Comics Review: Alex Raymond, Rip Kirby, Volume One: 1946-1948

Alex Raymond's post-WWII detective strip features the great illustrator's evolution into an excellent comics dramatist, showcased in a handsome (and hefty) hardcover collection




Rip Kirby, Volume One: 1946-1948, by Alex Raymond, is available for sale from Powell's Books. Click here to order.


Alex Raymond is best remembered for Flash Gordon, the fantasy-adventure newspaper strip he created in 1934 and illustrated up until his 1944 enlistment in the Marine Corps. Along with Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant and Burne Hogarth’s Tarzan, it represented the pinnacle of the illustrated-text adventure strip. Raymond combined bravura draftsmanship, composition, and rendering with an outlandish visual imagination. His concepts have since been run into the ground by George Lucas and others, but the sensuality and romantic sweep of his artwork remains compelling to this day.

However, Raymond’s achievement in Flash Gordon was that of an illustrator, not a cartoonist. The strips weren’t thought out in dramatic terms; Raymond didn’t play the pictures off each other for narrative effect. But Flash Gordon didn’t define Raymond’s career or aesthetic; it only represented a stage. When Raymond returned to civilian life after World War II, he was denied the opportunity to resume work on Flash Gordon (it had been turned over to his assistant), and so he proceeded to create a new adventure strip with Rip Kirby. It marked a considerable shift in subject matter—the protagonist wasn’t an epic fantasy hero like Gordon; he was an urbane private detective living in contemporary New York. Perhaps more importantly, the new strip also marked a major change in narrative style. Raymond dropped the static-illustration format in favor of the fluid dramatic storytelling epitomized by the work of peers like Milton Caniff and Roy Crane. He proved almost as adept at this new style as he had in the old. Rip Kirby may not define its style to the degree Flash Gordon did, but it is a sterling example of that style, and it should be considered a trendsetter in its own right. A coffee-table book collecting the strip’s first three years has just been published, and it makes clear that Rip Kirby was the key influence on the major soap opera strips that followed, including Stan Drake’s The Heart of Juliet Jones and Leonard Starr’s On Stage. Raymond combined mundane settings, nuanced dramatizations, and scrupulous attention to detail with a dynamic photorealist approach. Nothing that had come before was quite like it.

Rip Kirby wasn’t a complete break from Flash Gordon, though. Kirby is, in his own way, as idealized and glamourous a protagonist as Flash. He’s tall, athletic, and handsome, and his physical attributes are matched with intellectual ones: he’s a professional chemistry scholar whose hobbies include playing golf and classical piano. The dynamic of the principal characters is similar, too. Gordon had two sidekicks, Doctor Zarkov, who provided some intellectual balance to Gordon’s brawn, and Dale Arden, who also doubled as his love interest. Kirby has two as well: his butler Desmond, a former safecracker with welcome advice on nearly everything, and his girlfriend Honey Dorian. Dale Arden had her rival for Flash’s affections with the recurring character Princess Aura, and Honey has hers with the gangster’s moll turned singer Pagan Lee. And though many of Kirby’s cases revolve around more earthbound crimes like drug-related murders and blackmail plots, Raymond hadn’t lost his taste for the fanciful. Two storylines are built around a doomsday chemical weapon, and one of the villains kills her enemies with a cane head equipped with retractable poison fangs.

The key appeal of Rip Kirby is, of course, the storytelling and art. Raymond’s handling of character nuance in particular is first-rate. He had evolved into a master of figure drawing and portraiture while working on Flash Gordon, and he took those skills into new areas. The characters’ thoughts and attitudes are brilliantly suggested by their posture, gestures, and even the tilt of their heads. The naturalism on display is astonishing; there’s none of the hammy gesticulating one sees in less capable hands. Raymond’s character effects are occasionally so subtle that one may stare at a panel over and over again, wondering just how he pulled it off. In one scene, Kirby is beset upon by two children who insist on sitting in his lap and pestering him about his gun. Raymond shows Kirby in medium shot, and he isn’t doing anything but sitting, but his annoyance comes through hilariously. The effect is achieved primarily by the suggestion that Kirby is staring blankly past the children, and Raymond’s precision is extraordinary: Kirby’s face takes up less than half an inch on the page. Raymond’s handling of lighting effects is also superb, and his attention to detail in the clothing designs and set decoration is all but incomparable.

Raymond’s artwork is at its most striking in the early episodes. There is a heavier reliance on deep-space compositions than there is later on in the strip, as well a greater use of white areas. Raymond achieves some gorgeous juxtapositions between the whites, grays, and solid blacks in his panels. The early episodes were also rendered primarily in pen, so that on the occasions when a brush is used--usually to create decorative effects in the clothes and furnishings--the contrast makes the panels pop off the page. When one adds this to Raymond’s characteristic skill with figures, faces, and drapery, well, it’s hard to imagine a comic strip looking more elegant. However, nine months into the strip’s run, Raymond shifts to rendering largely with a brush. He also changes his design approaches. The panel compositions start relying almost exclusively on foreground elements, and the exquisite interplay between white, gray, and black is largely abandoned. The draftsmanship and dramatic skill are as impressive as ever, but beyond the photorealistic faces, the strip’s look doesn’t have much to distinguish it from the work of Frank Robbins or Steve Canyon-era Milton Caniff.

That, though, is plenty by itself to recommend the work. Those sleek early episodes are simply the icing on the cake. IDW Publishing and editor Dean Mullaney deserve an enormous amount of credit for bringing this material back into print. And on such a gargantuan scale! This slab of a book contains well over 800 daily strips, and if one enjoys the dramatic-continuity newspaper comics of the Forties and Fifties, it’s an absolute feast. Before now, one largely had to take on faith the view that Raymond’s dramatic storytelling skills were almost on the level of his illustrative prowess. The evidence is at last back with us, and it doesn’t disappoint.

Poetry Translation: Dante, Inferno, Song XIX

My translation of Song XIX of Dante's Inferno has been posted at Dante's Divine Comedy. Click here to read.

Movie Review: Capitalism: A Love Story

Michael Moore's latest broadside against the evils and inequities of American society is an overreaching, incoherent, and misguided mess.

One doesn’t go to a Michael Moore movie looking to satisfy one’s curiosity about a subject. Unlike most documentary filmmakers, he doesn’t explore his material. Instead, he packages it. He never shows anything that he doesn’t have a predetermined attitude about, and it is all in service to a larger point he is trying to make. At his best, as in Fahrenheit 9/11 and Sicko, he delivers a sharply focused polemic. He doesn’t tell a viewer much of anything new, but he does provide an outlet for the anger and frustration one feels towards his targets. One comes away happy that, on a rare occasion in a high-profile media production, the right people and things are getting the savaging they deserve.

However, Moore’s latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story, doesn’t provide much in the way of catharsis. A well-done polemic has an intense, rigorous view of what it is against. In Capitalism, Moore looks at the economic calamity that boiled over last year, but he can’t seem to get a grip on it. He tries to make the point that the devastating chicanery perpetrated by the financial-services industry is proof that capitalism is inherently evil--by its nature, it actively works against the common good. The material, though, isn’t pulled together into a coherent argument. The film is rambling, muddleheaded, and at times, outright nuts.

