Abe's Book Blog

Review: Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel

2010-12-14T22:13:00.001-08:00

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This is a memoir, a story of the author's life focusing on her childhood in a quiet Midwest town, living in a large, ornately-decorated Gothic revival house with her high school teacher parents and a pair (?) of brothers... Just add Bechdel to the long list of modern authors whose last names I can't pronounce. I guess I can just call her Alison, or "Al," or "Butch".

To me this book was little more than a long line of overly ornate descriptions, a bit of oddly-misplaced literary stuffiness, and, above all else, excruciatingly dragged out and overdone self analysis. Why must everything, I asked myself, from Al's childhood be analyzed through the lens of her thirty-something college-educated dykedom? That she is gay and that her father turned out to be gay as well does not strike me as the perfect opportunity for garish overstretched comparisons. And that she has read so much does not give her an excuse for stretching those comparisons really thin, to relate her life to many books of our posterity.

At some point, Alison and her brothers are taken to some construction site and given a tour. On the wall of one of the temporary huts she sees some pornography, and, feeling uncomfortable, whispers to her brother to call her Albert and treat her like a boy. What follows is an honest to goodness line from the story: "My brother ignored me, but looking back, my stratagem strikes me as a precocious feat of Proustian transposition -- not to mention a tidy melding of Proust's real Albert and his fictional Albertine." I doubled over laughing like the bitch that I am.

The story is dominated by her father, closeted of course, an OCD-type, detached and disinterested. He had a love for the ornate -- and he loved his house, he could "spin trash into gold" (and of course he gets compared to Daedalus more than once). Alison stresses how she developed a liking for the utilitarian as a result, as a kind of youth in rebellion -- unfortunately, the OCD rubbed off completely intact, and if anything, this love for the utilitarian just makes things worse.

Alison reminds me of someone: this woman who lives at the end of my street, who has sharp features, glasses, and a never-ending scowl on her face. She and her significant other, a soggy old man who seems almost friendly next to her, have spent probably thousands of hours tending to their pride and joy, their little postage stamp of a lawn. They have probably spent good money on it, too: they have had the grass professionally replaced three times (and it still looks like shit, patchy and brown). Recently (the middle of winter, I remind you) while walking the dogs, my sister had the great misfortune of walking across their tree lawn while crossing the street. The curtain snapped open and that woman, as if alerted by some sort of "neurotic Spidey Senses," snarled out at us. Luckily, I called my sister back and she stepped back into the street just in time. Flushed with triumph, I had the cheek to smile and wave. She closed the curtain shortly after. People around here have called the police for less.

Not to count out the entire legion of short-haired, glasses-wearing women out there. Some of the best people I've known have had almost no hair, and making fun of four-eyes is not polite. But Alison... to me, her mind is too narrowly fixed, and her ideas, while occasionally encouragingly relevant and on the mark (google "The Bechdel Test"), are too heavily painted by her imperfect use of words. For me they are also masked, concealed behind their creator's body and mind, which I simply cannot traverse, or even... ahem, penetrate. And so, for once it seems best to me to simply "agree to disagree" with this Alison Bechdel character (assuming she can swallow the cliche, of course :D).

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War Loses Its Romance

2010-12-10T08:21:00.000-08:00

I'm sure it was worth it to carve every last letter into that block of stone, sitting in the Veterans Memorial outside the Lackawanna County Courthouse in Scranton, Pennsylvania. It is a quotation from Colonel John S. Mosby, famed Confederate cavalry commander, and it tells, in some way, the same sad story I've already been over in this blog when I took a look at "Dulce et Decorum Est", a poem by the British poet Wilfred Owen. But Mosby, in his way as I said, his coarse and bumbling American way, drives home the same ideals. The inscription is apparently called "War Loses Its Romance" and if all future diggers had to go on for a picture of the American Civil War was this inscription... well, they'd have a warped, insanely simplified view, as usual.

Happys Thanksgivings

2010-11-25T10:02:00.000-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! (And PS... do you have any idea how long it took for me to make this costume?)

Being There

2010-11-20T08:14:00.000-08:00

Everything has a deep significance to me now - allegorical insight. Probably because I've been reading Being There, a short little novel by, uh, Jerzy Kosinski on which the film was based (pretty closely). I always liked the movie, at least as long as I've seen it. And the book makes me write in short, expressive sentences.

And, before you ask, no! "Chauncey Gardiner" is not a genius. He's not anything at all, except a blank piece of paper. I have had to constantly remind myself of that - it's very enticing - and I have the luxury of dramatic irony. Others, I suppose, have to be careful not to read too into it - the book, I mean. But the book itself, to me, is... well, it's not a blank piece of paper - I check and keep on checking, just to be sure - but it is also not some big monstrous allegory who only shows its tip above the waterline. It is a fun, quirky little story with just about as much depth and meaning as a blank piece of paper.

I mean, sure, it was written by somebody, and that somebody had some idea of how he wanted things to go, what he thought of the tale as a whole. And I suppose some "meaning" does peak through. For example, I have placed the name "Chauncey Gardiner" in quotation marks, because that's just what some people call him, not his real name. His real name, according to the narrator, is Chancy - because, the narrator says, his whole existence, even birth, was a matter of chance. But something strikes me as allegorical about the name - I mean, he was struck by a limousine a few minutes after leaving his garden for the first time. He was taken in by a wealthy couple and widely lauded, and had "every man's fantasy" thrown at him (not bad for a swollen calf).

Yeah, yeah... it's all blind chance, but something still scares me about him. He gardened and watched TV, and later tapped into that, the only experiences he had, to figure a place for himself in his world. When EE wants to get frisky he'd rather watch TV (therefore he is not human).

And the "Old Man"... the nearly anonymous wealthy gentleman who raised "Chancy" from an early age... I kinda hate him too. Why did he create this monster, this scarily innocent, entirely dependent creature and then release it onto the world? Why, if I didn't know better, I'd call the Old Man the modern Frankenstein, and "Chance" the Post-modern Prometheus.

The book is very similar to the movie, at least in content, but where I was inclined to laugh at the movie, at the characters' over valuing of "Chauncey's" simple phrases and the Forrest Gump-like "being there" coincidences, somehow for me the book is much more somber. Maybe it is for the simple reason of past acquaintance - I already know the setup and the punch line. Maybe it's literary pretensions, or its sparse writing - maybe it's all the essays I know exist about it. At any rate, people have found an awful lot to believe in here, apparently - even high-end scholars who say they know what they're talking about.

Well, now, I never went too far in my schooling, and so far, have resisted as best I could the temptation to look too deeply, into life and this book. We humans probe everything - many of us have a tendency to over think things. Take, for example, my dachshund Tobey - my family and I have invented an entire mythology around his past life, and his current trials in preschool. We all sometimes speak in his voice - high squeaky, maybe innocent voice - in which "he" cusses and swears and details his homosexual relations with our other dog, a chow chow named Sparky. He's the only of our pets with a real, set in stone personality and voice, and we all have strong attachment to him. He means so much to us, yet he is just a dog! He has never done any of those things.

I leave you now with a picture of Sarah, a woman who, like Chancy, was once seriously considered as a candidate for Vice President. In this painting she has a stack of pancakes on her head.

I return and tame the shrew

2010-11-16T07:48:00.000-08:00

After nearly a month without a posting, I'm back with one new post and plenty of ideas...

I have been jolted from my word-sleep by a middle-of-the-road community college production of The Taming of the Shrew. I first read the play, by Mr. R. Shakespeare a couple of months ago, in September. Then, I didn't have none too high opinions of it all. It struck me as the same old Battle of the Sexes - *yawn* - only with a strong misogynistic twist, courtesy of the times or Shakespeare himself, or whatever. I only read it so I could have something to disagree with when a feminist came calling with her obviously correct ideas about the inherent sexism of the play. My figuring was: "She may be right, but I'll be damned if she ever knows."

It's the same kind of thinking, I think, that runs through Petruchio's mind every time he picks up Kate and hauls her off to his house. (The audition fliers of every production of Taming of the Shrew ought to always say "Petruchio: All candidates must be able to fireman's carry a 150 pound woman for at least 300 yards.") In our production it was the typical fiery and diminutive Kate vs the typically tall and timber Petruchio. In the "Battle of the Sexes" here Kate puts up one hell of a fight, but ends with her hands underneath her husband's boot - willingly! of all things...

Truth be told it was this awful breaking of Kate's spirit, implied so well by the title, that initially gave an unpleasant rumbling in my tummy. And the unpleasantness comes to a head right at the end, when Kate gives her infamous speech. For a long time, naturally, the speech was given in total honesty (by a man); then, somewhere along the line, someone decided to deliver it with a wink and a nod. "She's only joking, everyone," says the director -- and Mr. Shakespeare is far too dead to say otherwise. In our production, however, the vitriolic speech is merely glazed over and the whole darn controversy along with it.

This production had nothing of the political or contentious about it. It featured instead lots of pelvic thrusting and silly sound effects. There was this girl who spent most of her time at the back of the stage, behind a cart with a variety of noise-makers sitting on it. It was her job to hit a drum every time an actor pretended to strike another actor, to honk a horn every time an actor sensually squeezed at the air in front of him. The one set of lines she had she delivered in an unsurprising Frankenstein fashion.

The performance may have overused the sound effects, especially the comic horn. Even seemingly innocuous phrases are knocked down to the level of groundling humor by the likes of the comic horn. "The reward is in the doing." (honk honk) and "The Universe is very, very big." (honk honk). I am not, nor will I ever be, inherently against the naughty sound effect or pelvic thrusting. Even a professional performance of Othello I saw fairly recently made ample use of the latter. And it makes sense: many, these days are inclined to call every Shakespeare play a "mouldy tale" as Ben Jonson did to Pericles, and sound effects act as a cheap way of spicing up the moldier bits.

Really, how much chocolate can you eat before your teeth begin to rot? Still, our group was rolling, most of the time. It only makes sense: we are all long-time casual fans of Monty Python, our teeth are yellow and crooked, and we still thoroughly subscribe to the idea that anything said in a British accent is just that much funnier. I'm sure if the Globe was still around today we'd be packed into the ground floor, throwing wisecracks and vegetables at the stage. As it is, the seating arrangements were "anywhere but the front row," and as for the vegetables... my girlfriend snuck in some hummus from the charity refreshment table.

There the atmosphere was soft and humorous, a gentle no-excuses take on William Shakespeare, and a great way to spend $10 and an evening. And, although what we took in that evening was hardly William Shakespeare, setting aside for now discussion of the play itself, this performance has so impressed itself upon me that "Taming of the Shrew" now has a pretty gold star resting next to it in the dictionary of my mind...

Now here's to another long ride on the saddle -- or at least another month!

Review: Jacob the Baker, by Noah benShea

2010-10-20T21:30:00.000-07:00

The Jacob in the title is a Jewish man (we know little else about him) and his title, "the baker," is apparently a sign of his low station in life. You are sad already, I can see, but don't be. Jacob is the kind with a body down low but a head up high, way in the clouds with his hopes for what's to come. He is the kind of man who revels in his low station, the sort of baker who doesn't wipe the flour off his clothes after a long day of work.

In other words, Jacob is wise. Accordingly he often has wise thoughts and writes them down on little sheets of paper, snippets of wisdom, proverbs mostly -- things like "It is the silence between the notes that makes the music" and "Each of us is the source of the other's river." The subtitle was right... "Gentle Wisdom For a Complicated World." . Yes, he labors along well in peaceful anonymity until one day... One of his slips of paper finds its way into a loaf of bread, and the woman who buys the loaf finds the note and comes back to the shop, asking for more. So Jacob, accidentally and reluctantly of course, becomes a kind of tzadik for his town, a wise and holy man who is sought after by those who have questions.

And, by God, does he have answers! He speaks almost exclusively in proverbs and has an answer for everything, even as he professes that he does not. He has an answer, I say, but of course it's not the one anyone wants to hear. It is something much more tangled and obscure. I wonder if any of his "wisdom" ever did any of the characters any good... I can't tell, of course, since every one of the dozens of little stories in this slim volume goes the same way: a person comes to Jacob with a problem or a question, and then Jacob answers it in his way, always putting in the last words, often ending with the apparent moral of the story. I hope they got their answer, but I have my doubts and my doubts say they may well have been better off with a fortune cookie.

benShea's website proclaims, "Noah benShea is one of North America’s most respected and popular poet-philosophers, and International Best-Selling author." A Wikipedia search returned only, "Did you mean Noah Bennet?" On his website you can buy "Noah Bears," teddy bears with a twist -- bears that wear t-shirts which say things like “Handmade by God.”(©) and "Prayer is a path where there is none." (©) And they have another little surprise: squeeze the button on their hand and then sit back to listen to about twenty seconds of wisdom, rendered in benShea's own low, gravelly voice. There are ten designs, $30.95 each. And please, "Remember, you make a difference and sometimes a bear does too!"

On benShea's Facebook "wall" a person calling himself Young Lee wrote...

I read Jacob the baker after i woke up from nightmare that I got sentenced from gods angel that I will be goin to hell And randomly pickd up the Jacob the baker in den which Was belong to my mother. Your book made me look my life again thanks.
Ps. I have question to Jacob the baker "will god listen to our every prayer we give?"

I wonder if there's special place for wisdom peddlers in Heaven -- a large room, I imagine, where thousands of smooth-talkers in snappy outfits speak only in proverbs, where they could talk about the "meaning of life" till eternity... maybe there is such a place, and maybe its name is Hell.

"Love's Young Dream" by Roddy Lumsden

2010-10-15T16:11:00.000-07:00

In the past few months I've been tumbling through a lot of poetry, both on my own and with the guidance of online readers, but this poem is the first and only to knock me down -- to bring me back three times to listen to it again. It was love. It still is. Young love is the best, I hear, and though I still hold out for 65-year-old love too, I have no choice at this point but to agree with the common sentiment.

The poem is called "Love's Young Dream" and it is here read by a man who calls himself simply SpokenVerse, a prolific and fairly popular Youtuber. The poet is Roddy Lumsden, a modernday Scotsman who... well, one gets the feeling he may have knocked on fame's door at one point -- been featured in a few "Up and Coming" lists in the eighties and nineties -- but has since then taken a misturn into that vilest of purgatories, relative obscurity. I don't know the reason, of course -- fame is fickle, etc., etc. -- but from where I stand I can say this: That's a damn shame. From what little I know, he is a man capable of crafting clever and well-constructed poetry. Many of his best poems seem to have a solid, even high-born concept behind them, which Lumsden manages to pull off with what I humbly call decent poetic mechanics.

In "Love's Young Dream" the theme is cliches, those "trite or overused expressions," those ever-scorned foundation stones of the English and perhaps every language. The narrator is in love with -- or, in our callously modern tongue, has a thing for -- a girl. A girl about whom we know very little, except that she is a "snow ball's chance in hell," a long shot, way out of his league. For all we know she could be Debbie Harry, but the important thing is he asks her out and she shows up... "And there with her giving me the wink,/The Jewish pope, the constipated bear." Throughout the narrator speaks almost exclusively in cliches -- and he is acutely conscious of it. So he ends the poem with that cute little number just above... Always people are asking "Is the pope Catholic?" and "Does a bear shit in the woods?" and in this case anyways, the answer is "No! Absolutely not."

In the comments section of the video (click on the video up there to visit its Youtube page and then scroll down to see the comments) a person calling himself Roddy Lumsden had this to say: "Nice to know some like this poem - I barely (bearly?) recall writing it - it came fast and was written in Edinburgh, probably in 1996. Not a poem I still have any attachment too, though witty in its way." He also corrects a mistake by the reader: "Also, it's six-one-fives, not six-fifteens - which is needed for the rhyme scheme." So that clears that up, though what "six-one-fives" -- and "gio" for that matter -- are I can't even imagine. Suffice to say, I guess, that one usually creases the first and splashes on the second.

Dulce et Decorum Est... part 2

2010-10-13T20:09:00.000-07:00

Today I have for you, friends, only a video, a clip from a BBC documentary on Wilfred Owen. Mr. Gray-haired Announcer Guy says a few words and then gets to reciting the poem "Dulce et Decorum Est," which I wrote about on Monday... I was very surprised indeed to learn that Owen is "the most studied poet in England -- after Shakespeare (after all)." He's one of those writers, I guess, who gets shoved down the throats of high school kids, generation after generation. We have those too, here in America. To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, Brave New World... I take a kind of foolish pride from the fact that I was assigned all of these books and never read any of them to completion. (Holden Caulfield don't got nothing on me.)

But now Wilfred Owen is a writer I feel I can get behind. A little dark and gloomy "War is Hell" poetry can do wonders for army recruitment -- in the correct direction, of course. Poetry, in this case, may very well have made a difference -- pounded some good sense into the heads of at least a handful of kids. It's great, but most of the people in the comments section of this Youtube video seem hung up on nothing more than Owen's homosexuality...

Dulce et Decorum Est...

2010-10-11T07:57:00.000-07:00

I have recently been taken in by this poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" by the WWI English poet Wilfred Owen:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

It is apparently one of Owen's most famous, one of the most famous poems of the war. It is the story of a group of soldiers who are headed back to camp after a day of fighting when, suddenly... "Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!" There is "an ecstasy of fumbling" as Owen and the other soldiers hurry to put their gas masks on, but at least one man is too slow and Owen has to watch the entire horrific death unfold. In the last stanza the poet addresses the reader directly, stating in a sense, "O, if only you knew..." In an effort to describe what the death must of have been like, the poet gives the sense of both drowning and burning, and it is a simple leap to put those two together. Imagine drowning in a lake of fire and you are well on your way to a typical conception of Hell, leading in this poem to the "cliche": Hell on Earth.

The last bit of the poem, "Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori" is Latin and comes from ode 3.2 (that is, Book 3, Poem 2) of the Imperial Roman poet Horace. Translated into fairly smooth and natural English, the line is rendered as, "It is sweet and proper to die for one's country." The line is so well-flowing and so deeply patriotic that it had prospered and found its way into fairly common use by the early twentieth century. (The rest of the poem, although it puts forth a fairly stirring depiction of the Roman-Parthian battlefield, is more dense and not quite so well remembered.)

The line, although used satirically in this poem, was primarily spoken with grim and earnest disposition. Owen Seaman, for example, (whose disposition, incidentally, may well have inspired A.A. Milne to create Eeyore, the gloomy donkey from Winnie the Pooh) stood whole-heartedly behind the phrase when he wrote his poem "Pro Patria." I am not sure of the exact date of this poem, or whether it came before or after "Dulce et Decorum Est," but clearly it was written during the war, by a man who was then too old to serve. This then brings an element of generational tension and brings to mind the old maxim -- something to the effect of "Old men make make the wars and young men have to fight in them."

To this day there are proud "military families" -- in England, in my own United States, everywhere -- who have history stretching to World War One and beyond, a long line of men (and now women) who imagine themselves marching cheerfully off to battle. "Pro patria mori" -- to die for one's country. The phrase does have a ring to it, but if we translate the Latin more literally... "Sweet and fitting it is to die for the fatherland." Suddenly, with more "foreign-sounding" syntax and the original meaning of the word patria, "fatherland," the phrase seems at least slightly more sinister; and, although I hate to say it, more like Nazi propaganda. Sure, this poem, on the surface, does not advance much beyond the single impression "War is Hell" but with my modern eye I see another aspect. I know that no major war has been fought using the principals of democracy, that "in order to preserve their freedom" young men and women must surrender their personal will at the boot camp doors. In short I see that War, in some sense at least, is fascism.

Review: On the Road, by Jack Kerouac

2010-10-08T21:51:00.000-07:00

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"

I know, it's so overused but for me, the above quote epitomizes On the Road; in a sense, it's the entire book. And it comes in Part 1 Section 1, so it's a great barometer. If you like it, boy are you in for a ride. (Why not get a tattoo?) Otherwise... "Oh boy... here we go..." That's what I said when I started this book; now, on the other side, my opinion still hasn't changed.

To read this book, one has to suffer through countless run-on sentences like the one above -- sentences that I'm sure many grade school English teachers would just love to mark up with red pen... And then there's the, uh, majesty of it all, a word I simply cannot apply to this book without a wink and a smile. Please, see William Shatner's dramatic reading of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" for similar laugh-inducing "wonder"... And then the reader will have to slog through the self importance, the dead seriousness that sits underneath the light-hearted frolicking of this book, a strong glimpse at the literary pretensions of its author... Most of all, get ready for absolutely no plot -- just driving, drinking and fucking.

Please, meet Jack Kerouac. Jack is a part of a little group, a nice gang of fellas who have a major hard-on for life. They like to "get their kicks," they're "mad," "wild" -- "beat," even. This group likes to gallivant about the US, subsisting primarily on alcohol and male-on-male romance -- despite repeated insisting to the contrary. "Sal" (Jack's in-book pseudonym, to my estimation an inexplicable, entirely useless addition)is always trying to get in with women, women who are principally described by the color of their hair. And he's always eating pie... real pie, the kind that apparently represents "the idealized comforts of a certain middle-class American domesticity." But to me, it's all a conspiracy: the women and the pie are there, sure, but they're squished in beside endless drinking, and endless all-night, all-male talking sessions.

Jack and his friends bounce around, off the walls and off the coasts of the country. They're all antsy motherfuckers; they can't sit still, as if some part of them, *ahem*, "burns, burns, burns." So they move -- by hitchhiking, bus, or private car -- from city to city, often spending just a few days in a city they traveled thousands of miles to get to. On the Road is apparently famed for its descriptions of certain towns and cities -- Lord knows why, since they are usually so brief and incomplete. Jack is the kind of guy who could form a bad opinion of a place just because it happened to be cold and rainy during the two days he visited. And the people... well, just about everyone who is not within Jack's little circle gets ignored.

Most everyone in the group is a delinquent of some kind or another. They steal, con girls into bed, abandon wives and children, and often descend on a family situation like a swarm of locusts. They can clean out a cupboard and a hot water tank in nothing flat, with hardly a thank you. And what gets me the most: they get away with every bit of it.

Yes, everyone in Jack's group is a pain in the ass, but my real wrath is pointed directly at "Dean Moriarty." I can't believe I've gone this long without mentioning him. In some ways, Dean is the book -- Jack spends all his time following Dean around, Dean begins the book and Dean ends the book. Perhaps he's God, in Jack's imagination (an obvious idol in mine); perhaps he's just an "Angel of Death." Or! perhaps he's just a man, a "mad" man with a ton of other issues besides.

I did not like this book; therefore, I did not like Dean. Everything I've said to describe the group as a whole works just fine on Dean. I can add a few, as well... he's so very wise, yet he never makes much sense; he alienates all those around him, who generally only want to be close to him; he messes recklessly with other people's lives, his "Taoist philosophy" not withstanding; and, most of all he can't sit still. Dean is the kind of guy who talks incessantly throughout a TV show -- he's so antsy and self-important, and it's almost like he can't help it. Maybe that's it: he simply can't sit down and shut up. He can't help being an asshole... in the end, he may be fun to follow around for awhile, but he's not a lifelong friend. He's not anything. Listening to his odd ravings will not make you smarter, he has nothing to offer.

Now for a bit of apologizing... I feel almost bashful about hating this book, a little scared. In a way I feel like the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier when he was so disgusted by a book of Whitman's poetry that he tossed it into the fire, a low point in his career and my estimation of him. Perhaps Whittier was too set in his ways, I think, to feel the magic and rhythm of a new kind of poetry. Perhaps I am too square to find a comfortable place among the Beats. I don't, can't, and won't get IT... Sometimes I ask myself, "Am I missing something?"

Only sometimes, mind you. The rest of the time... well, you already know. You know where I'm coming from at least. This book seemingly urges the reader to "burn, burn, burn" -- but, please, don't forget to spend five to ten hours reading it. Don't live vicariously through others, unless that "other" happens to be Jack Kerouac and his friends. Thankfully, this kind of self-indulgent literature will never have much of an audience because everybody wants to tell their story, nobody wants to listen. Regretfully, this book will always be known as the book that "turned on a generation...."

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Review: Blacksad, a graphic novel

2010-10-06T18:15:00.000-07:00

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

(Note: A review of a graphic novel always benefits from a few examples of artwork, and since I was unable to scan any from my copy of the book I have added a link here to a nice selection, courtesy of Google Images.)

This is the kind of graphic novel that tends to find its way onto Top 10 lists, and in this case the chorus of adulation seems predominantly justified. It's a collection, really, of three graphic stories, about sixty pages each, that were originally published on a "when-it's-done" schedule throughout this past decade. The stories are the stuff of classic noir, heavily inspired by the world set down by old pulp fiction and 40s-and-50s-era black-and-white American B-movies; except here the roles are played by animals that look like people, or as the authors prefer to see it, "people who look like animals."

So, Reader, meet John Blacksad, a big black cat, with a bit of white on his chin and an unfortunate name. He's a detective, and a fairly typical one at that, who has to deal with, in succession 1) unraveling and revenging the murder of an old flame, 2) immersing himself in a neighborhood race-war in order to find a missing child, and 3) investigating the murders of a circle of leftward-leaning scientists. The stories, although perhaps a bit typical, a bit too form-fitting to their genre, are still valiant, commendable efforts in their own little time and place... but the art... the art is for all time.

This collection was illustrated by Juanjo Guarnido, a former Disney animator. Now, these days the term "Disney animator" still packs a wallop, and if the quality of Disney's traditionally animated productions have degraded in recent years it is certainly not for a lack of talent. Nevertheless today the term "former Disney animator" may carry with it even more punch, since it indicates the person to whom it's attached has talent enough to be picked up by Disney, and freedom enough to create their own vision, free from under the still somewhat tyrannical eyes of the Disney crew.

Well, now... I suppose it's more than just a matter of DISNEY IS EVIL. The comics medium has been through a lot, spending most of its formative years in a production-oriented, highly profit-based world. And then, when comics went "underground," this new breed of artist had neither the money nor the inclination to make finely intricate comics. But now... now, I'm convinced we are in a golden age of comics art, when comics have moved off the assembly line, into galleries and museums, and many of the genre's top illustrators have the inclination, time, and financial freedom to create absolutely jaw-dropping stuff. And not just a panel or two, but throughout the whole book.

With Blacksad the artist has done just that. Just about every panel can stand on its own, as an individual piece of artwork, a testament to the artist's mastery -- and bane of millions of students who can only wish they had those skills. For proof just look at the faces: those bulky, awkward animal faces come to life and express a full range of human emotion (The Dreamworks people should take a few notes.) And mind you, the faces are just an example. The backgrounds, clothing, props -- even the atmosphere, a word as difficult and somehow intangible as the thing it describes -- all come to life in each panel.

When combined, the panels only enhance their effects; the narratives are always fast paced and the art sticks with them every step of the way. It never wallows upon itself, a common foible amongst the upper crust of comics art. Sometimes, I suspect, an artist of that caliber gets a little too full of himself. But not here... Here, almost child-like passion and enthusiasm positively drip from every page. And even if the stories don't appeal to you or the premise seems too cliche, I hope you will at least crack this book to enjoy the art. If nothing else, why not take Emerson's advice on Shakespeare? Read it backwards, from finish to start, and avoid all that messy plot nonsense that just confuses and obfuscates, and drags your attention away from the poetry in motion on the page.

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Shakespeare After All

2010-10-04T08:08:00.000-07:00

The title refers both to a 2005 book by popular Shakespeare scholar Marjorie Garber and an accompanying class given by Garber at Harvard University in 2007 whose sessions were recorded and are now freely available online. The book is a hefty one-thousand pages, devoting a chapter each to the thirty-eight plays now considered to have been written by Shakespeare. The course, obviously more stretched for time, looks at only eleven works of his later career, addressing them in the order in which they were (probably) written, starting at Troilus and Cressida, working through his classic tragedies and romances, and ending with The Tempest.

Small guess, then, as to what I've been up to lately... I had a mission, as far back as August 2009, to read all of the Bard's plays, and by September of this year I had read eleven. Now... not to make the greatest author of all time sound like a chore, but I was having some trouble keeping a schedule, knocking the plays down like so many carnival-midway targets. I was reading haphazardly, if not quite randomly. I started with Hamlet, almost a year ago, simply because Hamlet is all the rage these days. And why did I read The Taming of the Shrew about a month ago? I wanted to watch Kiss Me, Kate and felt no self-respecting self-proclaimed "Shakespearean" could watch that jaunty 50s-era musical without first suffering through its source material.

But now I'm all business: in about half a month I've gone through Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure... Othello is next. I have settled into a routine: I read the play (in my big crappy one-volume complete works collection), then read the accompanying chapter in Shakespeare After All (which I borrowed from the library, but you can read most of it on Google Books or, ya know, buy it), and then finally download the appropriate lecture.

The scheme has worked out just fine. In fact, I recommend it. It's perfect for those who, like me, are working through the Shakespearean canon for the first time, hopefully laying a foundation for years of rereadings, related reading, and viewing of stage productions: a lifetime of Shakespeare... Or a week... or a month...or a year... In any case, it's very likely you'll walk away with something -- it is Shakespeare, after all, and any time you devote to it is time well spent. But if you're floundering a bit, or you're having trouble just jumping in, I can't think of anyone better to assist you than Marjorie Garber.

Garber has already devoted much of her life to these works so she's fitting, not to mention willing, to help others on their way. She has packed her book with sharp, close-to-the-text analyses of each work, ideas so solid that some might be tempted to commandeer them for their own, a crime called plagiarism that's ironically frowned upon in most academic (yes, even Shakespearean) circles. A bit of reading Shakespeare After All and then you can knick a few lines like these, to impress your friends into boredom: "The outer world of Hamlet, the play, mirrors the state of mind of Hamlet, the character," or "In Twelfth Night the complacent, passive natives of Illyria are stirred into action by the arrival of the very active foreigners" (principally Viola, who disguises herself as "Cesario," and Sebastian, her twin brother)...

As if being a thief were not crime enough, I've gone and committed the crime of enthusiasm. "I can't help it, your Honor!" (That's how I'll plead my case in court.) Garber's enthusiasm is as infectious as her ideas. And, besides, it hardly feels like theft at all since most of her assertions are so sound, so close to the text itself that they feel like common sense. Yes, common sense: perhaps the highest compliment a piece of literary criticism or analysis can receive. Such nonsense doesn't hold punch with other critics -- no, they need something wacky and dense to pull apart with tweezers -- but surely the common crowd has sense enough to pay some attention to this book.

And while you're at it don't forget the accompanying course, either! the course that compliments the book so well. Part lecture, part discussion, the course allows Garber to fill in and flesh out some of the gaps she left in her book, and creates a forum where various forms of tongue-tied stuttering students can ask questions of Garber, and unconsciously fawn before her greatness. The teacher/writer herself, however, takes it all in stride and generally answers their questions well, with charming alacrity...

