A half-satisfied cat being better than none.
Moved mostly to post a couple of searches on which Google (and thus by extension this whole mighty interweb-thingie) failed me today. First, the Multnomah County Library has in storage a book with the tantalizing title: History of remarkable conspiracies connected with European history, during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, by Lawson, John Parker, d. 1852. But it’s in, as noted, storage, and anyway the library is closed on Mondays (thanks ever so much, Mr. Sizemore), so I couldn’t go on my lunch break to figure out whether or not I can pry it out of their hands for a week or so. But! Google would help! And instantly, to boot! Surely a book about so tantalizing a topic will have been read by someone somewhere, and thus naturally enough nattered on about on some obscure webpage. —I’ll at least have a better idea as to whether or not Mr. Lawson’s tome is worth the prying. But even the simplest variation of the title turns up bupkes, and John Parker Lawson, d. 1852 or not, fares little better.
Hmpf.
Second: enjoying immensely The Sword and the Centuries, by Alfred Hutton, FSA—he quotes primary sources extensively, is proving a wealth of delicious trivia about points of honor and fighting with long sharp sticks, and has that wonderful tang to his voice, that admixture of florid vocabulary and dry understatement that makes me weak in the knees. I mean, he uses words like supersticerie—
Well. Google turns up nothing, and the editors of the OED apparently hadn’t read Sword by 1971. —The meaning is clear enough from context:
A certain Gounellieu, a great favourite of the King, had incurred his hatred, and that justly, because this Gounellieu had killed, as it was said, with supersticery and foul advantage, a young brother of his…
...we have seen how various acts of “supersticerie” arose—how a wicked-minded man, feeling sure that his adversary was honest, would appear on the field with a good strong coat of mail concealed under his shirt…
Breaking the word and scrying its entrails helps, too (of course): super and sistere, to stand above, cf. intersices and superstition. Supersticerie does have a supernatural component, given the number of charms duellists would tuck about their person for a chance at that scant edge (and the vociferousness with which they then had to proclaim before God and King or Duke or Marshal they had done no such thing); and so one who depends upon such supersticery (as opposed, say, to mail coats hidden under shirts, or paying one’s buddies to waylay one’s opponent on the way to the duelling ground—also incidents of supersticery) is, of course, a bit superstitious. I like the quality of its movement in logic-space: appealing to extra-legal recourse is, in a sense, standing above the fray. And I like its linkage with another obsolete variant on super-sistere, which the OED had tumbled to in 1971: superstitie, the power of survival. —“The people are the many waters, he turn’d their froth and fome into pearls, and wearied all weathers with an unimpaired Superstitie.”
So there’s my contribution to the interweb-thingie, this week; give it a few days, and the next time someone goes hunting via Google for “supersticerie,” they’ll get something of an answer. One out of two ain’t bad.
But I’m still curious as hell about Lawson’s 150-year-old conspiracy theories. Anyone? Anyone?
The dark time was roasted by hailstones and flames.
The bright time was wiped out by a shadow.
There’s nothing I can do; there’s nothing I can do. Checking the news every five minutes does no one any good. Ripping off Robyn Hitchcock lyrics does no one any good. Giggling madly at slips of the lip in a global gamble with 10-million-people-at-risk-of-starvation chips does no one any good. Listening to the news choppers circle downtown and wondering acidly if the Burnside Free State will rise again tonight does no one any good. Grandly proclaiming that having lost what mattered to very real people we have won what matters to dreams and ideals is doing no one any good. —At least, it’s not doing me any good. Juliet, quoting a 4,000-year-old lament for the fall of Sumer and Urim? I don’t know if it did her any good. I don’t know if it’s doing me any good, though in a way I am—what? Grateful?
Such a little word.
There’s too much history in the air. Twelve years, three presidential terms ago, give or take a couple of months, we were all huddled around a TV in an unheated room in a big old Boston house, watching the bombs drop.There’s a mad sketch we all did, passing a big black sketchbook back and forth, watching that one guy, the human CNN guy, shocked and awed and scared out of his mind, reporting from downtown Baghdad. He went away after a day or so and was summarily replaced by a smug, blowdried little toad with an utterly improbable name. We laughed at him, because it was either that or scream at the phlegmatic silver-haired stentorians insisting, you know, that they just don’t value human life the way we do. And another turn about the widening gyre and here we are again. Deja vu, jamais vu. I know this place, though I have never been here before. I do not know this place, though I have been here many times. (This time? This time, will we finally fall from the lip of one interpenetrating, whirling cone to the apex of the other?)
Hunger filled the city like water, it would not cease.
This hunger contorted people’s faces, twisted their muscles.
Its people were as if drowning in a pond,
they gasped for breath.
Its king breathed heavily in his palace, all alone.
Its people dropped their weapons,
their weapons hit the ground.
They struck their necks with their hands and cried.
They sought counsel with each other,
they searched for clarification:
“Alas, what can we say about it?
What more can we add to it?
How long until we are finished off by this catastrophe?”
I’m going to unplug this thing and kick it in the corner for a bit. Metaphorically, understand. I’ll just be over yonder a ways. Talk amongst yourselves.
Burlesque.
Browsing Blogdex, I stumbled over two lit-crittish burlesques of our current sitch, from either side of the howling divide: that side, and this one. —Unfair, perhaps, but it is rather nice to have one’s prejudices reinforced now and again, isn’t it? (Meanwhile, in the real world—)
That pleasure taken in watching a bladesmith at work,
or, (Snicker-snack).
“And this is the only woman whom I ever loved,” Jurgen remembered, upon a sudden. For people cannot always be thinking of these matters.
That’s from Jurgen, the book currently living in the pocket of whichever coat I happen to be wearing, to be pulled out and dipped into whenever there’s a spare moment, its pages littered with bus transfers marking this passage or that, or the one following:
“Why, it seemed to me I had lost the most of myself; and there was left only a brain which played with ideas, and a body that went delicately down pleasant ways. And I could not believe as my fellows believed, nor could I love them, nor could I detect anything in aught they said or did save their exceeding folly: for I had lost their cordial common faith in the importance of what use they made of half-hours and months and years; and because a jill-flirt had opened my eyes so that they saw too much, I had lost faith in the importance of my own actions, too. There was a little time of which the passing might be made endurable; beyond gaped unpredictable darkness: and that was all there was of certainty anywhere. Now tell me, Heart’s Desire, but was not that a foolish dream? For these things never happened. Why, it would not be fair if these things ever happened!”
(If you happen to note that I’m quoting rather extensively from the early bits, specifically Chapter 4, “The Dorothy Who Did Not Understand,” it’s because the other book in my pocket is The King of Elfland’s Daughter, which I’d been reading til yesterday, when a surfeit of “the fields we know” prompted me to set it aside and cast about for a more bracing tonic. —Not to knock Dunsany, mind; Pegana’s one of my all-time faves. But enough every now and again is enough.)
I’m not sure where I first picked up the name Cabell as one to watch; it may well be that I merely saw the slim, well-used, gorgeously stringent 1940s Penguin paperbacks on the shelf at Powell’s and said, huh. Jurgen and The Silver Stallion have been in my to-read-one-of-these-days pile for a while; and now that I’ve dipped my toe, I can tell I’ve got a new obsession to occupy my spare book-hunting moments. (I’m rather amused if mildly taken aback to discover Cabell’s apparent influence on one my bêtes noires, Robert Anson Heinlein. [We can argue it later and elsewhere if you’re so inclined, and I’ll concede his importance and wouldn’t dream of denying his influence which, after all, is the reason this bête is so very noire. And I’ll even allow as how “The Menace from Earth” has a fond place in my heart and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a great book. But but but. Let’s just say for now that much as comic booksters have Papa Jack Kirby, speculative fictioneers have Papa Robert Heinlein, and the comics folks got the better deal by far.] —Not that I’ve much of a leg to stand on at the moment, but based on my familiarity with Heinlein, having skimmed a couple of biographical and critical essays on Cabell, and oohed and aahed over a couple-dozen pages of Jurgen, I’m going out on a limb and saying I think the Grand Master rather tragicomically Missed the Point. Or a Point. And even if one can argue successfully that Heinlein’s ends were largely sympathetic to Cabell’s, his means were quite different—and as the world seems hell-bent on proving beyond the shadow of any faith to the contrary these days, there are no ends. There’s never an end. Only means. But I’m legless and on a thin branch here; keep your salt handy. I will.)
Don’t mind me too much; I’m in the first mad throes of an infatuation. The bloom will fade, I’ve no doubt; it always does. (Nor could I detect anything in aught they said or did save their exceeding folly.) But until then—I mean, Jesus wept, would you look at this? Is it not a splendid rose?
Before each tarradiddle,
Uncowed by sciolists,
Robuster persons twiddle
Tremendously big fists.
“Our gods are good,” they tell us;
“Nor will our gods defer
Remission of rude fellows’
Ability to err.”
So this, your Jurgen, travels
Content to compromise
Ordainments none unravels
Explicitly . . . and sighs.
Projection.
Yeah, I know. Cheap indeed to begin a piece with a definition; it’s usually a sign of desperately padding one’s word count. Just humor me, okay, as I crib this précis of various definitions of Freudian projection culled from, I am assured, orthodox psychology texts:
- A defense mechanism in which the individual attributes to other people impulses and traits that he himself has but cannot accept. It is especially likely to occur when the person lacks insight into his own impulses and traits.
- The externalisation of internal unconscious wishes, desires or emotions on to other people. So, for example, someone who feels subconsciously that they have a powerful latent homosexual drive may not acknowledge this consciously, but it may show in their readiness to suspect others of being homosexual.
- Attributing one’s own undesirable traits to other people or agencies, e.g., an aggressive man accuses other people of being hostile.
- The individual perceives in others the motive he denies having himself. Thus the cheat is sure that everyone else is dishonest. The would-be adulterer accuses his wife of infidelity.
- People attribute their own undesirable traits onto others. An individual who unconsciously recognises his or her aggressive tendencies may then see other people acting in an excessively aggressive way.
- Projection is the opposite defence mechanism to identification. We project our own unpleasant feelings onto someone else and blame them for having thoughts that we really have.
Clear enough, right?
David Brock, of course, is famous enough for asserting that the peculiar vituperation of the current incarnation of the American right (and even, perhaps, their insistence on a vast, left-wing media conspiracy?) is due to projection:
But then there was something deeper that went beyond just partisanship. It went beyond disagreement on the issues. You could only find it in the emotional life of the actual Clinton haters, their own frustration, their own projection of their own flaws onto the Clintons. There’s hardly anyone in the book who wasn’t living in a glass house while they were making all these accusations against the Clintons. I’m not a psychologist, but you have some kind of psychological phenomenon going on where that deep level of emotion and hatred has to do with themselves more than it has to do with anything the Clintons said or did.
Of course, we don’t need to rely on what might or might not be rank psychobabble from a man who admits he isn’t a psychologist to explain what’s going on. There’s a far more prosaic form of projection demonstrably at work, as Nicholas Confessore explains:
When right-wing journalists don’t fall into line, they’re considered traitors, not professionals. In the late 1990s, The Weekly Standard’s Tucker Carlson was nearly banished from the conservative movement for being too critical of strategist Grover Norquist. Meanwhile, The New Yorker’s Sid Blumenthal was banished from journalism for being too close to Bill Clinton. To generalize, conservative pundits assume that establishment media such as the Times are partisan because that’s how their own journalists are expected to operate. They believe Howell Raines runs The New York Times the way they know Wes Pruden runs The Washington Times.
