Art Brut - "Direct Hit"

This is not actually a very good video. Turns out Eddie Argos is the young Stephen Fry (in need of a Hugh Laurie). Oh well. It's the sort of thing Belle and Sebastian could pull off (but not really).

Cthulhu Cthursday at Table of Malcontents

Not to be missed! The Table of Malcontents will be going away soon and I will miss awesome stuff like:

• Neil Gaiman on H.P. Lovecraft
• LOLCthulhus

Gaiman says the appeal of Lovecraft is the same as rock and roll. He makes you want to write in the same way that the Velvet Underground and the Clash inspire you to want to start a band. I'll buy that.

Terry Eagleton on Bakhtin

Though he can't avoid taking a few pointless swipes at Saussure and Postmodernism, Eagleton has an interesting review in the LRB and Bakhtin is always an interesting subject.

In Rabelais and His World, this orgy of signification takes to the street in the form of a carnival. In the Russian tradition of the holy fool, the ancient art of the people debunks all transcendental signifiers and submits all official values to satiric parody. Like the novel, it celebrates flux and mutability, the dynamic and unstable. All absolute values are ridiculed and relativised. Against the high-mindedness of official doctrine is pitted the lethal power of laughter. Travesty, disfigurement and inversion (nose/phallus, face/buttocks, sacred/profane, man/woman, high culture/low culture) rampage for a euphoric moment through the byways and marketplaces. Rigid oppositions are scabrously dismantled. Birth and death, destruction and renewal, body and spirit, wisdom and folly, the anal and the angelic are sent packing with their tails in each other’s mouths. Orifices are seen as the places where bodies breach their boundaries and merge ecstatically into each other. Everything about the practice is ambiguous, Janus-faced, too slippery to be pinned down. Carnival deflates the sublime and portentous; and behind this desublimation lies the bathos of the Christian gospel, for which salvation comes down to the gift of a cup of water. As the first movement in history to consecrate the common life, Christianity stands at the source of Bakhtin’s preoccupation with the everyday, just as it lurks distantly behind the current fascination with popular culture.

This a wonderfully descriptive paragraph with all sorts of amazing ideas to unpack. Debunking transcendental signifiers. Ridiculing and relativising absolute values. Travesty, disfigurement, and inversion. Dismantling rigid oppositions. This all sounds very postmodern to me and its a shame that Eagleton can't get past his bias and distaste. Perhaps it is the insistence that Eagleton reads through Bakhtin that there must be something behind the Carnival, a source for his preoccupation with the everyday. Some find Christianity, others would try to replace it with Marxism. For a postmodernist, there is nothing behind the desublimation. It is hyperreal, it is simulated, it is self-referential. The everyday and the fascination with popular culture is the life we have, nothing more. Travesties and monsters are there to remind us that language and art are themselves the forces that "make for human misery and oppression [and the forces that] can also make for emancipation and wellbeing".

Right Wing Blogger of the Day

A blog, appropriately called "Hot Air," goes digging for outrage in that bastion of lefty punditry, Newsweek.

Here's the flavor of the post, called "Science: Dems lose elections because they're too darned rational":

If only they were more emotional, like we fear-mongering man-monkeys, they might control all three branches now. I think all of us who’ve sailed the placid seas of Nutrootsistan can sympathize with that sentiment.

This is probably the third or fourth permutation of “conservatives bad, liberals good” science we’ve blogged since HA started, but this one’s special since it shares with George Lakoff’s stupid “branding” thesis the precious quality of being, in its own way, as insulting to Democrats as to Republicans. Does the left really need to have it explained to them by a scientist that emotional appeals tend to be politically effective? Don’t they have a few examples in their own scrapbook that prove the point? It’s like not being able to figure out sex without a doctor’s help.

So let's see how Hot Air did following my little list of talking points for conservative bloggers:

Never debate the facts, go straight for the ad hominem attacks

There's no attempt to dispute the article on the facts (which are pretty weak considering this is 2007, and the Dems did take back the house and senate last year). Just a lot of "they must think we're stupid, which means that they're stupid if you have to explain it to them, and the whole idea is stupid because it reminds me of this other idea which I think is stupid...", etc.

Invent a funny nickname for your opponent to support step one.

"Nutrootistan"

Characterize your opponent's position using religious language to underscore their inherent dogmatism and irrationality [this is so ironic my brain is bleeding].

See above. Also, the idea that a Democrat would run a political add invoking racial profiling is characterized as, "a cardinal sin on the left."

Accuse your opponent of employing your own worst tactics (scare tactics, demagoguery, name-calling).

"Don’t they have a few examples in their own scrapbook that prove the point?" and later, "Yep, nothing but sunshine, reason, and the Athenian agora for those Democrats." The links are meant to show that yes, in fact, the Democrats are the real "fear-mongering man-monkeys."

Assert that Computer Science and Electrical Engineering are the keys to all scientific understanding (including Environmental science, Biology, etc.)

Science bashing is implied in the title as well as the implied bashing of Drew Westen and his study. Since Psychology and Neuroscience are not subsets of computer science or electrical engineering, there's no reason to take them seriously if you're a good conservative.

Complain that we tie our own hands by not lowering our standards to the level of our enemies (x doesn't care about human rights, why should we? y doesn't comply with environmental standards, why should we?)

Sure, but hey: “Effective? Let’s just say that if John Kerry had used Westen’s words to attack the Swift Boaters who impugned his war record during the 2004 presidential campaign, Bush might be clearing a lot of brush in Crawford these days.” Ends and means, baby. Imagine what the abortion ads will look like.

I take that to mean, the ends always justify the means. So if Kerry had upped the ante, Bush would have as well. Thus highlighting the importance of always sinking to the level of the lowest common denominator.

Always blame others for everything that goes wrong (personal responsibility only applies to people you don't like)

Read the whole thing and ponder your exit question: In what meaningful sense is that piece different from a press release?

Update: See-Dub comments, “Meanwhile…as the picture of the pathetic polar bears on an ice floe drifts across our screen for the eight thousandth time as a newscaster reads a thinly disguised press release about global warming…”

Translation: the world would be a better place (for me) if it weren't for the left-wing media reading press releases as if they were the news!

My translation: when you are strange, people are strangers, and when you're a propagandist, everything looks like propaganda.

Horror Movie Release Party

More "transgressive" "showmanship" from the "horror" industry, according to the New York Times:

The idea behind Mr. Solomon’s planned party of course is to put “Captivity” back on the map, no small task given the scheduling hiccups and recent woes in the horror genre. Over the last few months a series of horror films have done poorly, culminating with the disappointing performance earlier this month by Lionsgate’s “Hostel: Part II.”

The hate is here. Lately, it's been occurring to me that I don't actually like this stuff. At all. (Kudos to everyone responsible for Hostel bombing. Your absence makes a difference).

Memes du Jour of the Day

• iPhone fatigue - I'm kind of sick of it already.
• Elizabeth Edwards taking Ann to Fist City - Everybody loves the smack-down justice.
• Cheney Hate - Impeach! Impeach!
• Die Hard IV - 80s-style retro action movie is maybe not so bad? Yippi-ki-yay!
  
• Tony Blair - We liked him for a while, but in the end, meh.

Update
After listening to others describe the Elizabeth Edwards call, I thought she'd really ripped Ann a new one. But if you watch it, she didn't lay a glove on her. It just makes Elizabeth seem uptight and her husband looks like a wimp by comparison.

Just remember kids, substance is for losers. Personal attacks and name-calling always win.

Scooby Doo and Skepticism

P.Z. Myers points out something that bothered me about the revival of the Scooby Doo characters:

Way back when I was a young'un, they always ended the same way: the Scooby Doo gang would always discover that the monster/spectre/alien was actually Old Man Cargill, dressed in a costume, trying to keep visitors away so they wouldn't discover his secret uranium mine, and they always led him away in handcuffs at the end, while he muttered, "If it weren't for those darned kids, I would have gotten away with it." I know, the cartoon was cheesily and cheaply animated, the plots were boring and predictable, and the characters were annoyingly trite, but at least they had a consistent message that the supernatural wasn't real.

That changed last time I saw it — the ghosts were "real". It was very strange: it was a badly done cartoon, waning in popularity, and instead of trying to reinvigorate it by, say, coming up with creative plots, or getting better artwork, or making the characters more interesting, they chose to throw away the one novel element of the show. The supernatural resort is often the act of lazy hacks.

The biggest problem with all supernatural fiction is, as Chris Mooney points out, the "conversion fantasy." The idea that it is better to be a true believer than a rational skeptic. It's what's always bothered me about Fox Mulder in The X-Files: that he was somehow morally superior to the other characters because he "believed."

Really good supernatural fiction treads lightly on this subject or views the conversion fantasy as the self-annihilating process it really is. In Lovecraft, the supernatural is a metaphor for the cold heartless universe and man's place in it. The universe is large, amoral, and indifferent to human suffering. Humans are small, mortal, emotionally fragile, and ultimately inconsequential. Anyone who is stupid enough to make a cult out of these elder gods usually ends up going mad or being destroyed.

The old version of Scooby Doo was dumb, but it did at least show that rationality and problem-solving could triumph over fear and chaos. The new Shaggy and Scooby Doo Get A Clue dodges the issue by being a G-rated version of the Venture Brothers, battling adventure story cliches. Still, how would Fred and the gang deal with the Call of Cthulu? Jinkies!

