Sequel to previous post of intense critical analysis of Star Wars and CS Lewis now involving superhero movies

Many years ago, in my youth, I read comic books about superheroes. I also watched Star Wars movies. I did not ever read Star Wars comics. I tried a few, but I didn’t find them very interesting in comparison to the overwhelming visual and auditory experience of the movies. I say that, but in my teens I did read the Star Wars original novelization by George Lucas, or so I thought at the time. Now Wikipedia says Alan Dean Foster ghost wrote it. I enjoyed the book, but at the time I read any science fiction I could get from the local library, which meant whatever water warped paperbacks were on the spinning metal rack by the front door and sometimes I’d have to keep spinning and spinning it and all I could see were the same books that I’d already read, actually the exact same copies of the books, with the tears and creases that I recognized from when I’d checked them out before, and so i got desperate and read the Star Wars novelization and as I say I kind of liked it but I liked anything with spaceships by that time and I didn’t find it as imaginative as a lot of other books that I was interested in, which brings me to the theme of this post, the Hagenart 1st and 2nd Rules of Writing for Media

Rule 1: The higher the complexity of the performance medium, the lower the level of creativity and complexity required for it to be interesting to most people. Basically, you don’t need to be as creative to write for a movie with moving visual and sound elements, as you do to write for say a novel. At an intermediate level, writing the lyrics for a song with music accompaniment requires less creativity and excellence than writing a poem to be performed by spoken word only. Basically, a bird must work harder to fly than a fish must work to float. 

Rule 2: The higher the complexity of the medium, the less freedom you have when writing for it. A person writing a prose novel can write with less constraints than a person writing for a movie.  The movie script has to be portrayable on a screen in a certain time. Basically, a bird may fly faster than a fish can swim. 

Rule 3: The rule of Transfers. When you make a movie out of a book, you lose freedom but gain the added dimensions of the new medium. When you make a book out of a movie, you lose the power of the medium and gain freedom. 

3a: The new freedom doesn’t usually help the movie made into a book, because the story is already set. That’s why novelizations fail to be interesting, because something written for a film will suffer from the transfer to a less powerful medium, without gaining enough from the freedom.  It may swim with the fishes but it will not fly with the birds. And it must compete with books written with the freedom enjoyed by Rule 2. 

And that’s why the Star Wars comics weren’t that interesting. 

But what about the movies made from books? They actually work pretty well, in general, because they bring the high caliber imagination and storytelling of a successful novel to the power of the sound and visuals of the cinema. But to move to a new medium, they lose some of the freedom of their original medium, so those annoyingly picky readers like myself may resent or dislike the film version. But we still watch it. Well, I don’t, not any more. They’ve hurt me too many times. Lord of the Rings cut too deep. 

Now I bring in the super hero movies, the supposed point of this post, yes!

The MCU people have managed to take the creativity and storytelling freedom of the comic books to film, while making the most of the cinema’s visual and auditory power.  They’ve also had some good fortune, in that the new special effects technology has enabled them to bring the comic books to the screen with far less constraints in their storytelling freedom - Lessening the impact of Rule 3. 

But there’s a secret advantage to making movies out of comic books as compared to regular novels, that makes all the difference: The comic books are serials, with lots and lots of storylines to choose from. The comic books sometimes retell the same story with minor changes many times. The readers can’t possibly even remember all the plots and alternate versions of each character, so they don’t care if the movies stick with the exact plot of whatever original comic storyline it was based on. So the MCU creators didn’t have to stick to some exact plot like the Harry Potter movies did - ugh, how they did. So the fans didn’t care. 

Except for Origin Stories.  Which the MCU people have wisely avoided, except for Iron Man - but I think that worked because they had Robert Downey Junior, and fun visuals. But that usually doesn’t work - I have come to believe that Origin Stories generally do not work in movies, because they take too long and pretty much depend on the actor - so if you don’t get someone really good, it’s unbearable and uninteresting. 

