Pun Repression

Last night (Friday night), I had a dreamed that on the internet I discovered there was a plane-owner named "Asp." In the dream, I was so excited that I decided to write a blog entry and to call it, "Snakes Own a Plane." (When I woke up, my efforts at googling "plane-owners" and "snakes" weren't quite as fruitful.)

The same night, I also had a dream that I was surfing the internet, and I discovered that a Danish guy had invented a new form of watermelon. In the dream, I decided to write another blog entry and call it, "Those lazy, hazy, crazy Danes of summer." I don't know, it made more sense in the dream ... eating watermelon during the summer, and all.

When I mentioned these dreams to my wife, she suggested that maybe I was repressing my desire to pun, and my subconscious mind was demanding an outlet. And you know, with early Freudian psychology, we all have this "id" that is trying to get us to do socially unacceptable things like engage in orgies, so, why not also accept that our "id" is trying to make us say bad puns in public? Our superegos reprimand us, "Do not make people groan in pain from a bad joke! It isn't nice!" so punning becomes a guilty pleasure. Perhaps we try to compensate, hiding our predilection: when we say the word "to," we giggle inwardly because we could also be saying "two," "too," or even "tu," and no one would be any the wiser. Soon, it becomes too much for us to take, and we might start punning in our sleep. Those unable to conform to social mores might take to violence, holding people hostage at gunpoint (a literal "captive audience"--"look out, he's got a pun!"), saying, "Have you had your shots? Laugh, or you will have your shots, oh yes, you will have your shots!" I think the moral of the story is that my wife should encourage me to make puns all the time.

Women's Hopes Dashed--By Comics!

In Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, Janine Barchas argues that the dash is of inestimable importance in Sarah Fielding's novel David Simple. Barchas points out that even though Sarah Fielding's 1st edition of the novel had 808 dashes, the 2nd edition--the edition edited by her patriarchial brother, Henry--only has 81 dashes! What happened to the missing dashes, you ask? Brother Henry imposed masculine stylistic conventions upon her and destroyed them. In so doing, brother Henry robbed Sarah's novel of its complexity. For example, the dash "allows [Fielding] to echo the non-verbal world which the women of her novel increasingly come to inhabit" (154). A dash is "a visual sign both of conversation and silence," giving "the sense of conversational immediacy and psychological affect" as well as emphasizing "the important role non-verbal communication plays" (160).

Barchas's arguments have convinced me that I need to take artists' implementation of the dash more seriously. Let us take a look at Fantastic Four #70 and see how Barchas's insights shape our reading. (I should add that, given that the dash is a direct assault upon patriarchy, it's a surprise that more women aren't reading comic books.) In context, The Thing (or "Ben") has gone crazy, and Mr. Fantastic (or "Reed") has just shot him with a menta-wave unit to return him to sanity. I shall only include the dialogue, not the captions.

Panel 1: [The Torch (or "Johnny") comments:] "Reed! You--you did it! He's collapsing! But--he--he's not breathing--any more--! You've--killed--him!" Panel 2: The Invisible Girl (or Sue) is outside. Sue says,] "Something terrible is happening in there--I just know it! I'm almost afraid--to open the door! That noise--inside----like something smashing down the wall!" Panel 3: [Sue crashes through the door.] "Ben--he's dead! And Reed--Johnny!! Wha--?!! Coming thru the wall--a giant, mindless android!"

Now, even without the captions, we have 15 dashes here within a space of just 3 panels (19 if you count the captions). With Barchas's insights, I can better account for the dash usage. Let's take the phrase, "You've--killed--him!" Paradoxically, this dash reminds us of both conversation and silence, of presence and absence. Few situations are so fraught with conversational immediacy and emotional intensity as those in which we point out that somebody who normally isn't dead, is being so right now. Yet this situation is also filled with non-verbal communication: Ben's body must speak the words that he cannot, nonverbally communicating, "Help me, I think I'm deceased!" When Johnny tries to verbalize Ben's plight--when Johnny says, "You've--killed--him!"--we are reminded that there are some things you can never say, especially when you are dead.

