Day of the Shock Worker

The following essay was re-engineered for the use of you frustrated office workers on those gloomy Dogbert days when you "just feel", as you claim, pooped, frustrated, or on the verge of "burn out". This is not a piece to excuse or palliate such feelings - it has been specifically designed to crush them. We firmly believe that the power of a strong social ethic can shame even the laziest cubicle-bound fatalist into productivity.

Any red lines represent the excision of formalist or capitalistic subversion that found its way into the original essay. 

Comrade, have you ever confronted your own productivity? Looking back over a long stretch of "everyday activities" (whatever they may be), have you ever asked yourself, "exactly what kind of worker am I?" Some of you might know quite well. When one thinks of the different "types" of worker, many common expressions come to mind, for instance:

• Easy-going
• "Hard" worker
• Perfectionist
• Enthusiastic
• Back-room worker
• Lazy
• Group thinker etc.

You might have never been quite able to fit yourself into these categories. Perhaps, like so many over-educated people, you are a little bit of hard worker. Perhaps you are even a self-designated  "perfectionist" - which implies you have a reluctance to finish something until it is polished as a work of art - a rather bourgeois and egotistical style of working!

But is there not something subtle to be gained from this critical and cynical style of the modern office worker, who hates what she does but does it anyway with a sardonic smile? Perhaps  there are some advantages to the egotistical capitalistic style of working - personal pleasure, emotional persuasion, the joy of exploiting an intern. But  no amount of cynical pleasure can fill up the entirety of our complex human existence. , We must push aside all such positive feelings, despite how wonderful and easy to grasp they might be. On this subtle point we must not at all be too dogmatic. And we should always bear in mind the excellent lessons pointed out to us by Comrade Trotsky MindApe, so long as we do not do so uncritically and without well-considered qualification.

One thing you rarely hear mention of in the 21st century office-and-mousepad world is classical "productivity" - getting something done as fast and near-standard as possible. You are often seduced by the idea of adding a personal touch, of mulling it over, of not trusting the plain model even when it is the best solution.

But today we proclaim: bitchy office workers of the world, you have nothing to lose but your back-pains!

In the battle for a victorious completion of the Bolshevik Five-Year Plan. Be in the front ranks of the shock workers of the brigade, the workshop and the factory!

Don't be fooled - customization is decadence. Shake yourself out of classificatory torpor! Forget the need to tickle your own ego with opiates like "self-satisfaction" and "loving your work". Douse your face in some cold water, have some raw beets and carrots, and remind yourself of the great Soviet "Shock Worker" movement of the 20's and 30's.

"Shock worker!" What a term! It must sent shivers of proletarian awe down your spine as soon as you read it. Derived from the Prussian "Shock Trooper" , it was adapted to the cause of worker productivity, enrolling a huge swathe of Soviet workers into "shock worker brigades", whose mass achievement was the hyper-production of quotas, sometimes earning the rank of "500" or "1000 percenters".

The marrow of this upbeat ideology can be found in Lenin's own article "How to Organize Competition". Lenin thinks the working class are too "timid" compared to the military and bourgeoisie - that workers need a new competitive and militarized ethic, a heroical persona to give them self-confidence.

Could not the following paragraph suit any modern business setting?

Competition creates the opportunity for employing it on a really wide and on a really mass scale, for actually drawing the majority of toilers into an arena of such labor in which they can display their abilities, develop their capacities, reveal their talents, of which there is an untapped spring among the people...

So long as we tart up, perhaps, the final sentence:

...and in which capitalism is crushed, suppressed and strangled in thousands and millions.

Are we to take Lenin at face value?  Absolutely not, without a critical outlook. Certainly his policies, and the policies that derived from them by Stalinists resulted in the actual over-working of thousands of already taxed soviet workers. Yes, it is a powerful rhetoric and the symbolism and propaganda which grew out of his teachings are an excellent stock-set of cultural motifs, indeed some of the most interesting history has heretofore produced - but we must not be overly seduced by a nostalgia for a false set of fairy communistic ideals that never really existed in real life.

Do you want to? Join! Hurry and join the shock group of model labor. Do you want to fight against the cold? Do you want to defeat hunger? Do you want to eat? Do you want to drink?

