(DGC Day Two)
By the second day of a conference -- any conference -- one's body begins to send out not-so-subtle distress signals. "You were not evolved to sit and listen and think all day," it says. "You need to move, to breathe deeply, to hunt large-bodied mammals and gather foodstuffs. At the very least, you need to move away from the damn laptop and buy me another chocolate martini." This is the only way I can explain having missed part of the afternoon gaming session, which I very much wanted to hear; I'd wandered down to the reception area and gotten involved in a heated discussion of women, religion, and various sorts of seminary education, which apparently fulfilled some little-known atavistic instinct. (The papers will be showing up online, thankfully, so that I can catch up on what I missed. Also, Andrew Huff joined yesterday's livebloggers for some of today's sessions.)
If yesterday's sessions were about the humanities, today's were about the social sciences. I especially enjoyed the morning session on "Meat Spaces and Digital Spaces," which talked about location(s) on- and offline* and which offered a useful bridge between yesterday's clearly "academic" discussions and today's "practical" ones (I'm putting those categories in scare-quotes because I don't believe in them, but they're handy signifiers). There were no early-morning Shabbat services to be had in the neighborhood of the conference, so I read the beginning of Mary Douglas's In The Wilderness instead -- just the thing for a nice Jewish girl attending a conference in the heart of the University of Chicago's anthropology department.
The afternoon sessions were more frustrating: several of them were extremely interesting but difficult to connect with each other. Of course, it may have just been that I lacked a firm base of preexisting knowledge about the topics under discussion, plus the part where I had to do deep-breathing exercises during the discussion period when someone referred to Leo Strauss as a "Neoplatonist crank."** I had forgotten to mention that I made it to Ted Castronova's (really fascinating) pre-conference talk on security and government intervention in MMORPGs on Thursday afternoon, and that only makes me sorrier that I missed the gaming session, since it's clear that the issues surrounding online gaming tend to draw together theory, praxis, and the ethics underlying both.
A group of us went out for dinner and wound up slinking into the Weinberger keynote address slightly late, but I don't think we missed much, and Dave did a very nice job of summing up some of the issues surrounding weblogging and (not coincidentally) animating the conference. I take mild exception to his characterization of Descartes, but I don't think he meant Descartes qua Descartes so much as... again, a handy signifier. And I have yet to read Small Pieces Loosely Joined, but I think perhaps I should. Following that, another reception, and I experienced quite possibly my greatest revelation of the conference: beer and Nutter Butters do taste extremely good together!*** Seriously, though, this conference has given me a lot of food for thought, and it's made me really excited about continuing to blog. More later, honest, although by "later" I mean "later this week."
Now, I could get up very early tomorrow and catch the early train back to Boondoggle, or I could sleep in, read part of the Ngaio Marsh collection someone has thoughtfully left in this guestroom, shower at my leisure, go have a nice breakfast at Salonika (with potatoes, to round out my carb collection), browse through a few used bookstores on the way to the bus stop, and catch the late train. Yes, I think this is what's called a foregone conclusion.
* -- I do not live in a "meat space," dammit -- and how must the vegetarians feel about that one? More on this once I get a chance.
** -- Which is inaccurate in two, possibly three, different ways.
*** -- Since I arrived in Chicago, I've managed to consume noodles, rice, rice noodles, beans, tortillas, roti, taro root, pizza, croissants, bagels, and now barley and peanuts. Fear me, for I am the Queen of Multicultural Carbohydrates! Or possibly just a really good candidate for the Atkins Diet.
(DGC Day One)
I am not, in fact, live-blogging the conference; AKMA, JOHO, and Kiplog are all doing a much better job than I could. Me, I'm just using my laptop as a note-taking device. I'm also neglecting blogging duties in favor of chatting with some really nifty people about topics I would never have considered by myself, which is more or less the point of a good conference. Chicago's weather is cooperating today (I'm not so sure about tomorrow), and we had excellent Malaysian food tonight, and I love Hyde Park; the only way this experience could be better is if (a) the conference bought me more chocolate martinis and/or (b) threw in complementary footrubs.
