Max Baucus.
Baucus is the cornerstone of the Republican plan to destroy not only the chance for Universal Healthcare, but even its reputation, by, as Atrios aptly summarized it, "'point[ing] out that the bad ungenerous bill they encouraged Dems to put forward is, in fact, a bad ungenerous bill."
Pretend to negotiate, turn the bill into a piece of crap, and then turn around and say it's a piece of crap -- quite a strategy. But it wouldn't have worked without the help of destructive idiots like Baucus.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
Idle Thought of the Day
The process of artistic growth -- particular an increase in sheer technical skill -- is at odds with the desire for consistency in style and surface across an artistic work.
For shorter works, obviously, this is less of an issue -- one of the many reasons beginning writers are encouraged to write short stories. You learn a bit, finish a piece, and apply what you've learned to the next. In the idealization (almost certainly rarely if ever achieved in real life, like the straight line through the vaguely-linear scattershot of data points), each story is better than the next.
But for a longer work -- the kind that takes years to create -- it's more difficult. Here, if you get better -- and again, I'm thinking primarily of sheer technical skill here -- you get the odd situation where the ending is better done than the beginning. Oh, you can go and rewrite the beginning... but it's time-consuming, and it's a process that lends itself to indefinite extension (although the point of diminishing returns surely kicks in somewhere). Sure, if you've done a lot of shorter works first this is probably less of an issue (although I suspect that artists rarely work so long on a short scale that it's not an issue at all when they turn at last to the long). But what if you are drawn to longer works, for whatever reason? Then it's a bit of a dilemma -- or at least a problem.
For shorter works, obviously, this is less of an issue -- one of the many reasons beginning writers are encouraged to write short stories. You learn a bit, finish a piece, and apply what you've learned to the next. In the idealization (almost certainly rarely if ever achieved in real life, like the straight line through the vaguely-linear scattershot of data points), each story is better than the next.
But for a longer work -- the kind that takes years to create -- it's more difficult. Here, if you get better -- and again, I'm thinking primarily of sheer technical skill here -- you get the odd situation where the ending is better done than the beginning. Oh, you can go and rewrite the beginning... but it's time-consuming, and it's a process that lends itself to indefinite extension (although the point of diminishing returns surely kicks in somewhere). Sure, if you've done a lot of shorter works first this is probably less of an issue (although I suspect that artists rarely work so long on a short scale that it's not an issue at all when they turn at last to the long). But what if you are drawn to longer works, for whatever reason? Then it's a bit of a dilemma -- or at least a problem.
The State of the Health Care Mess As Obama Prepares His Speech
...is very well (and wittily, and accurately (hence, extremely depressingly)) encapsulated by Matt Taibbi's article from last week, "Sick and Wrong", now posted online (via). Taibbi has been publishing bits and pieces on his blog over the last month or two, but having it all in one place is very powerful.
Limbaugh and the death panel lies and so on are just an aside in this piece -- as, for that matter, are most of the Republicans. Taibbi focuses on Democratic incompetence and succumbing to bribery have gotten them in the position of most likely doing the worst possible thing -- pushing a bad series of harmful proposals that will be called reform (so they can say they did something) which actually make the situation worse. And since facts on the ground do matter, Republicans will be able to run against it and win. As Taibbi says near his conclusion:
John Nichols has a nice little piece of wishful thinking up about how it's not too late, but it's about as convincing as, well, the idea that any piece of reform strongly supported by insurance companies will do any good.
My guess (and I'll try to write this up in fuller form if I can find time (don't hold your breath)) is that Obama's chance of being a great president was blown in the first few months of his administration, when he spectacularly failed at seizing a unique cultural moment in which a host of coincidental factors (the utter collapse of the Bush presidency and the consequent exposure of conservatism's consequences, Obama's own political talents and inspired campaign, and the terrible shape of the country on the day he took office which cried out for real reform) gave the opening to make a strong case for liberalism of a type not seen since the heyday of the Great Society. If he had seized that moment -- and I think use of the bully pulpit would have been the key move here (which he frittered away on bipartisanship with the minions of Rush Limbaugh (!)) -- he could have done something deep and transformational for this country -- and been a great president.
He blew that. Maybe he'll get another chance -- some crisis or issue which he could handle well -- but I think the odds are he let the great president train leave the station without boarding.
Perhaps we'll find out tonight whether or not Obama is going to piss away his chance at being a good president. At the moment, I'm guessing the odds are high.
But who knows. Say what you will about him, the man can give a speech. Maybe he'll pull it off.
