Gaudy Night: The Continuing Series - Me, a few months ago:

Here's a core truth I've noticed about the Real World: people are as outlandish as they can afford to be.

The Rocky Mountain News, yesterday:

GRANBY — A 52-year-old welder nursing a grudge against the town fathers and driving a bulldozer converted into a war machine ripped the heart of this high-country ranching town from its foundations Friday.

Among the structures destroyed or heavily damaged in a relentless 90-minute rampage were Granby's town hall and library, a bank, the town's newspaper, an electric cooperative building, Gambles Store, an excavating business and a house owned by the town's former mayor, as well as a concrete plant adjacent to the business of the man believed responsible for the bizarre assault.

I'll concede that authorities did not stop Heemeyer's rampage by reversing the polarity on his deathdozer. Otherwise, suggestive. (Via die puny humans.)

Support the Troops - Attn: Any Soldier lists the things our men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan can most use, from Under Armour HeatGear t-shirts to - beanie babies. There are unit-specific requests too. (Via Making Light.)

But I'm an Orphan! - Teresa Nielsen Hayden on a cheeky British plagiarist:

A student at the University of Kent who got zapped for plagiarism right before his final exams is suing the university for negligence, on the grounds that he's been cheating in exactly the same way throughout his studies there, and they've never said anything about it.

My first reaction was "Nice try, kid." On second thought, he does have a point. It's not enough of a point, but he has one.

And she's just getting started. Great stuff on the inadequacies of student handbooks, the methods of catching plagiarists and more.

Foods Touch - I don't think political blogger Alex Knapp writes about comics much, but he has a new item on the question of Superman's continuing relevance. Not a lot of detail, but he does demonstrate familiarity with the recent canon.

I Hardly Know Where to Begin - Heaven knows I'm not nearly as anti-liberal as I was, say, three years ago. I've come to appreciate nuances of liberal thought that defy the right wing stereotypes I held rather comfortably. But John Quiggin's most recent post on Crooked Timber brings it all back. It contains so many bad assumptions and begs so many questions, forms such a self-contained and highly-polished sphere of misconception that one can hardly grip it to refute. One can only marvel.

How Do You Spell Chutzpah in Arabic? - From Jim Lobe's column today:

Asked about Tenet's sudden resignation, Chalabi repeated those accusations, telling reporters that the CIA director's role in developing U.S.-Iraq policy has "not been helpful to say the least." Tenet, he added, had provided "erroneous information about weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to President Bush, which caused the government much embarrassment at the United Nations and his own country."

Mind you, Lobe suggests the "hero in error" was right in one instance:

Nonetheless, in at least one case, Chalabi's charge about Tenet's own role in faulty WMD evidence appears to have been correct. According to journalist Bob Woodward's new book, Plan of Attack, a critical moment in the run-up to the war occurred when Bush himself expressed doubt that the public would be persuaded by the CIA's evidence of the threat posed by Iraq's WMD.

"From the end of one of the couches in the Oval office, Tenet rose up, threw his arms in the air. 'It's a slam-dunk case!' the DCI said," Woodward reported, adding that Tenet repeated the phrase a second time when Bush asked whether he was confident about the evidence.

Ah, Good Times, Good Times.

Tenet - I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot about George Tenet's resignation over the next few days and weeks, some of which will even be true. I tentatively class Tenet with Colin Powell - men with more sense than the people around them but lacking the guts to go to the mat for their beliefs or walk away when it might have done some good. Note: I'm not saying Tenet did a great job managing American intelligence. But he does seem to have had a better sense of what was coming in Iraq, and a better appreciation of the true scale of the Iraqi threat to the US (minor).

This Is How Bad It's Gotten - From the Guardian:

Band member Mike Devine, from Bristol, said he had been approached by the officer and shown a copy of a text he had sent in April, which contained the words "gun" and "jet airliner".

The 35-year-old, who plays bass in a Clash tribute group called London Calling, had intended to text the lyrics - from the Clash song Tommy Gun - to singer Reg Shaw. Instead, he sent the message to the wrong number.

