Wax Banks

A lovely bit of violence for you.

Worse problems I or you might have.

Having finished M. John Harrison's beloved space-opera-with-an-asterisk Light I now face the question of what to read next. I fear this choice. Like any high-school tenor I blend and double first and only then (or thereby) proclaim, so whatever I read will end up swamping what I think of as 'my voice.' One 'easy' answer: Pynchon, whom I know better than to allow myself to imitate. (Left to its own devices, the spider in your hair will get the hell out of there and onto solid ground, as you'd refrain from fistfighting a battleship. Some fights you can call in advance.)

On the other hand I feel the usual unsupportable compulsion to finish more books This Very Month, but I've got no quick reads in the Queue. All I have are my secondhand Britishisms and ongoing mirror-stage preoccupations and this creeping story idea that's snuck in through some triple-locked carefully-monitored doors this week with mischief on its mind. Replacement, even. As I'm enamored of my self-image I'll do my best to sabotage it in the planning stages; if I am an expert at anything at all, then I...

Or, ooh, Stanislaw Lem? Should I try reading Dostoevsky for the first time? I've always had it easy, you know. I was a bottle baby, didn't even need to pick one nipple or the other. So this is all terribly, terribly tiring. Good thing too; I'm up early tomorrow. G'night.

[Oh, and/but how was Light? It was frustrating, then absorbing, then rapturous. Is that the right word? I can't help feeling he'd want me to find the right word - not least because once Harrison has found the word he wants, he flogs it until it's music. I'm scared of my own reflection so I do the opposite, which comes out the same - the way 7C6 and 7C1 are equal, but one is mean.]

My nation.

Books to read while blog posts grow in your fur.

(The title is, of course, a Cosma Shalizi hat-tip.)

Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe. This was the first novel I'd read in a long, long time - this summer, I think - and I couldn't enjoy it until I realized how horribly, bitterly ironic the whole thing is meant to be. Then I could push through. The book burned a hole in my head. If I had actually enjoyed anything about it other than its ideas I'd recommend it wholeheartedly; as it is, it feels like an Admirable Important Book You Should Read Some Weekend. Does that make me a philistine?

Howard Dean's Prescription for Real Health Care Reform. Succinct, pleasant, a bit anticlimactic after (1) Dean's thrilling talk in Harvard and (2) every other thing we've read about health care this year. My wife and I were reading this to one another before bed for about a week. Can I confess something? It put her to sleep on more than one occasion. Politics, baby.

A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole. For 3/4 of the story I wanted to kill Ignatius Reilly; and then, in a flash - on page 333, at Dorian's party - I wanted to comfort him. And then the Reillys' horrid neighbour told Mr Levy her story, the one about Ignatius's dog, and (quite against my will) I actually got a little misty. And then Ignatius was riding away from the house, and:

He stared gratefully at...the pigtail that swung innocently at his knee. Gratefully. How ironic, Ignatius thought. Taking the pigtail in one of his paws, he pressed it warmly to his wet moustache.

He's still a bastard of course. So many of us are. I think (and have been thinking) that this is one of the finest stories I've read. What a ride. I wish I knew what the heck a 'Yat' accent sounded like though.

Next: either one of the Dying Earth stories, Darkmans by Nicola Barker, (finally) The Echo Maker, or - why not? - 2666. Then again, there is this damned copy of Salt sitting on the nighttable. Can I tell you something? I hate pocket paperbacks. I know, it's probably just cultural disdain. But I don't like the form factor. The cramped pages. I wanna see the words stretching out before my eyes, pages a foot wide. My hands are aging too quickly for mass-market paperbacks.

[Update: Nope. It's M. John Harrison's Light, and now that I've made peace with the bleak misogyny of the thing (this won the Tiptree award? Do I not understand the purpose of the award?) the last 100 pages are just kicking my ass. Plus: trade paperback! I does what I wants when I wants it, chump(s).]

Damnedest thing.

20 reasons for a stranger to stop your heroes short

"You folks are..."

...hurting his business.
...trespassing on consecrated ground.
...mirror-images of her parents.
...not the first strangers to visit today.
...too close to a hidden cache of _______.
...in the middle of the parade route.
...drawing attention away from the mayoral proclamation.
...the spitting image of her long-lost kid(s).
...looking a little pale.
...in a position to help with some crooks.
...needed immediately - there's a fire!
...going to think I'm nuts, but could you _______?
...ideal couriers for this expensive book-sized package.
...the first customers we've had in twenty years.
...just the right blood type, by the smell of you...
...strong enough to lift a meteor, right?
...hopefully not frightened by ghosts.
...a little too foreign-looking for his tastes.
...in league with my goddamn wife, admit it.
...named in this will we've just read. Damnedest thing.

Divination.

I brought two tarot decks with me to the coffee shop thinking I'd use them for 'inspiration.' The 'Deviant Moon' deck has gorgeous evocative steampunk art; the other is my beaten old standard Waite-Smith deck, which is something like the template language of tarot - and more importantly, the default visual identity of 'the' tarot in the popular imagination. Strange how that happens: visual analogue to 'Kleenex' synonymizing with 'facial tissue,' though perhaps a more potent prompt to symbolic connection. People think of fortune-telling charlatanry when they think of the tarot, which is reasonable. But I think I'm looking for something else.

Well...or I tell myself so in any case. 'Inspiration.' The idea is to jangle loose some idea or association. Basically to buy idea-connection on the cheap. I have these cards with me because I wish to feel connected. Like reading lists of 'tips' in a hunting magazine, thinking you're learning how to be a hunter.

You have to respect the action of the thing. To buy in. Perverse, isn't it, that 'buying in' has become synonymous with 'having faith.' Well, I bought the cards. You surround yourself with the apparatus of belief. It's so satisfying to approach sacred places without rigor. Can you think your way into sacred experience? Yes, I suppose so. But you have to treat contemplation itself as sacred, or your space, postures, your food intake, the books you carry...you have to believe in some kind of magic. Which is to say, again, that you have to respect the action of each machine.

Else end up in its teeth, right?

Now, tarot cards don't tell you the future. Nothing does. But then divination is just a form of perspectival shift: Help me reencounter this strange moment. Divination pursues not certainty but possibility. Like the Sacrament of Reconciliation, it can bring about a change of stance, but the only change or manipulation that occurs in the activity is emotional, perspectival. You might say: aspirational. You sit in the confessional ready to engage with a new possible self and are 'transformed' (solely) to the extent that you're prepared to realize that possibility through action. Works in a mechanistic universe or any other. The contour of the experience - hush, prostration, air close in, fear, the imaginary presence of the Overseer - has been refined over the thousands of years. Institutional art. It's meant to produce an effect; it works.

Some people like naked pictures of the elderly. Some kneel before the dead. Some eat mushrooms or drink chemicals and see colours; others make bright music in dark rooms thinking it will save them from something they won't name. Some fuck for sport. Nothing will stave off death but irresponsibility. (The Fool dances heedless at cliff's edge, and alone among the Arcana he bears no number.) The purpose of the thing isn't the thing itself.

'Just...pardon the expression, but I love...no, I love the attraction. Or I love my own reaction.' (Jamie Laurie)

Can you show me the future? Yes. You will react to some arbitrary prognosis, thereby revealing some hidden desire.

Well. That's the one 'correct' prediction available to the diviner. But it's also false - in the sense that it can't produce the sublime moment of dislocation that art (even the art of 'fortune-telling') affords. Self-consciousness violates the integrity of the experience. There is no ironic divination, no uncanny self. We are our own baseline; the more we insist upon the primacy of our own experiences, the easier it is to 'get a grip' on things - and drag the moments yet-to-come down to our level.

But you know as well as I do that I didn't plan to work with the cards.

Opening up to new experiences is hard work for some people. The more I withdraw into myself, the more elegant my systems of justification (i.e. 'philosophy') become, the more detailed my analyses of 'divine' or sublime experience...and the further I get from experiential understanding of the divine. Which is to say you can say correct things or true things about God but not both, and one of those forms dies with us, is dead already. Truth is vitality.

I did come here to the café, yes, rather than staying in the apartment alone. But my new headphones are 'sound-isolating.' You can imagine what that means, but maybe you can't imagine what it feels like. It's absolutely lovely. Everything becomes backdrop (to me). All these folks animated separately from this fast-moving images in my head. They lose detail. I'm just as alone here as anywhere else I might disconnect myself through music. I lose the swirling movement of the air here. I forget what the heat of a body is.

And the cards? One box is out on the table, upturned so I can't see the art on the box. One is stashed safely in the bag. I'm free from the suggestions they might make. I don't wish to be seen (as). The last thing I want is for the future to behave irresponsibly.

The Fool. From the other deck - the unnumbered Major Arcane, or rather the zeroth card. The thing to which we return. Entropy rises as intention is washed out. Not order but tension. A maximally entropic universe is wholly known, as is a perfect crystal (entropy zero) - paradoxically, we can as easily describe an utterly dissociated universe as we can a rigid unitary identity. The fool only seems to surrender; he is his own ruleset. How can you walk across the canal? By not sinking. Why does your skin glow? I've never tried to hide it. Shouldn't you be sleeping? I can never know. As entropy rises we lose less and less information to abstraction.

