Alibi Shop

I've been volunteering as a reader/narrator on the free audiobook site LibriVox, which makes recordings of public-domain material that's usually from Project Gutenberg. I thought I would start posting about those projects here, both for anyone who for some reason wants to hear me read stuff, and also because it's been an interesting assortment of stuff I mostly hadn't seen before (generally LibriVox volunteers don't contribute things out of the blue, but sign onto projects someone has proposed and maybe read just a few chapters in each book). Due to the vagaries of copyright law, a lot of the books are from the 19th or early 20th century but once in a while there'll be something a little more recent that's in the public domain.


Psychological Warfare, by Paul M.A. Linebarger (2nd edition, 1954)
text - audiobook (11 hrs 47 min; I read 2h 21m of it)

This is a nonfiction treatise by a scholar and US Army officer who worked in propaganda and media relations for the Allies during World War Two. He's better known for his science fiction written as Cordwainer Smith, which is why I was interested in reading this.
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In the Mood for Love (2000, *****), Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021, ***½), Dune (1984, ***)

Black Widow (2021, ***), One A.M. (1916, ****), Basic Instinct (1992, **), Single White Female (1992, ****), Mildred Pierce (1945, ***½)

I Don't Want to Be a Man (1918, ****), I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997, ***), Tenet (2020, ***½)

The Invisibles volume 3 #12-9 (1999)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art: Warren Pleece/Philip Bond, except #12 by Bond

So we're back and it's the home stretch. I was surprised to see, now, that the gap after volume two was only two months in publishing time; somehow it had felt longer to me than the four-month gap after volume one. Maybe I was more impatient at the time because at the end of volume one it had seemed like anything could happen and it was cool just to think that the series might continue at all, whereas here it seemed like only a limited number of things could happen and I wanted them to get on with it. And the tone and framing of these issues basically announces "we know you've been waiting for us to get on with it." The reverse numbering* is a smart move because "this really is building toward something specific, the end is in sight" is something readers might be feeling a need for by now. Toward the same goal, there's a clear effort in the first few issues to check in with characters and ideas that have been important at various times, with a tone that suggests we're finally going to see them all come together in some unexpected satisfying way. I'm skeptical about that of course,** due to past experience and also because a fair amount of what we're getting here isn't so much exploring earlier ideas as just rehashing them with minor variations.
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The Invisibles volume 2 #17-22 (1998)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art: #17/19/20/21 by Chris Weston/Ray Kryssing, #18 by Ivan Reis/Mark Pennington, #22 by Weston/John Stokes

[Update: shortly after posting the original version of this, I learned a bit late that Grant Morrison came out as nonbinary/genderqueer last year and prefers "they". I'll respect that going forward and I'll revise past posts as soon as I have a chance.]

The big event that closes out volume two is that King Mob blows up Mason's mansion and tells him it's for his own good. That's a reasonable choice in several ways: 1. Mason's whole "I have all the money and I know all the secrets, whose side am I really on" deal was narratively a dead end, and incompatible with the "scrappy rebels with no time for logic" vibe that Morrison wanted to explore. 2. There's not much else left to do—nearly everything that was set up earlier has been either resolved or discarded, our heroes seem to have more or less won (and/or established that some aspects of the conflict are bogus* and don't need to be won). And 3. as volume two has often reminded us, explosions are cool; that's not an aspect of the series I ever enjoyed, but it's there, so we might as well go all the way with it. So, OK, but since I didn't like a lot of volume two I'm not too invested in a competent follow-through on volume two's plot threads and ideas. I'd rather write about the surprisingly effective and less literal-minded moments, of which there are a few more than I had remembered.
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Happy Together (1997, *****), Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018, ***), MacGruber (2010, ***), Blithe Spirit (1945, ***½)

Got distracted with a few things like moving, didn't watch a lot of movies or get around to writing about them, so I'm slowly catching up...

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971, ***½), Dashing in December (2020, ***), Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey (2020, ***), Wonder Woman 1984 (2020, ***½)

I know some of us, if we are nerds, got a little verklempt in 2019 when we realized Blade Runner took place in 2019, and in 2015 because of Back to the Future II, and so on. Some disappointment; some relief. So maybe people are wondering what kind of inaccurate future is in store for us this year. You have a choice! Possibly the most recent 2021 is from the 1992 novel Children of Men (the movie moved it ahead a little); the most famous is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (so Blade Runner was a rare case of an adaptation picking an even more unrealistically early future).

But a lesser-known 2021 is the year of the earliest scenes in Thomas M. Disch's Vietnam War-era story cycle/novel 334, one of my all-time favorite books by a unique and sometimes maddening writer. This is a slice-of-life thing about a dozen major characters just dealing with life in New York City over several years in the 2020s, which is kind of crappy in many ways, and science-fictional in two or three ways, and ordinary otherwise. The prose is graceful and surprising, even though a large section of it was structured as a kind of writing game, where the narrative was required to change focus in just one of three ways from one scene to the next. It's an often bitter satire that seems to read pretty differently for different people—some take it as a totally cynical bummer, I don't really. I spent a while writing up annotations because there are a lot of little side things in it I enjoy, and as usual time has put some of it in a different light: for instance, the idea that you could pretty easily see 53 different movies over several weeks in theaters was not a misguided futuristic notion, it was an entirely realistic description of 1972 New York and a thing you could do well into the '90s when I lived there (and some of his fictional films have since been made, for better or for worse).