Johnny, too, is at a loss for words: What else is there to say other than "You've--killed--him?" (Sort of like, "Mistah Kurtz--he dead.") To drive this point home, imagine the opposite situation: If Ben were alive, conversational topics would flow naturally. Johnny could say, "I--think--he's breathing! Call someone--a paramedic! Do you know--have you ever learned--CPR?" Instead, Ben's death reduces Johnny to silence. It captures for us that moment when consciousness fades to blackness ... when speech fades to blankness. Johnny is confronted with death, with absence, with silence--and in that moment, a socially induced paralysis takes hold of him, and takes hold of the reader. There is something beyond logos, beyond language, beyond loquacity, and we are powerless to ever control it. We are like Sue Richards, ever unable to see what is beyond that door, ever afraid to see what lies outside logocentrism. We fear whether the great beyond will realize our greatest dreams--or only dash them.

Self-Absorbed 100th post!

In November, 2005, there was a graduate student with a dream. His dream was that somewhere, there was a land, a land in which his mind could rove free. Free of the constraints of rational thought, coherence, or clarity. He did not find this land, but he did found this land, and he called it, "The Realm of Pseudo-Profundities." And so should you.

Sometimes, as I look back over these posts, especially the early ones, I have to remind myself that I have never taken illegal substances. I sometimes ponder how my style has changed since this blog's humble beginnings. Shows like The Simpsons or the website Homestarrunner seem to get progressively weirder the longer they continue; in contrast, I feel that my blog has actually moved closer toward normalcy. In my earliest posts, I lovingly crafted weird phraseologies alive with alliterative alley-oopedness; sometimes, I even out-lined a post in advance, such as my pseudo-profanities post. Yet at some point, I realized that all the effort this involved looked like the sort of thing I used to call "work," the very thing which this blog was created to avoid. I think my style has gotten less weird, partly because I've gotten lazier about blogging.

It's interesting to me to see how the subject matter of my blog has evolved. Initially, I envisioned the blog to be aimed at "academics": I was an English graduate student that was going to subvert academia and destroy it from within. But then, a funny thing happened. I started working on writing my Robinson Crusoe dissertation chapter. And months later, I was still working on my Crusoe chapter. My life centered around reading Crusoe-related paraphernalia. Now, since there are only so many blog entries someone can write about Crusoe, I sort of wandered from the academic fold and branched out into other areas, like cat analysis. Even though my blog has always been concerned with religion (such as midrashic angels without noses), I began blogging about Christianity more frequently; part of the reason for this increase is that my blog feed started going to my alma mater, a Christian college, and I thought it might meet readers' interests. Perhaps you have noticed that one of the most striking characteristics of this blog is its narcissistic quality: I blog about strange thoughts that I have, often unconnected to anything going on in the outside world. However, I recently subscribed to daily news updates, so maybe I'll be writing a lot more "news" blog in the next year (such as Barney the dinosaur's legal troubles). Recently, I have also tried to "return to my academic roots" a little bit with the "Expand your Jargon" series. I don't know where the next 100 posts will take me, but hopefully it's at least past the dissertation!

More Gossip, Please

On Sept. 14, the MLA job list went up, so I am now diligently scrutizining every aspect of my life to figure out how I can apply for one of their 18th c. teaching jobs. Need someone on 18th c. British and can connect it to science? Well, my conference paper considers the scientific effects of eating dirt! Need someone with a "postcolonial" interest, eh? Well, I can talk about eating dirt in Jamaica! "Cultural studies?" Well, I do know a little something about how cultural differences shape the eating of dirt. I even tested the topic out on my advisor (not in the sense of eating dirt myself, of course) and got my advisor interested, too! It's odd: I thought I was padding my CV by applying on a lark for a conference, but this one bizarre topic actually serves to connect me to multiple scholarly trends and more marketable for jobs that are outside my normal specialization.

So, what will I do after I have sapped myself beyond all human endurance and sent in my application materials? Well, I know what a lot of people will be doing! They'll be surfing the web to find out their job prospects. I read an article on Chronicle of Higher Education which mentioned a large number of "rumor mills." There's one for international relations, American and comparative jobs, Middle East history, political theory and public law, and even theoretical particle physics. Astrophysics has two, yes, that's right, two rumor mills! And would you believe the article does not list one single English job rumor mill? What has become of us? We English people, who pride ourselves on only our ability to communicate: I ask you, if we're planning on reading fiction for a living, are we really supposed to be bothered by a few untruths about people on the job market? Sure, there may be some ethical problems with posting unsubstantiated rumors about job hires on the web, and I suppose it's possible that we don't have an English job rumor mill because English department people are ethically superior to all other forms of humanity. But ethics be danged, I want someone to start an English job rumor mill! So long as I only read it without repeating it, it's okay.

