Flashback! To “American Splendor…!”

Why I waited so long, I don’t know.

But a little while ago I spent about four days watching American Splendor, another couple of days rooting around the Internet for various memorials, and rather felt like Harvey Pekar had colonized my soul for a long moment…which is no bad thing, for sure: because at the time I was dead broke and doing nothing but writing stuff and mailing stuff and boiling stuff to eat, and it’s all okay, that stuff, those little patches of put-your-head-down doldrumish living, in that it gives you that virtuous self-flagellating feeling…nevertheless, role models help, too! And Harvey-ish old Harvey, honestly he makes a pretty good one.

So there’s that, right away, before anything else.

But then on top of it the movie was real interesting to me, even if (I suspect) not for the reason the folks at Sundance and Cannes found it interesting — because I was fascinated by Paul Giamatti’s effort to “translate” Harvey. Of course no translation’s perfect, and every translation can’t help but betray the personality of the translator, that’s not exactly news…but in this case the subject’s pretty challenging, and that’s likely why things got weird in such a way, in this translation, that I can’t help but wonder what really went on in the making of this movie, can’t help trying to pick out the seams between the scenes. Everywhere you look in it, there are filters that acknowledge their own existence to you, and yet at the same time seem calculated to draw you in past them as though they were transparencies. Paul G. looks like himself sometimes, like “real Harvey” in flashes, other times (as I’m sure everyone has already said) like another caricature of Harvey out of American Splendor itself…and yet other times like a guy doing Serious Acting (or Comedic Acting) in a way you’re supposed to notice, while still other times not…and in total, it’s like something of all of them. And to me the whole thing’s all weirdly visible because of that, kaleidoscopic almost; sometimes the dialogue sounds like a ninth-grader wrote it, for an Afterschool Special no less…a demonstration of how what constitutes “realism” is sometimes prone to change with your platform, I think, as something tells me all the clunkiest-sounding stuff was lifted right off Harvey’s own pages…and yet it’s just at these times, in these vexed moments, that Paul G. is also extremely convincing, perhaps more convincing than at (almost) any other time, right when he has to infuse the clunk with something else to make it read more real. And this is acting that’s a bit harder to…I want to say “notice”, but I think “appreciate” might be better? There’s a grating absurdity to the staging of certain scenes, stuff you just know can’t have been somebody’s idea of the best thing to do…when Harvey meets Crumb we are treated to a weird myoclonic twitch of Hollywood-style hagiography, “two legends meet”, and it seems wildly underconceived: “hey, I’m inta comics myself, man”. Jesus, it’s like watching Roadhouse for the briefest of instants, all about how bullshit characters bump into one another, Roadhouse with a dollop of 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould thrown in. Comic-book stuff, you know? It’s a fight scene, or it would be if somebody was playing this a lot more meta than they are…but they aren’t, and it isn’t, so it’s more peculiar overlap, more kaleidoscope stuff…

But for me it’s a bit hallucinatory too, and therefore it works frighteningly well, to draw me in…because that’s my scene, I grew up in those rainy, shitty backyards with their garage sales, I recognize the clothes and I recognize the argot, I feel as though I am there, as though at any moment I myself might walk into the scene in the background, broke, hands in pockets, trying hard to look cool. Okay, and it’s not really synchronized well, it’s a few years out; but it’s just a few, and that’s still all the stuff I remember. Add to this that I can totally relate to Harvey, I consider myself a connoisseur of people like Harvey…and also maybe it’s just that so many people have banged on about the resemblance to me, that I can’t help seeing a bit of myself in Paul G…although my friend Stu D. looks a lot more like him than me, and so I see Stu in there too, and Stu’s inta comics himself, man, and so who does that make me in this movie again…? Weird deja- and double vu-type shit everywhere, and I don’t know if I remember all of it, or just enough of it to make me think I remember more than I do. Did I see Harvey’s friend Toby on a tape or something sometime, at some hipster’s house years later, and get ported back to the Eighties in the seeing? And thence to the early Seventies in my memory, perhaps, down the road of childhood but I just DON’T KNOW, it’s all wreathed in some kind of nostalgic familiarity but I’m not sure it’s mine. And yet, at the same time, I’m quite sure it is. There’s so much I recognize in here from comics, so much I’m bringing to this movie myself…there’s so much that Harvey and I share, even though we were not contemporaries or even neighbours, our towns are nothing alike and our lives are completely set apart…and yet, and yet, and yet once again. We go from scene to scene in the old movie-making fashion, though on first viewing we may not notice it…it’s just a thing about movies these days you know, the structure is all buried somehow, the lines of the symbolic skeleton are hard to discern under all the thick flesh and flabby motion laid on top of it. Stuff you have to have, of course, like you have to have the moment where Harvey slumps down and realizes he has to change his life, the most standard Hollywood motivational boilerplate there ever was and YET…!

