wildcat

It is remarkable how thirty seconds of conversation with one's mother on the phone can reduce one to a haggard, much-put-upon teenager (I believe the word is petulant). It's inscrutable, it is in no way scrutable. I'm reasonably sure I can do marginally well at being an adult, thank you. In other words: I know she means well, but she can still drive me crazy like nobody else.

In other news: I'm doing the dishes, about to boil some eggs, and then I'm going to bake cookies tonight. I have to get to work on another draft of the story and possibly listen to some Joni Mitchell while I do it.

PDK's Ubik is highly recommended, but I'm not sure it's still in print despite being on Time Magazine's list of 100 most important books since 1923. I'm halfway through, and will be writing up an extensive post on the thing once I've finished.

Steph was asking me earlier about Batwoman, a "new" character who recently debuted as part of the Batman Family. Specifically, because Batwoman is being introduced with a flurry of media coverage over the fact that she's actually a lesbian (gasp)! More specifically, the powers-that-be have referred to her as a lipstick lesbian, which will obviously make her more palatable to the fandom majority (when they're not busy foaming at the mouth over how her dirty lifestyle will infect the children, apparently)

First of all, Batwoman isn't a new character; she's a revamped character from the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties - Kathy Kane was the Golden Age Batwoman, who fought crime alongside her version of Batman with her own sidekick, the original Bat-Girl. Bat-Girl (as opposed to Batgirl) was her niece, Bette Kane.

Frankly, despite the "Bat-," both of them took a "Bird of Paradise" view of their costuming which seems counterproductive to stealth warfare in the gloomy cityscape of Gotham. Typically, in love with Batman and all of that.

(Unless it was ghost-pencilled, this is some Dick Sprang action)

Somewhere along the way, Kathy was erased from reality and a different Kathy was around tangentially but never became Batwoman. Bette became Flamebird and occasionally hung out with the Teen Titans and had a better costume and more of a personality. The Batman TV show in the Sixties introduced the world to Yvonne Craig playing Barbara Gordon, daughter of the police commissioner, who became Batgirl; Craig made the character quite popular and she ended up in print, where she currently operates as wheelchair-bound Oracle, a keystone of the Batman comics. After Barbara changed identities, an Asian assassin girl was made the new Batgirl and had some memorable adventures. I liked her, although I think I preferred Craig's Batgirl. And for a long time, there was no Batwoman.

Until now. The new Batwoman is Kathy Kane, but is not. She's Kate Kane, which doesn't have quite the same ring to it, but she does have a better colour scheme:

(Pencils by Joe Bennett, courtesy of 52 #7)

Red & black work better for a Batwoman than red & yellow. Unfortunately, any hope that lesbian stereotypes would lead to practical footwear like combat boots, no, sorry, this woman fights crime in high heels. Man. And the mask is a travesty, it looks weird and makes her forehead ridiculously elongated. But she pulls out the tough-girl attitude with the almost silent fighting.

I'm purposefully ignoring the goofy angle on her breasts, which make me assume that her costume is composed of some sort of highly compressed styrofoam.

Now, it should be pointed out that Kathy - I'm sorry, I mean Kate - is not the first lesbian on the Moon in DC Comics. The first one I can think of specifically was Maggie Sawyer, a tough-talking cop who headed up the Metropolis Special Crimes Unit, a friend and ally of Superman. Only she moved over to Gotham City to head up the police-procedural comic Gotham Central which included a longtime Gotham cop character Renee Montoya - who came out as being homosexual as well.

That's Renee up there thinking "hot damn" as Batwoman makes the scene. She's since struck out on her own as a private detective and she's got a partnership going on with one of my favourite characters, the Question, but apparently Renee follows the early Lois Lane School of Comic Book Womanhood: she hasn't got a clue that Batwoman is actually her ex-girlfriend, socialite Kate Kane.

And the other lesbian characters prominent at DC? Holly Robinson is the longtime best friend and protegé of Selina Kyle - Catwoman. In fact, while Selina's off having a baby Holly has picked up the Catwoman costume (having been trained by, amongst other people, Wildcat), and she's maintained a long-term, committed relationship with her girlfriend Karon.

