(This is a continuation of my dreamstory. Part 1)

~~
He opened the door. Cigarettes. Syrup. Urine. Burnt hair. The poker and blackjack tables were all upturned, chips scattered everywhere Oh my god! I should get some.. No. Keep focused. What is going on here? Where is everyone? Carefully picking his way though the debris, he reaches the door to the slot machine floor.

He slowly pushed the door open, and on first glimpse of the casino floor and the acrid stench of burnt hair and flesh reached his nose, he vomited. Cigarettes. Syrup. Death. Vomit.

As he regained what was left of his senses, he looked into the room. Through the smoke, he could see the slot machines on the floor, still flashing and beeping and buzzing. Their cheerfulness violently contrasting the apocalyptic seen in front of him. Bodies, hundreds of them, heaped upon the tables where the slots used to be.

Still smoking, sizzling, these were hardly recognizable as humans. Burnt and mangled, the demons played Mister Potato Head with them. Ripping limb from trunk, and reattaching with reckless abandon: arms, eyes, ears, noses. A human mosaic. A Picasso in flesh. Cigarettes. Smoke. Vomit.

Clambering over the chirping slots, he made for the front door. Terrified, speechless. He was going to leave his fellow gamblers to the same fate as these tortured souls. I have to get out of here. What IS this? What ARE THOSE? The sounds stopped. The lights shut off. A siren wails from no where, increasing in volume and pitch, like those sirens on public emergency broadcasts.

He falls. Shit. Shit shit shit. His ears splitting, he looks around him, trying to find an exit. In the dim light entering the glass front doors, he sees them. The bodies. Grotesque marionettes: dancing, flying, flailing this way and that. Mouths agape, sirens wailing in unison. Both a terrible and oddly beautiful sight. Or, it could have been in another time, another place. A unholy choir, singing of death.

But right now, he was too scared to realize his bowels evacuated. Too scared to realize his ankle was broken, and he wasn’t going to be running anywhere. Too scared to realize the bodies stopped screaming, and it was now just his own screams filling the room. But the others in the lounge weren’t. They heard the sirens, just as they now hear his screams. I thought he was looking for help? What’s going on out there? Cigarettes. Syrup. Urine.

Two of the puppets close in on him, grab his arm. Pull. Popping as his shoulders dislocate, and more screaming. He rises into the air, and stares into the fluorescing upside down eyes of the puppet before him. That child’s voice again–Laughing. Giggling. Almost innocent.–escapes the crooked mouth, and tells him “Don’t worry, mister. This is going to be fun!”

And with that, a bright light fills the room, engulfing him in flame, smells of sulfur and death. His screaming crescendos and then. Full Stop. His body no different than the bodies of the hundreds lying below. Twisted and surreal. Fire. Sulfur. Cigarettes. Syrup.

“See?” Giggle. “Fun!”

~~

And so ends part 2. Part 3 will come soon.

Shamelessly stolen from Avitable and Karen Sugarpants.

Who lives in your head?

Unlike Thomas, Eli is a realist, a man of facts. The world is how he observes it, how could it be anything else? Memories are subject, clouded with time and emotion. Garbage in, garbage out. Cold and calculating, his world is not recreated with a poof, a cloud of thought. It is reformed, redefined with each new observation. Each new day, each new experience, another data point.

Charts, graphs, plots. Everything fits together. Makes a statement. Pieces of a puzzle. Not making sense? Just more research, just more data. The world according to Eli was a machine, broken though it may be. Each piece interconnected with each other, teeth on cogs on sprockets on chains. But, then, they weren’t spinning right, were they? War and poverty and hunger and unemployment and books for pedophiles and arguments. Too many teeth, too few cogs. Where’s the fix?

More data, just more research. More study. Where’s the fix? That’s the world according to Eli. A set of problems looking for solutions. A set of solutions without knowing the problems. Never fixed, always broken, but it is a challenge! Something to work for! But why doesn’t it work? What piece needs fixing? Where to bloody start?

This is the world according to Eli. And as he lay, breathing becoming increasingly shallow, nearing the end of a life spent searching for answers. Data. The Present. No reminiscing. Memories unreliable. He shuts his eyes and POOF! He slips into memory, a life spent following his passion, always looking for answers, looking for problems, plotting, graphing.

He opens his eyes again, smiles, as the teeth of the cogs align, the machine begins humming along. Smiling, he closes his eyes again, and POOF!

NB: This is a spiritual successor to The World According to Thomas.

