Surging behind

Remember the surge? The idea behind the surge was that if we pump some more troops into Iraq to jack up security for a few precious months, maybe this will provide enough breathing space for the Iraqi government to hammer out a deal. It was always a hail Mary, a plan forged out of desperation -- the kind of thing that builds up tension at the climax of a movie but that typically fails miserably in real life.

So let's check in and see how it's working. Question one: have the troop increases led to some measurable increases in security for Iraqis? There is some dispute about this, even within Michael O'Hanlon's brain. So let's give the surge the benefit of the doubt and say it is indeed making Baghdad and Iraq as a whole more secure.

Now we turn to question two: Is the bump in security paying off? I.e., is the Iraqi government responding to the improved circumstances by moving toward a settlement on the tough issues (oil-revenue sharing, de-de-Baathification, federalization)?

Well, no. In fact, the Iraqi government has responded to the surge by falling apart.

This would seem to eliminate the surge's entire rationale, no? Even if there is a rapprochement with the Sunni Accordance Front (anything's possible), it's obvious that political reconciliation in Iraq is moving backward rather than forward.

So how does defense secretary Bob Gates explain this mess? “We probably all underestimated the depth of the mistrust and how difficult it would be for these guys to come together on legislation."

Oh Jesus H. Fuck, it's greeted-as-liberators all over again.

Still, now that Gates has acknowledged the error, presumably we're going to call off the surge and start figuring out how to wind this thing down with as few additional corpses as possible, right? After all, the evidence is in: temporary "breathing room" can't bring Iraq's warring factions to the table.

Nope.

Mr. Gates offered a slightly different formulation on Thursday, arguing that political progress would come when Iraqi Army and police units proved able to take over primary responsibility for maintaining security in areas now largely controlled by American troops.

“I think the key is, not only establishing the security, but being able to hold on to those areas and for Iraqi Army and police to be able to provide the continuity of security over time,” he said. “It’s under that umbrella I think progress will be made at the national level.”

Bear with me, because I'm about to make a sports analogy, and we all know that's not my strong suit. But this is what's called moving the goalposts.

With the speed and alacrity characteristic of the U.S. military, commanders will be reviewing the surge strategy in September, at which point, Gates said (in the words of the NYT), "the administration would have to balance the relative lack of political progress with the somewhat encouraging security trends."

Since that last sports analogy seemed to go OK, I'm going to try something more ambitious: this is like saying that, in assessing a football strategy, we'll have to balance the fact that we didn't score any points and gave up three touchdowns with the fact that we did some really strong blocking. The security trends are only relevant inasmuch as they enable political progress. If the surge could be sustained indefinitely, you could argue that the security improvements benefit Iraqi civilians, the people who have suffered for all our blunders, so better security is a good thing on its own merits. But we can't sustain current troop levels too far into next year, no matter how much we lower recruiting standards/extend the tours of exhausted soldiers/starve commanders in Afghanistan of manpower.

As of now, the surge makes no sense as a military strategy. Until yesterday it had a logic, however optimistic. But now that logic is exhausted, and yet the surge continues.

The only possible conclusion is that this is happening because the surge is not a military strategy at all -- it's a narrative one. It's a way to keep a tired show on the air one more season, like an adorable kid cousin or a Very Special Wedding Episode. The surge is the moment when the Iraq War jumped the shark. Can we please, please cancel it?

Why it's not in Bush's interest to fire Alberto Gonzales.

Haven't posted anything heartbreaking about Iraq recently, so as the Iraqi government -- and with it the rationale for Bush's troop surge -- collapses, I turn as usual to the New Yorker's George Packer, who writes:

After ten days or so, Omer went with a friend to look for his father at the morgue and found a scene of absolute hell. Bodies were stacked two or three high in the hallways, with no refrigeration, the older corpses beginning to decompose and generate maggots. Holding hands, Omer and his friend examined body after body until they found one that had been shot in the torso and might have been his father; they couldn’t be sure. Morgue officials led them to a room where a few dozen Iraqis, many of them women, were staring at six computer monitors. The screens showed a picture of one corpse’s face for a few seconds, then flashed the next face. Now and then, someone in the room would begin to wail. This was the closest thing to “closure” and dignity in death that the victims’ families could expect. Suddenly, the face of Omer’s father appeared on all six screens.

Butler, desnarked

Pulitzer-winning oversharer Robert Olen Butler has sent a lengthy response to Gawker about his loony e-mail re: his wife and Ted Turner. Gawker posted Butler's e-mail sliced into little chunks, with funny/snarky commentary in between. For those who want the soap opera without the commentary, I've put the pieces back together below.

Subject: Can you please give voice to this at your site?

I am sure there are a number of your followers who actually might want to understand this intense letter which was written in an extreme emotional circumstance. They encountered the email with no knowledge of two of the three principal players in the drama. They have only a sound-bite-and-media-spun understanding of the third. I can well see how a first reaction to the email by someone for whom it was not intended might be that it is only a bizarre and inappropriate document worthy of scorn.

But to begin to see the email in a fair way, you must understand this premise: I loved Elizabeth deeply for 13 years. I did not stop loving her when she told me what was happening between her and Ted. I love her still in an altered but sincere way. She loved me. She loves me still, but no longer as her husband. I'm sure many, if not all, of your readers have gone through their own dramas of love and loss. Love is not easily relinquished and it can shift its shape.

My drama of love and loss was particularly intense and had some strikingly unique characteristics. And it presented only a small range of choices, none of them good. In terms of the inevitable news of all this, my primary concern, of course, was with the community she and I lived in. If I had said nothing, the naked facts of the events would have meant that Elizabeth would be savaged by the rumor mill.

Even with the facts of her terrible childhood before them, some of the commenters on this and other forums are saying terrible and cruelly untrue things about her character. With no mitigating interpretation at all offered about what happened in our lives and in our marriage, you can well imagine how much worse the reaction would have been. It's just human nature. Nor would very simple, broad-outline public pronouncements have made any difference. If I had simply said something to the effect of "they're marrying for love and she and I will remain friends and I wish them well," it would not have been believed and the very same false assessment of her would have occurred. The explanation vacuum--even a partial one--especially given Ted Turner's involvement--would have been filled in a way that would have been unfairly critical of Elizabeth. Remember, I'm talking about the circle of our friends and acquaintances and colleagues here. Those were the people I had to focus on, not the wide general public. I never dreamed you all would get this intimately involved.

Either of those two choices--silence or vagueness--would have been the easy way out for me. I had nothing to gain from the letter I wrote unless it was a covert act of rage, an act of passive aggression. It was not. Your readers may not believe that. But my wife and I have warmly and lovingly spoken on the phone virtually every day since the breakup. We are going through this crisis of publicity together in a loving way. She is the one person in the world--the only one other than myself--who can judge if I am raging and aggressive over her. When I said in the email that she knew about, endorsed, and even encouraged the email, that was literally true. I showed the entire email to her before I sent it. She could have said not to do it. She could have significantly altered it. She did not. She made a few suggestions, which I implemented.

And the email was never a mass email. I chose five trusted grad students who know us both the best. I chose half a dozen faculty members who know us both the best. And they were asked, when the rumors reached them, to tell the appropriately nuanced story. Or to tell the fuller story on their own initiative--because everyone would soon know anyway. Yes, I sanctioned the use of the email I sent them in order to explain the circumstances to the people in our community who were hearing about this. Why should I avoid vagueness myself and then force them to be vague? Without that sanction to use the email, the explanation vacuum would have continued to form and be filled with lies. And this process worked exactly as I had hoped. That email went out six weeks ago. And faculty members and students alike have told me that all of the talk around campus and around town has been sympathetic and generous about both of us.

