Category: literature

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What It Is: 10/11/10

What I’m reading: Re-re-re-finished The Iliad, at last! I’ve got a bazillion questions/observations to follow up on. This is the fourth time I’ve read Homer’s poem, but the first time that I ever really felt for Achilles’ plight. In past readings, I think I focused too much on his descent into vengeful madness. Also, I considered him to be a bit of a douche. This reading, I found myself invested in his character in full, and feeling a great deal of sadness as he deteriorates into nihilistic gloom. I’m going back to The Odyssey next, where Achilles makes a sad return.

What I’m listening to: Simple Things and Fields.

What I’m watching: God’s Cartoonist, that Jack Chick documentary.

What I’m drinking: Bombay Sapphire & crappy ol’ tonic. We were traveling.

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Spending the weekend with their grey-pal Tut. He seemed pretty sad to see them go when we picked up the boys on Sunday. One of Tut’s owners e-mailed to let us know that everything was going fine; she told us that the dogs were all playing musical beds in the living room, and that Otis had cruised on upstairs immediately after entering the house. Otis has a habit of blindly zooming through any new house he enters, not exactly exploring, but trying to get to their furthest reaches ASAP. Anyway, Tut sleeps downstairs in the living room at night, so his owners thought Ru & Otis would be alright doing the same. Instead, one of the owners wound up sleeping downstairs with them, because my boys wouldn’t stop whining about being left to sleep away from people.

Where I’m going: I’ll probably head into the city this weekend for a little shopping-reconnaissance, and also to buy an accordion from an ex-girlfriend.

What I’m happy about: Getting to see a little bit of Kansas City, attending the fun wedding of one of Amy’s pals, and getting to catch up with an old high school pal I haven’t seen in around 15 years.

What I’m sad about: Not getting to see a college pal of mine in the area, whom I haven’t seen in 10 years. I tried, but she was busy during our scant window of free time.

What I’m worried about: The encroachment of The Jersey Shore. At our hotel in KC this weekend, we had to change rooms twice. The first time, it was because the room stank of cigarette smoke. Our second room was located next to The Loudest People Ever, a bunch of 20somethings who were in town to PARTY!!! We thought we could put up with it, but after the ruckus failed to abate at any time that Friday afternoon, and we could only cower in fear at the thought of what the four or five people would be like when they got back to their room drunk at 3 a.m., I decided to go back to the front desk to see if we could get a quieter room. As I waited for the elevator, the occupants of the next room joined me, heading out to PARTY!!! It was a pack of four, and I sweartagod, the two women looked like

  1. a cross between Snooki and J-WOWW, and
  2. J-WOWW without boob-implants and 70% more haggard.

I got to the front desk while they were making their standard ruckus in the lounge area, and I quietly said, “I’m in 221, and my room is next to Those People. I need you to find us a room not next to them.” The clerk’s eyes widened and she said, “I’ll get you up on the fourth floor, where it’s quiet. We’ve been getting complaints about that room for the last few hours.”

Now, the guys were standard post-frat sluggards, with beer-bellies, khaki shorts and baseball caps for non-baseball teams, but the ladies were in too-tight sheer white t-shirts, bras sticking out, and “worn” jeans that made them look like frayed sausages. I thought, “What hath Jersey Shore wrought?”

What I’m pondering: Starting a series of posts about Achilles/Odysseus/Homer under the title Man Of War. You guys interested in my ruminations on the subject, or participating in an online conversation about Homer?

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Chick Magnet

Last night / this morning, I watched God’s Cartoonist, a documentary about Jack T. Chick. I’d seen his comic-book-style religious tracts since I was a kid. Tammy, our next-door neighbors’ mom, made it her Baptist mission to save our souls.

She’d leave general interest ones on us, but when I was a teen, Tammy made sure to give me Dark Dungeons, the tract about why Dungeons & Dragons will surely send your ass to hell. A few years ago, she put Love the Jewish People in my mailbox. I mean, I assume it was her and not some bizarre anti-Semitic joke by other neighbors.

I thought the stories were just fine, but was entranced with the different visual styles of the cartoonists. I marveled at the jaunty, comic style of some of the strips, and their contrast with the Neal Adams-esque realist style of others. Sure, I hated the use of typesetting instead of hand-lettering, but I thought it was awesome how just about everyone got consigned to the lake of fire after death.

