Swinging on Janus’ Gate

2019, which arrives tomorrow, looks like an unreal date to me, as has every year since 2000. I grew up when “the 21^st century” meant the future of The Jetsons. Actually, the Jetsons were a very 1950s-ish family that in basic ways already was an atavism when the show first aired in 1962, but they had flying cars and AI robot domestic servants. The show’s prognostication was wrong on both the social structure and the technology. 2001: A Space Odyssey also was wildly optimistic on the tech side but stuck in the 60s socially…but that is another conversation. My current point is simply that when I saw the movie (in a Boston theater with a marquee that read “for stoned audiences” – hey, it was 1968) 2001 seemed a suitably distant future date for all the spacefaring tech on the screen. The fact of somehow now finding myself 19 years into the 21^st century feels…strange. Nonetheless, I won’t be writing “2018” by accident on my checks. I’m pretty good about making the change each January, probably precisely because the previous year didn’t look real either, so writing it never became an ingrained habit. The only day of the year I really have to be careful is my birthday when I have an unsettling tendency to finish a date “1952.” That tends to raise eyebrows at the bank.

While saving some documents to a flash drive the other day, I noticed that January 3, 2009 was my first post here on Richard’s Pretension. So, along with the New Year to be celebrated by pretty much everyone, there is a ten-year anniversary to be celebrated (if at all) just by me. Maybe I’ll have cake. In the first few years on this site I tended not to append (sometimes barely relevant) videos and pictures as I do now, but otherwise the posts haven’t changed in tone that much since 2009. They were and remain a hodge-podge of this and that. Of course, I was pretentious long before 2009. My blogging predates the word “blogging” by decades. It was a habit acquired by age 16, partly from writing for the school newspaper (yes, I was one of those kids), which was by choice, and partly from schoolwork, which wasn’t. My high school English teacher Mr. Drew required his students to write a 500 word essay every single day on any subject: “On my desk by 5 o’clock. That does not mean 5:01!” Only in later years did I appreciate just how much work he had generated for himself; wading through all that adolescent prose must have been rough. I won’t say I always enjoyed writing the essays, but I often did. So, even after graduation the habit persisted (not every day, but more or less weekly) in multi-page letters to friends, occasional essays and short stories published in obscure literary magazines (webzines by the ‘90s), and eventually in blogs with modest readerships including on Myspace. Remember Myspace? Five decades after those schooldays and one decade after first posting on this site I’m still at it – on New Year’s Eve no less. We all have our quirks. Where’s that cake?

New Year's Eve in
"After the Thin Man" (1936)

There are worse ways to spend New Year’s Eve as I know from experience. Most of my worst New Year’s Eve experiences have been the most outwardly festive ones – and I don’t mean because of the next morning’s aftereffects, which are a bonus feature. I’m just not keen on public merriment, though I don’t scoff at those who are. Loud is fine, for those who prefer that. I understand the impulse to celebrate dispensing with the old and welcoming the new, however loudly or quietly one prefers to do it. Unlike in videogames, in life we don’t ever get a do-over at our last save point. (That feature accounts for much of the popularity of gaming IMO.) The closest we can come is simply to declare a “fresh start,” and there are few better times to do that than at the New Year, whether one celebrates it on January 1, the second new moon after the winter solstice (Chinese New Year), or the vernal equinox (most ancient cultures).

We owe the January 1 starting date for the standard Western calendar to Julius Caesar. (The Gregorian calendar currently in use is simply his Julian calendar tweaked a tiny bit by eliminating leap days from century years not evenly divisible by 400, so that 2000 was a leap year but 2100 won’t be.) Prior to Julius the Roman calendar started in March. Like all calendars that try to incorporate lunar cycles, however, it was a mess and was constantly going out of phase with the solar year. So, Julius’ better calendar that set New Year’s Day on January 1 was adopted; it went into effect in 45 BCE. Inexplicably, he didn’t change the names of the last several months, so “December,” meaning “10^th month,” became in actuality the 12^th. No matter. He did pick a good name for the new first month. January is named for the two-faced god Janus. Janus was the Gatekeeper whose image on gates had one face turned inward and one outward – or metaphorically one toward the old year and one toward the new. The new New Year’s Day was soon enough after the Saturnalia for it to become an extension of the holiday season as it still is today. I suspect boozing to excess on New Year’s Eve (regardless of the calendar in use) predated the Romans, but they certainly continued the tradition. They also did the kissing thing, though nowadays that’s a midnight tradition that isn’t likely to end well and had better be skipped.

