Nick Mamatas's Blog, page 20
June 11, 2015
Dusty Rhodes, RIP
When I was a kid, I did not appreciate Dusty Rhodes. He was heavy, a cloying babyface with dumb moves like the "bionic elbow", and was Ric Flair's perennial whipping boy. When he came to the WWF and threw him in a polka-dot outfit, he was even worse.
I had to go back. Back to Florida, back to the Texas Outlaws, back to his wars with The Sheik, and then forward, to when he appeared in ECW. Then I got him. A good example:
And there's this intriguing snippet:
For a fat guy, he had stamina for days. He could keep up with modern choreography:
And he nailed one of the best promos in professional wrestling history, "Hard Times":
Of course, he had plenty of problems. It took me years to figure out what he meant when he called himself the "ballydawalla" (bull of the woods). When he held the book, his dusty finishes ruined the narrative. But he had that undenial charisma, and his weird body and bizarre dance moves made his matches fairly riveting.
And his kids ended up being great. Goldust is better now, in his mid-40s, then 3/4th of the WWE roster.
RIP Big Dust!
ETA: This blog post coves a lot of Rhodes's ability to appeal to an audience, and may even explain why I didn't care for him so much. In New York City, where I grew up, a working class hero is almost necessarily an immigrant. No surprise that WWF's top champs during my childhood were Pedro Morales and Bruno Sammartino. For the American south, Dusty Rhodes fit that role.
I had to go back. Back to Florida, back to the Texas Outlaws, back to his wars with The Sheik, and then forward, to when he appeared in ECW. Then I got him. A good example:
And there's this intriguing snippet:
For a fat guy, he had stamina for days. He could keep up with modern choreography:
And he nailed one of the best promos in professional wrestling history, "Hard Times":
Of course, he had plenty of problems. It took me years to figure out what he meant when he called himself the "ballydawalla" (bull of the woods). When he held the book, his dusty finishes ruined the narrative. But he had that undenial charisma, and his weird body and bizarre dance moves made his matches fairly riveting.
And his kids ended up being great. Goldust is better now, in his mid-40s, then 3/4th of the WWE roster.
RIP Big Dust!
ETA: This blog post coves a lot of Rhodes's ability to appeal to an audience, and may even explain why I didn't care for him so much. In New York City, where I grew up, a working class hero is almost necessarily an immigrant. No surprise that WWF's top champs during my childhood were Pedro Morales and Bruno Sammartino. For the American south, Dusty Rhodes fit that role.
June 10, 2015
Why Can't Publishers Make Writers Behave?
Recent events have made it clear that many people do not understand the relationship between companies and freelance contractors generally, and publishers and novelists (or other contracted writers) specifically. Publishers, and other bosses, often seek to control the public utterances of their employees. They have much less power to do so over their freelancers.
Freelancers, including novelists, are quite vulnerable in many ways. No pensions, no unemployment insurance, none of the usual labor protections enjoyed by employees, and no corporation to pay a share of FICA taxes. This why the old trick of firing workers and then bringing them back as freelancers is profitable—there's a whole raft of expenses beyond the salary that freelancers don't get.
On the other hand, a company can run into problems if it fires workers and rehires them as freelancers to do their same exact old jobs. The IRS checks to see if freelancers, especially long-term freelancers, or freelancers who seem to only contract with one firm, or freelancers who make a lot of money, are actually misclassified employees.
To avoid getting hammered, there are rules companies follow when interacting with their freelancers. Companies:
1. try to keep freelancers from using company office space or resources
2. try to avoid hiring freelancers to do exactly the tasks that are part of an employee's job description
3. try to keep from closely managing freelancers, outside of the basics of benchmarks, deadlines, and broad descriptions of receivables
4. try to keep freelancers tasked to particular projects or programs rather than utilizing their labor in an open-ended way
And they don't treat freelancers like employees when it comes to public utterances, or social media, or anything like that. Of course, this isn't to say that companies don't make decisions based on a freelancer's public utterances or social media usage—of course they do. They just don't act as though they do.
