Maus and Marketing

Posted on December 3, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

This is probably my least favorite page in Maus.

This page doesn’t have the design problems that I taked about over here, and, which Mahendra Singh elaborated on.

The second page is cramped and confused; the first is not a masterpiece of design or anything, but the simple four panel grid at the top is effective; the flies the visual tip off to the gruesome reveal of the corpses around the drawing board.

What’s interesting, though, is that, while one is sub-competent and the other is effective, both use the same basic formula. You also see it here:

In each, the page is set up as a reveal. The top visuals keep your eyes focused on neutral images, and then the bottom opens up into the horrible truth. That horrible truth is always the same truth; namely the Holocaust, symbolized with a crude obviousness either by the (poorly drawn) Nazi flag, or the Auschwitz gate, or (most viscerally) by a huge pile of dead bodies. the importance of the Holocaust is emphasized each time both by its position as revelation, and by its scale. In his page design, Spiegelman tells us, over and over, that the Holocaust is huge and that it leaps out at you.

That is not, I would argue, an especially insightful take on the Holocaust; it turns it into a pulp adrenaline rush. Those pages each seem like they’d work as well, or actually better, if you substituted Dr. Doom for the Holocaust in each case. IF you’re going to set up a supervillain behind the curtain melodrama, best to be talking about an actual supervillain. Hollywood effects work best with Hollywood content; trying to add drama to an actual genocide comes across as cheap and presumptuous.

Interestingly, Spiegelman himself is somewhat aware of this, and on the page I’ve shown here, and in the following page, he tries to address it.

Spiegelman here is discussing, and decrying, the Hollywoodization of his book. These pages are from the second part of Maus, after the first part had gone the pre-Internet version of viral. The “reveal” of the final panel is both of the corpses and of the book’s success — the foreign language editions, the TV and movie offers. You could see the bodies as symbols of Spiegelman’s innocent alt-comix purity — a kind of spiritual death, underlined by the reference to his mother’s suicide. The off-panel declaration that “We’re ready to shoot!” links the media explicitly to the Nazi murderers; Spiegelman, as tortured artist besieged by popularizers and reporters, is positioned as a tormented victim of the gas chambers.

Defenders of Maus will no doubt argue that these pages are ironized. For example, Eric Berlatsky (that’s my brother!) writes:

Spiegelman is sure to implicate himself when he depicts Artie at the outset of chapter two of Maus II. Sitting at his drawing table, in front of television interviewers, Artie discusses the commercial success of the first volume of his book while sitting atop a pile of anthropomorphic mouse corpses. He is depicted not as a mouse, but as a man wearing a mouse mask, performing Jewishness for commercial gain. The simultaneously humorous and threatening depiction of the American advertiser offering a license deal for Artie vests (“Maus. You’ve read the book now buy the vest!” [42]) indicates how Artie (and Spiegelman himself) uses the past not merely to recall it in the present, but for his own profit and on the backs of the Jews his book is purportedly “remembering.” Artie displays a questionable connection to the past in order to participate in the circulation of power and profit.

Eric, then, suggests that Spiegelman is intentionally undermining himself; that he’s implicating himself in the marketing of the book and the performance of Jewishness.

I’d agree that the page raises the questions that Eric discusses. But is the effect really to undermine Spiegelman? The sympathy in that second page remains resolutely with Artie, who is being “shot.” He is the sensitive artist/victim (reduced to actually infantilized crying at the end) while callous reporters and interlocutors try to make a buck or score stupid points off the corpses stacked around his desk. The shallowness and duplicity of the media is emphasized by Spiegelman’s use of masks here; because they are drawn in profile, where we can see the mask-strings, the reporters comes across as macabre and deceptive.

Spiegelman is drawn in profile on the first layout, too. You’re in his head though, and he’s alone; it doesn’t feel like he’s concealing something, but like he’s trapped; the mouse mask victimizes him, and connects him to the dead victims (who aren’t wearing masks.) And then from that bottom reveal and through the next page, Artie is drawn mostly looking out at the reader; you can’t really see the mask. It’s as if the dead bodies have made him a “real” Mouse. In addition, the presence of the reporters ends up being validating; the contrast between their clear masks and his “natural” features shows clearly who has the right to speak — they’re crass desire to commercialize the corpses around his desk positions Artie as feeling caretaker; the only one who truly understands the horror. Thus, the dialogue is mostly the reporters asking aggressive questions and Artie as genius artist undermining them with wit and humble brag, followed by sensitive breakdown. The low point is probably when Artie blithely suggests he would draw Israelis as porcupines — a smirking one-liner that both dismisses the very real problem that Israel poses for Spiegelman’s Jews-as-mice-as-victims metaphor and glibly ties into ugly Zionist narratives positioning Israeli aggression as righteous defense.

The real failure of these pages, though, is Spiegelman’s utter refusal to grapple with his own responsibility for the commodification he’s supposedly decrying. IF you really don’t want your Holocaust story to be easily consumable, there are ways of doing that, from Celan’s impenetrable poems silence to Philip K. Dick’s oblique, quiet puzzle-box The Man in the High Castle. The critical and commercial success of Maus is not an accident; it’s the result of the deliberately unchallenging way in which Spiegelman presented the material. And that makes his wailing about the burden of success (which he, again, explicitly compares to the horrors of Auschwitz) insupportably presumptuous. The page itself, with its build-up to the big gothic reveal, uses pulp tropes to dramatize the Holocaust. The quite clichéd juxtaposition of feeling artist and unfeeing reporters/media is also an easy cultural narrative. Even the revelation of Spiegelman as man, rather than as mouse, doesn’t so much undermine the iconography (we still get the shock of anthropomorphic corpses) as it shows us the hand behind the image. Tortured genius is hardly a new marketing meme.

