Remember this Dad?

I was out at breakfast, alone as Corrie gets some family stuff done in Texas, and on the way out there is a display table where the free newspapers and stashed. Also on the display are flyers for festivals, shows, conventions and the like.

I saw this on there today:

Back when we had season tickets to Music Circus, one of the shows that Dad and I went to was this one, "Chess". I remember thinking it was pretty cool, since it wasn't one of the classic Broadway musicals. Those "classic" ones are not really my cup of tea as far as performance art goes. I'll go and go from now until whenever, because other people I care about may be fans.

"Chess", though, was modern and intellectual, and one character, the moderator I think, when barking an order at one of the player's handlers (or it could have been the girl both players were in love with) says: "I want them HERE at noon SMILING." Then, as he's exiting the row, he turned and bellowed one the most memorable lines from any Music Circus show I ever heard: "Well, I don't give a shit if they're smiling."

Cursing and Cold War politics at a Music Circus show? That was fantastic. Maybe I'll take Corrie to this...

While living in New York Corrie was signed up with something called Gold Star Entertainment. They were a seat-filling organization that attempted to sell-out shows at wildly reduced prices. Corrie would get an email about what deals were available that week, and we'd decide what to see. That's how we saw "Madame Butterfly" among other shows and ballgames.

One show was called "Dust", wrought by Billy Goda:

Once again I encountered things I wasn't expecting. This show was free, with the six dollar service charge per ticket. Twelve bucks for some Thee-ayter?

Not a musical, the show revolved around three main characters; the protagonist was a guy, a recovering meth addict and newly released from jail, who had a job as a handyman in a condo; his girl; and the antagonist was played by Richard Masur, recognizable from his work in movies, the character here was one of the condo residents who treats the protagonist poorly.

This show had everything: cursing, drug use, gun play, threats---both idle and real---and the girl was even topless for ten solid minutes during an intimate argument scene.

We had no idea what it was about before showing up; read no reviews, had heard nothing...jackpot!

I'd hadn't thought about "Chess" for years, so today's discovery was rather sweet.

Some Rambling Notes on Comic Books

I have plenty to do otherwise, but I have a need to get some of this rambling crud out of my brain.

I have long had a post in my memory banks concerning comic books, and as I've thought about different things to add to it, it kinda morphed into a series of posts, and those seemed to balloon into a a project of a different kind. Like, I may desire to write a kind of history of the form, or catalog the mid-'90s implosion or the new renaissance that's occurring currently.

There are so many angles and subjects that I want to discuss, and that really to do it like I want may turn it from a series of posts into a series of "post-chapters" that could be collected. Like any of us have the time for that.

I have plenty to do otherwise...

One of the resources I used to collect the images I'll be using here today is Comic Book Realm. They have an immense database of comic book covers.

There are many genres that were highlighted in the thirties, forties, and fifties that were blotted out by the hysteria over the "Seduction of the Innocent" era. Those same genres were kept alive in the form in Japan, and are part of the current landscape back here in the States. Superheroes were the meat of the medium here for the bulk of the publication history over the last sixty years.

The purpose of this post is to 1) serve as an intro; 2) show myself I can consolidate rambling rootless ideas into something more; 3) highlight the varying levels of publisher in the comic book industry that all too often focuses on DC and Marvel a little too narrowly.

One of the reasons this (series of) post(s) has taken so long to get going is the wide-angle lens needed to look at everything...so I'm trying to narrow the focus here as an exercise.

***

Superhero comics have a wide array of types of characters, and besides character's abilities or powers, I'd like to momentarily highlight "popularity to the consumer" as a necessary element. Superman, Batman, Spiderman...these characters are all quite popular and will continue to have various monthly titles being published until...well, until they're no longer iconic members of a collected mass-media identity. Who knows when that may be...

But other characters who may not enjoy such lofty popularity levels get cancelled...and then brought back later, possibly altered, and put back out to a find a new audience. Sometimes they get cancelled again...and brought out again later...and cancelled again...you get the idea.

