Eco-education

Gary Larson is a funny man. I've read volumes and volumes of Far Side comics, which I started collecting from book fairs as a child, but I had never read There's a Hair in my Dirt until a link to the book as a PDF crossed my Tumblr dashboard.

The book is a funny, somewhat mean exploration of the problems that arise from people who want to take care of the world but know nothing about it. It follows the story of Princess Harriet, a beautiful lady who is keen to interact with the nature around her but who consistently gets things wrong because she tries to support cute, pretty creatures and save little cuddly animals but is disgusted with snakes and slimy things. She has a big footprint in her little natural world but almost everything that she does makes a negative impact on the world around her.

She tries to rescue a turtle crossing the road and ends up drowning what was really a tortoise, she feeds the cute animals in her forest and ends up supporting an invasive species that drives out the local animals, and finally she rescues a mouse from a "mean" snake. She ends up getting hantavirus from the mouse because she didn't realize that snakes are a valuable form of pest control that's much more helpful than harmful to humans who share environments with wildlife. It is the hair of dead Princess Harriet that is in stuck in a pile of dirt that serves as dinner for a little worm-boy; the story is framed by by his worm father recounting the tale of Harriet after his son complains about a hair in his dirt.

It is a little bit cruel, the worm family revels in the demise of Princess Harriet, but nature is cruel - or at least indifferent, and that's the main message of the book. You need to learn about nature because nature has no interest in taking care of you.

I think the main audience for this book is a lot like the kid I was when I was buying the Larson collections - a bright kid with an interest in science who also cackled over gross-out humor and is a bit morbid. I'm sure there are lots of kids out there who would really enjoy reading There's A Hair in my Dirt (the fact that it's a graphic novel of sorts might help) but it's got a message that's worthwhile for a lot of adults to internalize as well.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Larson, Gary. There's a Hair in my Dirt. Harper Perennial. New York: New York. 1998.

Tonal dissonance and sexist bull

Look, I don't hate horror comics, okay? I read through all of Wes Craven's Coming of Rage as floppies this year and enjoyed the hell out of all the blood and guts and gore, The Darkness is the one fucking thing that makes me want to play video games, and any of Stephen King's horror/novel crossover books like The Cycle of the Werewolf are the kind of shit that makes me get up in the morning.

I am also, just by pure happenstance and a long history as a goth kid, not totally ignorant about various forms of witchcraft, including modern branches like LaVeyan Satanism, Theistic Satanism, and Wicca as well as older forms of Paganism, Shamanism, and herbal medicine that are considered witchcraft these days.

AND I have tons of fond memories of reading Archie Comics as a kid and was totally the nerd who had to be home for TGIF to watch Sabrina the Teenage Witch every week.

With those things in mind (that I like horror comics, am kind of into witchcraft, and am familiar with the canon of the universe) The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is shit.

Look pals, just because you CAN grimdark something doesn't mean that you SHOULD. Instead of the light-hearted buffoonery and issue-of-the-week lessons of the original comics and various TV iterations THIS version of Sabrina features the affable Aunts Hilda and Zelda as gluttonous cannibals. In one case a totally harmless woman has her daughter taken from her, is driven insane and institutionalized, and then has her sanity restored so she can suffer more. (SPOILERS) Harvey's mother, driven mad by his death, brutally murders her husband as he tries to protect her. (/Spoilers)

I'm just going to take a second to point out that while witches were frequently accused of human sacrifice and cannibalism it isn't actually something we see much in the European history of witchcraft. Also absent from European witchcraft traditions: the need for a woman to protect her virginity in order to become a witch. That's getting into some gross sexist-as-fuck Gardner shit which, A) doesn't make sense if Hilda and Zelda did the same thing and are supposed to be centuries old and, B) SHOULDN'T SHOW UP IN A COMIC BOOK ABOUT A FUCKING MINOR. (Because, yes, kindly dumbbell jock Harvey is pressuring Sabrina into sex and she can't have sex with him before her sixteenth birthday and still be a witch because what the actual fuck.)

I've seen some commentary about the fact that this book allows women to exist without the need for men as a woo-girl-power kind of thing but that totally ignores the fact that men are also witches and seem to get their way more often (Sabrina's dad's illegal relationship with her mom, for instance) and are supposed to be the virgin servants of a distinctly masculine entity. Also how the hell does the virginity thing hold up - Edward Spellman had a relationship with Lady Satan (the actual FUCK.) before getting his rocks off with a mortal who both he and Lady Satan would eventually torture. Lady Satan also murders the kindly old drama teacher at Sabrina's high school so that she can fill in the position and fill out some decidedly cheescake-inspired suits. For a comic that is supposed to be about women and that some people are offering up as a vehicle for powerful female characters it sure does think of a lot of women as disposable.

