Unexpected Trips Though The Rabbit Hole

"I'm actually quite the bigot, you know." - said by no one, ever.

While I'm a huge fan of the well examined life, it's even more critical for an author to consider the role of bias in their work. An author may add a passage meaning to illuminate a certain point, then discard the context that the passage was illuminating. An author may have a personal ax to grind and be unable to separate it from her fiction. A few sentences tossed into a book can permanently color the reader's view of an author's entire brand.

It's important to speak out for your beliefs, but free speech is not speech free from consequence. Years passed before I picked Brenda Joyce back up after the The Prize. I've never really been able to take Linda Howard seriously since she used Burn to discuss her Randian beliefs about wealth. (I've also switched Howard from a purchase to an infrequent library read. I'd hate to increase her wealth and force her to pay all those burdensome taxes.) One of the things that drove me to read m/m romance in the 80's was an inability to tolerate yet another homosexual character used as an easy villain stereotype. In Eloisa James latest novella Seduced By A Pirate, she has a few throwaway lines that damaged her brand for me.

"Griffin had come to loathe the very mention of the first Viscount Moncrieff, a repellant beast who had slavered at the feet of James the First. In Griffin’s opinion, he received the title of viscount as a direct payment for personal favors of an intimate nature. His father had never liked that suggestion, though there was a bawdy letter upstairs from the king that confirmed Griffin’s impression." - Eloisa James, Seduced By A Pirate

There is no point to this mention of the first Viscount other than to establish that Griffin hated hearing about his ancestry. Nothing about the Viscount factors into the tale and he is never mentioned again. Why then, must the first Viscount be repellant, and a beast? Why did he slaver at the feet of James the First? If the point is to illustrate how Griffin felt about his heritage or about men who gather riches through words (he gathers his own through theft) why does the first Viscount have to be bisexual? Why does young Griffin assume this man he dislikes was involved in an intimate relationship with the king? If the letter confirms Griffin's beliefs, then the belief existed before the letter. If the belief is not predicated on the letter, how did Griffin form it? Does repellant slavering beast  automatically mean homosexual activity to young Griffin? How did he integrate that belief into his career as a pirate, given the relationships between some career sailors? We don't know. The only introduction of homosexuality in Seduced By A Pirate is the passage above. If it drives nothing about the character, what is the point of it's inclusion?

And thus an author's brand is damaged.  I don't think Eloisa James is a blatant bigot. I do think she has assumptions and norms derived from her culture that she hasn't critically evaluated in the context of reader response. This is totally cool. You can't write everything with an eye to who you may offend. What you can do is evaluate if what you're writing is necessary. Do these words add to what you're building or detract from them? Is this passage moving things along, illuminating what you want it to illuminate, or is it removing your reader from the reading experience? For this reader, it was hard to separate the author from her authorial choice.

Review: Frankenweenie by Tim Burton

When is a homage not a homage? When it's a pastiche.

Frankenweenie is a mess. Tim Burton needs to admit he's not only a member of Suburbia, he's one of it's biggest boosters. (His outsider card is hereby revoked.) With works like Ed Wood under his belt, being different is Burton's catchphrase. Frankenweenie is clever, visually arresting and a deep reenforcement of the stereotypes that turn kids into outsiders. (Burton hugs the status quo so hard I wondered if charges would be filed.) For a movie aimed at kids, Frankenweenie does a great job of perpetuating tired bigotries.

Young Victor is a quiet boy, preferring his dog to the company of other children. Deeply artistic, he finds creative outlets in science and stop motion animation. His father worries he might be... weird.  Of course Victor's mother reassures him that nothing is wrong with the lad. He's perfectly normal. But she goes along with the father's plan to hold Victor's scientific interests hostage unless he agrees to play a sport, perhaps even baseball like that nice boy Toshiaki? Victor's concession to his father's quiet unease results in the death of his beloved dog and the beginning of all future events. (Victor never blames his father for the accident, nor does his father blame himself. That's for the audience to do.)

