Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Scott McCloud A little over two years ago I wrote a review about Understanding Comics, a book whose theme is aligned with its title.  Last week I was checking on the author's site and almost fell over when I saw that he'd be in Sioux Falls presenting on his newest title Making Comics. In what's part of a larger tour, he and his family are hitting all 50 states promoting his newest title and giving his two daughters an experience they should take with them into old age. I have been buying more comics of late but one particular comment from a girl in the crowd confirmed the goal I've been having of late in buying books and other tokens of modern culture - she was saying that her interest in comics developed when she found a stack of her father's Elfquest comics in the basement. I'm hoping that the library that I build is something that emits more than just "possession" to either children or passers-by. I'm hoping that it will be more about treasure and the unlocking of life long passions. posted in [home], [books] 11:44:21 PM    comment []

Sunday, May 28, 2006

Fast Thinking, Cognition After a long time ago being confronted over posting on a book I'd just started I resolved to hold my posts until I'd finished my reading of any book. I'm going to break that rule though for a snippet from Words and Rules: Children begin to learn words before their first birthday, and by their second they hoover them up at a rate of one every two hours. By the time they enter school children command 13,000 words, and then the pace picks up, because new words rain down on them from both speech and print. A typical high-school gradudate knows about 60,000 words; a literate adult, perhaps twice that number. People recognize words switfly. The meaning of a spoken word is accessed by a listener's brain in about a fifth of a second, before the speaker has finished pronouncing it. The meaning of a printed word is registered even more quickly, in about an eighth of a second. People produce words almost as rapidly: It takes the brain about a quarter of a second to find a word to name an object, and about another quarter of a second to program the mouth and tongue to pronounce it. The wonder that is cognition - research like the above leaves me spellbound.  I've always been interested in language and have had this book for a while now. It makes for captivating reading and I'm sure I'll find myself resisting the urge to copy more and more of it into the blog as I make my way through. posted in [home], [books] 10:52:51 PM    comment []

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Furniture Books How do you organize your books?  Meme courtesy of Barbara, originally from an article in The Guardian. I wrote at length but accidentally lost it all.  Interesting statements from Barbara, I'm the same way: I also confess to something else the article comments on: I totally check out other people's bookshelves. I love seeing what books people own, because I feel like it tells a lot about a person--for good or ill. Interesting thing: in South Dakota it isn't a cultural norm to put your books out for other people so mine are all tucked away. So seriously, how do you organize them? posted in [home], [books] 8:47:15 PM    comment []

Saturday, November 26, 2005

"Notable" Books 2005 The NY Times has a list of 100 "notable" books for the year. A friend was over a few weeks ago and after seeing my shelves made a curt remark about my not having read1 "half of them," so I've been guilted into caging my urge to keep stocking my shelves.  That doesn't prevent me, however, from putting the following on my radar: Never Let Me Go - by Kazuo Ishiguro, probably best known for The Remains of the Day.  I like the anomaly that is Ishiguro, a Japanese man who gets the English better, or more than they care to, themselves. On Beauty - by Zadie Smith. After trying and not really getting into White Teeth, I think this will be a bit of an easier book to connect with - set in the US, jabbing at the conservative and the liberal, establishment and hip hop.  Glowing reviews and a great interview on Fresh Air. Prep - by Curis Sittenfeld.  It's a good story, and especially for people like me who have this unhealthy fascination with establishment, Ivy League, and Prep school, it's a good morality tale.  For a while I'd read a chapter each time I found the time in Barnes & Nobles. Freakanomics - Levitt and Dubner.  From the abstract: "economic thinking [about] everything from sumo wrestlers who cheat to legalized abortion and the falling crime rate." But the chapter that got me was on baby names and how they relate to economic well being.  The moral, of course, is not to name your child an expletive [warning on language for those likely to be offended]. posted in [home], [books] 1By the way, I have read more than half of them, and if I include the ones I've partially read I'd say more than two-thirds.  Just to save face... 2:23:47 PM    comment []