The universe has opinions. It loves symmetry and chaos. It loves order and dispersion, dissociation, eruption.

The Fool and the Magician want very different things: perfect experience (meaning total) and perfect action (meaning pure). Total control is a fool's dream, of course. We have opinions too. And remember that it's the magician who wears the jester's cap; the fool may as well have stepped out of bed. Or floated upward from its warmth, becoming dream. Perhaps.

This is what I wanted to avoid: unencumbrance. How strange.

Old man in a smart cravat, 3/4-length raincoat. Halting steps and careful hand motions. Keep your hands from disappearing. (The moment you become unself-conscious you disappear. The Magician knows that that's death; the Fool sees that it's life. Old age makes fools of us, thank God.) He disappears up the stairs, comes back. Books sticking from a well-worn leather satchel on his right hip. He leans left against its weight, rubs his hands together. I think of the room as cold or warm but I know it's a mistake. I bring energy or leave it behind, or share it, or feel it. You find the strength to surrender or don't. I can't imagine how cold he must find each room to be, what it's like to see skin fade to translucence and transparency because of fucking time...he knows 'hot' and 'cold' are measures of his tolerance, has earned the right to give in. I'm obligated to feign warmth. So many years to go.

The inside of Judgment's trumpet is very definitely not a living thing. Cold metal. Noisemaker. See? Look at you. You've run out of noises to make on the cards' behalf. A credulous person might give in now to...not 'to the cards,' fool. To the possibility of something new.

The cards are pocketed and away. What was I looking for? Doesn't matter. On my errand I found:

The Fool. From the other deck - the unnumbered Major Arcane, or rather the zeroth card. The thing to which we return. Entropy rises...

A credulous person might give in...

OK.

Incredulity is something you choose. 'I couldn't believe it!' Well, that was true before it happened. The moment of decision comes to pass no matter how you've prepared. 'Incredulous' is not 'how you feel' when something happens you can't believe. It's the posture you adopt, crab-walking toward a junction or possibility, shoulders hunched. How comforting it feels: limbs drawn in against imagined cold ('cold' is a feeling, not a measurement), every atom's position known and controlled. 'In control' is a feeling, not a place. An inch more space between the feet of the Fool and the face of the cliff won't buy safety. That's what the Fool knows. Safety is a feeling, not a possession. You can't buy into it anyhow.

True things can't be bought.

Dwelling on the surface of the cards while disrespecting the action of association - imaginative creation - is laziness. Alternate form of the same statement: typing isn't writing. Or: only lovers know the hidden name of love. Or: religious belief is the myth that makes faithful action possible; faith is authentic action.

Or if you're into the whole 'brevity' thing: Deal.

That doesn't seem like a good ending but if I don't give these things away they will bury me.

Activation energy.

I'm hesitant to have people over to our place for dinner because we're (mostly) messy people and the work involved in dinner-partying together seems daunting. But our enjoyable (small) dinner party last night reminded me of a couple of simple things:

1) Let the food do the work. I tend not to trust ingredients, want to hover around the stove adding spices and such. But my lady made a fantastic pineapple/ginger dressing for my elementary salad, each just a mix of fresh ingredients, and the whole thing just sang. The pleasure of eating wasn't a function of the time in preparation nor the complicatedness of the work. It usually isn't; I just always fear otherwise. Next to the hearty spices and caramel-crispness of the tofu/cabbage/plum/wonton cups, A2thaGI's smoothmellow squash/carrot dip, and the aggressive taste of the cuke/hummus/olive cups, the salad was a clear high soprano note.

I learned rudimentary voice-leading rules in college, and our meal last night (unconsciously?) followed them: each item its own melody, each in its own register.

2) To hell with regionalism. No one actually cares that you're doing a Chinese dish, an Italian dish, a South American drink, and a side of beef jerky. As long as each dish does its thing and one flavour doesn't steal from another, geography doesn't matter one bit.

3) Eating habits are only habits. Dinner parties are a two-way invitation; if you're doing it right, you'll be taking chances right along with your guests. Don't deny yourself novel pleasures out of misguided 'etiquette' concerns.

4) Cleaning is fun.

4a) Well, cleaning is sometimes fun.

5) A clean kitchen is a much, much more efficient kitchen.

6) Generalizing from (3), Habits are only habits. They don't correspond to any essential nature or identity. I cling to my habits because I dislike discontinuities in my precious Self, but whatever new habits I pick up, my life will reorder around them. That's how you become an 'alcoholic' or a 'video game addict.' You might have a propensity for a thing but your habits are mutable and self-perpetuating. Habitual behaviour is an evolutionary boon, duh. Trouble is, since human devolution kicked in and fitness got decoupled from survival we (the spectacularly wealthy, lazy, lucky) have been spinning against ourselves. Habits spawning habits, the apparatus of survival and continuance misapplied. I'm accustomed to not having folks over for dinner. But it's only a custom. No Self survives honest fellowship with friends; the Self is for the times we lack such contact. We are most selfish when we push others away and choose solitude. It's OK to let fellowship do the work of reconstituting us.

6a) No seriously, I got that shit from the tofu cups.

The greatest special effect is 'acting.' This is not really that.

A trailer for 2012 without special effects.

A friend of mine is part of the FX team (or rather, one of several teams) for this forthcoming film. I mean no disrespect to the craftsmen on her team, whose skills and seriousness are not in question. A job is a job. But whatever this modified clip reveals about the film (nothing nonobvious), it hopefully shows us something about us, which we might otherwise choose - as usual - to forget.

Compare to the original clip, and keep in mind the content of the scene: we are rooting for the plucky limo driver, his plucky wife and kids, and the plucky shitbird-new-boyfriend to survive the onscreen death of millions of innocent people. Note that the scene is played for suspenseful comedy (check out that donut). Note the pornographic nature of the violence, which completely strips every human but the protagonists of anything resembling humanity. The final image isn't supposed to be sad or terrifying - it's too big, too wide-angle, too melodramatically voyeuristic.

Nope. It's supposed to be awesome.

Whatever the experience of making the thing, that is the thing's purpose.

I secretly miss the braindead hackery of this show.

(Via Monsieur A. Epstein)

Here is why Bono matters.

Bono matters because, like a certain big-eared Hawaiian lawyer we know, he can communicate both passion and intelligence without dilution or condescension:

"Love is a big word to be throwing around in [the Balkans]," Bono continues, building up steam, talking over the engine noise. "Carrying the badge of nonviolence, at first glance, looks well on an Irishman, but we lives 100 miles from troubles. So in a way, it was no great act of courage for us to drain the flag of colour and preach nonviolence.

"It's a completely different thing if you live in Croatia or if you live in the western Balkans. These people have, within recent memory, seen just what a thin skin of civilization we had in the late 20th century. We had just made Achtung Baby and Zooropa - and people weren't only not loving their neighbours, they were torturing their neighbours. They were attaching electrical cables to their private parts and making them squeal. I would not be at all offended if somebody were to say, 'How the fuck dare you come and speak about love?'" [--from this week's Rolling Stone]

To be both passionate about knowledge and knowledgeable about passion is a fine goal.

HOT WIFE!! Here, I'll prove it with photographic digital evidence of online.

HOT WIFE!! [Update: MADDENINGLY SMART WIFE!!] Update: I looked over the blog's stats and referrers the other day, and you fuckers - actually googling 'hot wife' and the like - are just too creepy. So no more picture for you. Sidebar: Grow up!

Charity.

¹Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

²And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

³And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

⁴Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,

⁵Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;

⁶Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;

⁷Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

⁸Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

⁹For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.

¹⁰But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

¹¹When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

¹²For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

¹³And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. (1 Corinthians 13:1-13, King James Version)

A better ride.

Rio? Really?

How are they gonna deal with most of the world's semipro athletes doing 'rhythmic gymnastics' with the various man- and lady-whores of the Carnivale all night?!

Pornolympics is more like it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!drunknow

The world has turned and left me here.

Most recent comment on the endless Family Guy thread (bonus: check out agi and GoDaddy justifiably dissing me in the comments, before the teenagers arrive):

family guys ok if they werent so offensive its no perfect or even good but its just for killling time most episodes arent roflol funny but just haha funny except some parts where its just so random its hilarious. its better that they arent as offensive as south park cause they retain more fans this way by not scaring em all of....

but he what do i know im just some 15yearold reading an interesting disscussion im not however much into tv as i enjoy books cause i likem more uknow cause im kind of a book worm and btw im a boy

OK, typos, so what. But 'roflol'? 'its just for killing time'? 'just so random its hilarious'? 'retain more fans this way'? 'IM KIND OF A BOOK WORM AND BTW IM A BOY'?!@#@$!