Toshiaki covers all the points on the Asian character bingo card. He speaks in an erratic and assumed accent, slurring difficult English words (while voiced by an adult Brooklyn born actor). He's slant of eye and sly of nature. Good at baseball and fond of giant turtles, Toshiaki is a top student with a video camera always at hand. His faithful (and much dumber) fat friend Bob is on hand to take the risks so Toshiaki can best Victor in the science fair. When Bob breaks a bone his even fatter mother marches her cat-eye frames into the school to take down the science program. (Fat kids have fat overprotective mothers. It's a rule.) The Eastern European science teacher explains to the small minds in the small town (modest homes at modest prices!) that his goal is to expand his students minds as he cannot expand theirs. Victor's parents exchange knowing sighs as the teacher is promptly fired. Which means it's time to deal with the women. (I'd move on to talking about the black students, but the school hasn't one.)

Victor's neighbor and implied future love interest Elsa is here to show you how a young lady properly rebels. Elsa is soft of voice and sullen of manner. She may question the wisdom of lit candles in her hair but faced with male authority Elsa performs. She sings her wobbly song of patriotic love to the townspeople so they may admire how cute her fire hazard presentation is. When faced with danger she screams for help. I can't pick on Elsa. From the science averse butch gym teacher to the Weird Girl (Burton doesn't even name her. Weird Girl has a bit more backbone than Elsa but ultimately fails to hit the heroine mark. She's a pretty princess who believes the future can be foretold in cat feces.) all of the women in Frankenweenie lack the ability to save themselves. The closest we get is Victor's mother. After pacifying her husband, baking cookies, reading romances, vacuuming and offering Victor a choice of homemade breakfast goodies, Victor's mom spends a few moments fighting off monsters by her husband's side. And that concludes our look at female heroics in Frankenweenie.

In the end only Victor's reanimated pet corpse can be suffered to live - because he made it with love and therefore it's worthy. The other reanimated corpses were tainted by the lack of purity in their hearts, their desire to best Victor creating monsters. (Whatever. It's a boy and a dog story. I get it.) Further keeping Frankenweenie from reaching the mark is a confusing sense of place. The kids use large reels of film or Super 8 cameras, but also talk about running computer models. Victor's house is a love letter to late 60's fads and tableware, but the school's textbooks have removed Pluto from the list of planets. The mothers stay home in their wide skirts while the men march off to work. When the heck are we? There is much to admire in Frankenweenie on a visual level but I was kept from engaging in the story. I was unsatisfied by the message of love over ambition, devotion over determination. There's no need to make space on the dvd shelf for Frankenweenie, but you may wish to buy the inevitable Art Of  for your library.

Review: Right State by Mat Johnson and Andrea Mutti

Political commentary is hard to do correctly. I'd love to tell you that Mat Johnson has pulled it off but he falls into a familiar pitfall. There is no one human in Right State. These are puppets we've played with before. While obviously coming in from a liberal viewpoint, Johnson isn't that far from Frank Miller's recent conservative ravings. Johnson is gentler and less bigoted but still delivers a book without any relatable characters. There is no one for the reader to walk beside in  Right State. The most sympathetic character is a heavy handed stand in for a point of view. I leave Right State unsure of it's agenda. Nothing here is likely to shed light to anyone else. If you are a conservative Right State will feed your belief that liberals consider you ill educated at best and a racist head case at worst. If you are a liberal it oversimplifies the appeal of the far right political movement. There is a danger in assuming your idealogical opponent to be fundamentally different from yourself.

Ted Akers is a pundit. He speaks passionately for money without deeply believing his own words. He is rhetoric in a suit spreading a toxic point of view for profit. He is, of course, a good guy. No one ever thinks they are the problem. Right State has a strong set up here. Several far right pundits have recanted their past beliefs. Discovering you are part of the problem is not a simple journey to take. Instead of a gradual discovery of his own blindness, Akers is quickly immersed in a full fledged conspiracy. Reluctantly drafted to thwart a death threat against America's second black liberal president (no, Right State is not a futuristic thriller) Akers finds himself surrounded by extras from Deliverance. These undereducated militants consider Ted Akers a national hero.

