B and B's transgression

As you know, I work with a small epublisher called Belfort & Bastion. Here's a entry to B&B's editorial blog which I just posted. You can see the original here. Or you can just read it below.


Here come the Transgression…


In the next few weeks, we're going to be introducing a new category of works to the Belfort and Bastion catalog. Specifically, we are going to be offering you works of Transgressive literature and art.

Which should, of course, invoke in you a certain response. You should, at this moment, be sitting there in front of your laptop, your hand on that cup of mocha-grande, and be asking yourself, "What the hell do they mean by that?"

A damn fine question.

Unfortunately, we're not too sure ourselves.


*

It seems odd that there should be any question of what "transgressive literature," or "transgressive fiction" is. There's a whole section on it at Wikipedia. That wise source informs us, "Transgressive fiction is a genre of literature that focuses on characters who feel confined by the norms and expectations of society and who break free of those confines in unusual and/or illicit ways. Because they are rebelling against the basic norms of society, protagonists of transgressional fiction may seem mentally ill, anti-social, or nihilistic. The genre deals extensively with taboo subject matters such as drugs, sex, violence, incest, pedophilia, and crime."

All well and good.

But, come, let us be honest. Most of the time, and for most people, transgressive literature has meant just one thing. 

Sex.


*

It used to be that you could say what was "transgressive" without a whole lot of effort. It meant a dirty book. Or, if you prefer, porn or erotica.

And that was a good thing…for publishers and writers. It meant you could be daring and new (and extremely salable) by simply throwing in a few words like "dick" or "cunt" or "boob" or whatever. And, if you weren't particularly talented, well, terrific. Lack a plot or sense of character. No problem. A little sex here and there, plus a lurid and leerworthy cover on the paperback version, and who cared? I mean, really?

And if you could write…if you actually had talent…ah, so much the better. It meant that people like Oscar Wilde, Algernon Charles Swinburne, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Anne Desclos (a.k.a., Pauline Réage), Anaïs Nin, etc. could (like De Sade) smuggle ideas under the cover of smut into a greater public's otherwise unresponsive intellect.

Of course, it was a dangerous game. The endless court cases, the imprisonments of artists and writers, the unwelcome attentions of the world's Anthony Comstocks great and small…these were real threats.

But, until recently, you knew what was illicit to say. You knew what could not be said. You knew what was considered unspeakable.

Alas, that is no longer the case.


*

Sex was the lodestone of the unspeakable right through the 1970s. But after that …well, the erotic gradually faded from the transgressive. It became less taboo. Less dangerous. Less important.

That was, of course, because sex was no longer quite the problem it had once been. Unwanted pregnancy is a serious thing, and not just for the mother or the child. Societies, particularly but not exclusively pre-modern ones, are not fond of children who must somehow be supported without the co-operation of at least two adults. Preferably more. Hence, again particularly but not exclusively in pre-modern societies, marriage becomes a vital economic institution, and sex outside that institution becomes a sin. And discussion of sex outside marriage becomes a crime.

But contraceptives change all of that. Suddenly, extramarital sex becomes relatively consequence free. Yes, you run risks. You have your share of "illegitimate pregnancies." You have diseases, including quite serious ones, likes HIV. But, on the whole, sex becomes "casual." Even recreational. Indeed, it becomes the norm.

And, in the process, porn looses its sting. It becomes just another middle class industry.


*


Today, of course, there is nothing transgressive about porn. Except for the most obviously wantonly and hideous acts (rape, child abuse), there is not a form of sex that isn't portrayed quite freely in the market. Straight, Gay, oral, anal, group, solo, with dolls, toys or sheep …you name it, it's out there. 

The Dominatrix in her black leather catsuit bounds about superhero movies for the entertainment and titillation of twelve-year-old boys. Her brooding male equivalent, in tight breeches and equipped with a riding crop, is to be found on the covers of bestsellers everywhere. Soap operas and sitcoms, meanwhile, discuss role-play and pegging and mammary intercourse. Talk shows provide tips on the proper methods of bondage and the correct pronunciation of Bukkake.  Oh, and if you have questions about what "tea-bagging" is, or how one performs a "turkey slap," well, these things are nicely covered in the some 85 pages (and counting) of Wikipedia that deal with different sex acts.

Yes…of course, yes…there are still barriers and taboos. There are still places and times where one had better not raise, as it were, the issue. Yet, come! Admit it. This is a new age. And there is no turning back… in spite of the best efforts of moralists and censor of every stripe, ranging from the religious fundamentalist to the radically feminist.

Sex has become all too commonplace. It's depictions are no more transgressive than images of eating, and considerably less so than those of defecation.


*

So, what is transgressive now?

