tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30176644596568081782024-03-14T06:19:29.217-04:00Big Island Rachel's BooksUpdates Saturdays. Big Island Rachel's blog updates Sundays and Wednesdays and my Tumblr updates daily. I host a radio show called the Rodent Hour on Pratt Radio, Tuesdays from 8 to 10PM EST.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger50125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3017664459656808178.post-10027879038206578092013-12-22T16:55:00.000-05:002013-12-22T16:55:58.041-05:00Not-Review: World War ZI'm a very bad flyer. Right now, in my wallet, nestles the business card of a very nice Egyptian man who sat next to me and let me paw his arm and knee in sweaty, shaky panic as we descended into JFK Airport during a tornado warning. This was during the Arab Spring uprisings and he was on his way to fetch his mother in Cairo and bring her back to live with him in Los Angeles. Between the two of us, I think he had a hell of a lot more to be worried about. But panic is stupid and irrational that way, and there's really nothing I can do about my fear of flying except get on the damn plane and wait for it to be over.<br />
<br />
I tell this story because I'm panicking right now for a very stupid and irrational reason, and it's time to land this plane. I have to stop reading "World War Z."<br />
<br />
I hate zombies. I hate how fucking ubiquitous they've become in modern culture because it means I have to encounter them on every geek website and convention I go to. I'm not a big horror fan to begin with--I don't much like being scared, I get nightmares, and I grew up in a place that believes very strongly in the existence of ghosts, gods and ghouls. Tell a grown-up in Hawaii that you had seen a ghost, and they're probably going to say, "Yeah, there's loads of them around here." So my mind is very ready to believe.<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj23OxJPAccdzKNMYpgrY7uIAmUqAl-zgWHKEY9Yvux75em7EJPrI8SPtcfNjvYoZ-QU8iQSuvBDqx97e7PNd-aCtdjhSMPSWRnQv-fsTedwYCF4pqdWnwugpDKW4HIoEB5nwAXj316wAQ/s1600/mulder.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj23OxJPAccdzKNMYpgrY7uIAmUqAl-zgWHKEY9Yvux75em7EJPrI8SPtcfNjvYoZ-QU8iQSuvBDqx97e7PNd-aCtdjhSMPSWRnQv-fsTedwYCF4pqdWnwugpDKW4HIoEB5nwAXj316wAQ/s1600/mulder.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">As you might guess, I loved this show. It confirmed all my worst fears about the world.</td></tr>
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And yet, despite knowing this about myself--despite getting nightmares from "Zombieland," which is a goddamn <i>comedy </i>about zombies, I find myself spending my Sunday afternoon in a soggy mass of fear-sweat reading this stupid book. Why did I think it would be a good idea to pick up Max Brooks's "World War Z" from a Brooklyn stoop and take it home with me? What possible outcome could I hope for other than sweaty, shaky panic and the utter conviction that society is about to collapse under the weight of the undead hordes? Was it because Max Brooks is Mel Brooks's son?<br />
<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I may have had very different expectations for this book.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I don't know. But I had to stop reading and come write this instead, even though I can't really write a review of a book I haven't exactly read. I mean, I read the first 10 pages, and then I skipped ahead and read a 30 page chunk in the middle of the book, thinking that maybe if I jumped to the middle of the action, where it's all zombie-killing all the time, I wouldn't be as scared.<br />
<br />
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<br />
I should say that as far as zombie stories go, this one is pretty good. It's hard to come into a genre that's already overstuffed with variations on a theme. We've had slow zombies, fast zombies, romantic comedy zombies, zombies as a metaphor for racism, for capitalism, for sex--you name it, somebody has probably put zombies in it. "World War Z" sets itself apart from the pack by its form more than its story. It's written as an oral history of the titular World War Z, which ended 10 years before the book opens. The author collects first-person accounts from survivors about their experiences in the war, and I read them and cry and cry and cry.<br />
<br />
That's all I've got in terms of a formal review. I'm sure this is a very good book, but I'm going to dump it on the doorstep tomorrow. The truth is, zombies hit a little too close to home. They're a manifestation of humanity run amok, a blight upon the earth, an unstoppable force whose existence signals the end of society. And I don't need a reminder of that shit. A hurricane brought floodwaters within two blocks of my home; student loan debt stands at a trillion-plus; the coral is dying in Kona. Cataclysmic destruction is real enough in my world. I don't see the need to compound it with the fear of fucking zombies.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3017664459656808178.post-33612553909654054342013-12-08T14:29:00.001-05:002013-12-08T14:29:34.419-05:00Scifi Review: The Left Hand of DarknessThe sixties. Hell of a decade for science fiction. Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" and "Slaughterhouse-Five," Robert Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land," Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electrical Sheep," aka "Bladerunner," and "The Man in the High Castle," aka "The Nazis Won."<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkAKMkqwl1-CjS2b8ndatZr4OLD1l4oDPm0-mbW10oltSDjkzJabnZYV6sLy3SQDXNO5-Ie7ARUzGBlav4RHs8G814ILCIGMYaIoeC8W0M5Kx4KXshKE2S-SRbyLWk5FTpHeWoqlH5fUQ/s1600/left+hand.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkAKMkqwl1-CjS2b8ndatZr4OLD1l4oDPm0-mbW10oltSDjkzJabnZYV6sLy3SQDXNO5-Ie7ARUzGBlav4RHs8G814ILCIGMYaIoeC8W0M5Kx4KXshKE2S-SRbyLWk5FTpHeWoqlH5fUQ/s320/left+hand.jpg" width="181" /></a>But like everything that ever existed, it's not all about white dudes. This week we're going to look at Ursula K. Le Guin's 1969 novel, "The Left Hand of Darkness," which broke new ground for the exploration of feminism in science fiction. The book raised the bar for the sci-fi genre in general, reaffirming its importance in the family of literature as a vehicle for challenging deeply held societal concepts.<br />
<br />
"Left Hand" takes the concepts of sex and gender--which are so fundamental to the identity of humans everywhere that they seem to fall under the category of "instinct" rather than "cultural norm"--and asks what would happen if they simply didn't exist. What would humans be like without genders or sexual identities?<br />
<br />
I feel compelled to point out that this isn't like the Junior Anti-Sex League in "1984," nor is it the weee, free love let everyone fuck everyone else! in "Brave New World." Sci-fi abounds with societies in which sexual behavior is distorted or controlled by governments and outside influences--that's pretty much the world we live in now, which is why so many authors of all genres like to write about it.<br />
<br />
Nor is it like that one episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" where the writers tried to make a point about gay rights by having an alien from ambi-sexual, genderless race "come out" as female and declare her love for Riker, only to be kidnapped by her family and go through gender conversion therapy to get rid of all the lady in her.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">To be fair, who <i>wouldn't </i>turn lady for that face?</td></tr>
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The examples above start with the assumption that humans have genders and sexual identities, and extrapolate situations in which those attributes are shaped or controlled to achieve various societal and cultural outcomes. "Left Hand" is significant because it begins with a different premise altogether. It asks readers to imagine a world in which humans don't think about those things because they simply don't exist. What if we really could just treat each other like "people"?<br />
<br />
The world of "Left Hand" is populated by humans who are gender neutral the vast majority of the time. Once a month, they go into "heat," as it were, wherein their bodies are able to get pregnant or sire children. For those few days, their bodies have a "gender" or a "sex" as we might conceive it, but because people have an equal chance of being either gender every time they go into heat, such distinctions are largely meaningless. Except for those few days of the month, the humans have neither the urge nor the ability to have sex, so while the society has "room for sex, it is a room apart."<br />
<br />
Ironically, I have to spend a lot of time talking about sex in order to introduce a society in which sex simply doesn't matter. Except for a few pages toward the beginning, describing what I've
outlined above, the plot of "Left Hand" isn't at all concerned with sex,
gender, or sexual identity. The most significant aspect of this book, the one everyone talks about when they talk about "The Left Hand of Darkness," is the least important part of the actual story, which is about a small planet's first contact with alien life. But that's how central sex is to our own society--it's there even when it's not.<br />
<br />
So, the story is about first contact. A human from our Earth, Genly Ai, has come to the icy planet of Gethen as an envoy for this vague, benevolent organization of planets called the Ekumen (the United Nations or Star Fleet equivalent of this world). He is there to convince the people of Gethen that they are not alone in the universe and invite them to join the other planets in trade and cross-cultural exchange. One high-ranking member of the government, Estraven, believes in Genly's mission and what he represents, but Estraven is outmaneuvered by another politician, who wants to use Genly's presence to start a war with another country. Estraven and Genly both end up exiled to the other country, which is a totalitarian state. They have to escape from a concentration camp and get out of the country over a glacier in the middle of winter, with the slim hope of contacting Genly's ship and crewmates in orbit around the planet if they reach civilization alive.<br />
<br />
I remember being somewhat perplexed the first time I read this book, because I thought it was going to be explicitly about sex and power, a la "The Handmaid's Tale." It's actually an adventure story, full of political intrigue, daring escapes, and treacherous journeys through merciless but beautiful landscapes. Gethen is in the middle of an ice age, so the characters are always on the razor edge of survival, and tiny decisions can mean the difference between life and death from exposure or starvation. (It's winter here in New York, by the way, and I hate it, which is why I decided to read this book.)<br />
<br />
I read in a couple of different reviews that "Left Hand" is considered soft science fiction, meaning it's more concerned with characters and society than with physics or engineering. And it's true that while the narrator Genly Ai is an alien from a society that has mastered space travel, Gethen itself has about the same technology as the era in which it was written, minus television and air travel. However, I find it more challenging than other hard sci-fi works I've encountered, such as Isaac Asimov's "Foundations," because reading "Left Hand" requires a constant readjustment of the reader's relationship to the Gethen characters.<br />
I had to view them as both male <i>and </i>female, and remind myself that their actions and attitudes have to be seen as coming from both sexual identities. It's quite a mind trip. I can't accurately describe how it makes me feel as a reader to work so hard at undoing my social conditioning about sex and gender, just to understand a character and a world that has neither. That, for me, is the very definition of "speculative fiction." And it is hard.<br />
<br />
No pun intended.<br />
<br />
Final Grade: B+. Lots to like in this book, and it's challenging without being boring. But it's essentially a buddy story, so people who go into it expecting to see advances in technology or sweeping societal changes may be put off by the intimate nature of the plot. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3017664459656808178.post-40566178676513242322013-12-01T18:43:00.003-05:002013-12-01T18:43:56.227-05:00True crime: ColumbineLet's just pretend that four month break never happened.<br />
<br />
To celebrate the month of October, I checked out a bunch of true crime books from the Brooklyn Public Library. I wanted to be scared about things that could actually happen to me instead of zombies.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgwbFWMuKR744kSSxJhRJk1SLAqe1afMIpIqF_XzMFUuC9_UmcUWz65m15BXKq3H29tNk4Sa9Y63wXxDH3fqjqUvBD7h1Ys8hWTYZSXx6emxxdIdmEmWY2EJ0CFJrp7Ah3RTcA9bUSDLM/s1600/columbine.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgwbFWMuKR744kSSxJhRJk1SLAqe1afMIpIqF_XzMFUuC9_UmcUWz65m15BXKq3H29tNk4Sa9Y63wXxDH3fqjqUvBD7h1Ys8hWTYZSXx6emxxdIdmEmWY2EJ0CFJrp7Ah3RTcA9bUSDLM/s1600/columbine.jpg" /></a>The first book I read was "Columbine," by Dave Cullen (2009). The 1999 massacre at Columbine High<i>.</i>School in Colorado was the first major media event of my life. That sounds a little sick, like it was my first Superbowl or Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, but it's true. It was the first news story I ever noticed, because it was about people in my age group (or slightly older, I was in middle school). So much of the follow-up commentary was about people like me, what we were doing, and how we were feeling<br />
<br />
Reading this book, I remembered what we all "knew" about Columbine. The shooters were bullied loners; they were in a gang called the Trenchcoat Mafia; they were after jocks, minorities, homosexuals, and/or Christians; they could have been helped if only they'd been discovered earlier. The whole thing turned into this juicy morality tale about the importance of early intervention in the lives of troubled teens, and it was a satisfying enough narrative that it remains the accepted explanation of the Columbine Massacre even though it's almost entirely wrong.<br />
<br />
The truth is more mundane than the accepted tale of fragile young men pushed to the breaking point by a cold, uncaring society. Society had actually poured a lot of effort into the two. Both Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were in court-ordered therapy for committing a string of petty thefts and vandalism in the years leading up to the massacre. They had therapists, doctors, parole officers, medication, stable home lives, and a strong network of friends and co-workers. They weren't loners, they weren't unpopular, they didn't hate jocks, and they weren't bullied. "Trenchcoat Mafia," one of the most lurid and compelling parts of the story as it broke, was a nickname given to a group of kids at Columbine the year earlier. The term had fallen out of use by the spring of 1999, and anyway, neither of the shooters were part of it to begin with.<br />
<br />
What actually happened is that Harris was a full-blown psychopath. The efforts of his parents and doctors to turn him into a caring, productive member of society either amused him or infuriated him, and he felt no remorse or empathy for the people he hurt or killed. He was a real-life Joker who just wanted to watch the world burn.<br />
<br />
Klebold was depressed, suicidal, and obsessed with a girl who never seemed to have spoken to him outside his own mind. His motivation is a little harder to figure out--how much of his involvement was due to manipulation by a brilliant, charming psychopath, and how much of it was just his own desire to die and take as many people with him as he went down?<br />
<br />
I can't recommend this book enough. It's an incredibly compelling story to begin with: an in-depth look at one of the most shocking events of 20th century America. But when you come into it thinking you already know everything there is to know about the Columbine Massacre, like I did, you come away with a new awareness of the power of the media. We 21st century folks are familiar with the 24-hour media spin cycle, but in a way, Columbine is where that all began. (It was, for example, the first time emergency response crews had to deal with victims still inside the building using cell phones, which seems like a no-brainer now but was so radical at the time that it literally changed the rule book for emergency crews.)<br />
<br />
Final Grade: A. <br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3017664459656808178.post-59837392756960280832013-09-04T21:17:00.001-04:002013-09-04T21:17:55.075-04:00Comics Review: "The Sandman: A Game of You"Summer doesn't end until the autumn equinox, so technically there's still time to finish my Sandman retrospective. <i>There's still time! </i><br />
<br />
As always, <b>SPOILERS </b>abound!<br />
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<br />
The thing about "The Sandman" is that you start reading it and you
think, "Wow, this is amazing." And then you go on reading it and think,
"No, that wasn't amazing, <i>this </i>is amazing, I didn't know what
amazing was when I said that first bit was amazing." And then, "What was
I thinking?! I could beat my Past Self with a stout rod, THIS is the
true meaning of amazing."<br />
<br />
Then you get to "A Game of You"
and it's like the word "amazing" has crawled off the page, spanked you
in a firm but loving manner, given you head, and made you lasagna and a
martini. <br />
<br />
I feel a little bad about grading "The Doll's House" so harshly now. The events in it were clearly important because the series keeps circling back to them, first in "Season of Mists" and now in "A Game of You." It makes me look at "The Doll's House" a little differently, knowing that it was where the series got off the ground in terms of the long narrative. I still think "The Doll's House" is the weakest of the bunch, but I find I don't mind as much that Dream Vortex was so poorly explained, or that the main character was so flat and uninteresting compared to the side characters. <br />
<br />
This week's outing, volume 5 of "The Sandman," takes one of those side characters and explores in depth what the Vortex did to her life, both sleeping and waking. In "The Doll's House," Barbie was happily if creepily married to a man named Ken, and in her dreams, she was Princess Barbara, ruler-goddess of a fantasy land under siege by a mysterious evil force known as the Cuckoo. Barbie's encounter with the Vortex leaves her with neither brand-name approved husband nor princess fantasy world. She's divorced, living in a crappy studio apartment in New York, and entirely unable to dream. Her absence has left her fantasy land and its inhabitants without a princess and at the mercy of the Cuckoo.<br />
<br />
"A Game of You" opens with some of these inhabitants discussing Princess Barbie's long absence. Her closest companion, a large dog-like creature named Martin Tenbones, decides to go to the real world to find her again. He uses a dream-stone, the Porpentine ( a close relative, as it were, of Dream's ruby dream-stone from "Preludes and Nocturnes) to leave the Dreaming and come to Manhattan, but is quickly cut down by the NYPD. With his dying breath, he passes the Porpentine off to his beloved princess and begs her to save the land from the Cuckoo and destruction.<br />
<br />
This is one of the story arcs in which Dream himself doesn't appear much. When Martin Tenbones passes from the Dreaming to the waking world, Dream coldly observes that Barbie's fantasy land, a distant dream-island known as a "skerry," is dying and that he won't do anything about it. That's what skerries do, they live and they die, and this is a story about one's death.<br />
<br />
That sounds depressing. And it is. "A Game of You" is the saddest story in the "Sandman" universe. I'd even place it higher in tear-jerk factor than "Brief Lives" and "The Kindly Ones," because at least those stories concern sad events that <i>matter </i>in grand scheme of the universe. "A Game of You" is<i> </i>a tragedy that takes place on the margins of the everything, and its characters are rejects from mainstream society whose lives (and deaths) only matter to a very few other insignificant people. Unlike "A Doll's House," in which our main character is very special and immensely powerful, but just doesn't know it yet, "A Game of You" is about people who will never be special and realize over the course of the story just how un-special they really are.<br />
<br />
It's dark stuff.<br />
<br />
And it is phenomenal.<br />
<br />
"A Game of You" is arguably the best "The Sandman" has to offer. It's not my personal favorite, but objectively, this is the best piece of literature in the bunch. It's meticulously plotted and paced, it's characters live and breathe from their very first panels, and it illuminates better than a lot of other storylines what the Dreaming is, who goes there, and why. <br />
<br />
The power of the Porpentine enables--or forces--Barbie to return to her dream-land, but Martin Tenbones wasn't the only person who knew how to find her. An agent of the Cuckoo, a man with a chest full of crows named George (the man is named George, not the crows), has been living upstairs from Barbie in New York and monitoring her. When he sees that she has the Porpentine, he cuts open his chest and sends the crows out to menace the neighbors, giving them horrible nightmares in the hopes that they will destroy the Porpentine in order to stop the bad dreams.<br />
<br />
