I was sitting and reading the paper with the two pages held out in front of me. I wanted to know what time it was, so I looked at the top of the right-hand page and wondered why it only gave the date. Then I realized the paper wasn’t my laptop.

There’s nothing quite like Japanese feudal nostalgia to make me appreciate the benefits of modernity. Sure, crass capitalist libertines are hard to love…but at least they have no honor. That has to count for something.

I’ve only read the first volume of Kazuo Koike and Kazuo Kamimura’s Lady Snowblood, but there’s enough honor here to satiate me for quite a while, thank you. The story, set in 19th century Japan, is a rape-revenge narrative. a genre to which I’m by no means opposed. Koike’s take on rape-revenge here is, however, different in some important ways from that in exploitation films like “I Spit on Your Grave” “Ms. 45,” or “They Call Her One Eye.”

— In most American rape-revenge films, the point of the film is the reversal; you get to see a weak, apparently helpless woman turn the tables and castrate/murder her attackers. You can root for her in part because she’s so clearly the underdog; she’s got to be clever and inventive to turn the tables on her assailants.

In Lady Snowblood, though, the titular protagonist is super-hero tough. She is smart and inventive, sure, but you never actually see her in any particular danger (she does get beaten and tortured in one scene, but her torturer is honorable and its all just a misunderstanding. She never actually gets captured or even touched by any villain, at least not in this first volume.

— In most American rape-revenge films, the revenge is personal. That is, the woman is herself a victim, and then she takes revenge on the person who victimized her, rather than on some random individual. This can be a little complicated; for instance, in Ms. 45, the victimizer is men in general, and that’s who the revenge is inflicted on as well; in Death Proof one group of women is murdered and another group takes revenge on the guy who did it. Still, the mechanics work the same; the films are built around a mechanics which, while not always strictly logical, is grounded in a sense of personal justice, individual trauma, and retribution.

Lady Snowblood, though, isn’t built around personal justice exactly. It’s about a blood feud and familial, rather than personal honor. It’s not LS herself, but her mother who was raped years before LS was born. The mother did kill one of her assailants, but she was unable to kill the rest. So she deliberately offered herself to any man who would have her in order to become pregnant and bear a child who would carry out her revenge for her. To which you’ve got to say…um, yuck.

But that’s not the reaction of any of the mother’s peers. On the contrary, they aid and abet the project; mom dies before she can pass on the details of the revenge to her daughter, but her friends helpfully convey the information. Thus, mom deliberately and elaborately ruins her daughter’s life, and everybody around her is like, oh, yeah, that’s awesome.

Moreover, in order to make ends meet and get some cash with which to pursue her revenge, LS hires herself out as an assassin. Most of the people she kills are not especially sympathetic — gamblers, pimps, murderers and so forth. Still, you almost can’t help feeling sorry for them as Lady Snowblood impersonally hacks them into little quivering pieces.

And then we come to the last story of the volume, where our heroine ambushes a coach with an upper class mother and daughter. She kills the mother, then forces the coachman to rape the daughter. Then blackmails the coachman with the threat that his sperm will lead the police to believe he murdered and raped the daughter.

This is all part of an elaborate plot to shut down the Rokumeikan, an estate where upper-class, pro-Western Japanese engaged in orgies with Westerners. LS’s actions are supposed to be justified, as far as I can tell, because the mother and daughter she brutalizes were (A) sexually promiscuous; (B) overly Westernized; and (C) sexually promiscuous with Westerners.

There are certainly class animosities being played out here as well; the loathing of decadent aristocrats bleeds into the loathing of Westernization and modernity. That was true for the Nazis as well, though, I believe. And indeed, Lady Snowblood really does help to explain why the Nazis and the Japanese were able to find common ground. The loathing of weakness, shot through with racial and national connotations; the fetishization of violence; the belief that a violation of national or familial honor justifies almost anything. Add in the hypocritically decadent exploitation elements here — Lady Snowblood is always battling in the buff, for one reason or another — and the result looks, to me, pretty thoroughly vile. No doubt that makes me a spineless, dishonorable Westerner…but considering the alternatives presented here, I may be okay with that.

This article originally ran in a slightly altered form in Culture 11.