I think there is a short and a long-term answer to that. The short-term answer is that we shall see sex itself questioned. After having been so long taboo, its current dominance in society invites critique. An age, after all, in which the Kardashians and the Real Housewives discuss the intimate details of their bedrooms on Reality TV (and their revelations are considered worthy of front page coverage), is by definition ridiculous.

We shall see, then, a class of literature exploring that fact. We shall see a type of book asking if the insertion of this or the extraction of that is really so exciting. Or, indeed, if it is worth remarking upon at all.

And Belfort and Bastion has two titles about to go online that might be said to fall into this category. The first of these is WARNING: Sexually Explicit Content by Aubrey Tannhauser, while the second is The Pellucid Risen: Book One, Awakening, by Brad Amante.

Both of these mock sex, or rather, they mock our cultural obsession with it. They do so, however, in very different ways.

To explain that, let me take them one at a time.


*

The Pellucid Risen: Book One, Awakening, by Brad Amante, came into us via editor Victor Storiguard, who (as he puts it) "stumbled across" Mr. Amante's blog-based webfiction some time ago (you can see it at bradamante75.blogspot.com, by the way).

Amante writes science fiction and his book is, at first glance, nothing more than a piece of rather conventional space-opera, or rather "time-opera" since the main character visits the future. It concerns a young man, Robert, who has led a pretty wretched life in our own century, but who is then murdered for mysterious reasons.

However, he's frozen, and after five hundred years, he's brought back to life. In fact, he finds himself in a feminist utopia in which the sexes have completely changed roles. Women are tall and masterful. Men are small and delicate.

So far there's nothing here particularly transgressive. Sex-role reversal is a staple of sci-fi, and, indeed, in what passes for public discourse these days (think about the famous Newsweek issue, and the equally famous article in the recent Atlantic).

Ah, but here's where things get interesting. Robert, now a male ingénue named "Bobbi," has rather a lovely time. He's petted and pampered and wooed and won by dozens of beautiful superwomen, all of them desperate for his favors.

Women, on the other hand, well, they discover that being on top isn't quite the bowl of cherries they thought it would be.

And, this, of course, is the transgression. What the author is saying is simply this: the great and much ballyhooed Battle of the Sexes…the battle over sex, the battle during sex…is in the end irrelevant. The victory is uncertain, the victor unclear, the triumph …

Doubtful.


*

WARNING: Sexually Explicit Content by Aubrey Tannhauser, meanwhile, is perhaps a more subtle work. In it, Tannhauser presents us with the life and loves of Jacob Lamdan, a young man who wants nothing more than to be a famed author of well-crafted erotica.

And this should be a snap for Lamdan. He's a decent stylist and he's got scads of personal experience from which to take his material. He is, you see, one of those young men that women perceive as beautiful, no matter how they really appear. Where the rest of us poor heterosexual males (particularly those who are, as they delicately say, of a certain age) must struggle and sweat to gain even the passing attention of women, Lamdan gets it whether he likes it or not. They fall into his arms at the least excuse. They offer him sexual escapades that would embarrass Caligula. Indeed, they demand his attentions with a single-minded fury. (We have here something of Amante's Bobbi, do we not?)

But, Jacob discovers something distressing. To wit, his easily obtained sexual experiences provide no inspiration. They have required no effort, so they are not genuinely rewarding. They satisfy the animal, but they do not nourish the human part of him. He has no muses, only fuck-buddies and "friends with benefits."

In time, he finds that only by withdrawing from the sex may he save himself. In the process, he must confront both great unhappiness and real tragedy, but it is his route to salvation.

Which is, of course, how Mr. Tannhauser commits his own transgression. He takes the climax of every porn film, every romantic comedy, and every advertisement for underarm deodorant…i.e., the moment when boy-gets-girl and vice versa…and says, "It doesn't matter."

Doesn't matter. And maybe should be avoided.


*

So that's our two newest additions. And it is also my suggestion for short-term transgressions.

But what about the long? The other possibility I suggested? The second and more lasting sort of transgression.

That is complicated. And political. And for another day.

But, I will leave you with a clue. I hope it will be appropriately tantalizing.

It is a quote from Voltaire. It is: "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."

But let us change it. Let us say, instead, "whom you may not mock."

Three Books About Strangers

Okay, first some confessions. In the interest of full (or nearly full) disclosure, I'm about to write a blog entry about a book in which I've an interest. In my capacity as an editor of Belfort and Bastion (of which more later), I'm helping publish it.

That said, I think I'm objective enough to write about it with something more or less like a clear head. Or, as clear a head as I've ever got.

Still, you've been warned.



