve expected them to be, given what we’re given, which resulted in some unfortunate undercooking here and gauchely overdoing it there and left me mostly with I’m afraid a shrug; and then there was Jawbone, which was spectacularly taut and exactly pretty much what I wanted it to be until it somehow utterly failed to end; and then there was, well.
Oh, it’s a big thick wodge of an epic, diligently working the post-Martin space, which is terribly au courant for epics, and it’s got a killer title, and that’s about all I can say for it—it has nothing like Ojeda’s power, or Ng’s charm, it sags tiresomely when it doesn’t race through suddenly ancillary quests for plot coupons (I’m afraid my disdain is such I’ll reach for overused critical terminology): an Anthropologie®-curated fantasy with a girlboss gloss that insists I see a dragon without doing the work to show me anything like a goddamn dragon. —But Shannon did make two moves, at least, that stuck with me, in how they kicked me loose, but without anything beyond my own cussedness to draw me back:
The first (which, as I’m piecing this together, I realize happens second in the book, but it’s the first I remember, so) is when great revels are thrown to celebrate the introduction of Sabran, our unmarried cod-Elizabeth I, to her proposed suitor Livelyn, our cod-Anjou:
The Feast of Early Autumn was an extravagant affair. Black wine flowed, thick and heavy and sweet, and Lievelyn was presented with a huge rum-soaked fruit cake—his childhood favorite—which had been re-created according to a famous Mentish recipe.
And at that I closed up the book, and looked about the bus (I was reading this almost entirely on the bus, in to work, and back home again), and then opened it up to the front to scour the maps—here, follow along—there’s the Queendom of Inys, or cod-England, and the Draconic Kingdom of Yscalin, or cod-Iberia, and the Free State of Mentendon, which I keep thinking of as cod-France, but is really more of a cod-Low Kingdoms (which makes doomed Lievelyn more of a cod–Holstein-Gottorp, I suppose); there’s cod-Lybia and a cod-Levant, and then over here on our other map we have wee cod-Nippon and but also the Empire of the Twelve Lakes, which is a cod-Middle Kingdom and not a cod-Minnesota—but what we don’t have is a cod-India, a cod-Cyprus, a cod-Madagascar, a cod-Madeira, a cod-Caribe, a cod-Hawai’i, not a cod-plantation to be seen—so when I read that a Prince’s favorite dessert is
a huge rum-soaked fruit cake
and you have countries and cultures and glimpses of history recognizably English and Spanish and Dutch and Japanese, and you tell me offhandedly you have rum, rum which if it is to be rum and not some phantastick honey liquor or something, but rum made from sugar, sugar from sugarcane (I mean, you can make rum from beet-sugar, but I’d hope you’d tell me it was beet-rum so I could take at least some visceral delight)—and sugarcane as such requires prodigious quantities of backbreaking labor to grow and harvest and process on a scale industrial enough to have enough left over to think to boil it into liquor, liquor enough that it might occur to a royal pâtissier, or banketbakker, to soak a fruitcake in a bottle’s worth to see what might come of it, you tell me that this is a thing in your world, but I look on your maps and I can’t anywhere find a trace of the God-damned Triangle—
—I’m gonna get flung right the fuck out.
The second move that stuck (which, again, now I’m looking at it, came first) is at once almost anticlimactically smaller and yet so very much more large: it’s a move made over and over throughout the book, but this was (for me, at least, at the time, for reasons) the most startlingly salient example, the one after which I could no longer ignore the bedevilment—it comes as Niclays Roos, disgraced alchemist and con artist, exiled before the novel begins from Mentendon to the lone Western trading post in Seiiki, our cod-Nippon, he’s being palanquined across the island to a mandatory meeting with the Warlord, and gets inexplicably dropped on his own in the middle of downtown Ginura, the Seiikinese capital, where he knows no one, nowhere, not hint of how to get to the Warlord, not a thing, until he coincidentally bumps into an old friend and colleague: Dr. Eizaru Moyaka, who, with his daughter, Purumé, had come some time before to Orisima, the aforementioned trading post, to study anatomy and medicine with this exiled Western doctor. Eizaru offers his modest house to Roos as a place to stay until the Warlord is ready, and Roos gratefully accepts; after all, he knows no one else here, nothing, no-how.
