The fulness of time.
And anyway, you get right down to it, it was all little more than a side effect.
Sanders wasn’t trying to change my life or anyone else’s with The Tomorrow File. He just wanted to take the usual fare of his Palm Beach thrillers, the tropes of power and money and sex and intrigue, and spin them up as unusual fare, fresh and strange and even a little bit alien. And SF is a mighty fine tool for the job, though it can be a bit on the brutally efficient side as it so aggressively, even didactically, asserts the setting isn’t Kansas anymore. Ostranenie! Unheimlich! —Nicholas’s relationship with Paul is at once a detail of the overall unheimlich setting—bisexuality is no big deal in this brave new world—and itself a technique to foster ostranenie—potboiling sexual intrigue rendered suddenly strange and alien: “I had been in bed with Paul.” (And as such, it works quite well. Certainly stuck in my mind. —I think it was about Wild Things that some critic somewhere said something to the effect that bisexuality really shakes up the noir genre, kicking wide open the question of who can betray which for what, exactly—and yes, it does, indeed, but remember that everything new was old in its day. Even ostranenie; especially the unheimlich.)
But the thing about any tool no matter how mighty fine is that once you’ve used a hammer for a while you start to expect the nails. Read enough SF and you come to expect those unheimlich touches, the ostranenie of another world. It is itself familiar, usual, canny, heimlich. It’s what you opened the book for in the first place; that door damn well better be dilating by page three or you’re taking your custom elsewhere. —This is neither a good thing, nor a bad thing, it’s just a thing, and savvy writers and readers take it into account, ringing ostranenie games off their own expectations of the unheimlich as naturally as breathing. —But because Nicholas’s sexual relationship with Paul was aggressively, even didactically presented as one of the details that set the world of the book apart from the world around it; because it was an SF book; because as a reader of SF books, I’d come to expect, accept, even crave those details that deliberately set their worlds apart from the world around me—therefore, the book’s high unheimlich concept I accepted without hesitation. And that’s the twist of paradox, right there, that allows Nicholas to insist that even though he obviously wasn’t what he was, he still could be what he is, if only you’d let him. In meeting the writer halfway in order to set ourselves aside for a time in that other world, we also find ourselves unknowingly giving Nicholas the grace he needs.
So I’d had an epiphany, yes—but it was an epiphenomenon.
This uncanny æsthetic two-step, this strange state of grace—don’t mistake it for a necessary and sufficient condition. All art plays with ostranenie; pushing you over the brink is how we get to sensawunda. (Pulling you back: Oh, I see! Oh, I get it!) —Much as SF’s ability to make you take literally sentences that usually make only figurative sense gives the writer a more expansive word-palette than otherwise, the expectation that SF will of course be rich and strange allows it more room for accidental grace and pushmepullyou gamesmanship. (But that’s theory. Praxis: how does SF as a genre limit the sorts of sentences readers will take seriously? How do expectations of wonder and estrangement limit the otherworlds we can build within it?)
Necessary and sufficient or not, though, that space is central to the question of whether or not “Time’s Swell” is an SF story.
Now, it’s not a very good story. It’s a mood piece written in a muddle of first-person past- and present-tense that’s a universal solvent: salient details dissolve into a declamatory mush. As “artsy, shallow lesbian erotica,” about the best one can say is it doesn’t use “slick” as a transitive verb. But right out of the gate it aggressively, even didactically insists:
I remember nothing from before this place.
I ask her. Sometimes she is silent. Sometimes she tells me that she does not know, that she met me here, six months ago, that she knows nothing about my past. And then there are the days when she tells me that we’ve traveled through time, that we have come from the future and are trapped here. She tells me that she was a temporal scientist, that I was her project. That I am modified and enhanced for survival, for time travel, for perfection. Those are the bad days.
Sometimes I try to argue with her. If I am so altered, why do I look human? She has an answer for everything. Something about 23rd-century technology and spaceships that can move across time. It’s crazy.
