{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1784", "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it. Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.", "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'" }, "archive": "urth", "thread": { "id": 1784, "subject": "Tidbits of all sorts", "messages": 1, "voices": 1, "first": "1999-09-16T13:42:48+00:00", "last": "1999-09-16T13:42:48+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Michael Andre-Driussi", "address": "mantis at sirius.com" }, "date": "1999-09-16T13:42:48+00:00", "subject": "(urth) Tidbits of all sorts", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Welcome aboard, Shannon Wilde!\n\nNew Wolfe story: \"The Tree Is My Hat\" is a new Wolfe story in the just\nreleased horror anthology _999_. Set on an island in the South Pacific, in\nthe modern moment. Those of you in the Chicago area missed your chance to\nmeet Wolfe at the Stars Our Destination bookstore, where Wolfe was signing\n_999_ (and other books as well) on 9/9/99.\n\nLEXICON URTHUS sighting in UK: spotted on the shelf in the Manchester\nbookstore called Waterstone's. And this is not the first time, either--two\nor perhaps three times. The mildly curious and the simply fanatical are\nencouraged to make pilgrimage, look the book over, heft it, thumb through\nit, glance at the pictures of exposed bosoms, put it back, and then\npersonally thank the booksellers for ordering it, and displaying it on\ntheir shelf--shake hands all around, shed a few tears of pride (in\nWaterstone's) and joy (of things Wolfean).\n\n\neccentric WATCHMEN spoilers to follow \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIt has been more than ten years since I read WATCHMEN. My memory of the\ndetails is largely eroded, but that doesn't matter--I still have my\nopinion. In a nutshell, I thought it started out great, had a fair middle,\nand a weak end.\n\nTo my mind there are two pillars to WATCHMEN: the obvious one is a\nparody/scathing satire/savage deconstruction of the entire comicbook hero\nmode (probably another brainchild engendered by Orwell's notion that\ncomicbook heroes were \"fascistic,\" and how could commie-book heroes or\nsupersocialist heroes be constructed to counter the posterboys of\nfascism?); and the way this is all accomplished is through a worldview\nwhich is starkly Gnostic, in the noir downbeat school of Gnosticism .\n\nIn this Gnosticism: there is a True God who is utterly absent from the\nworld, and unreachable in this life; Earth is Hell, more or less; the\nDemiurge is a Pretender God, a yucky creature who created humankind and\nEarth and rules over both of them and pretends to be the True God. So in\nvanilla Christian terms, the True God is God and the Demiurge is Satan,\nroughly, and with a lot of heretical spin.\n\nSo in WATCHMEN we have a universe where \"superheroes\" helped win WWII, and\nshape the post-war world; but it becomes clear that these people are\ntwisted individuals, megalomaniacs--thus, the world is not as shiny and\nbright as a comicbook world, it is dark and twisted (and there cannot be a\n\"happy comicbook ending\" where \"good triumphs over evil\" or \"justice\nprevails\" or any of the other traditional comicbook conclusions). There\n=is= a real superman, Manhattan, but he grows bored with the world and\nleaves for Mars, where he can contemplate his navel (thus he is a stand-in\nfor the True God). Obviously the villain of the piece is a fellow who\nstands in for the Pretender God, and he even has a chateau in Antarctica, a\nhandy literary location for Hell (aside from Superman refs for the\ncomicbook crowd).\n\nPerhaps because the text/images so effectively destroy the authority of the\nsuperhero mode, I felt that WATCHMEN was hoisted by its own petard: since\nwe don't believe in superheroes anymore, why believe that WWIII is =reallyimminent? Why believe that this psionic monster bomb plot will =reallysucceed in averting WWIII? And why believe for a moment, in this \"real\nworld\" mode, that the ends justify the means?\n\nThe psionic monster bomb plot was so lame that I couldn't buy it as real\n(my disbelief, in part conditioned by the text itself, would not\ndisengage), nor could I appreciate it as parody. It seemed like suddenly\nthe text wanted to have some of the aegis, the aura it had been trashing:\nas if BORED OF THE RINGS suddenly tried to play it straight as LORD OF THE\nRINGS, by way of \"the Big Lie.\"\n\nSo in the end, the satire devolves into nihilism, and it seems like a good text for a Gnostic-brand\nmass-murder/suicide cult: because the world is hell; because the ends\njustify the means, we can kill some innocent people to possibly avert\nmegadeath (Tokyo train gas attack); etc. (And no, Lawrence Durrell aside,\nnot all Gnostic cults are suicide cults.)\n\nTo contrast Severian with WATCHMEN's Pretender God: Severian is a pawn who\nmakes it to the other end of the board and is reborn as a more powerful\npiece; the Demiurge is game designer and game player.\n\n(I liked MIRACLE MAN better.)\n\n=mantis" } ] } ] }