Eizaru lived in a modest house near the silk market, which backed onto one of the many canals that latticed Ginura. He had been widowed for a decade, but his daughter had stayed with him so that they could pursue their passion for medicine together. Rainflowers frothed over the exterior wall, and the garden was redolent of mugwort and purple-leaved mint and other herbs.
It was Purumé who opened the door to them. A bobtail cat snaked around her ankles.
“Niclays!” Purumé smiled before bowing. She favored the same eyeglasses as her father, but the sun had tanned her skin to a deeper brown than his, and her hair, held back with a strip of cloth, was still black at the roots. “Please, come in. What an unexpected pleasure.”
Niclays bowed in return. “Please forgive me for disturbing you, Purumé. This is unexpected for me, too.”
“We were your honored guests in Orisima. You are always welcome.” She took one look at his travel-soiled clothes and chuckled. “But you will need something else to wear.”
“I quite agree.”
When they were inside, Eizaru sent his two servants—
Wait—which the what, now?
We have a couple of academics living in a modest house—in the capital, on a canal, sure, nice little walled herb-garden, she’s answering the door herself, taking in an old friend on a whim, sure, but there’s a cat twining about her feet, and then, all of a sudden—servants?
This sudden, wrenching shift, the violent clash of assumptions, between what I’d expect of the class of a couple of modestly housed academics, worldly enough to travel to a distant, despised outpost for a chance to study with an exotically disreputable doyen, yet grounded enough to open their own door to visitors, and what the book was willing to prepare me to accept of their class, with the sudden irruption of these two servants, never named, never described, just there, to, to, I don’t know, to have done things, fetch water, keep the day’s heat at bay, lay out the food, deliver messages, to signal the class to which the doctors belong despite any other assumptions, to otherwise be ignored.
They’re of a piece, these similar ignorances: slipping a rum-soaked cake into a scene for the one set of connotations the word “rum” might bring, without taking into consideration all the others that freight the word; dropping a servant—two!—into a set-piece for no other reason and no other effect than that it is assumed servants of some sort must be there—a heedlessness severely detrimental to the building of a world.
But here’s me being awfully stern about an epic so—I’d say “slight,” I’d say “inconsequential,” but there’s stern again, and uncharitable. I mean, I did finish the dam’ thing, didn’t I? —And there, up above, did you catch it? When Virginia Woolf was telling us what we ought to do, and ought not do, before we set out to read the F--rie Queene? That we should “walk about London; observe the crowds; calculate the loss of life and limb; rub shoulders with the poor in markets—”
And who does it turn out to be are we, then, being addressed? And who, is it assumed, are not?
That mighty wall between us, standing high.
Over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, Elizabeth Nelson presents a Jonbar hinge I never would’ve thought of: what if Merle Haggard had released “Irma Jackson” when he wrote it?
INT. HEADSPACE. DAY.
You know what’s really irksome about the Royal Tenenbaums?
It’s such an overtly, ostentatiously bookish film, from the inspiration for the grown-up whiz kids past their prime (everyone else will tell you it’s that Glass brood, but I’ll tell you it’s much more the ilk of Claudia and Jamie Kincaid and Turtle Wexler) to the obvious surface gloss of those exquisitely designed dust jackets, from the genially gravelly Narrator to the way it’s broken into chapters, with those primly typeset insertions—
—and there, that’s it, that’s what’s annoying: the text of the book we’re ostensibly reading as the movie unspools. If you read it (and it’s large enough to easily read, we’re given enough time), well. Ostensibility crumbles. —Oh, the first one, the Prologue’s okay: it’s just the Narrator’s opening lines, set down on the page and perfectly prosaic, excellently novelistic: “Royal Tenenbaum bought the house on Archer Avenue in the winter of his thirty-fifth year.” But the rest?