Now, Ann Coulter—
I’ll wait till you stop laughing.
Okay?
Good.
Ann Coulter—stop it!—is, of course, the classic example whenever one brings up the American right wing and projection. Whether it’s the starkly simple example of her assertion that Jesse Jackson presided over riots in Florida streets in 2000, when the only riots in Florida streets were engineered by the genteel, decorous GOP, or multipage analyses of her factually challenged bestseller, Slander, that litter the internet, she is the nonpareil, ne plus ultra; she is the sine qua non for anyone making this argument. Cheekily or not. —Heck, don’t listen to me, open her book to find any of a number of petards:
In the rush to provide the public with yet more liberal bilge, editors apparently dispense with fact-checking…Books that become publishing scandals by virtue of phony research, invented facts, or apocryphal stories invariably grind political axes for the left. There may be publishing frauds that are apolitical, but it’s hard to think of a single hoax book written by a conservative.
But let’s leave behind for a moment the question of what some on the American right are saying and what it might say about them. Instead, consider these points culled from recent news:
- It is easier to demonstrate a link between the Bush administration and Al Qaeda than it is to demonstrate a link between the Iraqi government and Al Qaeda.
- The Bush administration continues to persecute by any means necessary a war that’s been planned since 1997, instead of acting against the very real and present threat. (Extra credit: John O’Neill and Marion Bowman.)
- And, because I like a trifecta as much as the next guy, there’s the baffling drive to cripple the very government whose stewardship was gifted to the Bush administration by the Supreme Court.
Given that. Given that projection is the attribution of one’s own undesirable traits onto others. Given that a marked propensity for projection can be demonstrated on the part of the right-wing punditocracy in general and Ann Coulter in specific. Give me all of this just for a moment so that I in turn can ask you, an impish smile on my face:
What can we then infer from the title of Coulter’s summer release?
Intellectually superior psychology always trumps defensive emotionality.
Couldn’t have quoted it out of context any better myself, dearie.
Mixed messages,
or, The incoherent text.
They’re not showing those Hallie Kate Eisenberg commercials before the movies anymore, but seeing a flick in a Portland theater hasn’t gotten any better. You pay your $5.25 (because honestly, who pays full price these days?) and then you sit down for a good six to ten minutes of commercials. Before the previews. And after that interminable waiting period where the screen is filled with slides from local low-budget advertisers (and those inane movie trivia squibs from Pepsi [if you live in a Pepsi town] or Coke [if you live in a Coke town]) and an audio feed is run of recently released pop hits, with the names of the artists, albums, and labels carefully enunciated, should you be moved to swing by the Sam Goody on the way to the parking lot.
And the last couple of times I’ve gone, they haven’t shown those Foundation for a Better Life PSAs, either. Which is kind of a shame; they’re slick and smarmy, yes, but still, it’s better to see a big bald biker shamed (a little, and genially) into being nice to a couple of little old ladies than it is to see the long-form brilliance of that ad for the new Volvo SUV.
Of course, even a simple PSA celebrating gratitude (pass it on!) can be more complex than it first appears:
Accompanying the opening strains of “Born to Be Wild” (a countercultural anthem of the late 1960s, prominently featured in 1969’s “Easy Rider”), the video opens with typical MTV-style of quick, staccato cuts. We see first a longhaired biker, and then a series of bikers, from various angles, hopping on their motorcycles, in front of a 60s-style diner, to the opening lyrics of the song (“Head out on the highway, looking for adventure,” etc.) A large, muscular biker, a skinhead who bears more than a passing resemblance to the wrestler “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, finds that his bike has stalled. Frustrated, he hops off the bike, gestures angrily at it, and galumphs to a pay phone, aggressively digging in his jeans for some non-existent change. Concurrently, on the left side of the screen, two small and elderly black women exit the diner and wobble on down the street. They approach the payphone as the lyrics tell the listener to “take the world in a love embrace.” Just then, the biker turns to them, and peevishly announces that the “phone’s taken,” evidently fearing that these elderly black women are in the habit of using public phones. One of the elderly, bespectacled black women looks at him with obvious concern, and diagnosing the situation, offers up some coins, as her voice creaks out the question, “Will this help you?” To the strains of “we were born, born to be wild,” the biker, a bit startled, examines the coins, and takes off his sunglasses. We see his face slope downward and soften. Softly he says “Hey, thanks.” The two women smile, and as they wobble away, he says, “I appreciate it.” As this biker puts the coins into the payphone, the graphics “Gratitude,” and “Pass It On” appear on the screen with the Foundation’s ID, just as the voiceover reiterates the words on the screen, and the name of the sponsor (The Foundation for a Better Life). Apart from the simplistic moral tale, a number of iconic reinscriptions have occurred here. First, both the denotations and connotations of the song, “Born to Be Wild,” and its most famous setting (in Easy Rider) have been flipped on their “heads.” “Easy Rider” chronicles the life and death of two “long-haired” bikers who take LSD with hookers while in a New Orleans graveyard. They also smoke a bit of marijuana, and as drug couriers, are essentially assassinated by rednecks in the segregationist U.S. southland. The main characters played by Peter Fonda (Wyatt “Captain America” Earp) and Dennis Hopper (Billy) function as iconic magnets for overt conflict over the implicit boundaries of “the American Dream” throughout the film, as they ride from Los Angeles to New Orleans, on their way to Mardi Gras. They are not symbols of unity and social harmony.
Likewise, the “biker’s” skinhead appearance in the FBL’s video gives him an “Aryan Nation” patina. As iconic skinhead, it seems very unlikely that elderly black ladies would approach such a figure. Given the decades of hostility between white supremacists and the black population of the US, a more realistic response would have been to quickly pass by the pay phone, saying nothing. Obviously, that’s not what happens in the video. What occurs is a recoding of these icons and histories into a structural-functionalist consensus (over gratitude and all the other common and desirable virtues). In doing so, they well illustrate Gomez-Pena’s claim about the shape of a corporatist multiculturalism that “artificially softens the otherwise sharp edges of cultural difference.” But why? And, why now?
(Of course, the Volvo commercial is in its own way fun to dissect: note the sexual subtexts in each “sighting”: the young son dreams of escape on the Loch Ness monster; the adolescent daughter dreams of a unicorn; the mother dreams of seeing Elvis driving a convertible down a desert highway [which—tangent—makes me think a) of James Dean, not so much Elvis and b) raises (tangentially, yes; those Harley Earl Buick commercials do it much more directly) the perennial question of why on earth car manufacturers try to sell modern cars by hearkening back to older models that were pretty much without exception better looking]; and the father’s dream is rather notably absent—are his dreams not worth commenting on? [Has he been stiffed?] Are we supposed to make the inference that this new Volvo SUV is his dream—thus, on the one hand, backhandedly remarking on the paucity of his imagination [an impractical thing, suited only for impractical people] while suggesting that only his [practical] dreams are deserving of reification? Are the dreams of the presumed norm, those white, middle-class, family-headin’-up men, to be kept private, hidden, safe, unknown? And whether that’s empowering or disempowering depends on context and strategy, of course [and the commercial rather wisely leaves both entirely in the reader’s hands]. —See the fun you can have before they show the trailer for the latest Jim Carrey vehicle?)
But! It’s the context of Regal Cinemas as digital pipeline snarfed up by predatory Native-American-heritage-drillin’ Qwest-ownin’ Bob-Dole’s-hand-shakin’ evil-white-capitalist guy, to be used to pump heavily coded crypto-fascist feel-good agitprop into the eyeballs of millions of captive moviegoers—it’s that context that makes it so terribly funny (to me, at least) that, when we went to go see The Two Towers last month, before the previews, before the ads and the PSAs, while we were finding our seats and they were showing those slides of local advertisers and inane movie trivia, and playing over the speakers snippets of new releases (artists and labels and album titles carefully enunciated, so you can remember them when browsing the aisles at the Barnes & Noble after the show), and right after the latest smooth smooth R&B sensation, they announce their next song is from a Russian pop duo: “All the Things She Said,” by t.A.T.u. (The generic announcer spelled it out: Tee. Ay. Tee. You. Clearly. Carefully. Although I imagine most people will end up calling them “Tatu.”)
And I’m all mixed up
feeling cornered and rushed
They say it’s my fault but I want her so much
Wanna fly her away where the sun and rain
Come in over my face
wash away all the shame
When they stop and stare—don’t worry me
’Cause I’m feeling for her
what she’s feeling for me
I can try to pretend, I can try to forget
But it’s driving me mad, going out of my head!
Russian lolitapop lesbians in their panties. Pass it on.
—I should maybe provide some context.
Volkova Julia Olegovna and Katina Elena Sergeevna were low-level toilers in the Russian youthpop industry, a sort of second-string mirror of the Disney-Orlando nexus that gave us the boy bands and Brtineys of the late ’90s (like those third-world knock-offs of Guess jeans and Star Wars action figures ) when they were plucked from a cattle-call audition to star in the latest creation of former psychiatrist and advertising executive Ivan Shapovalov (a sort of second-string knock-off of Lou Pearlman ): t.A.T.u. (Also: Tatu, Tattoo, t.A.T.y., and Taty. Since the “oo” sound is figured by “y” in Cyrillic. Comes from tattoos, which are hip. Or an abbreviation of “Ta liubit etu,” a rough transliteration of a phrase meaning “She loves her” or “This girl loves that girl” [I’m assuming some sort of slang or dialect; this doesn’t sound much like what little I remember of my Russian would suggest. “Liubit,” yes (“Ya liubliyu tie,” while it looks awful in Romaji, is one of the more beautiful ways in the world to say “I love you.”—With a good dark rich accent, of course), but “ta”? “Etu”? (Brute?)].)
The basic shtick: Yulia and Lena perform in schoolgirl outfits—kilts, blouses, ties; also, incongruous electric blue kneepads—singing emphatically of freedom and escape and not taking it any more and, well, their love for each other. They usually strip off each other’s kilt and blouse and perform some of the more energetic numbers in matching white T-shirts and underwear. (Also, kneepads.) The highlight of each concert is a kiss, which has started riots. (Also: riots when the kiss has been banned.) They started the band when Yulia was 15 and Lena 16. Lena’s now 18; Yulia’s going to turn 17 in February. They’re the biggest pop act ever to come out of Eastern Europe. They’re angling to hit the American market bigtime. Their video is already in rotation at TRL. And music critics are lining up to lament the fall of Western civilization. (The music? Chirpy Europop. Better in Russian than English, but all cheap pop music is vastly improved by not understanding the lyrics, and singing in phonetic English flattens their voices, which are a bit better than not. Also: they “do” a Smiths cover on the American release. “How Soon is Now.” Just so’s you know.) —My God, they’ve even cropped up in blogtopia.
So I think it’s too late to stop them. If you were so inclined.
