My favorite frozen pizza

Without question my favorite frozen pizza is the Home Run Inn brand. I first tasted one of these during my lost year in Charlottesville. This summer they became my special treat. This food has a state of exception clause for me; in emergencies, it will take over my life.

I don't know how to talk about food. Home Run Inn has a buttery, crispy crust that flakes as you bite into it. The cheese is a little thick--sometimes that's a no-go for me. I need to be in the mood. The sauce is savory but just that--it's the weakest part. Haven't had the toppings in a while, but they tend to be judiciously applied and taste just like what they're supposed to be. Not an easy task in frozen food.

My Batventures

A few weeks ago, a bat appeared out of nowhere and promptly disappeared into nowhere.

Last night, a new bat or the same bat returned. Bats are hard to find. I started going room to room, shutting off entry points and inspecting for bats. I shut the windows in my living room as well. Then I started hearing noises. I had trapped the bat between the screen and the pane of one window. It was getting antsy and irritable.

I don't have a lot of up-close experience with bats, so I immediately turn to rumor. Many bats have rabies, particularly those that end up inside houses. I needed to get it out without letting it bite me. I tried attaching a garbage bag to the window, and slowly opening it, hoping the bat would crawl inside. The bat was too smart for this, and kept pushing at the edges. Then I tried setting up a towel wall that the bat could grab onto. He wasn't interested. I decided I just needed to grab the bat and carry him outside, which is what I did. I left just enough space for him to crawl out, then scooped him up in a towel and held tightly. The bat began to make a series of noises. I rushed him outside and dramatically opened the towel. My next-door neighbors applauded.

This experience gave me a new understanding of Batman. I grasped, in the abstract, that bats are scary, but now I know why. They're better flyers than birds, more agile. They have amazing fingers--when it was crawling around on my screen, it moved more like an insect than a mammal.

On a tip from a friend, I have been reading up on the symbolism of bats. If this bat means what I think it does, I need to make some major life changes.

Reading Lacan, Part III

In which I attempt to dispel all the things I think I know about Lacan.

Once upon a time I took a class called Marx, Politics, and Theology at UVA. The professor asked us to please forget everything we thought we knew about Marx. All semester long, however, we kept slipping into some truisms about what Marx really meant or what he was trying to accomplish. He kept calling us on it. I found this activity very useful, so I sometimes try to externalize the things I think I know, in hopes that I can discard them if they don't turn up in the writing itself.

1) Lacan talked about something called the Mirror Stage, in which an infant recognizes its reflection in the mirror and can for the first time imagine its whole body, instead of merely seeing the separate parts visible to the eye.

I don't really think I know the implications of this, except what I've read elsewhere by people who are riffing on it.

2) Lacan made a distinction between the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic.
The Imaginary is connected to the Mirror stuff up above. The Real is reality, which we can't ever get to, because we constantly access it only through the veil of language or narrative--The Symbolic.

Again, I think this sounds pretty cool, but I don't really know what's at stake.

The big missing piece, the one I can't even put into a coherent sentence, is what Lacan thinks about Desire. I know it's an important word, one that will give his concepts some heft, but I don't know what he means by it.

So now, my goal is to try to ignore all this while I begin reading. Whenever I find myself trying to use these shards to build something, I pinch myself.

Reading Lacan, part 2

More "pre-reading" exercises:

The other night I went to a party at Chad's house. We talked about aliens, conspiracy theories, and new religious movements. He posited that if someone was interested in one of these subjects, it was nearly guaranteed that this person would also be interested in the other two. I agreed, and offered up an explanation I borrowed from Elaine Showalter's Hystories: the reason is that recountings of alien abductions, religious experiences, and conspiratorial mania sound very similar. To her, all of these responses, as well as other historical phenomena like hysteria and PTSD were all responses to trauma.

Chad strenuously objected to this premise, because he felt it was bad psychoanalysis: it destroyed the historical context for hysteria. He felt that WWI PTSD is a wholly different experience from Victorian hysteria. I don't think it is, but I do think I did a poor job of explaining Showalter's book. What sounded to Chad like an ahistorical romp that attempted to tie together disparate pheonomena under one roof, sounds to me like a demonstration of how historical circumstances produce different explanations. In other words, alien abduction is different from shellshock, but trauma is trauma no matter the form.