In short, Maus, in numerous ways, is an effort of deliberate middle-brow popularization. And part of that popularization is the elevation of Spiegelman himself; the genius interpreter, speaking from his pain as corpses overwhelm his drawing board. The bitter irony of Maus’ success is that the book’s defenders end up in the position of Spiegelman’s masked Nazi-like philistines,scrabbling joyfully amidst the corpses. And from the pile, finally, they lift Artie himself, circled by flies, the genius who realized that if comics marketed genocide, genocide in return would market comics.

The Good Draftsman: Of Mice and Men

Posted on December 2, 2013 by Mahendra Singh

The word “draftsmanship” is the loud, boozy, best-friend’s-sister of the artistic lexicon; available to all, understood by few. It’s a word which has come up in recent reviews of Art Speigelman’s exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York. Some critics have raved over Speigelman’s draftsmanship, others have pooh-poohed it. The word itself seems misunderstood by some readers and critics or perhaps its older meaning is no longer even applicable in modern comix and illustration.

Draftsmanship is the quality of someone’s drawing (not just their rendering or painting). Like many qualities, it is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain of heaven and soaks the pages of both those that give and those that take. There is both good and bad draftsmanship and here’s the crux: how do you tell them apart?

In our post-modern, relativistic times, where nothing is certain except the fact that nothing is certain, readers of a philosophical bent will spit up their breakfast pablum at the implications of the above question. My reply to them is simple: if you refuse to make judgements, that in itself is a judgment and you’re probably oppressing someone, somewhere with your double-plus-judgemental refusal to make judgements. Naturally, my own judgements are non-judgemental, that’s the temporary prerogative of all soapboxes. I have no doubt that many HU readers will bring their own, equally sturdy soapboxes to the party later on and deliver some equally non-judgemental counter-judgements.

Good draftsmanship is an accurate, visually logical and harmonious depiction of reality. No genuine, long-term success in drawing is possible without first mastering realistic figure drawing, no matter how symbolic the style. The ability to make a human being look human or a horse to look horsey or a Princess telephone to look princessy — regardless of the level of symbolic distortion and compression — that is the basis of superior draftsmanship. But that is only part of it.

Draftsmanship is not just making clean contour drawings, and it is not at all about copying photographs. Good draftsmanship is the harmony, accuracy and design of reality processed through the eye and expressed through the hand. It can be as telegraphically crisp as a Japanese ukiyo print or as exuberantly messy as one of Blutch’s brilliantly inked pages.

Blutch: Miles Davis

Good draftsmanship means that everything looks good, even when it looks ugly. This is where things get slippery. Our eyeballs operate by the logic of a non-verbal grammar and a good drawing is always, without exception, “spoken” in this abstract language — otherwise it is visual gibberish. I think that for comix readers and critics — many of whom seem to prefer using literary techniques to analyze comix — this concept is a head-scratcher. Perhaps this is one reason why so few artists write comix criticism; the verbalization of visual rules for even a professional audience is tricky, for a general audience it’s nearly impossible at times.

So, in art-school parlance, good draftsmanship means depicting reality with complete design fluency on every level. Any symbolic compressions of reality are designed so that the trained, so-called good eye is always satisfied by the parts and the sum of the parts. The core mark is always reality.

In any case, let’s look at a page from Maus, a page specifically posted by one critic as an example of the high quality of Spiegelman’s exhibit. Maus is many things, most of them good … but the draftsmanship is not.

The drawing of individual elements, such as the mouse-heads, is ungainly, even for cartooning. It is not that they should look more like real mice, that would be silly. The shapes/textures/lines are all where they should be to facilitate general navigation but they seem somehow squeezed into place. Taken individually, many of the shapes are inelegant and unsteady and note one thing: there are precious few lines of beauty.

Much of the detailing — clothing, hands, shading — is turgid and clotted, an effect exacerbated by the mono-width linework. Monowidth line-work needs air to breathe, and if you must cramp it, it must be fastidiously designed on every level, not just the over-all page level.

The rendering of volumes necessary to show the thrust of objects in space is often crude … example: the far-left mouse in the final panel needs his cheekbones and orbital bones indicated fluently. Yes, it’s a cartooney mouse but then why is it hatched? It would have been better to use a few simple interior contour lines to delineate the subsidiary planes.

In general, if one wants to use a weak, monotone contour system with fast, cursory crosshatching, the accuracy of shapes must be perfect. Here, the optically long lines (mostly describing backgrounds) are trembly and indecisive, the curved lines (mostly describing animate objects) lack the snap and bravura of the classic line of beauty. With pen and ink, one must always make a decision about how much of the hand’s presence should be visible on the page. You can go the slow Hergé route and hide the hand entirely or you can take the fast Herriman route and let the hand’s muscularity and nimbleness run amuck. Spiegelman’s inking style favours expressiveness but his draftsmanship betrays his aims. His hand is going faster than his eye can think.

Heinrich Kley comes to mind as the successful epitome of this style of draftsmanship (see the two illos above). His hand is nervous but his eye is confident, thanks to his draftsmanship, his mastery of reality. In Kley, one senses the shape governing every line, even if the line is still searching for it. His hand is confident of the eye’s automatic guidance. Shapes and lines are rhythmically linked — a basic tenet of good visual grammar.

But in this Spiegelman page, the shapes are not “magnetizing” the lines in the same way, his nervousness stems from a lack of confidence in internally visualizing the reality being described. Roughly speaking, the visual, reality-based grammar governing the naturally pleasing agreement between contours, volumes and lines is too weak to please the eye consistently.

Spiegelman is not a superior draftsman, and I doubt if he himself thinks that he is one. Frankly, who of us are really good draftsmen? Not I … and it is not even necessary for Spiegelman’s purpose. He has made a living in the publications field for a long time and knows the score: do the best page you can at the time and above all, make it fit the story. There are better looking pages in Maus and in other works of his.

In fact, his usual style of story-telling does not require good draftsmanship and in a work such as Maus, a certain visual crudeness is more emotionally effective than a cleaner, crisper hand would have been.

