Break out your wigs and ball tape: Season two of RuPaul’s Drag Race starts tonight! I was turned onto the show during season one by Tom and Lorenzo, may the most flattering light shine upon their cheekbones forever, and it may well be one of the most fantastic things ever made in the history of television.

You should imagine me typing that with entirely straight-faced fingers, depending on how you think I mean “fantastic” (read: fabulous). The show is outright ridiculous, in very many ways; take the premise, for instance: Nine drag queens compete to be “America’s next drag superstar,” which title they must earn through a series of Project Runway– and America’s Next Top Model–style challenges. (Isn’t that how everyone becomes one of America’s drag superstars?) RuPaul, in male and female drag, is both mentor and host (respectively), shot with the most lovingly Vaseline-slathered lens you’ve ever encountered in a nonmedical context. In each episode, after he gives the girls (even in interviews, out of drag, they refer to each other by their drag names and female pronouns; it’s delightfully disorienting) their challenge, he reminds them of the scoring rubric. They are judged on:

• Charisma;
• Uniqueness;
• Nerve; and
• Talent.

Then he tells them not to fuck it up. (I’m quoting.) At each judging, the bottom two are required to lip-sync for their lives, and then one receives Ru’s benediction (“Shantay, you stay”) while the other has to “sashay away.” The guests and guest judges are amazing—Bob Mackie, Michelle Williams (who cried watching drag queens lip-sync her song “We Break the Dawn,” and not in the bad way), Jenny Shimizu, Lucy Lawless, Charo.

To me, the show is plainly wonderful. But when I tried to describe it to a friend of mine, he nearly had an allergic reaction. (He can’t handle Beyoncé either, who is, let’s face it, a female drag queen.) And that’s when I remembered Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp.’”

By my lights, Sontag’s essay is not a triumph. It’s generally conclusory throughout (“Life is not stylish.” Well, says you), and where it attempts to reason, it is often either offensive or wrong. Or both. What’s most frustrating for me about the essay, then, is its quicksilver flashes of brilliance, the bits where Sontag succeeds in “getting down something of this particular fugitive sensibility.” When she talks about camp’s attention to “the degree of artifice, of stylization,” that rings a bell. “The great stylists of temperament and mannerism” sounds exactly right. And most of all, camp “understand[s] Being-as-Playing-a-Role.” These notes I recognize from my own experience; and taken out of context like I’m doing here, they could be from a magazine profile of a drag queen. These truths about camp exactly describe drag (which must be, I suppose, the ultimate enactment of camp—even though Sontag seems to suggest that intentional camp can’t be good, before she contradicts herself). So if she understands it so well, at least in some parts, how does Sontag miss the point so badly in others?

If you watch the first season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, you’ll see just how wrong Sontag is when she calls camp “disengaged, depoliticized—or at least apolitical.” You’ll see her error in basing camp in a “psychopathology of affluence.” You’ll understand the deep misprision in her bare assertion that camp is a “solvent of morality,” propounded by gays to make us more acceptable in a consequently less-moral world. This will all be clear to you because you’ll see actual drag queens doing drag.

The contestants cover a wide variety of approaches to drag. Porkchop and Tammy, for example, are comics; Ongina is a genderqueer warrior; Shannel is a showgirl; Rebecca is a tired little Latin boy in dress; and Bebe and Nina are creatures not of this world. Bebe and Nina give the lie to Sontag’s disparagements through their approach to drag, which is dignified and powerful. They cast a remarkable spell, and I think I’ve worked out how they do it. I don’t mean the makeup-and-artifice part—you can look that stuff up—but the way they hold their audiences in thrall. It’s a combination of glamour and guts.

