(But really—we’ll GET you, you hovertrucker…)

The CIA has a page for kids (thanks to Chris T. for pointing this out) that hilariously misuses (or, should i say, “misuses”) quotation marks:

Welcome. We’re glad you’re here to learn more about the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA is an independent US government agency that provides national security “intelligence” to key US leaders so they can make important, informed decisions. CIA employees gather intelligence (or information) in a variety of ways, not just by “spying” like you see in the movies or on TV (though we do some of that, too).

Italicizing or bolding these words would have worked better… I think they think the quotation marks are “clarifying” because they “highlight” key spy “lingo.”

But given, oh, you know, critical US “intelligence” “failures”—9/11, Saddam’s not having WMDs after all, the Afghanis not welcoming us (surprise!) as liberators and bearers of heroic Freedom Fries, &c.—the marks come off as “ironic” and “mocking,” or rather “sadly hilaaarious.”

The creepiest rhetoric bon-mot here is the final admonition to the youth that yes, the CIA have real movie-quality spies, not no bullshit rent-a-spy fools in cheap tuxedos, but real laser-watch carrying badasses.

In fact, the Company’s brilliantest “intelligencers” may be right behind you, spying after all—watching you Google naughty pictures of Megan Fox and the Avatar pseudo-ladies…

Little wonder we can smuggle sensitive “intelligence” out of critical installations in Central Asia by pretending the classified info is a Lady Gaga album. Hilaaaaaaaaarious…

The spy urinal. (?) No idea. This is what came up when I Googled “spy Wikimedia” in hopes of getting an old, rights-expired photo of a Russian guy hatcheting an anarchist or something.

It’s sometimes deflating to have an archnemesis who lobs only softballs. Ross Douthat, writing of a recent upsurge in popular conservative female politicos, ends with this faux-wise recommendation to us progs:

So however much heartburn Palin’s “mama grizzlies” give to those who associate feminism with the policies and prejudices of American liberalism, circa 1973, they should recognize their emergence for what it is: not a setback for the women’s movement, but a happy consequence of its victories.

Imagine for a moment that conservatives vote into power these “mama grizzlies”—women who want to make abortion illegal, fight against gay rights, and in general perpetuate the power of the moneyed 1% (white, male, Christian, decidedly non-feminist, &c.). For whom are the consequences happy? For Ross (white, male, &c.)? For conservative women who delude themselves that patriarchy offers some consolation to wives who play dutifully along?

Voting for conservative women isn’t necessarily “feminist.” Feminism implies a belief that women and men deserve the same rights. Voting for a liberal man who is actually a feminist is a better choice than voting for the socially conservative, anti-government grizzly-ladies of Mr. Douthat’s dreams. (And why vote purely on gender?—but that’s another topic.)

Calling on conservatives to vote for women because putting women in power is good for women… even though the conservative male-oriented wack American Right is not good for women… is a paradox… Just like supporting Obama because he’s level-headed in the face of adversity, then bashing him for being level-headed as soon as adversity arises. A boo and a hiss to Mr. Douthat and Mz. Maureen “Flippin-Floppin” Dowd.

Progress comes not from identity-based political chicanery (if you are like X, vote for X! even if you disagree with what X says!), nor from holding our leaders to impossible standards (be a cowboy! now be a lawyer! now be a messiah! now be a werewolf!?). True progress, if it exists, is probably slow to come and hard to recognize. I think we did recognize it when we voted for Mr. Obama. I think we recognize it increasingly when we have more prominent women on the Left and the Right. I agree with Mr. Douthat there.

But to say that hard-ass macho conservatives, whether men or women, are good for women and for our society, is to play Pinocchio:

Will it, dawg? Will it…?

