Me: So, today’s task is to try one of these sexual positions. I was thinking we could try [REDACTED]?

Wife: We’ve tried that before, and it didn’t work.

Me: Well, what about [REDACTED]?

Wife: You’re not flexible enough to do that, remember?

Me: You don’t have to be mean about it.

Wife: I’m not being mean; you’re just not flexible. You’re like the Tin Man, before he gets oiled.

Me: [pause, trying to decide if I should make an inappropriate comment about 'getting oiled']

Wife: [knowing look, slight discouraging nod]

Me: Alright. There’s always [REDACTED]…

Wife: Absolutely not. Not even if I was drunk. Not even if I was so drunk I’d passed out.

Me: Look, the Book says we have to do this, so we have to do it. We have no choice in the matter!

Wife: What about [blank] and [blank] and [blank]? You didn’t do those.

Me: [sheepish pause] …this is different.

Wife: Because it involves you getting laid?

Me: [silence]

Wife: [silence]

Me: Look, it’s the penultimate task. Sure, I skipped a bunch in the middle, but…

Wife: Fine. What about [REDACTED]?

Me: Yeah, that’s a possibility. We’d have to go buy some rope, a gallon of orange juice, and a monkey wrench, but——

Wife: [interrupting] I was kidding.

Me: [embarrassed pause] …oh.

Wife: I’m going to bed. Have fun with this one.

After some consideration, I will admit that he makes a few good points early on about the boy-oriented “spaceships-n-guns” formula of most current sets. And, yes, Lego now makes a lot of “movie-tie-in model sets”—with Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit sets coming in 2012!—but there’s nothing wrong with that, despite Mr Sinker’s insinuation that there is.

The place his post goes off the rails is his discussion of the Lego Millenium Falcon his son is getting for Christmas—and Jack’s getting one, too, and I’m really really excited about it, and about Ella’s Hogwarts set——and Mr Sinker says: “…it’s a model kit. We will put it together once and we will play with it a lot and that will be that. It won’t get remixed, won’t get hacked. Eventually it’ll come apart and be put away and not rebuilt because 1000 pieces is a pain in the ass.”

Bullshit.

As counter-evidence, here’s Jack’s Lego box:

That box contains—in addition to a basic starter set, a few pick-a-brick buckets, and two City fire trucks—Luke’s landspeeder (from A New Hope), the Wampa cave (from Empire Strikes Back), an Imperial V-Wing, Anakin’s snow speeder, Master Plo’s starfighter, and an Anakin-versus-the-Sith set (those last three all from The Clone Wars). Oh, and various minifig battle packs.

You’ll notice that none of those sets are still put together. They all were, once: I built most of them, and Lorna built some (with Jack’s help), and we had fun doing it. But sooner or later, all of them get taken apart—mostly sooner.

The fire trucks—Jack’s first Lego sets—stayed built the longest, because I would diligently repair any damage done after Jack finished playing with them. His first Star Wars Lego sets were the battle packs—the stormtroopers and rebels from Empire Strikes Back—and I would put the minifigs back together after he was done taking them apart. After a few weeks, though, I realized it was futile—and, more importantly, that I was doing something stupid. So I stopped, and Jack comes up with all sorts of crazy shit now, and it’s awesome.

The point of Legos is that you can take them apart, ‘hack’ them and ‘remix’ them: and the toys are designed in a way that encourages that sort of play, whether the set is a bucket of bricks or the motherfucking Death Star. Kids who build a set once and never create something new——

Well, I won’t make sweeping generalizations about kids and parents I don’t know. My only point is that my four-year-old doesn’t give a shit about keeping his “models” together, he “just make[s] stuff” out of the pieces and has his own adventures. As does my nine-year-old daughter, who recently chose the blue bucket of bricks when I was willing to buy her the T-6 Shuttle. She chose well, and I was proud.

Maybe the marketing department at Lego is evil—but marketing departments are evil everywhere, and the toys themselves still inspire creativity and imaginative play.

