Emerson on Curse Words (Commonplace Book)

My mother can never understand why her Oxford educated son talks like a truck driver. But I have Emerson on my side:

What a pity we cannot curse and swear in good society! Cannot the stinging dialect of the sailors be domesticated? It is the best rhetoric, and for a hundred occasions those forbidden words are the only good ones. My page about 'Consistency' would better be written thus: Damn Consistency!

The Mountain Goats' Fault Lines 1 (of 3)

What Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven is to the Western, what Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns is to Batman comics, what The Sopranos is to the mob story, what Seinfeld is to the sitcom, what Punch Drunk Love is to the Romantic comedy, The Mountain Goats' All Hail West Texas is to the unrecognized genre of guy-in-front-of-the-college-dormitory-with-a-guitar songs.

The song I want to talk about over the next three posts is called Fault Lines, from All Hail West Texas. You can listen to half of the song on this Amazon page; just click on the "listen" link next to the song name. (Hearing half the song and reading all the lyrics, below, it will be easy enough to imagine the whole song). In the context of songs about West Texas the title turns on the word “fault” which associates a mistake with a landscape. The lyrics are as follows:

Down here where the heat’s so fine, I’ll drink to your health and you drink to mine, as we try to make the money we scored out in Vegas hold out for a while. We drink vodka from Russia, get our chocolate from Belgium. We have our strawberries flown in from England. But none of the money we spend seems to do us much good in the end. I’ve got a cracked engine block; both of us do. Yeah the house, the jewels, the Italian race car: They don’t make us feel better about who we are. I’ve got termites in the framework; so do you. Down here where the watermelon grows so sweet, where I worship the ground underneath of your feet, we are experts in the art of frivolous spending. It’s gone on like this for three years I guess, and we’re drunk all the time and our lives are a mess, and the deathless love we swore to protect with our bodies is stumbling across its bleak ending, but none of the rage in our eyes seems to finish it off where it lies. I’ve got sugar in the fuel lines both of us do. Yeah the fights and the lies that we both love to tell fail to send our love to its reward down in hell. I got pudding for a backbone but so do you.

The subject of the song is prosaic enough: a couple is frivolously spending the money they won in Vegas, but it cannot fix something that is fundamentally wrong with each of them; their love is dying, but still lingers, and neither has the strength to end it. But it has much to notice, as I will discuss next time.

For now The Mountain Goats have a new album out, Get Lonely, and will be playing at the Bowery Ballroom in New York City on 30 September and 1 October; if you are there on 1 October you will see me in person.

Comics Out 7 September 2006

Grant Morrison and Jim Lee's Wildcats has been pushed back to 20 September, and that was the only thing I was getting this week (and I was very excited about it: Morrison said of it "I want to see beautiful people doing amazing things," and I thought, me too). Let me know if there is something I am missing.

On the comics news front Mitch, a frequent commenter here, has published his article "'Boston Legal' v. 'She Hulk': Heritage and Metafiction on Trial" at Silver Bullet Comics, where he is now a feature writer and reviewer.

And I wanted to say three things about last week's All Star Superman. First, I was stunned at how Morrison wrote a twenty-two page comic book that is essentially a rant by one character, but Morrison and Quitely worked in enough side-line craziness that you feel like it is an action book.

Second, I thought the subtle eyebrow thing was inspired: early on Lex says that people have been unconsciously trimming their eyebrows to achieve the "Superman Swoosh"; then, battling the Parasite Lex wipes his head, wiping of his left eyebrow in the process, which was apparently painted on; though it is concealed in several panels it is clear that over the next few pages he has no left eyebrow; then at the end his assistant lets him know and he draws it in again with a pencil -- but he draws it with a huge arch, so he is extra dramatic for his final evil speech. I think we are supposed to realize that he unconsciously shaved his eyebrow into the "Superman Swoosh" (he says other people have been doing it to justify the fact that he himself did it), and then shaved it off in a fit of rage. An amazing detail that runs through the whole book.