Now as to the intimate nature of the email, this is crucial to understand: there is not a single fact of Elizabeth's or Ted's or my personal lives that the intended audience could not easily have already known. Elizabeth has spoken and written openly, publicly, about everything in her childhood. Ted's persona and the details of the pattern of his love life are widely known (just read Jane Fonda's memoir). I do connect some dots to try to explain why Elizabeth has been drawn to him. But it was not meant to be a judgment against either of them. Ted's own difficult childhood is also public knowledge. We all of us often--some psychologists would say pretty much always--form adult relationships as an acting out of the basic love patterns of childhood relationships. There is nothing unseemly or wrong about this. It is the human condition.

And I tell you absolutely that Elizabeth did not do this for money and Ted did not do it lightly as conquest. They love each other deeply. And given what they've both been through in their lives, I expect them to be very good for each other. I love Elizabeth and her remarkable writing talent. I admire the wide-ranging good works Ted does to preserve the earth and prevent nuclear war. These are admirable people doing important work in the culture and in the world. I sincerely hope they have the rich happiness they deserve.

In spite of my previous chiding of you and your readers, I wish that happiness for all of you, as well. It's dangerous to live too deeply in a world of glib judgmentalism. And man, there is some truly legitimate short-burst writing talent among you all. But I hope at least some of you come to realize that vituperation, no matter how funny or elegantly expressed, is not an art form. Because some of you may well be capable of turning your talent with language--and your ferocious sense of right and wrong--to a more enduring purpose: to exploring, with courage and frankness and humor and compassion and moral insight, the truths of the human heart.

The geeks shall inherit the earth

Comic-Con International, the biggest annual comic-book convention, was held last weekend and is apparently now big enough to take over the city of San Diego for four days. (I did not attend.) Douglas Wolk:

This was, by all estimations, the biggest Con ever; Friday, Saturday and Sunday were all completely sold out, hotel rooms were impossible to score, the aisles of the San Diego Convention Center were clogged with fans, every nightspot in the city was awash with after parties every night.... Comic-Con has become an event where Joss Whedon, Stan Lee, Jenna Jameson, Sarah Silverman, Cory Doctorow, Michael Cera and Katee Sackhoff can all be spotted at the same party. We are all nerds now.

Tom Spurgeon:

I'll probably always remember this year for the moment when my pal Jordan Raphael and I were walking in an upstairs hallway to take part in the comics media panel and some Hollywood-looking guy literally elbowed past us, bellowing in a gruff voice, "Sorry, fellas. I have a panel to be on."

Shaenon K. Garrity:

There are people who are extreme obsessive fans of one, and only one, anime series, and these people will attend every single anime-, manga-, and random-Japanese-crap-related panel strictly so that they can get up at the end and ask a completely unrelated question about their one thing. I went to three panels on manga publishing, and this happened at every one, with a different person and different anime each time. All three questions were the same: "Are they ever going to make more episodes of ______?" All three answers: no.

Big announcement: after two decades of false starts, the Watchmen movie is slated for March 2009. Look, there's a website and everything. I will probably go see it, in an instance of the triumph of hope over experience. Smaller but maybe more exciting announcement: Grant Morrison will be writing DC's 2008 crossover Final Crisis.

So some guy tried to pitch Canadian cartooning genius/misogynist lunatic Dave Sim on a Dave Sim Celebrity Roast book. Sim's response is actually pretty sensible: "You roast a beloved figure as a contrast with all the nice things that people say about him: you don't roast someone that everyone hates."

Of course, he thinks the whole thing is a plot by YHWH, a giant monster who lives inside the earth and thinks she's God, so there's a limit.

Unintelligent design

I have nothing against the idea of redesigning the New Yorker. The most recent tweaks have made it more pleasant and readable than ever. But KT Meany's argument for sweeping changes to the magazine's look provide an inadvertent case study in the dangers of redesigning-for-the-hell-of-it.

In her introduction Meany writes:

It’s time to elevate design standards to the same level that grammar and language are held. Ain’t it?

The cutesy grammatical mischief of "Ain't" would be more convincing if the previous sentence weren't so illiterate. The same carelessness is evident in Meany's suggestions.

She starts with the table of contents:

First, create more space by removing any ads from the contents page. Territorially speaking, we own that space!

What a great idea! Just get rid of the ads! The editorial designers will have much more room to play with, and the result will be so pretty and readable that Conde Nast will be happy to print the magazine for free! Why didn't Rea Irvin think of that?

(However, I acknowledge the importance of advertisements, and, if they are necessary, simply extend the ToC across two pages.)

Even when making concessions to reality, Meany loses touch with reality. If you give the ToC another half-page, you have to lose half a page of editorial content somewhere else. Where does it come from? Or is that something for the editor to worry about while you're busy designing?

Anyone can make a table of contents look and function better if they're allowed to say "First give it twice as much space." The challenge of magazine design is improving things within the space you actually have.

Her dumbest suggestion, I think, is this one:

The magazine prints in four colors but predominantly uses only one: black. The 2 x 2-inch advertisement in the margin is bursting with color, yet the whole spread is sedately black and white: an inedible garnish amidst this rice-and-beans meal.

Pay attention to that metaphor. What does the garnish represent? That's right -- the text, i.e. the New Yorker's journalism and fiction.

If The New Yorker pays for CMYK, as the ad suggests, shouldn’t the spread sing with color? To make the most of money spent, let’s rethink color choices. Any one of the New Yorker sections could easily be differentiated with a subtle page tint. This would help one flip to desired articles. Illustrations could be colored, too. How devilish: Hell could look quite hot!

Well now. Since Tina Brown opened the door, the New Yorker has begun using color in ways that would once have been hard to imagine: in photographs and illustrations and in the red display type throughout. (If you have the August 6 issue nearby, take a look at pages 6, 43, and 72 for examples of the effective use of color.) Meany thinks that's not enough, and that there should be color on spreads that contain nothing but running text. Why? Because the publisher pays for color printing. This is the worst kind of design thinking: if it's available, use it! ("Where can we put this cool <marquee> tag?")

Her specific suggestions for color are as bad as you'd expect from the fucked-up premise. (1) She wants a "subtle page tint" for different sections -- maybe salmon for the listings, lime green for Talk, eggshell for fiction. This is such a great idea it's astonishing that not one of the zillions of magazines that print in full color has ever done it, perhaps because it would look totally moronic. (2) She wants to add color to the cartoons. This is the other worst kind of design thinking: the content is a tabula rasa for me to work my design magic on. Cartoons in the New Yorker are a particular kind of drawing with a long history. They're typically done in black lines and (sometimes) gray washes on a white background. The lack of color is not a sad concession to technological or economic realities -- it's a feature of the style. It allows for a particular kind of expressive linework that gets trampled on when you add color. Of course, certain drawings look good in color (there's one on page 65 of the same Aug. 6 issue), but they're not what we mean when we talk about New Yorker cartoons. If you want to replace the New Yorker cartoons with a different kind of drawing, you're welcome to suggest it, but you're not talking about design anymore, you're talking about cartooning.

And note the implication of that dopey "Hell could look quite hot" remark: apparently it's impossible to convey heat in a black-and-white illustration. Redesigning the New Yorker is a fine idea, but it should probably be handled by someone with more respect for writing and drawing than KT Meany.

The NYT posts Clive James's poem, "The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered."

What do you do if you're a Pulitzer-winning novelist and your wife leaves you to join Ted Turner's stable of girlfriends? If you're Robert Olen Butler, you write a fucking batshit-insane e-mail to your grad students telling them about it. I don't usually hard-sell stuff, but you must read this right now.

Update: Butler tells the Post that his wife, Elizabeth Dewberry, read the e-mail before he sent it, and "she was weepingly grateful to me for it. It's full of love and compassion."

