The Heart Is An Organ That Pump Blood

By Sarah Suzuki and Katie Anania

Photos by Patrick Bresnan <3

I. A Night in Hell

I was a Hell House virgin. Visiting a Hell House was meant to be an ironic gesture, wrought in the campy desires typical of Austinites such as myself.  When our 15-person caravan arrived at the Bethel Church in Temple, Texas, the parking lot was already packed with a snaking line of people.  Katie dashed to the front of the line.  “It’s a two and a half hour wait,” she said when she reported back.  “Should we get some Taco Bell?  Or maybe some beer?”  We considered getting beer, but decided to tough it out and wait in line instead.  It was a cool, crisp Friday night on the eve of Halloween.  Teenagers were there on dates.  The youth group kids giggled and gossiped while they waited, occasionally sneaking cigarettes behind the church vans that had shuttled them to Temple.  Parents wrapped protective arms around their children and shot resentful looks our way as the lesbian couples in our group offensively held hands.

By the time we reached the front of the line, we were cold and exhausted.  The doorman issued a dire warning: “It’s darkness layered on darkness in there,” he said, raising his eyebrows as he opened the door.

In the first room, a television screen proclaimed that we were not to take flash photography.  Patrick took a picture of the screen, using his flash, which grabbed the attention of a rather pudgy looking “Demon.” “No flash photos!” the Demon said.  Patrick, unblinking, took a picture of the Demon.

Don't Think of Elephants

The first room was a surgery ward filled with women, all of whom were crying and vomiting blood.  Behind a screen, a few doctors were in the middle of botching an abortion.  It was exactly what I had expected.  “Welcome to Hell!” the pudgy Demon said with a cackle.

In the next room, we were treated to a scene of an abusive husband murdering his three children, his wife, and himself.  It was unclear why the murders were happening.  Something about him being unemployed.  I watched the husband convulse on the ground in mute agony as blood gushed from his mouth.  I want an emotional connection, I admitted to myself.  But I felt nothing.  The mass murder had taken place quickly and without the horror of anticipation, turning a brazen, sinful trespass into flagrant kitsch.

In the next series of rooms, Kelly, a girl whose father “said she would never amount to anything,” pursued an on-line romance with Sergey, a fellow of the same stripe as the Craigslist Killer.  We watched Sergey make the moves on Kelly, who rebuffed.  The frustrated Sergey decided to rape her.  Before he did so, addressed us, unbuckling his belt as he did so: “Kelly is a tease, just like the rest.  Now I’ll show her!”

Sergey got what was coming to him, though, because Kelly had a handgun in her purse, which she managed to deftly wield only after her defilement. Sergey died on the ground, vomiting blood.

“But what of Kelly?” another overweight Demon asked the audience.  “Follow me, and let’s see what happened to her one and a half months later!”

“What are they feeding these Demons?” McCauley whispered as we filed into the hallway.  “Donuts?  Hamburgers?”

In the next room, Kelly was curled up in her bed, wracked by sobs.  A television screen above her flashed a montage of partial birth abortions spliced with shots of smiling Aryan children.  Kelly threw herself on the ground.

“You got yourself knocked up,” a Demon shrieked.  “And murdered your baby!”

“I hate myself!” Kelly said as she slit her sinful wrists.

“Kelly had it coming,” the Demon said.  “It’s just like her father predicted: She never amounted to anything.”

I was filled with a distinct sense of theater snobbery.  Where was the nuance in these stories?  The pacing was flat. What narrative thread connected the bloodied rooms of Hell House?

Fortunately, I filled with a yielding sympathy when, in the next room, the audience watched a Wayward Youth “do some freebase” in a pipe that my great-grandfather might have used.  The Youth took one hit of a drug that looked like baby powder, then vomited blood.  How cute! I thought to myself.  The Baptists wanted us to understand the dangers of drugs, but didn’t know what crack cocaine looked like.  Our group chuckled merrily and advanced to the next room.After walking through yet another scene involving shrieking gun death victims, we finally arrived in Hell.  Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Hell looks like Circuit dance club on Ladies Night, where hot chicks in tight clothes writhe in smoky cages.  I was vaguely turned on.  “Help me!” they shrieked.  There were no men in Hell.  Satan offered an explanation.  “These women gave in to Lust,” he said.  “And many are guilty of murdering unborn children!”

McCauley winked at one of the women in the cages, a blond.  “I should get this chick’s number,” she said.

Living a Lie

Sadly, Hell was the final room.  The troupe of overweight Demons escorted us to a hallway with three video monitors flashing images of The Christ being nailed to a cross.  A born-again-Baptist addressed our group in humble earnestness, which we found embarrassing precisely because we were there to satisfy our compulsive need for irony.  He urged us to pray with the minister that we may find Jesus.  Our group made a fast exit out the side door.
t was late, and we were hungry.  Hell had given us an appetite, which we sated at the Austin IHOP.  As we ate our Tutti Frutti platters and three-egg omelets, we processed the experience, which was marked by ambivalence.

Deflowered

“I wonder why they said nothing about being gay?” Keith wondered aloud.
They were probably all too scared to even act gay,” Katie said.  “The suggestion of gayness might tarnish an unblemished reputation.”
“God would not approve,” Keith said, nodding.”And on that note, I bet that Kelly is the coveted role,” Katie said. “Or being one of the screaming girls in hell.”

“I should have gotten that chick’s number,” McCauley said, shaking her head.  “Next time. Next time.”

My Hell House cherry had been popped.  Was it worth it?  Perhaps.  It’s pretty clear that my feminist self is heading directly to Hell.  At least I know that Hell is full of hot women.

Sarah Suzuki is social worker in central Texas who practices psychotherapy and works at AIDS Services of Austin. Like you, she is paying off student loans. On Sundays she likes to ride her bicycle and work on her graphic novel.

II. Hell Is For Other People’s Children

Note to readers: I’m probably too genteel to ever behave really badly. We all were. I don’t know what we were expecting, but we weren’t doing anything sinister. The carload of queers that spilled out into the parking lot of Bethel Church on Friday night were all products of middle-class homes, looking at the long line in front of the church, recalling the county fairs of our youth. We’d let our relationships with Jesus lapse, or maybe never blossom to begin with, but that wasn’t going to keep us from waiting our turn in the concession line. We cheerfully zipped up our American Apparel hoodies and ponied up for $2 nachos, $3 “frapps” (coffee drinks of flavored whipped cream—the pronunciation, presumably, a gesture against the French), smoked pot in our cars, and complained about the wait.

The mere existence of a concession line at Hell House, and our reliance upon it during the 2-hour wait to see the attraction, bridged a cultural divide between Us and Them. Regardless of ideological origin, cholesterol-laden snacks will always provide the human touch. In fact, that concession stand line was the most convivial space of the night. Sometimes I wish I’d spent the whole evening there drinking powdered hot chocolate instead of visiting the living hell that awaited me and my queer friends. Yeah, we were in hell, but not the way the Bethel Churchers wanted us to be. It was more of an aesthetic hell.