Take a few minutes to study the image below. Keep in mind that a photographer (perhaps in consultation with someone else) set up this photograph, arranged its elements in a certain way—and that at least one editor approved it for the cover. In short: it’s not accidental, but intentional. Think for a moment about what those intentions might be, about what’s going on in the photograph. Not to pose a leading question, but: what’s wrong with it?

Let’s start with the weapons, shall we? He’s holding a gun, she’s holding a spear—he’s a James-Bond type (it’s the retro-50s clothing that does it), she’s an Amazon, primitive and aggressive. The mop-spear is also a phallus—where is the base of it? in her crotch—and there are a variety of reasons she might be holding a phallus. We’ll come back to that. The difference in weaponry—a handgun, modern and Western, and a spear, primitive and savage—establishes a power differential: the male, with the more advanced weapon, is dominant.

Notice that he’s also taller than she is. If she stood up, she might be of more-or-less equal height—but she’s not standing up, she’s crouched down (with her legs apart, and her skirt open at the back in a subtly provocative way—but more on the clothes in a moment). Even the baby is taller than she is—and my impulse is to say that it’s a male baby, but the ruffles on the sleeves look a bit feminine. Hard to tell with babies, anyway.

About the baby: why is he holding it? We’re meant to assume, of course, that this is a family unit: father, mother, baby. Fathers hold babies, sure—though maybe less so in the 1950s, which the clothing is meant to evoke, especially the woman’s pleated skirt and “housework heels” and hairstyle—who mops dressed up like that, and with (muted) red lipstick?——at any rate, why is he holding the baby? There are two possibilities, I think: either to protect it from the Amazon Woman, or to hold it hostage. I find the latter more convincing—the baby-prison is on his side of the room, after all—but the baby’s neutral (indeed, resigned and somewhat disconcerting) facial expression makes it hard to decide.

Let’s come back to the phallus. By the way, I’m using “phallus” instead of “penis” because a phallus is a symbol, and a penis is an organ. They’re intricately related, of course, but she’s not holding an actual penis, just the symbol of one—a symbol of power and generative capacity and perhaps the capacity for violence (and, according to the psychoanalytic theorists, a symbol for the symbolic). Why is she holding it? Has she stolen it from the man, or—since, according to the logic of 1950s division of domestic labor, the mop is properly the woman’s—has she discovered that she also possesses a phallus with which to challenge the man’s phallus? And he’s not even holding a phallic gun, not a shotgun or an assault rifle or even a big fucking Dirty Harry .44 Magnum—he’s holding a tiny little Beretta .22 short-barreled pistol, and he looks nervous, like he’s never actually fired it before, and maybe it doesn’t even have live ammo in it, maybe it’s shooting blanks—does that kid really look like him, after all? (I didn’t go down this road in class—I asked my students why she was holding a phallus, and let them make suggestions, none of which involved the male’s tiny gun.)

Now for the mop as mop, and not spear or phallus. Where is the mop water? In the bucket? No, on the floor. Spilled, by the looks of it, and it’s also excessively clean—so she hasn’t actually been mopping yet—and who mops by dumping water on the floor, anyway? People who don’t know how to mop, that’s who. I’m trying to suggest that the image is suggesting that she’s not very good as a housekeeper, but that might be a stretch.

But there is water all over the floor. Where is it? Under the woman. What do women’s bodies do? They leak. (This gets a reaction from my students, even—especially?—the female ones.) What color is the bucket? Red. So: not water, menstrual blood. (Another reaction from the students, and maybe from you, too.) Why is there menstrual blood all over the floor? I don’t know. Nothing good, probably.

In class, one of my students pointed out the white suds on the bucket—but here, I’ll have to do it. White substance, vessel containing menstrual fluid… well, you can figure it out.

One of the things that means is that there will be more posts about this movie, from a more critical/pedagogical perspective, as I actually teach it—and so for now, I’m just going to talk about how awesome it was. Also: there will be spoilers.