*

The book is Stranieri: Life among Italy's Tourists, Expats, and Immigrants by Tristan Gans. In theory, it is a personal memoir of a trip to Italy undertaken by Gans and his then girlfriend (now wife) Sarah. And, yes, I know both and count them as friends.

Anyway, as young college gradates in 2008, the two went merrily off to Italy to live for a spell. Specifically, they went to the little industrial city of Brescia, where Sarah had landed a job teaching English. Gans went along to compose music and, as he says, contemplate art.

So, at first glance, you could be excused for thinking this was yet another imitation of Eat, Pray, Love and all the other recent English-language bestsellers about finding one's self in exotic locations. And, to a certain extent, there really is a book here that's sort of like that. It concerns a young couple, in love, yet human and so prone to the occasional bit of friction, exploring their relationship someplace far from home.

Except, read a page or two, and you find that's not all that's going on. Tristan and Sarah aren't in for an endless summer of love in the Tuscan sun. They find themselves instead in a grimy little industrial city, where the locals are for the most part unfriendly and inaccessible, and the only real connections they can make are with other foreigners.

Ergo, you have another book in this work, this one about the Stranieri from which the title comes.  Gans thus contemplates the Africans, Arabs, Eastern Europeans, Greeks, South Asians, North Americans, etc., who have made Italy their home (in spite of the objections of the Italians).

And a wild and wonderful crew they are. We have, for instance, Asad the Pakistani (maybe Gay, maybe not) who runs the international calling center in the neighborhood, and who becomes Gans' first real friend in Italy. Then there's Donnie Columbo, an Italian-American who's come to the land of his forefathers, discovered he is regarded by the locals as the most alien of aliens, and who has therefore embraced and exaggerated his Americanness to promote his business as a kind of cultural broker.

And there are others, some named and some not, but always present and always providing the services, labor, and energy which the Italians cannot seem to produce for themselves. Gans' sympathies are clearly and overwhelmingly with these people. He prefers them to the locals and he watches with no little fascination as they increasingly control vital sections of the economy. What will Italy be, he wonders, and how will Italians react, when they find they have been outclassed by their own guest workers?

So we have that book, that second book from Gans. It is the story of the New Peoples of Italy, and is an excellent read for that reason alone.

Ah, but we are not finished yet. There's a third book lurking here. And it may be the most important of all.


*

Years and years ago, I read a review of Ryszard Kapuściński's The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, an analysis of the fall of Haile Selassie. Alas, I don't remember the author of the review. I'm not even sure where it appeared. The New York Review of Books? The Globe? Oh, well.

Anyway, in it, the reviewer began by noting that when he (or she) had first picked up the book, he'd thought it was about "well, Ethiopia." But, in fact, it wasn't about Ethiopia at all. It was about Kapuściński's native Poland, where the Communist regime was just about to implode.

And, guess what. We have a similar situation here. The third book in Stranieri is a self-portrait.

Of Gans, and his whole generation.


*

As I say, I know Gans. He is young. He also describes himself as "upper middle class."

But there's a lot wrapped up in that expression. "Upper Middle Class." It means a time, a space, a mindset, and an interesting place to be today, if you're young.

Not necessarily nice. But interesting. As goes the Chinese curse.


*

To be young in the Upper Middle is to be at the center of a perfect storm of expectation. It is to be in a place where everything…everything…is focused on "being a success," on getting high SAT scores, on being admitted to the "good schools." It is to be in a place where Ritalin is handed out to everything with a Y-chromosome, where there is a college prep franchise after-school program on just about every corner, and where achievement is everything and standardized tests are the word of God.

And Gans is the product of all that. He is one of those young people who came through the System…who has been taught by it that he must achieve greatness. Not just success. Not just a happy life. Not just a rewarding career. But greatness.

Absolute greatness.


*

When my father was young, his parents hoped that he would have "a nice life." They hoped that their children would not suffer a Depression, as they had, and that he would live the comfortable middle class life which had been so cruelly stolen from them in 1929.

My father, in turn, wanted something quite similar for me. He made it clear that I was to pursue whatever path it was that led to my happiness. If that meant being a writer, well, it was a tough job to get, and a harder one to make pay, but that was my choice. He would be in my corner.

And I think a lot of Baby Boomers, people my age, were told something similar. My parents were a bit more hippies than some, but they were not uncommon. Their hope for their children was that they be, well, comfortable. Maybe not greatly wealthy. But comfortable.

Ah, but consider what we…people my generation and a little after …have said to our own children.

Is it all right to be "comfortable?" To have "a nice life?" To live a middle class existence?

I don't think that's what we've said. I think the message we've given our children is that they are to exceed beyond our wildest expectations. They are the tools by which we express our most malignant narcissism.

