Posts
Monday, July 6, 2009
Of Books and Bicycles on Nabokov's Lectures on Literature
I'm a bit pressed for time--four freelance reviews due by the end of next week--but I wanted to point everyone to Of Books and Bicycles' posts on reading Nabokov's Lectures on Literature. I read parts of his companion book on Russian literature years ago while making my way through Dostoevsky's work. (My then boss recommended it to me when he saw what I was reading, although I'm not sure why. Nabokov didn't think much of Dostoevsky.) In any case, OBAB's observations about Nabokov's approach and attitudes are really good. Click here and here to read.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Literature Review: Virginia Woolf, "An Unwritten Novel"
The text of “An Unwritten Novel,” by Virginia Woolf, can be read by clicking here.
In her best work, Virginia Woolf challenges the reader to reconsider his or her perceptions. She requires one to view familiar things in new ways. These include words, objects, people, and even society’s conventions. In “An Unwritten Novel,” she asks the reader to look in a new way at looking at things in a new way. One is presented with a transformative perspective that doesn’t highlight new aspects of its subjects; it only shows projections of itself. The story dramatizes solipsism.
The narrator is a passenger on a commuter train. At first, she is absorbed in her newspaper, but she finds herself distracted by the faces of the other passengers. She is particularly fascinated by an older woman, whom she calls “Minnie Marsh.” When the train empties out, “Minnie” tries to start a conversation, but the narrator isn’t interested in what she has to say. It goes in one ear and out the other until “Minnie” mentions her sister-in-law. Her contempt for the woman is obvious, and it piques the narrator’s curiosity. But “Minnie” stops talking about her as soon as the narrator shows interest. The narrator’s busybody impulses, though, are too strong not to find another outlet. In her thoughts, she indulges in extremely detailed speculations about “Minnie” and the sister-in-law. These veer into fantasies about “Minnie’s” religious life, and even into possible crimes and past guilt. As the ride continues, the narrator tries to incorporate another passenger (whom she calls “James Moggridge”) into her fantasy scenario about “Minnie.” However, when “Minnie” arrives at her stop, the narrator discovers that her speculations bear no relation to reality, though she can’t help but launch into another round of them based on the new information she finds out.
Near the end, the narrator says of herself, “Life’s bare as a bone.” In Woolf’s view, the narrator’s daydreams are reflective of her own emptiness. She is a completely self-absorbed character. “Minnie’s” efforts to strike up a conversation are fruitless; the narrator lacks the empathy to build a rapport with another person. She is only interested in “Minnie’s” conflicts and what makes the woman upset or uncomfortable. The narrator doesn’t see the world in terms of friendship and other relationships; people exist only for her entertainment. And when they don’t (or won’t) provide it for her, she retreats into daydreams that more than make up for the difference. She is all that exists in her mind; other people are just images to project upon. Her perspective only reveals aspects of herself.
In addition to its insights about the dark side of perspectivism, the story is yet another display of Woolf’s extraordinary sense of craft. It demands that she dramatize the narrator’ state of mind, and she does so through an extremely canny use of pacing effects. As the narrator becomes increasingly absorbed in her daydreams, the flow of words gets faster and more chaotic. At times, the narrator’s speculations take on a rhapsodic quality that occasionally borders on the manic. They are often reminiscent of Henry Miller’s automatist flights in the Tropic novels, but no one should confuse Woolf’s passages with the sort of go-for-broke surrealism that Miller epitomizes. She is as deliberate as he is reckless. The accelerated rhythms are not the result of the author getting carried away; Woolf uses them to render the narrator’s increasingly unrestrained imagination. She creates a crescendo of solipsism’s triumph: the fantasy’s details explode and take over, and their foundation is no longer in view.
The story lays the groundwork for Woolf’s approach in such novels as To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway. “An Unwritten Novel” demands that the reader see narration as a subjective matter--as a reflection of the mindset of the character whose perspective is being presented. “An Unwritten Novel” doesn’t tell us much about “Minnie Marsh” or “James Moggridge.” However, it does tell us a good deal about the narrator. She’s always focused outward, whether it is on the news or her speculations about the lives of “Minnie” and “James”; her own life is always beneath her attention. She doesn’t care about people beyond the opportunities they provide as springboards for her reveries. Her fantasies about others offer no insight; they only dramatize her own imagination. She exemplifies solipsism, and one can consider her the prototype for the characterizations in the above-mentioned novels, which are constructed through juxtapositions of the perspectives of characters who are self-absorbed in their own ways. The novels are symphonies, but they require certain kinds of melodies to give them form. “An Unwritten Novel” is where Woolf first finds the sort of melody that will do.
Other posts discussing Virginia Woolf's writings (click title to read):
Forthcoming fiction reviews:
In her best work, Virginia Woolf challenges the reader to reconsider his or her perceptions. She requires one to view familiar things in new ways. These include words, objects, people, and even society’s conventions. In “An Unwritten Novel,” she asks the reader to look in a new way at looking at things in a new way. One is presented with a transformative perspective that doesn’t highlight new aspects of its subjects; it only shows projections of itself. The story dramatizes solipsism.
The narrator is a passenger on a commuter train. At first, she is absorbed in her newspaper, but she finds herself distracted by the faces of the other passengers. She is particularly fascinated by an older woman, whom she calls “Minnie Marsh.” When the train empties out, “Minnie” tries to start a conversation, but the narrator isn’t interested in what she has to say. It goes in one ear and out the other until “Minnie” mentions her sister-in-law. Her contempt for the woman is obvious, and it piques the narrator’s curiosity. But “Minnie” stops talking about her as soon as the narrator shows interest. The narrator’s busybody impulses, though, are too strong not to find another outlet. In her thoughts, she indulges in extremely detailed speculations about “Minnie” and the sister-in-law. These veer into fantasies about “Minnie’s” religious life, and even into possible crimes and past guilt. As the ride continues, the narrator tries to incorporate another passenger (whom she calls “James Moggridge”) into her fantasy scenario about “Minnie.” However, when “Minnie” arrives at her stop, the narrator discovers that her speculations bear no relation to reality, though she can’t help but launch into another round of them based on the new information she finds out.
Near the end, the narrator says of herself, “Life’s bare as a bone.” In Woolf’s view, the narrator’s daydreams are reflective of her own emptiness. She is a completely self-absorbed character. “Minnie’s” efforts to strike up a conversation are fruitless; the narrator lacks the empathy to build a rapport with another person. She is only interested in “Minnie’s” conflicts and what makes the woman upset or uncomfortable. The narrator doesn’t see the world in terms of friendship and other relationships; people exist only for her entertainment. And when they don’t (or won’t) provide it for her, she retreats into daydreams that more than make up for the difference. She is all that exists in her mind; other people are just images to project upon. Her perspective only reveals aspects of herself.
In addition to its insights about the dark side of perspectivism, the story is yet another display of Woolf’s extraordinary sense of craft. It demands that she dramatize the narrator’ state of mind, and she does so through an extremely canny use of pacing effects. As the narrator becomes increasingly absorbed in her daydreams, the flow of words gets faster and more chaotic. At times, the narrator’s speculations take on a rhapsodic quality that occasionally borders on the manic. They are often reminiscent of Henry Miller’s automatist flights in the Tropic novels, but no one should confuse Woolf’s passages with the sort of go-for-broke surrealism that Miller epitomizes. She is as deliberate as he is reckless. The accelerated rhythms are not the result of the author getting carried away; Woolf uses them to render the narrator’s increasingly unrestrained imagination. She creates a crescendo of solipsism’s triumph: the fantasy’s details explode and take over, and their foundation is no longer in view.
The story lays the groundwork for Woolf’s approach in such novels as To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway. “An Unwritten Novel” demands that the reader see narration as a subjective matter--as a reflection of the mindset of the character whose perspective is being presented. “An Unwritten Novel” doesn’t tell us much about “Minnie Marsh” or “James Moggridge.” However, it does tell us a good deal about the narrator. She’s always focused outward, whether it is on the news or her speculations about the lives of “Minnie” and “James”; her own life is always beneath her attention. She doesn’t care about people beyond the opportunities they provide as springboards for her reveries. Her fantasies about others offer no insight; they only dramatize her own imagination. She exemplifies solipsism, and one can consider her the prototype for the characterizations in the above-mentioned novels, which are constructed through juxtapositions of the perspectives of characters who are self-absorbed in their own ways. The novels are symphonies, but they require certain kinds of melodies to give them form. “An Unwritten Novel” is where Woolf first finds the sort of melody that will do.
