Category: literature

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Catcher

I’m not too sure what the name of the song was that he was playing when I came in, but whatever it was, he was really stinking it up. He was putting all these dumb, show-offy ripples in the high notes, and a lot of other very tricky stuff that gives me a pain in the ass. You should’ve heard the crowd, though, when he was finished. You would’ve puked. They went mad. They were exactly the same morons that laugh like hyenas in the movies at stuff that isn’t funny. I swear to God, if I were a piano player or an actor or something and all those dopes though I was terrific, I’d hate it. I wouldn’t even want them to clap for me. People always clap for the wrong things. If I were a piano player, I’d play it in the goddam closet. Anyway, when he was finished, and everybody was clapping their heads off, old Ernie turned around on his stool and gave this very phony, humble bow. Like as if he was a helluva humble guy, besides being a terrific piano player. It was very phony — I mean him being such a big snob and all. In a funny way, though, I felt sort of sorry for him when he was finished. I don’t even think he knows any more when he’s playing right or not. It isn’t all his fault. I partly blame all those dopes that clap their heads off — they’d foul up anybody, if you gave them a chance.

Two weeks ago, I mentioned that I read The Catcher in the Rye under some degree of duress as a high school sophomore. (My English teacher insisted I make it the topic of my term paper.) I decided to go back to Catcher this week. (I read Salinger’s Glass-works last year around this time and didn’t feel like going back to them.)

It wasn’t as embarrassing a read as I feared it would be. I loved the pieces of New York he evokes, although I have to admit I simply can’t fathom the chronology of the first night. There just aren’t enough hours in a night to do everything that Holden Caulfield did: stay up late waiting for his roommate, get into a fight with him, hang out with Ackley, pack up, take train from Pennsylvania private school to NYC, find a hotel, dance with ugly girls in a bar, go to Ernie’s club in the East Village, walk 2 miles (“41 gorgeous blocks”) back up to the hotel, get weirded out by a prostitute, get into a fight with her elevator-pimp, take an hour-long bath, sleep “not too long” and wake up at 10 a.m. Tell me if I missed anything.

The bigger problem that I had wasn’t with the book itself, but rather with how we (okay, I) read it. No matter how much I tried to read Catcher as its own book, to get enmeshed in Holden’s deteriorating life, I found that I was looking for clues. I kept noticing little fragments — as well as longer passages (see that introductory quote above, from Holden’s experience at Ernie’s) — that may have helped predict Salinger’s decision to go into seclusion and cease publishing. Of course, while reading the book, I also re-read Ron Rosenbaum’s 1997 essay about Salinger. I wouldn’t say that my literary sleuthery holds a candle to his, but I admit that I couldn’t not read this book as a phenomenon of Salinger’s silence. (Sleuthery holds candles?)

Sure, Catcher doesn’t have the religious wackiness of his Glass stories, and when he wrote and published it, I doubt he was consciously thinking, “This will be such a huge success that I will abandon NYC and spend the rest of my days in Zen.” But it’s also written in a much more natural voice than that of Salinger stand-in Buddy Glass. Is there any other contemporary-ish writer whom we read with such . . . suspicion? I don’t think Thomas Pynchon’s brand of seclusion evokes the same detective-reading; that is, I don’t think people read his work with an eye to understanding why he avoids the public eye. But that’s because he still publishes (even if I don’t still read him). Even during 17 years of near-total silence, there were rumors that Pynchon was working on something big.

With Salinger, it’s a legitimate question as to whether he fed his post-1965 work into the furnace after it was “finished.” Or did he become like Charles Crumb, obsessively writing the equivalent of wrinkles and drapery and losing sight of everything else?

The answers will come soon, I’m sure, but how will they change the way we read him in the future?

Clip copyright 1994 Superior Pictures, “Crumb“, until they make me take it down.

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Lucky Seven

On this day seven years ago, I was

Now I’m

  • married,
  • living in my ancestral home, with lots of room for books,
  • keeping my weight around 40 lbs. below its peak,
  • retired as a book publisher,
  • working on the 100th issue of my magazine,
  • not planning any major trips,
  • starting Eddie Campbell’s Alec: The Years Have Pants, and
  • glad that I finished reading Gould’s Book of Fish, even though the other two books fell by the wayside.

