http://robilla.tumblr.com

It's my new picture blog.  A mix of abstractish art, stuff I liked as a kid/teen/kidult, oddball bricabrac, pop culture with its pants down.  Admittedly most of it forwarded from other such sites, but some personal pix and fireside chats.  I started it for a class on social media as they pertain to libraries, so expect some class-related modulation between now and the end of the Summer term.

Minnelli Bovary

I'm fascinated by this essay.  Robin Wood was a brilliant and idiosyncratic film critic whom I respect, so to read his heartfelt defense of Vincente Minnelli's Madame Bovary is an intriguing experience, since I consider the film to be a stinker.  My wife and I watched the film shortly after finishing the novel (in Merloyd Lawrence's translation).  I don't expect film adaptations to be "faithful" to the source in a pious way, but to play with it the way Charlie Parker played with Embraceable You, to wit:

So I'm a bit put off by Wood's insinuation that those of us who dismiss the film for straying from the book are demanding overmuch fidelity to source material at the expense of the film's own integrity.  I don't ask for much from adaptations, but at least read the darn book before adapting it.

Wood and I agree, though: it's fruitless to evaluate the film in relation to the novel.  I doubt that anyone who worked on the film even read the novel, except an uncredited script department drone who wrote the plot synopsis which I suspect was the true source material for the film.  After all, if you're trying to capture the complexity of Emma Bovary, you don't cast a hambone like Jennifer Jones in the role.  And poor James Mason, in the thankless role of Flaubert, gets stuck mouthing narration that hews far more closely to Ye Olde Tinseltown Hack's Guide to Purple Prose than, well, Merloyd Lawrence, through whose translating lens I've viewed Flaubert.

I don't mind that, as Robin Wood explains, Minnelli made a film that was not a Flaubert adaptation, but while he was making a film that wasn't a Flaubert adaptation, couldn't he have refrained from titling it Madame Bovary, as if it were a Flaubert adaptation?  I call it a bait and switch.  I call it rude.

It's odd that Wood doesn't talk about the casting of Van Heflin as Charles Bovary.  In the book poor Charles is a nebbish who puts his wife on a pedestal but never understands her longings or perceives her infidelity.  Heflin, whom I liked as a tough-but-sensitive hero in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (where he convincingly out-butched Kirk Douglas), isn't obvious casting for the role of a clueless nebbish, and the way Minnelli mans Charles up to suit Heflin while still sticking to the plot summary memo he'd received from the script department is rather remarkable.  Heflin plays the role like "Chuck Bovary, Gumshoe Cowboy," and a guy like that doesn't miss his wife's philandering.  No, what he does is forgive it.  Confronted with written evidence of Emma's straying, he burns the proof in front of her, letting her know that he won't hold it against her.  It's almost as if he gives her tacit permission to be monogamish instead of monogamous if that's what it takes to keep her.  As daring as the novel was, the film actually one-ups it with this striking portrayal of a man letting his wife cheat if that's what it takes to keep the marriage afloat.  It's the kind of thing that probably goes on more than anyone wants to acknowledge, so kudos to Minnelli for tellin' it like it is.

One more thing: a lot of the action in the novel and film takes place in the city of Rouen.  How do you pronounce Rouen?  I don't know, and neither does anyone in the film.

"So how do you like Rown?'

"Oh, it's marvelous!  Row-wahn is the loveliest place I've ever seen!"

"Yes, she's had quite a time here in Roo-en."

Pure community theatre.

But check out the Ball scene, which Wood singles out for praise.  Revisiting it on Youtube almost convinces me to give the film another try.

Bibliophile Owl-Earl

Apropos of nothing, I'm thinking about Sepulchrave, the Earl of Gormenghast, in the novel Titus Groan.  I need to reread the book, but as I recall, his situation is this: required by inherited title to perform meaningless rituals all day, he traipses, alone, to his library each night to find solace in books.  The rituals he is bound to perform every day are things like throwing rose petals into a fountain while reciting a bit of verse.  All these rituals are ancient parts of Castle Gormenghast's culture, but the meanings of the rituals are neither remembered nor considered.  In Gormenghast, the signifiers remain, but their referents have been sawed off beneath them.  The value of the rituals is not in what they signified to their originators, since no one remembers what that might have been, nor in what fresh significance might be crafted for them by the current practitioners, since no one bothers.  The value is seen as intrinsic: doing the rituals is what is done, for the good of The Stones, the stones that make Castle Gormenghast.  However complex the signification of these rituals may have been in a (presumed, never acknowledged) Golden Age, they have been reduced to the level of superstition and taboo.  It's no surprise that the Earl's job satisfaction is poor; there's no sense of accomplishment or significance in what he does, only obligation.