Dir. Richard Schecner

I get the sense that bad publicity has modified the yearly production of the Hell House scripts. This year, there’s no live abortion or queer punishments. The school shooting scene has been shelved because there haven’t been any lately in real life. Female sexuality, though, is an awesome problem and still going strong, and this year it’s been wedged into a spectacular montage of sexual violence, revenge, and depression.

One of the first scenes of Hell House features a rape and subsequent murder. Kelly is raped, albeit offstage, and then comes back onstage to shoot her attacker, killing him. The “plot” hereafter functions as a great domino-stack of sin, Hell House wants us to think that rape and murder are equally grave acts, and that one has the potential to produce the other. Kelly is raped and shoots her rapist immediately after her assault, but the sequence that we see on stage is strange. Kelly and Serge meet in Serge’s apartment, and then Kelly exits stage right to use the bathroom, and then the assault commences. The audience sees the assault happen by way of a video played onstage. “Demonic” music overlays a short video of Kelly being chased around the bed.  How is it considered beyond the pale for two teenage actors to simulate rape in a church setting, and yet we’re allowed to see a badly produced (like, Soul-Asylum-music-video-esque) filmic version of it? And why is it that the most emotionally profound moments in the whole performance are on video anyway? That shit has got to be a commentary on the fact that we all learn our emotions from TV.

And speaking of learning, it’s also important that we take away this next fact: that ladies contain within their own bodies the perfect opportunity for murder in cold blood. They don’t even have to walk out into the street to encounter a potential murder victim. They’ve got one right in their tummies – it’s super immanent, like carrying something around in one’s purse. How lovely and recursive, then, that Kelly had a gun in her purse AND a murder victim in her uterus! Ladies commit murder with guns and with aborto-scalpels, and then later on, with razor blades when we’re wracked with suicidal guilt.

Community Theater

Double Agents—Depression, Fat Demons, and You

So yeah, there were some clarity issues. Sarah has recounted some of them beautifully. The queers in the audience wanted to know who the hell was behind all these rapings and shootings and drunk drivings and so on. Is it the fat demons, or is it the characters being weak and vulnerable to them? We all know that being alone while you’re feeling depressed is totally hellacious, but in Hell House, the depressed are never alone. They have the fat demons with them at all times. The characters don’t appear to be able to see or hear the fat demons, but pretty much all of the characters are dogged subconsciously with insults until they succumb to freebasing, assault, et cetera. It’s a totally miserable—and worse, aesthetically impoverished through bad videos—world.

In the end, Hell House rests on the evangelical Christian message about self-control. Specifically, you don’t have any, and what you do have, you get from Jesus. That’s why evil is never allowed to stand by itself. It’s always enhanced, through props (the gun – lord protect me from twentysomething women with guns in their purses) or media (music videos of rape) or metaphysics (fat demons whispering in characters’ ears) or people like you. In the Christian cosmology, evil comes from Satan, and you’re just the agent of it. You’re a conduit of badness, a vessel for sin. So maybe it makes sense that the Bethel Church used all these props, media, and metaphysics to clarify Satan’s demonic message: it’s because Satan himself often uses all this stuff to get you. Satan, apparently, is a multimedia whore, seething inside all our entertainment.

Hell House, though, also uses music videos as a teaching device—to tell you about Jesus. At the final stretch of the tour, viewers are placed in front of several television screens, again flickering bad videos, but this time of the crucifixion. So the medium of video is a vessel just as a person is. You have to choose: are you going to be the Jesus video or the rape video? Will your circuit party be full of writhing, screaming women in cages or will it be full of Jesus? Well-behaved as I am, readers, I know my answer to that one.

Katie Anania is spending her vacation co-teaching a graduate course called Accidental Pornographies: The Visual Effects of the Women’s Health Movement Since 1970.  She is interested in performing any task for which she might be paid in cake.

Please Disperse

After all the work I did on theorizing The Dead Kitty, Mary Gaitskill went ahead and trumped me this summer with “Lost Cat.” Now I’m reading her latest collection, Don’t Cry, which has me moving through life at a halting pace. For days, it’s been like this: I read a story, close the book and come back to reread it several times before moving on to the next one. I’m only halfway through. You can’t just breeze through this thing. Gaitskill’s manipulative sense of humor is exhausting. As a reader, I feel like my computer does when too many applications eat up the virtual memory causing the hard-drive to make wheezing noises. The first story, “College Town, 1980″ is like her novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin, compressed into a tiny nugget. It took me a week.

When her father came to visit her in the mental hospital, right after Allan had dumped her, she’d said, “Daddy, I want you to beat me.” He’d turned away and licked his lips. Dolores didn’t see why he should balk at that; he’d been beating her mother for years, although it was true that it had never been a physical beating. Besides, the first time she’d been in the mental hospital, she’d asked him to kill her; this second request seemed reasonable in comparison.

- Mary Gaitskill, “College Town, 1980″

“College Town, 1980″ tells the story of Dolores’ slow recovery from a suicide attempt after getting dumped by Allan. “This wouldn’t be happening to me if Allan hadn’t dumped me,” she internally narrates. Somewhat like Laura from a story later in the collection, “An Old Virgin,” who walks around muttering “ugly cunt” to herself, Dolores wanders around Ann Arbor berating herself in third person – “She was an overweight twenty-nine-year-old in stretch pants and a scarf that hid her debased head, mentally ill, and unable to have orgasms, not even with herself, sitting in a college town with nothing to do but run around the phys-ed building” – running through old conversations with her ex in flashback. Before you can get too attached to Dolores as a plucky, emotionally abused, heroine, Gaitskill shows the brutal opportunism of our sentimental impulses: “She was seized with a need to to be near her brother, even though they did not get along, mostly because his gentle nature made her want to bully him.”

Allan dumped Delores because he was viscerally offended by her pornographic imagination. Their sexual dynamic was such that Dolores naturally debased herself in bed with him. “You’re like a faggot,” he complains. “”You asswipe,” she muttered.” Lazing around town, she can’t get Allan’s injunctions to be “strong” and “productive” out of her head. Everyone around her wants to be strong and productive, including a local bitch waitress who dreams of one day opening an abortion clinic and refuses to bring Dolores coffee for her anti-depressants – even knocking them off the table and onto the floor. “Was strength the ability to make someone leave a restaurant, mostly because they couldn’t bear to be in your presence anymore?” Unbearable as Delores is with all her open mouthed candy-munching, false nails and drag queen style of declamation, her depression is entertaining mostly to the reader. In-story, she’s a pain in the ass and her too-large forehead swathed in a scarf (she pulled out large chunks of her hair and feels bald without her little burqua) alienates others. Gaitskill’s theme is our disgust with socially useless depression. It’s okay to be depressed so long as you’re meta enough to be entertaining about your sadness. If your melancholia can’t pay its way – isn’t productive, isn’t palatable, can’t make you stronger or empower you [via Ayn Rand] – nobody wants anything to do with it other than to waive you off with the advice to ‘get over it.’

