20090403

Apparently, and this has been brought to my attention on several fronts, I have not kept up the kind of rigorous schedule of posting that readers expect or require of me. How did we get to this place, you and I? A place where I kind of have just become indolent, flush with the lethargy born of years of practiced irresponsibly? A place where you can barely be bothered to care, challenged only by the vaguest sense of a tickle in the backs of your minds—a curiosity—that prompts little more than a whatever happened to... Whatshisname?

So last Thanksgiving, the Monk and I took a week's vacation to travel northbound in order to visit one of her long-sequestered college chums. After a relaxing time away, we returned to a house that was in desperate need of cleaning. I took on the dishes and halfway through, whilst scrubbing a glass tumbler, said glass broke and lacerated my right hand to the bone. Essentially, I couldn't type well for over a month. After that I just kind of got out of the habit and while occasionally considering renewing my interest in the platform, just couldn't get up the inspiration. This earned lethargy continues apace even today.

This does not mean that I have been inactive though. My use of Facebook has been fruitful, I have written several book reviews, my participation at Christ and Pop Culture continues undaunted, and I've even begun a Twitter stream that I am attempting to keep worthwhile despite the fact that the platform actively thwarts worth. In any case, if you're interested, here are a pile of links to things I've produced of late.

Christ and Pop Culture
While primarily occupied as what I like to think of as the backbone of the site's commenting citizenry, I was recently asked to guest write an article in regards to Michale Karounos' recent review of the movie adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Coraline. The book and movie were great fun and the review's author both didn't get the material but made a number of foolish statements in its regard. So much so that Gaiman posted how thoroughly amused he was by the ridiculous effort. My article in response is found here: "Sticks and Stones: Being Hurt by a Christian Review of Coraline".

Book Reviews
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
The Absolute Sandman (4 vols.) by Neil Gaiman
Silverfish by David Lapham
Emma (7 vols.) by Kaoru Mori
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

Twitter
Twitter, to me, is a bastion of obnoxious nothings. There are a very few people performing on Twitter that are worth the trouble. As an evolving medium, people are still trying to figure out what to do with it and I think they'll continue to wonder until Twitter itself evolves. Part of Twitter's allure is its limitations, but those limitations also fuel my frustration with the medium—as they actively hamper value. Facebook offers something similar to Twitter, but adds the ability for user interaction with comments. This destroys Twitter's model in some ways. Yet Facebook's post-interactivity is limited to those who are your friends. One cannot simply just Follow worthwhile people on Facebook. As I said, media in flux.

In any case, my experiment with the communication vehicle lies here.

As I said there are very few people who make Following a really worthwhile endeavor, but one of those people is Merlin Mann of You Look Nice Today. I'm following Neil Gaiman, who is sometimes interesting, and Melanie Cogdill, who is likewise sometimes interesting. But really, Merlin is the only master of the medium I've encountered.

20081023.SnuffReview

NOTE: Until I get bored of the conceit, all reviews will be introduced like so with a clumsily worded Haiku Review.

Title: Snuff
Book: Novel
Author: Chuck Palahniuk
Year: 2008
Pages: 197

I'm not sure where the real problem with Snuff lay. Sure it's easy to point to dull and repetitive dialogue. Or continual narrative use by several characters of stock phrases that nobody uses very often. Or the uninspired characters. But somewhere beyond all that, Palahniuk just kind of, I dunno, fails to deliver a worthwhile story. And it didn't help that the ending was a confused jumble of narrative vomit—unless there were some hints to a different chronology that I had missed in my hurry to finish.

So anyway, here's what's what. Cassie Wright is this aging porn queen and she's setting out to break records by accomplishing sex acts with 600 men in a single go. Most of the book occurs in the green room, where the gradually diminishing group of 600 men mill about eating snacks and trying to keep themselves ready for action. The book is narrated by four of the characters, three individuals from the assembled male-strom (Numbers 72, 137, and 600) and Ms. Wright's manager, Sheila.