The film opens with Gwyneth Paltrow, coughing, and we know very quickly that she’s going to die (if, in fact, we didn’t know that going in). When she gets home to Minnesota from Hong Kong and hugs her son, who is about seven, we know he’s going to die, too—and we might expect her husband, Matt Damon, to die as well, but he doesn’t. There’s a fair amount going on during the opening minutes—we’re introduced to some other major characters, we see the early spread of the virus—but the mini-arc involving Beth (Paltrow), Mitch (Damon), and Clark (the kid) is one of the best parts of the film. Beth is sick, sure, but then she collapses at home, is rushed to the hospital, and dies—very quickly. Damon’s performance as he’s being told of his wife’s death is … well, excellent: it is not excessively (obviously) emotionally manipulative, and it gives a personal, individual weight of grief to the sufferings of countless millions that the film gives us. And when Clark dies while Mitch is at the hospital, well, you know that the film isn’t fucking around.

The cast was uniformly good. I was particularly impressed by Kate Winslet—which reminds me that I should watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind again soon—and by Jennifer Ehle (though I must say that Regency-era dress is more flattering than an orange biohazard suit). I am always impressed by Matt Damon.

Jude Law did well with a shitty character—my initial impression is that the blogger he plays is an antagonistically-written caricature, but I may change my mind. The character is used to make some interesting and salient points about the way misinformation spreads virally (get it?), but he also feels one-dimensional in a way that even more minor characters don’t. That’s one of the film’s strengths: despite the large cast of characters, and the ensemble cast, everyone feels like a real person—except Law’s Alan Krumwiede, despite his admirable efforts. I mean, what the hell kind of name is Krumwiede? The next stupidest name in the film is “Cheever,” and that’s not stupid at all.

I’ll end by saying that this is one of the most terrifying films I’ve seen—even though it ends better than one might expect—and now I feel compelled to stockpile canned goods and bottled water and vegetable seeds and ammunition and batteries, and et cetera, so that I can quarantine myself and my family when this shit actually happens, because we’re overdue for an epidemic.

Also: apparently chefs in Asian casinos don’t wash their hands after handling raw pork. So, watch out for that.

I took the nanobots home, programmed them, and turned them loose. They started cutting up the remaindered copies of The Book that I’d acquired for this task, making little blocks out of the pages—too small for me to see.

When I woke up the next morning, enough of the foundation was complete for me to see it: a four inch square, perhaps an eighth of an inch tall, slightly tapered. Two days later, the bulk of the pyramid was done, and the nanobots started putting the glossy outer layer down.

The capstone was set early on the morning of the fourth day, before I’d stumbled out of bed. By the time I awoke, the nanobots had sealed up the entrance to the crypt, interring themselves inside, hibernating, waiting to be woken. I put the pyramid inside a plastic box—I put that plastic box inside a bigger plastic box—I put that plastic box into a metal fifty-five-gallon drum, which I then filled with concrete. Once the concrete cured, I rolled the drum into a deep hole, covered it with dirt, and planted an apple tree above it.

I went to bed satisfied, my life’s work complete.

William Faulkner, Light in August (1932): Dude named Joe Christmas (seriously) rolls into a Mississippi town in the 1930s, takes a job shoveling sawdust at a mill. That shit job is cover for his lucrative bootlegging operation. Nobody—not even him, because he’s an orphan—knows if he’s black or white. Lots of flashbacks: turns out his dad was a carnie, and either black or Mexican, which makes Joe black, at least in the South, especially in the 1930s. He kills a white woman (they’d been having lots of sex, by the way, and everyone hated her because she was a Yankee), and then he gets shot—but he deserved it, because he was black. (Just to be clear: the novel and its characters are racist, but I’m not. Really.)

