story by Mike Mignola
art by Duncan Fegredo
Duncan Fegredo's art is messy and hectic; he captures what i imagine must be the more Kirbyesque aspects of Hellboy (something i can't say for sure, knowing about Jack Kirby's work in comics only from than what i've read that's been said about it by people like Neil Gaiman and Mike Mignola)--the sprawling, dynamic, literally larger than life depictions of action--some of Mignola's attention to detail and stylistic anatomical excesses in character design, but little else. i tend not to enjoy Hellboy as much when drawn by hands other than Mignola's--i even have reservations about the one drawn by P. Craig Russell. the latter, however--'The Vampire of Prague' (collected in Hellboy 7: The Troll Witch and Others)--at least had a script that seemed suited to Russell's style. Darkness Calls is very much Mike Mignola writing for Mike Mignola's Hellboy, and the fit is jarringly, exasperatingly imprecise; Mignola's Hellboy has always been somewhat minimalist in both writing and art, and the combination here (Mignola's writing and Fegredo's art) is disorienting--one never ceases to distract from the other. Mignola's Hellboy, even at its most cryptic and subtle, never failed to be coherent. Darkness Calls, by comparison, is a sprawling, untidy mess.
it's a shame that i should feel the urge to leave this series just when Hellboy's destiny seems almost certain to finally catch up with him; moreover, it seems churlish to say the least to judge Fegredo's work against Mignola's so summarily and so soon after his arrival to take over the reins from the book's creator. nonetheless, unless Mignola and Fegredo can find a balance between the minimalist, almost poetical narrative style of the former and the excessively cluttered art of the latter, i'm sorry to say i might not be there to see the end.
12.7.08
Hellboy 2 The Golden Army
directed by Guillermo del Toro
starring Ron Perlman (yay!), Selma Blair, Doug Jones, someone's voice in a clunky, but nifty, steampunky suit, Elric and his daughter (as siblings), Jeffrey Tambor and a cast of thousands. and Jimmy Kimmel.
not as good as i had hoped it would be. i love Hellboy, but del Toro's version has always been a different creature from Mignola's. the movie Hellboy's main weakness, to my mind, is also its strength: unmoored from 'real world' myths, legends and folklore (which underpin Mignola's original), the filmic version of the big red guy lacks weight, seems less substantial than the comic book version; in addition, his struggle against his dark destiny as Anung Un Rama, which takes centerstage or, if not, at least haunts the proceedings constantly in the main series of comics, giving the comics a foreboding gravity, a dangerous undertow to the blackly (and subtly) comic antics of HB and the Gang, feels like an afterthought here; they point to it, and not at all subtly, but it feels like a bit of a pantomime, really: oh, btw, Red, you'll be responsible for destroying the world...do i hear a callback for Hellboy 3? cha-ching!
cinemacynicism aside (and if there's a 3 coming up, bring it on), this unmooring, as i said, is also the movie version's strength: paying homage only to a tradition of the fantastic going not much further back than Tolkien and thereby playing very much on the surface of fantastic fiction, del Toro gets to lord it up and bring the full force of his literally monstrous imagination to bear, throwing everything from toothfairies to trolls to goblins to an elemental, an angel of death and giant killer mecha--none of which much resemble anything from the collective unconscious--onto the screen. Mignola once said all he wanted to do was draw monsters; he seems to have found his filmic counterpart in del Toro.
while i'm grateful that the magnificently talented body actor Doug Jones has been given some much deserved extra screentime, i'm afraid the otherwise charming Abe Sapien makes a poor lead for a film, and this decision having relegated Hellboy almost to the sidelines (though not in the action sequences, of course) hurts the film immensely. this is relative, mind you; objectively speaking, i do believe the film is split fairly evenly between the two leads; still, much of Hellboy's charm is Hellboy himself, and though i do agree that that much talked about scene with the two friends (Red and Blue) boozing it up to Barry Manilow was brilliant, i can't help but feel cheated of Hellboy's salty, straight-talking charm. the movie assumes our affection for Hellboy without really reminding us why we should love him, and while i love Hellboy more than most people i know, this assumption undercuts the full brilliance of the final shot of the film, making it feel insubstantial, even, dare i say, baseless and therefore rather twee.
Selma Blair, thankfully, remains as hot as ever.
oh, and for you geeks out there, the climactic (or pre-climactic) scene with the Golden Army kicks seventy times seventy different kinds of ass out of any scene from Bayformers.
so there.
starring Ron Perlman (yay!), Selma Blair, Doug Jones, someone's voice in a clunky, but nifty, steampunky suit, Elric and his daughter (as siblings), Jeffrey Tambor and a cast of thousands. and Jimmy Kimmel.
not as good as i had hoped it would be. i love Hellboy, but del Toro's version has always been a different creature from Mignola's. the movie Hellboy's main weakness, to my mind, is also its strength: unmoored from 'real world' myths, legends and folklore (which underpin Mignola's original), the filmic version of the big red guy lacks weight, seems less substantial than the comic book version; in addition, his struggle against his dark destiny as Anung Un Rama, which takes centerstage or, if not, at least haunts the proceedings constantly in the main series of comics, giving the comics a foreboding gravity, a dangerous undertow to the blackly (and subtly) comic antics of HB and the Gang, feels like an afterthought here; they point to it, and not at all subtly, but it feels like a bit of a pantomime, really: oh, btw, Red, you'll be responsible for destroying the world...do i hear a callback for Hellboy 3? cha-ching!
cinemacynicism aside (and if there's a 3 coming up, bring it on), this unmooring, as i said, is also the movie version's strength: paying homage only to a tradition of the fantastic going not much further back than Tolkien and thereby playing very much on the surface of fantastic fiction, del Toro gets to lord it up and bring the full force of his literally monstrous imagination to bear, throwing everything from toothfairies to trolls to goblins to an elemental, an angel of death and giant killer mecha--none of which much resemble anything from the collective unconscious--onto the screen. Mignola once said all he wanted to do was draw monsters; he seems to have found his filmic counterpart in del Toro.
while i'm grateful that the magnificently talented body actor Doug Jones has been given some much deserved extra screentime, i'm afraid the otherwise charming Abe Sapien makes a poor lead for a film, and this decision having relegated Hellboy almost to the sidelines (though not in the action sequences, of course) hurts the film immensely. this is relative, mind you; objectively speaking, i do believe the film is split fairly evenly between the two leads; still, much of Hellboy's charm is Hellboy himself, and though i do agree that that much talked about scene with the two friends (Red and Blue) boozing it up to Barry Manilow was brilliant, i can't help but feel cheated of Hellboy's salty, straight-talking charm. the movie assumes our affection for Hellboy without really reminding us why we should love him, and while i love Hellboy more than most people i know, this assumption undercuts the full brilliance of the final shot of the film, making it feel insubstantial, even, dare i say, baseless and therefore rather twee.
Selma Blair, thankfully, remains as hot as ever.
oh, and for you geeks out there, the climactic (or pre-climactic) scene with the Golden Army kicks seventy times seventy different kinds of ass out of any scene from Bayformers.
so there.
20.5.08
The Dragons of Babel by Michael Swanwick and a bit of John Clute's review
i don't know what to make of John Clute's review of The Dragons of Babel. not that it (the review) isn't a brilliant deconstruction of Michael Swanwick's brilliant deconstruction of the 'hidden monarch' template, but rather, i suppose, a nit i feel compelled to pick after reading something about a previous comment attributed to Mr Clute, re: the fabricated world in which The Dragons of Babel is set, which is the same world into which Jane is thrust in the far darker, angrier, more relentlessly cynical The Iron Dragon's Daughter, in which he (Mr Clute) says something to the effect that Mr Swanwick has constructed an 'anti-fantasy' in which the very tropes which bring us comfort in typical fantasies--magic and elves and faeries and even dragons &c--fail to do so, never allowing us to use them to escape the realities of our own world. in his review of The Dragons of Babel, Mr Clute, to my mind, excuses us from any guilt for doing with The Dragons of Babel what Mr Clute had (allegedly--i haven't read the source) said Mr Swanwick would not let us do with The Iron Dragon's Daughter. Mr Clute lays it down for us, saying that Mr Swanwick has written 'a tale whose very speed burns euhemerism--which is the process of interpreting myths as being mundane events misunderstood by the primitive folk who tell stories about the world--to ash.' which i admit isn't at all the same as saying 'The Dragons of Babel is good, clean, escapist fluff', but at least saunters vaguely in that direction. sort of.
which leads me now to think i'm probably better off wondering what i should make of The Dragons of Babel in light of The Iron Dragon's Daughter. because now, after reading Mr Clute's review, it has become possible for me to see The Dragons of Babel as a kind of subversion of what The Iron Dragon's Daughter did, and did so well.
to be fair, there is still quite a bit of the old cynicism from The Iron Dragon's Daughter on show in The Dragons of Babel (henceforth TIDD and TDOB, or Daughter and Babel, or maybe Iron Dragon and Dragons, respectively, depending on which moves me in the moment). perhaps more importantly, TDOB retains the fierce intelligence of TIDD, never once letting us think that Mr Swanwick is getting soft in his old age. or, rather, not getting soft *that way*. because, in fact, Dragons is a far kinder, gentler book than Iron Dragon ever was, and i feel almost sorry for the way the earlier book treated its protagonist.
certainly, Babel's protagonist, Will le Fey, undergoes his fair share of the requisite 'hero's trials and tribulations' and then some, but i for one never felt this was a particularly 'dark' book, certainly not in any way like Daughter.
instead, what TDOB is, unapologetically, unrelentingly BRILLIANT, in every sense of the word, including the one that suggests UPLIFTING and LIFE-AFFIRMING, two things TIDD was most decidedly not. in other words, what Mr Swanwick has done to subvert the essence of TIDD is this: he has allowed redemption to become an undeniable, integral part of Will's story.
moreover, if TIDD worked by going head on against the conventions of the genre, TDOB, true to its core trickster theme--and yes, it is very much a trickster story--works firmly within those conventions, if in ways that are very much its own.
