Rogue Dictionary

another image post

Don't even remember how or where I found this, just that it's funny. Heh. Now I want to complete that list.

i love this image

courtesy Thobias Fäldt, by way of Matt Fraction

today's xkcd is mindblowingly great

the anti-literary internet

David Foster Wallace committed suicide about a week ago. This is sad, if not entirely unprecedented. He was a towering talent, and, in memoriam, lots of his writings have begun springing up online. They're worth digging up—the man could dance with the English language.

One article in particular got me thinking: Federer as Religious Experience, published August 20, 2006 in the New York times. Obviously it's full of great, Wallacian sentences like these:

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

And these:

He is never hurried or off-balance. The approaching ball hangs, for him, a split-second longer than it ought to. His movements are lithe rather than athletic. Like Ali, Jordan, Maradona, and Gretzky, he seems both less and more substantial than the men he faces. Particularly in the all-white that Wimbledon enjoys getting away with still requiring, he looks like what he may well (I think) be: a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light.

And even (my favorite) these:

Genius is not replicable. Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform — and even just to see, close up, power and aggression made vulnerable to beauty is to feel inspired and (in a fleeting, mortal way) reconciled.

Sitting in my chair, reading these words on my computer screen, I realized that I was enjoying a fundamentally different experience from all the other reading I've done in this position.

Think about it this way. The internet is still a fundamentally text-based medium. I worked it out once, and I consume between fifty and a hundred pages of printed text per day off the internet every day, factoring in news, blogs, RSS feeds, and everything else. And that's exactly what it is: consumption. The words come in, the ideas come out, and I move on. Almost none of it really sticks.

But reading this article, written by a real honest-to-God gifted-to-the-sky writer, I realized that I've been doing the equivalent of consuming a thousand calories per day of Powerbars. Sure, it'll keep you alive, and even give you most of the energy/information/whatever that you need, but it's a fundamentally joyless experience. It's more about the end product, what you learned, what you can do with it, rather than the reading itself.

The internet makes it very easy to passively acquire information, to let it pass through us like so much water. And it is crucial to note that this is fine. Water is necessary for life, and, let's be honest, it would be exhausting to wade through an article like this one every time we wanted to find out what's going on in the world. But the English language is capable of so much more than this. In the hands of a master like Wallace, it can be made to turn backflips. The water can become a tidal wave and sweep us off to some wild and new island full of wonders we could never imagine on our own. It can requires our whole brain to parse it, grab us by the eyes and show us something new. And I'm concerned that, in the word-flood of the modern internet, the occurrence of such works is becoming rarer and rarer. After all, it's much easier to bang out a blog post (irony duly noted) or, heaven forfend, a Twitter than it is to put the blood and effort into really writing something.

So I find myself reconsidering all of those daily RSS feeds and newsposts and things. If I trim some of those out, I'll have more time to read things like this. And while I may know less, in some quantitative sense, I'll have acquired something less tangible, but ultimately more real (at least in terms of sticking in my memory).

And I am left wondering: These days, has our increased ability to know somehow come at the cost of our ability to be?

why doesn't superman drink beer?

Action Comics #869 came out this week, and it's a pretty rollicking good tale of Superman meeting Brainiac for the first time. But I'm not going to talk about the story. No, it's the cover that's got me interested.

Here's the original cover (click to enlarge):

And here's the production version (again, click to enlarge):

See the difference? Other than variations in color saturation, the production cover also has generic, slightly-distorted "Soda Pop" labels plastered over the bottles from which Clark and Pa are drinking. It's hard to tell, but the original seems to have them drinking Crow brand root beer, though Clark's bottle is turned such that only the word "beer" is really visible.

The reason for the change seems obvious. DC Comics doesn't want to influence kids by having their paragon of virtue drinking the evil devil-liquor, even if it only looks like that's what he's drinking.

But that raises an interesting question. Assume arguendo (as we say in law school) that Clark is drinking a beer. What's so bad about that? He's supposed to be about 33 years old, so there's nothing illegal about it. It's not like the concept of adults drinking beer is an alien one to most comic book readers, regardless of their age. And moreover, he's supposed to stand for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. What's more American than sharing a beer with your dad while you tell him stories about your life?

Let's put it another way. Clark can't get drunk. Alcohol doesn't affect him at all. He drinks because he likes the taste, not for any of the "bad reasons." Shouldn't an adult, let alone an adult with the powers of an Earth-raised Kryptonian, be able to exercise a measure of self-determinacy?

