- In the past few weeks (and, particularly, the last seven days), I have read many thousands of pages. This is probably more work than one should do for a piece of this type, but I am one of those guys who likes to perform due diligence. It’s too important not to. And really, I’m very honored to have this gig. So there you go. I’m getting close to the finish line. So if things aren’t entirely up to speed here during the next few days, bear with me.
- Bob Thompson, like any good reactionary who loves to keep a warm gun under his pillow, is confused by any book that doesn’t just feature turgid text. And Scott McCloud is right. Guys like Thompson will die. And the sad thing is that Thompson, a man who is no less prejudicial than a Jim Crow type who hopes that the dark-skinned people will be kept separately from the light-skinned people, will never know the joy of a story told in words and pictures. Of course, when the last old fogey kicks the bucket, there will no longer be a need for these bloated articles written by narrow-minded bigots.
- Speaking of the comics industry, there is a longass interview with Paul Levitz over at ICV2. (via ComicMix)
- Eric Rosenfield thinks Nick Harkaway’s The Gone Away World is “representative of a new kind of fiction gradually emerging, a fiction which knows no boundaries.”
- Joanne McNeil on women’s fashion.
- The new Metallica single confirms that this band remains corporate, dated, emotionless, ridiculously safe, and unlistenable. This track, which features arpeggios that sound like rejects from the “Nothing Else Matters” sessions and a guitar solo phoned in by Dave Mustaine, is about as far removed from the heights of Master of Puppets and And Justice for All as you can get. The key tipoff that things are askew is James Hetfield’s failure to growl or offer his trademark “yeuhah” at any point during this track. Yeah, I know the guy’s 45 and all. But if Trent Reznor can still channel his angst at 43 (and even reframe it in middle age), there’s simply no excuse for such a lazy performance here. Oh well. Let’s hope that AC/DC’s forthcoming album, Black Ice, offers more. Failing Angus Young and company, there’s always a few contemporary glam metal offerings.
- Can you guess where I’m from? I was tired, but I scored quite well, even on the city level. I blame this on my troubling tendency to practice dialects and accents in the bedroom. Listen for the pitch and phonemes! (via Maud)
- I neglected to report on Twatgate, but if you hadn’t heard the news, Random House, based solely on the complaint of three parents, decided that the word “twat” was just going too far in a YA book. The book in question was not authored by some casual pornographer, but Jacqueline Wilson. Part of me believes this to be a brilliant marketing effort to get Wilson’s novel in the headlines and thereby sell more novels. After all, what ten-year-old hasn’t heard the word “twat” by now? Nevertheless, between this and Random House’s previous contractual clause, which attempts to dictate the way that authors must behave, I’m wondering why the publishing conglomerate has so many bugs up its ass with its YA titles. If they keep up this level of needless kowtowing and autocracy, then surely YA authors will began their exodus to other publishers who aren’t exactly this anal retentive.
- Paul Auster is interviewed by the Sunday Times. Rather amazingly (and egregiously), the New York Times has yet to review the book or profile the man. (But to give the NYTBR some credit, I was shocked to see a serious consideration of a B.S. Johnson novel this Sunday.) The Los Angeles Times has reviewed Auster’s new book, but alas it’s been assigned to Jane Smiley, who once again fails to understand the book she’s reviewing. Smiley doesn’t comprehend that Man in the Dark isn’t so much about the big climactic secret (she seems to have confused Auster’s book with some Grisham-like potboiler or perhaps a pat M. Night Shyamalan film), as it is about the way that narratives often occlude the truth before us. Smiley is too obtuse a reader to spot the connections between Brill and Brick — the shared high-school sweetheart, the concern for magic, both of which came up in my recent conversation with Auster. Of course, Brill’s confession to Katya is going to “have the flavor of a synopsis.” The man’s a book critic for crying out loud! How could Smiley miss this? To add insult to injury, Smiley also fails to cite a single passage from the text to support any of her observations. This is lazy book reviewing, Pulitzer Prize or no. Smiley really should stick to writing dull essays about horses. Between this review and her Jennifer Weiner hit piece, it has become quite evident that Jane Smiley is incapable of appreciating any book that isn’t some take-no-chances, realist offering that offends and challenges nobody. And her review really bogs down what is otherwise a pretty good books section. Fortunately, Smiley’s terrible essay is compensated by Tod Goldberg’s amusing feature on tie-ins.