Spiegelman’s work has never been about draftsmanship anyway, he’s a verbal illustrator, especially pre-Maus. He is also, to the eternal gratitude of everyone who makes comix in North America, the guy who made us at least semi-respectable to both a better class of reader and the people who send us royalty cheques. Younger readers have no idea how difficult it was to get the NYC suits to take you seriously before RAW began cracking the glass ceiling.

Most American golden and silver and iron-age corporate comix were nothing more than the step-and-repeat of modular, symbolic marks designed to rubberstamp the reader’s eyes into a stupor. Draftsmanship took a backseat to speed. And the draftsmanship of many contemporary comix is even more laughable in its absence. Too many North American comix are made by talented writers who cannot get into print by writing alone and must take up cartooning to tell stories. And the bar for comix submissions is lower than other fictions simply because the bar for visual competency is often set by non-visual editors, readers and critics.

Cartooning is now the default mode of drawing in North America, in both illustration and comix. It’s cheaper to purchase because it’s easier to execute and doesn’t require expensive, specialized training. And most cartooning is poorly drawn since the level of symbolic reduction is usually so extreme that the slightest defect is multiplied ten-fold and spoils the entire effect.

In any case, as I get older and crankier, I care less and less for the stories and thematic concepts of most comix, I look at only the pictures. My Holy Grail is a sequential art where the drawing is the meaning* as much as the story or words, perhaps even more so, to the point where the visual grammar will express a story in its own universal language. In fact, sequential art is the only popular visual art form which has the potential to utilize draftsmanship at this level, to make the medium and the message precisely the same. Music, architecture and dance still do this regularly. Why not comix?

*I think that Matt Madden’s experiments in constrained comix, his Oubapian work, is a major step in this direction. The implications of what he and others like him are doing may result in comix evolving into genuinely visual, absolute art at last. And to those that think that contemporary gallery art has this absolute value, I beg to differ. Any visual art form which requires a verbal explanation to understand the “message” is not visual art at all.
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Mahendra Singh’s website is here.

Abortion and Violence

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared a while back on Splice Today.

Abortion is an act of violence. There’s not really any way to get around that. Therefore, if you oppose violence, you should oppose abortion — or so Ross Douthat argues in his column a bit back at the New York Times.

Douthat focuses specifically on the recent media flurry around Kermit Gosnell, a doctor in Philadelphia who specialized in gory, late term, unsafe abortions. The left wing and feminist media had covered Gosnell extensively, arguing that he was a horrible, bloody example of the results of Pennsylvania’s tight restrictions on late-term termination of pregnancy. Mainstream meida, however, had been less interested in covering the case. In Douthat’s view, this was because the mainstream media knew that its viewers would be horrified and disturbed by the details. Douthat argues that feminist and committed pro-choice advocates have made their peace with the violence of abortion. Others, though are more conflicted. For those in the “mushy middle” as Douthat says, the revelation of the brutality of abortion is off-putting — and so the mushily pro-choice mainstream media avoided the story.

Or, as Douthat sums up his argument:

To respond effectively to the doubts about abortion that fetal snipping summons up, pro-choice advocates would need arguments that (to rephrase Senior’s language) acknowledge and come to terms with the goriness of third-trimester abortions while simultaneously persuading the conflicted and uncommitted of their validity, and that somehow take ownership of the “violence” and “gruesomeness” of abortion (to borrow Harris’s words) without giving aid and comfort to the pro-life cause. And in the absence of such arguments, the pro-choice response to Gosnell feels either evasive and euphemistic, or else logically consistent in ways that tend to horrify the unconvinced — and in either case, inadequate to the challenge his case presents to the cause of abortion rights.

I think Douthat’s argument is right as far as it goes. Gosnell highlights the violence of abortion, and when people see that violence, they are repulsed.

What Douthat fails to note, though, is that restricting abortion is also violent — and sometime gruesomely so. Pregnancy is an intimate and difficult process; birth, as even men are aware, is extremely painful. To force someone to carry a baby to term and give birth against their will is to subject them to months of coercion ending in terrible physical pain. In extreme cases, as when the mother’s life is endangered by the pregnancy, refusal to allow abortions can be a death sentence. In cases of rape or incest, the outlawing of abortion can consign a woman to hideous, inhuman psychological trauma. This is why Todd Akins and his ilk try to deny that abortion from rape can occur — because, if they once admit that it can, the cruelty and violence of the radical pro-life position becomes painfully clear.

Douthat suggests that the mushy middle would be moved to oppose abortion, or at least late term abortion, if it only understood how hideous and violent the pro-choice position is. One might argue, on the contrary, that if the mushy middle really thought about cases of rape or incest or where the mother’s life is threatened, they would see how hideous and violent the pro-life position is. But the truth is that the abortion debate has been going on for a really long time; pro-life groups have fully publicized the violence and gruesomeness of late term abortions; pro-choice groups have fully publicized the violence and cruelty of denying abortion in cases of rape or when the mother’s life is threatened.

The mushy middle remains the mushy middle not because people don’t understand the violence, but rather because they understand that, on this issue, there is no escape from violence. On the one hand, there are dead fetuses; on the other, there are tortured women. Douthat suggests we can have clean hands if we step away from the first…but that’s only because he’s ignoring the second. Those in the mushy middle may not have thought about the issue as much as he has, but their confusion and ambivalence seems considerably more honest.

This is why, now, as ever, the best approach to abortion is to make it, wherever possible, unnecessary — by making contraception easily available, by providing sex ed, by improving social services so that raising children is not such an economic burden. Once a woman is pregnant with a child she does not want, your only option is to use state force to inflict violence against an actual human in the name of preventing violence to a potential human. I’m pro-choice in pretty much all circumstances, but I understand why some people come down in a different place. Douthat, in his column, quotes several pro-choice writers acknowledging the violence of their position. I wish Douthat was honest enough to acknowledge the violence of his.

Utilitarian Review 11/30/13

Posted on November 30, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Mahendra Singh illustrates Wallace Stevens.

For Thanksgiving I posted on America’s participation in Indonesian genocide.

