(In case you haven’t read it, Mary Oliver references this poem. Nietzsche dressed as the Overman first debuted here.)
In case you missed it, Dionysus in Wisconsin got shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award in gay romance. The ceremony isn’t until June, so I get to spend the next few months either being anxious or being fêted, depending on who you ask. The other nominated works (you can check them out here) are also tremendous, which is awesome and intimidating all at once. In a very good article on being nominated for things, John Scalzi refers to all the works nominated together as a peer group. It’s hard to conceptualize myself up next to those other writers as peers, because their books are so good.
Awards are weird. On the one hand, they can draw attention to works that otherwise have been overlooked, create critical conversation, and recognize people who do work very, very hard and often receive very little. On the other hand, as an outsider, they can often seem to reinforce mainstream, middle-class values and recognize works that have already received recognition. Not for nothing, the Pulitzer board declined to award a prize for Gravity’s Rainbow the year it was released, because some of the board believed it was obscene and unreadable. (Which it is, but not in a bad way.)
That is to say, in a certain sense, it doesn’t matter if the Barbie movie gets an academy award (or even a nomination); it’s already proved its point by grossing a billion dollars worldwide. It’s already won.
For every book I’ve read that had justifiably won the award it was nominated for, I can name one that wasn’t very good and made me wonder what the judges had been thinking. And of course, there’s the terrible conundrum of the writer who wins a major award early in their career and then never quite achieves that high again.
Anyway, as of this writing, my biggest feeling right now is just…happiness. As someone who was always kind of a weird kid, who wandered for a long time without much acknowledgement that my writing was what anyone wanted to read (remember this comic? yeah, bleak times), it’s nice to feel like, hey, actually, someone did like it after all. More than one someone.
I just want to take this moment to thank everyone who’s read the book already, or who heard the news and is reading it now. You guys are the best. If you ever get to Madison, let me know. I’ll make cookies.
Gonna file this under BF608 L86 2024 for Philosophy, Psychology, Religion–Psychology–Will. Volition. Choice. Control. (Feel a little bad for psychology, which still shares BF with parapsychology and occult sciences. That feels like a statement at this point.)
Also it turns out I have drawn a lot of comics about anxiety. Hmm. This one will be filed under B808.63 L86 2018, for Philosophy (General)–Modern (1450/1600-)–Special topics and schools of philosophy–Anxiety. (If you’re just here for the philosophy, feel free to peace out here.)
As I was scanning this comic, I was wondering what I was going to write for my little essay here. The time between initially writing this and finishing it was so long that if I initially had any additional thoughts, they have now gone away. But in the meantime, it is young Hal’s birthday!
Isn’t he adorable?
Anyway, I have been trying to think of some things about having a kid that I wish I had known before he was born. Honestly, most of the things that are coming to mind are not necessarily things you can know beforehand. Like no matter how good you are at putting your baby to bed, you’ve only learned how to put your baby to bed–you can’t know ahead of time how to do it, because your baby has his own personality and likes and dislikes, and you can’t help anyone else, because all babies are pretty different. But here we go.
1. Be careful when sneezing after a c-section. I don’t know why, but although I started back to running about five weeks post-op and was fine, I pulled a muscle or something sneezing just before six weeks. That was weird. And uncomfortable. I also managed to pull a muscle in my trapezius muscle while lifting the baby, and that hurt on and off for weeks. And occasionally my wrist and thumb have been angry. So maybe I should say just be careful generally–lifting a tiny cannonball four hundred times a day turns out to do a number on you. It wasn’t until I stopped pumping that my body actually started to feel like it was totally normal again (and that lasted for a few days before I started training for a marathon, so, uh).
2. Convert distances from kilometers to miles before you sign up for a race and don’t sign up for a 10 miler eight weeks after your c-section. This goes without saying, I think. I think I did the actual signing up in early September (so two or three weeks post-op), meaning I was off any drugs…so we’ll blame this on sleep deprivation.