For today, even as he finds “a lot to admire” in the Tea Party (his words, re: their pugnacious tenacity, or tenacious pugilistic rhetoric, or amiable backwardness, or something I don’t admire), conservative columnist and personal lit-nemesis Douthat admits that its most recent star has lost significant shine. Sayeth Douthat:

…it shouldn’t come as a shock that [Kentucky Republican and Tea Party boy-wonder Rand Paul] found himself publicly undone, in what should have been his moment of triumph, because he was too proud to acknowledge the limits of ideology, and to admit that a principle can be pushed too far.

Rand Paul, son of Ron “Ross Perot Redux” Paul, is looking to win the Party of Chai’s first Senate seat. But now he’s waffled on civil rights. Would he have voted to desegregate America? He didn’t seem sure, fearing government intervention in private practices such as excluding minorities from business, until those biased scoundrels—the Media—pressured him into clarifying his position as a bona fide 9/10ths supporter of the O.G. Civil Rights Act.

Boo, hiss, Mr. Paul. Waffling on a complicated budget bill? Take your time, read the fine lines. Waffling on waffles? Sure, consider pancakes. But waffling on civil rights? That’s so… old school. And not in the good way.

Hilariously, Douthat also points us to Paul’s record of paranoia regarding government projects which patently do not exist.

Now, I’m just as terrified as the next man of the secret alien commune in the Mojave where the Liberal Illuminati force Elvis to play badminton with Walt Disney’s headless body for their own amusement, but… A NAFTA superhighway “the width of several football fields” running straight from Mexico to Canada, cutting America in half like a government-cheese sandwich? That’s just crazy-talk.

(Plus, everyone knows a NAFTA superhighway would have to divert through the Babyhating Blue-State Coasts, forming a hateful wishbone that could eventually cross both oceans and be connected, on the Commie side, to Tokyo, and, on the Frog side, to Space Paris, from which we liberals receive our command-signals.)

[Double-plus, we don't have nearly enough oil to support the super-massive car-traffic of a highway "several football fields" wide. Unless Paul fears an army of Mexican, Central American, and South American immigrants bicycling furiously toward Texas, ready to take his job from him.]

Rand Paul does have some positive visions of the future, however: “I guarantee you it’s one of their long term goals to have one sort of borderless, mass continent.”

Hell yeah, Amero-Pangaea! Lookin good.

We already explored how Douthat thinks we Americans have synthesized our religions into meaninglessness, over-complicating the beautiful austerity of the monks and dervishes, giving up tradition for a syncretic post-reality that makes him shiver-n-shake. Now let’s talk politics.

In “Hollywood’s Political Fictions,” Douthat gets all hot and bothered about the state of America’s ability to represent itself viz-a-viz its 54th state (Iraq—after P.R., the Philippines, and Japan) on the silver screen.

Douthat insists we Americans reduce the complexities of war into easy-to-resolve dichotomies, good/bad, us/them, &c. This is precisely the opposite of his accusation re: religion. We complicate that; we simplify war. We (heterogeneous we) just can’t win.

“Americans believe in evil, but we’re uncomfortable with tragedy,” sayeth Uncle Ross. I think that’s reverse-true, meaning, colloquially, bullshit. I think Americans are perhaps more unused to tragedy than people living in non-empires, sure. We’ve had an unfairly sweet run, this past century.

I think some Americans are perhaps more apt to equate “the enemy” in a given situate with “evil,” but I hardly think we’ve all given up on nuances, gray areas, and, well, post-structuralism. (I realize most people don’t think, “Gee, I’m such a dope-ass post-structuralist!” But they do try to imagine the “other” side, even if they end up endorsing some patriotic nonsense. The attempt to juggle multiple language games, multiple centers of “truth” at once requires no particular schoolin’, just a certain openness of mind.)

The fact is, Americans know that there aren’t easy solutions in this life. That’s why we work hard at changing things (usually fucking them up, granted). That’s our gift and burden. We’re all too aware that the world is not simple, and that our actions have consequences. We just often mis-predict those consequences.

And even if many Americans were duped, for a time, into allowing Bush 2 to propagate wars based on the myth of easy solutions, this hardly means all or even most of us are still enamored with a simplistic, good-evil view of the current wars.

