words about words

Batman: No Man’s Land Vol. 2, Various Authors

Volume 2 of No Man’s Land opens with what is probably my least favorite art within all 5 volumes. It’s too cartoony, & everyone’s faces & bodies seem slightly squised. It’s almost like looking in a funhouse mirror, & it doesn’t really work for me. Luckily, it doesn’t last forever, & the plot is still decent, if a little heavy on Bruce’s “lone warrior man-angst”.

Next we get a few issues with art I like better, but plot elements that leave me out in the cold. It makes sense for Barbara to be dreaming of being Batgirl as now more than ever her physical limits are apparent, but Jim’s desparation to save her & her apparent relief at being rescued left me out in the cold. I understand her being happy to see her father alive, but I’m so tired of dudes rushing in to save ladies who are actually managing pretty well for themselves; argually, Babs was doing better in NML than Jim was.

The Joker pops up finally, but only briefly; then we get Bruce trying to figure out how to navigate the new rules & order of NML; while dangerously close to his solo-warrior man-angst nonsense, it is interesting to watch him struggle. Bruce is often a prick, especially to those trying to help him (& ESPECIALLY to ladies trying to help him), so watching him realize he’s in over his head is always a little vindicating.

There’s a weird interlude with Two-Face helping out the people in Montoya’ neighborhood who, being not white, have been forgotten/abandoned by the police. I was torn on this until a later issue that relies heavily on the relationship established between Montoya & Two-Face here to create its tension. It’s set before NML; when we catch back up to present time, Two-Face is claiming territory & wrecking shit, as usual.

Anyway, this issue isn’t my favorite of the series but it’s still quite solid. NML continues to do fantastic things with worldbuilding, & it’s clear that the writers & artists gave serious thought to what Gotham would be like under these conditions; small details like warm soda being treasured are arguably unnecessary but do make a difference. It makes the world feel more complete, which makes the story more powerful.

Derek Bickerton: Bastard Tongues: A Trailblazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World’s Lowest Languages.

Derek Bickerton is a linguist & Professor Emeritus at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, who originally got into linguistics to be able to objectively determine which literary works were better; find out which words were best, which sentences were best, & you could determine which books were best. It’s a silly notion, but considering this was in 1960, it’s a bit more understandable. Once he got his post-graduate degree in linguistics from the University of Leeds (a program suggested to him by a drinking buddy while they were killing time at a bar), he’s sent off to be a professor in Guayana, thus beginning his obessesion with Creole languages.

The book isn’t quite what I expected; it’s more biography told through his academic work & studies, but there is still some fascinating stuff about language. Bickerton is the originator of what’s called the “language bioprogram hypothesis”, which proposes that distant creoles have grammatical similarities because they were formed out of a prior pidgin by children who possess universal innate grammatical abilities. Basically, there are aspects of language which are biological, rather than simply learned.

Bickerton backs this up with several examples from far-flung Creole-speaking areas. He is clearly an expert, having spent decades bouncing from island to island, studying & transcribing. It’s also interesting when he mentions certain places he visited in Latin America, villages where people speak what other locals call “funny Spanish”, & mention that he didn’t have the time or resources to study that language…& no one had before, & no one has since, to the best of his knowledge.

One complaint I had was that Bickerton seems a little too willing to congratulate himself for hanging out in working-class bars populated mainly by minorities. Given when his reasearch was taking place, yeah, it was kind of a big deal, but people being proud of how progressive they are always rubs me the wrong way. Anyway, this is academia-lite & a great read, especially for people who aren’t used to denser academic texts, but still interesting.

Batman: No Man’s Land Vol. 1, Various Authors

No Man’s Land is the second “Wow, Gotham is so fucked” miniseries I’ve read recently, & so far I like it so much more than the still-great War Games. In No Man’s Land, Gotham has been abandoned by the majority of its residents and the United States government; a supervirus apparently similar to Captain Tripps in Stephen King’s The Stand hit, followed by a massive earthquake that destroyed essentially every building that wasn’t Wayne property. People are given a short timeline to ecavuate, & then the US government puts up a guarded border to prevent anyone from going in or out, complete with signs making it clear that Gotham is no longer part of U.S. territory.

No Man’s Land kind of reminds me of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s seventh season, when things finally get so bad that most people, including the demons, leave Sunnydale. Living in Gotham is not, in fact, unlike living in Sunnydale; a group of determined but wholly outnumbered individuals do their best to protect the city they call home, depsite the overwhelming amount of crime/demons. All throughout the show, you’re asking yourself why more people don’t leave Sunnydale; Gotham, at least, has the offer of a lot of wealth, but still. Anyway, I’m a sucker for post-apocalyptic stories, which is what No Man’s Land is, with the added bonus of it being a post-apocalyptic city that exists within an otherwise functioning country.