Your Tax Dollars At Work
Podcasting to Outperform Radio?
Some new figures released by the Radio Advertising Bureau suggest that radio is now facing problems. At both the local and national levels, radio revenue has dropped over the past year. Off-air revenue growth, meaning advertising that comes with podcasts and digital downloads, has surpassed the RAB’s expectations. It is expected to reach $2 billion by the end of 2008, almost a full year ahead of the RAB’s projected timeline.
I don’t know if these trends will result in radio people calling podcasters maggots or claiming them to be trapped within a basement in Terre Haute. But the upshot is that podcasting isn’t going away anytime soon.
Obama-Biden
Joe Biden is Obama’s VP. From a graphic design standpoint, it will be much easier to get the words “Obama-Biden” on a bumper sticker than “Gore-Lieberman.” Obama wisely decided on a VP candidate with two syllables. And I suspect that the natural third B (“Oh-ba-ma-bi”) that comes with that phrase was also a marketing consideration. Of course, should Biden decide to plagiarize again, at least he’d be copying from Obama’s team.
The Story That Has No Name
[EDITOR’S NOTE: While traveling on a bus, several passengers endured the drunken and boisterous clamor from several obnoxious frat boys in the back. They could not be quelled or cajoled to quiet down. In an effort to deal with these circumstances without going insane, my girlfriend and I started writing the following story on a laptop, switching off every 300 words or so until the battery died. The warped results can be read below. Aside from the brain monster and other supernatural elements, this isn’t that far removed from what actually happened.]
Their drunken bellows roared from the back of the bus, veering as aimlessly as a driver without a map, demanding all destinations.
There were twelve of them. And they sat in the back. They sang off-key. They shouted horrible jokes. They laughed at their limp bons mot. But there was no sign from the passengers in the front. No actions. Nothing so much as a “please be quiet” or a “hey I’ve got a headache here, would you mind keeping it down?”
They were the center of their own universe. Their universe belonged to them. And that universe involved the bus. Even if that meant lighting up a bit of skank weed or spilling the bottle of Jack onto the fraying gray carpet. Even if that meant seizing the seat of the eighty-two-year-old lady, telling the elderly cunt to sit the fuck in the front before I munch on your muff.
Fury floated across the faces of those who sat in front of them. One man who worked as a bounce tried to get this fakers dozen to stop. But they wouldn’t. The bouncer figured he could break six of their necks easy. But the bus was moving. It was already late. And he, like everybody else, just wanted to get the hell home.
Bellows, cackles, and frat house cries were the order of the evening. And headaches burgeoned and tempers flared until there was a sudden screech of the brakes.
“What the fuck was that?”
The fakers dozen waited.
“Yo, why we stop?”
But there was no movement from the driver. No stirring of life from the passengers.
Their faces looked out the window, but there wasn’t the single sound of cars passing, nor even the trusty wisp of the wind.
“What the fuck’s going on?” said Enrique, who was high as a kite on Don Julio.
“Well, fuck that shit,” said Harold. “We can have ourselves a good time whether the bus is moving or not, eh?”
They shouted at the top of their lungs again, expecting a reaction from all the chumps who had bought tickets for this ride from hell. But there wasn’t a sound. Not a peep. Not even the muted sigh from an exasperate.
Dawn, just one of two girls of the fakers’ dozen, nudged Harold in the shoulder. “This is really weird, why isn’t anyone else saying something?”
