Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us

Can we all agree on the greatness of Planet Earth?  I hope so.  That show rules.  It's like The Dark Knight of television: awesomely, justifiably popular.  Unlike, say, Nickelback.

The World Without Us is kind of like a written form of Planet Earth.  More or less a series of verbal snapshots, it elegantly, narrative-lessly rolls along, gently reminding us of how fucking dumb we are.

Not all the little bits got me, but the best of Weisman cuts deep.  My favorite parts involve the suckiness of cats (they kill more birds than any other thing in the U.S.), underground tunnels made of tuff, Thomas Jefferson (the first paleontologist?), the invincibility of plastics, the ironic uselessness of preserving the dead, the end of New York (ha!), and voluntary extinction.  There's some geology, a bunch of biology, some history, a little philosophy, and HOPE.  Whoo-hooo!!!

My Urban Ecology class is changing my life.  Read this book if you want an idea why.  Or buy Dark Horse by Nickleback!!!  They're the underdogs and could use your support against the MAN! 

10:05 PM - 2 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

I read this for my literary criticism/cultural theory class because, according to my professor, it fits into just about any theoretical paradigm.  I see his point.  Frankenstein is messy and silly, but it's undoubtedly loaded with tropes.  You wanna do a feminist reading?  Talk about Victor's subversion of the female role in creation / inability to provide his creation with a woman, etc.  Psychoanalysis your thing?  There are dreams all over the place / plenty of repressed sexuality.  More into Cultural Studies?  Perhaps we should think of the monster as, say, an African-American.  You like Marx?  The fable of De Lacey, Felix, and Agatha should give you plenty to work with...

What does the Jack Wolfean reading say about Frankenstein?  Victor sucks.  He's the kind of self-obsessed Romantic fool that's helped to discredit that entire movement in the eyes of many.  Let me clarify: he's a well-written character, but a morally feeble human.  Shelley (who was like twelve when she wrote the book) does a great job patheticizing him.  Are we supposed to admire Victor in the end?  Because I certainly didn't... in fact, I took a perverse glee in watching him suffer...

...I did!  I feel kind of bad about it, too.  Is my hatred of Victor any better than his hatred for the monster?  I'd like to think I have better reasons-- my disdain, for one, has nothing to do with physical appearance-- but we're more or less in the same angry boat.

What does this mean?

It means that Frankenstein kicks the shit out of Dracula.

9:17 PM - 5 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

Rore Morty.  Did anyone spot the spelling error in my previous blog's title?  It's been bothering me quite a bit...

I really like this Rorty guy.  He talks about philosophy and science and sociology like they were all literature. 

"This is nothing new," you say, "As many post-modern theorists use literary theory to describe all kinds of cultural phenomena."

"Well yeah," I respond, "That's what they say.  But most of those cultural studies people know nothing about literature.  A lot of them just use 'literary theory' as a front for bad sociology."

I'm probably wrong.  But that doesn't mean Rorty isn't different from the rest!  Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is coherent!  It reads like a book!  It is a book!  And yet it says many things that are hard to assimilate... like the whole spiel about our conception of "human rights" being outdated.  You're not gonna find many people who eat that up...

The book is based around a figure called "the liberal ironist," i.e. someone who combines a non-essentialist private tendency with a public tendency toward recognizing humiliation.  The private irony entails understanding the contingency in all vocabularies even as the ironist attempts to construct a new vocabulary for describing the world.  The public liberalism entails the belief that "cruelty is the worst thing that we do"-- not because of a natural right or reason-- but just because.

Rorty looks at examples of famous ironists and liberals in the Western tradition, offering radical interpretations of their most paradigmatic works.  Proust and Derrida are celebrated, Orwell is re-imagined (the 1984 chapter is easily the most intriguing reading of that book I've ever seen), Foucault is BEATEN DOWN (not really... but he's not made out to be a liberal), Heidigger is puzzled over (of course).  Remember when I recommended Pale Fire a couple of blogs ago?  I didn't even consider what Rorty says about Nabokov when I wrote that. 

Cuz I hadn't read him yet!  Duh!  (And what he says about Nabokov completely defied my expectation.)

I clearly don't wanna write about it, but Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is a solid read. It's helping me to turn away from essentialism, essentially.

