Joshua Malbin

Op-ed in the Washington Post by Lindsey Graham and Charles Schumer, March 19, 2010:

Last week we met with President Obama to discuss our draft framework for action on immigration. We expressed our belief that America’s security and economic well-being depend on enacting sensible immigration policies. … We urge the public and our colleagues to join our bipartisan efforts in enacting these reforms.

Statement released by Lindsey Graham today:

I want to bring to your attention what appears to be a decision by the Obama Administration and Senate Democratic leadership to move immigration instead of energy. Unless their plan substantially changes this weekend, I will be unable to move forward on energy independence legislation at this time. … Moving forward on immigration — in this hurried, panicked manner — is nothing more than a cynical political ploy.

To be fair, I think that on the substance of what’s going on this week Graham is actually right, and the Senate should move ahead as planned with climate legislation, since that’s written and ready to be introduced. I’d rather knock him for writing an empty op-ed he had no intention of ever backing up with action.

Update: Steve Benen makes the point better.

In terms of the calendar, I’m generally inclined to agree with Graham’s larger point — given that the climate bill has already passed the House, and so much of the legwork has already been done it for the next round, it makes sense to me for the Senate to finish Wall Street reform, then tackle energy, then immigration. I’m even inclined to agree with Graham that Dems are using political considerations, not policy goals, to prioritize between the competing policies.

But by threatening to kill both of the efforts he’s already invested so much time in, Graham is overreacting on an almost comical scale. Graham can’t call on the president to step up on immigration, and then throw a fit when the president does as he asks.

It’s enough to make me wonder if, perhaps, Lindsey Graham wasn’t really serious about either initiative, and last night’s tantrum is the result of a senator who’s negotiated in bad faith.

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Say you have a character you want to invest with mystery. You might start by having another character mention him ominously:

But she had made a previous stoppage on the second floor, and had silently pointed at a dark door there.

“The only other lodger,” she now whispered, in explanation; “a law-writer. The children in the lanes here, say he has sold himself to the devil. I don’t know what he can have done with the money. Hush!”

We can learn his name indirectly too, through mail left lying around:

…announcing that a respectable man aged forty-five wanted engrossing or copying to execute with neatness and dispatch: Address to Nemo, care of Mr. Krook within.

Then forget about him for eighty or so pages. When he comes back, have yet a third character remark that “Nemo” is Latin for “no one,” and try to go see the mysterious copyist against more stern warnings:

“You know what they say of my lodger?” whispers Krook, going up a step or two.

“What do they say of him?”

“They say he has sold himself to the Enemy, but you and I know better—he don’t buy. I’ll tell you what, though; my lodger is so black-humoured and gloomy that I believe he’d as soon make that bargain as any other. Don’t put him out sir. That’s my advice!”

Then apply the atmospherics with a trowel.

Mr. Tulkinghorn with a nod goes on his way. He comes to the dark door on the second floor. He knocks, receives no answer, opens it, and accidentally extinguishes his candle in doing so.

Naturally. Time for the pathetic fallacy.

The air of the room is almost bad enough to have extinguished it, if he had not. It is a small room, nearly black with soot, and grease, and dirt. In the rusty skeleton of a grate, pinched at the middle as if Poverty had gripped it, a red coke fire burns low. In the corner by the chimney, stand a deal table and a broken desk: a wilderness marked with a rain of ink. In another corner, a ragged old portmanteau on one of the two chairs, serves for cabinet and wardrobe; no larger one is needed, for it collapses like the cheeks of a starved man. The floor is bare; except that one old mat, trodden to shreds of rope-yarn, lies perishing upon the hearth. No curtain veils the darkness of the night, but the discolored shutters are drawn together; and through the two gaunt holes pierced in them, famine might be staring in—the Banshee of the man upon the bed.

The stage is set. The mystery man revealed at last.

For, on a low bed opposite the fire, a confusion of dirty patchwork, lean-ribbed ticking, and coarse sacking, the lawyer, hesitating just within the doorway, sees a man. He lies there, dressed in shirt and trousers, with bare feet. He has a yellow look, in the spectral darkness of a candle that has guttered down, until the whole length of its wick (still burning) has doubled over, and left a tower of winding-sheet above it. His hair is ragged, mingling with his whiskers and his beard—the latter, ragged too, and grown, like the scum and mist around him, in neglect. Foul and filthy as the room is, foul and filthy as the air, it is not easy to perceive what fumes those are which most oppress the senses in it; but through the general sickliness and faintness, and the odor of stale tobacco, there comes into the lawyer’s mouth the vapid taste of opium.

“Hallo, my friend!” he cries, and strikes his iron candlestick against the door.