One-year anniversary

2010-10-01T09:04:00.000-07:00

Abe's Book Blog is now one year old. In fact, its "birthday" was September 29, but I missed it. I was busy taking a trip with my mom to southern Ohio to check on "Papa," my misnomer-toting former-Nazi grandfather who's gone a bit loopy since his first stroke a few years ago. He took a nasty tumble on Tuesday, though whether it was the result of a "mini-stroke" or the half empty bottle of Black Velvet next to his bed we can't be sure. The plan is to put him in a home within thirty minutes of here. Barrels of monkeys will surely ensue...

But now to something much more near and dear. When I started this blog over a year ago I had no high expectations. "If I write a hundred posts in a year I'll be happy" is what I said. "And if I learn a few things about writing, and improve my styling a bit, well that's all the better," I added. Well, I have just barely reached my desired posting count and I don't know that I've learned too much, but I have enjoyed myself and I do plan to keep at it long into an indeterminate future.

Of course I have plenty of plans for the future, year #2 -- not least of which is the maintaining of a stricter posting schedule, probably weekly, Monday-Wednesday-Friday -- but for now I wish to reminisce. Here, then, are five of my posts that I think stand out. They are not necessarily my best or the most representative, but they all for one reason or another seem remarkable to me. Why? Well, while I ponder this, you have your own opinions and if you feel so inclined please do shout them out. Much as I love the sound of my own voice, it's always nice to receive comment here.

My choices are:

Review: Meditations of Marcus Aurelius - "Sure, Meditations is often, as George Long put it, 'obscure,' and [Aurelius'] language is often unnecessarily lofty and learned. Sure, his work suffers from the same inconsistencies of all the ancient works of ethics that our modern eyes have recently 'discovered.' Yet I respect this man and feel everyone can learn something from his writings. If nothing else, he tried." I tried, too. I took a swing at condensing and critiquing this classic but difficult ancient philosophy text in under a thousand words -- and I didn't fall on my face.
Harvey Pekar: a great man is dead - Back in July of this year Harvey Pekar, the man who wrote the long-running autobiographical comic American Splendor, fell over and died. The next day I gave him the best sendoff I could think of. The last line: "...hopefully someone can be conjured up to say: 'This is our guy! I'm immensely proud of him.' Oh, hell -- it's already done."
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead - My likening of the title characters of this classic absurdest play to a potted plant was, to me, spot on. And when I had nailed down that little bit the rest of the post seemed to naturally fall into place.
"Atlas is [Hugging]" - The title came as an afterthought, I swear. But the rest of the post is solid, giving the queen of mean, Ayn Rand, and her fans a good lashing, straying into humor occasionally without ever straying too far from the point. This is a very recent post, so I was and still am reading a collected edition of Heywood Broun, a 30s-and-40s era Socialist newspaperman and a big part of the Algonquin Round Table. The man's style inspired my post, and hopefully the solid technique employed by this classically trained newspaper columnist will continue to rub off.
What's going on here? (Part 2) - In this case, for once, the action in this post transcends the post itself. In essence, I spent one whole day in early April talking (almost) only in questions, then laid it out on paper (as the say) the next day. And why did I do this? Well... "If you want to get really philosophical about it, I don't know. Do I really have to answer this question? There was no grand scheme and there still isn't. It is not terribly useful, like curing Cancer, nor is it particularly breathtaking, like rock climbing or sky diving. But, but, but -- why does my life suddenly feel more complete?"

I do so hate these "digest posts" that simply recycle old content and create little to nothing new, and I'm sure you, the reader, do too. In television they call it "The Dreaded Clip Show." Since I don't like it when Everybody Loves Raymond does it of course I don't like to perpetuate the problem too much, anniversary reminisces excluded of course. But new content is coming soon, I promise -- next Monday if all goes well -- so hold tight, everybody, and get ready for an even more exciting year of Abe's Book Blog.

And please, remember to help control the pet population and have your pet spayed or neutered. (I watched too much TV down at "Papa's" house.)

On Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida

2010-09-25T21:21:00.000-07:00

Why have they stopped making silent film adaptations of Shakespeare's plays? Surely it was a terrific idea... And it's what Shakespeare would have wanted -- as Troilus put it*: "Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart." Who needs words? Allow me, please, to remake Shakespeare's splendid Troilus and Cressida in silent movie fashion. I wouldn't need any "mere words" and I wouldn't need but thirty seconds and this is how it would go:

A parade, with all the noble combatants of the Trojan War marching along, the Trojans in one column, the Greeks in another. The scene is "Noble", "Resplendent," "Honorable" -- read the Illiad, in other words. From there, however, the imagination of Shakespeare and his times takes over. Next in the parade comes Patrocolus, doing shoddy but apparently hilarious impressions of the warriors in front of him. Then comes Cressida, running away from Troilus (She's not really huffing it mind you -- more like a light jog. What a slut!). Then Pandarus comes, cheering the couple on and making lude gestures all the while. And then...well, I may have to throw the rest in there somewhere or other -- where is Helen in all this, for example? and Cassandra, the Trojan "prophetess"? and Paris? surely he can't march with the men... But certainly the finishing touch, the man to bring up the rear, as they say, would be Thersites, "a deformed and scurrilous Grecian,"** who is marching along with an awful smile, shouting victoriously (albeit silently) things like "all the argument is a cuckold and a whore" and "Lechery, lechery! Still, wars and lechery: nothing else holds fashion."

Certainly it was a gutsy move to use the Trojan War, often called the founding event of Western civilization and covered by no less than three epic poems, several ancient plays, and plenty of modern derivative works besides, as a backdrop for a sort of comedy, a trivial love story, a kind of political "problem play" that makes definite statements on the eternal folly of war. But the man who ventures the most risks will, if successful, reap the most rewards, and certainly some more audacious than I have come to call Mr. Shakespeare one of the most talented avant garde theatre artists of our time.

* "as Troilus put it..." in an entirely different context -- just one more reason not to trust words or the people that bandy them about!

** "a deformed and scurrilous Grecian," as described in the Dramatis Personae added by the eighteenth-century editor Nicholas Rowe.

"Atlas is [Hugging]"

2010-09-17T12:16:00.000-07:00

Recently my mother's 21-year-old fellow Family Dollar employee came into the knowledge, from obvious sources, that I have some interest in Russian literature. Thus he promptly suggested, in my mother's words, a "Russian female poet of the first half of the twentieth century." My mother could not remember the "poet's" name of course, but said that he had an edition of her work that he was willing to let us borrow. A few weeks later she finally brought the book home... It was The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. My life is an anticlimax.

And of course now she, my mother, has had her interest piqued and is well along on reading it -- even while many of my regular and, I think, appropriate suggestions languish on the bedside table for months at a time. Life is... ah, but no more truisms for today. After listening to my whining on the subject for a little while, she issued this compromise: "Okay, recommend me a book and I'll read it."

I chose Ego & Hubris: The Michael Malice Story, a graphic novel memoir written by both Malice himself and American Splendor author Harvey Pekar, illustrated by Gary Dumm. Malice is a perfect libertarian: a train wreck of selfishness, pride, and an overbearing need to see others suffer -- in other words, ego, hubris, and yes, even malice. And a big admirer of Ayn Rand, naturally. As if Howard Roark didn't paint an ugly enough picture by himself -- in an admittedly idealized, even propagandistic self portrait -- I had to go and enlist a real-life counterpart. "Michael Malice is a real piece of work" says Harvey Pekar on the graphic novel's cover, and Pekar was never a man for understatement.

I, of course, absolutely refuse to read anything by Ayn Rand, while at the same time having very strong opinions about all of it. I know her story, I say to myself... I don't know everything, but I know enough! She was the one who called herself "the most creative thinker alive," riding high on the completion of her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged -- then fell into a deep depression shortly thereafter when the novel was poorly received by several critics. She was the one who regularly flew into a rage when one of her admiring minions disagreed with her -- minions who were so smitten with her, I might add, that many of them dressed like her, generally obeying her opinions religiously, even on things as incidental as fashion.

Her latter-day supporters are no less embarrassing. As Mr. Malice has shown us above, the modern Ayn Rand supporter is invariably a conservative, a libertarian perhaps -- a Ron Paul supporter in Malice's day; a goof ball marching down the street, waving a "Don't tread on me!" flag, in ours.

Somehow, however, Ron Paul and his supporters have never scared me. Essentially opposite to my own political tendencies -- but not Nazis, nor the KKK, nor something considerably more obscure and therefore ominous. The Tea Party, on the other hand, is a group riding high on overt racism and xenophobia, vague statements and empty promises. I ask myself, "What kind of world do we live in where most conservatives see Sarah Palin as a better candidate for the White House than Ron Paul?" (And I must answer, "Essentially the one we always have.")

And there, I think, is the crux of my fear: libertarians, in general, might have the capacity to strike fear into my heart, if only they were more influential. As it is, however, they are not the conservative group who currently have six candidates for the senate, thirty-four for the house. No, it is the "tea baggers" behind this sudden surge. As wise man says, amongst ignorant cave men it is the one with the fire you oughta look out for. The others we can all laugh at, on account of their silly antics and outrageous claims.

I'd say Ayn Rand's defining and shining moment was a 90s-era Modern Library reader poll -- it's probably one of the most embarrassing things I have ever seen. The end of the twentieth century naturally brought with it no small amount of "top 100" lists -- and the Modern Library did not sit quietly by. They went and polled experts to create a ranked list of the top one hundred English-language novels of the century. Certainly plenty can be said about this list -- for example, in a list of one hundred spots does Joseph Conrad absolutely need to fill five of them? and shouldn't the criteria of the list exclude Ulysses automatically? But the real joke came with the list compiled based on an online reader poll. On that list seven of the top ten spots are occupied by books from either Ayn Rand or Scientology creator L. Ron Hubbard. Hey, it was the nineties, when the Internet was young, and statistics and common sense hadn't been invented yet.

No excuse has been dreamed up, however, that can explain away modern supporters of Rand -- nor supporters of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh for that matter.

Review: Medicus, by Ruth Downie

2010-09-12T10:43:00.000-07:00

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A fun fast read: I like a good mystery now and then, and of course it doesn't hurt if the book in question happens to be set in Ancient Roman times. Roman Britain, in fact, during the relatively pleasant and peaceful reign of Hadrian. But enough history:

The main attraction here is Gaius Petreius Ruso, divorcée, army medical doctor (medicus, medical... I think I get it!) and reluctant protagonist of this here tale. He is such a stick in the mud! A nice guy at heart but, trouble is, everything seems to be going wrong... his wife left him a few years ago but he still hasn't gotten over it, he's overworked and still lives in squalor... he lives in Britain... and worst of all, he somehow manages to get himself wrapped up in the murders of two prostitutes from a nearby brothel.

Ruso is the classic put-upon patriarch, an old and well-worn character trope which has been a staple of comedies at least as far back as the Romans themselves, and which found success long into the twentieth century (I can name three perfect examples: George Banks from Mary Poppins, Mr. Alonzo Smith from Meet Me in St. Louis, and "father" from E.L. Doctorow's 20s-set historical novel Ragtime). Secure in his faith of his de jure position of authority as a man -- over women, children, slaves, and anything else that moves -- the impotent patriarch is at the same time quite shocked when his de facto influence falls way, way short of his expectations, usually to comic effect. The modern approach of this kind of character is ambivalence at best: glad to see a few cracks in the patriarchal stranglehold, yet full of sad feelings regarding the mere existence, past and present, of that stranglehold. For my part, I say it's good to be back in the days when men were men, slaves were slaves, and cataract surgery was scary as all get out.

Ruso's the main attraction, of course, but a decent supporting cast surrounds him. There's Tilla, the dying native girl Ruso reluctantly buys off some random guy dragging her home -- a real fixer upper. She turns out to be a looker, though, so I guess that counterbalances the whole "sorry I got you wrapped in a ridiculous mystery" thing. Then there's Valens, the handsome, funny, socially at ease fellow doctor and roommate. And Priscus, the balding, bureaucratic administrator of the hospital -- who can really handle himself with a kitchen knife. There are others of course, but they're all women and/or slaves, so you can understand my silence.

This book, it is Roman enough for my tastes -- and modern enough too. "This book could be set at any time period, any place." Well yeah, granted, jokes about British cuisine never go out of style, but surely the Romans have a character all their own! Surely... lead water pipes, slaves, and a life expectancy of thirty-five -- isn't that enough? Ruth Downie, she does a pretty good job. Yeah, yeah, she's not Robert Graves, but then she's not Robert Fagles either (impressed yet? okay, how about Robert Redford? Robbie Williams? Robin Williams? Okay, I better stop...) Like I said, the book is Roman enough -- enough to get me in the mood without tugging and tearing at my poor little overworked brain cells. This delicate balance saw me through to the end of the book, allowing me to overlook the slow start, the just average writing style, and the really rather average mystery tale itself; to shrug my shoulders and go along for the ride. My little local library, for some reason, has every book in this series so maybe I'll go back for a double or even triple dip. *shrug* "When in Deva..." as they say.

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Richard III (and Peter Sellers too)

2010-09-08T10:24:00.000-07:00

The above clip is from the 1965 TV special "The Music of Lennon&McCartney" -- and yes, your eyes did not deceive you: it is indeed a dramatic reading of "Hard Days Night" by the now-legendary comedian Peter Sellers in full parody of Sir Laurence Olivier's turn as Richard III. I laugh when he says "alright" every single time, in spite of myself.

Youtube naturally has a variety of Richard III (and Peter Sellers) -themed clips:

Olivier's version of the opening "Winter of our discontent" speech (what good is the parody without the original?)

A collection of three other versions of Richard's opening speech, by Ron Cook, Jonathan Slinger, and Ian McKellen

The speech read by SpokenVerse, a fairly well known and professional-quality poetry reader who has over eight hundred recordings up on Youtube.

Peter Sellers playing Richard (and Queen Victoria) on the Muppet Show alongside Kermit the Frog.

Peter Sellers' cover of "Can't Buy Me Love" -- oh ho ho ho! If you watch only one of these clips please, please make it this one.

By now it must be obvious what I've been reading lately... I finished my first reading of the play only Yesterday and now have nothing but good things to say about it. I love the spread of the body count; that the most important people (ie Richard's two brothers) are the first to go, and early too, in the first few acts. And I like Richard -- a pure villain, with little to nothing of the sympathetic about him. And the other characters are all fine by me -- a bunch of murderous, power-grubbing inbreds. Their bickering amongst themselves comes to the effect of: "Fiend! You did kill my brother!" "Yeah, well, you killed my father and my cousin!" Seeing all this, in history and in this play, one may be driven to think that there was not an innocent one among them -- though the two "Boys in the Tower" are obvious exceptions.

In a sense, all the characters share in the role of villain -- and no doubt tear down the reputation of those who ruled England just before the Tudors, that glorious dynasty that still ruled in Shakespeare's day, some one hundred years after the events of this play, in the form of Queen Elizabeth.

I liked the "ghost pageant" at the end, wherein the lost souls of all the slain men -- with the soul of two boys and a woman in their mix -- glide across the stage, then a still-sleeping battlefield, cursing Richard. tossing and turning in his tent, and blessing his competitor, Richmond (Henry VII), blissfully asleep in his. Though the ghosts have only as yet drifted across my imagination, still I can imagine this scene as one of the best, most dramatic climaxes in all of Shakespeare.

Peter Sellers thinks so too.

Review: Parade (with fireworks), by Michael Cavallaro

2010-09-06T18:16:00.000-07:00

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'll start with a quote from the author's acknowledgements page:
"In the 60s my parents and grandparents moved to the U.S. from southern Italy. They brought a lot of stories with them about what it was like growing up there in the first half of the century. These were vivid and revealing tales, and seemed to hint at a rich and ancient world that had been lost somehow between two World Wars. At some point I decided to start writing them down."

The story of this book is "a strange little vignette," as the author put it, "hovering between fact and fiction, a quick fade-in and fade-out of a small puzzle piece of [his] own history." It is the story of one day in 1923 when Cavallaro's paternal grandfather, "Paolo" in this rendition, wrecked his life irrevocably. A band walks home after a festival. A group of fascist sympathizers "escorts" them on one side, and a group of Socialists, spurred on by the chance of a confrontation, walks along the other.

The page I have placed here to the right is perhaps the book's most understated; it is also one of my favorites. It is a short study of a typical day in the life of Paolo (the guy on the right) and his friend, the "Professor," just before havoc hits. We learn from this page that "Vincenzo has brought a whole parade with him." And the nature of the fireworks can easily be guessed at.

Dragged into the fray by matters of family loyalty, mixed in with the crazed clannish idealism of the time and place, Paolo commits murder and is tried for it. He only gets six months, but things are vastly different when he gets out: the burden of his legal defense has ruined his family financially, and the stress has led to the death of both his parents.

Raw passion is replaced by raw ruin.

However, the fiery passion of the Italian radical spirit, it seems, was not to be subdued. But he doesn't dwell long on his pain, as is apparent from the last page.

The artwork in this book is fantastic, and perfectly mirrors the intense mood, laced with sadness that this story epitomizes. It has big bold colors, with sharply defined shadows, and what I can only see as great pencil work, obviously done by a person with a strong background in animation. All of which made me audibly take notice when taking my first flip through, and elevate this book greatly in my imagination.

The comic, as I found out after a little digging, was originally published online, one page at a time, for free on a "webcomix collective" called Act-I-Vate. Web comics are a dime a dozen these days, but in this case "eyes popped" and publishers took notice. The story was published in a two-part miniseries by Image and later packaged into one trade paperback. The whole thing can still be read online, for free (though I am of the opinion that the colors, a big draw for me, lose of their impact when viewed on a monitor.)

And the story is apparently only the beginning of a planned larger arc, tentatively titled "Seven Years Without the Sun" -- though, as far as I know, no additions to the series have materialized. It seems Cavallaro has moved on to other things, but hopefully he never forgets his past -- and even remembers to write and illustrate some more of it, so the rest of us who have nothing but drunks and heart failure to fill up our family histories have some more great personal history to read.

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Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

2010-09-03T07:52:00.000-07:00

(And, hey, you heard it here first, folks.)

Yesterday, on a wild impulse which I am at an utter loss to explain, I watched the 1990 film adaptation of Tom Stoppard's breakout play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It is the story of two minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet and their bewildered, humorous wanderings through the tragic happenings of the great play. And how was it? Well, didn't I once write "impulse has become a magical word with me"? And although impulse with me does not mean an "I *heart* so-and-so" tattoo or even a new shade of hair, still I am satisfied that R&G* is a great movie and may well be an even better play.

As I told a companion, amid a profusion of other less successful words, the play is rather like the last thoughts of a potted plant before it gets smashed against the wall. She seemed to connect to that analogy, to think it made a lot of sense. I stole it, I guess -- though not without justification, I know -- from the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. In the novel a starship equipped with an "improbability drive" spontaneously creates two things, a whale and a bowl of petunias, miles above a planet. As it comes plummeting to the ground, the whale does what we can only assume every sentient being would do: asks important questions like "Who am I?" "What am I?" "Where am I?" "And what is that large hard-looking thing rushing towards me?" etc. -- while the only thing the bowl of petunias thinks is "Oh no, not again!"**

Both this play and that novel perfectly corroborate my image of classic British absurdism.. "How ridiculously absurd!!" cries the man with top hat and bubble pipe as he jumps on his pink kangaroo and hops away to Wonderland.

It was a fitting analogy, now that I look back after spitting it out. Absurdism is the key word here: these are men that are really no better than potted plants. They aren't supposed to have any thoughts, to wonder at the nature of their existence; nor, in turn of course, of their demise. Originally they were little better than a plot device, and also perhaps another set of walls for Hamlet to bounce his wit off of. And, oh my, they are entirely interchangeable! a fact that causes them much confusion in this play.

But while the Hitchhiker's Guide series is all about laughs and is little inclined to the philosophical, this play has much more to brood about. Perhaps it was simply the nature of the play on which it was based or maybe the dark cloud of an ending we all know is coming for our two heroes -- but I always had a difficult time laughing carelessly, carefree, at this play. How can I laugh when pondering the nature of existence? (Honestly, don't you wonder what Socrates was like when squeezing out a turd?)

Certainly, the humor is not perfectly to my liking: I have long had a great disdain for this kind of nonsensical humor, the sort of thing an audience member might respond to with "That's not funny!" only to be shot down by the wild irreverent response of the performer: "Exactly!" Much of the humor in this play revolves around the "inadequacy of language," which as you can imagine, tried my patience. "Yes, yes, we get it," I thought over and over again: language is not the perfect philosophical medium you thought it would be. Sorry for your loss, of course, but that entire thread of thought weakened my overall impression of the play: when one of the boys shouts out something like "Oh, what's the point?" I see little use in the other promptly responding, "The point of what?"

One last point before I go: the concept of metatheatre -- ie, a play about plays. No doubt inspired by Hamlet's play-within-a-play, R&G Are Dead several times has its main characters watch the on-stage players perform. At one point, in the movie at least, the on-screen players themselves are watching a puppet show. And since R&G could be considered a metaplay my final count is five levels. Inception eat your heart out.

Though I was overall impressed, pleased even, with this movie, I wonder about what the original play is like. Occasionally movies are little more than taped stage performances, but based on the thing as I saw it with my own eyes, and on the few reviews of others I have read, I expect a stage performance would be wildly different, better even, than this particular movie. I would jump at the chance to see this play live.

Notes:
* honest to goodness, I almost wrote "R&R"!

** Adams finishes this passage with a decided turn towards the philosophical: "Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now." You can read the whole of the passage at Goodreads.

The Imperfections of David Copperfield

2010-09-01T07:41:00.000-07:00

The below passage is from Chapter 52 ("I Assist at an Explosion") of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Note: italics added.

...Mr. Micawber had a relish in this formal piling up of words, which, however ludicrously displayed in his case, was, I must say, not at all peculiar to him. I have observed it, in the course of my life, in numbers of men. It seems to me to be a general rule. In the taking of legal oaths, for instance, deponents seem to enjoy themselves mightily when they come to several good words in succession, for the expression of one idea; as, that they utterly detest, abominate, and abjure, or so forth; and the old anathemas were made relishing on the same principle. We talk about the tyranny of words, but we like to tyrannize over them too; we are fond of having a large superfluous establishment of words to wait upon us on great occasions; we think it looks important, and sounds well. As we are not particular about the meaning of our liveries on state occasions, if they be but fine and numerous enough, so, the meaning or necessity of our words is a secondary consideration, if there be but a great parade of them. And as individuals get into trouble by making too great a show of liveries, or as slaves when they are too numerous rise against their masters, so I think I could mention a nation that has got into many great difficulties, and will get into many greater, from maintaining too large a retinue of words.

The passage comes right in the middle of a long speech by Mr. Micawber, the amiable but financially unsound "fallen gentleman" David has known and liked since he was young. It's a tirade, really, and its target is Uriah Heep, the scheming, lying, cheating bastard of a clerk who has slithered his way to the top (or writhed his way, as Dickens put it) through obviously unsavory means. But Mr. Micawber, who in his eternal lack of money seemed the perfect candidate for a clerk that Mr. Heep could keep under his thumb, has spent months gathering evidence and now, in this chapter, unleashes the full angry wrath of a Vesuvius.

I loved that chapter (and it could be worth reading it by itself, in its entirety) but the above-quoted paragraph made me laugh on its own account. That the one man so many high schoolers have wanted to resurrect and beat over the head for writing novels instead of haikus should interrupt his already tall narrative with a tirade against useless words... It seems gently ironic, and you know we hipster are all about the i, big or little.

I finished David Copperfield just a few days ago (how much it feels like a millennium has gone by!) and I now feel I have a clear view of Charles Dickens: not the most inspired man, by nature, but earnest always and eloquent in his plainness. You always know what he's about; and he's very British -- two ambivalent statements that I choose to interpret positively. Even when he made mistakes -- interrupted his narrative, for example, with the kind of chafe quoted above; or else took his good old time getting to the target even when he stayed on course -- I am inclined to forgive him. I see these imperfections as the idiosyncrasies of a harmless old grandpa -- a cast of character I am very sympathetic towards -- rather than the tiresome ego-soaked digressions of a blowhard at a podium in front of a captive audience.

Dickens comforts me, not only in the contents of his writing, but in his manner of writing it, too. What one calls rushed another calls produced on a deadline. Either way, Dickens' work seems always imperfect, smushed or squeezed, not polished to a shine. We are not all Joyce and some of us prefer it that way. Though I will never call Dickens rough-hewn -- on the order of bred-from-the-soil writer/farmers, whose many names escape me at the moment -- I still believe that it was what, not how he wrote that was the main compelling force for Dickens and in turn the chief concern for his readers. For my part, despite the imperfections, David Copperfield is one of the most charming books I've ever read... Yes, charming -- that's the perfect word.

Gimpel the Fool Animation

2010-08-22T19:55:00.000-07:00

Note: Don't be concerned that the first words you hear are Yiddish: the English dialogue starts at around two minutes and 23 seconds in. Also, Youtube had a strict ten minute limit when this video was uploaded, so here's a link to part 2.

Today I have for you a wonderful follow up and compliment to my review of the short story collection Gimpel the Fool, by Isaac Bashevis Singer. It is a cartoon adaptation of the first and eponymous story, a low tech hand-drawn piece, done in the early nineties by a man named Ezra Schwartz. Schwartz used, in his words, "about 10,000 paper frames" to create the movie. Each frame, in turn was composed of several layers of typing paper; Schwartz says he used about 80,000 sheets in all. The animation is accompanied by a beautiful original soundtrack and occasional Yiddish dialogue mingles with English, the main language of this adaptation. The movie took eight months for Schwartz to draw, and has since been screened at well over a dozen film festivals, between 1994 and 2006.

One can read more about the animation, including full credits, a list of screenings, and a few thoughts from the creator's own mind, here, at the page he obviously set up for the purpose.

Review: Gimpel the Fool, by Isaac Bashevis Singer

2010-08-20T22:50:00.000-07:00

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I was able to read only the first two stories of this collection before I lost my copy. But a few months past and I found another, cheaper and in better condition. Naturally, I took it for a sign -- how could I not?

In the world of this book everything is a sign, and things still have magic to them. It's a beautiful simple world, Eastern Europe like most of us have never seen -- a lost world, a farming world, and, what's more, a Jewish world. This book, it speaks of a time when Yiddish thrived as a language of literature as well as daily life, and the Jews who spoke it... well, they lived. Today we live in a world where some Jews regard Yiddish as unclean, corrupt. What a shame! Today, the world in these stories has greatly shrunk and we may someday lose it all together. Well, at least we have the stories... some crystallized remnant of that dead world, a testament to how beautiful it was.

In a sense, the eleven stories in this collection are fairy tales -- but not the kind Disney pushed out, nor even those written down by the Brothers Grimm. In the world of these stories, even while towns and cities are industrializing, demons walk the countryside -- they are all around you, ready to cause mischief. In this world happy endings are merely those that are not sad. Happiness here comes from leading a simple and virtuous life within the narrow confines of The Law. You may get tricked by a demon; you may be forced to spend an eternity or more in The Place No One Wants to Go. But, all in all, it is a place in which a person can live or even thrive.

Now, as I say, there are eleven stories in Gimpel the Fool but let's just look at some of my favorites:

"Gimpel the Fool" starts it off, and is probably the most high profile story in the collection -- also, the only one translated by Saul Bellow -- and it sets the tone too. It retells a story at least as old as Judaism itself: the "fool" who is mocked and tricked by all around him, but who is really more wise and virtuous than them all. The story was dampened a bit in my eyes, however, because of my then-recent reading of "Ivan the Fool" by Tolstoy, a story similar in title, style, subject, and mood.

"The Gentleman from Cracow" tells of the same poor little Jewish village seen throughout -- or it might as well be -- and the great prosperity and success that comes to the village when a rich man from Cracow decides to live there. Of course, things are rarely what they seem, especially when rich men are involved; men who really aren't men at all. In a climactic scene only a Jew -- or perhaps also a masochistic Christian -- could think up, a party the man throws to choose a wife amongst the town girls dissolves into a fiery lake ringed by cackling demons.

A few of these stories -- "The Mirror," about a woman who is in the habit of watching herself, naked, in a mirror; "The Unseen," about a married man who lusts after his servant; and "From the Diary of One Not Born," about a woman who is tricked into public disgrace by a doppelgänger husband -- are told from the perspective of a demon. And what does a demon do but try to trick mortals into a fiery doom? These three stories are ones of sin -- vanity, in the case of the first; lust in the second; and sheer bad luck in the third. The little devils seem to drop down on anyone and ruin their lives for no good reason. A harsh fate indeed, but I suppose temptation can strike us all -- it is the truly virtuous, then, who successfully resist.

The stories of the virtuous of this collection are "The Old Man," "Joy," and "The Little Shoemakers." The eponymous "Old Man" walks across a country torn apart by WW2 to reach his native town. And in "Joy"... well, I do not remember "Joy." (I could reread it, but why? with a sentence like that?) And "The Little Shoemakers"? That's my favorite of the entire collection: about the latest in a very long line of small-town shoemakers, who is greatly befuddled by losing his seven sons to the call of the New World. But never mind: he finds his way to them again, escorted out of war-torn Europe by their new-found money to find himself on the shore of a lake, around which the seven prosperous brothers have built a house each, a thriving family each. Curtain falls on seven brothers dutifully helping their father in the little hut they made for him on their property, mending shoes the old-fashioned way, and singing that old song they used to sing when they were boys.

Maybe you don't like this kind of story. Maybe it has no place in the modern world, amid touch screens, feminism, toned down Christianity -- but I love it. Suffice to say, in a business-like tone, "It appeals to my sensibilities" -- though we all know there is much more to it than that.

View all my reviews on Goodreads

Graphic Witness: Wordless Woodcut Novels of the Early 20th Century

2010-08-16T20:06:00.000-07:00

The arrival of the latest Library of America catalog in this home is always an exciting event, indeed: a reminder that, yes, some poor misguided souls do still send catalogs through the "snail mail"; a harbinger of the same old dead men as we can normally buy for $3.99 at any old grocery store (though this time with archival ink and acid-free paper!); and, at least in the case of the most recent catalog, the revealing of a little subgenre of books hitherto unnoticed by me.

The Library of America has decided to reprint a set of woodcut novels -- that is, novels told solely through a series of woodcuts, generally without words. The six featured in the collection were created in the 1920s or 30s by an American artist named Lynd Ward.

I had never heard of the man, nor the handful of other artists who joined him in creating wood cut (or wood engraving, or linocut, or even lead cut) novels during the first half of the twentieth century -- but they are a bunch worth knowing. Though the novels they created probably never mounted beyond fifty titles, still they have an important role in history -- some call them the "original graphic novels." And the art... to be frank, I'm no great purveyor nor observer of the visual arts, and, as description of the beauty of a mare is really best left to a stallion, I will say only that the art is "worth a look" -- or even two. So I went and I took a look.

