Good Guys, Bad Guys

News and Politics,

Every time I think modern American craziness has peaked, and will now degrade into mere oddness and maybe eventually into normalcy, it stops and turns around and zigzags to new heights. Since the health care bill passed I’ve read about a blogger who made a name for himself calling on “modern Sons of Liberty” to go on a massive window-breaking binge, and about one of the guys who went to a rally, got fired up and angry, and worked off their energy by mocking a man with Parkinson’s disease. I’m too depressed to get angry right now. I just felt a little sad. And then I read they’d both received threats. And that made me a little sad, too.

In the last decade, Americans have openly advocated torture. Americans have openly advocated holding prisoners forever, with no charges or possibility of redress. That’s just what Americans have advocated as official government policy; poll the hoi polloi and you’ll find people willing to indiscriminately bomb entire populations into the Precambrian era if you tell them it will kill a couple terrorists. Pick any crazy idea that violates the principles the United States of America are supposed to hold, and, somewhere out there, herds of Americans are in favor of it.

People into atrocity-endorsement often justify it with the observation that, hey, the people we’re wishing this on, or even actually doing it to, are Bad Guys. Actually, a lot of the people swept up in the War on Terror were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but never mind–for the sake of argument, we’ll assume they’re all genuine terrorists. And here the pro-torture crowd is right: terrorists are monsters.

The thing is, monsters are not born monsters, the way they’re born with brown hair or third nipples. Bad Guys put themselves into the Bad Guys category by doing bad things. What the torture advocates consistently do not get is that a bad thing is a bad thing no matter who you do it to.

It’s the “No, Wait, I’m the Hero” principle. Anyone with any exposure to movies or comics or TV knows this bit. Captain Kirk and Superman and the Doctor have the villain in their clutches, at their mercy… and they pull back, because killing the bad guy would make them just as bad as he is. And the audience groans, because it’s such a cliche. But just because it’s a cliche doesn’t mean there’s nothing in it.

Good isn’t something you are. Good is something you do.

Or, sometimes, what you refrain from doing. Let’s say you’ve witnessed a horrible injustice. Let’s say you’re face to face with some people who’ve done some bad thing–like maybe intimidating supporters of the health care bill. You want to respond… so you argue rationally. You take to the streets and protest. You apply ridicule. You take the Bad Guys to court. You start a group or a nonprofit to repair the damage done by the Bad Guys, or just donate money. You vote the right people into office or run for office yourself. Sometimes, when the Bad Guys have backed you into a corner and are coming at you with bricks–I mean literally coming at you, no metaphors here–you might, in self-defense, respond with violence.

But death threats? There are no extenuating circumstances for them. Twist logic all you want, but you’ll never make a logic pretzel non-euclidean enough to serve as a justification. Threaten someone–or torture them, or throw them into a hole and forget about them–and you’ve joined the Bad Guys, and it’s time for the remnants of civilization to take a stand against you. It’s no use arguing that the guy you’re threatening is himself a bad guy. The fact that you’re fighting a Bad Guy does not automatically make you Good.

(Does this mean it’s harder to be one of the good guys than it is to be one of the bad guys? Yes, it does. Life is unfair that way.)

Understand, I’m not setting up a false equivalence here. I’m not saying “Why, you’re both as bad as each other!” I hate that crap. It’s not Democrats who have maps marked with rifle sights on their Facebook pages, and it’s not the health care supporters who brandish guns at town hall meetings and fax pictures of nooses to members of Congress. (Republicans, meanwhile, complain that by just talking openly about the threats they’ve received, Democrats are “ratcheting up the rhetoric.” Or in other words, “Stop telling people I hit you, or I’ll have to hit you harder!”) But it’s because I don’t think both sides are equivalent that I expect my side to be better.

There’s one piece of good news, one little bit of hope we can pull from this mess. If bad is something people do, not something they are… well, they can stop doing it. And, as far as I’m concerned, they can join the Good Guys again. I don’t think they even need to apologize, usually; just understand what it is they’ve done, and decide to stop.

Remember the guys who mocked the man with Parkinson’s? At least one of them really has apologized. I think he means it. I think it’s worth giving him the benefit of the doubt, anyway. I want to believe that guy’s come back to civilization. I want the people writing the online threats to come back, too.

