Books are People Too

In the present day, for a great many who have embraced the profession as their own, writing has become a service industry, not unlike kitchen work or delivery. I have experienced this; it can pay well, it can be stable and secure, it can even be a half-decent way to spend one's day, so long as there are not too many days when it feels like a real job.

But writing ad copy or rephrasing quarterly reports is not "writing" in the Shakespearean, Thackarean or Hemingwayesque sense, but rather "communication" on the scale of runes scratched on tree bark to send a message that a man is stuck in the mud, as in the Kipling Just So story.  Communication is repeating something that we already know in a clarifying manner, in the most efficient way possible, to enable a process, such as sales, or decision-making for a company reading said reports, that has nothing actually to do with either the message or the method. This is what many writers who are caught up in the "service industry" logic fail to distinguish; that while thoughts are communicated through writing, the point isn't to communicate those thoughts to a specific person, or even a specific kind of person. The point is to communicate those thoughts because they need communicating, listener be damned.

I am commonly exhorted by various voices to write content that publishers will want to publish, because it will make them money. To get published, this content must not offend; it must not contain a possibility of being misunderstood; it must not be about subjects that are too "unfriendly" to the largest number of people; it must not depict persons in a way that would be considered demeaning, or punching either up or down, or across either. In short, I must write what already exists, but in sufficiently different words so that I am saying things that are safe and have already been said, but in a way they haven't been said before, or at least in a way that most people don't know hasn't been said before. Oh, and despite the resistance against "punching," it must be conflict-driven. That's very important.

It was not necessary for Shakespeare to write this way, as essentially there were no rules except for the ownership of the Globe, who did not care about anyone's hurt feelings — largely because the audience was free to express this by actively throwing things, with the approval of the management, that being the state of the theatre at the time. "Be an actor my son, but be ready to dodge."

More importantly, Shakespeare could not have written for me, personally, or anyone alive right now, no matter how many marketing experts he might have dug up like Yorick to tell him how to create conflict without punching down. Yet miraculously, he managed to write jokes that I have understood and laughed aloud at, in rooms of people not laughing, there to see Shakespeare the way they went to church, unaware entirely of the subtext. The funniest thing about my seeing Twelfth Night, my favourite Shakespearean play, is all the laughing I'm going to do in a near silent room. It says something, I think, about the failure of writing as "communication."  More often than not, because of the listener, the jokes don't land, however "there" they are.

Furthermore, this concept of target-audience engineering need not examples from so far in the past to show how clumsy is their design. To begin with, there is the great mass of authors post-1950 who simply fail to make inroads with the modern reader... but obviously, we don't suggest that Capote, Vonnegut, Plath, Ginsberg or Thompson shouldn't have bothered writing because, without their historical weight, they'd have faceplanted as authors if their first books had been published today. No, we're perfectly willing to make concessions that for them, in their time, without the engineering, it was okay to just go ahead and write whatever the hell they wanted, confident that today they'd still have readers, without the need of a 2026 publisher.  Of course, none of these writers were any good, right. I mean, none of them were worth reading, since they did punch down, and up, and sideways, and at themselves, with no regard whatsoever against an audience that had no rotten fruit to throw. We don't read them because they were good, no. Obviously not. We read them because... because... wait, why?

Well, I suppose because we can be BIG enough to grant a freedom to the dead, to write what they like, that can no longer be granted to the living. That seems plain enough.

To end with, I'll casually point out that no one in any era worth their sand, the term that used to apply to a person having value, waited for permission to write something. Nor did they pay any attention to approval, bans, refusals to publish or the prospect of being "disliked," which apparently is the worst thing that can happen to a person. If they could not make themselves heard one way, they found another. The only reason we know who Charles Bukowski was is because, well, he just did not give a fuck about who read or did not read his work. He did not write for other people. This is the point I started with. Writers do not write for readers. That's the role of the communicator.

Communication with words as a service industry is about being paid to write content that one is told to write. We are given a job, much like being asked to make a Monte Cristo sandwich; that job involves the arrangement of words to ensure, at their best, that they can only be understood one way. If I say that this company last year broke ground on a gas plant outside Sundre, and that the plant has reached a point where a definite date can now be named for when sour gas at that plant will begin processing, then the date matters, the clarity of what's going to happen on that date, how much of it is going to happen, where the supply will arrive from and where the finished product will go, how much it will cost according to the present figures, how much the predicted future will adjust those figures and so on, then all of this has to be crystal clear if the goal is to publish so an investor who might want to visit and tour the plant already has the correct information at their fingertips. The Monte Cristo's cheese has to be cooked just so, the bread dipped in the right amount of egg, and browned, just so, and cut just so, and plated just so, and on, so that it looks precisely like every other Monte Cristo this kitchen will make today, regardless of the cook making it. Communication, when done well, is not subject to the writer's footprint; it is best if the writer of the communication doesn't have one, since that will only muddy the message.

Human beings are not clear. They are muddy. Their motives are never straightforward and singular. Communicative writing is not natural because it requires us to think in a manner that diminishes the nuance that we are comfortable living with every day. The challenge, then, is that no matter how clear we make a thing, no matter how we flatten it into the most boring passages ever about the future of a sour gas plant, someone will misunderstand it because we are not built to all read things about gas plants or taste Monte Cristos in the same way. This makes communicative writing extremely frustrating, because no matter how one tries, the reader just won't have it. This is the point of Kipling's How the First Letter Was Written, because it invents a story about the invention of writing and the story is about how writing as a technology is a total disaster. Despite the effort to write a message for his daughter to carry, Tegumai only discovers that everyone misunderstands his efforts and his daughter Taffy is dearly tormented for his efforts. It is the most important story for a writer to read, I should think, because it carries a message a writer should never forget.

Do not write for other people, unless disappointment is your aim.

Mind you, I say this as I write for other people.

This right now, that I am doing, is communicative writing. I am writing a blog post explaining something I think deserves to be explained, but I fully expect it not to be understood, because it is not the nature of people to learn, appreciate or grasp things they do not already believe.

With my last post, I talked about my tendency to argue in association with a coffeeshop/bookstore that I ran for a brief time. I'll throw in that I began arguing in that other great crucible in which we're all forced to swim during our youth, school.  School for me was a situation where 29 trapped people, and me, would get into these arguments that I would impose ruthlessly, as was my nature then and is my nature now. I remember one of these was the argument that a hero "is a brave person." The class agreed. I did not. I did not believe then that it was so and 45 years has not changed my mind about this. A hero is a person who is there, who doesn't think, who does what's next, then afterwards generally thinks, "Oh my gawd, I could have died doing that. What as I thinking." That's my point. No thinking in the moment is involved. No thinking, no time to be "brave." One is too busy acting.

