Tag Archives: Somebody’s Wrong on the Internet

A Doctor in Every Panopticon: Response to Ben Schwartz

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Ben Schwartz posted a response/review to the first episode of the new Doctor Who season over on the main tcj.com site. I won’t summarize it in detail ‘cause it’s right here and you can just go read it. (Go read it! Support our host site! Give Ben some hits! He needs your support to counteract all the shit I’m giving him…)

Ben’s (admittedly tongue-in-cheek) thesis is that Eleven (the Doctor’s eleventh regeneration) is a “Tory” doctor – the idea being that this Doctor caves in to authority too quickly. I think this conclusion is wrong: it’s based first on overlooking the ways in which the plot of the first episode coheres internally, then overlooking how it coheres with the theme of the multi-episode story arc – the Doctor must decide whether the good of the many outweighs the good of the one – and then subsequently misreading how both that story arc and this specific story’s plot tie into contemporary British politics.

I’m not sure whether Ben feels like the old episodes are more tightly plotted than the new ones, but in my read, Dr Who has never been particularly about plot. It’s a secular morality play. If you don’t like morality plays, you’re probably not going to like this show (unless, these days, you just have a crush on the cute Doctor). But that doesn’t make it badly written. That’s like saying The Canterbury Tales is badly written because it isn’t The Lord of the Rings.

So although I think Ben is just mistaken about the plot points – something I go into in Ben’s comments section in nauseatingly geeky detail – mostly his post felt worth an argument to me because one of the reasons I do not watch a lot of tv in general is this notion, implicit in Ben’s position, that everything should be clearly spelled out bluntly and explicitly at the level of plot and dialogue, making it easy to get all the pieces on a casual viewing or two. To me, it’s the things that are not spelled out, but that can be reconciled via close reading (or even sometimes only by recourse to extra-diegetic elements) that give writing in any medium texture and life and complexity. I don’t share Ben’s concern with plotholes, but I also don’t agree that the episode actually has plotholes to be concerned about. I think it’s very tightly scripted and very well done.

Now, I’ll accept that the episode’s tightness is pretty subtle and easy to miss on one watching. (I’ve now watched it 6 times, because every time Ben said something I’d go, “Wait, what? Wait! Lemme watch that again!) But that subtlety is a tactic: just because it’s hard to catch precisely how things tie together in a single viewing doesn’t make the subtle bits “plotholes.” Having some things be tricky to figure out – but nonetheless tight – is what makes a video, tv or film or otherwise, worth watching and rewatching, that makes the viewer an active participant and rewards engaging for more than just a couple hours diversion. Dr Who is TV for geeks, which is why we’ve been watching it for 40-odd years.

So Ben and I, I think, disagree on what it means for an episode to be “well-written” because we think about plot in different ways. But that said, we also appear to have watched two very different versions of The Eleventh Hour. Ben argues:

[The Doctor] had direct contact with the Atraxi and then Prisoner Zero and was given the Atraxi message personally.

He points out that he leads the Atraxi to Zero by using his sonic screwdriver because they’re looking for alien technology — so, the Atraxi definitely know our world, that the Doctor’s not part of it, and then ignore this until it becomes a key part of catching Zero.

Ben rightly identifies the kernel of the plot in the second quote, but the details are wrong. The Doctor doesn’t lead the Atraxi to Zero using his sonic screwdriver. It’s actually fairly tricky for them to track something as small as the screwdriver. The Doctor tries to get their attention using it in the town square, and fails, because the screwdriver burns up before the Atraxi can, ahem, zero in on it.

The Atraxi don’t speak directly with him until the end, when he meets them on the roof. Prior to that, they’re just talking to his technology. Ben rightly remembers that in Amelia’s bedroom the Atraxi send their message directly – but it isn’t a personal message. It’s just the same rote “Prisoner Zero has escaped” that they’re broadcasting on every available communications medium, Earth-based and otherwise. They identify the alien technology of the sonic screwdriver and then broadcast their message directly onto the Doctor’s psychic paper.

But they don’t make the connection between the alien technologies and the biological alien. It’s not the Doctor they know; it’s the Doctor’s things. What they have a lock on is the technology they identified in Amelia’s bedroom and yard when the Doctor first arrived: that’s why they followed the Doctor away from Earth. (He says in the town square when he’s explaining why 12 years passed before they came back: “they’re only late ‘cause I am.”)