I want to pause here to refute the easy assumption that the patriot / militia movement is made up of cult leaders and dim thinkers. The election of President Obama may have galvanized them, but it did not create them. I have known sophisticated, intelligent, articulate people who have moved deeper and deeper into these movements over the last fifteen years. To conflate an extreme far right belief with insanity is to underestimate the attraction of this movement. What the KKK was to the 1960's, they are to us today. A plot on the level that Akers is sent to unravel would not consist of one crazed cult figure and dozens of dimwitted followers. While crazed cult figures and dimwitted followers can certainly exist in any party it lessons the impact of Akers awakening to have it precipitated by such a group. It also relegates Right State into a preach-to-the-choir stance. This book will no more reach across the divide than Miller's Holy Terror. This is a shame.

Akers, of course, discovers there is more at work behind the scenes than he realized. The militants are being manipulated by forces high in the opposition party, the party Akers once defended. His disillusionment is as swift as it is brutal. For the reader, it's a bit of a yawn. How much more compelling  would Akers awakening in place have been? How much could Johnson have said about our broken system of shouting if Akers awoke after a successful plot? If the catalyst was not being tossed down the rabbit hole but awakening in Wonderland and realizing the cost? What if the revelations in Akers came from the implementation of the change he advocated for? Right State is a lost opportunity. Johnson tells the story of a man confronting the crazy fringe he inspired. It may be the tale Johnson set out to tell but it is a well worn and cliched one. The fish in this barrel have already been shot. Johnson is better than this material and I hope he takes another shot at our great divide. Right State was all wrong for me.

Review: Deadlocked by Charlaine Harris

Harris is not a gifted writer. Her skill lies in her plotting and her ability to keep you interested in the next twist her road will take. Unfortunately Sookie spends large portions of Deadlocked driving in circles.This isn't to say you should skip Deadlocked, but there are some larger-than-Harris flaws in this one. Can we open with the big one?

Harris has always had a somewhat complicated racial world view - in fact this blogger has already summed that up nicely. Harris goes for broke in Deadlock. Alongside her usual quiet bigotry she highlights the character of Palomino - a vampire with "caramel" skin and "cornsilk" hair. Later in the book she has a character toss out the phrase jungle-bunny in an attempt to emotionally affect KeShawn Johnson. He (of course) is above such things. In a world where a black woman of superhuman strength and experience would permit herself to be named after a pony, I suppose we can allow for KeShawn's tolerance.

Deadlocked sums up some of the troubling aspects of the series. While Sookie doesn't dump vampires for their abusive ways, she does begin to examine her choices. Unfortunately Deadlocked is a character dump. The time spent with vampires isn't the engaging run through their soap opera ways that we're used to. Vampires come and go through Deadlocked without really capturing your attention. High stakes vampire drama seems like an afterthought to the real focus. Fairies. Ok, not really, but the addition of her fairy heritage is where (in my opinion) Sookie's story went to pieces. Deadlocked is full up to here with fairy. (I think we're fairly clear of them for the final book as Deadlocked seems to set the stage for their removal.) But vampires and fairies and werewolves, oh my. Everyone and everything makes an appearance in Deadlocked. If a character isn't included, they're contemplated. Relationships we don't care at all about are lingered over and remarked on. People take her to brunch. Sookie cooks half a dozen times for half a dozen occasions. She describes everything about her days in mind-numbing detail. She wonders what a flash drive is and understands a Reader's Digest reference. By the end of Deadlocked Sookie has closed the door on most of her past. She's walked away from most of the distractions the first eleven books brought her to refocus on the things that mattered to her in the first one. I think it may be a misdirection. My money for book 13 finds Sookie dead and sleeping with the angels, all of whom will undoubtedly be hard bodied sex machines who can't resist her small town ways.

