Tis the Sleazin' of Joy [It's a Wonderful Life(1946)]

Some years ago Connie Willis wrote (via a mouthpiece character in a short story in her collection Miracle and Other Christmas Stories) about the undeserved reputation the movie It's a Wonderful Life as embodying the true spirit of Christmas. (I'd quote her at length, but our copy of Miracle was lent out a while back and not yet returned -- how about that for the spirit of Christmas.) She preferred Miracle on 34th Street (1947): the mystery of the existence of Santa Claus isn't really ever tipped, and the question about whether old Kris Kringle is krazy, or maybe it's just society that's insane, is left more or less open through the end of the picture despite some heavy sentimental tipping about what you're supposed to believe. This question of faith in the unknowable presence of an unseen spirit in life made mysteriously manifest twice a year (Easter, and revisionistically, Christmas) is the essence of religious faith, or whatever part of the human spirit that in turn becomes organized as religious faith. That's always been the overlap between the Santa and Jesus legends. Santa has become popular because of the equation of literal materialistic gifts with the moral code of conduct required to get them ("he knows when you've been bad or good" "he's making a list") and the annual nature of his visits, which is a lot more predictable than the second coming. It's a Wonderful Life has to trot out an actual angel from the first frame of the film to assure the audience of the literal intervention of divine forces in life, even one so ill-examined as George Bailey's. It's Santa Claus to Miracle's Jesus, and it shows up at the same time every year on TV, too.

I don't disagree at all with the estimable Ms. Willis, and it's hard for me to argue that Miracle isn't better storytelling on nearly every front than It's a Wonderful Life. The latter movie tanked at the box office, and has accumulated its reputation as a Christmas classic slowly over the years. How this happened, I am not sure: a combination of repeated exposure to the baby boom generation on TV and the cult of Zuzu's petals. Miracle, on the other hand, was successful enough that the film industry has seen refit to re-make it four times (thus far), and, like A Christmas Carol, has lent its basic plot to a gazillion other movies since. Faith lost; faith redeemed; faith embodied in the love between a man and a woman; innocence restored.

Yet for some reason I continue to be drawn to watch It's a Wonderful Life over and over every chance I get. I've absorbed what sweet tidbits Miracle has, and as a screensaver to the season it's pleasant enough. It's a Wonderful Life is a twisted, bitter, and clinically diagnosable suicide note, and not incidentally was basically the end for Frank Capra's career. It is not, not, a good movie: but dissecting it every year, I seem to always notice something different about the film that makes me thankful for small favors. Those favors are not exactly what the literal text of the movie suggests, of course.

Let's review from the back to the front of the film. The miraculous delivery of George Bailey at the end of the movie is supposed to be because of not only his own self-review of the meaning of his life, but because of the intervention by prayer of the many people who love George, intervention which has brought Clarence down from heaven (where the rigid caste system in force keeps Clarence from moving up one class of Angelness unless he saves George from himself). It's a whirlwind of problems solving themselves in the last two minutes of celluloid which belies the deeply depressing turn of events of the previous couple of hours. The feeling is nothing so much like Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge -- speaking of great movies about to be remade, although I am thinking more of the cynical concision of the original Ambrose Bierce. I think too of the little Edward Gorey ditty:

The suicide, as she is falling,
Illuminated by the moon,
Regrets her act, and finds appalling
The thought she will be dead so soon.

I have an acquaintance who was on duty below the Golden Gate bridge -- jumper duty -- who had the unhappy experience of fishing the bodies of suicides out of the water from time to time. He tells of one jumper who was still alive, most of the bones in his body broken, who muttered, "I guess that was a dumb idea," before he passed out (and I think later died, although I actually can't remember that part of the story.)

What else to make of the ending of Wonderful Life? George Bailey, faced with a living hell, jumps to his death. On the way down, he considers the alternative distopia to the ugly distopia of his own life, and decides after all it's worth living. Too late: but before he hits, his brain invents a happy ending with everybody he loves around him, fade to black, The End.

Capra made Life coming off his celebrated series of propaganda movies during World War II, and of course his strangely cynically optimistic "classic" movies of the 30s before that. Life reads like a little resume of the woes of the first half of the twentieth century leading up to the A-bomb, wrapped up in the style and mindscreen of the propagandist.

