The hourglass of identity

Twentysomething and post-twentysomething fans of Joss Whedon from days of yore, prepare to feel old. I have stumbled upon a fact.

Remember David Boreanaz?

Yeah, this guy, Angel. Buffy the Vampire Slayer's swoony first love, appearing in the first three seasons and sporadically thereafter in a total of 57 episodes, later the lead singer of a rotating angst band on his own eponymous show, which ran for 111 episodes

Well, this Monday, September 30th, marks the day that Angel is surpassed by this guy:

Special Agent Seeley Booth, who has appeared in every episode of the crime dramedy Bones. All 169 episodes, this coming Monday.

So while in our hearts, it may always be the case that that guy from Buffy and Angel is on a crime show now, the truth as of Monday is that that guy from Bones was in some vampire shows in the late 90s and early 00s.

No offense to Mr. Boreanaz, who is great, by the way.

The Sun Also Dances, and so does Gatsby

Usually I resent physical mail delivery, since there is hardly ever anything I want in it and yet it never. stops. coming. except on Sundays, I guess. But I have in hand an advertisement for something I would not have thought existed: it turns out that the Washington Ballet is adapting The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway.

If it takes an English degree to think that's funny then my college education has done me some good. It's not merely that I am still uncultured enough to find ballet itself funny when juxtaposed with just about anything (although that is also undoubtedly true), but a Hemingway-ballet combination is the sort of thing one imagines exploding utterly, like matter and antimatter. Hemingway was such a strange animal in himself, a hyper-masculine and eminently taciturn writer; The Sun Also Rises itself is so bleak and uneventful that what I managed to read of it, in my two separate attempts, is largely a lacuna in my memory. To make The Sun Also Rises expressive, to make it flamboyant--I can hardly imagine that Hemingway would approve.

But then we live in an age of maximalism. The pendulum is at its far extreme from 1926, and if this generation is lost, most of us got that way without ever actually seeing the war that scattered us. Some of the best social commentary in the last 10 years has involved Batman. We don't do understatement anymore. So while Hemingway almost certainly wouldn't approve, maybe something as overblown as ballet would be able to expose the trenchant pathos that he was content to leave unsaid.

On the back of the flyer, the ad announces the ballet as "following on the success of The Great Gatsby." So apparently that was a ballet as well, but I missed it. (Not that I was going to go to Rises, mind you. I'm still in the process of coming to my main point. Thanks for staying with us.) However, I think that Gatsby is a more amenable story to bombastic presentation. Fitzgerald was more comfortable with stylistic flourishes, and excess is in the bones of the story.

In fact, it was the idea of just such a presentation that excited me back when I first got wind of Baz Luhrmann's movie version of The Great Gatsby. In a book that trades so heavily on prose and tone, any straight adaptation of the plot will fall flat--one of those increasingly self-evident truths that I think the brains of Hollywood are immune to. Linguistic flair should translate to the screen as cinematic flair: style and cinematography, of which Mr. Luhrmann at least has no shortage. At any rate, until a movie has come out, you can really only pin your hopes on mistakes that the production has apparently avoided, and I think it's a safe bet that Luhrmann's Gatsby will avoid the mistake of being dull.

I wish I did not have as many hopes for this movie as I do, but I have been pessimistic about the summer movie season so far. Recalling my intense distaste for Iron Man 2, I have few hopes for this year's vaunted sequels (the Iron Men and the Star Treks), precisely because I expect the expectation of money to have thoroughly crushed the life out of the spontaneous originals.

The irony is certainly not lost on me (is any?) that the movie I anticipate most this summer is based on a book that I am ambivalent towards. It read The Great Gatsby in high school, and then again when I was actually old enough to understand it, and I appreciated it but certainly didn't clamor for more. It is perhaps this lack of investment that allows me to hope at all. There is little threat of actual disappointment, as with The Hobbit. I have respect but not affection for the source material. The movie's failings should not gall me; its successes should entertain me. It's all gravy.

Except in spite of my protective disinterest, I find myself in a sort of informational purgatory. I want to read reviews, partly because they will help me determine what I'm doing with me weekend, and partly because I'm bored. Partly because while I'm not invested in the movie per se, I'm invested in my prediction that Baz Luhrmann is a good match for the source material, and I want to find out if people agree with me. All this in spite of knowing full well the aggregate reviews of this movie will be useless. 25% of viewers will hate Baz Luhrmann on principle. 25% of viewers will hate Leonardo DiCaprio on principle. 25% of viewers will want to flaunt their literacy by complaining about how the movie missed the spirit of the book. 25% of viewers will love it as empty audiovisual spectacle. 25% of viewers will be convinced that Gatsby and Daisy are a love story for the ages, no matter how shallow and awful they are supposed to be.

So we'll see. Or, anyway, I probably will.

"All that matters now are the people we care about."

I've been coming up with and shooting down ideas for posts all weekend. "Well, I'm not sure I can talk about this without going into detail about my freelance gigs..." "Well, story topic doesn't reflect too well on me..." "Well, this story doesn't reflect too well on this other random person who... well, you never know..."

I've been thinking about Jurassic Park lately. A couple weeks ago Girlfriend grabbed her 2-D glasses (to shield her from 3-D-induced headaches) and we went to see it in 3-D, since that's the way it's in theaters. While it was sort of interesting, I don't think the third dimension added much, except (of course) an excuse for getting it back in theaters. This would be my second time seeing Jurassic Park in theaters, the last time being back in the day, when I was 8.

We rushed out on a Thursday because it was the very last day that our local theater was screening the movie, and we had the unique pleasure of being literally* the only people in the theater. That meant we could actually... well, talk through the whole movie. About the movie, mind you, and it enriched the experience. I'm glad we were able to.

Anyway, I noticed a few things. First of all, I noticed that Jurassic Park really is an excellent movie. It came out 18 years after Jaws and I think Steven Spielberg did much the same thing for another generation here.

Second, the special effects still hold up, 20 years later. In exactly one scene I thought the dinosaurs' skin wasn't as detailed as it would be in a movie made today, and they were occasionally slightly "floaty," but all the other examples of these flaws that I can think of were more egregious and happened in movies years later. If you had told me Jurassic Park was a product of 2008's CGI tech instead of 1993's, I could have believed you.

Last of all, now that I've filled my brain with meta knowledge in the intervening 20 years, I can start thinking about the underlying morality of the movie. I don't mean the message that everyone remembers, and that an entire generation took to heart--that we absolutely should not clone dinosaurs even if we could and even though it would be completely awesome. I mean the more subtle, probably unintentional, morality that a movie ends up displaying when its plot revolves around killing off the cast.

I would dare to say there's always an implicit morality in any story where the cast gets slowly picked off, either entirely or in part. Who lives and who dies? This is how we find the moral lessons of thrillers.

It's worth pointing out that which characters live and die changes dramatically between the original book and the movie adaptation. Presumably that changes the morality quite a bit, but I'm only going to talk about the movie, because I saw it this decade, and I dare say more people saw it than read the book.

Obviously, I'm about to talk about who lives and who dies in this movie, so spoilers ahoy.

At first blush the sorting algorithm of mortality seems congruent with the moral that the more likeable characters keep repeating: respect for nature wins in the end. Genarro, the "bloodsucking lawyer," is the most excited by the chance to exploit the dinosaurs for profit. He is ignobly noshed on by a tyrannosaurus. Nedry disregards the danger of turning off the fences, and even insults one of the dinosaurs' intelligence to its face--a mistake that no one else makes. He is then puked on and eaten.

