In honour of the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Four, I have written a short poem which I would like to share with you now.
***
O Year, lost Year
O Two Thousand Four
Jesus Christ
WTF?
Bastard shitter.
Son of a whore.
Sodding arse candle.
Fucking god damn it,
Holy shitting crikey.
What was your deal?
Fuckfire
Things sure did burn.
Why did you hate me?
And America?
Why did you hate freedom?
And my sofa?
You son of a bitch.
I'll get you.
I swear
To
Shitting
Cock.
***
I would ask God to have mercy on all of our souls, but He is imaginary.
There's quite a nice look-out spot at 15th and Garfield, right across the street from Lakeview Cemetary. Here I once startled a raccoon, who stood up on his or her hind legs and waved her or his wee little arms at me. I suspect the raccoon wanted a hug. It may have been some sort of a trick; if I had gone in for a hug, the seemingly innocent beast may have coshed me and taken my wallet. I'm not falling for that one again.
But that is neither here nor there. On the easterly edge of this look-out, there is a sign hidden in the vegetation about litter. This sign, I discovered today, marks the beginning of a sinuous walking trail that carries you along the cliffside and then, by way of many sharp and perilous turnings, down to the very bottom, and then spits you out on Interlaken, at a boulder announcing you've been in Boren Park. It's got a nice outdoorsy smell to it, and there's lots of mud to go squishing through. Plenty of ferns. Very vibrant moss. It's easy to forget you're in an upscale residential neighbourhood. A bit precipitous at times, so you'll want to keep your wits about you. But it's good times.
NOTE TO THE READER: Those sharp and perilous turnings one encounters on a mountainside or cliff or what-have-you are called switchbacks, not razorbacks, hogbacks, or barebacks. I get them confused all the time.
Penguins escape huge earthquake.
This Christmas miracle confirms once and for all that, as I have long maintained, Christ was a penguin. The fact that penguins are not naturally found anywhere near Israel is simply further proof of His divinity: to deny that Christ was a penguin is therefore to deny that He was the Son of God.
The True Cross must have been quite small.
Bah, humbug.
Yes, it's humbug time again! Time to celebrate the miracle of humbug the old-fashioned way: to deck out the Humbug Tree in nooses; to sing jolly carols, with a glass of cold, frothy Humbug Bleach in hand; to give traditional humbug gifts, like ethnic strife around the globe, or unsecured weapons-grade nuclear material from the former Soviet bloc; to celebrate the birth of Our Saviour, the little Baby Humbug, a morbidly-obese 50-year-old man in a diaper and bonnet sent to this Earth to redeem our souls and steal our wallets and stink up our lavatories and commit vile acts with fruitcake. Are you full up with the humbug spirit? (Gin.) God bless us, everyone!
And a very merry humbug to all of you at home!
'Around the World' by Daft Punk.
That's the song I've been trying to remember for the last five or six years of my life. Couldn't remember the tune. Couldn't remember the lyrics. Couldn't remember the artist, or the release date. How I could be so sure that there was in fact a song that I couldn't remember, I can't say. But there it is.
King County can recount all the disputed ballots it wants, bitches. Suck it up. This ruling makes it considerably more likely that Christine Gregoire will end up the winner of the gubernatorial race, although, as the article mentions, Republicans are threatening to take it to court if it looks like she's won. Apparently winning a majority of the votes cast isn't good enough in their eyes. It didn't work for Al Gore...
Why does the Republican Party hate democracy?
Mo-mo-motivation:
That is what I lack.
Con-con-concentration:
I'll just go smoke crack.
Here's something I didn't know. Ohio is indeed doing a recount of the presidential votes, as one would certainly hope. What I hadn't known was that the money for this came from the Green Party. David Cobb's campaign site goes into more detail, and is keeping tabs on everything. (Where does that phrase come from, "keeping tabs"? Thank you, Google.) No-one expects it to change the outcome of the election, but this recount is important nevertheless, as there are real grounds to question the overall integrity of the electoral process this time around. Just as there were last time. This is not tinfoil hat stuff. There's been a lot of talk about unreasonably long lines at polling places, malfunctioning machines and their lack of a paper trail, voters directed to the wrong polling places, voter registration issues, potential suppression of minority voters, all coupled with very worrying pre-election statements from the Ohio Secretary of State and the Diebold moguls...The only way to find out if these effects were significant is to do a careful recount. It seems like common sense to me. If things did go wrong, this will help us fix them. If things didn't, we can all sleep easier at night knowing.
Why the cock did it fall to the Greens and the Libertarians to get this ball rolling? Why did John Kerry, with his millions of unspent campaign dollars, not foot the bill? This was something simple and obvious and (relatively) inexpensive, good for morale and fighting spirit and the future and America and Christmas and puppies and hot dogs on sticks. And Kerry and the Democrats didn't do it. Way to fuck up!
