BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Schizophrenics can't process metaphor

 
  

Page: 1(2)345

 
 
■
19:38 / 20.09.04
It's entirely possible he's just putting on an act with this indignant contempt for the reading public.
Precisely what I was thinking. I recall an interview (I think I still have it somewhere) where he was supposed to have hired some topless dancers, a big house and a butler to project some sort of louche Sebastian O impression. Could have been artistic licence on the part of the interviewer, but he does tend to bait interviewers a little. If he'd previously mentioned it to Cameron as Asperger's I guess he knew damn well that he was taking it up a notch to get a reaction.
Still, a bit sloppy.
 
 
lukabeast
19:54 / 20.09.04
Firstly, I think Matrix II and III genuinely are a mess, and hard to understand because they're poorly thought-out, pretentious, messy, inconsistent. I haven't yet been convinced to the contrary despite reading a number of fan defenses of these two films (I think the first is/will be seen as a classic of SF cinema.)

I can't disagree at all here. I was commenting only on the first flick. As for the second two..well as stated elsewhere on this board, albeit more eloquently, poo = poo.

I don't feel this is a great comparison with Morrison's work, because for the most part I think Morrison does come through in the end, and rewards careful reading. In almost every case (Bible John is one exception and maybe Mystery Play is another) his "complex" work, however hard to fathom initially, does have a plan behind it rather than being a patchwork of Philosophy 101.


I can't fully disagree here either, but I was generalizing more on the idea of taking some standard product (Superhero comic, Science Fiction film) and lacing it with other pop culture references, religion, philosophy, etc. So yes, I am on board with your assessment on how well each of these were respectively pulled off in these cases, this was just a simple comparison I pulled off the top of my head. Probably been reading too many Matrix VS Invisibles articles, hee hee.
 
 
Billuccho!
20:14 / 20.09.04
Ahh, this'll just convince Grant to write the first full-blown schizophrenic comic.
 
 
madfigs #32, now with wasabi
20:38 / 20.09.04
No way, Dave Sim jumped on that idea YEARS ago.
 
 
■
20:44 / 20.09.04
I knew I had it somewhere (these are all quite big images, btw):
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Page 5

This is 12 years ago when he had very little to prove. Interesting to see how pissed off he was by the having to keep doing Zenith, but how much of it is to be taken seriously? I do find the Millar/steroids bit funny, though.
I may scan some more stuff from these magazines, as there's some very nice stuff from Steve Yeowell, Kev O'Neill, Bryan Talbot and more.... I just need to get some decent image processing freeware.
 
 
goodkingwenceslaus
21:33 / 20.09.04
Kovacs wrote:

"Secondly though, Morrison has always interviewed as a persona. Right from his fey, Morrisseyesque fictionsuit of the early Animal Man period, he has put himself forward as a creation, a projection of part of himself. It's entirely possible he's just putting on an act with this indignant contempt for the reading public."

I share this hope Kovacs! There's no reason for Morrison to be pulling this nonsense--and I say this as a person who has written way more on the structure and minutiae of Animal Man, The Doom Patrol, and The Filth than is good for me! No reader should ever be trying to "get" what a creator intended anyway... That's what makes metaphor metaphorical, rather than allegorical--it's supposed to be multivalent, a doorway into a world of new thought, not a locked treasure chest of specific meaning that only one key will fit! Personally, I like what he does and I hope he keeps right on with it, but I don't see how these "outbursts" (staged or not!) can do anything but diminish his audience...

Dave
 
 
---
22:49 / 20.09.04
My thesis is that everybody's gone kind of schizophrenic, which also explains the rise of reality TV.

I'll stick another nail in my coffin here : how can anybody disprove his thesis that EVERYBODY has gone kind of schizophrenic?

That thesis has a whole load of weight behind it, but to come back to the part that's offending people, i can see how it looks like he's lumping everyone in with this.

HA! I just wrote two sentences that managed to insult both sides! I must be working for the Devil tonight, i just felt that it needed to be pointed out though, no offence intended.

To come back to another reason why he's probably a little frustrated with the majority of his readers right now : most of them probably don't read older literature or take in much else aside from comics, films, and tv. Grant maybe get's wound up at the fact that if people read a little more outside of the comics medium they would understand his ideas a lot more lucidly, and grasp some of the styles of his storytelling a lot easier. He surely pays homage to so many different written styles and works and when someone just announces something negative about his work and dismisses it, it rankles him that if they read more than just comics they would get a lot more satisfaction from his work.

