Meet the Lavenders

Our own Carrie Murphy has a chapbook out with Birds of Lace Press.

Tracy and I both often had a hard time figuring out how to respond to poetry appropriately during our time in the MFA. We know what we like and what we don't, but the conversations surrounding poetry in academia were usually mystifying. I generally find it more productive to ignore the whole question of what is "poetic" and to focus on what is beautiful, exciting, and fun.

Carrie's poetry is all of those things. It is smart and sexy and funny. It is good. We think very highly of her and her work, and we think you will too. Meet the Lavenders is about a girl group. I have heard her read a little of it. I am looking forward to reading the rest.

You can get it here for $5 plus $2 shipping. 

Here is a description from the press: "Carrie Murphy's 'Meet the Lavenders' introduces us to the fictional 1960s girl group The Lavenders, a threesome with dreamy dreams immersed in the pursuit of all that is girl group-related. A complex, adoring and intimate view of a musical and social phenomenon that usually doesn't allow a scratch below the perfectly manicured surface."

Here is a trailer featuring an unusually desperate reader:

"Losing is fun!"

There's a class of games I haven't played because it feels like it would be a bad idea while I'm still working on finding employment: things like Dwarf Fortress and its descendent Minecraft seem, to me, a little too potentially absorbing to be healthy right now. (I'm staying away from Angband too.) Ultimately it wouldn't matter, but it makes me feel a little better.

I do feel a lot like I've played Dwarf Fortess, though, as my friend Charlie's descriptions of his games are always so weird and specific that it can be a lot like playing just to hear them. The game is extremely complicated, both in terms of what you can build and in terms of how it can (and will, inevitably) collapse; while I'm sure some commonalities would emerge over time if I read more about the game, each retelling is so radically different from the last that it reads as more of a story than as a simple description of a game.

This New York Times profile of the brothers behind the game is pretty fascinating. The programmer, Tarn Adams, sees Dwarf Fortress as his life's work: he spends most of each day coding and lives modestly on donations from fans of the game. In spite of its incredible complexity, he plans to spend the rest of his life adding further layers of mechanics. Probably my favorite quote from the article: "The hippos like the sewers!"

Part of what's interesting about the game is that it seems designed to generate fascinating sentences. A lot of its energy is devoted to language, and to opportunities for language. I'm looking forward to trying it out someday.

"He's a tin can!"

Another weird thing about the morality of Saturday morning cartoons is the special vengeance reserved for robots and, occasionally, cyborgs. In most action-adventure shows aimed at children, the villains will frequently or primarily use robotic or otherwise artificial henchmen. The first time I noticed this trope was in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise, wherein the Foot Clan will be staffed primarily by human ninjas if the film is rated PG (see: live-action movies) but they will be robots if the show is intended primarily for children (see: the various animated series). 

You figure out pretty quickly that the Shredder isn't using robots because they're better at combat than human beings, or even more hardy. Quite the opposite: as a rule, robotic opponents are easily bested and they tend to come apart with the slightest effort. Their arms and legs are easily torn off, their heads removed casually, their bodies cut in half (vertically or horizontally) with even the crudest weapons. The Shredder isn't using these things, in other words, because they work. He's using them so the Turtles can destroy human forms guilt-free.

To return to the example of X-Men, there's a moment that happens fairly often wherein Wolverine realizes that an opponent is, in fact, a robot. Usually he figures it out by severing one of the thing's limbs. The obviously-robotic arm or leg will fall away, sparks shooting out this way and wires jutting here, the camera lingering lovingly on this image of dismemberment. Then we cut back to Wolverine, whose facial reaction makes it clear he sees what we see: this dude is a robot. Then he has to verbally acknowledge the situation, just in case anybody missed it the first time: "He's a tin can!" is the go-to line. Then, we go back to the severed robotic limb, looking especially robotic in case we didn't notice any of the other things that just happened. Then back to Wolverine, who smiles a while longer before closing in for the kill. He removes another limb or cuts its torso open.

The dominant emotion in these moments is clearly relief. Wolverine, who has been trying and failing to stab dudes all day, finally gets to really go for it. He can't believe his good fortune! The kids at home are supposed to be cheering also. Finally, they get to see some real action. And it's hard to blame the characters or the audience if they're maybe a little too excited at the chance to finally blow off some steam; as a rule, when it really counts, Wolverine can't seem to stab anybody. 

