Meh. Why Not?

Apparently, it helps to be bored before you engage with this meme. So while I'm waiting for some student to visit me in the next 40 minutes, I will engage you with my witless responses to the following questions.

Via Billville!

1. Elaborate on your default icon.
Um, I don't know what this means. Maybe this isn't the meme for me.

2. What's your current relationship status?
I have one partner and approximately 125 post-pubescent children.

3. Ever have a near-death experience?
I came close last night while listening to a college DJ detail the functions of his laptop for close to 30 minutes.

I've had a few near misses, but nothing I would call an "experience."

4. Name an obvious quality you have.
My short attention span and child-like susceptibility to lame memes like this.

5. What's the name of the song that's stuck in your head right now?
"Back in Time" by Huey Lewis & the News. I just got word of NASA's new launch vehicle, and was thinking of writing a post on it, and started thinking of a clever title for my post ("Back to the Future"), and started thinking about the film, and started hearing the theme song incessantly. But was it BTTF2 or BTTF3? Please, someone, help me.

6. Any celeb you would marry?
I'm guessing that most celebrities are at least as shallow as I am, so I see it as more of a tempestous fling than a yearlong commitment, but let's go with Scarlett Johansson for now, since she's in that new Dylan video that I can't stop myself from watching.

7. Has anyone ever said you look like a celebrity?
I seem to recall some unflattering comparisons to Meatloaf.

8. Do you wear a watch? What kind?
I have a largish collection of Fossil watches, but have never bothered to replace the batteries once they wear out. Now I just use my phone.

9. Do you have anything pierced?
My ears are pierced daily by the singing of the woman in the office next to mine.

10. Do you have any tattoos?
One, which I had done on the same day and at the same parlor where two of my dear friends got their tattoos.

11. Do you like pain?
Well, I have a tattoo and I'm a PhD candidate and I teach composition and I am a liberal living in Southern Utah. You decide.

12. Do you like to shop?
Last night, on the eve of my first substantial payday in three months, I dreamt I was gathering books, magazines, and action figures in a large warehouse-like store devoted to selling objects only of interest to me.

13. What was the last thing you paid for with cash?
I gave a cash tip to one of the cooks at a Mongolian BBQ. He was awesome.

14. What was the last thing you paid for with your credit card?
I bought a copy of Mark Helprin's new novel.

15. Who was the last person you spoke to on the phone?
My mother, oddly enough. She has two new kittens. And dozens of unfulfilled dreams.

16. What is on your desktop background?
This.

17. What is the background on your cell phone?
A soft but persistent voice that tells me to kill you.

18. Do you like redheads?
I'm with Springsteen on this one. Though I find redheaded men almost universally obnoxious.

19. Do you know any twins?
Just the gum-chewing blondes on bikes who sell me heroin.

20. Do you have any weird relatives?
Weird, verging on sociopathic.

21. What was the last movie you watched?
Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo. It's fucked up and disturbing and beautiful.

22. What was the last book you read?
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks

Farewell, Ninth Planet

Well, the decision has been rendered. I expect an immediate uprising from schoolchildren and educators worldwide. Meanwhile, the New Horizons spacecraft continues its long, cold journey to the newly decommissioned planet, regardless of astronomer infighting. NASA's Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission will arrive at Pluto in July 2015. It may not be a planet anymore, but I suspect Pluto will still be there for us, spinning resolutely in its lonely quadrant of space.

Maybe we should start calling all these orbiting objects "worlds" instead of "planets." Where's Carl Sagan when you need him?

Here's the official new definition of what constitutes a "planet" from the International Astronomical Union. And a wistful editorial from a Pluto-as-planet fan.

I must say, the decision makes complete sense to me, and I support it. But when I actually heard the news, I was surprised at the pang of sadness I felt. Seemed like it would always be there, you know? I guess it's still there; it just seems that much farther away.

In related news, a friend recently celebrated his 30th birthday.

New Reading in Comix Scholarship

My friend and colleague from Bowling Green, Stefan Hall, has published an intriguing article on David Mack's series, Kabuki, for the ImageTexT e-journal for Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. Check it out! Hire him!

Books Read in 2000

Well, this is more like it. I must've been motivated by the turn of the century to read more.

