I bought a really pretty Google TV, cut off my cable, and discovered how AWESOME the Chuck title sequence is in HD. I was in love. See, this is the first new TV I’ve ever bought, the rest being either hand-me downs or dead people stuff (don’t judge – you can get a lot of great bargains at estate sales), and while it technically won’t be paid off for a while, I feel like I’ve demonstrated a certain level of commitment to you: we will be together, Google, at least for the 36 months I have to pay this thing off.

But now the glow has worn off, and we need to talk. At first, I didn’t have a problem connecting the world’s longest HDMI cord to my laptop so I could watch Hulu on the big screen. I was so in love with the picture, it just didn’t matter to me all that much. And when I couldn’t get The Venture Brothers to play in Chrome, I went back to the HDMI cord, figuring you would get it sorted out soon. When your Flash player crashed on The Vampire Diaries video page (DO NOT JUDGE ME, GOOGLE!), I went back to HDMI, but really, Google, I just wanted to talk to you about it.

But lately, Google, I’m feeling like you’re not really there for me. I know how you feel about support, and I get it – people can be needy, and you like being able to do your thing. It’s cool. But, really, all we need is to feel like someone is listening. At first, I thought you got that – that is why you set up your support forums, right? So all of us, who are in a relationship with you, have a place to talk through our issues and get help from each other, a place where you can check in every once in a while and let us know it’ll all be okay.

That’s all I really want from you, Google.

But this morning, when I went looking for the Google TV support forum, it wasn’t there. [Interesting sidenote: I first tried searching for "google TV help forum" on my Google TV.  At this point, I'm done with this post (on my laptop), and my screen still says "Loading..."] Why wasn’t it there, Google? All I found was a bunch of threads in the wrong forum by some of your other early adopters, and when I finally found the Google TV help page, it looks like this:

You’re sending me to someone else? I don’t want to talk to someone else! I want to talk to you, Google! Why can’t you just love us enough to make a forum? Why, Google, why?

Sigh. We could have handled this privately, Google. But if you insist that you won’t talk about it, well, then . . . now I’ve got to make a scene.

Let me just tell you a couple of things about yourself, Google:

1. If I have to plug in an HDMI cable to watch the shows I want to watch, either because the networks are blocking you or your software can’t handle plugins, or you haven’t made a deal with Hulu or whatever, then I just wasted about $500. ‘Cause I could have gotten an HDTV, same size, for about that much less than I paid for your device. The way I see it, you owe me $500.
2. You know this image on your Google TV Quick Tour. Delete it, or release the app. It’s that simple.
3. About the networks blocking stuff: I live in a rural area, Google. One of the reasons I love you is that your mobile OS is available on phones that actually work in my area. You send your Street View cars (it’s cool, my network is encrypted) out my way so that your maps work, even in the places where few folks go. You seem to get that I should still have access to information even though I choose live out in the middle of nowhere. The networks don’t get that. They want me to have to watch their shows over the air, so I can watch the ads, and they can make money. I get it. I don’t even mind it. But here’s the problem: I CAN’T WATCH OVER THE AIR. They don’t make antennas strong enough to get all the networks in my area – I checked. The only way I can watch the networks on my TV, the way they want me to do it, is if I pay for cable or satellite. They’re making me pay for something that other folks get for free because of where I live, even though I could be getting it for free on your device. Now, I can get around it with my new friend, the HDMI cord, and I’m still paying the cable company for internet access, but it seems like you need to have a little talk with the FCC about how the networks are blocking access on your device to folks like me. I’m just sayin’.
4. Your Netflix app sucks. It freezes a lot, and I have to stop and restart and stop and restart and stop and restart. The one on the Roku is much better, and they’ll probably get Hulu before you, too. Sigh.
5. You need an app killer. I’m tired of rebooting my TV every time a plugin or app crashes and freezes.

Whew. I feel better now.

I’m glad we cleared the air, but if you really want to make it up to me, you know where to send the check.

Image via CrunchBase

I might actually be willing to use Ping – it’s a nifty idea, and would be a good replacement for that old Facebook app that allowed you to post what you were listening to but was too complicated and involved finding files on my C: drive all by myself, which, really, is too much effort to go to just to be embarrassed by how many times in a row I listened to that one Death Cab for Cutie song, and so I never used it – were it not for the fact that you will only allow me to choose three genres, which are narrow to begin with because even though “indie” and “punk” technically do fall under the “alternative” label, my taste for that label went out once I graduated high school and turned my attention away from Seattle, and besides, there are substrata I might be interested in exploring within the indie world, and you know how indie people are: we want more labels, Steve Jobs, because we live for labels, but now you want my musical tastes to be represented solely by the music I purchase from iTunes, which apparently consists solely of Beyonce, Lady Gaga and Madonna, which is fine, except it doesn’t fully represent me, and so, Steve Jobs, I’m beginning to think that you don’t understand me at all. Oh, and facebook integration would be nice too.

Image via Wikipedia

I’m newish to this whole podcast listening thing. The first time I tried listening to podcasts, a) there wasn’t too much out there, and b) what was out there really sucked, in terms of both content and production value.

In the last four months, my car has stopped picking up NPR consistently on the thirty-minute ride to work, so I’ve been using the podcatcher on my phone as a substitute. I have trouble remembering when exactly my previous forays into podcast listening were, since the internet moves in dog years, but things have improved a lot since whenever then was. While I listen, I tend to think over work-related issues, which makes sense, since I’m going to (or from) work. One of the regulars is the great “five paragraph essay” debate English teachers love to engage in, which goes something like this:

Pro - Beginning writers sometimes need to start with formula (like, say, the five-paragraph essay) to get better and then develop their own style. They need that scaffold. If you’re not teaching students to write this way, you’re doing it wrong.

Con – Five-paragraph essays suck. They’re boring, and professional writers don’t write this way. Let students find their own way, without formula, and oftentimes, they’ll come up with something better on their own. If you’re teaching the five-paragraph essay, you’re doing it wrong.