Church and State

Andrew Sullivan complains that Jesus was most certainly not a socialist:

I'm struck by how many readers seem to believe that the Gospels mandate an expansive welfare state. I can't see it myself. Jesus was admant [sic] about eschewing politics; and his injunction to help the poor was not an injunction to get taxed in order that others may help the poor (or more generally with government attempts to reduce poverty, to keep them poor). And, of course, in socialist countries, the government both takes more of your money and tells you that the needs of others are the state's business, not yours. No big surprise, then, that no other country gives even half as much in charity as Americans. A free society, low taxes and limited government actually leaves people with the means to do good. The French give one twelfth of what Americans give. Britain is the second most generous country, and, despite Tony Blair's best efforts, still the least socialist of the European powers.

It's all about attitude vs. approach. His natural bias is toward the Church rather than the State, and toward "charity" rather than "taxes", but it's just rhetoric. It's all the same when someone's shaking that collection basket in your face on a Sunday morning. I think the point he's missing is that countries without social supports NEED to be more generous because there is nothing else.

The difference is that in a socialist country this generosity is built into the national infrastructure. In a charity-based society, it's left to one's leisure time and Sunday observances.

How To Be a Conservative

This blog post from a conservative blogger (and the right-wingers who post comments) provides in microcosm a useful case study for the right-wing mindset:

1. Never debate the facts, go straight for the ad hominem attacks.
2. Invent a funny nickname for your opponent to support step one.
3. Characterize your opponent's position using religious language to underscore their inherent dogmatism and irrationality [this is so ironic my brain is bleeding].
4. Accuse your opponent of employing your own worst tactics (scare tactics, demagoguery, name-calling).
   
5. Assert that Computer Science and Electrical Engineering are the keys to all scientific understanding (including Environmental science, Biology, etc.)
6. Complain that we tie our own hands by not lowering our standards to the level of our enemies (x doesn't care about human rights, why should we? y doesn't comply with environmental standards, why should we?).
7. Always blame others for everything that goes wrong (personal responsibility only applies to people you don't like).
   

It's All About Cheney

Reading through the posts on Andrew Sullivan's blog over the last few days, it's becoming more clear that he's building a case against Cheney. When it comes to Iraq, torture, abuses of Executive power, and now war planning for Iran, it's clear that all roads lead to the vice-president.

It already appears that he either is or considers himself to be the de-facto ruler of this country and that he considers his office to be above the law. So what happens in 2008? If the Republicans win, will Cheney remain somewhere behind the scenes? If the Democrats win, will he make the coup official? Will he declare martial law?

Anything seems possible.

Scary Rabbits

Horror, Tragedy, Gimmicks, Catharsis, Torture, Boundaries, Eli Roth, Rob Zombie ... and two rabbits. All in one tidy little video. It really wraps it all up for me.

iPod Anarchist Miracle of the Day

"One Evening" by Feist to "Our Faces Split the Coast In Half" by Broken Social Scene

Art Brut - "It's a Bit Complicated"

OK, so Art Brut don't have to like The Stone Roses if they don't want to, and I'm free to like them both if I choose to.

The music itself is pretty generic, a young person's notion of what post-punk sounds like: somewhere between Weezer and Green Day on one side and the Arctic Monkeys and The Strokes on the other. The real hook of the band is the talk-singing delivery of the lead vocals which give the songs their shape and personality. As with Mark E. Smith of the Fall or Jarvis Cocker of Pulp, the songs are compulsively listen-able because the voice is distinct and irrepressibly chatty, and the stories always surprising and unexpected. It's like that friend you like to hear from who always has a story and a joke.

The danger for a band like this is that the songs have a sameness to them, and if you're not listening attentively it sounds like the same song over and over. But for now they have enough attitude and ideas to pull it off.

The best track is "Nag Nag Nag Nag" available at Salon for free.

Propaganda and the Simulacrum of War

Glenn Greewald on a rhetorical shift in the War in Iraq. This time the propaganda is for real:

All of this seems based upon the premise that for the last four years, we have had a strategy of simply leaving "Al Qaeda" in peace, just letting them be. But now, we have a new Commander, Gen. David G. Petraeus, who has dramatically embraced a bold, innovative, new strategy: "Let's get Al Qaeda." That, in turn, is what accounts for the rhetorical shift.

But that explanation is just ridiculous on its face, particularly in light of how many times we have heard in the past that we have Al Qaeda on the run in Iraq, that we have disrupted it ability to operate, that we have decapitated its leadership, through all of our highly successful offensive Iraqi actions against them. And that is to say nothing of the truly laughable notion that we are able to identify dead bodies as belonging to "Al Qaeda members" ("68 Al Qaeda militants killed!").

More importantly, all of this depends upon an underhanded and deceitful conflation of (a) the Iraqi Sunnis who decided to call themselves "Al Qaeda in Iraq" as they battled against the U.S. occupation of their country, and (b) the "Al Qaeda" led by Osama bin Laden which flew planes into U.S. buildings on 9/11. In every way that matters, those two entities are universes apart. But for obvious reasons, the political consequences of equating them are enormous. To conflate them is, as I said on Saturday, misleading and propagandistic in the extreme. For one article after the next to bolster that conflation is so journalistically irresponsible that it is hard to put into words.

But let us focus on the underlying and most significant point of all of this. This sudden shift in describing the "enemy" in Iraq as "Al Qaeda" is the by-product of a very familiar information-producing system: namely, the administration formulates narratives, the President announces them, his top officials and military commanders recite them endlessly, and then establishment "journalists" not only write them down, but rely exclusively -- and uncritically -- on those narratives to report events. As I noted on Saturday, particularly in the Update citing the work of other bloggers who have been tracking this rhetorical shift for several months, this is exactly how the transformation of the "War in Iraq" into the newly unveiled "U.S. War Against Al Qeada" was manufactured and disseminated.

Whatever else is true, all of these new reports about the glorious victories we are achieving against "Qaeda fighters" in Iraq are the by-product of this exact system. These reports rely exclusively, or overwhelmingly, on the claims of military commanders selected by the Bush administration to communicate "information" to the media.

The longer the war goes on, the more postmodern it becomes, and the more simulated and Baudrillardian the reality of the war becomes for the consumers of these narratives: the American people. Whatever the reality is for the Iraqis and the soldiers, we are being distanced from it, removed from it. The rhetorical shift is cynical, and conservapedia-esque in its hostility toward fact.

As Baudrillard wrote after the first Gulf War:

The question is not whether one is for or against the war, but whether one is for or against the reality of war. Analysis must not be sacrificed to the expression of anger. It must be directed against reality, against manifestness -- here against the manifest reality of this war.

Like the WMDs before them, this new enemy does not exist. If the administration and the complicit media continue down this path, the war itself will cease to exist. It will all be an illusion. The war is no longer about fighting and defeating an enemy. It is about manipulating the perception of a war to deter us from understanding what is happening on the ground in Iraq and in the administration (which may or may not be a war as we understood earlier conflicts). The fictionalized narrative which says that we are fighting a war against Al Qaeda is an attempt to lobotomize the people while deferring the unpleasantness of the manifest reality of the war. As long as the conflict is contained in this permanent state of suspension and ambiguity, the inevitability of total victory without cost remains the dominant and most pleasing narrative. No others need be entertained.

Rushdie, By Way of Example

Salman Rushdie serves as the perfect example of what happens when the accusation of propaganda becomes a cudgel against art.

From Johann Hari, by way of Andrew Sullivan:

Ah, the critics say, but he brought it on himself. He wrote things he knew were "provocative". George Galloway, completing his journey to the theocratic far right, has sneered that his novel is "indeed positively Satanic", and said "he turned 1.8 billion people in the world against him when he talked about their prophet in a way that can only be described as blasphemous."

This is exactly analogous to saying a woman wearing a short skirt is responsible for being dragged into an alley and raped. It is also flecked with a form of soft racism, since Galloway assumes all Muslims are excitable children who can only react to querying of the Koran with attempted butchery.

But of course the only one's who are being "provocative" are the religious leaders who openly called for Rushdie's murder. What does it say when your entire religious culture is based on propaganda (or is there any distinction between the two?)

The Satanic Verses is an all right novel, but Rushdie's masterpiece remains Midnight's Children, a magical realist novel about the founding of modern India and the children who made up its first generation. He should be congratulated on his knighthood and rewarded with many new readers.

Shock as Propaganda

Further proof that great minds think alike, I was planning to continue my blogging on horror and classical tragedy when Literacity posted this fun description of theatrical gimmickry in old-fashioned horror films. A coincidence, yes, but you may notice some overlap.

As I noted earlier, horror differs from tragedy in that it appeals to our kinetic emotions (as described by Joyce) rather than leading us to the elevating stillness of terror and pity (catharsis). Joyce described these kinetic emotions as pornographic and didactic. The former is pretty obvious, but for now I wanted to take on what might be meant by "didactic" emotions.

At first I was at a loss. It's a story meant to teach you something? Teach you a lesson? Provide a moral? OK, but that seems pretty tame. Nothing to get to excited about, but then it hit me. What about stuff that's meant to upset you, agitate you, get you marching in the streets. What about the sort of rabble-rousing books and movies that are meant to manipulate its audience? What about propaganda?

That's when I remembered an entire chapter in the Dramatica Theory Book that I had never bothered to read. And there it was:

Propaganda is a wondrous and dangerous story device. Its primary usage in stories is as a method for an author to impact an audience long after they have experienced the story itself. Through the use of propaganda, an author can inspire an audience to think certain ways, think about certain things, behave certain ways, and take specific actions. Like fire and firearms, propaganda can be used constructively and destructively and does not contain an inherent morality. Any morality involved comes from the minds of the author and his audience.