I posted my complete 50 Shades/Cthulhu mash up. Enjoy the thrashing bosoms and heaving tentacles.

I sneer at the design of one page in Maus.

John Grisham still sucks.

Emily Thomas on what the Nao of Brown gets wrong about mental illness.

Chris Gavaler on chess for androids and evil geniuses.

I explain what I think I’m doing with HU.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic:

—I talk about the documentary At Night I Fly and whether art is a salve for prison.

—I review Homefront and talk about the link between home and violence.

At Splice I argue that a documentary about working dogs in Iraq leaves out some things.

Other Links

Tucker Stone and Abhay Khosla on harassment in the comics industry.

Laura Hudson on harassment in the comics industry.

Ashley Fetters on short guy, tall woman in the Hunger Games.

Mikki Kendall on black women, feminism, and concern-trolling Michelle Obama.

Voices From the Archive: Jason Thompson on Orientalism

Posted on November 30, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

Jason Thompson responded to a discussion of Orientalism and reverse-Orientalism in Moto Hagio’s Heart of Thomas with a long post about Orientalism and art. I’ve reprinted it below.

IMHO, it’s important and valuable that things such as Orientalism/reverse Orientalism/racism/sexism/etc. can be recognized and acknowledged for what they are.

However, honestly, I’m definitely not interested in the tedious process of using these labels as a truncheon to bludgeon work produced in another era. (“BAD art! Bad, BAD art!”) It’s an intellectual exercise for its own sake, a ritual of the university system that tends to end up with the critic denigrating the function of art itself, and only ‘allowing’ art which aspires to absolute social realism above all else. As an example, I’m reminded of the excellent-but-very-tedious-in-this-way book “Idols of Perversity” by my former college teacher Bram Djikstra, which examines and picks apart Victorian & Edwardian artwork for its degrading and demonizing images of women. The book’s fascinating. The examples are fascinating. The level of research, and the insight Djikstra gives into the times he’s writing about, is commendable. And, despite the fact that we’re supposed to look at it all as examples of sexism (which they certainly embody), the art is great. But in the end, the whole thesis of the book is “art sucks.” According to this attitude, art must only be a reflection of the (conscious or unconscious) neuroses and prejudices of its time, hence, f*ck it, unless it’s propaganda for ‘correct’ attitudes.

IMHO, in contrary, there is a “fantastical”, personal & psychological realism which is just as valid as social realism. Something can express the ‘true’ feelings and fantasies of the author/artist, or of their society (stereotypical or prejudiced as they may be), while not reflecting the actual social reality of the situation. The completeness and clarity with which personal views are expressed (and, hopefully, the originality with which they are expressed and combined) is valid in a separate sphere from analyzing whether their views bear any relation to social reality. I mean, really, it’s fun & illuminating to poke apart Hemingway’s sexism or Lovecraft’s racism, but who cares whether an artist smoked cigarettes, etc.

Anyway, with regards to “Orientalism”, all cultures exoticize or demonize other cultures, just as all human beings exoticize or demonize other human beings, whether based on outward characteristics or just the fact that they’re separate entities and we can’t read their minds. Such is life. The Other is The Other is The Other. It’s perfectly natural that any country’s media is (in general) going to look at other countries and cultures this way. Since Japan is a big media producing/consuming society it’s naturally going to be producing lots of images of The World Through Japanese People/Artists’ Eyes, just as the US does. Of course, when such attitudes in art can be traced to, and reflected in, actual real-world ABUSES OF POWER — US foreign policy as seen through Chuck Norris’ “Delta Force”, for example — then THAT’S important and those interconnections are very worthy of pointing out and criticizing. But Japanese people oohing and aahing over some idealized glowing romanticized European world doesn’t reflect itself in invasions or wars or perhaps really anything other than taking photos of blonde German tourists.

Anyway, forgive the rant. But basically, I find this line of thought very easy to take to an extreme which deprecates the function of art within society and denies the IMHO unavoidable subjective nature of the realities everyone carries around inside their heads. It’s been awhile since I’ve taken art classes or critical study so I don’t know what the counterargument is to the idea that this attitude, generally, is anti-art.

50 Tentacles of Unspeakable Hue: Complete and Unabridged

Posted on November 29, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

As I’ve mentioned before, I wrote this 50 Shades/Cthulhu mash-up in the hopes people would buy it on Amazon. But no one did. So I thought I’d put it over here instead. If you enjoy it and want to throw me a buck, you can buy the kindle version here. Otherwise, you can just shamelessly freeload.

Oh yeah; NSFW, if you couldn’t figure that out.
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(This is a parody. Don’t sue me, please.)

Oh, my. Even the elevator was intimidating and impressive. I gulped and bit my lip and tried not to be too overly stimulated as the shining glass tube shot upwards through the slick, vertical passageway. On one side, a magnificent view of the Pacific. On the other, the inner workings of Mauve Enterprises, stacked floor on floor, shining in transparent glass. I could see people bustling here and there. Impressive looking people in suits. You could almost see the money steaming off those impressive suits. It was…impressive. I looked away to the Pacific again. Also impressive…but not as unsettlingly stirring as that money moving through corridors, directed by an enticing, directing will.

I struggled to get ahold of myself. I breathed deeply, causing the smooth, luxurious skin of my cleavage to rise enticingly — though, of course, I was completely unaware of my own considerable personal beauty. Would Sebastian Mauve be unaware as well? Did I want him to be? I was here on professional business — to interview the wealthy mystery man whose incredible power, wealth, and mystery probed into every rarefied orifice of finance. He was…mysterious. And it was up to me, Alisa Irons, reporter for the spunky internet startup Power and Money, to plumb that mystery.

Or, suggested my traitorous inner lady bits with an involuntary flutter, to be plumbed by it.