Well, the lovely two-volume box set above shown and described is a mere $55.00 online, $70.00 otherwise, but in my case mere is more like more , as in more than I can afford. I took neither route, opting instead to search for the book on my local library's database... No luck, exactly -- but I did find the slightly older (2007), yet still lovely book pictured to the left here. Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels by Frans Masereel, Lynd Ward, Giacomo Patri and Laurence Hyde (deep breath) is a collection, I'm convinced, well worth reading (or observing, or looking at, or staring open-mouthed at) -- largely because of the rarity and intrinsic value of the four wordless "novels" it contains. Frankly, the introduction by George A. Walker stinks, and the afterword by Seth is too short and even then just okay. It is the novels themselves, which are rarely reprinted and of course very expensive and hard to find in the originals, that naturally make the book.

Graphic Witness offers a nice variety too: from the vigorous, though imperfect technique of Frans Masereel, whom many consider the father of the subgenre; to the German-like style of Lynd Ward, already mentioned. All four books in the collection have distinct styles -- I'm sure I could match individual images with their appropriate books -- yet they share much. All the images in the book are dark, strict -- stern. And, while I suppose it is possible to soften the sharp lines of wood cuts and other forms of relief printing, as Masereel toyed with, all depicted objects are naturally hard-edged and very well formed. Now, I might say more on the artistic aspects of these four novels and their ilk, if only I were not a mule but a stallion. Perhaps, to mix my metaphors, though appropriately, I will one day find myself out to be truly a swan, but for now I will move on to more solid ground:

Narrative art: telling a picture merely through images. Seems challenging enough to me, without adding political subtexts. I don't know that all of the artists in the collection were "hardcore socialists" as I have heard tell, but I must confess that all were politically motivated and -- as I have come to expect from all politically motivated artists, not just Russians -- were remarkably fervent in their beliefs of social injustice and inequality. Frankly, I regard as within the realm of common sense that the more fortunate should aid in the rise of the less fortunate; that an ideal society is one in which all citizens are above a certain financial line; and that equality is more than just an ideal, to be looked for only in the words of misty-eyed professors and their students. So these artists believed, so they used the tools that came most at hand. How laborious the process of creating some one hundred wood cuts must have been! Even then, telling a complete, coherent, well done story in under one images is... well, to me even a wall of text seems much less intimidating.

To communicate information through images -- pure ideas, with little room for individual interpretation -- is a task I would certainly never want to get stuck with. Impossible, even, because as soon as someone tries, they create symbols, visual objects that a group of people associate with the same idea or group of ideas. Christianity, for example, has a very large catalog of symbols, many manifesting in or even being created for, narrative art. Beyond symbols, on that path, lay letters, words -- in a word, language, a collection of arbitrary symbols whose meaning a group of people agree upon.

History of narrative art is long and full of holes, but these days it seems the health of this particular art couldn't be better. While, in the days these woodcut novels were made comic books were sorely looked down upon -- leading the woodcut artists to distance themselves by avoiding comics mainstays like word balloons and multiple panels per page -- these days comics have reached literary pretensions all their own, in the guise of the New Yorker-acceptable graphic novel. For a bridge that connects these two acceptable media, I would advice the reading of Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels by David A. Beronä, a book that no doubt has much to add to (or even correct :) all of what I have said here. Read it and let me know -- or perhaps I'll have to read it myself!

Sentence Frequency and Originality of Expression

2010-08-14T13:17:00.000-07:00

R: Tomorrow we'll have everything we need for a good long time. This place has got to have a stockpile of canned goods. Hopefully it was overrun by the undead before it could be looted by anyone.

S: Yeah, hopefully it's just full of flesh eating monsters and our baked beans are still intact in there... If someone had said last year that I would ever utter that line out loud, I'd still be laughing now... Jesus, I'd love some baked beans right now.

The above quote is from The Walking Dead, a long-running and popular post-apocalyptic comic book -- go ahead, guess what kind of apocalypse it was -- issue #13 in fact, wherein a crew of survivors is discussing a possible raid of an abandoned prison, in search of food. You or I may never find ourselves in quite the same situation, but surely one does not have to live in a world dominated by the walking dead to wonder at the linguistic possibilities...

"There's nothing new under the sun." We've heard that old song and dance before, but with hundreds of thousands of words in the English language, which can be arranged into an incompressible number of sentences, we humans have a very long way to go, indeed, before we have mined out all linguistic possibilities.

In fact, you and I probably explore new territory every day, creating original sentences -- sentences that have never been said or written before in the history of the human race! Usually, we do this without noticing, though sometimes we do, and we end up saying something like, "Wow, that was a weird sentence" or "Man, I never thought I'd say that." It's a very, very intriguing idea. Wouldn't be great, for example, to see the long list of sentences that have each been said exactly once? Or wouldn't you like to see how many original sentences a great writer -- Shakespeare, for example -- created in his life?

Originality is so highly praised these days -- at least as far as large corporations are concerned, who are in the habit offering up to the customer some twenty or so patterns on a t-shirt, for example, with the idea that the customer will then be able to "express their personal style." Literature -- or as the Jews put it, "The Art of Scratching on Paper" -- is no different in this respect. Originality of expression they call it -- or at least I do. Everyone wants it, it seems, but always it remains a hazy object.

Therefore, I can only speak and think in vagueries: I know when I'm writing like Shakespeare (never) and I know when I'm writing like David Foster Wallace (never......?) but, honestly, how am I to know what's trite? or cliche? or, well, unoriginal? I can't and you can't either, Mr. Scholar; likewise with so-called original sentences. Surely, we all will be kept up late into the night, wondering if someone has already said, "Pass the pineapple Jello ASAP, Martha, you inconsiderate slut!"

So you're not Shakespeare and neither am I, but please don't fret! We can't all wax poetic about a rose, or a bear or something... (well said, Abe), but not everything that's original is so great: say the word fuck enough times in a row and you're sure to make a new sentence. Furthermore, common sense tells me that longer a sentence is, the more likely it is to be "original," which hardly seems fair... And what about gibberish? Like the ravings spotted by the lunatics we're forced to get close to on the bus or subway? surely their incoherent ramblings are at least as important to our society as the works of Allan Ginsberg...

Nevertheless (anyone else loathe that word with a white hot passion?), as you can see below, I have decided to parse some of my writing -- a journal entry of sorts, taken while bumping along on the road to visit my grandpa. "Papa" we call him, a former Nazi soldier and wife-beater who is now, rightfully so, rotting away at his mind in a big empty house full of guilt in an isolated part of southern Ohio.

But the trip was fun! and this little parsing experiment keeps me thinking... Such parsing, taken into academic settings, could provide a great insight in the world of folk linguistics -- that is, the study of how ordinary people view language. If only there was something, some great control group in the sky, to compare the resulting data to...

Red - sentences that no one has ever said before
Orange - sentences I have said before
Blue - sentences someone else has said before
Black (and in brackets) - notes I added to this blog post

August 6, 2010
We are well along on the road here, on our way to Papa's house. I've been reading some Jack Kerouac -- ironic, no? [How could someone not have written that before?] And I'm writing now because I'm starting to get the beginning shivers of the shits. [I wish so badly that the preceding sentence is original...] The reason for the shaky handwriting is twofold.

So far, On the Road is just okay -- and it grudges me a lot to say that. Already I get the feeling that the circle of the Beatniks was entirely a man's world. This, naturally, leads to the idea of homosexuality -- angrily suppressed at times. In Jack's case at least, fact indeed has backed up the idea. [Dude, Jack, everyone thinks you're gay. Wait, let me rephrase that: everyone knows you're gay.]

"If she goes to Case, omg -- I'll be happy for her."
(momentarily stopped.)
"Isn't that where Uncle Chris works?"
"I think it's pronounced 'MEH-nerds.'"
"I can smell out a lie!"
Thirty miles, or so, from Woodsfield. [I've visited my grandfather many times before.] Using pen found on the floor. [and I've use a lot of floor pens in my day, too.]
Country is officially the only music on radio... and we just hit a butterfly. "I hate when that happens."
"They raised her up a lady, but there's one thing they couldn't avoid." [probably sung more than said -- sung by middle-aged "country" women on their way to Trace Adkins concerts] Even that drivel is now breaking up. Probably the high hills around us.

Now, on the radio: a laugh-inducing tribute to firemen -- "you hit another butterfly."

"Isn't that a hearse?"
"Uh... yeah."
"Well, it's for sale."

"Everybody's got the fever. That's one thing you all know." Oldies comes in too, barely. This song I don't know...

"Oh, look. A quaint water wheel."

"The nail-driving competition will begin at 11:30 am" -- Tyler county fair commercial.

50s, 60s, and 70s radio station. "I hate when they, like, wallow in a decade. They would never play this on [ ]." [I never could keep radio stations straight.] They a have a list of a thousand songs that they play over and over.

The Young Man and the Dust Cloud: an original "folk tale"

2010-08-03T07:49:00.000-07:00

Note: Inspired partly by my friend's still ongoing trip to Romania, partly by my recent reading of some of of the delightful stories in Gimpel the Fool: and other stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, the below story is, if I have done my job right, nothing more than a simple folk tale- style story that will, at its best, make the reader think a bit, and at its worse, waste no more than a few minutes of the reader's time... I aim for "short and sweet."

-Abe Kurp

Once upon a time there was a village. It was a small happy village, at the foot of a tall mountain. Its few hundred inhabitants were not very educated or worldly, and people from other villages would often stop and laugh at them while passing through. But they were on the whole a jovial, kind-hearted people, content to run their own simple lives and help others with theirs when they could.

In this village there lived a boy of about seven years, who lived on a small farm on the outskirts with his mother and his three sisters. His father died when he was very young, so, although he was only seven he was already very accustomed to being the "man of the household." And a good man of the household he made, too! For, as kind and jovial as the villagers were in general, this small boy surpassed them all.

His kindness and virtue surpassed that of even the local holy man -- or so it was whispered when the villagers congregated. This man, who was not very good at delivering sermons and even worse at "practicing what he preaches," as they say, once heard some of these whispers. Inwardly angered at being surpassed in virtue by a small boy, the preacher denounced the child in his next sermon in an attempt to publicly humiliate him. The child took the derision with such calm good naturdness, however, that the villagers were shocked with their preacher, while the preacher for his part was so ashamed that he hid himself away for weeks, only emerging to deliver sermons, and never preached such a sermon again.

Yes, it was a quiet, happy place on the whole -- but all that was shattered on a hot summer midday. The young boy was still laboring in the field with his two oldest sisters when a cloud of dust appeared on the horizon. It was invaders from the north, who, despite being much richer and more powerful, had long coveted the simple happiness of this little town. Now, they were here to steal this happiness, to carry it away in sacks like so many coins or relics of gold. What else could they be after? The villagers had little else.

The dust cloud grew quickly and the villagers, unaccustomed to looking for invaders in those peaceful times, were caught unawares. When they did discover this cloud, the villagers tried to retreat to the mountains for protection. The boy and his sisters rushed back to their house to retrieve their mama and sister, then ran for the hills...The village lost many lives that day. The boy lost his entire family, and he himself escaped by a mere hair -- as if by chance, or Fate. Many other villagers vowed vengeance, sharpening their axes and forming alliances, but the boy just buried his mother and sisters and returned to his work.

Many years passed and the burnt fields of the village returned to, and even surpassed their former wealth and fullness. And no villager's farm was more prosperous than that of the boy, now really a young man. For Time did its work on men as well as the land, and the boy had grown into a tall, strapping young man. What is more, his kindness and good nature had never dimmed. And, though whispers of his tragic past still persisted, he was the most sought after man in town. All the old men wanted theirs daughters to marry him; and the daughters, for their part, were never opposed to the idea. The old women clucked over him during every town occasion, and the young men tried to befriend him in order to learn his secrets.

Our hero, for his part, seemed unaffected by the great stir he caused in his village. He listened intently to all marriage proposals, but never accepted one. And he politely conversed with the other young men when he had occasion to, but never accepted their invitations for hunting or swimming or cards. Even the preacher's repeated offers of a fishing trip, at his secret mountain stream -- a high honor in this simple town, though the spot was not as secret as the preacher supposed -- were politely but soundly rejected.

This preacher often sighed about the young man over dinner. "He is as kind as can be asked, with hardly a bad word to be said in his name. But still he has a distance about him. Still, he is all-consumed --I suspect, though he's never said so much -- by those...tragic deaths. You know, I am sure, the rumor that he watched his sisters and mother get cut down. And he would have gone too, would have flung himself in front of the sword, if some invisible force hadn't pulled him away." Here the preacher would always sigh in sad earnest. "I have spoken with many times, and prayed for him many times more; still, so he remains." The villagers, in their simplicity interpreted things more plainly: "he has a good soul but a broken heart."

Such were the state of things when, one day, a new cloud of dust appeared on the horizon. They came as quickly as before and in greater numbers too, but this time the villagers were ready. Up in arms and assembled at the town's border, the men took quick stock of themselves: all heavily armed, men young and old alike, the town beggars and the landowners, the sinners and the saints.

But at least one thing was missing: the young man. The village men were greatly surprised. Surely, with his natural leadership, for one, and his strong reason to fight, for two, the young man would be the perfect man to lead them into battle. Ah, but perhaps he was not aware, perhaps the cloud of dust had not reached his eye... A messenger, a young boy of no more than seven years, was dispatched to the young man's house.

The cloud was quickly approaching, however, and as the farm was far away on the outskirts and the little boy was slow in coming, the villagers chose one of the young man's rivals to lead them and then charged into battle. But they were badly outnumbered and, though they fought bravely and without reserve, were soon forced to retreat through the village to the mountains. The unluckiest among them were forced to a premature end.

Meanwhile, the horsemen from the north swept across the village, burning crops and pillaging homes. Soon a group of these horsemen reached the young man's farm. Aware of his history and reputation, they advanced slowly and cautiously towards the house at the middle of the farm.

When they were within fifty feet of the house, the front door opened and out walked the young man -- not up in arms, but in his normal work tunic, the dust and sweat of the field still encrusted to his skin. Almost immediately he began to speak. And the speech he made that day was remembered by all who were present, including the little messenger boy:

"So. Here you are. Years ago, when I was just a young lad, you struck my village. You burned our crops, our houses, you stole our tools and thus our livelihoods. Worst of all, you brutally murdered our families. You killed my family! My mother, my three sisters... And now you've come again. I foresaw your coming again, long ago."

"No." He cut short a horseman with the audacity to interrupt him. "I am not a soothsayer or a sorcerer. I have no magic. I do not really see the future. But I have common sense, and common sense tells me that a fox who has raided a nest of its eggs always returns. It tells me that a fox has a hunger that cannot be satisfied, that a fox is always in search of more...

Now here you are, not raging onto my farm like you did all those years ago, but on tip toes, like a group of common dinner guests. What, are you afraid of me? Perhaps you have heard stories... forget them. They are not true. Ever since you attacked. Ever since you... I have not been sharpening knives and axes, not practicing my archery. Ever since you came, I have tried to cope, to comprehend my feelings but, alas, I cannot.

In truth, I don't hate you. I don't love you either, though perhaps I should. My sisters do; my mother, too. They come and they speak to me sometimes, in the form of beautiful angels. They tell me not to hate you, not to kill you. 'Killing our killers won't bring us back,' they say. And I believe them. Even now they are here, saying 'Don't do it!" and I will listen. I do not know what will come of you all -- how you will die -- but I do know that it won't be by hand. You are safe, at least, from me. I will never disobey my mother and sisters, as long as I live and even afterwards."

His speech over, his audience stunned, the young man turned around abruptly and walked sternly back to his house. "Do as you wish," he shouted back to them as he shut the door of his house. And they did.

George is in Romania.

2010-07-31T22:42:00.000-07:00

God I hate cold openings, don't you? Now I have to explain: George is a good friend of the family who happens to be from Romania yet hasn't visited the place since she left with her parents over a decade ago, until now. is in? I don't have time to answer that one in full, so for now just think of it as the opposite of "is out."And Romania? that's a country, I think.

She left on the 22nd and will be gone till August something-or-other. She's already been to the Black Sea, museums, camping in the mountains -- and she's going to visit Dracula's castle! I'm extremely jealous so while she's away, I've decided, I'll do a little traveling of my own, except I'll have to use my Imagination.

So I went to the library, and guess what I found! First, The Land of Green Plums by Herta Muller, the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and former member of the German-speaking minority of Romania. She set all her books during the regime of Ceausescu -- can you say bleak? -- and, I gotta say, two pages in and I'm already very confused.

I also tracked down a cookbook, Taste of Romania, which also included some other neat things, proverbs, folk tales, and a little history. As for the food... actually, there are a lot of typical, decent-sounding recipes in there -- in between the haggis and calves brains. (Yes, George, I took that from the e-mail I sent you. I do that kinda thing all the time: 90% of the stuff on this blog was lifted straight from pamphlets I found at highway rest stops)

Now, allow me to present some Romanian proverbs I found in that cookbook. The author took them from a Romanian book of eight thousand proverbs, which in turn were taken from a ten-volume (!) set. Note that some of these were split into two or more lines (here the line breaks are denoted by slashes, as is customary), apparently in verse but without obvious meter or rhyme. I can only assume that the Romanian originals had these qualities...

He who steals an egg today/Will steal a cow tomorrow.
Give an egg today/You will receive a cow tomorrow.
Bread as fresh as can be/Wine as old as can be/Wife as young as can be.
A sharp vinegar breaks its own bottle.
Big fires are made even in small ovens.
Even the sea has a bottom.
Don't laugh at the donkey./The time will come when you will need/To mount him.
The husband doesn't know/What the village knows.
Water and fire cannot become friends.
From the word to the deed/Is like from the earth to the sky.
Don't run after the wagon that doesn't wait for you.
Being lazy, he shuts his eyes and opens his mouth.

So, there you are... Some are common enough and have English/American equivalents. Some are awesomely deep ("even the sea has a bottom"), while others make you wonder where the cameras are. A few have already entered my vocabulary.

I get hints of what it means to be a Romanian from those proverbs, and I have gleaned more from encounters with George's American-based family. My impression is generally ungenerous: distrustful, stingy, ornery, paranoid (gee, I wonder why...). From my experience, Romanians are -- at risk of sounding racist -- angry little brown people who have an affinity for stuffed animals and silk shirts.

Some more "food for thought" may be in order:

Bucharest, Romania's capital and largest city, during the nineteenth century became known to some as the "Little Paris of the East," due in large part to the importation of French culture -- particularly art, architecture and food -- by the Romanian aristocracy. With this nickname we all win: the rest of Europe, and America are allowed a a crusty laugh at Romania's expense, while loyal proponents of the, uh, "Romanian Way" -- George's uncle among them, apparently -- have something to hold over the heads of neighboring backwaters -- the rest of Europe, and America among them, apparently. (It is as yet unconfirmed that maps have reached "the Tiger of Eastern Europe.")

At least one man, I read, was of the opinion that one of the happiest times in Romanian history was the approximately 200 years it spent as a Roman province, Dacia. But Rome pulled out, leaving the natives to ceaseless enemy onslaughts, often with only the Carpathian Mountains for protection.

A country that small and powerless doesn't create the waves of history but instead gets tossed about by them. Often the best plan was to ride along wherever the waves would lead. But then this strategy has sometimes necessitated joining Hitler, which lead to some 700,000 Romanian deaths just the same. And the Romanian Jewish population went from around 800,000 at the start of WW2 to just under 10,000 in 1992? Oy... but who am I to judge?

Today, the Romanians are a people of recovery and rebuilding. Out from under "communist" rule since only 1989, the country seemed to be making great progress to economic strength in the early '00s. It joined the EU in 2007 -- kinda -- and earned itself the nickname "the Tiger of Eastern Europe." Ah, but the most recent economic downturn seems to have hit Romania especially hard... Oh, well...que sera, sera -- Romanian for "let's drag our leader's body through the streets."

Review: First Love and Other Stories, by Ivan Turgenev

2010-07-29T11:10:00.000-07:00

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The edition I read had just three stories: "First Love," "Spring Torrents," and "A Fire at Sea" -- a very odd trio they make. They are about 70, 140, and 10 pages respectively. If this were a muscle man competition, "Spring Torrents" would beat out the title story as a matter of sheer bulk, while the last story would have no choice but to quiver in his chair at the back of the stage, hoping beyond hope that no one sits on him.

The first two are thematically very similar: two tales of thwarted love, so obviously and painfully drawn from the author's own experience. Ah, the sweet melancholy of love unrequited or otherwise unfulfilled -- with my harsh old soul at my tender young age, it's really the only kind of love story I can take. Though I am still very new to his writing, I have reached a conclusion: this is Turgenev and I love him for it.

He was so preoccupied with this kind of tale, that his novel Fathers and Sons, really a novel of the generational gap, politics, philosophy and everything manly, found its way to a love story right quick! I can't but shake my head and smile. Even hard old hearts, hidden behind large and severe Russian beards have always been liable to melt.

"First Love" I read months ago, in another collection. Though I was largely impressed, and ate happily my first dose of the author's writings, I was rather peeved by the ending. I suppose it's one of those stories you can reread and then discover all the hints of the surprise ending hidden in plain view. But I, for my part, have not done this yet and am still convinced that the ending was jolting and disjointed.

"Spring Torrents" (or "Torrents of Spring" as I think I've seen it called) is at the other end, slow at first, with an unremarkable Italian girl for the main man's affections -- but it builds, ending unexpectedly, in a manner I feel I can be proud of.

"A Fire at Sea" is a major departure from its two older brothers and thus feels rather gruesomely tacked on. It is the autobiographical tale of a sea voyage the author took when he was about nineteen. The title spoils the premise -- it did really happen, and Turgenev freaked out, supposedly knocking aside children and women, and offering a crew member a ridiculous sum to save him. Well, that's what some other memoirs say, though Turgenev himself naturally paints a picture of more general uproar, thus shrinking and trivializing his own part...

This story could be (and probably has been) used to great effect in another, larger collection of the author's short works. It was written near the end of his life, about an event near the beginning -- an event that was always a source of embarrassment but colored his writing just the same. But here it has no place and shocks the reader out of the sharp and brooding reverie of what I now see as a pair of typical Turgenev love stories.

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Review: Low Moon, by Jason

2010-07-26T21:08:00.000-07:00

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Here's another one from that indefatigable single-named Norwegian artist and writer, Jason...Low Moon includes five stories, all featuring Jason's trademark minimalistic, undeviating art style; stiff anthropomorphic animals, mostly dogs; easy, silent movie-inspired writing; and sharp attention to detail.

The showpiece of this collection is the one on the cover. No, not "Low Moon," the title story and so-so western-style tale of a duel that is fought with chess pieces instead of guns. I mean instead "&", the story whose last panel graces the cover. First, how do you pronounce it? "and"? "ampersand"? "the artist formerly known as..."? Second, what's not to like about this story? Actually, it's two: two simultaneous stories, one told on the left page and the other on the right. Both are typical of this collection, about two protagonists who know what they want and will do anything to get it. They both see their plans through, yet both end up at a bar sitting next to a perfect stranger...

The other four stories are passable, if not outrageously successful. "Emily Says Hello" has a cool premise and a dramatic ending. "Low Moon" is, as I said, so-so, with a series of schticks that don't all shtick."Proto Film Noir" is probably the quirkiest of the bunch, and consequently my least favorite; it has an unfabulous ending, too. And lastly, "You Are Here" ends the book on a sweet note that didn't ring with me.

The art is, again, "passable, if not outrageously successful." The lines are straight as can be, and the art is generally not without a visual punchline. But I want more. I like the way this book looks -- but all his books look this way. I have read three of them and I am getting awfully tired of all these plain, single-color backgrounds! Even the layouts are uninspired: in this book we get nothing but the same four-paneled pages throughout.

Mind you, I get it: the simple style, besides being worthy on its own account, also allows Jason to comfortably produce one or two good sized books each year. There's something to be said about that method, especially for the young ambitious upstart, but surely Jason is past that. Surely he can afford to slow down, to elaborate on and fill in his well-established style.

What I like most about Jason's books are their unpretentiousness. Reading his books always makes me think, "Oh yeah, this is what the kids are reading!" but that doesn't discourage me. His books are hip, it seems, but they never lose track of telling a story, of entertaining. There's no impenetrable art house gunk in here -- or if there is, it doesn't clog up the machinery.

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"My Aunt Makes Up Her Mind About Me"

2010-07-23T15:40:00.000-07:00

Thus I began my new life, in a new name, and with everything new about me. Now that the state of doubt was over, I felt, for many days, like one in a dream. I never thought that I had a curious couple of guardians, in my aunt and Mr. Dick. I never thought of anything about myself, distinctly. The two things clearest in my mind were, that a remoteness had come upon the old Blunderstone life - which seemed to lie in the haze of an immeasurable distance; and that a curtain had for ever fallen on my life at Murdstone and Grinby's. No one has ever raised that curtain since. I have lifted it for a moment, even in this narrative, with a reluctant hand, and dropped it gladly. The remembrance of that life is fraught with so much pain to me, with so much mental suffering and want of hope, that I have never had the courage even to examine how long I was doomed to lead it. Whether it lasted for a year, or more, or less, I do not know. I only know that it was, and ceased to be; and that I have written, and there I leave it.

A passage like that ought to make even the most thickheaded reader (Hi, how's it going?) stand up and take notice. Personally, I crinkled my nose, played thoughtfully with my beard and said: "I should write a blog post now!"

The above-quoted passage is the very last paragraph of chapter 14 of Charles Dickens by David Copperfield, or vice versa. The young Charley/Davy has run away from his drudge job at his stepfather's warehouse to take refuge with his eccentric Aunt Betsey. The two "met" only once before, when David was a very small, posthumous child. She, shocked and disappointed at his being a boy not a girl, quickly fled from his life and formed a new quiet life for herself in a small cottage in...one of those towns with an Englishy name.

Some years later --maybe 6 to 8 years-- when David flees to her, he finds his aunt to be nice enough, despite being a bit "sharp" and possessing more than a few idiosyncrasies. And, with a penniless, exhausted, filthy nephew at her door, she proves her mettle by taking him in and defending him against the vile Mister and Miss Murdstone, the stepfather and his sister. "My aunt makes up her mind about me"...well, I think I've already gone and spoiled the result of that chapter!

Still, the above paragraph puts to an end one of the most fiery and intriguing passages I have read in a long time (too long to put here but well worth reading). The tongue lashing Aunt Betsey gives Mr. Murdstone, combined with her effective shutting down of Ms. Murdstone's 'picky little comments, render entirely impotent the until now most terrible and powerful influences of David's young life. So impotent for so long, David finally finds a sane and confident guardian -- an eccentric, proto-feminist, hermit lady -- to defend him and look after his future.

It is a new era for David -- a happy time for him, the author, and the reader. All three of us are now set free from youth-stealing drudgery in some anonymous warehouse along the river Thames and are now free to roam among the endearing oddballs of Victorian society.

But we can never forget the events of the previous chapters, particularly Chapter 11, "I Begin Life on My Own Account, and Don't Like It," epitomized by a title so sadly understated --whether on account of bravado or pain or plain English stuffiness, I don't know -- yet so full of grim foreboding towards the chapter it heads up. Charles Dickens never forgot his own two years at a boot-blacking factory, as evidenced by this and so many other books, characters, passages. His experiences at one of the lowest rungs of society at an awfully young age no doubt, the scholar will say, made him a more well-rounded author in future years, made him "worldly" (without lasting long enough to make him world weary) and, finally, created a unique character capable of creating hundreds of others that he used to populate his unique vision of the world. Pity, the things required for such gains...

Tom Sawyer and Charles Dickens

2010-07-18T18:41:00.000-07:00

I have recently started on my way through that worthy, well-worn tome of English literature, David Copperfield by Mr. Charles Dickens. I have seen my way through "I am born," "I am sent away from home," "I try opium and really like it," etc. and I have found everything to be to my liking. Most overwhelming are the characters: they just keep coming at you, and each of them seems ready and willing to take a comfortable seat and tell you a story of his life as long as the present volume. It seems he (the author) could not help endowing endearing interest, mystery and magic into all his characters, no matter how minor.

Take William, for example, a waiter the young David meets on his way to boarding school. While dining at an inn along his way, and blushing all over from the grand attention shown him, the young master is easily taken in by this William. The ale in little Davey's half-pint, it turns out, is poisonous -- why, it already killed a "Mr. Topsawyer" about a week ago. And since the inn management does not like to see anything wasted, the only possibility is for William to drink it instead. He soon grows queasy -- or says he does -- but no matter: David is having chops and potatoes, the only thing in the world that can cure this kind of poisoning... Things continue in this manner until William is quite satiated with his meal and the reader likewise with this little bit of parlor trickery.

What caught my eye was the name: Mr. Topsawyer. Sounds an awful like Tom Sawyer, doesn't it? And William's little bit of trickery fit nicely into the mold now so epitomized by Twain's boyish rogue, especially his little turn with whitewashing the fence... I had to know more so I put on my "Junior History Detective" badge and dove into the Net.

First things first: David Copperfield, originally published in 1850, preceded Tom Sawyer by 26 years. The lives of Mr. Twain and Mr. Dickens over-lapped approximately 35 years, and most of those saw the (presumably eternally mustachioed) younger writer still in literary diapers. The two met exactly once -- and "met" is hardly the word I'd consider best: "Twain, writing as a special correspondent of the San Francisco Alta California in January 1868, filed this report after seeing a public reading by Dickens at the Steinway Hall in New York. Twain was 32 years old at the time, Dickens a very old 55." This bit of writing is certainly not Twain's best, but his obvious reverence for the older man -- seen through the playful mockery and only natural hero defacement -- leaves within the realm of the possible the idea that Twain based his character at least in part on Dickens's work.

The origin of Topsawyer: As is common enough knowledge, sawyer is another, more archaic name for a woodcutter. This old-fashioned profession went hand-in-band with the sawpit, "a pit over which lumber is positioned to be sawed with a long two-handled saw by two men, one standing above the timber and the other below." I am given to believe that the man standing in the pit was known as the bottom-sawyer and the one standing on the log was the top-sawyer. The top-sawyer seems to have had the nicer, much less dangerous position -- the phrase having the upper hand comes to mind -- which, by extension, he may have acquired through conniving means.

If this does not suit you, I have another lead. A note from an Oxford World's Classics edition of Nicholas Nickelby has this to say about the term top-sawyer: "Norfolk slang for a skilled timber man, who may earn double the wages of other workers; by extension a 'top-sawyer' refers to a master genius in any profession." And as Sawyer became a fairly common occupational surname in England and its former colonies, it is not difficult to imagine some of the best of these men earning the surname Topsawyer... Then, it is not hard to imagine Twain separating the name into two and changing one measly letter

The "real" Tom Sawyer: My research was further complicated by the discovery of the existence of the handsome bloke on the left. What you might call the "real" Tom Sawyer, this man is most remembered for having an adventurous life, as well as the good fortune of becoming acquainted with the great Mississippi author.

A typical wandering, Westward soul, Tom tried his hand at gold prospecting, and distinguished himself as a hero -- rescuing some ninety people from a burning ship just off the "Southern coast" -- before turning out a successful career as a fireman.

