Moon, seen through my office window.

Why?

Because screamin' semen, that's why.

Geez.

Why, he asks. This guy.

The Party Tree is lit!

First Son hosted a gathering.

Jailbreak

"Come on, ladies! Over the wall!"

Ten minutes later, they were, indeed, over the wall. The chickens are restless.

It was comforting to know the neighbors had stopped speaking.

The Wisconsin Poet sends along a link to a bit of genius hilarity: Unhappy Hipsters.

Exchange

Me: Look at this tree I saw today. There's not a leaf on the thing.

The Wife: It's like the California version of Charlie Brown's tree! It's...it's like your career!

Me: [bitterly searches for right turn of phrase involving being stunted and sad and yet somehow, hilariously, fruitful; gives up; goes to sleep weeping softly]

From the comments section of The Awl.

liz [#3108]

Updike: 1/27/09
Salinger: 1/27/10

!!
:(

1:49 PM REPLY

True Religion

This review of Gene Yang and Derek Kirk Kim's The Eternal Smile at The Comics Journal is smart, perceptive, and well-written, and yet I couldn't disagree more with its conclusion: "this is a strong, well-executed, but modest work that feels like a warm-up for more ambitious future comics."

I think the book is kind of genius, and anything but modest, seeing as it takes careful aim at the unhealthy escape from reality that can be sought in both comics and religion, two things which are both hugely important to the writer. I'd call that pretty ambitious. The central story, Gran'pa Greenbax and the Eternal Smile is a flat-out amazing (and sort of harrowing) story of the uses and abuses of faith, and contains this wonderful, stammering speech from an abused employee:

"You know, I used to come here wh-wh-whenever I felt op-opressed by my - uh l-life. Seeing the Eternal Smile w-w-would g-give me hope - hope that maybe, j-just maybe, the underlying p-principle of the universe isn't m-m-monotony or fear or c-competition, but j-joy. I'd w-wonder if the Eternal Sm-Smile was the sm-smile of existence it-itself. And if existence itself c-could sm-sm-smile, then m-maybe s-s-someday I would too."

The review calls it a "satire of organized religion (somewhat surprising, given the devout Catholicism expressed in Yang’s previous comics)" Or, you know, not so surprising.

Oh, and I should add: that Gran'pa Greenbax story is about a whole lot more than the uses and abuses of faith. It's about man's creations (tech and wealth) obscuring his heart's true desire even as they approximate it. It's about how even our sad little conceptions of the divine may still be aiming us toward the real thing. It's about lots of things.

Today in Porn, Fox News Edition

Oopsie, Mr. Garrett. Gotta watch those links. Nice job blaming bit.ly, though. Naughty technology! Later, he called the naughty linkage "an innocent mistake." Well, sure - the mistake was innocent...

File under: nobody cares about your stupid grammar.

I just got an email from Wine Enthusiast, which sells glasses and openers and such. Apparently, they're selling a new sort of glass for Port, and they have decided to use the first line of a customer review as a pitchline:

From: newsletter@email.wineenthusiast.com
Subject: 'You haven't really drank port until you drink it from these glasses.'
Date: January 28, 2010 7:41:45 AM PST

But, I wonder: Can you say you haven't really drunk Port until you've drunk it from these glasses?

Or is it dranken?

Or maybe I'm just drunken?

Must be something I drank.

Outer space?

Or dirty roasting pan?

So good.

Ibraheem Youssef designs posters for Quentin Tarantino movies. Design is not dead. It's just working the edges.

[Via Gorilla Mask]

Bookmark

"Tarrou has some comments on the sermon preached by Paneloux: 'I can understand that type of fervor and find it not displeasing. At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there's always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they're returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth - in other words, to silence.'"

- The Plague, Albert Camus

Some days are harder on faith than others.

This collection of people trying to contact Mel Gibson via the comments section of a guy's blog post makes me very sad. It's not just people with screenplays. It's people with messages from God, people with troubled marriages, people who need money, people who want jobs, people who want a Noah's Ark movie with dragons and giants, people who have a strange spiritual connection to Mr. Gibson that they cannot explain, people who want help suing a hospital, people who want him to speak at their church, and on and on. Possibly the most heartbreaking: "take me seriously, please."

In other news, the guy played Hamlet. I think now he may be ready for Lear.

I cannot believe, that in today's society, with record numbers of people taking record numbers of anti-depressants...

...and with the general admixture of helplessness and hopelessness that hangs like a fog about modernity, that no one has snapped up sigh.com.

Today's Gospel, in its entirety.

"Jesus went home, and once more such a crowd collected that they could not even have a meal. When his relatives heard of this, they set out to take charge of him, convinced he was out of his mind."