For years after school, here, there, I'd meet people who'd known me and disliked me who would come up to me at a mall or a restaurant or on the street and act like we'd always been old friends and isn't it great and how is your life going, that sort of thing. And quite often they'd say something to me like, "I remembered that thing you said (eight years ago, when we were 15) and you know what, you were right. I only realised it a long time later, when (tells story about how they came to the same conclusion). I just wanted you to know."

When this happens often enough, one begins to realise that a lot of people argue against a premise not because the premise is false, but because they just haven't had enough personal experience to know one way or the other, so they assume the safest course of action: that "Something I don't personally know is necessarily false." This actually makes a lot of sense to me. As a writer, it makes the point that the argument written down isn't an argument for the time it was written, but for all time. That anyone, at any point in their life, might come back to a thing written again, only to find that now it makes sense, when once it did not.  This is a very strong reason to write things that won't be (presently) understood by people. Because we live in four dimensions, not three.

Writing, understand, not being communicative, can be as muddy as the writer wants it to be. A given sentence can have two, three, even four meanings. Take my phrase about Charles Bukowski:

"The only reason we know who Charles Bukowski was is because, well..."

These 12 words are enough, because the above, unlike communicative writing, is not clear. It doesn't tell you who Bukowski is; it does not define him as a poet; it does not explain, for those who do not know the reference, how it is the right reference here. Nor does it say if I personally like Bukowski. None of this is communicated. Intentionally. Because those who know the poet already know the story; those who don't know him won't benefit from the story. My liking him or not is irrelevant to my knowledge of him, and my awareness of how he's the right modern person to be inserted here.

Omissions like this are not accidents. Writing intentionally plays mind games; it sets out to do far more than lead you down a garden path to a plot twist, it willingly makes you believe that you're in a day garden when actually you're blindfolded, it's night, there's a cliff a foot to your left and no, I'm not the author of this tale, I'm the devil. Writing is about deliberately laying a story out in such a way that it can be read today with this impression given, only to find oneself waking in the night and thinking, "Wait a minute... what happened to the dog?"

These things are not "plot holes." More often than not a "plot hole" is a reader that has failed to pay attention (though, granted, with a lot of films, that is not always so). These things are deliberate to make the reader see the world in a manner that isn't meant to communicate on a conscious level, but a subconscious one. It is dirty pool, it is mendacity and brainwashing and a hoodwink. It is also delicious, which is why it continues despite all the other things we might do instead. We like to read, because it offers a cunning puzzle that cannot be found elsewhere: a human puzzle, where the rules do not reflect what's nice or normal or approved. The best books are not the ones we liked best. The best books are those we cannot make ourselves stop thinking about.

If there is a book you might hate, such that you find yourself railing against it and it's author with a vehemence that is unlike you, that is because the work got under your skin. That's what makes it a good book. You fought that book and you lost. And you don't like that. Too bad.

Books, like people, do not exist that we may approve of them. They exist with the ability to act freely upon the reader, just as your neighbour is free to do with his damned garden hose, or the co-worker with their need to slap a sticky note on your computer screen, or whatever miserable, terrible, sometimes beloved things that human beings do to human beings. A work of literature needs no more justification for its presence than does any human not actively bothering you on this planet... because whatever you may think, the most awfulest book by Ayn Rand or Robert Heinlein does not have the power to grab you and make you read it. But, like people you don't like, you still have to live on a planet where these exist. Worse for you, we continue to generally believe as a culture that it's inappropriate to burn these things, just as it is people... and in fact, that is what Heinrich Heine wrote in 1821: "Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too."

Thus, when we write, it is not another bit of non-offensive fluff that fails to punch that we strive to write, when we think of ourselves as writers. No, just as I taught my daughter to use her fists, so that she could defend herself if the time came, I give my books fists too, so they can punch as hard as they need. And if the reader doesn't like that...?

Well... fuck the reader.

Zen and D&D

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Persig, is a semi-autobiographical description of a trip taken between Minnesota and Montana.  Using the motorcycle itself and the trip vs. the author's perspectives upon artistic and intuitive philosophy, the book draws a distinction between the analytical vs. the romantic worldview.  The trip itself is romantic; the author reconnects with his son, he is travelling to Bozeman where he previously lived and taught at university (and had a breakdown).  Keeping the motorcycle in working order, the forced experience of travelling on a motorcycle and dealing with the real world, these force values of logic, precision and understanding of how systems work.

I was told to read this book by many of my friends when I was in high school, as well as several older persons with whom I had a continuous, intellectual relationship.  They felt the book would give my 17 and 18 year old self insights that they felt I needed... but when they would describe the nature of the book to me, in my mind it fell into the category that included The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castenada, which I considered a load of self-reflective junk thinking (and still do) and Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, which predates the same themes as Catcher in the Rye and which I consider to be Hesse's worst book.  I did not, as a young man, consider the world to be "superficial" and "unfulfilling."  I considered the problem to be those rigorous systems interposed between me and the world, namely school and family, which fought me at every turn as I struggled to free myself, embrace and fall in love with the world.  Thankfully, I succeeded.

I don't think Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a good book.  I think it has the idea of being a good book, but the author's ultimate attempts to reflect Phaedrus from Socrates wallows in neo-romantic counter-culturalism, exactly the culture that I intellectually grew up in with the late 70s and which I rejected out of hand because I felt it was going — accurately — absolutely nowhere.  As masturbation always does.

But, about seven years ago, with little else to do, I finally read the book; I did not find a regret that I hadn't read it at 18.  If I had, I would have infuriated my friends by refusing to find in it anything of value.  What I did find at the age of 53, however, was a framework for positioning two worlds within a narrative, which struck me as brilliantly intuitive for something that, publishing his book in 1974, Persig wouldn't know about.

Dungeons and Dragons is usually viewed as a separation from reality, just as we normally do with most forms of media intended to entertain us.  Less than an art film or an art book, like Zen et al..., D&D is not seen as particularly expressive of anything.  It's for "fun."  Just as most movies are, particularly those of the stripe that feature a lot of noise and arm swinging.  There is a fixed sentiment in the minds of most players that D&D is escapist, and that it ought to be, and that in fact any attempt to veer away from that escapism is viewed as ruining the game and further, making it some version of either squick or player abusive.

