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Superman, Krishna, and Sermon on the Rocks

Life is good.

World Fantasy was World Fantasy: some few hundred of my closest friends in the SFF community all walked out of the mist and smoke into Saratoga Springs for five days. Longer cons like this feel more like the creation of a village. I remember being fifteen on the campus greens of Sewanee, TN, in a golden fall, running into whoever I ran into, forming partiers by simple logic of accretion and the shouting of names across fields of blown dry leaves. Then, when the planets move out of alignment, the village parts like clouds. It’s a fantastic experience. (Which informs my conviction, by the way, that the structure of the con should allow all attendees the same level of safety and comfort I feel—free and easy wandering requires personal assurance.)

Attending conventions made a certain sort of hidden-world fantasy make a lot more sense to me. Neverwhere describes a con culture of a sort; so does The Last Hot Time (possibly the entire Bordertown universe?), and A Night in the Lonesome October, and of course Diana Wynne Jones’ Deep Secret. Folks step out of daily life into something different. And then they get back to the Work.

I’m listening to Josh Ritter’s new album, The Sermon on the Rocks, a lot, and a weird theory’s percolated in my brain. Basically, I think this is the album Superman would make if he decided it was time to head back to Smallville (or maybe if he never left Smallville in the first place). Hear me out.

Ritter calls the album “messianic oracular honky-tonk,” which places it on a genre continuum with high-period A3’s “sweet pretty country acid house music;” the perspective roots not in country (the genre) but in the country, in small towns and fields and water and the intimate personal geography that comes with growing around stuff that grows. City dwellers orient on streets, buildings, landmarks; grow up in the country, in the USA at least, and you orient on things without proper names: oaks, maples, rivers, rocks. (I’m told that in Wales all these have their own names, too.)

Top 40 radio country uses ubiquitous cultural signifiers (pickup trucks, the barbecue stain on my white t-shirt, etc.) to evoke nostalgia for country culture, but for me at least this tends to feel a bit fake, like the false evocation of community (“we’re all guys here, right?”) that precedes and attempts to excuse gross generalizations. The speaker’s hiding his or her own opinions and experiences by evoking things that of course everybody knows. “Yah, you grew up in the country, right? How about pickup trucks? Those are a thing you have, eh? Youv’e seen them? Huh? Buy my record!” As opposed to: this is my place. Let me show it to you. (That said, not all top 40 country feels this way. I think “I Want to Check You for Ticks” is particularly well-observed, for example.)

By contrast, in “A Big Enough Sky,” off Sermon:

What happened to the riverbed?
What happened to the prairie fire?
Can you tell me where the lightning went
Every time you met my eye?

The riverbed, the prairie fire, are metaphors, but they’re not common; Ritter has a specific riverbed in mind, I think, and a specific fire. And that calls to mind river beds and fires I have known—not some vague imprecise “oh yeah, we all know” style riverbed, but the riverbed my scout troop built a bridge over on the trail behind the high school baseball diamond, that connects down through Shakerag Hollow.

But Ritter knits these images to something bigger:

Nights are getting colder now
And the air is getting crisp
I first tasted the universe
On a night like this
A box of wine, an alibi
And the hunger in her eyes
In the place where the tree of good and evil
Still resides

The intimate personal geography (long roads, old cars, backroads and the boneyards in “Where the Night Goes”) naturally blooms to cosmic language (I first tasted the universe / on a night like this or in the place where the tree of good and evil / still resides). The album’s second song, “Young Moses,” completes with this amazing over-the-top semimystical boast in which country landscape and figures bloom oracular and transcendant. “I’m the king of the milkmaids, honey,” to me reads not just as an evocation of “milk and honey,” but as a specific reference to Krishna, who incarnated as a cowherd and, in one of my favorite stories, split himself into 100 Krishnas to carouse simultaneously and in equal full spirit with 100 milkmaids.

That’s what I meant by my evocation of Superman, above. Some of the songs on this album are oracular and personal, some (like “Henrietta, Indiana”) are stories, but they’re all sung by a person with dirt under the nails—someone whose personal geography is built from trees and rocks no one knows unless they’ve been introduced—and at the same time has this ecstatic cosmic vision of the potential and grandeur and wonderful horror of the universe. Cowpoke Krishna—whose closest avatar in the US pop media canon, really, is Superman returned to the farm.