Earlier this month, DC released a brand-new graphic novel, Earth One. The story is of a 20-year-old Clark Kent striking out of his small hometown into the big city, Metropolis. In this gritty new take on the revelation of Superman, writer J. Michael Straczynski and artist Shane Davis bring a refreshing and dark ambiance to the Man of Steel.

Like any 20-year-old, a young Clark Kent is lost, wondering what to do with his life. Does he pursue money? Fame? Sports? Or does he reveal his powers to the world, becoming its champion? Truly, the plight of any recent high school graduate is difficult, but add to that the ability to fly, shoot lasers from your eyes, and otherwise just be a badass? Well, that escalates the problem.

In addition, the young boy is concerned about his adopted mother, he wants to make sure she is well taken care of, and for once, it occurs to me that maybe Superman isn’t so different from us after all. This is the magic of Earth One. Straczynski takes a step back, and forces the reader to also take a step back and rethink everything that the movies and comics have told us about Superman. While he may be impervious to bullets and can shot put a tank from Metropolis to Smallville, he’s got problems. He has to make decisions that, because of his power, can affect thousands or millions of other people.

And that’s just the narrative. Earth One’s art is simply stunning. Rather than the usual super hero bright colors, the Metropolis of Earth One is muted and dark. The dingy scene casts a more realistic bent Metropolis, and is, honestly, how I always envisioned the city anyway. The whole book is muted in sepia, granting both nostalgia and reinforcing the dingy feel to the early days of a Superman just coming into his own.

Most people who aren’t that into comic books are still fans of Superman. For these people, Earth One is an excellent starter book. It doesn’t go too deep into comic book lore, and it doesn’t take any prior knowledge to get into or understand. Plus, the writing and the art are both incredible. So if you’re looking to cut your teeth, or if you’re already a comic book enthusiast, Earth One is an excellent book.

If you want to check out a little preview, go check out Earth One over at the DC site.

I would post a link to amazon or something, but I would rather that you go find your local comic shop and purchase the book there. These shops are usually great places, staffed by people who really care about comics, and will often help you find something you’re interested in. These businesses are hard to keep running, so any business they can get is better than nothing. So go support your local comic shop.

*Superman and Earth One cover image are all copyright DC Comics.

While it may be a little ridiculous (okay, maybe more than a little), I have made it a point to watch V for Vendetta on the 5th of November since the move came out. It was brought to my attention that I missed last year, but you know, it happens. But, as I sit here writing this post and watching the movie, I began to ask myself “why?”

For one, it’s just a great movie. In fact, that’s probably a large part of the reason. But there is at least one other reason: I wish I was V. Not in the sense that I want to overthrow the government and blow up myriad government buildings, but I want that conviction about something. The mental fortitude to plan and pursue a course of action to effect great change.

Also, I want to be such a strong collector, a curator of the former glory of a lost society: the glories of the “old days.” Not just having the stuff. I honestly don’t care about the stuff, but I want to know the history, know where our people have been and how we’ve got to where we are. V is not just a force of change: he is a keeper of the books, the histories. He is one of the outcast intellectuals from Fahrenheit 451. He knows the lore, and he keeps the histories alive. More importantly, he passes it on. Perhaps a little heavyhandedly, but such is life in a Hollywood movie.

Perhaps that’s why I’m so drawn to academia. I love to learn, to teach, to find the hidden, to understand our world, our culture more deeply because I know the lore, I know the sources, I know the histories. Of course, I don’t know it all, and I never will. But, there’s the fun. There’s always more, always new books, always more to study, learn, interpret. V set Evee free. She was suddenly able to think for herself. To think critically. That’s a skill being quickly lost in the world.

It’s not anarchy that’s the goal. Neither is it in V for Vendetta. At least not permanently. The hope is to get people thinking again. The hope is for critical, active thought to take place. That’s a lofty goal, and it starts with just one person: You.

“Beneath this mask there is more than flesh, Mr Creedy. Beneath this mask there is an idea. And ideas are bulletproof.” – V “V for Vendetta”

While I definitely wouldn’t classify myself as a true logophile, I definitely appreciate a good, descriptive or otherwise incredible word. Just a note: There’s really no rhyme no reason, these words just strike me as generally awesome. Here’s my top 10:

10. Reciprocity: A state of reciprocation.
9. Corpuscle: A free-floating cell.
8. Palimpsest: A paper from which writing has been fully or partially erased to make room for another writing.
7. Curmudgeon: An ill-tempered person.
6. Ephemeral: short-lived
5. Somnambulate: sleepwalking.
4. Minutiae: Precise details.
3. Schadenfreude: Delight in the pain of others.
2. Galvanize: Stimulate, inspire.
1. Sagacious: Sagely, wise.

