Winshluss's Pinocchio

This was a birthday present to one of many birthday books I bought myself. It's by Winshluss, a French cartoonist who was also, with Satrapi, behind the Persepolis movie that I still need to see. Quick review to spread the wealth around:

The basic story is a darkly comic retelling of Pinocchio, all sans (it's French!) words except for occasional interludes of Jiminy, the born loser cricket what lives inside Pinocchio's head.

I was surprised how funny everything was. It's not too often that I laugh out loud at comics anymore(--I submit that there is a definite minimum reading-speed limit needed in order to make a laughoutloud joke funny, and my Japanese reading-speed ain't it--)but I did a handful of times with Pinocchio. Like, there's this one bit where Pinocchio meets Candlewick (called 'Lampwick' in the Disney movie; called 'that kid who becomes Pinocchio's friend till he starts smoking cigars and turns into a donkey' by everyone who saw the Disney movie) and Candlewick offers out his hand to shake, only to pull it back and laugh like mad when Pinocchio tries to. Syke. Later in the book, Candlewick is being chased by soldiers and he begs Pinocchio to help him up a wall and to safety. Pinocchio holds out his hand to grab Candlewick's, who pulls it away again and laughs his head off. Oh wait, no, the soldiers chop his head off. He totally dies. Syke.

Anyways, really charming book. It won the Angouleme Best Album Award in 2009, if that helps. (Angouleme is like Comic-Con but less Hollywood; like Comiket but less porn. One hopes one can go one day, but sending one to Europe to buy comics would not be unlike sending a gambling addict to Monte Cristo to sightsee for a weekend.)

On hearing the announcement of Before Watchmen

So DC announced today the forthcoming Before Watchmen series, and the Blogosphere scrambled to fire back in kind. It's pretty interesting how the commentary's shaping up so far, though.

Like any political announcement, two groups of voices welled up in the aftermath, the yay-sayers and the nay-sayers. But the for and against crowds aren't blasting off their usual talking points--at least the for-crowd isn't. Usually the stuff you hear from that group is story-based. They're into the characters, or the story has a lot of potential, or whatnot. Take Civil War for example, where the people who liked it generally pointed to the dichotomies that were played out, especially between Captain America, Iron Man, and Spider-Man. Or the current events charge of the story, as it reflected a number of American political news at the time. The people who didn't like it (I say people, but it might've just been me) pointed to the sloppy pacing, writing, plot-twisting, side-changing, and overall pro wrestling/soap opera-esque air of impermanence of the story, reflected best by the temporary he's-really-dead-iness of Captain America (RIP Steve Rogers, April 2007 ~ August 2009).

(Or or! Spider-Man: Reign, where..where...let's call them likers...likers were like, 'It's The Dark Knight Returns, but for Spider-Man!', and ol' Jason the hater was like, 'Yeah, but Batman and Spider-Man aren't anything alike, so why should they both go dystopian in the future?' Wouldn't something really unique--like All-Star Superman was to Superman or Dark _Knight was to Batman--be better for the character? Or is that just me?)

(Speaking of, where are all the nosebleed-level good Marvel non-canonical one-shots?)

(Anyways:)

What you have here, it looks like, is one side saying that Before Watchmen should be permissible, because Alan Moore makes money doing fanfics for a living, so why not let other people fanfic his work?, while the other side, Alan Moore among them, are grumbling that they shouldn't try to milk further the golden Watchmen cow, it's perfect as it is except for that one teat Zack Snyder lopped off that one time.

Well, ethically speaking Moore is wrong. I mean, it's hardly worth writing complete sentences over. Lost Girls. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Miracleman. His original idea for, get this, Watchmen. From Hell fanfic-ized a real London doctor into Jack the Ripper. We might imagine Dr. Gull would not be terribly entertained by such a story.

But who cares what Alan Moore thinks about stuff that doesn't have anything to do with him. (Well, why do people read celebrity gossip magazines...ah, anyways,) The interesting point is that the masses have come out and voiced their opinions, and their opinions, instead of being straightforward 'I think it'll be a good/bad story'-type opinions, are more 'I think it is/isn't a worthwhile piece of art'-type opinion. Less entertainmenty, more literary theory-y.

And that's pretty cool, for one. For two, it shows how easy it is to make lit theory (or art theory in general) a worthwhile subject in schools. In this case, for a handful of exceptional reasons, Alan Moore was well known, his personality and opinions towards mainstream comics were well known, so most people interested in these kinds of comics pricked up their ears when DC made their big announcement. Just imagine if we could teach people Shakespeare in such a way as to garner opinions and fanfare like this every time another version of Hamlet debuts.