President Obama, for example, was never for the war, and now that he has to prosecute it, does anyone, even Ross Douthat, think he’s doing it simply or with a simplistic mentality? Has Obama reduced the conflict into a matter of good versus evil? (Whether you think Obama should pull out of Iraq immediately or not doesn’t matter. What does is his ability to see the conflict as nuanced, difficult, and non-Douthatian.)

Our collective non-simplicity is important to value, whether or not you agree with Douthat that the Matt Damon thriller Green Zone “refuses to stare real tragedy in the face.” Do I think, based on interviews, his other work, and Green Zone, that Damon is a smart dude who has realistic views about the American empire and its agenda in the Middle East? Sure. But does it really matter who Matt Damon is? Naw.

What matters is that I know there is no “simple” “good” or “evil” in the world. There are tyrants, sure. There are shitty situations, psychopaths, liars (Hussein, Bush…), plutocrats, oligarchs, oil men, bomb manufacturers, those who would gladly revise history (the leaders of Iran and Israel), and good ole-fashioned dumbasses. There are, as far I can tell, no vampires, no Doctor Dooms. Conversely, there are no classical heroes, only women and men who struggle to live and let live. Philosophies grow and mutate and die or are absorbed, all without strict goods and evils, without Meka-Hitlers or Jason Bournes.

Do I care whether or not Douthat enjoyed Green Zone? Naw. But I do mind that a syndicated columnist so brutally assaults reality, so often. Douthat claims “the narrative of the Iraq invasion, properly told, resembles a story out of Shakespeare.” There was a good nation, a brutal dictator, a cause for war (WMDs), and (he reiterates) a brutal dictator, “in his labyrinth.”

The minotaur of the labyrinth is a great archetype of pure evil, as in Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves and the urban-Gothic Tekkon Kinkreet. References to the labyrinth only too clearly betray Douthat’s essential problem: He’s protesting too much. Who’s the one reducing the complexities of war to a glib chunk of art? Douthat, invoker of the tyrant-as-minotaur, invoker of Big Willie S. and his clean, classical arcs (and unclean, human characters—and positively nucleic inherent moral struggles).

For all his easy-to-pick-apart bluster, Douthat does attend to one aspect of polemic that I admire—language. He calls for less poison and more “radical sympathy“—post-structural sympathy, sympathy with all the parties in a conflict, not just the Marines—and I wholehearted agree with him. I just think Matt Damon, for all his popular ninja-inspired gun-banging silver-screen antics, is more likely to create a new sympathy than Douthat, who is (perhaps like the author) trapped in a realm of addictive symbolism, a reduced realm, full of fire and the leavings of past epics.

It’s hard to get the news from poems (Green Zone is not, Douthat’s right, a good way to learn about the real conflict in Iraq; it’s a movie; it’s entertainment, big business). It’s harder still, for anyone with a poet’s brain (and liver) to eschew symbol and give up his minotaurs and five-act arcs.

I agree we should not comfort ourselves with “portraits of a world divided cleanly into good and evil.” Nor should we lambast Hollywood for not living up to the legacy of Kant. Let Matt Damon blow shit up, and let Obama and his crack team of technocrat do-gooders help Iraq pull itself out of the last decade, brick by brick, street by street, symbol by symbol. In the future, I’d like to see Iraq’s version of Green Zone.

In “Mass-Market Epiphany,” professional lowest-common-denominator Ross Douthat shakes in fear because we Americans synthesize our religions, consider our mystical options, and generally enjoy our grand Jeu—the play of the Transcendent across a broad, globe-spanning, history-informed matrix of signs, rituals, faces, styles of dress, chants, worship-centers, and sacral texts.

It is true. We have been from the first a lovely patchwork of agnostics, Deists, Puritans, satanists, hippies, materialists, born-agains, Methodists, Quakers, Muslims, Buddhists, and so on, and so forth.