Of course, no-one expects the average reader to wade through all of the classics or the occult/philosophy/religious texts just to grasp his comics, but the lack of reading other things which prevents understanding of many of the themes in his works is possibly one of many, many reasons (inside and outside of the comics industry) why he get's wound up with it all from time to time and says things like what he said in that interview.

I wouldn't like being interviewed if i made comics, people would have many reasons to HATE me if i got interviewed and i was in a bad mood. It can't be an easy thing to do so can't we just give him a bit of a break and put it down to a bad day instead of picking him apart so much?
 
 
miss wonderstarr
23:08 / 20.09.04
Star Wars: A New Hope entirely fits the classic quest narrative detailed in Vladimir Propp's structuralist study The Morphology of the Folktale. You don't actually have to read Russian fairy stories to be perfectly acquainted with how that pattern works... and as I think Haus suggested, similarly, most every mainstream Hollywood film operates according to time-honoured structures of equilibrium -- disequilibrium -- new equilibrium. A fan of American genre movies would, perhaps without realising it, be expert in the way narratives function and have functioned in many different cultural contexts for centuries.

As Haus also pointed out, reality TV shows are edited to tell a story, just like fiction, from the raw materials. If you watched the live feed of Big Brother you'd have a tedious sprawl. The 45 minute cut every evening gives you characters, dilemmas, tensions, conflicts, plot.

Every news broadcast is also told as a story to make sense of the stuff of real life -- constructed with heroes, villains, causes, resolutions.

I would say Morrison is being provocative and either hasn't really thought this through, or doesn't care because he's trying to make ripples (precisely as his comments are doing here.) Anyway if everyone is schizophrenic, he's surely included.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
01:14 / 21.09.04
I would say Morrison is being provocative and either hasn't really thought this through, or doesn't care because he's trying to make ripples (precisely as his comments are doing here.)

Which seems to happen in every single interview he gives. Why the shock?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
07:43 / 21.09.04
I think for me it was that he usually has the wit to have some idea of what he's talking about, whereas this is just the jumble of poorly-researched, my-mate-told-me nonsense and contradiction. I'm sure that, when one is surounded by the easily-impressed, the urge just to say whatever sounds clever is strong, but...

Actually, on reflection, it's probably because I would normally avoid reading an interview with him, for the reasons mentioned earlier in this thread.

Jack Frost: Well, if you read the thread, you will notice that his evidence for everyone having gone a bit schizophrenic - that people cannot process metaphor - has already been explained as not a symptom unique or universal to schizophrenia. So, that's how. Thanks.

As for the "off-day", "be nice" stuff - I think we are. Certainly, I think it would be a terrible shame if Morrison decided to give up on comics and write prose, if only because I generally enjoy his comics very much and find his prose rather less enjoyable. Ultimately, if he wants to write comics that sell more, he has to write comics that sell more. If he wants to write the comics he wants to write without compromising, he has to find an audience for them. If he wants to do interviews without coming across as a bit silly, he should read up a bit. Is all.

Honestly, I'm not seeing any substantiation of the idea that Morrison's readers are not reading "older literature", and the idea that Seaguy would have received a better reception had its readers only prepared with a shot of Sir Gawaine and the Green Knighte strikes me as a bit odd, but then I liked Seaguy and read "older literature", so I'm not the person to talk to on that.
 
 
Lord Morgue
08:10 / 21.09.04
Look, if George says you're all schitzophrenic, then YOU'RE ALL SCHITZOPHRENIC! Stop arguing. If you weren't a bunch of schitzos you'd know he was right. Except then he wouldn't be. Except then he wouldn't of had to say it now, would he? Just take your pills and eat the pudding.
 
 
---
08:12 / 21.09.04
I only meant the part where he says :

My thesis is that everybody's gone kind of schizophrenic

And didn't intend to suggest that people can no longer process metaphor.

Honestly, I'm not seeing any substantiation of the idea that Morrison's readers are not reading "older literature",

Your probably right, my mistake, i just keep thinking that most of his readers are young kids who read comics, i forget the fact that a lot of (most of?) comic readers nowadays are twenty something.
 
 
---
08:14 / 21.09.04
Just take your pills and eat the pudding.