The first couple of issues are composed primarily of world-building & exposition, but it’s fantastically well-done. One of my problems with War Games was that I never felt I got a truly clear timeline; perhaps this was intentional, designed to contribute to the chaotic feeling of the narrative, but mostly it was just frustrating. Here, it makes sense that we have a clearer timeline, as Oracle (alive but trapped in her Wayne-owned tower), is transcribing everything. Dating has, of course, started over: it’s no longer dd/mm/yyy, it’s x number of days after the quake. Little details like that, & the increased power & importance of tagging to mark gang territory, are really powerful here.

Anyway, Batman’s been missing, which Commissioner Gordon is both bitter & relieved about. Someone keeps throwing up bat-tags, though, & we find out it’s Batgirl. She refers to herself as “the Bat” when she intervenes, & implies that she was always the Batman, but people were too ashamed to admit they had been beaten by a girl; I liked this, as it played with the concept of Batman’s flexible identity, as so few Gothamites have actually seen Batman, & far fewer have gotten a clear look. With actual-Bruce-Batman gone, Helena is freer to do the work she wants to do. Of course, once he returns, it’s business as usual; he refuses to approve her, & orders her around without really sharing information.

There’s also some great art here; the Scarecrow pops up later in a plot wherein he tries to manipulate some refugees in a church into abandoning their principles, & I really like how he was drawn. My favorite parts of the artwork are the damaged buildings, collapsed in upon themselves. I love post-apocalyptic worlds, but only really well-built ones. The writers & artists of No Man’s Land did a fantastic job with the detail work, & I highly recommend it.

Theodor Adorno: On Pop Music

Adorno is, like Foucault, Barthes, and Marx, someone whose work you will be very familiar with by the time you finish your Communication degree, at least at my school. I do like some of his other writings, but even knowing the context for his hatred of & contempt for pop music, his work on the subject tends to leave me out in the cold. Adorno came to America shortly after Hitler’s rise to power in Germany; he left a country with a pervasive mass media industry based in propaganda for a country with a booming mass media industry based in what he saw as mindless, repetitive garbage.

In this article, he argues that there are two kinds of music: pop/popular music (at the time, swing, Tin Pan Alley, etc) & serious music (Western classical). Honestly, I think the historical context for his writings is more interesting than this piece, & not just because it really doesn’t hold up over time. There’s no way to really apply this to our music industry or society of listeners; even as the distinctions are as clear as Adorno makes them out to be (which I sincerely doubt), they’re no longer so clear. Furthermore, Adorno operates under a lot of faulty assumptions about popular music, but a few in particular bother me. He assumes that popular music, being repetitive and simpler than Western classical, has no meaning, completely refusing to engage with the fact that different people or groups of people listen to different music for different reasons, usually making their own meanings. A lot of the study on popular music, or what Adorno would call popular music but we wouldn’t, is now directed at audiences, listeners, & listening practices. Why people love the music they do & why it means what it does is both important & fascinating, & Adorno’s dismissal of these ideas are irritating.

He takes the step of acknowledging that there is some bad serious music, but still places it above popular music. He doesn’t seem to question the problematic nature of his evaluations, especially given his support for genres generally more accessible to the upper classes. Because of his history, he has a strong, personal opposition to mass media, & if he would write about that instead of how stupid popular music is, that would be more interesting.

Ronald Kline & Trevor Pinch: “Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States.”

I’m including things read for school in this, as the line in the info about me getting a degree in reading things & writing about them is not, in fact, a lie. So, anyway, this is an article I read for a class called Interaction With Technology, taught by a woman who hates all forms of technology & is convinced that we are far stupider than we are & need far more babying than we do. It’s possible I liked this article so much because everything else we’ve read for the class has been so dull & introductory that this is just better by comparison, but at the very least the topic is pretty interesting.

Kline & Pinch essentially set out to a) debunk the notion of technological determinism, which argues that new technological advances determine changes in culture & society, and b) use the example of the various uses of automobiles in rural America to argue for the “interpretive flexibility” if a technological artifact. If nothing else, the history here is pretty good, & there is some discussion about gendered roles in farm labor, which I appreciated. I wish it had been paired with an article about the interpretive flexibility of something a bit more modern (the article covers changes at the turn of the twentieth century) instead of…. well, nothing, because apparently 2 articles a week is too much for us to handle.