Review: Habibi by Craig Thompson

Habibi has been getting some great reviews. It's not surprising. Thompson is a beautiful artist with a real gift for page layout and imagery. To page through Habibi is to expect great things. In a way, Thompson's work is like Darger's. On the surface it is a mix of new and familiar pictures assembled into a grand narrative. At the heart it is a disturbing fetishization of the victimization of girls. There's also a slice of White Liberal and a dollop of Latent Homophobia running through it like a river  (Look, I come not to bury Habibi but to review it so let's get that underway.)

Thompson offers his tale of a world being slowly destroyed by profiteering and elitism, a tale of racial tensions and minority exploitation, a tale of pseudo-incest, pedophiles, abuse of power, human trafficking ... I lost track of it all actually. Over the bubbling stew of his big ideas is his smaller one, a comparison of Islam and Christianity. (I think Rumi's texts should be a controlled substance, like medical marijuana or Mad Dog.) Habibi starts with our young heroine Dodola being sold at age nine to her husband. Improbably (although certainly not impossibly) her husband has no family and so we open with child rape. (Kind of a sign the author has opinions on Arab culture.) It's okay because he teaches her to read and she comes to understand her rapist is like a child himself, captive to his desires. (I know. Pass the Excedrin.)

Dodola's husband is murdered and she is enslaved. There she claims a small black child she names Zam. Although she is still a child herself, her husband has made her literate and her abuse has made her feral so soon Dodola escapes the slavers and flees with Zam. At this point, and for much of the novel, Dodola and Zam appear to live in a long distant past. By the end of the novel they are freely moving in contemporary days asking us to accept that past events happened there as well. It doesn't work. Why is there an open 18th century slave market, complete with branding? Why don't they just shoot Dodola when she runs? Why is Zam's mother convinced they will be sold apart? (Human trafficking is still with us but the details do shift with the times.) Dodola and Zam escape to the desert where they find a marooned 1950's style yacht in the sand. They live there undisturbed for years. Dodola trades sex for food from the occasional camel caravan while Zam grows and gathers water. As the water dries up, he is forced to forage farther afield. As the only human he knows, Zam becomes drawn to Dodola sexually. (I started to call them Chris & Cathy in my head at this point.) But wait! After years of being raped in the desert (I mean bartering sex) Dodola is stolen away and taken to the Sultan's harem (really). She is obsessed with recovering her son Zam, to the extent that she doesn't bond with her actual son until he is the age Zam may have been when she met him. (Zam's age at their meeting could seriously use some continuity editing.) Her son reminds her of her most recent rapist and is therefore tainted. She wanted him to be black, like Zam, and when he is not she is disgusted. (This is getting way too long. I'm leaving half of it out and we haven't even got to Zam falling in with the transgendered and cutting his penis off in disgust over his lust for Dodola. Let's just cut to the chase.) Dodola becomes an opium addict. Zam rescues her from the harem, considers killing himself when he realizes he couldn't impregnate her anymore,  gets and quits a job as a middle manager at the water plant and they have a happily ever after nuclear family resolution when they adopt another slave. Whew.

Along the way we find there is no such thing as a decent Arab man. From Dodola's father explicitly selling her for sex to her multiple rapists to the seemingly friendly but actually unhinged fisherman working the diseased river, every Arab is corrupt. They don't keep their word, they rape and murder. Our black characters are just as one dimensional. There is the Mammy in the harem and the Magical Enuch, the Slave Mother and Zam. Women don't fare much better. Dodola is the most fully realized of them but she reads more as male fantasy than actual female. She is a motherly figure of intense dedication to her child / lover while a shrewd seller of self as well. Even as an opium addict or starving in a jail cell I couldn't connect with her. The transgendered are predatory, most obsessed with sex in some fashion. When Dodola and Zam attempt to return to Eden they find the ship overrun with refuse, a trash pile covered in trash pickers and their children. The rivers run with sewage, fish bones and filth. Only the water of the city is pure - carefully hoarded for wealth over health and filled with the toys of the modern world. Where Dodola and Zam have seemed to exist (even in the Sultan's home) in an English liberal fantasy circa 1780, now they dwell in 2010. This has to be a deliberate choice on Thompson's part but it falls flat. Our fairy tale is already drowning in detail and moral. Adding the sudden appearance of modern life makes it fall apart. So much of Habibi wants to be an aha moment. The author begs you to connect the lines of corruption, to see the way we have wandered from both faiths, the way the sins of the past and the sins of now are the same sins. Instead I connected finishing the book with wanting a long hot shower with a lot of soap. (Men love to draw women being raped. It's so meaningful!)