In horror you get the one two punch: the sex and violence of pornography with the propaganda of an author trying to "impact an audience."

Here's an even better example:

One tried-and-true method is to control what an audience knows about the story before experiencing the storytelling process so that you can shock them. Within the context of the story itself (as opposed to marketing or word-of-mouth), an author can prepare the audience by establishing certain givens, then purposefully break the storyform (destroy the givens) to shock or jar the audience. This hits the audience at a Preconscious level by soliciting an instantaneous, knee-jerk reaction. This type of propaganda is the most specific and immediately jarring on its audience. Two films that employed this technique to great effect are Psycho and The Crying Game.

Psycho broke the storyform to impact the audience's preconscious by killing the main character twenty minutes or so into the film (the "real" story about the Bates family then takes over). The shock value was enhanced through marketing by having the main character played by big box office draw Janet Leigh (a good storytelling choice at the time) and the marketing gimmick that no one would be allowed into the movie after the first five or ten minutes. This "gimmick" was actually essential for the propaganda to be effective. It takes time for an audience to identify on a personal level with a main character. Coming in late to the film would not allow enough time for the audience member to identify with Janet Leigh's character and her death would have little to no impact.

The Crying Game used a slightly different process to achieve a similar impact. The first twenty minutes or so of the film are used to establish a bias to the main character's (and audience's) view of reality. The "girlfriend" is clearly established except for one important fact. That "fact," because it is not explicitly denoted, is supplied by the mind of the main character (and the minds of the audience members). By taking such a long time to prep the audience, it comes as a shock when we (both main character and audience) find out that she is a he.

The twist ending, the shock are "gimmicks", yes, but also theatrical propaganda, a meta-story shared not on the screen but between the audience and the author in an ever escalating battle to outdo the last one. From the now seemingly innocent shocks of Psycho and the Crying Game, to the ever more shocking violence of a "showman" like Eli Roth and the provocations of "unrated director's cuts" on DVD, the point is to lure the audience with the promise of ever more transgressive images. The audience itself answers this call by viewing each film as a test. If you can't endure it, if you can't enjoy it, if you can't laugh at it, then you've failed the test. Worse yet, you're a wimp; you don't pass muster.

That's the point of the exploitation genre. The audience says, you show me the most disgusting thing you can imagine, and I'll prove to you that I don't care. And of course the author is more than happy to oblige in hopes that the audience will freak out. He's not really going to do THAT is he? And then he does.

Either way the author goes out of his way to make sure that the audience goes in with high expectations and talks about it later. It's all about the marketing.

As the Dramatica authors point out, propaganda has many uses and examples can range from Planet of the Apes to The Sixth Sense to The Passion of the Christ to Thelma and Louise to Crash. The danger is when you fail to meet those audience expectations (The Village) or when viewers begin to see propaganda and secret agendas in everything (Happy Feet) or when you cross the bounds of taste (the marketing of Captivity).

But the biggest problem is that we have a culture that on the one hand is eager for outrageous provocation and on the other is ever ready to censor and punish. It's easy to say, "it's just a movie." But that's the distinction between art and propaganda: stillness or action. And if the entire point is to get people riled up, motivated and active isn't that more than a movie? Isn't that a manifesto? A call to arms? Incitement to riot? At what point do we storm the Bastille?

Finally: at what point are we watching and at what point are we participating?

Or are we overestimating the power of propaganda? Does it actually work? It may give us a giggle or a healthy scream, but how does that translate into real life?

Perhaps propaganda is itself one more provocation: Beware! This movie may make you as sick and depraved as the people who made it. Watch it, if you dare!

A New Low for Bill O'Reilly

I prefer to pretend that he doesn't exist, and I don't like to blog about stuff I don't like or I'm not interested in, but this is too good to pass up. O'Reilly objects to coverage of the war, asserts the meaninglessness of bombings, and invents a story about censorship in World War II.

Keith Olbermann has a lovely response. One might even call it fair and balanced.

Two Cheers for Posh

New York Magazine's Fug Girls take a bold stand on Victoria Beckham, aka Posh:

In this age of starlets frequenting rehab before they're even old enough to drink legally, we find Posh's patented brand of over-the-top drama rather soothing and escapist. She's like Celebrity Sorbet, the palate cleanser we're served between heavy courses of sweaty idiots feuding with their mothers and spilling out of Escalades sans panties. She's totally delicious and refreshing. If only the rest of America would take a bite.

Just because our popular culture has devolved into witless starlets and trash television, it doesn't we can't have standards. It's the backlash to the backlash where our celebrity starvation has taken pop culturists in search of someone who is uncool enough to be cool and cool enough to be uncool. It's like Brit-pop. We're in the gutter, gazing at the stars.

Giallo at the Disco

This record's from March but I only came across it today. "I Always Say Yes" by Glass Candy which Pitchfork describes this way:

eight minutes of skeletal terror-disco, with horror synths straight out of Dario Argento's Suspiria set to a pulsing analog beat and singer Ida No's chilly, haunted vocals.

If no one had told you, you would have thought it was just a dance track, but the notion of "terror-disco" is too good to pass up.

Marginalizaton of Pop

An English professor ponders popular music:

The fate of hip-hop may be the best illustration of the increasing marginalization of popular music and its impact on American culture. Hip-hop is arguably the last great innovation in popular music, the successor to ragtime, jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock 'n' roll. All of those forms emerged out of African-American culture and changed the tastes of Americans of all races. Hip-hop also attracted a large audience of young white listeners, but it did not come to dominate public consciousness the way its predecessors had. That has less to do with the particular qualities of hip-hop than with the fragmentation of the market. Most Americans didn't hear the music routinely, so it remained foreign to their ears.

Early hip-hop stars like Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy were at least as critical of American society as Dylan ever was, and they led some commentators to imagine hip-hop artists as authentic and politically significant spokespeople for poor, urban African-Americans. But in the last 10 years or so, even though hip-hop artists like Jay-Z are popular music's most innovative contributors, the form has become less political, and its performers seem less culturally central.

In a different, more unified market, hip-hop stars might have become leaders like James Brown. As it is, popular music seems headed back to the margins of cultural life, and that is a loss for all of us.

Instead of the CNN of the inner city, rap gave into the same self-indulgent excesses of 70s and 80s metal and hair bands (self-mythologizing violence and misogyny). Instead of Dylan and James Brown, we've gotten Poison and Ratt with a beat. Indie rock on the other hand is a boutique musical form like Jazz was in the 60s and 70s. Ambitious, distant, unconcerned. Big music for small crowds. Micro-stars for a micro-culture. For now, I'm all right with that.

Rockies 4 Yankees 3

Colorado completes the 3 game sweep of the once surging Yanks. While New York falls all the way back to 10 1/2 games behind Boston, the Rockies are now one of the hottest teams in baseball. Just 3 1/2 games behind San Diego, if they can survive their upcoming road trip they might, dare I say it, contend. The tide is turning.

Typically this is the time of year when Colorado begins to swoon and commence it's inevitable dive toward the bottom of the standings. But if they can hold on, we may look back at this series as the real turning point.

Facts All Come With Points Of View

Facts won't do what I want them to!

PZ Myers makes better sport of the subject of the LA Times article on Conservapedia than I can, but I do want to quote just one section. An article on Hillary Clinton unsurprisingly asserts (without supporting evidence) that she may suffer from a mental disorder:

Schlafly calls the armchair psychology "borderline in acceptability" for his site, but he defends the Clinton article on balance as "an objective, bias-free piece from a conservative perspective."

The whole point of his encyclopedia, he said, is to provide a different angle on the facts — ones that a student researcher wouldn't necessarily find on Wikipedia, or in the school library.

[Emphasis Mine]

I didn't quote this bit for the Clintion-bashing. You'd be surprised if they didn't just call it the "I Hate Clintion"-wiki.

No, the hilarious part to me is that he clearly doesn't understand what "bias-free" means. A "conservative perspective" is by definition a "bias" (a "fixed attitude" so to speak). Secondly, isn't the intention to "provide a different angle on the facts" the sort of relativism that conservatives despise. The whole thing exemplifies the fundamentalist panic response of postmodernity. Or, to quote Conservapedia:

Truth is a "social construct" rather than empirically provable

Republicans Like the Spots Just Fine

The rigidity of conservative philosophy extends to the entire party. From the New York Observer:

Had they been more honest, they would have acknowledged that they had anointed a minimally qualified man with limited intellectual skills. He had voiced token support for their causes, but his narrow experience and sheltered life had left him unprepared for the intellectual and personal demands of the Presidency.

Unable to marshal facts and persuade a skeptical public on Iraq, immigration or Social Security, he resorted to emotional pleas and empty buzzwords. When his advisors failed him, he had no independent source of knowledge or analytical skills to guide him back on course. Moreover, the prized trait of Bush loyalty quickly lapsed into stubborn cronyism; conservatives, like the rest of the public, reacted in horror as Bush advanced unqualified friends like Harriet Miers and Alberto Gonzales.

This experience might have chastened the conservative establishment, but they—like the Bourbon kings who remembered everything and learned nothing—are on the verge of doing it again.

First, they insist on ideological purity, attempting to define Rudy Giuliani out of the mainstream of the party. Then they goad a smart, reform-minded former governor, Mitt Romney, into becoming a human pretzel, cheering as he contorts to adopt their pet social views while ruining his viability.

Bush is not the cause of anything. He is merely a symptom of the people who elected and supported him through one mess after another. And they will do it again.

Writing Like A Klingon

J. Hull has a funny article on the problem of writing from the Klingon point-of-view:

One of the fundamentals of Klingon language is the concept that there is no verb “to be.” No is, est, ist, etre, esta, etc. In Klingon, nothing is; everything does.

