Yearly Archives: 2009

First of his generation

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update, Matthew reports on a Gaiman press conference here and wraps up his thoughts about Worldcon here. (I should mention that the news conference also features Elisabeth Vonarburg, a Quebecois translator of s.f. who was being honored, though my interest is straight Gaiman.)
If you like podcasts, here are Matthew’s talks with the fantasy writers Lev Grossman, George R. R. Martin, and Felix Gilman. They get into some interesting stuff.
Martin is a lot more affable and down to earth than I expected. Without knowing much about him, for some reason I expected somebody prickly.
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Matthew talked to Gaiman here (which I already posted about) and also here. At the second link Gaiman talks about where he is in his worklife and career, and he says this:

 I’m essentially the first member of my generation to be a Guest of Honour at Worldcon. … It definitely has significance for some people that I’m doing this. And it has significance for me, I think.

I hadn’t known about the generational first, mainly because I don’t follow s.f. fandom. But this same year we have a president born in 1961 and a Worldcon guest of honor born in 1960, and in each case that’s something new. (For the presidency it’s very new: Clinton and George W. were born in 1946, which makes for a big jump to 1961. I can’t find a rundown on Worldcon g-of-h ages.)  
So, whatever. As a side note, Gaiman and Obama have some similarities. They both appear a bit slim and wandlike to be so imposing, etc. Gaiman gets called “emo,” and James Carville and others tried to girlify Obama during the ’08 primaries.

More Gaiman stories: “Daughter of Owls” and “Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar”

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These are from his Smoke and Mirrors collection, which I’ve been reading. They’re slight, and to my mind the shorter one works and the longer one doesn’t. But they illustrate a storytelling device that for some reason hadn’t quite made it into my head.

The device is this: a story will feel more like a story, a complete narrative, if its ending features some element that was also featured by its beginning. The echo or chime makes the reader feel like something complete has been told.
Humorists do something like that too. At least Calvin Trillin did: his last paragraph would always bring back some joke featured earlier in the column. Stand-up comedians pull the same trick. So it’s not like the full-circle device is a new discovery — we’re just talking about closure, right? But I don’t read a lot of stories, and for me it was an experience to catch the device at work. 
The better of the two stories, “Daughter of Owls,” was just a couple of pages and was written in the style of John Aubrey, which helped; not that I claim to have read Aubrey, but the style was fun and novel enough to give the piece some float, and then the full-circle device came along and buckled everything into being a story. Without the device, we would have this: way back in olden times, a mysterious girl is left by owls in a small town, and when she gets old enough the men of the town rape and kill her, and then the owls come and kill the men. With the device we have this: the owls who left the girl also left typical owl dung consisting of pellets that held small animals’ bones and skin, and then the owls who killed the men left dung pellets that contained the men’s bones. Story! (Pretty much; Gaiman’s telling helped a lot.)
The longer story, “Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar,” is buckled this way: an American boy having a dismal time hiking in Britain is fed up with his travel guide, which keeps promising decent inns, friendly people, etc.; he stumbles into an especially unpleasant village, where he has a mysterious encounter with the supernatural; he wakes up, the village is gone, no one has heard of it, and the relevant page has somehow gone missing from his guidebook; back home in America, he writes a letter to the guidebook author, not only to give her a piece of his mind about the book but also to ask about the mysterious town; he’s relieved when he never hears back.
The buckle is the guidebook, which is entirely ancillary to the story’s action. Nothing happens because of the book, its author doesn’t play any role in events, but hauling the book back in again still works well enough when it comes to holding the story together. The chime is still enough.
I find it Gaimanesque that mentions of the book should all be funny until the story’s very end, when the book has a final mention that’s played for quiet unease. To turn one feeling into another, amusement into fear, for example, is the sort of device Gaiman likes to work (or the  sort of whatever — I mean that it’s something he does). I think it adds to the, oh dear, silvery quality his work can have, the sense that various tiny givens of reality are too uneasy to stay put and that reality is always shifting at the corner of your vision. Why that adds up to “silvery” is another question, of course.
So, to recap, the buckle in “Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar” works even though the item used to make the circle isn’t at the heart of the story’s action. So the problem with the story is elsewhere. Basically, “Shoggoth’s” is meant to be Pete and Dud meet Cthulhu. That is, Gaiman imagines Peter Cook and Dudley Moore doing one of their addled-old-duffers crosstalk dialogues but sitting in an English counterpart to Innsmouth and using Lovecraft’s stuff as their subject. That’s all right as an idea, but what he comes up with isn’t much, just a color-by-numbers pastiche of Pete and Dud and a couple of commonplace observations about Lovecraft (yeah, he used big words). 
Also, I didn’t go for the story’s opening about what a bad time the fellow was having in England and how he hated his guidebook. High-spirited, comic Gaiman doesn’t add up to funny Gaiman, in my experience. 

Davis Minus Davis

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The following article ran in the comics journal a while back.
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Jim Davis
Garfield Minus Garfield
Ballantine Books
128 pages/color
softcover/$12.00
9780345513878

Jim Davis
Garfield: 30 Years of Laughs and Lasagna
Ballantine Books
287 pages/color
hardcover/$35.00
9780345503794

Garfield should be better than it is. Jim Davis is not and has never tried to be a great artist, but he is a talented cartoonist,. Flip through Garfield:30 Years of Laughs and Lasagna and you will see slapstick humor executed with hyperbolic panache (Odie’s tongue stuck to an ice-cold street lamp and then stretched across an entire Sunday spread is a stand-out.) You’ll read some solid schtick: (“Irma, is this tea or coffee?” “What does it taste like?” “It tastes like turpentine.” “Oh, that’s our coffee. Our tea tastes like transmission fluid.” Badabump!) You’ll even find the occasional moment of surreal brilliance (on an island vacation Jon’s palm-frond skirt is devoured by an infestation of leaf weasels.) The visuals are inventive and flexible; Davis is able not only to draw, but to render instantly recognizable, everything from a Baroque archway over a mouse hole to a Mongolian mime fish — the last of which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like it should be. In other words, all the elements are present for consistent, day-in, day-out, high-quality laffs.

Alas, it’s that very consistency which ultimately drags the comic down. Not that Garfield never delivers; I chuckled more than once while reading through this book. But three decades is a long, long time. To remain entertaining over that span, there needs to be change as well as continuity. Charles Schulz managed to go on, and on, and on by continually introducing new characters — Lucy, Linus, Woodstock, Peppermint Patty, Sally, Rerun, Spike — and revising old ones like Snoopy. Berkeley Breathed and Gary Trudeau had continuity; their characters existed in a loose but ongoing storyline which helped to place even repeated gags in different contexts.

Garfield, though, was, right from the beginning, more in the vein of crotchety warhorses like Beetle Bailey. There’s a fat, sarcastic cat. There’s Jon, his hapless owner. Shortly thereafter there’s Odie the stupid dog, and a few other ancillary characters — Irma the waitress, Nermal the cute cat, Pookie the teddy bear. And then that’s it. For ten, twenty, thirty years. Reading through this collection, the repetition across the decades is first amazing and then numbing. There’s one wow-coffee-makes-you-bonkers! gag…and then there’s another…and, yep, it still-makes-you-bonkers! It’s telling that when Jon finally, finally, after twenty-five years gets a girlfriend, it’s Liz the veterinarian, the sardonic woman he’s been pursuing almost that entire time. Another writer might have…I don’t know, made up a different girlfriend who hadn’t already shown herself entirely uninterested? Not Davis, though. Why draw somebody new when you’ve got a perfectly good character design just sitting there?

Davis shows the same level of creative attention in choosing his 30 favorite Garfield cartoons for the end of this volume . He predictably picks the strips debut…and after that one, he seems to make his selections entirely at random. They’re all just decent gags, like any other decent gag. Of course; what else could they be? The strip has no milestones, no events. Not only is nothing happening now, but nothing has ever happened, or will ever happen. It exists in an eternal amnesiac present.

This is what makes www.garfieldminusgarfield.net such a brilliant coup. In the last few years, some Internet users and bloggers started to digitally remove Garfield from the Garfield strip, leaving only poor Jon Arbuckle talking to himself. In 2008, Dan Walsh, an Irish musician and businessman, took the idea to the next level, systematically altering strips and posting a new one every day.

The result is that Garfield’s greatest weakness — its monotony — suddenly becomes a strength. Hammy sit-com vaudeville turns into Beckett — which makes it both more poignant and a hell of a lot funnier. Jon and Garfield threatening each other with sock puppets is fairly amusing; Jon brandishing a puppet at nothing and then sinking into utter lethargy is absurdist genius. Even the art is startlingly improved. When you take out the main character, the strip suddenly starts to use negative space as if it had taken an intensive design class. A three-panel sequence will often have two squares of nothing; just a primary color and a single line defining a table top. When he does show up, Jon is pushed to one side of the panel or the other, dramatically isolating him. Visually, it’s daring and funny, and perfectly captures the emptiness of Jon’s sad and lonely existence.

Walsh’s site became an internet sensation, and then began garnering mainstream attention as well. Soon enough Davis discovered it. To his eternal credit he didn’t issue a cease-and-desist order; instead, he co-opted it. The result is Garfield Minus Garfield — a book featuring Walsh’s de-felined efforts next to the original Davis strips which spawned them. Davis even tries his hand himself, personally eliminating the cat from several of his own comics. In fact, once he started with the erasing, Davis enjoyed it so much he employed it on the book’s cover as well, cheerfully blotting out Walsh’s byline. Garfield Minus Garfield claims that it is “by Jim Davis”; Walsh is credited only with the introduction, and as the creator of www.garfieldminusgarfield.net.

In some sense, Davis is right to claim full credit. What’s most fascinating about this volume is that it shows the extent to which Walsh’s transformed strips are true to Davis’ vision. Indeed, the majority of altered strips feature Davis’ jokes, essentially as he wrote them. It is Davis’ Jon who has spent thirty years without being able to find a girlfriend; it’s Davis’ Jon who stays home alone on Friday nights playing with Scotch tape or staring vacantly at the wall. It’s Davis’ Jon who says, “What is the purpose of life?” and then hits himself in the face with his own ice-cream cone. Walsh isn’t engaged in détournment; instead, he’s creating brilliantly inspired fan-fic. As Walsh himself notes in his introduction:

“…Jon has always been talking to himself. Garfield never really answers because his replies are always just thoughts… Jon has always been telling us these things; it’s just that with Garfield there you’ve been distracted from the truth: Jon needs some help!”

So Davis is an underappreciated genius then? Well, no…not exactly. Walsh is right that Jon is talking to his cat…but then Garfield’s not a real cat. He’s a cartoon character. Though his words are always in thought bubbles, he and Jon clearly are able to communicate much more effectively than I can talk to my two Siamese. When Jon and Garfield are together, they’re a routine; with Jon as the eternal straight-man for Garfield’s dead-pan zingers.

When Walsh takes Garfield away, though, you lose that stand-up frame, and have to start thinking of Jon as an actual person. In many cases, what this gives you is simply the slapstick without the final snarky putdown. “I had a pretty good day today. (Beat.) Once I got my leg out of the bear trap,” works pretty much the same whether or not you have Garfield around to add “Jon never disappoints me.” The Davis-created Garfield Minus Garfield strips in the second part of the book are almost all of this sort; the joke is the same in both original and revised strips.

Walsh takes this route too sometimes. But the best of his efforts are the ones in which Garfield was more intrinsic to the original gag, so that, when he is removed, Jon is left overreacting to nothing but his own troubled psyche. Thus Jon takes a sip of soup…looks horrified…and then collapses weeping. Jon lies on the floor…and lies on the floor…and lies on the floor. Jon says, “Do you have any unfulfilled dreams?” and then sits there silently for two panels. In at least one instance, when Jon seems a bit too witty, Walsh gratuitously removes a punchline.

The point is that the genius here is Davis’ — and it also isn’t. Borges has a short essay in which he argues that Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat was greater than anything either could have done alone. “[F]rom the lucky conjunction of a Persian astronomer who ventures into poetry and an English eccentric who explores Spanish and Oriental texts…emerges an extraordinary poet who resembles neither of them.” Something like that seems to have happened here as well. Davis is an aesthetically dicey mainstream cartoonist; Walsh is a wannabe rock-and-roller who never hit it big. Together, though, they are, as Borges said, an extraordinary poet. Erase Garfield and you are left with a Davis who is just the same, only funnier.

Lights and liver

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I’m reading Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors, a story collection, and wondering how often that phrase turns up in the slush pile if you’re Ellen Datlow or Weird Tales and wading thru the output of would-be writers of wistful, old-England-inflected, Gaimanesque fantasy. 

It’s a great phrase, catchy (what with the alliteration and the long “i”) but grim, with a brief mental tickle as the brain fills in what “lights” must mean. 
I remember Gaiman said somewhere that kids at conventions who were inspired by Dave McKean tended to show him works that used only McKean’s most obvious devices, such as little watch gears glued direct to the page. I imagine it’s the same for people imitating Gaiman, since he’s a man of many flourishes and catchy effects, stuff that it’s easy to fall in love with if you’re so inclined. “Lights and liver” calls out to be planted in narrations of supernatural errands, in sly dialogues between elves and ladies, in warnings to errant children from wise crones. Okay, I’ll stop. The point is that maybe the phrase pops up like a gnat when monitoring amateur fantasy output is part of your daily business.
Anyway, Smoke and Mirrors is going down pretty smooth with me, so I guess he knows what he’s doing. I even like the story-poems, which are done in freeform verse. I never would have thought I’d like them, but that’s the case. 
I do think a lot of the stories, poem or otherwise, come down to a few oddments wrapped in a shifting, glimmering, translucent, etc., silk handkerchief of verbal atmosphere that itself depends on a small collection of devices that Gaiman uses from story to story. But if I like reading the book, then okay. 

Partially Congealed Pundit: Statement of Purpose

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I wrote this in 1998, I think, when I was unsuccessfully applying to MFA programs. I actually used this as my Statement of Purpose. It was published in the Chicago Review a couple of years later.

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Statement of Purpose

(adapted from The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron with Mark Bryan; Media Marketing: How to Get Your Name and Story in Print and on the Air by Peter G. Miller; and from the graduate admissions and promotional materials of writing programs at Brown University, Stanford University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, the University of Houston, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Michigan, and Washington University in St. Louis)

To write is to bring representation and the suggestion of scientific method to the marketing of enlightened self-promotion. It is to be intimately connected to a high-tech ecosystem which overflows organically into a newer, better Graduate Record Examination. That is why, as a writer, I am a talented person. I reparent the artist-child who yearns to be a recognized authority; I pay too much in order to wear weird self-empowering clothing; I think of the universe as a vast electrical sea and of myself quoted in a national magazine. When I — a peripatetic Jungian — go to your cultural mecca to explore the beautiful irreverent shorthand of a profound, profane corporate brochure, the snowflake pattern of my soul will emerge, and, spiritually unblocking, I will become a controversial activist for ethnic and gender collages.

My life has always included strong internal directives. Well-packaged ideas, I call them. Although not always filled with sex and violence, they combine the comfortable nondenominational noncourse educational experiences of Poet Laureate Robert Hass with the sensuous television consciousness of solvent self-affirmer Sharon Olds, and accompany these attempts at conceptual and discursive emotional incest with literary modeling by Kafka, Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Pound, and Stevens. I tell this story not to drop names, but for reasons of ego and commerce. I want to work seriously with a unique community of writers, scholars, and critics in a program which, while current, is not overly specific.

As a kid my dad thought my art was an “unruly multisubjective activity.” That made me feel I was a multidimensional management consultant in pursuit of lush plants, plump pillows, experimental nonlinear interactive space: in other words, of one wonderfully nurturing self-loving something. As I have grown deeper, I have continued to rediscover that my creativity requires a sense of flow and stability different from other’s humility. I believe that the rituals of power and authority which traverse your writing package will fully open to me this sense of abundance — will allow me to perfect my craft and to immerse myself luxuriously in a rewarding publishing and teaching career. In return, I am certain I can contribute to your collective intellectual process by helping your institution maintain its competitive synchronicity.

Bad mood this morning

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Squeaky Fromme out just when more death threats against Obama are being reported. (Fromme here, threats here, found them on Memeorandum separated by a WSJ editorial.)

It’s not that I think interests are engineering a plot that involves Squeaky Fromme. It’s more like fate is setting up one of its dumb jokes. I think, “Yeah, that’s the shitty way things would work out. Obama gets killed, and right then there’s a Manson conspirator going free from prison.” 

The Boring Man and the Sea

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My cranky review of Jason’s Low Moon is online at Comixology. Here’s a selection:

As this indicates, Jason’s stories, like his pictures, are resolutely stripped of filigree. There’s no text boxes, and often not a lot of words. Open to any page and you’re likely to find some blank-faced animal staring meaningfully at something or other. The narratives unfold with a bleak, unexplicated inevitability. In “Emily Says Hello,” a hit man reports to his female employer on a series of successful murders, in return for which he receives an escalating series of sexual favors. Then things end badly. In “Proto Film Noir,” guy and gal meet, fuck, and kill gal’s husband…repeatedly, because he keeps coming back form the dead to have breakfast. Then things end badly. In “You Are Here,” a woman is abducted by aliens; her husband spends the rest of his life building a spaceship while her son grows up, gets married, gets divorced, and eventually joins his dad seeking her in the vastness of space. Then things end badly. And also poignantly.