And seven years ago today, I started this blog.

The world and I have gone through plenty of changes since that day. I’m happy that I’ve had Virtual Memories to help me try to chronicle it. To paraphrase Tony Kornheiser, I’ll try to do better next time.

Bonus: And we’re celebrating by having some glass guys remove the big smoked-mirror wall in our living room (installed by my dad, c.1989). Good thing they didn’t break any of those panels, or it’d be seven years of bad blogging ahead!

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Unrequired Reading: Jan. 29, 2010

Yeahyeah: first post in a while. I’m still struggling with my thoughts, writing, etc. I got re-walloped a few days ago by the news that a pal of mine from St. John’s dropped dead of an aneurysm at 36 last week (she was an undergrad when I was there as an, um, overgrad.) I have ups and downs, but I’m trying to get back to the regular posts — Unrequired Reading and What It Is — and hope to get around to some other stuff.

So just click “more” already!

Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Jan. 29, 2010”

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Enjoy the Silence

I was 16 and my high school english teacher, Rocco Gratale, was assigning term papers for the spring. I read over the list of novels that we could select for our subjects, and tried to go off the reservation. At the end of class, I asked him, “Do you mind if I do The Razor’s Edge, by Somerset Maugham?” My mom had that book on our shelf for years, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to read it.

My teacher said, “No, Gil. I think you want to do your term paper on The Catcher In The Rye.”

I’d never heard of it. I was all about the science fiction and the comic books back then. We were on pretty good terms, so I told him, “Geez, I’d sure like to do that Maugham book, Roc.”

“No, Gil. I think you want to do your term paper on The Catcher In The Rye.”

“Yes, Rocco. I’d . . . like to do my term paper on The Catcher In The Rye?”

I shudder to think of what aspects of my personality led him to “suggest” that book.

Now go read Ron Rosenbaum’s wonderful 1997 essay about Salinger. I never did get around to The Razor’s Edge, but I did see the movie a few years later.

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About Sang

On Monday, my friend Sang was found dead in his apartment. He had suffered a heart attack at some point last weekend, at the age of 43. We were introduced in 1999; my friend Vince Czyz met him and Chuck Bivona at a writer’s group in Montclair, NJ. Sang became the unpaid graphic designer for our micropress, Voyant Publishing.

Less than an hour before I got the news about his death, in an e-mail from Vince, I was looking at the cover he designed for our 2000 release, a collection of letters by Samuel R. Delany. I said to myself, “Man, did he nail that cover!”

I’ve been failing to write about Sang since then. We hadn’t seen much of each other in recent years, and all I have left are these fragments. The thing is, our conversations were intelligent but low-key. We were casually insightful, and thus the flavor of our friendship lingers, even though I can’t write anything of great importance about him.

If you want to get a better idea than I can muster of who he was, then go check out his blog and make sure to spend some time reading Chuck’s. I lost a good pal, but Chuck lost his best friend.

Here are some of those fragments. I’m sorry that they feel like trivia notes, but somehow they add up to my experience of a man’s life:

  • Our happiest shared experience was the end of the final game of the first round of the 2001-02 NBA playoffs, when the Nets beat the Pacers in double-overtime.
  • Our saddest shared experience was either 9/11 or the end of regulation of that Nets-Pacers game, when Reggie Miller bombed a 3-pointer at the buzzer to send the game into overtime. Reggie’s dunk at the end of the first OT also ranks.
  • Sang, Chuck, Vince and I, along with Samuel R. Delany, became the core members of an occasional get-together I called Smart Guys Salon. We would meet at the WWF restaurant in Times Square, have lunch and shoot the breeze.
  • His first cover illustration for The Place In Flowers Where Pollen Rests was terrible. The second one was perfection.
  • Raised in Korea sans dairy, he had no interest in pizza. This forced me to rethink my models of how guys hang out.
  • We agreed that No Reply At All had one of the greatest bridges in pop history. His ringtone on my iPhone was the opening bars of Keep It Dark, from the same Genesis record. When I played it for him last month, he giggled.
  • He’d started blogging a few months before his death, and did it pretty well. I only read a little of his fiction in 2003, so I don’t know how good that aspect of his writing became. I know that he was focused on getting published and was targeting Asian-American-specific literary magazines.
  • I still have his DVD of Black Hawk Down. He still has my DVD of Another Woman (since replaced). I think he still has (had) a few of my comics. He loved Miller’s Crossing almost as much as I did.
  • He gave my old girlfriend a copy of Buddha, by Karen Armstrong, for her birthday back in 2001 (or so). I spoke to her for the first time in 7+ years to tell her that Sang had died. She told me her cat Charlie (b. 1994) is still alive. Sang would’ve been floored by that.
  • I gave Sang a copy of George, Being George last month, because I enjoyed it and because he made an off-hand comment about wanting to get published in The Paris Review. I’m glad I didn’t get him a subscription to the magazine.
  • In 2007, I sent him a copy of Michael Bierut’s 79 Short Essays On Design. I don’t know if he ever read anything I sent him. He was always so busy.
  • In 2003, we took Chip Delany up to Readercon, outside of Boston. Chip had a 7:30 panel at the con, but we hit a ton of traffic during the drive. At one point, Chip told us not to worry about missing the panel. I told him, “Uh-uh, Chip. You are going to make that panel.” Sang went into Cannonball Run mode. I joked that we skidded into the hotel parking lot with two tires in the air. We dumped Chip in the lobby 3 minutes before his panel began.
  • There’s a photo from that weekend of Sang, me and Paul Di Filippo. He designed the covers for two of Paul Di Filippo’s books: Babylon Sisters and Little Doors. That photo’s somewhere in my house, but I can’t find it. I’m hoping Paul still has a copy. (UPDATE: Found! See below!)
  • Sang once Photoshopped our faces into a New Jersey Nets game-photo. I’m spotted up behind the three point line. He’s throwing down a one-handed monster-dunk. I can’t find that one, either.
  • Nets PF Kenyon Martin had a pectoral tattoo that read, “Badass Yellow Boy.” As you’d expect, this became my nickname for Sang.
  • On his Sega DreamCast, he created a Super-Nets team for NBA 2K2. He and I were the starting backcourt. The frontcourt consisted of Dr. J and souped-up versions of Buck Williams and Sam Bowie. We had as much fun playing that game as two guys in their early 30s can have without being stoned.
  • When I told him I had a business trip to Paris in 2002, he told me to make sure I check out “the vegetable people” at the Louvre. I now have a set of Arcimboldo drink coasters.
  • During summertime, when my Friday office hours were 8am-1pm, I’d sometimes drop in on Sang at his workplace. His partners lived in New Mexico, so he worked solo in those days. We’d shoot the breeze for hours.
  • He was a fan of John Byrne’s run of Superman in the mid-1980’s, and a big X-Men geek from Byrne’s earlier run on that comic.
  • He got back into role-playing games with a college pal of mine who attended our Smart Guys Salon. They launched a gaming company at one point. He touched that community, too.
  • I told him how one of our mutual friends would manage to take his shirt off every single time he was around my old girlfriend. Without fail. Sang didn’t believe this. I’ve never seen a person try so hard to keep from laughing the day it was proved true. Sang literally slid off his leather sofa and onto the floor, clutching his sides and covering his face.
  • He was mad that he hadn’t been invited to the party in 2004 where I met Frank Miller. He admitted that he would’ve spent the evening just walking behind Miller and bowing, so it was for the best.
  • I helped him write his online dating profile.
  • When I assured him I was never going to watch the rest of The Sopranos (after season 1), he revealed a funny joke between Christopher and Adriana. I ordered the complete series from Amazon set last week; it showed up yesterday.
  • The last time we were together, a month before his death, we talked about the merits of “Really?” vs. “Seriously?” I’d recently moved to the former’s camp, but he was sticking with the latter.
  • We had a good time that afternoon — even though the occasion of our get-together was to clean up (a small portion of) Chip Delany’s apartment (see picture above, taken by Vince Czyz) — and it makes me even sadder that he’s gone. He was in good spirits, and if you told me that one of the four of us — Vince, Sang, me and Chip — would be dead one month later, my money would’ve been on Chip, then maybe Vince.
  • He smoked all the goddamned time.

