While engaged in a dispute as to the existence of a God, Henry Shanks stabbed Adam Weimer to the heart and escaped arrest. TX1883
--Tweets of Old offers further evidence that Texas is partly Russia

THIS COUNTRY IS A GUN AND YOU ARE THE SILENCERS:

...As throughout the review, Gray is being a little unfair to Pinker here. (The book isn’t quite so blithe about mass incarceration as Gray makes it sound.) But his example gets at an important point about what you might call the hiddenness of contemporary violence, and the extent to which modern people can afford to recoil at various forms of cruelty not because they’ve completely gone away, but because they take place offstage, behind society’s scenes, in forms that most people don’t experience directly and therefore don’t need to reconcile themselves to.

So we regard public executions as an anachronistic barbarity, to say nothing of flogging, the stocks, and other pre-modern forms of punishment. But we’re kept safe from crime by a penal system that locks lawbreakers away in a self-enclosed world pervaded by hidden cruelties and unacknowledged forms of torture. We have a growing distaste for cruelty to animals, manifest in polls, pop culture, foxhunting bans, you name it. But the vegetarian minority notwithstanding, our daily meals come from factory farms and industrial slaughterhouses where animals are treated in ways that would make our gorges rise if we ever actually confronted them. And more provocatively, of course, there’s the case of infanticide: Common in premodern societies, abhorred in our more civilized age … unless, of course, you count the million-plus abortions in America every year, perhaps the most common and the most concealed form of violence that our society accepts.

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NO ALIEN INVASION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION! Last night I saw Attack the Block with a couple friends, and I absolutely, relentlessly loved it. It does exactly what it promises--aliens attack a British housing project, working-class/underclass community bands together to save their home--and does it with tons of energy and heart. It's sort of sf/horror/comedy, and real comfort food, giving you every cliche of its genres but giving them to you with style and love. Demi-spoilers in what follows.

I was really interested in the gender issues, in part because unlike the race/class issues they were never raised explicitly. All the men in this movie are gangsters, mini-gangsters, or layabouts. The women are much more responsible, and the girls are both drawn to the local guys and deeply mistrustful of them. That felt pretty real to me.

One friend suggested that the movie overturned the "action hero" archetype: A man doesn't become a hero by killing. He becomes a danger by killing. He becomes a hero by risking his own life to save others. I think that's sort of true (and the "carrying the evidence of your sin on your back" scene actually reminded me of the amazing waterfall scene from The Mission--that's how much this movie believes in its characters), although it is mostly a feel-good movie and that limits how much it can overturn worldly ideals of heroism.

This is a really, really funny movie, which never takes itself seriously; and yet it's also a movie with a really strong emphasis on redemption, forgiveness, and the need to attempt understanding of others. I was hugely fond of it.

POP-UP PULP: BOOK COVERS MADE INTO DRAMATIC 3D SCENES. Via Unequally Yoked.

"APHRODITE TRIED AND FAILED": Elizabeth Hand, Generation Loss. I would have loved this book in junior high.

Partly, that's because I could recognize good prose! Generation Loss is a lit-suspense novel about a washed-up junkie photographer (the awful title is a photo-jargon term, not that that's an excuse) who travels to darkest Maine to interview a reclusive artist, and stumbles into a decades-long, "the '70s were evil"-style mystery surrounding an abandoned artists' colony. The descriptions of Maine's harsh beauty are terrific--some of the best nature writing I've read in a while--and the metaphors and assorted prosy flotsam are frequently great. The use and rhythmic recurrence of symbolism (the vicious fisher cats, the snapping turtles...) reminded me of Stephen King, which from me is a big compliment.

And the novel stars two really horrible women who are nonetheless charismatic and compelling. I mean... Cass, the washout, is the only person who knows that her ex-girlfriend died in the World Trade Center on 9/11; she sees missing-person flyers for her, but doesn't tell the woman's family what happened. I'm amazed that I nonetheless wanted to read about her, rather than just growling, "Yeah, whatever, Hand, you think you're so edgy" and hurling the book away in disgust.

There are hints of Donna Tartt territory, "looking for ekstasis in all the wrong places," although this book is just much less intelligent than The Secret History. And several of the book's themes or elements are things I really love: "out of the past," photography, and characters who are worthless until they're needed, to name three.

What ruins the novel is its underlying worldview. One of the central ideas of the book, introduced very early, is that this is the story of how Cass dealt with one of the defining moments of her life: the moment when she didn't fight her rapist. (I think this is paralleled to her 9/11 awfulness, above, and resolved in the same later sequence of actions; I really don't like this parallel, but as prose, it's done pretty subtly.) I'm... really interested in reading about responses to violence, and in fact, this question is the reason I kept reading when, early on, the prose was all cussy and attitudinal.

But this is a story of redemptive violence--albeit one without the usual American echoes or photonegatives of the Gospel. And it turns out that while I'm deeply drawn to stories of redemptive violence, I can't stand those stories when they're presented with moralizing and death-fetishism, both of which are strongly present in the book's climax and denouement. (If you read the novel: the two places where the phrase "Good girl" appears? Haaaaaaaate.) Or to put it another way, stories of redemptive violence work as tragedy. They don't work, at all, as a gothed-out Girl Scout Handbook.