I have long argued that any performance-based activity is, necessarily, not only creative but ultimately informative.  Though we may resist the idea that D&D is making us better as people through teaching us how to manage others, even our friends, or work collaboratively together, or gain insight into history, physics and, most of all, ethics (my gawd, no!), the truth is that we are affected by our game play.  Granted, for those who are encouraged or empowered in some campaigns to act out, abuse others, self-aggrandise or otherwise behave like poopy-heads, the effect isn't necessarily positive.  Comparing D&D to film, we might rank such game experiences on a par with abusive forms of pornography or episodes of the Angry Video Game Nerd.  Nonetheless, the argument made here is that we're affected positively or negatively, but that we're affected.  To pretend otherwise is to turn a blind eye to one's motives.

One assumes that those with sight prefer a positive effect.  Which, logically, provokes a discussion and interpretation of how this is done... which brings us back to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Both sides of Persig's book — the technological and the romantic — evolve essentially from the same deeper truth — that the actions we take are based in our desire to obtain things, whether material or not.  We seek peace, we seek stability, we seek a better car, we seek a chance to visit a distant land... a process that is rooted in our biological need to sustain ourselves and survive.  If I do it now, sitting at this computer, or some other place, churning out food in a restaurant for clientele, the gifts I use for solving problems and meeting obstacles do not change when I am playing a game of D&D.  I am still me, seeking, acting in accordance with my ethical framework and striving to overcome.  D&D is not an escape from life... it is life in a different form.

Conversely, arguably, life itself is D&D.  My fighter character and an NPC decide to have a baby; I and my partner decide to have a baby.  My fighter has to find his way out of a dungeon; I have to find a job.  My fighter has decided to journey 500 miles to get the thing he wants.  I want to drive 500 miles to get to a D&D game.

There is no difference.  Out here, in the "real" world, the difficulties are more complex, the NPCs more difficult to predict, the choices more varied, the consequences of my actions more concerned and ultimately more final, but the principles by which I think my way through these difficulties are the same as I display when I'm playing.

This is the purpose of my novel.  It is auto-biographical, though I lie where I want to make the story work.  It is a philosophical investigation of life, but primarily in relating how the strategies employed here also apply there.  It does discuss my manner of DMing; but in exactly the same way, it describes my manner of being a friend and a co-partner with my other half.  

It's funny.  When I posted the first 6,000 words into ChatGPT and asked the program, "What is the book trying to say?" I nailed the answer right off.  I suppose, because it's not hung up on literary rhetoric.

Incidentally, "Zen" refers to a state of mindfulness and awareness, such as we might have about ourselves when we are in the world, thinking about how a D&D character might handle this problem, and while we are playing D&D, thinking about how a real world person might do so.

Howard and Conan

So, at the present, I am reading Robert E. Howard's Conan the Cimmerian Barbarian: The Complete Weird Tales Omnibus, through audio book, 35 hours, 850 pages, with 22 short tales, novellas and novels, and one short fiction historiography of The Hyborian Age.  In addition to earlier works that were Conan-like by Howard, I've completed two Conan novellas: The Phoenix on the Sword and The Scarlet Citadel.  I'm about a fifth of the way through.

I'll talk more about Conan at a later time, but for the present I'd like to discuss the introduction by Finn J.D. John, who edited and annotated the omnibus.  I think it's relevant that R.E. Howard original "sword and sorcery" writings predate those of Tolkein by some years, with nearly all the originals published in Weird Tales being published by 1935.  The Hobbit, we may note, was published in 1937.  Conan is utterly unlike any other character in human prose to that time.  My own take on Howard's work is that he was able to mesh the supernatural genre of pre-1925 with the pacing and tempo of pirate and adventuring stories from the 19th century to his day.

H.P. Lovecraft's first appearance in Weird Tales came in 1923, and no doubt was an influence on Howard; they were personal friends, though pen-pals, communicating with each other that endured until Howard's death.  But Lovecraft's style is scientific and intellectual, a sort of combination between the adventure of Jules Verne and the supernatural of H.G. Wells.  Point in fact, most "supernatural" tales over the hundred years between Shelley's Frankenstein and the 1920s featured the appearance of some strange entity within the ordinary framework of the normal world.  Stoker's Dracula is uncovered by ordinary persons passing letters between them, until confronted by the evil; similarly Stevenson's Mr. Hyde is again encountered by anything but adventurers.  This can be said as well for the Invisible Man and Dorian Gray.

This is all turned on its head by Howard, who depicts his main character as a violent, sword-swinging, primitive killer, who does not ponder the meaning of evil when he confronts it, but instead either kills it or finds himself unable to do so.  In my opinion, because Conan is far more the "murder-hobo" type, who rises to be a king, it is far more Howard's work that sets the tempo and the inner life of D&D than Tolkein, who is filled with rather passive beings who stumble around getting out of trouble in a very fairy tale manner — that is, with author intervention in the form of magic objects and plain stupid luck.  Bilbo finding the ring, for example.  Conan rushes at the enemy, far more reminiscent of the characters in Treasure Island or Ivanhoe, who choose to fight before they think.

Here, I'm not going to discuss the writing.  Truth be told, I consider Tolkein a better sentence-maker; I do not consider either Tolkein or Howard to be "good" writers.  My scale for what makes a good writer includes a lot of people that the typical English-lit major chooses to set aside, because by gawd, none of us will ever write like Shakespeare, yes?  That would be impossible!  So we must only include writers in our "good" lexicon that we may conceivably someday match, such as the dreck of Harper Lee and Truman Capote.  "Lower the bar!" cries Academia, "Let it include Sylvia Plath!"  And so it does, achieving the goal of not scaring the be-jeebus out of first-year students.

But I digress.

As John writes,

"Conan's fame, and Howard's legacy, would steadily grow in the postwar years in spite of reviews ... but the supercilious disapproval of the literary establishment would cast a long shadow nonetheless.  In fact, some of Howard's biggest fans — among whom must be counted L. Sprague de Camp, though many modern Conan fans would rather not — felt a sort of compulsion to temper their complimentary remarks about his work for fear of being themselves judged for appreciating such low-brow trafe."

Love John's choosing of "trafe" over "tripe," simply because it's such an obscure English word, demonstrating the writer's own need to put a flag on the hill and say, "See, I'm talking about Conan, but I have a vocabulary."