I said a couple of review back that "The Sandman" veered away from horror after "Calliope," but I think I spoke too soon. The nightmares the crows give Barbie's neighbors and friends are some of the creepiest images in the series. Barbie's best friend Wanda is kidnapped by comic books characters and threatened with saws and scalpels in a Bizarro-universe hospital; neighbor Foxglove is menaced by her old girlfriend Judy, who we last saw stabbing her own eyes out in the diner slaughter sequence from "Preludes and Nocturnes"; Foxglove's current girlfriend Hazel, who fears she may be pregnant from a drunken one-night stand with a gay man, dreams of a corpse-baby who comes to life to eat her; and neighbor Thessaly--well, she makes her dream-crow burst into flames by looking at it, and then she goes upstairs to murder George with a bread knife.<br />
<br />
One of these people is not like the other. <br />
<br />
Because I'm a writer and not an artist, I tend not to talk much about the artwork in "The Sandman," but I want to pause here and take a moment to acknowledge the art of "A Game of You." Shawn McManus drew all but one of the issues, and his style is strikingly different from the other "Sandman" artists up to this point. One the one hand, it's a little more cartoony than say, Mike Dringenberg, who did a lot of the early issues and "Season of Mists," but it has this amazing clarity to it that you don't often get even these days in mainstream comics.<br />
<br />
You can really see it in the faces of the characters. In superhero comics, often the only way to tell people apart is their hair and costume; the faces and bodies all look the same, especially the female characters, which may as well be traced from a Hustler magazine for all the variety the artists give them. But in "A Game of You," the faces not only look different, they look <i>distinctive</i>. In the last issue, Barbie meets Wanda's family and you can actually tell that they're all related. This may not seem like that great a feat, but as someone who reads a lot of comic books, I can tell you that it is unusual and rare to see related characters actually look like each other without all looking the same. <br />
<br />
As long as I'm talking about art, I have to retract my earlier comment that "The Doll's House" has the worst coloring ever, and shift that comment over to the inking in "Sandman" issue 34, chapter 3 of "A Game of You." Colleen Doran took over for McManus for this issue, and if you look at her original pages, they're great. But George Pratt came along to ink the pages and it came out looking like shit. The artwork was so bad that when DC released the Absolute Sandman editions, <a href="http://www.comicartfans.com/galleryroom.asp?gsub=90106" target="_blank">issue 34 was replaced</a> with Doran's original artwork that she re-inked herself.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSrv5wxhJlTMWxc8KGvqmYAoTc-UGOnUpIia5GSZ96kU8fE4y_lfQ" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSrv5wxhJlTMWxc8KGvqmYAoTc-UGOnUpIia5GSZ96kU8fE4y_lfQ" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Good art.</td></tr>
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I don't own that edition, so I'm stuck with the version that both Doran and Gaiman hated.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.goodgirlsgonegeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/thessaly.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.goodgirlsgonegeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/thessaly.jpg" width="208" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Shitty art. The more you know.</td></tr>
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There's your comics industry gossip for the day! Back to the story. <br />
<br />
Thessaly is an immortal witch who tears George's face off his dead body, nails it to the wall of his apartment, and makes him reveal all he knows about the Cuckoo. She decides to go into Barbie's dream and kill the Cuckoo, not because Barbie may die if she doesn't, but because you don't get to be an immortal by letting people push you around. To get to the Dreaming, Thessaly pulls the moon down from the sky and forces it to let her, Foxglove and Hazel take the moon's road into Barbie's dream. The three of them get to go because they fulfill the maiden-mother-crone archetype. But Wanda has to stay behind in New York with the comatose Barbie and the face nailed to wall because only women can walk the moon's road and Wanda was born a man.<br />
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<br />
Imagine, if you will, being a thirteen-year-old girl. (Pick your own, though, don't imagine being me, <i>I </i>was me, nobody else gets to be.) Imagine being thirteen in a small, fairly religious community with rigid ideas about gender and a streak of anti-intellectualism. In other words, imagine being thirteen in the United States of America. And you're reading a book in which all the main characters are women, two are gay, one is transgendered, one is a witch, and they're all trying to defeat a creature who exploits the angst little girls feel as they mature and become aware of the limitations imposed on them by society simply because they are female. <br />
<br />
In feminist circles, this is known as the "click" moment, when sexism ceases to be an abstract concept and is recognized as something that affects you as an individual. The political becomes personal.<br />
<br />
I'm not gay, or transgendered, or particularly witch-like, although I did go through a goth phase after reading "The Sandman." It's a bad look for the tropics, Google "sweaty goths" and you'll see what I mean. But this was the first media representation of gay and transgendered people I encountered that treated them as individuals, with lives and stories that were just as important as that of our White Male Protagonist, Dream. <br />
<br />
This was also the first time I realized <i>why </i>it's so important for people to see themselves reflected in the stories they consume, not in an abstract analyze-this-piece-for-symbolism way, but in an explicit this-is-the-point-of-the-story way. All of "The Sandman" is about the importance of stories: the stories we tell others, the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we live without being aware that we are doing so. "A Game of You" in particular is about the stories that sustain us, sometimes for years, but must nevertheless come to an end. Who are we, both with and without these stories? How do the stories we tell about ourselves create our identities? And how can we learn to move on when we can't move back?<br />
<br />
We're still only about half-way through the story. This shit is dense. <br />
<br />
Thessaly, Foxglove and Hazel are walking the moon's road; Wanda watches over Barbie's body in New York and chats with George's dead face; and in the dream-land, Barbie has been betrayed by one of her friends and is captured by the Cuckoo. The Cuckoo, as it turns out, takes the form of a ten-year-old Barbie and rules the land from Barbie's childhood home. She takes Barbie on a tour of the house and weaves a spell with her voice, explaining who she is, who Barbie is, and by the way Barbie and the land need to die now if that's all right with her.<br />
<br />
The Cuckoo was able to take up residence in Barbie's dreams because of Barbie's deep need for escape from the boredom of her waking life. Her parents wanted her to be a "little lady" and discouraged her from reading superhero comics or playing with boys, so she created a dream based on fantasy books and populated it with living versions of her toys. She became a princess, which is pretty much the only fantasy little girls are allowed to have, and in this fantasy, the Cuckoo was both her mortal enemy but also an integral part of the story. When Barbie lost her dreams due to Rose Walker's Vortexing, the Cuckoo was unable to fly away and go to lay Cuckoo eggs in the minds of other imaginative little girls, and now the only thing that will free her is the destruction of the skerry, which was once her cradle but is now her prison.<br />
<br />
So Barbie destroys her dream. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2212/2479795729_3c32fed3f4_z.jpg?zz=1" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2212/2479795729_3c32fed3f4_z.jpg?zz=1" width="309" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dream helps. A little.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The ending of "A Game of You" is a huge bummer, I'm not going to lie. Everyone one of Barbie's beloved dream-toy-friends dies, her fantasy land dies, and the Cuckoo flies away unscathed. The women on the moon's road show up too late to stop any of it, so not only was their journey in vain, but when Thessaly drew down the moon to get them to Barbie, the brief absence of the moon in the sky caused a hurricane in New York City (<a href="http://bigislandrachel.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-storm.html" target="_blank">which is eerily prescient, I have to say</a>). Dream shows up and offers Barbie a single wish, which she uses to get herself and the other women back home to New York, but when they get there, the hurricane has completely destroyed their building and everything in it.<br />
<br />
And Wanda is dead.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTfENS01LNV9CCIEmdon46IVs0z-fMakmikl1aHRHzXJRiBOfE08w" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="156" src="https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTfENS01LNV9CCIEmdon46IVs0z-fMakmikl1aHRHzXJRiBOfE08w" width="320" /></a>The last issue of this story arc is Barbie attending Wanda's funeral in Kansas. She's homeless, broke from spending the last of her cash on a bus ticket to the funeral, and Wanda's family doesn't even want her there. She sits on the edge of Wanda's grave for a while, talking to her about the secret world's that must exist inside of everyone, and as she leaves, she uses a tube of lipstick to write "WANDA" on the headstone over her friend's (male) birth name. The story ends with Barbie at the bus stop after the funeral, remembering a dream she had of Wanda and Death smiling and waving good-bye to her.<br />
<br />
I cried the first time I read it. I cried this time. This is a story that makes you have deep, complex feelings, and makes
you think hard about big, scary things. It never stops being incredibly sad and beautiful at the same time, how a person can be irrevocably altered on the inside and yet remain the same on the outside; how people struggle to make their insides match their outsides, so other people will look at a person and see the <i>true </i>self instead of the self that came with birth and other un-asked-for circumstances; how people leave and die for reasons no one can understand, because the beings in charge of those kinds of things are kind of assholes and don't like to think about the terror and anguish us mere mortals live in because of them. (Seriously, Thessaly, way to be a fucking asshole about the whole thing.) <br />
<br />
I think that's why I consider "A Game of You" to be the best of the bunch: because it takes these huge, frightening concepts and arranges them in such a way that not only do you <i>have</i> to look at them, but you <i>want</i> to look at them. Most of us don't want to think about how we've changed or how we will change as we get closer to death. Most of us don't like to think about death. But "A Game of You" asks you to look at those things, not because the story wants you to be uncomfortable, but because it wants you to be comfortable. It wants to show you that they aren't such bad things to think about, that this whole being alive thing is not as scary as it seems, though that doesn't mean it doesn't matter. It matters deeply, and that's why you need to look at it.<br />
<br />
I don't know, it's a little hard to describe. I'm pretty sure you could read the book yourself in the time it's taken you to read this long-ass review, and I've left out so much! I've left out all the references to "The Wizard of Oz," and what it means for both the kind of story Gaiman is writing AND the significance that story has within the gay community. I didn't touch on the controversy of Wanda's death and how some feel it perpetuates the "Bury the Gays" trope, which I feel is a valid criticism even if I don't necessarily agree with it.<br />
<br />
But again, long-ass review. Read it yourself. <br />
<br />
Final Grade: A+.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3017664459656808178.post-24115661186713459962013-08-17T15:17:00.001-04:002013-08-17T15:32:36.431-04:00Game of Thrones SpecialI have to interrupt my "Sandman" comic retrospective because I've spent the last few weeks deep in a Game of Thrones hole. I found a copy of "A Clash of Kings," the second book in the series, in a community garden on Columbia Street, and after I read that, there was nothing for it but to read the rest.<br />
<br />
The Game of Thrones series, more accurately known as "A Song of Ice and Fire" by Santa Claus-lookalike George R.R Martin, hit my radar as soon as the first advertisements for the television series went up in my subway station. I don't actually read a lot of fantasy, but there's only so long I could look at Sean Bean sitting on that chair made of swords at the Bergen Street F station before I had to know what all the fuss was about.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Advertising works.</td></tr>
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Also, "Game of Thrones" is the only television show that almost everyone in my office watches, and Monday mornings were our GoT recap sessions. I <i>had </i>to read the entire series so I could always know what was coming and give smug spoilers on request. Thus ensuring my place in the office hierarchy as the insufferable nerd who gives way to much of a shit about interests normal people would be slightly ashamed of having.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6n-ylknjbJ7wsm5zrYrVhBrS1gbW44SBZ0xtBkFx9S8GACTLKhetQ9SNzDPPa4SkcJ30mISpOag9kb4KQBcTT_dDP8krLHA3RfsRw2HiJ6-ptrwwY__UnHpwgOsVQOfvAABuKLKjYzzQ/s1600/IMG_0278.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6n-ylknjbJ7wsm5zrYrVhBrS1gbW44SBZ0xtBkFx9S8GACTLKhetQ9SNzDPPa4SkcJ30mISpOag9kb4KQBcTT_dDP8krLHA3RfsRw2HiJ6-ptrwwY__UnHpwgOsVQOfvAABuKLKjYzzQ/s320/IMG_0278.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">No shame. Haters gonna hate.</td></tr>
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The television show is great. And so are the books, as you might imagine. Even though there's umpty-zillion main characters and storylines, I think the books are best described as "readable." You get pulled into the world very quickly and easily, every character great and small feels fleshed out and real, and details about the society and history get doled out in manageable portions just when you need them.<br />
<br />
While there are recognizable elements from the fantasy genre in "A Song of Ice and Fire"--recognizable to both die-hard fantasy nerds and to anyone who saw a Lord of the Rings movie once in the theater because it was raining and it was the only movie everyone in your family could agree on--the series is actually a subversion of fantasy tropes. When I describe ASOIAF to others, I say, "It's sword-and-sorcery, but
heavy on the sword and light on the sorcery." It would be more accurate
to call it something like "realistic fantasy," or "fantastical realism." <br />
<br />
To be sure, all the familiar faces are there: kings, princesses, dragons, brave knights, gallant outlaws, swords with names and cursed castles. But ASOIAF takes the extra step of imagining a world where all of these things exist with ordinary human beings in a functioning, complex society, with politics, religion, social movements, and strained foreign relations. There came a point when I stopped viewing the characters from my own cultural perspective and began to view them from theirs, to see their society as they saw it, and that's when I knew that ASOIAF was a cut above most standard fantasy fare.<br />
<br />
The scope of the series is massive--it takes place over several years, in several locations thousands of miles apart,
and it's told from multiple characters' perspectives, so you can sometimes
feel a bit overwhelmed with information. I've read the entire series twice now, and seen the television series from beginning to end twice, and I finally feel like I'm getting a good grasp of what's going on. But figuring out what's going on is half the fun of ASOIAF! A common refrain in the office is, "Wait, who is X again, what's their deal?" And we get to spend another ten minutes figuring out the characters and their relationships to one another. As the BF's father also says every time we see each other, "I don't
understand anything that's going on, but I can't stop watching." <br />
<br />
All that aside, ASOIAF is just a great story. It's about love, betrayal, and ambition. It's about nations at war, a world in peril, and rulers both good and bad struggling for power. But it's also got incest! Ice zombies! People dying in horrifically imaginative ways! And <i>strong female characters!</i><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">You don't know about the adventures of the <a href="http://harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=311" target="_blank">Strong Female Characters</a>? Kate Beaton will school ya!</td></tr>
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I'd recommend it to anyone who likes fantasy, politics and political intrigue, sweeping multi-generational family sagas, and epic war stories.<br />
<br />
Also recommended to anxious flyers like myself. I really should have saved these books for my trip back to Hawaii this November. Five thousand pages of fantasy would have been the perfect distraction on my twelve hour flight.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3017664459656808178.post-25430375353693703082013-07-23T16:22:00.002-04:002013-07-23T16:22:42.853-04:00Comics Review: "The Sandman: Season of Mists"There's a certain part of me that wishes I had never read "The Sandman."<br />
<br />
Because if that were so, I could read it for the first time and have my mind blown all over again. <br />
<br />
"Season of Mists," the fourth volume in the "Sandman" series, is my favorite. I love the shit out of this story. It's hard for me to even articulate why it's just so goddamn awesome. Can I just scan every page of the comic onto this page and you can read it yourself, and then at the end we can clap our hands and dance around and screech about how wonderful it is?<br />
<br />
Quick google search confirms that's illegal. I guess I'll have to write the review. Oh, and even though it's been like, twenty years, <b>SPOILERS</b> below. <br />
<br />
So remember back in "<a href="http://bigislandrachelsbooks.blogspot.com/2013/06/comics-review-sandman-preludes-and.html" target="_blank">Preludes and Nocturnes</a>" that Dream had to go to Hell and battle a demon to get back his helmet? While he was there, he ran into an old girlfriend he'd condemned to everlasting torture for reasons made clear in "<a href="http://bigislandrachelsbooks.blogspot.com/2013/07/comics-review-sandman-dolls-house.html" target="_blank">The Doll's House</a>." The woman, Nada, was a queen who fell in love with Dream. He loved her in return and offered her immortality, co-leadership of the Dreaming, deification, anything she wanted, if she would stay with him forever. But Nada refused him because mortals shouldn't get involved with the Endless (more about this in "Brief Lives," coming up in a couple weeks). She killed herself to end the relationship, and Dream sentenced her to Hell as punishment for rejecting him.<br />
<br />
As Death says to him at the beginning of this story arc, "Condemning her to an eternity in Hell, just because she turned you down... that's a really shitty thing to do."<br />
<br />
This is why big sisters are so great: they call you on your bullshit. I'm glad I've got one.<br />
<br />
Speaking of families, meet the Endless! "Season of Mists" begins with an incredibly awkward family reunion in the garden of Destiny, the oldest Endless (say that five times fast). We met Destiny very briefly back in "Preludes," Death we know, and of course Dream; then there's the twins, Desire and Despair, who were both introduced in "The Doll's House"; one brother, called the Prodigal, is missing and won't be coming to the party; and for the first time, we meet the youngest of the Endless, sister Delirium.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I was Delirium for Halloween once. The hair dye all came out during apple bobbing.</td></tr>
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She's the personification of mental illness and bad drug trips, and she <i>really </i>doesn't want to be here. None of the Endless siblings do, actually. There's a great moment when Destiny says everyone must have a lot to talk about, since it's been three hundred years since they were last together--and they all just stare at each other in silence. And then they start fighting.<br />
<br />
Maybe they don't get along because they have too much influence over each other, in the sense that not even the Endless are exempt from the magical influence of the other Endless. When Dream tries to leave the party, Destiny won't let him because "that won't happen yet"; when Delirium makes butterflies to amuse herself, Desire makes the butterflies go into a candle flame, and Death takes them away. It must make them all very uneasy to be around each other, because it brings up uncomfortable questions of how much of what they think and do is based on their own choices, and how much is based on the influence of their family.<br />
<br />
Dream gets especially pissed at Desire when Desire starts listing all of Dream's failed romantic relationships, and it's unclear if Dream is angry because he thinks his love life is none of Desire's damn business, or because he knows that his love life is <i>exactly </i>Desire's business. Love is in Desire's job description, not Dream's. But Death reminds Dream that even if Desire is the reason all of his relationships end badly, Dream is still responsible for his own actions. He was the one who sentenced Nada to Hell, not Desire, and maybe instead of being angry at Desire for bringing it up, he should take a long, hard look at himself and the choices he made in his own life that bring him to this point.<br />