My empathy falls apart here. I don't know how to put myself into this book worm's shoes, I don't know what it would be like to have this particular arrangement of knowledge at age 15. I don't know what kind of relationship a person has to text, who grows up communicating in that form of writing. Something appears to be impossible forever. Waaah, waaah, waaah.

Barriers.

[Riffing off Chatty's post here.]

I think 'creative person' is a misnomer. Creativity is inextricably linked to context, to expression. Some people are able to come up with one side-splitting one-liner after another over drinks but can't write a joke to save their lives; others swerve effortlessly around bugs in code but can't see why their relationships break up. You might spitball two dozen wild ideas in a group meeting and draw a blank when staring at a blank page; the same melody that erupts from your horn in a jam session could be totally inaccessible in the studio or at the composition desk.

The common thread in these examples (let's get very, very abstract here) is the relationship between the mind's wacky-new-idea apparatus and its interacting-with-the-world apparatus. It seems to me we can describe creative 'blocks' in terms of conception/expression mismatch - and note that what we call 'genius' might be described as optimal ability/modality matching, or somewhat snarkily, well-chosen problems plus luck.

I find improvisation exciting and rewarding, and I'm a terrible planner. So I seek out situations in which I'm rewarded for making stuff up as I go along, and avoid having to make long-term schedules and plans. Because of this avoidance I lack practice at planning - which translates to reduced ability, thence to suppressed enthusiasm and (ha) avoidance. Experience only directly translates into more experience. Successfully applying a creative skill doesn't make me that 'kind' of person - it's just action. Even if it becomes habitual it's just action.

Habitual failure isn't a special class of experience or outcome, nor does it indicate an essential quality; it's only repeated action.

On Saturday mornings I tutor kids in Dorchester. It lifts up my spirit. Sometimes I'm confronted by a kid seeming not to know how to approach a problem, and beginning to sink into despair. The kid will come to believe that no approach is possible. This is the worst feeling, I think: loneliness. ('I'll be left standing still and the work - and my friends - will go on without me.') It seems to me that two dynamics are at work in those situations: when 'at rest,' the kid loses sight of what it would feel like to be 'in motion' (applying skill, displaying mastery); and yet half the time the kid knows every portion of the solution but can't (won't) combine them - won't try it out, I mean. Mismatch of conception and expression: not realizing that keys are for opening locks; not realizing that poetry is not written in an unknown language; not seeing that operations on dollars are easily translated to operations on decimals because dollars are decimals, etc.

Creativity is the willingness to test oneself.

Some kids don't know how 'smart' they are - how creative - because they don't recognize that they're in an environment where their creativity and risk-taking and intelligence will be recognized and valued. They harbor the misconception that when they manipulate complex symbol-systems in the form of SimCity or Halo or the chessboard they're applying skills that port directly to math problems, questions of history, wilderness tracking.

I see shapes and spaces when I listen to music - and am I far, far better at playing 3-D games with loud music on? Does my musical sense seem to 'tune' my spatial reasoning? It seems so. Well, now I know a secret...arrived at through (lite) analysis. The line between 'critical' and 'creative' thinking is blurry at best and can be obliterated entirely, if you let yourself experience 'criticism' as a creative act and incorporate analytical thinking into your creative activities. (When programmers speak of their job as an art form, we should take their word for it; after all we pretend that 'writing a novel' is not only an 'artistic' task but indeed a single task of any kind, despite the silliness and indeed impossibility of such a description. Same for writing a symphony, designing a megadungeon, building a website, etc.)

I'm terrible at certain 'creative' tasks. Plotting, for instance. ('Oh, sigh.') I have a hard time working out story-structures; stories fill in for me (when they fill in) like water droplets soaking into a piece of paper, moving from isolated points in every direction to 'fill in' the entire sheet. I can't conceive of stories in straight lines; shit, I can't even write a paragraph most days without a parenthetical apology or self-contradiction. Can I get away with calling that 'style'? I wouldn't be the first. On the other hand I am able to come up with snazzy little bedtime stories for my wife - which do coalesce into linear narratives, more or less. (And always with a moral at the end. Sample moral: 'Be true to your school.' Sample #2: 'Always eat a balanced breakfast.' The stories themselves are rather more morally complex.) Spitting out words I discover in myself a capacity for linear assemblage, which I don't know how to port over to pen-and-paper-and-write.

It would seem to be a matter of controlled testing, for me: start small, get acclimated, recognize analogies, submerge the ego. Exercise, in other words. Everything comes down to goddamn exercise.

I think conception/expression mismatches - creative errors - often result from egotism. You want to be 'you' but there's no such thing, so you corrupt your actions to correspond to an imaginary state of being. Isn't that comforting. Or, with less generalizing and more metaphorizing: you're saying 'sink or swim' but I'm worrying about whether I'll dissolve in water, y'know?

(I'm biting my nails right now. Shameful. Did I mention I've been wearing a rubber band around my right wrist? I snap it when I catch myself, but I don't always catch myself.)

Well, but to respond to this from Chatty...

As I said before, it turns out that some people have a really hard time coming up with an idea. Several more have an even harder time making something tangible with an idea when it finally manifests itself. The creative process has several mental blocks that get in the way between idea and final product. I think this is effectively so in the geek mind...

...I think we seem to have a hard time coming up with ideas because we have opinions about our ideas, or rather about our 'selves.' We imagine the Other judging us and let ourselves get bound up by the need to correspond to an ideal. 'I can not write this story about a wizard because I have not exhaustively worked out how this school of conjuration would function.' We've imposed a precondition on experience - a category. A new subproblem. How do you know that a subproblem is part of the problem you're trying to tackle? You know it when you encounter the subproblem in the context of solving the problem. When you directly experience it. The rest is egocentric fiction. Chatty cites these 'mental blocks':

• The Right Answer
• That’s Not Logical
• Follow the Rules
• Being Practical
• To Err is Wrong
• I’m not Creative

Every one of these is a version of, as Milch(!) would say, 'imputing motivations to some postulated Other.' We don't know what's in the hearts of other humans, and mistake the desire to know for a need, so we sink into despair, which is: 'I'll never be loved.' As if making and giving and feeling love were somehow different categories of experience; as if love were a disease to be passed rather than song to be sung; as if 'being loved' could possibly consist of anything other than shutting the fuck up and loving someone else.

Did this answer even a single question? Stop defending yourself; that battle is over. I'm trying to find the vocabulary of I love you, Reader(s). You win some you lose some. The 'be true to your school' part was at least funny though, right? Of course right!

No blogs for one week - maybe 'til Columbus Day.

Self-preservation. Nail-related anxiety might be stemming partly from pointless online bickering. See y'all soonish.

Concern.

My nails! Damn it, I've been pulling my nails compulsively since I was a little kid, and though they're longer right now than they've been in a year or more I'm still pulling them today. So much pretty dead white skin cells waiting to be broken and torn away, sterile satisfaction, to be, to...

Well, I'm fucked if I think too much about them and fucked otherwise, so let's stop here: nothing is easy when you're trying to shatter a decades-old compulsion trivially indulged. I'm fighting and losing, damn it! But fighting is preferable to, um, whatever else.

The bourbon, it turns out, does not help my willpower. And yours? How do you break bad habits, loved one(s)?

(I finished another writing project this week and realized anew that I am a Worth-While Human Doing. What, not 'being'? Nope. Just sitting there I'm as useful as a polyp full of birthday candy, waiting to bust.

Scattered, spoilery thoughts on Felix Gilman's excellent novel Thunderer.

Thunderer had me on page 4:

Countless painters decide to capture the Bird's image. It'll test their art. [...] Later, no one will even be able to agree what kind of bird it is. Some see a storm of bright feathers; others only the graceful motion of its wings. Little more than a sense of easy, invincible speed remains. A dozen minds conceive abstract new schools of painting to capture the moment.

You can imagine the last sentence (or rather, some immense distended version of it dripping with vile ichors and dark intimations best turned from with all speed, etc.) jutting from a Lovecraft story, but in Gilman's story it's a rational worldbuilding component: the passage of the Bird and its fellow deities really does change minds in that way. The city of Ararat, the central character of Thunderer, is as irrational as can be, but Gilman's offhand bits of description and microhistory always make sense; he knows how to maintain the 'vivid continuous dream' of good fiction. In this regard the novel is a complete success. Ararat has been showing up in my own dreams this week. I've been there and wish to go back.

What happened there is another, more ambivalent matter. [Spoilers damn you!] Thunderer picks up steam as it goes and ends with several vivid scenes, but they're out of proportion with the buildup; the climactic confrontation begins on page 425 of 437, and feels like a formality. The plot is patchy and unevenly paced and apportioned. One of the main characters, the scholar Holbach, is held up for most of the novel by several characters as a font of knowledge and possibility, but his eventual uselessness seems less like a clever irony than like a mishandled narrative thread. Another, the black-clad Captain Arlandes, doesn't do a single interesting thing after the first hundred pages, but just floats around waiting for Gilman to symbolically redeploy him in the final chapters. The protagonist Arjun's great quest gives the book its structure and ostensible central mystery, but his 'advancement' in the story consists of (1) getting superpowers and (2) apparently learning nothing.