Update 2: NPR has an interview with Butler, which doesn't add much. At the end, there's this about Dewberry, who wouldn't talk on-air:

She said she had read Bob's e-mail but had not approved it. "There are inaccuracies in it," she said, but would not go into detail.

Terrific Sopranos appreciation by Geoffrey O'Brien in the NYRB.

So in the course of breaking the news in Slate that it's a shame people don't write letters anymore (seriously), Anne Applebaum slips this in:

Letters have gone the way of the gentle anecdote, the meandering sentence, and the ironic paragraph. Try lengthy irony in an e-mail, and you'll be misunderstood. Try it in a newspaper column, and you risk furious attack. I once attempted to mock Americans' deep suspicion of voting machines, in contrast to our implacable faith in the solidity of ATMs and the safety of Internet shopping. Eight paragraphs of tongue-in-cheek do not go down well in the culture of instant point-scoring.

Wait - what?

So she's now saying that this Washington Post column, in which she argued that there's no need to require voting machines to provide a physical record because we all use ATMs and often don't ask for a receipt (and which, as numerous people pointed out at the time, is just unbelievably stupid and offensive) was tongue-in-cheek. So she didn't really believe it at all. She was writing a parody of a stupid Washington Post column.

No wait. I think the point is that she genuinely was making that argument, but that she used "tongue-in-cheek" techniques to do it, and that was what pissed people off.

First of all, she didn't. There's nothing in there you could call tongue-in-cheek. But more important, even if she had, that's not why people got mad. They got mad because the idea that there's no reason for voting machines to be required to produce paper records since we all use ATMs is just stupid and offensive in itself.

And then to try somehow defend yourself two and a half years later by mischaracterizing what the people who objected to it were saying is just focking infuriating.

Fun thread of "famous songs rewritten as limericks." Samples:

Shall I get you a drink, Maggie May?
Though I'm used, I don't care what they say.
While you're older (and how)
Please enjoy my youth now
'Cause 'Hot Legs' is just five years away.

Stevie Ray brought his Strat to the jam
When DB said "I'm through being glam.
"I'll no longer be soulful,
"'Sperimental, or doleful,
"So Let's Dance and cash in. Where's my gram?"

Third Avenue and 53rd
I stand without saying a word
Where once I turned tricks
Stabbed a guy just for kicks
Now it's luxury condos ... absurd!

So I was thinking that I should maybe do a post on Scott Thomas-gate since I've been thinking about it a bit, but then I saw that Hilzoy has said absolutely everything that needs to be said on it, way better than I ever could.

If you haven't been reading Fake Steve Jobs lately, he's been on something of a roll. Here's Caroline McCarthy on the anonymous blogger's old-school charm:

In a culture captivated--obsessed, even--by the antics of high society, an anonymous satirist starts publishing over-the-top missives purporting to be from an insider in that privileged niche. In the process, the faux-mogul skewers political elites, entertainers, business titans, and ordinary people in a way that's at once outlandish and provocative, hilarious and appalling. It reeks of Swift or Dickens or Twain.

Plus: Andy Ihnatko forthrightly denies that he's FSJ:

I say this here and now, without a single wink or ironic note: I’m not him. I had nothing to do with the blog’s creation and have never had the slightest thing to do with any of its content.

My alma mater is up for America's Most Annoying Liberal Arts College at Gawker.

Firmly under the heading of "bad for the Jews" is the tragic story of Darren Sherman, who met some girl on JDate, took her out to dinner, and then, when she failed to call him, demanded that she pay him back for her share of the meal. Fortunately this is 2007, and so his e-mails and voicemails are available for all to enjoy.

"Reading Comics"

Signs of comics' maturity are coming thick and fast these days -- I was in Forbidden Planet last weekend, and I swear there was at least 40 percent women in there -- but one of the most hopeful is Douglas Wolk's new book, Reading Comics. The book isn't a history of comics or a survey of the canon or an Understanding Comics-style dissection of the medium's mechanics. It's an intelligent critic's attempt to think about his responses to works of art. It works because Wolk is a a terrific reader -- attentive, insightful, sensitive, broad-minded -- and because he's very good at explaining his enthusiasms in layman's terms.

Wolk (who I've hung out with a couple of times) is unusually good at addressing initiates and novices at once: there's enough hand-holding for the reader who knows only, say, Maus and Persepolis, but even the most remedial paragraphs are larded with nuggets of interpretation and commentary for afficionadi to chew on. The bulk of Reading Comics comprises essays on specific cartoonists and works -- some canonical, some contemporary, some pure pulp. There's no attempt at completeness: Kirby and Crumb, among other colossi, are absent. (The book also largely ignores manga and strip cartoons -- the latter a surprising omission, given the reprint boom and the influence of Herriman, Schultz et al on art comics.) Some of Wolk's readings are clearly intended to upset a few applecarts -- Eisner and Ware come in for sober reappraisals -- but he's never ungenerous or capricious. In every case, he points out things I hadn't noticed in the work, even when he discusses cartoonists I've spent a lot of time with.

Most recent comics criticism wants to see comics as a new kind of literature, rather than a thing in itself, and thus winds up missing comics' drawn-ness. Wolk, on the other hand, is really good at looking: he's alert to the small touches that add up to a drawing style, and he loves the fact that such a style creates reality for the reader. This leads him to focus more on the nuances of illustration than on the panel-to-panel mechanics of comics storytelling (the kind of thing Scott McCloud emphasizes). Peeking out from behind Wolk's judicious tone there's a personal aesthetic. He particularly likes: pages that work as unified designs; comics that explore the connections between parts of a system; thorny, scratchy, "ugly" drawing styles; wild spatial abstraction. (Every item on that list is associated with Steve Ditko, the book's secret hero, and I suspect that if Wolk has an agenda it's to elevate wiry, intellectual Ditkoism to a position alongside massive, kinetic Kirbyism in the American tradition.)

Because Reading Comics is such a personal book, everyone will take issue with a few of Wolk's conclusions. He doesn't have much time for virtuosity, which causes him to underrate Crumb and Ware and to begin a strong essay on Locas by saying that "it's easy to like Jaime Hernandez's comics for the wrong reasons." (Really? Enjoying attractive drawing and witty dialogue is wrong?) And his long discussion of Grant Morrison probably has more to offer the converted than the newbie: he makes The Invisibles sound like an elaborate New Age metaphor, without capturing the punk dynamism and humor that make it a thrilling elaborate New Age metaphor. (I have a similar problem trying to convey what makes Morrison so awesome: if there were a parallel earth that was exactly like ours except that on this one I hadn't read any of Morrison's work, and if in some "Roth of Two Worlds"-style crossover I got to meet my counterpart and was encouraging him to read New X-Men and Seven Soldiers, I'm pretty sure my descriptions would be unconvincing and I would wind up waving my hands and shouting, "No, you don't understand -- it's awesome!")

Far more often, though, Wolk made me want to go back to work I've loved -- Love and Rockets X, Chester Brown's Yummy Fur, Ditko's Spider-Man -- armed with his insight, or to pick up things I haven't read yet. He gets Sim, Moore, and both Hernandezes dead-on. Mostly, he demonstrates that a love of comics can be as meaningful and as rewarding as a love of books or music. Recommended to fans and the curious alike.

This is pretty funny.

I've stopped posting about each latest Bush-admin outrage, because, hey, what's the point? And yet somehow they continue to come up with these little meaningless rhetorical things that drive me fucking nuts. The latest: Peter Stamison, the regional head of the General Services Administration, was in San Francisco, along with Nancy Pelosi, for the ribbon-cutting of some new federal building. Outside a police barricade were protesters shouting "Impeach now!" and "How about cutting the funding for war?"