Habibi is lovely. It's trying to tell an ugly story and it succeeds but the tale it tells is uglier than the one it intended. People are going to embrace this, people are going to endow it with superlatives. I think most of them will be white and culturally Christian. Habibi hits all the White Liberal buttons hard on it's way down. Good intentions and all that.

Review: Aaron & Ahmed by Jay Cantor and James Romberger

I've been on a graphic novel kick lately, and sometimes graphic novels mean having to say you're sorry.

I am very sorry I read Aaron & Ahmed. I really should have known better. The thing is, when a graphic novel promises to be a difficult read, emotional, challenging, all of that - I expect it might offer something new. A love story between two men in a time of war? A meeting of two cultures? A transcendence of humanity over inhumanity? Look, it doesn't have to all be Maus. At a certain point I'll take A Very Special Sugar & Spike.

9/11 graphic novels are all sophistic pieces of crap, and I should know that by now.

Aaron & Ahmed opens by showing how our poor schmo Aaron never really had a chance. With a Jewish name (turns out he's a nonreligious halfsie) and a dead dad, he loses his fiancee in the second plane. (Complete with real time phone call and touching the window of her plane as she goes.) Right. So now that the attempt at emotional manipulation has been made, we turn to Gitmo where a Dr. Mengele type is turning prisoners into dogs and frothing about how we are all programmable meat puppets awaiting the right coding of information to cast off our humanity. You know, the kind of shit that sounds deep when you're 11 (getting high at juvvie) or 17 (getting high at your mom's place in the Hamptons) or 43 (drunk on Tea) and male. Soon our young Aaron is feeding Ahmed (our chosen prisoner) estrogen to calm him while trying to make him fall in love via the patient / therapist relationship. Yea, I know. This book seriously wants to be deep. It thinks it has some profound insights about the nature of love and the nature of religion (hint, it hates the latter) and the ways of men who might like men when mixed with Stockholm Syndrome.

Soon Ahmed is magically transporting Aaron off to the depths of training camps in Pakistan where Aaron's first serious exposure to religion (and hard drugs) convert him into a walking time bomb of paranoid fervor. Returned to NYC, Aaron awaits his deployment while Ahmed has some bizarre change of heart. Wait, back up a second - just as emotionally manipulative as the early sequences for Aaron are the mid sequences for Ahmed. The West is bad but the East is worse and there will be war without end, praise Allah. Any complexity of the view from the other side is obscured by the need to have Aaron falling prey to the fanatical brethren. It's like a tiny bit of reason dropped into a giant shaker of bigotry and anger turned into a propaganda martini and served cold. (Insert Ron Paul joke here.)

Ok, so back in NY Aaron has God Fever and his meat puppet is out infecting other meat puppets while Ahmed is offering him romantic love and wanting to run away with him for a life of western decadence. Ahmed's change of heart is never explained. His reasons for taking Aaron to Pakistan are left in the dark, and his switch from trusted driver of OBL to homosexual craver of all things McDonald's rings untrue. Ahmed fails to evoke emotion or drive the plot in a logical manner. He stands in for Aaron to impose his own perceptions on before becoming a device to drive the plot in the circle the author wants it to go.