<br />
Begin the Overarching Theme! <br />
<br />
"Season of Mists" is about choices, specifically the question of what a person does when they find themselves in a mess of their own making. After Dream realizes that he's been a massive twatwaffle to Nada, he decides he needs to free her, even if it means facing Lucifer and all the hordes of Hell in combat. The last time Dream and Lucifer faced each other, Lucifer vowed to destroy him, so Dream is understandably nervous about going back to Hell. But when he gets there, he finds that Lucifer is sick of being the Devil and instead of fighting Dream, he's quit his job, closed up Hell, and is going to do something different with his life.<br />
<br />
This is one of my favorite plot twists in fiction. We've just spent an entire issue building up to the confrontation between Dream and Lucifer. Dream has said good-bye to all the subjects in his realm, and even paid a special visit to his best friend Hob in case he can't make their next meeting in 2090, so certain is he of either defeat or imprisonment in Hell. Lucifer, meanwhile, is disturbingly excited that Dream is coming, and makes an announcement to his own realm that in all the ten billion years of Hell's existence, no one has seen anything like what's coming.<br />
<br />
And then Dream gets to Hell and Lucifer tells him, "I've quit." No grand battle, no clash of immortals, just an empty Hell and a fallen angel who is tired of his job. Fucking brilliant. <br />
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Dream and Lucifer walk around Hell while Lucifer locks up the last few gates and talks about the circumstances that led him to this point. He speculates on whether or not he rebelled against God because he wanted to, or because it was part of God's plan to have a fallen angel rule a realm that was "Heaven's dark reflection." But whether it was free will or destiny that <i>put </i>him in Hell, he realizes that he himself is the only thing <i>keeping </i>him in Hell, and with that realization, he decides to just walk away. He's the second-most powerful being in the whole of creation--who's going to stop him?<br />
<br />
Almost as an afterthought, Lucifer gives the key to Hell to Dream, barely concealing his glee as he does so. "Perhaps it will destroy you, and perhaps it won't. But I doubt it will make your life any easier."<br />
<br />
Mic drop. Lucifer out.<br />
<br />
Immediately, realms across the cosmos spring into action. Everyone, from the gods of Asgard, ancient Egypt and Shinto Japan, to the agents of Chaos, Order and Faerie, to the displaced demons who served under Lucifer, wants that key. They all gather at the gates of Dream's palace, demanding entrance and an answer to the question of what will happen to Hell now that Lucifer is gone.<br />
<br />
Whew, this is getting intense. Let's check in with all of the dead people who were kicked out of Hell.<br />
<br />
The one-shot in the middle of this story arc is about a boy named Charles, alone in his boarding school over the holidays until all of the dead schoolchildren and headmasters come out of Hell and take over the school. The dead make it into a nasty place of repetitive self-punishment, and Charles concludes after his own death that "Hell is something you carry around with you."<br />
<br />
It's interesting to pause and get a mortal's perspective on this cosmic upheaval, as the rest of "Season of Mists" is the gods, angels and demons vying for possession of Hell. They're squabbling, bribing, begging, and threatening each other--and Dream especially--for something that wasn't really created for them. It's "a place for dead mortals to punish themselves," as Lucifer says, but the mortals don't have any voice in the proceedings. Nor does it really seem like they need one; if mortals can't punish themselves in Hell, it seems they'll do it wherever they end up--that Hell is a state of mind brought on by guilt, shame and desire for punishment for perceived transgressions.<br />
<br />
But Hell is also a very real place in the "Sandman" universe, which brings up some tough questions about this whole "choices and free will" theme "Season of Mists" explores. Yes, Lucifer can leave Hell--but he can't go back to Heaven, and when he leaves Hell he upsets the balance of the universe, leaving a mess someone else has to clean up. And young Charles can leave the school grounds for the wide world--but he has to die first in order to gain his freedom. Dream can free Nada from her prison--the story even implies that she could have freed herself if she stopped blaming him for her situation--but he had to upend the balance of the universe to do it. <br />
<br />
Choices cut both ways. You can walk away from a situation at any time, but the situation will still be there, waiting for either you or someone else to come along and see it through to the end. Hell didn't just <i>end</i> when Lucifer walked away. He gave Hell to Dream, because Lucifer is an asshole and knew that he was leaving Dream to clean up the biggest metaphysical clusterfuck since Lucifer rebelled against God. We exists in a universe of consequences, not a universe of free will unchecked by laws and reactions.<br />
<br />
So what happens in the end? God sends two angels to take back the key to Hell and Dream is happy enough to give the rule of Hell back to the entity who created it--even if the angels are less than thrilled to have such a task forced on them. The demon Azazel, who had hoped to rule Hell itself, tells Dream that it will consume Nada's soul to punish him for giving the key to the angels.<br />
<br />
Here's another great twist in the story. Thus far in "The Sandman," Dream has feared the power of Hell. In "Preludes and Nocturnes," Dream has to bluff his way to Lucifer's throne room, pretending to have more power than he does, and then he has fight a demon in fair combat to get his helmet back because he doesn't have authority to just demand its return. The second issue of the "Season of Mists" story arc is Dream going around say good-bye to everyone because he isn't sure he'll make it back from Hell alive, and in the third issue he tells Lucifer to his face that he's afraid of Lucifer's power.<br />
<br />
But get him on his home turf and threaten the woman he swore to save?<br />
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Dream traps the demon in a bottle. Forever.<br />
<br />
Up to this point in "The Sandman," Dream hasn't been portrayed as an especially powerful individual. The series begins with him imprisoned by hedge wizards by seventy years, and both "Preludes and Nocturnes" and "The Doll's House" stress the fragility of his realm, especially for the sleeping humans therein. He's a hard-working and responsible individual, much like his sister, Death; and very unlike his sibling Desire or his foe Lucifer, who have the air of effortless achievement about them at all times.<br />
<br />
What I love about the resolution of this storyline is that it shows how Dream could, if he wanted, fuck with people beyond all comprehension. He could drive everyone and everything who ever fell asleep completely insane; he could erase imagination and stories from the world; he could make it so no one ever slept again. But he doesn't do anything of these things. He fashions a very orderly realm, with bureaucracy and employees, and doesn't really throw his weight around like he could.<br />
<br />
Except with those who wound his pride, like Nada. He's not above using his powers to horribly punish those who hurt him on a personal level, and then immediately absolves himself of guilt by falling back on his status as the Dreamlord to justify his actions. He <i>had </i>to punish Nada, because she was just a mortal and not an equal of the Endless. He's gotten better since the series began. Comparing the present-day storylines to the flashbacks, we see him trying to rectify his mistakes and be kinder to those around him. He helps Calliope gain her freedom, he admits to Hob Gadling that they're friends (oh the bro-loves!), he tells the cat-prophet how to gain freedom for her and her people--you can really see the freedom-from-imprisonment theme growing out of Dream's experiences in "Preludes and Nocturnes"--and he frees Nada.<br />
<br />
After she schools him on his self-righteous attitude, though, because at first he can't even bring himself to admit to her face that he shouldn't have been such a dick. Change comes hard, y'all.<br />
<br />
Oh, and Dream frees Loki at the end of "Season of Mists"! If you don't know your Norse myths, Loki is a god of mischief who was deemed too dangerous to be in the world, so Odin imprisoned him in a cave under the earth, only to be released when Ragnarok (the apocalypse) occurred. Now he's just sort of wandering around, Loki-ing it up. If you've seen "The Avengers," you know this can only end badly. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/original/13/130295/3024601-6382617170-Loki_A.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/original/13/130295/3024601-6382617170-Loki_A.jpeg" width="230" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Do not read "Sandman" expecting Loki to look this good. </td></tr>
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<br />
So that's "Season of Mists." Lots of good, complex themes, a ripping good storyline, great art, callbacks to earlier issues, and foreshadowing galore! For example, the cat goddess Bast knows where Dream's missing brother can be found. Interesting plot development, that.<br />
<br />
Final Grade: A+. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3017664459656808178.post-67258884127200910632013-07-16T08:17:00.003-04:002013-07-16T08:17:52.509-04:00Comics Review: "The Sandman: Dream Country"<a href="http://cdn.comixology.com/2005/JAN05/midsize/JAN058148_m.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://cdn.comixology.com/2005/JAN05/midsize/JAN058148_m.jpg" /></a>Even though I'm reviewing Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman" in collected volumes, it's worth noting that "The Sandman" wasn't meant to be read like this. It was originally published as single issues of comics, not as books/graphic novels, and I've been wondering lately if I'm doing the body of work a disservice by treating it like all my other book reviews instead of going issue by issue.<br />
<br />
However, I'm going to stick with this format because "The Sandman"--and comic books in general, actually--are discussed among fans in collective terms. People speak about the Civil War story arc in Marvel Comics; or Warren Ellis's run on "Hellblazer": or Grant Morrison's multi-title "Batman" saga. Comics are published as single issues, but they're also published sequentially as multi-part story arcs. And while readers of comics historically didn't have the option of reading anything <i>but</i> single issues, today's comics readers rely as much on collected editions of story arcs as they do on single issues for consumption of the material.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NLAU0DjxYeU/AAAAAAAAAAI/AAAAAAAAA5U/JR7n-Y1RT8Q/photo.jpg?sz=48" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NLAU0DjxYeU/AAAAAAAAAAI/AAAAAAAAA5U/JR7n-Y1RT8Q/photo.jpg?sz=48" /></a>Digital distribution has further blurred the lines between the single issue and the collected arcs, as you have an option of purchasing one issue at a time, getting a whole arc, or even mixing and matching to create your own narrative interpretation of a work. Comixology, for example, lets you choose to read your comics by publication history, a development I'm looking forward to discussing when I get up to "Fables and Reflections."<br />
<br />
That said, not all issues of comics are part of story arcs. In the biz, we call these "one shots." A one shot is basically meant to be viewed as short story rather than a chapter in a novel. "Dream Country" is a collection of four "Sandman" one shots, issues 17 to 20 if you're keeping track: "Calliope," "Dream of a Thousand Cats," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and "Facade."<br />
<br />
I was only five when these issues were hitting the racks in stores, but I can imagine how exciting it must have been to scurry on down to the local comic book shop, pick up an issue of "Sandman" and get one of these. Each of them is a gem. "Dream of a Thousand Cats" is my favorite "Sandman" story, and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" won a World Fantasy Award for short fiction in 1991 (more on that later). I don't want to say that "this is where Sandman got good," because again, it's <i>all </i>better than most anything else in the medium. But I do think that the stories in "Dream Country" are where "Sandman" became consistently brilliant. They hit a high note that Gaiman & Co. sustained until the very end of the series' run.<br />
<br />
And a note about Gaiman's "& Co." I really like the edition of "Dream Country" I have because it has a table of contents that lists the different artists for each of the issues, which my editions of "Preludes and Nocturnes" and "The Doll's House" don't do. "The Sandman" became known for its wide variety of artists and styles, but sometimes it's surprisingly difficult to discern who drew which issue, especially if you have the older collected editions. I have a mix of old and new in my collection, and it's irritating to have to squint at the fine print in the copyright info to find out who drew what. Table of contents is the way to go. <br />
<br />
Let's break it down.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/scale_large/0/4/29626-4207-32934-1-sandman-the.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/scale_large/0/4/29626-4207-32934-1-sandman-the.jpg" width="210" /></a>"<b>Calliope</b>" is about writers and where they get their ideas. Richard Madoc gets his inspiration from the muse Calliope, who he keeps as a sex slave locked in his attic. Several years pass. He wins critical acclaim, audience love, money beyond his wildest dreams, all from raping and abusing the mythological goddess of epic poetry. Dream eventually shows up to rescue her, because they were once lovers and even had a son together, and also because he had just been imprisoned for several decades and knows how awful it is. When Madoc refuses to release Calliope, Dream curses him with so many different ideas for stories that Madoc goes insane. Madoc frees Calliope to make the ideas stop torturing him, leaving him a shattered, idea-less shell of a man.<br />
<br />
One aspect of "The Sandman" that waned as the series progressed was its horror element, and I think this story was the last one you could categorically define as "horrific." "Preludes and Nocturnes" had the visit to Hell and the diner slaughter, and "The Doll's House" had the serial killer convention. But after "Calliope," though "Sandman" was frequently scary in the psychological sense, it never really veered back into true "Hellblazer"/Clive Barker territory. And even "Calliope" resonates more for its quieter moments, like when Dream and Calliope say good-bye at the end, than for images like this:<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.goodgirlsgonegeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/madoc-itch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="233" src="http://www.goodgirlsgonegeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/madoc-itch.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">He had no pen or paper. He wrote his ideas on a brick wall with his fingertips.</td></tr>
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"Calliope" is a great story, and it's the first time Gaiman references Dream's son. That's going to be important later on.<br />
<br />
What can I say about "<b>Dream of a Thousand Cats</b>"? I love cats. I love "The Sandman." I love that "The Sandman" did a story about cats that did for cats what "Watership Down" did for rabbits.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSKLBI-tZFDygaP7daEzo9PmTP1sqJtE6dbzNUCV2MM-kx-tfqN" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSKLBI-tZFDygaP7daEzo9PmTP1sqJtE6dbzNUCV2MM-kx-tfqN" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">For death! And the world ending!</td></tr>
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"Thousand Cats" is another frame story that features Dream as a supporting character, like "Tales from the Sand." A group of suburban housecats gather in a graveyard to hear a cat-prophet preach. The Prophet tells a story about her former life as a pampered housecat, when she was just like all of them. Her owners drown her newborn kittens in a pond because she got pregnant by a stray and the owners wanted to breed her with another purebred. She goes to the Dreaming and meets with the Cat of Dreams for guidance and advice. He tells <i>her</i> a story about the former Age of Cats, when cats were the size of humans and hunted little cat-sized humans in their gardens for sport.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://sequart.org/images/cats-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://sequart.org/images/cats-1.jpg" width="283" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Good times.</td></tr>
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But the Age ended when one of the humans told the rest to dream of a world in which <i>they </i>were the dominant species, and one day everyone awoke to the world that we know now, where cats are just our little pets and humans rule the world. Even worse, the humans had dreamed it so that there never <i>was</i> an Age of Cats. They had altered reality to retcon the cat kingdom out of existence, because such is the power of a shared dream.<br />
<br />
The Cat of Dreams tells the Prophet to spread the word among cat-kind that if they can share a dream, they can bring about the Age of Cats again. So she walks the world, telling cats to dream of a better reality, in the hope that enough of them will dream one night and they will all awake in the Golden Age again. Most of the housecats in the graveyard scoff at her story as just an entertaining bit of nonsense from a famous crazy-cat-person, but one cat in the crowd... well:<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lncgmk3RVO1qllx8uo1_500.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lncgmk3RVO1qllx8uo1_500.jpg" width="288" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I'm crying. You can't see it, but I'm literally crying as I post this.</td></tr>
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I love the shit out of this story. My friend R has often bemoaned the portrayal of cats in fiction, especially children's fiction, because they're almost always villains, enemies of the truly heroic animals, or sniveling, cowardly assholes ("Watership Down," "The Secret of NIMH," "Cinderella," "Homeward Bound"). This is one of the few portrayals of cats in fiction as heroes, and the fact that the Prophet is female is just icing on the cake for me. <br />
<br />
In terms of where it fits into the "Sandman" mythos, it's a great example of what the series is getting at when it talks about the power of dreams. Dream as a character has his own set of powers, and while it's interesting to spend time with him and watch him struggle and scheme, I find "Sandman" more interesting for how Dream's existence affects those around him. This issue is the beginning of the ongoing discussion in the series: why are stories important? What do stories mean for the tellers of the tale, and for those who listen? <br />
<br />
The discussion continues in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," which has one of my favorite conceits for a story ever: William Shakespeare and his actors put on "A Midsummer Night's Dream" for the fairies referenced in the play. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://img501.imageshack.us/img501/5852/vessmidsummernightgj3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="282" src="http://img501.imageshack.us/img501/5852/vessmidsummernightgj3.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">So no pressure or anything.</td></tr>
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Will entered into an agreement with Dream, wherein Dream will give him the ability to become the greatest storyteller in the English language, and in return Will will write two plays specifically for Dream. One is "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and the other (which we don't learn until the end of the "Sandman" series) is "The Tempest."<br />
<br />
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This is the most famous issue of "The Sandman," because it won the World Fantasy Award for short fiction and was the first comic book to do so. Now, the story goes that after "Midsummer" won the award, the World Fantasy Award rules were amended so that comic books were ineligible to even be nominated in that category. I've read this on the Internet and even in some very well-regarded scholarly works (yes, scholars discuss "The Sandman," what of it?). It makes a great story because it shows how comic books are actual works of art but are still relegated to a lesser status by snobs who are out of touch with the zeitgeist.<br />
<br />
And it's not true. <br />
<br />
From the <a href="http://www.worldfantasy.org/awards/judges.html" target="_blank">World Fantasy Award website</a>: <br />
<dl><dd><b>All Fantasy</b> is eligible, High fantasy, horror, sword & sorcery, supernatural, children's and YA books, and beyond.<br />
<i>Comics are eligible in the Special Award Professional category. We never made a change in the rules. </i></dd></dl>
Italicization theirs. I think they got sick of angry "Sandman" fans bombarding them with requests to make comics eligible for regular awards again. I gather that it was like the year when "Beauty and the Beast" was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. It wasn't that there was any specific rule preventing animated films from getting nominated for Best Picture, it just hadn't ever happened before.<br />