It happened, didn’t it?

Paul G. plays it from the inside in that bit, just like he knows it…like he knows he’s in the scene in the movie where the hurtin’ songs are all over the radio after the breakup with the girl, like he’s resigned to the fact that it looks that way, and he can’t change how it looks. And that’s the movie, really; when he turns to Crumb on the bench and bitterly complains about his go-nowhere life, and his voice cracks…it’s like a bad movie then, something the kids in the theatre would laugh at, repeat to each other as a catchphrase later on…but that’s all true too, I think, even if this is Paul trying to say something and make it look natural, when probably only Harvey himself could make that bit look natural, because guys like Harvey are just really hard to emulate, you know? They’re too much themselves, they’re tough to reduce. And so there are things that break there, and a bit of real angst seeps through into that bad moment…it is really a good moment, then, and it sticks in my craw, I can’t quit replaying it. Translation hits a limit there, and I don’t know if that was intended, but it does work. Well…

Probably it was not intended?

Probably it really wasn’t, although on repeated viewings I did see the deep structure, the skeletonization of the thing…the symbolic balance that was designed into it, that could not have been accidental. In movies there is a strange thing that sometimes happens where the changing of the scene — the changing of it! — is what reveals character by carrying content, much as a penciller draws the eye across a page, or (probably more accurately) a colourist pushes it. It isn’t just about knowing where to end one thing and begin another, it’s about how that’s done — because it can be done many ways. A film is a montage, finally, in its core, and it obeys the dynamical rules of attraction and repulsion that animate a montage, the stuff they get down so pat with trailers, by snipping scenes and piping in music, playing with the beat of your expectations. It’s like comics, too, that part; as a montage and a collage have, inevitably, a lot in common. But in the actual movie it’s as well not to lean too heavily on the crutch of music, there, not to just say “take it to the bridge!” and then jam any old eight into the middle. That’s not really the high level of doing those things anyway, even if you do just put the music in there because you can you still must find a reason for it being that music, it can not really be “any old eight” and still tell you something at the same time. You’ve got to be more judicious than that. And sometimes “music” isn’t the answer, in a scene transition — because there are other ways of chasing down the dynamic of a transition, that follow the same rules as the other kind of break but use different devices. And sometimes that’s better.