So that's four main lesbian characters and one lesbian supporting character and where are they all? Gotham City, the longstanding "bad city" (as Michael put it), which disturbs me with its implications (Over in Metropolis, the "good city," Jimmy Olsen has to make do with his cryptohomosexuality). Now, on the one hand this bothers me, but at least this way they can maintain the long-standing Batman/Catwoman sexual tension with Batwoman and Catwoman. I'm sure a lot of femslash will pumped out over the internet.

At least with Holly taking over as Catwoman - well. I love Holly. I loved the Ed Brubaker "noir" run on Catwoman with a fiery passion, where Holly was an integral supporting cast member with a lot of screen time and very little focus on her sexuality (while a decent focus on the fact that she had a sweet relationship with Karon) - she wasn't foregrounded as a lesbian, she was foregrounded as a sidekick, a fighter, and a potential hero on her own right. She earned her chops and taking over for Selina as Catwoman makes sense - she follows through with the destiny that the various boys to be called Robin never get to fulfill - they don't get to be Batman.

As far as Kate Kane is concerned - besides the fact that I still want to call her Kathy - I'm reserving full judgement until I've seen another artist draw her (although I'm still going to hate the mask and the heels) and seen her actually some full-on dialogue. At least she's not going to put up with the kind of thing that the Golden Age Batwoman laughed off all the time:

(Art by Dick Sprang)

I've been hard at work on this draft of "Yobbos," or whatever it ends up being called. I'm a bit at odds with two of the characters who have just shown up and seem to be ciphers, serving a function within the plot but not actually feeling - in any way - like characters in and of themselves. I'm going to throw out some character biography bits and try to build them up and then attack their scene with more fervor.

A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater's adaption of the Philip K. Dick novel was decent. I enjoyed it, mostly, although it dragged in places because it felt like the screenwriters didn't exactly understand the difference between a novel and a movie in terms of visual and kinetic movement. As well, they seem to have failed to set up the basic and most central conceit of the story: who Bob Arctor is, who Fred is, and what their connection is. Oh, the connection is there but they don't clear lay out the lack of connection between the two - I went and saw it with Steph and Michael and they never really got that the character wasn't capable of seeing the link. I only knew about it because I've read the bookjacket of the book and part of the beginning, way back when.

I was thinking about all that this morning and realized that I would have preferred Linklater to use the Blade Runner approach to adapting the works of Dick: basically, take the basic premise and plot of the story and then go off in a completely different direction. Blade Runner is similar to and connected to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep but ends up running at a peculiar angle to it. The thematic focus of the two entities are quite seperate. I think A Scanner Darkly could have used that emphasis, especially given that many of Dick's ideas are prototypical, and have been used and abused in hundreds of different ways since he wrote them originally; taken straight, the works of Dick fail to feel entirely fresh. The acting was all right but there's only so much Keanu Reeves I can take. The animation aspect was incomplete - it was necessary in some ways but completely unneeded in others.

1. After a full week's worth of work I took in Jason and the Argonauts with Michael, Jenny, and the Dans. The upshot was that Michael needs to wear pants so his legs don't get cold, we should have brought snacks, and MY GOD how gay was Hollywood way back when? I kept expecting the Good Ship Argo to randomly change course and head for Fire Island. As expected, Jason showed all the military tactical thinking and observation skills: "Our thanks go to whichever God helped us." Because apparently he was looking in the other direction and didn't notice that, you know, Poseidon himself emerged from the water and held off the tumbling rocks. You know: Poseidon. The God of the Ocean. Trident. He was right there, can't miss him. Also - when the bad guy seeds the ground with the Hydra's teeth (didn't Herakles kill the Hydra, in a completely unrelated myth?), and they spring forth skeletal Harryhausen stop-motion warriors who trudge toward you in a slow fashion, shouldn't you just leave? Rather than standing there slack-jawed until the skeletons randomly and abruptly stop trudging to rush at you screaming?

Wisely, after a couple minutes of accidentally falling off cliffs, the majority of the Argonauts abandoned Jason and went to hide on the boat.

And for the record, if you're hanging around with Hercules? He's extremely susceptible to reverse psychology and will endanger the mission. "Now, everyone, we're going to this secret island OF THE GODS, and we've been told to only take food and water. No touching whatever else is there. Do you understand? Hercules, do you understand?"

"Well, if there's some maidens there, I'm going to have my way with them."

"Look, just don't touch anything would you already?"