I don't recall what his reading consisted of (another reason to reread the book), but The Earl's nightly library time doesn't seem to involve any research into the point of the rituals.  Perhaps he could refresh the rituals by delving deeper into his own culture, but this he does not do.  He's the pitiful bibliophile, using books as solace/escape from a disappointing life, rather than as an enrichment of life.  This, I can assure from personal experience, is no way to live.

Sepulchrave goes cray-cray after his library burns down; he thinks he's an owl.  This animal isn't chosen at random; Gormenghast's highest tower is abandoned by humans, inhabited by giant owls.  Perhaps this owl masquerade is the Earl's desperate attempt to go deeper into Gormenghast's heart than the stagnant contemporary culture of Gormenghast will permit; or perhaps the poor man just wants to escape from meaningless symbolism, unmotivated (and unmotivating) busywork, and insufficient significance.   Owls don't do symbolism (although they can be made to symbolize, as Pallas Athena could attest).  Owls just live, as The Earl tries to live, mouse-eating and all.  Finally The Earl goes to The Tower, ascending into that physical, rather than idealogical, part of Gormenghast that humans have abandoned, and gets consumed by owls himself, which may represent a cathartic embrace of The Real for the under-stimulated Earl, but of course it does neither himself nor his family any good.

The Gormenghast books leave me contemplating missed opportunities, as each character, many of whom have promising qualities, is held back from fulfillment by the pointlessness of everything their culture values (which boils down to the aforementioned ritual).  if the Earl could have found, in his books, a means of instaurating (a term I take from fantasy critic John Clute) his culture with the best bits of what it had forgotten (why throw those petals in the fountain?  Is the forgotten meaning worth remembering?), he might have saved himself and his culture.  Cultural stagnation and arteriosclerosis of the class system are the ruination of Gormenghast.

Alma Matters

When I arrived at my alma mater, the student newspaper wasn't anything to call your Mom about.  People routinely carped about the puff pieces, the weak efforts at humor, the amateurish layout (And yes, I know I'm being awfully snarky for someone who uses a prefab Blogger website, but I make no pretense to this being other than a vanity blog, while a student paper ought to sit up straight and comb its hair).  One time in my freshperson year, the paper grasped for greatness, at least of a comic nature, with a proto-Onion article about a fraternity getting a bug zapper;  this inspired some real amusement.  Its knowing lack of substance was no less nutritious than the rest of the paper's offerings, though, so the joke reflected poorly on the whole journalistic enterprise.

Over the years of my time there, more ambitious up-and-comers changed things.  By my senior year, some future editors of professional papers were testing their skills at the rag.  I recall sitting at the cafeteria table with freshman K--- W------- as he leafed through the school year's first issue and dissected its failings with an anger that suggested he would soon be pressing for changes.  He would indeed, along with G----- B---- and G---- P-----.  By the end of the year the failings K---- had detected were gone, baby, gone.  Soon the paper boasted an improved layout, a lively editorial page, and even a humor column that, lo and behold, was amusing.  The only thing missing was that staple of college papers, vulgar cartoons.  Dunno why.

The paper even indulged in some investigative journalism, proving that the administration's claims that the the campus food services were being run on a nonprofit basis were false.  Not that there's anything wrong with trying to make a buck per se, but all students were required to buy into the meal plan, and there were no refunds for unspent meal plan moneys, so trying to make a profit off a captive customer base (with no competition for those moneys) wasn't exactly playing by Adam Smith's playbook.  Nothing changed, but at least we knew where we stood.

After I graduated I still came crawling back to campus and scooped up the paper.  It continued to grow in might.  The humor writers got funnier and more pointed, and the editorial page initiated two regular columns, one by a fightin' liberal (who largely focused on local social justice issues) and one by a peacemaking conservative (who extended the hand of come-let-us-reason-together bipartisanship to lefties in a manner I found irresistible.  I need to find out what happened to that guy.)  And although I wasn't a sports fan, I'm told the sports page was exceptional.

Then one year the bottom fell out.  Suddenly most of the student-written content vanished, to be replaced by syndicated national news stuff, so if you wanted to know what Bill Clinton had done the previous week, the school paper was your rag.  Heaven help anyone who gets their national news from a college newspaper.  The humor columnists and the lefty guy remained, but the conservative guy had graduated and his replacement lacked his ability to draw illuminating connections.  She just typed up that week's values voter talking points and called it a day.