Surprise

Movies, Speculative Fiction

This weekend Roger Ebert published an interesting review of a not particularly interesting movie. The movie is The Bounty Hunter, and this is the interesting bit from Ebert’s review:

Let’s do a little mental exercise here, the same sort that the screenplay writer, Sarah Thorp, must have done. Remember the ground rules: The movie must contain only cliches. I used to test this exercise on my film class. I’d give them the genre, and begin sentences ending with an ellipsis. They’d compete to be first to shout out the answer.

Then Ebert gives us the first half of a dozen sentences (like “They dislike each other. So by the end of the movie …” and “He drives a …”). And in the next paragraph he walks us through the movie, and the end of every sentence is one of the first ideas that would pop into the head of anyone who’d seen more than a dozen Hollywood films.

Maybe this is one test of a good movie: At least half the questions raised by a good movie will have surprising answers. (I say “half” because, hell, you can’t expect everything to be surprising. Sometimes a cliche is the best way to set up something more interesting.)

I’m thinking, now, of the reason I didn’t get into Battlestar Galactica like apparently everybody else on the internet. I tried to watch the opening miniseries. My problem began with the scene that introduced Starbuck. She was in a bar playing cards with some of her fellow pilots. For no particular reason, I thought “Now she’s going to knock over the table and start a fight.” Ten seconds later, she knocked over the table and started a fight.

Then there were some boring space battles, and some more boring space battles, and a couple of fighter pilots landed on the planet under attack. And I thought “Now they’ll run across some survivors, and to show us how grim the situation is and what tough hard-decision-makers these guys are, we will learn they are unable to take everybody with them, and they will choose a couple people randomly, and leave everybody else to die.” And ten seconds later the survivors came running over the hill, and the pilots only had room for a couple. So I switched off. From what I’ve heard about the finale, I think the decision served me well.

Links to Things

Books, Comics, History, Speculative Fiction,

  • The amazing comics site What Things Do—which features complete stories by Sammy Harkham and John Porcellino, among others—is serializing What Am I Doing Here by Abner Dean. I was introduced to Dean’s long-out-of-print work by an article in Comic Art #9, and it floored me—it’s surrealism in the style of classic New Yorker cartoons.

  • Too Busy Thinking About My Comics is a blog I discovered from a link in the comments here. The author (I feel weirdly unsure whether it’s okay to use his name—he signed his comment here, but his blog seems to be anonymous) writes about superhero comics and British pop culture. Admittedly, those aren’t the kind of comics I read these days, but I have fond memories of Keith Giffen and J. M. DeMatteis’s Justice League and sometimes I still like to read about them. But It wouldn’t matter if I didn’t, because this is the best kind of criticism: sharp writing, and musings and insights that hook you even if you thought you didn’t care about the cultural artifact the writer is riffing on. I recommend “The Intrusion Of The Fantastic Into The Mundane No 1: The Thunderbirds Of Edinburgh” and “The Invention Of Loneliness: What Green Lantern Can Teach A Boy That Starro The Conqueror Can’t”, both of which managed to move me.

  • At the other end of the same topic, I once checked some of the later Justice League comics out of the library and my basic reaction was “What is this crap?” I couldn’t follow the Grant Morrison issues at all, and I speak as someone who mostly understood The Invisibles. It sounds like Justice League has now gotten about as dumb as it possibly can. But at least the MightyGodKing blog got a hilarious review out of the deal.

  • “Making Smarter Dumb Mistakes About the Future” is an article by Cory Doctorow about why so many old science fiction futures were so wildly wrong. It focuses on three common mistakes which Doctorow characterizes as “Like Today, But Moreso,” “Just Enough, And No More,” and “That’s Not Weird, It’s Dumb.”

  • The Believer chronicles ancient Roman poetry slams. Apparently they were pretty horrific deals. Juvenal classed them as health hazards.

    • A hectic calendar of literary competitions soon sprang up. At first, the Sebasta in Neapolis (Naples) was the most prestigious event, luring the Emperor Nero himself to compete before a crowd of thousands. The audience was not permitted to leave the auditorium during the thirteen-hour recital; it was said that a woman gave birth during the performance, and one old man feigned death so he could escape to the bathroom.

  • Finally, here’s a fascinating essay on scurvy, and how we gain knowledge, and lose it, and gain it back again.