A freelancer isn't owed a reason as to why the work orders have stopped coming in, after all. A novelist doesn't get to know why a book was rejected, or a new contract not offered.
While firing a worker and rehiring him or her as a freelancer is a good way to experience from scrutiny from the feds (Department of Labor especially), it is also the case that companies can misclassify employees as freelancers without any history of formal employment. It happens in the start-up world not infrequently.
Would novelists possibly cross the line into being actual employees of the publisher? It's easy enough to imagine writers with long-term relationships with a single publisher, who work according to a fairly rigid schedule (one-three books a year, with mandatory outlines or pitches), who draw most of their income from this one publisher, who perform publicity functions on behalf of his or her books and thus the publisher, etc. But it is doubtful that the DoL would twig that the novelist is an employee...unless the publisher went too far.
What's going too far? Telling the novelist what to blog about, attempting to limit his or her political activities or expression of opinions on the issues of the day or even the quality of other books put out by the publisher, and other "workplace" things.
What recourse does a novelist have? Wouldn't our nasty nasty writer, if he or she were to get a phone call or an angry email or an "open letter" from a publisher saying, "Stop blogging about wanting to kick tiny children in the shins till they cry* or we'll cancel your contract!" have to straighten up and fly right and behave and say only nice things to the "customers."
No. Of course the novelist has some recourse, especially if he or she has had a long-term relationship with the publisher, draws a lot of his or her income from that publisher, and has a history of receiving directives from the publisher about his or her behavior. That recourse: file for unemployment compensation, and let the DOL figure out whether he or she deserves some checks or not, and let the IRS figure out if it deserves some checks or not.
Push too far, too hard, too often, and a publisher may just find its headcount is much larger than it believed. And even if not, the publisher still gets to experience the annoyance and hassle of an investigation. If a publisher wants to play the game of "You'll never eat lunch in this town again!" in public or even in writing, that could lead to the freelancer, do-this-or-you-are-fired email in hand, giving the unemployment-filing trick a whirl.
This is one reason why all those tweets and emails and blog-comment huffing about a publisher doing something or at least saying something about that nasty, awful person whose books they publish are almost never going to get any kind of public hey-there-this-is-evidence response from a publisher.
There are other reasons too—awful people, up to and including criminals and the more blood-soaked breed of politician, write books all the time. There's a massive tradition of carceral literature in existence. If you've attended college, you almost certainly read the writing of some criminals, or even material that was written inside prisons. Don't think that awful blog posts or sneakity-doo trickery on the Internet will faze many publishers. Think of James Frey, who lied to millions of people, who had to settle a lawsuit because his memoir was wall-to-wall lies, and who was yelled at by Oprah (patron saint of nice people) on her show. Where did he end up? At the head of his own YA fiction sweatshop, and getting movies made from "his" stuff.
Publishing just ain't about "nice" when it comes to its writers, and that is true in both how it treats writers, and what it can expect from writers.
*An entirely hypothetical example of a legitimately horrible subject for blogging.
Freelancers, including novelists, are quite vulnerable in many ways. No pensions, no unemployment insurance, none of the usual labor protections enjoyed by employees, and no corporation to pay a share of FICA taxes. This why the old trick of firing workers and then bringing them back as freelancers is profitable—there's a whole raft of expenses beyond the salary that freelancers don't get.
On the other hand, a company can run into problems if it fires workers and rehires them as freelancers to do their same exact old jobs. The IRS checks to see if freelancers, especially long-term freelancers, or freelancers who seem to only contract with one firm, or freelancers who make a lot of money, are actually misclassified employees.
To avoid getting hammered, there are rules companies follow when interacting with their freelancers. Companies:
1. try to keep freelancers from using company office space or resources
2. try to avoid hiring freelancers to do exactly the tasks that are part of an employee's job description
3. try to keep from closely managing freelancers, outside of the basics of benchmarks, deadlines, and broad descriptions of receivables
4. try to keep freelancers tasked to particular projects or programs rather than utilizing their labor in an open-ended way
And they don't treat freelancers like employees when it comes to public utterances, or social media, or anything like that. Of course, this isn't to say that companies don't make decisions based on a freelancer's public utterances or social media usage—of course they do. They just don't act as though they do.