Other posts discussing Virginia Woolf's writings (click title to read):
Forthcoming fiction reviews:
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Comics Review: Alan Moore, Rick Veitch, et al, Swamp Thing, Book 5: Earth to Earth & Book 6: Reunion
Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing is widely considered to be one of the best--some claim the best--continuing adventure-comics series of the 1980s. Fortunately for readers, it divides quite neatly into three parts.
In the first third, collected in Books One and Two, Moore moved the feature away from its original self-pitying premise. The Swamp Thing, who was once a research scientist named Alec Holland, abandoned his quest to regain his lost humanity. He accepted and embraced his life as it was, and, at the end of the second book, his friendship with the Abby Cable character blossomed into love. The first two books chronicle the character’s realization of himself as a well-adjusted individual. The second third, known as the “American Gothic” storyline and collected in Books Three and Four, depicts the character’s growth from an individual to a citizen. Moore’s apparent view is that being exclusively preoccupied with one’s own circumstances, no matter how happy they are, is an inadequate engagement with life. One must recognize that one embodies a part that contributes to the whole of society, and that one has an obligation to make both the part and the whole as good as one can. The episodes have Swamp Thing encounter the various evils of human existence--racism, sexism, and environmental pollution, among others--and each contributed to the lesson that one cannot push evil away and compartmentalize it. The dangers it presents can only be minimized with direct engagement. One must also recognize that it is as much a part of any situation as the good.
The final third, which comprises Books Five and Six, is harder to pin down thematically. At times, Moore seems to be using Swamp Thing to tell modern, small-scale fantasy versions of the Trojan War and the Odyssey. At others, he seems to want to explore the responsibilities of being a god. It is hard to tell, though, as Moore repeatedly touches on these ideas and then backs away from them. He drops them entirely at points. This is not to say the collections are poor reads. Moore’s extraordinary sense of craft rarely falters, and the characterizations of Swamp Thing and Abby Cable remain vivid. However, Books Five and Six lack the richness of their predecessors. Moore doesn’t seem to have a strong sense of where he wants to go; it is hard to escape the feeling that he is coasting. Book Five starts out with a bang, though. A subplot involving Abby in Book Four takes center stage. Her relationship with Swamp Thing has come to the attention of the local authorities, and she is arrested for breaking the laws against bestiality. The case becomes a media circus, Abby loses her job, and she becomes a pariah in the Louisiana community in which she lives. Disgusted by the way she is treated, she jumps bail and flees to Gotham City. (Swamp Thing is published by DC Comics, and it takes place in the same narrative universe as Batman and Superman.) The police there arrest Abby by mistake, but before they release her, they receive a fugitive warrant from Louisiana. Swamp Thing returns from the “American Gothic” adventure just as she is about to face an extradition hearing. Now possessed of a god-like power to control the world’s vegetation, he demands Abby’s release and declares war on Gotham after they refuse. What follows is one of the most spectacular might-makes-right battles over a woman in all of storytelling. Agamemnon, Menelaus, and the fleet of a thousand ships are nothing compared to Swamp Thing.
The war on the city is awesomely imagined. Swamp Thing has vegetation overwhelm the city in a way that gives the term “urban jungle” a whole new meaning. (Picture the Manhattan of the film I Am Legend a few centuries down the road, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what is done to Gotham.) As things progress, he ups the ante, such as heightening the vegetation’s scent to bring a plague of insects down on the city. Needless to say, Batman launches an offensive against Swamp Thing at one point, and he gets put in his place as well.
The drama matches the spectacle. One sympathizes with Swamp Thing’s anger over the small-mindedness and bureaucratic obstacles that keep Abby from him, but one also respects the city’s refusal to turn her over. Their view is that they can’t just circumvent the law and acquiesce to what amounts to terrorism, despite their doubts that Abby’s relationship with Swamp Thing was somehow criminal. And Moore goes out of his way to make the reader uneasy about Swamp Thing’s actions. He draws explicit parallels between Swamp Thing’s war on Gotham and the destructive, self-righteous rampage of the Woodrue character in Book One. He also emphasizes that Swamp Thing’s actions don’t really solve anything. Abby is freed only after a legal argument successfully points out the absurdity of the crime with which she was charged. (The argument is hilariously witty, and one of the highlights of the book.) Moore also points out that what goes around comes around. Federal agents use the occasion of Abby’s release to ambush Swamp Thing, and they nearly destroy him.
It’s at this point that the material seems to drift. Moore has Swamp Thing find himself far from home after the attack, and the remainder of the episodes are divided up between Abby’s life without him, and his adventures while trying to make his way back to her. (If the Gotham City section was Swamp Thing’s Trojan War, these are his Odyssey.) The episodes are well-crafted in themselves, but they don’t build up any momentum; they often feel as if Moore was just marking time until his run was complete. He gives us an entire episode written from inside Abby’s grief over Swamp Thing’s apparent death, which is a cheat considering that Swamp Thing isn’t dead. Illustrators Stephen Bissette and Rick Veitch each script an episode in Moore’s stead that add nothing to the overall. The only notable thing about Swamp Thing’s version of the Great Wanderings is that they begin with his Island of Calypso rather than end there. The most interesting aspect of the latter episodes are the supporting characters Moore introduces to Abby’s life, but he develops them only to kick them to the curb in his finale.
The feeling that Moore’s attention is wavering becomes quite conspicuous in the next-to-last episode. Those who remember the Odyssey know that Homer spent a good deal of time building suspense in preparation for Odysseus’ final battle with his wife’s suitors, the battle he needed to win in order to reclaim his throne and make his homecoming complete. Swamp Thing’s final battle with his enemies, specifically his revenge on the federal agents who ambushed him in Gotham, is nowhere as developed. It feels rushed, and parts of it seem truncated, as if scenes had to be cut in order to fit it into one issue.
Alan Moore and Swamp Thing wave good-bye to each other. From Swamp Thing, Book 6: Reunion. Art by Tom Yeates, colored by Tatjana Wood. Copyright 1987, 2003 DC Comics.
The final episode is a shambles. Upon their reunion, Moore has Swamp Thing and Abby decide to abandon the outside world completely, which is a betrayal of the themes of engagement and responsibility that have driven the entire preceding series. Swamp Thing considers whether his capacity to end famine and hunger means he has a responsibility to do so, and he decides it isn’t his problem. One can’t help but feel that Moore is running away from the moral implications of what he has presented before. Moore’s sense of craft also seems to fail him. He frames the episode around having a stand-in for himself bid Swamp Thing good-bye, but he doesn’t integrate it with the main narrative line. He also doesn’t do much to develop the metafictional conceit of giving himself a role in the story. One would only realize the character was a stand-in for Moore if one knows what he looks like in real life. And if one doesn’t recognize him, the scenes featuring the character make little sense. The episode is an extremely disappointing conclusion to Moore’s run.
However, a bad final chapter certainly doesn’t undermine the entire series. Most of the disappointments of Books Five and Six come from considering them relative to what has come before. A similar dynamic affects one’s appreciation of the work of cartoonist/penciller Rick Veitch and inker Alfredo Alcala, who take over from Stephen Bissette and John Totleben. Veitch lacks Bissette’s intensity and command of detail, and Alcala’s rendering is nowhere as nuanced as Totleben’s, but the work is perfectly fine when considered on its own terms.
And that is ultimately what one comes away with. Even with its flaws, Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing was perhaps the most humane and morally conscientious superhero series ever published. Books Five and Six are no exception. Moore may flirt here with questions about the responsibilities of godhood, and he may ultimately turn his back on the theme of the moral necessity of engagement with the world. But he never abandons the emotional heart of the material found in Abby and Swamp Thing’s relationship. One can fault him for not staying true to his themes in these closing episodes, but he always stays true to his characters. The moralist gives way to the storyteller, and if one has to choose between the two, isn't that how one would want it?
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
Forthcoming comics reviews:
Friday, June 19, 2009
Publication Announcement: Speak of the Devil Review
My contributor copy of The Comics Journal #298 arrived in today's mail. It includes my review of Speak of the Devil, a graphic novel by Love & Rockets co-creator Gilbert Hernandez. The magazine should be arriving in stores sometime during the next two to three weeks.
The entire issue will soon be posted online, albeit behind a subscription wall. I'll add a link to the issue's preview page once it goes up.