The widespread gender norms we are mostly all embedded in make a man in a dress a figure of mockery. He is a ridiculous person, suitable for laughing at. Bebe and Nina know this, but through the force of their wills they are able to persuade the audience to forget. They wear their vulnerability like couture, and radiate such an honest refusal to be afraid, such a “state of continual incandescence” (Sontag again), that it doesn’t occur to the audience to take them as anything other than what they present themselves as. Which, importantly, is never real women. They do not seek to be mistaken for actual women, though it is of course a compliment to their technique if someone is fooled. Instead, they present themselves as men creating the illusion of female personae, an illusion that requires the audience’s collaboration if it is to stand up. Their special power is inducing the audience to collaborate in this way, and that power comes from the strength of will involved in unreservedly exposing themselves to ridicule. The show of vulnerability demonstrates a strength that the audience can’t help but respect.

Which is why I thought it was so outrageous that Rebecca made it to the final three with Bebe and Nina. Those two are true gender-performance artists, whereas Rebecca couldn’t even be bothered to blend her blush. Her goal was to be girl-sexy, which is a fine thing, and an impressive accomplishment for a man, but it doesn’t hold up to the amazing projection of the other two. Girl was outclassed, and she knew it the whole time.

Posts are always percolating, but for the next little while, action here will probably be slim to nil. I’ve been invited to blog the 2666 group reading at Infinite Zombies, so that’s where most of my blogging energy will be directed. See you over there!

(I do have one last Infinite Summer post in the works, even though we’re almost into next year now, but it’s held things up long enough. When it happens, it’ll happen. Meanwhile!)

I can’t say with complete confidence that The Best of Gene Wolfe is the best of Gene Wolfe (although Clute says yes), but it is astoundingly good, and remarkably consistent. If I’m putting together a team of books that can hold their own in a short-fiction cage match before Flannery O’Connor’s Complete Stories ultimately delivers the death blow, I’m torn between this volume and its sibling, Endangered Species. On the one hand, “The Death of Doctor Island,” “Seven American Nights,” “Petting Zoo,” “The Tree Is My Hat” (which I’ve always had a special affinity for because it was the first Wolfe story I felt I had truly understood), and particularly “The Eyeflash Miracles”; on the other, “The Last Thrilling Wonder Story,” “When I Was Ming the Merciless,” “The HORARS of War,” and “Silhouette.” (I haven’t yet got my hands on The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories, so for all I know it’s got a shot at the roster too.)

My point is, while I might quibble over the exact contents of a short-fiction collection called The Best of Gene Wolfe, it will inevitably be among the most gripping, exciting books of stories and novellas I have read. And it is.

I’m not really interested in writing a story-by-story review, though, or a subjective defense of Wolfe’s writing. Instead, I thought I might pay some analytical attention to Wolfe’s technique. Let me draw another circle around myself, even smaller: I’m going to look at one particular kind of technique Wolfe often uses, a species of unreliable narration.

Much of Wolfe’s work is written in the first person. He has said, “It always seems to me that if you have a narrator, if the narration is not by an all-knowing, all-seeing author, . . . then the narrator is damn well going to be unreliable. Real people really are unreliable narrators all the time, even if they try to be reliable narrators.” One interesting thing about Wolfe’s versions of the unreliable narrator is the ways in which they are unreliable. He often presents an in-story explanation for their possible unreliability. One narrator may at some point eat a hallucinogenic candy without knowing it; one is unconsciously in denial about his identity; a couple excise pages from their journals (which are the text) because they expect those journals to come into police custody. (In another example, which I will address again, it’s not the narrator who is unreliable—the work is in the third person—but the central character, who often serves as a kind of interpreter of events. He may have been contacted by a deity, or he may have a brain lesion.)

In keeping with that quote, Wolfe’s narrators are often not (wholly) deliberately unreliable. They tend simply to not know as much as they suppose—or as much as you might ordinarily want your narrator to know. This ignorance of the limits of their knowledge can lead to narratorial assertions that to the reader plainly cannot be true, but to the narrator obviously must be. Alternatively, the narrators are often mystified or confused by events in the story. Sometimes they merely report the cause of their confusion then throw up their hands; sometimes, though, they try to explain what has happened. In these cases, they are frequently wrong: They may accurately note the facts that have occurred while missing the meaning of those facts, or they may strenuously attempt to divine an ultimately unconvincing interpretation of the facts. Wolfe plays some of these miscues for comedy, but some of them are crucially dramatic, and one at least is the engine for an entire series of books.

