What I Read in February, Part 1

Wow, February went by quickly. I guess at some point I forgot that it only had 28 days, so that I felt comfortable with not sending in any of my bills until the very last moment. Hopefully that's all ok, but if I disappear a la The Trial remember that I did it all for my art.

Anyway, I'm going to split this month's books into three parts, for several reasons. First of all, if you'll look back to January's roll-call you'll notice that I got burnt out about five books in, and started to write basically nothing or good-for-nothing stuff. Second of all, my boss finds in imperative that I fuck around with a lot of spreadsheets today, so I can't sit around blogging like a beautiful opium dream. Ok, alright.

1. City People, Will Eisner.

I always feel somewhat conflicted about counting comic books as, you know, books. I know I shouldn't. Things like Asterios Polyp, Black Hole, Shortcomings
, etc., I have no problem with counting as "real literature." But let's be real, I read a lot of terrible bullshit too. And while I feel more comfortable shelving R. Crumb or Eisner as real authors than, I don't know, X-Men Present: Murder Mystery on Mutant Mountain, that implies a value judgement I'm not sure I'm comfortable with. Is it less valid as art just because I find it silly and juvenile? What the fuck do I know, who am I to judge? Anyway what I'm trying to say is I'm never going to mention Wolverine on this blog, ever.

City People is a Will Eisner sketch-book about his perennial subject, New York City. It's mostly made up of short vignettes grouped by their sensory imperative, for example, a section of smell and the city, a section on the relationship between the city and sound. Some of them are very clever, and show that even when he was just sketching around Eisner was a master-- working the kind of sensory detail difficult to pin down even in poetry or prose (who can really write well about smell, or taste?) into his overwhelmingly visual medium. Of course, when you deal with Eisner these days you have to be prepared for some frankly pretty embarrassing sexual and racial stereotypes, and I felt particularly appalled by some of his gags in this one. Still, definitely worthy of a look for anyone already familiar with Eisner's more meaty works. Working in this milieu he occasionally takes on a lightness and flexibility of line that reminds me of Harvey Kurtzman, and is really cool to see.


2. The Magus of the North, Isaiah Berlin.

(The version I'm writing about is an earlier edition, published on its own-- I'm not sure if the above version is the full text of what I'm talking about.)
I think I already talked about this last month, for some reason. That's not right, this was definitely read in February. Anyway, this was a relatively brief essay on the Counter-Enlightenment writer and polemicist Johann Georg Hamann, who I'd never heard of and probably neither have you. Fascinating though, in that although the two were friends, Hamann comes out as a sort of Bizarro Kant, taking Hume's skepticism of causality and warping into a balls-to-the-wall attack on rationalism and logic. "I look on proofs," Hamann wrote, "as a well bred girl looks at a love letter"; that is to say, with contemptuous fondness but absolute suspicion.

Berlin does an excellent job of cramming into less than 200 pages a brisk assessment of Hamann's broad and obscurantist bibliography while tracing the lines of his influence through Herder and Goethe up to the populist and anti-intellectual roots of 20th century fascism. Hamann, as a kind of ur-Romantic and mystic, is a kind of frightening figure in that despite the obvious flaws in his arguments and the terrifying intensity of his loathing for reason, everything he says has a compelling aesthetic weight. Its easy to hate the militant philosophy of Mussolini or Hitler, but being forced to confront their more benign great-grandfather is a good excuse to re-assess your assumptions. Unfortunately this book doesn't seem to be in print anymore, but I think you can find it in some specific Berlin anthology. I don't know, I'll look into it.


***~~I'd just like to interject here that I just found out on the New Yorker book blog that the guys who did Logicomix are doing a GN on Levi-Strauss and structuralism, AWWWW YEAHHHHHH SO PSYCHED~~***

3. The Earliest English Poems, Michael Alexander (trans., ed.)

Alright, anyway. I picked this up at my favorite bookstore in Phoenixville (ok, basically the only game in town, but still an amazing place) on the $2.00 shelf, possibly to offset a friend of mine buying two used and soiled Tarot decks and possibly because I'd been eying the newer edition of this title for a little.

I had some initial skepticism about Michael Alexander's translations-- apparently those Anglo-Saxons had quite a thing for late-period William Carlos Williams-- but the book won me over eventually. Alexander, while acknowledging his debt to Ezra Pound in some areas, succeeds in rendering these poems as products of an almost totally alien culture that at the same time stands at the foot of everything we've done since then.