My advice to the Democratic Party: stop fucking up.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden likes, among other things, to knit. I like, among other things, to do math. Sometimes, these overlap. Like now! There's a link on her sidebar today to another intersection of mathematics with the fibrous arts. You, too, can now crochet your own model of the two-dimensional stable manifold of the origin of the Lorenz system, that chaotic dynamical weather model system thingy that spits out all those pretty butterfly pictures of strange attractors. I'm still not really sure what a strange attractor is; not my field, y'see. I keep meaning to look it up...
Actually, why don't I do that right now? Yes, now!
This is about as useful as a completely pointless thing to a person.
Now I know. Now you do, too. We learned together. Isn't that sweet? Give me a hug. Give me a hug or I'll beat a hug out of you, so help me God. Don't make me take my belt off. I'll do it. Don't push me. That's it. You're asking for it. I'm getting Mediaeval in a moment, I swear. Just as soon as I'm done being a total sissy. Should be any moment now. Really. Any moment...now...
Really soon now...
Don't go! I'm about to get all primitive and savage on your unprotected buttocks.
Come back!
I made scones...
Hello?
This person, and this fella whose work he quotes, clearly do not understand set theory.
The best part of algebraic topology is when you can solve a problem by doodling. In particular, if you stare at this picture with an open mind, you should soon become convinced that the Thom space of the tangent bundle to the n-sphere is, in fact, homeomorphic to the quotient space SnxSn/A, where A is the antidiagonal.
The picture illustrates how to map the total space of this tangent bundle (considered as a subspace of SnxRn+1) homeomorphically onto the space SnxSn-A, by stereographically projecting, from the point -x, each tangent space TxSn onto Sn-{-x}. The Thom space of the bundle can be identified with the one-point compactification of the total space, and a little point-set topology will convince you that, if X is compact and B is a closed subset, the one-point compactification of X-B is X/B.
QED
Long, long ago, so long ago that it seems almost like earlier this year, I put virtual pen to virtual paper and scribbled a few thoughts about Gene Wolfe's The Knight, to which I wasn't quite sure how to react. I've now read The Wizard, the second half of the story there begun, and I'm still not quite sure how to react. It's a weird world. All fantasy worlds are weird. Not theologically or cosmologically, but politically and economically. This is due to the fundamental fact that it fucking sucks to be a peasant in a world made almost entirely of feces. I find myself, whenever confronting a piece of fantasy these days, paying a great deal of attention to how the author handles this.
Gene Wolfe seems to take a very idealised approach. I don't mean that he sweeps the crap under the rug, because he's pretty open about the prevalence of dung in his world. I mean that, to his characters, it just doesn't matter much. That is how their world works, and they, by and large, seem to accept it. As do their gods. This is not implausible: humans actually did live this way, scrabbling in the filth for petty warlords, for a very long time indeed; there are still people who do. But this is problematic. The characters may accept this, but the reader simply cannot. This is particularly the case in The Wizard, as Wolfe's characters are so concerned with honour and their codes of conduct. There is something shallow about Sir Able's devotion to honour while a cog in a vast machine for crushing peasants. He is better than the tyrant Arnthor (Able, as we discover, is also an Arthur-analogue; perhaps this story is, in some small way, the story of two competing visions of the Arthur legend, or perhaps it isn't), and he believes in being fair and just; but he is only, it seems, interested in fairness and justice insofar as these are possible within the existing framework of his society. This, perhaps, is the essential boyishness of Able, who, no matter how much time passes, continues to think of himself as a little boy thrust into a man's body and role. He is too in love with the world his discovers to think of changing it.
After my original musing on the place of shit in fantasy, Patrick Nielsen Hayden suggested in a comment that I ought to investigate Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos novels, which I completely forgot to do until I saw the omnibus volumes The Book of Jhereg and The Book of Taltos while I was killing time in a bookstore and my father was footing the bill. The two volumes contain five novels in all, and I have just finished the fourth. Brust deals with the absence of technology by replacing it with industrial-scale magic, which does for the Dragaerans what telephones, flashlights, motorised vehicles, and atomic bombs do for us. The social structure is still very feudal, however: the Dragaerans are organised into Houses with titles of nobility, live by various codes of honour and behaviour, and defecate on the great fearful and powerless masses of the peasantry, made up of Dragaeran Teckla and Eastern humans. The first two novels are basically plot-driven, as Vlad, an Easterner squeezed uneasily into one of the Great Houses as a low-to-middling-level crime boss and assassin, meets new and interesting people, and then kills them. They're fun reads, though not particularly deep or difficult. They set up a world which Vlad, like Able, essentially accepts as it is; he wants to advance within the social order, but wouldn't dream of challenging it.