A Dream Come True

As I was looking at my CV (or "curriculum vitae"), I was noticing that I have not given many conference paper presentations. More conference papers means more job search committees might say, "Hey, he writes things and contributes to knowledge, let's give him a job at our school!" However, there are two considerations that have prevented me from generating conference paper proposals. 1. I've been very busy the past few weeks working on things I have to do for the job market, so why should I write a proposal that's only optional? 2. I'm already scheduled to give a conference paper this semester, which means the English department probably wouldn't re-imburse me if I got accepted to another one. However, on Thursday, September 14, I got a short breather, and I thought to myself, "What the heck, I have a day, why not write a paper proposal for the conference that has a September 15th deadline?" Why not indeed? All I needed was to read the panel descriptions and try to think of something that might fit the theme.

But what subject do I know well enough that I won't sound stupid to the panel chair? For instance, if there were a panel on "Henry Fielding," ideally, I'd be able to say something in my proposal that indicated I knew something about the critical field of Fielding. I didn't have the time to survey that field. No, there must be something, some talent or knowledge-acquisitioned thing hidden deep within me, that, when exposed to the world, would blossom forth from the ground ...

From the ground ...

Eureka! Some of you may remember an old post I wrote called, "The Theological Significance of Eating Dirt." In this entry, I revealed the many fascinating things I learned about God and eating dirt in literature. Now, this topic is basically terra incognita (no pun intended), and I do believe I just might know the aesthetics on dirt-eating better than anyone else does. There actually are a lot of interesting things you can say about eating dirt and national identity; I'm not going to say them here, of course, because I do what I can to preserve my pseudoanonymity, and I fear the google search-engine. So, with a heart full of hopes, I sent my fledgling dirt baby proposal into cyberspace, and lo, it returned to me as an approved paper topic!

Now, even though I think I can say some meaningful things about eating dirt, I am not under the delusion that eating dirt is central to the national consciousness or something: I read a book jacket that argued tattoos were actually central to national identity, because America tried to discourage people from getting them. I never found that argument convincing. So, I'm not going to argue that dirt-eating is central to human identity because of the fact that mommas don't let their babies grow up to be dirt-eaters. However, I do think it's an interesting topic. I also suppose there's also a side of me that dreams of the following scenario:

College classroom. Late at night. Professor Murray sighs, reads a C.V., curses the applicant, sighs, reads another C.V., curses the applicant. Suddenly, he sits up straight. The sound of a chuckle mingles with the intake of his breath. A hushed awe. Then, a cry. "Doug! Doug, you gotta look at this! Did you see this guy who gave a paper on eating dirt? I've never heard of anything like this! We have got to interview this guy at MLA to find out what he said! Think of the insights to glean! The personality quirks to admire! The money to offer!" I just might hit paydirt.

Odin's Ways Are Not Our Ways

God's ways are not our ways, and I suppose that should be just as true of Norse gods. We want to box Norse gods in, make them conform to our own standards of goodness and logic. They are not tame gods, and they are not proto-21st century Americans, either. We must acknowledge them in all their wildness, and in all their wackiness.

This insight came to me while I was reading about the super-hero "The Mighty Thor" by Stan Lee in Journey into Mystery 90. (Hey, I needed a break from the dissertation, okay?) In the comics, Thor lives on earth and is the god of thunder. His father is the chief god, Odin. In this particular issue, Thor is surprised that some of his human friends and acquaintances are acting strangely. Thor remembers some advice his father Odin once gave him: "When something puzzles you, always seek the simplest, most obvious explanation ... no matter how impossible it may seem!" Now, that piece of advice sounds awfully conformable to human logic and wisdom, doesn't it? I mean, Occam's Razor says that, when someone is "given two equally valid explanations for a phenomenon, one should embrace the less complicated formulation." And Sherlock Holmes says, ""if you have eliminated all of the impossibilities, the only remaining possibility must be the correct one, no matter how implausible!" How refreshing it is to have a deity that thinks like human smart people do!