Avon and Somerset police said a Special Branch officer had visited Mr Devine after the person who received the message, sent on April 30, became concerned about its content and contacted police.

Mr Devine said he had been worried when an officer from the Special Branch confronted him at his office, and added: "I had no idea why they could want to talk to me."

The father of two said the officer had then produced a printout of the text message, which read: "How about this for Tommy Gun? OK - so let's agree about the price and make it one jet airliner for 10 prisoners."

We think we're good societies. Just societies. But we have Clash tribute bands run by thirty-five-year-old fathers. (With offices! we learn later in the article.) I wonder if they mumble the part about how "Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust." (Come on, Jim, a Clash tribute band necessarily mumbles all the words to ALL the songs!)

In Case You Forgot . . .

So I'm working the night shift here, and periodically stepping outside to try and keep myself awake. And while I'm doing it, I'm looking up at the big, bright moon in the sky, shining over the palm trees and the guard towers. No sooner do I step back inside than I hear the explosions-----BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Mortars, somewhere beyond the fence line. I guess they happen a few times a month--and of course, they're always at night. I imagine one of Sadr's little goons, setting his alarm clock to get up at one or two AM, and plodding out to his yard, digging up the mortar rounds, and then yawning while he aims them in the general direction of the post. And I thought my job sucked.

Ginmar's still writing, and still a must read.

Desire Under the Phlegms - I thought at one point that I'd do a whole review item on Grant Morrison and Chris Weston's newly-collected graphic novel, The Filth, but instead I'll just pick at one aspect of it that's nagged at me. For this site's non-comics-obsessive readership, The Filth is the hefty story of an operative who is part policeman and part garbage collector - his agency, the Hand, functions as something of the world's bureaucratic super ego. "We stop the world's back yard from stinking," as protagonist Slade's colleague Officer Nil puts it. When the world threatens to get too, well, gross, the Hand steps in to enforce Status Q.

The Filth is surreal, paranoid, Dickian, sexually explicit and, absolutely, the least erotic thing I've read in quite some time. It's a superb narrative of an extraordinary man trying his damnedest to hide in his version of an ordinary one. It's a fictive inquiry into, as Prince put it, "this thing called life," especially the conundrum of how we appear to be noble in reason, infinite in faculties, in action like an angel and all that, and at the same time, mired in icky stuff - sweat, piss, jizz and blood, poop, germs, snot, dirt, phlegm, rot et disgusting al.

I'm thinking this is a guy thing.

"Love has pitched his tent," wrote Yeats, anticipating The Filth's themes, "in the place of excrement." But Yeats was a guy too, just like Morrison.

My suspicion is that the ideas Morrison plays with in The Filth have a salience for men, especially young men, that they won't, in general, have for women. My guess is that most women, by the time they reach adulthood, have integrated the dualism of Spirit and "Filth" more completely than most men. They have to. A young woman has experienced monthly vaginal bleeding for at least a decade and anticipates several decades more of it. She either has given birth or has a very good idea what it entails. Social customs being what they are, she's probably cleaned more messes - done more laundry, more dishes, more toilets. Intimate with her mother's life in ways a son is unlikely to be, she is long over any shock at the idea that we are permeable bags of perishable fluids.

I watched my wife give birth and at last it came time for the dreaded e-word. Never comfortable with the idea, I had yet imagined that it would be done with something like an X-acto knife, and was surprised and vaguely nauseated when the OB/GYN pulled out what were basically chrome, sterilized pruning shears. And as the doctor, herself a woman, methodically cut through the perineum, single most wickedly delightful spot on the female body, I was thinking, more or less, "The Precious!" and my wife was thinking, unambiguously, "Oh thank God!" I know because I asked about it afterward. Her response was, of necessity, practical: she needed room to deliver the (bloody, icky) package.