Still, as Taibbi says, the health care reform effort has "amounted to a referendum on whether or not we actually have a functioning government." He ain't optimistic -- but I fear he's right.
So read Matt Taibbi and weep -- but do read it.
Limbaugh and the death panel lies and so on are just an aside in this piece -- as, for that matter, are most of the Republicans. Taibbi focuses on Democratic incompetence and succumbing to bribery have gotten them in the position of most likely doing the worst possible thing -- pushing a bad series of harmful proposals that will be called reform (so they can say they did something) which actually make the situation worse. And since facts on the ground do matter, Republicans will be able to run against it and win. As Taibbi says near his conclusion:
All that's left of health care reform is a collection of piece-of-shit, weakling proposals that are preposterously expensive and contain almost nothing meaningful — and that set of proposals, meanwhile, is being negotiated down even further by the endlessly negating Group of Six. It is a fight to the finish now between Really Bad and Even Worse. And it's virtually guaranteed to sour the public on reform efforts for years to come.... "It's going to give universal health care a bad name."-- which, for the insurance industry executives who have done so much to get us where we are now, may have been a big part of the point.
John Nichols has a nice little piece of wishful thinking up about how it's not too late, but it's about as convincing as, well, the idea that any piece of reform strongly supported by insurance companies will do any good.
My guess (and I'll try to write this up in fuller form if I can find time (don't hold your breath)) is that Obama's chance of being a great president was blown in the first few months of his administration, when he spectacularly failed at seizing a unique cultural moment in which a host of coincidental factors (the utter collapse of the Bush presidency and the consequent exposure of conservatism's consequences, Obama's own political talents and inspired campaign, and the terrible shape of the country on the day he took office which cried out for real reform) gave the opening to make a strong case for liberalism of a type not seen since the heyday of the Great Society. If he had seized that moment -- and I think use of the bully pulpit would have been the key move here (which he frittered away on bipartisanship with the minions of Rush Limbaugh (!)) -- he could have done something deep and transformational for this country -- and been a great president.
He blew that. Maybe he'll get another chance -- some crisis or issue which he could handle well -- but I think the odds are he let the great president train leave the station without boarding.
Perhaps we'll find out tonight whether or not Obama is going to piss away his chance at being a good president. At the moment, I'm guessing the odds are high.
But who knows. Say what you will about him, the man can give a speech. Maybe he'll pull it off.
Still, as Taibbi says, the health care reform effort has "amounted to a referendum on whether or not we actually have a functioning government." He ain't optimistic -- but I fear he's right.
So read Matt Taibbi and weep -- but do read it.
Monday, September 07, 2009
From the Files of Things That Make Me Grit My Teeth: Implied Lies
...such as in this claim from Ross Douthat's latest column:
The notion that we "spend nearly twice as much on health care as any other developed nation" out of a "quest for mastery over mortality" is so ludicrous, so dishonest that it's hard to know where to start. Maybe with this: it's flat-out false. We don't spend that much for that reason, since we actually achieve less "mastery over mortality" -- that is, we live worse and die younger -- than in countries with better health care systems. Or, at the very least, if you want to claim that we're doing it for that reason, you have to recognize that we're achieving the opposite of what we're aiming for. But we spend twice as much... and get worse results, because health care works better with one of the universal systems that all other industrial countries have.
Douthat implies that we spend twice as much to get better results -- but that's not true, and he has to know it: we spend twice as much to get worse results. We won't change because of vested interests in the status quo, that are willing to let vast numbers of citizens go uninsured (how much mastery over mortality do they have?) and the rest get bad quality insurance, rather than give up some profits. But his claim makes no sense without the implication -- again, the false implication that he must know to be false -- that we spend twice as much and that's a good thing, we get better results. If he acknowledged that we spend twice as much for a crappy health care system -- certainly compared to countries with good ones like France and Germany, although apparently we even get worse results (by which I mean: less mastery over mortality, i.e. people die younger) than countries with weaker ones like Canada and England -- then his sentence would make no sense.
So he's just lying.
Douthat's claim is not only mendacious but pernicious, spreading lies about why we have a bad system which are themselves part of why we have a bad system. We don't spend too much out of some supposed "quest for mastery over mortality" (a bit of Douthat's cultural conservatism that, rather than any respect for truth, caused him to write such nonsense), but because conservatives have been demagoging health care systems that are not only cheaper but also better than the U.S. system for decades (e.g. single payer). We spend twice as much because conservatives have, since Harry Truman's day, spread lies and deceit about the nature of government-paid-for health care. Lies and deceit such as they spread when they opposed Medicare -- pretty much the precise same lies and deceit that they are using now to attempt to derail Obama's (pretty half-assed at best from a liberal point of view, but better than nothing) health care initiative.