Because we’re reading an SF story (no, I’m not tautologizing; bear with me), we expect a certain degree of strange and uncanny detail. Because we expect it, we accept it when it presents itself. And because we accept it, we don’t question the other details that support it: the extreme, impersonal detachment of the narrator from the people and the world around her, her simple declaration of things we’d otherwise take for granted, the eerie sense of timelessness that wafts languidly throughout (“The ahistorical dreamlike landscape where action is situated, the peculiarly congealed time in which acts are performed—”? Perhaps. These do, after all, occur almost as often in SF as they do in porn). The story depends utterly on these other details to get done what it sets out to do, and these other details depend utterly on the idea that (for whatever reason, it doesn’t matter) the narrator has come from the future and is trapped wherever here is. —It’s the height of folly these days to proclaim that something is the height of folly (we raise that bar on an almost daily basis, and yet still keep clearing it with ease), but to insist, as does Don, that the “authors could have easily removed all SF content and the story would not have been changed in any significant way” is to have let the point pretty much pass you by. It’s the obverse of McCarty’s Error: James McCarty, writing for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, confronted by a book that hinges on the peculiar properties time exhibits as one’s velocity approaches the speed of light, had this to say:
To label The Sparrow science fiction is an injustice and downright wrong.
McCarty’s excuse was that he thought The Sparrow was, you know, good. Don’s is that “Time’s Swell” wasn’t what he expected. But it’s the same basic canonization mistake—just different sides of the fence.
Some people have suggested that since Jed Hartman’s “Future of Sex” editorial called for more SF that imagines something other than an entirely heterosexual universe, then Strange Horizons must be practicing “literary affirmative action” by publishing such (shallow) stories as “Time’s Swell.” Okay, sure. The same way all the prominent SF magazines are practicing literary sexism by publishing so many shallow stories that star heterosexual characters.
Well, no, not quite the same way: the prominent SF magazines don’t proclaim to all and sundry that they intend to practice literary sexism by publishing so many shallow stories that star heterosexual characters. —To be fair, neither did Hartman proclaim, per se: he just said he’d noticed a lack, laid it out pretty clearly, asked for pointers to stories that addressed it. “Whenever I read such a work,” he says, of the typical sort of SF he’s been reading and found wanting, “it makes me wonder why the fictional society of the far future is less sexually diverse than early–21st-century America,” and it’s hard to argue with him. (Me, I might wonder why the SF of today isn’t nearly so adventurous on the fronts of identity and sexuality as the SF of the New Wave, but that’s a specious comparison; don’t mind me.)
Yes, it’s disingenuous to pretend that when an editor of a fiction magazine asks for pointers to a certain type of story, they aren’t proclaiming, or at least setting forth a de facto agenda. So what? Editors don’t just correct spelling and give the grammar a once-over. Selecting stories based on theme and style and intent and voice to further their ideas of what makes for good pieces and a good magazine? That isn’t “affirmative action,” it’s what editing is. —Like what Jed Hartman’s doing with his editorship? You’ll buy more, or read more, whichever’s appropriate. Think his agenda’s leading him by the nose to pick stories you don’t like over stories you do? Take your custom elsewhere. His fortunes will rise, or fall, accordingly. (I understand there’s a whole science devoted to this phenomenon, or something. —The canon that results, by the way? Epiphenomenon.)
So the immediate question isn’t “Is publishing ‘Time’s Swell’ an act of ‘literary affirmative action’,” but “Is ‘The Future of Sex’ leading Strange Horizons to publish the sort of story that’s driving the punters away in droves?”
I don’t know. You got me. I haven’t dug into publishing histories or traffic reports, and I’ll leave all that to someone who cares more than I do. But to this layperson’s eye, Strange Horizons doesn’t appear to be hurting, and if I didn’t like “Time’s Swell” all that much myself, others who know as much or more than I do liked it fine. So there you go.
But at least it’s a more immediately interesting question than “Does publishing ‘Time’s Swell’ challenge my personal notions of what SF can’t do and mustn’t be?”
Now you’re just fuckin’ with me.
We should get this out of the way up front: my linking to this in no wise comprises an endorsement of the nasty tangled mess known variously as “recovered memory syndrome” and “trumped-up bullshit for which entirely too many innocent people are still serving time long after it’s been debunked.” Now’s not the time to get into why and how I might find myself saying and thinking pretty much exactly the skeptical things they’d (of course) want me to say and think; it’s enough to note I’m taking the following with as much salt as I can scare up.
And yet it’s still trickling ice-water down my spine. —After all, says Jeff over at Rigorous Intuition, “we went through the looking glass a long time ago. So there’s no reason why this shouldn’t be right, unless it’s dead wrong.”