The entire issue will soon be posted online, albeit behind a subscription wall. I'll add a link to the issue's preview page once it goes up.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Literature Review: Virginia Woolf, "Monday or Tuesday"
The text of “Monday or Tuesday,” by Virginia Woolf, can be read by clicking here.
Virginia Woolf’s short 1921 piece “Monday or Tuesday” is generally described as a prose poem. Some, though, feel it is better characterized as a prose collage. They don’t feel Woolf sought to illustrate any ideas or create any larger narrative meaning. In their view, the piece functions like a writerly version of a collage painting. The point was to create abstract, non-narrative effects through the juxtaposition of unrelated elements.
My reaction upon reading it is that I don’t agree, largely because the juxtapositions illustrate the same thing: the contrast of light and darkness, of seeing and not-seeing. In the framing paragraphs, for example, these are present in Woolf’s rendering of the heron’s perceptions in flight. The opening paragraph includes the lines “A lake? Blot the shores of it out! A mountain? Oh, perfect—the sun gold on its slopes.” The closing paragraph ends with “the sky veils the stars; then bares them.” In both instances, a moment of darkness is followed by a moment of light. An author does not present similar contrasts in different ways unless he or she is working towards a larger point.
The juxtapositions are not as obvious in the four middle paragraphs, largely because Woolf only explicitly renders the light: “light sheds gold scales”; “the firelight darkening and making the room red”; “Flaunted, leaf-light, drifting at corners”; and “space rushes blue and stars glint.” The idea of darkness is there, though. Woolf closes three of the four paragraphs with the word “truth,” or more specifically, “truth?” Truth is an obvious analogue for light, and one infers from the accompanying question mark that the narrator is not certain if light/truth has been achieved in the impressions the paragraphs render. Darkness is suggested, but not shown, although its presence may be clearer if one equates darkness with another form of not-seeing, that of confusion.
The contrast of truth with confusion also leads one to another analogue of “truth” and “light”: the notion of “understanding.” However, it is hard to see how the idea of “understanding” fits into the overall. Understanding is a term for intellect asserting authority over perception--giving it a context--and that doesn’t occur anywhere in the piece. The narrator’s perspective has little sense of a larger whole to which the catalogued perceptions belong. The framing perspective of the heron doesn’t understand what it sees, either, but the references to the bird being “absorbed in itself” and “indifferent” emphasize that it doesn’t care. It just accepts what it sees, and this is what the narrator recognizes that he or she is doing as well. The middle passages end, before the heron returns, with the words “truth? or now, content with closeness?” The narrator asks, “Do I understand, or do I just accept what is before me?” It can also be read as, “Should I understand, or should I just accept?” Being content is synonymous with acceptance, and happy acceptance at that.
Woolf uses the juxtaposition of the narrator’s perspective with the heron’s to create a deeper understanding of the latter. The simplicity of the bird’s point of view is highlighted. It sees and not-sees, it experiences moments of darkness and light, but it doesn’t concern itself with understanding. It is just “content with closeness,” the condition of perception with acceptance that the narrator ultimately approaches. Creating this epiphany would appear to be the purpose of “Monday or Tuesday,” and that realization of meaning is what makes it a poem instead of a collage. Its contrasts create understanding, not effects for which understanding is beside the point.
Other posts discussing Virginia Woolf's writings (click title to read):
Virginia Woolf’s short 1921 piece “Monday or Tuesday” is generally described as a prose poem. Some, though, feel it is better characterized as a prose collage. They don’t feel Woolf sought to illustrate any ideas or create any larger narrative meaning. In their view, the piece functions like a writerly version of a collage painting. The point was to create abstract, non-narrative effects through the juxtaposition of unrelated elements.
My reaction upon reading it is that I don’t agree, largely because the juxtapositions illustrate the same thing: the contrast of light and darkness, of seeing and not-seeing. In the framing paragraphs, for example, these are present in Woolf’s rendering of the heron’s perceptions in flight. The opening paragraph includes the lines “A lake? Blot the shores of it out! A mountain? Oh, perfect—the sun gold on its slopes.” The closing paragraph ends with “the sky veils the stars; then bares them.” In both instances, a moment of darkness is followed by a moment of light. An author does not present similar contrasts in different ways unless he or she is working towards a larger point.
The juxtapositions are not as obvious in the four middle paragraphs, largely because Woolf only explicitly renders the light: “light sheds gold scales”; “the firelight darkening and making the room red”; “Flaunted, leaf-light, drifting at corners”; and “space rushes blue and stars glint.” The idea of darkness is there, though. Woolf closes three of the four paragraphs with the word “truth,” or more specifically, “truth?” Truth is an obvious analogue for light, and one infers from the accompanying question mark that the narrator is not certain if light/truth has been achieved in the impressions the paragraphs render. Darkness is suggested, but not shown, although its presence may be clearer if one equates darkness with another form of not-seeing, that of confusion.
The contrast of truth with confusion also leads one to another analogue of “truth” and “light”: the notion of “understanding.” However, it is hard to see how the idea of “understanding” fits into the overall. Understanding is a term for intellect asserting authority over perception--giving it a context--and that doesn’t occur anywhere in the piece. The narrator’s perspective has little sense of a larger whole to which the catalogued perceptions belong. The framing perspective of the heron doesn’t understand what it sees, either, but the references to the bird being “absorbed in itself” and “indifferent” emphasize that it doesn’t care. It just accepts what it sees, and this is what the narrator recognizes that he or she is doing as well. The middle passages end, before the heron returns, with the words “truth? or now, content with closeness?” The narrator asks, “Do I understand, or do I just accept what is before me?” It can also be read as, “Should I understand, or should I just accept?” Being content is synonymous with acceptance, and happy acceptance at that.
Woolf uses the juxtaposition of the narrator’s perspective with the heron’s to create a deeper understanding of the latter. The simplicity of the bird’s point of view is highlighted. It sees and not-sees, it experiences moments of darkness and light, but it doesn’t concern itself with understanding. It is just “content with closeness,” the condition of perception with acceptance that the narrator ultimately approaches. Creating this epiphany would appear to be the purpose of “Monday or Tuesday,” and that realization of meaning is what makes it a poem instead of a collage. Its contrasts create understanding, not effects for which understanding is beside the point.
Other posts discussing Virginia Woolf's writings (click title to read):
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Comics Review: José Muñoz & Carlos Sampayo, The Alack Sinner Stories
My review of Muñoz and Sampayo's Joe's Bar stories can be read here. This essay is considered a companion piece.
Looking back on the 1970s generation of European cartoonists, it seems like the stars epitomized their own particular genres of potboiler fiction. Jean Giraud was the Western cartoonist. Vittorio Giardino was the master of espionage thrillers. Historical adventure stories were defined by the work of Hugo Pratt. A couple of genres had two competing masters, like Milo Manara and Guido Crepax with erotica, and Giraud (under his Moebius pseudonym) and Philippe Druillet with science-fiction/fantasy.
Hard-boiled crime fiction was the province of the Argentina-born, Europe-based artist-writer team of José Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo. (Well, Jacques Tardi, too.) Muñoz and Sampayo’s signature character, Alack Sinner, was a lonely, cynical private detective whose experiences invariably exposed the corruption of the world around him. Sinner, though, ultimately proved too compelling a character for the crime genre to comfortably contain. The stories never lost their detective-fiction trappings--particularly their noir look and their hard-boiled tone--but they gradually moved away from the mystery-story format in favor of creating a remarkable character study. Seven of the Alack Sinner stories have been published in English--the first four in sequence, and three others from various points in the feature’s run. (Sinner is also a featured character in Muñoz and Sampayo’s Billie Holiday graphic novel, but the book is not primarily a Sinner story.) Even in this incomplete form, Muñoz and Sampayo’s achievement shines through. The crime genre, famous for its terse superficiality, became the setting for the sort of complex characterization typical of literature. The Alack Sinner stories are an accomplished example of crime fiction in comics, but that's not all they are.
The first two Sinner stories, “The Webster Case” and “The Fillmore Case,” are probably the least interesting. They are most notable for the contrast between them and the strip in its mature phase. The stories are conventional private-eye procedurals. The story elements are familiar: intrigue and decadence among the wealthy, the beautiful young woman to be saved, the sarcastic tough-guy detective hero. “The Fillmore Case” is the more compelling of the two. Muñoz and Sampayo originally conceived Sinner as a private detective in the Sam Spade mold. In “The Fillmore Case,” they begin breaking him away from this hackneyed characterization. The story’s opening sequence, which shows Sinner beginning his day, quietly highlights an alienated, depressed aspect to the character. We see him drag himself out of bed and force himself to make coffee and get cleaned up before heading to his office. The clutter of the apartment is emphasized--the overflowing ashtrays, the piled-up dirty dishes, the newspapers and magazines strewn all over the floor. The scene provides a counterpoint to the depiction of Sinner as an ultra-competent man-of-action. He may be extremely capable on the job, but his personal life is a barely maintained shambles.