William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1610): An exiled duke (Prospero), his marriageable daughter (Miranda), and their not-exactly-human servant (Caliban): they live on an island. The duke, who’s also a magician, shipwrecks his brother (who betrayed him) and some other folks (who were also involved in said betrayal) on the island with them. Some stuff happens. The villains eventually repent, Prospero forgives them, Miranda marries the son of the King of Naples, and everybody goes home to Italy—except Caliban, who stays on the island, because nobody wants him. Nobody dies, which is disappointing.

Henry Neville, The Isle of Pines (1668): One white (English) dude, three white women, one black woman: shipwrecked on an Edenic island in the Indian Ocean. They don’t have to work for their food, so they have lots of sex. Their kids have sex. They get divided into clans. Eventually there’s clan-on-clan violence, because the descendants of the black woman just can’t behave in a civilized manner. A Dutch merchant ship happens across the island, helps the three nice clans put down a revolt by the “bad” clan, and then leaves, taking the story (scandal! sex! incest!) back to Europe. Also: “pines” and “penis” are anagrams. Because, you know, penises.

Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688): An African prince and his true love are separated—as all true loves are—sold, separately, into slavery in Surinam, where they’re reunited—as all true loves are. The prince (Oroonoko, who gets renamed “Caesar”) eventually leads a slave rebellion, but the rest of the slaves decide they’d rather not. Oroonoko beheads his very pregnant wife, and is going to then go on a killing spree, but instead spends several days on the ground, in the woods, next to the body of his dead wife. He’s eventually captured, at which point he disembowels himself—which is pretty awesome—and the colonial governor has him sewn back up and nursed back to health so that he can be executed properly (castrated, dis-armed, burned).

Mary Hassal, Secret History, or the Horrors of St. Domingo (1808): Letters from an American woman in Haiti to Aaron Burr—written during the brief period (1802-1803) in which the French attempted to retake control of the island following the 1791 revolution. Mostly the letters are about the narrator’s sister’s unhappy marriage to some French dude (the letters are vaguely fictional, but not far removed from “what really happened”: the author, whose real name was Leonora Sansay, was married to an unpleasant Frenchman, and was probably having an affair with Burr, who was—and I’m quoting Weisenberger here—”a notorious womanizer”). Not nearly enough horrors: somewhat disappointing.

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787): Lots of stuff about forests and rivers and ports and census data and blah blah blah—I skimmed a lot of this book—with some fairly vitriolic anti-black rhetoric in the middle of a chapter on “Laws.” An example: black people smell bad, because their kidneys don’t work as well as white folk’s kidneys, and so they secrete from the skin what white people piss out. Seriously. In his defense, I guess, he wanted to abolish slavery—but he also wanted to send all freed slaves back to Africa, because he thought whites and blacks couldn’t coexist without killing each other in a war of total extermination. Our third president, ladies and gentlemen!

David Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829): “Fuck you, white people. God is going to punish you for making us slaves, and—in His great mercy and justice—he’s going to punish you by letting us kill you all. Get yourselves ready.” (This is an eloquent and passionate pamphlet, despite the fact that it’s also fairly violent in places—lots of “God’s going to let you fill your cups to the brim with wickedness and then pour out His fiery wrath on you.” Good stuff.)

Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly (1799): A tale of two sleepwalkers: the Irish Clithero (such an unfortunate name) and the American Edgar. Things get really interesting when Edgar wakes up in a cave, with no memory of how he got there. He proceeds to kill a panther with his “tom-hawk,” eat it (or part of it) raw—in the dark—and then he kills a bunch of Indians on his way home. Spoiler: Clithero drowns at the end (he is, after all, Irish, and therefore unfit to survive).

Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (1856): Impossibly, stubbornly unperceptive American (merchant) ship captain encounters Spanish ship at a watering-hole in the South Pacific. Spends almost the entire novella thinking that the Spanish captain is both rude and mentally unstable—finally realizes that the slaves have taken over the ship and killed the real captain, and are planning to murder him and his crew, and take their ship, too. Lots of killing, at the end—and based on a true story!

