A podcast about books, art & life — not necessarily in that order
In honor of Sam Anderson’s “I never liked you” review of the new Thomas Pynchon novel
I’ve never read a word of any of Robbins’ novels, even though he was the go-to suggestion in my early college years whenever I’d mention that I was a fan of Pynchon’s work.
In later college years, Don DeLillo was the go-to suggestion. Sadly, I have read some books by him. I’m sure David Foster Wallace took the “If you like Pynchon, you’ll like . . .” role later in the ’90s. I have no idea who it is now.
Last week, I mentioned that I once kinda maligned the great cartoonist Richard Sala. A commenter who professed to be a fan of both of us asked me for the story. I was a bit suspicious, given the fact that I don’t believe I have any fans, but hey.
In 1998, I wrote a number of short reviews for The Comics Journal. I’d struck up an e-mail friendship with the editor at the Journal, the oft-mentioned Tom Spurgeon, a few years earlier, and he invited me to contribute to the new short-review section. He probably realized early in our correspondence that my longer-form writing tended to lose its way, contradict itself and otherwise become unintelligible, while my snarkiness, witticisms and occasional insights were best limited to a 150-word maximum. I wish I realized that.
The August 1998 ish of TCJ ran my short review of Mr. Sala’s comic Evil Eye #1:
I was under the impression that this comic was going to be sort of an Eightball to the Lloyd Llewellyn of Sala‘s past work. In fact, after his 17-part, 200-page Chuckling Whatsit
serial and subsequent collection, I was sure he’d move in a new direction, that he’d say, “Enough with the conspiracy melodramas. Enough with the mysterious stalkers, ritual killings and overlapping cabals!” Alas, that’s not the case. Evil Eye features a new serial replete with the B-move trappings and labyrinthine plots of The Chuckling Whatsit. Don’t get me wrong: Sala’s expressionistic artwork is more delightfully creepier than ever. It’s just the story is utterly stale. The inside cover of Evil Eye promises “thrills! chills!! and shock!!!,” but Sala’s delivered each of these so unerringly in recent years that I’d love to see him tackle a different milieu.
This was harsh. Not as harsh as some of the things I wrote for TCJ in those days, because it does include my genuine affection for Sala’s art and writing. It’s just that I thought that Mr. Sala had run his course with stories of secret societies, severed hands, fortune-tellers and ape-like killers, and was hoping he’d pursue a new direction with his comics.
Just a few months later (November 1998), TCJ ran a lengthy interview with Mr. Sala, conducted by Darcy Sullivan. Discussing the recurring “components†(Mr. Sullivan’s word) in his stories, Mr. Sala remarked,
Many artists actually have a specific vocabulary of obsession. Look at Hitchcock: he told very similar stories over and over again, and those are the ones that people love. When he tried to do something different, a screwball comedy or a period piece, people just didn’t accept it. As an artist, your goal should be to recognize your own personal obsessions, your own personal vocabulary, and use it. There was a review of my work where a guy said, “Enough with the mysterious killers and secret societies.†That’s like saying, “I’d sure like Peanuts a lot better if it didn’t have those kids in it.†I mean, that’s what I do. If you don’t like it, read something else.
It’s possible that I wasn’t “a guy,†because of the interval between publication of my review and the interview, but it sure sounds like what I wrote. Now, the point I was trying to make was that Dan Clowes’ Lloyd Llewellyn comic was a young man’s work in a narrow(ish) genre, where the next stage of his career — Eightball — was a quantum leap in terms of sophistication, humor, experimentation, and storytelling. One major difference was Mr. Clowes’ use of stories that directly address/engage the reader — like Art School Confidential, I Hate You Deeply (and its followup, I Love You Tenderly), Chicago, and Grist for the Mill — in which “Dan Clowes†or a stand-in plays the role of (usually irate) narrator. (This wasn’t the only thing I dug about Eightball, but it felt like a significant move away from LlLl.)
What I didn’t really get back then is that not everyone is Dan Clowes (or Pete Bagge). For Mr. Sala, all those recurring themes, locations and components are as direct as he can get. As he put it in that interview, explaining why he’s not interested in characterization:
What I’m writing are fever dreams. One person thrashing about in a world he doesn’t understand. Don’t bother searching for anything resembling a fully-rounded character. Don’t bother looking for any situation that has anything to do with reality. In other words, characterization is subordinate to plot and atmosphere. I’ll sacrifice characterization in a second for atmosphere. I don’t care what the character had for breakfast.
I mean, these stories are basically extensions of my personality. People use to ask me, “Why don’t you do autobiographical comics?†And I would say, “I’ve been doing them. These are my autobiographies.â€
A few years after writing my review, I read over my old Sala comics — Thirteen O’Clock, Hypnotic Tales, Black Cat Crossing — and found them much richer than I recalled. Sure, his usual coterie of storytelling elements cropped up again and again, but I saw them now as much subtler symbols, not simply of the mystery-at-hand, but of the roles of mystery and mysticism in the psyche. Of course, I can’t discount the possibility that agents of a secret society had sneaked into my home and replaced the earlier comics with new, stranger ones, but it’s more likely that I’d grown to understand the role of these personal, stylized components to Mr. Sala’s storytelling.