Lies and deceit like those Douthat is now spreading in the New York Times.
He probably phrased this lie in such a way as to make it fly under the radar of a factual correction -- he can always claim that it's a matter of opinion (itself false) -- but he is spreading lies here. His own deceit, and those of his ideological fellow-travelers, are in fact the factual situation which he claims to explain -- why we spend twice as much.
Our move toward physician-assisted suicide springs from the same quest for mastery over mortality that leads us to spend nearly twice as much on health care as any other developed nation.His column isn't about health care primarily, it's about physician assisted suicide, but the staggering dishonesty in this sentence is hard to get passed. (And in truth, I suspect people are more swayed by casual and implied deceits than by direct ones -- far more effective to lie as Douthat does here, in passing, and by assuming the falsehood you wish your readers to swallow.)
The notion that we "spend nearly twice as much on health care as any other developed nation" out of a "quest for mastery over mortality" is so ludicrous, so dishonest that it's hard to know where to start. Maybe with this: it's flat-out false. We don't spend that much for that reason, since we actually achieve less "mastery over mortality" -- that is, we live worse and die younger -- than in countries with better health care systems. Or, at the very least, if you want to claim that we're doing it for that reason, you have to recognize that we're achieving the opposite of what we're aiming for. But we spend twice as much... and get worse results, because health care works better with one of the universal systems that all other industrial countries have.
Douthat implies that we spend twice as much to get better results -- but that's not true, and he has to know it: we spend twice as much to get worse results. We won't change because of vested interests in the status quo, that are willing to let vast numbers of citizens go uninsured (how much mastery over mortality do they have?) and the rest get bad quality insurance, rather than give up some profits. But his claim makes no sense without the implication -- again, the false implication that he must know to be false -- that we spend twice as much and that's a good thing, we get better results. If he acknowledged that we spend twice as much for a crappy health care system -- certainly compared to countries with good ones like France and Germany, although apparently we even get worse results (by which I mean: less mastery over mortality, i.e. people die younger) than countries with weaker ones like Canada and England -- then his sentence would make no sense.
So he's just lying.
Douthat's claim is not only mendacious but pernicious, spreading lies about why we have a bad system which are themselves part of why we have a bad system. We don't spend too much out of some supposed "quest for mastery over mortality" (a bit of Douthat's cultural conservatism that, rather than any respect for truth, caused him to write such nonsense), but because conservatives have been demagoging health care systems that are not only cheaper but also better than the U.S. system for decades (e.g. single payer). We spend twice as much because conservatives have, since Harry Truman's day, spread lies and deceit about the nature of government-paid-for health care. Lies and deceit such as they spread when they opposed Medicare -- pretty much the precise same lies and deceit that they are using now to attempt to derail Obama's (pretty half-assed at best from a liberal point of view, but better than nothing) health care initiative.
Lies and deceit like those Douthat is now spreading in the New York Times.
He probably phrased this lie in such a way as to make it fly under the radar of a factual correction -- he can always claim that it's a matter of opinion (itself false) -- but he is spreading lies here. His own deceit, and those of his ideological fellow-travelers, are in fact the factual situation which he claims to explain -- why we spend twice as much.
Sunday, September 06, 2009
The Other Graphic Novel of the Year, Coming Next Month
The graphic novel of the year, of course, is David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp. This isn't my judgment, since I haven't read it yet (for the usual reason), but I have a copy and am looking forward to doing so, since I preordered it as soon as I heard about it -- basically, they had me at "Mazzucchelli". (I'm a fan of his from way back.) But everyone else seems to think it's the graphic novel of the year, and I bet they're right.* I'm looking forward to this one -- one reason I haven't read it yet is I want to find the time and space to do it properly. (Which means it might be years, I suppose, until I get to it...)
But then there's the other graphic novel of the year, which I just saw (here, via) is actually coming out next month: the long-awaited, much-rumored adaptation of the book of Genesis by none other than R. Crumb.
Now, I'm not quite as unmitigated a Crumb fan as I am a Mazzucchelli fan. I'm certainly convinced that Crumb is a brilliant draftsman, with a fine eye for social detail. But I'm not sure he's the best writer ever. As I've said before, my favorite Crumb comics are those where he's working from other people's works -- his collaborations with writer Harvey Pekar, his adaptations of Kafka and others, and so forth, plus little oddities like his 8-page piece on Philip K Dick, and of course his short history of America. Because in general, his more characteristic fare leaves me somewhat cold (however well drawn).