It’s hard to escape the feeling that, this time out, Moore is all over the map. Much of the first half is devoted to a ground-level look at the lives of various people who have been victimized by corporate greed. There are repeated visits to a family that is in the process of moving out of their foreclosed family farm. The viewer is told of the plight of modern-day airline pilots, whose compensation is so low that they often have to go on food stamps or get a second job just to pay the bills. Considerable screen time is spent on “dead peasant” insurance, in which companies take out covert life-insurance policies on their employees, with the company named as the beneficiary. Moore also includes an extended episode that deals with a youth detention facility scandal in Pennsylvania, where a corrupt judge threw the book at every juvenile offender so the company operating the facility could maximize the public funds it received. All of this is worthy of attention, but the situations need the right context to do them justice. Moore uses them as examples of the evil of corporate greed, but they feel arbitrarily chosen; one could go through a year of the New York Times and find dozens of examples that are at least as compelling. A good polemic builds as it goes; Moore scatters his attention, and he can't generate any momentum.

It almost goes without saying that he doesn’t give the film’s central material the treatment it deserves. The majority of the film is spent on the foreclosure crisis, the banking meltdown, and the bailouts and their aftermath. Moore does a fair job of outlining what led up to the crisis, such as deregulation, the securitizing of mortgages, and the use of derivative mathematical models to commit large-scale fraud. The film is nowhere as instructive on the subject as David Faber’s excellent CNBC documentary House of Cards, but it will do. But Moore all but completely ignores how self-destructive this was for the banks. Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers collapsed outright, and the remaining investment banks were forced into hasty mergers. One isn’t asking for sympathy for these institutions--they deserved every hit they took--but if an account of the events ignores what happened to them, it cannot provide a proper context for TARP and the other bailouts. Moore jumps almost immediately from the mortgage swindle of consumers to TARP, and it quickly becomes clear why he gives short shrift to the banks’ circumstances. Ignoring the specifics of the banking crisis allows him to claim that it was all a conspiracy to get the Treasury looted before Bush left office.

Moore, like a lot of people who should have known better, took a big, shameless snort of Yes-We-Can Kool-Aid mix last year. In his view of things, the bankers and their cohort were frightened by a great, high-minded movement that was sweeping the land. It was a movement that was empowering people to take back the country from its corporate masters. The pillaging wrought under Reagan, the Bushes, and (by implication) Bill Clinton, would be brought to an end. That movement, of course, was the Barack Obama presidential campaign. The bankers needed to get their hands on everything that was left for them to take before Obama ascended to office and ended their rapacity once and for all.

This is utterly ridiculous, for all sorts of reasons. Obama never campaigned against the power of corporate America. He has never advocated any legislation that would protect distressed homeowners from foreclosure (unlike, for example, his chief rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton). He was just as happy to deliver the TARP and other bailout funds to the banks as George W. Bush. The second half of the TARP money was authorized after Obama became President, and he certainly didn’t demand that any conditions be placed on it. (Contrast this with his draconian treatment of the automobile companies and their workers.) In fact, Barack Obama received more money in campaign contributions from Wall Street than any other presidential candidate. They all but certainly feel they got their money’s worth.

In fairness to Moore, he does seem to be waking up to how much he misjudged Obama, but nowhere near enough to let go of the fantasy he presents about last year. He acknowledges the campaign contributions in the film, although he pretends Obama got them after the meltdown. He also features an interview with William K. Black, the Wyatt Earp of the 1980s savings-and-loan scandal, who describes Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner as a useful idiot for the financial industry. (Black calls him a man who is wrong about everything, but consistently wrong in ways that favor the bankers.) However, Moore is in love with this idea of a people’s uprising sweeping the nation, and he credits Obama’s election with inspiring such events as the successful severance-pay sit-down strike at Republic Windows and Doors last December. This nonsense is an expression of the most dubious aspect of the film, which is the claim that capitalism is evil and democracy is good, and that democracy is finally beginning to fight back.

Moore is fatuously equating capitalism with the wealthy, and specifically with the rapacity that caused the present crisis. One doesn't find him denouncing the core capitalistic idea of private property; the prospect of middle- and working-class people owning their homes is all but idealized in the film. What he wants--and I am wholeheartedly with him on this--is a country where the non-wealthy can lead comfortable, fulfilling lives. Essentially, what he’s advocating is that the country return to where it was before the 1980s, back when taxes were used to level the economic playing field, and when laws and regulations were in place to prevent the sort of parasitic ingenuity that caused the current crisis. But it’s hard to escape the feeling that I understand what he wants more than he does. His thinking is as muddled as his use of words. (No one with any traditional understanding of “capitalism” or “democracy” would think of using those terms the way Moore does here.) He is so far into his tortured equivalency between capitalism and the rapacious rich that he's treating the notions of ambition and success with disdain.

In the best interview I have seen with Moore about the film (click here to watch), MSNBC entertainment correspondent Courtney Hazlett confronts him about his negative view of upward striving. I always enjoy watching Hazlett; she has a dry, ironic edge that makes her compelling even when one isn’t especially interested in what she’s covering. She draws Moore out on this subject; he reveals that he distrusts the very ideas of upward mobility and entrepreneurial success--he regards them as a lures in a sucker’s game. Hazlett asks him about the American Dream, and he scoffs, “I’d rather talk about the American reality. This dreaming stuff, come on! Really!” It's an astonishing exchange. This is the most successful documentary filmmaker in the history of movies, and he's effectively spitting on the entrepreneurial drive that got him where he is. He's justifiably angry over what the financial industry has done to people, but he's so overwhelmed by that anger that he's lost perspective on everything else.

The root of it all may be that Moore has lost his own dream. Throughout the film, he shows clips from home movies of him growing up in Flint, Michigan. His father was a factory worker, his mother was a homemaker, and they owned their house within a few years of buying it. The memories of his childhood are ones that Moore clearly finds a great sense of security in, and he wants for everyone to know that ideal. But he knows they can't; in many ways, it is gone for him as well. His once prosperous hometown is now a symbol of urban decay. In the film's most powerful scene, Moore and his elderly father go to look at the vast, empty site where the factory that employed his father once stood. The view is an effective trope for Moore's attitude: Corporate greed destroys everything. Unfortunately, it's also destroyed his judgment. He's now enamored with conspiracy theories, pied-piper politicians, and disparaging the very idea of entrepreneurial success.

Comics Review: Lilli Carré, "The Thing About Madeline"

Lilli Carré blossoms from a promising talent to an accomplished cartoonist in this affecting, superbly crafted fantasy about finding fulfillment in one’s life.




Lilli Carré's "The Thing About Madeline" is featured in The Best American Comics 2008, available for sale from Powell's Books. To order, click here.


