Petits Essais

Random thoughts.

• Remember Jonathan Franzen? He's the Luddite subliterate hack, rage at whom occasioned my post "'Science' Is the Operative Word"? Well, the gent who wrote the Reader's Manifesto reviews one of his books here. Not gently. More gently than Franzen deserves, but I suppose an editor might prefer something more complex than "KILL!!" written 2500 times.
  
  My favorite part is the line, "Franzen clearly has little interest in the world of work. (The same applies, incidentally, to whoever edited the novel.)" It is not only highly indicative of the mindset of the lit-fic writer extruder, but an excellently compact little insult. I flatter myself my Megan's Law joke is better, but it's also less useful.
• Axis Powers Hetalia is, probably, at least as overrated as Code GEASS and Hellsing. Aside from the irritatingly hamfisted shipping, it shows the usual Japanese tone-deafness when it comes to other people's history—and at one point, it also has a Stupid Pollack joke played completely straight.
  
  Look. If you were going to do a manga/anime about history, it'd have to be a banchô (school gang) story. Every one of the country/delinquents, for instance, would remember having had their asses kicked by France, but then he gave up fighting to please his girlfriend, Socialism. England would be the villainous, cowardly guy who kidnaps other delinquents' girlfriends in order to lure them into traps. And so on.
• Also, aside from how Austria, not Germany, is the heir to the Holy Roman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was nothing like the love-marriage portrayed in Hetalia. 18th- and 19th-century Hungarians used "Emperor Joseph" as a curse, for crying out loud, and talked openly of returning the Holy Crown to its proper supremacy—i.e., secession.
• I keep returning to that concept, incidentally, the Holy Crown of Szent Istvan, I mean. The idea—that the crown is a mystic artifact in which sovereignty resides, and the king merely the people's representative before it—is marvelously suggestive; I could write you eight or nine fantasy plots using the device, and each one different.
  
  Another idea, from another country where surnames precede personal ones, has always intrigued me—the Japanese idea of seals. That rocks, trees, temples, and sometimes people (usually princesses with a religious role, due to an ancient Chinese record describing Japan, or Wa as it was then known, as being ruled by one) form a containment on dangerous powers, like nuclear cooling rods, is marvelously useful in generating story.
  
  A variant of it is actually involved in battôdô. A scabbard is not merely a mundane thing that keeps a sword's cutting edge from undesired cutting; it is a seal on the violence the weapon itself represents. Arguably a similar idea is the basis of the Gurkha custom of never sheathing a knife without it drawing blood (they cut themselves, generally on the forearm, when they sheathe a knife that hasn't drawn blood). One might interpret it pragmatically, as not wanting to get into the habit of drawing blades easily, or mystically, as the blade itself (as an aspect of the wielder's heart) becoming "thirsty"—but is there actually a difference?
• People always base things—homunculi, serial murders, etc.—on the seven deadly sins. But why not the Four Sins Crying Out to Heaven for Vengeance? You could get a lot of mileage out of characters named/themed Sodomy or Murder, though Denial of Wages and Oppression of Widows and Orphans would be tough to pull off without it looking like James Cameron.
  
  And yes, the thing called "sodomy" is the "sin of sodom". It's not inhospitality. Not even ancient Jews were so fond of parallelism that, merely because Lot's virtue is hospitality, the wickedness of his city must arise from the opposite fault.
  
  Incidentally, Lot's hospitality approaches the point of vice—fathers have more duty to their daughters than to any guests, sorry, just as it would've been wrong to have his sons throw their lives away to protect the guests. Nevertheless, 3rd millennium BC Near Eastern mores being what they were (the guest was a sacred being—still is in the various Afghan honor-codes, which are of Persian origin), Lot's act corresponded to the (partly relative) thing called "common decency". Which is different from actual morals.
• That's something that confuses people about totalitarian or radical Islamic states (radical Islam being a totalitarian ideology, that's actually redundant), by the bye. Absent some idea of natural law, a "good" person—the person least likely to lie, cheat, steal, or commit adultery—is all-too-often also, if that happens to be expected of him, the person who will perform honor-killings or inform on his neighbors to the KGB.
  
  Also, that people—who have never had contact with alternative systems of values—nevertheless stand up against such unjust practices is a powerful argument against morals being culturally determined. And it can't be due to outside influences, at least not much of the time; many reformers in totalitarian regimes are equally critical of the other systems that would be the only source of those influences. Does anyone care to seriously maintain that Solzhenitsyn was primarily influenced by American liberalism in his critiques of communism?
• Know what? Shut up about lobsters already. They're bugs. They do not have a nociception center in their brain—they do not feel pain, merely a highly generalized distress. And if it is that important to you that they not be cooked alive? You shove a chef's knife into the base of their big head-plate, cutting edge toward their antennae, and then swing it down like the arm on a paper-cutter. That kills the bug instantly by bisecting its brain—although it doesn't behave any differently, because again, it's a bug, it doesn't need its head to live.
  
  You can also put them in your freezer for a couple hours, which kills them slightly slower but less traumatically—if an animal that remains alive after having its head severed, and, again, has nothing in its brain for registering pain, can be said to experience trauma. Which it can't.
• Be wary of B. R. Myers' earlier stuff, apart from the Manifesto; while Bush was in office he was as batshit as the rest of the artsy set, and he also appears to fall for animal-rights nonsense (he was the one who reminded me of lobsters), despite it being philosophically vacuous. And if you speak respectfully at all of Cindy Sheehan, an anti-Semite psychotic who made a marionette of her slain son's corpse, you are either a partisan hack or a slackjawed retard. And Myers is plainly not a retard.
  
  Also, bullfighting is not a displaced homicidal impulse. It is a degenerate form of a very badass pastime—in its original form, it was one man, with a spear or shortsword, and just as often a bear or boar as a bull. Then again, I come from a place where the hunting-god is still worshiped (he's simply called Black God), and where it's remembered that any animal that can kill you might as well be a dragon, for all the pity you should show when killing it.
• Incidentally, Black God of the Navajo is also Raven.
  
  Talking God, incidentally, is probably Owl, although the association of owls with ghosts has caused the identification to be largely ignored; the Owl who warns one of the men off from violating a sexual taboo, when the men and women were living separately, is probably Talking God. The man gave him a liver in thanks—"Very well, my grandchild, but turn your back; I allow no-one to see me feed."
  
  That the women were not so warned off was the origin of the Hostile Gods the Hero Twins later had to kill. Given the taboo in question, one would wager that sex-toys do not sell well in the Dinétah.
• Black God is also the god of fire, probably due to syncretism with the Hopi god Masauwu the Skeleton, who is in turn a reflex of the Aztecs' Mictlantecuhtli. Talking God has a ludicrous number of similarities to Quetzalcoatl, although interestingly the Hopi reflex of Quetzalcoatl, Pahana, is very specifically a missing god who will one day return.
• Speaking of stupid things Myers says, you most certainly can joke about violence while taking it seriously. People whose job is to take violence seriously—cops and soldiers—are a non-stop font of gallows humor, however much chin-pulling blue-nosed Puritans like Myers might want them to make long faces and speak exclusively in solemn tones.
  
  Anyone who actually knew any psychoanthropology—so not Myers, who repeats some risible howler about early hominids being scavengers—would know why humor and violence are linked. Fear is the common element; remember, humor is an interrupted fear-response. It's only irrelevancies, like, say, art, we're serious about. Or to quote Chesterton, "Men talk for hours with the faces of a college of cardinals about things like golf, or tobacco, or waistcoats, or party politics. But all the most grave and dreadful things in the world are the oldest jokes in the world—being married; being hanged."