Tag Archives: Noah

Utilitarian Review 10/8/11

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On HU

In our Featured Archive post this week, Aaron Costain looked at comics and architectural drawings.

Erica Friedman on the continuing relevance of small presses.

I talk about Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of the Planet and why we can’t escape the roaches.

Domingos Isabelinho discussed the work of Shannon Gerard.

Eric Berlatsky offered some sample Alan Moore quotes from the forthcoming (Updated: not forthcoming! already released!) volume Alan Moore: Conversations.

Nadim Damluji looked at Orientalism in Craig Thompson’s Habibi

Susan Kirtley discussed the greatness of Lynda Barry.

I reviewed Stephen Glain’s State and Defense and linked our empire to our national cowardice.

I looked at Orientalism in Neil Gaiman and P. Craig Russell’s Sandman story “Ramadan”.

And I posted a jangly pop mix download with the Bangles, Beatles, Bee Gees, and more.

Utilitarians Everywhere

For Splice Today I reviewed Kate Beaton’s new Hark a Vagrant! collection.

And also for Splice I looked at Alan Wolfe’s new book Political Evil

Other Links

Robert Stanley Martin reviews Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg over at Pol Culture.

Shannon Smith has a really amusing breakdown of the new Animal Man #1

At Splice Today, Tripp Weber argues that Wikipedia needs advertising.

Craig Fischer talks about Pluto and doubling in his new TCJ column.

Tucker Stone does what he does, and Mr. Terrific sounds horrible.

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: Bangles and Beets

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Inspired by the new Bangles album I’ve put together a jangly pop mix for download. You can download Bangles and Beets here.

1. Massachusetts — Bee Gees
2. Ferris Wheel — Donovan
3. Swim Up Behind Me — Amen Dunes
4. You and Your Sister — Chris Bell
5. Blindsided — Bon Iver
6. Movin’ In On You — Julee Cruse
7. Payne’s Bay — Beirut
8. Razzle Dazzle Rose — Camera Obscura
9. End of Time — Lindsey Buckingham
10. Breaking the Ice — Jeremy Jay
11. Pretty Girls Don’t Cry — Chris Isaak
12. September Girls — Bangles
13. Not This Time — Country Funk
14. The World — the Beatles
15. The Beat Goes On — Britney Spears
16. Open My Eyes — Bangles
17. Anytime — Journey

Just a Thing In Our Dream

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Earlier this week, Nadim Damluji wrote a post discussing the painful Orientalism of Craig Thompson’s Habibi. Nadim sums up his argument as follows:

Wanatolia represents the poignant identity crisis at the heart of Habibi: it wants to be a fairytale and commentary on capitalism at the same time. The problem is that in sampling both genres so fluidly, Thompson breaks down the boundaries that keep the Oriental elements in the realm of make-believe. In other words, the way in which Wanatolia is portrayed as simultaneously savage and “modern” reinforces how readers conceive of the whole of the Middle East. Although Thompson is coming from a very different place, he is presenting the same logic here that stifles discourse in the United States on issues like the right to Palestinian statehood. If we are able to understand Arabs in a perpetual version of Arabian Nights, then we are able to deny them a seat at the table of “civilized discourse.”

Thompson self-consciously presents his Orientalism as a fairy-tale. Yet the fairy tale is so riveting, and his interest in the reality of the Middle East so tenuous, that he ends up perpetuating and validating the tropes he claims not to endorse. Here, as so often, what you say effectively determines what you believe rather than the other way around.

Thinking about this, I was reminded of one of Neil Gaiman’s most admired Sandman stories — Ramadan, written in the early 1990s and drawn by the great P. Craig Russell.


The beautiful opening page of Gaiman/Russell’s “Ramadan”.

I haven’t read Thompson’s Habibi, but from Nadim’s description, it seems that Gaiman and Russell are even more explicit in treating Orientalism as a trope or fantasy. The protagonist of “Ramadan” is Haroun al Raschid, the king of Baghdad, the most marvelous city in the world. Baghdad is, in fact, the mystical distillation of all the magical stories of the mysterious East. Gaiman’s prose evokes, with varying success the exotic/poetic flourishes of Western Oriental fantasy. At his best, he captures the opulent wonder of a well-told fairy-tale:

And there was also in that room the other egg of the phoenix. (For the phoenix when its time comes to die lays two eggs, one black, one white.
From the white egg hatches the phoenix-bird itself, when its time comes.
But what hatches from the black egg no one knows.)

At his worst, he sounds like a sweatily clueless slam poet: there’s just no excuse for dialogue like “I can smooth away the darkness in your soul between my thighs”.