Today in Porn, Addiction Edition

Very blunt, very humble, very graphic confession regarding one man's porn addiction here, on the sports blog Deadspin.

"Anonymous, a porn addict, is a longtime Deadspin reader and commenter who will soon enter the same sex-rehabilitation facility where Tiger Woods is reportedly receiving treatment. Here, Anonymous explains his own addiction and why Tiger's treatment is no PR ploy..."

It's not easy reading; the guy is in a dark, dark place. But he wants to get out.

Today in Porn, Far East Edition

Over at Asylum, there's a porn infographic full of numbers presented without substantiation, so take this for what it's worth. But I had no idea - China as the world's largest source of porn revenue, followed by South Korea and Japan? The three of them accounting for nearly 75% worldwide? The U.S. a distant fourth? Wonders never cease. Is it just because we're all getting it for free on the Internet these days in the States?

Parenthood sets in.

At Blockbuster. Three videos to turn in, in exchange for three more. Lassie for First Daughter (dogs!), Mouse Hunt for the Big Boys (slapstick!), and The Hurt Locker for Mom and Dad (drama! plus explosions!) Um...

[Thinks about evenings this week, puts The Hurt Locker back, gets Mario Brothers cartoon for Third Son and Second Daughter.]

Sigh.

Today in Porn, Playoff Edition

Big game for the Chargers today. But for the Cheetah's plane, it was business as usual, flying over the stadium when the boys are in town. Click to enlarge if you must.

This is a medium.

The Body of This gets a thoughtful review...

...from New Blackfriars Review:

"In this these stories belong to the quest for an earthy Catholicism, an appropriation in art and literature of the great central truth that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us."

Do go read the whole thing. And then maybe buy the book!

Alphonse in the News

Joseph O'Brien has written a very fine piece in OSV about the little guy with the big chip on his shoulder. I couldn't be more pleased.

To celebrate, I'm going a-begging again. Let's try this Kickstarter thing one more time, shall we? Cheers!

Bookmark

"But of course, one must take 'sent to try us' the right way. God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn't. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down."

- C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Today in Porn, James Cameron Edition

Okay, so we've all seen Avatar, right? *raises hand, weeps into the silence* So we all know just how much those little tendril things that the Na'vi use to log into soul trees and other creatures and such look like fiber-optic cables, right? And we've all read the deleted sex scene script, right? And we all know how much of the movie's appeal is due to the astonishing use of technology to create something that resembles a heightened-reality version of nature, right?

So can you really blame me for thinking of Grandmaster Cameron when I read this piece on porn's adoption of both 3-D and streaming content to your personal mobile device?

Well, yes, yes you can. But I still think I'm on to something.

Thanks to the Manhattan Lawyer for the tip!

Today in Porn: "It's not prophecy if you keep it to yourself" Edition

So the adult world is all agog over Roxxy, the sex doll with a robot personality. Money quote: Creator Douglas Hines saying: "Sex only goes so far - then you want to be able to talk to the person."

But here's the thing. Mr. Godsbody's unfinished novel Augustine's Member, abandoned lo these many years ago (the protagonist had trouble with magazines - how quaint!), included a hilarious(?) encounter with a RealDoll (made right here in San Diego) outfitted with a USB hookup to a computer which allowed it to engage in conversation, the content of which depended on how it was treated. Honest.

That sound you don't hear is the world's tiniest violin, not even out of its case.

Vampires Live

Haven't finished listening to all of Contra yet, but so far, I like the live versions at Juan's Basement better every time.

Oh, please, oh, please...

Okay, now that Jerry Seinfeld has weighed in on the side of Leno/NBC, and Patton Oswalt has weighed in on the side of Conan, can we forget the late-night dudes and just have a comic throwdown between Seinfeld and Oswalt?

Punk is not dead.

Put a guitar in his hand and a cig in his fingers, and slap him on an album cover.

Bingo.

Finally figured it out: In the Loop is A Man for All Seasons played as farce. Tucker is Cromwell. But Foster, Foster is More deprived of grace.

Message from Second Daughter After Seeing the Childishly Simple but Delightfully Adult Pink Panther Classic Cartoons

"Daddy, you can never drink alcohol, because it's devil sauce, and it will kill you."

Today in Porn, Synchronicity Edition

Well, not exactly synchronicity, and not exactly porn. (Whaddya want for nothin'?) But a couple of days ago, I went to Barnes & Noble with the brood, and discovered that those crazy kids at McSweeny's had gone and issued a deluxe hardcover edition of this:

"A lost classic of underground cartooning, Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary is Justin Green’s autobiographical portrayal of his struggle with religion and his own neuroses. Binky Brown is a young Catholic battling all the usual problems of adolescence—puberty, parents, and the fear that the strange ray of energy emanating from his private parts will strike a picture of the Virgin Mary. Deeply confessional, with artwork that veers wildly between formalist and hallucinogenic, Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary is the controversial masterpiece that invented the autobiographical graphic novel."

