Who constants the reader?

Book: Watchmen

Writer: Alan Moore

Illustrator: Dave Gibbons

Published: 2008 (collection; DC)

You guys, this is totally a gateway drug.

It’s a first taste of humans who decide to become superheroes because of their principles and not because they have powers. It’s a first look at how corruption erodes even the best of intentions, how disillusionment leads to fast decay, how maybe the world is just too far gone to be worth saving anymore. It’s a first insight into how humans struggle so mightily to do the right thing only to see it crumpled under the weight of suspicion and nuclear war.

I like Rorschach’s absolute commitment to justice. It’s his kind of psychopathic slavery to black and white right and wrong that highlights how fluid justice actually is. I like Dr. Manhattan’s gradual detachment from the world, I like that the new Nite Owl has a bit of a gut, I like the Comedian’s explosively disillusioned reaction to Vietnam as a shaper of his general world view, and I loved the parallel to the real world in the pirate story the kid at the newsstand was reading.

SPOILER ALERT: I love Veidt's reasoning. Let’s blow up something so everybody gets too scared to fight anymore and bonds together! It reminds me of when the Emperor in Star Wars outlines his plan to take over the Galactic senate in some violent way and then goes, “And then we shall have peace” making the creepiest face to ever go along with that sentiment. But Veidt really does believe he’ll bring peace with war, and it’s such a fatal flaw in a guy who’s convinced himself and everyone else that he’s perfect and therefore assumes the weight of making the ultimate decision for mankind, like a parent who doesn’t trust a child to understand the “lesser of two evils” concept. Brilliant dissection of how much sacrifice is worth saving the remainder of the world.

I didn’t like Lorie. She was whiny. But even she stood up for herself.    

This is my favorite example of how comics and graphic novels tie words and pictures so closely together. It’s absolutely uncanny how closely Gibbons reflects not only Moore’s words but the irony, cynicism, and double meanings of them. I’d love to sit in on one of their work sessions to see how they bring everything together so freakin’ well.

  

Moore gets progressively weirder from here, sometimes with Gibbons in tow again. As far as I remember, V for Vendetta has the same tone and saving-a-corrupt-humanity-from-itself-with-terroristic-measures plot and the same lack of interspecies sex scenes, so that’d be a Recommended Next if you’re looking to ease into Moore and get away from superheroes.

Crazypants tour of Arkham part 1!

Book: Batman: Joker’s Asylum

Writers: Arvid Nelson, Jason Aaron, JT Krul, Joe Harris, and David Hine

Artists: Alex Sanchez, Jason Pearson, Guillem March, Juan Doe, and Andy Clarke

Published: 2008 (DC)

Pages: 124

From my limited first-hand (first-eyes?) experience with comics, I know that I like the Batman universe. I also know that the Joker is my favorite villain and Arkham Asylum is my favorite setting because they’re both so damn gleefully creepy. Therefore, I thought this slim volume of Joker-narrated, one-off villain-led tales would be a good start as my own venture into the gi-fucking-normous continuity, the first superhero comic I have not read by trading off on my boyfriend’s assurance that it’s awesome. (Although I still love those recommendations because 1. he’s always right about them and 2. they mean I get to make him read lit fic novels that he will end up enjoying too.)

I was right! Although such choosing logic doesn’t allow for the unexpected emotional left hook I’m always looking for, I did get several expected taps to the chin from this. Each story is drawn and written by different people, so the weak morality tale of the first story (everybody fears the Joker but he’s not the monster this time! It’s YOU PEOPLE and all he’s doing is exposing your own bloodlust through reality TV!) and the Lady or the Tiger? ending of the last (the reader flips a coin to see how deeply Two-Face has affected a guy with his same burn condition!) are isolated incidents. The Penguin’s story is my favorite, drawn rounded with parallels that visually connect his past and present in an obvious psychological path without getting him monologing. Oh, except for these couple of panels where he’s talking about this girl he’s fallen in love with while his henchmen get thrown around in front of him, and then Batman drops down and says he’ll be watching him and the Penguin goes, all day-dreamy distracted, “Yes, yes, see you next week.”