He thinks he has awakened his friend. He lies a little turned away, but his eyes are surely open.

“Hallo, my friend!” he cries again. “Hallo! Hallo!”

As he rattles on the door, the candle which has drooped so long, goes out, and leaves him in the dark; with the gaunt eyes in the shutters staring down upon the bed.

Are these tricks crude? You betcha. But they work.

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Dennis Hopper looms large in my mind as a weird hybrid of hippie and roughneck. I know him as an early Sunset Strip art scenester, showing photographs at Ferus; as the archvillain of Speed, an evil mastermind hiding out on the skids; and as the director of Easy Rider, which I half-saw one night in college. I picture him as a kind of Dog Soldiers Malibu-hills Don’t-Tread-On-Me cocaine libertarian, a portrait probably not entirely distinct from Hunter S. Thompson. I know he’s dying.

This video essay by Matt Zoller Seitz provokes a deeper consideration. Watching it, Hopper’s fragility leaps to the surface — the hard-luck cop in True Romance who dies rather than give his son up to Christopher Walken; the alcoholic coach from Hoosiers; flashes of tenderness, sensitivity, and weakness in dozens of Seitz’s clips. The art scenester appears an exponent of the avant-garde and a poet of nature and existence. It’s a moving tribute, well worth watching even at its considerable length for online video (24 min).

This, from Seitz’s short introductory essay, also rings true:

When I think about Hopper, I hear his voice in my head: the nasal Kansas vowels; the cowboy twang; and last but not least, the semicolons where periods would normally go, contributing to a sense that his thoughts, like works of art, are never finished, only abandoned, that he never really stops talking, that there’s always one more observation or pronouncement or dirty joke waiting just around the bend.

Jane Espenson’s warning against glib dialogue has been very helpful to my writing partner and me recently:

You probably loved it while you wrote it.  You could feel the emotion and poetry in it.  But when you reread it, it seems glib and overwritten.  If you take the poetry out, it feels flat.  In my opinion, the only thing wrong with the line is that it defies human psychology.  We don’t get articulate when we’re emotional — the opposite happens.  We get stumbly and tangled as we choke back our tears.

The trick, per Jane, is letting the poetry “creep back in when you write the next line, after the heat of the moment has passed”. Hopper seems particularly adept at a kind of unglib, poetic moment of rushing towards illuminated truth, as if the bends around which the observations wait all lead towards something bright, or fiery.

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Hope Larsen’s Mercury is published under Simon & Shuster’s Athenaeum imprint “for young readers,” and specifies that it is for “Ages 12 and up.” Given that comics are mostly aimed at teenagers, that seems an odd thing to have to specify. I mention it because I think its conscious effort to meet a YA audience’s tastes could be what make the book dissatisfying.

The dialogue is way too simplistic, for one thing, going on for panels and panels with nothing of substance said. I can easily imagine some of it working in a regular novel, surrounded by internal narration, but the comic format requires everything be made explicit, and a full page of  two flirting kids discussing coffee is simply boring.

The bigger problem, though, is that Larson’s drawing style sucks all the menace—and hence all the suspense—from her plot.  As my friend Lizzie Skurnick has chronicled, twelve-year-old girls can handle—want to handle—pretty sophisticated themes. So good for Mercury‘s intrigue, threats of violence, extrasensory premonitions. But Larson employs elements of neoteny (giant eyes; prominent, rounded foreheads; slightly oversized heads) that make all of her characters seem cute, even in dreams and visions that are supposed to be premonitions of death. (Compare them to Richard Sala or even the godfather, Edward Gorey, whose figures are just as simple but have evil little eyes and spiky bodies.) She also draws all her backgrounds in a flattened, perspectiveless, comic-strip-like style, which while fine in itself is completely incapable of conveying a sense of danger. In fact I like her drawing quite a bit, it’s just not scary.

Previews below the fold.

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A few months ago I complained about how the Kick-Ass storyline turned out and worried about the movie getting screwed up by following the comic too closely. Tonight I went and saw it and it was surprisingly good, even though it’s one of the more faithful comic-book adaptations I’ve ever seen. It did a much better job than the comic of setting expectations early and letting us know exactly what kind of story we were in for. It also did a little bit more with the idea of trying to dress up and be heroic without superpowers.

The action choreography and direction were particularly strong. As one of the people I went with pointed out, the action speeds up and slows down, Matrix-style, in a way that’s deliberately reminiscent of the way comic book action moves across panels. We see blurs punctuated by frozen frames, and it works.

A few words of warning. First, it’s gory. (I overheard one moviegoer say on the way out of the theater: “That was more violent than Quentin Tarantino.”) Second, it’s just an action movie. Don’t go in there expecting anything more.

