Catholics Vs. The Mentally Handicapped

Perhaps no single religious organization has played such an important role in censoring art and prosecuting new and interesting ideas as the Catholic Church. The examples are numerous and well-documented. The Church, in particular, has always been inextricably linked with the censorship of Hollywood movies, going back to the days of the Hays Code (so afraid, people were back then, of Cecil B. DeMille's period dramas). In fact, a lot of people don't know that the original text of the Code was authored by the priest and writer Daniel A. Lord. When that was replaced by the MPAA rating system in the late 1960s, Jack Valenti devised a system by which a lot of those strictures would stay in place, and you can still tell today from the obvious problem the MPAA has with grownup depictions of sex, as opposed to finding wanton displays of violence generally less offensive.

This is all common knowledge. Did you also know that the Catholic Church actually has people in their employ whose sole job is to evaluate movies based on how appropriate they would be to the average Catholic audience? The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has an "Office For Film and Broadcasting" that classifies movies according to these ratings:

A-I: General Patronage
A-II: Adults and Adolescents
A-III: Adults
L: Limited Adult Audience
O: Morally Offensive

It's sometimes fun to read their capsule reviews. I mean, they're readable, which is something you can't say about Peter Travers. At least half of their movies end up being rated "O," I've noticed. Their considerations don't always match up with the MPAA, as you will see from their review of The Invention Of Lying, which (most people don't know this) contains a pretty devastating takedown of organized religion:

Venomous supposed comedy, set in a world where lying is unknown and every word spoken is accepted as truth, and where God does not exist until a failed documentary screenwriter (Ricky Gervais) discovers the ability to deceive and, to comfort his dying mother (Fionnula Flanagan), invents the fable of an afterlife, going on to fabricate the story of a "man in the sky" who rewards good deeds and punishes evil, all of which is eagerly accepted by the credulous masses who flock to hear his message. Along with his co-writer and co-director Matthew Robinson, Gervais launches an all-out, sneering assault on the foundations of religious faith such as has seldom if ever been seen in a mainstream film, despicably belittling core Judeo-Christian beliefs and mocking both the person and the teaching of Jesus Christ. Pervasive blasphemy, some sexual humor and references, and a few rough and crude terms. O -- morally offensive. (PG-13)

Most of the reviews are in a similar, hilarious vein. But check out this writeup of Kevin Smith's Mallrats, and see if you find anything odd (my boldness):

Sophomoric sleaze about two college-age retards (Jeremy London and Jason Lee) running amok in a suburban mall after being rejected by their girlfriends (Claire Forlani and Shannen Doherty). Writer-director Kevin Smith plumbs the gutter for laughs but finds only mindless tedium. Sexual situations, nudity, drug abuse, toilet humor and constant gross language. (O) (R) ( 1995 )

The USCCB, which is the official voice of the American Catholic Church, is calling people retards? Any normal standards and practices committee would have nixed that pejorative in a heartbeat, and would probably have had words to say with the writer in question. Such is the intellectual state of American Catholics today.

NOTE: I wonder if this review was colored by the controversy surrounding Smith's Dogma in 1999? Still, that's just harsh, USCCB, to make fun of Jason Lee like that.

NOTE II: Although I saw Mallrats again recently and they're probably right...

Rich Lowry Pretends There is Good News

National Review editor Rich Lowry--a guy who supposedly cares more about truth in reporting than searching for ways to validate his magazine's agenda--managed to get my interest by writing a post called "The Good News For Obama." The first few sentences, however, disturbed me, not necessarily because they were incorrect but because he says a lot about National Review's online stable of writers:

. . . I suppose is that he's just had a 1994-like event without actually losing control of Congress. Tonight reminds me a little bit of the defeat of the rule on the crime bill in the summer of 1994 — a sharp crack in the edifice of Democratic rule that promised more change to come.

And then, of course, is the clincher sentence: "It was all avoidable, of course, if they were willing to compromise sooner, but they were drunk on their ideology and their power." Yeah, if only they were "willing to compromise," those pigheads. Does this sound like a dispatch from Opposite Land?