"Aye, verily, Mighty Hercules will touch nothing yadda yadda." (Mouths to other Argonauts: Jason's such a little bitch.)

Followed by Hercules and Hylas (brainy, effeminate intellectual to Hercules's brawny masculine muscle) accidentally stumbling upon the treasure OF THE GODS, and Hercules trying to take a "javelin" he finds there ("Actually," says Hylas, "Herc. You know. Based on the scale of this GIGANTIC pearl I just found, that's, you know, a BROACH PIN. Not that I'm saying your stupid, but you're never going to be metrosexual. This is probably why you don't get along with Jason, you know, the one always talking to our Goddess-shaped figurehead.") followed by THE WRATH OF THE GODS, in the form of a giant bronze warrior. For god's sake, DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING, HERCULES.

Oh, and eventually they find Medea, otherwise known as "No, wait, there are almost no women in this film and the guys are going to start to feel awkward what with all the brawny boys in revealing Grecian clothing and man-diapers and such," who is one of the sole survivors of a shipwreck that leaves her floating in the ocean with perfect makeup and hair. The other survivors are unimportant, so only Medea is brought up to Jason's "private quarters" - you know, that random bamboo screen you know Ocastus or Theseus had to drag up from the bottom of the ship to give the illusion that they all haven't been sleeping on the decks like mongrels and Jason has airs above his station. She doesn't really do anything but drug some guards, betray her nation, pray to Hekate, and somehow end up utterly lovestruck with Jason. Maybe Theseus should introduce her to his wife Antiope, one of the Queens of the Amazons to build up her self-esteem.

Incidentally, Hera and Zeus would never get along that well.

Next week we've got The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.

2. Breakfast this morning: Well, brunch, at ReBar. I had a steamer full of vegetables, rice, and grilled tofu served with a spicy peanut sauce, with a side of a half-avocado just a touch on this side of being ripe enough. Plus, peach ice tea. Followed by Amaretto and Tiramisu gelatto.

3. Accidentally ended up in Munro's and bought three books: A Modern Bestiary-- Ars Poetastrica by Alessandro Gallenzi, a book of poetry. America's Best Non-Required Reading 2004, edited by David Eggers with an introduction by Viggo Mortensen. America's Best Short Stories 2005 edited by Michael Chabon. This last one features yet another story from the Joyce Carol "I write Six Stories Before Breakfast, sitting on the loo" Oates canon, and "Bohemians," by George Saunders.

I haven't read a fresh Saunders in a while. I once got an A on a paper for Short Fiction Techniques which basically had Meringue kidnapping Saunders and tying him down to a torture device to extract important fiction-writing information from him.

4. Steph has apparently made it around the sun yet again, with no major ill effects. Somebody said Canoe Club, so I'm going to try and make it to that for a little bit tonight.

But seriously, I've hit page nine and this story is ABSOLUTELY SHIT. I have, in fact, coughed up better things. A more constructive use of my time would be belching the goddamn alphabet, because this thing is worthless.

Would it hurt the characters to have a goddamn real human reaction to something? Could they try speaking with different vocal patterns or something? How many times can I use the word "dust" before I want to shoot myself in the face? Why do all my stories sound the same?

And the worst thing is that I have to finish writing the thing because I can't leave it all hanging like this!

Richard Feynman's There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom (1959): "Feynman also suggested that it should be possible, in principle, to do chemical synthesis by mechanical manipulation, and he presented the 'weird possibility' of building a tiny, swallowable surgical robot by developing a set of one-quarter-scale manipulator hands slaved to the operator's hands to build one-quarter scale machine tools analogous to those found in any machine shop. This set of small tools would then be used by the small hands to build and operate ten sets of one-sixteenth-scale hands and tools, and so forth, culminating in perhaps a billion tiny factories to achieve massively parallel operations."

I'm not sure I understand the "Van der Waals forces" -- I'll need to ask Michael about that at some point. For some reason "dispersion forces" refer to particle attraction rather than the opposite, but I might not be reading carefully enough.

Thank you for providing completely random burly, good-looking bike mechanics that wander around the streets looking for people who are having mechnical failure problems with their bicycles and stalk the streets themselves, grumpy, in need of some repair.

Actually, this reminds me of that old Monty Python "Bicycle Repair Man" sketch.

Regards,
B.