I'll confess that I didn't entirely know what to expect from this conference, with its mixed body of academics and artists and technicians and designers. Were we expected to Be Technologically Relevant at every turn? Or were we, on the other hand, expected to genuflect ritually toward Bakhtin every five minutes? I had second and third thoughts about my presentation, since the Technological Relevance of a Hebrew poem written by a frankly peculiar thirteenth-century Kabbalist is a tad bit complicated* and since I couldn't make my Bakhtin connections fit into a fifteen-minute timeslot. As it turned out, I had very little to worry about -- and, in retrospect, a casual glance at the program should've reassured me that any conference where Hittite information architecture marches alongside game theory isn't fixated on Technological Relevance.
I don't know how Alex decided to order the sessions, but today struck me as very much humanities-focused, divided into the general realms of religion, history, and literature. It won't surprise most of my readers that I felt entirely at home all day. Perhaps I just enjoy having my prejudices confirmed, but it did my heart good to hear people discuss "new technology" from five or six thousand years ago and throw around words such as "sacramental" while discussing the permutations of existence in cyberspace. I'm really impressed by the quality and breadth of the presentations I heard today. I also appreciate the approach to its diverse fields which this conference seems to be taking: most of the presenters are explaining complex (i.e., not dumbed down) ideas and concepts but doing so very clearly and concisely.
I can already see that I will need to blog about my objections to the term "meatworld." At the moment, however, I need to get some sleep instead. For the record, I would like to state that this conference is more fun than a lapful of puppies and that if anyone is interested in undermining my virtue, chocolate martinis would be an excellent place to start.
* -- But exists. In spades. I believe we'll be collecting the papers online sooner or later.
If anyone recognizes the source of this post's title without prompting, please keep reading. I will need your help. For the rest of us, the title is that of a poem by one David Herbert Lawrence, better known as a novelist (and for good reason, judging from the smattering of his poems I've read). It begins like this:
How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species--
Presentable, eminently presentable--
shall I make you a present of him?
The correct answer, according to the rest of the poem, is "Dear God, no." However, I'm afraid that the poem also more or less sums up how I feel about Lawrence's entire literary oeuvre: "Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings / rather nasty."
The problem here -- because I can happily go through life disliking all sorts of authors, and the late Mr. Lawrence is in no position to care what I think of his output -- is that I am teaching a freshman class in the fall which is linked to another freshman class (that is, the same students are in both) which is taught by a colleague in the English department who thinks D.H. Lawrence is the cat's pajamas. Seriously. I used my favorite clever description of Lady Chatterley's Lover on him -- the one where I call it "the 1920s' answer to Fear of Flying" -- and he didn't so much as crack a smile. He is even proposing that we discuss excerpts from The Rainbow (I think) in both our courses, and the particular excerpt he has in mind would work nicely, except that I can't stand D.H. Lawrence. However, I like this colleague, and I want the whole linked-classes thing to work out, so I decided to try and figure out some redeeming qualities in ol' David Herbert. You can see how far I got with the whole "I like poetry, let's try poetry!" approach (which, by the way, does work for me and Thomas Hardy).
I don't want to give you the wrong impression; I have not studiously read my way through Lawrence's collected works in toto. I read Lady Chatterley's Lover at about age eight -- this is what happens when you leave an extremely fast-reading child to her own devices -- and, quite understandably, couldn't see what all the fuss was about. I reread it somewhere closer to age eighteen and still couldn't see what all the fuss was about the book, although I had a much clearer idea of what the fuss was all about for poor Connie. I don't object to novels about women learning that they are sexual beings, or post-Industrial-Revolution class consciousness, or English aristocratic mores, although I must confess that all three topics seem a little dated and so tend to wear on me very quickly when considered as ponderously as Lawrence considers them. But LCL goes on... and on... and on... and, no matter what, I would never sleep with anyone who made an erotic comparison between myself and a chicken... and on... you get the idea. I did finish it, but I have apparently blocked out the entire ending, except that Sir Clifford continued to be a jerk and the pet names for body parts were mildly alarming.