We don't take pills. Is that why we always argue in this head?
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
08:28 / 21.09.04
'Seaguy' is based on medieval quest literature which always has the young hero setting out and he has his companion who gets killed, the questing beast

Am I going soft in the old bonce, or is this also a bit iffy?

(I can't think of a mediaeval epic in which the hero has a beast, questing or otherwise, for his companion, which then gets killed - perhaps Grant M. is thinking of T. H. Whtie's The Once and Future King? In which King Pellinore has a loving bond with his quarry, the Questing Beast, but it is still his quarry rather than his companion)
 
 
miss wonderstarr
08:31 / 21.09.04
One of the symptoms of schizophrenia is the schizophrenic can't process metaphor. If you say to a schizophrenic 'a rolling stone gathers no moss' he takes it utterly literally! He doesn't see it as having any kind of secondary meaning.

You know, it's kind of telling that Morrison probably lifted this idea not from psychiatry textbooks but The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, one of the most popular novels of the last year.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
08:35 / 21.09.04
I only meant the part where he says :

My thesis is that everybody's gone kind of schizophrenic

And didn't intend to suggest that people can no longer process metaphor.


A thesis is a statement put forward to be proved or disproved. George's proof that everyone has gone kind of schizophrenic is that they are no longer able to process metaphor. Unless you apply that proof (which it turns out is unsafe), you don't have a thesis. You have an "unsupported proposition". The unsupported proposition "everyone's gone kind of schizophrenic" is a very tempting one, because it is sweeping, sounds good and suggests to the listener that you have some deep knowledge both of psychiatry and of anthropology, but if it is then supported by a misunderstanding of what schizophrenia is, it doesn't hold up.

As such, I'm afraid your statement above doesn't make much sense, or at least is not terribly useful. I can say "Wow, everyone's just gone kind of psycho, haven't they?", but without an idea of what I mean by psycho and what my proof is, it's not terribly useful or indeed terribly interesting.
 
 
_Boboss
08:41 / 21.09.04
why shouldn't you believe that a rolling stone will gather no moss? leaving mr jones' midnight swim to the side, it remains a total pop fact that: a rolling stone will not gather moss

does this make i mad?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
08:44 / 21.09.04
Actually, Charlie Watts is the curator of the largest single collection of lichens in private hands in the world.
 
 
_Boboss
09:10 / 21.09.04
oop, yep, there's that AND i just happened by the local old pop-people's home only to see ronnie wood hanging out the back of kate moss' mossy face - yuk. it seems i couldn't be more mental if i tried.

things:
! quite enjoyed the hint that seaguy and shebeard might be brother and sister, and how this fits with antidad and the mummy

" confused, but not surprised, to the reaction to the reaction. no-one actually thought seaguy would be a big seller did they? it's a very enjoyable and nicely drawn bit of quirk, but it wasn't aimed at the big audiences was it?

£ has anyone got this interview yet? save us the ha$$le and post the whole lot up eh?

$ i love the one with the robot animals
 
 
DaveBCooper
10:13 / 21.09.04
Coming in late as I only got my copy of Arthur yesterday. Skimmed the interview. And I think it’s interesting and perhaps telling that this small aspect of it has been focussed on. How come no-one’s dwelling on the bit where he refers to Alan Moore later on, eh ?

Anyway, I think Grant’s probably wrong on a variety of levels about this one, but I’m not taking it personally - in fact, thinking about it has illuminated why I’ve found his recent work to be less satisfying.

It’s not so much any need for a three-act structure that makes me feel NXM and Seaguy weren’t quite so hot, but the fact that the storytelling seemed uncertain, and incomplete; events were, or appeared to be, happening off-panel, and the reader had to do the work to fill in the gaps. The Filth and NXM alike seemed to generate the need for loads of people to explain the Qabbalistic relevance, and to refer us to the Lucifer Principle or other books, to understand, which suggests Grant’s writing was more a case of story-suggesting than storytelling. The works don’t necessarily stand alone as complete stories, they need you to look elsewhere.