Anyways, I think the project is dangerous. (I mean, really. Alan Moore knows his way around a curse, people.) It's fine what they're doing, of course. On every level; DC owns the copyrights. But think about this on an artistic level. If you make new Spider-Man stories, there's no issue because the character is essentially meaningless. He and Wolverine and [take your pick] were designed from the outset to be rehashable, ageless characters. The difference between one monthly superhero and another is the difference between a red gum ball and a blue one (unless you find a milk crate of really old, mint-condition, first edition red gum balls, in which case you're rich). Superheroes can take on a bit more weight if an artist does something really special with them in a non-continuity one-shot--like Mark Millar did with Superman in Red Son--or if the character's story is endable, like Toriyama Akira eventually did with Dragonball.

But with something like Watchmen, you're dealing with a real piece of gold. Watchmen is different. It's beautiful from almost every angle. (Here's where I'd describe how and why if there weren't already a hundred million articles on that elsewhere on the Internet.) Like a Mozart symphony, a Sappho poem, a Shakespeare play, or a Beatles song, you don't talk about Watchmen like you talk about an off episode of Battlestar Galactica. You don't talk about what could have been better, you talk about why this or that good bit made the whole extraordinary. You assign the work for study in a college class and you scrape it down to the spine, looking for as many patterns and near-patterns as you can find, and when you're done reading or dissecting you sit back and you breathe out and you say, 'damn. I wouldn't have thought of that, but I'm glad someone did.'

So that, I reckon, 's why people generally fanfic open-ended, lighter stories rather than Hamlet or Moby Dick. If the artist has created such a beautiful shape that there's nothing to really add to, then why bother? In trying, there's a danger in damaging your artistic reputation. 'You think you're good enough to entertain me more with Watchmen's characters than Alan Moore? Good luck, buddy.' I guess that's how I feel. But those books have got to get some pretty exceptional reviews before I let DC Comics near my cash-udders.

It's possible, though. Moore's proven that throughout his career, that you can take characters set in stone and do something interesting with them. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen isn't a good example--most of those characters were pretty pulpy to begin with, and so, in my opinion, they fall pretty close to the guilt-free zone of rehashing monthly superheroes. But Lost Girls was a big gamble. It could have tanked (like the Star Wars prequels! I said it!), and while it didn't fully...(what's the opposite of tank?), it did well enough to justify using the characters, methinks.

Ulysses

I finished Ulysses as the sun was going down on 2009. I want to write something long about it, but till I find the thyme I'll just post a few notes here. 

Alright, first off, this book is to normal novels as Shakespeare is to elementary school Christmas pageants. The latter are good--or cute--but the former are works of nigh-unachievable genius, of enough depth to last centuries.

Second: if you haven't read Ulysses yet, what you've heard about it probably consists of 1) the book takes place during a single day, and 2) nothing extraordinary happens. That's essentially what I learned about the book, indirectly, over the past handful of years. But that's a bad assessment. That's like saying the Moonlight Sonata is for the piano and doesn't have any lyrics. Ulysses isn't about an unextraordinary day--it's the opposite of that. It's a baptism for prose.

Here's an anecdote for how to approach Ulysses. One day in the 19-teens, a buddy of Joyce's said to the man himself, "Some of your contemporaries think two books a year an average output." To which Joyce replies "Yes, but how do they do it? They talk them into a typewriter. I feel quite capable of doing that if I wanted to do it. But what's the use? It isn't worth doing."

I disagree that it's not worth doing, but I get his point. To Joyce, a story is something you tell your child before they go to bed, or to your buddies at the bar. A novel, though, is a work of art, and it should be distinct from speech. With Ulysses, Joyce took prose from its rank as stylized speech and promoted it to poetry. The chapters are structured like symphonic movements, echoing their distinct styles and themes forwards and backwards into one another. This is different from a straightforward story like Harry Potter, where the only thing that separates one chapter from another is the plot.

I also have a gripe with the stream-of-conscious label that surfaces in every introductory conversation about the book. Through the story the thoughts that flash across the characters' minds also flash across the pages of the book, but that's an awfully limited (and boring) explanation of how the book's written. In fact, this is another way Joyce separates his story from the rest of the rabble: most books on writing will tell you the most important part of style is to not have one--writing unobtrusively is the safest bet for a readable story. Thinking of Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling is wonderful at this kind of writing, which is one reason why her stories are so readable. She puts the images right in our heads for us, almost like TV. She's smooth as butter.

James Joyce isn't. He makes you work for your $13.99, and sometimes it's a pain in the ass. 

But to be fair, it's really only novelists that are hounded for allowing themselves to be seen working the strings behind the curtain. We don't look at Rembrandt or Michelangelo or Tarantino hoping to not find the essence of their personalities in their work. If Tarantino's movies were as singularly story-driven as Peter Jackson's or Stephen Spielberg's, I might not've gotten Inglourious Basterds for Christmas from my dear friend Matthew. And likewise: Da Vinci's not as realistic an artist as my iPhone, but I still likes him.