With that in mind, let him sketch for you in a handful of dust a quick little story about John Gannon and James Guckert and Johnny Gosch and James Gannon.
You do the hokey-pokey and you turn yourself around.
Traditional head-scratch at dearth of women in blogosphere.
Ritual response-link to What She Said!
Ancillary self-serving notation for record of new linchinography entries: Pinko Feminist Hellcat and Echidne of the Snakes.
Close with traditional packing away of subject, with flourish, someplace easily accessible. Note in calendar to exhume and respond to head-scratch again in three months’ time.
(You want to know what the funny thing is? The ice-edged gut-punching joke of it all? Five minutes spent perusing any feminist comment thread or discussion group would be enough to rapidly disabuse Messr. Drum and his commentariat of the idea that women aren’t “comfortable with the food fight nature of opinion writing.”)
Boy, that’s a lot of moms.
You might remember the recent flap over Buster the Bunny’s visit to a couple of mothers in Vermont, and the outrage our shiny new Secretary of Education felt at the idea tax money was being spent to expose our children to those people. Here’s a videoblog entry from Blogumentary that features an interview with the show’s senior editor, with clips from the episode in question, and some distressing news about just how much damage the Secretary’s intemperate words have wrought. —I’ll also throw in a letter to Secretary Spellings from Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) that ends like this:
I am by now myself used to the kind of meanness which was the basis of your decision, but I am sorry that young people all over this country who happen to be gay or lesbian have now learned that the person who has been picked by the President of the United States to help with their education has such a fundamentally negative view of their very existence.
Keep those cards and letters coming.
Could be belongs to us.
The second time I encountered the idea? I dug my way to the bottom of a paper bag full of paperbacks from the Breckenridge County Library’s annual fundraising book sale and came up with this—
I had been in bed with Paul Thomas Bumford, my Executive Assistant. He was an AINM-A, an artificially inseminated male with a Grade A genetic rating. We had been users for five years, almost from the day he joined my Division.
Paul was shortish, fair, plump, roseate. He wore heavy makeup. All ems used makeup, of course, but he favored cerise eyeshadow. Megatooty, for my taste.
Strangers might think him a microweight, effete, interested only in the next televised execution. In fact, he was one of the Section’s most creative neurobiologists. I was lucky to have him in DIVRAD.
The narrator is one Nicholas Bennington Flair; he’s young, brilliant, anethical, powerful, rich, gorgeous; that’s the opening to chapter X-2, which starts on the third page of “Mr. Bestseller” Lawrence Sanders’ 1975 novel, The Tomorrow File. It’s not, let’s get this out of the way, a very good book—it’s your basic beach-blanket brave new clockwork 1984, a dystopic vision of a far-flung future (1998!) full of kinky sex, freighted slang, and petroleum-derived foodstuffs. “Every year our bread became fouler and more nutritious,” says Nicholas, and that pretty much sums up the book’s moral tone. —I read it not too long after I saw that TIME magazine cover, somewhere between 11 and 12: old enough that I’d read any number of trashy potboilers in which men and women occasionally did the oddest and most obliquely described things to each other in and amongst the action and skullduggery; young enough that I was still trying to figure out exactly what. The mechanics were problemmatic: which was doing whom where, exactly? And in God’s name, why?
(Oh, shush. I was shy and bookish and a late bloomer.)
So meeting Nicholas Bennington Flair pretty much for the first time like that, having him so casually announce
I had been in bed with Paul
when just moments before he’d been flirting outrageously with his boss, Angela Teresa Berri, Deputy Director of the Satisfaction Section of the Department of Bliss (formerly the Department of Public Happiness, formerly the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare)—“Her nipples were painted black, a tooty fashion I found profitless”— It was another door, another seed, another bite, another slippery inch down those slopes. To have gone from zero past that image straight to a protagonist so openly, unapologetically queer! And more to the point: the protagonist of a Zukunftsroman. —Had Nicholas been narrating a contemporary beach-blanket thriller, he’d’ve been an alienating figure. No matter how exotic the locale, he’d’ve been insisting he was with all his queerness here and now, and I could look around me and see that this was not so. But science fiction—specifically, future-fiction, no matter how ham-handedly wielded, no matter that his once-future is now our past—SF gives him a certain license. He’s insisting that he and all his world could be, and inviting you to step awhile in his shoes and see the sights.