What a fucking mess. I like comics but even the pacing of this whole thing feels off - the rising tension of each issue is predictable and tedious, the whole comes to an unsatisfying conclusion, character development is not even on the fucking radar - it's just untidy and the writing seems like it was hurriedly scribbled in the journal of a tween boy who wanted to show it to his friends so they could see how dark and twisted and TOTALLY MASCULINE I GET BONERS FOR HOT LADIES OKAY his mind is.

That's actually another thing I have beef with - one witchy-type article discussed the fact that witches are presented as ugly to match the ugliness of their deeds; that they don't need beauty because their power makes them above it. Well. Sure, that's true, at least of all the witches who are supposed to be over a certain age. Sabrina is cute and sexy by turns and Lady Satan is sexy as fuck, even if she does have to steal faces from mortals.

This book is Sabrina the Teenage Witch as scripted by Eli Roth. It's maybe good enough for a rejected GWAR album cover but probably not even that. You care about the people being ripped to shreds on a GWAR cover, their faces convey pain and horror. Not so here.

Which is the only negative thing that I have to say for the art. The faces aren't great at conveying emotion but I can't tell if that's a lack of practice or if poor Robert Hack just had too much going on in each page to convey the appropriate emotional response in every panel. Jumping from a discussion of physical intimacy and young love to the ritual preparations to slaughter a goat is enough to make any artist tear their hair out, let alone one who hadn't worked on ANY sequential books before this. Hack does a fantastic job with what he was given to work with, and I think the art is stellar. It's got a great vibe that instantly recalls Rosemary's Baby and tries to set a mood much better than any of the writing does. I think Hack is a great horror artist and I hope he continues working in horror comics, I just wish he'd had a writing team worthy of his talent and skill for his first run out of the gate.

(UGH, FUCK, I just realized that Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa is the one adapting The Stand to comics and fuck half of me wants to read it and see how it went and the other half of me thinks that even the original novel did way too much of the "women are commodities in the apocalypse" bullshit that I feel like Aguirre-Sacasa would have just made worse. FUCK)

Cheers,
     - Alli

Aguirre-Sacasa, Roberto (Writer). Hack, Robert (Illustrator). The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina
     Vol. 1: The Crucible. Archie Comics. New York: New York. 2016

Missing pieces

Funfact: If you ask me to buy you a comic book for Christmas I will read it before I give it to you. I don't make the rules, that's just how these things work, and I am aware that this is kind of a dick move.

I also sort of don't care that it's kind of a dick move because it gets me to read comics that I otherwise wouldn't and that can be tremendously edifying.

I don't know why my sister decided she wanted Andre the Giant: Closer to Heaven, but I must say it's a good choice. The Princess Bride - that's probably why she wants it: she's super into the book and the movie and recently read Cary Elwe's memoir so I'm sure that's a contributing factor.

As a comic it's a pretty decent offering. The art is compelling and dream-like, presenting you with images that communicate their subjects well but are always a bit off - whether it's glowing eyes or exaggerated features the characters don't fit into the real world, just the larger-than-life story of Andre the Giant's life. As a story it's a bit simple. The character of Andre narrates the man's life and does so in clear language that is touching and a bit predictable. There's real human tragedy and a great deal of success but I feel like it's lacking something important. There's a depth and emotion missing from the whole thing that I felt throughout.

Robin Rou____'s letter at the beginning of the graphic novel has this quintessence that's missing elsewhere. Her pain is real and her love and distance from her father is well communicated. I can't tell what she's got that the rest of the book doesn't - if it's honesty or bitterness or mourning - but I do feel like something's missing.

I probably never would have read this book on my own, and I'll probably never read it again, but it's a great offering for artists looking for inspiration and a decent choice as a book to read through at the library or comic shop.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Easton, Brandon and Denis Medri. Andre the Giant: Closer to Heaven. Lion Forge Comics.
     San Diego: California. 2015

Nonbinary representation before that was a thing

 

I think all of the years I spent not reading Ursula K. Le Guin can be attributed to the melodrama of the first few pages of The Left Hand of Darkness. Now that I've gotten over myself and just read the damn thing I'm probably going to spend a few years kicking myself for not getting into her work earlier.

