PANK's lovely redesign

A while ago I wrote a critique of PANK's layout (among several other online magazines), the general argument of which was that while PANK is cool and looks cool and is more navigable than most online mags, it could be more readable in several key ways. Roxane Gay commented that PANK was being redesigned and I've been looking forward to it since -- and while I assume my post had little or nothing to do with it, I am happy to see that everything I asked for has happened, more or less.

You've got the issue index with titles and excerpts, you've got the "next" and "previous" buttons on the content pages themselves, you've got generally a sexier-looking format that retains the flexibility to display just about anything you can put in a blog. It's all very nice. I looked up Tracy's story "Pink" and enjoyed the new format.

So, nice going PANK! It's a great magazine and an attractive one as well.

"Winter nights fall fast enough but even faster in the country."

Story four in Curio, "Christmas Eve," is here. This one contains what are probably my two favorite lines in the whole thing -- maybe not objectively the best, but they made me happy. (I'll put 'em after the cut, so as not to spoil.)

Sweet Readin'

I get the sense people appreciate our blog's tendency to stray from straight-up litblogging, and so I'm going to make more of an effort to regularly link here to the things I read on other subjects.

So here's one thing: I regularly enjoy Felix Salmon's blogging on finance and economics -- it's often over my head, but I enjoy the challenge and often feel I'm actually learning. This piece on the increasingly automated nature of Wall Street, where trading is increasingly handled by artificial intelligences working at inhuman speeds, is meant to explain the issue to those of us who aren't exactly experts on the stock market, and as such it's especially readable and informative.

Indie Album Covers

After being headachey and lightly ill most of our day, Mike and I decided to spend the night in to relax and recover. Thanks to a Facebook meme, though, we've spent the last two hours being remarkably productive at making album covers for bands that don't exist (but perhaps should). Here's a selection of our handiwork. This is not the entirety of the collection, because we are both super nerds, but they are the best.

A polyphonic, headphonic EP featuring the angel voice of Dennon Sims.
 Highlight: "When They Talk I Anticipate Gold"

(Tracy Bowling, cover)

"Originally a weekly Reading Lolita in Tehran book club, Bookless in

Baghdad quickly discovered a shared passion for acid jazz. With a sound

like the bastard child of Hot Chip and an IED, these immaculate craftsmen

know how to get the best possible sound out of an hourglass and an iPad."

-NME

(Mike Meginnis, cover)

"Never have crooner sensibilities, potsmoking politics, and a mandolin 

patched through a vocoder met so beautifully, so soulfully, so well." 

- SnakesTeeth.Com

"Finally!" 

- The LA Times

(Tracy Bowling, cover)

1. Form 11-C
2. The Motion Carries
3. The Board Has Many Questions
4. Compound Interest
5. Q4 and Seven Inches
6. This is your business model?
7. (This Mother is) Tax Deductible
8. Clarify Your Mission Statement
9. Hang-Time with God
10. This Tycoon's Open Shirt Reminds Me of Nam

(Mike Meginnis, cover)

1. Paolo             7:37
2. Quiverfull     9:02
3. Target X       4:13
4. Chemois        3:30
5. Black Sand    9:48
6. Eat Me           1:24

(Tracy Bowling, cover)

"If you've ever wondered what happened to the Anti-Japanese Army for the
Salvation of the Country, I'll tell you what happened to them. It was Timbaland.
High-resin beats for an age without reason."

- Village Voice

(Mike Meginnis, cover)

1. Cheap Flirt
2. Happy Initiation
3. Cars Cars Where Are the Cars
4. Why Bother to Dress
5. Find My Captain
6. Hungry for Snow Caps
7. Robespierre/Yes I Did
8. >>funyons!
9. Show Me the Yearbook
10. One Hundred Lollipops
11. Go to Hell Brian
12. Gryphon
13. Stupid Fish
14. Bright-Eyed Fern
15. Secretary's Day

(Tracy Bowling, cover)

1. What the Fuck is that Eagle's Problem
2. (It's Hard to) Make Love with a Face Like That
3. MORE LIKE THAT ONE
4. Flock Off
5. Flesh from Bone
6. Too Close
7. Bird driB
8. Okay, but really? (What did I do?)
9. You've got a pretty mouth.
10. Eagle Poops Are Falling

(Mike Meginnis, cover)

The meme, for those interested, is this:

1. Go to Wikipedia and click Random Article. The first article you get is the name of your band.
2. Go to QuotationsPage.com and click on Random Quotes. The last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is your album title.
3. Go to Flickr and click on "Last Seven Days" under Explore. The third picture is your album cover.
4. Use Photoshop or a photo editing program (we used picnik.com) to put it together.  