I don't disparage Conan, nor seek to separate myself intellectually from it, because it has as much to do with "good writing" as does a hack saw.  His work is a tool designed to convey an idea; it's not mucking around with words to make pretty things.  It's scope and influence on writers these past hundred years dwarfs so-called better writers, who have done precisely nothing to create their own genre of literature, and even less to make themselves readable.  Therefore, do understand that I'm saying the reader does far more good to read Conan than to read of the Grey Mouser, and far more good for their communication of ideas to deconstruct the adverbs and adjectives of Howard than those of Tolkein.  Howard's phrases are raw power, picking the story up and hurlng it into the future, while Tolkein's phrases are pet dogs chasing their own rumps.  Damn the "quality" of it.

It is shocking to remember that Howard committed suicide in 1936 following the death of his mother from tuberculosis.  From Wikipedia,

"On the morning of June 11, 1936, Howard asked one of his mother's nurses, a Mrs. Green, if his mother would ever regain consciousness. When she told him no, he walked out to his car in the driveway, took the pistol from the glove box, and shot himself in the head. He died eight hours later, and his mother died the following day."

Thus the entirety of Howard's time to publish Conan stories consists of the narrow window between 1932 and 1935.  Given that though I've only read a small portion of the original stories, with DeCamp's and Lin Carter's fingerprints, it's plain already that he was improving considerably as a writer over his earlier works.  I look forward to seeing if that continues as I read the omnibus; I suspect it will. What a loss, therefore.  What a loss.

 

Robin Hood

 "Story, at least in the European tradition, requires conflict.  Characters must be flawed, they must make mistakes, their opponents must get the better of them.  Things in some way, shape or form need to get bad, need to entertain uncertainty.   In Return of the King, a conventional story, Denethor's actions must bring Pippin and Gandalf and Faramir low, in order to create the tension that will be relieved later in the story when the conflict is resolved.

"However, these basic mechanisms of narrative tension are at odds with the needs of propaganda ... the subject of propaganda has no arc but upward.  They begin strong and stronger, they crush all that oppose them, their opposition is flimsy and victory is trivial."

Dan Olson, Trimph of the Will and the Cinematic Language of Propaganda

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown, in Nottinghamshire, published in 1883 and written by Howard Pyle, is an awful book.  Interest in the character of Robin Hood had grown all through the 19th century, starting with his appearance in Walter Scott's 1819 book Ivanhoe, and Pyle — an American — was significant in cementing the version of Robin that dominates the 20th century and the present.  All the jargon about robbing from the rich and giving to the poor was central to The Merry Adventures, which pulled together multiple myths about the band of outlaws in Sherwood Forest that firmly established that list of familiar names.  Pyle invented none of the characters, so far as I know ... but he expanded them, give them additional parts to play in other stories while rounding out the merry band.

However, the stories are simply ... bad.  Every fight goes on and on for an hour without either contestant succeeding in striking the other; Robin is forever blowing three blasts on his horn to "summon five or seven score men" to overwhelm his enemies; there's never any doubt that Robin's going to succeed at some effort — and worst, in nearly ever story there's hardly a conflict at all.  By pretending to be someone other than himself, largely playing the part badly, Robin merely catches people unaware and then robs from them.  It's so obvious where the story's going that it's painful to sit and wait for the resolution to arrive.

Yet every adventure is describes as great and greater still, with none of the Merry Men ever being in real danger, not for a second.  It is as described above:  a really awful sort of propaganda for an England that's as interesting as a pasteboard sign outside a failed restaurant.  It's been something of a trial to bear up, to reach the end.  And that says nothing of the terrible, terrible verse that every character sings at every opportunity throughout.

There is nothing so boring as winning.  If anyone doubts me, get yourself on audible and have a listen.  If you're paying your monthly fee, the book is free; it costs no credits.  The audio version is not quite 11 hours.  I'll bet most couldn't get through two.

_____

If you wish to comment, please write questions, ideas or opinions to alexiss1@telus.net and they will be posted on Saturdays.  Feel free to introduce new subjects or present your own work. 

If you wish to make a donation to Patreon, it will be greatly appreciated and help with costs for illustrating the Streetvendor's Guide. 

The Limit

Setting the menu aside and getting to those meat & potatoes.

While I pursued an undergraduate degree in university, I didn't choose to go on.  I have no masters, no doctorate to my credit; I've never written a thesis or a dissertation, and had it picked apart by the gatekeepers of knowledge.  I have much respect for those who have — therefore please understand that it's not my purpose here to disparage higher education or the choices that we make in deciding our fate.

I enjoy the Why Is This Happening? podcasts with Chris Hayes of MSNBC.  The guests tend to be highly educated and experienced; they tend to be persons at the forefront of their professions or civil servants whose past put them in a distinct position giving them tremendous insight.  Best of all, the subjects are varied and unexpected, as the guests come from all walks of life.

A recent one featured Natalie Wynn, of the youtube channel Contrapoints.  Once upon a time I was a follower, but as Wynn became less and less substantive, in favour of boosting her ratings by pursuing the dramatic, I ceased to listen.  I've heard her give interviews before; off the cuff, I find her wearisome.  Judging from her earlier work, there's a mind there, but it's one that needs preparation to be interesting.

This post is not about her, or her background — nor is it about her politics, which I won't deconstruct.  Rather, it is about a random inoculous thing she says about eight minutes in; I quote it.

Chris Hayes: So you decided that philosophy was not for you; but what did you like about it?

Natalie Wynn:  I really liked being a philosophy major when I was an undergraduate.  I think philosophy’s more fun to study at the kind of 101, 201, maybe even 301 level.  It’s fun to get this grand tour of intellectual history when you’re reading Plato one week and the feminist philosophers the next week – and then post-modernism.  It’s very exciting to go through all this for the first time, and you feel the kind of thrill of your mind expanding.  But by the time you’re considering writing a dissertation, and it’s like, “Okay, which three paragraphs of Heidegger am I gonna spend the rest of my 20s writing about — oh, that’s, um, that’s a different situation.

Hayes: Totally.

I find this very funny.  It's not meant to be.  Wynn is entirely earnest about her reasons and there's no doubt this is exactly the experience that thousands of doctorate-students have about their field, especially in their 20s.

Only, there's a discontinuity that slaps me right in the face.  Do you see it?  There's an intrinsic flaw in the university system, right there, bold as a neon sign.