Last year, I reviewed Lilli Carré’s The Lagoon, which I found an extremely frustrating piece. Carré was a striking cartooning talent, with an obvious interest in formal experimentation, but the story was largely inscrutable. There was a hermetic feeling to it, as if a good portion of it was still locked up in her head. I had come to the book after reading a number of current comics where the authors had never bothered to give their material any kind of dramatic or poetic shape. In my review of The Lagoon, I unfairly lumped Carré’s work in with those meandering efforts. Unlike the peers of hers in question, she clearly conceived her work in terms of narrative effects; the problem with The Lagoon was that there was something about the story that proved ineffable for her. She gave a sophisticated surface to material that just wasn’t accessible. One was caught between admiration for her obvious sense of craft and annoyance at the solipsistic nature of her content. I read it at a point where my patience with inchoate efforts was at a low ebb, and she became a target for a bit of misguided lashing out.

However, two subsequent efforts make her quite the target for praise, and there is nothing misguided about it. “The Carnival,” which I’ll review soon, is probably the single best comics story of the past year. “The Thing About Madeline,” the subject of today’s piece, isn’t quite as accomplished, but nonetheless, it is a finely crafted gem. Everything comes together for Carré—the piece is elegantly structured and paced, with meanings both clear and affecting.

The key moment in “The Thing About Madeline” is when the title character comes home one evening and finds a doppelganger sleeping in her bed. Up to this point, Carré has methodically constructed a portrait of Madeline as someone who is dissatisfied with her life. She has a boring dead-end job, and she spends her off-hours at the local bar getting drunk and singing along with her favorite song on the jukebox. The opportunity is there for a romance with another bar regular, but Madeline is too caught up in her unhappiness to make the connection. This portrait climaxes with the arrival of the doppelganger, a trope for the intensity of Madeline’s feelings of alienation. She has become so estranged from her life that she is no longer the one living it.

The story then artfully moves from metaphor to irony. In short order, the doppelganger takes over every aspect of Madeline’s life, but the double finds happiness there. Her morale is high at work, and the bar becomes a place to socialize rather than retreat into oneself. Romance even blossoms with the fellow she hangs out with there. Madeline finds herself literally on the outside looking in. She has become so completely shut out of her life that her acquaintances no longer recognize her. When she and the double finally confront each other, her sense of alienation reaches its apogee: She no longer recognizes herself. Carré uses personification to powerful dramatic effect.

The confrontation scene works as a climax and a second turning point. In the story’s third act, Madeline leaves town and builds a new life elsewhere. Lessons appear to have been learned from the doppelganger episode; Madeline embraces her new routines and relationships instead of allowing herself to be defeated by them. Carré, though, is too sharp to end her story on such a pat, moralizing note. A few years later, Madeline briefly encounters a person she knew in her old life, and things have changed for him. When she last saw him, he was happy and fulfilled, but now there is an air of dissatisfaction to him. The story ends with Madeline being stalked by a second figure from earlier in the story, one who appears to be acting out of an obsessive sense of envy. It is a superbly suggestive finale. Carré closes the story on a portentous note, and she challenges the reader’s judgment of Madeline as a character. Madeline’s problem in the story’s first two sections may not have been her attitude; perhaps her circumstances were inherently demoralizing after all. The ending also lends itself to a supernatural reading at odds with the one I'm presenting here; there’s a feeling of the uncanny in the final moments that cannot be dismissed.

Carré’s presentation of the story is largely excellent. The panels are clear and unostentatiously drawn. She also does a fine job of building the story’s rhythms. The story moves back and forth between expository narration and dialogue scenes; it never feels monotonous, and the shifts in the approach to dramatization never call attention to themselves. The only things that aren’t handled particularly well are the color effects. The scenes featuring Madeline’s old life are rendered in indigo hues, with the ones in her new circumstances presented in a muted orange. The shift is clearly intended to reflect the emotional change in her life, but the meaning is too obvious. The color gray is also used, and the handling of it is confusing. Carré uses it in the outside-looking-in moments, but the feeling she is trying to evoke with it never comes across. These, though, are niggling flaws, and one respects the effort; it is always better to fall down by trying too much than trying too little. One’s sense of Carré is that she strives to make every element she includes serve a narrative purpose, and overall, “The Thing About Madeline” is a superb example of craft and formal control. She’s a terrific cartoonist.

Other reviews of work by Lilli Carré:

• The Lagoon

Poetry Review: Terrance Hayes, “A House Is Not a Home”

This elegantly constructed poem uses a drunken tiff as a springboard for a reverie about sounds--and satirizes bourgeois African-American pretensions about their heritage along the way.

“A House Is Not a Home,” by Terrance Hayes, is featured in The Best American Poetry 2009. To purchase the anthology from Powell’s Books, click here.

So much of reading contemporary poetry involves working through tropes. No matter how much one enjoys analyzing things, it can get a bit wearying at times. A poem like Terrance Hayes’ “A House Is Not a Home,” an exercise in building structure out of free association, is an enjoyable respite. Hayes catches a reader up in his imaginative flights. By the end, he also has one marveling at how he pulls his verbal caprices together into a coherent whole. Reading the poem is like listening to an experienced jazz musician play out one apparently unrelated riff after another, only to recognize that they’re adding up to a coherent song. The hook isn’t there at the beginning; you pick up on the refrains as you go.

The starting point for “A House Is Not a Home” is an incident in which the narrator gets his ears boxed by a friend and the friend’s wife after an inappropriate display of drunken affection. At first, all he can think of is the happier moments earlier when the three of them were singing along with soul crooner Luther Vandross. From then on, every thought that occurs to him relates to sound, which eventually circle back to the scene with his friends. The structure isn’t immediately obvious, but it is ultimately very simple. The passages about the friends alternate with passages featuring the musings about sounds. The latter function like bridges between the choruses of the former.

The reader may be taken aback by the nature of the sound imagery. Examples include the sounds of church fires and “a skull that only a sharecropper’s daughter can make sing.” Obviously, Hayes is evoking images from the battles over Jim Crow and civil rights. However, one doesn’t get the sense that he’s laying it on in the service of any kind of personal self-aggrandizement. If anything, he’s doing the opposite. Bringing it up in the context of a drunken reverie makes it come across as a poke at the narrator's pretentiousness in bringing it up at all. The feeling of absurdity is only enhanced by the narrator's plans to do his aural explorations as a hypothetical employee of the--brace oneself--"African American Acoustic and Audiological Insurance Institute." There’s an irksome pomposity to bourgeois African-Americans polishing the talismans of bygone oppressions, particularly those they only know vicariously. Hayes seems to recognize how ridiculous that behavior can be. Anyway, everything comes back to the narrator’s relationship with his friends, and that is ultimately what’s important. Sounds may evoke the symbols of history, but they also stand in for mundane personal experiences. It’s the latter that always stays with one the most.

Movie Review: Bright Star

Jane Campion’s treatment of the love affair between Fanny Brawne and the great Romantic poet John Keats occasionally comes to imaginative life. Overall, though, it isn't much more than a mild, rather dreary historical romance.

Bright Star, written and directed by Jane Campion, is at its best in its happy moments. A Romantic spirit suffuses bits like John Keats (Ben Whishaw) basking cheerfully atop a tree, or Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) lying in bliss as a sunny breeze blows a window’s sheer curtains over her. There’s a charming slapstick scene featuring Keats and Fanny walking with her prepubescent sister (Edie Martin). The couple walks behind the younger girl, holding hands and kissing, but every time she looks back, they immediately separate. Their moving away from each other becomes increasingly theatrical, and they ultimately freeze into human statues whenever the sister turns. And Campion comes up with a wonderfully magic moment to illustrate how inspired Fanny was by Keats’ famously passionate letters to her. She and her sister begin a butterfly farm in their bedroom, and one stares in wonder at the scene with Fanny, her sister, and her mother (Kerry Fox) talking while the colorful insects flutter around them.

