CBR III #5: Blake Bell's Fire & Water: Bill Everett, the Sub-mariner, & the Birth of Marvel Comics

Part of me wants to adopt the voice of Stan Lee: Because you demanded it, the bio; Excelsior. But that’s just not true. In Bill Everett’s twilight years of creating comics and superheroes for generations, Stan Lee came to power and created what we now know as comics. Stan Lee is a household name. Bill Everett is not. Yet Bill Everett had laid down all the right notes before Stan was even a gofer.

Bill Everett was an alcoholic who struggled with the bottle as much as his chosen profession. He constantly missed deadlines and let people down. But such was his personality and his work that someone would always keep hum employed.

He created the Sub-Mariner. He created the Human Torch. He introduced a bold muscular violence to comics that never existed before him. Today, we thrive on action and heroics in the movies. Bill Everett made that happen. He died of a broken liver with little fame. And he bequeathed soaring action to the comics.

This book is not a biography, isn’t painstakingly researched, and doesn’t profess to be so. It’s a big coffee table art book filled with anecdotes, and legend and endless pages of really good art. It is exactly what it purports to be.

I am myself not an expert in the history of comics, and I sometimes do not see what is described in the book. There was much better draftsmanship to come. Better stories. Better ideas. But when people first started to think about stapling together comic drawings and selling them, Bill Everett was THE maverick.

I don’t even like his drawing style. But I did see his motion and narrative and learned a lot about the art form. That is why you want this book.

Yes, the stories of comics in the forties are memorable and nostalgic. But that isn’t the focus here. It’s a big book. It is filled with his art. You get your money’s worth just for that. The text is secondary.

What it does do is give a portrait of a just born art, and the way one man shaped graphic narrative for decades to come. I will never love his drawings; they really do seem cheap and empty to me. I have not eyes to see that part of history. What I did learn, though, was the birth of motion through panels, of suspense, of trepidation. The kinds of layouts that Bill Everett produced from his imagination allowed all future generations of comics to be. He had no history to draw upon. And no one paid him enough to care. He, in fact, professed not to care. And yet here we are, basking in the wealth that he helped form.

If you ever loved comics, this book is for you. If you want a critical biography, keep on truckin’, but you won’t find a better one of Bill Everett. The book tells three stories: The birth of comics, the growth of an artist, and an artist’s downfall. It does so with love and reverence, between the mighty pages of art. What else can I say?

If he had come on the scene 20 years later, someone might have said excelsior. He might command better respect and be better known. But that didn’t happen. At least we have this book today. Thank god for that.

CBR III #4: Michael Chabon’s the Yiddish Policeman’s Union

Reading Michael Chabon inevitably leaves me with my skin tingling, my senses rapacious and my soul restless with a passionate and earnest urgency to be awake in the world.  I can’t underscore the vibrant hot-bloodedness of his work enough.  I haul the most tawdry hyperbole out of the cellar that I can find, and it is lacking.  My shriveled black heart blooms and mutates in his work.  I have trouble looking people in the eye afterward because I am vulnerable and teary, a naked and painful love-creature bounding, swollen with both jubilation and melancholy.  I don’t normally try and articulate the wonder of his work; I just give people his books, like a dime store apostle.

People familiar with Chabon will know that he is a shameless lover of genre fiction and has an alchemist’s skill for twisting and blending supposed low-brow conventions into penetrating art.  The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is an alternate history that speculates on an outcome of WWII and an Israeli war that results in a 60 year interim Jewish state in Alaska.  The story takes place in the waning days of the Sitka Jewish state.  2 million citizens are paralyzed with anxiety over what is to become of them and it is a credit to Chabon’s story-telling that it takes over a hundred pages of embedding the reader into this world to truly reveal the fear.  In this world, the Jews are not welcome anywhere.  Mirroring actual histories, they are being evicted, without any options for where to go.  The theme of being forced into action, but with no good choices to make is reflected in layer after layer of the actual story, a motif that frames the story in the chess conundrum of zugzwang .

In this fully realized world, Chabon delivers a hardboiled noir of a mystery that comfortably stands shoulder to shoulder with Chandler, Hammett, Cain and Jim Thompson.  In true Chabon fashion, the mystery is a love letter to the genre and Chabon uses it to explore the rich themes that always flow through his work:  love, family, father son relationships, identity, loss, grief, endurance, guilt, redemption.

