Right now, we live in a tumultuous nation, filled with internal strife emanating from Washington and, though ostensibly at peace, always kept on a footing for war thanks to both all of the international actions undertaken by our awe-inspiring military and the national security mindset of a post-9/11 world. To say that it can be difficult sometimes determining how to live our lives in this climate is an understatement.
But as 2012 comes to a close, again, it is good to think about another country similarly torn by crises on a grand scale. 200 years ago, Napoleon Bonaparte and his Grande Armee invaded Russia with a goal of conquering the superpower and got as far as laying waste to Moscow…only Napoleon had suffered his most staggering military action yet before reaching Moscow, at Borodino, and unprepared to face Russia’s winter and vastness, he was forced into a retreat which slashed his forces and laid the groundwork for his two great defeats and total loss of power.
Remember, you never get involved in a land war in Asia, and Russia stretches all the way through…
Fifty-seven years later, a veteran of another Russian war—the Crimean—who had fought in the endless and draining siege of Sevastopol wrote a book about the before, during, and after of Napoleon’s assault on Russia. That veteran’s name was Leo Tolstoy, and his book was War and Peace. [Read more…]
I would imagine that few people could tell exactly who Lytton Strachey was and what he did, even those who recognize his name; with a few exceptions in scholars, academics, and devotees of Bloomsbury and Strachey’s close friend/ex-fiancee Virginia Woolf. This is a mistake. It is more than that Strachey was, by the time of his death in 1932, something of an international celebrity, cutting a distinctive profile with his massive but gaunt body, long beard, and reedy voice. For at the same time Woolf was revolutionizing fiction alongside Joyce, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and other contemporaries, Strachey was reinventing full-length non-fiction almost overnight.
Welcome to “Recorded Conversations,” an occasional feature where all the Addison Recorder editors contribute their thoughts about a question, idea, or prompt. Everyone will chime in, and then we see where the conversation wanders. For today’s conversation, J. Michael Bestul looks forward to a few drinks over the Labor Day weekend, and wonders aloud what might be drinking.
Prompt: You’re at a bar, restaurant, or pub that you’ve never been to before. The place has a pretty good drinks list, and on it, you notice ____________. And because this is one thing you always have to try when you’re at a new place, you order it.
Question: What is ____________, and why is it the libation you order?
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Oh wait, it’s August now. Never mind.
Take two.
(I just want it to be very clear that my drink of choice is not Maus by Art Spiegelman. In no universe is it a statement that I will walk into a bar to see if they have a Kristillnacht Martini and whether or not it meets my given standards. That’s just (a) morally incomprehensible, and (b) silly. Also, I’m not a fan of Krystal Vodka. But we’ll get there.)
I’m honestly a big fan of just going into a bar and ordering a beer. My preferred brews of choice are Smithwicks, Newcastle, whatever Oktoberfest brew is on tap, or a good ale that pours nicely and goes well with a burger and bar fries. Smithwicks in particular is a favorite. It’s a beer to me that speaks to having just finished a hard day’s work.
My mover’s fee is not extravagant. Just efficient. Like me!
(It was also a gift after I helped my friend Beth move. This was the time where I discovered that one of my mutant powers is the ability to load a moving truck in the most efficient, durable, and easily accessible way, a talent that has come in useful several times since. Many friends will vouch for me not only for that move, but for others moves since (including some of our Recorderstaff!) I transformed what looked to be at least four trips between apartments into a trip and a half, and was rewarded by Beth with a six pack of Smithwicks and pizza. This is also the best moving payment ever. But we’ve gotten off topic.)
Welcome to “Recorded Conversations,” an occasional feature where all the Addison Recorder editors contribute their thoughts about a question, idea, or prompt. Everyone will chime in, and then we see where the conversation wanders. For today’s conversation, J. Michael Bestul looks forward to a few drinks over the Labor Day weekend, and wonders aloud what might be drinking.
Prompt: You’re at a bar, restaurant, or pub that you’ve never been to before. The place has a pretty good drinks list, and on it, you notice ____________. And because this is one thing you always have to try when you’re at a new place, you order it.
Question: What is ____________, and why is it the libation you order?
Erm, Travis joined the conversation a little late, talking about comic books when we had moved onto adult beverages. Here’s the question he was actually answering:
Question: You’re teaching a class in popular culture, literature, or the like. As part of your curriculum, you need to incorporate one graphic novel or comic book series, and only one. Which one do you use, and why?
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Speaking as one with a vague appreciation of the graphic novel (I have read them on several occasions, and do enjoy them, particularly those featuring excellent story telling), I find it difficult to really choose just one graphic novel to teach. That is not because of a wide variety of books that I find appropriate to educate as to the potential of graphic novel storytelling beyond Captain America, Batman, and the Hulk, as titles such as Persepolis, Watchmen, and Gaiman’s Sandman series immediately spring to mind. Rather, it is because I am only partially versed in the deeper history of comics beyond the Marvel and DC storylines.
Welcome to “Recorded Conversations,” an occasional feature where all the Addison Recorder editors contribute their thoughts about a question, idea, or prompt. Everyone will chime in, and then we see where the conversation wanders. After the annual pop culture festival that is San Diego Comic Con, and shortly before fall semester starts at universities, J. Michael Bestul has posed this quandary:
Question: You’re teaching a class in popular culture, literature, or the like. As part of your curriculum, you need to incorporate one graphic novel or comic book series, and only one. Which one do you use, and why?
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I have to admit that I am not nearly so versed in graphic novels and comics as J. and Andrew. Certainly, I enjoy them, but I have never made it a point to explore them in full. Thankfully, I actually do teach courses where I would encounter just such an predicament as J. laid out in his prompt, so I have an answer all ready to go.
My choice if I were to teach one graphic novel in a course would be Ghost World by Daniel Clowes. It’s the story of two disaffected teenage girls, Enid and Rebecca, drifting through their post-graduation life with an excess of ennui and a distinct lack of direction. As written and drawn by Clowes it’s the type of works that feels at once deeply personal and surprisingly universal. Certainly, not every student is going to see a direct reflection of their dyspeptic suburban environment, as I did when I first read it. But the feelings of discontent that both girls feel are undoubtedly universal, especially at that stage of late adolescence.
Neither Enid nor Rebecca have big dreams in Ghost World, just a desire to find something meaningful to do, and maybe someone to care about without a protective layer of irony. Not exactly the Jay Gatsby-types, but Ghost World is a much more grounded work than Fitzgerald could have dreamed of. Ghost World isn’t set in the here and now anymore (it was published almost 20 years ago, ye gods…), but it depicts universal emotions in such a specific manner that I think it would resonate strongly despite any initial skepticism towards the form or its content.
That reluctance plays into my decision as well. In my teaching experience, it has been a repeated delight to push new materials on my students when they expect not to like it. Screening films like The Tree of Life, Gegen die wand, or even Young Mr. Lincoln is met with groans and eye-rolls. Most 19-year-olds aren’t terribly interested in pushing their own cultural boundaries, and don’t expect to ever like anything they encounter in a classroom. Introducing a graphic novel that is not about superheroes, and which doesn’t make up for that with romance or drama, seems like a sure way to engender grumbling.
So when it comes time for class discussion, it is deeply gratifying to hear “I expected to hate it, but that was really interesting.” Not every reaction will be like that, obviously, but I fully expect that Ghost World would earn the remark from someone. Other graphic novels would do much the same, of course. But Ghost World means a lot to me, and half the fun of designing your own curriculum is making others experience things you enjoy, so it wins.
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Read the responses from the other editors,J., Andrew, and Travis, as they are published throughout today
Welcome to “Recorded Conversations,” an occasional feature where all the Addison Recorder editors contribute their thoughts about a question, idea, or prompt. Everyone will chime in, and then we see where the conversation wanders. After the annual pop culture festival that is San Diego Comic Con, and shortly before fall semester starts at universities, J. Michael Bestul has posed this quandary:
Question: You’re teaching a class in popular culture, literature, or the like. As part of your curriculum, you need to incorporate one graphic novel or comic book series, and only one. Which one do you use, and why?
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Answering this question was rather easy. There are four graphic novels which have surpassed the level of merely “inspirational” for me, and then it became a process-of-elimination game.
Jeff Smith’s Bone, which I have written about before, is at 1,332 pages—and every one of them densely packed—too long for this purpose. As much as I love Fun Home, Alison Bechdel’s work increasingly tips the balance in favor of words over pictures when they should be ideally equal. And Craig Thompson’s Blankets, even though it is the only comic which has ever made me weep, got crossed off for an odd reason. Even though Thompson’s illustrations are of the highest aesthetic caliber, I realized that except in a few places (the breathtaking, I’m trembling just thinking about it image of Craig and Raina’s bodies fused together, for example), the pictures and design augment the impact the reader feels as opposed to being in a symbiotic relationship with the story to create that impact.
(The same goes for Ray Fawkes’s breathtaking One Soul, which I recently finished and highly recommend.)
In comparison to these books, Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchellirevels in displaying all that the graphic novel is capable of, when not going farther and actually pushing the boundaries.