To all the readers out there (perhaps not numerous but…ahem…discerning), whether your evening tonight is loud or quiet, may your 2019 be pleasant.

Zooey Deschanel & Joseph Gordon-Levitt reprising Frank Loesser's 1947 What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?

Ghosts of Christmas Past

In my younger days articles in newspapers and magazines regularly appeared in December remarking about the high rate of murders and suicides between Christmas and New Year’s Day. In the past 20 years they have been replaced by articles debunking any such increase. Two decades of debunking might seem adequate, but the articles still appear. The debunkers are correct. April and May, not December and January, have the highest rates of deadly violence to oneself and others. December is relatively slow. Yet, this, too is misleading. The older writers were not simply making stuff up. They were reporting anecdotal evidence from EMTs, police, and hospital workers who insisted they were exceptionally busy during Christmas season. They really were and they are. Their mistake was assuming that the extra busyness must be due to violence. It was and is not. Natural deaths spike substantially this time of year. This is not a myth, and they are what keep emergency responders busy. Study after study confirms that the holiday season is deadly. Philips, Barker, and Brewer in their study “Christmas and New Year as Risk Factors for Death” published by the NCBI state, “In the two weeks starting with Christmas, there is an excess of 42,325 deaths [in the U.S.] from natural causes above and beyond the normal winter increase. Christmas and New Year appear to be risk factors for deaths from many diseases.”

As yet, no exogenous cause for the increase has been found, so the answer may lie in the individuals themselves. It is well known that people with serious health conditions have a way of surviving to landmark dates. They are more likely to die on or shortly after a birthday, for example, than in the several days prior to it. So, too, with other notable (to them) dates. They want to survive until then and they do. Afterwards they don’t care so much, so they don’t. To be sure, we cannot “think” ourselves well, but we do seem able to hold out a while longer if we choose – not a lot longer, but often long enough. The end of the year, whether we mark it in our minds by Christmas or by the actual New Year, is such a landmark.

A little pleasant nostalgia: 1962, I think

The question remains why we don't retain enough enthusiasm to last until the next landmark. The holiday blues are an obvious suspect. For all the “‘tis the season to be jolly” exhortations, many adults have bouts of nostalgia-inspired sadness this time of year. Nostalgia can be sweet, but beyond a certain age it can’t be separated from loss. For that reason, for example, after my sister passed my mom hated the Elvis Presley song Blue Christmas and changed the station when it played on the radio. Among the losses is our own youth. Inevitably this reminds us of our own mortality. (I never thought the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in  A Christmas Carol made a very convincing point, by the way; the same fate awaits penny-pinchers and generous souls alike; the “unmourned” aspect isn’t likely to bother one much under the circumstances, though I suppose in the context of the story there is the risk of carrying chains like Marley.) To top it all, some of us never recover from the news about Santa.

I don't normally experience holiday blues, though this is something for which I take no credit: there are other times and events that put me in a funk but leave other folks unfazed. We all have our buttons. For those who do suffer the blues this time of year, I’ll just offer the reminder that the season ends soon enough. In the meantime nostalgia needn't be depressing. I even rather like Blue Christmas. 

Elvis – Blue Christmas

Pluvial Perusals

A rainy weekend left time to munch on bookshelf fodder, both morsels of which had curious origin stories. My reasons for picking them are less curious. Anthony Burgess had satisfied my reading urges before. As for the other, my recent review of academic publications about superhero mythology prompted me once again toward the comic book shelves to explore one character (strangely absent from Marvel live-action movies), none of whose comics I had previously read.