Mean dragon ladies with glasses on chains generally represent the Pro side, with free-spirited hippie mavericks on the other, and I find myself stuck firmly in the middle.

So, while arguing with myself about formulaic writing on the way to work, I’ve noticed that most of the podcasts I’m listening to adhere to formulas:

1. Podcasts that follow the 2 (or more) guys, a girl, and a roundtable formula

Buzz Out Loud – To be fair, sometimes the revolving cast of cnet experts includes another woman, but most of the time, Molly Wood is holdin’ it down as the lone female with Rafe Needleman, Jason Howell, and another dude; they’re entertaining, but her rants are totally the reason I keep listening. When I get time, I’m totally going back to catch up on the now-defunct Gadgettes (co-hosted by Wood), which follows the two-woman discussion formula below.

NPR’s Culturetopia – NPR collects all of its pop-culture related broadcasts for podcast, but the only one I listen to is the Pop Culture Happy Hour (the one actually created for podcast), hosted by Linda Holmes from the MonkeySee blog. This is a recent addition, but most of the ones I’ve listened to feature Holmes, Glen Weldon (NPR comic/book guy), Stephen Thompson (NPR music editor, formerly of the A.V. Club), and Trey Graham (NPR Digital Media guy).

NPR’s All Songs Considered – Bob Boilen is on all the time, but it’s really at its best on the roundtable-type episodes when Carrie Brownstein (Monitor Mix, Sleater-Kinney) is on, so look for her name in the archive (and be sure to check out the Best Opening Tracks episode – it’s a good ‘un). This one’s generally longer than my drive, so I save it for the weekend.

2. Podcasts that follow the two-woman discussion formula

Stuff You Missed in History Class – Katie Lambert and Sarah Dowdey of HowStuffWorks explore history. The recent series on Catherine the Great was interesting, but the episode that really grabbed me was the one last week about the Trung sisters of Vietnam, who led the resistance against China in the first century. Katie and Sarah get bonus points for elaborating on areas of controversy and suggesting sources for further reading.

Stuff Mom Never Told You – This one is the newest addition to my podcatcher feed. Molly Edmonds and Cristen Conger (also from HowStuffWorks) discuss gender-related sciency stuff, like the correlation between intelligence and sperm motility.

3. Podcasts that follow the This American Life formula

These podcasts all follow the “people tell funny/sweet/themed stories” formula, with some sort of Ira Glass-like narrator providing the setup. I generally have to be in a certain kind of mood for these, and they’re longer, which means weekend listening, but when I’m in the mood and have the time, they’re good stuff.

This American Life – I’ve grown to really appreciate the themes, the structure, the storytelling, and the Ira Glass as I’ve entered my thirties. This is still my favorite example of this formula, but I’m more than a little annoyed that I can only stream archived podcasts since 3G is spotty pretty much anywhere I want to drive. I could, of course, pay 99 cents to download the archived podcasts from iTunes, but that just seems wrong, until I remember that podcast listeners completely miss NPR fund drives.

The Moth – The Moth is a storytelling nonprofit in NYC that puts on events where real people tell real stories before a live audience. They record them and podcast the best ones. Each podcast contains only one story, running anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour.

Risk! – More storytelling, only with an emphasis on comedy (and riskier language). Kevin Allison, formerly of the State, plays the role of Ira Glass. Like This American Life, each episode collects several stories with a common theme, and like The Moth, they have a live show. Each podcast is compiled from both the live show and studio sessions. The music sets this version of the formula apart – they include short, original ditties and skits related to the theme in each of the episodes I’ve heard.

4. Podcasts that follow the Siskel and Ebert formula

Sound Opinions – Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot are music critics in Chicago, so the formula is a bit of a shout-out, though they tweaked it a bit, replacing the thumbs with “buy it,” “burn it,” and “trash it.” I generally like All Songs Considered better for only doing positive reviews, but sometimes I do need to hear that, say, the latest John Legend record sucks. This airs on Saturday afternoons on my local NPR, but every time I turn on the radio on the weekend, I can’t find anything but Car Talk or Prairie Home Companion, so the podcast works better for me.

5. Podcasts that follow the Fresh Air Formula

Fresh Air – I find Terry Gross’s voice incredibly soothing, and she has a knack for choosing interesting interview subjects (the episode with Walton Goggins is a fairly recent favorite), but my local NPR moved Fresh Air to a time that’s inconvenient, so if I’m listening to her, it’s the podcast, and it’s usually the weekend.

BBC’s World Book Club – Harriet Gilbert talks to authors about their best-known work. There’s a studio audience, and their questions sometimes seem obvious, but, really, once you’ve read the book, what do you ask its author that isn’t obvious? These are longer (about an hour) podcasts, for weekend listening. I highly recommend the episodes with David Mitchell and Carlos Ruiz Zafon.

Book Lust with Nancy Pearl – Pearl is the Seattle librarian who does seasonal recommendations on NPR’s Morning Edition. Her recommendations are generally excellent, but I listen just because I love the way she talks about books. She makes me want to read more. Here, she interviews authors, and while it’s not as engaging as the Morning Edition appearances, she asks good questions.

I’m not sure what this means about my own formula debate, except that maybe the reason podcasts have gotten better is that they went through that “beginning writer” stage, where they had to imitate formula to get better. The question I have as a listener is whether I’m going to get bored with that formula, and, if and when I do, am I going to be able to find podcasts that break from formula? Or are they, as I fear for my students, going to be producing the audio equivalent of the five-paragraph essay for the rest of their lives?

The last time I cried in a movie was E.T., so I tend to judge every subsequent attempt to make me cry by this standard:

I call it the Gertie Metric because Mom, Michael, and even Eliot’s tears didn’t bother me at all, but the moment Gertie started crying, the six-year old version of me lost her shit in a crowded theatre, much to my parents’ embarrassment.

In retrospect, I was kind of an easy mark at six years old. The adult me scoffs at my younger self, wondering why I fell for the “cute kid crying” trick, until I remember that scene is the most effective use of that trick in the history of film. Now, when I see someone else try to use it, I just roll my eyes. Whatever. It’s not Gertie.