In the "Wonderful" version of George Bailey's life, his little town is dominated by the mean old Scroogian miser, Potter. Potter, unlike Scrooge or every last "villain" of Miracle on 34th Street, is left unredeemed at the end of the movie, still apparently in possession of George's $8000. (What kind of sadist makes the beloved Lionel Barrymore into such a disgusting villain? Well, probably Barrymore himself, but talk about casting against type!) In the alternative universe of George's imagination, the one where he'd never been born, the slavery of Bedford Falls to Potter is simply one of degree. Without the single hold out of the Savings and Loan, the town which has been a confining purgatory to George his entire wanderlust-encrusted life becomes a true living hell: booze, floozies, hopheads, wage slavery, poverty, unrelenting personal misery, and most literally, the ruin of the very house George restored from ruins in his "real" life with Mary. Some wonderful life. George had every reason to be bitter and frustrated, the way the forces of entrepreneurial capitalism and normative social moires trapped him in a town he hated. For all the supposed idealism of the small town setting, do we ever see Bedford Falls in the present in the light of day? It's Christmas noir

It seems, in the end, very unlikely it was the threat of prison and disgrace, fueled with alcohol, that suddenly gave George the idea of suicide. (And here's another loophole left unresolved: George couldn't have believed the insurance company would honor his policy if he suicided.) No, he must've been thinking of it for years, and finally reached a tipping point. That, in turn, is probably why I find the movie so clinically fascinating at this time of hope and redemption, while Miracle gets an obligatory nod and yawn. Another year, we're all still here, that's a good thing.

I have observed this particular point about It's a Wonderful Life in previous years. On this year's re-viewing, however, I noticed another bit of subtext that had escaped me previously. George's despair is all about...sex!

The clues are there on the surface, and they're pretty disgusting. Violet Bick, the town slut whom George "saves" by giving her money to get out of town for a fresh start -- in New York City? -- what was George thinking about? is shown trying to dangle her wares in front of Georgie at the age of 10, the innocent future Mrs. Bailey watching and waiting inches away. Violet has to represent the "wanderlust" that George has for travel and exotic experience -- for going to college ("there's a time and a place for everything, and it's called college") -- for variety outside of his humdrum predictable Bedford Falls life. His downfall is precipitated in part by the suggestion that his alleged embezzlement is due to some kind of pay off to Violet for favors we don't need to mention, wink wink. In the scene in Mary's house after she and George have walked home after their dip into the high school pool (nothing symbolic about that drop through the gaping crevasse that appears with the throw of a switch, eh), Mary's mother asks what the heck George Bailey is doing there, when good old Sam Wainwright is offering his considerable charms -- in New York City!!! -- just at the other end of the phone line. "He's Making VIOLENT LOVE TO ME, Mother!" she yells up the stairs, pausing the glance at George for his reaction. In George's alternative life, the one where he never existed, the final horror he has to be shown by Clarence, the ghost of Christmas present, is -- what happened to Mary? Clarence, shudders, reluctant to tell the horrible truth about what happened to Mary without George -- "she's an OLD MAID!" he sobs, and George is horrified. The state of continued virginity in the middle of the sin city that has now become Bedford Falls in George's absence is the WORST THING THAT COULD POSSIBLY HAPPEN. (Just to rub it in to poor Mary's character's fate, she is, of course, that classic stereotype of spinsterhood -- the librarian!)

So, in the end, George's sacrifice of his own wanderings and sexual adventurism is to save Mary from the worst fate that could possibly happen to a fruitful woman. In the world of Bedford Falls without George, everybody's gettin' some except for his putative wife. Zuzu's petals, indeed. He has to undo his selfish nihilistic act of suicide in order to redeem her. The path not taken, the path that would have lead to George breaking out of both the geographical confines of his town and the strict moral code of bourgeois middle class America, must be shown to be terrible, so the quotidian reality of his life can be palatable.

The final scenes of the movie show George being showered in money, the fruits of his loins restored to him, everybody surrounding him watching him cheering him on. It's a Wonderful Life -- but what a sick, sick movie.

Happy Endings for Jack Womack and Jane Eyre

I had forgotten what a nearly indescribable pleasure it is to read Jack Womack in tiny increments while falling asleep. There's something about the mix of his language, the arcs of plot, the ambience, the penumbra of softly-floating place and uncertain time that produces excellent dreaming. I mean this will all the respect in the world: a Jack Womack book is one of the best ways to fall asleep. Your brain can be activated and excited and still drift off imperceptibly into one's own iconographic alpha-wave reverie without any ill effect.