It's about time somebody killed me.

8:43 PM - 4 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Richard Rorty’s Acheiving Our Country

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Abraham Lincoln...

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

3:25 PM - 2 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s The Conduct of Life

This is my last blog of the summer.  I'm an English major, so I'll more than likely be reading some novels over the course of the coming school year.  I can't promise reviews, though... not while I'm writing papers and exams and stuff.  I suppose I could write about everything next summer...

Wait!  What's that you say?  You want to hear my thoughts on the books I read last school year?  Really???  Okay, you got it!

Heart of Darkness: I don't know why I've had to read this overrated piece of nothing twice.
In Our Time:  Made me appreciate Hemingway in a way that The Sun Also Rises and "The Old Man and the Sea" could not.
The Bluest Eye: Toni Morrison isn't really on the same page as me philosophically... but this book is practically Faulknerian.
The Sound and the Fury: This book is Faulknerian.
The Handmaid's Tale:  Blah blah blah politics... I'm not really a fan of dystopian fiction.  I need characters, man!
Utopia:  The Utopia itself isn't that interesting, but the "frame" is pretty neat.
The Awakening:  Much more challenging than I expected.  Edna Pontellier is a fascinating "feminist."
The Poisonwood Bible:  Starts off fun, then gets preachy, then shoots itself in the foot.
Ben Franklin's Autobiography:  Dude was kind of a dick.
The Faerie Queene (Book One): Surprisingly (?) readable.  A true epic.
Mrs. Dalloway: Readably surprising.  Epic truths.
The Tempest: Why didn't I read this, like, a decade ago?
AND A BUNCH OF OTHER STUFF ABOUT OTHER STUFF

For the record, I took courses in 18th/19th century American Literature, 20th century Modernism, Women in Literature, and Early British Literature last year.  I read a shitload of Early Modern plays in a great History of Theatre class, too.  Which is all fine and dandy.

Before I discuss the work I should have started discussing a billion years ago, I want to thank everyone who has commented on these book reviews for giving me things to do and things to think about.  An extra-special "Shout Out" goes to Kyle and J White, who've been especially generous with the words and deserve your undying respect.

Now, then... The Conduct of Life is hard to find.  The Portable Emerson at the Independence Township Library has only two of its nine essays; most book retailers don't sell it; colleges are more likely to teach Emerson's better-known essays "The American Scholar" or "Self-Reliance."  (After much searching I finally located it in one of those Library of America hardbacks that look cool but are a pain in the ass to read.)

Yet as far as I'm concerned, The Conduct of Life is better than Walden.  Okay... maybe not.  Perhaps there was once a time when Thoreau's ideas were "truer" than Emerson's, and there is certainly more to Walden than just "getting back to nature" (see my review for more!).  Sadly, the passage of time and the diffusion of Walden's message into phony hippyism has left it a little stale in parts.  The dense, unpredictable, and hard-to-find (which maybe is a good thing) Conduct of Life suffers from no such affliction.  Even if you've read Emerson's famous first series of essays, these nine will probably impress you.  They are HARSH!  The first half of the first one ("Fate") is easily the most disheartening Emerson I've ever read (though the book's finale, "Illusions," comes close at some points).  I mean, have you ever heard of a "Transcendentalist" saying something like this:

"Jesus said, 'When he looketh on her, he hath committed adultery.'  But he is an adulterer before he has yet looked on the woman, by the superfluity of the animal, and the defect of thought, in his constitution.  Who meets him, or who meets her, in the street, sees that they are ripe to be each other's victim."

Or this:

"...The key to all ages is -- Imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority of men, at all times, and even in heroes, in all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity, custom, and fear."

Or this:

"...The illusion of love... attributes to the beloved person all which that person shares with his or her family, sex, age, or condition...  As if one shut up always in a tower, with one window, through which the face of heaven and earth could be seen, should fancy that all the marvels he beheld belonged to that window."