I understand that this description of Arjun misses one of the points of the story - he lives a very full, exciting life in this book, with or without the involvement of Ararat's gods, and while not advancing in his preexisting quest he finishes a couple of others through ingenuity and dedication - but the Thunderer's plotting lacks the neatness and imagination of his worldbuilding.

The book has plenty of things on its mind that Gilman never quite follows through on, for whatever reason(s). Interesting suggestions about religion and politics are made; brief vivid parallels to current events are drawn; astonishing feats of narrative telescopy are performed; a mature sexual relationship is ably rendered; a feral, almost inhuman Peter Pan (the book's most interesting and truly otherworldly character) swoops in to save the day several times; and in the end, as several critics have pointed out, it's the city's survival that matters. Which seems a bit...cheap, in a way. It's tiring to get wrapped up in the story of a half-dozen people and a city only to find that the fates of the half-dozen are just incidentally or symbolically important.

I know I made similar complaints about Last Call, which was less vivid, more plotty, and ultimately less successful than Thunderer. But Gilman's treatment of human psychology is more believable and complicated than Powers's, and even as his characters morph from people to icons they retain the reader's interest, or in any case they held mine - which can't be said for 3/4 of Last Call's quartet at book's end. (Among Powers's surviving characters, only Arky stays human - and that poor bastard didn't even have a plot to follow.) I don't mean to dwell on Thunderer's inconsistent characterization and plotting in this review; it's just more immediately rewarding to point to what isn't perfect in the book than to rhapsodize about what is, viz., Ararat itself.

Fantasy cities have a certain appeal, starting with: they allow us to generalize (or more diplomatically 'universalize') without offending actual existing socioeconomic groups or being bound by the dramatic inadequacies of mere history. Plus there's something appealing to a certain kind of reader/writer about schematic creations like Ararat (or New Crobuzon or Gaiman's London or Powers's Vegas): a good fantasy city turns the entire world into a multiplication table, cyclical, algorithmically generated, easy to interpret. As busy as life but with none of the complex terror of talking to other human beings. And the big win for readers: everything corresponds to a straightforward System of Meaning. The neighborhood lines are bright and their identities clear, the organic process of urban development and variegation follows some abstract Plan, and - inevitably - there's some magical character who can traverse the city in unnatural ways, taking in its unnaturally sharp angles and artificially concentrated smells and inhumanly bright colours and producing perfect understanding.

(The archetypal modern urban decoder is of course Sherlock Holmes; Ararat even loosely fits Holmes's turn-of-the-century time period. Ararat's Perfect Urbanite-Semiotician is Arjun the (naturally) outsider, who learns to travel through time and space by listening very carefully to music. He's the wide-eyed focus character who strides, then slouches, then phases through the city searching (at least nominally) for his people's lost god, the Voice.)

The appeal of such a character isn't hard to understand: industrial cities are complicated and unnatural, their straight lines and mechanical sounds forbidding, their mere scale alienating and soul-deadening. They look like circuit boards, and deliver the same electric shock to the unwary. It's nice to imagine people with the ability to leap from building to building in a single bound (Jack) or step directly from one neighborhood to another (Arjun and Shay) or drop out of one life/career and into the next (Defour) or concoct a Book of All Things (Holbach and Nicolas) or see the full expanse of the city all at once (Arlandes and the Thunderer itself). Gilman's achievement in Thunderer is to build a city that can contain all these characters/types yet still remain vibrant and complex, organic and believable, a truly living thing. Gilman manages to deliver both a complex urban ecosystem and a set of unifying (comforting) fantasy premises and tropes without losing the wonder in either. I admire his work in Thunderer; it's lively but clear, and never dull. If it were more shapely I'd call it a great fantasy novel.

[Summary damn you!] The language of Felix Gilman's Thunderer is sprightly and clever; his characters are more 'neato' than 'deep,' but the story flows, and complicates, and satisfies. Gilman is better here at establishing ideas and situations than at plumbing their depths, but this is (was) his first novel, and that capacity will come in time, I've no doubt. In the meantime the sheer inventiveness of Thunderer is enough to recommend it, which I do without reservation. This is a hell of a first novel.

Discount on eye of newt.

20 people you might meet in a magic shoppe

Old man foolishly seeks weapons to rescue kidnapped grandson
Merc/thief stocking up before raiding mail station (next door)
Teenager collects materials for first love spell (doomed)
Musician defending self against devil collecting on soul-purchase (doomed)
Gardener cheating at biggest-pumpkin contest
Farmer readying anti-gopher incantation (doomed)
Bartender preparing brew that turns patrons into cavemen
Seer needs supernatural advisor to explain nightmares
Spelunker wants to create ever-burning torch (doomed)
Chaos-worshipper crafting bomb for local school
Kids mean to make magic rocket (doomed)
Owner's ex-spouse seeks post-separation redress at knifepoint
Parents want spell to keep (possessed) child from nail-chewing
Time-traveler stuck without functioning wormhole
Pregnant nun seeks magical abortion for demon spawn
Writer's novel sprung to unholy life; seeks unbothered sleep
Chemist indulging curiosity, avoiding derisive colleagues
Game designer looking for ideas (doomed)
School librarian on errand for evil science teacher
Seamstress must repair growing tear in spacetime in living room

Fall feeling.

Autumn is generally my favourite season of the year. A brisk fall day under a bright grey sky in sweater and hat is one of the best things. The first time you see your breath on evening air, balled fists jammed in coat pockets, you're not yet hunched into the New Englander's wintering posture of tucked chin and tense rounded shoulders...or the cutting cold wind off the Charles River just to piss you off a bit, hone your edge, ready you for the bitter hell of Boston winter. I love even those things. The right music helps; love too. If you can tell the difference you're not listening closely enough. I awoke from a two-hour trance to chiming guitars and the sky deepening from carolina to columbia to cornflower blue on its way to (I hope) the extravagant red of martian cities. I used to find myself in this situation all the time. The important thing, whether the sun's rising or setting and whether or not the music has yet found its way back from animated suspension to resolution and diminuendo and hush, is - the only thing is - will you listen to that -

Modes of instruction (RPG edition).

The D&D 4e 'training' adventure, Kobold Keep, contains five rooms, each containing bad things to kill.

Frank Mentzer's sample adventure for The D&D Basic Set contains seventy rooms - many of them empty.

Between them is an essential difference in opinion about the nature of the fantasy hero - and purpose of tabletop gaming. I am intrigued. (And this week, when this next round of paying writing work is done, I promise to write about something else. Maybe Thunderer, maybe the next nighttime read, A Confederacy of Dunces, bitterly funny so far.)

Of late: chemical bonds.

[From the thing I've been working on all summer.]

The Nature of Chemical Bonds (they’re just like love)

Most atoms want to form compounds: atomic combinations. The forces that bind atoms into compounds are called chemical bonds, and can take many forms. Chemical bonds are like love: sometimes they're about sharing something important to both of you (covalent bonds – shared electrons), or changing each other for the better (ionic bonds – exchanged electrons). With some love-bonds, it's the amount of electricity flowing all around you that keeps you together (metallic bonds – crystals trapped by a sea of electrons).

Sometimes the course of love has more to do with circumstances than what's between you; the same goes for molecules. There are chemical forces that aren’t bonds, and aren’t as strong as chemical bonds, but which do alter atomic behavior.

A molecule is the smallest group of atoms that can take part in a chemical reaction; it’s a tightly-bonded group of two or more atoms in a fixed ratio.* H2O, for instance, is the chemical formula for a molecule called "water." A billion oxygen atoms and two billion hydrogen atoms might constitute a quantity of water,** the substance, but the units are two-to-one clusters. The chemical formula indicates the ratio, not the molecule count.

[*] I won’t speculate on whether the "love" metaphor holds up for giant polyatomic molecules and ions.

[**] This is actually a miniscule amount of water. A decent-sized spoonful of Jell-O contains a million billion billion molecules of H2O. And yet, paradoxically, there's always room for Jell-O. It's a miracle, I guess.

Quantum Theory.

Last night I slipped through time to a parallel dimension
You were alive and happy

Our children played in trees
were strong and wise
and knew no fear

We watched them play together

Somewhere everyone is happy
Somewhere fish do not have bones
Somewhere gravity cannot reach us any more
Somewhere you are not alone

This morning, when I awoke
God was dead but I lived on
I cannot move
but I am free
I found the source of gravity

Somewhere everyone is happy
Somewhere fish do not have bones
Somewhere gravity cannot reach us any more
Somewhere you are not alone

Somewhere in a parallel dimension
Happening now but not within your sight
The force that binds the universe together
Everything is gonna be alright

--Jarvis Cocker, 'Quantum Theory'

Please watch this.

Complete Seinfeld, $99 today only.

