Category: Literature

I’m having trouble not creating a ruckus while reading Twisted Toyfair Theatre’s Seder Masochism, a touching story of the Fantastic Four’s Ben Grimm—better known as the Thing—discovering his Jewish roots. Amazing costuming job on the various action figures, and hysterical storyline. (Courtesy BoingBoing.)

Boing Boing: Andre Norton, RIP. Sad to see a talented writer pass, though she did have a long and productive career (even if I can’t for the life of me pick out the books from that list which I avidly devoured as a preteen). Pause a moment and remember Alice Mary Norton (who in writing for a male dominated audience decided to adopt a male pseudonym).

Tony Pierce: bookshelf meme. Normally I don’t play these games, but I can’t resist one that allows me to plug low-tech word distribution mechanisms like books. Instructions: ”Copy the list from the last person in the chain, delete the names of the authors you don’t have on your home library shelves and replace them with names of authors you do have. Bold the replacements.”

The list, as received from Tony and updated by me:

1. Charles Bukowski
2. Umberto Eco
3. William Gibson
4. J.R.R. Tolkien
5. Mark Twain
6. James Joyce
7. Anne Sexton
8. Doc Searls
9. William Shakespeare
10. George Herriman

It’s been hard to write this one. Will Eisner was such a living legend of the comics field for so long that it’s hard to admit he’s really gone. Especially when unimaginative, fourth-rate artists continue to haunt the pages after his departure. When will we ever see his like again?

Best eulogy: Michael Barrier: Will Eisner: Moved by the Spirit. Best celebrity eulogy: Neil Gaiman. Best obituary: New York Times. Best retrospective of Eisner’s work: his own site.

Wired News: Inside the Mac Revolution. Andy Hertzfeld has taken his great site, Folklore.org, which collected stories from the early days of Apple and the Mac, and published Revolution in the Valley: the Insanely Great Story of How the Mac was Made. Looks cool, even if I have read a lot of it before…

New York Times: A New Forum (Blogging) Inspires the Old (Books). The article name-checks all the usual suspects, including Salam Pax, Jessica Cutler, Ana Marie Cox, Belle de Jour, Real Live Preacher, Julie Powell, and Elizabeth Spiers, but misses Tony Pierce (though he did get featured on Screen Savers). The interesting thing is that bloggers may be more interesting to publishers not because their everyday writing is readily accessible for judging but because they come with a built-in audience. So much for the art of literature.

While looking for cover art for my books in Delicious Library, I found this site dedicated to Roy Kuhlman, the graphic designer responsible for those unforgettable covers for the Grove Press and Evergreen paperback lines. As part of a larger site on Grove Press, J. A. Lee has collected scans of 45 different Kuhlman covers, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous and back to the sublime again.

Between Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison and The Day After (which my host is currently watching and I’m failing to avoid), I really need to find something cheerier. Maybe some Joy Division.

—About The Day After. Judging from the IMDB message boards, the kids who didn’t grow up with the Cold War think the movie is pretty hokey. I’d agree with that, watching it again with the benefit of 21 years of better special effects and the end of the Soviet Union. But I also remember that I watched it at the age of 10 or 11. And rode the bus to school with the kids from my neighborhood, who were normally a pretty reprehensible bunch of cut-ups (and some actual delinquents), but on that day everyone was absolutely quiet. Kids talked quietly to each other in their seats. My neighbor from across the street, who was known to beat me up from time to time, talked to me and quoted the Einstein saying that appeared in the movie: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Three years later I was still periodically being jolted awake with dreams that the bombs had fallen.

As for today, I’m grateful we no longer face the spectre of imminent annihilation (though I don’t think the alternative of lots of small scale terrorist attacks is much better). I feel fortunate to have lived through the 90s, during which it seemed for a time, prior to September 11, 2001 anyway, that we could think about war and peace on a human scale again, free of the shadow of the Cold War. I think this is part of what is at the root of my opposition to the restriction of our liberties, the reckless headlong plunge toward war in the Middle East, the growing cloud of suspicion (which has gotten so bad that a dark-skinned photography student can be singled out as a possible terrorist for taking photos of one of Seattle’s most notable tourist attractions) of our fellow man: that I have tasted freedom from fear in my lifetime and do not want to surrender to fear once more.

