Giacomo Leopardi (Commonplace Book)

Since blogs can easily act as commonplace books -- like W.H. Auden's A Certain World -- I thought I would post quotations at least once a week in addition to my regular postings. This way I can collect things that I think are quite good even when I don't have anything specific to say about them.

This week I give you Giacomo Leopardi:

No profession is as sterile as that of literature. Yet pretense is so valuable in the world that with its aid even literature becomes edifying. Pretense is the soul, so to speak, of the social life and is an art without which no other art of faculty, considered according to its effects on the human mind, can be perfect. Consider the fortunes of two persons, one of true value in every way, the other of false value. You will find that the latter is more fortunate than the former; indeed the false one is usually fortunate, the true one unfortunate. Pretense makes an effect even if truth be lacking, but truth without pretense can do nothing. Nor does this arise, I think, from our evil inclinations, but because bare truth is always an impoverished thing, and hence if we would delight or move men we must use illusion and heightening, and promise more and better than we can give. Nature herself is an impostor with man, and renders his life likeable and bearable chiefly by means of imagination and illusion.

Shadowcat, Wolverine, Batman, Buffy

The final panel of Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's Astonishing X-Men 15 -- Whedon's strongest issue thus far -- ends with an image of Shadowcat (Kitty Pryde) standing in running water and proclaiming "Now it's my turn." This is, of course, an homage to Uncanny X-Men 132 (The Dark Phoenix Saga) in which Wolverine said the same thing in the same situation when he fought the Hellfire Club.

The moment -- Shadowcat is the only team member not to be taken down by the bad guys -- also invokes the standard Justice League of America plot in which the villains have subdued the entire super-powered team but underestimate Batman. In Grant Morrison's JLA: New World Order for example, Protex, having captured Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman, and Martian Manhunter, can't believe Batman is giving him so much trouble. "Batman! Batman! He's only a man!" he cries. The captured Superman smiles to himself, and Batman saves the day. The bad guys ignore Batman because "he is only a man" (i.e. only a human being without superpowers); the bad guys will ignore Shadowcat because she is only a little girl, and not a man (like Wolverine).

In his introduction to the collection of his comic book Fray (the only indispensable Buffy comic book spin-off) Whedon says this:

"Don't get me wrong, there were certainly other things on my mind in my young adolescence. But almost certainly topping the list were girls and comics. More specifically girls in comics. Because, frustratingly, there weren't that many. At least in the Marvel universe, where I made my nest, there were very few interesting girls young enough for a twelve year old to crush on. ... Until Kitty Pryde... Cut to me grown up -- yet somehow not remotely matured. The idea for Buffy the Vampire Slayer came from that same lack I felt as a child. Where are the girls? Girls who can fight, who can stand up for themselves, who have opinions and fears and cute outfits?"

Shadowcat, Whedon comes out and pretty much says, is the origin of his obsession with cute girls who can fight -- Buffy, all the Slayers, Willow, River Tam (from Firefly) and Wonder Woman.

That final panel in Astonishing X-Men 15 is important because in it Whedon invokes the two biggest male bad-asses in comic book history -- Wolverine and Batman -- and puts the origin of his cute girl fighters in their place. He thus usurps comic book history, making his preoccupations central. None of this would matter unless he was such a strong writer, strong enough to make us see the history of comic books a little differently in the light he shines. "Shadowcat, Wolverine, Batman, Buffy," we say to ourselves, "That actually makes sense." Only Whedon could make us see those names as equal, and importantly related.

Anne Carson's Epitaph: Evil

A quick post today on Anne Carson's Epitaph: Evil from her 2000 collection Men in the Off Hours. Here is the whole poem:

To get the sound take everything that is not the sound drop it
Down a well, listen.
Then drop the sound. Listen to the difference
Shatter.

The enjambment of the final line is fantastic -- the sentence appears to end with the word difference, and then in the final line, in the final word, we discover we are being told, not to listen to the difference, but to listen to the difference shatter. The whole thing has the beauty and enigma of a Zen Koan.

And yet I am going to risk some of my authority as a poetry scholar and say that I don't really get it. Carson is a serious, wonderful poet, who deserves the praise she gets from both poets and critics. I have written an entire chapter of my doctoral thesis on a cycle of poems from this volume (her best, I think), and I have read (several times) all her published work. Why is the poem called Epitaph: Evil? I don't know. Beyond the connection to Zen Koans, what is the poem about? I don't know. As a teacher I aim to show how poetry appreciation can be an important part of living a full life, but I don't have anything more to say about this particular poem (though I wouldn't be surprised if someone did). I wanted to use my failure here as an opportunity to dispel the idea that poetry is only obscure if you don't know what you are doing. I am a poetry expert, and the thing is far from clear to me. And there is nothing wrong with that. Don't let the obscurity of contemporary poetry keep you from reading it. It may become clear in time, and other poems by the same writer may strike you more directly. Also, as in Epitaph: Evil, you may learn to like something you don't understand at all.

Comics Out 6 July 2006

Nothing coming out this week caught my eye, and I didn't see anything shocking on Newsarama, but if anyone has anything to say, this is your place to say it. Comment away. (Comments on Superman Returns should go under "Comics Out 28 June 2006.")

Snake (The Video Game from 1980)

When I was a security guard I used to play a video game called Snake on my cell phone. Snake was originally a game from 1980: here is the Wikipedia article on it, and here is a place you can play it online.

While I have recently attempted to avoid self-indulgent over-interpretations, especially on this blog, I am going to give in here. Without overdoing a connection between the snake, the apple and the fall of man from the Garden of Eden -- between the four walls of the game and the fallen, closed physical universe -- I think the game shows a great sense of Gnostic fatalism. The snake is constantly in motion, unable to stop or even slow down. There are only three options: the snake can crash into the walls or itself (Game Over); it can perpetually avoid the apple (playing while avoiding racking up any points); or it can grab the apple only to have another and another instantly appear (the game proper). The first is choosing death. The second Lacan would call the drive avoiding the lure of the object-cause of desire: basically asceticism. The third is what Lacan would identify as the metonymic structure of desire, basically the fact that we never want something, but always something else. Every apple yields another and the point of the game is to keep grabbing apples. Every time the snake grabs an apple it is enlarged but becomes more of a danger to itself; as the snake gets bigger it gets harder to avoid the snake crashing into itself. In the game we are not only our own worst enemy, we are our only enemy; the strategy of the game is to follow the apples while avoiding encountering ourselves or the walls of our prison, which becomes harder with every encounter with desire which is never the last (the apples never stop coming). There is no way to win Snake: the best we can look forward to is getting the maximum score that results when wmaneuverre in such as way as to fill up the entire playing field -- our desire leads us to our death as the last apple crashes us into our tail as there is no where else to go.