Why do you need The Complete Seinfeld? Among other reasons:

* It's the canonical 90's TV show, even moreso than The X-Files and Twin Peaks and (yes) The Simpsons. In terms of both sitcom history and recent American cultural history it's an invaluable resource.

* There haven't been many comic ensembles in the history of television with the chemistry and chops of Seinfeld's cast. Even the group's weakest actor (Seinfeld himself by a large margin) was blessed with great timing and a natural feel for how to deliver a punchline; as the show developed according to each performer's strengths, his comfort and ability grew, and by the show's fertile middle period he held up his end of the show just fine. His castmates, meanwhile, are masters who deserved every Emmy.

* While it's been surpassed in this regard by Arrested Development, mid-period Seinfeld featured the most complex sitcom plotting yet seen, not to mention the darkest outlook of any network comedy I know of. It was poisonous satire played skillfully to the cheap seats, written with the dense referentiality of The Simpsons. The best writing on Seinfeld was the smartest and funniest on TV, Back Then.

* Why in the world would anyone forgive Michael Richards anything? Because Kramer is one of the great TV roles - a type and yet an individual, which is to say an icon. George is a richer role, Elaine a more difficult one, but of the four Kramer is the holy figure.

Bah. I just bought the thing while writing so I'm fresh out of ready-for-sublimating desire. Just buy the damn thing. $99 is a fantastic value for this much TV.

District 9.

The opening half-hour of District 9 is so good that it sets the film up for failure or godhood; it does fail, ultimately, through a combination of thin worldbuilding, rapidly-attenuating characterization, threadbare plot, and (I imagine) subtleties lost on this American viewer. Roger Ebert picked up on a few such encoded messages:

The title “District 9” evokes Cape Town’s historic District 6, where Cape Coloureds (as they were called then) owned homes and businesses for many years before being bulldozed out and relocated. The hero’s name, van der Merwe, is not only a common name for Afrikaners, the white South Africans of Dutch descent, but also the name of the protagonist of van der Merwe jokes, of which the point is that the hero is stupid. Nor would it escape a South African ear that the alien language incorporates clicking sounds, just as Bantu, the language of a large group of African apartheid targets.

The film's first aim is to engender sympathy with the aliens, who are inscrutable, inconsistently rendered, and - let's be frank - vile. The protagonist is no less vile, his startling and always-clear onscreen transformation notwithstanding; Sharlto Copley's performance in the lead role is unforgivably good, given that the bastard's never acted before. This doesn't make the aliens easier to empathize with, however. The film's other aim is to entertain you with a merry brutal chase and some action-movie histrionics; writer/director Neill Blomkamp achieves this second aim with skill and panache (particularly given his smaller-than-usual budget). He's a filmmaker to watch.

But you can see action movies any weekend. The decidedly un-Hollywood first half-hour of District 9 you only get to see for the first time once - lucky you. That it's bound to be followed shortly thereafter by the remaining 80 minutes is misfortune of the sort we've all seen before, and can indeed see every single goddamn weekend at our local cinemas and video stores. Lucky us.

Well it's a fine time anyhow, if underwhelming in the end. What are we left with? Potential, as ever.

Tissues at the ready.

The best thing about MetaFilter is the occasional 'here is an amazing, achingly personal story prompted by some bit of pop-culture or breaking news' comment. The cancellation of Reading Rainbow prompted one such story. The first few paragraphs are moving, but if your mom or dad was a teacher, the end of the post might destroy you.

I watched Reading Rainbow, 3-2-1 Contact, Square One, Sesame Street, and Mr Rogers's Neighborhood as a kid. (I was forbidden from watching MTV until middle/high school, and never watched it at home.) I wish I'd known how lucky I was. Thanks, mom and dad.

Q: What sort of man was Ted Kennedy? A: It doesn't matter.

Senator Edward Kennedy lost his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980. Afterward he gave one of the most important orations by a liberal speaker since WWII. He cosponsored the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 and felt betrayed when it was underfunded by the Republican administration and Congress. Kennedy killed a woman named Mary Jo Kopechne on Martha's Vineyard forty years ago and 'got away with it.' He had lots of money and power and was spoiled. He took out a second mortgage on one of his homes to help pay for his 1994 senatorial campaign. He was expelled from Harvard for cheating on a Spanish test and was readmitted because Harvard is full of people like him. He drank a lot. He endured the assassinations of two brothers. Kennedy was a vociferous antiwar advocate in the early 70's. He pushed for universal health care for nearly 40 years. He supported busing in Boston despite vicious attacks from his constituents. He believed that ending poverty was a Christian responsibility, and worked toward that end.

In the mid-80's Ted Kennedy publicly defied the racist white South African government in support of Bishop Tutu. Ronald Reagan appointed him special go-between in negotiations with Gorbachev. His father Joseph was a criminal and a successful politician. Ted Kennedy was a firm supporter of women's rights. The women in his family have not been accorded the same status and privilege as the men. He felt a strong sense of noblesse oblige. He stayed conscious through the operation that removed his brain tumor. His speech about Robert Bork was effective demagoguery. The Kennedys and their many handlers and hangers-on are under the mistaken impression that they deserve power because of their status. Ted Kennedy worked very hard. He was an important and effective senator. He died this week.

Facts are facts; categories are bullshit. What sort of man was Ted Kennedy? Don't ask stupid questions. He was a man, he made mistakes, he profited, he paid, he suffered, he worked, he died. Narratives of 'redemption' and 'class privilege' and 'the prerogatives of power' and 'the lion of the senate' don't apply - or rather, they apply each in part, and help us get a grasp on the life of a dead man, which shared these qualities with every other human life: it was difficult and it ended. We demand that he be something more than the sum of his actions and experiences because we wish the same for ourselves. We remain ignorant, terrified, angry, hopeful, attached, and so death is difficult for us to understand. We wish our stories ended in something other than everlasting darkness.

Ted Kennedy was many things, and the television and newspapers and magazines are full of rich idiots bloviating on his 'meaning' and 'legacy' and 'nature' and so forth. On 'the Kennedys' and other gossip. These declarations might inspire but they do not educate. They bring us no closer to the man. He has gone beyond our reach now. Ted Kennedy worked hard and died having lived fully, for 'good' or 'ill'; the work remains. We should attend to it, and to the facts of the man's life, instead of groping about for his 'true nature.' His category, his identity. As if such things, in this world of acts and objects, meant anything at all. As if they could keep night from falling on us too.

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale.

Stayed up late last night to read the second half of The Handmaid's Tale. What exquisite writing! I worried at first that the politics of the book would be narrowed and hardened by polemic, but the characterizations are unfailingly generous and rich; unexpected kindness and connection and 'predictable' vileness all flow seamlessly together, and none of the narrative-present-time human elements are jarring. Some of the language is dated, of course, as are the assumptions about the role of consumer technology, and Atwood's version of a nativist-religious-reactionary revolution is the thinnest element of the book. But the implausible aspects of the Tale's future history nonetheless serve their purpose; what comes after the rickety bridging-fiction of the coup is emotionally airtight (however provisional or limited as political prediction).

And such writing, my god...the last sentence of section IX is a little stylistic fillip that occurs nowhere else in the novel; it's so beautiful I had to stop reading, if you know what I mean. The second half of the book is sprinkled with gorgeous, unexpected turns like that: flashbacks emerging almost undetected from present-time narration; imagined snatches of dialogue (e.g. Offred's vision of the Wives denigrating Janine); the instantly convincing reconstruction of Moira's narration. The book gets funnier, livelier, more sensual as it goes; the dusty opening chapters give way to fond memories, sexual longing, frank acceptance, and - finally - moments of rapture. I'm jealous of Atwood's skill. It's not just that every character is a complex human being; the writing itself evolves slowly from Offred's grim reportage (oh how very honest her justified cynicism seems) to the dangerous, intoxicating vulnerability of the final movements. The passages about love (after Jezebel's) are too true and honest to bear; Atwood's decision to follow them with the Salvaging is perhaps cruel but surely correct.

Offred is a real person. What higher praise is there for her creator?

I'm a little out of sorts today, and not just because of the book itself. Between Last Call and Atwood's novel, I've now read more novels (two) in the last three weeks than in any three month period since college. The purpose of confession is explicitness, so: I'm embarrassed, angry, worried about being exposed as a liar and hypocrite and poseur. I'm also hopeful (which is even more embarrassing). Maybe I'm learning how to read again. Wouldn't that be nice.

One other thing. Agi kept saying that The Handmaid's Tale was a 'hopeful' book, and through the first 150 pages I thought she was speaking ironically, playing a nasty trick. She was right though, as usual. Gents: listen to your wives.

