"What I'd really like to have is a tricorder for evil."



Starnes Walker, research director for Homeland Security's Science and Technology division, commenting on new efforts to develop technologies to detect IEDs within the United States.



USA Today 11/27/07 3A

I’ve been reading a lot recently – here are some updates:



Last week I finished Hal Duncan’s Ink (the sequel to Vellum). Ink very kindly begins by explaining some of the events from Vellum, which was extremely helpful. This is characteristic of the difference between the two books – if Vellum is visionary yet (sometimes) incomprehensible, Ink ties things together so that readers can apprehend the deeper patterns connecting the beautiful fragments. Although Ink is more readable than Vellum, it is somewhat less compelling – I still love Duncan’s hallucinogenic juxtaposition of synchronicities, but he succumbs to self-indulgency in this book, particularly in the ending, which is a bit of a fizzle. Worth reading if you like (or love!) Duncan’s style – and if you can enjoy portrayals of interesting characters having cool moments of doing awesome stuff – but those with little taste for avant-garde experimentations may find this a sluggish read.



For dissertation purposes, I recently finished Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. What strikes me most about this book is how it puts a revolutionary face on a deeply reactionary sentiment. At first, this story seems to have countercultural sympathies – in a totalitarian future where people burn books instead of reading them, someone must break free from social conventions and open his mind to the possibilities of fiction! Great stuff, right? But then, we soon discover that the reason for all the book-burning in the first place is because America has been overrun with minorities, and it has become politically-incorrect to print anything that might “offend” anyone with different views or opinions from oneself. In the end, Bradbury is writing a rant against what he can only see as the rise of political correctness and the fragmentation of American “unity” into the balkanization of special interest. In my mind, this represents a failure to see that “minority” voices (particularly in the 1950s) might have something valuable to offer, particularly in the 1950s when this book is written.



The book lefty a bad taste in my mouth. I don’t think that Bradbury actually has a soul. He’s like some kind of handsome doppelganger who SEEMS to have a soul until you get close, and then you can smell the rot. =) I remember being similarly unimpressed with the reactionary sentiments in Something Wicked This Way Comes.



I’m currently teaching T.H. White’s The Once and Future King in my Intro to Fiction class, and I love it! I first encountered this book when I was in high school, and it is one of the earliest places where I learned to read for symbols, images, and themes. It’s great to be able to return to it now as a teacher and share some of the things I learned with my students. We just finished the first part (The Sword and the Stone), and there’s so much STUFF to talk about that I can hardly fit it all into the class.



I find that teaching fiction at this level, I tend to be less focused on “critical” readings (the kind of thing I do most in my research) and more focused on appreciating the density of imagination that the author has created. In the class, we read to get a sense of the depth of what the author is trying to say or do with his story and technique, rather than making larger critical observations about what is accomplished. I think that’s fine – students at this level (typically sophomore nonmajors) don’t typically catch a lot of subtlety when they read, and the purpose of this class is to improve reading, writing, and critical thinking skills – so it feels right to focus on getting them to read more attentively and to appreciate the density and complexity of what’s happening in the prose in front of them!



One thought that strikes me – White is very a kind of shaman at heart. Not in the sense that he was initiated in any Native American tradition (he’s actually very paternalistic about American Indians), but because he has an amazing capacity to imagine experience from alternative points of view. Arthur’s entire education (he is transformed into a series of different animals) is a powerful shamanic initiation if I’ve ever seen one. And Merlyn has been eating far too many peyote buttons for his own good (he experiences time backwards! I mean come on!)



More later…

I saw Resident Evil: Extinction on Friday night, and it was fun. “Fun” in my mind is a specific variety of “good,” but “good” is a vague descriptor that can mean too many different things when applied to media. =) For example, I’d describe Vellum as “visionary” – another specific variety of “good” that I enjoy a great deal, but that others might not like so much (for some people “visionary” can translate into “confusing.”) Resident Evil was fun for me because it had Milla Jovovich kicking ass. It also had great music and some well-constructed moments of zombie horror. The plot was bad, but all I ask from a film like this is a strong enough foundation to support Milla looking hot and badass while killing zombies, and I’m pretty much satisfied.



It’s been a while since I’ve posted about comics – I just got a new stack in the mail, and I’m finished with the DC stuff. Here are some reflections (with spoilers!)



Overall, DCs contributions over the last few months have felt wimpy. I think DC is still in a state of transition – to me it feels like they’re still recovering from the end of the Morrison/Waid run on JLA, which gave the whole DC continuity a “center” for a while that it has been missing lately. With Waid’s return to Flash, and Dwayne McDuffie (Justice League Unlimited) taking over on Justice League, I think they’re steadily moving in the right direction.