So I realized that my complaint about Mr. Sala’s lack of “development†was like asking Edgar Allan Poe why he didn’t write Last of the Mohicans; it’s not the story he was here to write. Moreover, to continue the cartoonist comparison, Dan Clowes soon outgrew the “personal narrator” device and went on to write some remarkable comics during the past 15 years.
It’s a good thing I didn’t take Mr. Sala’s advice — “If you don’t like it, read something else†— because I’ve gotten a great deal of joy out of his later work. Even if Delphine reads a little too quickly for a book that took almost 4 years to serialize. (I know, I know: Delphine is as much about the textures as it is about the story.)
Now go immerse yourself in some of Mr. Sala’s comics. I’m waiting for Cat Burglar Black
Cover art to Richard Sala’s Black Cat Crossing
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Reading over my old reviews as I prepared to write this post, I realized that they really need their own forum, so I’m planning to run “Klassik Komiks Kritikism†every Thursday, bringing you the best of my 11-years-old meanness. Because you’re worth it.
To be fair, I also wrote some positive reviews. In fact, one of my most gratifying moments came when one of the Langridge Bros. mentioned that my longer review of Zoot Suite
Anyone who’s read Jaime Hernandez’s Locas
Still, I’ve been hoping for a while now to compliment my three Jaime Hernandez drawings of Maggie & Hopey, Terry Downe and Penny Century with a trio of drawings of Jaime’s guys.
Comic-Con International in San Diego represents the best opportunity to do this, since Jaime and his brother Gilbert bring binders of drawings to sell at their signing sessions. But I haven’t been out to the Con since 2005; my wife didn’t have a great time when I dragged her to it that year, although now that she learned Ray Bradbury was in attendance at this past Con, she’s full of regret. So maybe next year. I guess I won’t ask her to wear the Princess Leia costume this time. (No, that’s not her.)
It’s my good fortune to have an all-around great pal who is obligated to cover the Con. I asked my Comics Reporter pal Tom to keep an eye out when Jaime was doing his signing/drawing sale sessions. A few days after the Con, I received a UPS package that looked like it was mauled by the company’s new cadre of package-sorting grizzly bears.
Tom, expecting this sort of abuse, did a fantastic job with the internal packaging, so I’m now the proud owner of three Jaime drawings of Rand Race, Doyle, and the beaten-down Ray Dominguez! Time to trim (slightly) and frame ’em!
I’ve posted all six of my Jaime scans to flickr, so just click through Penny Century for the whole set!
Now with fewer architecture links! Just click “more”!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: July 31, 2009”
I discovered a couple of sites this week, and figured I’d share ’em with you. Since they’re not around individual posts, they don’t make as much sense for Unrequired Reading:
In Duck Soup, Groucho Marx gets locked in a bathroom by Harpo, leading him to shout, “Let me out of here! Hey, let me out of here! Or throw me a magazine!”
For reasons I won’t bother to mention, a shelf in our downstairs bathroom contains a number of essay collections (Orwell, Rosenbaum, Amis) and three volumes of the Paris Review Interviews. The latter is a new series, collecting many of the same interviews as PR’s old Writers at Work editions. I haven’t gotten around to scanning those oldies into the library, but I think I have 4 or 5 of those old volumes from the ’70s and ’80s.
The new volumes cover broader periods of time, since there’s a lot more to choose from (and maybe some of the writers they once interviewed have fallen from memory). For this week’s 0-fer, I 0-fer up the roster of the Paris Review Interviews, Volume 1
What I’m reading: I finished A Drifting Life
What I’m listening to: I had Underworld Day at my office last week. That kept everyone away.
What I’m watching: Things Change, Napoleon Dynamite, Get Shorty, some Arrested Development, and the second-to-last episode of this season of The Deadliest Catch.
What I’m drinking: Juniper Green, another one of my snooty-ass highbrow gins.
What Rufus is up to: Another grey-hike, a bath. We were considering taking care of the latter this weekend, and his decision during the former to start tromping through muddy puddles sealed the deal.
Where I’m going: Scotch-Bowl night this Saturday! It’s a big benefit evening for our greyhound rescue group. I get to show off my dainty wrists by weakly flinging a bowling ball. Joy!
What I’m happy about: That Rickey Henderson’s Hall of Fame induction speech was as entertaining as I’d hoped.
What I’m sad about: Having to revise my opinion that Fight Club was 2/3rds of a good movie before going off the rails. Upon review, it’s turn-for-the-bad takes place almost exactly at the halfway point.
What I’m worried about: That you guys will get get mad if I use bit.ly URLs instead of the original URLs for Unrequired Reading links. Let me know if that would bother you. That is, do you roll over my links and see where they point before you click through? If you do, then my converting over to bit.ly would be a problem.