*
Mr Swanwick's Faerie may recall to more recent fantasy readers' minds China Mieville's Bas Lag, with its hectic, multi-ethnic (as Mr Clute points out), decadent urban society and the combination of elements both science fictional and fantastical, but to my mind Swanwick's is the superior construct. Mr Swanwick's alchemy is far more fluid, resorting to none of the rather forced justifications Mr Mieville imposes on his world for the coexistence of the two sets of elements. Mr Swanwick recognizes that they are all, whether 'science fictional' or 'fantastical', products of the imagination, textural instruments of narrative, and handles them (and handles them deftly) as such. moreover, Mr Swanwick more successfully borrows from myth and folklore, recalling Neil Gaiman's Sandman and Mike Mignola's delightful guignol in Hellboy, and hewing closer to the kind of motley cast one finds in the Titus Groan books, albeit without the delightful twist of Mervyn Peake's creations being all, ostensibly, human despite their grotesqueries; at any rate, i have always felt that Mr Mieville was better off relying solely on his admittedly magnificent imagination.
there is another reason why TDOB bears comparison to Mr Mieville's oeuvre--and this is what Mr Clute seems to have deftly sidestepped in his review: while TDOB (again unlike TIDD) can be enjoyed solely as an escapist romp through an overwhelmingly colorful and richly textured if somewhat sordid--squalid?--sordid fantasy construct, there is very definitely some Politics-Capital-P going on here. not punk-rock-adolescent-rebel-coming-of-age-schoolyard-and-living-room-and-dinner-table politics as in TIDD, though there's a dose of that as well, but real-world-current-events-news-at-eleven-old-farts-on-a-bench Politics, the kind Mr Mieville has been known to engage with head on. Mr Swanwick, however, doesn't take the bull by the horns. rather, it feels more like he's hitched a ride on its back or is simply running with it: the Politics in TDOB feels like the kind of subtext that is woven intrinsically into the 'hidden monarch' template, another thread, a means for the narrative rather than an end; Mr Swanwick seems to be saying that the Politics is as much a part of the collective subconscious as the fey, trolls and speaking toads &c that populate the story. there is a scene that recalls 9/11, and yet the horror is undercut...but i won't give it away. suffice to say that although the Politics is there, there seems to be an unwillingness to fully engage with it, a refusal, almost, to bear any responsibility for what is being said and pointed out whatsoever.
he may be right about it all, but on some level i can't help but find it a bit gimmicky. if it didn't work so well, i might be led to think that Mr Swanwick is playing another trick on us (and there are many tricks in TDOB), trying to convince us that the story he is telling is Relevant-Capital-R, when all it is is good, clean, escapist fluff, an old emperor clothed in the latest fashions.
whatever the case, i happily confess myself hoodwinked. at the very least, though no longer the same kind of audacious subversion of the genre that was The Iron Dragon's Daughter, The Dragons of Babel, even while submitting to the demands of the genre template it deconstructs, cunningly shows us just how fresh and intelligent fantasy can still be.
which leads me now to think i'm probably better off wondering what i should make of The Dragons of Babel in light of The Iron Dragon's Daughter. because now, after reading Mr Clute's review, it has become possible for me to see The Dragons of Babel as a kind of subversion of what The Iron Dragon's Daughter did, and did so well.
to be fair, there is still quite a bit of the old cynicism from The Iron Dragon's Daughter on show in The Dragons of Babel (henceforth TIDD and TDOB, or Daughter and Babel, or maybe Iron Dragon and Dragons, respectively, depending on which moves me in the moment). perhaps more importantly, TDOB retains the fierce intelligence of TIDD, never once letting us think that Mr Swanwick is getting soft in his old age. or, rather, not getting soft *that way*. because, in fact, Dragons is a far kinder, gentler book than Iron Dragon ever was, and i feel almost sorry for the way the earlier book treated its protagonist.
certainly, Babel's protagonist, Will le Fey, undergoes his fair share of the requisite 'hero's trials and tribulations' and then some, but i for one never felt this was a particularly 'dark' book, certainly not in any way like Daughter.
instead, what TDOB is, unapologetically, unrelentingly BRILLIANT, in every sense of the word, including the one that suggests UPLIFTING and LIFE-AFFIRMING, two things TIDD was most decidedly not. in other words, what Mr Swanwick has done to subvert the essence of TIDD is this: he has allowed redemption to become an undeniable, integral part of Will's story.
moreover, if TIDD worked by going head on against the conventions of the genre, TDOB, true to its core trickster theme--and yes, it is very much a trickster story--works firmly within those conventions, if in ways that are very much its own.
*
Mr Swanwick's Faerie may recall to more recent fantasy readers' minds China Mieville's Bas Lag, with its hectic, multi-ethnic (as Mr Clute points out), decadent urban society and the combination of elements both science fictional and fantastical, but to my mind Swanwick's is the superior construct. Mr Swanwick's alchemy is far more fluid, resorting to none of the rather forced justifications Mr Mieville imposes on his world for the coexistence of the two sets of elements. Mr Swanwick recognizes that they are all, whether 'science fictional' or 'fantastical', products of the imagination, textural instruments of narrative, and handles them (and handles them deftly) as such. moreover, Mr Swanwick more successfully borrows from myth and folklore, recalling Neil Gaiman's Sandman and Mike Mignola's delightful guignol in Hellboy, and hewing closer to the kind of motley cast one finds in the Titus Groan books, albeit without the delightful twist of Mervyn Peake's creations being all, ostensibly, human despite their grotesqueries; at any rate, i have always felt that Mr Mieville was better off relying solely on his admittedly magnificent imagination.
there is another reason why TDOB bears comparison to Mr Mieville's oeuvre--and this is what Mr Clute seems to have deftly sidestepped in his review: while TDOB (again unlike TIDD) can be enjoyed solely as an escapist romp through an overwhelmingly colorful and richly textured if somewhat sordid--squalid?--sordid fantasy construct, there is very definitely some Politics-Capital-P going on here. not punk-rock-adolescent-rebel-coming-of-age-schoolyard-and-living-room-and-dinner-table politics as in TIDD, though there's a dose of that as well, but real-world-current-events-news-at-eleven-old-farts-on-a-bench Politics, the kind Mr Mieville has been known to engage with head on. Mr Swanwick, however, doesn't take the bull by the horns. rather, it feels more like he's hitched a ride on its back or is simply running with it: the Politics in TDOB feels like the kind of subtext that is woven intrinsically into the 'hidden monarch' template, another thread, a means for the narrative rather than an end; Mr Swanwick seems to be saying that the Politics is as much a part of the collective subconscious as the fey, trolls and speaking toads &c that populate the story. there is a scene that recalls 9/11, and yet the horror is undercut...but i won't give it away. suffice to say that although the Politics is there, there seems to be an unwillingness to fully engage with it, a refusal, almost, to bear any responsibility for what is being said and pointed out whatsoever.
he may be right about it all, but on some level i can't help but find it a bit gimmicky. if it didn't work so well, i might be led to think that Mr Swanwick is playing another trick on us (and there are many tricks in TDOB), trying to convince us that the story he is telling is Relevant-Capital-R, when all it is is good, clean, escapist fluff, an old emperor clothed in the latest fashions.
whatever the case, i happily confess myself hoodwinked. at the very least, though no longer the same kind of audacious subversion of the genre that was The Iron Dragon's Daughter, The Dragons of Babel, even while submitting to the demands of the genre template it deconstructs, cunningly shows us just how fresh and intelligent fantasy can still be.
23.3.08
Juan Antonio Bayona's The Orphanage (El Orfanato); plus: two cents on the Oscars and a nod to Anthony Minghella
saw The Orphanage today. i'll let Peter Bradshaw tell you about it, over at The Guardian:
http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Guardian_Film_of_the_week/0,,2267233,00.html
The Orphanage is far more complicated and intelligent and yet also more heartwarming and somehow more conventional than Alejandro Amenabar's The Others. personally, i prefer the latter.
i guess i just like it when things are subtly unusual. as a f'rinstance, i liked both There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men (the only two films from the Academy's most recent list of nominees i've seen) but prefer the former, the strangeness of which i find harder to define than the overt weirdness of the latter.
also, i think Daniel Plainview and his limp (or his bowling ball, take your pick) are more bad ass than Anton Chigurh and his captive bolt pistol. but that's just me.
*
the most striking things about the work of Anthony Minghella (that i've seen) for me are wisdom and compassion. displaying a thorough understanding of the moral complexities of modern life, Minghella somehow managed to remain uncynical without seeming naive. his films were unambiguously moral without being black and white: they showed us that knowing right from wrong is all it takes and yet hardly ever enough. they seemed completely aware of the flawed nature of humanity and yet refused to see that as a reason to lose faith in it.
Moriarty paid tribute to some of Minghella's best work (imho) over at ain't it cool news:
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/36054
meanwhile, Colin Vaines at The Guardian posted a more conventional tribute:
http://film.guardian.co.uk/anthonyminghella/story/0,,2267545,00.html
http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Guardian_Film_of_the_week/0,,2267233,00.html
The Orphanage is far more complicated and intelligent and yet also more heartwarming and somehow more conventional than Alejandro Amenabar's The Others. personally, i prefer the latter.
i guess i just like it when things are subtly unusual. as a f'rinstance, i liked both There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men (the only two films from the Academy's most recent list of nominees i've seen) but prefer the former, the strangeness of which i find harder to define than the overt weirdness of the latter.
also, i think Daniel Plainview and his limp (or his bowling ball, take your pick) are more bad ass than Anton Chigurh and his captive bolt pistol. but that's just me.