Case in point: I abhor the promo for The Choir that seems to run every other commercial break on BBC America.  The promo consists of a bunch of clips from the show, about a  Clay Aiken lookalike choir director named Gareth Malone who takes a bunch of schoolkids with no previous training (sniffle) to the World Choir Olympics in China (aaww), intercut with quotes from positive reviews of the show, which try really hard to convince me that the show will wrench a tear from my eye and warm my cold, stony heart, and at the very end, they throw in the “cute kid crying” trick:

Whatever. He’s not Gertie. It’s not that I don’t want to sympathize with this kid, but the whole commercial is just trying too hard. There is no way I’m going to cry at this show.

This is not to say that the show doesn’t legitimately tug at my heartstrings. It’s just that when it does, it just ends up making me angry. I’m already annoyed that Malone, who purports to be about encouraging everyone to sing, held auditions, and that even the embarrassing auditions were aired, American Idol-style. Way to go, show; that’s totally gonna encourage the rejects to keep singing.

Then, in the first episode, Malone tells a tone-deaf kid not to sing on the recording they have to send to China, which is pretty brutal, but not as brutal as sending that same kid a copy of the recording on CD as a Christmas present. All the while, the producers are getting footage of this kid attending extra practice sessions and working on that Lion King song on his own at home because he just wants to get better so he doesn’t let anyone down. The Choir isn’t about encouraging everyone to sing; it’s about finding kids who already have talent and making them into winners. Put another way, it’s about leaving out the kids who get in the way of winning.

How is that any different from American Idol? Oh, right. It’s actually more cruel than Idol, because these kids didn’t really ask for it. You came to their school, inserted yourselves into their lives, and now you’re profiting from them, but it’s OK because some of them got a trip to China. It makes me so angry I could cry, show, but I refuse to let you have the satisfaction.

This is not to say that the BBC hasn’t ever made me cry (see also: early regeneration), or that I don’t cry at reality TV shows. James May, for example, has me crying on the regular these days. You may know him from the Three Stooges-style car porn of the BBC’s Top Gear (he’s the nerdy one with the floppy hair), but I’m absolutely loving his new show, James May’s Toy Stories.

The show is formulaic, but it’s a formula that works: every week, May chooses a new toy, preferably one with a rich history. He interviews an expert on that toy, comes up with a big project involving that toy, and then crowdsources the production of the project, making sure to include both kids and adults. He gives at least two incredibly awkward motivational speeches to the folks who help him, and at least once during the course of an episode, the project appears to be on the verge of collapse. The finished product manages to bring me to tears every time, by virtue of the size and scale and awesomeness of it all.

This week’s episode was about Plasticine. May crowdsourced a flower garden, made entirely of Plasticine modeling clay, for the Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea Flower Show.

The garland hanging on the door was made by some ladies at a Hindu temple. There’s sushi, made by sushi chefs, on a picnic blanket under the tree. Some of the flowers were made by schoolchildren, some were made by attendees at a Home Expo, and the poppies were made by elderly veterans. Sure, artists from the studio that makes Wallace and Gromit helped out, and the bust of William Harbutt, the inventor of Plasticine, was sculpted by Jane McAdam Freud (Lucian’s daughter, Sigmund’s great-granddaughter, for those keeping track), but two thousand normal folks were involved in putting this together. May takes all comers, and even refers to it as “the People’s Plasticine Garden” in the episode. Every time I look at the garden, or the reconstructed Brooklands racing circuit, made of tracks for Scalextric toy cars, or the life-sized Lego house, the awesomeness of it all brings a little tear to my eye.

Most of all, James May gets me to cry because he’s doing it right. While he recruits a few ringers, he invites people who aren’t artists, and who may not have “talent,” to make art, and he includes all of them in these massive, celebratory pieces. He educates his audience about toys that may have fallen out of fashion, teaches a little something about history, and models the power of crowdsourcing and community-building.

I learn something from watching May convince ordinary people to help build stuff, which is more than I can say for Gareth Malone’s project. That’s why May gets the waterworks. When Malone takes the kids who can’t hold a note, carry a tune, or hear tone, teaches them to sing, and carries them to China, I might be willing to shed a tear for him. Until then, whatever. He’s not Gertie.

From Ben Ratliff’s review:

Anne Carson’s new book comes in a box the color of a rainy day, with a sliver of a family snapshot on the front. Inside is a Xerox-quality reproduction of a notebook, made after the death of her brother, including text and photographs and letters, pasted-in inkjet printouts, handwriting, paintings and collage. “Nox” has no page numbers, and it’s accordion-folded.

I didn’t really need another reason to love Anne Carson, but she gave me one anyway. I love seeing books that reflect the processes, written and artistic, that writers use. I like the idea of books as works of art, but this, this is book as craft. Which is to say, it is the kind of art we can all make – perhaps not with as much literary merit as Anne Carson, but with as much care.

I need this book. Today.

In the meantime, I’m comforting myself by revisiting this awesome set of directions for making an accordion book from Belle Boggs’ Blog. Anne Carson made an accordion book to memorialize her brother; Belle made one to memorialize her dog.

Belle also has a new book out. It’s called Mattaponi Queen, and, so far, it’s great. I say “so far” because I keep rereading the first story, “Deer Season”; I’ve read it three times, mostly because it brings back memories of the first community I taught in, but also because it’s that good, and that subtle.

Secretly, I love steampunk. Perhaps it’s the last, dying embers of my rebellion against my mother, but I love the idea of alternate history that mashes up time, and science, and history, and magic, and, most of all, gets the objects all wrong. Every piece of steampunk I consume is an affirmation that not everything has to be right all the time.

My latest steampunk consumption, Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker, has brought a new dimension to this love/hate relationship with steampunk. While there’s a lot to love about the novel, it just didn’t immediately hit my literary sweet spot, and I’ve spent the better part of the past two weeks trying to figure out why.

Warning: There be spoilers here, and not just for Boneshaker. Proceed at your own risk.