That's not to say that, hithertofore, one would move to Mr. Womack's work for what one might call a happy shot of brain candy to top off the evening. Being a confirmed Dickhead and Sterling cyberpunker and rabbit-hole-Burroughser back in the 1980s, it did not take me long to find Womack's Ambient series when it first appeared. I cannot say it was as easy to find subsequent works. In some kind of strange paradox of space and time, it seemed to be pressingly harder to obtain an in-print copy of each volume as it appeared, and the lag time between a new installment appearing and my (a) being made aware of said volume, (b) being able to obtain a copy of it, and (c) having sufficient time to give it proper attention, for attention his works have demanded, only increased. The large lag between the penultimate entry in the series, Random Acts of Senseless Violence -- surely one of the saddest works set to pen since Little Dorrit plodded through Newgate -- and the final entry, Going, Going, Gone set up some kind of strange vortex of personal time slippage for me. At some point in the late 1990s I'd stopped looking for new Womack, before the internet so easily disgorged such details previously hidden in Forthcoming Books, and I somehow didn't discover the publication of Going, Going, Gone until five years after its initial publication. (Womack actually got a non-Ambient book out between them, which at the time suggested that Ambient was over -- making the final entry seem even more like a coda.)

I can guess, perhaps, although this is only a guess, the multitude of factors that went into the seven-year gap in the series. The drift of the publisher is clear enough: my first-edition-paperback of Ambient is in standard paperback size, with a typical SF weird-bad illustration on the cover of a stone Elvis on top of a sleek black limo with "Dryco" license plates. The last volume, Going, Going, Gone, is a sleek trade paperback from Grove Press, with a slick photomontage but with binding and printing that bespeak a far more literary appreciation of Mr. Womack. That is to say, I suspect between 1985, when the manuscript for Ambient was written, and 2000, much happened to antiquate the marketability of the Wo-verse. The idea of Elvis as worshipped saint and demigod became as much as a cliche as cyberspace itself, the philosophical and spiritual implications being distorted by their appropriation into pop culture. The overselling of the Gibsonian touch as the next big thing in fiction passed, no later than The Matrix spewing the sense of the alternate back in mind-bending visuals -- so inert and rigid, in fact, in the age of the pause and the slow-frame advance and the chapter access, compared to the ineffability of fiction. So too I can readly imagine that Womack's sales figures declined, particularly as his "series" of books were, on face value, so insecurely linked to one another. To this day, other than the omnipresence of Dryco in one form or another, it's hard for me to readily describe the commonalities of the book beyond the style, language, and just general sense of a consistent vision into something.

Another possibility, of course, is the painting-into-a-corner problem. Most authors of series do this by creating beloved characters who become prisoners of their readers/fans: no sooner is a compelling character introduced than those who love that character demand that s/he never change, and woe to the author who tries to shake free of the shackles of their own invention. Womack had no such constraint, in that he managed to create humanely-crafted characters in a set of universes that prevented those same characters from ever recurring. He shifted from third person to first to the epistollary novel and then finally back to first in the form of the imagined autobiographical novel. The chronology was jumbled, as the stretch of realities shifted from an imagined future to a parallel one to a merged one that seems in Going, Going, Gone to be simultaneously in 1968, 2021, and 1985. No, Womack didn't paint himself into a corner in the usual manner. It was just that the rabbit hole he fell down was a deep, dark one indeed, and I wouldn't blame anybody on the earth for giving up on chasing the bunny after Random Acts of Senseless Violence. Staying there would've been too depressing, and likely the unremunerative nature of being a dedicated, unclassifiable, linguistically accomplished and stylish author required some attention to a day job of some sort that would've been hopelessly bolloxed up by continuing to think Ambient-ly.

So I finally got a chance to read Going, Going, Gone, in fifteen-minute increments before falling asleep over a month or so, and I was, needless to say, curious about where Womack and Dryco had gone. Big spoiler coming up: Jack did himself a favor, I believe, by killing off his universe in the last ten pages of this wonderful coda, of ripping Dryco out of space and time and settling competing distopias into our own present and strange distopia. His hero, Walter Bullitt (try not to think of Steve McQueen when you read that name), morphs into Womack himself, tapping away on a modern computer instead of the greased disfunctional typewriter aura of previous works. He kills off the gremlins and ghouls that sat on the shelf in suspended animation since Random Acts of Senseless Violence, resurrects a few friends, and gives everybody in the series a biographical obituary in a glossary at the end of the book. Some might read some of this as being recursive, self-referential, or simply indulgent: I read it as appropriate therapy, a recap of the talking down he obviously had to do in the seven-year gap of time. Womack's got something new coming out later this year or next, and I can only imagine that having gotten himself out of his corner, he's got new a new life of the pen or keyboard or whatever awaiting him. I'm happy for myself as a reader that he managed to put the stake in the vampire's heart in such a way that we can enjoy moonlit nights once again, but perhaps still enjoy strolling through the scrapbook of grievous neck wounds at a later date with re-readings of the series. And I hope for Womack's sake he gets enough readers this time around to support the writing habit on a more regular basis.