[Surprise, surprise: Mary McCarthy's NYTimes review from 1986. I'm confused by her dismissal of the characterization; perhaps she couldn't tell Nick and Luke apart, but I knew them on sight, and I found the Commander (Fred) vivid and terrifying. This seems somewhat more accurate: 'At the same time, the Republic of Gilead itself, whatever in it that is not a projection, is insufficiently imagined.' But then the specifics of Gilead aren't the point. Offred's emotions, her desires, the constant (un)welcome return of her memories, the contortions required by her circumstances and the hardening ideas around her: all these things are instantly recognizable. The satiric target of The Handmaid's Tale isn't one particular religious/political movement or moment, but rather the dark desires given rein by fundamentalism, political or religious. Things would never happen quite this way; if they did, though, this is how they would feel. These are the choices we (would) face. Correct and true are not the same thing of course.]

Despair.

I started reading The Handmaid's Tale last night. I only made it through 75 pages and already I wish I were dead. My lady tells me it's a 'story of hope,' but she keeps saying it with this smile that makes me think I'm being set up for a fall. Alas. Click the image to see what I've been up to lately.

Milestoned.

Handed in what should be the first draft of a completed manuscript today. I have some administrative matters to attend to today and need to get started rewriting quite quickly, but since this project has been my summer's main focus, I feel at the moment as if I deserve a strong drink. I'll settle for a brief shower, as I neglected my morning ablutions and consequently stink like a fucking wet dog. Reader(s), you have my best wishes.

(p.s. I feel a little foolish pissing on Last Call like I did last night. The man's a beloved modern fantasist, after all, and plenty of people call it his best book. I just can't shake the feeling that, for all its imagistic potency and narrative drive, there's something the book completely failed to do, and it's got something to do with just-plain-people...)

Tim Powers, Last Call.

Tim Powers's Last Call comes highly recommended, but after finishing it tonight I can't shake a feeling of tremendous disappointment and frustration. It's not a bad book; indeed it starts beautifully, improves and accelerates throughout its first few hundred pages, and ends 'satisfyingly,' as it's supposed to. The trouble is that for all its no doubt richly-imagined goings-on and Powers's obvious intelligence and gnarly imagination, nothing much happens in Last Call. Familiar symbols (the Tarot, the Fisher King, the mythology of Vegas gambling and the poker table, bits of The Waste Land) are deployed enthusiastically, knotty plotlines proceed according to the familiar contours of those symbols, and at the 'exciting' climax the symbols (excuse me, characters) meet in symbolic conflicts devoid of emotional power. The book moves so briskly that you don't notice that it's not actually a thriller - each of its scenes seems to refer to a scene from a parallel novel, in which actual human stakes are played for in an actual world by actual humans, rather than elements in a Tarot-themed Gantt chart.

It is, in short, a neat idea (a few of them, really) stretched out over half a thousand pages. It's a heck of a story, and when 'THE END' comes it turns out not to have been much at all.

(I kept thinking of American Gods. Do not take that as a compliment.)

The good parts - Crane's early suffering over the fate of his wife, Dondi's apology, the Mandelbrot man, the slam-bang opening section, the regular appearance of steaming cups of coffee and cold beers - are just right, and pieces of the book will stick with me, I suspect. But with one exception the characters in the book never quite rise to the level of people. The relationship between Diana and Scott is wish-fulfillment and (when you think about it) a bit gross, and both characters get less interesting as the story progresses; the depiction of Scott's alcoholism is utterly facile; Dondi is a sentimental caricature but only that, and the thinness of his cruel backstory feels contemptuous on Powers's part; Arky spends most of the novel dicking around offstage in a plotline that has no interest beyond its dorm-room-bullshit-session premise, and his arc is engaging but far too handy to get invested in; Nardie is like a stock character beamed in from some other story; and Leon fulfills none of his initial promise, vanishing behind a twirling villain-moustache for most of the book.

Of all the characters, only the old man Ozzie is as neat-o as the book's symbolic register, and the book is weirdly muted in its treatment of him and his fate. I don't think that's a matter of noir aesthetics; rather, I imagine that Powers (like so many of his readers and critics!) was so enamored of the meaning of his story, its mythological referents, that he forgot to make the story itself matter. And we didn't mind - after all, who can complain about Weird Fantasy that flatters the allusion seekers and conspiracy fans in the audience? Some of the allusions and mythic parallels are so blunt they're offensive - when one character eats a thin white poker chip at a moment of transformational crisis, is it really necessary to have another character moan, 'Christ'? And should we pretend not to notice when the exact same thing happens a dozen pages later, with a bloody wound in the side immediately followed by a blasphemous 'Jesus!' outburst? I half want to assume that Powers's tastelessness in those passages is an ironic wink rather than a failure of nerve and style.

But I couldn't put the book down. It's exhilarating, and a few moments are breathtaking. But it feels, in the end, a little bit pointless. One Amazon reviewer unwittingly hit the nail on the head: 'One character is destined to play the Fool card in the drama and manifests as a homeless man who lives in special "boxes" all throughout Vegas.' Yes, I thought, that describes Dondi's storyline perfectly. I realized only after a moment that the reviewer meant only to describe Dondi's premise. And...and most of the jokes are puns. And without their symbolic parallels most of the events are meaningless or just not there at all. And the last 100 pages are a weirdly-paced mess, the beautiful coda marred by needless exposition and a saggy anticlimax that made the previous few hundred pages seem like much ado about nothing much. And, yeah, I couldn't put the book down. I feel like a fool for caring about 500 pages of notes for the Greatest Dark Magical Fantasy Novel Ever Written About Vegas, which Tim Powers slyly published in the guise of a novel. What a smart man he is.

Inspired by Mr SEK.

OEDIFICATION: to put out one's eyes in a fit of misplaced rage.

(I'd wanted to call it KENTISTRY but it turns out I'd misremembered Lear.)

Working still.

Busy few weeks, etc.

Still working.

Paying work is sapping all my writing energy, so nothing for here yet. Sorry.

On the plus side, PAYING GODDAMN WORK.

Why no posts?

Trying to limit Internet nonsense while traveling. Writing otherwise anyhow. Back on the 4th. See y'all soon.

Worldbuilding is storytelling: complication, complexity, and micronarratives.

My recent obsessions taken to a 3,500-word extreme! Go read (and if you're an RPG nerd, you should be following Philippe's blog anyhow).

The Hurt Locker.

The Hurt Locker is an excellent film, painfully intense from beginning to end and generous in its treatment of its characters and world. I recommend seeing it in the theatre if possible.

That's it for my review. Go see The Hurt Locker.

The rest is a misplaced complaint. (Spoilers follow.)

The dominant theme in recent Iraq War dramatizations has been the surreal, arbitrary nature of the war. Nothing about the soldiers' on-the-ground experience is connected to the narratives put forth by mainstream media outlets (in their role as government PR services), and beyond the usual war-is-hell, soldiering-is-strange, fight-for-your-brothers, innocence-gets-lost, it's-tough-coming-home material that makes up nearly every war film ever, Hollywood has had little to say about the Iraq War other than 'This makes little sense.' The Hurt Locker fits this mould: the film doesn't make any statements about the Iraq war as such. Rather, the film's declarative content is right there in its epigram, the first frame of the show: 'War is a drug.'

The Hurt Locker is the story of a drug addict endangering the lives of the people around him by feeding his addiction; more specifically, it's a recidivism story rather than a redemption story, so the ending shouldn't come as a surprise, though you may come away disappointed in the characters.

(Let's say up front that the movie is a drug too: at a tense point in the extraordinary mid-film mercs'n'snipers sequence I hissed out 'Kill the motherfucker' at one of the onscreen American soldiers, disturbing my wife and filling me with a potent cocktail of self-loathing and self-justification for the rest of the running time.)

The plot of The Hurt Locker involves three soldiers on an ordnance-removal squad: two provide cover, supplies, and communications, while the third (James) puts on an enormous space-pillow suit and defuses roadside bombs and IEDs and the like. It's an action/suspense movie, and the material is all guns and near-death and warrior antics. (The most incredible plot point in the film is the main character's simple statement of how many bombs he's defused. It's also the lead actor's best moment - an unbelievably complex show of emotions in no more than fifteen virtuosically-uncomfortable seconds.)

The story, on the other hand, has little to do with explosives; the film is ultimately a study in how the intensity of war denatures and distends the human heart, and what effects war-addiction has on soldiers and civilians alike. The story is told effectively, though not definitively, if you know what I mean.

If you spend two hours watching a film with (what you take to be) its central question in mind, you can start to believe that you're entitled to an answer; that's a reasonable assumption but incorrect. This belief is even stronger when the film makes its major concerns clear from the outset. The central plot question of The Hurt Locker is, as always, 'What happens next?' More specifically: 'Will they make it?' More editorially: 'Will James get his coworkers killed?'

This is only mechanism, though. The story-motor is a different question altogether: 'Why is James like this?' It's voiced by a couple of characters in the film, most memorably by James himself. The answer, in keeping with cinematic-Iraq-war standards, is 'I don't know.' Or rather, the answer is in the epigram - 'War is a drug' - and perhaps you'd be justified in thinking this both an elegant bit of storytelling and a frustrating piece of halfway-analysis.