Tracking the Doctor in the Tardis is different – philosophically and in practice – from tracking the Doctor walking around. Atraxi scanning technology isn’t precise enough to find an individual the size of a human being quickly. Even with the sonic screwdriver going off in the town square and the Atraxi directly overhead, they can’t pinpoint the screwdriver, let alone identify the Doctor and Prisoner Zero, in that few seconds. In fact, although we don’t know it during the scene in the town square, the Atraxi don’t even know that the Doctor is alien until they scan him at the end of the episode on the rooftop – after he actually does succeed in phoning them. They scan him, and then they say “you are not of this world.”

So the Doctor’s being alien in fact isn’t a key part of catching Zero (except insofar as he’s smarter than we are). And the alien-ness of the Doctor’s technology doesn’t play any role either: what the Doctor did, he did entirely using present-day Earth technology: a laptop, a computer virus, and a camera phone. The Atraxi’s ability to scan alien technology in particular ends up being entirely irrelevant. Instead, what’s relevant is the distinction between the technology and the individuals who use it – and the fact that the Atraxi’s technology can’t tell the difference.

Insofar as there is something political in this episode, this is it. The use of earth technology is it. The gap between who a person is and the technology (s)he uses is it. This is well-played technology-as-Panopticon – and there aren’t many places, in the West at least, where the Panopticon has more present-day relevance than in 21st century Britain. According to the BBC, there are 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain – about one for every 14 people. That’s almost Orwellian, and it’s a huge issue for British politics.

But Ben gets the wrong party: the surveillance state is even more Labour than it is Tory. Officially the Tories support reductions in the surveillance state – but convicts are an exception to their plan to reduce the reach of their databases. In Britain-as-Panopticon, Labour and Tory are equally implicated. Certainly surveillance is a political issue, but it’s not one that falls out on the reductive liberal/conservative binary so characteristic of American politics.

Surveillance is instead a political issue in the Foucauldian sense. Foucault explained it thus in Discipline and Punish:

Perhaps we should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands, and its interests. Perhaps we should abandon the belief that power makes mad, and by the same token, that the renunciation of power is one of the conditions of knowledge. We should admit rather than power produces knowledge…that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. These “power-knowledge relations” are to be analysed then, not on the basis of a subject of knowledge who is or is not free in relation to the power system, but, on the contrary, the subject who knows.

Surveillance is about gathering information and turning that information into knowledge about the people under surveillance. What’s at stake in this episode is not the straightforward partisan allegory, but its moral facet: the omniscience of the panopticon, and the limitations of that omniscience.

That gap between the individual and the technology, the gap the Atraxi surveillance cannot bridge, cuts to the moral heart of the very existence of a state: the necessity for individuals to make decisions on behalf of the many that affect each individual one, and the inadequacy of the knowledge we base those decisions on. Where better to explore the relation of surveillance to power than in a story where the hero’s power so explicitly comes from knowledge?

This is why the question (blustering over the Internet on Whovian message boards at the moment) of why the Doctor gives up Prisoner Zero without any evidence of his guilt is missing the point. Foucault’s insight is that the perspective of the Panopticon is not just about monitoring the prisoner – it’s about the way in which the ability to monitor individuals creates a category of citizen subjectivity unique to the modern state: individuals are transformed by surveillance into objects of knowledge.

That’s what Prisoner Zero is to the Atraxi, and by the force and necessity of his power-knowledge and the limitation of Earthly time, to the Doctor as well. The Atraxi mothership is a Panopticon – in concept and in design – but it is the Doctor who is all-seeing. Zero’s body is trapped in a forcefield of power and knowledge articulated by both the Atraxi and the Doctor: a forcefield that renders any sense in which he might be “not guilty” irrelevant – secondary in the face of the need to “govern” and “protect” the rest of the world. The state depends on the prisoner. The sacrifice of the one is necessary for the good of the many. The Doctor, like Foucault, knows this – and it makes him sad.

This is the point Ben misses when he insists that the Doctor jumps when the Atraxi flash their badges. Yes, the Doctor is complicit in the use of surveillance technology against Zero – but when the Atraxi take Zero, the Doctor’s expression is heartbroken. He’s genuinely sorry. It’s not a rote caving to an external authority; it’s recognizing that no individual beings matter in this universal, timeless, always existing field of power-knowledge. The Doctor recognizes his own subjugation to his own power.

