For the last couple weeks, I was guestblogging on Boing Boing, which was awesome and terrific and great. Thank you so much to Xeni for inviting me, and thank you to Cory, Pesco, and Mark for allowing me to join in the fun. It was my second time, and it really is such a great time. When you do it, you find out how free and loose and interesting the entire process is, and for anyone who spends a large amount of their time obeying rules and is perhaps someone who is more inclined towards breaking rules than bowing to them, to be set free is truly a wonderful thing.
During my tenure there, I posted about the Brock Lesnar vs. Frank Mir fight. I had been pretty excited about the fight since it was announced lo' I don't know how long ago. I take a keen but casual interest in MMA. Why? I don't know. I'm sure lots of people have lots of ideas about how it's not really a sport, and it's like the WWE, and it's nothing but glorified bar fighting or some such thing. In my opinion, whatever that's worth, it isn't. I can see how it would appear to be that way from the outside, but those characterizations simply aren't true. I think it's compelling and brutal and sort of, well, beautiful ugly. If you know what I mean by that, you get it. If you don't, you don't.
I've been interested in Lesnar for some time now, for a few different reasons. He's part man and part cartoon. He's not just big, he's huge. He's a freak, of sorts. I identify with that. I'm 6'1", and when I was a kid, I would go to the doctor, and the doctor would hold up a chart that showed where all the other kids were in terms of height, and then to show me where I fit in, the doctor would point at a space above the page. Sometimes, freaks of nature are real.
I shifted a character in my novel-in-progress to approximate him. And I was really looking forward to the fight. And I was pretty interested in seeing Mir getting his face pounded in after all the smack he had been talking. The fight may have not been the greatest fight ever--Lesnar's main technique seemed to amount to smooshing Mir--but it wasn't bad. In case you missed it, Lesnar won.
When I posted on Boing Boing about it, I was surprised by the comments. People were disgusted by it: by the sport, by the photo, by the spectacle. At one point, someone referred to me as "scum." Many asserted that this was not a wonderful thing. This one came the closest as to why I posted it:
Maybe Susannah was trying for a meta reference to the opposite of pr0n? Instead of two (or more) people trying to explore each other's bodies, MMA is two people trying their best to deconstruct each others bodies. Both can use the adjective pounding to equal effect as well...Mostly, it was about the photograph. It is a brilliant photograph that tells the story of the fight, what happens when you say one thing and another happens in the ring, what goes down when you stop talking and something else takes over.