A freelancer isn't owed a reason as to why the work orders have stopped coming in, after all. A novelist doesn't get to know why a book was rejected, or a new contract not offered.
While firing a worker and rehiring him or her as a freelancer is a good way to experience from scrutiny from the feds (Department of Labor especially), it is also the case that companies can misclassify employees as freelancers without any history of formal employment. It happens in the start-up world not infrequently.
Would novelists possibly cross the line into being actual employees of the publisher? It's easy enough to imagine writers with long-term relationships with a single publisher, who work according to a fairly rigid schedule (one-three books a year, with mandatory outlines or pitches), who draw most of their income from this one publisher, who perform publicity functions on behalf of his or her books and thus the publisher, etc. But it is doubtful that the DoL would twig that the novelist is an employee...unless the publisher went too far.
What's going too far? Telling the novelist what to blog about, attempting to limit his or her political activities or expression of opinions on the issues of the day or even the quality of other books put out by the publisher, and other "workplace" things.
What recourse does a novelist have? Wouldn't our nasty nasty writer, if he or she were to get a phone call or an angry email or an "open letter" from a publisher saying, "Stop blogging about wanting to kick tiny children in the shins till they cry* or we'll cancel your contract!" have to straighten up and fly right and behave and say only nice things to the "customers."
No. Of course the novelist has some recourse, especially if he or she has had a long-term relationship with the publisher, draws a lot of his or her income from that publisher, and has a history of receiving directives from the publisher about his or her behavior. That recourse: file for unemployment compensation, and let the DOL figure out whether he or she deserves some checks or not, and let the IRS figure out if it deserves some checks or not.
Push too far, too hard, too often, and a publisher may just find its headcount is much larger than it believed. And even if not, the publisher still gets to experience the annoyance and hassle of an investigation. If a publisher wants to play the game of "You'll never eat lunch in this town again!" in public or even in writing, that could lead to the freelancer, do-this-or-you-are-fired email in hand, giving the unemployment-filing trick a whirl.
This is one reason why all those tweets and emails and blog-comment huffing about a publisher doing something or at least saying something about that nasty, awful person whose books they publish are almost never going to get any kind of public hey-there-this-is-evidence response from a publisher.
There are other reasons too—awful people, up to and including criminals and the more blood-soaked breed of politician, write books all the time. There's a massive tradition of carceral literature in existence. If you've attended college, you almost certainly read the writing of some criminals, or even material that was written inside prisons. Don't think that awful blog posts or sneakity-doo trickery on the Internet will faze many publishers. Think of James Frey, who lied to millions of people, who had to settle a lawsuit because his memoir was wall-to-wall lies, and who was yelled at by Oprah (patron saint of nice people) on her show. Where did he end up? At the head of his own YA fiction sweatshop, and getting movies made from "his" stuff.
Publishing just ain't about "nice" when it comes to its writers, and that is true in both how it treats writers, and what it can expect from writers.
*An entirely hypothetical example of a legitimately horrible subject for blogging.
June 5, 2015
Kwangju
A wonderful personal and political essay on Kwangju, the uprising, the massacre, and history by Tim Shorrock, in The Nation:
In my view, the most damning document, obtained from the National Security Council, was the detailed minutes of a fateful White House meeting on May 22, 1980. During that meeting, which was led by Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter decided that the Kwangju uprising—despite the US knowledge that it had been sparked by the slaughter of unarmed civilian protesters - had to be crushed militarily. Five days after the meeting, South Korea’s crack 9th Army division rolled into the city and killed the remaining rebels holed up in the provincial capital building.