Actually that’s rule 4: Origin Stories should be left to the Comic Book, unless you have RDJ to do it for you. MCU seems to know this. The DCCU people haven’t quite learned it.  But they’ve still made a lot of money, because of Rule number 5: Anything about superheroes makes money now because we humans love to fantasize about being superheroes because we want to be unique and we have learned from the internet that we are not unique. We are living in gigantic high tech anthills and we are not biologically designed to be ants, we are chest beating monkeys who live in small tribes where everyone knows us and we are important to the group. We dream about joining a special tribe, rising above the ants somehow, having a secret quality, a superiority that transcends our everyday ant struggles and failures. 

So those are some of the Hagenart Rules. There are more of course. I like making these rules. It feels like being an alpha gorilla with big hairy arms, telling the other monkeys about my favorite comics and hogging all the oranges. 

 

Now that I’ve thoroughly dissected HP Lovecraft and CS Lewis, we will pivot this high caliber analytic cannon of a blog toward our next target; a comparison of the Star Wars and Marvel Superhero movies. The movies that Martin Scorcese pointedly described as “not cinema”, igniting a firestorm of publicity for the Marvel movies and whatever he was working on at the time, I don’t really remember, but I do remember my appreciation for the sheer snootiness of his comment, and I remember that he and some other directors were concerned about some gloriously worthless and unbelievably snooty cause, something about preserving old movies on original handcrafted plates or something, and someone from Empire magazine interviewed him about it and asked him what he thought of all the superhero movies, probably hoping to get some priceless comment in a comic book store guy voice, and that’s probably the only interview in Empire magazine that people like me will refer to for years to come. 

So are the Marvel movies “cinema”?  I have no idea because I don’t know what that means. Are they artistic? Are they literature? I don’t think so. 

I think the first Star Wars movie is artistic. I think Lucas created a new type of fantasy with it, a re-imagining of the fantasy genre by replacing the medieval outfits with California new age cult robes and replacing the horses with spaceships and laser swords. I don’t think he brought anything new to the sequels, and I think his weird desire to tell an anti-technology parable with movies that glorify a mix of technology and fantasy fatally interfered with his storytelling instincts. He stopped going for the 70’s realism vibe that mixed so interestingly with the fantastic elements in the first Star Wars, maybe I wonder responding to criticism from his pompous film school friends or, worse responding to praise from Joseph Campbell. He needed someone outside his circle to bounce ideas off, maybe. 

Of course I could clear my throat and point at yours truly now, but that would be tacky. We’re here to talk about George and how we could help him, or could have helped him in 1980, after Empire Strikes Back and before the Ewoks. Or maybe the Ewoks existed in his mind at the time and so many beautiful people had called him a genius to his face that he’d already lost it and he wanted to be mentally naked and bare his mind Ewoks and all on the big screen. 

So it’s 1980 and we’ve walked through a time portal with a message for Lucasfilm.  

It just so happens that in a previous post, we had a book, That Hideous Strength, by CS Lewis,  from which we had removed the first six chapters or so, and were kind of left hanging there until now by, once again, Yours Truly. 

It’s all coming together now. The first two Star Wars movies - I’m not going to dignify that prequel Roman numeral crap with a turgid discussion of which came first - will take the place, in a multi-media format, in place of the removed chapters of That Hideous Strength. But whenever Obi Wan or Yoda talk about the force, they add a bit about the macrobes and how the leader of the bad macrobes on earth turned Darth Vader to evil. 

But what about Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra? Totally improved with a judicious injection of laser swords and Star destroyers. Ransom visits Mars with an earth colonial battle fleet, and foments an insurrection after connecting with a mystical guerilla leader named Oyarsa Malacandra, who teaches him the force and gifts him a sweet lightsaber to fight the earthling empire. 

It gets better in the new version of Perelandra. Ransom gets word that a new super Jedi lives on Venus, named Perelandra. She’s green skinned but human in form, kind of a mix of a Yoda and a human. She rides around the oceans of Venus on a floating vegetable mat powered by her force-magic at triple digit speeds. Ransom teaches her to channel her energy for righteousness, but the emperor lands on his personal shuttle and tries to woo her to the dark side. Surprise! She joins the Emperor and kills Ransom in a duel, after Ransom wounds the emperor, who falls in a Venusian lava flow. The green lady rescues the Emperor and he becomes Darth Vader. 

Here’s the twist in the third book, the evil green Sith replaces the Princess in the Star Wars chapters. 

