Victor D. Infante's Blog, page 185
December 18, 2010
Digression: DADT and Batwoman
I've been getting around to writing about Greg Rucka's marvelous depiction of Kate Kane, AKA Batwoman, an openly gay female comic book character. And I will. But a big part of her back story is her dismissal from the army for refusing to lie about her sexuality. So naturally, when the wonderful folks at the DC Women Kicking Ass blog posted this, I couldn't resist sharing:
Here's to the closure of a shameful chapter in our history. It took too long, and too many brave and loyal men and women had to suffer while we got our collective shit together, but I'm glad Don't Ask Don't Tell wasn't just repealed, it was repealed in such a way as to make it almost impossible to make it a political football as soon as we have a new administration.
To echo the DCWKA blog, here's to never having to post this image again.
Here's to the closure of a shameful chapter in our history. It took too long, and too many brave and loyal men and women had to suffer while we got our collective shit together, but I'm glad Don't Ask Don't Tell wasn't just repealed, it was repealed in such a way as to make it almost impossible to make it a political football as soon as we have a new administration.
To echo the DCWKA blog, here's to never having to post this image again.
Digression: Superman
As I run off to the Post Office and then to ARTSWorcester to meet up with some folks, I give you two wonderful Superman-related things that have come across my screen this morning.
First, the origins of Superman's greatest villains, done in the style of Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland.
Second, some thoughts about the absolute best "re-imagining" of Superman, John Henry Irons, AKA Steel.
First, the origins of Superman's greatest villains, done in the style of Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland.
Second, some thoughts about the absolute best "re-imagining" of Superman, John Henry Irons, AKA Steel.
December 17, 2010
The Problem With Superman (Part III)
In the end, I have to boil it down to myself and him, and where we stand in regard to one another. He's a fiction, of course, but I've lived comfortably with all sorts of fictions for years. No, he's the kind of fiction that gets under my skin. He held the moon in the sky when it was falling. He wrestled an angel to a standstill in San Francisco. He boxed Muhammad Ali on an alien space station. I've done none of these things. I have a bum knee that gets sore when the weather turns cold and wrestle with writer's block in Worcester, Massachusetts. (And indeed, I found it gratifying that he had at least one story, Under A Yellow Sun, that pretty much centered on him struggling with writer's block, too. Some things you can't bend-steel-in-your-bare-hands your way out of.) No, I like some of the stories, but still, I'm not ever going to be Superman, and I don't even think I particularly want a Superman in the world.
I wish I had Dave Macpherson's poem about Superman handy, riffing on his Jewish roots. I wish I could see the world the way those two boys living in Cleveland did, the world Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster saw, if only long enough to grasp it on more than an intellectual level. We talk about the Depression and the Holocaust, the absolute totality of poverty and existential threat, as if we understand them, but most of us really don't. There are parts of the world where they do understand these things with total clarity, but not in America. We're a culture that equates minor shifts in tax policies with totalitarianism, that sends soldiers off to wars in far off places that seem so distant from most of our day-to-day realities that they may as well be video game captures on the television screen. We have our suffering -- God, yes -- but perhaps collectively lack a sense of proportion.
It takes a different kind of era to give birth to a Superman, the kind where everything is even more hard-scrabble than it is now, and yet still somehow more black and white, at least on the surface. The sort of time when you really were looking for excuses to look up in the sky. No one wants to hear that phrase, right now. It heralds something darker. Hell, even the dream of X-Ray vision's been taken from us, replaced with full-body scanners at the airports. Pop culture, particularly comic books, are filled with Superman knockoffs, but really, that's all they are -- echoes of the 20th century, still reverberating off the walls.
And maybe it's a good thing that Superman's still whispering: the best of the last century, that promise of nobility in the face of lengthening shadows. And maybe it's important that he was alien, because maybe that sort of encompassing goodness, that unfathomable perfection, is something we really need to look to an other to understand, because finding it in ourselves? That seems like a tough sell. But there he is, and here we are, and somehow, it's certain he's not going anywhere. And maybe that's OK. History's difficult to silence, and if something from yesterday needs to ghost us into the future, it might as well be him.