Thinking I must have missed something, I tried to read a handful of Lawrence's other novels somewhere around about college. Women in Love is absurdly slashy, as my fanfic friends would say, to the point that I was mentally screaming at the two male characters to get it on already (although I'm fairly sure they were wrestling nude in the book, so perhaps that was superfluous). The Rainbow annoys me marginally less, but I couldn't get all the way through either book (and I can get all the way through some really lousy books, so that's saying something). All the characters are either miserable or having sex, and I don't think Lawrence could write the interior thoughts of a female character if his life depended on it.* There's gratuitous Biblical subtext in both books, and I'm normally a huge fan of gratuitous Biblical subtext, but in this case I just didn't care. Furthermore, I'm not quite sure why the reader is supposed to be so convinced that sex is salvific (except when it needs to be purified for reasons which remain equally unclear to me, although I grasp that murder is a Bad Thing, and there's something about a primitive subconscious on which I remain mercifully unclear). As theology, these books are remarkably incoherent; I am hard pressed to see why they're much of an improvement as literature, either.
I may have tried to read Sons and Lovers -- there was an intensely creepy mother figure, right? And lots of anxiety about sex tiring men out? And something about mineworkers? And -- yeah, it didn't make a huge impression. My colleague from the English department has informed me that Lawrence wrote a late novella in which Jesus goes off and has salvific sex (with Mary Magdalen, who is also a priestess of Isis, or have I got that wrong?) after the Resurrection; it is called either The Escaped Cock or The Man Who Died. Unfortunately, it must be just inside the limits of copyright, because I can't find it online, and after all the John Thomas stuff in LCL I'm not sure I can check out a book entitled The Escaped Cock without snickering. Still, that's my next step unless any of my readers would like to offer suggestions.
So, dear readers, what on earth do people see in Lawrence's novels? And -- given what some of you have picked up about my interests, proclivities, and reading habits -- what ought I to try reading?
* -- And now I'm beginning to suspect that Robert Heinlein rather than Erica Jong was the logical literary successor to Lawrence, but that will take us into another post altogether.
I've written about half of a big long post about Buffy and blood and Christianity, and now I'm realizing that there's a point at which you just admit you're writing an article* and consider sending it to peer-reviewed journals. But I wanted to post something about Buffy, because now it's over, and....
... I'm going to miss it. (Okay, spoilers for "Chosen" ahead. Clearly marked casting spoiler for Angel S5 in final paragraph.)
(1) Waaaaaaaaaaaaah! I am trying not to take it personally that they killed off the closest thing I had left to a perspective character. Half a pint of ice cream later, I am... well, still taking it personally, but less so.
(2) For the millionth time, that thing is not a scythe. (It's also not a very convincing prehistoric artifact, but that's another story.) Scythes are long, curved, and relatively narrow, designed to cut through large quantities of grain and leave it lying in bundles. Also, if they wanted to give Buffy a Woman's Weapon, it would've made better sense to have it be a sickle. That said, the Slayer weapon was an axe -- a really cool axe.
(3) We are going to assume that the Wolfram & Hart limo driver slipped Angel a dose or two of Prozac on the way up the coast, because he was way too cheerful and quippy. Still, Buffy & Angel have amazing chemistry, and I do appreciate the closure.
(4) The cookie-dough speech was... okay, at least they recognized it was horrible. And the concept was decent. Buffy's 22; she can worry about deathless love (so to speak) several years down the road. Or, y'know, in the movie.
(5) As series-ending conceits go, that was good. As battle plans go, that... needed work. Why not wait around the open Seal, only allowing one or two ubervamps out at a time, instead of going inside and arranging your forces in such a way that the whole army can swarm up to attack you? And a few flamethrowers for the civilians would've been a smart idea. Dawn had the right idea, tactically speaking: you do not engage in hand-to-hand combat against superior forces if there is any possible alternative.
(6) After years of people including the phrase in fanfic for no apparent reason, they finally made Willow saying "Oh my goddess" canon. (Except, y'know, in the context of a completely mind-blowing spell rather than everyday conversation.) Is it wrong of me to find that so hilarious? Also, as I keep saying, it's funny how the sacred only works in connection with one of the Scoobies or as a force for evil; it has no independent existence. As Kennedy pointed out, Willow is her own goddess. Q.E.D.
(7) With the possible exception of Anya (and I am not objective about Anya; see #1), everyone got a touchingly in-character scene or two, and everyone wound up with exactly the destiny they were supposed to have, I think. I wasn't even rooting for Kennedy to die.