Link it for us in the comments if you've got a great one!

Tattoo Lit

So I just got a tattoo.  It's a literary tattoo and my seventh tattoo.  I have two other "lit" tattoos:  the last image and line from The Savage Detectives (which was featured in The Word Made Flesh) and WORDS.  Now I have the antlers from the cover of With Deer by Aase Berg.  All three of them are on my right arm.  Lit tattoos are the plan for my right arm.  I also want to get This Living Hand written in caligraphy around my wrist, "All I am is thought without language," a line from A Plate of Chicken by Matthew Rohrer, and "Boundless love," two words from Frank O'Hara.  Those are the ones I have wanted and they were in the front of the line, before the antlers, until Black Ocean announced they would give anyone who got a tattoo from one of their books a lifetime subscription.

This wasn't just for free books.  I'm a fan of Black Ocean's books.  They are well designed and the poetry is amazing.  Though there are other great poetry presses out there (I work for one of the best), I can't think of a press that makes objects that look and feel as good as theirs.  The amount of thought in the design of their books is equal to the thought that goes into the poems inside the books.  Chapbook presses aside, there are only a small handful of presses that do that kind of work.

Along with the HD micro-review/blurb thing I wrote, I wrote one for With Deer.  Here it is, for your pleasure:

With Deer is a mythological grotesque that explodes diction and nature simultaneously.  Aase Berg compounds words and expands their meaning by changing their part of speech.  Most of the poems are in prose and I felt that this was a great mode for the poems, which are very narrative in style, though highly surreal.  The world that With Deer inhabits is entirely post-apocalyptic, yet entirely pre-industrial.  The darkness of With Deer feels like it’s straight from a Black Metal song or a Norse myth.  Goransson’s translation is beautiful and I feel that he was either heavily influenced by Berg, has imprinted his signature style onto With Deer, or both.  Definitely an excellent book of prose poetry.

My tattoo-getting shirt is a cut-off miller light T-shirt

"We always called that rusty metal shack the Brewster house. "

Story three in Curio, "The Brewsters," is now up.

Update: Illustration now existent.

Teaching and Learning from The Simpsons

Well, classes started today, which meant I did not sleep last night. There are so many worries to keep me up when facing the prospect of teaching (and taking) a new class. Mainly the worries involve not getting ready for class on time for reasons ranging from an inability to find appropriate clothing to the right number of jokes to tell (and when) to a suddenly discovered lapse in my syllabus. Also there are strange little dawn-mares, like today's, which featured Hank Hill gleefully adding on to his and Peggy's apartment following the eviction of a Chinese couple who were operating a laundromat in the upstairs, only to find that a church had prior claim to the land, leaving him screaming a trademark "Aaaaaaaaagh!" in the For Sale-sign section of the local hardware outlet.

Things resolved positively. I think a friend of my family owned the church. Set him right.

Anyway, getting painfully nervous on the eve of teaching tends to imply, for me, an overall painful nervousness that an ambitious course won't succeed. And that's precisely where I am, looking at a semester of teaching second-level rhetoric and composition with a unifying theme of The Simpsons. Reading about The Simpsons, writing about The Simpsons, and of course, watching episodes of The Simpsons in my glorious hour-twenty-five of Tuesday-Thursday time. I got to select the episodes. That much I think I've done a good job of, thus far.

I should be enjoying it. I should, right? It is The Simpsons, and The Simpsons is my favorite show since I've been born. (Seasons 12 through infinity excepted.) It helps, too, that the subtitle of the course is "Representations of Home and Family," and so I get to talk about The Simpsons as incarnations of and alternatives to "the American family," which is a subject of almost endless interest to me, seeing as how I grew up in one of those. Plus, The Simpsons is properly viewed, I am convinced, as a family show. Not a cartoon for adults (a la Family Guy, Robot Chicken, The Venture Bros.), and not a kid's show with some mature jokes thrown as a bone (everything Pixar makes). A show that lets children be involved, fully (and often smartly), from beginning to end, and that also appeals to and brings good storytelling to adults. To put it another way, I started laughing at The Simpsons because my older brother did, but I continued laughing because I learned what I (at all of 6 years old, seriously) was laughing at, which was the depiction of a family not very much like mine, but with a lot of the same motivations, needs, and knowledge of each other.