I've found people who dismiss psychoanalysis because it seems to them completely ahistorical and unscientific, and I've seen people who portray it as the exact opposite: totally historical and of scientific merit. I'm looking for a middle ground. On the one hand, the concept of repression is individual desire folding under societal rule--cries out for context. However, we're never not in culture, so the concept of repression actually does look pretty universal to me--but the forms it takes will differ.

Trying to read Lacan again

I'm making another go of it with Lacan. I've become loosely familiar with the name from a variety of surrogates and followers: I've read some Zizek, Kittler, Dolar, and Butler. But my direct experience with Lacan is limited to browsing through my Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Basically, I've decided that I can no longer trust these surrogates and I have to go directly to the source. So Ecrits is lying open on my coffeetable right now.

Why bother with this project? I could very easily go through my entire AM-STUD career without touching the Ecrits or the Seminars. Well, I think theory is important for generating frames through which we can understand the world as it is and critique it in order to fashion a different world. When I was an undergraduate, though, I tended to look at problems from an anthropological perspective, which has cultivated in me a healthy distrust of psychoanalytic theory.

Now I feel that:

IF you're committed to some kind of concept of social construction, THEN you need a bit of psychoanalytic theory.

So this project is ultimately about adding detail to the above statement.

Paul Hornschemeier's Let Me Be|Perfectly Clear

Hornschemeier makes me feel all funny inside. His collection of short works, Let Me Be|Perfectly Clear features expertly drafted parodies of the current indie-comics luminaries: Ware, Clowes, Burns, and more. Hornschemeier is a loving critic, however, because he replicates their stylistic tics and somehow throws away the rest--it is like he is making fun of the tics more than the works or the authors.

Let me try to put it another way. The much-discussed Obama cover of the New Yorker is supposed to take a series of mental images and make them solid, and by doing so expose their flimsiness as solids. Similarly, Hornschemeier uses Ware's little boxes and makes them feel trite. The effects alone are revealed, at last, to just be effects. Finally, we can appreciate that Ware is more than the shortlist of stereotypes he conjures, because we can sense something missing from Hornschemeier's re-creations.

I'm not exactly sure what Hornschemeier wants to get out of these exercises. Several times in the book he sets himself up to be viewed as an art critic. In Perfectly Clear he has a section labeled like a portfolio of artwork--it is a parody of a parody of postmodern art, jokes we've heard a million times before about polar bears in snowstorms. This is why I feel funny inside. I think as a comics critic he's taught me something about comics today, but I am only interested in his work as criticism.

Is Mad Men Any Good?

I have my doubts about Mad Men, the newly canonized "Best Show on Television". I like two things about the show, but I could like them more:

1) The period setting. Love the suits, the buildings, the dresses, etc. Liked the casual chauvanism too, but I feel like it's designed to be a pat on the back to us '00ers, who know better. They're not exactly plumbing the depths of the storyline--we follow the secretaries, and their reactions are nauseatingly predictable.

2) The shop-talk is the most fascinating aspect of the show to me. Why isn't there more of it? Would its novelty be lost?

I haven't learned to care about any of the characters yet--maybe with time. I will be finished with season one before sunday, when the second season begins.

Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide

This summer, I'm trying my level best to learn the history of graphic design from the ground up. In the long term, this project is to shore up my understanding of the interactions between word and image in the 20th century. In the short term, I can grasp what was happening to graphic design in the early twentieth century and compare it to comics history.

I picked up this volume, by Johanna Drucker and Emily McVarish, because I hoped it would explain graphic design in a language I already understand, High Theory. So far it's still a challenge. The nature of textbooks requires their authors to move quickly past concepts that actually do require a little more depth.

Chapter one lays out graphic design in prehistory. In doing so, the chapter also outlines the principles of graphic design in general, but in piecemeal fashion. Statements such as, "only humans have the capacity to represent absent and abstract phenomena in symbolic form" throw me for a loop. I need to sit down and think them through (luckily, I have the capacity to represent abstract phenomena in symbolic form, so thinking it through is theoretically possible). So I am moving very slowly.

Karaoke: American Legion, 7/18/08

Last night got epic. Zack and Michael Mario, outgoing (in both senses) Comm. Studies students, gathered a bunch of graduate students together for friday karaoke at the American Legion. It's still not the best atmosphere in the world, and the host still sings too many songs, but we had people from Communication Studies, History, and American Studies in force. And then, the writers' workshop folks showed up . . . and it became a dance party.