Certainly, this Tom seems the sort liable to be of interest to Mr. Twain -- and, one fancies, perhaps his name had just the right ring to it. But we can't be sure: "Twain scholars, including Barbara Schmidt of Tarleton University have been unable to verify any claim that Mark Twain named his book for this particular Tom Sawyer."

We can't be sure is the operative phrase for all of this. I am merely a junior detective, remember -- and, you can't forget, even top-sawyers make mistakes. This web could very well be entirely of my own making, constructed more out of willing than waying. So, please admire the art work -- but don't touch. Works of art like this are so very terribly fragile.

Harvey Pekar... Part 2

2010-07-15T09:28:00.000-07:00

A lot of things happen when a person dies -- but, mostly, nothing happens. Harvey Pekar has been remembered, his life recounted in dozens of newspapers, yet no one has actually done anything about it.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer gave him a front page story, which lacked anything remarkable except for occurring in the only daily paper of the city Pekar lived and knew. (I was going to take the time to electronically scan the newspaper but luckily these days so many newspaper articles have an online counterpart.) This article is the headpiece, in my mind, for a long series occurring in papers about the world, telling the same basic story. Ha. Obits...

Below, I have collected a few more articles of more interest than the average obituary.

Jacob Heibrunn of The Huffington Post wrote an inspired piece, "The Collapse of Cleveland," in which he pulled together three seemingly unrelated events -- Pekar's death; the death of George Steinbrenner, Yankees owner and one-time Cleveland shipping magnate; and the exit of Lebron James, former Cavalier all-star and supposed god, for another team -- as a sort of base for apocalyptic conclusions obvious from the title.

The Washington Post, in their "Comic Riffs" perennial feature, paid more appropriate tribute, gathering quotes from some of Pekar's former collaborators and fellow members of the industry. Frank Stack: "I've heard him compared to Charles Bukowski, of course. But I think he was even more like an American Chekov. " *eh*...

Splash Page, MTV.com's comic-themed blog, featured an interview with Jeff Newelt, editor of "The Pekar Project," an online comics project that saw Pekar paired with a "quartet of artists." Of course, Pekar left many projects unfinished, and others that are finished but yet to come out, among them "a bunch of" comics for the project and a graphic novel, simply entitled Cleveland, intended for release in 2011. Newelt also spoke of writing a tribute comic himself, as well as the possibility of tribute comics from other artists and writers.

It also occurred to me that, with all this talk of a "great man" and so-and-so, perhaps some are left wondering: "What's 'is stories like?" The main American Splendor series, of course, can't be missed, but below I have collected and recounted most of his non-AS graphic novels...

Our Cancer Year, with Joyce Brabner and Frank Stack - "This is a story about a year when someone was sick, about a time when it seemed that the rest of the world was sick, too." Harvey's and his wife's trials with his cancer during the early nineties are juxtaposed against larger events, particularly the escalation of the Gulf War.

American Splendor: Our Movie Year - Harvey tells us what it was like to be a celebrity, of a sort. This book documents his life leading up to, and including the release of the well-received film adaptation of American Splendor. "Can he keep his everyman persona [and good looks] in the face of an award-winning movie based on his autobiographical comic book series? Happily, the answer is 'you bet.'"

The Quitter, with Dean Haspiel - A memoir of earlier years, from the little kid days, through his short-lived college experience, to his many menial jobs and his finally settling with -- more like grasping onto for dear life -- a government file clerk position. In short, it's the story of a kid who quit at everything and later kinda fell into becoming an icon of his city.

Ego & Hubris: The Michael Malice Story, with Gary Dumm - This book follows the entire life of one Michael Malice, a semi-successful business man who attributes his success to reading Ayn Rand. From my review: " Michael Malice is a real jerk, but I loved reading about his life." and "I think I'll just stick to my indifferent attempts at altruism, thankyouverymuch."

Macedonia, with Heather Roberson and Ed Piskor - This book follows a college student who dives into the history of modern-day Macedonia in an attempt to discover more about practical peace-making work. Never read it.

Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History - The story of a radical '60s era student activist group -- never read it.

The Beats - A hodgepodge of stories and artists, memoirs and more typical nonfiction comics. It starts with lengthy graphic biographies about Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, then breaks down into a series of smaller of comics divulging both a more general history and, sometimes, a more specific angle -- "Beatnik Chicks," for example.

Studs Terkel's Working: A Graphic Adaptation - Another hodgepodge of writers and artists -- Pekar just sorta presided. It's the perfect book for him to adapt: a series of people talking frankly about their everyday working lives.

Harvey Pekar: a great man is dead

2010-07-12T16:27:00.000-07:00

"I’m saddened to learn of the death today of Harvey Pekar, age seventy, author for thirty-four years of the comic book American Splendor..."

So. "Here's our guy..." In the post title I have labeled him a "great man," a personal title as full of sad irony as the title of his long-running series. "Great" is an adjective I am hard pressed to use to seriously describe anyone, but I will always be ready to admit that there was something special about Harvey Pekar. He was a man inherently outside the mainstream: ugly, neurotic, anti-social, "curmudgeonly," and probably smelly too. (Don't believe that last: I never met him.) He was a guy many probably felt sorry for, and whom others laughed at, as with his infamous appearances on Letterman. I, for my part, felt there was no other route but kinship.

I never met him, as I said, yet I still feel like I know him -- a peculiar side effect of autobiography, especially the quotidian variety (Harvey, you taught me that word) Pekar's work typified. He was a man I wanted to meet. I was going to -- at some book-warming event, or a kind of gallery showing -- but plans fell through that night and I ended up reading one of his comics instead. Maybe it was for the best... we'll never know. As it is he will always occupy a tender, endearing place with me, alongside other grumpy, seemingly unapproachable people.

And he was unapproachable, at least in his stories, at least to some. Man... you think Pekar himself was ugly... his writing is what nice guys call "vigorous" or "full of 'local color'" or "true to life," while craftily avoiding words like "boring" and "stiff," never mind "finely-crafted" or, simply, "gorgeous." His writing style and his character are both hard to like, but certainly they are equally hard to hate -- probably because they are so true, so full of sincerity. There are no intentional lies between the pages of American Splendor -- just an ordinary guy attempting earnestly to tell it like it is.

About his real life -- the parts never put on paper -- I can say nothing absolutely. Working with him was probably not always easy: his unswerving attitude towards his stuff caused some head butting with his artist collaborators throughout his career. His tendency to leave his work uncut and unedited, for example, peeved both artist (Gary Dumm, one of Pekar's long-time collaborators once complained to us, "There's no room for the art!") and reader ("Hey, mac, you got anything shorter, maybe?"). But in the end, Dumm, the artist found him to be "without fail a generous and helpful friend to me..." And Abe, the reader, is in the midst of accounting for himself.

Don't believe the news anchors: "Cleveland is my hometown." Chicago was taken -- Miami, too. Pekar was -- is -- the real king of Cleveland. He deserves more recognition, from both the comparatively highbrow, and the people "from off the streets of Cleveland" -- as American Splendor was originally subtitled. As it is, we'll simply have to pretend that the Harvey Award is in honor of him as well as the late, great Harvey Kurtzman. And we'll have to hope that the four or five of his books in every local library will reach dolefully empty hands and will maybe spark a tinder in just the right imagination. And hopefully someone can be conjured up to say: "This is our guy! I'm immensely proud of him." Oh, hell -- it's already done.

May he rest in peace.

5 Reasons Books Are Better Than Movies

2010-07-08T09:52:00.000-07:00

There was a time, not so long ago, when an army of Internet minions was slavishly devoted to scientifically discovering the "Top 10 of..." just about anything. From "The 10 head-bangingyest metal songs of all time" to the more modest "Ten can't-miss pudding recipes" to the just plain strange "Top 10 places I've seen you, my darling" -- everyone's had the itch. But, somewhere between now and then, the collective attention span was unduly divided duly -- and half of ten is five. So, in regretful capitulation to the times here are the "5 Reasons Books Are Better Than Movies," a subject nevertheless near and dear to this blog's hearts and my own. And you'll let me know, won't you, dear Reader: is this post trite or recondite? (That's my new thing, see, meant to one day run in TV Guide alongside "Cheers and Jeers.") Please, please let me know. Now here's the list:

1 Books look good on the shelf - You can tell so much about a person, they say, from the books they have on their shelves. But what do you gain from perusing a movie collection? What, some guy has the third Godfather film but not the first two? He has the Star Wars Christmas special? Lame. Totally lame. But if he has the 60-volume set Great Books of the Western World? Class. Totally class.

2 Books burn better - All the hoopla surrounding the so-called "travesty" of book-burning is unfounded and unrealistic. Books burn at 451 degrees and humans only need 98.6 of that; so one book has the power to warm 4.574 people! Also: I can't help but think that the protagonist of the Jack London short story "To Build a Fire" would have been a-okay if he'd just had a copy of his own harrowing story within reach.

3 Some books are dangerous - I suppose you can kill someone with just about anything, but there is something beautifully appropriate about smashing a faceless enemy's face in with the complete works of Freud. I keep the standard two-volume set of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on the bedside table at all times just in case -- just in case I get an opportunity to crash a burglar's head between those two meaty cymbals and finally prove the relevance of Roman history.

4 Some books are harmless - Sure, the books of #3 contain dangerous ideas, and are big and heavy to boot, but there is another breed. Surely there can be no harm in a good (or awful) paperback presented to the inmates of our prison system. A paperback is nearly useless as a blunt weapon, and paper is a poor material choice for building a shiv, while to many a DVD or VHS tape is just so much sharp and pointed plastic. If nothing else, there's always item #2.

5 Books sometimes smell good - This just in: "bookhuffer.com" is still available!

An excerpt from my notebook

2010-07-06T15:58:00.000-07:00

Note: Below, an excerpt from my notebook, taken from the entry for today. --Did I really write this today? it seems so long ago... I also find it hard to believe that this came from a journal or a diary so I called it a notebook instead. Yet it is appropriately self centered; I considered calling this post "I Want."

Also: "Diaries and journals are the lowest form of literary output."-- Mr. Nabbie Cough. (Don't trust writers: they are rotten, liars.)

Richard Wright wanted to write in a way that would make his words disappear. I want something like that: to write with such conviction and solid strength that my essence is always preserved, even after translation, even after a catastrophe or Time's slow decay burn large parts of the manuscript. I want to say what I mean, mean what I say. I want to write tight, finally (sic!) crafted fiction. I want to create my own little world.

A stumbling block for me has always been the idea that each new story requires a new world. This is not what Chekhov did. He created his world -- his own private vision of Russia -- and used it over and over. It is not hard to imagine the lady with the dog sitting next to Gusev, the sick sailor on a homeward bound ship, or with what's-his-name, the little apprentice who wants to return to his Grandpa. I can see them all laid out in a fanboy collage, the way they do with Marvel and Simpsons characters. This would be more tasteful...

I want to write stories that are stories, not pieces of art. I am reminded of a sculpture I saw recently in the Modern Art exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art. An irregularly shaped, many-cornered wooden base rising some six inches above the floor supported, first, a naked human figure bending over to touch its toes, and second, a careful network of wound metal chain laid across the platform, projecting out from about half of the human figure. Is the chain, I wondered, secured to the base? Is the sculpture exactly as it was when it rolled off the assembly line? What would happen if I reached down and pushed a chunk of the chain even just an inch? What if, heaven forbid, a strong wind -- but I guess they don't many of those at the core of a museum.

My point: art, at least the stuff at a museum, is die on wool, paint on canvas, carve on stone. Sometimes, they say, great artists would prepare for the future, painting things intended to shine for centuries, even if they became very black from soot or very faded from overexposure to light. Now, too few works are created for a realistic future. Even public sculptures and so-called installation art are terribly confined to the artist's view -- "Pigeon shit on sculpture makes local artist cry 'Fowl'". There is, still, an idea of immortality through art -- ars longa, vita brevis -- but nothing lasts as long as we'd like... Better to give your art up to bigger and brighter heads rather than let it languish, after you're gone, in a hopeless struggle for relevance in a future you can't possibly imagine.

Review: The Comfort of Strangers, by Ian McEwan

2010-07-01T11:34:00.000-07:00

My rating: 2 of 5 stars
So... this is it, then? This is "Postmodernism," this is what our current generation has to show for itself. This kind of book is, somehow, going to be held up in the near future as representative of these, our modern days... "I don't know, man. I think you'd piss a lot of people off..."

The Company of Strangers by Ian McEwan is of a breed with which, I must admit, I am mostly unacquainted. My only other experience in this realm has been White Noise by Don Dellilo. (Listening in on a modern lit. university class taught me, if nothing else, that it's de-LIH-loh, not de-LAE-loh.) That book left me with the same marked ambivalence I have here now. It goes without saying that I've had trouble even with forming an opinion -- then, when it comes, it sits there on the fence, an impenetrable, frustrating, and ugly blob of gray.

Mary and Colin are on vacation (or "on holiday" as someone named Ian McEwan invariably puts it). Mary and Colin are a young unmarried couple who have become disillusioned and dulled by their seven long years of shared experience. Colin is a "girly man" with an apparently "perfect" physique and no discernible personality. I have never seen him naked, but then Mary and Ian keep telling me he's perfect. Ian and Colin, however, are fairly mum on Mary, so she has left no impression at all.

The on-page couple spends the first third of their 127 pages despondently wandering around the neighborhood. Then they meet a guy, Robert, as if by accident. (BUT IT TURNS OUT IT WASN'T AN ACCIDENT!!!! DUM! DUM! DUM!!! ). And he, uh...he takes the pair to a bar and, for some reason, reveals his early years as a daddy's boy, including one ridiculous yet very memorable anecdote (Remember kids: don't snitch on your older sisters). This meeting, as the inside flap discovers to us, THROWS THEIR WORLD UPSIDE DOWN.

I hear this is a tale of violent masculinity, all wrapped up in a quirky suspense/mystery/thriller tale that ends... well, I guess the dweeby, sensitive type finally gets the sand kicked in his face that he always deserved, and that we always knew was coming. I hear the story shambling along, sometimes rambling, but never losing track of its inevitable, obvious conclusion. Suspense -- yes it does exist in this book, but I could never muster the suspense to care.

Like that Delillo book I read, The Company of Strangers created no likable characters and placed them in a totally anonymous location which you might call "Everyville" but which I call "Who-gives-a-rat's-ass-ville" (est. 1945). I kid (at least about the date: we can never be sure when, exactly, "literature" and its Cultural brethren, went to total shit). We are definitely overdue for a resurgence -- something crisp and sexy, not dull and unrelatable.

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"The Ashtray"

2010-06-16T17:38:00.000-07:00

I can say with a bare minimum of hemming and hawing that "The Ashtray" by Anton Chekhov is, for me, the most influential piece of short fiction that has never been written. That's right: as the story goes, one Vladimir Korolenko, a fellow Russian, fellow writer, and fellow for fun, once asked Chekhov how he wrote his stories. Whereupon the writer of slightly more stature picked up an ashtray that happened to be lying about and proclaimed he would write a story about it by the next morning. To the best of my knowledge he never did.

Much pleasure can be derived merely from speculation on what this story could have been like. Chekhov was a true master who was capable of writing just about anything, from the aptly-named "Misery", to numerous humorous short stories, to love stories like "The Lady and the Little Dog". In what direction would he have taken this tale of such humble beginnings? What part would that ashtray play? (Somehow I imagine it being smashed against a wall or against a head -- then I remember the 5-pound alabaster ashtray that used to sit on our old front porch...) Would an ashtray -- I dare to say -- make any appearance at all? (Yes, definitely. The progenitor of the literary technique today known as "Chekhov's gun" would never needlessly obscure such an object.)

But also "The Ashtray" story -- or, rather the story of the story -- can serve as inspiration. Chekhov throughout his life produced hundreds of these little nuggets of fiction, these compact yet remarkably complete short stories. And, he would have us to believe, he did so hurriedly, perhaps with as much effort as was required to pick up that ashtray. Surviving manuscripts do paint a different picture -- one of a cash-strapped young man who nevertheless put great care and spit and polish and elbow grease into his work -- but I suppose the author's mere perception will do...

I assure you: though I have posted nothing on this blog for weeks, I have been endeavoring to add my own cocktail of industrious fluids to a series of short stories:

"The Acrobat" -- You've met him before, but I assure you he has changed. He is out of infancy, of course, and long past toddlerhood. Indeed, now he is in his awkward and pimply years -- if I had my druthers such people would not be allowed into polite society until (hopefully) past their affliction.

"Step on a Crack..." -- In the fine tradition of creating stories based on small aspects of folk culture, I have endeavored here to create a story about the old phrase "Step on a crack, break your mother's back". I have created a kind of idyllic 1950s town, wherein a group of three siblings will accidentally discover that the old ditty has some weight to it. Expect a trip to the hospital in a visit to dear old mother; expect a line of groaning moms, all suffering from the same mysterious affliction; expect the formation of a kind of "mothers league" who plan to combat the new plague by filling in all the cracks in the pavement of their town. I imagine it in the gentle, playful style of Roald Dahl's children's fiction.

"Foundling Father" -- Another cute-ish story, this one about a wheelchair-bound old man who is abandoned in front of an orphanage during the night while he sleeps. The orphanage takes him in and he finds a new and better life. I am not one for inspirational, but this will certainly be lighthearted...

"The Death March of Middleburg Heights" -- A semi-autobiographical piece that will detail a bizarre and furious argument I had with my sister, which spanned hours and a large chunk of our suburban neighborhood. I added "Middleburg Heights" to the title with the idea of creating a series of stories detailing the odder sides of suburbia. The name is both an in-joke -- Middleburg Heights is an actual place, near where we live -- and an appropriate moniker for a typical "Every town" of the Midwestern United States.

"Henrietta" -- This is another in the bizarre suburbia vein... detailing the fixation of one odd, reclusive old man on a certain blond-haired young girl. This one stresses the semi in semi-autobiographical -- though the truth is bizarre enough as it is...

So there you have it...

On the reading front, I am currently working through The Best American Humorous Short Stories: 43 Stories by 31 Authors. I just finished "Pigs is Pigs" by Ellis Parker Butler, a silly story about just how much it should cost to ship a pair of guinea pigs by train. Flannery, the agent at the local station, wants to charge the fee for livestock -- "pigs is pigs" after all. The owner of said pigs is pissed; so ensues a torrent of letter-writing and a lot of bureaucratic nonsense. Meanwhile, the animals do what they do best, and soon Flannery has thousands of "pigs" on his hands. An amusing story, it has elements of the playful mayhem brought on by seemingly innocuous events, found in stories like If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and Too Many Mice. Disney even made a cartoon based on the story.

I hope to read a bunch of these short story collections, to expose myself to a variety of styles moods -- especially those that are not old and/or Russian...

The Acrobat (Part 1), by Abe Kurp

2010-06-08T22:50:00.000-07:00

Note: Below I present to you approximately a thousand words, the beginnings of a short story I've been meaning to write since April. I have written little more than what you see below and I am not sure where this tale is going, but I have a good feeling about this. I'll keep chipping at it and hopefully end with David or something... Either way, I plan to play a little game: finish "The Acrobat" then read Lolita, then rewrite my story, hopefully with a whole new view on creepy.

About an hour has passed since first I took my seat. The clowns amused me with their antics, the juggler brought me to silence with his death-defying throwing of knives, and the elephants charged the crowd to roaring. But the roaring has died; now there are only a handful of conversations, scattered about the crowd like tiny pebbles on an old gravel road. Some of the torches at the perimeter have been extinguished, the tent is subdued and dark. The three rings at the center of the crowd are empty. Children seated near the entryways are peering over the railings, hoping to be the first to catch sight of the next act. I am quiet and content. I sit, amusing myself with contemplation of the various acts, amusing myself with speculation of what is to come next. The show, the pamphlet assures me, is approximately three hours long.

"Have you seen the popcorn vendor?" the man to my left asks suddenly. "I could really go for some popcorn but the damn vendor has gone and run off, it seems." I look at him silently: a fat pig of a man, red faced and sweating profusely, squeezed into his chair and his clothes in turn. He is my brother, Rudolph. "If you see him you will let me know of course; Arnie?"

"Yes, of course." My answer brings him a kind of satisfaction. He readjusts himself in his seat and continues talking with the man to his left. I return to amusing myself. After a few, tentative “ahs” and “ums” his monologue continues:

“To fly... It is the thing that people want more than anything else – even more than money.” There is a woman in the front row, far in front of us, wearing a purple pillbox hat and a white dress with purple polka dots. “Money can buy trampolines, flying machines, and paper wings, but even a billionaire is not a bird; even he cannot flit and flutter about like the commonest of sparrows.” A little girl in orange sits next to her. She has been making a nuisance of herself during the entirety of the show. “This does not keep him from trying. The man who owns this circus, for example, must desperately yearn for the sky.” During the juggling she was evidently bored; she was running about the section, grabbing and pulling at whatever she could find. An usher was forced to crawl under some bleachers to get at her, then escort her back to her seat. “Why else are they leaping, jumping, twirling – 10, 15, 20 feet off the ground?” This same usher – shortish, youngish, plumpish – is now standing and sweating in a corner near the door.

I look over at my brother. He is working himself into it now, adding gesticulation and flourish to his words. “Those lithe little creatures, in their little black and gold costumes; they jumped, leaped, soared – up, up, up – but always they came back – down, down, down." With each "up" he pushes his right hand higher into the air; with each "down" he throws it down, closer to the head of the man in front of him. His high and strained voice, made worse by his excitement, carries its notes to the entire section, but no one makes an open protest; everyone tries to ignore him. This approach has already failed them. “Flying... It is useless, really – not even worth the effort...”

He suddenly becomes subdued. His hands fidget for a time, then flutter abruptly downward and come to rest on his gut. There is silence in our section. Rudolph has seemingly run out of things to say – he has finished his spiel in an abrupt and uncharacteristic way. Now, like a cat who is caught falling on its ass, he postures and primps in an effort to look cool, calm, collected. I can hear the gears – he's trying with all his might to pull forth a new topic for discussion. The man on his left – never much of a talker, a major draw for Rudolph – is staring downward, at the golden hair of the woman directly in front of him.

The crowd around us is quiet, like little squirrels in a big, big forest, afraid of disturbing the ogre. Some minutes pass. I can hear his breathing soften, deepen – his inner state has calmed to the state of his outer appearance. I wish I knew what he was thinking: I have a feeling it would make me laugh. He scratches his head incessantly – an itch has been bothering him for over a week, which he has never failed to mention. He bites at his already apple red lips. He favors the bottom lip; it looks several weeks riper than the top one.

A middle-aged couple – man and wife, apparently – have bravely struck up a conversation two rows in front of ours. I smile when I look at them. They are middle aged, neither more than fifty, with full heads of mostly-brown hair. They are not so old, yet it seems like they have been married forever – they even resemble each other. They amuse me, too, because they are brave. This old married couple – cute, short, and presumably kind – have accomplished what I have never had the courage to do.

Their talking opens the flood gates: soon there are two conversations in our section, then three, then six, and so on. It happens so quickly, Rudolph is bewildered and further stunned into silence. I watch him with the corner of my eye. He is bewildered – now fidgeting with his belt buckle, now looking anxiously over at the man on his left, now returning to his imaginary itch.

“Aha! The acrobats!” He practically shouts these words, excited, and anxious to halt the flow. He succeeds only in frightening a little girl in front of me, who had just begun to speak. “The acrobats were beautiful... But still, I wonder, what will come next?” The man on his left says nothing. “I wonder... when they will be ready. Isn't it getting awfully late, indeed?” He looks down at his wrist, before realizing he has misplaced his watch.

“Say, Arnie.” I am his last resort for a conversation partner. “Have you seen that vendor yet?” I open my mouth as if to speak, but he keeps talking. “Of course; you haven't.” I have. "I haven't either, and, as you know, I have these wonderful super hero eyes. Like Superman.” He laughs: “Ha. Ha.” two short, moderately loud bursts.

The sound of trumpets is blasted about the air; Rudolph's mirthless monosyllable still jingle in my ears. Everyone is brought to silence. There is some commotion at the entrance on the other end of the tent, directly across from us. Five or six employees mill about the entrance; the crowd is a buzzing blanket of whispers, punctuated here and there by a shout.

Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor

2010-05-31T21:50:00.000-07:00

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
From the author's note to the second edition:

That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great importance. For them Hazel Motes' integrity lies in his trying with such vigor to get rid of the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind. For the author Hazel's integrity lies in his not being able to.

You can run but you can't hide. Lord knows, Hazel Motes tried. Haze came from a long line of southern preachers, and he had, it seems, every intention of falling in line. But something between boyhood and the place where we first meet him -- on a green plush train seat headed home from the war -- he lost his faith. That's an oversimplification; he lost his belief in redemption -- in the need for it. So, it simply follows, that he lost his faith in Christ.

That is a lie. Hazel Motes, to the day he died, never stopped believing in Christ. He runs from the "ragged figure who moves from tree to tree" -- this is a book about that running -- but, in an ironic twist that only God could cook up, his efforts to push away only bring him closer. He goes to see a prostitute and she mistakes him for a preacher -- a common occurrence throughout. He forces himself to seduce a 15-year-old girl, Sabbath Lily Hawks -- one day he says something to the effect of "Gee, I really ought to seduce that girl" and writes her a crude note -- but her vigorous affirmative response throws him off. Whereas he is forcing himself into sin, to prove a theological point, she seems to revel in sin for sins' own sake. Nevertheless, he goes through with his plans of "seduction" and his ultimate redemption comes rather dramatically: he blinds himself with quicklime.

This book is preoccupied with the sensation of sight. Why, even the name, "Hazel Motes"..."mote", literally a speck or particle, is familiar through Mathew 7:3 "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?" And the character is sometimes called Haze, which is both an Army-like nickname for concealing the girlish "Hazel" and a synonym for fog. Then there is Sabbath's father...we learn through a newspaper clipping that he tried to blind himself in the name of the Lord, as a public spectacle. A second article proclaims that he chickened out.

From a relatively simplistic perspective, Wise Blood can be seen as one in a line of novels in the Southern Gothic style -- that peculiarly American branch of the Gothic novel that used the grotesque, ironic, and odd to explore deep issues of politics, society, and *surprise* religion. At the fore of this view is the character Enoch Emery (there are some great names in this book), whose ridiculous adventures replicate -- in a grotesque, minstrel show way -- the inner struggles of Hazel. He dresses in bright, day-glow suits; he steals a primitive human mummy from a museum, perhaps perceiving it to be the "new Christ"; and finally, he overtakes a man in a gorilla costume and takes his place. Enoch is the leader of a parade of ridiculous characters, who all jump into Haze's life and quickly jump out again. There is Sabbath and her father (reminiscent of Paper Moon); there is the prostitute; there is a con artist who hijacks Haze's soapbox preaching for a money-making scheme; there is the doppelgänger Hazel that the conman uses in Haze's places (Hazel later kills him with his car); there is the cop who pushes Haze's car off a cliff, smiling; there is even the car, the Essex. Haze and his Essex go through a lot -- it is his home, his soapbox, even his murder weapon; a number of essays have been written about their relationship.

Is this a book of despair? In my mind, not at all. Why, it ends how you would expect any good Christian work to end: with the man finally meeting his maker. Seeing the way so many Christians act towards death, one may be lead to believe it's a bad thing. Life may be absurd, and death even moreso, but please don't despair. This is not a book about, in, or on despair...At times it seems even comical: it brings to my mind a particular type of cheesy religious illustration, depicting ordinary people at their lives while Jesus looks on helpfully. Well, Hazel simply never bothered to turn his head -- in fact, he obstinately refused. There is a kind of pitiful irony to the fact that the only character who claims to reject Christ is the only one who truly believes.

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Comics: Are You WEIRD too?

2010-05-26T23:35:00.000-07:00

I suppose I could have chosen any number of comic strips I actually like for this post, but that's not the kinda guy I am. No, I'm the type of guy who stumbles onto some random piece of junk and then can't get it out of his mind. I mean, just look at it (click on the image to the left to enlarge it). WEIRD? Well, are ya? Ya know, we're all a little wacky. We're all really original. Just like snow flakes, finger prints and the shoes we wear. Here's an idea: let's chalk up relatively minor variation to some deep and powerful uniqueness...that we all share.

"There are people who cry when they hear folk music, no matter what."
"There are people who talk to themselves and learn a lot from the conversation."
"There are people who enjoy peanut butter banana bacon sandwiches and always will."
There are people who like to be strangled while dressed in zebra costumes. There are people who get off from the smell of farts. There are people who think they're dogs. Weird? You could be weirder. Get to it!

*pause for laughter*

Aside from the little foray above, my experience with comics lately has been a very positive, reassuring one. There is just so much good shit out there -- I try to sample a bit of everything. Since reading my first graphic novel in late 2008, I have only read a bit over fifty of 'em, but things have started to pick up lately. I published "A Trio of Graphic Novel Reviews" last month and it looks like I could use another in the same vein very soon.

Most eye-opening has been the experience of reading the Best American Comics series -- specifically the installments for 2007, 2008, and (working on) 2009. An excerpt from my review of a similar collection, Flight, sums up this series admirably: "No doubt these authors are... the up-and-coming stars of "underground comics" (that are not especially underground), mixed in with some chaff for good measure." You know the drill: wade through a few comics about the author's cat or that wacky girl he just met; wade through the half-baked stuff that passes for art, next to the half-baked stuff that passes for writing. You will find some gems.

Case in point: Kaz's Underworld. The strip follows characters like "Creep Rat" and "Sam Snuff" and appears regularly in alternative weeklies about the US -- it's the kind of strip that has a "hate mail" section on its website. And it beats the pants off of Derf's The City (though Derf wins in the pseudonym department). I hesitate to place a sampling here on account of imposing legalese, but you can see a few dozen strips in the site's "archive section". It has quickly found itself a place in my heart next to xkcd and Calvin and Hobbes.

Also....I have long understood the magic of both piracy and comics. But, boy, imagine what happens when you put them together! The '00s have seen the emergence of legitimate online comics, from the small-time webcomic operations of the hopeful dreamers, to the larger undertakings of the big boys in the comics world. And with the rise of the legitimate...

Today --right now-- you can find just about any comic you're looking for, online. Now, I'm not the one to rampantly steal; I live by the maxim that stealing sparingly is okay. If want to read The Walking Dead -- the break-out zombie series with a soul -- and no issues have crossed my path; if the library is all out of copies of Ghost World; heck, if I have a sudden urge to read Conan or something similar, the Internet welcomes me with open arms. I'd love to take a closer look at the books on lists like the CBR's top 100 of 2009, or else more general lists like the A.V. Club's best of the '00s. Then...well, I suppose I can investigate some legitimate, public domain stuff from sites like Golden Age Comics.