But these moments are fleeting; the butterflies are no sooner introduced than their corpses are swept into a dustbin. The (chaste) romance between Fanny and Keats was a doomed one. They met when she was 18 and he was 23, and he was dead from tuberculosis at the age of 25. Campion’s take on the material--she based her script on the relevant portions of Andrew Motion’s gargantuan 1998 biography of Keats--is grubbily naturalistic, with an emphasis on dreariness. The film isn’t boring--the individual scenes are intelligently written and reasonably well crafted, and the story moves along at a decent pace. But Fanny and Keats aren’t especially vivid characters, and Campion appears more interested in recreating the period than anything else. Her knack for poster imagery occasionally gets the better of her--there are shots of flowery meadows that are suitable for framing--but, in general, she seems to want to impress the audience with gritty realism. Her vision of England circa 1820 is long on rain, mud, and gloomy interiors, and she manages to get in a few scenes that highlight London’s squalor as well.

Campion isn’t especially true to the setting, though. The actual Fanny and Keats had fairly active social lives, but judging from the film, one would think they were living in relative isolation on the English countryside. There is an early ball scene, with Fanny having a full dance card, but afterward, she is never shown having any suitors. As for Keats, apart from his relationship with Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider), his housemate and benefactor, he seems a friendless recluse. The romance seems to blossom by default. The inattention to the social milieu also leads to some discordant moments later in the film. When Fanny’s mother tells her that her relationship with Keats has become a source of gossip among their neighbors, one has no idea who the mother is talking about. And after Keats develops tuberculosis, a gaggle of friends repeatedly show up to discuss raising funds in order to send him to more healthy climes in Italy. One sits there wondering who these people are, and why the film hasn’t introduced them earlier.

The picture is relentlessly low-key, and it fails the most basic test for a fictional treatment of historical figures: Would anyone be interested in these people without any prior knowledge of who they were? One appreciates the challenge Campion faced in taking this material on. Writers are difficult characters to dramatize. They tend to be sedentary, introverted workaholics--hardly the stuff of an engaging movie. Other filmmakers have tried to solve the problem by getting overtly fanciful with the writers’ lives. Shakespeare in Love, the most successful example, used the writing and initial performance of Romeo and Juliet as the basis for a rich farce. Another recent effort, Becoming Jane, reimagined an episode from Jane Austen’s life as the sort of narrative one would find in her novels. Campion significantly departs from the facts of Keats and Brawne’s lives just once, and even that seems half-hearted. After being told of Keats’ death, Fanny hacks off her hair and, in a near-catatonic reverie, wanders the wintry countryside reciting a sonnet he wrote for her. It’s part Sylvia Plath and part Emily Brontë, and it’s an uninspired fizzle.

One might think that Campion would have tried to build a counterpoint between Keats’ poetry and the events of the story, but the poems are used in a way that suggests Campion had to be reminded to include them. Ben Whishaw occasionally reads lines from the poems in voiceover, but it never adds anything to the scenes. Fanny and Keats intently read stanzas of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” to each other, which makes little sense given that Fanny is repeatedly shown to find poetry baffling. The initial use of “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art,” the sonnet Keats wrote in Fanny’s honor, is laughably redundant; Keats recites the line “Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast” with--that’s right--his head nestled in Fanny’s bosom. Whishaw delivers a fine reading of “Ode to a Nightingale” over the closing credits, but the placement makes it seem like an afterthought.

The cast is largely unmemorable. Ben Whishaw’s Keats and Abbie Cornish’s Fanny are notable mostly for their physical contrast: he’s sallow and frail, while she’s robustly healthy and plush-figured. Whishaw and Cornish are capable actors, but the characters aren’t developed enough to be particularly compelling. Kerry Fox and Edie Martin are piquant as the mother and sister; one only wishes Campion had given them something to do. The only performer who makes a strong impression is Paul Schneider. Unfortunately, though, the impression he makes the wrong kind. Charles Brockden Brown is written as a comic boor, but Schneider is far more boorish than comic. Every time I heard that booming voice of his, I sat there clenching my teeth waiting for him to leave. Worse, Campion seems oblivious to how bullying a presence he is in his scenes; she needed to tone him down, and she often makes him even more overbearing. An extended rant in which he berates himself for failing to do right by Keats would have been too much under any circumstances; Campion has him yell it over the sound of a squalling baby.

Looking at the ads for Bright Star, I’ve been struck by their similarity to those for the Twilight movies. The male protagonists are wan, gaunt, and vaguely Byronic, and the women are both earthy, unidealized beauties. Twilight’s hook is that the vampire hero loves the heroine too much to give in to his lust for her blood. (Is there any question as to the metaphor there?) It has been derided as abstinence porn, and Bright Star has this quality as well. An air of unrequited desire hangs over the film, with Campion putting an exclamation point on it in Keats and Fanny’s last scene together. She offers to have sex with him the night before he leaves for Italy, which he refuses out of, as he says, “conscience.” Bright Star seems tailor-made for audiences who get the appeal of Twilight , but wouldn’t be caught dead watching a teenage vampire movie. So they’ll happily go to Campion’s flat historical love story instead. It isn’t imaginative enough to confuse them, and it’s about a great writer, so it must be serious. Essentially, Bright Star is Twilight for pretentious middlebrows. Personally, I’d rather reread Keats.

Comics Review: José Muñoz & Carlos Sampayo, Billie Holiday

Billed as “The story of America’s greatest and most tragic jazz singer,” this short graphic novel reads more like a modernist elegy for her. Unfortunately, it is one that remembers her more for the pathos of her life than her music.



Click here to purchase Billie Holiday from Powell’s Books. The book is out-of-print from the publisher, so copies may not be available at all times.



It is hard to think of a medium more unsuited to a story treatment of a musical figure than comics. Narrative cartooning isn’t a textual medium so much as it is a dramatic one; the characters in comic strips and graphic novels have far more in common with the performers in theater and film than they do with writers’ prose descriptions. A cartoonist can show a singer performing, but it is impossible to evoke the tone of the vocals or the cadence of the delivery.

However, that hasn’t stopped cartoonists from trying, and some have even succeeded to a degree. One example is Robert Crumb, whose biographical strips of figures like Charlie Patton strongly evoke the milieu from which the musicians’ work emerged. Another is Bill Sienkiewicz, whose flamboyantly hallucinatory treatment of Jimi Hendrix’s life was an extremely apt analogue to the visionary rock guitarist’s music.

I had hopes for José Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo’s short (49-page) Billie Holiday graphic novel, first published in 1991. Muñoz’s flair for noir atmosphere, urban settings, and tellingly grotesque visual characterizations is ideal for the ‘30s and ‘40s New York nightlife in which Billie Holiday came to prominence. His expressionistic genius for dramatizing alienation seemed a natural for evoking the hauntingly spare quality of her singing. Sampayo’s scriptwriting can be erratic, but he provides his collaborator with a suitable springboard more often than not.