I think men have the privilege of going through youth fairly "self-contained," anatomically. Sheltered. Desire drives them into engagement with "the place of excrement" and it's a shock. Suddenly we really want to "swap spit" and probe orifices and "exchange fluids," but it represents a loss of control and a breach of male autonomy. I can think of two artists, often considered "misogynists," whose horror is not of women at all but of male desire: the poet Philip Larkin and the musician Elvis Costello. (Mind you, in lesser talents what starts as horror of male desire can get offloaded onto women and become misogyny proper.) Women seem to have varying attitudes toward intercourse during menses. Men seem to find it intimidating, at least the first time.

I'm generalizing terribly. I'm not saying women "don't get it" - if anything, I'm trying to avoid saying men get "worked up over nothing." I'm hoping that female comics writers - mostly bloggers, given that this is a blog - will tell me how off-base I may be on their reactions to the book in question and the topic in general. I also wonder if they'd agree with me that the book, for the most part, lacks compelling female characters - women who read more like women than a man's idea of female types. It seems to me that just about every female character in the book, from Agent Nil to Mother Dirt, is either a man's dream or nightmare of women. (The one exception is probably Sharon.) Tim O'Neil famously praised The Filth at the expense of Morrison's superhero comics, but on the matter of female characters specifically, I think practically any of the women in New X-Men were more fully realized than the women of The Filth, even vampy Emma Frost.

Don't get me wrong: I enjoyed The Filth a lot. The art is wonderfully detailed and grungy. Morrison is a great chronicler of goodness - one of the hardest things for a writer to be - and his protagonist, Slade/Greg Feely, is a touchingly good man. I felt for him. I would definitely recommend that you read this book.

Of course, I'm a guy.

Quick Blogwatch - Brooke Oberwetter on the Army's latest stop-loss orders. Tyler Cowen on a Brad Delong health-care proposal. Your chance to vote for me in a contest I deserve to win dammit! Eat, Shoot and Leave THIS! (Okay, not a blog item. Work with me here.) Matthew Yglesias on the Vast Persian Conspiracy. (Also not a blog item. Just be grateful I give you stuff to read.) Micha Ghertner on innovative approaches to teen chastity, which leads you to the indispensible, and not remotely work-safe, TechnicalVirgin.com.

There. That ought to hold the little bastards.

UPDATE: Fixed a typo pointed out by a couple of kind souls.

A Fanboy's Placeholders - The Post Style section's lead story today is a profile of cartoonist Will Eisner.

Meanwhile, Steven Grant attacks my "literature of ethics" thesis regarding superhero comics. Fair's fair, and we'll come back to it, but Steven, bubelah, since you call my claim a "blogmeme," even though its chief vector of transmission has been an essay in a non-blog webzine, how about tossing a link to this here blog in your article? Do it for a fellow former GEnie user, man! I know it was more than 10 years ago, but I even said nice things about Whisper. Meanwhile, Dave Intermittent has some reactions to Steven Grant's reactions. I promise more of my own when I'm not dashing off to work.

Back to Business - A couple of you have written to express relief that there has been so much light-heartedness on this blog lately since, as Chad Orzel put it, "You were starting to scare me for awhile there." Well, it's been fun, but we have to get back to dealing with the imminent collapse of civilization as we know it. Do note that there's an Article Rating module to the side where you can vote on its quality. Excerpt:

In another scene in the movie, Shrek and Donkey need to be rescued from a dungeon where they are chained against the wall. The rescue is conducted by Pinocchio who is asked to lie so his nose will grow long enough for one of the smaller cartoon characters to use it as a bridge to reach Shrek and Donkey. Donkey encourages him to lie about something and suggests he lie about wearing women's underwear. When he denies wearing women's underwear, his nose begins to grow.

But there's much more on this crucial topic.

Haiku U - And now for something completely different. I'm still getting haiku mail. I appreciate it. But instead of continuing haiku talk here, I've opened a comment thread on my LiveJournal for further haiku discussion and disputation. Go! if you want to.

A Different Fanboy's Notes - Nate Bruinooge goes on vacation, reads comics, tells you what he thinks of them. Everything from Blankets to Runaways.