(We’ll leave once was for another time, and let’s not even try to tackle phantasy’s always already. —While the pieces of this essay-thing lay fallow, Jo Walton went and said the following, as neat as you please:
At twelve, The Dispossessed turned my head inside out on politics, making me question everything I’d seen as axiomatic. At fourteen Triton did the same on sexuality. What SF did was made me consciously aware of how the world was, of the things the world accepted as normal, and made me constantly question those things instead of taking them for granted. All SF did this for me. Heinlein did. Asimov did. Niven did. SF gave me the worldview of “this is a way of arranging things” rather than “this is the way things are.”
(So there you go.)
Which is not to say that The Tomorrow File is a very queer novel, mind. Sanders was “Mr. Bestseller,” after all; he’s not out to freak the punters, much less raise their consciousness—just titillate ’em on their beach blankets with a mere soupçon of épater. Nicholas talks a mean game—
“I’m bisexual,” I admitted. “By intellectual choice and physical predilection. I think most objects are, admittedly or not. The sexual preferences of obsos were conditioned by biological necessity and hence by society. Neither prevail today. Efs can procreate without sperm. The preservation of species is no more vital than its limitations. Now we can indulge our operative natures, which are androgynous.”
“What does all that mean?” she asked.
“That I like to use both efs and ems.”
“Oh, yes,” she breathed. “Use me.”
Ah, amour! —But! The only em Nicholas ever actually “uses” in the course of the book is young, effeminate, pudgy Paul, his assistant, his foil, his nemesis; him alone, as opposed to a score of efs, from the tootily black-nippled Angela to a couple of distressingly declassé Detroit girls. And while the book entire is something of an exercise in clinical detachment, it’s still telling that there’s not the slightest spark of lust or desire or longing in how Nicholas deals with Paul: he sees him; he just doesn’t want him. Only their final encounter is described with anything approaching the particularity of Nicholas’s encounters with those varied and sundry women, and that enough to make it clear it’s Nicholas who tops, while Paul Bumford bottoms. Our narrator’s essential masculinity, you see, has thereby not been compromised: buggering a subordinate is still splashing about in the shallow end of the genderfuck pool, a step or two beyond a couple of it-girls lugging it up on the dancefloor for the benefit of Mister Kite. —Also, and as another for instance, there’s the problem of the book’s only authentic queens:
Through the trees, drifting, came the two young ems, neighbors who had so amused my mother. Wispy creatures from the adjoining estate. Both barefoot, wearing identical plasticot caftans decorated in an overall pattern of atomic explosions.
They were carrying armloads of natural flowers: something long-stemmed and purple. They asked if they might leave them on my mother’s grave. I nodded. They put them down gently.
“She was a beautiful human being,” one of them said. The one with a ring in his nose.
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Who were they?” Paul breathed when they ran away. Startled fauns.
“Friends and neighbors,” I said.
“The kind of ems who give homosexuals a bad name,” Paul said. “Flits.”
“You’ve changed,” I told him. “You wouldn’t have said that a year ago. In that tone.”
“‘When I was a child,’” he quoted, “‘I spake as a child. When I became a man, I put away childish things.’”
“Now I’ll give you one,” I said. “‘Upon what meat doth this our Cæsar feed, that he has grown so great?’”
It can’t help sniggering, this book; pointedly opting not to judge the morality of the characters, the actions, the era it pretends to find so morally empty. Sanders, after all, is very good at letting his audience feel superior to the people who are indulging in the very vices they themselves would indulge in, if they had a chance. (How else does one become Mr. Bestseller?) —What’s significant is that for once bisexuality—a man’s bisexuality—is presented as one of those vices. What’s significant is that Nicholas’s relationship with Paul is vital to the book: while Nicholas himself might tell you it was wanting life to have more charm that was his downfall, or perhaps a morbid conviction that the only worthy moral verities are those drawn from an obsessive contemplation of the works of Egon Schiele, we know it’s the way he treats Paul throughout that’s key to where he ends up, and why. —And keep in mind: I was 12, maybe 13, and trying to fit together a couple of very big pieces of how the world works that had rather haphazardly been given to me: it is possible for men to like other men; here, then, is a man who likes other men; here is that man in a relationship with a man he likes. Heady stuff.