But if Gaiman’s hold on his material wavers at times, Russell makes up for any lapses. Beneath his able pen, the Arabian Nights is transformed into sweeping art nouveauish landscapes, a ravishingly familiar foreign decadence.

As I said, this is all clearly marked as fantasy — both because there are flying carpets and Phoenixes and magical globes filled with demons, and because the whole point of the narrative is that it’s a story. As the story opens, Haroun al Raschid is dissatisfied with his city, because, despite all its marvels, it will not last forever. So he makes a bargain; he will sell Baghdad to Dream, and in return Dream agrees to preserve the city forever. The bargain made, the city vanishes into dream and story. And not just the Phoenix and the magic carpet disappear, but all the marvelous wealth and luxury and wisdom of the east, from the luxurious harems to the fantastic quests. Orientalism, as it is for Craig Thompson, becomes just a story which never was.

Gaiman and Russell, then, avoid Thompson’s error; they do not conflate reality and fantasy. Fantasy is in a bottle in the dream king’s realm, forever accessible, but never actual. The real Middle East, on the other hand, must deal with a grimmer truth; the last pages of the story show Iraq as it was in the early 90s — ravaged by sanctions, brutally impoverished, and generally a gigantic mess by any objective standards (though not, of course, by the standards of the Iraq of a decade later.) In this real Iraq of starvation and misery, the other Iraq is only a dream. As Gaiman says, speaking of an Iraqi child picking his way through the ruins, “he prays…prays to Allah (who made all things) that somewhere in the darkness of dreams, abides the other Baghdad (that can never die), and the other egg of the Phoenix.”

So that’s all good then. Except…whose is this dream of Orientalism, exactly? Well, it’s the Iraqi boys, as I said, and before his, it was Haroun al Raschid’s. But really, of course, it isn’t theirs at all. It’s Gaiman and Russell’s.

Orientalism does have some roots in Arabic stories; I’m not denying that. But this particular conception of the folklore of Arabia as a single, marvelous whole, containing all that is wonderful in the East, in contrast to a sordid, depressing reality — I don’t believe Gaiman and Russell when they say that that’s a thing in the mind of Iraqis. Habin al Raschid giving up his dream is a dream itself, and the dreamer doesn’t live anywhere near Baghdad.

“Ramadan,” then, is a tale about losing a fantastic land to fantasy — but it isn’t Habin al Raschid who loses it. Rather, it’s Gaiman and Russell and you and me, (presuming you and me are Western readers.) Gaiman and Russell are, like Thompson, nostalgic for Orientalism — they know it’s a dream, a vision in a bottle, but they just can’t bear to put the bottle down. Our fantasy Middle East is so much more glamorous than the real Middle East, even the people who live there must despair that our tropes are not their reality. Surely they want to be what we want them to be, democrats or kings, sensuous harem maidens or strong independent women. Thus the magical Arabia and the sordid, debased (but potentially modern!) Arabia live on together in the world of story, comforting Western tellers with the eternal beauty of loss. Our Orient is gone. Long live our Orient.
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Nadim’s thoughts have inspired an impromptu roundtable on Orientalism. which can be read here as it develops.

The United States of Cowardice

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This first ran on Splice Today.
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Stephen Glain’s State vs. Defense is a chronicle of America’s post-World War II militarization of foreign policy. Which is to say, it’s a long, depressing slog through stupidity, stubbornness, waste and blood. From Joe McCarthy’s bone-headed, politicized assault on civilian China experts in the State Department to Jesse Helms’ bone-headed, politicized assault on civilian foreign experts of all sorts; from the fictitious Gulf of Tonkin incident to the fictitious WMD’s in Iraq; from the groundless characterization of the Soviets as an aggressive threat during the Cold War to the groundless characterization of China as an aggressive threat today, the United States has for six decades picked up bucket after bucket of bullshit, buried its collective head in the offal and gone staggering blindly off towards empire. At some points in the accounting, you’re forced to wonder why Washington even bothers to invest in weapons. Why not, after all, simply cut out all the middlemen and just physically bury our foes, real and imaginary, in trillions of dollar bills? At least it’s a more effective strategy than SDI.