Part of what makes Billie Holiday a letdown is that Muñoz isn’t the dominant partner this time out. The art here is extremely reserved. Muñoz’s skill is obvious; his staging, compositions, and orchestration of black and white are immaculate. However, the intensity one sees in the Joe’s Bar and later Alack Sinner material is rarely found. The art is elegant rather than expressive; it asks to be admired instead of felt. The singing scenes--Holiday is shown performing “Fine and Mellow” and “Lover Man”--are especially disappointing; they’re little more than a collection of mannered chiaroscuro head shots. Muñoz doesn’t dramatize the script so much as decorate it.

And it is not a good script. Sampayo doesn’t seem particularly interested in Holiday’s life as a singer. His focus is not on Holiday the performer so much as it is Holiday the victim. One episode after another emphasizes the pathos of her life. We see Holiday the teenage prostitute. (One john tells her, “I got the biggest equipment north o’ Mississippi; you gonna remember me.”) We see the Holiday who suffered horribly abusive lovers, including one who drives her to a remote area, orders her to strip, beats her, and then burns her clothes before stranding her. We see the Holiday who was harassed by police, most notably her infamous arrest on drug charges while on her hospital deathbed. There’s the heroin, the liquor, and the racism. Sampayo has always had an appetite for melodramatic sensationalism, and he uses Holiday’s life to gorge on it.

He tries to be artful about it, though. The script intersperses the episodes featuring Holiday with present-day (1989) scenes that alternate between Alack Sinner, Muñoz and Sampayo’s recurring private-eye character, and an entertainment journalist who is writing a story about Holiday for the thirtieth anniversary of her death. The journalist is a smug, yuppie ass who has never heard of Holiday before receiving the assignment. Sinner, on the other hand, is haunted by his two encounters with Holiday when she was alive, the first when he was a child and the second as a young police officer. The structure is a basic modernist exercise in building a story through the juxtaposition of perspectives. Sampayo contrasts the person who doesn’t remember Holiday at all with a man who remembers her more than he perhaps should. The two of them are further juxtaposed with Holiday herself. The device offers no insight into anything. It only serves to dampen the garishness of the Holiday scenes and give the book an elegiac tone.

Part of me wonders if the script was originally intended for a television or screen treatment of Holiday’s life. That would explain why the singing scenes are so unimaginatively handled, and why others seem designed for Holiday’s recordings to be used on the soundtrack as a counterpoint to the action. (This is especially the case with her most famous recording, “Strange Fruit.” The book gives the reader a great deal of build-up to the song, but there’s no follow-through.) Oddly enough, it might also explain why the Sinner character is featured. There’s no good reason him to be specifically used in the role he’s given. An original character would have worked at least as well, and it wouldn’t have seemed arbitrary--the only apparent reason for Sinner’s presence is to create a link between this book and Muñoz and Sampayo’s other work. But whatever the script’s origins, its biggest failing is that it hasn’t made for good comics. Apart from the shallowness of its content, it plays to almost none of the medium’s strengths. If anything, it only highlights the medium’s weaknesses. Muñoz does a handsome job of illustrating it, but for a reader, that shouldn’t be enough.

Note: The book’s back cover features a quote from jazz critic Stanley Crouch’s afterword that appears to be a testimonial. This is misleading. The “Billie Holiday” referred to in the quote is the singer, not the book. Crouch’s afterword is an essay reflecting on Holiday’s life and legacy; there is no mention of Muñoz and Sampayo’s story anywhere in it.

Other reviews of José Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo’s work (click to read):

• The Alack Sinner Stories


• The Joe’s Bar Stories

Comics Review: R. Crumb, The Book of Genesis

The master cartoonist's long-awaited Biblical adaptation is finally here, and it is a stodgy, repetitive effort--one that suggests the graphic novel is beyond his creative capacities.



The Book of Genesis, illustrated by R. Crumb, is available for sale at Powell's Books. Click here to purchase.


Robert Crumb is undeniably one of our greatest cartoonists. Before him, the best comics artists--for example, Winsor McCay, Harvey Kurtzman, and Charles Schulz--were commercial entertainers before they were anything else. They always produced their work with one eye on the audience. If they had to make a choice between following their muse and alienating their readers, concern for their readers always won out. Crumb was the first to embrace the Romantic ideal of the artist. Following his muse was paramount, with self-expression and art for art’s sake the highest goals. There were no limits on subject matter with Crumb. And he has used his freedom to develop a satirical eye and command of nuance that is unmatched by any of his peers. Each new Crumb strip has been an event for readers for over four decades now.

Ironically, it has always been a challenge to recommend work by him to those unfamiliar with his œuvre. Most people need to get acclimated before being confronted with his more extreme material. There is also the problem of format. Crumb has always embraced the increasingly anachronistic magazine format for comics; he doesn’t like thinking about his work in graphic-novel terms. (He once said the thought of the work involved in producing a book-length effort was enough to make him physically ill.) My usual solution has been to refer people to the Kafka for Beginners book he produced with writer David Zane Mairowitz. The underlying material is familiar to most readers to at least some degree, and Crumb keeps his excesses in check. Most importantly, his earthy, anxious artwork is very much at home with the adaptations of Kafka excerpts, dramatizations of the writer’s life, and satirical pokes at Kafka’s contemporary readership. My only reservation in recommending it is that Crumb was perhaps a bit too sympathetic to Kafka’s work. A great adaptation would have had the two’s sensibilities at odds to a degree; it would provide a great reading of both Kafka and Crumb as artists.

The Book of Genesis, when it was announced as a work-in-progress a few years back, was promoted as the magnum opus we have never gotten from Crumb. When considered relative to the Kafka effort, it promised to duplicate that book’s strengths and transcend its shortcomings. Described as a comprehensive adaptation of the Biblical material, the Genesis project would be a book-length effort. The material would make it accessible beyond the coterie of Crumb’s readership. And best of all, it promised the enlightening discords readers didn’t get from Crumb’s handling of Kafka. The thought of Crumb’s trenchantly satirical perspective illuminating this hoariest of ancient texts was irresistible. One hoped for the pot at the end of the artistic rainbow: a rich, defining statement from a great contemporary talent, and a brilliantly irreverent reading of a monolithic cultural touchstone. One anticipated a work that could redefine one's view of both artist and subject.

Well, the book has now been published, and it is a strong reminder of the truism that one should never get one's hopes up in the arts. Anyone expecting an imaginative retelling of the Biblical material, or an inspired effort from Crumb, isn't going to find it here. In his introduction, Crumb writes, "I approached this as a straight illustration job, with no intention to ridicule or make visual jokes." He can say that again. His treatment of the material is grindingly literal-minded. It is barren of any hint of satire or irony. In short, it is a plodding, R-rated Classics Illustrated handling of the Biblical text. Crumb often isn't even in especially good form visually.

Crumb's timidity in imposing his point of view on the material goes beyond eschewing any satirical approach. He won't even give it his own narrative rhythms. One of the pleasures of Crumb's work is the loose, open pacing he employs; combined with his incomparable eye for detail, it gives his work a lifelike texture that few cartoonists can duplicate. However, in Genesis, he doesn't allow scenes to play out and find their own shape. Instead, he largely adopts the monotonous, illustrated-text approach of Prince Valiant cartoonist Harold Foster. A snippet of narration is accompanied by a panel that largely repeats the same information. No thought has been given to using the text as a counterpoint to the images. The dialogue scenes aren't much different. Talking heads and indifferently posed figures tediously expound at one another. Crumb's usually acute dramatic sense largely abandons him. He grossly overuses manic-eyed, raised-hair expressions for dramatic emphasis, numbing whatever effect they might have had if they had been used more sparingly. The rare, reasonably well-dramatized scene, such as Tamar's seduction of Judah in Chapter 38, isn't enjoyable so much as it is a relief from the rest of book's dramatically repetitive tedium.

The individual drawings aren't especially interesting, either. Crumb's figure drawing is frequently desultory, and his treatment of the character's faces is often hackneyed. He makes an effort to individualize the men's faces, but the refusal to shape the scenes dramatically makes the characters largely indistinguishable from another. In one chapter, he models a trio of brothers after the Three Stooges, and it barely registers. The female characters fare even worse. The most prominent ones, including Eve, Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel, all look like Crumb's Devil Girl. Crumb's vision of God is a retread of the Michelangelo cliché of the stern, robust old man with a long, flowing beard. The one character I was really looking forward to seeing Crumb's treatment of was the Garden of Eden's serpent. It's a letdown; Crumb makes the character an indifferently drawn rehash of one of Wallace Wood or Mark Schultz's lizard people.

The drawing is probably at its most interesting when Crumb models it after the work of one of his idols, Pieter Breughel the Elder. Crumb frequently falls back on Breughel imagery when the text requires him to illustrate the more abstract verses. However, even that wears out its welcome. One can take only so many images of unidealized peasants tilling the land, or herding livestock, or sitting down at communal gatherings before the sight has one's eyes sliding off the page.

The overwhelming problem with Genesis is that Crumb doesn't seem to have thought it through as a dramatic piece. The scenes are not played off each other for dramatic effect, and he doesn't imagine the characters as distinct, idiosyncratic personalities whose interactions are greater than the sum of the parts. He just seems to have illustrated each verse, one after the other, without any consideration as to how they might contribute to a larger whole. The refusal to see the project as a challenge in terms of orchestrating dramatic choices led him to repetitiously wallow in hackneyed treatments of the material, with most of the clichés of his own making. One is hard-pressed to call Genesis a lazy effort; producing it took five years of Crumb's life, with the effort apparent in every intensively cross-hatched panel. But it comes across as more of a test of his artistic endurance than an opportunity to expand his creative range. Perhaps he was right to once feel physically ill at the prospect of having to produce a book-length effort. The problem, though, has proved not to be the amount of work that would need completion; it's that he's not up to the creative challenges such a project entails. I should emphasize that there's no shame in being only a master of short pieces, as Crumb most assuredly is. I love Alice Munro and Ernest Hemingway's work, but I've never been that taken with their novels, either.

Comics Review: Alan Moore & Bill Sienkiewicz, Big Numbers 3

A bootleg version of the third chapter of the legendary unfinished graphic novel has surfaced--and leaves one even more wistful over the promise of what might have been.

Big Numbers 3 has never been published in print format. Jpegs of the "bootleg" version can be seen by clicking here.

The unfinished works of exceptional artists always hold a special fascination for their audiences. If one is captivated by what is there, one can’t help but wonder about the glory of what didn’t see completion. Michelangelo’s Tomb of Pope Julius II, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood--these are but some of the treasures that were never fully realized. In the book Beyond Life, the fantasy writer James Branch Cabell put forward the idea of a library “contain[ing] the cream of unwritten books—the masterpieces that were planned and never carried through.” Cabell’s imaginary library is one that any lover of the arts would revel in visiting.

The prize of that library’s comics shelves would undoubtedly be Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz’s unfinished graphic novel from the early 1990s, Big Numbers.

Moore and Sienkiewicz were arguably the most accomplished talents working in adventure comics in the 1980s. Moore’s scriptwriting on books like Watchmen showed an insight, imagination, and command of narrative craft that could hold its own with the best that contemporary film and prose fiction had to offer. To paraphrase one reviewer, Moore brought adventure comics as close as they would ever get to literature, and he came closer than anyone could have guessed. As for Sienkiewicz, he had evolved from an attractive though derivative illustrator to the most visually audacious cartoonist working. In Elektra: Assassin and Daredevil: Love and War, both scripted by Frank Miller, he brought the Neo-Expressionist aesthetic to adventure comics. Eclecticism reigned, and whatever style or medium he considered most effective in rendering a scene was what was used. A collaboration between these two promised to be a spectacular piece of work.

The premise of Big Numbers only raised expectations. Using the tenets of chaos theory as a guide, it would dramatize the impact of a U.S.-style shopping mall being built in a British Midlands community. The book was to be modeled on literary fiction; the fantasy and adventure trappings of Moore and Sienkiewicz’s previous work would not be present. It was hard to escape the impression that the authors saw their previous efforts as belonging to an artistic stage they had outgrown. This statement on modern life was part of a new, more mature phase in their work. Judging from Moore’s statements in interviews, he saw the projected 500-page work as his magnum opus.

Two installments encompassing 80 pages were published in 1990. Moore introduced readers to a wide range of characters in a series of deftly written scenes that were frequently humorous and melancholy all at once. Sienkiewicz dramatized Moore’s script in a nuanced, elegantly naturalistic style that largely relied on subtly toned pencil renderings. There was no sensationalism in Moore’s scripting and minimal hyperbole in Sienkiewicz’s art. This was a work of literary fiction conceived in comics form, and one couldn’t wait to see how it would develop and turn out.

No further installments were published. Sienkiewicz, who reportedly felt overwhelmed and constricted by the massive detail in Moore’s scripts, lost interest in the project and abandoned it. Al Columbia, who assisted Sienkiewicz on the first two installments, was hired to take over, but he lost interest as well, and it is believed that he destroyed the pages he completed. Sienkiewicz did finish the art for the third installment, but after Columbia gave up on the book, the decision was made not to publish it. In the years since, ten random, unlettered pages from the third issue were printed in a couple of magazines, and Moore’s script for it was published online. But despite its availability, the prospect of looking at the disparate, incomplete material for the third issue was off-putting; it seemed like eating a dish by consuming the ingredients separately, with a number of them missing or in the wrong proportions.

Bill Sienkiewicz's original, unlettered page 12 for Big Numbers 3.

However, this past March, the complete and lettered third installment showed up on the Internet. Someone who possessed a full set of Sienkiewicz’s pages for the issue lettered them using Moore’s online script as a guide. [Note: This may not be exactly the case; please see the comments.] The pages were sold to Moore scholar Pádraig Ó Méalóid, and with Moore’s permission, this “bootleg” version of Big Numbers 3 was posted on livejournal.com. The presentation is not ideal: Sienkiewicz’s rich pencil rendering is covered with mechanical tone, and the pages’ appearance suggests that they began as faxed proofs of the original art. But as cheesy as they look, the pages are readable. The sauce may be a supermarket-shelf generic instead of gourmet, but the food underneath is still first-rate. Sienkiewicz’s intentions for the art are apparent, and one finds Moore’s narrative becoming increasingly sophisticated. Big Numbers will never see completion, but the achievement of this third installment is impressive, and it is easily one of the key comics of the year.