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“How the Grinch Stole Christmas” is the ideal American Yuletide legend. Dr. Suess’ fable is set in a perfect, egalitarian world; the Whos of Whoville are an entire nation of deracinated middle-class nuclear families, with houses identical down to the mouses. Their Christmas rituals are defined in terms of amorphously desirable products: “their presents, their ribbons, their wrappings/Their snoofs and their fuzzles, their tringlers and trappings!” Of course, Seuss rushes to assure us that even though the Whos are robbed of their presents, they still wake up happy and singing. Thus the Grinch decides that Christmas “doesn’t come from a store….that it perhaps–means a little bit more!” But what does it mean, anyway? Certainly nothing particularly or specifically Christian — just general good cheer and carols. The evil Grinch who steals all the goodies functions, then, less as an actual villain and more as a catalogue: the whole point is to see him up there on Mount Crumpit, with the gigantic bag full of goodies that shows just how much stuff the Whos have, and how wonderful their Christmas therefore is. Plus, once their aggressive optimism has won over the cranky, cynical Grinch, he brings them all their presents back anyway! The enthusiastic blankness, the aphasiac hypocrisy, the perfect transubstantiation of Christianity into uplift — it couldn’t possibly say any more clearly “Made in U.S.A.” In comparison, the villainous banker and close-knit community of the Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” fairly reek of imported socialism.

Indeed, the American spirit galumphs and galerks through every one of the Doctor’s works. Like his fellow citizens, Seuss is boisterous, hearty, optimistic, profligate in invention, and not too heavy on the thought. “Yertle the Turtle” a fascistic terrapin, forces all his pond-fellows to stack themselves in a tower so he can climb to the top. The solution? Not collective action, nor courageous resistance, but a single fed-up burp by a turtle named Mack, who just isn’t going to take it anymore. In “The Sneeches,” the sneeches with stars dislike the sneeches without stars. The solution? Not understanding, or non-violent resistance, but simply a machine which removes stars! In Seuss’ universe, there is no problem that cannot be solved by old-fashioned practicality, good will, bizarre new-fangled machines, or some combination of all three.

Perhaps Seuss is most American, though, in his fascination with appetite and production— the two pillars of capitalism. The king in “Bartholemew and the Oobleck” who wants to create a new kind of weather; the nameless narrator in “On Beyond Zebra” who longs for a more extensive alphabet; the titular avian in “Gertrude McFuzz” who dreams of a more feathery tail; Luke Luck in “Fox in Sox” who, along with his duck, ceaselessly licks lakes, the “fine fluffy bird called the Bustard/Who only eats custard with sauce made of mustard” in “If I Ran the Zoo”— who but Seuss could create such a procession of obscure and excessive desires? And who could satisfy them with such a range of bizarre products? “The Cat in the Hat Comes Back” reads like an extended surreal advertisement for Voom!, the miracle product that gets pink spots off snow. “Green Eggs and Ham” reads like an extended advertisement for…well, you know. And, perhaps most tellingly, in “The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins,” an absolute monarch is brought to his knees by a miracle of excessively propagating haberdashery. Feudalism falls before the unlimited power of production, and the zombified slobbering sound you hear off-panel is Milton Friedman rising from the grave to eat his own heart out.

Of course, Seuss never actually comes out as an advocate of the free market and unrestrained trade. On the contrary, when he has an explicit moral, it is as likely as not to be anti-greed. The king who insists on creating a new kind of weather ends up buried in gluey green Oobleck; the bird who wants more feathers ends up with such a profusion of plumage that she can’t even move; the Cat in the Hat is repeatedly chastised for allowing his transient desires (for a bath, for juggling, for kite-flying) to upset domestic harmony. Frugality and moralistic self-denial are standard American virtues, and Seuss, here as everywhere, is in sync with his countrymen.

But, it must be asked, self-denial in the name of what? The Grinch, as we noted, takes the presents away only to heighten their value and then return them. Similarly, though the king may regret having ordered up the Oobleck, the reader doesn’t. The whole pleasure of the book is in watching the kingdom drown in disgusting ichor; the joy in mess is leant piquancy by the knowledge that that mess is itself the righteous ooze of justice.

Part of what is so repulsive about the Oobleck is its suggestion of bodily fluids; it clots and sticks and is colored like snot. The story’s narrative is tied to abjection; the outer world is buried in the body’s waste. At the same time, this is a remarkably bright-eyed and bushy-tailed abjection. There is certainly anxiety in Seuss’ Oobleck illustrations, but there is also charm and gusto and enthusiasm. The way the Oobleck obscures barriers and selves is pleasurable — even titillating. It’s polymorphously perverse.