So—mediocrities and problematizations real and manufactured aside—I’ve got to give credit where credit is due. Because Nicholas Bennington Flair did not insist he was what he was, but instead that he could be what he is, if only the reader would let him, he became in an odd sort of way the change some wanted to see in the world. My world, if nothing else, became bigger because of him, and this book, and for that I have to tip my hat. Right time, right place, maybe; maybe my world would have achieved its intended size some other way, if I hadn’t found this book at the bottom of that paper bag. To quote Delany, stupidity is “a process, not a state”—
A human being takes in far more information than he or she can put out. “Stupidity” is a process or strategy by which a human, in response to social denigration of the information he or she puts out, commits him- or herself to taking in no more information than she or he can put out. (Not to be confused with ignorance, or lack of data.) Since such a situation is impossible to achieve because of the nature of mind/perception itself in its relation to the functioning body, a continuing downward spiral of functionality and/or informative dissemination results. The process, however, can be reversed at any time…
Maybe. But for all its flaws, The Tomorrow File was the key that opened the door; it’s what got the job done. Kudos.
Did it? —Get the job done, I mean. It takes a special sort of hubris to label homophobia qua homophobia as stupidity, shamefully toeing the dirt across from the blissful state of ignorance I’d been in, before I read Mr. Bestseller’s dystopia. —Whatever epiphany I might have realized in those tweenage days, it wasn’t until Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand that I understood—that I knew, in my bones—that a man liking another man was no different than me liking, say, Eva. And that was in my senior year of high school. Sophomore year, and altogether elsewhere, there was that unfortunate incident after a biology class, involving Bobby Brown, and that song Craig had put on a mix tape. “Hey there, people, I’m Bobby Brown,” I sang—sneered, really—“some say I’m the cutest boy in town,” and then I was on the floor having crashed into a lab table on the way down. Bobby stood over me, glaring, which was shocking—he was such a quiet, geeky guy, so much so that a quiet, geeky guy like myself felt perfectly—safe? justified?—in, well, mocking him. A startled faun. Where the hell had that tackle come from? He stormed out of the classroom as I pulled myself to my feet. —And if you’d asked me at the time I’d’ve said I don’t know, I had no idea, and if you’d asked me at the time I’d’ve said that wasn’t what I’d meant at all. It was just the congruence of the name. Mean-funny. You know?
But now I’m not so sure; I remember that little surge of spiteful triumph, that snigger just before he knocked it out of me, a rush that was as out of all proportion to the stupid, stupid joke as his sudden burst of anger. Why had I felt so safe? So justified? Why had he felt so threatened? “Oh God I am the American dream…”
While I’m making pithy posts.
Go, save Wampum. The Koufax Awards, a labor of love, swamped their bandwidth; Julia’s got an emergency donation button to get ’em back on their feet.
—If only so we can all vote for “Falling Reentlistment Rates Among Right Wing Pundits Threaten War on Terror” to get next year’s Koufax for Funniest Post.
Dog bites man.
Right-wing pundit accuses former US president of treason.
(We know at long last they have no shame, but what about the rest of us? What must we do to rid ourselves of these meddlesome batshiners? —Or at least return them to the dark corners where they won’t get in the way of the rest of us going about the business of the world?)
And it came to pass.
I had no idea at all it even existed before I saw the cover of TIME magazine.
The idea had literally never crossed my mind. It wasn’t that it was a thing that couldn’t or shouldn’t or oughtn’t be done; it wasn’t a thing, at all. It didn’t exist. Inconceivable. —After? Well, take your pick: I’d stepped through a door that slammed shut behind me; a seed had been planted; I’d taken a bite from the apple; the world got just that much the bigger. I was that much further down the slippery slopes that fall away on all sides from Innocence and Grace. I knew a little more of what it was I didn’t know.
When did I see it? Hard to say. It’s dated 23 April 1979, but I remember it alongside the cover they ran just over a year later, when Mount St. Helens blew its top. Magazines were kept in pretty much the same place, on and around the corner end table, so I might be remembering them together because I saw them (two powerful, iconic images) in the same place and not necessarily at the same time. So it was somewhere between April of 1979 and June of 1980, sometime just before or after my 11th birthday, that I first became aware of the idea of homosexuality.