It’s with the third story, “Viet Blues,” that Muñoz and Sampayo break free of mystery-story conventions and turn the feature into an exploration of Sinner’s character. It tells of his friendship with John Smith III, a young African-American jazz pianist (and Vietnam veteran) who has gotten on the wrong side of the Harlem mob. Sinner and Smith are contrasting studies in loneliness. Sinner’s man-of-action behavior is revealed as an escapist compulsion; he’s looking for trouble as a way to escape his disappointment with his life, whether it’s breaking up a mugging, telling off his clients, or mixing it up with the mobsters who are targeting Smith. Escapist compulsions dog Smith as well: he’s a heroin addict, he plays music to forget, and he hangs out with a pair of black militants for protection, even though he couldn’t care less about their views or their cause. Sinner acts out to escape; Smith retreats inward, although he finally lands on his feet. The story ends on a disturbing note. It’s pointed out to Sinner that his self-righteousness is borne of an impotent sense of justice. He tries to make things right in modest ways, but he’s doomed to disappointment because he inevitably acquiesces to society’s power structure--one in which the law is used as a weapon. In the story’s view, success only comes from making--and finding fulfillment in--one’s rules for oneself.
“Viet Blues” is also a leap forward in terms of the art. Muñoz’s early style clearly shows him to be among the comic-book heirs of Milton Caniff: rich blacks, detailed deep-space compositions, and loose (although highly knowledgeable) draftsmanship. In “Viet Blues,” he sheds the stiffness of his work in the feature’s first two episodes; almost every panel feels more energetic and intense. Muñoz also shows a greater dramatic range. He handles the violence in a Vietnam flashback with a virtuosity that would make Joe Kubert envious, but he’s equally at home in the somber, understated pathos of the scene in which John Smith III goes cold turkey on his heroin habit. The Muñoz of “Viet Blues” is not yet the expressionistic master of the Joe’s Bar stories, but he’s a first-rate comics dramatist.
Muñoz’s mature style is on dazzling display in “Talkin’ with Joe,” a story from much later in the feature’s run. Longtime comics fans would probably consider “Talkin’ with Joe” the Alack Sinner origin story, but it is probably best viewed as the story in which the Joe’s Bar and Alack Sinner material converged. We first see Sinner as another denizen of the bar, drinking away his troubles into the night. After closing, the owner sits down with him, and he relates the story of how he became a private detective. It’s nothing suspenseful, much less glamorous; Sinner was a Manhattan beat cop who became so demoralized by the self-righteous thuggery of the police force that he quit in disgust. It’s a portrait of a conscience in crisis; the story’s turning point occurs when Sinner has to decide whether to go along with the department’s brutality after his sister is attacked by a gang. Muñoz’s visuals are brilliant. His expressionistic rendering of New York gives the reader the city of one’s worst nightmares: a dark, crowded urban swampland of garbage. Every character besides Sinner and those he confides in is a monstrous grotesque, with his fellow police officers like a chorus of jeering gargoyles. The hallucinatory intensity of this milieu is only heightened by the calm in the scenes of Sinner with those he trusts, such as the bar owner and his sister. Alienation and loneliness have never been dramatized so effectively. It’s a piece that fits seamlessly with the character portraits in the Joe’s Bar series.
The masterpiece of the Sinner stories in English is “Memories,” another story from a later point in the series. It begins with Sinner getting up and looking at some pet fish he bought the day before. He ends up thinking back on various times in his life. The memories are all moments of helplessness. Some are mild, such as his teenage self not knowing what to tell his sister when she first gets her period. Others, though, are horrific, like when Fairfax, one of Sinner’s partners on the police force, murders his family in despair. Muñoz and Sampayo use the pet fish to dramatize Sinner’s emotional state. At first, their faces are benign and their markings harmonious. However, the panels featuring them bookend each new flashback, and the fish become gradually more grotesque. By the end, they’re monstrous, and Sinner imagines them as his dead parents, inviting him to join them, presumably through suicide. Muñoz and Sampayo build the story to a fever pitch, and they end it with an apt metaphor for Sinner’s rejection of despair: he flushes the creatures down the toilet. Muñoz’s expressionistic bravura is superbly used as a narrative counterpoint; the images of the fish provide the beat for the melodies of the flashback scenes, and they gradually heighten the story’s pitch as it progresses. Form and content are inseparable here; “Memories” is a story that would be impossible to execute in any medium besides comics.
The strength of “Memories,” “Talkin’ with Joe,” and “Viet Blues” leave a reader eager for more, as well as willing to overlook the clunkers among the rest of the stories translated into English. (“The Fillmore Case” and “The Webster Case” are examples of the feature before it found its voice, while “Life Ain’t a Comic Strip, Baby” and “North Americans” find Muñoz and Sampayo spinning their wheels.) The knowledge that additional stories are out there untranslated is especially frustrating. The Alack Sinner stories have not done well by Fantagraphics Books, their principal English-language publisher--low sales caused a Sinner reprint series to be cancelled after five issues, and they also presumably derailed plans for a promised trade-paperback translation of the extended Sinner story "Nicaragua." One hopes it was only because the comics market of the late 1980s and early 1990s wasn’t especially amenable to a serial reprinting of the material in magazine format. We’re in the age of the graphic novel now, and a thick book-length collection of the stories would be especially welcome.
The Alack Sinner stories published in English:
Looking back on the 1970s generation of European cartoonists, it seems like the stars epitomized their own particular genres of potboiler fiction. Jean Giraud was the Western cartoonist. Vittorio Giardino was the master of espionage thrillers. Historical adventure stories were defined by the work of Hugo Pratt. A couple of genres had two competing masters, like Milo Manara and Guido Crepax with erotica, and Giraud (under his Moebius pseudonym) and Philippe Druillet with science-fiction/fantasy.
Hard-boiled crime fiction was the province of the Argentina-born, Europe-based artist-writer team of José Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo. (Well, Jacques Tardi, too.) Muñoz and Sampayo’s signature character, Alack Sinner, was a lonely, cynical private detective whose experiences invariably exposed the corruption of the world around him. Sinner, though, ultimately proved too compelling a character for the crime genre to comfortably contain. The stories never lost their detective-fiction trappings--particularly their noir look and their hard-boiled tone--but they gradually moved away from the mystery-story format in favor of creating a remarkable character study. Seven of the Alack Sinner stories have been published in English--the first four in sequence, and three others from various points in the feature’s run. (Sinner is also a featured character in Muñoz and Sampayo’s Billie Holiday graphic novel, but the book is not primarily a Sinner story.) Even in this incomplete form, Muñoz and Sampayo’s achievement shines through. The crime genre, famous for its terse superficiality, became the setting for the sort of complex characterization typical of literature. The Alack Sinner stories are an accomplished example of crime fiction in comics, but that's not all they are.The first two Sinner stories, “The Webster Case” and “The Fillmore Case,” are probably the least interesting. They are most notable for the contrast between them and the strip in its mature phase. The stories are conventional private-eye procedurals. The story elements are familiar: intrigue and decadence among the wealthy, the beautiful young woman to be saved, the sarcastic tough-guy detective hero. “The Fillmore Case” is the more compelling of the two. Muñoz and Sampayo originally conceived Sinner as a private detective in the Sam Spade mold. In “The Fillmore Case,” they begin breaking him away from this hackneyed characterization. The story’s opening sequence, which shows Sinner beginning his day, quietly highlights an alienated, depressed aspect to the character. We see him drag himself out of bed and force himself to make coffee and get cleaned up before heading to his office. The clutter of the apartment is emphasized--the overflowing ashtrays, the piled-up dirty dishes, the newspapers and magazines strewn all over the floor. The scene provides a counterpoint to the depiction of Sinner as an ultra-competent man-of-action. He may be extremely capable on the job, but his personal life is a barely maintained shambles.