1000 percenters! Are you not shamed by such numbers, you kulak dog? You sweat butter and laziness - the shock worker sweats oil and blood! You yawn the yawn of a thousand bloated yaks - the shock worker breathes necessary amounts at the efficient interval! He would replace his heart with a engine, his legs with wheels, his arms with a general sort of swiss-army knife contraption, apt for screwing in bolts and cutting pizzas alike.

For the modern office drone, there is no more salutary outlook than this of the shock worker. Consider: since you have been misled by the mythology of an ergonomic, parasitic existence, you have noticed silly things, un-productive things, like back pains, eye strain, boredom, frustration, loss of libido etc. You feel these things because you are resisting the march of dialectical materialism.

Now let us look at the modern office shock worker. What does he know of these petty complaints? His back is like a rod of iron, his ass hard like the steel of the railroad. He sits in his cubicle like a perfectly machine-built cog - there is no clutter, there is no single unnecessary item. As soon as his hand touches the mouse and keyboard, he is at once a part of the machine - his deepest viscera vibrate in sympathy with the glowing spreadsheets and the dance of PowerPoint graphs.

Look him in the eyes, just try to make small talk with him! You will hear only calculated and glorious grunts of triumph as he flies through the work of ten kulaks such as yourself while you dally away your lunch hour with caviar and Tsarist champagne breaks. You who grasp so hard at the threads of your own "personal growth", and all the while decay in the muck - ask the shock worker how he grows!

"I? I? I is the letter of the reactionary. It is IT that grows, comrade, and it alone with the productivity of the organization!"

And you asked him what he does on the weekend!

Anybody with work today and a social and incorruptible mindset must immediately identified himself with the title of "shock worker". It is exactly this kind of militarized courage in the work place that you should depend upon everyday. A pride in completing something, or having the ability to complete it, with a powerful, even intimidating efficacy.

Maybe there is room for humanity, humour, and urbane cynicism in your off hours. Maybe there are days when you do indeed need to step back from the black hole of labour and ask yourself on an existential level what it is all about. Your ego should not be entirely ignored. But remember that collective, futuristic identification with machine-like efficacy is a powerful and fun way to get yourself through some rather bland days.

No pat on the back or "great job!" for you! You must want your work to be so highly charged as to "terrorize" with its quantity, and the fierce speed with which it was accomplished. But it is not yet enough! Faster comrade, and faster still! Before the inevitable screensaver of history blacks us all out.

October 1 - the All-Union Day of the Shockworker. We have a report! We are completing construction of the foundation of the socialist economy!

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Post-Secondary World Systems

Chief Interlocutors:

CUSANUS, University student and president of the Student's Association

TESSOUAT, College student and partisan

SIMPLICIO, A buffoon with only a High School education

---

Audience Member: Hello, I've come for the dialogue?

Usher: Of course sir, we have an excellent pair of seats in front. Right this way Madam.

Audience Member: I hear it's a good one, eh? Might even get Platonic?

Mrs Audience Member: Oh dear, I hope it doesn't come to that.

Usher: Not to worry madam, we provide all of our customers with specialty goggles in case of unexpected hypostasis. Now here we are.

Audience Member: Bless you, lad.

Mrs Audience Member: La! She starts!

---

A DIALOGUE CONCERNING THE TWO CHIEF POST-SECONDARY WORLD SYSTEMS, or, The Story of the Double Edged Swordfish. This dialogue is presented WITHOUT FRENCH SUBTITLES for de 'earing h'impaired.

CUSA. Yesterday we agreed to come together to split a pitcher -

SIMP. To splitcher?

CUSA. Yes, splitcher, we agreed to splitcher, and moreover so did she, but it's been so many years since she took gymnastics that we might as well continue what we were doing until she's done stretching. Now if you remember, mongomaniacs, we agreed to get together in this dialogue in order to discuss the merits and faults of the two chief systems of post-secondary education, those of the University (or "College" in America) and the College (or "Farmyard" in America), thereby to determine the which of which is the superior..Er, with which the superior...Er, carry the one and...

TESS. Which's better?