(I don’t remember the article itself, which is a shame, though you’ll note it isn’t so important that I’ve gone to the library to look it up, or indeed perform much more than a desultory googling. It’s noted here as a “relatively sympathetic post-Bryant cover story,” and I suppose it’s a measure of our post-Bryant age that we’re now fighting over basic rights for homosexual relationships instead of basic rights for homosexualists. —I do remember wondering at the the pair of female hands, there at the top: I was confusing the Latin homo for the Greek homos, even if I might not have put it that way at the time, and further mistranslating homo as man. So the male hands made sense as “homo” sexuality, but not the female. Ah, lesbian invisibility! —If I did discuss the cover with either of my parents, it was merely to clear that up, but I’m mistrusting the memories that suggest such a conversation occurred, and where does that leave us?)
How about you? Any one moment or thing in particular? A watershed, or did it just seep in, with no clear eureka between knowing and not? Or have you always known, and do you find the idea of not knowing in your bones that this is one of the ways the world works to be quaint, odd, disturbing? —It’s important, I think, to note these things.
A modest proposal.
How about we on the Left start looking into a class-action libel suit against these moonshit batshiners?
(Psst. You grownups still clinging to the right wing? You libertarians still trying to convince yourselves that voting for Bush was the lesser of two evils? Y’all just got your Ward Churchill moment. Speak out or fuck off.)
Your first lesson in leaping with a laughing heart:
It may be justifiable anger, but I won’t trade the rest of my world for it.
Hmm? Oh. Just pasting this on my virtual refrigerator. Don’t mind me.
Hellblazer, not Constantinople—
As far as I’m concerned, it’s Hellblazer that’s the interloper. Check the pedigree: Alan Moore steals Sting from Brimstone & Treacle and has John Totleben and Stephen Bissette do him up as John Constantine, a right bastard foil to the Swamp Thing’s lumbering straight man; he did his business deftly, hinted at a dark and stormy backstory, got in some unforgettable licks, then vanished in a puff of cigarette smoke and an unanswered joke. Beauty.
Then Rick Veitch dragged him back onstage for his run with the bog-god. And then the right bastard got spun off into his own dam’ book, and Jamie Delano got to unwind a lot of that dark and stormy backstory for about 40 issues or so until a rousing what-if send-off with art by the one, the only, Dave McKean. Next month: new creative team! —And all this before the Garth Ennis / Steve Dillon run, which most folks think of as the definitive Hellblazer.
So I wasn’t too put out by the news of the movie. LA? Plenty enough mythology to work from, trust me. (Where else can you find such a hellish city of angels? Thank you, thank you, I’m here all week.) —Keanu? Pfft. Why not? (My knee doesn’t jerk at the mention of his name; him, I can take or leave. Maybe it’s how there’s only a dozen people in the world who know why it is I laugh with such delight whenever I catch him playing Don John.) —The movie can pretty much fly or fall on its own, far as I’m concerned: though it was on the small screen, we’ve already had pretty much the best adaptation of John Constantine to moving images we could hope for. I’m good.
The which said, initial reports aren’t all that enticing.
If Delano and Ennis’ Hellblazer is Mexican food, Constantine is best understood as Taco Bell.
But: on the other hand: Tilda Swinton as Gabriel:
(I do think it’s amusing, though, that the reporter, at least, appears never to have heard of Prophecy. Some might say, with good reason.)
Liberty is what I mean when I point to it.
And second, that it captured beautifully the single most important thing that I learned from my years working on “constitutionalism” in Eastern Europe: That 90% of the challenge is to build a culture that respects the rule of law, and that practices it. A document doesn’t build that culture. And no one has a formula—either for building it, or preserving it.
Certainly not a law professor.
—Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford Law School
Why is it so hard for people to understand that there is a category of behavior not covered by the legal system?
—John Yoo, Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law
But are not limited to.