But then, in a masterful stroke, Stan Lee reminds us that Thor, even when seeming to begin with human logic, turns that logic on its head, because he has special godlike reasoning powers. Thor reflects, "The simplest, most obvious explanation! If people are not acting like themselves, then they must not be themselves! They must be imposters!" See, I wouldn't have gone for that. I'd have suggested maybe they'd just eaten a bit of undigested mustard, maybe had a bad day or something. Even though I knew Thor was a god, I was still skeptical of his idea, but you know what? In the end, it turned out he was right after all, and his so-called "friends" were really just extra-terrestrial imposters. Boy, did I have egg on my face. Still, it taught me that sometimes we just have to learn to trust that which is beyond our understanding. Like comic books.

While I'm at it, I figure I might as well quote this catchy aphorism uttered by Mr. Fantastic in Fantastic Four #65: "Wives should be kissed--and not heard!" A super-intelligent super-hero cannot be wrong!

Pseudoanonymity

Cloaked within a shrouded mystery of thorough unrevealedness, Leopoldtulip sits at his computer, laughing. His is the power to type things, things deemed too controversial even for words, and all with complete anonymity. Except for the fact that a bunch of people know who he is.

I have taken steps to secure my secret identity, of course. I call myself "Leopoldtulip." Nevertheless, over the months of this blog's history, people have repeatedly called me "John" in the comment box. There are only so many times I can type, "I do not know this John person of which you speak, for I am the great and powerful Oz!" before it gets old. Nevertheless, for some strange reason it is psychologically re-assuring to pretend that people can't figure out who I am: For instance, I never refer to "my wife" by name, even though there's this person named "Teresa H.T." who leaves the kind of comments that a wife (or at least a kept woman) would. In trying to deceive others about my identity, have I deceived only myself that I am deceiving anyone?

I also must admit that I apply a double-standard: I do not name my wife, but I constantly refer to our cats, Cricket and Pippin. My wife has suggested that, given the distinctive names of our cats, it would be easier for someone to guess my identity based on the cats' names rather than my wife's, given the large number of people named Wife in the world. Her argument makes a lot of sense intellectually, but not psychologically. Perhaps it is because I just think of cats as being harmless, non-sentient beings. They have no credit card history or webpages that an enterprising private detective can trace. They are prisoners here and can never try to sell their story to ABC. And if I didn't call them "Cricket and Pippin," what would I call them in my blog? Thing 1 and Thing 2?

I suppose what makes me saddest about the inadequacy of my anonymity is that it makes it harder to effect real social change. I was just reading an article about how the anonymous blogger Brewster Pennybaker at Alfred College crafted an "I hate my College President, Uma Gupta" blog. Every entry, one would learn a new reason to dislike Gupta, such as that she took a four-day weekend over Memorial Day, that she must suffer from personality disorder, that she must be paranoid, etc. (I can't imagine why she'd think that someone was out to get her ...) The blogger even successfully mobilized marginally apathetic faculty members into seething masses of burning hatred. Now, there's a blog that effects real social change: things got so bad that Gupta eventually left. And No matter how hard Gupta tried, she could never figure out what person hated her so much that he/she dedicated an entire blog to her destruction.

I could never do that to someone. Not just in the sense that I'm a nice guy, but in the sense that I don't want someone getting back at me. There's just no way that I could viciously assault someone's character on this blog and prevent that person from finding out who I am. What if someday I want to brutally savage the government and/or reveal military secrets? It is true that, when Jonathan Swift anonymously wrote the controversial "Drapier Letters," no Irishman would turn him in for the 300 pound reward from the English, even though his identity was an open secret in Ireland. It is also the case that he didn't have a comment box where people were calling him "Swiftyboy," either. Man, I could actually be held personally responsible for what I write. That sucks!