Napoleon Symphony: a Novel in Four Movements by Anthony Burgess

After the success of the modestly budgeted film A Clockwork Orange based on Anthony Burgess’ novel of the same name, Stanley Kubrick approached Burgess once again. This time Kubrick had in mind a grand epic about Napoleon. Kubrick asked him if he could come up with something. Burgess obliged, providing Kubrick with an idiosyncratic manuscript structured like (to the extent two very different art forms can be alike) Beethoven’s Eroica. Kubrick decided he couldn’t do anything with it and dropped the notion of a definitive Napoleon movie. (This was probably wise: the last serious attempt, Napoleon [1927] written and directed by Abel Gance, is 333 minutes and gets us only as far as 1797.) Kubrick instead chose to make the less epic but still interesting 18^th century period film Barry Lyndon (1975). Anthony Burgess, meantime, polished up his manuscript and published it as a novel in 1974.

This novel is no challenge to Tolstoy and was not intended to be. It is (in Burgess’ words) “a comic novel” though it is not a parody either. The comedy arises, when it does, in the contrast of the heroic image with the human beneath – as it arises whenever we examine our idols closely. We don’t get the great battles and grand events but rather the stage coach rides before them, repasts after them, evenings in taverns, arguments with colleagues, table talk with lovers, and private moments. Burgess assumes the reader already has at least a basic knowledge of his historical career and does little more than indicate (often indirectly) when and where a scene occurs. We see Napoleon as humanly inconsistent: alternately inspirational, mawkish, noble, petty, idealistic, unprincipled, self-effacing, and pompous. The four “movements” into which the book is divided are his rise to fame and power, his defeat in Russia, the Hundred Days, and his exile at St. Helena. Burgess, by the way, planned to be a composer before unexpectedly finding success as a writer. His flair with words is always reason enough to read him.

This is not a book for someone looking to learn history via a more-or-less accurate historical novel. Most basic information about the era’s events simply isn’t in it. But if you wonder what the man could have been like when just being himself, this gives a plausible picture.

Thumbs Up. Not my top pick of Burgess (A Clockwork Orange and Nothing Like the Sun are more fun), but Thumbs Up nevertheless.

**** ****

She-Hulk by Dan Slott

In 1978 CBS had a hit with its TV show The Incredible Hulk starring Bill Bixby as Dr. Banner and Lou Ferrigno as his green alter-ego. It was so popular that executives at Marvel worried that CBS might develop a gender-reversed spin-off series, much in the way The Bionic Woman was spun off The Six Million Dollar Man. If CBS did this before Marvel copyrighted and trademarked a female Hulk, CBS rather than Marvel would own the rights to the character. Marvel tasked Stan Lee with creating the character, and in February 1980 The Savage She-Hulk appeared on comic book racks.

Jennifer Walters is a petite and physically frail young attorney. She is also a cousin to Bruce Banner (Hulk). Bruce has no choice but to infuse her with his own mutated blood after a run-in with criminals leaves her bleeding to death: there is no time to wait for a safer source. Jennifer catches her cousin’s condition and acquires the alter-ego She-Hulk. Unlike her cousin, however, she retains her full mental faculties when green and has considerable control over her transitions. She actually prefers her green persona to her vulnerable original one, sometimes even arguing her court cases as She-Hulk. She isn’t very secret with her identity. She becomes one of the Avengers. A feature of her 20^th century comics is her awareness of being a comic book character and her tendency to “break the fourth wall” and talk to the reader.

Comic book characters get rebooted and made over regularly in order to keep them current, and She-Hulk is no exception. Accordingly, I opted for the 21^st century tales by Dan Slott in the collection She-Hulk: The Complete Collection. In Slott’s updated version of She-Hulk the fourth wall is more often bent than broken: Jennifer is one of the star lawyers at a prestigious firm specializing in (what else?) superhero law, and the firm’s prime research tool is its comic book collection. Not all the courtroom drama is in earthly courtrooms. She is whisked away on a matter of Universal Law in outer space and is herself put on trial by temporal authorities for interfering with the timeline. Meantime there are more conventional (by comic book standards) confrontations and interactions with other superheroes and villains including her archenemy Titania who at one point comes into possession of an infinity gem. (Marvel fans will know what that means.) There are good supporting characters in the stories, for example a teen would-be villain who is the granddaughter of Jen’s boss, and Mallory Book, Jen’s rival at the firm. There is also Jen’s reliable colleague (non-superhero) admirer at the firm who, though never making any overtures, awaits the right moment to escape the “friend zone.” The moment never arrives since Jennifer always has suitors with whom he can’t hope to compete.