Of course, I was close with my family. It'll be interesting to me to see what students have to say about how The Simpsons does or doesn't reflect their own families, and how exactly it entertained them as individuals without, maybe, hearkening to the same family touchstones.

One answer, of course, is that the jokes have been honed like crazy, so that they end up just perfectly pitched to catch a wide base, and we're spending some time talking about that--how the creators concocted and revised the series, and how they acted as rhetors to figure out what their audience would want, what would get a laugh and what wouldn't, what was worth risking the censors for and what was worth risking sentimentality for. We're going to talk about how the show has adapted to the audience over time while also challenging and alienating certain parts of that audience; we'll talk about how it has conversed with other families, other cartoons, and other cartoon families, while still maintaining some pretty strict world-rules of its own as far as cartoonishness, absurdity, etc., and we'll talk about what that might mean about our national perception of "the American family." We're going to talk about the almost math that most humor uses by setting up a familiar equation but changing the result. (Using funny, super-old philosophy such as Henri Bergson's here.) In short, we're talking about the show from several rhetorical perspectives, and in the process I'm hoping concepts of audience, idea genesis, positionality, intertextuality, and revision will become clear.

But we're also going to talk about influences--influences on the show's creators and influences on our perceptions of and approaches to reading and viewing. I've been challenged in the past by the general reluctance of my students to read carefully or critically, of the gulf they seem to place between any kind of printed writing--even little stuff like AP articles and Wikipedia entries--and their own. And I've been surprised by the downright animosity some of them bear toward being asked to read at all. Instead of being frustrated by it, I want to use the class to get to the heart of it and start prying some of those formed assumptions about reading up. So I'm asking them to examine their influences (and perhaps biases) when it comes to reading, to think about the things they've read that have moved something in them, and to imagine what that quality would look like translated to different sources and styles of writing. I've been immensely happier as a writer and reader since I realized, sometime in the middle of undergrad (where most of them are now), that I can find something to hinge my own interest on in almost anything I read--more often, in fact, in academic texts than in fiction--and that this isn't just a coping strategy for poor or reluctant readers; it's the difference between someone who gets anything out of reading at all, ever, and someone who doesn't. I'm trying to use the class as an opportunity to show them, too, that writing is a chance to create a thing you'd want to read. The Simpsons doesn't exist because Matt Groening and Sam Simon and all these people felt the absence of the Flintstones or the Jetsons and wanted to bring that family back again. It happened because there was no show that had the qualities they wanted, so they made it. And eventually--not at first, but eventually--it was The Simpsons that they made.

The connection between The Simpsons and writing seems, to many in my department, tenuous. I got laughed at when I introduced myself and my course at the departmental workshop this semester. A teacher in front of me who'd been saying "Fantastic" after all the women teacher's introductions and humming lots of little academic approvals at classes including the words "identity" or "gazes" scoffed (literally scoffed!) and said "Fun!" when I introduced mine. (She did the same when I introduced my class on robots, too--it's primarily a personal problem of hers, though I do think faculty tend to sneer a bit, unfairly, at the "fun" classes.) Here's the thing, though: I don't think of The Simpsons as being a subject that is fun for me. I think of it as a supreme challenge to balance a genuine love for the show, which many of the students share with me, with a critical and interrogative eye for how the show has been shaped over the years, for the choices it's made, and the choices it's turned down. I think of teaching The Simpsons as a way to uncover and work to remedy things I find contradictory and troubling--social biases, behaviors, attitudes, toward home and family--in characters I've tended to uncritically love.

To be totally honest, I think of this as the only type of academic inquiry worth doing. If, by teaching rhetoric, we're trying to inoculate against things we already avoid and know we hate (preconceived notions, hasty generalizations, pathetic fallacies, logical leaps) and not trying to get to the bottom of something that we love but don't yet understand, then what are we engaging students in the study of? I'm not sure this constitutes learning much at all, and I'm curious about how it might affect the quality of students' reading and writing. After all, it's hard to do something with a particular reading--to write about it, especially--if there's no reason for different individuals to be reading it, internalizing it, having independent thoughts about it. I'm not suggesting there's not a fixed body of information in a particular textbook reading for them to get--just that I imagine it's difficult for a student to perceive that there's anything, even comprehension-level stuff, to be gained by reading if the idea of the course is that they need to theorize about identity and gazes instead of uncovering them for themselves in places that matter. In places they want to make better.