But then he discovers that he can’t, in fact, overcome his past after all, and he returns to form by taking out his anger on the one thing that was starting to rebuild his humanity. It was pretty sweet.

Poison Ivy’s is basically an origin story with naked leafy ass, and the Scarecrow gets some neat deco art but a disappointingly thin connection between his talk about harnessing fear and the actual action. All enjoyable, and I believe there is a Volume II on the shelves. 

Best of 2009?

Book: The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009

Authors: various

Published: 2009 (Vintage Anchor Publishing)

Pages: 380 of stories

“Conventional” is a word that could go either way: good if it’s talking about anti-murder social norms, for instance, or bad when planning what to wear for a Parliament Funkadelic concert. For short stories, it falls in that maddening grey area of It Depends. Here, it goes mostly flat.

These are good stories. But are they as electrifying and eclectic as 2009 wants to be remembered? Hell, no. 2009 must’ve been a boring-ass year for short stories (oh God I’m so ashamed that I don’t know how false that is) OR the PEN/O. Henry Prize people treat experimental fiction like I do; with polite smiles and forced attention if they run into each other at a cocktail party.

But they’re the hosts of this weird soirée. They’re the host who knows hidden little things about everybody and how they would secretly fit together with other people’s hidden little things and so it’s their literary duty to nudge these into place so all of a sudden everyone has these epiphanies and goes home saying, “Wow, I had no IDEA we’d get along so well!” to their new best friends. They don’t do that in here.

Even the most lively piece, a chapter from Junot Diaz’s A Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (I just get more and more proof that book is worth obsessing over), I knew already. It’s still awesome, of course, and all the other stories were good and I enjoyed them, but I didn’t get jolted by anything new, and that’s the whole reason I buy anthologies like this.

Well. That’s one reason.

The second reason is completely selfish and always makes these sorts of collection worth it even if the stories are lackluster. Listed in the back are all the magazines and literary journals that submitted stories to the prize committed for that year. And not just the names, but the websites and the editor contacts and the physical mailing addresses. So I make a habit of going down these lists for places to submit my own work. (You know, when I’m getting low on rejection notices or contributor copies.) It gives me that sickening rush of ambition that’s a good motivation to get my submitting ass in gear to shape up and send out whatever I’ve got new from the past whenever of writing.

Two or six or nine months from now, this book will finish proving its worth to me. Until then, it will sit on my shelf in deceptive calm, much like me half an hour before a deadline.     

Katydids

Book: The Book of Human Insects

Author/artist: Osamu Tezuka

Published: 2011 (Vertical; this edition), 1970-1971 (Play Comic; original serial run)

Pages: 364

Trying to get a handle on what’s so good about a revolutionary is difficult when said revolutionary ushered in the movement that became the norm over the next forty years. Style taken for granted and even expected now blew people’s hair off when it first came out. But how does a style stay fresh through its process of mainstreaming?

Wait, I’m supposed to have an answer for that. Um. Sex and violence and blackmailing that all revolves around a pretty young girl who manipulates her way through most of the artistic talent spectrum while recharging at her childhood home next to a wax figure of her dead mother will always cause compulsive page-turning. Especially if there’s an insect metamorphosis structural metaphor that’s obvious but never explicated mentioned (I love you a little for that, Mr. Tezuka). Especially especially if the characters are all drawn so uniquely and the sound effects are either onomonopias or stage directions, depending on what makes the story clearer.

Yes! That is why Tezuka still reads completely unique. Uh huh.

I mean it could be that I’m still a noob in the comic world. But y’all, the point is I liked the story and I connected with the emotions and I kept turning the pages (taking a break when they discussed the Japanese steel industry and flinching twice when the young girl gets slapped by a man—once because she stole a life’s work’s honor from one and once because she wanted to get rid of another’s child, which—I understand the first instance a lot better even if my kneejerk reaction is “Gah let’s not hit women”) until I hit the lonely, lonely end.

And ultimately, that’s the best measure I have as your Constant Reader.  

Auntie Zadie doesn't actually live here.