As, for that matter, is most of Seuss’ oeuvre. You can see it in the furry, genderless, insinuatingly bulbous critters; in the oral appetites for indistinct fluids (“Do you choose to chew goo too sir?”); in the way bodies morph and change dependent on desire (so that when an elephant sits on a bird’s egg, the egg hatches an elephant bird); even in the insistent labial pleasures of the rhyme and rhythm. “Happy Birthday to You” stuffs its birthday boy with hot dogs rolling off a gigantic spool; “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” has the Grinch slide down the chimney into the quiet Who home, sneaking about while the whole Who family sleeps together in a single Who bed. It’s all just a little suggestive.

So is Seuss a capitalist or a sensualist — a bourgie Republican small-businessman or a subliminally subversive Democratic free-love guru? The answer, of course, is that he’s both. In the United States different kinds of lust get parceled out to different parts of the political spectrum; appetite for products and wealth to the business right, appetites for bodies and pleasures to the hippie left. In Seuss, though, the two blur together into one seamless whole. The infinite replication of hats is the delight of the narrative, a kind of sensual pleasure. Similarly, the binding together of bodies in Oobleck satisfies a fantasy of capitalist production — the invention of new and superfluous goods. The entrepreneurial satisfaction of every desire and the polymorphous elision of taboo are really just the same side of the same coin. Love of excess is love of excess; that’s the Grinchiness of Christmas, and of the U.S.

In the entryway to the large, central cube, Vonderwelt finds a letterboard announcing an event hosted by a certain Dr. Glenn Bacca, Ph.D.: “Building Trust, Building Sales: It’s Your Move!” On a fold out table to the side there is a cardboard box filled with glossy pamphlets describing Dr. Bacca’s many accomplishments. “Dr. Glenn Bacca, Ph.D., is one of the most sought-after motivational speakers in the country,” the pamphlet announced. “Known to earn up to $20,000 for a single engagement, Dr. Bacca has made a name for himself wowing crowds and boosting sales from Palm Beach to Palm Springs.”

That’s from a very bitter short story about conferences and the dregs of the academic life. It’s by Justin E. H. Smith, who is a professor of, I think, philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal. The fellow above is posing as Dr. Bacca, the motivational expert.

The protagonist of the story is a poor schmuck who can’t find the conference room for the talk he’s supposed to give. The reason is that the talk has been canceled, and the reason for that is there was never a good reason to give the talk, as the fellow himself realizes. Reflecting on the sign for his talk:

Dammit! Vonderwelt thinks. Why do they always write ‘Ural-Altaic’ when it’s supposed to be ‘Aral-Ultaic’?! And where is that damned circumflex accent over nâk? Nak doesn’t even mean anything! Come to think of it, nâk doesn’t mean anything either. I thought it did when I did my thesis. I made up this whole big structuralist structure that made it mean something. That went out of fashion, the profession crumbled into a thousand little camps –dear old arrowhead collector here, indigenous advocate there, grating culture-studies clones all around– and I was left with my meaningless nâk: just a sound, really, just a meaningless sound the fates had conspired to make the center of my career. Nâk means employee benefits is what nâk means. Nâk means braces for the girls. Nâk meant braces for the girls anyway. Now it’s just this last meaningless talk of an undistinguished career, advertised with clip-art, to be given in the Minnetonka Annex of the Minneapolis Sheraton.

Ouch! Closer to home, Professor Smith is bitter about life at Concordia and the effects on his toilet of an imaginary Tom Friedman. Who can blame him?

(Via Sullivan, once again.)

I don’t believe a word of all of this. Berlusconi is a happy married man and loves his family, he would never do such a think. This is a conspiracy of the Comunists Party who wants to bring the governament down. GO HOME YOU COMUNISTS

Boobee, Lachine,

That’s a comment left on the Times of London web site under an article about Silvio Berlusconi’s alleged adventures as a consumer of paid sex. Boobee is amazingly determined in calling Berlusconi “happily married,” given that Berlusconi’s wife has told the press how pissed off she is that he’s spending time with an 18-year-old model. In fact Berlusconi was at the girl’s 18th birthday party, where he gave her an expensive piece of jewelry to honor their already extant friendship. But if you saw Colbert last week, you already know that part.

The latest stage of the scandal centers on women who were paid to attend Berlusconi’s parties and who allegedly did the sort of things you would expect. From the Guardian:

Nicolò Ghedini, Berlusconi’s chief legal adviser, defended his client over the D’Addario affair by describing his client as a mere “end user” of the women, who was not therefore at risk in the Bari investigation. For good measure, he added that “Berlusconi could have them [women] in large numbers for free”.

As an American, I didn’t know Italy could have a sex scandal.