Many of the best instructors I know articulate a similar vision, and struggle with a similar nervousness about their classes before they teach. Less a nervousness that students will like them, or that the copier won't be broken, or that the computer will work, than a nervousness that students will learn, think, be improved, be well served. So, "Eat my shorts!" to the people who laughed at my teaching The Simpsons. I lost sleep over this class. Did you?

His Sleeve-Stretching 16-Inch Biceps

When I started grad school it was on a fellowship that let me stay up standing in burrito store lines and squirting limes into beers until four am. My roommate would be hip-deep in student essays in our living room and I’d be tapping out novel pages and taunting him, have fun, ha ha ha, but of course the next year when I had to teach to pay rent the universe bit me for my cruelty and I was assigned sections of ENGL 150 & 250 that started at eight in the morning. This was in Iowa, and in November – February meant that to get to my classes I had to rise at 7:30 and pull on a blazer and tromp out through untouched snow and cross streets kicking slush just to get dripping to my dank classroom in the basement of the English Department. Sometimes I’d see my students at the intersections and they were as gray as me but happier, probably, because their frozen brains would be only somewhat required in the hours to come whereas mine would be put to work animating our course.

One of my friends from grad school lives in Tennessee now—she just got there, actually—and told me her classes Monday were cancelled for snow. (I didn’t even realize Tennessee has snow.) Monday was the first day of her term, and this upcoming Monday is MLK Day, of course, and her class meets once a week, so that her entire schedule was pushed back two weeks by weather.

Here in Florida we don’t have it so bad, but it’s frigid lately, and we live in homes not designed for the cold (our apartment has one heater, and it’s an AC unit that has red settings you can turn the knob to) and it’s killing me to get out of bed. This morning the cat was a tiny ball by my shoulder with her nose stuck under a blanket. She inspired me to write a story, which I wrote about instead, featuring frozen pets.

Writing about that story I never wrote got me thinking about the other mini-stories I considered putting on Moonshot and didn’t. I just looked through the archives and found drafts for

“Clustered, Huddling” : No memory of what this even was about, but it was probably inspired by a similar cold stretch last month.

“What a Lot of People Don’t Know is the Song ‘Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer’ is About a Drunk Driver” : Pretty much explained in full by the title.

“+20 Allure” : About an acquaintance with a magical and simple hairband that makes her gorgeous. Maybe the main character was going to swipe it and see if it worked on anyone else.

“Barcadenstein” : Frankenstein updated and set in a barcade. Obviously this one had good reasons for not developing past the title.

“The Princess and the Cake” : What?

“Untitled” : Someone decides the best way to kick start his partner’s libido is to get really out of shape and then really in shape again. Contrast therapy.

“His Sleeve-Stretching 16-Inch Biceps” : No clear memory of what was going on here.

“Ts” : A fantasy about running into one of the staff members from a local news station on which everyone is very careful to pronounce very sharp t sounds in every word, to the point of awkwardness.

“Pooh-Style” : About someone who will only have sex Pooh-style, naked but for a shirt. Probably really about someone who ruins the mood by making a joke, after stripping to just a shirt, about having sex Pooh-style. Why would you bring up Winnie the Pooh? one of the characters might ask, just before falling into a nostalgic stairwell in his brain.

Okay so maybe I'm sort of a hippy: Yeasayer.

At a bar a month or so back two friends 1.5 times my age told me I looked like John Lennon. Appending a picture so you could judge for yourself would require taking one (my hair is longer than it's been in a while, my logic being I'll get it cut when it stops looking charmingly shaggy) and also looking at my own face, which I find endlessly uncomfortable. I don't actually like the idea of looking like John Lennon, whose face I've always found a little grotesque.

Right now I'm waiting you might say breathlessly for a record by Akron/Family called, I kid you not, S/T II:The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT. Akron/Family is the sort of band that records an album called Love is Simple and on it there's a song called "Love is Simple" without the slightest hint of irony, and then after making the album they lose their singer to a Buddhist Dharma center in the midwest. They're the sort of guys that wear beards and take band photos of themselves swimming around shirtless but not really sexy. (Although those may be some of the sexier band photos out there, precisely because they weren't meant to be, but only records of bodies.)

About once every four to six months I promise myself I'm going to interact with the people around me in a strictly loving, open, and generous way. I decide to let people know how warmly I feel toward them even if maybe I also sometimes feel cold. This resolution rarely lasts long, mainly because my anger when faced with human incompetence or laziness is what you might call intense. As in like you can, if you follow me around for an hour or so after I've dealt with someone who doesn't respect the actual needs of his or her fellow human beings and the responsibilities of his or her station, you can hear my language degrade like stop-motion footage of an orange left out to rot -- and then at some level of obscenity I satisfy myself and sort of snap back into a reasonable adult sort of mood.