(I was kinda fuzzy on the notion of the various sects of Christianity as a kid; I had no idea why one group of Christians would believe the leader of another group of Christians to be the Antichrist. I didn’t really pick up on interdenominational hatred till college, so I never got why the comics had it in for Catholics, Mormons, Christian Scientists, et al. I always thought everybody just hated Jews. Go figure.)

Anyway, I enjoyed the heck out of the documentary, with its combo of interviews, excerpts of Chick’s tracts, and pseudo-animations of same. I thought the movie did a great job of not belittling Chick, even while many of the interview subjects (esp. Dan Raeburn) unloaded on the hate-filled content of some of the comics. (I’d link to the trailer, but it actually focuses on all the “bad” parts and makes the movie look like more of a hit piece than it really is.)

I really dug the varying perspectives and the attempts at filling in the enigmatic history of Jack Chick and his publishing company, but the Rev. Ivan Stang stole the show. He was entrancing with his good-natured, not-quite-earnest take on Chick’s comics and how they helped him start the Church of the Subgenius. I just loved Stang’s Texas groove and his marvelously dancing eyebrows. I’d better get slack.

The commentators and the strips themselves do a great job of conveying how the tracts’ simplicity is the key to their enormous success. There’s a neat discussion of the art style of one of Chick’s cartoonists, and how he may have been part of the “muscular Filipino school” of comics drawing, but the movie doesn’t go too in-depth about the comics craft of the tracts.

In all, I was thrilled to learn about Chick’s life and the leaps into weirdness he made over the years, as influential figures led him to rail first against the Illuminati/Masons/Druids (?), then Catholics, then witches/Satanic possession. And every other group out there (although there’s no racial animus, just religious).

At the office this morning, I thought the documentary would make a fun topic of conversation. I mentioned it to one of my coworkers, a drunken racist who thrills for early- and mid-century Americana. Chick was from a later period (c.1970 to today), but surely he’d have an opinion on Chick’s work.

He had no idea what I was talking about.

I decided to check with a couple of other co-workers, each in their early-to-mid-50s. Not a one had heard of Chick or knew what the tracts were. When I showed them samples online, they were amused, but had no recollection of ever seeing one. “You never came across one of these on a park bench or a bus-stop?” I asked. Nope. “But there are like a billion of them in circulation!”

English - This Was Your Life.gifI started asking the younger staff, figuring perhaps they’d seen them growing up. Not a one. Eventually, I found one person who knew what I was talking about: our circulation manager, who’s a few years younger than me and a big comics fan. He didn’t remember any of them in particular, but he knew what I was talking about. I was hoping we could bond over This Was Your Life and its beyond-creepy rendition of a giant faceless God.

Still, this was even worse than the time I polled the office to see if anyone knew who Paul Weller is. Two people out of fifty knew of him, The Jam or Style Council. But this? Weren’t Chick tracts everywhere? How could they never have seen one? Now, my office is neither in WASP Central nor Rome. But somehow, ‘nary a person in it lived close enough to people who wanted to save their souls, Baptist-style.

I e-mailed Tammy’s son Todd about this (and the documentary today). In the evening, he wrote back, “That’s funny, because I was out running this morning and I found one of those tracts on the railing of the bridge. I figured I should leave it for some poor soul lost in sin — besides, I have the whole collection (ha-ha).”

When I told my wife I was watching the documentary last night, she told me, “Don’t erase it! I want to watch that!” When she was growing up, she said, they used to have tracts on a spinner rack at the Assemblies of God meeting place. Which is a church, but not her church. (I’m still a little unclear about all these denominations.)

So now I’ve gotta ask: you’ve seen Jack Chick tracts before, right?

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Who am I?

I’m the guy who had four magazines waiting in his mailbox when he got home from work today — Monocle, Sports Illustrated, The Paris Review, and Esquire. I’m the guy who looked at the cover of the latter, muttered, “Lousy better-looking-than-everyone Javier Bardem,” then noticed the words, “PHILIP ROTH PG. 146,” and smiled.