Sunday, November 06, 2005

The Quiet American I finished The Quiet American, my first Graham Greene book a while ago - I had written in March (looking at those pictures makes me tear up) that I wanted to tackle it, and I foolishly thought that as a small book it would be quickly read.  I haven't written about it to date because I haven't known where to start.  Now that I'm up to the task I'll begin with why I was attracted to it. The book is a vew of "American" from the outside, and from a Britton.  I feel myself teetering on an inside and outside experience of being American and I thought this book would let me interact with that. The book is really about Vietnam and the ideas about being "American" are really an undergirding.  It's about war and journalism - the process by which we come to understand the events around us.  It's about an old British journalist, Thomas Fowler, and an American, Alden Pyle.  It is about old men and young men's love - and the crevice between them. Before reading the book I knew Vietnam vaguely in terms of the war and the glut of films I'd seen about it.  I ended up printing out a map in order to orient myself - Greene writes with an assumption of the reader's understanding of the geography and I had none.  Lately I've only bought critical editions of "classic" books and in this case it was wise - mine contained a short and engaging history and context of American involvement in Vietnam.  I had no idea of the interplay before the war between the Chinese, French, Japanese, and British.  My American education tells me only about American involvement and American interaction with the world, in fabricated "pivotal" moments. I disliked the protagonist, the journalist Fowler, probably, ironically, in an American way; he was a man who pretended to be objective, to believe in "nothing."  A man who treated his woman like a concubine. The book begins with the premise of an American ideologue - a young man with books and ideals who arrives in Vietnam to inspire a "third force" - an alternative to the hapless French and "evil" communists who have been fighting each other. What do I mean by ideologue?  In this context I refer to a person who becomes so enraptured by a framework of ideas that they cease to reconcile it with practical realism.    Beyond an ideologue, the American Greene paints is a man who sees the world only in his terms, no matter how absurd it may be.  At one point the young American points to a cafe and says that it could "almost be a soda fountain."  I almost laughed aloud at how true this was, recalling countless conversations where a person would ask me about Africa on American terms. The young American, in a misguided sense, believes in love.  His is not a love of necessity or arrangement, it is a love of choice.  A large, somewhat quiet, "third person" role in the book was that of Phuong, a Vietnamese woman who is between the older British protagonist/narrator and the young American.  With no regard for her past involvement with the older gentleman reporter, the American steals her away, imposing her "choice" and his overwhelming affection with regards to love. Finally, the young American believes in a notion of "greater good." That is to say that deception and even death can be reconciled as a sacrifice for something greater - in this case it is Democracy.  His clandestine activities in Vietnam render this thesis over and over, with the older, cautious, and more worldly British protagonist/narrator watching with a sickened fascination. This is only one dimmension of a much larger story, but it was the one which I was able to follow most closely.  It had a few merits but on the whole, albeit that I'm indoctrinated, I found myself disliking it more and more as each page passed. Americans are ideologues.  George Washington was an ideologue.  The people who come here to find a future are also ideologues and that is where their American-ness begins.  The focal point of that ideology is idealism; that good and evil exist; a notion that the world can be better, that our individual actions can find traction here to bring that "better" closer to us - for some that means closer to their children as they see thier lives as mere stepping stones for a better future. Ideology is dangerous, and when it mixes with an idea that necessary sacrifice can be made it becomes a very potent evil.  We forget to ask ourselves who sacrifices, who dies as a result of any "noble" effort.  But the world needs ideas, and it most certainly needs ideals.  It needs fools who believe in love.  It needs the sort of simple mindedness that can say "all men are created equal." There's so much more to this book that I can't help feeling like I'm selling it short.  I have yet to finish all the critical responses in the back of my edition.  But it's revealed my American-ness to me - those unscripted tendencies that I've slowly assumed while being here.  It shows me how American idealism and hope can be, simultaneously, a greatest strength and weakness. posted in [home], [books] 8:30:26 PM    comment []

Thursday, September 08, 2005

Good Pulp I finished Rain Fall a few weeks ago, the first of a series from Barry Eisler. An ex-military hitman who stops his victim's heart with a PDA.  The CIA, Yakuza, Tokyo, jazz music, Vietnam, small town New York State, and some paranoia.  Light snippets of Japanese interspersed through the novel for your pleasure... It's pulp to make you think, to experience Tokyo, to think Japanese and American all at the same time.  I don't read very quickly by any means and it was about a weekend's worth.  Try out the first chapter here [PDF link]. posted in [home], [books] 8:31:49 PM    comment []

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Berlin This weekend I finished Berlin, the first in a series of graphic novels by the author and illustrator, Jason Lutes.  As the title suggests, this book is focused on the city in its entirety and its tumult during the dying days of the Weimar Republic between World War I and World War II, and although the storyline does revolve around a core set of personalities the author uses a variety of clever devices to keep our perspective larger, on the city as a whole. Lutes is a brilliant artist but what really propelled this book beyond the typically good graphic novel was its writing. Although each cell is a montage of feeling and visual empathy, I was constantly impressed with how it read aloud as well as any carefully crafted traditional novel. I've debated with myself quite a bit on whether to post "quotes" from the book; without their visual accompaniment it seems a bit crass. In the opening chapter the reader is introduced to Kurt Severing, a weathered journalist, and Marthe Müller, a young woman who is traveling from the country to study art in Berlin.  Severing is a man who is painfully reconciling himself with the truth of his city: that it is being torn apart by the ideas of Marxism and socialism in a struggle with the combination of ignorance, poverty, and nihilism that make the German fascism of that time.  As a writer this manifests itself in Severing through his writer's block, a sort of paralyzing disbelief at what is happening, with which he struggles for most of the book.  Marthe, on the other hand, is at odds with herself in an introspective way; after the death of her younger brother she's only recently been able to bring herself to draw.  Throughout the book she tries to discover what her art means to her and what makes her draw.  It seems that the struggles of the writer and the artist are close to Lutes' heart; in a recent interview he admits to having difficulty choosing to pursue writing and literature instead of art.  The blurry line between writing and drawing is evident from the start: Marthe sketches on lined paper and journals in a sketchbook. After finishing Understanding Comics earlier this year, I've paid close attention to "the gutter" in graphic novels - that is the space between frames where your mind creates a link in the narrative.  Most American comics transition from "action to action" cells and hence allow the reader to put together a sequence of events.  Lutes' approach is different; many of his transitions are "scene to scene" - the kind that allow your mind to construct a larger picture of a thematic place or feeling.  Reading Berlin is a reminder of the power of ideas and unrest; how they spread themselves through the edges of society into a potent force.  After World War I the idea of socialism was in a violent struggle with the nihilism of right wing fascism and Lutes paints a picture of the discontent among those that have survived the first World War - a sea of veterans - returning to a crippled, desperate city. We see the narcotic fanaticism of leftist socialism championed by Rosa Luxemborg and Karl Liebknecht. It's ambitious for Lutes to attempt a story in this context but I think it succeeds because each character of Berlin allows us to watch it unfold, rather haplessly - they are being carried by powerful currents and struggle only to stay afloat. And as the diseased unrest begins to take over they are either torn apart or pushed together.  Because it's only a first installment, it stops short of true closure.  There are new issues of the Berlin series, published by Drawn and Quarterly, but I'll probably wait to feast on the second collection when it's published as a book.   posted in [home], [books] 10:59:04 PM    comment []

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