Category: literature

Posted on

It’s only the river

Amy & I meandered through the French Quarter yesterday, in search of cheap novelties (some voodoo dolls at the French Market), some holiday presents (a couple of higher-end masks at Rumors, and a sweatshirt from the local Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville, which my boss contends has the best margaritas around), and coffee and beignets at Café Du Monde.

We took a ton of pictures yesterday, but I forgot to bring the cable for my camera along for the trip, so mine will have to wait till we’re home next week. Amy has been working much more diligently on hers, and has demonstrated an eye for photography that leaves me jealous. She’s also willing to spend time with Photoshop and Lightroom to improve her pix, while my point-and-click mentality seems to carry over to many aspects of my life.

Anyway, the Quarter was pretty full of people, even though we got in pretty early (around 9am). The New Orleans Bowl football game between Rice and Troy had been the night before, so partisans for those two schools were everywhere. In fact, CDM was completely packed when we arrived. The weather was in the mid-50s, and Amy pointed out that you could tell which people were locals because they were the ones wearing scarves and gloves.

After breakfast, we began taking pictures. I brought my laptop along, in hopes that the citywide WiFi service was actually functioning, but the Earthlink-provided network didn’t show up on my menu when we were sitting in Jackson Square, so I dropped the laptop off in our car. Sorry, no liveblogging from the streets of NO,LA, dear readers. Maybe next trip.

When Amy gets her pix posted, you’ll get an idea of how gorgeous the morning light can be in the Quarter. It was the first sunny day since we arrived on Thursday, which got Amy in a good mood. The rain and drear can bring a body down, like it has today.

(In fact, we’ve spent a good chunk of time just hanging out in her parents’ living room. Since I just crossed the 700-page mark in that Berlin Noir omnibus I brought along for the trip, I can attest that we’ve, um, had some time on our hands.)

During our walk yesterday, we stopped at Faulkner House Books in Pirate Alley (yarr!), where I picked up a small collection of post-Katrina columns by Times-Picayune writer Chris Rose, who’s been chronicling the human costs of the catastrophe as well as anybody. I’ll probably read it after I finish the remaining 130 pages of Berlin Noir today.

It turns out the bookstore’s doing pretty well, at least if some of the comments I heard from the manager about the prices they fetched for a few rarities is true. I’m being deliberately vague, but it sounds like they made some serious scratch from selling a couple of New Orleans-related literary memorabilia. It warms my heart that there’s a market for the stuff.

I can’t offer much of an assessment on the city’s recovery. The French Quarter isn’t like the rest of the area and, while there were plenty more tourists than our last trip in July, that’s not adding much to the conversation. During the coverage of the New Orleans Bowl on ESPN, the commentators talked about “how little has been done” down here for the people, and showed a short clip of the student-athletes taking a bus tour through the lower Ninth Ward.

As Amy & I walked through the Quarter, we reminisced about our wedding weekend down here. There are so many landmarks for me (and even more for Amy, who spent so many years in the city), so many resonances, so many reminiscences, that it’s hard for me to imagine that it can go away for good, within our lifetimes.

Last night, at the home of Amy’s grandmother, some family members railed against FEMA, the local contractors, and the state’s governor, who evidently finished a legislative session unable to pass a bill to spend the state’s $2 billion surlplus. Since it’s not their district, these in-laws didn’t directly lambaste the re-elections of Ray Nagin or Rep. Jefferson, who was recently caught with $90,000 dollars in bribe money in his freezer, but they weren’t happy about either of those developments.

After we got back from her grandmother’s place (we were dropping off some leftover chicken tenders & cream cheese wrapped in bacon), we found a documentary about New Zealand on the Travel Channel. There was a segment on Napier, the art-deco city on the north island. It spent a little time showing off the buildings, then explained how it all resulted from a massive earthquake and fire in 1931 that wiped out the city. (In fact, the whole documentary was along these lines: each segment started out with beautiful images and descriptions of wonder and grandeur, then segued into “the dark secret behind it.”)