Empowerment is  a source of great amusement to Gaitskill. “Folk Song” is a story contrasting a serial killer, two turtles and a porn star (a coded version of Annabel Chong) filming a gang-bang – she intends to screw 1000 men in one marathon fuck session – and the convergence of their sexualities. The serial killer, turtles and the porn star resort to shells to defend themselves against the overwhelming sensory input of intimacy. “… she feels his dick and forgets her heart.” The position is anti-Deleuzian, as the porn star tries to compare her gang-bang to the song of  John Henry, – “She is like John Henry anyway because she is trying to make herself into a machine. A machine can never be hurt or raped or killed. But no matter how she tries, she will not succeed in becoming a machine. Because she is something else.”

“Mirror Ball” chronicles a girl’s loss of part of her soul to a slutty musician after a one-night stand. Gaitskill reiterates her theme of that anomalous place of attachment and detachment inside of sex; the one which is a chastisement to tone deaf, post-HIV, sex positivity.

He took her soul – though, being a secular-minded person, he didn’t think of it that way. He didn’t take the whole thing; that would not have been possible. But he got such a significant piece that it felt as if her entire soul were gone. As soon as he had it, he not only forgot that he had taken it; he forgot he’d ever known about it. This was not the first time either.

The boy is a repeat offender, moving through a plurality of women at once, whereas the girl loves serially. Though I think Gaitskill fumbles the psychoanalysis of the soul thief (raised by a defensive single mother; taught by her bitterness to fold inside himself; etc), the girl’s pain reaches out from the page. If I may get autobiographical for a moment, I lived with a soul thief for a time. His apartment was filled with the mangled souls of exes. You could see one hovering over the framed picture of he and his ex as a couple which sat on the nightstand beside my side of the bed. One soul hovered over the refrigerator on top of which he kept a manila envelope containing the negatives of head-shots from another ex (an actor) who would pester him with emails and voice mails begging for them back.  Another ex had gone bankrupt and spent several months after their breakup cooking and cleaning at the apartment. The accommodating soul thief had even “bought” some of the guy’s VHS tapes (piles of Bette Midler shit with the exes’ soul that my boyfriend didn’t want even want to watch) in exchange for rent loans. Another of his exes was a Unitarian minister; kitty-corner to our sofa was a spare pew from the guy’s church containing that one’s soul; it formed the world’s first sofa-pew-sectional. Despite my desire to involve my own experiences with the story, “Mirror Ball” is the most humorless of Gaitskill’s pieces. It uncharacteristically stresses the pathos of emotional mutilation so that she can write a heavy-handed allegory, instead of indulging her strength as a master of  comedically humiliating details. This same flight into fantasy hobbles her again in her recent New York Magazine piece on Ashley Youmans “Kristen” Dupré.

In “The Agonized Face” a book reviewer attends a writer’s conference to write a  puff-piece about the collected authors. While there, she fixates on a feminist and a post-colonial writer and makes the conscious decision to loathe them.

I had been asked to write something funny, and the feminist author sounded pretty funny. I pictured her in a short skirt and big high heels, standing up on the balls of her feet with her legs bowed like a samurai, her fists and arms flexed combatively, head cocked like she was on the lookout for some patriarchy to mount.

While she is personally charmed by the Somalian post-colonialist with his African version of magical realism – even is entertained by his story of the village slut mounted by the protagonist’s grandfather – she also feels distaste for his work: only a “third world” writer, a commodity form unto itself, could get away with that story without the coddling readership pointing out that if the protagonist didn’t have his grandfather around to infect the village slut with VD, then he’d have to turn to his own mother and her two sets of breasts. The journalist’s disgust for the Somalian writer’s story tempts her to go easy on the feminist, but since the feminist is unable to write about sex with disgust the reviewer can only feel contempt for the woman’s delusionally cheery view of sex and rape. Gaitskill is elaborating a position she took in her famous Harper’s “rape essay,” which she reads in the following video.

For Gaitskill, feminism can’t decide if it’s overprotecting young girls or not protecting them enough. It disingenuously tries to take on both these positions at once. By sanitizing sex, feminist authors becomes fodder for the reviewer in “The Agonized Face” who feels that any woman who reads and enjoys the feminist writer’s syrupy complaining and self-effacement is trying to dull her own intelligence about sex.

At this rate, I have three weeks left with Don’t Cry. It’s been a few years since I spent any time reading Gaitskill. I’m turned on by her writing again after having tuned out because of the rambling structure of her last novel, Veronica. In retrospect,  the descriptions of second shift temp-work in New York City in that book depict some of the loneliest scenes I’ve ever read. I’m looking forward to seeing how Gaitskill will trump me next.  If you’ve ever cut yourself or raked yourself over the coals – literally or figuratively – Don’t Cry is for you.

We’ve all gone to the bathhouse after a horrid date or breakup with the intention of getting some AIDS. The death drive is nothing to be ashamed of, and all my friends who do have HIV get free massages and acupuncture from the City. They also go to kick-ass parties all the time. This is what gay men want; not children; not to send out fancy wedding invitations.

When you enter it looks just like Lady Gaga’s video “Bad Romance.” When those white creatures come out of their coffins in their 21st century mummy garbs, they move exactly like the horrible zombies at the bathhouse. The only real difference is that, for practical reasons, gay bathhouses aren’t so well lit. I once knew someone whose abject job it was to clean one, but Gaga’s isn’t just clean – it’s completely sterilized to highlight the pure experience of the disease. You walk into the clean space and, like zombies to the smell of brains, the creatures start crawling toward you.

Lady Gaga is a 100% faggot production, from the audience of leather queens watching her seize to the mockery of straight porn where the straight women (you can tell from their long fingernails that they are straight) force feed her champagne. A friend points out that the hairless cat symbolizes her Brazilian wax. We’re impressed also by the quiet mid-video homage to James Whistler’s “White Girl.”

The coffins from which they emerge are viral marketing for the new Mac Pro computer mouses, representing the new form of disease transmission as people are now meeting anonymously online.

I asked around to see if anyone else thinks this is an homage to the Cremaster Cycle. The consensus is that Lady Gaga is better than Matthew Barney. Self-immolation isn’t her goal. Sure, she’s fucked up (not only the pupils of her eyes are dilated… her WHOLE EYE is dilated), but she gets what she wants: the video ends with the Gucci Faggot annihilated as Lady Gaga “survives” the experience. The cost? She ends up as Amy Winehouse.