It is true. William James gave us our own meta-genius of religion (the genius of the study of religious geniuses), so we’ve always had options, a book of faiths from which to choose.

And then we invented Anton LaVey and televangelism; and I don’t care where he was born, we invented John Lennon, too, that ur-syncretic mentality and shaggy humanist-expressionistic chutzpah (see: Melville, Whitman, the Beats).

And then we took the internet from a Brit and made it what it is (mostly a font of Japanese pr0n), and the new religion of hyperconnectivity is as ours as it is anyone’s (though I suppose that obscures the grace of the rhizome, to speak of the nationality of it).

So, Ross, why are you so scared of the power of American adaption and adaptation? Why are the deaths of the old traditions and the births of new ones—deaths and births which are forever in process, but particularly, increasingly so since Nietzsche and World War I and globalism—anything to fear?

Douthat’s are the same old conservative anxieties that have always plagued us. Times are changing too quickly! We’ve traded in religion for new-fangled séances and snakeoils, and wires and tubes! Here’s Douthat waxing at his most lyrical:

Without them [severe, ole-skool religious practices], too, we give up on what’s supposed to be the deep promise of religious practice: that at any time, in any place, it’s possible to encounter the divine, the revolutionary and the impossible — and have your life completely shattered and remade.

I actually quite like his take on the promise of the shattering power of the Divine, the Mysterium’s ability to transcend our ability to even contemplate it, to put it in any box. But I disagree that the loss of ye old religions in any way diminishes man’s ability to experience this shattering.

The fact is, the Divine is never familiar except to those who experience it, and then it is unique, in each case. It has never been transferable via tradition; these traditions have never engendered true revelations, hence the constant defections from them, culminating in modernity. It is ridiculous to write of America as being more or less affected than other nation’s by the world’s gyring out of a dark age of cathedrals and sharia law.

If anything, America is simply more heterogeneously affected, because to be “American” is to be any number of such a wide range of types and sub-types—each of which may transmit the revolutionary and the impossible in different ways, with different signs, while still feeling the touch of the same unnameable Transcendent.

More expandable than Douthat’s thesis (”Americans = ‘losing’ religious feelings) is any thesis that looks at how the Divine strikes us, in the era of the hypertubez. The future saints may already preach on Facebook (shudder).

In any event, I look forward to abler writers’ analyses of the machines of religion as they mutate forward through history, ever new, ever the same (hierarchically organized to make money and control populations; individually mind-blowing, as experienced by individuals, within their own matrices of signs).

The news is generally frightening. I learned a few days ago that, in the Lone Star State, one Debra Medina is fighting to become the Republican candidate for governor. Her platform is staunchly conservative, and she’s so bat-shit crazy that even Glenn Beck isn’t amused. Quoth the New York Times:

Ms. Medina also appeals to state’s rights advocates who long to shift power from Washington to state legislatures. A leitmotif in her speeches is the idea that the federal government has usurped power from the states and that Texas should be able to nullify federal laws and regulations it deems unconstitutional. Her first target would be the Environmental Protection Agency, she says.

“We will tell the E.P.A., ‘You have no authority here,’ ” she told the Fort Bend County Chamber of Commerce on Thursday.

Thanks, Debbie. I can picture the freedom now: Those goodfernuthin E.P.A. pansies will quake as they’re forced by the noble Texas rangers to unlock Emperor Obama’s hidden oil-filled mega-caves off the coast of Corpus Cristi!

(Then they’ll have to free the animals, sending the august turtles-o-th’-sea to their native breaker islands, the ones used by our proud military to broadcast sub rosa numbers stations, thus preventing the start of Secret World War IV.) [Lol.]

In other news, liberals continue to drift farther from liberty. In the same Times that gives us that lovely snippet about the E.P.A., we have Paul Krugman shouting:

…The real story behind the euromess lies not in the profligacy of politicians but in the arrogance of elites — specifically, the policy elites who pushed Europe into adopting a single currency well before the continent was ready for such an experiment.