I was friendly with the lefty guy, and still consider him a friend (despite his cold snubbing of my facebook friend request last year) so I asked him (this is shortly after the paper's downturn) what happened.  As he explained it, K--- W------- and G---- B---- had been grooming the sports page editor to take over, but the Student Council had the final say in the matter, and they chose Miss Affability instead of Mr. Black Guy With A Track Record.  (For the record, two of the three editors who made the paper great were in fact editrixes, and the better of the humor columnists was female, lest anyone think I'm implying that the gender of the new editor (or righty editorialist) was a problem.)  It seems the new sheriff in town just wasn't up to scratch.

The climax came a few months later, when the paper carried a huge advertisement, a half-pager or so.  As I later heard from an English Prof (who accepted my facebook friend request, bless her) someone called the ad editor and placed a big order.  The ad editor said "yes I said yes I will yes" without adding "Oh, sorry but I have to ask: the ad doesn't say the Holocaust is a myth, does it?"  And so the ad went straight to the printer without anyone from the paper checking to make sure it didn't say the Holocaust was a myth.  And so my alma mater's school paper found itself one day besmirched with a tiny-type explanation of how Them Thar Juden are skeered to honestly debate the reality of the Holocaust.  I assume I was not the only person to send the editor an email explaining that she was perhaps a bit of a fool.  Apparently everyone with on-campus emails got an apology/explaination, while those with email accounts ending in ranma.com didn't, which explains why I didn't.  ( I also found that ranma.com email accounts only had enough memory for about two messages, which may explain why it did not last and ranma.com is a rather enigmatic website today.  It was the 90s, people.)

About a decade later the paper got some national notoriety because, as part of its hallowed tradition of reporters interviewing their friends and fobbing it off as journalism, the paper ran an interview with a pair of students who went on to burn down a bunch of churches.  This interview got a lot of play in what-were-they-thinking articles.  (Another thing about those guys: I was almost in a lo-budget comedy movie with them.  I auditioned, got offered a small part in which I woulda been interacting with the arsonists themselves.  I thought the script was unpromising, and took a pass.  The production was scuttled by the boys' arrests.  The filmmaker planned to salvage to footage with a documentary, but he didn't seem like the sensitive insight type, so I doubt it panned out.  On the other hand, his awesome loft apartment/audition space was decorated with Kandinsky and Klee prints.  Kandinsky and Klee are My Favorites, so maybe I'm underrating his potential.)

Recently I went looking for online versions/archives of the alma mater paper, like grown-up college papers have.  I found a couple of listless, abandoned efforts at online versions scattered about the place, but for archives you gotta go to my alma mater's library.  Have fun.

If this article reads oddly (or even poorly), that's what comes of mixing foreign beer with American microbrews.

Teenager From Inner Space

Daddy Tired.

I'm in Gradjulate Skuwl so I don't have as much time/energy/focus for this blog as I did when I had an office job and posted during lulls in work.  Heck, I barely have time to make the eight espressos a day I swill down just to keep the pace brisk.  Plus we have a new cat we're trying to teach not to shred the flesh off of everyone who comes near.  

Of course when a Man/Child gets this much responsibility, he starts to remember more innocent times.  Times when he took games like Teenagers from Outer Space really seriously.

When I was in high school, this game (abbreviated TFOS) seemed to offer a way to reframe the whole experience, make it less frustrating and more fun.  A few years later I discovered anime, and yet I didn't make the connection between Rumiko Takahashi, a manga artist whose work Teenagers From Outer Space openly cannibalized, and TFOS itself, even though I was obsessed with Rumiko Takahashi's work (because it seemed to offer a way to reframe my whole post-college experience, make it less etc.)  Only now, as I take a fresh look at TFOS, do I see that I was playing in Rumiko's world before I ever fell in love with Rumiko's work.

What's more, I have two supplements to the game, one from R. Talsorian, the company that released the game, and another from a third-party startup.  

The first is called Field Trip.  It's a module (for non-dorks: a role-playing module is essentially a ready-made story for gamers to use, absolving the referee of the responsibility of creating the story, instead socking the ref with the responsibility to learn the story) that I haven't really read.  The plot hinges on a School Vice Principal organizing a booby-trapped field trip.  The idea of an utterly hostile Vice Principal doesn't square with even my most persecution-complexy school memories, and strikes me as a nonclever variation on what I wanted from TFOS: a recasting of school experience to make it more fun.  Yeah, I liked satirizing the faculty in these games, but I knew they didn't HATE us.  They just hated the cruddier things we did.  Early in the module the Vice Principal hijacks the school bus and reveals himself to be a terrorist sleeper agent, at which point I ran out of patience, not due to post-9/11 sensitivity, but out of exasperation.  These dumb jokes don't resonate with my school experience.