And you might well be so inclined: there’s a lot not to like here. This is rank exploitation, by any definition of the word. Should you doubt it: take a gander at the photos they’ve shot for Maxim and Jane, for a neat-enough bracketing of the current scope of the newsstand. —Or go for broke with the stuff done for the Russian Maxim. Go: read the reactions that first popped up on MetaFilter back last summer. They aren’t even “real” lesbians, after all. (Though the epistemological implications of that sentence are staggering, to say the least; one could have a field day writing papers on the warring meanings of the word “lesbian” as used within lifestyle squibs written about t.A.T.u.) —The kisses and cuddles are all an act, put on for the stage and the cameras; some denizens of the bulletin boards insist the two girls really hate each other. (Some denizens insist Elton John wants to adopt the girls. Grain of salt and all that.) The thing is, they’re cheerfully, maddeningly upfront about how it’s a put-on. Sort of. “Everybody thinks we are lesbians,” says Lena. “But we just love each other.” (Keeping in mind that this is translated from the Russian, of course, and that leering Ivan Shapovalov, that cigar-smoking svengali, is hovering in the background, controlling everything they say.) There’s also the boyfriends the tabloids write about and the husbands they want to have one of these days.
So: exploitation; objectification; a manufactured pop phenomenon taking on the trappings of marginalized sexuality for edgy thrills; frat boys giggling over photos of schoolgirl lesbians; nymphettes cavorting on stage in their underwear; a synthesized Europop cover of a Smiths song. Ivan Shapovalov is out to make a buck by any means necessary, and Interscope is more than willing to aid and abet him, and Matthew Yglesias should be ashamed for having been taken in.
But a funny thing happens with pop culture, betwixt cup and lip.
Robin Wood is a film critic who talks about the “incoherent text,” a text that says several conflicting things all at once—his seminal example being Taxi Driver, which at once condemns and celebrates Travis “You talkin’ to me?” Bickle, though he did extend the idea, asserting that the incoherent text was the dominant storytelling mode of ’70s cinema, “full of ideological contradictions and conflicts that reproduce existing social confusion and turmoil.” (And now that I’ve set all my pieces on the table, and am about to try to make a pretty shape out of them, can I just digress a moment to point out that I know about Robin Wood because of Buffy? That he’s a Freudian [and anti-American self-hating leftist socialist, to boot] critic with an abiding interest in themes of repression? That Buffy’s tagline this [it is to be hoped final] season is “From beneath you, it devours”? That the principal’s name [wait for it] is Robin Wood? And you remember how Jonathan was killed? And the principal was the guy who, all as-yet unexplained, dragged his body out of the basement of the school around back and buried it? So tell me, you smart people: why the fuck is a character named for a Freudian critic of horror films repressing the evidence of a horrific sacrifice by burying it? Hmm?) —Ahem.
Where was I?
Oh.
Okay: I don’t want to suggest that crypto-fascist PSAs or faux-lesbian lolitapop stars are deliberately, consciously incoherent texts; the good stuff, the art that is more than one thing, that embodies and takes up on all sides the struggles it’s about. But any time there’s a dissonance between what’s said and what’s read, you have incoherence. (Don’t take that too far; given that no one ever reads even the most didactic piece in the manner in which it was intended, one could then state that every text is incoherent. While this might prove a useful point in a cocktail party donnybrook, it renders the term itself useless, critically speaking.)
The dissonance between what the “Pass It On” PSA says on its surface and how its subtext works, and what we can infer of the intent behind it from the circumstances behind its creation and distribution, sets up an interesting enough incoherence that makes for a diverting field of critical play. (Some might call it hypocrisy and move on, but they’re no fun to play with.)
t.A.T.u. is set up by a leering svengali who cynically pulls every last trick out of the books, and outraged critics (who really ought to know better) are all too eager to fall into line and into their scripted roles, damning the whole concept to the horrible fate of selling millions of records. But to insist that the only way to read t.A.T.u. is as exploitation, as a man’s debased idea of teenaged lesbian love, as Europop tarted up with a tawdry underaged striptease, is to deny the readings of hundreds of thousands of online fans who have found something of value—whether it’s an expression of something they feel themselves (faked or not), or of something they know is in the world and want to see reflected in their music and pop culture, or something more basic, more primal (oh, hush): after all, teenagers directly and unapologetically expressing their sexuality (cleanly, simply, shorn of the cartoonish excesses of Britney and Christina—which are, after all, rather clearly not sex, not as we know it)—that’s a gloriously satisfying fuck you in an age which thinks calling students “sluts” is acceptable sex education. (Certainly, it’s the closest thing to genuine rock ’n’ roll rebellion I’ve seen these past few benighted years.)
“And if the young women of Tatu are genuine teen lesbians, their willingness to delve into matters of homosexuality on a public stage could very well be a source of some inspiration to the many other teenage lesbians out there.” Which is what The Star’s critic had to say. “If they’re merely fanciful eye candy for men who dream of a world where women never wear outerwear and routinely drop giggling to the ground for tickle fights, the high-stakes pop market has hit yet another new low.” —And that’s the rub, isn’t it? After all, why on earth can’t they be both? More or less. Here and there. At one and the same time.
It all depends on who’s reading it, and when, and how, and where. Also, why.
Incoherency.
(Yes, but what about how that rebellion is commodified, packaged, and sold? And how faux lesbianism aside, Shapovalov is trafficking in the images and ideas of girls in emotional distress, marginalized; defiant, yes, but unsure, uncertain, confused; above all, girls who need to be protected? —Oh, shut up. It’s getting late.)
Anyway. That’s why I laughed, when t.A.T.u. started chirping about “All the Things She Said,” before a Mormon PSA designed to gently nudge us all back into a kinder, gentler, less confusing, more coherent Golden Age. Mixed messages. Futility is sometimes terribly funny. (And then, of course, we saw part two of The Lord of the Rings: a story of the importance of mercy and the power of redemption set in a world profoundly and irrevocably split between good and evil.)
—At least, that’s part of why I laughed.
Too much woman (for a hen-pecked man).
“What’s the difference between you and Peter Tork?” asks Phil.
“Me?” says me.
“As an example. What’s the difference between you and Peter Tork?”
“I don’t know. What’s the difference?”
“You didn’t date Nico.”
I love it when Phil comes to visit.
We picked him up this morning for a late breakfast and a few hours of general bumming around. The plan, as laid out yesterday, had been to maybe do some record shopping.
“No,” he says, at breakfast. “Scratch that. I blew my budget yesterday. Unless…”
When Phil trails off like that, it’s an invitation to prod him for more. This is always worthwhile. “Yes, Phil?”
“Well, I’m trying to fill in some of the gaps in rock history between, oh, Char Vinnedge and, oh, Chrissy Hynde…”
Jenn and I grin at each other. “Who?” says Jenn. —She’s asking about Char Vinnedge, of course. I mean, if you don’t know from Chrissy Hynde, well, read this and go buy some albums and listen to them and then come back. Not to be snooty or anything. But.
Anyway: Char Vinnedge: as Phil tells it, back in 1964 the Beatles came to America. Vinnedge went to see them in concert and (like most screaming young girl fans) left with the burning desire to form her own band just like them. So she dragooned her sister and a couple of friends into playing the songs she wrote and they called themselves the Luv’d Ones and if they never quote broke out of the Michigan circuit back in the day, we can in this 21st century buy a run of their stuff off Sundazed Records and with the benefit of hindsight note how ahead of their time they were and how Vinnedge was a guitar god of the first water and if we go a bit overboard sometimes, assuring folks they weren’t the puppets of record company executives, they weren’t a marketing gimmick at all, why, that all-girl band really did play their instruments, well, it’s understandable. (We’re frequently reminded the Monkees could play their instruments, after all.) —But the Luv’d Ones are unusual. They were ahead of their time. They blazed a trail, back there in the mid ’60s, for all that it’s gone largely unnoticed.
Rock history, then, from Char Vinnedge to Chrissy Hynde.
“Well,” says Phil, “for one thing, there’s the Joy of Cooking.” And can we stop for a moment and reflect on how fucking cool it is to name an American roots-folk-rock band the Joy of Cooking? “They were formed in the late ’60s, early ’70s, when I think both of them were in their 30s. So they were doing rock songs about housewives being abandoned by their husbands and having nothing to do all day but drink, you know? But they weren’t an all-woman band. They had some guys who would come and play their instruments and keep their mouths shut. And anyway, they aren’t the ones I’m looking for. Not today…”
“Oh?” I say.
“Fanny,” says Phil. “Fanny and Birtha.”
“Fanny,” says Jenn.
“And Birtha,” says Phil. “I’ve got one album by Fanny, but it sucks. Still. It’s an all-woman heavy rock band from like 1971. And Birtha I think put out two albums, and everyone says they’re better than Fanny, but I’ve never seen either one anywhere. So I’m safe. I’m not going to find them. I mean, I blew my music budget yesterday…”
So we pay for breakfast and Jenn heads back to the house to work on the latest page of Dicebox and Phil and I stroll down Hawthorne to Excalibur, where he picks up a 1973 copy of The History of Underground Comics (out of print). “I blew my music budget,” he says. “Not my buying-neat-stuff-on-a-whim budget.” And on our stroll back to the car, we happened to pass Crossroads Music, and since Phil had already blown his music budget and anyway he was not going to find what he was looking for, he was safe, right?
Score: Birtha, by Birtha; Charity Ball and Rock and Roll Survivors, by Fanny; and a copy of Sandinista on vinyl, which isn’t one of the gaps Phil was trying to fill, but is pretty thin on the ground at this moment in history, so.
And so I got to hear Birtha, and I got to hear Fanny, and I think I agree: Birtha’s the better band. The opening track on the album—“Free Spirit”—gets this chugging beat underway that cries out for some Quentin Tarantinoid to dredge it up for a perfectly obscure moment of transcendent pop-culture swagger on film. And if Shele couldn’t quite do the Janis she was trying for (I think it was Shele), well, she hit close enough to not have any regrets, I think. —But I’m perverse: I think I like Fanny better. Of the two albums we heard, I’d be more likely to play Charity Ball than Birtha. More range—no, not quite; more ambition in what they were reaching for, even if they weren’t as successful in pulling it off. It was a more fun album, in some respects. But I want both albums in the house—it was like—okay. There’s the Replacements song, “Alex Chilton,” right, which is one of the best songs ever. And it’s about Alex Chilton, who was the prodigy kid behind Big Star, whom a lot of people who know from music talk about but you don’t hear all that much. So I finally go out and get the CD that has Big Star’s first two albums together, and I play it, and it was—but I need to digress again. Back in high school there was a cool radio station in Chicago whose call letters escape me. Michael Palin, looking for a quick hit of cash, did a couple of rather funny television commercials for them. In one of them, he was inexplicably holding a pizza while informing the viewer that this particular radio station did not play its music over and over and over again from some pre-programmed hit list. Variety, that was the key. A wide spectrum of songs. He looks down at the pizza, and sighs. Holds it up. “And to think,” he says, “This was once ‘Stairway to Heaven’.”
Maybe you had to be there. But: the point: Big Star is pretty squarely in the genre called Classic Rock; it’s what you’d hear on the radio in the upper 90s to the low 100s, I guess, and don’t those stations usually have a morning Zoo? “Aqualung” and Foreigner? You know? Big Star would in style and approach and general sound fit seamlessly into that format. —Except that it isn’t pizza.
And neither is Birtha. And neither is Fanny.
And now I want to hear some Luv’d Ones, too.
“They weren’t the first, though,” says Phil. As if one could ever point to anyone and say, that person, there, that’s the first. As if the category we’re talking about—women rock instrumentalists? Rock bands fronted by women who wanted to front their own rock band?—were anything more than a vague sketch. Fanny and Birtha weren’t the only points (we could maybe hunt around for whatever Bitch put down on tape somewhere) and of course Char Vinnedge wasn’t the first (if you wanted to get silly about it, you could point to maybe Bessie Smith).