What I plan on doing now are looking at two specific characters and their mottled publishing history and how the character changed over those years. One character exists in one single comic book universe, both company-wise and fictional-universe-wise. The other character represents the extraordinary makeup of the publishing universe.

The first character is the Spectre, the white-skinned and green-cloaked apparition from the early DC universe. The Spectre started out as James Corrigan, a detective killed by gangsters who has his spirit fused with god's Wrath. He uses his powers to end bad guys, in creative ways, but after a while the talent behind the title lost interest, and the Spectre was relegated to help-out duty as a member of the Justice Society, the fore-runner of the Justice League.

In 1967 the Spectre returned with his own title, but lasted only until 1969:

On the shelf until 1987, the Spectre may have been used occasionally throughout the seventies and early eighties, but my own knowledge doesn't have that filled in so well. But in 1987, he was back with his own title. This time the Spectre was sort of a boss-like character, head of the section of the DC universe that deals with the occult and magic. Other characters with wizardly powers occupied this space.

Only they didn't really know what to do with the character. It only lasted until 1989. In 1992, John Ostrander came to DC with an idea for reviving Spectre...in truth it had to have been before, probably near the end of the Volume 2 series, seeing as how the Volume 3 series debuted in 1992.

One of the reasons I chose the Spectre for this discussion was primarily because of this Volume 3 and the following Volume 4 editions of this title. I read the John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake title for a few years. These guys had a plan...

Lasting until 1997, the title examined the internal battle between the dead Jimmy Corrigan and the nearly all-powerful Wrath. Many stories dealt with the Spectre being summoned to mete out vengeance upon some lowly subjects who had misbehaved (often committing acts far more socially acceptable-while-being-wrong rather than capital offenses), and the ensuing battle between the remaining humanity within Corrigan and the need for blind violent justice.

The stories were compelling and they gave the character some teeth. During a rather successful decade, the Spectre turned up in many titles, usually as a motivating character or uninvolved messenger (see the house-cleaning "Zero Hour" crossover or the fully painted collection of fine art "Kingdom Come").

Near the end, the readership skewed more mature, and with the speculative bubble-busting, the title was scrapped.

Within a few years, though, it was decided that Hal Jordan, former Green Lantern turned bad-guy named Parallax (again, see "Zero Hour"), was just too important to be gone forever. He was brought back, but not as a Green Lantern, but rather as the ghost tied to Wrath.

This was between 2001 and 2003, and soon enough Hal was back to being the young, non-white-templed Green Lantern everyone loved, but for a while he acted as the Spectre. I'm not quite sure what happened during the title's run, and I'll look into it later.

I find it interesting how upon each cover of each iteration, the Spectre's doing something magical with its hand(s).

Now the second character was brought back a few times, but has as many companies publishing him as there are editions. This character is Solar, Man of the Atom, but occasionally called Doctor Solar. He was one of three Gold Key characters from the fifties and sixties that Jim Shooter purchased the rights to to launch his own fully consistent and inclusive fictional universe in the nineties in Valiant. This was right after Shooter failed in his bid to purchase Marvel; he left and formed his own company, but that's the subject for a different day.

Solar debuted in 1962 for Gold Key Comics, and arrived at his "iconic" outfit by issue 3. Here's a neat cover from issue 7:

Gold Key was neat because they had oversized comics and didn't follow the Comics Code Authority. The other two characters who's rights were purchased were Magnus, a robot fighter from the 40th century, and Turok, a dinosaur hunting native American. This iteration ran through 27 issues to 1969, and was brought back in 1981 with issue #28:

This version lasted for four issues that stretched into 1982.

The Valiant universe from the nineties was created inadvertently by Solar, and while I wasn't a reader of Solar specifically, I was/am a fan of the Valiant line of reading material. Here, is issue #7's cover, because I thought I'd do my part to follow the thread:

This title ran from 1991 until 1996, when Valiant stopped publishing under the Valiant banner and the video game company Acclaim revamped the universe it had bought at the height of the bubble in '94, finally using their own banner.