Don't believe me? Try the following little test. Go to an affluent suburb and, if you can, engage a few parents in conversation. Ask them how they would react if little Johnny decided on a career as a plumber. Or if Tiffany proclaimed her intention to be a stay-at-home Mom.

As I say, ask the question. But you might be well advised to do so at a distance. And perhaps even then wear a bullet-proof vest.


*


Now, understand, there is nothing wrong with being a plumber or a stay-at-home mom. In fact, they can be rewarding professions. A good tradesman can earn over $100 an hour. And stay-at-home Moms (or Dads) can provide so many advantages to a family that their actual economic input may exceed that of the so-called "breadwinner." (Think of the cost that most families otherwise face in terms of things like child-care.)

But that's not enough, is it? To be successful in a rational, normal, healthy sense is simply not enough for us anymore.

What we want for our children…what we shall demand…is for them to be inhumanely accomplished. They are to be Stephen Jobs or Bill Gates or Hillary Clinton or Condoleezza Rice or Brad Pitt or Halle Berry or Stephen Hawking or Jane Goodall or…well, you get the point.

But there's the rub. We can't all be Stephen Jobs or Bill Gates or Hillary Clinton or Condoleezza Rice or Brad Pitt or Halle Berry or Stephen Hawking or Jane Goodall or whoever. We can't all be great. We can't all be stars.  This isn't Lake Wobegon where all the children are above average. Some of us, even if we are talented and wise and filled to the brim with the best of ambitions, will fail.

And the vast majority of us…well, we shall never grandly fail nor grandly succeed. We shall just be… people.

For better or worse.


*

What this means, though, is that a vast number of young folk—those of Gans' age, class, and origins—are doomed to misery.

They cannot help but be so. They have been trained, programmed, indoctrinated from their earliest youth with the idea that they are obliged to achieve greatness. I don't mean that they think they can achieve it. I don't mean they think they will achieve it. I mean they are obligated to gain it. They are commanded to do so. They must.

And if they do not…

Then they are worthless.


*


I've wondered how we got into this weird mess. How did we come to this great, national neurosis by which we (or, at least, our middle and upper middle classes) act out Alice Miller's Drama of the Gifted Child on a titanic scale.

I'm not at all sure. Though, I have wondered if it has something to do with media. We tend to take our role models from the people we know in our communities. Not so long ago, that meant the people we actually might meet—the town doctor, the local banker, the mighty president of the women's club.

But now, our "community" has expanded via the cinema, the TV, and the web to include the whole world. The banker, lawyer, and clubwoman have been replaced by Donald Trump and The Kardashians—people whose lives, celebrity, and conspicuous consumption are trumpeted to the heavens.

The obtainable is thus rejected. The only acceptable goal is what cannot actually be achieved.

And our children…they are condemned to the anguish of Tantalus, forever reaching, never acquiring.


*

And Gans has wised up.

During his long sojourn in Italy, watching what he suspects is the decline of the West (he is writing while the economic system melts down in 2008-2009), he's figured out that he's been sold a bill of goods. He's realized that no matter how hard he works, how dedicated he is, how talented he is…it isn't going to happen. 

He begins his story as a composer. He has internalized the idea that he must be the next John Cage, or even a Mozart. And he has done his level best. He is no slacker. And he is talented. His music is good.

But as he watches Italy and the world wrestle with the new realities of resource scarcity, oil depletion, the rise of China and India, the post-industrial scarcity of jobs, the appearance of strange new totalitarianisms…the general impoverishment of us all both economically and intellectually…

He sees the future.

It is surely no accident that as he ends the book, he is no longer planning on a career in music or the academy. His profession will be, instead, bankruptcy law.


*

And so, I think, Stranieri will be an important book. It is a corrective. It is a rebuttal. It is the voice of many, many young people who are just now waking up to the fact that they have been given goals that cannot be reached. And that other ends, which they have been told to despise, are not only better but perhaps the only ones possible in our curious and mutable age.

In fact, I hope it is the first example of a new literature—a kind of text in which our children hesitate before the TV, watch for a few moments while The Real Housewives obsess about fame and fortune and diamond tennis bracelets, and then … perhaps with a sigh…switch off the box.

And go outside to cultivate the garden. 


*


Stranieri should be up and running on both Amazon and the Belfort and Bastion site very shortly. The official launch is August 20, 2012. Lots of little things will be happening before and after that as well.

I do hope you'll read it. As I say, it is many books in one. Though, again to repeat myself, the last of them is my favorite. And there is a reason for my preference. You see, I have always been a bit of a fan of the heroic.

And there is something heroic about this new literature…this literature of re-born realism…

It requires courage to take in hand the vorpal sword and slay that Jabberwock, i.e., grandiosity and the unrealizable expectation.