But Phil wants to talk about somebody else. “Nope. There was somebody earlier…”
“Who, Phil?”
He grins. “Kathy Marshall, the Queen of the Surf Guitar. She was 13 years old. She played a lot with Eddie and the Showmen and blew Dick Dale off the stage. And guess how many recordings she has.”
I shrug. Phil holds up his thumb and his forefinger and makes a circle with them.
“There’s a couple of acetates somewhere of two songs written for her that nobody’s pressed,” he says. “That, and maybe six pages of photos of this 13-year-old girl in a cute little dress with a Fender Stratocaster in the Encyclopedia of Surf Guitar. She apparently lives in Orange County these days. Had a couple of kids. She’s what, 52?”
And then we talked about whether one can categorically state that Death is a character in every Coen Brothers movie (I can’t find it in The Big Lebowski and I’m not entirely certain about The Man Who Wasn’t There) and what you’d maybe put on a mix tape that begins with “Mink Car” and ends with “All Tomorrow’s Parties.”
“Hey,” says Phil. “What’s the difference between you and Peter Tork?”
I love it when he comes to visit.
Ludafisk.
If you give a man a Fisk, you’re an insufferable asshole, but if you teach a man to Fisk, you’ve created a whole new asshole.
I suppose this was the immediate impetus, but I’m shall we say reluctant to ascribe to the piece any recognition beyond that which it’s already gotten, and anyway, it’s merely a catalyst which has set off a chain reaction prompting me to try and synthesize some half-formed, vague ideas kicked loose by Barry’s discussion thread on pornography and some (very) recent reading on Russian magic and some speculatin’ on the nature of Gödel’s Theorem, which I’ll doubtless take as far out of context as poor old Schrödinger’s Cat . (Someone keep Professor Hawking away from the gun cabinet, please?)
Webster’s defines Fisking as—well, no, it doesn’t, not yet. But definitions are out there; most seem to cite the Volokh Conspiracy, so let’s do the same (by way of the Neo-libertarian News Portal):
The term refers to Robert Fisk, a journalist who wrote some rather foolish anti-war stuff, and who in particular wrote a story in which he (1) recounted how he was beaten by some anti-American Afghan refugees, and (2) thought they were morally right for doing so. Hence many pro-war blogs — most famously, InstaPundit—often use the term “Fisking” figuratively to mean a thorough and forceful verbal beating of an anti-war, possibly anti-American, commentator who has richly earned this figurative beating through his words. Good Fisking tends to be (or at least aim[s] to be) quite logical, and often quotes the other article in detail, interspersing criticisms with the original article’s text.
A thorough, forceful (if figurative) beating, then, that tends to or at least aims to be logical, administered to someone for something they said. And I like my humor neck-snappingly bleak, so it is with a small grim smile that I appreciate the aptness of taking one’s inspiration from an account of a thorough, forceful, illogical beating administered by an angry mob to someone erroneously assumed to be an agent or a symbol of that which is evil or bad or harmful—or at the very least of that which is pissing them off that particular day. —And, like Fisk, I am not without my sympathy. Even as I scratch my head at trying to parse the “logic” in refuting a citation of Gandhi’s life’s work by pointing out the man was assassinated. (“And look what happened to him.” “Oh! Jolly good show! ’it ’im again! ’it ’im again!”)
But I come not to Fisk a Fisking. —Not because I think Fisking is wrong, no. Not because I curl my lip in a disdainful sneer at figurative beatings, or recoil from the taste of blood on my rhetorical jackboots. Nor because I’m tired, and think it’s a futile endeavor, akin to Canute spitting into the oncoming tide—I am, and I do, but that’s not why I’m not Fisking a Fisking today. No.
It’s because it’s so damned easy.
My Christmas present to myself this year was The Bathhouse at Midnight, W.F. Ryan’s monumentally descriptive survey of (as the subtitle puts it) magic in Russia. In his introduction, he lays out the intended scope of the book (which, as noted, is monumental), discussing the problems one encounters when one sets out to write about the history of magic in Russia, and one must figure out what it is one means when one says “history,” “magic,” and “Russia.” How does one account for the differences between written and oral traditions—especially when the border is as permeable as it is in Russian history? What bits of all those many and varied regions stretching across 11 time zones that we (or some of us) have at one point or another called “Russia” do you include, and what do you leave out? What is magic? How do you know it when you see it? How can you differentiate it from assumptions of divine intervention, or folkloric tradition, or religious ceremony? (Do you need such differentiations in the first place?) —The most interesting of these definitional problems is figuring out what magic is, of course, or at least coming to a vague agreement as to the particulars of what we’ll call magic for the course of the book. Ryan never quite comes out and offers a firm definition of his own (beyond the general impression that he’ll be more inclusive than not—a fine and worthy goal, in this case), but he does summarize some interesting definitions along the way: Magic is an alternative to religion, the other side of its coin, a corruption of it, parasitic to religion, a deviation from spiritual or social norms, or (charitably) a semiotic system of oppositions to religion. That form of religious deviance whereby individual or social goals are sought by means alternate to those normally sanctioned by the dominant religious institution. Magic’s goals are overwhelmingly the expression of personal desires for sex, power, wealth, revenge, relief from sickness or protection from harm; religions usually have social, ethical, spiritual, and numinous aspects that transcend individual ambition. But as Ryan puts it (and I’ll quote directly now, rather than tightly paraphrase): “Most attempts to come to terms with the sameness or distinctness of concepts of magic and religion suffer to some extent… almost all can be made to fit the evidence at most points, and almost all break down at some points in specific cases.” Each definition is a useful enough tool in and of itself, for doing what it is it does, but each breaks down somewhere or another. The tool is to be used when needed and set aside when not; definitions should always (strive to) be descriptive, not prescriptive. The map is not the thing mapped. This is important to keep in mind, because, to quote Gábor Klaniczay (and to drag this digression back onto the ostensible topic of Fisking):
The wide array of theoretical explanatory tools and comparative sets stands in puzzling contrast to the ease with which each general proposition can be contradicted.
Call it Klaniczay’s Corollary to Gödel’s Theorem and keep it in mind; we’re off on another digression.
—Samuel Delany has written (most notably in “Politics of Paraliterary Criticism” in Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary, and thank God John still has my copy, or I’d start quoting at length and we’d never get out of here) that one of the central problems with sympathetic attempts to seriously critique paraliterary stuff like comics or SF is that they almost always start with an attempt to define the thing to be critiqued. Delany’s point is that genres are impossible to define, because they are social constructs, highly permeable categories highly fluid both from day to day and person to person. One can never delineate with any degree of precision the necessary and sufficient conditions that make SF SF, or comics comics; therefore, attempting to define them is futile from the start. Also, it lends a déclassé air of pseudo-science to one’s criticism, as if one has such a distrust of one’s material that one must appeal to a nominally neutral definition as an argument from authority. (Webster’s defines SF as…) So quit stinkin’ up the joint, kid; you’re embarrassing me.
Which is not to say I agree wholly with Delany, or that there’s never a need for definitional thinking. Criticism can be cheekily likened to one of those blind folks with the elephant discoursing at length about what it is they’ve experienced, the immense fan-like quality of it (or the peculiarly prehensile, ropey nature, or the way it calls to mind thick, gnarled tree trunks), how that quality compares with what Foucault says about how it’s really a wall, and the thoughts set in motion by contemplating the differences and similarities of the ways we each perceive this thing we call “elephant.” It helps in this circumstance to articulate what you think you’ve experienced, and how, and why; it helps to say right off the bat what it is you think an “elephant” is. —But to mistake this articulation for a definition is to mistake a description for a prescription, a tool for a law, the map for the thing mapped. It is to believe you’re really talking about a fan, a rope, a tree trunk, a wall, and to forget we’re all trying to figure out what this thing called “elephant” is.
There’s another reason to eschew the definition in criticism (or polemicism): because definitions are by nature imperfect, theoretical explanatory tools that can with puzzling ease be contradicted in one or another of their particulars, because for any given axiomatic system there exists propositions that are either undecidable, or the axiomatic system itself is incomplete, well, it’s all too easy to poke holes in definitions. And it’s all too easy to mistake poking a hole in a definition for refuting someone’s argument; to say, “The tool you made that house with is imperfect, therefore the house is not worth my consideration.” (Which, no, is not what Audre Lorde meant.) —And even if the debate is entered into in good fun and good faith, it’s all too easy to get sidetracked arguing about the words one chooses to define the thing instead of coming to grips with the thing itself.
And Fisking is little more than poking holes in someone else’s definitions.
Each statement of the anti-war, anti-American speech to be Fisked is parsed as if it were a definition: of the speakers’ credo, his or her intentions, worldview, as a statement of what anti-war anti-Americans in general think. Any contradiction that can then be pulled from what the Fisker takes to be that credo or worldview, or those intentions, or any action from anyone counted as anti-war or anti-American, is then held aloft, trumpeted, crowed over as a critical flaw in the thinking of one’s target. See? A contradiction! See? The tool is imperfect! See? We don’t have to pay any attention to the house! —When in doubt, point out that Gandhi practiced non-violence. So did Martin Luther King, Jr. And they both got assassinated! See? Quod erat fuckin’ demonstrandum.
’it ’im again.
When we talk about—anything, at length, our own experiences, what we think those mean, morally, ethically, politically, critically, when we talk about the camps of feminism or vampire slaying television programs or whether or not we should go to Iraq to demonstrate a commitment to something as ridiculous as peace and as ludicrous as respect for human life, over beers at the bar or in our blogs or in peer-reviewed journals, we are, in a sense, describing our piece of the elephant. Comparing it with what other people have said about that elephant. And we can keep in mind the shortcomings of definitions (or decide that what I’ve laid out here is utter hogwash), but we can’t help but speak in them; and whenever we try to define what it is we mean when we talk about the elephant (whether it’s the one in the living room or the one that just did the loop-the-loop under the big top), we can’t help but define ourselves. Debate based on respect does its best to reach past those definitions, to look from the tools to the thing being built with them, to leap from the map to the thing mapped. It may miss, it may disagree, it may get it wrong, but it makes the attempt. And this takes work. It doesn’t come easy. (That’s why it’s usually a mark of respect.)
On the other hand, anyone at all can trumpet a contradiction. Anyone at all can complain about a tool. Anyone at all can kick, can lay into someone with the boots and fists of an angry mob, can crack open a cheek with a thrown rock. —Whether they aimed it logically or not.
Anyone can Fisk.
And that’s why I don’t. It’s déclassé.
An interesting wrinkle,<br /> <em>or,</em> Again with the posse.
So Norah Vincent riffs on an old Jackson Browne lyric uncredited and Charles Pierce emails James Capozzolla pointing this out and Capozzolla decides to rib Vincent about it and posts Pierce’s email in its entirety with the headline or rather subhead “Norah Vincent: Jackson Browne Fan—And Plagiarist?” and now Vincent is tut-tutting over the outrageous slings and arrows that are let fly at established Fourth Estaters from the unwashed, the unpoliced, the unshackled. (Yes, I know blogtopia is self-policed by a fairly neat and effective smart-mob mechanism. But “self-washed, self-policed, self-shackled” just doesn’t have the same ring.)