In my view, the most damning document, obtained from the National Security Council, was the detailed minutes of a fateful White House meeting on May 22, 1980. During that meeting, which was led by Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter decided that the Kwangju uprising—despite the US knowledge that it had been sparked by the slaughter of unarmed civilian protesters - had to be crushed militarily. Five days after the meeting, South Korea’s crack 9th Army division rolled into the city and killed the remaining rebels holed up in the provincial capital building.
Rocket to the Red Planet
Originally a comment over on File770.com (one of many many threads on the topic of the Hugo Awards) in response to the claim that all who oppose the Sad Puppy/Rabid Puppy Hugo slates are Marxists:
It's actually the Puppies who are the Marxists.
Their agent of change is a subaltern proletariat—those workaday beer-money fans who have gone unheard and who must be organized by an intellectual caste into a fighting force.
Puppy Leaders take the form of an advance vanguard of leaders who use democratic centralism in the form of slates, and cadre-only decisions to compose the slates, to exercise political power to a greater extent than their numbers would otherwise suggest. Though a numerical minority, they are the practical majority—just like, literally, the Bolsheviks ("majority" faction).
Their aesthetic is socialist realism—wary of experimental fiction, ambiguity, future pessimism, and all the "pink" stuff, the Puppies want meat-and-potato writing, clear and even didactic moralistic themes, and future optimism.
Work is secondary, position is primary: thus Puppies frequently demand to know why writers like Jim Butcher and Kevin J. Anderson haven't gotten Hugos before, since they are so popular. Actual explanations for why the particular books on the slates are important and award-worthy never seem to be made. It's pure proletkult: what is liked by the masses is the best.
A common Puppy theme is that writers who haven't earned Hugo nominations previously should get them, and that a broader fandom should be able to enjoy seeing their favorite writers win awards. For a group of people who sniff at "participation medals", this demand is essentially that: mass redistribution of wealth in a reputation economy.
There's a red star rising over Spokane, comrades! Forget the term puppy, we should be calling Brad and Larry Belka and Strelka!
PS: to learn more about Soviet space dogs, check out Belka, Why Don't You Bark? by Hideo Furukawa.
It's actually the Puppies who are the Marxists.
Their agent of change is a subaltern proletariat—those workaday beer-money fans who have gone unheard and who must be organized by an intellectual caste into a fighting force.
Puppy Leaders take the form of an advance vanguard of leaders who use democratic centralism in the form of slates, and cadre-only decisions to compose the slates, to exercise political power to a greater extent than their numbers would otherwise suggest. Though a numerical minority, they are the practical majority—just like, literally, the Bolsheviks ("majority" faction).
Their aesthetic is socialist realism—wary of experimental fiction, ambiguity, future pessimism, and all the "pink" stuff, the Puppies want meat-and-potato writing, clear and even didactic moralistic themes, and future optimism.
Work is secondary, position is primary: thus Puppies frequently demand to know why writers like Jim Butcher and Kevin J. Anderson haven't gotten Hugos before, since they are so popular. Actual explanations for why the particular books on the slates are important and award-worthy never seem to be made. It's pure proletkult: what is liked by the masses is the best.
A common Puppy theme is that writers who haven't earned Hugo nominations previously should get them, and that a broader fandom should be able to enjoy seeing their favorite writers win awards. For a group of people who sniff at "participation medals", this demand is essentially that: mass redistribution of wealth in a reputation economy.
There's a red star rising over Spokane, comrades! Forget the term puppy, we should be calling Brad and Larry Belka and Strelka!
PS: to learn more about Soviet space dogs, check out Belka, Why Don't You Bark? by Hideo Furukawa.
May 27, 2015
Wednesday Quick Notes
I am trying to finish a book in five days. Looks like it'll be ten. Maybe fifteen.
Gene Mapper got a nice review in Publishers Weekly, calling it a new kind of cyberpunk novel. We should have a handful of advance copies at the Bay Book Fest in two weeks.
Tim Shorrock, who wrote an essay for my first book, Kwangju Diary, was made an honorary citizen of the city this last week. He spoke briefly on the topic of the Kwangju Uprising.