Zak Sally, Like a Dog

Comics, , ,

Cover Art

Zak Sally subtitled Like a Dog, a collection of his comics from the past decade-and-a-half, “Recidivist #1, 2, and Assorted Garbage.” This subtitle rushes past “too modest” to embrace “misleadingly self-deprecating.” As he explains in his notes, Sally’s not entirely happy with everything in this collection. It’s his figuring-things-out book, a record of how he hauled his work up from “competent” to a level where he could feel good about it. But he’s starting from competent.

None of the stories in this book are bad. Some are uncertain. These are the comics Sally created while he was figuring out what he wanted to do with comics. But the seeds of his style are already sprouting in the first pages of Recidivist #1. There’s thick, organic brushwork–some of Sally’s drawings look like they were grown. There’s a fascination with anatomy–between and within Sally’s stories are detailed anatomical studies which obviously paid off; in the torsos of the “Two Idiot Brothers” you can see every muscle. There are pools of black ink deep enough to lose things in.

Sally often separates text and art. What I mean is that the text would be comprehensible by itself. The interaction between words and pictures are what comics are all about. Some comics achieve their effects by emphasizing one over the other. I think Sally is one of those cartoonists for whom words are the keystone. That can be a bad thing–newspaper and gag cartoonists in particular sometimes decorate words with redundant illustrations–but Sally’s pictures add extra layers of meaning and deepen the text. Sally’s text might mean something on its own, but his text plus his images mean something else, something more interesting.

An example of Sally’s experimentation with word and picture is “The End is Here, Now,” an autobiographical strip set on New Year’s Eve, 1999. It’s drawn in a three-tier grid. The panels are split horizontally. Above, straight text tells us what goes through Sally’s head: he’s amazed at the passage of time, he feels like something big should be happening. Below, comic panels with word balloons show us what he says and does: he wanders, has a drink, tries to climb a fence, and winds up at a party. The narration and the comic run in parallel, each independent until, in the next to last panel, Sally has a sudden and hazily understood realization…

…And, for the first time, the narration halts with a colon and jumps across to the word balloon. The narration and the pictures connect at the moment Sally’s internal monologue connects with the world. The last panel breaks the visual pattern set by the rest of the comic: an image of Sally looking up at the sky is framed by his thoughts at the top and the bottom.

For me, the most fascinating thing about Like a Dog was the afterward. Looking over my “Links to Things” posts, I notice I’ve frequently linked to articles about writing. Which is a little weird. My creative outlets are comics and drawings; I don’t have any ambition to write books, just reviews and blog posts. But I do read a lot. I like knowing how the books I read were written. (I often think people like me are the real audience for those “how to write a novel” books.) I like knowing how the comics I read were drawn. I can’t help feeling that Penguin Classics are superior to other books, not because they’re classics, but because they have introductions and footnotes.

In his afterward, Sally discusses the background of each strip in the collection. The strips collected in Like a Dog tell the story of how Sally learned and honed his craft. The story ends with Sally taking joy from the act of creation, but getting there was a hard trip. “My comics terrified me,” he writes. “I hated my comics, and I hated myself for making them; and, when I wasn’t doing that, I hated myself for not making them.”

Which is what really got my attention, because, man, I feel like that all the time.

Sally remembers worrying so hard about his craft that he was unable to start. I still get like that. I’ve found I have to be of two minds… first you have to get something down, without worrying about whether it’s any good; at that stage worrying will stop you cold. Then you have to switch modes and be hyper-critical, because inflicting half-assed failures of craft on your audience is disrespectful. You have to revise until the work is good enough to send out into the world. When you release the work you have to switch modes again, separate the finished work from your ego, because it’s in the hands of the audience and, good or not, some of the audience won’t like it, and you can’t take it personally. (Me, I only wish I had that problem–hardly anyone reacts to my work at all.)

Admittedly, that last paragraph was a detour; I’m trying to review Like a Dog, not my brain. And maybe this bloviation about craft is a little pretentious coming from, basically, a gag cartoonist. But it’s part of why I connected with this collection. It’s encouraging to learn that somebody this good has felt the same kind of self-doubt and worked his way out of it…. and that maybe it’s not so bad if, years after the fact, your early work embarrasses you. That just means you’ve learned something.

On Feeling Stupid

Miscellaneous Ramblings

Facepalm

In February I had an x-ray and learned that for three weeks I’d been walking around on a fractured toe. Specifically, a “linear lucency … consistent with a nondisplaced fracture.” I’m still reminded of this every time I bump it or move it the wrong way.