So what does this GSA dude have to say? He says, "I think we all as taxpayers — those of us taxpayers, as opposed to you people back there — are the ones that make this work."

In other words, that majority of the country that opposes the war and the administration obviously don't pay taxes, are criminals, have abdicated our rights as citizens, and can therefore justifiably be ignored.

Do I sound hysterical? I feel like I might be getting a little hysterical. It's just that this shit has been going on for a long time now, and I'm kind of losing it a little bit.

So, so true.

Of course, there's something annoying and depressing about conservatives abandoning Bush, because, after all, everything awful about him was clearly visible in 2004, and things didn't have to go the way they did. But this Peggy Noonan column is a satisfying read anyway, and she gets off a couple good insights that might not be available to those of us who never fell for W's bullshit:

I suspect people pick up with Mr. Bush the sense that part of his drama, part of the story of his presidency, is that he gets to be the romantic about history, and the American people get to be the realists. Of the two, the latter is not the more enjoyable role.

Americans have always been somewhat romantic about the meaning of our country, and the beacon it can be for the world, and what the Founders did. But they like the president to be the cool-eyed realist, the tough customer who understands harsh realities.

With Mr. Bush it is the people who are forced to be cool-eyed and realistic. He's the one who goes off on the toots. This is extremely irritating, and also unnatural. Actually it's weird.

I guess maybe everyone already knew this, but Ryan Lizza is going to be the new Washington correspondent for The New Yorker. This is totally a brilliant move on their part. Over the last couple years, the worst thing about The New Yorker has been its political coverage, which has almost never gone beyond rehashing the most conventional of conventional wisdom. Jeffrey Goldberg, though apparently a great reporter and writer on the Middle East, was never cut out to do the job, as a former New Yorker writer recently admitted to me. (Ha! this makes it seem like I hang out with former New Yorker writers all the time!) Lizza understands politics, and how it's changed in the last decade, and how to write about campaigns, in a way that no one I've ever seen writing for The New Yorker does, and he's also just a great reporter. Also a nice guy, in my limited interactions with him.

My friend and colleague Rachel Morris now has a blog. Go for her brilliant Columbia Journalism Review cover story about an Al Jazeera cameraman detained at Guantanamo. Stay for the links to gay-sweater-gate, the secret cause of McCain's implosion.

When you're writing a novel, you start to sort other people's novels into the following categories: novels that you're confident your novel will be better than, novels that you hope your novel will be better than, novels that you'd love for your novel to be as good as, and novels that you know your novel has no hope of coming close to. (This came to mind because I'm finally reading Mating, which is squarely in the last category.)

Surowiecki fans: Here's a smart review-essay from Foreign Affairs, covering globalization, progress, and simplistic free-market homilies.

The mayor of Philadelphia is currently third in line for an iPhone at the AT&T store in Philly.

Fake Steve Jobs:

To those of you who serve under me at Apple, I say this: Yes, I have berated you, and insulted you, and exasperated you. Yes, I've fired your friends for no reason, and made you work harder than you ever thought you could work. Yes, I've taken you away from your spouses, your children, your transgendered domestic partners. In some cases your devotion to me has cost you your marriages. You've sacrificed a great deal for this. But has it not been worth it?

Eric Lichtenfeld in Slate performs a close reading of the Die Hard catchphrase:

When terrorist-slash-exceptional thief Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) taunts hero John McClane (Bruce Willis), "Who are you? Just another American who saw too many movies as a child?" and asks this "Mr. Cowboy" if he really thinks he stands a chance, McClane's answer—"Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker"—marks the moment that McClane, an everyman, assumes the mantle of America's archetypal heroes: Roy Rogers, John Wayne, Gunsmoke's Marshall Dillon, and others who have been so vital to American boyhood. Unlike the many action-movie one-liners that are rooted in the hero's narcissism, McClane's stems from our collective wish-fulfillment. He is not referring to himself, not suggesting an "I" or a "me" but an us.

This is all valid, but I don't think Lichtenfeld gives enough time to the line's rhythmic beauty. Phyrric-spondee-trochee-trochee: a soft opening ("yippee"), a triumphant double-stressed cresting ("ki-yay"), and then the happy landing on the metrical regularity of alternating stressed/unstressed syllables ("motherfucker"). It's the rhythm that gives the phrase its playful feel and makes it more fun to say than "I'll be back" or "I'm your worst nightmare." Although the combination of gibberish and profanity doesn't hurt either.

George Packer has a blog.

Young Ezra Klein completely humiliates Larry Kudlow here.

Danah Boyd observes a burgeoning class schism between Facebook and MySpace:

The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we'd call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

Check out Jew Benny Feilhaber scoring a stunning winner for the US in the final of the CONCACAF Gold Cup.

At last, getting excited about the US soccer team seems at least theoretically possible.

UPDATE: Michael Winn of Weil, Gotshal and Manges points out that Feilhaber was joined on Sunday by another MOT, defender Jonathan Bornstein.

Vintage LOLcats!

More on Sao Paulo's advertising ban:

The law was hailed by writer Roberto Pompeu de Toledo as "a rare victory of the public interest over private, of order over disorder, aesthetics over ugliness, of cleanliness over trash… For once, all that is accustomed to coming out on top in Brazil has lost."

As a Mac user I mostly ignore Windows, but sometimes I stumble upon something that seems to sum up the entire Windows experience. Like this sentence, from a Lifehacker post: "That means the whole process of hunting down obscure error messages—especially those containing cryptic error codes—just got a whole lot easier."

Astute analysis of The Sopranos -- the whole thing, not just the last five minutes -- by New York's Emily Nussbaum.

And it was no wonder we, as an audience, identified with Melfi. She was—hard to remember, but it’s true—a perfectly decent therapist. She handled Tony’s transference gently; she gave him tools to cope with his mother and uncle (tools he used to consolidate power, but still). She even saved a life, that of Meadow’s child-molesting soccer coach. Instead of ordering the murder, Tony stumbles stoned into the family rec room, stunned with the effort of not killing, moaning to his wife, “Carmela, Carmela, I didn’t hurt nobody.”

Back then, this scene struck me as the show’s iconic moment—a bravura sequence in which the decision not to commit violence was as thrilling as any bloody hit. In a drama built on gore, it was thrilling. Though Tony continued to collect envelopes, order hits, screw goomars, it seemed like evidence that he could be a different man.

And then something in Chase's vision went black.

Very smart close-reading of that final Sopranos scene.

Bored? Excellent logic problem here. Satisfying, legitimate, non-trick solution here. (The solution's in white type; select it with your cursor to read it.)

When you are feeling low, it is fun to laugh at the stupidity of others: So here's a blog post about Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, which I've just finished reading for the fourth time. Check out the comments, both from David Cawley. Cawley thinks that (a) Hollinghurst himself is the author of the blog entry; (b) Hollinghurst will enjoy hearing his novel compared to Bonfire of the Vanities; (c) Hollinghurst would like to begin a sexually charged e-mail correspondence with David Cawley. The first two, at least, are obviously false.

Very vague Sopranos ending spoilers ahoy

Here's my take on this Sopranos thing, now that everybody else has had their say. The Sopranos was never about plot development or resolution. Almost every episode introduced story elements that were never mentioned again, let alone resolved. The world of The Sopranos is largely non-cumulative: events don't tend to build on each other. (The exception is that most seasons included a guy who didn't fit, who caused problems for Tony and the crew, and who wound up dead.) I like a good solid narrative resolution, which is one of the reasons The Sopranos will never mean as much to me as The Wire. But it's not fair to criticize the ending for failing to do the thing the show has always refused to do.