Anyway, I think it’s a great album. Give it a listen.

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New Bookburners this week! Shore Leave features bellinis, belligerence, and problematic clockwork.

Superman

I just spent all afternoon writing a prospectus for edits on the book I’m tentatively calling Five Eyes Break, which is the next book in the Craft Sequence after Two Serpents Rise. I was going to take some time to discuss the Craft Sequence, my plans for it, Two Serpents Rise, and crazy worldbuilding, but that’s beyond me at this stage of typing-degeneration. I’ll make it up to you on Monday, Internet, I promise.

Instead, let’s talk about Superman! I still haven’t seen the movie, but Superman’s in the air. I’ve never been as much of a Superman reader as I am a Bat-fan, but the character’s grown on me over the years—and outside of his continuity, he remains one of the most versatile and powerful symbols in comics. Superman can be the standardbearer of undeconstructed Truth, Justice, and the American Way. He can be an incarnation of Reaganist foreign interventionism. He can be Jesus, or Jesus, or Jesus. He can even be Stalin (sort of).

He is the ur-Superhero. Eric Burns White has used Myth Criticism a couple times to describe Superman as the archetype superhero, the perfect iteration of the myth, from which all other superheroes are a deviation. Here’s a good summary of the argument, though there are spoilers for Man of Steel near the end. Superman is the Superhero; Batman is a superhero with a vengeance complex and an unhealthy fascination with terror. Maybe those faults make Batman a more interesting character, but they don’t detract from the value of Superman.

My friend Dan and I were talking about Herculean labors the other day, and Dan raised the excellent point that Hercules, for all his position as the Strong Man of Greek Myth, solves his trials by being smart. Each labor is designed to be impossible to accomplish with strength alone—the Augean Stables, for example, would take one man, no matter how strong, his entire life to clean out. Hercules solves this by redirecting a river. He couldn’t do that without his immense strength, sure, but immense strength alone wouldn’t solve the problem.

I propose a similar model for Superman stories. The best of them aren’t “Superman hits Bad Guy faster than the speed of light, bad guy goes away,” they’re “Superman is placed in a position where it seems impossible to act in a Supermanly manner, and must figure out how to act and remain Superman anyway.” The climax of Richard Donner’s first Superman movie (Lex Luthor’s two-missile dilemma) might be the simplest possible formulation of the Superman challenge. Grant Morrison’s All Star Superman lives and breathes and is beautiful thanks to this type of challenge. (And / but this sort of story also runs the risk of making Superman stories a little self-centered in their morality, which Alan Moore points out in his great Superman tale, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?)

Anyway, that’s all. No outrage here, just some pondering. And, by god, if you read comics at all, read All Star Superman, and Alan Moore’s Superman stories—Alan Moore’s DC Universe collects many of his tales of the name-brand character, but his Supreme: The Story of the Year and even his Tom Strong books have lots and lots of Superman in them.

Superman and ‘Maybe…’

Ever since the new Superman trailer dropped a while back, I’ve seen a lot of people griping about Pa Kent’s “Maybe…” line. The context, as much as is apparent from the trailer: kid Clark has just saved some kids in his schoolbus from drowning by lifting the bus out of the water by himself. This seems to have triggered a low-key Smallville witch hunt (voiceover by shocked mother: “I saw what Clark did,” with that sort of nasal overtone that implies “and he will suffer for it”), which leads to the following conversation.

Pa: You have to keep this side of yourself a secret.

Clark: What was I supposed to do? Let them die?

Pa: Maybe…

I get the anxiety about whether we really need a darker Superman, even though I would read the hell out of a Superman comic that had the Man of Steel hitchhiking across Steinbeck’s America, and I sort of hope this film (which seems to have some industrial fishing sequences) will linger with Clark on Cannery Row. But man, Kevin Costner as Pa Kent is selling me on that line. He sounds like a man who understands that he lives in, well, Smallville. That the people he’s grown up with are good, and kind, and might be scared by something they don’t understand. That small town life may be wonderful, and / but it’s also built on secrets known and never acknowledged. On silence and studied avoidance of confrontation. On learning rules and lines and staying within them.

Based on delivery, I don’t think that’s the end of the conversation between Pa and Clark, either. Beats me whether the movie will do anything interesting with that line, but, you know, someone’s going to raise a hand and say “I actually like that line and what it implies,” and it might as well be me.