Big Brother is Watching You

"Every blog you see
every site you flee
Every page retrieved
every comment leaved1
I'll be watching you."
-The (Secret) Police

Guys like numbers. In The River Why, David James Duncan remarks on the oddity of John 21, where Jesus's disciples show their quantification propensities by counting 153 fish. Duncan writes, "This is, it seems to me, one of the most remarkable statistics ever computed. Consider the circumstances: this is after the Crucifixion and the Resurrection; Jesus is standing on the beach newly risen from the dead, and it is only the third time the disciples have seen him since the nightmare of Calvary. And yet we learn that [the fish numbered precisely 153]....How was this digit discovered? Mustn't it have happened thus: upon hauling the net to shore, the disciples squatted down by that immense, writing fish pile and started tossing them into a second pile, painstakingly counting 'one, two, three, four, five, six, seven...' all the way up to an hundred and fifty and three, while the newly risen Lord of Creation, the Sustainer of their beings, He who died for them and for Whom they would gladly die, stood waiting, ignored, till the heap of fish was quantified. Such is the fisherman's compulsion toward rudimentary mathematics!"

Internet technology being what it is, there is another thing to quantify: the number of visits to a blog! A few months ago, I signed up with statcounter.com, which I highly recommend. Since I am never going to pay them for their services, I figured I at least owe them a blog entry. They have some of the coolest features I have ever seen. Many internet counters may tell you how many times your pages have been loaded on a day; for example, you might get 38 hits on a day and think blissfully to yourself, "I have 38 fans!" Unfortunately, you might not have 38 fans: it just might be that you have one particularly obsessive fan who has clicked on your page 38 times. Or, even worse, perhaps the reason your one fan reloaded your blog so many times is that they weren't reading your blog at all: they kept looking at your links, hitting the "back" button, then leaving again.

Statcounter not only tells you how many "hits" you have on a day: it also tells you how many of these hits were from different visitors, and how many of these visitors are 1st timers/returning. It tells you how long they visited a page. It tells you where that person lives! It tells you what site they visited before yours: for instance, I discovered someone had linked to one of my posts simply because I kept getting internet traffic from the same blog. It tells you what google searches brought someone to your site. Not that I care, but it even tells visitors' IP addresses and browser choices. Statcounter lets me set up a "blocking cookie" on my own computer, so that my counter isn't affected by my own visits. (Think how shaming it must be to have five hits on a day, four of which have been yourself.) Best of all, statcounter is free!

Now, statcounter only keeps this level of detail for the most recent 100 page loads--you can increase the number through an upgrade, but you have to pay for the service. I think that statcounter is most useful if you don't get many visits, because then you have something to do when virtually nobody's reading you. Sure, perhaps only three people visited your site that day, but you can spend ten minutes carefully studying them, their geographical location, and their viewing habits. Not that I would do that sort of thing, of course, because that would be obsessive.

The weirdest thing is learning what google searches take someone to a blog entry. For instance, I wrote a post recounting how, as a 12-year old, I wrote a really bad rock song about ear-piercing being sinful, along with Scriptural proof-texts. I got all sorts of hits from google searches like "piercing arguments," "Biblical reference to ear-piercing," etc. I couldn't help but feel bad for all of these people who had actually hoped for something substantial but had ended up at my blog instead. Perhaps the one I feel worst about is a person's search, "how to console someone with a death in the family," which took the person to this beauty. I never really thought about the odd weakness of google: it can tell whether certain words show up, but not whether they are serious or humorous. Also, google searches not just an individual blog entry but a whole month's archive: so, when someone googled "skit based off Ananias and Sapphira," mine was the first hit on google, because one of my blog entries used the phrase "Ananias and Sapphira" and a different entry in the same month used the word "based."

However, sometimes the google searches can make me feel touched. For instance, someone did a google search for "fully human, fully divine," and went to my site. Normally, I would feel bad about someone wanting a serious post and getting a silly one. However, statcounter lets me go to the google screen, and I saw that even before the person clicked on my site, google had excerpted the phrase "fully monkey," a key silliness signifier. I like to think that there's this unknown personage who sincerely wanted to learn some serious Christology, but found him/herself intrigued and inexorably drawn in by the siren song of the monkey. That is a high compliment indeed. Both to my writing, and to monkeys.