You would think that with four narrators, we would get four distinct voices, but despite the fact that Mr. 600 describes everyone as a "dude" and Sheila takes every opportunity in her narrative stream to refer to men by a string of euphemisms for masturbation (e.g. "pud-puller," "willy-wankers," "palm pilots"—yeah, I know, ho-hum...)—despite the fact that a couple of these narrators have obnoxious verbal tics, each of the four are quite obviously Palahniuk thinly veiled. Each of the narrators does this little shtick where they'll enlighten the reader to some odd piece of knowledge about one subject or another (usually movie star trivia) and then they'll punctuate by saying: "True fact." I've never run into anyone who talks like this ever, so to run into four or five in the course of a day seems a little tough to swallow. Also, I may have heard a person at some point in my life refer to the pointing index finger as a quote-unquote gun finger, but again, four people in a day?

Anyway, the story moves along at a nice clip and I finished it in good time, but I wouldn't call myself satisfied. Maybe Palahniuk spoiled me with Survivor, but a lot of this just had a kind of been-there/done-that feel to it. This felt like an author phoning it in. And I still don't know what happened with Sheila at the end. One minute she's pounding on the door and the next? It either skips a scene or we go back in time. And in either case, I just don't get it.

Rating:

Note: Overstreet can sleep happy tonight secure in the knowledge that his book was better than Chuck "First Rule" Palahniuk's.

HR.AuraliasColors

NOTE: Until I get bored of the conceit, all reviews will be introduced like so with a clumsily worded Haiku Review.

Title: Auralia's Colors
Book: Novel (Fantasy)
Author: Jeffrey Overstreet
Year: 2007
Pages: 336

I had only heard good things about Jeffrey Overstreet's fantasy novel, Auralia's Colors. Which is, I'll state up front, not the best way to approach a text unbiased. I picked the book up expecting greatness and found only good-ness. I delved its innards hoping for something that would transcend its genre and discovered a novel mired in its genre.

Not that it's all bad. And neither is it at all bad. Auralia's Colors does though make generous use of what for lack of a better term can be called faults.

First the bad.

The novel, like most of its kind, labours heavily under the burden of its forefathers. The stereotyped tropes of the genre are a cruel taskmaster under whose fell thumb Auralia and her colours never threaten to emerge. The themes are tired and overworn and I felt like I was reading any number of the fantasy books I grew up with as a kid. Many of the characters are mere caricatures and you know from the first page of their introduction exactly who they will turn out to be (I had hoped while reading that he would be turning these stereotypes on the reader, playing with and then dashing expectations, but alas...). The prose is overheated, wrought over and again in the forge of Overstreet's imagination. (I read the first couple pages to The Monk while she prepared herself a lunch and her response: "Hm, I think he's trying to hard.")

Randall Munroe (of XKCD) recently posited a helpful rule of thumb regarding these types of novels:

Auralia and her colours do suffer on this point—though not as much as they might. While Overstreet is not quite as imaginative world-builder as Phillip Pullman and doesn't have the master's grasp on the language as does Tolkien, he does tell a well-paced story. This is something at which Pullman, for all his imagination, utterly fails. Overstreet's characters who are less like the cardboard standees that populated the Suncoast Videos of yesteryear are engaging enough and I really did want to find out what would happen in the end. The climax to this first book was satisfying enough that I went to the library to see if they had the first sequel Cybele's Midnight, but they didn't. And I'm not quite sold enough to actually purchase it.

As far as Fantasy goes, I'd put Overstreet far below Tolkien (but who isn't when it comes to fantasy), quite a stretch below Gaiman, a bit below Feist and Rowling, far above Pullman (though my butt is also far above Pullman), better than most of those Dungeons & Dragons books I read in juniour high, and probably on a par with McCaffrey and nearly on a level with Lewis (though in fair disclosure, I'm not the biggest fan of Lewis). Of course, this is his first novel and some authors have been known to hone their craft as they go.