For a long time I didn’t notice anything wrong. I mean, obviously I knew my foot hurt. I was limping. But it took me over two weeks of limping to notice my foot had hurt long enough and badly enough to justify calling a doctor.

Drive a car long enough, and something will probably go wrong. Maybe you hear a squealing noise, not very loud at first. Without really thinking about it you drive a little bit slower. Maybe the brakes are a bit soft, and you instinctively brake a little sooner to compensate. Gradually the noise grows. Gradually you drive a little more gently, and a little more. And one day you notice, hey, you’re driving at ten miles per hour and braking half a block away from the stop sign and your car still sounds like it’s rehearsing Tosca.

We do this all the time. We thump squealing refrigerators and dishwashers and clothes dryers into silence. We put up with TV aerials that must be adjusted and readjusted with microscopic precision to pick up signals. We live with watches that stop randomly and work with computers that crash and tolerate small appliances if they start to smell funny.

You can get used to all kinds of things. You can be used to a thing for a long time, until one day it hits you that you’re too used to it, and you’ve let it go way the hell past the point that it ought to be tolerable. I was amazed, and a little alarmed, to discover I could do this with my body.

Maybe the real lesson here is that life never ceases to provide us with new things to feel stupid about. Which in some ways is better than not feeling stupid. If we never felt stupid, would we notice when we had something new to learn?

Dino Buzzati, Poem Strip

Books, Comics, Speculative Fiction, , , , , ,

Cover Art

Sometimes a book comes late to the party. It walks in bearing beer and waving a hot new album it’s discovered, to find that very CD blaring from the stereo and the guests already drunk. That’s Poem Strip, Dino Buzzati’s graphic novel retelling of the Orpheus myth. I gather Poem Strip was an important comic in Italy; according to one review it was the 1970 winner of the Paese Sera Best Comics of the Year Award. But in English Poem Strip made its first appearance in 2009, and entered like an aging swinger who’s never revised his mustache and still wears forty year old polyester bell bottoms.

Here’s the problem: Poem Strip is absurdly, distractingly sexist. Buzzati drew many pictures of women for this book, and most are at least half and generally some smaller fraction of naked, and even while ushering guests down staircases or staffing the front desk in an office they tend to pose as though for girlie mags. Derek Badman, in his review at MadInkBeard, speculates that these women were in fact traced from girlie mags. He also complains that some of Buzzati’s drawings are crude. I think we have to cut the guy some slack on the art; he was obviously drawing one-handed. It’s a lot like the often-adolescent and now mostly embarrassing underground comics of the 1960s; you get the sense that this is the work of a guy who’s just realized standards have opened up to the point that he’s allowed to publish sexy drawings, and in all the excitement has forgotten that sometimes it’s better not to.

Much of the early part of the book is taken up with a song from Buzzati’s Orpheus—here a rock star named Orfi—called “Witches in the City.” Orfi alternates paranoid ramblings about all the women he thinks are out to seduce him with chanted litanies of names—“Barbara Yvonne Leda Fiorella,” et cetera, as though implicating the entire other half of the human race. Not only are women sirens luring men onto sharp rocks, they’re all in on it together, man. I hope Buzzati got into therapy at some point.

It’s too bad Poem Strip is hiding behind this huge stumbling block, because there’s also a lot to like. Stylistically, it looks like a collaboration between Fredrico Fellini and Glen Baxter, colored with a limited palette. Buzzati references Fellini directly at one point, as well as Murnau’s Nosferatu, Arthur Rackham, and a number of other artists who he credits in his brief forward. He fits his style to the tone of the page, swinging from realism to expressionism and back and still managing to keep Poem Strip a unified whole.

You know the story (at least, you should). Orfi, despite his weird gynephobia issues, has somehow managed to keep a relationship going with Eura. Who dies. In case you hadn’t guessed, this is Euridyce. So Orfi follows her into the underworld, reached through a strange door in the Via Saturna. He’s met by a talking overcoat that at one point calls itself “Kruschevian.” An interview with the translator confirms that the overcoat is a reference to the Soviet premier but unfortunately doesn’t explain the connection. (I wish Poem Strip had a new introduction, or maybe some footnotes.)