Having statcounter also enables you to employ some neat counter-espionage technology. Sometimes, after I visit a blog or link to it, someone--and by "someone," I mean whoever owns the blog I visited--will use their advanced tracking technology to learn that this "Leopoldtulip" guy linked to them, and they will spy on me by looking at my blog. With statcounter, it's like having a double agent spy within their ranks--several times, statcounter has told me when someone got to my site through "technorati" or a different web counter system. Who's spying on whom, buddy? You think you're so cool with your complex internet tracking capabilities, but tell me, who's ... spying ... on whom?

1.Yes, yes, I know it should be "left."

This Book does not Exist

I was looking around Amazon and was surprised to discover a review for a book that does not exist. The reviewer, Sean McKeever, writes, "Hi. As the author of the material, I'd like to point out that this edition was never published by Marvel Comics. The material claimed to be reprinted in this volume has yet to be reprinted beyond its original comicbook format. Since Marvel has collected the first six issues of Inhumans in digest format (see ISBN 0785117555) there is a chance that this, the remainder, will one day be reprinted." McKeever's The Inhumans Vol. 1 is very good, which is why I was looking around Amazon for his work.

His comment got me to thinking what an incredibly surreal experience it must be to see a book on Amazon, supposedly by yourself, that is non-existent. When I am particularly bored, I sometimes just type the word "Leopoldtulip" in amazon.com, but it's not like I actually expect to find anything there. To be honest, I'd feel rather weird if I didn't get the message, "No results matched your search." What would I do if it brought me to a description of the book, The Best of the Realm of Pseudo-Profundities? I guess I'd stare at the screen a little. Perhaps I'd feel a little flattered that some people thought my material offered sufficient commercial promise that they consequently stole it from me. But mainly, I'd wonder what the heck was going on.

If I were the writer of the above amazon review, however, I'd probably also feel a little cheated. Any time that I typed in my name Sean McKeever to survey the several pages of listed publications all by me, my eyes would always focus on that one book. The non-existent edition that "has yet to be reprinted," because apparently the stupidheads at Marvel don't know what's good for them. Forever taunted with the reminder that "there is a chance that this, the remainder, will one day be reprinted," but believing it probably never will be. It's demoralizing enough for authors that Amazon lists books that are out of print without listing editions that never were in print. As an author, one would always feel a sort of painful attraction to the entry--the book that does and does not exist at the same time. (Yes, I know it exists in individual comic book form--much as these blog entries exist as individual blog entries--but not in one collected edition.) Once a week or so, maybe you'd check to see if anybody of "The emperor has no clothes" temperament has written a comment, "Umm, isn't Amazon only supposed to list books that actually exist?" Finally, you just cannot take the indeterminacy anymore: you are going to leave a comment!

The additional weirdness factor is that you don't simply have to leave a comment; you have to rate the book according to a five stars system. So how do you rate a nonexistent book? Especially if you know it may someday exist, and you don't want the ratings skewed. And especially if the book is written by yourself. I respect Sean McKeever, because he only gave his work three stars. I was tempted to write my own review of his book (if it's a non-existent book, I have just as much right to review it as anyone else) and give it five stars as a reward for his being a classy guy who didn't give himself high ratings.

The only slightly more surreal experience I can think of would be if Sean McKeever googled his name and found his way to this blog entry. Should he leave a comment to say whether my speculations at all resembled his own? Pretend that this blog entry, like the book, does not exist? If there are any surreal questions you would like to ask Sean McKeever if he ever visits this blog, leave a comment below.

Gumshoes of the world, Untie!

It's those little incomprehensible differences between the sexes that get me. What better way to say "I love you" than playing a computer game where you try to kill each other? Love is all about making yourself vulnerable, like when you only have a revolver and your partner has an uzi. It is Mr. and Mrs. Smith without the secret agent training. My wife doesn't see things this way, so I am often forced to kill computer-generated wood-elf armies when I could be killing my wife's hand-picked elite fighting force of undead hordes.

I finally figured out why she refused to play games like Warcraft 3 with me. It was not simply that she disliked computer games; it was because she wanted to make me so desperate that I would play any computer game with her, even if it had a girly phrase like "Nancy Drew" in the title. I won't lie to save my reputation. I grudgingly admit that it is a fun game.