Compared to which T. Rex seems mild and sympathetic.

And I'm in NM

Well, I'm officially in NM. I'll be posting here again.

Watch for all the sordid details.

my tweets

Which reminds me...

If you read my tweets because you buy or sell comics and keep track of my offerings, you should know that you'll have slim pickings over the next few weeks. I'll be on the road and what tweeting I do, if any, will be purely personal and be about my travels.

However, towards the end of July I'll pick up again. AND I hope to establish a new twitter account just to deal with my ebay business.

So, stay tuned. More to come.

I'm on the road!

Hello, hello!

I'll be on the move for a few weeks and so won't be posting here much. Not that I've had a lot of time to do so recently anyway...but my apologies and promise to do spent more time Xcargoing once I'm in NM.

Talk to you soon.

mjt

I kept copies of almost every magazine I ever worked for. They filled up boxes and boxes in the basement. Now I'm getting rid of them. I'm even selling some of them on ebay.

Oddly, I find this harder than throwing away my personal notes. These, you see, have been seen by other people. They are thus, somehow, more concrete. More real.

What is purely private is like a fantasy. It may dismissed, dissolved, murdered...and no one is the wiser. There are no witnesses to threaten retribution.

Datamation at eBay.

I haven't been ignoring you.

Discovered to my considerable distress that people had been commenting on my blog postings but, for some reason, I've haven't been seeing the aforesaid comments.

So, I haven't been ignoring you. I've just been, as is (alas) too often the case, stupid.

If want to reach me, please feel free to do so at MichaelJayTucker@gmail.com. I'd love to hear from you.

Cheers
mjt

Ted Nugent

I have been watching the Ted Nugent affair with interest. His more or less open threats of violence against the Obama family are, indeed, distressing. Yet, on some level, I am not disturbed by the predictably inane statements of a celebrity who appears both daft and decadent. What is, however, genuinely terrifying is something else. To wit, that when he spoke, his audience applauded.

Once again, I repeat my plaintive question: how have we come to this?

moving

Spent another day packing and sorting and throwing away. We've also now got a big U-Haul container out in the driveway. Periodically, I go dump another load of stuff in it.

I've got almost all of my own personal papers and such packed up and in the U-Haul container. On one level, that's very good news indeed. On another, well, there is something disconcerting about knowing that most of one's personal and professional life can get squeezed down to a dozen 12x10x15 banker's boxes.

Sort of humbling when you think about it.

Santorum's Rise

As I watch the unexpected success of Santorum in the primaries, I'm struck by how many of his supporters are the working poor (or below), the dispossessed, the needy…the people, in short, who have been left-behind, alienated, or terrified by our postindustrial age. To them, it offers little but poverty, indignity, and a loss of self-worth as wounding as annihilation. They are looking for someone to blame, and pretty much anyone will do.

It is the great fault of Liberalism that it did not recognize those individuals nor seek them out as allies. (Let us face it, the Conservatives had a point. The Left of the last few decades has sympathized far more with spotted owls than unemployed men.) It is the great power, and shame, of the Right that it recognized those people before anyone else, and was eager and willing to exploit them.

Yet, in this the Right invited its own enslavement if not destruction…as I think, now, it begins to realize. With Santorum's rise, the Right of the Elite finds itself confronting another, very different Right, one that has very little sympathy with its libertarianism and secularism.

Already, the Elite has reason regret the forces it has unleashed. In time, I suspect, it will learn to fear them.

Life Everlasting...

I have friends who are inspired by the idea of not dying. I mean that literally. They hold that technological advancement will someday…someday reasonably soon… give us the power to banish death. Or, at least, to extend human life into the realm of centuries or even millennium.

I suppose that's a good thing and a worthy end. I support it. Yet, I do not think I'd care for it myself.

I mean, I've have not been particularly competent in managing the 50-something years I've already got. One shudders to think what I'd do with 500 more.

Dare not speak its name...

I have been following with interest the spate of stories about the sudden emergence of the "N-word" in connection with President Obama. A sticker reading "Don't Re-Nig: 2012" has appeared on car bumpers and on the web. A nationally read blogger posts a cartoon of the president as a chicken-eating spook. And on and on.

So, finally, it is all beginning to break, isn't it? The fog lifts. The concrete appears behind the vast abstraction. The reality: the virulence of the Right, of its hatred of Obama, has nothing to do with economics, nothing to do with being a "socialist," or a liberal, nothing to do with foreign policy or the support of Israel or energy…

It is about Race. It has always been about Race. It always will be about Race.

But, then, we knew that already, didn't we?

We just didn't dare say it.

where you can find the Konas

I realized I ought to say where on Ebay my surrealistic Kona comics are. They are here.

