A cavalcade of comics coverage!
I don’t think in any language. I think in images. I don’t believe that people think in languages. They don’t move their lips when they think. It is only a certain type of illiterate person who moves his lips as he reads or ruminates. No, I think in images, and now and then a Russian phrase or an English phrase will form with the foam of the brainwave, but that’s about all.
—Vladimir Nabokov
And Me, too! I’m thinking, except there’s only really one Russian phrase that I can pick out of my foamy brainwaves these days, and that’s “Ya sliushayu jazz.” —But you’ve probably already got this. So you’ve seen the quote. Ah, well.
So we had the first-ever Stumptown Comics Fest last weekend, and all in all it went quite well. The Old Church proved a startlingly apt environment for comics geeks of every stripe, for which Messr. Deutsch (Hereville!) is owed many thanks. And if you were there, and you bought a ticket from a bearded guy in a vest who kept stamping people on the palms of their hands rather than the backs or the wrists, well, that was me; hi. Sorry about that. Hope you had fun. But if you weren’t, well, I’d like you to take a look at this, for instance—
—which would be a photo of Bill Mudron (Pan” alt=”” />), Kevin Moore (In Contempt!), and Bethanne Barnes (Future Ruler of the World!), all vamping in front of guest of honor Christopher Baldwin (Bruno! Little Dee!). Also, I’d ask you to take a gander at this—
—which would be Ty and Ian Smith (Emily and the Intergalactic Lemonade Stand!) working out some sibling rivalry or other. Heck, I’ll even ask you to peer thoughtfully at this—
—if only because the pipe organ is pretty much a visual definition of boss. (You’ll have to click through for a glimpse of the stars up Bethanne’s nose, though. —It’s a long story.)
Once you’ve done that, I’m going to ask you to read this.
TO THE EDITOR: This is for “Mr. Hip” Erik Henriksen. Nice of you to feature something comics-oriented, but you forgot something very obvious—the true comics community is made up of geeks [Destination Fun, Stumptown Comics Fest, June 3]. Now I know “geek” is extremely hip right now, but I don’t mean indie rock/hipster geek. I mean the real geeks, the intelligent outcasts that played Magic in junior high while you made fun of them and hiply listened to grunge and Snoop Dogg.
Now pretty much anything in this city with an ounce of underground coolness has been taken over by scenester fucks, exploiting it until it’s sucked dry and turned to shit. But the twice yearly Portland Comic Con you mentioned in your article is not for the too-cool-for-school crowd—it’s for the real people. Not a fucking fashion show where scenesters can strut down their runway and “oooh” and “aaah” over each other’s generic black/brown wardrobes, sip wine, and snub each other (which I’m sure the Stumptown indie comic extravaganza will be).
Just become the fucking yuppies you’re destined to be and go to First Thursday like the rest of them. Stay out of the comic scene before you contaminate it more than you already have.
—Heather Lockamy
Now—and I’m being totally honest, here—it’s hard to blame Heather. It is. Really. —See, “Mr. Hip” did a very enthusiastic job of talking up the Stumptown Fest, but he did so in that inimitable Portland Mercury fashion of trash-talking everybody else on the field in question: in this case, the venerable Portland Comic Book Show, for years pretty much the largest comics event in the Pacific Northwest. Henriksen’s piece doesn’t seem to be archived online, so I’ll take me some liberty, here—
Twice a year, there’s a really horrible comic convention in the Memorial Coliseum basement, where dusty boxes of old superhero comics are hoisted out of geeks’ basements for other geeks to oooh and aaah over. It’s the type of place where you expect to see the Comic Book Shop Guy from The Simpsons waddling about, and unless your idea of a good time is debating the continuity errata of Stargate SG-1, it’s best to stay away.
Ten points from Gryffindor, Mr. Henriksen. This is a lazy opening, tagging such vastly overused tropes as the Comic Book Shop Guy and continuity neuroses for a cheap, crowd-pleasing us-them shot. —I’m not knocking the praise he goes on to slather over the nascent Stumptown Fest; heck no. And he was slathering that praise under a deadline, and I’ve been there all too many times myself not to recognize the siren song of said cheap shot and the easy, welcoming rhythm of a well-worn cliché. You just don’t have time to fact-check every puff-piece in the weekly what’s-doing section and deathless up the prose it deserves. (Of course, our major news media works under similar circumstance, which led us pretty much into a spectacularly stupid war in Iraq. Surely we can learn from their example?)
