Hope is the new bleak.
Every now and then
A madman’s bound to come along.
Doesn’t stop the story—
Story’s pretty strong.
Doesn’t change the song.
While back, Kugelmass wrote about an “indispensable essay” by Sean McCann and Michael Szalay called “Do You Believe in Magic?”—and while I haven’t gotten around yet to reading it myself, this passage of Kugelmass’ stuck with me:
While McCann and Szalay criticize academics who believe in the political efficacy of their symbolic labors, I would argue that most scholars working on culture now invoke “the political” in bad faith, with little hope of creating real change, out of a desire to seem compassionate and politically involved to hiring committees and their peers. The proof is in the pessimism: the message is that political change is impossible, even if an awareness of injustice is still praiseworthy.
Mostly because it reminded me of nothing so much as this:
That’s from Runaways, which is about the best set of characters to be added to the Marvel universe in thirty years—and I can say that not because it’s a good comic book about compelling characters, but because so few new characters are ever added to anything like a Marvel universe (instead, we work endless shifts in the nostalgia mines, coming back to the past a bully again and again to eat our own four-color fictions, yes yes). —The Marvel universe centers around a New York City riddled with superheroes, from the Avengers up on Fifth to the Fantastic Four in midtown to the X-Men out in Westchester; Brian K. Vaughn drops us instead in Los Angeles, where a group of kids discovers their parents are actually supervillains, working together to control the city and its crime. (Vaughn uses the Gothamite myopia of 417 5th Avenue to good effect: the reason LA’s been so quiet in the 616, home until now to nothing more superheroic than the West Coast Avengers and Wonder Man, is that these supervillans are so damn good at what they do: their fist is adamantium; its grip implacable.) —The kids, of course, do what anyone would do, upon discovering their parents are evil: they run away from home, learn to use their powers and gifts, and come back to fight the good fight, defeat their parents, and—homeless, jobless, hunted—squat in a cave under the La Brea Tar Pits, using their powers and gifts to, y’know, fight supercrime and stuff. (And help other runaways, of course, like the android son of Ultron, or the Super-Skrull above, who’s run away from penn’s people’s genocidal war.)
That is, of course, what you call high concept, and to my mind works much better than Vaughn’s other, better-known comic-book pitch.
After all, what heroes these kids are! Homeless, jobless, hunted, still: they don’t try to change the world about them. Much as they might want to. They use their powers and gifts, their superstrength and supertech and supermagic and their telepathic velociraptor instead for good, to keep the world about them safe as it is. —An awareness of injustice is all well and good, you see. But political change is impossible. Only villains try to change the world.
This is how it works in the superhero business, of course; the story that’s pretty strong. —And in part it’s commercial necessity, sure: superheroes live in something very much like our world, except with superpeople, and they have to come back month after month for another 22 pages of four-color adventure; if they went about trying to change the world, well: pretty soon their world wouldn’t look very much like our world, would it? What with all those superpeople in it, with all that great power.
But it’s also what’s bred in the superhero’s bones: that great power lies hidden until some threat springs up—and then the glasses come off, the shirt’s ripped open, the power’s unleashed. Once the threat’s vanquished, the power retreats; our hero’s alter ego stands up, brushes away some debris, resettles the glasses, and no one’s ever the wiser that they were saved by the great cloaked power that walks among them every day. —If you start to use that power not just to save the world from threats but to change it, make it better—well. You’d be out there all the time. You’d never wear the glasses again. They’d start to catch on.
A great responsibility comes with that great power, after all, to do the right thing. But what is the right thing? (You think you know? Really? Who are you, God?) —Best to swear your own Hippocratic Oath before pulling on the longjohns: First, make no change. “Because traditional superhero teams always put the flag back on top of the White House, don’t they?” said Grant Morrison back in the year 2000. They were writing an introduction to the first collection of Ellis and Hitch’s Authority. “They always dust down the statues and repair the highways and everything ends up just the way it was before…”
Morrison would have you believe (for the length of the intro, anyway) that Ellis and Hitch invented the idea of uncompromising superheroes who set out to change the world like the best of proper villains: “The Authority dares to imagine a world beyond the post-modern ironic hopelessness of endless recycled TV quotes and retro-nostalgic feedback. Welcome to a superteam with an agenda, on a scale beyond the billion-dollar budgets. A superteam whose headquarters looks like a dog’s nose and still kicks ass.” —It’s bollocks, of course, and only forgivable because Morrison clearly knows it’s bollocks. Superheroes have in one way or another been bucking against this static stricture for years, ever since the writers and artists and editors started to suss out that, y’know, they had this great power, right? Maybe a great responsibility went along with it?
They’ve been bucking at it, but they haven’t overturned it. The story’s pretty strong. Heroes defend the status quo. It’s what they do; it’s what makes them heroes. The Authority, who do not, end up as despotic demigods (with much less grace than Miracleman before them), and even from the start it isn’t so much a superhero comic as it is a noisy widescreen smashemup comic. —A much better high concept from Ellis is Planetary, where a villainous Fantastic Four defend a status quo that hoards the wonders promised by pulp fiction, keeping them out of the hands of the rest of us all; the righteous rage of the protagonists as they set about the task of returning our birthright is a splendid little engine of subversion. (Even better is his Global Frequency, in which cast-off Cold Warriors cobble together a DIY network of cellphones and satellites and Q-clearance secrets: mad scientists and retired superspies walking among us, keeping us safe from the pocket armageddim they helped to build back in the day for bosses who no longer have the budgets to keep them in check. Great cloaked power with a crippling responsibility fighting horrific threats—but threats to a hopeful new status quo, threats engendered by the overturned vestiges of the last status quo, still kicking out there in the dark.)
—Awareness of injustice is praiseworthy. Hell, it’s necessary: how else are you going to know whom to hit?
But political change: that’s impossible.
Turn back to that scene from Runaways, and that Kugelmass post:
The rainbow-colored girl is Karolina, who goes by Lucy in the Sky; she’s an alien whose parents hid in LA as movie stars and used their alien abilities to get ahead in the Pride. The one doing the fade from Jay-Z to Beyoncé is Xavin, the aforementioned Super-Skrull. —Xavin shows up after the Runaways defeat their evil parents and claims Karolina as his bride. The usual punchemup is followed by the usual expository dump: a long-ago agreement between their parents arranged a marriage between them, Xavin’s here to make good on it, and stop a terrible war between their peoples. But! Karolina’s gay.