But he also recognizes that he is the one individual in a position to determine whether the field of power-knowledge serves good or evil. (I’m wondering whether this will be a theme in the upcoming Churchill/Nazi/Dalek episode.) The Doctor, contra Foucault, turns the surveillance technology back against the Atraxi too. He subverts the Atraxi by turning their attention FROM the technology TO the one individual who does matter in that field, the individual in the Panopticon, the organic, living Doctor – the Doctor who protects the Earth. The Doctor who is our Superhero. The Superhero whose superpowers are his compassion, his mind, and his knowledge.

This is why I just don’t think this episode can be easily reduced to partisan politics, as Ben suggests, or even to simplistic questions of whose authority is most compelling.

Doctor Who doesn’t just have knowledge and a conscience. He has the power to make decisions that challenge and test the limits of his conscience, and that have consequences for individuals – individuals with whom he feels genuine compassion but over whom he nonetheless has power. Ben not only completely diminishes the complexity of this story when he overlooks how much the Doctor struggles with this role; he diminishes – like so much of contemporary politics in the age where the most powerful Panopticon is the eye of the media – the extent to which political good always relies on the ability of those individuals fortunate enough to sit in the panopticon to watch themselves as clearly and as vigilantly as the prisoners below.

I Think Ganges Is Boring

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Apparently, this means that I should just give up writing about comics altogether and, I don’t know, join a monastic order of geeks and castrate myself with a rusty center-staple according to Sean Collins, who broke all the bones in his hands and found one of those funny fedoras just so he could call himself the Mr. A of random critical comics pronouncements.

Some of you are no doubt asking yourselves — what the hell is Ganges? Who is Mr. A? Who is Sean Collins? Who cares?

If you asked yourself all, or any of those questions, or indeed, any question at all, ever — you sir (or madam) are beneath contempt. Find an entire run of comics journal back issues, liquify them through the power of your lameness, do a zombie ritual to resurrect the lower intestine of Art Spiegelman’s sainted father, and then use the latter as tubing to rectally partake of the former until first-rate poorly-edited critical prose gushes from your newly erudite nose hair like wisdom from the Internet or brilliant babies from your mama.

Let’s have some other, lesser people talk then.

Hey, here’s Tucker Stone. He likes Ganges. Fuck him.

There’s a temptation to label mainstream fans as being lazy for not caring about Swallow Me Whole or Blankets, to call them “bone-ignorant” — that’s just a bunch of horseshit. It’s an attempt by boring assholes to assign an overall meaning to a bunch of personal choices made by a group of people that those boring assholes don’t know anything about. On an individual level, I’ve heard a couple of people say they don’t want to read comics that focus on the mundanities of regular life, but I’m more often exposed to people who just like what they like because it’s what they fucking like. Besides, the attitude you’re describing — that’s not coming from real sampling of readers. It’s coming from the internet’s sampling of readers, it’s coming from small publishers (and most small publishers are readers with credit problems), and the internet and small publishers are pretty much wrong all the time about why people like the things that they like, because most of the people who write blogs, read blogs, leave comments — they aren’t the majority opinion. They’re the minority opinion. If the comics internet was an accurate representation of what comics mattered to people, it would be shitloads of articles about Bone, Y: Last Man, Crumb’s Genesis — and it’s not. And thank God it’s not! But what you’re talking about — why people react the way they do, and what does that mean — hell, the internet isn’t going to answer that question. It doesn’t know either.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don’t know, the Internet doesn’t know…cry me a river, fanboy. You know who knows? I know. And what I know is that the river Ganges is filled with floating turds just like your taste, asshole. “Oh, why can’t this Robin comic be more like Glenn lying next to his wiiiiiiffffeee? Why are abstract comics so difficult to understand? What’s this critical discourse doing in my pants, and why’s it feel so good when I touch it?”

Hey, here’s Sean Collins. He likes Ganges too. Fuck him.

I mean, if you met someone who only watched superhero movies, you’d think that was weird and dumb, and you’d be right, and saying so wouldn’t make you a boring asshole, it’d make you a person who was right. Moreover, saying so does not mean you’ve extrapolated that they’re some horrible CSI Miami-watching mouthbreather or anything else about “who they really are” or whatever. You’re just a critic, addressing what people are saying about specific comics, which is a valid thing for a critic to do.