Book: Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

Author: Zadie Smith

Published: 2009 (Penguin)

Pages: 297

I had been saving this collection since I bought it for something ridiculous like 90% off cover price in the last gasping summer days of my hometown Borders. Why? Because It's Zadie motherfuckin' Smith, author of three of my favorite novels, the first and the best of which she got published when she was twenty-four. White Teeth at twenty-four!

And so I was saving this because if I read it right when I bought it, it'd be over with too soon. I'd have no ZS to break the monotony of dead white lit fic I have a habit of putting way too much hope in.

And so, when her essays reveal a tremendous knowledge of literary theory and intellectual cultural analysis and only the briefest, unadorned glimpses of personal life, I was reminded of Stuff I've Read on the Internet (fuck save us all) that said she's kind of a cold person. 

I really don't want her to be like that. I want her to be a sister of literature, like she talks about in her essay on Their Eyes Were Watching God. I want to feel like she'd find a funny, easy way to break her favorite subjects down for us while letting her methods reveal how her own brain works.

Maybe these essays do, and her mind just works a lot more like a straightforward scholar than I want it to. Her collection of movie reviews for The Guardian are the strongest arguments for the possibility of her being the person I want her to be; but they're her briefest and least seriously structured. And I could track various tropes in her novels in subject matters, at the very least: Golden-era Hollywood, old fathers who started second lives, mixed race and age-gap marriages, straddling cultural lines and not being quite accepted on either side.

These are solid, excellently-written essays. But I was expecting a series of those chats you have with your best friend at two in the morning outside wandering back to their car when the air is clear enough to shoot your ideas back and forth on invisible telepathic lines. What I got was a series of discussions from a really good teacher. I learned more this way, but I missed the emotional high that comes from the matching of minds.

Translated: I am shamed into thinking I should've been an English major.

Weirdness evolves

Book: Innovative Fiction: Stories for the Seventies

Authors: various

Pages: 224

Published: 1972 (Dell Publishing Co., Inc.)

The seventies, man. To me, they sound like Led Zeppelin, look like my parents’ faded high school senior portraits, and make me blink like I’m staring at a disco ball. I don’t know how much of the persevered nostalgia to believe; I wasn’t there.

But I’m most inclined to believe real time travelers like this collection of short stories, which have the authentic whiff of being written and published in the era. It’s interesting to see what qualified as innovative fiction from forty years ago, because to me, it seems like avant-garde prose shares a lot of the same underlying structural principles:

• Stream of consciousness narration that implies chaos and all its marginalia is important because it’s closer to the actual thinking process and thus a more authentic way of recording
• Screwing around with grammar, most notably making up new words and writing dialect phonetically
• Seemingly nonsense that represents a higher theme buried under stupid-sounding sentences
• Titles that crack me up (I’m going to start yelling, “Miss Euayla Is the Sweetest Thang!” [all emphasis and capitals and exclamation points the author’s] at random intervals to liven up my work of standing at a cash register)
• Multiple points of view that clash together like jagged pieces of glass to make the reader wonder what really happened and how

But just because authors play around the same way doesn’t mean they come up with the same thing, or even things that look remotely like each other. These stories still seem odd now, which means weird just keeps evolving. (Woo!)

Most of these stories I enjoyed on at least one level. Sheer absurdity carries a lot of them, like the first one “The Hyannis Port Story” about a guy who goes to install windows in a very vocally Goldwater-supporting house that’s right near the Kennedys’, and “The Jewbird,” which is about a talking bird who comes into a family’s house and starts integrating himself into the family before the dad decides he hates it and kicks it out. 

“Momentum,” the story I was most reluctant to read because it was presented in one big breath of stream of consciousness on two independent columns of each page that I had to zigzag both my eyeballs and brain through while still remembering the other side, surprised me at how touching I found it by the end. It’s about a guy going back to his college and trying to relive his glory days. This was the best example of how a weird structure can elevate a common subject; his rush of confessions and digressions revealed his nerves and mood swings right next to the everyday details that he had to pay just as much attention to in order to get through his visit.

