The Oncoming Hope

SANDMAN MEETS INFINITE JEST:

Part of the reason I've been a little lax about these Sandman Re-Blogs is that I've been sucked into the bottomless abyss that is Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. These are not two works that you would imagine a lot of crossover with, but more and more I can't help thinking what a great comic book series Infinite Jest would make. In fact, Wallace's trademark footnotes would work perfectly well as the sort of asides that are common in Sandman: quick cuts to the Dreaming, stray thoughts invading, passages and passages of loving description converted into art, etc.

In this issue, especially, the parallels leap out, particularly in regard to our friendly gothic sisters, Chantal and Zelda. Here, as with Joelle van Dyne, we have two beautiful girls with no outward deformity hiding behind veils. Chantal dreams of perfect sentences, as does Avril Incandenza. They are both willfully committed to this Doll's House.

In many ways, the Doll's House is the equivalent of Ennet House in IJ: these people aren't trapped there, they aren't locked in, they can leave at will, but for various reasons they don't (at least not yet). They are drawn body and soul to this place, whether that's because of Rose or whether that's because of something else within themselves. (Does this make Don Gately a vortex?)

We meet Gilbert the same way we meet Lenz: in a dark alley, dressed as a vigilante superhero. Like Lenz, Gilbert has other places to be, but he's content to be here (more than content, actually). Gilbert is not a serial killer in training though, of course.

But apart from the superficial similarity, there's a larger confluence in theme: these are people regarded as grotesques by mainstream society and are searching to find their true humanity, which seems only accessible in non-reality i.e. dreams in Sandman or addiction in Infinite Jest.

Likewise, dreams reveal lack of humanity. Look at Ken, going through the motions. In his dreams he is everything he wants to be, and what he wants to be isn't human at all, it's a caricature, it's a Bret Easton Ellis stereotype.

ON CITIES AND DOMAINS:

I said I'd come back to the whole issue of space and city and domain, and here we are. 
We are introduced to the necropolis in Zelda's dream: the city of the dead.

I believe I'd discussed before how the Dreaming appears to operate as a quasi-feudal system, with Dream sitting in the throne room, not micro-managing, but broadly guiding the kingdom. So it's interesting when Rose says "Each mind creates and inhabits its own world, and each world is but a tiny part of that totality that is the dreaming..." and then proceeds to break down the boundaries to create a single dreaming. So that suggests me that rather than executive ruler, Dream is more of a judiciary leader, a Supreme Court of sorts dedicated to maintaining the separation of different dreams. He creates and administers the rules, (and punishes offenders like the Corinthian) but does not govern the whole of the Dreaming. He just governs his judicial branch, as it were, with Lucien, Matthew, et al.

OTHER:

I'm probably not the first to comment on this, but I do wonder about Zelda being drawn explicitly in the style of John Tenniel's original Alice in Wonderland illustrations: See Alice Here. Going by the stories being told, it would be more fitting for Barbie to be drawn in that style, as she enters a sort of late Victorian fairytale herself, complete with anthropomorphic animals and magical talismans.

Next Issue: We Conclude The Doll's House

I chose this because of a fantastic BBC documentary series I've been watching by the same name, which essentially traces the democratizing effects of networks and systems from Ayn Rand's thought through Silicon Valley's network utopians and then back through nature itself.

I've been reading a lot of Brautigan over the past year, but this is a different beast. Rather than his typical humorous anti-poetry, here he expresses sentiments that might have inspired Philip K. Dick dystopia.

It sums up the political theory driving the whole series: that computer systems will replace so-called governance as the guidance for ordered society, but only if man can create computer networks as free, open and structured as ecological systems.

I honestly wonder if some BBC producer read this poem and then created a documentary series to illustrate it.

"All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace"
by Richard Brautigan

I'd like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think

• (right now, please!)

of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think

• (it has to be!)

of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

Well folks, they've just announced the 2011 shortlist for the Caine Prize for African Writing, featuring five short stories (all are available to read at the website linked). I'm joining the wonderful Aaron Bady at zunguzungu, along with a few other bloggers, in reading and reviewing the pieces before the winner is announced.