From what I recall (and I was 8 at the time), the Clinton crime bill was exactly a model of the kind of compromise that Lowry and his fellow Republicans choose to ignore--it created whole new classes of death penalty offenses, including nonviolent drug trafficking and carjacking, and it rewrote the book against habeas corpus for a lot of drug offenders. The "compromise" part was that it also included legislation outlawing assault weapons, which I don't even hear teabaggers complaining about very much (although that doesn't stop them from guessing about Obama's agenda for the guns they currently own). Newt Gingrich's Contract With America did its best to ignore whatever part of the bill might have pleased the Republican masses, arguing (and getting) legislation establishing mandatory minimum sentences for said drug traffickers and carjackers. Ignoring whatever compromises your opponents offer is itself offered in the spirit of compromise.

It has gotten to the point in National Review where even the pretense of either supporting Barack Obama or registering that he is popular and intelligent, or even a decent human being, is no longer acceptable.

In The New Republic, Jonathan Chait wrote about National Review's competitor The Weekly Standard, and sought to define their difference in this way:

A magazine like National Review specializes in making the case for conservative ideas. The Standard's contribution is to assert over and over that Republicans are succeeding, or at least doing better than you think they are. The idea is to buck up your side and encourage them to keep fighting, in order to ward off the self-defeating psychology of losing.

Maybe. Or maybe they basically serve the same function, and the only difference is that National Review has slightly better writers. It reflects a Larouchian readership that has such a foul conception of liberalism that when someone says something innocuous about how Obama did the right thing in taking out Somali pirates, they have to perform public penance for the remainder of the day. Does this really seem like the kind of atmosphere where "conservative ideas" can be expressed without fear?

You have to feel sorry for the people who work there, sometimes. I know it's not really fun to be a journalist anywhere, but it must particularly sting having to constantly walk on eggshells, satisfying a constituency that no longer sees open-mindedness as a virtue. This is probably true of any political magazine (it's why I can't stand reading The Nation, either) but in the case of National Review, you have a stable of writers that are basically forcing themselves to deny that Obama, like a broken clock, has to make a pleasing decision once in a while. The laws of physics demand it.

One of these days, in the near future, I'm going to write a long post about why I still can't believe they publish the insane ramblings of Andy McCarthy. Here is his latest piece, replete with facts clearly pulled out of his ass; here is a classic, in case you're in need of a good evening purge (not a euphemism: I mean vomiting).

This Is A High

I've reached across virtually every Web 2.0 platform to relay the news: the new Gorillaz album, Plastic Beach, comes out on March 9. I had been hoping for another Gorillaz release in 2010, given Damon Albarn's relative lack of output in the last year or so. I first learned about the album a few weeks ago, when Albarn talked in an audio interview about getting together a list of guest stars that outdoes even Demon Days in terms of sheer, ridiculous diversity. They include: Barry Gibb, Lou Reed, Mos Def, Mick Jones and Paul Simonon (!), Bobby Womack, Mark E. Smith (in the Shaun Ryder part, I imagine), Snoop Dogg, and the Syrian National Orchestra.

I'm pretty sure that I'm the biggest Damon Albarn fan I know--his handsomeness and boisterous personality have resulted in a lot of bad press on this side of the Atlantic, but I could make a good case for Albarn as the forerunner for a lot of what we might call world music-oriented popular music, from M.I.A. to Vampire Weekend. He managed to prove all the haters wrong by making one great Blur record in 2003 without Graham Coxon, and that is in addition to forays with Gorillaz, the Good, the Bad, and the Queen, his solo album Mali Music, the Chinese opera Monkey: Journey to the West, and this mind-blowing song by Amadou & Mariam. Plus, he reunited with Coxon and Blur for a farewell tour that didn't result in any new music but did provide footage for an upcoming film that promises to rank up with the Beatles Anthology in terms of manipulative weepiness (protip: 13 outdoes even Sea Change in that department).

In short, Albarn has emerged as the only guy to come out of the Britpop scene who seems to have an enduring and evolving interest in different types of music (please compare with Oasis). Except maybe Jarvis, but was he ever as willing to cede the spotlight to such a sterling group of fellow musicians? Check out the new Gorillaz track "Stylo" here, and imagine a world where popular radio showcases Albarn, Mos Def and Bobby Womack trading vocals.

An additional note: What is this album going to do for Gorillaz, narrative-wise? The cover for the "Stylo" single features Murdoc and Noodle, the latter seemingly having finally reached puberty, but from what I recall, Noodle was killed after her floating island windmill was shot out of the sky by mysterious helicopters in the video for "El Manana." Is it possible that Plastic Beach will lack the mixed-media unity of its predecessors?