I would also say this with those disappointed in happy endings, even ones as strange as that in Going, Going, Gone: the sense of dread that had built up by reading the previous five books in the series made the end of the series seem especially surprising, not just tacked on (like, say, Jane Eyre -- cf. subs.) That, my friends, is just pleasurable reading.

It's hard for me to figure how the Ambient series is going to read ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now. But I've changed my mind in recent years about what constitutes great literature. The old saw is that "timeless" literature is that which transcends the ages, withstands reinterpretation, allows imitation and its less sincere forms of flattery in endless cycles, which supports literary criticism and doctoral dissertations and occasional film versions. (Somewhere, some time, somebody is going to be tempted to try to put a Womack work on the digital equivalent of celluloid: after all, Bill Burroughs was in his seventies before somebody had the balls and bad judgement to put millions into a film version of a major work, but by god, Bill lived to see the day.)

My own feelings are that, while it's possible I will be around ten, twenty, or fifty years from now, a hundred seems unlikely. Ambient was great because it was great when I read it the first time, and Going, Going, Gone was pretty good when I read it the first time, and they were great ways to do whatever a book does to one's brain: mediate, reflect, amplify, clarify, invent, fill, empty, I'm not sure. All culture is just a way of mediating our reality and experience over some truly basic facts and emotions: fear, hunger, horniness, and possibly boredom. Most everything else seems residual or an epiphenomenon, and discussions about the divide between pop culture and fine art seem to me to be pointless hair-splitting about better ways of passing time and lying, creatively, to ourselves: the end points always are the same, the virtue of the wiggly lines to those points either of ambiguous value or moot. That is to say, I don't see moral relativism in Ambient so much as the moral of reality, mediated and propagated to my sleepy brain.

So it was an odd coincidence of the "to read" shelf that right after I finished Going, Going, Gone, the next book up was Jasper Fforde's first "Thursday Next" series, The Eyre Affair, published a year after the last novel of the Ambient series. It's great brain candy in its formulaic derivative way. I'm not saying Fforde ain't original per se: it's just that you couldn't get half the jokes without having the subtle transformations of mass consciousness that twenty-plus years of Neuromancer's influence have wrought. Fforde doesn't have to explain parallel universes, he can pillage some of the lighter ramifications of quantum physics without being obliged to detail them. Not that Womack ever did: but a lot of what I got, in the broadest sense, out of the Ambient series was a way of reconciling humanism with the truly disturbing, non-intuitive, almost too large to comprehend implications on thought, language, and being that developments in physics have forced into our consciousnesses in the past decades. "Science Fiction", maybe, but only because the reality behind the science is so compellingly loud. The Thursday Next series is, of course, the complete fantasy, and focussing as it does on alternate universes and time streams where our intrepid heroine can have adventures courtesy of a variety of SF genres from classic horror to cyberpunk itself, with a strong sense of hommage to the readers of classic literature, is far more a product of genre fiction than Ambient ever was. The Thursday Next books are public constructions, and have all those paint-you-in-the-corner characteristics of successful popular fiction series I alluded to earlier: biographical and plot details that must be rationally reconciled, a cast of supporting characters, a strong main character to whom loyalty is given and utter consistency demanded by her fans, anthropomorphization of the fictive. The truly main idea Thursday Next takes from SF -- nay, probably from filtered readings of quantum reality -- is the creation of the real by creation of fiction, of the observable by the observer. Namely, the idea that a book, once written, is a reality and that the reader and author are engaged in a constant game of protecting that reality. Thursday Next is just a literal instantiation of a protector of the canon, and the series is quite playful and articulate in a way about navigating the pitfalls of the relationship between author, reader, and the fictional characters they conspire to create.