The organizations who have filed letters of protest with the committee include: the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU); American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC); American Federation of Labor- Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO); American Friends Service Committee; American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA); American Jewish Committee; Amnesty International USA; Anti-Defamation League; Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee; Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund; Asian and Pacific Islander American Health Forum; Asian Law Caucus; Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, AFL-CIO; Asian Pacific American Legal Center of Southern California; Bill of Rights Defense Committee; Catholic Charities USA; Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, Univ. of Calif., Hastings College of the Law; Center for Community Change; Center for National Security Studies; Episcopal Migration Ministries; Fair Immigration Reform Movement; Golden Vision Foundation; Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, Harvard Law School; Heartland Alliance for Human Needs & Human Rights; Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society; Hmong National Development; Human Rights First; Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights; Immigration Unit of Greater Boston Legal Services; Irish American Unity Conference; Jewish Community Action; Jewish Council for Public Affairs; Korean Alliance for Peace and Justice (KAPJ); Korean American Coalition; Kurdish Human Rights Watch, Inc.; Labor Council for Latin American Advancement; Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund; Leadership Conference on Civil Rights; League of United Latin American Citizens; Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund; Midwest Immigrant & Human Rights Center; The Multiracial Activist; National Asian Pacific American Bar Association; National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium (NAPALC); National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum; National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Education Fund; National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development; National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL); National Council of La Raza; National Day Laborer Organizing Network; National Employment Law Project; National Federation of Filipino American Associations; National Immigrant Solidarity Network; National Immigration Forum; National Immigration Law Center; National Korean American Service & Education Consortium; Organization of Chinese Americans; Peace Action; People for the American Way; Refugee Law Center; Rural Opportunities; Service Employees International Union; Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund; Sikh Coalition; South Asian American Leaders of Tomorrow; South Asian Network; Southeast Asia Resource Action Center; Tahirih Justice Center; United Nations High Commission for Refugees; Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations; Unitarian Universalist Service Committee; UNITE HERE; U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI); Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs; Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children; World Organization for Human Rights USA; World Relief; YKASEC-Empowering the Korean American Community; and Young Koreans United of USA.
The Republicans on the committee in question want to set aside the rule of law for the Secretary of Homeland Security.
Apparently, our spanking new Attorney General was not a bad apple.
By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself.
“It’s becoming silly for an actor to think, ‘If I do a Japanese commercial, the American audience won’t be aware of it,’” Kaminsky said. “It’s becoming a tiny, tiny world. Now actors think, ‘Why should I do a commercial for a foreign market and be ashamed to do a commercial for America?’”
“Audience and consumer attitudes have changed,” added Jonathan Holiff, whose Los Angeles firm, the Hollywood-Madison Group, pairs companies with celebrity endorsers.
“We have all become much more jaded and are no longer taken aback to see celebrities from all walks of life jumping into the advertising game.”
Apparently, the paparazzi really wanted the Heineken. Isn’t that funny?
Oh, wait—there’s one more piece you need:
Lenny: I brought a bag of money in case he wants us to burn it again.
Homer: I hope he tells us to burn our pants. These are driving me nuts!
It’s going to be one of those weeks.
Prolixity.
Alan Moore: Horrible, tatty book, but what this has got in it is lots of crappy little drawings that are indecipherable to anybody else but me, but which are basically all I need for anything re: writing comics. They will give me a breakdown… they’ll just be sort of these pages—these are bits of Promethea—I will break down the page area into a number of panels. Now, I’ve got a simple, mathematical mindless formula that I follow that is—I mean if you look at these little bits of dialogue that go in each of the panels you’ll see that they have little numbers written after each of the lines and what this is is the number of words.
Now, this is basically something that I took from Mort Weisinger, who was the harshest and most brutal—
Daniel Whiston: DC editor?
AM: —of the DC editors during the ’60s.
DW: Bit of a tyrant from what I hear.
AM: Oh Christ, he was a monster, I remember Julie Schwartz telling me—who was a lovely man—he told me about Mort Weisinger’s funeral—and this was probably just an old Jewish joke that he’d adapted—for Mort Weisinger—but he said that apparently during Jewish funerals there’s a part where people can stand up and spontaneously will say a few words about the departed—personal tributes, things like that. So it’s Mort Weisinger’s funeral, and it gets to this bit in the funeral and there’s absolute dead silence, and the silence just goes on and on and on and nobody gets up and says anything and eventually this guy at the back of the synagogue gets up and says: “His brother was worse!” [Laughter.]
But anyway, Mort Weisinger, because he was the toughest of the editors, I thought: “All right, I’ll take his standard as the strictest.” What he said was: if you’ve got 6 panels on a page, then the maximum number of words that you should have in each panel, is 35. No more. That’s the maximum. 35 words per panel. Also, if a balloon has more than 20 or 25 words in it, it’s gonna look too big. 25 words is the absolute maximum for balloon size. Right, once you’ve taken on board those two simple rules, laying out comics pages—it gives you somewhere to start—you sort of know: “OK, so 6 panels, 35 words a panel, that means about 210 words per page maximum.”
