The Twleve Days of Mythos

On the First Day of Mythos my True Love Gave to Me, A God Sleeping Under the Sea

On the Second Day of Mythos my True Love Gave to Me, two kings in yellow, and a God Sleeping Under the Sea

On the Third Day of Mythos my True Love Gave to Me, three shoggoths, two kings in yellow, and a God Sleeping Under the Sea

On the Fourth Day of Mythos my True Love Gave to Me, four black goats, three shoggoths, two kings in yellow, and a God Sleeping Under the Sea

On the Fifth Day of Mythos my True Love Gave to Me, five for-got-ten tomes, four black goats, three shoggoths, two kings in yellow, and a God Sleeping Under the Sea

On the Sixth Day of Mythos my True Love Gave to Me, six mi-go going, five for-got-ten tomes, four black goats, three shoggoths, two kings in yellow, and a God Sleeping Under the Sea

On the Seventh Day of Mythos my True Love Gave to Me, seven cities sunken, six mi-go going, five for-got-ten tomes, four black goats, three shoggoths, two kings in yellow, and a God Sleeping Under the Sea

On the Eighth Day of Mythos my True Love Gave to Me, eight cultists praying, seven cities sunken, six mi-go going, five for-got-ten tomes, four black goats, three shoggoths, two kings in yellow, and a God Sleeping Under the Sea

On the Ninth Day of Mythos my True Love Gave to Me, nine voids a-howling, eight cultists praying, seven cities sunken, six mi-go going, five for-got-ten tomes, four black goats, three shoggoths, two kings in yellow, and a God Sleeping Under the Sea

On the Tenth Day of Mythos my True Love Gave to Me, ten Deep Ones deeping, nine voids a-howling, eight cultists praying, seven cities sunken, six mi-go going, five for-got-ten tomes, four black goats, three shoggoths, two kings in yellow, and a God Sleeping Under the Sea

On the Eleventh Day of Mythos my True Love Gave to Me, eleven hybrids hiding, ten Deep Ones deeping, nine voids a-howling, eight cultists praying, seven cities sunken, six mi-go going, five for-got-ten tomes, four black goats, three shoggoths, two kings in yellow, and a God Sleeping Under the Sea

On the Twelfth Day of Mythos my True Love Gave to Me, twelve dreams a-dreaming, eleven hybrids hiding, ten Deep Ones deeping, nine voids a-howling, eight cultists praying, seven cities sunken, six mi-go going, five for-got-ten tomes, four black goats, three shoggoths, two kings in yellow, and a God Sleeping Under the Sea!

Happy Holidays, Everyone!

Let Me Show You What the Jesuits Taught Me: Jared Lee Loughner as Gordon Pratt

Jared Loughner has proved somewhat impervious to political analysis, but that hasn't stopped all sides of the blogosphere from weighing in on his possible partisan motives. Right-wingers point to the presence of the Communist Manifesto among his favorite books as evidence that he's a liberal. In some odious homage to ahistorical nonsense, they also cite the presence of Mein Kampf as additional evidence, but somehow manage to overlook the presence of Ayn Rand's We the Living.

Saner observers point out that Loughner's rants on secret mind-control grammar are more associated with the outer fringes of the Right Wing, and that his obsessive bimetallism is an article of faith to actual elected Republicans on the state and national level. They also note that the gunman targeted a Democrat who voted for the Affordable Care Act, a fact which the wingers only take to mean that even Democrats are murderously enraged over Obamacare.

A third faction argues that Loughner's possible mental illness depoliticizes his murder spree entirely. But this is simple evasion. The mentally ill have politics, just as the physically ill do. Loughner was politically obsessed, even if his commitments were somewhat opaque to others. He went to a political event, and targeted political figures.

That said, the combination of communism, Nazism, Randism, and existentialism, along with goldbuggery and other obsessions makes me think that looking at a list of favorite books isn't going to tell us much about him. Such a motley assortment of mutually exclusive philosophies seems more like padding than it does an actual foundation for political commitment. Most of all, it reminds me of this:

Bait and Switch: NYT edition:

It's true that any actor in a Broadway show has a tremendous opportunity, and that might be worth taking a risk. Even if that show is less a play than a "Ponzi Scheme with Costumes." And even if the risks are less "bombing with the critics" than "never walking again."

Still, I'm not sure this front-page link from the 12/26 New York Times entirely reflects the tone of the story it leads you to:

Sometimes I think they do this just to spite me.

Mailing the Knife

In high school, perhaps some of you wrote letters to your future selves. Maybe you told futureyou not to forget about the importance of rocking out or keeping it real. Or maybe you wondered if you ever met someone you could love as much as (choke) the one who broke your heart (sob sob sob). It’s a cheesy exercise, but it has its charms, as well as its cringing embarrassments at what a melodramatic little crapsocket you were.