Finally, Tucker’s coup de grace is the fact that most of the audience doesn’t really care about critics or critical approaches to what they enjoy reading anyway. But so what? Most of the people in the theater with us at Up in the Air yesterday have never read Pauline Kael. But criticism is not therefore an egomaniacal waste of time, any more than making art that most of the audience for that art form doesn’t really care about would be. Kevin Huizenga shouldn’t hang it up just because he’s not Jim Davis; similarly, we shouldn’t crumple up the idea of analyzing art and arguing for standards and throw it in the trash because many people would just rather read/watch/listen and then do something else.

If you met a person who only watched superhero movies, that person would be fucking dead, Mr. Genius, because if they only watched superhero movies that would mean they weren’t doing things like eating and breathing and and even if you really like Heath Ledger you’re not going to make it through Dark Knight like that. So, yeah, go ahead and make fun of the corpse on your couch, Mr. Collins, and pat yourself on the back for maintaining standards and analyzing art and rejecting egotism by dressing just like Kevin Huizenga. Bravo for you!

Here’s Tom Spurgeon. He likes Ganges. You know the drill.

In broad terms it’s not that MOME readers should be suggested to read Tiny Titans, but that a hugely presumptive, distorted dismissal on their part should be as open to criticism, especially when it risks the industry being shaped according to those presumptions.

I’d like the industry to be shaped like the Comics Reporter’s tiny distorted titan rearing up to declaim “Happy birthday! I am sorry I cannot attend your promotional event!” Then watch those fuckers who only read one kind of comic scatter like inferior third world populations. I love the smell of eclecticism in the morning.

Also, if you’re a Mome reader, you should just give up. I mean really people. Talk about no self-respect.

Happy To Be Here

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As I mentioned a week or so back, I’ve been reading a bunch of comics criticism recently. One essay I looked at was by Marc Singer. (I don’t know Marc personally, though we have some mutual acquaintances making it feel really weird for me to refer to him as “Singer”, which is why he appears here under his given name.) Anyway, the post I linked to is a pretty fabulous discussion of what went wrong, and what could have gone right, with Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis. It’s extremely entertaining, and is more or less grist for my thesis that writing about super-hero comics tends to be better than writing about art comics.

That isn’t exactly what I was going to talk about here, though. Instead, I wanted to comment on the end of Marc’s post, which is basically his farewell to blogging. I’ll quote it at some length.

One of the nicer things about comics blogging is that you don’t really have to do it every day; as long as Tom or Dirk links to your post, it doesn’t matter how badly you’ve let your readership atrophy. But that can be a trap, too. Comics blogs offer a guaranteed (if tiny) audience and absolutely no standards other than the ones you and your chosen peers set for yourselves. Not exactly a recipe for great writing, which makes the great writing it has produced that much more remarkable. But once you fall out of the habit for a while it begins to look a bit too cozy, a bit too comfortable.

The problem is not the subject matter, even when a subject disappoints as deeply as Final Crisis does, severing that last tether to the weekly conversation. The problem is the medium itself. If blogging is daily it is also ephemeral, yet the ephemera cling to life with embarrassing persistence; even the best-kept archives reek with the overripe tang of long-forgotten controversies that never mattered in the first place. (Paul O’Brien thinks comics are boring! Micah Ian Wright lied to me! How could CrossGen fail?) Not long after I started this blog I made an effort, haltingly at first, to purge it of such ephemera, to write only pieces I thought I could be proud of later. I’m still proud of many of them, but the consequence was a blog that rarely updated and still took more effort than a blog should take.

Some folks are able to turn their blogs into part of their professional development or, better yet, make blogging a profession unto itself. More power to them. Writing this blog has been incredibly valuable, as a laboratory for developing ideas and as a motivation to push my style in directions it otherwise wouldn’t have taken. But after a while it’s time to apply all that work to formats and venues that aren’t measured chiefly by their frequency. No matter how much time and energy I sank into it, blogging has always been a hobby for me. Time spent blogging is time not spent writing for some other format that demands better work and offers something more durable in return.

Obviously, Marc is a lot more positive about blogging than Gary Groth. But the two do share general attitudes in common, I think. Both argue that blogging is less rich than print (Gary says “shallow” if I remember correctly; Marc uses the less pejorative “ephemeral”.) Blogging, they say, is caught up in petty controversies and rushed judgments; print is more thoughtful and more durable. If you’re serious about writing about comics, more or less, you should probably write a book (or at least write for a magazine).