Also...I must relate the story of Erik Martin, a 13-year-old kid with liver cancer who "always wanted to be a super hero." Well, since he's dying and all, the Make a Wish foundation decided to make it happen. So, they hired a bunch of surely under-worked actors to pose as 1) Spider-Man 2) "Dr. Dark" 3) "Blackout Boy". Turns out the Seattle Sounders, the local soccer team, got themselves locked in their locker room. It was all up to "Electron Boy" to drive to the stadium -- in a Dolorean! -- wave his hands and make it all right... The Seattle Times covered the event, and there's also a short clip from CNN on Youtube. Watch the clip. Honestly, watching a bewildered, speechless, spandex-clad kid get dragged around by over-enthusiastic adults is a wee bit depressing. But-- his genuinely enthusiastic response at the very end of the clip made the whole thing seem worthwhile.

(Before I go I have to mention "Child Bankrupts Make-A-Wish Foundation With Wish". I thought it was genuine for longer than I care to admit -- then I found it hilarious.)

Geeks, Nerds, and Liberty

2010-05-25T09:20:00.000-07:00

I feel obligated to tell you, guy who's staring at the screen right now, that May 25 is a day of some celebration. More than just a time to nurse those Victoria Day hangovers (Oh, you Canadians and your silly customs), it is a time for celebration in various realms of geekery...

Towel Day - On May 25, 2001, two weeks after the death of science fiction writer and all around funny guy Douglas Adams, his supporters decided it would be a pretty good idea to carry around towels all day while heroically pointing their thumbs at the sky. All this in the name of commemoration of the man, whose The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series is the greatest absurdest comedy science fiction by a British man the world has ever seen, probably. Why the towel motif? Well, in Adam's humble opinion, a towel "is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have." Along with the number 42 and the urgent plea, DON'T PANIC, towels are an integral part of the series. How absurd! (See, that's exactly why I don't watch British television...)

In reality, the celebration of Towel Day leads to no more than a few hundred minor events scattered around the world -- everything from parties, to lectures, to giveaways. And one can't forget about the few thousand photos on Flickr or the many exciting contributions from the Youtube crowd. Finally, that guy with the intentionally thick-rimmed glasses has an opportunity to forgo his Abercrombie & Fitch scarfs in favor of a towel -- if only for one day. And the heavyset dad type can wrap a towel around his neck before heads off to his IT job. And then there are the real fans...

Geek Pride Day - This is a similar, apparently non-copycat event that is also precisely 15.3% more annoying to me. Some guy was trying to get the holiday off the ground since 1998, originally in honor of the anniversary of the opening of the first Star Wars film, but it only really took off in 2006, when geek chic was in full swing. It's cool to be a geek, I guess -- my little mind don't understand. A random blog has more:

To the gadget-obsessed, math & science savvy, sci-fi fanatic who hyperventilates with excitement the moment you step into an Apple store – today is for you. And even if your geek colors only run as deep as being a Tina Fey devotee and Glee-k (fan of the tv show Glee), revel unashamedly in your geekiness.

Revel! damn you. Just what are you supposed to do on this day? Well, there's a list going around -- apparently part of some manifesto gobbledygook -- but I suggest quoting without attribution. "Just what makes you a geek? [Reverse?] plagiarism" -- Neil Gaiman.

Glorious 25th of May - In honor of Terry Pratchett's long-running and absolutely massive fantasy comedy series Discworld, which is also a lot less funny than H2G2 because I never read it. I don't get the significance of May 25 to this series; I don't want to... I've been meaning to read at least one of those books, but there are like, uh, fifty of them, man.

Argentina's bicentennial, Lebanon's Liberation Day, Jordan's Independence Day and Integrity Day, "a day of contemplation of L. Ron Hubbard's 1965 study on Scientology Ethics." (yay!)

The Faces of Mark Antony

2010-05-21T11:48:00.000-07:00

I have recently been re-reading the Life of Antony, a perhaps 40-page biography of Mark Antony written by the first century Greek historian and moralist Plutarch. The work is a part of Plutarch's Parallel Lives, "a series of biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, arranged in pairs to illuminate their common moral virtues and vices." Plutarch, besides being a great writer and a virtual fountain of anecdotes, is also the source of some potential answers to a question that has long been bothering me: Who is Mark Antony?

Surely similar questions tickled the mind of Shakespeare as he wrote his plays Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. And no doubt Ivan Turgenev had in mind the nature of Antony, perhaps the most famous of lovers, when he wrote his autobiographical novella First Love. I have read all of these works, and yet the true identity of Antony remains a mystery. Unfortunately, these great writers were working with the same information that we all have: the dead and decaying words of a handful of classical historians. The true nature of the real Mark Antony is doomed to remain a mystery, but writers like Cassius Dio, Appian, and Plutarch, together with the many fictional works they have spawned, afford a basically complete, if unverifiable tableau.

Antony's life can be neatly divided into three main segments:

--Julius Caesar's second in command - After a rocky early manhood of wild parties and large debts, Antony fell in with the famous future dictator and proved to be a perfect fit for Caesar's regime of blunt militarism and blatant populism. Plutarch writes of Antony, "What may seem to some very insupportable, his vaunting, his raillery, his drinking in public, sitting down by the men as they were taking their food, and eating, as he stood, off the common soldiers' tables made him the delight and pleasure of the army." He proved himself regularly on the battlefield as a good commander and soldier -- courageous, energetic, and tactically skilled, if occasionally rash -- and he fell easily into the hardships and deprivations of soldierly life, though he lived opulently when not at war.

-- A triumvir with Octavian and Lepidus - When Caesar was assassinated by the group of senatorial conspirators led by Brutus and Cassius, Antony came immediately to the fore as a ruthless, conniving and capable statesman in his own right. Cicero, in fact, reportedly lamented their failure to kill the errand boy along with the master. Their over-careful squeamishness proved to be the downfall of both the senate's power and the Roman Republic. For a while, Antony ruled all of Rome together with Octavian (who later became the first emperor and gave himself the honorific of Augustus), with a much weaker man, Lepidus, luckily yet unluckily stuck in there as the third wheel.

--Cleopatra's lover/bitch - Ah, but there were too many roosters in the hen house that was Rome, so Antony, as the stronger and older triumvir, went off to the eastern provinces, home of much of the empire's wealth and grain. But he fell under the spell of Lust, Love, or a queen named Cleopatra. Cleopatra encountered Caesar and Pompey in her "salad days," as Shakespeare put it, "but she was to meet Antony in the time of life when women's beauty is most splendid, and their intellects are in full maturity." (she was about 28; the average life expectancy throughout the Ancient World has been estimated at 35) However, she was apparently no great looker, according to Plutarch and according to her extant sculptures. Did she woo those foreign envoys with intelligence? Power? Or even drugs? This last ruler of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, this perfect symbol of foreignness and mystery continues to intrigue, often at the expense of Antony.

From this vague outline, I suppose, I could begin to sketch a character. Luckily, great writers who have come before have already done the lifting. Shakespeare -- great at many things, but particularly great at constructing characters -- has given us not one but two distinct portrayals of Antony. There is the very capable, even conniving statesman of Julius Caesar and the hapless frat boy, hopelessly in love with an exotic queen in Antony and Cleopatra. The same Antony who holds up Caesar's bloody, holey toga to incite the mob to riot later watches in awe as Cleopatra sails down the Nile on her golden barge. Shakespeare lifted both scenes directly from Plutarch.

Cicero offers a third view in his Philippics, a series of fiery, damning speeches against Antony. Cicero describes Antony as an ignorant buffoon, a hedonistic drunkard, and -- worst of all -- a womanly dandy. However, Cicero was about as "fair and balanced" as Fox News. He also used the Philippics to praise the relatively young and harmless Octavian to the heavens. A lot of good that did: during the proscription, when the triumvirs drew up a long list of people to kill, Antony put Cicero first on the list, and Octavian made no objection. Cicero's hands and head were nailed to the doors of the senate house, as if to say, "Big Brother is watching" (or something like that).

My last impression of Antony comes from a very different source: from Ivan Turgenev's short novel First Love. The narrator is a young man, modeled after Turgenev himself, who falls desperately in love with his neighbor, Zinaïda, a woman five or six years his senior. Unfortunately, he is just one of about a half dozen suitors, ranging in age from the sixteen years of the narrator to the forty or fifty of the mature old bachelor. Zinaïda takes advantage of them all, though her real love is revealed in a surprise ending. In the below scene, there can be no doubt who represents Cleopatra. There is, however, some discrepancy over who is the real Antony.

She went up to the window. The sun was just setting; high up in the sky were large red clouds.

'What are those clouds like?' questioned Zinaïda; and without waiting for our answer, she said, 'I think they are like the purple sails on the golden ship of Cleopatra, when she sailed to meet Antony. Do you remember, Meidanov, you were telling me about it not long ago?'

All of us, like Polonius in Hamlet, opined that the clouds recalled nothing so much as those sails, and that not one of us could discover a better comparison.
'And how old was Antony then?' inquired Zinaïda.
'A young man, no doubt,' observed Malevsky.
'Yes, a young man,' Meidanov chimed in in confirmation.

'Excuse me,' cried Lushin, 'he was over forty.'
'Over forty,' repeated Zinaïda, giving him a rapid glance....
I soon went home. 'She is in love,' my lips unconsciously repeated.... 'But with whom?'

Indeed, Zinaïda and by extension Cleopatra, is an enchanting woman. Yet I am quick to dismiss such characters -- as I said in my mini-review of Antony and Cleopatra: 'The Big C' herself. The real fascination with First Love is the picking apart of Antony -- in all his forms.

Untitled #1 by Abe Kurp

2010-05-10T12:22:00.000-07:00

I've been having a wee bit o' trouble getting the creative juices flowing lately, so here is a poem I wrote a few months back. There is much I could say about this poem -- I have already gone through much of that in my head -- but now I am resigned. So please allow me to simply say I like it, present the poem below, and metamorphicly pray for a change in mental climate. Ahem. Ta-da:

It is 12 o'clock noon in the countryside,

And nothing of worth has been done:
The cows are not milked,
The cheese is not hung,
– A weakling would call it a day –
But the ones newly risen
Know not of such prisons
While enjoying the singe of the Sun,
The burnings and turnings of the high-level'd Orb,
The trees and the grass of the One.

Review: Black Boy by Richard Wright

2010-05-06T11:48:00.000-07:00

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I love (yet hate) this book and its ilk because they are so eventful, so full of (unpleasant) happenings. And the best (or worst) part is that it all happened -- our predecessors really did struggle and strain to give us the pleasant, even uneventful lives they always wanted -- not withstanding occasional straying from the strictest truth in this particular book, but I'll get to that later. These journeys, particularly those of African Americans, have elements of both the attractive and the repulsive. Odi et amo* as Catullus put it (Sing it, Daddy-O! Sing it!) or as Wright himself puts it, "The Horror and the Glory."

By page 22 of the narrative, when Richard is only six years old, he has already been through a horrible array of experiences. The book opens with a four-year-old Richard accidentally burning down the family house while playing with matches. At the same age he hangs and kills a cat because his father, in anger, "told" him to. His father does not punish Richard so as not to seem as going back on his word. His mother, however, is outraged on moral grounds and forces Richard to bury the cat; needless to say, he is very remorseful and never commits such acts of wanton violence again. This is the first example in a long line, however, of Richard's manipulation of language for his own ends.

Richard's father soon separates from his mother and abandons the family to live with another woman. Richard was to meet his father again only after some fifteen years in hopes of reconciliation; the gorge between them, however, proved to be too wide and perilous. At age six, Richard was in the habit of wandering the neighborhood while his mother was at work; he liked especially to hang around on the doorstep of a saloon. One day, a man grabs him by the shoulder, brings him into the bar, and buys him a drink. Soon he is quite drunk and people are giving him small coins to blurt out lewd things that he does not understand. This went on for some time, it seems: "I was a drunkard in my sixth year, before I had begun school." This unpleasant ordeal finally ends when his mother puts him and his brother under the watchful care of an old black woman. "The craving for alcohol finally left and I forgot the taste of it."

Oh, how horrible! How awful! Yet I can't look away... The book continues in this fashion, a parade of horrible happenings underscored by a near-constant hunger, throughout the first section, "Southern Night." Richard bounces around, or rather gets bounced around, the South and experiences a series of setbacks -- just when life seems decent enough, livable even, his circumstances change and he is swiftly moved onward. The second and final part, "The Horror and the Glory," tells of Wright's experiences in Chicago after moving out of the South, in his early manhood. This last one hundred or so pages was cut by Wright for the initial publication in 1945 at the instigation of the Book of the Month Club. Only in 1990 were the two parts reunited as the whole the author originally intended.

At first hearing of this, I assumed the motivations to be entirely political and social. Chicago, I assumed, was not the land of milk and honey Wright had expected. The average white Northerner of the 1940s -- ie the primary Book of the Month Club audience -- surely had no such complications in their black-and-white, North-and-South worldview. ("On a cold and gray Chicago morning/a poor little baby child is born...") Then there is Communism: the majority of this second section deals with Wright's joining the John Reed Club and the Communist Party, and his later struggles with the leadership of these organizations. In 1945, the First Red Scare was not too long ago and the age of McCarthyism was just around the corner. "The 'C' Word" has long had a chilling effect on many a middle- and upper-class spine.

But no: all my speculation seems to have been for nought. Though I may never know for sure -- unpublished correspondence between Wright and a Book of the Month club higher-up remains firmly locked behind ivory in the archives of Princeton and Yale -- I see the motives of chopping off the second section 'fore publication as merely stylistic. The second part drags -- it's boring -- and as a consequence, it tends to drag the rest of the book with it.

The only part of the second section I found entirely worthwhile is that which describes Wright's time working as a janitor at a high-class Chicago hospital. Once, two old, black colleagues got into a fight in the break room which ultimately resulted in them knocking down and opening dozens of cages of testing animals. They, with Richard's help, put the things back in their cages and were never caught, though they could never be sure if they placed them correctly, if they botched or else temporarily reprieved the research of their white doctor employers. Then there is the telling tale of Richard's step cleaning. Always he is called upon to clean the steps of the institution, always the white passers-by step onto the steps he is working on, spreading dirty water onto other steps, making more work for him; never in his tenure did a person politely step over. And last there is the allegory of the silently barking dogs: Wright often had to hold testing dogs down while doctors snipped their vocal cords; often he would see them howling silently towards the ceiling. The comparisons were too tantalizingly appropriate to pass up.

All talks of Communism, particularly of the petty in-fighting and quibbling Wright had with his superiors and fellows in the Party, are simply tedious and against the overall impression of the book. I understand: the Party whole-heartedly accepted him; I understand: this was the first group (of predominantly whites, no less) that accepted him as a person, as a comrade even. But the quibbling overpowers these undercurrents -- perhaps they could have been brought to the fore through careful, proper pruning.

Despite my own quibbling over the second half, I cannot but love this book. We are so much alike, the author and I, it is uncanny. We have been shaped by very different lives, but we both turned out atheist yet morally firm, sensitive, strong-willed...naively altruistic. No. We know it is impossible, yet it is necessary: the people of the world must unite and see each other as the siblings they are. Someday...

Our feet back on the ground... Wright and I even have almost identical views of American race relations. He was made to suffer the indignities from white individuals, and even came to see whites as one angry mass, yet he never came to hate them. All those who have been fired by the aggressive, even militant words of Malcolm X should have this book second on their reading list. Malcolm taught me the phrase "self-degradation" and told me to hate it, while Richard has given me new eyes on the subject. He was well aware of these black-on-black crimes instigated by white oppression, but instead of working himself into a blind rage, instead of driving a wedge further between the two races, Wright manipulated the system, to get what he wanted. The most striking and memorable example comes when the young Richard forges a note so he can borrow some books from the library: "Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger boy -- I used the word 'nigger' to make the librarian feel I could not possibly be the author of the note -- have some books by H.L. Mencken?" Where is your X now?

But enough about me! Let's hear about the "Every Man!" Black Boy and the original title American Hunger are titles that make no claim to autobiography. Instead, they are general titles, "Every Man" titles -- the first a hearkening to the eternal boy-ness of American black men of the day, the second an evocation of the eternal hunger, both physical and metaphorical, of all poor, Southern blacks. In this view it is the story of a non-particular person of a particular time and place.

In this view, Wright is justified in his bending, twisting, and even outright contamination of Fact. One story, for example, wherein one of Richard's uncles drives a horse cart into a (shallow part of) a river as a kind of practical joke on Richard, in Fact happened to Ralph Ellison. An even more outrageous fib comes later, when Richard is chosen as valedictorian of his class and is asked to write a speech. He does so but his principal decides that he ought to recite a speech he wrote, instead. Richard, in the story, refuses and gives his own speech in full; in reality, he capitulated. Fact checking: because Louis Armstrong didn't really land on the moon or win the Tour de France.

Taken as fiction all anxieties about the truthfulness of Black Boy can be disregarded. That is the route William Faulkner took, when he wrote to Wright shortly after the book's publication, and here I must agree. Though I sharply question the term "Every Man," though I have always been indifferent at best toward the political and social impact of literature, here I must agree. Taken as literature, as merely a piece of art, this book simply shines. To that I can say "amo" all by itself and leave the "odi et" to Catullus.

* Note: odi et amo ("I hate and I love") are the opening words of the two-line poem known conventionally as "Catullus 85."

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Tomb Raider, by Grahame Davies

2010-05-03T20:22:00.000-07:00

I challenge every empire
I challenge Microsoft:
Rewrite the code controlling
The moves of Lara Croft.

She'll come from our cyber ghetto
With a mission even greater,
No pillager of temples
But a mad museum-raider.

Not swiping ancient treasures,
No English lordship's spawn
But a daughter of oppression
Shouting like a gun.

From every ancient culture
And every ravaged race
She's coming to the capitals,
A fist in the first world's face.

She's blasting through the bookshelves
To take our legends back
With guns of endless ammo,
Fluent in Welsh...and black.

Relics of ancient Egypt
Of Celts and Navaho-
She'll smash each glass display-case
To steal back what you owe.

She'll blow away the watchmen,
Blast down the iron doors.
Yo white boy! Here comes Lara
To take what isn't yours.

The above is a translation of the Welsh (!) original, done by a Mr. A.Z. Foreman for his blog Poems Found in Translation. Mr. Foreman in his own estimation is "a linguistics student with a love of literary translation and a penchant for blogging" -- at least he didn't call himself a polyglot. His blog features dozens of his own English translations of poems originally written in a variety of languages. He claims to be able to read all of the source languages-- and, granted, he must have some proficiency in them -- yet I skeptically assume we have not found the Rosetta Stone just yet.

Each blog post typically includes (1) the translation (2) the original (3) an audio recording of the author reading the original. Foreman, I'm afraid, is snarky and perhaps a bit full of himself -- the following incendiary remark being based, of course, on little to no experience (but he has section on his blog called "Meditations" -- a worser word than "essays" if used in weakling ways). Despite this, and despite having already linked to the main page, I would feel remiss if I did not link directly to the post from which I copied this poem. ("Just because I don't submit to print anthologies doesn't mean I don't like receiving credit for my work. K? Thanks.")

And now... to the poem! (commence appropriate Batman music) This poem centers about Tomb Raider, a long-running and respected series of video games, and its titular character, Lara Croft. The series began in 1996, when computer processing limitations made Lara's improbably large boobs improbably square to boot. Since then the series has become one of the best selling in video game history; Lara Croft has been portrayed by Angelina Jolie in a couple of movies, and is one of the most recognizable video game characters, up there with Mario and Pacman.

But this poem wants none of that. Why, it's just like a Welshman -- focus on the negative, turn a well-loved character into a creature of the damned. You see, Lara Croft does exactly what it says on the box -- raids tombs...and other sites of archaeological significance. And she just so happens to be British, to talk with a cute little British accent (setting aside Angelina Jolie for just a moment). The temptation to make the connection to real life was too strong, it seems, for Davies. Some people just aren't the forgiving type.

So, from Davies' "fever'd imagination" comes a world fantastical, sadly unrealistic, where Lara is the exact opposite of all the empire and tyranny she apparently represents, where she raids museums instead of temples, where she is "fluent in Welsh...and black." And I thought my dreams involving Lara Croft were unrealistic (something with whipped cream and Esperanto). If nothing else it's imaginative...

There is a strong current of oppression through it all, of black people especially. There is the above quote, yes, and then there is the use of the word ghetto. The poet is, by all accounts, very white (I have it on good authority that Levi Coffin was black) and very Welsh, yet the poem seems peculiarly centered on white Americans' racial anxiety towards our darker brothers. Perhaps the translator shoehorned in these hints, or perhaps this poem is exactly the mirror that the author intended. I will probably never know as the Welsh language is almost completely opaque to me. Still, a little something managed to bore its way thru: the sentence Foreman translates as "Yo white boy!", in the second to last line, is written as "Hei, Honci!" in the original. Oh, how exciting is cross-cultural exchange!

Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind; by Margalit Fox

2010-04-30T21:57:00.000-07:00

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Behind the bleak, brown cover of Talking Hands is a book brimming with color and information. Similarly, a relatively new language -- a signed language that is unlike any other -- has been blossoming for the last seventy years amidst the sand in al-Sayyid, a Bedouin village in the Negev desert of southern Israel. In this village of approximately 3,500 a genetic form of deafness has been thriving as a result of frequent intermarriage. Today, about 150 villagers are deaf, but these people do not live isolated, marginalized lives, a common fate for deaf people throughout history. Rather they are fully-functioning members of their society and they owe much of this freedom to al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ASBL), a language that sprang up about seventy years ago when ten deaf villagers were brought together and consequently formed a simple contact pidgin.

This language was presumably very simple, virtually without grammar, an amalgam of gestures and signs, mostly nouns, thrown haphazardly together (though we will never be certain: all ten first-generation signers are dead). The second generation, however, were the real magic makers, morphing their parent's grammarless gestures, somehow, into a simple, yet fully-functioning language. Today, the members of this second generation are in their thirties and forties, raising the third generation of signers, who range from infancy to young adulthood. Not only the deaf children but also a large percentage of their hearing brothers and sisters, learn ABSL as a first language. So, unwittingly, these villagers have create a world that many deaf people have pined for, where deaf people are on the same level as hearing people and no one is singled out because of their deafness.

This village, as it turns out, offers a fascinating, even tantalizing opportunity for linguistics. At least as long ago as Noam Chomsky many linguists have been lusting after something, a thought experiment so taboo that it has come to be known as the Forbidden Experiment: essentially, put a bunch of kids together, with no linguistic input save for perhaps a few basic words and see what they make. This could help answer many important questions, chief among them, "How are languages formed?", "What are newborn languages alike?", and "Just how fundamentally similar are languages?" Al-Sayyid has offered a natural opportunity to answer those questions without the risk of forming a roving pack of feral children.

This book is the product of Margalit Fox, a New York Times reporter who, in 2004, decided to shadow a group of four linguists as they went on a research trip to al-Sayyid. The linguists' tools were basic -- just a laptop computer that showed a series of pictures and some video, designed to elicit basic vocabulary and syntax respectively -- but the data they collect will surely keep them busy for the rest of their careers. After the first chapter, "In the Village of the Deaf," Fox spends the next chapter discussing sign language in general. In the following chapters she follows the same pattern, alternating between discussing ASBL in particular and signed language in general.

ABSL is of great interest to many academic disciplines and Fox at least touches on all: anthropology, psychology, genetics, physiology, and of course the many aspects of linguistics. In her attempt at revealing ABSL Fox discusses the results of so many scientific studies, drops so many interesting tidbits she can't help but make her readers all a bit brighter. And I couldn't help but write a blog post about some of them. Already I see this review as rather wordy, more didactic than critical; it is all Mrs. Fox's doing.

Really, this is a great book for anyone -- you need not know anything about sign language or even language in general. It is a colorful, fact-filled book that never made me want to skim. With this in mind, and with the relative popularity of language books in the present day, I can only wonder why this book has not found more of an audience.

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A Trio of Graphic Novel Reviews

2010-04-27T08:54:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

I am writing to let you know that I have recently written, count 'em, three reviews about, count 'em, three graphic novels. Enclosed are the three links, together with quotations of the first sentence of each of my reviews and maybe a few other juicy little morsels.

Give It Up! and Other Short Stories by Franz Kafka, illustrated by Peter Kuper.
"This was my introduction to Kafka... I, too, can't believe it." I really, really have been meaning to get to it -- to The Castle or The Trial or even something by Alan Bennett. I certainly don't want to waste my life (though I do read a little Joyce now and then) so I will jump to attention soon. But really, what drew me to this collection was the magnificent art. As for the stories...I don't want to be disrespectful towards a master writer so I will reserve primary judgment for now.

The TOON Treasury of Classic Children's Comics, edited by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly
"As any jackass who's read a few graphic novels knows, comics have been through some rough times." A nice smartass, attention-grabbing opening sentence if you ask me, though perhaps I ranted on a bit too long about comics in general at the expense of the task at hand. I also included a poem, "Ode to the Disney Ducks" by Carl Barks.

Whiteout, written by Greg Rucka and illustrated by Steve Lieber
"Whiteout is a fun, nothing-special thriller -- that just so happens to be set at the bottom of the motha-f****** Earth!" Could I really add anything to that, even if I wanted to? Yes, obviously; read the goddamn review!

Though I called them so, really none of the three qualify as a graphic novel in the purest sense of the term. Give It Up! is a collection of adapted short stories, The TOON Treasury is a collection of tales taken from old children's comic books, and Whiteout is simply a reprint of the four issues of the original miniseries originally published in 1998. So "graphic novel" is a loose and sometimes silly term. Wikipedia, in its article on graphic novels, has a section, "Criticism of the term," that features quotes from a number of notable comics figure. My favorite comes from Alan Moore -- as outspoken as ever, yet right on the money:

It's a marketing term ... that I never had any sympathy with. The term 'comic' does just as well for me. ... The problem is that 'graphic novel' just came to mean 'expensive comic book' and so what you'd get is people like DC Comics or Marvel Comics — because 'graphic novels' were getting some attention, they'd stick six issues of whatever worthless piece of crap they happened to be publishing lately under a glossy cover and call it The She-Hulk Graphic Novel....

Review: Lavinia, by Ursula K. Le Guin

2010-04-26T15:53:00.000-07:00

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Lavinia is not a great book. In fact, I think the most it stirred inside me was an urge to reread the Aeneid. I was intrigued by the premise: to finally put a voice to the "Helen who never speaks", Aeneas' third and final wife, Lavinia. But the execution turned out to be rather wispy, ephemeral; I know this woman no better than I did. Her towns and forests, her land of Bronze Age Italy, have remained similarly obscure.

It is no surprise, really, that a time that was ancient and obscure to the Ancient Romans themselves should remain so to us. But this is fiction: Le Guin had total license to shape the world as she wished; however, that great work of epic poetry, hovering over her head and ours forevermore may have proved too much for the mature and talented fantasy writer. Lavinia -- that is, as she is portrayed in this book -- seems far too aware that she is just a character in a book, that she and her entire world may exist, first only in the imagination of Virgil, then only on the musty old pages of his book.

Le Guin wrote Virgil into her tale: at a sacred spot near Lavinia's village, that she visits regularly, Virgil appears to her in a shadowy form and talks to her, tells her of what is to come. Naturally, he laments not having written her story, favoring Camilla, the warrior princess and one of Turnus' allies, instead. He could rewrite his poem, but, *oh* he's dying. How sad. Though I liked the idea of the sacred spot -- every literary character needs a private little garden of her own -- I could have done without the shadowy portrayal of "the poet."

Why, I wonder, are the parents of these kinds of historical dramas either unbelievably liberal or else terribly cruel? Le Guin splits the pair: Lavinia's father, King Latinus, is as kind, wise and liberal as Marcus Aurelius could only dream about; her mother, Amata, however, is cruel and a little crazy, even going so far as to kidnap Lavinia, under the guise of a religious rite, to try to force her to marry Turnus. I rather liked the characterization of Amata: she has not been quite right in the head ever since her two sons died early, and her fixation on Turnus as the preferred husband for Lavinia is largely because they are kin, though the looks she send to him across the dinner table may lead some to wonder.

I could not ask more, either, from the characterizations of Turnus, the hot-head and gallant fighter who is more than a little timid underneath -- or that of Latinus, the dutiful and deeply religious father, who gives his daughter to a foreigner, as destiny decrees. Ascanius, too, Aeneas' son, came out well: the dutiful son who yet lacks most of the luster of his legendary father, who is overeager and makes mistakes.

I would have liked to see more from Achates, however, Aeneas' trusty second in command -- how could comparisons not be drawn to Agrippa? He could have played the cool-headed Voice of Reason, much in the manner of Enobarbus from Antony and Cleopatra. Aeneas himself, in this tale, is a statue, entirely unapproachable. He has dialogue, of course; he does speak, but his characterization is minimal. It is almost appropriate: no one ever will, or should, know exactly what ran through that statue's head. He is too noble, above-it-all, too important to the legendary roots of the Roma Empire, to have such petty things as emotions.

Lavinia, however, is the main character of this book: far too important to leave her portrayal unfinished, skeletal, and wispy. She is deeply religious -- religion, naturally, plays an important part in all proceedings. She is, unsurprisingly, a sort of proto-feminist -- why else write a book like this, if not to divulge a woman's point of view? And she is dutiful, to her family, to her destiny, to the world and its perceived will. So she is everything that was expected of a Roman matron, with a few modern twists thrown in. But she is not a full character. Her world is not complete. This book is not complete.

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Five Tidbits on (Signed) Language

2010-04-21T09:46:00.000-07:00

I am currently in the midst of Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind, by Margalit Fox. The book is intended for the general audience so, though it is ostensibly about Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), "a sign language used by about 150 Deaf and many hearing members of the al-Sayyid Bedouin tribe in the Negev desert of southern Israel," about half of the book is devoted to the history and science of (signed) language in general. A full review will surely follow but first, here are a few fascinating tidbits I gathered from the book.

1. Some languages have only two color words: essentially, black and white. However, they are not black and white in the traditional, anglo-centric tradition: black represents all the dark and muted colors, like blues, greens and grays; white represents the bright yellows, oranges, reds, etc. If another color is needed during practical conversations, speakers have been known to point at an object of the appropriate color. It works well in Al Sayyid: though they live in a bleak desert most families have very colorful rugs and traditional clothing.

Generally, the more color words a language has the older it is: English has eleven *basic* color words (nevermind niceties like mauve and chartreuse), as do Japanese, Hebrew and Hungarian. Predictably, ABSL has only two -- it is only about seventy years old -- though some of the community's deaf children, who attend classes where the more standard Israeli Sign Language is used, have brought home a third word: purple.

2. The creation of American Sign Language (ASL) was a happy accident. In 1815, an American preacher by the name of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (yes, that Gallaudet), inspired by Alice Cogswell, his nine-year-old deaf neighbor, traveled to Europe to find an effective method of teaching the Deaf. What he discovered, a sign language today known as Manual French, was a cobbled-together mess of signs from Old French Sign, together with many of the creator's own invention. Essentially, it was French but on the hands, but what worked ex oris was very impractical and unwieldy ex manus. Sentences that took upwards of fifty signs to say in Manual French can be translated to ASL, for example, in as little as five.