Said venerable Portland Comic Book Show is, indeed, in the basement of the Memorial Coliseum, and its overall ambience is one of dust and flea market. But that’s where you go for old skool superhero books and original Pogo newspaper strips and sugary J-pop soundtracks and abstruse action figures. And yes, there’s usually a buxom B-movie scream queen signing autographs next to the guy who played Second Jawa from the Left. Movies and video games steal attitude and approach from comics, to say nothing of talent; so comics in turn leans on movies and video games to draw a crowd, and if you’re going to turn up your nose at that, you might as well give up utterly on the mighty San Diego Comic-Con. —But there’s also reps from three of the most notable publishers in the industry, and writers and cartoonists from the superhero mines and the new mainstream; for years, this show has been a steady and reliable anchor in the Pacific Northwest comics scene. The Stumptown Comics Fest isn’t supposed to replace it, gentrifying comics out of the reach of ordinary, everyday geeks—it’s there to augment it. (Seriously. The Comic Book Show could only offer up ten tables for small press cartoonists. The Stumptown crew was convinced they could sell twenty. And the Old Church was just sitting there, on the corner…)
But all this nuance can’t fit in a quarter-page puff piece, and so Heather’s knee jerks rather understandably, and she misses out on a fun time and ends up calling the lot of us “scenester fucks” and “fucking yuppies,” and we’re standing around with paper stars up our noses going “Wha?” and wondering when the Buffy animated series will start already.
So really, in the end, it’s worth one of those tired, long-suffering laughs. The real people, lost in the epistemological mix, talking past each other once again. Us? Them?
Anyway, Heather: I’m sorry I didn’t play Magic in junior high. I was too old when it first got started. But I did play it, and I understand somebody who threw down with you back in the day had a book for sale at the Fest. So please, feel free to show up next year, because there will be a next year, and it’ll be as geeky as this one was. And if you don’t end up liking it? Well, I guarantee you the Comic Book Show will still be there. This town is more than big enough, and then some.
Now, I’m going to steal one last photo from Erika’s report (so I didn’t take any myself. So sue me):
Yes, that’s Jenn (Dicebox!), but the gentleman she’s speaking with is Dapper David Chelsea (David Chelsea in Love! Perspective!), who recently played host to a smattering of Portland’s finest underground inkslingers in a 24-hour comics fest. The results are now online for all to see. Go! Free comics!
Finally, a moment of silence: Dirk Deppey admitted the obvious last week. ¡Journalista!, one of the leading lights of the comics blogosphere, just ain’t coming back now that he’s editing the Comics Journal. Well, damn, says I. I hadn’t been holding my breath, but I’d still been holding out hope, a pale slender thread of it, anyway, and, well, sure, the comics blogosphere is bigger and bawdier and just plain noisier than it was when he got started, and if a lot of that’s due to him, well, it’s showing no signs of letting up since he had to go away. But still: something’s been lost. An important focal point, a dollop of healthy snark, a one-stop shop for industry gossip and pointed pontificatin’. Hats off, sir. —But he does enthusiastically recommend Kevin Melrose’s Thought Balloons, and heck. That’s good enough for me.
So there’s your cavalcade already. I’ve got to get back to reading about the Weimar Zukunfstroman which, let me tell you, is depressing as fuck. (A hasty postscript to Mr. Henriksen: no hard feelings, ’kay? The publicity really was much appreciated, and I have no doubt that Gryffindor will make up those points easily, and more besides.)
What color are the dolphins in her world?
Here’s what Peggy Noonan wants from Bill Clinton’s forthcoming autobiography:
Sometimes candor is an act of patriotism. The patriotic act we need from him in his book is utter frankness and honesty about how it came to be that terrorism was ignored by our leaders throughout the 1990s, that pivotal time.
I’d crack a joke, but why bother? —Anyway, TMFTML totally aced Nicholas Confessore’s question, so, um, why bother?
Revolver (five).
(In which I take it personal. —The personal is political, after all.)
Int. office, late afternoon, and there’s J. Jonah Jameson, editor-in-chief of the Daily Bugle and Peter Parker’s nemesis, his Commissioner Gordon, you know, in the movie they got that guy who plays the psychiatrist on Law & Order and the white supremacist on Oz to play him, only this is a Frank Miller Daredevil book, so he’s stern and avuncular in all the right ways, and he’s drawn by David Mazzuchelli, so he’s a subversively old skool figure striped with these impossibly rich, impossibly noir, utterly impossible shadows from venetian blinds. He’s got his sleeves rolled up, by gum, and a pre-Bloomberg cigar is smoking like a chimney, and he’s delivering a stern and avuncular beat-down to ace reporter Ben Urich, cowed into submission by the Kingpin’s goons. “Listen, Urich,” and you can hear the growl coming up off of the cheap glossy paper, “there are thing you just don’t let happen in this racket. Number one is you never get scared away from a story. Not while you’ve got the most powerful weapon in the world on your side.” And then he picks up I swear to God a rolled-up newspaper—this is back when Miller knew how to swing a cliché—he picks up this newspaper and he shakes it at Urich. “This is five million readers’ worth of power. It can depose mayors. It can destroy presidents.”