Then suddenly there's Teckla, the third novel. Suddenly this world comes alive. The peasants are revolting! ("You said it," replied the King. "They stink on ice.") Teckla was a real delight for me to read: this sword and sorcery world suddenly discovers revolution, and the peasants are taking up arms and building barricades in the streets. This contrived world suddenly starts to breathe. And it does so without satire. Teckla comes at it from a very interesting perspective, too, as Vlad, our narrator, is a counterrevolutionary fellow, a few rungs, like Able, up the social ladder; but unlike Able, he is forced to confront the profound injustice of his society. He attempts to dismiss the revolutionary spirit as slogan-mongering and ideals over people, but when he crosses words with the chief slogansmith, Vlad loses so thoroughly that even he begins to wonder. Vlad seems to realise, at the end, that the revolutionaries are right, and that his inability to join them is symptomatic of his being really fucked up. Nothing is really resolved by the end--the Empire still stands and the poor are still hip-deep in waste--but revolution is in the air, and it is heady, and the world has begun to acknowledge its own ugliness. I hope the later Taltos books follow up on this; the fourth, Taltos, was another straightforward adventure yarn...
A fantasy world is a very unstable thing. One can suspend one's disbelief enough to accept magic, perhaps, and fabulous beasts, and the suspension of physics, and a lot of tinkering with the physical world. But it's hard to accept much tinkering with psychology and economics. Beneath every king, behind every bold knight, just around the corner from every mighty wizard or down the street from every daring thief there is a grumpy mob with pitchforks and dung, and sooner or later their shit will have to hit the fan.
If America were a person, it would basically have AIDS at this point, as every cell in its body attempted to die all at once from about a fuckzillion rightwing infections. The body politic is oozing pus from its countless lesions: the pus of the Iraq War, the pus of privatisation, the pus of intelligent design, the pus of bad climatological hurting...I could go on. Pro-war Democrats worry that pacifists like me make the party seem less credible on national defense. The irony is unmistakable, and also slick and rancid as, you guessed it, pus. The gubernatorial race here in Washington state is especially purulent...Creationist Republican Dino Rossi was ahead after the initial count, and just 42 votes ahead after the mandatory machine recount. Gregoire and her Democrats have ponied up for a hand recount, and there's a real chance she could still come out ahead, which would clearly be a Good Thing, but if she pulls it off the Republicans will start bitching about stolen elections, and might try to take the thing to court...Seriously, Washington east of the Cascades needs to be given to Idaho, or swallowed by the Earth, or lost, or something. Seattle is the only reason for this state to exist, and the rest of the state had better damn well accept the fact.
Anyhow. America sucks.
You know what doesn't suck, though? Reading.
Unless you have to read these, the passages longlisted for this year's Literary Review Bad Sex award (won by Tom Wolfe). These professional writers somehow manage to be much, much worse than those curious souls who spend their time writing M*A*S*H slash.
What is the deal with slash fiction, anyhow? I can understand the appeal of fanfic in general, especially fanfic devoted to escapism like Star Trek or Buffy or Doctor Who, the appeal of playing around in a rich fictional universe to which one feels a deep sentimental attachment, and the appeal of exploring beloved characters. I can even get my head around escapist slash: maybe actual slash-writers don't see it this way, but I could see queering characters up as a mechanism for people who aren't straight males to reclaim, or become more at home in, a fictional world full of straight male constructions of sexuality. Like hot Kirk-on-Spock action, for example. (Anyone who just gets off on the idea of Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner engaged in Greco-Roman wrestling without subversive intent probably needs a good cold shower, some fresh air, and serious oral sex.) Something similar might apply to Adric and Turlough tossing each other off in the TARDIS lavatory, though it's harder to justify Doctor Who slash on subversive grounds since the Doctor's been readable as he stands as a huge queer icon since Patrick Troughton first minced onto the screen. I can't quite see Buffy slash in the same subversive light, since the show queered itself up pretty well on its own; but, on the other hand, the male characters tend to be sexy, and a big gay fling wouldn't really seem out of character for any of them. I couldn't blame anyone for turning their imaginative faculties onto Angel and Spike and a bottle of wine and a sweaty catfight leaving clothes in artful tatters.
And funny slash I can understand. It seems like a pretty straightforward approach to parody, perhaps not very original, but generally worth a giggle. The thing is, I'm pretty sure not all slash is meant to be parody. Sometimes authors seem to go to great lengths to get their characterisations just so, modulo the ass-loving thing.
Like with the M*A*S*H slash I linked to above.
M*A*S*H slash.
That's like writing fanfic about Mr Belvedere 'polishing the silver' with the butler off The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
M*A*S*H consists of Alan Alda alternately pretending to be Groucho Marx and pretending to be deep. Don't get me wrong--I watched and enjoyed the show when I was a lad. But it's hardly a grand and epic canvas on which to paint a fantasy world of adventure and dick. How can anyone get worked up enough about it to write fanfic in the first place? What would make someone want to colonise that world? And why take it seriously enough to keep the characterisations faithful? Do people really fondle themselves thinking of Radar and Colonel Blake? I've seen Nativity scenes sexier than that.
Slash is, yes, a mystery. Not because of the sex or the sexuality. But because people are willing to spend that kind of time and energy on Law and Order.