But it seems to me like adapting Genesis is the task that Crumb was born for. First, it's an adaptation, someone else's words (I believe that he is incorporating the entire text -- based on but not strictly adherent to Robert Alter's translation -- into his work), which as I said are the places where I think that Crumb really shines. While Bible adaptations might have, at first blush, an awkward air of the classics illustrated, stories-for-kids to it, this isn't necessarily so at all: there have been absolutely brilliant comics adaptations of biblical books published recently, and I'm sure Crumb will do as good a job (albeit in an entirely different way). And of course Crumb isn't going to pretty up the stories the way that children's adaptations' do; on the contrary, I think it's central to Crumb's project that putting the often violent, often sexual (often in a disturbing way) words of Genesis into images force us to confront their meaning in ways that we can avoid when reading all-too-familiar words. As Jeet Heer writes in his piece on the book:
But I have a bit more to go on here. Reading excerpts from an independent fictional architecture like Mazzucchelli's graphic novel can give you a sense of the style, but not much more: it's a narrative whole that needs to be confronted as such, and an unfamiliar narrative that one needs to encounter on its own terms. A biblical adaptation, on the other hand -- while doubtless having ongoing themes and an overarching artistic coherence that adds much to the work when read in its entirety -- is easier to read in bits and pieces. The original text is episodic; for a great many of us, the stories are deeply familiar, so that we can mentally place them in context without much trouble -- in fact, many of us are used to reading the text in bits and pieces anyway. And so on.
The only official excerpt published in English, that I've been able to find, is the eight-page excerpt published in The New Yorker -- which, alas, is not officially online (the link above just tries to get you to subscribe). A blogger has posted it here, although who knows how long that will get past the copyright police. There's also a photo of a two-page spread of the issue here, but it's hard to see well and doesn't represent the project in a fair way.
But if you read French, there's a lot more online -- and this requires a fairly low-level knowledge of the language, at least for those who are familiar with the original text (normally I'd need a dictionary and a fair amount of time to read a text like this, at least well; but here, with the English text so familiar, it is quite easy to read quickly without any assistance.) A French journal, Télérama, is publishing a bunch of large chunks of it. (via) So you can go ahead and check out Crumb's versions of the stories of Adam and Eve, The Flood and Sodom and Gomorrah, the Binding of Isaac and several others. It's great stuff; check out this page from the destruction of Sodom:
It's a great time for the graphic novel. And Crumb's Genesis, like (if reputation is anything to go by) Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp, are two of the reasons for it.
Update: I've now read Asterios Polyp. I may try to write up my thoughts later -- hopefully after another reading (or two) -- but the brief version is: it's fabulous. If you're reading it -- no, if you're rereading it, too much distraction (& possible spoilers) for a first reading -- check out these annotations (via, which links to a lot of other resources too.)
_____
*I only hope it's success means that someone finally reprints Mazzucchelli's stories from Rubber Blanket #1 & 2 in some accessible form...
But then there's the other graphic novel of the year, which I just saw (here, via) is actually coming out next month: the long-awaited, much-rumored adaptation of the book of Genesis by none other than R. Crumb.
Now, I'm not quite as unmitigated a Crumb fan as I am a Mazzucchelli fan. I'm certainly convinced that Crumb is a brilliant draftsman, with a fine eye for social detail. But I'm not sure he's the best writer ever. As I've said before, my favorite Crumb comics are those where he's working from other people's works -- his collaborations with writer Harvey Pekar, his adaptations of Kafka and others, and so forth, plus little oddities like his 8-page piece on Philip K Dick, and of course his short history of America. Because in general, his more characteristic fare leaves me somewhat cold (however well drawn).