Rating:

NOTE: While browsing Borders last week, I thought I'd check out the book's sequel, read the first chapter, and see if it was improvement enough to tempt my wallet (as I happened to have a spending allowance burning a book-sized hole in my pocket). I went to Sci-Fi/Fantasy and browsed down to the O section. Or more precisely, where there would have been an O section had there been any O authors. Apparently there are plenty of N fantasy authors and piles of Ps, but nary an O.

Still, I knew they had the book, so I meandered over to their handy self-service computer and located the mislaid volume. As it turned out, they had a bunch of copies. All in the wrong section. For some reason, the novels had been labeled (I'm guessing by the publisher) as "Christian Fiction." Man, way to stick to the ghetto. Sure, the book would probably find a ready audience (as Tycho might say, "a Captive audience), but the author's work will never be able to be appealed to a wider audience if it's shuffled into some dreary corner with a bunch of books that didn't deserve the cost of binding. Seriously, have you ever stopped to admired the tortured writing that passes under the banner of "Christian fiction."

I might not have been made a particular fan of Overstreet's trilogy (?), but I liked it alright. And I could see myself finishing the series if it didn't cost me anything but time. His work deserves better than the ghetto.

20080930.Berlin.Review

Book: Comic
Author: Jason Lutes
Year: 2000
Pages: 212

Every now and again, a comic comes out that assures me that the medium can tell certain kinds of stories in a way that no other medium can touch. Every now and again, a comic comes out that despite its natural humility asserts itself as a model to which the medium should aspire. Every now and again, a comic comes out that just flat-out knocks me off my feet and makes me think that everything is going to be alright after all.

That comic this time round is Jason Lutes' Berlin: City of Stones.

It's not that Berlin presents such a rosie vista of the panoply of human history. It doesn't. It's not that Berlin will offer a solution to the din of political strife that will always wrack the tired bones of human society. It won't. And it's not even that Berlin allows true love to conquer even the dankest moments of our human despair. It can't.

What Lutes' book does, however, is demonstrate that creative geniuses still stalk the earth. The great classical composers are dead and gone. The sculptors who decorated the world with marble and jade are survived only by their stones. The giants of the jazz era have passed into mere memory. Bach. Beethoven. Mozart. Michelangelo. Bernini. Rodin. Satch. Bird. Trane.

And here is Jason Lutes.

Among the geniuses of the comic form (Ware, Smith, Eisner, Hernandez, etc.), Lutes is in the top tier. His work is careful, planned, and makes use of so many narrative tricks that they cease to be tricks and exist merely as natural part of his extensive visual vocabulary. Recently having taught an introduction to comics creation, I had a hard time not using Lutes' work in every example I had prepared to illustrate technique. There is so much story built into every page that his works are the kinds that continue unfolding upon subsequent readings.

With the recent release of the second book of the trilogy, Berlin: City of Smoke, I thought it best to reread City of Stones so I could jump right into its sequel. This was my third complete read of the book and fresh narrative details continued to make themselves known. With the story and plot developments more or less solid in mind, I was able to pay closer attention to some of the methodology behind Lutes' work here, taking special care to follow his panel transitions and the way he allows the story to flit from character to character. This is all the product of a special kind of genius.

For those unaware, Berlin follows numerous characters through the end of the Twenties and the start of the Thirties in Wiemar's Germany. The economy is a disaster. The government is breaking the terms of armistice. Political turmoil grips the city as communists and fascists fight to save their country from its fate. And of course, there are the Jews, living under the quiet threat of a future none would predict. Yet despite it all, Berlin is still trying to be a Great City. There is still wealth and privilege (even while the workers begin falling to poverty and starvation) and veiled acceptance of the libertines. And the press is still free. Somewhat.