If you’re a fan of Star Trek, or even if you’ve happened to catch one of the movies, you’ve probably noticed that these guys are very externally oriented. No matter what situation or what potentially hostile alien entity they run into, they’re always the ones to suggest “shoot first and ask questions later.”

"there are several words meaning “to fight” or “to clash against”, each having a different degree of intensity. There is a plethora of words relating to warfare and weaponry and also a great variety of curses (cursing is considered a fine art in Klingon culture). "

While you could see Klingons struggling to come up with new ideas or envisioning some new plan that could help them, changing their nature or pretending to be something they are not seems impossibly foreign to their natures. This isn’t to say that you couldn’t write a Be-er Klingon into a story — in fact, it might actually be interesting to see. But when you’re raised in a world that says “The window smashed Worf” instead of “Worf smashed the window,” chances are you’re going to prefer to solve things externally.

So don’t be a Klingon when it comes to writing movies. Klingons make awful screenwriters. Well, not completely awful. I’m sure their plays are viscerally exciting, but every story would have the same kind of externally motivated Main Character. There would be no Casablanca, no Romeo and Juliet, no Unforgiven, and no Hamlet. A culture without these kinds of stories is just sad.

You can't write if you have no interior life or the ability to understand the hearts and minds of other people. Of course that doesn't stop hollywood from churning out one empty headed action movie after another. And I'm pretty sure Klingons did write 300.

Ipod Random Ten

Random ten with a music snob's comments:

1. "Digital Love" by Daft Punk
   You realize this was in a Gap commercial don't you?
   
2. "Don't Stop" by The Stone Roses
   Art Brut wouldn't approve.
   
3. "Mile End" by Pulp
   From Trainspotting. Soundtracks are sooooooo uncool.
   
4. "Blinded by the Sun" by the Seahorses
   The embarrassing spawn of the Stone Roses.
5. "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1" by The Flaming Lips
   Wayne Coyne hates Nirvana! But the Lips' last record kind of sucked.
   
6. "Closer to the Heart" by Rush
   Where do I even begin? Canadian prog metal.
   
7. "Rectify" by Beth Orton
   Warmed over Joni Mitchell
   
8. "So Hard" by Pet Shop Boys
   At least Daft Punk has the robot costumes. Wait, what am I saying?
   
9. "Big Mouth Strikes Again (Live)" by the Smiths
   AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHH!!! I'd like to smash every tooth in your iPod!
   
10. "'Round Midnight" by Thelonious Monk
    Nice segue. Nothing pretentious about suddenly switching over to Jazz. Nothing at all. Yeesh.
    

The Immigration Debate Explodes Its Own Head

Megan McArdle (a problematic libertarian and blogginghead), throws a nice stink-bomb into the immigration debate. Her argument: if the problem is that immigrants refuse to assimilate into the larger American society then why do we tolerate native anti-assimilationist cultures like the Amish? Her answer: because the Amish are cute, harmless, and white while Mexicans are not. That is, it's the racism, stupid. You can practically hear the collective heads of conservatives everywhere exploding simultaneously. The comments to her blog post are a must read if you want to understand the American mindset on the issue.

To me this another lose-lose situation like gun control. You can talk about legal vs. illegal immigration (and gun ownership) till the cows come home, but the laws are easy to get around and only penalize the law-abiding. If it was possible to control Mexican immigration, it would be controlled. The incentives for illegal immigration far outweigh the risk and penalties. Meanwhile, Canadians come and go without a care in the world because it's in their interests to play by the rules (I assume). Otherwise we're looking at a Children of Men-style dystopia with jail cells on the streets and deportation zones from San Diego to South Texas.

My own response to all of this is far less wholesome:

1) Isn't the nation state sort of an outmoded 19th century concept by now? We have a global economy with global networks. International corporations have staff that coordinate on a daily basis between North America, Europe, and Asia. Why are we so consumed with national sovereignty and borders? Shouldn't all borders be open? Won't the future best be served by the destruction of all maps?

2) Whatever happened to the "go west, young man" spirit? Most Americans are descended from restless immigrants who left home and country to seek a better life elsewhere. Why then do so many of us consider the current US borders to be the terminus of all human history? Shouldn't we be focusing on and encouraging massive emigration of Americans and American culture to other parts of the world. If I want to live in Brazil or Scotland or Hong Kong, shouldn't I be able to do just that? Wouldn't the world's troubles be solved by a little friendly colonialism cultural exchange?

(Those who live within the Culture should be accorded full benefits. Those who do not care to assimilate will be granted pocket-nation status without benefits. Those who care to bring war against us will be dealt with by Special Circumstances. See Iain M. Banks for full details.)

In my opinion, America is a state of mind. It is a constitution. It is neither the people nor the land (it is especially not a religion). We should be trying to extend it's reach at the top rather than worrying about who gets included at the bottom. This should also be our cultural response to the failed gunboat diplomacy of neo-conservatism. Ex-pats of the world unite! Emigration now!

[Via Andrew Sullivan]

The President and His Spots

A pretty decent post from Glenn Greenwald on the overly simplistic explanations and justifications found in political discourse. He writes:

In many ways, those who think that George Bush personally or the Bush movement generally can be quickly and easily explained away with trite slogans and all-encompassing cartoon theories ("he's evil and there is nothing else to say" or "the whole thing is a grand plan to enrich his corporate cronies and that is all there is to it") are driven by the same temptations. The need to find some simplistic, overarching theory to explain the whole world is powerful and universal, but such simplicity is rarely accurate.

This is why I don't go in for any kind of conspiracy theories with regard to history. On the one hand it boils things down to a single cause, which is never the case, and on the other hand it demands a level of competence and secrecy which human beings are just not capable of achieving.

I don't believe that the president is evil, but I do believe that he and I have incompatible belief systems. I also don't believe that anything that has happened in Iraq serves a hidden agenda; it's basic mismanagement. He misunderstands every situation because his binary approach to the world (good v. evil) doesn't allow for complexity.

As a side note, it is human nature to assume other people's biases and beliefs are motivated by secondary desires ("he's just saying that to win votes" or "he's just doing things to help the rich"), while we consider our own biases and beliefs to be pure and untainted. We believe something because it's true, they believe something because it serves their purposes.

But in human psychology, our motivations and desires are always fluid and changing. It's our fixed attitudes and biases that form our belief system, and in western culture we tend to believe that these things are not flexible or subject to change. Justice. Truth. Democracy. For us, these are Platonic ideals, transcendent and immutable absolutes. For Bush, Good and Evil are also universal, and not subject to change or discussion. The problem with this is that these sorts of locked ideas and biases can, at times, cause us to make the same mistakes over and over again. For Bush it is not his motivations that are the problem but his binary thought processes. These sorts of biases are very difficult for a person to change. These sorts of worldview level beliefs are locked deep in the psyche and require generational change that is beyond the individual. As the saying goes, a leopard cannot change its spots, but you can get a new leopard.

In the end, Bush's motivations, his sincerity, are beside the point. It is his core values and beliefs that are incompatible with and insufficient for his role as president in a time of crisis. He can't abandon his Capitalist Christianist views, and therefore the U.S. desperately needs to find a new leopard in 2008.

Hell is Other People's Musical Taste

An article at the Guardian (via Salon) about overrated albums, according to a few contemporary musicians.

Here's the list:

• Tupac Shakur - All Eyez On Me
• Nirvana - Nevermind
• The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds
• The Stone Roses - The Stone Roses
• The Strokes - Is This It
• Television - Marquee Moon
• The Beatles - Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band
• Abba - Arrival
• Arcade Fire - The Neon Bible
• Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon
• The Doors - LA Woman
• The Smiths - Meat Is Murder
• Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band - Trout Mask Replica
• Velvet Underground and Nico

Not all of these albums are worth defending (The Doors, Abba), and some of the commentors just about get it right as far as why some records are good without being as great as they are reputed to be (Beach Boys, The Strokes, The Smiths, Nirvana). But mostly they either completely mischaracterize what the albums are about, or just attack the album as a proxy for attacking other people who like the record, or people who told them that they should like the record.

Tjinder Singh of the very mediocre Cornershop apparently has not heard anything from Pink Floyd other than "Money" (and therefore misses the point of the record overall. The theme of the record is Time and Mortality).

Ian Williams of Battles (a band I like) doesn't like the Strokes because they were "rich kids from uptown New York" unlike Ian Williams of Battles.

Alex Kapranos of the overrated Franz Ferdinand doesn't like Television because "people pontificate over the album." Darn those people and their pontificating.

Eddie Argos of the obscure yet overrated Art Brut dislikes The Stone Roses because:

They're totally overrated. Plus they covered Scarborough Fair. I don't understand why people still play their music in nightclubs - it makes me really angry. When I'm drunk in a club I usually end up arguing with the DJ who's playing them. The Stone Roses were an awful, awful band. They were uncharismatic, their lyrics are nonsensical and their music is dreary. Also, we have them to thank for Oasis, although at least Noel Gallagher is funny and Liam is a bit of a pop star. The Roses make me think of kids older than me swaggering around with bowl haircuts and affecting Manchester accents. It makes my skin crawl. And all their fans are so smug: "Oh, you don't understand it." I do understand it! It's ridiculous that it regularly gets voted in at the top of those "greatest British album ever" polls. They spawned a new thug-boy pop culture.

So apparently he's the only kid in the history of the world to have been picked on in High School by thuggish faux-Manchunians. Darn those Stone Roses fans and their swaggering ways and bowl haircuts! It's like he grew up with the cast of A Clockwork Orange. No wonder he's so punk.