Nevertheless, Gallaudet took the system home with him and, together with Laurent Clerc, one of the most prominent pupils of the language, founded the Hartford Asylum for the Education and Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb on April 15, 1817. It was the first school for the deaf in North America and is now called the American School for the Deaf.

It is there that the magic occurred: drawn by the promise of full and proper communication, dozens of deaf pupils joined the school each year. Very shortly the school had a few hundred students. Yet the magic came, not in the classroom, but in the hallways and dormitories. For the first time dozens of deaf people were together on a daily basis, able to interact in some form. In short, they made a language, today called American Sign Language. It probably happened the same way all languages are created: the first generation, armed with perhaps a few hundred signs,* created a basic contact language with almost no grammar -- a pidgin. From there the second generation, lead particularly by young children, took that simple, grammarless gobbledygook and turned it into a language -- a creole. Which brings me to my next point:

3 The language instinct or language bioprogram. In the late 1950s, a man named Noam Chomsky, a man as important to Linguistics as Charles Darwin is to Biology, began what is today sometimes known as the Chomskyan Revolution. Chomsky's work was extensive and far reaching but the crux of the revolution was the idea of the language instinct -- a hypothetical, innate ability that all healthy humans possess which enables them to learn, speak, understand, and even create language.

The nature of this bioprogram is not entirely understood, but decades of research by a whole spectrum of linguists has proven that, yes, it does exist. Derek Bickerton, for example -- author of a book I read last year: Bastard Tongues: A Trail-Blazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages -- has spent his long career studying spoken creoles in the Caribbean and South Pacific, those relatively new "bastard tongues" that sprang up as a result of the unfriendly colonial clashes between native and European languages.

It is a concept that fascinated me then, when I read Bastard Tongues, and it still fascinates me now. Particularly, what are the commonalties of all languages? When stripped down to the essentials, as in the creole stage, languages have proven to be remarkably similar. Language geek that I am, I can't help but grab my pipe and dream about the "perfect" language -- some kind of creole-ish mess, with serial verbs galore, no doubt.

4 Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language is not the first sign language to spring up in a remote village with a high percentage of deaf people. About a dozen have been documented that still exist, though most are not as thoroughly ingrained in the culture as ABSL. However, there was one: Martha's Vineyard Sign Language sprang up, not surprisingly, on the little island south of Cape Cod. MVSL began its life in the early 18th century, when a form of genetic deafness was passed down through the close-knit population, and lasted till 1952, when the last deaf signer died. Little linguistic evidence survives but there is much anthropological evidence and, ahem, anecdotal evidence. Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha's Vineyard, by Nora Ellen Groce, relays many of these anecdotes as the author heard them from elderly, hearing residents in the 1980s. The book is at the top of my to-read pile.

5 Is it an Upper- or lowercase "D"? In the simplest terms the word "deaf" is just an adjective like any other, used to describe a human trait-- like "tall," "fat," and "pretty." However, for at least decades -- and probably much longer than that -- many deaf people have seen one another as closely bonded, as a kind of subculture. Thus the emergence of the term Deaf Culture and even the "Deaf Power Movement," to defend and extend the rights and privileges shown to deaf people.

* The signs used by the original class of the school include homesigns (ie simple gestures the deaf people used to communicate with their families at home), signs from Martha's Vineyard Sign Language, and, of course, signs from Manual French. To this day French Sign Language and ASL are rather similar -- in fact ASL signers can generally understand French SL much better than British SL.

OpenCourseWare: Academia opens its doors (just a crack)

2010-04-15T20:47:00.001-07:00

OpenCourseWare, or OCW, is a term used to describe materials of college courses (ie courseware) that is shared freely via the Internet (hence OpenCourseWare). Undoubtedly, the idea of putting material from university classes onto the Internet is a very old one, perhaps as old as the Internet itself. And there were a few minor attempts at sharing college class materials with the average world, including that of the University of Tübingen in Germany as part of their timms program, but OCW really began with MIT. In 2000 the first spark of their ambitious plan -- to make the courseware of all of their classes freely available online -- came into being. In October 2002 the materials from twenty-something courses went online. As of 2002 material from every course they offer is available via their website.

Google "OpenCourseWare" and the MIT-OCW site is the first on the list, which is as much as to say that OCW is synonymous with MIT. The hallowed science and engineering university was the first out of the gate and remaina the horse to beat, even if other highly regarded universities like Yale and UC Berkley have made their bids. It is a very fitting situation: MIT have always been forerunners in Academia regarding open source software (OSS) and creative commons licensing. It seems only natural -- like OCW is just another step for them into the world of the free and reusable. They have a lot of company: today well over one hundred US universities have some form of OCW.

OCW course pages typically include a syllabus, any miscellaneous notes and materials, and -- most important to the average user -- podcasts or, more rarely, video recordings, of the courses' lectures, almost always recorded during a class, while the hundred hungry young minds in the classroom take their notes.

I recently finished listening to History 106B: The Roman Empire, a 2008 course from UC Berkley -- my formal introduction to the world of OCW. It covered the history of the Roman world, from the late Republic to the reign of Constantine. It was great: the professor, one Isabelle Pafford, has a lively lecturing style and carries an enthusiasm for her subject that is rather infectious. It worked out great: I downloaded all of the mp3 files onto my iPod and listened to the roughly 40 minute lectures when the mood struck.

Unfortunately, the majority of university courses require textbooks, books that are exorbitantly expensive and often difficult to find. And I encountered the additional difficulty of learning even the names of the texts since "History 106b" came with no syllabus that I could find. I had to piece together what texts the class used through the tidbits I gathered while listening. But that, too, worked out great: after borrowing one of the text books from the library and finding it just-a-little-dry, I turned to the books I really wanted to read -- especially primary sources like Suetonius, Tacitus, and Plutarch, all of which were entirely new to me (I have not yet read Cassius Dio *frowny face*).

Excerpts from the four great writers mentioned above, together with many others I have yet to touch, were assigned reading for the Berkley class. Exciting as those must have been, I had the pleasure instead of reading a handful of books that they missed. I just love the situation: the lectures provide much-needed structure to my learning and introduce me to a variety of new things in the mean. And I never have to worry about exams or dreaded "source assignments." I can take my time, read what I want, give it time to settle in the stomach and the brain.

The MIT-OCW website states that each course on their site "requires an investment of $10,000 to $15,000 to compile course materials from faculty, ensure proper licensing for open sharing, and format materials for global distribution. Courses with video content cost about twice as much..." Setting aside the "how?" -- as in, how the hell can it be that expensive to publish a few measly lecture notes, etc.? -- I wonder about the "why?" Call me Mr. Cynic but I have never seen our American institutes of higher learning as the temples of generosity and altruism they should be.

But I will not dwell on that subject. Instead, I can only say how grateful I am that these materials exist, to kindle the flame that, I have determined, will never go out till the inevitable snuffer known as Death. I am not the only grateful, hungry soul: naturally, blogs and websites have sprung up, written by autodidacts with a particular interest in OCW. My personal favorite, The DIY Scholar, does a fantastic job of keeping its readers current on the latest OCW -- it also features an immensely useful "Best free courses and lectures," featuring the author's personal favorites, updated regularly and split into helpful categories.

I recently discovered, as a result of that second link, a course from UC San Diego on the history of the Byzantine Empire. I have also been enticed by two Open Yale courses, which all features video -- thus offering a wonderful opportunity to see flesh and bone and blackboard. The first, simply titled Death, is a philosophy class on the subject of being no more -- directed by the bearded, plaid-wearing, over-articulating, cross-legged-on-the-desk sitting Shelly Kagan who prefers his students to call him "Shelly" and who strikes me as just a little arrogant. The other is The American Novel Sine 1945, performed by Amy Hungerford -- who looks a lot less dykey moving around than her preview photo would lead you to believe. The idea is to push (or drag) my reading tastes into the modern era, to uncover some substance behind the great names.

Just us next week (or tomorrow) for a collection of photos of "typical college classes" -- or something along those lines.

Cirque du Soleil

2010-04-13T16:32:00.000-07:00

Did you know, friends, that this past Sunday we, us four, went to see Cirque du Soleil downtown at the Wolstein Center? The group currently has seven or eight troupes touring the continent, plus one stationary troupe -- perhaps in Quebec, the progenitor? Or maybe in New York, the Big Apple?

This particular show was called Alegría. Wikipedia says it has a darker story and feel to it compared to their dozen or so other shows. *shrugs* It met my expectations: essentially, it's an on-stage circus with each act occupying the stage for some minutes before morphing into the next act, all tied together by a very loose story.

There were acrobats of all sorts: synchronized trampolinists, a trapezist, a similar act but with a pair of stretchy ropes instead of the trapeze, a "giant ring" performance, and -- my favorite -- the balance beam act, though these "balance beams" were really long beams of flexible material, each held on the shoulders by two supporting characters.

These acrobats were all lithe, androgynous, potentially erotic -- though this is a family friendly show -- leaping about the stage in skin-tight white jumpsuits, with equally white skullcaps and make up. The balance beams and the trampolines made quite a spectacle: dozens of these same-looking, remarkably flexible creatures, twirling in the air from one slim white beam to the other, or else bouncing in perfect synchronization on the trampolines, often barely missing one another.

There were other acts, including the requisite dancing (mainly between acts), and (god-awful) singing. There was a juggler, a pair of fire dancers (hoo boy, watch them twirl), as well as a pair of contortionists (hoo boy, watch them twist and bend about one another, while miraculously forming no position that is undeniably sexual).

But now we come to the crowning jewel, or, as Mom put it, "I liked the clowns." They were just two, dressed in typical clowning clothes whose act(s) consisted only of pantomime -- physical comedy and prop comedy, of course -- with much fast-spoken gibberish and the occasional phrase ("I still love you," I think I heard after a particular paper airplane was crushed under heel). In turn their crowning jewel came just after the aforementioned balance beam act: the two fools ran out on stage with their own white beam and proceeded to parody the previous act. After hurling a few invisible, imaginary acrobats to their deaths the fools went into the crowd, coming back with a man to whom they planned the same fate. It all worked out -- hilariously. This man was remarkably good natured, even graciously accepting some cream in the face after his proverbial fifteen minutes.[n1] I wonder if he was a plant -- or does Cirque du Soleil so trust their audience and sneer at litigation?

These were the comedy relief, the giant paper airplane between the oh-so-serious leotards. But they were more: they were accessible, familiar and consequently the most important part of the show. Those young, fit acrobats, [n2] performing before a crowd of the simply average, can come to be seen with milky, glassy, even lusty jealous eyes. If we are not repelled from them we are drawn to them, to the idea of flying and doing the unimaginable at least twice each day. But such is the stuff of unfulfilled dreams. Comedy, as always, is there, immediate and open to all. You must be stupid or drunk with pain to never laugh at anything.

The show featured other characters, in the same vein: a group of parading musicians, lead by a hunchback with a cane and a red coat[n3]; a small miscellany of females with pointy noses, bulbous middles, large curly wigs, and a unique fashion sense; and a queen of sorts, a woman in a white dress and hat -- did she have a wand? -- whose singing may haunt my dreams for weeks. The only memorable, worthwhile song was the theme (of sorts), performed by the wandering band and consisting primarily of a few catchy bars, repeated again and again.

It was not "the greatest show on Earth" -- but we all enjoyed ourselves. Particularly pleasing was the price: $0.00, courtesy of Dad's "work connections" (see Note 1). They were good seats, too: the center of Row K, first level. Our usual loge accommodations were unavailable -- the boxes for some reason were closed for that performance. O Fie! Let them eat cake and all that... Still, the prices were astounding: 58 bucks each for our seats, reaching to the mid-70s for some of the floor seats. We all agreed: it was fun but not $232-fun. We are glad for Dad's connections.

We have managed to see, on the cheap, American Idol[n4], Manheim Steamroller, the Rockettes, Twelfth Night, and now Cirque Du Soleil. We are establishing quite the Yuppie credentials. Oh, what's next -- Lawrence Welk?

Note 1: I gave it some thought: is there any nonsexual way to describe getting cream in the face? And a side note: did Andy Warhol really spawn a proverb? Really?
Note 2: at the end of the show, during the applause, many performers removed their caps, revealing a shocking variety of shape, color, creed, and --yes-- gender. In my defense, illusions, if they are believed, can be as real and dangerous as reality.
Note 3: the hunchback was the favorite character of Hannah and Dad. I was a bit cool -- as usual.
Note 4: I skipped all American Idol performances, thank you very much.

Review: The Living and the Dead, by Jason

2010-04-11T07:39:00.000-07:00

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
As Tim, a fellow reviewer on Goodreads, put it: "This is just one of those stories where a dish boy falls in love with a prostitute and they try to survive the zombie revolution." For once, those lying anon. thugs from the Intertubes are right: the aforementioned dish boy --dog-man, really-- is busy collecting the necessary hundred bucks for that one unforgettable night when a meteor (much like the one on the cover) strikes, leading to an apocalyp...ZomBies!!*Braaaains%$*!!! His plans of love and sex seem shattered, but perhaps even Love can find a place in Zombieland?

The Living and the Dead is probably the first book I have read cover-to-cover in a public library since the hallowed days of Frog and Toad. It is without words, excepting the occasional onomatopoeia and a mere seven lines of dialogue, presented in their own panels, silent movie style. It can be "read" in under ten minutes by all but the extremely vegetative. (I did not time myself.)

The author, a so-called Jason, from so-called Norway, is now on my list -- my good list, not my shit list. His is an art style that is simple and clean, heavily influenced by the so-called ligne claire style invented by Hergé, famed creator of The Adventures of Tintin. (He probably got the idea for his single-name pen name from Hergé, too -- I kinda like it, it's got a Greek/Roman feel to it: Diogenes of Sinope, Jason of Norway.)

The anthropomorphic animal motif seems to permeate just about all of his works. The comedy, too, seems to make a regular appearance. No, there are no pianos falling from the sky (at least in this work), but the humor is there: as the back cover says, "It puts the 'dead' [back] in deadpan." (*nyuk*nyuk*nyuk*) I managed to track down another, wordier Jasonian work -- The Left Bank Gang: Hem, Ezra, and Scott as the dog-(men) we always knew they were -- before toddling out of the library in earnest search for father.

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Martial on Cato

2010-04-05T13:11:00.000-07:00

If, unlike Cato, you stay pure,
Forgoing suicide's allure,
I find you better for denying
Cheap praise solicited by dying.

Martial 1.8, as interpreted (very, very) loosely by Gary Wills in his Martial's Epigrams: A Selection. Henry George Bohn puts forth a much more sober prose translation in his book (pages 27 and 28) and also includes three verse translations from rather anonymous sources. Behold, the prose translation:

In that you so far only follow the opinions of the great Thrasea and Cato of consummate virtue, that you still wish to preserve your life, and do not with bared breast rush upon drawn swords, you do, Decianus, what I should wish you to do. I do not approve of a man who purchases fame with life-blood, easy to be shed: I like him who can be praised without dying to obtain it.

I will not judge any reader who feels the sudden urge to get up and grab a glass of water. Yes, it's dry -- forgivable in this instance because it is a prose translation, designed strictly to bring across content, not feeling. However, the verse translations are not much better, so I have not included them here. The stuffed-shirt club, it seems, had a good ol' time expurgating and expunging all foul words, gaiety, and fun from Martial's Latin originals.

One Elphinstone’s translations of Martial’s epigrams were so horrible, they prompted Robert Burns to write the little ditty seen below.

O THOU whom Poetry abhors,
Whom Prose has turnèd out of doors,
Heard’st thou yon groan?—proceed no further,
’Twas laurel’d Martial calling murther.

Clearly, nobody better create a crap translation of Martial without first looking over his shoulder for a certain Mr. Burns. But alas, even the possibility of a beat down from the Bard of Ayrshire himself did not impede such stuffy progress; nor does it prevent certain non-poets, like the Gary Wills we met at the very beginning of this post, from giving the dusty epigrams the one-two-three.

I met this Gary Wills just yesterday, when I picked up his aforementioned at a rarely-visited library branch. I have not read it much -- clearly he severely favored function over fidelity, a great quality in my mind. But, there may just be a bit too much of the "scholar playing the poet" in all this: some reviewers have claimed the total annihilation of Mr. "laurel'd Martial," though these days he cries murder.

Martial is also very new to me and I already like what I see. I'll be sure to keep this blog up to date regarding my activities on the front line of Martialis.

What's going on here? (Part 2)

2010-04-03T18:05:00.000-07:00

Just two days after the ridiculous events, and my appropriately ridiculous blog post, of April Fool's Day 2010, I bring you a post with the same title but with much different content and soul. On April 1, 2010 I had a(nother) goofy idea: what would it be like to communicate using only questions? Could I do it, or would my brain turn to mush after a mere five minutes of straining? And, if my brain didn't turn to mush of its own accord, would my ticked off conversation partners do it for me? All very interesting questions, but what makes you think I have the answers? And do you think that stopped me from trying?

So...what, exactly, did I do?
As I said, I had the idea on April 1, but it was late in the evening so I only got a few hours of questions-only speaking in there. The next day, though I admittedly forgot about my plans for some ten minutes after waking, was the real beginning of the challenge: one day of communicating (mostly) through questions.

That "mostly," timidly squeezed in there between those parentheses, is a sign of either weakness or good sense. From the start I knew this little experiment could tick other people off, so I made a few provisos:

I could use single-word responses, especially "yes" and "no" -- though I tended towards "mm-hm" and "mm-mm."
If a fight seemed likely to erupt I could switch to normal, unrestricted speech. I had to use this rule only once and I was just the mediator.
I could use any kind of sentence, as long as it ends in a question mark when written down. Nevertheless I tried not to be formulaic and brought forth a solid mixture of the fives Ws, as well as the "yes-no"s. I also tried to avoid long statement clauses with question clauses tacked on at the end.

Someone more disciplined and serious about this whole matter would have little technical difficulty in trimming the three provisos above, but the social consequences could be dire. Just remember: talking with other people is always better than sitting alone, asking questions of yourself.

What was it like?
Not as difficult as I first imagined. Different, too; a kind of experience I had never quite encountered before. I have a tendency to be verbose, to labor a point of Roman History or the book I happen to be reading, which ultimately leads to only stifled yawns. This experiment, far from leading to rows as I had anticipated, was an awakening or at least a reprieve. In retrospect, I suppose it is not at all surprising: people like to be listened to, to have their stories heard.

But I am neither Studs Terkel nor a Hallmark channel original movie. Luckily, you can be much more than just naively altruistic or annoyingly philosophical when using only questions. You can be inquisitive, of course -- but also funny, angry, mean, embarrassing. At least I managed all those, and much more, in well under 24 hours. The only thing truly difficult to express, not surprisingly, is direct statements, especially regarding yourself, your feelings. "What do you think?" she says. "Well, what do you think?" is all I can say -- usually a better choice than, "I like the blue dress best."

I did not tell my dad about my little experiment and the whole day passed without him noticing. Everyone else with whom I had primary contact knew -- I'd blabbed my mouth the night before -- but none seemed deeply outraged by it. Only my friend George said she was annoyed -- but only once and I bet that was more a matter of the content rather than the method (perhaps I should add "annoying" to that above list of emotions). And the woman at Family Dollar, I swear, saw me as a typically terse and sullen teenager. Everyone else seemed utterly oblivious. I suppose that's typical: they are accustomed to oddball words and phrases issuing from my mouth; Hannah says I usually ask a lot of questions, anyway.

What would a questions-only world be like?
I am convinced, at least with the way things stand now, that a world with just questions would be a very dull world, indeed. (A questions-only novel would be equally boring -- just a note to all those potential Georges Perecs in the audience.) Questions -- most questions -- are meant to be answered. They are not terribly interesting in themselves and are a direct cry for this additional information. This experiment was so successful because of their answers, not my questions.

However, things change, people can adapt. Linguists and psychologists have uncovered an enormously wide array of circumstance in which people have lived, to which they have adapted -- with varying levels of success. Of course, there is no telling what a world of only questions would be like, but of course I feel the urge to speculate.

I see it as a world of enormous circumlocution: the detective says, "Did you murder those five people?" and the suspect says, "How should I know? Did I?" Even if this supposed suspect wanted to confess he would certainly have to jump over more hoops than in the current situation.

If you want to get philosophical about it, we already live in a "world of enormous circumlocution." We have never been able to say what we mean, mean what we say -- not really. Yes, there have been attempts at creating a new, clearer, more logical, even philosophical language. John Wilkins and his contemporaries gave it the old college you-know-what in the 17th century, but the endeavor has lapsed into the realm of folly ever since. As for more recent endeavors, like Lojban, see XKCD. In short, if we can live with the current state of inaccuracy and circumlocution, why couldn't we adapt to another layer, or two?

Why?
If you want to get really philosophical about it, I don't know. Do I really have to answer this question? There was no grand scheme and there still isn't. It is not terribly useful, like curing Cancer, nor is it particularly breathtaking, like rock climbing or sky diving. But, but, but -- why does my life suddenly feel more complete?

WHAT'S GOING ON HERE?

2010-04-01T10:25:00.000-07:00

So there I was, topeka-ing random shit as usual, when I ran across the good old fashion '80s music parody you see above, courtesy of Zlad -- who is also the Anti-Pope. Everything was going fine until I noticed a little option that wasn't there before: TEXTp -- return to the '80s (even more) while saving Youtube some money. (Yay!) Now, I could launch into the long and (not really) complicated history of ASCII art but I'll just get to what everybody is waiting for: Elektronik Supersonik... in TESTp. And certainly, you can't forget Tunak Tunak Tun... in TEXTp. Though the Youtube gods, it seems, truly hate us, for "Benny Lava" is not available for viewing in TEXTp...

Wikipedia has an article about wife selling on the front page(which is completely legitimate), Topeka, Kansas, has changed its name to "Google," and reddit has gone coo coo for cocoa puffs, and, uh, I guess Starbucks is now offering really big, as well as really little, cups of coffee...

The world has come to an end. IT is AN AP0CAllYPsEeee! Or so I thought, but Huffington Post had the right answer, they made it all clear (they always do: they're liberals. HaHa, I'm nearly as witty as Ann Coulter):* today is April Fuels!...

So enjoy a day of lame office pranks and enormous corporations showing their humorous side. And don't forget to read The Guardian's article on The Amazonian tribe that can only count up to five --proving once and for all that the British have a really sick form of humor-- and don't forget to eat your Raisin Brahms. I will return, I promise, to something a little more becoming and usual tomorrow or at least as soon as I can get Paul Erdős to sign my paper.

* notice the clandestine frowny face, accentuated further by the asterisk -- so it's frowning even though it has a flower in its hair. ha (!)

Review: The Roman Way, by Edith Hamilton

2010-03-29T22:08:00.000-07:00

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
What does it mean to be an American? Despite living smack dab in the middle of the U.S. my entire life, despite being surrounded by other so-called Americans, despite all my obvious expertise, of course I can't answer that question. It is ridiculous, of course, to even consider that one worldview or way of thinking surrounds everyone in a particular country, from the homeless black man to the millionaire heiress. Hit the streets with intentions of gathering opinions and then draw a general consensus, and I doubt you will hold in the end little more than vague generalizations.

The Roman Way attempts something of the sort with Ancient Rome, and the prospect seems even more absurd. Hamilton asserts, simply by writing this book, that there is some kind of "Roman Way," a peculiarly Roman way of thinking. To support these claims she goes to the Romans themselves, or what's left of them; that is, she relies only on the literary remains. In a way this approach makes sense: "The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can." But there are some obvious caveats: the "Roman Way" gleaned from these writings, of course, will not be that of women, slaves, free men of the lower classes, etc. --in short, 90-something percent of the population. These people are mentioned in the works of the privileged, and consequently in The Roman Way, but always through the very partial lenses of those writers. So this book is not the evaluation of how some 50 million people from two millennia ago thought about the world, but how a few dozen men wrote about it, in a perspective representative of a few thousand.

This much narrower scope makes the subject much more manageable, and there is still much room for discussion. Edith Hamilton does an admiral job, running through Roman literature, from Plautus and Terrence to Juvenal and the Stoics, discussing each author's unique spot in literature as well their commonality with other Roman authors. Homogeneous bunch, they may seem to some -- yet Catullus, Cicero, and Horace, three rich white men of approximately the same era, were each of vastly different stuff. To support her thesis, Edith Hamilton must somehow bring these people together, threading together their common thought.

Just what did bind these people together? Maybe it is Nationalism, sometimes manifested as simple pride in one's country, sometimes shaped into an almost fanatical devotion to Queen Roma. It is a good first guess: the sentiment seems to pervade every inch of some authors' works, especially the political authors. The poems fit in, too, to some extent --The Aeneid was one large advertisement for Rome, after all-- but just how much did the dreamy and intense Catullus care for such things?

Then there is Romanticism -- a tough sell when talking of such a common sense, seemingly unimaginative group as the Romans, but Hamilton convinced me. She drove home her point especially through comparing the Roman works with Greek counterparts. For example, in the Aeneid, when Vulcan forges a shield for the hero, "flames lick the sky." In the Illiad, when Hephaestus fulfills a similar request for Achilles he simply makes the darn thing -- it is loud, fiery, and perhaps even divine, but it lacks that sky-licking flare. I have not read the Illiad, but Hamilton asserts that, though it has a thoroughly romantic subject, it never strays far from what she calls classicism. Those day-dreaming Greeks, it seemed, preferred to keep their daydreaming within the realm of possibility, while many of the normally practical Romans let their minds soar when putting words on paper.

For further analysis of the differences between the Greek and Roman minds we have very convenient sources, namely the Latin plays of Terence, Plautus, and Seneca, and those of their Greek counterparts, on which they were based. Some are intended as direct copies, yet somehow turned out different, probably the influence of that mysterious force again. Then there are the plays of Seneca, which he intended from the beginning to be different, maybe romantic, and even distinctly Roman. Now there's some food for Common Sense: why would Seneca set out to create something so different from the Greek original if he didn't sense another, more home-spun style and sentiment?

It is an interesting theory, but it does require some squeezing and pushing, and I am still not sure what common feelings bound these men together --yet I am sure there was something of that sort, some kind of "Roman Way." Ultimately, it is one of those classic questions of the liberal arts: "you will never be able to answer it, but you will learn a lot by asking it." In this Edith Hamilton does an admirable job, a goddess of classical literature, laying out the facts for us mere mortals --and not shying away from liberal amounts of conjecture and digression.

Hamilton was a "popularizer" --because she dumbed things down, says the cynic -- because she made things interesting and fun, says the enthusiast. I am obviously a fan: Hamilton herself is classy and classic, and this is the kind of book that will always have a place. The question is one many will never grow tired of asking, the answer one that will eternally remain elusive, and, even though originally published in the '30s, "The Roman Way" has not lost its relevance in the discussion. It is one of the lucky few nonfiction books that will surely grace the shelves of public and school libraries for years to come.

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Stoicism and the Modern Era

2010-03-23T19:07:00.000-07:00

Invictus by William Ernest Henley
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbow'd.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Ah yes, very nice: manly, noble, heroic. This poem marks the poet's stoic attitude towards the amputation of his leg on account of tuberculosis, a disease which had troubled him since the age of twelve. (But, besides the whole "I'm missing a leg thing" it seemed to work out well enough: Henley wrote the above poem, perhaps the most famous thing he ever wrote; and Robert Louis Stevenson immortalized him further by basing the character "Long John Silver" on him. And they say Nelson Mandela kept a copy of the poem, written on a scrap of paper, during his incarceration.)

The above poem is just one piece of writing in a very long line to promote a strong-willed, unemotional, unflinching attitude towards life's troubles that we have come to call "stoic." This profound seriousness goes at least as far back as Socrates --it is difficult to imagine Socrates smiling, amiright?-- but Stoicism as we know it, as a full-fledged philosophy, did not emerge until the 3rd century BC, created by a Greek man named Zeno of Citium.

The philosophy seems to have taken off immediately, with just about all of Alexander's successors proclaiming themselves Stoics. However, nothing but fragments survive from the first two periods of Stoicism, and we have complete texts only from Stoics of the high Roman Empire, of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD: people like Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca. (Anyone hoping for a more serious discussion of Stoic beliefs should see "Stoicism," and the two related articles from The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)

I have known about the Stoics and their works since High School Latin class, and they have always produced from me a kind of ambivalence. Were they wise men or fools? And does such an unforgiving, so terribly masculine worldview have any place in today's society? But --who am I kidding-- I have always had a bit of the Stoic about myself: I use the term "pesky emotions" more often than most, and I have tendency to grow glassy-eyed when I think of the possibilities of self-sacrifice, against an insurmountable opponent for a cause I believe in deeply.

My great interest --no, it is not yet an obsession-- in Ancient Rome must surely add something to the flame. The Stoics embody --or try to embody-- all of the ideals, all the character and strength of a romantic, or else propagandic, view of the city and its empire. Have I lost you? Just imagine the smells: sweat, olives, and leather -- that is Romanticism. Now imagine the stench of piss and shit, rotting corpses, smoke --that is Realism.

Above all, the Stoics seem to be known for their heroic deaths. Seneca The Younger, accused by the tyrannical Emperor Nero of complicity in the Pisonian Conspiracy, was forced to commit suicide. He sat in a bath of warm water and slit his wrists, surrounded by a circle of friends, dictating his last commands to a scribe, stiff upper lip to the end. Cato, chased about the Empire by Julius Caesar, finally knifed himself in Utica. Then there is the so-called "Stoic Opposition," a group of senators who stood up to the emperors, especially during the reign of Domitian -- naturally, heads rolled.

The Stoics's tendency toward martyrdom, together with their strong moral codes, have lead many Christian writers to see them in a kind light. The "last bath" of Seneca, for example, has been seen as a disguised baptism, and Dante placed him in only the first circle of Hell -- the nicest, although it is still Hell. While other pagans were off to the gladiatorial events, wild parties, and crucifixions, Stoics tried their best to be good Christian men --they just didn't know it.

This generally approving view of the Stoics continued well through the Middle Ages, and culminated in the formation of Neostoicism in 1584. This revival movement didn't exactly make waves; however, many of the core principals of Stoicism continued to be held in high regard by some long into the modern era.

Some, however, have looked upon Stoicism with much disdain. I recently discovered some explicit talk of Stoicism in a story called "Ward 6," by Anton Chekhov. It has two principal characters: Dr. Andrey Yefimych Ragin , the superintendent of a hospital in a provincial town, and Ivan Dmitrich Gromov, a patient of Ward 6 --where the lunatics are kept. One day, the doctor stumbles into this ward and consequently discovers a partner for conversation in Gromov. Please allow us to listen in:

"There is no real difference between a warm, snug study and this ward,' said Andrey Yefimitch. 'A man's peace and contentment do not lie outside a man, but in himself.'