So far, so good, but then the model breaks down. The next two deaths are Arnold, the non-scuzzy computer guy, and Muldoon, the game warden, and the only person who seems to "get" the velociraptors. If anyone should survive based on the respect-for-nature model, it's him--and incidentally (book spoiler) in the book, he does.

So what gives?

Well, to be fair, Jurassic Park is a popcorn thriller, and not much thought was probably given to the meaning of character mortality beyond what would please the audience, but having realized that and looked into it anyway, I was a little dismayed by what I saw. It's, quite simply what Dr. Sattler says to Hammond while he eats ice cream and muses about his flea circus: "All that matters now are the people we care about."

And that, it would seem, is it. Dr. Sattler's ambiguously romantic life partner survives, as does the charming mathematician who flirted with her, as do Hammond's two grandscamps, who are protected more directly by Dr. Grant's grudging psuedopaternalism (and whose affection in turn saves Hammond).

Who dies, then? Nobody likes Genarro or Nedry. Arnold and Muldoon are likable but professional. Since they're competent and emotionally unattached to anyone else in the movie, they're treated as protectors of the central cast, like the electric fences, and removed to raise the tension in the final act.

So as much as I loved the movie, I was a little saddened that in the end it doesn't seem to matter, really, that people died, since they weren't anyone we cared about.

I guess the only real thing to be done about an observation like that is to do better in the next book, movie, or whatever, that we make.

* Yes, literally. People who know me already know what I mean when I say "literally," but if you're just joining us, I'm unabashedly pedantic about that word. So I mean exactly, actually, and unhyperbolically what I am saying here.

On villainy

Last night I watched the 1996 movie version of The Crucible, which prompted me to read parts of the play. Girlfriend's edition of The Crucible has something that I think was missing from whatever edition I (think I) read back in high school: long digressions by Arthur Miller on the characters and his research. While my reading of plays is admittedly limited, I don't know of anything to parallel The Crucible for the length, depth, or digressiveness of its character descriptions. When Reverend Hale comes on the scene, for example, Miller dispatches the character's physical description in one sentence, his history and personality in four more, and then goes on for three additional pages about the idea of the Devil as a political tool.

But in the spirit of such digressions, I'm using this as an excuse to talk about something else. The very first character description in The Crucible set me thinking in this particular direction: it was the description of Reverend Parris, that "In history he cut a villainous path, and there is very little good to be said for him." (On the subject of that "very little good," the text is silent; we learn instead about the bad rest of him.) It got me thinking about the construction of good villains.

Parris isn't the villain of The Crucible, but he doesn't come off well, and Miller makes no effort to soften the blow. It is a problem, I think; I believe I am against the portrayal of evil people with no good at all in them. This isn't to say that a work of art should contort itself to show a glimmer of goodness in every evil character, but to look behind the curtain and see that Miller saw nothing positive in him gives me the sense that his conception of the character was lacking.

Oh, yes, pick a fight with Arthur Miller, why don't I?

Well it's not really about him, but this mostly reminded me that there has been something good, or at the very least pitiably human, in every villain who has really affected me. Sometimes it is a very small thing, but it creates depth--I would go so far as to say that it allows horror.

As is often the case, I go to movies for my examples. I first noticed this effect in the 2007 version of 3:10 to Yuma, in the character of Charlie Prince; he was violent, sadistic, thoroughly amoral, and loyal with a purity that touched on innocence. I thought at the time that it was the ability to be hurt that made him stick in my mind, and that was part of it, but not all.

As I said, it allows horror. A villain who is merely a force is immune to judgment, like a natural disaster. We need the glimmer of good in order to register that it is a human doing the villainous deeds in a story.

A good villain is both evil and imposing (with regard to the protagonists). The necessary opposite faces of these elements are good and pathos. Without them a villain is hollow from behind.

Hence we have Darth Vader's paternal impulses and physical disfigurement. Hence we have Heath Ledger's Joker unconsciously tonguing his scars. (I search my memory for some sign of good in him, and can only think of his rationalizations. He claims to be seeking after some sort of truth; contrast with Bane in the following movie, who accomplishes similar kinds of terror but with explicitly sadistic intent.)

"What about Iago?" a certain sort of person might challenge. "He is evil without good or pathos, and considered to be the greatest villain ever set down."

"I disagree," I would say to this imaginary person who I created for the sole purpose of disagreeing with him. I would patiently explain how it is the mystery of Iago's motivation, not its absence, that seizes the imagination. Iago has values, he has a grievance, and he has a motivation. We are interested in him because we know these things; if we discovered that he wasn't, in fact, human, I suspect that we as an audience would lose interest.

(Meanwhile, as I write this, the Superbowl has apparently stopped because the lights went out. Speaking of losing interest.)

A last point on the subject is that I don't think the ideas of "good" and "evil" are very useful in creating compelling characters. Not to say that I prefer a grey-and-grey moral universe to a black-and-white one (not least because the greys tend to darken until the morality is black-and-black). But perhaps it is better to regard characters as "virtuous" and "vicious." The question of virtue and vice shouldn't be wholly detached from what side of the story the character falls on, but it represents a whole lot of continuums.

"Old Bugs," and how to make a point badly

One thing I will say about Lovecraft,* he is good enough that his misses are educational. I keep coming back to a story I didn't like very much, as a good example of a sort of literature I don't like very much, that being the fictional polemic.

"Old Bugs" is a deviation from form for Lovecraft, being a fictional harangue about the evils of alcohol. Not being particularly interested in the American interbellum period, myself, I tend to forget about the temperance movement, Prohibition, and so on. So it came as a surprise, but shouldn't have, that H.P. Lovecraft, in addition to his other uptightnesses, was a teetotaler.

The story, written in 1919, takes place in the distant future of 1950, where alcohol is illegal and only available at the seediest of speakeasies alongside hashish and opium. The title character** is a thoroughly wretched drunk who is far fallen from prior respectability. The story is contorted a bit to give the impression of a major reveal, but the upshot is that in spite of being a lifelong thrall to the demon drink, Bugs heroically prevents [spoiler] from starting down the same dark path.

It's worth pointing out that, according to Wikipedia, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia (by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz) calls "Old Bugs" "a little masterpiece of comic deflation and self-parody."*** It may well be, although the humor went by me, and I think the sin Lovecraft commits is basically the same either way.

It's not the argument itself I want to talk about, although it intrigues me a bit to see how Lovecraft portrays drinkers as wretchedly addicted, to a man. Was the concept of alcoholism as something that some people are prone to and others aren't in circulation in the 19-teens, I wonder? Even uninterested as I am in recreational drugs, some of the imagery (men licking spilled whiskey off the floor in a bar where they're presumably already being served) makes me wonder if the excesses of D.A.R.E.'s rhetoric existed through the ages with its target changing with the circumstances.

I enjoy and appreciate arguing and making points. I don't like seeing polemical points made overtly through fiction.

Now, I was going to go off about my frustration with the practice--but then I remembered that tales as venerable as "Little Red Riding Hood," wouldn't I? What am I saying if I condemn "Old Bugs" for making a point through fiction but let stand stories that are genuinely persuasive or thought provoking.

There are two points I won't settle for from myself:
1. It's wrong to do it badly, but it's okay to do it well.
2. It's okay as long as you're making a point I like.

My conclusion is that fiction is useful for demonstrating "truths," but not for demonstrating "facts." If an author says "what if such-and-such?" and proceeds honestly from there, the reader will usually follow. True, the author may only have presented an intriguing thought experiment in this case, but that is the limitation of not using facts. If an author simply says "this is so" in the context of fiction, there is no argument. The author is simply saying "because I said so" and there is a very narrow range of subjects on which I will take a fiction author's word. It's a good habit not to trust a nonfiction author either if you can manage it.