Gene Mapper got a nice review in Publishers Weekly, calling it a new kind of cyberpunk novel. We should have a handful of advance copies at the Bay Book Fest in two weeks.
Tim Shorrock, who wrote an essay for my first book, Kwangju Diary, was made an honorary citizen of the city this last week. He spoke briefly on the topic of the Kwangju Uprising.
May 22, 2015
Friday Quick Notes
Here's a little book sale some of you might be interested in. Lethe Press is selling Spicy Slipstream Stories, which I edited with Jay Lake, for ten bucks! Down from fifteen! Includes stories by Carrie Vaughn, Ekaterina Sedia, and more. Also, all royalties go to Jay's family, as I signed them over to the estate after his passing last year.
Pretty psyched to have sold a Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder story to an anthology. More information to come in a week or so. It was an interesting thing to try, as Hodgson's originals are a bit weird and not widely read these days. Though my story veers from the Carnacki formula of his friends listening to him describe a recent case of exploring a possibly supernatural event, I tried to keep to the tone typical of the stories. Other things I've been working on lately have been going in very different directions. I occasionally end up some list or other of "Weird fiction" writers, though I never really overly associated myself with that scene despite all the Lovecraftian work I've done. I find digging into some old set of stories and trying to create something like it a formal challenge, but don't feel the sort of visceral connection a lot of contemporary writers working in the weird mode do to these old cats. I just like formal exercises and mimickry.
Forthcoming very soon from my day job is a new hard SF novel called Gene Mapper. If you're a book reviewer (a real one), drop me a line!
Pretty psyched to have sold a Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder story to an anthology. More information to come in a week or so. It was an interesting thing to try, as Hodgson's originals are a bit weird and not widely read these days. Though my story veers from the Carnacki formula of his friends listening to him describe a recent case of exploring a possibly supernatural event, I tried to keep to the tone typical of the stories. Other things I've been working on lately have been going in very different directions. I occasionally end up some list or other of "Weird fiction" writers, though I never really overly associated myself with that scene despite all the Lovecraftian work I've done. I find digging into some old set of stories and trying to create something like it a formal challenge, but don't feel the sort of visceral connection a lot of contemporary writers working in the weird mode do to these old cats. I just like formal exercises and mimickry.
Forthcoming very soon from my day job is a new hard SF novel called Gene Mapper. If you're a book reviewer (a real one), drop me a line!
May 19, 2015
"A Single Samurai" by Steve Diamond
"A Single Samurai" by Steve Diamond is a current nominee for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story. It's not one I'd read before, but when I downloaded my Hugo packet, I made a beeline for it.
Among the many uh issues with it is this one: it is a first-person narrative, told in the past tense, in which the narrator dies at the end.
Among the many uh issues with it is this one: it is a first-person narrative, told in the past tense, in which the narrator dies at the end.
May 18, 2015
Monday Quick Notes
I'm racing against a deadline...a December 2014 deadline, so not much has been going on. But here are a couple of things:
Michael Cisco's The Narrator has been re-released. It's a brilliant novel. Here's my blurb for the new edition:
“The Narrator is not a subversive fantasy novel. It eliminates all other fantasy novels and starts the genre anew. You must begin your journey here.” —Nick Mamatas, author of Move Under Ground and Love is the Law
Miéville and Vandermeer blurbed it too. Check it out!
Have you seen the Barry Graham guest-edited Tartan Noir issue of The Big Click? Well, you have now!
We're enjoying this trap EP about being a Muslim-American party girl druggy on SoundCloud: Ekim.
Thank God Mad Men is over. Never watched an episode, but the tweeting has been aggravating for years.
Michael Cisco's The Narrator has been re-released. It's a brilliant novel. Here's my blurb for the new edition:
“The Narrator is not a subversive fantasy novel. It eliminates all other fantasy novels and starts the genre anew. You must begin your journey here.” —Nick Mamatas, author of Move Under Ground and Love is the Law
Miéville and Vandermeer blurbed it too. Check it out!
Have you seen the Barry Graham guest-edited Tartan Noir issue of The Big Click? Well, you have now!