Here Bonhoeffer points the way, in his essay “After Ten Years,” written in 1943 during his imprisonment. Two things he wrote in this essay, after being denied the freedom to publish, to preach, to teach, and ultimately to leave his cell, stick with me in some quiet way:

Surely there has never been a generation in the course of human history with so little ground under its feet as our own. Every conceivable alternative seems equally intolerable. We try to escape from the present by looking entirely to the past or the future for our inspiration, and yet, without indulging in fanciful dreams, we are able to wait for the success of our cause in quietness and confidence. It may be however that the responsible, thinking people of earlier generations who stood at a turning-point of history felt just as we do, for the very reason that something new was being born which was not discernible in the alternatives of the present. …

Optimism: It is more prudent to be a pessimist. It is an insurance against disappointment, and no one can say “I told you so,” which is how the prudent condemns the optimist. The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned; it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy. Of course there is a foolish, cowardly kind of optimism which is rightly condemned. But the optimism which is will for the future should never be despised, even if it is proved wrong a hundred times. … To-morrow may be the day of judgment. If it is, we shall gladly give up working for a better future, but not before.

Salon: The man who invented the future. Interview with Alan Moore, writer of many “comic book” dystopias, on the odd resonances between many of his works and the current War on Terror. While normally people like to name-check The Watchmen in this context, here the interviewer (Scott Thill) accurately checks the parallels with V for Vendetta:

[Moore]: Fascism is like a hydra — you can cut off its head in the Germany of the ’30s and ’40s, but it’ll still turn up on your back doorstep in a slightly altered guise. … “V for Vendetta” has had an annoying way of coming true ever since I wrote it in the early ’80s. Back then, I wanted something to communicate the idea of a police state quickly and efficiently, so I thought of the novel fascist idea of monitor cameras on every street corner. And the book was, of course, set in the future of 1997. But by that year — and I don’t know if Tony Blair and Jack Straw were big fans, but evidently they thought its design for future Britain was a really good one — we had cameras on every street corner along the length and breadth of the country.

(Aside: I had a ridiculously large comic collection in middle and high school—one of the dubious perks of working at a comic store was not having to go very far to spend one’s paycheck—and V for Vendetta was one of the few works I kept when the rest of the collection was sold wholesale. I would love to say that I was making the connections at a young age, but I doubt I went further with it than the general affinity that the intellectual kid who gets beaten up at the bus stop feels with victims of real oppression, and the gratitude that that same kid feels to those who dramatize the exile that they feel inside. That’s not to say that I wasn’t politically conscious, just that I didn’t always go out of my way to get really informed beyond what I saw and reacted to in the news magazines. Hopefully I’ve learned a few things since then.)

I always felt that, Moore’s vision of the dystopia aside, that his character’s reaction to it—the “vendetta” of the book’s title—was profoundly unsatisfying when you got right down to it. I wonder whether this is a reflection of the sense I have that the book is trapped in British history. The first volume opens with echoes of Guy Fawkes, who is today celebrated for failing to change the order of the world in his attempt to bomb Parliament, and V’s methods don’t really move past that (except directly to murder). There’s no vision for change beyond the ending of the current order and the placing of the people’s fate in their own hands. I guess that Moore’s point was that it should end there, that solving the problems needs to be done by the people rather than by some narrator or revolutionary.

(Link via BoingBoing. More writing and analysis on the work at the V for Vendetta shrine and the annotations by Madelyn Boudreaux.)

Today is the 100th anniversary of the events in James Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses. The novel, set on June 16, 1904, has been celebrated on that date since its 1922 publication with public readings and other celebrations.

Today’s celebrations, tinged though they are with the heavy handed legal threats of Joyce’s heirs toward “unauthorized public performances,” include an enormous volume of posts around the blogosphere and media. In no particular order:

• New York Times editorial: Bloomsday, 1904. Tilting against those who would decry the book for being elitist: “there is really no less elitist novel in the English language. Its stuff is the common life of man, woman and child. You take what you can, loping over the smooth spots and pulling up short when you need to. Dedalus may indulge in Latinate fancy, and Joyce may revel in literary mimicry. But the real sound of this novel is the sound of the street a century ago: the noise of centuries of streets echoing over the stones.”
• New York Times Book Review: Bloomsday, Bloody Bloomsday. John Banville spends a page online talking about his youthful efforts to get his hands on a copy of the book, and his consumption of critical response in lieu of the actual tome. Nice anecdote about the first Bloomsday, fifty years ago, which apparently ended after a scuffle between the organizer and a poet and devolved into inebriation.
• Village Voice: Happy Bloomsday! The writer points out that there is more than a little of the pagan ritual in the observance of the day, complete with “deep feeling, props, costumes, and food.”
• Bookslut points out that Slate’s weeklong Ulysses discussion has no Irish authors, and only one participating author so far.
• Bookslut also points to the BBC’s Cliff Notes to the Cliff Notes to Ulysses, so you too can sound like you know what you’re talking about. Amusing with this article to read the Joyce-bashing in the comments thread. These are probably the same bunch of people who think opera is to be endured. Nice comeback by Stephen Fry, though.
• BBC: Celebrations mark Joyce anniversary. Indicates that, contrary to earlier reports, there will be public readings on the streets of Dublin of the work.
• Seattle Times: Bloomsday’s 100th celebrated in print and with a Seattle reading. The Seattle reading will be at UW, a little bit out of my way and a little out of the spirit of the celebrations.
• My own Bloomsday participation, unless I can find an Eastside pub where there is a reading: an excerpt from the Wandering Rocks chapter.
• Tom Harpel suggests that at least one other kindred spirit will be at our local Redmond Irish pub, the Celtic Bayou.
• Ben Hammersley posts an excerpt of the conclusion of the novel, and points to a new page-a-day Ulysses RSS feed, courtesy Jason White. Holy copyright violations!

Which sets me to a goal for next year, as I fear it’s too late for this one; if I can get a few hundred people to post a page or two of the text to their blog, we could have a virtual Bloomsday reading. Any takers?

Ed Cone: Bless His Heart, or How to Speak Like a Native. The political blogger hits some high points of North Carolina dialect, though I will say that “hey” as a greeting is not isolated to North Carolina—I remember it widespread in Virginia (southeastern, Charlottesville and Northern) and it’s equally pervasive in Redmond, Washington. I do have to give him points for calling out other regionalisms, including “people” for family, “tea” meaning sweet iced tea, “might could” as previously discussed here, “like to,” and of course “bless his heart.” And my wife still makes fun of me when I tell her to “mash down on” a button on the remote, meaning to hold it longer than a quick press.

Courtesy Doc Searls.

It’s weird to see A Wrinkle In Time as a kid’s Disney TV movie. Good weird, some of the time. But the transformation to the screen makes even the mean stuff of the book, the scenes on Camazotz (which used to give me nightmares as a kid) look cheap and somehow funny.

Madeleine L’Engle agrees:

NEWSWEEK: So you’ve seen the movie?
Madeleine L’Engle: I’ve glimpsed it.

And did it meet expectations?
Oh, yes. I expected it to be bad, and it is.

But for all that, it’s actually not awful. Watching it recalls the power of the book, the tremendous contrast between family and awful hate, the fierce cynicism of IT and its servants and the aching love of family no matter how fragile.

Thom Gunn, British writer transplanted to San Francisco, formalist poet of highly informal topics, is dead. New York Times, SF Chronicle obituaries. Neither captures the full impact of the man and his poetry.

As a young soon-to-be-ex-poet in 1992, I was blown away by The Man With Night Sweats. Such highly formal structure (rhymes, even), on such highly personal subjects. Love, AIDS, mature relationships, all through a lens I had never experienced before (at that point in my life, I didn’t know that I knew gay people), through such highly disciplined language that I didn’t understand it for years. But I already knew it trumped whatever meager potential for highly distilled language I had in me.

The long awaited day arrived yesterday, while I was at work. I came home to a rectangular package from Fantagraphics. The first volume of the Complete Peanuts had arrived at last. More thoughts on this joy later, but let me just say that having a hardback Peanuts collection is, well, like a warm puppy. And it has an index!!!!

At various times in the past I’ve written about my fascination with the work of Joseph Cornell and my experiences with his works. Last night I finished the big collection of his work, Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay…Eterniday, and as always came away both inspired and humbled by the work.

And saddened. William Gibson wrote in Count Zero that the Cornell-manque boxes encountered by the protagonist evoked “impossible distances, loss and yearning,” and Gibson wrote that he sensed autism behind Cornell’s obsessive junk-shop searchings.

I think the truth is closer than that. Cornell’s series of parrots caged in decaying European hotels rings sad when you know he spent his entire adult life in his house in Queens, taking care of his mother and brother. Imprisoned? By choice, if so. But still, looking at the empty bird cage and cut wire of Toward the Blue Peninsula, with its open window in the back of the box, one wishes that Cornell, too, had let himself fly the coop.