Le Guin's writing has made my life better in a significant way even outside of the fact that she writes good books. Her exploration of gender at the heart of The Left Hand of Darkness is aggressively feminist for the time that the novel was written and even today could be seen as shocking with the realizations that a human who views sex and gender as a binary encounters in a nonbinary species.

I'm hella 1000% here for this shit.

Ai's difficulty in his relationships with the Gethenians is a beautiful exploration of the male gaze and how it colors literally everything in the world as Le Guin depicts it. Ai has trouble accepting nonbinary pronouns and presentations, he forces descriptions of behaviors as belonging to one human gender or another, unconsciously assigning positive traits to masculinity and negative traits to femininity. Ursula K. Le Guin went in with guns blazing and stripped the logic away from gendered assumptions and gave not one single fuck about making her work more palatable or less challenging.

And it's amazing - it's also amazing how far we've come since 1969 and how stuck we seem to be in some ways. Right now we have a whole vocabulary for gender fluidity and nonbinary spectra that simply didn't when Le Guin was writing TLHoD; but right now we still have issues of people seeing certain kinds of work or chores or colors or clothing as right for only one gender or another, completely ignoring that there might be something in-between.

Anyway, I loved the shit out of the book and it made me cry. A+, 10/10, would read again.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. Ace Books. New York: New York. 2010. (1969).

Stupid mistakes with smart books

Reading a post-apocalyptic novel during the 2016 presidential election was probably not the greatest plan I've ever had. It stalled my reading in a pretty major way because it's hard to use a nightmarish corporatocracy as a means of escapism when you're attempting to escape a nightmarish corporatocracy.

It also might have been useful to know that The Year of the Flood is the second book of a trilogy before I started reading it, but I have a history of making that kind of mistake and try not to let it bother me.

What IS bothering me is that this is only the second novel I've read by Margaret Atwood. That is bad and wrong and something I will have to fix because, GOD DAMN, this woman can write.

The Year of the Flood is about a bunch of misfits who create an eco-based religion surviving the months and years before and after a bioengineered virus destroys most of the human race. It's scary and heady and is told through the eyes of incredibly well-constructed characters who are deeply satisfying in their richness and perspective.

The craft of this novel kept knocking my feet out from under me. Atwood had to sculpt a religion and its scriptures from scratch to match the world around it. I know it sounds easy when both things go together but how well it's done makes it very clear that there was a lot of work and effort put into the creation of the Gardeners and their hymnal and that work pays off. It's all tremendously believable and is far more enticing than a fictional cult should be.

I really, really want to read the other two books in the MaddAddam Trilogy, so I'm going to cut myself off before I start speculating about the world of the novel. I haven't read it yet and I don't want to spoil it for myself.

Cheers,
     Alli

Atwood, Margaret. The Year of the Flood. Anchor Books. New York: New York. 2009.

Translating media in an okay way

I read The Count of Monte Cristo last year and happened to catch the 2002 film adaptation on TV earlier this month. I'd seen the movie in theaters but I'm pretty sure I hadn't seen it since, though I remember liking it when it came out. Now I'm less sure how I feel about it.

The book is incredibly long - probably too long. It wants to do a lot of things in a really brilliant way but has to settle for doing a couple of things brilliantly and the rest of the things in kind of shitty way. The Carnival section is much too long, there's a tremendous amount of backstory on several characters who don't actually have much of an impact on the novel, and the length of the damn thing eventually makes its protagonist less sympathetic than he would be in a shorter story.

The 2002 adaptation solves a lot of these problems by dropping all but a few characters and cutting the story down to a manageable size (and almost completely ditches Carnival, which is a SIGNIFICANT improvement). But it also loses a lot of what is interesting about the novel from a historical fiction perspective, to the point that the shifting political sands that define the book become a single-scene plot point at the beginning of the movie and basically never get mentioned again. It's a tradeoff that I think makes sense from a cinematic perspective but that does make the whole less compelling - perhaps a miniseries or a TV show would be a better way to make The Count of Monte Cristo come alive on a screen than a feature-length film was.

There are a couple of changes that I think were really well done, especially in respect to the choices and agency of Mercedes. I'm never ever going to bitch that we get a soppy happy ending if that soppy happy ending replaces a master-slave/owner-lover/whatever gross relationship. The ending of the book is pretty fucked up and I think the movie did a really decent job of keeping the fucked-up revenge fantasy without completely alienating the audience from Edmond's character by having him sail off into the sunset with a brainwashed slave-girl.

The movie is a fine way to spend a couple of hours, the book is a fine way to spend a couple of weeks. One is not a brilliant reflection of the other, but it's a totally decent translation to a totally different medium.