Chapter One as we can see starts off with “Royal’s suite at the Lindbergh Palace Hotel. There are shelves full of law books and hundreds of spy novels in stacks on the floor.” Chapter Four? “The side entrance of the hotel. Royal goes in through the revolving doors.” Chapter Seven? “The next morning. Richie comes downstairs. He carries the stuffed and mounted boar’s head.” The Epilogue? “A gentle rain falls in the cemetery, and the sky is getting dark.” —This isn’t the sort of prose to be found in books with those dust jackets, in novels written by Ellen Raskin or E.L. Konigsberg—these are passages from the screenplay of the movie that we’re watching, bald instructions to the production team, this is what needs to be seen to make the story happen, copied as-is and pasted just so, to lorem ipsum up a handful of grace notes in the movie’s art direction. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it, sticking out among all the other details so much more carefully considered. It irks.
I get a little twitchy, whenever the subject of cinematic writing comes up. —Cinematic writing, filmic writing, the screen-like æsthetic: here, let me grab a passage from Simon McNeil’s Notes on Squeecore, since that’s where I’m going to tell you it most recently came up:
Wendig is, perhaps, the clearest example of a novelist who writes in a filmic style. Now I think it’s important to draw out how I talked previously a bit about how this was a characteristic of Hopepunk—the mediation of a literary canon via its filmic representation being something I called out within the Hopepunk manifestos—but this isn’t so much a matter of Wendig mediating literature via its depiction on screens as it is Wendig drawing the screen structure back into the book. The crafting of an image becomes the chief concern of the novel in Wendig’s hands. Action is in the moment and the dialog is kinetic precisely because Wendig is trying to show his audience a moving picture rather than tell them a story. In a way the lionization of show, don’t tell, almost inevitably leads to the logic of a filmic literature. After all, internality often involves telling the audience how somebody feels. As “Show, Don’t Tell” becomes a hard rule, it’s not hard to see how an audience of would-be authors with an insufficient grounding in literature but a lot of exposure to television will inevitably interpret that to turn the page into a kind of screen.
Breezy, surfactant, imagistic, often in the immediately present tense and almost always the disaffectedly third person (first person in screen-like tips from teevee to vidya: first-person shooters, don’t you know): at its most amateurishly egregious, the iron law of SHOW DON’T TELL eats itself, as the prose insists on telling you the show that needs to happen in your head: bald instructions to the production team, as it were; passages cut and pasted from a screenplay. (Rather than show you a dinosaur, I tell you to see a dinosaur, to tie this to other ongoing threads.) —It can be intended as complimentary, to say of someone’s prose that it is cinematic, but there’s always a bit of English on the ball: oh, look, the writer’s trying so hard, the poor dear, to make prose do what it manifestly can’t—and anyway, everybody knows the book is always better than the movie. (Think of what it means, after all, what’s intended, when a television show is said to be novelistic.)
And, well, I mean, here’s me, then, and the epic: specifically imagistic, immediately present, disaffectedly third, cinematic, yes, okay, sure, filmic, all right, I’ll even cop to a screen-æsthetic, but only if I get to play with all the various meanings packed into “screen,” but but but I know what it is I’m doing, it’s not amateurish, honest, I’m sufficiently grounded and aware of if not all then at least a great many literary traditions—
See? Twitchy. And that’s never a good look on anyone.