Understand ... universities and other post-secondary institutions are there to teach people.  The process of obtaining a doctorate is a specialized learning exercise, in which students demonstrate through various means their ability to understand the material, defend it, and thus meaningfully provide it for others, most probably students, upon request.  In non-STEM fields, particularly, the probable usefulness of a doctorate of the humanities or social sciences is to be a professor ... therefore it stands to reason that other professors should be the gatekeepers on whether anyone should be a part of that cabal.

Being an expert on Heidegger, and specifically upon an important turning point in Heidegger's work — or anyone's, really — is critical if you're going to make some other person understand why and how those three paragraphs are fundamental to philosophy.

Only, do you know who did not spend his 20s focused on three paragraphs of Heidegger?  Martin Heidegger, who wrote all the paragraphs — and thus spent his life advancing the field of philosophy by writing on everything that interested him, and not just how to explain other people.

The creation of any Heidegger is not the goal of higher learning.  This is brilliantly demonstrated in the obscure 1970 film, Getting Straight, in which the main character is working to defend his master's thesis in English Literature amidst a series of university protests against Vietnam, ending with the campus being put under martial law.  The final critical scene occurs when the main character Harry is interviewed by a tableful of professors, who quibble over Fitzgerald's work, The Great Gatsby — specifically, if you can believe it, the significance of Carraway's attraction to the character Jordan Baker in the novel.

This was a classic "three paragraph" fetish among literalists in the 1960s; I'm tempted not to go into it, since if there is an English scholar in the crowd today there's sure to be the sound of "Oh, that bullshit"  in the room.  Simply put, the old saw that Carraway was queer for Gatsby.

I have no idea what the hell they teach now on that.  I don't know if this is still embraced by scholars or if the world has come to its senses ... or if it's still a final exam question.  I saw the movie when I was very young, definitely before being old enough to enter university.  I'd read Gatsby by then; and I knew all about the violence that took place on school campuses in the late 1960s.  Harry, the main character, spends the movie breaking himself against the anvil of preparing himself for the cross-examination he's going to face, while everyone else he knows is breaking themselves against the political reality of free speech versus military force.  It's absurdist (which is why Wikipedia calls it a "comedy").  Harry walks past armed soldiers, to meet with old men to discuss fictional characters, and ultimately whether or not one fictional character was, in fact, gay.  Harry doesn't believe it; but then he's faced with one professor who argues Carraway's queerness to hysterical levels — because obviously it proves Fitzgerald was gay.  It becomes painfully obvious that if Harry wants his ticket, he will have to sacrifice his beliefs ... and worse, the mountains of research he's done regarding Fitzgerald — which he has to pretend he doesn't know.  And he tries.  He tries really hard.

And then ... he just loses it.

There is a kind of insanity in what people believe ... and what they think they have to believe, especially about things that'll never be known.  The process of deconstruction has its limits.  Nitpicking about any three paragraphs, for any length of time, isn't much of a life.  We do better if we attempt to write as Fitzgerald or Heidegger did, than concern ourselves overmuch with what either meant.  It's well enough if we come away from such things understanding what the mean to us ... and help others understand what it might mean to them.  But if we think it matters what it means absolutely, well ...

That way madness lies.

Mallet Whacking

After some introspection about Saturday's technical problem of connecting the player and the dungeon, I realized that I'd failed to mention craptologist Joseph Campbell's theories on mythology, with the hero's journey neatly shown below:

For the record, I loathe this diagram, I loathe the poor, cherry-picking scholarship that led to this diagram and I loathe the second-rate scholarship that has led to many ignorant junior college English professors embracing this diagram.  I'm not the least sorry if any given reader finds this insulting. Campbell was a hack, right up there with other pseudoscientists like Wilhelm Reich and Erich von Daniken.

But of course, if you promote a theory that every myth corresponds to one ideal, then sell this theory to a million would-be myth-makers, the result is an endless string of shit Hollywood films about chosen messiahs that are called forth to an adventure because it is 'fate,' preferably with characters who are orphans and yet somehow specially manufactured so as to be the only proper saviour.

Thus I did leave out the most obvious and annoying solution for the player + dungeon problem . . . make one of your players "the one" and then pour convenience, ability and invulnerability all over the character like a big sploosh of anointing oil, guaranteeing success in all endeavours.

For the few young here who haven't had time to know better, I warn you away from theories that try to hammer human culture of any form into a single mold.  The result in the end always turns out to be an unsightly mess mashed into a round hold by a wet, dripping mallet . . . but we shouldn't expect that to keep some 'scholars' from trying.  The world seems much simpler if it is neatly packaged up in a bow, even if it takes 200 pages of incomprehensible language to 'prove' that it is so.

The Original Fantasy

"And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it.  I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."

Matthew 16:18-19, The King James Version

"And when we reached the first step of the stair
It was white marble, polished to such gloss
That, even as I am, I saw me there;
And dyed more dark than perse the second was -
A calcined stone, rugged and rough in grain,
And it was cracked both lengthways and across;
The third step, piled upon the other twain,
Seemed all of porphyry that flamed and shone
Redder than bright blood spurting from a vein,
And this, God's Angel held both feet upon,
And on the threshold of the door he sate,
And that seemed made of adamantine stone."

Canto XI:94-104, Dante's Divine Comedy, Purgatory; translated by Dorothy Leigh Sayers

Begging the reader's indulgence, I wish to give a small 'geography' lesson.

Film and everyday culture has traditionally proposed that, within catholicism, that moments after passing away the first thing that you'll find yourself facing is the Gate of St. Peter, described above by Dante.  Naturally, this is all folk tales and fun, so we have made much mock of it in the last century.  Some depict an endless line at the gate; others the possibility that 'failing' at the gate involves a trap door and so you're dropped into the other realm in a wonderfully comic shock. It has long been a western notion that there's a conversation that you're bound to have with St. Peter when the time comes, where you'll explain your actions, give Peter and God a good talking to about the mistakes they've made or simply moon the bastard for all the crap you've had to endure.  But you don't have to worry about any of this if you happen to be an expert in parkour - because then you'll just leap the fence.

If we adopted the world of seven centuries ago, however, the time of Dante, you might be surprised to find yourself nowhere near a gate, but in fact at the mouth of a river - an earthly river, in fact.  The souls of the good were supposed to gather at the mouth of the Tiber, below Rome, at the infamous port of Ostia . . . at one time, the busiest port in the world, this being where grain was unloaded from Egypt to feed the enormous population of Rome.