<br />
I'm not arguing that comic books aren't still kind of pushed into this artistic ghetto and sneered at by intellectual types. That totally happens. But comics fans have got to stop repeating this story about the World Fantasy Awards changing their rules to exclude comic books in the wake of the "Midsummer" win, because it's not true, and false claims hurt the cause more than they help it.<br />
<br />
Now I've had to spend all that time talking about the politics surrounding the story without getting to the story itself. How very meta. <br />
<br />
So, the story--do you like Shakespeare? Because there's a lot of Shakespeare dialog in this story. I have to confess that I enjoy Shakespeare when it's being performed, but I can't seem to follow it so well on the page, and I tend to gloss over the parts of this story that are the actors performing "Midsummer." However, what I do really enjoy in this play is the relationship between Will and his son, Hamnet, who's been feeling rather neglected since his father made a pact with the immortal anthropomorphic manifestation of dreams. Hamnet is traveling with Will and the theater troupe so that father and son can become closer, but all Will cares about is his stories. Hamnet even jokes with one of the players that if he died, his father would just make a play out of it.<br />
<br />
That's on one side of the curtain. On the other side, the audience side, the fairies and Dream enjoy the night's entertainment. Some common fairies in the back row provide a bit of comic relief, as one of them can't follow the story and thinks Dream just brought the troupe there to be the fairies' dinner. Robin Goodfellow, called the Puck, is so excited by the play that he puts the human player to sleep and takes his place on stage. King Auberon gives a sack of gold coins to the head actor, which of course turn into dead leaves when the sun rises because fairies are assholes. And Queen Titania gives an apple to Hamnet while telling him how great life is in her kingdom, an interaction Will ignores because he's too busy watching his own play.<br />
<br />
If you know a bit more than the average person about the life and works of Shakespeare, you may get a chill watching Hamnet and Titania together. In the play "Midsummer," one of the early plot points is that Titania adopts a human child. Hamnet plays this part in the comic's version of "Midsummer." And in real life, William Shakespeare did have a son named Hamnet who tragically died when he was just eleven years old. The implication in Gaiman's "Midsummer" is that Hamnet was stolen by the fairies, because again, fairies are assholes. <br />
<br />
One more significant development in "Midsummer." Dream has a rather one-sided conversation with Titania, who was maybe his lover at one point (implied rather than stated). He's having doubts about the pact he made with Will, a crisis on conscience in the wake of gifting the man with stories. Dream made the pact because he wanted the old stories to live on through the ages, which is a high priority from Dream's perspective--he has a job to do as the Prince of Stories and he's going to do it to the best of his abilities. But he didn't tell Will what such a gift would cost him and Will didn't bother to ask, which is pretty typical of mortals. Not just because mortals are short-sighted, but because (as Dream fears) they wouldn't understand the costs even if they <i>were</i> told. Their minds aren't meant to comprehend someone like Dream.<br />
<br />
It's a rare moment when Dream ponders his impact on people's lives and suddenly doubts that what he does is right and fair. Dream isn't usually a character who looks to the past or thinks very deeply about the decisions he makes. He's been doing this job for a long time. He knows what he's doing, thank you very much, and he will not be criticized by those who think they know better just because a couple of mortals get trampled along the way.<br />
<br />
This is going to come back around in a big way in the next volume, "Season of Mists." Get ready.<br />
<br />
Okay, I've spent a decent amount of time talking about the most famous (and perhaps best) issue of "Sandman." I have more to say, but there's one last story in "Dream Country" to get through, so let's move on to "<b><span class="st">Façade.</span></b>"<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg37JsiLT85-6kZwiuMFTu7pRJ3MPPcR3SffiNLd7py9Qt0Nw3Bsj32uYtOCqYISvggqvpAXXsTOx_7UUPB3Y0_Z2nSUbdFBD9oUEjXWvpAnxxj8VcUh5SflmZtHOA4RdWNoGBfXpNGJgg/s400/Sandman-Neil-Gaiman-Element-Girl-Facade-DC-Comics.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg37JsiLT85-6kZwiuMFTu7pRJ3MPPcR3SffiNLd7py9Qt0Nw3Bsj32uYtOCqYISvggqvpAXXsTOx_7UUPB3Y0_Z2nSUbdFBD9oUEjXWvpAnxxj8VcUh5SflmZtHOA4RdWNoGBfXpNGJgg/s320/Sandman-Neil-Gaiman-Element-Girl-Facade-DC-Comics.jpg" width="209" /></a>Dream isn't in this story at all. It's about a day in the life of Urania Blackwell, also known as Element Girl, a DC comics C-list superhero who now lives as a miserable shut-in because she's too ashamed to show her hideously misshapen face and body to the world. All she wants to do is die, but she's basically indestructible and can't think of any method of death that would actually destroy her.<br />
<br />
So Dream's sister Death comes by and gives her a bit of good advice, leading to possibly the only happy ending in fiction caused by the main character's successful suicide.<br />
<br />
It's weird to read this story right after "Midsummer." "Midsummer" is so grand and weighty, stuffed full of important historical and mythological personalities. "<span class="st">Façade," by contrast, is a much slower, more intimate story about an insignificant nobody dying alone in a filthy studio apartment. But I feel the two stories are thematically connected and actually flow quite well together.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="st">First, they are both about immortality. Will enters into a pact with Dream so that his stories may live forever; and Urania enters into a pact with Ra, the Egyptian sun god, so that she too can live forever. Neither Will nor Urania understand the true costs of their pacts at first, but one of the immediate consequences in alienation. </span><span class="st">They are no longer ordinary mortals, they are <i>special</i>. </span><span class="st">Will becomes distant from his family in order to focus on his work, and Urania cuts herself off from the world entirely. </span><br />
<br />
<span class="st">(An aside: I'm not familiar with the character of Element Girl in the regular DC comics, so I don't know why she isn't out there fighting crime like a regular superhero. It isn't explained in this story, and I have to assume that she just didn't have the temperament for it, as she seems like a gentle soul who maybe cracked under the pressures of crime-fighting, but that's pure speculation on my part.)</span><br />
<br />
Another way these stories are connected is that both are about loss. Dream commissions "Midsummer" from Will because the fairies aren't going to visit Earth anymore, and Dream doesn't want their contributions to the world to be lost or forgotten. One consequence of this is that Will loses his son twice over, once because he neglects the boy to write the play, and then again when Hamnet dies/is taken by the fairies. When Urania becomes Element Girl, she loses her humanity and any hope for a normal life, and most of her story is her dealing with that loss.<br />
<br />
However, what makes "<span class="st">Façade" special is that Urania's story has Death in it instead of Dream, both in the literal and metaphorical sense. Dream as an entity is all about stories, and Urania's story has ended. Nothing happens to her and nothing ever will, so she's beyond Dream's notice and influence. The only left for her is the end. She needs to meet her death, and Death. </span><br />
<span class="st"><br /></span>
<span class="st">Death, when she comes, tells Urania that in the end, all things die, and Death is there to meet all of them at the end. Again, this is in contrast to Dream, who is rather discriminating about those he meets directly, and very choosy about who gets his special attention. But whether you're a mortal, a god, or a galaxy, Death is there for you. But not in an ominous way, like "there's no where to hide"; more like "you don't have to go through this alone." Death holds Urania when she cries, comforts her about her miserable wreck of a life, and mediates between Ra and Urania so the former can release the latter from her immortal existence. She's quite friendly, this Death, and just wants you to get where you're going. </span><br />
<span class="st"><br /></span>
<span class="st">It's quite a feat of narrative to end a story with a suicide and still leave the reader feeling uplifted. You don't hear about "</span><span class="st">Façade" very much in "Sandman" fandom (I imagine it comes up more among fans of the Death spin-off series), but it's as good and profound as anything else we'll see moving forward.</span><br />
<span class="st"><br /></span>
<span class="st">Final Grade: A. It's the shortest of the "Sandman" volumes, but "Dream Country" is a winner all the way around.</span><br />
<span class="st"><br /></span>
<span class="st">Next time: volume 4, "Season of Mists." We return to Hell. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3017664459656808178.post-18753604450918615272013-07-06T13:49:00.000-04:002013-07-06T13:49:07.732-04:00Quick Hit: "Breakfast of Champions" by Kurt VonnegutAt this point in the summer, it should be time for another "Sandman" review, but I'm out of town this weekend--as I was last weekend because I'm very popular and important--and there isn't time.<br />
<br />
I'm going to do a very quick review of Kurt Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions," which I read in a single sitting on the Fourth of July, Independence Day, America's birthday, the best of all days etc.<br />
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This is the second Vonnegut book I've reviewed. The other one was "<a href="http://bigislandrachelsbooks.blogspot.com/2012/12/review-slaughterhouse-five-by-kurt.html" target="_blank">Slaughterhouse-Five</a>" if you want to relive the magic. I thought it would be appropriate to read Vonnegut on Independence Day because he always has such cutting things to say about American society, and "Breakfast of Champions" is no different.<br />
<br />
This is the first work of his I've read that deals explicitly with racism, and I was pleased to discover that he does it right, for lack of a better term. Not to be down on the genre, but scifi writers, especially male ones, tend to hold some troubling views about sex, gender, and racial politics ("John Carter of Mars"). It always bums me out to read something racist or sexist in a book I've been enjoying up to that point, because I'm not a person who can sweep aside the more problematic elements of a work and enjoy the rest of it at face value. Once the author has revealed himself as racist or sexist, the work loses credibility in my eyes.<br />
<br />
But we're not talking about <i>those</i> authors, we're talking about Vonnegut, who I feel to be the greatest American satirist since Mark Twain. His books are basically, "This is bullshit, and this is bullshit, and this thing here that you've never thought that deeply about, it's bullshit too, and fuck the wealthy and the awful people with too much money and power, and fuck you for putting up with it, you poor doomed bastards."<br />
<br />
But, you know--literary.<br />
<br />
"Breakfast of Champions" is the least scifi book of his that I've read. There are no aliens, time travel, post-apocalyptic scenarios, or crazy inventions. A wealthy man in a Midwestern town is going mad; an aging and unsuccessful scifi author is hitchhiking to the Midwestern town to attend an arts festival there; they briefly collide; and eventually the scifi author is going to win the Nobel Prize in medicine for his theories on ideas as viruses.<br />
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There's also a few subplots about writers as the Creators of small universes, since the narrator of the story is the writer of the story. It gets a little meta in places, for example when the author explains that he gave this character's mother these traits because the writer's own mother had them, and it scarred the writer in the same way that it scarred the character. And yet, even though the book tells you several times that this is all made up and even pulls back the curtain to show you how its crafted, the story never stops feeling meaningful. It's an amazing thing that I don't feel I've described very well here. You just have to read it yourself and experience the genius that is Vonnegut.<br />
<br />
Final grade: B. I always enjoy Vonnegut, but this isn't one of his stronger works. Recommended for fans of the author and those who like biting social commentary. Happy Independence Day!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3017664459656808178.post-77058061602195507582013-07-03T12:02:00.000-04:002013-07-03T12:02:15.295-04:00Comics Review: "The Sandman: The Doll's House"Here is the growing pains story arc of Neil Gaiman's award-winning, critically-acclaimed "The Sandman" comics series.<br />
<br />
Personally, I think this is the weakest volume of the bunch. "The Doll's House" has a lot of cool ideas and some genuinely good single issues within the larger arc, but overall, it's a bit of a mess. It suffers from some truly bad dialog, lack of cohesion to its central theme, unclear explanations of its larger mysteries, and honestly, the worst coloring I've ever seen in a mainstream comic. I wondered if it was just my copy, but J, who you'll remember is reading this series with me, said that her copy has terrible coloring, too. Maybe it's just the re-prints and the original issues looked okay, but man alive, in some places it looks like a four-year-old took some frayed felt markers to the artwork.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The awfulness of that dye job haunts me.</td></tr>
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I'm going to get tired of saying this, but this volume is still good, because it's still "The Sandman," which is better than most anything produced in the medium. But there are 10 books in the series and someone's got to be the bottom of the heap, so I'm going to call "The Doll's House" the worst of the bunch and dive right in.<br />
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"The Doll's House" is an immediate sequel to "Preludes and Nocturnes." Dream has returned to the Dreaming with his tools and sets himself to the task of repairing the damage done while he was imprisoned. Four major citizens of the Dreaming are missing and running loose in the real world, and a phenom known as the Dream Vortex has manifested itself in the young American, Rose Walker (she of the awful colored hair). Dream has to locate and subdue the missing dreams and deal with the Vortex before the dreams do any more damage in the real world and the Vortex destroys the Dreaming. In the meantime, lurking in the background is the second of Dream's siblings we've met: Desire, a being of indeterminate sex who lives in a giant scale replica of itself. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">It's a house--and a doll! Symbolism!</td></tr>
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Desire has a hand in Dream's current troubles, although we don't know the extent of its involvement until the very end of the story. And this is my major problem with "The Doll's House." I have no clue what actually happens in the story. Individual plot points are fairly easy to suss out, but I don't get the larger significance behind those plot points and what repercussions they have in the "Sandman" universe as a whole. <br />
<br />
The volume opens with a single-shot issue called "Tales in the Sand," which explains how Dream came to have a girlfriend he condemned to suffer forever in Hell (we met her in the previous volume). Bad breakup, basically. Desire admits that it had a hand in all that pilikia, because Desire is an asshole and likes to fuck with Dream for shits and giggles. So Desire has a hand in Dream's present troubles, too, though damned if I can figure out what it is.<br />
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I get what Desire did, and even why it did the thing (I'm trying to avoid giving spoilers for a 20 year old comic). What I don't understand is how Desire knew that doing the thing would result in a Vortex. Dream says to Rose Walker that he doesn't understand how or why a Vortex happens. If Dream himself doesn't understand Vortexes, how does Desire know? Dream is the elder sibling and Vortexes happen in his realm, clearly he's the expert on them, yet Desire understands them better and is even able to predict when and how one will appear?<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">And seriously, what is up with her hair?</td></tr>
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This bugged the shit out of me when I was 13 and it bugs the shit out of me now. A lot of heavy metaphysical stuff happens in "The Sandman," and fortunately Gaiman got much better at explaining the larger ideas and how they fit into the rules of the "Sandman" universe. But this first time around, he sets up some interesting concepts and can't quite stick the landing. There's a little too much left un-explained for both the readers and for the characters in the story, and that bugs me. If <i>I </i>don't get it, fine, but if the <i>characters</i> don't get it either and don't know what lesson to take from it, I'm left wondering what the point is. Considering that Rose Walker reappears throughout the series and is
clearly "important," there should have been a better explanation of why
she matters and what impact her existence has on Dream.<br />
<br />
I'm being awfully hard on a comic that's still better than anything I've ever written. Let's talk about what works in this volume. The issue "Collectors," much like "24 Hours" in "Preludes and Nocturnes," is a wonderfully horrific little story about a serial killer convention. I loved it as a morbid 13-year-old, but I love it even more now, because I've been to comics conventions and I get all of the con in-jokes Gaiman makes.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Also, it's creepy as fuck.</td></tr>
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There are two one-shots included in this volume that are as good as anything else in the "Sandman" series. I already mentioned "Tales from the Sand," which is significant because it's the first time we get to see what will become a regular occurrence in the series: the frame story, or the story within a story. These frame-story issues usually have an ordinary person
telling a story in which Dream is a side character. If we're going by
the hero's journey as set by Joseph Campbell, then Dream appears at the
point in the story when the hero ventures to the underworld (the
Dreaming) to get advice from the spirits/gods (Dream). <br />
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As early as "Imperfect Hosts," the third issue of "Preludes and Nocturnes," Dream is called the Prince of Stories. And as Gaiman expanded this universe, he expanded the meaning of
"dreams" to include all stories, storytelling, and storytellers. The
Dreaming became not just a place where people go when they fall asleep,
but the metaphorical and literal birthplace of all stories, and the best issues of "The Sandman" are inevitably the ones that really explore what stories mean to people and what they mean to Dream. The next volume, "Dream Country," is made up entirely of these frame stories, so I'll discuss this more next time. But "The Doll's House" did it first with "Tales in the Sand" and is therefore notable (and redeemable) for it.<br />
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The second single-shot issue in this volume is "Men of Good Fortune," which has nothing to do with the events of "The Doll's House" but is delightful because it introduces Dream's one and only friend: Hob Gadling. Hob was just a dude in a tavern in the twelfth century, drunkenly bragging to his buddies that death is optional and he never intends to die, so Dream gives Hob immortality.<br />
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They meet in the same tavern once every 100 years to have a drink and talk about what Hob's been up to. Sometimes Hob is doing great--has a knighthood, a family, lots of wealth--and sometimes he's alone, destitute and being drowned as a witch by neighbors who notice he doesn't age. At their meeting in the nineteenth century, Hob tells Dream that they only reason Dream keeps meeting him century after century is that Dream is lonely and wants a friend. Dream gets all huffy that the implication that a being of his power and stature would deign to be friends with a mortal, or even have the need for something so base as friendship. However, their meeting in the twentieth century happens shortly after Dream has been imprisoned naked in a glass box for 70 years, which tends to clarify a person's priorities, so he shows up for his meeting with Hob because <i>they're friends!</i><br />
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<br />
This is one of my favorite issues of "The Sandman." It's so sweet and optimistic, unlike most of the other stuff in the series, and it shows Dream in the best possible light, as someone capable of forming bonds of trust. "Men of Good Fortune" gets to the heart of why friendship is so important to people's development and growth. Most of the time, Dream does what he does from a sense of duty and barely-concealed sanctimony (which is why he can't hold on to a girlfriend). This is the only time he does something because he <i>wants</i> to, and he's a better, more decent individual for it. <br />