—For the record, and not that anyone asked: I don’t think what Vincent did to Jackson Browne was plagiarism. Then, I live for the oddball allusion and the kick that the echo of a half-remembered snippet of something else can add to a piece. Nothing new under the sun and Fair Use and Devil take the hindmost or hang the consequences or whatever. Capozzolla was if a wee bit disingenuous still quite right to put that question mark after “Plagiarist?” But! Were someone to tag me for, oh, I dunno, stealing a parenthetical aside from Delany (it was just sitting there, honest, so plump and digressive), well, I’d cheerfully own up to it. And on we go to the next. —Not obsessively stew over it with conflicting rationales for a couple of days and then drag it back into the spotlight when online Wall Street Journal content is successfully held liable for libel in Australia. Dirty pool, that is, and we’re not even taking into account her refusal thus far to name those she accuses of the smearage.
So Capozzolla is right to take the incident apart in a fine and mighty dudgeon, and Vincent’s editor would do well to maybe take his phone calls on the matter.
(Psst. Mr. Capozzolla? Not to get all pedantic or nothin’, but it’s never “the hoi polloi.” Just “hoi polloi.” Verb. sap. and all. Not that anyone asked. But.)
Fort Disconnect.
“Eighty-seven thousand dollars?” says Valerie. She has the office next door and two kids and a house out over the hills and a husband who also works full-time. She’s talking about this. (Really, it’s $87,510. If you live in Virginia, the state government will pick up an additional $3,937.95 in sales tax. There’s no shipping and handling, but it’ll take 12 weeks or so to make arrangements with the artisan to have it built on your property. So you’ve pretty much missed the holiday deadline, if you were hoping otherwise.) And before we get too much further, I should probably make it clear that I have nothing against said artisan or people who have the wherewithal to pay $2,870 for a credenza or $8,980 for a trundle bed or $15,492.50 for a toy Range Rover or even people who spend more than my good friend Amy blew on a house for a backyard fort. (Amy works full-time for the county. Her housemate and swiggee is getting a law practice off the ground. No kids, but two cats, and we all know how cats are.) And I don’t have anything against the people who are trying to make a buck off selling the most extraordinary children’s furnishings in the world. (Aside from perhaps a lingering resentment at yet another attempt to provide “an unparalleled on-line shopping experience.”) —I’m as eat-the-rich as the next guy, but let’s face it: when you’re projecting $3 million in annual sales, you’re not moving too many toy Range Rovers or backyard fortilaces or probably not even $2,100 Silver Stream prams. Those are showpieces, wowpieces, beautiful chimeræ that you can order, yeah, sure, but are really just there to build buzz and get the punters in the door, lending a burnish of class and elegance (with a soupçon of crass consumerism) so they feel a sympathetic shiver as they pony up for $136 lamps and $30 backpacks and $60 rugs. So: no potshots at Posh Tots.
I have an altogether other purpose.
Go back to Posh Tot’s front page and note with what pride they spotlight the items ordered through them that grace the baby nook of Rachel and Ross’s apartment on Friends. The Black Toile Adult Glider, the Classic Changing Chest, the Retro Crib, the Silver Cross Ascot Stroller, the (handpainted) Princess Wallhanging, the Sir Lance-a-Trot, Jr. Ruminate for a moment on this: an untenured professor of pæleontology and a middle manager in purchasing for a large clothing concern—or is she still with Ralph Lauren? I don’t follow the show that religiously—these two middle class low-rent bobos are spending $3,598 on six classy, high-ticket items for baby Emma. (Even with the rent on their spacious West Village apartment.)
I’m a project manager for a small legal database firm these days (apparently, I’m also something of a paralegal now, or something); I also freelance as a designer and a writer (I swear, Brett, I’m working on it! Honest!). The Spouse is in addition to being a world-renowned cartoonist (and you know what that pays) is a production designer for an industrial design firm. We have two cats and too much house. We’re middle class low-rent bobos, and when people ask us these days when we’re going to have a kid we kind of shrug and say well, we’re no longer trying not to. We’re not taking temperatures and eyeing calendars and scheduling nookie, but we’ve given it some thought and crunched some numbers and shrugged and said we can do it, if. It won’t be a drunken accident that catches us utterly by surprise and totally throws our lives and finances out of whack for the entertainment of millions of viewers each week.
Even so, I gotta tell you: no way in hell can we even begin to think of dropping $3,598 on a stroller and a rocking horse and a toile glider and a crib and a changing chest and a handpainted original one-of-a-kind wallhanging.
(Of course, Rachel is in purchasing. Maybe she cut a deal.)
We live much better on TV and in the movies than we do in real life. Delany made a point somewhere or other that I’d quote if I hadn’t loaned my copy of Shorter Views to John that almost all forms of storytelling deriving from the 19th century European tradition (I’m on a limb on that on; I’m remembering the vague boundaries of the class he referred to, and not how he articulated it) take great if unconscious pains to make the protagonist’s class and level of income at least vaguely clear within the first few pages. (Try it out yourself: pick up a book in any genre and watch for the telltale clues. It’s interesting. Now try to imagine telling a story that doesn’t.) —In television, and in the movies, it’s more insidious; the narrative clues of job and responsibility and finances are divorced from their visual cues, dissolved in a general haze of meticulous art direction and product placement. (Think of all the offices on TV workplace sitcoms, which look like the net bubble never burst with their exposed brickwork and Aeron chairs and iMacs—hell, remember the G4 Cube? There were more of those on TV shows than ever actually got sold, I think.) It’s a false image, an eidolon, a fevre dream that can’t stand up to the real: a haze of upper middle class accoutrements with no clear accounting of how they were acquired (we got that easy chair and the sleeper sofa as an apartment warming gift from Jenn’s mother, who anyway wanted somewhere to sleep when she visited us; those bookshelves—the two black ones we bought on sale at Office Depot, but the other two we got in the “divorce” from the household, after carting them around Massachusetts and across the country; the TV set is almost 20 years old; the Fiestaware we registered for our wedding, and Jenn’s grandmother got us most of it; the masks there on the wall were a gift from my parents; the brass table was $20 at a yardsale, helluva find); workplace comedies filled with people whose home lives we never see—where they spend the money they make, or how (or how much), though they always have choice clothes; utter disconnections between the jobs they nominally hold and the wacky situations their impulsive purchases land them in (that untenured professor of pæleontology snapping up an apothecary’s table at Pottery Barn, say). It’s a different world, a disjointed world, and when a show takes a step out of it—even a tiny one—it’s news, it’s a hook, it’s Roseanne or Drew Carey and not much else. (Okay. Malcolm in the Middle.)
But there’s reasons for this and there’s escapism and people aren’t blind sheep working themselves into an early grave for material comforts that will never be enough—they are, but that’s not really where I’m trying to go with this, either, any more than the eat the rich bit. It’s that image of another world, it’s the glass screen between them that I want you to keep in mind. Because when the folks inside the Beltway say that Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) is from another world, I think it’s because they’re in the mediated one. The one where you can buy apothecary’s tables on a whim and $600 bed linens for your 6-year-old daughter, no sweat. It’s not so much thinking that everyone is rich as it is having trouble imagining what not being rich looks like and feels like. Those $12,000 per annum lucky duckies have everything they could ever need, right? They look so happy on TV…
And Kaptur, of course, is from ours. We are the other world.
(Oh, hell. What am I saying? Of course it’s fucking obscene to spend $87,000 on a backyard fort. Jesus. Eighty-seven thousand dollars. Off with their heads.)
Kid detectives. Also, how magic works. (Really.)
Jenn wasn’t feeling well, so I went to Johnzo and Victoria’s by myself. And since for a variety of reasons I wasn’t feeling like engaging in another round of sartorial combat with Mr. Snead (among them: I’d been painting a bathroom and trying to figure out how to build a wall all day; I didn’t feel like a tie; and anyway, I’d just worn my green three-piece to an office party the night before), I decided to dress down: jeans, white shirt, yellow sweater, black Chuck Taylors. Encyclopedia Brown, I decided, looking at myself in the mirror. Twenty years later, that is, and mumblety-mumble pounds heavier, and while I’d like to imagine ol’ Leroy’d grow up to look devilish in the right light with a dapper Van Dyke, the indications are not favorable. —Also, I don’t wear glasses.
Anyway, because I was thinking of myself as Encyclopedia Brown, twenty years later, the pear brandy sipped from a coffee cup seemed that much the sweeter, somehow. The Veggie Booty that much the spicier. It was with an edgy, naughty glee that I larded my sociopolitical rants with unexpectedly crude sexualized metaphor. (Though I rather imagine ol’ Leroy’d ascribe to more of a get-by-on-your-own-merits winner-take-all I-got-mine-screw-you zero-sum libertarianism, rather than [say] tendencies toward Bakuninist anarcho-syndicalism, but one can muse. Regardless, he’d be more willing than I was to cut George Will some slack. Because of the whole baseball thing.) And there was something deliciously wicked about nipping out to score some cloves, even if they were filtertips, and even if it did take me three matches to get one of the damn things lit. —I palmed the matches all the way back to the party, where I threw them tidily away in a dumpster. My two Chuck Taylors, it seems, were still goody.
But what the whole Encyclopedia Brown thing ended up putting me in mind of was Josie.
Josie Has a Secret is maybe my favorite thing over at Kristen Brennan’s shrine to go-go late ’90s hyperactive possibilities. It’s squarely in the tradition of the kid detective, with the puzzle in each chapter whose secrets are revealed at the ever-important back of the book. But unlike Encyclopedia Brown and Sally Kimball, the Dragnet of the kid detective set, Josie and Darla kick it up a little on the amoral, wicked side—more like the Great Brain, say (and those with a better memory for Fitzgerald’s books than me are hereby invited to open up the Wikipedia entry). —Josie and Darla are, after all, not detectives, but magicians (Penn & Teller, that is, and not Harry & Hermione). That’s what makes the book special.
For one thing—toying with magic whether staged or otherwise (?) takes us one big step closer to the thing detective fiction is “really” about. For another, staging the puzzles in each chapter around classic magic tricks that are revealed in the back of the book encourages critical thinking in a more (I think) successful way than pummelling kids through trivia (Encyclopedia Brown knows there’s no Q on the telephone dial, and that the Confederates would never have called it the First Battle of Bull Run until after the Second)—you’re learning the bare bones of pranks you can pull on your friends, after all.
But most importantly: Josie manages to pull off its debunkeries with grace and charm, never stooping to the acidly dismissive sarcasm that Randi and his ilk are all-too prone to fall prey to. It’s a heartening display of intelligence and generosity of spirit in a field that sees all too little of either. (Where the fuck are the sequels, already?)
—Plus, illustrations by Kris Dresen. How can you lose?
So now I’m rifling through old memories of long-since-lost books. Emil and the Detectives, of course, though I’m really thinking of the book I always called Emil and the Detectives but which wasn’t—it was German or Dutch or (just maybe) French, and I was reading an English translation (you read weird books when you’re a kid in Iran), and this book’s shtick was that each puzzle chapter had a full-page illustration teeming with Purloined Waldo-esque detail that hid the solution in plain sight. (Anyone?) —There were also some books about bear spies; I want to say they had something to do with Bearsylvania, but Google just brings up teddy bear hobbyist sites (when I go looking for 25-year-old kids’ books, yes yes). Also: did Gahan Wilson illustrate some books about Loonies who lived on the Moon? With a Space Navy? Or was it someone else who just drew like Wilson? Or am I having another flashback? And there’s a couple of books on the tip of the tongue about a kid inventor—more a step sideways from kid detective than a step closer in, I think—but he invented all sorts of wacky stuff, like a flying bicycle, or at least something he could use to make a bicycle fly. I’m remembering this haunting nighttime flight home over moonlit countryside on a bicycle, and a midnight picnic of sandwiches in a field in the middle of nowhere… Also, I think he tried to make his own soda pop once and instead derived a frictionless lubricant. (Anyone?)