CUSA. Concisely put, browbeater. Now, it has long been agreed upon that these bodies, while dedicated to the education and information of the world public, are almost always constituted as communities. Not all bodies are constituted this way. Some have more upper-thigh fat, which contributes to a more congested thoroughfare (and trust me, it is thorough).

At any rate, just like cities, there is a great deal of variation between constitutions, culture, and between the happiness of its citizens. Remember that the Divine Plato, in his chief dialogue The Republic, chiefly builds from divine excellencies of nature and the human soul a puppet play of the ideal city as could be constituted in the ideal form divinely, chiefly, and without an overabundance of squash. I hereby propose this very method as the start of our investigation - which of the two compares most closely to the ideal city?

SIMP. How do you talk like that, anyway?

CUSA. If you are referring to the rhetorical complexity of my personal mandarin, I'll have you know that my grandfather was at Eton, dog!

SIMP. Well maybe he shouldn't have been eatin' dog.

TESS. Now listen Custy, I like where you are going with this. The basic idea is that universities and colleges are like two different types of countries. Ok, fair enough. I guess we're trying to figure out which one is the "first world" country, right?

CUSA. Aptly put, my sans-cullottic chum. And it's exactly on this point that the University comes on top...

I said, comes on top...

SIMP. *sips his drink*

CUSA. No? Nothing? Alright then. On top.

Remember that it is we who are the intellectuals, the researchers, the golden philosopher kings of the Platonic Republic. We pump the world engine with the fuel of our thought; we send out the armies of Enlightenment, critical thinking, and engaged dialogue into the world to conquer the nebulous terrorism of bias; it is we who, in an ever faster and manic age of information and digitization, act as stewards for the knowledge of the present and future....

TESS. Ok, I hear what you are saying, but I think you might be veering off-track a little. The point of this exercise was to figure out which community was the best. Well, tell me, from a practical stand-point, how much does a burger cost on campus?

CUSA. A burger? They are fairly expensive actually. 7-8$? I don't know. I never get them.

TESS. Oh?

CUS. They are kind of gross. You know, iffy. Unbalanced. Most of the food on campus is distributed through a pretty sketchy food corporation.

TESS. Interesting - Socrates can't cook his own meals? Very different from what we have. I had a delicious lunch today on my college campus actually - a beautiful organic salad and leek soup. For four bucks!

SIMP. What kind of salad was it?

TESS. Quinoa!

SIMP. Oh, I've heard of that. It's that food that sounds differently than it's spelled and tastes even worse.

CUSA. It sounds delicious and healthy to me. How do they sell it so cheaply?

TESS. It's made by the culinary students - as part of their curriculum. They sell the food they cook on campus at reduced rates, they get to practice, we get to eat well crafted, home-cooked meals - everybody benefits!

CUSA. What a charming idea! Wish we could do that...We have to run bake-sales on the sly for fear of getting shut down by the administration. And even in those, the cupcakes are as half-baked as the causes they support. 

SIMP. Buy a baked good! Save the bare-back black squirrel from extinction!

TESS. I didn't know there was such a thing as a bare-back black squirrel.

SIMP. Well there's only one, but he's getting on, you know.

CUSA. Do you see what we have to deal with? Er...With what we have to deal?

TESS. Well compared to that, we're kind of a communist paradise - on college campuses so many of the programs offer real goods and services. We've got cheap haircuts, tailors, carpenters, mechanics - and everybody working for the love and challenge of the labour itself. A walk through campus is like a stroll through a real town.

CUSA. And so cheap...

TESS. Is there really nothing like that on University campuses?

CUSA. Are you kidding? Take a walk from the University Centre to the library. You won't find anything of value there you couldn't pick up somewhere cheaper, faster, and with a better general odour. And I mean the same thing for the goods and services as well as the ideologies and STDs on display or being hollered in your ear or shoved into your hands with a wink and a scowl.

No,  where you guys are Copernican, we are still Ptolemaic. For us, the stars revolve around our own egos. No mentality for sharing. But what could we even offer one another? Books, articles, reading material... Certainly no preserves or haircuts or anything like that.

TESS. Sounds kind of top-heavy to me.

SIMP. And not in the good way!

