I see by the low rating of this volume of Tom King's Wonder Woman run--to be expected because he has previous runs on the other two in the DC trilogy-I see by the low rating of this volume of Tom King's Wonder Woman run--to be expected because he has previous runs on the other two in the DC trilogy--that people are either sikci fo Tom King or just reflecting on the crazy nature of this story. And I can see why people get cold on it as a whole, because there's a lot of junk tacked on at the end to fill out the volume, but overall I continue to be so impressed by King's consistent inventiveness. Just amazing. Quirky, but remarkable.
The opening feels like a kind of rom-com as Superman and Wonder Woman go to a mall to get Batman a birthday present, which feels light and silly and just fun. Then the central story, whcih could have been developed more, sure, but still promising; as the blurb says: "Captured by a team of villains, Diana Prince finds herself up against the nemesis of our story, The Sovereign, wielding the Lasso of Lies. As her new adversary tightens the grip on Wonder Woman’s psyche, will she prove victorious over the web of Amazon lies weaved in Man’s World?"
So in one sort of fantasy sequence that is interwoven here, Diana plays a fifties housewife sort of chained to a trad husband who wants his supper on time. So this undercurrent here is a critique of the whole back-to-when-men-were-men and women were barefoot and pregnant and making pot roast that the current wave of incel demands. And Diana is of course having none of that bs. So it is easy and kneejerk liberal to make fun of/deeply critique the current view of women in the Amerikan right, but King takes a fresh and lively approach only he could do well. True, if you are looking for a more narrative, more rock 'em and sock 'em superhero approach, you will be disappointed, but this is as King is always about, ideas, and a frsh aproach to Wonder Woman as feminist icon for today. Cool, I say, though I admit the stuff tacked on undermines the whole a bit....more
Fright (1950) by Cornell (George Hopley) Woolrich was re-released as part of the Hard Case Crime Book series, a very pulpy noir book. Hopley was actuaFright (1950) by Cornell (George Hopley) Woolrich was re-released as part of the Hard Case Crime Book series, a very pulpy noir book. Hopley was actually part of--as you can plainly see, sorry--his actual name, but he used it as a pseudonym along with many others, as many noir/pulp writers did. They didn’t get much money for these books, which they wrote fast and maybe primarily for as much cash as the chiseling crime book industry would throw at their feet.
But Woolrich was no run-of-the-mill crime writer; arguably he was one of the best, actually, as many include him in an elite club with folks such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardner. Fright was not one of Woolrich’s best books, but it is a good page turner. As even a cynical bastard like James Ellroy would acknowledge, “You could palpably feel the agony in Woolrich and his work.” A “master of suspense,” without question. Even the title admits that this tale is cataloguing just this basic emotionHe is maybe best known for the short story “Rear Window” that Hitchcock adapted to film (Jimmy Stewart, Grace Kelly). Other titles include The Bride Wore Black and The Black Angel.
This one is about a guy-the time period is 1915 Manhattan--who is working on Wall Street and about to be married to the woman of his dreams, who makes a mistake, gets blackout drunk and sleeps with a stranger who blackmails him just before the wedding. Oh, yeah, (spoiler alert) and he kills her and stuffs her in his closet. It's called Fright, but the fright comes from guilt, so it's a cautionary moral tale: Don't get drunk and sleep with a stranger especially before you marry the (rich) girl of yr dreams, you idiot! So of course he talks his young new wife into leaving Manhattan immediately to escape to a small nameless town, and then things really go downhill, a crosscountry trip of escaping from "mistake" after mistake. An increasingly frightful trip to Hell! He is now afraid of everyone; are the cops on his tail?! All misery, all the time.
So you start with the typically sleazy cover that looks like it sets up the scene; a femme fatalish woman in her underwear, with a man, crazed by her beauty, her allure, follows her to his doom. This is not exactly what happens in the book, but you can’t fault the artist who probably never read the book. The idea of such a cover promises lots of sex, too, which in this case is kind of a cheat, as almost nothing sexual happens at all after the One Night of Regret, which he doesn't recall because blackout. If you are looking for The Joys of Sex, look elsewhere; this is the opposite of a bodice-ripping S & M billionaires-with-babes sex romps, sorry.
