So begins Akira Hiramoto’s Me and the Devil Blues, my most recent and dramatic example of how ambitious manga can truly be. It’s doubly unusual in that it’s a Japanese comic about a figure from American musical history—but let’s face it, you’d have trouble overestimating the impact of American popular culture in Japan in all of its forms, especially American music. One of my own favorite musicians from Japan, underground guitar-god Keiji Haino, was inspired by Blind Lemon Jefferson and calls himself “just a bluesman”; heck, they even the word blues itself in Japanese—ブルース—is a direct import from English.

Devil turns to the life of Delta bluesman Robert Johnson for its inspiration, someone whom the term “legendary” follows around like a halo. The broad outlines of his life do read like legend: he had a prodigious talent for the guitar at a young age, drifted around and played and womanized, recorded only a bare handful of songs that have all since become blues staples, and had only two photographs taken of him in his entire life. And then in 1938, at the age of 27, he was dead—poisoned by a jealous husband, or so the mythology goes, for hitting on his wife. The mythology was all the more aggrandized by the notion that Johnson had indeed sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads in exchange for his guitar wizardry. Devil assumes the myth is true, and spirals feverishly outwards from that conceit to create a kind of parallel mythology of Robert Johnson’s life. It’s not meant to be a factual biography, but a fantasy about Johnson and the America he lived in at the time—a land of depression, Prohibition, racism, superstition, violence, and, yes, that ole devil blues.

Inoue is easily one of the single greatest manga-ka alive right now, and I don’t feel I’m indulging in hyperbole by saying that. Here is the guy who created Slam Dunk (which is only just now reaching us in a legitimate translation; how’s that for slow justice?), Buzzer Beater, and Vagabond—with Vagabond alone being so good that anyone else could easily have retired after finishing it. But he started another manga, Real (about wheelchair basketball), while Vagabond was still running, and judging from what little we’ve seen in English so far it’s clear he’s not doing it out of a sense of responsibility to anything but his art.

The source of the in-joke behind all this should be automatically familiar to anyone who’s read or watched Genshiken (either the manga or the TV series; the joke’s the same in either one). Kujian, as it’s called for short, is the show-within-the-show that the characters were fans of. Part of the joke was that Kujian didn’t actually exist—the glimpses we were given of it made it look like an amalgam of every anime/manga cliché imaginable, plus a few we forgot about along the way. It worked wonderfully in the context of the show, because you didn’t need to see the whole show to know how it worked. Anyone who’d done any decent amount of time in otaku-dom could fill in the blanks on their own.

Many years ago, I used to know someone who used the word "sheeple" a great deal, and that person's use of it was almost inevitably fulsome and elitist. The not-so-unspoken insinuation was: All those people out there are mindless stumbling herds of morons, present company excepted of course. The more I learned about this person, the more I realized he had no right to such unearned contempt for "the masses", especially when he hadn't done a thing in his life to elevate himself above them ... except grouse about how his genius had gone unrecognized by the sheeple.

As I put it to a friend the other day, the only person you should worry about or angst over feeling superior to is the guy you were yesterday.

“Genius” is a word I now hate, no thanks to being bled dry of meaning after decades of unthinking abuse. When Apple has a “Genius Bar” in their stores (staffed, for the most part, by people who are not whole orders of magnitude smarter than the rest of us, just better trained in things Apple) and the word itself is used as a sit-com insult, there’s not much room left to sink, is there? Zaregoto, though, understands all this and uses it as a starting point. Those with genius express it narrowly—through one skill, one insight, one idea—and even the smartest of people can be undone by the simplest and most underhanded behaviors and motives.

I didn't manage to visit Powell's -- but I did visit the "satellite" stores at PDX, and between that and the Barnes & Noble at the mall directly behind the hotel (shame on me, I know), I came away with a good deal of material that kept me awake on the plane:

• Joseph Mitchell, My Ears Are Bent. I have the feeling Piet would love this book -- it's a collection of 1930s-era reportage by the titular author, a time where Chesterfields in the mug, fedoras, endless cups of black coffee and jiggling the phone hook for the operator were the stock-in-trade of reporters all around. Every time I read something like this, I get a grudging nostalgia for rattletrap Underwood typewriters.
• Crime and Punishment. Yes, this old chestnut, but this is a more recent and far more vigorous translation than the one we were force-fed in college. I started reading it without expecting to get past the first few pages and devoured nearly half the book on the plane ride.
• Natsuo Kirino, Grotesque. I still need to write a review of this woman's jaw-rattling Out -- that book, like this one, doesn't deserve an easy category like "crime fiction" or even the "feminist noir" label that's been plastered rather . Out was made (badly) into a movie in Japan, and is evidently being re-made domestically in a version that hews closer to the book's original heart-as-black-as-ink of darkness. Grotesque takes a technique only used towards the end of Out -- a multiple-POV trick used to fully document an incident in all of its aberrant ugliness -- but does it bookwide, and the end result is not gimmicky but chilling as all hell. Kirono's new novel Real World is also on my to-read list.
• Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War. Jury's out for now on whether this is insightful or just tripe-ful. The strategies themselves are not the problem -- it's Greene's examples (e.g., Thatcher's administration in Britain being bolstered by her handling of the Falklands campaign) that seem like a case of regressively fitting an interpretation of facts to support his theses. I suspect Greene is a far better student of strategy than history or politics.