And how about yours? Favorite words? Least favorite words?

Thomas was an unassuming man. Well, sort of, as unassuming as anybody else. He assumed a lot of things, many of them entirely false. But he guessed that’s what made him human. Some days he traveled back in time, revisiting the events of his life, but they never seemed quite the same. The world according to Thomas, he mused, was created and destroyed in mere moments, only to be created anew again the next time his mind traveled backward.

People, politics, civilizations, poems, philosophies POOF! They came and went like will-o-wisps. Like Jude, he began to feel obscure. Outdated and outmoded in a society of quickly rising, fast burning stars. Throw-away beauties and throw-away politics, and throw-away philosophy. Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. But, that’s never how it went, not in the world according to Thomas. Hell, not in the world according to anybody. There was never reduction. Only production, and not even by the people who promoted the whole thing. It was shipped off, shipped out. Made cheaper, Made in China ®. Leaden toys, oil spills. Produce. Produce. Produce. It wasn’t a triangle, just a line. No starting, no stopping. Then what?

Then he’d move on. POOF! Another throw-away thought, another throw-away philosophy. It isn’t quite cynicism, though, he imagined. No, the cynics just say everything sucks. And it doesn’t all suck. There’s just no changing anything. Some new bills here, a new president there, but it’s all really the same. It’s not cynicism, but helplessness. Confusion. POOF! Another freedom gone, another Facebook private message made public. Another judge taking kickbacks for imprisoning children. His friends and coworkers branded him with a big scarlet A. Not that “A.” That one was for adultery, which had become another throw-away philosophy, another throw-away marriage, another throw-away wife POOF! No, this “A” was for apathy. But that wasn’t quite it either. The world according to Thomas had problems! The apathetic don’t admit to problems, why bother? No, not apathy. Something else. Then what?

Then he’d move on. POOF! Another throw-away debate. Another throw-away hung parliament. Another throw-away pundit. Pundits sure aren’t very punny. Another throw-away joke. The problem in the world according to Thomas was that people thought too much. Well, sort of. People thought about which angle would be best for Facebook and which friends could see what, and OH MY GOD, did you see what happened to Tiger Woods? Another throw-away news story. Another throw-away anchor. Take a swim with Edna, take a deep breath. Then what?

Then he’d move on. POOF! See, the will-o-wisps weren’t always so bad, just sometimes there were more, sometimes less. It’s their way, he supposed. Some of them true, some of them not. Everybody had them, he figured. Figured that’s what made him human. Somewhere deep, he felt it all would work out someway or other. Maybe never be the same as it used to be, but figured that’s okay too. The world according to Thomas had changed quite a bit as his memories flashed in and out of existence. Figured it always had. Always wood. Then POOF! He’d move on. Another throw-away blog. Another throw-away idea. Another throw-away story. POOF! There goes the world according to Thomas.

In the spirit of fair play, there will be spoilers in this post, I’m sure. I don’t know, as I haven’t written it yet, but I do know I’m not particularly sensitive to what is and isn’t a spoiler, so if you haven’t seen it and expect to be surprised by the story (you won’t be), then come back later. It’ll still be here.

First of all, James Cameron has done something amazing here. There’s no denying the intense complexity of the world he’s created, and not just visually. The whole topography is intriguing, in that it is all at once vaguely familiar and entirely Seussical. From the impossibly tall, and twisty, trees, to the floating mountain ranges, to the vast canyons, every piece of the landscape is taken right from the great sights of our own Terra, only magnified and made somehow more grand on this alien world. Hats off to you, Cameron, for your vision here, and hats off for pulling off such a visually stunning film.

But, the story. Come on, now! Lets roll Dances With Wolves, Fern Gully, Things Fall Apart, and Mechwarrior all into one and call it new? What is this mess? Okay, so, the dastardly humans have showed up to strip mine this planet for “unobtanium” despite any consequences to the indigenous people. There are some scientist types who disagree with this, but they suck at being powerful until the marine shows up. In his wheelchair. There’s a huge twist. The warrior man has a handicap. Instead of hubris, it’s nonfunctional legs. Potaytoh, potahto, I say, when it comes to being a warrior. The scientist people can control genetically grown bodies that look like the aliens, which is a huge help in trying to learn their ways. Or, at least, it could be.

