For two of the these three months I've been off, more-or-less. I've felt that I'm not reading enough, but a glance suggests that's crazy. I continue on my diligent work on my pre-established lists of science fiction and fantasy "gaps"; prose books I own but hadn't gotten around to reading; comics I etc. Mixed in are some poetry I read for April and a handful of other books I checked out from the library. And so...
sf&f: Foundation (my feelings exactly); Little, Big (wonderful); Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion (I prefer the sequel); Valis (reread for the first time since I loved it as a teen); Perdido Street Station (a bit longer than necessary, but I will read more Mieville) ; The Stars My Destination (I see why it's influential, but not that impressed); Dune (in progress)
comics: Building Stories (amazing); Rabbi's Cat (great); The Lovely Horrible Stuff (not the Eddie Campbell I love) and Mssr Leotard (not it either, but closer); Morrison's New X-Men, JLA, and Doom Patrol (the last in progress); New Moon (Jason, who I like ok); Carnet de Voyage (reread)
other/list: The 20 Year Death (interesting experiment, but the sources (Simenon, Chandler, and Thompson) are all better; Novels in Three Lines (an odd book); The Counterfeiters (Hugh Kenner--terrific. Must finally read Gulliver's Travels); Splendide Hotel (Sorrentino-- wonderful); The Widow (Simenon dure. Ariel Winter was closer than I thought at first).
other: The Gift of Tongues and In the American Tree (two very different poetry anthologies); Gustaf Sobin's Earth as Air (collection of lyrics for National Poetry Month; Sharpe's Escape (meh); Madame Maigret's Own Case (not exactly as billed) Desparate Characters.
If you count TBP collections for the Morrison, that is 35 books in three months.
Monday, July 1, 2013
Monday, June 3, 2013
STL #113: The Boys
And with this I end what has become a half-year-long accounting of the reading of the previous year. At this point, I don't care that much about The Boys. There was a spiritedness I felt (or imagined) when I first discovered it last year, but as it has sunk in, I recognize the series clearly is lesser than and derivative of other earlier critiques of the superhero genre. There's a whole tradition of super-hero critique starting in the mid-80s with Watchmen and Dark Knight (maybe). It's well-known that Alan Moore intended Watchmen as a final nail in the coffin, the ultimate critique of the genre's fascist tendencies. What happened was that subsequent work embrace the darkness of the critique--that's probably what's happening in Frank Miller's work since that time, it pretty much explains the flood of "grim and gritty" comics of the 90s. Around the new millennium, the critique returned with Warren Ellis's work on Stormwatch and The Authority and has been a part of the landscape ever since. There are essentially two ways of looking at this movement, both of which involve the having and eating of cake. One one hand, the fans can feel all sophisticated being hep to the critique while indulging in the most gratuitous tropes. On the other hand, this formula allows the writers to get paid best they can while making fun of a genre and fanbase they disdain. I'm pretty sure both things are going on with Garth Ennis's first extended creator-owned series since Preacher. It's about a covert org bent on policing the abuses of superheroes, who run amok with violence and sexual debauchery. The series then gets to portray orgies and decapitations, all in the name of critique of the fascist love of power inherent, they say, in superhero comics.
So maybe for a short time I played the mark, the drooling idiot who thought he was in the know. But in any case, The Boys may remain important in the history my reading practices (a topic I understand is of interest to no one but myself). My first contact with The Boys came through a stack of single issues, the "floppies" that for so long remained the cornerstone of the comic book industry. I got these at a library discard sale, along with the TPB (trade paperback collection of previously published issues) of a mini-series featuring all the same characters in the most "shocking" excess. The mini-series was called "Herogasm" which says everything I need to say about it. The first phase of my reading was therefore disjointed--I had the first four issues, a gap of about 30 issues followed about 20 of the next 30 issues. I also had partial mini-series spotlighting main characters and the aforementioned 'gasm. The result of this kind of reading, an artifact of the publication culture based on serial publication and a collector's mentality, is a sense of the "world." You know the types of things that happen in the world, but not all the details of what "really" did happen. A friend then loaned me a digital archive included all the issues published at the time, which was all but the last. I read these on a cbr reader on my iPad. That final issue I purchased and read on Comixology, a store with its own reader. So it might be that The Boys will the the first of a chain of hybrid reading experience that I experience in a range of media. This hybrid species probably won't last that long; floppies at least are sure to disappear in the near future. The question I wonder about, then, is how does the material condition of reading an incomplete stack of issues differ from the continuous reading of a digitally archived body of work? It certainly does, and it seems clear the previous is soon to disappear from our world.