Which all means, since I don't think I've mentioned it yet, that Ulysses isn't just about a few Dubliners walking about the city on some unremarkable day in June, 1904, nor is it narrated just through their eyes. One episode is a symphony. One is a play. One is "a nineparted episode without divisions introduced by a Sallustian-Tacitean prelude, then by way of earliest English alliterative and monosyllabic and Anglo-Saxon, then by way of Mandeville, then Malory's Morte d'Arthur, then the Elizabethan chronicle style, then a passage solemn, as of Milton, Taylor, Hooker, followed by a choppy Latin-gossipy bit, style of Burton-Browne, then a passage Bunyanesque, after a diarystyle bit Pepys-Evelyn, and so on through Defoe-Swift and Steele-Addison-Sterne and Landor-Pater-Newman until it ends in a frightful jumble of Pidgin English, nigger English, Cockney, Irish, Bowery slang and broken doggerel [which is] linked back at each part subtly with some foregoing episode of the day and, besides this, with the natural stages of development in the embryo and the periods of faunal evolution in general." The last one is a single sentence in five or six paragraphs, 40 pages long.

Ulysses isn't an easy read, but given that all the conversations I've ever had about the book have consisted of bragging about having read the thing, I think a new approach has to be established. I shall take this opportunity to my stab at it.

Ulysses is a novel about how utterly remarkable a day is if we apply significance to it. He uses as his setting Dublin, and gives it to us through the eyes of Jamesapold Joycebloom, et al.

So how and why does he apply significance to it?

The way I see it is, Joyce was a Catholic, and everything about him as an artist can be understood through Catholicism. So what's Catholicism? A church with longstanding traditions and an incredible attention to extravagance and detail.

If you look at Ulysses like a Mass, it all comes together. At least it does for me. Ulysses is complex is its delivery (like the Mass) but it's very simple at its center (also like the Mass). Masses congregate the faithful around the word of God, to offer confession and forgiveness of sins, and they take their good old time doing it with all the standing and sitting, the kneeling and praying, the singing and bell-ringing, the eating of bread and sipping of wine, the shaking of hands and passing of envelopes. The God of the Mass is God, through his son Jesus Christ. The god of Ulysses is James Joyce, through his sons Leopold and Stephen. Ulysses shows us Dublin circa 1904, but it takes damn near 800 pages doing it with all the lists, themes, obscure details, inner notions, wordgames, fantasies, hallucinations, styles, moods, colors, body parts, and references to the Odyssey so as to match the exact layout of the part and place of the day we're experiencing at the time. 

Yes: Ulysses at its core is about Joyce and how cool he is. Stephen is young-Joyce and Bloom shares many of the traits of older-Joyce. Molly Bloom is probably verymuch like Nora Joyce, and most of the rest of the characters in the book were connected to Joyce in some real-life way. Joyce didn't write stories to make stuff up--he wrote them to show the world around him in a legitimate, artistic portrait. Joyce always saw himself as a martyr and the subject of conspiracies, and so he made a book about the people he knew in Dublin functioning around two aspects of himself, who fight the world around them inch by inch as Telemachus and Ulysses.

It's conceited, but Joyce was a conceited guy. But so was Beethoven. It doesn't lessen the effect of their art. Ulysses is certainly the most complex (readable) book of the last century--if not ever--and it deserves a place in every lit major's undergrad canon. It can be a gradschool book, but it doesn't need to be. Anyone can read the thing with a Sparknotes handy: it's coming on 90 years since it was published, so enough highbrow folks have sat around considering the thing for a bunch of handy guides to've been published by now.

Anyways, I thought it was as good a book as humans were likely to produce before the asteroid. You might give it a go.

Brian Boyd, Someone in Japan Loves You

This need be read only by litcrit nerds, with my apologies.

Once upon a time I was in a writing student. From my extensive and expensive schooling I learned two very important rules about writing: 1) writers write, and 2) that if ever I should find myself hankering to write about a book, I should do a book review instead of a litcrit essay. Book reviews, aside from being publishable in places that people go to read, are also rich in straightforward, practical point—they tell you what the book’s good for.

Let’s jump right into it, then. This’ll be inflammatory, so get your salt ready. The current state of literary criticism rather sucks. It’s a knee-deep theoretical marsh lit with the fires of the souls of the dead and through which you’d need a Gollumesque obsessive recluse to find your way. In college I was always frustrated by the lines of thinking of many literary critics. These people could dissect a text for hundreds of pages without my understanding the importance of what they were saying. For years I thought it was my simpleminded approach to literature fostered by an adolescent obsession with superheroes. But as I piled the semesters under me—and the accompanying bills—I got bitter about it. I could follow the arguments they were making, but for me it was like going to a baseball game. It’s very exciting indeed when someone actually hit the damn ball, but in the interims I couldn’t be bothered to focus on people standing around intensely being paid hundreds of dollars per hour for their trouble.