DW: And if you’ve got one panel you’d have 210…
AM: …and if you’ve got 2 panels you’d have 105 each. If you’ve got 9 panels it’s about 23 – 24 words—that’ll be about the right balance of words and pictures. So that is why I obsessively count all the words, to make sure that I’m not gonna overwhelm the pictures, that I’m not gonna make—oh, I’ve seen some terrible comic writing where the balloons are huge, cover the entire of the background—
“It’s an amazing media error, a huge blunder. I’m sure the Bush administration is thrilled by this spin.”
Yeah, I know, we could be talking about almost anything. But in this case, it’s specifically out-of-the-ass estimates of voter turn-out and its implications that got trumpeted as gospel and slung as a cudgel and are now being walked back, well, over at Editor and Publisher, at least. I don’t know that this is even being hinted at on page A15, elsewhere, out there.
—In Iraq, silly. I know, I know, it’s hard to keep up…
I do so hate this sour mood of mine.
Gets to the point when Matt Taibbi, trying to make Sy Hersh look like an optimist—
RUMSFELD: Anyway, I guess the point I’m trying to make is that I don’t know if we’re starting another war. I tried to ask the president about it the other day. We schedule a meeting. I go in there. He’s sitting behind his desk and everything’s the same as before, except now he’s got this big brass plate on his desk that reads, “Ask me to show you my MANDATE!” He’s got a plate of tater tots and he’s hucking them at Laura’s new dog there, making these bomb noises, like “Pyew! Pyew!” And I’m like, “Sir, are we invading Iran?” And he looks up and says, “Iran? That’s a great idea! Put Rumsfeld on it!”
FEITH: Jesus! And you say?
RUMSFELD: And I say, “Sir, I am Rumsfeld!” And he says, “You’re kidding. Then who was that who was just in here?” And he points to a security monitor. I look at it, and there’s a guy walking down the White House corridor, towards the exit, who looks just like me!
FEITH: Who was it?
RUMSFELD: How the hell do I know?
FEITH: Was he Defense?
RUMSFELD: I don’t think so. I’m Defense!
—well, it just isn’t bleak enough, and I find myself scarfing up the War Nerd on the sly—
Everybody’s asking me what’ll happen if we attack Iran. To get a quick preview, just do what this guy in my eighth-grade class did: put a firecracker in your mouth, hold it between your front teeth, and light the fuse.
Your friends won’t believe you’ll go through with it. So when it blows up in your face, you’ll expect them to be impressed. And you’ll be surprised, just like this guy in junior high was surprised, when all you get is a perforated eardrum and a reputation as the biggest dumbass in the school.
Right now, Bush is standing there with a lit match and a big firecracker labeled “Iran” in his mouth. Except it’s more like an M-80 or a whole stick of dynamite than a firecracker. Nobody believes he’ll be dumb enough to light it, to actually attack Iran. Even the Iranians don’t believe it; Khameini, their head Mullah, said last week “America is in no position to invade Iran.”
He’s right about that. Even the US Army brass admits we’re “overstretched.” We don’t even have enough troops to control Iraq; a war with Iran would mean calling up every National Guard unit we have. Even then, it would take years to get them combat-ready.
And this time the Brits won’t come with us. They’ve been making that clear, on the quiet. If we go in, it’ll be as a coalition of one.
So Khameini’s right; we can’t attack Iran. But that doesn’t mean we won’t. Khameini was making the same mistake everybody’s been making: assuming Bush and his cronies have a lick of sense.
—so much so that it takes me too dam’ long to recognize the nihilism masquerading as tough-nosed realism, the second-hand armchair experience cloaking itself in coarse, pseudo–old-skool ethnicisms—I know you of old. You’ve got as much to learn from the world as we do, bucko.
I need to put it all down, the news and the knee-jerk and the flailing outrage, just put it all down and back away. Since I’m not getting the job done here. (A perennial plaint, hereabouts. —What is the job? You let me know, you ever find out.) Work on the damn reprogramming and re-design. Pick up the comics and the SF and the phantastique; start picking at the differences between trees and labyrinths. Drug myself with ostranenie; stave off with denial what I can’t move or shift with red-faced ranting.
My God. I used to live there.