What I Should Love About Boneshaker

A swashbuckling retro sci-fi novel with a female protagonist, set in the 19th century Northwest? I should be all over this book, and I haven’t even gotten to the zombies yet.

It’s the objects that sold me on this book. I love the descriptions of the objects, like the static electricity-powered sonic cannon, the gas and electric lightbulbs, and the cyborg arm. Throw in some dirigibles, and I should be a happy, happy girl.

Objects are what make me love steampunk, in spite of myself. I love the idea of subverting the material culture of the 19th century through anachronism. There’s something about that subversion that feels like a celebration of those materials – the brass fittings and oiled valves, the springs and clockwork mechanisms, the goggles and lab aprons of the tinkerers who create them. It’s the anachronism – the fact that these objects shouldn’t be able to do their work in this time – that hooks me into these beautiful, beautiful objects. Because if we can subvert the objects, as Cherie Priest says, we can subvert the history:

But with its time-travel/history-altering underpinnings, steampunk has the capacity to un-write some of the rules that created the Other in the first place. It offers a voice to those who were marginalized, allowing them to stand up and say, “I was here. And I absolutely, defiantly reject the implication that I wasn’t.” It’s open to everyone — including those whose historical representation got left out, written out or killed out of hand.

I like that Priest seems to have this goal of openness in mind with the Clockwork Century series – the next volume, Clementine, will presumably follow Croggon Hainey, pirate airship captain and minor character in Boneshaker. The fact that Hainey and his crew are African-American speaks to Priest’s un-writing of rules, as do the women in Boneshaker: Briar Wilkes, who sets off over the wall to find her son in the land of zombies, hitching a ride on a pirate airship; Lucy, the saloon operator with an arm of brass (as opposed to the usual heart of gold); and the Native American Princess Angelina, who is nothing if not a clutch performer. Add the underground Chinese community, represented most fully by Huey, the resident tinkerer, throw in some subtle class commentary and swashbuckling action, and there’s a lot to love about this book.

So why didn’t I love it? Why is my internal bookometer stuck firmly on “like,” with nary a twitter in the direction of “love”?

It’s the Zombies, Stupid

I’ve been on a zombie kick recently. I’m kind of obsessed with zombies as a metaphor for consumerism, the rise of zombie stories in conjunction with the rise of film and television, and the zombie renaissance that seems to have accompanied the rise of the internet (Mira Grant’s Newsflesh Trilogy is a great example of that particular zeitgeist at work), to the point that I don’t even care how pretentious that sounds or if someone else has said it first.

What I’ve learned from reading and watching zombie stories is this: the zombies are us, and they have be us in order to really be scary. In order for zombies to inspire the pity and fear that Aristotle talks about (and zombies are all about tragedy), a character the reader/viewer really cares about has to get turned into a zombie. A good zombie story requires sacrifice.

Boneshaker doesn’t make that sacrifice, at least not on a personal level. Sure, a minor, minor character (who has four lines, two of which are “Well,” (Priest 225) and “Yes, ma’am” (226)) gets turned, but it wasn’t anywhere near as scary as it would have been if, say, Lucy or Swakhammer or Rudy had been zombified (and Rudy deserved it). I can’t really fault Priest for the first two – I didn’t want to give up Lucy or Swakhammer either – and it’s hard to blame her for not definitively turning Rudy, knowing I’d probably be complaining about how obvious a choice it was if she did. I have to respect the fact that she didn’t go the easy route on that one. Ultimately, I also have to respect the fact that Priest sacrificed not just one character, but an entire city, to the zombies.

I don’t think the lack of personal sacrifice is even what really bothers me about the zombies. Despite my insistence on zombies as a contemporary pop metaphor, I’m fine with their temporal relocation – hell, it lets me fanwank on Voudou for a while, so that’s cool. What really ticks me off is that they’re very nearly the sum total of the Things that Can Only Be Explained by Magic in the novel, and they get only a bit part, serving as obstacles to be overcome or weapons of war. They are, in a sense, objectified, and this makes them just about the steampunkiest objects in the book.

Things that Can Only Be Explained by Magic

The places where I really can’t resist steampunk – the TV shows, movies, and comics that use their elements well – are full of magic. Sure, a lot of the gadgets on Warehouse 13 are scientifically plausible – the Tesla stun gun, the Farnsworth video cell phone – those are the objects that got me hooked into the show, with their steampunk styling and allusions to famous tinkerers. But then they throw in Lewis Carroll’s mirror, Harry Houdini’s wallet, Edgar Allan Poe’s pen, and some purple goo, and suddenly, it’s all about magic. The magic is what makes it make sense.

The same is true for the steampunk objects in The Vampire Diaries (groan if you must), which are what got me really and truly hooked into watching that show. 19th-century tinkerer Jonathan Gilbert’s inventions – the vampire-detecting pocket watch, the vampire-controlling clockwork music box – turn out to be useless on their own. Their power comes from the spells wrought by Emily Bennet, an enslaved witch who works in secret, so that Gilbert can take the credit. Cherie Priest would like the way those objects, and the show, unwrite the rules of Othering. It doesn’t get much more steampunk than that, and yet the magic is what makes them work.

As much as I love Terry Gilliam and really like Hayao Miyazaki, City of Lost Children is still my favorite film with steampunk elements. The styling is steampunk at its darkest and most beautiful, from the Gaultier costumes to the cyborg synaesthetic eyes and assorted gadgetry. Most of these objects seem plausible, or at least pseudo-scientific (see the brain in vat of green liquid), but the most important of these objects, the dream-stealing device used by the mad scientist Krank, is so implausible as to Only Be Explained by Magic. This makes sense in a fable about the magic of children’s dreams. The magic is what the story’s about.