But I do love people and feel very warmly toward them. My books are meant to be long, honest meditations on this love, and for instance why it hurts.

And so for years and years I didn't like music because I thought music was about being cool and getting laid. And often it is. But there were bands like Dufus where it wasn't about either. Years ago I interviewed the guy from Dufus and I asked him about this and he said, quite simply, he'd already had sex. I didn't take this to mean he was done with sex (why would he be?) and he has since then reproduced. What I took it to mean was mainly that he had done that thing and that he had some reason to suspect there would be more coming, and so he could focus on making music that made him feel good. So for instance:

(Here is another performance of the same song, this time solo. Also here is a song he did called "Farting Without Fear," and believe it or not it's good. Dude gets more sound out of one guitar than most bands get out of three.)

When I found out that I did like music it was because I learned their were bands as weird and messy as I felt. I used to listen to a fair amount of hardcore, which I still like, and noise rock, which is still good stuff, with of course my ideal being Modest Mouse, which was a loud weird angry miserable confused band. What I wanted was a full spectrum of sound and a full spectrum of confused mingled feelings all mixed up together in the same song, which would direct my feelings and in some way exhaust them, so I could feel nothing.

But it wasn't really nothing I wanted, precisely. There is a low-level buzz of love behind the rest, when you peel or cut or burn the rest away. What I wanted was to find a way to feel that thing behind the other things for longer periods of time. And as I grow older and become some sort of adult I find I can enjoy longer periods of serenity. And in my serenity I maybe feel like John Lennon. Or what I feel like is the sort of person who could record that sort of music. (And then maybe die a violent death.)

When I close the cover or document on a story is when it becomes crass or cruel in a way that tells me the writer never bothered to love. 

It's been easy perhaps to dismiss Yeasayer as a sort of lesser Akron/Family, the Akron/Family you listen to between Akron/Family records or while said band tries to figure out how to be as good as they were before their singer went away to be a Buddhist. They were supposed to be "World Music Akron/Family" when their first album came out, I think, which is another way of saying Akron/Family. And well "world music" is generally not attractive as a descriptor, because apparently, judging from where I've seen the term used before, the world's music sort of sucks. But listen: thing is "2080" really rocks.

And when Odd Blood came out people were describing it as some sort of psychedelic '80s retread, which a) were the '80s often psychedelic? and b) the '80s are probably my least favorite musical decade. In terms of the last fifty years I would, generally speaking, rank the decades as follows, as far as my enjoyment is concerned: 2000s, 1970s, 1960s, 1990s, 1980s. And it might be kind to say the songs from Odd Blood don't give good sample. You can listen to thirty seconds of anything on eMusic, which is still how I get my music, though that subscription is becoming less attractive every year. But so recently, well after the point where everybody else had moved on, I decided to download Odd Blood. And it turns out I like it! Not just "Ambling Alp," which like you'd have to be a monster not to (I forgive you if you are one), but "Madder Red" and also "O.N.E" and "Rome," and others. You can see what they meant about the album's native decade, particularly in the production style actually, but a hippy is a hippy any decade you find him: he wants to dance, he wants to hug. Both of which things I will do with you at any party or place where we can call beer our excuse, or also without excuse.

But maybe the best way to enjoy Yeasayer or to introduce yourself is Live at Ancienne Belgique, a Christmas gift to their fans. You can download it for any price, including free. Having been recorded in October it's got a nice mix of their songs new and old. And yet also being a live show it has a warmth that sometimes the production of their records proper doesn't capture, because vocals slightly smoothed (not autotuned: merely rehearsed) and because all errors removed. "Red Cave" becomes one of the sweetest songs you'll hear anywhere.

It's all so delightfully earnest. There's a keyboard choir on "Wait for the Summer" and it's not apparently a joke. "Mondegreen" makes about a thousand times more sense awash in crowd noise. The weird sort of gastrointestinal synths are an invitation to dance. Guitar out of a cop drama. Reverb reverb. And "Ambling Alp" is even more fun: explicitly a sing-along.

Anyway you can go get it if you want. It made me feel nice, and love.

"Because I'm an ass."

I really like this post by Michael Chabon about the whole Huck Finn thing.