And it does happen here, and you can see the intent percolating along behind it, and that’s fine…even if it takes a couple viewings, it’s still fine. It’s actually not the main thing, though I seem to be harping on about it a bit here…it’s not the main thing, but it tells you something about the toolbox of craft that’s being used here. But, that break, on the bus stop bench…I don’t know if that’s out of the same toolbox. Later on, when Harvey turns to Joyce and asks her if he’s real, if he can survive himself…it is the same thing as the bench, it is the same thing, but what was previously “bad” is reconstructed here as “good”…now Paul is being Harvey in a way he wasn’t before, or Harvey’s being Paul, or we’re being both of them…something’s happened to the kaleidoscope, it’s all collapsed in on itself, and the light’s broken through. Art? Yeah, well, but that kind of thing’s happened to me, you know? I’ve been there; right there. It isn’t just something somebody made up, it’s real, and meanwhile the real Harvey is still sitting in the White Room, too, comfortable as you please, no monolith in sight but just people wandering around in that holding-tank of a space, that strange little isolation ward, peculiar little spaceship…and the most important thing about that scene is that it happened, not to Charlie Chaplin or Achilles or Batman, but to Harvey Pekar. Paul will get just so close to him in his final soliloquy, he will get extremely close actually, if you know what Harvey looks and sounds like, and if you watch. He’ll get as close, really, as he’ll ever come. And that’s how a real actor does it, I think: I think the world of Paul’s skill, and here at last you do get to see it in “full” performance, the one-man show style. So suddenly it goes meta as anything, and a bunch of tensions built up in the “translation” resolve themselves…

Happily…

But, was it actually planned-out that way?

I guess that doesn’t really matter; the French liked it well enough without knowing that. Aha, the French, they really did like it, didn’t they? I amuse myself by imagining why: because here was something really, really American, but also something they could come to grips with, this Very American Thing, so aha! That’s what they’re like, I knew it! I swear I knew it all along.

Of course, I don’t see it that way. Because I’m not seeing it, I’m feeling it…I’m feeling all that weird familiarity, that nostalgia, loaded on top of the slice-of-life and the artful construction. It’s like a mirror to me, as to them (I imagine) it is more of a window. Sitting there boiling my potatoes and trying to write enough decent stuff down to call it a proper day, feeling broke, feeling invisible. Economizing, in many more ways than one. I’m as old now, as Harvey was when Revenge Of The Nerds came out.

Do you remember that movie?

Man, I remember that movie.

There is no part of it, that I don’t somehow remember.

Funny how that goes.

The War On Wikileaks

Hello there, Bloggers: welcome to your front-row seat. Getcher peanuts here.

Reports are coming in, that the Western democracies are trying to kill Wikileaks: kill it fast and kill it dead, and they’re not too fussy about doing it in the open, either. Isn’t that interesting?

Well, if you don’t think it’s interesting, I guess there’s every possibility that you’re not reading this…possibly also, there’s every possibility that you’re the sort of person who doesn’t invite me to your Christmas parties…

And I actually have quite a lot to say about it, but I’m still working it up, so consider this an abstract, rushed out in the hopes it’ll beat the next wave to the shore. Have you heard the stories? You can donate to the KKK through Mastercard if you want to, but you can not donate to Wikileaks; if you want to put your money in a Swiss bank you can do it if you are a dictator, but not if you are Julian Assange. Wikileaks on Twitter? You can, again, find the KKK there…but Wikileaks, no way. Check out this guy, who says PayPal’s frozen his account because he’s donated to Wikileaks. Check out this story, of the CIA placing a Wikileaks mirror site online hoping to gather data on you if you’re curious about Wikileaks. Which, as the link tells us, did not happen…but who among us doesn’t find such a thing plausible?  If this is a tempest in a teapot, it’s a mighty big teapot still, and there’s still a tempest in it…and it’s gaining strength.  Internet businesses seem oddly emotionally-engaged with the idea of Julian Assange being a troublemaker, and the thing’s just starting to smell kind of funny, you know?  The Orange Revolution found a home on Twitter, but Assange can’t;  one wonders how Amazon, recent defenders of your right to buy a How-To guide for pedophiles if you want, looks on the great whistleblowing controversy of our times…

[EDIT:  Oh no but wait...one doesn't wonder that...]

And so:  is it all orchestrated? It is certainly beginning to look as though it is massively orchestrated. You’ve got the somewhat suspicious legal pursuit of Assange by Swedish authorities, you’ve got his incarceration without bail in the UK. You’ve got U.S. talking heads invading your living room each night telling you it’s all about national security. They’re calling it cyberterrorism, and who can blame them? They’ve probably been waiting years to call something cyberterrorism; the word “cyberterrorism” is probably like Viagra for journalists, slightly better than that for Republicans.