Berlin follows a Marxist journalist, a country-mouse art student, a nightclub singer, a family divided over politics, a Jewish tramp, the boy with whom he trades goods, a lesbian, a socialite, a policeman, and a handful of political radicals (both communist and fascist). Its weavings can chart a difficult path to traverse, but the work pays well and is worth every moment of inspection.

Rating:

Check a sample of Berlin: City of Stones via Amazon's Search Inside feature.

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Book: Comic
Author: Jason Lutes
Year: 2008
Pages: 200

As far as middle chapters go, City of Smoke runs pretty much better than expected. Second acts generally fend off some of the energy and presence of the first in order to properly explode into the final act. While maintaining his virtuosity over the form, Lutes does calm things down a bit after the May Day massacre that concluded the first act.

City of Smoke largely explores two themes: the robust nightlife that ruled Berlin's hidden quarters and the growing political strife between factions of the citizenry. And the two societies seem largely oblivious to each other. The night society drowns reality in celebration and excess, while the workaday masses are drowned by concerns for a faulty government, a crashing market, and the evidence of a revolution at hand.

As in the first, journalist Kurt Severing is our guide and it is largely from his perspective that we are probably meant to absorb the story (though not entirely—as his appalling disdain for sweet, sweet jazz marks him as unreliable). It is through Severing, who supports Marxist ideology but refuses to participate in anything more demonstrative than his occasional journalism, that we first discovered the city in the first book, City of Stones; and it is again Severing who provides teetering balance to the ruckus between the night and the day societies.

Lutes, in addition to his mastery of the comic medium, proves himself an excellent student of the human state, capturing intricately the poison that infects us all. Of course he depicts flawlessly the poor, huddled masses as they struggle to stave off starvation and fight for a political hope that will surely disappoint (as political hopes are wont to do), but further, he delivers too the poison that inflames even human joy and celebration. We are given witness to ecstasy and abandon, but realistically, we also are allowed to see the darkness that threatens from the horizon, that in some sense has already leapt into the lives of the happy.

And Lutes does this in such a way that he doesn't come off as depressing so much as he does real. There is a veracity to his work that the reader cannot help but admire. As far as story direction, I didn't like some of his choices for some of his characters. But they were always real choices. And I respect the story for it. And they set up well the story to come.

As a minor critique, there were small moments in this second volume when I felt the usual creator's care diminish. A page here with shaky art. A panel there with a name plainly omitted from the text balloon. On the whole these things did not harm the book for me. But I did notice them.

My only real complaint is now that I have finished Volume II, I've got a good half-decade's wait to see Lutes' conclusion.

Rating:

Check a sample of Berlin: City of Smoke via Amazon's Search Inside feature.

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Notes:
Here are two great interviews with Jason Lutes in regard to Berlin:
• PBS interview
• Comicbook Resources interview

Also, about a year ago, I reviewed another book by Lutes (though he only contributed the writing), Houdini: The Handcuff King.

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20080925.TheRoad.Review

Book: Novel
Author: Cormac McCarthy
Year: 2006
Pages: 287

It ended better than it began.

Despite being a very short book, I nearly gave up on The Road circa page ninety. It was, in a word, dull. As in without sheen. Without colour. Without any of that undefinable verve that makes a story interesting.

Sure, there were moments that would hold me. A nice bit of dialogue. The description of a passing forest fire's affect on the macadam road. A quick scene of action and blood-letting. An occasional turn of phrase (this was the first time I'd encountered "her nipples pipeclayed"). But these all were mere punctuations along a rather bland path.

After page ninety things began to pick up and while they never achieved any level of wonder that would keep me from putting the book down for either bed or bath, by the conclusion I was satisfied that I had read a worthwhile book. It's ideas and themes are worth pursuing and so far as post-apocalypse goes it doesn't tend toward cliche.

Plus, the father and son apparently run into Kilgore Trout along the way and give him a can of fruit cocktail and some coffee.

Rating:

Two more excerpts:
Description of the ELE that kills the world
Conversation with Kilgore Trout