<br />
Hob continues to pop up every now and again in the series, and it's always a little heartbreaking when it happens because it illustrates the gulf between Dream and his dreamers. All living things, humans, animals, gods, planets and stars pass through his realm, but he is only friends with one person in the whole of existence. It's a tragedy in the true sense of the word, because it's a situation of his own making, and it will eventually prove his undoing.<br />
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Grades: C+ for the main story arc in "The Doll's House." The coloring is distractingly bad, I don't think Gaiman knew many Americans at the time because the American characters' dialog is clunky and forced, and there's so much left unexplained that I can't rate it higher than "Preludes." But the serial killer convention is awesome.<br />
<br />
However! Grades of A for the two one-shots, "Tales in the Sand" and "Men of Good Fortune." This is the sort of thing that people talk about when they talk about "The Sandman." <br />
<br />
Next time: "Dream Country."Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3017664459656808178.post-17972562146345256872013-06-20T07:41:00.002-04:002013-06-20T07:41:58.784-04:00Comics Review: "The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes"About a month ago, I walked into the comic book store and recognized the person J checking bags at the door. It was a glorious moment, and not just because I was coming from seeing "Iron Man Three" and it was free comic book day.<br />
<br />
J used to worked on my floor in a now-defunct department, which meant that in addition to her job at the comic book store, she was in need of another work study gig at the school. And we had just lost a round of work study employees to graduation.<br />
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Worlds were colliding.<br />
<br />
J gives me the opportunity to bring my hobbies into the office. I gave my coworkers fair warning that she was coming and that her presence would reveal depths to my nerdery I've only hinted at before. Though how could any warning ever really prepare the uninitiated for listening to a two-hour conversation about "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine"? (Survey of office-mates indicates it can't.) <br />
<br />
Anyway, J and I are re-reading Neil Gaiman's groundbreaking "Sandman" comics together this summer. Reading with others opens you to fresh perspectives on familiar works, and since summer is the time when a lot of my geek websites run fresh reviews of old/classic television shows, I'm going to take this opportunity to review the first comic books series I ever read.<br />
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"The Sandman" was published by DC's Vertigo imprint from 1989 to 1996. Its seventy-five issues were collected into ten volumes, which I will now type from memory (you'll have to trust me that I can do this trick, as there's no way to confirm that I didn't just open a wiki-page on another tab): "Preludes and Nocturnes," "The Doll's House," "Dream Country," "Season of Mists," "A Game of You," "Brief Lives," "Fables and Reflections," "Worlds' End," "The Kindly Ones," and "The Wake." <br />
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I think I got all the apostrophes right, but some of those "and"s may be ampersands.<br />
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As I said, this was the first comic series I ever read. I'd always loved the comic strips that ran in newspapers, especially back when "Calvin & Hobbes" and "The Far Side" was still being published and the funnies page was worth a damn. Everyone knew to set the funnies aside for Rachel to read with the intensity of a medieval scholar deciphering an illuminated manuscript. I rarely laughed (except at "Garfield," fat cats are hilarious). The jokes didn't interest me as much as the interaction between words and pictures, how they could tell a story over time and suggest movement and speech where there were only static images on newsprint. <br />
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I was primed to make the leap from the funnies to comic books, but unfortunately, it was the 90s, which was kind of a nadir in the mainstream comics industry.<br />
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It didn't help that the only comic book store I ever encountered was Android's Dungeon on "The Simpsons," and that establishment wasn't exactly a bastion of culture and good life choices.<br />
<br />
Without holding a single issue of a comic book in my hands, I knew that it was shameful to like comic books. When I went to the library to check out a "Garfield" or "Calvin & Hobbes" collection--always with a couple of real novels, like a teenager trying to disguise a pack of condoms with Slim Jims, paper towels and discount Halloween candy at the drug store--I'd see the "Batman"s, "X-Men"s and "Avengers" collections. I'd see them. I'd want them. But I didn't touch them, not even to flip through. Not because they were "for boys," though I know that turns a lot of little girls away from comic books. I didn't pick them up because comics were stupid trash for stupid people. They were low class entertainment, and I was too smart to waste my time on them.<br />
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Like a lot of nerds, smart was all I had. I wasn't good a sports, I wasn't popular, and I wasn't pretty, but damn, was I smart. And like a popular girl whose life can come crashing down around her if she gets a bad haircut, I wouldn't be caught dead with some "picture book" in my hands. Every book I read, I wanted people to see me reading it and be impressed by how advanced my reading tastes were. I didn't even read the Harry Potter series when it came out even though it was written for people <i>my age</i>, because I read adult novels, not kid-stuff. (Yes, I was also kind of insufferable. Who isn't at 13?)<br />
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I had a friend who was just as insufferable as me, if not more so because she was also kind of goth-y. And she loved "The Sandman," as is the goth's wont. She uttered the gateway words that have seduced many a pseudo-intellectual down the dank and musty aisles of the poorly-ventilated comic book store:<br />
<br />
"It's not a comic book. It's a graphic novel."<br />
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Graphic novel I could handle. It had the word "novel" right there in the title, which meant it was literature. It helped that the cover of "Preludes and Nocturnes" is one of artist Dave McKean's fabulously surreal constructions of wood, flowers and madness, with not a pair of tights or a cape in sight. You don't question the intelligence of a girl reading a book like this.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"If you have to ask what it means, you don't get it."</td></tr>
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McKean did most of the covers for "Sandman" (though he didn't do the interior artwork), and he did them in the pre-Photoshop era, which meant he literally constructed them. This is a photograph of a sculpture that actually stands about four feet high, as I learned the first time I saw Neil Gaiman speak.<br />
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I bring this up because even though I was a pseudo-intellectual who had to justify my love of the comics medium by couching it as this alternative art form that you had to be sophisticated to understand, the people who created "Sandman" actually <i>were</i> intellectuals. They <i>were</i> groundbreaking alternative artists pouring their hearts and souls into this massive, sprawling epic that strove to do nothing less than illuminate the nature of imagination itself.<br />
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Not that you can tell from "Preludes and Nocturnes," which collects issues 1 to 8 and covers the first story arc of the life and times of the titular Sandman, the King of Dreams, also called Morpheus. Re-reading it as an adult, I'm struck by how simple it is, and how unlike it is from the volumes that follow. It's not a bad story--in fact I think the strength of the series is that even when it's not at the top of its game, it's still better than almost anything else in the comics medium--but its clearly going through some growing pains, switching artists after its third issue and relying on some rather clunky voiceover narration from Dream to keep the story going. <br />
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Later in its run, "Sandman" would become known for its rotating cast of stellar artists putting their own spin on a character whose appearance changes depending on whose looking. Its hard to criticize the shift in style that comes half-way through this volume when it foreshadowed such good things to come. And the voiceover disappears altogether after issue 10 or 11, meaning that as clunky as it feels as a storytelling device, "Preludes and Nocturnes" is also the closest the reader ever gets to being inside the head of Dream, who actually becomes more distant and unknowable the longer the series goes on. For that reason, it's fascinating to see him narrate his quest, even if it doesn't always work as a storytelling device.<br />
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So what happens in this story arc? The King of Dreams is captured by an English magician in 1916 and spends the next seventy years trapped in a glass dome in the magician's basement. Various characters, some of whom we'll meet again, develop sleep disorders resulting from Dream's imprisonment and the subsequent metaphysical distortions through the fabric of Dreamtime. Then Dream escapes and spends the rest of the story trying to recover three lost magical objects that give him most of his power: a pouch of sand, a helmet made from the skull of a god, and a ruby.<br />
<br />
As my friend R says, it's basically a video game. Each object he re-acquires levels him up and gives him the power he needs to move on to the next item on the list. He finds the pouch of sand with the help of John Constantine, a character who enjoyed an extremely successful run in the "Hellblazer" series, to which the early "Sandman" owes a great artistic debt.<br />
<br />
(Lecture alert! Alan Moore created the character of Constantine for his groundbreaking series "Swamp Thing," which was one of the earliest mainstream comics to publish without the seal of approval from the Comics Code Authority. While the 90s were a pretty awful time for superhero comics, the 80s and early 90s saw the arrival of several British writers and artists who revolutionized the medium and are largely responsible for making comics good again. See Moore's "Watchmen," Grant Morrison's "Animal Man," and of course, Gaiman's "Sandman.")<br />
<br />
After the pouch, Dream goes to Hell to recover his helmet from a demon. This was probably the issue that really got me hooked on "Sandman," and remains the point in the volume at which I really become interested in the story. The artwork is superb, and it's the first time the reader gets to know Dream as a character in his own right, not as a shadowy figure humans encounter in the darkness. More than any other issue in the story arc, it also sets up characters and plot points that are part of the larger "Sandman" epic. Dream meets an ex-girlfriend in Hell, is a righteous dick about it, throws his weight around with the Lords of Hell while trying to conceal his lack of power over them, and David Bowie Lucifer vows to destroy him. All of this will come back to bite him in the ass. <br />
<br />
I'm less wild about the next chapter, where Dream meets some members of the Justice League and discovers that a D-list supervillain has his ruby. But the issue after <i>that </i>is about the supervillain spending 24 hours in a small-town diner, driving its patrons mad with the power of the ruby. The reader is trapped within the narrow walls of the diner with the victims, but is also aware, through the TV in the background, that the whole world is succumbing to the same madness. Excepting the violent imagery, this issue could be an episode of the "Twilight Zone," which frequently took place in small-town diners in apocalyptic settings. Dream only shows up on the last page of this story, after everyone has tortured, murdered, fucked each others' corpses, and committed suicide.<br />
<br />
"24 Hours" somehow manages to be more horrifying than the issue set in <i>actual </i>Hell. It also set up some of the major themes that run through "The Sandman": the power of self-contained worlds; the existential horror of the Hells we carry around inside of us; and the idea that what we see, however grand or terrifying it seems to our eyes, is just a small facet or a representation of a much larger whole. Gaiman states in the afterward that he didn't feel he found his voice until the last issue of this volume, "The Sound of Her Wings," but for me, the whole thing really starts coming together and feeling like "<i>The Sandman</i>" (in italics with a note of hushed awe) in "24 Hours." In a lesser series, this issue would have been a highlight, but in "The Sandman," it feels more like we've finally reached the status quo and are ready to rock.<br />
<br />
The next issue, "Sound and Fury," is okay. It's appropriately climactic. Supervillain and King of Dreams battle for possession of the ruby, laying waste to the Dreaming realm while the world continues to cut, burn, and slaughter itself. The artwork is good and there's enough gravitas to really sell the idea that if Dream loses, all is lost. But it reads more like the penultimate issue of a standard superhero story arc than the type of story "Sandman" would become. When I was younger, I loved it. Now, I tend to shrug, because I know that this isn't the best they can do.<br />
<br />
I understand what Gaiman meant about finding his own voice. Most of these early issues are heavily indebted to other comic series, with cameos and references from all corners of DC in order to firmly establish "The Sandman" within that universe. And while they're good--often great--"The Sandman" ultimately ends up going in a very different direction, far away from DC universe continuity and deep into its own mythology. It becomes bigger and grander, pulling away from adventures and quests and addressing more the existential quandaries implied by the existence of Dream and the rest of his family, the Endless.<br />
<br />
In "The Sound of Her Wings," we meet his sister Death.<br />
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Possibly no other character in this series has had as much impact on pop-culture as Death, not even Dream. She's just a sweet, perky goth girl who happens to be the anthropomorphic manifestation of the darkness at the end of all things. And even though she's super busy, what with all the people dying all the time, she wants to cheer up her little brother, who's kind of been a whiny jerk since he escaped from that glass box and saved the world. I love the relationship between Death and Dream, who may be these powerful cosmic beings but are also, underneath it all, a brother and a sister from a dysfunctional family who have no one but each other to lean on when times get tough.<br />
<br />
There is a truthful emotional core to this issue that's somewhat lacking in the rest of "Preludes and Nocturnes." It's a quiet moment of family bonding to round off a parade of horrors and strife. As "Sandman" progressed, it succeeded whenever it hewed to this formula (and tended to fail when it didn't, as we'll see next time in "The Doll's House"). <br />
<br />
So that's "Preludes and Nocturnes," volume one of the critically-acclaimed "Sandman" comics series. Does it hold up under the scrutiny of the adult reader who doesn't care if her co-workers see her reading Harry Potter in the lunch room? Absolutely. It's not the strongest story arc of the series, but it's also not the weakest. It's very different from the series "The Sandman" eventually becomes, but it's also similar enough that I can appreciate the differences as an interesting evolution and progression of ideas and themes. I still find things to like about it, and not as many things to dislike as I expected.<br />
<br />
Final Grade: B. It can't be higher because it is a little clunky and rough around the edges, but it also can't be lower because it's the fucking "Sandman" and it's still better than anything the rest of us chuckle-heads will ever come up with. <br />
<br />
Next time: "The Doll's House." Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3017664459656808178.post-19565202714919022292013-06-12T06:56:00.002-04:002013-06-12T06:56:40.432-04:00Review: "All Over But the Shoutin" by Rick BraggIt's been a while since I reviewed a memoir.<br />
<br />
There was a time when I was really into this genre and read all the memoirs I could get my hands on. I even wanted to write a memoir myself, but had to put that project on hold because--I don't know if you know this--memoirs are really, really hard! You'd think at first glance that they would be easier to write than fiction because you're drawing from real life events, and the writers who do it well make it look effortless. However, a memoir has a very difficult task to accomplish: take something that is, by definition, complicated and without end (LIFE) (let's pop some bold and underline on that actually) (<u><b>LIFE</b></u>) and transform it into a neat, linear story with a beginning, middle and end.<br />
<br />
Life is very unsuited to literature. It defies the standard three-act structure, never supplies the satisfying story and character arcs that make for compelling fiction, and has this nasty way of just petering out into the next series of events without giving you any satisfying conclusion. There are no bangs at the end so you know when to clap. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://fnacpantherimage.toutlecine.com/photos/a/m/a/amadeus-1984-04-g.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="214" src="http://fnacpantherimage.toutlecine.com/photos/a/m/a/amadeus-1984-04-g.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Maybe if they'd shot him out of a cannon at the end?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
As proof of my theory, today's author, Rick Bragg, had to win a Pulitzer in journalism before he wrote his memoir, "All Over But the Shoutin." Or maybe that's just a coincidence. Either way, it's quite a good memoir about growing up poor in the rural South.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.southernculture.org/cover_of_Rick_Bragg_book.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.southernculture.org/cover_of_Rick_Bragg_book.jpg" width="206" /></a>This describes a lot of offerings in the memoir genre, I know, and Bragg admits at the beginning of his book that his is a very typical story and perhaps of no interest to anyone. He didn't write his memoir to break new ground, but rather because his beloved grandmother died and made him aware of how little time certain members of his family may have left on the earth. He wanted to capture their stories and life experiences before they died, because they'd always been dismissed as unimportant in the eyes of society, but were important to him personally and therefore worthy of memorializing.<br />
<br />
I don't think this is best memoir I've ever read, but I found it noteworthy because of how self-effacing Bragg is in describing his life. Memoir writing is inherently a narcissistic endeavor, in that the author assumes that whatever happened in her life is so fascinating that the rest of the world needs to know about it. Frequently the author is correct in that assumption, otherwise why would we read memoirs? But Bragg's memoir is significant because he focuses less on what makes him and his family unique, and more on what makes them the same as all the other people he meets later in life as a journalist, even if those other people are freedom fighters in Haiti or bodega owners in the Bronx.<br />
<br />
There's a wonderful universality about Bragg's writing that you don't often encounter in the memoir genre. The book does suffer in a few places from having a too much emotional distance from its main subject--Rick Bragg--but makes up for it by imbuing even passing characters with liveliness and humanity. <br />
<br />
Final Grade: B. Recommended for fans of memoirs, stories about the South, and those interested in journalism.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3017664459656808178.post-64291913258350776082013-06-01T12:16:00.001-04:002013-06-01T12:16:25.126-04:00Review: "The Tender Bar" by J.R. MoehringerHoly shit, did I never post this?! I wrote this review weeks ago and it's just been sitting in my drafts box<br />
<br />
So this was not a memoir about alcoholism, let me get that out of the way. When a book is about a childhood and early adult hood spent in a bar, you expect it to be about substance abuse (also, the description on the cover said it was the best book of its kind
since Mary Karr's "The Liar's Club," which was about alcoholism).<br />
<br />
<a href="http://readingforrobin.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/tenderbar_pb1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://readingforrobin.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/tenderbar_pb1.jpg" /></a>But "The Tender Bar" is actually about masculinity and how a boy learns to be a man. The author, J.R. Moehringer, was raised by a single mother and had to cobble together father figures from the men at his local Manhasset, Long Island bar, Publicans. The various uncles and neighbors and friends who showed him how to be a good man--and in many cases, how <i>not</i> to be a bad man--are vividly portrayed with both humor and pathos. I didn't learn anything about the masculine identity I didn't already know (as a woman, I already know far too much about the male ego, what makes it tick, and what makes it dangerous, as I discussed in my review of "<a href="http://bigislandrachelsbooks.blogspot.com/2013/04/review-wide-sargasso-sea-by-jean-rhys.html" target="_blank">Wide Sargasso Sea</a>"), but it was a nice change of pace from the kinds of books that I usually read, and a reminder that white males who go to Yale are humans, too. <br />
