20 thoughts on “Utilitarian Review 5/11/13”

1. Finished Frantiek Skala’s Cecil’s Quest this morning. Simple plot, but the photography and model carving work make it a contender for one of the loveliest looking comics I’ve ever seen. He also has a book of carved heads, but I hope he makes more comics.
   Also finished Dave Cooper’s Suckle today. I like it better than Ripple. Funny, with interesting hallucinatory images but I still think his paintings are better than his comics.

   I caved in and shelled out 4o pounds for Berserk 18, which I have needed for a long time to continue reading the series. Also got 33 and 34 for a price that suggests they were reissued. Dark Horse has been very strange in not really rising to the demand to make new printings of the books that need it the most, there are threads and even youtube videos complaining about Berserk not being printed enough copies.
   I still need 28, 30, 31 and 32 but they are going for far more than I’m willing right now. I really hope 18 isn’t reissued too soon because I promised I wasn’t going to pay more than three times the original price.

2. I’m still reading Cloud Atlas. Right now I’m well into the second section, written from the charming scoundrel point of view. POV dude lacks morals but is a good writer, and has some interesting insight into the motives of the characters in the previous section, so all in all I’m pretty entertained.

   I’ve also gotten a little further into Friday Night Lights. The author really does have a lot of empathy for the sports-are-everything mindset, and an appreciation for what the athletes do on the field, but at the same time, he’s pretty brutal in his assessment of the (racist, unintellectual, one-trick-pony) town. I can see why this book was kinda controversial.

   I’m reduced to these books that were made into movies or TV shows because everything else at the B&N near my house is either a celebrity self-help book or a pop-neuroscience self help book, basically.

3. Also, the comment section on that Great Gatsby review… man oh man.

   It’s always nice to know where a reviewer is coming from, so I’m glad Rex gave himself away when he made sure to mention how much he hates Baz Lurman (who is Australian, just in case you didn’t know), and how much he disagrees with the use of hip hop on the soundtrack. Some nice zinger takedowns in the review but we clearly have different aesthetics.

4. I didn’t read the comment section.

   I like Strictly Ballroom and hip hop…but that film was still really, really bad.

   Not as bad as Olympus Has Fallen, but still not good.

5. “On Why The Gop Isn’t Addressing Jobs.” Standing ovation for Mr Berlatsky.

6. Oops, misspelled his name, it’s Frantisek Skala.

   I get tired when I see people on forums watching old favourites so often but I watched Inferno and Nosferatu again for the first time in at least 5 years maybe. I really wish there were more like these. Art Zoyd’s soundtrack for Nosferatu is one of the most amazing soundtracks I’ve ever heard. Even though they call them “silent”, these films can be made or broken by their soundtracks.

   Nearly finished the second volume of Tezuka’s Phoenix (couldn’t afford the first one) and unfortunately it is very good and confirms my fears that my shopping list will get bigger.
   I’ve not read Tezuka till now because as a rule I avoid critically acclaimed things unless they have some attractive aspect that hooks me in (I’ve got a lot of things for critical acclaim only that did nothing for me). I flicked through his books many times and they didn’t really intrigue me, but reading more about the epic scope of his stories finally got me interested enough.

7. I thought about going to see that Gatsby film, but decided it would be cheaper just to take some bad acid and hire a circus midget to flush my head down the toilet for two and a half hours non-stop, while he sings the greatest hits of Girl Talk through a megaphone.

   Just kidding — I never thought about going to see that Gatsby film.

8. It was an excuse for me to read the book again, which was enjoyable; I liked it better than I remembered.

   My piece about the film is up on the atlantic now if you’re interested:

   http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/05/-i-the-great-gatsby-i-movie-needed-to-be-more-gay/275768/

9. Huh @ the premise of your review. I gotta say, if I’d known there was supposed to be all this subtext to The Great Gatsby, I’d have liked the novel a lot more.

   I mean, on the one hand it is pretty obvious that Nick is attracted to Gatsby, but Gatsby is a hugely charismatic egotistical jerk, so, like, whatever. On the other hand, if we’re really supposed to read against the narrator/read between the lines of all of the narration, that’s a lot more interesting.