Now get ready for awesomeness - in the Empire Strikes back she’s the one who trains Luke in the swamps of Venus, no Yoda, and after the big reveal of Luke’s father, we’re ready for part three with Jabba and the fight between the rebels and the empire on earth. 

We go Meta at that point: Darth Vader turns out to be George Lucas. He’s the president of several film conglomerates, and also President of the US, and Chief Justice and Speaker of the house, and Secretary General of the United Nations. He’s been making movies about his own interstellar empire! The audacity! 

I would wrap up both series with a double wedding of Luke, Han, and the Green Lady, with the audience slash reader still the only ones wise to her big secret. Sequel anyone? Yes, I believe I’ll have another slice -of both streams, please!

PS: I know we never included the superhero movies in our critical discussion - Sequel anyone?

How to RPG the CSL Space Trilogy

 I originally tried to begin this post with the words; “According to my rather indifferently performed internet research, this post will mark the first time a literary work is analyzed by being turned into a role play game,” but the fact that I hadn’t done any internet research at all began to bother me, so much so that I tried to actually do some research, and ended up getting a nasty shock when my first google search result returned a Wikipedia article on “LitRPG” which seemed to be an entire genre based on an idea that I had been congratulating myself for inventing. I did some reading and even found some fascinating sub-genres with Japanese names because they pertain to styles of manga. Eventually I concluded that LitRPG does not quite correspond to my idea but that my idea no longer afforded me any satisfaction and I did not feel like developing it in a post. 

It just doesn’t seem all that neat or original anymore. But anyway, while other people may have turned books into role play games, I would be willing to bet scads of money that no one else has ever even felt an inclination to turn this particular book, Out of the Silent Planet, by CS Lewis, into a role playing game. It would probably suck. The protagonist that you would play doesn’t really do anything adventurous in the book, and most of his character development is learning how awful modern earth civilization is and how much happier and more in touch with everything the primitive seeming martians are. 

So I figure that you would begin the game on the spaceship. You could play Ransom, Devine or Weston, but instead of strength or intelligence points I would give them Earth Pride Points and Understanding, or Ken points.  Their Ken points track how hip they are to what the martians, who are in a state of Grace, are laying down for their gross fallen earthly civilization type souls, and would help them develop their  EP score to 0, so that they are sufficiently ashamed of Earth by the end. Ransom would have a beginning Earth Pride score of 10 (out of possible 20 like DnD), but as a linguist he would have a Ken score of 15. Devine would be a 12 on EP and a 12 on Ken. Weston would be a 17 on EP but only a 10 on Ken. After his trip through the space, Ransom would get to remove one EP point. By the end of the story, when Ransom meets the God of Mars, his EP would be like 1, but Devine would be like 7 because of his low Ken. But Weston would still be at 14 or so on EP because his Ken is too low for EP lowering opportunities. 

You could make a better game out of the next book in the series, Perelandra, because in this book Ransom is already hip to how nasty earth is compared to the other planets but he’s a wimpy professor and has to fight the devil. So the big conflict is whether he can work up the courage to punch Weston, who is possessed by the devil. Also, there’s a Venusian Eve who has green skin and walks around naked, and Ransom has to maintain British indifference to her condition. These twin goals can complement each other by giving Ransom a capacity to transfer his sexual testosterone into violent testosterone. So every time he sees the naked green demigoddess he has to make a saving throw for his British indifference. If he succeeds on the throw he can transfer 1 point of sexual testosterone to his violent testosterone score. Then every time he sees the possessed Weston (who is also naked which probably helps with the BI) talking to his girl he rolls for indignation. The higher his violent testosterone, the better his advantage on these rolls. If he succeeds the indignation roll he can take a swing at the possessed old man.  At that point you can just play the game like a DnD battle.   Both of the pugilists are professors, so strength and constitution would be minimal, as would attack damage. 