<br />
The star of this work isn't the narrator, though, or the men he gathers around himself to emulate. Publicans is the true subject of "The Tender Bar." The book is as much a history of the bar and the honored place it held in the community as it is about J.R. Moehringer, and I really enjoyed that aspect of the story. The bar, as an active character in the book, was the beating heart of Manhasset, a real public house where everyone, men, women, and children, could go and be welcomed with food, drink, and company. Publicans provided a safe place for the author during the rough times in his life, and also provided a compass for the decisions he had to make as he stumbled toward adulthood, and it's heavily implied that he was only one of many who needed the bar in this way.<br />
<br />
Continuing my theme of books that didn't go where I thought they would, the fact that this book wasn't about alcoholism says a lot about how I expect drinking narratives to go. I don't know if it's my latent Temperance Society woman coming out (I'm not going to say my latent Puritan, because they drank like fish), but I do feel weirdly guilty that I expected the author to turn into a wretched drunk who had to reject the bar in order to get sober and live a truly meaningful life. The life he led in Publicans was deeply meaningful, and overall the relationship he had with the bar was a healthy one. This is a rare memoir about a drinking life that isn't about substance abuse.<br />
<br />
And he ends the book by realizing that all of the things that make a good man were right in front of him the whole time, embodied in his mother, so take that, patriarchy!<br />
<br />
Final Grade: B. Recommended for fans of memoirs, stories about boys and their fathers, and the people you meet in bars. <br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3017664459656808178.post-6735709893199510812013-06-01T12:14:00.002-04:002013-06-01T12:14:32.944-04:00Book Review: "The Rabbi's Cat" So it turns out that art schools have a pretty good selection of comics and graphic novels in their libraries. Today I'm reviewing "The Rabbi's Cat," an original graphic novel from French writer and artist Joann Sfar.<br />
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"The Rabbi's Cat" was also made into a well-received animated movie that I haven't had a chance to see yet. Maybe the BF will let me put it on the Netflix queue--and maybe he'll finally return "The Seventh Seal" so we can start getting other DVDs in the mail again. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">You have had this since February and haven't watched it. Admit defeat and return it so we can get more cartoons.</td></tr>
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The story is told from the point of view of a cat owned by a prominent rabbi in 1920s French-colonized Algeria. Kitty is just an ordinary kitty until he eats the rabbi's parrot, at which point he becomes sentient and gains the ability to talk. To the consternation of his owner, the first thing Kitty says is a lie: "I didn't eat the parrot." So the rabbi tries to turn Kitty into a pious, Jewish kitty by teaching him the Talmud, even though Kitty wants to skip all that and go straight to learning the Kabbalah.<br />
<br />
This is a story about the Jewish experience, much like <a href="http://bigislandrachelsbooks.blogspot.com/2013/02/review-to-heart-of-storm.html" target="_blank">"To the Heart of the Storm"</a> by Will Eisner. "The Rabbi's Cat" isn't actually about the rabbi's cat--it's about the
rabbi and the people he has to teach and guide in his community, even
when he isn't entirely sure where he's going himself. His world is in a constant state of change: modernization of clothing, morals and attitudes among his congregation; changes in French bureaucracy that could remove him from his post; his daughter is getting married to a Parisian Jew from an entirely secular family; and his cat has learned how to argue scripture with him.<br />
<br />
It's tricky to incorporate anthropomorphic animals into a story without it becoming childish or overly precious, and I think Sfar did a great job of making Kitty into a fully realized, adult(ish) character without losing the humor and whimsy that cats bring to the lives of their owners. Furthermore, Sfar seems to have a very specific reason for telling the story through the eyes of the cat instead of via one of the human characters. He uses the the outsider perspective of the animal narrator, who neither understands nor conforms to societal pressures and expectations, to great effect to illuminate the various states of separateness and alienation experienced by Algerian Jews both in their homeland and in the land of their colonial overlords. As a free agent, Kitty can observe and question human behavior in a way that the rabbi, who is bound by all the myriad rules of the Torah, has never done before.<br />
<br />
Also--kitties!<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Joann Sfar with cat. *squee*</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Final grade: B. Recommended for fans of cats and those interested in the Jewish experience and life under French colonial rule.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3017664459656808178.post-86641782977601838612013-05-11T08:49:00.002-04:002013-05-11T08:49:51.413-04:00No Post--workingThis week I read Craig Thompson's "Blankets," and Joann Sfar's "The Rabbi's Cat," but I'm working today and tomorrow so the reviews will have to wait until next week.<br />
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Sorry.<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3017664459656808178.post-63741085233268391792013-04-28T12:30:00.001-04:002013-04-28T12:30:24.321-04:00Review: "Gardens in the Dunes" by Leslie Marmon SilkoThis is the second book by Leslie Marmon Silko I've reviewed, the first being one of my all-time favorite novels, "<a href="http://bigislandrachelsbooks.blogspot.com/2012/10/ceremony-by-leslie-marmon-silko.html" target="_blank">Ceremony</a>." <br />
<br />
I didn't like "Gardens in the Dunes" as much as I liked "Ceremony." "Ceremony" was more experimental, with a non-linear time structure, and also more ambitious in what it was trying to achieve from a technical perspective, in that the physical text of the novel is gradually revealed to the reader as an integral part of the ceremony described in the story of the novel. It invites the reader's participation in the ceremony via the act of reading, rather than asking the reader to be a passive witness to the events as presented.<br />
<br />
"Gardens in the Dunes" is a more conventional novel that lacks the meta-textual complexity of "Ceremony," but is ambitious in other ways and always entertaining. I didn't feel the least bit disappointed with "Gardens," not like when I read Monique Truong's "<a href="http://bigislandrachelsbooks.blogspot.com/2010/11/monique-truongs-bitter-in-mouth.html" target="_blank">Bitter in the Mouth</a>," the far-inferior sophomore effort from the author of my other favorite novel, "The Book of Salt."<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.farmbrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Silko-gardens.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.farmbrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Silko-gardens.jpg" /></a>The story "Gardens" is told from the perspective of multiple characters and incorporates a wide variety of <br />
settings, from the Arizona desert to jungles of Brazil to the citron groves of Corsica. It also addresses themes and events outside of the American Indian experience, which surprised me more than it should have. A lot about this book surprised me in ways that made me newly aware of the limits our society places on American Indians, right down to the narrow and rigid narratives we allow them in mainstream literature. I kept expecting bad things to happen according to my own expectations of American Indian lives, but while some bad things do happen, they never happened in the way I expected, and frequently good things happened instead. Families are re-united instead of being torn apart; children live instead of die; dreams come true instead of dying; land is secured, not stolen. <br />
<br />
When the Indian Police take the main character, Indigo, away from her sister and put her in the government school, I expected the rest of the novel to be about how horrible the government schools were to the children stolen from their parents and forced to live there. But Indigo escapes to find her older sister, Salt. And I expected the novel to be about her re-capture and punishment in the school, or maybe about the abuse she suffers as she searches for Salt in the lawless desert. But she's taken in by Hattie, a recently-married white woman living with her husband on his citrus farm in the Californian desert. So I expected Hattie to try and force Indigo to be more like a white child, cutting her off from her heritage, but Hattie actually ends up being a Harvard-educated liberal who is a very supportive surrogate mother to Indigo. They go on a trip to Long Island, England and Italy, and I then expected Hattie to want to keep Indigo away from Salt and adopt her as her own child. But Hattie actually returns Indigo to her family, leaving Indigo better off, with both world experience and a trunk full of exotic plants and seeds that she and her sister then plant at the titular garden in the dunes. <br />
<br />
This is just one story-line of many that took me by surprise. "Garden in the Dunes" may not be as technically ambitious as "Ceremony," but it more than makes up for that with the ambition of the story itself. I don't know if it was Marmon Silko's intention to play with the reader's expectations the way she did, or if I'm just a lot less enlightened and knowledgeable about the literary traditions of people of color than I think I am, but this book was an eye-opener for me in any case. <br />
<br />
The standard cultural narrative is that the American Indians lost everything, and maybe that's a comfortable narrative for the mainstream audience because it absolves us of responsibility toward the current American Indian population. An extinct plant can never be brought back, so there's no need to waste effort or time trying. But a narrative about American Indians who endured and even thrived is trickier to digest because it demands attention be paid to issues that the mainstream considers settled and done with, which is actually quite disrespectful to the people still confronting these supposedly "settled" issues every day (see my review of "<a href="http://bigislandrachelsbooks.blogspot.com/2012/12/review-round-house-by-louise-erdrich.html" target="_blank">The Round House</a>" by Louise Erdrich).<br />
<br />
Final Grade: B+. Recommended for those interested in plants, American Indians, travel stories, stories about sisters, and the American West.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3017664459656808178.post-28787234809555673152013-04-20T09:25:00.001-04:002013-04-20T09:25:48.115-04:00Review: "Wide Sargasso Sea" by Jean RhysI wanted to like "Jane Eyre" so badly.<br />
<br />
And I did like her--Jane Eyre the character. Jane wasn't the problem. It was that fucking Lord Rochester. What an asshole. I want to dig up his imaginary corpse and punch him in his dusty, moldering nuts. <br />
<br />
Fortunately, there's a version of that story where Rochester isn't portrayed as a smoldering aloof hero--a Batman of the English countryside, if you will--but rather the greedy, insufferable white devil I suspected him to be<i> all along</i>. <br />
<br />
<a href="https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTbSZKVkfpjtOO2vs99y4oftwJDju5Gj4DSBr0mIOH5qpzSR6vVkQ" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTbSZKVkfpjtOO2vs99y4oftwJDju5Gj4DSBr0mIOH5qpzSR6vVkQ" /></a>Jean Rhys's "Wide Sargasso Sea" is about Rochester's first wife, the madwoman in the attic, Bertha. In "Jane Eyre," Bertha is said to be Creole, a woman of British descent born and raised in the Caribbean colonies. Rhys shifts the timeline of her book to coincide with the emancipation of slaves in Jamaica, and re-imagines "Bertha" as Antoinetta, a daughter of slave owners who lose everything when they were unable to make the shift to a post-slavery world. An unnamed English nobleman, whom we assume is Rochester, marries Antoinetta for her stepfather's money when she's barely seventeen and fresh out of the convent school. While at first they are happy together at a small house in the Jamaican countryside, a man claiming to be Antoinetta's half-brother by her biological father and a former slave contacts the nobleman. The man tells him that Antoinetta's mother went mad, that Antoinetta herself had shown signs of madness as a girl, and that Antoinetta's stepfather and stepbrother swindled in nobleman into marrying an obviously defective piece of merchandise. The nobleman then refuses to touch or speak to his wife, who doesn't understand why he's suddenly treating her so coldly, and then she actually does go mad when the nobleman dismisses all of her servants, takes her to England, and shuts her up in the attic so he won't have to look at her anymore.<br />
<br />
I feel like there should be a name for this genre, where non-western or minority writers re-tell a classic Western story from one of the non-western or minority character's point of view. Rhys re-tells "Jane Eyre" from the perspective of the madwoman in the attic; David Henry Hwang re-imagines Puccini's opera "Madama Butterfly" as a spy story with an actual Peking opera star as Butterfly; Alice Randall re-writes "Gone With the Wind" with Mammy's daughter (and Scarlett's half-sister) as the narrator. <br />
<br />
These types of stories are fascinating to me because one, there are not enough minority voices in literature, and the further back in history you go, the less there are; and two, it's a valuable exercise to contrast how white writers see and portray minority characters and how those characters see and portray themselves. These works break down white constructs of what it means to be black, or Oriental, or Creole, and re-define them based on how actual black people, Orientals, or Creoles experience race and identity.<br />
<br />
By doing this, the writer also breaks down and re-defines the concept of whiteness, which hitherto has been the unexamined default, the norm, defined by what it is <i>not</i> rather than what it <i>is.</i> The apparatus of societal power is exposed by those crushed underneath it, to those who are its beneficiaries but are barely aware of its existence. James Baldwin in "<a href="http://bigislandrachelsbooks.blogspot.com/2013/03/baldwin-blowout.html" target="_blank">The Devil Finds Work</a>" talks at length about how white people can never really know black people, but how black people know white people better than white people know themselves because such knowledge is necessary for survival in the white man's world.<br />
<br />
Works like "Wide Sargasso Sea" reveal aspects of "Jane Eyre" and the character of Lord Rochester that weren't present in the original novel, in addition to offering a richer and more meaningful back-story for a marginalized character from the original work. The relationship between the colonizer, England/Rochester, and the colonized, Jamaica/Antoinetta, moves to the forefront of the story and illuminates how larger societal ideas about life and civilization affect individuals. "Jane Eyre" presents the events as one unlucky individual with an insane wife without examining the very ideas of sanity and insanity and how they relate to colonialist attitudes about the effects of geography and environment on individuals living away from the civilized motherland. <br />
<br />
I could go on in this vein--I haven't even really touched on Rhys's shifting of the timeline of her book to coincide with emancipation and how the black characters in her book deal with freedom and have to re-define their relationships to the whites in Jamaica. But I've already written way more than I planned to about "Wide Sargasso Sea" and I'm afraid that the only people who will find this interesting are other scholars of postcolonialism (which my spell-check doesn't even recognize as a word, so I know I'm drifting pretty far from the mainstream with this review already).<br />
<br />
I recommend Jean Rhys's "Wide Sargasso Sea" for fans of classic literature, especially "Jane Eyre"; people who enjoy the hard-to-name genre of non-white authors re-telling white stories from the perspective of non-white characters; and anyone interested in the history of the Caribbean and the Age of Imperialism.<br />
<br />
Final Grade: B+. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3017664459656808178.post-5592283002696583592013-04-10T07:38:00.000-04:002013-04-10T07:38:12.056-04:00Bonus Review! "WE3" by Grant Morrison and Frank QuietlyGet ready to cry: this is a comic book about a doggy, a kitty and a bunny trying to find their way home.<br />
<br />
Writer Grant Morrison and artist Frank Quitely are one of the most popular comics teams working today. Individually, they are masters of their respective forms, but together they're a powerhouse. In the same way that people will line up to see "the new Brad Pitt," comics fans line up to get "the new Morrison and Quitely." Their names alone move the product. <br />
<br />
That's just a bit of background for the comics layperson. Actual comics readers may feel like a film buff who just had me explain who Alfred Hitchcock was, but we try to be inclusive on Big Island Rachel's media empire.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMJqEgt2kyfjUlnAG89HwJdY0JpEjC5UQ8ZFOBEwwUOstZ-bi7HJaQwcy4UuyeJbtnVXRAhrmIgLeq-qGpWuMVHXL0AgsQZfV3raTAzJvTYlLU4HavHaYh6c7eGohzOxTxAY-mLwFdfw/s1600/we3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMJqEgt2kyfjUlnAG89HwJdY0JpEjC5UQ8ZFOBEwwUOstZ-bi7HJaQwcy4UuyeJbtnVXRAhrmIgLeq-qGpWuMVHXL0AgsQZfV3raTAzJvTYlLU4HavHaYh6c7eGohzOxTxAY-mLwFdfw/s1600/we3.jpg" width="208" /></a><br />
Anyway, "WE3" is an original miniseries by Morrison and Quitely about three house pets stolen from their homes who have been fitted with weaponized exoskeletons and given the ability to talk. The military created them to test the possibilities of using animals in war zones instead of humans, and the experiment was successful--so now they're going to kill the animals and move on to the next phase of the experiment with new, more dangerous animals. Our three heroes break out of the laboratory and hit the road, battling their way across town and country to make it home again.<br />
<br />
If you aren't already crying, you're dead inside.<br />
<br />
Story-wise, the plot is pretty simple and the characters fall in to some basic archetypes. The dog, called 1, is the stalwart leader, the cat, 2, is the ruthless, cynical wildcard; and the rabbit, 3, is plain-spoken and sweet.<br />
<br />
I think I just described the make-up of the Powerpuff Girls: head, hands, and heart; brain, brawn, and spirit; Leia, Han, Luke. As I said, this story's been done many times over, but in a case like this, where it's done so well, you can see why the archetype has endured for so long. There's great drama and pathos in the ragtag team of rebels battling the empire while trying to address their internal conflicts; or, if you want to draw from the Eastern tradition, in the master-less ronin wandering the countryside in search of closure and justice.<br />
<br />
The fact that "WE3" tells this story with cuddly-wuddly animals instead of humans heightens the emotional impact. Animals are, to draw again from the Eastern tradition, like cherry blossoms: beautiful, but short-lived and transient. (If you're ever watching a Kurasawa film and see cherry blossoms, impress your friends by saying that the blossoms represent mortality and a character is probably about to die.) Animals trip our emotional triggers because their lives are so short and intense compared to our own. Most of us experience the death of a beloved pet long before we ever experience the death of a human close to us, and the knowledge that animals we grow to love aren't long for this world makes them intensely sympathetic characters.<br />
<br />
Animals are also very moving because they articulate some of our most basic needs and fears. WE3 have a limited understanding of the human world and are completely outmatched by it, weaponized exoskeletons notwithstanding, and our hearts are moved by their plight because we, too, frequently feel outmatched and confused by the world and just want to get home. It's a primal fear and a primal need, one that taps into the survival instincts we were all born with, so the characters' drive and motivation are instantly understood and embraced.<br />
<br />
And then we all cry and cry and cry. Hopefully not on the subway, like I did. This is not a good book to read in public.<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjxZd3_ugnp-aSzlqndmtihpZfknlaabsMG_shIwTpxPNVau_K181fU9KJc_OnDZh2wFlw3gFhQfHCzrhXSLq2DOLmC-RdI_G04671hCpuCaL68G3syomIq47uI7O03dzGav-S_k3HqgYi1DoI6dDyJCEHQks9cSTPMWK3A-g=" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjxZd3_ugnp-aSzlqndmtihpZfknlaabsMG_shIwTpxPNVau_K181fU9KJc_OnDZh2wFlw3gFhQfHCzrhXSLq2DOLmC-RdI_G04671hCpuCaL68G3syomIq47uI7O03dzGav-S_k3HqgYi1DoI6dDyJCEHQks9cSTPMWK3A-g=" width="303" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">God. Damnit.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />Final Grade: B+. Required reading for comics fans. Recommended for people who like animal stories, war stories, science fiction, and sadness.