*
the most striking things about the work of Anthony Minghella (that i've seen) for me are wisdom and compassion. displaying a thorough understanding of the moral complexities of modern life, Minghella somehow managed to remain uncynical without seeming naive. his films were unambiguously moral without being black and white: they showed us that knowing right from wrong is all it takes and yet hardly ever enough. they seemed completely aware of the flawed nature of humanity and yet refused to see that as a reason to lose faith in it.
Moriarty paid tribute to some of Minghella's best work (imho) over at ain't it cool news:
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/36054
meanwhile, Colin Vaines at The Guardian posted a more conventional tribute:
http://film.guardian.co.uk/anthonyminghella/story/0,,2267545,00.html
26.1.08
The Bedlam in Goliath, The Mars Volta
as with 2006's Amputechture, the album that first got me into TMV (the samples i heard from the first two full-length albums always suggested too much of At the Drive-In to me and i freely admit that i could never push myself to give either De-Loused or Frances a proper effort), Cedric Bixler Zavala's lyrics here are awfully forgettable and more likely than anything to elicit a thoroughly sincere 'eh?' still, by the second run of 'maybe i'll breakdown/maybe i'll try/circumvent inoculation' &c, i'm trying (i said the lyrics were forgettable didn't i?) to sing along as well as nodding my head to every funky downbeat i can catch (which isn't easy, by the way, but a bit easier than on Amputechture). CBZ throws words together with a kind of Durrellian abandon: regardless of what they mean, it's hard to argue with the fact that the lyrics, unintentionally funny or not, do, in fact, fit, nestling comfortably in the liberal noodlings of the rest of the band.
on first listen, trying to convince myself i wasn't always going to buy the CD the moment i saw the Jeff Jordan artwork by sampling it first at the HMV listening station, Bedlam struck me as Amputechture amped. a closer listen suggests maybe these guys are trying to rein things in a bit after all. don't get me wrong, the songs are as chaotic as ever and i've yet to hear a prog rock band as visceral and compelling (viscerally compelling?) as TMV, but there's a tighter proginess to this album that suggests, say, Metropolis rather than Erotomania (Dream Theater anyone? no? ah well).
but enough of my wanking about with things beyond my ken. have a gander at what's being said here, over at punknews.org:
http://www.punknews.org/article/27438
with bands like TMV, you get the full entertainment package: music, lyrics, album art, rabid internet snarkery.
on first listen, trying to convince myself i wasn't always going to buy the CD the moment i saw the Jeff Jordan artwork by sampling it first at the HMV listening station, Bedlam struck me as Amputechture amped. a closer listen suggests maybe these guys are trying to rein things in a bit after all. don't get me wrong, the songs are as chaotic as ever and i've yet to hear a prog rock band as visceral and compelling (viscerally compelling?) as TMV, but there's a tighter proginess to this album that suggests, say, Metropolis rather than Erotomania (Dream Theater anyone? no? ah well).
but enough of my wanking about with things beyond my ken. have a gander at what's being said here, over at punknews.org:
http://www.punknews.org/article/27438
with bands like TMV, you get the full entertainment package: music, lyrics, album art, rabid internet snarkery.
19.1.08
Cloverfield
written by Drew Goddard
directed by Matt Reeves
Cloverfield does exactly what it says on the tin (ie, 'a monster movie for the YouTube generation'), which is more than can be said for a lot of recent movies (insert relevant 'I am Legend' digs here). the monster itself isn't anything anyone who's seen a fair share of post-Toho's Big Five monster movies will find surprising, i think, and i doubt it has enough of its own personality to knock any of these off the list, but it serves its purpose.
just try not to walk into the theater looking for the sort of thing Manohla Dargis ostensibly was prior to writing this NYT review.
admittedly, there are quite a few moments when the idiocy of hanging on to the camera will most likely get to you; still, overall, it worked for me.
i particularly liked the way the filmmakers chose to give us glimpses of the pre-Rob's Going Away Party And Monster-Fest past. interesting spin on the flashback. true, most people probably won't take much away from the sparse character development despite these glimpses offer, probably not enough to form a truly effective empathic relationship with the characters, but the film does what it can within the constraints it sets for itself.
right. winding down with 'Something's Gotta Give' on TV. yes, i can be *that* kind of movie guy.
directed by Matt Reeves
Cloverfield does exactly what it says on the tin (ie, 'a monster movie for the YouTube generation'), which is more than can be said for a lot of recent movies (insert relevant 'I am Legend' digs here). the monster itself isn't anything anyone who's seen a fair share of post-Toho's Big Five monster movies will find surprising, i think, and i doubt it has enough of its own personality to knock any of these off the list, but it serves its purpose.
just try not to walk into the theater looking for the sort of thing Manohla Dargis ostensibly was prior to writing this NYT review.
admittedly, there are quite a few moments when the idiocy of hanging on to the camera will most likely get to you; still, overall, it worked for me.
i particularly liked the way the filmmakers chose to give us glimpses of the pre-Rob's Going Away Party And Monster-Fest past. interesting spin on the flashback. true, most people probably won't take much away from the sparse character development despite these glimpses offer, probably not enough to form a truly effective empathic relationship with the characters, but the film does what it can within the constraints it sets for itself.
right. winding down with 'Something's Gotta Give' on TV. yes, i can be *that* kind of movie guy.
9.1.08
Chuck Palahniuk's Rant
how weird is that? every now and then while i'm reading Chuck's latest thing, this godawful mess of a book he calls an oral history, this audible groan starts to well up from deep inside of me like all the different voices Mr Palahniuk had flashfrozen onto the pages of Rant were joining up into some biblically-disproportionate monastic chorus of disillusionment in my head. rising OHMS and OHMS and OHMS, and i'm sure it isn't just four beats, four cycles a second but it could be and anyway what do i know i got no rhythm? and then i'd turn the page and it would cut out. the noise, that weird noise, it would just cut out like someone'd pulled the plug. and i'd just keep going like that until i hit the end and there weren't no where else to go, no thing to do but crossfade from the words on the page to the four walls surrounding me that are just a little hard to focus on right now.
huge noisy messed up lug nuts book like that just shouldn't work should it? something as big-minded and pretentious as that, it's gotta fall apart some time, right? only a matter of time and it's gotta fall apart. what's keeping it together, right? it can't be anything can keep something like that together. right? well, i'm done. and i'm still waiting.
it took me two or three false starts before i could finish Rant; this last attempt, it took me two, three days, maybe even a week to get past the first 90 or so pages, reading them in little bits, a chapter here and there. then the last two hundred words or so, i swallow them all up in two nights, two big gulps just like that.
i can imagine why someone would put this book down and never pick it up again. but i can't imagine that being anything but a sad thing, either. sure, i put this book down after i started it myself; twice, maybe thrice since i got it. but i always knew someday i'd see it to the end.
this is a book of ideas, whatever that means, chockful of them like Chuck was a newbie and didn't know better but to put all his easter eggs, the good with the rotted, if you will, all together in one tight little basket. it starts off weird enough, crazy, and it just gets crazier and crazier as you go along. first you think it's one thing, then it's something else. it flipflops once or twice and every now and then it gets a bit hard to swallow, and by the time you get back to that one thing, it's formed such a crazy messed up loop and those OHMS are just so crazy loud in your ears that when it cuts out in the end you're kinda just left there with your mouth hanging open, not sure if you want to laugh or if you want to cry or if you're blinking fast enough because you can't just seem to get the walls around you to focus. or maybe it's my astigmatism.
heard of a relativist novel? i haven't. i just thought it up, and it just seems like a really good way to some this book up that i had to ask if you'd heard of such a thing. with Rant, Mr Palahniuk, it's clear he's playing games with you, and by the end he'll have you either laughing with him or shaking your head in frustration, a big ol' pile of poisonous varmint snapping at your heels as you walk away. it's like, you know he's gotta have ONE THING in mind, right? there's gotta be something definite, but everybody, everyone you talk to, every witness he calls to the stand for you to cross-ex, they just refuse to budge and they won't tell you nothing's for sure. i mean, sure, they're telling you what they know to tell, maybe some of them really are and maybe some of them really aren't, but you can't never really know for sure, can you? like he's saying, Mr Palahniuk he's saying, in the really real world (which Middleton and the America of Rant can't be, can it?) one story can't just be one story anymore but all manner of different others depending on who's telling, and you can't never tell what's true and what isn't. and the ones that seem truest maybe the ones that make everything one big fat lie, and not all folk, not everybody's going to like that, will they? how weird is that?
but i guarantee he'll have one or two things stuck in your head, clawing around in there for days like it's trying to get out. like a big fat jab in the arm, like an inoculation. how weird is that? for some folk it might be just the thing for an inoculation from boredom; a few just might find themselves inoculated against things like complacency, stupidity, or whatever you call it, sheepiness; but for others, i won't deny it, it may just inoculate them from wanting to pick up this book ever again.
but you gotta pick it up to find out for yourself, you know?
huge noisy messed up lug nuts book like that just shouldn't work should it? something as big-minded and pretentious as that, it's gotta fall apart some time, right? only a matter of time and it's gotta fall apart. what's keeping it together, right? it can't be anything can keep something like that together. right? well, i'm done. and i'm still waiting.
it took me two or three false starts before i could finish Rant; this last attempt, it took me two, three days, maybe even a week to get past the first 90 or so pages, reading them in little bits, a chapter here and there. then the last two hundred words or so, i swallow them all up in two nights, two big gulps just like that.
i can imagine why someone would put this book down and never pick it up again. but i can't imagine that being anything but a sad thing, either. sure, i put this book down after i started it myself; twice, maybe thrice since i got it. but i always knew someday i'd see it to the end.