Every few pages, and sometimes in the same panel, Mazzucchelli will alter the paneling method, the color scheme, even the types of lines he is using to draw, creating a work which is as much a master class on how much variety lies in comics aesthetic and practice as Scott McCloud’s non-fiction titles. (Even Thompson sticks to the traditional one-panel-after-another form.) More importantly, Mazzucchelli is not showing off with this array of choices: every time his drawing and layout undergo a stylistic shift, it accompanies a change of scene and tone in the story; to take only one example, when Asterios and Hana have an argument, curvy florid red lines fill half a very detailed panel and blur into sharp geometric blue lines, reflecting the emotional distance between them. His words and pictures complement each other in a way very few texts in the medium have ever achieved.
But Asterios Polyp is more than a technical marvel. Mazzucchelli also tells a profound and gripping story laden with philosophical and romantic themes, and tells it with all the skill of a great novelist. He ties together multiple plotlines and uses recurring details in ways which make one want to immediately start the book over once finished. Best of all, the storytelling feels impossible without the illustrations. I cannot spoil anything, and do not even wish to talk about the plot to any extent. I will say that on the very first pages, a scene occurs which grows more and more laden with meaning as the reader discovers the many facets of Asterios. The scene’s significance could have been described with words alone, but I doubt this possibility…and even if it could have, it would have been far more difficult and hard to convey without Mazzucchelli’s well-chosen, ultimately heartbreaking imagery.
Asterios Polyp combines superb storytelling and pictorial artistry of the most innovative sort, and does so in a way which displays how words and pictures can work together in the best ways and not merely sit side by side. If I had to teach one graphic novel, pick only one which could encapsulate all that is wonderful and possible with the medium, it would be Asterios Polyp.
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Read the responses from the other editors,J., Bean, and Travis, as they are published throughout today
Welcome to “Recorded Conversations,” an occasional feature where all the Addison Recorder editors contribute their thoughts about a question, idea, or prompt. Everyone will chime in, and then we see where the conversation wanders. After the annual pop culture festival that is San Diego Comic Con, and shortly before fall semester starts at universities, J. Michael Bestul has posed this quandary:
Question: You’re teaching a class in popular culture, literature, or the like. As part of your curriculum, you need to incorporate one graphic novel or comic book series, and only one. Which one do you use, and why?
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I came up with the “one and only one” limit to make this challenging for myself, and to the other sequential art geeks that may inhabit the Recorder’seditorial board. As someone who’s taken a university course that focused on nothing but comic books in culture, and presented a conference paper on them – and whose wife works at a comic book shop – the challenge is in the limitation.
So let’s start with what kind of hypothetical class I’d be teaching. Since I get the unrealistic ability to choose my class in this scenario, it would likely involve American fiction, speculative or supernatural fiction, or mythology in modern — and Modern (and Postmodern) — storytelling. The comic book in question would need to:
tie back to other class readings, and
illuminate other facets of popular culture in its own unique manner.
With that in mind, my series of choice would be Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. I’d prefer to utilize the entire Mignola-verse (Hellboy, BPRD, etc.), but if I could only use one book, it would likely be Hellboy: the Conqueror Worm.
Since there would be a heavy focus (in this hypothetical class I’m teaching) on genre fiction (Bierce, Lovecraft, Howard, Borges, García Márquez, Asimov, Pratchett, Gaiman, Hill), and the theoretical underpinnings of mythmaking & intertextuality (Campbell, Jung, Eco), I would want a superhero comic book that could easily connect with these foci.
Tying the Mignola-verse together with these other readings is the easy part. Hellboy is a variation on our old friend, the heroic monomyth, but it also is a study in intertextuality. Mignola is very open about where he derives his stories from – whether he is retelling a piece of Asian or Celtic folklore, or utilizing the cosmic monsters (and their amphibian/human hybrid minions) that are a direct reference to Lovecraft’s Mythos.
But more than intertextuality, there are other pop culture connections that can be taught via Hellboy. One is the difference in storytelling between media (say, the Hellboy / BPRD books, graphic novels, and films – as well as Geek & Sundry’s “Motion Comics”), and another is the conventions of the comic book medium itself. As fellow Addisonian Alex pointed out in our last Conversation, sitcoms always tend to wrap up by the end of the episode. That is, they are episodic – after the conflict is resolved (or pushed back), the fictional world returns to its neutral state in time for the next episode.
Superhero comics are very, very similar. Even if a series-changing event occurs (e.g., death of a main character), at some point the series will only bend so far before that event must be undone or unwound (e.g., character comes back to life, or was not dead) — thus snapping the series back to its neutral state.
The Mignola-verse series defy that convention. The author has acknowledged this defiance in a recent story arc, indicating that in these series, when something is broken, it stays broken. The first dramatic example of this was with Hellboy: the Conqueror Worm, wherein Hellboy is pushed into a situation that goes against his character. When the tale ends, this causes him to reject the neutral state, thereby moving the narrative beyond episodic conventions.
And in the years since, Hellboy has only further broken from the episodic “return to neutral.” In the latest tales, for example, Ragnarok actually happens. Populations are wiped out. The world doesn’t go back to the old normal:
That’s what Professor Bestul is offering up this semester. How about the rest of you gents?
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Read the responses from the other editors,Andrew, Bean, and Travis, as they are published throughout today.
To begin, let me just say that, on behalf of all of us at the Addison Recorder, I would like to offer our condolences to all of the victims of the shooting that happened early this morning at the movie theatre in Aurora, CO. These murders are horrifying, a senseless act of violence that might seem like a vast impossibility, and because of the nature of this particular act, many of us around the nation, and the world, are in a deep state of mourning today.
There are many things to be said about this attack. I want to try and keep from politicizing the nature of the event, casting blame about, and making this into something more than it is. Lord knows that I want to rant about several things, and I’ve struggled with this in my mind as I sit down to write out my thoughts and feelings. Therefore, I apologize if this gets wordy, windy, or overly dramatic. If you wish to avoid such thoughts (though I’m trying to avoid getting preachy), close out now and you won’t have to suffer through my thoughts.
“You are all part of a Lost Generation” – Gertrude Stein to Ernest Hemingway
“Teenage angst has paid off well,
Now I’m bored and old.
Self-appointed judges judge
More than they have sold”
– Serve the Servants, – K. Cobain
Note: This article is best read while listening to Loud Music.
The idea of a generation of young people living and breathing and sharing the same cultural experience is not a new thing. It’s only in the 20th Century that Americans have, in an effervescent need to create a label for anything and everything under the sun, labeled themselves as belonging to part of a generation in an effort to unite and identify their own personal experience so as to make sense of the whole thing. Or something like that.
Welcome to “Recorded Conversations,” an occasional feature where all the Addison Recorder editors contribute their thoughts about a question, idea, or prompt. Everyone will chime in, and then we see where the conversation wanders. The question for this first Conversation was posed by Alex Bean:
Question: What cultural object (movie, music, show, book, play, whatever) do you find yourself coming back to again and again over the years?
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Indeed, Alex, that is a wide-open question. Thus, I feel it deserves a broad-ranging answer. Not broad-ranging like Mr. Cook’s answer, but an answer so utterly gargantuan & sanity-sapping that it has mutated beyond its origins as a cultural object and into an unnamable sub-culture.
I came to the Mythos from a few different angles, much like a Hound of Tindalos. By my teens, I was already a devotee of Poe and Bierce, as well as a tabletop gamer. In addition, my local library had a section dedicated to Wisconsin writings, including the stories of August Derleth. When my mind pieced together these seemingly dissociated bits of knowledge, it lead me inexorably to HPL.
That selfsame library also contained many blasphemous tomes published by Arkham House, the Wisconsin publishing house founded by Derleth and Donald Wandrei. These included the original anthologies of Lovecraft’s work, which I confess to borrowing often and for the full allowance of time.
It was the summer after my first year of high school when I cracked open an HPL story for the first time. Under the searing light of a relentless midday sun, I read the short story “Dagon.” It was… okay. I mean, I liked it, but it didn’t grab me.
Dagon did, however, grab the front of this ship.
After a bit of research, I learned that the chronological approach was not the best way to read HPL. So I jumped next to “The Nameless City.” The mood and ambience of that story struck me. Maybe there was something to this Lovecraft fellow, I thought. On it went, my enjoyment of HPL’s work slowly overtaking me, much like madness does to his protagonists.
And then I read “The Colour Out of Space.” I was hooked. This was the story that sealed my fate as a Lovecraft geek: the slow terror of a creeping blight, the sheer horror of powerlessness in front of an unworldly presence, and yet… a seemingly random event.
After that, all I could do was tumble down into this Styigan abyss. I was devouring weird and supernatural fiction that were tangential (or influential to) HPL’s Mythos. It introduced me to Robert W. Chambers and his Yellow Sign, which prepared me for the plays of Luigi Pirandello. It—
Have you seen the Yellow Sign?
I’ve got to pull back, here. There isn’t enough room in this response to list all the creative vistas that HPL opened to me: games like Delta Green, Arkham Horror, and Call of Cthulhu; other authors of the weird such as Arthur Machen, Ramsey Campbell, and Neil Gaiman; songs by the likes of Metallica, the Mountain Goats, and the Darkest of the Hillside Thickets; podcasts, films, people, my Master’s thesis…. And on, and on, ad infinitum.
I keep returning to Lovecraft and his Mythos for more than the original stories. The man himself was terribly flawed, and his stories could’ve used better editors. But the ideas that flowed from Lovecraft’s pen, and the community of writers he encouraged and collaborated with, those are what keep me coming back to his eldritch Mythos.
Read the responses from the other editors:Bean, Andrew, and Travis.