(8) Giles is back in character! Yay! (Well, there was the part where Giles should've hugged Buffy when he got off the bus and discovered she was alive, but whatever.) The homage to the pilot episode was a little forced, but still funny.
(9) On the whole, then, "Chosen" was a lot better than this season had led me to expect; it didn't fix everything, but it was a good episode with some really great and funny moments. I'm going to miss the show, but it was past its prime, and I'm glad it ended on a reasonably strong note.
(10) (This is a casting spoiler for the next season of Angel. If you do not want to read said spoiler, close your eyes and scroll up now, 'kay?) After all that, they'd better bring Spike back as human -- not only for reasons of dramatic irony but because it's pretty clear that everything except his soul melted away down there.
* -- For instance, when you realize that you have quoted both Ratramnus and Bram Stoker in the third paragraph.
Has anyone else encountered the phenomenon of dejá blu? You know, the sensation that you must surely have blogged about a given topic before? A few weeks ago, when I hit the NYT Magazine article (now back in archives) about the undue influence of "Straussians" in the upper echelons of the Bush administration, my first thought was, "didn't I write about Strauss and liberalism way back in fall of 2001?" Well, I certainly intended to, and after some poking through old archives on my laptop I found a partial post which must've been an early casualty of Blogger's late-stage unreliability, or possibly my job-hunting schedule. Alas, it failed to make the transition into my Movable Type archives, and so I find myself compelled to address the recent hullaballoo over "Straussianism," even though the political side of the question has been dealt with in detail over at Invisible Adjunct (scroll up from the bottom for two posts plus comments), Diachronic Agency (scroll up for further exchanges between the blog's authors), and One Good Turn (scroll up for another post).
I am neither a philosopher nor a political scientist, but I do have some small expertise in reading esoteric premodern texts, and so that is the direction from which I approach the works of Leo Strauss. Strauss was a German Jewish philosopher, political scientist, and classicist who emigrated to the U.S. in the '30s two steps ahead of the Nazis and taught at the University of Chicago in the '50s and '60s, influencing a whole generation of very smart people, many of whom grew up to be either professors or policy wonks.* Several of my own grad-school professors were among this generation, and if I correctly understand the rather incoherent concept of intellectual filiation being espoused in the NYT article, I might well qualify as a "Straussian." At any rate, I'm tolerably familiar with the side of Strauss's thought which addresses the intersection between politics, religion, and textual strategizing. In fact, I've played with some of the same texts Strauss did, and although I find myself in disagreement with him on numerous points, I am consistently impressed and influenced by the force and quality of his arguments.
My favorite of Strauss's works -- I consider it reasonably characteristic of his writings on classical texts, although he never seems to have admitted the existence of a period known as "medieval" -- is Persecution and the Art of Writing. The current paperback edition labels it as a "political science" text for no apparent reason and makes it sound even more impenetrable than it actually is, but do give it a shot if you enjoy thinking through the meta-issues surrounding writing and deliberate obfuscation or esotericism. (It helps to have a mild interest in the history of philosophy, but that's not absolutely required.) Persecution offers a very minimal historical narrative about the conditions under which three important works were written (Judah Halevi's Kuzari, Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed, and Benedict Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus), but it builds on that in order to describe the different strategies by which these three authors present ideas which were impossible (unlawful, extremely dangerous, or both) to discuss openly in writings which were to be publicly circulated.
So what, you ask, is the danger of savants in the Bush administration, academia, or elsewhere reading about hidden messages in Spinoza? Not, in my view, a heckuva lot -- but to be fair, the concern is not about whether or not one can take Maimonides' Prologue to the Guide at face value. In the course of explaining the conditions under which such texts emerge, Strauss concludes or strongly implies that (a) most, if not all, philosophical texts are also (inevitably) political; (b) these texts must be privileged and read with attention to authorial intent as well as historical context; and (c) government -- especially government by the people -- is not spectacularly worthy of trust when it comes to understanding complex ideas. Perhaps I have missed something major here -- I have read perhaps a third of Strauss's total works, and that third is heavily weighted toward text studies -- but that's more or less what I see coming out of Strauss.