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<br />
Literally, that is the fear. I'll be somewhere that I want to read something, and I have nothing to read, so I just have to sit there and <i>not read.</i> Shudder. <br />
<br />
Obviously, within the comfort of my perfectly Rachel-sized den, where each of my three sit-spots (couch, bed, window where I blog) has a stack of books in grabbing range, this isn't a problem. But as soon as I step out the door, the anxiety begins.<br />
<br />
Do I have a book? Does it fit in my purse? Is it too heavy? Will it crush my lunch?<br />
<br />
And that's just on a normal work day. If I have to leave for a longer trip, or God forbid get on a plane, watch the fuck out. People who have witnessed me packing--or more embarrassingly, witnessed me unpacking at the other end of my journey--are stunned at the amount of books I choose to haul with me.<br />
<br />
But if I don't bring four books on an overnight trip to D.C., what if I finish Book 1 on the train ride down? And then I have to go to Book 2 and I don't like it, so I have to go to Book 3 and I don't like that one either? Then I'd say, "You all laughed at me for bringing Book 4, but lo, Book 4 is needed!"<br />
<br />
The point is, my whole right side hurts right now from dragging a suitcase with four books on four separate forms of transportation over the last two days. There's no excuse for this behavior in this day and age. I own a tablet! If I wasn't so cheap, I could just load up my e-reader app with all the books and comics I'd need for a trip to Inner Mongolia and back. But I am cheap, and the free selection on those things is limited to classics. Frankly, I didn't much care for "Jane Eyre" after Lord Rochester was introduced, and I already read "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." Spoiler alert: everybody dies. <br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.fizzythoughts.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/when-the-emperor-was-divine.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.fizzythoughts.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/when-the-emperor-was-divine.jpg" width="208" /></a>Unfortunately, last weekend when I went to R's parents' house for Passover, my fear manifested itself. I brought Julie Otsuka's "When the Emperor was Divine" and finished it before the train ride was over. I had nothing to read on the way back up. To compensate, this weekend, when the BF and I went to D.C. for his brother's baby's naming ceremony (hi, Big Scientist's Newborn Daughter!), I brought four books. Because Book 1 was Julie Otsuka's "The Buddha in the Attic," and that shit was not happening twice. I finished "Buddha" on the way down to D.C., and Book 2 was sufficient to get me back home to Brooklyn, but if it hadn't been, I had back up.<br />
<br />
Both "Emperor" and "Buddha" are very short books, and they deal with kind of the same subject matter, which is why they're getting a joint review. I was in the mood for Asian-themed literature because the BF and I have been watching "Avatar: The Last Airbender" together, and I remembered reading a review of "Buddha" when it was nominated for the National Book Award in 2011, so Otsuka Oeuvre it is!<br />
<br />
"Emperor" is about a family of unnamed Japanese-Americans who are forced to leave their home and live in an internment camp in Utah during World War II. The book is told in five parts from five different perspectives: the mother's, the older daughter's, the younger son's, a combination of the daughter's and son's, and finally the father's. The book is more concerned with emotion and tone than plot as it explores the feelings of fear, loneliness and boredom that come with being labeled a traitor and packed off to a camp so the authorities can keep an eye on you. <br />
<br />
<a href="http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327878988l/10464963.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327878988l/10464963.jpg" width="220" /></a>"Buddha" is also heavily infused with emotion and tone, and the timelines overlap slightly, but it is much more experimental than "Emperor." It's told in from the first-person plural perspective: we, our, us. The "we" are Japanese picture brides coming to America in the 1920s, meeting their husbands, making a life, having children, and eventually being taken away to the internment camps. Although the first-person plural perspective seems like a gimmick at first, it's remarkable how Otsuka manages to keep the whole thing together, conveying a sense of share experience and community while still making every detail unique to a single woman's life experience. <br />
<br />
Both books are, as I said, quite short, but the length works for the type of tight, precise storytelling Otsuka employs. The subject matter is very sad, dealing with a dark chapter in American history that isn't as widely known as it should be. The internment and deportation of Japanese-American citizens during World War II is at odds with the narrative we like to tell of that time, when the country pulled together on the home front to build ships and planes and defeat the evil Axis powers. Images of unwanted citizens assigned a number and packed onto secret trains to undisclosed locations is something the bad guys did, and it's hard to face the fact that the good guys were doing it too.<br />
<br />
Final grade for both: A. Recommended for those who like experimental literature, American history, Asian-American history, stories about the immigrant experience, and people who aren't going very far from home and want a really light book that fits in a <br />
purse.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3017664459656808178.post-35766026129458370732013-03-30T08:55:00.001-04:002013-03-30T08:55:44.263-04:00Review: "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay"We're in the middle of Passover right now. Let's celebrate by reviewing a book about Jews!<br />
<br />
Michael Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" won a Pulitzer, so it's not going to be earth-shattering when I say that it is a great book. It's about the American Sam Clay and his Czech cousin Josef Kavalier, who team up in 1939 to create one of the most famous comic book superheroes ever, The Escapist. The Escapist is a Chabon invention--no such character exists in comic books--but the circumstances of his creation and the cousins' rise in the newly-created comic book industry is factual, an amalgamation of the many real artists and writers that found success and failure in this uniquely American form of art. <br />
<br />
The Escapist is an escape artist who goes around the world liberating the trapped and oppressed. The artist part of the duo, Josef Kavalier, was also an escape artist, or at least he was training to be one in Prague before he came to America. The book begins with Kavalier escaping the Nazi occupation of his city by smuggling himself out in the coffin of the Golem of Prague.<br />
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The Golem of Prague is a figure from Jewish folklore, a proto-superhero that a rabbi creates out of clay and animates by carving the name of God into its forehead, in order to protect the community from people who get the itch to beat and kill their Jewish neighbors. The most famous Golem was created in Prague in the 16th century by Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, and this is the Golem that Kavalier accompanies to Lithuania so the Nazis can't get their hands on either Kavalier or the Golem. His new life in America revolves around him getting enough money to get the rest of his family out of Prague and give them a new start in his adopted country.<br />
<br />
It's a short leap from there for Kavalier, with his cousin Clay, to create a superhero who continuously escapes and helps others escape from evil men. The theme of escape and liberation runs through the various events of the novel, which follows the two cousins through 20 years of love, war, and personal and professional setbacks. While I initially picked up this book because I wanted to see Chabon's take on rise of the comic book industry, I was pleasantly surprised to see how the story was about so much more than just comic books: it was about dreams, and freedom, and the inability to escape from your own basic nature, no matter how hard you try.<br />
<br />
Final Grade: A. A smashing read. Recommended for those interested in comic books, Jewish history and folklore, World War II, and magical realism<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3017664459656808178.post-10550234912704686172013-03-17T12:46:00.002-04:002013-03-17T12:46:57.220-04:00Baldwin Blowout!The BF and I were watching clips of "Totally Biased" online and a drag queen made a joke about the Stonewall Riots that I didn't understand. She said, "And I think James Baldwin was there, too," and the studio audience laughed and laughed. Every schoolyard instinct in my headspace lit up like a Chanukah Bush: everyone is laughing and I don't know why, so it must be a joke at my expense!<br />
<br />
So the BF loaned me his copy of "The Devil Finds Work" to convince me the TV people weren't mocking me, and we find ourselves here today. I'll be reviewing "The Devil Finds Work" (1976), "Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone" (1968), and "Giovanni's Room" (1956), all works by writer, activist and world traveler, James Baldwin.<br />
<br />
Baldwin (1924 to 1987) was an important literary voice in the black civil rights movement. You may be familiar with Baldwin's more famous works, "Go Tell It on the Mountain," and "Notes from a Native Son," both of which deal with the experience of being black in America. He was also gay, which explains the "Totally Biased" reference that confused me so, and brings me "Giovanni's Room."<br />
<br />
This was only Baldwin's second published book, so he was pushing the boundaries of social mores in literature right out of the gate. The main character is an American man living in Paris in the 1950s. He is engaged to another American, but she goes out of town for a while and he moves in with a young Italian man, Giovanni. The book opens with the narrator sitting up all night, getting drunk in a small rented house on near the coast because Giovanni is going to be executed in Paris the next day. The narrator backtracks from there, relating how he fell in love with but ultimately betrayed Giovanni and left him in the state that lead to his execution. It's a story of shame, love and lost, not exactly good times, but an interesting read that provides a frank and honest description of homosexuality from a time when the topic was still very taboo.<br />
<br />
"Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone" is also about homosexuality--or rather, bisexuality--but mostly it's about art, specifically the experience of the black artist in America. The main character of the book is a very famous black actor who suffers a heart attack on stage, which leads him to consider the life choices he's made and the people he's met along the way. I like this book because of the gulf it describes between the artist as an individual and the artist as he exists as a symbol for his audience. The main character struggles with his desire to live an unorthodox life that is true to his chosen craft, because it is at odds with the expectations his family and community has for him. They want him to be a preacher, like his older brother, or at least get a regular job and raise a family of his own, while he would rather travel, be on stage, and fuck a lot of people (wouldn't we all). Not that his vision of himself as an artist is perfect either, though. He has to struggle for many years, playing the roles of servants and bootlicks on stage because those are the only roles available to black actors, before he gets his break. I really enjoyed and admired how "Tell Me" so thoroughly explored the profound ambivalence that comes with being an artist and a public figure, especially as the artist realizes that the things he holds most dear are the things that most alienate him from others.<br />
<br />
"The Devil Finds Work" was the first book of Baldwin's I read, as I mentioned earlier, but chronologically it comes last. It's not really a book at all, but an extended essay on the portrayal of blackness in American film. It was very dense and took the the longest to read of the three, even though it's the shortest. Unfortunately, I'm sure a lot of the essay's brilliance was lost on me, because I haven't seen any of the movies referenced in it (except for "The Exorcist"). The BF writes in the margins of all of his books, so there were plenty of notes to help me along, but I'm hard-pressed now to remember any of the points Baldwin made. <br />
<br />
I'm not what you'd call a film buff. Movies unsettle me for their ability to deliver a huge emotional wallop in a relatively short amount of time. I prefer novels, which give me space and time to inhabit the characters' worlds and absorb their struggles; or television episodes, for the the same reason. So it a weird way, "The Devil Finds Work" was a pretty good way for me to explore the deeper meanings of film without having to put myself through the experience (ordeal?) of actually watching the movies. <br />
<br />
Since this was a special post, I'm not going to grade any of the books. I'll just end with stating that James Baldwin is one of the Great American Authors and you should read his work if you get the chance (not the later stuff though, my local librarian told me that his last three novels were awful). Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3017664459656808178.post-89989008284881220632013-02-09T09:45:00.000-05:002013-02-09T09:45:37.762-05:00Review: "To the Heart of the Storm"Strangely enough, that title has nothing to do with the foot of snow that fell last night. "To the Heart of the Storm" is a graphic novel by Will Eisner, an autobiographical account of growing up Jewish in New York City. It's the only book I've ever successfully gotten the BF to read.<br />
<br />
I don't mean to imply that he doesn't read, it's just that he tends to read non-fiction, mostly for his own edification, writing supplemental notes in the margins that bug the hell out of me when I borrow his books. He doesn't read like I do, constantly, compulsively, sometimes painfully, to the exclusion of all other activities. For a while, I had a half-hearted campaign to turn him into me. I gave him books to read, fantasy and horror and superhero, thinking that he surely must be bored with those film and architecture books, and just needed the right piece of fiction to awaken the true book addict that lurks inside everyone. As you might expect, the whole thing went about as well as his attempts to get me interested in classic episodes of "The Twilight Zone." You just can't force your passions on your partner.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">You wait to force them on your children.</td></tr>
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He's never going to come to ComicCon with me, and I'm never going to get <i>that</i> excited about spending the afternoon in a museum. (It's cold, you can't touch anything without him scolding you, and there's no place to sit down unless you're cheek by jowl with sticky Midwesterners. I don't understand the appeal.) So imagine my surprise when I handed him "To the Heart of the Storm" and he sat down and read the whole thing in an afternoon. I think I've cracked the code: the BF likes Will Eisner.<br />
<br />
A note about Eisner: he was a cartoonist and writer, and one of the inventors of the American comic book, creating titles like <i>Sheena, Queen of the Jungle </i>and <i>The Spirit</i>, the latter of which has never been out of print. In World War II, he pioneered the genre of "instructional comic," producing booklets for the Army during the war, and for private companies and schools in peacetime. The comic book industry awards are called the Eisners (and Will Eisner actually won several Eisners in his lifetime, which pleases me greatly for reasons difficult to articulate). <br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.willeisner.com/library/images/to-the-heart-of-the-storm-cvr-300.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.willeisner.com/library/images/to-the-heart-of-the-storm-cvr-300.jpg" width="223" /></a>This was actually the first work by Eisner that I've read. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that as a comic book fan, because it's like being a film buff without ever having watched "The Godfather." As far as introductions go, "To the Heart of the Storm" is one of the best graphic novels I've ever read, and completely explains why Eisner gets to have the industry awards named after him. It's a deeply personal work that showcases his extraordinary talent for sequential art and writing. It's also a deeply political work about Eisner's experiences with racism and antisemitism as a child, told from the point of view of Eisner as young man on his way to fight in a war that's been brewing his entire life. <br />
<br />
What I find fascinating about this book is that Eisner wrote it in 1991, when he was in his seventies. He'd already lived a lifetime between the events of the book and the time of its creation, and yet "To the Heart of the Storm" feels so immediate and raw, like it all happened to him yesterday. I was struck in particular to the detail he put into his mothers and aunts shoes in flashbacks to their childhoods on the Lower East Side in the late 1890s and early 1900s. And there is such an overall feeling of sadness and anger over the whole work, a helpless and confused kind of anger that only children, with their limited understanding of the world, are capable of feeling. This enormously successful man, having proved all detractors and tormentors wrong decades before, still felt the pain of being called "kike"; of pretending to be gentile so he could go to parties in middle school; of hearing his so-called friends supporting Hitler's actions against the Jews. It never stopped hurting. <br />
<br />
I would recommend this book to--well, anyone. It's suitable for children as young as ten or twelve, no swearing or nudity. Even people who don't normally read comic books will appreciate the work of this master of the form. And if being racist knocks you down a full letter grade in my system, creating a thoughtful and biting anti-racist and pro-humanity piece must get you bumped to the top in Big Island Rachel's world.<br />
<br />
Final Grade: A+. It gets the + because the BF liked it, too.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3017664459656808178.post-39027337534272438342013-02-03T11:56:00.001-05:002013-02-03T12:00:58.224-05:00Review: "This Book Is Full Of Spiders, Seriously Dude, Don't Touch It"I called it!<br />
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<br />
Last week, I wrote about the joys of <a href="http://bigislandrachelsbooks.blogspot.com/2013/01/interlude-other-peoples-bookshelves.html" target="_blank">other people's bookshelves</a> and said I would find my next book to read on R's shelves. And sure enough, this week we're looking at David Wong's "This Book Is Full Of Spiders, Seriously Dude, Don't Touch It" (2012).<br />
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David Wong is the pseudonym of Jason Pargin, a senior editor and columnist for the humor website <a href="http://cracked.com/">Cracked.com</a>. Go there now if you want to never get anything done, ever again. I have a feeling that Cracked is responsible for more lost productivity than Lolcats and pornography combined, at least in my own experience. It has a seemingly endless archive of funny columns and lists on any number of topics, updated every day, and it's affect is best described by this xkcd comic:<br />
