Update: Something tells me that nobody is going to want to talk about anything but what I say about superheroes.

Maybe I can’t make it to Susan’s birthday party, but at least I can answer a few questions. (This will all be on the test, so pay attention!)

1. Robots or superheroes?

   It pains me to say this, but . . . robots.

   I’m too much the postmodernist now not to want to turn things over to see what crawls in the shade of their dark undersides. (My enjoyment of too many fantasy stories, for instance, is now marred by the antidemocratic subtext of any story that involves placing the “rightful” king on the throne.)

   And as much as I enjoy the four-color craziness of the Golden Age and applaud the bright-eyed enthusiasm of Siegel and Schuster, I can’t forget that “superheroes” also means Steve Ditko and Frank Miller and Mike Grell. It’s Mr. A and Rorschach and Women in Refrigerators Syndrome.

   It’s the underlying assumption that civil society is a failure, that to be a suspect is to be a criminal, that “extraordinary rendition” is the only road to justice. It’s an ugly world and it’s not the world I live in.

   If it was just that some superheroes were written that way, that would be one thing, but as it is, I think it’s the only way superheroes actually make sense, and guys like Ditko and Miller and Grell are just more up-front about it.

   I haven’t yet found an inescapable ruinous subtext for robots, so: robots.

2. What did you like best about Oxford?

   The sense of history, I think. Not just that the university was anywhere up to nine hundred years old, but that when I worked on the papers for my courses on colonial Indian history, I did it in a building constructed in the 1880s as a training center for the Indian Civil Service. And that I was preceded at the the college I attended by both John le Carré and Dr. Seuss.

   (Plus, getting my master’s from a world-class university finally erased the shame of the grades I got my junior year of high school.)

3. The Arbitrary Fortune Fairy gives you five thousand dollars, but you have to spend it in the next 72 hours. What do you spend it on?

   If I’d responded to this in a timely manner, the answer to this would have been obvious: fly to Vegas for the aforementioned birthday party.

   As it is, the answer would probably still involve plane tickets in some way, but possibly also more prosaic things, like buying a television. Or maybe I'd fly to Florida for a long weekend, get myself a motorcycle license, and spend whatever was left on a used Ducati.

   (Still, I’d be regretting Vegas.)

4. I’m not a fan of those “if you could live in any past time or place” questions, so I’m not going to ask that. But I am going to ask this: if you could bring the dominant clothing style from any past time or place back into fashion, what would it be?

   I won’t presume to speak for women’s fashion (though, in passing, I’ll note that I’m partial to the Twenties and Thirties), but for men’s, it would be some era in which hats were worn and suits had waistcoats and more than three buttons. Like, say, this one.

5. Which author, living or dead, would you most like to be favorably compared to?

   John le Carré. Particularly, John le Carré any time from Tinker, Tailor to A Perfect Spy, but I’d settle for the John le Carré of any era.

Extra credit

Almost two and a half years ago, Gwenda asked me five questions, too. I wrote three answers, got stuck, and never posted any of them. So, long overdue:

1. If you could be any font, which would you be and why?

   Caslon. Classic but not antiquarian, elegant but understated; deceptively readable, but capable of cloaking with apparent respectability the most radical sentiments.

2. Why zeppelins?

   It’s a class thing, I think — that nostalgia for an age in which air travel was a luxury available only to the leisured wealthy is of a piece, I'm sure, with the nostalgia for ocean liners, railways, Edwardian shooting parties. For more proximate causes, Michael Moorcock and his Oswald Bastable stories (which, it should be noted, make airships into instrument of colonial liberation struggle and anarchist revolution) and then to Hayao Miyazaki, with his floating castles and ominous flying battleships and daring air pirates.

3. What thing/person/situation that you’ve encountered in a foreign country struck you as strangest at the time?

   Coming out of the Bahnhof Lichtenberg onto the streets of East Berlin after a week and a half in the then-Soviet Union, starving and culture-shocked, only to hear the familiar melody of “Tom’s Diner” by Suzanne Vega.

4. Did you have access to a well-stocked library, home or outside-the-home, as a kid? If so, what was it like? If not, what kind of books did you generally have access to?

   Oh, yeah. I grew up in a house (well, several houses, in sequence) full of books. History, archaeology, classics, mysteries, SF, contemporary fiction and gonzo journalism, architecture, cartoons, you name it.

5. What is the most lost you’ve ever been?

   You know, I don't get lost much. Or maybe I do, but I don't realize that's what it is. But the most disoriented I've been was boarding a Tokyo subway and finding on it a map that bore no apparent relation to the one I was familiar with. It took me quite some panicked moments to figure out that they did actually connect up in a couple of places, and what I was seeing was not the map of Bizarro Tokyo but of the interlocking private system that takes over some of the lines as in the southern suburbs.

Figure 1. Me as a font.