Then there's a more recent thing called The Landing.  It's devoted to describing a shopping mall for the TFOS characters to enjoy.  The writing is a mess.  The original TFOS writing style has a competent-standup-comic verve; the jokes may be hit or miss, but there's a sense of humor and an offer to enjoy yourself.  The Landing's style isn't reminiscent of standup; it's reminiscent of a science project report, droned aloud by a dull, serious student.  It's full of poorly thought out ideas for jazzing up your fantasy mall, but the most irksome element is the new races.

TFOS has 4 races your characters can be: human, near human, not-very-near-human and Real Weirdie.  Not so much races as categories, right?  It's a terrific way to encourage the right loosy-goosy spirit, because you can play pretty much anything under these rules.

So why do you need new races?

The new races turn out to be various categories of Furry.  One humanoid fox race, TWO humanoid cat races (one anthropomorphic cat, the other human-with-cat-ears-and-tail, an oddly popular image in Japanese cartoons) and grumpy-old-man goldfish.  Okay, the goldfish are cool.

(Sidenote: In my view there's a substantial difference between traditional funny animals (Uncle Scrooge etc.) and the whole furry thing.  Uncle Scrooge is really a human disguised as a duck for a practical cartooning reason: cartooning is in part about abstraction, and by giving Scrooge a duck bill and a ducklike stance he's abstracted far away from any human appearance.  So you can't judge him by his looks.  You have to evaluate his deeds and words.  So it is with most funny animals; they're just people whom we must judge by their behavior, since their appearances don't reveal much about them.

With furry art, though, the duck bill or the squirrel tail is the whole point.  These characteristics are fetishistic, not always in a sexual sense, but certainly in a broader meaning of the word "fetish."  And people have a right to their fetishes, even if they ick me out (and furry icks me out to an illogical extent). but I love cartoon animals while disliking anything forthrightly furverted. )

I don't mind a'tall that some people take their TFOS with a side of Furry.  To thine own self be true; I always used this kind of game to address my heart's yearnings, so why shouldn't furries?  But I'm a little irked by the way furry stuff permeates The Landing, not because I don't like furry stuff, but because I don't like the attempt to encroach on the freedom of the original game's premises.  The nature of TFOS is to allow for any kind of character, but the nature of The Landing is to mandate specific kinds of character: the kinds The Landing's creators enjoy.  In this sense TFOS is small-l liberal and/or libertarian, while The Landing is small-c conservative.  The former gives unfettered permission to Do Your Thing, while the latter wants you to Do The Author's Thing; it tries to corral you into a rigidly defined set of values and fetishes (and fetishes are usually rigorous in their rigid definition.)

Anyway, I'm going to grad school as part of my ongoing (in part successful) efforts to have good life experience directly instead of mediating life through entertainment.

When Tinkerbell Met Nyarlathotep

I'm coming to the conclusion that God might not deserve all the vitriol I've spat at It recently.

The cat we tried to save, Tinkerbell, had to be euthanized.  It was kinder to end her intractable suffering than to prolong her suffering, so her short, gentle, troubled life is done.  I hoped that, between the painkillers and our affection, she would have a pleasant death, but her dying moan was horrible; it seemed to contain all the suffering her little body had experienced.  I tell myself that it was merely the result of drug-relaxed muscles wheezing air past vocal chords in an unusual fashion, but I'll never know, will I?

So I got very angry at God for a while.  It's utterly incoherent that an all-good, all-loving, all-powerful Deity would permit and/or cause such suffering.  I don't buy the usual rationalizations that try to balance that equation.  You know the ones:

• God has a plan that we can't know, everything happens for a reason.  This hand-waving doesn't deal with the conundrum; it just refuses to engage the conundrum.
• Closely related: Who are you to question God?  It's the same as the first one, really, but adapted for the kind of people who lick the hands of tyrants.  My response to this is not polite.  
• The old character-building argument.  "Caring for a suffering animal made you more empathetic," that sort of thing.  While this argument has merit, it doesn't really get God off the hook, does it?  If I tortured your pets to death, or through inaction allowed them to be tortured to death, I doubt you'd thank me for the wonderful character-building exercise.  No double standards, please.
• Then there's my favorite, the Original Sin argument, A.K.A. blaming the victim.  We have suffering because we did something wrong.   Eve deserved it; she was dressed like a slut, so she had it coming.  I suspect the whole Original Sin narrative was cobbled together by some pious soul who wanted to get God off the hook.  Why do people always want to let God off the hook?