The third novel in that Berlin Noir omnibus jumps 9 years from the end of the second, from 1938 to 1947. Berlin is in ruins, and the Russians are starting to separate the east section of the city from the west. It made me wonder what the city’s like today, how it integrated in the last 15 years.

The rain’s heavy again today, and they’re issuing flood warnings. Nothing cataclysmic, of course: just enough to overrun the various drainage systems for a while.

Posted on

Just a couple for the road

I have about 50 pages remaining in Ron Rosenbaum’s Shakespeare Wars, but I don’t wanna carry that along this trip, so I’ll finish reading it when I’m home.

Instead, I’m bringing along Berlin Noir, an omnibus of the first three Philip Kerr detective novels about Bernie Gunther, and Sophocles’ Ajax, which pertains to This Thing I’m Trying To Write. I imagine that I’ll receive some books from my Amazon wish list as gifts while I’m down in Louisiana, so I’m trying to pack light.

Posted on

Unrequired Reading: Dec. 15, 2006

Y’know, I’m actually keeping an archive of these Unrequired Reading posts, if you’re really bored at work. Meanwhile, here’s this week’s collection of links I didn’t have time to post about. I oughtta be done with The Big (400 pg.) Year-End Issue of my mag by the beginning of next week, so that should get me back to posting more regularly about stuff. Which in turn will get you commenting more regularly, dear readers.

Till then, there’s more after the jump!

Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Dec. 15, 2006”

Posted on

If you build it

A few years ago, I was shooting the breeze about the anicent Greeks with a buddy of mine. It turned out that he was devoted to Herodotus’ descriptions of the war against the Persians, while I preferred reading Thucydides’ accounts of What Happened After. In a sense, it encapsulated how our lives contrasted (at the time): as an alienated author, he was interested in the battles and heroism, while as a publisher, I was more interested in how everything gets administered after the heroism.

(I couldn’t come up with any parallels for the Melian dialogues, but nobody’s perfect.)

Anyway, I bring this up because of an article in this month’s issue of Wired. See, it’s one thing for architects like Frank Gehry to come up with never-before-seen organic forms for buildings, but it’s another thing to actually build them.

Posted on

If only they had Bizarro King

I’m not a gamer. This isn’t because I think video games are beneath me, but because if I had a game console I would play obsessively and ruin my life. The only console I’ve owned was a Sega DreamCast that was a hand-me-down from my dad. I played NBA2K on it for a while, but it wasn’t as much fun as when I used to hang out at my buddy Sang’s place and play our customized version of the New Jersey Nets: the backcourt was comprised of me and Sang, and the frontcourt featured souped up versions of Dr. J, Buck Williams and Sam Bowie.

I’ve avoided the game craze for years, but a couple of recent discoveries may tip me over the edge.

First, I found out that the new Superman Returns video game includes the ability to play as Bizarro Superman, wrecking as much of Metropolis as you can before the big blue guy shows up to stop you. As longtime readers know, I’m a huge fan of Bizarro. I’m hoping the game is successful enough to spawn a video game set on Bizarro’s home world, a square planet where everything is backwards.

As if that weren’t enough, I saw a commercial this weekend for a video game based on my second favorite character: the King.

No, not Elvis; it’s that Burger King mascot, and his surreal episodes of delivering BK fare to an unsuspecting populace. I first gained respect for the King when he got into those NFL commercials, making interceptions and high-stepping it into the end zone. There was something about that eternally grinning mask, that Guy Fawkes of fast food vibe, that caught me.

This game looks like it consists of trying to sneak up on people and give ’em burgers. I can’t argue with that, although I do wanna see him get added to the next edition of Madden.

So I ask you: Bizarro Superman and the King? Can a man resist?

Fortunately, they’re only on Xbox, and I don’t wanna give Gates, Ballmer, et al. my money . . .

Posted on

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!

Posted on

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.)