“Fuck if I know,” said Harold, “and why should you care?”
“Because it’s creeping me out! You should see what’s going on.” Dawn poked Harold in the small of his back. He yelped and Gregg, sitting the furthest away from him, bellowed, “She’s got you by the balls again, H!”
Harold’s face blushed. Struggling with the sense of shame that accompanied it, he denied Gregg’s claim with equal volume, then turned back to Dawn. She had that needy look again, like her world couldn’t work without him turning the lever all the way to the end, and once more he wondered why he was banging her, even if only on Sunday afternoons. She wasn’t that hot. And now she wanted him to stop the party in the backseat and check on – it flew out of his head.
Dawn stared at him, not wanting to understand Harold’s total enslavement to attention deficit but knowing she had to. Of course it sucked. Nothing got through to him, not even basic human decency. She tried to remember why they fucked every Sunday, why she was sitting with his sorry-ass friends, why she was smoking their low-grade weed. And why they were the only ones making noise.
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll go and check.” She shoved Harold harder in the small of his back and took secret pleasure when he cried out. The rest of the twelve voiced their displeasure, too. “You always have to spoil everything,” said Enrique’s fuck buddy Miranda, a joint dangling from her mouth. Dawn hated her the most, but fighting Miranda was like trying to engage with a brick wall.
She stared ahead, focusing intently on the front of the bus. It was strange to think of silence as being louder than noise, but that’s what Dawn thought as she made her way to the driver’s seat. When she did, all thoughts of silence versus sound escaped her mind.
Because the driver was gone.
“Hey, what the fuck?”
“Silly bitch at it again,” said Harold. “Always looking for someone new to blow!”
“I’m serious, Harold. There ain’t no driver here. Just a buncha….”
That’s when the first of the fakers dozen went down. Harold was keeping track.
“Dawn?” called Harold.
“Stupid bitch. I’ll suck your cock better,” said Miranda. The weed was hitting her head almost as hard as Enrique’s tequila.
Enrique laughed. Everything was funny with Don Julio, almost as funny as it was with jello shots. Not that he went in for that pussy drinking shit. Even the sight of Dawn falling down, as if sucked through a hole at the bottom of the bus like some human-sized chunk of strawberry shake slurped through a giant straw.
But where the fuck was Dawn? And why the fuck weren’t the passengers ahead saying a goddam thing?
“Hey, assholes,” shouted Harold to the front. “You paying attention?”
There wasn’t a peep from the passengers.
“Ain’t it a bit fucking funny that nobody’s saying a FUCKING thing?”
Harold tapped the shoulder of the woman in the seat in front of him.
“You paying attention, you cunt? Dawn’s gone, you fucking….”
But her shoulder dissipated into a shower of ashes. Harold looked at the other passengers. They were all grey husks. Even the colors of their clothes had faded to gray.
And still there wasn’t a sound outside.
Harold looked at Enrique, who was still laughing at nothing. This was the guy who was supposed to be his best buddy? When the girl he was fucking would happily ask anyone, especially Harold, if she could suck him off? When he wasted himself day and night on that Don Julio shit when everyone knew it just made Enrique look and act like a bigger chump? And now that Dawn was fucking GONE, all Enrique could do was sit around and laugh?
Harold could hardly process what was happening, but he knew this: everything was a big fucking lie and he had to do something. So he lunged at Enrique, hands going for his best buddy’s throat.
“What the FUCK are you doing, you mongrel waste of a piece of shit? Dawn – did you even SEE what happened?”
“Harold, calm the fuck down,” Miranda slurred, “You don’t have to get so violent. What’d Enrique ever do to you?”
“He never did anything! He never did anything for any reason!” Harold pointed to the vanished woman in front of him. “And now she’s disappeared, too. The whole bus has disappeared and everything’s grey and he does fuck-all!” Harold tightened his grip on Enrique’s throat. The laughs turned into slight choking sounds that made Enrique sound even more pathetic. “You really pick ’em, Miranda. You foolish little slut.”
