Category: literature

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Absent Friends and Comedians

My weekend started with an 80-minute drive after work Friday evening. I managed to cover nearly 33 miles in that time, getting from Ramsey, NJ to a bar on Amsterdam and W. 83rd St. in NYC. Which is to say, there are certain aspects of living and working in NJ that can be frustrating. Traffic is a major headache, which is why I don’t schedule anything too tightly for NYC on weeknights.

For instance, I was heading in Friday for dinner with friends at a Thai (sorry, “Pan Asian”) restaurant that’s never done me wrong, and I asked them to set it up for 7pm, since that would give me enough time to make it through whatever traffic was en route, as well as some pre-dinner gin to help wash away the week.

I got to meet up with Mark F., a good friend of mine, for that pre-prandial libation. We shot the breeze for an hour or so, discussing the novels of Richard Price (he gave me a copy of Samaritan that evening), the music of Stan Ridgway, Michael Penn and X (the former of which he referred to as “the music equivalent of Raymond Chandler”), and the declining levels of service and professionalism in this world (I dumped my Mahwah Honda story on him). I also gave him his chanukkah present, even though he’s not Jewish. I told him not to open it till sunset on Friday, but we’ll see how that works out.

The easy familiarity of our conversation reminded me of how little I’ve seen of my friends in the past few months. Work has been tiring, but I should’ve been getting out a little more or getting people to come out to our palatial country estate.

I got an even bigger reminder of this at dinner a short time later, when I discovered that one of my closest friends has been engaged since September. She told me that she didn’t want to give me the news in something as impersonal as an e-mail or phone call, so she’d been waiting till we met up in NYC.

For three months.

This is in contrast to what I did after I popped the question back in May 2005, calling friends all over the country as I drove up the FDR on my way back to NJ, then blogging about it. But I’m such a whore, as you know.

Anyway, congrats to Elayne & Tim on their nuptials!

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Cloudburst

“The things we crave are either near us or far, whereas time is about process. I have lived many years and I have learned not to trust process. Creation, destruction: these are not the real story. When we dwell on such things, we inevitably lapse into cliché. The true drama is in these relationships of space.”

–Emil Kopen

I’ve bought a lot of comic books over the years, but I’m not what you’d call a collector. When a store clerk asks if I want a bag-and-board for a new purchase, I answer, “No, thanks. I just read ’em.” I used to have some “valuable” comics, but I sold most of them off during college. I don’t remember what I needed the money for. A few years ago, I gave away a ton of “worthless” ones to some friends of mine. They treasure them.

You could say I own a couple of expensive comics, but that depends on your definition of “expensive”. Is $100 too much to spend on a hardcover collection of Little Nemo in Slumberland comic strips, reprinted at their original size (21″ x 16″)? Is $95 too much to spend on a three-volume slipcased edition of the complete Calvin & Hobbes, the best comic strip post-Peanuts? Is $125 too much to spend on the trade paperbacks of the final 100 issues of Cerebus? (Okay, don’t answer that one.)

And is $3,000 too much to spend on Hicksville?

There’s certainly nothing on its cover to indicate that Hicksville carries such an extravagant price. In fact, my edition reads, “$19.95 US / $24.95 CANADA”. It’s no rare, pulled-from-circulation issue, has no first appearance of Wolverine nor the death of a well-loved character (“Not a dream! Not a hoax!”).

But Hicksville brought me to the other side of the world, to small towns and jade factories, to wineries and bungee-platforms, to glaciers and Bunny Hell, to myself and beyond. It brought me to New Zealand.

Hicksville collects a story from the early-to-mid-1990s comics of Dylan Horrocks, about a comics journalist who travels to a small town to research the childhood of a famous cartoonist. The journalist discovers that everyone in this town is a comics aficionado. It’s a dream that I think all comics readers had at some point in their lives, that there’s a place in which we’re home.

But it wasn’t this vision that stayed with me over the years and led me to call my travel-industry friends to set up a two-week tour of the North & South Islands. I wasn’t naïve enough to think there was a comics Shangri-La waiting there. (That’s in Angouleme!)