I was particularly moved by the poem "Deor," the monologue of an exiled bard without anything much left for him. The refrain "That went by; this may too." lends an eerily familiar Stoic flavor to the piece, and the last stanza is as softly chilling as Stanley Kunitz's "Old Cracked Tune":

"Of myself in this regard I shall say this only:
that in the hall of the Heodenings I held long the makarship,
lived dear to my prince, Deor my name;
many winters I held this happy place
and my lord was kind. Then came Heorrenda,
whose lays were skillful; the lord of fighting-men
settled on him the estate bestowed once on me.

That went by; this may too."

The anxieties of obsolescence and insignificance occupy an ominous spot in the mind of every writer I know, and every writer I've ever really loved-- Proust writes my favorite summing up of it in Swann's Way; "At those times it seemed to me that I existed the same way other men did, that I would grow old, that I would die like them, and that among them I was simply one of those who have no aptitude for writing" -- so to hear those sentiments arising out of that remote universe was poignant and scary and beautiful.

Michael Alexander's notes and introduction are equally valuable, combining a nice Oxfordy erudition with just the right note of the fanatic's idiosyncrasy (his advice to the reader to bellow, not just recite, the poems aloud I demurred from out of respect for the downstairs neighbors). A solid introduction to a fragmentary and elusive literature.

Anyway I hope you guys like reading about Vikings because for some reason, this is only the beginning. February was Unofficial Viking-Fest 2010.

4. Novels in Three Lines, Felix Feneon.



5. The Tower, W.B. Yeats. I read this out loud while getting my hair cut, getting really into it at parts, so much so that I'd start to slip down in the shitty office chair we'd dragged into the kitchen. "Stop squirming around," Abby kept saying, "you're getting hair all over the place, and you know, you make all of your food in this room." WHATEVER WOMAN THIS IS YEATS.

I've always really enjoyed The Tower, and will insist to my death-bed (maybe) that "Among Schoolchildren" and "Those Dancing Days Are Gone" are among Yeats' most perfect poems, and of course they're in there rubbing elbows with power-houses like "Leda and the Swan" and "Sailing to Byzantium." It's a lot of poetry for a slim and unassuming little book. As always it rewarded a reread, this time completely killing me with "A Man Young and Old," which I'd somehow failed to appreciate on any meaningful level before. Holy fuck everybody, I don't even know.

6, 7, 8. Northlands, Brian Wood.




So here's where my ambiguity about comics crops up again. I like Brian Wood, I thought Demo and Local were really... acceptable. But I just don't really know. After reading the aforementioned Old English poems I began a three or four day infatuation with that culture that resulted in a lot of boring bullshit being added to my Amazon wishlist (if I ever actually order the "Domesday Book" please kill me, I don't need to be reading any 11th century censuses) and culminated in marathoning the first three volumes of Wood's Northlands , a series taking a Wells Tower-esque aesthetic to various times and places in the "Viking Age." I can respect his obvious pleasure in jamming together genres and contexts to see what works (the first volume is a fairly straightforward revenge story about the Orkney Island in 980, the third is a "Fugitive" style manhunt story set during the occupation of Ireland, and the second a series of shorter pieces) but the material is wildly uneven.

Part of this can be reproach or praise laid on the shoulders of the artists. Davide Gianfelice draws a nice sword fight but his characters have all the expressiveness of a Saturday morning cartoon, while Vasilis Lolos lends the sparse one-issue "The Viking Art of Single Combat" a kind of kinetic poetry. Ryan Kelly as usual earns his paycheck, giving a gritty, punch-drunk patina to the longer form "The Cross & The Hammer," rendering its protagonist as simultaneously admirably tenacious and kind of fucking scary in the Toshiro Mifune or Lee Marvin mold.

Thinking on it some more, I don't feel too bad about listing these slim TPBs here. Brian Wood is obviously cramming a lot of passion and love into these stories, and is pushing himself to areas untapped in his earlier, more satirical or realistic stories. I don't love it as much as I did his Local, which I'd still hold up as a prime example of the capacity of graphic storytelling as a vehicle for contemporary short fiction, but every page sings with his enthusiasm for the project, which I definitely have to give props to.

Later this week, hopefully Wednesday, I'll get the second third out of the way, from Norman Cohn on bloodthirsty Anabaptists to Elif Batuman on all kinds of good things.