I wish I had Dave Macpherson's poem about Superman handy, riffing on his Jewish roots. I wish I could see the world the way those two boys living in Cleveland did, the world Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster saw, if only long enough to grasp it on more than an intellectual level. We talk about the Depression and the Holocaust, the absolute totality of poverty and existential threat, as if we understand them, but most of us really don't. There are parts of the world where they do understand these things with total clarity, but not in America. We're a culture that equates minor shifts in tax policies with totalitarianism, that sends soldiers off to wars in far off places that seem so distant from most of our day-to-day realities that they may as well be video game captures on the television screen. We have our suffering -- God, yes -- but perhaps collectively lack a sense of proportion.
It takes a different kind of era to give birth to a Superman, the kind where everything is even more hard-scrabble than it is now, and yet still somehow more black and white, at least on the surface. The sort of time when you really were looking for excuses to look up in the sky. No one wants to hear that phrase, right now. It heralds something darker. Hell, even the dream of X-Ray vision's been taken from us, replaced with full-body scanners at the airports. Pop culture, particularly comic books, are filled with Superman knockoffs, but really, that's all they are -- echoes of the 20th century, still reverberating off the walls.
And maybe it's a good thing that Superman's still whispering: the best of the last century, that promise of nobility in the face of lengthening shadows. And maybe it's important that he was alien, because maybe that sort of encompassing goodness, that unfathomable perfection, is something we really need to look to an other to understand, because finding it in ourselves? That seems like a tough sell. But there he is, and here we are, and somehow, it's certain he's not going anywhere. And maybe that's OK. History's difficult to silence, and if something from yesterday needs to ghost us into the future, it might as well be him.
December 16, 2010
Odds & Ends!
No time for actual blogging right now, but here are a few interesting tidbits from around the world:
*No column this week. Casualty of my "staycation." But instead, I do have a number of fine recommendations in The Weekend Starts Now for your Worcester-area entertainment pleasure, including great shows by Slitstitch & the Clozapines, Valencia, Tester and the No More Ribcage Tour. And speaking of the latter, the young poets get a shout out in Nancy Sheehan's "Go" video (toward the end, after the 'Christmas Carol" stuff):
*American Idol winner Lee Dewyze probably won't be coming back to Worcester any time soon, what with a bad review from Craig Semon and a near-altercation at Nick's!
*The Guardian wonders if poetry has a role in protest politics. (I certainly hope so, because otherwise, I wasted rather a lot of my life.); Edward Winkleman ponders how aware artists should be of their own market; MightyGodKing.com offers some great thoughts on James Bond, which fits in well with all the "heroes" talk around these parts; Bleeding Cool News has a roundup of the kind of disturbing V for Vendetta invocations lately, from the silly to the tragic; and my friend Kristin revisits her Ten Lessons Learned in her first ten years of teaching.
There. That should tide you over for a while ...
*No column this week. Casualty of my "staycation." But instead, I do have a number of fine recommendations in The Weekend Starts Now for your Worcester-area entertainment pleasure, including great shows by Slitstitch & the Clozapines, Valencia, Tester and the No More Ribcage Tour. And speaking of the latter, the young poets get a shout out in Nancy Sheehan's "Go" video (toward the end, after the 'Christmas Carol" stuff):
*American Idol winner Lee Dewyze probably won't be coming back to Worcester any time soon, what with a bad review from Craig Semon and a near-altercation at Nick's!
*The Guardian wonders if poetry has a role in protest politics. (I certainly hope so, because otherwise, I wasted rather a lot of my life.); Edward Winkleman ponders how aware artists should be of their own market; MightyGodKing.com offers some great thoughts on James Bond, which fits in well with all the "heroes" talk around these parts; Bleeding Cool News has a roundup of the kind of disturbing V for Vendetta invocations lately, from the silly to the tragic; and my friend Kristin revisits her Ten Lessons Learned in her first ten years of teaching.
There. That should tide you over for a while ...