So maybe for a short time I played the mark, the drooling idiot who thought he was in the know. But in any case, The Boys may remain important in the history my reading practices (a topic I understand is of interest to no one but myself). My first contact with The Boys came through a stack of single issues, the "floppies" that for so long remained the cornerstone of the comic book industry. I got these at a library discard sale, along with the TPB (trade paperback collection of previously published issues) of a mini-series featuring all the same characters in the most "shocking" excess. The mini-series was called "Herogasm" which says everything I need to say about it. The first phase of my reading was therefore disjointed--I had the first four issues, a gap of about 30 issues followed about 20 of the next 30 issues. I also had partial mini-series spotlighting main characters and the aforementioned 'gasm. The result of this kind of reading, an artifact of the publication culture based on serial publication and a collector's mentality, is a sense of the "world." You know the types of things that happen in the world, but not all the details of what "really" did happen. A friend then loaned me a digital archive included all the issues published at the time, which was all but the last. I read these on a cbr reader on my iPad. That final issue I purchased and read on Comixology, a store with its own reader. So it might be that The Boys will the the first of a chain of hybrid reading experience that I experience in a range of media. This hybrid species probably won't last that long; floppies at least are sure to disappear in the near future. The question I wonder about, then, is how does the material condition of reading an incomplete stack of issues differ from the continuous reading of a digitally archived body of work? It certainly does, and it seems clear the previous is soon to disappear from our world.
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
STL #112: Skills and Exhortations (The Art of Fielding and The Original of Laura)
I liked The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach's 2011 debut novel. Quite a bit, actually. It is a well-honed perfectly conventional novel. In reading it, you can tell it emerged from workshopping and rewriting, and blood and sweat and tears (or rather, typing, typing, and typing). What I remember enjoying in particular is a single refrain, the prototypical sports cheer: " You are skilled! We exhort you!" and also a handful characters including Henry Skrimshaw, the protagonist shortstop who comes down with the yips and his mentor, the catcher Schwarzy who is skilled, but falling apart at the age of twenty two. The novel is enjoyable, immensely readable. The author is skilled, we should exhort him.
I have a feeling that Harbach will always be, at least in part, the author of The Art of Fielding. In the end, the author is merely skilled. He may have another celebrated season, for his next novel or the one after that. Vladimir Nabokov is many things, but is not the author of The Original of Laura. He certainly wouldn't claim it--he wanted his notes toward this unfinished novel destroyed because he did not have the time to develop it and refine it, or even finish it. The edition designed by Chip Kidd reproduces the index cards he composed on. Some are relatively fleshed out, some are just bare sketches of scenes. One scene sticks out in my head. It comes early on in the sequence, when the book still reads (nearly) as a finished novel. The title character is returning home late, after a night of illicit behavior, and she and we see a laughable character, "her obese husband, in a rumpled black suit and tartan booties with clasps... walking a striped cat on an overlong leash." This is just won gem in a drawerful, trunkful, of VN's career. The figure is pathetic, and it is the clasps on the booties that makes the reader disgusted even if sympathetic. This is the consummate novelist's art, which Nabokov could seemingly invoke at will during his long career--finding an image that reveals whole unwritten stories, illuminate the life of a character, and allowing us to understand our world more fully.
What I seem to be doing here is weighing a single index card against a doorstop of a novel, and finding in favor of the 3 X 5 card. This isn't fair of me, pitting a rookie against a Hall-of-Famer. So what am I getting at in this comparison? Hymning a paean to genius? I spent an afternoon reading The Original of Laura, but several days with the The Art of Fielding. I have recommended the latter to numerous people, but can't imagine a scenario by which I would recommend the former (it is nowhere near where one would begin with Nabokov; surely any Nabokophile would be apprised of it already). I think I might be in the thought-territory that I enter every time I read a recently published novel: that the form is dead. Novels continue to be written for many years to come; they will emerge burnished and hopeful from workshops and they will drop roughly out of isolated writers' lonely years. But at this point, I fear we have nothing new to learn from novels. We are merely picking over images and shards. The fragmentary form of Nabokov's notes might represent a literature better suited for out times--brief and gestural, but gleaming out of the darkness.