A couple stories I just didn’t understand, whether I’m too removed from the political subtlties of the times or whatever a hobo in a wheelchair is supposed to mean as a symbol when he gets shipped across America in a big crate. Sometimes I just DON’T KNOW.

But that’s okay, because as weirdness evolves, so does your Constant Reader.

   

Superheroes through one good eye

Book: Marvels

Writer: Kurt Busiek

Artist: Alex Ross

Published 2008 (as collection, Marvel)

Pages: Guys, comics don’t number their pages. Let’s just get over that now.

This is more dreamy watercolors from Alex Ross, this time depicting the rise of the Marvel universe in New York City with a focus (heh) on how it affects the citizen as seen through the photojournalistic lens of Phil Sheldon.

I use the word “dreamy” because Ross’s art is blurred just enough around the edges to give me a sort of warm fuzzy feeling when I’m looking at it even when he’s showing me a massive two-page spread of carnage wrecked by the superheroes who are supposed to be protecting the damn city, not tearing it apart. *shakes cane*

That’s what most of the conflict is about—whether or not the superheroes who emerge are actually good or just another agent of chaos (albeit well-meaning). Public opinion sways with how the big battles go; Phil himself leans more toward the thankful side with an “oh hell no!” streak about mutants, which surprised me considering how obsessed he becomes about documenting all the others so they’ll be better understood.

The writing is good in this one. Phil’s internal monologues sound like things people actually think to themselves, and he’s not overly perfect by any means. This might be a result of him being a normal guy instead of, like, Spiderman or someone, but I don’t really care because it makes for good outside observation on just exactly how these heroes are received. Good call making him a photojournalist too, because that way he can be everywhere the plot needs him to be without any unnatural torturing of his own storyline.

I never did get a full answer out of him, though. He just keeps questioning his and everybody else’s views about the superheroes until he retires, and then he puts it down like he puts down his camera. Maybe the resolution lies deeper in the Marvel canon.

A few influences I noticed in the art:

• I’m definitely not imagining the Nighthawks panel, where Ross paints a couple of his main characters into that famous café for dinner.
• I’m almost positive I’m not imagining Bea Author being painted as one of the guests who talks about how ugly the Thing is during a sculpture opening.
• I might be imagining the faces of Paul McCartney, Jimmi Page, and Keith Moon being in a couple of the medium-angle crowd scenes. I do like my classic rock. 

A brilliant scattered mind

Book: Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

Author: David Foster Wallace

Published: 2005 (Little, Brown and Company

Pages: 343

David Foster Wallace’s “Host” (about talk radio and how it got to be such a broadcasting juggernaut) is the only essay to use these box-and-arrow digressions instead of footnotes. But it illustrates perfectly what it’s like to read his writings.

“Did you know that US lexicography even had a seamy underbelly?”

No. No, I did not, but now I do, and it’s this ability to deeply mine such subjects with such a fiercely churning analysis and absurdity detector that makes David Foster Wallace one of my new favorite authors.

Yeah, this book was dense as hell, but it was worth the work and the headache I nursed after gorging on it.

(A bookstore clerk from a Charleston trip I took told me that Consider the Lobster is the best gateway into DFW’s writing. That was a couple years ago; cut to last weekend when I went with my boyfriend to the Boarder’s out here. It’s closing, which means everything’s on sale, which means you better believe we combed that entire place of half-empty shelves, which meant I found this book and decided it was time. When I run out of books from my old pile, my been-waiting-patiently-for-who-knows-how-many-months-slash-years pile, I’m going to find Infinite Jest and the three bookmarks it requires.)

His literature and language essays are the most…straightforward isn’t the right word. The most linear, I think is better. He talks about the Great Male Narcissists in a review of John Updike’s Toward the End of Time; he talks about Kafka’s humor (did you know Kafka even had any humor? I sure didn’t) in written speech; he talks at very long, interesting but also long, lengths about authority and usage of American English; he gets right to the heart of why sports memoirs are so disappointing but why he keeps buying them anyway: he keeps looking for the transcendence he sees in the great athletes when they’re playing their game, convinced their physical eloquence will translate to the written word.