December 15, 2010
"Buckaroo Banzai" Digression
If you've only ever seen Peter Weller as the sleezy ex-cop in Dexter, you may not know that he is entirely made of awesome in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, one of my favorite films of all time.
It is cheesy, and this clip is no exeption. But dear God, do I love this film. May need to watch it again, soon.
It is cheesy, and this clip is no exeption. But dear God, do I love this film. May need to watch it again, soon.
The Problem With Superman (Part II)
It's not that I hate Superman. I don't. I actually rather like him when, for example, he appears in Justice League of America. I like the way he bounces off the other characters. Maybe it's that I prefer Superman with a good contrast. Certainly, I like quite a bit of the Batman/Superman team-ups that have appeared over the years. I don't know. All I know is that I inevitably drift out of Superman solo titles after a while, no matter how well-written. The only one I've kept up on at all in recent years is Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman, and I'm fairly sure that's squarely down to how much I like the writing.
It's not even that I don't appreciate Superman as a piece of iconography. Hell, if anything, I'm obsessed with Superman as a metaphor. Just off the top of my head, I know that several of the poems that appear in my book -- Andy Kaufman and Superman's Phone Booth, When Superman Was Resurrected, Warhol Days and There is No Word for 'Fear of Culture' -- reference symbols and metaphors from the comic quite liberally. And then there's the odd kinship I've always felt with Superman's creator, Jerry Siegel, who also lost his father in a violent incident in his youth, a parallel I've been aware of for some time, but wasn't moved to address in poetry until after reading Brad Meltzer's excellent thriller, The Book of Lies. Eventually, inspired in part by Meltzer's novel, I worked my feelings about the dark symmetry into my long poem, Boys' Own Stories, which is, as of yet, unpublished.
No, Superman's bouncing around my psyche, but oddly, I find I have little time for him in the day-to-day of my pop culture consumption. I find I want to love Superman more than I actually do. And I don't think I'm alone in that. Obviously, his comics sell well enough, I suppose, considering he's usually starring in several at any moment. And then there's Smallville, but somehow that always seems to succeed sort of despite being about Superman. Indeed, it seems to find its success in being just shy of being Superman. I hear good things about the cartoon, too, but then there was that tepid movie starring Brandon Routh, which didn't really seem to know where to go with the whole mythos. No, Superman's out there in the culture, and in force, but still ... I spend a lot of time talking to the sorts of people who are kind of fanatic about this stuff (some of them even blog about it!) and I never really get a sense of deep love for the character, and even when I do, I never get a sense of association. I get a sort of historical appreciation, or an affection for particular stories, but I never really find anyone who seems to see themselves in Superman.
Maybe it's the immense power. Certainly, it's always a challenge for the writers, keeping challenges coming. And from the point of view of trying to associate with the character, it's true, they make it a little tough, even as wish fulfillment. Certainly, everyone wishes they could leap tall buildings in a single bound, or change the course of mighty rivers with their hands, but I sometimes have to wonder if there's something odd about fantasizing about having that sort of power these days. Power -- that sort of power -- doesn't seem enough to ward off the dark anymore. America has enough nuclear missiles to destroy the world several times over, remember, but the airplanes at the center of the 9-11 tragedy were taken over by men with box cutters. Perhaps, in our conception of a hero these days, we look for a sort of power and execution of power that's a bit more nuanced. Maybe, deep down, we know power alone isn't enough.
And then there's the character himself, or at least, the popular conception of the hero: the boy scout, fighting for truth, justice and the American way. It seems, in these times which sort of teeter between firmly entrenched cynicism and an earnestness which seems desirable and yet a tad still out of reach, Superman's more of an aspiration that an association. You can see why he's loved, even if you really don't.
That's a lot of ambivalence, but icons sometimes do that. Especially when you get the appeal, but it's something you kind of wish you could feel more than intellectualize. Morrison, at the least, has always managed to sell it to me. His run on JLA, particularly, was one of my favorites, his final story pitting the JLA against a planet-destroying war machine from beyond the stars, with Superman trapped inside. Wracked by despair, he tells Batman and the Martian Manhunter something along the lines of, "All we ever wanted was to save Krypton and Mars. To save our parents. But we never did."