“I… I like girls,” she says, outing herself for the first time to most of her team.
“Is that all that’s stopping you?” says Xavin. “Karolina, Skrulls are shapeshifters.” (It’s true. They are, and penn promptly shifts from Beast to Beauty.) “For us, changing gender… is no different than changing hair color.”
—Xavin has since spent most of the rest of the comic in male form, and while there’s tonnes of interesting possibilities there, ways to address sexuality and appearance and transgender issues, the reality is we’re dealing with the midlevel properties of a company that’s just now getting used to the idea of admitting the very existence of gays and lesbians in their proprietary, persistent, large-scale popular fiction. What we’re dealing with is a token gay character in a relationship that to every external indication is perfectly heteronormative. —Runaways is about to get a new creative team; “Xavin won’t be a girl skrull,” the artist has said; “editorial make a note on that already, that one will change completely.”
Some critical theorists try to avoid sounding corny or naïve by exiling their political optimism to a purely theoretical or ineffable realm, a move McCann and Szalay lampoon as “The art of the impossible.” To take one example, in uncomplicatedly’s excellent new post there is a description of the queer theory version of this:
This was particularly true of the queer theorists, at least two of whom focused on queer reading practice as something that draws on textual possibilities rather than textual actualities to move toward an imagined utopian future that is acknowledged as imagined, and yet still must be imagined.
Well, Christ. I mean really. Can you blame them?
But to circle around again to whatever I thought my point was going to be when I got started (and I still haven’t put in anything about fear of power as political change is impossible so therefore the power to effect it must be impossibly great and the accompanying responsibility too too much to bear please take it from me please, and we could even hare off after learned helplessness if we wanted to: all the things that keep our superheroes reactive, stammeringly inadequate in the face of simple, pointed questions from those on the short end of the stick: status quo)—
Dr. Horrible, of course. Who’s talking about anything else? —“Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” is Joss Whedon’s barn-raising internet show, a musical about a bumbling supervillain who’s trying to win the girl of his dreams from a smugly thuggish superhero. The supervillain is, of course, the protagonist, and so must win our sympathies; right at the very beginning of his first blog, he speaks a little speech to let us know what kind of supervillain he is:
And by the way, it’s not about making money, it’s about taking money. Destroying the status quo. Because the status is not quo. The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it.
He’s holding a plastic bag filled with the remains of the gold bar he tried to teleport out of a bank vault. “Smells like cumin,” he says, and sets it to one side—bumbling, like we said—but our hearts are with him. The world is a mess. We do not want the status quo. The smugly entitled heroes who defend it are not on our side.
We are all supervillains, now.
(Actually, our hearts are with him from his opening laugh, but that doesn’t help my argument. So.)
—This, by the way, is the secret of IOKIYAR; this is how it is that a Republican can shred the Fourth Amendment by resuming the warrantless wiretaps of yore, take up the Nixonian argument that it’s not illegal if the president does it, and blithely overturn the Magna Carta itself, and hear nothing but applause—yet if a Democrat but mentions a “civilian national security force,” the applause turns to jeers of brownshirts. —Republicans are conservatives; conservatives defend the status quo, standing athwart history yelling “Stop!” at every threat that comes along; those who defend the status quo are heroes—says so on the label. And we will always cut heroes more slack than villains.
(We are villains. We want to change the world. We demand, for instance, that we must all work together to change our collective behavior to offset the upset of global warming. —And it’s villains who demand we change the world; villains who demand we work together are fascists. QED.)
So we can’t change the world, political change is impossible, but we can change the story, right? A little? Change if not the status quo, then change the direction that phrase is pointing? And once we do that—
Well, yes, and no. You have to know where it’s pointing, first. “Dr. Horrible’s” isn’t a story about changing the world. That’s just a gesture towards audience sympathy which proves mildly interesting in the current political climate. “Dr. Horrible’s” is a story about a bumbling supervillain who’s trying to win the girl of his dreams from a smugly thuggish superhero. Dr. Horrible isn’t a world-shaking agent of change, out to slyly subvert our received sense of right and wrong; he’s upset that this girl he likes but can’t talk to is sleeping with this utter jerk who will never treat her right—
Dr. Horrible is a Nice Guy.™
For me, the most chilling moment in the whole thing comes at the beginning of Act II, during the duet between Horrible and Penny (the only person who does a damn thing to effect any political change at all)—it’s when Dr. Horrible, spying on a date between Penny and Captain Hammer, sings:
Anyone with half a brain
Could spend their whole life howling in pain
’Cause the dark is everywhere
And Penny doesn’t seem to care
That soon the dark in me is all that will remain
—Jesus, I thought. Does Whedon know what he’s playing with, here? The moment passes under Penny’s wispily soaring lines about how happy she is, how can she trust her eyes—does he see how twisted the responsibility just got in that seemingly tossed-off stanza, the status quo that’s been set up? —Yes. Yes, he does, and in the end, as Dr. Horrible takes his wrongful place in the Evil League of Evil, a bumbler no more, his only saving grace, his sliver of a chance at redemption, is he can finally see it, too.
Awareness of injustice is praiseworthy. Political change? Impossible. We can’t possibly change the world. Not without changing the story, first.
And if you’re going to do that, you’d damn well better be sure just what story it is you’re in.
Now, as to Reading Comics—
Two paths, a yellow wood: divergence!
Timothy Burke is first out of the gate with a reading of Reading Comics, and while I’m still frowning over my own opening lines I wanted to say: yes, the Comics Journal and Scott McCloud and, yes, even Douglas Wolk each in their own way suffers, to this degree, or that, from a need to redeem comics post-panic to mainstream or academic respectability—but damn do they ever go about it in very, terribly different ways. —Such that umbrelling them all beneath a single shibbolethic “Comics Journal Syndrome” left me quite dizzy.
Always already.
One Million is partially a discrete story and partially a corporate directive: a coordinated event involving the work of dozens of DC’s artists and writers for hire, but with core concepts created by Grant Morrison, who with Val Semeiks and Prentiss Rollins generated the four-issue miniseries in which the main story events occur. Morrison’s work stands out for considering the DC Universe’s structure from a critical perspective, and in One Million he presents a vision of the future that, as an extrapolation, highlights the unspoken paradoxes of the DC Universe as an ecology for intellectual property more than it does the rules of cause and effect that ostensibly govern the universe as a serial fiction. One of the members of the Justice League asks logically, “What are the chances of an identical JLA arising hundreds of centuries from now?”; the degree of similarity between this future of the DC Universe and its present seems a stretch even within the loose reality of superheroes, and yet, given the real rules of the DC Universe—Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman must maintain the iconicity, the brand equity, that makes them viable in a market—it makes perfect sense that, within the parameters of this corporate fiction, the year 85,271 will bring us more of the same Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.