Firstly, shouldn’t we capitalize “Euromess?” I have a hunch that “Amerimess” (shudder at the fugliness) would get the cap. Or is this a reference to the currency, the euro (€); in which case, why doesn’t Krugman write “euro mess” or “euro-mess?”

Secondly, what the fuck? The problem with Europe is “elitism?” Sayeth an elite, in a country whose numero uno problema is that most of the country thinks there’s a problem with elitism (and intellectualism, and Darwinism, and most any -ism, even the ones that work pretty dern well) and is thus resistant to reform of any kind?

I mean, a) is this true? Did Jozef-the-Plombier, the average European citizen, really let himself get “duped” into supporting a strong currency? And, even if this is true, b) is the lesson that we Americans should learn from Greece’s financial woes that we should never, ever “trust the elites?”

The problem is probably semantic. I think the word “elite” is skunked (along with “postmodern,” to name just one), meaning it’s so often debated, so hotly, that no one even knows what it means any more. It’s a word everyone runs from and accuses everyone else of running into.

I wonder who these Euro-elites are, for example. Do they represent a powerful, self-interested business class that actually exists? On one level, I’m sure Krugman knows his economics and knows what and who helped fuel poor Hellas’ rapid decline.

But, simply by calling these avaricious policy makers “elites,” Krugman muddles an already complex issue. Thanks to that word, they become the same bogeymen feared in America (slick-talking Obama-analogs, the intellectuals against whom Palin bravely speaks, when she’s not distracted by the reminders scribbled on her hand). [Double lol.]

The problem with the idea that “elites” can’t be trusted is that they in fact can be. George Washington was an elite, in terms of class, money, education, military decoration, political ambition and achievement, and hair-style (mega-wig).

Even hardcore Marxists must admit that not all silver-spooned, Hahvahd-educated elites are wrong all the time. In the postmodern world, ideas are judged pragmatically (usually by professional hard-ass and British person Simon Cromwell, an online vote, or some combination of those two).

Of course, just to make the world wend round weirder, David Brooks posted an essay today arguing that we should trust the elites, though Brooks can’t resist telling us that the elites of the Olden Days were luckier and happier, and that our cold, autistic world is through.

If only the problems of the failing hyperintellecutal micromanagerial nouveau oligarchs here were simply their lack of empathy and their reliance on Blackberries—and not, say, their lack of Empire, their lack of money, &c. Then we really could have elected an Obama and known that our Obama would use his oligarchy’s surplus of cash and emotional equity and military trust around the world to affect positive change.

Instead, we lose the EPA (no need for the hilarious supernumerary periods) and find more bogeymen, everywhere we look: It is our leaders’ elitism that dooms them, their lack of empathy—anything but their stupidity and hubris, their playing out a cycle on a stage that has seen the cycle played before.

The NYTimes reports on our ongoing war against the grotesque—and consequently against fun, against childhood, and against the imagination. The war’s a pity, since it will never be won.

By excising Scream masks from public schools, officials will only encourage children to go home and experiment in the “Satanic” (as Halloween is described in the Times piece by one Illinois school district spokesman) on their lonesomes. Sales of Left For Dead and True Blood DVDs will rise. The truly maladjusted will continue to torture housepets and use depth charges to destroy their parents’ bowls of Grape Nuts. When all is said and micromanaged, keeping schools free of darknesses, real and imagined, will not drive those darknesses from the world.

Meanwhile, children will miss out on a wonderful holiday, a non-religious day of atonement on which reckless merrymaking, sugar-consumption, and grotesque miming lead us down too-often unexplored paths in our minds.

Grotesque miming does us a real mythological service, I think: It allows us to confront our demons in the daylight, in the shapes of our friends and frenemies. A dance party full of Franken-people, vamps, James Browns, cosmonauts, Elvises, and unicorns becomes a vivid, tangible dream wherein before there was an empty floor and a pair of speakers. (Nightmares serve a similar function and can be similarly cathartic.)