It's one of those things Morrison does well, letting the impossibly epic narrative fade into the background as he displays something hugely revealing about the characters in a matter of beats. And it's true, it's one of very few panels where I've really felt I've gotten the character, where I felt there was something there I could relate to, that sense of loss, that sense of trying to fill the hole inside with something positive.
The Routh movie used Superman as a Christ figure, and while that's a perfectly valid device, it fell a bit flat. Even as a self-avowed, non-churchgoing Christian, I don't particularly need my fictions to beat readers or viewers over the head with messages to which I may be somewhat sympathetic. Handled poorly, it cheapens everyone involved in the process. And the Routh film did handle it poorly, as have many other portrayals. But show me a guy with all the power in the world, who can still only even begin to fill the hole in his heart by doing good works and helping others? Yeah. That's a Superman I can get behind.
It's not even that I don't appreciate Superman as a piece of iconography. Hell, if anything, I'm obsessed with Superman as a metaphor. Just off the top of my head, I know that several of the poems that appear in my book -- Andy Kaufman and Superman's Phone Booth, When Superman Was Resurrected, Warhol Days and There is No Word for 'Fear of Culture' -- reference symbols and metaphors from the comic quite liberally. And then there's the odd kinship I've always felt with Superman's creator, Jerry Siegel, who also lost his father in a violent incident in his youth, a parallel I've been aware of for some time, but wasn't moved to address in poetry until after reading Brad Meltzer's excellent thriller, The Book of Lies. Eventually, inspired in part by Meltzer's novel, I worked my feelings about the dark symmetry into my long poem, Boys' Own Stories, which is, as of yet, unpublished.
No, Superman's bouncing around my psyche, but oddly, I find I have little time for him in the day-to-day of my pop culture consumption. I find I want to love Superman more than I actually do. And I don't think I'm alone in that. Obviously, his comics sell well enough, I suppose, considering he's usually starring in several at any moment. And then there's Smallville, but somehow that always seems to succeed sort of despite being about Superman. Indeed, it seems to find its success in being just shy of being Superman. I hear good things about the cartoon, too, but then there was that tepid movie starring Brandon Routh, which didn't really seem to know where to go with the whole mythos. No, Superman's out there in the culture, and in force, but still ... I spend a lot of time talking to the sorts of people who are kind of fanatic about this stuff (some of them even blog about it!) and I never really get a sense of deep love for the character, and even when I do, I never get a sense of association. I get a sort of historical appreciation, or an affection for particular stories, but I never really find anyone who seems to see themselves in Superman.
Maybe it's the immense power. Certainly, it's always a challenge for the writers, keeping challenges coming. And from the point of view of trying to associate with the character, it's true, they make it a little tough, even as wish fulfillment. Certainly, everyone wishes they could leap tall buildings in a single bound, or change the course of mighty rivers with their hands, but I sometimes have to wonder if there's something odd about fantasizing about having that sort of power these days. Power -- that sort of power -- doesn't seem enough to ward off the dark anymore. America has enough nuclear missiles to destroy the world several times over, remember, but the airplanes at the center of the 9-11 tragedy were taken over by men with box cutters. Perhaps, in our conception of a hero these days, we look for a sort of power and execution of power that's a bit more nuanced. Maybe, deep down, we know power alone isn't enough.
And then there's the character himself, or at least, the popular conception of the hero: the boy scout, fighting for truth, justice and the American way. It seems, in these times which sort of teeter between firmly entrenched cynicism and an earnestness which seems desirable and yet a tad still out of reach, Superman's more of an aspiration that an association. You can see why he's loved, even if you really don't.
That's a lot of ambivalence, but icons sometimes do that. Especially when you get the appeal, but it's something you kind of wish you could feel more than intellectualize. Morrison, at the least, has always managed to sell it to me. His run on JLA, particularly, was one of my favorites, his final story pitting the JLA against a planet-destroying war machine from beyond the stars, with Superman trapped inside. Wracked by despair, he tells Batman and the Martian Manhunter something along the lines of, "All we ever wanted was to save Krypton and Mars. To save our parents. But we never did."