Total number of pages read: 8639
Pages read in 1990: 7743
Pages read in 1991: 4870
Pages read in 1992: 5395
Pages read in 1993: 7568
Pages read in 1994: 4441
Pages read in 1995: 5417
Pages read in 1996: 4268
Pages read in 1997: 6890
Pages read in 1998: 6546
Pages read in 1999: 4324

Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Star Trek: Vulcan's Glory by D.C. Fontana
Great Books by David Denby
Mrs. Dalloway by Virgina Woolf
Grown Up All Wrong: 75 Great Rock and Pop Artists from Vaudeville to Techno by Robert Christgau
The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell
Battle of the Books by James Atlas
The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene
Star Trek: The Ashes of Eden by William Shatner
The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace by Terry Brooks
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robinson
Selections from the First Two Issues of "The New York Review of Books" edited by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein
In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike
Get a Life! by William Shatner and Chris Kreski
The Poorhouse Fair by John Updike
Star Wars: Rogue Planet by Greg Bear
I Am Not Spock by Leonard Nimoy
Star Trek DS9: The Fall of Terok Nor by Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens
Flashforward by Robert Sawyer
The Same Door by John Updike
ST Voyager: Mosaic by Jeri Taylor
Wartime by Paul Fussell
I Am Spock by Leonard Nimoy
Over the Edge by Harlan Ellison

My 25 (Or So) Favorite TV Characters Ever

Inspired by this post and its included links, and by the fact that, having finished writing my syllabi, I have nothing better to do. Couldn't quite keep it to 25, so you get some bonus characters.

1. Homer Simpson
(80% of my everyday conversation comes from this character.)
2. Andy Sipowicz, NYPD Blue
(I love the arc of this character through the series. Strangely parallels my father's attempts at redemption.)
3. Tony Soprano
(He won't die in the end. I can feel it.)
4. Lt. Commander Worf, Star Trek: TNG and DS9
(In his best moments, Worf is the Prince Hal of Star Trek.)
5. Doctor Who
(Especially as portrayed by Tom Baker, though Christopher Eccleston's Doctor is a close second.)
6. Spock
7. T-Bag, Prison Break
(Not one to apologize for who he is or bullshit about his motivations. Even though he's, you know, a child rapist.)
8. Dana Scully, The X-Files
(Torn between her science and her faith. Gorgeously conflicted.)
9. Garak, Deep Space Nine
(I love how it takes him five minutes to articulate his lines.)
10. Det. Mick Belker, Hill Street Blues
(An early model for my high school persona.)
11. Toby Ziegler, The West Wing
(He's moody and his brother's an astronaut.)
12. Dr. Gregory House
(I am so close to being just like him.)
13. Det. Vic Mackey, The Shield
(So street. I like how he calls douchbags "pussies," and calls pussies "douchebags.")
14. Col. Henry Blake, M*A*S*H
(The clown who died tragically, precipitating a long, slow decline in the series.)
15. Elaine Benes, Seinfeld
(Pretty much just for the dance.)
16. Lt. Colleen McMurphy, China Beach
(Pretty much the most depressing goddamn show I've ever watched. I like the flashforward to her as a depressed PTSD victim in the show's final season.)
17. John Locke, Lost
(Another whacked-out Jesus freak. But, for him, it works.)
18. Lurch, The Addams Family
(Genius. I bust out just seeing him. I hang on his every moan.)
19. The Robot, Lost in Space
(At one point during my childhood, I wanted to be this dude. Warning!)
20. Dr. Johnny Fever, WKRP in Cincinnatti
(Strangely, probably the character that had the most influence on my adult life.)
21. Londo Mollari, Babylon 5
(Despicable, and ultimately tragic. Like George W. with a worse haircut.)
22. Ari Gold, Entourage
(For his tantrums.)
23. Larry David, Curb Your Enthusiasm
(In, say, 15 years, I will become him.)
24. Mr. Rosso, Freaks and Geeks
(There isn't a a character on this show that I didn't identify with and/or adore in some way. But Rosso wins out for his execrable cover band.)
25. Jayne Cobb, Firefly
(Shiny. At least he didn't die in the movie.)
26. Lex Luthor, Smallville
(Did it ever occur to you that maybe the hero of the story. . . is Ziget?)
27. Denny Crane, Boston Legal
(This space could be taken by any Shatner character, really. Aren't they all the same?)
28. Jack Bristow, Alias
(Not to be fucked with. Unless, you know, your show is cancelled.)
29. George Michael Bluth, Arrested Development
(Another dude who can bust me up without really having to do anything.)
30. President Laura Roslin, Battlestar Galactica
(I keep expecting her to fuck up, but she manages to rise above it all. I might be willing to follow her to the Promised Land.)
31. David Brent, The Office
(Not just a pair of tits.)