I'm going to be honest from the get-go: I cannot provide the depth and quality of socio-political analysis that Aaron can regarding the African continent, so I won't even try. I'm going to focus on the works from an English literature perspective with a touch of international politics.

The prize will be announced in five weeks, so you'll be getting one review per week. But enough business, let's move on to the first story!

"Hitting Budapest" by Noviolet Bulawayo

The first thing that strikes me about this story is its strong sense of internal rhythm, almost childlike, and certainly accidental.

There's an interesting juxtaposition of dream vs. resignation within the story, the consequences of which are conveyed through basic childhood emotions of greed or jealousy and desires for conformity (if I'm a miserable Bastard, than you need to be one too).

I'm usually a bit wary of having this type of story told through the eyes of children (often the results and so-called insights are banal and cheaply manipulative) but Bulawayo takes the "Lord of the Flies" approach of conveying difficult conditions through dark humor rather than the Barbara Kingsolver approach of "and then they must kill their own babies! See who horrible their lives are? Cry now."

This is the power of hearing these stories from the voices of the native writers. Western writers, no matter how well intentioned, cannot help but inject heaping doses of pity, cannot help amplify the misery so that they can make themselves feel more grateful about their own world.

Instead, we get to hear from writers for whom this is reality, not tourism. Because it's their reality, they learn to accept it, not spend the entirety of their time looking for greener grass. Even when Darling states his life plan of moving to America, we get a subtle hint that that's not just a dream, or a hope, but something more simple. He wants to lord it over his friend that he could potentially get out, and Bastard can't.

It's this tension between the harsh conditions and adolescent one upmanship that drives the story forward. In this simple childhood play lies the seeds of violence, of corruption. Right now, when faced head on with their deprivation in the form of lust for the visitor's tossed away food, they scream like animals outside her house. When faced again and again with that deprivation, how will these children contort? What will they become?

ETA:

Here are links to other excellent posts on the subject (many are not as kind as I am, but I always say look for the bright side! And the line "because her grandfather made her pregnant" really does hit like a soppy ton of bricks. But jump into the conversation!

At last, the long-rumored episode that readers never forget, and probably never expect, for that matter.

I think this issue clearly demonstrates how the series has finally found the balance between horror and more subtle commentary. Gaiman understands that psychologically speaking, there is literally nothing more terrifying than a convention of serial killers, and he lets that speak for itself. He portrays them as characters one might see at a nerdy sci-fi convention (and lets be honest, at a certain point in the 80's/90's, and probably until this decade to be honest, admitting to being a sci-fi nerd was just as socially off-putting as admitting to being a serial killer).

But I digress. Back to the horror vs. subtle-goings-on thread. On first read, Gilbert's recounting of the Red Riding Hood story seems very much balanced to the former. But of course it's foreshadowing: like the fairytale girl, Rose is looking to visit a family member, only to find said person kidnapped by a killer. The link is further strengthened by their names: Rose and Red.

I'm pretty sure this is the first issue to be entirely contained within one setting, namely the Empire Hotel (please correct me if I'm wrong, but at the very least, there are usually scenes of Dream zipping about through dreams). So when Morpheus finally appears, he enters the scene like electricity; his presence is immediately felt. Even the Corinthian can't maintain his punny facade for long.

And of course, by revealing the truth of their actions to themselves, Morpheus deprives the killers of the only thing that justifies their actions: their delusions. He proves, yet again, that the worst punishment is neither incarceration nor death: it's the absence of things to look forward to, the absence of hope, the very absence of dreams [delusions in this case].

Next week: Things become very, very strange.

Last fall Yeasayer released the rather marvellous video for "Madder Red." And now Herman Dune takes Yeasayer's horrible moppet and raises it a cute blue yeti and Don Draper! If this be a new music video trend, I accept! So let's look at our two challengers:

In the Southern corner we have Jon Hamm, driving around Austin with a rather adorable young date:

Herman Dune - Tell Me Something I Don't Know (official video, long version) from City Slang on Vimeo.