When I was a child my mom had none of the snobbish prejudice so common at the time against comic books for kids. She opined that “reading is reading” and anything that encourages it is a good thing. So, she craftily brought home reading material likely to appeal to my sister and me including comic books. She supplemented these with magazines, children’s literature, and more ambitious material such as Mark Twain and Sir Walter Scott. The strategy worked. Both Sharon and I became early and lifelong recreational readers. Comics faded from the mix of my recreational reads by the time I was in high school with the exception of some counterculture novelties by Robert Crumb and his ilk. They didn’t really return to my coffee table until the current century, and then only because adult-oriented comics were a social phenomenon that couldn’t be ignored by anyone interested in the state of popular culture.

Adult mainstream comics were already well established in the US by the 1980s, but I’m often late to pop-culture parties. I’m not quite sure what to make of them. There is something unsettling about the power fantasies of superhero comics appealing to adults; they seem to be something one should grow past. Yet, I readily admit I often enjoy the comics even if my reason for buying them (at least so I tell myself) is to keep abreast of pop-culture. Their popularity coincides with an ongoing long-term decline in sales of traditional literature, both fiction and non-fiction, but I doubt that is cause-and-effect. Other modern diversions probably account for the decline – along with current approaches to formal education that too often make reading seem painful to students. The decline in the consumption of literature is regrettable, but perhaps my mom’s perspective is still the right one: reading is reading and something (even something with pictures and words like “zonk!” and “plink!”) is better than nothing. If it contains clever artwork and storytelling, better yet.

Thumbs Up

Smash Mouth - Everyday Superhero

Four Diversions for Sleepless Nights

December is a rather busy month for most of us, but there still might be days or evenings when we have time to unwind and the notion of picking up an old-fashioned book or movie is more appealing than whatever is on the screen of our cell phone. The following recently have occupied some of my time (mostly in the middle of the night) with mixed results:

Earth Descended by Fred Saberhagen

20^th century science fiction by the better authors has a special quality to it. Even when the themes are adult (as they often were by the 1960s) the tales to modern eyes commonly have a refreshing innocence. Even when they are un-PC (as they often were throughout the era) they are absent the meanness that permeates so much of present day writing and culture. Saberhagen is one of the better authors, best known for his “berserker” stories about self-replicating doomsday weapons. Earth Descended is a collection of a dozen of his short stories written between 1968 and 1981. Saberhagen’s style evolves interestingly in this period from straightforward to experimental and from optimistic to cynical.

The stories bear little similarity to each other in any way other than in prose style and by broadly fitting a definition of scifi. They include a berserker tale that intersects (really) with Sherlock Holmes. There is a magic-filled fantasy story (“Earthshade”) originally written for Larry Niven’s Warlock series. There is an interstellar generation ship (“Birthdays”) of a peculiar type. Observer created reality becomes all too literal in “Recessional.” Mortality is optional in “Calendars.” There is even his own scifi version of Theseus in Crete. The collection is science fiction as we all too seldom encounter it anymore. Recommended.

**** ****

Jeff, Who Lives at Home (2011)

This dramedy was recommended to me by the Amazon algorithm as a movie I might like. It is reassuring to know that Amazon and Google don’t know everything about me yet, perhaps because Alexa isn’t listening in my house. (It amazes me that so many people are complaisant about installing web-connected listening devices in their own homes: devices that listen carefully enough to judge the quality of the relationships in those homes. The Independent reported research by Imperial College Business School concluding that “digital assistants could predict with 75 per cent accuracy the likelihood of a relationship or marriage being a success.” I’m sure the unsuccessful will get unsolicited ads for marriage counselors and divorce attorneys on their smart phones.) Anyway, this movie by the Duplass brothers just didn’t work for me.

