A small request.

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of - but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Robert A. Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

I would like to thank my small readership for the compliments and observations about my blog that they have passed on in person or over the phone. But I'd be very grateful if you'd leave a comment on the blog, as well - I just think that it looks more, I don't know, lived-in, if people leave a note now and then.

-Sid

And also to you amen.

Architecture penguin catalogue misanthrope boilerplate unnecessary bus recent multiple random generation reply your neighborhood here meaningless modern decay ware idiosyncratic polymath and also to you amen typo giveaway subjunctive sesquipedalian dance.

-Anonymous, spam

Today at work I was chatting with Paul the in-house courier, an affable and entertaining young fellow, and we were discussing some random word spam that had made its way past the new Printing House spam filters. The spam in question had absolutely no sales pitch of any sort, it was just word salad, and we were speculating as to why anyone would send it. We agreed that it was probably just some sort of low-pass reconnaissance by the spammer community, just testing to see what would get through, but I presented the alternative theory that they were net dreams - the nascent consciousness of the Internet manifesting itself as the same sort of garbled metaphor that any of us might experience during a run of rapid eye movement.

Obviously, it's the first explanation, but imagine, imagine if it was the second one. The nature of consciousness is elusive at the best of times, and investigations of the phenomenon are hampered by that elusiveness. Recommended reading here would be Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, wherein he suggests that consciousness bears the same relationship to reality that roadmaps do to the landscape - a duplicate in another medium that allows us to find our way.* The Internet, with its odd connections, its millions of nodes, and its constant flow of information, would seem to be an acceptable start in the process of creating a digital analog of the human mind, a "duplicate in another medium".

But will that lead to consciousness? Science fiction author Vernor Vinge has suggested that there is a point in our future where the combination of humans and computers will cause the creation of some kind of superhuman intelligence, leading to a leap in our evolution that will defy description. He refers to this shift as the Singularity, and is understandably (or perhaps sadly) vague about how it will take place and what it will mean to us. In his defense, how could he be specific? What sort of leap of imagination could predict the nature of post-humanism? In his novel Marooned in Realtime, Vinge sets his scene by having a small portion of humanity that has been in stasis for a variety of reasons emerging in a post-Singularity world where the rest of humanity has vanished, leaving behind only vague clues as to the nature of the transcendent experience that has led to their disappearance.

I have to admit to being sceptical about the concept: jokes about internet dreams aside, I don't think that we are one step closer to the creation of technological sentience than we were a thousand years ago. Well, to be fair, we're one step closer - I suspect that in 1008 no one was thinking about it at all.

- Sid

* Yes, I DO own a copy of Mr. Jaynes' book, for the doubters among you. And, just to completely establish my geek credibility, I stumbled across it in a used book store and purchased it because I'd seen the Beast reading it in an issue of X-Men.

"See, there were these two guys in a lunatic asylum..."

Batman: "I don't know what it was that bent your life out of shape, but who knows? Maybe I've been there too. Maybe I can help. We could work together. I could rehabilitate you. You needn't be out there on the edge any more. You needn't be alone. We don't have to kill each other."

"What do you say?"

The Joker: "No. I'm sorry, but... No. It's too late for that. Far too late. Hahaha. Y'know, it's funny. This situation. It reminds me of a joke..."

"See, there were these two guys in a lunatic asylum..."

Alan Moore, The Killing Joke

Great things are being said about the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, with a lot of attention being given to the late Heath Ledger's portrayal of the Joker. I was surprised to discover that the look of the original Joker was inspired by a 1928 silent film entitled The Man Who Laughs, based on a 1869 Victor Hugo novel and starring Conrad Veidt in the title role. The bizarre grin sported by the protagonist is caused by deliberate mutilation when he is only two years old.

I haven't seen the new movie yet (I like to give it a couple of weeks in order to let the fanboy community get out of the way) but I've heard a couple of people comment with surprise on how the Joker is portrayed as a complete anarchist, a villain with no motive other than the creation of chaos. I've also heard some media commentary on how the Batman is presented in a darker fashion, more brutal than previous incarnations.

Really? My god, where have you people been? Oh, sorry, I tend to forgot that the mainstream only knows Batman from the 60's TV series and the movies - which is unfortunate, since they really haven't done justice to any of the characters. In fact, the closest that the popular media have come to a satisfactory portrayal of the Batman and his villains is in the three animated series done over the last few years. (For you trivia fans, Mark Hamill of Star Wars fame was the creator of the superb Joker voice in Batman: The Animated Series.)

Recommended reading would have to be DC Comic's The Killing Joke, now celebrating its 20th anniversary. Brian Bolland, the artist, is not at his best with Batman, but his portrayal of the Joker as a grotesque clown is perfect. Alan Moore's script is equally perfect, and leads one to wonder about the difficulties of writing from the perspective of a character who is insane.

Less approachable is the 1989 graphic novel Arkham Asylum, written by Grant Morrison and illustrated by Dave McKean. This experimental work, done with a combination of illustrative techniques, points out the essential truth of the Batman series: all of the characters, including Batman himself, are insane.

Notice that no one ever goes to prison - the criminals are all incarcerated in an asylum for the criminally insane. And Batman, as much as any of his opponents, is psychotic: the product of a childhood trauma that created an obsession with cold, hard, rigorous justice that has extended to a schizoid alter ego that dresses like a bat and stalks the night in search of criminals, each of whom represents, in some way, the man who killed his parents. As the Joker observes in Arkham Asylum when one of the other inmates says that they should take off Batman's mask and see his real face, "Oh, don't be so predictable, for Christ's sake! That is his real face."

- Sid

P.S. I feel like someone who's gone into the supermarket for milk and come out with $200 of groceries. Originally all I was going to do was mention the Conrad Veidt connection for the look of the Joker, but an hour later, which included digging out The Killing Joke and scanning the cover, I end up with a psychological treatise...