After I got home from the bike ride this morning, the one with the spontaneously generated bicycle mechanic, I talked to Michael on the phone and we ended up driving out to Sidney to rescue Dan from his mother's house, where he was busy doing fifteen loads of laundry and in need of transportation back into Victoria.

The house was a thrill; it's the kind of house I imagine living in with Michael once we've become more successful and I've gotten over my starving writer phase, although there was only one guest room and I'd probably prefer to have two so that he could have an office and I could have a library-cum-writing-room to work away in. Actually, we'd probably need to have three such rooms, one of which wouldn't have any natural lighting in case Michael wanted to have a darkroom to develop photos in. But the principle is the same, and the house looks out over the water with a nice patio and lots of light. It's fairly small but well laid out for what we'd need, especially with a big kitchen, lots of counter space. The master bedroom's closets - there were three - each had curtain rods and green curtains rather than doors.

Sidney is a strange place to visit, like some post-apocalyptic world where only the Greek restaurants have survived, thrived, and become the dominant species; rabid packs of Greek restaurants herd across the lands, scavenging and consuming, farting souvlaki out into the ecosystem. That and bookstores, which are like a kind of mossy deposit that grows and breeds dust fumes.

We ate a filling lunch at this pub called the Rumrunner, after narrowly avoiding a Greek Restaurant stampede like something from Pamplona, and then wandered off to look in bookstores. I buy a lot of books, I know. When Christian's back on Vancouver Island we can, in Dan's words, "enable each other." I didn't find anything by Harlan Ellison, which is my current mission, particularly his collection Strange Wine; I'm looking for his story "Croatoan." Instead, I found a three buck copy of Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man at the Haunted Bookshop, and then I found a collection of comics by the french writer/artist Jean Giraud, more commonly known as Moebius. If I have some time I'll try and come up with a more expansive post about Giraud's work, as he is generally considered to be one of the greatest sequential artists in the canon.

(Image by Jean Giraud; ganked off of Lambiek.Net)

The Boarding House apartment needs some adjustments vis-a-vis bookshelves; I've only got three sets of shelves but that isn't nearly enough, and there isn't enough wall space to lean them up against without actually mounting some shelves directly onto the walls above. I'll talk to the landlord and see how he feels about the idea, he may even see it as a benefit.

I also need to think about weeding my comic book collection to make some more room on that side of the apartment.

Rebecca's Pocket: Articles & Essays:

"Heather Armstrong created Dooce.com in February 2001 'with a post about Carnation milk, it being the best in the land.' A year later she was fired from her job for writing about her co-workers, famously becoming the first person ever to be 'dooced': fired for blogging. In August 2005, Dooce is ranked #9 on the Technorati Top 100."
[found via Near Mint Heroes]

The evening is planned out for me: work away at the short story until this draft is finished, and then give it a read through for errors. After that I want to sit down and figure out some options and approaches to take with the rewrite. I've got concerns about the point of view, the tense (it's currently in past tense but that feels awkward at the moment), and I'm wondering if there's anyway I can explore the characters a bit more intimately without resorting to the roving omniscient POV I've used in other stories; I love that perspective but I don't want to overuse it. Possibly I need to make some fairly fundamental changes to the social structure and makeup of the story world itself because I suspect I may be falling into some foxholes and ending up trapped in them.

Going to try and pound out a couple more paragraphs for the Casualty Draft so that I can finally say thank-you-and-good-bye to it, start from scratch. I have a far better idea of the environment I'm writing about, and the characters are starting to form to a certain extent, but I think the perspective and narrative thrust of the piece is all completely wrong. "Gazelle" is a better working title, but even that may not last out the drafting process. I'm going to switch it to another character's perspective and I think I'll keep it in past tense but I need to figure that out once I've gotten a paragraph or two of Draft #3 finished.

Anyway: Christian's back in town, Michael and I took him to Koto last night and drank too much sake will consuming too each sushi and then we wandered through James Bay and bought him cleaning supplies. It's good to see him looking happy again, and he's got less than a month before he starts teaching classes.

"Bathtub gin," she said as she lay back in the femur-dry tub with the notable ring of soap scum running along the sides. "I want to be changed into bathtub gin." She wore the scandalous red top that hung off one shoulder to reveal her black bra strap, she wore the sharp black pants and the red sandals, sandals so red they belonged in one of the grimmer Hans Christian Anderson stories. "Look, look, this isn't exactly some shocking request, I want to be bathtub gin, I want to be drunk in the classical sense." She smirked, and then gave off a burpish chortle like a porpoise in heat.