Maybe I Just Don't Get It

Does the upcoming Allen Ginsberg biopic need to be called Howl? (suggested better title: Love Poem On Theme By Whitman). And why is he being played by James Franco, an (admittedly excellent) actor who looks about as Jewish as Harry Osborn? The biopic premiered at Sundance today; expect the standard long national rollout and Oscar buzz (with a 10% chance of severe backfire) at the end of 2010. Here's a clip:

You will hopefully remember that David Cross played Ginsberg fairly recently in Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, and although similarly goyish, I thought he did a pretty good job. Or at least he had the look down, so the question has to be: can Franco rock the beard?

(Scene I'm most hoping will be dramatized [as if that is even needed]: Ginsberg vs. William F. Buckley on Firing Line).

It also has Todd Rotondi as Jack Kerouac and Andrew Rogers as Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In the annals of beat movies, will this be Naked Lunch or The Subterraneans? I'm surprised by how strongly this movie resembles hard boiled, low-budget noirs of the 50s, but that is no indicator of overall quality. The worst-case scenario is that we have another retro biopic in the most regressive sense of the word.

In other related news, Jay Farrar of Son Volt and Ben Gibbard of 500 Garden States of Elizabethtown have joined forces to release an album inspired by Kerouac's most unreadable book, Big Sur. Find out more about it here, but don't blame me if you find it a lot more compelling or enjoyable than the source material.

"KEVIN DILLON IS DEAD"

This is certainly the best liveblogging of the Golden Globes that I have ever seen.

Why no Pirahna II: The Spawning?

I'm generally a pretty big fan of SNL's digital shorts, which tend to stick out of what are generally pretty mediocre shows. Whether or not this is due to their non-live nature, I don't know.

More specifically, I'm a big fan of their occasional series Laser Cats. The basic gist of these shorts is that Andy Samberg and Bill Hader keep trying to get Lorne Michaels to greenlight this terrible idea for a science-fiction epic set in the future, where cats indeed can shoot lasers and are used by humans for brutal laser warfare. Lorne Michaels clearly doesn't like the idea, and has basically banned the two from mentioning it, so Samberg and Hader have to resort to getting celebrity guests to trick Michaels into watching another installment. Last time, they had Steve Martin, which was funny because Martin tried to pass off Laser Cats as a veiled allusion to King Lear.

This time, they got James Cameron, and these are the results:

They manage to reference every single James Cameron spectacle, save (sadly) for The Abyss and True Lies (I haven't seen either movie in a while--feel free to prove me wrong). Oddly, this video helped illustrate an idea I've had for a while that Avatar and Aliens could conceivably take place in the same universe--the AMP suit brandished by the bad guy in Avatar and its similarity in construction to what Ripley used to battle the queen alien being the most obvious example. Then I started thinking, conceivably, that the Terminator stories could fit in there somewhere as well...and since you have Aliens you might as well have Predator...and from there I started devising a new Wold Newton sci-fi cosmology and of course I realized how sad I was.

It's funny, but I prefer sketches like Laser Cats to what Samberg has been doing with the Lonely Island these past few months.

Avoid All Metaphors!

Having read a lot of John Updike in the past few months, I wonder why he is generally thought of as a particularly egregious describer of sex. Not that there aren't plenty of moments, especially in the Rabbit books, where I noticed he had probably overstepped the boundaries of good taste. But does that qualify as bad sex/writing when he starts applying his omnipresent lens for parsing out detail on parts of the human anatomy? What other ways of describing sex are there, and what should we find acceptable?

Auberon Waugh, the son of Evelyn, established the Literary Review "Bad Sex In Fiction" award in 1993. The odd thing about this award is that many of our greatest writers have since won the prize. This year, the nominees included Philip Roth, John Banville, Amos Oz and Nick Cave (for his novel The Death of Bunny Munro). I've read Roth's The Humbling, so I know that the book's occasional foray into nauseating scenes of lesbian-hetero experimentation are far from the worst thing about the book. But still, Roth is a great writer, and if he can't write something light or funny or profound about this certain action, how is anyone ever going to be able to write a tolerable sex scene?