3. Emotional labor is for suckers. Emotional labor is the process of using your emotions in order to provoke or prevent a particular emotional response from people. And it’s just not worth it–you can’t tell someone news that will upset them in some perfect way so as not to upset them. You cannot hint at things you’d like people to do. Don’t say, “Um, do you think it’s time for the baby to take a nap?” Say, “I need to put him down for a nap now.” Don’t say, “Well, it was nice of you to come.” Say, “Get the fuck out of my house now, I’m tired.” (J/k, maybe don’t say that.)
4. You will become the expert on your baby. This is the best advice I got before Hal was born (it came from my sister-in-law and friend Claire Wahmanholm, doctor of poetry). So when you figure it out, feel free to (assertively, if need be) show the various grandparents/sitters how to put your baby down for a nap, feed him the way he likes, whatever. Do remember that over time, they will develop their own relationships with him and figure out what works for them in that context, but at the beginning they may need to be told.
5. As my mom put it, women don’t largely get to debrief after giving birth. I’m not a trauma theorist, but it doesn’t take a ton of psych to realize that when you go around talking to people about their kids and birth stories, you’ll sometimes get this sense that they are retelling their story in a way that is mean to make them feel better about whatever happened to them. Similarly, people get very insistent on the things they can control, like what they feed their infant or what kind of diapers they use, because it makes them feel better about all the millions of things they can’t control. This can lead to people saying things that sometimes come off as quite shirty about how their “thing” (exclusive breastfeeding for two years, cloth diapering, attachment parenting, whatever; not vaccinating is one of the more extreme and harmful examples of this) is so much better than whatever else. The best thing to do is not get involved.
6. The reason people fall into more sexist roles after having a baby is that the only people anyone has watched parent up close is their own parents, and thirty years ago it was a lot less typical for men to take on 50% of the parenting. If this works for you, fine. (It doesn’t work for me.) But at least be conscious about what you’re agreeing to.
7. Like most experiences, it’s hard to appreciate how amazing having a baby is until you’re not inside the experience anymore. Just smile as best you can at the old lady who corners you at the cafe. And when you see other people who are earlier in the process than you are, just reassure them that it gets better.
8. It is okay to buy some earplugs and wear them while you’re doing time holding a fussy/colicky infant. You’ll be more relaxed, and everyone will be happier because of that.
9. When in doubt, make art. Any type, doesn’t matter. It’ll make things better.
Somewhat to my surprise, since I’d already seen a movie this year, I found myself seeing Snowpiercer this past weekend. I am still not sure what to make of it; it’s a hodge-podge. The film is based on a French comic book (Le Transpierceneige, created by Jacques Lob and Benjamin Legrand), directed by Korean director Bong Joon-ho, produced by Korean producer Park Chan-wook, (among others), filmed in a studio in the Czech Republic with glacial shots done in Austria, starring a cast of mostly quite famous American and British actors with a few Korean faces thrown in for good measure—names you might recognize include Chris Evans[0], Tilda Swinton, Ed Harris, and John Hurt. If you’re into Korean films, you’ll recognize some of those actors as well–Song Kang-ho is kind of a big deal. Or if you’re face blind it will all be kind of a weird mishmash to you. Sorry.
Let’s go to the synopsis. Warning, this review contains spoilers for basically every major plot point.
The film kicks off in the rearmost compartment of a train. Following an attempt to stop global warming around 2014, the last remnants of humanity are crammed onto a high-speed train that circles the globe at a rate of once per year. After eighteen years of this, Curtis (Evans) has had enough; after watching an unidentified woman in a yellow jacket take two of the tail car’s children for unknown purposes, he decides it is time to launch a revolution. Accompanied by his gang of misfits, including an 18-year old kid named Edgar[1], an old man with only one arm and one leg named Gilliam, an angry black woman named Tanya (mother to one of the taken children, Timmy), a sad and wild-haired man named Andrew who has one arm (father to the other taken kid), and a sassy tattooed martial artist called Grey, they kill a bunch of the guards and manage to burst into the prison car where they release Namgoong Minsoo, designer of the locks on the train car doors. They offer him drugs (a solid industrial waste product called Kronol) in exchange for him opening the doors on the way to the engine.