It’s with the third story, “Viet Blues,” that Muñoz and Sampayo break free of mystery-story conventions and turn the feature into an exploration of Sinner’s character. It tells of his friendship with John Smith III, a young African-American jazz pianist (and Vietnam veteran) who has gotten on the wrong side of the Harlem mob. Sinner and Smith are contrasting studies in loneliness. Sinner’s man-of-action behavior is revealed as an escapist compulsion; he’s looking for trouble as a way to escape his disappointment with his life, whether it’s breaking up a mugging, telling off his clients, or mixing it up with the mobsters who are targeting Smith. Escapist compulsions dog Smith as well: he’s a heroin addict, he plays music to forget, and he hangs out with a pair of black militants for protection, even though he couldn’t care less about their views or their cause. Sinner acts out to escape; Smith retreats inward, although he finally lands on his feet. The story ends on a disturbing note. It’s pointed out to Sinner that his self-righteousness is borne of an impotent sense of justice. He tries to make things right in modest ways, but he’s doomed to disappointment because he inevitably acquiesces to society’s power structure--one in which the law is used as a weapon. In the story’s view, success only comes from making--and finding fulfillment in--one’s rules for oneself.
“Viet Blues” is also a leap forward in terms of the art. Muñoz’s early style clearly shows him to be among the comic-book heirs of Milton Caniff: rich blacks, detailed deep-space compositions, and loose (although highly knowledgeable) draftsmanship. In “Viet Blues,” he sheds the stiffness of his work in the feature’s first two episodes; almost every panel feels more energetic and intense. Muñoz also shows a greater dramatic range. He handles the violence in a Vietnam flashback with a virtuosity that would make Joe Kubert envious, but he’s equally at home in the somber, understated pathos of the scene in which John Smith III goes cold turkey on his heroin habit. The Muñoz of “Viet Blues” is not yet the expressionistic master of the Joe’s Bar stories, but he’s a first-rate comics dramatist.
Muñoz’s mature style is on dazzling display in “Talkin’ with Joe,” a story from much later in the feature’s run. Longtime comics fans would probably consider “Talkin’ with Joe” the Alack Sinner origin story, but it is probably best viewed as the story in which the Joe’s Bar and Alack Sinner material converged. We first see Sinner as another denizen of the bar, drinking away his troubles into the night. After closing, the owner sits down with him, and he relates the story of how he became a private detective. It’s nothing suspenseful, much less glamorous; Sinner was a Manhattan beat cop who became so demoralized by the self-righteous thuggery of the police force that he quit in disgust. It’s a portrait of a conscience in crisis; the story’s turning point occurs when Sinner has to decide whether to go along with the department’s brutality after his sister is attacked by a gang. Muñoz’s visuals are brilliant. His expressionistic rendering of New York gives the reader the city of one’s worst nightmares: a dark, crowded urban swampland of garbage. Every character besides Sinner and those he confides in is a monstrous grotesque, with his fellow police officers like a chorus of jeering gargoyles. The hallucinatory intensity of this milieu is only heightened by the calm in the scenes of Sinner with those he trusts, such as the bar owner and his sister. Alienation and loneliness have never been dramatized so effectively. It’s a piece that fits seamlessly with the character portraits in the Joe’s Bar series.
The masterpiece of the Sinner stories in English is “Memories,” another story from a later point in the series. It begins with Sinner getting up and looking at some pet fish he bought the day before. He ends up thinking back on various times in his life. The memories are all moments of helplessness. Some are mild, such as his teenage self not knowing what to tell his sister when she first gets her period. Others, though, are horrific, like when Fairfax, one of Sinner’s partners on the police force, murders his family in despair. Muñoz and Sampayo use the pet fish to dramatize Sinner’s emotional state. At first, their faces are benign and their markings harmonious. However, the panels featuring them bookend each new flashback, and the fish become gradually more grotesque. By the end, they’re monstrous, and Sinner imagines them as his dead parents, inviting him to join them, presumably through suicide. Muñoz and Sampayo build the story to a fever pitch, and they end it with an apt metaphor for Sinner’s rejection of despair: he flushes the creatures down the toilet. Muñoz’s expressionistic bravura is superbly used as a narrative counterpoint; the images of the fish provide the beat for the melodies of the flashback scenes, and they gradually heighten the story’s pitch as it progresses. Form and content are inseparable here; “Memories” is a story that would be impossible to execute in any medium besides comics.
The strength of “Memories,” “Talkin’ with Joe,” and “Viet Blues” leave a reader eager for more, as well as willing to overlook the clunkers among the rest of the stories translated into English. (“The Fillmore Case” and “The Webster Case” are examples of the feature before it found its voice, while “Life Ain’t a Comic Strip, Baby” and “North Americans” find Muñoz and Sampayo spinning their wheels.) The knowledge that additional stories are out there untranslated is especially frustrating. The Alack Sinner stories have not done well by Fantagraphics Books, their principal English-language publisher--low sales caused a Sinner reprint series to be cancelled after five issues, and they also presumably derailed plans for a promised trade-paperback translation of the extended Sinner story "Nicaragua." One hopes it was only because the comics market of the late 1980s and early 1990s wasn’t especially amenable to a serial reprinting of the material in magazine format. We’re in the age of the graphic novel now, and a thick book-length collection of the stories would be especially welcome.
The Alack Sinner stories published in English:
- "Memories," Prime Cuts #4, Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, August 1987, pp. 1-20. Out of print.
- "Talkin' With Joe," Sinner #1, Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, October 1987. Out of print.
- "The Webster Case," Sinner #2, Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, March 1988. Out of print.
- "The Fillmore Case," Sinner #3, Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, May 1988. Out of print.
- "Viet Blues," Sinner #4, Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, September 1989. Copies can be ordered here.
- "Life Ain't a Comic Strip, Baby," Sinner #5, Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, September 1990. Copies can be ordered here.
- "North Americans," RAW #2.3, New York: Penguin Books, 1991, pp. 59-73. Out of print.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Site Issues: Welcome (Back) and Happy Birthday
The site had its first birthday last month. It also passed the 10,000 hits mark, so I thought I should take advantage of the occasion to say a few things.
First of all, thanks to everyone who's stopped by and especially to those who have made donations. Your interest and generosity are deeply appreciated.
Second, I'd like to note some additions to the Politics & Media blogroll at left. People like Amy Goodman, Juan Cole, Bill Moyers, Susie Madrak, Welton Gaddy, and Peter Werbe were oversights. They should have been added a long time ago. Ian Welsh is a recent find, and I encourage everyone to check his blog out. He's an excellent writer on politics.
There are also some reinstatements, such as Atrios, Digby, and Firedoglake. My differences with them were all rooted in things that happened during the general-election campaign that probably deserve to be forgotten. None of them were among the Hillary slanderers of the primary season, and all have been more than willing to go after Obama for his crap since taking office. The same is true of Thom Hartmann.
Ed Schultz was among the mud-slingers last spring, but that aside, I generally agree more with his take on things than I do with anyone else in the broadcast media. A big plus in his favor is that he's also the media's biggest advocate for single-payer health insurance. I don't think his broadsides against Hillary were the result of innate asshattery so much as they were due to wrongheaded offense over the David Shuster matter. (Schultz and Shuster are long-time pals.) My rule of thumb with forgiveness is that I'm willing as along as I feel that what I objected to isn't going to be making a return appearance. In such cases, I'm more than willing to let bygones be bygones.
In the Literature links, please note the addition of Of Books and Bicycles, a wonderful book-lovers blog I recently discovered. Dorothy W. has an extensive list of other book-lover sites on her blogroll there, so I'll be exploring those and adding links to the ones I like in the days and weeks to come.
As for the frequency of posts here, I'm committed to stepping up the pace and getting back to a post a day frequency. I'm not making any promises, though; I've made too many on that score that have fallen through. All I can say is that I'll do my best and we'll see.
That's all for now.
Thanks again, everyone!
First of all, thanks to everyone who's stopped by and especially to those who have made donations. Your interest and generosity are deeply appreciated.
Second, I'd like to note some additions to the Politics & Media blogroll at left. People like Amy Goodman, Juan Cole, Bill Moyers, Susie Madrak, Welton Gaddy, and Peter Werbe were oversights. They should have been added a long time ago. Ian Welsh is a recent find, and I encourage everyone to check his blog out. He's an excellent writer on politics.
There are also some reinstatements, such as Atrios, Digby, and Firedoglake. My differences with them were all rooted in things that happened during the general-election campaign that probably deserve to be forgotten. None of them were among the Hillary slanderers of the primary season, and all have been more than willing to go after Obama for his crap since taking office. The same is true of Thom Hartmann.