What I’m pondering: Whether the process of re-scanning all my books for Delicious Library will lead to my chucking at least 100 more of them into the “I’ll never read this in my lifetime” pile.
I’m too giddy with anticipation of Rickey Henderson’s Hall of Fame induction speech to do any real blogging this weekend, dear readers! I know it’s too much to hope that he’ll deliver his speech in the third person, but chances are it’ll be a memorable speech (not as awesome as Ozzie Smith’s, but hey).
To tide you over, I offer up a post from fellow St. John’s alum Bourgeois Surrender. A few weeks ago in Unrequired Reading, I linked to Fired from the Canon, about “canonical” books that don’t deserve that status. I was too busy to write about the list and the comments, but it turns out that B.S. ruminated on the topic for a bit and offered up his takes on the books mentioned there. I liked his exploration of Absalom, Absalom!
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In honor of this evening’s fine dining experience — I’m taking Amy to Chef’s Table, a wonderful French restaurant here in NJ — I’ll also link to Bourgeois Surrender’s take on fine dining.
I think he may be conflating Really Amazing Restaurants with Very Formal Restaurants, but I can understand where he’s coming from. Thanks to years of business travel, I’ve learned to appreciate Really Amazing Restaurants, even when they’re a little pricey.
Two years ago, I met up with my pal Elayne at Otto, the Mario Batali pizza restaurant near Washington Square. During our meander after (she was chaperoning two teenagers who were in town to see a Korn concert at South Street Seaport), she mentioned another Batali restaurant, Babbo. She mentioned that Babbo was so expensive, she felt it wouldn’t be right to eat there. She’s progressive, politically speaking.
As is my wont, all I could do is quote from Miller’s Crossing: “You’re missing out on a complete life.”
(While our recent meal at Batali’s Del Posto with some food-blogger friends of Amy’s was nothing to write home about, it was the single best service-experience I’ve ever had in a restaurant. The wait-staff was mind-bendingly good.)
When my brother and his family were visiting last month, he told me that a friend of his from college had recently gotten hitched. The bachelor party took place in Las Vegas and the bill for one dinner of 20 patrons came out to $6,000. I said, “Yeah? That’s $300 each. If you’re buying wine or booze, you can hit that number in no time.”
I think he was a little shocked at my blitheness. It’s not that I go out and spend that sort of cash on meals, but I’ve been out with clients to good restaurants and peeked at the check before my boss picks it up.
That said, my brother’s circumstances and fine dining opportunities are different than mine. He has two children and doesn’t drink. Our lives sure have diverged over the years.
All of which is my roundabout way of saying, people shouldn’t splurge on fancy meals when they can’t pay their bills, but sometimes an expensive meal is worth it. (And I can understand how working people with children would be averse to this sorta thing.)
Now go read some Bourgeois Surrender!
Gil in his 20s couldn’t have imagined that he’d one day put a thousand-plus-page Thomas Pynchon novel
But there you are. It’s the same theme you read from me a dozen times before: As I’ve grown older, I have less and less interest in contemporary fiction. Especially the (poorly defined) postmodern stuff.
I was quite a pomo in my college days, but I’ve learned to appreciate the merits of a, well, traditional lifestyle in my later years. Unlike other college-era decisions, this one had little to do with trying to piss off my parents. I think rather I had a desire to be New. I wanted to treat This Very Moment as an unprecedented one, unconstrained by past rules and laws. I imagined that novels had to be Encyclopedic in order to capture the world.
In short, I was a bullshit artist.
In grad school I started wending my way back to the beginnings of literature — as well as science & math, politics & society, and philosophy & religion, not to mention poetry, but I’m still a sucker for novels — and began to understand how much of modern writing was merely an echo of the trends, themes and devices that were in use nearly from the beginning.
Still, the occasion of this LA Times piece on the 61 essential postmodern reads interested me a little, at least in an 0-fer kinda way. (There’s also a good 2-part interview with John O’Brien (1 and 2), the publisher of The Dalkey Archive. My tastes and interest have diverged pretty far from Mr. O’Brien’s mission, but I respect his vision for the press, his tenacity, and his attempt to justify publishing such esoterically unreadable works as Carole Maso’s AVA
Unlike previous times I’ve broken down literary lists for an 0-fer post, I found that I needed to granulate this one a little more finely. In addition to “Read it,” “Read something by the author,” “0-fer” and “Who?”, I found that there were a bunch of books on this list that I started and never finished. Rather than put them in the “Read something by” list, I decided to add “Started, never finished.” It’s probably meaningful that this list has so many books that fall into that category. I should probably add “Will never attempt to finish” and “Why did I waste my time with this?” or “Read, but regret”, but no need to go overboard. I’ll just make little annotations on some of ’em instead.
Without further ado:
but haven’t tried his proseIf you want to find out what I have read over the past 20 years, it’s just a click away!