March
31,
2002
So this weekend, I was in a comic shop. As I do whenever I go into any
kind of book-related store, I started wracking my brain for potential
purchases. This time 'round, I managed to come up with (among other
things) Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics
. I'd heard
good things about it, so figured I'd buy a copy.
Understanding Comics is, essentially, a piece of comics criticism
(in comic form) -- but that's "criticism", you understand, in the
theoretical sense, not the "Boy, last month's Superman sucked" sense.
It's the kind of criticism that starts off by looking for a working
definition of "comics", which then segues into the depiction of space and
time in comics, the universalizing powers of abstraction, and so forth.
It sounds a bit abstruse when I put it that way, but it's actually
enormously approachable -- a gripping read, in fact. It's lucid,
informative, thought-provoking... and I suspect that the people who most
need to read it never will. Because, see, one of the main theses of the
book is that comics are their own art form that shouldn't be viewed as a
bastardization of writing and art, but should be viewed as a separate art
form with its own conventions and axes of quality; and while that strikes
people like me (who read and enjoy good comics) as a nearly self-obvious
proposition, it'd be striking and novel to the sorts of people who'd never
consider picking up this comic book in the first place.
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March
21,
2002
So I'd seen this commenting stuff before, but since I'm using a nifty Perl
script of my own device, rather than one of those Blogger-style programs,
I didn't think I could use it. Well, it turns out I can. So I am.
Comment away, Good Reader.
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March
21,
2002
Yesterday, the weather was spring-like, and my mood for books reflected
the change of season. In winter, I want light, happy books because the
season is so oppressive. In spring, I can handle darker things, because
the season cheers me back up.
So, feeling up for darkness, I picked up Iain Banks' The Wasp
Factory
. I got what I was looking for, in this tale narrated by a
calmly insane murderous teen.
I can already tell that my comments about this book are going to be
half-formed and tentative; this is one of those books that needs to
percolate for a while before I can really come to a definite opinion about
it. Still, I can say some things about it.
For instance, I can say that while it's not a science fiction novel (Banks
uses his middle initial when he writes science fiction), it has a very
sfnal pace of incluing -- you start out not understanding much, and things
are revealed to you over the course of the book, and the climax of the
book is, in some respects, the final revelation about the background.
And I can say that it reminded me of nothing so much as the beginning
parts of Tim Powers' Last Call -- a twisted family, dark secrets,
and ritualistic primitive magic (though in Powers' book, the magic
unequivocally works; here, we suspect otherwise).
And I can say that this is a very disturbing book. The narrator calmly
relates chilling anecdotes with a sort of detached rationality. This is
someone who's utterly mad, but not in a hysterical fashion at all -- this
is someone who can function well within the world, but has an insane moral
and philosophical outlook. It's a very good book, to be sure, but I doubt
I'll ever read it again.
After finishing The Wasp Factory, I wasn't in any particular mood
for sleeping, and decided to read something a bit less depressing, so I
picked up Ken Grimwood's Replay
, a story about a man who has
to (gets to?) relive the last 25 years of his life over and over and over.
The book falls into my own private subgenre of "books where a normal guy
suddenly develops an inexplicable and quasi-magical talent, and has to
cope with it." Other works in the subgenre include Brenda Clough's How
Like a God, Steven Gould's Jumper -- and, not a book but
otherwise very similar, the Bill Murray film Groundhog Day, where
the protagonist has to relive a single day repeatedly.
I suspect I have a weak spot for this subgenre, as I liked all those
works, and liked Replay quite a bit, too. Astonishingly enough, I
stayed up until 2:30 AM to finish it, on a night when I'd already read one
book in its entirety. The biggest thing that keeps me reading late at
night like that is a sense of pace -- that the book is moving briskly
along, and that I just want to see the one next thing that's coming up.
Grimwood possesses that, obviously; I was completely unable to put this
thing down.
But a book with nothing more than a proper pace is ultimately a
thrilling-but-empty dish; fortunately Grimwood provides quite a bit more.
More than anything else, this book is suffused with a sense of loss --
every time the protagonist reaches the end of his 25-year span and has to
restart, he loses everything he had. All his accomplishments, gone;
everything he created, never existed; the women who loved him, total
strangers. The feeling that Grimwood evokes -- that sadness for the
passing of something wonderful and beautiful -- is the same kind of
emotion that Guy Kay does so well in his books.
Combine that emotional base with technical skill, interesting characters,
and a solid plot, and you've got a damn fine book.
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March
20,
2002
After my recent stint of short, light books, I decided to tackle something
a little more demanding. I glanced at my shelves, and pondered
Gravity's Rainbow.
Well, maybe not something that demanding, I decided.
I ended up grabbing Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
on the twin
bases of: 1) It's meritorious and not totally fluffy, but 2) it's also
pretty short.
The edition I have (a Bantam Classics one) has Middle English (ME) on the
left pages, and Modern English (ModE) on the facing pages. The ModE
translation is of the literal, rather than poetic, variety; it makes no
attempt at all to capture the rhythm or cadence of Chaucer's writing, and
even (somewhat bizarrely) ignores his word choices for more obvious words.
That's fine when they're changing "ycleped" to "called", but rather
irritating when they change a perfectly understandable word to a
completely different and only marginally more understandable word.
Of course, in theory, I shouldn't give a damn about the translation,
because I'd've read the ME straight. Well, that's theory. Reality is:
yeah, I could read the ME, but there were enough unintelligible words that
I had to keep making frequent glances at the ModE translation, and (more
importantly) a number of words that looked like they meant one thing, but
really meant something else. Reading the ME was possible, but it was
frustratingly slow, and about halfway through the Prologue, I realized
that I was spending so much effort trying to decipher the text that I
was barely comprehending it on a narrative level.
So, screw that. For the rest of the book, I read the ModE straight, with
only occasional glances at the ME. This means that I can't much comment
on Chaucer's style, and I've already criticized the translators' style.
So, what about the stories? In a word: Ick.
Chaucer's historically important, and I can respect that; but in terms of
actual quality, well, the state of writing has long ago passed him by.
His plots are simplistic, his characters caricatures, and his politics
positively (if expectedly) medieval. Most of the stories in my edition
focus on sexual politics -- lots of talk about adultery and marriage and
gender roles; after reading this, I've now read the word "cuckold" about
twice as much as I had previously. These are timeless themes, of course,
but... well, Chaucer was writing some centuries before the advent of
feminism, and most of his sexual politics are pretty damn antiquated to a
modern eye.
And when Chaucer's talking about other topics, he's even more grating.
The Pardoner's Tale, which is intended as a social satire on the selling
of indulgences, is done with sledgehammer subtlety -- the pardoner mostly
sits around bragging about how greedy and venal he is, and the reader just
rolls his eyes. And then there are the exceedingly nasty pieces of
anti-Semitism; relics of the time, of course, but deeply cringeworthy all
the same.
The question that comes up with any piece of classic literature is whether
the work is only important for its historical significance, or whether
it's still enjoyable as a piece of literature to a modern audience. Alas,
in Chaucer's case, my answer is that reading The Canterbury Tales
for pleasure is a fruitless and futile exercise. I'm glad that I can say
I've read it, but I didn't enjoy reading it.
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March
6,
2002
One of the several ways that the third Harry Potter book deviated from the
first two (in addition to, for instance, not sucking) is that it had a bit
of a cliff-hanger ending. The shoelace was tied, but the aglets were
dangling. Consequently, I was looking forward to reading the fourth book,
J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
. The
catch is, it's only out in hardcover so far, and the third book wasn't
good enough to qualify Rowling for buy-in-hardcover status. So, I waited
until I could bum the book off of Anne, and got a chance last weekend.
My conclusion, which I'll get out of the way up-front, is that with this
volume, the Harry Potter books finally reach into the realm of actual
goodness. The first book was cliched and dull; the second book was fun
but trashy, the third book was actually decent, and the fourth book is
firmly good. That's a nice pattern, and bodes well for the fifth book.
Which, I might add, I'm now moderately awaiting, because this book ends on
even more of an untied note than the third one. Argh.
Why's this book better than the previous three? I think it's because
Harry's no longer a kid. I have a strong aversion to child protagonists,
since it never makes sense for them to do anything important and the book
always needs to present elaborate excuses for why adults aren't stepping
in to take care of things. (For the most extreme form of this idiocy,
witness the truly awful Star Trek fan fiction where the crew gets taken
out and kids need to command the Enterprise. And if you're wondering why
I know this, I read a MSTing of it (by Adam Cadre, the same guy who did
the famous MSTing of "Eye of Argon", wrote the superb "Photopia" text
adventure, and also wrote the surprisingly good high-school novel
Ready, Okay!).)
In the fourth book, Harry's firmly a teenager, and he acts noticeably more
grown-up. There is romantic interest (or, at least, an awareness of the
possibility of romantic interest); there is a greater capacity for
reflection and decision; there are a lot fewer inane "Well, I should tell
Dumbledore, but I won't" plot devices; and most of the cutesy kids' book
ornamentations that were introduced in the first book are downplayed by
now. The silly made-up words, the mischievous-but-unthreatening ghosts,
the Suessian candies -- they're still there, but they hardly matter any
more. The series has evolved past a need for those kiddie props, so they
still litter up the Potterverse, but they're just lying around now; the
book (and Harry) no longer cares about them.
In other words, I'm starting to like this series of kids' books because
it's ceasing to be one.
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