this is a book of ideas, whatever that means, chockful of them like Chuck was a newbie and didn't know better but to put all his easter eggs, the good with the rotted, if you will, all together in one tight little basket. it starts off weird enough, crazy, and it just gets crazier and crazier as you go along. first you think it's one thing, then it's something else. it flipflops once or twice and every now and then it gets a bit hard to swallow, and by the time you get back to that one thing, it's formed such a crazy messed up loop and those OHMS are just so crazy loud in your ears that when it cuts out in the end you're kinda just left there with your mouth hanging open, not sure if you want to laugh or if you want to cry or if you're blinking fast enough because you can't just seem to get the walls around you to focus. or maybe it's my astigmatism.
heard of a relativist novel? i haven't. i just thought it up, and it just seems like a really good way to some this book up that i had to ask if you'd heard of such a thing. with Rant, Mr Palahniuk, it's clear he's playing games with you, and by the end he'll have you either laughing with him or shaking your head in frustration, a big ol' pile of poisonous varmint snapping at your heels as you walk away. it's like, you know he's gotta have ONE THING in mind, right? there's gotta be something definite, but everybody, everyone you talk to, every witness he calls to the stand for you to cross-ex, they just refuse to budge and they won't tell you nothing's for sure. i mean, sure, they're telling you what they know to tell, maybe some of them really are and maybe some of them really aren't, but you can't never really know for sure, can you? like he's saying, Mr Palahniuk he's saying, in the really real world (which Middleton and the America of Rant can't be, can it?) one story can't just be one story anymore but all manner of different others depending on who's telling, and you can't never tell what's true and what isn't. and the ones that seem truest maybe the ones that make everything one big fat lie, and not all folk, not everybody's going to like that, will they? how weird is that?
but i guarantee he'll have one or two things stuck in your head, clawing around in there for days like it's trying to get out. like a big fat jab in the arm, like an inoculation. how weird is that? for some folk it might be just the thing for an inoculation from boredom; a few just might find themselves inoculated against things like complacency, stupidity, or whatever you call it, sheepiness; but for others, i won't deny it, it may just inoculate them from wanting to pick up this book ever again.
but you gotta pick it up to find out for yourself, you know?
2.12.07
Beowulf
screenplay by Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman
directed by Robert Zemeckis
the weakest thing about Zemeckis' Beowulf is the presentation: the graphics and Zemeckis' direction--it seems they haven't yet gotten CG 'photorealism' down quite right, and Zemeckis still appears to be at the experimental stage with the form, not really knowing what to do and what not to do with it. in fact, his hyperkinetic direction takes away from the true brilliance of the movie, which is the story Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman have crafted from the otherwise sparse narrative (i don't mean the language of the original poem, some of which Gaiman and Avary leak into their screenplay, i mean the actual details of the story). true, the dialogue itself can be a bit clunky, but the story is fuckin' brilliant (nods to QT and Avary's Pulp Fiction). contrary to what you may have heard, as far as i can tell A&G have been perfectly faithful to the original. where they do depart from it are in places that allow exactly the kind of liberties they have taken to subvert and, paradoxically, realize the full potential of the tale as a narrative.
certainly the departure has an almost kitsch-y comic-y zing to it--the slinky, sexy femme fatale of Grendel's mum, f'rinstance--but that only seems right considering what we've always had with Beowulf: a particularly zippy piece of Archeo-Pulp entertainment.
but i digress. i'd meant to talk about the weaknesses of the film, and how CG doesn't have to be as clunky as it seems to be in Zemeckis' hands. i'll let you see for yourself. first, go watch Beowulf. you've seen it? then check out this vid:
(thanks to cloudedOne over on YouTube; clips from Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. music by Tool--Wings for Marie, pt. 1 from 10,000 Days. note to self, get in on the Final Fantasy series.)
the eyes are still a little creepy, but don't they seem warmer to you than Wealthow's were, even in her tenderest moments? and the action...if you're going to go all hyperkinetic about it, that's how it's done.
now don't get me wrong...i entered the theater a bit uneasily when i went to see Beowulf, and a good number of scenes at the beginning had me cringing in my seat for all the wrong reasons. but as i've said before at the other life, i walked out pretty happy with what i saw. although admittedly, most of it had to do with the reasons stated above.
the odd thing is, the Pixar people seem to know exactly how to handle this sort of thing. why can't the rest of Hollywood seem to get it?
directed by Robert Zemeckis
the weakest thing about Zemeckis' Beowulf is the presentation: the graphics and Zemeckis' direction--it seems they haven't yet gotten CG 'photorealism' down quite right, and Zemeckis still appears to be at the experimental stage with the form, not really knowing what to do and what not to do with it. in fact, his hyperkinetic direction takes away from the true brilliance of the movie, which is the story Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman have crafted from the otherwise sparse narrative (i don't mean the language of the original poem, some of which Gaiman and Avary leak into their screenplay, i mean the actual details of the story). true, the dialogue itself can be a bit clunky, but the story is fuckin' brilliant (nods to QT and Avary's Pulp Fiction). contrary to what you may have heard, as far as i can tell A&G have been perfectly faithful to the original. where they do depart from it are in places that allow exactly the kind of liberties they have taken to subvert and, paradoxically, realize the full potential of the tale as a narrative.
certainly the departure has an almost kitsch-y comic-y zing to it--the slinky, sexy femme fatale of Grendel's mum, f'rinstance--but that only seems right considering what we've always had with Beowulf: a particularly zippy piece of Archeo-Pulp entertainment.
but i digress. i'd meant to talk about the weaknesses of the film, and how CG doesn't have to be as clunky as it seems to be in Zemeckis' hands. i'll let you see for yourself. first, go watch Beowulf. you've seen it? then check out this vid:
(thanks to cloudedOne over on YouTube; clips from Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. music by Tool--Wings for Marie, pt. 1 from 10,000 Days. note to self, get in on the Final Fantasy series.)
the eyes are still a little creepy, but don't they seem warmer to you than Wealthow's were, even in her tenderest moments? and the action...if you're going to go all hyperkinetic about it, that's how it's done.
now don't get me wrong...i entered the theater a bit uneasily when i went to see Beowulf, and a good number of scenes at the beginning had me cringing in my seat for all the wrong reasons. but as i've said before at the other life, i walked out pretty happy with what i saw. although admittedly, most of it had to do with the reasons stated above.
the odd thing is, the Pixar people seem to know exactly how to handle this sort of thing. why can't the rest of Hollywood seem to get it?
30.11.07
Moonlighting, Season 3 Episode 11: Blonde on Blonde
written by Kerry Ehrin
directed by Jay Daniel
series created by Glenn Gordon Caron
(i had decided long ago that i wouldn't write reviews. but, hell, this deserves something as excessively overwrought as everything that follows. if you have a low tolerance for bad puns, melodrama and cliche, steer clear of this post.)
ever since the show went off the air, i always assumed that when i ever found my way back to the Blue Moon Detective Agency, my fave episode would be Atomic Shakespeare, Maddie (Cybill Shepherd, in full-on Cybill Shepherd mode) and David (Bruce Willis as we'll never see him again: with a full head of hair at the start of the series--which, btw, he lost progressively with each ep) taking on the roles of The Bard's Kate and Petruchio. ('Didn't think I could pull it off, did you?') but four episodes later (with, admittedly, a couple low-fizzlers in the mix), they knock my socks off with Blonde on Blonde, and a better summary of the show's conceit i have yet to find (or only rediscover).
we start off with what looks to be a pretty straightforward pea-in-a-cup mixer: a couple hot blondes playing off each other in alternating scenes to Janet Jackson's Nasty, both of 'em drop-dead gorgeous lookers. remember when MTV was edgy? already we have an idea where this is all headed: by the end of the show, both bombshells will have dropped killer secrets, but only one of them will have dealt Dave a fatal blow. (see?!? melodrama!)
the show always excelled in subverting all the cliches of hardboiled detective fiction (and other genres besides), and this ep does it better than most. in one scene, after having tailed Maddie to the neighborhood grocer's, we get an extreme close-up of Dave: almost flush with the slightly fisheyed lens, almost filling the screen, his cold, damaged eyes looming in the foreground. the perspective further diminishes Herbert Viola (Revenge of the Nerds' Booger, Curtis Armstrong) who stands earnestly behind him. Bert tells him some people in the office think there may be a 'personal thing' between their two bosses. does that have anything to do with what they're doing here?
'You have been laboring under a severe delusion, my friend,' Dave tells Bert in a pitch-perfect Bogeyesque deadpan. 'What we're doing is simply covering a fellow operative without said operative knowing what we're doing here.'
who does he think he's fooling? but he pulls a spook story about some terrorist escaped from a jail in Cairo who's heading out to La-La Land, pulls it right out his ass, fully formed like, as if he had Borges' library somewhere deep inside his bowels, and reels poor Bert in.
nevermind that Herbert 'Smaller than a cello, bigger than a violin' Viola eventually gets left behind and forgotten by Kerry Ehrin when, almost exactly halfway through the ep (if not halfway exactly) the switcheroo is pulled, and Dave ends up tailing the wrong blonde.
we saw this coming, we see this sort of thing pulled all the time, and if you don't take too kindly to knowing jabs in the ribs from the off-camera crew (even from castmembers throwing winks across the fourth wall), the whole thing will no doubt seem, well, laborious. as per the requirements of any ubermensch of the hardboiled genre, Dave has one of the worst nights of his life, waking up next to a dead body, jumping down two stories into a garbage bin, even landing himself in the joint. and in the end he'll be left standing in the rain.
for those of you who haven't seen the show, well, i'm not spoiling any more of it for you. but even for those like me who know how it will all end, there's a lot more to be found on a second, maybe even a third viewing. Glenn Gordon Caron hated detective shows, once even had his characters say there were too many of the kind on TV those days, but you wouldn't know it from the way everything is done here. the show is the perfect homage to the genre, taking the most familiar, most facile elements of hardboiled detective fiction, of pulp, using cinematography that harks back to the heyday of noir...takes it all and uses it as nifty packaging--that's right, damn pretty gift wrapping is what it all is--and it somehow isn't insulting at all. despite the pastiche/parody treatment, the genre is somehow elevated, and in the end the show uses those kitschy and cliched elements to tell an almost excessively romantic (despite always keeping its head down, low-key and, unlike this post, anti-melodramatic), startlingly humane--and yes, still somehow immediate--Story.
but maybe that's just me. i've been in love with Maddie and Dave since the first time i laid eyes on 'em, one dark and stormy Sunday* night.