I have a feeling that Harbach will always be, at least in part, the author of The Art of Fielding. In the end, the author is merely skilled. He may have another celebrated season, for his next novel or the one after that. Vladimir Nabokov is many things, but is not the author of The Original of Laura. He certainly wouldn't claim it--he wanted his notes toward this unfinished novel destroyed because he did not have the time to develop it and refine it, or even finish it. The edition designed by Chip Kidd reproduces the index cards he composed on. Some are relatively fleshed out, some are just bare sketches of scenes. One scene sticks out in my head. It comes early on in the sequence, when the book still reads (nearly) as a finished novel. The title character is returning home late, after a night of illicit behavior, and she and we see a laughable character, "her obese husband, in a rumpled black suit and tartan booties with clasps... walking a striped cat on an overlong leash." This is just won gem in a drawerful, trunkful, of VN's career. The figure is pathetic, and it is the clasps on the booties that makes the reader disgusted even if sympathetic. This is the consummate novelist's art, which Nabokov could seemingly invoke at will during his long career--finding an image that reveals whole unwritten stories, illuminate the life of a character, and allowing us to understand our world more fully.
What I seem to be doing here is weighing a single index card against a doorstop of a novel, and finding in favor of the 3 X 5 card. This isn't fair of me, pitting a rookie against a Hall-of-Famer. So what am I getting at in this comparison? Hymning a paean to genius? I spent an afternoon reading The Original of Laura, but several days with the The Art of Fielding. I have recommended the latter to numerous people, but can't imagine a scenario by which I would recommend the former (it is nowhere near where one would begin with Nabokov; surely any Nabokophile would be apprised of it already). I think I might be in the thought-territory that I enter every time I read a recently published novel: that the form is dead. Novels continue to be written for many years to come; they will emerge burnished and hopeful from workshops and they will drop roughly out of isolated writers' lonely years. But at this point, I fear we have nothing new to learn from novels. We are merely picking over images and shards. The fragmentary form of Nabokov's notes might represent a literature better suited for out times--brief and gestural, but gleaming out of the darkness.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
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.]
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.]
Sunday, April 7, 2013
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)
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.
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.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
STL #109: Father and Son, and Some Exercises for Editing
Like last week, I am writing on a strict deadline (I just spent 30 seconds dithering between "strict" and "tight" and then picking the word "dithering"--time to move on). This style might be appropriate because one of the two writers I want to talk about probably writes with minimal editing, letting words pour out without agonizing them. I'm talking about Stephen King, the old man on the mountain of horror fiction (the mountain being made of words he has written). The other writer I think might be a little more judicious (I had "measured," but that doesn't project the quality of character (not character attribute") that I want--on with it) though I think his novel could be trimmed too. This other writer I is Stephen King's son, Joe Hill.
Both writers are clearly horror genre writers, though of different generations of course. They are both well beyond the raw weirdness of pulp writers, but not a part of the 'cooked' type of mainstream novelists for whom horror is just a trope ("really, aren't the only real monsters of our own making? Another glass of chardonnay?") Both King and Hill I'm sure recognize the metaphorical implications of horror fiction, but they also really want to scare the shit out of their readers. Hill's novel, Heart-Shaped Box, had some of the scariest scenes I read last year--the ghost on the radio, the girlfriend with the pistol... as far as the scare-factor goes, I might only add a scene in John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel The Harbor in which two supernatural rednecks drown a girl in a mop bucket, and scenes with Pennywise the clown from It (see below). HSB is maybe a little two long, and the explanation of the haunting is disappointing, but for pure scariness it really delivered. It took me longer to read because I had to stop reading it at night before bed.
As I said I got spooked by It, too. I may have mentioned that I read four King books last year-- my first (and maybe last) four ever: Carrie (sketchy, in the sense of undeveloped), The Shining (good characterization of Jack Torrance, but the fact that King was figuring it out as he goes along really shows), and On Writing (fine) were the others. The Shining and It were both good, but also too long. The worst thing a horror novel can do is explain to much, and late in It the characters travel back in time to see this great evil land on planet earth (IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE!!!). Somehow Lovecraft, in his raw state, can get away with something like that, but my point is that even if this scene doesn't detract it certainly doesn't add, and the novel would benefit by losing at least 200 pages. I've heard this verbosity has gotten even worse as King career progress and his editors stopped bothering to tell him to cut (because a)they were too busy counting their money and b) apparently editors don't do that anymore.) I imagined teaching a creative writing class in which It is used for a series of editing exercises. Keeping every sentence, reduce a portion the text by 10, 20, 35 percent. Reduce the novel by 20 percent by selecting sentences to strike. Reduce the novel by 35 percent by deleting chapters. Reduce the novel by 50 percent by deleting chapters, sentences, words. And so on. I think any of these exercises could be done, and the result would be better.