I think we’ve made some good progress with the Space Trilogy, but unfortunately the last book in the series, That Hideous Strength, besides being mostly unbearable to read until the end, is also almost completely unplayable, like the dictionary or Doctor Dre (showing my age there). I honestly don’t know what to do with the third. It needs something. If I were a book doctor, I would prescribe radical multi-segment-otomy, the wholesale removal of the preliminary chapters. But we have no organic replacements for those chapters, unless we could draft some master writer, like Charlie Kaufman or Eminem, to provide us with some replacement chapters. But of course they’re busy, and we have a patient on the table with four or five chapters removed, cut open to their binding, desperately in need. We’ll have to provide something. If not a living transplant, a clumsy, crude prosthetic will have to do. 

Fortunately I happen to have crafted some in my spare time

Hagenart Album Cover 09/22/20

 

More on Lovecraft and Lewis but with a huge digression on interstellar drama

 It is pleasing to report that I have managed to re-read Out of the Silent Planet, the first book in the CS Lewis Space Trilogy. I hoped to achieve some insights to bring to you, gained in that crucial third reading, but I have nothing.  I can’t even remember a good portion of the re-reading because I kind of blanked out during some of the more tiresome parts where he and all his hrossa and sorns have yet another go at how wicked and crazy and unnaturally evil humans are, and the despicably patronizing main character Ransom just nods like one of those kids in Sunday school who made like they liked church just to annoy other people. 

So really, instead of coldly and dispassionately subjecting the work to razor sharp analysis, I just kept mentally looking at my watch and eating snacks. It looks as if my intellectual capacity peaked in my forties, and my forties are a fond memory now, a hazy and indistinct one. Like Out of the Silent Planet. 

Okay, major confession: 

Halfway through the re-reading I thought about reading Jack Chalker again. I’ve mentioned his books in this blog before, and I don’t care to revisit the shameful nature of the original association between his Well of Souls books and my teenage self, but I still enjoy the epic sweep of his stories, and I believe he tried to do justice by his female characters, if in the manner of a kindly pimp (lots of sexualization, but some of them are smart and can beat people up, like Lara Croft or the women in Marvel Movies). He also explored transformation and gender bending, eye opening stuff to a kid who group up Mormon in Utah, but a gay or transgender person might find his stuff exploitative - actually anyone might.  

Chalker published his first novel and his biggest hit, Midnight at the Well of Souls, in 1977, at the same time Star Wars came out. I find this interesting because In his book, Chalker describes a spacefaring humanity, an interstellar civilization, but that interstellar civilization is a backdrop for his story, a given. Much like Star Wars, he tells a story about people traveling around in spaceships that could just as easily have been about people traveling the ocean in sailboats. The plot does not revolve around how spaceships work, it’s basically a fantasy set over a traditional “sci-fi” background, or a sci-fi skin set over a sword and sorcery tale. 

I think Isaac Asimov might have done this first, with the “Foundation” series, which is about a “galactic empire” in which people travel all over the galaxy in spaceships as casually as we might take a flight to the coast, like it’s no big deal at all. The story isn’t about space travel at all, except that Asimov does insert a paragraph here and there where the characters muse about space travel in a very abstract and philosophical way in verbiage that could just as easily have emerged from the mind of a chemistry PhD living in New York City with a great memory and a fear of flying. 

Asimov knew a lot of science and he certainly knew that “hyperspace” was a plot device, and he knew that if humans ever do send spaceships out of the solar system, that it will take those spaceships hundreds if not thousands of years to go to even the closest stars, and that any galactic empires that might develop would not bear any resemblance to the societies described in his books, unless you took an extremely abstract view of his stories, meaning you took them as a story about an interstellar civilization with the elements tweaked, with the people described as normal humans like us even though they would have to be hundreds or thousands of years old to live through multiple interstellar trips. And of course we now know about genetic engineering and computers and the society changing effects of them. The people and the communities and governments of a civilization that could manage intergalactic travel wouldn’t look like ours at all. They would actually start to resemble the creatures in a Lovecraft story. His aliens don’t resemble humans, and experience time on a much different scale than ours. I think a true representation of these interstellar galactic empires should be a mashup of Star Wars and the Mountains of Madness. Which of course I certainly would set out to write if it weren’t for all that copyright stuff. 

