Internet Self-Improvement: We Already Know the Answers We Seek

I was originally going to title this post "The Pointlessness of the Self-Improvement Internet", but decided that was too harsh, since I still think the idea of self-improvement is worthwhile. But it struck me the other day that a lot of the advice we seek is kind of pointless, because, as my actual title suggests, we already know what we need to do.

Someone on the Tim Ferriss Show - it might have been internet finance guru Ramit Sethi - once said that advice on the internet boils down to three questions:

• How do I get skinny?
• How do I get rich?
• How do I get laid?

To these I'd add a fourth, which is "How do I get published?"

(As a quick aside, it struck me a long time ago that these mapped pretty perfectly onto how I described my own goals)

The problem is that people looking for answers to these questions on the internet are actually looking for a shortcut - in each case, there are long-term and deeply unsexy ways of achieving all of these goals:

• How do I get skinny? Don't eat crap, eat less of it, and move around every day
• How do I get rich? Don't blow your money on stuff you don't want/need, and learn how money works
• How do I get laid? Scrub up, dress nice and cultivate an interesting life (this is relevant if you're looking for a relationship or just a hookup)
• How do I get published? Read a lot, write a lot, send out what you write (and revise intelligently)

In fact, as someone who's read a fair amount of self-improvement, self-help and productivity literature, I can attest that the best books on any of these subjects are clear on how slow and unsexy the best ways of achieving these goals are. There aren't really magic diets that will let you eat pizza every day and magically shred your belly fat, and there aren't scripts that will get you laid every time.

You can even go a step further and point out that almost all questions to advice columns have a simple answer. I read Dan Savage's Savage Love column each week, and whenever he gives the letter-writer the answer to DTMFA, you have to imagine the letter-writer already knows that they should be dumping the person who's caused them to write in. This goes equally well for Miss Manners and other types of advice columns - at some level you know what you should do in a given situation.

Though I'll say that it's not a bad thing that people are asking an impartial and knowledgeable third party to weigh in sometimes - someone's circumstances may have taught them all kinds of inappropriate ways of dealing with diet, relationships or money, so sometimes it is good to get a second opinion.

My objection, by the way, isn't to self-help or advice columns. I just get frustrated (with myself, because I do it all the time) when a situation gets over-complicated and over-thought, even though there's a pretty simple answer that's staring me in the face. To wit, if I want to slim down, I should take care of my body and be careful what I put in it; repeat as necessary for the other categories.

Still, it's also useful to find different approaches to all these questions - with fitness in particular, the things to do can change as you get into shape, so that what worked before just brings you to a plateau. Biggie Smalls put it wisely when he said, "Mo' money, mo' problems."

Now, if you'll excuse me, it's cheat day, so I need to go eat a donut. I'll worry tomorrow about how best to work it off!

Spoiler-Filled Thoughts on FX's The Americans

Just finished the Americans yesterday, after six seasons spread out over more than a year. I'm a little ambivalent, since the finale left a few things open that I'd have liked to see addressed. But even if I can't put it up in my top 5 all time great shows alongside the Wire, the West Wing and Justified (plus the Simpsons and Deep Space Nine), it was a well-done show that certainly belongs with the greats.

In terms of the plot, the cat-and-mouse game between Stan Beeman and the Jennings family was probably the best part of the show, better than the one between Hank and Walt in Breaking Bad. But the 80s soundtrack and visuals also drew me in episode after episode - seeing the houses and hotels that the characters inhabited was like delving into some kind of genetic memory for me, since it reminded me so much of the built environments I grew up in.

The other notable thing about the show was its brutality. Early on it struck me how every episode featured at least one fucked-up thing happening, from Philip and Elizabeth helping a South African anti-apartheid activist give a racist countryman a Soweto necktie, to Philip covering up various murders and deaths that happened around him.

Now, I promised spoilers, so spoilers will come after the jump:

In Praise of Sandman Mystery Theatre

I guess it's getting to be a cliche that I write to praise whatever comic I'm reading at the moment, but this post is just that: I restarted my collection of Vertigo's Sandman Mystery Theatre, and I'm glad I did.

I wasn't going to, initially. My Great Big Comics Re-read is in progress, as it has been for almost three years, and oddly enough it felt like I'd just recently read the collected and single issues I have. A few years ago I'd unearthed my old copies, which started about 24 issues in and missed the first issues of several successive storylines, and then at my now-departed local comics shop I found some beautiful collected editions that gathered one year's worth of issues in each volume. I picked up the first two volumes, which got me up to speed on where my single issues had started.

When I first started reading the series in the 90s, it was because of my interest in the wider DC Golden Age, spurred in part because of James Robinson's Starman series (which at one point featured a crossover with SMT and its artist, Guy Davis). It took a while for other Golden Age heroes to appear, but I was intrigued by the re-imaginings of characters like Hourman or the Crimson Avenger. And then I was further drawn in by the dark storylines and the trappings of the period.

It also helped that the series was subtly connected to Neil Gaiman's Sandman, where Wesley Dodds (the main character of SMT) is mystically influenced to start his adventures. This connection takes the form of prophetic dreams that plague Dodds in each story, and relate to the case he's working on. The connection was further exploited in the Sandman Midnight Theatre special, where Dodds encountered Dream during his captivity.