TESS. What way is that?

SIMP. The bad way.

CUSA. And how. Look, you realize we can't even govern ourselves? You'd think a place so infatuated with learning would be governed mainly by well educated students and professors, right? Well, somehow a wily eunuch class of administrators have wedged their way in between them. Real shysters. They are basically an MBA fund-driven conglomerate who run the place like a third-world slum lord, squeezing money out of tenants and cramming 20 families to a single toilet...

TESS. Third world? You'd think "liberal education" would involve a little self-reliance.

SIMP. They are pretty good at the breakfast buffet...

CUSA. Brains and buttocks alike are heavy things to cultivate. But the one thing we do have over you colleges is the single most important of all.

TESS. What's that?

CUSA. We have good libraries. Presumably, once in a while, someone gets around to reading some of them.

SIMP. Reading in a library? What are you, a satanist? Libraries are for three things, and three things only - oggling, toggling, and googling.

CUSA. So long as we have books...

SIMP. Ma se io vi concluderò, in virtú delle medesime proposizioni concedute ad Aristotile, che i corpi celesti sieno essi ancora, non meno che gli elementari, generabili e corruttibili, che cosa direte voi?

CUSA. Come again?

SIMP. Not without a quart of gin, friend.

TESS. You all have book-dependency. It seems to me like we embody the popular spirit of a classical city-state much more effectively than you guys do. You're like monks.

CUSA. Maybe. But we shave less. I'm calling it in for the day, shall we splitcher again?

SIMP. Ladies and Gentlemen, while our two antagonists walk off hand-in-hand to the bar, I present a little song entitled:

Ode to the Dialogue as a Forgotten Vehicle for Social Change -

From the dramas of the Grecian

To the works of Galilei

Nothing has been so efficient

To get from point A to B.

Why d'you brag about your Euclid?

Why'd you ramble like Descartes?

Why'd you make a documentary?

Why d'you map it on a chart?

Nothing naturaller, nothing simpler

Than a conversa-ti-on

Between friends had of an evening

Where is heard everyichone.

Let us plunge in information
Let us let free the bits and bytes

For to help its liberation
Is the steward's sole delight.

Portmanteaus

And now a special guest presentation from long-time Kutenist and hustler Spencer McBride, a sequence of Portmanteaus in A-Minor:

The Rube Goldberg Variations – This famous early 20^th century work of art by the well-known interpreter of the composer of cartoons Ruben Bach, Glenda Gouldberg, evolves the sublime mechanical and mathematical functions of Bach’s innovative scribbling’s, reinvigorating the way the boot hits the fishbowl in front of the cat on a treadmill with a pointed message rarely seen in other interpretations.

Necronomeconomics – This will one day refer to the economy, once the Zombapocalypse has occurred.  There will of course be different interpretations, the most famous of which will be Keynesian  Necronomeconomics, upheld by the walking corpse of John Maynard Keynes, and Friedman Necronomeconomics, upheld by a man literally fried to death on an exposed wire.  Alternatively, this term can be used to refer to how much money you can make off of nerds by referencing Zombies in literally anything. 

Encyclopedophile – Someone who really likes Encyclopedias!  Likes them so much, in fact, that they play around with them a bit too much, traumatizing and altering the essentials of their constituent parts to such a radical degree that their insides, both intellectual and physical, would be unrecognizable to anyone who thought they knew the definitions before.

Supervisorry – someone who works in a supervisorry capacity is constantly apoplectically apologetic for doing so.  Their orders are perpetually accompanied by elaborate apologias and requests that you only do what they say if you really really feel like it and don’t wish to lose your job.  The defining feature of a Supervisorry manager is their misconception that their phrasing of “I’m really sorry, but could you please stay late today and finish _____,” is an attitude consistent with buddy-buddy friendship and a desire to not break the social contract of equality, rather than simply being incredibly fucking patronizing and annoying. 