Apollo sat on the toilet with the lid down. Apollo: God of Light, Poetry, Music, the Sun. You could tell all of this from the way his ringlets of blond hair burned and scorched the air, you could tell from the shimmer running down his chest, the way his treasure trail sizzled. He looked, for a God, distracted and disturbed. "What, bathtub gin? Not a flower, a river, a nice chianti?" Since he'd arrived in a bluster of divine music and the harrowing of walls by sunlight - yes, sunlight - Apollo had sat upon the toilet as though a throne and questioned her demands. "I could turn you into a lark if you like. Or a songbird of some kind. You seem like a mockingbird girl to me--"

"Bathtub gin." It was really very simple: turn her into bathtub gin already, be done with it, don't fuck around with heavenly eyes and a smile like that. She'd performed all the correct rituals, the supplication, the debasement of herself in honour of him and his. She'd summoned him from above, from Olympus, with seven hours to go before she was expected back at the office supply store and there was no coffee in the house.

"It's just that. Well. Don't you have better things to do than be an alcoholic beverage? Especially one of dubious, ah, lineage?"

"I should have summoned Dionysus, you know. Bacchanals and such. Sparagmos."

"Eating raw animal flesh can be a little..." He shut his mouth, opened it again, and shut it. He kept fingering the strings of his lyre in a particular way, a peculiar way, and he seemed more inhibited than he was supposed to be.

"Shouldn't you be trying to have sex with me or something by now? I know about Daphne. You, look, you gods are supposed to be prone to absolutely fucked up responses to situations and you're coming over all reasonable on me here. How difficult is this? I want to be bathtub gin. Wave your fingers and get out of here already."

"Daphne's old history. I have, as they say, grown as an individual, even if my father hasn't managed it. As it stands, you're displaying terrible hubris, miss, and can't call me down here to do whatever you please. I'm the boss of you."

"So punish me, already!"

"Punish you by changing you into, say, bathtub gin, right? You expect me to be predictably goaded into it like old Zeus or Hera. We Gods, we punish as befits the crime. We punish according to the laws of poetic justice."

"If Dionysus were here I'd already be smelling like juniper berries by now."

"Yes, I suppose you would. Very well: I shall punish you."

And he flicked his fingers, oh - snap! And thus, with the underwhelming song sung in Greek, she transformed, her limbs fluid, her hair dissolving, all of her essence dispersing into a pool of lite beer.

And Apollo was gone.

(c) 2006 Ben Rawluk, all rights reserved. // What, you expect great art? I wrote this in five minutes!

Well, damn. I sat and watched the first four episodes of Lost this evening, finally, after what seems like a long, long wait to get the disc. And, dammit, now I have to sit and wait until I get the next couple episodes. Because, narcotic-like, it's in me and I need to see where this goes. So far pretty much a series of What the fucks, but I get a distinct Prisoner vibe off the thing. I'm a little surprise that the more-or-less male lead, Jack, hasn't killed someone from the constant pressure to do something, because apparently he's the only one capable of dealing with anything. Kate, Sayid, Charlie, and Sun are pretty aces so far. Once I've watched more I'll write up something more interesting.

Drove up to Chemainus with Michael and Daniel today, had bland, bland food, and drove back. Saw North America's "biggest hockey stick" in Duncan on the way back, want to use that detail in a story sometime. It was hot, and Chemainus is boring. Once I was home I hard-boiled some eggs and had them for dinner.

The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad was terrible, although redeemed primarily because the Sinbad carried his miniaturized fiancee around with him in his pants. There was probably room for an entire harem.

Wonder Woman #2 (by Allan Heinberg on words and Rachel & Terry Dodson on art) is out later today, so I'm rereading the first issue. Random highlights...

DONNA: You all right?

STEVE: Well, I'm not feeling very manly or heroic right now.

DONNA: So, next time you'll rescue me.

STEVE: I love that you think we're going to live long enough for there to be a next time.

The new status quo being that Princess Diana's little sister Donna, who used to be Wonder Girl, is currently Wonder Woman; she and Diana's best friend Steve have been attacked by Diana's rogue's gallery: the Cheetah, Giganta, and Doctor Psycho.