But it seems to me like adapting Genesis is the task that Crumb was born for. First, it's an adaptation, someone else's words (I believe that he is incorporating the entire text -- based on but not strictly adherent to Robert Alter's translation -- into his work), which as I said are the places where I think that Crumb really shines. While Bible adaptations might have, at first blush, an awkward air of the classics illustrated, stories-for-kids to it, this isn't necessarily so at all: there have been absolutely brilliant comics adaptations of biblical books published recently, and I'm sure Crumb will do as good a job (albeit in an entirely different way). And of course Crumb isn't going to pretty up the stories the way that children's adaptations' do; on the contrary, I think it's central to Crumb's project that putting the often violent, often sexual (often in a disturbing way) words of Genesis into images force us to confront their meaning in ways that we can avoid when reading all-too-familiar words. As Jeet Heer writes in his piece on the book:
As he did in earlier adaptations, [Crumb] embraces a volatile, often abrasive text soaked through with lust and blood.... The completeness of this version is important, because, as Crumb rightly complains, every other comics adaptation seems to have been streamlined and modernized, often to make the shocking old stories palatable to readers, especially kids.... Unlike these bowdlerized versions, Crumb’s doesn’t hide the fact that the holy book is filled with stories of incest (Abraham marrying his half sister, Sarah; Lot being seduced by his daughter), frenzied bloodlust (God’s various acts of mass murder, the terrible slaughter of a village after a young boy seduces Jacob’s daughter, Dinah), and general unsavory behavior (the theme of fraternal violence that runs from the story of Cain and Abel to the concluding saga of Joseph and his spiteful siblings). Images can cut deeper than words, especially when those images are executed by so psychologically alert an artist as Crumb. It’s one thing to read about the daughters of Lot seducing their father in a desperate attempt to repopulate their tribe after the destruction of Sodom; it’s quite another to see Crumb’s depiction of the sodden Lot, his eyes in a daze, straddled by a zaftig Amazon who looks vaguely troubled by her reproductive mission.So like Asterios Polyp, I expect this one to be great.
But I have a bit more to go on here. Reading excerpts from an independent fictional architecture like Mazzucchelli's graphic novel can give you a sense of the style, but not much more: it's a narrative whole that needs to be confronted as such, and an unfamiliar narrative that one needs to encounter on its own terms. A biblical adaptation, on the other hand -- while doubtless having ongoing themes and an overarching artistic coherence that adds much to the work when read in its entirety -- is easier to read in bits and pieces. The original text is episodic; for a great many of us, the stories are deeply familiar, so that we can mentally place them in context without much trouble -- in fact, many of us are used to reading the text in bits and pieces anyway. And so on.
The only official excerpt published in English, that I've been able to find, is the eight-page excerpt published in The New Yorker -- which, alas, is not officially online (the link above just tries to get you to subscribe). A blogger has posted it here, although who knows how long that will get past the copyright police. There's also a photo of a two-page spread of the issue here, but it's hard to see well and doesn't represent the project in a fair way.
But if you read French, there's a lot more online -- and this requires a fairly low-level knowledge of the language, at least for those who are familiar with the original text (normally I'd need a dictionary and a fair amount of time to read a text like this, at least well; but here, with the English text so familiar, it is quite easy to read quickly without any assistance.) A French journal, Télérama, is publishing a bunch of large chunks of it. (via) So you can go ahead and check out Crumb's versions of the stories of Adam and Eve, The Flood and Sodom and Gomorrah, the Binding of Isaac and several others. It's great stuff; check out this page from the destruction of Sodom:
It's a great time for the graphic novel. And Crumb's Genesis, like (if reputation is anything to go by) Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp, are two of the reasons for it.
Update: I've now read Asterios Polyp. I may try to write up my thoughts later -- hopefully after another reading (or two) -- but the brief version is: it's fabulous. If you're reading it -- no, if you're rereading it, too much distraction (& possible spoilers) for a first reading -- check out these annotations (via, which links to a lot of other resources too.)
_____
*I only hope it's success means that someone finally reprints Mazzucchelli's stories from Rubber Blanket #1 & 2 in some accessible form...
Saturday, September 05, 2009
Quote of the Day: Heather and Bob's Wedding Edition
And what his chiefe end was of creating woman to be joynd with man, his own instituting words declare, and are infallible to informe us what is mariage, and what is no mariage: unlesse we can think them set there to no purpose: It is not good, saith he, that man should be alone; I will make him a help meet for him. From which words so plain, lesse cannot be concluded, nor is by any learned Interpreter, then that in Gods intention a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and the noblest end of mariage.
-- John Milton
Friday, September 04, 2009
Another Example of How the Alteration of a Single Word Can Produce an Entirely Different Poem
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
Nintendo, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night...
-- Apologies to Alan Ginsburg
And this doesn't even get to the line
where it really gets good.who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
(This sort of game can be endlessly multiplied, of course. My wife, for example, suggested that a better version would be created by swapping in "iPhone" instead of "Nintendo".)
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Two Big Comics PDFs
In the last week or so, two long-time bloggers have published some of their work in pdf form; anyone who's interested in comics should check them out (and possibly some others of you for the first one; read on...).