I didn’t set down specific rules I’d follow, or at least not break, when I set out to figure out what I was going to do and be doing. It’s more that the rules assembled themselves, from what I wanted to pull off: an epically longform, episodic serial, and the best and most prevalent examples thereof at the time were superhero comics and hour-long dramedic television serials. So I leaned into that. —I’ve written before, about the differences between words, and moving pictures:
The primary difference between prose and cinema (beyond the obvious) is I think in time, and how each handles it; cinema (like theatre before it) no matter how achingly it might strive for universal generalities, must necessarily show you specific people doing specific things in specific places at very specific times. Prose, on its wily other hand, can say: “Monday morning staff meetings were always a chore for Willy” or “For the next week whenever she went to the coffee shop she saw the woman on the corner” or “And then everybody died.” —The narrow bandwidth of prose can’t begin to approach the wealth of incidental detail that makes up cinematic specificity without enormous slogging effort; most of the tricks and tips one needs to learn to tell stories and have them told with mere words, in fact, those reading protocols we’ve all had put in place, have everything to do with tricking us into thinking that specificity’s been achieved without us noticing (just as a great many of cinema’s tricks are all about forcing us to empathize with the saps up on the screen, bridging the vast gulf between their specificities and ours).
Setting out to ape the effects of one with the tools of another, though, is less about what I’m going to do (write with immediacy and specificity, as if, yes, I’m telling you what you’d see and hear if the story were playing out on a screen, yes yes) than what I won’t: generalize, pull back, sweep up and away from that immediate moment, that specific place. —And there’s one more thing prose does, that the epic does eschew:
Every narrative has a narrator. This may seem a ravelled tautology, but tug the thread of it and so much comes undone: a narrator, after all, is just another character, and subject to the same considerations. What might we consider, then, of a character who strives with every interaction for a coolly detached objectivity that’s betrayed by every too-deft turn of phrase? Who lays claim to an impossible omniscience, no matter how it might be limited, that’s belied by every Homeric nod? Who mimicks the vocal tics and stylings, the very accents of the people in their purview—whether or not they’re put in italics—merely to demonstrate how well it seems they think they know their stuff?
It’s only those texts that admit, upfront, the limitations and the unreliability of their narrators, that are honest in their dishonesty. —The third person, much like the third man, snatches power with an ugliness made innocuous, even charming, by centuries of reading protocols: deep grooves worn by habits of mind that make it all too lazily easy for an unscrupulous, an unethical, an unthinking author to wheedle their readers into a slapdash crime of empathy: crowding out all the possible might’ve beens that could’ve been in someone else’s head with whatever it is they decide to insist must have been.
I’d never presume to tell you what someone else is thinking, good Lord, no. That would be rude. Instead, I’m going to show you what it is they do, and say, and let you draw your own conclusions, and trust you to adjust them as we go.
Framing it this way, as what I’m not going to do, makes me mindful of the tools I’ve set aside, and turns those vasty fields untrampled into negative space—a very potent consideration in any composition: instead of showing you a dinosaur, or telling you to quick, think of a dinosaur, the hope is that these dotted moments, and the space implied between them, might at this moment or the next shiveringly resolve in your head into the suggestion, of a dragon-like, dinosaur-sylph—and all the more impactful, as it’s one you’ve made yourself.
A long way round, perhaps, but fitting, I think, for an idiom that seeks to immerse you in a slightly disjointed reality, to make you believe that at any moment a short sharp shock of the numinous might intrude. —At any rate: I’m having fun. The occasional twitch aside.
Actually, you know, the one for the epilogue’s okay, too? “A gentle rain falls in the cemetery, and the sky is getting dark.” That’s a fine-enough turn of phrase for a novel, or even a screenplay. Except of course for the fact that it’s not getting dark in the scene that then unfolds: the sky’s a fixed and dreary mid-afternoon. —The perils of adaptation, one supposes.
Fine china.
Oh, hey, twenty years. Happy anniversary. —I’m not sure if Gordon Sinclair kept flinging haggises—hagi?—across the Bow River; cursory internet searches suggest his patented flinger wasn’t so much a success—but then, we’re none of us doing too well. If you’d come to me, then, to tell me that twenty years on we’d be entering the third year of a global pandemic, determined to forget any lessons we might accidentally have learned; that the Objectivists who’d taken over Silicon Valley would be cheerfully conspiring to break every utopian promise the internet had ever made for the sake of an energy-guzzling money-laundering bookkeeping trick; that we’d be staring down the barrel of an inevitably impending Christofascist takeover, and the only thing the Democrats could think of to fight it was to lionize Dick “Torture” Cheney, I mean, honestly: in the list of what-the-fuckeries piled up over the past twenty years, the fact that Donald freaking Trump is an odds-on favorite to win a second term as president barely cracks the top five.