A classroom full of Kanyes and zombies (oh my) asks children to externalize their own fantasies and terrors, and to confront those of their peers. The pooled child-mind purges itself of gorillas, Beyoncés, pirates, and ghosts. Darkness is made grotesque, overwrought, impossible, silly—in a word, real. And thus its power vanishes.

I wonder what is to be learned in a realm of positive costumes, where approved archetypes (unicorns) and the mimesis of role models (Beyoncés) are okay, but confrontations with fears real (pirates) or imagined (zombies) are not. On a day of what should be cathartic, real-problems-preventing rule-breaking, the enforcing of vague rules of costume-etiquette and pseudo-taste strikes me as imagination-hamstringing, at best.

I hope the children all go as Anonymous this year.

The New York Times periodically makes verbal mistakes of the sort I feel the need to exegete and file under “Wackness.”  This latest might be called The Case Of The Invisible Punctuation.  Or, even better, The! Case: Of, The? Invisible; Punctuation.

In “A Corporate Culture Cornfed on Greed,” Manhola Dargis’s review of Steven Soderbergh’s new tragicomedy The Informant (Matt Damon = a greedy white dude screwed by his own greed), we are told:

Notably, there’s no punctuation mark in the title of Kurt Eichenwald’s book “The Informant: A True Story,” though there might as well be.

And yet a colon (:) clearly separates the book’s title from its subtitle. Hrrm.

Last time I checked, a colon counted as a punctuation mark. True, it’s doing its job here by quietly linking a sort of super-sign (the book’s title) to an appositional, paratextual fact (that the book is based on the downfall of a real biotech exec at ADM).

But no matter how quietly it does its magic on us when we glance over it, the colon is still a mark of punctuation; it indicates a slight pause after the first sign; it asks us to prepare to analogically link that sign to something yet to come…

And yet it would be nitpicking to put Dargis on blast merely for making a mistake. I get it: There’s no exclamation point in Eichenwald’s title, and there is in Soderbergh’s. He so crazy!

So why doesn’t Dargis’s sentence read “there’s no exclamation point in the title?” Are we afraid to write the names of our punctuation marks? Is the exclamation point really all that bad, that its name must be an anathema and its presence obfuscated, even in an article which begins with a discuss of, wait for it, exclamation points!?

The exclamation point, she serves a noble purpose, especially circumscribed within the interrobang (!? or wtf mark). Without her, our zany cartoons would be far less zany. Just look at any comic book.  Without the exclamation point, our ZAM!s, ZOT!s, POW!s, KERPLINK!s, SCHLORP!s, FAP!s, BAMF!s, FUNF!s, and SNIKT!s would affect us less; and the deaths and introductions of our most brightly clad heroes would be, not STUNNING! or AMAZING!, but merely STUNNING, which word on its own, naked, brings to mind not so much the power of the imagination to redecorate the night journey again and again for successive generations of young dreamers, but the power of a Tazer. To stun you.

Or is it that the colon is really so invisible that she cannot be mentioned by a professional reviewer!? Is the colon the bad seed!? Has the colon lost her syntactical judo-prowess, the ability to shoot information forward: To motivate terms, face-first, into other terms, creating bold new chimeras of logic, new tangles of gestalt super-words!?

Gentle reader, I leave it to you to scorn these marks or to scorn those who abstain from naming them. For my part, I will continue to defend them reflexively, perhaps stupidly, the way a mother panda defends her sons’ bamboo-cud sculptures, long after the sons themselves have been captured to display in San Diego.

God damn you, San Diego. And long live the quiet colon:  And her sister, the mark of wtf!?

Inga Dubay and Barbara Getty win an Honourable Badge of Merit, not for chiding us that our handwriting is spastic, nor for implying that this is due to a degenerating decade and a half of instant messaging and texting, but for finally explaining to me why the fuck it’s so hard to read traditional “cursive,” or, as I think of it, confusing word spaghetti.