So it begins very pulpy but actually gets better, more literary, in a way, as things go on. The new young wife--a doormat for much of the book--makes a kind of surprising turn, after the descent into Hell becomes too much for her, but the surprise is no feminist uprising, though. Then it almost turns bathetic, very over the top in a wild way. But the epilogue makes it clear this tale is in the hands of a master of the bleak noir crime tale. I dunno, it moved from 2 stars to 3 stars and it may finally be better than that. ...more
The Flemish House (1932) is Georges Simenon’s 16th (of 75) book in his Inspector Maigret detective series. This one takes place in Givet, near the BelThe Flemish House (1932) is Georges Simenon’s 16th (of 75) book in his Inspector Maigret detective series. This one takes place in Givet, near the Belgian border. Maigret is asked to visit the town at the request of Anna Peeters, who wants him to clear their wealthy Flemish family from what is suspected guilt in the murder of a young woman, a lower-class local woman named Germaine Piedboeuf who gave birth to Anna’s brother Jospeh's child. The town hates the Peeters family and thinks they killed Germaine.
But who really murdered the young woman? Maigret, out of his jurisdiction, finds the answer to the question, but the resolution is surprising, and somewhat disappointing. But the atmosphere, the tone, the loca color, is superb. ...more
“In that moment of uncontrolled fury his tears washed away his whole childhood, trust, love, credulity, respect.”
Stefan Zweig's The Burning Secret (19“In that moment of uncontrolled fury his tears washed away his whole childhood, trust, love, credulity, respect.”
Stefan Zweig's The Burning Secret (1911) is an intense novella focused on twele-year-old Edgar, the only child of a woman who seems to feel she has never loved her husband. Away with her son, she sort of casually opens the door to the attentions of a baron who initially gets inside her world through Edgar. When they are connected, however, the baron--it seems to Edgar--abandons him, as does, it seems, his mother. The boy does not understand what is going on with this couple, but gets worked up into an emotional turmoil that escalates to attacks on them and running away.
This is a very astute psychological portrait of a boy on the cusp of adolescence, very sensitive, very anguished, beautifully rendered, reminding me of early Hesse stories, Joyce's Dubliners. There are surprises in it especially involving the ways the boy is able to manipulate his mother in the process. When you are twelve you probably don't fully understand the "burning secret" of adult lust! I really enjoyed it....more
Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse's A New Name: Septology VI-VII (2021) is the third volume of what Fosse intended to be a single book, and is now availablNobel Prize winner Jon Fosse's A New Name: Septology VI-VII (2021) is the third volume of what Fosse intended to be a single book, and is now available as such. As with many great works, it took me a long time to figure out what this is about. In my initial review of the first volume I admit I kinda made fun of the mundanity, the repetition. While acknowledging that some interesting things were going on with the character, when I saw the words "hypnotic" associated with the prose, I used the phrase "sleep-inducing" to describe what is going on sometimes in that first volume. I regret that and feel foolish and ignorant about it. So I'll once again revise my reviews of the first two volumes to reflect my current view that this work is, like the other two novellas I read and liked, a real contribution to the history of literature, a great story about a simple rural painter, Asle, and his dead wife and his explicitly clear doppleganger.
The surface story of an aging, isolated painter, quietly spiritual, here comes to conclusion. The whole story takes place in seven sections, one for each day leading up to Christmas. Asle's world is small, painting every day, so,metimes seeing Åsleik, his neighbor and friend; Beyer is his gallerist who shows and sells his paintings. A doppelganger artist also named Asles. His dead wife, Ales, with him very day. We sometimes go into the past, and fluidly, quickly interchangable with the present. In the last week we meet two women who like the two artists, who look alike, both named Guro, one of them a woman he meets in a restaurant, one of them Åsleik's sister. I think it is all told in one unbroken sentence, all 667 pages!!
After what has been pretty steady pacing, abrupt but fluid shifts of point of view and time frames, there is an intensity in the final pages to underscore Fosse's intention to convey what is happening to the main character at the end, on Christmas day. Notes: Joyce, Beckett, language, great empathy for this man, for all of his characters. What is going on? Ultimately, mystery, magic; someone said Gregorian Chant; the music of Hildegard von Bingen, Tomas Transtromer, Tarjev Vesaas's The Birds, stories of simple people in the deeply spiritual struggles of their every day lives. And the place of art and its relationship--for a Christian artist--to God.