These bodies, or avatars, are really the most key aspect of the message this movie really is driving home. The whole environmental bit is part red-herring, part unifying bad-guy, but more on that in a bit. The humans really think they can become a part of the alien people if they look and talk like the same way. How much more insulting can you really be? I mean, there’s the old adage about the ducks, but does that really apply to people? If I put on a yarmulke, grow a long wispy beard, some curls, and wear a big hat, that doesn’t make me one bit Jewish. But, according to the movie, this should be enough to be accepted into Hasiddic circles. “But, COME ON! I LOOK LIKE YOU, OKAY?” This argument is flawed on so many levels, and to a point, the movie actually admits this, since the Na’vi reject the “sky people,” even in their Avatar forms, but that surely doesn’t stop them from trying the same thing again and a again. Just look at the mecha everywhere. The humans have no faith in their own form, and strive to find something to make themselves better, be that natural resources or surrogate bodies and augmentations.

Ultimately, the target of the humans isn’t nature, or environment. It’s Na’vi culture. This point seemed so blatantly obvious to me, but I still hear this whole guilt-ridden coalescence into, “Okay, James Cameron. We get it. We destroy the environment. We’re sorry.” It’s just absurd. The Na’vi are concerned with the environment because it is PART of their family, their culture, not because it’s what keeps them alive.

So, the story may have been weak, and the vast majority of people who talk about it take it as a little more clever Wall-E type chastisement, but what James Cameron created in the world of Pandora transcends all the problems the movie does have. While Jake Sully and the other characters might be entirely translucent, but the world is extremely rich and full of magic that we haven’t seen before. Quite frankly, the plot and characters only existed because Hollywood wouldn’t make a 3D movie of a simple tour around the world of Pandora, which would have been just as exciting in my opinion.

So, before you jump up on your high-horse and decry the movie as shallow, take a step back and actually LOOK at what Cameron has to show you. You might be surprised at how effectively he communicates to you through your eyes. 4 out of 5 cnidarian soul tree seeds.

I was catching up on Twitter this evening, and I ran across a particular tweet from @grammargirl. (You can find her over at Quick and Dirty Tips) She said this:

Wow. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has temporarily stopped acquiring manuscripts. Their editors aren’t buying books.

She linked to this article over at Publisher’s Weekly. If you don’t want to read the article (Come on. It’s short.), the key line is “PW has learned that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has asked its editors to stop buying books.”

I’m a big fan of books. I read a lot of them. I buy a lot more of them. Some day, I would like to write one or two. I’ve been watching the publication industry for a while, because I would like to get into it in some capacity, and I have never heard of a publisher putting an entire hold on buying books. Spokespeople at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are saying that the move isn’t indicative of anything too sinister, but how can it not? While I’m sure the publisher has a vast store of manuscripts it has purchased not (yet) published, but if a publisher stops buying books, it creates a stagnation in thought.

Think about it: no new books are coming in, so new books will stop going out, and while there are tons of books out there, and no one could ever read them all, publication of new and ever-improving ideas is a must for the development of culture, philosophy, or really any other facet of life. This move by Houghton Mifflin really has me concerned, even if it is being called a “temporary” situation. This is a dangerous precedent for them to have set.

My last post looked at the theme of fate and free will in a couple of Hardy’s poems, but this post is a more in-depth look at one of those poems.

In “Going and Staying,” Hardy gives us his view of time, and its nature. This lovely little poem is not a mere observation of time, the constant of life, but it is a roadmap, a guidebook to the intricacies of time. It shows us how time flows, its nature, its effect of us, its effect on the world, and even its tripartite structure. The poem, though it is a short 15 lines, packs all of these elements into its metrical form, its formatting, and its other metaphorical and poetic mechanics.

Beginning, the overall theme of the poem, if taken as a whole, is clearly time. Time is the ever-flowing part of our lives, and Hardy gives us that image in the first stanza. Each piece of the poem has something to do with movement or with something temporal. The “moving sun-shapes” let us infer the movement of the sun as a day passes, the brook is flowing, the “moonlit May” again instills the idea of all things being trapped in a temporal universe (ll. 1-5). These images continue in the second and third stanzas with the mentions of “seasons,” “bleed,” and not to mention the words reused from the title: going and staying (ll. 6-7). The third stanza is the most blatant use of time-related language. Hardy confronts time head-on, and even describes Time as something ethereal, something just beyond our grasp, but still active in our lives.

