I read Ariana Franklin's Mistress of the Art of Death series again as braincleaner. It's working, and I'm glad
she's writing a fourth one.
~~
I read Chuck Palahniuk's
Lullaby, finally. It's strange, yeah, but it's interesting--and also functioned as braincleaner. The main character finds himself in possession of a poem that can kill, then finds himself able to kill with a thought. What follows is a fairly convoluted tale of the corrupting nature of power, mixed with the clash between modern media's force-feeding style and a situation where an influx of information can be deadly, and then sprinkled with a heaping spoonful of WTF-gender-and-sexuality and studded with liberal pokes at the fourth wall.
Old George Orwell got it backward.
Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed.
He's making sure your imagination withers. Until it's as useful as your appendix. He's making sure your attention is always filled.
And this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.
(p.18-19)I still really wish I'd been at the reading he did at my old college--the one where a number of people in the audience passed out.
~~
I went back and read chunks of David Foster Wallace's short story collection
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and found myself more appreciative of its frequently overly-wordy WTF than I was in college. He was an oddball, that one, but his writing style's conductive to sitting down and concentrating on what's being said--something I needed.
~~
Mark Millar's graphic novel
Old Man Logan wasn't as puerile and poorly-written as Wanted, but somehow was even less cerebral or well-plotted. The story opens up fifty years in the post-apocalyptic future, as Wolverine's non-mutant kids offer to sell their working x-box in order to pay rent.
If you can't get your brain around the idea of an x-box making it fifty years without bricking, this would be a good stopping point. It just gets worse from there. Om nom nom adamantium. Seriously: if I get started, I'll rip the entire story to shreds.
Otherwise . . . I'm not sure if Millar aims for transparent bigotry or just lands there anyway. The bad guys are a black man covered in gold jewelry, a Hispanic girl with too many facial piercings, and the (morbidly obese) Hulk's cannibalistic trailer-park-living kids/grandkids--an emo-haired punker, some rednecks, and a perpetually-publicly-breastfeeding female. The protagonists? All white males. The good women? Sidelined or
fridged. The young, attractive women? Evil or whores. Then there's how Wolverine/Logan is a pacifist(!) who hasn't popped his claws in fifty years and who is stomped/stands by placidly as his friend gets beaten down--but he finally turns violent and almost stabs a random bar patron in the face when they imply that he might be gay. And of course, the work completely fails
the Bechdel test.
Subtlety, thy name is not Millar.
But at least it wasn't Wanted. Few things can be as bad as a monster made of Hitler's poop or the closing line "This is my face as I'm fucking you in the ass."
For braincleaner from that, I might have to dig up the Wonder Woman comic written by Jodi Picoult.
~
The thing I thought would be novella-sized is going to top out at about 15000 words. Oh well. As long as I finish it.