'You should go and preach that philosophy in Greece, where it's warm and fragrant with the scent of pomegranates, but here it is not suited to the climate...'"

counters Gromov, and continues by calling his conversation partner "flabby and lazy," along with further condemnations of his character. Then he has this to say about Stoicism:

The Stoics, whom you are parodying, were remarkable people, but their doctrine crystallized two thousand years ago and has not advanced, and will not advance, an inch forward, since it is not practical or living. It had a success only with the minority which spends its life in savouring all sorts of theories and ruminating over them; the majority did not understand it. A doctrine which advocates indifference to wealth and to the comforts of life, and a contempt for suffering and death, is quite unintelligible to the vast majority of men, since that majority has never known wealth or the comforts of life; and to despise suffering would mean to it despising life itself, since the whole existence of man is made up of the sensations of hunger, cold, injury, and a Hamlet-like dread of death. The whole of life lies in these sensations; one may be oppressed by it, one may hate it, but one cannot despise it. Yes, so, I repeat, the doctrine of the Stoics can never have a future; from the beginning of time up to to-day you see continually increasing the struggle, the sensibility to pain, the capacity of responding to stimulus.

This does nothing more for the doctor than amuse him: he does not take the warning Gromov, and ultimately Chekhov, are handing him. Things end badly for him: the doctor's new habit of regularly visiting Ward 6 is viewed with suspicion by his superiors and he is consequently fired from his position. Soon, he is lured into Ward 6 and locked in as an inmate; he dies shortly after from a stroke.

It is easy to sit on a perch -- to be the one of the richest men in the world, yet play at being poor. Philosophy, all philosophy is as much a luxury commodity as statuettes of gold. I often see it in this way. But Epictetus, at one point a slave who was heavily beaten and abused by his master, to the point of a permanent limp, gives that argument pause. I leave you with another quote:

Philosophy does not promise to secure anything external for man, otherwise it would be admitting something that lies beyond its proper subject-matter. For as the material of the carpenter is wood, and that of statuary bronze, so the subject-matter of the art of living is each person's own life.
Epictetus

Awful Library Books

2010-03-19T10:03:00.000-07:00

Behold, Awful Library Books, a blog run by two librarians from Michigan with a mission: to weed out all of those outdated, odd, and just plain awful books from their and other libraries. The format is plain and simple: each post features one book, with its cover and perhaps a few other images, and then a brief riff and/or description. They have been doing the same old song and dance since April 2009 and have garnered a surprising amount of press, from the usual dozens and dozens of run-of-the-mill blogs, to prominent websites like BoingBoing and MomLogic, to mainstream media like Time -- heck, the two even made an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Behold, the first and last time I post a clip from that show on this blog:

The two librarians started with their own library, but I imagine that eventually went a little dry. Now, they receive numerous submissions from people around the world. Most of them, unfortunately, are of the "har, har, this book is old" variety. "Oh look, this girl has hair and clothing that was fashionable in the 80s but now is not!" And then there is the outdated, (more openly) misogynist stuff: "A woman's place in [the world] is on her back!"

Much as I like to disagree with those fair and balanced, imaginary people I quoted up there, I have to admit, the routine gets a little old. They are probably all the rage amongst other librarians -- I bet some even envy them. But that squeaky clean, "librarian humor" is just not for me. (Picture, for a moment, me as a librarian.... Yes, I too am glad that's over!)

Nevertheless, if you stick around long enough, they uncover gems like those shown in the clip above. And if you lust for more, PopHangover has a list of their ten favorite (awful) books, and the duo themselves compiled a list of their favorite books of 2009 And, oh yeah, don't forget my personal favorite, Crafts for (The?) Retarded:

Fireside Stories, by Abe Kurp

2010-03-16T19:09:00.001-07:00

Dum loquor, hora fugit --Ovid *

The hours always flew by: Grandfather in his arm chair by the fire, his little grandson on his lap. The old man would tell stories and the boy would listen. They were fanciful things, cobbled-together bits of classic tales, weaved together by some universal thread. Meandering things, these stories were, full of inconsistency and repetition. But he was a storyteller by nature, and the child loved it.

Grandfather was an old and skinny man, converging on 70 years old, who wore thin-rimmed spectacles and a well-trimmed beard; he spoke in a low and gravelly voice, and had only a few, yellowing teeth remaining. He carried about him an eternal air of great dignity --despite the thin wisps of white hair that fluttered upwards of five inches above his head --despite the drooling --despite the rickety, toddling manner in which he walked.

He had been a professor at the local college. Now he lived in the house of his youngest son, in a big tan-colored house, the finest amongst the fine. This son -- a surly little thing from birth -- was rarely around, usually away on business; how else could he pay for the house? As for her, the mistress of the house, when she was not out socializing with the neighbors, she kept herself quite locked up in her private chambers. She employed a woman, in fact, whose sole employment seemed to be the deterring of unwanted intrusions.

So the old man was often left alone with the boy, his only grandchild. Their relationship had begun without promise, with befuddlement and bewilderment on both accounts. But one day, Grandfather set aside his newspaper and began telling a story. The boy, a little surprised, set down his toys and did his part as a listener. That first day he sat on the far end of the rug, at least ten feet away from his grandfather. But the next day, he sat in the middle, then on the other side, and so on, until the end of the week, when he sat on his grandfather's lap.

Grandfather stole from all the greats: anything to keep the story afloat and keep his grandson happy. Virgil, of course, and Apuleius, and Homer and even Hesiod. Amongst the epic tales of these grand old heroes he mixed in tales of his own experience: from his time in the war, his young manhood, his several attempts at love. As for the boy, he only listened and stared into the fireplace, ever fascinated by the endless undulations and alterations.

One day, it was story time -- the boy was ready, but the old man was not. There was no sign of him; of course he was not in his usual spot by the fire. The boy checked the other rooms: the kitchen, the hallways, his grandfather's bedroom, and every other place in the house to which he ready access.

He asked two maids. They ignored him. He walked out to the stables, to inquire if, by some fluke, Grandfather had gone for a ride, but the stable hands abruptly and rudely brushed him aside.

He was forced to do it: to see his mother. He spent the next few hours in his room, playing listlessly with his toys, his mind always wandering. He tried to gather strength, to face the dark dread in his stomach. His few previous attempts to see his mother in her room had all ended the same: boxed ears, a horrible scolding, the loss of one meal. But maybe today would be different; besides, he had to know.

He slowly and solemnly approached the big French doors of his mother's room. He lifted his little hand and knocked, defiantly, three times. The hoarse voice of the maid said, "Coming... Hold on a second, please."

She opened the door. His appearance brought a look of disgust to her face. A voice from within --his mother's-- ordered the woman to "let the man in, you ninny. I swear, the small hand of a clock moves faster than you." The maid reluctantly did as she was told.

The boy entered -- his mother was surprised, but only for a moment. Then she welcomed him to her room, like any good hostess. She did not offer him to sit or have a drink. She asked, "What would you like, dear?" in a soft, placating voice.

"I want to see my Grandpa." The boy returned her frigid terseness.

"Oh, dear me," she said. "I had a feeling it was something to do about that. Your father -- I mean, your grandfather, is away. He went away dear, and he won't be coming back for a very long time."

"Where?" said the boy. "Why?"

"To London, dear, on his business trip," was her only response. The interview was soon over after that. The boy returned to his room and cried.

Three weeks later, the boy was playing in the kitchen when he heard a noise at the back door. The door opened and closed while he went to investigate. Standing there was his Grandpa, wearing a brightly colored shirt, with deeply tanned, leathery skin. The old man stooped, arms wide open, beaming a smile, as his grandson ran into his embrace.

* For more on the above-cited Ovid quote, including a little background, its meaning, and an audio reading, kindly visit the appropriate post on the Latin Via Proverbs blog.

The Ides of March

2010-03-15T19:05:00.000-07:00

Beware, beware, be a very wary bear.

It's March 15th, the Ides of March. On this day, more than two millenia ago, William Shakespeare got into an epic, bumpin' and frumpin', no-holds-bard (bard, *snicker*) fist fight with Julius Caesar. Scholars continue to quarrel over the exact outcome, though someone in the crowd was supposed to have said, "Beware the Ides of March, 'cus J.C. just brought it today, motherfucka'." The precise meaning of this phrase remains unclear.

*Ahem* It's March 15th, the Ides of March, the one time each year when the old dusty Romans are dusted off and trotted around the bustling forum we call the Mainstream World. Did you know the Romans invented concrete, domes, glass-blowing, and a hypocaust heating system? Prefer the Ancient Greeks? Pfft, the only thing they every invented is homosexuality. "However, the screw press [for pressing olives] was almost certainly not a Roman invention." Wikipedia ruins all my fun.

Oddly enough, though I am, and have been for years, a fan of everything Roman -- I refuse to add the affix "-phile" to something I merely like (take that, Society!) -- I have not (yet) pissed my pants over this day. I guess it's same old same old for me. I liked the Romans before they were cool -- everyone else is just a poser.

For proof, ou can read some of my reviews of Roman-related books on the appropriate Goodreads shelf. And while you're busy with that, I'll be here scratching my head, wondering why I don't yet belong to the The Roman History Reading Group. Also, why haven't finished listening to that podcast course about the history of the Roman Empire?

Oh, and here's an Esperanto translation of Hadrian's famous "Animula vagula blandula" poem. Yeah, I happened to translate that yesterday, for no special reason or occasion. Yeah, I do awesome stuff like that all the time.

Animulo, vagulo, mildulo,
Gast' kaj kunulo de la korp',
Al kie vi nun iras,
Nuda malforta kaj pala,
Sen nia estinta plezur'?

Then there is the Latin original:

Animula, vagula, blandula
Hospes comesque corporis!
Quae nunc abibis in loca,
Pallidula, frigida nudula
Nec ut soles dabis joca?

Then, for you cretins out there (you know who you are) who do not understand either of these hallowed languages, there is this blog post by poet Tom Clark, which features a variety of English translations, as well as some of Clark's explanation and commentary.

Cum amor,
Abe

Review: Medea, by Euripides; translated by Robin Robertson

2010-03-14T19:06:00.000-07:00

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Medea is an intriguing and difficult play -- the former largely due to the latter. Based on Greek mythology, it follows part of the tale of Jason and his wife Medea. Medea, a "barbarian" princess from the kingdom of Colchis, follows the Greek Jason, of Golden Fleece fame, to Corinth. Things go fairly well until Jason runs off with a younger woman, the daughter of Kin Creon, the king of Corinth. The play opens with this atrocity; it ends with a far worse one.

Medea is left to languish in her house while the new lovers get familiar amidst the palatial bedsheets. Then the king himself comes to her house and orders her to leave the country. But Medea has murderous intentions. Even her nurse -- a classic example of the wise and temperate servant, set against the excesses and stupidity of the masters, a common trope long into the Victorian era (Nelly, from Wuthering Heights, anyone?) -- speaks of her mistress' plot in the first speech of the play. Medea, in a terrible act of anger towards Jason, but also as a form of self-destruction, plans to kill her two young sons.

She hopes, of course, to gain revenge against Jason. But it is also a form of self destruction. Failing the existence of any maternal love or even plain human empathy, Medea is, at the very least, gruesomely cutting short her bloodline. All hopes of any kind of immortality, therefore, are ended. To say nothing of the children...

Soon Jason himself swings by the house, surely fresh from the "marriage" bed. Although he is confident of his dominant position in society -- and therefore is arrogant enough to feel his acts justified and to order Medea to accept her fate -- still he has misgivings. Perhaps he genuinely feels guilty; perhaps he feels obligated to see after her welfare; perhaps his sole concern is for the children. In any case, the ol' Kobe Bryant tactic doesn't work, and Jason leaves Medea as angry and stubborn (*hmph* women) as ever.

Then the King of Athens comes by -- yes, Virginia, kings do make house calls -- and Medea makes him promise to shelter her in his city after she flees Corinth, and to keep her safe even against military attacks.

Then things get crazy: Medea pretends to be reconciled; accordingly, she has her two boys deliver gifts to the new bride; but these gifts are poisoned, and both the princess and her father die offstage. Jason seems not to like this and returns to the house in a fury. But Medea is too busy for talking -- too busy killing her sons; their cries of terror can be heard from inside the house. Jason holds an argument with his former wife through locked doors. Then the chariot of Helios, the sun god and Medea's grandfather, carries her above Jason's head, to freedom. The End.

A reader can see this play in two lights: in the originally intended, traditional view; or else in the modern idiom. For the former, imagine a Greek theater, with an all-male cast and probably an all-male audience. The play is performed in a heavily patriarchal society; some of the male actors are wearing dresses, assuming high-pitched voices. The play tells the mythical story of a woman who turns bloody and vindictive -- yes, yes, typical woman -- but gets away unpunished -- not typical.

Then there is the chorus. In this play, it was intended to be a group of Corinthian women, who commiserate with Medea and encourage her to seek revenge, though they frown upon "punishing herself" -- ie, by killings her own children. The chorus of Ancient Greek theater usually played a very distinct role -- to play the part of "society," to give the main characters advice and incite into the "right" actions. How odd it is, that this group of vindictive, seemingly vindicated women was played by men -- their lines were written by a man -- in a play performed exclusively for men.

And, to those wondering if Euripides was a kind of rogue, with radical views, remember that the play was based on long-standing mythology. Mind, this play was not particularly popular -- it finished third in the Dionysia festival in 431 BC -- but Euripides certainly was not run out of town. Perhaps some scholars have it all figured out (I hear some call this play an example of proto-feminism!), but I'm still a bit baffled.

Then there is the other light: to look on this play as a work of modern times. Certainly, we don't read it in the Ancient Greek anymore, and the translation I read, by Robin Robertson, seemed especially tuned to the modern ear. This way we can completely, without reservations, sympathize with Medea -- though probably not approve of her actions. And we can pass off her comments on the weakness of women as simple irony. Oddly enough, this approach seems to make this play less of a puzzle, at least for me.

I bet if we had read this in high school instead of Antigone I would have jumped back into Ancient Greek literature sooner. I am only just testing the waters of that hallowed genre, yet I am already certain that Medea must be one of the best plays in the bunch, especially from a modern perspective.

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Review: The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009

2010-03-09T10:34:00.000-08:00

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Oddly enough, this is probably the first short story collection I've read cover-to-cover. This is cause for celebration, or at least a new "shelf" on Goodreads. I think I'll call it "short-stories." (oooh!)

If you're going to read your first short story collection why not this one? It is part of an annual series that collects a few stories and non-fiction pieces published that year in some of the better magazines and websites. So it's a smörgåsbord -- or perhaps a "mixed bag" if you are a cynic, or if that little circle above the "a" frightens you.

After the Introduction by Marjane Satrapi -- which explains her early reading tastes and devotes not a single word to the works it is introducing -- there follows 30-50 pages of random facts, of the kind commonly found in the "Uncle John's Bathroom Reader" series. So "out-of-place" and "confused" are words sure to come to mind. In other words, between Satrapi's admission to being humbled while reading giants like Dostoevsky, and a list of the "Best Craigslist ads," I was scratching my head (perhaps only metaphorically), wondering just what I was reading. But it's all good. Satrapi is always fun to read, and who doesn't like reading a few lists of trivia? Especially me, who once-upon-a-time read almanacs avidly.

Then there are the stories. I find there is no need -- nor am I able -- to write about every single story in the collection. Instead, a general word about the stories as a whole: eclectic and varied; decidedly leftward leaning (doesn't the cover speak that clearly enough?); and, as always with these collections, variable in terms of quality. Tastes vary, although I doubt any story in this collection will cause even the most picky reader to throw the book down in disgust. Nor do I doubt that everyone will find at least one worthwhile story.

And now about some of my personal favorites (Note: Some of these works can be read online, in part or in full, so I will be sure to post a link where appropriate):

The Chameleon by David Grann (non-fiction): about a 30-something French man, Frédéric Bourdin, a serial impostor, who often posed as a young boy. He used to wander around Europe, creating new characters and scenarios, sometimes convincing people for many months at a time. He says he only wanted love and attention. The law enforcement were always unsure of how and for what to punish him. His ugliest hour came when he posed as a missing American boy and hoodwinked the lost boy's family for several months, though eventually turned himself in. He is now married and has a young daughter, and claims to have given up his old ways.

Wild Berry Blue by Rivka Galchen: A story of an eight-year-old Jewish girl who "falls in love" with a former heroine addict who works at McDonalds -- I'm not making this up. The story is told from the point of view of the girl, all grown up, and we learn at the end of the story that there have been many similarly odd infatuations since.

Diary of a Fire Lookout by Philip Connors (non-fiction): Even with all the exciting works of the collection within the realm of fiction, somehow this simple diary of a man who sits in a tower in Gila National Forest in New Mexico and looks for forest fires is near the top of my list. There are some touching moments (he finds a solitary, dying fawn), and some interesting encounters (with a pair of "smokejumpers," people trained to jump out of planes to combat fires in rugged, otherwise unreachable areas; and with a pair of hikers, who were planning to hike, if not all, then most of the Rocky Mountains). I am a bit miffed that people with degrees from upper-crust universities seem to gravitate towards that kind of job (*sigh* you are not Thoreau); still, this an interesting piece of work.

Mississippi Drift by Mathew Power(non-fiction): The writer joins a group of "river vagrants" as they attempt to sail down the Mississippi River. The skipper and primary constructor of their makeshift boat is a guy named Matt, "a dumpster-diving, train-hopping, animal-rights-crusading anarchist and tramp," who runs his ship with an oddly totalitarian grip. During the story we also encounter "Poppa Nuetrino," a kind of grandfather of trash-boat builders and the main proponent of a "Whoa, man -- far out!" kind of "philosophy." There is a biography of this man, The Happiest Man in the World, by Alec Wikinson. Regarding Matt and his own trash boat, the other crew members steadily dropped off, until Matt was alone and the boat eventually capsized.

The Temp by Amelia Kahamey: A new woman, a temporary employee, steps into a typical humdrum office and steadily convinces the other employess -- without saying a direct word about it -- to quit their jobs for happier pastures. An uplifter, for sure.

To be frank, this collection is loaded with works taken from magazines that I never read. But it is nice to get an annual look into the world of well-pressed button-down shirts and the soft-spoken voices of NPR personalities. And for the record, there are only two classes of people who use the word "intelligent" when they mean to say "smart": the under-educated and the over-educated.

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FANCY CATZ - teh cutiest LOL caz in teh WORLDZ!

2010-03-02T11:26:00.000-08:00

Review: You Can Never Find a Rickshaw When It Monsoons, by Mo Willems

2010-03-02T11:22:00.000-08:00

My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Usually these kinds of post-college trips around the world lead to nothing more than a few souvenirs -- perhaps an object that perfectly sums up a culture, for the low-low price of $15-- and the satisfaction of knowing that you're just that much better than everyone else. Sure, this little group of "true travelers" all know of their superiority over the tourist horde. Sure, they may now throw around the term "culturally enlightened" a bit more. But, hopefully, it ends there. Most people don't write a book about it, and those that do rarely get published.

The author of this book, when he's not playing for the Cleveland Cavaliers while posing as a black man (really, who is he fooling?), is apparently a children's-book author of some renown. At the time of the trip, 1990-1991, he was just another fresh-faced youth with a goofy haircut -- but fame tends to add relevance to just about anything.

During the trip, Willems drew a daily single-panel cartoon, depicting the day's most interesting happening. Years later, in a time known as 2006, he regathered these hundreds of cartoons, added some explanation or commentary to each, and sent them out into the world in an orange, paperback binding. And I bought it! (or checked it out from the library -- books are expensive!)

I'm not one to make sweeping statements, but, well, here it is: most people want to travel and "see the world," but most people don't. In this book, Willems repeatedly voices his hope that it will encourage others to make the plunge. How many it encouraged, I don't know, but I'm not convinced. A series of black-and-white, kid-style drawings of the world is not the world. Nor do the occasional funny moments lift this book to anything thrilling. I say, if you want to see the world, without seeing it, read a traditional travelogue or log onto the Internet.

Nothing against this book, however. The author seems like a nice guy, and I wish him luck with writing stories about crazy pigeons that find hot dogs, and may or may not drive buses. I just wasn't terribly, terribly impressed with this book.

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Sassy Gay Friend: Hamlet

2010-02-26T21:39:00.000-08:00

And the last four comments on Youtube:

nadesNspades (2 minutes ago)
to be gay, or not to be gay. that is the question.

BeNice2Others1 (7 minutes ago)
Oh God...I'm 6 seconds in and I can already tell it's gonna kill me with laughter

nahikuroots (9 minutes ago)
Hilarious! This should be a series!!

peacebewithyou90 (9 minutes ago)
wat a homophobe go fuck yo momma bitch.

A Hundred Years' Good Luck (Part 2), by Abe Kurp

2010-02-23T10:55:00.000-08:00

The exciting conclusion to A Hundred Years' Good Luck (Part 1)!

The wedding was only one week and three days distant when I paid a visit to the town's butcher, only to discover that my demands of six yearling sheep could not be met in time. So it was that I was compelled to call for my dealer -- for I had come to see him as my dealer.

We met in the country, barely five miles from my home, on a farm owned by a man I hardly knew, where my dealer was temporarily housing the sheep. The sun was six hours into its westward journey and already the field glowed golden. "Congratulations!" His thick, brown voice preceded his embrace. "You're going to have a son at last. And from such fine stock, too." He released me, winked, and said again, "Congratulations."

My short and wary response surprised him. But that signature smile faltered for only a moment. The pleasantries dismissed, he could now proceed to his favorite form of conversation: business. "So, you'll be wanting to see those lambs, then. They are the finest specimens -- the finest I could find on such short notice. Got them from three different sources -- three sources for six sheep! Ah, my brain aches now with all that business talk. Though I did it for a good cause, eh? And it is an interesting story: the first man, he had---" He looked at my face and paused. "But maybe another time, my friend. Come, this way. I got them in a pen on the other side of the barn."

The six animals were fine enough. Oh, perhaps two were a bit older than I might have anticipated, all of them a bit more scruffy, slightly thinner than I had hoped. But they were all healthy and passable enough, befitting the occasion.

"It is surely not good to have them out here in this pen all day and night, in all kinds of weather," I said, after a few minutes of contemplation.

"You are right my friend, of course. For that, I hired a boy -- the youngest son of my farmer friend. He feeds the sheep each day, then leads them into the barn at night. There is no need to worry, my friend; have I ever done you wrong? Of course not."

A few more minutes passed as I continued to examine the animals. There was little conversation, besides my occasional, lackadaisical questioning and his quick and confident replies. He was patient enough, and when I had exhausted my small bag of questions, he was the first to bring up the subject of price.

I had known this man long enough to know that money was always an issue -- or rather the issue of money was an issue. Despite the many years he had spent at polishing and honing his craft, still his approach to the subject was never quite perfect. He felt embarrassed, I think, whenever he had to name a price; it became more a duty to him, than the pinnacle of his craft.

That day, I settled the matter briskly, agreeing upon only the third offered price. Then I called for my horse, gently refusing his offer of a drink on the merit of the quickly setting sun. He embraced me once again, though this time he held in his verbal congratulations. Just before leaving, already mounted on my horse, I remembered my duty as a friend. I invited him to the wedding and rode off. The pounding of the horse's hooves upon the well-packed earth deafened his response.

"Marriage is a sacred bond, my friends, between a man and a woman, a bond that cannot be justly broken except by death. Each of you stands here now, before all of your people and before the Almighty, to swear..." The minister continued as eloquently as he could, while my mind slowly drifted -- to the bright, light blue sky; to the beauty of the Earth, and of this wedding in particular. I sat in the front row but no one seemed to notice my faraway gaze.

I leaned to my right and my eyes fell on the merchant, sitting across the aisle. I had expected him to sit on the bride's side, in the very last row, so as to avoid conflict with my two darlings. Yet somehow he had contrived a seat in the front row of the groom's side. He sat there, as natural as a pea in a pod, his usual smile an endless presence now. What kind of lies did he use to weasel his way amongst my new son-in-law's family? I began, for the first time, to doubt his moral fiber.

When the minister had finished and the couple taken their first kiss and the polite applause finished, the merchant rose and began a speech. Why could he possibly be giving a speech in these circumstances? What right or reason did he have? I began to sweat; I glanced around nervously -- no one else seemed surprised. I decided to listen:

"...tragic death of my brother, I am given the honor and duty of giving away this fine man, my nephew, to his beautiful new wife and her lovely new family. Congratulations, lad. One hundred years' good luck to you and yours! Thank you." The crowd applauded as my newest relative walked over and embraced me.

Palin Song.

2010-02-22T13:29:00.000-08:00

Part of Sarah Palin's infamous interview with Katie Couric, set to piano music: Reaganomics finally makes sense.

A Hundred Years' Good Luck (Part 1), by Abe Kurp

2010-02-19T10:12:00.000-08:00

I bought six yearling sheep, once, from a man in dark robes, with face and mustache to match. He was not a shady man: I simply mean to say he wore dark clothing of black and browns, darkened further by an accumulation of much dust, dirt and grime. His face, skin and hair, all naturally dark -- for he was from Spain -- were darkened by a similar measure.

He was a jovial man, if not always kind -- though given to smiling. This last was especially useful in his chosen trade: dealer, in anything that would sell. He never missed an opportunity to spread his mouth, to reveal his small white weapons; for, indeed, he used them as a soldier does his rifle, with finely crafted precision. And like a soldier, he took great pride and care of his instruments of war: always white like pearls and sharp like daggers.

I did not mind this man, nor his idiosyncrasies. Yet neither his charm and easy nature as a man, nor his years of fair dealings as a seller, prevented him from making enemies. His good personality was but a facade, they said, or a worm at the end of a hook. His dealings were so fraudulent as to be worthy of the courts. Three times this man was compelled to visit the local courthouse, three times the case was quickly dropped. Years passed and still they persisted in their cries of "Bribery!", much to the chagrin of the Judge and the other leading citizens of the town. And as for the merchant's teeth, they blamed vanity -- only this terrible vice, they said, could lead a man to gargle his own piss!

That is what some said. I believed none of it, a position I have always been naturally inclined to take in all matters of rumor. I made trade with him frequently, despite these cries of contrariness from those nasty few. Nearly every time the man made a stop in our small town I would buy, on one hand, something useful for the house and home; and on the other, a "useless" trinket or bauble for the family, which nevertheless served to smooth relations with my three little urchins, lead triumphantly by my shrew of a wife.

My dealings with this man went on in the same straightforward and unremarkable manner for years, with no alteration, excepting the steady growth of my children and therefore their increasingly outlandish demands for gifts. Time did its work, and soon it came to pass that my eldest, a sharp-nosed, rough-hewn girl of seventeen years, managed to contrive a man to marry her. This came as a shock to both of her parents -- or at least to me, who, for many years, had wondered if she should find a husband at all, let alone at the "ripe old age" of seventeen.

He was a respectable, well-bred man of twenty-three, from three towns to the west, the eldest son of an Army Lieutenant, and well along on his own course as a soldier. Never had I anticipated such an agreeable match for any of my children, especially for my eldest, who had a personality to match her complexion. Only her eyes, sharp blue and beautiful, seemed redeeming; yet their sparkle and clarity promised a depth and beauty of soul that I knew she could never fulfill. This young man was also nothing to admire, or even to look upon but, as a man, much less is required of him in such matters; besides I am sure I will never have the duty of his marriage bed. I had met him only once and knew little of his character.

In all, it was a dream. Truly it was, for all dreams are equally as fleeting. I soon discovered the source of this remarkable occurrence: my darling wife and daughter had promised this young gentleman, or at least he had come to expect, a dowry of some fifteen thousand -- which, on top of the expense of the wedding and the accompanying festivities, was, of course, to come directly from my pockets.

I wandered around my town and house for many days, always muttering of the terrible expense and trouble of having such ugly, disagreeable children. Many about town, including the Judge, seemed to give me up for mad and dumb, or else to simple senility. But there were two who never faltered in their faith in my sanity: the two masterminds of this plot, my two taskmasters, who had come too far, expended too much effort, to let a man of my mere stature interrupt their plans.

When I had bothered myself in this manner for five straight days, my daughter and wife decided to put this "needless fussing" to an end. They cornered me in our garden -- practically against the wall -- and proceeded to lay out their demands. They did not bother themselves with pleading or begging, or even coaxing. The event felt more like a war conference than a plea for my marriage blessings, and it was clear to all who represented the defeated faction.

They took their turns at berating and reproaching me: for my greed, my inconsiderate behavior, my apathy for my daughter's welfare, and more. In the course of half an hour, my perfectly reasonable position -- that my funds were and always would be rather meager, that I hoped to provide reasonably well for my other daughters, that the couple would surely live happy and fulfilling lives with even half the stated sum -- was irretrievably torn and tattered.

To resist seemed useless now, even to me. The date was set for June 18, less than two months away. The two women set to constant tittering about, and even occasionally making, preparations for the wedding. They had promised to handle all the affairs surrounding the wedding. I could only watch passively as task after task came to rest, as if by magic, in my own grasp. I came to feel like a man in a labor camp with an admission fee: not only was I willingly working toward my own doom, but paying for it, in an all too literal fashion.

Liked the story? Then don't miss A Hundred Years' Good Luck (Part 2), which some are calling "the exciting conclusion to A Hundred Years' Good Luck (Part 1)!"

Review: Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen

2010-02-16T11:54:00.000-08:00

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is not the most thrilling novel. Even amongst its less-than-thrilling brethren, it may seem a bit dull and uneventful. It is the story of a relatively poor young girl who is taken in by her wealthy uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, and for years lives with him, his wife, and his four children on their big estate, Mansfield Park. Fanny Price --that is the girl's name-- is never treated unkindly, but she is always made to feel apart, not a servant yet not on the level of the Bertram children.

The book skips fairly quickly to her young womanhood, to around the age of 18. Sir Thomas has gone off to see to business matters in Antigua, and you know how it is with mice when their personal member of parliament is away. The young Bertrams are especially a'tizzy about the arrival of a dashing brother-sister pair from London. Love interests and intrigues abound amongst the others, while Fanny sits quietly by.

Fanny seems to be a matter for contention amongst readers and reviewers. She does seem awfully timid and dull. Why, even the author herself seems to neglect Fanny through much of the first half of the book, and after reading just one chapter of Emma I am convinced that she is no Emma Woodhouse. Yet, I like her. I feel she and I are of a similar mind -- at least, while reading, I need not examine and contrast the depicted worldview with mine. And as dull and timid as she may seem on the surface, she is simply bubbling over with things to say, on the inside. It is her sense of propriety, and probably some feeling of inferiority, that make her hold her tongue.

Fanny is a character for the middle child, the girl who has felt neglected amongst the wooing of the eldest and the cooing at the baby. As Fanny bears the neglect beautifully and later flourishes, ultimately triumphing in her way, those who have felt neglected in their time can learn from her and take hope. She is a wonderfully strong character, though she works within the conventions of society. As she is no Emma, so she is no Antigone -- she is a quieter sort of heroine. I like her, yet I understand the demand for a lively, fiery protagonist. And yes, I long ago decided that I, like Fanny, might make a dull main character.