Andrew Rilstone -- a fabulous writer who's works I've had occasion to recommend before -- just published a... well, what would you call it? Ebook? Booklet? Zine? I'm not quite sure. But it's called Who Sent the Sentinels?, it's 60 pages long (formatted for printing if you feel like it) and it's composed of a series of short essays which add up to an extended analysis of Watchmen, both the comic and the movie, with a lot of interesting things to say about earlier comics (particularly Marvel during the era of Stan Lee (which Rilstone has written about previously)). I don't know if I'd go so far as Eddie Campbell and say that it was "the finest analysis of Watchmen that I have so far read," but it's pretty damn good, filled with insights, and very well written to boot. (Although I could have done without the first section, frankly... or at least with less of it. Maybe I need to reread it.) Anyone with an interest in Watchmen -- which, properly, goes far beyond people with an interest in comics -- should check out Rilstone's fabulous work. The post to download his work is here; this is a direct pdf link. (Perhaps I should note I haven't seen the movie yet, and don't plan to, so my reading of his work is based mostly on his reading of the comic; if you know the movie, you'll have a different take on it. Doesn't matter; it's a fabulous whatever-it-is.)
The second pdf is of somewhat more specialized interest, but really anyone who is interested in comics should check it out. Alan David Doane has been blogging and writing about comics for a long time now, and among other things he's interviewed a very large number of top comics creators over the last decade. He's just collected a decade's worth of interviews into a single 291 page (!) ebook, nicely formatted, and available for free at his blog (this is a direct pdf link). I haven't read them all yet, but they're fascinating to browse, and the odd line dating the interview (e.g. Bendis, "...I'm doing a little arc on Daredevil...") adds to the charm of the thing. If you are interested in interviews with comics creators, check it out.
Finally, while it's almost certainly a coincidence, it's hard not to pause on the fact that two big, important pdfs appeared so close upon each other, and wonder if this is a format poised for future growth as far as free-internet writing goes. The pdf book does seem (for odd psychological reasons having little or nothing to do with practical access) more substantial than a series of blog posts.
Andrew Rilstone -- a fabulous writer who's works I've had occasion to recommend before -- just published a... well, what would you call it? Ebook? Booklet? Zine? I'm not quite sure. But it's called Who Sent the Sentinels?, it's 60 pages long (formatted for printing if you feel like it) and it's composed of a series of short essays which add up to an extended analysis of Watchmen, both the comic and the movie, with a lot of interesting things to say about earlier comics (particularly Marvel during the era of Stan Lee (which Rilstone has written about previously)). I don't know if I'd go so far as Eddie Campbell and say that it was "the finest analysis of Watchmen that I have so far read," but it's pretty damn good, filled with insights, and very well written to boot. (Although I could have done without the first section, frankly... or at least with less of it. Maybe I need to reread it.) Anyone with an interest in Watchmen -- which, properly, goes far beyond people with an interest in comics -- should check out Rilstone's fabulous work. The post to download his work is here; this is a direct pdf link. (Perhaps I should note I haven't seen the movie yet, and don't plan to, so my reading of his work is based mostly on his reading of the comic; if you know the movie, you'll have a different take on it. Doesn't matter; it's a fabulous whatever-it-is.)
The second pdf is of somewhat more specialized interest, but really anyone who is interested in comics should check it out. Alan David Doane has been blogging and writing about comics for a long time now, and among other things he's interviewed a very large number of top comics creators over the last decade. He's just collected a decade's worth of interviews into a single 291 page (!) ebook, nicely formatted, and available for free at his blog (this is a direct pdf link). I haven't read them all yet, but they're fascinating to browse, and the odd line dating the interview (e.g. Bendis, "...I'm doing a little arc on Daredevil...") adds to the charm of the thing. If you are interested in interviews with comics creators, check it out.
Finally, while it's almost certainly a coincidence, it's hard not to pause on the fact that two big, important pdfs appeared so close upon each other, and wonder if this is a format poised for future growth as far as free-internet writing goes. The pdf book does seem (for odd psychological reasons having little or nothing to do with practical access) more substantial than a series of blog posts.
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
Sometimes Truth Accidentally Slips Through
"[I]t’s unusual only because we so rarely hold large corporations to the rules."
-- The New York Times, August 31, 2009
(Well, ok, the article is quoting someone -- Professor Katherine Porter of UC Berkeley -- but still.)
-- The New York Times, August 31, 2009
(Well, ok, the article is quoting someone -- Professor Katherine Porter of UC Berkeley -- but still.)
Monday, August 31, 2009
Quote of the Day
BUFFY: Does it ever get easy?
