At this rate I may write more about books I abandon than ones I finish. (Cue Calvino reference.) Maybe it's just because I keep thinking to do something more elaborate with the ones that are done and typically just never get around to it.
Any way, the one that's easy to peg is Mary Lee Settle's Spanish Recognitions: The Roads to the Present (2004). Saw this on a remainder table and it looked like the kind of personal recollection and historical recap that suckers me in, so I checked it out of the library. In the end I only got about 60 pages (out of 350) before giving up. For a travel writer, Settle is remarkably uninterested in her travels, giving only abstract descriptions and in what I read (and a bit of skimming ahead) not mentioning any individual person, especially never naming anybody. Except, that is, for the long-gone writers and artists that she rather tediously writes about (Teresa of Avila is "a writer of pure honesty and essential truth, however obscured by the language and metaphors of her time"). Settle seems to want to write about Spanish culture with some sniffy NPR tone instead of Spain on the ground - not only could she easily have written this book (again based on just the portion I read) without visiting Spain but in fact I'm not entirely sure she did. How odd for a novelist to have so little interest in people and not only did I give this one up but now will never read anything else by her.
Tore Janson's A Natural History of Latin (2002, English translation 2004) is also the work of a sloppy thinker but I got through almost a third of this book just because of inertial interest in the subject. A big red flag came early on when he writes that Julius Caesar was "reputed" to have said "Et tu, Brute" and then commences on an analysis of that phrase. How can any classicist not know this is a complete Shakespeare invention and that Caesar's actual final words were either in Greek (Suetonius) or only silence (Plutarch)? Janson also makes odd comments like comparing Roman war in Gaul to genocide, apparently based purely on the numbers that he doesn't question. I had this aside for a couple of weeks and was deciding whether it was worth finishing when I heard about Nicolas Ostler's Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin which seems both more fun and more substantial. So bye bye Janson.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
I love comic fans
http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=142267
Most people have been spared the atrocity of One More Day but not the folk who've posted 28 pages in a day (& counting) of commentary. Out of, what, five billion people on the planet only one was annoyed about Spider-Man's marriage and since he happened to be Marvel's Editor-In-Chief he decided to do something about it. The resulting OMD story was the kind of thing that gives superhero comics such a bad rep, so bad that even Straczynski who already created the worst single comic book ever (the 9/11 "tribute" in Amazing Spider-Man) claims that he was asking Marvel if his name could be removed from the story. It's not just that OMD was turgid and devoid of any dramatic conflict but that it was presented as the deepest soul searching as if we'd believe that just on somebody's say. Yeah, DC also backed off on the grim control-freak version of Batman and that wasn't a bad move--it doesn't take long before such narrow characterization runs its course--but Spider-Man stories were just starting to get really interesting. Now it appears we're in for more Marvel deja vu all over again.
So why are comic fans upset? Because basically Marvel reverted to SM status quo of about 20+ years ago and for no reason that anybody can see. It's a Bobby in the shower moment. Sure most readers expected that at some point Marvel was going to reset SM so that his secret identity was still secret (I actually liked the story potentials that revelation opened up) but putting everything back that far is more than a little odd. We already have Ultimate Spider-Man and the Marvel Adventures version so why go with yet another teen heroes & villains story? And with just one SM title that comes out three times a month making it a little tricky to keep track this may be the time many readers bail.
Most people have been spared the atrocity of One More Day but not the folk who've posted 28 pages in a day (& counting) of commentary. Out of, what, five billion people on the planet only one was annoyed about Spider-Man's marriage and since he happened to be Marvel's Editor-In-Chief he decided to do something about it. The resulting OMD story was the kind of thing that gives superhero comics such a bad rep, so bad that even Straczynski who already created the worst single comic book ever (the 9/11 "tribute" in Amazing Spider-Man) claims that he was asking Marvel if his name could be removed from the story. It's not just that OMD was turgid and devoid of any dramatic conflict but that it was presented as the deepest soul searching as if we'd believe that just on somebody's say. Yeah, DC also backed off on the grim control-freak version of Batman and that wasn't a bad move--it doesn't take long before such narrow characterization runs its course--but Spider-Man stories were just starting to get really interesting. Now it appears we're in for more Marvel deja vu all over again.
So why are comic fans upset? Because basically Marvel reverted to SM status quo of about 20+ years ago and for no reason that anybody can see. It's a Bobby in the shower moment. Sure most readers expected that at some point Marvel was going to reset SM so that his secret identity was still secret (I actually liked the story potentials that revelation opened up) but putting everything back that far is more than a little odd. We already have Ultimate Spider-Man and the Marvel Adventures version so why go with yet another teen heroes & villains story? And with just one SM title that comes out three times a month making it a little tricky to keep track this may be the time many readers bail.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Andrae's Barks
When I first heard about Thomas Andrae’s Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book: Unmasking the Myth of Modernity (2006) I was pretty excited. A substantial critical book on Barks? I almost bought it on the spot but held back and now that I’ve read it am glad I did so. Andrae wasn’t trying to produce a biography of Barks and though he seems to have enough material to have done so he gets that part out of the way fairly quickly. Instead he’s more focused on critical explication (that myth of modernity in the title) and along with the biography relegates any historical information about the Disney comic book or comics in general to a supporting role. Political and social history comes in whenever he needs a support for an argument which is when we get little potted, nearly cliched stories about, say, atomic bomb malaise.
The problem is that he really doesn’t have enough critical engagement for a book of almost 400 pages. If this book had been cherry-picked for about 50 pages of the best, most apt material and then used in a study that probed the development of Barks’ art, the industrial factors that influenced it, the culture of the comic book, the funny animal genre, etc then we might have had a book of some substance. (Though perhaps needless to point out that such a broad view is probably unthinkable for most academics.) The basic theme is that Barks’ stories critique modern culture and while I think that’s true to some degree, Andrae seems to find the critique under every rock. Again and again he brings up a Barks story and then goes into detail about how it is a satire or parody (those two words and variations must appear on half the pages) of the American dream or race relations or post-War economics (no really). After a while Andrae almost becomes the boy who cried wolf – he finds such consistent and detailed attacks in Barks that you’d think Andrae was writing about Adorno. But it’s not just that repetition since Andrae also tends to stretch this past the point of plausibility.
Take one example, not chosen completely at random but certainly representative. On page 95-6 he discusses the 1953 story “Some Heir Over the Rainbow.” Scrooge has decided to determine his heir by having a competition between Donald, the nephews and Gladstone by hiding three pots of gold and then seeing what they do with the money. At the end of his analysis Andrae sums it up as “The story thus again reveals capitalism’s contradictions.” The catch, though, is that there’s nothing capitalist about this since it’s purely a contest about the distribution of wealth. Such a contest could have been held in almost any society and it’s easy to imagine the same thing done with, say, a Roman emperor, a medieval Chinese warlord, a Renaissance Pope, an African leader (not in reality perhaps but then this is a story about talking ducks). In fact the story it most strongly suggests is King Lear which came from a pre-capitalist society.
It’s not just that Andrae doesn’t understand what capitalism is (or at the least doesn’t apply it correctly to this story) but time and again his analysis feels like he’s reaching for anything that could be claimed as subversive. Perhaps it’s no surprise that his analysis is almost always on the literary/story level and rarely probes into the structural, into how a story is told and that meaning created. In some sense this is odd because he is listed as a film professor at San Francisco State University and you’d think he’d be more in tune to the visual elements but not on the evidence of this book. At one point he does bring up cinematic deep focus and though he gets that one right his application to comics isn’t entirely apt. Most comics actually already have fore and backgrounds in “focus” leaving artists to come up with alternate methods to handle this such as abstracted backgrounds or viewpoints that minimize the potential confusion. (One of the main flaws of such early 90s future-Image artists such as Jim Lee is that they didn’t grasp this fundamental principle of comics storytelling and packed their images so full of undifferentiated detail that the foreground might as well have been the back. George Perez can get away with it as a sometimes inspired hack, not a meretricious one.) I suppose this is the point where I’m supposed to bring up the author’s academic jargon but really Andrae is pretty light with that and anyway that’s just the language academics use – if you can’t handle it that’s generally your problem, not the writer’s.
And finally why is there a filmography but no bibliography at all? At the very least a page or two about where to track down reprints of much material or even further reading (Carl Barks: Conversations came out in 2003 from the same publisher).
The problem is that he really doesn’t have enough critical engagement for a book of almost 400 pages. If this book had been cherry-picked for about 50 pages of the best, most apt material and then used in a study that probed the development of Barks’ art, the industrial factors that influenced it, the culture of the comic book, the funny animal genre, etc then we might have had a book of some substance. (Though perhaps needless to point out that such a broad view is probably unthinkable for most academics.) The basic theme is that Barks’ stories critique modern culture and while I think that’s true to some degree, Andrae seems to find the critique under every rock. Again and again he brings up a Barks story and then goes into detail about how it is a satire or parody (those two words and variations must appear on half the pages) of the American dream or race relations or post-War economics (no really). After a while Andrae almost becomes the boy who cried wolf – he finds such consistent and detailed attacks in Barks that you’d think Andrae was writing about Adorno. But it’s not just that repetition since Andrae also tends to stretch this past the point of plausibility.
Take one example, not chosen completely at random but certainly representative. On page 95-6 he discusses the 1953 story “Some Heir Over the Rainbow.” Scrooge has decided to determine his heir by having a competition between Donald, the nephews and Gladstone by hiding three pots of gold and then seeing what they do with the money. At the end of his analysis Andrae sums it up as “The story thus again reveals capitalism’s contradictions.” The catch, though, is that there’s nothing capitalist about this since it’s purely a contest about the distribution of wealth. Such a contest could have been held in almost any society and it’s easy to imagine the same thing done with, say, a Roman emperor, a medieval Chinese warlord, a Renaissance Pope, an African leader (not in reality perhaps but then this is a story about talking ducks). In fact the story it most strongly suggests is King Lear which came from a pre-capitalist society.
It’s not just that Andrae doesn’t understand what capitalism is (or at the least doesn’t apply it correctly to this story) but time and again his analysis feels like he’s reaching for anything that could be claimed as subversive. Perhaps it’s no surprise that his analysis is almost always on the literary/story level and rarely probes into the structural, into how a story is told and that meaning created. In some sense this is odd because he is listed as a film professor at San Francisco State University and you’d think he’d be more in tune to the visual elements but not on the evidence of this book. At one point he does bring up cinematic deep focus and though he gets that one right his application to comics isn’t entirely apt. Most comics actually already have fore and backgrounds in “focus” leaving artists to come up with alternate methods to handle this such as abstracted backgrounds or viewpoints that minimize the potential confusion. (One of the main flaws of such early 90s future-Image artists such as Jim Lee is that they didn’t grasp this fundamental principle of comics storytelling and packed their images so full of undifferentiated detail that the foreground might as well have been the back. George Perez can get away with it as a sometimes inspired hack, not a meretricious one.) I suppose this is the point where I’m supposed to bring up the author’s academic jargon but really Andrae is pretty light with that and anyway that’s just the language academics use – if you can’t handle it that’s generally your problem, not the writer’s.
And finally why is there a filmography but no bibliography at all? At the very least a page or two about where to track down reprints of much material or even further reading (Carl Barks: Conversations came out in 2003 from the same publisher).
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier
It’s 1958. The Big Brother government (from 1984) has recently collapsed. A young James Bond is tricked by the long-lived Mina Harper and Allan Quatermain, leading to a chase involving Bulldog Drummond, Emma Peel and Harry Lime. They travel through an England where faeries were run out in the 17th century and now a functioning spaceport is a tourist attraction. The title’s black dossier describes exploits of some earlier Leagues as well as a French and German counterpart.
Almost exactly a year after its original publication date, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier makes its appearance. Typically Moore blames the folk at DC for the delay and unspecified behind-the-scenes shenanigans (clearly including the omission of the much anticipated 45rpm record that’s even mentioned in the text as being present) though by now I tend to think this stuff is as real as that snake god he’d like us to believe he worships.
Whatever the case, Black Dossier wasn’t entirely worth the wait. Oh, it’s loads of fun and more imaginative than most current comics/novels/TV/take-your-pick but far too much is just thrown together and feels like background material that should have been left back. A somewhat lengthy text piece tries to tie Lovecraftian gods to other forms of mythology, something that seemed cliched decades ago and is no more complex in the dossier telling than in my single sentence here. A faux-Shakespeare play is easily the weakest thing in the book since it seems almost as if Moore has never encountered anything Elizabethan, though a nearly unreadable Burroughs (W.S. not E.R.) pastiche is perhaps as bad. Maybe imitations are not Moore’s strength though I think this lapse is a bit broader in that he’s not really comfortable enough in straight prose to sustain such writing for any length. I suspect he would be a top-notch playwright or scriptwriter if he didn't enjoy complaining about the business folk in such businesses.
It also occurred to me that Moore is basically a re-writer in that nearly all his major and most minor work is him revising something that already exists: Swamp Thing, Miracle/Marvelman, Watchmen, From Hell, LOEG, Lost Girls. Even Top 10, Promethea, the ABC books and the various superhero stories draw from a pool of shared material much as folk and blues songs do. Certainly this shouldn’t be pushed too far--Watchmen for instance owes pretty much nothing to the Charlton originals and of course there’s always V for Vendetta and other odds ‘n’ sods that sprang (or occasionally crawled) from his brow.
Black Dossier is structured as that basic chase story with the contents of the diegetic dossier strewen throughout. As mentioned, some of this is more labored than interesting (or even well done) and it’s disappointing that Moore didn’t take at least one technique from Conan Doyle and fill the text with passing references to adventures or characters that we don’t otherwise know about. Yes, there are some new stories here but the long history of Orlando is almost more connect-the-dots in the worst manner of the back-up material to LOEG 2. In other words, each piece should either stand on its own more effectively or create a mosaic rather than simply elaborating something we already know. And it’s odd that we’re expected to take all the dossier contents more or less at face value – Moore is a big Sopranos fan so couldn’t he have learned the dramatic value of deceptive characters?
This time there’s a lot more British pop culture than before and without Jess Nevin’s annotations I would have gotten very little of it (even including Emma Peel’s identification). Most spectacularly a character who appears towards the end that I think most Americans will have the same stupefied, mindboggled reaction that I did, though apparently nearly all Brits will know exactly who this is. (Yes, I’m being deliberately vague.) Not a complaint but it does create an interesting feel, almost like I'm missing a joke which I suppose is exactly what's happening. There are also a few echoes of Lost Girls as if Moore had some aftershocks and I can’t help but think that a lot of the references are shoved in there just to have a reference. Admittedly that’s part of the appeal but at one point he draws from a book that if Nevins has IDed it right seems to have never been translated into English and there’s a lot of similar obscurities that you think he’s just combing reference works for this stuff.
So while I will re-read the original LOEG (and own the Absolute edition) and just the story but not backing material of LOEG 2, Black Dossier is not something worth returning to.
Almost exactly a year after its original publication date, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier makes its appearance. Typically Moore blames the folk at DC for the delay and unspecified behind-the-scenes shenanigans (clearly including the omission of the much anticipated 45rpm record that’s even mentioned in the text as being present) though by now I tend to think this stuff is as real as that snake god he’d like us to believe he worships.
Whatever the case, Black Dossier wasn’t entirely worth the wait. Oh, it’s loads of fun and more imaginative than most current comics/novels/TV/take-your-pick but far too much is just thrown together and feels like background material that should have been left back. A somewhat lengthy text piece tries to tie Lovecraftian gods to other forms of mythology, something that seemed cliched decades ago and is no more complex in the dossier telling than in my single sentence here. A faux-Shakespeare play is easily the weakest thing in the book since it seems almost as if Moore has never encountered anything Elizabethan, though a nearly unreadable Burroughs (W.S. not E.R.) pastiche is perhaps as bad. Maybe imitations are not Moore’s strength though I think this lapse is a bit broader in that he’s not really comfortable enough in straight prose to sustain such writing for any length. I suspect he would be a top-notch playwright or scriptwriter if he didn't enjoy complaining about the business folk in such businesses.
It also occurred to me that Moore is basically a re-writer in that nearly all his major and most minor work is him revising something that already exists: Swamp Thing, Miracle/Marvelman, Watchmen, From Hell, LOEG, Lost Girls. Even Top 10, Promethea, the ABC books and the various superhero stories draw from a pool of shared material much as folk and blues songs do. Certainly this shouldn’t be pushed too far--Watchmen for instance owes pretty much nothing to the Charlton originals and of course there’s always V for Vendetta and other odds ‘n’ sods that sprang (or occasionally crawled) from his brow.
Black Dossier is structured as that basic chase story with the contents of the diegetic dossier strewen throughout. As mentioned, some of this is more labored than interesting (or even well done) and it’s disappointing that Moore didn’t take at least one technique from Conan Doyle and fill the text with passing references to adventures or characters that we don’t otherwise know about. Yes, there are some new stories here but the long history of Orlando is almost more connect-the-dots in the worst manner of the back-up material to LOEG 2. In other words, each piece should either stand on its own more effectively or create a mosaic rather than simply elaborating something we already know. And it’s odd that we’re expected to take all the dossier contents more or less at face value – Moore is a big Sopranos fan so couldn’t he have learned the dramatic value of deceptive characters?
This time there’s a lot more British pop culture than before and without Jess Nevin’s annotations I would have gotten very little of it (even including Emma Peel’s identification). Most spectacularly a character who appears towards the end that I think most Americans will have the same stupefied, mindboggled reaction that I did, though apparently nearly all Brits will know exactly who this is. (Yes, I’m being deliberately vague.) Not a complaint but it does create an interesting feel, almost like I'm missing a joke which I suppose is exactly what's happening. There are also a few echoes of Lost Girls as if Moore had some aftershocks and I can’t help but think that a lot of the references are shoved in there just to have a reference. Admittedly that’s part of the appeal but at one point he draws from a book that if Nevins has IDed it right seems to have never been translated into English and there’s a lot of similar obscurities that you think he’s just combing reference works for this stuff.
So while I will re-read the original LOEG (and own the Absolute edition) and just the story but not backing material of LOEG 2, Black Dossier is not something worth returning to.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Black Dossier annotations
Jess Nevins has again done indispensable annotations for the new LOEG book Black Dossier. Below are my own suggestions & additions:
P12, panel 3 – Probably coincidence but there’s a 1950 film called Odette about a female spy.
P12, panel 7 – Perhaps the statue being taken down is Churchill? Might be worth noting for some Americans that the guy with the raised fingers isn’t flashing a victory sign but the British equivalent of giving somebody the finger. Perhaps at the Giles Grandmother?
P13, panel 1 – Maybe “anti-sex league” also refers to Amis’ Anti-Death League?
P16, panel 8 – My first thought of “-ipley” was Ripley’s Believe It or Not though that doesn’t seem to have any obvious connection. Maybe Titus Cobbett also refers to Brian Lumley’s Titus Crow? And of course real-world writer William Cobbett (Rural Rides) would be likely to have written on “inland revenue”.
Panel 9 – “Atrocity pamphlet” might also refer to the propaganda practice of creating atrocity stories involving the enemy. My first thought for “Harry Blake” was the character Harry Palmer but can’t see any reason for the name change. It’s a long-shot but “Harry Blake” might refer to a work of what seems to be fanfic by Robert Douglas at http://www.alternatehistory.com/gateway/contributions/Kaliscount.html. It refers to a Harold Blake who discovers a “magical substance”. For the stylized letter on the folder if you turn it upside down it resembles a pound sign. I wondered if the folder at the bottom was supposed to say “spy cars” but “-oy cars” makes more sense since everything else is upper-case. Note that the black dossier Allan is holding is like our real-world book without the dust jacket.
P20 – Is it just me or does the landlady resemble Judy from Punch & fame?
P21 – Not sure about Prof Donnol either but “donnol” is an anagram for London. “Lifting you on wings of song” – On Wings of Song is a Thomas Disch novel.
P23 – Note Mina’s comment that Bond “wasn’t very tanned” for having visited Jamaica.
P24 – Gloriana replaces Elizabeth in LOEG and then Jacob for James I.
P29 – Kevin O’Neill was born in 1953, maybe August 22 is his birthday? I can’t find a reference. Moore was same year but November. // The film director is more likely to be De Mille. See photos at http://www.classicmoviefavorites.com/demille/awards.html and with Krazy Kat at http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a44/moxievision/fairbanks-demille-felix.jpg.
P30 – The robot with 1937 is on its chest seems to be taunting us. There was a 1937 Donald Duck cartoon with a robot and that year also a Li’l Abner strip but none resemble this one. There was also a real-world robot called Elektro which also has no resemblence. // It may be important considering Orlando’s history that Tiresias was given the forced sex change because he intervened in an argument between Hera and Zeus about whether men or women have the most pleasure from sex.
P33 – Some of these events are also described in the Aeneid which is also a founding story for Rome.
P35 – That image in your annotations will certainly have some familiarity to viewers of anime. // Romulus supposedly founded Rome in 753 BC and that’s when Romans dated their calendar (or at least part of it anyway).
P37 – The real-world followers of Spartacus were crucified by the thousands along the Appian Way, however not including Spartacus himself who seems to have been killed in battle.
P38 – “charlatan snake cultist” could be a reference to Moore himself. Though it doesn’t mean anything Heliogabalus is mentioned in Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Modern Major General”.
P47, panel 1 – Note the jet plane in the background.
P49 – Faerie’s Fortunes Founded echoes Love’s Labour Lost which had a perhaps apocryphals sequel Love’s Labour Won (scholars disagree over whether it’s a lost play, an alternate title for another play or just a mistake). Don’t know if it means anything but this is dated three years before the actual First Folio (1620 before 1623). I don’t think there were any illustrations in the First Folio or indeed of folio or quarto editions of the time but could be wrong.
P52 top – Lots of puns about maleness (orchid having derived from the Greek word for testicle). Mistaken identities are also common in Shakespeare – The Comedy of Errors is pretty much completely built of that.
P83 panel 3 – Is “Larkin” on the building a reference to Philip Larkin? Can’t think of any reason that would be so.
P88 – Doctor Carrot seems more likely but I couldn’t help but wonder if this may be Flaming Carrot.
P90 – The license plate 0211731 might be the date November 2, 1973 (or in American order February 11) with an extra digit but I can’t connect that to anything. The initial zero might actually be a “D” but that doesn’t help either. You think it must mean something because it’s such an odd thing to have there (unless British cycles are different?).
P93 – Could “Secret of Paris” refer to Sue’s Mysteries of Paris? For “Joycamp Harlots” the band Joy Division took their name from what was supposedly the prostitution section of concentration camps during WW2. I’ve never found any reference to support that and think it’s probably something they saw in passing. Do you think the magazine right in front of Allan is called “Antichrist”? “John Bull” of course is the British equivalent of Uncle Sam.
P93 panel 4 – The door has 23 which is supposedly a mystical number in some forms of magic(k).
P96 – In boxes at bottom left note box on furthest right has a “23” in Roman numerals. 1666 was the date of The Blazing World but also of the Great Fire in London.
P104 – Maybe too obvious to point out but the cutaway of the Nautilus is a tip of the hat to all the similar ones in Silver Age comics where you could see plans for the Batmobile or Fortress of Solitude.
P113 – The figure in top hat probably is Caligari but might also be combined with Svengali from the du Maurier novel Trilby. See for instance http://hubpages.com/u/104524_f260.jpg but some images of the Barrymore version also show him with white gloves.
P115 – There are similarities to Graveyard of Unwritten Books in the novels of Jasper Fforde and to some degree in Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind (though the latter makes little use of it).
P151 – “Vanness Avenue” is Van Ness Ave in SF. “descend into Maya” – Maya is the Buddhist term for this material world (if I have that right).
P155 – Ginsberg recorded an album of Blake poems.
P169 – Did anybody point out that Black Dossier is set in 1958, same year that the novel Dr. No came out?
P179, panel 1 – At the bottom on the ramp is a Cthulhu-looking character. Also a mermaid to the left.
P12, panel 3 – Probably coincidence but there’s a 1950 film called Odette about a female spy.
P12, panel 7 – Perhaps the statue being taken down is Churchill? Might be worth noting for some Americans that the guy with the raised fingers isn’t flashing a victory sign but the British equivalent of giving somebody the finger. Perhaps at the Giles Grandmother?
P13, panel 1 – Maybe “anti-sex league” also refers to Amis’ Anti-Death League?
P16, panel 8 – My first thought of “-ipley” was Ripley’s Believe It or Not though that doesn’t seem to have any obvious connection. Maybe Titus Cobbett also refers to Brian Lumley’s Titus Crow? And of course real-world writer William Cobbett (Rural Rides) would be likely to have written on “inland revenue”.
Panel 9 – “Atrocity pamphlet” might also refer to the propaganda practice of creating atrocity stories involving the enemy. My first thought for “Harry Blake” was the character Harry Palmer but can’t see any reason for the name change. It’s a long-shot but “Harry Blake” might refer to a work of what seems to be fanfic by Robert Douglas at http://www.alternatehistory.com/gateway/contributions/Kaliscount.html. It refers to a Harold Blake who discovers a “magical substance”. For the stylized letter on the folder if you turn it upside down it resembles a pound sign. I wondered if the folder at the bottom was supposed to say “spy cars” but “-oy cars” makes more sense since everything else is upper-case. Note that the black dossier Allan is holding is like our real-world book without the dust jacket.
P20 – Is it just me or does the landlady resemble Judy from Punch & fame?
P21 – Not sure about Prof Donnol either but “donnol” is an anagram for London. “Lifting you on wings of song” – On Wings of Song is a Thomas Disch novel.
P23 – Note Mina’s comment that Bond “wasn’t very tanned” for having visited Jamaica.
P24 – Gloriana replaces Elizabeth in LOEG and then Jacob for James I.
P29 – Kevin O’Neill was born in 1953, maybe August 22 is his birthday? I can’t find a reference. Moore was same year but November. // The film director is more likely to be De Mille. See photos at http://www.classicmoviefavorites.com/demille/awards.html and with Krazy Kat at http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a44/moxievision/fairbanks-demille-felix.jpg.
P30 – The robot with 1937 is on its chest seems to be taunting us. There was a 1937 Donald Duck cartoon with a robot and that year also a Li’l Abner strip but none resemble this one. There was also a real-world robot called Elektro which also has no resemblence. // It may be important considering Orlando’s history that Tiresias was given the forced sex change because he intervened in an argument between Hera and Zeus about whether men or women have the most pleasure from sex.
P33 – Some of these events are also described in the Aeneid which is also a founding story for Rome.
P35 – That image in your annotations will certainly have some familiarity to viewers of anime. // Romulus supposedly founded Rome in 753 BC and that’s when Romans dated their calendar (or at least part of it anyway).
P37 – The real-world followers of Spartacus were crucified by the thousands along the Appian Way, however not including Spartacus himself who seems to have been killed in battle.
P38 – “charlatan snake cultist” could be a reference to Moore himself. Though it doesn’t mean anything Heliogabalus is mentioned in Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Modern Major General”.
P47, panel 1 – Note the jet plane in the background.
P49 – Faerie’s Fortunes Founded echoes Love’s Labour Lost which had a perhaps apocryphals sequel Love’s Labour Won (scholars disagree over whether it’s a lost play, an alternate title for another play or just a mistake). Don’t know if it means anything but this is dated three years before the actual First Folio (1620 before 1623). I don’t think there were any illustrations in the First Folio or indeed of folio or quarto editions of the time but could be wrong.
P52 top – Lots of puns about maleness (orchid having derived from the Greek word for testicle). Mistaken identities are also common in Shakespeare – The Comedy of Errors is pretty much completely built of that.
P83 panel 3 – Is “Larkin” on the building a reference to Philip Larkin? Can’t think of any reason that would be so.
P88 – Doctor Carrot seems more likely but I couldn’t help but wonder if this may be Flaming Carrot.
P90 – The license plate 0211731 might be the date November 2, 1973 (or in American order February 11) with an extra digit but I can’t connect that to anything. The initial zero might actually be a “D” but that doesn’t help either. You think it must mean something because it’s such an odd thing to have there (unless British cycles are different?).
P93 – Could “Secret of Paris” refer to Sue’s Mysteries of Paris? For “Joycamp Harlots” the band Joy Division took their name from what was supposedly the prostitution section of concentration camps during WW2. I’ve never found any reference to support that and think it’s probably something they saw in passing. Do you think the magazine right in front of Allan is called “Antichrist”? “John Bull” of course is the British equivalent of Uncle Sam.
P93 panel 4 – The door has 23 which is supposedly a mystical number in some forms of magic(k).
P96 – In boxes at bottom left note box on furthest right has a “23” in Roman numerals. 1666 was the date of The Blazing World but also of the Great Fire in London.
P104 – Maybe too obvious to point out but the cutaway of the Nautilus is a tip of the hat to all the similar ones in Silver Age comics where you could see plans for the Batmobile or Fortress of Solitude.
P113 – The figure in top hat probably is Caligari but might also be combined with Svengali from the du Maurier novel Trilby. See for instance http://hubpages.com/u/104524_f260.jpg but some images of the Barrymore version also show him with white gloves.
P115 – There are similarities to Graveyard of Unwritten Books in the novels of Jasper Fforde and to some degree in Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind (though the latter makes little use of it).
P151 – “Vanness Avenue” is Van Ness Ave in SF. “descend into Maya” – Maya is the Buddhist term for this material world (if I have that right).
P155 – Ginsberg recorded an album of Blake poems.
P169 – Did anybody point out that Black Dossier is set in 1958, same year that the novel Dr. No came out?
P179, panel 1 – At the bottom on the ramp is a Cthulhu-looking character. Also a mermaid to the left.
Monday, December 3, 2007
Not finishing books
Once upon a time I finished every book I started. Can't remember now if there was any particular reason for this other than I had a lot of time and only chose books that seemed interesting in some way. Which seems kinda obvious but one benefit of true nerd-dom is a lack of peer pressure to keep up with whatever you "should" be doing. (And of course is why I hit college with a phenomenal amount of SF and fantasy under my belt but not much in the way of classics or mainstream reading, a situation that's pretty much reversed in the couple of decades since then.) Though I'm sure somewhere there must have been books long forgotten that I never finished the first I remember deliberately giving up was Huxley's Point Counterpoint which was assigned for a class when I was a college sophmore or junior. Though I think it's something I might like now, at the time it seemed turgid and pointless so I dug up some reviews and critical pieces, synthesized that into my own paper and got a "B" for it.
The reason this comes up is that I just gave up on Carlo Emilio Gadda's That Awful Mess on Via Merulana after making it about 80 pages (of nearly 400). This sounded like My Kind of Book: a philosophical mystery compared to Joyce with lots of local color and obscure references. I'm a sucker for mysteries with that high-brow art attitude: Eco, Auster, early Peter Dickinson, even Chesterton. And that description of Awful Mess is more or less true except that I didn't get to much philosophy. One problem is that all the characters blurred together even though I stopped and actually started over which sorted some of them out but now they seemed like pretty much just names (perhaps more proto-Barthesean than it should have been). And though the multiplicity-of-voices approach does seem promising in practice it was just too much work reading for very little payoff. So I didn't stop reading because it's "bad"--for all I know another 30 pages and it would all click into place--but because I realized it wasn't entertaining/interesting ("entertaining" being the lowbrow and "interesting" the middlebrow words for the same thing) enough to give up that time when something else could be in its place, and because I'm not gaining anything by finishing it.
This past summer I similarly gave up on W.J. Cash's The Mind of the South for somewhat the same reasons. This is a book I'd wanted to read for years and finally in one of those inexplicable moments took it out of the library and started. This one was even more clear cut because as pure writing it was neither here nor there so it came down to what did I hope to gain by finishing it? All Cash's talk of Cavaliers and hill folk was removed from any kind of reality I've seen in 40+ years as a Southerner or could even match in any meaningful way to even more imaginative discourses so in the end it seemed like all I would learn is a piece in the story of how the South has been perceived and even created as a conceptual category. Which, really, I don't much care about.
The reason this comes up is that I just gave up on Carlo Emilio Gadda's That Awful Mess on Via Merulana after making it about 80 pages (of nearly 400). This sounded like My Kind of Book: a philosophical mystery compared to Joyce with lots of local color and obscure references. I'm a sucker for mysteries with that high-brow art attitude: Eco, Auster, early Peter Dickinson, even Chesterton. And that description of Awful Mess is more or less true except that I didn't get to much philosophy. One problem is that all the characters blurred together even though I stopped and actually started over which sorted some of them out but now they seemed like pretty much just names (perhaps more proto-Barthesean than it should have been). And though the multiplicity-of-voices approach does seem promising in practice it was just too much work reading for very little payoff. So I didn't stop reading because it's "bad"--for all I know another 30 pages and it would all click into place--but because I realized it wasn't entertaining/interesting ("entertaining" being the lowbrow and "interesting" the middlebrow words for the same thing) enough to give up that time when something else could be in its place, and because I'm not gaining anything by finishing it.
This past summer I similarly gave up on W.J. Cash's The Mind of the South for somewhat the same reasons. This is a book I'd wanted to read for years and finally in one of those inexplicable moments took it out of the library and started. This one was even more clear cut because as pure writing it was neither here nor there so it came down to what did I hope to gain by finishing it? All Cash's talk of Cavaliers and hill folk was removed from any kind of reality I've seen in 40+ years as a Southerner or could even match in any meaningful way to even more imaginative discourses so in the end it seemed like all I would learn is a piece in the story of how the South has been perceived and even created as a conceptual category. Which, really, I don't much care about.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Babylon 5: The Lost Tales (2007)
And if the rest are like this they can stay lost. Thank you, I’ll be here all week; don’t forget to tip your waitress. Even offstage, I can’t help but think that Straczynski had all these years to prepare and this is the best he has to offer? There’s a short exorcism tale so embarrassingly clumsy that few people would have thought it worth releasing and then a longer moral-choice story that while it works overall is definitely slim.
Let’s start with the exorcism and certainly that subject sounds odd for B5. I remember hearing a story that Straczynski was annoyed by the supernatural elements in Neil Gaiman’s script but can’t find any verification so let’s just leave that as an unsubstantiated and possibly wrong rumor. In any case, Straczynski seems to have gone that route himself and “seems” because you can always posit the demon as some kind of utterly natural alien though there’s not the slightest hint of that in the episode.
Which may or may not matter considering how embarrassing this segment is. The entire opening is pretty much nothing but two characters spouting exposition at each other, nothing dramatic about it and a voice over or text crawl could have served the same purpose just as ineptly but much lower on the annoyance factor. Actually, there’s a brief scene just before the exposition-a-rama showing an unknown man falling down in what appears to be a warehouse area. A bit is shot through some kind of circular object, perhaps with the idea of adding some visual interest though it’s so completely unmotivated that’s really just distracting. Maybe he was trying to indicate the character is trapped but I sincerely hope not. (Straczynski is the credited director though the IMDB also lists Sara Barnes.)
So the point is that Catholicism (or Christianity in general?) has been declining since humans reached the stars and found no angels, not even Vorlons. The priest goes on (and on) about this while Lochley lays out her problem. (Tracy Scoggins is as wooden an actor as you can find.) Seems the guy from the first short scene is possibly possessed by a demonic entity and when he’s finished his crumpets could Mr. Priest please have a look-see? Admittedly there’s a bit of spark to the priest-possessee dialogues though overall they don’t amount to much. In the end it’s tossed away by having Lochley jump up from a sleepless night having realized the “secret” and then she then gets to deliver a cringe-worthy monologue at full volume. The entire segment has no subtlety, no depth, no brains, no nothin’.
The second and longer segment revolves around whether Sheridan will save Earth from a disastrous attack by assassinating the prince who will grow up to lead said attack. This story is much better, partly because the cast is stronger but also even though the conflict is quite schematic at least it has some substance. The impact is reduced by having some out-of-the-blue disaster that relies on Sheridan believing that a vision he has is actually of the future and not some hallucination or illusion (a line of dialogue even addresses this, though in a somewhat improbable “I know what’s real” tone). And then the prince volunteers personal info to Sheridan that it’s hard to imagine anybody in such a cut-throat court doing. Even worse is a scene with a news reporter that shows Sheridan playing a mean practical joke but actually comes across as misogynist. Was this intended to display another side to Sheridan or did Straczynski actually think this might be funny? (The misogyny seems completely unintentional though still hard to deny.)
In the end the second segment relies on Sheridan thinking of an unexpected alternate solution which is perfectly fine even if it mostly sidesteps the moral dilemma. The unfortunate capper, though, is a bit where Sheridan accuses the technomage of perhaps manipulating him to do the this alternate solution which the technomage had wanted all along. This doesn’t even really make much sense and you’d have to really stretch the earlier scenes to make that fit. But then that possibility is never resolved anyway so it feels completely tacked on.
Let’s start with the exorcism and certainly that subject sounds odd for B5. I remember hearing a story that Straczynski was annoyed by the supernatural elements in Neil Gaiman’s script but can’t find any verification so let’s just leave that as an unsubstantiated and possibly wrong rumor. In any case, Straczynski seems to have gone that route himself and “seems” because you can always posit the demon as some kind of utterly natural alien though there’s not the slightest hint of that in the episode.
Which may or may not matter considering how embarrassing this segment is. The entire opening is pretty much nothing but two characters spouting exposition at each other, nothing dramatic about it and a voice over or text crawl could have served the same purpose just as ineptly but much lower on the annoyance factor. Actually, there’s a brief scene just before the exposition-a-rama showing an unknown man falling down in what appears to be a warehouse area. A bit is shot through some kind of circular object, perhaps with the idea of adding some visual interest though it’s so completely unmotivated that’s really just distracting. Maybe he was trying to indicate the character is trapped but I sincerely hope not. (Straczynski is the credited director though the IMDB also lists Sara Barnes.)
So the point is that Catholicism (or Christianity in general?) has been declining since humans reached the stars and found no angels, not even Vorlons. The priest goes on (and on) about this while Lochley lays out her problem. (Tracy Scoggins is as wooden an actor as you can find.) Seems the guy from the first short scene is possibly possessed by a demonic entity and when he’s finished his crumpets could Mr. Priest please have a look-see? Admittedly there’s a bit of spark to the priest-possessee dialogues though overall they don’t amount to much. In the end it’s tossed away by having Lochley jump up from a sleepless night having realized the “secret” and then she then gets to deliver a cringe-worthy monologue at full volume. The entire segment has no subtlety, no depth, no brains, no nothin’.
The second and longer segment revolves around whether Sheridan will save Earth from a disastrous attack by assassinating the prince who will grow up to lead said attack. This story is much better, partly because the cast is stronger but also even though the conflict is quite schematic at least it has some substance. The impact is reduced by having some out-of-the-blue disaster that relies on Sheridan believing that a vision he has is actually of the future and not some hallucination or illusion (a line of dialogue even addresses this, though in a somewhat improbable “I know what’s real” tone). And then the prince volunteers personal info to Sheridan that it’s hard to imagine anybody in such a cut-throat court doing. Even worse is a scene with a news reporter that shows Sheridan playing a mean practical joke but actually comes across as misogynist. Was this intended to display another side to Sheridan or did Straczynski actually think this might be funny? (The misogyny seems completely unintentional though still hard to deny.)
In the end the second segment relies on Sheridan thinking of an unexpected alternate solution which is perfectly fine even if it mostly sidesteps the moral dilemma. The unfortunate capper, though, is a bit where Sheridan accuses the technomage of perhaps manipulating him to do the this alternate solution which the technomage had wanted all along. This doesn’t even really make much sense and you’d have to really stretch the earlier scenes to make that fit. But then that possibility is never resolved anyway so it feels completely tacked on.
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