OK – from the top of the stack to the bottom:



My feelings on “The Sinestro Corps War” are shifting slightly. I started out hating this story (because I despise the notion of “Parrallax” the yellow-fear demon with a venomous passion), but Johns and Gibbons are kicking it into overdrive now, and the whole story is getting the kind of “cosmic space opera” feeling that the Rann/Thanagar War should have had, but failed to achieve. I don’t like the premise for the story, but I have to admit that the execution is doing something kind-of cool. I find myself digging the “Corps” issues (especially the “Mogo” stuff) more than the Hal Jordan GL book. We’ll see if it goes anywhere.



Countdown sucks. I was trying to get into it for a while, but I’m far enough in now to say, with conviction, that it sucks. It’s a shame, because the Mary Marvel story could be a blast in the hands of someone like Morrison. I hate Donna Troy and Jason Todd and “Bob” the Monitor, and yes, Jimmy Olsen MUST die. Nuff Said.



Birds of Prey – sniffle! I’m very sad that Gail Simone is leaving. This title, in her hands, has been a consistent favorite. I’m going to follow her over to Wonder Woman, and hope that she can bring something interesting to a character that no one ever seems to be able to do anything good with. (If there’s anyone who can breathe life into WW it’s Gail Simone). I’ll ride out the Birds of Prey transition and see if anyone can pick it up, but the death of Knockout in 109 totally blows. Don’t walk into this title and dismantle the Secret Six, jerk.



Waid’s Brave and the Bold is quite fun – I loved Batman vs. the Legion of Super Heroes. Despite George Perez’s weird art (which makes everything look like a Crisis!), this book has lots of promise. Frank Miller’s Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder is just goddamn weird, goddamn it. Morrison’s Batman is probably awesome, but it will be hard to tell until he’s done and I can read the whole thing in one long chunk – Morrison’s storytelling doesn’t lend itself well to reading in individual issues. Batman #666 was great, though!



Justice Society needs to get a bit more momentum going, but I was surprised to find that I loved the Libery Belle story – surprised because I loved Jesse Quick back when she was part of the Speed Force crew, and I’ve never understood the whole “Liberty Belle” transition until now. (Why be a lame patriotic slugger when you could be a hot speedster?) I’m glad she has her speed powers back. In general, this book needs to focus on a few central core characters, or else it will spread itself too thin (this seems to be the danger now).



I’m glad Meltzer is leaving Justice League, and I can’t wait for Dwayne McDuffie to take the helm! Meltzer’s run had all the trappings of being really good, without actually BEING good. It was sad. I want McDuffie to pick this book up and whip it into shape – give it the kind of excitement and interpersonal character development that made JL Unlimited (the cartoon) so compelling.



The winner this month is the Flash – it is such a relief to hear Mark Waid’s voice in this book, after all the crap that’s happened in the Flash continuity since Geoff Johns left! I’m glad Bart is dead, I’m glad Intertia is a statue, and I’m really happy that Wally is back. I also really enjoy Daniel Acuna’s artwork (he was great in Uncle Sam, and he’ll be great here). I’m not sure if I’m going to be much of a fan of the Wonder Twins, but I’ll give Waid some time to develop this before bagging on them too hard.



Enough for today! More after I’ve finished the Marvel stack… =)

I started off last time talking about Hal Duncan’s Vellum, and I didn’t have time to get into my thoughts and reflections:



I found myself inspired by this book. Baffled at times, because the narrative can be difficult to follow, but profoundly inspired. There are points when it’s less like reading a narrative and more like looking at a psychedelic word-painting. I’ve just started Ink, the sequel, and it begins with a summary of Vellum that puts things into perspective – one of the reviews I’ve read calls Vellum a kaleidoscope of conjoined and disjointed images, while Ink links those images together. That’s ringing true for me. (As I started reading Ink, I found myself going “Oh! So that’s what was happening at the end of Vellum!” several times).



This is the kind of book that makes me want to do creative things. I read Duncan, and I want to write, make films, run games, craft profound or beautiful things.



I love the way Duncan tips his hat to Michael Moorocock and the New Wave of the 1960s (I’m particularly sensitive to this because the New Wave is at the core of my dissertation). In one of the realities in the later part of Vellum (after the bitmites have shredded the world into multiple synchronicitous paradigms), Jack Carter becomes an “assassin angel” fighting against a totalitarian state using “sex pistols” fueled by chi energy – the style, tone, and themes in this section are a deliberate tribute to Williams Burroughs and Michael Moorock (Jack even refers to himself as “Jerry Cornelius,” Moorock’s reality-hopping cross-dressing James Bond for the psychedelic era). I have to confess, these are my favorite moments in part two! It’s nice seeing writers keeping the Jerry Cornelius myth alive – especially when Duncan outdoes Moorcock in some ways.