Fuck, I watch a lot of TV.

You Are Who You Quote

Via kottke.org:

Go here and look through random quotes until you find five that you think reflect who you are or what you believe.

Here are my five:

• "Everything you can imagine is real." (Pablo Picasso)
• "Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence." (Robert Frost)
• "Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself/I am large, I contain multitudes." (Walt Whitman)
• "It is necessary to try to surpass oneself always; this occupation ought to last as long as life." (Queen Christina, of Sweden)
• "Emergencies have always been necessary to progress." (Victor Hugo)

Another Utah Senator for Family Values

I don't know. You decide. Is this guy just a racist asshole or an ignorant fuck? (My guess: probably a little of both.) Either way, Utah State Senator Chris Buttars is yet another shining example of the kind of people who routinely get elected here:

"Sen. Buttars says ruling against school segregation was wrong."

For the record, Buttars also disputes the theory of evolution, saying, in this editorial, that it has "more holes than a crocheted bathtub." Way to work the creative metaphor, Senator!

I'll say this for Utah voters: they're loyal to their own kind.

Speaking of racist assholes, check out this fascinating look at the prime-time hate-speech forum that is Lou Dobbs Tonight. Looks like open racism in America is as mainstream as apple pie. Again.

In Which I Once Again Shill for the New York Times

I was surprised and pleased to see the lead of this week's NYT Book Review given over to a rather glowing review of a new biography of Alice Sheldon, aka James Tiptree, Jr., one of the best, and most important, female SF authors. For nearly her entire career, Sheldon wrote and published as Tiptree, a mysterious author who, despite winning numerous awards and accolades, never appeared in public. You can read more details of Sheldon's life in the review, but her stories still hold up as compelling and occasionally chilling insights into human discrimination. Sheldon is not my favorite SF author, but I would not appreciate what SF is capable of without her writing. My favorite story of hers (and one of my favorite titles of all time) is her 1976 novella, "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?", available in this collection.

You can read more reviews and some excerpts from the biography here.

Jaime Hernandez' strip for the NYT Magazine continues to hold its place as the first thing I read in the paper every Sunday. In the most recent installment of his story, "La Maggie la Loca," Hernandez ties together 20+ years of his characters in a single panel. I have literally grown up with his characters, who have aged in real time, and Hernandez has managed to both appeal to my sense of nostalgia while creating a story that is completely accessible to readers unfamiliar with his work (though the existence of such ignorance confounds me). Additionally, Hernandez continues to amaze with his ability to move me with only a single facial expression.

The current installment is not yet online, but you can read all the previous installments of the series here. It represents graphic storytelling at its finest. I can't wait for it to be collected in an oversize volume, even if it only ends up being 20 pages long.

I don't know anything about tennis, and I care even less, but I will read pretty much anything written by David Foster Wallace. Helpfully, he provides much of the background information I need in his copious footnotes to this article on some player I've never heard of before. But it's still worth reading. Any writer who can get me interested in tennis (or, for that matter, lobsters) deserves a fucking Nobel, though they'd probably have to invent a new category for the guy. Nobel Prize in Parenthetical Remarks?

And check out this article on Outkast, possibly the best band of the decade, despite the fact that they're not really a band, and at least one of the members doesn't want to be in one.

Books Read in 1999

In '99, I was editing Petroglyph, a magazine of creative nature writing. So, again, I wasn't reading a lot of books, but I was reading a lot. Mostly poetry. Bad poetry. Lots and lots of bad poetry.

Though I didn't read many books in 1999, the ones that I did read were, for the most part, exceptional, including the best books I have ever read about Elvis Presley and the U.S. space program.