This is a big part of the appeal Parasyte has held for me through its first two volumes—the idea that something can look like a human, behave like a human, and yet somehow be completely alien underneath. Rather than stop there, though, each successive installment of Parasyte has expanded on the idea. Assume that there are humans among us who have been invaded with alien beings—what then? How do they mingle among us undetected? What happens when some of them merge incompletely with their hosts?

First, to me, the idea that there's just "stuff you like" and "stuff you don't like" is self-limiting, because once you consciously embrace that as a way to define your tastes, a whole galaxy of other possibilities get knocked out of the box. It sounds like an argument from ignorance, and that's why I felt like the mounted attack on it seemed on target.

But that doesn't excuse all the other things that were wrong with the attack: its mean-spiritedness, for one -- and now that I look at it again, the way the responder uses the premise to put words in the other person's mouth, which pretty much invalidates the whole enterprise. It may well be true that "There's just music you like and music you don't like" is a prelude to warding off any objective criticism, as was claimed, but the original posted didn't actually do that -- that was something the other guy pre-emptively accused him of. (Assuming that such a thing wasn't snipped out due to my own ham-handedness with preserving the quote.)

I don't like the idea of not subjecting one's own tastes to a little analysis, but it's not much good if you come to that conclusion by steamrolling and logic-chopping, is it?

as i've said many times, there is no good music or bad music - just music you like or music you don't like

that opinion is banal, false and mistaken at the same time.

you are probably right that 'good' and 'bad' won't take you very far critically. to that extent it seems a banal observation.

then you conclude that there is 'just music you like or music you don't like', which seems patently false. there is just as obviously music that is more or less complex, music that has strict tempo and music that doesn't, tonal and atonal music, etc., etc., and many more critical categories that can be applied that tell you alot about music.

finally, i think it is mistaken, in the sense of being an opinion that should be opposed. it sounds liberal but it is arrogant: it pretends to be democratic (admitting that everyone has their own opinion), but it is self-serving because it implies that no one can criticise *your* taste.

i am not trolling - i just don't think that such banalities should pass without comment

This could apply to a critical appraisal of just about anything, when you get down to it. As it stands, it's one of the better arguments I've heard for being willing to examine and refine your own tastes without falling back on know-nothing arguments like "I don't know what 'good' art/literature/music is, but I know what I like."

Plenty of people use this formula to justify what they like. I know I used to do it, but after a while I realized something: If you don't do any actual thinking about what you like and don't like, if you shun trying to make deeper connections, in a way you're damaging your future ability to determine what you're going to like and not like. The problem with saying "I don't know what's 'good', but I know what I like" is that it's an argument in favor of your own continued ignorance about your tastes. And that means, as I see it, enduring a lot more crap than you have to.

Most folks aren't critics and don't want to become critics. For them, it's completely beside the point. They don't want to analyze what they like, they want to enjoy it -- and the analysis, for them, ruins the enjoyment by turning the whole thing into a boring homework exercise. They're not worried that their justification is a circular argument -- I like what I know, and I know what I like -- because none of this requires logic to work.

The flipside of this, though, is that if they're in the company of people who analyze what they like as a way to deepen their enjoyment of it and find perspectives on it that they might not have found on their own, it isn't a homework assignment; it's fun.

Magic is probably the earliest of Shirow’s works to be released in English, and its primordiality shows in every respect—artwork, storytelling, conceptualization, humor, the whole tamale. If nothing else it’s interesting because it shows how even in his earliest stages as a creator, Shirow suffered from the same limitations that also inhibited his later and more polished works. He spun out nigh-incomprehensible plots that seemed to be used more for atmosphere than actual storytelling; he created characters who were little more than mouthpieces of one variety or another; and he never met a whacked-out theory he didn’t like.

