Acephalous

"YOU HATE THE CROW JUST DIE"

Such was the entirety of an email I received, presumably as a result of someone searching for an awesome Crow costume and landing on this post. I'm going to take it as a badge of honor and remain aloof and amused.

The gold's gonna be good.

UCI recommends that one or twice a year every instructor should record him- or herself teaching and sit down with a pedagogical counselor and go over the results. It's a harrowing experience, but useful in the extreme because it helps temper some habits that've become so fixed they don't register as extreme anymore. It's an exercise in becoming painfully self-aware of how one behaves in a classroom, and I'd recommend it to anyone who teaches ... and Rick Perry. Because there was this one time I was all hopped up on the caffeine before my session and I came into class and it went something like this:

 

You start with a bang, hitting your buzz words, but you slowly peter out, start checking your notes, and begin rambling before rousing yourself momentarily as you prepare to crash again. It's a poor performance, hilariously so, but I can sympathize. It must be tiring trying to remember all that tripe.

Holy Terror, Frank Miller!

In 2006, Frank Miller announced a forthcoming publication called Holy Terror, Batman! in which the Dark Knight would go to Afghanistan and get in a fistfight with Osama bin Laden. He claimed it would hark back to an earlier era in comics history when, for example, Superman would marshal his many powers to annoy Hitler:

All well and good, except DC didn't think the Batman brand would be enhanced by being aggressively associated with the worst elements of the Bush administration, and so the world was spared Holy Terror, Batman! Until a few weeks ago, that is, when Miller published Holy Terror, a book about a Batman-type vigilante who teams with a Catwoman-type thief and a Commissioner Gordon-type chief to defeat a series of terrorist attacks against a Gotham-type Empire City. (Miller's roman à clef is so obvious I believe DC might be able to sue for copyright infringement.) Let me begin by warning you:

This book is more terrible than I'm leading you to believe it is. It's Batman as written by Pam Geller after she and Glenn Reynolds split a box of wine. Only worse. Where the art isn't muddled it's obscured by a dense bank of unnecessary Eisner spritz. Human proportions—especially female proportions—remind anyone who may've forgotten of his directions to Jim Lee on All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder:

Less human than human.

Alyssa's post on the sentimental core of Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman is spot on:

I was surprised by how incredibly sweet the comic is. I wasn’t really expecting that. The basic premise, for those not in the know, is Lex Luthor finds a way to essentially give Superman fast-developing cancer, leaving Superman to do a lot of bucket-list things: give Lois Lane the chance to experience his powers for the day; nail one last scoop for the Daily Planet; go back and visit the grave of Jonathan Kent, his adopted father; save the world one last time.

However, the hallmarks of Morrison's work, according to renowned comic scholar (and Alyssa's occasional interlocutor) Douglas Wolk, are:

reality-bending metaphysical freakouts dressed up in action-adventure drag; metaphors that make visible the process by which language creates an image that in turn becomes narrative; a touch of feel-good self-improvement rhetoric; faith in the the power of pop and popularity to do magic; and skinny bald men who are stand-ins for Morrison himself, heroically conquering sadness and making the world evolve. (Reading Comics 258)

If those two descriptions seem at odds, that's because they are. Morrison is a talented but unintegrated artist. What do I mean? He can be as aggressively annoying as Wolk's flattering account of him suggests. Incorporating proxies of himself into narratives about the nature of narratives and claiming that magic makes these metaphorical selves visible? That is, to quote my advisor, pure "postmodern gee-whiz wankery." It's cleverness for the sake of being hailed as King Clever, and it grates on my every last nerve because it's so clinical and intellectualized.

AND YET.

I came to graduate school to study the works of James Joyce, whose complex wankery far outstrips anything Morrison's attempted, much less accomplished. So why does Morrison bother me in a manner Joyce doesn't? The short answer is that, at his best, Morrison doesn't bother me at all. When is he at his best? As Alyssa notes, it's when he's stripped a story to its emotional core and presented its complexities not as worthy subjects in and of themselves, but as natural consequences of a human narrative. Of course, the protagonists of these "human" narratives are rarely human: in All-Star Superman, it's Superman; in We3, it's a trio of weaponized house-pets.

That is to say: Morrison seems to have a problem elevating actual humans to a position worthy of simple human sympathy. A kidnapped pet or an orphaned alien are worthy of sympathy because they aspire to be more than their outsider status allows them to be. But an average human being? He or she is what he or she is—short of a magical authorial intervention that's as likely to land him or her in Sade's castle as provide anything resembling hope or help. The only transcendence average people can acquire is by proxy, e.g. Lois's "acquisition" of Superman's powers on her birthday.

In short, I don't find in Morrison much in the way of human sympathy for ordinary humans. This is where—their shared love of verbal and narrative pyrotechnics aside—I find Morrison lacking what Joyce possessed in abundance: because behind the modernist wankery that is Ulysses is a simple story about a man dealing (poorly) with a crisis he knew was coming but couldn't avert. It's a powerful story because of its fundamental humanity, not, as would be the case with Morrison, despite it.