Remember when we used to do that here? We will again, by gum!

Big Time - Time Magazine chose Radley Balko to joust with the food nannies. He took his Big Media money and got himself some guest bloggers for the week. An excellent crew too. Keep an eye on the Agitator. You should anyway.

Endless Summer - Hey, the haiku mail is still coming in! Chad Orzel, showing the social graces that marked him for a career in the sciences, writes

My flippant response to people quibbling about line lengths and syllable counts in English "haiku":

It's a perfectly good haiku,
when written in Japanese,
asshole.

Later,
Chad

Mike "Epoch" Sullivan, who appears to be blogless these days, writes

The best haiku EVER, courtesy of a rather silly web game called "Kingdom of Loathing," is:

Hippopotomus,
Antihippopotomus,
Annihilation!

Ahem. Anyhow.

As someone who studied a fair amount of Japanese, it always bothered me that people got into the whole 5-7-5 thing and did nothing else with haiku -- forgetting the season imagery and the concept of creating a sort of momentary thought, rather than a narrative. Also, it endlessly bothers me that the work "haiku" is treated as two syllables in English while it's three mora (I've never heard the word "onji" before, but maybe it's more commonly used in poetry) in Japanese.

But, since, I've come to feel that the American/English haiku has a valuable place in, well, if not poetry, doggerel. Basically, it's a lot like a limerick: very strict in structure, short, and not restricted in content. But easier to construct, and primarily humorous. It seems to serve a purpose, as long as it's not taken very seriously.

Alan Sullivan sticks up for 5-7-5 on Fresh Bilge (see comments), but he's just wrong. (At least, he overstates the case. I think Epoch has a point that the 5-7-5 structure works as a vessel for self-aware humor.)

More e-mail, this time from David Moles:

In college, I briefly flirted with the idea of trying to write a Shakespearean sonnet in Japanese. Trying to write iambic pentameter in a lanaguage with no stressed syllables is tough. The ABAB CDCD EFEF GG rhyme scheme, in a language where what sound a word ends with depends on its part of speech (and, in the case of a verb, on its tense) was also kind of a problem. I gave up when I decided that if I kept at it I was going to turn into one of those Borges characters who entertains himself by analyzing the effect on chess of removing the queen's rook's pawn, or some equally pointless habit... English-language haiku has always struck me as being the same kind of exercise.

Heh. He said Borges!

One more thing. Mike's e-mail reminds me of an exercise from the first poetry class I ever took: write a "quiet" limerick - one that plays against the expectations of the form. My effort cheats, using an identical where a rhyme should be, but what the hell:

Silent Night

Now the sliding glass doors have rung closed,
and the shoppers are handbagged, and hosed,
and are out at the curbs.
Only muzak disturbs
the hush of the mall when it's closed.

Go Pistards! - This morning I e-mailed my favorite hoosier, Radley Balko, to apologize for switching my allegiance from the Indiana Pacers to the Detroit Pistons for what I considered sound reasons. With Evil back in the NBA Finals after their Game 6 defeat of Minnesota, the overriding imperative of Stopping Evil meant wanting the Eastern Conference champ to go into the Finals as rested as possible. That meant the Pistons needed to win tonight. And they did! Had Indiana won Game Five, I'd have rooted for them instead.

As a bittersweet bonus, rooting for this edition of the Pistons is sorta almost like rooting for the Washington Wizards, as explained by Michael Wilbon last week. In some alternate universe where the DC franchise makes the right moves at every turn rather than the wrong, substantially the same guys would be wearing Wizards teal and - what's that other color, tan? into the championship series.

Anyway, since Detroit has a whole bunch of baskets they never got around to using against Indiana, they should be in great shape against the Forces of Darkness.

Holiday Mail - Readers write about things other than the fate of Western Civilization - that is, about the sort of stuff I've been blogging about this weekend. Bruce Baugh:

Granted that I'm not having one myself this summer, but...right on, brother. The whole point of a burger is to get good meat, good condiments, and do very little to it. People who want to fancy things up should go play with something else.