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What It Is: 8/23/10

What I’m reading: After Bernard Knox’s death last week, I decided to read his introduction to Fagles’ translations of Homer. I found myself bored by them for some reason (probably because of their focus on philology), so I decided to break out my old Richmond Lattimore translation of the Iliad. I don’t think I ever read the intro before (written by Lattimore), choosing instead to dive right into the poem itself. It was illuminating, esp. his segment on how the meter of the poem informs some of the descriptions, as well as his piece on how many of the similes bring everyday life into a poem about war. I decided to dive back into the Iliad, with hopes of sticking through the Odyssey, too, and then rolling into Troilus & Cressida and some of the other Shakespeare plays I haven’t read. The problem is, it’s tough for me to stick with this stuff when I’m not being pushed nowadays. It almost makes me want to start some sorta online book club. I doubt I could put together a Homeric Reading Society of Ringwood, NJ, awesome though that concept would be. I could do what I did with that Montaigne collection, and try to write about it each week, but the Essays are (mostly) self-contained and speak about personal experience in a way that the Iliad and the Odyssey don’t. I think any attempt at writing book-by-book comments on Homer would be a waste of my time, insofar as it would have to involve real scholarship I simply don’t have the time to perform; I’d much rather have a conversation about it. Still, I’m going to reimmerse myself in the wrath of Achilles. I’ll try to let you know what comes of it. Maybe I’ll finally develop some ideas on how we’re supposed to understand the role of the gods in the play (Lattimore’s intro has some helpful comments on that, too.)

What I’m listening to: Greetings from Asbury Park, Spirit of Radio, Wake Up The Nation, and the most awesome single of the year:


What I’m watching: An Education and Whip It,. Comments to come on Tuesday. I hesitate to call them reviews. We also watched that Rush documentary again, because it was on, and because it’s wonderful to see the camaraderie within the band. And you really need to watch Louie.

What I’m drinking: G’Vine Nouaison & Q-Tonic.

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Not too much. I didn’t take them on my hikes this weekend, and we decided the Sunday grey-hike was too rainy to deal with.

Where I’m going: NYC this afternoon for a pharma-interview, but no other travels planned.

What I’m happy about: A raver-looking chick behind the register at Ramsey Outdoor told me, “Wow, you have really beautiful eyes,” when I was buying a hat to keep the sun off during hikes.

What I’m sad about: She could’ve been my daughter, if I’d started off young.

What I’m worried about: The doggies’ seeming bout of allergies, which is leading them to nibble on their forelegs and sides at weird hours. I thought they might have fleas, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Amy’s for giving them benadryl, but I’m hoping this’ll pass..

What I’m pondering: Whether I could launch that Homeric Reading Society here in town. “Ringwood Atheneum”?

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What It Is: 8/16/10

What I’m reading: I finished Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up, the Scott Pilgrim comics, and The Playwright, a comic written by Daren White and drawn by Eddie Campbell. I enjoyed The Playwright a lot more than I enjoyed Campbell’s last big comic that he wrote himself, The Fate of the Artist, and it was a much more satisfying book than the ill-conceived adaptation of The Black Diamond Detective Agency. I need to go back and re-read The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard to see if I was judging that one too harshly. Anyway, I also re-read Wilson, which I enjoyed just as much as I did when I read it in May, and went back to Matt LaBash’s essay collection, Fly Fishing with Darth Vader, but that’s partly in the interest of clearing off my nightstand. I haven’t thought about what book I want to commit to next.

What I’m listening to: A random mix of singles and albums, none of which are coming to mind right now.

What I’m watching: Greenberg, Notting Hill, Matchstick Men, and District 9. I’ll try to write about them tomorrow.

What I’m drinking: Whitley Neill and Q-Tonic.

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Visiting their golden retriever cousins in Connecticut, then taking a long greyhound hike the next day up at Wawayanda state park.

Where I’m going: Nowhere! Amy managed to get Monday and Tuesday off, so I tweaked the remainder of my vacation schedule to match that, but I think we’re just gonna stay in and do some house stuff and otherwise try to take it easy.

What I’m happy about: Learning that one of my pals is the subject of a new Paris Review Writers at Work interview. And clearing out a shelf and a half of books by admitting to myself that I will never write a novel about the epistemological implications of the Enigma machine and what it means to decode something. Even though it means I have to give up on using the title Tales from the Cryptanalyst. Which I still think is awesome.

What I’m sad about: One of the people on our grey-hike learned she has throat cancer and is getting what sounds like pretty aggressive radiation treatment.

What I’m worried about: What I may find when I’m cleaning out the attic today.

What I’m pondering: How you separate the questions, “What is the meaning of life?” and “Do you believe in an afterlife?”, both of which were posed to me by another person on our grey-hike on Sunday. She’s “conducting an informal poll,” as she put it, on the former question, and it struck me that it’s difficult to talk about that without making assumptions about the latter question.