We went to Douglas’s house for the Fourth; well, Douglas’s and Lisa’s and Sterling’s. There were some comics people there, and some people who weren’t comics people, but there were enough comics people there that we talked a bit about comics. (There was a music person or two there as well, and we also talked about music, but everyone can talk about music.) —Douglas was passing around the first issue of Mike Kunkel’s Billy Batson and the Magic of Shazam!, soliciting reactions (consensus: why did he have to credit himself with words and pictures and heart?) (though I thought but didn’t say: Open Season!); this prompted one of the people who weren’t comics people to ask which Captain Marvel this was.
“DC’s got him,” someone said.
“Yeah, but this is following pretty closely on Jeff Smith’s take,” said someone else.
“So it’s in Jeff Smith continuity?” said a third person, disingenuously.
“Well, there are fifty-two universes in the DC universe now,” I said, only a tad less disingenuously. “So who knows?”
“Exactly fifty-two?” said the person who wasn’t a comics person.
“Yes,” said Douglas, with that smile of his. This is so ridiculously geeky; this is so ridiculously cool.
“Except one was destroyed, right?” I said.
“In fact, it was the fifty-first that was destroyed,” said Douglas. “So now it goes one through fifty and fifty-two.” —They hang like fruit from the Multiversal Orrery, green and blue and cloud-frosted: “New Earth is secure,” says the super-science guy in his super-science car. “The Bleed drains are intact. The Multiversal Orrery has survived repair after the loss of moving part: Universe 51.” (It is all so much bigger than we even imagine, yet look! The Earth is still the most important place of all. How comforting!)
“So, are we in there somewhere?” said a different person who wasn’t a comics person.
“Not anymore,” said Douglas.
“To them,” I said, “we’re fictional.” I hadn’t known we weren’t in there anymore. I’m thinking of fiction suits.
“Well, actually, not exactly,” said Douglas, his smile widening. “In All-Star Superman 10, Superman jumpstarts the infant universe Qwewq to see what a world without superheroes would be like. And it’s us. He created us. Superman is basically God.” —And it’s true; he did, almost as an afterthought, with a nano-optical transfusion of pure solar energy. And it’s us. There at the end we see Earth-Q, inside the barely beating heart of the sickly infant universe Qwewq, and there’s Joe Shuster, drawing Action Comics #1: “I really think this is it… Third time lucky. This is the one… this is going to change everything.” (As above, so below, yes yes, which leaves only one question: what’s up?)
“Wouldn’t it make more sense if his father was God and he sent Superman to save us?” said the person who wasn’t a comics person.
“Well,” Douglas started to say, but I hadn’t been paying attention; I was trying not to think of Chris Ware, so I interrupted. I said, “Wait a minute. Didn’t they send that superteam into Qwewq to save it from not having superheroes?” [JLA: Classified 1 – 3. —Ed.]
“The Ultramarines,” said Douglas. “Yes.”
“So if we’re Qwewq, then where are they?” I said, spreading my hands to take us all in. “Because they sure aren’t here.” (“A doomed micro-Earth, in an infant universe,” says the Knight. “With no such thing as superheroes,” says Jack O’Lantern. “This should be interesting…” says Warmaker One.)
“Ah,” said Douglas. “They aren’t here yet.”
In Molho’s bookshop, one of the few downtown reminders of earlier times, I found Joseph Nehama’s magisterial Histoire de Israélites de Salonique, and began to see what an extraordinary story it had been. The arrival of the Iberian Jews after their expulsion from Spain, Salonica’s emergence as a renowned centre of rabbinical learning, the disruption caused by the most famous False Messiah of the seventeenth century, Sabbetai Zevi, and the persistent faith of his followers, who followed him even after his conversion to Islam, formed part of a fascinating and little-known history unparalleled in Europe. Enjoying the favour of the sultans, the Jews, as the Ottoman traveller Evliya Chelebi noted, called the city “our Salonica”—a place where, in addition to Turkish, Greek and Bulgarian, most of the inhabitants “know the Jewish tongue because day and night they are in contact with, and conduct business with Jews.”
Yet as I supplemented my knowledge of the Greek metropolis with books and articles on its Jewish past, and tried to reconcile what I knew of the home of Saint Dimitrios—“the Orthodox City”—with the Sefardic “Mother of Israel,” it seemed to me that these two histories—the Greek and the Jewish—did not so much complement one another as pass each other by. I had noticed how seldom standard Greek accounts of the city referred to the Jews. An official tome from 1962 which had been published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of its capture from the Turks contained almost no mention of them at all; the subject had been regarded as taboo by the politicians masterminding the celebrations. This reticence reflected what the author Elias Petropoulos excoriated as “the ideology of the barbarian neo-Greek bourgeoisie,” for whom the city “has always been Greek.” But at the same time, most Jewish scholars were just as exclusive as their Greek counterparts: their imagined city was as empty of Christians as the other was of Jews.
As for the Muslims, who had ruled Salonica from 1430 to 1912, they were more or less absent from both.
If they aren’t here yet, well, that does resolve a few things, I suppose, such as how the Knight and Beryl, his Squire, can show up a year and a half later on the island of Jonathan Mayhew, and how Superman inspires Earth-Q after the Justice League chases Black Death into it and gets lost. (“As unlikely as it seems,” he says, “this unhealthy attoscopic copy of Earth developed entirely without superheroes.” —Superman isn’t usually one to lie behind the passive voice.) —But keep in mind there are two Qwewqs in that story: the infant universe, over immensely unthinkable gobs of time, grows up into the adult universe of Qwewq, tainted by a seed of evil planted long ago now by Black Death, and despondent at having grown up for so very long without superheroes of its own, it comes back in time to attack the Justice League even as they’re lost inside its infant self: it becomes Neh-Buh-Loh, the Nebula Man, whose touch has the power of 20 atomic bombs. (We become; attoscopically small though we may be, in an unimaginably large universe the size of a big man, we are nonetheless the most important thing of all. We come back in time, despondent, tainted; it didn’t change everything, after all.)
