Since Noah’s a poet, so am I. I wrote this years ago during a quiet moment on the Bond Buyer copy desk.
A Pulp Haiku“Get your goddamned handswhere they can do me some good,”she said gustily.
Twentieth Century Boy
Since we’ve been talking about comedy and humor, and since I’ve been sneering at Achewood, I thought it only fair to show what happens when I try to be funny in a creative context. This was published a while back at Poor Mojo’s, but I think I forgot to link to it. Anyway, I’ve reprinted it here, in all its scatalogical, metrically confused, and pointlessly erudite glory.
If there’s a lot of enthusiasm for this, I may reprint my filthy parodies of CCR songs. So, you know, comment at your peril.
***************************
Twentieth Century Boy
I took the road less traveled and ran into a ditch.
Robert Frost was there already so I fucked that bitch,
on and on, ‘cause my genius is for lovin’;
He whinnied, “Are you Yeats or is this the second coming?”
Santorum spread like wisdom
Wisdom spread like kitsch,
I pounded him like Ezra till his modern jism twitched.
A canto is a canto but my manwhich is for real;
I manipulate my Mandarin so hard your cheeks’ll peel,
and my daring manifesto bears the Manischewitz seal.
No ideas but in things,
no things but in your butt,
abstractions are distractions from the traction of my nuts,
and the friction of my diction gets me deeper in the cut —
“Is this your lost generation?”
“Nah, my shit is just backed up.”
You’ve got to keep it regular; you need a complex structure,
and my foot-long has the footnotes that’ll help your bowels rupture.
My allusions are protrusions that pry you ever wider;
I’m going to show you fear in a handful of fiber.
You’re the casement; I’m the cannon;
you’re the system; I’m the thinker;
you know it cause you feel aesthetic movements in your sphincter.
The pains increase, you sue for peace, call in the League of Nations;
You’re whinin’ cause you say I owe your hymen reparations.
You got a pact? It’s wack.
I’m not half through being fractious;
just look the other way and I’ll slip up like parapraxis,
And there are you,
the six millionth Jew.
impaled upon my axis.
W.H. was an odd one, Wallace was an even
I’m going to show you thirteen ways of looking at my semen.
My consciousness is streamin’,
My epiphanies are peein’,
Just a taste of my waste and your life’ll lose its meanin’.
You think April’s cruel? Then watch this mother breedin’!
“The horror! The horror!” My Kurtz steams up your Congo.
Your inferior interior is throbbing like a bongo.
My craft begins to quicken.
My Lord Jim’s in your riggin’.
More dusky booty than Gauguin — I’m an atavistic brigand.
I stole the plums out of your icebox —
my thumbs up in that nice box —
my wheelbarrow’s in your chicken as Depends fall on the sidewalk.
My free verse is plain and simple like a lumpen rake or hoe.
This No Man’s Land is fallow and I’m waiting like Godot,
for your skanky bum to put out with the existential flow.
You’re farting like you’re Sartre; there’s no exit to the loo;
the atmosphere gets plaguey like I’m sittin’ by Camus.
You think that I’m dissuaded? Hell, filth is my milieu —
a clean crack is the one crack I do not go gentle through:
Let’s all rage, rage, against the wiping up of poo.
The fragrant asses of the masses fire up my five-year plan;
I’m building up my industry in your Uzbekistan;
I’m developin’ like Oedipus all randy in his pram:
I put the sex back into complex and the oral in exam.
Finnegan’s steak is the text and I’m ready to cram:
this is a portrait of the artist as a battering ram!
on the comparative silliness of sf fandom & sports fandom
A story about the completely embarrassing nerdiness of sports fans.
who wants your life, anyhow?
Noah’s recent post on Achewood (especially the comments) and Tom’s recent post on Judd Apatow writing a William Shatner sketch for Saturday Night Live, are making me think about a certain kind of humour.
People on the Achewood thread are talking about standup-style humour, at least the kind we hate, and what it is, and why we hate it. A couple of years ago, my husband got satellite radio, and had a phase of listening to the standup channel on long drives. Until that experience, I had thought I liked standup. But during those long drives, I got to thinking, “Man! Standup comedy is just a societal tool for enforcing conformity, isn’t it?”
Outside of comedy geniuses, standup seems to be all “Men are like this. Women are like this!” “Black people are like this. White people are like this!” “Straight men are like this. Straight men better not be like this if they know what’s good for them!”
Which brings us to Apatow having Shatner shit on his fans: both those guys make their living primarily off of people who are nerds, losers, you know, people who escape through fantasy, who at least have the image of themselves as people who fail at romance, or are socially awkward or immature. People who need to “get a life,” because the one they have is not the one they’re supposed to want.
So is it a self-deprecating kind of joke, and we’re supposed to think Shatner and Apatow are also losers who need to get a life (except not because being a geek is fun)? Are they trying to appeal to the cool kids who are not Shatner (or embryonic Apatow) fans, to convince them that Shatner and Apatow are really better than those trekkie losers? Or is it just making sure as many people as possible feel vaguely insecure that they aren’t measuring up to standup comedy stereotypes, and fall in line and/or, you know, buy something?
Who Wrote the “Get a Life’ Sketch?
Judd Apatow, actually, with Bob Odenkerk. Saturday Night Live had the two of them as writers back in 1986, when Shatner did a guest-host appearance.
The sketch is famous because Shatner yells at a bunch of Trekkies for being such losers: “Move out of your parents’ basement!” and “You, you must be almost 30… have you ever kissed a girl?” As we know, Apatow would do a lot more about losers later on.
BONUS: Wikipedia has an entry for the Get a Life by Nadine Gordimer but not the one by William Shatner. I would never, ever have predicted that.