* There are actually many things I will say about Lovecraft, but today I will say this.
** One also forgets that "Bugs" was once a "name."
*** It's also worth granting that this story was not published until after Lovecraft's death, so we shouldn't judge him too harshly by it. I hold it to be unfair to judge an artist by what they choose not to release to the public.

Remembering remembering September 11

The front page of every news site I look at today makes prominent mention of the anniversary of the September 11th attacks. I find myself asking, for the first time I can remember, whether remembering the attacks should be a yearly observation.

I try to remember a comparable event. Only John F. Kennedy's assassination comes to mind. Perhaps someone who knows can inform me: were there memorial observations a year later, on November 22, 1964? Ten years later, in 1973? In 1974?

My intent here is not to diminish JFK's death (if it turns out that we did not observe it so consistently afterwards) or suggest that we should lay off the 9/11 memorializing. I just mean to say that the way we have continued to mark the date, especially without it actually having been made an official holiday*, strikes me as unusual.

Last year I set down my memories of the day of the attacks. Today I went back and re-read them, to remind myself. These things do slip away if we don't mark them. As I get old enough to notice myself forget things that happened to me, I realize that memories are not self-sustaining. We mark what we choose to remember.

I remember that in 2002 I was already disappointed in how quickly we had lost what good had come of the attacks: a sense of unity and purpose, a shared conviction that America was worth protecting, imperfect though it was. People had sworn that "everything had changed" and then, largely, gone back to the way things had been before. Not everything changed, but some things did, and as might be expected of murder, the deepest changes have mostly been for the worse; but eleven years on I think that, when we said we would "never forget," we might actually have meant it.

* Correction: apparently it is. I confess that I had not known. Apparently "Patriot Day" was created on December 18, 2001.

Clayton astutely pointed out that Pearl Harbor Day (December 7) is the closest analog we have. By contrast, though, it was designated in 1994, almost 53 years after the attacks.

So, to be honest, I'm disappointed that September 11 was immediately made an official holiday. If it were not, I would suggest that it be made one now, and it would perhaps mean more. I would prefer a name that didn't taste so strongly of euphemism, as well. But perhaps it says something better about us that the events are remembered, while the empty words disappear. There are quite few mentions of "Patriot Day" today.

Fishing for controversy - Spoilers and scholars

Eminent scholar and literary critic Stanley Fish said something dumb on Monday, and the great thing about eminent scholars and literary critics is what good exercise disagreeing with them can be. In this case, Dr. Fish mounted a defense of his column from two weeks ago, in which he gave away a plot point of the Hunger Games trilogy.* In response to a flurry of frustrated comments, he made the following claims:

1. We actually enjoy stories more after they’ve been spoiled.

2. The only books that can truly be “spoiled” are ones whose only value is suspense, i.e. inferior ones.

Tacit corollary: If you have a problem with knowing the ending of a book in advance, you’re either reading the wrong books or you’re reading the books wrong.

If you know me you might be surprised that I’m staking out my opposition to spoilers. Wasn’t it I who casually read about the ending of The Usual Suspects** mere days before the culmination of my friend’s years-long quest to find a copy to show to me? Did I not come to fantasy by paging through a companion encyclopedia to The Lord of the Rings, pausing with particular enjoyment at the entry for Gollum, which described his character arc in full? Well, yes. But we shouldn't always do unto others as we do unto ourselves.

Fish argues that the pleasure of rereading is greater than the pleasure of reading something the first time. I don’t disagree with this point. Many times has it been said that the difference between serious readers and the rest of humanity is that serious readers will read the same book more than once. I may not, as Girlfriend does, reread The Lord of the Rings ever year, but I know the pleasure of coming back to something and reading it more deeply, with more knowledge.*** If nothing else, we get better at understanding a story with each pass. But because one pleasure is greater is no reason not to have both, says I.

Fish even brings Science! to bear in defense of his first point, which in a literary argument is a little like bringing a shotgun gun to a knife fight. But, like a consummate knife-fighter holding a shotgun, he’s more assailable here than he ought to be. One preexisting opinion and one study do not combine to form a fact, or even a consensus, and it’s beyond ambition to suppose that modern psychology is able to comparatively measure two disparate kinds of enjoyment.

Are they disparate? Fish admits as much, but he dismisses the entire value of a spoiler-free read as “suspense,” and he argues that suspense can be recaptured on subsequent readings. What he is describing, though, is one form of tension, and not the whole pleasure of experiencing a story for the first time.

With foreknowledge, we can enjoy dramatic irony in knowing from the beginning, say, that our hero is really a tomato. We appreciate the double-meanings and ambiguities that allow this fact to exist in the story alongside an impression that the hero is a human being. We may even wish, caught up in the emotional tide of the story, that it were not so that the hero was a tomato. But having been told in advance, perhaps by an eminent scholar and literary critic, that the hero is a tomato, we will never—not once—wonder as the tension mounts if the hero is really a pineapple, or an automobile. We cannot have uncertainty.

I was only recently introduced as an adult to serious mystery writing—Dorothy Sayers’ novels—and I found that a great deal of the pleasure came from trying to outguess the novel. Often I was wrong, or only partly right (never completely right), but the novels were rich with possibilities in that first reading. For a moment, everyone could be the killer, in every possible way, and not in a winking “or so it seems but we know better” sense.

Having had and enjoyed that experience, I can go back and read the books again. Knowing the truth of the story I can enjoy hints and ironies and depths that I hadn’t seen before, and that is in no way diminished by my having read the book once before in ignorance.

There's been argument about the authority of the author and the reader's freedom to interpret, but nowhere do those two factors coexist in such perfection as before the story is finished. The million possibilities the reader brings, and the winnowing of those possibilities by the author into the complete text, are a part of any story. For Fish, though, it seems the story might as well be over before it's begun.

You can’t write an academic paper about how you had the wrong idea about what was going on in a book, at least not if you hope to be an eminent scholar and literary critic. However I would feel sorry for anyone who had become so good at rereading that they had forgotten how to read a book for the first time. I would resent someone who casually damaged someone else’s ability to enjoy what they no longer could. I would lose respect for anyone who purported to be a scholar of reading and displayed such ignorance of—or contempt for—the way most people experience most stories.

It’s been observed that writing is like sex: first you do it by yourself, then you do it with a few close friends, and finally you do it for money. I would say that reading is as well: the first time you do it wrong, then you get better with experience, but it would be sad to skip the first time.

* Full disclosure: I have not read the article in which he does this, because I have not read The Hunger Games, and, as you will see, I take the issue of spoilers more seriously than Fish does.

** On a forum thread called “The Ultimate Spoiler Thread,” where each new post spoiled a different book or movie.

*** Tangent: Watch Arrested Development twice. It’s ridiculous.

Bat-servations

This started as a reply to a comment on my last post, but it just kept getting longer in the conception.

Having seen The Avengers, I saw the latest trailer for The Dark Knight Rises as well. So, let's talk about that.

Okay. Batman Begins was surprisingly good. The Dark Knight was surprisingly better. If The Dark Knight Rises is as much better than The Dark Knight as The Dark Knight was than Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan may actually become a god.

Do I give TDK too much credit? I really don't think I do. Begins may have been the best Batman movie to date, when it came out, but TDK actually transcended. It gave people new ways to see the world, which I think is a big part of what art is for. The Joker's makeup and Glasgow smile became new shorthand for a modern kind of evil.*

All that to say that I am braced for disappointment by TDKR, because there's a lot more room to go down than up. It may do me good to lower my expectations, anyway.