As the following cover states, indeed, "Look what we've done":

The Acclaim folks had a few one-shots and this miniseries (from 1998), and they were relatively well received, but the industry was in a changing mood, and by late '98, Acclaim was shuttering the comic book part of their company.

The jumped in at a tough time, strangled their titles, decided to revamp them to make them more video-game-showcasing friendly, and by the end took a bath on the whole enchilada.

Years later, the mega-independent publisher Dark Horse, the first label to find a steady life on the Marvel and DC margins, approached Jim Shooter with an idea to revamp Solar once again. Here is that series' cover for issue #7, this time from 2011:

That series was well received enough to garner the attentions of one of the newest companies that had carved out a niche on licensed material. Both IDW and the company here, Dynamite, have made a very successful business out of producing high-quality licensed material: stuff from movies, television cartoons, and old comic properties.

Here's one of the variant covers from issue #1 from just last year, in 2014.

***

I enjoy specifically how both of these titles can, when properly informed, trace out so much of the industry's history over the past 80 years. Purpose and popularity cycle greatly over the years, and both the Spectre and Solar can attest to that. 

With the Spectre one can watch one of the comic book blue bloods---DC---flail about and try to milk a lucrative idea out of a misunderstood property and find varying levels of success.

With Solar, one can see how much of an industry isn't controlled by the blue bloods, and how only two major current publishers have been left out of the story (Image and IDW).

***

Going about some research for my students about the comics I'd be "selling" for Sherbux, I stumbled upon some reporting of the reemergence of the Valiant comic book universe. That was the impetus for the return to researching ideas for and about comics.

While I'm not fully convinced I did what I wanted to do with this post, I started the ball rolling on an idea I've been scratching notes on for a while now. 

More Flanagan Magic

At the end of the long camping trip we took earlier this summer, and after a long walk from the ocean to the Haight---all the way through Golden Gate Park---we stopped in at an independent bookstore. It's one of my habits: trying to find something to buy at independent bookstores.

On this trip I found a nice paperback copy of Richard Flanagan's Man Booker Prize-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North:

Flanagan's other majorly well-received work, Gould's Book of Fish, is one of my favorite books ever, and I've picked up and read over the years two others of his (Wanting and The Unknown Terrorist) at our erstwhile local Dollar Bookstore solely on the merits of Gould's... They weren't as good of the ...Book of Fish, but that's unfair, as few books are.

Having finished Narrow Road to the Deep North, I'd like to report that it is as good, but in a different way. Structurally the storytelling may be superior, and as the back of the paperback says, "This is the book Richard Flanagan was born to write." That's true.

I was under the impression, gauging from reviews, that it was a brutal look at a Japanese POW camp in Burma as orders came down from the Emperor to build the un-buildable railroad from Siam to the west and hasten both the planned invasion of British-held India and continue a supply chain to the western-front Japanese troops, a supply chain that had been cutoff from the seas by the American military.

I was surprised then as the sections of the book unfolded and the Camp took a while at which to arrive. After I'd finished the book, I went back through and reexamined the opening chapter, and then set about marking off the five sections in my own pencil. I'd mark my own titular label, the pages it covered, how many pages are in the section, a brief recap of the section's content, and even the previous section's beginning and ending pages. Check out the page for Part III, labeled by me as "The Camp/The Line":

I did this to illuminate a few things for myself in the middle of trying to scratch out my own first novel. I used it mostly as a guide for pacing.

The return to the first chapter of a book about suffering, deceit, infidelity, leadership, and history's ramifications was fully enlightening. I marveled how in the 52 pages Flanagan sets up each one of the character types and characters---outside of Major Nakamura. Everything's there. The introduction of our hero, Dorrigo Evans, happens in the very beginning, and we get a look at him as a boy--oversized and confident. We meet his brother and see some shenanigans between Tom, the brother, and a neighbor's wife. The section jumps around through time effortlessly, as we get the post-war and now sorta famous Dorrigo as he's lamenting having to write the forward of book based on a collection of prison camp paintings while also not being sure why he's still keeping an affair going with his mistress, the wife of a fellow surgeon.