I don't know at this point in my life that I will take the time to reread it all, but I really should, now that I am just beginning to understand it, but I am not foolish enough to pretend that anyone can fully understand great works of art. As Ales says, art shoud also be operating beyond anyone's rational capacity to describe it. If it could reduced to an argumentative "point," it would not be art. Art lives in mystery. Fosse said it: "writing is a way to express the unsayable."...more
This is one of my favorite short stories from one of my all time favorite short story collections by Flannery O'Connor, one that is relevant to the coThis is one of my favorite short stories from one of my all time favorite short story collections by Flannery O'Connor, one that is relevant to the continuing refugee crisis.”The Displaced Person” is about a woman on a farm who takes in a “displaced” Polish family, the father having survived a concentration camp. He’s an amazing worker and so disrupts the largely dysfunctional indolence of the farm, but when he states his intention to bring others from Poland to join them, this crosses a line for her:
"It is not my responsibility that Mr. Guizac has nowhere to go," she said. "I don't find myself responsible for all the extra people in the world."
In the process, O’Connor shows us how the woman and others on the farm who resent the “displaced person” themselves become "displaced" from their own self-satisfied ways of living. The story becomes ultimately tragic, but is very powerful, and moving, and as I said, relevant to today's immigration politics.
"The Displaced Person" is actually novella-length. It was also developed into a one-hour film I actually saw (and taught, as a high school teacher!) first when it came out in 1976. Here's a trailer for it, but you can see the whole thing on YouTube for free:
Lady Asquith’s “The Corner Shop” (1925) is a much anthologized ghost story by a writer who was once famous for writing them. This particular edition iLady Asquith’s “The Corner Shop” (1925) is a much anthologized ghost story by a writer who was once famous for writing them. This particular edition is part of the world-renowned Seth’s Christmas Ghost Story series, single stories elegantly illustrated in small book format.
This is a story-within-a-story tale where we read a manuscript from recently departed barrister Peter Wood about his having purchased a knickknack at a corner curiosity shop--a Jade Frog--that happens to be worth a fortune. He buys it from an old man he assumes is a butler.
Wood isn’t comfortable with his new fortune, feeling the shop didn’t know the worth of the frog, and so he writes a check to the shop for half of his earnings. He goes to the shop and talks to two women who are the owners.
So I won’t spoil it, though you already know it is a ghost story, but the tale has something of Dickens’s Christmas Carol about it in that it is a morality tale.
Some will find the prose somewhat stuffy, maybe, but it is carefully written, kind of sweet, not really creepy. Aclassic ghost story! I’d read it before in some anthology but was glad to read it again, thanks to Seth’s relentless nostalgia for literature and literary practices of the past. ...more
Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir (2024) has to be in the conversation as one of the best comics memoirs/novels of all time. For some reason I did not Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir (2024) has to be in the conversation as one of the best comics memoirs/novels of all time. For some reason I did not get to it last year, when I read several fine graphic novels, some of them memoirs. This has to be on the shelf with Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, Craig Thompson's Blankets, and Art Spiegelman's Maus as yet another brilliant intergenerational story of trauma and recovery, works of art that redefine our understanding of the possibilities of the medium. I'll acknowledge that not everyone will have the time or patience for this very long, very packed story, and it was work for me in ways these other three iconic mountains were not for me, but you need to at least try it, as the rewards are rich.
Hulls is Chinese-American, telling aspects the history of China beginning with her grandmother's memoir, written there documenting brutal aspects of Mao's Revolution. As she makes clear, neither her grandmother's book nor Hulls's own book will ever be legally published there. After years of psychological abuse Grandma managed to escape with her daughter to Hong Kong, and then had a "mental breakdown" that would last the rest of her life. As psychologically astute and intellectually informed as Bechdel's memoirs ab0ut her father (and especially) her mother, this story examines the matrilineal history of her family, digging deeply into (especially) the relationship between she and her mother, who eventually became a (sometimes combative) partner in the construction of the text.
Tess and Mom went for their research back to China, Hong Kong, where they examine biraciality as a site of power and loss for their family. Tessa's biological grandfather was a white Swiss who left the country after grandma got pregnant. The book took ten years for her to write, after she had escaped her crazy family for many years to travel the world, until her grandmother finally died and she elected to slow down and make sense of her and her matrilineal life.