As an aside, it seems weird to have a) have the prison car between the tail and the rest of the train, and b) have the guy who designed the locks in prison. If the prisoners are all in suspended animation, it’s a shorter trip for the guards if the “economy class” car is before the prison. And wouldn’t you want to keep the lock designer happy to prevent him doing EXACTLY WHAT HE IS ABOUT TO DO?
Anyway, Namgoong lets his daughter (Yona) out of another cell and they agree to head for the front of the train, although Namgoong makes it clear that this isn’t his first choice. A few cars later, after discovering what goes into the protein blocks (hint: not the stolen children, as I initially assumed), they get into a long and bloody battle with axe-wielding guards in scary knit balaclavas. The cinematography here is really great—the train goes through a tunnel, giving the director an excuse to shoot in “night vision” as well as regular light, and the fight choreography is similar to the hammer scene from Oldboy.[2] At the end of the fight, Curtis chooses to let Edgar die in order to capture Minister Mason, who is apparently the only government official on the train and who acts as a go-between from “the people” to Wilford (the engineer/train owner). There are several interesting set pieces as they continue to advance up the train, but I don’t really want to summarize everything. The short version is that it is repeatedly impressed upon them that the train is a closed ecosystem—like the biosphere experiment—and balance must be maintained. A bunch of Cutris’s friends die, because that’s what happens in ensemble films with multi-racial casts. And then, just like that, the survivors (Curtis, Namgoong, and Yona) are outside Wilford’s (played by the amazing/creepy Ed Harris) door.
Let’s talk about Wilford for a minute. His name is very interesting to me—a combination of “will,” which brings to mind all kinds of Nietzschean imagery (the will to power, i.e. Nietzsche’s conception of ambition, whatever it is that drives humans to be all they can be), and “Ford,” which brings us around to “Fordism,” which is either a clever way of expanding the market for your product by bringing your workers into the middle class or a truly diabolical way to keep your workers impoverished by encouraging them to buy the very product that they’re making (further separating them from the means of production as you go) and convincing them it’s all their idea.[3] Having become an overman[4], Wilford is not interested (as Zarathustara was) in educating the people about overcoming man (or Christianity, I guess). Instead, Wilford has recreated the world within the train, and it’s a peculiarly Calvinist one he’s come up with. As has been reinforced throughout the film, people are born into a role and remain there until they die.[5] Everything that happens on the train is essentially under his absolute control.
At this point, the revelation that Curtis’s little revolution was stage-managed by Wilford should come as no surprise to the viewer. Curtis gets, in a short span of time, offered the opportunity to take over for Wilford (because he’s also an overman, I guess, or because Wilford likes the cut of Curtis’s jib or something), and he finds out what has happened to the missing children (hint: the train is running out of pieces). The camera pulls back a bit and gives Chris Evans a chance to really ACT. Curtis has eaten babies, seen his friends die, seen children put into small compartments to perform questionable feats of engineering. . . it has been a rough couple of days. And then, suddenly, we are reminded that Namgoong and his daughter are still in the hall outside Wilford’s room, and Namgoong is planning to use the Kronol to blow a hole in the side of the train to escape through.[6]
So here we have a choice presented to our hero. Side with the power, the authority, the DEITY of the train, or side with the tiny, crazy, chaotic element against the authority and all it stands for. On the one hand, a dictatorship is not a great way to live, but they are surviving under Wilford’s leadership, and arguably his choices are. . . at least somewhat necessary. On the other hand, they’re not really living, sitting in darkened bunks day after day as the world clicks by under their feet—the world they inhabit is not one that affords them access to the full spectrum of human emotions and experiences.[7] And—well, live free or die hard, baby.