We then get glimpses of Dorrigo and Amy, from before being shipped out, and it seems like Dorry and Amy may have had something. We get an internal issue from older Dorry about one of his prison camp soldiers, Darky Gardiner.

So far, no prison camp itself stuff.

The next section is nearly a hundred ages, and chronicles Dorrigo and Amy's torrid love affair, and his constant self-loathing through it all, Amy being the much-younger wife of someone who qualifies as Dorrigo's uncle.

Over a hundred-and-fifty pages in, and we finally get to the Camp. Here we get Nakamura and Darky, Colonel Kota and all the boys on the Line. Here we meet Dorrigo Evans as the "Big Fella", soon enough in charge as commanding officer and reluctantly having to choose which men to send on one-way tickets to the reaper. The scenes of brutality, of starvation, of tropical ulcers and uncontrollable diarrhea during the monsoons of Siam and Burma, of the shabu-addicted Nakamura (shabu is Japanese meth-amphetamine), are painted with stomach-churning power.

The fourth section covers the random lives of the survivors in the intervening years up until their deaths, and how each of them were severely affected by the Camp, including Nakamura in the ashy remnants of Tokyo. The fifth and last section is mostly the same, but we get the end of Dorrigo and Nakamura and even Amy, the revelation about Darky, and even a big forest fire action sequence.

Heartbreak and loss and pain are the pieces of life that literature can best showcase over the course of work, and here, coming full circle with the first section, an idea is driven home masterfully. Coming in at under 400 pages also shows off Flanagan's abilities.

This book is a masterpiece.

Odd note: there is much discussion by characters both Aussie and Japanese about poetry, and each of the section markers that I drew on have tiny fragments of poems. Even the book's title, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, is taken from the travelogue writing of Japanese master Basho. I find it interesting that this masterpiece by Flanagan takes as a title the exact same name of another, much older well-known work.

That's interesting because the exact same thing happened with his other masterpiece, Gould's Book of Fish. That work is named for the original William Gould's Australian-prison project that carries the same name and exists in the Aussie National Archives as a treasure.

Symmetry of some kind I suppose...

One More Reboot Note...

Okay, so...

First let me apologize for polluting this hallowed space with Terminator stuff. I hadn't realized that Genisys would be, to quote Bender, an atrocimacy. Oh well.

But have you seen this?

Now, I'll be the first to usually decry the lack of originality in major film-making these days, but the Wachowski's Sens8 on Netflix is trying to do something about that (it's certainly original, but plodding...). Reboots, sequels, comic books...(sigh) All this while Richard Flanagan contemplated finding work in the Australian coal mines because his writing career seemed destitute...(super sigh).

Anyway, with the new all-lady Ghostbusters, I'm trying to be more easygoing. The main reason is because I'm all in with Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy. I don't know what that says about me. Melissa McCarthy is the new-era lady-John Candy, and while there are a few shitty movies she's in, I appreciate she still gets leading roles.

And, it turns out, Dan Aykroyd loves the new cast as well. Maybe he must, seeing as how he's likely attached in some way to the property.

Anyway, the picture of the new Ecto 1 appeared online and inspired me to post this, but partly to take away the bad taste of the former lead post.

Okay Dan...

Two Questions for you, Dan, and Dad, you're welcome to play along.

Question 1: What do Bill Paxton and Lance Henriksen have in common?

(Waiting)

(Still waiting...)

(Do you already know and this is annoying you?)

Okay: They are the only two guys to be Terminated, Alienated, and Predatorated. Of course Lance wasn't macked by a Predator until 2004's AvP, but I'm counting it.

Here's a short piece about them.

Also, here's a neat link to a discussion of the first four Terminators, my source for the aforementioned connection. Of the four, the writer mentions 'half are good to great, while half are bad to worse.'