The wayback machine

Computers are fuckin' wild, friends. The changes in computing from thirty years ago to now are mind-boggling. It makes the 60-year jump from flight to lunar landing seem glacially slow.

The Cuckoo's Egg is a book that makes you first marvel at how different computing was when the book was written and then gasp at the vast gulf between the attitudes of then and now. In 1989 Stoll was the kind of optimist that it seemed was needed to promote the growth and understanding of networked systems, but in 2016 he looks like a hopeless idealist. We're on an internet that is, essentially, Stoll's version of computer hell. There's no transparency, everything is password protected and a lot of communication is encrypted - whole security systems are set up to verify the authenticity of requests from jump to jump and server to server. Stoll operated in a world where anyone with a phone line could enter almost any server because very few servers had any means of preventing them from doing so.

I (kind of) work in IT and I (actually) spend a lot of time dealing with, discussing, and researching information security (InfoSec - which is a polite way of saying "hacking" and hack prevention). As a result of my time spent on IT and InfoSec Stoll's ancient systems are fascinating in how they are constructed on a basis of trust that has *never* existed in my adult lifetime. But it's also really interesting that, in spite of how untrusting we've become, we're still dealing with a lot of the same problems Stoll describe. People are still bad at changing default passwords, applying patches, and managing individual accounts. We're still infinitely socially engineerable and it's usually pretty easy to guess most people's account names and passwords based on the information available on their public facebook pages (or at least it's easy to re-set their accounts so that you can change their passwords).

But one thing that did suffer tremendously in the wake of the attacks described in The Cuckoo's Egg has been the slow, aching death of open-source software. It's not 100% gone and probably never will be - everyone has experienced open-source in the form of Wikipedia - but open-source operating systems make up a much smaller part of the landscape than they did in 1989.

The EMACS word processing program was an oft-unpatched open-source program that had a vulnerability and left a backdoor into systems it was installed on. Using an accidental opening like this to access a system is called an exploit and exploits are what has led to the languishing of open-source products. If anyone can add to the code of a program than anyone can drop in a backdoor or a virus; large software companies don't typically do this intentionally and attempt to prevent it from accidentally happening because they have a reputation to worry about. We can actually see this playing out in the world right now with attitudes toward Adobe Flash and debates about OSX and Windows; Flash is being phased out because it's too open to attack, OSX has gotten major criticism for concealing SSH vulnerabilities, and Microsoft is facing a lot of suspicion because it sometimes seems like Windows 10 was specifically made to be difficult to protect. When an exploitable vulnerability from a major publisher becomes known they rush to fill the hole to keep their customer base. When a vulnerability becomes clear in open source software users often question if the cure is going to be worse than the disease.

Most people who use open-source operating systems and programs these days are somewhat more savvy than people who are comfortable using a computer straight out of the box - I think this is because there's a sense of inevitability. Open-source users know that their configuration is a fleeting thing that's going to be lost to upgrades and reinstalls in three months to keep up with technology and security from known vulnerabilities. It's more overhead than casual users are comfortable worrying about.

But back to Stoll - his story is the reason that this is true. The Cuckoo's Egg tells the story of the first really well documented (and publicly known) ongoing hack. Now we hear about this kind of thing every other month, but Stoll had front-row seats to watch the way that humans were going to define the way that other humans interacted with networks. And it turns out that humans were going to have to be more isolated and circumspect than the idealistic Stoll had hoped.

The book is a good read from a historical perspective, and it's a genuinely interesting story, but it won't tell you a hell of a lot about the way technology works today. It brings up some good questions that we have yet to supply good answers for (most notably: how do you handle discovering an exploit - do you reveal it and risk copycats or keep it secret and hope more malicious actors don't stumble on it) and he makes a strong case for education and transparency.

There are some pretty awkward moments, though, as a result of when it was written. At one point Stoll, a Berkeley liberal in the late 80s, mimics a Chinese accent in a way that is painful to read. There's a mild undercurrent of benevolent sexism. It's not comfortable, but it does explain a lot about how and why internet culture came to be what it is (mainly that it basically got started by English-speaking white dudes who had no idea they were excluding women or people of color, and would have been offended if you suggested that they were doing so - surprise! everything is very much the same).

I liked The Cuckoo's Egg, I'll be hanging onto it and probably re-reading it a few times in the future. It's a great case study, if nothing else, and is written in an engaging and understandable way.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Stoll, Clifford. The Cuckoo's Egg. Doubleday Publishing. New York: New York. 1989.