I’m not sure why we drifted apart. I certainly had less hang-out time once I’d settled down with Amy (we met at the beginning of 2004), but even before that, we’d stopped getting together so often. I think the gaming company consumed a lot of his time, but maybe it was something else. Life has its mysteries, and death tends to leave them unrevealed.

Left to right: Me, Sang Lee and Paul Di Filippo

From Readercon 2003: Sang flanked by me and Paul Di Filippo. Photo by Deb Newton.

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Man Out of Time: Comics

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There are three major problems I have with writing about comics for this “favorites of the decade” post:

  1. One of my best pals is a comics critic, and I always feel like I’m coming up short when I try to discuss comics around him.
  2. I can’t draw worth a damn and always feel like I’m coming up short when describing the visual side of comics.
  3. I have no idea what constitutes the “of the decade” part of “favorite comics of the decade.”

See, I love Chris Ware’s book, Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth, but, while it was published in 2000, it’s actually a collection of comics published in the ’90’s. Do I include that, or do I only consider books in which most of the work was originally published this decade? Because so many comics are first produced as serials, I’ll have to make an arbitrary ruling on this.

Because it really was a hell of a decade for collections of pre-2000 work. There were massive volumes of the Hernandez Brothers’ great Love & Rockets comics, Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo Sunday comics (reprinted at their original size!), the first volumes of the complete Popeye strips by E.C. Segar, Charles Burns’ Black Hole, the three-volume collected Calvin & Hobbes, Humbug, Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s gekiga books, Bill Mauldin’s Willie & Joe, the World War II Years, Jim Woodring’s Book of Frank, the complete Peanuts series, Tales of the Bizarro World (the 1950’s reprints), Scott McCloud’s Zot! from 1987-1991, and a million more great collections. Had it come out on time, the collected Alec comics by Eddie Campbell, The Years Have Pants, would have been at the top of my comics list, even though many of the comics in it are pre-2000. (One of my pals says he just found a copy in a comic store, but I’m still waiting for an Amazon delivery of it.) I have no idea if it’s a great time to be a reader of mainstream/superhero comics, but it sure is a blast to be a “literary” comics reader (with a steady job and decent income) in this era.

So I’ve tried to confine this list to comics that were mostly of this decade, but this would’ve been a much easier task at the end of the previous decade. Then I could have just recited the litany of usual suspects — Dan Clowes‘ Eightball, Pete Bagge’s Hate, Beto & Jaime Hernandez, Chester Brown’s Yummy Fur, Ware’s Acme Novelty Library, Seth’s Palookaville, R. Crumb’s Mystic Funnies and Self-Loathing Comics, Woodring, Panter, et al. — and seemed smart enough. Perhaps I’d have tossed in a somewhat obscure short story by David Mazzucchelli (Discovering America), to look even smarter!

But I’ve fallen off in my comics reading in recent years. It seems that the comics I most want to read are also the ones that take the most time to read. With my work and entertainment priorities, I really have to shut everything off to make time for good comics. I don’t think there’s a dearth of good new work; rather, there’s definitely a ton of new, likely worthy comics this decade that I simply haven’t read: Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (my only nod to The Bush Years theme for this series), Nate Powell’s Swallow Me Whole, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Craig Thompson’s Blankets, Gary Panter’s Jimbo’s Inferno and Jimbo in Purgatory, Al Columbia’s Pim & Francie, Lynda Barry’s What It Is, and on and on.