Religion exists to control us and is harnessed for evil by many forces. Money and power drive wars. Governments don't care about the human cost. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. There is no nuance in fervor. The masses can be manipulated. (It just goes on and on.) If you're drug free and over the age of consent do yourself a favor and give Aaron & Ahmed a pass. There may be an interesting and multifaceted look at the underlying causes of 9/11 out there but I doubt it's got an English translation. I should brush up on my German. Or maybe Swedish. Possibly Japanese. I don't know. Oh, also, gay people are noble and stuff. Love drives Ahmed to his doom!!! (Sorry, was that a spoiler?)

Review: Holy Terror by Frank Miller

I honestly can't believe the asking price on Holy Terror. MSRP is $29.99 and I don't think I'd buy it for a buck. Here's everything you need to know. "Stunning art can't save this reactionary rage tale lacking nuance or emotional engagement." Also? Phantom Menace had smoother dialogue. This is a propaganda piece in the worst sense of the word. By dehumanizing Al Qaeda's soldiers Miller wants the reader to be comfortable with their slaughter. This version of Al Qaeda is one without explanation. A Muslim's first sip of beer before blowing up a nightclub undermines even their zealotry. In Holy Terror's construct your choices are between murdering violent thugs on 'our' side and murdering violent thugs who are on 'their' side. There is little difference between the two. I have long been a fan of Miller's dramatic art style, his willingness to tackle dark, complex characters and his refusal to sanitize human motivation. Holy Terror is just bad. It fails on so many levels that I am disappointed in Miller for bringing it to market. This is a work that would have been better served sitting in a filing cabinet, unearthed postmortem to show how the author used art as a catharsis while his self editing eye recognized it's failure. Put to that purpose, Holy Terror could have enhanced Miller's legacy. Instead it serves as a disappointment to me and a cautionary tale to others. Without the self awareness he brought to the characters of Sin City or the pointed humor of Martha Washington, Miller offers a shallow work I'd expect to come from Iran's propaganda department. Here, read the Amazon version of this review.


"This one's bad kids, really bad. Visually, it's as stunning as Miller's best work but Holy Terror is an uninspiring fantasy lacking all nuance. While Al Qaeda retains it's name, New York turns into Empire City and the attacks come from deep within it's bowels. (Like a bad taco.) The wooden conversations appear inspired by 1950's serials (or the recent work of George Lucas), the villains ramble on to prove their lack of motivations or redemptions and our heros are too sadistically drawn to root for. Without the charm or self awareness of Sin City's denizens they slash and slaughter their way through the gossamer thin plot. In tone Holy Terror reminded me of an anti-semitic screed with a different ethnic focus. Miller is capable of much, much more than this. Had he put his rage aside, Miller could have offered the definitive book on terror and our need for those who fight it. Instead readers are treated to an outpouring of anger with a side of contempt. His therapy, our cash. The Batman clone is a man who orders Americans killed as easily as he does terrorists. He is somewhere past vigilante. If this were my first Miller book it would also be my last. I'd think, nice artist, too bad about the text. The art is fantastic. Miller's distinct style is put to excellent use in several panels, his anger fueled sketches of elected leaders as ineffective talking heads are among his best work. His signature three color art style is beautifully deployed throughout Holy Terror. Sadly, the story is abysmal. It's tedious, it's repetitive, it's predictable and it's ultimately unenjoyable. Bogged down by it's own strident fury, Holy Terror simply isn't worth owning." 


Frank, what happened to us? Remember in the 90's when it was all love letters and puppy baskets? I can defend your use of sexually aggressive impossibly proportioned women, I can defend the belief that "Sometimes standing up for your friends means killing a whole lot of people" but The Fixer is no Dwight.   I can't defend what is essentially hate speech, even if that hate has solid roots. To emotionally engage with The Fixer you have to accept that his way is the only way, that there is no future beyond slaughter, that sadistic torture and murder are a sane answer to horror. Evil is eternal. There will always be madmen with new and inventive ways to terrorize the innocent. What defines a people is their reaction to it, their recognition of what is and is not decent. There is no depth to The Fixer, no brighter day. His is a world of perpetual war, mutually assured destruction. It's also really boring.