I sneered fairly vigorously at Gary, largely because he didn’t know what he was talking about. Marc, on the other hand, does know what he’s talking about. I still think he’s basically wrong in his evaluation of blogging, but he’s not being unfair or outright ignorant. Which means that to respond to him I can’t just sneer. I actually have to try to defend blogging.

So here goes. The main thing, maybe, that separates me from both Gary and Marc is that I don’t necessarily think that writing about comics in any venue is actually serious or durable or especially worthwhile from any objective perspective. Indeed, it’s a rare, rare, rare book that can be said to matter in the sense that the world would be a measurably better (or a worse) place if said book had not been written. Needless to say, most of those rare books involve theology or politics, not commentaries on sequential pictographs.

Now, that’s not to say that writing books is worthless. There are other perspectives than the objective one, and you don’t have to measure a work of art (which is basically what a work of criticism is) by its utility. You can measure it, for example, by the love that was put into it, or by the small group of people who are touched by it. Or you can measure it by its insight, or its formal competence, or its poetry, or what have you. But none of these criteria, it seems to me, necessarily privilege books over the Internet.

Now, it’s true that you can do some things in a book that you can’t do in a blog. They’re different genres of writing. If you want to write a lengthy study, and want to engage with an academic audience — for career reasons or just because that’s what interests you — it’s probably best to publish a book. I understand that. One of my regrets for this piece is that, while I read a lot of academic writing to put it together, few of those academics are going to read what I have to say and respond to it. It’s just in the wrong place to become part of the discourse. Which is unfortunate, but, you know, that’s the tradeoff I get for not finishing my Ph.D.

But because academics aren’t paying attention to it, does that mean that a piece of writing is more ephemeral, or less durable, or less good? I just don’t see it. I mean, yes, blogs deal with passing controversies and issues of the day. So did Shakespeare. So did Shaw. So did Swift. So did St. Paul, for that matter. That’s what writers do; they deal with issues of the day because, you know, your day is where you live. You don’t reside in some universal Platonic n-space, where you can write about only matters of broad import and forget the rest. I mean, Alexander Pope’s writing is almost entirely made up of petty sneers at literary rivals who have long since ceased to matter to anyone except those graduate students reading Alexander Pope’s poetry. Does that mean that Alexander Pope’s poetry is inferior to, say, a determinedly non-political poet like, say, Mark Strand? Not necessarily; it just means you have to read different footnotes.

I mean, if Marc didn’t want to get into blog troll battles, that’s certainly his right; there’s no reason to engage in such things if they don’t interest you. But, on the other hand, I don’t think it’s right to say that such controversies are less worthwhile than writing about the end of Final Crisis in some absolute sense. Four hundred years from now, are you sure anybody is going to recognize Grant Morrison’s name any more than they’re going to recognize Paul O’Brien’s or Colley Cibber’s? Write for yourself and the audience you’ve got, because that’s the *only* one you’ve got. Certainly, folks like Derek Walcott think that they’re writing for generations to come — which is one among many reasons why Derek Wolcott’s writing sucks so thoroughly and so consistently.

Another way people often denigrate blogging, I think, is by suggesting that it’s not as concentrated, or thoughtful, or ambitious as writing a book. Again, it’s true that ambitious blogs don’t look like ambitious books, but I don’t think the difference is necessarily one of quality or thoughtfulness per se. As a blogger, I’m currently in the process of writing at length about every single issue of the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman run. Economically, that’s simply not something you could do in print. Similarly, a collaborative work of criticism like Tom Spurgeon’s massive series of holiday interviews on comics of the decade would be much, much more difficult to organize in a print magazine than online.

The point here is that there are a lot of projects that are feasible in the blogosphere that aren’t possible in books, just as there are things possible in books that aren’t really doable online. It’s not, at least for me, a question of honing my skills in blogging so some day I can get down to the real work of writing books. Rather, blogging’s like any other artistic endeavor. You put in the genius and the time and the effort and the love that you’ve got, and that’s exactly what you get out of it. If Marc, or anyone, has other passions or other interests, or if the particular demands and concerns of blogging don’t line up with your own, then, of course, he or they should go do something else. There’s no shame in that. But, on the other hand, I don’t think there’s any particular shame either in staying with the blogosphere and what it has to offer. I know that, at least for me, blogging has been an incredibly rewarding experience — a chance to work with other writers I admire; to write and publish any number of pieces I’m proud of; to interact with a sometimes receptive and sometimes critical audience. I have gotten a couple of gigs out of it, too, but that’s really just been an added bonus. Whether I ever write a book or not, blogging has very much been its own reward.