The scene from the last episode that sticks with me is the one with A.J.'s shrink, when Tony starts talking about his mother and Carmella gives him that look of exhausted disbelief. It reminded me of the pilot, when Tony went to Dr. Melfi for the first time. At the beginning, it seemed like The Sopranos was going to be about a guy who goes into therapy and has to confront who he is and what he does, and who begins to undergo a wrenching process of change, with all the concommitant effects on his life and the people around him. That could have been a great show. But it's not the show we got. (I blame Melfi, who was a consistently terrible shrink: platitudinous, pointlessly confrontational, irrelevant.) Tony's lack of progress in therapy was a microcosm for the show as a whole: the same stuff happens over and over again, and nothing changes, and there's no progress except people dying. Remarkably, it was still a pretty good show.

Am I the last person to know this? The NYPost reveals that the big current emo bands -- Fall Out Boy, Panic! At the Disco, The Academy Is ... -- are created on an assembly line by a couple of Svengalis, just like *NSYNC/Backstreet/O-Town.

Ledes we never got past:

Really, the most that can be said of a great film is not that it is like a great book. Film is its own literature; and whereas I understand the comparisons of The Sopranos to the masterpieces of the realist novel, and I myself have not been immune to the hyperbolic impulse in praising this magnificent enterprise, it strikes me that the achievement of The Sopranos is not so much that it puts you in mind of Balzac or Dickens, but that here on television, for most of a decade, were tales that could stand in the company of Fassbinder, and Kieslowski, and Mike Leigh, and Chabrol.

From Leon Wieseltier's paean to The Sopranos. Really, the most that can be said of a great television program is not that it is like a great film.

Far from the tree

When I heard the Safari-for-Windows rumor, my response was, "It'll never happen -- Apple is a hardware company." Apple's business model is: (1) make objects; (2) sell them for a profit. They make OSX to sell Macs. They make iTunes (for Mac and PC) to sell iPods. How could Safari for Windows help their bottom line? If I had had more time yesterday I would have written a post to that effect, linked to Mary Jo Foley's blog, and looked like a moron.

So now I'm confused.

The main justification I've heard is that WinSafari is a kind of advertisement for OSX. As Engadget put it, "it seems the Apple folks plan to use it in much the same way they've used iTunes to grow the Mac fanbase by giving Windows users 'a glass of ice water to somebody in hell!'" In other words, Steve Jobs believes that PC users will try Safari and think, "This free browser is awesome -- now I'm going to spend $2,000 on a new computer to get other software that is presumably equally awesome." I find this hard to believe. Safari is a good browser, but it's not that much better than Firefox.

So what's Apple thinking?

My guess is that it has something to do with the new iPhone development standards that Jobs announced today. For those of you who don't follow this stuff as obsessively as I do: independent software developers (i.e. programmers who don't work for Apple) will be able to write programs for the iPhone, but those programs will be akin to "web apps" like Google Maps and Flickr -- they'll run in the iPhone's web browser, which (it so happens) is a version of Safari.

So what I'm thinking is this: there will be occasions when a developer wants to write a program that runs on both the iPhone and the desktop (e.g. a program that syncs data between your phone and your computer in some specialized way). For most purposes, the iPhone will integrate with your computer using iTunes, just like the iPod does. But these new iPhone programs can't run in iTunes, because iTunes doesn't run web apps.

If Apple wants to accomodate them, there's three choices: (a) build browser-type features into iTunes; (b) force developers to write apps that work on Firefox or Internet Explorer as well as Safari; (c) port Safari to Windows. Option (a) stretches the iTunes concept (already pretty elastic) past breaking point. Option (b) would have worked for a while, mostly, but it risks sticking developers with compatibility issues going forward, which might have been a brake on iPhone software development. Option (c) allows Apple to build special features into this or future versions of Safari, just for developers of iPhone software.

So that's my guess: that the version of Safari on your computer will integrate with the version on your iPhone in some way. Time will tell.

So a bunch of high-profile lawyers (including Alan Dershowitz, Robert Bork, and Viet Dinh) put together an amicus brief for Scooter Libby. In his order allowing them to submit the brief, my new hero Judge Reggie Walton includes the following footnote:

It is an impressive show of public service when twelve prominent and distinguished current and former law professors of well-respected schools are able to amass their collective wisdom in the course of only several days to provide their legal expertise to the Court on behalf of a criminal defendant. The Court trusts that this is a reflection of these eminent academics' willingness in the future to step to the plate and provide like assistance in cases involving any of the numerous litigants, both in this Court and throughout the courts of our nation, who lack the financial means to fully and properly articulate the merits of their legal positions even in instances where failure to do so could result in monetary penalties, incarceration, or worse. The Court will certainly not hesitate to call for such assistance from these luminaries, as necessary in the interests of justice and equity, whenever similar questions arise in the cases that come before it.

[Via Swampland.]

From the making-a-fool-of-yourself-on-the-Internet department: A blogger named Mollie dares to criticize John Colapinto's New Yorker profile of Paul McCartney, and Colapinto responds by throwing a hissy fit in the comments. Money quote: "And that's why you're a blogger and not a writer." (HufPo confirms that it's really Colapinto.)

According to sources, Zack has posted some very minor spoilers for The Wire below. (They are properly flagged and everything.) While I think it's great that Zack is posting again, I am a total spoilerphobe and am thus unable to look at my own blog while his post is at the top. So here, to take up space, is a picture of a loldog. Borrowed from icanhascheezburger.com, obviously. By the way: am I the only one who thinks loldogs are way better than lolcats?

What better way to mark my triumphant return to the 'sphere after a hiatus shooting big game in the jungles of Tanzania than with this shocking tale: I was on a train from DC yesterday (Acela, coz that's how I roll) and we stopped in Baltimore. Who should get on but fockin McNulty! I swear to God. He sat down on the other side of the aisle, one row in front of me, and just started reading the international section of the New York Times, as if there weren't an ongoing epidemic of gang-related drug crimes and political corruption in the city, crying out for his hard-charging no-bullshit approach to police work. As the train left Baltimore, we could see the derelict backyards of those row houses in the ghetto, with like trash and car parts strewn everywhere, like where they left Omar's boyfriend after shooting him the eye or whatever. And McNulty didn't even look up!

Eventually the guy next to him got off the train, so I came over and was like "McNulty!" and he kind of smiled shyly. So I asked him if I could sit down and talk to him and promised it'd just be for a couple minutes, since I didn't want to be like the guy in Zuckerman or whatever, and he said sure, in a not unfriendly way. Of course I had to start off asking him questions premised on the fact that I was talking to "Dominic West", but I soon realized I didn't really care much about "Dominic West", so the conversation was a bit stilted (he was less impressed than I had hoped, for instance, by my revelation that I, like him, am from England). But once I just started assuming he was McNulty things went better. He said he's not in season 5 very much (which they're filming in Baltimore right now, hence him being there) but it's the best one yet. It'll be out in January. SPOILER ALERT - SKIP TO THE END OF THE PARAGRAPH IF YOU WANT TO AVOID LEARNING EVEN THE MOST BANAL TWO PIECES OF INFO THAT I WAS ABLE TO GET OUT OF HIM ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS IN SEASON 5: He ends up with that nice Beadie Russell but they "have problems". Bubbles does not die.

I got him to flash that roguish McNulty grin a few times, to my immense gratification (though I am no coblogger.) One time I think was when I told him that my Mom liked Stringer Bell best, and he said alot of the ladies like Stringer Bell best, and then he said "Bastard!"

Re: On Chesil Beach: Who knew that Ian McEwan was such a fan of the early-'60s British blues boom? I'm going to go out on a limb and say he's the greatest novelist in history to mention both John Mayall and Alexis Korner in two consecutive books.