Source: Get a Life by William Shatner, with Chris Kreski
*Cough* — Manga — *Cough*
Valerie D’Orazio whines that nobody buys female super-hero comics.
The next step for women in mainstream comics is to translate our hopes and dreams and talents and superheroines we love into comic book sales. Past the idealism, past the blog posts, past everything — we need to sell these books. Nobody fucks with JK Rowling, and there’s a good reason for that.
Of course, D’Orazio is talking about stuff like Wonder Woman and Hellcat (how many of you bought the Hellcat mini-series? she asks plaintively.)
Here’s a tip or two for those wondering about super-hero comics:
1. Supporting titles as an act of socio-political charity may get you an unread copy or two of Hellcat, but it’s not going to prevent the series from getting cancelled.
2. There are a number of extremely successful female super-hero comics. They just aren’t put out by Marvel and DC.
Number 2 is probably going to leave the fangirls scratching their heads. Where are these successful super-hero titles with woman they ask? Why haven’t I seen them?
Well, the titles I’m thinking of are things like Buffy, and Sailor Moon, and Cardcaptor Sakura. Stuff that doesn’t look like super-hero comics; that comes out of a manga genre or crosses over with horror/goth. These titles have all the hallmarks of super-herodom — someone with extraordinary powers runs around saving people. But they forswear the kind of tights/double-identity/clubhouse continuity crap that is there to appeal to 25-35 year old guys.
In other words — you want super-hero comics for women? Then don’t go begging to the fans to support you. Instead, write fucking super-hero comics for women. Lots of women. Not just the very small number of women who care about the super-hero-genre-as-sold-through-the-direct-market. Because you know what? There aren’t enough of those women to support a title. There’s never going to be enough of those women to support a title. It’s just not going to happen. Especially in a fucking recession.
And, let me add, it’s not clear why it should happen. There’s lots and lots of product out there. Why do women need to run around trying to appreciate a genre that has never, and will never put them center stage as consumers? The fun bits of super-heroes for women can be picked out and put in other contexts — and, indeed, they have been. So why deal with the rest?
Now if you want to blame mainstream comics for promoting an insular, unimaginative approach to their product and marketing — hey, I hear you. But blaming women (or anybody) for not buying this crap? Color me unimpressed.
Update: Edited to correct spelling of D’Orazio’s name. Sorry about that Valerie!
Update the second: Well, to no one’s surprise, I didn’t actually read all the back links before I posted…but now I have (sort of.) Josh Tyler started things off with a kind men are from mars, women are from venus argument about why women don’t like super-heroes; then Heidi has a round-up of various folks taking him to task because women do too like super-heroes and he’s sexist.
I think Josh is right that women and men have different genre interests. I think his accusers are probably right that the way he parses those genre distinctions (women like romance; men like things that blow up) is simplistic enough to verge on lad mag territory (which is to say, it’s kind of sexist.)
Josh’s argument is in the context of movies; he’s arguing there aren’t many super-hero movies and there never will be, and that’s fine. But, of course, and again. there are heaps of female super-hero movies. Lara Croft, Buffy, Underworld (or whatever the hell that’s called), the Terminator, Alien — just lots of tough women onscreen performing super stunts in the interest of saving people. Oh, right…and Kill Bill and The Matrix has that too…and Charlie’s Angels, and…well, the list goes on. A lot of these are aimed at guys, obviously, but it’s hard to imagine they don’t have a bigger female audience percentage-wise than DC and Marvel do in general. Again, it’s not that women don’t like super-heroes; it’s that, within the limits of corporate fan fic, the aging stable of female characters owned by the big two just isn’t all that appealing to a broad audience. I mean, could you take Wonder Woman, give her a gun and a vampire boyfriend and…I don’t know, a horse, a cool car, anything except that fucking stupid invisible plane and the weird-ass lasso — and have her suddenly be popular? Maybe. But once you’ve done that, why call her Wonder Woman?
Wolverine Cooler for Kids
Dirk Deppey doesn’t write long form too, too often, which is everybody’s loss. He picks up his keyboard and runs with it in today’s Journalista though, explaining, among other things, why Jeff Parker sells better than Peter David but nobody seems to care.
One of the themes at which I’ve been hammering for the last couple of years is the bogus notion that “Direct Market = comic-book industry,” a myopic, self-absorbed viewpoint among superhero fans that sits at the heart of much modern thinking on the subject. As noted in the above link, the network of comic-book stores that constitutes the DM is overwhelmingly frequented by 25-35-year old men who’ve been reading superhero comics for a decade or more. But does this mean that companies like Marvel and DC can only cater to this crowd and this crowd alone to justify their continued publishing divisions? Posting in the comments section of Willingham’s essay, Marvel writer Peter David certainly seems to think so:
Here’s the interesting thing: Many fans have said much the same to me at conventions. And I routinely tell them that the types of stories they want to see, and the type of heroic clarity they desire, is routinely on display in the Marvel Adventures and the Marvel First Class books.
And fans will flinch back like Van Helsing from the cross and exclaim, “But those are… KID’S books.” And the titles routinely languish in the absolute basement of sales.Make of that what you will.
Alas, this statement only makes sense if by “fans” you mean “comics-shop patrons.” Two figures illustrate the point: According to ICv2, Marvel Adventures: Spider-Man #45 sold just over 5000 copies to DM retailers in November… a low number to be sure. And yet, industry analyst Todd Allen notes the most recent circulation filings by Marvel Entertainment, which reveals that as of March 2008 the all-ages Spider-Man title had 31,479 subscriptions. If these numbers are similar to the current subscription base for the series, then the Jeff Parker-written series sells roughly six times the number of copies through the mail as those sold through what has come to be the seen as the traditional method of distribution, making its total circulation equal to the DM sales of David own X-Factor series.