SDI is still under development, of course, at least as far as I could figure out from the Internet. We also, as Glain notes, continue to have troops in South Korea, “defending…one of the world’s most prosperous countries from its famine-stricken neighbor,” as well as troops wandering around the Sinai Desert “as they had since 1982 as part of a multinational peace-keeping force.” When the Cold War ended and we didn’t have any reason to gratuitously and provocatively violate Soviet airspace with spy planes, the military brass, reluctant to end a program just because it was useless and dangerous, decided to start gratuitously and provocatively violating Chinese airspace. This has resulted in a heightening of tensions that could conceivably, Glain notes rather helplessly, lead to a catastrophic Sino-American war.

Indeed, the overwhelming takeaway from Glain’s book is helplessness. No matter the cost in American lives (to say nothing, of course, of those poor bastards overseas), no matter the cost to our standard of living, no matter the catastrophic foreign policy failures, the empire, it seems, only expands. Even Commanders-in-Chief, in Glain’s account, can do little to stem the inevitable American march towards war. Glain, for example, points out that president after president has been horrified by SIOP, the Pentagon’s Single Integrated Operational Plan for “winning” a nuclear war. In the first incarnation of the plan during the 1950s, “Casualty estimates ranged between 175 million and 285 million Russian and Chinese dead, regardless of whether or not China was party to a Soviet attack [Glain’s emphasis]”. Counting dead in Eastern Europe and resulting fires, the death toll would probably have topped one billion. Eisenhower said the plan “frightene(ed) the devil out of me,”—yet he signed off on it. Kennedy wanted to get rid of it too, but didn’t. Reagan—not a man noted for his soft stand on Communism or, indeed, for his rationality—called SIOP “crazy.” Yet, despite the fact that president after president has condemned it, and despite the fact that the Cold War has been over for more than two decades, SIOP still exists, a sign of America’s apparently insatiable nostalgia for apocalypse.

Glain is excellent at explaining bureaucratic infighting. In one passage he discusses how a supine Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State failed to back her wonks, with the result that the invasion went ahead without any input from anyone who had any clue about Iraq before the invasion. In another he describes how the oleaginous Richard Perle helped undermine massive arms reduction at the end of the Cold War by encouraging Reagan’s woozy fantasies about the viability of SDI.

Still, Glain’s focus on the upper echelons of policy tends to leave a few questions unanswered. Kennedy and Johnson, Glain shows fairly clearly, didn’t want to escalate in Vietnam, but they did, in large part because they feared political backlash. Obama and Biden made some vague gestures towards attempting a drawdown in Afghanistan, but they were, according to Glain, politically outmaneuvered by their military officers. “For Obama,” Glain says, “there was no alternative to expanding the war, particularly if he wanted to win at least some Republican support for his domestic agenda.”

The question, then, becomes not so much why do presidents want to engage in endless military overseas adventures, but rather, why do we? Despite war after war; despite a humiliating, catastrophic failure in Iraq; despite what appears to be an endless slog in Afghanistan; the American people just can’t say no. Sure, there have been occasional protests; Glain points in particular to the nuclear freeze movement in the 1980s which arguably had a real impact on Reagan’s foreign policy. But in general, and especially since 9/11, we seem as a whole in love with our empire. What is our problem?

I don’t have a definite answer, but I have a guess. Our problem is that we are cowardly, craven shitheads, who spend our lives in desperate fear for our measly, worthless lives. We drop bombs on the innocent and guilty alike, kidnap, torture, and assassinate, and plan to wipe all human life off the earth because we are terrified that somebody might try to kill us.

Don’t get me wrong. I really don’t want to die in a terrorist attack. I am even less eager to have my loved ones die in a terrorist attack. But at some point, you really do need to buck the fuck up. The chances of me or anyone I know getting killed by murderous strangers is infinitely smaller than the chance that I’ll die in a car accident. And it is dishonorable to allow my government to drop bombs on Afghan wedding parties on the off chance that I might possibly be slightly safer. How many people, exactly, need to be reduced to jelly to make up for Americans’ collective spinelessness?

The Right likes to wail about the culture of dependency fostered when you provide some minimal resources to prevent people starving in the street. But nobody wants to talk about the real culture of dependency; the trillions of dollars we spend on our defensive nanny state, assuaging our knee-jerk timidity by swaddling ourselves in weapons of death. Our leaders like to talk about American virtue, but there is no virtue without personal courage. Until we realize that, our terror will continue to be a scourge, and the only question will be whether it will destroy us before, or along with, the rest of the earth.

The World With Roaches

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This first ran on Splice Today.
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For reasons which remain largely a mystery to me, I’ve been obsessively watching episodes of the godawful Heroes television series. You’d think I’d have known to stop right away when first episode, opening scene is of some earnest scientist nattering away about how cockroaches, not humans, are the pinnacle of evolution, and how these nasty little crawling critters are deterred by neither sleet nor snow nor nuclear fallout, like some sort of post-apocalyptic six-legged egg-laying postmen.