But what about the trailer? Well, the hopes and fears it provokes in me can be sorted by character.

Batman: I think I've guessed how this movie will go down, but I hope to be surprised along the way. For now, I'm glad that the movie's marketing has gotten ahead of the "Batman dies" thing. That is, a lot of people are thinking it. If we did die in this movie, it would be an easy mistake to underestimate fans' intelligence and studiously avoid mentioning the possibility, so that it would come as a "surprise." Instead, the trailer is full of "maybe."

Bane: It's hard to tell where they're taking this guy. He's got some sort of xenomorph thing going on with his face. When they put a bag on Cillian Murphy's head and called him "Scarecrow," it made sense to me, but whatever they've put on Tom Hardy's face is harder to believe than the leather fetish/luchador mask in the comics. He's clearly got it in for Batman personally, and that's about all I can tell.

Catwoman: I've always worried about what they would do with her, because she's an easy character to make ridiculous. The workplace romance she has going with Batman will be a hard sell after what happened in TDK. Most of all I'm just afraid that she'll fall victim to what I call Julia Roberts syndrome: the belief that when the camera is pointed at an attractive woman, nothing interesting can go on for fear of distracting the audience. On the other hand, in what little we see of her in the trailer, I'm almost worried that she'll be--dare I say?--under-sexualized, a failing I had not thought Catwoman even eligible for. In what is surely, granted, an emotionally climactic scene, she seems so darn sincere. This from a character whose persona normally says, "Come play with fire." 

John Blake: Who the hell is Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing? I'm as glad to see him in this movie as the next guy, but what is he doing? If nothing else, he's promising that the movie will have more plot than I can extrapolate from a teaser trailer and Wikipedia.

* To be clear, I think photoshopping it onto a politician's face is a vicious and puerile way to make a point. If we must be so crass, though, the toothbrush mustache was overdue for retirement. The point is that it speaks to the penetration of the image.

Superheroes, Spartans, and dwarves!

Yesterday Girlfriend and I went ahead and saw The Avengers--ahem, Marvel's The Avengers, no doubt to ameliorate the confusion of three or so people expecting a new John Steed movie. I'm not too sure what to say about it. Any accurate account of my opinion would probably be unfair considering the extent to which I enjoyed the movie; just saying that I enjoyed it would give the wrong impression, too. (I suppose this is a knot that movie reviewers learn how to cut early on.) I enjoyed watching The Avengers on a big screen. I do not think it would have held my attention on my television. It was, as I told a few people, a lot of scenes, the majority of which were entertaining. That they don't add up to much is probably not the fault of any of the artists involved. After all, we know whose movie this really is. It's in the title.

 I was not invested in this being a good movie. Since Iron Man 2 I haven't had hopes to speak of for Marvel movies. If Batman weren't still going, I would be ready to call this comic book movie thing over. The Disney Renaissance lasted 10 years, generously defined; if we're having a Golden Age of Comic Book Movies, well, it's been 11 years since Spider-Man.

One place I do hope the magic is lasting out the decade is in the Lord of the Rings franchise, for franchise it has become, and The Hobbit is coming (and coming again next year, because why not?). I wouldn't mind seeing a comparison of how much money is riding on these two enterprises.

Now, back when I played Halo: Reach I noticed a problem that I almost wrote about at the time, and looking forward to The Hobbit I see the chance for the same mistake. It turns out that good characterization can ruin a good character.

I played the Halo games, and I, for one, thought the character of the Master Chief was a very good one. I'm not going to call the series an example of deep or transcendent literature, but the Master Chief was a nearly flawless action hero. He wasn't exactly flat; his character had some conspicuous, gaping holes. He was Spartan 117, and he had extra kung fu where most of his personality should have been. This was apparently the human cost of the Spartan program. There was pathos in it. That's how he came off to me, anyway.

Then came Halo: Reach, where we had the privilege of meeting six other Spartans. Now they had to be differentiated. (Actually, did they? For the story Bungie wanted to tell, but I wonder.) They had to be characterized, and humanized. For the Halo series, some of them were pretty well-rounded. Jorge maybe even had depth--at the very least, there were tensions in his character that made him interesting. The gentle giant thing isn't the freshest character angle, but I liked him. He certainly didn't seem to have parts of his soul missing.

Suddenly, what the hell was wrong with Master Chief? If the other Spartans were capable of feeling the tragedy of war--capable of feeling fear and empathy--capable of bonding with and mourning comrades--then 117 lost his excuse. Now, apparently, the Spartan project wasn't dehumanizing. Master Chief must have had his Clint Eastwood growl when he shipped out to boot camp. He doesn't care because he doesn't care. The pathos is gone. Suddenly, he's either a cardboard character or a psychopath.

So I had that problem with Halo: Reach. By elevating its characters above their type, it made the old hero--first and foremost an excellent specimen of a type--and undermined him. If I ever go back to play the campaign in any of the Halos, I will probably ignore the characterization in Reach, but I can't unplay it.

So, Tolkien gave us elves and dwarves. In The Lord of the Rings he could use the different races and types. Dwarves were a certain way, elves were a certain way, and you didn't need to think about it too hard. Tolkien helped us out by never making us deal with more than one dwarf, or more than one elf, at a time. So Gimli and Legolas stand out as distinct from the rest of the Fellowship, and they have personalities, even without ever being much more than representatives of a cultural type.

I'm not going to get on Tolkien's case at all. The Lord of the Rings movies flattened out Legolas and Gimli even further--Gimli in particular. And to be fair, the movies' Gimli is not the character Halo's Master Chief is. He comes dangerously close to being the sum of the running gags around him.

So Gimli is, at best, a type. The shallowness of his characterization is supported, inasmuch as it is supported, by the absence of other dwarves to compare him to. So what am I worried about? The 13 dwarves in The Hobbit. In the book, not all of them are characterized. In the movie, they're all going to have to be differentiated, at least. Maybe even well-developed--actors get bored, after all. Which is fine, except I suspect it's going to get harder to appreciate the LOTR trilogy on its own terms.

This is Peter Jackson's fault, more or less. He left The Lord of the Rings open to this. Admittedly, his neglect in this area may have freed him up to do awesome things in other areas of the movies. And really, I'd rather see The Hobbit be as good as it (they) can be. I just wish everything could be perfect and everyone could win. You know.

The selves we choose, and the selves we create, Part 2

Part 1 is here.

I've thought recently about just how many characters I've invented--not as a writer but as a player of video games and role-playing games. It is more than many but fewer than some. That's the point I was getting at in my last post: that the act of choosing and creating characters is becoming a common and frequent cultural experience. It means something to make these choices. At the very least it reflects something in us.

Video games are becoming a major way that people interact with stories. It's worth noticing, then, that it's often the role of the player, not the designer, to create the protagonist. Halo and its iconic Master Chief rose and fell in the last decade. The hero of the games we play today is mutable.

Granted, this trend is largely the work of a few studios, but Bioware, Bethesda, and the caretakers of MMORPGs are doing a lot more than their share of the storytelling.

Truly granular character creation has become a hallmark of western RPGs. These are really the video game equivalent of the bildungsroman, with the player's hand on every brick as it comes down. The whole game might be a character creation mode: the first hour or so is spent defining the character in broad strokes such as sex, name, appearance, and aptitudes; the next 20 to 100 hours are spent deciding how the character reacts to various scenarios.*

I confess that, from everything I've heard, I could speak more authoritatively on this subject if I had played the Mass Effect games. There, I am told, is a rich narrative that changes profoundly based on the choices you make about and with your character, not just a world you move through in a set direction making cosmetic choices as you go. When I have $100 and 100 hours to spare I will look into this further.

