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Brilliant neighbors

From the Greatest Bus Driver in the World: Poultry notes, featuring a thoughtful exegesis of soon-to-be-ex Justice Connor and her memorable career in the entertainment industry. His Back to the Blog combines some excellent writing on antidepressant medications with careful observations of Jon’s cat and the environment.

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, B^2 breaks radio silence with one of his patented, remarkable comicstrip remixes. This time, it’s a melancholy reflection on memory and loss cast as a Mark Trail Sunday strip. Genius! He’s a freaking genius! He does seem to be feeling rather down, I’m sorry to say.

A thank you to Chris for his link to SuperDuper, and I note with pride a link to the ineffable IOCNM.

Finally, Editor B has been chronicling his passage upcountry, from the Mississippi delta (which, as you all know, shines like a National guitar) to my hometown of Bloomington. In today’s entry, he hooks us quickly with a tale of dining in a cave before moving on to celebrate the peculiar and kind ways of this vast and contradictory land on the eve of its’ birthday celebration.

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Piratical!

I read this amusing NYT piece to Viv aloud because she was asking why I was chuckling. Extra points to the author for assiduously avoiding the Napoleon Dynamite and Pirates of the Caribbean referents the photographer so carefully captured. While a tad glib, I am filled with admiration for the writing itself in this article.

Geez, 2-for-2 from the Times. I gotta stay in more; my link-fu weakens!

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Flight

JG Ballard reviews The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination 1920-1950, by Robert Wohl, in the Guardian.

I have read, and deeply enjoyed, Professor Wohl’s previous book on the subject of the cultural symbology of aviation, A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908 to 1918. I am quite looking forward to reading this newer book as well. The period covered in the latest book represents the zenith of aviation as a pop-culture referent. Therefore, it’s the period in which the aviation archetypes that have always gripped me first gained wide purchase in the popular imagination.

While I loved the prior book, I found it overly documentarian. This complaint probably stems from Wohl’s profession, that of historian. I craved not merely encyclopedic paragraphs stating who did what and how given expression of the symbology of flight was disseminated, but also what it may have meant at the time. That’s not to say Wohl doesn’t provide interpretation, only that documentation is his primary focus.

While I’m at it, what a treat it is to read Ballard’s typically dystopian dry wit on the subject. Maybe he’ll take a crack at it – Plane Crash, anyone?

(Given that my folks are currently winging off to this week’s god-knows-where – is it China? – my own black joke is really quite inapproriate. Let’s hope I lack reasons to regret come tomorrow.)

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Aldiss in his Quicktime

Meet the Author | Book Bites – Brian Aldiss: Greybeard. (Quicktime autoload)

I just started plowing through some early work by one of may favorite UK New Wave SF authors, Brian Aldiss. I have never really plumbed what attracts me to his work, but he shares a commoanlity of tone and certain interests with his peer J. G. Ballard.

I am just beginning his 1964 Greybeard, a book I have no idea how I missed as a kid. It’s got me hooked. For whatever reason, a trope of the British New Wave was the ‘disaster novel,’ in which some never-well-delineated catastrophe has upended human society. The hallmark of these books is the resolute focus on character development and interaction rather than the American Golden Age describe-and-prescribe modality.

This book comes quite early in the writer’s career, and so it came to me as a deep an pleasant surprise to come across the link up top, in which the author descibes a bit about how the work came to be.

I adore Aldiss’ material, and have stacks and stacks of his books; it truly mystifies me that I never came across this volume previously.

The same site offers clips of the author on essentially all of his best known work, but not, alas, my minor favorite, The Malacia Tapestry:

The Helliconia Trilogy: Aldiss’ masterwork, an encyclopedic history covering 5000 years of a world whose seasons change as slowly as ice ages.

Supertoys Last All Summer Long: The short story that inspired A. I.

The Twinkling of an Eye: A work I do not believe I have read.

Trillion Year Spree: Aldiss, who has worked as a critic for many years in the UK, looks at SF. This book helped inspire in me the idea that genre fiction is well worthy of serious critical investigation.

