Acephalous

Once upon a time, her crazy had more bite.

As I'm catching flack from, among others, two of the three co-panelists from my MLA panel on academic blogging concerning the title to my Camille Paglia post, I feel the need to have Molly Ivins clarify it for me (courtesy of Ahistoricality) :

You think perhaps this is a cheap shot, that I have searched her work and caught Ms. Paglia in a rare moment of sweeping generalization, easy to make fun of? Au contraire, as we always say in Amarillo; the sweeping generalization is her signature. In fact, her work consists of damn little else. She is the queen of the categorical statement.

There was a period in which Paglia could be counted on to be write with force and clarity, i.e. before she began writing disorganized columns brimming over with self-aggrandizing allusions and mindless repetitions of right-wing talking-points. In 1991, she even possessed prescience enough to predict her own rightward drift:

[I]f people are trying to critique from within the academic establishment, and they're getting tarred with the word "neoconservative," you keep on doing that long enough, people will get used to hearing it about themselves, and they will become conservative.

Case in point: Camille Paglia. Did her ready-made anti-feminist statements predispose her to drifting so? Without a doubt. Were her arguments about the inability of woman to create truly great art always as absurd as they seem now? Absolutely. However, she would not have become the media sensation she was in the early '90s had she not packaged her faux-feminist critiques in a language understandable to the general intellectual culture. There were (and are) many anti-feminst thinkers who rivaled Paglia in virulence but not prominence, and the point of my title was that she now resembles those muted, vainglorious misogynists more than the contrarian firebrand she once was.

Damnable confabulation.

I'm presently torn between two alternative means of interpreting the uninterpretable.  Because I'm a lit-git, I'm tempted to go with the unscientific advice Gertrude Stein belatedly offered her mentor William James:

[Y]ou do not really believe yourself why should you, you know so well so very well that it is not yourself, it could not be yourself because you cannot remember right and if you do remember right it does not sound right and of course it does not sound right because it is not right. 

That I'm the sole source of that seminal articulation of the grit that chokes the gears of our cognitive grind to a halt is a national tragedy . . . because how are there no modernists whose Steinian veins have bled out and into Google more stainingly than mine?  (I'm not even a modernist anymore you know.)  Now where was I? 

I do not really believe myself why should I, I know so well that it is not myself, it could not be myself because I cannot remember right and if I do remember right it does not sound right and of course it does not sound right because it is not right.

That would be where I was.  But keeping in mind my abiding interest in things neurological—I did write a chapter on the Founding Father of American Neurology after all—you probably won't be surprised to learn that I've spent the past few days researching why it does not sound right and of course it does not sound right because it is not right.  Then Jonathan Dresner damn near channeled Stein in his comment the other night:

Memory is a funny[.]*

It is.  Jonathan's story of seeing a pink bow in a black-and-white cartoon is a poignant funny that also happens to be relevant, as I'm currently seeing things that I couldn't have seen, e.g. I remember seeing the car slam into the semi's trailer even though, as I mentioned in the original post, the fog was so thick I couldn't even see the semi once it passed me.  So why do I think I saw what I couldn't have seen?

My brain did the math.  It calculated what must have happened between the time I last saw the car in my mirror and where it landed and then turned that understanding of what must have happened into a memory of having witnessed it happen.  So even though I couldn't have seen the crash occur, I'm burdened by a nightmare-inducing memory of it.  Intellectually, I know this to be the result of garden-variety non-pathological confabulation, indicative of nothing more than the procedural drills required to produce an unbroken experience of consciousness; emotionally and ethically, however, it feels wrong to bear witness to a tragedy that I did not, in fact, witness. 

Put differently: I know my eyes have two blind spots (punctum caecum) because there are no rods and cones where the optic nerve exits the eye and that the brain fills in details to occupy that absence; however, I've never felt betrayed by this perceptual white lie before, or that there was anything ethically dubious to the claim that I "saw" something that was actually in a blind spot.  My brain behaved no differently in reconstructing my memory of the crash than it does when it allows me to experience an unbroken field of vision, yet there does seem to be something ethically dubious about its behavior here.  Moreover, the fact that it performed this reconstruction in order to torment my sleep with visions of it strikes me as an appalling cosmi-cognitive joke.

*Had he been less concerned that his words accord with the dictates of English, I don't doubt that Jonathan would've embraced his inner lesbian modernist and went with the impactively tacky "Memory is a funny" over that grammatical sentence he actually wrote.

By request: my visual rhetoric course

As requested in the comments to my last post and via a couple of emails, here's a general outline of the course I teach on visual rhetoric. (If you find it interesting or just want to give me money, the book I'm co-writing with my course director should be available early next summer.) I'm more than happy to debate the merits of teaching rhetoric and argument through popular culture or the validity of any of the particular readings I put forward; however, keep in mind that those readings are presented in the classroom and, as such, are designed to be arguable instead of definitive. I want them to argue with particular statements because I'm teaching them how to argue, so there are moments (particularly in the readings of the films) that I'm deliberately wrong. Those moments will likely be obvious to you, but you're not an 18-year-old undergraduate on the short end of an institutional power imbalance who's afraid that, should they contradict me, they will fail the class, lose their scholarship and spend their days toiling away in the service industries.

That said, here are links to the analytic portion of the course:

1. I introduce them to the idea of the overdetermined image, because nothing is accidental in an Alan Moore script.*
2.  Nor, for that matter, is anything accidental when it costs $80,000 per second to film it, which is why we then discuss how Christopher Nolan turns Batman into classic horror monster in Batman Begins. The point here is get them fluent in the language of film, so that they might make arguments about how directors manipulate the camera in order to appeal to the audience. (We also discuss what is and isn't in the diegetic space, e.g. music, which is heard by the audience but not the characters.)
3. Then it's on to The Dark Knight. That link goes to a reading of the interrogation scene; this one leads you to a similarly thorough analysis dedicated to proving the controversial thesis that Batman is really fast—because demonstrating that even the simplest of claims require evidence and careful argument to be taken seriously is the point of the course.
4. Now that they're relatively fluent in the language of film, we try to prove something a little more complex; namely, that Superman Returns is very much about 9/11. First, I take them back to September morning; then we analyze the action sequence that's about planes slamming into NYC landmarks, lest they think I'm reading too much into the anxieties the film taps into.
5. Now that they're comfortable with film, I get them to apply that knowledge to comics via the comic that's about the conventions of comics and is therefore utterly unfilmable, Watchmen. I begin by reminding them of the overdetermined nature of the image, then we discuss panel transitions and word-picture relation, move on layout and narrative flow, then I try to prove what I stated in the second sentence about Watchmen being a meta-comic. My argument's deliberately argumentative, because Dr. Manhattan can also function as a figure of the reader as well the author, but that's an argument I want to have. From there, it's onto the unfilmable film itself.
6. Now that they can break film and comics into their constituent parts, I re-orient them in an explicitly rhetorical direction. We talk about the rhetorical situation, which is, of course, a triangle. (For the record: that silliness is me teaching myself to manipulate images in Photoshop for my book on teaching visual rhetoric.) Then we situate the rhetorical context in the historical context via Warren Ellis's Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth.
7. From there on out, it's all about the writing.  I teach them about paragraph burgers, which, while silly, is the single most effective means I've found to teach paragraph structure. Students intuitively understand that you don't call a pickle with and a piece of a cheese a "hamburger." For the remainder of the quarter, we use the tools from the beginning of the course to make sophisticated arguments about the rhetorical stakes of what they'd otherwise dismiss as pop culture ephemera. 