Ah.

Giganta: "When Dr. Doris Zeul discovered she was terminally ill, she transferred her consciousness into the body of a size-shifting circus strong-woman and became known as Giganta." Because there's no part of that concept that isn't all weird and lovely. Circus strong-women! And her outfit's collar is lined with leopard print...

The Cheetah in her current incarnation is Doctor Barbara Minerva, as Diana seemed to face off against a lot of women with evil doctorates. She's an archaeologist who bargained away her soul to become an evil Cheetah-woman with immortality. Currently she's mostly human-looking now and strikes me as similar to the Silver Age Catwoman with her cheetahs-instead-of-henchmen routine.

Doctor Psycho (again with the evil doctorates!) is a creepy telepathic little person with a domination/submission kick going on and a desperate need to humiliate Wonder Woman. But she beats him every time.

Keep in mind that these are Diana's "Patriarch's World" foes, as half the time she's off fighting Ares, the God of War. And her arch-nemesis will always be the man-into-pig-changing sorceress Circe.

"It seems so pointless" - my mother on aging female reproductive system-related surgeries. Honestly, I'm always surprised - will always be surprised - when women I know feel the need to clam up if I'm around when discussing dirty female health things; I've heard so much, and it's so hard to explain where I'm coming from, how many women I've lived with and how up front my mother is. It's just your body. Blood isn't icky, I'm not some weak-willed willow tree fainting at the sight of it.

Wonder Woman was apparently delayed, drat. BUT, BUT, BUT, I picked up Matt Fraction's Casanova and Warren Ellis's Nextwave. Love! Nextwave is my own private super-hero team.

I miss Michael, we haven't had much time this week. And I want to write about robots. And I'm reading Jeanette Winterson's Weight, her retelling of Atlas and Heracles. I miss Joy, Matt, Steph, Caroline, Samara, and Tara. I want to ride my bike and eat escargots and drink too much gin while sitting on a riverbank somewhere, the sun setting. I want to lug my typewriter to dingy coffeehouses and type-type-type until the incessant clacking sends everyone away and I can smoke imaginary cigarettes because I don't smoke and I can write-write-write this next draft to "Gazelle" and send it backwards through time to be published in Amazing Stories or some other pulp magazine. Maybe I should send it to Michael Chabon and David Eggers when I'm done and demand that he publish it in his next McSweeney's anthology with the Mike Mignola artwork because THEN I WOULD HAVE TRULY ARRIVED. Fuckers.

Lost is some sort of obscene drug. Locke is shaping up to be the group's -- shaman? Wise man? Jack alternates between being the leader and an absolute grump. Sun and Charlie are probably my two favourite characters.

Michael's shaving my head tomorrow, then we're going out to a going-away thing for Kaz. I missed a bocce ball game in favour of work. I look forward to not missing bocce ball games in favour of work. Something's a little unbalanced around here lately, well, something's missing: structure, outside work, writing focus, something. I might focus next week on worrying about that, getting my head above water with regard to that. I have too much of my life ahead of me to start sinking under, losing my conversation skills, becoming some sort of frog. Feel distinctly frog-like, of late.

Yesterday was one of those convoluted days that started out with a plan to have coffee with Christian and then ballooned, cocooning-caterpillar-like, into a segmented journey through Victoria, or something.

Starting in Munro's with Harlan Ellison and Banana Yoshimoto and then ice cream at the gelatti shop; Chintz & Company to look at things we can't afford, no, and narrow lanes filled, it's where yuppies go to die; Value Village to beef up Christian's kitchen with expensive pots for nine dollars, dust filling up our lungs until we got past the trainee cashier and made it into the street. Chinatown stores to look at plates and bamboo mats.

Then: The Patch, to stand in changing rooms under the awful light, looking into the mirror and feeling fat, and sallow, and doomed. I think they'd sell more clothing if the lights made you look attractive and fresh. It's all just bad food photography. Then we walked up to Moka House and there was cheesecake, and iced tea, and pallid baristas who recognized me from previous low patches that always linger like a background, you used to work at... and other baristas that probably moonlight acting in teen horror flicks with Rose McGowan and Paris Hilton*.