Kona The Caveman and Me

I think I may have discovered why I'm such a strange little duck. I mean, truly bizarre. And proud of it, I might add. I've seen normality. It wasn't pretty.

But, also (and in this I'm serious) I worry a bit about the state of comic books. Or graphic novels. Or sequential art. Or call them what you will. They are, or were, the popular art and so important.

To explain…as you know, I'm moving. And, because I'm moving, I'm emptying out my house. Just about four times a week, now, I take another truckload of stuff to the dump. What I'm not throwing away, I'm donating to this or that charity. A still smaller percentage of my possessions I'm trying to sell on Ebay.

And among the things I'm trying to sell are scores and scores…hundreds!…of comic books, all that I bought or received in my misspent youth. My parents mailed them to me some years ago. I think for the amusement of watching me try to find a place to store them.

Anyway, as I go through the comics, almost all of which date from the early 1960s, I'm struck by how really weird they are.You'll recall I mentioned the series that had Mickey Mouse as a spy—a five-foot rodent who talks, somehow inserted into our world of humans, utterly out of place and yet no one seems to notice anything odd.

Well, as I've delved deeper into the piles, I've found more and more like that. More and more that's downright loopy.

For example, I've just put on Ebay three issues of "Kona, Monarch of Monster Isle," one from 1963 and two from 1964. (They are here)

Who's Kona? you ask. He is, I answer, a cave man. Specifically, Kona is a caveman who happens to look a lot like a movie star with long blond-white hair and who lives on an island that time forgot. It's the sort a spot where Neanderthals, dinosaurs, and giant apes live cheek by jowl.

Kona is the king of all this. Then, one day, a family of modern humans, the Dodds, crash their blimp on the island. That's right, a blimp. Long story as to what they were doing in a blimp and where they were going before they crashed. Suffice to say they do crash, Kona saves them, and thus begins a beautiful friendship. Kona abandons his island and he and the Dodds roam the world and have marvelous adventures.

According to Don Markstein's Toonpedia, Kona appeared when Dell publishing was in desperate need of new material when its former partner, Western Printing, set up its own line of comics, the famed Gold Key. In the process, it took with it all the titles and characters that had formerly been in Dell's stable. Kona was one of several characters to dash to Dell's rescue.

But I mention Kona because of the comics' art. It is surreal. I mean that it's surreal in the sense that the surrealists meant. The books are a succession of images…startling, alien, even hallucinogenic! It is hard to put into words just how alien they are, or how much they challenge one's normal perceptions of things.)

Thus, on Monster Isle, we have Neanderthals mounted on dinosaurs and firing rifles and Tommy guns. In the 1963 issue, Kona and friends discover the Pacificans, once humanoid but now equipped with the heads of fish or lizards—and with these strange creatures they do epic battle.

It is …it really is…a little like an acid trip. And not necessarily a good one—as demonstrated by the Pacificans, with their heads of beasts and their high-tech weapons.

And all this was my early reading matter. Is it any wonder I am myself so peculiar? The amazing thing is that I'm not even stranger than I am—maybe sprouting an animal head while riding on a dinosaur.

Okay…

Now comes the serious part. These comics date from the period when comic books were considered complete and total trash. There were no such things as well-respected "graphic novels." There were no professors using them in classes on postmodern literary theory. They were wholly without value…or so said the dominant culture.

Now, of course, all that's changed. Comics, or comix, have been legitimized. They have been integrated into haut culture. Works like Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman, and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, are quite rightly regarded as important pieces of art.

Which is all good.

And yet...

Sometimes I worry.

I am not sure you could do something like Kona, these days. Even if you could somehow scrape away the unconscious racism and sexism in the work, you might not be able to reproduce its vigor, its energy, its dream-like intensity. Those characteristics may not be valued any longer.

As I look at graphic novels (things Maus and Persepolis excepted) I'm troubled by how alike many of them are. They have a hero who faces some great challenge (Vampires, Zombies, whatever) but who spends more time wrestling with his or her own angst than with the villain. And it is angst of a very special sort—adolescent angst, or, at most, twenty-something malaise. Oh, now and then, the artist throws in Meaningful Social Issues…Feminism, gun control, Race-Class-Gender...but those are in the script as a backdrop. They are the setting before which the main character performs his or her endless soliloquy.

Which is, I think, a problem. I'm not sure how long an art form can last given so limited a repertoire. (Surely it is no surprise that comic book sales are down.)

But even if comics/comix survive, there is a deeper, more fundamental concern. I'm troubled by yet another thought.

What if the price of acceptance into haut culture is the loss of creativity?

Mickey Mouse, Secret Agent...

I'm still putting stuff on eBay. Comic books from my lost youth, chiefly. Recently, I stumbled across a set of comics that were genuinely bizarre—"Mickey Mouse, Super Secret Agent."