And the next day, The Onion ran this. (Link mildly grotty.)

And there it is.

So good.

Avatar = Disney's Pocahontas.

Via Film Drunk.

Dear New Yorker:

I am sure that every day, thousands upon thousands of would-be writer-types sit down and bang out sad little screeds in your direction that do little more than advertise their deep and doomed desire to see their names in the byline of a piece in the New Yorker. But dad burn it, would it kill you to stop treating Christianity in such head-shakingly silly ways?

I mean, yeah, I get it, you're past the Jesus stuff. Sill, it might be worth remembering this bit from Donna Tartt's The Secret History:

"Well, whatever one thinks of the Roman Church, it is a worthy and powerful foe."

Maybe? Anyway, now we have this, in Ariel Levy's takedown of Committed, Elizabeth Gilbert's sequel to Eat, Pray, Love. What's most frustrating is that Levy is clearly a good, smart writer. She just couldn't be bothered to give complexity its due in the religious realm. My general point: ignore Christianity if you like, but please, if you're gong to pay attention to it, pay attention to it.

Things start to get bumpy when Levy stops reviewing Gilbert's book and starts in with an essay on marriage. It's a long passage, but I'm just retro enough to go with it. What follows is Levy, with me in brackets.

Marriage is an anachronism.

[BAM.]

It is a relic from a time when we needed an arrangement to manage property and reproduction and, crucially, to establish kinships for purposes of defense: safety in numbers.

[Nice use of "relic." One might simply say that marriage has its origins in the time when we needed such arrangements, unless one wanted to load the sentence against the possibility that we might still need them, particularly when it comes to, say, raising kids? I'm pretty sure there's a certain amount of data out there supporting the claim that children do better in stable, two-parent homes. First school of love and all that.]

A web of families connected through marriage produced a clan of people who were less likely to kill you than everybody else was. Such was the life style in the Fertile Crescent, and, not coincidentally, the Old Testament is fixated on genealogy. Sexual reproduction within marriage was a way of creating more of God’s chosen people. Originally, Jewish holy men were required to be married.

["And Cain slew Abel." Sorry, couldn't help it. But really: Joseph's brothers conspired to kill him. David had Bathsheba's husband killed. Saul chucked a spear at David. And don't get me started on the prophets, to ones who cemented the Israelites into a people. Sniping? Maybe. But sweeping statements like this bug me. I mean, sure, Levy has a point. But I think she's being a tad reductionist in her effort to make it stick.]

With the advent of Jesus Christ and the New Testament, marriage fell from grace.

[BAM.]

The early Christian ideal was a utopian human family, an earthly mirror of Heaven above, unafflicted by the rivalries and allegiances of bloodlines. Jesus was not the marrying kind. “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters,” Jesus taught, “he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26).

[True enough, and that bit about the early Christian ideal is worth investigating! But if you're going to bring Scripture into it, then I kind of think you should take this into account:

Some Pharisees came and tested him by asking, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?"

"What did Moses command you?" he replied.

They said, "Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away."

"It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law," Jesus replied. "But at the beginning of creation God 'made them male and female.' 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.' So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate."

When they were in the house again, the disciples asked Jesus about this. He answered, "Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery."

Sounds to me like Jesus is not only working to shore up the institution of marriage, but also grounding it in the will of God from the very beginning. I don't think this is a stretch. Nor is it some esoteric teaching. Yes, Christianity sought to get outside the tribe, to build a community without borders or bloodlines. But that doesn't mean they sought to do away with marriage, does it? Wife-swapping, communal child-rearing, etc.? I mean, maybe it's true, but the Scripture cited doesn't show it.]

St. Paul decreed, in his First Letter to the Corinthians, “It is good for a man not to touch a woman,” and said he wished “that all men were even as I myself”—celibate. “If they cannot contain,” Paul conceded, “let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.” This is, as Gilbert notes, “perhaps the most begrudging endorsement of matrimony in human history.”

[Again, true enough. But Paul also said a few other things about marriage. Some of those things are also fraught with difficulty, but there is this:

"Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church— for we are members of his body. 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.' This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband."

I mean, the Catholic Church, which is still the largest Christian denomination going, goes so far as to call marriage a sacrament, a visible sign of God's grace. That's a long way from "marriage fell from grace." Sort of the opposite, really.]