But I will provide an illustrative discussion of a future member of an interstellar species:

To begin with, they would have to be equipped with internal radios/smartphones, so they could communicate in the vacuum of space. This means they would have metall in their skeleton, in order to provide maximum reception and transmission capability. So obviously, we’re talking robotic skeletons with data storage capacity, vastly augmented memory and intellectual ability. Obviously this would entail greater strength and durability, but at the expense of weight. So we could give this future human a much thinner skeleton. Next, let’s talk tentacles and antennas. I’m envisioning a set of antennas and intermediate tentacles on the top of the head, replacing the useless hair so prized by primitive humans. Next, a tentacle instead of a tongue, and jointed mandibles for more efficient chewing.  I think almost anyone would agree that a third set of limbs would be tremendously helpful. These should be long enough to reach the ground, so you could use them for locomotion or use the finger tentacles on the end like extra hands. Next, a long prehensile tail and a pair of wings. The wings would actually be tentacles with a little rocket engine on each tip. And an extra eye to see in infrared. And metallic scales as skin. This human would run on electricity instead of food, but we’ll definitely keep the stomach in order to house useful bacteria. This human should not require oxygen, but just as with the stomach, the lungs will be kept in order to store useful chemicals in gaseous form. 

Of course by now you might be thinking that this creature might look strange or repellent to us.  Picture this creature as the cast of Star Wars. Darth Vader would look comparatively benign. 

But that’s not all. The ships these creatures would ride across the galaxy would not look anything like the movie set spaceships, where people sit in what looks like a couch from a winnebago and talk or play space chess for a few minutes while someone flips a “hyperdrive” and they teleport to wherever they want to go. These ships would take hundreds or thousands of years to go to other stars. Nobody could sit on a couch and wait it out. They would have to be cryogenically frozen if they wanted to physically make the trip. Or, hear me out, they could make the trip as a hologram. Their thoughts would be downloaded into a transmitter and sent in a radio transmission to a receiver on a planet a hundred light years away. I picture holographic starships, beamed across interstellar space, carrying a host of holographic passengers. Once at the destination, they could rent a solid body or float around in holographic form. And of course they would be a copy of the original, who would still be hanging around on earth. 

Try and work through the plot of Star Wars or the Foundation series after these adjustments

Hagenart comic 08/21/20

 

Hagenart comic 07/28/20

Hagenart comic 05/27/20

Programming unlocked

I remember that I have promised several times to continue my discussion slash literary review of HP Lovecraft and CS Lewis, and of course I have not done that yet because I haven’t performed the crucial and required re-reading of the Space Trilogy by Lewis and some selected stories by Lovecraft. 

In the meantime and before I launch my own comic book version of Lewis’s Perelandra, I’ll take a minute to discuss computer programming or “coding” as the kids and cooler old people call it. I’ve been learning this computer programming thing for a few years now, and I’ve made some stunning progress, specifically I have already created my own future calculator.  Not a Future Value Calculator, a Future Calculator. 

In the How To Program books they usually show you, in one of the early chapters, how to write a Future Value Calculator that will calculate interest on a loan. They probably figure that anyone who is going to learn computer programming will most likely be getting a sweet job and buying a huge house very soon and will most def need to figure out what kind of huge mortgage payment they’ll have to fork over each month to live in that huge house.  

That didn’t really pertain to me so I kind of lost interest in the Future Value Calculator and instead I thought, “I’d much rather determine  the actual future than just the future amount of some sleazy loan. “ Then I tossed the programming book into the trash and began to devise an electronic tarot card reading program and fished the programming book out of the trash and slowly over the course of months and indescribable frustration I created Hagentarot, a tarot card reading that will predict your future (within a reasonable percentage of accuracy) using nothing but JavaScript, which is a programming language for web pages, specifically for images and buttons. Please take a moment to experience Hagentarot now. The reading does not take long and it will change your life. 

In which case the reading wouldn’t be very accurate, would it? I may do a version 2.0 where it doesn’t change your life so much that it affects the accuracy of the reading, that’s a tricky one.

I had a sort of a vision when I began the project, of what the tarot reading would look like and how it would work. Needless to say that beautiful vision did not quite make it into reality. Computers are cruel and uncooperative, but as you age you become inured to failure and disappointment, resigned to defeat. You don’t cry when the candy gets snatched away. You just move on patiently to the next bright wrapper, living for the brief spark of residual hope you feel when you gaze upon the bright colored crinkliness. 