In some ways, this is a legitimate solution to the problem of how to resolve high-stakes dramatic tension without warping the minds of young children. You can question the prevalence of action shows in children's entertainment, but once you're committed to making such a series, you're going to need a work-around for this problem. However, with even a little scrutiny, the solution breaks down and becomes, in my eyes, more troubling than the problem it was meant to address.

For one thing, the heroes usually learn that they're fighting machines only after they've used sufficient force to kill what they believed at the time was a person. Wolverine cuts off the arm, watches it fall to the ground, and then sees that the dude is a robot. No wonder he's relieved: he thought he was doing something awful! Now it's okay. His attempted murder is retroactively justified. (We see again how this model requires that intent become a non-issue.)

Secondly, this moment requires that the robots are simulating humanity. It wouldn't bother me if Wolverine were to dismember, say, a rogue backhoe, but neither would Wolverine express such delight and relief in the process of doing so: it would pass without remark, and (precisely because the object he murdered was strictly an object) it would carry little or no dramatic weight. The Foot Clan do not behave like things, however. They are not efficient, their movements are not stiff, they do not broadcast their machine-ness to the viewer in any way. Rather, they go out of their way to simulate humanity. They are often comedically clumsy. They sometimes seem to be afraid. They seem to react to their environment emotionally, rather than treating it as purely instrumental. They do all of these things so that we can enjoy the experience of watching violent murders on television, even if those murders officially deny themselves. To the extent that they behave at all like machines, it is their willingness to launch themselves in wave after wave at the Turtles, their clear superiors, which really only establishes them, within the genre's conventions, as henchmen. We've watched dozens of fat guys (actual people) charge blindly at a rampaging Chuck Norris; to the extent that this behavior defines the Foot as mechanical, it applies to dull-witted human beings across the board. If anything, it only seems to reinforce our suspicion that henchmen are not human.

In X-Men it gets weirder still. While the closest equivalent of the Foot and their only recurring robotic enemy, the Sentinels, are more convincing as non-humans (they evince emotions, but these emotions are so clumsy, broad, and inappropriate that it only reads as slapstick) but there are a number of peripheral characters, especially certain cyborgs, that make the trope especially troubling. We have to remember that this is a highly unrealistic sci-fi world wherein Turing-proofed AI is not only likely, but sort of mundane; there aren't any foregrounded mechanical characters (at least at this point in the series) but if we saw a thinking and feeling machine it wouldn't be even a little surprising. We assume they're out there, among the various aliens and mutants and superhumans and deities and so on. And occasionally it seems likely we're dealing with one: at the close of the Dark Phoenix Saga, Wolverine ends up fighting robots who profess pride at their mechanical nature, asserting that "organics" can never defeat them. Of course these are still, in spite of their intelligence, legitimate targets for maximal violence, presumably because they don't feel pain. Their intelligence doesn't give them a right to their bodies, it only makes them more interesting conversational partners during a fight.

In the case of the occasional cyborg characters, dismemberment (but only of the clearly-robotic parts) is not only normal but practically required. This is the weirdest thing of all: the characters clearly experience fear, if not necessarily pain, when their robotic arms are removed. And it's not like these are extraneous parts: these are replacements for their organic arms, which were presumably amputated to make room for the new, mechanical ones. Conceding for the sake of argument that they don't feel pain in these, or that such pain is so diminished as to exist in a different moral category from our own pain, the implication seems to be that it would be morally acceptable to dismember a paralyzed person so long as you knew he or she would survive: after all, he's not going to feel it. Even human beings have no right to their presumed-numb mechanical body parts. The difference between a robotic limb and a paralyzed limb is of course that you can repair the robotic arm more easily, but even if we could effortlessly regrow our paralyzed limbs should they be removed, I doubt we would consider it moral to thoughtlessly remove them.

The project, then, is not to allow the guiltless destruction of inhuman objects, but rather to get as close as possible to a human being and then destroy that. The clear implication is that there are subhuman categories that do not deserve our sympathy or any sort of human rights. And this is what concerns me: that children (and adults) exposed to this entertainment are being trained to think like killers. They are being taught that there are classes of people, or almost-people, that have no right to their bodies, that do not feel authentic pain. These are the people we can treat however we want.