It's one of those things Morrison does well, letting the impossibly epic narrative fade into the background as he displays something hugely revealing about the characters in a matter of beats. And it's true, it's one of very few panels where I've really felt I've gotten the character, where I felt there was something there I could relate to, that sense of loss, that sense of trying to fill the hole inside with something positive.
The Routh movie used Superman as a Christ figure, and while that's a perfectly valid device, it fell a bit flat. Even as a self-avowed, non-churchgoing Christian, I don't particularly need my fictions to beat readers or viewers over the head with messages to which I may be somewhat sympathetic. Handled poorly, it cheapens everyone involved in the process. And the Routh film did handle it poorly, as have many other portrayals. But show me a guy with all the power in the world, who can still only even begin to fill the hole in his heart by doing good works and helping others? Yeah. That's a Superman I can get behind.
December 14, 2010
The Problem With Superman (Part I)
I think one of the things that was annoying me most bout Docx's rant against genre literature in The Guardian is that it seems to largely miss the point of one of "low" art's great strengths: That, as little is often expected of it, it often has the freedom to germinate the ideas that eventually get refined into both high art and commercial art. It's no accident that comic books -- a medium where just about anything can happen -- are proving to be the backbone of the movie industry, with a great number of ideas and stories being generated that couldn't find homes in more "respectable" mediums. (I'm in danger of overusing quotes here, I know.) Never mind that Neil Gaiman's Sandman and the invasion of British writers into the American mainstream comic book publishing world just about legitimized the whole field. ("I say, old chap. Is that a comic book you're reading?" "No, no. It's a graphic novel!" "Oh. very well, then. carry on.") No, putting Gaiman, Alan Moore and the rest aside for a moment, the serious treatment of comic books, their history and their tropes has been a serious conversation in fiction, from Michael Chabon's brilliant The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay to Austin Grossman's excellent Soon I Will Be Invincible to my old friend Jeff DeRego's Union Dues short stories, the comic book and it's role in the culture has been fair game for years. It's part of the conversation. And that's just a sliver of the influence the derided genres have had on the rarefied "literary" end of the spectrum. It is not that one group of work is one thing, while the other is another, it's that there is a current running between the literary works, and in that current, even the humblest airplane thriller might have something important to say, even if its a kernel of a literary conceit, or a novelty of perspective.
High-end literary fiction often lives up to its title. It does. But it doesn't hold a monopoly on ideas, and a lot of the best ones, be they a lyrical device or the presentation of a metaphor, or just an effective execution of an age-old trope ... a lot of those get generate down in the pulp.
And it's with that in mind that my mind drifts to that most iconic of the early comic book heroes: Superman.
Just about every American knows Superman. Born on the doomed planet Krypton, rocketed to Earth by his scientist father. Raised in Kansas by a loving couple who taught him truth, justice and the American way. Uses his mighty alien powers for good. Flies, except on Smallville, because they didn't want to run up the effects budget or something. Yeah. we know the story. It's one of those stories, out of all the millions generated in the 20th Century, that we can almost guarantee will survive for ages to come, like Sherlock Holmes (which were basically pulp stories) or the works of Shakespeare (which were performed, more often than not) for commoners.) It's a hard truth to break to the literary elites: the stuff for commoners usually outlives everything else. It's sturdy, and it's built to touch some real need or instinct.
But I have a secret. I don't much care for Superman ....
High-end literary fiction often lives up to its title. It does. But it doesn't hold a monopoly on ideas, and a lot of the best ones, be they a lyrical device or the presentation of a metaphor, or just an effective execution of an age-old trope ... a lot of those get generate down in the pulp.
And it's with that in mind that my mind drifts to that most iconic of the early comic book heroes: Superman.