But, it’s the wrong word. “Terrorism”: that’s an inapt metaphor for what we’re seeing here. If you were in London recently, you probably already know what the better metaphor is.

What we’re witnessing here is a riot.

A slow-motion virtual riot, and we’re all inside it: you and me and the NYT.

And the funny thing about that is, that the Western democracies have rather a lot of online instruments that operate as virtual analogues for grabbing someone off the street and arresting them, but not too many for dispersing crowds…in fact they’re only got one each, and only one of them has one that can be deployed with anything like swiftness and anything like quiet. That’d be, of course, the United States and its Patriot Act — the only thing like a fire hose and a tear-gas cannon in the online world as of this moment. Oh, those Internet analogies, all the “virtual X” metaphors and the “cyber-Y” similes…everyone’s always racing to bang them out on the anvil, it’s a game, it’s a contest, it’s a sport, it’s a job…in some rare cases, like the whole “copyright infringement is not theft” argument, it’s a series of combat manoeuvres played out on a very small piece of active ground surrounded by a vast no-man’s-land of people flicking channels after work and not really caring…but now, right now, it’s something else as well.

Right now, it’s a recruitment drive. It’s a guilt trip. It’s a personal appeal from Jimmy Wales. Please let us do this. The Western democracies have an enviable record of success with the whole “requiring and securing assent from citizens” thing, because all they’ve ever had to do to get it is yoke your interests with theirs and then apply the necessary leverage. “You must put up with an X while I enjoy a Y because otherwise neither of us get anything”. It’s the Prisoner’s Dilemma reconstructed as extortion, through the mere addition of whatever amount of force it takes to bend it into that shape. Everybody knows it. Everybody’s used to it. I’ll drive my Porsche while you take the bus; by the way the fares are going up and the hours are being cut; but it is necessary.

This time, though…the necessity isn’t too evident, is it?

Because whistleblowers may well constitute metaphorical WMDs to people in government, but to ordinary citizens they’re not explosive at all. In fact they make rather a jolly noise. Here we are, all of us, milling around in the street and beginning to tap our feet to that merry tune, just a little. Just unconsciously. At any moment we may begin to sing, and then what will anyone be able to do about us? No amount of state or corporate control of narrative will be able to convince us that singing’s not worth doing once we are doing it, and then the “terrorism” thing will stop working, it will be too late to deploy the online capabilities of the Patriot Act, we will all be living in an SF novel from the 1970s and they will be stuck with Wikileaks forever…!

So the only thing to do, is try to kill it now. Kill it fast and kill it deader than dead, do it in a hurry and don’t bother about being clever, don’t worry about code-names or plausible deniability, just get rid of it now, and then later we can make up some story, it won’t matter so long as the infodumps stop coming.

Like I said, you’d have to be blind not to see it. And I think we do see it, don’t you?

I mean, me personally…what I see…

…Is that it isn’t going to work.

But it is going to be interesting, it is going to be very interesting indeed, to see these governments bet their right to lie and then lose it. You know, I use Wikipedia every day, and I definitely find it a benefit…but I’m very happy to tell you that I will never be giving poor sad-faced Jimmy a single red cent to support it. Never. Just not going to happen. Basically, my position on that is: if it goes, it goes.

And this general principle of mine might be extended some fair little way beyond Jimmy, too. If you know what I’m saying.

So:  good afternoon to you, Internet!  How fresh and clean the world looks out there;  I have no idea why I’m sitting in here, when I could be out and about in it.

Everything That Happens Is For The Last And Most Significant Time

So…

It’s probably not what you think.

You see, last year for Christmas, I got the Jack Kirby Fourth World Omnibus’ final volume.

