Sandman Material, Brewers Phrase & Fable

I'm in my (semi) Annual reading of the Sandman, along with a great book I got from my favorite online remainder store (bookcloseouts.com), The Sandman Companion. The book is a set of interviews between the author Hy Bender and Neil Gaiman, the genius behind Sandman. Bender also provides a background/summary of each book and decent background.

Gaiman mentions in the interview that if come across a weird word in the Sandman you'll never go wrong looking it up in Brewer's Phrase & Fable - and, cool enough, the internet provides an online copy!

So, to test it out, here's Morpheus = (2 syl., the Sleeper). Son of Sleep, and god of dreams: so called because he gives these airy nothings their form and fashion.

Here's another online Brewers: From Bartleby.com, and the dream/morpheus entry.

Backpost finished 2009-12-23.

Kurt Vonnegut & Don Imus

Well Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at 84. This happened the same day that Don Imus was fired by MSNBC (and suspended by CBS) for saying nasty stuff.

The contrast between these two is instructive. Vonnegut was (until yesterday) the most important living American writer - because he was imaginative, knew how to write true satire, and generally he knew right from wrong. He was often compared to Mark Twain - and that's a fine comparison because the two were fine-thinking humorists. As such, even though I often disagreed with Vonnegut's politics, he was a hero to those of us who try to see the world realistically and communicate that realia to others. He was successful while most of us aren't. Hence, a hero.

Seeing Vonnegut a few months ago on The Daily Show was a defining nexus of this moment in time's highest culture. It was like witnessing Einstein meeting Freud (which never happened) or Twain meeting Churchill (which did). True, Jon Stewart and Kurt Vonnegut aren't at the stature of the above four, but we take what we can get.

Then there's Don Imus. I have not listened to the show for any decent length. I first heard of him from a relative, back in the late 80s, who liked the show because Imus told sick, racist jokes. Since that description, I have steered away from anything to do with him. Which was why I was so surprised a couple of years ago when I heard that he was a powerful interviewer of the powerful political elite. Huh? The racist-joke slimeball interviews presidential candidates and NYTimes reporters?!

Naturally, I am happy that Imus has finally been hoisted by his own petard. But the more important question is why he had been able to continue for so very long? Related to that question is: why did this obviously noxious and racist bonehead get caught LAST WEEK for what he has been doing for years?

The same holds true for Ann Coulter. She has been saying unconscionable things for years. Yet she gets smacked down for calling Jon Edwards a bad word. Huh? Especially since, if you've seen the footage, she actually did not call Edwards the fg-word. It was actually a botched joke. [Which, when it's as obvious as it has been in the case of Kerry and Coulter is a valid defense; it also applies to a recent flap over Garrison Keillor and can even apply to Imus's last straw.]

Why does it take so long to catch on to the vile nature of people like Imus and Coulter and why does the tide turn, often, on a small action and not on a grand error?

The same is holding true for the current government, by the way. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc were obviously criminal incompetents from day one. Yet America only figured this out around September 2006. Not after Katrina, not after no WMD, not after the economic policies written by Daddy Warbucks. It was before the Foley scandal, too. It just kinda happened. And the big revulsion - the one that should be in place now - has yet to happen. What I mean is that just as Imus and Coulter are now exposed for being the kind of people I knew they were years ago, so too Bush & Cheney will be exposed... it's this freakish new law of perception... but I don't know how or when it happens.

It does fall under the Tipping Point kind of dynamics, for sure. It's frustrating to me because until the point tips, the slimeball in question is given honor and access. Imus and Coulter were given respect, Bush and Cheney still are, yet when the point tips people will see them and revile them just as I see them and revile them now. Yet my revulsion, before the point tips, is heretical and unacceptable.

This is why it's an irony that Vonnegut dies the day a slimeball is unfrocked. Because Vonnegut saw the truth and was able to tell people about it. Yet his books were often and still are banned and reviled. While people like Imus walked free, Vonnegut's books were even burned. But I, like Twain and Vonnegut, can look at these ironies, inconsistencies and infuriations and find solace in the attempt to tell the truth of it all.

Clifford Geerz dies

Oh my! See the obituary from Princeton.

He was the father of modern, decent, anthropology. Oy.

Pic from the Princeton obit.

Hunter S. Thompson, 67, Author, Commits Suicide

Tuesday afternoon, in the middle of the conference, I finally get to look at a Times - the only source I have when I'm in hyper-focused conference mode - and I get floored by Thompson's suicide.