Jerk Classics

I don't know who decided every book published before 1922 must be a "pot-purri" of "balderdahses!", "my words!", and "tally hos!", but I suspect that the Indigo Corporation has something to do with it. Aren't all "classics" the same in their books? Their tendency to heap poetic ingenuity into bargain-hunter dollar bins is a depressant to say the least. There is nothing more discouraging to a Homo-Pseudo-Sapiens with a 25$ Chapter's Gift Card in paw to discover that the carefully crafted literary masterpieces of ten generations can now be bought in bulk in the discount section at 6$ a dozen. Bargains are one thing, but this is undignified.

Still, never one to balk at a deal, I was in the middle of loading up Doré-filled telephone book reprints of the world's classics  into my potato sack when I hit the Austen pile. Now, I'm no Darcyophile, but even my untrained eye could detect something awry in the cover of Pride and Prejudice - I think I distinctly and clearly read and Zombies afterwords. Neither wasted nor psychotic at that particular moment, my good genius spoke, and warned me to be on the look out for SATIRE.

It suddenly occurred to me that some Wiseacre Willy was trying to have FUN with the CLASSICS. I suppose I can understand the particular post-pubescent glee of this goomba who decided in one fine, Red Bull spattered afternoon's cram session that some Zombies would be cool right about now. Unfortunately, this sort of thing never occurs in isolation. Imagine my chagrin when I found the following pamphlet in the back of the aforementioned volume:

Book Reviews: Quirk Classics!

This week I review several new releases from the Quirk Classics series. From the people who brought you Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Android Karenina, and Sense and Sensibility and Seamonsters, comes a whole new batch of classic literature - with a macabre twist!

Bram Stoker's Dracula ... and Vampires!

The time I waited seemed endless, and I felt doubts and fears crowding upon me. What sort of place had I come to, and among what kind of people? Did they have fangs? Turn into bats? Did they drink, like, blood? Because that would make them vampires. What sort of grim adventure was it on which I had embarked? Was it a vampire hunting mission? Because I saw like, 12 vampires on the way here, not to mention their zombie underlings. Was this a customary incident in the life of a solicitor's clerk sent out to explain the purchase of a London estate to a foreigner? Solicitor's clerk! More like vampires' clerk! Mina would not like that.

I know what you are thinking - why would anyone want to read some old stuffy Victorian love story like Stoker's snooze inducing Dracula? Well, what if I told you they added some freakin' VAMPIRES to the mix? That boring trip to the Carpathians just got way more intense for demon hunter Jonathan Harker. And if you are the kind of guy who can't stand a slow epistolary love story, they've added just enough fang and cross fight scenes to get your BLOOD really boiling! A must-read for classic and vampire lovers alike.

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark ... and Ghosts!


Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous poltergeists,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of ectoplasm,
And by ghost-busting, end them!

Shakespeare's most boring play just got what it needed - a gang of crazy ghosts. That's right, it turns out the dreary old Danish castle haunted! it's up to whiny princeling Hamlet and his lovable dog Pastrami to solve the mystery of the 7 Ghosts of Elsinore! No more soliloquies and thees and thous - this play's now got MURDER and THE UNDEAD going for it.

Treasure Island  ... and Pirates!

Couldn't understand what was going on in the original? Sick and tired of that thick Scottish/Irish/Whatever accent getting in the way of everything? Well, Robert Louis Stevenson's classic story about a sea-faring lad and his alcoholic companions just got a much needed dose of PIRATES! Come about the S.S. Arrgh, Matey! as young Jim faces off against a bunch of lecherous drunks, only to be saved in the final moments by some swash-buckling, ninja-slaying pirates. A much needed positive revamp of this tired and depressing Victorian tale of substance abuse and pederasty.

And don't miss our other upcoming titles, including:

Beowerewulf
Homer's the Odyssey ... And Cyclopses!
Dante's Inferno...IN HELL!
The Call of Cthulhu and Sea-Demons!
Hegel's Phenomenology of Ghost Busting!

The Changing of the Guard

Fall (unlike Autumn) is my favourite season. As Thoreau gruesomely puts it, preceding Vincent Price's spiel in Thriller by 120 years: "When the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk in." Life becomes singularly crisp along with the leaves and the weather. The brains of North American mankind, long melted into steamy juice by the Summer Sun, begin once more to solidfy into a semi-functioning globules. In some, the brightness of the leaves inspire a brightness of thought. These people beget ideas, ideas beget ambition, and ambition begets heartburn. The cyclical melody of nature is played out on every deciduous, while the ground base of the evergreen keeps the eternal rhythm of the Earth. Chipmunks play the kazoo, and the screeching Blue Jay does its level best to ruin the effect of Mother Nature - to no avail.