We're enjoying this trap EP about being a Muslim-American party girl druggy on SoundCloud: Ekim.
Thank God Mad Men is over. Never watched an episode, but the tweeting has been aggravating for years.
May 8, 2015
Good Writing vs Bad—Hugo Edition
I often use these two lines from Farewell, My Lovely in class, as an example of excellent writing:
"It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window."
I then ask what we know about the blonde? The older students know definitively that "it" is female—the e in blonde is the giveaway. The younger, more politically annoying aware students will often point to and object to the "it" in "It was a blonde." They have good eyes—the narrator is referring to a photograph of a blonde. And she's attractive, strikingly so, perhaps even archetypal in her blondeness.
And what do we know of the narrator: he's intelligent, creative, cynical, attempts to detach himself from his own animal nature, is irreligious but was likely religious at some point, likes to show off. We know more about him than about her. And there's also a rhythm that carries us on—the second sentence wouldn't work nearly so well without the first, which is a double iamb. (da DUM da DUM it WAS a BLONDE) Not bad!
And now, some sentences on a similar theme, from the Hugo-nominated novel Skin Game by Jim Butcher:
I’m pretty sure the temperature of the room didn’t literally go up, but I couldn’t have sworn to it. Some women have a quality about them, something completely intangible and indefinable, which gets called a lot of different things, depending on which society you’re in. I always think of it as heat, fire. It doesn’t have to be about sex, but it often is—and it definitely was with Hannah Ascher. I was extremely aware of her body, and her eyes. Her expression told me that she knew exactly what effect she was having on me, and that she didn’t mind having it in the least. I’d say that my libido kicked into overdrive, except that didn’t seem sufficient to cover the rush of purely physical hunger that suddenly hit me. Hannah Ascher was a damned attractive woman. And I’d been on that island for a long, long time.
What do we know of this woman? Well, she has eyes and a body and, uh, some kind of look on her face. But what we don't know what. Is it, "Yeah, you want this, baby, and I like that!" or is it "Haha, another dumb nerd with a boner. That's right, waddle over here, Pointdexter!"?
And what do we know of the narrator—he has an erection, and he likes to flap his lips. And he's the world's worst anthropologist. (What society are you in?)
Now, why would some readers look at this mess and think "Good writing!" Simple: they're being asked to do something very simple—think of a hot chick. What does she look like? Whatever you think hot chicks look like, duh! No rhythm, no clever figurative language, nothing impressive about the narrator, but the words say "think of a hot chick" and you do and that makes you happy and there you are.
The "hot chick" is rather an aside anyway. Think of a guy in a hat. Think of a guy inhaling deeply and using all his AWESOME POWER in ONE BLAST. Think of any big city—this one happens to be named Chicago despite having almost nothing in common with Chicago. (By way of contrast, you can to this day use Farewell, My Lovely as a map of LA's Westside.) It's just dumb sloppy bullshit, that has the advantage of being easy enough to write that anyone willing to do it can make deadlines easily.
Note that I'm not discussing the sexual politics of the scene, for the simple reason that any human attitude or endeavor can be described well, or it can be described poorly. Content is a matter of taste and context. One needn't be a so-called "SJW" to look at Butcher's prose and see nothing but a piss-poor Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a hardboiled detective looking back at you, with a crooked smile and far-off look in his eye as his dick gets hard.
Is it hot in here, or is it just the society we're in, mama?
"It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window."
I then ask what we know about the blonde? The older students know definitively that "it" is female—the e in blonde is the giveaway. The younger, more politically annoying aware students will often point to and object to the "it" in "It was a blonde." They have good eyes—the narrator is referring to a photograph of a blonde. And she's attractive, strikingly so, perhaps even archetypal in her blondeness.
And what do we know of the narrator: he's intelligent, creative, cynical, attempts to detach himself from his own animal nature, is irreligious but was likely religious at some point, likes to show off. We know more about him than about her. And there's also a rhythm that carries us on—the second sentence wouldn't work nearly so well without the first, which is a double iamb. (da DUM da DUM it WAS a BLONDE) Not bad!