What brought me to New Zealand was the sky. It’s no mean feat in a black-and-white comic book to convey such subtlety in clouds. In fact, Horrocks’ scratchy pen style would seem to dictate against it, mere outlines separating absence from absence. But there was something in his skies that stayed with me. I was captured by the romance of it, right down to the Maori name for the country: Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud.

In 2003, I decided to go there and see it for myself. My friend Liz set me up on an “adventure tour” group, which was an extensively mixed bag of people (one of whom has stayed a good friend ever since). For the first few days, all I saw were clouds. Oh, and rain. Lots of rain.

But by the time our tour headed to the South Island via the Wellington-Picton ferry, the sky cleared and I started to understand things that I can’t explain. By the end of the trip, at the peak of the Ben Lomond trail, a mile or so above Queenstown, I knew where I was.

A day later, I would spend 24 hours in planes and airports, replaying Emil Kopen’s remarks about space, not time, being the essence of storytelling, as I jetted from Queenstown to Auckland to LA to Newark. Today marks the third anniversary of my return from NZ. Time and space.

I bought my copy of Hicksville at a small press comics expo in Maryland in 1998. Dylan Horrocks was in attendance, signing copies (he’d been brought in to give a presentation on the history of comics in NZ). He made a sketch on the first page of my copy, along with the inscription, “Hey Gil! You’re always welcome in Hicksville!”

And I am.

(You really want to look through my photos from that trip.)

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It’s a Rap!

(You know you wanna check out the pix from my meanders in Toronto on Friday)

Home from Toronto a lot easier than my boss, whose flight home on Friday got cancelled due to “the airspace over Boston,” according to his pilot. He asked if this meant the bad weather & high winds we had all over the northeast, and was told that it did not. So, after 4 hours in an Embraer 145, he was allowed to leave and headed back to our hotel, where he sat in the bar and watched hockey.

Meanwhile, official VM buddy Sam and I went to see the Raptors play the Celtics in what Sam called “battle of the worst coaches in the NBA.” Since the Raptors have a game tonight against the Knicks, we figured maybe it’s a round-robin tournament.

We had fun at the game, but it was despite the action on the court. Sam’s now been to two NBA games with me (we hit a Dallas game against Orlando in April 2005), and he’s convinced I have NBA-Tourette’s, in which a constant stream of analysis & invective pours forth from my mouth during professional basketball games. We joined up with my boss after the game for a drink or two. He seemed pretty exhausted by the hurry-up-and-wait. I admit: if I were stuck in an Embraer for 4 hours, I’d probably go bananas.

Earlier in the day, after I visited Sam’s company in Oakville and toured the company’s produciton facilities (not as heavy-duty containment suiting as I wore on Thursday), I wandered around Toronto a little, while the weather was clear.

Unfortunately, this wandering didn’t coincide exactly with the clear weather, and I was stuck in some darned cold rain for a while. Early in my meander, I stopped at the Roots store in the Eaton Centre to get a hat and gloves. But then I decided that they were kinda pricey and, besides, the weather was okay now, so it would stay that way forever.

From there, I exited onto Yonge Street, which I forgot was an interesting amalgam of high-end retail, good record stores, and low-rent strip clubs. I headed off from there to a used bookstore I remembered from a past trip, but didn’t find anything.

I decided I’d walk through the University district and visit the famed comic store, The Beguiling. I spent a while there, hoping the weather would clear again and trying to justify spending $240 (Canadian) for a limited print by Sammy Harkham of a golem walking in the forest. I held off (I’ll wait till the USD appreciates against Canada’s dollar, and I’d probably be fine with a panel from The Poor Sailor anyway).

One of the nice things about having started doing yoga is that rambling ambles like this one don’t seem to give me the slight mid-back pain I was getting the past few years. I’ve only been on it for a few weeks or so, so hey.

During this walk, I came across two things I didn’t take pictures of: the Bata Shoe Museum and the Robarts Library. The former looks entertaining enough, and I bought a postcard from there for Amy, to give us yet another reason to take a long weekend here in the springtime.