Quips such as these are all over the place: I estimate that 80% of Emerson is quotable out of context.  (10% of Emerson is absolutely hilarious out of context: "My boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise.")  But why quote Emerson at all?  What makes him so fine-bloody-tastic?  I'll try to explain...
1. He's usually succinct: Heck, just look at how he describes beauty... "The line of beauty is the result of perfect economy... There is not a particle to spare in natural structures."  Like on the Ramones' first record!
2. He's wild:  Emerson's economy isn't always simple... if you miss one word, you might miss an entire concept!  The guy jumps around like a Tigger.  And it doesn't help that...
3. He's unconventional:  The chapter on "Wealth" took me off guard.  Why would Mr. Nature love money so much (man "needs to be rich")?  Well, first of all, he's not just a partisan douchebag.  And secondly...
4.  He has good reasons:  See the subject of "Poverty demoralizes" from the same chapter.
5. Even if his reasons are totally contradictory he says them with enough style to make everything seem okay:  Emerson's ideas about the individual versus the masses don't appear to gel... and yet...they... doooooo
6. He's more or less predicted every psychological breakthrough of the past two centuries in The Conduct of Life:  Specifically in "Fate" and "Illusions."  The former has my new favorite summary of the microsciences:  "In science, we have to consider two things: power and circumstance.  All we know of the egg, from each successive discovery, is, another vesicle; and if, after five hundred years, you get a better observer, or a better glass, he finds within the last observed another.  In vegetable and animal tissue, it is just alike, and all that the primary power or spasm operates, is, still, vesicles, vesicles."

I'm gonna stop my analysis here cuz I'm tired and I want to save my best insights for a future paper that might never be.  To conclude, The Conduct of Life is damn fresh for a damn old book.  Read it after you've read all that other stuff I've recommended (which is everything I read this summer because I'm a waffle).

(Actually... do it in this order-- Moby-Dick, Leaves of Grass, The Human Stain... then the rest)

5:18 AM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Paul Auster’s City of Glass

Ostensibly a mystery, City of Glass has more in common with Pale Fire than The Big Sleep.  Have you read Pale Fire?  No?  GOD, why not???  It's sooooooo neat.  Playful but unpredictable, funny but creepy, highly readable but extraordinarily deep... it's like a delicious layered dessert (about authorship) with you (reader) as the filling and the mysterious "fictional" author (Nabokov's character) as the cake and the "real" author (Nabokov) as the icing...

City of Glass has similarly spastic fun with its genre.  Most of the normal whodunnit elements are here-- a midnight phone call, a detective-client romance, an insane villain, etc-- but they've all been post-modernized.  For example, the novel's detective Daniel Quinn isn't a real detective at all but a writer of, you guessed it, mysteries.  So why is he involved in an actual mystery?  Well, he gets mistaken for an "actual" sleuth...

I wrote the "actual" sleuth's name and then deleted it.  If I told you who the "actual" sleuth was, the book would hardly be ruined-- I still haven't really figured out the significance of said detective's name. Still, it's a pretty great secret, one that bears being read BY YOU, not spoiled BY ME.  It's the kind of secret that could not be conveyed properly by a movie or video game.  City of Glass is full of ideas that only work on the printed page.  Like Pale Fire, this novel is as much about literature as it is literature.  Discussions of Don Quixote and Paradise Lost make for two critical scenes, but even more than that, the very fabric of the novel is "literary": essentially, City of Glass is about a man's obsession to become the stuff of his work.

Don't let that scare you, though!!!  This book is more fuuuunnnnnnnnn than Be Your Own Pet.  The chills are chilling and the thrills are thrilling.  And even if the ending isn't quite as tidy as The Big Sleep's, it will leave you satisfied.  I'd never read any Paul Auster before picking up City of Glass, but I'll likely finish his New York trilogy someday based on the success of this first part.

5:04 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Herman Melville’s Billy Budd

My second Melville book of the summer isn't really Billy Budd... I found my copy of the unfinished novella in a collection of "Six Modern Great Short Novels" published in the 50s... the "definitive" edition of Billy Budd not existing until '62.  Doh!

The differences between my version and the "true" Billy Budd seem thankfully small-- a name change here and there, a weird preface, etc-- so I think I got the gist of it.  It's kind of like Othello on the ocean, with the angelic Billy Budd playing Shakespeare's titular tragic hero and the "naturally depraved" master-at-arms Claggart standing in for Iago.  The latter tries to screw over the former for no rational reason, concocting schemes based around the ship's prevailing fears of mutiny (the book's post-Revolution context is key and probably could be mined for a good allegory if I had to write a paper entitled "Allegories in the works of Herman Melville, Male Gigolo").  But Billy is more than meets the eye...