Curtis of course makes the choice to choose anarchy instead of autocracy, and he and Namgoong huddle together to protect Yuna and Timmy (remember Timmy?) from the explosion. The train derails, killing (probably) everyone except the kids.[8] A few minutes later, we see Yuna and Timmy regain consciousness and step out into the snow, where they see. . . a polar bear, proof that life has, as Ian Malcolm put it, found a way.
Aside from the fact that if you are seventeen years old and have lived on a train all your life, you are probably unprepared to deal with the realities of meeting a polar bear in the wild, what does this ending actually suggest to us? Of course, opposing autocracy is portrayed as a brave and bold move, but the result is not so much anarchy or freedom as desolation. Even if the earth is now inhabitable again, two people do not a gene pool make. And of course the actions of the anarchists may have in some limited sense have aided a few people, but Curtis and Namgoong just killed an awful lot of people who were not given a vote on what they’d like to see happen. In a certain (utilitarian) sense, choosing autocracy here is really the better choice, since after becoming leader, Curtis could have made more controlled decisions to bring a more democratic system of government to the train, and even an end to the train ride.
Of course, fuck utilitarians, am I right? Philosophically speaking, the choice is really supposed to be a non-starter. Choose autocracy and you lose your humanity but keep your life; choose anarchy and you die a human death, because is there anything more human than one man standing alone against an incredible power that will totally kill him at the end of the act?[9]
One other way that the choice can be viewed is as a rejection of Calvinism and a turn towards Sartre’s theory of radical freedom. While Wilford’s world contains within it the imputation that all the inhumane stuff—the eating babies, killing people to maintain a balance in the environment, the protein blocks, the general terribleness—is all justified because that’s the way the world is. You are either elect (first class) or not elect (coach), and that’s your place in the world forever and ever amen, and then whatever baby eating you have to do is pre-ordained and therefore doesn’t affect you getting into heaven. On the other hand, Sartre saw freedom as an integral part of humanity, and, as the man says, “existence comes before essence” (itals. in original, Sartre, 1946). That is a fancy way of saying that by exercising choice, man creates himself, his life, his personage, his. . . destiny seems like an inappropriate word, so let’s say his life. Curtis, having been borne though the train like a leaf on a stream is now, finally, able to make one true choice. Perhaps the first choice of his life.
What I was really struck by was the total uselessness of it all. The civilization of the train, if you can call it that, doesn’t give any reasons why human beings are worth saving at all. At best, they are a summary of the terrible, petty, terrified parts of human nature, all huddled together in a desperate attempt to survive, going nowhere fast. Maybe I’ve been watching too many episodes of Cosmos, but what really is the point of human survival? Ultimately it means nothing; the sun will go nova in a billion years and nothing of us will remain.
Let me put it another way. I have a dear friend who once told me she found that thought comforting—no matter how badly humans fuck up the planet, fuck up each other, in the longest of long runs, it’s totally irrelevant. Saving my own incredibly present fear of death, I can see her point. Watching this film, I was reminded of the futility of the struggle, and found myself asking, “Why wait?”
Was it a good film? I don’t know. You should see it though. Unless you just read my review, in which case I totally spoiled the ending for you. Sorry about that.[10]
Notes
[0] He was in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, which I think I actually saw. Here, he’s made up in the way that Hollywood makes up very attractive men to be somewhat grubby and broody, so you know it’s a Serious Film with Thinking and Implications and whatnot.
[1] It is a little disconcerting to hear that name on the screen, when everyone knows that Edgar is the big black mop of a dog who is currently sleeping on the floor behind me as I write this.
[2] The original Oldboy, not the pointless American remake.
[3] Like many things, it depends on who you ask. What Ford (or Freud, as he occasionally allowed himself to be called) actually did was pay his workers enough that they could buy the cars they were producing.
[4] Alternative translations are a bit loaded—Superman or Übermensch. Smooth rhetoric aside, I do think that from the way the character is portrayed and from a lot of little details I don’t have space to discuss, we are meant to understand him as an overman. However, beyond that, he didn’t get the name by accident, you know?
[5] And then what? Not covered in the film. Presumably fed to the fish.