The in-story narrators are not the only avenues Wolfe uses to introduce uncertainty; even in his third-person work, the narration often tracks close to one or more characters, without the kind of distance between narrator and narrated that is necessary for an omniscient perspective. Indeed, at explanatory or interpretive moments, Wolfe often exercises the third-person narrative prerogative of diving into a character’s thoughts; the narrating voice in fact doesn’t explain at all, ceding its authority instead to that character and temporarily adopting a first-person point of view—with all the same reliability risks outlined before.

But none of this has yet touched on the subject I want to wrestle with, which is the technique (the writerly craft, that is, not the specific operations) of this unreliable narration. Brace yourselves for the simile I’m about to lay on you:

It’s as if the substance of one of these unreliably narrated works—the characters, the setting, the plot, etc.—is a magnificent cubic sculpture, baroquely burrowed through, complex with caverns and crystalline with combs. The narration is then a polished brass facing affixed to the surfaces of the cube. When you first see the sculpture, the brass is all you observe. It’s aesthetically self-consistent, pleasing, perforated here and there with curious gaps, but a finely made thing. Thanks to the spaces inside, the sculpture is only a little heavier than it looks. It makes satisfactory sense as an aesthetic object, but something about those punchouts haunts you. You keep coming back to the sculpture, turning it over in your hands, looking at it from different angles. Then one day you notice that, at this new angle, you can see through one of the perforations into the cube’s cathedral interior, and suddenly the whole sculpture makes a deeper and more awesome sense. Now that you know what angle to look from, the gaps in the surface all show chambers and structures in the heart of the cube that reveal an organization you only suspected before. You see details that were wholly concealed, and echoes you couldn’t have matched to each other; what seemed merely decorative now stands in prominent dialogue with other areas, and some region that occupied your attention now melts into a fuller pattern.

The trick here—and I use the word not to demean Wolfe’s accomplishment, but to emphasize its intentionality and createdness—is the writing of a narration that seems like a complete piece of art and yet still, perhaps almost subliminally, hints at a fuller conception that supersedes and frequently contradicts it. This isn’t quite unreliable narration, and it isn’t quite obfuscation; given the religious bent of much of Wolfe’s fiction (or, more properly, the religious interpretations that much of Wolfe’s fiction permits and sometimes encourages), it probably makes more sense to see in this tactic a palimpsest of the Book of Nature: careful observation and contemplation of the “natural” (that which is presented directly to the senses) leads to the revelation of what was hidden.

And I wish I came up with these interpretations earlier in the process of writing these posts, because it feels like there’s a lot more to say in that direction—but if I’m going to say it, it’s going to be in a different post. For now, Seacrest out. (Spooky: it’s like EROCK and Matt Roe know who I am…)

(I take it for granted: I’m gay, I’ve been to Cuba, I’ve worked in publishing, and I contact my Congresswomen. You tell me there’s no file with my names on it.)

I like an awful lot of music that’s conventionally called annoying—I was almost in tears of wonder the other day at the opening to Einstein on the Beach, “St. Andrew (This Battle Is in the Air)” is one of my favorite tracks on Icky Thump, and some of Messiaen is like the sun exploding in my face for joy—but the inanity of smooth-jazz and elevator-music backup singers popping out fragments of a chorus that nobody else is singing just drives me up a tree. I may be flexible nigh unto indiscrimination on many matters of art, but in this I am rigid: backup singing must back up singing.

Wow, after all that, I left out an important part: the second half of my argument. I said that the Eschaton section shows that the effort to separate one’s self from the world is doomed to fail, and gave as justification for that assertion the denouement of the scene. But that’s just plot interpretation; here’s how I back it up with the actual text.