Meanwhile, Katie Roiphe wrote a piece in the New York Times Book Review lamenting the passing of a certain machismo attitude toward sex in writing, most clearly exemplified by Roth, Updike and Mailer. A new breed of writers, including David Foster Wallace (curiously) and Dave Eggers, are more inclined toward describing extreme acts of "cuddling." Are they simply avoiding the trap of being eligible for next year's Literary Review award? Roiphe doesn't really talk about that, so concerned is she with this new trend of treating women with respect, or in Benjamin Kunkel's case, with a perhaps unhealthy level of attachment.

I was glad to find, then, Andrew Sullivan's post directing me to an essay written by Sonya Chung that includes some advice about how to avoid the mistakes of Roth and Mailer without feeling sheepish or cuddle-dependent. Here are her ideas:

1. Beware of sensory descriptions which include food analogies – “honeydew breasts” (Styron), “like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg” (Littell), “the oysterish intricacy of her” (Anthony Quinn), “he felt his cashew become a banana, and then a rippled yam” (Updike) – or “wet” verbs like smear, suck, lick, slither, slide.

2. Be sparing with anatomical terminology for sexual organs, whether scientific or slang; and if your passage does contain such words, beware of mixing and matching high diction and low diction, i.e. it’s nearly impossible to get away with raunchy lyricism. (Here I will spare the reader specific examples, but suffice it to say that sex-organ diction, both high and low, is apparently like neon paisley; it doesn’t go with anything.)

3. Avoid spiritual-religious metaphors – “salvation” (Palahniuk), “rapture” (Ayn Rand), “magical composite / weird totem” (Roth), “on the edge of a precipice beyond which can be glimpsed a dark-green distance in a reeking mist and something shining out at them, a pulsing point of light” (Banville), “my licking a primitive form of language in a simple prayer” (Theroux) – or any language that gestures toward the grand or the epic: “weeping orifice” (Ann Allestree), “Imperial pint of semen” (Neal Stephenson), “Defile her” (Roth), “like a torero…trailing his cape in the dust before the baffled bull,” “gravid tremulousness of her breasts” (Banville).

4. Be hyper-vigilant about clichéd metaphors and similes, particularly oceanic ones: “like a tide determined to crash against those ancient rocks” (Simon Van Booy), “it was as if he were splashing about helplessly on the shore of some great ocean, waiting for a current, or the right swimming stroke to sweep him effortlessly out to sea” (Sanjida O’Connell).

5. Avoid machinistic metaphors: “with his fingers, now experienced and even inspired, he starts to steer her enjoyment like a ship towards its home port” (Amos Oz), “I’m going to pull the lever, I’m going to let the blade drop” (Littell), “he enters her like a fucking pile driver” (Nick Cave).

These are mostly well-illustrated cautionary examples, and I hope to come back to this list frequently, but I really like the last one about entering someone "like a fucking pile driver" and I now want to read The Death Of Bunny Munro quite badly.

Besides, "machinistic metaphors" are the wave of the future, right?

Spinning in the Daffodils

In the past, I have registered my severe approval of the new Josh Homme-John Paul Jones-Dave Grohl band Them Crooked Vultures. You will even find on Rockaliser that I named their eponymous album the fourth best of the year. Elsewhere, it was basically ignored. My fascination with this band is so deep that, in typical loser fashion, I have been searching online for non-album tracks. One of their newest songs is called "Highway One":


This is a pretty good video with poor sound, but I chose to share it because a) it features John Paul Jones riffing it up on an electric mandolin (and basically carrying the entire song) and b) because I'm pretty sure I love the woman talking at the beginning of the video.

"John Paul Jones on the mandolin"--are there any prettier words in the English language?

If you want to see a video of them playing "Highway One" with fairly decent sound, go here. There's nothing else that sounds like this song, I guarantee you.

Goodbye, New Avengers

Robot 6 reports that Marvel Comics, following the events of Siege in April, will be canceling all four of its key Avengers books: New Avengers, Mighty Avengers, Dark Avengers, and Avengers: The Initiative. Some of this isn't a surprise: Dark Avengers, in particular, seemed like a concept that would have to reach its end, given that Norman Osborn's exit from the big picture is basically a foregone conclusion at this point. Still, New and Dark Avengers are Marvel's bestselling books, I think, and basically ending a chapter of Marvel's greatest and most successful franchise of the past decade seems to confirm that Bendis is changing the game, once again (cue Internet haters).