Random Terminator fact: the only one I saw in the theater was T3, with Marc and Tony in San Luis Obispo on a forgettable Wednesday afternoon. John Connor a schmucko and Claire Danes the secret leader of the resistance? Okay, fine, I'm in... I guess I never cared that much.

This fatalist guy never seemed the right heir to Ed Furlong:

Maybe this guy was:

But I still haven't see T:Salvation. I guess I never cared that much.

Okay, so Nick Stahl and Chris Bale are in the pictures above as kids, and are the source for the tougher second question.

Question 2: What are the two movies represented in these still images?

Fence, Schmence...

Facts, schmacts... You can use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true.

Simpsons digression...my bad.

And now, a dispatch from suburbia: Dan's Fence Gets Macked By Drunk Girl

Sorry Dan. Some drunken chick busts up your fence while on a run from the police, even down to three wheels at the time of final impact, and here you are, surveying the situation after a restaurant-dinner-interrupting phone call.

I should probably let you tell the story, since I don't know anything about it. Well, beyond ma's emails and stories and apparent court battles.

This post was supposed to be about how our new cat's destructo-matic nature pales in comparison, yet still induces the same kind of head-scratching moments where you find yourself saying to yourself, "Well... Shit."

Not firing on all cylinders this afternoon.

Also, I wanted to write "Fence, Schmence".

Also, do you remember that little cartoon book with the illustration of a picket fence labeled "Fence", and next to it just a solitary picket labeled "Fent"? For some reason that cartoon has been flashing in my brain ever since I heard about The Great Basswood Fence Macking That Didn't Involve A Moving Truck Driven By A Hairy Stoner.

Saving Baseball

I'm not sure I truly believe baseball really needs "saving", so claims made by the title of this post may be for imagination's sake only.

Rob Manfred, the new commish of baseball, has been bringing different ideas to the table to stem the erosion of the sport's popularity. The fan base has been skewing older and whiter as of late. Some ideas are on the table just to discuss, like the elimination of the shift. Not that I'm the most vocal purist, but eliminating the shift is ludicrous. Learn to lay down the bunt...

Creating urgency is now the driving desire of the Sports-Industrial Complex. In a world where live entertainment is so sought after, the importance of each of those live events is becoming paramount. The NFL has figured this out. MLB has yet to figure out how to make the marathon season into something more tasty for the young crowd.

Manfred talks about making games shorter. Maybe even lopping those extra 8 games and getting back to the "classic" 154 game schedule.

This conversation happened last night:

Me: So the new baseball commissioner is thinking of shortening the baseball season. Urgency's the name of the game now...

Corrie (in that way great wives listen and pay attention to shit they don't care about): Ooh really? How many games is he planing on taking?

Me: Eight.

Corrie: (Cute smile) Wow...that's it?

I rattled off a brief history of the 154-game schedule but trailed off. "What baseball really needs to do is..."

I then laid out a proposal that had been festering away in my imagination in an unformed state for too long. Maybe it had been the day spent slowly roasting in the sun at my master's graduation ceremony, marinated by the slow drip of scotch from my flask, or fullness of my belly with pork porterhouse and Pinot Noir, but at that moment last night the idea flowed from my brain through my mouth out to the ether.

I started by telling Corrie that what baseball needed to compete with the specter of its own past were changes far more radical than anything on the table.

I propose two separate regular seasons, one 90-110 games long, the other 30-40 games long with a two week break in the middle for All Star festivities. I propose that the two best teams from each league from the first, longer regular season (Season A) are put into a half a single-elimination bracket. The four best teams from Season B, two from each league that aren't the same as from Season A, will fill out the rest of the bracket. Those bracketed teams then play single elimination games for the right to represent their respective leagues in the best-of-seven World Series.