Ed Schultz was among the mud-slingers last spring, but that aside, I generally agree more with his take on things than I do with anyone else in the broadcast media. A big plus in his favor is that he's also the media's biggest advocate for single-payer health insurance. I don't think his broadsides against Hillary were the result of innate asshattery so much as they were due to wrongheaded offense over the David Shuster matter. (Schultz and Shuster are long-time pals.) My rule of thumb with forgiveness is that I'm willing as along as I feel that what I objected to isn't going to be making a return appearance. In such cases, I'm more than willing to let bygones be bygones.
In the Literature links, please note the addition of Of Books and Bicycles, a wonderful book-lovers blog I recently discovered. Dorothy W. has an extensive list of other book-lover sites on her blogroll there, so I'll be exploring those and adding links to the ones I like in the days and weeks to come.
As for the frequency of posts here, I'm committed to stepping up the pace and getting back to a post a day frequency. I'm not making any promises, though; I've made too many on that score that have fallen through. All I can say is that I'll do my best and we'll see.
That's all for now.
Thanks again, everyone!
Friday, May 29, 2009
Non-Fiction Review/Politics: Eric Boehlert, Bloggers on the Bus
Note: This review has been revised since its initial posting.
There’s a fairly decent test for determining whether a non-fiction book is a serious effort: See if there’s an end notes section in the back. The goal of any good journalist or historian is to provide as definitive a treatment of the book’s subject as they possibly can. They should want any enterprising reader to be able to retrace their work, and if they’re particularly thoughtful, they know that their efforts are providing at least some of the groundwork for other writers’ efforts down the road. There is no implicit plea for trust on the author’s part. If one questions what is written, one can check out the author’s facts. And if one disagrees with the author’s analysis, it should be easy to determine where one and the author part ways. If there is no end notes section (or a bibliography, for that matter), the book is all but assuredly a work of “popular” non-fiction--essentially an airport read. While it may be engaging, it is no more serious journalism or history than a novel by John Grisham or Fern Michaels is literature.
I’m sad to report that Eric Boehlert’s new book, Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press, is a journalistic airport read. There are no end notes or bibliography, and more importantly, there is no substantive reporting or serious analysis of its subject. It purports to tell the story of the liberal blogosphere and the 2008 election, but it treats events as anecdotes, and Boehlert’s handling of them gets more incomplete and disappointing as the book goes on. It is primarily a series of profiles of the most prominent liberal bloggers and Internet figures in the 2008 primary and general-election campaigns, and it drops the ball in this as well. Several of the most prominent figures are mentioned only in passing or not at all. In sum, Bloggers on the Bus is poor journalism, bad history, and an embarassingly slapdash piece of work. It's especially disappointng coming from Boehlert, whose work at MediaMatters.org has strongly criticized several reporters and broadcasters for many of his failings here.
The first chapter is representative of several of the book's problems. It covers the successful campaign to cancel a pair of Democratic presidential debates sponsored by Fox News and the Nevada Democratic Party. Many on the left felt that Fox, given its reputation as a GOP propaganda organ, was an inappropriate sponsor. In response, they launched an ultimately successful campaign to get the debate cancelled. Boehlert, though, can't tell the story straight. He lets himself get sidetracked by extended profiles of filmmakers Robert Greenwald and Jim Gilliam, which take up 10 of the chapter's 16 pages. He overhypes the importance of efforts by Greenwald, Gilliam, and bloggers like Matt Stoller in getting the debates cancelled--judging from this account, the most important player was actually MoveOn.org. The biggest problem, though, is that the basics of reporting and research are ignored. Apart from Greenwald and Gilliam, the only person involved whom Boehlert interviewed is radio host Christiane Brown. He didn’t talk to any of the other principals, which include MoveOn.org, Fox News, U.S. Senator Harry Reid, the John Edwards campaign, the Nevada Democratic Party, and the Carson City Democratic Committee. He fails to cite any sources, including reports from which he lifted quotes from Reid and Fox chairman Roger Ailes. He doesn't even give the dates of on-air complaints about the cancellations from the Fox pundits. It is hard to believe one is looking at the work of a professional journalist.
As the book goes on, it becomes clear that the point is to provide a context for the profiles of the various bloggers and Internet folk. Despite the book’s considerable shortcomings as journalism and history, these are fun to read. The people given the extended treatment include Duncan Black (Atrios), Heather Parton (Digby), Jane Hamsher, Arianna Huffington, John Amato, Howie Klein, Alegre, Susie Madrak, and Glenn Greenwald. Boehlert is occasionally able to effectively build the entire story of a particular event out of his profiles, as he does with Philip de Vellis, who posted the anti-Hillary take-off on Apple Computer’s “Big Brother” ad, or with Joe Anthony, who independently created Obama’s popular MySpace fan page.
The major problem with the profiles, though, is that Boehlert doesn’t provide them for a number of important figures, such as John Aravosis, Jerome Armstrong, and Josh Marshall. The most shocking oversight is the failure to profile Daily Kos proprietor Markos Moulitsas, who one would think would have rated at least a chapter or two. Regardless of one’s opinion of him, he is undoubtedly the single most prominent member of the liberal blogosphere, and Boehlert’s failure to give him his due leaves a gaping hole in the book.
The short shrift given Moulitsas is most notable for the lost opportunity to provide some needed history. The politicking efforts of the liberal blogosphere extends back at least as far as the 2004 primary season. Since then, there has been the pushback on George W. Bush’s efforts to privatize Social Security, Paul Hackett’s (unsuccessful) effort to capture a traditionally GOP Ohio House seat in 2005, and the Ned Lamont Senate campaign in Connecticut. A good profile of Moulitsas and the Daily Kos would have covered all of this, and it would have provided a good background for the other sections of the book.
The history Boehlert does provide is inaccurate and incomplete. He writes that the first political bloggers were Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan. He further claims the liberal blogosphere didn’t begin in earnest until 2002, when Jerome Armstrong founded MyDD and Moulitsas launched the Daily Kos. Actually, the first political blogger was Terry Coppage, who started Bartcop in 1996. The right-wing sites The Drudge Report and FreeRepublic.com began in 1997. Bob Somerby launched The Daily Howler in 1998. Mickey Kaus didn’t begin Kausfiles until 1999, and Andrew Sullivan didn’t start The Daily Dish until 2000. Other sites that began in 2000 include Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo and JennyQ’s now-defunct Media Whores Online. (Media Whores is also where Atrios got his start.) Jerome Armstrong began MyDD in 2001, not 2002. All of this information is available online, and it took me less than an hour with Google to put it together. The laziness Boehlert shows in his reporting extends to his research as well.
The two chapters devoted to the civil war that erupted between the online supporters of Obama and Hillary Clinton are particularly disappointing. In many ways, Boehlert misses the story. According to him, the key moment in the conflict was the Clinton-supporter walkout that Alegre led at the Daily Kos in March of 2008. The crux of the fight was actually the week leading up to the Democratic primary in South Carolina on January 26. Obama had unexpectedly lost primaries in New Hampshire and Nevada, so to bolster his efforts, his campaign launched a series of specious accusations that the Clintons were racists and engaging in racist appeals to voters. (The memo outlining the strategy can be read here.) Obama’s online supporters never cared for the Clintons in the first place, and the accusations of racism--the equivalent of child molesting to many on the left--gave them all the rationale they needed for an anything-goes jihad. The Clinton supporters, furious at the smears being directed at both them and their candidate, turned hard against Obama, with many seeing him as a demagogue who needed to be defeated for the good of the Democratic Party.
The Obama campaign had also been hiring a number of workers to blog for the campaign, and it’s widely suspected that they were used to astroturf the Daily Kos and other sites. If so, this certainly exacerbated the situation.
Boehlert seems oblivious to all of this. The racism smears against the Clintons in the days leading up to South Carolina are ignored, and he claims, wrongly, that the Obama campaign did nothing to provoke the online war. He fixates on the claims of sexist language being used against Hillary Clinton and her supporters, but he doesn’t research their validity. He doesn’t dispute the charges, but he doesn’t challenge the claims of innocence made by Moulitsas and others, either. The narrative devolves into a “he said/she said” argument between two camps.