The Library, on the other hand, is one of the most overwhelmingly depressing buildings I’ve ever seen. It may’ve been worse because of the rain and gray skies, but I can’t imagine a scenario which the appearance of this building inspires anything but fear and dread. Don’t let 1970s architecture happen to you!

After I left The Beguiling emptyhanded, it was time for another overpriced cab ride back to the hotel. I was amazed by the cost of cab rides in this city, as well as the ones I had to take to the pharma companies, which were outside the city. The flat-rate limo-y cars were also awfully expensive, including $51 CAD for the 20-minute ride from downtown to the airport.

In keeping with my recent post about accumulating all sorts of change and foreign currency, I returned home this morning with about $47 in Canadian bills and change. I feel like George Soros.

Anyway, a really neat thing happened during the short (54-minute) flight today. We completed our initial descent through the cloud cover, and all I could see were brown-gray hills and a few houses and a winding road or two. I thought, “We’re only 15 minutes from landing, but I have NO idea where we are right now.” It looked like Pennsylvania farmland, or far western NJ.

Then I noticed the Sheraton Crossroads to port, and it hit me: I was looking down at my morning commute! Sure enough, Rt. 17 threaded away from the Sheraton, southeast to Ramsey. Our plane followed Rt. 208 for a bit, as I picked out landmark after landmark (the Nabisco plant, the Ikea across from Garden State Plaza, even the Lukoil I stopped in last week). I’ve only had this perspective from a plane once before. Usually, I come home at night, or on different flight paths.

It helps to see things from different angles. Except Raptors/Celtics games.

(check out a couple of pix from my Toronto walkabout)

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Not Feeling the Pynch

I’m in between books right now. This condition never lasts long, but it’s strange that it’s happening just now. See, there’s a new book out by an author who used to be my fave, but I’m not interested in reading it, and I’m not sure why that is.

Last week, I stopped by a nearby bookstore and took a look at the new novel by Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day. I used to consider myself a devotee of his books, but I was surprised to find that I had little interest in buying this one. This is a marked change from the winter of 1990, when I got out of a (barely) moving car to run into a B.Dalton’s after seeing the newly published Vineland in the window. There was even some bating of my breath in 1997 when Mason & Dixon was released. Now? Bupkes.

It’s not because of an aversion to long / involved books (AtD is nearly 1100 pages); I just finished a 600-page exploration of the history and meaning of the mourner’s kaddish, worked my way through a 1200-page biography of Robert Moses last summer, and read Proust’s opus in the spring of 2005.

The problem (I think) stems from a short work by Pynchon: his introduction to a recent edition of George Orwell’s 1984. I read the intro a few weeks ago, and was amazed by how much Pynchon came off as an aging hippie who was trading off his old licks. Pynchon’s attempted hijacking of 1984 to tacitly denounce the Bush administration read as something far less nuanced than I’d come to expect from the writer. This, of course, led me to suspect that I was too kind in my past readings of Pynchon’s work, but I haven’t gone back to check.

(A gentleman named Mark Ciocco summed up pretty nicely some of his problems with Pynchon’s 1984 intro in a post and a followup) on his blog a few years ago.)

So, by the time this new book saw print, and the first review (from a right-wing newspaper) mentioned the cardboard-ness of The Bad Guys in the novel, it struck me that maybe I’m just too old for Pynchon’s whole Merry Prankster / anarchist counterforce approach, in which the doomed valiant create chaos just about for its own sake, with the corollary belief that order is inherently evil. Or maybe he’s too old to see the present era with the vivacity of his earlier work. Or maybe he’s still writing allegories of the struggle against Nixon.
I’m rambling, which you’re used to by now. I’m trying to convey this suspicion I have that, despite all the gorgeous, Rilkean prose and labyrinths of symbolism he broke out in Gravity’s Rainbow, and all the intricate, encapsulated plotting of The Crying of Lot 49, and even the wondrous camaraderie he evoked between Mason and Dixon, this guy may be a burned-out wreck who complains about The Government, Big Business, Dehumanizing Technology, and other embarrasingly obvious targets.