Attention Zack fans: My erstwhile coblogger has a piece in the New Republic, on NBC News White House correspondent David Gregory and how he "saved the White House press corps." Update: Doesn't coblogger read kind of like a homophobic slur? Not intended, bro, for reals.

Slate's Dahlia Lithwick explains the significance of this week's Guantanamo decisions:

In the coming weeks, we may well learn that Brownback and Allred drive Volkswagen buses and wear love beads. But I doubt it. More likely, we'll learn that they are among the many, many highly conservative legal and career military professionals once willing to follow this president wherever he led them, until suddenly one day when they were not.

Jezebel (new gynocentric gossip blog from the Gawker empire) has a feature whose premise is as follows: men's magazines are better written than women's magazines, so let's get a men's magazine writer to critique articles from women's magazines. I am curious as to the identity of the lunatic/genius who thinks of this stuff. Anyway, this recent installment is more than 1,500 words long, and it's about Alyssa Shelasky, who writes a blog for Glamour, and it has nothing to recommend it except its quality. You can totally enjoy it without reading the source material.

I especially like the way the reviewer's insight into Shelasky's failure as a writer bleeds into criticism of her failure as a person -- a slippage that, given the nature of the work under discussion, is both inevitable and appropriate.

Three new TV ads demonstrating the iPhone's interface. Holy cow. Update: Gruber goes into detail: "I can’t recall the last time I’ve seen any tech product advertised simply by demonstrating how it works."

NYT piece on Google's constant refinements to its search engine. Contains a surprising amount of information that isn't in any of the millions of other Google articles.

It was twenty years ago today ...

... that i watched a BBC documentary entitled It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, about the making of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I remember coming home from school and sitting on my parents' bed with my dad, glued to the screen as George Martin played the original master tapes of the album to show how the different parts were layered and various commentators explained how the songs were sequenced to create the impression of a continuous, thematically coherent work. Today, on the twentieth anniversary of that formative childhood experience, I'm feeling a bit nostalgic. I'm not sure if there's been a falling-off in quality or if I'm just getting old, but somehow today's documentaries about defunct pop groups can't compare to the classics of my youth. The documentaries of 1987 had an innocence, a feeling of possibility, that I'm not sure we'll ever recapture. I feel sorry for today's kids, having to listen to things like this weekend's Radio 2 documentary, in which "multi award winning engineer Geoff Emerick heads back in to the studio to demonstrate the innovative techniques employed for the recording at Abbey Road studios back in 1967." It's just not the same.

David Leonhardt has a good point about Lou Dobbs, one that applies to much of the talking-head community:

The most common complaint about him, at least from other journalists, is that his program combines factual reporting with editorializing. But I think this misses the point. Americans, as a rule, are smart enough to handle a program that mixes opinion and facts. The problem with Mr. Dobbs is that he mixes opinion and untruths.

Crazy Wikipedia stuff (blah blah blah series): Perhaps, like most people, you believe that the Church of Scientology is a dangerous cult that preys on the credulous and goes after its critics with a heavy hand. But what if, unlike most people, you also believe that the wacky sci-fi theology of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard is a valuable body of religious teachings? Well, you might find some like-minded friends in the Free Zone.

An open letter from The Office's B. J. Novak: "I bet I'll really like The Wire when I get around to watching it. It sounds great. In the meantime, please SHUT UP ABOUT HOW MUCH I AM GOING TO LOVE THE WIRE. I have a lot to do, and I have a long Netflix queue."

Crazy Wikipedia stuff (3rd in a series): How do people measure the comparative spiciness of different foods? Why, they use Wilbur Scoville's eponymous Scoville scale, of course.

There's a grammar thing that's been bothering me for a while now: sometimes people put commas between adjectives, and I know that the commas don't belong there but I can't explain why. A clear example is What a good, little boy! Most people would agree that comma is out of place. But why? We use commas in What a beautiful, complex, challenging book! It's one of those I-know-it-when-I-see-it things, and those always make me uneasy with grammar because what if my precious instincts are wrong?

The truth is more complicated and elegant than I had guessed: adjectives in English go in a precise order by category, which goes like this:

opinion :: size :: age :: shape :: color :: origin :: material :: purpose

and as long as the adjectives can be categorized you don't need commas between them. A discussion of the phenomenon is here; an explanatory chart is here.

What's amazing is that every native English speaker has absorbed this system and maybe one in a thousand could explain it.

Crazy stuff you can find on Wikipedia (second in a series): You have 1,679 binary digits in which to communicate with aliens. How much information can you convey? Probably not as much as the authors of the Arecibo message.

Al Gore: "It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse."

Crazy stuff you can find on Wikipedia (first in a series): Is 90 percent of all television actually set inside the mind of an autistic boy? Why yes it is, according to the Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis.

Mark Pilgrim responds to Microsoft's patent-infringement assault on Linux with a bit of autobiography:

My name is on a software patent. It happened during my brief tenure at IBM.... No one had done this exact thing, in this exact way, for this exact purpose, before we did. The patent was original, it was innovative, and it was still shameful.

UPDATE: There's a good history of Microsoft's war on open-source at Roughly Drafted.

Who's stronger: Alan Moore or Grant Morrison?

A year ago, in response to a request from my erstwhile coauthor to comment on Alan Moore's spoiled-brat media tour, I posited an alternate-universe Moore:

Imagine if, instead of bouncing from publisher to publisher, he had followed a path through mainstream comics like that of Grant Morrison, who has alternated periods writing mainstream superhero books (New X-Men, JLA, and soon Batman) with work on his own creations for DC's mature-readers imprint Vertigo (The Invisibles, The Filth, We3 -- all of which Morrison owns outright). Imagine if, instead of writing Superman homages in Supreme and Tom Strong, Moore had spent a year writing Superman, or, instead of WildCATs, JLA. I suspect Moore's later work would be more satisfying, and mainstream comics would certainly be richer for his involvement.

In the year since I wrote those idle words, Grant Morrison has apparently been thinking about Moore's career this way too, to the point of embedding the idea in his recent Seven Soldiers series, and most recently issuing a subtle challenge to rival and bête noire Moore in an interview posted last week.

How all this works is going to take some explaining.

In 1990, Grant Morrison wrote himself into the DC Universe. Morrison was wrapping up his run on Animal Man, over the course of which the animal-powered protagonist had gradually gained metafictional self-awareness and begun to suspect that he was a character in a story being written by someone else. Comics are often preoccupied with different realities – parallel worlds, alternate futures. Morrison’s big idea was to play with the boundary between the fictional reality in which Animal Man uses his powers to fight crime and the apparently-less-fictional reality in which Grant Morrison sits in a flat in Glasgow writing Animal Man for DC Comics. (Morrison, who practices chaos magic and has taken a lot of drugs, would probably say that neither reality is any more fictional than the other.) In his final issue, he and the character had a long and mind-blowing conversation about all this.

Although no one had done such a deep pomo metafiction thing in superhero comics before, other DC writers and editors had appeared in the company’s comics, usually in cute little jokes like this 1985 issue of Superman, which was a 70th-birthday present for longtime editor Julius Schwartz.

Twenty years later Morrison wrote Seven Soldiers, a crazy, brilliant web of interlocking narrative that appeared as seven separate minseries about peripheral DC characters. On the fringes of 7S was a set of shadowy agents known sometimes as the Seven Unknown Men and at other times as the Time Tailors, who were seen performing surgery on the fabric of the story itself. These figures, Morrison said in interviews, were himself and Schwartz and the rest – the writers and editors who had appeared in DC comics in the past. Morrison recognized that he and the others, by breaching the wall between fiction and reality, had become citizens of the DC Universe, available to be deployed into stories just like any other minor DC character.