- darknessatnoon

EDIT: Reader “Violet” compiled the video’s product placements.

Parrot by Starck ($1600)
(0:11)

Nemiroff Vodka ($50)
(0:16, 02:28, implied throughout video in glasses)

Heartbeats by Lady Gaga ($119.95)
(0:24, 0:30, 0:34, 1:12, various times in video)

Carerra ‘Safari’ Sunglasses ($ unknown)
(03:56)

HP Envy ‘Beats Limited Edition’ by Monster ($2,299)
(2:44)

(There’s also a Nintendo Wii controller at (02.43), but it’s probably not a paid placement.)

Credit: Blair Waldorf

…….and those fucking high ass heels are from Alexander McQueen.

To this day, I mourn the demise of the DivaSparkles ACTIVATE! For a good year or two, it kept Chris Claremont & his fans in check with posts like, “Chris Claremont Makes Me LOL in Sadness,” “Let’s bust this ‘New Exiles Sells Out’ BS, ‘kay?” and “!!!Dreamboat CC SPEAKS!,” plus numerous assorted cunty reviews. Whatever your personal feelings about the author, it was a tragic day for freedom of speech when CC’s representatives filed an injunction or something and shut him down. Now every few months, I have to log on here to keep track of Claremont’s latest ridiculousness, and, let me tell you that with X-Men: Corrections being published on a bi-weekly schedule, one man simply can’t keep up with the flow of nonsense.

Recently, CC took his alternate future tale, GeNext, of the children/grandchildren of the X-Men to India where Becka Munroe (Storm’s rape-baby from an encounter in the Savage Land with Brainchild) and her cohort were transformed into South Asians in another well-intentioned, deeply off-color racial parody.

Perhaps We'll Give Her Some Dialogue!

Rooting for Gravity

There are pages and pages of this, as the cast is transformed into a collections operator, a bicycle messenger riding the streets of Mumbai, a village person, a homeless Indian, mechanics, etc. I haven’t wanted an Indian to die this much since I first was introduced to Mohinder “Mogli” Suresh on Heroes.  The one real X-Man in the GeNext cast is their negligent professor, Beast. He’s the sensitive, intellectual, mutant ape-man with the Elvis Costello glasses – a character designed to appeal to Old Maids and Furries.  CC isn’t content to merely offend the sub-continent. He has plans to stereotype the most populous nation on earth. CBR news reports, “Claremont explained that he’d been working a lot of what he’d been learning about India into his upcoming “GenNext” work. He also pointed out that China’s history and culture would hopefully be integrated into his work as well.” He’s been brushing up on history and other non-fiction, since, “I find now I’m reading a lot more nonfiction, simply because every time I read fiction, I think I can write it better. But every time I read nonfiction, I learn things.”

A perceptive audience member confronted CC, and asked why this Bitter Betty has returned to the franchise after 18 years of doing nothing of note:

“I’m under contract. I have to produce work, they have to give me work,” explained the writer.

I can understand bitterness. Claremont was unceremoniously fired from the X-Men after 14 years where he set the stage for the entertainment industry juggernaut that it became. I get it. I’m not a breath of fresh air, myself.  I don’t find it easy to let go, either! Sometimes, however, you have to decathect.

Today, Claremont announces that Marvel has decided to stroke his ego further by green-lighting New Mutants: Corrections (the New Mutants were the junior class of X-Men and are only compelling as 80s nostalgia).

And now for something completely different — coming in the spring, 2010, will be New Mutants Forever, courtesy of me, Editor Jordan White and an artist to be named soon (ahh, where’s Sienkevitch when you really need him? Or Arthur? Or Rick? Or Leialoha? But I digress … ) Same rules as XMF, the series picks up right where I left off, in the aftermatch of the two-part adventure with the Hellions. As with XMF, it should prove an interesting contrast / alternative to its 616 counterpart — and of course, this one will actually give a credit to the series / characters creators, what a concept!

Give it a try, should be fun. We might even manage to catch you all by surprise.

Cordially,

Chris Claremont

If that’s cordial, I’d like to see Claremont try to be a bitch.

Prior to the Enlightenment, families associated through kinship – the symbolics of blood relation organized property and rights. Eventually, the couple form and ‘intimacy’ began to restructure human relations. It wasn’t about who you were related to but rather who you chose. Simone de Beauvoir would argue in the Second Sex that the best way out of a woman’s state of natural narcissism was for her to share a project with a man. This dispassionate relation, whatever it was, – raising a kid, growing chives, collecting bees -, work in general, would best allow the couple to bond and simultaneously achieve independence. Recent theorists of reflexive modernity have argued that a new dominant cultural formation has arrived: the work family, which I’ve written about in the past. So, I get that CC considers the X-Men his family. The attachment is understandable. He spent fourteen years raising them, working with them everyday. These imaginary people – as well as the real people who collaborated with him – mean something significant to him. The guy once dedicated one of his novels to Storm!! I also understand that it’s important to just let go. A passionate attachment can utterly destroy you, particularly when it drives you to extraordinary lengths to correct past mistakes. It’s classic supervillain behavior to try to recapture the past. What Claremont is doing is tantamount to stalking the X-Men. The main victim is his legacy which he’s despoiling with sub-par writing even by the standards of the outdated style of 1980s comics. Aside from his legacy, his possessive attitude towards the franchise is completely undignified. Moreover, he’s annoying the fuck out of me. Take for example, this shit.

This Is Not a Meme

Seriously, what is this shit about Wolverine being Jean Grey’s one true love?! It’s especially revolting when CC has gone on record stating that he envisions Wolverine as Bob Hoskins (!?!!), but concedes he can see why they went with Hugh Jackman instead. Jean Grey and Wolverine is not gonna happen, Claremont. Get that through your thick head! I also don’t know what he’s thinking with the linen pantaloons, however I’ve come to suspect lately that he has Pirates of the Caribbean on repeat in his dvd player.

If you don’t think that he’s bitter and that he’s not trying to force memes just watch this video – if you can stand the torture of the sycophants watching him clap out the syllables in his head before he speaks.

The highlight is one of the passive aggressive parts where he “forgets” the name of Mark Millar, the incredibly famous comic book writer who was allowed to write a storyline that CC always wanted for himself but never could get because of ‘editorial interference.’

One of the early meanings of “bitter” comes from sailor’s jargon. As defined in 1867, “A ship is ‘brought up to a bitter’ when the cable is allowed to run out to that stop..When a chain or rope is paid out to the bitter-end, no more remains to be let go.” Bitterness comes from holding on too tightly. It’s for people who want to remain in the same place. Not long ago, I read a blog post from an academic who hadn’t gotten tenure. It was one of the most painful things I’ve ever read. This person couldn’t handle their ‘career’ coming to an end. She was unable to envision a future for herself. It was a highly traumatic read, and a story about such loss I’d never link to it. I’ve met a lot of people who have come to the end and can’t let go, many of them in academia. I’d never wanted to become the bitter academic, the scorned lover. One of my greatest fears is to become one of those people for whom speaking from experience is nothing more than an inability to reconcile the present with the past. 

