Even damn geeky … but not absolutely geeky.

Ideaspace can bite my anti-imperialist crank, to paraphrase an old NatLamp word balloon.

“But still, in Tsukuyomi Moon Phase for instance, it’s just assumed that there will be sexual tension between college-age Kouhei and Hazuki, who looks like a 10-year-old girl. “You better not touch her,” his relatives warn. If my relatives felt they had to tell me this, I’d either (a) get new relatives or (b) take a long hard look at my life.”

& Eric, isn’t that just a baseball wonk? Nate Silver, say.

Middle Earth, on the other hand…that’s gospel.

And who says jedis, hulks, etc. don’t exist. Of course they do… in “Ideaspace”….where our fictions are more real than our reality (insert Prospero’s monologue from Black Dossier here).

No reason he can’t be both. And no matter what, he’s always lovable.

Thanks for everything you said about the article. You and Dumas are my most engaged readers. He outdoes us all for passion, but you’re way ahead when it comes to reasoned response.

“Certain kinds of baseball fans are considered ‘geeks’ … You’re definitely wrong about that.”

Professor, if you’re still here, let me step into a disagreement between you and your brother. I decided there was a continuum of geekishness, from the non-geekish to the absolute geek, with the latter being represented by people who make themselves experts about other-worlds entertainment entities such as Star Trek, superheroes, LOTR, Star Wars, etc. A baseball geek would be pretty damn geekish, yet he would not be a full-fledged geek. Only a few notches short, true, but not quite there.

My reasoning was:

1) at least baseball exists; Middle Earth, Klingons, the Hulk, the Jedi, etc., do not.

2) if you just say “geek,” other-world entertainment fixations are part of the package that comes to mind (along with computers, bad hygiene, no social skills). Any other fixation has to be specified by a modifier, such as baseball.

Now that I think of it, it was Noah who put in my head that there could be such a thing as geekishness, a quality that waxes and wanes, and not just the old geek/non-geek dichotomy. It was when he said it was usually better to talk about racist thoughts, attitudes, reflexes, etc., and not about racists. Most of us have our racist moments (or bigoted moments, since maybe a person’s particular hangup has to do with age or orientation or religion, not race), but we’re not all-over racist all the time. I figured it could be the same for geeks. Was I right? I don’t see why not.

But such are the building blocks of blog controversies.

Certain kinds of baseball fans are considered “geeks” however. You’re definitely wrong about that.

If people don’t feel like clicking through the link, Tim’s comments are here:

“I think you’re right about that Alter piece, Jeet, and I’ve been surprised at the praise it’s gotten from comics quarters. Clearly, the man knows his Bible (to understate matters), and his comments about his area of expertise are valuable, but it’s a mystery to me why so many people are also nodding their heads to his aesthetic judgments.

Especially sequences like this:

“Imagine for a moment an illustrated version of Anna Karenina or The Charterhouse of Parma, in which there would be one or more graphic frame for every sentence of the novel. An artist with Crumb’s inventive energy might provide many pleasures along the way, but what is enabled in the novel through words–the deft slide in and out of the point of view of the characters, the subtle play of irony, the nice discriminations of the narrator’s analytic observations–would inevitably be flattened in the pictorial representation.”

I mean it’s sort of true as far as it goes, but Alter doesn’t then go on to recognize that the choices Crumb makes enable an entirely new set of ambiguities and artistic effects that aren’t present in the original text, and make the book worth evaluating as its own entity, and not strictly as a one-to-one translation. I mean, this is Comics Appreciation 101 type stuff.

So yes, I agree with you, Jeet: the Alter piece is far more problematic than the Hajdu, especially since it’s been taken so much more seriously by people who should know better.”

No point in arguing about this, of course, but I hope any readers inclined to take Noah’s word will click through the link and see if my short blog comment bears any resemblance to his description of it.

By the way, this is a fun game to play with almost everything Noah writes!