Anyway, musical taste is very personal and we don't like having other people push their tastes on us. We also don't like music from people we don't like to begin with. That's the reason I don't like Reggae, Jam bands, and the Grateful Dead to this day; all those annoying trustafarians and their dirty, dirty ways.

As for me, The Smiths, Pink Floyd, and the Stone Roses will probably be in my record collection forever.

Saturday was Bloomsday

The 103rd anniversary of June 16, 1904. Go read some Ulysses if, like me, you forgot.

NYRB Reviews Falling Man

The struggle to make sense of the events of 9/11 goes on. It was a black swan; beyond meaning, and beyond metaphor.

The New York Review of Books has this to say about Don DeLillo's new book, Falling Man:

DeLillo the novelist prepared us for September 11, but he did not prepare himself for how such an episode might, in the way of denouements, instantly fly beyond the reach of his own powers. In a moment, the reality of the occasion seems to have burst the ripeness of his style, and he truly struggles in this book to say anything that doesn't sound in a small way like a warning that comes too late. Reading Falling Man, one feels that September 11 is an event that is suddenly far ahead of him, far beyond what he knows, and so an air of tentative rehearsal resounds in an empty hall. What is a prophet once his fiery word becomes deed? What does he have to say? What is left of the paranoid style when all its suspicions come true? Of course, a first-rate literary intelligence can eventually meet a world where reality acknowledges the properties of his style by turning them into parody, and in these circumstances, which are DeLillo's with this particular novel, the original novelist may be said to be a person quietened by his own genius. This is another American story—the story of Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles—and it gives us a clue to the weakness of Falling Man.

"What is left of the paranoid style when all its suspicions come true?"

Prometeus Unbound

This is a pretty cool video (via Table of Malcontents):

A Cautionary Tale

Now this is scary:

About a dozen years ago, an old friend of mine was told by his daughter that she was going to get married. This suited him fine, but he balked at pouring untold thousands of dollars down the drain of a full-dress wedding. "I'll tell you what," he said to her. "I'll give you a choice: You can have a wedding, or you can have $30,000 to help you get started on your new life." Without a moment's hesitation, she astonished him -- and me, too, when he told me the story -- by replying, "I'll take the wedding."

It's like watching Deal or No Deal. Take the cash you fool!

Fantastic Four

The tomato meter is at 27%. I think I'll be better off curling up with a stack of back issues.

Update:

Another good reason to skip the film:

For Jessie Morrison, movies are a way for life. The 29-year-old University of Memphis student publishes a local movie magazine, has written screenplays, and until recently, worked as a projectionist at the Malco Ridgeway Four.

But a negative review Morrison wrote that was published last Friday on "Ain't It Cool News," a movie gossip website, has landed Morrison in hot water with both a movie studio and his employer.

"They did what they thought was best to track me down," Morrison said in an interview Thursday.

The review was about the movie "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer," which opens Friday. Owen viewed the movie at a private screening he worked as a projectionist for. He then wrote a critical review of the film, calling it the "Fantastic Four Travesty."

Movie studios are so classy.

Cavs 82 Spurs 83

How much more painful would it have been if the Cavaliers had won the game just to extend their misery? Let's just put it behind us shall we?

Now the question is, who can the Cavs add for next year's rematch?

Forget Black Swans

I think this article kind of misses the point about Black Swans. From my point of view, a black swan is something that could not be predicted and is not repeatable but has a major impact: Microsoft, 9/11, Shakespeare, The Beatles. It is pure meaning but lacks all utility. You can't look at what the Black Swan has done, study it, follow the steps, and expect to arrive at the same place they did. The trouble is that our culture places too much emphasis on Black Swans and makes them the norm. If you were as smart as Bill Gates, you'd be a billionaire; 9/11 was a wake-up call to our nation and we must act before it happens again; if you could write as well as Shakespeare, you would be a genius; if you were as good as the Beatles you would be rich and famous. None of this is true.

So what's useful about Black Swans is that once you recognize them, you can pretty much ignore them. They teach you not to dwell too deeply on things that are strange or beyond your contro.l Instead of cursing your bad luck, you can get on with your life.

Terry Eagleton's Meaning of Life

Terry Eagleton gets on my last nerve. He is essentially someone who is very bitter about postmodernism because of the fact that it leaves no room for the hardcore revolutionary Marxism he prefers and has basically been trying to get back at it ever since. His brand of thought is to postmodernism what Intelligent Design is to Evolution. He's not trying to prove anything, he's just muddying the waters.

So in Salon today we have his new essay stretched to book length proportions and an eager reviewer ready to give him the benefit of the doubt. The most annoying part of the review come when the reviewer takes on his strawman version of the postmodernist as an ultra-constructivist:

This "constructivism" is a form of the "relativism" that cultural conservatives in this county love to denounce, so some might be surprised to see the left-wing Eagleton condemning it, too. (In fact, Eagleton has been criticizing deconstructionism and its spinoffs for decades.) Eagleton strenuously objects to the constructivist rejection of absolute or inherent meanings. "Nobody actually believes this," he remarks of constructivism, and he's right about that in more ways than he realizes. Outside of academia, hardly anyone even pretends to believe in this stuff, so seeing it eviscerated isn't as important to the civilian reader as Eagleton seems to think. Of course we all realize that, to use Eagleton's example, "it just would not work for us to 'construct' tigers as coy and cuddly"; that's idiotic. Complicated identities like gender roles are another matter; we know they're at least partly configurable because they've changed in the course of history.

Yes well, few people pretend to believe this stuff, because no one argues things this way. No one would argue that the "essential nature" of a tiger is constructed in our minds. No one argues for a world conjured out of thin air by language.

But we could argue that the meaning of a tiger is a cultural construct. A killer, a monster, or a big cat? How your culture views them will tell you a lot about whether you are more likely to hunt them to extinction or grant them protected status in a nature preserve. Even the reviewer gets confused between what gender roles are (cultural constructs) and how that's different from whether one is anatomically male or female (your essential nature as it were).

The review then continues with:

Eagleton goes on to cite the scholar Frank Farrell, who has linked the postmodern insistence on an infinitely malleable reality to roots in early Protestantism. The old Catholic idea that things have "essences" or "determinate natures" could not be reconciled philosophically with the doctrine of an all-powerful God; any given thing's inherent nature would limit what God could do with it. "God's arbitrary will," as Eagleton puts it, cannot be constrained, so things can only be what they are "because of his say-so, not because of themselves." In this belief Eagleton sees the seeds of the 20th century's "cult of the will."

Which I guess is Eagleton's way of undermining the deconstructionist's argument from Platonism and Logocentrism, but again all it really does is muddy the waters. The idea that deconstruction begins with some obscure branch of Protestantism is absurd. I couldn't even Google Frank Farrell to find out what he actually says. The truth is that deconstruction begins right in the heart of western thought with Derrida's astonishing reading of Plato and the New Testament. The cult of the will, of course, is pure Nietzsche.

It just goes on and on with one bad idea after another:

To Eagleton, postmodernism, with its repudiation of inherent or "deep" meanings, is, for all its revolutionary rhetoric, a variation on the same theme. To get back to the question driving his book, the motto "Life is what you make it" may sound banal, but it reeks of a similar hubris. It "reflects an individualist bias common to the modern age" by insisting that we all find our own meaning of life in a personal, private realm. But if meaning has its own roots in language, then claiming this, Eagleton argues, is like claiming that everyone gets to make up their own personal meanings for words.

In terms of postmodernism this paragraph is complete nonsense. You can see the "individualist bias" in the Decadents and in some strains of Modernism, but in postmodernism there is a very clear notion that our own identities are culturally constructed, and that it is very difficult to be the master of one's destiny when your own sense of the world is mediated through your culture.

His real problem with the sort of individualism that he incorrectly extends to postmodernism, is that it rejects generalization and universal values. And without universal values there's no global proletariat, no class struggle, no revolution, and no Marxist utopia. Even if you're sympathetic to his call for social activism and the moral value of working for the sick, the poor, and the imprisoned, this is no way to argue for it.

So fine, "meaning is in fact the product of a transaction between us and reality," as Eagleton is quoted. No one ever said it wasn't. The real issue is what happens in that transaction, and what meaning you come up with. If the world is a text we read for meaning, we lose our ability to make predictions and vice versa. Perhaps philosophers should think less like readers and more like authors.

Author 2.0

An article at the Times about software for writers. And a good response from J. Hull at Daily Dramatica.

I just wish these sorts of tools did not need to be defended so vigorously, but the Times writer sort of misses the point of why the tools are useful and also what it is they actually do. First they are useful for the same reason that notebooks, and post-it notes, and white boards, and bulletin boards, and sketch pads and every other tool you might use to brainstorm ideas are useful: they get your ideas out of your head and into the world. As any writer knows once you start the process, your ideas immediately begin to reshape themselves, connect and disconnect to and from other things in surprising ways. It is all part of the process. So if you can do that on your computer, why not?

Secondly, this sort of software does not guide you toward ever more reductive outcomes until you have some pre-fabricated "choose your own adventure story" at the end. If only! I'd have a lot more finished stories if it did. The real issue is that the software often gives you more story notes than you know what to do with, and opens up a whole nightmare of where your plotting is weak, your ideas incomplete, and your characters one-dimensional. It actually makes you work harder.

Two Dramatica-centric points:

First, I very rarely use the actual software (though I have it), and prefer to write things out in my notebooks the old fashioned way. I do however use the Dramatica theory books to help me sort things out and keep my thoughts structured and organized.