Anyway, there's a bit in it that always makes me a little weepy, where this pissed-off family is watching a TV movie based on Walt Whitman's life and work, which sounds simultaneously super-cheesy and maybe a little cool. The movie throws in some lines from "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry", where Whitman is trying to imagine people of the future and he decides they'll be doing a lot of the same stuff, going around New York, seeing things and having problems, and he loves that so much. "What is it, then, between us? What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?" The narrator doesn't dig the movie at all, and that kind of lofty earnestness isn't the book's usual style; but you can tell Disch does like these people, not because they're necessarily nice or smart or making him hopeful about the future, but just because they're managing to get by.

There's a less sympathetic character, a jaded social services manager with a bad case of affluenza, who is into a sort of drug-assisted historical LARPing. In the game, she's chosen to be a 4th-century Roman matron—because she thinks of her real world as being on the way out, just like the Roman Empire. It's written such that you can see how it'd be tempting to think that way, but also how it can be a self-indulgent luxury, a way of reassuring yourself that all the things that bother you will surely be destroyed soon. It's the mean flip side of Whitman's empathy: I identify with you, people of the past, because you're doomed and unworthy like me, and because nothing either of us does matters!

This novel (in its collected form at least) is pretty much the same age I am. I was a science-fiction-crazed kid, but my own ideas about the future were usually pretty vague. If as a kid in the '80s I'd been able to hear from my future self how 2021 looks right now, it would've been a mixed bag for sure: pretty scary in some ways, frustrating in many, and a nice surprise in a few—a similar mix to the style of 334, and unfamiliar to about the same degree that that world would be from either the real present or the past. Past-me wouldn't have known what to say, but I would've wished us all the best.

Making up stories about the future, especially one you could theoretically live to see (even though Disch didn't), is like placing a marker to get the future's attention: remember here I was thinking about you, hoping you're carrying on, give me a nod back when you get there.

I know it's not super worthwhile to pick on a random opinion piece on a genre entertainment magazine site, but there's something about "This Is Not Fiction" (by Charles Pulliam-Moore on io9) that really grinds my gears, and I'd like to think most people don't share this writer's obtuse point of view.

Basically, Pulliam-Moore is trying to make a point about how we should take politics seriously and not use things like Star Wars as metaphors, which... OK, I agree with the first part at least. But he's trying to make it by, among other things, dwelling on how one of Alexandra Petri's humor columns—the one about the Stormtrooper denouncing the bad guys at the very last minute as the Death Star is about to blow up—is "notably uninspired" and is "an attempt at humor masquerading as opinion"(??) and that Petri (or the Washington Post editorial department, since Pulliam-Moore seems to think this is a devious scheme by the Post to sneak "humor" onto a page where no one will recognize it, even though this is Petri's regular gig and she's fairly well known for such pieces) is trying to convince us that, since the Death Star is about to be blown up, the bad guys are defeated forever and all our problems are solved. He harps on this repeatedly and says jokes like this are "smoothing over the ugly realities."

Now, if the author just doesn't approve of humor in general, or thinks humor might be OK but not during a crisis when it's our duty to read nothing but cold hard facts, or doesn't like Petri, or thinks she should have made a more sophisticated joke... whatever. But I've rarely seen a better example of totally missing the point of a joke while attacking it. I can't believe anyone would have to explain this, but the point of that joke absolutely isn't "the bad guys are defeated forever, because that's what happened to the Death Star." That's not even true in the Star Wars movies: the bad guys come back again and again! And in the context of current reality, the point VERY OBVIOUSLY is along the lines of: "Look at the balls on these schmucks, putting out their last-minute denunciations as they flee the sinking ship. Anyone from the administration who says they weren't really a Trumpist at this point, when it's obviously just to cover their asses, should be laughed at and considered just as dirty as the rest of them." And the reason that's a point worth making—either in joke form, or in some other form that this guy would be OK with—is that we're well aware that our problems aren't over, that the rats didn't go down with the ship, and it'd be a really good idea not to just hire them onto other ships after a token affirmation that they meant well. Which is something we've seen happen many times before.

I know Pulliam-Moore understands that point because he makes it too in this very article ("One can't be certain what will become of the countless career politicians who willingly hitched their wagon to Trump's ... few of them will face any real repercussions")—while simultaneously insisting that a satire piece about exactly that same issue is bad because it distracts us from thinking about exactly that same issue. I'm not sure how that's supposed to work unless the idea is that fantasy stories are so stultifying, so inherently an opiate of the people, that they can't possibly convey a real point through satire and metaphor—that the kind of silly people who enjoy such entertainment will just go "Hey, Star Wars, fun!" and ignore the real-life implications. I wouldn't be surprised to see such an argument from some David Brooks-style moral scold with no interest in or understanding of any kind of fiction. But from someone who writes genre entertainment criticism it's more than a bit weird.