Warren Ellis’s Captain Swing, Ignition City, and Aetheric Mechanics are all about the steampunk (or dieselpunk, or whatever), but I haven’t gotten to (or all the way through) them yet. My favorite appearance of steampunk elements in the work I have read, in the webcomic FreakAngels, is probably the most restrained, if a little bit tongue-in-cheek:  FreakAngel KK is, literally, a steam punk. She’s styled steampunk, in corsets, fishnets, and weird tubes jutting from her miniskirted hips, but she also builds machines that run on steam. Somehow, I’m never entirely sure that KK’s not keeping that steam-powered motorcycle/helicopter in the air with her brain. Even the most plausible explanation for the steam chopper (that she invented it, and it works, for real) relies on KK’s FreakAngel abilities, which allowed her to absorb her vast knowledge of the mechanics of steam (and punch a hole in the world – mustn’t forget that). The magic in FreakAngels comes from these abilities. It’s the magic – much, much more than the steam – that moves the story.

My favorite piece of steampunk, Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, is all about magic -  the literary sleight-of-hand involved in mashing up fictional characters (all of them), settings (The Nautilus), and events (the Martian invasion from War of the Worlds) in Victorian London (and, more recently, mid-20th century London) is simply mind-boggling. The entire premise of that work is that it Can Only Be Explained by Magic, and its magic comes from allusion, most consistently to H.G. Wells. Sure, Captain Nemo and the Nautilus are there to provide steampunk styling and allusions to Jules Verne, and there are characters borrowed from other Victorian writers, but the events are driven primarily by Wells’ creations, creations which Can Only Be Explained by Magic.

Boneshaker, on the other hand, is almost entirely steam-powered. The gadgets are almost all plausible – folks were making dirigibles in that time period, and accelerating their development has become something of a steampunk convention; the Daisy Dooser (sonic cannon) seems to be powered by a Tesla coil, which makes sense; the bellows and smokestack-like towers of the underground air circulation system are a nice nod to the architecture of industrialism in that period; even the steam-powered Boneshaker machine seems scientifically conceivable.

Lucy’s cyborg arm is really the only gadget that isn’t plausible in that time period: though the construction of the arm fits right into the period, I was never quite sure how it worked. Lucy is pretty clear about how the arm connects to her body – “it’s bolted onto my bones” – but how her mind controls the movements of the arm is left a mystery (“He didn’t tell me, either, how he planned to make it work” (262).). It’s more than a century later, and we’re still working on getting brains to connect to and control prosthetics – if Lucy has a functioning cyborg arm in the 1880s, it Can Only Be Explained by Magic, but it’s a little bit less magical, and more plausible, for reflecting modern advances in prosthesis (such as attaching prosthetic limbs to bones with titanium screws).

Which brings me back to the zombies as the only Things that Can Only Be Explained by Magic, that magic taking the form of blight gas, a thick yellow fog that turns folks into zombies (Priest calls them “rotters”) in large doses and gets them high in smaller doses. Said blight gas is the direct consequence of the Boneshaker machine’s rampage, and it feels like a curse. I’m used to steampunk where magic allows devices to work, stretching possibility to create something new. I’m comfortable with magic being a good, or at least a useful, thing. In Boneshaker, magic is the consequence of the  devices at work, and that magic is ugly. It creates obstacles. It hurts instead of helping. It’s scary.

This depiction of magic is pretty consistent in Priest’s Clockwork Century universe: in the short story “Tanglefoot,” magic is a direct consequence of the tinkering wrought by an orphan boy. The automaton he builds becomes possessed and wreaks havoc, a chain of events eerily similar to the events that set up Boneshaker, in which inventor Leviticus Blue’s out-of-control Boneshaker machine releases the blight gas that turns Seattle into the land of zombies.

Damn. I think the bookometer just moved.

As much as I want to hate the lack of magic in Boneshaker, I find myself loving the way Priest is using magic. Magic should be scary. Boneshaker‘s magic emphasizes horror in the genre mash-up that is steampunk, and when I think about it, all of the steampunk I can’t resist is really about horror, from Warehouse 13′s cursed objects to the distorted dream-state of City of Lost Children, with vampires and world-breaking freaks thrown in for fun. In this respect, Boneshaker is also very much like the steampunk I truly love - not for nothing does Alan Moore include Mr. Hyde, Wilhemina Murray, and Dr. Moreau. Horror is tied into steampunk’s lineage, perhaps even more so than magic.

The Parent Trap

Steampunk goes back to the 19th century because that’s where science fiction starts, with Jules Verne and Mary Shelley and H.G. Wells. Referencing those three writers is deliberate, from the Jules Verne styling of the objects to the Frankenstein-like inventors, who reach farther than they should, but still manage to hold our sympathies for their effort. Those references also serve a larger purpose, and here’s where I really want to love steampunk: it’s all about reconciling the science, represented by Jules Verne, with the magic of fantasy, represented by Shelley and Wells. Steampunk is a child of divorce, begging its parents to get back together. As a reader, I can’t help but to feel its pain, even as I acknowledge the reasons Wells gives for the split:

These tales have been compared with the work of Jules Verne and there was a disposition on the part of literary journalists at one time to call me the English Jules Verne. As a matter of fact there is no literary resemblance whatever between the anticipatory inventions of the great Frenchman and these fantasies. His work dealt almost always with the actual possibilities of invention and discovery, and he made some remarkable forecasts . . . But these stories of mine . . . do not pretend to deal with possible things; they are exercises of the imagination in a quite different field. They belong to a class of writing which includes the Golden Ass of Apuleius, the True Histories of Lucian, Peter Schemil, and the story of Frankenstein . . . They are all fantasies; they do not aim to project a serious possibility; they aim indeed only at the same amount of conviction as one gets in a good gripping dream (qtd. in Mac Adam xiv).

In other words, it’s not you, science, it’s me. Now leave me to my fantasies. It’s pretty clear that H.G. Wells won the custody battle (though Verne reserves visitation rights) where Alan Moore is concerned, but Boneshaker reminds me of the third parent, serving as a literary shout-out to her influence.

Mary Shelley

Like its literary progeny, Frankenstein mashes genres, combining Gothic horror and Romanticism to create science fantasy, as Wells might call it. I’ve always thought of it as a fable about parenting, with Victor Frankenstein as the ultimate dead-beat dad. It’s a cautionary tale about reaching too high, too fast, and the moral is clear: here’s what happens when you don’t worry enough about being a good parent. Victor is too selfish, too egotistical to worry about trifles like responsibility and parenting; he creates, but fails to hold himself accountable to or for his creation.

