Elementary

Posted on May 18, 2013 by vommarlowe

The setup is simple and straightforward. Sherlock is a recovering addict, Watson is his live-in sobriety coach, and together they fight crime.

Sherlock consults for a police captain at the New York Police Department. The captain is played as a solid, thoughtful cop who is both ethical and smart. The captain’s semi-assistant is a detective who, while also smart, finds Sherlock irritating at first (mostly because Sherlock is, in fact, irritating).

In this show, Sherlock is a know-it-all asshole, but not actually sociopathic. He treats people in general rather poorly in regards to social mores but he’s not cruel and he has quite a lot of hidden caring. He searches for justice in part because he doesn’t like seeing people hurt. As time passes in the show, he begins to care (in his own way) for Watson and to push her to re-engage with the medical practice she left behind.

Watson, for her part, begins as a competent but distant surgeon who has now become a sobriety coach. She’s shown as very honorable and deeply ethical. She won’t discuss patients unless she believes their lives are at risk, she thinks of others’ well-being over her own, and she is shown again and again as sensible and competent. The disgrace that caused her to stop practicing medicine is revealed, over the episodes that I watched, to be a mistake not of hubris or competency or what-have-you, but just….a mistake, as all humans are prone to make sometimes. She feels deep remorse over the mistake, as all ethical people would, and she makes penance as best she can.

I’ve read criticism of Watson, as her character, as showing her as fallible, as various things.

But I quite like her, and I think the show portrays her quite well. I’ve met many medicos in my day. Very few admit to human fallibility beyond it being a theoretical possibility that happens only to other people. It takes the very best, the most compassionate, to admit they can screw up. And only by admitting the possibility for those mistakes can such mistakes be prevented. This is dealt with in one episode quite well.

Sherlock himself is brash, snotty, sarcastic, and difficult. But since he always came off that way in the books, I don’t mind.

The reader may be wondering why bother with a new version of this show. The BBC’s latest offering seems to be the current favorite. I can understand the appeal. I watched the first season. The production values are lovely, the acting good, the mysteries competent, but I found the characters less enjoyable than some friends of mine. Interesting enough, but… Maybe I’m too much of a genre hack, but I find sociopath heroes more unlikeable and boring than enjoyable. (For those who don’t know, the BBC Sherlock is portrayed that way.) I enjoy the BBC version for what it is, clever and witty with plot twists.

Elementary is much more like a cozy wrapped up in a police procedural.

The cozy genre isn’t just about the mystery of the week, it’s about the characters who grow over many books or seasons. The tiny choices in life that affect great outcomes.

In that way, Elementary is very much a cozy. Watson, in this verse, is a sober companion to Sherlock’s addict, emotional mentor to a emotionally hurt person healing from addiction, but she also gains from him. Sherlock here is smart. He knows he’s smart. But that intelligence also causes him trouble. He craves connection, and with Watson, he finds it. But finding that connection isn’t enough for him. Rather than just take, he starts to offer things to her.

Being Sherlock Holmes, however, his idea of gifts of friendship are sometimes a little off. He brings her a coffeecup full of spaghetti, since the taste of the food is not impacted by utensils and cutlery. Obviously.

One of my favorite parts of the series occurs when Sherlock goes to a dinner party with Watson’s family. She is terrified that he will make a variety of social gaffes. Instead, he spends his evening subtly convincing her family that she is making a difference in her profession. Sherlock doesn’t even approve of her being a sober companion, but he knows that her family’s approval is very important to her. He does it for her.

Through each of the episodes, Sherlock and Watson solve various crimes. At first, she assists with medical knowledge, forensics, coroner-type information, and what might be called empathic emotional understanding. This ends up surprising Sherlock in the early stages, but as time passes, he relies on her more and more.

Their initial partnership, sober companion and addict, has a time-limit. As their friendship grows, Sherlock eventually convinces Watson to become his mentee in the art of detection.

But the two of them are wonderfully complicated and multi-layered. When Sherlock sends Watson off on her own case, for practice, he tackles what should be the harder case. I was amused and delighted to discover that the show brings much of the pilot episode’s visual imagery back for Watson’s first case, switching their positions.

Eventually, they both decide they do their best work together.

I know HU gets a rep for hating haters who hate, but you know, I just enjoy this show. Both characters are beautifully acted, the mysteries are interesting, the supporting cast is great, and the emotional arcs believable.

I’m sure that means it’s DOOMED. DOOMED to be cancelled.

But hey, in the meantime, the first season is available for sale at the usual Amazon/iTunes/etc.

Utilitarian Review 5/18/13

Posted on May 18, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Adam Stephanides begs you not to rearrange the manga.

A commenter named Alexander on why as a trans man he loves Sailor Moon.

Me on sequence in Satoshi Kitamura’s children’s book “When Sheep Can’t Sleep”.

Chris Gavaler with an appreciation of Austin Grossman’s novels.

Ng Suat Tong on the selections for the best comics criticism of 2012.

Me on Gay YA and Nora Olsen’s Swans and Klons.

Jacob Canfield on his choices for best comics criticism of 2012.

Me on the advertising campaign for the Yves Saint Laurent Touche Eclat make-up pen, and how capitalism will eat the self (for better or worse.)

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I talk about

— how the recent Gatsby film erased Nick’s gayness.

— David Bowie’s glib, stupid anti-Catholicism.

At Splice Today I talk about

— the great jazz trombonist Bill Harris honking.

— Angelina Jolie, mastectomies and femininity.

—The Julianne Moore rom-com The English Teacher, and how it’s supposed to be set in my hometown.

Other Links

Matthias Wivel on the best comics criticism of 2012.

Barack Obama sucks.

Mary McCarthy on the joys of embarrassing your kid.

Monika Bartyzel on why the Disney princesses suck.

Tucker Stone urges you not to tighten up your Berlatskys.

Elissa Strauss provides a manifesto for lazy birthing.

A house down the street from where I grew up. Significantly less chic than any of the houses in the rom-com The English Teacher

The Radiant Touch of Commerce

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

Last week Charles Reece, Sarah Shoker and I had a conversation in comments about authenticity, plastic surgery, commerce, make-up and other things. Along those lines, I thought it might be interesting to talk about this back-cover ad for from the May issue of Vogue for the Touche Éclat make-up pen, featuring models Jourdan Dunn and Ginita Lapina.

“Le Tent Touche Éclat covers imperfections while letting your natural radiance shine through,” according to the copy.

As that suggests, the ad, like a lot of fashion, is deliberately playing with tropes of naturalness and artificiality. The make-up pens stand in for cigarettes — which in turn stand-in for phalluses, so that applying make-up becomes, all at once, socially (not to mention physicaly) dangerous, a tease for a male(?) viewer and an assertion of sexual power. Moreover, the two women — with their similar smooth styling, poses, head tilts, and standard smoldering stares — double each other, artificially cloning the others’ look. White becomes mimicking of a (natural?) black, while black becomes a micmicking of a (natural?) white. The doubling creates a standard (everyone is doing it) and suggests there is no unitary standard (doubling is uncanny.) Similarly, the weird gold nowhere against which they pose contrasts with the simplicity of their outfits; Dunn’s black dress is so low cut that she’s au natural for all practical purposes, while Lapina appears in unadorned black (with plunging neckline.)

IN part, the ad uses the natural/artificial binary as a lever to commodify naturalness. Dunn and Lapina become multiplied, deindividualized icons — carefully arranged compositional elements in someone’s, or everyone’s, golden dream. The repetition of their diverse natural, individual selves tends to make those selves, in their naturalness and diversity, replicable, and therefore available and purchaseable. With makeup, you two can be as individual as them.

You need this individuality, or uniqueness, or (if you prefer) authenticity if the transaction is going to be appealing or exciting. It’s not just being able to purchase a replicable thing; it’s the sense that the replicable thing purchased is special. That’s the appeal of the interracial models. But it’s also the appeal of the inevitably controversial cigarette imagery. And, for that matter, of the connotations you set up when you put a black woman and a white woman together, each wielding a penis substitute — cultural discourses around prison butches and interracial lesbianism are buried, but not, imagery like this suggests, utterly forgotten. As Tom Frank has pointed out over and over, controversy and rebellion sell; nonconformity is the most exciting conformity of all.

The market, then, takes any form of authenticity or individuality, and turns it into an image of itself, so you’re buying back your own natural radiance to be applied artificially, or purchasing markers of rebellion (interracial mixing, lesbianism, cigarettes) just like everybody else.

Capitalism’s de-authentification of everything can certainly be depressing and constricting, demanding that women conform their real bodies to impossible standards (I’m sure the image here has been extensively photshopped, like all images in fashion mags.) On the other hand, though, it’s hard not to see some appeal in the artificiality as well. Where is this world we are being shown, where race is interchangeable, where deviant sexuality is glamourous and fabulous rather than marginalized and persecuted, where beautiful bodies float free of social stricture or even — as cigarettes become mere style icons — fear of cancer? It’s easy to say, well, interracial fraternization and even hints of lesbianism aren’t scandalous any more — but that “any more” is pretty recent. Forty years ago, this image would probably have been unprintable in a mainstream publication. Today, it’s being used to sell cosmetics.

If the problem with capitalism is that it makes rebellion conventional, then the upside of capitalism is that it makes rebellion conventional. And the way it does that, in part, is through a relentless assault on authenticity.There is no norm but the market, before whom the only differences that matter are desires, and all desires are equal. Everything is surface and style, which means that every proscription — against blacks, against gays, against smoking — is waved away as long as you are beautiful enough and have the right products.

That gold, glowing background, then, can be seen as capitalism itself — the mystic n-space that turns bodies and individuals into their own perfect replicas. The only morality there is that little bit of glowing glamor you can grab, the only pleasure the thrill of letting that glamor swallow the self in its brightness. Is disappearing into the brightness freedom, or is it nothing left to lose? It probably depends on what you had to lose in the first place, ow what you think you can get in exchange for your soul. Or maybe, as Waylon Jennings said in an authentic, wise song you can purchase in replicable digital form on I-Tunes, “Sometimes it’s heaven, sometimes it’s hell, sometimes I don’t even know.”

Gay YA: Harry Potter, Twilight, and Nora Olsen’s Swans and Klons

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

YA fiction often has a complicated relationship with gay content. On the one hand, writers for young readers are often leery about presenting homosexuality. J.K. Rowling, for example, has famously said that Dumbledore was gay — but that revelation came at a Q&A with fans, not in the books themselves.

But while gay characters tend to be closeted or simply absent in YA, the gay experience is oddly and insistently prevalent. YA is, for obvious reasons, often focused on the process of growing up; it tends to be structured around the division between adults and children. And one of the main ways that the division between adult and child is explored, or dramatized, is by making more or less explicit parallels with the division between straight and gay.

In Harry Potter, for example, Harry’s move from childish oppression to magical power and fulfillment is accomplished through the discovery of a secret subculture living hidden in plain sight, recognizing one other through secret signs and rituals. In Twilight, similarly, the world of the vampires and werewolves is a metaphor for the passage to adulthood. But it’s also a queer closet which contains both pale, effeminate Edward’s refusal to have sex with Bella and hyper-masculine werewolf Jacob stripping his clothes off in front of Bella’s father. Even in the Hunger Games, the Capitol’s Roman wrongness is visible mostly through the effeminate styles and carriage of its inhabitants. Katniss’ too-quick adulthood in the games is also a too-quick introduction to decadence, partially defined (as decadence often is) through gay tropes.

The point here is not that these series are “really” gay. Rather, as critic Eve Sedgwick argued, the point is that the queer/straight division has huge cultural power and weight. YA books tend to be about marginalization, about identity formation, about the way that you can occupy one social category one day and another the next without feeling or even looking any different. With such themes, YA authors almost can’t help using queer tropes, or being used by them.

In this context, it’s interesting to look at an actual honest-to-God, openly queer YA novel. Nora Olsen’s Swans & Klons is set in a future where a plague has killed all the men. Women form pair bonds with each other, but reproduction is handled by the ruling doctors, who supervise the cloning of a few hundred established genotypes (or Jeepie Types.) Some of these clones are humans, who spend devote theirs lives to art or science or intellectual pursuits. Others are Klons, genetically manipulated to be a docile, strong, loyal servant class.

The novel focuses on two girls — Rubric and her girlfriend (schatzie) Salmon Jo. They’re both about to move out of the children’s dorms and onto their apprenticeships. They are, in other words, on the cusp of adulthood, with all its queer secrets.

There are a lot of those secrets. Virtually everything you first learn about the plague and men and Klons turns out to be a lie. (Spoilers coming up, if you care about that sort of thing.)

It turns out that the Klon are not genetically different from humans after all. They aren’t engineered to be happy servants. They just have a different tag put on their toes when they come out of the vats. They don’t lack human “intelligence and emotional development”. The “humans” are simply taught to think they do. Moreover, Klons are, again, drawn from the same genetically identical Jeepy Types as everyone else. There are Klons who look exactly like Rubric, who think in much the same way Rubric thinks, who have the same genetic aptitude for aesthetics that Rubric has. But Rubric gets to spend her life making art, while the Klons that look just like her toil in factories or clean up filth.

The drama in Olsen’s book, then, doesn’t come from elaborating differences, or even from bridging differences, as it does in Harry Potter, or Twilight, or The Hunger Games. Rather, the plot is propelled by the realization that differences, and for that matter similarities, are arbitrary. They’re not magic truths we understand when we become adults, but categories we impose. They may determine us, but we’re also responsible for them. To be an adult, or a child, or queer, or straight, isn’t as important as how we live in those categories, and, even more, how we make others live in them.

Rubric and Salmon Jo, horrified by their discovery, eventually free a Klon and escape from their city across the border into the wilderness. There they find that not all males have died. The Barbarous Ones (as they’ve been labeled) still bear male children, though the genetic plague causes those children to be mentally and physically deformed. Though these males will never, in some sense, become adults, the Barbarous Ones raise them with great affection and love,

Rubric finds the males repulsive; she argues that just as her own society has bought into the delusion that Klons are nonhuman, the Barbarous Ones “have just bought into a mass delusion that Cretinous Males are really glam.” Salmon Jo replies:

“Maybe every place has their own delusion. But I think the one here is better, kinder. You know how before we left home I said I didn’t know what human was? I know now. The Sons taught me what it means to be a human being. Even if they’re sick or not brainy, they’re just as human as us. I think they make you learn more about yourself, and that’s why the Barbarous Ones think they’re such an asset.”

It may seem odd for a lesbian novel to locate humanity paradigmatically in males, or for a Bildungsroman to find its most eloquent moral experience in perpetual childishness. But both choices are, I think, a measure of Olsen’s refusal of easy categories. Perhaps because her queer themes are more acknowledged and controlled, she’s able to tell a YA story that isn’t about growing up to know the truth of difference (“Vampires are real!” Magic is real!”) Instead, Swans & Klons urges its readers to define humaity as broadly and generousy as possible, so that it includes adults, and children, and everyone on the margins.

Best Online Comics Criticism 2012 – The Final List

Posted on May 14, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

Late is better than never. Presumably.

The truth is that I almost chucked this whole thing into the trash heap because of a number of last minute exits from the voting process. I lost 3 judges in the early months of 2013 but, thankfully, Jacob Canfield stepped in at the last minute to give this year’s judging an extra voice and hopefully more diversity in taste. So diverse in fact that there was very little agreement as to which articles should make it to the final list in the initial voting.

The jurors this year were Jacob Canfield, Ken Parille, Caroline Small, and myself.

Looking back on the final list for 2010, I have to say that, in general, I’m happier with the final selection this year. Part of this is no doubt due to the fact that this is the first year I’m actually participating in the voting (while restricting the number of votes I actually use). The voting process for 2011 was a wash but my personal feeling is that 2012 was a better year for comics criticism than 2010. Perhaps readers here will pipe in with their own thoughts.

As for the final list, let me just remind everyone again that there is nothing less dependable than collective taste.

Three Votes Received

Craig Fischer – “Taniguchi Blossoms”

Fischer received a vote each for “The Lives of Insects: On Photography and Comics” and “Devils and Machines: On Jonah Hex and All Star Western” as well. So the final choice here is a bit of a compromise. Of these three articles, I would say that Fischer’s piece on the intersection(s) between photography and comics has the most to say about the art form. It is divided into 3 sections, moving from traditional photo comics, to the synthesis of both art forms and hence to the photo comic as “found” object (hinging on the indefinability of comics). I have little little doubt it was the most poorly received of the three in view of its intellectual content and semi-obscure sources.

“Taniguchi Blossoms” is a close and passionate reading of one of Jiro Taniguchi best comics, The Walking Man. The pleasurable emotions Fischer derived from that manga are communicated with a deft touch, though I will say that I disagree with his concluding comments where he cites Taniguchi’s A Zoo in Winter as another example of “the frisson between the perfection of [Taniguchi’s] diagrammatic art and the pressed by percolating emotion of the characters.” That latter manga has an obviousness and predictability which I associate with pot boiler Japanese romances.

Matthias Wivel – “New Yorker Cartoons: A Legacy of Mediocrity”

Wivel also received a vote for his article, “Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes.” The Barks-Donald Duck essay is a detailed run down of the comics being reprinted, giving historical background and story detail, before throwing light on past editorializing and the issue of recoloring.

The New Yorker article seems to be the more interesting selection, not least for the thoroughness of its negative criticism. It probably helps that I personally find The New Yorker to be a bright shining repository of shallow cartooning (with the usual exceptions). The publication targeted is certainly august, pays well, and is seen by many as the holy grail of paid cartooning work. It has attracted very little cogent negativity over the years. The article is a welcome corrective.

Two Votes Received

Corey Creekmur – “Remembering Locas”

This was part of a Locas roundtable in early 2012. The title is self-explanatory and takes in the long tradition of continuity and fan memory in comics with special emphasis on the intricacies of this mechanism in Locas. Creekmur extends this act of remembrance to all aspects of the work: the publisher-gods; the demands on Jaime’s readers; the action of memory and time on the characters; the essence of nostalgia in Locas; the purposeful and inescapable recollections on the part of the artist.

Heather Love – “The Mom Problem”

This is a lengthy article at Public Books about Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? I think it is safe to say that of the dozens of articles written about that comic in 2012, this is one of the better ones, providing basic background information before moving on to more detailed analysis. The focus here is less on Bechdel’s command of comic language but the Freudian aspects of Bechdel’s relationships and the structural importance Donald Winnicott’s work plays in the comic.

The article is a useful example of the dichotomy between comic criticism written for an intellectually serious site meant for general readers and that for a specialist comics site. While the latter sites often contain a mixture of traditional literary and more comic-based readings, it is only in recent years that more extensive, less technical reviews have appeared in the other type of publication.

Sean Rogers – “Flex Mentallo and the Morrison Problem”

Rogers is one of the best new(-ish) writers that the editors of TCJ.com have decided to employ and his article on Grant Morrison probably his most discussed piece of comics criticism. Bad Morrison (of which there is plenty) is certainly all too easily maligned, but what of the more “canonical” works (Animal Man, Doom Patrol, All-Star Superman etc.) For Rogers, the problems with Flex Mentallo are representative of a much deeper rot and Morrison’s soulless insularity.

Peter Wilkins – “Pluto: Robots and Aesthetic Experience”

This article was cited by Caro as “probably” being her favorite. The title is once again self-explanatory. The article succinctly ponders the nature of humanity, intelligence, and the aesthetic imperative. It ends with an insoluble question concerning the transaction between violence and art.

_______

A short comment on a notable omission.

2012 was probably the best year on record for TCJ.com in terms of comics criticism so it’s a bit strange that so few pieces managed to get enough votes to pull through to the final list. Part of this has to do with the fact many of the more impressive critical endeavors at TCJ.com this year were the result of accretion and accumulation. I would say that the best writing on Chris Ware’s Building Stories in 2012 was probably at the roundtable at TCJ.com. There was a more superficial blessing to be had as well. In contrast to many of the mainstream reviewers, most of the writers eschewed boosterism while remaining overwhelmingly positive. For this small mercy, I am grateful.

Articles at TCJ.com which received a single vote include Joshua Glen on “The Pathological Culture of Dal Tokyo“, Glen Gold on the Hand of Fire roundtable, Jeet Heer on Crumb, Ryan Holmberg on Tezuka Osamu, Dan Nadel on Born Again, Nicole Rudick on Frank Santoro’s Pompeii, and Dash Shaw on Jeffrey Brown’s Cat Comics.

Of these, I would single out Ryan Holmberg’s articles on manga at TCJ.com for special mention. His work follows in the long line of comics historical scholarship which has been the primary mode of engagement for much of the history of comics criticism. The exception in this case being that the subjects being discussed—vintage manga—have never had a “popular voice” in the English language.

Most of the judges won’t have time to write about their choices this year so I’ll list one other writer who was considered during the voting process. Two articles by Nicolas Labarre found favor with one of the judges. One on City of Glass at Comics Forum and the other on Art and Illusion in Blutch’s Mitchum at The Comics Grid.
_____
Update: Judge Jacob Canfield discusses his selections here.

Soon YOU Will Be Invincible

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Chris Gavaler

About five years ago, a group of honors students were trolling my campus for a professor willing to create and teach a course on superheroes. They found me. The syllabus I submitted to C&D for approval included a predictable roster of comic books, interspersed with a few influential pulp novels and even a smattering of Nietzsche and Shaw. But then a friend handed me a novel I’d never heard of, a then recent hardback about an evil genius and the team of superheroes he fights. Standard comic book fodder, but the blurbs on the back assured me this was a literary novel.

And I thought: Really?

This is of course well before my superhero obsession had achieved its current proportions, but I had serious doubts. Sure, in rare cases, a comic book, say Alan Moore’s The Watchmen, could scale the pop culture ladder to achieve recognition as a work of serious literature. But this Austin Grossman guy, he was going the other direction. Soon I Will Be Invincible was a novel descending into comic book clichés. Yes, Michael Chabon had won the Pulitzer for The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, but that wasn’t a novel about superheroes—that was a novel about superhero creators. Totally different.

And then I started reading. I didn’t make it through the first chapter before going online and ordering my own copy so I wouldn’t mark up my friend’s with underlines and scribbles. Always a sure sign I’m in love. This evil genius, Dr. Impossible, he was hilariously witty and improbably poignant. Where Alan Moore applies psychological realism to darken comic book stereotypes, Grossman achieved a realism that didn’t destroy the beloved formulas. His supervillain still MWAHAHA-ed, doomed to lose every plan for world domination, but under that absurd surface was a frighteningly familiar human being. Where Moore devastates superheroes, Grossman heightens the character types by constructing vast inner psychologies.

So I revised my syllabus and made those honors students read it. And then I made my book club read it. And then, since my kids weren’t reading entirely on their own yet, I read it to them. (My son’s twelve now, and when he heard Austin Grossman was coming to my campus, he found my scribbled-up copy and read it to himself again.) My daughter had already read most of Harry Potter on her own a few times, but she liked the ritual of a parent droning from a book over the breakfast table and after dinner on a couch. Soon I Will Be Invincible may be the last novel I read to them both. When I tried to start another, she very politely asked: “Dad, can we do something not about superheroes?”

But she loved Grossman too. How could the children of two professors not fall in love with a geeky genius in an endless battle against the stuck-up superhero bullies who persecuted him in middle school? But it was Grossman’s second narrator, an amnesiac cyborg, who bulled me over. Despite (or perhaps because of) her fantastical absurdities—she shoots rubber bullets and a grappling hook from her forearms—her character took on emotional resonances I didn’t notice at first, meanings smuggled in under all the fun.

So when I got to the paragraph where she mourns the loss of her old self, the kid she can’t even remember ever being, I couldn’t read it. Literally. I choked up. Repeatedly. My kids thought I was having some kind of seizure. I was looking at my almost-pubescent daughter, a girl who had maybe ten minutes left in her childhood, and suddenly the metaphor of an amnesiac cyborg was the most profound truth I’d ever read. Or not read. I eventually had to give up and hand the book to her to read aloud to her brother.

And now Austin Grossman has a new novel. How will I cope?

He’s again returned to my childhood, not to comic books this time, but video games. I can recall reading a green computer screen over a high school friend’s shoulder as he typed responses to text-only prompts. The game Zork began with the words: “You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.”

That nameless main character, “You,” is also the title of Grossman’s new novel. Instead of plumbing the secret depths of superheroes, YOU offers a subterranean view of the computer gaming industry, a multiverse Grossman knows particularly well. He started writing games twenty years ago—because what else would you do with a B.A. from Harvard?—stopping to study Victorian literature at Berkley before launching his literary career while still continuing to expand his work in video.

My family has more Austin Grossman on our shelves than I had realized. He co-wrote Epic Mickey, a game I’ve watched my son slash through with our Wii remote. His credits are long, and even a non-gamer like me recognizes titles like Tomb Raider and Jurassic Park. Though I admit when I saw the headline “Dishonored Writer’s New Novel Shows a Video Game Generation Being Born,” I thought Grossman must have done something really, you know, dishonorable. (Dishonored actually won a range of awards last year and is considered the best action-adventure of 2012. )

I predict equally honorable accolades for YOU. The novel just launched, and Washington and Lee University will be hosting a reading on May 14^th. Should you happen to be in attendance and feel a sudden, inexplicable wave of déjà vu, it might because Austin’s identical twin, Lev, stood on the same stage last fall to read from his own upcoming novel, a sequel to The Magician King. There’s clearly an annoying surplus of talent in the Grossman gene pool.

In my family, all the computer DNA went to my two brothers, stepbrothers, so no nature-nurture mystery there. Grossman’s characters enrolled in their high school’s first offering of computer math. So did I—before fleeing the next day. My brothers basically taught the class. I’d still rather watch Space Invaders over someone’s shoulder than play it myself. So all the more amazing to me that Grossman can render the spectacle of 80s and 90s games so thrillingly. Graphically you might just be a plus sign battling hordes of ampersands in a forest of Vs, but his prose imbues your plight with improbable depth, both three-dimensional and psychological.

My brothers went on to careers as programmers, and one is, in fact, a game designer in a universe that bears an uncanny resemblance to YOU. But saying the novel is about video games is like saying The Old Man and the Sea is about fishing. It tells you a great deal and nothing at all.

I will say that YOU is a fantastic novel, but not fantastical. Sure, the game’s archetypal adventurers chat with the narrator on a regular basis, but you can write those off as dreams and daydreams. And, yes, that ur-bug infecting the game code has an almost supernatural vibe, but Grossman never quite exits realism. Or rather, fantasy and reality become flip sides of a single coin. While Invincible explores the disturbing borders where real and unreal meet (the seams in cyborg skin graphs, for example), YOU overlaps the two worlds–literally, the game maps are overlays of Central Park, Disneyland, Scotland.

Ultimately, the difference between here and there, you and your role-playing self, tumble into a shared real/unreal universe, the coin Grossman keeps spinning for almost four hundred dizzying pages. When I set the book down, I had to recalibrate my senses, shake-off the metafictional jet-lag, before handing YOU to my son. He’s a video game junky. He’d dive through the screen of his laptop if he could. I’m glad he can’t, but Grossman provides the next best thrill.

22 Ways of Looking At a Sheep

Posted on May 12, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared on Comixology.
__________

Comics are sequential art, I’m told. So how do you get art into a sequence? The usual answer is through narrative. Superman helps a little old lady across the street in that panel; fans get older and creepier in this panel; Superman feasts on the blood of innocents in the third panel; Frederic Wertham weeps silently in the final panel. Sequence.

There are other ways to organize images in a sequence though. For example:

There’s an obvious, instantly recognizable progression there. But it doesn’t use narrative.

On the one hand, putting images in a simple numerical sequence seems…well, simplistic. And it actually is simplistic— this is how children’s books are organized, after all. At the same time, breaking away from narrative, however it’s done, is a step away from traditional structures and towards modernism. Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is the Western referent that leaps to mind. But perhaps even more apropos are classic ukiyo-e Japanese print series. In Yoshitoshi’s 100 Aspects of the Moon, for example, a central theme approached from a set number of angles creates the opportunity for unity, rhyme, and even sequence without narrative.

In this print from 100 Aspects of the Moon, a great Chinese general Cao Cao crosses the Yangtze river on the day before his defeat.

And this is the same place, eight centuries later. Su Shi, a poet, composes a verse by moonlight about, or inspired by, Cao Cao.

The two images aren’t contiguous in the series…they were made four years apart. But you have to think that Yoshitoshi remembered the first while he made the second, and that they’re meant to nod back and forth, at least. Certainly, they complicate or expand on each other; in the first Cao Cao, in full glorious color, sails towards a tragedy he doesn’t know. But the poet (in a much less elaborate, less brighter image) does know it; the boat in fact seems to be sailing back, returning in the opposite direction from Cao Cao’s voyage. You can almost see Cao Cao and the poet looking at each other, one not seeing (turned away), one seeing…but both transient compared to the ever-cycling, singular moon (and it is singular, since the moon in the first print actually seems to provide the moonlight for both images.)

(I discuss some other images from Yoshitoshi’s series here,for those who are interested.)

A more recent series working in the number-rather-than-narrative vein is Satoshi Kitamura’s When Sheep Cannot Sleep: The Counting Book, published in 1986. Kitamura — a Japanese expatriate living in London — splits the difference almost exactly between simplicity and sophistication. The volume is, as the title makes clear, actually a children’s counting book; the protagonist, a sheep named Wooly, sees one butterfly on the first page, two ladybugs on the second, and so forth. At the same time, though, the way in which Wooly’s adventures are presented is suggestive and elliptical in a way that recalls the Japanese print series. For the most part, and unlike in most counting books for kids, the book does not specifically list the number of objects Wooly encounters. Instead, the counting theme is unspoken; unifying the series silently, the same way the Chinese general’s goings and comings form a clear but unstated link between the Yoshitoshi drawings above.

Kitamura’s book reads like a Japanese print series in a number of ways, from his off-center compositions, to his subtle use of blank space, to his lovely color palette, all the way to his clever, intentionally humorous use of visual puzzles. You’re always wondering from page to page what you’re supposed to be counting and where it is, just as in Yoshitoshi’s series you’re always looking for (and not always finding) the moon.

There is a significant difference in approach, though, between Kitamura and Yoshitoshi: Kitamura has a narrative. His lumpy sheep is having trouble falling asleep, and the book follows Wooly as he wanders through a nighttime landscape, in an effort to escape insomnia. Eventually he finds a house and starts performing the usual children’s nighttime rituals of eating, bathing, and finally getting into bed. In short, it’s a story familiar to reader’s of kids’s books; a child going to bed.

Except, that, again, it isn’t. Though the narrative is there, it doesn’t control or guide the book. It’s counting that moves the book forward; narrative is a bonus rather than an engine. As a result, Kitamura can let his mind and paintbrush wander, and the story and images float free, almost unconscious of where they’re supposed to be going. When Sheep Cannot Sleep has a dreamlike aura entirely appropriate to the subject matter; each of Kitamura’s vivid watercolor images seems like a quietly disconnected, hyper-real moment. Mysteries — what are those UFOs doing? whose house is that? who put out the pajamas? —don’t ever resolve . They’re meaningful not because of the narrative closure they set up, but because of how their humor, or poetry, or eeriness resonantes within an individual image.

When Sheep Cannot Sleep isn’t hard to follow, and it’s certainly not avante garde. Wooly is an unassuming creature, and his needs are straightforward; he just wants to get into bed and dream. Not much happens, and the book is too simple to allow for a complicated plot. Or, alternately, it’s too complicated to allow for a simple plot, depending on which, of various ways, you look at it.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Monthly Archives: May 2013