STL #111: Pulphead: About John Jeremiah Sullivan but maybe more about Guy Davenport (Not a Ladder but a Web)

[Ed. Note: This draft has been bottle up in the queue for at least three weeks. I am going to do a 20 minute once over and release it. Writing about books I've read over 6 months ago was not a good idea. The remainder of the 2012 review will be cranked out in short order.]

The first thing I ever read by John Jeremiah Sullivan was the interview he conducted with Guy Davenport for The Paris Review. The questions are standard for the journal--mostly about process, biography, or disposition. [Ed. note: I recently read that the questions were actually written by Davenport and that he enlisted his young friend as a sort of a beard. In any case, the "interviewer" aspect of this transcript is not what struck me at the time.] The appreciative introduction is informative, but not particularly memorable apart from my keen interest in the subject. So on beginning to read Sullivan's collection of essays Pulphead, I had no memory of my earlier contact with his writing, and no knowledge of his link to Davenport. In the first essay, "Upon this Rock," about his experience attending a Christian rock festival, he refers in passing to Davenport and Benjamin Urrutia's translations of the sayings of Jesus. I noted this reference to a favored writer, but didn't think much of it. It's a rather eclectic source, but a reasonable enough reference given the subject. Nothing much in the essay suggested an influence of Davenport. The essay, approaching what to the literate liberal sensibility is a tasteless, socially harmful subject (Christian rock), reflects an honesty and engagement with the people he met there that I found touching (but still funny and aware). Two essays later, I encountered a vaguely Davenport-esque figure. Andrew Lytle is described as an aging, cultured, oracular, and dignified survivor of Modernism (well, the Agrarians) living in limited approbation and general obscurity in Lexington KY. If it was a story rather than essay, I might have suspected the main character was based on Davenport. But most of the ensuing subjects--The Real World, Michael Jackson, Axl Rose--quickly moved away from Davenport's world of high art. But midway through the volume lies "La-Hwi-Ne-Ski: Career of an Eccentric Naturalist," dedicated to Davenport. The subject, Constatine Samuel Raffinesque (the "eccentric naturalist" in question) is at once a Davenportesque subject and a curiously Davenportesque figure. Again, the central figure seems like a fictious picaro, moving through the 19th century landscape and settling in Kentucky.  The eccentric naturalist seems like he would attract the attention of the author of a monograph on Louis Aggassiz.

What to make of this unexpected connection between a working features writer, freelancing for GQ and other magazines, and the Guy of Lexington? [Ed note: Changed from "Don of Lexington." Both phrases are terrible.]  It turns out the link is personal--Sullivan grew up near GD and knew and admired him since he was a young man. In an interview he says he spent several years reading nothing but books suggested by Davenport. This unexpected connection suggests that there the web of culture that Davenport traverses so ably in his essays (and fiction for that matter) is broader than it seems at first. It is as broad as a thinking mind's interests. I take the web metaphor from Sullivan--in his capacity of Southern editor for The Paris Review he tells a correspondent looking for guidance in what to read that "My only piece of advice before recommending some titles would be: don’t fall for the inferiority/superiority racket. We’re not on a ladder here. We’re on a web. Right now you’re experiencing a desire to become more aware of and sensitive to its other strands. That feeling you’re having is culture. Whatever feeds that, go with it." He then goes on to a reading list headed by Every Force Evolves a Form, The Geography of the Imagination, and The Hunter Gracchus. 

Sullivan is no copy of Davenport but he is without a doubt a skilled craftsman, and true a voice. Any number of scenes stand out to my mind more vividly than scenes in New Yorker stories: waiting for Bunny Wailer, the uneasiness of living on the set of One Tree Hill. He crafts true and wonderful sentences: "This is us, a people of of savage sentimentality, weeping and lifting weights" is widely quoted, but my favorite is this description of Axl Rose: "I consider the moment in the 'Patience' video when he does the slow-motion snaky slide-foot dance while letting his hands float down as if they were feathers in a draftless room--one fleeting near-pause in their descent for each note that Slash emphasizes in his transition to the coda--the greatest white male rock dance moment of the video age." That unwieldily, bizarre sentiment is followed by a simpler clarification: "What Axl does is lovely, I'm sorry." [Ed. Note: This final note is the shipwreck of another version of this piece. That is what I do. I'm sorry too.]