*I've never written up my notes on getting them to think about structure via punchlines, which begins, not surprisingly, here with The Killing Joke. The gist of it is that jokes don’t work if you only provide the punchline, which is my way of introducing them to the notion of process: this shot in a film or panel in a comic or argument in an essay only works as a punchline if the joke's been properly set up. Basically, I try to get them to think about argument in terms they intuitively understand.

A New Literary History of the United States in Literature

The publication of A New Literary History of the United States will likely strike a few chords familiar to the participants in the debate that followed Rohan’s latest post.  Written neither in the Emory Elliot mode—a history of items both literary and American—nor that of Sacvan Bercovitch—a history all items written by Americans that can be yours for the low, low price of $299.29—editors Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors instead decided to write a cultural history of the United States in a self-consciously literary voice.  As Laura Miller at Salon* writes, the two

have pitched the biggest tent conceivable, pegging each of the chronologically arranged essays in the book to “points in time and imagination where something changed: when a new idea or a new form came into being, when new questions were raised, when what before seemed impossible came to seem necessary or inevitable.” With this in mind, they’ve produced a compendium that is neither reference nor criticism, neither history nor treatise, but a genre-defying, transcendent fusion of them all. It sounds impossible, but the result seems both inevitable and necessary and profoundly welcome, too.

This is, then, an anthology seemingly written to drive J.C. Hallman to drink, because it doggedly focuses on cultural significance over the literariness of the literary.  However soul-deadening he might consider its subject matter, the manner in which most of it is written would likely meet with approval.  Though idea-driven, the prose in Jonathan Lethem’s entry on Thomas Edison—in which he exclusively discusses the inventor’s place in film history—still sings: 

Yet again, Jack Cashill proves why the country needs more actual literary critics.

Jack Cashill, who received a Ph.D. in American Studies in 1982 then promptly forget everything he learned earning it, has returned with more evidence that my assessment of him ("an idiot of long-standing") was correct.  He accuses Michiko Kakutani of plagiarizing his 2008 blockbuster, "The Improvised Odyssey of Barack Obama," and begins his defense of this claim as one does: by demonstrating that William Ayers is familiar with Homer's Odyssey.

Ayers knows his Homer. In his 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, for instance, he specifically identified the Odyssey's "Cyclops" as a metaphor for the "doomed and helpless" United States. "Picture an oversized, somewhat dim-witted monster, greedy and capricious," Ayers wrote in his uniquely patriotic way, "its eyes put out by fiery stakes and now flailing in a blind rage, smashing its way through villages and over mountains."

If, as Cashill hopes to establish, "Ayers knows his Homer," it would behoove him not to quote Ayers saying that Odysseus put out the eyes of the famously one-eyed monster Polyphemus.  That Ayers speaks of a stereoscopic cyclops speaks ill of him; that Cashill attempts to establish both his own and Ayers's classicist credibility via a quotation about a two-eyed cyclops only proves that neither should be trusted with Homeric parallels.  (Leave that to the experts.)  Then, as if he anticipated the complaint of the previous sentences, he politely offers evidence of their validity:

In Dreams, Obama confronts his own menacing one-eyed bald man, a Savak-loving Iranian.

Obama once spoke with a one-eyed man, Cashill argues, therefore this reference to a one-eyed cyclops in Dreams From My Father corresponds with Ayers's reference to a two-eyed one in Fugitive Days.  Granted, my summary of his point may be uncharitably literal, even though Obama's one-eyed man had, to all appearances, two eyes ("an older balding man with a glass eye," the "drift of [which] gave the Iranian a menacing look"); and even though the point of Obama telling this story is that, despite one of the man's two eyes giving him "a menacing look," he "was a friendly and curious" person; and even though, unlike the Odyssey, in which the curse of the one-eyed cyclops Polyphemus results in his father, Poseidon, to unleash contrary winds and furious storms, thereby extending the travels and travails of Odysseus, all that resulted from this conversation was that someone else quoted Malcolm X; even though all those parallels break down, maybe I am being uncharitably literal.  Once the sentence I quoted above is inserted back into its context, the parallels between Homer's epic and Obama's memoir become clear:

In Dreams, Obama confronts his own menacing one-eyed bald man, a Savak-loving Iranian. Before he completes his heroic cycle, he also confronts many of the other distractions: green-eyed seductresses, blind seers, lotus-eaters, the "ghosts" of the underworld, whirlpools, and about a half dozen sundry "demons."

Obama, as scripted by Ayers, lived the most Odysseus-esque life of anyone ever. I never even knew he went to the underworld!  But our President is even more Homeric than that because, in Cashill's estimation, Obama

assumes the role of both Telemachus and Odysseus, the son seeking the father, and the father seeking home.

This novel statement—no variation of which has appeared in the 2,800 year history of criticism on one of the foundational texts of the Western tradition—was later brazenly stolen by the chief literary critic of the New York Times:

“Dreams From My Father,” written before [Obama] entered politics, was both a searching bildungsroman and an autobiographical quest to understand his roots—a quest in which he cast himself as both a Telemachus in search of his father and an Odysseus in search of a home.

Kakutani should have known better than to borrow such a unique insight into the structure of the Odyssey.  Did she really think no one would notice her thievery if she included it as an afterthought to a sentence with which it bears an organic connection?  If Cashill's larger argument is correct—if, that is, "Ayers leaves scarcely an Homeric trope unturned in his mining of the Odyssey to describe Obama's 'personal interior journey'"—then any literate person who reads both the Odyssey and Dreams From My Father would pick up and comment upon the Homeric parallels, meaning his sentiment is too mundane to be plagiarized. 