The annoyances of Summer are less pronounced, and by mid-October usually die out completely. A week-long "dog day" in the bedouin months becomes a welcome guest in the visit of several "Indian Summers", with hardly a scalp skinned. Street performers, moral campaigners, and other "characters" retire to their winter quarters - therein to devise fresh ways of pestering their arch nemesis, "status quo". Likewise most insects are silenced by the encroachment of Jack Frost. A few of Nature's own fascist party (wasps, hornets, and other uniformed menaces) survive, mainly marching up and down crab-apple trees and leaning against school-yard walls looking for trouble. These are quickly persuaded to desist from their political activities by means of a can of WD-40 and a lighter.

While many enjoy the leaves, some are especially enchanted by the dark purplish tint of the high skies. Kierkegaard says: "The reason why I so much prefer autumn to spring is that in the autumn one looks at heaven — in the spring at the earth." I don't think he ever looked straight ahead, which much to the chagrin of the Copenhagen omnibus corporation. Counterpoise his view with that of Edgar Allen Poe, who complains whiningly of  "a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens..." What a wailer! The man ought to have written murder stories! Yet both these nattering melancholiacs highlight the eternal variety and suggestiveness of the Fall sky. Its highs are the highest, its lows the lowest of the year. This applies equally well to the rhythm of the internal; for with Thanksgiving and Halloween no belly is happier than in the Fall; no colon more active.

It is no coincidence that for children school starts in the Fall. It is the tragic high point, and therefore the most dramatic part of childhood living. It is eminently poetic in its archetype: having lived the lives of semi-barbarous tribesmen, swallows versus amazons, they return to civilization, exhausted, browned, and ready to be re-colonized by insipid mental jumping-jacks. 

Yet they are cheerful! School marms well know the narcotic effect of the Fall air - how well it mixes with the rustle of new schoolbags and the odor of pencil cases - and how handily it balances out with the stern, depressive optimism of the modern classroom.

Compare the child of mid-October with the child of late-November in a 300 word essay for Monday. You will see that the high feeling of Miltonic revolt, the heartfelt childhood pentameter, "Better to reign in Summer than serve in Fall!" is replaced by a silent, slavish plodding from bell to bell to lunch to assembly to home. For the Undergrad, the Master's student, and PhD, the preceding descriptions of childhood psychology applies, taking into account the mellowing effect of age; that is, after every Fall they seem to find it harder and harder to get up again.

Halloween is the crown of the season. My enthusiasm for this really American holiday knows no bounds. Compared to the Horror Movie Marathon that is Halloween, Christmas is a preachy after-school special. The beautiful thing about Halloween is that there is no moral analysis. Unlike any other Holiday, its true spirit (the Great Pumpkin if you will) is entirely visible in its activity. There IS no spirit of Halloween besides greed, candy, and monsters. No inner moral. Neo-Pagans will claim it for equinoctal harvest rites, Catholics for All-Saint's days etc. but the import of both of those "feasts" coincide almost exactly with the frankness of Halloween itself. Halloween in all of its incarnations declares "there are two things abroad in life; sweets and demons."

People often debate whether the most cultish franchise of the Holiday Season, Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, is a Halloween or Christmas movie. I believe it falls strictly in the camp of the former. Not only does Halloween abjectly conquer Christmas in a physical sense; one gets the episteme of Halloween (impish scheming, repetitive malevolence, Schadenfreude) imposed upon Christmas in its entirety. The ever-lamented "commercialization" of Christmas is Halloween triumphant.

This brings me to a tangent: The most quintessentially American work of art I can think of? I try hard, but I keep coming back to It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! The American season, the American holiday, American puritanism, American greed, denomenationalism, slang, investment, loss, litigation, exile in France, parties, military patriotism, the quest for sincerity, Jazz. There is not one part of the movie that isn't full-blooded American. 