The book almost completely falls apart when it gets to the general-election campaign. Boehlert depicts the bloggers as fighting the good fight against Sarah Palin and others, and the chapters feel like one has stepped into an alternate reality. Contrary to Boehlert, Palin got the better of the blogosphere. The misogyny that confronted Clinton got flung at her, too, and a particularly nasty smear about her children quickly discredited the Daily Kos community and other bloggers with the public. (In fairness, Boehlert does acknowledge this to an extent.) Bloggers, in Alaska or elsewhere, had nothing to do with the eventual consensus that Palin had no business being on the Republican ticket. What brought Palin down was her interviews with Katie Couric, in which she came off as completely unprepared and unsuited for the Vice-Presidency. The establishment media does deserve some credit every now and then. Couric certainly deserves it with Palin.
The most notable thing about the political blogs in the fall campaign was just how unimportant they were. Boehlert notes that they were irrelevant to the Obama campaign, but he doesn't discuss they became increasingly irrelevant to their audiences. The presidential race effectively ended on September 15, when Lehman Brothers went under and the entire financial services industry was facing collapse. Obama kept his cool, McCain didn’t, and that was all she wrote. The real story in the blogosphere was the sudden popularity of economics sites like Calculated Risk and Naked Capitalism. People were desperate to make sense of the financial disaster, and they wanted an alternative to the pro-Wall Street line being fed them through the corporate media. The economics blogs were doing what the political blogs had done in response to the Iraq War and the pro-GOP puffery of the mainstream news: They provided information and analysis people weren’t getting elsewhere. In short, they filled a need, and that’s what makes any human venture successful.
And sadly, that’s what may make this extremely disappointing book a sales success. The 2008 campaign, particularly the Democratic primaries, were a roller-coaster ride for many, and it occasionally left them not knowing up from down. There’s a desire out there to get some perspective on what happened--to put it all in context--and Boehlert’s book is, as of right now, the only place they can go. If it’s successful in the book trade, one can only hope it will motivate another publisher to get a competing book out there. Let’s hope that would be one by an author who believes in the importance of research, reporting, and getting the story right. That's the sort of author one would have expected Boehlert to be.
There’s a fairly decent test for determining whether a non-fiction book is a serious effort: See if there’s an end notes section in the back. The goal of any good journalist or historian is to provide as definitive a treatment of the book’s subject as they possibly can. They should want any enterprising reader to be able to retrace their work, and if they’re particularly thoughtful, they know that their efforts are providing at least some of the groundwork for other writers’ efforts down the road. There is no implicit plea for trust on the author’s part. If one questions what is written, one can check out the author’s facts. And if one disagrees with the author’s analysis, it should be easy to determine where one and the author part ways. If there is no end notes section (or a bibliography, for that matter), the book is all but assuredly a work of “popular” non-fiction--essentially an airport read. While it may be engaging, it is no more serious journalism or history than a novel by John Grisham or Fern Michaels is literature.
I’m sad to report that Eric Boehlert’s new book, Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press, is a journalistic airport read. There are no end notes or bibliography, and more importantly, there is no substantive reporting or serious analysis of its subject. It purports to tell the story of the liberal blogosphere and the 2008 election, but it treats events as anecdotes, and Boehlert’s handling of them gets more incomplete and disappointing as the book goes on. It is primarily a series of profiles of the most prominent liberal bloggers and Internet figures in the 2008 primary and general-election campaigns, and it drops the ball in this as well. Several of the most prominent figures are mentioned only in passing or not at all. In sum, Bloggers on the Bus is poor journalism, bad history, and an embarassingly slapdash piece of work. It's especially disappointng coming from Boehlert, whose work at MediaMatters.org has strongly criticized several reporters and broadcasters for many of his failings here.The first chapter is representative of several of the book's problems. It covers the successful campaign to cancel a pair of Democratic presidential debates sponsored by Fox News and the Nevada Democratic Party. Many on the left felt that Fox, given its reputation as a GOP propaganda organ, was an inappropriate sponsor. In response, they launched an ultimately successful campaign to get the debate cancelled. Boehlert, though, can't tell the story straight. He lets himself get sidetracked by extended profiles of filmmakers Robert Greenwald and Jim Gilliam, which take up 10 of the chapter's 16 pages. He overhypes the importance of efforts by Greenwald, Gilliam, and bloggers like Matt Stoller in getting the debates cancelled--judging from this account, the most important player was actually MoveOn.org. The biggest problem, though, is that the basics of reporting and research are ignored. Apart from Greenwald and Gilliam, the only person involved whom Boehlert interviewed is radio host Christiane Brown. He didn’t talk to any of the other principals, which include MoveOn.org, Fox News, U.S. Senator Harry Reid, the John Edwards campaign, the Nevada Democratic Party, and the Carson City Democratic Committee. He fails to cite any sources, including reports from which he lifted quotes from Reid and Fox chairman Roger Ailes. He doesn't even give the dates of on-air complaints about the cancellations from the Fox pundits. It is hard to believe one is looking at the work of a professional journalist.
As the book goes on, it becomes clear that the point is to provide a context for the profiles of the various bloggers and Internet folk. Despite the book’s considerable shortcomings as journalism and history, these are fun to read. The people given the extended treatment include Duncan Black (Atrios), Heather Parton (Digby), Jane Hamsher, Arianna Huffington, John Amato, Howie Klein, Alegre, Susie Madrak, and Glenn Greenwald. Boehlert is occasionally able to effectively build the entire story of a particular event out of his profiles, as he does with Philip de Vellis, who posted the anti-Hillary take-off on Apple Computer’s “Big Brother” ad, or with Joe Anthony, who independently created Obama’s popular MySpace fan page.
The major problem with the profiles, though, is that Boehlert doesn’t provide them for a number of important figures, such as John Aravosis, Jerome Armstrong, and Josh Marshall. The most shocking oversight is the failure to profile Daily Kos proprietor Markos Moulitsas, who one would think would have rated at least a chapter or two. Regardless of one’s opinion of him, he is undoubtedly the single most prominent member of the liberal blogosphere, and Boehlert’s failure to give him his due leaves a gaping hole in the book.
The short shrift given Moulitsas is most notable for the lost opportunity to provide some needed history. The politicking efforts of the liberal blogosphere extends back at least as far as the 2004 primary season. Since then, there has been the pushback on George W. Bush’s efforts to privatize Social Security, Paul Hackett’s (unsuccessful) effort to capture a traditionally GOP Ohio House seat in 2005, and the Ned Lamont Senate campaign in Connecticut. A good profile of Moulitsas and the Daily Kos would have covered all of this, and it would have provided a good background for the other sections of the book.
The history Boehlert does provide is inaccurate and incomplete. He writes that the first political bloggers were Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan. He further claims the liberal blogosphere didn’t begin in earnest until 2002, when Jerome Armstrong founded MyDD and Moulitsas launched the Daily Kos. Actually, the first political blogger was Terry Coppage, who started Bartcop in 1996. The right-wing sites The Drudge Report and FreeRepublic.com began in 1997. Bob Somerby launched The Daily Howler in 1998. Mickey Kaus didn’t begin Kausfiles until 1999, and Andrew Sullivan didn’t start The Daily Dish until 2000. Other sites that began in 2000 include Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo and JennyQ’s now-defunct Media Whores Online. (Media Whores is also where Atrios got his start.) Jerome Armstrong began MyDD in 2001, not 2002. All of this information is available online, and it took me less than an hour with Google to put it together. The laziness Boehlert shows in his reporting extends to his research as well.
The two chapters devoted to the civil war that erupted between the online supporters of Obama and Hillary Clinton are particularly disappointing. In many ways, Boehlert misses the story. According to him, the key moment in the conflict was the Clinton-supporter walkout that Alegre led at the Daily Kos in March of 2008. The crux of the fight was actually the week leading up to the Democratic primary in South Carolina on January 26. Obama had unexpectedly lost primaries in New Hampshire and Nevada, so to bolster his efforts, his campaign launched a series of specious accusations that the Clintons were racists and engaging in racist appeals to voters. (The memo outlining the strategy can be read here.) Obama’s online supporters never cared for the Clintons in the first place, and the accusations of racism--the equivalent of child molesting to many on the left--gave them all the rationale they needed for an anything-goes jihad. The Clinton supporters, furious at the smears being directed at both them and their candidate, turned hard against Obama, with many seeing him as a demagogue who needed to be defeated for the good of the Democratic Party.
The Obama campaign had also been hiring a number of workers to blog for the campaign, and it’s widely suspected that they were used to astroturf the Daily Kos and other sites. If so, this certainly exacerbated the situation.