In 1966, Walt Disney and Gold Key comics decided to get into the booming spy-story market (this was when James Bond and the Man From Uncle were at their peak). And so, Mickey Mouse was promptly retooled as a kind of furry, big-eared 007.

The comics produced on this theme are almost surreal. In them, Mickey and Goofy (as the only anthropomorphic animals in a world inhabited otherwise entirely by humans) engage in 007-style adventures, complete with Bond-type villains and beautiful heroines.

I've got two that I'm offering for sale. The first is the premier issue of the series, "Mickey Mouse, Super Secret Agent in Assignment Time-Lock," which is dated June of 1966 and recounts Mickey and Goofy's unwilling recruitment into "PI, police international." The second is "The Mystery at Misty Gorge," in which our heroes venture into "Africa's Taboo Territory," to rescue Mara Doorna, a brilliant scientist who just happens to also be a willowy blonde. It seems she's been kidnapped by bad guys who want her to use solar power to make artificial diamonds. (No. Really. Could I make that up?)

On one level, these stories are merely bizarre. But, on another, there is something wonderfully subversive about them…an excursion into a parallel universe where the conventions and pretensions of the Spy Flick, the Comic Strip, and the Real World come together disastrously in a sort of three-way car crash of the intellect.

Which brings up an interesting question. To wit: I'm trying to market these to comic book collectors. But, I wonder if I'm not barking up the wrong tree. Perhaps I ought to be selling them to tenured professors of postmodernism and gifted directors of Absurdist Theater.

All a question of market niche, as it were.




Ebay

Liberals, Horror

So the other day I was researching some statements made by high-ranking Nazis before World War II. (Why? Long story. I am using the quotes in a play, believe it or not.)

Anyway, a couple of such remarks I ran across were particularly intriguing. In one, for instance, a statement from a speech made in the early '30s, a Party spokesman triumphantly noted that a certain other party had recently been forced out of politics entirely. National Socialism had, he noted, swept the scum's "black, red, and gold banners" out of the nation.

Who was this? Who was it that the Nazis hated so much? Whose banners were black, red and gold? Not the people you might think. He didn't mean Communists, he didn't mean some rival fascism…he didn't even mean Zionists or politically active Jews.

He meant liberals.

The Nazi's reference was to something known as the "Iron Front." Despite the rather ominous name, the Front was a union of center and mildly left of center organizations more or less allied with the Social Democratic Party (SDP). Some, like the SDP, were mild socialists. Others were surprisingly conservative. All, however, valued civil liberties, the democratic process, and (for lack of a better term) basic decency in politics. Their common flag was a Red, Gold, and Black tricolor—the traditional colors of German liberalism—and their common image was three arrows or spears in a row, one arrow in opposition to each threat to German democracy: the Nazis, the Communists, and the Traditional Right.

And the Front was the group the Nazis detested. Its leaders were arrested and sent to concentration camps even before the Communists. Even before the Jews.

And it makes sense. The Front, not the Communists, not the Stalinists, was the true antithesis of the Nazis. The Stalinists they might hate, the Communists they might try to destroy, but ultimately Radical Right and Revolutionary Left understood the other. Each admired the other. Each regarded the other as a fertile recruiting ground. (As one Nazi famously said, a good Communist could always become a good Nazi. But a Liberal? A Socialist? A Democrat? Never. That was impossible.)

And I think the Front is important to us. Not just because of its role in history, but because of what it tells us about how fanatics regard reasonable men and women. For them, compromise, negotiation, moderation, the golden mean…these things are not just distasteful. They are the Wholly Other. As terrifying as the Kraken. As alien as life from Mars.

And it explains too, I think, why the Right hates us so thoroughly today, here in America. Why it is that the Tea Party insists President Obama is a Moslem and traitor, in spite of every evidence to the contrary. Why it is that the GOP proclaims us Leninists in spite of all we do or say. Why certain churches announce that we are in league with Satan.

You see, we are terrifying to them. We are terrifying beyond measure. We are terrifying because we attempt to be otherwise. Because we attempt not to frighten.

For them, for whom only the bully and the thug are comprehendible, we are thus inexplicable, and therefore horrible.

Saddam Hussein, ebay, and me

As you know, I'm moving. As you also know, I'm either throwing away or trying to sell tons of stuff I've gathered over the last 30 years or so.