Why not exploit the randomness of small samples sizes? Imagine a team like the Marlins, knowing that if Jose Fernandez will be healthy by June or July, deciding to simply not risk bringing him back until later, knowing they only have to kick ass in the B season? How about a good team securing a spot in the post-season bracket from the A season then trying out all rookie squads for a while in Season B and get better at developing their own players? How about teams that only play for the shorter Season B?

Since baseball is ruled by statistics and numbers more so than any other American sport, think about leaving the stats for a year-in-year-out basis being the combined Seasons A and B--that way they'll at least resemble what we recognize.

Anything partly inspired by the '81 strike has to be mostly insane, but it's time to get radical. What type of prize could there be for wire-to-wire dominance? A bye? Maybe it should be the three best from each league each half, with byes for statistical juggernauts...

This will never happen, but it may be radical enough that if it were adopted, a new era of intrigue and urgency would be brought to the game.

Scottle of Botch

In the rare event of friends visiting our Long Beezy apartment, I would find myself eventually offering them some scotch.

How I came to be in possession of scotch is itself an interesting anecdote: Auntie Peg prefers Dewars, and people give her Glenlivet as gifts. "I don't drink single-malts," she says, "Here, Patrick, do you want this? Just take it..."

"Why, I think I can make a home for that," I nod as I look it over. Then thank her. I guess that anecdote isn't that interesting...

Anyway, the only hard liquor we ever really have in our apartment, when we do have some, is either Jameson or Beefeater. Irish whiskey or London gin. Old school and works for us.

The Glenlivet, for me, was similar to Jameson, only smoother. It was warm and sweet and relaxing and deliciously fiery. I started to learn why people drink scotch. I've tried it with ice, but as of now, I prefer it neat.

Anyway, I offer it to the random visitors. "Ooh, I don't dig on peat," they say. "Ahh, that's to peaty for me. I don't like the smoke..."

What? "What exactly does peat taste like?" I ask them. Smokiness, or something...I can't get a satisfactory answer from them. In fact, it sounded like a line oft repeated in peer circles I am no longer privy to. Like everybody agrees to dislike something because of a perceived sleight. I have, for full disclosure, been part of those peer circles before, agreeing that I dislike something for reasons that I may have agreed with, but certainly never explored how strong the perceived dislike was through experimentation.

Anyway, I use an old timey safety razor with removable blades, cold water, and a badger brush; I shave at night before bed. My skin has never been happier. Now I enjoy scotch, and my liver may rejoice if I have three ounces of scotch instead of twenty ounces of beer.

I've never felt as grown-up as I do now.

Endless Optimism

Dad, I love the optimism you display regularly with our Yanks. I wouldn't say that I'm specifically pessimistic, but I'm far away from anything that constitutes a "Yankee baseball scene", especially since I don't ride the train anymore and I took the newspaper app off my phone (it sure did suck...).

But a few weeks ago I had my laptop and I went through and watched all the available videos concerning the up-and-coming Yankee prospects...the future, as it were.

I don't remember their names, but there were a few mentioned. I was trying to be optimistic, feeling that eventually we'd talk, and I was trying to guess your view. Really I was trying to talk myself into Teixeria not being totally broken down and A-Rod being useful.

Headley at 3rd I'm not really against, but it seems like Yankee-Business-As-Usual---hire a former all-star on the back end of his career. He was an all-star, right?

Anyway, I like the Caribbean kid they have to follow up Jeter, Didi Gregorious, even though it sounds like he can't hit. Maybe I just like his name.

Dave Robertson's gone...is Dellin ready to close? Tanaka is a superstar, for sure, as long as his elbow holds up. For sure the rotation depends on him and CC and that kid from Miami, Nate Eovaldi. The Eovaldi move, for me, didn't have the Pavano-stink that that particular move had, but how much of that is the perpetual optimism we Yankee fans have?

What's the over-under on wins for the season? 87? I just went to look it up: 86 wins. They also mention McCann and Ellsbury, two guys I forgot. For some reason Beltran makes me sad like Teixeria, but McCann should bounce back well, and he wasn't even that bad. And Ellsbury was everything we wanted, right?