The relief Wolverine feels at discovering his enemies are machines -- are not authentically human -- strikes me as a species of the relief people have felt in the establishment of slavery, in launching wars. The pleasure of discovering a category of person that can be freely exploited and broken seems to be intense.

It's not that I'm especially concerned that these stories create killers. The sort of people who are devoted fans of X-Men and Ninja Turtles are not widely known for their violent tendencies. It may be that externalizing and processing this impulse through narrative is good for us. But I have to think it would be better still for us not to replicate the ways of thinking that create armies. Children are thinking about violence and death all the time. This isn't because the popular media has foisted it on them: rather, violence and death are all around us, and exploitation too. Growing up is, in many ways, learning to see and then sublimate these things. By teaching that violence can be justified -- that there are good and bad categories of violence, important and expendable categories of people -- we trivialize it, and perpetuate things we should prefer to end. I would rather that we acknowledge, in our stories, and especially the stories for our children, what violence really is, and how much its victims (deserving or not, if such can be deserved) really suffer.

It's Sunday: ChillTFO

via: @holyyodel

Would you like to be my lit friend in DC?

If you know me at all in my actual life, you know that I crazily, inappropriately, outsizely and completely love the state of New Mexico. I moved here three years ago to get my MFA at NMSU and I just fell hard for everything about it: the strangely beautiful desert, the gigantic sky, the mountains, the food, the manana attitude and casual lifestyle, the Old West stuff everywhere, all of it, everything, in total. It's my place.

cliche desert sunrise picture

I even love stuff about New Mexico that most people hate, like the bad drivers, lame local government, insane wind and heat and dust and the way you ALWAYS get a rock in your shoe even if you're wearing a pair that is completely tied and closed.

Unfortunately, the winds of the world are now pushing me towards Northern Virginia, where my boyfriend is going to be doing a Phd. I'm basically crying my eyes out every day to leave NM, but as I've just secured a job in my new area, I'm trying to have a good attitude about leaving where I love to live in the political highwayland of the DC suburbs.

Here I am looking pensive and forlorn on a hike. See how much I don't want to leave the desert?

One thing that could make the transition a bit better for me, I'm hoping, is if I had a way to meet like-minded individuals. If you're reading this post on this blog, I'm assuming you are at least somewhat like-minded.  I hear DC has kind of a burgeoning lit scene. Do you live there? Do you know any writers who do? If you're a person who likes books and lives in NOVA or DC or even MD, I am inviting (imploring?) you to be my friend. I'm planning on going to readings and stuff but I also like to drink drinks and do non-literary things with literary people.

I'm arriving around August 15th. Get at me. Please and thank you.

The Peculiar Morality of Saturday Morning Cartoons

I've been watching the '90s X-Men animated series continuously for the past couple weeks, whenever I didn't have something especially urgent to do. I'm hopefully in the final phase of a job search, so that's most of the time.

I loved the show as a kid. I think of myself loving comics generally, but the truth is I didn't spend a lot of time reading them until my teenage years, when I discovered Vertigo and later Chris Ware. Back then I was really more excited about the cartoon. At some point my schedule changed such that I missed many of the later episodes, though I can't figure out what would have pulled me away except by force. Watching it now, I'm honestly surprised by how good it is; there are painfully weak episodes in every season (the Christianity-themed Nightcrawler guest star episode is especially execrable) but the writers made a lot of smart choices that showed respect for and faith in their audience, and while the animation has its problems it rarely suffers from a lack of effort or interest. The multi-episode arcs are complex and interesting, with an ongoing time-travel thread that gets surprisingly convoluted without ever quite becoming ridiculous. The time-travel thread in particular is effective because it shows the viewers how wrong things can go, how high the stakes really are: because of the peculiar morality to which action shows for children subscribe, we can't actually see anything bad happen, but we can see the terrifying future results of hypothetical bad things that might eventually happen.

For instance, in the time-travel thread we occasionally see the glistening preserved adamantium skeleton of Wolverine. What the show never explicitly says, but what you have to know in looking at it, is that Wolverine died. He died so violently, in fact, that all his skin and meat were stripped from his metal-coated bones. That must have been awful. But we didn't see it! So it's all okay. As long as we supply the suffering, as long as we're responsible for that cognitive leap, it's acceptable for it to exist within the show.