On this reread I'm less interested in the connections to the rest of the DC Universe (or the Vertigo-verse), but find myself more transfixed by the period details. I can't claim to be a great 1930s buff, but some of the other stories I've been enjoying lately, like HBO's Boardwalk Empire, put me in mind of SMT because of when they take place.

Part of the period detail is the look of Wesley Dodds, who's portrayed in most of the storylines less as a Batman-style playboy adventurer, and more as a kind of nerd who fights crime. Instead of being tall, handsome and strong-jawed, he's a bit dumpy and wears glasses.

But this portrayal of the main character brings to mind the other thing I'm enjoying about reading this series again. A key theme is the cruelty and indifference of the period, and it's unflinching in showing the effects on the victims and criminals of all the violence, racism and other horrors on display. Even the cops are casually cruel, as when one hints that he disavowed his sister because she married a black man; even Wesley Dodds wrestles with his own prejudices during a storyline that involves the murder of a string of gay men.

The reason I like this aspect of the series is that, especially in comics, we treat the 1930s as a time of innocence and fun, but it was actually fairly violent. It wasn't a patch on the 20s, when Prohibition turned basically all Americans into criminals, but it cemented the power of the gangsters who made their reputations in the previous decade. And on top of that, the Depression caused a huge dislocation of life and its certainties, which led to violence and fascism basically everywhere.

The Depression and the onset of fascism are hinted at in the book, but it's impossible to discount their influence on the tone of the book, and they make it a powerful response to the more libertarian/objectivist readings of superhero comics (e.g. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns).

That said, I don't know if I've ever met anyone else who read Sandman Mystery Theatre when it was running, so I consider it one of the also-rans of Vertigo. This is unfortunate, because I consider it one of the better-written books from the imprint, for the reasons mentioned above. I'm glad that DC published those large collected volumes I found, but the thing I'd really love to see is an HBO adaptation of the book - I think the themes would work quite well on TV now, and they'd be able to make the setting look really good.

And more than anything, it'd be nice to see the book gain some new fans, and potentially lead to more collected editions...

Now Can We Take Right Wing Extremism Seriously?

For about four years, I've been one of many talking about the risks associated with the Trump Administration (for the year before that I was foolishly downplaying his chances of getting the nomination, let alone the presidency). Like loads of others, I've drawn comparisons between his regime and that of fascists, Nazis and authoritarians the world over - not just the paranoia of Hitler or the megalomania of Mussolini, but also the deep corruption of Suharto.

A lot of people have responded, to me and others, like we're over-reacting. When I made the comparison to Suharto, four years ago, a friend replied that he'd taken power in quite a bloody coup, whereas Trump had been elected. My response was that the Suharto comparison was his family - I predicted then that his children and wife (wives) would cash in and be at the heart of loads of shady deals. I think it's fair to say that I've been proven correct.

Where I differed from some commentators was in Trump's approach to authoritarianism. I believed (and still believe) that he's not trying to dismantle democratic institutions because he has some agenda - it's just that they stop him doing the things he wants, and so he wants to eliminate them. Others did see a willful destruction of democratic norms, whether because he wants a private army or because he's in the pay of someone like Vladimir Putin.

The attack on the US Capitol building this week sort of proves us both right - he probably knew exactly what he was doing when he whipped those people up and pointed them at the place where the November election was being certified. But it's also still hard to imagine there's some overarching plan to all of his machinations - he failed to get Mike Pence on-side for the coup, for example.

But I think the most important thing that's come out of this week's actions is that we can no longer ignore how right-wing extremism is the biggest problem facing America at the moment. The last few years we've seen people discount the problem, or suggest that we on the left will let Islamist terrorists off but we freak out more about supposed right-wing extremists. But the proof is there on the screen - they exist, they're being directed firehose-like at democratic institutions, and they're racking up a body count.

This isn't to discount Islamist terror, by the way. ISIS is out of the news because of the coronavirus pandemic, but they're still out there, organizing and inspiring attacks in Asia and Europe, including two in France just last year. They're an ever-present threat, but attacks in the US have been fairly rare in the last few years, with 9 taking place since 2012.

Right-wing terror attacks, however, have been quite common in the US in the last decade or so, with 13 occurring since 2012. They're less common worldwide than the Islamist ones, to be fair, but it's clear that in the US you're more likely to be killed by a white supremacist than an Islamist.

The feeling is that the authorities here have handwaved racist and xenophobic terror more than Islamist terror, probably because it's supposedly easier to identify Islamists than KKK members or neo-Nazis. In turn, this has probably left right-wing terrorists more emboldened to carry out their attacks - and that's even without taking Donald Trump's influence into account.

What's ironic is that there's not much dichotomy between Islamist and right-wing terrorists, even if they mutually despise one another - both rely on imperfect understandings of their foundational texts, and target men who generally feel passed over by society, among other similarities. Online content is also instrumental in radicalizing both groups.

