Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

1. Scott Adams, having alerted the world that he had terminal cancer and not much longer to live, has died, according to an announcement released today. Adams was the creator of Dilbert, one of a short list of iconic newspaper comic strips that successively defined their eras. Dilbert was a startlingly satirical strip, a standing refutation of the notion that business, because it has to make a profit, is more efficiently run than government agencies. But like other strips, even iconic ones, it outlasted its own brilliance and became tired out and hectoring, but no more so than did Adams himself, who fell down the right-wing rathole, not just in supporting DT but by being disingenuously nasty about topics like racial identification and the Holocaust. The snark that once served him well had gone rancid.

2. Neil Gaiman. I don't have to elaborate on the grief that this once-esteemed author became revealed as a truly toxic sexual predator. But if you want an elaboration on his background, and on not the origins of his offenses but on how the seeds of what made him the kind of person who could do that could be found in even his most spectacular early successes, there is an astonishing book-length (over 70,000 words) online essay by Elizabeth Sandifer on Gaiman's career. It's full of digressions: it starts with a full explanation of the background of Scientology: Gaiman's father was a leading Scientologist, and it must have affected Gaiman, though it's not clear exactly how, and even once you get past that, there are plenty more digressions on the backgrounds of Tori Amos and others who appear in Gaiman's career. But the main thread is about his writings and his career as a writer. Sandifer's thesis is that Gaiman always wanted to be a celebrated big-name author, but unlike those who just dream of it, he worked hard to make his writings deserve that status, and there's much on his innovations and creativity. But there are also warnings, of which the echoes of the author in Ric Madoc of "Calliope" are only the most obvious. But then there was a turning point when Gaiman achieved that full celebrity status, around the time of American Gods and Coraline in 2001-2. It was then, Sandifer says, that the sexual abuse which had probably been going on long already became obsessive and even more toxic, and victims described the experience as if Gaiman were enacting a script. And, Sandifer says, his writing fell off and lost its savor at the same time: the cruelest literary remark in the essay is that The Graveyard Book "feels like the sort of thing a generative AI would come up with if asked to write a Neil Gaiman story."