Note: Overwrought Music Video for Comedy Purposes Only

A lot of the moral weirdness of the show centers on Wolverine. He's generally the most popular X-Man. I can't honestly say I know why -- his incredible longevity and ability to survive terrible circumstances allows the comics' writers to tell some interesting stories, but his basic schtick of being a grouchy guy who likes to kill stuff but also is secretly a teddy bear is not what I would call the core of a compelling character. Rather -- and this is especially true in the cartoons -- he's a bit one-dimensional. Anyway, he's popular, so you have to include him and you can't change much. But, as he exists, he sort of demands a lot of material the cartoon can't accomodate. His powers are, remember, the following:

1) He has these really sharp claws. 2) He has a mutant healing factor. 3) His skeleton is coated with metal. 4) He has sharp senses, like an animal.

Three of those four powers require violence to be relevant. You can't use sharp claws except by cutting things, and most of the time those "things" would have to be people. You can't heal unless someone does you harm. Your skeleton isn't likely to come up very often unless something's gone terribly wrong. So they tone Wolverine down a little. His healing factor doesn't seem to be as good anymore (one of his enemies seems to know he can die from excessive cold, and it takes him days rather than seconds to recover from a scratch across his torso) which is a good call, because otherwise there would be no danger for him in a world where most weapons do no visible harm. His claws seem a little smaller and a little less lethal (though this varies from episode to episode). But they can't change the underlying principle: Wolverine is the one X-Man who doesn't mind killing, who in fact kind of likes it. But they also can't change this: Wolverine is not allowed to kill anyone because it would upset children and their parents.

Their solution is that Wolverine is constantly planning to kill people. He just never gets to actually do it. In almost every episode, he pushes someone down on the ground, gets out his claws, and says something like "Now let's see what you had for breakfast" (they use that one several times). You can tell he's going to cut the guy's head off or gut him because there's no other way it can end, and because he's probably said at some point in the episode that he's planning to do this. And, well, it's what you would do, right? These are life-or-death situations. The lives of his loved ones are at stake. Nothing else makes sense. But you also know that he's not going to actually get to hurt the person. Each and every time, someone throws a rock at him, or punches him off, or shoots him with a (harmless, but forceful) laser. Then he just sort of forgets to try again, I guess. It's weird, and if you watch too many of them back to back it also gets pretty funny. Like Worf in Star Trek: TNG, Wolverine is ostensibly the deadliest character, and he's also usually the first one to go down.

Another weird thing is that someone apparently told the writers that they couldn't use the word "kill," as in, "I'm going to kill you." So the characters can literally threaten to cut each other into pieces, but they can't talk about what the result of doing that would be. (You know, death.) Instead, they have to say "destroy." I don't know about you, but I find the idea of destroying a person way more threatening than the idea of killing someone. To destroy a human being would be to ruin them thoroughly, wouldn't it? Wouldn't it mean breaking them down to their component parts? Wouldn't it mean wrecking their lives, and then maybe killing them even after the death was largely academic?

The underlying principle in these ways of avoiding violence is that intent doesn't matter as much as action. And in practice I agree, most of the time. Yet there must be something terribly corrosive about making the decision to end another person. There is surely a difference between a soldier trained to kill and one who's done it, but the difference doesn't seem to be moral, and it must diminish with every day that soldier renews his commitment to the inevitable killing. We see Wolverine decide, again and again, to kill other people. The fact that he apparently never gets to actually do it seems, at some point, irrelevant. We are still continually watching him live in that moment of choosing to kill.

I've always remembered the "destroy" thing as being more of a Gundam Wing tic. There were two English dubs for this surprisingly quiet entry into the giant robot 'splosion-fest genre, and the one aired during primetime was again directed at children. The blood was mostly edited out and the deaths were downplayed, but the series was about giant robot battles in a growing giant robot war wherein a core of powerful giant robots often blew up dozens of other giant robots in a matter of minutes. There's just no getting around the fact of death in a show like that, but you can still say "destroy" instead of kill.

The characters were naturally threatening and promising to kill each other constantly, and begging for their lives, and so basically the word "kill" came up in the script approximately forty times a minute. In the kiddie dub, it was "destroy" instead. The results were hilarious. (I don't know how there isn't a YouTube montage of this nonsense.) 

I wonder how cartoons today deal with these problems. I feel, from what I've seen, as if they're generally less ambitious and more good-natured to begin with and so avoid much of the awkwardness discussed here. But I'm not sure. What I do know is how weird I felt, at times, watching these shows as a kid; they suggested a morality I could never really understand.