I have spoken, and it is so.

He must be right because he agrees with me!

John "Zizka" Emerson on haiku:

My favorite is Jack Kerouac:

"Useless, useless --
the warm rain
drives into the sea".

Kerouac did tons, of varying quality. Gary Snyder did a few. Snyder, who studied Japanese diligently, admired Kerouac's haiku. Neither one counted syllables at all, IIRC. Reznikoff did lots of haiku-like poems. So did Pound, of course:

"The apparition
of these faces in the crowd --
petals on a wet, black bough."

I agree that matching the Japanese is impossible and undesirable, but the general idea of English haiku is good IMO. I actually improved the Kerouac slightly. I can't remember the exact original. The Pound one I sometimes quote without the "apparition". I know why "apparition" is there, but somehow it seems clunky. I have no ethics, really.

I instinctively rebel at the first line of the Kerouac example, which is not imagistic in the least. But the truth is, when I've read classical Japanese haiku in translation, they too seem to make room for abstract ideation. It may be that their Western forebears have pushed the primacy of the image farther than they themselves would have taken it.

Ultimately, this is my problem with haiku: I don't believe in the primacy of the image. Perhaps say, rather, the sufficiency of the image, its overriding importance, in poetry. I believe images are important building blocks of musical thought, but just as you can have a pile of bricks that are not a house, you can have one or two or a hundred perfectly realized images that are not a poem. There have been individual writers and entire movements in poetry that disagree violently - even contemptuously - with me on this. While I regret that kind of esthetic strife, these people are fuckwits.

Okay, that was a little strong. But they're incorrect.

I do like a lot of Gary Snyder poems, though, especially the famous one about cutting trails for the forest service.

Jesse Walker reminds me of his own adventure in 5-7-5 "haiku," and adds

The best high-school-formula English-language haiku ever was written by a classmate of mine:

Five four three two one Counting back from seventeen That makes poetry?

© 19__ Jesse's classmate.

Mmm! - DIana Moon offers a hamburger recipe for when you absolutely must cook your burger inside - e.g. when there's a blizzard or you live in Manhattan or both. (I can't really think of another reason.) Scroll down to "Gourmet Hamburger Recipes."

Meanwhile, could someone wise in the ways of Blogger's new interface help Diana finally get her item-specific permalinks working? I'm given to understand it's possible now, and she's writing a bunch of important, link-worthy stuff, so it would be nice to be able to actually link it. Contact her at the e-mail address on her website.

I Get It Now - Your Talking Dog has been blogging in "haiku" all week, I finally realize. Call me a pedant, but I hold with those who argue that the true form of the classical Japanese haiku in English is not three lines of syllable count 5-7-5.

Why do I disagree with your ninth-grade english teacher? Because there's a lot your ninth-grade english teacher never considered. The classical Japanese haiku is written in seventeen onji. Onji are sorta kinda syllables, but with some twists. There's a "syllabic 'n'," for instance. Japanese onji are, unlike American syllables, uniform in length and stress. Japanese tends to take more syllables to get across the same message than English does. Do literal translations of the great haikuists, like Basho or Buson, and you'll rarely require 17 syllables to do the job. You can usually do it in ten or twelve.

Next, the line count. Japanese haiku traditionally comes in one single line of characters. Also traditionally, there's a "cutting word" - a word that serves as punctuation - after the fifth OR the twelfth syllable. English doesn't have a system of cutting words. It has punctuation instead, and in verse, line breaks. So to account for the fact that the cutting word could come in either position 5 or 12 of seventeen, scholars like Arthur Waley created the 5-7-5 schema - an adaptation that was too long, too punctuated and too heedless of the verse characteristics of english, which is based far more often on stress or a combination of stress and syllable count than syllable count alone. (The 20th century mania for syllabics is something of an Asian import, actually.)