That said, pace K-sky, it doesn’t suck.

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About a year and a half ago I saw Keith Gessen read from All the Sad Young Literary Men. During the annoying Q&A that followed, he was asked something about characterizing the current literary moment, or something like that, and described a split in contemporary fiction between people reacting to dead realism by writing about “guys flying around and stuff” and people (like him) who were trying to explore the bizarre side of reality in the Internet age. As someone who writes about “guys flying around and stuff,” I can say that one reason I usually shy away from writing about Internet realities is that they’re incredibly ephemeral. When it can take a matter of several years for a fascination to pass from your brain to paper to a reader’s hands, and Internet culture is moving far faster than that, it’s difficult to write anything that doesn’t feel dated before it’s published.

I was reminded of this a little while reading Peter Bagge’s new graphic novel Other Lives. We haven’t seen anything at all from Peter Bagge in almost three years (and I wonder how many people even noticed that Apocalypse Nerd existed), and nothing really significant since Hate ended its legendary run in 1998. But let’s say that he’s been working on the Second Life–focused Other Lives since 2007, when Apocalypse Nerd wrapped up. I feel like about 2007 is when fascination with Second Life was at its peak; since then I’ve heard about nothing but World of Warcraft and Facebook. (Granted, I don’t travel in these circles, really. But World of Warcraft has 11.5 million paying monthly subscribers and Facebook has around 68.5 million unique visitors while last year Second Life had a record 769,000 repeat users.) So already, on its date of publication, Other Lives feels a bit like it’s fallen out of a time capsule.

That’s all beside the point, I guess. The book itself is mostly pretty good. The primary main character Vader Ryderbeck (the pen name of journalist Vladimir Rostov) feels like a recognizably Baggeish creature, full of self-loathing and insecurity, and self-aware enough to spell all of it out in thought bubbles and dialogue. He used to be fat and unpopular, but has pulled his act together enough and lost enough weight to get himself a hot girlfriend, though unbeknownst to him she’s carrying on a virtual romance with a creepy college friend of his on “Second World.” Through that creepy college friend he reconnects with a possibly insane college acquaintance who may or may not work for the CIA tracking terrorist conspiracies in Second World.

For the most part all this is likable and easygoing. The major problem with it is the ending, which is why the remainder of this review gets a major SPOILER ALERT and goes after the jump.

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This news cheers even me.

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I learned a beautiful new word tonight, “haecceity.” Wikipedia:

Haecceity is a term from medieval philosophy first coined by Duns Scotus which denotes the discrete qualities, properties or characteristics of a thing which make it a particular thing. Haecceity is a person or object’s “thisness”.

It should be distinguished from “quiddity”, which refers not to the “thisness” of a thing but to the “whatness” of a thing, its universal rather than particular qualities. Quiddity (a word I’d much heard but never heard defined — is it the name of a board game? No, it seems, a literary journal).

Do you know the herring joke?

A jokester in Chelm once thought up a riddle that nobody could answer: “What’s purple, hangs on the wall, and whistles?”
When everybody in Chelm gave up, he announced the answer: a herring
“A herring?” people said. “A herring isn’t purple.”
“No,” replied the jokester, “this herring was painted purple.”
“But hanging on a wall? Who ever heard of a herring that hung on the wall?”
“Aha! But this herring was hung on the wall.”
“But a herring doesn’t whistle,” somebody shouted.
“Nu, so it doesn’t whistle.”

Maybe it’s not so complicated it needs an example, but if it does, there’s your joke. The haecceity (what a pair of dipthongs) of this herring is considerably different from the quiddity of herrings. Therein lies the humor.

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“You’re a Jedi warrior? I…I don’t know what that means.”

—Ewan McGregor, The Men Who Stare At Goats

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There have been a lot of new crime comics coming out lately, many of them combining crime and horror. Crime and horror do go well together. So why not one combining crime, vampires, and an alien crash-landing, all set in Prohibition-era Manhattan?

Obviously Turf isn’t taking itself too seriously, which I suppose is what you’d expect of the first comic from Jonathan Ross. Yes, that Jonathan Ross. It may be that comic books make lousy movies, but TV people seem to be able to move into comics comfortably.

There are some glitches. The pages are too dialogue-heavy, for one thing. Comics at their best enforce economy of language, and frankly Mr. Ross could have used an editor. The page layouts are impressive, though, constantly varying the size and arrangement of their panels. Sometimes the panels are quite small, which can make things appear cramped and static even when the drawings themselves are lively, if that makes any sense.

It’s a five-issue limited, so I guess you could always wait for the trade paperback.

Preview below the fold.

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