Readers, take heed. Churning out crap “forever” is what can happen if you allow yourself to be eaten alive by your own bitterness. Prilosec is taken once daily. After 18 years, that comes to $3593.75. Even if he economized with Tums six times a day, 18 years of repressing heartburn and raging envy still comes to $2283.26. Chris Claremont represents a parable about the importance of  humbleness and good economic planning.

When literary critics want to teach the concept of “voice” in literature to their students, it’s inevitable to turn to to Shakespeare’s Hamlet for the ideal example. Not only do they get to learn Hamlet’s own uniquely histrionic tone, but his father’s disembodied voice booms out “Mark me. … Lend thy serious hearing to what I shall unfold,” conflating the concept of the storyteller with a unique vocalization and call to attention. I don’t mean to be pretentious by invoking Shakespeare, especially since teaching him has to be one of my top ten worst academic experiences (not because of the material but because of the kind of students who sign up for a course like that). It’s just that Hamlet is the place that most exceptionally lays out the concept of voice.

I spent my summer thinking quite a bit about voice and authorial signature when reading through a pile of crime novels. I’m finding more and more that that literature in my spare time bores me while I correspondingly gain a greater appreciation for plot-centric stories. Comic book writer Duane Swierczynski is better known for his novels and ended up being one of my early brain-free contenders. Except, as I read one novel after another of his, throughout my reading spree, I noticed more and more that his wit and little authorial signatures were overpowering the usual noir blah. I couldn’t not pay attention to him giggling in the background. Unlike many of the other books I’d read, his seemed a little more crafted than usual; a little more aware of the genre as a literary entity than as something pulpy to be churned out.

One of the things I noticed from his first novel, Secret Dead Men, to The Wheelman, to The Blonde, to Severance Package, to Level 26 , were the repeated references to underwear. Underwear wasn’t just a regular part of character description, it plays a role in the plot.

The Wheelman with underwear cum clue:

That’s when he saw the note had been resting on something else – a piece of fabric.

No, not fabric –underwear .

Katie’s.

…

Lisa woke up and stared at the bloody shirt again.

It had been balled up and pitched into a corner, along with a pair of wrinkled dress slacks, socks, and underwear. The underwear was definitely not Andrew’s. When they’d first started dating, Andrew had worn tighty-whiteys – Fruit of the Loom. Gross! Old-man underwear. No matter how tough the guy, it made his legs look like little froggy legs poking out of a diaper.

Andrew loathed boxers; they were too baggy to wear under jeans, he said. So Lisa promptly escorted her American Express Gold card and Andrew to Boscow’s, at the Franklin Mills Mall, where they settled on the next best thing: Fruit of the Loom boxer briefs. Lisa vetoed anything close to white; Andrew went home with a half-dozen three-packs of navy blue, black and dark grey. The tighty-whiteys went into the weekly garbage.

The underwear balled up in the corner was a pair of blue-green plaid boxer shorts. Definitely not something Andrew would wear.

So whose were they?

The Blonde’s striptease of death:

Her panties were purple but, like her bra, were very basic. No satin, no things. Just functional, everyday underwear. The kind Jack’s wife wore, except on their anniversary or for weddings.

“I need a moment to think,” Jack said.

“And I want to get off,” Angela said. “Very badly.” she reached up and grabbed a remote that was hanging by a wire from the ceiling. She pressed a button. The plastic nub hummed to life, and even though Jack had never seen anything like it before, its design and purpose were suddenly very clear. “Don’t you?”

Jack didn’t answer, because as soon as he figured out the saddle, another fact hit him cold. The saddle was across the room. Easily more than ten feet away.

And Angela was getting ready to mount it.

“No!” Jack yelled. “Wait!”

Severance Package and the underwear of SHEER HORROR:

Jaime rounded the bend and looked into Chase’s room. Andrea was there in the wooden rocking chair, holding Chase in her arms, humming to him. Only Andrea looked different. She was wearing only her underwear.

“Andrea?”

The room was dark. He needed to see them. Touch them. Smell them.

His hand found the light switch, but before he could flip it, she spoke.

I was a tad concerned reading Swierczynski’s latest novel, Level 26, which is a collaboration with CSI creator, Anthony Zuiker, that he’d be repressing his style to write something more in the mainstream vein of bland crime-drama horror. Given that this is being hyped as the first hybrid ‘digi-novel,’ with scenes that take place on the Level 26 website, I was worried that he’d try to write something without leaving his mark.  Halfway into the book, I was upset to see no mention of underwear until it occurred to me that Sqweegel – described to be so far the worst serial killer in human history – was dressed in the ultimate expression of underpants, entirely in a latex gimp suit. One of Sqweegel’s main concerns early in the novel is how to streamline the amount of butter it takes to get into his outfit:

In the next room, Sqweegel opened the combination lock on the refrigerator — which was kept at the warmest temperature possible — and removed four and a half sticks of butter. He had tried economizing and getting it down to four, but the extra half stick really was necessary. Five was too much and not really a solution anyway.

Four sticks were the ideal; fours sticks come in every package. Which meant that every eight packages required one extra package, to be used for half sticks.

He tried not to think about the half stick too much. Someday he’d find a way around the half stick.

I wrote to Swierczynski asking him to elaborate his reasons for the recurrence of underwear in his book. He was initially surprised to realize he did this. I pointed out that it occurs in every novel, and in the most recent book he even includes a few scenes with an infant in a gimp suit. If, as Hannah Arendt posited, every newborn represents the entrance of newness and possibility into the world, then a baby in bondage-wear is the counterpoint that, nuh uh, agency is always constrained and that some people are just born fucked. While there was no great theoretical reason – he admits he finds underwear “funny.”  I realized that I have a similar problem to his, which is that I can’t write an academic article without coming off as immature by parodying the form with the interjection of humor. He’s one of the best crime writers I’ve ever encountered even though one of the ‘faults’ with Level 26 is that it never reaches a point where it’s actually scary. Instead, Sqweegel’s obsessive evilness becomes highly entertaining.

I know it’s “evil” to track down the trauma therapy group of the wives of fireman who died in the WTC in order to torture the ones who remarried, but it’s also such an outlandish little cry for attention by Sqweegel that the whole section of the novel comes off as completely hilarious. Even the disturbing male rape scene had me in stitches while avoiding seeming grossly homophobic.