[6] There is of course debate about whether or not the endless winter has settled down enough for this to be a tenable plan. Namgoong claims that a plane wreck he has been looking at is increasingly uncovered each year—apparently there are no climate scientists onboard who might confirm or deny this assertion. Having lived through many a Wisconsin winter, I can say I sided with Namgoong, but also he could have found a better place to put his plan into action than when cruising through the mountains.
[7] It does give them the opportunity to eat things like babies and legs though. So there’s that.
[8] I felt very sad at this point that the amazing aquarium that they all walked through probably got smashed and all the fish died.
[9] Hint: Last time, he got nailed to a tree. Or, as I put it to my friends, you don’t get to be a Christ figure and die a nice death at home of old age surrounded by your family and children.
[10] I just wanted to note that every time I typed “autocracy” during the writing of this review, I typed “autocrazy” instead. That seems appropriate.
Have you heard of a madman who on a bright morning lighted a lantern and ran to the market place and cried incessantly, “I seek God! I seek God!”
Writing a thesis is simultaneously the best and most terrible thing I have ever done.
Anyway. Nietzsche! Has there ever been a philosopher with a cooler mustache? I think not. Other things Nietzsche had: Syphilis. But that’s not to say we should write him off. He grew up next door to a church–his father was a Lutheran pastor (who died when young Friedrich was four). That he later went on to propose some revolutionary ideas about man’s relationship to religion in the 19th and 20th centuries is not entirely surprising. He lived a quiet life in the mountains, because of health issues, and so he knew what he was talking about when he said that happiness comes from overcoming obstacles. That’s an older idea than him, actually; I believe it goes back to Aristotle. At any rate, Nietzsche is quite cagey and doesn’t say what he thinks the new morals he’s calling for should be like. He is pretty clear that he thinks hanging on to Christian morality is stupid and outdated. You can check out the famous passage on the death of God from The Gay Science here. (He talks about the death of God again in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.) He has a marvelous mode of writing, it’s very readable. What else? Philosophy Now magazine did a marvelous podcast about our fellow that you can listen to here. And philosopher Alain de Botton did a 24-minute episode of a longer series for the BBC about Nietzsche, and you can check that out here. It’s awesome both because the US would never air something like that (not enough desperate housewives) and because de Botton is very good at explaining the essence of Nietzsche’s philosophy.
Is that enough links? Can you tell I’ve been doing some research? I’m having an affair with Nietzsche; don’t tell M. Foucault, I fearhe would sulk.
I wrote an article on running for a local running blog called Technically Running. You can read it here if you’re interested. You can check out the last comic I did with Nietzsche in it here.
This comic will be filed under B3317.L86 2013, for Philosophy (General)—Modern (1450/1600- )—By region or country—Germany. Austria (German)—By period—Later 19th and 20th centuries—Individual philosophers—Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900—Criticism and interpretation.
B, who has not had the dubious pleasure of reading Ms. Rand’s works, looked at this and said, “Does Francon really marry half the men in the novel?” Yes, she gets married three times, the last time to Roark, who previously raped her. And that is kind of why I have difficulty taking The Fountainhead seriously. I haven’t even gotten to the part where Roark talks about “Prime Movers” and how he shouldn’t be punished for blowing up a building because he is more special than everyone else.
Seriously, Rand is like if you took Nietzsche and put it through a sieve so you only got the overman (aka uberman) stuff out and forgot all of the compassion. Nietzsche, who once threw his arms around the neck of a cart horse to stop it being flogged, who wrote to a friend (after he’d gone crazy, admittedly) that he was having all the anti-Semites shot.
So yes, she missed the boat somewhere. Though I do think that Paul Ryan’s particular blend of Catholicism plus Objectivism makes him much more Swiftian than Randian. I do wish the media would stop saying that we here in Wisconsin like him; the man is a total tit and we are aware of it. He keeps getting elected because his district includes all the horrid little white flight suburbs outside of Milwaukee.