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This book is actually a sequel to Wong's "John Dies At The End" (which was made into a movie this year). Both are set in a Midwestern town only identified as Undisclosed, an area known to the Iroquois as Seriously, Fuck That Place. It's poor, boring, and quite possibly the portal to Hell, or at least to another dimension of shadow men and monsters. David Wong, both narrator and author, and his best friend John are life-long inhabitants of Undisclosed and self-appointed monster-hunters and protectors of the town. They are also complete drunken fuck-ups. This is a difficult enough situation when they're just trying to save their own skins in "John Dies At The End, " but when they're called on to save their entire town and possible the world from evil brain parasites in "This Book Is Full Of Spiders," they have to somehow rise above their own jackassery and become heroes after a lifetime of being losers.<br />
<br />
It's rare that a book can both make me laugh out loud and have to sleep with the light on. "Spiders" is hilarious, especially in the first third (it gets less funny and more action-oriented toward the end), but it's also terrifying. The humor is in the words, the horror in the situations, and it works surprisingly well. The genre of horror humor is pretty sparse to begin with, but books like this one show that the two don't have to be mutually exclusive. Both humor and fear draw their impact from <i>surprise</i>. We laugh more at jokes when we don't know the punchline ahead of time; we don't fear the monster we see as much as the monster we don't see. Wong the author understands the similarities between the two states and takes us on a wild ride to the end of the world and back again.<br />
<br />
At the risk of big ole <b>SPOILERS</b>:<br />
<br />
"Spiders" is a book about zombies. The brain parasites that begin multiplying through the town can reanimate their dead hosts, exist only to expand their numbers, and can only be stopped by removing the head of the host or destroying the brain. The twist on these zombies is that the parasites change the physical make-up of their hosts, much like the alien in John Carpenter's "The Thing." The world reacts to the news of the zombie apocalypse much like you'd expect them too: by setting up anti-zombie militias and Tweeting. <br />
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I have to confess that as much as I enjoyed "Spiders," which is a more technically accomplished work than its predecessor, on the whole I prefer "John Dies At The End." I'm just not that into zombies, and we've reached such a pop-culture saturation point with them that I've lost whatever small interest I may have had with them (and it was a very small interest, because as <a href="http://bigislandrachelsbooks.blogspot.com/2013/01/review-haunting-of-hill-house-by.html" target="_blank">we've established</a>, I'm a massive pansy). <br />
<br />
As far as zombie apocalypses go, "Spiders" is fairly standard, from the shady government goons who may hold the key to the cure, right up to the stirring action movie climax. And if you like that sort of thing, you'll love this book. Wong is clearly versed in the tropes of the zombie genre (zomb-re?) and his love and appreciation for his source material shines through in this well-crafted addition to the cannon. It's done well. It's just been done. <br />
<br />
Final Grade: B. Recommended for zombie fans, horror fans, readers of Cracked, and people who like dick-jokes.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3017664459656808178.post-46394319497875172072013-01-26T09:29:00.000-05:002013-01-26T09:29:43.012-05:00Interlude: Other People's BookshelvesI don't want to make my shelves jealous, but I love browsing through other people's book collections, especially if they're readers like me. I can spot a kindred spirit by their books: by the variety of theme and type, by the way the books are organized, and by the person's willingness to talk about their books the same way others talk about their pets or their kitchen.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Get ready for an onslaught of library porn. I found a tumblr on the subject.</td></tr>
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There's an indefinable <i>something </i>that distinguishes a book lover's from a layperson's collection. I can tell at a glance who has a true library and who just has a place where the books go. The presence of so-called genre writing is a big clue. If there's a lot of sci-fi and fantasy hanging around, that person is probably a reader; ditto for comic books and graphic novels, especially if they're prominently displayed where visitors can see them. There's still a big of shame and stigma attached to enjoying genre writing, so a willingness to display such works and invite comment says the reader ain't give a damn what other people think of her interests.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Why yes, I do own every book every written about Rubicks cubes.</td></tr>
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Variations on theme are another clue. Readers who are really in to reading tend to go for depth and completism. The BF has "The Sun Also Rises," "This Side of Paradise," and "The Great Gatsby"; he also has many books on the subject of the Great Depression and the art and design aesthetics of the 1920s and 30s. R's bookshelf has "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," so it's not surprising she would also have a non-fiction book called "Teaching Race in the Classroom." <br />
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I'm a bit hard-pressed to explain my own thematic elements. Maybe it's like tickling: you can't do it to yourself. I may have to get someone in here to look at my shelves and explain them to me.<br />
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And finally, a true reader and book-lover will always have something to say on the subject of organization. My friends J and L organize alphabetically by authors' last names, like a proper library; the BF shelves his books (and DVDs) chronologically by the year they were published/produced; right now I'm shelving by height, though I may organize them by color in the near future, just for a change. It's never haphazard. There's always a reason the books are set up like that, and the book-lover desperately wants you to comment on it so she can explain her system.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">It all began when I saw "Beauty and the Beast" as a child...</td></tr>
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This post was originally going to be a review of Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried," which I borrowed from R's library. But while I enjoyed the book and could probably mash my brains into saying something witty and profound about the text, what I'm actually thinking about this morning is the fact that I'm going to R's apartment later today and will be able to browse through her books again. That's what I'm really excited about: other people's bookshelves. It got me to thinking about the people I've known and the book collections I've had--no other way to put it--relationships with, and decided to say something witty and profound about that instead.<br />
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I may just be a hawa'e maoli (collector urchin) when it comes to books and want to pick up every book I see and glom it on to my body to conceal me from predators.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.botany.hawaii.edu/basch/uhnpscesu/htms/kahoinvr/images/toxopn/colurchlb7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="237" src="http://www.botany.hawaii.edu/basch/uhnpscesu/htms/kahoinvr/images/toxopn/colurchlb7.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Turtles and sharks will be baffled by my impenetrable armor of cornflakes </td></tr>
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But there's more to it than that. I like other people's bookshelves because while reading tastes are a very personal thing, a bookshelf is rather public in nature. A bookshelf is an open display of a person's inner world and imagination, what they like, what they think about, what they desire. It's a strange mixture of the public and the private that endlessly fascinates me for its potential to both reveal and conceal the truth of a person's being. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://static.neatorama.com/imagesb/2012-12/03/eye-sauron-book-tower-hobbit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://static.neatorama.com/imagesb/2012-12/03/eye-sauron-book-tower-hobbit.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sauron knows what you think about at night. <i>For shame.</i></td></tr>
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Now why do I get the feeling other people are going to stop showing me their bookshelves?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3017664459656808178.post-78608917078898632772013-01-19T09:50:00.000-05:002013-01-19T09:50:31.025-05:00Review: "Geisha: A Life"You may have read over at my other blog that <a href="http://bigislandrachel.blogspot.com/2013/01/briefs.html" target="_blank">I'm swamped with work stuff </a>right now, so it's an interesting coincidence that this book popped up on my radar. "Geisha: A Life" (2002) is a memoir by Mineko Iwasaki that describes her training and career as the most successful modern geisha in Japan. At one point in her life, she worked for five years straight without a single day off, and lately, I've been feeling her pain.<br />
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Just to be clear, I'm not reviewing "Memoirs of a Geisha" by Arthur Golden. In fact, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,393813,00.html" target="_blank">Iwasaki sued Golden</a> over his book, because he listed her as one of his primary sources after he promised to protect her identity. She wrote her book as a kind of anti-Golden account, even stating in a few places that she wants to clear up the misconceptions that outsiders have about geisha and the world of the karyukai ("flower and willow world," basically the districts in Japan that house geisha and cater to their clients).<br />
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The book itself is a quick read. I've actually read it twice since my busy time started. I found it compelling for the world it described, though the writing itself is a bit dull. As far as memoirs go, it commits the fatal sin of telling-not-showing, using the "This happened to me, and then this happened to me, and then I met this person and we did this together" method. <a href="http://bigislandrachelsbooks.blogspot.com/2013/01/review-haunting-of-hill-house-by.html" target="_blank">Shirley Jackson she ain't</a>. But Iwasaki is a fascinating person who has led such an interesting life that the dull writing almost doesn't matter. She's giving away intimate details of one of the most secret and misunderstood societies in the world. How can you look away?<br />
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I'm biased in favor of this book to begin with because modern Hawaii culture is greatly influenced by our Japanese population, and I recognized a lot of the festivals and art forms described in the book. Furthermore, I played taiko drums for many years under both Japanese and American teachers, so I recognized many of the techniques and attitudes Iwasaki's teachers used on her during her training. Of course I never got within a hundred miles of the kind of talent and mastery that a geisha has over her chosen art form, but it was all familiar enough to make me feel a bit nostalgic.<br />
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Final Grade: C. Recommended for those interested in Japanese culture, geisha, and sticking it to the imperialist white man who tramples the dignity of your profession. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3017664459656808178.post-87941696388874937022013-01-13T10:00:00.000-05:002013-01-13T10:00:58.676-05:00Review: "Flight Behavior" by Barbara KingsolverI felt so confident that I would love Barbara Kingsolver's latest novel, "Flight Behavior" (2012) that I actually bought it. New. <i>In hardcover.</i> I had an option at the time, because I had a gift card to the fabulous <a href="http://greenlightbookstore.com/" target="_blank">Greenlight Bookstore</a>, to purchase two of her earlier works in paperback, but went for the shiny new book instead, because I've followed her career and she tops herself with every subsequent work she publishes. Hot damn, I thought, new Kingsolver and gift card to afford the hardback. I am one lucky Big Island Rachel.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Luxury goods!</td></tr>
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But no. Just--no.<br />
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"Flight Behavior" wasn't as big a disappointment to me as reading Monique Truong's mediocre <a href="http://bigislandrachelsbooks.blogspot.com/2010/11/monique-truongs-bitter-in-mouth.html" target="_blank">"Bitter in the Mouth"</a> after her superlative "The Book of Salt." That let-down was a literary tragedy for me because I just loved "The Book of Salt" so very much. I will get around to reviewing it someday, I promise.<br />
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This was merely a disappointment, considering that it came close on the heels of "The Lacuna," which literally made me clasp my chest and cry out in pain at one point. And I recommend Kingsolver's "The Poisonwood Bible" to anyone who talks with me about books for more than two minutes. (I <i>really </i>regret not buying those two books in paperback at Greenlight when I had the chance.)<br />
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What both of these books have in common is that they deal with sweeping historical events from the perspective of the rather insignificant individuals caught in the middle of them. The overall effect humanizes these big, almost unfathomable occurrences that shape countries and cultures. There's something so intimate and personal about her stories, something <i>immediate</i>, that both transcends and illuminates time and place in Kingsolver's novels. You never feel like you're reading "historical fiction." <br />
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"Flight Behavior" attempts to do the same thing, but instead of discussing Communism in the Americas ("The Lacuna") or the de-colonization of Africa ("The Poisonwood Bible"), this book is about climate change. The every-man that walks us through the issues of the day is Dellarobia, a young mother in the Appalachias who discovers a colony of monarch butterflies on her in-laws' property. The monarchs should be at their winter home in Mexico, but have instead come here, because of climate change. A media circus swirls around the butterflies appearance, a handsome scientist moves into Dellarobia's barn to study the phenom, and she realizes that she has some tough choices to make about the unhappy life she's built for herself.<br />
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This is not a bad book, by any means. I read the whole thing, after all. I really like Dellarobia and feel for her plight. She married the boy who got her pregnant in high school, and while he's a good man, she's just too quick and smart for the kind of the life he can offer her. She loves her kids, but resents the hell out of the limitations of stay-at-home mothering. And she's poor. So poor, gang.<br />
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Poverty in modern America is a big theme in this book, and I sort of wish it had been the sole focus, because Kingsolver describes it so well. I loved the scene where Dellarobia and her husband have a fight in the dollar store as they attempt to put together a "real Christmas" for their children on a $50 budget. The book lingers over details like their truck on its third engine, the lack of protein in their diets, the shoddy stitching on their cheap clothes, and the free lunch forms Dellarobia gives to her son to take to school. <br />
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Much like Edith Wharton does in "Ethan Frome," Kingsolver illuminates the dark reality of the American dream, where all pathways to salvation and happiness require an amount of money that is simply impossible for the protagonists to acquire without an act of evil, wanton destruction. A lot of the tension in "Flight Behavior" comes from Dellarobia's
father-in-law, who wants to sell the timber rights of the butterflies'
mountain to a logging company to pay off his debts so he doesn't lose
his land outright. If the mountain is logged, it will effectively mean the extinction of the species, because so much of the North American population is wintering on the mountain. And worse, it will only pay the debt for a month or so, leaving the family right back where it started. It's a short term act that will have permanent repercussions.<br />
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Anyone else hear the whistling of the symbolism sledgehammer as it swings down toward your head?<br />
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Here's where the book falls apart for me. It's about climate change, and when I say that, I don't mean that climate change is the larger issue in which these characters' stories play out; I mean it's <i>about</i> climate change. There's long passages where scientists explain how climate change works, what greenhouse gases are, and why every argument that states climate change isn't happening is wrong. There's protesters and activists camping out on the butterflies' mountain. There's media personalities describing how they'll put the spin on the story to make it seem like climate change is a matter of controversy in the scientific community. And at some point, all of this tips the balance, and the book stops transcending its theme. It becomes polemic, its agenda too transparent, and I feel like I'm being preached at.<br />
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It's such a shame, because I feel like certain aspects of this book really do keep that balance. The preacher of the community makes some great arguments about God wanting humans to be responsible stewards of the planet, showing that the issue of climate change isn't as clear-cut as rational, science-minded people on one side and stupid religious people on the other. The scenes about poverty show that planet-destroying habits don't come from a place of selfishness or evil, but from need and lack of affordable alternative options. Dellarobia's whole situation is symbolic of climate change: she just sort of went along with everything and made the best decisions she could, until she looked up one day and realized that she was fucked. <br />
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But all of that deftness and subtlety is thrown out the window whenever people sit around a table and <i>talk</i> <i>about climate change</i>. It feels so clumsy and forced, like that part in George Orwell's "1984" that is just a passage from another book analyzing how totalitarianism works. Did he think his readers wouldn't understand it without the scholarly essay? We have just spend a hundred-odd pages with characters living in that society, I think we know what's going on.<br />
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I don't love all of Kingsolver's books. I didn't even finish "Animal Dreams," one of her earlier works. But the talent and skill she's accumulated over the course of her career made me expect a little more from "Flight Behavior" than was actually delivered. It's an okay book. It's just not great.<br />
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Final grade: C+. Recommended for those who like family dramas, stories about the American frontier, environmental issues, and butterflies. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0