Obviously, since we’re talking about web pages, I also learned some HTML and CSS along the way. Even as a 50 year old who fondly remembers the Atari 2600 Superman game, I didn’t have much trouble with HTML. 

But then I had to learn about CSS, which is the code for the appearance of the web page. I say “learn about” because after months of effort, patiently typing in values in “em” and “%” for “padding” and “margin-left”, and seeing the results, or more often than not with CSS, seeing no result at all, I came to the conclusion that CSS just doesn’t really work, that I knew CSS fairly well and that while it can perform some amusing tricks, it’s in beta testing still, not something a professional would ever rely on without the mediation of special patch code kept in secret files in Iceland by the Swedish guy who invented the Internet. But then I saw this website, CSS Lace, where someone created a painting out of CSS. It only works if you view it in Chrome. 

If you’ve never heard of CSS or tried to learn it, you wouldn’t even look twice at this image. It would be another flash of colors that you swipe by on the interwebs without a thought. 

But if you’ve tried to learn CSS, and you find out it they used CSS to make it, you will know it as satanic wizardry. Something inside me went pop when I saw it, and I knew that I might learn about CSS, but I would never know it.

Hagenart comic 04/10/20

Hagenart comic 03/23/20

Hagenart comic 03/11/20

Hi I’m John, I work in Quality Assurance

 I recently posted something about unpleasant careers, which reminds me that for the past decade or so, even reaching back into the time before IPhones, I’ve worked in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing, in Quality Assurance. Why Quality Assurance? Why Pharmaceuticals? Entirely by accident, of course. I was working temporary jobs, which I rather enjoyed actually, and had an assignment to go work at a pharmaceutical plant, and eventually got a permanent job there. It could easily have gone the other way, if I hadn’t gotten that particular job I would probably have moved to other assignments and maybe stumbled into some other career, and I’m betting that if I hadn’t gotten a push from a Manager there who happened to view me with second hand approval (I was a friend of their star employee), the position would have gone to someone else more deserving. But here I am, working in a heavily-regulated, science based industry where management prefers humanities degrees with a minimum of two years Creative Writing experience. Haha! Gotcha! They’re actually pretty easy-going about the creative writing experience.
And yes, I do some writing for this job, mostly emails of one sentence or less - and they are spell-binding, I assure you! I mock myself, but I would love to teach a college course in emails, procedures, and investigations; the only reading and writing I’ve done in pharmaceuticals, and they probably comprise over 90% of the professional reading and writing performed by English majors in the pharmaceutical industry and possibly anywhere. Humanities Professors would probably prefer to completely ignore the existence of this kind of English, but I can’t think of a better way to gain appreciation for “literature” as we call it, the English designed to tell a story, than to study it alongside the everyday English, the English that organization people use to avoid telling any story at all. I would call it “camouflage writing”. It’s actually a lesser form of fiction, meant to bore and repel rather than enchant and distract. You may write it to hide your lack of knowledge on a subject, or to avoid telling people all you know about the subject to safeguard your job, or like the greater part of working people you may have never really learned to write except in the organization where everyone writes in camouflage and you don’t actually know how to write in any other way.
And of course, in a regulated industry, the regulating authority will read your procedures and your investigations. Maybe they will read them in front of your managers. Maybe their eyes will glaze, and they will stifle a yawn, and the managers will sign you a thumbs up, and offer them a blanket and a pillow.
People ask me; “What is Quality Assurance? What do you do exactly?” And I answer...
Gotcha again! Nobody has ever asked, literally ever, in all the years I’ve told people that I work in Quality Assurance. Not only have they not asked what it is, they usually stop asking me anything, as if my answer was so awful, so surprising in a very bad way, that they don’t dare ask anything more, as I might construe the slightest hint of interest on their part as a signal to vomit forth every nasty dribble of information on quality assurance that I’ve been holding in all these years and they so do not want to hear about it that they are conversationally frozen with fear.
I completely understand, of course. The name “quality assurance” was devised by the same people who devised standard operating procedures and please believe me when I say that they are not interested in being interesting. See notes on camouflage writing above.