Quarterly Report

In the first three months of 2013, my reading has followed a list established at the beginning of the year. I am following a reading program inspired by 1.) a poll of the best science fiction and fantasy novels of a)the last century and b)this century 2.)comics I have that I haven't read and 3.)prose books I have but haven't read.

sf&f: Nine Princes in Amber (quick read, lots of fun) The Name of the Wind (dreadful) American Gods (good, but long)

comics: Claremont's X-Men (so many issues) Manhattan Projects 1 (a book to follow), Pride of Bagdad, Animal Man, Flex Mentallo, Fourth World Omnibus 1 and 2 (brilliant), Incorruptible

other list books: Borges Fictions and Non

Other books: the first Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child (meh), Gone Girl (meh in retrospect), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Other notable: Caught up (almost) on New Yorkers and in process launched a tournament of short stories. In second round now, having found second stories many in podcast form of most. Finals may be full books.

In process: The Twenty Year Death, Novels in Three Lines, The Gift of Tongues (poetry anthology for April)

STL #110: Grant Morrison (Supergods and others)

I live in a poor city with an underfunded library. Last year I learned that I could get a card for the wealthier, surrounding county's library system, and well, it has made a difference. On my first visit browsing the shelves, I came across Grant Morrison's prose book Supergods. This was a book I had been excited to read. Supergods is Morrison's peculiar take on the history of superhero comics, with his own work taking a lead role in the later periods. There are two important things to know about Morrison: 1.)as a comics writer he is a genius without peer and 2.) as a prose writer he is not. Supergods focuses some of the themes you can decode from his comics or that he has uttered in various ephemeral outlets like interviews or comics letter columns. As one example, he writes “If this book has made any point clear, I hope it's that things don't have to be real to be true. Or vice versa.” That's a wordy version of his application of magic in his comics: images and words come together as magical spells, that bring things into this world that weren't in it before.

In the last week, I finished his run on Animal Man (his first major work in the American comics world) and Flex Mentallo, a narrative version of the history of comics portrayed in Supergods. The first four issues of Animal Man were one of the first things I read of his after Doom Patrol and Arkham Asylum. Coming off of those books, it was really something of a disappointment. The first four issues read like a mini-series dusting off an old property just to service the copyright of the character, which on one level it was. There are a few signs of things to come, though: the radical animal rights implications, an interweaving of the narrative strands, in which an innocuous domestic scene of the hero at home might comment on the villain's quest (and the villain isn't exactly a bad guy here). With the fifth issue though, things start to take off. Starring Wile E. Coyote as Jesus H. Christ (neither is named as such), this issues starts the journey into metafictional waters that reaches its destination twenty issues later, when Animal Man meets his maker. That is to say, Animal Man meets Grant Morrison. There's a wonderful remembrance in that issue of the author as a boy, flashing a coded message to his imaginary friend "Foxy" in the hills across the water.

Flex Mentallo comes a few years later, after Morrison had established himself as a comics messiah of sorts. As Supergods makes clear, this book is the secret history of comics--each issue represents an era in comics, from the Golden Age to the Silver Age, from the Dark Age to a later Renaissance; in all modesty, Morrison uses Flex Mentallo to mark the emergence of a new age of comics.

Although putatively about Supergods, I see this post has actually become about my more recent reading of Morrison. I'll end with some other recent reading I've been enthusiastic about--Kirby's "Fourth World" comics. These comics, interlocking plotlines from four series were obviously an influence on Morrison, not only for their theogony but their structure, which influenced his finest work, Seven Soldiers. This project was actually a series of mini-series featuring renewed versions of C and D list superheroes. His goal was that each issue would be a self-contained unit, as would each mini-series, but the real story is in the unfolding of the entire sequence. In playing with universes inhabited with super powered beings, the writer might think to become the Super God himself. Morrison is one of the few writers in comics to fully embrace this aspect of what is essentially commerce for an artistic end.