Of course, Cashill's larger argument is not correct.  Just because Ayers and Obama both use words that relate to the sea ("fog, mist, ships, seas, boats, oceans, calms, captains, charts, first mates, storms, streams, wind, waves, anchors, barges, horizons, ports, panoramas, moorings, tides, currents, and things howling, fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, and murky") doesn't mean that Ayers ghostwrote for Obama or that either are directly indebted to Homer.  Cashill predicates his complaint against Kakutani on her having stolen the substance of his argument while denying its conclusion.  She did nothing of the sort.  She tossed off a nifty parallel that fit organically within a larger framework; Cashill erected a larger framework in order to draw tendentious parallels between Circe and Diana Oughton on the grounds that she dated Obama for a year and lived in a nice neighborhood.

UPDATE. It turns out I was wrong—Cashill’s claim that William Ayers wrote Dreams From My Father has been independently confirmed. Should you desire to see a man eat his hat, here is a link to my formal apology.

Thanks to Adam Roberts, even academics writing books about comics are insufferable elitists.

If you hadn’t noticed, one of my esteemed co-bloggers recently exploded the internet, such that people are saying things like:

Oh, I see. Popular is bad. Common feeling among self-defined elites.

That would be Kevin Standlee, responding to Rich Puchalsky and I on one of Adam Robert’s many other blogs.  The three of us are, in Standlee’s estimation, elitists who hate science fiction:

Oh, I see, you’re saying that anyone who likes SF is stupid.

Those words were written in response to a post that argues:

[T]he very heart’s-blood of literature is to draw people out of their comfort zone; to challenge and stimulate them, to wake and shake them; to present them with the new, and the unnerving, and the mind-blowing. And if this true of literature, it is doubly or trebly true of science fiction. For what is the point of science fiction if not to articulate the new, the wondrous, the mindblowing and the strange?

I would frame that argument differently: when I read science fiction, I want to replicate the wonder my nine-year-old self experienced when he first read Frederik Pohl’s Gateway.  I had never considered the possibility that the universe might be littered with the archeological remains of civilizations snuffed out before the proto-pre-dawn of human history.  The thought of it was so sublime that, a decade later, I watched five seasons of Babylon 5 trying to recapture it.  Not that I’ve stopped, mind you, but when you consider the sheer volume of science fiction I’ve consumed in the twenty years since I read Gateway, I think you can see why that experience is increasingly illusive: more often than not, what I read contains ideas I’ve already encountered, so the only avenue to awe is through the quality of execution.  There are exceptions—Perdido Street Station being the one example, Adam’s conceptually audacious novels being another—but they merely apply meat to Adam’s claim that the nominees for the 2009 Hugo Awards fail to engender what proper science fiction should; namely, Schopenhauer’s sublime: 

The telos of the back cover

I can imagine no more frustrating a reading experience than the one I just had with Iain M. Banks' Excession.  Is it a great novel? 

I don't know. 

Is it a good novel? 

I don't know. 

Why don't I know?

Because I didn't—because I couldn't—read the novel on its own terms.  I spent the entire time awaiting the arrival of a plot that never materialized.  Why did I do that? 

Because of the back cover:

Mother Jones and the National Review on the dubious quality of Sotomayor’s prose: “This apple’s the worst orange I’ve ever tasted.”

This past week, the attacks on Sotomayor have turned from what she’s said to how she’s said it.  Conservatives began by hammering away at the “weird, unidiomatic constructions and errors of punctuation and grammar [in] her infamous 2001 ‘Wise Latina’ speech.”  Now, I advocate writing conference papers that “contain few expensive words and no Faulknerian feats of subordination” on the grounds that no human being—not even the academic ones—can parse grammatically complex arrangements of jargon on the fly, so I’m more attuned than most to the fact that what passes for grammatical in English as she is spoke doesn’t pass muster in English as she is wrote.  You can imagine, then, why I chafed at Heather McDonald’s criticism of Sotomayor’s unscripted speeches for containing errors endemic to spoken language.  Just because an unscripted speech is transcribed after the fact doesn’t make it written; or, as per my talk, just because it can be put to paper doesn’t mean it was meant to be read there.

Judging the quality of her prose from her speeches, as McDonald and fellow Bench Memos writer Ed Whelan did, is an intellectually dishonest exercise for the simple reason that nobody (outside of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) speaks in paragraphs. Not that this stops the other member of the Bench Memos team, Matthew J. Franck, from claiming Sotomayor “writes” sentences that were clearly spoken aloud; or that those sentences “begin with a thought and trail off without saying much of anything after all, or double back and contradict themselves,” i.e. that the transcription of her unscripted speech transcribed sentences that were clearly spoken aloud.

When I taught literary journalism, I always included Mark Singer’s profile of Errol Morris on the syllabus because it works both as an introduction to New Yorker-style profiles and a meta-methodological essay on how to approach transcriptions critically and responsibly.  Here’s Singer transcribing Florence Rasmussen’s speech in Morris’s Gates of Heaven (1978):

If I could only get out. Drive my car. I’d get another car. Ya . . . and my son, if he was only better to me. After I bought him that car. He’s got a nice car. I bought it myself just a short time ago. I don’t know. These kids—the more you do for them . . . He’ s my grandson, but I raised him from two years old . . . I don’t see him very often. And he just got the car. I didn’t pay for all of it. I gave him four hundred dollars.

Singer responds to her outpouring by noting that

[w]ith an arresting instinct for symmetry, Florence Rasmussen manages to contradict most of what she has to say. It seems that she knows certain things, but then, in the next moment, she trots out contrary information[:] I’d like to drive my car; but I might not even have a car any longer, might have to buy a new one. I bought my son—O.K., he’s not my son, he’s my grandson—a new car; well, I didn’t pay for the whole thing, I gave him four hundred dollars, but anyway I want my money back.

As viewers of The Fog of War (2003) know, this technique works as powerfully on former Secretaries of Defense as elderly Floridians, not because either is particularly muddleheaded, but because Morris takes advantage of the infelicitous glitches that accompany the spontaneous production of spoken language.  McDonald, Whelan, and Franck seem not to understand how language works.  They scoured “virtually all [Sotomayor's unscripted] speeches on the Senate website” and discovered damning evidence that they were, in fact, unscripted speeches; then, they lambasted those transcripts of her unscripted speeches for failing to meet the standards demanded of the written word, which proved to them that Sotomayor is “a mediocrity as a writer.” Whelan even suggests she’s a hypocrite for “present[ing] herself as a stickler for good grammar” when her speeches contain constructions that would be ungainly, if not outright ungrammatical, on the page.  How about we hoist Whelan by his own petard?

Well, it’s an unguarded moment where she says what folks on the left think which, their job is to use judicial robes to make sound policy and the law is largely a vessel for them to fill with their own preferences.