Just about every American knows Superman. Born on the doomed planet Krypton, rocketed to Earth by his scientist father. Raised in Kansas by a loving couple who taught him truth, justice and the American way. Uses his mighty alien powers for good. Flies, except on Smallville, because they didn't want to run up the effects budget or something. Yeah. we know the story. It's one of those stories, out of all the millions generated in the 20th Century, that we can almost guarantee will survive for ages to come, like Sherlock Holmes (which were basically pulp stories) or the works of Shakespeare (which were performed, more often than not) for commoners.) It's a hard truth to break to the literary elites: the stuff for commoners usually outlives everything else. It's sturdy, and it's built to touch some real need or instinct.
But I have a secret. I don't much care for Superman ....
December 13, 2010
Hey! Somebody Else Asking if Poetry is Dead! How Novel!
OK. To be fair, Anis Shivani is actually asking if poetry is at a "dead end," which is not exactly the same question. It is, however, just as tiresome.
More later, I'm sure. Save to say, I'm terribly, terribly bored with the same "provocative" questions being asked over and over again. They really do stop being provactive after awhile, and instead serve to keep conversations at a stand still.
As the English Beat once sang, "How come the feeling that it's always just started?" I'm burning out on hotshot literary critics and essayists who have a platform and yet can't think of anything more interesting to do with it than pose the same questions over and over again.
ETA: Link fixed!
More later, I'm sure. Save to say, I'm terribly, terribly bored with the same "provocative" questions being asked over and over again. They really do stop being provactive after awhile, and instead serve to keep conversations at a stand still.
As the English Beat once sang, "How come the feeling that it's always just started?" I'm burning out on hotshot literary critics and essayists who have a platform and yet can't think of anything more interesting to do with it than pose the same questions over and over again.
ETA: Link fixed!
December 12, 2010
More notes for Later ...
The literary world's full-on crazy is out in full strength today. Next up to the whipping post is Maria Bustillos, who displays her complete and utter lack of understanding of the Harry Potter story in the online essay, "Harry Potter and the Incredibly Conservative Aristocratic Children's Club." Light rebuttal from Elizabeth Minkel over in The New Yorker, but it still feels more needs to be said.
Notes for when I have a moment
Edward Docx inherits the mantle of Literary Twitness with his article for the Guardian, "Are Stieg Larsson and Dan Brown a match for literary fiction?: The Millennium trilogy and Da Vinci Code authors sell millions – but according to novelist Edward Docx their books are 'amateurish'. Here, he argues that even good genre fiction doesn't bear comparison with works of true literary merit."
Yes, I'll confess I felt guilty the last time I called someone a Literary Twit, but this time it's really deserved. Thankfully, Nick Mamatas already has the take down, because I'm pressed for time right now:
"The very worst of genre fiction—Dan Brown is namechecked in the headline—is compared to some ideal of literary fiction. Forget any book to book comparison, or any attempt to read the best of genre fiction and compare it to the best of contemporary literary fiction. Author Edward Docx is shameless in his error as well, going so far as to say that, 'proponents of genre fiction are not sincere about the limitations even of the best of what they do...' without demonstrating that those limitations exist (and that similar limitations do not exist in literary fiction.) Did you spot a second minor error, by the way? He conflates genre fiction's proponents with its authors."
Funny. I've made that exact point about arguments about poetry genres, too ...
Yes, I'll confess I felt guilty the last time I called someone a Literary Twit, but this time it's really deserved. Thankfully, Nick Mamatas already has the take down, because I'm pressed for time right now:
"The very worst of genre fiction—Dan Brown is namechecked in the headline—is compared to some ideal of literary fiction. Forget any book to book comparison, or any attempt to read the best of genre fiction and compare it to the best of contemporary literary fiction. Author Edward Docx is shameless in his error as well, going so far as to say that, 'proponents of genre fiction are not sincere about the limitations even of the best of what they do...' without demonstrating that those limitations exist (and that similar limitations do not exist in literary fiction.) Did you spot a second minor error, by the way? He conflates genre fiction's proponents with its authors."
Funny. I've made that exact point about arguments about poetry genres, too ...