*the show aired Tuesdays in the US, but i remember it was past bedtime Sunday nights back home.
directed by Jay Daniel
series created by Glenn Gordon Caron
(i had decided long ago that i wouldn't write reviews. but, hell, this deserves something as excessively overwrought as everything that follows. if you have a low tolerance for bad puns, melodrama and cliche, steer clear of this post.)
ever since the show went off the air, i always assumed that when i ever found my way back to the Blue Moon Detective Agency, my fave episode would be Atomic Shakespeare, Maddie (Cybill Shepherd, in full-on Cybill Shepherd mode) and David (Bruce Willis as we'll never see him again: with a full head of hair at the start of the series--which, btw, he lost progressively with each ep) taking on the roles of The Bard's Kate and Petruchio. ('Didn't think I could pull it off, did you?') but four episodes later (with, admittedly, a couple low-fizzlers in the mix), they knock my socks off with Blonde on Blonde, and a better summary of the show's conceit i have yet to find (or only rediscover).
we start off with what looks to be a pretty straightforward pea-in-a-cup mixer: a couple hot blondes playing off each other in alternating scenes to Janet Jackson's Nasty, both of 'em drop-dead gorgeous lookers. remember when MTV was edgy? already we have an idea where this is all headed: by the end of the show, both bombshells will have dropped killer secrets, but only one of them will have dealt Dave a fatal blow. (see?!? melodrama!)
the show always excelled in subverting all the cliches of hardboiled detective fiction (and other genres besides), and this ep does it better than most. in one scene, after having tailed Maddie to the neighborhood grocer's, we get an extreme close-up of Dave: almost flush with the slightly fisheyed lens, almost filling the screen, his cold, damaged eyes looming in the foreground. the perspective further diminishes Herbert Viola (Revenge of the Nerds' Booger, Curtis Armstrong) who stands earnestly behind him. Bert tells him some people in the office think there may be a 'personal thing' between their two bosses. does that have anything to do with what they're doing here?
'You have been laboring under a severe delusion, my friend,' Dave tells Bert in a pitch-perfect Bogeyesque deadpan. 'What we're doing is simply covering a fellow operative without said operative knowing what we're doing here.'
who does he think he's fooling? but he pulls a spook story about some terrorist escaped from a jail in Cairo who's heading out to La-La Land, pulls it right out his ass, fully formed like, as if he had Borges' library somewhere deep inside his bowels, and reels poor Bert in.
nevermind that Herbert 'Smaller than a cello, bigger than a violin' Viola eventually gets left behind and forgotten by Kerry Ehrin when, almost exactly halfway through the ep (if not halfway exactly) the switcheroo is pulled, and Dave ends up tailing the wrong blonde.
we saw this coming, we see this sort of thing pulled all the time, and if you don't take too kindly to knowing jabs in the ribs from the off-camera crew (even from castmembers throwing winks across the fourth wall), the whole thing will no doubt seem, well, laborious. as per the requirements of any ubermensch of the hardboiled genre, Dave has one of the worst nights of his life, waking up next to a dead body, jumping down two stories into a garbage bin, even landing himself in the joint. and in the end he'll be left standing in the rain.
for those of you who haven't seen the show, well, i'm not spoiling any more of it for you. but even for those like me who know how it will all end, there's a lot more to be found on a second, maybe even a third viewing. Glenn Gordon Caron hated detective shows, once even had his characters say there were too many of the kind on TV those days, but you wouldn't know it from the way everything is done here. the show is the perfect homage to the genre, taking the most familiar, most facile elements of hardboiled detective fiction, of pulp, using cinematography that harks back to the heyday of noir...takes it all and uses it as nifty packaging--that's right, damn pretty gift wrapping is what it all is--and it somehow isn't insulting at all. despite the pastiche/parody treatment, the genre is somehow elevated, and in the end the show uses those kitschy and cliched elements to tell an almost excessively romantic (despite always keeping its head down, low-key and, unlike this post, anti-melodramatic), startlingly humane--and yes, still somehow immediate--Story.
but maybe that's just me. i've been in love with Maddie and Dave since the first time i laid eyes on 'em, one dark and stormy Sunday* night.
*the show aired Tuesdays in the US, but i remember it was past bedtime Sunday nights back home.
28.11.07
Caitlin Kiernan's Alabaster
Ms Kiernan's writing sits comfortably on the shelf between Poe and Lovecraft, perhaps leaning with her ear held close to Lovecraft; albeit the stories she tells are character-driven, with non-kitschy prose and sans unpronounceable horrors with not enough vowels or too many consonants or both (or have i got it the wrong way round?) and without a hint of the word 'eldritch'. (i don't think i've encountered it yet, but you never know.) on a table (the sideboard loaded with sweetbreads and cornbread and raw fish and foie gras and tarts and gorey puddings and jellybeans--and is that a bottle of absinthe?) with Neil Gaiman seated at one end and M. John Harrison at the other, Ms Kiernan sits beside Neil, waving, perhaps, at Edward Gorey leaning in to say 'Halloo'; Elizabeth Hand is also at the table--she sits closer to Mr Harrison. the two ladies seem to be somewhere between the two, but that might only be a trick of perspective. they might be holding hands beneath the table one moment, or arguing over matters of natural history the next. Ms Kiernan might also have a place at Angela Carter's knee--Ms Carter's very modern, very hip teenage daughter, who just so happened to be raised in that strange land across the Atlantic. Michael Moorcock creates a whole other tangent with her work, though who sits on the other end of that particular line it's hard to say; maybe it's only Moorcock again, in Mother London rather than Eternal Champion mode. William Gibson, in Goth drag after listening to Robert Smith and Tom Waits all night, coated with the dust of paleontology rather than the junk of technophile sociology, might also be peering from some tenebrous corner.
of course, Ms Kiernan's voice is also very much her own; this taxonomy, or genealogy, is all mine (and, probably, subconsciously stolen from the literature map though i haven't been there in a while): a lazy way to describe what should better be experienced. i could drop quotes, but, like i said, i'm lazy, and while one line seems as good as another spoken in Ms Kiernan's beautiful voice, i'd rather you went and found them yourself.
of course, Ms Kiernan's voice is also very much her own; this taxonomy, or genealogy, is all mine (and, probably, subconsciously stolen from the literature map though i haven't been there in a while): a lazy way to describe what should better be experienced. i could drop quotes, but, like i said, i'm lazy, and while one line seems as good as another spoken in Ms Kiernan's beautiful voice, i'd rather you went and found them yourself.
10.11.07
Mike Carey's Hellblazer: The Gift
i may have mentioned this before, and anyone who has been following the adventures of John Constantine doesn't need me to repeat it, but here it is again anyway: every writer brings his own brilliance to John Constantine. i've never read Alan Moore's original, but there is an identifiable essence that ties each incarnation to the others.
still, each version is distinctive: in Neil Gaiman's hands, Constantine was always the Laughing Magician, a man of undeniable charm, unflappable humor and salty if obscure power, wielding a magic that seemed hardly typical of the word in fantastic fiction; in Jamie Delano's hands, he was a working class mystic, with a handyman's approach to magic, though his manipulations of synchronicity were more recognizable as the stuff of occult fantasy; Garth Ennis gave Constantine a harder edge by making his desperate entanglement in the war between Heaven and Hell more personal, more intimate, more visceral. Ennis also revealed the secret to Constantine's power: more than your typical magician, he is a confidence artist, and a bastard; Ennis' Constantine rarely cast spells, unless it were to bluff, preferring less occult means of deception. Warren Ellis portrayed a more typical hardboiled character with his almost stereotypically noirish story arcs; Azarello--i hear, not having read his run--made Constantine almost unlikeably ruthless.
i may have mentioned this before: Mike Carey struck a fine balance between Delano's mystic and Ennis' bastard confidence trickster. it is almost redundant to say that each time we run into Constantine, he is at the end of his tether, but while it may seem Ennis had done the ultimate 'John-at-the-end-of-his-tether' story with Dangerous Habits, it seems to me we feel it more acutely with Carey: while Ennis practically ground Constantine into dust during the course of his almost sadistic run in the comic, Carey's Constantine seemed ground from the get go: Carey's Constantine had already gone through everything Ennis and the other writers had thrown at him, seemed barely emergent from that dust--and he goes on to live through much more.
Carey's Constantine fit perfectly into the past--the life story--other writers had built for him. while he seemed to follow most naturally from Ennis' Constantine, it is easy to see this JC as the end result of everything he had gone through throughout the comic's life.