Consistent with the many, many reports I’d had of it, I found it profoundly anticlimactic. But with the emphasis most definitely on the “profound” part: as this Hunger Dogs book it seems I’ve always just kept missing all these years provides a unique and much-needed punctuation to the petering-out of Kirby’s visionary Fourth World. Just as I imagined it would, of course…

But, I never anticipated just how it would…and thus I was unprepared for the complexity of the experience. People say a lot of things about Hunger Dogs: that it’s a disappointment, that it’s bad, that Kirby looks not-himself, that he seems hurried and frazzled and out of his usual control. That it reads like the work of an older man who’s past his prime, and who’s lost his once-sure touch; that it limps downhill to a fractured and fizzled termination of its promise and its prophecy, instead of delivering the goods in the good solid concluding way comics should, and Kirby himself certainly always did. And…

That’s all true, actually!

Except, not really.

I had a clever little bon mot for it once. A few years ago now, I received an e-mail from the late great Steve Gerber (I know!) asking if I’d be so kind as to give him a little background on Canada’s medical system…because, as he said, down in the States people are always hearing about how long wait-lists in Canada are forcing them to go south for treatment, but the problem is they’re always hearing it from the wrong people. So was there, Steve wanted to know, an iota of truth to those claims of theirs?

Seeing a chance to be clever in front of my idol, I eagerly replied:

“An iota? Yes. Of truth? No.”

…Followed by about fifty thousand words of fabulously unnecessary elaboration, but then hey: gotta be me.

And the same holds here, in more ways than one. Disappointing, HAH! It’s so disappointing it makes your skin crawl, it’s so disappointing you worry how it will all come out! It seems I’m always banging on about happy accidents, serendipitous collapses, and the like…but this one was a challenge even for me, and for just one simple reason, which was that it totally worked. I believe in the evolution of the artist, you see. I believe in “old men’s stories”. I believe in making it more personal and less easy for much of your old audience to follow you as you go along. I believe in complexity and idiosyncracy, and even metatextualism-gone-mad, for that matter. But Hunger Dogs makes it all far, far too real not to feel it:  not to feel the real moment taking over, and the truth being laid bare, and the heart-cry going out willyou-nillyou to be heard. It’s usually so easy for us to gloss over Kirby’s topical ambitions while we’re looking at his timeless “myth-making”, just as we always gloss over his subtlety while we’re absorbed in his taste for action…we’re used to wishing somebody would come along and ink the rough pencils of his words, to make them more lugubrious: less like operatic declaration, less like so many verbal speed-lines, less like the sound-effects of characters and more relatable for us as their naturalistic “thoughts”. But of course none of Kirby’s pencils have ever exactly been rough, have they? And so there’s an assumption concealed in that occasional wish of ours, that doesn’t quite stand up to scrutiny. When we wish (say) that someone like Stan Lee had been around to dialogue Orion, it isn’t a wish that makes much sense if we’re willing to examine it closely: was Stan ever really subtler, or more naturalistic? Did his dialoguing ever truly temper Kirby’s “eternalistic” flights of fancy by bringing them down into a more topical sphere, more relatable to specific time-and-place, as the popular story goes? I like Stan’s dialoguing quite a lot, but just because he brought the soap to Kirby’s opera, that didn’t make him more concerned with “relevance” than Jack was; quite the reverse. Because (arguably, I suppose), it was the relevance that was the jarring thing about Kirby’s work…the unsettling thing, the truly hyper-stylized thing, the thing that many fans erroneously deemed “rough”.

Hunger Dogs, as it was published, is perhaps the roughest thing Kirby ever made, in that sense. But also, I suppose inarguably, it is actually rough: as the pure graphical brilliance flickers in and out, one moment a stunningly composed page showing Kirby still — still! — innovating to beat the band in terms of layouts if nothing else, and the next a weird throw-the-kitchen-sink-at-it sheer bolt from A to B, the music turned to brute hammering, seemingly uncaring of what technique is “best”, so long as the momentum keeps up. The tension, for a reader like me, mounts and mounts. There’s a certain panic creeping into the pages: desperation running to and fro.