The elevator slid to an immaculate stop redolent of good taste, and the doors hissed open. I gasped, once more unconsciously agitating my bosom, as I beheld the massive antechamber beyond. Holy crap. The décor was sumptuous and subtle…but also, subtly, disturbing. The thick carpet was covered with swirls and patterns, almost seeming to form a script or an alphabet throbbing with unspeakable meanings. Directly in front of the elevator was a pedestal, upon which a nude bronze sculpture of a shockingly well-formed and realistic woman (somewhat resembling myself!) struggled with what looked like an octopus. I looked closer, and realized it was not exactly an octopus — there were too many tentacles, and the central head was not really a head, but itself a mass of writhing limbs. My broad reading led me to conclude, therefore that it was some sort of mythological thingee. Not an octopus, anyway. Also it was not struggling with the woman, but…holy crap. I turned my eyes modestly away to the wall hangings, which were also covered with swirls, swirls, swirly swirls. They dipped and slid and criss-crossed not unlike those not-octopus limbs. They coiled around and up, sliding smoothly into my eager, pouting brain the way they slid right up into the statue’s….

“Miss Irons?”

I started. Oh, my. I was looking into the eyes of a very beautiful woman. Her dark eyes were limpid pools, her white bosom strained against the fabric of her blue dress. Around her neck was an odd piece of jewelry…a kind of octopus, but not really an octopus, like the one on the statue. Its tentacles seemed to be exploring her cleavage, which was more amply visible than I would usually expect in a business setting. But perhaps cleavage amply displayed was what Sebastian Mauve demanded. I imagined Sebastian Mauve perusing the cleavage. My inner lady bits sat up and did some complicated writhing at the thought. What sort of man was he, who would so boldly, so shamelessly, peruse both staff cleavage and octopus statue rape? Skeevy, perhaps. But it was the skeeviness of power.

“Yes,” I breathed, perhaps too enthusiastically. “I’m Alisa Irons.”

The woman looked me up and down frankly. “I’m Virginia, Sebastian Mauve’s personal assistant. Come right this way, please.” She turned briskly, whisking the cleavage away, and replacing it with a stellar bottom. Oh my. I felt a flash of some indefinable emotion as I thought of Sebastian Mauve’s relationship with that roundness. Had he watched it swivel above this very carpet with these very oddly affecting swirls? The speculation and the gyrations and the contemplation were all making me feel a little dizzy.

And then the door was open, and he turned and holy crap. His eyes smouldered; his tailored suit hung just so on his well-muscled frame, his pants hung just so on his, oh my.

“Hello, Miss Irons,” he said, his voice cultured and bristling manfully with manliness.

“Hello,” I said vaguely. Everything tilted, and I pitched forward helplessly. Two of the three grapes I had eaten for lunch came rushing up, and out.

He had caught me. His eyes smouldered into mine. An ironic smile played over his lips. His mouth opened enticingly.

“You vomited on my jacket,” he said, wittily.

“I know,” I volleyed back.

“It takes a strong woman to have the courage to vomit on the jacket of a man as quietly powerful as I am,” he volleyed back back. I could smell his scent — aftershave and cleanliness, with just a hint of brine. My inner lady bits did back flips. The lone remaining grape in my intestine told them testily to stop it.

Sebastian smiled smoulderingly, as if he could see my thoughts, and the thoughts of the lady bits, and also perhaps of the grape. “Ostentatious incapacity intrigues me, Miss Irons,” he said. “It speaks to an unusual truthiness of character.” With a single motion, he settled me in a sumptuous chair and tore his shirt asunder. Buttons popped off, abs popped out. His chest was smooth and chiseled. I bit my lip. He tossed the shirt into a corner with a casual abruptness. Oh my.

He leaned towards me, smouldering black eyes smouldering, muscles tensed across his bare arms. “Are you…feeling better?” he said, with a low intensity that ensured a final, decisive route of remaining grape by ladybits.

Before I could answer, his cell phone rang. The ringtone was something classical and impressive, showing his refinement and taste, as classical music will. Though I did not recognize it, I responded intuitively and with all my heart and refinement and taste.

“How beautiful!” I said, as the tinny phrase repeated.

I saw his eyes open wider as he realized we shared a common love for whatever his ringtone was. It was a bond that would never be broken.

He answered the phone decisively, our eyes still locked. Then his jaw clenched and he turned away. I watched the muscles of his back as he uttered brief, staccato commands and answers. He was probably moving almost unimaginable amounts of money with every monosyllable. The back muscles moved, the commands staccatoed, the money whizzed. I didn’t care about material things at all — if I did, how could I have responded so forcefully to the spiritual beauty of the ringtone? Still, watching him command money and stuff with his shirt off was pretty hot.

He slammed the phone shut. He turned back to me. His dark eyes were full of anger…but when he spoke it was with a surprising gentleness.

“Miss Irons,” he said quietly. “Are you a virgin?”

I caught my breath. I bit my lip. I flushed. My inner ladybits cheered. The grape was so stunned it shriveled to a raisin.

“That is none of your business,” I said. “How dare you? I…I am not merely a sum of money you can move about on the phone, no matter how sexily.”

He crossed his arms on his magnificent chest. “Please,” he said. “I know we are all sensitive people, and that we have so much to give. But this is an emergency. Your safety is in peril.” He came around the desk. I caught my breath. My bosom heaved without my knowing it. “Your hymen,” he said. “I need to know its status. Now.”

Something in his tone, something in his assurances, assured me. “Yes. I…I’m a virgin,” I admitted. “My hymen is intact.” I lowered my eyes. “It’s probably because I am so unconscious of my extreme beauty that things have come to this pass,” I said apologetically.

His jaw, which I was sure had tightened as much as it was possible for a jaw to tighten, tightened further. “I would curse your demure and improbable lack of self-knowledge,” he said, “if it were not so endearing. And even then, perhaps, if we had time. But we’ve got to get you out of here!”

He grabbed me roughly and lifted me from the chair, propelling me towards the door with strong, strong, knowing hands.

“Mr. Mauve,” I said. “What…?”

We stepped through the office door and my half-formed thought choked and died and ceased to form.