George Schuyler, Black No More (1931): A satire: A black doctor (Dr Crookman) invents a cheap, quick, painless process to turn blacks white (by giving them accelerated vitiligo): no blacks means no racism, right? No, not really. Follows the exploits of Matthew Fisher, a whitened black, who goes to work for the Knights of Nordica (the new Ku Klux Klan), stoking white fears of blacks who don’t look black anymore but are still really black underneath—making lots of money in the process. In the end, white is the new black, and everybody’s still racist.

Part of the reason—and I may be projecting backwards here, at least a little bit—is that the (perpetually) serial nature of (most) comics felt like work. I like my narratives to be contained and finite, and serial comics are exactly the opposite. Every issue of every comic I read as a kid was the middle of some story arc, which was itself part of some larger collection of story arcs, and I fucking hated it. (Serial comic titles are like soap operas, basically.) I had no idea what was going on, no idea where I would’ve had to start, no idea when the story would end—and, because I’ve never liked interacting with strangers, and this was before the internet, I had no resources for figuring out the answers to those questions——so I just didn’t read comics. I read books. On the playground, during recess, in grade school.

(Another reason I never got into comics, which developed later, and also applies to things like the Star Wars Extended Universe—there’s an obsession with continuity and canonicity that I find ridiculous. I can explain why to you sometime, if you’re interested, and you buy me a beer. For now, here’s an example.)

A few years ago, though, I started to get cautiously interested in comics, largely because a blogger that I read regularly (or read [past tense] regularly, until he stopped posting regularly—which sounds vaguely familiar) kept blogging about Watchmen. I eventually read it, and I was hooked—cautiously. I started slowly picking things up as I found them at Half-Price Books, but I had other things to read, and my reintroduction to comics stalled. Then I read Fun Home in a seminar last fall, and was blown away: that was text that made me realize how much the medium was capable of (a lot). And then I read Asterios Polyp over the break after that semester, and I was hooked in a not-cautious way.

I read Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke. I read Frank Miller’s classic The Dark Knight Returns, and its companion Batman: Year One (I’m still trying to get through The Dark Knight Strikes Again). I read Warren Ellis’s Planetary series—and even taught his Planetary/Batman crossover/one-shot, “Night on Earth,” in my first-year writing course this semester. (If it’s not obvious, I’m a fan of Batman.) I read Mark Waid and Alex Ross’s Kingdom Come.

I started to feel confident: with the power of the internet, I could identify (mostly) self-contained story arcs (and read them, too, in an ethical grey area). I solicited advice from more knowledgeable friends and colleagues, and tried to figure out where to start——with Grant Morrison’s (really recent—July to December, 2010) “Return of Bruce Wayne” run in Batman. It was good, if a little odd, and it might actually be better the second time through. It was great! Comic books!

…and then I read Morrison’s All-Star Superman.

It was often, as the above image (pages two and three of the first issue) shows, gorgeously illustrated—but it made no fucking sense. Well, it made sense occasionally, but when it did, it was either inane, or derivative, or boring. To sum the plot up: Superman gets too close to the sun, which overcharges his cells (which are like little solar batteries, I guess?—that’s one of those things that makes me hate comic books)—which means he’s dying, slowly, for the whole twelve-issue run, and he has to complete twelve labors before he dies (except he doesn’t die, exactly, but goes into the sun to keep it running after it turns blue, like a super-hamster on a fusion wheel, or something).

Okay: a hero, twelve labors, a final sacrifice: those are the elements of a good plot. But the labors are never enumerated in the series, and the list Morrison later provided includes some that seem less-than-heroic (and aren’t really presented as “labors” in the text)—and the doing of the labors is surrounded by lots (and lots) of narrative clutter: things that happen for no particular reason except to happen. Some people like that, I guess—but life is full of things that happen for no particular reason, and I like my narratives more carefully constructed than that.