And that’s not because the reader’s failing to get it, or not seeing the levels, but because the first and most obvious level – that of actually propelling the story along in some fashion – isn’t clearly being met. If that’s not being satisfied, if you don’t actually know what’s happening in the story (and in NXM, the lack of clarity in the art in the last arc was arguably as much to blame for this as the plot gaps), then the reader’s less likely to see metaphor or whatever as an acceptable substitute. If your hero’s quest for the golden maguffin is a metaphor for his spiritual awakening, then if you can’t tell from the narrative if he’s currently lost in the woods of unreason or buying a carton of yogurt from a man with a donkey’s head, then you’re not going to look for the metaphor underlying it. That first level must be clearly present as a foundation before you start adding extra levels.

And in that regard, Seaguy, unfortunately, doesn’t really succeed; despite (and unfortunately in contrast to) the clarity of Cameron’s art and narrative skills, the story jumps from place to place with events happening without any apparent reason for them. So you’re left with a story that feels incomplete. As much as the ‘throwing out of crazy ideas’ might have become Grant’s trademark in recent years, I actually think he’s actually become a victim of the observation he made about his own work in Animal Man 26 about his stories seeming to build up to something that never really happens… which is a shame, as it kind of makes it look like he didn’t really know where he was going, or didn’t have it planned out. With Seaguy, for example, instead of the scene-shifts and plot holes, why wasn’t it a four issue series ? The end has the feeling (like Thomas Harris’s Hannibal) of someone doing an exam and putting in everything in note form before the end of the allotted time (or space). It feels like a creator who’s not wholly in command of their story, and breaks the spell of the story. Which is a shame.

So on a personal level I disagree with his assessment about not getting it; I got it all right, I just didn’t think it was very well done.
 
 
_Boboss
10:25 / 21.09.04
Clang! the bars fall on seaguy's face again. that's the ending.

dave, you're a mean tease. this interview is only, so far, available in meatspace and sold thousands of miles away from where many of us live. it's also a pissload more expensive than you normally have to pay to read a georgie morrison interview.

so tell us. what does he say about alan moore? i'd be very interested to discuss that if only i could know....

but then, i'm nuttier than a radio 1 dj. Bllleeeeuuuurgh!

(see?)
 
 
DaveBCooper
10:50 / 21.09.04
You’re right, I’m a mean tease… but one without a scanner, so can’t post the details.
“You want interviews ? Well, interviews cost, and arthurmag.com’s where you start payin–” (thump thump) “- by Paypal”, as they didn’t say at the start of a not-good 1980s TV show.

And I’m being mean-ish about the Alan Moore thing; he only really refers to him in passing, but it suggests the so-called animosity’s not quite the Levitz-Quesada fight people seemed to believe it was. Insofar as it seemed to suggest he kept up with Alan’s work. Minor thing, but vaguely noteworthy, I felt.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
11:54 / 21.09.04
it suggests the so-called animosity’s not quite the Levitz-Quesada fight people seemed to believe it was

I feel so good that I don't even know what this means.

K-C C: I was wondering about that - whether the grammar meant that the questing knight had a companion who gets killed and a questing beast, and that the beast was therefore meant to be the insect or possibly the wasps of Atlantis, or whether the companion was meant to *be* the questing beast, in this case Chubby, which we know of course represented Seaguy's id/libido/manstick....
 
 
Four
12:16 / 21.09.04
I thought sea guy was poor, not excessivly wierd or hard to grasp, just well below par for GM's work. I think this inteview is just him covering/frustration.
 
 
yawn - thing's buddy
12:41 / 21.09.04
I recently met gm in glasgow and he told me his thoughts regarding scizophrenia and the typical comic book fan.

He was sincere. This is how he talks. Surely you are all used to it now. It’s a broad brush statement but it certainly makes a point.

I don’t think its too far from the truth to suggest many comic book fans are hung up on continuity (which provides a safe recongnisable coherence) and an ‘empirical’ approach to storytelling which renders them ignorant to other ways of revealing fiction. The media and copy-friendly short cut is to call them all schizoids. I get what he’s saying.


But….

Seaguy’s failure was the format. It would have been more successful if released as 96 individual prestige cinnamon flavoured ‘meat-sheets’.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
13:00 / 21.09.04
Yes, yawn, but he has made a very basic mistake in his understanding of schizophrenia. He is sincere. He is also incorrect. It's as if he said, "I think everyone is a bit tetraplegic these days. They just can't do arithmetic."

If you're complaining about how closed-minded and stupid people are, it's best not to show your ignorance. That's not media-friendly. It's The Sun-friendly, and it's the kind of ignorance that would lead to piss-taking in the more critical environment that he seems to want. Cake. Eat. Have. Can't. See also medieval quest narratives.