Of course, it is the Halloween story that is typically American. It is the inverse of the Christmas story. In Christmas, the Scrooge or Grinch character starts off greedy and hates the holiday, loses their greed, and through some trial learns to become a lover of the season. Halloween stories are always the opposite. The protagonist starts off loving Halloween, and through some terrifying tribulation, is usually miserable, bloated, or otherwise disaffected by the end. Tu vuo fa l'americano!

 Halloween stories are not the same as ghost stories or horror films. Halloween is not a time for sheer unadulterated fear. I rather think late summer is more appropriate. Henry James, Poe, and Dickens incline towards December as the month of true terror. Halloween is more about mellowing death. Halloween is about the harvest moon. Halloween is America. The very act of Trick or Treating - a kind of sweet-toothed blackmail - is it not an embodiment of the American Dream? It is with strong perception that Thoreau locates the vitality of Fall in America especially:

"Europeans coming to America are surprised by the brilliancy of our autumnal foliage. There is no account of such a phenomenon in English poetry, because the trees acquire but few bright colors there. "

The Infographics of Dr. Caligari

In the today of today, I have been informed, anybody who has anything to say had better say it using an informational graphic - that is an "infographic" - or not say it all.

What is an "infographic"? In our new digital environment, the fast pace of information transfer has made it necessary to distinguish between plain old information, and the essential  informative information, or as I like to call it, "infoformation". Since, according to Goonberg's theorem, a picture is worth approximately 1024 words in most Indo-European languages, the substitution of images for sentences has been deemed the most efficient and cheerful way to get the point across...

But what is the origin of the infographic? Anything but cheerful and lighthearted. Like many other modern amenities such as rockets and transvestites, the infographic had its genesis in the Weimar Republic era of German history. In the advent of post-war malaise, futurism, nihilism, and especially expressionist film, the raving geniuses of the era grasped this new and powerful means of communicating like Death, the fiend, grabs at the quivering candle-flame of human life.

 Indeed, it has recently been discovered that, in order to make ends meet, many of the most famous German expressionists tried their hand at the avant-garde art of "das Infografik". An examination of Weimar era magazines and newspapers reveals a treasure trove of infographic commissions by no other than F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, and Hermann Warm. The following examples demonstrate how the infographic kosmonauts of the 1920's captured the Zeitgeist of their era in a tour de force of pictorial efficiency comparable to our own:

Exhibit A: KAIN und ABEL (F.W. Murnau, 1919):

This was originally commissioned by the Kinder Surprise Chocolate firm to illustrate the percentage of German youth who enjoyed Kinder Surprise eggs vs. other chocolate products. Unfortunately for Murnau, the Kinder people were not terribly pleased with his interpretation of the data they provided him, and he was refused payment. Here we see the symbolic shadow-play typical of the early F.W. Murnau at work.

Exhibit B: Beginner's Guide to Investment (Fritz Lang, 1922):

Fritz Lang was commissioned to do this cheerful piece on how to invest in the stock market. It was designed to show the burgeoning class of first-time investors the basic statistics that would help them orient themselves and make the most of their portfolio. Note Lang's characteristic use of emphatic text combined with imagery of mass alienation.

Exhibit C: Twix o'Clockopolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)

Besides inventing the famous rocket ship "count-down" in Frau im Mond (1929), Lang is also credited with developing the advertising slogan "Twix o'Clock" for the delicious treat. Piggy-backing off the success of his film Metropolis, Lang fused design, advertising, chocolate, and powerful Verfremdungseffekt  imagery to stimulate a spiritual renaissance in the Weimar chocolate industry.

Exhibit D: Das Pie Chart des Dr. Caligari (Hermann Warm, 1928):

The Frankfurter Allegemeine were eager to get a comparative pie chart showing the housing situation in the different regions of Germany. What they got was Hermann Warm's trademark angular approach to architectural mise-en-scene, a few hastily tacked on statistics, and a dire warning for pie-lovers everywhere. This was among the last attempts of German expressionists to use infographics before the movement lost both steam, and funding.