Second, when I do use the software I do not like the question tool, and usually go straight for the Story Engine so I can get a good look at how all the pieces are fitting together (or how they are failing to fit together).

Catharsis and the Impossibility of Closure in Horror

Interesting chat about horror movies with Adam Lowenstein:

CP: When I talked to Roth recently, he said he holds hope in the fact that soldiers in Iraq have thanked him for Hostel, for giving them "tools" in much the same way that you're talking about. A word like catharsis seems insufficient to describe the effect that you and Roth are talking about.

Lowenstein: I agree with you. I think that catharsis is among the least valuable assets that one could gain from a horror film. Because catharsis is really all about...

CP: Closure, right?

Lowenstein: Closure, yes. And forgetting—"getting over" something. What these horror films remind us, of course, is that the trauma is never really over—that we haven't remembered it enough before we can forget it. I think the real value of the horror film is to remind us that catharsis is too easy, too artificial, and too closed. We know from history that the events we think we've passed through and gotten over and understood come back to haunt us in all kinds of ways. Horror's dark gift is to remind us that the tragic events we think we've gotten over and understood always come back to haunt us.

It's old-fashioned Return of the Repressed kind of stuff. What we find terrifying at any given time is that which we most want to pretend doesn't exist. It's those fractures and nasty unspoken secrets that haunt us and can't ever let us go.

The Return of Top Chef

What does it mean when Top Chef is about the most exciting thing happening on TV? The show comes on and I'm hypnotized. Maybe it's the food. Or maybe it's Padma and the octopuses.

Sonic Youth - Daydream Nation Reissue

Pitchfork gives the reissue a 10.0 and says:

I don't expect to hear too many complaints about the rating above. Daydream Nation is a great uniter: You'd be hard pressed to find many fans of indie rock who don't have some love for this record. That's partly because this record is great, sure-- that's one boring reason-- but it's also because this record is one of a handful that helped shape the notion of what American indie rock can potentially mean. It's almost a tautology: Indie fans love Daydream Nation because loving stuff like Daydream Nation is part of how we define what indie fans are.

There's something to that circular logic but not a lot. I sometimes liked this record, and I definitely liked the people who liked it, but I never loved it, nor do I think it defines everything that's come after it in the last 19 years. For some, indie rock is becoming defined by nostalgia for skate culture, slackerisms and Dinosaur Jr. And the ironies of Sonic Youth's lost youth were already being played out when Goo hit the shelves. To celebrate Daydream Nation is really to celebrate ourselves. For we too were once young, raw, unformed, energetic, ineloquent and direction-less. It is the sound of a million Converse high-tops with nothing to do and nowhere to go. There was never any danger of a teenage riot because in the world of Sonic Youth nothing is really at stake, and there's nothing to rebel against except our own sleepy complacency.

Cavs 72 Spurs 75

The Cavs played harder, but not better and certainly not well enough be anything more than competitive at home against San Antonio. LeBron will be the goat as he gave the ball to Varejao who inexplicably tried to be the hero and missed. They needed to be better in every phase of the game and it just didn't happen. Even the big fourth quarter eluded them. This series is ovvvvver.

God is a Metaphor

PZ Myers with a nice blog post that subtly turns into an even better essay on humanism and literature:

[Stanley] Fish confuses the rejection of the supernatural pretext with the rejection of the depth of real feeling. He is mistaken. In my case, I read his superficial theological gloss with loathing because I see him substituting the wishful thinking of millennia of shamans and priests for the reality of the human condition—his conciliatory apologies are support for generations of lies. He confuses the efforts of the writers of those texts to grapple with suffering and doubt with the legitimacy of the religious answer; I can respect the beauty of religious literature and the struggle put into it while at the same time realizing that falling back on the will of an imaginary being is an admission of failure. I don't consider the believers to be simple-minded—I think life can be hard, and that the great minds of history have endeavored to articulate some sense of meaning to pain and beauty, because that's what human minds do. But I also think that passing the buck and inventing an ineffable universal will as an ultimate cause is a seductive trap, one that Fish has readily fallen into, where we try to project our mental state onto the universe as a whole. St Paul's anguish was real, but the supernatural entity to which he directed it was not. When an atheist rejects the entity, it does not mean the anguish is denied.

God is just a metaphor for all that is universal in the human experience (the terror and pity of tragedy). We don't need religion to find meaning; we need art.

Cavaliers 92 Spurs 103

I hate to admit it, but King Kaufman is absolutely right this time. The Cavs should not have benched LeBron in the first quarter. King thinks this vindicates his assessment from the NCAA tournament, but I'm of the opinion that fouls and clock management are completely different in the NBA than they are in College.

As much of a laugher as the game was, the Cavs outscored San Antone 30-14 in the 4th quarter negating most of the enormous half time lead the Spurs had built. More importantly, after he returned in the 2nd quarter, James only had one foul for the remainder of the game, so foul trouble was never an issue. If Cleveland had let him play in the first and managed to keep the score close (instead of falling behind 28-17), it would have been a real ball game.

The real problem for the Cavs was the surprisingly poor play of big man Ilgauskas, the soccer-mad shenanigans of Varejao who seemed to spend most of his time flopping to the ground (and finished with 8 points and four personal fouls for his efforts), and the inability of Gibson to get going with his outside shooting (though he finished with a respectable 15 points).

Now the Cavs must win all 3 in Cleveland starting Tuesday night. They needed to do that anyway, so they should just stay the course and learn from their mistakes the way they did against Detroit. This thing isn't over yet, but it really will be if they lose at home.

Richard Rorty

Rorty, the philosopher of politics and pragmatism, has died at age 75.

Here's the New York Times Obit.

Meaning and Prediction

I was wondering what the Dramatica guides had to say about catharsis in stories, and it turns out the theory doesn't have much to say at all. From Chris Huntley's perspective, most story processes are either Post-Aristotelian or based on Campbell's Hero's Journey, or both. He argues that Dramatica is something different altogether:

An early axiom determined in the development of the Dramatica theory was this: If you look for Meaning, you cannot Predict. If you look for Prediction, you cannot find meaning. In other words, you can try to find meaning in a work OR you can predict how to put it together—but not at the same time from within the same context. Why? The short answer is that we use one as the given in order to evaluate the other. When looking for meaning, we assume a particular story structure. When looking for structure, we assume a particular meaning (author's intent). It's tied to the same reason we can see light as particles and waves, just not at the same time within a single context. One aspect defines the basis for the others. Story structure provides the basis for seeing meaning in the story. Meaning provides the basis for understanding and manipulating structure in a story.

In other words, meaning is tied to the audience's experience of the story while structure is tied to the author's perspective of the story. The audience perspective allows a synthesis of the underlying story elements to discover its "meaning." The author's perspective assumes a given meaning (author's intent) to manipulate the arrangement of the story's structure and dynamics. It's all a matter of context.

For example, Robert McKee approaches story from the audience's perspective whereas Dramatica approaches it from the author's perspective. McKee speaks of author and audience but always with an eye on the story's meaning—a view only available to someone looking at story from the inside. This view is great for understanding audience reception but limited when trying to fix story structure problems. In this regard McKee is in the same boat as Syd Field, Christopher Vogler, Michael Hauge, Lajos Egri and probably most all other story mages.

One major difference between Dramatica and more traditional story theories seems to be this:

• Dramatica works with story from the objective author's view that allows writers to clearly manipulate elements of a story's structure. From this author's perspective, it is difficult to find the meaning of specific author's choices.
  
• Many other story theories work with story from the subjective audience's view that allows writers to see the meaning of flow and elements of the story. From this audience's perspective, it is difficult to predict which story elements are essential and how they should go together.

So when we talk about genre and aesthetics, we're really looking at story meaning from the audience perspective. We're trying to write as readers rather than as writers. As a result we lose our predictive edge. To understand the essence of a story, what differentiates it from others, and how, as a writer, we can bring something unique to the table. Most story processes, including Aristotles's Poetics are really descriptions of art and not genuine instruction manuals.

From the writer's perspective, the challenge is to look at your work like a recipe, or a code block. You know what you want the outcome to be, a cake or an application, so now you have to look at what elements you'll need to include to achieve that effect. To borrow from business-speak, it's beginning with the end in mind in order to predict a result. If I do this, my story will come out like that. If I include these genre elements, my story will come out like Close Encounters. If I change this, this, and that, it will be more like Signs.

The challenge is to think about story elements as though they were DNA, and predict the effect of mutations on this animal or that.

In Your Blog, Killing Your Lolcats

I had been struggling to decide what I thought about the whole LOL Cats meme-omenon. Cute? Stupid? Witty? The antithesis of wit? It was consistent enough that I thought there just had to be something more to it. And as a developer, I did get a kick out of the LOLCats programming language.

Fortunately the Table of Malcontents has come to set me straight:

LOLCats isn't funny: just because Boing Boing just heard of a forum meme that was run into the ground by Something Awful three years ago does not make it a cultural phenomenon. But the Laugh Out Loud Cats, by Ape Lad? Genius.

Can't argue with the guy who brings me Cthulu Cthursday every week. Glad that's over.

Horror and the Tragic Sense of Life

Previously I'd been thinking about the horror genre as including stories in which one or more elements in the story have gone horribly wrong: there is something wrong with the physical world; there is something wrong with actions and behaviors; there is something wrong with the way we are perceiving and understanding things; there is something wrong with people's attitudes and sensibilities regarding life and the world.