Hagenart comic 02/23/20

I complain a lot about my English degree

I  complain a lot about my English degree and how people with English degrees don’t get paid like engineers unless they get a law degree too, but to be honest I have met or heard of dozens of successful people who incidentally happened to have an English degree. I believe that if you’re a tiger and a go getter you can do well no matter what degree you earned, but if you’re not a tiger or a similarly type-A animal, you should study engineering. I’ve actually toyed with the idea of abbreviating my degree as “Eng.” on my resume, just to get by HR keyword searches.
I’ve developed my own theories to explain why English degrees might be undervalued by businesses. Most people would tell you that business managers want to be lean and want results, and hiring someone to just write things when technically any college graduate should be able to write, and when there might not be a business need for cleverly worded essays every day, seems like a waste of money to most of them. Why not just hire an engineer who can write?
And many people in the sciences definitely believe that English degrees are easy degrees, and that therefore the people with English degrees haven’t worked hard or learned to problem solve like the science majors have, so that a bunch of soft-headed poets with no grasp on reality have glutted the job market.
To clarify, no engineer or manager has used those harsh and judgmental words in my presence, I have interpolated their formless, nonverbal twitches and mutterings and as an English BA can form those thoughts in a more verbally direct manner.
Forgive me, I mentioned that I have my own theory: Humanities studies have suffered an evolutionary reversal similar to what peacocks might suffer if wild dogs developed a lasso. Previous to this hypothetical lasso, young people of the upper classes invented English and other Humanities degrees to learn art and poetry, in order to impress potential romantic partners or spouses. Nobody saw any actual utility in an English Degree, it functioned like a magnificent peacock’s tail to impress other young people by its utter uselessness, back when a person’s uselessness signified
At this point you may believe that I am about to say, in agreement with prevailing belief, that the job market was the lasso, but I believe it was the Civil Rights movements of the 60s. The purveyors of English and Humanities degrees, like High Priests, had used the so-called Dead White Males of British Literature as their Idols, and used the DWM’s Works as their Magic Totems, in order to add the facade of sanctity and seriousness to the peacock’s tail. The egalitarian values of the Civil Rights movement eroded and discredited the DWM’s authority, and so destroyed the romantic magic of the English degrees. Young people sought out alternative forms of magic; rock music and beat poetry, sourced by the new Idol of Social Activism. Some High Priests stayed true to the old idols, but the rest switched to align their teachings with the new egalitarianism. They escaped the worship of the DWMs, but in the mad rush to Social Activism, they unhinged the bread and butter roots of the degrees, the utilitarian mechanics of writing and textual analysis, unfortunately associating them with the old hierarchy. They trained a generation of English BAs with uplifted values and sloppy, unfocused writing skills. The orthodox High Priests denounced these methods, but even more unfortunately, associated them with the new Social Activism. The engineering faculty, who respected the old

 Humanities DWMs as the gods of a neighboring tribe, viewed the new, lose, free wheeling Humanities curricula with contempt.
So the state of the humanities at the time of my own studies. I took classes with both sects, and as you might expect I did not take a side. I chose a Creative Writing emphasis, as you might expect, but I enjoyed the disciplined critical analysis classes, as you might not expect.
The University of Utah offered a creative writing MA, which I did not pursue, because I believed, and still believe, that you need to find something to write about. The people who believe that you need to find something to write about will usually, after arriving at this decision or realization, boldly go off to Antarctica or New Guinea, offering up their mortal frame to the tribulations of unpleasant weather or unpleasant people in order to compile a database of sufferings to spin into lucrative, matter of fact accounts that readers like me will devour appreciatively in the comforts of the suburbs. I didn’t do that either, so I followed a third alternative, listless pursuit of unpleasant careers. So that’s what I have to write about.