Songs performed:
Rick Astley--"Never Gonna Give You Up"
Ace of Base--"The Sign"

The Astley went just ok. I did the dance from the video. He has a deep voice, but in that key, I still felt like I was holding on for dear life.

In contrast, The Sign went nearly perfectly. The house had filled up by this point, and enough people sang along that I didn't even need to touch the chorus.

Quick Thoughts on The Dark Knight

I liked it. Didn't dare love it.

A lot of the reviews treat The Dark Knight as though it has newly bestowed narrative richness on the Batman franchise. While this is true as far as the films go, I doubt these people have been seriously reading Batman in comic book form at all. Some may cite the '80s work of Frank Miller, but to be honest, Batman has been a nuanced and complex character from creators Kane and Finger on. In my opinion, TDK barely reaches this plateau, and doesn't climb any further. It doesn't really have anything to say about the character that the comics haven't numerous times.

For that matter, I'm pretty sure that a lot of the kudos are due to The Dark Knight's attempts to shoehorn superheroes into a realistic world. This is kind of cool, but completely unnecessary. I hope we never see a 'realistic' Superman, and we certainly don't require one to produce a great Superman comic or movie.

I guess the main problem here might have to do with the specialization of critics in a multimedia world--the focus is necessary for critics to succeed, but it means they can only adequately judge movies in light of other movies.

Watchmen, Issue 1

This feature will be a lot cooler when I have my scanner hooked up again. Should have a review of Dash Shaw's Bottomless Bellybutton up by tomorrow.

I've forgotten a lot of the minor plot points of this comic, although the major ones are impossible to forget. The cover of my paperback edition is an extreme closeup of the comedian's smiley-face button, smeared with 'bean juice'. In this case, readers have not yet seen the smiley and might treat the cover as some kind of abstract art. There's just a black oval on a yellow background--not really enough to make out what it is. The blood really does look like bean juice here, or some kind of waxy or plastic substance--certainly looks lighter than blood--a disturbingly articifial touch. The cover of the first issue is much more contextual.

Did Watchtower ever come with its name as a band around the pamphlet? For some reason, I feel like the WATCHMEN band evokes it beyond name. It would fit with the 'end is near' vibe.

This first issue sidesteps a potential narrative problem by making use of Rorschach's journal--it roots the story in time, promises access to Rorschach's thoughts, but not the unfettered access we might receive from a narration box. R is still at a distance from us. Lots of discrepancy between the words and the images here--R's journal speaks of looking down on waste and decay, just as we are looking down from the building to the street. But R is not up there, not yet. Moore pulls these moves off so often that they begin to grate.

We begin to receive 'world-building' in subtle and less subtle ways. Stilted references to government officals, newspaper clippings.

Rorsschach proves himself a much more thorough inspector than the detectives--I almost said 'able', even though at this point, the motive for the comedian's death is still unsustained speculation. While the detectives chatted throughout their search, Rorschach pulls his off in silence. It certainly gives him a mysterious aura.

One could easily be forgiven for thinking that Rorschach himself is behind the killing at this point. His name evokes psychiatric disorder, which his behavior and journals back up. And how does he know to investigate this death in the first place? Is it simply tied to coming upon the scene of the crime, or is it because he recognizes the smiley he finds on the ground as the Comedian's? Sally tells us that R is disturbed as well, and we learn he is wanted for the deaths of several men, and doesn't seem to be able to meter out justice in proportion to the crime, as Dan's anecdote suggest.

We're also introduced to the other main characters, with Moore's typical irony. Dan, the Nite Owl, can't even bother to stay out past midnight--a sign of his larger failures of definition. Ozymandias has a few choice turns of language as well. He tells Rorschach to "have a nice day," the phrase most often associated with the smiley face in the 1970s. Rorschach also calls him " a better class of person" which is definitely true in the financial sense, but is probably not true in regards to his actions, or even in R's perception.

Hollis Mason's autobiographical excerpt from Under the Hood rounds out the beginning. I really detest Moore's prose unchained, and for the life of me cannot recall why this information is narratively important. It may prove conceptually important--what with it being a story of a man in costume who breaks down emotionally to overwrought music.

More to come!