Driving home tonight, I heard a song by the Who on my Sirius radio. I hadn’t heard Cry if You Want in a bazillion years, and my first thought was, “Man, Kenny Jones was a boring drummer.” But then there were the lyrics, which feel apropos:

Don’t you want to hide your face
When going through your teenage books
And read the kind of crap you wrote
About “Ban the Bomb” and city crooks

So I’m back where I started: between books. I’d start Ron Rosenbaum’s Shakespeare book, but I’m flying soon (Toronto to visit a couple of clients) and I don’t want to carry a big hardcover with me. I could always follow Ron’s recent suggestion and start reading the Philip Kerr Berlin Noir omnibus. Choices, choices. . .

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Unrequired Reading: Nov. 24, 2006

It’s the Black Friday edition of Unrequired Reading, dear unreaders! Amy & I are skipping out on the shopping chaos, since we took care of a bunch of it during our Paris trip. Plus, what with these here internets, we can get plenty of holiday shopping done from the comfort of the old fainting couch! Without further ado:

Here’s a BW piece on how the Analog Meat Market is performing. No, it’s not an article about offline dating services, it’s about The Rise of Tofurky!

* * *

Michael Kinsley has decided that, because “the market” doesn’t set “the right price” for a share of stock in a company, capitalism is inherently flawed.

* * *

Poor Kinsley. If only the state could become more involved in determining how companies do business. Well, actually, there was significant legislation passed during the Clinton administration to “shame companies” into doing the president’s idea of the right thing:

Clinton’s brainstorm: Use the tax code to curb excessive pay. Companies at the time were allowed to deduct all compensation to top executives. Clinton wanted to permit companies to write off amounts over $1 million only if executives hit specified performance goals. He called [Graef Crystal, author of a book on corporate greed] for his thoughts. “Utterly stupid,” the consultant says he told the future President.

Now, 13 years after Clinton’s plan became law, the results are clear: It didn’t work. Over the law’s first decade, average compensation for chief executives at companies in Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index soared from $3.7 million to $9.1 million, according to a 2005 Harvard Law School study. The law contains so many obvious loopholes, says Crystal, that “in 10 minutes even Forrest Gump could think up five ways around it.”

* * *

Even when people try the old Robin Hood routine, it goes awry (thanks, Faiz)!

* * *

Charles Krauthammer doesn’t like Borat.

* * *

When I first saw the Beth Sholom Synagogue designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, I called it “Battlestar Judaica.” Here’s a piece about the architecture of houses of worship, which seems to be an excuse to post a sldeshow of neat photos.

* * *

I really need to sit down and read the Aeneid sometime.
* * *

I’ve long contended that Paul Allen has the anti-Midas touch, but I had no idea that his Portland Trailblazers have the most incredibly messed-up business situation in professional sports. This one’s long, but it makes for pretty entertaining reading, if only to find out that a man worth $22 billion should never come along with you to negotiate buying a car.
* * *

I don’t have any pity for car salesmen, esp. after the guy at the Mini place tried scamming Amy into buying a $550 stereo system. Looks like they’re under plenty of pressure.

* * *

And, in honor of Black Friday, a Christmas display you won’t forget (thanks, Tina).

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Too marvelous for words

In the new City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple lays a whomping on Steven Pinker’s theory of language development. Dalrymple being Dalrymple, he draws out the moral implications of Pinker’s theory:

The contrast between a felt and lived reality — in this case, Pinker’s need to speak and write standard English because of its superior ability to express complex ideas — and the denial of it, perhaps in order to assert something original and striking, is characteristic of an intellectual climate in which the destruction of moral and social distinctions is proof of the very best intentions.

Given that Dad’s english isn’t among his top two languages, and that my first writing influence was Stan Lee, I’m pretty amazed that this site isn’t filled with pages of fragmented alliteration. Fortunately, I had Mom (and Chris Claremont).