I actually came to truly intensive character creation through wrestling games. (There was a run of very good wrestling video games in the late 90s that you didn't need to care for actual professional wrestling to enjoy.) I could spend hours on that, building a ridiculous costume piece by piece, and choosing exactly what kind of punch my character threw when I pushed the button this way or that way. The legitimately boggling slider festival that opens Skyrim is comparatively manageable.

But one of these is more like sculpture and the other is more like writing. Role-playing video games adapted the free-form character crafting of their tabletop forebears and combined it with the cosmetic characterization element. The upshot was that you could make yourself a character in the story, either in the sense of making one for yourself or making one out of yourself. With an amount of obsessive application that's hardly even abnormal in this day and age, one could create a Tussaud-quality likeness for their in-game avatar. And of course these are almost all fantasy role-playing games, meaning you choose an "class" for your character such as a wizard, a warrior, or a thief.

So here there is no stable of characters to choose among, but a whole spectrum of possibility. What do we choose? I almost always used myself as a model. My own given name--not Cory, the other one--was suitably exotic to suit a fantasy protagonist.

So when I discovered the D&D-inspired Baldur's Gate 2 my first character was a sorcerer named Corodon, Neutral Good by alignment and apt to talk his way out of danger when he could. He was an elf, and his skin was blue (not drow indigo, but more cyan) so he was suitably bizarre, but otherwise he was who I wanted to be in the game. With class a variable, and skin color brought back within the bounds of normalcy and self-identification, this continued to be my first character in games I've played of the same sort until today, more or less.

Oddly, I didn't follow the selection heuristic I mentioned in my last post. My characters tended to be idealized versions of myself. After the blue skin experiment, I didn't take the opportunity again to make a character alien or monstrous, even when the Elder Scrolls games made it a viable option.

The penchant for charismatic characters comes partly from the sort of morals I wanted to play and partly from the practicalities of the games themselves. Bioware in particular filled its games with lavish dialogue trees, so that talking your way out of (or into) a situation was always at least interesting. I wanted to be able to talk my way through trouble because I wanted to see how the game would handle it--the story that got told that way was more interesting to me than the one where every problem got solved through fights.

The idealized self was my go-to through about halfway through Dragon Age, two years ago. That's when I looked at my digital "self" and found myself profoundly bored with him. Instead of stepping into the character's place in the world, I was out here, looking at a character who, because he had no real differences from me, was a blank. I, the audience, liked or disliked characters, and approved or disapproved of developments, but my protagonist didn't: he was a vessel, not a character. Also his face, which was sort of like mine but not quite, got very hard to look at after a while.

Such is the danger of this type of association. It also runs up against the frustrations of finite character choices. This turned me off Mass Effect very early on. My protagonist was me, according to me, but I often had to make decisions where what I would have done wasn't an option. This made the story that the game was willing to tell more galling than engrossing.

My friend Bryan found a solution of sorts. In Mass Effect he modeled his character not on himself, but on Edward James Olmos, best known to us as William Adama in Battlestar Galactica. The likeness was only approximate, but what he found was a face with character--and not his own. So when the character followed Bryan's instructions in a way he didn't expect, the result was a surprising development that revealed something of the character's character, not a failure of the interface.

Naturally I stole the idea. I confess that it has done less for my experience of Skyrim than I had hoped. But then as a writer I have always been greedy for dictatorial, rather than merely interpretive, control over stories I participate in.

I never get the same sense of flamboyant self-expression from most RPGs that ask me to build a character as opposed to the ones that ask me to choose one.

The most freedom I can remember in character creation was in a plucky Telnet game called RetroMUD. Being entirely text-based, a player described their character's appearance in words, meaning practically anything was possible. The game also offered a truly preposterous array of races (including dragons, titans, atomies, robots, and squid) and more character classes than it's really safe to think about. Just writing about RetroMUD actually makes me want to play it again, not because it was good as a game or I was any good at it, but because it is a world where you can really be someone, and that someone is almost anyone.

But really, RetroMUD is so much text-based that playing it is almost like writing. It teeters on the far edge of the continuum between Reading and Writing, where the big guns of gaming stay, ultimately, tethered to the Reading end by the authorship of the designer.

* I say "deciding" somewhat pointedly. Rare (in my experience) is the game where doing the "right" thing is really more difficult than the alternative. Bioshock came close with the choice of saving or harvesting the little sisters, but couldn't resist compensating you more or less in-kind for the resources you gave up by sparing them. But fictional interactive ethics aren't quite a topic for today.

The selves we choose, and the selves we create, Part 1

"Call me _______."

So might have begun Moby Dick, the video game. All the canon material would refer to the main character as "Ishmael," of course, but the actual audience would have been divided. Some would keep Ishmael, some would name him after themselves, and some would come up with something else entirely.

"Call me Jack."

"Call me Gaheris."

"Call me Batman."

A couple articles I found on Medium Difficulty the other day got me thinking about the more general implications of character selection/creation. It's something we do a lot now, those of us who play games, anyway. It's a literary act. We might divide interactive narratives up this way: the ones that give you one character to play as, the ones that ask you to choose from a stable, and the ones that ask you to build a character yourself.

I hadn't realized before, but with the mainstreaming of video games I think it's safe to say that most people below a certain age have chosen or built a character at some point. World of Warcraft alone accounts for millions upon millions of characters created, and since it has reached its tendrils into distant corners of the culture, it has probably introduced a great many people to the act who otherwise wouldn't have. My cursory search didn't turn up hard numbers on WoW, but City of Heroes (which doesn't hold a candle to WoW) counts 43 million characters created over eight years. So this is a thing that people do.

Video games, more than most any other medium, are venues for the self-expression of the consumer, the audience. A game asks (or tells), "Who will you be?" "What will you do?" and "Can you do it?" These are the questions we, as an audience, ask most media, not the other way around.

Granted, previous generations have also had to choose who they would "play as": cowboys or Indians, cops or robbers, Allies or Axis. (And of course there is Nothing New Under the Sun, but if we made that an end of it, how would we feed the writers?) But never, I suspect, so often and with so many variations. And in these games, you choose your role in your own narrative. To create a whole narrative and then ask the individual audience to choose a protagonist is a quietly radical change.

Especially when we are young, character selection is about self-identification. When we are older, if we still play games, we approach characters in a more jaded manner; we perhaps know better who we are, and look more to try on another skin for a while.

Some games, such as the Legend of Zelda series, only asked me to name my character, but this in itself was a choice that spoke to how I would engage the game. (Link and Ishmael have a lot in common in terms of depth of characterization.) "Cory" fit into the perversely constrained name space of games translated from the Japanese, so I was inclined to use it when a blank-canvas hero needed a modicum of characterization. I did want to be in the game, so it was Cory rather than Link or Crono or Ness. Until, again, I got old and jaded.

There was always, of course, the option of taking the game entirely on its own terms and using the canonical name. (Earthbound is an intriguing exception in that it presented its "canonical" names as fallbacks in case you couldn't think of anything yourself.) Later on I would choose obscure and intriguing names, like Gareth, Nimue, and Arvel, to make the characters mine but not me. Other players (especially of a certain age) took a still different approach, noticing that many vulgarities also fit in the little name box. I never much appreciated this approach, mostly because I got no pleasure from that sort of transgression. I wanted to inhabit the fantasy, not mock it, and there's something a bit lame about being too cool for one's own video games. At any rate, merely letting the player choose the character's name opens up at least four distinct kinds of engagement.