We walked in one direction through Beacon Hill Park to Christian's apartment, dropped his stuff off, lost his phone, found his phone, went to the Thrifty's to get snacks to go with a bottle of wine and called Michael to meet us in the park for same. Along the way I tried to explain the joys of Ray Bradbury to Christian but utterly failed, I think, because I kept repeating myself and words like simple, clean, poetic, crisp. Fucking crisp. Anyway: The Illustrated Man. Read it, if only for his description of the rains on Venus:

"The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunnelled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men's hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain and it never stopped."
- Ray Bradbury, "The Long Rain."

We scared off some family function over by the bandshell and were left to eat and Michael joined up with us and we drank and then it got terribly dark and Michael took photographs, as he does and then we wandered back to Christian's when it was too dark and cold and finished up for a bit before heading off for the night.

There was an episode of Dead Like Me in there, the one sad one, and snippets of Prospero's Books because Christian has it on his computer and we're going to sit down one evening and watch the whole thing. He's going to use it in one of the classes he's teaching. And a documentary on the Beat Generation, narrated by Allen Ginsberg which was not nearly as peculiar as that documentary on the history of America's railroads, hosted by Johnny Cash.

Because nothing will be as peculiar as that, ever, especially once Johnny Cash is in period costuming.

Regardless, I've finished warming the digits and I have a task: third draft. Motors running, Annie Lennox pumping, curtains open, light pouring, on we go!

* - Christian is far funnier than I am.

Ragnell talks about the new All-Star Wonder Woman series coming out, and specifically what artist/writer Adam Hughes has laid out as his codus for the series. Wow! I'm totally excited about this now. All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder (and...breathe!) is shite, but we all know my feelings on the All-Star Superman series, so this sounds like I'm going to have two series to pick up.

Tomorrow is the delayed Wonder Woman (standard series) and Justice League comics, not sure what else is going to be out. I'm going to try and get to the shop after work by, like, 4:30, so I can pick them up on the way to get drinks with the gang. BECAUSE I NEED MY DAMNED WONDER WOMAN ALREADY.

1. I have food poisoning. This appears to be the result of a sub sandwich I had for dinner at work. Either way, Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" is on repeat in my head.

2. Christian picked me up bright and early this morning and we went to buy shelving. I've got a couple more shelves for the apartment all set up, which means the book crisis will shortly become less of an issue. I still need to clean out the closet up and the biggest problem is weeding my comic books - getting rid of the ones I don't read anymore, or won't need to reference later. I've been moderately cutthroat so far, but I'll need to kick it up a notch and really go hard core this evening. I've got a cardboard box's worth to give away to WIN so far, but I need to have two boxes' worth by the end of the endeavour, if not more. Ruthless, I must be ruthless.

3. Plans to see Little Miss Sunshine on Monday night. I'm extremely excited to see this film.

4. There is a stain on my shirt, I just realized. I am not impressed; furthermore, I need to do laundry.

5. Expect me to post something on Wonder Woman and the evil doctorates in Science, soon. Not sure when. Day or so.

Michael and I need to make some postcards and send them. You know: send postcards. I suppose if I spent enough time at it, really worked at it, I could gather enough moths to carry the postcards across the sky. But would they actually be postcards?

Otherwise, it's too hot during the day but getting cold at night. And I have a basket of laundry that I need to do.

I found the French & Saunders parody of Ingmar Bergman. I think it's supposed to be focused on The Seventh Seal - doesn't really look like Strawberry Fields at all.

Keep trying to write for wildcat and the only things that jump up are sporadic notes, sentence fragments, and ellipses. Actually, that describes most of my outloud dialogue as well.

Is it weird that I think of what I say outloud as "dialogue?"

I sat in the laundromat for about an hour. The dark load became unbalanced, had to be adjusted. I had to wait for it to catch up to the lights before I could start the dryer. Otherwise, I wrote about two pages in a spiral-bound notebook using a black gel pen. My brain is fruiting.

I work until nine and then I have to slink home with Carol King on my discman to sort out my apartment some more. I want to weed the CDs, shelve the ones I'm keeping, and get rid of a couple cardboard boxes that are taking up too much room in there. I would eventually like to have space in the closet to store actual things.