It's just a book about Indian history.

Earlier this week, Salman Rusdie told Haaretz:

Everybody loves The Wire and I think it's okay, but in the end it's just a police series. I love The Sopranos. Deadwood, which didn't last long, was a series I liked a lot; it had more filthy language than I've ever heard on television anywhere in my life, but it was brilliantly written. I like some of what is on now, like Breaking Bad and Dexter.

Ever since then, his Twitter feed's been mighty entertaining. In particular, he implicitly claims that The Wire is "just a police series" but Entourage is something more.  (I'm not sure exactly what that something is, but it must have to do with the fact that, as a celebrity himself, he could relate to the Vince and his crew on a profound level inaccessible to those of us who found the show and its characters vapid and humorless.) Rushdie's dismissal of The Wire as "mere" genre fiction couldn't be more poorly timed, coming as it does on the tail end of Colson Whitehead's dismissal of genre fiction as an operative category in contemporary literature. Genre only matters, Whitehead argues, to people incapable of seeing past it. One would assume that a magic realist like Rushdie would understand that.

But no.

He'll watch Game of Thrones, but only because it qualifies as research:

I watched all that because if I am going to work in this field, I need to know what it is going on. I have been making myself have whole-series marathons to get the point of how it goes. I will soon start writing my little series.

What's his "little series" about?

It's a sort of paranoid science-fiction series, people disappearing and being replaced by other people.

Sounds like just another science fiction series to me.

Form and Content in Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman

Before I begin, I would like to re-admit that I don't "get" Grant Morrison.  I understand and, to some extent, can appreciate what others find interesting about his work, but for me reading Morrison is akin to arguing with someone who believes that, after death, we enter "the Supercontext ... a fifth-dimensional, informational continuum where things that we don't quite understand go on." (Because that's exactly what it is.) In other words, I don't disapprove of Morrison's grand scheme so much as I think its philosophical underpinnings are as sound and stable as those of anyone else who drops too much acid and claims communion with unseen entities of vast esoteric power. They—being the philosophical underpinnings, not the unseen entities of vast esoteric power—are there, certainly, but they're there to be accepted as revelation, not to be argued with.

That said, I decided to teach All-Star Superman anyway and will attempt to do it justice. Fortunately for me, that's not too difficult to do if I concentrate on the opening pages of the first issue. To wit:

The only way to make that argument convincing is not to.

Scott’s already addressed this nonsense, but since I’m the visual rhetoric guy, I thought I’d take a whack at the Erick Erickson’s contribution to We Are The 53%:

First and foremost, Erickson’s point is that he works three jobs, and then something, something, something, and something else.  Whatever his point is, he doesn’t particularly care whether or not he communicates it.  An illegible image of some scribbles isn’t likely to inspire a movement.  It’s akin to a child screaming for attention for attention’s sake, because without legible words the only message Erickson can communicate is that he wants to communicate a message.  His incompetence has rendered his point beside itself—because his point is that he is making a point, damn it, and he is making it on the Internet.

He actually states his argument over at Red State, but I think he had a better chance garnering sympathy with his non-message:

[A critic] wants you to fixate on the new house and ignore the old house. My wife and I bought it for $110,000.00 in March of 2001. It is appraised, for taxes, at $119,000.00. We’re having a tough time selling it. My student loans payments are more each month than the mortgage. But with the new house? It was originally for sale for over $600,000.00 and we benefited from the misery of others in the market downturn. It was tasty misery at that.

The man owns two homes—one of which is worth upward of half a million dollars—and clearly enjoys exploiting the market conditions he and his fellow-travelers created.  Revels in it.  Hence the significance of the non-message he communicates: when he tells people what he truly believes, they’ll understand that Erickson is as odious as the policies he supports.  Your average human being tends to be better than the worst consequences of his or her political beliefs.  For example, most conservatives champion the free market, but when they meet someone who lost everything when the housing bubble burst, they respond sympathetically because, for them, the consequences of their belief are systemic.  They take no personal joy in someone else’s homelessness.

Erick Erickson, however, is not an average human being.  He’s a spoiled man-child devoted to an ideology so despicable not even he can bring himself to communicate it directly.  Yet he feels compelled to because he knows there are other terrible people out there who share the-sentiments-that-shall-not-shared and genuinely seeks their approval.  So what does he do?

He artfully arranges some books on the desk behind him, takes off his shirt and scribbles his foul screed.  He performs the very act (“whining”) he condemns in blissful ignorance of his unintentionally ironic statement.  The man can do nothing but whine—and he proves as much by whining an unintelligible criticism of whining.  If there’s a market for shirtless men who loudly say nothing, I suppose we ought to thank Erickson for cornering it for us.  Somebody had to, and far better him than us.