Now, there are people who call themselves "Straussians," but I really wonder whether they are reading Strauss carefully enough.** Strauss knew better than to put himself in the position of the persecuted remnant; the self-proclaimed "Straussians," on the other hand, see themselves as an elite rearguard making the last stand on behalf of Western Civilization against the barbarian hordes of historicism, modernism, and relativism. Strauss knew his history -- indeed, his transhistorical arguments depend upon it -- but the Straussians labor under the impression that undue attention to history is an admission of weakness. Strauss, despite his determined adherence to a (rather inclusive) Western textual canon, mixes very nicely with all sorts of thought deemed "postmodern," and that is in fact how I have employed him. However, the Straussians are convinced that the world started going to hell in a handbasket right around the Enlightenment, and not in the good sense of "going to hell in a handbasket."
Frankly, "Straussianism" reminds me a lot more of Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind -- commonly identified as a key "Straussian" text (Bloom was a student of Strauss's) and also a key neoconservative manifesto. The reason the NYT Magazine is writing about this, you see, is that Strauss has been thrust into the position of intellectual ancestor to neoconservatism. Indeed, the article identified the American Enterprise Institute as a den of Straussians... to which I can only say, with heartfelt emphasis and keen intellectual incisiveness, "huh?" I am slightly more neoconservative than Ralph Nader, and I have about as good an intellectual claim as Paul Wolfowitz to anything "Straussian." There are many interesting things to be said about the intellectual bases of neoconservatism, and I have no doubt that Strauss's influence played some role in the development of such an ideology, but to identify "neoconservative" with "Straussian" is not only wrong but intellectually sloppy.*** Also, to constantly drag in the adjective "Jewish" in anything other than a genuinely explanatory context is suspect, and not something Strauss himself was foolish enough to do in dealing with either texts or their authors.
Where I disagree most with Strauss -- and this is not incidental -- is his observation in Persecution that a liberal society seemingly has no need to write its own esoteric texts. I think Strauss is selling his subject short, but not in the direction the neocons might take it. It seems to me that most writers today still need to hide something from the eyes of the uninitiated, whether it be their identities (hello, bloggers!) or the origin of their ideas or certain types of radicalism (and, no, neoconservatism doesn't qualify most of the time). What I'd like to know is why and how our "liberal" Western society continues to be fascinated by "hidden" or "esoteric" writings; leaving aside the number of TV channels and programs dedicated to either the interpretation of Scripture or the Discovery of Hidden Texts of the Cool-Sounding Historical People, prophecy subplots are multiplying like bunnies on prime-time TV. Someday, I will make the mistake of writing a book about this, and I will not blame it all on Leo Strauss -- but I might mention him somewhere around about the foreword.
* -- This site has a lot more detail about Strauss and "Straussians," if you're curious.
** -- These are, of course, Straussian fightin' words.
*** -- I am as shocked as anyone to find myself agreeing with Andrew Sullivan on this point.
Boondoggle U.'s Big Commencement ceremony will be held tomorrow morning. Our total student body is in the five digits, with far too many graduates to read all the names at the Big Commencement, and so the assorted colleges and schools within the University have been having individual commencement ceremonies over the past few days. I recently attended one of these baby commencements, acting as a faculty marshal -- a task which involves wearing a Special Ribbon and performing Significant Hand Gestures to guide our graduates in the complexities of self-alphabetization, procession, and recession. I did this because I had been asked and because it would look good on my service record, but, honestly, I suspect that directing human traffic is more fun than sitting on horrible little plastic chairs like a good faculty member.
I also suspect that I like graduations, as long as they aren't mine. I enjoy the arcane and quasi-archaic details of academic regalia -- there is a small, baffling corner of my mind which can identify gowns from every single Ivy* and a handful of other major universities -- and the challenge of finding something decent yet minimal to wear underneath. I enjoy watching students, especially when they used to be mine, and their proud families. I don't mind ducking out of photo ops or taking pictures for people. I get a kick out of directing traffic. "Pomp and Circumstance" is fun to listen to a couple of times a year, and bagpipes are just neat. Someday, somehow, I am going to get my hands on a ceremonial mace just so I can make the requisite jokes about clerics. I wouldn't want to attend one of these suckers every week, but once a year, what's not to like?