Jeff (Jason Segel) is a 30-year-old man-child living in his mother’s basement in Baton Rouge. He doesn’t believe money is one of the important things in life but does believe in fate and the interconnectedness of the universe. Signs is his favorite movie. When he gets a wrongly dialed call from someone seeking “Kevin,” he takes it as a sign to seek out Kevin. Along the way he interacts with his ultra-materialistic brother Pat (Ed Helms) who is letting his marriage and other important things in life fall apart. Pat suspects his wife might be cheating on him, though it would be hard to blame her under the circumstances. The frustrated hardworking mother (Susan Sarandon) of Pat and Jeff, meantime, has a secret admirer at work. All of them end up en route to New Orleans. Events occur on the trip that are supposed to be heartwarming (I think), but to me they seem so contrived as to take the viewer (this viewer, anyway) out of the moment. The supposed denouement of the film (the revelation that Jeff is not such a loser after all) is frankly still up for debate at the end. One good deed during a crisis on a road trip is not a validation of a general lifestyle; it just means that Jeff is a nice person, which no one ever doubted.

This film has generally positive reviews, with the adjective “amiable” turning up a lot, but to me its mere 83 minutes seemed very long. Thumbs Down.

**** ****

Killing Dylan by Alastair Puddick

This mystery novel published in 2016 is enjoyable from start to finish.

Freddie Winters is a mystery writer who was college friends with fellow writer Dylan St. James. Freddie is published and modestly well-known but he has to scratch for every pound and frequently has to dodge his landlord for lack of funds. Dylan, by contrast, is enormously successful with his more literary fiction that, according to Freddie, “has me choking on my own bile. Fortunately for Dylan, however, it is the same type of stuff that has middle-aged, middle-class women recommending it to their book clubs.” If you detect resentment at Dylan’s success in that, you’re right, and Freddie avoids Dylan for that reason.

Dylan doesn’t return the ill feelings, however, and one day he shows up at the coffee shop where Freddie commonly uses the free Wi-Fi. Dylan says that someone is trying to kill him but the police aren’t taking his claims seriously. He asks for Freddie’s help as someone good with mysteries. Attacks by auto, letter bomb, and even a speargun lend credibility to Dylan’s claims. Freddie looks for a motive from Dylan’s ex-wives, doctor, publisher, and others. The writing is good, the characters engaging, and the plot twists are clever, suspenseful, and funny. Thumbs Up.

**** ****

The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018)

The plot device of an ordinary person caught up against his or her will in a spy adventure (e.g. the esteemed North by Northwest and the disposable The Man Who Knew Too Little) is an old one, but it still can work if done right. This one is done sufficiently right: it is no modern classic, but it is amusing and is full of more well-choreographed mayhem than any Bond film.

Audrey (Mila Kunis) discovers the hard way that her boyfriend Drew is an agent. When he is shot in front of her, she and her friend Morgan (Kate McKinnon), believing they are in danger whatever they do, try to complete Drew’s mission by delivering a flash drive to Vienna. It doesn’t go well. In chases from Vienna to Prague to Paris to Amsterdam to Berlin they try to stay alive as the body count mounts and they try to figure out who is on whose side. And yes, it is a comedy, sort of. Thumbs Up – not way up, but up.

Trailer: The Spy Who Dumped Me

Headshrunk Supers

In an October 31 post below regarding the first season of The Adventures of Superman, I repeated the oft-mentioned observation that superhero stories are very much of a type with ancient tales of heroes and demigods. In fact, the ancient heroes and gods turn up in modern tales with some frequency, such as Ares in Wonder Woman and most of the important characters in Percy Jackson & the Olympians.

That observation prompted a revisit to the multi-volume The Golden Bough by James George Frazer. Originally published 1890, it remains the single most important work on the origins and evolution of mythology, not just in the West but around the world. That assessment is likely to annoy a modern anthropologist, most of whom make a point of dismissing Frazer as unscientific. Yet, though his sources are literary rather than archeological and his analyses necessarily speculative, he more often than not is convincing on the fundamental points. This is why he was such an outsized influence on foremost members of the literary and intellectual scene of the late 19^th and early 20^th century, including Robert Graves (whose The White Goddess is another essential tome on mythology), W.B. Yeats, Aleister Crowley, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Campbell, T.S. Eliot, Carl Jung, and many others. He still appeals today. Camille Paglia commented that even though he might have been superseded on details, he “will remain inspirational for enterprising students seeking escape from today's sterile academic climate.”