In the opening book in the series, The Eyre Affair, to provide yet another spoiler, Thursday is required to change the unsatisfactory ending of Jane Eyre in order to save the work from destruction by an arch villain of possibly demonic origins. The macguffin of this plot is lovingly twisted around, in that in Thursday's alternate universe, the unsatisfying and abrupt ending of Jane Eyre is even worse than it is in "our" universe. Thursday's intervention ends up making it even more satisfying, though, than it is in our universe; it's a wish fulfillment for readers who don't like the endings or are unsatisfied with strange quirks or holes (real or imagined, but perceived) in favored works, and yet cannot fix them. The literary police enforce the canon, and our rogue cop in this universe is one who, in order to protect the subtext, is willing to fiddle with the text.

It's fun, rollicking, thought-provoking for a popular and successful series, but somehow doesn't have but a tenth the courage of Jack Womack's work to date. There's nothing wrong with that. But props where props are due: I think, using the logic of Thursday Next, there would be no Thursday Next without Dryco.

Sometimes, if you love something, you have to kill it. Womack sneaks this delicious block into Going, Going, Gone (very parenthetically, one small coincidence between Going, Going, Gone and The Eyre Affair is that both books have short but wonderful descriptions of dilapidated grand hotels):

In the past the bellhops would've had the dicks lay into the Dynamos with saps if they'd dared to even walk past the place; but you could tell it wouldn't be long before management finally wrapped its mouth around the gas pipe, and let in sci-fi conventions.

Hey, sometimes it's the slap in the face that helps you come up for air. Methinks Womack gave a couple of loving slaps to some of his fans to help them float back up to the surface with him. There's not only air, but maybe a little sunshine waiting up there. I've appreciated Jack Womack's deep dives, but I'm just as glad that Walter Bullitt and Jane Eyre got their happy endings.

Karen Hughes to the Rescue

Bush Administration to Apply Successful Campaign Tactics to World Diplomacy

News item: CAIRO – Karen Hughes, a folksy Texan and longtime confidante of President Bush, has one of the toughest jobs in the US government: convincing the rest of the world, particularly the Arab world, that US policies are in their best interests. She started her first week as the State Department's top public relations officer with a "listening tour" of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.

October 2, Ankara -- today Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes attacked the war record of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the former Major General of the Israeli Defense Forces and highly-decorated veteran of four of Israel's wars dating back to its struggle for independence. Echoing commercials broadcast this week by "Red Sea Dhow Captains for the Truth" on Al-Jazeera, Hughes said "Nobody saw Ariel Sharon get wounded. Isn't it obvious he fought in those wars just so he could someday run for the Knesset?" Hughes comments elicited confused looks from her Turkish hosts.

October 4, Baghdad -- Today US Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes made a surprise visit to Baghdad, where she met with members of the Iraqi provisional government and gave a pep talk to US troops. "We know that Sadaam Hussein was planning on making gay marriage legal in Iraq, " Hughes said, "and that if we hadn't intervened, he'd still be in Baghdad issuing wedding licenses to tourists from Morocco and Fire Island." Hughes went on, "Is that the kind of leadership you want? here in the very land of the Garden of Eden, without the US, the muslim world would've become the world of Adam and Steve instead of the home of Adam and Eve." A State Department spokesman later amplified Hughes' comments, saying, "I think the one point of agreement between muslim countries and the Bush administration is clearly we don't want homosexuals marrying and undermining traditional family values like they have in Saudi Arabia."

October 7, Tripoli -- US Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes, extending her goodwill "listening" trip of the middle east to Libya, today told President Moammar Qadhafi that he had a "truth problem." "You claimed to have invented the internet, discovered global warming, and been the inspiration for 'Love Story', Mr. Qadhafi," Hughes said in a joint press conference to the stunned reaction of the Libyan leader. "So how will we know if you're really going to stick to that agreement to give up your nukes? We might as well tear it up now!" Hughes smiled and posed with Qadhafi for photographs after the news conference.

October 11, Karkuk -- On the last leg of her mideast "listening" tour, Karen Hughes heard the comments of a hand-picked audience of members of the Republican Party of Kurdistan. "What's your biggest concern today?" asked Hughes of Jalal Qazi, an unemployed refinery worker from Karkuk. "Secretary Hughes, without a doubt, the biggest concern we have today is that the United States Congress must pass a comprehensive energy bill with full oil depletion allowances to allow off-shore drilling on the California coast and continued exploration of the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge," Qazi said. "Only then will the democrats' dangerous idea of adding a fifty cent a gallon gas tax be eliminated and I can feed my family as a gainfully unemployed member of the world petroleum community." Qazi then looked straight into a Fox News camera and pleaded, "Democrats, why do you hate freedom so?"