This idea of deploying is important. Any comic set in the DCU (or the Marvel Universe, or etc. etc.) is both a thing-in-itself and a single piece of a massive collaborative project that stretches back (in DC’s case) to 1938. (Name another kind of story being written today that’s connected to a story from seventy years earlier, not as a retelling or an appropriation but as a continuation.) When Grant Morrison writes a story about Animal Man, he’s making artistic use of a character made up by Dave Wood and Carmine Infantino in 1965 and amended by countless others. When he writes about Zatanna and Mr. Miracle and the Guardian in Seven Soldiers he’s grabbing whatever shiny things catch his eye from seventy years of storytelling and playing with them. And this deploying thing is not just the form or condition of Seven Soldiers – it is, in a way that will become clear in a few paragraphs, the theme.

The villains in Seven Soldiers are a bunch of evil time-travelling fairies called the Sheeda, who come to our present for something called the Harrowing. The Sheeda are an agricultural race, and what they farm is civilizations: they’ve given us 20,000 years to develop culture and technology and society, and now they’re coming to reap, to raze our civilization and feed off it, leaving a few humans alive to “seed the crop” for the next Harrowing in twenty millennia.

This is weird enough, maybe. But there’s more: the Sheeda were set in motion by one of those Seven Unknown Men, a renegade referred to as the Terrible Time Tailor. The real behind-the-scenes villain, in other words, is one of the DC writers/editors who has appeared in a comic at some point. And it’s pretty clear, from a bunch of clues in 7S that we won’t go into right now, that the villain in question is Alan Moore.

Moore than a feeling

Morrison’s enmity toward Moore is perhaps comics’ most outrageous instance of the Anxiety of Influence. Moore was the first British writer to come to prominence in American comics, and in his wake DC sent over recruiters to see if the British comics industry might have any more like him. Among others, they found a Scottish kid named Grant Morrison and let him write a Batman graphic novel and a book about a minor hero called Animal Man. That Batman story, and the first few issues of Animal Man, are very much in the style of Swamp Thing-era Alan Moore: serious, wordy, aiming to lend psychological and thematic and poetic depth to what are basically superhero stories. Within a year or so, though, Morrison was exuberantly throwing off the shackles of Moore-imitation and developing the riffs that mark his own work: surrealist humor, metanarrative game-playing, and the ambition to distill the least realistic, zaniest, most colorful aspects of Silver Age comics into dense, fast-paced stories packed with strangeness and surprise.

Alan Moore's best-known work is still Watchmen, the canonical new-wave superhero comic. The non-comics people who read Watchmen (and there are many: it was listed on Time’s top 100 novels of the twentieth century) probably don’t realize this, but the characters in Watchmen were based on a line of superheroes published by an also-ran company named Charlton Comics in the 1960s. The history goes like this: in the early ’80s DC acquired Charlton’s characters, superheroes like Captain Atom and the Blue Beetle. Alan Moore looked at the Charlton heroes and realized that, because they were so derivative of DC’s and Marvel’s characters, they comprised a complete set of superheroic archetypes – the superman with godlike powers, the gritty urban vigilante, the millionaire crimefighter with the crazy gadgets – and could thus be used to tell a very nice Ultimate Superhero Story. Moore pitched such a project to Dick Giordano, then DC’s executive editor. Giordano declined to hand Moore the reins to the Charlton characters, but encouraged him to create new superhero-archetype characters to use in their place. So Captain Atom became Dr. Manhattan, and the Question became Rorschach, and Moore wrote Watchmen and Dave Gibbons drew the pictures and the series sold huge and was one of the first comics to be collected in a mass-audience paperback and was in general an Event.

At some point after Watchmen’s release, Moore stopped working for DC. In an interview with the Comics Journal in 1990, Moore gave explained the split thus: After Watchmen was done, Moore was afraid DC would cheapen his work with spinoffs and sequels. During a meeting, one of the top editors told him that no such secondary works would be published as long as Moore maintained a good working relationship with DC. “I don’t respond well to threats,” Moore told the Journal, and so he walked. Still, DC hasn't done anything with the Watchmen characters in the twenty years since the end of Moore’s series – despite the fact that, say, a Rorschach solo book would have been a sure commercial bet.

This story, I think, reveals why Grant Morrison cast Alan Moore as the villain in Seven Soldiers. From a Morrisonian perspective, Moore, like the Sheeda, wants only to reap, never to sow: he took the Charlton characters, and Swamp Thing, and other DC properties, and he used them for his own purposes and refused to contribute anything to the common pool of ideas. (What characters or concepts in today’s DC Universe have their origin at the hand of Alan Moore? Well, there’s, uh, Mogo.) Morrison, by contrast, prides himself on giving as much as he takes. Part of his plan for Seven Soldiers, for instance, was to rehabilitate obscure characters for other writers to take over. So Jack Kirby creates Klarion the Witch-Boy in 1973, and Klarion mostly drops out of sight until Grant Morrison uses him in 2006 and provides him with a milieu and a supporting cast, and three months later he shows up in an issue of Robin written by Adam Beechen.

By Morrison’s lights, then, when Moore got protective of the Watchmen characters, he wasn’t just being precious and arty; he was being selfish. Worse, he was hoarding characters that had ultimately been invented by other hands. What Moore should have done (again, from Morrison’s perspective) is to say, “Yeah, we borrowed these characters, and changed them in certain ways, and we had a great time with them and got to tell our story. And now if anyone else wants to pick up anything we’ve done and run with it, well, that’ll just enrich the massive collaborative fictional tapestry that is the DCU.” Which is, of course, pretty much exactly the opposite of what he did.

Permission Granted

And so we come to this week’s interview. The occasion for the interview was the end of 52, a yearlong weekly DCU-spanning series on which Morrison was one of four writers. (One of the remarkable things about it was Morrison’s willingness to collaborate on an equal basis with three writers who have their talents but who are not artistically in his ballpark.) The end of the series featured something DC fans have wanted for a long time: the restitution of the multiverse. (In a nut: from 1961 until 1986, the DCU consisted of an infinite number of parallel earths; from 1986 until this month it consisted of just one earth; now it consists of parallel earths again, although only 52 of them.) In the final issue of 52 we saw glimpses of a few of those parallel earths, one of which appears to feature the Charlton heroes: Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, the Question, and the rest. Remember, these are the characters that Alan Moore adapted for Watchmen.

And in the interview, Morrison says "If you miss Vic Sage as the Question [Sage died of lung cancer in 52], you should be able to follow the adventures of Vic's counterpart on the Charlton/Watchmen world of Earth 4." Not the Charlton world -- the Charlton/Watchmen world.

Don’t think Morrison doesn’t know what he’s saying here. He’s saying, Those Watchmen characters don’t belong to Alan Moore, they belong to DC. He didn’t create them himself, he adapted them from other people's creations. They are on the table. They are in play. And his work is part of the soil that DC’s writers are tilling, even if he wishes it wasn’t.

Or, If you don’t play nice, if you don’t share with the other kids, we’re going to take your toys away from you.

Let me be clear: I don’t think the DC brass have some big plan to reclaim the Watchmen characters from Alan Moore (although you never know, especially with the Watchmen movie looking like it's finally a go). I think it's mostly just Morrison having some fun. I suspect that when he said "the Charlton/Watchmen world" he was grinning like the proverbial canary-eating cat, and the only thing compromising his happiness was the well-known fact that Alan Moore doesn’t have an internet connection.

RoBros gets results! From the LA Times:

FOR THE RECORD:
Alan Moore book: An article in the April 29 Calendar section and a subsequent For the Record referred to the title of an Alan Moore graphic novel as The Watchman and The Watchmen. It is simply Watchmen.