Update: Corrected various embarrassing errors — proving the superiority or inferiority of blogs, depending on how you look at it.

The New Yorker Hearts Luddites

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I found myself reading this essay by Gorjus about Chris Ware’s Halloween New Yorker cover recently. In case you missed it, this is the cover:

And here’s what Gorjus has to say about it:

The children are literally masked, yet still engaging the world—going forth into that terrible night, mashing down on the button at the house they don’t know, mumbling and punching each other to you go first. They are open to the world; the masks are meaningless, the toys of children, soon to be ripped off to suck in the sweet Halloween night…..

The parents of the children wear a different mask; while there is nothing physical upon their faces, the reflection of their email and RSS feeds and status updates smear across their features, shutting them off from the world more than any Wolverine® latex ever could. It is, in one still image, a surpassing and comprehensive look at American society in the 21st century: we send our children out with masks to play-act traditions that were shaky and hoary when we were young, forcing them to play outside and make friends with the neighbor girls, while shutting down ourselves via 3G and electrons and Cymblata and whiskey more then even our own parents could manage.

That Mr. Ware has evoked this without showing us a single costume, or a single face, or truly, anything other than basic shapes coupled with a flat-matte color palette, again validates the dozens of honors that litter his career.

I’ve been reading a lot of comics criticism recently, as it happens, and one thing I’ve noticed is that writing about super-hero comics is almost invariably better than writing about art comics. That’s because writing about art comics tends to be really unendurably sententious. I mean, “going forth into that terrible night”; “traditions that were shaky and hoary when we were young”; “Mr. Ware”; “again validates the dozens of honors that litter his career”…I mean, come on. It’s like we’ve stumbled into the back cover blurb of a volume of contemporary poetry. The stink of reverence is suffocating.

Again, I don’t blame Gorjus personally. This just seems to be how folks write when they write about art comics. It’s particularly unfortunate in this case, though, because…jeez is that cover a drearily cliched piece of crap. I mean, Chris Ware sure goes way out on a limb there, using the pages of the New Yorker to sneer at contemporary technology and those who use it! Boy, I bet that was a hard sell to Francoise Mouly, huh? Imagine…the stodgy old New Yorker being old and stodgy! Really shifts your paradigm, huh?

Obviously, Chris Ware is a talented designer…but I have to say that personally my patience for his antiseptic blocky buildings and antiseptic toy-like people is pretty much exhausted. And, just out of curiosity, where exactly are the Halloween decorations here? Oh, right…if you included those, the picture wouldn’t be quite bland enough. Yes, yes I know that he’s showing the antiseptic emptiness of contemporary life…to which I say “feh,” and also, “yawn.” The bourgeoise literary tradition where you excoriate the bourgeoisie for their empty, lifeless culture by creating empty, lifeless culture — it’s been going on for generations, and I presume it’ll continue as long as two bourgeoisie are alive so that one can sneer at the other, but I don’t see why we (bourgeoise or otherwise) need to pretend that it provides some deep and humane insight.

Because it doesn’t — it’s just glib. Which is what this cover is; overwhelmingly glib, with the self-satisfied glibness that is the inevitable adornment of a real New Yorker cartoon. You could get the same level of insight from the crank at your local bar. “Damn it, cell phones…they’re ruining the world! People just don’t talk anymore like they used to!”

You want to know the technology that actually affects the Halloween ritual? As somebody who went trick-or-treating in the quite affluent neighborhood of Hyde Park, I can tell you that the mechanical device at the end of everyone’s fingers was not the cell phone, but the digital camera — except for the moments when people were using their cell phones as cameras, I guess. Because everyone was taking pictures of their kids in their cute costumes, for even in this soulless, technology-ridden age in which we sadly toil, taking pictures of kids in costumes is still the sort of thing that parents do more or less constantly.

Gorjus finishes his essay by saying, in reference to both the cover and Ware’s interior story, “It’s bleak, this world; it’s rife with cynicism and misanthropy, as can be said of much of Mr. Ware’s work.” But this image, at least, isn’t bleak or cynical. It’s nostalgic and suffused with easy sentiment and easier moralism. It’s a big slab of maudlin hooey concealed under a thin veneer of urbanity. And it, and its critical enablers, deserve to be hooted.