GILES: You mean life?
BUFFY: Yeah. Does it get easy?
GILES: What do you want me to say?
BUFFY: Lie to me.
GILES: Yes, it's terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies, and everybody lives happily ever after.
BUFFY: Liar.
-- Joss Whedon, "Lie to Me"
(Buffy the Vampire Slayer, episode 2.07)
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Quote of the Day
To return to the enlightened bishops and theologians, it would be nice if they’d put a bit more effort into combating the anti-scientific nonsense that they deplore. All too many preachers, while agreeing that evolution is true and Adam and Eve never existed, will then blithely go into the pulpit and make some moral or theological point about Adam and Eve in their sermons without once mentioning that, of course, Adam and Eve never actually existed! If challenged, they will protest that they intended a purely “symbolic” meaning, perhaps something to do with “original sin”, or the virtues of innocence. They may add witheringly that, obviously, nobody would be so foolish as to take their words literally. But do their congregations know that? How is the person in the pew, or on the prayer-mat, supposed to know which bits of scripture to take literally, which symbolically? Is it really so easy for an uneducated churchgoer to guess? In all too many cases the answer is clearly no, and anybody could be forgiven for feeling confused.
-- Richard Dawkins, published excerpt from The Greatest Show on Earth (via)
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Quote of the Day: The World-in-Law
(The "fairy fruit" mentioned in the passage below is key in the fantasy novel these paragraphs are from, and is ultimately complex and elusive; but to understand this quote all you need do is to think of it as an illegal hallucinogenic, euphemistically referred to in legal contexts as "silk".)
"What was the Law invented for? What are you driving at, Nat? I suppose it was invented to prevent rapine, and robbery, and murder, and all that sort of thing."
"But you remember what my father said about the Law being man's substitute for fairy fruit? Fairy things are all of them supposed to be shadowy cheats -- delusion. But man can't live without delusion, so he creates for himself another form of delusion -- the world-in-law, subject to no other law but the will of man, where man juggles with facts to his heart's content, and says, 'If I choose I shall make a man old enough to be my father my son, and if I choose I shall turn fruit into silk and black into white, for this is the world I have made myself, and here I am master.' And he creates a monster to inhabit it -- the man-in-law, who is like a mechanical toy and always behaves exactly as he is expected to behave, and is no more like you and me than are the fairies."
- Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), Chapter 17
Sunday, August 02, 2009
Best. Headline. Ever.
"Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything"
Via Gerry Canavan, who notes, "Not from The Onion..."
Alas, it turns out the theory doesn't work.
Too bad!
Via Gerry Canavan, who notes, "Not from The Onion..."
Alas, it turns out the theory doesn't work.
Too bad!
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
What Taibbi Said
The reason a real health-care bill is not going to get passed is simple: because nobody in Washington really wants it. There is insufficient political will to get it done... It won’t get done, because that’s not the way our government works. Our government doesn’t exist to protect voters from interests, it exists to protect interests from voters. The situation we have here is an angry and desperate population that at long last has voted in a majority that it believes should be able to pass a health care bill. It expects something to be done. The task of the lawmakers on the Hill, at least as they see things, is to create the appearance of having done something. And that’s what they’re doing. Personally, I think they’re doing a lousy job even of that... [Democrats] aren’t even pretending to give a shit, not really. I mean, they’re not even willing to give up their vacations.If Obama's election was all about hope, his Presidency, so far, has been about hopelessness. It's not because I think Obama is a bad politician; frankly, I remain convinced that he is just about the best we could hope might be elected in our current political climate & system. All we are learning is how little that means.
This whole business, it was a litmus test for whether or not we even have a functioning government. Here we had a political majority in congress and a popular president armed with oodles of political capital and backed by the overwhelming sentiment of perhaps 150 million Americans, and this government could not bring itself to offend ten thousand insurance men in order to pass a bill that addresses an urgent emergency. What’s left? Third-party politics?
-- Matt Taibbi
If Obama gets through a real health care bill -- with a public option, an employer mandate, and ideally a surtax on the rich -- then maybe there will be some hope here. If not, then, as Taibbi says, what's left? Third party politics, the Democratic party -- both seem equally hopeless and useless.