The hat problem:

Three players enter a room and a red or blue hat is placed on each person's head. The color of each hat is determined by a coin toss, with the outcome of one coin toss having no effect on the others. Each person can see the other players' hats but not his own.

No communication of any sort is allowed, except for an initial strategy session before the game begins. Once they have had a chance to look at the other hats, the players must simultaneously guess the color of their own hats or pass. The group shares a hypothetical $3 million prize if at least one player guesses correctly and no players guess incorrectly.

Can you figure out how to win more than 50 percent of the time? A Berkeley math professor did.

Weirdly, this does not appear to be a joke:

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. - Staff members of an elementary school staged a fictitious gun attack on students during a class trip, telling them it was not a drill as the children cried and hid under tables.

James Fallows on a tragic new twist to the U.S. Attorneys scandal: "If this is so, it is ... as low an act as any we have heard of in modern politics."

Fresh Air interview with Friday Night Lights exec-producer Peter Berg, which confirms two things I'd suspected about the show: (a) the actors are usually ad-libbing (something that's especially apparent in the scenes between Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, who make me think Yeah, this is how married people talk), and (b) the people making the show really, really care about what they're doing.

This is kind of crazy: Time needs a short essay on evolutionary biologist and atheism cheerleader Richard Dawkins for its annual 100 Most Influential People list. So who do they commission to write it? Michael Behe, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, which advocates for "intelligent design." Behe, predictably, writes a piece that's critical of Dawkins and his ideas. When Time runs it, though, they add all kinds of language that makes Behe sound more respectful of Dawkins than he really is. The following seems to have been made up from whole cloth by an editor at Time:

It is a measure of the artful way Dawkins ... tells a tale and the rigor he brings to his thinking that even those of us who profoundly disagree with what he has to say can tip our hats to the way he has invigorated the larger debate.

Behe's original contains nothing about "the artful way Dawkins ... tells a tale," or "the rigor he brings to his thinking" (in fact, he accuses Dawkins of sloppy argument). It doesn't credit him with invigorating anything. Behe's only words of admiration are for Dawkins's "energy and determination."

This is unfair to Behe, obviously, but I don't give a fuck about Michael Behe, and if he ever gets sick, I hope he insists on limiting his treatment options to creationist medicine. The real problem is that the editorial process on display here -- Hey, here's thinking outside the box: what if we get one of those intelligent design guys to write about Dawkins? / I love it! / Say, did you see that Dawkins piece? Needs to be toned down a little ... -- trivializes and misrepresents the issue and goes out of its way to cast a creationist-in-disguise as a reasonable, respectful adversary with a plausible case.

Last year the city of São Paolo, Brazil, passed a law banning all outdoor advertisements. A set of beautiful photos of cityscapes that aren't trying to convince you to buy something is here. Wanted: a major American city with the stones to do this. I'm looking at you, San Francisco....

Is Karl Rove the new Hegel? From the are-you-sure-that's-what-you-mean? department:

A White House official who has been intimately involved in shaping Bush's war dialectic said the president will continue to talk about the "global war on the terror," even if it "doesn't fit a political science definition."

Geek fact-checking department: We were surprised to see this correction in the LA Times:

FOR THE RECORD:
Alan Moore book: An article in Sunday's Calendar section about comic-book artist Frank Miller referred to the graphic novel The Watchman by Alan Moore. The title is The Watchmen.

Well, no, actually -- the title is Watchmen. Still uncorrected are the assertions that Daredevil has no powers (he has preternatural senses, including radar, that compensate for his blindness) and that Miller is "the most important comic book artist of the last 25 years."

Shocking decline in literacy among moralizing newspaper columnists

Bad writing is everywhere, of course, but when it shows up in a piece bemoaning the death of reading, it's particularly enjoyable. The piece in question, by one Kathleen Parker, is from the Orlando Sentinel's website. The opening sentences have already been mocked by Bookslut, but they're worth mocking again here:

People who read books are different from other people. They're smarter for one thing. They're more sensual for another. They like to hold, touch and smell what they read.

That's funny for two reasons. (a) It's not true, or at least it's completely speculative. You can maybe infer that book-readers are smarter than average (although then you get into semantics about the word smarter), but you'd have to bring some data to substantiate the "more sensual" claim. (b) It's entirely off-point. If reading books is a good thing, that has nothing to do with what books feel like or smell like.

Then there's this funny thing Parker keeps doing where she uses hyperbole -- a legitimate linguistic device with a long pedigree -- and then turns around and apologizes for using it.

Soon, who knows? Maybe we'll be burning books in the town square chanting: We don't need no dadgum books. We got Innernet porn 'n' satellite TeeVee! OK, so maybe the end of civilization isn't nigh, but the systematic gutting of culture from newspapers is symptomatic of a broadening illiteracy that bodes ill for the republic. [Italics mine]

If you think a book-burning riff will help make your point, go for it. If you think it's a bit far-fetched and might undercut the seriousness of your argument, leave it out. (I'm with option B -- people don't burn things that they don't give a shit about -- but it's your call.) But why on earth would you include it and then dismiss it as unrealistic? Parker does something similar in the last graf:

The loss of yet another book editor and the homogenization (or possible loss) of another review section may not cause the Earth to shift on its axis, but it is symbolic of the devaluing of American letters.

Why raise the possibility of the Earth shifting on its axis only to dismiss it?

Parker's main point is that newspapers that are eliminating book-review sections are "apparent signatories to a suicide pact."

From a practical standpoint, [such cuts make] no sense. Clue: People who read newspapers are also likely book readers. So why do newspaper editors and publishers think that killing one of the few features that readers might -- big word here -- READ is a smart move in an era of newspaper decline?

Because the people who run newspapers have never thought about any of this even once in their lives, and they need Kathleen Parker to tell them which side their bread is buttered on.

Listen, Kathleen: I'm as anxious about the decline in book-reading as you are. (I am, after all, writing a book, and I'm hoping there will be people to buy it when I'm done.) I like book reviews too, maybe more than you do: when you say that Florence King, of the National Review's Misanthrope's Corner, "elevated book reviewing to a literary art form," it makes me wonder if a voracious reader like yourself has gotten around to Virginia Woolf or Edmund Wilson. But if there's one thing book-reading in America doesn't need, it's an illiterate newspaper columnist for a champion.

Terror

Of all the scary shit that has happened in the past seven and a half years -- the stolen election, the people crashing planes into buildings, the "suspension" of civil liberties, the trumped-up intelligence, the misbegotten war, the failure to plan for entirely foreseeable events, the insistence on "staying the course" when any hope of success is gone and on sacrificing human lives to avoid embarrassment, the contempt for international institutions, the illegal domestic spying, the politicization of every arm of the executive branch -- the one that I can never quite forget about while I'm watching The Office, the one that has turned into a persistent hum of terror at the back of my head, is the indefinite detention of hundreds of foreign nationals on little or no evidence without trial or appeal, also known as "Guantanamo Bay." I often find myself trying to avoid reading about it, it scares me so much.

Here's a Peabody Award-winning episode of This American Life, originally broadcast last year, about what happens at Guantanamo and how we got to this sorry pass. (I guess they're taking another break from documenting liberal upper-middle-class existence.) It includes interviews with two former detainees. (Ira Glass begins the program by pointing out how rarely we see interviews with ex-Guantanamo inmates on TV or in the paper.) You can download it to your iPod or read the transcript. It will make you think about Kafka's The Trial, and about Orwell's 1984, and about the stories we used to hear about the USSR, and about what the hell has happened to this country.

Have you, like me, been wondering: why the fuck is Alberto Gonzales still running the Department of Justice? It can't just be Bush's famous "loyalty," can it?

Well, it isn't. In an LA Times op-ed, Elizabeth Holtzman explains the real reason.