Despite her goofy name, I liked Phreedom Messenger in part one. She started out as the kind of weird kick-ass character that could rope me into an entire series of books, if treated well. And her plan to play Eresh and Metatron against each other was great. Unfortunately, she gets pregnant and becomes nothing more than a faceless baby-carrier in part two. Aaarrrrgh! Why do writers create interesting and compelling female characters only to strip away their personalities and reduce them “walking wombs” in so many stories?!? (Grumble, grumble).



One of the things I’ve been chewing on is the way this book fictionalizes America’s current and future activities in the Middle East. Part of the story is set in 2017, and the “war on terror” as we know it has continued to escalate. The public face of this “war” is a cover for the struggle between Metatron’s Covenant and Malik’s Sovereigns. Metatron seems to want an unkin “demoncracy” (where all unkin are subject to a rule of law), while Malik and the Sovereigns are striving for autonomous self-sovereignty (the right to answer to no one but themselves). Both Metatron and Malik enslave others (by graving them with the Cant) in their efforts to win this war. It’s tempting to read this as a critique against both “Jihad” and “McWorld” – in Duncan’s analysis, both imperial capitalism and local fundamentalisms operate according to a parallel logic of instrumentality (they turn people into tools, means rather than ends, instruments to achieve a greater goal or greater good).



The need for a third option, then, becomes vital. Most of the main characters are rebels who refuse to side with either the Covenant or the Sovereigns.



Chewing on Duncan’s treatment of these issues, I was put in mind of Fredric Jameson’s argument (summarized by Jonathan Clark) that “the political possibility of the postmodern cultural object lies in its failure.” In Signatures, Jameson argues that many texts attempt to represent contemporary social conditions only to fail, but that failure is itself a kind of success – the very failure to map existing conditions can become a map of the circumstances that prevent such mappings. A failure of representation can itself become a representation of the forces that mystify and obscure the landscape in question.



I think this critique has relevance in Duncan’s case. Vellum constantly bombards the reader with images of the “war on terror,” brief soundbites and comments about American imperialism, and the image of an extreme religious fundamentalist building a network of terror in the Middle East. The Covenant/Sovereign war (which seems to be presented as a McWorld/Jyhad struggle) dominates the background of the story, and any time the characters are in 2017, there always seems to be a television somewhere tuned to scenes of devastation (bombings, terrorist attacks, military actions) on CNN.



The “war on terror” is thus ubiquitous in this text, but Duncan’s story critically fails to “map” with any depth the complexity of the real-world situation. There’s a half-finished gesture to encompass both American imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism as subsidiary elements in the unkin war, but this flounders (the bitmite apocalypse interrupts the whole thing, and Malik, who was one of the characters I’d have liked to seen in more depth, seems to just be forgotten). Jameson calls “historicity” a semblance or affect of history without any actual depth – Duncan deploys a “historicity” of the “war on terror” (a sense or feeling that he’s referring to historical events), but his history evades any concrete signifieds. The “war on terror” here is a dominant presence, but its presence is ultimately depthless (there is little sensitivity to the complex histories that have produced the present situation).



I think that Duncan’s representation of “the war on terror” here is a failure, but it is a failure that may have political possibility, insofar as it maps the general conditions of “incomprehensibility” that characterize this war. As someone who has recently been teaching current events (in my American Studies class), my sense is that many people experience America’s current activities (the “war on terror,” the occupation of Iraq, the buildup of hostility toward Iran and North Korea) in exactly the way Duncan describes – as a ubiquitous backdrop, an ever-present context, something happening on CNN that’s hard to look at while impossible to avoid. Yet this ur-context is simultaneously stripped of historical depth (try asking most people what Al-Qaeda actually stands for, and you’ll encounter a mess of misconceptions).



To put this thought more briefly: I think that while Vellum relentlessly deploys images of “the war on terror,” it fails to represent the conflict with sensitivity. At the same time, however, I think that Vellum (perhaps inadvertently) portrays the general incomprehensibility of the “war” with amazing accuracy.