We meet Meyer Landsman, a depressed, drunk, down-at-the-heel police detective who wants nothing more than to disappear into a black hole after his marriage implodes over a pre-natal tragedy (another zugzwang in the story).  Unfortunately, a junky is murdered down the hall from him and the hollow empty death takes hold of Landsman and won’t let go.  Soon it becomes apparent that the murder is a single loose end in something far larger, as the case is buried and closed, from the highest orders.  Like Marlowe, or the Continental Op, this sets Landsman on an obsessed course to find the truth no matter what is uncovered and no matter the lumps he takes.  It’s a pitch perfect story in this regard:  the seemingly isolated crime, the hints of wealth and power being tied to the crime, the exhausting labyrinth that becomes more dangerous and more futile at every turn, the improbably large conspiracy revealed by the dogged obsession of the detective.  Chabon braids politics, organized crime and Jewish mythology into an audacious almost hammy story that successfully juxtaposes pathos with almost keystone kop silliness.

Like any good potboiler, the story, despite being vast, is actually a claustrophobic embroilment of several interwoven families and their secret violent histories.  The protagonist and the murder are catalyst for everything to unravel.

If it was only a noir, it would be a great noir.  If it was only a literary journey through the painful hearts of marriages, families and communities it would be a great literary journey.  If it was only a subtle and nuanced exploration of a speculative alternate history providing insight into the real world and its history, it would excel on that front too.  But Chabon sets the bar high, and goes for the trifecta and achieves it.

The other thing that needs mentioning (unless you’ve read anything by Chabon) is his virtuoso opera of language.  Chabon’s gift of language requires lusty, athletic, blood streaked metaphors to describe.  It’s punk, not chamber music; it’s a cage match not fencing, it’s needy primal fucking, not lovemaking.  In any lesser hand, Chabon’s brand of extravagant verbosity and punch drunk metaphors would be shameless purple prose, but he has an inner wizardry that transcends the rules and even the most jaded reader can’t help but become ecstatic.

Stop reading this review, go read the book!

Houdini and the Irreverence of Imagination

There was a period during my childhood where when my imagination was ignited by the idea of magic, I wasn’t thinking about Narnia or Middle Earth, but Harry Houdini.  I don’t remember why.  Stage Magic and Escape Artists were and still are largely a thing of the past (other than the rare performer who is more about Pink Floydesque light shows than human scale misdirection and contortions). 

I read every biography of the man I could find at the library.  And I remember I owned a weighty tome, a bible sized book, not even a kids book, on the history of stage magic.  It had a bright red book jacket and the simple, monolithic and dignified title, Magic.  The typography on the cover was in majestic turn of the century ornate lettering. 

Perhaps it was a fascination with larger than life figures, and the enthralling mystery of the past with its rough wool coats and horse drawn carriages.  That probably is it, because at the same time Houdini was enchanting me, I was fascinated with Edison, The Wizard of Menlo Park, and Alexander Graham Bell who accomplished the feat of sending his voice through a wire to be heard in the distance.

I'm reminded of all this because this morning, during an internet ramble over groggy coffee, I saw that one of the top trending topics on Twitter was Harry Houdini.  Much as his name is still instantly recognizable and practically a synonym for escapology (yes, that is a word), being a Twitter meme just struck me as so randomly and absurdly improbable.  Turns out, it is the crafty dodger’s birthday today.  Ok, fine; but does that explain cresting a Twitter wave?  Is Houdini still that deep in the contemporary public’s imagination?  Is he still a cultural icon?  Do little boys dress up as him for Halloween?  Is there an action figure?

I put down my coffee, put on my Sherlock cap(when I was a kid, I didn’t need to rely on metaphor when I needed my Sherlock cap), and rolling up my sleeves set out to understand why, 85 years after his death, Houdini was topping the Twitter charts.  I scanned some biographical material, looked up various events and retrospectives going on around the world, but nothing really explained why suddenly the cybervoid was cascading with Houdini chatter.

I am a lazy and easily distracted investigator, and after 10 minutes or so of furious inquiry, it struck me that a Google image search of the man was just the instant gratification my frustration required.  Serendipity loves me, and I found that today, the sign hanging over the Google shop looked like this:

Mystery solved.  Sort of.