And we know what happens to Neh-Buh-Loh, dark Huntsman to the Queen of the Sheda, who comes back in time over and over again from the far future at the end of it all to stripmine civilization whenever it gets rich and ripe enough; she ate the age of Neandertal super-science, destroyed the glory that was Camelot, and came for us here at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the apotheosis of the superheroes—well, not us, no, but New Earth or Earth-1 or wherever it is in the Orrery where the superheroes live. Neh-Buh-Loh was tasked with killing the Queen’s daughter before they invade, but he couldn’t; he hid her, instead, and for failing his dark Queen he was exiled to the Himalayas. Frankenstein (née Frankenstein’s monster) finds him there and kills him. —In a corner of the data readout Frankenstein downloads from SHADE we learn that the effort of the Ultramarines has been considered unsuccessful; given superheroes, we grew up despondent anyway, came back still tainted. (Everything still wasn’t changed.) —“They could not heal you,” says Frankenstein, hauling Neh-Buh-Loh’s lance from his own dam’ body. “Instead they gave you medicine to hasten your end. The flaw… the doubt you feel… is the presence of death…”
That’s us, then, Earth-Q, the world the superheroes couldn’t save in the barely beating heart of an infant universe: disgraced, despondent, tainted, unchanged after all, come back a bully to eat our own four-color fictions, only to die writhing in the snow by the monstrous hand of Frankenstein.
So can you understand why I’d rather believe the superheroes haven’t gotten here yet? (Look about you! Do you see them anywhere yourself?) —Of course, Neh-Buh-Loh does say he’s only three billion years old when Frankenstein kills him, and we’ve been around some five times longer than that. (Well. Not us, per se.) And All-Star Superman is in Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely continuity; it doesn’t exactly hang from the Orrery with all the fifty other universes, and we have to turn to hypertime and the snowflake to begin to make sense of that. —I have been a bit disingenuous.
All this muddle and hullabaloo roils just under the smoothly buffed surface of those corporate icons. They tried to iron it all out back in ’85 with Crisis on Infinite Earths: fix those nagging continuity errors by wiping them out; rewrite history to simplify it all: top all the Silver Age Crises on Earth-Two and Earth-Three with the Crisis to end all Crises: Infinite Earths! Monitor vs. Anti-Monitor in the battle to end all battles! Smash them all together in a super-genocide that leaves us with but one clear agreed-upon continuity, and start the universe all over again from there. A Big Crunch, that spawned the next Big Bang; and so we returned and began again.
But for all its noise and exuberance and color, its sound and fury, this is still a humble, ephemeral art; there is more than a little wabi-sabi in comics, and there is always already a flaw in continuity. And as a small army of cooks sets to writing and penciling and editing their multitude of bubbling broth-pots, that flaw begets more flaws, swarming and roiling about, and the attempts to work around them become more baroque until elseworlds and otherwhens hive themselves off what you now must call Earth-Prime, many worlds that offend the sensibilities of continuity’s Copenhagen-cops (what an easy way out, they sniff). And here we are, back where we started: now it’s an Infinite Crisis to top the Crisis on Infinite Earths, only when we’re done, it’s not that there’s one Earth again, but fifty-two, hanging from the Multiversal Orrery. (Except, you know, the All-Star books, and a bunch of the Elseworlds stuff, and some of the future stuff, all of which is in hypertime, or out on the snowflake elsewhere, which we don’t really talk about much, but anyway—)
Having already had a crisis, though, and kept going, you’ve always already had that crisis. Much as they might like to forget it, later. —Have another, or enough of them, and you’ll find you’re always already in a crisis. The fifty-two Earths were hung from the Orrery only a couple of years ago, and already they’re threatened by the Final Crisis (as final, I’m sure, as its predecessors were infinite). —“Do you feel as though time is speeding up, darling?” says Lord Fanny, somewhere out there in hypertime. “I mean, actually getting faster.”
And there’s already a flaw, as always: this Final Crisis was to have been precipitated by the deaths of the New Gods, and Orion, Darkseid’s son, raised by the Highfather, the bestial, well-meaning New God of war, is killed a couple of different times in a couple of different ways in a couple of different places by different writers and artists each keeping watch over their different pots of broth, all before his body can be found in the garbage in the opening pages of the Crisis itself. —As flaws go, this one’s simple enough to explain away: cowards, after all, die a thousand deaths! How many more might a god die? I’m much more concerned about that Gordian knot I kicked around above: the infant universe Qwewq, and us, left alone on Earth-Q: created by Superman after he found it, already abandoned by the Ultramarines who hadn’t left yet to save us from despondency, murdered by Frankenstein some twelve billion years before we have a chance even to show up. (Some fans complain how Superman in Final Crisis didn’t seem to know Orion, or the New Gods, when after all he’s served with them off and on for years; how much worse not to have recognized Earth-Q when he walked its streets a couple of years ago!) —And that tangle of inconsistencies all came not from a dozen different broth-pots and a dozen different cooks but just the one writer, Grant Morrison, who’s busily upending the Multiversal Orrery with its absolute honest f’reals this time Final Crisis.
And who is always already up to something. —Even if it isn’t always the same thing.
That went on a bit longer than I anticipated. —Most of this we didn’t talk about at all; most of it only occurred to me later. Exegesis d’escalier. And we didn’t only talk about comics, either. Lisa and I, for instance, had a long conversation in the kitchen about infants and kids and the limen between them, and the strange nature of the year that stretches before me and the Spouse and which overwhelms just about everything else these days. And I snagged a CD by Princess Superstar from Douglas’s freebie box. It was a good party.
Mostly I wanted to set up the punchline: it’s this thing I can’t find anymore on the web, since Jason Craft left and went to Earth X and then let Earth X fall off the web and then brought it back. He had a line in documenting the care and feeding of what he called proprietary, persistent, large-scale popular fictions—soap operas and arc-driven television, MMORPGs, the superhero multiverses of Marvel and DC, which are arguably the largest and most sophisticated of them all.
He wrote a brief squib in his long-lost blog, about something a friend of his said, when asked why he bought all those comics every month. Are they really that good? Are they any good at all?
Well, yes, they are any good at all, his friend said to this interlocutor. (Friend of a friend of a guy I’ve read on the internet whose blog I’m citing has gone the way of all æther.) But are they that good? See, and he hemmed and hawed a minute, as anybody would who’s spending that much money every month on ephemerally exciting attempts to maintain the iconicity, the brand equity that makes superheroes viable in the marketplace. And then he said, it’s like, you know, all this stuff is happening, right? I mean, sure, in comic books, yeah, but it’s happening there, and this is how I keep up. It’s like I’m reading the news, you know? Is the news that good?