Frazer is definitely worth a visit on his own merits. His discussions of fertility cults, resurrection myths, scapegoating, sacrifices, and more are endlessly fascinating. (Single volume abridgements of The Golden Bough are available, but if you have the time tackle the full set.) However, revisiting his work proved a misstep with regard to considering modern superheroes, who belong to a later stage of mythology. They are adventurers in the mold of Theseus, Hercules, Perseus, and Bellerophon. Frazer doesn’t ignore these completely, but the older and deeper entities such as Isis and Osiris interested him more. While I don’t regret the diversion into Frazer, more recent books on the modern superheroes themselves were, perhaps unsurprisingly, more directly useful. There is a plethora of such books from which to choose, but I went with The Avengers and Philosophy, which contains contributions from 18 philosophers, and The Psychology of Superheroes with contributions by a couple dozen psychologists. Are these authors overthinking the subject? Well, yes and no. There really are ethical questions raised in the context of comic book superhero tales, and the characters work only to the extent they reflect something about the human condition. It’s important to note that both books rely primarily on comic books as sources, not movies. The storylines there differ from the screen versions substantially. Nonetheless essential character traits are usually unchanged by the transition to screen.

Mark White, who edited the collection of essays that make up The Avengers and Philosophy gets us started by contrasting the ethical systems of Captain America (a deontologist), Iron Man (utilitarian), and Thor (virtue ethicist). The classic example to contrast the first two is the trolley car conundrum. A runaway trolley with 5 people aboard is headed for a certain lethal crash; you can prevent it by throwing a switch that diverts it onto a track where one person is standing and will definitely be killed. Do you throw the switch? A deontologist says no; it is never right to choose to kill an innocent person and that is that. A utilitarian says one death is better than 5; throw the switch. This is why Iron Man and Captain America were on opposite sides of the Civil War. Iron Man (Tony Stark) says look at the outcome, which will be better if we cooperate with the Registration Act. Captain America says forget the outcome: the Registration Act is wrong. Thor has another approach altogether. He strives to be a virtuous person: loyal, honest, brave, true, honorable and supportive of comrades even if that comrade is Loki. He doesn’t much interest himself in other ethical minutia – and that is the potential problem. One can have all those virtuous traits in a bad cause.

Other authors in the collection discuss responsibility for unintended consequences, ask if might is right, ask when ends justify means in war, and ponder the possibility of redemption. Several superheroes (e.g. Hawkeye and Scarlet Witch) had stints as villains, after all, while others (notably Black Widow) are ambiguous. Forgiveness is not much in fashion in the 21^st century, but in the comics, at least, it’s discussed. There is even a discussion of the nature of reality with regard to She-Hulk who is aware she is a character in a comic book. There also are discussions of love, which in the real modern world all too often resembles something out of a comic book. You’ll never look at the Avengers quite the same way again after this book, and that is all to the good.

The Psychology of Superheroes poses questions (and offers tentative answers) that are much more personal. For example, Robin S. Rosenberg, who edited the collection, asks in her essay, “So how different would Superman be if he had grown up in a different part of the country?” Suppose Clark had grown up in Brooklyn with unsupportive parents? What of Clark is nature and what is nurture? Robert Biswas-Diener in his essay discusses Peter Parker. Yes, we all know the guilt trip over his uncle’s death that led to his crime-fighting, but is that the reason he continues? Biswas-Diener thinks not. After all, he has done more than his share taking down supervillains, but he doesn’t retire. Biswas-Diener thinks he simply enjoys the opportunity to use “the full range of his strengths.” Other authors discuss such various topics as the effects of prejudice (Magneto), the deliberate simplification of one’s public persona to reassure others (Superman), and the employment of the dark side of one’s character (Batman) to positive ends. Chuck Tate suggests, “Maybe this apparent contradiction explains why Superman and Batman can’t get along. Superman knows that the Batman is closer in motivations and behavior to the villains.” There is much more on the expression and suppression of aggression and anger, on psychopathy, on the psychology of readers of superhero comics, and on the inmates of Arkham Asylum.

The reader can’t go wrong with either book. For those who feel a twinge of guilt at “wasting” time on superficial superhero comics and movies, the books offer a way to turn them into meaningful entertainment. By sharing our insights from them with those in our company who just seek pure escapism, we thereby can be supervillains. That prospect has an allure, which is something upon which Dr. Rosenberg might have an opinion.

Suzi Quatro – Official Suburban Superman