I've made it through the first four discs of Lost Season 1. Will Sun have to reveal her "dark" (cough) secret? Will Sawyer and Kate finally get it on? Will Kate get it on with Jack? Will Sawyer and Jack finally get it on? Locke is very much the shaman or wise man of the group, like I said before, and he's training Boone as an apprentice - vision quests, hallucinatory trials, et cetera. I like Boone better when he's not mooning after his step-sister. I like Hurley a lot as well, given that while everybody's running around tending to immediate physical survival and functioning, Hurley's the one to make some headway toward spiritual survival and consolidating the group in a way that Jack seems unable to comprehend. None of this really means anything to anyone who hasn't watched Lost yet.

Shortly after menacing Metropolis due to a Black Kryptonite binge, Superman spends some time as Clark Kent, sent into the belly of Stryker's Island for an exclusive: one hour to interview the "the world's most notorious criminal scientist," bad old Lex Luthor.

(Panel from All-Star Superman #1; pencils by Frank Quitely with digital inks/colours by Jamie Grant)

Luthor's just been sentenced to sit in the electric chair for crimes against humanity, his latest being the attempted tampering with the Sun itself - his most recent bid to (a) destabilize the global economy and (b) kill Superman. Which means solitary confinement except for a couple of prison guards who walk around with him while Luthor builds ridiculous robots in a provided workshop, because typically the American government is too opportunistic not to take advantage of the "Da Vinci of Crime's" cast-off inventions even with him on death row and more than likely planning on staging his own brilliant and dastardly escape.

And so Clark Kent - who, as far as anybody knows, is mild-mannered, maybe a little on the portly side and utterly hopeless - walks into the mouth of Hell, prison, to stand beside Superman's greatest opponent for an hour's worth of conversation. And while Luthor has carefully engineered Superman's current terminal dilemma - supercharging his cells with solar energy that leads Superman to greater power but fast approaching death - he acts as dull-witted Kent's protector as they tour the facility, where Luthor is in charge. "...You know, I've spent so much of my adult life in prison, thanks to him. It seems like home. Predictable, comfortable."

(Cover for All-Star Superman #5; ibid)

Morrison spends this issue setting up Luthor as a dark mirror, a human mirror to Kal-El. In some ways, not even that dark - when Clark shows up in Luthor's workshop he's busy putting the final touches on a "bibliobot" - "A roving library. He'll read you any of a thousand classic works from 'Ulysses' to 'A Tale of Two Cities'...most of the time he just floats around on his own-- it's pathetic. Culture's a dirty word nowadays, but God knows, I try..." Even with his reputation as a cruel-hearted, opportunistic sociopath, Luthor has an aim at making the world a better place, much like Kal himself. He works out all the time in the big house, building muscles that are actually worth something because they aren't derived from solar power and Kryptonian genetics. He's trying to reach a pinnacle of human perfection in spite of Superman, even if the whole thing is part of his attempts at world domination. He wants to be top dog and he can't quite deal with Superman being top dog despite of "altruism" that Luthor can neither properly identify nor understand. He wants to better mankind as long as he's still on the top of the heap.

The irony is that Lex - like Lois - can't get past Clark's fumbling facade. Clark is Superman's guise, and operates as a tool for saving people on a smaller, less obvious scale - he saves Lex's life from a fatal electrical accident while looking like a buffoon. And he sets up an interesting pattern in the comic: while Lex has gone out of his way to set up Kal's death, he goes out of his way to protect Clark from the dangers of prison and a riot. Sure, Clark's not really in any danger and actually saves Lex several times in covert ways over the course of the comic, but Lex demonstrates a peculiar regard for Clark as an example of the common man that he perceives as stunted due to Superman's presence. Maybe he and Clark can be friends, like Clark asserts - if he can get past his hatred for Superman. All Lex sees in Clark is a man who was constantly tossed aside by Lois in favour of Superman, which is true in a fashion and is highlighted in Morrison's story by Lois's continued inability to deal with the revelation of the secret identity gimmick.

Quitely does an excellent job - particularly in this issue - of changing Clark's body language and stance to deflect attention from his size and similarity to Superman. He looks a bit pudgy and genial compared to Superman, and the effect is that the illusion of not being Superman is reinforced and made more believable. When Luthor picks up on tiny clues - like his eyebrows having "the Superman swoosh," he assumes that Clark plucks his brows to make them look like the Man of Steel's, because "apparently 65% of men subconsciously trim their eyebrows that way, to be more like him."

Maybe more later, I'm still processing this all.