Then you’ll look over that day, rewrite Dallas.
Because JR was too evil,
He was too evil.
It’s all because of JR that everything
Went crazy with the world,
With the world.
Make JR nice and all our history
Will be mystery.
Remember:
This song could be about Jesus
But it can also be a song about you.
This song could be about Jesus
But it can also be a song about you.
Be good
Do all the things you should
Be good
Do it as you wish you would
Be good
Do all the things you should
A nightmare from which etc.
Also, I’d like to join my wingnut brethren in demanding to know why Google insists on slighting Western civilization everywhere by not honoring Bloomsday with one of those special little squiggly cartoon things. (Is a stately plump Buck Milligan too much to ask?)
Any sufficiently advanced art is indistinguishable from poetry.
From Norway via Mr. Snead, One Foot in the Wild—an RPG poem on nature and footwear. (Perhaps “indistinguishable” isn’t quite right—?)
Der Tod und das Mädchen.
Heather Corinna insouciantly tosses a head-slapper of an analogy into the sex-work debate.
Say nothing.
Sara reminded me of rickrolling, and got me to read the Wikipedia article, and—well, there’s just something about the po-faced seriousness of Wikipedia’s house style, you know?
In the “Never Gonna Give You Up” music video, directed by Simon West, a smiling Astley sings and dances to the song in various outfits and venues, sometimes accompanied by backup dancers. A bartender has a notable presence in the video, as his behavior gradually shifts from casually noticing Astley’s singing to being fully engrossed in the song with energetic acrobatic moves. The athletic exertion of many of the other dancers also becomes more intense over the course of Astley’s performance.
You’ve got to say something, but you can’t say something, or you’ll risk unleashing controversy—we assume, for the moment, that your goal isn’t to launch a flame war—and so you bend over backwards to say something about the thing in question without saying anything until that last sentence topples down a Zen navel of staggering uselessness, utterly indistinguishable from its hypothetical Onion parody.
I’d just gotten out of the shower, trying to sluice off the Bakersfield dust, and I stood there before the hotel TV set with the remote in my hand, gawping as the talking head said something like how unfair it was, how he couldn’t get over how unfair it was, that a white politician couldn’t survive something like this. This being Obama’s relationship with the storied Reverend Wright, his unfair survival of which has been only by dint of writing and delivering one of the most powerful speeches in the last, what, 40 years of American rhetoric? Can we make that call yet?
Thing being that it seems the talking head is blithely unaware of white politician John McCain’s relationships with snarlingly vicious anti-American Christianists such as John Hagee and Rod Parsley, that he’s managed to survive by dint of inviting the press corps to a barbecue at his wife’s summer house.
So I yelled at the TV and changed the channel. Alton Brown was showing us how to cook an omelette. —It was only later that it occurred to me: maybe when I was walking through the lobby and saw a giant TV screen full of TV screens full of pictures of Wolf Blitzer standing there, mildly puzzled, before a rank of giant TV screens in his glossy, empty Situation Room; or maybe it was while I was sitting in the Salt Lake City airport and some white-toothed boytoy surrounded by bobbing glossy headshots boasted about sending his Entertainment Tonight Truth Squad out on the thankless task of determining whether Will Smith was really a Scientologist now or what—the talking head had time to fill. He had to say something about the thing in question, but he couldn’t risk saying anything, and so.
…his behavior gradually shifts from casually noticing Astley’s singing to being fully engrossed in the song with energetic acrobatic moves.
It’ll help, I think, keeping this in mind. Whenever they say something stupid (which is, um), they’re just doing their job, which is to say something about the athletic exertions of the background dancers without saying anything at all.
—I’ll smile more, anyway, and yell less, which is as good as it gets these days.
As falls Duckburg, so falls Duckburg Falls.
I don’t know why it should be so affecting to pick up an English translation of a 37-year-old Chilean book on Disney comics hauled down from the back bookshelf to proffer to a young cartoonist who ended up not borrowing it the night before as intended and flip through it desultorily only to happen at random upon the following passage—
Let us look at the social structure in the Disney comic. For example, the professions. In Duckburg, everyone seems to belong to the tertiary sector, that is, those who sell their services: hairdressers, real estate and tourist agencies, salespeople of all kinds (especially shop assistants selling sumptuary objects, and vendors going from door-to-door), nightwatchmen, waiters, delivery boys, and people attached to the entertainment business. These fill the world with objects and more objects, which are never produced, but always purchased. There is a constant repetition of the act of buying. But this mercantile relationship is not limited to the level of objects. Contractual language permeates the most commonplace forms of human intercourse. People see themselves as buying each other’s services, or selling themselves. It is as if the only security were to be found in the language of money. All human interchange is a form of commerce; people are like a purse, an object in a shop window, or coins constantly changing hands.
—but it is; it is.
“Never lose the ability to be offended.”
We’ve had our issues, too, over the past five years. I’ll never forget one thing that really grabbed me and Sonja Sohn, especially, brought it to David’s attention. David mentioned—we’d asked him about someone’s murder, you know, why would you do that, and he says, well, there’s no hope.
And we all took great offense to that. If there was no hope, you wouldn’t even have a cast here. All the stuff that the people, that we’ve gone through. So how dare you say that. I remember Sonja brought it to my attention, and it was something she had every right to say, and she really got on David about that. We took issue with that.
That’s Wendell Pierce, who plays the Bunk, from a Sound of Young America interview with him and Andre Royo. [via]
People of quality.
Harper’s recently unearthed Dorothy Thompson’s spectacular assault on Godwin’s Law—
It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know.
(Don’t worry. She wrote it in 1941. I don’t think rhetorical assaults scale that preëmptively.) —It’s an interesting reading experience, a concentrated dose of the artist’s bog-standard Zen-flip, limning universals with specific particulars: Mr. A and Mr. B, D and Mrs. E, James the butler and Bill, the grandson of the chauffeur, who’s helping serve to-night. Who will go Nazi? Who already has?
I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.
Does she? —Far be it from me to question her credentials, but still: there’s something ugly in seeing this trick in ostensibly objective op-ed form, however thin the ostensibility: a roman à clef sans roman. Even Friedman’s cabbies have more panache.
Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.
No matter how much you nod your head with the beat.
Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.
Oh? Define “nice.” —People who don’t go Nazi? I see, I see.