The "bootleg" lettered version of page 12.

Moore maintains the easygoing pace seen in the first two chapters. He and Sienkiewicz again invite the reader to relax with the characters, and the nuanced understatement of the panels, despite their unfortunate surface appearance, still compels the reader to lose oneself in them. The craft on display in the third installment is just as remarkable as that in the first two. The detailed visuals reinforce the languorous rhythms, but Moore never falls into the trap of letting the scenes meander on aimlessly. Every single one is structured to end on a pointedly ironic note. The structure and detail in the scenes play off each other wonderfully, and one again finds oneself caught up in the lives of the numerous characters.

The third installment remains guided by the view of human interaction that informed the scenes in the first two chapters. Every person is regarded as an idiosyncratic entity, with those idiosyncrasies finding expression in routines and behavioral patterns. Alienation, which defines virtually every relationship Moore depicts to some degree, results from those patterns meeting, coming into conflict with each other, and creating tension. People then either retreat from one another, or they fall back on routines intended to bring the tension level down, such as making jokes or following through on courtesies. Moore apparently sees behavioral constants as the means through which people impose order on the uncertainty of their lives.

However, Moore doesn’t become complacent in his depiction of the characters’ interactions. The third chapter highlights that a key aspect of people’s dealings with one another is reductionism. We cope with our experience of other people--particularly in new encounters and peripheral relationships--by reducing each other to stereotypes. In keeping with Big Numbers’ roots in mathematical theory, one might say that people respond to complex input by simplifying it into a more easily processed form. This has its obvious bad points and its less obvious good ones. The bad is that it leads to prejudice and bigotry. The good is that it allows for more pointed and confident interactions with each other.

That said, the chapter is at its most enjoyable when Moore emphasizes the absurdity that reductionism creates. A recurring scene features a young welfare clerk sitting at her vegetative husband’s hospital bedside: she's good-naturedly--although haplessly--trying to fill out a shopping-mall marketing survey on his behalf. The mall’s American personnel--including its architect, managers, and marketing supervisor--are shown making complete asses of themselves while trying to ingratiate themselves with the Midlands locals; all they do is repeat one boorish stereotype of British people after another. The marketing supervisor, in particular, is so obliviously obnoxious in his prejudices that every scene featuring him is a comedic gem. One also sees some sharp satiric ideas from Moore, such as the role-playing game the architect’s teenage children are product-testing. It’s called “Real Life,” and the first three things the kids determine in setting up the game characters are their race, gender, and economic class.

Nearly everything in the chapter emphasizes the process of reductionism found in contemporary life. There are the marketing surveys and canvassers that nearly every character is confronted with; the goal is reduce each and every one of them to a marketing profile. People are presented to the public through photographs. A local author participates in the effort to turn her life into column inches for a local newspaper. That same writer is hard at work on a novel, another distillation of life into the two dimensions of the printed page. Reductionism, though, is difficult for her; she writes of a character, “It was very hard to sum her up,” and feels blocked.

The chapter’s most memorable scene depicts a teenage boy explaining the chaos-theory concept of two-and-a-half dimensions to his depressed father. A piece of paper is two dimensions, and a ball is three. However, if one crumples the paper into a ball, it’s no longer a two-dimensional object, but it’s not quite a three-dimensional one, either. The father is intrigued, and the boy describes the second-and-a half dimension as “like a new planet” and a place to go on holiday. The crumpled paper--the image of which is used for the chapter’s splash page--is a metaphor for a new way of thinking about the way we relate to others; it illustrates the possibility of a middle ground between the overwhelming input of human interaction and the reductionist approach people rely on to manage it. Judging from this scene, happiness in dealing with others may be found in a synthesis between the facile stereotyping perspective people rely on and an impossible all-encompassing one. Moore's metaphor suggests that there may be a way beyond the alienation that defines contemporary life.

One will never see how Moore might have expanded on that idea. Judging from his other work, it’s impossible to believe he had done more than just scratch its surface. The opening chapters of his From Hell and Watchmen are compelling, but no one could guess those works’ ultimate richness from those chapters alone. The same would have been all but undoubtedly true of Big Numbers. The third chapter brings a fuller understanding of what was lost by the failure to complete more than a quarter of the book. The failure is beyond a disappointment; it’s about as close to an artistic tragedy as one can imagine. But even so, it does not overwhelm the pleasure of going over the 120 completed pages again and again. Even in truncated (and partially adulterated) form, they are dazzling in their wit, craft, and artistry. The knowledge that this beautifully realized and possibly very wise work will never see completion makes Big Numbers perhaps the most bittersweet effort comics will ever know.

Reviews of other works by Alan Moore (click title to read):

• Batman: The Killing Joke


• Big Numbers 1 & 2


• Miracleman


• Superman: For the Man Who Has Everything


• Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?


• Swamp Thing, Book 1: Saga of the Swamp Thing


• Swamp Thing, Book 2: Love and Death


• Swamp Thing, Book 3: The Curse & Book 4: A Murder of Crows


• Swamp Thing, Book 5: Earth to Earth & Book 6: Reunion

In Memoriam: Ted Kennedy (1932-2009)

I knew when the brain cancer was announced last year that Senator Kennedy would not be with us much longer, but the news this morning still came as a shock. Kennedy was one of the rare larger-than-life figures in U.S. politics, and it is hard to believe that he is now gone.

One can easily find a detailed list of his legislative accomplishments on the news Web site of one’s choice. Television today will certainly be dominated by remembrances and testimonials. As for me, I would like to recount the four things I will always admire him for.

The first is his presidential candidacy in 1980. Kennedy and then-President Carter were both Democrats, but when faced with an ineffectual leader who was unsympathetic to his political vision, Kennedy did the right thing: he mounted a primary challenge. It was something I wish we would see far more of. An elected official should always have to answer to his or her constituents, and that should never be trumped by questions of party loyalty. To those who claim that Kennedy’s challenge cost Carter reelection and opened the door to Reagan, my response is to study the history more closely. Reagan did not lead in the polls until after the debate between him and Carter. He was also dogged by the third-party candidacy of John Anderson, a rival for the GOP nomination. Anderson ended up getting nearly seven percent of the popular vote, and in a normal political year, that would have sent Reagan down in flames. Carter’s loss was Carter’s loss. All Kennedy did was admirably act on a basic principle of representative government.

Kennedy’s greatest moment for me was his leading the charge against the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork. A crank who had shown himself to be an unprincipled toady during the Watergate scandal, Bork never should have been allowed on the federal judiciary in the first place. Stopping his ascendancy to the Supreme Court was of paramount importance. An hour after the nomination was announced, Kennedy delivered an incendiary speech denouncing Bork. He demanded, in no uncertain terms, that the Democratic Party stand foursquare against the nomination for the good of the country. Which they did, and Bork’s nomination was defeated. Kennedy’s actions were a textbook study in political leadership: Take a stand on principle, and define the debate on one’s own terms.