Boneshaker, like Frankenstein, is the story of a child seeking out his absent father. Zeke Wilkes travels behind the wall, into Seattle, hoping to find his presumed-dead father, inventor Leviticus Blue. Like Victor Frankenstein’s monster, he is looking for answers from his creator, a man who, if we are to believe the heroine, is just as egotistical as Frankenstein and quite a bit more selfish. This is a man who, like Frankenstein,  creates without a care for the consequences, which ravage not only the creator’s own life (and the lives of those he holds dear), but an entire city. One gets the feeling that, had Leviticus Blue been around for Zeke’s birth, he would have been a terrible parent. He just wouldn’t have worried about it enough.

By contrast, the heroine of Boneshaker, Briar Wilkes, worries too much about being a good parent. It’s not overstatement to say that she obsesses about her parenting skills throughout the novel, though her worry is understandable: what parent whose child runs away from home wouldn’t worry about her parenting skills? Still, the doubt she constantly seems to be vocalizing feels like the equivalent of “do these jeans make me look fat?”; it’s a question asked so that the reader can reassure herself that Briar is, indeed, a good mother, by virtue of having doubted herself in the first place. By the time all of Briar’s secrets are revealed, it’s a reassurance the reader needs.

Maybe I’m a bit sensitive to this kind of self-flagellation, but when NPR is telling me about women who write books about feeling like a bad parent, and the best parent I know is posting “parenting fail” updates to her Facebook feed, I start to wonder if maybe Shelley and Priest aren’t commenting on gendered approaches to parenting and self-doubt.

Boneshaker has me wondering: do women worry more about parenting? Not are they better parents, but do they worry more? I know from experience that the “you’re a terrible parent! It’s your fault I’m so screwed up!” guilt trip always got way more mileage on my mom than my dad – was I unconsciously aware that this would work on my mom because of her gender socialization? I don’t mean to suggest that men don’t also worry about being good parents – Kenzaburo Oe and Harry Chapin have convinced me that they do – but do women worry more? More to the point, why is this? Am I OK with this?

Damn. The bookometer just moved again. Any book that can make me ask those questions is full of love.

Works Cited

Mac Adam, Alfred. “Realist of the Fantastic.” Introduction. The Time Machine and The Invisible Man. By H.G. Wells. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003. Print.

Priest, Cherie. Boneshaker. New York: Tor, 2009. Print.

—-. “Steampunk: What it is, why I came to like it, and why I think it’ll stick around.” The Clockwork Century. 8 August 2009. Web. 30 May 2010.

Note: The bookometer was inspired by the illustrations at Hyperbole and a Half, which are way better than mine. The Alot Is Better than You at Everything is required reading.

1. Last Kiss – J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers

More for listening than viewing pleasure:

2. Tell Laura I Love Her – Sha Na Na

For those who doubt the supremacy of this version:

3.7-11 – The Ramones

Again, more for listening than viewing pleasure:

4. Bat Out of Hell – Meatloaf

5. The ’59 Sound – The Gaslight Anthem

6. In My Hour of Darkness – Gram Parsons

More listening than viewing.

7. Through the Wire – Kanye West

8. Mr. Ambulance Driver – Flaming Lips

More listening than viewing.

9. Carroll County Accident – Porter Wagoner

He’s kin, so I have to include him, despite his sexual harassment of Dolly Parton.

10. Not Even Stevie Nicks…-Calexico

11. In the Curve – The Avett Brothers

So, the latest “WTF, me?” moment: in conversation with a friend last night, about the differences in going to shows in City X and City Y (one difference, offered by said friend, being the grabbiness of dudes in City Y), the following words escaped my mouth: “but the chicks in City Y are all coked-out skanks.”

Oh, What the Fuck, me? Really? That, self, is what you call blaming the victim (we’ll just leave the gross generalization and basic inaccuracy of the statement out for now, but really, self, you know better on that count too), and it’s the kind of stuff you like to get all steamed about when you read Jezebel and whatnot. You, self, know better. WTF were you thinking? As if dudes who go to shows to pick up (as opposed to, you know, listening to music) and treat the women at these shows as grab-bags are somehow excused by the level of skankiness (Oh, self! Judgmental and sexist? That’s just . . . UGLY) you perceive? Self, go bang your head against the wall for a while. Come back when you’ve knocked some sense into yourself, and then you can talk.

So, I’m calling myself out. I think folks, feminist folks, should do more of that. Too often we wait for other feminists to call us out, as if it’s their responsibility to correct us, to educate us. Bullshit. I admire the hell out of feminists who, when called out, readily say “I was wrong,” but I wish more folks would call themselves out, instead of being thankful that indiscretions occurred a while ago, or in private, or only in our heads. It’s a journey – I like it when folks make their own path visible to me, show me the steps in their revision, their writing and rewriting of self and perspective – it makes it possible for me to undertake my own revisions, to know that there is hope, no matter how fucked up the words that come out of my mouth (or the thoughts that lurk in my head) may be, that I can become a better feminist, a better person. I want to know that in the struggle to rid myself of fucked-up thinking, I’m going to take some steps backward every once in a while, but that if I call myself out on that, I can move forward from there. But it’s not anyone else’s job to do that for me. So I’m calling myself out.