Virginia was braced against her desk, her arms rigid. Her skirt was hiked up around her waist. Her spectacular ass bucked and thrust rhythmically, in time to the thrusts of…oh my.

It was man-like, to some degree. Two arms, two legs. At first I thought it was a guy in a costume, which clearly would not have been appropriate for the office, anyway, but still. After a couple seconds, though, I saw the proportions were not quite right. It looked sort of like that black lagoon creature; it was obviously aquatic. Its webbed, green-black hands were wrapped around her hips; the frills at its neck quivered in eagerness or satisfaction or anger, or just to quiver, who knew? Though a virgin, I was not utterly without experience, and so I could tell that its penis was thoroughly unlikely, if not actually impossible. It was green and huge, with ribs all down the side, and some sort of twist or hook at the end. It didn’t look like there was any way it could go in, despite Virginia’s obvious and extreme lubrication. But in it went. Holy crap.

Virginia screamed.

The creature, apparently encouraged, thrust again. Its tongue, a long ropy strand, came out of its toothy mouth and dexterously performed an evaluation of Virginia’s interior assets in preparation for a sensitive merger. She screamed again. The creature made a wet growl.

I felt shock, and horror, and a confused but intense communication from the inner lady things. But all those emotions were overwhelmed by pity. I put my hand on Sebastian’s bare shoulder as he pulled me across the room.

“This…this sort of thing happening in your lobby,” I whispered. “Mr. Mauve — Sebastian — I never guessed. How it must hurt you!”

He turned his dark eyes to me. They still smouldered, but in a vulnerable, wounded way.

“You look like my mother,” he said. “Here, now…with all this….the giant ribbed penis…the anal tongue sex….”

He tried to go on, but I shook my head, touched that this tragic moment of fish-sex which we had lived through together had uncovered in him unexpected depths. “No,” I said. “You don’t need to say anything else. I understand.”

I knew the moment was real. My inner lady bits, the grape, me myself — we were all in agreement. Even the fish-thing seemed to recognize the importance of what we had; it pulled out of Virginia’s various apertures, and turned towards us. Some viscous, greenish fluid was dripping from it where it was difficult to ignore. Virginia sat up too, her tits declaring her an independent woman who could make her own decisions about fish sex. Also, she made a little noise as the fish creature stepped away from her, towards us. Its thing quivered. Oh my.

Sebastian grabbed me and jammed me into the open elevator. The doors closed just in time. We were safe.

Or…I thought I was safe. Until I turned to Sebastian.

“You!” he said. “What do you think you were doing!”

Though I felt that after the ringtone and the fish-sex in the lobby I knew him better than anyone else did, or could, still his character was more complex than many other complex things, and this was obviously one of those complexities. I cast about helplessly, trying to imagine what I had done to offend. “You mean…coming here while virgin?” I asked tentatively.

“Hah!” he said. He loomed over me, his smouldery eyes flashing and smouldering. “A virgin! Are you telling me you were not looking at that giant green penis?”

I flushed, and bit my lip for good measure. “It was right there,” I said. “I could hardly have helped looking at it…and besides!” I rallied, “I bet you were looking at Virginia’s huge tits, weren’t you?”

He seemed taken aback…then grinned. “Don’t you know that no man is going to look at anyone else’s tits when you’re in the room?” he said.

“No,” I said, “I don’t know because I am completely unconscious of my own personal…” I didn’t get any more out. He had taken me in his arms; the clean scent, with a hint of brine, was all around me as his lips pressed against me. I could feel his erection hard and unashamed. It did not feel as big as the fish-man penis, but it was plenty big enough.

He pushed me up against the elevator wall that I couldn’t help realizing that he owned. It was like being kissed on the front by him and on the back by his stuff, which was almost more him than him since there was more of it. His tongue moved skillfully, his stuff was hard… oh my.

Outside the glass walls of the elevator was a scene of excessive debauchery. Fish-men-things, like money, were everywhere…and, it seemed, in everyone, of whatever gender. As we descended one level, I saw a well-preserved women in her 60s joining a young blonde in performing enthusiastic fellatio on one of those ribbed monstrosities; on another, a well-endowed man was stroking himself while the creature entered him from behind. I could even see a few of the things climbing the outer walls, their erections dragging against the windows, leaving little trails of cum, or slime, or whatever it was.

As a lover of great literature from Pride and Prejudice to Twilight to 50 Shades of Goo:Bred by the Billionaire Tentacle (available as a digital e-book), I sensed that there were narrative complications that had not yet been fully explained.

“Sebastian,” I said determinedly as he bit my nipple in passing, and kept moving down. “Sebastian…oh my! Sebastian…ooooh…if you are not careful, I am going to orgasm while watching a giant green penis sodomize one of your colleagues!”

Sebastian’s ministrations stopped abruptly. His face appeared, his mouth somewhat damp, his brow furrowed, his dark eyes doing that thing they did. Which was smouldering.

“What?” he said.

“You heard my independent and spunky repartee,” I said firmly. “Green penises. Wit!”

Sebastian looked around. I could see the heavy burden of having his office sacked by fish sex monsters descend upon him.

“Sebastian,” I said. “Tell me. Virginity. Abominations from the deep. Mauve enterprises. Your mother and the wounded little boy inside you. Explain it all, darling. I won’t judge you.” I reached out to smooth his face, but missed and grabbed his impressive erection instead. He seemed to find it comforting, so I left my hand there. He gazed into my eyes, pumping subtly below the waist.

“You are an extraordinary woman, Anna,” he breathed. “Despite everything, I’m glad you fell into my office and vomited copiously on my shoulder.”

“My name’s Alisa,” I said, tracing lightly up his shaft.

“Right,” he agreed. The elevator doors slid open. The corridor outside seemed fish monster free. He grabbed my arm and pulled me swiftly after him.

“I will tell you everything, Alisa,” he said. “You deserve that much. But first we need to make sure you’re safe.” He flipped his cell phone open with a masterful air of command. “Alfred,” he said. “The Batcopter!”