The answer is that we read the tops of characters to determine their meanings. We don’t read the bottoms. Loop all the tops together, and you have a senseless bird-language. Write the upper halves of letters cleanly, and you have the language of Samuel Johnson, bell hooks, and fictional wise-acre Peter Griffin. (Loop the bottoms of words together, and you may have ill graffiti. Depends on your handstyle.)

On April 15, 1940, [Igor] Stravinsky’s unconventional major seventh chord in his arrangement of the Star-Spangled Banner led to his arrest by the Boston police for violating a federal law that prohibited the reharmonization of the National Anthem.

—Wikipedia

My brother G, an iPhone enthusiast, sent me an email the other day regarding a service call he’d made to AT&T Wireless. The email went, my emphasis:

word of the day… i learned from AT&T CUSTOMER SERVICE REP

frustrational, synonymous (i think) with frustrating… as in “i know that is frustrational…”

wow…

I enjoy pointless faux-Latin suffixes, and I enjoy words/signs that perform the very acts they mean to capture abstractly. The word frustrational is, albeit only mildly, actually frustrating.

I was not sure, after reading G’s email, that I’d ever feel frustrationalized, even if I knew I’d often feel frustrated. But I still laughed and copied the word into my mental florilegium, somewhere between frotteur and fulvous.

I then spent some hours editing the Atlas Obscura, an online encyclopedia of naturally or historically wondrous places and collections of curiosities.

If you’re headed out of town and want to see something besides yet another Denny’s water closet, search the Atlas. Waterfall of primordial blood? Check. Garden of poisonous plants? Sure. Living bridges made of massive entwined roots? Why not.

The Atlas is relaxing to edit and inspiring to read. Its entries are almost entirely inoffensive. They widen the world without challenging it. They are written to inform. Nothing about the project is harsh by design; the Atlas, like other moderated wikis, appeals to a broad audience.

So I was naturally surprised and even frustrationalized when the New Yorker, a once-notable journal of centrist politics, mediocre fiction, and blurry inscrutable cartoons about cat-psychiatrists and men trapped on desert islands with various supernumerary household appliances, published on its website this bizarre and seemingly off-topic review of a new patch of internet esoterica that I not only enjoy reading but actually edit.

The review is neither scathing nor adoring. The reviewer says she/he is “not immune” to the Atlas’ charms. But then the reviewer refuses to engage with the site on its own terms. The reviewer claims the Atlas is branded as a “club or society,” which isn’t true: The Atlas describes itself only as a “compendium” and “collaborative project.”

Inaccurate reporting aside, the tone of the review is off. Why does the reviewer mention Wes Anderson, for example? To my knowledge, Mr. Anderson makes twee, fantastical movies about immature man-boys of the type often played by the Wilson brothers. I like his movies, sure, and he does mention exotic, faraway places like Texas, but he’s hardly cornered the market on “exotic” or historical art.  (And the Atlas isn’t fiction. It’s nerd love pur sang. It’s an encyclo-freakin-pedia!)

The use of the name “Wes Anderson” in a review of a project undertaken by young scholars feels to me not like a valid jab at privileged knowitalls, but like a flailing attempt on the part of the New Yorker to participate in the discourse of hip. Their review of the decidedly non-twee Atlas reminds me of some technophobic friends’ scathing opinions of Twitter, a site these friends have never actually visited.

It’s not surprising that the fear of the unknown should follow us from the newsprint era into the era of the all-connective Web. Too, it’s not weird that the New Yorker should worry about its relevance. Frankly, it may not be especially relevant. It has clout; it frequently publishes good writing. But lots of magazines and sites publish good writing. Increasingly, clout is going to run downhill, from the dinosaurs to the more adaptable mammals of the publishing world.