The book is SO well-written, but I can't say it is ever easy. And the artwork, while accomplished, is dark, swirling, emotionally complicated, rarely "Pretty," but how could it be.. Craig Thompson blurbs that she is channeling David B in his intergenerational saga of his brother's illness in Epileptic. If yuo need brushing up on the horrors of twentieth century Chinese history (45 million starved in one period as the official message was Prosperity and Growth and Triumph), this might be a place to begin. In spite of its length and extremely detailed exegesis of the complicated relationship between the three women, I still call it a masterpiece, an often fascinating and often troubling family chronicle. ...more
The Boneyard Mythos: Prelude, The Shadow Eater is a Free Comic Book Day introduction to the universe, a short story focused on a writer who is taking The Boneyard Mythos: Prelude, The Shadow Eater is a Free Comic Book Day introduction to the universe, a short story focused on a writer who is taking a break from his marriage/family for a week to get his script done. But it appears he is already there? As with the other three entries in the series so far, including Passageway, Ten Thousand Black Feathers and Tenement, the art is great and the narrative is allusive, mood-ful, light on the narrative.
The story is about a troubled writer taking a break at a remote cabin, for a week from his marriage/family, ostensibly to getting a late script done, But it appears he is already there??! He gets freaked out, clearly, encountering some being who seems to echo some of what he has been saying. It just may be that I am starting to get the approach here. Standalone glimpses into the world, start any place you want, they all tell you something about the mythos but never all of it. . . The idea for The Bone Orchard Mythos sprang from Sorrentino, who wanted to do darker stories, but expansive, like H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.
I have actually, to tell you the truth, been reading the first four entries backwards, starting with Tenement, then Feathers, then Passageway, then this! And what does it say that I givethis very spare short short story with little narrative at all four stars? I guess because I am trying to read with them and their image-focused approach. This one has some coherence to it I like, a relatability I didn't find in the others so far.
My third experience of the self-contained entries in Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino's Boneyard Orchard Mythos comics series. As with their Gideon FMy third experience of the self-contained entries in Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino's Boneyard Orchard Mythos comics series. As with their Gideon Falls horror series the art, the images are central, and there seems to be a building that is a portal to Evil. In Gideon Falls, it is a barn, and in this one it is an apartment or tenement house, where seven lost people live. One has died, and they all are trapped and so they go into the belley of the beast.
None of the characters or their stories are particularly memorable, but I think more and more story and character are not the point in the Lemire/Sorrentino horrorscape. The point is images of horror, which Sorrentino does particularly well, with Dave Stewart adding a great deal to the mood through his coloring. Nothing in the narrative really comes together, nothing really happens, as with the finish of Gideon Falls, so I think this is either 1) that Lemire is just not that good at conveying what he wants to say through these stories or 2) the team has deferred to tone and mood over story. I may need to rethink all of this at some point, but I still will say there is not much "there" there. At the end there is some information about seven key mythos figures, one per tenement storey. So maybe oveer time we get some more detail there?...more
This second offering in Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino's Bone Yard Mythos is a little better than Passageways, the first volume, since there is a lThis second offering in Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino's Bone Yard Mythos is a little better than Passageways, the first volume, since there is a little bit more focused story, wherein two gamer girls get lost in the game world, ala Stranger Things. Sorrentino's art is insanely good, as usual, the main reason to see any of their collaborations, moving in the volume from mighter sweeter brightly lit artwork to the usual dark, brooding expressionistic horror aesthetic. The story moves from the girls' youthful connections to their adult lives as they inevitably separate. But that fantasy world is always with us, apparently.
I'm trying to figure out why the storytelling in Lemire's horror work is so. .. . thin, elliptical? If you take a positive view, it is more "poetic" in that it is missing narrative links, so maybe it is more about tone and mood as the core of horror for Lemire, in keeping with Sorrentino's artwork, of course. Let the images do the work. Maybe most fantasy and horror is mainly about the images over narrative coherence? At any rate, a lot of folks like the art way more than the writing here....more
Pessoa/Soares: “I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.”
Pessoa/Soares: “I write because Job: “My soul is weary of my life.”
Pessoa/Soares: “I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.”
Pessoa/Soares: “I write because I don’t know.”
You are planning a party; here’s your guest list:
Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov (from Crime and Punishment) Melville’s “Bartelby the Scrivener” Kafka’s Gregor Samsa (from The Metamorphosis) Joyce’s Stephan Dedalus (from The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) Camus’s Merseault (from The Stranger) Beckett’s Molloy Sartre’s Roquentin (from Nausea)
I'm a comics guy, too, so let's let in Noah Van Sciver (who wrote Disquiet [I suspect naming it with Pessoa in mind] and a comics biography, The Hypo: The Melancholic Young Lincoln.