(What? Magic? How it works? Oh. Right. Forget Crowley; read chapter three of Josie. Right there in one place is everything you’d ever need to know about magic—“magickal” or otherwise.)
Two pennies for Potter.
So Chris Suellentrop slags Harry Potter a couple-three weeks ago, and blogging’s still in a tizzy. Lessee: Kieran Healy sorta found it interesting; Glenn Reynolds disagreed, and said Potter and George W. have a lot in common; Mark Kleiman rather effectively disagreed with Suellentrop, Healy, and Reynolds, though Healy disagreed with aspects of Kleiman’s disagreement; Barry Deutsch brought up the overarching subtext (or is that too mixed a turn of phrase?) of egalitarianism and free will versus the predetermination of one’s heritage that runs through the books; Sisyphus Shrugged thought Rowling’s pretty much put paid to the notion of predetermination; Deutsch said no, she hasn’t, dammit; Sisyphus challenged him to a duel; and Kevin Raybould thought a) the original piece was satire and b) at the expense of George W., thereby managing the neat trick of agreeing with both Suellentrop and Reynolds, albeit snarkily, and Kleiman agreed with Raybould.
Got all that?
Good.
Me, I think Suellentrop’s bit was a lightweight joke tossed off on a coffee break and, as is usual with professionally generated content on the web these days, not worthy of the amateur discussions it’s arguably sparked. Since I’m not an habitué of Slate (it crashes Mozilla 1.1 on my iBook without fail—funny, that), I first heard about it via a discussion over on Plastic, which focussed (fruitlessly, for the most part) on who’s the better moral agent, Harry Potter or Frodo (who’s stronger: Superman or the Hulk?), with a soupçon of the usual anti-intellectual refrain: “Why do all these critics have to spoil stuff by reeeeeading it? It’s just a freakin’ kids’ book!” But the Plastic discussion did call to my attention this older Slate piece, which insists the Harry Potter books are a repudiation of Thatcherism (and is as cheeky as Suellentrop’s, since it cites this essay in support—which posits Potter as a [Harold Macmillan and Iain McLeod] Tory, and Draco Malfoy as [delightfully] Harry Flashman); it also brought up this book, which argues that the Potter books glorify “that apex of class privilege, the English public school.” (Given that—as a Yank—most of my notions of English public schools involve books in which characters say things like “But just turn over for a moment, Jimmy, and let us have a look at your bottom. I’ve rather a fancy for nice bottoms,” this line of argument threatens rather rapidly to end up in places I don’t want to go.)
I just want to add two points to the Potter hootenanny: the first being something Michael Chabon said, in a Salon interview about his (fantastic) new book, Summerland, which I think gets at the resentment of Harry that simmers under Suellentrop’s fluff piece, and those who take it more seriously than not, what with the moral luck and the free will and the predestination and all. I’ll snip the relevant passage and exercise my Fair Usage rights:
I have a lot of respect for what J.K. Rowling’s done in her books. They’re very pleasurable and enjoyable, but if I had a criticism of them it would be that Harry is too good and too talented too quickly and seems to take to the idea that he’s the special one too easily. It’s always about Harry winning. That’s what he does again and again, and if he ever gets into trouble it’s not because he’s weak or ineffectual and not up to the task, it’s because his opponents are so evil, or someone betrays him so he doesn’t stand a chance. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t imagine that character because it’s not enough my own experience of childhood.
Would Harry be more likeable (or less prone to prompt such a backlash) if he were weaker? If he were to fuck up once in a while? Are his troubles never the result of his own failing, primarily? Are there always mitigating rationales and extenuating circumstances in the narrative to excuse him from (or at least temper his) self-loathing? —I don’t think the answer’s a simple, binary yes-or-no, and I think Potter-philes and -phobes could each split hairs six ways from Sunday to prove the other’s full of fewmets, but I myself am going to come provisionally down on the side of yes, but. (I still like the kid. And the books. A lot. The movies, not so much. But.)
That said, let’s wipe Harry and blood and moral luck and free will off the table for a minute. There’s a character whose absence from any discussion of Rowling’s morality is sorely felt; who must be given his due if we’re to get a handle on the bigger picture in which these choices (or predestined events) occur. I’m speaking, of course, of Severus Snape. (Sisyphus Shrugged has alluded to theories regarding the parallels between Snape and Harry; I for one can’t wait to hear them.)
Snape, then.
Oh, he’s an asshole, all right. (You can hear it in his very name: Ssssseverus Sssssnape.) He’s mean and he’s rude and he’s spiteful and unjust, and he unfairly favors the students of his own house over the others. He plays favorites and abuses his power to punish those he dislikes and he holds a baseless, irrational grudge against Harry because of a long-ago schoolboy rivalry. Snape is a Slytherin, through and through; he’d never quibble over the means to his ends, and God only knows what he did to earn that Dark Mark on his forearm.
Of course, one could as easily say he merely protects his charges from the perhaps justified but nonetheless pernicious prejudices of other houses, and that when his Slytherins disappoint him, he can be has dangerously spiteful to them as he is to Our Heroes; one could observe that Professor McGonagall is similarly unfair in the protection and advancement of her Gryffindors—if not in the same fashion, or degree, well, the crime’s still something both are guilty of.
But all this smacks of moral relativism—which, I understand, is treason in this time of war.
So what are Snape’s ends, towards which he will use any means? (Mr. Vidal wishes to remind us that “there are no ends, only means.” Mr. Vidal is being a troublemaker again—could someone kindly show him the door?) —There is in this Potterverse a fully functioning society of wizards that allows them to live their lives, exercise their powers, explore their world, interact with each other to shape and mold that society, and pass along what they’ve learned to the next generation, with safeguards in place to keep from distressing the (overwhelming) majority of lumpen Muggles (“freaking the mundanes,” as we put it in college). That society is facing a threat it only barely withstood once before: the magical power and revolutionary ideas of one Voldemort, née Tom Malvolo Riddle, who is not content to keep the wizarding world safe from Muggles’ prying eyes, but would, instead, subjugate the Muggle world to the power of the few but mighty wizards—under his enlightened rule, of course. Standing against this threat? Folks like Dumbeldore, McGonagall, Hagrid, Sirius Black—and Snape.
They have their disagreements. They argue, Snape and Sirius and Dumbeldore, and even fight over where this society of wizards should be going, and what exactly they ought to be passing on to the next generation (and how)—but they all recognize the greater good of that society; they all understand the need to maintain some sort of framework within which they can tussle over their differences.
But we haven’t really dealt with the moral relativism. After all, the argument could be made that this is merely a struggle between two ruling paradigms; over whose vision of the wizarding society will reign supreme. The only reason to like Snape by this logic is because his proximate ends—maintaining the status quo—happen to synch up with those of our nominal heroes: the pampered jock, undeserving beneficiary of dollops of moral luck, his assorted sidekicks and hangers-on, and the white-bearded patriarch sitting at this very apex of class privilege. The characters the writer wants us to like. Snape—pallid, mean, spiteful, unjust Snape—merely shines, a little, in their reflected flattering light; this is no more a sound moral basis for judgement than watery tarts handing out swords.
Luckily, John Rawls is there in the clench.
The wizarding society, as we’ve seen, is unfair. It’s unjust. You can cheat and exploit others and do the wrong thing and still get ahead (in fact, sometimes it seems you must do so, a little, to advance at all). It’s far from perfect. It is, in fact, ripe for some sort of revolution—which is just what Voldemort is offering. But: I can’t think of anyone sane who could from Rawls’s original position choose Voldemort’s ideal over the wizarding world as it is, warts and all. Voldemort is trying to destroy that world—the framework within which the others have their disagreements—but he has nothing more waiting to replace it than “Full bloods only!” and “Loyalty to me!” He doesn’t even bother to cloak his ideology in Marxist world-saving rhetoric or distract the masses with stunningly stage-managed rallies; the best he can do is some lame-ass Skull-and-Crossbones sheets-in-the-graveyard games. Initiation ceremonies for the frat-boy elite. Lucius Malfoy and Wormtail and the other Death Eaters aren’t out to save the world, or make it a better place; they’re out for their own aggrandizement and profit. —Dumbeldore and McGonagall and Hagrid and Sirius and even, young as they are, Harry and Hermione and Ron, all see however dimly that greater good. They’ve all at least given some thought to that original position, if not quite in those terms, and in their own halting, stumbling ways, are working towards their own idea of a better world for all, or most, or at least a goodly chunk. And Snape, though he might have been tempted by Voldemort in the past, sees that greater good as well. And is doing some dicedly dangerous stuff to fight for it.
(Draco? Draco Malfoy? Well, he’s still young. Kids have a hard time seeing past themselves and their immediate circumstances; coming to recognize something like that original position—if not necessarily in those terms—is a pretty good benchmark for growing up. Harry’s starting to; Draco hasn’t yet, and that’s the big difference between the two of them, I think. There’s still time for Draco. Not that I have high hopes.)
Geeze. Ramble much? I could just as easily have pointed out that Snape fulfills the role of the Honorable Villain: you know, in the comic books, when Spidey has to team up with Doc Oc so their powers combined might defeat the truly alien evil that threatens their status quo, that daily round of relatively inconsequential fisticuffs and snappy banter. “We’ve got to work together to defeat it!” “Make no mistake, Spider-fool. This changes nothing between us. We are still mortal foes!” —Actually, that’s a lousy example. But you get my meaning. Right?
And if that’s not enough, we could go back to Snape’s protective instinct, and the care he takes of his Slytherin charges, the bulwark he presents against the slings and arrows of prejudicial others—including the author, Rowling herself, who insists on describing all Slytherins as thuggish and ugly and mean, shows their every action in the worst possible light, and gives them names like Millicent Bulstrode and Severus Snape and Crabbe and Goyle and Draco frickin’ Malfoy. It’s hard not to feel at least some grudging admiration for a character willing to stand up to his own author, and who does so with such panache that she herself can’t help but recognize how perversely honorable—how queerly cool—he really is.
Aw, heck. Maybe it’s just I have a thing for redemption stories; I’m a sucker for a guy with dark hooded eyes wrestling his own worst instincts on an ill-fated quest to make some sort of amends. We don’t know even now if he’ll pull it off.
But it’s going to be one hell of a show.
—Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Alan Rickman’s a hottie.
There are two kinds of books in this world.
So I find this book on the science fiction shelves of a middlin’ bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina, and my interest is immediately piqued. (Look at the cover. Does that look like science fiction to you?) (And yes: that sort of snap judgment does indeed kick over a can of worms. Nasty, divisive business, those genres. But: think of “science fiction” less as a much-maligned, ghettoized idiom whose ability to address the human condition with a much wider than usual array of metaphor and imagery has been grotesquely overlooked by narrow-minded Philistines, and more as a commercial classification which overworked booksellers use to quickly categorize product for easy sales—think of it like that, and you’ll see what I mean when I say a book like this on those shelves in a store like that is going to catch your eye.) (I mean, geeze, next thing you know you’ll be putting Canopus in Argos in between Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser and Harpy’s Flight.) (Actually, Powell’s shelves half of Canopus in Literature and half in Science Fiction/Fantasy. Which doubles your chances of stumbling across it, I guess, but makes it a bit difficult to pick up the whole set at one go.)