While the words themselves lend us the thematic concerns of time, we can extrapolate that theme to the layout of the poem as well. The poem is in three stanzas, representing the three parts of time: past, present, and future. The first stanza gives us the feeling of good times, of outdoor activities as the sun casts long shadows, the pleasant murmuring of the brook, the cool Spring evenings, “but they were going.” These are pleasant memories of the past, of things since ended. The second stanza takes us into the winter, into the cold and bleak time of year. Everything nice has faded, and in the present, cold reality is what stares us in the face. The final stanza looks forward to the foggy future, and it realizes that what was good then has faded. What is bad now will fade. And in their due course, all things good and bad will fade as one. Hardy’s tripartite poem seems directly related to our attitudes toward tripartite Time. Don’t we often wish for the simpler days of the past, in lieu of the difficult times we are facing now? How much easier is it to cling to the pleasantries of the past instead of focusing on what’s in front of us now? The future, then, is ethereal, is unattainable. We can never live in the future, only in the present, and Hardy’s exactly right: the niceties of the past and the harsh reality of the future will both be obscured by time. The good will be replaced by bad, the bad will be replaced by good, and, to steal from Browning, “God’s in his heaven, and all’s right with the world” (“Pippa Passes”).

Hardy’s meter also gives us a view of his thoughts on the nature of time. Not only do his stanzas tell us of the tripartite structure of time, but also do his metrical tendencies show that tripartite structure, and the subtle differences in those parts. The meter tells us that time is, by and large, regular, plodding ever onward without change; however, sometimes, it may not seem so. Sometimes things take longer than we’d expected. The meter in the first and third stanzas is exactly the same: iambic tetrameter in the first line, the same plus an extra short syllable in the second, iambic tetrameter in the third and fourth lines, and two iambic feet and an extra short syllable in the fifth. The sameness of these two stanzas is akin to the steady pace of time for eternity past and eternity future. In either case, time is fixed, and nothing can make past events closer to the present, and nothing can make the events of the future further away. It’s even, and it’s symmetrical. The further away the past, the closer the future, and vice versa. The middle stanza, however, is unique from the other two.

In the middle paragraph, the measured, symmetrical meter gives way to a more chaotic beat. This stanza has the same basic pattern, but there are a few anomalies. The first line begins with an inverted iambic foot. The second line is almost metrically the same, but just before the last foot, Hardy has added an extra short syllable. Rather than having nine syllables, this second line has ten. The fourth line is almost entirely metrically different. Rather than the strict iambs of the other stanzas, this line is setup this way: inverted, inverted, double long, iamb. Changing the meter for only this stanza, the stanza on the present, shows us that while the underlying structure of Time is the same, the present is chaotic and dynamic. In contrast to the evenness of the past and the future, the present is able to be grasped, to be controlled, and while Time itself will always continue on, the present is less stable than either of the other two pieces of the structure of time.
The rhyme scheme, too, gives us a clue about where to find another statement about the nature and persistence of Time. Each of the three stanzas follows the same rhyming pattern, ABAAB, but the A rhyme is replaced in the two other stanzas. The B rhyme is repeated throughout the poem, and like Time, remains a constant in all parts of our lives. The B rhyme also falls on the same lines in every stanza. This measured consistency is another indication of the easy, measured consistency of Time. Time never changes, its ever-presence

The persistence of the B rhyme is, in itself telling, but it signals another interesting element of the poem which, in yet another way, illustrates Hardy’s insistence that Time does not stand still and is always flowing. Looking at the B rhymed words, all of them end with –ing. Grammatically, verbs ending in –ing are participles, which implies a continuation of action, whether relegated to the past, or continuing from past to present, or even continuing from the present on into the future. It’s this repetition of description of continuing action that gives us the sense that all of these events are taking place in some temporal structure, and the fact that it’s continuing necessarily means that time is moving around and through whatever action that may be. The repeated participial verbs give the poem a sense of motion, and that motion is the inescapable flowing of the great river of Time.
Hardy wanted to illustrate to us the nature of Time, and its multi-faceted structure. Hardy’s comments on time permeate the poem, from the overt in the diction itself to the clandestine and subtle in the rhyming pattern, the meter, even in individual metric feet. The poem is rich with comments on time, and what may seem like a simple musing on the flow of time, is actually a deep, meditative, intentional look at time, its features, its nature, and its structure.