Siege is to be followed by something called the "Age Of Heroes," which no one really knows about, but it seems to signal a return to a less interconnected and more upbeat Marvel universe. My impression is that Bendis is capitulating to the haters complaining about heroes beating on each other as opposed to villains (I thought Secret Invasion was supposed to be the answer to that problem, but somehow it seemed to cause even more complaining--imagine that). New Avengers is to end with a big 64-page New Avengers Finale, which I'm really looking forward to, mainly because it is 64 pages long. There also seem to a be a series of one-shots that suggest...hey, is Spider-Man going to die?

(Might as well make my predictions as to who I think is going to die this time: I'm going to guess the Sentry, Mockingbird perhaps, the Hood maybe, Maria Hill, and Ms. Marvel. Maybe some of the utility Thunderbolts. Then again, I've consistently predicted that Maria Hill will die and she hasn't, yet).

I am as far from a Bendis hater as you can imagine: I think his run on Daredevil exceeds the best of Frank Miller, I love his Ultimate Spider-Man, and to a degree his Avengers runs as well. Plus his non-Marvel work, which is uniformly high-quality and funny stuff. I credit Bendis with really pushing the envelope forward as far as dialogue goes, injecting a natural, easygoing demeanor to his characters that made the Avengers more fun to read when they were sitting in their hideout hanging out than when they were out fighting evil. If Alan Moore was the writer who injected poetry into the staid expository dialogue of Stan Lee and co., Bendis is the first guy to come along whose dialogue sounds like the way real people would talk. If those people were superheroes.

Nevertheless, I read Siege #1, and it pains me to say it isn't very good. A lot of the problem is that there was a lot of setup, as is generally necessary, but more importantly there doesn't seem to be any comfortable vantage point by which we can view the action scenes: if this were an issue of Dark Avengers, we could look at it through their point of view, but since this is a company-wide crossover it seems as if a lot of pieces on the chess board have been moved, with no real focus. I also have no idea what Thor's deal is these days, as I haven't been keeping up with his title. There's still hope for this one, though, and I have been loving "Dark Reign" as a whole, even more than Civil War or Avengers Disassembled.

I hope the new, adjective-less Avengers title still has Bendis writing it. He's really emerged as a natural leader in terms of moving Marvel's classic characters in unexpected directions: who else could have imagined, ten years ago, a government-sanctioned Avengers team headed by Norman Osborn in an Iron Man suit, featuring the former Scorpion-turned-Venom masquerading as Spider-Man, plus the psychotic killer Hawkeye dressed up as Bullseye? If someone had told me, as a 13-year old, that this would someday happen, I would be even more diligent about reading the comics that I read.

Of course, no matter what Bendis does, some people just crave the heyday of Kurt Busiek. Let's just hope Siege gets better.

Thanks For the Unintended Shoutout, Pat Robertson

(P.S. I'm in the process of developing a lot of content here in the next few days so if an errant viewer stumbles upon here, there is plenty to occupy his or her time.)

Pat Robertson has alienated a lot of reasonable people in the last few days, due to comments he made during an episode of his still strangely watchable Christian news show The 700 Club. Here's a video showcasing the most relevant comments:

Good for the people calling him out. Surely, this is not only crazy talk but exactly the wrong type of observation to impart at a time of unimaginable crisis. But you may be confused as to what Robertson is referring to. He's actually questioning the motives behind the Haitian slave rebellion of the late 18th century, which is considered by many historians to be the first large-scale slave revolt of its kind. One of the principal characters in this drama was a vodoun priest named Dutty Boukman, who we will get to later.

Soon-to-be Dr. Robert Taber, a doctoral candidate at the University of Florida, wrote a special guest post for FiveThirtyEight called (somewhat misleadingly) "A Qualified Defense Of Pat Robertson." In it, he writes:

For religious conservatives in Haiti and abroad, the idea that the leaders of the slave revolt led and participated in a Voudou ceremony provides a troubling contrast to presentations of the United States’ founding fathers as devout Christians, one that explains their vastly different fortunes. Many view the U.S. invasions and the rule of the Duvaliers being as indications of the devil’s two hundred year lease on the country.

(The Duvaliers he is referring to are a family team of autocratic, murderous dictators--François "Papa Doc" Duvalier was president of Haiti from 1957 to 1971, and his son Jean-Claude ruled until being ousted in 1986.)