Games of a different sort offered a choice from a small stable of characters. When I was young the choices were simple. I preferred Luigi to Mario when there was little to distinguish them but their palettes. In games where characters had statistics given I gravitated towards the fastest, because I equated speed with finesse and superiority, even though I was myself incapable of finesse.

Street Fighter II, then fighting games in general, broadened the horizons. At least I know of no precedent to the 8, then 12, then 16 playable characters in Street Fighter II's various iterations. Mortal Kombat was anemic in comparison with 7, but still offered a wide array. Between the two of them I developed the heuristic that would determine my character identification for a good long while.

I might stop to mention that back then (in my day) video games had manuals, and these manuals told you a lot more than just how to play the game. In fighting games especially, they contained backstory for all of the playable characters. When I rented a game (these also being the days before manual theft became so pervasive that the game rental outfits gave up entirely on including manuals with rentals) I spent the car ride home poring over this information, determining what I thought of all the characters and who I would play.

Consciously, I chose characters who I saw as morally in the right. Sometimes, as in Mortal Kombat, this had to be a relative judgment. In my mind that was the determining factor. Scorpion was the ghost of a ninja who wanted revenge on Sub-Zero for murdering him and his family; this was the guy I was pulling for. Obviously, in retrospect, moral righteousness was not my only determining factor. Sonya Blade was pursuing a international criminal, and wasn't an undead abomination or a professional murderer. Raiden was a god. But I stuck with Scorpion.

Really it was the monsters, the outcasts, that I was drawn to. I related to Scorpion's inhumanity as well as his sense of grievance. In Street Fighter II, I played Blanka, the feral and inexplicably green jungle warrior. Later, when I played Killer Instinct, I played the werewolf in search of a cure for his condition, or the ice alien who just wanted to go home. In retrospect, I went for monsters first, unless they were explicitly evil. But if someone had green skin and a hunchback, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. (And it always was him, which may or may not say as much about game design as it does about me.)

But these games offered many choices, and many ways to choose: nationality, fighting style, sex (or sex appeal), or purely pragmatic reasons (which character am I most successful with?). One could play a hero or a villain, and being the villain did not mean taking it upon oneself to lose for the sake of the narrative. Fighting games, in fact, were my introduction to the multiple ending--every character's story was different.

This post has gotten quite long, so I will leave it there for now. Character selection was one ritual of my youth, but character creation (when I discovered it) was another, more involved, more expressive, and more suited to its own post in Part 2.

Another scary pineapple story

The judo club is ramping up for belt testing in a week, and I decided to go up for promotion. The sudden change in the tenor of practice ("I know this is what works, but this is what they'll look for on the test.") put me in a foul mood about standardized testing, generally. Hence, I was poised to be outraged by the news coming out of New York about their 8th-grade English test. As it turns out, its complicated. Complicated and frustrating.

The other day there was a flap in New York about a bizarre reading followed by some vague questions on the state standardized English test. The reading was a sort of postmodern fable about a race between a pineapple and a hare. While the hare won the race, most of the spectator animals assumed that the pineapple had something up its sleeve. The moral of the story: "Pineapples don't have sleeves." The passage is attributed to Daniel Pinkwater, though it hardly resembles what he turns out to have actually written.* For one thing, his story was about a rabbit and an eggplant.

Here's the story at the New York Daily News. It's worth pointing out that that is not where I read about it first. I saw this first on Gawker, where writer Max Read seems to have made some judicious edits to the reading and questions to make everything even less explicable. At any rate, the quoted material in the two articles doesn't match up. More on that later.

First of all, I find the story itself amusing. I "get" it. I'm not upset that something silly, or even a bit nonsensical, made it onto the standardized test. The questions are the problem.

About those questions. They're different, depending on where you read about it. According to the people begging Mr. Pinkwater for guidance,** the questionable questions are "Which animal was the wisest?" and "Why did the animals eat the pineapple?" Now, even for a perfectly logical reading, these are subjective judgments that aren't suited for multiple choice questions. Asked of a nonsense story, they are a bad joke. On a standardized test, on which hangs children's futures and teachers' careers, they are an affront. But.

But, those aren't the questions as reported by the New York Daily News. They quote the questions as (emphasis mine) "Which animal spoke the wisest words?" and "The animals ate the pineapple most likely because they were..." These aren't great questions, but they're better. They should be cause for indignation, but as standardized English tests go they are apparently par for the course.

Now I read the question has been discounted from students' grades. Oh, and if you were wondering, the animals ate the pineapple most likely because they were annoyed. Now, assuming that the questions are as the News related them, and not as Gawker did (and I hope I can trust a newspaper in this matter), if this brings shame on the testing regime the irony will be that there was nothing especially bad about the questions. It just took a truly absurd story to make people notice.

New York paid Pearson VUE $32 million dollars for this test, and forgive me if I get the impression that Pearson didn't try very hard.

The saddest thing, to me, was the News's quote from Tyree Furman, one of the kids taking the test. "I thought it was a little strange, but I just answered it as best as I could. You just have to give it your best answer. These are important tests."

* There's no permalink to the post in question, as far as I can tell. If it's not on the first page by the time you read this, go to April 17, 2012. Or just buy his novel, Borgel. Having read it, you'll know more about this mess than I do.

** They more or less match the questions on Gawker, but the versions there are even more vague, and because of a change to the reading, the right answer to one is almost certainly different. Apparently this reading has shown up on tests in other states before; maybe this is an older version. The worse, then, for those other states.

Quantum ecclesiastics

A certain law of nature was pointed out to me today, after I experienced it. Simply: when you visit a church, it is always "doing something different." It's a Heisenbergian thing. You have to go to a church regularly before they'll let you see a regular service.

Case in point: the church I visited today devoted its service to saying goodbye to its associate pastor. The church building was also undergoing renovation, meaning that the church was at a different church.

But it is a nice church, despite its essential unknowability.

A brief thought on temporality and musical theater

Watching both Sweeney Todds (that is, the ones with Johnny Depp and George Hearn, respectively), I was surprised to find I preferred the new movie. It's an odd thing, since I liked the 2007 movie inordinately when I first saw it. I was wholly unfamiliar with the Broadway show and had, in fact, not yet had any unambiguously positive interactions with Stephen Sondheim. But as I learned more about the show I found I disliked almost every difference I learned of between the movie and its source.

I started writing at length about my preference of the one over the other, but I realized it was a bit silly of me. First of all, there's no accounting for the 80s. More to the point, it's hardly fair to compare a Hollywood film to a filmed stage production, any more than it would be fair to judge the movie based on a live reenactment by Johnny Depp and friends. I'm comfortable confessing that I will never have a truly informed opinion about live theater performed before I was born.

Sequel Syndrome

I'm admittedly late to the game with this, but there's something baffling to me about movie sequels. I just watched Ip Man 2 and, while I don't want to run that movie down too much, it got me thinking about this again.

I call it a syndrome, first, because "sequelitis" is taken. TV Tropes offers a wide but not comprehensive list of symptoms and occurrences. Second, I call it a syndrome because I, at least, can't pin down a single cause. (Perhaps, like many modern diseases, the underlying pathogen is confirmation bias.) Sometimes a sequel's just worse. Sometimes there's someone or something you can blame, but not always.