—Oh, but that’s just dinosaur talk! This is the wired age. Everything’s changed. It’s many-to-many and participatory journalism and Nick Denton gossip. It isn’t five million readers; it’s fourteen hundred inbound links on Technorati. It’s ranking as a Mortal Human on the Truth Laid Bear ecosystem. It’s a taste of the power that took out Howell Raines, man.
And it isn’t a rolled-up newspaper he’s shaking at me, either. It’s a photo he’s sliding across the desk, into the light of a halogen desk lamp, the only light in the room. I can’t see his face. He isn’t smoking, but the place smells like old cigarettes and burnt coffee. “Well?” he says.
The photo is a Time magazine cover from 2003, when they chose the American soldier as their person of the year. Somebody’s photoshopped in a Nazi armband, some notches on a riflebutt. “The American myrmidon,” says the headline.
“What about it?”
“It’s a simple request,” he says. “Just say it clearly and unequivocally.” There’s a click, and from somewhere comes this eerie, tinny mock-up of my voice, like a forgotten voicemail message. “This graphic disturbs and disgusts me and it is not representative of what I believe.”
I don’t say anything. It’s been a while, but I’m wishing I had a cigarette.
He clears his throat, leans forward, his chair squeaking. One hand slipping into the light to tap the photo. “Come on,” he says. “Will you denounce this image as vile hatemongering? As something that doesn’t represent your point of view?”
And still I don’t say anything.
“All you have to do,” he says, “is say, ‘That’s disgusting. I don’t believe that.’” It’s my voice again. I bite my lip. He leans back in his chair. “And I’ll believe you,” he says. “I really will.”
The threat is so implicit, so thoroughly beaten into our lizard-brains by years of bad television upon decades of B movies, that he doesn’t even realize he’s making it.
“...it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long...”
FastNBulbous is one of the house trolls over at Political Animal, and they have a loyalty oath for all us card-carrying liberals—
A poll for you Political Animal Readers:
The following appeared in a theatre review written by Michael Feingold in the Village Voice:
Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don’t give a hoot about human beings, either can’t or won’t. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.
This opinion is presumably not shared by Foreman; you can gauge the breadth of his imaginative compassion from his willingness to extend it even toward George W. Bush, idiot scion of a genetically criminal family that should have been sterilized three generations ago.
How many of you agree with the author that Republicans should be exterminated and that the Bush family should be sterilized? If you don’t agree, should the author be made to apologize and/or resign and/or be fired, a la Trent Lott? Also, would the publication of this review be prosecutable as a hate crime in Canada?
Posted by: FastNBulbous on June 9, 2004 at 8:04 PM | PERMALINK
Oh, heck—we wouldn’t need to exterminate them all. How was it Quentin Tarantino said that Ezekial 25:17 went?
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.
If we executed enough evil tyrants in order to physically intimidate Republicans by making them realize that they could be killed, too, well, heck. The weak would fall into line. The Democratic party could take its rightful place as the corporatist opposition party, and we could all take a deep breath, smile, and get down to the real work of leaving this world better than we found it.
Sure would make things a heck of a lot easier.
But! Alas. We are all of us here on the sinistral side crippled with the terrible moral burden of trying, trying real hard, to be the shepherd. We are most of us trying so hard we won’t even claim to be better than those we fight: we know that anyone can slip, and that claim no matter how right it might feel in our gut leads to the dehumanization of those who set themselves against us. All we can do is remember that there are no ends, only means, and one of the means we must eschew is their eliminationist rhetoric, no matter how satisfyingly cathartic it might be to stop a moment and say to yourself, what if—
But no. We’re trying, real hard. To the ever-increasing us! —I’ll always drink to that.
But not with just anyone. There’s limits; there’s always limits. A little later in the dicussion, FastNBulbous, responding left and right to those who’ve forgotten Rule No. 1, lays this on us—
I repeat, has any other public figure, or someone as “cultured” as a theatre critic, called for the genocide of millions of Americans based on their political views?
Coulter’s call for the execution of one individual who fought on the side of those who were responsible for the deaths of 3,000 Americans against our troops is not analagous, imho.
Of course, this asshat of a reviewer is entitled to make statements that bely his status as an assclown.
I just find it interesting that when someone calls for the extermination of millions of Americans, the response of most people here is to point out relatively mild statements by Republicans rather than condemn the genocidal wishes.
I was hoping that more people would try to convince me that they don’t agree with this jerk.