That’s it for today! More later…

I’m currently finishing Hal Duncan’s Vellum, the first book of a two-part series concluding with Ink. Duncan is a Scottish New Weird writer – although “New Weird” can be a and contested term, I’d use it to broadly refer to a current avant-garde fantasy movement focused on disrupting genre boundaries and formal conventions often associated with mainstream fantasy (whatever that is). Vellum is Duncan’s first novel, and it won high praise from Jeff VanderMeer, who called it “a revelation – the opening gambit in the career of a mind-blowing colossal talent whose impact will be felt for decades.” VanderMeer has also praised Duncan enthusiastically online in several places. In terms of other associations with the New Weird, Duncan’s short fiction appears in an anthology called Logorrhea alongside work from VanderMeer, Jay Lake, Theodora Goss, and Michael Moorcock.



Here are my initial reflections (with spoilers):



This novel is a long beautiful psychedelic poem. It is formally and stylistically intimidating – readers who aren’t into “highbrow” technique and experimentation will despise this book, and even some (like me) who enjoy this sort of thing may still feel left out in the cold. One quick way of describing the book might be to say that it can be “too artsy for its own good.” I don’t particularly feel that way, but I’m comfortable with a level of ambiguity that some readers find annoying.



The story is about a war between the unkin, awakened humans who have opened up “a locked door in their heads” in order to access the Cant, a kind-of meta-language that functions as the narrative operating code of reality (61). Reality, in this setting, is shaped by “gravings” on the Vellum, which is the palimpsestic “medium” of reality. Most people only walk the surface of the Vellum, but unkin understand that there are layers of possibilities underneath the surface, an infinite number of potential worlds underwriting the world that is. Upon awakening, unkin achieve their own special “graving” or true name:



“It doesn’t have to be physical, although sometimes people wear it in their eyes or on their skin for everyone to see, a thousand-yard stare or a knife-scar tattoo. But what makes it a graving, a name that you can read and maybe even use, is that it’s real close to the surface, some event has brought it out, a welt on the surface of reality. You get it for your own reason, if you ever get it at all; maybe you get it the first time you fuck, maybe the firs time you kill, either way it’s your own special graving, it’s you, that secret name carved into your consciousness at that precise moment when you suddenly, instantly realize: I know what I am” (51).



The tension in the story comes from an ongoing war between the Covenant and the Sovereigns, unkin who are described as angelic and demonic forces. The angelic Covenant, lead by the archangel Metatron, are attempting to unite the unkin and limit their powers in order to stabilize reality. The demonic Sovereigns, loosely organized by Malik, refuse to accept Covenant law and seek to impose their own realities onto the Vellum. Metatron imagines his project as the establishment of a metaphysical democracy, where the rule of law transcends individual will. The struggle between the Covenant and the Sovereigns is also the hidden war underwriting the near-future “war on terror” in 2017 (one of the book’s settings), where the Covenent have their own “man” in the White House, and where unkin can see “angels begging for their lives on Al Jazheera” and sense “Malik in Damascus, at the heart of it all, graving Shariah law and hated of the West into all his followers” (82).



The novel’s protagonists are a small number of unkin who refuse to take sides in the war between the Covenant and the Sovereigns – both sides can etch “gravings” into their followers, changing their true names and identities, and these “gravings” have ripple effects through time. One of the protagonists, Phreedom Messenger, deliberately has her own graving merged with the name of the Sumerian goddess Innana in order to create a hybrid true-name and evade Metatron’s detection (because he already has her name listed in his Book of Life, allowing him to find her wherever she may be). This graving process changes her (and Inanna) on multiple levels of the Vellum, and this is stylistically represented by intercut scenes from Phreedom’s life in 2017, the “real” unkin Inanna’s childhood an ancient Uruk, and the mythical Inanna’s archetypal story.



The story becomes very formally complex, because people are attempting to re-write each other’s gravings all the time, resulting in chapters that bounce back and forth between the psychedelic simultaneity of the present (2017), the past, and the mythic past. It gets even more complex, because unkin can themselves travel through time (they seem to act in multiple times at once), and they also can enter each other’s minds and memories, resulting in a complete breakdown between “inner” and “outer” spaces. (One unkin might enter another unkin’s memories in order to change his identity, and by changing such memories, he’s actually changing history…)



There’s also a very strange framing story, mostly disconnected from the other narratives (although I think this changes in Ink), about a dude named Guy Renard who discovers the macromimicon, or the Book of All Hours, which allows him to descend into the depths of the Vellum (into the dreamlike infinite alternate realities beneath the surface world most of “us” live in).



Whew! That’s more time spent on summary that I’d intended, but as you can probably tell, this is a difficult book to summarize (and I’ve hardly scratched the surface). I’ll end here (due to time) and come back soon to share my thoughts and reflections…