It occurs to me, though, that I may not be angry because of suffering and death per se (grieving is another matter), but because Mr. All-Loving All-Powerful fails to live up to the inflated reputation.  If I were of a different faith I might not be so angry.  If I were a Hindu I might just say "Well, that's how Shiva rolls.  I don't like it, but there's no disconnect between this earthy horror and Shiva's reputation."

A short story that I used to read for high school forensics competitions springs to mind: Nyarlathotep by H. P. Lovecraft.  I have fond memories of reading this in a manner so hammy it would make Vincent Price wince.  I never won the competition, but once a judge said "I have just been through hell on earth," after I concluded, and that made it all worth it.  I remember being uneasy about my reasons for selecting the story, though.  It was such a blasphemous parody of Millennialist Christian theology, and I  was so attracted to it despite my piety.  Nowadays the religious vision in the story seems far more plausible to me than the cuddly God on offer at Churches everywhere.  Sure, Lovecraft's cosmic worldview was shaped by racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and plain old misanthropy, but does that make him so different from the early church fathers?

Anyway, I conclude that I need to reexamine the Bible.  It's possible that the all-loving and all-powerful nature attributed to God is more a product of Christianity's marketing department than the Scriptures.  I don't doubt a more complex portrait of the Almighty comes through in the primary texts; texts which may not overburden God with more goodness and omnipotence than is compatible with the facts on the ground.

Drinking Beer on Antibiotics

My shirt is ripped and bloodstained.  Our office looks like a crime scene.

A couple weeks back we saw a sick-looking cat (please understand I am not using slang of any kind here)  and decided to save it, if we could.  We took this leaky-eyed, scrawny, clotted-fur cat home, fed and watered her (she wanted that food and water, desperately) and took her to the vet.  We named her Tinkerbell (as in "clap your hands if you want her to live").  The next day we took her to the Vet, and found that Tink has FIV, a fatal disease.  We did some research and found that cats can live with FIV for years, and that they're unlikely to transfer the disease to another cat (only cats can get it) unless one of the cats bites the other.

We decided to keep Tink in our office  and keep her separate from Mr. Two, our cat.  Miss Tink responded well to food and love, and slowly became a healthier, comfortable cat; eyedrops and medicine gradually changed her from Zombie Stray to Actual Housecat.  She proved to be sweet and gentle, with a pleading stare that compelled me to give her treats.  Meanwhile we kept her presence a deep dark secret from Mr. Two.  We joked about the Jane Eyre/Lost-ness of the situation; Madwoman in the Attic, The Others.

Today I strolled into her room to do some trivial thing or other, when I heard a banshee yowl.  Mr. Two had discovered the horrifying truth about why we were keeping him out of the office.  Mr. Two (understand: a sweet, gentle, affectionate cat, but unneutered and hormone-soaked) attacked.  I lept into the fray like a class-A dumbass who loves cats more than is reasonable.  CHOMP!

The big questions: had Mr. Two partaken of Miss Tink's infected blood?  Could I get Mr. Two's fangs out of my arm (apparent answer: not anytime soon)?  Would Mr. Two rip my whole forearm off?  Where did Tink just go?

I got Two off me and trapped him in the bedroom.  Blood all over the house; all mine, I hoped.  Blood pulsing from holes in my arm.  I grabbed the cheapest-looking towel from the bathroom closet and covered my wounds, then spent the next few minutes looking for Tink.  I began to seriously believe that Mr. Two had SWALLOWED HER WHOLE.

Anyway, Tink is now boarded at the Vet, Two still has blood matting his fur, and it appears the only broken skin belonged to me.

What are we gonna do with Tink?  We thought we could give her a safer, more comfortable environment than the street, but apparently not.  And who else can take her?  No one wants a sick cat.  Poor Tink did nothing to deserve this suffering.  Maybe the kindest option we have is to let her suffering end.

I'm angry at our cat, but what's the good of that?  He was just acting on instinct, thinking his territory was imperiled.  I'm mad at myself for allowing Two to get past my scrutiny, but if I was gonna flush screwing-up out of my system one would think I'd have managed by this stage of my life.  I'm mad at God Almighty for letting innocent living creatures suffer like Tink does, but God Almighty only exists so we can claim He has a reason for everything that happens.  That Bastard better have some good reasons, is all I can say.

Happy Thanksgiving!