Hagenart comic 02/08/20

Crossing the streams, a Hagenart fiction

I’d like to say that we will now resume the CS Lewis HP Lovecraft series, but I still have not performed the re-read. A wise man once said “Character is Fate”, and another person, a reasonably intelligent person, has said that character is 98% of any story.
If both statements are true, then Fate is 98% of the story too. Or maybe Fate is the story, and there really there is no 2%. Or maybe the fellow who wrote “character is fate” really meant character is 98% fate, but just rounded up, in which case we’ve identified the missing 2% and it’s whatever of character isn’t Fate, or is it a tiny bit of Fate that isn’t Character?
I believe both are true and as a result this blog is fated to unreliably planned, and I personally won’t ever get to direct “Star Wars / Star Trek: Crossing the Streams”. Which I have already written as the sequel to “Something Hideous Came Out of the Silent Planet”, as written by George Lucas if he were the son of HP Lovecraft and CS Lewis and married Gene Roddenberry and they had a son who was me and I grew up rich and got to sleep in all the time.
Crossing the Streams Act 1:
A spaceship glides seductively across a dazzling field of stars. The camera pans in to a huge window on the front of the spaceship, the windshield if you will. A man in a form fitting black suit stands looking thoughtfully at the starscape. It’s actually me, I’m playing the Captain as well as the director. I’m not sure if I’ll be wearing a hat for this scene. We might do a steampunk thing where I’d be wearing a stovepipe hat and a monocle
The scene changes, to inside the spaceship. An alarm goes off, with flashing lights. A crew member in a snazzy uniform turns to the captain and says they’ve detected an ancient radio signal coming from an older quadrant of the galaxy. I indicate in Trekkie that they should play the message on the spaceship’s dope holodeck. I go into the holodeck with my holodeck crew. The Trekkie holodeck actually recreates reality, it’s like stepping into a video game that you can touch and experience with all your senses. The holodeck plays the ancient radio message, which is the whole Star Wars saga, except that I play a taller and better looking version of yoda. In this magisterial role, I recognize the badly written plot elements and use my magic powers to edit them out. My crew members play my acolytes, and they applaud my rewrites. The emperor and I fight a light saber duel. I win, but he tries to cheat with force lightning. He removes his mask. It’s George Lucas. He condemns my rewrite, but I counter that as the original creator of Star Wars he can not exist in this reality and is therefore without power here. Either he exists and it’s all a badly written fantasy, or it’s reality and he cannot exist. He disappears. My acolytes applaud. I declare myself supreme space admiral. They look wary and confused. I mow them down with force lightning.
Well that’s just a taste, I envision the full series will cover several volumes and possibly a plot with characters

Hagenart comic 01/29/20

Hagenart comic 01/22/20

Addendum to a continuing series that got discontinued in the middle of trying not to apologize for discontinuing

We’re taking a hiatus from the CS Lewis HP Lovecraft series to initiate a new series, not really a series but more like an addendum to an already continuing series, and this new addendum to an already continuing series puts me in the mind to make a little announcement about series in general on this website, which I have always envisioned and dreamed would kind of follow a non-profit TV station type format, with regular series that would air at a certain time on a certain day and specials that air once, and live sporting events and a few documentaries.
But so far this blog has followed more of a slowly-going-bankrupt non-profit with no programming director type of format, where a series runs for a few episodes and then with no closure or warning another series starts and each series runs on less and less budget until it’s just me, the station manager, standing on a naked stage in a sad, crumpled t-shirt, mumbling about his hopes and dreams and ignoring the frantic signals from the cameraman that he’s leaving but the camera is still recording, and the cameraman finally just takes a deep breath and steps away from the camera, which Is not a hand held camera or yes, it’s a hand held camera that he’s mounted on a makeshift stand and duct taped in place. So he backs away from the iPhone on the makeshift stand, knowing as he does so that he has completely abandoned all hope of getting paid for his hours of work for this sad little failing YouTube channel, but he walks fast out of the studio that can only be used on weekends when the carpentry shop in the front isn’t open. He’s angry and disgusted and aimless and desperate, but he’s one of those happy people with actual technical expertise in something that more responsible and with it and together people pay money for and he’ll be fine after a few drinks and a short casual job search but his girlfriend who was always so nice and warm and seemed like such a wonderful person at the station parties will convince him to sue the sad failing station for back pay and drive what’s left of it into bankruptcy that the station manager works at two minimum wage jobs for years to pay off while the cameraman and his girlfriend move into a sweet house in Park City and they drive Teslas to their union gig camerawork and acting auditions and they get their kids into child acting and drink themselves to death while the Station Manager tries to think of something to write for his internet web-log.

Hagenart comic 01/14/20

Hagenart comic 01/07/20