And in the Northern corner we have Kristen Bell, acting her heart out in defense of a horrific monsterpet:

Now I know which side I stand on in this particular war (though I occasionally vacillate due to ____ _____'s _____), but this is an opportunity to hear from you, dear reader! Which video do you prefer and why? Come back tomorrow for the results.

For the record, I am ignoring the extremely silly headline for the article, as headlines by their very nature are overstated and manipulative.

As I was reading an article about the IMF's historical complicity with women's rights violations, one sentence struck me like a baseball between the eyes:

For many in the developing world, the IMF and its draconian policies of structural adjustment have systematically “raped” the earth and the poor and violated the human rights of women.

I could go on about grammatical incorrectness and general object-verb failures (and oh, how I want to!) but I'll forgo my grammar nazi reflexes. ("Get to the point, miss oncoming hope, perilously lodged in your glass house!")

It's that word, that word that stands in the middle of the sentence, visually punctuated with quotation marks to guarantee that you don't miss it (there's no other reason for the quotation marks to be there, unless it's a word quoted directly from original speech made by 'many in the developing world', the 'earth' or 'the poor').

Now I read the rest of article because it was recommended by someone I trust, and because I am generally interested in the tyranny of IMF structural adjustment policy. And of course I am interested in international organizations and the systemic oppression of women.

But I couldn't get that "raped" out of my head. No matter how salient the rest of the points in the article might be, that one word has primed me to read the whole thing as overblown and exaggerated. That word tells me this article is written by an activist not an informer. It tells me that every sentence is colored with pre-conceived notions rather than respect for fact.

I accept that hyperbole is the bread and butter of internet commentary. But in most cases, especially as regards to political economy, the facts and the statistics are outrageous enough. The policies that have made the sex trade the only available occupation for thousands of women are deplorable on their own. But poorly formed policies that have been proven not to work do not directly equate to "violations of women's bodies."

Hi everyone, and welcome to my latest (and first) issue of Sunday meditations, a chance for us to discuss fun, random things in the comments.

Today's question: what is your #1 writerly device? Meaning, some trope, image, theme or figure of speech that keeps showing up in your work, unbidden, unknown to you until the editing stage? And would you give it up if you had to?

I'll get the ball rolling: mine is the humble semicolon. I've yet to meet two sentences that can't be truncated and rejoined.

"I still do not see what purpose this will serve...[but] It might be interesting." Morpheus is obsessed with purposes and reasons and rules and regulations and power and all sorts of Type A obsessions, at least as presented so far, so this bit of dialogue lets us know that the story will be a wee bit different. I myself don't understand the point of Death's exercise, except to get Dream to go out and meet his minions.

And as for Death, what do we learn of her? When Hob basically insults her very being, her very reason, and her occupation, her reaction is not anger or vengefulness. She is amused! And as a result of her amusement, she chooses to make his belief come true; he will live on.

I am pettily amused by the first panel, and how pub grumblings back then are basically on the same lines as pub grumblings today. Things do not change with time; how well this sets up the story of the man who will not change with time (not physically at any rate!).

And so we ride through time in this oddly standalone interlude in the book (though pieces are placed for future stories, i.e. Dream's deal with Shakespeare), where Dream meets with Hob once every 100 years.

I could never put my finger on exactly why I liked this story so much the first time, and still do now: it reminds me of the original Time Machine movie, with Rod Taylor (the hotness!). To me, it's an extended version of one of my favorite movie scenes of all time, where George sits in his time machine, absolutely still, watching the shop window dressings change as time goes by, variously amusing George, titillating him, exciting him. The mannequin sequence leads into a longer, more disturbing sequence, where his home is transformed, the city is transformed, and even nature herself is transformed.

But still, "The years roll by, everything unfamiliar. Except the smile of my never-aging friend." So is Dream Hob's mannequin? Or is Hob Dream's constant? As they both barrel through their respective immortalities, who is more in need of a reminder that la plus ca change, la plus le meme chose?

Other notes:

-Fun Chaucer cameo!