To put it another way, I felt there were a good many things to be said about stories and authors and the way people reacted to them, but that litcrit was at best a shotgun trying to pick apples at fifty feet. There was too much being put out there and the worth of any one contribution made to an understanding of literature was questionable.

(Well, the same thing can be said about biology and mathematics, but in those fields of science, insignificant contributions are arrived at after empirical research. Contributions to literary criticism come from a long history of people’s good sense, the same process that brought us Freudianism and Creationism. They were useful in their time, and certainly interesting ideas and worldviews can be generated under these schools of thought, but schools of thought are the lower-level memes that evolve into the sciences. As we have empirical alternatives in sociology, biology, and meteorology, we shouldn’t defer to Freud to explain the human condition anymore, just as we shouldn’t use God to explain the existence of Man or the occurrence of natural disasters—in the realm of serious scientific study, at any rate.)

I was slowly moving towards the assertion that the study of literature should be a science instead of the schools of philosophy that it is now. Until now there hasn’t been a thesis strong enough to help literature crawl out of the lower subjective echelons of the humanities, and it’s been rollicking there, obscure but egoistic, since the Enlightenment.

I just finished On the Origin of Stories by Brian Boyd, a 150-year anniversary tribute book to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. It’s a well researched (the bibliography is 50 pages!) but readable analysis of why storytelling is so pervasive among Homo sapiens, and an argument for a new kind of literary criticism, provisionally dubbed evocriticism, which analyses texts from various focuses through an evolutionary lens.

If I were disposed to hyperbole and fits of rapture—and I am—I would suggest that this book will win Mr. Boyd no few props and herald the end of literary Theory as a serious academic discipline. That is not to mention the slew of essays and research papers by a certain Mr. Downey that will appear on the Internet machine or in print over the next several years.

From the beginning: I bought this book at its Japanese-import price because I’m way interested in the cognitive sciences and way interested in why litcrit is so uninteresting. The former interest comes from my search for an answer as to why I’m so very strange indeed in the context of my family; the latter, as I’ve already expounded upon at length, comes from me being forever annoyed with the superfluousness of most essays on stories I’ve ever read. And I’ll be damned if this book didn’t turn out to be a soothing aloe on the rash of my litcrit frustrations.

Here’s my problem with large swaths of litcrit: By and large, litcrit takes a discipline that is linked directly and deeply to the human psyche and doesn’t justify it, doesn’t explain its origins, doesn’t offer any bigger answers—and certainly doesn’t ask any big questions. By doing so, it differs substantially from the sciences and even from philosophy. By doing so, it comes close to religious tradition.

Boyd’s book showed me that literary criticism doesn’t click with me not because I’m impatient or dense (I do like books, after all), but because I’m inherently frustrated with its impractical denominationalism. (Well, that’s my interpretation at any rate. I minored in religion and was frustrated by denominationalism there, too. Education made me too snooty for churches; given thousands of choices I was unsatisfied with them all. The same thing happened with me and literary criticism: initially I was impressed, but I grew to be baffled and finally annoyed.)

Denominations aren’t bad in every situation, but they have places where they belong and places where they don’t. The Flat Earth Society is a denomination that doesn’t belong, for what I might suggest are obvious reasons. The various schools of thought working out an ultimate unifying theory in physics do belong, because they’re all trying to come up with a solution from various models. The schools of thought in literature are different in that nobody’s proposing a solution because nobody knows (or even thinks) there’s a problem. We end up with a slew of non-falsifiable denominations. All interpretations of a text, so long as they’re backed up with textual evidence, are valid, because who’s to say they’re not? Or, worse, texts are dissected according to arbitrary limitations, like through a structural, or colonial, or post-colonial lens. There are certainly interesting things to be said about Hamlet if interpreted by feminist theory, but what does it say about the story that makes a difference? At most these papers are pointing out things we can label neat, not useful and certainly not important. And really, neat things are for blogs and trivia games, not doctorial theses.

Boyd’s book submits that there is a problem: that humans evolved to tell stories, and that works of literature live and die by how well those works captivate an audience’s attention. He goes on at length about how and why our brains evolved to use fiction as a tool, and how and why we use it in our day to day lives, even from early childhood. He uses that information to develop a theory of literary criticism that he goes on to apply to Homer’s Odyssey and Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who!, looking at each text from standpoints universal (e.g. from a cross-cultural, biological point of view), local (cultural), individual (from the author’s perspective), and particular (from the story’s perspective). His method shows that not only does this theory provide fresh (and empirical) angles explaining why classics and modern classics remain so ingrained in our imaginations, but also that many of the modern schools of litcrit aren’t useless, just limited in scope. Postcolonialism still has a place in the world, albeit as a part of something bigger.