It’s sad, because comics have been part of me since I was a little child; they’re my first language, and I wish I could keep up with their conversation more than I do with novels, music or film. I have dreams occasionally about wandering through unreal malls or shopping plazas, and visiting the comic shops. I don’t recall if I ever find Hicksville-esque Comics That Should Have Been on those dream-walks, but there have been enough good ones for me to offer up another list:

Favorite Comics of the Decade

Wimbledon Green (2005) – Seth – I may’ve missed a step or two in Seth’s progression, but this is the comic where he seemed to get away from autobiographical comics and/or lead characters who bear an astonishing resemblance to Seth. The sketchbook style of the work seems to free him from an over-reliance on a 1940’s

New Yorker

cartooning style (which he employed very well, but had become too much of an identifier, in my opinion). The fragmented storytelling style presaged his next book . . .

George Sprott: 1894-1975 (2009) – Seth – . . . which was flat-out amazing. Expanded from Seth’s series of one-pagers in the NYTimes Magazine’s Funny Pages, this gorgeous book tells the story of lecturer, TV host, Arctic explorer, philanderer, one-time seminarian, Seth intersperses his not-so-omniscient narrator’s descriptions of the man’s life with interview-style passages with the people who knew Sprott. The complexity of the character belies Seth’s cartoony style, drawing the reader (this reader) into the life of a small-city semi-celebrity. I think it’s a remarkable comic; it’s my favorite of the year and may just be #1 among this list, too.

Ice Haven (2001) – Daniel Clowes – Only a few installments of Clowes’ Eightball were published this decade, but man were they good. Ice Haven is a repackaged edition of Eightball #22, and uses a number of different cartooning styles (in short bursts of a page or two) to tell the story of a small town in which a child may’ve been kidnapped in a Leopold & Loeb scenario. Clowes has a new book coming out in 2010, and I’m guessing that, if I’m writing this sorta post 10 years from now, it’ll be high up on my list.

The Death Ray (2004) – Daniel Clowes – Another standalone issue of Eightball (#23), this one sorta pays homage to 1970’s comics. It tells a “realistic” but utterly fractured superhero story, laden with Freudian weight and a deeply disturbed “hero.”

Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow / The End #1 (2006 / 2007) – Anders Nilsen – This guy’s fiancee got sick and died in a hurry, and these two books are an attempt to work through his grief. It has some of the saddest passages I’ve ever read in a comic and, even though the second volume ends on a somewhat redemptive note, I’m still sure that if I meet Nilsen I’ll want to give him a big hug and reassure him that life’s not that bad.

Jaime Hernandez‘s body of work – I have no idea how to relate the ongoing magnificence of Jaime Hernandez’s comics. In this case, the arbitrary decade-mark is silly. He and his brother Beto have continually produced some of the finest comics in history for nearly three decades now. Jaime’s comics from 1998 to 2007 (or so), collected in Locas II, a 400+ page volume, show a master storyteller working at the top of his game. Pick up the two Locas collections, and get to marvelin’.

Safe Area Gorazde / The Fixer (2001) – Joe Sacco – Comics reportage from hell on earth. In this case, Sarajevo during the war in the 1990’s. Sacco’s comics journalism is unprecedented and unparalleled, while his eye for caricature marks him as a mutant David Levine.

Achewood (2001-present) – Chris Onstad – The only online comic I follow, and one of the most bizarre and funniest things I’ve ever read. Shortly after we adopted Rufus, we came home to discover that he’d stolen one of Amy’s bras from the hamper. Thanks to Achewood, we could simultaneously quote Lyle, who said, “I’m lickin’ this bra! Found it at the police station!”

I Killed Adolf Hitler (2007) – Jason – It’s no Inglourious Basterds, but this 48-page time-travel-with-a-twist tale by Norwegian cartoonist Jason is one of the more delightful comics I’ve read. Several of Jason’s works have an O. Henry twist to them, but they’re a joy to read.

Kevin Huizenga’s body of work – A while ago, I asked my comics critic pal Tom who the good young comics talents are. I’d looked around at indy comics and had concluded that no one had stepped into the role once held by those usual suspects I mentioned above. Tom pointed me toward Kevin Huizenga and Sammy Harkham, and I have to say that they’re the two best young (under 40) cartoonists I’ve seen this decade. I’m putting Huizenga on the list because I’ve read more of his work, but I don’t have an individual favorite comic by him. Still, he’s good enough that I can recommend you pick up just about anything he’s published, esp. his Glenn Ganges comics.