I’d written a long essay once on a few serial killer true crime stories, and one of the things that I considered a weakness in the genre was the way it relies on crimonology and ‘facts’ about criminals. Crime novels spend way too much time giving you – the middle class – nice inside truisms about how the other side likes to live. While at a certain level it comes off as silly, I prefer this well-wrought humorous sadism and brutality over cliched “dark” factoid-heavy pop psychology.

One thing I would have preferred in the digi-novel would have been a higher level of stalking to add a little more terror to the humor. It was a little frustrating to have to heave myself up (I was still wearing a cast on my arm while reading this) every twenty pages  to watch a video of Sqweegel misbehaving on the book’s website, especially the times that the video consisted only of an email or text message. If I were to improve the concept somehow, I’d make it so that when one first logged into the website you’d have to enter in your own telephone number and email. That way, the killer could text you at random times or cyber-stalk you to add to the visceral realism of the experience. If you’re going to go high-tech, I think you ought to make sure it’s not out-dated tech. An IM from Sqweegel would have thrilled me!

Another Swiercynski touch is the paralyzed woman who can’t speak but can only shit-talk via her thoughts.

The Blonde

She couldn’t move a muscle, but she heard every word. This son of a bitch wasn’t going to die screaming. He would be too busy choking on his own blood.

Level 26

And two straps tightened, and the mask cut into her face.

Sibby reached up with her fingers, feeling the butterfly IV needle pull from the back of her left hand. She scratched at the plastic mask, but her fingers felt fat and formless, partially numb. Why was this so difficult? Goddamnit, it was happening again, and here she was unable to do something as simple as pull this fucking thing away from her own fac–

The paralyzed raving mute woman is a theme, which isn’t to say that he doesn’t like to beat the shit out of his men. It’s not just about showing that they’re tough in a fantasy of invulnerability – because a few of them are soft men – he simply prefers to heap abuse on all his characters via incredibly violent 3-way chases. One of the novels does end with a paralyzed male stuck in a drainage pipe, unable to speak as his brother in-law disposes of his body, and in another book a character spends half the novel tooling around in the stairwell of a high-rise with a nerve agent clogging his eyes and throat.

Part of the point, I think, is that even when paralyzed and with no voice unavailable to you, you still have the power to at the very least get pissed off. It doesn’t mean you can get a happy ending, but the rage is your right. This isn’t King Hamlet’s voice. No one is asking you to lend Swierczynski your serious hearing. Nevertheless, I highly recommend you listen anyway. Constantly inserting his particular obsessions makes Swierczynski comparable to Quentin Tarantino. Unlike Tarantino, he is not going out of his way to bug the shit out of you.

Heidegger didn’t think much of airplanes.  While to some they were a symbol of a new machine age, to him they were shiny reminders of a type of calculative thinking.  The jet airliner sits, he wrote, on the taxi strip ready for takeoff, all its component standing by.  All living and non-living things, so Heidegger, were being made ready in this way, a relationship to technology that makes both machines and people exist in a constant state of preparedness.  He foresaw that humans and the objects that they surround themselves would one day come propitiously close to being nothing more than a standing reserve, a collection of faculties and attributes at the ready to be marshaled in the creation of orders (what Heidegger called the ordering of the orderable).  If Heidegger could prophesize such a future while waiting to board the next flight to Geneva, one wonders what sublime horror he might have experienced contemplating the calculative capacity of the cyborg.

The variety of flesh-covered machine inhabiting Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles operates by breaking down humanity into parts that can be mechanically reproduced, treating human behavior as an endless source of data to be mined.  Cyborgs pursue the idea of a standing-reserve with shocking exactitude.  They mime not only features but ideas, their inability to grasp social nuance makes them all the more refined when grasping social action.  Chromartie (Garrett Dillahunt), a particularly menacing terminator cyborg that goes through multiple incarnations throughout the series, mines a human F.B.I. agent called Agent Ellison (Richard T. Jones) for information on stolen identities, and then carries out an impersonation of an F.B.I. agent.  Cyborgs take jokes and turn them into strategies. Ellison has become a scaffold unconsciously modeling tactics of deception.  The series lays down multiple instances of machine mimesis, each an uncanny repetition of human interaction and collectively forming a continuous lamination of danger on top of the everyday world.  The most disturbing moments cohere around what is a subtext of the series, the impossibilities of appropriate motherhood.  Catherine Weaver (Shirley Manson), advance liquid metal cyborg, learns through a kind of pixilated mimesis about how to comfort her flesh-and-blood daughter:

and

videos are for educational purposes only

It’s not only the cyborgs who mime motherhood.  Nothing about being a mother comes naturally.  The main character, Sarah Connor, has by her own admission to learn behavior modification to even approach motherhood.  Everyone doubts if she’ll ever get there.

she’s working on it

The fear that drives each episode is not that cyborgs are becoming more like humans in each new iteration (as in the movies, the terminators are numbered T880, T1001 and so on and with each increasing number comes an increasing level of sophistication), but that humans are more cyborg than they care to admit.  The horror is not that they can imitate us, but that we can be decomposed into a series of replicable actions. Goffman’s presentation of self in everyday life is no longer a mode of explanation of social interaction, it has become the only game in town. Beneath the apparent givenness of human emotions, perhaps we have been nothing more mimicking creatures all along.  Mother Connor has long since figured that one out.  Her stated intention is to create a state of fear in her son and in herself, a process requiring approaching the threshold of the non-human with increasing paranoid frequency:

comforted by ghosts?  Like the machines, they’re always watching.

According to Connor, the human mother, it is intentionally-inflicted trauma that is the last thing keeping the standing-reserve at bay.  Meanwhile, according to mother cyborg, it’s cellular. She keeps a little part of herself in a fishtank as an electric eel shaped sliver of metal, a liquid reserve germplasm, available in case the other specimen is destroyed, or as Heidegger would call it, enframed—reincorporated into a definable order.

A cyborg manifesto? There’s no time to explain.

The provide us with two modes of engaging in a poetics of technology, one that makes the human and non-human adjacent, and causes them to almost touch.  The necessary obverse of this adjacency seems equally clear, the trade of maternal comforts for those of the body in pain.

Sareeta B. Amrute and darknessatnoon went to grad school together. They spent a cold winter weekend holed up together, traumatically absorbed in Sarah Connor’s Chronicles. She is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington. She is currently writing a book on the Indian IT industry.

two days and six hours of sleep later, beyond the frustration that I can’t work on my chapter, my blog entries, have to type one handed – beyond even the pain my shoulder from the amateurism of wearing this sling -, I can only think of what I least want to think about. namely, crashing my bike and breaking my elbow.

also, I rememberrememberremember seeing the cronenbergesque gash on my leg for the first time. I am incredibly lucky. if I were any shorter I would have busted my knee. the fracture on  the right arm is barely visible in x-ray, minor, and the bruise covering my left palm is healing. without a helmet, I could have been killed if I’d landed wrong when the pothole threw me off my bike. I’m lucky. lucky even to be trapped in this agonizingly claustrophobic cast for the next six weeks. such a minor trauma – compared to the critical injuries in the er – is devastating all the same. compared to a friend who had both feet broken by a delivery truck or to another friend who lost one leg below the knee from hopping flatcars. the woman stitching my leg  together had lost her brother last year when someone opened a car door as he biked past without a helmet.  not sure what will constitute working through it – getting on a bike again or smarting up enough to never touch one again?