Now a bit about some of the other characters:

Mrs. Norris, the unpleasant cat of Hogwarts caretaker Argus Filch in the Harry Potter series, is a fitting tribute to the Mrs. Norris of Mansfield Park. Fanny's other aunt (along with Sir Thomas' wife, Lady Bertram), Mrs. Norris is eternally harassing and chiding the girl. She is a bustling, meddling creature, and the only characters who like her are the two Bertram sisters, on whom she dotes.

Tom, Maria, and Julia Bertram: Three of Fanny's cousins, they are all greedy and opportunistic. The girls especially are perfect foils to Fanny, examples of greed and other "ill thoughts" that Fanny does not, cannot posses. They are certainly not evil incarnate, and I felt they all deserved to be forgiven for their faults and misdeeds, but they do each receive a degree of punishment.

Edmund Bertram: Fanny's fourth cousin, he is good-hearted and proper, but at times misguided. To Fanny, he is always her only something, whether companion, advocate, listener, or... I'll let the ellipsis tell the tale.

Henry and Mary Crawford: The dashing young broth-sister duo from London, everyone at the Park is impressed by them, except Fanny, naturally. They seemed more like plot devices than characters to me.

Sir. Thomas is the dignified, above-it-all patriarch, though that view is occasionally parodied. He does not play an enormous role, though I found myself liking him, for some reason, so that is why he gets a mention.

I think of this as a novel of characters; there are many strong, interesting characters, and yes, with the absence of a thrilling plot, the characters must needs take over. In the second half, when the plot has much more life, the characters come even more alive. I imagine few will fall madly in love with this novel, but I still consider it worthwhile to have read.

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Carrots, by Abe Kurp

2010-02-11T12:51:00.000-08:00

Below, a short-short story I wrote yesterday, polished today. Carrots, by Abe Kurp, is A tale of lost love and the consequences, with copious (unintentional) Shakespeare references. Carrots are also little orange vegetables that help you poop and see in the dark.

It was six months ago when he began this deadly, silly folly. She, the wife, had played the fool and pretended not to know; she knew, in reality, five minutes after his first orgasm that wasn't hers. She cried, stopped, then cried anew. But the hours passed, with no manly shadow at the door --Nothing --No one, at which to yell, scream, throw.

The hours passed and she fell in love again. She waited for her sweet prince, flights of angels --or hordes of little goblins-- no longer in her mind. He came home, returned to the house at last, oblivious to all the torment, his mind on but two things: a) sex, b) affair. He had done it on an impulse, to satisfy a craving long left unfulfilled. Now Impulse was a magical word; now, he longed for more.

Luckily, he was a good actor (they didn't hand out the role of Othello to anyone). Luckily, she seemed simply unaware: she a sheep, the affair a part of the wide world beyond her little pasture. Even if she knew, or contrived sketchy weavings of his distant rumblings, she never said a word.

She was quiet like a sheep, he thought, though he had never been near the countryside. His liaisons continued without cause or reason for abatement. When interest faded on his first --really, truly his second-- he was not miffed; there were always more to come.

His lust for others defied all attempts at reconciliation. Her make-up dinners and forgiveness stews were eaten with indifference at best, and heartiness at worst --fuel for the next round of dicking around. The hours they spent together --in wind-swept meadows, dim-lit bars: romantic spots he used to love-- were now only a reprieve from constant thrusting.

She was chopping carrots in the kitchen when he returned. He was drunk: she could hear his stumbling and slurring in the hall. He was not alone: there was a pair of slurs and stumbles, distinctly heard. Her longtime fears were rectified: the other was a woman; he had brought a woman to the house.

The giggles and slurs came closer, the chops of the knife against the cutting board grew closer and closer to their brethren.

The door flew open and banged against the wall. A red-faced, sorrowful man stood there, clinging to the arm of a blond-haired young one, all smiles till she saw the kitchen's occupant. The bright lights of the kitchen flashed against the dark blue sequins on her dress. Both faces lost their color.

With tiny, discolored sentences he tried to make his stand, to defend his improprieties. Sixteen years of love's labor would be lost in only a few nights of breezy infatuation. Was it worth it, now, to fling it all away?

She heard but did not listen, nor did she speak. Even he seemed to know the time of forgiveness had already passed. To Abyss she had lost him, to Abyss he now would go: it was time to cut this matter short.

Reflections on the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe

2010-02-07T20:52:00.000-08:00

Note: Anyone wishing to experience these stories for themselves can download them, in a variety of formats, from Project Gutenberg, or read them online at PoeStories.com, or else download free, volunteer-recorded audio versions of some tales (of varying quality) from Librivox.org.

Edgar Allan Poe, master of the macabre, perverse, and mysterious, has been the subject of my reading for some months. Since I came upon "The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe" in my sister's room, I have been reading at least one story each week, on Sunday. Here they are now, in the order in which I read them, accompanied by a short, non-spoiling blurb.

The Pit and the Pendulum: A prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition suffers horrible and unusual torture, more of mind than of body. "I was sick, sick unto death..." An English teacher would surely write "Good use of imagery!" in the margins.

Fall of the House of Usher: An unnamed narrator visits an old friend, only to find a decaying house, and two frail, equally decaying siblings, the remains of the name of Usher. The narrator does what he can to ease the man's grief in his twilight hours, but the House of Usher -- both the physical house and the bloodline -- are doomed to fall.

Balloon-Hoax: An account of a trans-Atlantic balloon flight, originally represented as fact, the article caused quite a sensation when it was published in 1844, though now it is a mere curiosity (and precursor to the "Balloon boy" hoax).

The Masque of the Red Death: When a terrible plague strikes his kingdom, Prince Prospero locks himself away in his palace with his royal retinue. Months pass with no relief, so the arrogant prince decides to throw a masked ball, but it seems even the rich and arrogant cannot avoid the grasp of Death...

The Tell-Tale Heart: An obviously insane man tells us of his attempts at murdering an elderly fellow resident -- whom he refers to only as "the old man" -- all the while insisting that he is not insane. Perhaps he is not -- that is, if guilt be a sign of sanity.

The Black Cat: Similar to The Tell-Tale Heart, and often paired together by scholars: both are tales of a murderer wracked with guilt, from the murderer's point of view. The Black Cat features the addition of the titular feline, and has a few more supernatural elements; It also seems a bit more gruesome.

The Oval Portrait: A very generic (though very short) Gothic-style "horror story." It even mentions Ann Radcliffe, queen of the Gothic novel (with whom I'm familiar only through Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen) so that should give you an idea of where his mind sat. It tells the tale of a portrait of a young lady, which gradually reveals the evil of the artist. I hear this story inspired Oscar Wilde in his own little whiny tale about a painting.

The Angel of the Odd: A man, while reading the newspaper, is disgusted with the number of improbable stories and with the people that believe them. Then a man with a wine barrel for a torso and wine bottles for limbs appears, and things get unlikely, strange and -- okay, I'll say it -- Odd.

The Premature Burial: The narrator details several accounts of premature burial -- that is, entombment before one is truly dead -- before recounting his own supposed experience. He has an illness that causes him, on occasion, to give all appearances of death without it being so. Terrified of being buried alive, he takes all conceivable precautions against it, but can they be enough?

The Cask of Amontillado: A man lures another to his doom with promises of fine wine. I have a distinct mental picture, from reading this story in middle school, of the narrator slowly and steadily going about his brickwork.

The Imp of the Perverse: The urge to do wrong simply because you know it's wrong. The narrator explains this concept at length, in essay-like fashion, before divulging his own dirty little secret.

The Island of the Fay

The Murders in the Rue Morgue: Often regarded as the first detective story, this tale depicts an amateur detective and his friend as he pieces together the true story behind a mysterious double-homicide in a Paris mansion. The answer involves a man in a monkey mask, or so I've been lead to believe.

"Gender Genie" Internet Tool Can Discern Gender Without Looking in Underwear

2010-02-04T10:14:00.000-08:00

I recently found a neat little curiosity, The Gender Genie:

Inspired by an article and a test in The New York Times Magazine, the Gender Genie uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author.

You simply copy and paste a block of writing into the text box, choose the genre of the writing (you can pick from "fiction," "nonfiction," and "blog post") and press "submit." The tool quickly analyzes the text and spits out two columns of words (one for each gender), and tells you whether it thinks the author of the work is male or female. It is supposedly around 80% accurate.

The tool scans the document, picks out certain key words, and assigns a numerical value to each word. Then adds up all these numbers -- when the answer falls within a certain range, the author is determined to be a certain gender.

The number each word is assigned is apparently based on how "masculine" or "feminine" it is -- but not in the ways you might expect. For more on the "gender of a word" see Alexander Chancellor's article about the tool from The Guardian:

One of [the researcher's] findings is that women are far more likely than men to use personal pronouns ("I", "you", "she", etc), whereas men prefer words that identify or determine nouns ("a", "the", "that") or that quantify them ("one", "two", "more"). According to Moshe Koppel, one of the authors of the project, this is because women are more comfortable thinking about people and relationships, whereas men prefer thinking about things. But the self-styled "stylometricians", in creating their gender-identifying algorithm, have been at pains to avoid the obvious.
The algorithm pays no attention to the subject matter of a piece of writing, or to the occurrence in it of words that might suggest a greater interest by one sex or the other, such as "lipstick" or "bullets". Instead, it looks for little clues that both writers and readers would probably fail to notice, such as the number of personal pronouns used.

Unsurprisingly, the tool picked me out as a male every single time -- even when I tested it with The Stark White Elevator, a story I wrote with a female narrator. I must admit, I have always felt more comfortable with thinking in the realm of objects than the world of feelings, people, relationships. Psychologists have been calling us "Left Brainers" for years: we are good at math and other logical things, though we can never understand why puny humans cry. And I guess my cries of "I am not a Robot!" have been easily found out as lies -- even, ironically, by a computer program.

So I am a Robot; now I know. But after learning that almost all of the female contributors to The Guardian were discerned by the program to be male, I wanted to experiment some more, to see if I too could trick the system. So I put in my sister's report on Woodie Guthrie and Odetta Holmes, but it was determined to be distinctly feminine.

But then I tried her report on Macbeth, which came up male! Yet another startling revelation? Maybe Hannah is a man, or maybe the machine had gotten it right in a different way. I distinctly remember helping "a lot" with that report. How much is "a lot" could and would be debated to the end of the Earth, but now Robots do not lie.

Now try the tool out for yourself, and ta-ta for Tao!

The 2010 Reading Challenge: As it Stands

2010-01-17T19:43:00.001-08:00

We are more than halfway through the first month of 2010 -- it still seems incredible. On the book front, the reading challenge (which encourages the four participants --Hannah, George, Mom, and me-- to read at least fifty books this year) is in full swing. Here's how it stands:

Abe
The Memoirs of Hadrian
Ragtime
The Space Merchants
Imperium

Mom
The Lost Boys
Everybody's Dirt (not finished)

Hannah
Bridget Jone's Diary
Stones From the River
The Road (not finished)

George
Christmas Carol
The Gum Thief
Confessions of a Falling Woman: And Other Stories

Suicide in the Trenches, by Siegfried Sassoon

2010-01-16T08:05:00.000-08:00

Here's a cheery little poem, set in the trenches of WWI...You'll never guess how it ends.

Suicide in the Trenches
I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

If you still don't get the message, perhaps listening to this high school choir tear apart "What The World Needs Now" -- no doubt that will put it all to rights:

Review: Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar

2010-01-11T19:37:00.000-08:00

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Memoirs of Hadrian is the most meticulously researched, and, as a result, the most historically accurate work of historical fiction I have ever encountered. Written intermittently between 1924 and 1954 by a French-American, homosexual woman, it has since become a bit of a monument of historical fiction, and, to a lesser extent, gay fiction. If not for its non-Roman, non-Emperor origins, it would surely be called a monument of autobiography and history. If only it were "real."

It convincingly portrays the inner thoughts of an old and dying Emperor Hadrian, as he looks back at an eventful life of over sixty years. It is told in the first person, as a long letter to the young Marcus "Mark" Aurelius, his young future successor. At first I thought this approach a bit clumsy. Yet it is believable: long works were sometimes addressed to friends of the author, as if letters; and Marcus Aurelius seems a convincing target. The Meditations and the genuine autobiography of Hadrian would have made a great pair.

Unfortunately, this book is not and never will be quite genuine. Hadrian did in fact write an account of his life, but it has been lost. This book can be viewed, from one direction, as an attempt to fill that void -- piecing together the evidence that does remain, filling in a few holes with fiction, and adding a poetical fancy over the whole. Everything flows nicely, with the author simply trying to patch up history rather than rewrite it.

As a scholarly experiment in history, literature, and biography the book rings and shines. If Mme. Yourcenar wished only to convincingly portray the emperor and his world, she succeeded wonderfully. Hadrian traces his entire life, from glazing over his childhood in Spain, to his imperial cursus honorum, to his accession and extensive travelling throughout the Empire. His many personality quirks and traits are also on display: like his great admiration for Greek culture, his artistic and literary pretensions, his passion for detail, his competency and justness as a ruler, but also his extravagance. As a historical figure, there is a bit of both Nero and Augustus in him.

Ultimately, he ruled competently enough for most people to overlook his idiosyncrasies. Antinous, a man-boy from Bithynia whom he fell desperately in love with, is a great example. After the young man died, by drowning in the Nile river at the age of twenty (some say accidentally; this book takes the more fanciful route of willing sacrifice), Hadrian deified him. He started a cult around the kid, founded cities in his name, and commissioned hundreds or even thousands of statues in his image. Yet, in a world of Suetonius and other scorned senators like him, no one seems to have batted an eye.

As entertainment, this book is sometimes lacking. It is caught between general, pure-entertainment historical fiction, and genuine historical texts -- between I, Claudius and The Meditations. It sometimes "smells too much of the lamp" -- like she did her research a little too well and didn't rely on her writing talents enough.

Perhaps she forgot that it was a work of fiction and not a history text. Though, for this very reason, this book probably would make a fun and informative read for students of an introductory Roman History course. The general reader, however, may want to brush up on their Roman history beforehand. The names of long-gone people and places abound, and footnotes and/or a glossary would have been nice. At least, these were lacking in the edition I read -- though the bibliographical notes and the author's notes on the book's composition were great additions.

"Convincing" is the best one-word review I can imagine for this book. It sucked me in, and only slipped a few times. Yes, occasionally, very occasionally, I felt the huge time gap, and perceived the work as a "fake." Yet, I am even convinced that, if it were not widely established as fiction, it could fool most people, even some scholars.

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Generic Love Poem. by Kirsty MacDonald

2010-01-07T13:35:00.000-08:00

The Internet tends to crap out a lot of worthless refuse -- and the world of Internet poetry is no different from its brothers. If it's not endless amounts of regurgitated e.e. cummings, it's something much worse: "original" poetry, which, as the irony quotes probably give away, isn't very original at all.

Yet, sometimes a gem falls out, proving once and for all that, if you eat enough, without restriction, you will eventually crap out a precious stone -- or at least something worth one read. I found this poem through StumbleUpon, on a site called Hello Poetry. I liked it because, while it is ostensibly a love poem, it calls itself a generic love poem, thereby accepting and embracing the popular concept of the generic. Less grandly, it takes a simple hook, a little gimmick, and takes it to a satisfying and clever conclusion. Ta-da:

Generic Love Poem. by Kirsty MacDonald
Call a doctor/ plumber/ priest*
My heart is broken/ leaking/ deceased*
My life is worthless/ so much better/ over*
I'm going to kill myself/ tell your wife/ Dover*
How could you leave me/ not know/ lie?*
I hope you return my stuff/ come back/ die*
I'll never forget you/ forgive you/ go away*
I need closure/ a DNA test/ to tell you I'm gay*
Your face/ crotch/ top of your back*
Is so beautiful/ lumpy/ unusually slack*
Your ex/ mother/ best friend from school*
Always made me great coffee/ feel inadequate/ drool*
I will miss you/ kill you/ stalk you forever*
That way we can be friends/ get away with it/ be together*
I'm sorry you did this/ I did this /we failed*
I promise to pay you/ dye it back/ get you bailed
Please don't leave me/ show the Polaroids/ write or call*

(*delete as appropriate, just delete it all.....)

8 Nifty Books I Read in 2009

2010-01-05T10:18:00.000-08:00

2009 was a good year overall, especially for reading. I read a little over a hundred books in that fabled land we now call Last Year. You can see the entire list on my Goodreads bookshelf. Or read about the 8 stand-outs below. Why 8? Well, it was going to be 15 -- then 10. I guess I just got lazy. Or maybe I like the number 8. Maybe I like the way it looks: like a sideways infinity sign. Maybe...

Chicken With Plums, by Marjane Satrapi (graphic novel) - This is the story of Satrapi's great-uncle, a famous Iranian tar player, who decides to lay in his bed and never come out. He holds on for eight days, as we look at the ups and downs of his life. Then it's over -- the book and his life. It's gloomy, it's powerful, and it's written and illustrated by the author of the two Persepolis books, and Embroideries -- all of which I also read this year. This one is not her most popular work but it is my favorite.

Ego & Hubris, by Michael Malice, Harvey Pekar, and Gary Dumm (graphic novel) - A libertarian businessman and professional A*hole, Michael Malice tells us the story of his life with the help of American Splendor's Harvey Pekar and Gary Dumm, writer and artist, respectively. My family and I visited Mr. Dumm at his house, in August '09. He's a very nice guy and I've been meaning to write of the visit for some time.

The Gum Thief, by Douglas Coupland - Two Staples employees, a middle-aged failure named Roger, and a 24-year-old goth girl heading for the same fate, Bethany, begin a solely epistolary relationship. There is absolutely no sex or even sexual tensions -- just two mundane people trying to grope their way (in the cleanest sense) to something better. And there's a novel within a novel: Glove Pond, written by Roger and displayed to us in fragments in-between the letters. A Goodreads friend recommended this to me.

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë -After years of poo-pooing these "girly" and "stuffy" Victorian novels I finally decided to read one. A sallow, oppressed, middle-class English orphan gradually grows into a woman. When she leaves boarding school, after many years and chapters, it is to take up a position as governess for a young French girl, Adele -- who just happens to be the ward of the dark, brooding, and decidedly hunky Mr. Rochester. Then things get really exciting. I don't want to spoil the ending, yet I feel the novel's most famous line, "Reader, I married him." does it for me.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mr. Mark Twain - An illiterate boy from Missouri takes a long raft ride with a black guy. That description leaves us all doubtful, yet I will always love this book. It is the only book I am certain I will want to read again, even on my death bed.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Simon Armitage - Yuletide at King Arthur's court is interrupted by a green guy, on a green horse, who challenges someone to chop off his head. Sir Gawain takes the challenge and promptly cuts off the guy's head. Then, when the guy carries his head off, Gawain bound by honor to seek out this man in a year's time, to accept a similar blow. Much merriment, chivalry, questing, morality, and symbolism ensue. Armitage's Modern English translation -- accompanied, side-by-side, by the original Middle English -- really makes the poem sparkle and perhaps does for it what Seamus Heaney did for Beowulf.

Y: The Last Man series, by Brian K. Vaughn (graphic novel) - OK, this is really a mini-series, compiled into eight graphic novels. But it's still something you shouldn't miss! One day, all the men and male animals mysteriously and instantly die -- except for a dopey New Yorker, Yorick Brown, and his pet Capuchin monkey, Ampersand. A great comic book adventure. I have yet to read the last two volumes (Soon!).

Review: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce

2010-01-02T18:20:00.000-08:00

NB: This review contains spoilers.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I read this on an impulse; "impulse" has become a magical word for me. This mysterious force is what lead me back to Shakespeare and later introduced me to James Joyce; now here I am, finished with Portrait, working my way through Dubliners, and occasionally glancing warily over at those other two Joyce novels. I'm convinced: Impulse is a type of magic for the man who doesn't believe in magic.

There is something magical about this book, too. At least the combination of impressive passages that I could understand, and the sections that seemed just out of my grasp, together form something that I perceive as magic. Joyce created a brew of imagery and collage-like features that I can sometimes admire, sometimes only gawk at in awe and stupefied wonder.

Several words, no doubt, have been thrown about to describe this and other Joyce works: "fragmentary," "mosaic," etc. -- I prefer the word "collage." He has a style that loves to weave together seemingly unconnected scenes and paint gorgeous pictures. I was always amazed to see a thread of imagery weave its way from scene to scene, seamlessly. There is much art in blending images into a complete collage, one that has many, varied elements that somehow combine to form a continuity over the entire work.

Portrait is a "coming of age" story: it starts with a boy, naturally secretive and rich in imagination, and, through the steady processes of a good education, Catholic guilt, and Irish nationalism, gradually leads to a man. That man is either James Joyce or his literary alter-ego, "Stephen Dedalus." I have no idea where the boundary line sits, though I tended to think of the man/boy in the book as Joyce -- I received a jolt, on at least two occasions, when I suddenly found the name "Stephen" on the page.

It was fun to watch the steady progress of the boy into the man, the dabbler into the artist -- and to also watch the style morph and grow. Across the book's five parts, the reader sees the superficially Victorian beginnings transform gradually into the "real," full-grown Joyce-ing of Part V.

The beginning reminded me, at least superficially, of Jane Eyre: middle class child fallen on difficult financial times, boarding school, a childhood friend catches a disease and slowly fades away. I felt his childish fear and exhilaration when he made the trip to the rector's office; his imaginative twisting of The Count of Monte Cristo; and his excitement and confusion while sitting at dinner with the adults in his family, an onlooker to political debate.

The sense of Part II was more difficult for me to discern. Though the word "Admit." certainly has a chillier feel to it now -- uttered as it is by a schoolmate who harasses Stephen, a scene made even more chilling through the playful demeanor of the offending boy. Then there is the depressing, demeaning, even entropic, visit to Cork. His father tries to remember the good 'ol days as the rug slips out from under him. And then there is Emma, his "beloved" whom he never gets to know -- only a symbol of pure womanhood on a far off pedestal.

In the middle, my interest began to sag. Religion dominates: with the never-ending sermon, the "wicked" acts of Stephen, and the subsequent repentance. It certainly was not my favorite section, though I did like the description of sin as a "torpid snaky life feeding itself out of the tender marrow of his life and fattening upon the slime of lust" -- among other dire, Catholic images. And, despite his seeming happiness while living the "good life" of complete devotion after repentance I couldn't help but think how awful it must be to be Catholic.

Things pick up again when he is asked to join the Church, but declines. We get a small peek into the family cottage, and the full extent of his nuclear family. His relatives are simply "sister" or "mother" -- the distant between the main character and his world, not just his family, is always evident. At least twice he refers to the outside world as just so much noise, often an inconvenience. The book is remarkably self-centered, reflecting the title, as well as the author's natural introversion.

The last section of Part IV, in my mind, is the pivotal and best scene, in which he walks along the beach, ready to head to University, becoming a man before our eyes. The last line of the scene, for some reason, has stuck with me: "and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant pools." I'll let anyone reading this experience it, in whole, for themselves.

Then there is Part V, the shining gem and achievement -- the full man. We are bombarded with learned talks of esthetics and politics and theology, with loads of Latin (oddly, without translation in my edition), and many literary allusions. I began to strongly sense the tension between the three languages: English, in which Joyce will always feel a foreigner; Irish, newly revived among the upper class due to a surge of nationalism, though Joyce avoids it; and Latin, still the trusty and ancient language of the educated.

I don't quite perfectly recall or understand the ending. I'll get back to ya...

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New Year's Greetings

2010-01-01T11:53:00.000-08:00

I wonder where these guys shop...

All I got for Christmas

2009-12-26T08:52:00.000-08:00

Sure, sure, we atheists aren't supposed to celebrate Christmas. Rather we are to stay locked in our houses, probably scowling, throughout the many weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas that constitute the modern "Holiday Season."

My family and I take a less dire and depressing approach. We have been celebrating Christmas since I was a tiny tot, too young to have memories -- but we do have pictorial evidence. We decorate the house, complete with a tree, always a live one; we give each other presents; we have a nice dinner; we try to be nicer to one another. And yes, certain members of the household let the stress of the days get the best of them.

Some would call us rampant consumerists, still others would call us hypocrites. I try to ignore both and just try to enjoy the extra time together. I like to think of it as the Christian way, with much less guilt, dogma, etc.

But to Hell with all that rhetoric! What happened yesterday, the 25th of December, 2009, at my house? And what did I discover in the shiny red stuff we call wrapping paper? Not surprisingly, plenty of books:

Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow - Historical fiction set in Ragtime-era, turn of the century NYC. I've been toying with exploring the world of Jazz, so this seemed a decent place to start.Besides, the author has the same last name as a personal favorite Science Fiction writer!

A one-volume, paperback "Unabridged" Shakespeare collection - Just what every child dreams to find under the Christmas tree. Sure, it took twenty years, but there it was -- and there I was, misty-eyed. It's large and awkward, of course, but at least it's readable. Lookin' forward to readin' 'em all

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski - What's good for Stephen King and Oprah is good for me. OK, I asked for it on an impulse and I'm not sure what to expect.

The Ascent of Man, by Jacob Bronowski - Ostensibly a history of science, though it really covers a wider a span -- it's based on a BBC mini-series of the same name that originally aired in the 70's.

The Iliad, translated by Robert Fagles - This book, along with The Odyssey, was bound to pop up on my reading lists eventually. It is just too classic, and I'm too into epic poetry and classical literature. After reading Fagles's translation of The Aeneid I decided to stick with his translations.

The Alien Years and Those Who Watch, by Robert Silverberg - A couple of generic, 70's-era science fiction by an author who never attained huge popularity but did churn out consistently good genre fiction.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy - Another perfect book to ask for as a Christmas gift. A father and his young-ish son travel across a post-apocalyptic landscape. It's probably rather bleak and sparse, yet I think I'll enjoy it.

I also received a new set of headphone and some slip covers, for my iPod. And a knitting kit!

Merry Christmas

2009-12-25T18:42:00.000-08:00

Ho! Ho! Ho! Merry Chris-- wait, what the fuck is that?

This has been a nice Christmas. It started in the morning, when I furiously ripped my way through wrapping paper and eventually emerged with a large pile of books. I also got a few accessories for my iPod nano. A post on the particulars of this haul is forthcoming.

Then there's the 2009 retrospective, from a book perspective -- naturally. I'll run down the list of books I read this year and try to point out major trends, etc.

Lastly, there is the eternal, hanging question of the future. I wonder what 2010 will hold, in books and otherwise. Maybe I'll manage to fire off a post about that before New Years.

On Catullus and His Poems

2009-12-22T11:03:00.000-08:00

Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 84 BC - c. 54 BC) was a Roman poet, today known solely for the 116 surviving poems of one book. He was born in Verona, to a father who was at least wealthy and distinguished enough to host Julius Caesar on at least one occasion. Other than that, we know nothing of Catullus's youth in Verona. He reemerges to History when he moves to Rome, probably in his early twenties. There he apparently spent the bulk of his later years, interrupted only by a one-year political stay in Bithynia and perhaps occasional trips back to Verona. His death is enigmatic, as is most of his life. There are no extant ancient biographies of Catullus, so all that we know about his life has been pieced together from analysis of his poems and a few other writers that make mention of him.

Catullus was part of a small circle of poets from Verona now known as the "new poets." So named, because of their propensity for experimentation and, usually, shunning of the old and well-established forms of poetry, especially epics. They were influenced heavily by a similar group of poets from Alexandria who wrote during the Third Century, in Greek. Unfortunately, Catullus is the only "new poet" whose work has survived in any substantial form -- we have less than 200 lines from the others in his circle, combined.

We will never know what we are missing from these lost poets, though Catullus's poems do allow some tiny glimpses and speculation. Catullus wrote love poems, of course, but also fierce, if not always serious, invectives ("hate poems", let's call them), some explicitly erotic stuff, and a few touching condolences. He apparently loved to experiment with meter -- Poem 63, for example, is written in "galliambic" and is the only surviving specimen of its kind. Almost all of his poems stay firmly in the everyday, only occasionally venturing into mythology. His language tends to suit his themes; at least it is not lofty and often contains vulgarities.

Catullus's poems vary in theme and tone, yet they typically portray the Epicurean, upper-crust lifestyle of himself and his friends. Many are addressed, presumably written as mock letters, to one or more of these friends. It is soon clear to all readers that this circle enjoyed and actively sought the "good life" and largely avoided politics, philosophy and other serious, or even occasionally altruistic endeavors.

Still other poems portray his now-famous affair and later break-up with the woman he called "Lesbia," probably truly named Clodia Metelli, another figure of the city's upper class. Clodia was a strong, forceful character, at least a decade older than Catullus, the poet himself just one in a long string of lovers -- today, we might call her a "cougar" or a "man-eater."

Besides her important role in Catullus's book (she features in 25 of his poems), she is also known to history for a scandal. A man named Caelius was one of her lovers, until he decided to break it off. "Hell hath no fury..." and all that, so Clodia soon retaliated by bringing charges against this man in court. Cicero, the famous politician and orator, who just happened to be a political enemy of Clodia's brother, decided to defend Caelius as his lawyer and in the process gave the now-famous speech, Pro Caelio, in which he heavily lampoons Clodia, apparently aiming to destroy her in every manner but the physical. (It's on my to-read list!)

Catullus is never quite so brutal, though he does throw a few biting words, most notably in Poem 37, in which he calls her house a brothel and insults her latest favorite, a Spaniard named Egnatius; and Poem 58, shown below, in which he fancies her a streetwalker.

Poem 58
Lesbia, our Lesbia, the same old Lesbia,
Caelius, she whom Catullus loved once
more than himself and more than all his own,
loiters at the cross-roads
and in the backstreets
ready to husk-off the "magnanimous" sons of Rome.

In truth, she probably never walked the streets as a common prostitute, nor had sex any more often or with more partners than most of her male counterparts. In truth, the only information we have about her comes from a heart-broken former lover; and a grouchy, conservative old man who was using her for his own political gains, and highly disapproved of her and her kind, including Catullus himself. So, Clodia Metelli had the good fortune of being immortalized by two of the greatest and most eloquent writers of Ancient Rome, and yet the bad fortune of often being portrayed so negatively.

But it wasn't all bad! To prove it, I leave you now with another poem, Catullus 5, which is (apparently) his most famous. Heck, it is probably one of the most famous love poems, period -- and I personally love it.

Poem 5
Lesbia, live with me and love me so
we'll laugh at all the sour-faced
strictures of the wise.
This sun once set will rise again;
When our sun sets, follows night
and an endless sleep awaits.
Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,
Then a thousand, and a hundred more again
Till with so many hundred thousand kisses
you and I shall both lose count,
nor any can from envy of so much kissing,
put his finger on the number of sweet kisses
you of me and I of you, darling, have had.

PS: I found this great website which features all of Catullus's poems, in the original Latin as well as in translation into dozens of languages. Translations are done by volunteers so quality varies, and usually sags. Still, it is no doubt the best of its kind on the web -- for better, professional translation it seems one will have to buy a real-life book.