One character in Billy Budd that has no precedent in Othello is the bookish captain Edward "Starry" Vere.  The reasonable midpoint between the extremes of Billy and Claggart, he is given the toughest decisions to make in the novella.  His plight may be even more sympathetic than Billy's.  In a work that often veers towards the metaphysical, "Starry" Vere becomes a kind of archetypal pragmatist.

Which reminds me... (I LOVE writing that because it's so completely unecessary)........... much has been made of the struggle between good and evil that lies at the heart of Billy Budd.  Yet I believe the story's more interesting dichotomy is that between fact and fiction.  Lemme quote a bit... this passage is found near the novella's close: "The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction can not readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable that with fact.  Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial."  That's cool.  Ya see, Melville died before he could properly finish Billy Budd.  So, ironically, the "ragged edges" of his work could be ascribed to the "truth" of death.  Was Melville conscious of his impending end? 

Plus, Billy Budd is almost certainly fictional, which creates a bit of a problem: if Billy's (fictional) tale is presented by Melville as truth but is written without symmetry of form... do you see what I'm getting at here?  There is a collision of fact, fiction, and surmise in the form Billy Budd that casts doubt on our ability to distinguish each from the others, a mess found in the content as well: Claggart's attacks on Billy are built around rumors, the "trial" scene is hardly an impartial, just proceeding, there is a brief showdown between imaginative thought and science as played by the Purser and the Surgeon.  And Melville's choice of perspective here, as in Moby-Dick, is puzzling: he writes as an observer aboard the ship, but possesses a nearly omniscient knowledge of its events.

WEIRD!  That's what Melville is... America's weirdo.  Or America's Dostoevsky. Or not-- Billy Budd is a unique experience.  It certainly ain't as thrilling as Moby-Dick, and I wouldn't call Billy, Claggart, or Captain Vere the most compelling figures in the canon, and the language can be a little trying at times. 

But if yer tired of reading about your problems, give it a shot.

3:37 PM - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Philip Roth’s The Human Stain

Philip Roth is slowly but surely becoming one of my favorite authors.  I've read one of his books each of the past couple of summers (Goodbye Columbus and Sabbath's Theater) and the popular favorite Portnoy's Complaint before that (which has actually been my least favorite of his... still good, though), and I'll come back to Roth next summer well-aware of how close to the truth this man consistently gets.  I've yet to encounter a contemporary artist with a better bullshit detector.  And his prose is like butter.  Even his most labyrinthine and philosophically complex sentences scan beautifully.  Plus: lots of sex.  I was considering starting this review with a (not) funny comment about the "human stain" as some kind of sperm mark or something...

Ho HO HOOOOOO!  Philip Roth deserves better.  The Human Stain is wonderful.  It chronicles (from the perspective of Roth's surrogate, the writer Nathan Zuckerman) the life of Coleman Silk, a college professor besmirched by a "racist remark" he utters (in quotes because it ain't racist at all son!).  Silk puts his reputation in greater danger by having an affair with a woman half his age, the "helpless illiterate" Faunia Farley (in quotes because she is much more than the book's fools make her out to be!).  Antagonizing their relationship are the careerist co-hort of Silk, Delphine Roux, and Faunia's ex-husband, the crazy-ass Vietnam vet Les.  Things pan out and shit goes down.

Of course, "shit going down" in a Philip Roth novel entails a lot.  Audiences pay quite a bit of lip service to people like Tolkien or Rowling who populate their books with a boatload of characters, locations, etc.  I think what Roth does is more impressive-- he gives us just a handful of intriguing personalities and then develops the hell out of em.  History, ideology, relationships, motives, whatever-- the map of Coleman Silk's life is fantastically rich in detail.  Delphine and Les, characters who would be straight villains in a lesser work, here are written as astoundingly life-like human beings; Silk, meanwhile, is given more than a few absolutely despicable characteristics (this book is quite heavy on the negative implications of self-reliance).  And even with the novel's ambitious weave, a non-chronological structure found in most of the Roth I've read, the book has no fat: all we learn seems essential, no revelations are repeated.  The quotations on the back of The Human Stain write about Roth in terms normally fit for a historian, apropos for an author whose characters could very well be part of our "real" chronology.

The Human Stain uses the Bill Clinton impeachment scandal as a backdrop, a disturbing time for the sanctimony-bashing Roth.  As such, this is a passionate, occasionally political work.  But the book's time is never overwhelming.  Look at how it deals with *RACE*.  If John McCain's presidential campaign addresses race as a child (DON'T PLAY THE RACE CARD or you might THINK) and current academia addresses race as a psychotic mother (YOU'RE ALL FUCKING RACISTS!), then The Human Stain imagines it like... well... any mature American adult should.  It doesn't examine "race" like a kind of alienating tool or taboo, but as a single important characteristic in the making of a human being.  Roth emphasizes the universality of identity problems here, with Coleman, Faunia, Delphine, and Les each a multi-faceted web of idiosyncrasies (not just members of a RACE, CLASS, or GENDER      Fuckers).

I probably just said that because I'm a WHITE, MIDDLE-CLASS MALE, though.

The Human Stain is, in short, required reading for the college-bound/college-residing/etc cuz the human stain (concept) is more than a couple of reductive, easy-to-digest cliches.  Rock.

10:42 PM - 9 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass

Your favorite rock star is not a poet.

Okay?

And incoherence rarely (if ever) equals depth.

(That bit was inspired by the lyrics to "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" by Wilco and a write-up of Wilco's Lollapalooza show featured on Pitchforkmedia.com.  The review called "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" a "fucking amazing" song or something.  It's really not.  It's an mind-numblingly simple folk ditty with dumb noises and meaningless lyrics and an attractive vocal melody.  Emily showed me the light... "I assassin down the avenue"?  Fuck you Jeff Tweedy, that doesn't stand for shit, you pretentious douchebag, I'm not going to let your fucking bullshit Yankee Hotel Foxtrot fool me any longer, I know it's just a bunch of simple folk ditties with dumb noises and meaningless lyrics!!!!! I love KAMERA and JESUS ETC and I'M THE MAN WHO LOVES YOU and WAR on WAR and others!!!!)

Leaves of Grass is the American Bible and Walt Whitman is the American Christ.  The fact that the "Bible" Bible remains more popular in America than Leaves of Grass is... well... actually... not that astounding.  This is a tricky, dense, progressive text.

Though I guess the Bible is fairly difficult as well.  Despite what the hard-line American right and left want you to believe, you could probably justify any act with the Old and New Testaments.  The thing is just packed with contradictions... like Leaves of Grass.  I've ranted on this blog before about Thoreau and Twain getting the educational shaft by way of over-categorization; Whitman may have it worse.  "He's a transcendentalist.  He's democratic.  He's dead and white.  Done." WHATEVER!  This guy is complex!  Leaves of Grass fucking opens with a paradox ("One's self I sing, a simple separate person/ Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse")!  It's as "human" a book as they come.

That's a cliche, but it bears repeating.  It took quite a bit of time for Whitman to sing all he sings in his text (nearly forty years between the first and "Deathbed" editions); naturally, his voice changes over its course.  Sometimes he's boisterous, sometimes withdrawn. Sometimes he's satirical, sometimes deadly serious.  Leaves of Grass ages and adapts to the climate of Whitman's America; post-Civil War (described in the Drum Taps collection), Whitman seems to be locked in a kind of persistent tragic reverie.

Leaves of Grass is Whitman, see.  "Me" is often conceptualized as "The poem you're reading" or "The book you're holding."  And "Me" is especially concerned about "us."  He invites us to touch his body, then questions our motives.  He claims to speak the truth, and then asks that we don't take his word for it.  What sorts of things can we take from all these opposing directions?  Is that even the proper question to ask?  I mean, in many ways, this book is a character study: a free pass into a fascinating, dynamic psyche.  Or perhaps the primary function of Leaves of Grass is to lessen our dependence on other visions for our ideas of truth...

Fuck.  I don't know... actually, no (I write like Elton John sings in "Your Song"... badly!).  I don't think Leaves of Grass has a single ulterior motive.  It's got too many subjects for that!  Look at "A Boston Ballad."  No one's going to say that it's one of Whitman's very best.  But as a put-down of executive pomp (which is almost never in short supply) it's charming.  And it curiously steps outside of an idea that hovers around many of the Leaves: that, basically, all is well (oversimplification!).  Political commentary is not unique to "A Boston Ballad," either... even the poems of the Calamus and Children of Adam are laced with hopes for America's betterment ("I Sing the Body Electric"... I've read it a million times and am still stunned by just how encompassing Whitman's humanity is).

Again I'm selling a book short with generalizations.

I'm gonna try to explain Leaves of Grass (that's actually impossible, but you get what I'm saying, right?) from a different angle.  I believe that there is little point of reading a book if it's only going to confirm the convictions you had before starting it.  Scratch that.  I don't mind if one wishes to strengthen their faith in a certain idea (by reading, say, an anti-Bush book), but...

I'm gonna try this again.  Albert Camus.  He's okay.  I liked The Stranger.  But when you're a secular teenager and you only think about yourself (like me), what does The Stranger tell you?  "I can kill shit!"  The Stranger could never be one of my favorite novels because its ideas are not all that far removed from any non-Christian kid's these days: "The world sucks!"  "I'm gonna die anyway!"  "Fuck it all!"  "Religion is lame!"  ETC

Leaves of Grass has more than a few notions that are common to my peers.  Like "Love," or whatever.  But its conception of DEATH, my friends, is extraordinary.

(That's all I really wanted to say in those last four or five paragraphs.)

Yes, Death.  Leaves of Grass paints it clearly: it is THE theme.  Life is interesting, but death...is... in... a whole different... err... TIME ZONE!  Walt Whitman makes it gorgeous.  Which isn't to say I'm going to kill myself tomorrow.  I'm not!  Death scares the poop out of me!  But of all the hundreds of poems in Leaves of Grass, few affected me quite like the death ones.  Let's put aside biology for a second: if all life could pretty much be summed up as the gradual acquisition of knowledge, aka moving from the known to the unknown, then isn't death the logical finale?  I never really thought about the name "The Great Unknown"... it's an appropriate one.  Death is the one thing humans can't conquer because its experiences cannot be brought back.

Or can they?  Whitman seems to believe in resurrection; not a foolish belief, if you ask me.  Isn't part of Whitman's consciousness reborn in anyone who reads one of his Leaves?  It reminds me of the ideas of the soul described by Douglas Hofstader in I Am a Strange Loop, a tremendously engaging work that I have left tremendously unfinished...

Look at all the ways that Death is figured in Leaves of Grass!  Look at all the evolution in Whitman's Death meditations!  Look at the beauty of the language!  It makes one optimistic.  Even his eulogy to Lincoln, the popular "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," isn't despairing.  In fact, it might be the most satisfying intersection of art and the inevitable I've ever read.  You just don't find that kind of death treatment in most places (Shakespeare excepted).  When you see someone like Whitman get pumped for Death, you have to stop and wonder why.

I've been working on this review for about two hours and my back aches.  Please leave a comment that will provoke a thought.  I'll provide a topic.

Resolved: Leaves of Grass is the essential work of American fiction.

7:49 PM - 4 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum, etc

I saw The Dark Knight and was particularly affected by (surprise, surprise) Heath Ledger's Joker.  For those who haven't seen the film (all two of you), Ledger plays Batman's arch-foe as a quasi-philosophical, menacing anarcho-punk; a villain far scarier, smarter, and eviler than the overrated Nicholson/Burton creation.  The best thing I can say about Ledger is how transparent he is-- as I watched The Dark Knight, I didn't once think about the actor's own unfortunate story, completely engrossed in his genius's (there's a bit of genius in the Joker, no?) onscreen antics.

Anyway, after the movie I decided to read some Batman comic books, specifically those with the Joker.  I wasn't able to find any at the library (a little help, Mike Espejo?), so I downloaded a couple as torrents.  I didn't want to spoil the epic stories on my computer screen (The Long Halloween, Batman: Year One, etc), figuring I'd get around to them in paper form if I liked the downloaded books enough.  I ended up reading four books: Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, Ed Brubaker's The Man Who Laughs, Jim Starlin's A Death in the Family, and Grant Morrison's Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on a Serious Earth.  These stories are considered amongst Batman fans to be some of the best in the genre.  With the exception of the episodic Death in the Family, the books are all "one-shots," or not part of a larger series.

(Perhaps) predictably, A Death in the Family was my least favorite.   It chronicles the quest of Batman and Robin (Jason Todd) in the Middle East to find Robin's real mother and stop the Joker, who's been fucking around with nukes.  Written in the late 80s, Death in the Family has quite a bit of social commentary (Joker laments that he is feeling the strain of Reaganomics; Joker becomes an ambassador for AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI) but a dull story that's filled with corny action cliches, unconvincing coincidences, and Superman scenes (fuck Superman).  Its saving grace is the titular "death," a harrowing, brutal sequence that brings out the worst in the Joker.  The art is by Jim Aparo, Mike DeCarlo, and Adrienne Roy and is, like the story, mostly bland but for, again, the infamous death.

The Man Who Laughs is a much better Joker tale with a much better Joker.  Featuring gritty, exciting art courtesy of Doug Mahnke and David Baron, it acts as a sequel to Batman: Year One and likely provided much inspiration for The Dark Knight.  As it was released in 2005, the thematic concerns of The Man Who Laughs are a touch more relevant than those of the rest I read (the key here is not Joker's "madness," per se, but his terrorism), and the emphasis on Jim Gordon is always good.

There is a major problem with The Man Who Laughs, though, one that might have started with Alan Moore's beloved Killing Joke.  It's the backstory!  It sucks!  Part of the Joker's success (from a critical standpoint) in The Dark Knight is his total inscrutability-- he has no name, no (single) history, no relations.  The Killing Joke and The Man Who Laughs make the Joker a sad man who went insane due to dire circumstances.  Lame!  Granted, the art of how the Joker "came to be" is exceptional, drawn with a tremendous eye for human detail and sporting a killer climax (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/53/Jokerkillingjoke.png).  But I'm not buying the narrative.  The Joker can't just be a poor sap comedian pushed over the edge... that's Batman's role!  The Joker has to be a mystery...

The "present" in The Killing Joke is more effective yet far from perfect.  The Joker basically tries to fuck over Gordon's life, ruining his daughter's crimefighting career and conscripting the Commish into a hellish carnival in just a couple of panels.  The book peaks during a dramatic showdown between Batman and his nemesis, concluding with a total knee-slapper that has Batman in stitches.  The ending is somewhat notorious for its ambiguity and has garnered both rave and disparaging reactions from fans.  Here's my take: as far as complicating the relationship between two mortal enemies, The Killing Joke's finish works.  But in the context of the book that came before, the ending also feels a tad inappropriate.  I mean... what about all that stuff that happened to the Gordons?  Does Batman even care?  The gravity of the Joker's atrocities in The Killing Joke calls for a doozy ending, but the three main storylines of the book (The Joker's formation, the Joker's plot, and Batman's psychological conflict with the Joker) don't quite cohere at the finale.

Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on a Serious Earth has a similarly disappointing ending, but its impressive style, disturbing story, and conceptual ambition make it the best of the four Batman books I read.  It's gorgeous to look at (Dave McKean is the illustrator), combining freakishly distorted character design, Ian Sigmon-style paint splatter, seemingly hasty scribbles, occasional collage, an unconventional, nearly free-form panel structure, and a whole lot of black to conjure up a world that traverses seamlessly from history to legend to madness (there seem to be no walls in Arkham).   The Joker here is a gaunt, flirtatious monster, part "Lord of Misrule" and part mother for the rest of the Rogues Gallery (which is huge here: Two-Face, Killer Croc, Mad Hatter, Clayface, Dr. Destiny, Black Mask and more all make appearances).  Though it gets bogged down in psychological gobbledygook, Arkham Asylum nevertheless does a commendable job sprinkling symbolism, allusion, metaphor, and other frankly literary tropes into the Batman mythology.   Of all the "Batman is as mad as the Joker" statements made in the Batman books I've conquered, this one is easily the most elegant.

And of all the Charlie Browns in the world, you're the Charlie Browniest.

So I might be picking up a "big" Batman epic soon.  If anyone has any suggestions, suggest!  Expect Leaves of Grass reviewed here, same Jack place, in, like, a week!

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