The section starts out by distinguishing very carefully between map and territory. We get a couple pages specifying in great detail what real-world objects stand for what game-state concepts:

The black cotton E.T.A. armbands — for when God forbid there’s a death — designate the noncontemporary game-era’s atomic power plants, uranium-/plutonium-enrichment facilities, gaseous diffusion plants, breeder reactors, initiator factories, neutron-scattering-reflector labs, tritium-production reactor vessels, heavy-water plants, semiprivate shaped-charge concerns, linear accelerators, and the especially point-heavy Annular Fusion research laboratories in North Syracuse NNY and Presque Isle ME, Chyonskrg Kurgistan and Pliscu Romania, and possibly elsewhere. (323)

This section can be mildly tedious, since it feels like an extraneously obsessive level of detail on dry military simulation. (Personally, I find the almost compulsive thoroughness amusing.) But the point is to ground the map side of the game firmly in facts and details. It says, These are the real items (“[B]oys’ tennis socks or boys’ street-shoe socks or girls’ tennis socks with the little bunny-tail at the heel or girls’ tennis socks w/o the bunny-tail,” 324) on the real-world side of the game, and this is the algorithm that lets you interpret them in terms of the game. The focus on the symbolic relationship between real objects and their referents in the game underscores that those objects and their referents are not the same thing.

Then there’s about two pages told almost strictly from the territory. The development of the Triggering Situation is comical, and has kind of a plot line to it, but the text gives no way to know whether there are real-world analogues to the events described. Does “A single one-megaton SS10 evades antimissile missiles and detonates just over Provo UT, from which all communications abruptly cease” correspond to a child’s lobbing a tennis ball toward the AMNAT territory? The book doesn’t say. (I’m inclined to think not, mostly because in this section, we’d have been told so if it were so.) But the point is that this bit of the Eschaton section is heavily involved in expanding on the territory side of the game with (nearly) no reference to the map side; the two are highly differentiated.

Until the attacks start. If you read my previous post, you know that I leaned pretty heavily on an interpretation of Eschaton’s rules that characterizes attacks as the asymptote of the rules’ distinction between map and territory; beginning with the first explicit attack made by an Eschaton player, the text itself shows the breakdown of that distinction. What actually happens is that Evan Ingersoll is lobbing old tennis balls at socks placed on a particular part of the tennis court. What that represents is an alliance of Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Syria firing 5-megaton warheads at missile silos operated by the Soviet Union in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. But what we’re told is, “IRLIBSYR’s Evan Ingersoll starts lobbing warheads at SOVWAR’s belt of Third-Wave reserve silos in the Kazakh” (327). Unless we read carefully, making sure to separate map references from territory references, it’s easy to miss the elision between the two. This kind of vacillating between map and territory within the same sentence occurs throughout the section—my favorite short example is “Lamont Chu is throwing up into the Indian Ocean” (341), but by far the best longer one is when Air Marshal Ann Kittenplan finally loses it:

Kittenplan shakes Chu’s arm loose and darts over and extracts a warhead from SOVWAR’s portable stockpile and shouts out that well OK then if players can be targets then in that case: and she fires a real screamer at Ingersoll’s head, which Ingersoll barely blocks with his Rossignol and shrieks that Kittenplan can’t launch anything at anything because she’s been vaporized by a 5-megaton contact-burst. Kittenplan tells Ingersoll to write his congressman about it. . . . (339)

Look at all that: Kittenplan (map/territory) extracts (map) a warhead (territory) from SOVWAR’s (territory) portable (map) stockpile (territory) and says if players (map/territory) can be targets (territory) then in that case: and she fires a real screamer (map) at Ingersoll’s head (map/territory), which Ingersoll blocks with his Rossignol (map/territory), saying she’s been vaporized by a 5-megaton contact-blast (territory). So she tells him to write his congressman (not map or territory, actually, but a map-context reference to the government structures that the players represent for the territory; even funnier).

The text consistently undercuts the distinction between map and territory, in exactly the way that gets Pemulis so worked up. And that’s the textual support for the argument I made (or intended to make) in my previous post: The section begins with a rigorous separation between them, but lapses into a narrative confusion of the two that mirrors the plot-level collapse, so that we have both plot and text illustrating the untenability of the distinction.