Holy crap.
_____
“So,” I said. “You’re Batman.”

Sebastian nodded distractedly, still distractingly shirtless, as a trusty minion piloted the famous crime-fighting copter out over the Pacific.

“It’s a way of giving back,” he said. “When you make your billions as quickly and obscurely as I did, you feel, of course, entirely justified in your own improbable brilliance, but also grateful to the average schmucks who got out of the way. The least you can do, really, is don a costume a few nights a week to become a dark avenger of crime. ” He shrugged. “The adrenalin rush is fun, too. Nice change of pace from the other extreme sports I’ve tried, like cliff diving, prole tossing….” He trailed off. “But that isn’t what you want to talk about, is it, Arabella?”

“Alisa.”

“Right.”

His eyes brooded.

I wanted to brush the hair from his eyes. I missed again and stroked him down there. He made a cute little sound. Oh my.

“Your mother,” I breathed. “Fish sex invasion. Virginity. Why?”

He nodded, once; the crisp, harsh nod that struck fear in the cowardly hearts of criminals and sent funds scurrying like green fish with penises through the glistening tubes of extreme philanthropy.

“My mother was a whore,” he said, raising his eyes to my face. “She looked just like you.”

My heart melted. His member twitched at the profound sorrow of his words. I jerked gently, knowing that what he needed now, more than ever, was tenderness.

“She was on drugs,” he continued, as I slid down to better facilitate the truth rising in his wounded manliness, like truth sap in a truth tree. “And she was also involved in obscene and unspeakable rites. She summoned things from outside of time; horrible twisted abominations that should not have been! Can you imagine what it was like, Alexandra, to lie there every night beside her, terrified, and watch the tentacled beasts crawl up through the rotten boards of our decayed hovel to satisfy their depraved lusts?”

I shook my head in horror, running my tongue back and forth across the hard knot of his shattered youth, which was extremely hard. I fondled the backstory lightly with my fingers. Holy crap, and also oh my. This was incredibly hot — and also, no doubt, therapeutic, especially since I reminded him of his mom.

“Let it all out,” I said, but my mouth was full so it came out as “Lepphalt.” An appreciative throb assured me that he understood the sentiment.

“She would step naked into the bathtub,” he continued, his voice rising. I was concerned for a moment, but then I figured the minion had heard it all before. “Her firm white breasts rising in anticipation, the exploitive Oedipal content hard and red with depraved lust. The thing that waited rose up, its head a writhing mass, its long tentacles thrashing.”

He touched my head as I bobbed, and his voice took on new urgency.

“That’s…uhh..that’s why I…want you to let me sacrifice you to Cthulhu. It’s what I do with all my girlfriends. I…oh…find someone who looks just like Mommy, seduce her, and then throw her to the unspeakable eldritch fiend so it can rut in all her orifices and drive her utterly mad! Oh!” he exclaimed in a final spasm of sincere vulnerability and also semen. I looked up thoughtfully, watching his sexy concerns detumesce. I was glad to have helped him so much…but could I possibly help him so much more?

“So,” I said, biting my lip in a manner which was unconsciously fetching, “you want to watch me be violated by a hideous atrocity from outside of time and space?”

“Yes,” he said.

“And this is what you do with all your girlfriends? This is what it means to have a relationship with you?”

“Yes,” he said again, with a hint of impatience.

“And…the virginity? The fish-sex invasion?”

He shrugged. “Cthulhu likes virgins. Private elder god reasons. And the fish monsters come every Thursday. It’s a team building exercise.”

“It’s Wednesday.” I pointed out.

He nodded. “Right.”

I sat back on my haunches, which were so similar to Sebastian’s mother’s haunches, and which, therefore, Sebastian found appealing even outside of their innate attractiveness. I basked in the aura of Sebastian; the custom crime-fighting helicopter, the silent minion up front who had seen so much and was yet so cheerfully bland and faceless, the shirtlessness, the flaccid but stimulating penis. Did I want to be sacrificed to an unnameable horror? My inner lady bits were perhaps somewhat interested; Sebastian’s description of his mother’s ravishment was certainly impassioned. On the other hand, my grape pointed out that there was maybe something mildly disturbing about Sebastian’s intense dedication to his noble war on crime. And what about all those other girls?

“Did you throw Virginia and her big tits to Cthulhu?” I asked him.

He snorted. “Virginia! She looks nothing like my mother! Besides, do you know how hard it is to find a good secretary? Those who Cthulhu uses are shattered in body and mind and their souls devoured. You can’t take good dictation after your soul is devoured. Even filing suffers.” He stood up, his penis dangling, his biceps bicepping. He clasped me tightly against him. “Andrea, I don’t just throw every attractive, bosomy girl I come across to my unholy master. Only the truly special may be meat puppets for Cthulhu. And you…you are the most special meat puppet I have ever encountered!”

He looked at me with those dark Sebastian eyes that had looked at so many possessions, so much money, so many bosoms, and so many tentacles. I felt my inner value skyrocket as I realized all the luxury items that he was ignoring, all the other things he could consume to salve his trauma rather than utterly destroying me in a bizarre sex ritual. Yet it was the utter destruction that he wanted; the utter destruction he needed. How could I not feel flattered? How could I not feel safe as he lifted me in his arms and flung me, despite my screams and protests, out of the helicopter and into the Pacific far below?

“Afterwards I’ll buy you a Volvo!” he shouted in parting.

The wind whipped about me as I fell, Sebastian’s wounded expression of anticipation and his again-rigid consumption pattern receding above me, the unique, incredibly expensive Bat-copter piloted by the well-paid minion falling away. The wind howled, but that was quickly drowned in the mighty roar from below. I caught a glimpse of Cyclopean tendrils falling from unnameable perspectives, and then the terrible maw engulfed me, and my dress was torn away like one of those things that gets torn off in one of the many, many novels I have read about tearing. I imagined Sebastian looking at me through very expensive Bat-binoculars, made just for the viewing of distant tentacle-rape, and felt the grape retreat in a huff as my inner lady bits moistened. Oh my.