This assumes that you've been a good and repentant Christian; if you haven't been, you'll find yourself on the banks of the River Acheron, waiting for the Demon Charon to ship you over into hell - and meanwhile you'll be pestered by clouds of stinging gnats.  But let's be generous.  Let's assume you've at least - as many say they will - repent at the very last moment, on your deathbed.

So there you are in Ostia, with all the other shades that have died.  You haven't any substance any more, your 'body' does not cast a shadow and there's not very much to do except speak to some of the others who are also waiting there.  You might, if asked, take up an instrument (which you'll be surprised to discover you still possess, if you're a musician), but for the most part you're too anxious for that.

You're waiting for an angelic pilot who will return with a boat that will take you completely to the other side of the world, the antipode of Ostia.  This turns out to be quite seriously in the middle of nowhere, a long, long way east of New Zealand, a lucky call for a church and Dante who did not live in a world where New Zealand or Australia were known to western Scholars.

That's 41.74 S, 167.76 W

Finally, the angel shows up - and takes hundreds with him, but not you.  Then this happens again and again.  The decision-making process does not seem based on first-come, first-serve.  You begin to realize that the leaving it off until the last minute idea seems not to be working that well.

Don't misunderstand me.  There's a reason why, on this blog, I spell it 'gawd' and not 'god.'  I'm a sinful bastard, quite ready to pay my coin to Charon and let havoc progress from there.  All I'm suggesting is that there was a rhyme and reason the manner in which mythical constructs are built - and be reassured, there is no more complicated and complex fantasy landscape than that of hell, purgatory and paradise.  And here Dante codified it all up for us.

At last, you get a ride.  The angel wills the boat around the world at unbelievable speeds (not being limited by physics) and you find yourself at the shore of purgatory.  And there, no, I'm very sorry, you do not see a gate.

What you see is a beach and a lot of reeds and a fellow who doesn't even happen to be a Christian. This is Cato of Utica, called the 'younger' to separate him from his great-grandfather.  Cato is 49, impatient, stern and anxious to get you off the beach and on your way, since there are others coming.  No, he isn't here to listen to complaints.  He speaks and you find yourself jumping at his tone, hurrying on your way up to the first terrace of ante-Purgatory.

Yes, that's right, you're not even in Purgatory proper, yet.  You're lucky, though, for the first terrace - the worst - is for those who were once part of the church but were excommunicated.  These poor schmucks have to spend 30 years for every year of falling away from the church wandering endlessly about the terrace . . . wandering, wandering, wandering.  Not you, however.  You're not of their breed, so you climb your way up through the nooks and crannies to the second terrace - and there, you learn you are among the indolent.

That is, you've waiting your whole life to get your shit together - and lucky for you, you did at least manage to do so before you died (you're not in hell forever, right?).  Unfortunately for you, however, a great mood of melancholy overcomes you and you flop onto your ass, your arms resting on your knees.  You are tired, oh so tired.  The sun is terribly hot.  Slowly, you crawl away, getting behind one of the great rocks on the terrace, where you find some shade - and there you pant, languorous, up to doing very little.  After a time, the sun moves and you do too, keeping in the rock's shade, waiting for the sun to set.

And this you do for the number of years that you have lived your life up until the moment of your death.  Twenty years, fifty years, eighty years.  Lax, winded, lolling, prostrate, disabled . . . and waiting.  Waiting with nothing to do and only other helplessly tired, formless souls to keep you company, all of you too tired to do more than contemplate your state.

Here you stay, waiting for the long years of your life to pass, until finally, after all that, you may yet get to see the gate described at the top of this post.

Here, too, I leave you, to think about Appendix N, and the contents thereof - a lot of cheesy, second-rate writers of the last century or so, whose context was so distantly remote from the time in which your characters live that their characters might as well be space cowboys.

I can't honestly recommend Dante.  He is a bitch to read, entirely because he is so far removed from our present experience, even our ideas about life and death.  I cannot manage him without notes and a lot of patience - that I don't suppose most have, unless they've adapted themselves to the understanding that there is a great deal to be gained in working hard for hard-to-acquire knowledge.  If you have not tried Dante yet; or if you have tried Dante and failed to get through (as I did, disastrously, my first three times), then I don't imagine you're going to take me seriously if I say, "read this."

After all, it's good to have a strong understanding of 13th century Italian history.  It's good to have a solid grounding in Greek and Roman literature, plus history.  It's good to have more than a passing comprehension of the church that once ran the western world.  Before I could, in all good conscience, recommend Dante, I would first tell you to read all of that.

This isn't easy.  This takes commitment.  You've gotta want it.

Then again, you've already got your whole life to sit around on your ass once, don't you?

Flimsy Screens

"But, I don't understand," said Dorothy, in bewilderment. "How was it that you appeared to me as a great Head?"

"That was one of my tricks," answered Oz. "Step this way, please, and I will tell you all about it."

He led the way to a small chamber in the rear of the Throne Room, and they all followed him. He pointed to one corner, in which lay the great Head, made out of many thicknesses of paper, and with a carefully painted face.

"This I hung from the ceiling by a wire," said Oz. "I stood behind the screen and pulled a thread, to make the eyes move and the mouth open."

"But how about the voice?" she inquired.

"Oh, I am a ventriloquist," said the little man. "I can throw the sound of my voice wherever I wish, so that you thought it was coming out of the Head. Here are the other things I used to deceive you." He showed the Scarecrow the dress and the mask he had worn when he seemed to be the lovely Lady. And the Tin Woodman saw that his terrible Beast was nothing but a lot of skins, sewn together, with slats to keep their sides out. As for the Ball of Fire, the false Wizard had hung that also from the ceiling. It was really a ball of cotton, but when oil was poured upon it the ball burned fiercely.

"Really," said the Scarecrow, "you ought to be ashamed of yourself for being such a humbug."

"I am - I certainly am," answered the little man sorrowfully; "but it was the only thing I could do."

And so it goes.

When I read this story again as an adult, which would have been in my late 20s, I saw something more in the above passage than the appalling behaviour that everyone sees in the Wizard.  I was told to read the book by a prof I had, Dr. Janos Svilpis, about whom I can find only one reference online, as J.E. Svilpis.  Ah, the days before the internet.  Dr. Svilpis, who also believed brilliantly that the Three Stooges were representatives of Russian Communism (Lenin, Trotsky & Stalin), used to buy his favourite students beer at a local tavern, where shelled peanuts were free and where the shells were simply swept off onto the floor, where they would be swept away at closing time.  The Highlander is gone now; but I shall always remember loud arguments with a paid-for beer in my hand, in a room that smelled of peanut shells, with the most gonzo prof I ever had.  Poor Svilpis.  He did not fare well when student evaluations became the norm.  He was far too 'out there' for students concerned about what jobs their degrees would buy.