Essex County Trilogy (2009) – Jeff Lemire – Okay, this is one of my quirky ones. I met Lemire in May 2009 at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. I bought the first installment of his Essex County trilogy, Tales from the Farm. I was mighty impressed by his story of a superhero-obsessed kid on a little farm in southwestern Ontario, dealing with the death of his mom. Lemire’s loose, scratchy inking made for lovely expressionistic pages. (Sure, maybe the kid looked like he was in his 50’s some panels, but hey.) This fall, I picked up the mammoth (500+ pages) edition containing all three of Lemire’s interlocking Essex County stories, as well as some side stories and ephemera. I think I dug this for the same reason I liked The Straight Story; the stories are earnest without being corny. The closest he comes to cheating is also the one moment that sorta choked me up, so I’m gonna let him slide. I can’t decide if he’s one of those “next generation of great young cartoonists” or if he’s “just” going to do good, strong work for the next dozen years. He’s moved from independent publisher Top Shelf to do a couple of series for the DC-owned Vertigo imprint; I’m sure the pay’s better, but I’m ambivalent about the work he’s produced for them. Which is its own conversation/blog post: am I really okay with an artist (in any field) who produces one really good work and never reaches those heights again? I like to think I am, but I still feel disappointed when subsequent works fall short. This is a lot more than I intended to write about Lemire’s comics.

All-Star Superman – Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely – The only superhero book on my list. Over the course of 12 issues, Morrison affectionately fuses modern storytelling and styles with some of the wackier elements of Superman comics from the ’50’s and ’60’s, ultimately elevating the character to the archetype of sun god. And it includes a 2-part story featuring my all-time favorite Superman concept: Bizarros. In this case, Superman discovers that, on a planet of 5 billion Bizarros, all meant to be the opposite of normal, one turns out to be the opposite of the opposite of normal. (He calls himself Zibarro and spends his time writing poetry and feeling misunderstood.)

Asterios Polyp (2009) – David Mazzucchelli – I just don’t know what to make of this book. It’s so phenomenally drawn and well-designed that I was floored when I read it, but there’s a sterility/flatness to many of the characters that undercuts Mazzucchelli’s story and the theory that underlies it. In that sense, it reminded me of the worst aspects of a Novel of Ideas. To its credit, it still has plenty life in it. it’s an important comic, just breathtaking in parts, and I’ll definitely give it more readings, so it makes my faves of the decade list.

Louis Riel (2004) – Chester Brown – This story of Canadian politician and resistance fighter Louis Riel is a beautiful, stark change of pace from Brown’s surrealism and his autobiographical tales. Also, it was the first book my wife ever bought me.

Fred The Clown (2004) – Roger Langridge – He portrays slapstick better than Lee Evans performs slapstick. No, not the wide receiver for the Buffalo Bills! The other Lee Evans! Roger’s all over my honorable mention list, but this is the book that I’ll flip through when I’m procrastinating downstairs in my library.

The Book of Genesis (2009) – R. Crumb – If you don’t get comics, you don’t get comics. If you do get comics, then you know that Crumb drawing an adaptation of the first book of the Bible is All That. After all, he is, to quote Robert Hughes, “The Brueghel of the second half of the 20th century,” or somesuch.

Honorable Mention

A Drifting Life – Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E. – Warren Ellis, Stuart Immonen

Exit Wounds – Rutu Modan

Unstable Molecules – James Sturm, Guy Davis

Little Nothings – Lewis Trondheim

Delphine – Richard Sala

Omega: The Unknown – Jonathan Lethem, Farel Dalrymple

Fin Fang 4 – Roger Langridge, Scott Gray

Let Us Be Perfectly Clear – Paul Hornschemeier

The Muppet Show – Roger Langridge

The Perry Bible Fellowship – Nicholas Gourewitch

Promethea – Alan Moore, J.H. Williams III (eh…)

Planetary – Warren Ellis, John Cassaday

Kramer’s Ergot #7 – Everybody

Epileptic – David B.

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