How I listen, how I read

It occurred to me last night (or, in fact, now, when I first opened up the "new post" page and started typing the words you are presently reading, due to the fact that evading the mental blocks designed by my own mind to stop me from creating a blog post currently requires me to start writing at night and then continue + finish the next day when guilt over the time I've already sunk won't let me do otherwise) that a chief difference between how I listen to music and how I read books is that I mostly listen to music in order to stop feeling emotions, or rather, to exhaust them. That is to say that when I am too angry or when I am too sad or when I am too nervous my preferred coping strategy is to open up the ol' iTunes playlist and choose an album that is likewise too angry, sad, or nervous. Then I listen to that album until I no longer feel the way I felt. So like for instance when I feel that the universe is against me and I'm going to die broken and alone I might listen to "Cowboy Dan" on a loop for a while:

If I want to listen to music but I don't have any particular emotion going on more than the others I'll usually listen to something really laid back because I don't want to screw with how neutral I'm feeling (for me a certain variety of very conscious, very aware laid-backness is extremely nice). Or I will listen to a display of joyful virtuosity because my favorite feeling in the whole world may be the unique blend of care and carelessness, of play and work, involved in a truly show-offy display of virtuosity, because secretly I worship technical accomplishment in all I do, to the point where (because I am not technically accomplished in most things) I can barely work up the will to do much of anything other than write and help others to write. Anyway when I feel this sort of laid-backness I will maybe listen to something like White Denim's Exposion, which has the benefit of being both extremely chill and quite technically accomplished:

In fact I am listening to White Denim now, because I feel pretty laid back right now, because of a reason. ("Now" still refers to "last night," when I wrote this, and when in fact I suspect I will post it, though you will probably still read it "today," or rather, tomorrow, if you read it at all.) That's what made me think of writing this post.

So basically when I listen to music my goal is usually to reduce my feelings by way of catharsis, or at least to maintain my feelings more or less where they are. There are exceptions to this rule (for instance, I usually listen to Antony and the Johnsons more to exhaust emotions I never even actually have than to deal with anything I'm actually feeling) but I tend to listen to those exceptions less often than the albums that fit the rule.

When I read the situation is different. There are some books I use this way sometimes (for instance I would say my experience of Blake Butler is closer to how I feel about bands like Modest Mouse than it is to how I feel about many other writers I enjoy) but usually if I'm reading a book I am looking to expand and intensify my thoughts and feelings for the duration. For instance I have just finished The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and man I had a great time with that, like a lot of people. It's dramatic and in some places perhaps even very slightly melodramatic but that's the point. I had a lot of different feelings while I was reading it -- often paler imitations of the feelings the characters themselves were feeling, for instance intense grief, terrible longing, deep regret, intense pride, terror, courage. If the novel had not delivered these feelings I doubt I would have bothered reading it. But it did.

Why is it that I want my music to whittle me down and my reading to build me up? I'm really and truly not sure. It seems lame to end a blog post with a question about how other people feel about your post's subject because a) of course you're invited to comment and b) it never works, but still, I am curious: does this post resonate with your experiences? Or do you feel differently? What is the deal?

Learning from Don Bluth Films, pt. 3

Bet you didn't know this was going to become a regular thing!

Anyway, Tracy and I are having a nice little night to ourselves. We ate some pork tacos and then some Nutella toast, I spent some time researching agents (who, it seems, are interested in good books; go figure), and now she's working on some documentation for our old digs at Puerto del Sol. (I did some of that earlier today.) She turned on All Dogs Go to Heaven for a bit of background noise and I got a little sucked in.

There's a lot I don't love about All Dogs, especially the orphan, and there are a few things I really do like (the menace of Carface, more persuasive for its imperfection, and the juxtaposition of metaphysical and squalid imageries), but the key moment in the film, the bit that makes it worth watching, is what happens when Charlie gets up to Heaven. It's not what you would expect.

It may be worth noting here that while I do not really believe in Heaven, and I haven't for some years now, I've never been able to invest the emotional energy necessary to believe in much of anything else, including the nothing I suspect is waiting for me. To the extent that I try to comfort myself about death, the way I like to look at it is this: before I came around, there wasn't nothing, there was in fact everything, and everything will persist when I'm gone. My death doesn't end anything. In fact, it may be a sort of reunion -- with the everything I wasn't experiencing before I was alive. Not being alive is the normal state of affairs, after all.