The smell of brine was everywhere, reminding me of Sebastian’s scent. For an inhuman unspeakable demon, it was remarkably gentle, as if it was instinctively tamed by the curve of my thighs and my appreciation of the Impressionists and designer watches. Delicate, independently writhing cilia played across my incessant self-questioning. Was it right to accept a Volvo? I tried to call Sebastian’s name, but all that came out was ” ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.” Perhaps this sort of translation problem was why Sebastian had had such problems with former sacrifices and dictation.

I saw the great tentacle rise before me, huge, grey-green, and ribbed, like a gigantic version of the fish-men penises that Sebastian had not wanted me to look at. A giant lidless eye opened, the swirling geometries causing me to drool and gibber, even as I understood intuitively that it had its own sorrows, and its own tragic reasons for manifesting as a monstrosity whose foul, slimy, hideous and mountainous flesh concealed a heart desperately in need of love. It stroked various things leisurely, then moved down, down, down…and suddenly thrust. Holy crap.

Annual Thanksgiving Hate America Post

Posted on November 28, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

Happy holidays! Thought I’d take this opportunity to reprint this cheerful post from Splice Today about our government’s shenanigans in Indonesia. Have a good turkey day; regular posting should resume tomorrow if all goes well.
_______

“But given the history of abuse by governments, it’s right to ask questions about surveillance — particularly as technology is reshaping every aspect of our lives.” That’s a quote from Obama’s news conference this August, in which he defended the NSA’s data collection program.

From the way Obama phrased that, it’s not clear which governments he’s talking about specifically. Who are these governments who have abused information gathering, anyway? What did they do with it?

Well, here’s one abuse of government information gathering I’ve been reading about recently. Not so long ago, U.S. intelligence made lists of civilians, including men, women, and children, to be executed without trial.

This was back in 1965 during the Cold War, just as the U.S. was ratcheting up its involvement in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. At that time, Indonesia was ruled by Sukarno, an anti-colonialist and anti-Westerner with close ties to the the Indonesian Communist Party, or PKI. He was something of a Qaddafi figure, though without quite Qaddafi’s record of support for terrorism and general butchery. Sukarno was an authoritarian ruler, with all that that implies, but certainly no worse of one than the authoritarian rulers of many countries to whom we funneled, and still funnel, money and arms.

On September 30, 1965, there was an abortive coup attempt in Indonesia, and several high-ranking generals were killed. The coup seemed to be linked to the Communist Party. Anti-Commuists in the military, led by one Suharto, used this as an opportunity to seize control, unleashing a flood of anti-Communist propaganda. They also unleashed a bloodbath. Across the country, Communists, or people associated with Communists, or people accused of being Communists, were rounded up and slaughtered — often by virulently anti-Communist Muslim youth groups. An anonymous description of the violence in Robert Cribb’s The Indonesian Killings: 1965-1966 describes village chiefs, children, and members of teacher’s unions being mutilated, tortured, and killed, their bodies dumped in rivers or shallow pits, and banana trees planted on their graves. Here’s one typical account:

A young boy…was arrested by Ansor [members of the Muslim youth group.] He was then tied to a jeep and dragged behind it until he was dead. Both his parents committed suicide.

Nobody knows how many people died in the carnage, exactly, but scholarly estimates range between 300,000 and 1 million.

So what was the U.S. doing while this was going on? Mostly cheering from the sidelines. Again, this was the Cold War, and these were Communists being killed, at least in theory. The U.S. had long hoped that anti-Communist forces would triumph in Indonesia. Officials had contacts with Suharto, and basically wished him the best.

The U.S. did more than just wish him well, though. Twenty-five years after the massacre, reporter Kathy Kadane reported in a May 21, 1990 Washington Post story that she had gotten a number of State Department officials to speak on the record about their involvement. They said that they had provided lists of Communists to the Indonesians, presumably so that Suharto could better hunt them down. The lists included members of women’s groups and youth groups. Kadane quoted former U.S. Embassy official Robert J. Martens justifying his decision to turn over the lists to Suharto.

“It really was a big help to the army…. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad. There’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.”

In this case, striking hard at a decisive moment meant, apparently, helping thugs track down school teachers so they could chop off their breasts before decapitating them.

After Kane published her piece, U.S. intelligence officials pushed back, arguing that Martens had been acting on his own, without official agency direction, and that the names hadn’t been all that helpful to the Indonesians anyway (in direct contradiction to Martens’ statement above). Ultimately, there’s no way to know exactly what happened, in large part because the Indonesian genocide was so successful —opposition was broken, Suharto moved into power, and Indonesians who knew what was good for them kept quiet about the killings, or else. Kane’s article came out decades after the genocide, and decades after that, scholars still have sparse details about every aspect of the killings, even though Suharto finally was forced from power in 1998.

Still, one thing seems clear — the U.S. had intelligence, and that intelligence was used (with whatever efficacy, and officially or by one dude) to help a bunch of authoritarian thugs commit genocide. Even after the story blew up on him, Martens was still insisting that aiding the military was the right thing to do. ‘If we had any purpose in the world except to be bureaucrats,” he told a New York Times reporter, “that was the sort of thing I felt we ought to be doing.” Shades of Oliver North.

The point, for our present purposes, is pretty straightforward. If spies have information, they will use it in pursuit of their “mission,” whether it’s fighting Communism or fighting terrorism. And if they trample on some civil liberties, or kill a few innocent kids — well, they’re not going to worry about it all that much. Indonesia was a long time ago and a long way away. But 500,000 dead is a whole lot of bodies to contemplate with equanimity. Our spies did though, and I don’t think they’ve changed all that much. I doubt the current NSA program will end up abetting genocide. But the fact that our government has this particular history of abuse seems like a pretty good reason not to trust them at all when they promise that the information they gather will not be used for harm.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Yearly Archives: 2013