While the attack on the US Capitol resulted in far fewer deaths than the 9/11 attacks, we can hope that it causes a similar alignment of policy (although hopefully with far less demonization of "the other" than occurred 20 years ago). 9/11 was a sort of wake-up call to the US that despite its victory in the Cold War there would still be challenges to its hegemony; this will hopefully be a wake-up call that conspiracy theories and economic devastation come with wider costs to American prestige, and America's ability to achieve its goals abroad.

After all, Islamist terrorism would only ever be a sideshow to Great Power politics in which countries like China attempt to challenge the US's superpower status. China and Russia can use the images from Washington this past week to paint liberal democracies as overly chaotic, and build the case for bringing other countries into their own orbits of authoritarianism.

This comment is not intended to demonize either country or its people, by the way - but both China and Russia have heavily nationalistic media apparati that depend on negative integration to tell their populations that they alone are the chosen people (similar to what we do here, of course). Chaos here serves the purpose of those apparati elsewhere in stifling dissent at home and in getting smaller countries to fall into line. Therefore, if we in the US are truly the shining city on a hill that we like to boast about, we need to get back to showing the benefits of an open and free society, to counteract the lures of stable but illiberal governments.

Ellis, Ennis and Morrison: Revisiting the Big 3 of Vertigo

Following on from my re-read of Hellblazer, this summer I moved on to what I call the Big 3 names of post-Sandman Vertigo. I talked about Garth Ennis and Warren Ellis a little bit then, but I haven't talked much about Grant Morrison, beyond my admiration for his runs on Animal Man and Doom Patrol. I also haven't talked much about Preacher or Transmetropolitan, which at the time were some of my favorite books.

When talking about Garth Ennis's Preacher, Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan or Grant Morrison's Invisibles, I always think of them as their masterpieces, in that I can't really think of a more personal book that any of these authors has written since. Ennis's The Boys is a TV show now, and Morrison was instrumental in rewiring the DC Universe after he moved on from Vertigo, but I don't think anything of theirs has really landed as strongly as these three books did.

I started with The Invisibles, because of the three it's the book I know the least, and of which I remember the least. I have the first two collections, and the last one, so the story is a little disjointed when I read it again. And I have to admit that the gap doesn't do it a lot of favors. Given the preoccupation with 90s conspiracy theories, it feels the most dated of the three, and in my opinion suffers from the worst excesses of Morrison-being-Morrison. One example is all the conversations where one character is talking to another about something, and the second character responds by talking about the weed they're smoking at that moment.

He does do a nice job of tying everything back at the end that he's been teasing since the start, but the book never quite gelled for me the way some of Morrison's other work did. For example, Batman Incorporated felt more like what Morrison did best - unearthing lesser-known DC characters and giving them a new spin.

Preacher was up next, and of the three I think it holds up the best, though it can sometimes also feel quite dated. That, however, is mitigated by the themes that Ennis writes about, like male friendship and religion. In a lot of ways it's a spiritual sequel to his run on Hellblazer, specifically the aspect of a being born of a union between angel and demon, and I think it's done the best job of showcasing Ennis's preoccupations without the nihilism of his later work (for example, Crossed or Punisher MAX).

My collection of Preacher trade paperbacks also has a large gap, between the first five and the last volume. However, the volumes I do have present enough of the story Ennis and Steve Dillon were telling to feel like they're paying off in the final volume. Still, there are enough references to things that happen in volumes 6-8 that I'd like to revisit those books, and maybe one day reread the entire run from start to end.

The final one is Transmetropolitan. It came at around the time that I discovered Warren Ellis's other work in the WildStorm Universe, particularly Planetary and the Authority. Once again, it feels rather dated, though for different reasons than Preacher or the Invisibles - one aspect is the way he demonstrates his antagonist, the US President (as based on then UK prime minister Tony Blair), destroying the US constitution. I'm sure this read fine until January 2017, but the Trump administration has proven impossible to satirize or predict, and the Smiler just feels implausible now that we've seen it actually happen here.

It's also a little weird reading the wish-fulfillment of the protagonist, Spider Jerusalem. He's this witty, angry journalist who has a pair of attractive attendants (both of whom he sleeps with), and who everybody loves because of his words. He also wins all his physical fights despite being skinny and weedy, which is a bit absurd after reading Preacher.

I've called Transmetropolitan Warren Ellis's masterpiece, because it deals more with his personal preoccupations, but I like the Authority and what I've read of Planetary a bit better - he himself may not like superheroes but he wrote them damn well, especially as deconstructions of the genre.

Now, I've called these guys the Big Three of Vertigo, but there's a Big One that I'm missing, and that's Neil Gaiman's Sandman. I have the great misfortune of not owning any of the Sandman trade paperbacks, so I won't get to revisit that story on this go-round. But I'd like to, since I've probably read more of Gaiman's work after Sandman than I have of the other three above (apart from Morrison).

It's instructive to read these books again, especially after such a long time, and to understand them with twenty more years of life experience than I had when they came out. But it's also kind of a shame that there hasn't been a comparable work to any of them since, neither from the authors themselves or from their peers. Still, it's been exciting to revisit these personal visions of three of comics' most celebrated writers, and to see where I get the DNA of a lot of my own work and interest.