Fuck, I’m burned out. This is a blog, not a scholarly journal. I’ll leave the argument there, incomplete, with my highest recommendation to sit down with the book and a highlighter. I’m really interested in anyone else’s opinion on the issue, especially since I was being so belligerently dismissive of three centuries of literary criticism on the grounds that it always skipped over why I should read Othello, whereas an Amazon user-submitted review would get straight to the heart of the matter. I think evocriticism is going to rock the next generation of lit majors, once someone comes up with a better name. I call dibs on Social Theory.

Did they say this at college, or did I just miss it?

I just realized, after a good deal of college where everybody assumed I had had good poetry theory teachers in high school, the difference between prose and poetry. It's so simple, and other people in books have told me before, but I didn't have the sense to understand. Check it out:

prose=storytelling. Storytelling is talking about something that happened, in any number of ways.
poetry=language sex. Language sex is when you take a language, say English, and wrap it around yourself like a putty lover and you yourself are made from putty and you two become one and you decide to take a look at the world with your ears made of English and your eyes made of English and your tongue not coated in but actually English, and you create something markedly removed from prose, where the average writer is just talking about how something looks or sounds--you're not describing a damn thing. You're telling us what it is if all its
double-helices were letters and line breaks and grammar.

At least great poets do that, most of the time. I think Murakami said it best when he said...and this isn't a quote because I don't own the book...that poetry needs to create a metaphysical tunnel from itself to the reader's mind. Something for the language to pour through and muck up the rest of your mind with its linguistic beauty. If he succeeds, the poem should lose a good deal in translation. I've always wondered what reading Shakespeare in a non-European language must be like. Probably like reading a good story, but almost certainly not like reading Shakespeare.

Of course we're in the age now where everyone's doing everything, so the definition above is defunct, at least in practice. But I think even up to 50 years ago that's what people were aiming for, and I think they should still be aiming for that, at least in terms of everyday short poems.

Anyways, Beckett and Eliot wrote some cool things about poetry that I've read in the last few days and I think you should read it:

Beckett said, in his essay "Dante...Bruno. Vico..Joyce."

Poetry is essentially the antithesis of Metaphysics: Metaphysics purge the mind of the senses and cultivate the disembodiment of the spiritual; Poetry is all passion and feeling and animates the inanimate; Metaphysics are most perfect when most concerned with universals; Poetry, when most concerned with particulars. Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity. Considering the Scholastics' axiom: "niente 'e nell'intelletto che prima non sia nel senso" it follows that poetry is a prime condition of philosophy and civilization. The primitive animistic movement was a manifestation of the "forma poetica dello spirito."

The s.o.b. didn't bother to translate the Italian becaus he thought everybody forever should be privy to such education if they were to considered truely worthy of reading his shite, but I remember enough of the language to make due: "nothing is in the intellect which didn't first come from the senses" and "the poetic form of the spirit."

And Eliot, in his essay "Milton I", in comparing Shakespeare and Milton, said

At no point is visual imagination conspicuous in Milton's poetry. It would be as well to have a few illustrations of what I mean by visual imagination. [He does a passage from Macbeth that I don't care to write, and then this one:]
Light thickens, and the crow
Makes wing to the rooky wood.
not only offer[s] something to the eye, but, so to speak, to the common sense. I mean they convey the feelings of a being at a particular place at a particular time. ... With Shakespeare...the combinations of words offer perpetual novelty; they enlarge the meaning of the individual words joined... In comparison, Milton's images do not give this sense of particularity, nor are the separate words developed in significance. His language is, if one may use the term without disparagement, artificial and conventional.
O'er the smooth enamel'd green...
...paths of this drear wood
The nodding horror of whose shady brows
Threats the forlorn and wandering passenger.

He goes onto suggest that Milton writes English like a dead language. I'm not sure. Never read the guy. But I'd like to. And Eliot's a fucking smart guy.

Where the fuck do ideas come from?

Ze Frank is one of two or three things on the e-net that I really wish I'd get around to reading more often, but never do. But Thaine keeps me linked up to the really important ones, and this episode about creativity is right up my show-people-shit alley. Be warned, should mommy or someone be reading, it's pretty much purely vulgar. But it's amazing advice for artists.