I’m fortunate to have friends who allow me to call myself out, or who take the time to call me out privately, when I say fucked-up things. It’s a luxury to have that kind of space, or kindness, which I think is one of the reasons why I feel M.I.A.’s pain over the New York Times profile by Lynn Hirschberg (even though, really, posting her phone number? WTF were you thinking, M.I.A.?). The truffle fries and their inherent suggestion of hypocrisy didn’t bother me a bit – who doesn’t expect their pop culture heroes to fail in “keeping it real” every once in a while? Ex-boyfriend who says her only talent is manipulation? Dude, whatever. I’ve been hearing that about Madonna for years. The part that got to me was the intimation that she’s been telling stories about her Dad:

She named her first album “Arular,” after her father. Even though her father was not a Tiger, she also used tigers on her Web site and her album artwork and she favored tiger-striped clothing. This was not an accident.

and later:

Her father remained in Sri Lanka (whenever they saw each other, he was introduced to Maya as her uncle, so that the children wouldn’t inadvertently reveal his identity). Maya claims that she has not seen him in years. Diplo told me a different story. “I met her dad in London with her,” he said. “He was very interested in sustainable living and was teaching in London. But he wasn’t a good father.” Whatever the truth is, Maya has gone from trumpeting her father’s revolutionary past in order to claim that lineage to playing down his politics to support a separate narrative. “He was with the Sri Lankan government,” she now maintained, when I saw her in Los Angeles. “He’s been with them for 20 years. They just made up the fact that he is a Tiger so they can talk crap about me.” (Her father could not be reached for comment.)

I don’t know enough about the Tamil situation in Sri Lanka to be able to comment on whether or not M.I.A. is coming correct on that particular issue. That M.I.A. chooses the side that she feels best represents where she comes from is fine with me – it’s personal for her in a way that it will never be for me, and it’s not for me to judge that perspective when I don’t have all the information. What bothers me is the suggestion that she’s not allowed to revise the ways in which her perspective on the Tamil Tigers informs or is informed by her perspective on her father.

The last lines of each of the paragraphs I’ve quoted – “This was not an accident”; “(Her father could not be reached for comment.)” – and the inconsistencies Lynn Hirschberg, the author of the profile, points out in the second paragraph I quoted seem to suggest that M.I.A. is manipulating her story/her father’s story to fit her political perspective, and calling her out for doing so. It’s as if Hirschberg wants M.I.A. to say she’s wrong, or was wrong, about her dad, but failing to recognize the ways in which it might be painful to admit that.

Part of me wonders if it’s even actually possible to know that M.I.A. is/was wrong about her father. Don’t we all tell ourselves stories about our parents, making them out to be alternately heroes and villains, as suits our own psychological needs? Neither version is completely right, and yet both versions are, at times, correct.

Maybe it’s that I see parallels in my own stories about my father’s family. My grandfather’s version of his mother’s story is that she was a tragic figure, an undiagnosed manic depressive, but also a badass who could ride a horse and shoot a gun at the same time, with enough accuracy to pick off prairie dogs. His sister-in-law’s version was that my paternal grandmother was a mean, jealous, hateful bitch who ripped the steering wheel off the Model T, running it into a ditch, every time someone pissed her off. Which version is true?

It’s easy to reconcile two versions, by two separate authors: both can possess elements of truth, so the truth is somewhere in-between. It gets more complicated when you have two conflicting stories by the same author. My father has participated in burning rainforests. My father works to research effective fertilization techniques in tropical soils so that rainforests don’t get burned. My father is a proponent of petroleum-based fertilizers, and this makes him a tool of Big Oil. My father wants to feed people. All of these are stories I have told myself, and others, about my father’s work. Which of these is true? I honestly don’t think I know enough about him, or his work, to be able to tell you.

Here’s what I do know: revising his story is one of the ways in which I revise myself. It’s called growth. It’s messy, and it’s complicated, and it takes time, which is why we like to pretend that it’s invisible, composed in Microsoft Word without tracking the changes, rather than on paper, where every strikethrough, erasure, and clot of White-Out can be seen. It’s about the product, rather than the process, so we pretend the product is all there is.

M.I.A. has commodified herself. She is a product. That’s the point of the profile. She’s not allowed any more revision. That’s a shame – as a fan, a feminist, a writer, a person, I like seeing the revision. Which is why the irony of the New York Times’s revisions to the profile is really kind of delicious. I imagine its flavor is something akin to truffle fries.

1. Hoodoo Voodoo – Billy Bragg and Wilco

2. Brainy – The National

3. Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around – Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty

4. Till My Back Ain’t Got No Bone – William Bell

5. Butcher’s Tale (Western Front 1914) – The Zombies

Note: I’d really like to see WWI with zombies. Get on that, will you, someone?

6. Point and Shoot – Yo La Tengo

7. Protect Ya Neck – Wu-Tang Clan

8. Run Run Run – The Velvet Underground

9. The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance – Vampire Weekend

10. Here Come the People in Grey – The Kinks

Suggestions for #2 are always welcome.

From Hryck.'s flickr photostream, under a CC attribution license.

Comics have never really been that big a deal in my life: I remember devouring Archie comics on trips to my grandmother’s house in West Texas, and even though I know they’re not real comics, there must have been something about the medium that appealed to me even then. Just not enough to look for other comics to read, beyond the checkout line at the IGA. Which is a shame, really, because I’m sure I missed out on some great stuff. I don’t know why, for example, as into the X-Men cartoon series as I was in middle school, I still have never picked up an X-Men comic. I think part of me somehow knew that I wasn’t serious enough about it to justify a trip to the comic store. It was safer to just watch the cartoon from the comfort of my parents’ couch.

The Sandman omnibuses my friend Derek lent out freshman year of college were my first introduction to the world of “real” comics – Neil Gaiman showed me that comics could be literary – epic, even – in scope and subject, and that it didn’t have to be all about superheroes. My friend Claire, who has always been braver than I in navigating “boy-only zones,” introduced me to indie comics by gifting me Ghost World, and my friend Andrea introduced me to Chris Ware by blowing up images from the ACME Novelty Library on the color copiers at Kinko’s. My friend Ehren introduced me to los Bros. Hernandez, and really, that’s a reading relationship I should have continued, because I loved their work, but I just stopped after Duck Feet (which was the first thing I bought), and I’m not even sure why.

In the years between now and then, I’ve been into comics tangentially, picking up things that tended more toward the literary and current/historical event end of the spectrum, works probably best classified as graphic novels, by folks like Joe Sacco, Jason Lutes, and Charles Burns. I’ve read, and, in some cases, taught, the obligatory Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, and Gene Luen Yang. Oh, and I read Watchmen too. Basically, I read stuff I didn’t have to set foot in a comic store to buy – I ordered from Fantagraphics or (gasp!) purchased them at my local Barnes and Noble, the safest of all safe zones for wannabe comic book readers, where one can browse the meagre offerings without actually speaking to anyone, thus avoiding the revelation of an embarrassing lack of comic book cred.