Toward the end of the film, the war-addict returns home to his ex-wife and baby. At the grocery story he faces a vast aisle of scrupulously art-directed cereal boxes; after a moment's existential crisis, he grabs one with a look of mild but manageable irritation on his face. Our 'hero' is a quick-witted, intelligent man, and a hardboiled fighter - and newly attuned to the complexities of human lives and so forth, as prompted by his latest experiences in Iraq. We get two minutes of domestic footage, and he chooses to be redeployed to Baghdad. Roll credits.

James's final choice feels inevitable - i.e. believable, a correct storytelling decision - but I wanted The Hurt Locker to stay with him and take a chance on rendering his less intense (but no less complex) life at home with his ex-wife and kid. The upshot of the film is that he can't function anymore in an environment other than the life-or-death insanity of war, where he's both an effective fighter and technician and, occasionally, a mortal danger to his allies. Fine. The psychology of our 'hero'/loose-cannon is convincing and complex, and The Hurt Locker is a rich and honest treatment of its subjects in their main environment. But we only see them against the backdrop of the war. Which is a fine choice but now I'm preoccupied with the alternatives for some reason. Is that my fault or the film's?

I came away from The Hurt Locker desperate to find out how a smart, capable, emotionally-complex man like James - a hero - handles his few days or weeks at home. How do his survival mechanisms fail, exactly? We know that they fail, hence his voluntary redeployment, but I'd have been just as happy or happier had the film condensed its bomb-squad material into an hour and followed the processes of James's mind on the home front for another hour. How does war-addiction manifest in the world beyond the battlefield? How would the tightly-wound pragmatist James, who feels no apparent bloodlust but whose vengeful-romantic streak nearly gets his squadmates killed, respond to the armchair viciousness of America's war-cheerleaders? How is a man so clear-eyed about his addiction (in his moving monologue in the baby's bedroom) so easily overtaken by it?

But then I'm asking for another movie entirely. To hell with that. The Hurt Locker does what it sets out to do; I'm tempted to say it does so flawlessly. Now, two days after going to the theatre and a thousand words into a 'review,' all I want is to see the rest of the story, the missing piece. Y'know, the bit with women and kids and conversations in English and our hero actually managing a life that isn't prescribed in every way. For whatever reason, I demand to know the details of his failure, the mismatch between the world of war and (merely) the world. I want a good answer to a new question. To hell with that too. I wonder what else is playing this week.

If.

If a fella comes off as a pretentious overcompensating ass in his writing, but his wife's been in the ground just a little while and he's obviously having one of those what-is-life,-really? periods...do you hold it against him? What kind of person does that make you? Or him, really?

Too long; didn't read.

In 2001 (02? 03?) Zhan suggested I take a look at two community (i.e. 'Web 2.0,' i.e. 'social networking') websites: MetaFilter and Plastic. He was killing a lot of would-be thesis-researching time on those sites at the time, as I recall.

Plastic was the smartest, funniest Slashdot-like site back then.

MetaFilter was the deepest.

I sent my $5 for a MeFi membership, joined Plastic for free, and pissed away many many hours reading and occasionally ranting over the next mumblemumble years.

Plastic's gone and MeFi celebrates ten years of dilettantism, inanity, dogmatism, and genuine love this weekend. Here's to Matt Haughey, the most successful community architect on the Internet, and to the blue, green, and grey.

Trying to figure out the history of fantasy roleplaying games. One in particular, for the moment.

[Why do I care? Because tabletop roleplaying is extremely important in the evolution of modern American fantasy, not only generic fantasy but the mass-mediated fantasies that lull us to sleep (and rouse us to fight - each other, if no one else). D&D is far and away the most popular pen-and-paper roleplaying game - that doesn't matter as much in the post-EverQuest, post-World of Warcraft era, but it still matters. The new books are bestsellers, and D&D still gives popular fantasy - books, movies, and games - much of its basic structural and stylistic vocabulary (y'know, the bits that don't come from Tolkien and Star Wars and such).

Plus, what can I say? Lately I spend my weekends rolling dice. I wanna know what's going on, and why.

I'm not an authority on this stuff - this is my attempt to put down the 35-year history of one game that's had tremendous influence. I'd like to try to talk about the nature of that influence later, as I think about it more. And so we're clear: I wasn't there, and this isn't about What A Swell Time It All Was Before The Suits/Millennials Ruined It. Nor is it cultural history. This is one attempt to summarize the history of a design as I see it. Probably I'm all wrong - I'm sure I've overestimated the irritations of actually playing AD&D, which I'm limited to reading rather than playing. This is all Big Angry Declaratives because I get that way sometimes, but really the whole thing has a giant question mark on top of it.]

OD&D

In the beginning you had miniatures wargaming - Napoleonics, Ancients, and so forth. Gary Gygax wrote a fantasy-wargaming ruleset, Chainmail. In 1974 he took a bunch of Dave Arneson's ideas (in particular the central conceit of roleplaying games, 'You are your character'), mixed them in with his own fantasy-gaming preoccupations, and produced Dungeons & Dragons, a tabletop game that was much closer to individual-scale wargaming than 'storytelling with dice.' Indeed, original D&D was more a Chainmail expansion than a full-blown game in its own right; while the three 'little brown books' presented an alternative combat/measurement system, D&D players were expected to own Chainmail, and to be familiar with the conventions of miniatures wargaming. The game's setting was straight-up midcentury pulp fantasy, with no small amount of Tolkien (and a few spoonfuls of Lovecraft) thrown in to sweeten its heavy Leiber/Howard men-of-mixed-morals flavour.

Food.

Of course I find food obsessives ridiculous. Never moreso than when they're borrowing affective postures from their literary betters:

So, clearly, decent food can be had at more than reasonable prices [at the Cheesecake Factory], but it takes some careful choosing on a menu with more than 200 offerings. The biggest drawback is the mall-like atmosphere, a sense of faux everything that is perhaps inevitable in any large chain. The fact that any of the 146 CFs around the country can put out this astonishing variety of food is an impressive work of corporate organization and efficiency. But I left feeling sad, and not sure why. I think, on reflection it was because of the sense that what we'd just experienced was simply a company responding to the demands of America, and the demands of America were helping us to take our food one step backward rather than one step forward, and I don't think we have time for backward steps.

Well, no, but if you're worrying about how no one makes 'slow food' anymore and don't give a shit that doctors are all about hair-trigger optional C-sections - or you were as interested in the importance of Twitter during the recent Iranian uprising as you were in a democratic goddamn uprising in a nearly-nuclear theocracy run by imbeciles and lunatics - then your worry about 'backward steps' comes off as a little goddamn precious. Does 'faux everything' make our world worse? Yes it does. Is the availability of cheap tasty food at the shopping mall really the worst possible case? Nope. Does your Overwhelming Sadness at the availability of an unbelievable variety of (mass-produced freeze-dried sensually-denuded) cheap food in the suburbs seem like a gross luxury, given that the suburbs themselves are so complexly mind-warping that the Cheesecake Factory doesn't even crack the list of the Top 50 Things Worthy of Scrutiny About This Fucked Living Arrangement? Yes it does.

And you know what? The Cheesecake Factory sucks, just like lamely recreating the first scene from the film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to promote your basic-cable TV guest appearance sucks. Just like Hollywood sucks generally, and massive income inequality sucks, and mosquitoes and designer clothes suck, and the bourgeois food-tourism that passes for 'adventure' TV sucks. Plus it sucks extra that David Foster Wallace is dead, John Coltrane is dead, Robert Altman is dead, and we have to go on pretending that weeping into your tastefully-arrayed miniscule portion of honey-glazed whatever counts as having an existential crisis.

Keep writing, Mr Ruhlman. You take it seriously and ask new things of yourself and I admire that (a great deal) (but only that).

Keep preening, foodies everywhere.

The fallout is bad but it's bomb I'm afraid of.

This is how you review the written word!!

Dig it.

My life just got much worse in a hurry.

I just spent eight minutes reading the blog of a gossip-blogger with the stage name 'Perez Hilton.'

Everyone who supports this imbecile: go fuck yourself, hard, now.

Music → Markup.

[This turned out to be something, but it's still just about Phish, so if you're at all skeptical about this sort of thing, skip to the bottom paragraph and be done with it. Seriously! You have been warned.]

For many Phish fans, the segue is the true measure of a set's fluidity and complexity. In Phish-fan parlance there are two kinds of segues - the bracket and the arrow. Take this setlist, from 4/5/98 in Providence:

Oh Kee Pa > YEM, Theme > McGrupp, Gin → Cities > Sparkle, Melt

The crucial element in there is the Gin → Cities marking, which denotes an improvisatory bridge between the songs, a passage that's neither the clattering midtempo rock of 'Bathtub Gin' nor the thumb-on-the-turntable sludge-funk of Phish's Talking Heads cover. Not only does the music not stop, it changes form to get from one tune to the other. If the tunes aren't in the same key, the band might start the second song wherever they already are, tonally, and drop into the right key after a few seconds or minutes - or the may walk the circle-of-fourths for a while before alighting on a suggestive key, which might prompt a new musical direction. The point is, when you see an arrow on a setlist, it means something is going on, risks are being taken, truly new music is coalescing in the gutters between tunes. The word 'composition' is being stretched and joyously repurposed onstage. For Phish fans (as for Deadheads) there's nothing better than a clean-but-crazy segue, one that in retrospect makes perfect sense but could never have been predicted at the outset of a jam. For many fans, those are the holy moments.