I could continue complaining about All-Star Superman, but you don’t want to read it, and I don’t want to write it. The point is that my newfound enthusiasm for comic books, while intact, has become more cautious again—and it will be a while before I read Morrison or Superman (whom I’ve never really liked) again.

“Chase a butterfly away from its flight pattern to disrupt meteorological systems worldwide.”

I saw no butterflies today. If I had, and I’d chased them from their flight patterns, would it have actually changed anything, or was I always going to have chased them, and so the real change would have been to not chase them away, except that path wasn’t and never was open to me?

…no, nevermind, I’m not going there this evening.

This is why we have narratives, right? To make sense of all the impossibly small and unknowable factors that make up big, complex, world- or life-changing events? I and my two of my friends and colleagues read Clarissa over the summer — and I promise I’ll write at least one last post about it at some point — and at least one of the things going on in that novel is an attempt (or parallel attempts) to figure out what happened, what thing or things propelled the paragon of virtue into the power of a libertine who eventually raped her, and how those things (and which of the things?) lead to her death. (And thus I reduce 1,500 pages of densely-printed text to one long and cumbersome sentence.)

We need narratives: nothing makes sense without them. At the same time, narratives make sense of things by ruthlessly trimming away all sorts of things that might or might not be important, and by loading down the things that are left with all the scraps and shavings of importance that the ruthless trimming left behind.

Anybody remember Day 43? (I didn’t, really.) An exercise in trimming, which is what this post needs, despite being barely 300 words long — all of it a digression, digressing from nothing in particular. My thoughts are the butterflies, and I’m chasing them around, fueled by bleary-eyed tiredness and bourbon, and it would defeat the point of this day’s task to edit, to revise — choosing one word instead of another, over and over, is what got me here instead of wherever it was I thought I was going when I started out.

Well, there you go. Time for bed.

“…should you ever meet her, call her Aubrey and she will tell you a secret.”

A woman sat down next to me on the train. I glanced at her, reflexively, quickly, and went back to the novel I was reading: Faulkner’s Light in August. She settled into the seat, opened a magazine, started reading.

Two stops later, as the train pulled away from the station, I said — neither loudly nor quietly, and without looking up from my reading — “Tell me a secret, Aubrey.”

I waited a beat, and then another, and then turned to look at her. She was staring at me, a look of puzzlement and something that was not quite, or not quite yet, anger — and something else flitting around behind her eyes that I could not identify.

We looked at each other for a moment, and then another, and then she said: “What did you say?”

I said: “I said: ‘Tell me a secret, Aubrey.’ “

She said: “My name isn’t Aubrey.”

“I’m not sure that matters,” I replied.

She paused, and looked away, and then looked back.

“There are no secrets left,” she said, “no secrets that can be told, anyway, because the telling makes the secret public. It used to be that you could tell a secret to someone, and it would go no further, or go further so slowly that by the time it became what we might public knowledge it didn’t matter anymore, the reasons for keeping it secret had passed or no longer obtained. Now, though, there is no grey area between secret and something everyone knows — once told, the secret takes on a life of its own, contagious, viral, an incorporeal zombie that bites and infects and spreads so fast that one wakes up the morning after telling to find oneself in a wasteland, a world wrecked and forever ruined. And so what secrets I have I will keep to myself, and anyway my name isn’t Aubrey.”

After some amount of time had passed, or maybe as soon as she stopped, I said: “I’m sorry; I’ve had a few drinks too many today.”

“…but it’s 9:30 in the morning,” she said blankly.

“I know,” I said, and went back to my reading.

The fall semester starts next Monday, and so now most of my energy is going to last-minute panic preparations, but I hope to get a least a few real posts written this week. Once the semester starts, I should be able to get back into the groove. It doesn’t seem right: I’ll have less time, but my time will also be structured and divided and allocated and whatever. During the summer, I let myself go to seed.

Anyway. Excuses, excuses. Stay tuned.