“Hey, don’t call me a -” But Miranda didn’t have a chance to finish her sentence. The left side of her head began to melt, starting with the blond hair framing her face, to her cheekbones, down to her neck and collarbone. Then the right side melted away. A husk of grey nothing remained, and even Harold, who only cracked open his introduction to neuroscience book once every few weeks, recognized the color as being the same as the mush making up most of a person’s brain.
Miranda’s brain. Right. In front of him.
He dropped his hands from Enrique’s throat and screamed. Then screamed even louder when he heard Enrique’s stupid, pathetic little laugh start up again.
“What the fuck? The two hos of the fakers dozen are gone?” shouted Harold. “What? The? Fuck?”
Enrique was laughing his ass off. Shit, this was better than that viral video he had watched of the guy shoving the peanut jar up his ass and bleeding all over the fucking place.
“Enrique, are you paying attention?” Harold screamed.
Miranda’s gray ash had splattered all over him. He had become a human-sized Miranda ashtray, so to speak, in less than a second. And this was fucking funny. But then Enrique realized that he couldn’t move. The ash had seeped into his skin, casting a gooey mold and pinning him to his seat.
Enrique stopped laughing.
“Guys, what the hell’s going on?”
Two small globular claws punched their way out of Miranda’s brain. The claws begin to snap at Enrique, clacking in a staccato pattern that Enrique recognized from some mariachi techno shit he’d heard that day on some MySpace page. Some band called The Frat Boys Heading to Manhattan. Shitty name, shitty concept, but good music. And now the good music was biting right back.
The brain leaped forward and the claws tore at Enrique’s throat. Great geysers of red exploded from his torn neck. Enrique couldn’t laugh. And he certainly couldn’t scream. The Miranda brain monster had clawed out his larynx and was snapping further. There was only the sound of hollow gargling. A broken pipe experiencing an unexpected brush with the air.
As Miranda’s brain supped on Enrique’s blood, it seemed to obtain more energy. And the claws began moving faster. Snapping quicker. Suddenly, two eyes burst out of the brain. Harold knew those eyes well. They were Dawn’s.
Harold’s brain split across his corpus callosum. The left part coolly told him to get the fuck off the bus, because everyone who stayed on it either turned into gray brain ash or got killed by it. The right part got more to the point: RUN!
He listened to the right part of his brain and sprinted down the center. The Miranda-Dawn monster was gaining on him, flinging blood towards Harold that he had to duck to avoid. He reached the front, keeping his eyes well away from what remained of the other humans and looked for the door.
And then he could not move. Almost against his will, he turned away from the door and faced the Miranda-Dawn monster. When it spoke, the voice was terrible and emitted a smell not unlike human decomposition. It filled Harold’s nostrils and the gag reflex was overwhelming.
But he found a way to swagger because because hey, he was Harold Motherfucking Chase and no one, not even a monster, was going to mess with him. “You might think you’re a badass monster but you’re really nothing but a double-ho-bag of pussy stench,” he gritted out, each word more difficult to speak than the last one.
The monster laughed and the resulting sound was like feedback from a microphone, the whiny pitch growing louder and more intense until Harold thought his eardrums would burst.
He wanted to turn, reach the door, but his feet would not obey. Then his legs. Then his torso. He looked down and it wasn’t that they couldn’t move. They had transformed. He was becoming grey ash from the tips of his toes until his midsection, his chest, up and up. He had a dim memory of a strange-voiced man singing about being eaten by a boa constrictor until ‘oh heck, it’s up to my neck. Oh dread, it’s up to my head.’
The monster laughed again, and Harold’s eardrums succumbed. As they shattered, he let loose a matching sound of agony and torture that he could not hear. Neither could anyone else. Except the monster.
And when it did, and Harold was nothing more than a puff of grey matter, it grinned.