Filing this under B945.R233 F6 L86 2012 for Philosophy (General)—Modern (1450/1600- )—By region or country—United States—By period—19th and 20th centuries—Later 19th and 20th centuries, 1860-2000—Individual philosophers, A-Z—Rand, Ayn—Separate works, A-Z—The Fountainhead.
This isn’t the first time I’ve done Rand, by the way: #352 also features her crazy-looking cheekbones.
Also, here are three great pieces of trivia I found out while researching this comic:
Ayn Rand took her first name from the Hebrew word “a‘yin” (עין) meaning “eye.”
She eventually signed up for both Social Security and Medicare.
At her funeral, someone brought a wreath of flowers in the shape of a dollar sign.
Moving on, I ran a race yesterday. It was the Run for Snow 14.5 km trail run in Elver Park. I was very excited to be racing again.
Of course, I was so excited that I forgot my camera, so I only have two photos, both taken from the organizer’s website.
Waiting for the gun. Photo by CXC Skiing.
The race had three distances: 5.5km, 9km, and 14.5km. I signed up for the longest of these.
It was a very small field–about 14 women and 18 men in the 14.5km, with the same or fewer entrants in the other two distances. I seeded myself toward the front (why not) and so when they shouted “Go” I was almost immediately passed by everyone.
My legs were pretty cashed from my long run (13 miles) the day before, it turns out. I still have all my cardiovascular endurance, but I’ve lost some running-specific strength over my little vacation.
The 14.5km course was in three sections: a three-mile (ish) loop, a four mile (ish) loop, and then the first loop again. I say “ish” because my watch went a bit crazy and only recorded part of the race (about 8 miles of it?) so I’m not entirely sure how long each loop was. Here is the map it came up with:
I have circled the actual location of Elver Park and the run in blue. We did not cross the road (Gammon) at all.
The first section seemed to be mostly uphill, but long, gradual climbs, very run-able. I enjoyed it. If I’d been on the first three miles of an ultra, I might have walked, but I didn’t have to. The second loop had a number of sharper climbs and some very technical sections of trail (i.e., trail with rocks and tree roots on it) that make one pay close attention. It was at this point that I realized another woman was behind me by maybe 50 feet or so. As we went into the third loop, I had to pull myself out of my head and actually race to make sure I didn’t get passed. It was hard (at one point my stomach started to cramp and I thought I was done for, but it resolved without issue), but it was a great final section, and I managed to hold my position! I finished in 1:22:47, good enough for 4th woman overall and 2nd in my age group. Out of three. So not that impressive, but I had fun.
I look strong! Nice. Photo by CXC Skiing.
Upcoming races include:
Salt Lake Emigration Canyon Half Marathon–2 Sept.
Lakefront Marathon–7 Oct.
I’m hoping to do a couple of local races I do every year (Literacy Network 10k, Berbee Derby 10k) and I’m hoping to head to Lake Forest for the Dream for Eileen 5k. But that’s it. Maybe something bigger in the spring, once I’ve gotten my mileage back up.
Bryan tells me that this comic reminds him of #303: Playing it Safe. I think the swearing teddy bear is still one of his favorite characters. It reminds me of the previous one I did with Derrida and his cat (I can’t seem to find ANY of the Derrida ones offhand. Weird.)
I will tell you something about the last panel: When I started looking up female philosophers, I noticed that 2/5 of them (Hypatia and Tullia) had nude portraits on their Wikipedia pages. I’ve never seen a nude painting of any male philosopher, including Socrates, who was a dirty old man and totally asking for it. If you want to know what society values in a woman, there it is. Hypatia: Mathematician. Philosopher. Astronomer. Naked.
Seriously, I can count on one hand the number of female philosophers I read (Philippa Foot was the major one) and on zero hands the number of pre-20th century female philosophers I read. That’s kind of screwed up.
Anyway, enough of that.
This comic is filed under NX652.P47 L86 2011 for Arts in general–Characters, persons, classes of persons, and ethnic groups–By name of character, person, class of persons, or ethnic groups A-Z–Philosophers.
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