Sure, very much along the same lines, talking about what he calls the criterion but which selecting judges.

Well, how is that honoring people who put their lives at risk in public service and, look, at 9/11 we understood for a while what firefighters do.

Whelan clearly offends Franck’s standards: he “writes sentences that begin with a thought and trail off without saying much of anything after all.” The first sentence subordinates a clause about as clunkily as you can imagine; then you read the second sentence, observe that it doesn’t even include the subordinate clause it introduces, and marvel at the paucity of your imagination.  I suppose that second sentence meets Franck’s standard on a technicality—the sentence defies the laws of grammar and stops before it has a chance to trail off without saying much of anything—but that third sentence turns on a dime “and, look,” informs us that we know “what firefighters do.” Does that count as “much of anything”?

They do eventually get around to criticizing Sotomayor’s prose on the basis of what she’s actually written: they find that while it’s not “ungrammatical,” it is “tedious and ‘impenetrable.’” That link leads to Stephanie Mencimer’s article in Mother Jones, in which she pings Sotomayor’s prose for “rarely hit[ting a] sort of breezy cadence [because she] devotes the bulk of her legal analysis to quotes from statutes, regulations, and other opinions ad nauseam[.]” How she’ll legislate from the bench when she’s busy citing dull precedent is as mysterious to me as, for example, how a prose-scold could write “quote” instead of “quotation” in the middle of a complaint or believe Diane Wood’s summary of Merchant of Venice signifies much of anything in the Age of Wikipedia.

In the end, the case against Sotomayor basically amounts to this: on the one hand, her speeches betray all the ungrammatical tics common to spoken language, and if you treat those speeches as prose, you must conclude that she’s a poor writer; on the other, the prose of her legal opinions isn’t ungrammatical, but because it betrays the tedious tics common to lawyerly prose, you must conclude she’s a poor writer.  You see where this is headed.  If word leaked out that “Ed Whelan” was actually Sotomayor’s pseudonym, the Bench Memos team would argue that, because Whelanmayor did all that I documented above, you must conclude that s/he’s a poor writer.  Were it then revealed that Whelanmayor did Diane Wood one better and actually wrote Merchant of Venice, the Bench Memos team would claim that, in light of the difficulty of Shakespelanmayor’s prose, the Western Canon requires immediate revision and you must conclude s/he’s a poor writer . . .

(x-posted.)

Concerning the inherent superiority of printed text to irresponsible online drivel.

Is it absolutely necessary for the image gracing the cover of the most recent issue of the official mouthpiece of my professional organization to depict something that, when seen on my desk by a colleague from another department, compelled her to ask where a viper fish would even get a detachable penis to whack off against a shrimp-wielding toucan? Do other departments not laugh at us enough already?

Why does this same issue contain a write-up of a forum from the 2007 MLA convention? Did it really take two years and change to transform that panel into something print-worthy? So I take it the first sentence is supposed to read:

In contributions to this 2007 panel of the division on Comparative Studies in Romanticism and the Nineteenth Century, titled "Untiming the Nineteenth-Century: Temporality and Periodization," periodization, a venerable mainstay of comparative literarature safeguarded by its apparent neutrality, is critically arraigned.

Lest you think I'm mocking the author of this sentence, Emily Apter, let me make this absolutely clear: Apter's introduction is lively and interesting—historicists like myself tend to be interested in arguments about or against periodization even when we disagree with them—but how well is her intellectual project of two years previous served by appearing so belatedly? How well is her intellectual integrity represented by an error so basic only a typesetter could have made it?  These are the standards against which necessarily inconsequential (because) online conversations should be judged? 

Maybe I'm still in a foul mood, but I don't think so.

Because, of course, Jack London sucks harder than many comics, Part II

(My commenters wrote my first response to Bill's post for me.  They nailed it so accurately posting what I'd originally written seems unnecessary.  I'm neither kidding nor, it seems, necessary.  So in the [likely] event of a [hilariously hi-jinxed] tragedy, Acephalous can [and should] live on.)

Let me start with a statement that will annoy everyone: if a close-reading reveals that a work flirts with the formal elements of its genre or genres—whatever they may be—that work should be canonized.  Not that works that fail to engage the formal limitations of their genre are uncanonizable, mind you, but works that succeed both as an example and a critique of a given genre deserve canonization.

But canonization into what? 

In an age of inexpensive and practically limitless storage, the question of canonization need not be hidebound to the idea of preservation.  Within its first month of operation, Google digitized the 99 percent of the Western Canon, and even though some of those works are too recent to be viewed, they'll all eventually be released as copyright expiration rolls forward.  When I began my Mark Twain chapter in late 2005, for example, only the 1894 edition of Pudd'nhead Wilson was available through Google Book Search; by the time I began revising the chapter in the summer of 2008, I could track revisions of the novel over the span of two decades.  Because Twain is culturally significant and canonical, the saturation of Google Books with variant editions of his most important works was inevitable.  

This was not.

When I began working on The Youth of Washington (1904), I had to order it through interlibrary loan.  It took three months to arrive.  Henry Cabot Lodge's George Washington (1889), Paul Ford's The True George Washington (1896), Woodrow Wilson's George Washington (1896), Worthington Chauncey Ford's George Washington (1900) and Norman Hapgood's George Washington: A Biography (1901) trickled in.  Had I held off on writing my chapter until I'd looked over all 140 of the novels of English Colonial or Revolutionary America published between 1895 and 1908, I'd still be waiting for interlibrary loan.  Now all those Washington biographies are available, as are most of the historical novels I wanted to read for deep background. 

Are those novels good?  No.  Do they deserve canonization?  No.  Is it significant that as tensions between Spain and America strained and Americans became uncomfortable with the imperial pretensions of their leader, an appetite for works relating to Revolutionary figures or set in the Revolutionary period become incredibly popular?  Might that not have something important to say about what Americans thought it meant to be American at the time?  Is that not a viable object of study?  Do I not ask a shitload of rhetorical questions when I get polemical? 

For a few of generations, English professors claimed that cultural knowledge was the provenance of the literary (what with perceptiveness being the core feature of literary sensibility).  So when a scholar wanted to know how things stood between America and Europe at a given time, they would not turn to any of the countless travel narratives written by Americans in Europe and Europeans in America, but to the most acutely literary accounts of the current state affairs.  To wit:

The problem with Lucy's account of the canon and cultural knowledge should be obvious: however you define the literary, it is not the same thing as cultural knowledge.  An alternate canon, based on how a text registers and reflects the conventions of its time, is required; a subset of that canon would include texts that fought against their cultural constraints in order to articulate something convention had difficulty accommodating.  No matter what you call those texts, they are the ones deserving of close-reading.  