In most types of stories we focus on the protagonist's efforts to solve the problem and restore things to their original state, but in horror the emphasis is on the damage done. If E.T. kills Eliot, E.T. is a horror story. If Cary Grant murders Audrey Hepburn, Charade is a Giallo. Horror is what happens when the hero in a Fantasy or Suspense story (or any other genre) fails to reach his goal. Horror is where the conventions are turned upside down and darkness replaces the light.

So this got me thinking about drama and tragedy and how they differ from Horror. After all in drama things often go poorly and in a tragedy the hero dies in the end. Hamlet is a story that begins with a supernatural intrusion and ends with the death of its hero. Yet the play is not considered horror, and indeed there isn't anything at all scary about it. What's the difference?

In Hamlet it's pretty easy to see that the ghost is not an intrusion but the memory that sets him on his path. More importantly over the course of the play we see Hamlet struggling with his own personal feelings and inner demons which are ultimately the source of his self-destruction (the play's obviously more complicated than that, but we'll let it slide). So perhaps in drama we see characters dealing with personal crises, and in horror the crisis is alien and impersonal? Comes from somewhere else? It's not clear.

The first thing to do is clarify what a Tragedy actually does. I turn to my old copy of A Handbook To Literature, Sixth Edition by C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon:

In drama a tragedy recounts a causally related series of events in the life of a person of significance, culminating in an unhappy CATASTROPHE, the whole treated with dignity and seriousness.

I like the way they pack this sentence with lots of provocative terms. First is the "unhappy catastrophe" which we've noted is found in both horror and tragedy. But, in tragedy, the story is treated with "dignity and seriousness." This sounds stuffy, but it appeals to me because in a previous blog I noted that the four ur-genres are non-fiction, comedy, drama, entertainment where drama is the serious player nestled between funny and fun. So tragedy is an unhappy catastrophe treated seriously, while horror (as genre fiction) is an unhappy catastrophe treated as entertainment?

Let's continue,

According to Aristotle, who gave in the Poetics a normative definition of tragedy, illustrated by Greek plays, with Sophocles's Oedipus Rex as the best example, the purpose of a tragedy is to arouse pity and fear and thus to produce in the audience a CATHARSIS of these emotions.

(We're getting to the bottom of things now! You can't go back an further than Aristotle.)

Here we reach that dangerous and poorly understood word catharsis. What is meant by the arousal of pity and fear? And how does one achieve the "proper purgation" of these emotions? Is it meditative or ecstatic? Are we called upon to pagan sacrifice by proxy? Is the tragic hero a stand-in for the fallen and resurrected god? We'd be much closer to horror if we were. But no, this is erasing the clear differences between the two because we don't experience the death of Hamlet in the way we experience the terror of a ghost story.

"Aristotle has not defined pity and terror. I have," says Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I will defer to Joyce and his alter ego for a better understanding of the tragic emotion:

Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer.

Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.

I have separated the two sentences to make them easier to read and to highlight the elegance of their parallel structures. In both, Joyce emphasizes that these feelings are intended to stop us dead in our tracks so that we'll see things with utmost clarity. Second the audience is meant to stand as witnesses for we are "in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings." The terror and pity we feel is not reactionary, it is not an unfocused response, but a clear understanding that death is universal and inescapable. This fact is meant to unite us. It is meant to release us from fear and sentimentality by demonstrating that even kings and demi-gods suffer the fate of the common mortal man. With pity we empathize with the sufferer because he does not deserve his fate. With terror we experience the knowledge that we share his fate as does all humanity.

Next Stephen (Joyce) attempts to clarify his position:

The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it. You see I use the word arrest. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is.

As I noted above, the power of catharsis is its static nature. It does not take us from point a to point b. It forces us to stop and focus. He continues:

The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing.

So now we move from drama and tragedy, to other forms of art in which instead of terror and pity we move in one of two directions, toward desire or loathing:

Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts.

These are poles of attraction and repulsion. We are either drawn toward something or pushed away from it. In pornography we are enticed, in didacticism we are taught a lesson.

The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.

Working backwards, we see that Stephen (Joyce) is arguing that stories in general inspire in us either desire or loathing. They represent wish fulfillment or inspire disgust. In tragedy we are elevated to a level above base reactions and achieve a sense of empathy, a connection between our selves and the whole of humanity.

But what of horror? Does it achieve this purifying state? Is its catharsis static or kinetic? Do we pity the victim or does he fill us with loathing? Do we share the terror of mortality, or do we desire images of death?

Here is Michel Houellebecq quoting H.P. Lovecraft:

I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes.

From this bold and decadent perspective, humanity is loathsome and its extinction is desired. Human suffering is not meaningful because humanity has no meaning. They are a great cosmic joke, an accident, owing their existence to those alien forces and cosmic gods that "leer down from the external universes."

What we have in horror is not tragedy but an inversion of the purifying catharsis brought about by pity and terror. It is an esthetization of loathing and desire in which the mind is simultaneously drawn to what disgusts it and repelled by what inspires lust in it (attraction to violence, hostility to eroticism, for example). Horror desires the suffering of the human sufferer and loathes that which unites us in the secret cause (our common mortality).

In the end catharsis is replaced by awe, the feeling of wonder and dread that accompanies our encounters with monstrous creatures and monstrous deeds. Pity and terror bring us in touch with the experiences of others, wonder and dread are felt only for ourselves. It represents the perfectibility of selfishness, the desire to stand apart from the mass of humanity. In its kinetic form it is simultaneously self-loving and self-loathing. It represents reclusiveness and dreams, a withdrawl into a world of personal fantasy. As Hoellebecq writes, "Those who love life do not read." More specifically, those who love life, do not read horror.

This may all sound very unkind, but I am not trying to criticize horror. I am trying to describe it as accurately as possible. Not just its escapist thrills and terrifying beauty but its misogyny and pornographic brutality. Horror as a genre is a failed form of fantasy where the monsters win. As art, horror is a failed form of tragedy where catharsis does not release us from suffering but opens us up to the dread and wonder of "whatsoever is grave and constant." It does not purify, it corrupts.

That which could unite us is replaced with the knowledge that the universe is cold and indifferent, and that death is a solitary journey into nothingness. There is terror (for ourselves), but there is no pity.

Hoellebecq writes:

The paradox, however is that we prefer [Lovecraft's] universe, hideous as it is, to our own reality. In this, we are precisely the readers that Lovecraft anticipated. We read his tales with the same exact disposition as that which prompted him to write them. Satan or Nyarlathotep, either one will do, but we will not tolerate another moment of realism. And, truth be told, given his prolonged acquaintance with the disgraceful turns of our ordinary sins, the value of Satan's currency has dropped a little. Better Nyarlathotep, ice-cold, evil, and inhuman. Subb-haqqua Nyarlathotep!

Mogwai - "7:25"

Salon has a link to the new track from Mogwai. It's both very beautiful and very boring. Post-rock extended to its logical proggy conclusion. And yet, I want to hear it again.

A New Low at AICN

Harry reviews Hostel 2 very positively which should come as no surprise. The fascinating thing is that the Talkbacks fight back, criticizing his support for these kinds of movies and taking him to task for his defensiveness, personal investment, and lame self-justifications.

The amount of effort that so-called Horror fans put into rationalizing their enjoyment of gore and violence tells me that there's something seriously wrong. And to use real crimes and recent kidnappings and murders of young women as supporting evidence is just evil.

Morning iPod Anarchist Miracle

"Hideous Towns" by the Sundays into "Ramble On" by Led Zeppelin. The bass lines and strummity strums fade into one another very nicely.

Analysis of Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows"

So far in my attempt to find the building blocks of the horror genre, I've been looking at just the overall story level, and have not really gotten into the other perspectives.

In Dramatica, every story has four perspectives, called throughlines, that interweave to form a complete view: they, I , you, and we.

• "They" defines the overall story approach and how things look from the omnipotent perspective. At this level characters are treated as types and assigned roles as though the author was describing to you the movie he saw the night before, "It's about this guy and..."
  
• "I" defines the first person perspective and is the main character of the narrative. This is the character we as the reader and audience most identify with.
• "You" is the perspective of what's called the impact character. This is the character that stands in the main characters way or provides an opposing point of view. In some stories this is the antagonist, in others it can be a friend or a teacher who provides a push to the main character. In the case of horror it is usually assumed that the impact character is the unknown other, the killer, the manifestation, whatever the fantastic element is.
• "We" is the perspective reserved for the subjective storyline and the main/impact character conflict. If the overall story is told generically, the subjective story is where the meat is. It is the heart and soul of the story.
  

In every story, each of these perspectives maps to one of the four quadrants. Either Situation, Activity, Fixed Attitudes, or Manipulations. When talking about genre, we're generally just talking about the Overall story perspective. In a Weird Tale, this "They" perspective is mapped to the Situation quadrant (which I defined in horror as Corruption). But to complete the story, you would also have to map the Main Character's view, the Impact Character's view, and the Subjective storyline's view to one of the other three (which in horror I called Mayhem, Decadence, and Madness).

This brings me to Algernon Blackwood's story "The Willows" and what I want to do is analyze the story very briefly based on the four story quadrants and the four perspectives.

There all sorts of cool ways you can do this in Dramatica, and the theory allows you to get into much, much more detail about character goals, problems and solutions, character attributes, etc. ad infinitum. I'm also cheating a bit (OK, a lot) by inventing my own terms but as a thought experiment I think it works.