So how should English-language haiku be written? Trick question! They shouldn't be written at all. Same goes for sestinas. (We don't just pick on the Japanese forms around here.) But if you insist, as I did in my misspent youth, write your haiku more or less strictly as follows:

* about 2 lines (1-3)
* heavily punctuated between lines (dashes are cool; so are colons - if you're writing in three lines you can go easy between any two of them; you can of course punctuate virtually)
* about 7 total stressed syllables (5-9), unstressed syllables as necessary
* one of your two lines should be substantially longer than the other, in terms of stress count, e.g. 5:2 or 2:5 (obviously, if you're writing a one-liner or three liner, this changes)
* don't forget your season words! unless you're writing senryu.

Examples:

     dusk
not the ice cream truck
 . . . wind chimes

the heat
cinderblocks in the dirt yard

Those were the two of mine that I remember. Here's one of the few genuinely great haiku in English, by the late John Wills:

dusk   from rock to rock a water thrush

Note that the greatness of Wills' composition inheres substantially in his explotation of its Englishness. The whole poem is a single headless pentameter (five iambic feet, with the first one dropping the unstressed syllable):

DUSK [...] | from ROCK | to ROCK | a WAT | er THRUSH

The poem is bounded by a symmetry of rhyme. The short U-sounds of DUSK and THRUSH book-end the poem, and open and close our view of the action. The short O-sounds of ROCK, ROCK and WAT pace the bird's flight.

At five stressed syllables and a single line it comes in on the low end of the classical measurements I outlined above. But one wouldn't want to read it out of any canon. If you insist on trying to match Wills, read some books toward that end. If you want to see someone get even more wound up about the topic, read D-squared.

UPDATE: Minor edits. Fixed the misremembered word in one of the two haiku I remembered. Also, got rid of the "Japaneses" in para two.

Wow - Fresh Bilge reprints a powerful letter to the editors of a Vermont paper from the mother of a gay son. The letter dates from April 2000. Excerpt:

Many letters have been sent to the Valley News concerning the homosexual menace in Vermont. I am the mother of a gay son and I've taken enough from you good people.

I'm tired of your foolish rhetoric about the "homosexual agenda" and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant. You have been robbing me of the joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny.

Read the rest. It's a stunning, flawless composition.

You have the audacity to talk about protecting families and children from the homosexual menace, while you yourselves tear apart families and drive children to despair.

"Other stories pushed Pentagon assertions so aggressively you could almost sense epaulets sprouting on the shoulders of editors." - Obudsman Daniel Okrent of the New York Times offers his own retrospective on the paper's prewar coverage of Iraq's WSD capability. Excerpt:

No one can deny that this was a drama in which The Times played a role. On Friday, May 21, a front-page article by David E. Sanger ("A Seat of Honor Lost to Open Political Warfare") elegantly characterized Chalabi as "a man who, in lunches with politicians, secret sessions with intelligence chiefs and frequent conversations with reporters from Foggy Bottom to London's Mayfair, worked furiously to plot Mr. Hussein's fall." The words "from The Times, among other publications" would have fit nicely after "reporters" in that sentence. The aggressive journalism that I long for, and that the paper owes both its readers and its own self-respect, would reveal not just the tactics of those who promoted the W.M.D. stories, but how The Times itself was used to further their cunning campaign.

It's a Party Party Weekend - For your grilling pleasure, particularly if you are a frou-frou sort, MSN offers 10 gourmet hamburger recipes. All of them assume you've bought into the Official Ongoing Ground Meat Scare and will cook your burgers for 14 to 18(!) minutes. They tend to involve things like cilantro and porcini mushrooms. Also, the interface for the story is itself a bit much. Me, I'm a burger minimalist. Give me good ground meat and a hot grill and even ketchup and mustard are more than I require. The planet's best foods - a good burger or steak; fresh berries - taste best unadorned. IMHO, you know? For my burgers, I like a rub, comprising

1tbl black pepper
1 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp mustard powder
1/2 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp marjoram

Mix it up good in a custard or tea cup. Dump onto a plate or cutting board and spread evenly. Dredge burgers on both sides. Grill until medium rare, or, if you insist, longer. Serve on a soft, whole wheat bun.