Are we really concerned that kids, in an effort to be like Superman, will start pounding down the Pabst Blue Ribbon? Isn't it more likely that they'd tie a towel around their shoulders and jump off a roof? And didn't we get past that once the Comics Code fell into disuse?

two things that made me happy today...

First, book five of Scott Pilgrim was announced: Scott Pilgrim vs. The Universe. It comes out February 4, 2009. I am counting the days.

Second, Xeni Jardin is livetwittering and photoblogging the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo press conference. That is one hell of a sexy spaceship.

what was so good about the dark knight?

. . . spoiler-free semi-review . . .

What was so good about The Dark Knight?

No, it wasn't Heath Ledger (though his Joker was both bonechilling and brilliant).

No, it wasn't the gorgeous, IMAX-enabled cinematography and special effects.

No, it wasn't even the awesome (though stupidly-named) Batpod.

The best thing about The Dark Knight is summed up in one of Harvey Dent's lines: "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

This movie did something no other summer superhero flick has ever dared to do: it negated the entire concept of the superhero, and it did so fearlessly and honestly, without a hint of angst (well, no more than necessary while telling a Batman story).

In this Gotham, superheroes don't, and can't, exist. A man can't go out every night and beat criminals to a pulp without repercussions. He can't waltz through hell without the flames leaping up and burning some of his loved ones. Like Battlestar Galactica at its best, this movie makes you believe that any terrible thing can happen. It has weight and realism, such as I never believed a "mere" superhero movie could pull off.

The Dark Knight's Batman has been honed down to his deepest, most razor-sharp and essential nature. What makes a Batman? It's not intellect or physical prowess. As the first movie says, "The training is nothing. The will is everything." Batman's primary virtue is his limitless, indomitable will and psychological endurance. He has the ability to bear anything, to do anything in the pursuit of his mission. And in this movie, Chris Nolan takes that will and wrenches it as hard as he can. What is left is something...pure and more than a little terrifying.

That is how I found myself in an IMAX theater in Los Angeles at near 5 AM on Saturday morning. My face was pressed up against the cold, black glass of Gotham's endless night. In between gasping breaths, I bore witness to something incredible. This movie, this savage, merciless deconstruction of the superhero genre, kindles in its closing minutes a feeble, flickering flame. It whispers that maybe, even surrounded by all this, the neverending battle (as Clark would say) is still worthwhile.

And THAT, friends, is what is so good about The Dark Knight. Like all the best superhero stories, it's about a tiny, ephemeral, but ultimately invulnerable hope.

chabon was only partly right

We say “secret identity,” and adopt a series of cloaking strategies to preserve it, but what we are actually trying to conceal is a narrative: not who we are but the story of how we got that way—and, by implication, of all that we lacked, and all that we were not, before the spider bit us. Yet our costume conceals nothing, reveals everything: it is our secret skin, exposed and exposing us for all the world to see. Superheroism is a kind of transvestism; our superdrag serves at once to obscure the exterior self that no longer defines us while betraying, with half-unconscious panache, the truth of the story we carry in our hearts, the story of our transformation, of our story’s recommencement, of our rebirth into the world of adventure, of story itself.

Michael Chabon, Secret Skin: An Essay in Unitard Theory

Chabon's theory, elaborated in that New Yorker article, and explored more deeply in The Amazing Adventure of Kavalier and Clay, is that the essential element of the superhero is the transformation. The shirt rip. Going from Clark Kent to Superman. This:

And I don't deny that that's important. But for me, the most goosebump-inducing moments are those when the superhero uses his powers surreptitious, out-of-costume. There have been gallons of ink spilled on this: that superheroes can really be about the secret that makes you special or sets you apart.

That's part of it. The other part is that it's easier to dress up and go do heroic things. It's when you have to figure out some way to catch a bullet, or save someone from a burning building, all while in civilian clothes, that it gets...interesting.

After all, I always rejected the true identity (Superman) vs. secret identity (Clark) stuff. He's both those people, but I always felt that there's so much more complexity available when your hero has to do it with smarts, and not just blinding, overwhelming power.

If the transformed hero is the one who is supposed to stand over us and inspire us, the disguised hero is the one who's really got our backs. When no one's looking, when it's not about making a statement, when it's about just getting the job done with both hands tied behind your back.