Perfect Blue

I just watched Perfect Blue because the guy that directed it also directed Paprika and holy crap I thought it might be about submarines but I was wrong. Kon's storytelling style is in the same vein as what I want to do with writing. He lets you establish certain assumptions about the world and then he deconstructs them, and then reconstructs and deconstructs them, and then does that again a few times. It's not like a Hollywood mystery, where maybe one or two twists happen right before the climax to solve the missing plot point; Kon tries (and I think succeeds at) twisting the story into a new shape entirely by the end of the movie. Restructures its DNA. It's so great and so crazy that I'm half inclined to call it greazy. All that, and it's salvagably confusing, by which I mean it ain't Lynchian.

My favorite part was the pizza delivery bit.

AvP@

I watched AvP2 yesterday. That's a movie whose plot is the title. Not unlike Capcom vs. Street Fighter, or Sonic & Knuckles. I wanted to get some writing done, but after the first Lord of the Rings-esque epic shot of a hunter and his twelve-year-old (Buddy) a-hunting in the woods, I couldn't pull away.

This is how the movie was made, as near as I can tell. First, the writers, to research the small American town in which the movie takes place, went and interviewed real Americans to get a feel for how normal folk in such towns live their everyday lives. Being a Hollywood production, the AvP2 writers settled for their affluent Californian neighbors' opinions, who perhaps saw The Great Outdoors once when they were seven.

Next--well nevermind. You know. Even if you didn't see it, you know. But here's one mistake I noticed immediately: the writers, director, etc. thought it was necessary to build the plot up like a normal movie. 1) Introduce the reason for the Aliens and Predator to meet, 2) Introduce human cast, 3) Converge the disparate plotlines, and 4) Rumble. But that's how a normal movie works. Normal movies work like that because you go in not quite knowing where things'll end up, so you've got to make introductions, build plots, and all that. Not with AvP. You know what you're getting going in: you're getting Alien(s) versus Predator(s). I submit that this movie would not have only been better, but salvageable, should the director have chosen to start the movie in the middle of a/the major battle. Then we could have gotten the whole AvP theme out of the way, leaving 60 or so more minutes to develop more interesting themes. Instead, they worked their way up to the fight, which shows a great disinterest and disrespect in and of the audiences' intelligence, money, time, and desire for a good ol' time at the movies.

This, I think, is important, because it's a Hollywood trend just like it's a daytime TV trend and a mainstream comics--maybe mainstream entertainment--trend. If entertainment executives are letting their creative staff get away with this kind of shit--if they've let entertainment turn into an industry for the sake of profit rather than entertainment (which of course they've done), then entertainment's turned into nothing more than junk food. Immediately appealing to the basest of senses but ultimately unhealthy.

If I were, say, running for president, I'd run on the platform that should any megabudget production such as this produce such an absence of intellectual, technological, or philosophical advance in the human species as a whole--if the movie leaves the viewer walking away with nothing of substance whatsoever--then the studio funding the production has to reproduce the budget and donate it to a charity of their choice. There's room and time for shit to be made on the Internet, but movie and publishing industries are too costly and too consuming to be throwing away resources like this, especially when there are so many artists in this day and age who want to produce legitimate, worthwhile stories. Stories which, handled correctly, could easily include Aliens fighting Predators. Look at what Moore did for superheroes, or Tolkien did for fairy stories, or Chandler did for detective noir. Genre isn't born bad, it's just written that way, and we're wasting our potential putting up with the majority of shit produced these days. I just imagine the places we'd be if the entertainment and publishing industries held themselves to the same standards as theoretical physicists or some other impressive-sounding academic industry (excluding Academia, whose system of chronic publishing for tenure I think inspires panic and wanton paper-writing from otherwise very intelligent minds).



Anyways, the movie was shit.

welkin, due down

I called Carrie this morning and she said she was gonna do a masters or doctorate in literature instead of an MFA in writing and I said good on ya because it's my (certified) opinion that creative writing programs are sorely lacking in the area of artistic common sense, focusing on the ethereal feeling art gives you when, you know, I mean, you just know, man, you know? rather than a comprehensive view of narrative art across the media harnessed thus far by Homo S___s, the latter of which would have the immediate effect of producing many intelligent, working writers who understood the nuances of the craft from every angle instead of from a faraway, binocular vantage point instead of its current ejaculatory output a few prodigies yearly.

Ontheotherhand, lit programs at any level are flawed like San Andreas since with very little (any? anyone?) exception they read novels and poems while standing cold and forlorn on the outskirts of Le Kingdom Academia (Narrative Art Dept.) are all the comics, songs, spoken-word, screenplays, performance art, interpretive dance, blogs, and whathaveyou ever written.

I dunno. It seems to me if you're gonna study art, you can focus on whatever you please. But you've gotta know art before you can make such an assumption. Otherwise your understanding of the medium is lacking, right? And Einstein wouldn't stand for that.

epiphanie

I'd been thinking about the difference between writers and sociologists lately. Reason being, I'm a writer and most of my friends are sociologists or faux-sociologists. Tina, on the other hand, is a sociologist whose friend-base is primarily writers. And I always get the strange feeling I've seen this friend-scenario several other times.

