I’ve got an article up at Comixology about why Spider-Man should be a pacifist:

Indeed, Spiderman’s real sin here is not against morality or society, but against the tropes that keep the genre afloat. Super-heroes have to act. They’ve got to fight crime. If they don’t, you don’ t have a narrative. Super-heroes have “great responsibility,” but it’s always the responsibility to do something. You could conceivably have an origin story in which Wombat-Man decked a baddy, the gun went off, Cousin Joe got shot, and the hero decided “With great power comes great responsibility!” And so Wombat-Man decides never to mess with crime again, and instead uses his phenomenal digging powers solely to aid with infrastructure projects! Again, you could have such an origin – but what you’d end up with would not exactly be a super-hero comic

Bram Stoker
The Lair of the White Worm

It’s hard to believe that this novel was the basis of the excellent 1988 Ken Russell movie. Indeed, Bram Stoker seems to have written The Lair of the White Worm with his brain tied behind his back. The protagonists wander like lobotomized puppets from scene to scene, pausing occasionally to launch into long passages of earnest, muddled exposition, and then to congratulate each other on their lucidity. They are, moreover, bland to the point of culpability. Lady Arabella is a decidedly ineffective villain, especially considering the fact that she can turn into a giant snake, but, though it was clear early on that she wasn’t up to the task, I spent most of the book hoping against hope that she’d devour that prig, Adam, and his little wife too.

The book would be unreadable if it weren’t for a loathsome current of anxiety sliding underneath the surface malaise. This anxiety breaks through most distastefully in the novel’s insistent racism, which even by the low standards of 1911, is embarrassingly vicious. It peeps out rather ludicrously in the bizarre, unmotivated plot devices — the confused references to mesmerism, the multiple mongooses, the giant menacing kite, the titular, antideluvian white worm itself. And it is most effective in the last few pages, which, in true horror fashion, come leaping out of the general fog to deliver heaping and gratuitous gouts of gross-out.

Entertaining as that ending is, the real reason to check this book out of the local library is the set of lovely and evocative illustrations by Patricia Coleman Smith. Just another reminder that, from Dracula on down, Stoker has always inspired better art than he himself could produce.

Well, another gig I had lined up crashed and burned. For a brief shining moment I was the book reviewer for a magazine to be called Prettyboy — kind of a Maxim for girls, supposedly. Didn’t quite get off the ground though, leaving me with a bunch of reviews and nowhere to publish them. But there’s always the blog. So, here’s the first of several random book reviews that I’ll be posting over the next couple weeks; this one of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ memoir,”The Beautiful Struggle.”

*********************

The American memoir is a fairly simple formula. Clearly identify your colorful ethnic heritage (Chinese, Jewish, Irish…even Appalachian will do.) Milk said heritage for all it is worth. Discuss your simultaneous love of and resentment of said heritage. Milk your ambivalence for all it is worth. Feel deeply. Stir well, then appear on Terri Gross.

In The Beautiful Struggle (a deeply felt title if ever there was one) Ta-Nehisi Coates has followed the formula down to the ground. Coates grew up in Baltimore, the son of a Black Panther who ran his own Afrocentric press. Heritage, consciousness, and a fetishization of his own family’s exotic difference form the core of the story. Young Ta-Nehisi hated his oddity — his name, his family’s refusal to celebrate the Fourth of July, the ban on eating most kinds of meat. Yet at the same time that difference, that heritage, is his salvation — both in the narrative, since consciousness saves him from the street, and in the bookstore, where the ethnic accent is what he’s got to sell. Why are we reading this, after all, if not to learn about this unique subculture, where young men play the djembe drum and drop ebonics like the scatterings of Yiddish in a Philip Roth novel? It’s all about being torn between two worlds and reconciling with the father you leave behind and selling your nearest and dearest to a public that smacks its lips over each new flavor of nostalgia.

And yet, contradictorily, there’s something heartening about seeing this kind of book — a basic, tiresome, clichéd memoir — being written by a black man. Because, at least for the past hundred years or so, African-Americans have been pretty much the only Americans who could write memoirs that didn’t suck. Richard Wright and James Baldwin and Malcolm X wrote about their pasts with a bitterness that made it very hard to turn memory into all-purpose, non-denominational spice for a happy ethnic buffet. When they served you up their difference, it was, at least partially, in the hope that you’d choke on it, as they had been forced to do repeatedly, and for years.

The U.S. hasn’t become color-blind or anything; we’re still an awfully segregated nation, black President and all. But reading this book, I felt a little like blogger Andrew Sullivan said he did when, after going to hear Obama give a disappointing economics speech, he came home, sat down, and realized with something of a shock that a black candidate for President had just bored him for several hours on tax policy. The goal of integration is, in some sense, to become mundane. Why, after all, should African-American writers be burdened with writing all our decent memoirs, anyway? Why shouldn’t they be able to shamelessly exploit their ancestors just like every other two-bit poetaster? If the Holocaust can be a guarantor of sensitive seriousness and triumphant book tours, why not the crack epidemic in inner-city Baltimore?

Admittedly, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ memoir isn’t that bad. Occasionally he sets down his literary pretensions long enough to fire a zinger worthy of his very entertaining blog. I think my favorite is his quip about how frat boys ruined Bob Marley “like they do everything they touch. You can’t write as dreadfully as Art Spiegelman all in a day, I guess. Perhaps next generation, though. I have a dream.

It’s from a regular daily newspaper, not a white power outfit.

Monosyllable — For most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this was the most common slang euphemism for one of the most dreaded of the four-letter words, i.e., cunt. ‘Mrs. Jewkes took a glass and drank [a toast to] the dear monosyllable. I don’t understand that word, but I believe it is baudy.’ (Henry Fielding, Shamela, 1761)”

—from Hugh Rawson, Dictionary of Euphemisms and Other Doubletalk

One is Bosom Buddies. The show came and went in the early ’80 and had a reputation as being too cool for the room. I saw it once and the episode had a great line that encouraged me to think the show was ok. Decades later I rent the dvds and … oh boy. The title sequence is especially bad: music, winsome comedy shots, the lettering of the credits. So this is why people hate tv.

I slept a lot this weekend and had crowded dreams, very tedious dreams with a lot of detail. One involved a superhero comic about some girl taking on the identity of Dr. Moonlight or whatever you call the Batman knockoff Alan Moore devised for Supreme. At the same time, Batman existed in the same comic. A passage by a wiseguy comic book critic was read aloud and it made the daring proposition that the Batman family “could be considered a mutant, dry-land offshoot of Aquaman.” Then the dream moved on to an episode about the American Revolution taking place somewhere that wasn’t America.