So, I liked Ip Man a lot. The story has some parts that you can only accept because it's a kung-fu movie, and other parts that are just absurd. It is, at heart, the story of a man who overcomes adversity by boldly being able to. Still, there were some genuinely subversive moments that made it good to watch even when nobody was punching anyone.

I only heard about Ip Man, though, because of a glowing review I read of Ip Man 2 in Seattle Weekly. The sequel's score stands well above the original's on Rotten Tomatoes, so I was quite excited about 2 after seeing 1.

Girlfriend caught it before I did, but Ip Man 2 is basically Rocky IV. (Actually I think if Sylvester Stallone had thought to go to Sammo Hung for his fight choreography from Rocky II on, the world would be a substantially better place.) It also occurred to me belatedly that the original audience wouldn't have identified at all with the white antagonist, making the movie possibly less morally complex than it had even seemed at first. I am actually aware of nothing that Ip Man 2 does better than its antecessor, which is why it's so weird to me that the critics should prefer it. Is there something wrong with movie critics? (I notice that RT's audience ratings line up better with my own opinion, which lends itself to that theory.)

Anyway, Ip Man 2 has the same writer and the same director as Ip Man, as well as rather too much of the original cast. As a writer (finger quotes optional), I'm inclined to say it lands at the feet of the writer, but I can't say what constraints he, or anyone else, was working under.

It might be useful to look at some other sequels that suffer from similar symptoms. Sherlock Holmes, Iron Man, and Casino Royale all recently yielded inferior sequels. The first two changed writers, and the last one changed directors. Yet they all seemed to fall flat on so many levels, including what just looked like lazier editing from the returning directors and lazier scripts from the returning writers. Were they bored?

(I'm also of the opinion that the whole problem starts with The Godfather Part II, but if you think that that one was better than the original I won't fight you over it.)

Thankfully there have also been some recent exceptions. Carriers, if you will. Spider-Man and Batman Begins both had sequels that were actually better. Spider-Man changed writers completely, but Batman kept the same writers and added Jonathan Nolan to the mix (and I'd be surprised if he didn't have any influence on the first one). However it was done, neither one of them slackened off.

(On a side note, The Dark Knight Rises apparently has the same writing team as The Dark Knight, which, according to the evidence examined so far, suggests that... nothing.)

There's one common thread among all of these. It's subjective, but we're talking about art, so, yeah. A sequel basically has to have a new character, since a good original takes its cast to the natural result of their interactions.

The new character has to be strong enough to change the dynamic of the movie. Otherwise you just end up with your sequel's protagonists retreading the same arcs they went through last time. See Quantum of Solace, in which James Bond relives the last five minutes of Casino Royale, chasing down a bad guy who's so inert that the big reveal about his evil scheme doesn't make 007 bat an eyelash. See The Godfather Part II, whose most interesting character is dead before the movie starts, and whose present-day storyline unfolds pretty much exactly the way the end of the first movie implied it would.

On the other hand, need I go into a long explanation of the significance of the Joker in The Dark Knight? Or, take the progenitor of superior sequels, Terminator 2. The important new character in that movie actually isn't the T-1000 or John Connor; it's the original Terminator, back but with a completely new set of motivations.

On the other other hand, there's the sequels whose new characters are just weird and annoying. Not to name names.

And while the quality  of the new characters is more of an indicator of overall quality, it's not perfect, and it still looks like another symptom, rather than a definitive cause.

Nor can we just say that a franchise/character/premise has run out of good ideas. Iron Man 2, Ip Man 2*, and Spider-Man 3 (sigh) both suffer from an overabundance of plots. What they needed was to be pared down so that subplots would have room to grow naturally, instead of being crowded out by competing real plots.

I could go on like this but I think my thesis is still that the cause is still unknown. Study must continue, though, for only then do we stand a chance of finding a cure.

* I feel the need to point out that Ip Man, unlike the other entries in this list, is a person's actual name. While I admit to comic book heroes being overrepresented in this post, he is just a real person with a name that's a bit unfortunate to Anglophones.

Want/Do not want

Dipping my toes in the waters of trying to get things published, I've learned some interesting things. My first pitch to Cracked got turned down, on the basis that its appeal would be too narrow. I understood that. Someone's got to look at the bottom line. But I realized something important.

I didn't want to publish that article.

I wanted it to be published, yes. But the concept was a little weak. The research was a little thin. Without the flag of a major comedy website to fly over it, I don't think I would have been willing to put it out there with my name on it. I wanted someone to tell me it was a good idea, but in a vacuum, I wouldn't have called it a good idea myself.

It will return as an item in a broader, better article pitch.

Now, yesterday, I was having a little fun. I was doing some of my obligatory writing for the day but at the moment I wasn't feeling right to work on Nenle and Death (I got to it later). I happened upon something I knew about already: a poem called "The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den."

It's a neat little poem written in Classical (i.e. 2,000-year-old) Chinese, made up entirely of tonal variations of the sound "shi." It was whimsical and amusing, but the translations I found were clinical and not much fun to read in their own right.

Having some time on my hands and needing to write, I adapted the translations I could find into my own "translation," which was less accurate but more fun, I thought. Now, I used the word "translation" enquotedly there because I can translate Chinese like I can translate Koala, which is to say that I cannot, even a little. I took the thrust of the translations I read and gave them a rhyme and a rhythm.

The end product amused me, so I decided to post it here. First, though, I checked something. I discovered, to my surprise, that while it's written in a 2,000-year-old dialect, the poem is from the 1900s, by a linguist named Chao Yuen Ren. He was illustrating the whimsical point that simple romanization won't work for Chinese languages. The point, though, is that the poem is not in the public domain, and, much to my dismay, I can't just do whatever I want with it. So, sadly, my adaptation, which I think has the potential to get a smile out of someone, can't legally see the light of day for 15 to 40 years, depending on whose copyright laws apply. It made me sad.

This was the same day my Cracked pitch got nixed. The difference in feeling was an interesting lesson in the difference between wanting to publish, and wanting to be published.

It's not who you don't know, it's what you don't know

In my last post I made some mention of the Ocean Marketing debacle that unfolded like live theater over the week after Christmas. If this is new to you, a quick search will set you straight. The Examiner had the most complete play-by-play I could find. (Scroll down 2/3 of the page to "Original Article" to start at the beginning.) You can also see how it all started on Penny Arcade.

The phrase "a tragedy without a hero" came to my mind in reference to the affair, so I Googled it to see where that phrase has come up before. Thanks to one Waldo F. McNeir, the first few hits are in reference to Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar. A parallel or two come to mind. Entertaining as it was, the story of Ocean Marketing did have some resemblance to a group stabbing.

To recap: Paul Christoforo was in charge of distributing a product, and revealed himself over the course of an e-mail conversation with a customer to be a rude, petty, egomaniacal idiot. This was put out on the internet, at a moment when a large number of people had more free time than normal (and, I might hypothesize, some holiday frustrations to vent). The result was an information-age combination of the pillory and the Roman Colosseum. The internet ate Mr. Christoforo alive.

I come to bury Paul Christoforo, not to flame him. Did he deserve what happened? As it became clear that the man's name would be thoroughly demolished within a week, I found myself wondering that quite a lot. Clearly Mr. Christoforo has certain glaring personality flaws which make him unfit for any position which gives him even the illusion of power over other human beings. He had that position, though, and we can presume it was his livelihood. Is it possible to not deserve to lose something that you had no business having in the first place? What are the ethics of training the internet's Disproportionate Response Beam on someone? Is there a lesson to be learned here, and does anyone have the self-awareness to learn it?

