The fan-favorite, canonically 5'3" mutant called Wolverine has been next in line for The Insomniac Treatment for a while, having been announced in September of '21, a year I will admit to not remembering entirely. As it approaches, we've been buffeted by new video clips of Wolverine's clothing being deliciously flensed just this side of mutant homoerotica, and a picture of his face that makes him look like an escapee from Roblox.

There was a game I remember playing on the Dreamcast where you lost your clothes as they were punched and kicked off, I think I remember the name but I don't want to look it up because it's so perfect in my mind. It was like a battle damage He-Man situation but it also had a strip-tease angle I don't recall being emphasized in the children's toy.

When we were talking about whether Emily Wilson would be considered Based or perhaps Debased for her position on Nolan's Odyssey, she had not yet entered the code, turned both keys, and launched her mortal salvo from The London Review of Books. There's a case to be made that these vectors were fitted with fitted with searing Earthcrusher warheads, payloads of dubious ethical standing whose legality is - in a word - illegal.

I hadn't read her translation, so I always felt a little outside the conversation, but the froth about her use of the word complicated was such that she felt compelled to discuss it plainly. Even in my comparatively dumb and intentionally useless work, whose purpose is to hand-make, age, and then serve a kind of artisinal idiocy, a surprising amount of our time is choosing which number is funniest or swapping words in and out the way an optometrist might swap lenses at your exam. What I extracted from her essay is that she has a sense of humor about all this stuff. She'd have to. Also, as a fellow word-juggler I kinda liked her reasoning on it.

This riposte of hers, no doubt a little inspired by being called the inspiration for the film, disembowels Christopher Nolan. I would never spoil it, it really needs to be read. But I also like it because it refuses to engage with culture and its manufacture like a team sport, where a work's quality is a function of its polarity, whose political aims it can be made to serve. It is such a pleasure to hear truth spoken - the free speech of an individual - even if just for a little while.

(CW)TB out.