I’m not sure why Google, who often dresses up its logo for holidays, would actually cobble together a completely different logo for this particular historical figure.  Maybe whoever owns Google was also fascinated as a child.  Doesn’t really matter, I heartily approve of the colourful gesture.  I approve of a nod that makes millions of people stop for a moment and imagine the past; a nod that might spark a childhood memory of bright eyed wonder; a nod that reminds us of spectacles that didn’t require 200 million dollars worth of special effects.  It’s a delightful way to start the day.

I find myself, now, still casting back in memory to days of childhood enterprises when my pursuits required no order or reason.  I simply raced off after my obsessive nose in any direction that took me in the moment.  One week it might be steam engines, the week before that Charles M. Schulz.  Always, either the library or my household bookshelves had something to feed fierce curiosity.  Of course, trawling library stacks for answers was just as likely to result in abandoning a question when kismet intervened in the form of some completely unrelated book catching my eye.

It all gets me thinking about a series of articles in the British press over the last couple of days.  Some Minister was rallying for a reading challenge of 50 books a year for kids.  It was a goodwill publicity kind of thing, some easy sound bites— really, it’s not such a stretch to stand up and say you are generally in favor of literacy.  Only there was a backlash as the British government (and everywhere really) is closing libraries, slashing school budgets and social programs and in general making it more and more difficult for children to have books.  A number of prominent authors piped up to on the nature of reading, the motivations for reading.  They criticized the idea of quantifying reading, of making it seem a chore, a hurdle to overcome.  After all, a child who likes reading will plow through enormous numbers of books, many times the low bar 50 expectation.   

There was also much discussion on what children should read.  Recommendations of important novels poured in.  Serious people called out for the inclusion of non-fiction.  I appreciated Philip Pullman’s contribution that children need ready access to ample amounts of rubbish.  It echoes sentiments Michael Chabon has so often elaborated on concerning the value of pulp novels, genre fiction and comic books.  There aren’t many as literate as Chabon, so I am inclined to accept his wisdom on the matter.

Really what all the factions combined are getting at is children need access to a broad variety of books.  Rather than a curriculum, or seal of approval from educators, they need no one peeping over their shoulders or interrupting them as they follow their own spontaneous noses.

Of course, children also need to see adults reading, to know that it is a normal past time.  It also plants the seed to wonder what is in those books that they should so occupy the attention of adults.  I was fortunate to grow up in a home where making rounds of the library and book store was as regular as many people hit up Netflix.  Keep in mind, this wasn’t the parental chore of getting a kid to read.  The adults were just following their own noses and I was left to my own devices.  No one told me to read, or what to read.  If someone had, they wouldn’t have been recommending Houdini biographies or Peanuts strips.  And I probably would have resented being told what I ought to be interested in and for how long.

What does any of this have to do with Houdini’s birthday?  Nothing.  But it does have to do with spontaneous curiosity generated by a logo, by random objects and events in our paths that ignite something and beckon us to follow.  It does have to do with the real magic books have to transport and transform, and to fill the mind while always increasing its capacity.

So Happy Birthday Houdini.  Thanks for all the memories.  And thank you libraries for having been able to keep up with my rapacious appetite.

Kidnapping The Golden Age

Using metals as a designation for eras is a short hand for technological capability, i.e. Bronze Age, the Iron Age.  In the never ending deification of technology, the paradigm portrays a civilization’s progress through metalworking, amassing strength, power and momentum.  Somewhere along the way, the arts adopted a similar looking way of naming eras, except with the opposite implication, one of degradation: a weakening, a dilution and a loss of value.  We’re all familiar with the notion of the “golden age of cinema”, despite it having little meaning. 

 

Comic Books are categorized in a similar fashion: Golden Age – Silver Age – Bronze Age.  I really don’t care for era headings that suggest an inexorable decline in quality, an inevitable decay.  It’s pessimistic and inaccurate.  There’s almost a religious self-loathing in the notion of an ideal time followed by a continuous fall from grace leading to the very bottom in the present.  On a grand scale, time is most easily observed as the process of entropy, but that doesn’t translate culturally to the early days of an art form being wizardry, the Silver Age being vaudeville magic shows and the Bronze Age being an unshaven mug hustling card tricks on a street corner.

I suppose, part of the designation has literally to do with the antique collectible value of comic books and that has probably been the most destructive element for comics being part of the magic garden of childhood.