Total number of pages read: 4324
Pages read in 1990: 7743
Pages read in 1991: 4870
Pages read in 1992: 5395
Pages read in 1993: 7568
Pages read in 1994: 4441
Pages read in 1995: 5417
Pages read in 1996: 4268
Pages read in 1997: 6890
Pages read in 1998: 6546

Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession by Greil Marcus
Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick
Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide by Robert Michael Pyle
Waterland by Graham Swift
Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia by Dennis Covington
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Rise and Fall of English by Robert Scholes
Aftermath by Charles Sheffield
The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the "Apollo" Astronauts by Andrew Chaikin
Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie

The Ship of State 

(Non-) Inspirational Quote of the Day

It is now several years that our country has been heavily involved in the war in Vietnam. During most of this time, it has been inescapably evident that the entire venture was in several ways grievously unsound. It was unsound in the first place because it was devoid of a plausible, coherent, and realistic object. The regime in South Vietnam has been throughout too weak, too timid, too selfish, too uninspiring, to form a suitable or promising object of our support. And even if this regime had been a most vigorous and effective one, we would still be faced with the fact that the methods to which we have found ourselves driven, in the effort to crush by purely military means an elusive and disguised adversary, have been so destructive of civilian life, even in South Vietnam itself, that no conceivable political outcome could justify the attendant suffering and destruction.

And that's not the only way this effort has been unsound. It has also been unsound in its relation to our own world responsibilities and to our responsibilities here at home. It has represented a grievous disbalance of our world policy. It has riveted an undue amount of our attention and resources to a single secondary theater of world events. It has left us poorly prepared, if not helpless, to meet other crises that might occur simultaneously elsewhere in the world. And finally, it has proceeded at the cost of the successful development of our life here in this country. It has distracted us and hampered us in our effort to come to grips with domestic problems of such gravity as to cry out, as we all know, for the concentrated, first-priority attention of both our government and our public.

These are indeed grievous drawbacks to any sort of military effort. They were all clearly visible a long time ago. It did not take the agony and the grievous human losses of these past two to three years to make them evident to anyone who wanted to see.

--George Kennan, writing in February 1968

I read the quote in this article written by Ronald Steel on the occasion of Kennan's 100th birthday.

Books Read in 1998

Flushed with success at teaching college-level courses, I soon learned to cockily neglect student papers in favor of reading more interesting (and literate) fare. I also took a literature course on drug addiction and another on James Joyce, which may explain some of the more esoteric titles in this list. To this day, I want to get a tattoo of a phrase from Ulysses; I just haven't decided which one yet.

Here's Bill's shockingly incomplete list.

Total number of pages read: 6546
Pages read in 1990: 7743
Pages read in 1991: 4870
Pages read in 1992: 5395
Pages read in 1993: 7568
Pages read in 1994: 4441
Pages read in 1995: 5417
Pages read in 1996: 4268
Pages read in 1997: 6890

Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi (trans. Frances Frenaye)
Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas DeQuincey
The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens
Wilderness Tips by Margaret Atwood
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard
Whisky Galore by Compton Mackenzie
Ulysses by James Joyce (ed. Hans Walter Gabler)
The New Bloomsday Book by Harry Blamires
My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid
Pronto by Elmore Leonard
Fermat's Enigma by Simon Singh
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The House Gun by Nadine Gordimer
Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's "Basement Tapes" by Greil Marcus
Star Trek TNG: Q-Space by Greg Cox

And while we're on the subject of books, check out this great new blog from Bookman and company (apostrophe notwithstanding).

Chazzbot: Year One

New year, new picture. Thanks for reading. Chazzbot is one year old!

Kinky fun coming in the next year of Chazzbot: I adopt a pre-pubescent boy, dress us both in tights, and start hanging out in a cave. Then we get chummy with the Enoch City police commish. And, hey, I might actually post some new entries!

The photo above was taken at the 2005 Jackson Hole wedding of Robin & Micah. I think you will agree: it is the best photograph of me ever taken.

You can expect a small flood of new posts once I start school again and leave my current job as a fry cook. Please stay tuned.

In the meantime, please enjoy this symbolic comix page: