Category: Literature

Sisyphus, Bolaño Style

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A passage from Roberto Bolaño’s big fat novel 2666 (context unimportant)—

Archimboldi’s response surprised Bubis. In it he said that Sisyphus, once he was dead, had escaped from hell by means of a legal stratagem. Before Zeus freed Thanatos, Sisyphus asked his wife not to perform the usual funeral rites, knowing that the first thing Death would do was come for him. So when he got to hell, Hades scolded him and all the infernal lords naturally clamored to the skies or the vault of hell and tore out their hair and took offense. But Sisyphus said it was his wife’s fault, not his, and he requested permission to return to Earth to punish her.

Hades considered it: the proposal Sisyphus made was reasonable and freedom was granted to him on the condition that he stay away for only three or four days, long enough to get his just vengeance and set in motion, however belatedly, the proper funeral rites. Of course, Sisyphus jumped at the chance—not for nothing was he the craftiest man in the world—and he returned to Earth, where he lived happily to a ripe old age, and didn’t go back to hell until his body failed him.

According to some, the punishment of the rock had only one purpose: to keep Sisyphus occupied and prevent him from hatching new schemes. But at the least expected moment, Sisyphus will devise something and he’ll come back to Earth, Archimboldi ended his letter.

The Third Reich: Part III — Roberto Bolaño

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As a means of plot summary, here’s an excerpt from my review of the second part of Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Third Reich (serialized this year by The Paris Review and forthcoming in hardback from FSG (uh, the Bolaño’s book, not my review, of course))—

If 2666 impossibly haunts The Third Reich from the future, then paranoid Poe haunts it from the past. Last time we checked in, Udo Berger and his beautiful girlfriend Ingeborg had made tentative friends with another German couple while spending the summer at a seaside resort in Spain. Through this pair, they meet up with two nefarious locals, the Wolf and the Lamb; Udo also begins obsessing over a man named El Quemado, a burn victim who rents paddle boats to tourists. For Udo, the holiday is meant to be a working vacation—he’s a wargame enthusiast, and he plans to write a defining strategy for a new game called “The Third Reich” (implicitly, he plays the Nazi’s side). In the meantime, he’s also taken with the hotel’s owner, Frau Else, a German transplant who mysteriously disappears to take care of an ill husband who no one seems to see.

The third installment of The Third Reich amplifies Udo’s paranoia and isolation. He spends most of his time playing Third Reich with El Quemado, and although he assures his best friend Conrad, via telephone, that he’s beating the burned man, we see his control (and sanity) slipping away. Udo seems unconcerned that Conrad has been comforting Ingeborg, probably because Udo is still trying to bed Frau Else, who has mysteriously disappeared in this third chapter. When he’s not busy sleeping nightmarish sleep or lurking around the hotel at night, Udo picks fights with the night-watchman; clearly, he’s outlasted his welcome in this tourist town.

This section of The Third Reich is shorter than the first two, and although I’ve enjoyed reading the novel in pieces, it’s with this section that the strain of serialization begins to show. Bolaño’s slow-burn Lynchian dread is clearly climaxing here, and it’s unsatisfying to have that suspense interrupted. It’s also unclear how The Third Reich will resolve, or if it will resolve—Bolaño isn’t exactly one to neatly tie up loose ends—but I’m hoping that we’ll get to learn more about El Quemado’s strange motivations, and get another glimpse of Frau Else’s husband. We’ll see soon—the winter issue is out soon with the final installment.

Italo Calvino on Charles Dickens

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Italo Calvino on Charles Dickens’s last novel Our Mutual Friend. Essay from Why Read the Classics?:

The Thames at nightfall, dark and muddy, with the tide rising up the piers of the bridges: against this backdrop, which this year’s news stories have brought to our attention in the most lugubrious light, a boat approaches, almost touching the floating logs, barges and rubbish. At its prow stands a man staring with vulture-like eyes at the current as though looking for something; at the oars, half-hidden by the hood of her cheap cloak, is a girl with an angelic face. What are they looking for? We soon learn that the man recovers the corpses of suicides or murder victims who have been flung into the river: the waters of the Thames seem to contain every day a rich catch for this particular fisherman. As soon as he sees a corpse floating on the water’s surface, the man removes the gold coins from his pockets, and then drags him with a rope to a riverside police station, where he will receive a reward. The angelic girl, the daughter of the boatman, tries not to look at this macabre booty: she is terrified, but continues to row.

The openings of Dickens’ novels are often memorable, but none is better than the first chapter of Our Mutual Friend, the second last novel he wrote, and the last one he completed. Carried along on the corpse-fisher’s boat, we seem to enter the dark side of the world.

In the second chapter everything changes. We are now surrounded by characters out of a comedy of manners, attending a dinner-party at the house of parvenus where everyone pretends to be old friends but in fact they barely know each other. However, before the chapter ends the guests’ conversation suddenly turns to the mystery of a man who drowned just as he was about to inherit a vast fortune, and this takes us back to the suspense of the opening chapter.

Continue reading “Italo Calvino on Charles Dickens” →

Three (Somewhat Literary) Lists for 11 | 11 | 11

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Eleven Authors Who Were Also Veterans of War

1. Stendahl (Napoleonic Wars)

2. Ambrose Bierce (Union Army, American Civil War)

3. Erich Maria Remarque (German Army, WWI)

4. George Orwell (Republican Army, Spanish Civil War)

5. Kurt Vonnegut (U.S. Army, WWII)

6. Joseph Heller (U.S. Air Force, WWII)

7. Eveyln Waugh (British Royal Marines, WWII)

8. Norman Mailer (U.S Army, WWII)

9. Gore Vidal (U.S. Army, WWII)

10. Tim O’Brien (U.S. Army, Vietnam War)

11. Anthony Swofford (U.S. Marine Corps, Persian Gulf War)

*          *          *

Eleven Encyclopedic Books, Overstuffed with References, That Compel Compulsive Reading

1. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville

2. Finnegans Wake, James Joyce

3. Expelled from Eden, A WilliamVollmann Reader

4. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Georges Perec

5. Wittgenstein’s Mistress, David Markson

6. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien

7. Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco

8. The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald

9. The Recognitions, William Gaddis

10. Between Parentheses, Roberto Bolaño

11.  The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, Donald Harrington

*          *          *

Eleven Excellent Films About Films and Film-making 

1. Hearts of Darkness, Eleanor Coppola, et al

2. Lost in La Mancha, Keith Fulton et al

3. Burden of Dreams, Les Blank

4. Adaptation, Spike Jonze

5. Be Kind Rewind, Michel Gondry

6. The Player, Robert Altman

7. Ed Wood, Tim Burton

8. Stardust Memories, Woody Allen

9. Sullivan’s Travels, Preston Sturges

10. American Movie, Chris Smith

11. Barton Fink, Coen Brothers

Eleven Encyclopedic Books, Overstuffed with References, That Compel Compulsive Reading

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Eleven Encyclopedic Books, Overstuffed with References, That Compel Compulsive Reading

1. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville

2. Finnegans Wake, James Joyce

3. Expelled from Eden, A WilliamVollmann Reader

4. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Georges Perec

5. Wittgenstein’s Mistress, David Markson

6. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien

7. Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco

8. The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald

9. The Recognitions, William Gaddis

10. Between Parentheses, Roberto Bolaño

11.  The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, Donald Harrington


“The Discharged Soldier” — William Wordsworth

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Drawing of Adrian Jones by Michael Fay
Drawing of Adrian Jones by Michael Fay

In Section IV of his Prelude, William Wordsworth evokes the most moving encounter with a veteran of war that I have ever read. At first reticent to be anything but a voyeur, the narrator (Wordsworth, in all likelihood), slips “into the shade/ Of a thick hawthorn” to spy on the “meagre man” with a “ghastly” mouth “in military garb” resting on a “mile-stone.” As the poor ex-soldier, “Companionless,” begins to issue “low muttered sounds, as if of pain / Or some uneasy though,” the narrator shakes his “heart’s specious cowardice” and hails the veteran as a human being, asking for his story. It turns out that the guy is slowly—and with great difficulty—returning to his “native home.” Wordsworth takes the veteran to a nearby friend’s house for companionship and rest, before returning to his own home in a contemplative mood. Full text of  “The Discharged Soldier”—

No living thing appeared in earth or air,
And, save the flowing water’s peaceful voice,
Sound there was none–but, lo! an uncouth shape,
Shown by a sudden turning of the road,
So near that, slipping back into the shade
Of a thick hawthorn, I could mark him well, 390
Myself unseen. He was of stature tall,
A span above man’s common measure, tall,
Stiff, lank, and upright; a more meagre man
Was never seen before by night or day.
Long were his arms, pallid his hands; his mouth
Looked ghastly in the moonlight: from behind,
A mile-stone propped him; I could also ken
That he was clothed in military garb,
Though faded, yet entire. Companionless,
No dog attending, by no staff sustained, 400
He stood, and in his very dress appeared
A desolation, a simplicity,
To which the trappings of a gaudy world
Make a strange back-ground. From his lips, ere long,
Issued low muttered sounds, as if of pain
Or some uneasy thought; yet still his form
Kept the same awful steadiness–at his feet
His shadow lay, and moved not. From self-blame
Not wholly free, I watched him thus; at length
Subduing my heart’s specious cowardice, 410
I left the shady nook where I had stood
And hailed him. Slowly from his resting-place
He rose, and with a lean and wasted arm
In measured gesture lifted to his head
Returned my salutation; then resumed
His station as before; and when I asked
His history, the veteran, in reply,
Was neither slow nor eager; but, unmoved,
And with a quiet uncomplaining voice,
A stately air of mild indifference, 420
He told in few plain words a soldier’s tale–
That in the Tropic Islands he had served,
Whence he had landed scarcely three weeks past;
That on his landing he had been dismissed,
And now was travelling towards his native home.
This heard, I said, in pity, “Come with me.”
He stooped, and straightway from the ground took up
An oaken staff by me yet unobserved–
A staff which must have dropped from his slack hand
And lay till now neglected in the grass. 430
Though weak his step and cautious, he appeared
To travel without pain, and I beheld,
With an astonishment but ill suppressed,
His ghostly figure moving at my side;
Nor could I, while we journeyed thus, forbear
To turn from present hardships to the past,
And speak of war, battle, and pestilence,
Sprinkling this talk with questions, better spared,
On what he might himself have seen or felt.
He all the while was in demeanour calm, 440
Concise in answer; solemn and sublime
He might have seemed, but that in all he said
There was a strange half-absence, as of one
Knowing too well the importance of his theme,
But feeling it no longer. Our discourse
Soon ended, and together on we passed
In silence through a wood gloomy and still.
Up-turning, then, along an open field,
We reached a cottage. At the door I knocked,
And earnestly to charitable care 450
Commended him as a poor friendless man,
Belated and by sickness overcome.
Assured that now the traveller would repose
In comfort, I entreated that henceforth
He would not linger in the public ways,
But ask for timely furtherance and help
Such as his state required. At this reproof,
With the same ghastly mildness in his look,
He said, “My trust is in the God of Heaven,
And in the eye of him who passes me!” 460

The cottage door was speedily unbarred,
And now the soldier touched his hat once more
With his lean hand, and in a faltering voice,
Whose tone bespake reviving interests
Till then unfelt, he thanked me; I returned
The farewell blessing of the patient man,
And so we parted. Back I cast a look,
And lingered near the door a little space,
Then sought with quiet heart my distant home.

Eleven Authors Who Were Also Veterans of War

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Eleven Authors Who Were Also Veterans of War

1. Stendahl (Napoleonic Wars)

2. Ambrose Bierce (Union Army, American Civil War)

3. Erich Maria Remarque (German Army, WWI)

4. George Orwell (Republican Army, Spanish Civil War)

5. Kurt Vonnegut (U.S. Army, WWII)

6. Joseph Heller (U.S. Air Force, WWII)

7. Eveyln Waugh (British Royal Marines, WWII)

8. Norman Mailer (U.S Army, WWII)

9. Gore Vidal (U.S. Army, WWII)

10. Tim O’Brien (U.S. Army, Vietnam War)

11. Anthony Swofford (U.S. Marine Corps, Persian Gulf War)

“My Books Are Forgeries” — Philip K. Dick

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Slate has published an excerpt from the forthcoming collection of letters and other ephemera, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (by, uh, PK Dick). An excerpt of that excerpt—

My books are forgeries. Nobody wrote them. The goddam typewriter wrote them; it’s a magic typewriter. Or like John Denver gets his songs: I get them from the air. Like his songs, they—my books—are already there. Whatever that means.

The most ominous element from my books which I am encountering in my actual life is this. In one of my novels, Ubik, certain anomalies occur which prove to the characters that their environment is not real. Those same anomalies are now happening to me. By my own logic in the novel I must conclude that my or perhaps even our collective environment is only a pseudo-environment. In my novel what broke through was the presence of a man who had died. He speaks to them through several intermediary systems and hence must still be alive; it is they, evidently, who are dead. What has been happening to me for over three months is that a man I knew who died has been breaking through in ways so similar to that of Runciter in Ubik that I am beginning to conclude that I and everyone else is either dead and he is alive, or—well, as in the novel, I can’t figure it out. It makes no sense.

William Gibson: “Bleak House Is the Best Steampunk Landscape That Will Ever Be”

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From The Paris Review interview, William Gibson on on Charles Dickens’s Bleak House—

INTERVIEWER

The Victorians invented science fiction.

GIBSON

I think the popular perception that we’re a lot like the Victorians is in large part correct. One way is that we’re all constantly in a state of ongoing t­echnoshock, without really being aware of it—it’s just become where we live. The Victorians were the first people to experience that, and I think it made them crazy in new ways. We’re still riding that wave of craziness. We’ve gotten so used to emergent technologies that we get anxious if we haven’t had one in a while.

But if you read the accounts of people who rode steam trains for the first time, for instance, they went a little crazy. They’d traveled fifteen miles an hour, and when they were writing the accounts afterward they struggled to describe that unthinkable speed and what this linear velocity does to a perspective as you’re looking forward. There was even a Victorian medical complaint called “railway spine.”

Emergent technologies were irreversibly altering their landscape. Bleak House is a quintessential Victorian text, but it is also probably the best steam­punk landscape that will ever be. Dickens really nailed it, especially in those proto-Ballardian passages in which everything in nature has been damaged by heavy industry. But there were relatively few voices like Dickens then. Most people thought the progress of industry was all very exciting. Only a few were saying, Hang on, we think the birds are dying.

 

“On the Difficulty of Imagining an Ideal City” — Georges Perec

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“On the Difficulty of Imagining an Ideal City,” a poem or essay or something—a text—by Georges Perec. The piece is one of the selections in Perec’s collection of miscellany, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces:

I wouldn’t like to live in America but sometimes I would

I’d love to live on the Boulevard St Germain but sometimes I wouldn’t

I wouldn’t like to live on a coral reef but sometimes I would

I wouldn’t like to live in a dungeon but sometimes I would

I wouldn’t like to live in the East but sometimes I would

I love living in France but sometimes I don’t

I’d love to live in Greenland but not for too long

I’d like to live to a hundred but sometimes I wouldn’t

I wouldn’t like to live in Issoudun but sometimes I would

I wouldn’t like to live on a junk but sometimes I would

I wouldn’t like to live in a ksar but sometimes I would

I’d have loved to go in a lunar module but it’s a bit late

I wouldn’t like to live in a monastery but sometimes I would

I wouldn’t like to live at the Hotel Negresco but sometimes I would

I wouldn’t like to live in the open air but sometimes I would

I love living in Paris but sometimes I don’t

I wouldn’t like to live in Quebec but sometimes I would

I wouldn’t like to live by my own resources but sometimes I would

I wouldn’t like to live in a submarine but sometimes I would

I wouldn’t like to live in a tower but sometimes I would

I wouldn’t like to live with Ursula Andress but sometimes I would

I wouldn’t like to live in a village but sometimes I would

I wouldn’t like to live in a wigwam but sometimes I would

I’d love to live in Xanadu but not for ever

I wouldn’t like to live in the Yonne but sometimes I would

I wouldn’t like us all to live in Zanzibar but sometimes I would

Elephant Disguised as Ernest Hemingway — Click Mort

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(More).

A Bad Night’s Sleep — Michael Wiley

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A Bad Night’s Sleep, Michael Wiley’s third detective novel, opens with protagonist PI Joe Kozmarski working what appears to be a boring job. He’s hired to investigate the repeated robberies of a Chicago construction site. Sure, it’s a glorified nightwatchman gig, but this job might get him closer to retiring in a certain north Florida fishing town he dreams about. The job gets too interesting too quickly, however, when the burglars arrive and begin stealing equipment and material. Then the police show up—and help rob the site. Kozmarski calls 911, more police arrive, and, in the firefight that ensues he shoots—and kills—one of the robber cops.

While waiting in jail to be charged—an event that never quite comes to light—Kozmarski reflects—

Every time I’d seen someone die I’d felt the world go a little quieter like I’d lost part of my hearing, and sooner or later the singing, laughing, and screaming would fade into a hushing wind of white noise. That had happened when my dad died. It had happened when Kevin, a boy I was supposed to be protecting, ended up twisted and broken on his mother’s kitchen floor. It happened. Shooting the cop felt worse. I’d ripped a little hole in the universe and I wondered what sound would fly through it.

Kozmarski’s little hole lets in more than strange sounds. The cop-shooting imperils his PI license, damages his (not exactly heretofore spotless) reputation, and leads undercover cops to threaten him (to the point of firing shots) as he leaves jail. The stress doesn’t exactly help protect his tenuous sobriety either, and Kozmarski’s soon on the sauce again (let’s not even mention that little bag of coke his “friend” sends him to help through these troubled times). Luckily (although that’s hardly an appropriate adverb here), Kozmarski’s friend on the force sets up another job for our distressed hero, one that could clear his name and clean out some of the dirty cops of the Chicago PD. Kozmarski infiltrates the corrupt gang of crooked cops, but as he plumbs deeper into the mystery, the line between good guys and bad guys becomes increasingly nebulous.

A Bad Night’s Sleep is a page turner telegraphed in terse, tense, vivid prose. Wiley’s plot and dialogue alike are hardboiled in the noir tradition of Hammett or Chandler, and his characters and pacing bristle with the gritty immediacy one might find in George V. Higgins. There’s a smart brush of black humor to A Bad Night’s Sleep that comes from Wiley’s characterization and his protagonist’s wry observations. And for all of his hard edges, we find in Kozmarski an engaged protagonist, a man of genuine pathos. Wiley delivers what readers want from an intelligent mystery—keen, suspenseful plotting, sharp action sequences, and a hero we can care about.

A Bad Night’s Sleep is available now in hardback from St. Martin’s Minotaur imprint. Read our interview with Michael Wiley.

Lars Iyer on Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives

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Great great great essay from Lars Iyer today at The White Review. The essay is called “Nude in Your Hot Tub, Facing the Abyss (A Literary Manifesto After the End of Literature and Manifestos).” You should really just read it; I think Iyer does here what David Shields might have meant to do with Reality Hunger—only Iyer is far more clear and cogent (and not, like, all whiny). Here’s a taste, Iyer on Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives:

A final example of literature that faces its own demise and survives: Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives is a book about an attempt to create a literary vanguard in 1975, written after the conditions for vanguardist practice had collapsed. It is a book about political revolution written in a period after the inevitable failures of such revolutions have revealed themselves. It is a novel about a literary avant-garde and yet the novel itself resists the conceptualization and stylization that a literary avant-garde requires. It is an ecstatic, passionate novel—Bolaño himself describes it as a ‘love letter to my generation’—that plays out as a parody of the desires for Literature and Revolution. It is a novel, like all recent novels, that comes too late, but unlike most others it finds a way to address this lateness. In doing so, The Savage Detectives provides another model for how all would-be authors can appropriately speak about our anachronistic dreams.

The supposed heroes of the book, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, leaders of the literary ‘gang’ called the Visceral Realists, are rarely on stage in the novel for very long. For the most part, we hear of them only at a remove, through the disparate narrators Bolaño calls forward to tell their tale. And the verdict on them is mixed – they have an admirer in gauche and excitable law student Madero, whose brilliantly funny diaries bookend The Savage Detectives, but they have their detractors, too. ‘Belano and Lima weren’t revolutionaries. They weren’t writers. Sometimes they wrote poetry, but I don’t think they were poets, either. They sold drugs,’ says one of Bolano’s narrators. ‘The whole visceral realism thing was… the demented strutting of a dumb bird in the moonlight, something essentially cheap and meaningless,’ says another. In the end they head towards ‘catastrophe or the abyss’, as they wander the world, still attempting to strike literary and political poses when the time for Literature and Politics has gone. ‘We fought for parties that, had they emerged victorious, would have immediately sent us into a forced labour camp’, Bolaño writes of his generation. ‘We fought and poured all our generosity into an ideal that had been dead for over fifty years’.

(Read our review of Iyer’s novel Spurious. Read our interview with Iyer).

Bret Easton Ellis on David Fincher’s Film Zodiac

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This weekend, Twitter followers of novelist Bret Easton Ellis were treated to BEE’s views on the films of director David Fincher, with particular consideration paid to Fincher’s overlooked (by audiences, at least) 2007 film Zodiac. I liked Ellis’s commentary, not just because I think he’s spot on here, but also because he points out why so many people might not have liked (or, dare I say “got”) Zodiac on first viewing: the movie was mismarketed. Here’s BEE—

In my original review of Zodiac, I pointed to my own early misunderstanding of what the film was—

When Zodiac came out last year, I prejudicially–and wrongly–assumed that the film, the tale of the infamous Zodiac killer who menaced California in the late sixties and early seventies, would be a moody character study, all ominous texture, smoggy chase scenes, and desperate anger à la Fincher’s 1995 thriller, Se7en (that movie where Gwyneth Paltrow’s head gets chopped off), or even worse, Fincher’s awful 1997 effort The Game. Most Hollywood suspense films–Fincher’s included–propel themselves on chase sequences, meaningless yelling, and overstated light and music queues that seem to scream “this is the part where you feel tense.” Zodiac, however, eschews all of these often vacuous tropes in favor of simply telling a story.

Zodiac is a methodical, investigative procedural about truth, a film that looks at what happens when we try to put order to disorder, when we try to give narrative to life’s loose ends—when we try to understand radically stochastic violence. In retrospect, it seems to me that Fincher’s work here is akin to Roberto Bolaño in some ways, and I think that if people went into it understanding that it was going to be a meditation on truth, and not, say, a cops and robbers thriller, they might appreciate it more (for what it’s worth, several people wrote in on my review to tell me how wrong I was about what I liked about the film. I think, like Ellis, they should give it another shot).

“I Think Life Is Full of Anxieties and Fears and Tears. It Has a Lot of Grief in It, and It Can Be Very Grim” — Charles Schulz on Religion

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Lots of great quotes from Charles M. Schulz on religion (and more) via Biblioklept reader JESCIE.  Sample—

I don’t know the meaning of life. I don’t know why we are here. I think life is full of anxieties and fears and tears. It has a lot of grief in it, and it can be very grim. And I do not want to be the one who tries to tell somebody else what life is all about. To me it’s a complete mystery.”

All citations are from Charles M. Schulz: Conversations, which I now want to read.

 

Books Acquired, 11.02.2011

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20111106-152604.jpg

I teach a night class on Wednesdays, and although I enjoy it, I also teach morning sections on Wednesdays, so I’m exhausted when I get home over twelve hours later that night. Anyway, I was thrilled to find a nice little packet from Shocken/Pantheon when I came home last Wednesday—a memoir, a graphic novel, and a book that blends and comments on both.

Meir Shalev’s My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner is new in translation from Schocken. Their description—

From the author of the acclaimed novel A Pigeon and a Boy comes a charming tale of family ties, over-the-top housekeeping, and the sport of storytelling in Nahalal, the village of Meir Shalev’s birth. Here we meet Shalev’s amazing Grandma Tonia, who arrived in Palestine by boat from Russia in 1923 and lived in a constant state of battle with what she viewed as the family’s biggest enemy in their new land: dirt.

Grandma Tonia was never seen without a cleaning rag over her shoulder. She received visitors outdoors. She allowed only the most privileged guests to enter her spotless house. Hilarious and touching, Grandma Tonia and her regulations come richly to life in a narrative that circles around the arrival into the family’s dusty agricultural midst of the big, shiny American sweeper sent as a gift by Great-uncle Yeshayahu (he who had shockingly emigrated to the sinful capitalist heaven of Los Angeles!). America, to little Meir and to his forebears, was a land of hedonism and enchanting progress; of tempting luxuries, dangerous music, and degenerate gum-chewing; and of women with painted fingernails. The sweeper, a stealth weapon from Grandpa Aharon’s American brother meant to beguile the hardworking socialist household with a bit of American ease, was symbolic of the conflicts and visions of the family in every respect.

The fate of Tonia’s “svieeperrr”—hidden away for decades in a spotless closed-off bathroom after its initial use—is a family mystery that Shalev determines to solve. The result, in this cheerful translation by Evan Fallenberg, is pure delight, as Shalev brings to life the obsessive but loving Tonia, the pioneers who gave his childhood its spirit of wonder, and the grit and humor of people building ever-new lives.

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I read Daniel Clowes’s Mister Wonderful that Wednesday night. It was a treat—a wonderful balance of sweetness and acidity. I’m sometimes frightened by how closely I identify with Clowes’s protagonists. Full review next week.

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I can’t believe that Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus hasn’t been remarked upon more—perhaps folks are still digesting it, like me, I guess. I consumed the first 50 pages immediately after finishing Mr. Wonderful, staying up way too late (all of this, accompanied by some mediocre red zin led to a mini-hangover and a generally poor performance teaching classes the next morn). Anyway, MetaMaus is far more engaging than any description of it might suggest. It combines Spiegelman’s cartoons with interviews and other media to detail the process behind creating the original Maus books (or, book singular I suppose is more appropriate). Fascinating stuff, covering memory and art and representation and mice &c. I’ll probably review it in bits and pieces—it seems like too much to process. It also comes with a DVD which I haven’t taken the time to look at yet—-

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Guy Fawkes Day and V for Vendetta

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“Remember, remember the 5th of November…”

I was lucky enough to live in New Zealand for a few years as a kid, so I got to experience Guy Fawkes Day. We made effigies of Guy, then we burned them on a bonfire. There was a barbecue and fireworks. To my American ass, it seemed a mixture of the Fourth of July and Halloween—strange and marvelous.

It was a few years after my last Guy Fawkes experience that I read Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta. V, an anarchist who wears a stylized Guy Fawkes mask, wages a vigilante war on a harsh authoritarian government. Along with Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, V was a first for me, something different from the comics I was reading at the time, stuff like Chris Claremont’s run on The Uncanny X-Men and other Marvel titles.

A film version of V for Vendetta was released in 2006; Alan Moore famously had his name removed from it. I enjoyed the film, although it certainly wasn’t as good or thought-provoking as Moore’s original story. And even though the film looked good, the passive experience of watching an action movie can’t measure up to David Lloyd’s original art work and that wonderful space between the panels of comics that engages the reader’s imagination.

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This afternoon [see editorial note below] I finished the first graphic novel of Alan Moore’s  run writing Swamp Thing, and I can’t wait until my library hold on the second graphic novel comes in. I had no idea Saga of the Swamp Thing would be as good as it was, nor as beautifully illustrated; it’s actually better than V for Vendetta or Moore’s other famed work, Watchmen (and none of these titles are even in the same league as Moore’s masterpiece, From Hell). Alan Moore and Steve Bissette’s run on the DC Comics series essentially led to DC’s creation of the edgier Vertigo imprint for their more “mature” titles, such as The Sandman. These titles helped to change the audiences of “comic books” and helped to make the graphic novel a new standard in the medium (no mean feat, considering the fanboyish culture of comic nerds, a culture that prizes rarity of print run over quality of storytelling).

One of the lessons in V for Vendetta is to illustrate what happens when we don’t allow for dissent, what happens when ideas are both prescribed and proscribed, and all dialogue is muted. Authoritarian governments consolidate their power from the silencing of ideas. A healthy society requires all sorts of opinions, even ones we don’t like. The smiling Americans in this photo aren’t burning effigies of would-be revolutionaries, they are burning something much more dangerous–books.

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[Editorial note: So, I ran a version of this post on Nov. 5, 2006—it’s actually one of the first posts I ever did on the blog, which I began in Sept. 2006. Looking over it—which is to say editing it and making minor revisions (and grimacing frequently, but trying to keep those revisions minor, like moving commas)—I can see the growth and scope of the blog; especially I can see my own limited sense of what I wanted Biblioklept to be. The post also strikes me as excessively vague and preachy (especially that last paragraph, written after years of Bush Era Fatigue, which is kinda sorta still going on, I guess, Bush Era Fatigue, I mean, only I’d give it another name now). I wish I could remember more details of Guy Fawkes Day/Night, but I was young—9, 10, 11—and it seems vague. I still remember the history of Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot, although that’s probably more a result of paying attention in AP European History than anything else. This editorial note is way too long. I never finished Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing, but the second volume was good, as I recall].