The two fields seem to me to be a lot closer to one another than, say, writing and literature. Or sociology and political science. Writers and sociologists both want to understand human beings on the most personal possible level, and use that info to their own ends--writing books, poems, making friends, being tactical sycophants.

So I came up with a theorem. Call it Theory I. It seemed to me that sociologists spent their entire careers trying to get into other people's heads, whereas writers spent their entire careers trying to get out. (If you're on Facebook, you might've read the quote about some 50% of all writers suffering from some degree of mental disease, from simple OCD to advanced manic-depression. It's a work hazard from tapping the collective un/conscious so often, I thought.)

Anyways, I think I was wrong. The more I think about it, the more I think Theory II is the more correct, albeit the more disturbing, comparison:

(And you're damn right I'm italicizing my own quote. Skeet skeet.)

The difference between sociologists and writers is that sociologists spend their lives trying to break into other people's heads, while writers spend their lives trying to break out of their own.

Genre is the bogeyman.

I have a single blaring problem with the way in which I was educated as an English Writing major in college: genre. Now, genre was taught poorly because of a bigger problem, that of the concept and definition of art in general, but the miseducation and lack of exposure to narrative genre in college I think was the most harmful thing our professors did to my peers and me.

genre: a category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter.

medium: an agency or means of doing something.

My first memory of genre in college was the first day of Intro to Creative Writing. The professor read through the syllabus, talked about the class, and, upon dismissal, said in an offhand way that there was to be no genre-writing. He gave examples: horror, fantasy, mystery, sci-fi, &c.
My last memory was four or five years later, in my Writing Capstone class, where my peers were arguing over whether or not a certain piece was a prose-poem or flash-fiction. I chimed in, saying genre-labeling was silly, and that it was enough to call the piece prose, since it was a narrative story told without specific metrical pattern. The class laughed, said I was genre-labeling. Now, it happens that I wasn't; I was observing the medium the author chose to employ, not the genre, but the class didn't know the difference. A group of 11 senior English Writing majors, my peers, lots of them better artists than me, didn't know the difference between a medium and a genre.

That's probably not a big deal if you're a doctor, or a mechanic, or a tech consultant. But it should be important if you're a creative writer, or have any creative writing aspirations. It should be important because a basic understanding of artistic categorization, silly as it may usually be, is essential to understanding what art is and how it functions in the modern world--it's as essential as knowing what a simile is, or iambic pentameter, or a paragraph. Medium and genre aren't grammatical terms, but they're just as important to know for a writer as the speed limit is for a mechanic.

Here's why:

I think genre's a silly old thing. It's helpful with regards to essays, or general discussion about related topics, but sometime in the 19th century, some bloke decided that with the influx of ye olde average citizen customers, he had to come up with a quick and simple way to appealingly categorize his bookstock. Thus was invented the modern genre (probably): it has led to a common knowledge of what horror stories are, what sci-fi/fantasy is, what stories you might find in the Graphic Novels section, the Western section, or the Fiction/Literature section. But there's a big problem here, ain't there? According to the definitions above, Graphic Novels are a medium, not a genre; Sci-Fi and Fantasy aren't nearly the same thing, so why are they shelved together; why does Western have its own shelf label and Cyberpunk doesn't; and what in God's green name gives Fiction/Literature such prestigious placement when it's really nothing but a catch-all category?

Of course there are spacing issues. No normal bookstore can own enough books to give a shelf to every genre, subgenre, or quasigenre invented in the past decades. So let's not blame bookstores here. But do those questions up there seem ridiculous? I don't think they do; lots of people have talked to me about that sort of stuff before, and I've talked about it to lots of people. My problem is that not enough of the folks I graduated with could answer why genre is different from medium, the answer being the first sentence of this paragraph. And if they don't know the difference between genre and medium--or why genre exists in the first place, or why it's good to understand what different mediums can do for art--then they're being held back from some integral understanding of art. And if you're an artist, that's no good.

Here's the horror: I've known people to not read anything written outside the 19th century; I've known people (Hemingway, for one) who say talking about writing is bad luck; I've known people who consider writing a mystical experience that should never be questioned or scientifically explored; and I've known tons and tons of people who don't write outside of the Fiction/Literature genre--and I'm pretty sure 95% of them don't have a specific reason why.