Carey's first Hellblazer story, All His Engines, seemed to me almost pitch-perfect in its portrayal of John Constantine and his world. from the very beginning, Carey had made the comic his own, as if he had been writing Hellblazer all his life. it doesn't seem surprising, then, that in the course of his run, it seemed at times almost as though he were only rushing through it all, racing through issues fast as he could to hit certain beats in the narrative, or only beat his deadlines and ultimately get to the end. almost as if he were bored with the comic, and only wanted to get it done so he could move on to other things--Lucifer, presumably, or his Felix Castor books. still, it pays to stick it through; if there's one thing Carey's good at from the narrative standpoint, it's in giving his readers a jolly good pay-off at the end of each story.
exemplifying this apparent impatience, Reasons to be Cheerful often read to me like a laundry-list of old characters, as John Constantine's children eliminated everyone who had ever known or only just met him--no matter how fleetingly. but more than this, as Carey approached the end of his run, he seemed almost hellbent on wiping the slate clean--in fact, he seemed headed in that direction even earlier, with Staring at the Wall, which ended with Constantine's memory wiped, the man wandering aimlessly through London without even his name.
in his final story arc, R.S.V.P., Carey even dealt a fatal blow to John Constantine's relationship with his one remaining friend, the one person who'd stuck through everything with him.
but Carey, thankfully, did more than simply 'wipe the slate clean'; with The Gift he laid down the bare bones of John Constantine the character, presenting a template for future writers; here is the 'identifiable essence' that comes through with each successful incarnation of the character. The story is now one of my three fave Hellblazer short stories--the other two being Gaiman's Hold Me and Ennis' Forty. in The Gift, Carey shows us just how well he understands John Constantine as a character, and, more than just a beautifully dark, darkly subtle coda to the tragic Down in the Ground Where the Dead Men Go, it is also a good place to begin for someone who has only just met the man both Heaven and Hell love to hate.
The Gift also shows us what magic is all about, what Constantine has always known magic to be all about, what--one suspects, one hopes, given the the subtelties of his Voice of the Fire--Alan Moore had always intended the character to say about magic: it isn't about casting spells, throwing bones or cheating the devil. ultimately, magic is legerdemain, sleight of hand; smoke, mirrors, turning tricks--perceptions. magic is about revealing the truth in the world by what appears to be the only truly effective means: deception.
in the end, we must face the fact that Constantine's talent for magic doesn't come from studying spellbooks, old religions, apocryphal texts, etc.; nor does it come from the blood of Nergal coursing through his veins; in the end, Constantine's good at magic for one reason: he's a right bloody bastard, innit? and the best bloody liar you're ever likely to meet.
still, each version is distinctive: in Neil Gaiman's hands, Constantine was always the Laughing Magician, a man of undeniable charm, unflappable humor and salty if obscure power, wielding a magic that seemed hardly typical of the word in fantastic fiction; in Jamie Delano's hands, he was a working class mystic, with a handyman's approach to magic, though his manipulations of synchronicity were more recognizable as the stuff of occult fantasy; Garth Ennis gave Constantine a harder edge by making his desperate entanglement in the war between Heaven and Hell more personal, more intimate, more visceral. Ennis also revealed the secret to Constantine's power: more than your typical magician, he is a confidence artist, and a bastard; Ennis' Constantine rarely cast spells, unless it were to bluff, preferring less occult means of deception. Warren Ellis portrayed a more typical hardboiled character with his almost stereotypically noirish story arcs; Azarello--i hear, not having read his run--made Constantine almost unlikeably ruthless.
i may have mentioned this before: Mike Carey struck a fine balance between Delano's mystic and Ennis' bastard confidence trickster. it is almost redundant to say that each time we run into Constantine, he is at the end of his tether, but while it may seem Ennis had done the ultimate 'John-at-the-end-of-his-tether' story with Dangerous Habits, it seems to me we feel it more acutely with Carey: while Ennis practically ground Constantine into dust during the course of his almost sadistic run in the comic, Carey's Constantine seemed ground from the get go: Carey's Constantine had already gone through everything Ennis and the other writers had thrown at him, seemed barely emergent from that dust--and he goes on to live through much more.
Carey's Constantine fit perfectly into the past--the life story--other writers had built for him. while he seemed to follow most naturally from Ennis' Constantine, it is easy to see this JC as the end result of everything he had gone through throughout the comic's life.
Carey's first Hellblazer story, All His Engines, seemed to me almost pitch-perfect in its portrayal of John Constantine and his world. from the very beginning, Carey had made the comic his own, as if he had been writing Hellblazer all his life. it doesn't seem surprising, then, that in the course of his run, it seemed at times almost as though he were only rushing through it all, racing through issues fast as he could to hit certain beats in the narrative, or only beat his deadlines and ultimately get to the end. almost as if he were bored with the comic, and only wanted to get it done so he could move on to other things--Lucifer, presumably, or his Felix Castor books. still, it pays to stick it through; if there's one thing Carey's good at from the narrative standpoint, it's in giving his readers a jolly good pay-off at the end of each story.
exemplifying this apparent impatience, Reasons to be Cheerful often read to me like a laundry-list of old characters, as John Constantine's children eliminated everyone who had ever known or only just met him--no matter how fleetingly. but more than this, as Carey approached the end of his run, he seemed almost hellbent on wiping the slate clean--in fact, he seemed headed in that direction even earlier, with Staring at the Wall, which ended with Constantine's memory wiped, the man wandering aimlessly through London without even his name.
in his final story arc, R.S.V.P., Carey even dealt a fatal blow to John Constantine's relationship with his one remaining friend, the one person who'd stuck through everything with him.
but Carey, thankfully, did more than simply 'wipe the slate clean'; with The Gift he laid down the bare bones of John Constantine the character, presenting a template for future writers; here is the 'identifiable essence' that comes through with each successful incarnation of the character. The story is now one of my three fave Hellblazer short stories--the other two being Gaiman's Hold Me and Ennis' Forty. in The Gift, Carey shows us just how well he understands John Constantine as a character, and, more than just a beautifully dark, darkly subtle coda to the tragic Down in the Ground Where the Dead Men Go, it is also a good place to begin for someone who has only just met the man both Heaven and Hell love to hate.
The Gift also shows us what magic is all about, what Constantine has always known magic to be all about, what--one suspects, one hopes, given the the subtelties of his Voice of the Fire--Alan Moore had always intended the character to say about magic: it isn't about casting spells, throwing bones or cheating the devil. ultimately, magic is legerdemain, sleight of hand; smoke, mirrors, turning tricks--perceptions. magic is about revealing the truth in the world by what appears to be the only truly effective means: deception.
in the end, we must face the fact that Constantine's talent for magic doesn't come from studying spellbooks, old religions, apocryphal texts, etc.; nor does it come from the blood of Nergal coursing through his veins; in the end, Constantine's good at magic for one reason: he's a right bloody bastard, innit? and the best bloody liar you're ever likely to meet.
2.11.07
INTERSTITIUM: this life, reimagined, revivified
i wouldn't have admitted it then, but when i dubbed this blog my 'other life', i had been rather obviously acknowledging what reading was for me back then: escape. while the aesthetic i frequently vocalized elsewhere never directly condemned reading as escapism, i had always consciously struggled to make more of my reading than there really was to it.
when i first decided i was probably a writer, it was because i kept finding myself dissatisfied with what i thought was all there was to read. Neil Gaiman's stories weren't as ubiquitous then as they are now, Michael Moorcock was near mythical, legendary in his abscence in our bookstores in spite of all i'd hear about Elric and all the other incarnations of the Eternal Champion; i hadn't yet even heard of either Mervyn Peake or M. John Harrison. and i'd grown tired of Tolkien and Lewis, the legion of clones they raised in their collective wake, no matter how brilliant i knew the originals were--and still are, for all that they are dead and constantly being reanimated and plundered.
like many of the decisions i've made in my life, the impulse behind the one that 'made' me a writer was at heart one of rebellion. a refusal to simply accept what i was being served.
to put it less dramatically, being dissatisfied with the great bulk of fiction i was being presented with at the time, i wanted to write things of my own, things i knew *i* would *want* to read.
as Banzai Cat once put it, i spent too much time wishing for a certain kind of fiction.
occasionally, i *would* get my wish. hence Peake in my library; hence Harrison, hence Mieville, hence VanderMeer, and Moorcock and Moore. hence even Eco, hence Ondaatje and Greene, hence Thomson and Durrell. hence James Salter, hence Jose Eduardo Agualusa, hence Anais Nin. but even then, i suppose, it's been true all along: that aesthetic, deliberately constructed though i thought it was, went deeper after all. reading wasn't all escape for me.
it was research.
it isn't that i was directly stealing ideas, though in some ways, it really *is* as bad as that. when i created, for instance, St Etienne-vaux-Grumm and Ruttage, sister cities to Troll's Vespertine from Troll's Doll--and Vespertine as well--i wasn't just re-inventing New Crobuzon, or Ambergris, or Gormenghast, or Viriconium. rather, from those cities--those writers, i should say, i.e., Mieville, VanderMeer, Peake and Harrison, respectively--i learned how i might craft my own fiction of place, structured and individualized on the most familiar landscape for a functioning autist: my own closeted imagination.
i am not, therefore, your conventional bibliophile. i cannot simply be told a story. i must be able to take more away from it than that; i must also in some way learn how to tell it the way you did, without necessarily making me a mere mimic--that must mean i must also somehow see myself in it. else there must be something in it i can twist, defile, corrupt, make my own. is it ideas i'm after? is it style? i'm not too sure, but i believe it's something subtler than that, more subliminal. in some ways, to the reader and writer who are fortunate enough to be 'purer at heart', more sinister.
blame it on growing up with Choose Your Own Adventure, if you like.
i am not, however, completely unaware that this in itself is a kind of escapism; the artist's desire for expression is in some ways another way of showing a failure to cope with--to confront and to ultimately accept--external reality. yes, of this i'm all too aware.
nevertheless, this, i've come to realize, particularly with my more recent choices, is why i read: i read for research. which is probably why it's a good thing i finished the first draft of spukhafte ferwirkungen, Sehnsucht, vom Geist der Schwere (pretentious title, ennit?) before i found Alison MacLeod's The Wave Theory of Angels, before I found Janna Levin's A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines.