   Some commenters are saying that there are some subtle hints in the movie that Nick might be at least bi or at least attracted to Gatsby, so maybe the problem is the movie keeps the subtlety of the novel re: queer themes, while completely erasing all other forms of subtlety?

   Like if the whole movie had been subtle, then you could read some shots as clues of at least bisexuality, but because the rest of the movie is not subtle, it’s hard to pick those themes out.

   I haven’t seen the movie, but I like Baz Luhrman and the actors and the soundtrack and the concept, so I kind of feel like I should, even though it’s been getting mixed reviews.

10. Yeah; Gatsby is a *lot* more interesting if Nick has something particular to hide.

    I still have mixed feelings about the novel; Gatsby and Daisy and Tom and the melodrama all leave me fairly cold. But Nick and his secret and his weird relationship with Jordan Baker are weird and subtle and engaging and kind of great.

11. Hi Noah,

    Your Gatsby article was very nice. Hope you don’t mind if I leave my comment here. (I’ve been thinking a lot about Gatsby ever since you told us that it was a lesser quality artwork than early Wonder Woman.)

    On of the interesting things about your queer-Nick reading of Gatsby and the reaction of many Atlantic readers is that neither the reading nor the reaction is all that new. In fact, they’re older than I am. In 1967, Leslie Fiedler explored Nick’s fascination with Tom’s masculinity and his brutal body. That same year, Ken Kolb published Getting Straight, in which the protagonist, a stalwart Fitzgerald fan, rebels against his sex-obsessed literature teachers, who want to make both Nick and his creator “queer.” You can see the confrontation here, at the close of the 1970 film adaptation of that book. Funny how little has changed, particularly when one is talking about a novel about denial, forgetfulness, feelings of purity and disgust, and repeating the past.

    Of course, I am completely on your side — and Fitgerald’s, who talked openly and appreciatively about what he called his feminine side (“I am half-feminine; at least my mind is”). And, of course, this photo has made a few rounds on the Internet recently.

    You are right on the money with the McKee scene, but it seems to be that the novel is full of such moments, where Nick tells us about himself (“I am … full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires”; “I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices”) and others tell us about their impression of Nick (“‘You forget there’s a lady present,’ said Jordan. Daisy looked around doubtfully. ‘You kiss Nick too’).

    But I think you underplay — in the comments at least — the extent to which the novel is about this man’s deep love for Gatsby. It is a love of his artifice, and a belief in that art, even in the face of its ludicrous artificiality: “Then it was all true”; “I had one of those renewals of complete faith in him”; “I didn’t want to go to the city…. I didn’t want to leave Gatsby.” And it is a love that becomes more possessive of the man as the novel progresses, till Nick wants to assure us that, in the end, it was just Gatsby and him, that he was the one person Gatsby to whom Gatsby had not lied.

    Indeed, by the end, he has all but become Gatsby. And this might help to explain some of the most hard-to-swallow passages in Fitzgerald’s prose. All those sentences of high portent — all that stuff of about the “the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing” and all those descriptions of Gatsby and Daisy’s first kiss — were not from Gatsby or what he shared with the narrator. The novel makes it abundantly clear that James Gatz can hardly string three coherent sentences together. That love story — adore it or despise it — is Nick’s love story, in Nick’s overflowing words, about a world (real or not) where “even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.”

    Peter

12. Thanks Peter! That’s a great comment, and a lovely reading of the book.

    As I thnk I mentioned in the comments over there, Eve Sedgwick has this hysterical passage in Epistemology of the Closet where she lists all the reasons people say that gay content can’t exist or doesn’t matter. There should probably be some sort of drinking game where you use that list while reading comments threads….

13. That gay reading of Gatsby is interesting. I don’t think they teach it that way in High School!

14. I agree, pallas, it’s not the high school reading. But then, without high school, of what ideas would college English teachers disabuse their students? :-) No, kids, Huck Finn is not about the glories of life on a raft and learning to overcome racism. Moby-Dick is not about the conflict of Man and Nature. And “The Road Not Taken” is not a celebration of nonconformity.

    And Noah, I’m glad you liked the comment. Your writing often inspires me to write back and write more.

    For example, I wasn’t kidding when I said your Wonder Woman proclamation had me already thinking about Fitzgerald, and not to the benefit of Wonder Woman — nor to the benefit of comics in general. Gatsby is by no means my favorite novel; it may not even make my “Top 10 American Novels, 1900-1950.” (Although I do have a soft spot in my heart when I hear Fitzgerald defenders like Haruki Murakami say, “If The Great Gatsby is not great, then what the heck is?”) Still, in Gatsby and other great and no-so-great fiction, I have experienced an intensity of interaction and absorption that few, if any, comics have been able to match.

    Sometimes this comes at a momentary turn of phrase, like when Gatsby and Nick were groping through darkened abandoned rooms and Nick “tumbled with a sort of splash upon the keys of a ghostly piano.” At other times, it is the book’s ability to recreate not a vision, but the feeling of a vision or an event — whether the list of party attendees, scribbled on the back of a train schedule, each with its own amputated story, or the blurry and fragmentary night in Manhattan (the “McKee” affair) with its image of “bloody towels upon the bath-room floor, and women’s voices scolding, and high over the confusion a long broken wail of pain.” Or it could be just Fitzgerald’s ability, in that book, to parcel his narrative perspective out among characters, lettering different linguistic registers glide against one another.

    Sadly, comics have rarely been able to reproduce that overall effect (in me). They can be stunning or clever or even profound, producing a reading experience like skimming along surfaces, powered by little bursts of visual adrenaline. But they have seldom held me inside them. Gatsby, even at its silliest, holds me.

15. WW and Gatsby are different I think not so much because of comics/prose as because one is closeted and one really kind of isn’t. Gatsby’s about secrets and being closed in (perhaps the sense of being held?) WW is about spectacle and exhilarating fabulousness, I think.

    There’s also realism/fantasy to think about…

16. True, true, all around. And I am not trying to denigrate the faboulisity of WW. But I do find myself wondering why comics — unlike novels, unlike paintings, unlike music — so often hold me at arm’s length, or vice versa. What is it about them? What is it about me?

    [P.S. When is your WW book coming out? I need to see it!]

17. The WW book has been done since last August. In theory it’s with a reader (or readers?)…and then I’ll deal with comments and then….

    So yeah, I don’t know. Hopefully someday.

    I can find comics very immersive myself…so since I don’t really have that experience of alienation it’s hard to say what it might be…?

18. Hi Noah,

    I’m sorry (for both of us) to hear about the long road to publication.

    Regarding the reading effect of comics, I know that you and I have disagreed about such things before — perhaps the last time being about whether photo-comics produce an overall different sense of narrative time/place (as opposed to drawn comics) and whether they produce a different sense of comics’ artifice, its sense of movement, etc. I never know what to do with that level of disjunction, at least barring wider empirical evidence. But as you often write, “mileage may vary.”

    Best, Peter

19. I can’t even remember talking about photocomics! I’m getting old….

20. ———————
    peter sattler says:

    …I do find myself wondering why comics — unlike novels, unlike paintings, unlike music — so often hold me at arm’s length, or vice versa. What is it about them? What is it about me?
    ———————–

    Nothing necessarily to do with you. Aren’t most novels and music more “immersive” and “collaborative” art forms, where the “action” takes place in our heads, where we add to the work via our inner personal imaginings?

    A while back (was it here, or at the late TCJ message board?) there was a discussion about, “why are so few comics truly scary?” With horror novels, that immersive/collaborative effect is at work. With horror movies — relatively very few of which are animated — we go to the other extreme, with a vivid replication of reality.

    While with comics, there is the constant fact that these are rendered narratives, the “artifice” of the drawings distancing, preventing our “adding to the work via our inner personal imaginings.” And photocomics fare not much better; their static breaking up into juxtaposed panels (not to mention blocks of copy, word balloons) getting in the way of the “vivid replication of reality” that movies provide.

    As for paintings, works as different as http://uploads0.wikipaintings.org/images/rene-magritte/the-menaced-assassin-1927.jpg and http://uploads7.wikipaintings.org/images/rembrandt/the-blinding-of-samson-1636.jpg imply a narrative; yet we get to imagine (or, in the case of Samson, know) what came before and after. We don’t have, in effect, the story laid out before us, step-by-step.

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