I'm not arguing that writers should give genre another chance. Lots of people have read non-realistic fiction and they don't like it, or they do but they don't like writing it themselves. That's cool. Do what you love. Write what you know. But my argument is that to be an artist--writer, drawler, singer, whatever--you should damn well know art. Doctors, lawyers, dentists, mechanics--these guys have to go to school for a long time and know shit they'll never have to imagine applying, but they're professionals, so they know it. Artists are professionals too. In fact, art, in my opinion, is the greatest human endeavor. It'll be that which outlasts us that can still communicate with the universe: pots, paintings, and poetry. So why on Earth would a typical higher education institution like Pitt-Greensburg teach me a ton of useful stuff--grammar, lit history, how to find an agent, how to prep a manuscript, how to push yourself creatively, how to read in public, what bars are good for what writers--and not think to touch on the essence of art itself? To teach us what art is--even if only writing--and to teach us what the media of prose and poetry can do for us as artists, and what genres are, and why they're silly and why they're useful?

I don't know. But I'm saying that understanding everything about writing behind-the-scenes, like getting an agent, trying to publish, signing a contract, etc., won't be terribly helpful if your impression of the market is false or based off of the genre-labeled codswallop and a general impression of what the population is reading. You still might get published, but I can guarantee you that no matter how much you're doing it for the money, you're also doing it to write a good book, and without a full understanding of art in this day and age with 250,000 new books published per year, you can be sure your creation's going to be lost to time before the next holiday season.

I don't mean to come off as a Nazi (in fulfillment of Godwin's Law), and I'm absolutely not suggesting that every artist needs to go to school, or read books, to understand the craft. But I do stand behind the notion that considering the creative process a mystical magical experience during which sometimes you produce genius and sometimes you sit and stare at a blank page for hours is crazy as hell, because it doesn't need to be that way. Spend some time thinking about your process--what you do, how you do it, why that is--and you'll be ultimately better off when you break down on the side of an imaginary highway, wondering how in the hell you're going to meet your personal deadline on time. Plus, doctors, lawyers, and mechanics will respect your work ethic, since you'll be more akin to an ever-contemplating philosopher than a recklessly experimenting mad scientist.

--- -- --

So the point of all this was that the 360 is coming out with a game soon called Eternal Sonata. Click for the trailer. It's so great, because it takes genre and kicks it in the nuts with the defiant glare of a 5 year old girl. The game, get this, is an RPG about Chopin, the composer. Here's a lifted quote: "Eternal Sonata follows the adventures of famed composer Frederic Chopin as he travels through his own dream world filled with colorful characters and stunning locales. In a land where music influences both combat and exploration, Chopin sets out on a journey not only of self-discovery, but also one of redemption."

You can argue that it's not really genre-bending, as much as a typical RPG with Chopin squeezed in, but I disagree. If the plot has been carefully hammered out (which I imagine it has), then we have a story that has strong elements of historical fiction (genre), Japanese RPG (subgenre), Japanese popular animation (which I'm classing as a quasigenre, since it's such a visual staple with its own pros and cons) and classical music (genre) all in one. That's pretty rad, and pretty ballsy for a videogame company. Thaine, I want you to buy it and rock it out for me.

/gramr/

I just read

“French works like Peeters or Groensteen seem to be concerned with how things function in the contexts of the ‘work of art.’ In contrast, proposals like McCloud’s (and mine) do not care what the work is about, but hypothesize structural principles at work in the medium and (hopefully) cognition. To invoke an analogy: I’m interested in identifying how ‘nouns and verbs work.’ They’re interested in how people ‘use nouns and verbs in writing.’” (by some guy I should probably know named Neil Cohn)

and thought it was interesting because McCloud's books are some of the most interesting, intelligent and, with the exception of Reinventing Comics, agreeable essays on the medium in existence. But, but now this Mr. Cohn supposes to say that McCloud is a prescriptivist as opposed to a descriptivist. I sorta named this blog after the latter school of thought that supposes that folks were talking long before they were writing, and consequently written grammar rules should always take into account the ways in which folks use the language first, as opposed to prescriptivist rules which describe the patterns of language. Now, I'm not gonna sit here and pretend I haven't had lotta cheap wine, but I know a middle-ground approach is probably the best way to go. With regards to the passage about comics, Cohn made me realize that McCloud is an absolute prescriptivist, and I his ideological enemy. But then Cohn made me realize that I'm not a complete descriptivist, since in fact I buy, love, and like McCloud's books, so to some extent I have to agree with prescriptivist principles. IN FACT, Cohn is the most recent example of me realizing that the middle-ground is the way to go pretty much all the time. Barring, of course, sociological situations where the norm is to one extreme or the other, in which case leaning to the opposite extreme to an intelligent degree is all right, even good. Like with the Bush administration. Or the absurdly descriptivist superhero comics industry. Or the so-far-beyond-absurd-it's-nutty descriptivist TV soap opera industry, which I'm being introduced to in hour-long incrimints every weekday at 1:00.

It's Days of Our Lives, by the way. Stefano is the shit.