The defeat of Robert Bork will always be the triumph I most admire, but his “Where Was George?” speech at the 1988 Democratic Convention will always be the moment I most enjoy. It was a hilarious, masterly delivered polemic about George Bush the Elder’s evasions about his involvement in the Reagan Administration’s litany of scandals. The best tribute to the speech I can think of is to show it, but it is unfortunately not available online. It was brilliant in its simplicity. Kennedy recited one Reagan scandal after another, ending his broadside of each with the refrain, “Where was George?” The crowd in the convention hall caught on immediately, and before the speech reached its halfway point, they were reciting the question for him. The evening ended with the question—and accompanying laughter—echoing in one’s brain.

The only downside of this terrific oratory was that it led to Kennedy keeping his political head down after Bush the Elder was elected President. Bush made no secret of how much he resented Kennedy for the speech. Looking back, it is fairly obvious that, for political reasons, the Democratic leadership did not want to antagonize the notoriously thin-skinned Bush by reminding him of it. (Kennedy was heavily involved with the negotiations over the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, but he had to deal with Bush through proxies.) Kennedy exited the political limelight, and other Senators, such as Russ Feingold, Bernie Sanders, and the late Paul Wellstone, eventually assumed the roles of spokespeople for the liberal perspective in the Senate.

But Sanders, Feingold, and Wellstone will always walk in Kennedy’s shadow, and that brings me to the fourth—and most important thing—for which I admire him. He was the standard-bearer for the legacy of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. Sadly, he often found himself fighting a rear-guard action against the efforts of Reagan and the GOP to roll back those programs and their accomplishments. But for all of that, he still managed to extend and refine them in many ways. Examples include the Family and Medical Leave Act, COBRA, and the aforementioned ADA. No one fought harder to make this country work, and not just for the rich, but for the vast majority of its citizens. He once said, “Sometimes a party must sail against the wind.” He did that when circumstances demanded it, and despite opposing winds, he was occasionally able to sail further than any legislator had before.

He was a great leader, and he will always be remembered.

Ted Kennedy, 1932-2009. Rest in Peace.

Fiction Review: Virginia Woolf, "The String Quartet"

"The String Quartet" is featured in Virginia Woolf's short story collection, Monday or Tuesday: Eight Stories. If you are interested in buying a copy of this book, click here to purchase it from Powell's Books.

In “The String Quartet” (1921), Virginia Woolf went beyond simply trying to render the experience of music in stream-of-consciousness terms; she renders the narrator’s state of mind while listening. Along the way, she raises questions about the nature of that experience. Is it aesthetic and recreational, or is it simply a means of escapism? In the end, she answers in favor of the latter. The experience of art has become a respite from the disappointments and alienation of contemporary life.

Woolf begins the story with a string of impressions, much in the way that defined “Monday or Tuesday” and took up the bulk of “An Unwritten Novel.” There’s no rhyme or reason to them from the narrator’s standpoint. She reflects on the various means of transportation to the music recital she is attending, followed by a cataloguing of the minutia of the news and local hubbub: international treaties, the flu this year, the weather. The impressions then shift from a general contemplation of the outside world to the particulars of the scene at the recital. The narrator considers the snippets of small talk around her, and she cannot help but feel that something is lacking. One thing leads to another, but it never seems to end in fulfillment. She muses:

It’s all a matter of flats and hats and sea gulls, or so it seems to be for a hundred people sitting here well dressed, walled in, furred, replete. Not that I can boast, since I too sit passive on a gilt chair, only turning the earth above a buried memory, as we all do, for there are signs, if I’m not mistaken, that we’re all recalling something, furtively seeking something.

The narrator can impose no order on her thoughts, as she has no passion for the moment, and the worthwhile is unknown and beyond her grasp.

But if order cannot come from within, it is found without. The quartet begins their recital, and the narrator gives herself over to the thoughts the music brings to mind. It is romantic imagery she sees, beginning with thoughts of nature and giving way to fantasies of princes and swordfights and chases through the castle. Chatter from the audience disturbs her, but only briefly. She dismisses it. “The tongue is but a clapper,” she thinks. The scene in the recital hall has taken on a new grace:

The feathers in the hat next me are bright and pleasing as a child’s ratthe. The leaf on the plane-tree flashes green through the chink in the curtain. Very strange, very exciting.

The music provides structure, and if the structure is agreeable, everything in the context it provides becomes comfortable. Unfortunately, that structure dissipates once the music is done. When that happens, the narrator’s feelings of alienation and the inadequacy of life assert themselves more strongly than ever.. On the street outside, she passes by someone who asks, “You go this way?” Her reply is a resigned “Alas. I go that.” Her own life holds no promise for her.

One surmises that Woolf’s point may be that while structure is a necessity for a fulfilling life, it has to be a structure rooted in passion; the structure created by a routinized existence simply won’t do. The latter creates a chaos. Alienation is a mindset of rejection; it doesn’t organize or build, and the consequence is experience treated like detritus, a notion that Woolf dramatizes brilliantly in the story’s opening paragraphs. The enjoyment of art in such a context cannot be a celebration of aesthetic achievement. Art has become the escape from modern alienation; it provides the passion-based structure missing from modern daily life.

The challenge for Woolf as an artist is to find a structure that captures both the joy of music and the disappointment of contemporary life. Her solution was an elegant one; she creates a counterpoint between the two. The opening paragraphs render the alienation of the narrator, and they build the reader’s sense of it quite effectively—one moves from the alienation from life in general to alienation from the particulars of the scene at the recital. Then the music comes in, with the narrator’s thoughts developing from Wordsworthian love of nature to the sentimental Pre-Raphaelite fantasies of chivalric life long ago. Romanticism defines her mindset, with her musings taking on a progression that has history’s imprimatur. It is a clever touch by Woolf. If one is going to identify a pattern of wayward thinking with an aesthetic approach, why not have it develop along the same lines as the art? Getting back to the development of the story, Woolf moves from the presentation of the music to directly playing it off the thoughts of alienation; the irritating voices of the other audience members punctuate the narrator’s music-inspired reveries. Most impressively, the reveries transform them. As the narrator puts it, “I say all’s been settled; yes, laid to rest under a coverlet of rose leaves.” And when the fantasies reach their crescendo, the story comes full circle, and the narrator finds herself back in the alienating world away from the melodies. Woolf renders alienation and the escapist power of art by creating a prose symphony that dramatizes both.

“The String Quartet” is modernism at its finest. It captures the experience of modern life, doing so through the dramatization of a single perspective with all its idiosyncrasies on full display. Effects are built more through juxtaposition than traditional cathartic structure; the story’s elements are collaged and orchestrated. I cannot quite bring myself to say that it matches the achievements of her greatest novels, but among her short fiction it definitely stands out.

Other posts discussing Virginia Woolf's writings (click title to read):

• "A Haunted House"


• "Monday or Tuesday" (story)


• "A Society"


• "An Unwritten Novel"

Forthcoming fiction reviews:

• Mohan Sikka, "Uncle Musto Takes a Mistress"


• Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road


• Virginia Woolf, "Blue & Green"


• Jim Shepard, "Sans Farine"


• Virginia Woolf, "Kew Gardens"


• Adam Haslett, "City Visit"