Posted by: FastNBulbous on June 9, 2004 at 9:15 PM | PERMALINK
Why should we point out relatively mild statements? Why should we be concerned with hyperbolic calls for genocide from Village Voice theatre critics when smiling Republican ignorance and hate killed so many thousands and laughed about it until they were forced by blood and sweat and oceans of tears to pay the least respect a fellow human being is due?
So I’m only human. I’m not going to rush to buy Bulbous a drink unless there’s some small sign of contrition; some vague gesture toward an apology. But I am only human: I’m not going to spit in their face, either. (Read this, I might say, and think, real hard, about what it is you’re doing, and why.) —Or kill them, for God’s sake. “Execute” them. (Ha! As if I could.)
James Howard’s Romeo and Juliet,
or, Revolver (an intermission).
John Holbo cites Nietzsche and makes my head ring, once more proving how inadvisable it is to do this sort of work without a license, or at least a basic grounding in the classics:
The stronger the roots which the inner nature of a person has, the more he will appropriate or forcibly take from the past. And if we imagine the most powerful and immense nature, then we would recognize there that for it there would be no frontier at all beyond which the historical sense would be able to work as an injurious overseer. Everything in the past, in its own and in the most alien, this nature would draw upon, take it into itself, and, as it were, transform into blood. What such a nature does not subjugate it knows how to forget. It is there no more. The horizon is closed completely, and nothing can recall that there still are men, passions, instruction, and purposes beyond it. This is a general principle: each living being can become healthy, strong, and fertile only within a horizon. If he is incapable of drawing a horizon around himself and too egotistical to enclose his own view within an alien one, then he wastes away there, pale or weary, to an early death. Cheerfulness, good conscience, joyful action, trust in what is to come—all that depends, with the individual as with a people, on the following facts: that there is a line which divides the observable brightness from the unilluminated darkness, that we know how to forget at the right time just as well as we remember at the right time, that we feel with powerful instinct the time when we must perceive historically and when unhistorically. This is the specific principle which the reader is invited to consider: that for the health of a single individual, a people, and a culture the unhistorical and the historical are equally essential.
And, well, yeah, though there’s a demon on my shoulder muttering sardonically, what, you have to repeat history sometimes, to give your life some direction? (What comes after farce? —And if Rumsfeld were to look it over and then note that gosh, there’s a distressing lack of meaningful metrics, well, I might allow as how he is not without his point on this one.) —And so I’m stuck halfway, trying to figure out how to say something not altogether unmeaningful in the matter of World Building v. Allegory, though that’s not it—Tlön v. Quantum Mechanics, perhaps, or Schrödinger v. That Darn Cat—and comes now the Urbane Sophisticate and the Rude Mechanical tumbling ass-over-teakettle down an astroturfed hill, about to crash into Samuel Delany, who’s waiting in the wings for his spearcarrier’s cue as Siegfried bellows his last. And while I’m trying to figure out whether the next move up my sleeve is necessary, or needlessly petty, Nietzsche through Holbo whacks me upside the head with the Martian’s lesson: knowledge is power is a crock. The more you know, the less you can do, and that’s the hidden snare in the Wiccan Rede. (But isn’t that the point? Strength is for the weak! That way, you never have to do anything.) —But this has dissolved into a mush of inside jokes and personal shorthand; airy gestures in the general direction of what I think I’m trying to say, rather than hard work with muscular prose, digging in to figure it out. So I’m off to the drawing board again. In the interests of slaphappiness and the general spirit of what-the-fuck, I’ll leave you with this:
Romeo and Juliet, Wrote by Mr. Shakespear : Romeo, was Acted by Mr. Harris ; Mercutio, by Mr. Betterton ; Count Paris, by Mr. Price, The Fryar, by Mr. Richards ; Sampson, by Mr. Sandford; Gregory, by Mr. Underhill ; Juliet, by Mrs. Saunderson ; Count Paris’s Wife, by Mrs. Holden.
Note, There being a Fight and Scuffle in this Play, between the House of Capulet, and House of Paris ; Mrs. Holden Acting his Wife, enter’d in a Hurry, Crying, O my Dear Count! She Inadvertently left out, O, in the pronunciation of the Word Count! giving it a Vehement Accent, put the House into such a Laughter, that London Bridge at low Water was silence to it.
This Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, was made some time after into a Tragi-comedy, by Mr. James Howard, he preserving Romeo and Juliet alive; so that when the Tragedy was Reviv’d again, ’twas played Alternately, Tragical one Day, and Tragicomical another; for several Days together.
Oh, one more goddamn thing:
To protect subordinates should they be charged with torture, the memo advised that Mr. Bush issue a “presidential directive or other writing” that could serve as evidence, since authority to set aside the laws is “inherent in the president.”
—from that WSJ story on that torture memo
They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that’s what Bill Clinton says—and he is, after all, the President of the United States.
Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that “if the president does it, it can’t be illegal.”
Shit. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb.
—from Hunter S. Thompson’s Nixon obituary
The theme of short and pithy posts shows no signs of abating:
I was quite amused by this joke.
For your consideration:
Little Dee, the new daily strip from Chris Baldwin.
Something I didn’t necessarily need to know:
When a hand-crafted, all-natural vanilla marshmallow is dunked in a glass of Rosemont Estate’s 2002 shiraz, the aftertaste—once you’re past the initial burst of something foully rot-sweet, like a failed grappa—is an astonishing simulacrum of IHOP’s blueberry syrup.
Revolver (four).
Götterdämmerung
Dritter Aufzug
Waldige Gegend am Rhein—Vor der Halle der Gibichungen
(Zwei Raben fliegen aus einem Busche auf, kreisen über Siegfried und fliegen dann, dem Rheine zu, davon)
HAGEN
Errätst du auch dieser Raben Geraun’?
(Siegfried fährt heftig auf und blickt, Hagen den Rücken zukehrend, den Raben nach)
HAGEN
Rache rieten sie mir!
(Er stößt seinen Speer in Siegfrieds Rücken: Gunther fällt ihm—zu spät—in den Arm. Siegfried schwingt mit beiden Händen seinen Schild hoch empor, um Hagen damit zu zerschmettern: die Kraft verläßt ihn, der Schild entsinkt ihm rückwärts; er selbst stürzt krachend über dem Schilde zusammen)
VIER MANNEN
(welche vergebens Hagen zurückzuhalten versucht)
Hagen! Was tust du?
ZWEI ANDERE
Was tatest du?
GUNTHER
Hagen, was tatest du?
HAGEN
(auf den zu Boden Gestreckten deutend)
Meineid rächt’ ich!
Revolver (three).
So why am I not liking Stone? —As much as I’d like to, anyway.
Well. Open the book to the foreword, cribbed from Quanta: Essays on Quantum Physics by one Kurt Soldan, and follow along as we trip through the fourth paragraph:
You have heard of the famous thought-experiment of Schrödinger’s Cat. The cat lives in an opaque box. It so happens that opening the box will kill the cat, because of the way the box is constructed. We cannot see into the box, or X-ray the box, or anything like that. But we want to know whether the cat is alive or dead inside the box. If we open the box to look, then it is certainly dead—but is it alive or dead now, before we open the box? The quantum moral of this story is that the cat is alive and dead at the same time. It inhabits both states of being simultaneously; what happens when we open the box is that our action of opening the door collapses these quantum probabilities into one single pattern, the pattern being ‘the cat is dead.’ Schrödinger’s famous cat will test the suppleness of your mind, I promise you. You want to think ‘Well, either the cat is alive or it is dead, and by opening the box we find one or the other to be the case.’ But that is not the way it is at the level of the quantum; at the level of the quantum it is ‘the cat is alive and dead until it is observed, and then the act of observation collapses the probability wave-form into a single determined pattern—dead, in this case.’
Now, I am not a physicist. (Ha!) But I read something that pig-ignorant, and I reach for my gun.
Oh, don’t gimme none more o’ that ol’ quantum physics,
No, don’t you gimme none more o’ that ol’ quantum physics,
For my head will fly, my tongue will lie, my eyes will fry and my cat may die—
Won’t you pour me one more o’ that sinful ol’ quantum physics.
The cat was never supposed to be both. “One can even set up quite ridiculous cases,” said Erwin Schrödinger, before setting forth his famous paradox:
One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.
It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a “blurred model” for representing reality. In itself it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.
Schrödinger is talking about the usefulness of the “foundation of intuitive imagination”—the map, the model, the tool, the image—one must use to take hold of something like quantum mechanics. But be careful—
Of course one must not think so literally, that in this way one learns how things go in the real world. To show that one does not think this, one calls the precise thinking aid that one has created, an image or a model. With its hindsight-free clarity, which cannot be attained without arbitrariness, one has merely insured that a fully determined hypothesis can be tested for its consequences, without admitting further arbitrariness during the tedious calculations required for deriving those consequences. Here one has explicit marching orders and actually works out only what a clever fellow could have told directly from the data! At least one then knows where the arbitrariness lies and where improvement must be made in case of disagreement with experience: in the initial hypothesis or model. For this one must always be prepared. If in many various experiments the natural object behaves like the model, one is happy and thinks that the image fits the reality in essential features. If it fails to agree, under novel experiments or with refined measuring techniques, it is not said that one should not be happy. For basically this is the means of gradually bringing our picture, i.e., our thinking, closer to the realities.