Overall Story

The Overall story in the Willows is defined by the situation the narrator and his companion find themselves in and their encounter with the supernatural. The story begins with them traveling on the Danube river:

We had made many similar journeys together, but the Danube, more than any
other river I knew, impressed us from the very beginning with its aliveness. From its tiny bubbling entry into the world among the pinewood gardens of Donaueschingen, until this moment when it began to play the great river-game of losing itself among the deserted swamps, unobserved,unrestrained, it had seemed to us like following the grown of some living creature. Sleepy at first, but later developing violent desires as it became conscious of its deep soul, it rolled, like some huge fluid being, through all the countries we had passed, holding our little craft on its mighty shoulders, playing roughly with us sometimes, yet always friendly and well-meaning, till at length we had come inevitably to regard it as a Great Personage.

Here already we have hints of some supernatural intelligence at the heart of nature. Later as the companions travel deeper into the wilderness and farther from civilization:

We had "strayed," as the Swede put it, into some region or some set of conditions where the risks were great, yet unintelligible to us; where the frontiers of some unknown world lay close about us. It was a spot held by the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of peep-hole whence they could spy upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point where the veil between had worn a little thin.

So we see that the known world is being haunted by this other unseen supernatural world. The order of things has been subverted and corrupted by this new situation and "set of conditions."

Main Character Story

The main character perspective is given to us by the first person narrator and his companion, the Swede, is there as a sounding board and counterweight. In "The Willows", the main character is defined by his psychological confusion over the strange situation he finds himself in. As odd things continue to appear and happen the MC struggles to find rational explanations. The Swede's intimations of something more mysterious leave him uncertain of what to believe.

"Look here now," I cried, "this place is quite queer enough without going
out of our way to imagine things! That boat was an ordinary boat, and the man in it was an ordinary man, and they were both going down-stream as fast as they could lick. And that otter was an otter, so don't let's play the fool about it!"

He looked steadily at me with the same grave expression. He was not in the least annoyed. I took courage from his silence.

"And, for Heaven's sake," I went on, "don't keep pretending you hear things, because it only gives me the jumps, and there's nothing to hear but the river and this cursed old thundering wind."

"You fool!" he answered in a low, shocked voice, "you utter fool. That's just the way all victims talk. As if you didn't understand just as well as I do!" he sneered with scorn in his voice, and a sort of resignation. "The best thing you can do is to keep quiet and try to hold your mind as firm as possible. This feeble attempt at self-deception only makes the truth harder when you're forced to meet it."

Here, the Swede identifies that the Main Character is defined by the possibility of self-deception which is a clear indication that he is dealing with Madness and head games. Can I trust myself to know what's real and what is not?

Impact Character Story

If this were not a horror story I would assume that the impact character is the Swede. He is after all the one who forces our narrator to face the truth of the supernatural forces they are dealing with. And perhaps he is in the sense that he speaks for The Willows since they do not speak for themselves and he is the one who is able to describe what it is that they are doing, and worse yet what they want. But ultimately I think the Swede is a narrative device, a translator for both the narrator and for the audience.

The impact character storyline is told through a series of odd occurrences which mostly happen unseen and offstage. At one point the narrator says,

"Further disaster! Why, what's happened?"

"For one thing--the steering paddle's gone," he said quietly.

"The steering paddle gone!" I repeated, greatly excited, for this was our rudder, and the Danube in flood without a rudder was suicide. "But what--"

"And there's a tear in the bottom of the canoe," he added, with a genuine little tremor in his voice.

I continued staring at him, able only to repeat the words in his face somewhat foolishly. There, in the heat of the sun, and on this burning sand, I was aware of a freezing atmosphere descending round us. I got up to follow him, for he merely nodded his head gravely and led the way towards the tent a few yards on the other side of the fireplace. The canoe still lay there as I had last seen her in the night, ribs uppermost, the paddles, or rather, the paddle, on the sand beside her.

"There's only one," he said, stooping to pick it up. "And here's the rent in the base-board."

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that I had clearly noticed two paddles a few hours before, but a second impulse made me think better of it, and I said nothing. I approached to see.

There was a long, finely made tear in the bottom of the canoe where a little slither of wood had been neatly taken clean out; it looked as if the tooth of a sharp rock or snag had eaten down her length, and investigation showed that the hole went through. Had we launched out in her without observing it we must inevitably have foundered. At first the water would have made the wood swell so as to close the hole, but once out in mid-stream the water must have poured in, and the canoe, never more than two inches above the surface, would have filled and sunk very rapidly.

"There, you see an attempt to prepare a victim for the sacrifice," I heard him saying, more to himself than to me, "two victims rather," he added as he bent over and ran his fingers along the slit.

It is unclear who is responsible for these odd occurences or whether to believe the Swede's warnings. Later, the bread goes missing, and finally they find themselves under attack:

There, in front of the dim glow, something was moving.

I saw it through a veil that hung before my eyes like the gauze drop-curtain used at the back of a theater--hazily a little. It was neither a human figure nor an animal. To me it gave the strange impression of being as large as several animals grouped together, like horses, two or three, moving slowly. The Swede, too, got a similar result, though expressing it differently, for he thought it was shaped and sized like a clump of willow bushes, rounded at the top, and moving all over upon its surface--"coiling upon itself like smoke," he said afterwards.

"I watched it settle downwards through the bushes," he sobbed at me. "Look, by God! It's coming this way! Oh, oh!"--he gave a kind of whistling cry. "They've found us."

I gave one terrified glance, which just enabled me to see that the shadowy form was swinging towards us through the bushes, and then I collapsed backwards with a crash into the branches. These failed, of course, to support my weight, so that with the Swede on top of me we fell in a struggling heap upon the sand. I really hardly knew what was happening. I was conscious only of a sort of enveloping sensation of icy fear that plucked the nerves out of their fleshly covering, twisted them this way and
that, and replaced them quivering. My eyes were tightly shut; something in my throat choked me; a feeling that my consciousness was expanding, extending out into space, swiftly gave way to another feeling that I was losing it altogether, and about to die.

Like the smoke monster in Lost, the Willows manifest themselves to claim their sacrifice. Fortunately our heroes escape the Mayhem long enough for the creature to find another victim.

Subjective Storyline

The Subjective storyline is told through the interactions of the narrator and the supernatural forces he is increasingly beginning to associate with the ever present Willows:

With this multitude of willows, however, it was something far different, I felt. Some essence emanated from them that besieged the heart. A sense of awe awakened, true, but of awe touched somewhere by a vague terror.

This sense of awe persists in all of his encounters. Later the narrator sees strange figures:

Far from feeling fear, I was possessed with a sense of awe and wonder such as I have never known. I seemed to be gazing at the personified elemental forces of this haunted and primeval region. Our intrusion had stirred the powers of the place into activity. It was we who were the cause of the disturbance, and my brain filled to bursting with stories and legends of the spirits and deities of places that have been acknowledged and worshipped by men in all ages of the world's history. But, before I could arrive at any possible explanation, something impelled me to go farther out, and I crept forward on the sand and stood upright. I felt the ground still warm under my bare feet; the wind tore at my hair and face; and the sound of the river burst upon my ears with a sudden roar. These things, I knew, were real, and proved that my senses were acting normally. Yet the figures still rose from earth to heaven, silent, majestically, in a great spiral of grace and strength that overwhelmed me at length with a genuine deep emotion of worship. I felt that I must fall down and worship--absolutely worship.

This experience has led him to Decadence and worship of unknown Lovecraftian gods and idols. The subjective view is defined by this otherworldly and obsessive connection between the narrator and the unknown.

Story Structure

If we take all four of these stories together we find the overall structure of "The Willows":

• An overall story of Corruption: Supernatural intrusion into the Natural world.
• A main character story of Madness: Can I believe what I am seeing?
• An impact character defined by Mayhem: The creature in pursuit of its sacrifice.
• A subjective story defined by Decadence: The awestruck worship of evil gods.

This story is artfully interwoven so that it plays as a single narrative throughout, even as it moves from one perspective to the next. In the end the four storylines are resolved as the river calms, nature returns to its normal state, and they discover a body floating down stream:

For just as the body swung round to the current the face and the exposed chest turned full towards us, and showed plainly how the skin and flesh were indented with small hollows, beautifully formed, and exactly similar in shape and kind to the sand-funnels that we had found all over the island.

"Their mark!" I heard my companion mutter under his breath. "Their awful mark!"

And when I turned my eyes again from his ghastly face to the river, the current had done its work, and the body had been swept away into mid-stream and was already beyond our reach and almost out of sight, turning over and over on the waves like an otter.

The supernatural force, whatever it was, has gotten what it wanted and little doubt remains in the narrator's mind about what he has seen and experienced.

Interestingly, this story reveals a possible outcome for horror stories I hadn't previously considered. With "The Willows", we actually have a story of success. They escape the flood waters and returning safely toward home. They avoid the consequences. But in this case they have to pay a price meted out by the Willows: the death of the unknown person in the river. In order for them to live someone else must die. Oddly, Blackwood allows the river to erase the narrator's crime without comment. We never know how the narrator feels and whether or not it has changed him.

One would assume that we should judge the story outcome as bad. After all someone died, but the victim does not elicit much pity. The Willows claimed their sacrifice and perhaps that seems good enough to us. That is the allure of the Decadent mind set shining through.

For both the reader and the narrator the Willows elicit a sense of awe and worship. That's what we like about this kind of strange fiction: that momentary, elusive, madness enducing vision of the other world. But it is a decadent vision and in "The Willows" this horror mind set is a trap. It leads only to submission and the annihilation of one's will under the awesome power of the unworldly: terror without pity, the horrific equivalent of tragedy. Ultimately, decadence is the consequence the narrator escapes. The ecstatic vision is gone until the Willows return in search of fresh blood.