Life, in the overcoat’s view, is like an ocean whose tides are set by death’s huge gravitational pull. In the afterlife, the absence of death creates a different emotional landscape. The dead can’t die again, can’t be injured and have no need for physical pain, so they have fewer things to fear. They have less to lose, and fewer reasons for sadness. With all of eternity to play with, anything can happen; life’s possibilities never close off. Knowing the answers to the ultimate questions, they have no sense of the uncanny. They have no need to pass on their genes to a new generation, so no need to feel passion.

To placate the dead Orfi sings to them about what they can no longer feel. This is the best and most substantial passage in the book. Buzzati illustrates an old man who “checks his mailbox for the hundredth time but there’s nothing there,” dried leaves on the wind forming “strange ghosts in the sky,” a bogeyman floating over the city. Every image gets at least a page to itself. The art here is mostly at the expressionist end of the scale, as much designed as drawn, and weirdly evocative. A thing that rises by the side of the road and reaches out to a traveler is depicted pretty much as a blob, but it’s scary as anything.

Finally, Orfi finds Eura, and loses her again—but not the way you’re thinking. This is where Buzzati kind of redeems himself in terms of gender politics. Usually this myth treats Eurydice like the rope in a tug of war. She dies, Orpheus drags her out from Tartarus, then she’s yanked back because of something Orpheus does. But in Poem Strip Eura refuses to follow Orfi out of the underworld at all. Eura doesn’t mind being in the afterlife. She’s in the right place. She’s dead.

And maybe, Eura hints, the afterlife isn’t a cold, passionless place after all. Love is not absent, and she and Orfi will be together again when the time is right. It’s Orfi who’s yanked away from the flatly prosaic afterlife to the land of the living. Poem Strip returns to the themes of Orfi’s song in the last few pages, depicting swirling storms and “turreted clouds of eternity.” the disturbing, uncanny world of the living goes about its business as Orfi stands in the Via Saturna, holding the promise of Eura’s ring.

Links to Things

Art, Books, Comics

  • From the New York Times, why English is a great language for newspaper headlines with accidental double meanings.

    Since English is weakly inflected (meaning that words are seldom explicitly modified to indicate their grammatical roles), many words can easily function as either noun or verb. And it just so happens that plural nouns and third-person-singular present-tense verbs are marked with the exact same suffix, “-s.” In everyday spoken and written language, we can usually handle this sort of grammatical uncertainty because we have enough additional clues to make the right choices of interpretation. But headlines sweep away those little words — particularly articles, auxiliary verbs and forms of “to be” — robbing the reader of crucial context.

  • Here’s another New York Times article that interested me simply because it introduced me to a new word:

    In a 2004 essay, he coined a term to describe it: “solastalgia,” a combination of the Latin word solacium (comfort) and the Greek root —algia (pain), which he defined as “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault … a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ”˜home.’”

  • Catherynne Valente explains what publishers do, and why books are not cheap, and why, no matter how long Kindle owners hold their breath, they’re not getting cheap ebooks or a vibrant self-publishing industry anytime soon:

    I’ve read the slush pile. And in this Orwellian post-publishing dystopia, you will be, too. The mass of ebooks will be unedited, badly written, and horribly presented. And while this is an unpopular thing to say, that’s pretty much the state of self-publishing now. There are a few great self-published projects, and they are buried in an Everest of trash. Essentially, a reader acts as an acquiring editor, sifting through the mediocre, offensive, awful, and laughable for one good book. And readers will usually give up after a few burns.

  • Ann Leckie, on how stories shape thinking, and why we therefore need to think about what stories mean:

    The way to have control over how the metaphors and stories you ingest affect your thinking is to know they’re doing it and to be aware of how they’re working. You have to think about them to do that, have to question them. If you’re a writer, in my opinion you should be doing that as a matter of course, just to improve your abilities. If you’re not a writer, well, pick your own level of analysis. If that’s just “Squee!” fine. But just because you don’t see the subtext doesn’t mean it isn’t there, and worth questioning.

  • Finally, Dan Nadel has new information on Herbert Crowley, the cartoonist who created one of the most interesting entries in Nadel’s book Art Out of Time, the brief, bizarre strip The Wiggle Much. Unfortunately, as I write this Nadel’s current blog is having technical problems and this post seems to have vanished, but if it reappears, be sure to take a look—it included some tantalizing cameraphone photos of Crowley’s sketchbooks.