(Which is a neat explication of the basic scientific method, minus peer-reviewed journals and grant applications; its application to the debate over, say, creationism as a scientific enterprise, is left to some other digression.) —The cat was only ever a warning, a “ridiculous case” demonstrating what happens when you try to use your image, your map, your tool where it doesn’t apply, a blurred photo and not a crisp snapshot. “Of course the cat can’t be both alive and dead at the same time!” says Schrödinger. “The wave function, the psi-function, the system vector—it works, but it’s not all that yet! We have work yet to do to bring our picture closer to the realities! What part of ‘serious misgivings arise if one notices that the uncertainty affects macroscopically tangible and visible things, for which the term “blurring” seems simply wrong’ do you not understand?”
But quantum mechanics is hard, and strange, and that cat-in-a-box is a vivid image, ennit? And so over the years that original ridiculous case has been worn down to a nubbin of a shibboleth: quantum mechanics is so fuckin’ strange, man, there’s like, this cat? That’s alive and dead? At the same time? —To the point that “Kurt Soldan” can write an essay, a whole series of essays, apparently, on quantum mechanics, and can conjure up the cat without even mentioning the thing that makes the gedankenexperiment quantum in the first place: there’s no radioactive substance balanced precisely on a fifty-fifty shot of an atom decaying over the course of an hour, set to trigger a mini-Goldberg deathtrap if it does; instead, there’s just a box impermeable to observation that will kill the cat if you open it. Pop quiz, smart guy: is that cat alive, or dead? Well? You can’t peek inside! You can’t X-ray it! Ha! It ain’t either! It’s both, until you open that box and kill the cat! “If you did not observe,” says our friend Soldan, “the cat would continue to exist in a quantum probability soup. But by observing you collapse the probabilities into a certainty.” (But that’s from later, when Soldan’s talking about a nano-cat, ten atoms long. Is it here? Or there? —You see that look that just passed over some of the audience’s faces? You just spotted the physicists. You want to make ’em look like that again? Tell ’em in all earnestness you heard that quantum computers are so fast because they use CPU cycles on all the infinite copies of themselves sitting idle in all the other infinite manyworld multiverses out there.) —It’s not a sharp photo of a cloud that sort of looks like a cat, it’s an impressionistic watercolor of the feed from somebody’s catcam. It’s using a hammer to adjust the focal length of your laser. It’s using a Portland street map to plot a course to alpha Centauri. It’s a dim echo of a half-understood metaphor hauled out and ginned up to lay the foundation for what I’m afraid is one of the book’s hedgehogs:
And this is the most profound implication of all, the deepest philosophical shake-down; because it follows from this that it is our observation—our power, as sentient intelligences to make the observation—that determines the universe the way it is.
Well, yes, in the sense that specifically observing a particle on the quantum level makes it do things it wouldn’t do if it weren’t observed, and there’s all sorts of neat stuff like quantum cryptography that spins off of that, and you’ve got the Copenhagen interpretation and the Many-Worlds interpretation and the Transactional interpretation (which makes me think of warm fuzzies and cold pricklies hopping back and forth across Planck lengths like fuzzy Maxwell’s demons, silver hammers glinting in the—what? Why are you glaring at me like that?), and you’ve got all sorts of freaky optics experiments that would have made Newton even grumpier than he famously was. But what you don’t have is a goddamn cat that’s neither alive nor dead in a goddamn box somewhere, and from that you can’t determine that your sentience, that self-aware sliver of spacetime just behind your eyeballs, your I-ness, has some anthropocentrically mystical ability to kill that cat or keep it alive just by observing it. (Or, opening the impermeable box. Which kills the cat, in Soldan’s example. The cat presumably being alive otherwise, since there’s nothing else to kill it. Except maybe lack of food, or water. Or air. Since it’s an impermeable box. —And if it’s sentience that pops the cork, don’t you think the cat would have a say in the whole affair?)
The last book I literally threw across the room was Piers Anthony’s Macroscope, on or about the fourth or maybe fifth time the girl physicist was openly pitied by the omniscient third-person narrator for being female, and so not as smart as the boys, and prone to flighty panic, and in need of comfort; maybe it was when her stateroom was decorated with frilly pink windowshades. I can’t remember the precise moment. But! I’ve figuratively thrown many other books across many other rooms for crimes less than this. —It’s one thing to make your way through your particular quotidian routine, ignorant of this or that point of quantum mechanics and the gedankenexperiments that tease them into shape. It’s another thing entirely to claim the authoritative mantle of science fiction with such a baldly shaky grasp of the science involved.