But this afternoon, I had to go to the comic book store. I’ve been flirting with The Invisibles trade paperbacks for the past few months, even going as far as tracking down a Barnes and Noble that had the first volume and putting it on hold, but never picking it up, because really, it’s seven volumes, and I just don’t have that kind of cash right now. I know myself, and I am nothing if not an obsessive reader. Today, I made the mistake of reading the first issue online, which meant that I had to then find the nearest copy of the first volume and go get it. Which meant my GPS and I found ourselves racing to the comic book store, an hour from my home, in order to get Volume 1 of The Invisibles before closing. Which meant I had a lot of time to think, in the car, about facing my fear of comic book stores. Which meant I first had to define where that fear comes from.

I’m afraid of comic book stores for the same reason I’m afraid of record stores: they make me feel like a poseur. Immediately upon crossing the threshold, my shoulders tense, my neck muscles tighten, and I affect a slouch with my hands in my pockets (no easy feat, considering the tension in neck and shoulders), thinking that somehow, this will not belie the fact that I am trying really hard to look cool. I am, in fact, rehearsing what I will say if anyone tries to make conversation (“I’m just here to browse, but I’m also looking for…”), so that if the folks behind the counter deign to speak to me (in most cases, mercifully, they do not, until checkout; I dread checkout.), I can make it clear that I do not need any help, because I belong here, really I do, but that if they want to help, without judgment, I will gladly accept that help. It’s all very complicated.

I have developed this little one-liner (and the accompanying stance) after years of feeling uncomfortable in record stores. This discomfort has actually gotten better – I am no longer afraid to go to the record (or comic) store alone, having finally come to the conclusion that it’s much better to go alone than face embarrassment in front of friends or boyfriends. And there will be embarrassment. Because there will always be something that I should know, but do not know, or that I think I know but is really completely wrong, or that I half-know and try to make conversation about because I belong here, really I do.

So I faced my fear, and went to the comic store, where, when I entered, I was the only customer, and so I had to get spoken to, but I was prepared, and the owner was super nice, so it was cool. And then other customers came in, and suddenly, I was a big fucking deal, because I was a woman. In a comic book store. The conversation went something like this:

Me: I think I better stop now. The stack is already too big.

Owner: You found some good stuff.

Me: Yeah, well, Vertigo’s got my number.

15 year-old dude: I didn’t know women collected comics.

Me: Well, yeah. Is that OK?

15 year-old dude: Are you kidding? It’s awesome. Will you marry me?

And then they talked some more about how awesome I was. Basically, everything I have always secretly wanted, when walking into a comic store or record store, it just happened. And as great as that was (and it was), I kind of feel like shit about it now. Because while I may have felt like a poseur before, I’m pretty sure this was the moment when I actually became a poseur. Because, literally, I just bought my first six issues of anything since Chris Ware, in college. And I’m such an idiot that I bought issues 5, 7, 9, and 10 of The Unwritten without noticing they were out of order, because I was nervous, and a moron, and now I have to go find 1-4, 6, and 8, because I can’t stand the idea of not reading them in order. And the worst part: I let that kid think that I was as serious about it as he was.

Which brings me to the other area where I feel like a big fraud: while I might like to think that I did a good thing, challenging this kid’s perception that girls aren’t into comics, I also realize that I was a little too comfortable being a girl who was cool because other girls don’t read comics. I did, before I left, admit that I don’t make it into comic stores often, and thank them for being so friendly, and promise to come back soon, but I don’t think that’s really the appropriate response.

If I had enough comic-book cred to really challenge that perception, I’d like to think that I would have, in a friendly but more forceful manner, and I’d like to say that the reason I don’t have that comic book cred, the fact that I’m not serious about it as that kid, trumps the need to show feminist cred in what should be a gender-neutral space, but both of those are complete bullshit.

I didn’t challenge it because the reasons I started to read comics are the same as the reasons I started to listen to indie rock, which are the same as the reasons I started to read sci-fi, which are the same as the reasons I started to play video games, which are the same as the reasons I started to watch basketball or hockey or baseball: they give me something to talk about with the opposite gender. In short, I started doing all of these things because I wanted boys to like me.

And while that may not be the reason why I continue (or stop) doing those things, that reason completely fucks up my feminist cred in those arenas. Because, really, cred matters nowhere as much as in feminism, and there’s little worse than a feminist poseur. Which may be why so few young women self-identify as feminist. It’s one of the reasons I’ve been afraid to fully enter into feminism, just as I am afraid to enter the comic store or the record store.

I get why cred is important, especially in feminism: you want to make sure that folks know what the fuck they’re talking about, because there’s a lot of room for people to say shit that hurts other people, and that should be avoided. But something about the emphasis on cred itself strikes me as unfair. In order to have access to records (or comics) and build up expertise and knowledge (cred) in those areas, I have to go into those stores, but I’m afraid to go into those stores because I lack cred, and it goes on and on and on and on. That’s kind of unfair. And you can’t have a movement about fairness run by people who aren’t fair. Because then the internet is full of people accusing each other of being bad feminists, and ironic hypocrites, and lacking cred and whatnot. Which is not to say that I want to enter into that fray, at all. ‘Cause I lack the cred to do that, at all. Even though I belong here, really I do.

And even though I want to belong here, really I do, what if the real reason I’m afraid to go into the feminism store is the same reason I want to go into the record and comic book stores? What if I just want the boys to like me?

Note: I’m still working on the Battlestar Galactica post. I promised myself I would get it done by April, but that totally didn’t happen, so no time until school lets out and I have time to confront my self-doubt. It’s nerdy, and way too long, and also completely wrong, and I don’t care. It’ll be up sometime in June or July.

Update: American Vampire is really good. In case you were wondering.