Note that I slipped from speaking of genres in the first paragraph to cultural conventions in the last.  I did that on purpose.  Genre focuses too intently on what a thing made from words looks like.  ("My novella's a long short story in 10-point Times Roman and a short novel in 14-point New Courier," says the aspiring writer.)  From the get-go, however, these things made from words contained stuff like this.  Texts have always had visual components, and while those components are sometimes abstracts (as with the afore-marbled page), the introduction of visual representations of the world into the textual economy of a novel alerts readers to the presence of a realist ethos.  But remember: 

Verisimilitude is not an end.  It is an always imperfect—because always filtered—means.  What matters is not the presence of supplementary gestures of verisimilitude but the manner in which they interact with the text.  For example, this comic sucks:

The image of Red-Eye (from Jack London's 1906 novel Before Adam) adds nothing to the description provided by the text; in fact, it looks like what a sketch artist would draw if provided the description in the text.  Now compare that to this or this or this or this or this.  Why do I have to justify studying the subject of all those thises but can write about Red-Eye with nary a care?  Is it because Before Adam was written by London?  Because he wrote it a century ago?  Because a quinquagenarian with Ivy credentials stretching four generations back wouldn't feel mortified if caught reading it on the subway?

(x-posted.)

What's wrong with Reading Comics? Quite a bit, actually.

Because late to the party is better than never, I’m reading Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics.  When I’m not maybe being mocked, the book is a compelling read.  This is a problem.  Since tradition dictates picking nits with blurbs, I’ll start with the quotation from the Los Angeles Times printed on the cover:

Deliciously quotable.

Of all the Times blurbs to pick with nits, this one may not even be the best.  From the back cover:

Everything is here.

If everything is there and there is deliciously quotable—but let me begin with the second blurb, because it concerns a minor point.  No matter how you define “everything,” Reading Comics does not contain it all.  Wolk periodically informs the reader of this fact:

There are . . . several very big names I’m barely mentioning or neglecting outright in the following pages: Jack Kirby, Robert Crumb . . . (137)

And we can ellipses away there because this is a book about comics that barely mentions or outright neglects Jack Kirby and Robert Crumb.  Why the Times would make claims the author explicitly rejects I don’t know—but I suspect its decision relates to the tone of casual expertise Wolk displays throughout the book.  Every reference I catch—about half of the ones Wolk drops—complements his argument; however, the way you wear your erudition lightly on the web differs from how you do it in print.  The book’s delicious quotability is a byproduct of its learned chattiness, and if the medium is ever to attain academic respectability, its expositors will need to try a little harder than this:

[Steve Ditko] shared a studio for years with bondage/fetish artist Eric Stanton and has claimed they didn’t collaborate, but Ditko expert Blake Bell has a Web site on which he points out some work credited to Stanton that’s clearly Ditko—those hands are the giveaway. (157)

Not only does Wolk punt academic form, he punts online decorum too.  If you mention that someone has a “Web site,” you provide the reader with a way to find it.  A link to Blake Bell’s discussion of Ditko and fetish comics in a printed book would be gravy, but at least provide the name of the site (Ditko Looked Up) and the name of the article.  Speaking of which, the article is not on the “Articles“ page, nor is it listed on the “Creations." It took me some time to track down the reference—according to its address, it should have been on the “Creations” page—and once there I realized why Wolk obscured the reference.  Behold the first evidence Bell uses to establish that Ditko collaborated with Stanton:

The dead giveaway here is the man in both pages; especially the bottom inset panel on Page 2. How Ditko is THAT guy? Look at the fingers on his smoking hand! Did Stanton even TOUCH that panel?

Now for the second:

That cop in the bottom three panels of Page 6 (on the right) is so Ditko, it is scary. Look at the body contortions of the woman in Panel 1 of the same page.
That’s vintage Spider-Man. This brings us back to the point—Ditko had far more to do with Stanton’s artwork than just inking.

I don’t doubt the authority of Bell’s eyes, but his mode of argumentation is for crap.  Papering over his source the way Wolk does will not win the medium any respect.  There are ways to talk about how comics are drawn—line and technique, understanding of anatomy, &c.—but Wolk declines to do so here.  His technical description of Frank Miller’s work in the next chapter is more robust, but there too he refuses to push too far into specifics.  If you aim to establish the distinctiveness of a particular style, you need to borrow or build a vocabulary with which can do so.  The claim that something “is so something, it is scary” simply won’t cut it. 

I admit to having a vested interested in building a reasonably critical working vocabulary, but even so, I’m not sure how useful Reading Comics will be to the project.  Because, pace John, Wolk’s book can’t “the best work of literary criticism [anyone reads] this year” because, though the prose may shine and the erudition sparkle, it just isn’t critical enough to be called criticism.

(x-posted.)

Enemies made or enemies born?

On this day in history, two men—one of whom would say that the other’s life work represented “the utmost human degradation[:] an idiot’s vegetative existence”—were born. In 1885, the author of that statement, Marxist literary critic Georg Lukács, dewombed in Budapest. Often cited as the founder of Western (or philosophical) Marxism, Lukács can be considered the grandfather of the armchair academic activists who fought the radical fight from tenured positions at illustrious institutions. I only half-kid here: his claim in The Historical Novel (1937) that the role of the literary critic was to examine “the relation between ideology (in the sense of Weltanschauung) and artistic creation” (147) allowed otherwise sedentary scholars to label as revolutionary action an exegesis on Dickensian realism.  Anyone whose work analyzed critical or socialist realism, i.e. literature which displayed “the contradictions within society and within the individual context of a dialectical unity,” could consider him or herself a soldier in the Great Class War Against Mystification. Like Susan Sontag, I find his definition of realism—socialist, critical or otherwise—unnecessarily reductive and his dismissiveness of non-realist works short-sighted (if not out-right anti-intellectual).

In 1906, the same year Lukács received his Ph.D., was born the man whose work depicted “an idiot’s vegetative existence.” That Samuel Beckett’s novels, plays and poetry trafficked in “human degradation” was reason enough for condemnation: unlike realists novels, which were capable of creating dialectical conversations between singular narratives and the social totality of history, modernist novels wallowed in the singularity of their narrators:

Lack of objectivity in the description of the outer world finds its complement in the reduction of reality to a nightmare. Beckett’s Molloy is perhaps the ne plus ultra of this development. (152)

If an author grounds that nightmare in “the Aristotelian concept of man as zoon politikon” (151); that is, if an author provides a reference against which the consequences of the actions of social animals can be judged: only then can reader or critic differentiate between the concrete potentialities (what happens) and the abstract potentialities (what the character thought could have happened). Authors who refuse to declare what happened—who mess in the pseudo-realization of abstract potentiality—create readers who will never know from dialectical. They will not be social animals critically examining the societal structuring of their lives through the power of realist narratives; they will be unwitting dupes forever mired in the pathological subjectivity of Molloy, forever sucking pebbles. Their lives, such that they are, will be spent in the Grand Hotel Abyss, which Lukács describes as

a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered. (qtd. 22)

Needless to say, I disagree.