Well, if you check my ebay page today (see here), you'll find something rather amusing. Or, if not amusing, then weird as h*ll. Specifically, you'll find I'm selling a batch of English-language propaganda from Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

How did that happen? Well, in 1984, I was a very young trade press journalist writing about computers. I was a bit bored and dreamed of doing something that would have "real significance." One day, while on the bus to work, I had a brain flash. I could do a book about the Iran-Iraq War, which was going on at the time. I figured it had to be important since, after all, the world was trembling at the idea of oil cutoffs from the region. And, besides, Iraq was using chemical weapons in a big way. The unspoken prohibition against them that had endured, more or less, since 1918 had vanished almost overnight.

So, I started contacting various potential sources. One of these was the Iraqi Embassy, or more precisely, the Iraqi Interests Section in Washington. (It was kind of an un-Embassy that Iraq maintained while Hussein and the Reagan White House worked out their complicated relationship.)

I called up a press officer at the Embassy and asked a few stupid questions. A few days later, I was startled to find a large package in my mailbox. It contained all of this material.

Truth be told, it was kind of creepy. Even then, everyone knew that Saddam Hussein was a major despot. I kept wondering what would happen now that my home address was in a file, somewhere, at the Iraqi Interests Section.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, nothing much did happen. I never heard from the Iraqi Embassy again. And, when I took my book proposal to various American publishers, all I got was rejection slips and a few impolite chortles.

My favorite comment came from an editor who said, in more or less these exact words, "It sounds like a good book, but no one will care about these little p*ssant countries a year from now." The scary thing was that she was probably right. Americans would only really recall the two nations after our own people started dying in the one and because of the other.

Such, alas, is human nature.

deadly passions

I was reading the news on the web the other day and came across an article about Congresswoman Giffords. The piece reported that she had asked one of her longtime associates to run for her vacant seat.

It was innocuous enough story. But, then, for reasons that I can only describe as masochistic, I scrolled down to read the commentary left by other visitors to the site There were a few remarks left by well-wishers, and then scores of vituperative attacks…on her, on her husband, on President Obama, on Democrats, on liberals and moderates in general.

I'll spare you the details of what was specifically said. Suffice that they were quite awful. The least offense of them referred to Giffords herself as "mush head." Other posts from other readers announced that of course all politicians were parasites and would be duly removed in the coming libertarian revolution. Still others repeated the Birther fantasy which, for reasons I will never understand, remains alive and kicking.

I knew, of course, that these incredible remarks were the work of a few sad, sick bastards who otherwise would be scrawling four letter words in their own excrement on the walls of public rest rooms. The only difference is that now the Web, and its anonymity, allows them to smear their feces across the globe.

I knew that. Yet, I found myself depressed. Consider the recent GOP debates with all their venom. What if this is the new norm for political discourse? What if this…the verbal abuse, the bald-faced lies, the utter lack of empathy, the demonization of others, the thinly veiled calls for violence…is the rhetoric of our age?

What then? Where do we go? In the grip of such deadly passions?

Return to New Mexico

It is a little after seven in the morning. I'm in New Mexico, now. I'm here to visit my parents, and also to open up our new apartment. It's a bit early for me to do so. We won't be out here full time until July. But, it makes some sense to have a place to stay when we (or, rather, I) visit …as I will do increasingly between now and the final move.

I'm in the apartment at the moment. It is quite nice, though a little empty. I have no furnishings except a futon bed borrowed from my father. And I'm alone, of course.

There is an oddly familiar feeling to all this. Not quite thirty years ago, I started my professional life sitting in exactly such an apartment, this one in New Hampshire. I'd gotten my first real job in the trade press at a magazine there. Martha was to join me in a few months. And so, I was alone in a set of rooms that were either starkly and chillingly empty, or utterly alive with promise and potential. Take your pick.

Today, as then, I shall of course select the latter, the promise and potential. It is far healthier to do so.


*

My son says that our moving West is a wonderful thing for us in that it will give us a fresh start. He is right. He is wise. And yet, let us confess, there is something melancholy in acknowledging that one's life's does need a fresh start, does require a new beginning…

*

The problem with such moments of reflection is that they lead to uncomfortable places. If it had not been for this crisis, would it have been possible for us (for me) to change? Or had the inertia become so great, the detritus so deep, that only the most fearsome events could force a return to motion and mobility?

In which case my mother's stroke was more than a medical emergency. It was her gift. Her sacrifice.

Let us hope that I am worthy of it.

Santorum's America

The idea that Santorum is now neck and neck with Romney is disturbing to say the least. That he might be the Republican nominee is appalling. That he might be president of the United States is horrific. The man has no more business running a nation than he does operating a nuclear reactor in his basement.

Though I do wonder. If the unthinkable should happen, and he gets the nod, what will the young libertarians of Mr. Paul think of the Santorum vision of an America governed like a giant parochial school? With condoms forbidden by law, uniforms required, and serious discussion of whether patent leather shoes really reflect up?


(news story here)