However, I will not be at the Big Commencement tomorrow, for the simple reason that it falls smack-dab in the middle of my Saturday morning worship service -- probably right around the time I'll be reading Torah, since this happens to be the weekend our Almost Orthodox minyan is meeting. On the advice of certain senior colleagues, I have opted to come down with a convenient headache this year instead of getting the requisite excuse from my Dean. (For those of you not part of the academic cultus -- and we don't get a whole lot more ritualistic than this -- Commencement attendance is required of all tenure-track faculty.) However, I am not happy with this. I don't object to lying in the abstract; I do object to lying in cases where it's gratuitous, inelegant, and far too easily disproved. Next year, I will have to explain the whole business all over again -- or, if they happen to schedule Commencement on a weekend when I don't actually have responsibilities to the service (that'd be one or two weeks a month), I could always attend. But I don't want to, even though I like the event for itself. It's my sabbath, dammit.
I feel odd about claiming a sabbath sometimes. After all, I don't go to synagogue every weekend, especially with all the travel this time of year. (I do make it to some service or other about three weeks out of four, and I lead some sort of Torah discussion one or two of those weeks.) I drive to synagogue, would eat pepperoni pizza for breakfast beforehand if I had it in the fridge, and will cheerfully carry out all manner of non-Sabbath-observant plans between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday. In fact, I've attended various departmental events on Friday night and Saturday afternoon, and even one "retreat" that ran from Friday morning through Saturday afternoon. Increasingly, though, I find myself being just a tiny bit activist about those -- the "retreat" was too far from civilization to make it to a synagogue (yes, I checked), but I did find a windowsill and light all eleven possible candles at the Christmas/Eighth Day of Hanukkah party this past December.** I may tinker with my Sabbath, but I want it to be my decision, not the university's. And, y'know, why should I have to feel odd?
I am generally happy and comfortable with being part of a minority faith, but sometimes I get sick of half-apologizing for my religion (whether it's being too religious or not religious enough). It's certainly not as though Christians have to be regular churchgoers to justify the time they get off on Sundays, and I'm fine with that -- I enjoy my secular weekends as much as the next person. But, Jesus***, can't people take a minute to run through the major world religions and pull out their datebooks -- or Google -- to check on movable feasts? I may not know exactly when Diwali is this coming year, but I know how to find out. If an administrator (from any sort of institution) is scheduling a public event, especially one at which it is known that persons of other faiths will be attending, he or she should at least look at a freaking calendar first. Sooner or later, I am going to have to point out this problem to Boondoggle University -- maybe suggest that a Saturday afternoon graduation ceremony would at least avoid conflicting with most people's services, although the no-driving crowd is unlikely to turn up regardless. But I resent being put in this position. I'd much rather save my Commencement-week energy for such crucial pasttimes as mocking funny hats from European universities.
Oh, well. After running through this in my head for the squintillionth time, I do have a headache.
* -- The Harvard people are in denial. That's not crimson; it's fuchsia. Or possibly hot pink. Either way, it's a good thing I didn't go to Harvard.
** -- Eleven, because it was also Friday night.
*** -- Jesus broke the Sabbath for himself and his disciples and the occasional random healee. He did not try to abrogate it or move it around, and it seems unfair to hold the man responsible for the timing of his death -- but life would be much simpler for me if Christianity had stuck with a Saturday Sabbath.
One last (I hope) discovery from the First Year of Teaching: that absolutely crashing sense of happiness that used to come when you woke up on the first morning of summer vacation during grade school? And then disappeared as the end of college and grad-school classes simply meant that it was time to work on papers 24/7? Well, it's back. Not that I'm not busy -- since my final class meeting on Thursday, I've attended one lecture, two academic receptions, one retirement party, one teaching workshop, and one Torah-study group, which I led. Then I went to a comic-book store.
I should explain that I am Not A Comic(s?) Fan. I don't have any difficulty accepting comics as an artistic or literary medium, although I suspect I'm not an ideal comic reader just because I'm so strongly text-oriented. It's the comic-book culture that baffles me. I've been into no more than a handful of comic-book stores in my life, but I'm afraid I've developed a detailed cultural stereotype from that meager exposure -- oh, okay, that and knowing a great many people who do frequent them. The comic-book shop in my head is a dingy little place full of white middle-class teenage boys who can't seem to manage to meet a newcomer's eyes or say "hello"; one charitably assumes that they are enacting Profound Alienation from Society, but they may just be socially incompetent (or, in one notable experience of mine, focused on a point about a foot below my eyes). And I just don't get the point of so many things. I mean, the wider implications of anti-gravity Brassieres of Doom on female characters aside (I saw quite a few of those on covers this morning), what sane person would go to a super-specialized shop every couple of weeks in order to buy teeny-tiny (not to mention physically fragile) installments of a story at three bucks a pop? And why don't they have titles organized by subject instead of genre, so that an interested person could have a shot at browsing in some area more specific than "manga"? And what is with with those letters at the back of published issues?