Where was I?
Ah, yes. Saw this book a year ago, finally just got around to picking it up, have now begun reading it, pure curiosity and no real expectations (though Anthony Burgess does go on about how it’s Scotland’s shattering work of fiction in the modern idiom), so it wasn’t until I got to this passage—
Lanark did not wish to be an artist but he felt increasingly the need to do some kind of work, and a writer needed only pen and paper to begin. Also he knew something about writing, for when wandering the city he had visited public libraries and read enough stories to know there were two kinds. One kind was a sort of written cinema, with plenty of action and hardly any thought. The other kind was about clever unhappy people, often authors themselves, who thought a lot but didn’t do very much. Lanark supposed a good author was more likely to write the second kind of book.
—that I smiled to myself and settled in; I’m in good hands with this one. (It gets rather rapidly weird and strange. Science fiction? No. But a dark fantasy, thus far. In the modern idiom, of course.)
It’s true. He do read wierd stuff (sic).
Steve Lieber cuts a magisterial figure in a silk dressing gown and a pair of pinstriped trousers from a bespoke morning suit. He’s bracketed top to bottom by flawless white spats and a leopard-skin fez, that indispensible Excelsior! of sartorial whimsy. “Come in, come in!” he booms, stirring a cup of coffee. “May I offer you anything? Coffee? Port? A cigar?”
“Oh, no,” I demur, stepping into the airy chambers of Mercury Studios as one of the black-clad assistants takes my jacket. (Yes, it’s a hot summer here in Portland. But one doesn’t make points with Mr. Steve Lieber by dressing down.) “I’m fine.”
“Are you certain? They’re Cuban…”
“Couldn’t possibly.”
“Well then. What can I do for you, Mister, ah—I’m dreadfully sorry—”
Oh, how charming! As if it’s his fault he doesn’t remember nobodies like me. “Kip Manley, sir. Freelance critic of the paraliterary. I wanted to speak to you about your upcoming column, for, ah—” And here was a dicey dilemma. How to refer to the (rather rudely named) site without risking a disruption of our delicate decorum? Luckily, discretion was close to hand with a deft dodge: “Kevin Smith’s movie and pop-culture periodical?”
“Ah, that rascally World Wide Web site, Movie Poop Shoot dot com,” said Lieber, his voice and genial smile suggesting that, while its declassé taste was not an habitual one on his tongue, he nonetheless revelled genteely in the Rabelaisian wit of this misbegotten moniker. He continued to stir his coffee. “An argosy of acerbic articulations on (and analyses of) the arcana of that glorious business we call genre entertainment. How wonderful that a movie’s nebulous marketing scheme could, like Pygmalion’s statue or Frankenstein’s monster, take on a life of its own and go forth, into the world, to do what good it can. And how pleased I am to be able to steer its course with my few humble suggestions.” His spoon clinks against the cup, a merry sound against the industrious hullaballoo of the studio all about us: I can just make out shy, retiring Paul Guinan before he ducks back into the echoing gut of a hollowed-out 1887 knock-off of a vintage Reade Electric Man, brought it at no little expense for vital artistic reference; that bearded man taking tea beneath the windows with Ron Randall is, yes, George Lucas, here I believe to confer on the finer points of Imperial starship chandlery for the forthcoming third and final film (I try not to gawk); and in yonder corner—but no: I was sworn to secrecy as to the nature of the project being got up to there, and its participants, else I’d drop such hints as would make the whole comics industry sit up and slaver. —And this is a quiet day at Mercury.
“At any rate,” says Lieber, “if you’d care to step over to my workspace…” Stirring his coffee, he leads me to a sunlit corner laid with a hand-knotted Persian rug, defined by a pigeon-holed secretary desk to one side (quaintly archaic, its miniature writing-surface burdened with several precariously balanced stacks of leather bound books and brightly colored comics periodicals) and a sleekly modern, skeletal drawing table to the other (an ebony-and-teak tabouret, its dozens of drawers neatly shut, stands half under it like a faithful hound). A work table defines the third side, and it is here that Lieber pauses, looking a moment at the work of two black-clad assistants upon a sheet of bristol board, painted with black ink and strapped to a restraining frame. One of the assistants holds a bedraggled toothbrush, stiff with white paint, and shakes it at the board as if to admonish it for some imagined slight. “If you would,” says Lieber, holding out one hand and shaking back his rakishly unfastened French cuff. The assistant gladly surrenders the brush. “I think you’ll find,” says Lieber, holding the brush bristle-up and then whipping it with a subtle twist of his wrist, “that with white on black, a modified Wronski flip results in a more pleasingly scattered splatter. It’s just the thing for starfields—if a bit tiring for explosions. Here. Try it yourself.” The assistant takes up the brush again, and performs quite adequately. Lieber beams. “Now then,” he says, stirring his coffee. “Where were we?”
I should, perhaps, take this opportunity to steer the conversation back to our ostensible topic, but I’m distracted by the tantalizing mound of books. “Are these for upcoming projects?” I ask, picking up a much-loved copy of Eco’s Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language.
“Ah. I’ll be reading the chapter on symbol closely as part of my terminally in-progress response to McCloud’s Understanding Comics. While the semiotic dialect between signifier and signed is not the same thing as the closure of which McCloud speaks, there’s nonetheless a mischievous transference at play into which I wish to delve more fully. Plus,” he purses his lips, stirring his coffee, “there’s Dylan Horrocks’s piercingly trenchant Journal essay to take into consideration.” He sighs, stirring his coffee. “I’m afraid at this rate it shall be posthumously published, if ever.”
“And this?” I say, of a trade paperback edition of Anne Hollander’s Sex and Suits.
“Ah,” he sighs. “Don’t get me wrong. Wonderful book. But she has little to say on the subject of rep ties, about which I shall be doodling a little piece for Gentlemen’s Quarterly. I’m afraid the definitive history has yet to be written… Oh, and the Carter there—have you read Carter?”
“No,” I allow, momentarily spell-bound by the bizarre image on the cover, as provocative as the title: The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman.
“You must read Angela Carter. At any rate—and though it’s not officially hush-hush, I nonetheless really shouldn’t tell you—”
I perk up. He stirs his coffee a moment, drawing it out. Smiling.
“I’ve tentatively agreed to adapt that book for a publisher who as yet must remain nameless.”
“Excellent!” I cry, and then the next book in the stack catches my attention. “But Sex and Rockets?” I say, holding up the luridly jacketed hardcover. “Surely this is a bit lowbrow?”
“Not at all,” he says. “Work-product. It is the definitive biography of John Parsons, who made a brief appearance in the most recent issue of Alan Moore’s Promethea. I’m curious as to Parsons’ continued cachet as a black magician of some note when it’s quite clear from his own writings he wasn’t a terribly good one. A point I intend to make in my mostly favorable survey of the occultic history underlying that marvelous comic book—in an upcoming edition of my column, which is, I think, why you came to see me today?”
Indeed. Playtime is over. I pull out my notebook to begin the formal interview as he lifts his spoon from the coffee cup—it’s a delicate green cup, fragmented with delicate black lines, as if sketching an incipient fracture; Lieber will, in a moment, explain that it is a priceless example of the Japanese soma-yaki style. But at this moment he lifts the cup to his lips and sips. “Ah,” he says, smiling. “Just right.”
—But! Honesty compells me to admit that I have taken some few liberties with the truth. The “Wronski,” after all, is a quidditch maneuver, and those who know me will recognize that I loaned Mr. Lieber my own prized leopard-skin fez. As for the rest of it: oh, heck. Go read his damn column yourself and find out. It’s a hoot and a half, and if he isn’t really tackling obscure rocket-scientist magicians and surrealist erotomanic picaresques, well, he is writing about comics about bees and about non-linear road trip poetry and about skin-mites that live on Charles Darwin’s head, so I wasn’t too far off. Was I?
Seeing doppel.
He smokes, of course, because I let him. Doesn’t mean I’ll let him have the good stuff. Silk Cut, or Gauloises, maybe. Harsh and bitter and nasty. I glare at him through the haze.
“Yeah?” he says.
“I’m getting tired of it.”
“What?” he says. “The lies? The deception?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“So what are you going to do?”
Christ, I don’t think I’d ever realized how acerbic he comes off, sometimes. How sarcastic. Cocksure and arrogant. —Is his voice sliding ever eastward, over the Atlantic? Is mine getting more Southern? “You know I’m probably not going to do anything about it.”
“Except bitch at me.”
“Why not? What else have I got to do around here?”
“Nobody’s stopping you from getting anything done.”
“You are!”
“And whose fault is that?” He smiles. We both have beards, naturally enough, but they do different things to our smiles. His is unpleasant. (I am told by those in a position to know that mine is more, shall we say, goofy.)
“Elias,” though, is what I say next. Struck by a sudden—insight?
“Elias,” he says. Skeptical. “Your last and least pathetic attempt at creating a truly evil person.”
“That’s who you’re starting to remind me of in these little chats.”
“Please,” he says. “Elias was adolescent transference at best; irresponsibly inept psycho-social lashing out. —Or did you miss the significance of how the other character you played then was such a monstrous suck-up?”
“Don’t try to psychoanalyze me,” I snap. (I honestly had missed it. Till now.)
“You and I,” he says, grinding out his cigarette, “are playing for altogether different—and higher—stakes. On a considerably more public stage.”
I have to laugh at that.
“It’s getting more public all the time,” he says, coolly, shaking out a fresh cigarette.
“For you, maybe. A little.”
“What’s good for me,” he says, sighing, “is good for you.”
“And what’s good for General Motors is good for America.”
And that’s when he laughs. “Pretty much. But it was me that got you into Dante’s for free that night.”
“Which was such an effort for you, I’m sure.”
“Did I get what I wanted in return? I don’t remember ever seeing that write-up…”
“You know that wasn’t my fault.”
“Whichever. But it is both of us being spoken about. Elsewhere. Sometimes in the same breath.” That grin again. “You nearly had a heart attack when you stumbled over that one.”
“You exaggerate.”
“Perhaps. Nonetheless: you are, I think, afraid. Of what? Paraliterature is paraliterature.”
“It’s not that simple,” I say. “It’s hardly that simple.”
“It sounds to me like someone needs to remember the lesson of the Mark of Cain.”
“And emet, yes, yes. Thank you for showing me of the error of my ways.”
He smiles, a little—pleasantly—and nods appreciatively. “Emeth. But that was a good idea of yours.”
I frown. “I’d thought you were the one who came up with it.”
He looks away, down at his keyboard. Sucks in some smoke and blows it out. “You had a point in coming here? Aside from pestering me?”
“Ada,” I say.
“Or Ardor,” he says. “What about it?”
“Who gets it?”
“You? Or me?”
“Precisely.”
He waves a hand dismissively. “Go ahead and take it. My plate is pretty full at the moment.”
“Gee,” I say. “Thanks.” It isn’t as withering as I’d hoped.
“Just maybe don’t write anything about it until you’re sure you’ll finish it. This time.”
“You haven’t finished it yet, either.”