And that's about the best I've got. But when I'm being lazy about it, what I hope for is pretty much the generic afterlife you see in cartoons like All Dogs. It should be like life, but boring: less suffering, less work, more time to spend with loved ones just sort of pleasantly floating around, enjoying the ease of making it without making rent. So when Charlie is murdered and floats up to Heaven, I'm thinking, "That looks like a pretty great deal." Sure it's boring, but sometimes boring is good. Anyway, he isn't really dead. The rational response would be a celebration. It would be exploring his new digs. It would be maybe romancing the pretty lady dog who seems so eager to join him in a duet. When you go to Heaven you're supposed to say, "Thank you!" Or you're supposed to say "Awesome!" Or you're supposed to, at any rate, calm down, chill out, relax, and enjoy.

Charlie makes the movie work when he refuses to stay. In fact, the key is that he's not even actually interested in Heaven. It's weird because he's clearly not a believer, has obviously invested extremely little thought in his soul's final destination, and yet he's not at all surprised to find himself there in the clouds. He could not give less of a shit about what's happening, about the implications of it. His immediate response is to go back down and deal with Carface.

And it's key here that Carface is not actually a major evil, especially at this stage in the film. Yes, he killed Charlie, and yes, he'll probably do it again. But honestly? These are dogs. We're not that worried about them. The empire at the heart of their dispute is a pile of raw meat and a rat race track. This stuff manifestly does not matter.

And that's precisely what makes it so great as a reason to go back. This is the moment in the movie when we realize we're dealing with a sort of maniac: the special kind of crazy person that makes a good protagonist, the kind of guy who especially won't let something trivial go. He's willing to risk his life and his immortal soul in order to get back at a bulldog in a vest and lime-green bow tie, not because he thinks it will make his life better or even because he thinks it'll make it worse but because he just can't help himself. Everything that comes before this terrible decision is prologue, and most of what comes after is coasting on it. We're pretty sure he could make a great mistake again, and we're interested in seeing what will come, in any case, of this one.

It's a useful example of something I've said here before: you want to make a story happen, make sure you've got some characters willing to make terrible, awful mistakes. Characters eager to ruin their own lives.

Novel Length Short Story: The Pearl by John Steinbeck

So I just finished reading a novel.  It was short-ish, but reminded of what Gabe said back in short story month about genres of length.  The Pearl feels like a short story.  I really don't think I would have read it or kept reading it if I didn't HAVE to take baths because my bathroom only has a tub.  My copy is all old and shit.  I'm fine with dropping it in the water.

This is really just to say, that yes, short stories over 100 pages exist.

It's Sunday & Team USA Lost: ChillTFO, We Still Have Miley Cyrus and Gymnastics

Our most Traffic-Gettingest Posts

Were you ever wondering how to generate traffic for a lit blog attached to a seemingly never-coming literary magazine based on the reputations of two writers no one ever heard of? (That would be Tracy and I.) Well, most of our posts are not especially good answers to that question, but follow me in a journey up my own butt as I reveal our most traffic-getting posts of all time.

#1. The Lime-Cucumber Gatorade Review.

In this one I make fun of the concept of Lime-Cucumber Gatorade, then "liveblog" my first experience of the beverage. Hilarity ensues. This one is easily our all-time most popular post, and I wrote it drunk in about fifteen minutes on a Saturday night. A surprising number of people link to it on Facebook in a week, and it often gets dozens of hits a day from various Google searches, which makes sense given that we're the top result for a Google search on the subject, and I don't know about you but the first thing I do whenever I see or experience a new beverage is to Google it and see what some jerk with a blog thinks about it. This is also our most commented-upon post, with a current count of 13 comments, about twice what anything else has ever gotten, and still going strong. Most of the comments seem to like the drink, and several agree that I'm gay.

Nothing I write will ever be more popular than this post. Nothing. Ever. Soon it will develop its own consciousness and rampage through the countryside.