I'll be moving on from this disquisition into horror next week. While this year I'm planning on delving into fantasy in an organized way, I still plan on reading more horror. So where to next? Though I said I might not read more King, thinking about how his novels would be better if shortened subliminally convinced me to try some of his short stories, like his early collection Night Shift or the novellas in Different Seasons (or Danse Macabre a nonfiction book about horror, for further recommendations). I might also try Hill's short stories in 20th Century Ghosts. In fact, I can easily put together a little list of short stories, from M.R. James to Joyce Carol Oates (Nightside is the name of one collection, and there's another I can't recall) to a writer named Thomas Ligetti who sounds interesting (Songs to a Dead Dreamer). To that, I would add Shirley Jackson (based on Lethem's recommendation), Peter Straub's Ghost Story and a book by Andrew Vachss, who I know as an ultra-hard boiled crime writer, called Sacrifice.
Both writers are clearly horror genre writers, though of different generations of course. They are both well beyond the raw weirdness of pulp writers, but not a part of the 'cooked' type of mainstream novelists for whom horror is just a trope ("really, aren't the only real monsters of our own making? Another glass of chardonnay?") Both King and Hill I'm sure recognize the metaphorical implications of horror fiction, but they also really want to scare the shit out of their readers. Hill's novel, Heart-Shaped Box, had some of the scariest scenes I read last year--the ghost on the radio, the girlfriend with the pistol... as far as the scare-factor goes, I might only add a scene in John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel The Harbor in which two supernatural rednecks drown a girl in a mop bucket, and scenes with Pennywise the clown from It (see below). HSB is maybe a little two long, and the explanation of the haunting is disappointing, but for pure scariness it really delivered. It took me longer to read because I had to stop reading it at night before bed.
As I said I got spooked by It, too. I may have mentioned that I read four King books last year-- my first (and maybe last) four ever: Carrie (sketchy, in the sense of undeveloped), The Shining (good characterization of Jack Torrance, but the fact that King was figuring it out as he goes along really shows), and On Writing (fine) were the others. The Shining and It were both good, but also too long. The worst thing a horror novel can do is explain to much, and late in It the characters travel back in time to see this great evil land on planet earth (IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE!!!). Somehow Lovecraft, in his raw state, can get away with something like that, but my point is that even if this scene doesn't detract it certainly doesn't add, and the novel would benefit by losing at least 200 pages. I've heard this verbosity has gotten even worse as King career progress and his editors stopped bothering to tell him to cut (because a)they were too busy counting their money and b) apparently editors don't do that anymore.) I imagined teaching a creative writing class in which It is used for a series of editing exercises. Keeping every sentence, reduce a portion the text by 10, 20, 35 percent. Reduce the novel by 20 percent by selecting sentences to strike. Reduce the novel by 35 percent by deleting chapters. Reduce the novel by 50 percent by deleting chapters, sentences, words. And so on. I think any of these exercises could be done, and the result would be better.
I'll be moving on from this disquisition into horror next week. While this year I'm planning on delving into fantasy in an organized way, I still plan on reading more horror. So where to next? Though I said I might not read more King, thinking about how his novels would be better if shortened subliminally convinced me to try some of his short stories, like his early collection Night Shift or the novellas in Different Seasons (or Danse Macabre a nonfiction book about horror, for further recommendations). I might also try Hill's short stories in 20th Century Ghosts. In fact, I can easily put together a little list of short stories, from M.R. James to Joyce Carol Oates (Nightside is the name of one collection, and there's another I can't recall) to a writer named Thomas Ligetti who sounds interesting (Songs to a Dead Dreamer). To that, I would add Shirley Jackson (based on Lethem's recommendation), Peter Straub's Ghost Story and a book by Andrew Vachss, who I know as an ultra-hard boiled crime writer, called Sacrifice.
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