“Of course not,” he says. “And yet,” musingly, “we will think different things about it…”
“Will we?”
“If people remembered the same,” he says, “they would not be different people.”
“Think and dream are the same in French,” is what I say—I think—but I’m not sure, because one of us says, “Douceur,” and for a moment it’s almost like I’m the one sitting there, tie loose, almost but not coughing on a lungful of bitter nastiness that suffuses effortlessly into my thirsty blood, and I’m peering up at him, ratty sweater puckered by an old blob of translucent caulk, in dire need of a haircut. “Douceur,” I say, again, or not, and he shakes his head—“Silk Cut,” he says—and coughs once, wetly, into a curled-up fist, and the moment passes.
“Do you?” he says, suddenly serious. “Want me to stop?”
Well, no, I don’t say. That’s not what this is about, I don’t say. I just—I just— I just can’t find the words. (Which is the crux of the matter. Isn’t it?)
“That isn’t really feasible,” is what I end up saying, and I wince (inwardly) at my glaring lack of charity.
“All right, then,” he says. Stiffly.
So I turn to go. And that sonofabitch just goes right back to typing.
Slaysome.
I am an avid viewer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (as you might have guessed). Sue me: I like a show that’s taut, well-written, funny, scary, emotionally true (even if a tad melodramatic at times), confident enough in its skewed storytelling to kick it around and have fun.
This may explain why the current season has been something of a disappointment.
Oh, it started strong. Started with a bang. Bobbled a little, but then there was the musical, which was the astonishing miracle of a elephant waddling up to the edge of a plank near the tippy-tippy-top of the Big Top itself, a black feather clutched in its trunk, and you know the thing’s all gonna be done with wires, they’re not gonna let an elephant plummet to its death or anything, but, I mean, come on. Fly? In forty-eight minutes plus an overture? Singing and dancing? Original songs? On a TV show? My God, doesn’t anyone remember Cop Rock? (Why, yes. Fondly, in fact. But that’s a kettle of fish of another color.) —Anyway, the elephant fuckin’ rocked.
And then the writing headed south (hear that giant sucking sound?), and Willow got “addicted” to magic, and we won’t even talk about the Doublemeat Palace fiasco.
There’s been glimmers to keep the true fan going, though even I have been tempted to just go shut it off, already. But the past few episodes—I mean, like, Xander and Anya’s wedding, which was a low farce that couldn’t pull itself off, you know? And the guy they got to play Uncle Rory: nice enough, but too familiar, and he was no Bruce Campbell. It all felt wrong (even if the whole bit with future Xander coming back to warn himself not to marry Anya was a nice touch)—until we got to the end, when it suddenly became clear that this episode had been written by someone who was sick unto death (much like myself) of the TV wedding convention, the iron-bound law which states that one party or another will, must, has to have “cold feet” and consider tossing the whole shooting match into the garbage (usually on the flimsiest of pretexts) only to have his or her love reaffirmed by some pious TV bullshit, much laughter, the best man forgot the ring, the bridesmaid’s snogging the brother-in-law, ha ha, I do. Gag. —So to see the farce on Buffy turn suddenly, sharply into ordinary yellow-bellied craw-sticking chickenshit everyday tragedy, as Xander walked, was—well, it was refreshing. Didn’t redeem the episode, but did manage to salvage it, give it that kick of something umf.
But last night’s—
Last night’s—
God damn. Last night’s was creepy nasty good in all the right ways. A beautiful job of deconstructing the show itself, stripping it down to bare essential parts and kicking them around and laughing even while you wince at some of the rough bits, and then put it back together again with a triumphant roar and a last lingering shiver—
Jesus.
(I’m being incoherent. I do apologize. Some of this is [one hopes] mitigated by the fact I just got done watching it; I was at the laundromat last night. We taped it. Watched it tonight, just now, over dinner [torta de papas, olive bread, a nice enough Primitivo] and sat there, grinning at each other, hey, this one isn’t gonna drop the ball. So this is fresh and hot off the press and raw and all of that.)
Remember DS9? (Hell. Remember when Trek didn’t actively suck rocks?) Anyway. There was that episode where the Orb or whatever was fucking with Sisko’s head and he was suddenly somehow back in the ’50s writing science fiction stories for a low-rent Golden Age two-bit Campbell knock-off ’zine. A nice enough episode actually dealing with race in a meaningful way (let’s not talk about the show’s uneasy relationship with race) and even if it had a Twilight Zone naïveté it was still something nice to say about the power of dreams (or, let’s be realistic, the power of two-bit Campbellesque pulpy genre fiction). —It was a graceful reminder of why exactly DS9 was doing what it was doing in the way it was doing it, and even if they cheesed it out a little over the next season or so with Sisko’s ’50s alter-ego occasionally popping up in a mental institution, scribbling scripts on the walls, it still helped galvanize the show. Plus, it was neat seeing all the various alien actors without their prostheses.
Anyway, point being: I’m sure that casting a bald black man with a neat little beard as the mental ward doctor in last night’s Buffy was a conscious nod; a tip of the proverbial hat.
Choice demographic.
“So there’s this great article on Salon,” I’m saying.
“Yes..?” says Jenn. She’s tapping and clicking at the iMac, putting pictures of arcane technical gear into seemingly arbitrary places on a giant white field.
“You remember Stargate? You know how it became a TV show?”
“Vaguely.” We’ve got our Buffy, our Angel, our West Wing, and I guess we won’t be watching Futurama much anymore. —And Farscape, whenever it manages to be on. But I digress.
“Well, it used to be the number one syndicated action hour whatchamacallit on TV. Hot enough that they were actually talking about doing another movie, a whole series of movies. They were talking a new Trek.”
“And?” She’s peering intently at the computer screen. Tap. Click.
“Well, the producers decided being number one wasn’t good enough. See, the audience was tilted female—”
“Oh,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Space bimbo?”
“Yup. And killing the sensawunda exploration plotlines in favor of dark ’n’ moody conspiracy theories. So the fans’ favorite actor left in disgust, and they let him go, and now the fans are revolting, the ratings suck, and the plans for a movie are pretty much on hold.”
“Idiots. Why do they keep screwing things up like that?”
“I dunno. Hey. What’s that?”
She tears her eyes away from the screen for an instant. She’s using the stylus tonight, with the drawing tablet. She swears by it these days. Makes me feel old-fashioned. Give me a keyboard and a mouse any day, please. —Besides, it looks anachronistic, that plastic pen, the paperless tablet, and her Dickensian fingerless gloves. But I digress. “It’s an issue of Bitch.”
Which, of course, is rather obvious. What I’d meant by asking “What’s that?” wasn’t so much “What’s that?” as “I see you’ve recently acquired an issue of Bitch; might I inquire as to why—assuming, of course, there is a specific purpose?” It’s just that “What’s that?” seemed more efficient. More fool me.
Luckily, it hinges on Dicebox, so Jenn’s eager to talk about it. “It’s got an article on black women as characters in science fiction,” she says, “so I picked it up. I haven’t read it yet. I have all this work—”
“Mind if I?”
She sighs. “Just leave it where I can find it.” Moves a speaker—I think it’s a speaker, it’s round and wedge-shaped all at once, and on a weird wire cradle, but it looks like it has some speaker cones in there somewhere, and it’s the sort of matte black that’s really popular with serious hi-fi gearheads—anyway, she moves the speaker a smidgeon to the left; nudges it back. So I pick it up. Flounce on the bed. Flip open the magazine. Mermaids on Coney Island, fatsuits as the new blackface, a comparison of mary-kateandashley and My Evil Twin Sister, an intriguing interview with Allison Anders (I’d always thought Gas Food Lodging was overrated, but that’s neither here nor there)—and Harriet the Spy? From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler?
Hold the phone.
“I loved Harriet the Spy,” I say.
“What?”
“Harriet the Spy. I loved it. There’s an article in here about the gender gap in young adult fiction. Lamenting how we’ve fallen from the heyday of the ’60s and ’70s, when you had books like this with characters like Harriet or Claudia and writers like Louise Fitzhugh and M.E. Kerr. Christ, I’d completely forgotten her. She rocks. Is That You, Miss Blue? All those books.”
“I remember,” says Jenn. Apparently, I’d bored everyone to tears a few weeks ago by pointing out to all and sundry that The Royal Tenenbaums was Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and The Westing Game, 20 years later.
“It seems I’m an anomaly.”
“Oh?”
“Boys aren’t supposed to like reading books about girls. I had no idea Harriet the Spy was a girls’ book.”
“It is.”
“Well, it shouldn’t be. It’s just a fucking awesome book about, about being a writer and too smart for your current circumstances and just starting to figure out how to manipulate the wider world around you and . . . ”
“But it is a girls’ book.”
“Yeah, well, fine, I understand that. But it shouldn’t have to be.”
Jenn yawns and stretches. “Boy, am I glad we dropped a half-gig of memory in this puppy. These files would be impossible to work with without it.”
“Of course,” flipping more pages, “the backlash is that everyone thinks boys don’t read enough, and so there need to be more books for boys, and so more books are written with boys as heroes or narrators.” There are exceptions; there are always exceptions. (And it’s an utter coincidence one of those was written by someone I know. So there.) “Even Kerr’s written mostly from the point of view of boys lately, and you remember Island of the Blue Dolphins?”
“Yes…”
“They wanted him to change the sex of the heroine. He had to convince them it was based on a true story.”
“Geeze.”
“‘Why have young males been left out in the cold when it comes to publicly funded libraries? I think it’s because most librarians are female—or gay…’”
“Who said that? The writer?”
“No, she’s quoting a Canadian educator. Ray Nicolle.”
“Jerk.”
“Yeah. And—”
“What? What’s so funny?”
I’m giggling because I’ve reached the point in Monica T. Nolan’s article (“Harriet and Claudia, Where Have You Gone?” and it’s not online yet, so go grab issue no. 15 of Bitch and read it your own dam’ self) where she ties it all together: “The publishers of YA books must woo male readers, and—like the quintessential heroine of the ’50s teen romance—have embarked upon a never-ending quest to win a boy’s approval and gain the status and sense of self-worth they crave.” I’m giggling because suddenly, it all makes a twisted sort of sense, the whole Stargate fiasco—of course being number one in the ratings isn’t cool, if your viewers are primarily girls. The icky, uncool, clingy side of fandom, the obsessively thumbnailed gallery side, the slash-fiction writing side, the side of fandom that insists on making comparisons to Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and David Copperfield, as the Salon article takes pains to point out: the girly side of fandom. Of course that’s uncool. You want to hang with the in-crowd, the geek-kings, the choice demographic as Ferris Beuller would put it: the fickle, disdainful 18-25 males who think Seven of Nine is hot and argue about conspiracy theories and don’t buy all that much, which is why advertisers are so keen on snaring them, which all makes sense if you stand on your head and think about it with high school logic. Junior high school logic. The Stargate producers just wanted to be cool, man.
Screw the chicks.
“Yeah,” says Jenn, as I’m trying to convey this epiphany to her. “That’s nice, but—”
“Fuck,” I say, waving my arms around. The cats are getting nervous. “It even explains that crap about NBC thinking they have to skew their comedies male next year. They’ve been making too many shows for women. Like Ed. Jesus!”
“Hon,” says Jenn, still peering at the screen, “you’re starting to rant.”
“But,” I sputter.
“Why don’t you go write all this down? And let me finish my work, okay?”
Well, it does all make sense. It does.