YES. That. *nodsnods* I kept doing that while I was reading.

I’ve wanted to read DFW since I read an article in Rolling Stone about his suicide. He just seemed so passionate and talented and like he was actually doing something to combine those two strengths. And then in a reporting writing class I took, our first assignment was to read a commencement speech he had given; it was about trying to find the transcendent in every day, and, frankly, it’s the best advice I’ve gotten about how to deal with the real world.

So I respect DFW, a lot, as a writer and as a thinker. His writings make me feel justified and hungry about finding pathos in the deep meanings of things. No, it’s probably not a good idea to take comfort from a suicidal artist of any sort. But I do.

  

Painted to save the day

Book: The World’s Greatest Super-Heroes

Text: Paul Dini

Art: Alex Ross

Publication: 2005 (DC Comics) in collection form

Pages: not numbered

The main thing I took away from this collection is probably the least significant aspect of it: Wonder Woman is hot.

But stay with me; my appreciation stems from the gorgeous artwork that Alex Ross hand-drew and painted for these stories, which originally appeared as separate comic tabloids that tell stories of famous superheroes’ human sides. The oversized paper and the entire omnibus collected in a hefty hardback that put a dent in my stomach sucked me right into their worlds. Everything looked fantastic and dynamic and photorealistic at the same time, idealized yet in a way that seems entirely possible to achieve.

And then I read the words. Blunt, heavy-handed, overly quippy and exposition-tastic. I didn’t like them. Is going from reading a novel to reading a comic just something like going from driving a car to riding a bike—both fine modes of transportation that have to be handled with different aspects of awareness to get to the same place? It kinds of feels that way to me.

In this specific collection, Superman, Batman, and Captain Marvel all seem to be playing out personal PSAs by using their powers in very noble efforts they find doomed from the beginning but still worth pursuing. I got conflicted between thinking why don’t they just use their powers to help in ways they know will have more permanent, practical effects and wanting to give them hugs when they didn’t make as much differences as they wanted to.

I also liked the virus storyline of the Justice League American section, plus the character management that it juggled. Although two maybe-trivial questions: 1. Why is Hawkman’s wife called Hawk Girl? They seem pretty equal in all other aspects. 2. I don’t understand the Green Arrow’s concept. I mean I do—Robin Hood, basically. But why arrows?  

But Wonder Woman was pure awesome. I loved her conflict between knowing she could fix these warring countries and her shock at realizing how she came across as arrogant when she just wanted the best for humanity. And I loved how she actually learned how to deal with that, too, in a way that let her use her powers in ways that showed people her true good intentions.

All she wanted to do was save the world. And be a little taller than Superman. She kind of beasted him both ways in this collection.    

Awesome job, ladies.

Book: Fantastic Women: 18 tales of the surreal and the sublime from Tin House

Authors: various (edited by Rob Spillman)

Published: 2011 (Tin House Books)

Pages: 256

I’ve been trying to review this book but the mermaids and werewolves keep getting in the way.

They’re all over these stories, along with nuns who fall in love with lighthouse keepers and people who have two shadows, one of which grows up to be The Troubled One, and people with a surplus of oranges conducting surveys on if you think you’re someone’s most special person (hi, Miranda July!) and a woman who turns into a deer at night but doesn’t know how to tell her husband what it means and a woman bound and gagged and hanging upside down in her own home watching soldiers burn themselves and the neighborhood children on grill funeral pyres in her back yard. And a house with a tourist road running through it.

What I like most about these stories is how the peculiar parts of each are taken for granted: Uh, yeah there are pocket universes you can jump around in for fun and for hiding. That’s the way it’s always been. None of these writers club you over the head with the surreal aspects going “Look! I wrote something SURREAL! Isn’t it WEIRD and WACKY and WHIMSICAL and other w-words that mean HOLY SHIT UNIQUE?”

No. They write from places of serene, quiet confidence that you, dear reader, can figure out the weird shit on your own. They’re gonna focus on what’s going wrong over here, or how this lady gets through her day when things are falling apart.