Boehlert seems oblivious to all of this. The racism smears against the Clintons in the days leading up to South Carolina are ignored, and he claims, wrongly, that the Obama campaign did nothing to provoke the online war. He fixates on the claims of sexist language being used against Hillary Clinton and her supporters, but he doesn’t research their validity. He doesn’t dispute the charges, but he doesn’t challenge the claims of innocence made by Moulitsas and others, either. The narrative devolves into a “he said/she said” argument between two camps.
The book almost completely falls apart when it gets to the general-election campaign. Boehlert depicts the bloggers as fighting the good fight against Sarah Palin and others, and the chapters feel like one has stepped into an alternate reality. Contrary to Boehlert, Palin got the better of the blogosphere. The misogyny that confronted Clinton got flung at her, too, and a particularly nasty smear about her children quickly discredited the Daily Kos community and other bloggers with the public. (In fairness, Boehlert does acknowledge this to an extent.) Bloggers, in Alaska or elsewhere, had nothing to do with the eventual consensus that Palin had no business being on the Republican ticket. What brought Palin down was her interviews with Katie Couric, in which she came off as completely unprepared and unsuited for the Vice-Presidency. The establishment media does deserve some credit every now and then. Couric certainly deserves it with Palin.
The most notable thing about the political blogs in the fall campaign was just how unimportant they were. Boehlert notes that they were irrelevant to the Obama campaign, but he doesn't discuss they became increasingly irrelevant to their audiences. The presidential race effectively ended on September 15, when Lehman Brothers went under and the entire financial services industry was facing collapse. Obama kept his cool, McCain didn’t, and that was all she wrote. The real story in the blogosphere was the sudden popularity of economics sites like Calculated Risk and Naked Capitalism. People were desperate to make sense of the financial disaster, and they wanted an alternative to the pro-Wall Street line being fed them through the corporate media. The economics blogs were doing what the political blogs had done in response to the Iraq War and the pro-GOP puffery of the mainstream news: They provided information and analysis people weren’t getting elsewhere. In short, they filled a need, and that’s what makes any human venture successful.
And sadly, that’s what may make this extremely disappointing book a sales success. The 2008 campaign, particularly the Democratic primaries, were a roller-coaster ride for many, and it occasionally left them not knowing up from down. There’s a desire out there to get some perspective on what happened--to put it all in context--and Boehlert’s book is, as of right now, the only place they can go. If it’s successful in the book trade, one can only hope it will motivate another publisher to get a competing book out there. Let’s hope that would be one by an author who believes in the importance of research, reporting, and getting the story right. That's the sort of author one would have expected Boehlert to be.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Poetry Translation: Dante, Inferno, Song XVII
My translation of Song XVII of Dante's Inferno is now up at Dante's Divine Comedy. Click here to read.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Fiction Review: Kevin Moffett, "Tattooizm"
A remarkable aspect of fiction is its ability to captivate us with the lives of people we otherwise wouldn't have anything to do with. Andrea, the protagonist of Kevin Moffett's 2006 short story "Tattooizm," is an aimless 19-year-old slacker living in a beachfront Florida town in what appears to be the mid-to-late 1970s. Apart from her boyfriend Dixon, a 24-year-old aspiring tattoo artist, she has no real ambitions or interests, and that relationship has lost its appeal for her as well. The only thing holding them together is sex, which annoys her--she wonders if it is "turning her into a dull and contented cow." She looks forward to classes at the local community college that fall, but she's more engaged by her idealized notions of being a student than any interest in the work it entails. Aside from sex, the only thing she gets active enjoyment out of is yelling "Cajun" at the local drifters when the car she's in goes by them; the irony is that her attitude towards life isn't far removed from theirs--it's the same mindset at an earlier age. The wonder of "Tattooizm" is Moffett's ability to create such a compelling character study from such a dull, empty life. From the story's opening paragraph to its epiphanic conclusion, it is nothing less than captivating.
The conflict that drives the story is Andrea's resistance to Dixon giving her a tattoo. Dixon is, in some ways, just as much an overgrown baby as Andrea, but unlike her, he's not apathetic. He is engaged with life, but he's a fool--destined to be confounded in everything he does. He's the sort who will convince himself that driving the speed limit will mean his never having to stop at a red light, and he holds to that no matter how often it's demonstrated he's wrong. As for the tattoo, he sees it as a sacrament between him and Andrea; her assent to it would be a way of saying that, no matter what, a part of him would always be with her. It's permanent; it's a commitment. And Andrea, whose thoughts are inevitably daydreams to take her mind off the present, keeps putting him off. The only thing she wants of Dixon in the future is some clever way of describing him to friends and boyfriends down the road. She'll look back on him fondly, but with the affection she'd have for "an old toy or a book that she read in bed when she was sick." Moffett carefully builds the tension in Andrea's attitude towards Dixon over the course of the story, and it's not giving away too much to reveal that she does finally agree to the tattoo. The surprise is in the tattoo Dixon chooses to give her. He turns out to be not quite as big an amiably headstrong dope as he originally seemed, at least as far as Andrea is concerned. He fully understands her attitude towards him, and the tattoo reflects this. It's something she can choose to acknowledge or not acknowledge forever; no one will know unless she goes out of her way to tell them, and even then they might not believe her. It's permanent, but it only requires the commitment she's willing to give it.
What makes the story work is Moffett's effective shuttling between his development of Andrea's view of Dixon and his treatment of every other aspect of her life. The Dixon passages are the foundation, with the others like momentary departures from a melody that are terrific music in their own right. We see the fun she has with her younger brother while baby-sitting him, her looking back on her friends and boyfriend from high school, her fantasies about school in the fall. Moffett's pacing is immaculate. He never dwells on anything too long, and his rendering of the scenes and Andrea's musings are both concise and fluid. It's hard to imagine he has a high opinion of his protagonist, but his tone is so breezy that one never catchs him making a judgment. He demonstrates that no character is too insignificant for a capable writer; one just needs to give everything its proper development and weight.
"Tattooizm," by Kevin Moffett, is featured in Tin House 26 (Winter 2006). It is also included in Moffett's short-story collection Permanent Visitors, published by the University of Iowa Press, and in Houghton-Mifflin's The Best American Short Stories 2006.
The conflict that drives the story is Andrea's resistance to Dixon giving her a tattoo. Dixon is, in some ways, just as much an overgrown baby as Andrea, but unlike her, he's not apathetic. He is engaged with life, but he's a fool--destined to be confounded in everything he does. He's the sort who will convince himself that driving the speed limit will mean his never having to stop at a red light, and he holds to that no matter how often it's demonstrated he's wrong. As for the tattoo, he sees it as a sacrament between him and Andrea; her assent to it would be a way of saying that, no matter what, a part of him would always be with her. It's permanent; it's a commitment. And Andrea, whose thoughts are inevitably daydreams to take her mind off the present, keeps putting him off. The only thing she wants of Dixon in the future is some clever way of describing him to friends and boyfriends down the road. She'll look back on him fondly, but with the affection she'd have for "an old toy or a book that she read in bed when she was sick." Moffett carefully builds the tension in Andrea's attitude towards Dixon over the course of the story, and it's not giving away too much to reveal that she does finally agree to the tattoo. The surprise is in the tattoo Dixon chooses to give her. He turns out to be not quite as big an amiably headstrong dope as he originally seemed, at least as far as Andrea is concerned. He fully understands her attitude towards him, and the tattoo reflects this. It's something she can choose to acknowledge or not acknowledge forever; no one will know unless she goes out of her way to tell them, and even then they might not believe her. It's permanent, but it only requires the commitment she's willing to give it.
What makes the story work is Moffett's effective shuttling between his development of Andrea's view of Dixon and his treatment of every other aspect of her life. The Dixon passages are the foundation, with the others like momentary departures from a melody that are terrific music in their own right. We see the fun she has with her younger brother while baby-sitting him, her looking back on her friends and boyfriend from high school, her fantasies about school in the fall. Moffett's pacing is immaculate. He never dwells on anything too long, and his rendering of the scenes and Andrea's musings are both concise and fluid. It's hard to imagine he has a high opinion of his protagonist, but his tone is so breezy that one never catchs him making a judgment. He demonstrates that no character is too insignificant for a capable writer; one just needs to give everything its proper development and weight.
"Tattooizm," by Kevin Moffett, is featured in Tin House 26 (Winter 2006). It is also included in Moffett's short-story collection Permanent Visitors, published by the University of Iowa Press, and in Houghton-Mifflin's The Best American Short Stories 2006.
Poetry Translation: Dante, Inferno, Song XVI
My translation of Song XVI of Dante's Inferno is now up at Dante's Divine Comedy. Click here to read.
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