Welcome to Dreamsong, the third volume of Hiroaki Samura’s Blade of the Immortal, for my money the best comic running apart from one of Dark Horse’s other titles, Berserk (which I need to get caught back up with one of these days). It’s not just the unmistakable art style or the show-stopping characters or the gut-level storytelling—it’s the fact that you’ve got all this side by side in the same book, and none of them comes at the expense of the other. It’s all of a piece.

That said, this is only the first of two or three editing passes -- the first is for major cleanup (moving blocks of text around, rewriting sections that need it), and the second is for line-by-line cleanup, something I'll probably have a little third-party help with. This is actually not something I do well by default, so the more additional help I have the better.

I've noticed that I typically have a fairly clean first draft -- a lot of the most aggressive, "I don't think I need this at all" editing tends to happen before I ever sit down at the computer. Most of what happens at this stage is organizational: figuring out what to emphasize or put into the background, that kind of thing.

Another thing I'm trying to figure out is how much to excerpt. I'm actually thinking of doing something slightly unorthodox -- chapters 1 and 2, and then a later chapter about Henry and Winthrop's early life, which is actually chapter 5 or 6 (I'm still dithering with the chapter order early on).

My drop-dead day for getting the ms. to the printer's is August 15th. If I keep up my current pace I could well have a first pass done by early next week, and some early-draft samples after that. Look for another progress report in a few days.

The Eightfold Path is not a program of accumulating merit (or merit badges) so that someday the Big Buddha in the Sky will open the gates of nirvana to you. Yes, some of the old texts can make it sound that way, but today sophisticated Buddhists generally give that language a more inward and immediate application. ... [I]t's pretty hard for most people to get their minds quiet and clear enough to recognize [that nirvana is right here in the ordinary world of samsara] if they're busy killing or stealing or coveting their neighbors' wives. Virtue is its own reward. ... [I]t helps release your consciousness from complicated patterns of aggression and consequences so that it's free to recognize its own inherent heavenliness. [Emphasis mine.]

We've all heard that one before: "virtue is its own reward." So much so, I suspect, that it's been drained of meaning and has no more real weight than a PSA about seatbelts. But reading that article helped click it into place, and allowed me to put into words a good deal of what has been floating around in my head on the subject for ages.

Most of us are probably familiar with the gamut of arguments about altruism -- whether or not there is such a thing as a truly selfless act, etc. My take is that there probably isn't, but it doesn't matter -- that there is a threshold of selflessness for a given act that once crossed makes it effectively selfless as far as others are concerned. A friend of mine once put it this way: "Yes, it is selfish of me to do good things for other people, because I enjoy watching them smile and be happy. That is very selfish of me!"

The more you do the right thing, the easier it becomes to cross that threshold without making yourself feel uncomfortable, because over time you lean more towards your desires and everyone else's being in sync. There will always be some level of conflict between what you want and what everyone else wants. You can't get rid of them entirely, but you can lean towards harmonizing them as much as possible. Even if that form of harmony consists of avoiding something entirely, it's better than inspiring further conflict with it.

The other part of how virtue winds up being its own reward is hinted at in the above excerpt. By doing the right thing, you're forced less and less to extricate yourself from the aftermath of having done the wrong thing. I'm reminded of people I used to know who would dream up huge, elaborate and quite physically and mentally tiring plans to defraud other people so they wouldn't have to work a straight job -- and yet somehow never realized that it would probably be less work overall just to get and hold down a straight job. (Although, obviously, a lot less exciting -- but again, their idea of "exciting" just sounds like unending hassle to me.)

This has implications on both the outside and the inside. When you're not making trouble for yourself outwardly, it's easier to learn how to not make trouble for yourself inwardly. I'm again reminded of people I knew who would encounter something negative in their daily lives, and then compulsively reinforce the badness by venting about it with others: "Look! This bad thing happened! Doesn't it suck? Don't you feel bad for me? Come on, let's commiserate about this terrible thing. -- No! I don't want to hear about the fact that you had fun today. Nobody else deserves to have fun when I'm suffering like this." It's hard for me to see this serving any other function than to convince yourself that you're going to be miserable no matter what.

Virtue is its own reward because it makes the inside of your head a much more livable place. And at the end of the day, when your eyes are closed and your head's hitting the pillow, where else is there left to go?

Over the course of the previous volumes we’ve followed Guin, he of the body of a gladiator and the head of a leopard, out of the forbidding Roodwood and into the wastes of the Nospherus. He’s become self-appointed guardians of the royal twins Rinda and Remus, been chased by the armies of the Mongaul empire, made tentative allies out of the simian Sem to protect their lands against invasion, and headed ever deeper into the wasteland to find and enlist the fabled (many would say fictional) Lagon in their ongoing fight.