Maybe Nova will return before the Break and Pineda will leave the pine-tar alone while working up his rebuilt elbow...

See? Talked myself into some optimism...

Author Notes

Happy New Year!

I was perusing Amazon.com the other day and checking up on a few books I'll be making the purchase of in coming months. One is by Marlon James and is titled A Brief History of Seven Killings, and takes place in Jamaica. It's about the corruption and craziness involved in social upheaval and what-not. I heard it was very good.

I was also looking up some info on Up Up and Away [Expos Book] by Jonah Keri. The subtitle is far too long to put here, so I paraphrased it. It's a book about the Montreal Expos, and it looks pretty cool.

Another baseball book that caught my attention came out in 2014 was titled 1954, and like the Expos book, had a long subtitle. Written by Bill Madden, a baseball writer from New York that I remember fondly, it's about, namely, 1954 and how that was the first year both world series teams had black players and the the social changes that happened the same year (Brown vs. Board of Ed.). It looks good.

Baseball books aside, it was on Amazon's page for A Brief History... that I saw, down on the bottom where they have suggestions about "Customers who bought this also bought...", a familiar name: Bone Clocks by David Mitchell.

Mitchell, Dan if you don't know, wrote the nested egg "novel" Cloud Atlas, which I'm guessing was better than the movie (which I missed). Dad turned me onto it a decade or more ago. Bone Clocks follows a similar structure it sounds like, but with more connection between the sections.

Next to Bone Clocks was The Laughing Monsters, about shady business folks and shady African deals and shady weddings and nationalities---but was written by Denis Johnson, he of Tree of Smoke and Jesus' Son fame. Denis Johnson and David Mitchell both had books published in 2014. What the hell was I doing that I missed these?

THEN I saw another familiar name: The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a novel about POWs during WWII carving a road out of the Indonesian jungle written by Richard Flanagan and published in 2014.

So, along with Murakami's Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki..., Richard Flanagan and Denis Johnson and David Mitchell all published books last year, 2014.

Narrow Road... is being highly touted by the reviews on Amazon... Have you gotten to it yet, dad? I'll ask when I call sometime soon, seeing as how blog posts make for strange communiques. So far, besides Gould's... I've read Wanting and The Unknown Terrorist. Both aren't bad, but I would never had read them had I found them at a non-dollar bookstore AND hadn't read Gould's Book of Fish. Those two I don't really even recommend to people, whereas I've bought multiple copies of Gould's... as gifts for people.

Another book listed on that bottom scroll was Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel. It was familiar to me because of a list put together by the fine folks at Powell's Bookstore. Powell's is the Portland institution that we visited on our Oregonian sojourn, and I was reading up on their website about good books in 2014 and Station Eleven was listed. It tales place in some weird post-apocalyptic world where acting troupes roam wild...or something.

It kinda reminds me of something I'm reading now, Brittle Star by Rod Val Moore. It's published by a small press of LA writers, and Moore's been described on some websites as a "writer's writer". I guess that means his general audience is writers? It sure sounds like that's the case as I read.

Brittle Star is about prisoners that have been exiled on a distant planet where they are to remain for one year. These aren't hardened criminals, mind you, they are all former humanities professors. They are instructed to choose between two different colored uniforms upon arrival: one color is celery, the other, something called "celedon", which Corrie assures me is an actual thing. It's rare that I come across an English word that I've never seen while people like Corrie and other folks in the design industry use with regularity.

Anyway, celery and celedon are basically the exact same shit, and in the first 40 pages, picking the uniforms is about as exciting as it gets. I joke, and dad, you'd probably like it, but you'd also get what I'm saying. It's moody and well written, and, for better or for worse, is like the back says (incidentally the tidbit that convinced me to go with this book over another unknown quantity): Sartre meets television's "The Prisoner"; and A Brave New World as reinvented by Italo Calvino.

Now, I don't even know what the hell that last part is talking about, but I know I like Aldous, and my interest was piqued. Now I just need to look up Italo Calvino...