I’ll close on an historical odditiy: not only was Lukács born on April 13th, so too was the French psychoanalyst and psychoanalytic theorist, Jacques Lacan. It’s as if the day conspired to give birth to the thought of Louis Althusser (which, as you can probably guess, is one part Lukácian, one part Lacanian and three cans of crazy).

(x-posted.)

Justifying comics as legitimate objects of study, Part II: HELL STALKS ON FOUR PAWS!

I concluded the previous post with a nod to William Blake as someone who explored the word-picture relationship and I will get to that, but first I should clarify a few issues I raised without fully addressing yesterday:

1. Vance rightly noted that titles of paintings were often left to benefactors and history, so putting that much interpretive weight on such thin ice might not be the best idea.  I agree.  I fully intend on leaving this series of posts immersed and hypothermic.
2. JPool noted that treating paintings like panels could be a category error and Miriam and Gene implicitly agreed, suggesting I might be better served by a Hogarth or one of his ilk.  I agree.  But I chose to go with Caravaggio and Blake over Giotto and Hogarth because I wanted to focus attention on an individual image before I moved to discussing the interaction between multiple images arrayed in narrative.  
3. Andrew liked the arrows and will be disappointed with this post. 

Now that I have well and cleared my throat, let us venture forward to William Blake and "The Tyger" from Songs of Experience (1794).  It reads:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Where to start?  Should I go full Keats and spend a day on each stanza?  Probably . . . especially when you consider that 1) his manuscript looked like this:

Because 2) he spent tedious years perfecting the placement of every word on every line.  Maybe I'll declare next week Blake Week and do just that.  But tonight I want to focus on the general impression of feline bad-assedness created by the text of the poem.  What we have here is a TYGER! MADE OF FIRE FORGED BY DREAD HANDS AND SHARP TOOLS OF METALLURGY TO HAVE DREAD PAWS.  So FEROCIOUS is this FIRE TYGER! that the poet cannot even imagine THE ABOMINABLE FOUNDRY in which SOME DEMENTED LORD created SO GRIM A BEAST. 

TRIGGER WARNING: IF YOU ARE NOT PREPARED TO LOOK INTO THE BRUTAL MAW OF HELL ITSELF DO NOT CONTINUE READING THIS POST BECAUSE I AM ABOUT TO POST THE PICTURE OF THE FIRE TYGER! BLAKE INCLUDED WITH THE POEM.  SERIOUSLY IT'S WAY TOO MUCH FOR YOU I MEAN YOU CAN BARELY EVEN WATCH R-RATED MOVIES THIS WILL BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU TURN AWAY I TELL YOU TURN AWAY!

More evidence Zack Snyder's Watchmen misses Moore's mark.

Hunting around for an item required to address the comments on the previous post, I came across a still from Watchmen's credit sequence:

As Meredith Woerner writes:

The opening shot, with Nite Owl giving a fist full of justice[,] has a big Batman reference.  First, check out the posters to the right.  Look familiar?  And isn't that Mr. and Mrs. Wayne at the back entrance of the opera, being saved from a bloody death?  And . . . the opera bills say: "Die Fledermaus" (The Bat).  So can we safely come to the conclusion that the original Nite Owl stopped Batman from popping up in their universe?

No.  If we could, there wouldn't be a poster for a comic book? film? play? radio serial? starring Batman in the background.  There is Batman-themed entertainment in this universe.  (And if the opera being exited by the Waynes is Die Fledermaus, Snyder alludes not to Batman lore but Batman Begins.  Scratch that.  The opera in Batman Begins is Mefistofele.)  The larger problem with this scene neatly encapsulates the larger problem with Snyder's aesthetic.  He is faithful in act but not in spirit.  His heart sins.  In Watching the Watchmen, Dave Gibbons says outright what every careful reader of the novel already knew:

I mentioned to [Alan Moore] the idea of pirate comics, reasoning that a world with real superheroes would have no need of them in comics.  Alan later took that throwaway idea and constructed an entire allegorical narrative from it within the main story.

So why did Snyder include an advertisement for some sort of Bat-themed entertainment in the credit sequence?  Because it would be cool.  Who cares if it violates the fundamental narrative logic of the work Snyder purports to love? 

Does Dr. Manhattan act as a figure of the reader in Alan Moore's Watchmen?

(This post picks up right here.  Turn that double em-dash into a colon and forget you read the rest . . . but for continuity's sake I will rewind one sentence.)

Unless you happen to be Dr. Manhattan:

 

For brevity and bandwidth I'll skip the move into this flashback and focus on the one out of it.  In the left panel you have Dr. Manhattan in Vietnam.  The fireworks behind him celebrate V.V.N.  The body before him carried the child of the man in the coffin on the right until said man shot it in the chest [thanks JPRS] and turned that woman into a body.  Note that unlike the panels discussed earlier the expression on Manhattan's face doesn't change.  What has happened has already happened and he cannot change it without changing what has already happened.  Make no mistake: he can change it.  He can prevent the Comedian from shooting a pregnant woman in the chest.  He even tells the Comedian not to do it:

 

But as the Comedian does it anyway . . . then complains because Manhattan didn't turn the bullet into water.  The conventional reading of the novel stipulates something importantly philosophical is behind Manhattan's reluctance or refusal to act here.  I think the answer is much more mundane: unlike Ozymandias, who experiences in memory the emotions he felt in the moment, the unmoored-in-time Manhattan feels nothing not because he has abdicated moral authority before the throne of universal indifference, but because for all his power within the novel he merely functions as a figure of reader.  (To answer Rich's creepily accurate pre-emptive criticism, I would say that Manhattan doing nothing with his power trumps its potential.)