#2. The One About Duke Nukem, Video Games, and Sex

This one may grab the second-most hits from Google per day on average, but it's definitely first in disappointing Google users. I know this because people never find it searching for "Incisive commentary on sex in games that begins with the premise Duke Nukem Forever was a shitty game," or, "Video game discussion that ultimately and counter-intuitively concludes the Lunar series is the sexiest video game of all time," but instead some variation on "Duke Nukem sex tape" and "Duke Nukem sex." I'm pretty sure they just want to see the Duke get laid. Which is kind of weird, actually, because the sort of man-child who likes that game would presumably rather be dissolved in acid than be called gay. And yet here they are, searching for porn on the basis of its male participant. In any case, it makes me glad I elected not to include video of the offending Duke Nukem scenes.

#3. Teaching and Learning from The Simpsons

This one is weird mainly in that people seem to be Googling its title pretty much exactly, but I don't feel like these are readers of the site. I guess they wake up one day and ask themselves, "Has anyone taught a Simpsons class? Did they learn anything from it? I sure hope so!"

The answer is Yes, the Internet. Someone has done that. (It was my wife.)

#4. The One Where I say Bookstores can Suck a Fat One.

This one is benefitting not from particular Google searches so much as Google's faith that if something is linked in fifty places, it must be pretty good. Some guy who apparently answered one of those "Make money simply by blogging!" ads wrote a decent response (which I can't be bothered to find) to this post that was mostly actually a rehash of this post, then he put that response on every generic blog about books or reading within fifty miles, presumably in order to get someone (him or his corporate overlords) some AdSense dollars. My entire online writing career is about burying some pornographic Captain N fanfiction I wrote when I was fourteen at the very end of a long list of Google results, and this guy has really helped the cause.

I like big books (and I cannot lie).

So there's a YouTube user who apparently saw that they were now allowing ten-hour videos and thought, "I am going to make ten-hour loops of Mario climbing a vine, and such." Then this person did exactly that. And, in spite of seven years of higher education, I am currently watching the video. Or rather, I'm listening to the Mario theme on loop while the video plays in another tab. Every now and then I click over to that tab and watch Mario climb the vine for a little while. And that really is all that happens: Mario's music plays, he climbs the vine. I'd like to say I'm doing this out of appreciation for the absurdist sense of humor that led to such a video, but while that's playing a small role, I think the truth is I can't believe anyone would make a ten-hour video that wasn't brilliant. I know how this person made the video: he hit copy and paste a lot of times. Or maybe it was even simpler. Maybe he told iMovie, or whatever program, "Waste ten hours," and then it did. Maybe there's a button for creating idiotic loops. I But somehow, even though I should know better and in fact I do know better, it seems terribly ambitious, a sort of Dada masterpiece.

Mark O'Connell wrote a thing a while back comparing our relationships with long novels to Stockhom Syndrome. I felt an immediate sense of recognition and at the same time I thought it war sort of ridiculous. Which is probably how a kidnapping victim feels when someone points out his or her own unhealthy attachment to the perpetrator. I guess I like to look at it differently. When I read a big or even an interminable book, I am being optimistic. I am choosing to believe in the author: to believe that there are still ambitious things worth doing. To be sure, it is fallacious to equate bigness with ambition, and the obvious pun (it is "phallacious" as well) has some truth in it. I am a man who wants to be a Big Man who wants to believe there is such a thing as a Big Man, who has fetishized bigness for its own sake, I am sure. I can find such motivations in everything I do, which suggests I'm either a hopeless retrograde sex addict, a human being, or both.

These days I mostly read long novels when I'm given a choice, which means that the indie lit crowd and I are often reading different books. Small presses generally focus on small books, for a mixture of financial reasons (it costs more to print more, after all), reasons of fashion (the general rule of literary magazines today is to shrink rather than grow), and for other reasons also. I guess I find the financial origins of these small books a little frustrating, not least because I tend to write long books: too long for most small presses. Again, it's not that longer books are actually better, but that they seem to project a certain self-confidence, a certain quantity of daring: they are brave enough to demand our time, our money, our strength (we have to hold the suckers up). I like to invest my time as a reader in writing that believes in itself. And while O'Connell wrote mostly about dull, pretentious time-sucks, I am reading David Mitchell, who often writes long books, and whose long books are as tight, lovely, and entertaining as any short novel could hope to be, but moreso, because there's more. And really, as someone who loves reading, that may be all I'm really asking.

But then I think about the ten-hour mario video still running in my other tab, and it makes me wonder why I read what I do. Am I more interested in the idea of big, ambitious art than I am in actually experiencing beauty? Sometimes, maybe, yes. And all I can say in my defense is this: 

"Oops."