Here’s to you and your temper
Yes, I remember what you said last night
And I know that you see what you’re doing to me
Tell me, why?

Why do you have to make me feel small
So you can feel whole inside?
Why do you have to put down my dreams
So you’re the only thing on my mind?

I’m sick and tired of your attitude
I’m feeling like I don’t know you
You tell me that you want me then cut me down

- Taylor Swift, Tell Me Why

Dear God, make me a bird. So I could fly far. Far far away from here.

- Jenny Curran, Forrest Gump

Hip Hop is the art of  feeling aggressively put upon. Your chances have been stolen from you. There’s a conspiracy. If hip hop took anything from reggae, it’s the grand myth of the ‘Babylon System‘ – ‘You can’t educate i/ for no equal opportunity.’

Our country music stars are avatars for long-term suffering and yearning. Taylor Swift explicitly identifies with famous white girls whose lives have been ruined by men who done ‘em wrong, ‘Cause you were Romeo/ I was a scarlet letter / And my daddy said stay away from Juliet.’ In fact, Swift is the delicate Little Eva from Uncle Tom’s Cabin; she’s Jenny from Forrest Gump, wilting beautifully and breaking our hearts.

Gimme the mic. Gimme the award. Your purse, too.

Even if Kanye West’s little outburst at the VMAs last night wasn’t staged, the script for it lay fallow in our collective consciousness long enough so that it was readily available. Black thug attacks and “steals” the microphone from dewy young white woman – a staged collision that sent a surge of adrenaline through racists and women’s studies program all across the English speaking world. I am amazed at how all morning, people have been talking about Kanye West, Taylor Swift and Beyonce as if they are real actual people instead of outright cultural commodities. Every move they make is scripted. Even their breakdowns are scripted.

In the midst of it all sat gracious Beyonce who was able to shine without getting up. It was amusing to see master-thief, Beyonce, not taking something that wasn’t her’s for once. All three celebrities were able to strut, walk and waddle away with their brand image intact.

The true challenge of the evening was Lady Gaga. For a couple of months now, I’ve been struggling with what to make of her. Is she Andy Warhol or fucking retarded? She came in low under my radar and exploded into my consciousness by humping an inflatable killer whale in one of her videos. The next thing I knew, she was dancing and fucking on crutches in a wild homage to broken doll porn. What can you make of someone who does ‘acoustic’ performances on an electric keyboard and acts like she’s performing a concert on a grand piano?

Shakira claims Gaga is ‘the 21st century Grace Jones.’ If that means she stands for meaningless modernism, I agree. More pertinently, this blog’s musical consultant, Josef F, claims that Lady Gaga’s face looks like a bucket of smashed crabs.

'A really fugly munter' - says urban dictionary.

Something about this woman activates the reptile part of my brain. I can’t help laughing hysterically whenever one of her videos pops on, or when she speaks about sex, or when she speaks about art. I laugh when she speaks or appears in general. Her public persona could only be the product of a team of gay sociopaths behind the scenes. She came out of nowhere with a fortune in production money at her beck and call, bringing an ‘evil’ gay New York art scene sensibility to middle America via MTV.

“

Lady Gaga Accepts Best New Artist Award While Dressed as a Used Tampon - image via fourfour.typepad.com

Rumor was that during last night’s performance of Paparazzi at the VMAs, Lady Gaga would reenact the death of Princess Diana on stage. Either she pussied out or approached it so allegorically that only the broadest comparisons can be drawn. Instead, she decided to more directly address the rumors about her surgical appearance which hold that she has a big donkey dick.

Meta Commentary on Rumors that she is a Post-Op

At the conclusion of her performance last night, Gaga made a public sacrifice. She  lynched herself so that Kanye wouldn’t have to. Presumably it was a ’statement’ about celebrity victimization tailor-made to appeal to her VMA celebrity audience. Beyonce could not be lynched as she would break the rope. And while Taylor Swift ought to be lynched for bad music, at the moment America needs to see only one fool lynched at a time to satisfy its hunger for public execution. Thanks to Lady Gaga, Kanye et. al.’s  careers will survive to crash and burn another day.

I’ve always been a casual fan. Convention life isn’t for me. Sweaty people dressed in garbage bags breathing my air and crowding into my space. I remember when Buffy the Vampire Slayer was winding down – I’d found Buffy’s abhorrence of eternal return fascinating – my interest was so apparent that someone I never even talk to – my mother – thought to send me a copy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale which I never got around to reading. It was  a moment when “shippers” were writing their homoerotic fanfiction and posting it to the net. In the abstract (by which I mean “sort of thinking about it, but not”) it was all really interesting, except I could never bring myself to actually read the stuff. I was fascinated in the kind of way in which fascinated means talking about it but not really paying attention to what you’re really talking about (relatedly, Supervalent Thought just posted a smart entry on brainstorming that gets to the root of what brainstorming can do for you).

Then about a year and a half ago, I ran across some X-Men fans mashing up X-Men and Simpsons images on the net. It was hysterical to me in a way that I couldn’t quite describe. It was as if someone was tapping all this demented private knowledge that I’d passively absorbed for personal storage and was rubbing it in my face. It was exhilarating.

I decided that I had all this “information” and it was imperative to do something with it. So I became a fan.

I can’t say that I’ve always been the nicest person to other fans, but I’ve discovered and bonded with at least as many amateur geniuses and perverse fetishists as I’ve run across Juggernaut aficianados. In the meantime, I’ve neglected this blog. It’s only fair that I share with you guys some of my more entertaining threads in case any of my readers are similarly interested in this kind of worlding. It’s not always funny; it’s not always smart; sometimes it goes nowhere, but it’s where whimsy and the occasional ambien high can take me. I can attest to a few real gems in this mess. Looking back, it’s amazing how many of  these were inside jokes and how many were created to annoy other people. Perhaps I should seek help.

Literary Theory

The Creepy X-Men

Literary Mystery

Should the Queen of England Knight CC?

X-Treme X-Men: From the Beginning

Fashion

Fashion Forward: How Will Yukio and Storm Make-Over Armor

So Which X-Men Do You Think Can Dance?

Power and Authority

Who Is Your Favorite Boot-Licking Crony of Magneto?