All Pigs Is Equal

There's a fairly large proportion of "new" children's books aimed at the under-3 set that are illustrated versions of nursery rhymes or kiddie songs. I strongly suspect this is for a combination of two reasons: first, the story's in the public domain, so there's no tricky creative problem of thinking up an original idea or possibly being sued by another author. One rather thinks that there's a diminishing return on new ideas in this literary space, anyway, since the kids have never heard the stories before; the cry for novelty, the emergence of boredom, and the demands of being fashionable have to wait until a kid is at least five or six. At least until they've run through the canon. The other reason, obviously, is that the story is pre-marketed. Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, Aunt Ethel, etcetera, all know "Old McDonald" already, so they just need to be sold on the version: some cutesy artistic style, or a drawing that's evocative of something else that will trigger that buying decision. (If it seems like I'm cynically imputing pure avarice and sales to the authors' selection of a text for their books, I'm not; I'm making a factual assumption about publishers who select authors for publication.)

Parenthetically, note I didn't mention fairy tales: the fairy tale seems to be absent from the early early childhood reader, or present only in extremely watered-down versions. The fairy tale requires some narrative sophistication from the tot to figure out how Goldilocks might get from table to bed, to provide a backstory to why she's in the woods, and so forth. Further, since most fairy tales have rather grisly implications or outright twists to them, it requires the buying audience not be offeneded. To that end, the re-use of classic folk tales takes on two variants, neither of which is necessarily a good thing for the literary tot. The first is the bowdlerization of the tale in favor of sensitivy, self-esteem, or whatever childhood development trend is deking publishers and parents into mediocre tameness. Case in point: in the library some months ago, I happened across a version of "The Three Little Pigs" that had a friendly wolf; I think the pigs and the wolf all sat down, ate hummus, and sang kumbaya at the end of it. The threat of destruction, being eaten, and the retribution of the victims towards the aggressor at the end, of course, is all absent. The three pigs and the wolf might just as well have come out of the same bottle in the 'Brave New World' Universe for all the differences they seemed to have. Don't get me started about where conflict resolution techniques might enterer into it. The other trend towards novelty, by the way, is a form of cultural imperialism that some might call diversification: using the myths and folktales of other cultures. This is not entirely a bad thing, as at least it provides education and novelty for the parent. Although the question in the world of the monomyth, of course, is the same as why college curricula may or may not wish to continue to teach the works of dead heterosexual men from the power elite. My son has a very charming little book from some Inuit cultural standpoint called "Mama, Do You Love Me?" (which we've read in both English and Spanish), in which the mother provides all these great ripostes to the kid's challenge of what-ifs: e.g., what if I turned into a walrus, would you still love me? The mom uses umiaks and mukluks and all sorts of culturally-significant iconifiers to answer the question, over and over, I'm going to love you no matter what, even if you become a man-eating serial killer (polar bear, orca, whatever). My question in reading this to my own kid is: well, that's cool, but is my kid learning about other cultures or being hopelessly confused by having completely alien objects to illustrate common emotional concepts? Although, honestly, it doesn't bother me, since I'm of the opinion that any reading is good reading and being able to dive into alien worlds is one of the best things about the literary life at any age. In any event, to get back to my main example, this particular 'Three Little Pigs' book was marketed to the pre-schooler (the current term for a kid between the toddling years and kindergarten, if you're not familiar with marketing niches for kids) so the discussion of the fairy tale will have to wait for a couple of years when my kid is old enough. We're talking right now about just nursery rhymes and old songs that are re-re-recyled into children's books.

I will digress away again for a moment and tell you I love bacon. It tastes great, and cooked pig in all its forms is mighty fine food. At one point, though, I gave up the flesh of the swine for a number of years. It wasn't (at the time) for any particular health concern. It was because I read an article about some reasearchers who had taught pigs how to play video games. They were trying to learn something about porcine cognitive functions, presumably so they could figure out how pigs could be research subjects for the usual gamut of human conceptual and cognitive research topics in psychology, neurology, etc. They did the usual thing of starting out the pigs with a food reward, but discovered after the pigs had learned the "rules" of this game (it was sort of, I gather, a form of Pig Pac-Man, where the pigs had to negotiate a character through a maze using their snouts on joy-sticks, and if they completed a level they'd get some food), that the pigs would play whether or not they got a food reward. (This has, of course, been exploited by the PETA crowd as more 'evidence' of some kind of higher moral character due to the higher cognitive function, as if having more cognition among the animal kingdom was some kind of special qualifier for not being eaten. On the contrary, one sees a definite correlation between higher cognitive function and cruelty.) In any event, PETA or no PETA, the idea that an animal that would play something for fun's sake, for some reason, really took to me, and I became weirded out by the idea of eating pig meat. I think it was the same way I don't want to eat dog or monkey, because they like to chase balls and masturbate, to no apparent purpose except self-gratification, among other qualities -- just like us! And we don't eat one another, do we, except under special circumtanxes, like Andean air crashes, or symbolically, like the Eucharist. (Rather coincidentally, my wife's cousin apparently saw the same study and gave up pork, too, for a similar reason...for a while.)