Sci-fi writers love the cockroach, and the cockroach loves them back. In fact, the cockroach loves us all, because the fact is that the roach will not survive long after we’re gone. On the contrary, the truth is that the cockroach will flip over on its back, put its legs in the air and expire a week or two after we turn off the central heat. Roaches are human parasites; they thrive in such numbers because we kill their predators and provide them with food and climate control. They’re not even resistant to radiation; we’d survive a nuclear holocaust far better than they would. It’s true they’re a triumph of evolution, but that triumph isn’t durability. That triumph is us.

I learned about the roach’s limitations in Alan Weisman’s 2007 ecological thought-experiment The World Without Us. The book imagines what would happen if humans suddenly disappeared, examining how long it would take for the sea to reclaim Manhattan, or for elephants to repopulate Africa, or for cats, dogs, and roaches to go the way of the dodo.

Weisman’s title is, coincidentally, a central concept in Eugene Thacker’s In The Dust of This Planet. For Thacker, the “world without us” is still thought experiment, though one of a different kind than Weisman’s. In Weisman’s book, the world without us is a future in which human beings are extinct. In Thacker’s, the world without us is a “spectral and speculative world,” a way of trying to think the non-thinking of human non-existence.

Thacker defines the world without us in contrast to the world for us (which is the world that we “interpret or give meaning to”) and also in distinction to the world in itself (which is “the world in some inaccessible, already given state.”) For Thacker, the world in itself can never be thought or reached; as soon as it is conceived (through geology, or theology, or cosmology, or other forms of human thought) it becomes part of the world for us. The world without us, on the other hand, is the world that we cannot conceive. It is not opposed to us, it is not neutral to us; it is “somewhere in between, in a nebulous zone that is at once impersonal and horrific.” If you think of a cockroach as an irritating pest, you’re thinking about the world for us. If you think about a cockroach that isn’t being thought about, you’re imagining the world in itself. But if you think about the cockroach as the cockroach failing to think about itself, you’re thinking about the world without us — which, Thacker argues, is creepy.

The subtitle of Thacker’s book is, in fact, The Horror of Philosophy, Part 1, and what he is trying to do in part is to use ideas from horror to construct a philosophical vision of the “world without us.” He references a dizzying array of texts, from pulp horror to black metal to medieval mysticism, to approach these ideas, but one writer he returns to repeatedly is H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft is infamous for his lumbering prose and cosmic pessimism; his conceptualization of a universe in which heavy, nameless adjectives slither across vast, hideous paragraphs in pursuit of nameless and inhuman dooms. Lovecraft’s also particularly interested in a kind of world without us — his stories focus on vast forces with unknowable motivations and unspeakable corporalities, great cyclopean blanknesses that humans cannot see without going completely mad.

As the above suggests, it’s very difficult to talk about Lovecraft without putting your tongue at least a little in your cheek. Thacker manages it, though, which is both impressive and somewhat off-putting. Indeed, Thacker’s tone throughout is hard to parse. With his welter of eclectic sources (Marlowe’s Faust, Keiji Haino, J.G. Ballard, anonymous internet poetry) he’s clearly being an eccentric philosophical genius in the Slavoj Zizek mode. But where Zizek makes his personal investments very obvious (Lacan, Marx, Hitchcock, St. Paul), Thacker’s are considerably less evident. He doesn’t seem to want a revolution, and though he raises ecological issues, he doesn’t exactly have an ecological program. Nor is he interested in a Freudian reading of horror to understand human beings — he doesn’t even reference Kristeva or abjection. So if we’re not changing society and we’re not changing the plaent and we’re not changing ourselves, what exactly is the point?

The point is, somewhat disappointingly, no point. In his summation, Thacker insists that he is making mysticism “relevant”. He then goes on:

But the differences between this contemporary mysticism and historical mysticism are all-important. If mysticism historically speaking aims for a total union of the division between self and world, then mysticism today would have to devolve upon the radical disjunction and indifference of self and world. If historical mysticism still had as its aim the subject’s experience, and as its highest principle that of God, then mysticism today — after the death of God —would be about the impossibility of experience, it would be about that which in shadows withdraws from any possible experience, and yet still makes its presence felt, through the periodic upheavals of weather, land and matter. If historical mysticism is, in the last instance, theological, then mysticism today, a mysticism of the unhuman, would have to be, in the last instance, climatological. It is a kind of mysticism that can only be expressed in the dust of this planet.