I was reminded of that exercise this morning when I read about the tax deal Obama is negotiating with the Republicans. Democrats got outplayed at every turn on this issue, and now the wealthiest will get budget-busting special tax breaks over and above the cut everyone else gets.

It would be bad enough if that were all. But the worst of it is that the Republicans' ostensible concession-- a 2 year extension, rather than a permanent one. So come election time 2012, we can now count on another round of this exact same demagoguery. It's like putting those words in a time capsule for our future selves to enjoy. Except the letter isn't to ourselves. It's to the GOP. And it's not a letter. It's a knife. And not even one of those decorative knives engraved with words on it. Just a plain old stabber.

I'm not averse to compromise, or even to our side taking a few wounds at the knife fight. But do we have to give them the knife?

Obviously, Too Much Time on My Hands

Sentence of the Week: 7/24/2010

"After all, life, for all its agonies of despair and loss and guilt,
is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing, full of
liking and of love, at times a poem and a high adventure, at times
noble and at times very gay; and whatever (if anything) is to come
after it, we shall not have this life again. " --Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond,1956

Marvel Keeps Using That Word. I Do Not Think it Means What Quesada Thinks it Means

Marvel likes its sub-lines, like 1602 and now Noir. The last year has filled out the line with Daredevil, Luke Cage, Punisher, Wolverine, and two series each for Spider-Man and the X-Men. This week brought us an Iron Man for the Noir-iverse, and it has fine art, a fast-paced story, and loads of Easter Eggs for the longtime Marvel fan. But if this first issue is many things, this Iron Man is emphatically not noir. It is pulp. The pain of it is that one could easily produce a noirish Iron Man story, if not for one problem: Tony Stark.

Though Film Noir is a notoriously slippery genre, with fairly elastic boundaries, there are a few defining features. Among the most important is the nature of the protagonist. He is generally not a man of action or great achievement. If he is distinguished, then his glory days are long passed. Think of Mitchum in Out of the Past, Kirk Douglass in Ace in the Hole, or Joseph Cotten in the Third Man.

Having this kind of protagonist at the core has serious implications for the plot as well. The noir hero never initiates the plot. He is dragged into it by a femme fatale, or by a larger scheme (as in Third Man) Occasionally, he is resentful in his reduced circumstances and stumbles upon an opportunity to seize his main chance (as in Ace in the Hole). But he is almost never in control of circumstances. (A Google search for "film noir" and "in over his head" returns more than 200,000 hits). So the noir character is a regular guy, caught up in a much larger game. And generally, that larger game is the corruption of the world. From a gumshoe caught up in a new age of apocalyptic warfare to a cynical Angeleno bearing witness to the ugly rise of the modern American city, film noir suggests that one person can't ever win. The best they can hope for is to wring out a little measure of dignity in an increasingly dehumanized world.

In this context, how can we look at this Tony Stark as a noir hero? He is supremely confident, always in control. He fights Nazis in lost cities, searches for Atlantis, and has a "Men's Adventure" amanuensis following his every move. He isn't Mike Hammer, he's Doc Savage. Now, there's nothing wrong with being Doc Savage. This guy, this guy, and this guy all have more than a touch of the Man of Bronze in their makeup. But none of them are noir. They're pulp heroes. They're larger than life, not living their lives; not mensch but ubermensch. But, then again, how do you take a character defined as swinging playboy and millionaire superstar and put him in a noir story?

Easy. You don't make him the viewpoint character. Tony Stark isn't a noir hero. His exalted position in society makes it almost impossible. We never meet the noir hero when he is a lord of all he surveys, and the genre generally takes a pretty ambivalent view towards the socially powerful. They are signs of the rot and corruption that the noir hero struggles against in vain, architects of the fallen world. But if we don't see inside Stark's head, we can put him in that ambiguous role. A millionaire with a secret agenda-- that's noir. The Noir line has used such viewpoint characters before, as in the original X Men Noir, which used the Golden Age Angel to investigate the more outre X-Men cast.

So imagine this: It's 1948. A washed-up boxer is looking for work. A beautiful redhead hires him for a job-playing chauffeur and bodyguard for her boss, one of the richest men in town. There's an immediate spark between the boxer and the secretary. And the boss is sweet on her too! But the boss is strangely frail. He spends hours each day in that iron lung contraption. They say he got sick working on that bomb that ended the war. The guilty nightmares that haunt him drive him to seek forgiveness, though most nights he goes looking for it at the bottom of the bottle. It would be so easy to take everything. And if the money isn't enough; well, there's another redhead who will pay handsomely for Stark's research notes...

It may not read better or sell better than Iron Man Pulp, but it would be the start of a story that would actually be Iron Man Noir.