Svilpis did not think the Wizard of Oz was a children's book, and as I remember he called me an 'idiot' for thinking that it was.  Well, he was buying the beer.  So I read the book and found that he was right.  Not simply because the poppy field is about heroin, though that's what everyone who reads the unexpurgated text discovers, but because there is a great deal about the idiocy of human behaviour to be found in L. Frank Baum's text.  In the scene above it is not just that the Wizard is a very poor person - it is also surprising that Dorothy and her friends were taken in by such pathetic ruses.

A dress and a mask?  A burning cotton ball?  A beast made of skins sewn together?  Are you kidding me?

The film production of the book recognized that there was an elaborate failure in the Wizard's design - but rather than exemplifying the book, the film set out to 'fix' it . . . so generations of people fail to understand that the Wizard is not hiding behind a curtain, but a mere 'screen.'  A screen so flimsy that a little dog could tip it over.  Here's the passage: "The Lion thought it might be as well to frighten the Wizard, so he gave a large, loud roar, which was so fierce and dreadful that Toto jumped away from him in alarm and tipped over the screen that stood in a corner. As it fell with a crash they looked that way, and the next moment all of them were filled with wonder."

Yes, Baum IS telling a tale about how charlatans set out to fool perfectly ordinary people, but he is also expressing the utter, blatant ease with which dumb, heartless and cowardly people are fooled.  Because it is pathetically simple.  So simple that people cannot tell the difference between human skin and many thicknesses of paper.

We shouldn't wonder that so many of the things we find and see in the world turn out to be garbage.  We shouldn't wonder when we are taken on a tour, only to find the trip isn't worth the money we've paid.  We should expect that the materials we've bought turn out to be mere reproductions of other materials, that were themselves reproductions.  We are so desperately in need of something new, we're ready to fool ourselves in buying anything . . . and then convincing ourselves for years after the fact that what we have is the real thing.  We're willing to saddle up, head out West and face witches, that belief is so strong in us.

What morons we are.

I was working on a passage last night about work - the work that it takes to make a world, and the work that it takes for that world to be something amazing.  Afterwards I thought about the passage, and chuckled, because I know that the last thing most anyone wants to do is work to make a world.  So I think, "What am I doing here?"

Perhaps the wisest thing I could do would be to build a flimsier screen.  When I have people tell me that the game is 'only' this or that, then clearly what is called for is the making of a flimsier screen.  It would be so easy to start another blog, upon another email address, and simply preach exactly what the hix in the stix want to hear - and then sell them sewn together skins and paper-mache heads.  I could build myself up by attacking day and night that 'tao fucker guy,' building up a sweet following that would buy my derivative crap. Because that's how it is with people.  Tell them what they want to hear, and let them walk themselves right into a witches' castle.

Dr. Svilpis must have messed me up though, because here I am writing a book telling people that they're going to have to work, and probably fail for a long time, if they want to have the thing they want.  That's no way to get rich.

Stolen Adventures

I have a confession to make.

Recently, in my online campaign, the party there was captured by bandits.  It's an occasional sort of event that happens to parties from time to time, and usually it plays like death.  The party gets angry, a few search for ways out of the mess, revenge is vowed and until the party actually frees themselves, it is boring as hell.

The context, or 'story' as some DMs call it, doesn't allow for much interaction.  The characterization of the bandits is usually wooden and horrifically cliched, making it impossible for the party to have any emotional response except resentment or embarrassment for having gotten themselves in this position.

Now, let me pause here and say that the famous Appendix N from the DMG is shit.  I don't mean that the actual content there is shit - though admittedly, some of it is - but that it is completely worthless for Dungeons and Dragons.  Everyone has read it.  Most of it is pulp fiction, with little or no literary characteristics, and while adventure rich the adventures themselves are for the most part as flat and staid as the above interaction of bandits.  Pulp fiction isn't meant to appeal to people with an education, it is meant to appeal to the necessarily ignorant - which Gygax and Arneson must have been, for just look at the shit they read.

(This is two posts now where I've crapped all over popular fanboy wank-text.  I am so having a good time!)

I think I was very lucky to have had parents who possessed a library of over 2,000 books, including a dozen different series including all the classical literature I could ever ask for.  But of course, a lot of it was completely out of my reach when I was only seven.  I was deep into atlases and geographical statistics at the time, but I didn't have the experiential context to manage a book like Robinson Crusoe, Moby Dick or even Call of the Wild.

Fortunately, my parents had seen to that too, and in the 1950s - before I was born - they had begun collecting a simplified form of those classics - namely, Classics Illustrated.

Now, I wouldn't suggest that the Classics Illustrated library - as comic books - is a stand-in for Appendix N.  I am suggesting that the length and breadth of deeper, well-written material kicks pulp fiction for six ... if you have the time, the patience and the wherewithal of mind to realize the possibilities offered - for staid and dull campaigns like the party being captured by bandits, among a thousand other possible adventures.

One of my favorite examples of the Illustrated library was one called The King of the Mountains (Le roi des montagnes), which is so wonderfully obscure now there isn't even a wikipedia entry for it.  That is, in English.  The French Wikisource has an entry.  The author was Edmond Francois Valentin About, who was extraordinarily popular in his day.

The story of the King of the Mountains is about an ordinary German botanist who, while collecting plants north of Athens in and about About's day, is kidnapped by a bandit chieftain in the mountains, who then insists that he must write a letter in order to obtain a ransom of 600 pounds.  The bandit, Hadji Stavros, is extraordinarily charismatic, strong-willed and temperamental, and enjoys the loyalty of a large number of men.  The bandit is also heavily involved in the business and maintenance of the countryside around Athens, even contributing some of his own money to the repair of roads (2,540 francs), as they had gotten so bad no one would travel them, "leaving us no one to rob."  The King has a daughter in school, upon whom he tries to impress virtue, and he loans his men occasionally to persons of his family to fight in war.