Super-state: A recent work that I am unfamiliar with.

Affairs at Hampden Ferrers: A non-SF novel. I haven’t read this but I have read much of his non-SF material and it is quite good.

Greybeard: The catastrophe novel I’m reading today.

Non-Stop: Another work that I’m unfamiliar with; however I suspect I have read it sometime in the deep past.

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Men of Yesterday

I recently read – more devoured – Gerard Jones‘ breezy, sprawling Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book.

Here’s a Comics Journal discussion thread about the book – it looks like I’m not the only comics lover that found the book gripping.

Jones charts the rise and diffusion of the contemporary American comic book from the 1930s to the present day, and properly uses the tragedy of Seigel and Shuster’s experience as Superman’s creators as the tentpole upon which he drapes an entire socioeconomic history.

His prose is clear and propulsive; the book could be written about nearly any American industry’s 20th century rise, and this is one of its’ great strengths. By carefully showing how comics and periodical publication were tied to and reflected the economic realties of their time and place, the specific story becomes general, allowing the reader to identify with the colorful people Jones depicts.

Jones’ approach is distinct from that of other comics writers and flows from his determination to set his story in the full context of America rampant. Instead of restricting his primary sources to the people of greatest interest to comics fans, the artists and writers and publishers, he spoke to the families and business associates of these people as well, and in so doing, found his way to the men behind the curtain. By asking people who had no exposure to the often-repeated creation myths and anecdotes of self-definition, Jones uncovers some significant and fascinating facts about the first generation of superhero cartoonists.

The single most compelling item is Jones’ discovery that Jerry Siegel, Superman’s creating author, lost his father to an armed robber while in his teens. That’s right – the Batman’s creation myth, apparently crafted independently of Siegel’s life history, somehow is a direct reflection of the creation of Jerry Siegel’s need to invent the Man of Steel.

The book is full of clear-eyed, thoughtful analysis of the lives and characters of people that are almost always offstage in comics writing – from his evenhanded presentation on Frederic Wertham to the life histories of DC’s (then National Periodicals) founders, Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz. Donenfeld’s ties to bootlegging and the mob, which helped pave the way for the success of the company’s distribution networks are given particular attention. Like the Kennedys, Warner Brothers (which can be seen as having grown from National) owes its’ prominence in part to bootlegging; Batman’s utility belt was paid for with money that Meyer Lansky helped to gather.

The book is completely nonjudgemental on these and many other matters, generally striving to narrate the events associated with these characters with sympathy. I know I’ll still never be able to hear the phrase “Truth, Justice and the American Way” quite the same way again.

Others have noted that the books is practically a required companion to Chabon’s monumental Kavalier & Clay. I concur. The book is worthy of its’ companion in every way.

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Aztecs, the Clash, the Presidency and the Bible

Occasionally, I mention that one piece or another in a given issue of The New Yorker has particularly struck me. In general, though I try to avoid doing so, mostly because the magazine appeals to me so consistently that if I did not deliberately choose to exclude it from my blogging, I’d be repeating myself weekly.

This week, however, in addition to the previously remarked upon first-ever presidential endorsement, several other worthwhile pieces were published. Richard Avedon’s election year portfolio (not online, alas), the photography series that he was working on at the time of his death, looked to me like images of Americans at the dawn of photography, the keepsake photographs of Union and Confederate soldiers. I found the photographs deeply touching and nearly unbearably sad. A surprisingly flattering profile of Paul Wolfowitz and John Updike’s engaging reflections upon the language of the Bible rub shoulders.

But the pieces that prompt this entry are two works of critical appreciation. First, New Yorkers, please go to the Guggenheim to see “The Aztec Empire,” reviewed and – I am amazed – apparently grokked by Peter Schjeldahl. I am a profound, long-time admirer of pre-Colombian Mesoamerican art, from the earliest known works produced by those we call the Olmec to the work highlighted in this show and associated with the Aztec empire. Yet that art (even the Olmec, despite Schjeldahl’s assertion that the earlier work is less blood-soaked) is profoundly hard to grasp for persons who are products of a Western sensibility. The ideas and religion that produce the metaphorical armature the art operates within are predicated upon the concept and practice of human sacrifice.