Then, after some years had passed, I came across a history of the US Civil War that touched on the quick burials of the massive numbers of dead after some battles. The corpses had to be covered with only an inch or two of dirt as a temporary expedient until more regular burial could be accomplished. One significant problem in those days when the battleas were fought largely in open fields and in farm country was...well, livestock getting at the bodies. Specifically, it turns out pigs really enjoy the taste of human flesh, and ate the corpses with gusto, using those video-game-playing snouts to get through the top layer of soil. (The cemetary at Gettysburg -- you know, at the dedication of which Lincoln gave the Gettysbureg Address -- was the permanent cemetary, set up to avoid the pig problem.) And I say they prefer human flesh, because I've subsequently learned that dumping corpses on pig farms is a preferred method of disposing of the murder victims of organized crime in certain parts of the world.

So, my feeling since then, is: I better get the pigs before they get to me. Higher cognitive function be damned. Which leads me back to the thought" how ever did I get this vision of the pig as a creature whou wouldn't eat me, given a chance? Nature suggests that you're either a candidate for another species' dinner, or vice versa. Domesticated animals we've merely formalized a sort of biologicsl social contract with, in which they reproduce and live for fixed periods of time, rather than the rather random intervals and lifespans more typical of predator-prey relationships.

Why, the litrary canon of the nursery, of course. It's full of anthropomorphized talking animals who wear pants, talk on the telephone, hug their babies, and do similarly unlikely things. It is, after all, fiction -- as it turns out, virtually all science fiction when you stop and think about it. We raise each generation on "The Island of Dr. Moreau", filtered these days through progressively diluted characters marketed by Happy Meal merchandising tie-ins.

So my son has about five versions of "This Little Piggy", illustrated in a variety of ways, virtually all of them pretty happy. I suspect the "This Little Piggy" rhyme, like a lot of the rhymes and songs from the English folk canon, has its origins in some socio-political upheaval of 500 or 1000 years ago (you know, 'Ring Around the Rosy', 'Mary Had a Little Lamb', etc.) Who knows what a 'piggy' actually was when this rhyme was invented, literally or metaphorically? I don't. Told in the oral trradition, "This Little Piggy" is mysterious indeed. My earliest understanding, best as I can recoolect, was that 'Piggy' was just a synonym for 'toe'; but if you read any of my son's books, the conceit of illustration has turned all these piggies into literal domesticated but fully anthropomorphized pigs. The strangeness of what the market was (the pre-destination for a pig to the slaughter?) and the luck of the draw of life as to which one dies or 'stays home' is replaced by the confusing literalness og Pig 1 doing the grocery shopping, and Pig 2 under the bed covers with a thermometer in its mouth and a box of Kleenex (tm) on the bedside table. The question of why a pig would want to eat roast beef -- the carcass of a fellow barnyard animal -- and why another pig might get none is answered: one piggy likes the company of the diner, while another pig simply prefers peas ( "Good for Piggies!" says the label of the can.) Pig #4 doesn't even go hungry! Finally, in varoius versions we have, Pig No. 5 goes "weee wee wee!" all thw way home because (1) he is riding his tricycle, (2) he is happy to be out of school, and (3) he and another piggy (pig No. 6?) are playing hide and go seek with -- a wolf! They're having fun -- they're not in dire peril of being eaten, nor are they as the original rhyme rather suggests, beating a cowardly retreat. Nowhere, in any illustrated version, are there any human toes being wiggled. These books, exquisitely, are randomized metaphors without any actual symbolism -- anti-metaphors in a way. By being illustrated, they become oddly literal, picking at guessed meanings that neither make any sense nor produce mystery. In this sense, I think perhaps my son's conception about the five little piggies, like his future conception about the three little pigs and the big bad wolf, may end up being a bit less quixotic and puzzling than mine, but that also means his ability to create meaning between those odd spaces of the tale will be hobbled. What other rhymes and songs that will remain as spoken and song lore, and which will be marred -- perhaps ruined? by reading the picture books, time will tell. I do know that in some instances, "reading" a book may in fact be a poorer literary act than simply learning the story by word of mouth. God help us all if my son learns alternative words to "Popeye the Sailor Man" or "The Colonel Bogey March" via some illustrated book instead of the way the creator intended him to, that is, on the playground. I don't know where he's going to get the idea that pigs are, in fact, vengeful creatures intent on homicide, or even the idea that wolves eat meat, reading the kiddie books out there. Give me the flesh of flesh-eating swine. Then again, I myself had many misconceptions about pigs from the old stories, such as, just because they like to play video games is a reason I shouldn't eat them even though they'd eat me in a heartbeat if they could.