I’m just surprised that the New Yorker would try to engage the world of cool, hip, twee, [insert adjective you think the New Yorker thinks is synonymous with "cool"] via a tactic so blatant. Like the chubby boy in fourth grade who can only let the pretty girl know he “like” likes her by spitting on her Bedazzled jeans-jacket, the New Yorker finds a cooler, younger site and wants to do… something… to/with/for it. But it ultimately proves a mite lost, unsure how to use its cultural clout and toward what end.

The Atlas has, in its first few weeks of life, garnered hundreds of followers from around the world, not to mention good reviews from Time and Metro. No doubt the New Yorker will continue to flail and look lost. I don’t need to extrude my syllogistic inklings very far to feel good about my own generation’s efforts to write well, explore the world, and perhaps - just perhaps - make it a little less of an old-white-dude-with-a-monocle kind of a place.

Reading strong prose inspires me. 2666 makes me want to go to Mexico and solve terrible crimes, or to write a novel about a Mexican detective, or to at least publish a novel under the name Archimboldi. In the same way, I often find myself inspired to write while reading insipid prose. But even more than make me want to write, bad prose makes me think in a certain unfettered way.

Like making coffee or taking a long shower, mentally excoriating bad writing as I read it frees up parts of my mind normally reserved for creating anxiety. Newly unbidden, these anxiously creative parts think amok, farting forth strange ideas. (Demi-tangent: Steven Bach once told me that the most difficult narrative knots of screenplays often unravel in the shower. And what Steven said is true for all types of narrative writing, even if my screenplays will always be too long and too weird to produce.)

Sometimes, though, I can’t tell whether the prose I’m reading is bad or merely distinct, perhaps a little alien. I read a sentence, experiencing it as “bad,” enjoying its badness. Then I go back and see that it’s not bad in the way I thought it was. Maybe my reading was too literal, too schizoid, too connective, too green, too moon. Then I change my mind again. Reading this type of ambiguously “bad” prose, I become more and more reflective, until I lose the overall thread of what I was reading in the first place.

Take for instance this perfectly intelligible sentence from the article “U.S. Nuns Facing Vatican Scrutiny” in the New York Times:

Nuns were the often-unsung workers who helped build the Roman Catholic Church in this country, planting schools and hospitals and keeping parishes humming.

Nuns planting schools? It’s an image right out of the Codex Seriphinianus. For some reason, it struck me when I read it as overly cute, the wrong action. Planting a building, perhaps, makes a certain metaphorical sense. But would you say that you plant an institution, with staff and students and conflicting schedules and a night-janitor cleaning up a healthy smear of inexplicable bat guano in the computer lab? Given the calculus of schools, maybe they can be seeded or grown. But planting doesn’t do it for me.

Consider also the medieval/pastoral notion of a whole parish humming along together, literally. It’s a properly nun-like act, the organization of co-humming. Humming is harmonious, otherworldly, and communal in a chaste way. “Parish humming” conjures up an image of all of church-dense Brooklyn taking to the streets to join hands and hum a song by, I dunno, Journey or Beyoncé. (Probably Journey. Everybody sings that one fucking song, “Don’t Stop Believin’,” at karaoke.)

At the same time, we now have arboreal schools (or schoolchildren?), I suppose growing out of the tilled field of America (or knowledge?), and a bunch of parishioners (kept) humming, which humming doesn’t necessarily have squat to do with the arboreal school/kids. I find my orthography grows cluttered as I try to untangle the sentence’s metaphors. The images clash and, perhaps ecstatically, perhaps in a good way, kill each other off , as if in autumnal cannibalism.

By way of a sweeping conclusion, I should add that the nun-article is a good read for reasons other than the sentence about humming that tripped me up. Nuns apparently face a new inquisition from the Holy See, where lady-suits and reiki are still not cool. I know the Pope likes to preserve tradition and rigor, but nuns aren’t exactly the problem, are they?

Then again, perhaps the brides of Christ are tweeting and debating stocking-propriety on the boards of Nike Talk.

O modernity. You rock.