I stole all this for my campaign, and I'm confessing it now.  I am concerned with the party's perception of me now, since they seem to believe that I thought the whole thing up on my own.  However, as T.S. Eliot said, "Good writers borrow, great writers steal."  I needed something extraordinary for the adventure, something that climbed to a higher ideal, and Edmond About had conveniently supplied it for me.

Incidentally, when I grew older and obtained a copy of the original book - translated, I'm afraid, I don't read French - I discovered the plotline of the original book was very little like the Classics Illustrated comic.  This, naturally, was rather enjoyable, as it enabled me to read the book for the first time as a thing in which I did not know everything that was about to happen.  I would strongly recommend the book.

I would strongly recommend reading a lot of intelligent, complex, difficult, proven literature that's been created by dedicated authors these past 28 centuries of human development (and Gilgamesh too, if you must), instead of all the worthless crap that's been written since the 1940s.  If you did, you might begin to understand why I am so angry about the film that was described so nastily in the last post, and about the simple-minded fanboy culture that permeates the D&D world right now.

There is better than this.  Players deserve better than this.

If you are interested (and I have to laugh at how juvenile it is now), I did find a copy of the classic comic online.  You should be able to find a copy of the real book if you bother to search - and of a thousand other real books besides.

Toss Appendix N into the trash heap.

Why I Do Not Read Fantasy

Having read this insightful post from Dave Cesarano, from about 17 months ago, I find myself puzzling over the question, why is it I do not read fantasy literature.  Because I don't.  Last year, I read through some R.E. Howard, and was struck - as I am always struck when I read books from my youth - with how truly juvenile it is.  While the praises falleth like gentle rain, I admit that I do not decry the stories; they were instrumental in my intellectual construction.  I would not want to live in a world where they did not exist.  That said, I'll probably never read them again.

I will certainly never read Tolkein again.  The Ring, the Hobbit, the Simarillion - I'm done with it.  Except for the Hobbit, reading the rest was more like an academic project than a thing done for joy.  I've read the Hobbit twice (once aloud to my daughter), and I've read the Lord of the Rings once.  It took six stabs at it to get through the entire book, and in the two tries I've made since, I got bored and quit.  That's eight altogether ... about the same number of times I've read Thucydides' Peloponnesian War cover-to-cover.

I've read the Simirillion twice, cover-to-cover ... for anyone who's read Tacitus or Livy, the 'Sim' is a cakewalk.  Alas, Tolkein for all his 'greatness' is but a patch upon Herodotus, whom he clearly tried to emulate - the result is something like comparing Edward Albee to Shakespeare.  There's certainly cleverness in the former, but it just doesn't - well, it just doesn't.

Not that anyone reads Herodotus, mind.  Both Tolkein and Albee are accessible.

I'm not fundamentally opposed to present-day fantasy.  I don't care that its scatological or violent or pornographic.  I don't care that its loaded with nihilism or depressive images.  If you're going to promote the reading of Camus, you can hardly take a position against themes which develop nihilism.  There is no subject matter and no character that does not have its place in the ongoing discussion that is art ... and anyone who takes a position that this theme, or that theme, is unworthy of a novel is a fool.  Not merely wrong, and not merely misguided - but a figure of such complete ignorance as to warrant pity.  One gives like pity to the drunk on the morning sidewalk railing at commuters on their way to work.  The drunk is so utterly out of the mainstream of life, pity is the only emotion one can feel.

Thus my distaste for fantasy does not stem from its theme.  Much of it is badly written, but I've no doubt much of it is written well - perhaps as well as anything I've read, though I confess that I wouldn't know which author to point at.  I am simply not driven to investigate the matter, a drive I lost from the experiences I had when once I did care to open a cover or two.

I think, honestly, it has more to do with the place I am than with the writing.  I simply don't "fantasize" that way.  The attempts I've made now and then - including the ill-fated abortion I began last year - to write fantasy suffers the same lack of interest as reading it.  I am not tuned to investigate supernatural phenomena thematically.  It brings me no messages of clarity or methodology; it does not inspire me to live my life differently; it offers no insight into other human beings with its prism.  It offers all that a dead horse on the side of the road might offer.  The flies are intriguing; the shape of the horse in its mortality compels the eye; the smell both offends and activates the senses; one is driven to look, and one is driven to turn away.  The shock may induce vomiting; it may induce realization that life or beauty is transient.  In the end, however, it is only a dead horse.  There are ten million horses in the country that are alive, and all ten million will one day be dead.  The presence of this horse at this time is not very significant.  The corpse cannot instruct me how better to see myself in terms of my longer span of life; it cannot aid me in negotiations with my daughter or my life partner; it cannot solve the nagging problem that remains in chapter 29 of my book.  It is there, and real, and of interest to someone, but my feeling is rather that I had walked from my origin to my destination without it being there.

At the end of the day, I cannot point to a single fantasy novel, from Dante's trilogy and Milton's Paradise Lost, up through Baum, Barrie and Lewis, without feeling that they've ceased to influence me.  Perhaps, possibly, my mind remaining open, I will stumble across something written in the fantasy genre that will leave me a different person upon exit than I was upon entry.  In the meantime I shall rely upon some unread novel by Fitzgerald or Eliot to manage that metamorphosis.  I shall save fantasy for when I enact its presence in the shape of the god I play while dungeon mastering.  It seems better suited for that medium.

Girls Are Geniuses Too

I'd like to throw out a quick encouragement for readers to have a look at the new link on the right, Girl Genius.  This is something I started reading about two years ago; but after reading fifteen or twenty panels, I lost interest and quit.  There wasn't a lot of text, the continuity and transitions tended to be jumpy and overall the storyline seemed like it was going to go places that didn't interest me.

I was so wrong.

A couple of weeks ago, out of boredom, I took another crack at it.  Almost immediately after the point when I'd first quit, the story started to kick in, and after about forty panels I was completely hooked.  As a story it is crazy complicated, with many, many characters and a great deal of in-story references that must be grasped to get what the story is about (and the artist seems in no way willing to stop adding characters and complexity) ... but it is funny, clever, smart and the story lines do eventually get wrapped up - or so I assume, because its two weeks later and I'm still reading.

That's because the first panel begins in November, 2002, and the happily insane artist has been producing three panels a week for the last eight years.  I'm about half way through the story at present, thoroughly enjoying that I have another comfortable week or two of reading ahead of me.  The comic is still in production, so at some time I will catch up and find myself hanging like everyone else for my weekly fix.

Give it a good try.  For those fascinated by steampunk, this is required reading.  I kid you not.