Giving Out Ideas for Free

Should Nightcrawler Become the New “Daredevil”?

Rachel Summers: Mania and Depression

Would Meds Interfere With Rachel’s Psychic Powers?

WOW, It’s like Rachel Grey is psychic or what!

Legal Theory

Did Rachel Summers Commit Statutory Rape?

Is Mind Control An Actionable Offense?

Should Professor X Be “Put Down”

Is Cyclops Really Dating Astrid Bloom?

Is Cyclops de facto a Gigolo?

Biology

Are Telepaths the Fourth Species?

Who is the Most Omnipotent Mutant?

Should Wolverine and X-23 Sniff the Ground More?

Would You Like to See Charles Xavier Crippled Again?

Did the High Evolutionary turn Omega Sentinel into Magneto’s Fake Power Suit?

My Favorite Character Has Been Mangled!

This … is the Face of a Moron

Beast Must Die

How Should Beast Next Devolve?

Beast: War Crimes (Spoilers)

Slandering Jean Grey

Is Jean a Superfreak?

Jean Grey is Older than Emma Frost: The Warp Savant Thread

Should Emma Frost Ask Jean Grey for Her Personality Back?

Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda: The Grifter Girl Thread

Race

So, Is Chimera Asian or What?

Should We Hold It Against Tyrone (“Cloak”) Johnson for Dating Outside of His Race?

Does Kitty Pryde Need Her Mouth Washed Out With Soap?

Where In the World Is Carmen Pryde?

Love and Family

Power Couples: Love is in the Air

Power Couples (New X-Men Edition): Should Nekra Shack Up with Namor?

Family Resemblance: Is Kingo Sunen Dr. Takiguchi’s Long Lost Son?

Drowning in the Fathoms of Adulterous Frenzy

Sage

Is Diana Prince a Sage Rip-Off?

Domestic Violence and the X-Men: Do the X-Women Need to Build a Shelter?

The Habit

X-Men Cold Turkey

Petition for JEAN GREY, METRO U CO-ED

My, oh, my, fat people are vicious. Especially fat boring mid-westerners.*

They’re shimmying about in their chairs, trying to get their arms above the belly fat in order to reach the keyboards to post angry comments on the Internet about Cintra Wilson’s Critical Shopper essay on JC Penney opening up in Herald Square. The resulting outcry against the New York Times would do Horace Greeley proud. If I’m to understand correctly, critics of the piece break down into three camps.

1) Those who find it in poor taste to mock the obese (‘fat people need clothes, too!’).

2) Readers who are upset about the way in which Bill Keller, an editor at the Times, later backhanded Wilson’s story.

3) People who don’t find Cintra Wilson funny in general.

Number 1 is a fair complaint as  fat people are never going to be considered fashionable in New York, so why not let them have unfashionable stores from which to shop? Wilson has already apologized for having hurt anyone’s feelings. I’ll return to number 2, and as for the 3rd complaint, well, – nothing’s funny if you don’t have a sense of humor.

The New York Times and its editors are in an unenviable position here. JC Penney shouldered its way into town like a fat person who has to buy two seats on the plane, and it’s a story. It’s a story that by rights belongs to the Fashion section. But how is Fashion for the New York Times supposed to run a positive review of JC Penney?

Can you imagine?

It’s like being pissed off that AO Scott didn’t effectively or effusively enough sing the praises of Paul Blart: Mall Cop.

Sam Sifton is poised to become the Times’s new food critic. Is he now meant to start reviewing new menu options from Wendy’s and Hardee’s because that’s where “real people” eat?

At the end of the day, critics are society’s designated bitches. For example, Michiko Kakutani exists for the sole purpose of offending the Thomas Pynchon reading literati. As long as she exists, she will regularly remind her readers that there is no such thing as ‘American Literature’ – even if she has to take a stab at every living American author, one by one – until we learn that the Great American Novel is a vain and fruitless fantasy. In general, Kakutani is weirdly obsessed with debunking the idea of a ‘real’ Thomas Pynchon novel.

Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, “Against the Day,” reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes.

and

Though Inherent Vice is a much more cohesive performance than the author’s last novel, the bloated and pretentious “Against the Day,” it feels more like a Classic Comics version of a Pynchon novel than like the thing itself.

Kakutani is our nation’s one true Kantian – she is on a deep philosophical journey to find the noumenon, or Pynchon in himself. There exist on the Internet, fetish websites dedicated to dissecting, dissing, condemning, loving, hating and ejaculating on every one of Kakutani’s reviews, which doesn’t belie the fact that she’s right about Thomas Pynchon. If his novels actually do exist, they probably shouldn’t.

The relationship between Kakutani and Pynchon is symbiotic. She produces byline to troll and bitch him out; which correspondingly generates cocktail conversation and internet chatter; which, in turn, creates a buzz around his latest book, increasing revenue, giving Pynchon the financial security he needs to write more novels with which to troll Kakutani.

When it comes to JC Penney, the math is a little fuzzier. No one wants to be seen defying the Fashion section of the Times because no one actually wants to be fashionable (truly fashionable people spend 99% of their time being stubbornly unfashionable until the taste of the day swings back their way). The Times knows this. They know that by offending JC Penney, they willfully risk ad revenue and JC Penney’s corporate ire. It’s different with Kakutani because, as anyone knows, there is a great deal of social standing to be gained in disagreeing with her. When it comes to fashion, you want to be liked by the designated bitch. When it comes to literature, you want to be the first one to tell the designated bitch to blow it out her ass.

The purpose of critics, while they are oftentimes pious hypocrites, is to offer up value judgment. They’re the antithesis of academics, whose job it is to excuse the worst tripe (such as anything by Doris Lessing) by placing it in ‘historical context’ without taking into consideration that context doesn’t exist - it emerges – and that their own critical works are the filthy excrescences from bad writing.

It’s pretty clear from reading the comments on the Jezebel article devoted to the Cintra v. Fatties scandal that the sociological bent of most Women’s Studies programs in America has produced a reading class that fears and despises anyone possessed of an evaluative judgment. While I like most of the articles on Jezebel for their honest, bitchy, forthrightness, the comments section is like attending a feminist consciousness lowering seminar. Commenters sit Native American style on the floor, turn on their laptops and log-in to the supportive culture of Jezebel commentary where there is something akin to the Facebook ‘like’ button by which readers can ‘promote‘ one another’s comments.

What the feminists on Jezebel don’t understand is that fashion is not democratic. Good taste is not equivalent to what’s popular. As a critic, Cintra Wilson does not have to accord herself with the general will. To put it in terms they can understand: just as there is no ‘right to life,’ there is no ‘right to be fashionable.’

* This entry is the product of a conversation between theheartisanorganthatpumpblood and songsaboutbuildingsandfood. songs has already blogged about Jezebel. His piece can be found here.