Third, I have heard people complain about Luthor appearing as a bit of a buffoon, not realizing how many times Clark is saving his life in the issue. I see the point but I think Morrison and Quitely are more interested in showing how Superman alters simple things like his posture to become Clark Kent (even though Kent towers over Luthor in this issue, for instance); the important thing is how Morrison and Quitely demonstrate how that could fool Luthor, which is quite an accomplishment. The "people don't realize Clark is Superman" thing is something in the past we just had to accept; now I believe it.

From Strunk and White's Elements of Style (Commonplace Book)

Flammable. An oddity, chiefly useful in saving lives. The common word meaning "combustible" is inflammable. But some people are thrown off by the in- and think inflammable means "not combustible." For this reason, trucks carrying gasoline or explosives are now marked FLAMMABLE. Unless you are operating such a truck and hence are concerned with the safety of children and illiterates, use inflammable.

Hopefully. This once-useful adverb meaning "with hope" has been distorted and is now widely used to mean "I hope" or "it is to be hoped." Such use is not merely wrong, it is silly. To say "Hopefully I'll leave on the noon plane" is to talk nonsense. Do you mean you'll leave on the noon plane in a hopeful frame of mind? Or do you mean you hope you'll leave on the noon plane? Whichever you mean, you haven't said it clearly. Although the word in its new, free-floating capacity may be pleasurable and even useful to many, it offends the ear of many others, who do not like to see words dulled or eroded, particularly when the erosion leads to ambiguity, softness, or nonsense.

Crockett Johnson's Harold and the Purple Crayon 4 (of 4)

The lone poet in nature is traditional and Harold’s isolation does not feel unnatural until, searching for his bedroom window, he draws a city full of windows. Harold, concerned twice about getting lost (its why he drew the path he strayed from, and why his forest had a single tree), cannot find his way home. The city is the only thing in the book that overwhelms the frame of the page, and a city without people cannot help but recall, at least for older readers, a post-apocalyptic landscape. The dragon was unnatural and fantastic (and its seamless incorporation further emphasizes that in the mind there is no distinction between the internalization of reality and the imagination); the moose and porcupine were at most somewhat peculiar but cute animals made by a child’s scrawl. Harold’s policeman, however, is disturbing (something I have felt since I was a child), partly because it is the figure Harold is most unable to render even in a cute cartoon form: he is a mockery of a human form, a scarecrow with spikes for fingers. The disturbing aspect of the policeman is emphasized because while we may have assumed that Harold’s animals moved to eat the picnic leftovers (though the moose has not moved from Harold’s initial lines on the earlier page, the still image keeps this ambiguous) – though we may have assumed that were this a cartoon we would see Harold’s figures come to life – it is sadly clear that his policeman is completely stationary and dumb: he is the only of Harold’s “creatures” we see fully drawn on more than one page, identical with his arm pointing on both. Harold’s journey – which has taken him from his thought and the blank page, to field, forest, ocean, beach, and mountain has led us past an empty house to an empty city and the mute and paralyzed figure of the Law that would impress any psychoanalyst. This moment is very much the culmination of the journey, though not of the book, as the bleak moment causes Harold to wish more firmly for home, and to remember the way there.

The final pages give us a triumph of solipsism (though the silence of the Law is already pretty good): Harold remembers his window is the one that frames the moon, draws it and the room around it, and goes to sleep. He anchors his room around a completely arbitrary point, one he established on the second page and which has been on every page since. His mental anchor is the changing, shifting source of reflected secondary light – the moon of the generous night of Whitman, Stevens and Ashbery. And it is also, at the end of an extremely internal story, that we find an additional level of internalization as for the first time Harold draws himself inside an enclosure: his discovery -- his creation -- of the right window is not simply finding the one with the moon in it, but finding himself of the other side of that window (the city landscape was especially imposing in part because the cold regular faces of the buildings had no openings).

Harold and the Purple Crayon is a child's version of Romantic poetry, raising all the issues that haunt every poet after Wordsworth: Wallace Stevens for Beginners.

(Postscript: I think I may have made a mistake breaking this discussion into four parts; if you felt at all lost, and are interested, go back and read parts one through four in order.)