But I come not to quibble with technique. Or Nazis, for that matter. Nor is this another self-indulgent joke at the expense of certain public intellectuals. —I’m more struck by certain issues of class as littered if not limned throughout the piece (Mr. A, but Bill, the grandson of the chauffeur—noticed that too, did you?), especially in light of the hullaballoo over that dam’ privilege meme. (And how sobering to find oneself even tangentially sided with Megan “Jane Galt” McArdle. Can one not hate the meme, but love the mimesis?) —Allow me a handful of quotes:
The gentleman standing beside the fireplace with an almost untouched glass of whiskey beside him on the mantelpiece is Mr. A, a descendant of one of the great American families. There has never been an American Blue Book without several persons of his surname in it. He is poor and earns his living as an editor. He has had a classical education, has a sound and cultivated taste in literature, painting, and music; has not a touch of snobbery in him; is full of humor, courtesy, and wit. He was a lieutenant in the World War, is a Republican in politics, but voted twice for Roosevelt, last time for Willkie. He is modest, not particularly brilliant, a staunch friend, and a man who greatly enjoys the company of pretty and witty women. His wife, whom he adored, is dead, and he will never remarry.
Thus, Mr. A. Now, his abecedarian counterpart:
Beside him stands Mr. B, a man of his own class, graduate of the same preparatory school and university, rich, a sportsman, owner of a famous racing stable, vice-president of a bank, married to a well-known society belle. He is a good fellow and extremely popular.
And thus to thesis, antithesis, synthesis—
Mr. A has a life that is established according to a certain form of personal behavior. Although he has no money, his unostentatious distinction and education have always assured him a position. He has never been engaged in sharp competition. He is a free man. I doubt whether ever in his life he has done anything he did not want to do or anything that was against his code. Nazism wouldn’t fit in with his standards and he has never become accustomed to making concessions.
Mr. B has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer. He married for money and he has done lots of other things for money. His code is not his own; it is that of his class—no worse, no better, He fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value—success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. As a movement likely to attain power, it would.
Forget the diagnosis. Note the particulars: money; background; breeding; taste; carriage—all different, even opposite, as so deftly delimited. And yet, we nonetheless have Mr. A and beside him Mr. B, “a man of his own class.”
Which means what, exactly? That set of people who attend the party as guests, not servants or relatives of the help?
(Well, yes. But still. —How can one begin to fight something so protean, yet so unyielding?
(Why, by talking about it, of course. Well, yes, but—)
They’d enjoy eating,
take pleasure in clothes,
be happy with their houses,
devoted to their customs.
Cords to knot for the commonplace book. —In a comment to the Infamous Brad Hicks’ endlessly provoking post on the city-burners who (may or may not have) brought about the end of the Bronze Age in 27 tumultuous years, 
perlmonger says:
But barring some so-far unforseen archaeological find, we are unlikely to find out what their actual motivation was, because one thing that the city burners seem to have gone way out of their way to do was to completely destroy the technology of written language everywhere they won battles.
Fredy Perlman would have said that that was because writing in the bronze age civilisations was devised and used as a mechanism of oppression; something that was there basically to define and record the ownership and value of grain and slaves (and the glory of the kings and priesthood) would necessarily be seen, by slaves with an oral history of the time before they were enslaved, as something to destroy.
No way of knowing for sure, of course, but it makes sense to me at least…
Which reminded me of this, from Delany:
Norema suspected Venn was perfectly crazy.
Nevertheless, Norema was sent, with the daughters and sons of most of the other families in the harbor village—some thirty-five in all—to be with Venn every morning. Some of the young men and women of the village when they’d been children had built a shelter, under Venn’s instruction, with ingenious traps in its roof so you could climb up on top and look down from the hill across the huts to the harbor, and Norema and the children who sat with Venn under the thatched awning every morning made a cage for small animals they caught; and they learned the marks Venn could make on pieces of dried vegetable fiber (that you could unroll from the reeds that grew in the swamps across the hill): some marks were for animals, some for fish, some for numbers, and some for ideas; and some were for words (Norema’s own contribution to the system, with which Venn was appropriately impressed)—there was a great spate of secret-message sending that autumn. Marks in red clay meant one thing. The same mark in black charcoal meant something else. You could use Venn’s system, or make up a new one with your friends. They nearly used up all the reeds, and Venn made them plant many more and go hunting for seedlings to be carefully nursed in especially nice mud. The whole enterprise came to a stop when someone got the idea of assigning special marks for everyone’s name, so you could tell at a glance (rather than having to figure it out from what it was about) just whom the message came from. Venn apparently intercepted one of these; someone apparently deciphered it for her.
“We must stop this,” she told them, holding her walking stick tight with both hands up near the head, while an autumn rain fell from the edge of the thatch to make a curtain at her back, fraying the great oak tree, sheeting the broken slope that rose beside it, dulling the foot path that cut across the grass beneath it. “Or we must curtail it severely. I did not invent this system. I only learned it—when I was in Nevèrÿon. And I modified it, even as you have done. And do you know what it was invented for, and still is largely used for there? The control of slaves. If you can write down a woman’s or a man’s name, you can write down all sorts of things next to that name, about the amount of work they do, the time it takes for them to do it, about their methods, their attitudes, and you can compare all this very carefully with what you have written about others. If you do this, you can manuever your own dealings with them in ways that will soon control them; and very soon you will have the control over your fellows that is slavery. Civilized people are very careful about who they let write down their names, and who they do not. Since we, here, do not aspire to civilization, it is perhaps best we halt the entire process.” Venn separated her hands on the gnarled stick. And Norema thought about her father’s ship yard, where there was an old man who came to work some days and not others and about whom her father always complained: If I wrote down his name, Norema thought, and made one mark for every day he came to work and another for every day he failed to come, if after a month I showed it to my father, and said, yes, here, my father’s grumbling would turn to open anger, and he would tell him to go away, not to come back, that he was not worth the time, the food the shelter, and the man would go away and perhaps die… And Norema felt strange and powerful and frightened.
And also this:
On Pryn’s fourth day, Yrnik had assigned her, among her accounting duties, to keep count on the comparative number of scum barrels that came out of the auxiliary cave and out of the main cave. Once stacked outside, the barrels’ origins were indistinguishable; and the farmers were always coming up to pick up a barrel or two of free fertilizer anyway, so that even markings would not have been truly efficient.
Pryn kept count.
Each day the main cave produced between forty and fifty barrels of yellow-green gunk.