The bracket segues, on the other hand, can denote anything from the stop/start of OKP > YEM to the band fading out 'Theme' while Anastasio tosses out the opening licks of 'McGrupp.' Old Phish setlists tended to be heavy on the brackets and light on arrows - though once in a while you'd stumble across some absurdity like this, from 2/20/93 in Hotlanta:

Wilson > Reba, Tweezer → Walk Away → Tweezer > Glide > Mike's → My Mind → Mike's > Hydrogen → Kung → Hydrogen > Weekapaug → Have Mercy → Weekapaug → Rock and Roll All Nite Jam → Weekapaug, Fast Enough for You > Big Ball Jam > HYHU > Terrapin > HYHU → Harry Hood, Tweezer Reprise

Yes, the show is as ridiculous as its setlist. (And a fine copy is available in the Live in Atlanta box set.) The Glide > Mike's Song suite feels like a single performance; the frenzied quote-heavy performance of 'Glide' carries over as Anastasio starts whipping up the 'Mike's Song' guitar line, and when the band slingshots into the tune it's like the resolution of the previous song's tension. The spirit is improvisatory though the setlist was at least partly written in advance, and if the set wasn't full of onstage composition, it did feature wild onstage rearrangement - songs popping up within other songs, lengthy quotes piling atop one another, an anarchic party-hearty spirit that might've seemed strange from a bunch of 20something nerds. 'My Mind's Got a Mind of Its Own' evolves organically out of a cooled-out 'Mike's' jam; 'Kung' starts up where 'I Am Hydrogen' should be; 'Have Mercy' slips into a 'Weekapaug' longueur before a brief KISS tribute, and the whole scene feels like a single suite. Segues got more meaningful later on in the band's career, as average song length stretched far beyond the old standards:

Halley's Comet → Tweezer → Black-Eyed Katy > Piper, Antelope

That's 11/22/97 II, one of the canonical Phish sets from the band's greatest tour by far, Fall 1997. In this case the setlist hides more information than it reveals: 'Halley's Comet' skips right past the usual outro chords and into a greasy funk groove that mutates, after fifteen minutes or so, into a terrifyingly intense 'space jam' - roaring noise and feedback, celestial synth textures, and a pounding lost-in-a-cave beat from Fishman on drums. The whole thing lasts 25 minutes, and if it's the most interesting and uplifting jam of the set, its appeal is matched (in other ways) by the devastatingly sexy Tweezer → BEK middle portion. The set wanders all over the goddamn map musically, and there's nothing in 'Halley's' or 'Tweezer' that would explain what transpired between the two songs.

In the future we'll make improv-rock setlists as we now make 'tag clouds' on blogs - the heaviest tracks will simply be noted in a bigger font, and big breakaway jams will get their own 'Jam' notation in 48pt blinking Comic Sans, and the world will be light. Or shit - by then I suppose the world will be shit. I wonder whether they'll look back and say this post sped up the process of beshittening, or stemmed the tide for a moment - or perhaps they'll say nothing at all, as I've just done.

Well. To sum up: Improv-rock fans use straightforward markup for their setlists, which in combination with fan expectations and collective knowledge enables complex evaluation and info-exchange - despite the data's lossy compression scheme. This notation is unique to improvisatory rock; most jazz fans rarely need to note segues in this way. What's important to me isn't important to you, probably, though the fact that it's important (to me) might be an entryway by which you access the hidden heart of Just Another Human Being. And so how will I find my way into yours?

Easy pieces.

the day.

that day i will tend to things.
you will not take the sheet rolling over in bed.
that day i will skip breakfast i think.
i will walk only away.
that day i will eat an unhealthy dinner.
i will try to read a book and fail.
i will lose my place.
that day i will hate sunshine.
i will not want to be touched.
i will watch children sit.
you will not be singing along as you walk in from work.
that day i will be tired.
i will fear to sleep.
you will not make up funny words over dinner.
i will have my way on the issue of the television.
that day i will not know what sentences should look like.
you will not turn from the unwashed laundry rolling your eyes.
that day i will forget obvious things.
i will catch myself not breathing.
you will not again gather into a human shape
what remains of me
that day.

L,
W.

Holy guacamole - Palin resigns.

From her statement to the press today:

If I have learned one thing: LIFE is about choices!

And one chooses how to react to circumstances. You can choose to engage in things that tear down, or build up. I choose to work very hard on a path for fruitfulness and productivity. I choose NOT to tear down and waste precious time; but to build UP this state and our country, and her industrious, generous, patriotic, free people!

Life is too short to compromise time and resources... it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: "Sit down and shut up", but that's the worthless, easy path; that's a quitter's way out. And a problem in our country today is apathy. It would be apathetic to just hunker down and "go with the flow".

Nah, only dead fish "go with the flow".

No. Productive, fulfilled people determine where to put their efforts, choosing to wisely utilize precious time... to BUILD UP.

And there is such a need to BUILD up and FIGHT for our state and our country. I choose to FIGHT for it! And I'll work hard for others who still believe in free enterprise and smaller government; strong national security for our country and support for our troops; energy independence; and for those who will protect freedom and equality and LIFE... I'll work for and campaign for those PROUD to be American, and those who are INSPIRED by our ideals and won't deride them.

I WILL support others who seek to serve, in or out of office, for the RIGHT reasons, and I don't care what party they're in or no party at all. Inside Alaska - or Outside Alaska.

But I won't do it from the Governor's desk.

I've never believed that I, nor anyone else, needs a title to do this - to make a difference... to HELP people. So I choose, for my State and my family, more "freedom" to progress, all the way around... so that Alaska may progress... I will not seek re-election as Governor.

And so as I thought about this announcement that I wouldn't run for re-election and what it means for Alaska, I thought about how much fun some governors have as lame ducks... travel around the state, to the Lower 48 (maybe), overseas on international trade - as so many politicians do. And then I thought - that's what's wrong - many just accept that lame duck status, hit the road, draw the paycheck, and "milk it". I'm not putting Alaska through that - I promised efficiencies and effectiveness! ? That's not how I am wired. I am not wired to operate under the same old "politics as usual." I promised that four years ago - and I meant it.

"...so I better run!"

Y'know what? All in all I think it's kind of a great little speech. Political suicide, presumably, and given her history I'd bet you ten bucks (following Josh Marshall here) that this is about cutting her reputation losses and getting out of the public spotlight before additional ethics investigations snow her under. (Plus that MacArthur quote is craaaaaazy.) But today I finally began to understand how people could go for this woman. She just doesn't sound anything like a politician.

Which is to say on one hand her aggressive willful parochialism and grotesque bigotry ensure that she's not actually qualified to run anything bigger than Wasilla, by the looks of it, and I wish those poor bastards something better than Sarah Palin's stewardship.

But on the other hand: well, she's one of a kind, huh? Weird to get so far and be so wholly without shame. Admirable, kind of.

(I'm being sarcastic, but not just that. I really do think it's all kinda neat! Scary but neat! Like an episode of Buffy but with much less coherent dialogue.)

The financial crisis described slightly differently.

The financial crisis is the one thing that could have turned Obama's election - which was about young people's energy, new ideas, the blurring of standard GOP/Dem party lines - into nothing more than a middle chapter in a litany of grownup problems. It's the one situation in which Obama is no longer the bold (comparatively) young reformer but just another guy trying to fill the Big Political Moment.

I wrote this back in the day:

What are Dems getting out of Obama? How is the party establishment hoping to play his election, and what happens to his candidacy now that he's (sort of) the presumptive nominee? And what is it like to be a Young Voter in this extremely consequential election, voting for someone who seems to be as Outsider-y as you can get, yet who would never ever have gotten this far without the intrinsically creepy mechanisms of modern-media politics, to which he's rhetorically opposed? And, and: What kind of political generation is arising from the very, very questionable feelings of agency and 'ownership' that Internet/distributed political financing and the constant blather of blogs seem to promise? There's reason to believe that Young Voters are more apathetic than they've ever been, across the board; what does it mean that they're rousing themselves to vote for this guy?

What do these assholes think this is, a game?

Back then I really thought the election was about a sea change in American governance. I was excited about the election as such, the symbolism of it, the pragmatic power-sharing and -shifting of it. (Yes we did! and so forth.) The financial crisis - and the hyper-partisan mudslinging that's followed, much of it nonsensically 'socialism'-themed - hasn't suddenly turned Obama mortal and fallible. It's shown that as far as our nation's ruling class of venal middle-aged assholes was concerned, the election was never going to be allowed to change anything.

And that, ladies and germzzz, is my cup of fresh-brewed morning cynicism for today!