Hmm, maybe you also invite Hamlet (for some historical perspective) to recite his “To be or not to be. . . “ soliloquy as entertainment, or have Macbeth say out his speech at the party opening, “Tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day. . .”
And you will add your own literary grumps, when you begin to pick up the pattern of this literary party guest list. Some fun, eh? What’s a good party game for this bunch, Russian Roulette? My list above is all male, but I also just read (8/21) Anna Kavan's Asylum Piece, so I could make another list of just women, too, of course.
I just met someone who is a perfect addition to the guest list, Bernardo Soares, from Ferdinand Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet published in 1982, 47 years after his death at 47 in 1935. What do they have in common, the characters on our guest list? All men, yep. Men largely living without women. And many of them alone, even if they live with others. Sad, sad men. Melancholic. Intense. Maybe today we would psychologically diagnose some of them as bipolar or neurologically diagnose them as autistic/Asperger Syndrome or philosophically diagnose them as nihilist?
So what does Soares, a mild assistant bookkeeper, bring to the party that we don’t already have? Well, for one, he’s Portuguese, from Lisbon, and The Rua dos Douradores, where he lives and works and eats alone in one solitary restaurant night after night. Soares’s “story”—never to be finished, based on scraps of paper Pessoa threw in a trunk, edited and arranged by Richard Zenith with loving care—is mainly a collection of aphorisms and philosophical reflections and psychological insights with respect to Soares’s experience of “disquiet,” which I take to be a psychological condition akin to depression, ennui, and alienation, but which also seems to be a kind of existentialist statement.
Some people think Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet makes of Lisbon what Joyce’s works make of Dublin, or Kafka’s works make of Prague. The difference? Joyce’s novel is a narrative, and Disquiet actually resists narrative in most respects. It resists coherence, completion, and is a kind of deconstructionist, meta-fictional precursor to postmodernism. Resistant to logic. Often absurd. I don’t think it is for everyone, especially if you want to read a good old-fashioned story, but it does create a portrait of an interesting character, and it does have some of the most beautiful and insightful sentences you will ever read in a book. Many people list it as one of the greatest works of fiction of all time, and I won’t say nay to that, but I think as he never finished it, most readers won’t finish it, either. Would Pessoa care if we finished it? What does it mean to "finish" or not finish any book, especially this one?
The basic move Pessoa makes to convey “disquiet” is a set of repeated paralyzing contradictions, inversions, circularities or oxymorons, which can also seem very darkly funny:
“. . . the stoicism of the weak.”
“Though naturally ambitious, he savored the pleasure of having no ambitions at all.”
“Consoler of the inconsolable, Tears of those who never cry, Hour that never sounds — free me from joy and happiness.”
“To give love is to lose love.”
And on and on, delightfully and sometimes painfully so.
The Book of Soares’s Disquiet is a portrait of melancholy, of isolation:
“Do not make the infantile mistake of asking the meaning of things and words. Nothing has any meaning.”
“I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything.”
“I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect.”
Soares in his spare time keeps a journal of sorts, though we have no idea when he wrote what he wrote. Writing and reading do sustain him, in a way.
“There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality.”
But writing is also not self-discovery so much as it is self-erasure:
“To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
“I write because I don’t know.” {but not that he now expects to know; see above where life has no meaning to discover]
And he’s also sustained by dreaming (which is of course related to reading and writing):
“I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry.”
But as with writing, there's also the flip side of dreaming:
“The only important fact for me is the fact that I exist and that I suffer and cannot entirely dream myself out of feeling that suffering.”
And he's alone:
“We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.”
We are left with this explosion of dolorous language, “those feelings that inhabit the gloom of my wearinesses and the grottoes of my disquiets.”
The Book of Disquiet raises questions about the nature of authorship in that, while it is technically authored by Pessoa, it is credited to one of his several heteronyms, Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper. Who is Pessoa? He’s not a stable, unified person, but multiple and fractured. Pessoa was known primarily as a poet with several titles under several different names. The whole idea most of us ascribe to of an author's "voice" is clearly undermined by Pessoa. He leaves us with fragments of literature and identity.
As Soares says, I feel “The vast indifference of the stars.” Seems like he and Hamlet and Beckett and Camus would have a lot not to talk about at your party. ...more