Rereading WATCHMEN

I'm about to begin rereading Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' comic WATCHMEN. I'm a little nervous. Scholars and comic fans have frequently called it the best comic ever written, and some literary lists with inclusive aims name it as one of the best books, full stop, of the past century.

I found it cold. Many of the dazzling experiments failed to deliver for me--the chunks of texts at the back of each issue, the 'Black Freighter' comic hidden inside. And I, like many others, hold it responsible for turning superhero comics into atrocity exhibitions--the darker, the better. But even its critics continue to snatch bits and pieces of narrative, dialogue and imagery from its pages.

With the film currently in development (which will once again boost sales), WATCHMEN actually has a better change of longevity than its company from 1986, Maus and The Dark Knight Returns. Maus is getting a bit tired from overpraise these days, and the new wave of literary comics looks to displace it. DKR remains a biting read (much easier to jump into than either of the others) but these days its playful elements stand out much more than its muddied philosophy.

Onward!

Quick wrap-ups

okay, I haven't been blogging, but I have been reading.

Neuromancer--I read this because of a stray remark Geoffrey Winthrop-Young made last semester: if you really want to understand the media theory of Friedrich Kittler, read this book--it's about computers learning to talk to other computers. I found this element of the book to be most fascinating, and I was left wanting more. The humans of the book disappointed. It was hard to appreciate the sheer inventiveness and world-building of the book because many of the ideas have become commonplace, and several elements, like the Rastafarians in space, feel trite.

Men's Style by Russell Brand (i think)--I know nothing about men's fashion, which is exactly why I was reading the book, the only one of that subject available at the public library. It was both informative and amusing. Brand is a good prose stylist who knows how to repeat himself without wearing out his welcome. As I struggle towards a fashion sense, this book has already come in handy several times.

Chiggers by Hope Larson--There are only two things wrong with this book about a teenaged girl at camp. The first is that it abandons the color of Larson's earlier works. The second is the the typography grates. Otherwise this is an outstanding comic about adolescence that felt painfully familiar to me, a boy who has never been to summer camp. The biting dialogue, the casual lies, the quizzical expressions all hit their marks.

Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible

I totally ignored this book when it came out last year, because "that novel about superheroes" did not sound all that appealing. If I want to read about superheroes, I have comics! This is not my attempt to police boundaries--I really like being able to see action and costume design and so on, instead of getting brief descriptions.

Grossman's book is extremely light. It's an easy and pleasurable read, especially for someone like me, who's comfortable with all the superhero tropes and can accurately predict the major plot twists. The dual first-person narratives are attempts to play through some comic book ideas in a new setting. Comics readers are used to the gritty narrative box, but we really don't spend a lot of time in characters' heads. Much more of our comprehension of characterization comes through the body language of the figures. The book makes us ask what it would really be like to be a super-villain or a new team member.

The most enjoyable section involves two perspectives on a fight between the Champions, earth's prime protectors, and Doctor Impossible, a recently escaped evil genius. First we hear about the fight from Impossible's pov. He has respect for the heroes' abilities and fears the encounter. From his perspective, he escapes by the skin of his teeth. When we get the heroic recap of the fight, it's a different picture. Dr. Impossible appears to have easily beaten back the entire team. This example teaches us that Dr. Impossible's high standards and low self-esteem fuel his villainy, which the Champions reinforce by viewing him through a narrow lens. This is not the most insightful observation about the mechanics of hero-villain interaction, but it is a solid foundation that could be built upon. I imagine that similar ideas could be presented by "showing" them in a comic, but it certainly seems like much more of an uphill battle, narratively.

Unfortunately many of the plot points peter out, and throughout the book there is a decided lack of gripping subtext. As many writers on comics have pointed out, superheros supply subtext that is as obvious* as it is durable. Everyone knows Superman is a godly figure, and it will always be fascinating to think about religion through him (even in Superman Returns, which at least stressed that increasing technological sophistication need not produce secularization).

Grossman seems aware of the dangers of stating the open subtext, so his big rhetorical flourishes, buried in his characters' minds, involve resilience towards taking over the world, rather than resilience in general. I'm sympathetic to this decision, but it renders the novel all-surface.

* there's got to be a good term for the kind of subtext that we're completely aware of, that requires no digging, but at the same time couldn't exactly be called text either. I'm going to use "open subtext" for now, kind of a play on "open secret".