However, what I really wanted to comment on is "Gumshoe online." You see, my wife didn't start off my slow descent into womanness territory by saying, "Why don't we play Nancy Drew?" She started by saying, "IF you really want me to play a game with you, let's play a detective game." She appealed to my sense of frugality: "The 1st game is free." It starts you off with a rippling masculinity private detective, but he behaves so stupidly that you will play Nancy Drew out of desperation.

Now don't get me wrong. I grew up playing the King's Quest series, a fun fantasy adventure game where a lovable King Graham wandered the countryside and, in MacGyveresque fashion, always found a use for seemingly pointless objects. Sure, to the untrained eye, a tambourine seems useful only for goofy praise and worship music--but it can actually scare a life-threatening animal! Shazam! Every object that is not bolted to the ground will end up serving a useful purpose. It's the sort of world that would be an atheist's nightmare: "Look, I just found this smelly old fish that enabled me to save the entire bee colony from a bear! Are you trying to tell me the fish just happened to get there by chance, silly atheist person?" So, in principle, I can handle a game in which you start off with nothing but your wits.

Yet for some reason, it really bothered me that Gumshoe Online has the same basic premise of your owning nothing. You begin the game with an office. The only things within this office are an empty desk and the air you breathe. Now for your first challenge: you have to sneak into a house with a locked door. You'd think that maybe, seeing that you are a detective, you would own a prybar, or at least know how to find a store that sells prybar. No. You need to walk around town a little, look around, and notice that someone has just left a conveniently placed prybar lying on the ground. And while I’m on the subject, what kind of freak private eye doesn’t even own a flashlight? What kind of freak private eye has to wander around in houses looking to permanently "borrow" someone else's lockpicks because he doesn't have his own?

Forced to be self-critical, I wondered whether I was employing a double-standard, blaming the Gumshoe Online game for criticisms just as applicable to King's Quest: aren’t both characters just wandering around looking for objects they ought already to own? Happily, C. S. Lewis convinced me I was perfectly justified, so the self-doubt is gone and the merciless mockery can continue. Lewis talks about different forms of “realism”: “realism of content” refers to works which depict a likely (or “realistic”) situation—for example, it is “realistic” for private eyes to exist. However, there is also “realism of presentation,” which refers to works which may depict an unlikely situation (you are a ruler of a fantasy kingdom and wandering around to find your castle that an evil wizard has stolen) but may realistically depict how a person might behave under those circumstances. The real difference between the two games is that they observe two different kinds of realism. King’s Quest has “realism of presentation”—if my kingdom and castle were kidnapped along with all my personal possessions, then like King Graham, I’d behave by going crazy in the kleptomaniac department and hoping to pick up something useful. Gumshoe Online is trying to have “realism of content” (a private eye with an office) but then makes him incapable of functioning in a realistic way—such as owning office supplies. The game must contradict itself in order to instantiate itself. (I don’t know what that means, but it sounded good, so I figured I’d write it.) If that crisis in the game's self-identity doesn't bother you, then by all means, play the game, it's not bad.

I did learn from the experience that, even if I thought the game had these fundamental aesthetic flaws, it was fun to play a game with my wife. Since then, we’ve been playing the Nancy Drew game, where you also have to go around picking up objects, but since you don’t have an office, and the winter snow storm means that you’re trapped in the haunted mansion, it does not merit my indignation. Except I really wish it were a Hardy Boys Case Files mystery instead.

A Minor Observation

Wow. I have to express some surprise (along with Janeeyreish) that the last blog entry has generated the largest number of comments in the history of this blog, and I am still scratching my head wondering why. I recall a philosophy professor suggesting that college students were fairly uninterested when it came to issues like "What is truth?" and pretty loud when it came to aesthetic issues like "Metallica sucks!" Maybe we express our opinions more readily about aesthetic issues (music, cuteness, etc.) because the conclusions seem more personal: we like the "truth" because we think it is the truth (objective), but we like a rock band because ... we like it. (Or, in the case of Celtic punk, because it is the awesomest musical creation in existence.) An assault on a favorite rock band can seem a personal attack on one's own identity and interests, because aesthetic judgments often seem more subjective and more like a product of "choice" than truth judgments do. Perhaps ironically, cuteness is objectively more compelling than other subjects because it has this subjective component. Or maybe it's because this is a labor day weekend and people were bored. Either way, the enigma of cuteness remains.