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a response to this piece, taking umbrage mainly with its title, arguing that the defense of Pat Robertson's comments is an offense in itself. Taber stood by his comments, claiming only that the story of Boukman and Co. making a pact with Satan is still an extremely resonant one among evangelical Christians and superstitious Haitians alike. Which is true, and I have no problem with the American public learning more about the devil pacts that have shaped the courses of so many nations. If I could have them teach it to my future kids in school, I would.

Anyway, Pat Robertson may have inadvertently bolstered my career as an English scholar. How is this? In September 2008, I took a Senior Seminar class for my English major focusing on postcolonial representations in restoration literature. One of my projects was to develop a Wikipedia page for a book I was writing a paper for, an insanely polemical leftist potboiler written by Guy Endore, titled Babouk. I could explain what the book is about, but I'd rather direct you to the Wikipedia page, which as I just said, was written by me (it has since been amended by others, of course). The important detail is that the main character Babouk, an African trickster and storyteller who is shipped to Haiti as a slave and becomes the voice of (explicitly liberal and anti-capitalist) resistance, is in fact a fictionalized version of Boukman. American public interest in Boukman, now, is as high as its ever been, and according to these online statistics, the number of page views for my little article has increased dramatically.

All of this is a long way of saying: Thank you, Pat Robertson. Your insensitive, yet oddly accurate religious ravings have inadvertently benefited exactly one (1) person. Now I know what Kurt Vonnegut meant when he said that he was the only person in the world to have ever benefited from the bombing in Dresden. Something like $3 for every dead body, I think he said.

BONUS/PLUG: Interested in reading my article on Babouk, which was accepted for publication this past summer? Are you curious about the Haitian slave rebellion, Edward Said's Orientalism, or developing alternative canons of literature? You can find it here (PDF; my own contribution starts on pg. 55). If you chance upon this blog and decide to read this thing in its entirety, you will be the first person to ever do so. I don't think even I've even read the whole thing; the whole thing is one benzedrine-fueled blur of madness...

Rock Band Or Die

Lately on Hulu I've been seeing a lot of X-Box 360 commercials starring Jane Lynch that are pretty weird. I managed to find some on Youtube. Take a look at this:



After seeing a certain commercial dozens of times, I start to have really weird thoughts, so bear with me. Does it seem to you as if it is heavily implied that Jane Lynch is holding this family hostage and forcing them to include her in all sorts of weird, family activities? Observe how terrified everyone else seems to be.

The Umpteenth in a Series of Endless Beginnings

Hi, my name is Nathan and I hope this is a convenient introductory post for you! <-- This will be the last time that I ever use an exclamation point, hopefully.

I've been meaning to get back into the blogging game and perhaps branch out further. Barring a Livejournal account or two, I formerly had a blog I called Sacks Files, which really was a terrible name for a blog the more I thought about it over this last 2+ years. I decided to jump ship and start anew for that reason, plus I have graduated from college and now use a proper gmail account (and changing my former blog's email address is too hard for me). So, this is it.

In the past, I had the tendency to write more long-winded articles about whatever seemed interesting. They were more intermittent, and I wasn't quite satisfied with the amount of content I put up (this was not helped by knowing that no one else really cared). So I may try to write some shorter, punchier things. And I hope to be updating this more than once a week or even once a day.

I will probably not write about music very much here because I already have a joint music blog with my friend Aaron M. called Rockaliser. I do consider it fair game, as do I consider subjects like film, literature, cognitive neuroscience, comic books, history, advertising, domestic politics, living in DC, trying to be a writer, etc.

I also hope to accumulate an audience this time around. Please, please just forward this around to anyone who has the potential to be even remotely interested in what I am saying.

In case you are wondering, "Phineas P." refers not only to Phineas P. Gage, the railroad construction worker who in 1848 miraculously survived a steel rod through his brain, destroying what his physician John Harlow called "the equilibrium or balance,so to speak, between his intellectual faculty and animal propensities" and generally just becoming horrendous company to be around. It also refers to a fake character I created in high school, Phineas Pifferman (long before I ever knew about Gage, I think), who I introduced as a cruel, abusive editor-in-chief of my school newspaper The Web in a joke-themed April Fools issue. Is there a connection? I'm trying to develop some overarching philosophy about the necessity of being incorrigible and unpleasant...it will manifest itself in time.

In the meantime, I guess I will be more, what's it called...pleasant?