it is, however, also quite probably a good thing that i found them when i did. what an embarrassment it would have been if i'd actually tried to get the shitty thing published, the state it's in!
i knew there was a lot yet to be done with the thing, but now i have a more solid idea of what i need to do, and what i've gotten myself into. sigh.
more on Ms MacLeod's and Ms Levin's books later. when i get my head around talking about them. rest assured, i *am* reading them, and though i make no promises, i *do* plan on attempting to semi-real-time review them--though it's a bit late for Wave Theory.
yup. it would appear that this other life is just about set for a revivification.
when i first decided i was probably a writer, it was because i kept finding myself dissatisfied with what i thought was all there was to read. Neil Gaiman's stories weren't as ubiquitous then as they are now, Michael Moorcock was near mythical, legendary in his abscence in our bookstores in spite of all i'd hear about Elric and all the other incarnations of the Eternal Champion; i hadn't yet even heard of either Mervyn Peake or M. John Harrison. and i'd grown tired of Tolkien and Lewis, the legion of clones they raised in their collective wake, no matter how brilliant i knew the originals were--and still are, for all that they are dead and constantly being reanimated and plundered.
like many of the decisions i've made in my life, the impulse behind the one that 'made' me a writer was at heart one of rebellion. a refusal to simply accept what i was being served.
to put it less dramatically, being dissatisfied with the great bulk of fiction i was being presented with at the time, i wanted to write things of my own, things i knew *i* would *want* to read.
as Banzai Cat once put it, i spent too much time wishing for a certain kind of fiction.
occasionally, i *would* get my wish. hence Peake in my library; hence Harrison, hence Mieville, hence VanderMeer, and Moorcock and Moore. hence even Eco, hence Ondaatje and Greene, hence Thomson and Durrell. hence James Salter, hence Jose Eduardo Agualusa, hence Anais Nin. but even then, i suppose, it's been true all along: that aesthetic, deliberately constructed though i thought it was, went deeper after all. reading wasn't all escape for me.
it was research.
it isn't that i was directly stealing ideas, though in some ways, it really *is* as bad as that. when i created, for instance, St Etienne-vaux-Grumm and Ruttage, sister cities to Troll's Vespertine from Troll's Doll--and Vespertine as well--i wasn't just re-inventing New Crobuzon, or Ambergris, or Gormenghast, or Viriconium. rather, from those cities--those writers, i should say, i.e., Mieville, VanderMeer, Peake and Harrison, respectively--i learned how i might craft my own fiction of place, structured and individualized on the most familiar landscape for a functioning autist: my own closeted imagination.
i am not, therefore, your conventional bibliophile. i cannot simply be told a story. i must be able to take more away from it than that; i must also in some way learn how to tell it the way you did, without necessarily making me a mere mimic--that must mean i must also somehow see myself in it. else there must be something in it i can twist, defile, corrupt, make my own. is it ideas i'm after? is it style? i'm not too sure, but i believe it's something subtler than that, more subliminal. in some ways, to the reader and writer who are fortunate enough to be 'purer at heart', more sinister.
blame it on growing up with Choose Your Own Adventure, if you like.
i am not, however, completely unaware that this in itself is a kind of escapism; the artist's desire for expression is in some ways another way of showing a failure to cope with--to confront and to ultimately accept--external reality. yes, of this i'm all too aware.
nevertheless, this, i've come to realize, particularly with my more recent choices, is why i read: i read for research. which is probably why it's a good thing i finished the first draft of spukhafte ferwirkungen, Sehnsucht, vom Geist der Schwere (pretentious title, ennit?) before i found Alison MacLeod's The Wave Theory of Angels, before I found Janna Levin's A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines.
it is, however, also quite probably a good thing that i found them when i did. what an embarrassment it would have been if i'd actually tried to get the shitty thing published, the state it's in!
i knew there was a lot yet to be done with the thing, but now i have a more solid idea of what i need to do, and what i've gotten myself into. sigh.
more on Ms MacLeod's and Ms Levin's books later. when i get my head around talking about them. rest assured, i *am* reading them, and though i make no promises, i *do* plan on attempting to semi-real-time review them--though it's a bit late for Wave Theory.
yup. it would appear that this other life is just about set for a revivification.
12.4.07
V. 1922 - 2007
no, not quite a fan, nor even necessarily a believer. but is there any particular reason i need to explain myself to you? to anyone?
9.4.07
Kelly Link's Stranger Things Happen: first one, or maybe two stories...we'll find out in a bit
i forgot: i also got Kelly Link's Stranger Things Happen over the weekend. (yes, i know...retail therapy. what a bitch. still, it seems to have worked. i'm feeling much more chipper now, thank you very much. i, consumer.)
my introduction to Link was by way of The Faery Handbag, which i'd pulled at random from the interweb. sadly, no, that didn't get me out there hunting for her stuff, and i passed up the other samples of her work available online.
surely, however, i was missing something? so i went ahead and read bits of The Specialist's Hat from some 'Slipstream' Anthology a bookstore had sold me by mistake. (i can't remember the title of the book, but Banzai Cat will know the one. ask him.) better, imho. much. but i'd only read the first bits of it to fill in some dead space in between doing other things, and when i put the book down to continue with those other things, it promptly, er, slipped from my mind and i've never found the urge to get it back.
but i ramble aimless. where was i?
right. Stranger Things Happen.
Story the 1st: Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. sigh. i can't help but feel disappointed by this story. certainly, the dead man's letters are simply lovely, and the prose and narrative and all the strange details are all successfully evocative of that same twilight described by John Singer Sargent's painting -- that precarious balance between fresh-lit lanterns and faded evening sunlight, that ethereal yet somehow ambivalent glow to the faces of the innocents, the carnations, lilies, roses, used here to magnificently subtle effect (and affect) to illustrate something like capture, or maybe entanglement in the delicate membrane between life and death.
unfortunately, the intervening omniscient voice, though most likely deliberate, strikes me as a kind of literary failure of nerve, as though Ms Link couldn't find it in herself to trust either her dead man narrator or the reader to get the story right. or, at least, not the way she wants either of them to get it.
i can't help but feel this story could have been so much better without those intervening bits, and was thus mortally wounded by them, the way, say, AI could have been so much better without being Disneyfied by Spielberg.
(ok, it isn't quite the same thing, not a very good analogy at all, but i wanted an excuse to link to this.)
so what Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose suggests to my mind is a writer with obvious talent, more comfortable with the sort of evocative yet minimalist prose that seems favored by high-minded literature these days than most other writers in the so-called genre, but who hasn't yet learned to trust either her self or her audience or both.
no, i wasn't completely happy with Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (this is entirely unoriginal of me, but can't you tell i just love that title?), but there's no way i can deny it's a beautiful piece of work.
an ambiguous start: promising, and lovely, but fatally flawed and, by itself, ultimately disappointing.
Story the 2nd? no, not yet, i think. not here, from work. i'm currently (perhaps wrong-headedly) trying to draw up some vague parallels that seem to be lurking between Water off a Black Dog's Back and James Salter's lovely My Lord You, and while i'd like that to manifest in the next post, i have to admit it might not.
8.4.07
fiction comma electric
in case i wasn't being clear -- and a recent conversation with Banzai Cat seems to indicate as much -- i have dropped all pretense towards 'critical' review on this blog. whatever i may say by way of 'comments' (such as this here set of so-called 'reviews'), until further notice, is purely reactionary; none of this from-the-hip 'criticism' (for lack of a better word) is meant to stand up to critical deconstruction, and if any of it does, i'll be more surprised -- if, i'm sure, more pleasantly so -- than anyone.
anyhoo, that out of the way...
today i picked up James Salter's A Sport and A Pastime, Iain Sinclair's White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, and The New Nature of the Catastrophe, ninth volume of The Tale of the Eternal Champion, the latter as a result of my crusade to track down and obtain every single piece of published fiction i can find by M. John Harrison (not to mention the fact that, yes, Jerry Cornelius is cool).
though i'm still wholly engrossed in Rupert Thomson's Death of a Murderer, i dipped into Catastrophe for M. John Harrison's 'The Ash Circus', which starts after the death of Jerry Cornelius, and, about which, this seems the best way to describe my feeble-minded reaction:
(which also happens to go some way in leading me closer to a solution to certain investigations i have been conducting in my increasingly malcontent little headspace.)
a better way to celebrate Easter all by my lonesome, i can think of none.
anyhoo, that out of the way...
today i picked up James Salter's A Sport and A Pastime, Iain Sinclair's White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, and The New Nature of the Catastrophe, ninth volume of The Tale of the Eternal Champion, the latter as a result of my crusade to track down and obtain every single piece of published fiction i can find by M. John Harrison (not to mention the fact that, yes, Jerry Cornelius is cool).
though i'm still wholly engrossed in Rupert Thomson's Death of a Murderer, i dipped into Catastrophe for M. John Harrison's 'The Ash Circus', which starts after the death of Jerry Cornelius, and, about which, this seems the best way to describe my feeble-minded reaction:
I read anyone who electrifies me or seems to be doing something I don't understand
-M. John Harrison, Disillusioned by the Actual, interview by Patrick Hudson, here, at The Zone.
(which also happens to go some way in leading me closer to a solution to certain investigations i have been conducting in my increasingly malcontent little headspace.)
a better way to celebrate Easter all by my lonesome, i can think of none.