Hunter S. Thompson, by all accounts, was a paranoid degenerate and deeply weird person who nonetheless had an immense effect on my writing and literary worldview. Even deeper, I felt a kinship with his outlook - that were he to have been born an orthodox Jewish redhead in 1972 he'd be me instead of being a godless coked-out gun-crazy superfreak. The converse is true, because I felt he was a brother under the skin, I was long afraid that there but for the grace of God go I. I feel the same way about Belushi.

Thompson was an outlaw, a unique voice, and one of the most important writers in the 20th Century. His concept of "gonzo" journalism is based on the phenomenological philosophy of the breakdown between subjectivity and objectivity - his most important contribution to literature, epistemology and that rarefied nexus between ethnography and journalism that the greatest non-fiction writers inhabit.

I was very worried that his suicide came from the inevitable depression inflicted on we who see too much - a depression that may have been fueled by his mythically enormous drug consumption. Thank God, sorta, it turns out that he gunned himself down for all-too-understandable reasons for someone of his Libertarian freaky-deaky worldview: he was getting too sick.

We didn't think he was going to die quietly. A profound egotism drove his appetites for narcotics, pornography, guns, explosives, the fourth amendment, Freedom and is the very basis of Gonzo Philosophy. It's that same egotism that drove him to go out in a blaze of glory.

The gifts of family and God that I was given have kept me away from that egotism and those appetites, but I still mourn the loss of a person who spoke to my mind with an eerie resonance.

Extracts From Adam's Diary

In my senior year of college, when we needed to find quotes to put next to our pictures in the yearbook, a literary snob friend of mine said that the only legitimate quotes were those we found ourselves when reading or listening to songs. Getting quotes from a quotebook was not proper. Yes, she was an English major. I agreed in principle, except of course that I read quotebooks for fun so, by Talmudic logic, I was fine.

Ironically, I did have a quote from a story that I would have loved to use but I couldn't find it in time. Ten years, and one internet, later I can find the quote and broadcast it to ya'll

This is from Mark Twain - the only decent 19th Century American writer (who I am glad to say is not only better than Melville and Hawthorne but could also probably thrash them both in a barfight) - from his short story Extracts From Adam's Diary (about Adam Harishon and eating meat):

It was against my principles, but I find that principles have no real force except when one is well fed

Go Twain!

Postcript on Derrida

As an anthropology student in a comp-lit dominated department, naturally I needed to read Derrida (luckily my mother, a Comp Lit professor, had a copy in the home). Anyone who went to college with me, and even people in outlying states, heard my voluble tirades against this overwrought con-artist.

His death (the New Republic entitled their obit/study "The Death of the Author") has brought all the penny-ante academists out of the woodwork (myself included) to sound educated by giving an opinon and interpretation of this Frog of One Color.

Today's times has an op-ed by a Williams professor (What Derrida Really Meant) who claims in his first paragraph:

Along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, who died last week in Paris at the age of 74, will be remembered as one of the three most important philosophers of the 20th century. No thinker in the last 100 years had a greater impact than he did on people in more fields and different disciplines.

Normally I was going to let Derrida's death slide into the inevitable obscurity but that first sentence got me a-raging all over again.

In the top 3 of the 20th Century, eh? I guess if we limit philosophy to things that have nothing to do with reality (and therefore leave out the scientists, psychologists, and statesmen that made more impact - leave out Einstein, Freud, Jung, Feynman) then we still have more important and influential thinkers.

I never thought I'd say this, but Foucault is far more important than Derrida ever dreamed (and did). And I hate Foucault.

Bertrand Russell? John Dewey? Santayana? I guess they didn't have much impact as Derrida... if you're a professor at Williams. But deconstructionism is an invalid philosophy, a philosophical gumdrop in a world that demands bread.

{2009 Pic update: Surreal Derrida from this philosopher pix site. Isn't the internet great!}

The Sandman

Long have I been interested in Neil Gaiman's Sandman. I can't say it is the best graphic novel ever made, that distinction goes to the yin/yang of the Dark Knight Returns and The Watchmen (the debate over which one is greater is unwinnable). Yet the Sandman transcends that all because it was commissioned by DC comics to be a standard piece of work and it just blew the doors off. It raised the level of graphic novels to the level of mid-range literature; there's more in there than in Dickens and Melville (although Gaiman would hate me saying that).

Anyhoo, I have wanted to acquire the books for some time now, and nobody sells them for under $20 in good condition. Three weeks ago, in a stroke of good luck, some dude was selling the collection of 10 books for under $10 each - and I was able to grab it before the first bid with a 'buy me now' (for those who frequent Ebay, this is a great thing... true, some ebay ghouls out there might advise waiting until the last moment and snipe some fool... but I am often that fool and auctions are for chumps).

For fellow fans:

• Sandman FAQ [Alas, dead]
• The Annotated Sandman [Link Updated]

(Pic link from here, found in 2009)