I should probably note: the most prominent Kurt Soldan on Google is a music critic, and no bookfinder I have at my fingertips can turn up the spoor of his Quanta: Essays on Quantum Physics, and anyway, anyone who’s read Dune and its ilk ought to stroke their chins thoughtfully at the aggressive blandness of that citation. Which is why I’m laying Soldan’s sins at Roberts’ feet. —So the possibility exists that this foolery could be deliberately that: foolery, in service of a point yet to be made. (Not quite halfway through the book yet, and I did just read a grippingly horrific murder scene.) I don’t hold out hope, though: the mystical enthronement of sentience is a key to how his FTL travel works, and it’s a sucker’s bet that observation isn’t a key to how the corker of a plot works out. (Besides: if Roberts is capable of japery on such an infuriating level, he’s got a killer deadpan. —But if “Kurt Soldan” wanders onstage, I can’t be held responsible for what will become of my copy.)
And yet: this isn’t what I’m trying to get at. I reached for my gun; I threw the book across the room. But I can put up with a lot to get whatever-it-is I’m after. I can deal with this. I can accept this book on its own science-fantastickal premise and go from there. Right? I’m a mensch. I can pick it back up again.
It wasn’t till later that I found it wasn’t what I was after, so much.
Pumpkinry.
Like many of you, I am a devoted follower of Fafblog!, the world’s only source for Fafblog. I was especially keen on last week’s nigh-exclusive interviews with many movers and shakers, including Dr. James Dobson, Donald Rumsfeld, Osama bin Laden, and Jesus Christ. But the capper to Interview Week was a sit-down with An Enormous Pumpkin:
Fafblog!: Now I understand you are deliverin an address at the World War II memorial this Monday.
An Enormous Pumpkin: That’s true. It’s a great honor, even for such a huge pumpkin.
FB: Can you tell us what it’ll sound like?
AEP: Mostly silence, with some rooty settling noises, seeing that, as a pumpkin, I am incapable of speech.
FB: That’s very appropriate and thoughtful.
AEP: I certainly thought so.
Color me stumped. Certainly, a conversation with An Enormous Pumpkin is important in the scheme of things, but is it really vitally important? Enough so to deserve the attention of Fafnir, Giblets, and the Medium Lobster? It did not appear so. And yet it had. A puzzlement. —And so stumped I remained, until I popped by the Whiskey Bar for a quick one. Billmon had the historical perspective I needed, in the course of comparing Ahmad Chalabi with Alger Hiss:
Handsome and Harvard educated, well connected in Washington circles, Hiss started out with the media and the weight of “respectable” opinion on his side—particularly since his accuser, journalist Whittaker Chambers, was an eccentric flake. But young California congressman Richard Nixon, newly assigned to the House Un-American Activities Committee, heard Hiss testify and decided he was lying. Nixon wound up in control of a three-man subcommittee charged with investigating Chamber’s accusations.
Hiss’s story had holes in it, but he might have avoided prison if he hadn’t sued Chambers for slander. As evidence in the case, Chambers produced a roll of microfilm of classified State Department documents allegedly passed to him by Hiss for delivery to the Soviets. Worried that someone might steal the film, Chambers hid it in a pumpkin on his Maryland farm—thus stamping the documents for all time as “the pumpkin papers.”
Signs! Signs and wonders! Thank you, Fafblog!
(But wait—does that mean that Giblets & co. know Chalabi is really as innocent as Hiss never ceased claiming to be? Will a tell-all book yet tumble from An Enormous Pumpkin, telling us what we need to finally make sense of it all? Is a zombie robot Richard Nixon about to claw his way out of Linus’s pumpkin patch with a bag of toys for all the good children? —Holy shit! George Tenet just resigned! Or was pushed! Golly, politics sure is weird.)
Revolver (one, an addendum).
The book I’m not reading is on the internet
The book I’m not reading is a brand new movie
The book I’m not reading isn’t out yet
And it’s all new to me
The book I’m not reading isn’t written down
The book I’m not reading is an English translation
The book I’m not reading should be read aloud
And I’m getting impatient
Peace, by Gene Wolfe; Land Under England, by Joseph O’Neill; Fairyland, by Paul J. MacAuley; Moominpappa at Sea, by Tove Jansson; The Wrestler’s Cruel Study, by Stephen Dobyns; 13 Stories & 13 Epitaphs, by William T. Vollmann; Wormholes, by John Fowles; The Mystery to a Solution, by John T. Irwin; The Child Garden, by Geoff Ryman; Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, by Samuel R. Delany; House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski; The Various, by Steve Augarde; Last Love in Constantinople, by Milorad Pavic; Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides; Fantasy and Politics, by Peter S. Fisher; Stone, by Adam Roberts.
(I think the problem’s clear: I can’t commit.)
Heh. Indeed.