And now, some sentences on a similar theme, from the Hugo-nominated novel Skin Game by Jim Butcher:
I’m pretty sure the temperature of the room didn’t literally go up, but I couldn’t have sworn to it. Some women have a quality about them, something completely intangible and indefinable, which gets called a lot of different things, depending on which society you’re in. I always think of it as heat, fire. It doesn’t have to be about sex, but it often is—and it definitely was with Hannah Ascher. I was extremely aware of her body, and her eyes. Her expression told me that she knew exactly what effect she was having on me, and that she didn’t mind having it in the least. I’d say that my libido kicked into overdrive, except that didn’t seem sufficient to cover the rush of purely physical hunger that suddenly hit me. Hannah Ascher was a damned attractive woman. And I’d been on that island for a long, long time.
What do we know of this woman? Well, she has eyes and a body and, uh, some kind of look on her face. But what we don't know what. Is it, "Yeah, you want this, baby, and I like that!" or is it "Haha, another dumb nerd with a boner. That's right, waddle over here, Pointdexter!"?
And what do we know of the narrator—he has an erection, and he likes to flap his lips. And he's the world's worst anthropologist. (What society are you in?)
Now, why would some readers look at this mess and think "Good writing!" Simple: they're being asked to do something very simple—think of a hot chick. What does she look like? Whatever you think hot chicks look like, duh! No rhythm, no clever figurative language, nothing impressive about the narrator, but the words say "think of a hot chick" and you do and that makes you happy and there you are.
The "hot chick" is rather an aside anyway. Think of a guy in a hat. Think of a guy inhaling deeply and using all his AWESOME POWER in ONE BLAST. Think of any big city—this one happens to be named Chicago despite having almost nothing in common with Chicago. (By way of contrast, you can to this day use Farewell, My Lovely as a map of LA's Westside.) It's just dumb sloppy bullshit, that has the advantage of being easy enough to write that anyone willing to do it can make deadlines easily.
Note that I'm not discussing the sexual politics of the scene, for the simple reason that any human attitude or endeavor can be described well, or it can be described poorly. Content is a matter of taste and context. One needn't be a so-called "SJW" to look at Butcher's prose and see nothing but a piss-poor Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a hardboiled detective looking back at you, with a crooked smile and far-off look in his eye as his dick gets hard.
Is it hot in here, or is it just the society we're in, mama?
May 5, 2015
Charlie Hebdo and PEN
Are you still Charlie? I never was, but the question of what to do bout Charlie Hebdo has come up again thanks to PEN America giving the French comic paper PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award. At the award dinner, famous writers typically play table hosts, but this year several have declined and have called for a boycott as the racist and Islamophobic imagery Charlie traffics in is beyond the pale.
Did you know...I'm actually a member of PEN America? And did you know that there is another universe, that is much like this one, except that in that universe I'm a well-respected literary writer? In this one, I'm just full of myself, so of course I wondered what I would do.
I'm against the sort of racist imagery used in Hebdo—it strikes me as a step too far. For whatever reason, and this may just me being steeped in a US cultural context, I can totally understand R. Crumb's infamous "When the Niggers Take Over America!" and "When the Goddamn Jews Take Over America!", though what is really telling is that the first strip can be most easily found online as a pirate scan on a pro-Nazi website, so I won't be linking. Crumb finally stopped drawing his Angelfood McSpade character because some things just cannot be fully repurposed.
Alison Bechdel has an interesting, if too short, blog post on why she has decided to step in and fill a seat opened by the boycotters. She links to this site, which attempts to explain the Hebdo cartoons. It's interesting, but ultimately not persuasive. Hebdo is left like Crumb, or Screw were left—they're libertines more than leftists, and juvenile. And few people end up more racist than an aging libertine who encounters a new generation of easily offended pearl-clutchers to piss off. Hebdo has routinely seen sales double or magazines sell out each time it has run controversial cartoons of Muhammad.