"Some Pig!" as the Bard once wrote. Actually, it's one of the best parts of "Charlotte's Web" -- Wilbur the Pig is spared the butcher's block through Charlotte's flim-flammerry -- but Charlotte dies in the end, anyway (and her children, most probably, ate her corpse.) I can hardly wait until my son is old enough to read the book and digest the implicit horrors. That is, if the digitally re-touched version hasn't supplanted it by then...

John Roberts Interviews for Some Other Jobs

Been following those scintillating Supreme Court confirmation hearings for the putative Mr. Chief Justice Roberts? Me, neither, not after listening to the pablum drool unctuously and meaninglessly off his lips the first day. I was left wondering how John Roberts would interview for some other jobs....hmmmm....

Interviewer: "Thanks, Mr. Roberts, for coming in to interview for the position of structural engineer. Let's get right to it. If you were building a highway bridge, can you describe to me the appropriate ways of using pre-fabricated trusses versus concrete fill techniques?"

Judge Roberts: "Unfortunately, because I might actually be involved in building a bridge at some point in the future, I cannot respond to that question."

Interviewer: "Um...well, can you recap for us the factors that went into the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse in 1940?"

Judge Roberts: "I can say that in a general way it had a lot to do with wind and the bridge falling. But to go into greater detail would be to sacrifice my future impartiality in investigating future bridge collapses."

Interviewer: "Um. I see. Well, how about the Great Pyramids of Egypt? Were they built long enough ago? And I don't know of any current plans anybody has anywhere of building a large stone pyramid."

Judge Roberts: "Of course! It's not actually a pyramid, or rather they're not pyramids, they're tetrahedrons. The framers of the Great Pyramids clearly intended for the structure to have five sides -- counting the bottom."

Interviewer: "No arguing that, Judge Roberts. You're hired!"

...

Interviewer: "Dr. Roberts, why do you feel you'd be qualified for a position as Chief of Surgery for this, the most prestigious hospital and medical school in the country?"

Judge Roberts: "I am a doctor, I like to think a pretty good appellate doctor, that is, one to whom referrals are given. I've had 39 of my patients admitted to this hospital in the past."

Interviewer: "Can you tell us which of this cases were the hardest for you to diagnose?"

Judge Roberts: "I'm afraid to do that would be to violate patient confidentiality, and I have a sacred oath to avoid doing that."

Interviewer: "But, we don't want you to use names. Just tell us, say, which cases you found best illuminate your philosophy of medicine."

Judge Roberts: "I really must decline to talk about any cases. I will say that there were some cases where I diagnosed some medicine and performed some surgery that did not agree with my personal philosophy of medical treatment, but which I did at the request of my employer."

Interviewer: "Ah, and as the head of the medical staff here if we hire you, you will now be free to tell us what those practices are, so you can change the rest of the hospital staff's methods to better fit your idea of what good medicine is, right?"

Judge Roberts: "No, of course not, I would completely respect the precedents of established medical procedure, even if I thought it would kill a patient."

...

Interviewer: "Father Roberts, thanks for coming in for the interview for the job of parish priest. Do you believe that life begins at conception?"

Roberts: "Honestly, that issue might come up in a homily, sermon, or even confession some day, so I'd prefer not to comment on it."

Interviewer: "But, Judge Roberts, do you believe in a literal interpretation of the bible, or in the precedents of canon law?"

Roberts: "My own beliefs certainly would not come into any decision I might make with respect to the issue."

Interviewer: "But what if you thought a certain interpretation were wrong? Suppose your monsignor issued a proclamation saying that abortion was OK, and you thought it was murder under all circumstances?"

Roberts: "Obviously there are some circumstances in which my own strongly-held beliefs would take sway. I'm not saying, of course, that this necessarily is one of those issues, or isn't."