*****

You know what? That's probably more than enough. From there, Levy notes the elasticity of the concept of marriage, and cites examples from Eskimos to Ancient Greece to Iran to 19th-century China. She does not pay any particular attention to Christian Europe. She doesn't have to, because she's already shown that Christianity doesn't really have much interest in marriage. The rest is worth reading, to be sure - go check it out. But I'm gonna spill the final line, if only for the way it illuminates Levy's general sense of the question: "Marrying for money hasn’t exactly gone out of fashion, but generally we are not engaging in strategic dynastic mergers. And in contemporary America we no longer need to get married to produce additional farmhands. So what’s the point?" Indeed. Here's an idea: instead of finishing with that as a rhetorical question, why not start with it as a real one? There are, after all, a few married people out there who might be able to furnish a reply.

...

Okay, okay - to be fair, Levy asks that rhetorical after pointing to evidence that marriage does not make women happier. But to my mind, that just makes the question more interesting and less rhetorical.

Today in Porn, How to Access Your Inner Stripper Edition

One of the really great things about writing for an alt-weekly is that occasionally, a particularly enterprising publicist like April Storm will dig up your website and send you an email. Like the one I got today, offering me the chance to interview "world's greatest porn star" and savvy businessperson Tera Patrick, author of the recently released Sinner Takes All: A Memoir of Love and Porn. Take it, April:

"Don’t miss your chance to talk to Tera about:

Setting the record straight about the rumors that plagued her career

The right and wrong reasons to get into porn

Why porn is an ‘equal opportunity industry,’ as opposed to Hollywood

How it feels to be the only girl to ever grace the covers of Playboy and Penthouse within a month of each other

How to access your inner stripper

The 'Rules' of her five-year marriage to Evan Seinfeld and what went wrong"

Actually, it'd probably be worth doing to hear the answer to that one about the right and wrong reasons to get into porn. But even so, I'll probably pass.

THAT SAID, I would be foolish not to share this ringing endorsement from comedienne Margaret Cho: "Tera Patrick is a true icon of our time, a fantastic example of the power of femininity, sexuality and intelligence.” It's a brilliant line - people on both sides of the porn question can affirm Patrick's status as a true icon of our time. And there's no doubt that she's an example of the power of femininity and sexuality (and probably intelligence, given the business acumen). The power of femininity to attract male interest? The power of sexuality to arouse men? The power of intelligence to make money from male desire? Again, who could argue?

Poetry Corner

I was supposed to post this Thursday night, or at the latest, Friday day. Now it's Sunday, and I'm too tired to think of anything clever by way of an excuse. From The Wisconsin Poet, who offers all sincere apologies to John Donne as regards the title.

Valediction Forbidding Nostalgia: New Year’s Eve

-For Cecilia

It was a party like every other
We’d been wallpapered and rugged
Into – the foods and drinks arrayed, the bother
And mess left behind in the host’s kitchen
For tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
It was after dinner and guests began to mingle,
Became watered and drugged
By nostalgia as strong as champagne
And wine as steep as sorrow.
The married clustered apart from the single
And standing between, Janus
And I, reflecting between us
The end of December and a year.

The sky closed down early behind the darkness
In the large French doors that bless
Our hosts’ variegated entrées.
In my leaning length, I am standing there
And my full-girthed reflection embarrasses me.
I look away but not before spying
Your pretty, conversational face
Engaged with a friend in pleasantry
And solemnity and finesse.
I pretend to be chasing after you (you lying
On the bed of my brow in age
And bounty), that you are a new conquest,
And I sidle up in mock false-courage
To ask our friend your name.

You roll your eyes at the jest
And stop short of a giggle
Before returning to the same
Conversation you were having with our friend
At some point between midnight’s middle
And year’s end.

The bells on television count off,
Refresh in a strange way,
Satisfy the bones, the blood, the flesh enough –
A rush of time, a new year, new month, new day….
Then for a moment, real terror –
The thought crossed my mind, a soft buzzing,
Like a computer coughing at an error
And my eyes go blurry, fuzzing
Around the edges
Like the albumen
In the pan
Beginning to cook
Toward the yolk.

What if my life,
More than a practical joke,
Was a series of walks along the ledges
(I can’t help but step along, shake, look)
Of high buildings with all the windows locked?
Would I be as shocked
To discover that you were not really my wife?
And then it dawns on me that you must
Be my wife - memory is one sign
That these years have not been in vain –
And the other? The thin wisp of lust
That escapes beneath the curtain,
Out the window and up the night sky.
Why,
Not even January is as certain.

Signs of the Times, Disney Edition

Robin Hood: "We'll have six children..."

Maid Marian: "Oh, a dozen, at least!"

I saw the dawn of the decade.

Yeah, yeah, I know - pics or it didn't happen. But it's the truth. It's a good thing this baby is cute. Happy New Year!