Then again, I always was a pessimistic curmudgeon.
If you’d like to look back, to when blogging was a thing, and we weren’t yet rocketing up the hockey stick, there’s the previous retrospectives: the ten-year argosy (posted 3,635 days ago) and the 2019 update; to which from the past couple of years I’d add maybe this one, and this one, and let’s not read too much into the fact they’re both needling George R.R. Martin?
So, yes, it’s been quiet hereabouts. I did write five novelettes last year, which might help to explain some of it, maybe? —The epic’s up to 586,000 words, which is 34% of a Song of Ice and Fire, and I said we weren’t going to read too much into this.
Anyway. See you when I see you.
GO—MOVE—SHIFT
Telling as all get-the-fuck-out that in the headline “Portland neighbors beg for help as homeless camp takes root” the NEIGHBORS doing the BEGGING aren’t the ones without a roof.
Pontypool variations.
All due respect to Barry, the cartoonist, but his analysis I think leaves out a wide middle swath: there are Republicans, who are tools, who believe ridiculous lies; there are Republicans, who believe in the power of ridiculous lies; and then there are Republicans, who know, deep down, the lie isn’t true, but pretend to believe with all their heart, no matter how ridiculous, because it gives them the excuse they need to do what they want to do anyway. It’s this last set that are the most dangerous, but also our only hope: if the cost of pretending to believe the lie’s too great, they’ll stop—because they can. —It’s just the cost is so damn cheap these days, is the thing.
A clay envelope or hollow ball, typically with seal impressions or writing on its outside indicating its contents.
Someone, somewhere, recently pointed out that you don’t see the sainted Limbaugh’s favorite insult, “feminazi,” being tossed about with quite such abandon anymore, now that the right’s decided maybe the Nazis had a point.
That’s the sort of observation that’ll stick in your craw, if you let it.
I’m caramelizing (well, roasting) cabbage tonight, and if I were still on Twitter, I’d needle Keguro about it. Or roast him. I mean. You know what I mean.
This is mostly what has occupied my mind, mostly, of late: high-minded despair; quotidian satisfaction. On the one hand, there’s strong evidence a not insignificant number of Supreme Court justices want to do away with Gideon, and thus the very basis of my job; on the other, this new technique of cooking the noodles with the milk has kicked my macaroni and cheese to the next fucking level, let me tell you. —The whipsaw, ever and always.
I mean, anyway. That’s how I am. How are you?
The cabbage was delicious, by the way.
So forgive me, I guess, is the basic point, if I go on about what I’ve been doing over there, but it’s what I’ve been doing: the entire Trump administration, I managed to write six installments; in this, so far, the first year of the Biden interregnum, I’ve (just about) written five alone. That, such as it is, isn’t nothing. —And so.
Anyway. That’s how I’ve been. How you doin’?
Civitas Aurelianorum.
So I’ve finally slowly been picking away at Treme, in part because I’m feeling a bit of a jones for some of the world below the Mason-Dixon, but mostly because I want that taste of systemically languid flânerie about a quintessentially urban warp and woof without, you know, all the fucking poe-leece the fucking Wire brings to the table (though there are still cops, of course there are cops, Jesus, the cops), and anyway: this point I’m making is entirely evanescent, but nonetheless: it is of some interest that the Baltimore of the Wire is, to the extent that it’s not only an inside joke, but a goddamn plot point, an insular world sufficient almost entirely unto itself, but—the New Orleans of Treme is almost from the very beginning dependent upon not nearly entirely but still to a surprising extent within the fiction coterminal with New York City. —But in the meanwhile, the car is making this very loud noise, and I’m supposed to be able to walk away from the day-job for a week-long vacation that involves a lot of driving just next week. But at least this verde margarita’s cold and spicy? At least.