Because they will fall apart, and nobody except the protagonists will notice until it’s too late, if ever. Sometimes the main women manage to right things, sometimes she just lets go. Either way it’s a great collection of ethereal stories that all touch each other’s fancy without being remotely identical. Yay, Tin House.

I might use the rest of this space to blab about how I don’t like when women writers are described as such. Words of all things should be taken equally as seriously from whoever writes them and based on whether the words or plots or characters or styles are stupid or not. Blah blah, done with that because I do also enjoy being able to end on a hypocritical “Awesome, ladies” note. I mean, I am a proud member of their tribe.      

Brilliant minatures

Book: And Yet They Were Happy

Author: Helen Phillips

Published: 2011 (Leapfrog Literature)

Pages: 305

The Reactions

Reaction #1

I don’t know what to make of this book. It’s a collection of two-page vignettes (which, if you’ve never tried it, is an awesome word to taste while you say it) that are, I think, loosely connected to make a bigger picture of one couple’s life. Only they don’t feel cohesive enough to be about just one couple.

They slide too much between points of view and verb tenses to construct an overarching narrative. My brain likes overarching narratives.

Reaction #2

But my brain, like with the Mike Sacks book, couldn’t put Phillips’s down either, for similar reasons. They’re really compelling, and with these, there was an added curiosity of how they were meant to tie together.

Reaction #3

I kept reading to find the hidden meaning that I was sure I was missing and would come to suddenly understand (bing!) if only I read enough of her words. Once I got beyond the flood series, which is the first chunk of the book and not the most reader-friendly part to dive into (pun intended), I started feeling connected to these weird flashes of everyday life as imagined past their ordinary boundaries. The fight series especially hit home because she managed to write exactly how it feels without exaggerating into melodrama but keeping every ounce of miserable meaning and expressing them in weird ways that shed new light on it.

And that is my favorite kind of writing.  

Outsourcing my love

Book: Your Wildest Dreams, Within Reason

Author: Mike Sacks

Published: 2011 (Tin House Books)

Pages: 264

The page count on this one lies. Two hundred and sixty-four pages sounds like sitting down to a three-course dinner; this reads like eating a family size bag of potato chips, driving that same compulsion to consume just one more to see how it tastes different than the last one until suddenly there are no next ones (and yet your stomach remains convinced there’s more for another ten minutes. Or that might just be mine).

Yeah, I know that metaphor’s been used before. Shut up. I’m saving all my nice ones for my 

novel.

My favorite piece was “Saw You on the Q Train,” which set up and deteriorated a whole relationship through imagined Craigslist missed connection ads. It’ll give you a little sense of Sacks’s superior sense of absurdity to know that Q and Purse’s downfall starts with an argument over a theoretical swing one of them didn’t want in their theoretical shared back yard and ends with lawyers putting on their best courtroom threats. On Craigslist.

Also good: “Outsource My Love,” “A Leaflet Dropped Over Amy Weller’s House” (“from the slightly more exciting, grownup, and respectable name of MICHAEL SACKS”), because Sacks is excellent at exposing the more ridiculous aspects of both romance and business jargon when he combines them; and “Short Story Geared to College Students as Written by a Thirty-Something Author,” because he nails exactly how college students act. Right? You kids still do the Limp Bizkits and whatnot, yeah? Ah, who cares. It’s funny! *waves graduated cane*   

And then there were the letters from writer Rhon Penny “(silent H), and I am no longer married,” who writes to famous authors proposing collaborations on things like getting his own fatwa (to Salman Rushdie) and extending John Steinback’s writing estate V.C. Andrews-style (ghostwritten, with poetry slams to keep it relevant to the kids). I almost fell out of my chair reading that last one, and then I righted myself and remembered that not everyone finds classic literature parodies funny. Except I bet you do if you’re reading this blog.

The only thing I didn’t care about were the lists that didn’t elaborate on their items (“Signs Your College Isn’t Very Prestigious,” “Reasons You’re Still Single,” “Things You Must Do Before You Get Too Old,” one or two more) because they went by too fast and didn’t sink in.

But let Mike Sacks funny you up, because he’s good at it.