Though Mr. Yglesias has some distressingly retrograde ideas when it comes to women and their participation in “politics” (I do not think that word means what he thinks it means), one cannot help but be charmed by his attempt to dustbin Godwin’s law:
But while the “two presidents” theory has some merit, it is unsatisfying both intellectually and emotionally. As in physics, where quantum field theory and general relativity coexist uneasily, we yearn for a grand unified theory of Bushism that would put the two halves of the agenda together. Now, at last, with the revelation that Ahmad Chalabi has been passing intelligence information to the regime in Iran, the opportunity presents itself to construct just such a unified theory. The truth, hard as it is to accept, is that Bush is an Iranian agent.
The cheek! The unmitigated cheek!
Revolver (two).
These mostly right-wing visionaries were either unable or unwilling to view history as the outcome of numerous, intertwining factors that could be analyzed and interpreted from a rational perspective. Instead, historical events were perceived as part of a state of flux ultimately determined by the supernatural. Military defeat, political collapse, and economic crisis were thus transposed to a conceptual realm framed by notions of heaven-inspired retribution and miracles, of collective crucifixion and resurrection. People who were characterized by what Bärsch defines as a “subject-centered mentality or consciousness” reject notions of objectivity or causality: they do not accept a world in which causal links work themselves out independently of transcendent forces. They deny objective experience, disparage reason and intellect in favor of instinct and intuition, and unconsciously erase the boundary between fantasy and reality.
Unsuccessful in war and unable to adjust to a troubled peace, Weimar’s visionaries dismissed what was for them an overly complex, difficult, and demoralizing reality and indulged in elaborating fantasies of a vicious war of revenge that cast them in the role of conquerors. In their literature these angry men gave vent to primitive wishes for the annihilation of France, England, the United States, or whomever else they pictured as Germany’s enemy. But the war visions of the 1920s were not merely the self-serving fabrications of isolated malcontents. Instead of being left to dissipate in the realm of dreams, daydreams, and semireligious entrancement, the visions of revenge and renewal were converted into a literature of mass consumption. The published fantasy—often a quirky mixture of adventure story, fairy tale, millenarian vision, and political program—was intended to act as a catalyst inflaming the same type of emotions among the readers that originally elicited the fantasies in the minds of their creators. In this manner, what originated as compensation for the frustrated individual was transformed into a psychological tool, a propagandistic call for militant nationalism and engagement in antirepublican politics. Some of these writers, in fact, were also active as political speakers and agitators.
—Peter S. Fisher, Fantasy and Politics:
Visions of the Future in the Weimar Republic
Revolver (one).
When I hear of Schrödinger’s cat, I reach for my gun.
—Stephen Hawking.
The other day I saw a battered Volvo station wagon downtown that had been refitted as an ice cream truck, with Good Humor menus stuck to the sides and the ominous snout of a deedle-deedle-deedle loudspeaker wired to the hood. It was, thankfully, silent. It lowered a moment in the mouth of Park, then jerked into a left turn onto Alder against the oncoming traffic.
There’s a lot of books I’m not really reading at the moment. One of them is Stone, by Adam Roberts, and I really do want to like it, not least because I picked it up on Miriam’s recommendation. —I really want to like it because what I want is a gonzo spicepunk genrefuck genderchuck kick-out-the-jams drop-your-jaw throw-back-your-head-and-yee-fuckin’-haw honest-to-God space opera, one that mainlines every color in a Bollywood rainbow through showboating Hong Kong action arias, that’s full of Doc Smith lantern jaws and William Gibson mirrorshades taking the piss out of each other, that’s wisely foolish enough to make you laugh when it breaks your heart, that dumps you breathless and shaken on the other side, ready to climb back in and read it again. And I’m enough of a mensch not to kick Stone just because it isn’t that book. (Maybe if Michael Chabon were to channel Angela Carter? Or Cordwainer Smith, or James Tiptree? Maybe if John Irving were to get with Neal Stephenson and they could work on endings together? Zadie Smith could team up with Vernor Vinge, sure, or maybe Samuel Delany could somehow heal the Splendor and Misery, which maybe isn’t quite what I’m on about in this parenthetical aside to a digression from an introductory sally, but hey, a jones is a jones, and while I’m at it I might as well wish Avram Davidson were slipping new pages into the Akashic record when no one’s looking. —Maybe what I need isn’t prose. God forbid. But maybe what I need is for Elaine Lee and Michael Wm. Kaluta to get back to work already and live up to the premise this time. Maybe what I need is for the entertainment revolution to happen already and for television to collapse under the weight of manufactured reality and for epic digital video pop operas with Spike Jonez sword fights and mashup limewired dance numbers to get piped directly into our handhelds at 13 episodes a go.) —Confidential to whomever: Iain M. Banks ain’t doin’ it. At least, not yet.
Guess that whole hobbit thing has run its course.
Wanted to make sure you saw the tagline of the new ad campaign Air New Zealand is running on Yahoo:
