Keely has
1413 books
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| # | cover | title | author | isbn | isbn13 | asin | num pages | avg rating | num ratings | date pub | date pub (ed.) | rating | my rating | review | notes | recommender | comments | votes | read count | date started | date read |
date
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date purchased | owned | purchase location | condition | format | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0679776214
| 9780679776215
| 3.63
| 478
| 1989
| Jan 28, 1997
|
Between the description of an 'infinitesimal glass of sherry', the litany of cutesy place names ('Crook Manor', 'Ceck's Bottom', 'Pock-on-the-Fling')...more
Between the description of an 'infinitesimal glass of sherry', the litany of cutesy place names ('Crook Manor', 'Ceck's Bottom', 'Pock-on-the-Fling') and actually reminding the reader in as many words that the theme of the book is 'the grotesque', I now know what it's like to read a book with the iconoclastic spirit of Gormenghast as written by an author lacking the wit or idiom to carry it off. It's affected, trite, and tiring. Mostly tiring.(less)
| Notes are private!
| none
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0
| May 30, 2013
| not set
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May 31, 2013
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0880295309
| 9780880295307
| unknown
| 3.62
| 8
| Jun 01, 1990
| Jun 01, 1990
|
Once again, I'm reminded that even a lackluster history often has a better plot and characters than most novels. Gardner does have his good points, bu...more
Once again, I'm reminded that even a lackluster history often has a better plot and characters than most novels. Gardner does have his good points, but overall he becomes easily enthused by the great names of certain English heroes--not to say that they weren't remarkable men who shaped history, but there's a little to much hero-worship for my tastes. Likewise, there are a few remarks about the 'violent, mysterious, spiritual East' and other such silly prejudices that Said built a career on critiquing, but overall it's not a book that dwells on such assumptions, and even reverses them, now and again. Most interesting is the fact that the premise of the book is the uniqueness of the East India Company, a shipping interest owned by shareholders that incidentally ended up one of the most powerful empires in history, an empire owned and run by businessmen, and for profit--though they were often used as a screen for government interests, and ran on a debt most years of their existence, paying lie to the old notion that 'if business were run like governments, they'd fail'--for indeed, most business do run on debt and loans, and it hardly cuts into the profits--indeed, in allowing for larger risks, it often makes them bigger. However, I was unconvinced by the premise that this system of governance is unique--firstly, it seems that the majority of governments have been run for the profit of their little elect group, and whether you call them 'nobility' or 'the board of directors' is really only a matter of tradition. More than that, there are of course more modern examples of the 'Barons of Industry' running governments both at home and abroad, from Banana Republics and Drug Cartels to the Fiji Water Tyranny, and of course the fact that Bills in America tend to be passed or blocked on the basis of lobbyists and high-payed consultancy positions. In the end, more than anything, it reminded me of the post-cyberpunk world in Snow Crash, where the map has been literally divided up into the protectorates of various business concerns. But then, since the business schools of The East India Company produced John Stuart Mill and the philosophy of Utilitarianism, I begin to ask whether open rule by a corporation might not be better than half-secret rule by them--at least then, we'd have a better idea of what we were getting. The most fascinating part was the role of Rani Lakshmibai in the terrible Sepoy Revolution (a rather important bit of history that we don't get here in the States). She was a modern day warrior queen who lead her people in an uprising against the Company, as it was trying to suppress their religion and dearest cultural traditions, one of the most foolish things an invading force can do to a far remote culture over which it has power.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| May 30, 2013
| May 30, 2013
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May 31, 2013
| Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1551119595
| 9781551119595
| 3.31
| 239
| 1894
| Oct 12, 2011
|
The problem with most Utopianists, as game designer Ken Levine points out, is that they don’t take into account the nature of humanity. Instead, they...more
The problem with most Utopianists, as game designer Ken Levine points out, is that they don’t take into account the nature of humanity. Instead, they lay an ideal on top of humanity, and because it is a nice idea, just assume that it will just automatically smooth everything out. But, of course, the world has always been full of nice ideas, and despite that fact, greed, ignorance, brutality, and lust always end up getting in the way. But then, the Utopianists were some of the first fantasists, authors who created and explored strange, false world of representational ideas, the world of Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, and Morris’ News From Nowhere --but alongside these were the satirists, those who created fantastical realms because of how effective such creations are when we want to mock the arbitrary traditions of our own world: Lucian’s Storia Vera, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, or Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. In the end, De Mille’s fantastical world has too little to do with reality to make it really interesting. The book starts off rather promisingly, giving us some amusing characters and then rushing full-bore into life-or-death adventure in a strange, new land--anyoine who has read Burrough's John Carter of Mars books or Haggard's Quatermain stuff will recognize it immediately: our hero must learn to survive amongst the unpredictable, alien culture. Of course, De Mille was the one who did it first, and there is something to be said for that. Unfortunately, he can't keep up the pace, and by the midway point, we’re completely stagnated in goofy worldbuilding: the hero speaking at length to the natives about their world, then turning and speaking directly to the audience for a further chapter where he repeats everything. Then we break off to the frame story--a set of sailors reading this mysterious manuscript out loud--as they sit around theorizing what type of extinct creatures the narrator was describing, and whether the Antarctic race he encountered were the tenth tribe of the Jews or a race of Red Sea troglodytes, complete with a discussion of Hebrew phonemes. Yet this culture isn’t particularly interesting, even though it sometimes gets close--the idea of a culture that idealizes the poor and downtrodden, that thinks fondly of death and sees wealth as an evil is not really all that odd. Eventually, De Mille has his narrators mention that it sounds like Buddhism or the Ascetic Christian tradition that sprung up from that Indian mystical influence. Unfortunately, De Mille doesn’t take cues form these cultures and add in details that make his little world unusual enough to be interesting, nor does the culture make much sense: the system which he describes seems to have no way of supporting itself as it is explained. Instead, like the Utopianists, he merely sets up a world that is the opposite of ours and never bothers to question how it might come about or why human beings would follow it, once it were established. Of course, if it were just a bit of background info, lightly touched upon, the setting for an otherwise rip-snorting adventure, I might not mind so much, but since he spends chapter upon chapter trying to explain its nonsensical intricacies to us, its silliness and flaws cannot really be overlooked. Once again, I am reminded of my own person writing rule that it is better to imply than to explain, to show the world as it is through the action rather than sitting down and trying to explain it. The only thing that achieves is revealing to your audience all the holes in your ideas. Then we head back to the frame story where the characters all talk about dumb and poorly-written the book is, and how it doesn't really make sense, though one gets the impression that De Mille is doing it in an attempt to be funny and clever. Then they start talking about the thematic meaning of the book, that even though the people in this culture have all the things we want, that we think will make us happy, they still aren't happy, and in fact they want all the stuff that we despise. I suppose that would be a somewhat clever premise, but it isn't actually how the action or characters are set up. Since the culture is arbitrarily set up and (despite a lot of discussion on the subject) there's never any clear psychological reason for the characters to behave the way that they do, the satire falls rather flat. De Mille evokes Swift by name, talking about representational satires that reveal something about our world to us, but he simply isn't funny or clever enough to pull it off, and so it just becomes the same allegory over and over, occasionally interrupted by some very welcome action scenes. Indeed, the book described by the characters in the frame story sounds vastly more interesting than the one we actually get. The lesson of Lucian, Swift, and Carroll is that the reader is less concerned with complex explanations about the author’s intentions than with story, character, action, wit, and insight. But then, their worlds were attempts to explore ideas through extended metaphors, whole nations and peoples that represented complex and unusual ideas--the truest definition of magic in literature being a metaphor, physically realized. De Mille’s is just an example of contrarianism: he has taken the world as it is and turned it upon its head without much rhyme or reason to account for it, and as Quentin Crisp points out in his introduction to Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series, being original is not the result of looking at what everyone else is doing and performing the opposite, but of finding a purpose that drives you, a philosophy that gives meaning and direction to what you write. De Mille possesses neither that purpose nor an exciting tale to tell in lieu of it, so I suppose that really does make this book the prototype of the modern fantasy tale.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| May 06, 2013
| May 20, 2013
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May 06, 2013
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0060838655
| 9780060838652
| 4.16
| 52,668
| 1980
| Aug 02, 2005
|
Howard Zinn saw a problem in the world, a great bias in our understanding of history, a history written by the winners--by tyrants and industrial magn...more
Howard Zinn saw a problem in the world, a great bias in our understanding of history, a history written by the winners--by tyrants and industrial magnates and warmongers--and so he did something about it: he created an equally flawed and opposed bias, just as carefully constructed to prop up his own one-sided conclusion, in an act which always calls to my mind Bob Dylan's line: "In a soldier's stance, I aimed my hand. At the mongrel dogs who teach. Fearing not that I'd become my enemy. In the instant that I preach." A staunch idealist, Zinn's standard method is to throw out the baby with the bathwater: he finds an imperfection in a plan or event, and declares that, since it it not perfect, it should be rejected, outright. There is no pragmatism, no sense of compromise, no utilitarian notion of 'the greater good' for Zinn--if there is a flaw in an action, then that action must be condemned. He has come out as saying that war is never a solution, that since people died, the conflict of World War II is not excusable, that the cessation of the Fascist war machine was not worth the cost. Of course, this beggars the question: what else? Is there some better solution to the problem, is there anything else that could have been done to prevent it? Likewise, he has rejected US intervention in Korea, despite the fact that when we look at the split Koreas today--the North a wasteland of violence, malnutrition, and ignorance, the South a modern nation with a thriving economy--it is difficult to argue that, despite the deaths in that war, the intervention was not, overall, a positive. Certainly, I am not of the camp who believes the US to be some sort of 'World Hero', that we are justified in policing the world, or in enforcing our ideals upon other nations, but neither do I buy the image Zinn paints of the US as a hand-wringing Disney villain that ruins everything it touches--the real truth of the matter is somewhere in between. Some things which the US has done, such as our interference in Afghanistan--well on its way to becoming a modernized, self-sustaining nation in the mid-20th Century--tearing down its government, arming its warlords, and making it the staging ground for our Cold War battles with Russia--are awful examples of selfishness forced upon the world. The actions of our government and intelligence community there were not for the greater good, they were at the expense of the Afghans to our own benefit, and there are many such damning examples, but to focus solely on them is just as bad as ignoring them entirely. Zinn has received much credit for revealing truth, for reinvigorating our education system and our view of history, but honestly, his work was a bit late for that--already, such diverse perspectives were emerging, and while it took some time for them to trickle down to Middle Schools and the public consciousness, nothing in his book was a revelation to devoted students of history. Even those historians who were sympathetic to minority experiences and opposed to the white-washing of history tended to condemn Zinn for cobbling together a poorly-researched work which took only those parts that were convenient to his thesis and left out all else--and beyond that, twisting and misrepresenting his sources to his own ends. But his work is sensationalistic, and work of that sort has a way of finding its way into popular discussion, whether it is accurate or not. His opponents can cite him of an example of 'all that is wrong with that point of view', while his supporters are attracted by the fact that his work tends to cast as the true heroes of history the uninvolved thinker, the academic who talks a great deal, attends protests, but does not get his own hands dirty, since in Zinn's approach, to interact directly with the imperfect world is to sully one's self. It's hardly surprising that, in the modern age of 'Entertainment News', as represented by the vehement spewing of incoherent bias, figures like Zinn and Chomsky should become elevated. Zinn's book is like the 'documentaries' Zeitgeist , or What the Bleep Do We Know? , like Daniel Quinn's Ishmael or Hesse's Siddhartha , or the writing of Bell Hooks--all works that are fundamentally more concerned with the author's prejudice than with anything resembling fact. In college, it's not uncommon to find folks who are devoted to all of the above--and if there's a better way than that to say "I have relatively little capacity for critical thought, but need constant confirmation of my own specialness', I don't know it. But then, such works are liable to spark off movements--not because they are accurate or well-written, but because they flatter certain preconceptions in the person who reads or watches them--meaning that the movements they inspire are not far removed from cults, centered as they are on philosophies which do not correspond to reality. It is truly sad that, in the end, the common state of politics can be boiled down to a question like 'Do you follow rush Limbaugh, or Kieth Olbermann?', when in fact both of them are equally sensationalistic purveyors of half-truths delivered by way of ideology-filled rants. One sometimes wonders what we might achieve if we were able to think of the world in terms other than false dichotomies--but since I, unlike Zinn, am not an idealist, I shall have to accept the fact that it's simply how the human mind works, and do my best to work within that system.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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0
| not set
| not set
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May 03, 2013
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0012674591
| 2940012674593
| 3.74
| 423
| 1910
| Mar 03, 2011
|
Another paranormal investigator in the tradition of Van Helsing, Dr. Hesselius, and John Silence, I was curious to see what Hodgson would do with the...more
Another paranormal investigator in the tradition of Van Helsing, Dr. Hesselius, and John Silence, I was curious to see what Hodgson would do with the idea, especially after reading his
House on the Borderland
and finding it to be refreshingly uncanny. Unfortunately, the Carnacki stories are so flat and formulaic that they add very little to the subgenre. Every case follows the same pattern: a group of men gather at Carnacki's house and sit around for a bit before he suddenly launches into his story: he's called out to investigate some occurrence, he describes some incident as giving him the 'creep', he refers to a number of other cases 'which you fellows certainly remember' (but which are never, themselves, described), he piles on a lot of colloquialisms, follows this with some goofy made-up terms ('Second Sign of the Saaamaaa Ritual'), mentions someone 'lacking pluck', describes a vague feeling and insists 'we must know what he means', eventually blinds himself with a camera flash, sets up his 'electric pentacle', then explains the whole matter (barring a few mysterious details), and sends his friends out into the night. Sometimes, the cases are supernatural, while other times we get a full 'gothic explique' that tries to account for the apparently supernatural elements as mere tricks. So, there is some variation in the subject matter, but not very much, especially when compared to the John Silence tales. Worse than that is the fact that Carnacki himself is a very flat character, somewhat unflappable and matter-of-fact, but otherwise entirely unremarkable and without much sense of interior personality, despite all his friendly colloquial expressions. In Silence, for example, we get a figure who actually seems affected by the cases in which he takes part, who has an investment in the people involved, and in what those cases suggest about the reality of the world. Silence has a perspective, a sort of bias which makes him feel like an actual person caught up in a lot of strangeness. Carnacki, on the other hand, is so matter-of-fact about everything that there is very little unique about his approach. He's not a figure who must deal with the implications of the supernatural, of the long-term effects they have on a human mind, but an implacable force that solves whatever is before him. Certainly, sometimes he has a fright, but the horror in these tales is all of a very physical variety. There is always some menacing thing, some murderous force which is acting upon him, which must be fought and overcome. The force is never dangerous to the mind, or the perception of the world, only to the physical body. As such, the Carnacki stories form a prototype of the jump-scare movies which are popular today: there are always half seen things in the shadow of the corner of the room, lurking around every corner, malicious and violent and only held off by Carnacki's magic circles. I do have to say that I find the idea of his 'electric pentacle', a vacuum tube ring which protects him from supernatural forces to be terribly amusing. Again, it somewhat negates from the supernatural aspect, turning the thing into a physical scientific investigation, but its such a wacky, Ghostbusters idea--I only wish he'd been able to do more with it, that the stories had been odd enough and psychologically intriguing enough to make of the pentacle more than a mere plot object. There's also an odd continuation of the pig-based horror that Hodgson explored in House on the Borderland, which illustrates just how lucky Lovecraft was to base supernatural monsters on his intense distaste for seafood, since kosher law seems not to translate as well into the disturbing and horrific.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| Apr 14, 2013
| Apr 20, 2013
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Apr 14, 2013
| ebook
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| 1426438281
| 9781426438288
| 3.72
| 1,357
| 1908
| Oct 11, 2007
|
Read, write, and study books for long enough, and you'll eventually start to recognize how stories work. You'll find yourself saying things like "Oh,...more
Read, write, and study books for long enough, and you'll eventually start to recognize how stories work. You'll find yourself saying things like "Oh, this character's going to die soon because the author just resolved the ongoing tension they had with the hero" or "Ah, the mysterious stranger must actually be the orphan child of the Baron that people keep talking about". To people who don't know how to do it, it seems like a magic trick, but the only thing you need to do is pay attention to details and to ask yourself "where is this story going to go next?", and it becomes surprisingly obvious. Anyone who has read one of those endless 'Cthulhu collections' which contain one story by Lovecraft, two by the editor, and the rest by nameless authors knows that horror stories are particularly prone to follow certain patterns. If the character finds a big, carven stone gate in a cave, you can bet he's going to go in there and discover some weird, ancient stuff. If the old farmer won't let him see the barn, you know there's something bad in there. And at first, reading The House on the Borderland, one of the all-time classic works of supernatural horror, I thought I had things pinned down pretty well. We ease into a familiar old 'evil creatures' story for the first third, with our main character getting more and more weirded out by all the strange things happening around his old house. However, if you'd asked me to predict the rest of the book based on the beginning, I wouldn't have come anywhere close. Suddenly we're wrapped up in time and dimensions, in a kind of grand metaphysical horror that seems to be completely removed from everything that happened before, and it's only at the end that it all finally comes back around and the reader is able to piece together just what has been going on. Usually, early, influential works in a genre are fairly straightforward--often, they are fumbling, as the author tries to figure out what it is they are trying to say. Hodgson's story, on the other hand, is more wild, imaginative, and unfettered than any modern horror tale I've read. It really stretches the limits of the reader's comprehension, and leaves behind many intriguingly incomprehensible images. It is sometimes a bit slow-going, and there is also the problem that some of the elements seem a bit silly. Of course, if you saw them in real life, in the flesh, they would be terrifying, but Hodgson isn't always able to bring home to the reader the pure weirdness of it, to shake us up enough that we are able to see it with fresh eyes. That's something every great horror author must be able to do in order to be effective, particularly in the early parts of the story, where seemingly normal but odd things are slowly building to a head. However, many of the ideas and images Hodgson gives us are perfectly unsettling on their own, without any need for an intermediary. If I was ever concerned that the supernatural elements I put into my period horror stories are 'too strange for that era', I clearly need not worry. No one is going to out-weird Hodgson any time soon--nor, I think, do any other living writers provide much of a threat to his well-earned reputation.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| Apr 2013
| Apr 09, 2013
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Apr 07, 2013
| Paperback
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| 0486201058
| 9780486201054
| 4.15
| 575
| 1927
| Jun 01, 1973
|
Sometimes called 'the most important piece of literary criticism in the Horror genre', Lovecraft's essay on the history and method of supernatural hor...more
Sometimes called 'the most important piece of literary criticism in the Horror genre', Lovecraft's essay on the history and method of supernatural horror is a great resource for readers and writers alike, as it mostly consists of a list of his favorite authors and their most notable and unusual stories. Really, an editor should go through the text, collect all the stories and authors Lovecraft mentions, and then make them into a shot story collection, with this essay as an introduction--hard to think of a more effective primer to the genre than that. Unfortunately, I wish that Lovecraft had gone into greater depth about the style and methods of horror writers, particularly when he was going through all the example authors. If he had taken certain stories and passages and used them as illustrations for how to achieve this or that effect, then this would be an indispensable analysis. As it is, you get a lot of plot outlines along with generalized bits of praise or condemnation from Lovecraft, himself. He includes many of those longer Gothic works, talking about certain moments which manage to rise above the formulaic melodrama and tacked-on romance that tend to dominate such lengthy, ambling tales, but it's hard to feel that it's worthwhile to wade through all that just to get to the few superlative instances. His discussion of Hawthorne's longer works, in particular, made them sound much more appealing than my actual experience with them, years ago. Then again, Lovecraft, himself is known to indulge in verbose exposition, so he may find that style less off-putting than I do. Likewise, Lovecraft's chapter on Poe is much more laudatory than what I would write, as I find most of his work to be uneven and repetitive to the point of narrowness in terms of images, ideas, themes, and tone. Lovecraft, himself, does acknowledge some of these problems, but as with the rest of the essay, it could have done with more specific examples and laying out of ideas. It looks like I'll have to return to the stories, themselves for instruction, and hope that proves to be enough. Amusing that Lovecraft outright rejects the 'Gothic Explique'--when an author tacks on a bit at the end that tells the reader how all the apparently supernatural events actually have a reasonable explanation such as mass hypnotism, a dog covered in phosphorescent mushroom spores, or a full-sized human skeleton rigged up as a marionette--also known as the 'Scooby Doo Ending'. Then again, I'm not fond of it, myself, especially in a profoundly supernatural tale where the explanation must become absurd in order to account for everything that has happened. But so far, I'm happy to report that my book seems to lie within the guidelines set down by Lovecraft, so that, at least, is a promising sign.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| Mar 31, 2013
| Apr 2013
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Mar 31, 2013
| Paperback
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| 1592240429
| 9781592240425
| 3.71
| 14
| 1918
| Oct 25, 2002
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Dunsany is best known as one of the masters of fantasy, possessing one of the most complex, developed, and subtle voices in supernatural fiction, as h...more
Dunsany is best known as one of the masters of fantasy, possessing one of the most complex, developed, and subtle voices in supernatural fiction, as he displayed to peerless effect in The King of Elfland's Daughter, one of the few fantasy books I've read where the magic actually felt magical, instead of just being a contrivance or allegory. And yet, so many times, when I discover these great authors, it takes me a long time before I read another of their books. I'm not sure why I possess this habit--perhaps its that, once I've found something really good, I know it's there, waiting, and so I can get on the search for the next revelation and return to my cadre of Great Authors when I'm too tired of disappointment. Then of course, there are also those authors, like Leiber, who start out brilliantly and become rather disappointing, themselves, as time goes on. So there is always a certain hesitancy when approaching a new work by a well-loved author, because few things are more unpleasant than to watch someone do something poorly when you know it is perfectly within their power to do well. Gladly, when I cracked this collection of tales fictionalizing Dunsany's experience in The Great War, I discovered that Dunsany's skill was to be felt in all its force. Within, you will find his knack for creating odd little characters who feel real by virtue of their unrealness--that same gift that lent Peake and Gogol their brilliance. Likewise he demonstrates his fine sense of mood and rhythm, and of curious turns in his language, which never fails to remind me that he wrote all his stories longhand, with a quill pen. There is also a great variety of mood and theme, from stories of small life to unsettling, eerie tales to his meditations on the ancient, fey spirit of the land, and the crass stupidity of war. Unfortunately, coming to the middle of the book, this variety of approaches begins to wane, and he gives us a number of stories which harp on the same themes over and over--namely, the foolishness of the Kaiser and the destruction of the ancient beauty of France. Some of these are quite powerful and affecting, but others rehash the same ideas over again, and it becomes rather dull. Its not that any individual story is weak, but it feels like we're looking at many drafts of the same idea, some stronger than others. This was really the only reason that I dropped the rating down from five stars. Indeed, its one of the few examples I can think of where the removal of some stories would have improved the book. In any case, it did nothing to reduce my opinion of Dunsany, and I'll have to make a note to myself to visit his lovely works more often than has erstwhile been my habit.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| Mar 28, 2013
| Apr 03, 2013
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Mar 28, 2013
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0812967259
| 9780812967258
| 3.85
| 19,474
| 1912
| Jan 14, 2003
|
One of the most pleasant aspects about reading adventures like those of Doyle, Wells, Kipling, and Haggard is the particular presence of the character...more
One of the most pleasant aspects about reading adventures like those of Doyle, Wells, Kipling, and Haggard is the particular presence of the characters, their little joys and quarrels and concerns. There's this humorous self-awareness throughout the story that makes the whole thing read as if its being told, given over to the reader in a particular voice. Certainly, this can be carried too far and made condescending, as with C.S. Lewis, but it goes to show what a winking authorial presence can lend to a work, especially to a melodrama adventure. Too often among the lesser class of 'thrilling' books, we get flat characters who are so profoundly competent and neutral that they lose any chance of possessing a personality. It just goes to show that a good story, be it action or horror or what have you, still requires some humor, some wryness to inject suitable depth and humanity, just as a good comedy can profit from a bit of pathos and tension. Of course there are some rather insensitive colonial notions woven into it, which some readers are quick to forgive as being a 'symptom of the time', but a perusal of Wells shows that it was not an inextricable part of the Victorian man's mind. The story's notions are delightful, made up of the sort of thing that can still fire up a young man's imagination today, and it's hardly surprising to see that they were picked up and elaborated upon by numerous later authors, most prominently in Burroughs' 'Tarzan' and 'The Land That Time Forgot'. The latter book I actually read as a child and mistook for Doyle's work, and it was only recently that I realized and rectified my error, and I'm glad I did.(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| Mar 09, 2013
| Mar 13, 2013
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Mar 09, 2013
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 4.12
| 93
| 1893
| 1893
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December 26th, 1913, Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce disappeared into the Mexican desert, never to be seen again, and so it was that, in appropriately mysteri...more
December 26th, 1913, Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce disappeared into the Mexican desert, never to be seen again, and so it was that, in appropriately mysterious manner, one of the premiere American horror authors passed on into the undying realm of night. Bierce was the preeminent innovator of supernatural stories between the death of Poe and the rise of Lovecraft, and to be quite honest, I prefer his approach to either of theirs. While those authors tended toward dour, indulgent, overwrought prose, Bierce preferred a lighter touch, built upon precise, carefully-constructed prose and driven by a deeply morbid wit, somewhere between Nietzsche and Alexander Pope. What may be most interesting about his tales is that, despite their simplicity, they often require quite a bit of thought from the reader: when you reach the end, you know something terrible unnatural has occurred, but piecing together precisely what happened requires a moment of reflection, where the discrete details of the story come together to imply something much more grandly dark than the apparently simple story would seem to contain. To me, the sheer mirthlessness of Poe and Lovecraft denies their stories a certain depth--they are not capturing the whole human experience, but concentrating obsessively on one particular part, as befits the natures of such odd, affected men--men who we imagine to be just as off-putting as the strange, damaged characters in their stories. Bierce's abberation if of a different sort, that of a deep cynic who turns to laugh at the world, at its every aspect, life and death, joy and horror. In missing this from their stories, other horror authors reject a large part of the palette with which horror and madness can be depicted. Chambers dabbled effectively in this laughing tief, as well, but with more uneven results, as his horror career slowly transformed into a series of bland drawing-room romances. Dunsany, also, has a sense of wit, and of the humor of desperation, but none has so devotedly focused the breadth and depth of their talent on the subject as Bierce. Some of the stories in this, the last of two such collections Bierce published, are similar, but there are also those inexplicable and masterful standouts which differ in their approach and the effect they achieve from any other horror author. In the end, there is no mistaking Bierce's handiwork, it is in every line: in every careful comma and semicolon, every aphoristic turn, touch of frontier Americana, vivid picture of awful war, and wryly bitter observation.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Mar 05, 2013
| Mar 27, 2013
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Mar 05, 2013
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| 0192835904
| 9780192835901
| 3.70
| 2,101
| 1824
| Oct 07, 1999
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I came across Hogg through his interactions with de Quincey, and so I grabbed his most notable work from Project Gutenberg, expecting another 'Opium E...more
I came across Hogg through his interactions with de Quincey, and so I grabbed his most notable work from Project Gutenberg, expecting another 'Opium Eater' about some clever reprobate's adventures through the Victorian. If you know anything about this book, then you can imagine my shock and wonder at discovering the story it actually contains. It begins simply enough, as a witty picaresque set in Scotland and making some mockery of self-righteousness and Calvinist pre-destination in particular. But then the thing breaks off, it becomes suddenly clear that it is impossible for it to continue as it began, and we are split off into a second telling of the same events from a new point of view, a la Rashōmon. This second version is much darker and the prose becomes experimental, until we seem to be dealing with a crazed serial killer attended and impelled by a strange figure who may be the devil himself--if indeed he exists, at all. The narrator is what we'd call a 'flat character', as despite his doubts and concerns, he remains static throughout and does not go through a great revelation about his state. This can be somewhat frustrating, as often, the only thing we desire of the character is for him to show the slightest bit of self-awareness, but the story is also a kind of satire of allegory, and those of us who recall The Pilgrim's Progress, Piers Plowman, and Everyman will see that Hogg's work provides a sort of parallel to Candide , and that the wooden characters are a fuel for mockery, and for deeper thought. Yet I found Hogg's work much more interesting than Voltaire's, for as much as Voltaire turned the allegory on its head, in the end that's just an inverted allegory, relying on the same stereotypes for its message, but mocking instead of lauding them. Hogg, on the other hand, manages to make the whole thing conflicted, self-consuming, deluded, and mad. His treatment of Calvinist doctrine might be said to play rather straight, but all the other notions his story is concerned with intermingle and subvert beyond any straightforward interpretation. But in the end, and for all that, I'm not sure what to say about it. As a piece of art, it is powerful and unusual, prefiguring existentialist and experimental literature, but for what it all means, I feel somewhat less qualified to say.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Mar 05, 2013
| Mar 08, 2013
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Mar 05, 2013
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| 1587156520
| 9781587156526
| 4.13
| 1,096
| 1907
| Jun 01, 2002
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This is, of course, one of those classic short stories of weird horror mentioned alongside the work of Lovecraft, Howard, Machen, and Chambers as wort...more
This is, of course, one of those classic short stories of weird horror mentioned alongside the work of Lovecraft, Howard, Machen, and Chambers as worthy of even a discerning reader. Like many such stories, it starts somewhat slowly, establishing first that normal life from which we must soon, and by gradations, deviate beyond recall. however, I grew to feel it may have been a bit too slow, though it can be hard to judge such a balance. So much of the story was carried on the particular delivery of the concept, so I'm not convinced that quite so much preparation was really necessary. But then, Blackwood does sometimes struggle with delivery, falling back somewhat on repetition to ensure that his points come across, which makes sense for an author writing in an experimental genre for a wide serial audience and who may be concerned about being too obscure, but whether it was a bit of long-windedness on his part or an editorial decision I cannot say. In any event, after the setup is complete and we start descending into the otherworldly, the story starts to pick up pace, and by the time the concept is laid before us, I was deeply impressed by the insight and imagination of the thing. The presentation of the uncanny is so complete, so infectious, and so grand in its implications that I am hard-pressed to compare it to any other contemporary author but Dunsany, who achieved a similar effect in fairy tale. Indeed, I am hard pressed to think of another author who so subtly depicted the cosmology of shifting worlds until Moorcock, who did it in a rather rough style, or the Strugatskys, who took on the same concept and expanded it until it dwarfed the entire world of man. It is no wonder that this work is so influential, because it asks many difficult questions of the reader, and invites you to expand upon it, to sit and dwell and try to produce your own understanding of just what is actually going on, and what it means for the insignificant people caught in the middle. It has certainly altered the way that I think about the writing of horror, and it goes to show that the particular treatment an author gives their idea can make or break it for the story.(less) | Notes are private!
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Mar 05, 2013
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| unknown
| 3.80
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| 2004
| unknown
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When reading many of the weird horror writers of the early Twentieth Century, one sometimes gets the sense that it's not that the situations were real...more
When reading many of the weird horror writers of the early Twentieth Century, one sometimes gets the sense that it's not that the situations were really that horrible, but that the protagonists thrown into them happen to be rather skittish, lily-livered, and needing only the slightest nudge to push them off the edge in the first place. Lovecraft's heroes, in particular, can be rather touchy fellows. So there has been a desire to explore what it might be like to see a more strenuous and competent individual trapped in the same situation. After all, we get glimpses of these characters, such as the denizens of Innsmuth, the magic-working cultists, and Lovecraft's Tale of Charles Dexter Ward, where it is clear that it's possible for people to get a better grip on the paranormal world, and even to use it to their own advantage. Of course, these days, the pendulum has swung rather to the other end, and you're likely to see shotgun-toting sorcerer heroes who shoot at Cthulhu with rocket launchers, until the term 'psychological horror' is no longer remotely applicable. It's not that characters should be defeating the elder menace, any more than they should 'defeat' a hurricane, but it is interesting to see a character with a greater penchant for survivability. Paranormal investigation has quite a long history in literature, with sorcerers and priests capturing and exorcising ghosts and other spirits, but the modern notion of the non-denominational specialist has a much more recent origin: the Theosophical movement of the Victorian period. During this time of high colonialism, Europe was bringing back myths, practices, and ancient texts from every corner of the Earth, and then trying to get them all to match up into some kind of metaspiritual tradition. Predictably, the whole thing was a nonsensical, poorly-researched mess, and thus, wildly popular. Clubs were started up, seances were held, and charlatans rooked old ladies out of their inheritance. Blackwood, himself, was a member of the most notorious of these societies: the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. So, by the time he got around to creating his fictional investigator, the whole thing was all rather tired, which is quite clear in the stories, for Mr. Silence is constantly taking pains to separate himself from that 'other class' of psychics who make extravagant promises and talk about possessing a 'gift'. So it's interesting that one of the first full-time paranormal investigators in fiction (that I'm aware of) is already somewhat subversive and on the edge--but then, as a calm, rational figure after the style of Dupin and Cuff, he's somewhat out of place with charismatics and wealthy eccentrics. Blackwood here retains his unfortunate habit of sometimes over-explaining or giving us information more than once, but for that, the stories are well-devised and contain some quite interesting cosmological hints. Oddly enough, two of the three stories in this collection take the most profound interest in the ways of cats and their relationship to the spiritual realm which, while perfectly interesting, didn't seem to profit from re-examination, particularly not within the same brief collection. However, I am curious to see what else Blackwood might do with the character, particularly if he manages to put him into more sticky situations. So far, we've seen him competent and self-controlled--often the real danger comes from whether he will be able to save the other characters from themselves before its too late--but I'm curious to see what Silence is capable of, when pushed.(less) | Notes are private!
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Mar 05, 2013
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| 070433013X
| 9780704330139
| 3.53
| 347
| 1974
| May 1974
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And so the adventures of Oswald Bastable continue, thrusting him yet again through the barriers of time and into a strange Earth at once familiar and...more
And so the adventures of Oswald Bastable continue, thrusting him yet again through the barriers of time and into a strange Earth at once familiar and disturbing. The themes and characters we explore are similar to the first volume, featuring at the center yet another Nemo-esque warlord whose methods give our narrator uneasy pause. By the end, we find ourselves liable to agree with Mr. Bastable's suspicion that time is having a laugh at his expense, forcing him to experience history as 'variations on a theme', and not a theme he appreciates reliving. Usually, describing a book like this as 'alternate history' is a malapropism, since 'alternate' means to shift back and forth between things while 'alternative' means 'of a different sort'. So, if we described wind power as an 'alternate energy' to coal, that would mean we would be constantly switching between wind and coal, not replacing one with the other. But in Moorcock's case, both terms are actually applicable, which must be a boon to sci fi fans that have trouble keeping words straight. So, if our theme is 'world-shaking war', the variation here is 'global politics of racism'. There is a certain tension throughout the book because Moorcock presents a lot of genuinely racist characters of different stripes and degrees, and even lets prejudice slip into his narrator's mouth. It's clear that the violence and rhetoric of the Civil Rights Era tickled Moorcock's unyielding imagination, so we get quite a few powerful (and somewhat unsettling) scenes charged with the complexities race dynamics. Moorcock also seemed to take a bit more time with his narrative as compared to the last book, and didn't rely quite as much on bare exposition to carry the story along, which was nice--but as usual with Moorcock, it was a fairly straightforward adventure with some interesting concepts driving it along throughout, but lacking polish and care. Reminds me of this charming episode of Neal Degrasse Tyson's StarTalk where sex researcher Mary Roach talks about the fact that long-term couples experience better sex because they tend to take their time and get lost in the moment, whereas newer couples are often 'going through the motions' of what they think should work. It's the same with writing books, people: don't just go through the motions when you should be in the moment, taking the time to give your narrative the attention it deserves.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Feb 16, 2013
| Feb 20, 2013
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Feb 16, 2013
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| 039474067X
| 9780394740676
| 4.02
| 5,628
| 1978
| Oct 12, 1979
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There's a curious double-standard between what we expect from White guy authors compared to authors of any other background. When an author is a Nativ...more
There's a curious double-standard between what we expect from White guy authors compared to authors of any other background. When an author is a Native American, for example, we tend to expect their books to deliver to us the 'Native American experience'. If the author is a woman, we tend to expect that her book will show us the 'female perspective'--to the degree that female authors who write stories about men often take on a masculine or nondescript name, like J.K. Rowling. So we get Western-educated authors like Achebe, Hosseini, and Momaday who write thoroughly traditional novels in the Western style and then place a thin veneer of their own ethnic background onto those stories, and are praised for it in academia, because their work meets expectation: delivering to The West a simplified and pre-colonized version of foreignness. As a White male author, on the other hand, the expectation is that you won't stick to your own cultural identity, but will instead attempt to explore the breadth and depth of human experience through characters of many backgrounds--and why not? White guys have been doing it for years, and many of them were quite good at it. In fact, the problem here is not that White guys are encouraged to take on other roles, its that non-White folks are discouraged from doing so. As Said points out: it is not only Black people who are capable of writing about Black people, or only Arabs about Arabs, or only Whites about Whites; we all need to explore similarities and differences in our fellow humans. So here I am: White guy, trying to explore humanity, writing a bit of fiction about Colonialism, about the English rule in Egypt and India, featuring characters of different backgrounds--but it's daunting. I don't want to do it thoughtlessly, and though I take a great deal of inspiration from Haggard, Kipling, Conrad, and Burton, I don't want to incidentally adopt their shortcomings along with the interesting bits. So I thought I might combat their prejudices by taking in the most notable and talked-about book on interactions and stereotypes between The West and The East. However, Orientalism was not what I expected; but then again, it wasn't what Said expected, either. He didn't intend to write The Book on East/West interaction, his work is much narrower in scope. The whole of the book is Said looking at a dozen authors, mostly French and English, some academics, some fiction writers, and gives examples of a number of quotes for each where they talk about 'The East' in ways that demonstrate a certain bias. That's pretty much the book, all four-hundred pages of it. Why spend that long on such a specific topic? Because this book was meant for a small academic publication, and that's what specialized academics do. Now, if you've read any of the other reviews of this book on GR, you'd get the impression that Said is an enraged polemicist who spends the whole book denigrating 'The West' and praising 'The East'. It’s inexplicable to me that any person with basic reading comprehension could come away from Said with this view. Indeed, once I realized the scope of this work (and that it wasn't likely to help with my specific writing concern), I almost abandoned it, but I wanted to get to the 'angry Said' part where he defames Western civilization, just to see how bad it got. It never came. Said's tone throughout the book is exceedingly dry and cautious--too much so, for my taste, I've been known to enjoy a good diatribe--so any prejudicial anger a reader might find in this book is only what they brought in with them. The notion that Said is anti-Western or Pro-Islam is such a bizarrely inexplicably misreading that the only reason a reader could come away from the book with that belief is if they brought in a huge set of prejudices and then ignored everything Said actually wrote. First, they must assume that ‘East’ and ‘West’ are terms that have well-defined geographical and social meanings, and then ignore the fact that Said repeatedly states that, to him, 'East' and 'West' are just convenient ideas, not real, solid entities--that it is ridiculous to talk about India, China, and the Middle East as if they were one culture, or even to lump in the various Arab states with one another, when they each have very different histories and values. There is no more unity between all Islamic nations than there are between all Christian nations. Trying to place a line between Greece and Turkey and claiming these are separate cultures is artificial. Lest we forget: Troy was in Turkey, when the Roman Empire died in Italy it continued in Istanbul (as Edith Hamilton points out: Roman rule was always more Persian than Greek), Southern Europe was long ruled by Moors, and as Ockley’s 1798 History of the Saracens contentiously point out, nearly everything Europe knows of Greek philosophy and mathematics came from Islam. Then, the ignorant reader would have to assume that when Said points out a specific trend in some authors of the ‘West’, that this constitutes an attack on ‘The West’ as an entity (which Said denies exists). this despite the fact that Said explicitly holds many of these Western authors in high regard and specifically states that there’s nothing wrong with cultures having interdependent relationships: “The Arab world today is an intellectual, political, and cultural satellite of the United States. This is not in and of itself something to be lamented; the specific form of the satellite relationship, however, is.” The reader would then have to assume that this perceived attack on a fictional ‘Western Culture’ was the same thing as an uplifting of ‘the East’, even though Said often speaks about how many Eastern states are damaged and without a modern intellectual tradition to train its members to do the work of improving them, and that all the great centers of study and economic control for Islam are in England or America. But then, the fact that there are prejudiced readers is hardly surprising: the world is full of people trying to divide everything up between 'us' and 'them'. I get comments from people who don't realize that Islam is an Abrahamic religion--that it shares the same holy books, prophets, and god as Christianity and Judaism--people who aren't aware that a 'fatwa' just means any public statement by a scholar. You read about American military consultants in the Middle East who don't know the difference between Shia and Sunni. Very few these days would connect this quote: "The ink of the scholar is more precious than the blood of the martyr" with Mohammed. How easily we forget that Athens is closer to Marrakesh, Tunis, Cairo, and Baghdad than it is to Paris, Berlin, or London. I remember seeing a picture of a map where the Middle East was replaced by an impact crater, with the words 'Problem Solved' beneath it, completely ignoring the fact that the reason there is constant conflict there is because powerful First World countries have gone in, supplied both sides with cheap guns, made Opium the only profitable crop for farmers to grow, and set up regimes whose only purpose is to funnel money and natural resources out of those countries and into multinational banks--of course the area is going to be politically unstable under those conditions. Indeed, Said openly admits that there is much wrong in the Arab world, that it is full of turmoil and violence and lack of education, and that it is all too easy to paint it as a ‘fallen culture’ when compared to the heights of culture and science it once achieved, and which sparked off the Renaissance in Europe. Of course, to typify them that way is to ignore the fact that we do the same thing within our own cultures, that the cliches of American rednecks and hippy-dippy liberals are the same as the cliche arab: ignorant, sectarian, ever-feuding, following charismatic leaders into reactionary movements. We can point to Religious Fundamentalists, Tea Party Yokels, Ron Paul Libertarians, Militant Feminists, and Black Muslim Brotherhood members and find the same clannish human system at play. I was constantly struck by the fact that the separation Said depicts between the ideas of East and West were just the generic type of power separation laid out by Marx that mark the separation of a dominating power structure versus the population whom they control and profit from. They make the same generalizations: that the population is childlike and irrational, easily manipulated, and in need of their governance. Very little of Said’s analysis was specific to the conflict between the East and West, which may have been deliberate on his part, but I think it would have made his neutral stance clearer if he had expressed this outright. As an avowed Humanist, I think that extending the narrow facet of his argument and showing us that this is how power works everywhere, at all times, would have made his work stronger, overall. As I read, it seemed that what Said was saying was clearly true, but not in a revelatory way. I found myself comparing it to Angela Carter’s The Sadeian Woman, my high-water mark for social criticism, where her statements are inescapably true, but in a way you never realized until you saw it written out. I kept waiting for Said to take it to the next level, to elevate these basic, naked conclusions to some profound and insightful conclusion. Of course European, christian powers would mythologize and simplify Islam, of course they would make of it a phantom enemy of it, while at the same time trading, allying, and trading inspiration with it--that is no more than differing cultures always do, as Said points out. What great insight into this system is meant to shock me? Am I simply too much the postmodern, atheistic American to see what he says as anything but basic and inescapable? I came to this book looking to find something insidious, some system by which these cultures interact uniquely, but all I got was ‘most people are dumb, dominating forces produce propaganda, Europe vs. Islam edition’. Of course we are all Quixote and Pangloss, making ourselves heroes of a fantastical narrative and creating enemies to blame because we are too weak to do anything else but maintain that fiction. But, even if we are all human, and Said is a Humanist, and all power structures operate in the same ways, there should still be some specifics which set this incidence apart. I was waiting for Said to do some serious unpacking. It’s not enough to show a passage of Renan’s and demonstrate that his Semites are ‘sterile’--I want to know how that construction is achieved, why it is important, how it operates culturally, why it is an important and vital part of this interaction. And yet, just as he seems to be reaching a kind of specificity, he breaks off: “Why the Orient seems still to suggest not only fecundity but sexual promise (and threat) . . . is something on which one could speculate: it is not the province of my analysis here, alas, despite its frequently noted appearance.” So then, if not that, what is the province of his analysis? It isn’t until his conclusion that he lays out his purpose and helps us to understand why he didn’t extend to these sorts of specific conclusions, which made me wish that he had made his conclusion his introduction, so I wouldn’t have spent four-hundred pages wondering why he keeps stopping just at the point when it was starting to get interesting. This is an academic work with a very narrow scope. It is meant to give a view of a very specific trend in Orientalist criticism amongst a group of authors, and not to force on the reader any specific conclusion about what this trend means, or how it operates on a minute level, except to point out that it exists and that it represents standard power dynamics. That is the purpose and the effect of this book, and it invites the reader to use it to extend these examples into specific arguments and observations of their own, to use the general roadmap provided as a guide for their own work. The fact that it has become the central text on the subject is an accident of time and place, for that was not the author’s purpose, nor is this a transformative, revelatory work that sets out a specific theory of analysis for looking at Orientalist works, as I wish it had been. In the end, Said’s Orientalism is not a primer, but an exploration and an experiment which is incomplete without further scholarship on the part of the reader. Since Said is not specific, we cannot know just how accurate his readings are unless we can compare them to our own readings of the same works, so it can only be a companion to our studies and not a work which, on its own, develops a unique view which we can use, as scholars, going forward.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Jan 07, 2013
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Jan 07, 2013
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| 1411652916
| 9781411652910
| 3.62
| 8
| May 05, 2011
| Oct 09, 2005
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It was June of 1816, during The Summer that Never Was, when a volcanic eruption in Indonesia caused frost and snow through the summer, killing crops a...more
It was June of 1816, during The Summer that Never Was, when a volcanic eruption in Indonesia caused frost and snow through the summer, killing crops and leaving uncounted numbers in a state of starvation. Meanwhile, in the rented Villa Diodati, a party consisting of Lord Byron, Dr. Polidori, Mary Wolstonecraft Godwin and her fiancee, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and stepsister Claire sat down and read aloud from a collection of French stories. It was perhaps the most momentous night in the history of the Horror story. Soon, the guests declared that they would each have a hand at their own 'tale of terror', from which Mary was to write Frankenstein, Byron his 'fragment of a novel', and Polidori 'The Vampyre', the first story about such a creature published in English. Though the stories in Fantasmagoriana (published as 'Tales of the Dead' in English) are not the most remarkable or best-crafted, there is no lack of melodrama to be had. Most of all, anyone who reads this collection will witness the marked difference between these simple tales and the complex, thoughtful treatment given to the subject by the attendees of that fateful reading. It just goes to show that a skilled and philosophically-minded author can tackle any theme or genre, and make of it something profound and immortal.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Dec 03, 2012
| Dec 31, 2012
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Dec 03, 2012
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| 0486287424
| 9780486287423
| 3.32
| 2,307
| 1821
| Sep 28, 1995
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While researching the use of opium for my own (fictional) writings into the subject, I came across this fascinating article about a fellow whose habit...more
While researching the use of opium for my own (fictional) writings into the subject, I came across this fascinating article about a fellow whose habit of collecting paraphernalia led him to become both the leading expert on them and an addict. The interview led me to the work of Dr. H.H. Kane, and Kane's analysis led me back to de Quincey, with whom I had some prior familiarity due to my literary studies. De Quincey's writing style is precise and exacting, but he does not have that flair for storytelling which marks a fascinating diarist. Indeed, many of the most intriguing parts of his tale are those he declined to go into in great detail, and throughout one can see his struggles not so much in what he has written on the page, but in what he cannot bring himself to say. He comes to the cusp of his own suffering again and again, but to cross that threshold is to relive his greatest shame and disappointment, so he often skirts it. No doubt this is why Dr. Kane accuses de Quincey of presenting all the beneficial sides of the drug's use, and ignoring the dangers. Yet I found myself constantly thankful that I was not in de Quincey's position, for his constant and unabated suffering seemed clear enough to me. Indeed, when he spoke of being unable to complete his work (the promised third part of his Confessions never arrived), of the weeks or months passing by without his being perceptibly closer to completing all of the great tasks and projects he had set before himself--one does not have to be a taker of laudanum to sympathize, as being an artist of any stripe is quite enough to understand that eternal struggle. But though some of his narrative is less than vivid, most interesting are his descriptions of opioid dreams, which visions were so influential to fantastical authors like Gogol and Lovecraft. Indeed, his vision of the 'impossible castles of the clouds' are recognizable in the writings of numerous mythos authors, who were so obsessed with the realm of dreams, especially when it bled into quotidian life.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Nov 26, 2012
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Nov 23, 2012
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| 0451528956
| 9780451528957
| 3.71
| 90,801
| 1886
| Sep 02, 2003
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After the overblown Frankenstein and the undercooked Dracula, it's pleasant to find that the language and pacing of the third great pillar of horror i...more
After the overblown Frankenstein and the undercooked Dracula, it's pleasant to find that the language and pacing of the third great pillar of horror is so forceful and deliberate (especially since I was disappointed by Stevenson's other big work, Treasure Island). But then, this is a short story, and it's somewhat easier to carry off the shock, horror, and mystery over fewer pages instead of drawing it out like Shelley and Stoker into a grander moralizing tale. But Stevenson still manages to get in quite a bit of complexity, even in the short space. As I was reading it, I found myself wishing I didn't already know the story--that it hadn't been automatically transmitted to me by society--because I wondered how much better it would be to go in not knowing the answer to the grand, central mystery, but instead being able to watch it unfold before me. Much has been said about the 'dual nature of man', the good versus the evil sides, but what fascinated me about the book was that despite being drawn in such lines, it did not strike me as a tale of one side of man versus another. Indeed, it is the virtuous side who seeks out a way to become destructive, showing that his virtuosity is a mere sham. Likewise, neither Jekyll nor Hyde seem to have any real motivation to be either 'good' or 'evil', it is more that they are victims of some disorder which compels them to be as they are--that causal Victorian psychology which, in the end, robs anyone involved of premeditation for what they do. Dracula kills to survive, Frankenstein does so because he is the product of the ultimate broken home and Hyde does it as a self-destructive compulsion despite the fact that he loves life above all else, yet is unable to protect himself well enough to retain it. This is not the evil of Milton's Satan, or of Moriarty, who know precisely what they do and do it because of the way they see the world before them, but that of the phrenologist, who measures a man's head with calipers and declares him evil based upon the values so garnered, independent of any understanding, motivation, or reason. And yet this is not an unbelievable evil--indeed, Stevenson uses it as an analysis of addiction and other self-destructive behaviors, where the pure chemical rush of the thing becomes its own cause, despite the fact that the addict will tell you he wishes nothing more than to be rid of it, to be normal again, never to have tasted the stuff in the first place. It is a place a man might fall into through ignorance and carelessness, never realizing how hard it could be, in the end, to escape. And that's something we can all relate to, far more than the sociopathy of Moriarty, which requires that you have complete understanding but just a completely different set of emotional reactions to the world around you. It is much easier for most people to say that there is some part inside them that they do not like, that makes them uncomfortable, some thoughts and desires which rise unbidden from their brain, and which they must fight off. And it is the fact that they are strong enough to need to be fought off that unsettles us and gives us pause, for we do not like to think that such incomprehensible forces might always be there, working, just beneath the surface, and which might come out not due to some dark desire or motivation, but due to simple, thoughtless error.(less) | Notes are private!
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| Nov 14, 2012
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Nov 15, 2012
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| 0192828398
| 9780192828392
| 3.75
| 54,735
| 1869
| May 14, 1998
|
Jules Verne, classic pulp author, innovator of science fiction, originator of 'steampunk'--or was he? Many readers of the English language will never...more
Jules Verne, classic pulp author, innovator of science fiction, originator of 'steampunk'--or was he? Many readers of the English language will never know the real Verne, and I'm not talking about those who dislike reading. Indeed, many well-meaning folks from the English-speaking world have picked up and read a book titled 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea' cover to cover, and yet still know next to nothing of Verne, due to his long-standing translation problem. And as an interesting note, twenty thousand leagues does not refer to the depth of the Nautilus, but the distance traveled. Since his earliest publication, when the author was still alive, translations of his work into English have been abhorrent. For speakers of other languages, he is considered an intelligent, thoughtful, deliberate author, not a half-competent penner of fun pulp adventures (and this isn't some Baudelaire/Poe error on their part). Indeed, it's created a catch-22 in literary studies: current translations of Verne are so bad that no one wants to read or study him, so there's little demand for new translations. How bad are the old translations? Bad. Often up to 25% of the text is cut. Character names are changed, as are plot points and events. Anything which might reflect poorly on British colonial policy is left out. Verne's carefully-researched scientific facts and numbers are arbitrarily changed or deleted. 'Diving suit' becomes 'life vest' and in several incidents, translators added racial epithets, in one case translating 'he said' as 'whined the Jew'. Compare two translations of Verne, and you're likely to find they differ greatly in length, content, and story. Indeed, even the title in French does not end with 'sea', but 'seas'. Sadly, picking up a copy of the book, new or used, and you are still likely to get one of these terrible translations, since they are in the public domain. But we need suffer beneath this maltreatment no longer, for recently, several scholars have labored to bring to us faithful and well-researched translations. F.P. Walter donated his translation to Project Gutenberg, and it may be found here, while William Butcher's, which includes a critical introduction and footnotes, is available here. Reading through these, it must be clear that Verne is not a pulp author, with more imagination than sense, but then, it's also difficult to describe his work as science fiction or steampunk. For the first, all the technologies he puts forth are not fictional, but real, current technologies: submarines had been in use since the American Civil war and his descriptions all rely closely on data found in scientific journals. It's true that his submarine is much larger and more advanced than any other, but it's hardly the same leap as a race to the moon or a journey through time. Indeed, as with Doyle's Professor Challenger stories, it is not man who is fantastical, but the world around him. As for 'steampunk', the Nautilus skips right past steam and diesel and is wholly powered by chemical batteries and electricity, with nary a cog or flywheel to be found. As for the writing itself, it is intelligent, the characters strong, and Verne is quite capable of giving us those little insights which subtly alters our perception of the various interpersonal conflicts which dominate the book's plot. Though there are various events--the squid, meeting with this or that vessel, the undersea gardens, travel to the antarctic--these are all scattered throughout the story willy nilly, as if it were a real travelogue, tied together by the real central plot, which is the conflict between the captain and our heroes. But since fiction is artificial, it does not make sense for the author to pretend that it isn't, so I found it disappointing that the individual occurrences of the plot rarely seemed important, nor did Verne build up to them or create a letdown, afterwards. The famous scene with the giant squid was particularly disappointing and anti-climactic, emerging suddenly and then over in a few moments. It's something I've been struggling with as I work on my own Victorian sci fi novel: ensuring that each scene has purpose on its own, and flows from one to the next. It need not even be a clear flow of events: flow can also be achieved through mood, tone, and pace. Verne's book owes a great deal to Moby Dick, a book which bravely thrust from scene to scene, but where each scene was conceptually interconnected with the one before and the one after that, even if one was about the classification of whales and the next about someone being swept out to sea, there was still a conceptual link between them. Verne's digressions of science and classification are not bound up in the purpose and philosophy of his story, as Melville's are, which leads to another problem that I have been carefully weighing in my own writing: what to include. Again and again, Verne spends long parts of chapters listing through types of fish seen outside the ship. Some of these are like Ovid's lists: full of lovely images, colors, and shapes, a melange of words and sounds that approaches a sort of poetry. Some contain humorous or interesting details which have some bearing on the situation at hand. Yet in many instances, they are merely long, dry, and add nothing to the book. It certainly makes sense, as our narrator is a trained classifier, and duly interested in such things, but one of the rules of fiction is that we leave out reality when it is dull or extraneous, or pass it by with a few words, as Verne does dozens of time, commenting on the passing of days or weeks in a paragraph or even a sentence. To me, leaving in such long-winded, repetitious digressions was a mark against the book. But then, science fiction is very fond of such digressions, and Verne also indulges in the other kind: the long chapters of explanation about length, tonnage, and the particulars of undersea travel, all taking place at the slow pace of a Socratic dialogue: 'but then how do you replenish these sodium batteries being, as you are, always at sea', 'well, you see, I distill it from the very . . .', and so on. And of course, almost none of these myriad details are ever shown to be important again. My general rule is to only go into detail so much as it: I. Impacts the story directly II. Sets an artistic mood III. Symbolically explores the philosophical ideas in the book, or IV. Is amusing, in and of itself But then, Verne is not only indebted to Melville, but to Poe, and his disjointed, bizarre story The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket--his only foray into the novel, and one of those books that is so flawed and unusual that it has inspired whole generations of authors who feel that, with a bit more focus and tightening up, they might turn its form into something quite strong. So, when we rush from carefully-detailed and researched science and plunge into silly, unsupported tall tales in Verne, we can, to some degree, thank Poe, whose story started as a straightforward travelogue and ended as some kind of religious symbolic fever dream. But it is strange to me to see Verne spend a chapter talking meticulously about the tonnage of the Nautilus and what volume of water would be required to sink to certain depths, and then claiming that sharks can only bite while swimming upside-down and that pearl divers in Ceylon wouldn't be able to hold their breath for more than a minute at a time. It just goes to show that no matter how much careful research and deliberation you put into a book, you're still going to make errors, so in the end, you might want to focus more on your story, plotting, and pacing (things you can control), and less on endlessly researching things that could just as easily be passed over without the story losing anything (except length). And overall, this is what I wish Verne had done. While I respect the intelligence and precision with which he pursues his work, and I would definitely not rank him among the pulps, the very rich character story at the center of the book was too lightly touched upon, when, as in Frankenstein or Moby Dick, it could have been the focus, and made for a much stronger book. The characters, the conflicts, and the psychology were all there, but in the end, we leave the book without a completed arc.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| Oct 22, 2012
| Nov 13, 2012
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Oct 22, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 1405206217
| 9781405206211
| 3.82
| 3,810
| 1942
| 2002
|
As with all the early Tintin books, we're getting roughly the same plot over and over: Tintin is visiting a foreign country where he runs afoul of a c...more
As with all the early Tintin books, we're getting roughly the same plot over and over: Tintin is visiting a foreign country where he runs afoul of a criminal organization doing something wacky. He tracks down various clues as a couple of crooks try to kill him. Each time, he miraculously survives by pure luck. Then he beats a whole roomful of large, armed men to a pulp and escapes in a stolen aeroplane. All the plot points are convenient and interchangeable, built on haphazard coincidences and luck. So, while Tintin is always charging forward, he isn't always a particularly active character, since he's not as much planning and overcoming as much as blundering through. I know it's old and I know it's juvenile, but comparing it to Winsor McCary or Carl Barks, it's pretty tame. The backgrounds are lovely, and the character design is getting stronger--I love the ligne claire look--but it's not standing out against the competition, yet. The whole premise of this one with the giant floating meteor made of a 'new element' that somehow causes all living things to grow--except Tintin and Snowy--is so nonsensical it was hard for me to know what to make of it. Here's a story that, on one hand, is about multinational drug cartels, where the hero wanders the streets of European cities with a drawn pistol braving very real dangers. The contradiction between these two extremes makes the tone of the work rather difficult to make sense of. If it were the Little Prince or something where the universe is surreal and dreamlike, it would be easy to accept, but the odd combination seems to be at odds with itself. Even in Barks' work, where the characters are cartoon animals, there is a greater sense of narrative unity in what we are meant to take seriously as plot and what is light fun. Another odd entry as I wait for Herge to hit his stride.(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| Sep 2012
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Sep 19, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 2203001011
| 9782203001015
| 3.23
| 2,695
| Oct 01, 1930
| Jul 01, 1999
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Like the last volume in the series, this one is another flop bearing no real resemblance to the themes, characters, or style of the later series. The...more
Like the last volume in the series, this one is another flop bearing no real resemblance to the themes, characters, or style of the later series. The whole thing is a haphazard cartoon filled with slapstick violence starring pugnacious jerk Tintin and his bad-joke-making dog. Yeah, the treatment of Africans and big game hunting make H. Rider Haggard look tame and responsible in comparison, though I find it hard to argue that the stylized drawings of the Africans are racist, since it's not like the European characters are examples of detailed realism. I mean, when your main character's head is a mouthless blob with two pseudopods and tiny holes for eyes, it's hard to complain that other characters in the book are too simplistic. But yeah, another read that's only interesting to completionists and cultural historians.(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| Aug 30, 2012
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Aug 31, 2012
| Paperback
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| 0867199032
| 9780867199031
| 3.67
| 5,102
| 1929
| Mar 01, 2003
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It can be an odd experience to look at the early work of an author (and artist) who later proves to be innovative and masterful. The work here is sou...more
It can be an odd experience to look at the early work of an author (and artist) who later proves to be innovative and masterful. The work here is sou rough, the plotting so silly, and the characters unrecognizable to fans of the later series. But then, no artist emerges into the world fully formed, and even Moebius had his awkward stage. In this fisrt story, Tintin himself is less the clever, charming figure of the later books. Much like Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie, the character starts off as an unpleasant prankster eager to fight anyone he meets. The story, itself is very goofy and cartoony, full of pratfalls, one-liners, fights, and spectacular crashes. Guns and bombs are not frightening things, but tools of slapstick. The book also has none of the painstaking research which marked Herge's later work. His depiction of Russia is simple propaganda with the Soviets as overblown villains. There is no attempt to look at any real cultural differences. However, there are some glimmers of possibility here. The clean lines and motive sense of gesture is present, and the influence of American cartoonists like McCay and McManus are very clear. But anyone looking for a genuine Tintin story is not going to get one, here. The only reason to read this volume is for completeness' sake, for those who are curious to see the sketchy, awkward beginnings of a series that became a worldwide phenomenon.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| not set
| Aug 25, 2012
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Aug 24, 2012
| Hardcover
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| 1595827404
| 9781595827401
| 4.14
| 451
| Oct 05, 2011
| Oct 05, 2011
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One more, I'm having trouble getting into Corben's art. Some of it is great, and I love the EC vibe, but it's making me nostalgic in the wrong way: in...more
One more, I'm having trouble getting into Corben's art. Some of it is great, and I love the EC vibe, but it's making me nostalgic in the wrong way: instead of thinking 'this is a great homage to the EC classics' I start feeling like I should just put Hellboy down and read the real thing. Some of Corben's character and backgrounds are great: expressive, detailed, idiomatic. But there are also a lot of little details that throw me off. Some of the exaggeration on the characters lacks a sense of shape and form, so there are a lot of oddly flat faces and problems with proportion, particularly when we're looking at the characters from a distance. Then there's the fact that every woman who shows up has huge, pendulous breasts which are barely contained by a plunging neckline--and I mean all the women: old crones and young ingenues alike. The style is more Harry Crumb perversity than busty superheroine exploitation, but it still strikes me as an odd and tonally inappropriate choice. There are also various perspective issues, such as tables and the rooms they are in having vanishing points that simply don't match. As for the stories themselves, they are less remarkable and less expansive than earlier volumes. There are some truly odd moments, but they tend to the goofy rather than the mythic. Otherwise the stories we're getting are rather straightforward examples of classic British and American horror. They're not badly written or stupid or anything, they just aren't particularly impressive. Earlier collections constantly enlarged Hellboy's world and character, changing tone, culture, and time period frenetically, building by implication a much larger world in the vast space between all those disparate points. These stories, being more tonally and culturally similar lack that implication of depth.(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| Aug 21, 2012
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Aug 21, 2012
| Paperback
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| 1595824774
| 9781595824776
| 4.22
| 755
| Jun 09, 2010
| Jun 09, 2010
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Normally I like the odd Hellboy collections more than the main plot--they have greater variety in theme, tone, and homage--but this isn't one of my fa...more
Normally I like the odd Hellboy collections more than the main plot--they have greater variety in theme, tone, and homage--but this isn't one of my favorites. The title story was rather simplistic, compared to other Hellboy shorts. No real surprises, no inexplicable, vivid monsters, just a straightforward country witch story. I appreciated that Mignola was riffing on the classic EC titles, but I didn't feel the imitation came off that well. I know Corben is one of those artists with a great reputation, but I was not moved by his art in this story. Some of the panels had some really grotesque, well-textured caricatures, but many of the other depictions felt a bit flat, particularly the faces. I can appreciate when a form is distorted well, with a sense of volume to it, but there was something soft about the edges and lines here that weakened the characters, especially when the EC homage was making me nostalgic for Wally Wood's implacable inking. Both Wood's and Mignola's art tends to be defined by those dark, inky spaces, the chiaroscuro separation of light and shadow which throws the grotesqueries into sharp relief, so I felt the more vague forms Corben used were a poor choice for either Hellboy or an EC allusion. Fegredo's work is splendid as always, and it was nice to see Mignola return and do a bit of art, himself, though his contribution struck me as particularly unadorned. Whether this is because Mignola has taken a hiatus from art and is not in his top game, or whether I'm comparing him to Fegredo's masterful draughtsmanship, it's hard to say. Dysart's work was fairly strong, with good coloring, but again, I missed the crisp lines that defined most of the series. In The Chapel of Moloch is a fun exploration of the old Lovecraftian notion of the artist whose minute senses bring him into accidental contact with the Other World, but again, it was a bit bland and predictable, particularly in comparison to some of the more imaginative and wondrous stories of other collections like The Chained Coffin. This is one of those rare times that I'm more interested in the overarching plot than in the eccentric asides, so I won't mind returning to it in the next collection.(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| Aug 16, 2012
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Aug 16, 2012
| Paperback
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| 1595824316
| 9781595824318
| 4.44
| 1,339
| 2010
| Mar 23, 2010
|
It's hard to overstate how impressed I continue to be with Fegredo's artwork as this series continues. He took in Mignola's style, refined it, and rec...more
It's hard to overstate how impressed I continue to be with Fegredo's artwork as this series continues. He took in Mignola's style, refined it, and recreated something which perfectly captures that feel--which is somehow even more Mignola than the original. The fact that his work on other books explores completely different styles with equal effectiveness has left me with the strong impression that he is one of the most skilled artists working in the medium today. I'm also glad that Mignola has been freed up to concentrate just on the writing, and all of the allusions, references, and loving homages to the great horror authors and tales of myth are delightful. There is here, in terms of depth, just as much in play as in Sandman. Unfortunately, I am not always pleased by the pacing. Too much of what goes on is given to us as explanations, as exposition. I would really like to be able to see these stories and characters playing out before my eyes rather than be told the state of things. The moment we are introduced to the Arthurian mythos, the whole thing is explained to us in a few brief scenes. It would have been much more satisfying if it had been introduced, allowed to build, then turned on its ear as a climax. Subverting it at the same moment as its introduced doesn't give the reader much time to get into the story. But then, much of it feels like it was thrown together from disparate parts instead of planned from the beginning. Previous characters are resurrected in new, odd roles, events are reinterpreted, and it sometimes felt a bit forced. I really liked the odd, scattered, brief tales we get of Hellboy exploring a grand, disconnected world, and so the idea that Mignola would try to simplify and streamline that into something small and digestible is not appealing. There's also a lot of redundancy of Hellboy recalling things people have said, rehashing of old scenes, and other such bits which made me feel like Mignola was striking me in the head with the plot. It's not as bad as Strange Places, which is one long piece of overblown exposition sucking all the wind out of the series, but it's hardly ideal. I am glad that Mignola recovered from the dull storytelling of the Island, and from the doltish Hellboy of the movies, whose influence could be felt in the clanging dialogue of the previous volume. It gives me hope for the future of the series. The complexity and drive of the plot is promising, and if Mignola can find a way to show more and tell less (which should be less of a chore with Fegredo as master-shower), the series could again reach the heights to which it sometimes magnificently rises.(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| Aug 14, 2012
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Aug 14, 2012
| Paperback
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| 0785100202
| 9780785100201
| 4.46
| 46
| May 1994
| May 1994
|
Moebius is unquestionably a great artist, but his visions as a writer often suffer from an overabundance of Frenchiness, which I feel is best typified...more
Moebius is unquestionably a great artist, but his visions as a writer often suffer from an overabundance of Frenchiness, which I feel is best typified by the introductions to his collections where we get psudointellectual wackiness like: "One finds things on the beach. Things dragged up from the depths, and casually abandoned by the sea, almost as a peace offering to its eternal opposite, the land." Such overbearing attempts at deep symbology always feel forced to me, and they distract from the story, itself. I tend to think Moebius is at his worst when he is trying to deliver some grand spiritual or social message about The Great Truth, since it's hard to do that without coming off as pretentious and vague, as in the conclusion of L'Incal. But this story takes a different tack, focusing more on humor than on Big Questions. The humor is subtle and pervasive, and the sci fi story behind it fun and fast-paced, so that I began to imagine what it might have been like if Moebius had illustrated a version of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy--which, judging from this book, would have been amazing. The visuals were some of the most consistently beautiful and wondrous that I've ever seen in a comic, including Moebius' other works, which are myriad and masterful. The use of psychedelic color and chiaroscuro was always inventive, clear, and expressive, though some of the highlighting on the characters was a bit sketchier, and stood out from the overall style a bit. All in all a delightful piece, and proof that Moebius never sat on his laurels, but improved and refined with every book he drew.(less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| Aug 11, 2012
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Aug 11, 2012
| Paperback
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| 1569714983
| 9781569714980
| 4.34
| 5,231
| Sep 21, 1984
| Jan 01, 2001
|
Like many, I read comics as a child, but I was not avid--never a collector--and it was not until I became an adult and returned to comics that I began...more
Like many, I read comics as a child, but I was not avid--never a collector--and it was not until I became an adult and returned to comics that I began to look at what they can be, and the stories they can tell. Whatever avidity I lacked then, I have since made up for, becoming an incidental snob for European comics. Similarly, despite my familiarity as a child with Japanese anime, it is only in recent years that I have returned to that tradition. I watched Dragonball, Sailor Moon, and Ronin Warriors when they first appeared on American television in the mid-nineties. I recall seeing violent, action-packed films on the weekends on the Sci Fi channel. This was before America had a concept of 'anime' or 'manga', but I recognized the art style in the 'Special Interest' section of Blockbuster, and began a tradition of renting one of these over-the-top movies each time I had a birthday. I still remember my friends and I waking in horror one morning to discover my mother had put in the tape of our latest blood-spurting Sci fi flick--against our expectations, she enjoyed it--she even took us to see Ghost in the Shell during its art house theatrical release. Yet I drifted away from it in the intervening years, and even when I started reading comics again in college, I didn't seek out manga. To some degree, my disenfranchisement was due to the American fandom, which has made popular a lot of very inane comics and shows. Many of the movies I enjoyed as a pre-teen were juvenile romps which I cannot enjoy now. Yet there are great comics and pieces of animation coming out of Japan every year, even if they don't always become popular. So, one day as I found myself searching in vain at the tenth comic store for back issues of a late nineties anthology which included a translation of a Franco-Belgian cowboy comic I have grown to love, I suddenly asked myself why I wasn't doing the same thing for Japanese comics--especially because there was a whole wall of them the next aisle over, a luxury an American fan of European comics has never known. So I began with Lone Wolf and Cub, primed by my love of Kurosawa movies. In terms of Legend, the next choice was obviously either this or something by Tezuka (who will surely follow). Since I had seen the film as a child and made it my first DVD purchase when I got my laptop (one of the few breaks in the long anime hiatus of my college years), the pull of this book was strong. Otomo is one of those preeminent figures in comics--like Moebius or Tezuka--who both as artist and writer revolutionized the way comics looked and felt, and the ways they told stories. Between his meticulously realized architecture and technology, epic fight scenes, and influential body horror visions, his work seems nigh irreproachable. The reader is often struck by the power and beauty of his panels. Additionally, the transitions he chooses are inventive and lend some scenes that subtle, sensory pacing never seen in American comics. Yet there are odd moments when a head or arm will be the wrong shape or size, and lacking dimension. It is strange in such a detailed work to see such elementary mistakes--the sort of thing I have never seen Moebius do. These errors are few, and hardly compromise the work, but they are somewhat jarring. The manga has much more plot and complexity than the film, but you don't see it until later volumes. Even though there is often a lot going on--many characters running around the city, all at odd and running into each other periodically--the story sometimes lacks for depth. All the back and forth and action keeps things moving, but it's not always the most direct or effective way to tell the story. The frenetic pace often progresses at the cost of character development. The characters in the story are not dynamic, changing figures: their mentalities and goals stay the same throughout the series, which is a long time to go without change. We do get moments of confrontation between the characters where their relationship is brought to the forefront, but since we rarely get any buildup to these moments, they tend to feel rather artificial. In fact, when I watched the film again, I found it does a much better job of developing the characters and their relationships, using a gradual series of meaningful interactions to let the audience know what these characters think of one another, and why. Otomo touches on a lot of ideas about power, technology, military force, and personal identity, but often, these notions are communicated though exposition--characters sit down and talk about them. It would have been more effective if there had been shorter character arcs withing the story where the personal conflicts and changes they went through would help to reveal these concepts and explore them more fully. But that has long been a critique of many of the more lengthy manga (and anime) series: that they end up spending a great deal of time going back and forth with lots of similar instances of combat to the detriment of the story and pacing. There is a real artistry to the combat, which Otomo clearly takes delight in crafting--and the visuals are often effective and engrossing--but he's constantly calling back to these big ideas of philosophy and interpersonal conflict, so the form and function are sometimes at odds. But for all that, it's impossible to ignore how well visualized everything is, and how complex and multi-layered the society and politics are. This is clearly a work of great intensity and concentration, where (nearly) every panel is the result of forethought and an abundance of ideas. It is no wonder that this work is widely influential because it is so full of imagination that it challenges the reader to think about the medium in new ways, and demonstrates the power of the singular vision of an artist.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| Jul 29, 2012
| Aug 2012
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Jul 29, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 048623973X
| 9780486239736
| 4.35
| 17
| Apr 01, 1980
| Apr 01, 1980
|
You'd better believe I grabbed this when I saw it in a comic shop in midtown NYC. Doré and Ariosto: a confluence of brilliance and delight almost too...more
You'd better believe I grabbed this when I saw it in a comic shop in midtown NYC. Doré and Ariosto: a confluence of brilliance and delight almost too wondrous for man to behold--you may want to use your eclipsoscope, just to be safe.(less)
| Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| not set
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Jul 16, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 014044310X
| 9780140443103
| 4.23
| 52
| Aug 30, 1975
| Dec 08, 1977
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Perhaps it speaks more to the age I live in than that of the author, but I'm always surprised to find a reasonable, rational mind on the other end of...more
Perhaps it speaks more to the age I live in than that of the author, but I'm always surprised to find a reasonable, rational mind on the other end of the pen. Though his work is full of prejudice and idealism, it is constantly shifting, so that now one side seems right, and now the other. His use of hyperbole and oxymoron prefigures the great metaphysical poets, and like them, these are tools of rhetoric and satire. Every knight is 'undefeatable', every woman 'shames all others by her virtue', and it does not escape Ariosto that making all of them remarkable only makes more obvious the fact that none of them are. Ariosto's style flies on wings, lilting here and there, darting, soaring. He makes extensive use of metafiction, both addressing the audience by means of a semi-fictionalized narrator and by philosophical explorations of the art of poetry itself, and the nature of the poet and his patron. As with most epics, Ariosto's asides to the greatness of his patron are as jarring as any 30-second spot. His relationship to his various patrons was extremely difficult for him, as he was paid a mere pittance and constantly drawn away from his writing to deliver bad news to the pope (if you're thinking that's a bad job, Ariosto would agree--the See nearly had him killed). This is likely the reason that these moments of praise fall to the same unbelievable hyperbole as the rest. His patrons could hardly be angry at him for constantly praising them, but his readers will surely be able to recognize that his greatest compliments are the most backhanded, and merely serve to throw into stark contrast the hypocrisy of man. Since we will all be oblivious hypocrites at some point (for most of us, nearly all the time), the only useful defense is the humility to admit our flaws. Great men never have it so easy: they cannot accept their mistakes, but must instead be buried by them. Though Ariosto often lands on the side of the Christians, his Muslims are mighty, honorable, well-spoken, and as reasonable in their faith. The only thing which seems to separate the two sides is their petty squabbling. Likewise, he takes a surprisingly liberal view of sex and gender equality, with lady knights who are not only the match for any man, but who need no marriage to complete their characters. He even presents homosexuality amongst both sexes, though with a rather light hand. His epic is not the stalwartly serious sort, like Homer, Virgil, or Dante. Ariosto is a humanist, and has none of the fetters of nationalism or religious idealism to hold him in place. His view of man is a contrary, shifting, absurd thing. The greatest achievements of man are great only in the eyes of man. By showing both sides of a conflict, by supporting each in turn, Ariosto creates a space for the author to inhabit. He is not tied to some system of beliefs, but to observation, to recognition; not to the ostensible truth of humanity, but to our continuing story. Ariosto took a great leap from Petrarch's self-awareness. While Petrarch constantly searched and argued in his poems, he found a sublime comfort in the grand unknown. Ariosto is the great iconoclast, not only asking why of the most obvious conflicts, but of the grandest assumptions. The grand mystery is only as sacred as it is profane. Ariosto is also funny, surprising, and highly imaginative. Though his work is defined by its philosophical view, this view is developed slowly and carefully. It is never stated outright, but is rather the medium of the story: a thin, elegant skein which draws together all characters and conflicts. The surface of the story itself is a light-hearted, impossible comedy. It is no more impossible than the grand heights of any other epic, but only seems so because it is not girt tightly with high-minded seriousness. Perhaps Ariosto's greatest gift is that he is doing essentially the same thing all other authors do, the same situations and characters, but he makes you laugh to see it. To be able to look at life simply as it is and laugh is the only freedom we will ever know. It is all wisdom. For this gift, I hail fair Ariosto, the greatest of all epicists, all poets, all writers, all humanists, all men, and never to be surpassed.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| not set
| not set
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Jul 16, 2012
| Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0140443118
| 9780140443110
| 4.17
| 93
| 1532
| Aug 30, 1975
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Perhaps it speaks more to the age I live in than that of the author, but I'm always surprised to find a reasonable, rational mind on the other end of...more
Perhaps it speaks more to the age I live in than that of the author, but I'm always surprised to find a reasonable, rational mind on the other end of the pen. Though his work is full of prejudice and idealism, it is constantly shifting, so that now one side seems right, and now the other. His use of hyperbole and oxymoron prefigures the great metaphysical poets, and like them, these are tools of rhetoric and satire. Every knight is 'undefeatable', every woman 'shames all others by her virtue', and it does not escape Ariosto that making all of them remarkable only makes more obvious the fact that none of them are. Ariosto's style flies on wings, lilting here and there, darting, soaring. He makes extensive use of metafiction, both addressing the audience by means of a semi-fictionalized narrator and by philosophical explorations of the art of poetry itself, and the nature of the poet and his patron. As with most epics, Ariosto's asides to the greatness of his patron are as jarring as any 30-second spot. His relationship to his various patrons was extremely difficult for him, as he was paid a mere pittance and constantly drawn away from his writing to deliver bad news to the pope (if you're thinking that's a bad job, Ariosto would agree--the See nearly had him killed). This is likely the reason that these moments of praise fall to the same unbelievable hyperbole as the rest. His patrons could hardly be angry at him for constantly praising them, but his readers will surely be able to recognize that his greatest compliments are the most backhanded, and merely serve to throw into stark contrast the hypocrisy of man. Since we will all be oblivious hypocrites at some point (for most of us, nearly all the time), the only useful defense is the humility to admit our flaws. Great men never have it so easy: they cannot accept their mistakes, but must instead be buried by them. Though Ariosto often lands on the side of the Christians, his Muslims are mighty, honorable, well-spoken, and as reasonable in their faith. The only thing which seems to separate the two sides is their petty squabbling. Likewise, he takes a surprisingly liberal view of sex and gender equality, with lady knights who are not only the match for any man, but who need no marriage to complete their characters. He even presents homosexuality amongst both sexes, though with a rather light hand. His epic is not the stalwartly serious sort, like Homer, Virgil, or Dante. Ariosto is a humanist, and has none of the fetters of nationalism or religious idealism to hold him in place. His view of man is a contrary, shifting, absurd thing. The greatest achievements of man are great only in the eyes of man. By showing both sides of a conflict, by supporting each in turn, Ariosto creates a space for the author to inhabit. He is not tied to some system of beliefs, but to observation, to recognition; not to the ostensible truth of humanity, but to our continuing story. Ariosto took a great leap from Petrarch's self-awareness. While Petrarch constantly searched and argued in his poems, he found a sublime comfort in the grand unknown. Ariosto is the great iconoclast, not only asking why of the most obvious conflicts, but of the grandest assumptions. The grand mystery is only as sacred as it is profane. Ariosto is also funny, surprising, and highly imaginative. Though his work is defined by its philosophical view, this view is developed slowly and carefully. It is never stated outright, but is rather the medium of the story: a thin, elegant skein which draws together all characters and conflicts. The surface of the story itself is a light-hearted, impossible comedy. It is no more impossible than the grand heights of any other epic, but only seems so because it is not girt tightly with high-minded seriousness. Perhaps Ariosto's greatest gift is that he is doing essentially the same thing all other authors do, the same situations and characters, but he makes you laugh to see it. To be able to look at life simply as it is and laugh is the only freedom we will ever know. It is all wisdom. For this gift, I hail fair Ariosto, the greatest of all epicists, all poets, all writers, all humanists, all men, and never to be surpassed.(less) | Notes are private!
| none
|
1
| not set
| not set
|
Jul 16, 2012
| Paperback
|
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