In the narrative present he amounts to little more than a M.A.D. weapon that maybe leaks carcinogens.  The conceit that he can be anywhere at anytime structures the fourth issue of Watchmen and calls into question whether Manhattan's flashbacks are actually flashbacks.  More constantly forces us to consider the status of what we see.  Take these panels from the first issue:

 

What is the relationship between the central and flanking panels?  Are we getting the detective's mental reconstruction of the struggle based on the evidence at the scene?  Is Moore juxtaposing the actual struggle with the detective's reconstruction of it?  What about these panels from the sixth issue:

Does the narrative jump to the perspective of a dying Kitty Genovese there?  Is that Rorschach's reconstruction of the last thing she ever saw?  Point being: throughout the novel Moore exploits the then-to-fore unexamined conventions of comic transitions.  He literalizes the oldest of the old standbys—the scene-to-scene transition—by granting Manhattan the power to teleport from one scene to another.  These characters have been transported from one scene to another via this transition the whole book to no ill effect.  But when Manhattan transitions them from a studio to a parking lot or New York to Los Angeles, their stomachs bark and they vomit uncontrollably.  What the reader painlessly accomplishes—what you, dear readers, painlessly accomplished when you scanned the panels above—requires godlike powers to be effected by characters in the novel. 

Watching Watchmen: How unfilmable novels become unwatchable films.

(This beast began as the post I promised last week.  Now that I've played hooky all my points about the uniqueness of Watchmen's narrative mode seem more salient in light of their absence from the film.  So I decided to fold my review into the half-composed post.  But for the record I still never get around to discussing my larger theory of Manhattan as readerly proxy.) 

Some books teach you how to read them: Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, JR, and Infinite Jest spring first to mind.  From a purely formal perspective Watchmen belongs in their company.  It does to the conventions of comic narrative what Joyce did to realism, Pynchon did to pulp, Gaddis did to dialogue and Foster Wallace did to sentiment.  All the techniques discussed in the following had been used in comics before—there is nothing new under the oxen of the sun—but never in the service of creating a new breed of reader.  Consider the following sequence of panels from the funeral of the Comedian:

 

The first three panels transition moment-to-moment.  Such transitions slow down the action by forcing the reader to observe actions divided into their constiuent parts.  They typically depict a realization on the part of the character which the author wants the reader to linger over (for example) or a demonstration of how fast or powerful someone is.  But the "action" that Moore slices into its constiuent parts consists of "listening while standing still." 

For a hack like Mark Millar the amount of dialogue squeezed into the slow zoom of those panels would stretch credulity.  But Moore is no Millar.  (How better to compel readers to pay attention to a face than four consecutive panels that zoom in on it?)  Moore wants the reader to focus his attention on the expression Ozymandias wears and the pat content of the eulogy.  The payoff of the latter is dialogue-driven and immediate; the former, however, pays off in a way only comics can.  When the moment-to-moment transitions give way to the scene-to-scene transitions in the third and fourth panels the change in Ozymandias's expression is as subtle as it is important:

 

As the scene moves from the present to the past the vacant expression Ozymandias wears in the third panel gives way to weariness in the fourth.  Pay attention to the eyes: somehow neither the mask nor the adhesive with which he glued it to his face can hide the bags beneath his eyes in the fourth panel.  The moment observed by the steely eyes in the third panel brims with resignation and despair . . . and yet those eyes reveal nothing but cold resolve.  Whatever flashback the reader witnesses will involve some sort of transformation from the man in the fourth panel into the man in third.  Ozymandias later confirms this suspicion:

 

That meeting catalyzed Ozymandias.  It changed him into the man who could do what he eventually did.  While serving witness to the burial of a brutal man, Ozymandias remembers the moment he realized his ends were incommensurate with his means.  And though he recalls his despair in the fourth panel with resolve in the third, remembering the moment in which he decides what he must do brings him no joy:

 

The scene-to-scene transition out of the flashback is a mirror image of the one that brought us in.  The memory of the moment he sternly turned to genocide causes a swell of unwanted emotion and his mask cracks.  Seems like juxtaposing the magnitude of the scheme he set in motion and the hardening of heart required to do so saddened him.  His eyes soften once deprived of the contrast the regal purple of his mask provided.  Devoid of the flushed conviction that drove him to this moment, the corners of his lips turn down.  The past is the past and cannot be undone.  Unless you happen to be Dr. Manhattan—about whom more momentarily.  (That odd-looking link allows you to choose your own adventure.)  Now to the film.

Zack Snyder's dogged dedication to the panel makes those moments in which his film deviates from the book all the more apparent.  My first (and minor) complaint is that he shoehorned the Twin Towers (formerly located in Lower Manhattan) into what had been in the novel a shot of the Chrysler Building in Midtown Manhattan:

 

Enlarge if you can't see the Twin Towers to the right of the priest's umbrella.  I'm not such a stickler for fidelity as to be annoyed by the fact that Snyder buries the Comedian in Jersey City instead of Weehawkin or Hoboken.  (The establishing shot puts the Midtown skyline on the left side of the screen, so we must be looking at Manhattan Island from New Jersey instead of Brooklyn.)  But I am bothered by the fact that Snyder moves the Twin Towers in order to keep them in-frame both in the establishing shot and the long-shot of the priest approaching the grave.  This undue attention to the Towers continues throughout the film.  When Dan Dreiberg first arrives at Adrian Veidt's office, the Towers are clearly visible through the window.  One of the ubiquitous Veidt Industries blimps creeps from the left side of the screen to the right and is seemingly aimed directly at the Twin Towers.  (Avoiding even the appearance of a collision is likely the reason for the second continuity error listed here.)  If Snyder had done something meaningful with 1 and 2 World Trade Center that would be one thing.  Sticking them in as many shots as possible is little more than an undignified grasp at an unearned gravitas.  

My second (and more significant) complaint is that for all his literalism, Snyder completely punts the unique formal elements I discussed above.  All the transitions that distinguish Watchmen from its lessers are gone.  For example, during the funeral he cuts from a close-up of Ozymandias (shot straight-on) to the flashback of the inaugural (and only) meeting of the Crimebusters from the Comedian's perspective.  That they are  now called the Watchmen and helmed by Ozymandias instead of Captain Metropolis matters less than the fact that Snyder chucked the original transitions (which focused on mourners engaged in acts of remembrance) in favor of transitions that focused on what the Comedian did. 

Why is this significant?  Because it demonstrates that Snyder never grappled with his source material in formal or structural terms.  The narrative techniques that contributed to his own sense of the book's significance went unrecognized; in their place is the kind of fanboy literalism that compels people to write open letters to Peter Jackson accusing him of assaulting Tolkien.  Snyder recognized the genius of Watchmen but never learned where it originated.  As Dana noted, the narrative itself is as inherently compelling as a novel about a man who spends the day trying not to think about the affair his wife is having.  Put differently:

The experience of viewing Watchmen resembles what it would be like to watch an adaptation of The Bloomsday Book.

(Note: I chose to air these complaints because I haven't seen them out there yet.  I could've complained, for example, about the pornographic violence and listless pornography.  Who charges fight scenes with erotic energy but shoots sex scenes as if they were moving diagrams of a V8 engine?  That would be Zack Snyder.  I have many more complaints of this sort, but as you've already read variations of them elsewhere, I see no need to pile on.)

