After a reactor accident in which water was unleashed there were attempts to get things under control by lowering the temperature and freezing the water. But that just resulted in radioactive iceotopes.

A friend mentioned going to Sandy Eggo and while there watching Avenue Q. He hadn't seen the Ellen Feiss version of “The Internet is for porn,” so I sent him off in that direction. I haven't seen the musical, so he let me know that the name of the schoolteacher is Mrs. Thistletwat, which, I told him, suggests a vegetative vagina dentata. A venus claptrap, he responded, which would be better were it original, but evidently it's a character/monster (“A large plant monster that could fire burning pollen. In the comics, Vexor was surrounded by his kind. He was brought from the comics to steal Drew's unusual plant. During battle, Claptrap swallowed Roland and Jo inside and they clung onto his inner roots to avoid falling into his stomach acid. He ended up defeated in the end, when Drew used the power of Gargantus. Venus Claptrap was later brought out of the comics again by Vexor during the ‘Shadow Borg’ saga.”) from the Big Bad Beetleborgs and voiced by Bob Johnson (Mission: Impossible [the voice of/on the Tape]), but in any case, I just imagine Mrs. Thistletwat and Venus Claptrap as a pair of Garbage Pail Kids cards.

It's 83F already and supposed to get to 88F today (31C), which isn't bad as far as temperature goes, though it will be a bit humid. In Madison we say that we have two seasons: winter and road construction. And when summer gets hot and sticky we all yearn for those months of sub-freezing temperatures, but winter is months away, which is just another way of saying, I can't get snow satisfaction.

Last night I read a few of Marvel's most recent offerings: New Avengers #32, X-Factor #21, New Excalibur #21, and Exiles #96. The last two are underwhelming Chris Claremont creations. The problem with current Claremont work—in addition to the typical Claremontisms (bondage/slavery/submission, VR/training/simulation in every issue)—is that there is little in the way of organic narrative flow. When I read New Excalibur I get the feeling that I could cut the pages out, throw them in the air, rearrange them, and get another valid layout. Many of the “transitions” are unmotivated and prefaced only by some form of “meanwhile”—usually just a place name or time, which is to say ... a radical cut. I get the feeling that Claremont sort of has a idea of and for the larger arc, the “story” he is telling, but as a result there is little organic about each issue, and the only actual “story-telling” elements are the end-of-issue cliffhangers, which appear without fail—always some sort of “big reveal.” And furthermore there is a lot of talking, some in the form of dialog rather than monologue, but it comes across as talking heads not quite able to achieve a proper info-dump.

As a contrast and remedy for such shoddy story-telling I would present X-Factor, penned by the almost always reliable Peter David. Reliable is too gentle and modest, for David has a great feel for plot, character, wit, and dialog. His issues work as both stand-alone stories and as parts of larger arcs. There is often a “theme” of sorts that unifies the various narrative strands so that there is a logic of sorts connecting things even when not all the leads are on panel together, but this never reduces to a simple “moral.” Issue #21 also ties in coincidentally to recent channel chat about being lonely and being alone, for the issue revolves around communication and miscommunication, and the lead stories involve Jamie Madrox, the “Multiple Man,” who is never alone (he can create duplicates of himself) but is often lonely, and the “Isolationist,” who suffers forced isolation because of uncontrollable (except for drugs?) telepathy/mind-reading.

New Avengers is often hit-or-miss. Issue #31, for example, involves a great deal of fighting and has an important revelation at the end, but the “story” could have been condensed to two or three pages, and would have been during the Silver Age. Months ago I mentioned how much I love the artwork in issue #26; all of these are penned by B.M. Bendis, and while #26 is rather subtle and subdued, given Bendis's normal dialog ticks, other recent issues have felt a bit bloated and directionless. Not so with #32, which is light on the action and heavy on the banter, and for the first time in months it works. The issue consists, primarily, of our protagonists carrying the dead Elektra-Skrull back to the U.S. in Danny Rand's corporate plane and discussing or debating along the way what to do with it, where to go, etc. This simple set of questions with no easy (and satisfactory) answers leads not just to speculation about who else could be a Skrull (no mention is made of the factoid that for many issues back in the X-Men franchise Wolverine was replaced by a Skrull, while the “real” Wolverine became Apocalypse's Horseman, War [a role refused by the Hulk]), but also to wild conspiracy theories, attempts to get the characters to act, broken-record one-liners by Peter Parker, harsh words about our protagonists by Logan, and something approaching a meta-critique of the whole Civil War debacle. It's not that great, but it's good, cheap-enough entertainment, well-concocted, and although it's a bit of a breather, an exposition issue after several issues of fighting, it works by not being complete decompression—there is just enough tension in the dialog to make it interesting. But I fear that won't last.

Recent links/news—“Best Places to Live: Top 100” (towns, not big[ger] cities) ...

• 1. Middleton, WI: “Pros: Small-town charm; booming economy; extensive parks and bike trails Cons: Do you like winter?”
• 5. Claremont, CA: “Today, Claremont is called the City of Trees and Ph.D.s. The city has won the National Arbor Day Foundation's Tree City USA award for 19 straight years”

Thursday I have a phone interview; it was going to be in-person, but, "Because so many of our candidates are out of town and to keep this process fair in accordance with TAA guidelines, let's make your interview via phone as well." Whatever.

I was flipping through the introduction to Gary Banham's Kant and the End of Aesthetics (London: Macmillan, 2000) yesterday and for the first time, perhaps ever, actually had a desire to read Hegel, and I'll tell you why:

There is a need to discus one other kind of thinking of ends which, it could be claimed, is the only form of such thinking not discussed by Kant: chemism. This is presented as a principle by Hegel in both the ‘Greater Logic,’ the Science of Logic, and in the ‘smaller Logic,’ the Encyclopaedia Logic. In both works the principle of chemism is presented towards the close and is introduced as an intermediary principle between mechanism and teleology. (9)

Middle terms and intermediaries are my work. The short form is that in somewhat Aristotelean terms, mechanism is thinking in efficient causes while teleology is about final causes (often “purposes”). What is missing since English empiricism (which banishes formal causes to metaphysics) is real work on formal causes, and I want to argue that one of Kant's main hurdles lies in bridging material & efficient and final causes by reinventing types of formal causes (without resorting to them wholesale, for metaphysics as a science is not possible). The final Banham quote on Hegel goes as follows (and is a reason I don't really care for Hegel, but it's still interesting):

In the ‘Greater Logic’ Hegel tells us that chemism is the principle of sexuality in the natural world and of language in the spiritual world. On this basis it would also be the principle of Sittlichkeit in ethics. It is the middle term of judgment which renders the latter a three-part relation rather than simply binary in form as in Kant. (10)