The auxiliary cave, Pryn realized as she stood among the men and women along the cave wall, listening to barrels bang, could easily have filled twelve or thirteen, given the number of wide, wooden, first-fermentation settling troughs foaming over the floor.
That afternoon it produced three.
Pryn passed hours watching the whole infinitely delayed operation.
When she went off to the equipment store (the converted barracks that included Yrnik’s office), she stood for a long while before the wax-covered board Yrnik had hung on the wall for temporary notes. On a ledge under it was a seashell in which Yrnik kept the pointed sticks he’d carved for styluses. An oil lamp with a broad wick sat beside the shell. You used it to melt the wax when notes had to be erased over a large area. Pryn picked up a stylus and looked at the board’s translucent yellow.
Once she said out loud: “But I’m not a spy..!”
The main cave had put out forty-seven barrels of fertilizer that day.
Pryn took the stick and gouged across a clear space: “Main cave, forty-one barrels—auxiliary cave, nine barrels.”
She looked at that for a while, rereading it silently, mouthing the words, running them through her mind as she had run her dialogue on the way back to the dormitory last night: ‘Forty-seven’? ‘Three’? she said to herself in several tones of voice. ‘Who am I to commit myself to a truth so far from what is expected?’ Over the next few days she could push what she might write closer to what she’d seen. But that would do for now. ‘To write for others,’ she thought, ‘it seems one must be a spy—or a teller of tales.’ She put the stick back in its shell.
“Writings are the thoughts of the State; archives are its memory.” (“Designation by means of sounds and lines is an admirable abstraction. Three letters designate God for me—a few marks a million objects. How easy it becomes to handle the universe in this fashion!”) —Go massive, a wise man once said; sweep it all up, things related and not. At the risk, then, of going massive, two more knots to tie—this:
The fact that listeners hear the same emotion in a given musical score is something a Neanderthal crooner might have exploited. Music can manipulate people’s emotional states (think of liturgical music, martial music or workplace music). Happy people are more cooperative and creative. By fostering cooperation and creativity among bands of early, prelanguage human ancestors, music would have given them a survival edge. “If you can manipulate other people’s emotions,” says Prof. Mithen, “you have an advantage.”
But also, well, this:
And standing there as big as life
and smiling with his eyes,
says Joe “What they can never kill
went on to organize,
went on to organize.”
From San Diego up to Maine
in every mine and mill,
where working folks defend their rights,
it’s there you find Joe Hill,
it’s there you find Joe Hill!
Hope is not a plan.
Point is—I come from a generation of young liberals who, after the relative coddling of a Clintonian childhood, were horribly crushed by election outcomes. Not once, but twice in a row, with 9/11 in the middle (my 18th birthday was two days before).
I strongly suspect that we will be forever a little messed up by having come of age in what might prove to be a peak period in world prosperity, relative international calm, and predictable disappointments—followed so abruptly by trauma after trauma after trauma.
I recall, probably around spring break of 2002, sitting with my father (well-weathered by the injustices of the world) and watching the sunset together, my mom’s extended family chattering around us, and quietly telling him, “I just want to know that the world is going to be okay.”
And for the first time ever, he told me, “Well, Dylan, it’s not.”
David Simon (yes, that David Simon) shows up in a comment thread to say much the same thing (if not as succinctly) to Matt Yglesias, who feels Simon’s vision of bleak urban dystopia is counterproductive to advancing the values we hold dear:
Writing to affirm what people are saying about my faith in individuals to rebel against rigged systems and exert for dignity, while at the same time doubtful that the institutions of a capital-obsessed oligarchy will reform themselves short of outright economic depression (New Deal, the rise of collective bargaining) or systemic moral failure that actually threatens middle-class lives (Vietnam and the resulting, though brief commitment to rethinking our brutal foreign-policy footprints around the world). The Wire is dissent; it argues that our systems are no longer viable for the greater good of the most, that America is no longer operating as a utilitarian and democratic experiment. If you are not comfortable with that notion, you won’t agree with some of the tonalities of the show. I would argue that people comfortable with the economic and political trends in the United States right now—and thinking that the nation and its institutions are equipped to respond meaningfully to the problems depicted with some care and accuracy on The Wire (we reported each season fresh, we did not write solely from memory)—well, perhaps they’re playing with the tuning knobs when the back of the appliance is in flames.
Does that mean The Wire is without humanist affection for its characters? Or that it doesn’t admire characters who act in a selfless or benign fashion? Camus rightly argues that to commit to a just cause against overwhelming odds is absurd. He further argues that not to commit is equally absurd. Only one choice, however, offers the slightest chance for dignity. And dignity matters.
All that said, I am the product of a C-average GPA and a general studies degree from a state university and thirteen years of careful reporting about one rustbelt city. Hell do I know. Maybe my head is up my ass.
That thread in general is well worth your while beyond Simon’s pith; I’ll just highlight one other, inconclusive comment, and leave it at that:
I clerked for a very conservative federal judge who was known in our district as the “hanging judge.” He was a huge Wire fan and his sentencing/judging really changed for the better since he started watching the show. Of course, I don’t know if it was the show for sure; but his view and treatment of the people coming before him changed dramatically.
Fascists are people;
Liberals are people;
∴ Liberals are fascists.
Yes, another blip about Jonah Goldberg’s very serious, thoughtful lump of horseshit that has never been smeared across the public discourse in such detail or with such care. —Over at Unfogged, Bob McManus thinks Jonah deserves serious consideration, and while my immediate impulse whenever anyone asks why we aren’t taking it seriously is to point to Bérubé (his lunch with Horowitz; more en pointe, his Goldberg variations), let’s, well, take McManus seriously:
“You think Jonah deserves serious consideration”
Yes I do. If I were a progressive blogger, I would look at the book and wonder what was being taken off the table rather than what was being put on the table. I would meta and Strauss the damn thing. He had a purpose. He is getting paid.
And yes, Jonah has a purpose; Jonah did, indeed, depressingly enough, get paid for his fumbling assault on language and critical thought. But his purpose is simple enough to discern: he’s out to degrade any attempt at defining and situating fascism. What’s he’s trying to take off the table are Umberto Eco’s 14 ways of looking at a blackshirt, replacing them with nothing more than a bulge-eyed spittle-flecked bellow of “Fascist!” in a crowded theater. And if you’ve followed the links above, you already know why he’s trying to do this: Bérubé, that prancing jackanapes, told you plainly enough:
So if Jonah Goldberg’s project is to show that liberalism is the new fascism, it probably makes sense to ask whether there’s any old-time fascism running around somewhere while the doughty Mr. Goldberg mans the perimeter.