So: relevant? Yeah, it feels pretty damn relevant…to the point where it may be the most relevant comic of its type, to its times, that I’ve ever seen…!

Which is a most unlikely triumph, if ever there was one. Kirby, of course, was always interested in fusing the topical to the timeless — indeed, I feel pretty comfortable saying that interest was at the root of his mythmaking efforts! — and in the most productive phases of his Fourth World, topicality was his most indispensible tool. Because you have to start with Cosmic Hippies if you want to get to some real FOREVER PEOPLE when you’re done — naturally, since how can they really be thought of as pinballing across time and space, if they don’t have anyplace to start pinballing from? And from thence to meet Chance, Infinity, Hope and the Devil…as all who are young, finally, are young in the same and most significant way: and everything that happens is the expression of an ultimate even as it is the expression of a particular. Hippies? Yeah, of course they’re hippies. Is that clunky, that they’re hippies? Yes, it probably is, but don’t worry: the young are made to move things forward from where they begin, to inhabit all times eventually…and moreover, we should probably be alert to the fact that not only is the window on an immediate “oh, I see: hippies” default reading of the Forever People rapidly closing, but even more rapidly than that, the phase-pulse of cultural context is crawling caterpillar-like up the transmission to a place where, even to those who themselves remember the hippies in real life, the meaning of what they were at the time is getting lost. So what started in the centre, is escaping to the outskirts; old contexts are falling away, the good no less than the bad, and new ones springing up in their turn to pass away in their turn, and whenever we remind ourselves that it’s later than we think, we should also learn to remember that actually it was already later than that ten minutes ago, and we already missed it…

…And can never catch up to it, now.

Sounds good so far, okay; but there’s more than one way of skinning a cat, and one man’s transcendence can be another man’s crash, too. Or, is that the other way around? Look at these pages, both in Hunger Dogs proper and in “Even Gods Must Die!” from one year earlier: art aside, Kirby is hitting new heights as a writer here, as he winds up to what we’ve all been waiting for, all the payback of philosophy, all the teleological big-T truth his prophecy’s been closing in on. But it all rushes rather stumblingly into the space of conclusion, and it does look hurried, even harried, and through a series of strange reversals the fusion starts to become unglued, and the topical begins to dominate things with a distinctly ominous force. Defeat. We’re in the mid-Eighties now, and all the rules have changed, all the high and mighty objectives have become tarnished…the odour of the specific times is everywhere, and the air’s that close in here now, you know? The general implication of doom in every layout and on every page whips up our alarm with remarkable force, like the winds of a gathering storm, and in this final moment the colours and textures have all gone strange too, flattening out the perspectives, draining away the scope of things. We are looking at a master, but we’re looking at him through a very specifically-distorting lens in 1985, we’ve dosed and now the peak is coming…or perhaps, more accurately, the hangover’s kicked in. The sounds of the action have to fight their way to us; the silver platitudes of old no longer sing to us as they once did. It’s all a mess. There is no guarantee that we will be well, because we may not be in safe hands: and this is what Comics looks like now, at this time, in this place. Grimy. Muddy. Trite. Unsatisfying.

Enervating?