There are echoes of Nietzsche here in the death of God, and of paganism in the gesture towards the climatological, and of Lovecraft in the unhuman, and even of Zen in the paradox of the experience which is no experience. But despite Thacker’s insistence, it’s not really clear to me why mixing together all these different nihilisms adds up to a different, more contemporary zero. Nor does this amalgamation of nothing seem particularly terrifying.

The truth is that a nothing, even if (especially if?) it references multiple philosophical traditions, just is not especially scary. This is why Weisman’s World Without Us isn’t horrible at all. While Weisman’s world from which humans vanish is certainly inspired by apocalyptic and doomsday narratives, his book ends up devoid of anything like terror precisely because he refuses to talk about people. The world without us, as a world actually, truly, without us, is a peaceful, even beautiful place. There’s nothing worrisome about the rainforests regenerating. There’s nothing frightening about roaches dying out. Nuclear reactors melting down kind of sucks for the biosphere, and you certainly feel bad for the animals stuck with our waste, but it doesn’t give you a sense of cosmic dread.

Which is why the thing in Lovecraft that is The Thing, the terror that has no name, is not a world without us. Rather, it’s a world without us that is still us. As Roethke says, “something is amiss or out of place/When mice with wings can wear a human face.” The vampire, the ghost, the zombie, the crawling thing that says our name…. When you’re here, you’re here and that’s okay; when you’re gone, you’re gone and you don’t care; but if you’re stuck halfway in between, you’ve got a campfire tale to keep the kids awake.

Erasing God does not leave a world without us. It leaves a world in which there is nothing but us, in forms we can neither entirely recognize nor entirely disavow — our arbitrary cruelty, our indifference, our amorphous fluids leaking out to stain the stars. We say the roach is our alien successor, but in fact it’s our familiar image, scuttling out across the planet in its numberless hordes. In Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” the human narrator sloughs off his mortality and wades into the ocean to join his monstrous, alien kin. “We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.” That’s the horror; not that the depths of the world don’t care about us, but that they do; not that someday, somehow, somewhere, the planet may be free of us, but that it never will — that we, and the roaches, will be here intertwined forever.

Utilitarian Review 10/1/11

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On HU

Caroline Small talks about SPX and expanding the audience for comics.

Ng Suat Tong discusses Anders Nilsens’ Big Questions.

Robert Stanley Martin on D.B. Echo’s Paul Krugman joke.

Anne Ishii on continues her Elfquest re-read.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I discuss the sublime irrelevance of the Bangles.

Also at the Atlantic I talk about superhero sexism and a bunch of non-superhero comics that you should read instead of DC and Marvel.

At Splice Today I review the assassin movie Killer Elite.

Other Links

Alyssia Rosenberg on whether feminists should give up on comics.

Deb Aoki on DC’s sexism.

A 7-year-old reviews the new Starfire.

A review of Michael Kupperman’s Mark Twain.

Women in Marvel Comics.

Alyssa Rosenberg on Frank Miller’s Holy Terror.

Utilitarian Review 9/24/11

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On HU

Vom Marlowe discussed Avatar: the Last Airbender.

I talked about Delta Swamp Rock, race, and the South.

I had an essay on the Black Eye Anthology, Johnny Ryan, and black humor.

Sean Michael Robinson on trolling natural disasters and the will of God.

I review Miranda Lambert’s pop country album Revolution.

Richard Cook on Giallo, violent Italian crime films.

A shoulder-shrugging country mix download for your listening pleasure.

I discuss race and the television show heroes.

And finally, I consider DC’s sexism and wish the company would just go out of business already.

And the Featured Archive post this week discusses fashion, fine art, and ontology.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Washington Times I sneer at Pearl Jam Cameron Crowe’s new documentary about same. Pearl Jam fans in comments freak out. You’d think I’d insulted Art Spiegelman or something.

At Splice Today I talk about Thelma and Louise and Women in Prison films.

And also at Splice Today I review Balam Acab’s latest effusion of New Age hipness.

Other Links

Archie Out of Context tumblr courtesy of Erica Friedman.

Charles Reece has a great essay on whiteness in Cowboys and Aliens and Attack the Block, part of the Pussy Goes Grrr Blogathon.

Michael Dooley interviews Percy Crosby’s daughter.

The Atlantic has a good article about K Pop taking over Japan.

Tessa Strain on the new Wonder Woman reboot.

C.T. May on Playboy Magazine.

TCJ with a big Johnny Ryan interview.

Slate with an article on the economics of being a fashion model.