Now that these powerful and unsettling pieces have come to light (or is it shadow?) can we expect a revival in expressionist attempts to convey scientific facts to an ever more info-hungry user-base? Will the public demand not just easily digestible facts, but deeply emotional artistic expression? Will the collective psyche of the Internet flit ever and anon between the light of true beauty and the darkness latent in the human soul?

To all these questions, this author raises a fourfold allegorical eyebrow, and asks "Warum nicht...Nicht...Nicht?"

Pynchon, Adjectives, and Why All Great Writers Must Be Funny (Except Stendhal)

When it comes to "my opinion", we all have our defaults. Defaults, like faults, come in many flavas. One of the most frequently encountered is the adjectival default. When somebody solicits (or depending on how lowbrow they are, asks) your opinion on a certain topic, thing (probably movie, book or album, but maybe food) you no doubt have some safe fall-back adjectives to throw out while you stake out what you actually THINK.

"Awesome!"
"Pretty sweet"
"Kind of boring"
"Interesting but."

For anybody who speaks to me in person, usually about books, the default you get, if it was something I enjoyed, is "funny".

I've called nearly every great classic under the sun "funny". Homer was definitely "funny". Cervantes, Rabelais, naturally, Sterne, surprisingly, "funny". Now Nietzsche also has his moments, and my books Thoreau is a crowning humorist. The whole Rabbinic tradition is one long Catskills routine.

 I reckon I'm the only person in modern history to think the Divine Comedy aptly named without further explication. (Come ON, that fart-trumpet scene with the devils? Black gold!)

Virgil, Pachabel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Russell Brand are all off my guest list because I don't find them "funny" in the least. I need to chortle at least once a page, or I don't like your book.

 (I think the only exception for me is Stendhal, who is more than justified, being a Bonapartist, in lacking a real sense of yuks and still being among the top 5 greatest writers in the last thousand years.)

Why this is? Real cowboys don't cry, so really the only objective (meaning decent) bodily reaction I can trust in is a chuckle. Thus, with a leap of faith so wide it would make Kierkegaard and a self-help therapist proud in equal measure, we come to my personal mantra, "what I laugh at, is, objectively, the greatest!"

Now, having just read, lately, Gravity's Rainbow, I can add it, and Pynchon, to the happy list of gigglers that make up the kaboom of my personal canon. I'm not going to list my favourite jokes (except for the scholastic discussion of "ass backwards", the adventures of Byron the lightbulb, fickt nicht mit dem Raketenmensch! and nearly every scene with Marvy), but I will say that the book, having been read, reverse engineered a lot of what I previously thought might be funny, into is.

I always thought the great novels of the "classic american + modernist" bunch, Moby Dick, Ulysses, etc. to be particularly funny. Now Gravity's Rainbow shares a similar kind of joke. A kind of conceptual "uh-hyuk" thought goes back to Homeric simile. I mean the "Just as a             climbing a mountain-reared         , so too Achilles..." which are always kind of smile-inducing.

Now Pynchon made me realize that Plato was funnier than I thought in being the first to really invent the "ONE BIG SIMILE" genre. In The Republic, the joke is to cram the entirety of the human soul, errors, byways, naughty bits and the few straight-men, into the framework of the ancient Greek polis. The crux is like teenagers in art class saying "Imagine if we built a giant c(l)ock tower out of lego!" and cackling maniacally.

But the joke only becomes really hysterical when the concept is  planned out. Class after class. Serious, frowning faces, electrons and proteins dedicated to making this really good. The whole tower, the design, the function ("an observation deck! Bahaha!") have to refer back to the initial punchline. This is where all inside jokes and great literature get their "sell" power - details. It turns out that Plato does this exactly this, only with constitutions.

Now Moby Dick (sic) does it with a whale. Ulysses with the city of Dublin. Pynchon, easily enough, does it with a rocket. The technical details (whale blubber, Dublin street meat, rocket schemata), the accuracy in all three cases make the joke even FUNNIER, make it transcendental. It's no longer a passing simile for a smirk - it's an institutional SATIRE.

Laugh-out loud funny isn't just a joke - it's a joke that you get in the presence of others who don't, won't, can't see the penis for the trees.

P.S. Sorry this post isn't that funny itself. Dr. Johnson called fun "a low cant word" and I agree that one can't both talk about and be it.