Try threatening instead, perhaps. “Boredom is horror spread thin”, and all that. None of this came about in the way it should have come about, all the way from the early Seventies to now, and you can practically taste the accumulated dissonance…and yet thematically, this same dissonance serves a purpose for the reader, gives the whole enterprise a mighty metatextual punch that it otherwise might not have had. So is it, therefore, a happy outcome? No, most definitely it isn’t; and I feel sure that none of us would let the course of things go this way if we were given a chance to go back and change it. But just for that reason, there’s something oddly precious about this frustrated finish…or, not precious exactly, but perhaps suspended. Something that fits precisely because it is so glaringly unmeet, and indeed such a shame. Because it’s right in the Master’s own title-blurb: history is ultimately decided by the Hunger Dogs, and not by you or me or anyone else who has a name — and that this is a war story, not a stirring super-ethical fable of flashing fists, bold speeches, and clever Plans, becomes a clearer fact to our eyes in this degraded masterpiece, as we see — really see, damn it all! — sometimes on purpose, and sometimes not, as that brilliance flickers! — how the advent of the Age of Micro-Mark finally sucks every last bit of nobility and gravitas and justice and even good and evil, right out of the heroic fable’s marrow. Which is why it’s Orion who wins us through to meaning again in the end, against this terrible conceptual corrosion, this manic nerviness…because he is the only person who truly understands these things, the only one who feels the true reality of contingency in his bones and blood. So, it’s sloppy and it’s awful. It’s pointless and it’s hallucinogenic. It’s better than “The Pact”, because it’s so bad. And it sticks in your head just the same way that all Kirby stuff does, despite everything this time, but also this time because of everything. Because it’s the end of everything, part bang and part whimper, it’s both a mishandled deflation of Comics’ New Possibilities and its crowning glory all at once, and it’s not for the faint of heart!

Because of everything that didn’t happen as it should’ve, you have to really work at the hope, here!

Which makes the whole thing so much stranger, and more powerful, than anything I’d been expecting…

…That, really, I hardly know what to say about it.

Something dies, here.

And yet something survives, too.

I think I may have talked about it before, in terms of the Norse Creation that Kirby loved so well: Odin, from the beginning of the world doing everything he can think of to avert its promised end, somewhere around its noontime creates the first man and woman…created free of fate, as he himself isn’t. So the story’s already over before it’s properly gotten started, Odin has come to the top of the wheel and is headed ineluctably back down; he cannot break free from the cycles of time and seasonality. But his newly-created human beings are not so imprisoned, are not bound to cycles: instead branching off at right-angles from them into an open space of possibility. And “further forward, few can see now/ Than Odin fighting the Fenris-wolf” means just that the old bastard’s story doesn’t turn into anything other than what it’s always been. In other words: there’s nothing to see, because there’s nothing to say. The old species simply can’t have, what the new one has got. The wheel can’t turn into the arrow.

It’s all already over; it’s all already been later than Odin thinks. He just hasn’t realized it yet.

An “old man’s story”: well, it certainly is! It’s ambitious, it’s provocative, and it all but yanks the rug out from under your feet as it first thwarts, then dissolves, your expectations. Crisis is here, some culmination of events that is utterly implacable, that will destroy you as you face it unless you yourself can change to meet it. The future, the new species, has escaped: somewhere in the exile-universe of the Infinity Man, the Forever People walk off to explore an uncharted planet, where perhaps “the unsowed fields bear ripened fruit” — where “not only the children of men, but the children of gods too” will dwell in a new reconciliation — the afterlife not of people, but of the universe itself. Somewhere Metron advances, towing something utterly new behind him, and Highfather delivers the moral: you just have to leave all that stuff behind, turn your face from it. Failure’s normal, as is fear. But it doesn’t matter.

The lesson of Himon, I think!

But it’s hard to learn. By the end, you have to want to learn it, or you just can’t. You have to choose to learn it. Is Hunger Dogs everything I heard it was, is it a disappointment, is it bad, is it a depressing anticlimax full of rough work and unachieved ambitions? Is there an iota of truth to that story?

Well…

An iota, you say?

Yes.

Hi, Hi, Hi

Hello, Bloggers, I’ve been working really hard lately on non-blog things.  I do apologize for my absence.  I really did want to be with you folks, but circumstances forbade it.

Up ’til now.

It’s been a practically Gwydionian plague of hail over here at Casa Plok…blue mice…black holes…shit-thunder…the whole cosmic enchilada, BOOM!

But I’m back.

And gonna post a lot of long-winded shit in the next couple days.

First up:  a real David-Allison-style book on THE UNIVERSE…

…And from there we’ll just see how it goes.

Did you miss me?

I MISSED YOU.