What fascinated me about the story was the gradually developing portrait of Mr. Christoforo as a man with a seriously flawed worldview. He is apparently obsessed with contacts and status. When he wanted to make himself out to be a big man, he fabricated contacts for himself. When Mike Krahulik laid him low, he imagined that Krahulik had formidable contacts.

Christoforo's interview with MSNBC is particularly illuminating of this pathology. Here's what I consider the crown jewel of the interview: "Ultimately, if I was able to control the customer, it never would have happened. I've dealt with thousands and thousands of customers with similar complaints, they were all asking the same question. When is it big enough that it hits the news? When it hits Penny Arcade, when it hits a guy who has the biggest affiliations in the industry." "You never know who knows who," he says later, "and lesson learned." See above re: self-awareness. Mike Krahulik's big affiliation is with the internet, not the Freemasons. "Customer Dave" didn't have any special strings to pull either. He just sent an email to somebody he had never met.

Personal contacts will always count for something, but easier, freer communication is eroding their power. The smoke-filled rooms where men of consequence used to chortle and plot look more and more like bunkers where they hide from the organic, chaotic powers at work in the larger world.

At least, I hope it's that way.

September 11, 2011

The tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks is naturally producing a lot of commentary.  I think that's good.  While my general rule on this blog has been to avoid commenting on politics, I'm going to relax that today.  It's not that I think what I have to say is especially important, but it is what it is, and I'd like to share it.

People like to say things about never forgetting this or that, but forgetting is too easy.  We're bombarded with new information all the time, and new versions of old information.  Then things happen, and people get old and die.  I wish, for example, that I had asked my grandfather questions about World War II.  Things that only he remembered are gone now.  So I hope that a lot of people record what they remember while they can.

I've never much liked the term "9/11" but that's the one that stuck, perhaps for exactly the same reasons that I dislike it.  It's just two numbers, perhaps the most banal and hollow name that could have been produced using the English language.  But the event itself was huge and complicated, and I remember the time we spent groping for a name adequate to three separate suicide attacks and everything that happened around them.  I think we'd recoil from a name worthy of the events it described, and so we chose the opposite.

I saw a blog argue the other day that the importance of 9/11 as an event is grossly overestimated.  I disagree, though it's not really an argument you can have.  3,000 is a huge number and a tiny number.  As a number of human lives it only barely defies our ability to conceptualize it, hardly worth mention against crimes and tragedies killing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, thousands of thousands.  I've met people now who don't feel very strongly about 9/11 and that's always strange for me but I think I'm beginning to understand them.  In terms only of death and destruction it wasn't a national event, and I can't speak to the effects of that anyway--nobody I knew died.  But 9/11 really was important as a psychic event, and it either affected you or not.  It affected me.

Ten years ago I was sixteen years old, a senior in high school.  I lived on Long Island, at the suburbs roughly midway across the gradient from New York's urban sprawl on one side to posh beach houses on the other.  My best friend at the time's father commuted to the city and worked in the World Trade Center, and this was nothing special.

And while I'm setting the stage, I want to point out one thing that's too easily forgotten: confusion.  It's so easy to forget what it was like not to know something that you learn later.  But when people in the future look up 9/11, if they only read the true facts of what happened, they'll practically be reading lies.

September 11, 2001 wasn't the day Al Qaeda launched a terrorist attack.  Not until the end, anyway.  First, it was the day a plane crashed into one of the Twin Towers.

We found out about this first period, when our teacher got a phone call forwarded through the main office.  She had a relative--I don't remember which--in the WTC, and she let us know, since any of us might have also.

I remember on my way to my next class, hearing the radio playing in the janitor's room.  Two radio hosts were talking about the crash, and one of them pointed out that it was very foggy over the city.  This made sense at the time.

I remember that distinctly but I have no memory of when the second plane hit.  The school administration was trying not to say too much, and maybe they never announced it.  In my next class there was an announcement made over the loudspeaker that there had been "an explosion" at the World Trade Center.  No other details.  I still don't understand why they called it an explosion, if they were withholding information to prevent panic.  But like every decision made that day, it's easy to criticize.  No one knew what to do--the school administration was figuring it out as they went along just like the rest of us.

I took the opportunity to tell the class what I knew.  At this point, knowing there had been a plane involved, I had the advantage on everyone else.

At some point before the next class it made its way through the class that there had been a second plane, and there was no question that America was being attacked.  I use that phrase unreservedly, even though people tend to look at it as hyperbole now.  At that point, though, that was exactly the sense we had.

Next class was Spanish, and the teacher refused to postpone a test we had that day.  I respect the decision now (I might even have then).  Everyone just wanted to tell everyone else what they had heard, and she probably wanted to know too, which in all honesty I never thought of until just now.

But I did get some information before the test was handed out: New York City was experiencing a full-scale air raid.  Bombs were being dropped.  Whoever told me that didn't say what country the bombers had come from, and I don't recall asking.  I think at that point I accepted that information was going to be incomplete, but I had no reason to doubt what I was hearing.

I realized then that this was a very important day.  I took out my school-supplied day planner and wrote underneath that day's homework assignments, "Bombing of New York begins."  Because I had no idea when what was starting would end, and I definitely had no idea how hard it would be to ever forget the date.

The rest of the day is a blur until the end.  At some point I got set straight about the bombing.  In the cafeteria after school someone was collecting money to buy bottled water for rescue workers.  I had $20.  I bought a pretzel and gave the rest to the guy collecting.  He directed onlookers to my example, and I was very proud of myself.  I don't remember if the pretzel was any good.

Before my mom came to pick me up someone explained what had really happened: two planes had hit the Twin Towers, and another had hit the Pentagon, the Air Force had shot down a fourth one headed to Washington D.C., and fighters were pursuing a fifth that was headed for Los Angeles.

I'm not sure I knew the towers had fallen until I got home.  Once I talked to my parents, who had had access to the news and not the high school grapevine, I became acquainted with the facts, such as were known.

The first estimate of the death toll was over 6,000.  In a few days it would shrink by more than half as redundancies were discovered between the different sources, but it took a long time for the real figure to replace that first one in my mind.

I was mad.  I was swearing in my head, and that was not at all normal for me.  It had been unthinkable--I mean really unthinkable--that someone could attack America on American soil, right in the heart.  You do not f*ck with us.  I wanted to do something.  I wanted to fight someone.  Carpet-bombing Afghanistan that very day seemed like a perfectly appropriate response.

I don't think I'm the only one who thought that, and I want to point out that we didn't attack Afghanistan that day.  It was more than a month before the military response, and I remember how frustrated some people were.  Whatever happened afterward, I have to respect what President Bush did in that month: he waited when the public wanted to attack now, and he projected a confidence that there would be justice.  He made a humanitarian case for dismantling the Taliban regime to people who thought they already had good reason to want blood.  Looking back, it was a scary time.  There could have been rampant vigilantism, race riots, if the President had been more bloodthirsty or more reluctant.

The next couple days at school were devoted to processing what had happened.  There was an assembly, but I don't remember much of what was said.  I do remember one classroom discussion where one of our Muslim classmates shared that his first reaction to the news had been to think, "God, don't let it be Muslims."  I think hearing that was good for us.

One thing I do remember from the assembly was a teacher recounting how he had told some student something my dad had mused to me once or twice: Every generation in history, basically, has had its major war.  His had had Vietnam, then Korea and World War 2 before that, World War 1, and so on back... but our generation hadn't yet, and possibly never would.  And the teacher admitted he had been wrong.

For almost twenty years, we thought we might make it, though.