(Yes, I realize that I attend super-specialized professional conferences several times a year and drop a great deal more than three bucks on a lot of books, but they're bound, darnit, and I'm pretty sure they're business expenses. Also, I smile at people while I'm doing it, as long as they're not trying to score the same display copy. Then I snarl. Er, perhaps this isn't the best way to admit that I recognize the irony here, but I do, really. Honest.)
Anyway, I was happy to discover that the store I visited this morning wasn't much like the ones I'd been in before. The shop wasn't dingy, it had decent-sized windows, the most knowledgeable clerk there was female, and there were browsers well outside the stereotype in terms of both age and race, although the core demographic was still teenage and young-adult white males. As a matter of fact, the place was doing a pretty brisk business; perhaps that's normal for Saturdays, but I'm sure it helped that today has been touted (by some of you in the blogosphere) as Free Comics Day. Free Comics Day was part of why I decided to have a rare moment of spontaneity and go comics-shopping today -- not so much out of an insatiable desire for Free Comics as out of the belief that I wouldn't be quite as conspicuous among other browsers. The reason why I went in the first place was to acquire the latest issue of Fray, a comic series about a future Slayer written by Joss Whedon. I'd been mildly curious about Fray since it started coming out last year. If it had been available in book form, I would've picked it up then, but of course it's not -- what I got at the store this morning was the seventh of eight issues (after a long hiatus). God knows how one might acquire the back six -- another aspect of comic culture which baffles me, since surely people must get interested in some series midway through.
So, obviously, a more sensible person would've waited for the trade paperback, but I'd heard just enough about Fray's plot to make me curious, and Whedonesque had announced the appearance of this issue in the past week or so, and I happened to be passing the store on the way back from services... and I wanted to do something sort of frivolous to celebrate the end of days, er, school. So I stopped in. I found the latest Fray, then wound up perusing the graphic-novel section (turns out I recognize a lot more of those titles than I'd've thought), investing in one volume for possible future use in teaching, and noting down a few other things which might be interesting to pick up sometime. I also skimmed through the "free comics" table and wound up with a fairly silly little confection about a cat and a bird with drawing styles varying each episode for no apparent reason.* Then I went home and read my comic. (There will be nothing approaching a plot spoiler in the following discussion.)
Overall... hmmmmm. The story seems like fun -- not incredibly deep, but that's fine for a quick read. The thing is, I'd probably enjoy reading the trade paperback a lot more. I didn't have trouble figuring out enough of the backstory to follow along; it's just that a comic book is... short. Especially for someone who reads overly fast and tends to ignore images in favor of words on the first several read-throughs. (Thoughts on the images: pretty. However, the heroine is inexplicably wearing a midriff top under her relatively practical leather-like jacket, and the heroine's sister has on an anti-gravity Brassiere of Doom under her apparently-very-tight-since-I-can-tell uniform. Just sayin'.) The letters at the back were all about the hero-worship, which may be gratifying to write and see in print but is godawfully tedious to read. Yes, that's nice, you worship Joss, you want to hunt down and kill someone in the last issue who admitted to finding it derivative, whatever. My first reaction: "For crying out loud, why don't they include some in-depth critical analysis?" My second reaction: "Okay, self, this is obviously not the time to call someone else on geekiness."
I might go back to the store, though. Nice place.
* -- It was that, Archie, something superhero-y with spandex and an involved storyline, something so urban-boho-hip-alternative I knew I wasn't worthy, or something with fantasy Japanese overtones and slave girls getting rolled out of carpets. The urban-alternative one also had an overly endowed woman being subdued by a man for reasons which remain unclear to me, although they may have involved a messy kitchen. Or drugs. Or something.