This quote came to me via Ezra Klein, who also has some good things to say about the topic. He compares it to climate change:
Taibbi is right that this, like climate change, is a litmus test for our government. Both are serious, foreseeable and solvable threats to our society. One threatens to bankrupt the country. The other threatens irreversible damage to the planet we live on. Responding to such threats is the test of a political system. And our system will fail it. We will not avert catastrophic climate change. We will not protect ourselves from health-care inflation.I actually think the two are quite different: on the one hand, you have, as Taibbi says, "an angry and desperate population that at long last has voted in a majority that it believes should be able to pass a health care bill", and the political system is too dysfunctional to respond to what the public wants (and voted for). On the other hand, you have a much worse catastrophe, which is not so strongly felt by the public (certainly not enough to make it a voting priority), but whose danger and immanence make it, in a different way, a test of the system. The one is whether the system can respond to the voting public; the other is whether it can respond to dire threats. So far it's flunking both.
I go back and forth on how much this is Obama's fault. If he'd played his hand better from the get-go -- presented us as in the emergency we were in, and tried to use the direness of the situation to push through climate change legislation and health care legislation along with (better) economic legislation with the force that FDR did in 1933 (for which ignoring the Republican minority, not courting them, would have been necessary if hardly sufficient) -- then we might have done better. Or perhaps the veto points and the inherent foulness of so many democrats is simply too strong, and what Obama is showing is that it simply can't be done.
Because, again, I think Obama is as good as we'll get. Which just means that we're totally fucked, because he ain't doing well enough in at least a half-dozen areas where things are dire and posed to get worse. If he can't do better than this, then...
What?
I wish I had a better answer than: despair, because we're fucked. But that's what I'm feeling right now, today.
Quote of the Day
What is the semiotic iconography of cheese?
-- Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 143
-- Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 143
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Today is a Good Day to Remember Self-Evident Truths
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
-- The Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, July 4, 1776
Happy July 4th, everyone!
Friday, July 03, 2009
Thoughts of a Baby Held Up to a Mirror
Who's that baby that I suddenly see?
And if poppa's holding him, who's holding me?
And if poppa's holding him, who's holding me?
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Updating Humbert Wolfe
You cannot hope
to bribe or twist,
thank God! the
British U.S. journalist.
But, seeing what
the man will do
unbribed, there's
no occasion to.
-- Humbert Wolfe (almost)
***
PS: On the topic that is the subject of the first stanza's links, I particularly liked this bit from Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth (via):
Oh, and the Post's Executive Editor, Marcus Brauchli's line -- "you cannot buy access to a Washington Post journalist" -- is a great example of the genre of lie including such classics as "we don't torture" and "I did not have sex with that woman". Call it the "who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes" genre.
But you see? Even as I describe it, I fall into the trap: the outright bribe is so much more outrageous than the pervasive power-worship, excusing the criminal, and so on and so forth that the media does, it's easy to forget the latter is far more important in its effects.
to bribe or twist,
thank God! the
But, seeing what
the man will do
unbribed, there's
no occasion to.
-- Humbert Wolfe (almost)
***
PS: On the topic that is the subject of the first stanza's links, I particularly liked this bit from Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth (via):
Weymouth knew of the plans to host small dinners at her home and to charge lobbying and trade organizations for participation. But, one of the executives said, she believed that there would be multiple sponsors, to minimize any appearance of charging for access, and that the newsroom would be in charge of the scope and content of any dinners in which Post reporters and editors participated.Ah yes, if there are multiple sponsors -- perhaps I should say "sponsors" -- that totally means you're not charging for access. And I love how her concern isn't that they might actually be charging for access, but simply that it might appear that way -- so they need a bit of cover. You can understand the misunderstandings that might result from language like "Underwriting Opportunity: An evening with the right people can alter the debate".
Oh, and the Post's Executive Editor, Marcus Brauchli's line -- "you cannot buy access to a Washington Post journalist" -- is a great example of the genre of lie including such classics as "we don't torture" and "I did not have sex with that woman". Call it the "who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes" genre.
But you see? Even as I describe it, I fall into the trap: the outright bribe is so much more outrageous than the pervasive power-worship, excusing the criminal, and so on and so forth that the media does, it's easy to forget the latter is far more important in its effects.
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Shoter Michael Scheuer
"I hope we suffer a devastating terrorist attack, since otherwise we might suffer a devastating terrorist attack."
The blogs that I've seen discussing this have focused, reasonably enough, on the moral horror, the nature of (the subset of) right wing "patriotism" that this embodies, the ultimate desire for an autocratic fear-based state, and so forth. But what gets me most is the sheer illogic of it.
The blogs that I've seen discussing this have focused, reasonably enough, on the moral horror, the nature of (the subset of) right wing "patriotism" that this embodies, the ultimate desire for an autocratic fear-based state, and so forth. But what gets me most is the sheer illogic of it.
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