1.4.07
here comes the rooster
so. The Road beats all the other competitors to a spit-roasted pulp and takes the Rooster. more meat for the roast, i presume. a bit disappointing for being a most predictable end to my first experience of the Tournament of Books.
no, i haven't read it. sure, ever since Paul raved about it on his blog, i'd been curious about it, reading the first few passages everytime i step into a bookstore. but somehow, i never felt the urge to take it with me out of the bookstore. if the reviews are to be believed, this book has everything going for it: post-apocalyptic setting; check. heavenly writing applied to descriptions of Boschian hell; check. the 'intimate in the face of the cataclysmic'; check. enough gloom to last a lifetime; check. brilliant minimalist *black* cover, great quality paper, etc.; check.
i *almost* got it yesterday. instead, i got Rupert Thomson's Death of a Murderer.
so far, it's working out rather well, pulling me out of Thomas Disch's bathetically cool 334.
(wtf?!? you say? where did *those* books come from? what happened to Ballard and Pynchon and Darrieussecq and Peake? welcome to the clamor and chaos that is this facet of my life: 334 peeped out from my boxes back home and insisted i take it with me, and now Myra Hindley's quiet whispers are beckoning, and, i find, impossible to resist.)
no, i haven't read it. sure, ever since Paul raved about it on his blog, i'd been curious about it, reading the first few passages everytime i step into a bookstore. but somehow, i never felt the urge to take it with me out of the bookstore. if the reviews are to be believed, this book has everything going for it: post-apocalyptic setting; check. heavenly writing applied to descriptions of Boschian hell; check. the 'intimate in the face of the cataclysmic'; check. enough gloom to last a lifetime; check. brilliant minimalist *black* cover, great quality paper, etc.; check.
i *almost* got it yesterday. instead, i got Rupert Thomson's Death of a Murderer.
so far, it's working out rather well, pulling me out of Thomas Disch's bathetically cool 334.
(wtf?!? you say? where did *those* books come from? what happened to Ballard and Pynchon and Darrieussecq and Peake? welcome to the clamor and chaos that is this facet of my life: 334 peeped out from my boxes back home and insisted i take it with me, and now Myra Hindley's quiet whispers are beckoning, and, i find, impossible to resist.)
the hunting of the snark
read this before you go on. then, if you still feel the burning need to, proceed as you will with the rest of it:
obviously, i wasn't personally happy with most of the contents of this Digest, but, given my current tastes, mindset, etc. (and anyway, who am i to talk?) that should probably be taken as a mark of approval rather than a fatal judgement: Kenneth has provided a much needed avenue for the publication of stories that might not otherwise have found a home.
not all of you will be pleased, not with everything you find in this Digest; then again, isn't that part of the nature of genre?
Wail of the Sun:
i admit: i’ve had it with this sort of epic fantasy, you’ve got to come up with something truly imaginative and magnificent to impress me these days with this sort of fiction; so there’s no way i can pass off saying i approached this story without apprehension, without bias. still, there’s much to be said about how this story didn’t work without resorting to ‘bah. another epic fantasy. grumble grumble’: the fantastic elements felt very contrived. some vivid imagery, maybe, but typical. the human elements were even weaker: Redenthor’s ‘flaw’ was hardly anything more than fluff, and couldn’t have been more poorly chosen; the characters in general were stereotypes, their dialogue predictable, artificial, unnecessary. the underlying sentiment of the entire piece was more melodramatic than truly affective, and while this story is supposedly meant to be a mere fragment, it also dismisses any responsibility for that connection; a king falters, a world burns; we’re meant to feel for the fact that he dies for his daughter? it can be done, sure -- in fact, i’m all for focusing on the intimate in the face of the cataclysmic -- but it certainly wasn’t done here.
Thriller:this was the most fun of the lot. the sheer imaginative cheek of the premise alone is worth giving it a go, and Andrew Drilon’s well-sustained second-person execution does it justice, with just the right amount of humor -- cheeky, at times even self-effacing -- thrown in with the gore. it’s a typical zombie story, sure, and fits right in with the whole ‘Living Dead’ canon, with, perhaps, a little less of the biting social commentary. but who really watches those movies for ‘social commentary’ anyway?
and what did you expect after learning that MJ’s true legacy wasn’t, after all, certain questionable doings at a whimsical little place called Neverland? (i know, i know: we’ve all heard that one before. but it’s true, ennit?) pure entertainment.
The Middle Prince:i’ve said much about this already, broadcast by Banzai Cat over on his blog, and i really don’t know how else to put it. an interesting premise that was not done justice; there seem to be a few too many ‘shortcuts’ in the narrative, ‘violations’ of the ‘rules’ upon which the premise relies so heavily for it to be truly
meaningful. i can’t help but feel it could have been so much richer; i don’t feel convinced this is the way the story ‘should’ have been written, what i feel is one of the ‘obligations’ of a writer to the reader. that may be utterly wrong-headed and, in the end, may have been the only problem, but still: that definitely ruined it for me.
Insomnia:pulpy, predictable, derivatively lovecraftian horror? hell yeah! Joseph Nacino drops one from his personal crusade to translate spec fic tropes into something that actually fits a Filipino context. i don’t think BC quite does it here -- he good cop-bad cop elements, for instance, are a little disinheriting, though i’m sure some local filmmakers would beg to differ -- but the delivery doesn’t push any such pretensions, and so neither does the appreciation of this story require it; this is a story told the way it’s told, the way it happened. period.
Inhuman:a friend of mine pointed out the sentimentality of this story: ‘the fifth element is love.’ while there is something, appropriately, very Filipino about resorting to such melodrama, i realized my friend was right; there’s also something about it that simply throws the whole thing off. however, i’m not sure we meant the same thing: well-written (possibly the most well-written of all the stories here), well-researched (possibly the most etc., etc., as well), i found a pretension to the tone of this story that i felt inappropriate, and while my friend didn’t agree it was at all ‘too pretentious’, it was his comment that unlocked it for me: the gravitas to this story is somehow undone by that sentimentality; suddenly the pretension is revealed to be naiveté, and the whole thing collapses on the weight of its own, er, gravitas.
obviously, i wasn't personally happy with most of the contents of this Digest, but, given my current tastes, mindset, etc. (and anyway, who am i to talk?) that should probably be taken as a mark of approval rather than a fatal judgement: Kenneth has provided a much needed avenue for the publication of stories that might not otherwise have found a home.
not all of you will be pleased, not with everything you find in this Digest; then again, isn't that part of the nature of genre?
23.3.07
Crimson (after White)
Everything in this world issues fully-formed from the loins of a benign monster called manufacture; a never-ending stream of objects - of graded quality, of perfect uniformity - from an orifice hidden behind veils of smoke.Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White
this isn't part of the chaos just yet (though it may well be in the future), but thanks to the first eighteen 'episodes' having been published as an online serial by the guardian, i've found it threatens to deform my rather malleable reading aesthetic, and may supplant one or two books from the current pending list...
only i find i'm not sure i'm *quite* in the mood for another doorstop to enter the list, what with Against the Day underneath it all...
right. 'work.'
Don't get soaked. Take a quick peek at the forecast
with theYahoo! Search weather shortcut.
unmelting, irrelevant
Two centimetres of snow since last year; not enough to wipe out our traces. No one left in a radius of four thousand kilometres, except for three Russians who are hibernating in the Vostok base. And us, of course, but how can we be counted?
Marie Darrieussecq, White
that's right. a fifth book has fallen into the chaos. but for now i've chosen to spend most of my time with Millennium People. at last, i think, i have a sequence of books i truly want to follow-through with, though i know the end of one must inevitably distort my perception, deform my plans.
nevermind. i'll gawk at that bridge when i get there.
meanwhile, Tom Waits has returned to my playlist with Alice, alternating with the manufactured comfort of Amos Lee's Supply and Demand.
When I'm dead in my grave
Set me adrift and I'm lost over there
And I must be insane
To go skating on your name
And by tracing it twice
I fell through the ice
Of Alice
Tom Waits, Alice
20.3.07
tourney season?
...it is by no means an easy thing to be promoted from the rank of 'visitor' to that of 'resident. It has been known to take many years. It is difficult to understand quite how the transference comes about. It is an almost mystical procedure and is, of course, in the hands of the natives - that basic layer in the triple sandwich of island life.while the Tournament of Books rages on elsewhere (thanks Paul), i, too, find myself coincidentally pitting several books, if not necessarily against each other, then in a chaotic, randomly rotating tag team.
Mervyn Peake, Mr Pye
Tourism is the great soporific. It's a huge confidence trick, and gives people the dangerous idea that there's something interesting in their lives.
J.G.Ballard, Millennium People
of these, Mr Pye and Millennium People (incidentally, i don't know why the cover on amazon.co.uk is in grayscale. my copy has Richard Green's cover illustration against a field of sunset-y orange reminiscent of Liz Pyle's cover for Mother London) provide the most interesting contrast: one was written right smack in the middle of the twentieth century, the other not long after the end of it. both describe a kind of parochialism and/or the struggle against it - in the Sarnians of the former, the middle class revolutionaries of the latter - and identify (or identify with) the decadence of that period, and, in their own distinct ways, constitute a rebellion against it.
Peake, though considered a 'modernist', writes in prose that feels almost archaic: his sentences are lengthy, his diction colorful and vivid; Ballard's prose is stark, a sharp if typical example of the kind of prose found in postmodern surrealist fiction. (well, the sort i've encountered, at any rate, in books that have often, if not consistently, been labeled as such.)
Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day, i find, provides a nice bed for the other two to lie in, a sort of contemporary mongrel middle ground that resists categorization while nestling comfortably into either 'potential pigeonhole' (or foxhole, as we are, ostensibly, at war here.) and quite a few others, at that.
Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics fills a few unavoidable gaps in the fractured rule of my inner gestapo of 'taste'.
i've also been unable to stop myself from writing, providing a disingenuous sense of creative equilibrium.
oh, cool. The Office. and Donny Osmond, Kelly Holmes and David Baddiel on The Kumars at No 42.
interrobang.
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