HD

I wrote a couple micro-reviews for a workshop a couple years ago and one of them was of HD's Selected Poems.  I recently re-found the piece and thought I'd share it with you all here, as it's one of my favorite books:

HD’s Selected Poems was first published in 1957, four years before her death in 1961.  I was a little disappointed that the book didn’t give information about when each poem was previously published, mostly because I felt like her language didn’t feel “old.”  Her first book, Sea Garden, is 94.  Her poems do rely on classical images and ideas, using Greek and Roman gods and heroes, so the content does get a little stodgy.  The thing that draws me into her poems the most is her syntax and her images, which feel very contemporary at times.  There are also places that I can actually see my own writing in, such as this stanza from Adonis:

Not the gold on the temple-front

where you stand

is as gold as this,

not the gold that fastens your sandal,

nor the gold, reft

through your chiseled locks,

is as gold as this last year’s leaf,

not all the gold hammered and wrought

and beaten

on your lover’s face,

brow and breast

is as golden as this

The syntax in these lines, the repetition, and the figurative language that the stanza closes with are amazing.  It’s poetry that makes me want to write more poetry.  Though I know this is highly subjective, I think that is the definition of a successful poem.

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark reviewed.

I've been fascinated with Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark since I first read about it not long ago. The Wikipedia page is probably a good place to start for the uninitiated. Basically it's a big giant mess of a musical about Spider-Man from Julie Taymor, the lady who brought us the Broadway version of The Lion King. Also Bono and The Edge. It's unbelievably expensive (according to Wikipedia, about $65 million with running costs of $1 million a week) and it's stupidly dangerous: though actors have been flying around on wires for centuries, apparently the particularly elaborate setup Taymor's created is a bit much: they can't make it work consistently, and people keep getting hurt.

Now that the show is actually, finally out and about -- though still in "previews" so as to prevent people from being to mean about the fact it's still a goddamn mess -- the press reaction is pretty fun to watch. I like this Josh Roberts review for Comic Book Resources in particular, providing as it does the vital comic geek perspective on a play that was clearly not designed for geeks (emphasis mine):

From weak performances to laughable music numbers, nearly every single problem facing "Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark" stems from its convoluted story. Director Julie Taymor and Glen Berger wrote the book, providing audiences with a story that's as difficult to follow as it is disrespectful towards Spider-Man's established character. Deviations from Marvel lore are to be expected; this production is meant for the mainstream masses, not the Wednesday Warriors, after all, and nearly every single comic book adaptation goes through its fair share of changes. But the musical's creative departures are both arbitrary and insulting towards Peter Parker's core beliefs.

Take Swiss Miss, a new female villain created by Taymor specifically for "Turn off the Dark," as an example of the former: when the character marks her first appearance, one of the members of the geek chorus asks another: "Who is that?" The response he gets from a fellow geek, who is narrating this portion of the story? "Oh, I just made her up." That's the only explanation that Taymor can muster: she just made the villain up. There's no other reason to include Swiss Miss, as her character contributes virtually nothing towards the show's forward momentum. Beyond her admittedly stunning costume -- a vast array of spinning blades and other sharp objects -- we learn absolutely nothing else about Swiss Miss. She is, in a word, pointless. And so it goes.

But there's no character that better symbolizes the show's creative misfires than Arachne. She is both needlessand insulting. Her story is revealed through the geek chorus as well as a book report written by Peter himself: in Ancient Greece, a young woman attempted suicide after scorning the gods, but was resurrected by Athena and subsequently turned into a spider-goddess. (That's the gist of the story, at least, as Arachne's origin is completely botched by the swift-talking geek chorus who themselves represent yet another character inclusion that completely distracts from the story, an especially ironic failure considering that their sole reason for existing is to provide clarification and commentary on plot points.) Arachne is directly responsible for Peter's transformation into Spider-Man, providing him with the key radioactive spider-bite as well as his red-and-blue tights -- because, as Taymor's book rightly points out, there's just no way that a teenage boy can sew his own costume; a Greek goddess providing it for him makes much more sense. 

I think the most disappointing thing about this is actually how boring it sounds. Roberts goes on to say that the costumes and acrobatics are a lot of fun, but who cares? These people looked at Spider-Man and the best they could do was say, "Wow, he's like a modern Greek hero! He's, like, this century's Hercules!"

I mean, let's be clear: Super heroes are silly. Everybody knows that. But you know what else everybody knows? Each and every thing this play seems to be trying to tell them. Which doesn't matter, really. It's just that the amount of time, money, and human suffering that's gone into this project is pretty clearly a ridiculous waste. At this point I'm fairly certain the story of the making of this thing is way better than the story of the thing itself.

Yeah, clearly this needed to happen.