At the same time, there was a massacre. It was not a guerrilla counter to a military incursion, or a firefight in response to imperial takeover, exploitation, and occupation—and it certainly wasn't done with the tacit or explicit support of France's marginalized Muslim population. Deborah Eisenberg asked if PEN shouldn't give "the award retroactively to Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer and its satirical anti-Semitic cartoons?", which is one of those clever-sounding things that make zero sense when you think about it for more than two seconds. How many militaristic and oppressive Jewish states and international Jewish terror networks were there in the 1920s and 1930s? One can also tell the difference between a Nazi publication and a formerly leftist publication gone rotten from age and idiocy.
The main issue is one of the Spectacle: dubious attempts to explain the shooting as a response to provocation grope toward the issue, but miss it. Both the drawings and the the shootings are Spectacle. (Hebdo is specifically linked to century of bad taste as avant-garde, and there can be no greater critique of the commodity-form while encouraging its perpetuation than shooting up a place. How many Hebdo cartoons did you see in January and February?) How do you fight Spectacle? You demystify it.
So in the other universe where I was asked to attend the gala as a table host, I would, with an iPad full of cartoons by Hebdo, Crumb, the awful Mike Diana, Haderer, and the large number of cartoonists worldwide who have been imprisoned or tortured by various governments, and the folks who spend a grand to sit next to me can hear and see aaaall about 'em.
Well, until security removed me.
Did you know...I'm actually a member of PEN America? And did you know that there is another universe, that is much like this one, except that in that universe I'm a well-respected literary writer? In this one, I'm just full of myself, so of course I wondered what I would do.
I'm against the sort of racist imagery used in Hebdo—it strikes me as a step too far. For whatever reason, and this may just me being steeped in a US cultural context, I can totally understand R. Crumb's infamous "When the Niggers Take Over America!" and "When the Goddamn Jews Take Over America!", though what is really telling is that the first strip can be most easily found online as a pirate scan on a pro-Nazi website, so I won't be linking. Crumb finally stopped drawing his Angelfood McSpade character because some things just cannot be fully repurposed.
Alison Bechdel has an interesting, if too short, blog post on why she has decided to step in and fill a seat opened by the boycotters. She links to this site, which attempts to explain the Hebdo cartoons. It's interesting, but ultimately not persuasive. Hebdo is left like Crumb, or Screw were left—they're libertines more than leftists, and juvenile. And few people end up more racist than an aging libertine who encounters a new generation of easily offended pearl-clutchers to piss off. Hebdo has routinely seen sales double or magazines sell out each time it has run controversial cartoons of Muhammad.
At the same time, there was a massacre. It was not a guerrilla counter to a military incursion, or a firefight in response to imperial takeover, exploitation, and occupation—and it certainly wasn't done with the tacit or explicit support of France's marginalized Muslim population. Deborah Eisenberg asked if PEN shouldn't give "the award retroactively to Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer and its satirical anti-Semitic cartoons?", which is one of those clever-sounding things that make zero sense when you think about it for more than two seconds. How many militaristic and oppressive Jewish states and international Jewish terror networks were there in the 1920s and 1930s? One can also tell the difference between a Nazi publication and a formerly leftist publication gone rotten from age and idiocy.
The main issue is one of the Spectacle: dubious attempts to explain the shooting as a response to provocation grope toward the issue, but miss it. Both the drawings and the the shootings are Spectacle. (Hebdo is specifically linked to century of bad taste as avant-garde, and there can be no greater critique of the commodity-form while encouraging its perpetuation than shooting up a place. How many Hebdo cartoons did you see in January and February?) How do you fight Spectacle? You demystify it.
So in the other universe where I was asked to attend the gala as a table host, I would, with an iPad full of cartoons by Hebdo, Crumb, the awful Mike Diana, Haderer, and the large number of cartoonists worldwide who have been imprisoned or tortured by various governments, and the folks who spend a grand to sit next to me can hear and see aaaall about 'em.
Well, until security removed me.
Nick Mamatas's Blog
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