Schjeldahl faces this squarely in his review, and draws a direct line between the Aztec and our world.

“Oddly, the alien and alienating viciousness of Aztec culture makes it more accessible than that of other bygone and tribal nations. It provides dramatic focus. Confronting such things as a blackly humorous skull mask, made from a real skull, we know exactly where we stand with the Aztecs: aghast. The supreme quality of their supple, sensitive, elegant arts may be the scariest thing about them, because it testifies that a civilization based on slaughter steadied and inspired human genius.”

He concludes by implying that he’s talking about some unpleasant current events in the Middle East. The review is carefully written, though. It’s clear that he’s also discussing the ways and means of empire, the cost of imperial scale.

One page later, a loving celebration of the Clash, penned by Sasha Frere-Jones sails into view, headed for port. The occasion is the $30 release of a deluxe edition of London Calling, long the rock critics’ canonical choice as the high point of the band’s career. The record, of course, is all about the costs of empire. In so far as many people have reviewed the record in prior incarnations, Jones’ choice is unremarkable. However, deciding to review a record which your peers universally acknowledge as a definitive masterwork presents a particular challenge. A critic must feel that they have something new to say about a piece to make the writing worth doing, and in the case of a masterwork, you can say one of two things, essentially. You can disagree and have fun with the project of willfully defining your stance in opposition to your peers’ consensus. Or you can agree, and attempt to craft the definitive encomium on the work in question.

It’s far easier to pursue the first option. It’s much less about the work under consideration, though, and more about building personal reputation. As such, the subject of the review is not the artist’s work; rather it’s the reviewer’s artistry.

Jones decided to take on the harder option. I’m thinking it was a success. I have read a fair amount of praise for the Clash, and a fair amount of praise for this album. This album is not my favorite Clash record (that’s Give ‘Em Enough Rope). Despite this, Jones somehow captures the sweep and energy of a great Clash song. I found myself nodding, muttering “Yeah!” and “Yes!”

“And what can you call this generous mountain of music, this sound that levitates around its own grievances like a plane on fire?”

By the end of the essay I was anticipating references and points of argument, in the manner that one anticipates a cymbal splash or drum fill at the bridge of a song. If it were possible to have been playing air pen, I would have been scribbling furiously in midair. Jones does this, in part, by citing lyrics from three of the record’s best songs in three out of four of the essay’s closing paragraphs. By citing the music directly in the expectation that the reader knows and loves the record, he effectively samples the music, and sets his words to theirs, and to our emotional experience of the music in question.

One hopes he chooses to continue the exploration. A book by Jones about the Clash along the lines of Marcus’ Mystery Train on Dylan would be welcome reading indeed.

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Iphigenia at Aulis

Having managed to view fragments amounting to one half of the final episode of the decidedly average The Spartans, I variously learned or was reminded that:

  • Upon the Athenian defeat at Syracuse, about 7,000 Athenian invaders were imprisoned for a fair period of time in a quarry at Syracuse, exposed to the elements and fading fast. According to the transcript of the show,

    The Athenian prisoners had only one chance to live: the Syracusans had a passion for the verses of the playwright Euripides, and prisoners who could recite them in a style that pleased their tormentors were allowed to leave the quarry to be sold as slaves.

    To clarify: The Syracusans held the prisoners of war in an outdoor prison camp, subject to torture, and would not let them go until they said words which pleased them.

  • Upon the Spartan-led defeat of Athens, the Spartan leader Lysander erected an expansive monument to himself and his allies. The show did not display a reconstructed image, and I wonder if someone has assembled such a thing. I had thin luck Googling for it at all.

  • Following the Spartan defeat of Athens, Sparta was the dominant military power in the region, and “her commanders became known for corruption,” a fact which sourly comforts me.

Interestingly, I came across these class notes for a play by Euripides which appears to directly address these themes.