Over at Sans Everything, Jeet Heer does what little spadework’s necessary to demonstrate that Jonah’s own National Review has been steeping in precisely that old-time fascism for years. —Thus does Jonah’s 496-page argument collapse: no longer a brutally clever attempt at shifting the Overton window, it stands revealed as nothing more than a desperate bleat of “I know you are, but what am I!”
It stands revealed, yes, to those that read; but only those who already know will read. —How do you reach someone who believes what Jonah’s said? Or at least professes to believe?
I’m stuck in the koan. —On the one hand, of course this assiduous furore of taking-unseriously isn’t an attempt at argument per se. Posting clips from A Fish Called Wanda won’t convince anyone who isn’t already in your corner of anything; nor will baldly proclaiming that the new fascist stormtrooper is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore. They’re tokens and dogwhistles in a playground slapfest, and the best you can say for us over them is we’re less likely to pretend otherwise. “Taking Jonah seriously” doesn’t work on the playground; all we can hope for is damage control. —To the extent they aren’t spontaneous upwellings of disgust, or hails and hearty laughter shared with weary fellow travelers, or attempts to spit in Jonah’s coffee, our salvos and volleys strive inch by inch to effect our own Overton shift: to achieve some critical mass and attach some small measure of shame to the name of Jonah Goldberg, so this media outlet or that think-tank venue might think twice before inviting his participation, and his opportunities to play his tokens and sound his dogwhistles might thereby be lessened. If only a little.
On the other, we win to the extent we can by increasing the us and decreasing the them. It’s hard to do that when you’ve grabbed them by the lapels and you’re smacking them in the face with their own dam’ book and you’re bellowing “Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!”
Harsh, yes, but also unfair.
It only just now occurred to me: Alan Moore’s (and Kevin O’Neill’s, yes yes) Black Dossier is really his Number of the Beast.
Drive-by kulturklatsch.
I’m needed elsewhere; I’m trying to Get Things Done. (Never mind the sooty faces tugging at the Forge!) —This is mostly me using the Outboard Brain. And so: this (which found via this) seems somehow to me to be saying something, what, obverse? to this, which is (indirectly) about this. (I’d add something about the stagnation of the direct market in comics as everyone waits for trades that never come because the floppies don’t sell, but I’m not sure where to put it.) So: no thought, just bookmarks. (On a seemingly unrelated note: should I kill the joke about the three lions entirely? I mean, head, hand, and heart, but who the fuck’s gonna follow that?)
More on the behemoth.
Dylan, as ever, says it best. —Meanwhile, Momus is trying to take the piss out of Potter and The Wire at the same time, and for such an intellective jackanapes falls distressingly flat. Announcing to the world that you think the point of a name like Severus Snape is “you don’t have to waste much time working out whether they’re good or evil” is to mistake the set-up for the punchline, and if you require nothing more than a weepy third party’s word to accept that Bubbles must be “the most sympathetic character ever to appear in a TV drama,” well, you’re pretty much doomed to repeat the downfall of Tom Townsend, who never read novels, just good criticism, thus to efficiently garner the thoughts of a critic as well as the novelist.
—Ah, well. Momus is not without his point re: “wholly human,” and at least it’s—wittier? more insightful?—better than Ron Charles’ weary screed about how it’s all not really, you know, reading.
—racing down tracks going faster, much faster—
Immanentise the eschaton!
You let the eschaton alone. It’ll come in its own good time.
—Competing grafitti noted in the neighborhood of I want to say Glastonbury
Set out, set out. —But there’s a couple of things that ought to be explained first, like how magic works; right now, I want to talk about a hitch in the body of time. Lord Fanny and King Mob, drawn by Jill Thompson, hanging out in a diner:
And it is, isn’t it? Getting faster. All the time.
But this has nothing to do with eschatons or apocalypses, armageddim or fifth suns. There’s no damn whirl; no damn pool. It’s all so much simpler than that. There’s just us, and here, and now, and the aforementioned body of time. —The thing about time being that your immediate, visceral sense of it, the time that has actually flowed over and past you, your experience of it, your experience, well, that time is always the same size and the same shape, once it’s set (and rather early on): it’s always the size of your life. (“No more, no less,” to tap another echo elsewhere.) As you get older, as you pack more hours and days and years into the same little box, each one is necessarily left with a smaller slice of the whole.
Pitiless, perhaps, but that’s math for you. —“See,” said my littler sister, when she told me this, “a year is like a twelfth of my life. But it’s like a twenty-fourth of yours.” Grinning like a canaried cat in the back seat. (She had every reason to, of course. Already my years were smaller, harder to see, easy to lose in the crowd. It’s only gotten worse.) —Of course everybody King Mob speaks to has been saying the same thing. Everyone ever has always said the same thing. It’s always already been getting faster.
Keep this hitch in mind, and you’ll be able to answer certain questions like a chuffed Robert Graves: why there’s always jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, for instance, and never jam today. Why every Golden Age is the same Golden Age, and where the Old Skool was; when the Eschaton will strike; where Armageddon will have been.
Forget it, and you fall prey to the anthropic fallacy—the lie of the one true only. Like a smug Frank Tipler, you’ll think that here and now is special because you’re here and now; you’ll think you can say for sure when the jam will arrive; you’ll believe it’s all finally coming to pass and in your time; you’ll know in your bones that time is actually getting faster, because every year to you seems shorter than the year before.
The funny thing about The Invisibles is that while the plot depends upon this fallacy—time really is speeding up, just as Fanny says; the age of the fifth sun is about to end in whirlpools and apocalypses, and the crowning of a dark Lovecraftian king in Westminster Abbey during a solar eclipse—but the point of The Invisibles is precisely opposite: we all immanentize the way we die: alone. Our initiation is always already about to begin; it’s never not the Day of Nine Dogs, and Gideon’s last phone call is the same as Wally Sage’s, to tap another echo, elsewhere again. (Or Jack Frost, with Gaz in his lap. —Of course there’s a plot! Of course the plot must have such a ridiculous, action-packed climax! It’s all a game, remember? Sucked from an ærosol can. Go back and play it again!) —The fact that you’re in the here and now doesn’t make this here, this now any more special than any other slice of eternity—except, that is, of course, to you. And every hour that passes you by makes every other hour that much the smaller, the faster, much faster, until they never let us out ten blocks later.
—Thus, the hitch in the body of time.