Oh, hang on. GOSH! YOU MET GEORGE! WUBBADUWUBBAWUBBA! That's like meeting Krishna and Jesus in the same taxi! Coudl you ask him about a scene transition in Doom Patrol #31, which I think was, like, a *total* loophole to bring back Elasti-Girl.
 
 
yawn - thing's buddy
13:12 / 21.09.04
haus:

nah.

he lives in the sticks these days.
city only occasionally.

this means to you:

your doom patrol dilemma will continue.

poor ting.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
13:31 / 21.09.04
And you know why he lives in the sticks?

Because he's gone all schizophrenic!

And he needs the extra space for his multiple personalities!

Which is what schizophrenics have!
 
 
Ganesh
13:45 / 21.09.04
Maybe he's... livinginthesticksophrenic!!!
 
 
Ganesh
14:21 / 21.09.04
The media and copy-friendly short cut is to call them all schizoids.

Except that that's not the same thing as schizophrenia which is hardly synonymous with 'concrete thinking'. It's idiotically superficial pop-psych-lite. I'd kinda hoped that even George's sketchiest skimresearching was better than that.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
14:27 / 21.09.04
I really meant to ask Grant today whether Ragged Robin was one of Crazy Jane's personae, but he was a bit sleepy aww. I can txt him if you really want an answer to any urgent questions -- he is "away" on my MSN right now -- but he should be home around 7pm tonight so I hope to ask him over the washing-up and post tomorrow morning latest
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
14:29 / 21.09.04
I'm confused.
Is this like Arseburger's Syndrome?
 
 
---
16:47 / 21.09.04
Ok Haus, i see what you mean, but it's still a thesis isn't it? You said yourself :

A thesis is a statement put forward to be proved or disproved.

But then you said :

Unless you apply that proof (which it turns out is unsafe), you don't have a thesis.

So if a thesis is a statement to be proved or disproved how can it not be a thesis if proof isn't applied to it? Isn't that the whole point of the thesis you describe? That it's looking for proof and not needing accompanying proof alongside it in the first place?

It was just the Schizo bit that hit me as possibly being right, i didn't think of what actually made a thesis when it hit me or the statements relation to metaphor.

A Zen master walked up to his disciple and asked him :

"Go find your true nature and come back and tell me when you've found it."

The disciple looked at him with a serious face and said :

"Schizwhip on your dizwhip."
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
17:17 / 21.09.04
Because, he said slowly and carefully, the only substantiation of the thesis offered is discarded by you, in favour of a general "hey, isn't everyone just, like, totally schizophrenic? Isn't Grant right?" However, the *only* aspect of this "schizophrenia" that Morrison identified, the inability to recognise metaphor, has been discarded. Therefore there is no value ascribed to "schizophrenic" in your statement.

Now, we have already established that George did not know what "schizophrenic" meant when he constructed that thesis, hence the removal of the modifier about concrete thinking, and I am prepared to bet real cash money that you're not clear on that one, so what exactly do we have left? "All people are becoming kind of (descriptor without any associated value)". That is, "All people are becoming kind of something undefined".
 
 
---
18:23 / 21.09.04
OK the pennies dropped......

KERPLUNK!

I get you now, you meant that what i said was meaningless because all i could pull out of it was a sweeping, general statement that wasn't really adding anything to the discussion at hand. Your right about the cash money thing aswell. All i got from that was a reminder of the Prodigy song Girls, which is a very good song, the album is good too, very good, very very good.

Just to add : i get 'clear' thinking about as often as women have that time of the month. I'm out of here now. My main contribution to this thread is : "Schizwhip on your Dizwhip."

And don't you forget it.

I'm going to TURN this macHIne OFF, and get back to BOOK learning and deep breaths of calm, relaxing, air.

MORRISON DESPAIRS

Of course he did, this whole thing came about because he works for for a presently thick, stupid, messed up fucking company that won't do him the small favour of dropping the profit obsession JUST ONE TIME for someone who's helped put them where they are now.

It might make good business sense DC, but it doesn't qualify for any type of fucking COMMON sense, which most other people kind of naturally have, did you know that? And how much money has he made you so far?

Fuckwits.
 
  

Page: 1(2)345

 
  
Add Your Reply