Matt Kindt's Superspy

Superspy is a collection of related stories about spies of various European powers during the Second World War. The focus is on character; the missions live in the background. Like others, I'm not quite sure what to think about this comic. One the one hand, it has ambition leaking out its spine. On the other hand, the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

Let's begin with the artwork. The above example demonstrates clearly that this woman's dance is a coded message--the only way her hair is forming the words is through movement. I am fond of the expressionism at the heart of such images. Moreover, this artistic choice sells what is, to me, the main point of the book: being a successful spy is all about being a master storyteller, because a master storyteller creates suspension of disbelief.

I'm not ready to call Kindt a master storyteller, however. As one might imagine, there's a lot of confusion and double crossing in a series of stories about spies. Kindt organizes the stories in not-quite chronological order, and characters who appear in multiple stories often undergo vast cosmetic alterations. I like puzzles, but puzzles need to be compelling--not all puzzles are, by virtue of being puzzles, all that interesting. I'm just not invested. Here's a question: what makes a puzzle interesting? What is the rhetoric of a successful puzzle? Why do some people like some puzzles that other people don't? A lot of folks I know like figuring out all the little things in House of Leaves, for instance, but I can't be bothered.

I plan to have more on spies and spy-dom if I finish Legacy of Ashes.

Air Guitar--Dave Hickey

What better way to begin a cultural commentary blog than with a book about cultural commentary? Dave Hickey's Air Guitar is a collection of essays about art and music, although the tagline emphasizes the connection between American Art and American Democracy. Hickey is a fantastic writer who can drag along a disagreeable prick like me for a considerable amount of space.

I first encountered this book in the reader Mass Communication and American Social Thought. There, part of his introduction serves as an epigraph: "I knew there was no chance of talking with my professor about what a cool book Tristam Shandy is." I have to admit, most of the time in academia makes me feel exactly the same way. Hardly any of my fellow students seem excited about whatever they're learning, because that fascination and professionalism appear to be mutually exclusive. It's beginning to wear on me, and made me a worse student, less interested in digging for the right reasons, and afraid to learn because it means being wrong a lot of the time. So Hickey definitely captures my sympathy when he rails against academic structures.

Throughout the essays Hickey puts forth the strong argument for agency, and it has two parts. 1) The institutions and devices that we sometimes claim control the earth are nowhere near that successful.
2) People can see the difference between appearance and reality; they understand the rules of the game.
This is why Hickey begins with Vegas, claiming that despite appearances it is one of the most honest and democratic places around.

Naturally, I have problems with his argument and ultimately his book. First I feel that most people are pretty powerless, and duped. For some, this kind of admission is academic elitism, but I see no reason why we should suppose that academics have somehow been let off the hook. The realization of one's chains does not equal transcendence of them. I also object to the contrarian attitude towards academia that Hickey displays. Academics may not do a lot of good, but that doesn't mean they don't live in the real world.

I wonder what Hickey thinks of the internet, given his paeans to participatory democracy. My bet is that he was initially enamoured but has probably soured on it somewhat since it largely repeats the same old media consolidation we've seen elsewhere.

I enjoyed this book, especially the writing. It's nice to find a sparring partner you don't hate.

Real Life!

Real Life got in the way! However, that doesn't mean I haven't been reading. Reviews of Superspy, Air Guitar, Graphic Design: A New History, and more are on their way (when I return home to my scanner).

The Plan

Here's the deal: this summer, I'm going to try to read a book every day. This will probably fall apart, say, tomorrow, but until then I plan to report to you on my progress.

These are my goals:

1. Become a super-reader. I'm in training to be an academic, so as busy as my life is right now, it's going to get busier. I need to find time for reading in the margins of the day. Some of my professors receive a gross amount of books in the mail each week and polish them off during their lunch breaks. This I admire.
2. Become a super-writer. Writing has always been one of my weak spots--what better way to learn how to write than to condense book-length arguments into a couple of pithy paragraphs?
3. Vary my cultural consumption. During the school year, I read and write for about 12 hours a day, come home, and fall asleep in front of the tv. I'm fine with this. But we're entering rerun season again, and I am worried that tv's great serial flowering is coming to a close.
   

I have a few other reasons which I'm having trouble articulating at the moment, so I'll save those for a different post.

. . . and we're off!