(x-posted.)

I performed an experiment on myself and I do believe I failed.

A friend sent me the text of a recent WSJ editorial entitled “Will This Crisis Produce a ‘Gatsby’?” I’ll link to it later—for now I want to recreate my bad-faith reading experience in all its glory.  My first reaction was to the title, even though I know authors never write their own titles.  But this one seemed sufficiently troublesome to warrant criticism.  I wrote:

You would think someone at the WSJ would know that enough about literature to know that The Great Gatsby was published in 1925.  If you grant the title its premises, the question should be “Did Someone Write a ‘Gatsby’ in 2004 and If So Who Was He or She and What Was the Title of It?” But that’s not quite right.

The WSJ‘s infuriating decision to publish the titles of books in quotation marks means that we’re not even sure whether the current crisis will be producing a novel affectionately called Gatsby or a fictional Jew with class insecurities who meets an untimely end.  Because we have umpteen examples of the latter—Curb Your Enthusiasm may even be a Gatsby-in-progress.  Tune in next season to find out!

But even that’s not quite right.  Given that The Great Gatsby preceded the financial crisis by more than half a decade, maybe the author wants to claim that Fitzgerald’s slim volume caused the Great Depression.  In which case we must discover and burn all copies of the mysterious 2004 novel or unwrite the fictional Jew.  Obama said we all needed to chip in.  This is how we, as literary scholars, can do our part!

Then I started reading the text itself.  The mention of Louis Adamic seemed promising, and the rest of the article built what I took to be a fairly solid case until the last few paragraphs:

John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath” made the Joad family’s flight from the dust bowl into an emblem of people coming together to remake their world. A similar image was implicit in the very title of Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor’s documentary book “An American Exodus.” Even works of light entertainment like the massively popular “Gone With the Wind” or John Ford’s landmark Western “Stagecoach” were in keeping with the prevailing message of the times. All these works told of epic journeys in which a group of people overcame destructive competition in their discovery of a common destiny. Each called for Americans to act collectively to remake a democratic society where opportunity would be open to all.

In effect, such declarations helped lay the cultural groundwork for the New Deal, providing the ideological infrastructure for the new governmental institutions created during the ‘30s.

My response?

If there’s one thing I learned writing my dissertation, it’s that you can’t throw words like “ideology” around like that—especially not when you’re claiming that a book published in 1939 laid the groundwork for the policies that were curtailed in 1939 by “Dr. Win-the-War.” If I’d tried to end-around history like that I would’ve—I don’t know what would’ve happened to me, actually, because I’d learned early in my graduate career to avoid situations in which I could be browbeaten by “the fact, man, the irrefragable fact!”

I continued blustering on—scrolling back up the article, snipping the bits that confirmed my claim of sloppy historicism and snarking mightily upon them—until I returned to those final paragraphs and hit the byline:

Sean McCann, a professor of English at Wesleyan University, is the author of “A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government.”

At first I thought I’d been pranked.  Then I realized I’d done it to myself: I’d read the article about as uncharitably as it could be read.  I’d clipped the sections suggestive of causality . . . and ignored all those that spoke directly to the notion that the cultural output of the ‘30s reflected a growing disenchantment with the vision of social mobility that’d been aggressively asserted in the ‘20s.  See Sean’s article for all the details.

Me?  I’m off to go where they send half-cocked purveyors of online opinion when they misbehave: to The Corner.  (Dunce cap not optional.)

(x-posted.)

More on Watchmen: Dave Gibbon's layout and John Higgin's ink in the age of mechanical reproduction.

(A reader reminds me to link to the first post, because "[this one] makes no sense without it."  Earlier post today notwithstanding, I have the most considerate readers.)

Vance and I have been back-channeling about Watchmen this past week.  It occurs to me that there's no sense in wasting my brilliant thoughts on an audience of one (!?!) when I could be sharing them with all the world.  Vance agreed.  Our first quibble concerns the look of Dave Gibbon's panels.  Vance insists the panels looked dated.  He's not wrong.  But before we discuss some of his limitations, we should attend to Gibbons' strength: layout.  Consider these panels again:

Teaching the Overdetermined Image

As anyone who teaches funny books or films knows, the task of convincing students that the scene before them is anything other than incidental would try Job’s patience.  You show them a panel from the surprisingly awful Superman and Batman vs. Aliens and Predator like, say, this

It's always already been the end of epic film.

Whether he knows it or not—and "he" being Adam Kotsko, I'll bet he knows it—this Weblog post is less about the formal fit between epic and the television serial than the relation of film to the episodic form.  I know that sounds backwards—what with MOVIES! being PRESENTED! on SCREENS! the SIZE! of WYOMING!—but the compounded facts of run time and the modern American attention span necessitate we consider film the proper realm of the self-contained episode.  Even films which promise sequels announce their completion in terms of whatever -ology they embrace. 

Films should be about something in the original, locative sense of the word.  They should surround some subject matter, be "on every side" "wholly or partially," as per the OED.  They should be self-contained.  Not that they shouldn't be sweeping—you can frame Guernica or a sublimely panoramic view of the Hudson River and slap it on a gallery wall without robbing them of sweep—but they should recognize their formal limitations.  Films can only intimate narrative epicness.  They can't achieve it. 

"But!"

"But But But!" 

Try me.  Start listing epic films and I'll start listing films with grandiose tableaux.  The Lord of the Rings?  Shot in that sewer of New Zealand.  Blade Runner?  The Lord himself envies Ridley Scott's matte painters.  With film we confuse the formal qualities of narrative epic for the GIANT! SCALE! presented by the movie screen.  Cases in point: Iron Man and The Dark Knight. 

Both were hailed as epic upon release, and yet both are far superior films on the small screen.  Before you ask: I do remember what I wrote about The Dark Knight on IMAX, and inasmuch as it relates the experience of watching an obscenely high-quality image projected on the side of an eight-story building, I stand by it.  Watching the film on a small screen—one on which a bug of a Batman glides between five-inch tall skyscrapers while Heath Ledger's Joker licks human-sized lips and establishes human-sized eye-contact—it's impossible to deny that this supposedly epic performance is better suited to the televisual medium.  (This goes doubly for Iron Man, which barely passes for "good" on the big screen but shines when we connect with Robert Downey Jr. as a human actor in corporate world.)

Not that I think we should deny that the serial drama is also better served on the small screen.  A solidly written, solidly acted television show can be a better film than most films.  To wit: having finished the first four episodes of the blogosphere's own Leverage, I can't help but wonder what went so terribly wrong with Ocean's Twelve and Thirteen. 

(x-posted about.)