Something that really stands out about comics of yesteryear is a bold simplicity and earnest clarity of line and form; of character and story.  It is easy to perceive earlier incarnations of comics as wielding a kind of purity and innocence—a golden age by way of Dylan Thomas sensibility.  Those comics were definitely drawn for and priced for children, and yet, or maybe because of it, they are sort of timeless and ageless.

I hope children still read comic books, and read them with the intensity and immersion that I remember.  But comics have matured in ways I sometimes find marvelous, but also ways that make me feel sad for the children.  I sometimes feel like we loved our comics so much that we wanted to keep them for ourselves, making them more convoluted as we aged, bogging them down with an adult’s sense of continuity and complexity, not to mention an adult’s sense of interpersonal relationships. Along the way, we may have started to lose the idea that they were for children first.

If far darker and more sophisticated storytelling is not barrier enough to children, there is also the price.  Paper and printing cost more than they once did, and artists and writers are better paid than they once were, but there is an undeniable relationship between the price of comics and the audience.  Pricing of a commodity is always based on the very most the market will bear.  A ten year old cannot compete as a target market with a 45 year old middle manager whose life still revolves around the day of the week that the comics are shipped.  From a business standpoint, that adult market is several cohorts, all more numerous than the dwindling children market, at least two generations into shrinking family size.  Of course that neglects the great wisdom of churches and tobacco companies:  hook ‘em while they’re young.

When I was a kid, most stores had a comic book rack—corner stores, grocery stores, pharmacies.  A kid could independently go on his own quest for 4-colour magic and pay for it with allowance, couch scrounged change, or even by returning a few pop bottles pulled from the trash.  Getting lost in cosmic adventures and heroic glory could be part of a private autonomous universe.  In essence, children were pint sized hunters and gatherers.  Today, virtually the only place to buy a comic book is a comic book store, a specialty shop for collectors and the obsessed.

Today, rather than the subversive act making a pilgrimage on foot or bicycle to the comic rack—sometimes a literally transgressive act if the corner store was outside of a permitted radius from home—the kid has to petition a parent to bring them to the collector store.

There is more to it than just the loss of freedom.  When I was a kid, I had no conception of comics being collected, financially evaluated and sealed away in little plastic vaults.  It would never have occurred to me that an adult would read a comic book.  Sure, by adolescence, in my hunger to read comics from before my time, I had discovered comic book stores.  They were more of an oddity back then, seedier, kind of like the comic shop in the Simpsons.  Back then, it was still common to see kids in these shops. 

In fact, as I reflect on it, I am probably of the first generation that was transitioned into being collectors while still youth, into a world that rabidly followed something akin to the stock market.  I think if you were born ten years before me, the entire formative youth years could be enjoyed in a pristine state where comics were simply a pleasure and an escape.  If you carried on reading them as an adult, it might still simply be a love of the comics even if the layers of pleasure evolved.  The Overstreet Price Guide, a bible of the cape-and-tights financial market, dates back to my youngest years and no further.

Today, after a kid has convinced mom or dad to drive them to the place where comics are hoarded, and accessed a parental credit card--since the cover price on a single comic book ranges from $4-6 these days--there is still one more loss that subtracts from the riches of a child’s own space.  The kid walks into a brightly lit boutique of dense cross merchandising.  Expensive cross-merchandising.  Aimed at adults.  The kid knows it is aimed at adults, because there are no kids in the store.  There is a table in the back, and four men in their early thirties are arguing about Pokemon.  There are two men in expensive suits frantically looking for the newest issue of whatever.  There’s another man leaning on the counter placing an order for a recent anime box set that comes with a “for mature audiences” rating.  Three more guys in their late twenties are in the “toy” aisle drooling over comic hero figurines, which are the oversized, highly sculpted $60-and-up descendents of the $2 Star Wars action figures I grew up with.

The toys themselves shine a light on the intended market.  The action figures I played with as a child were cheaply made, and cheap to buy.  They didn’t have articulated joints, they were coloured poorly and tended to come from generic molds.  To be frank, they look like crap to an adult.  But that didn’t matter because no one was trying to sell them to adults.  You have to remember, to a kid, a blanket propped up on a broom can be a hidden fortress, a cardboard box can be the Batmobile, and a small copse of trees can be Middle Earth.  In comparison, action figures were pretty heady and intoxicating.  We used them to wage campaigns and tell stories.  We also used them to make rules and learn what rules were for.  We unwittingly used them to develop into proper human beings (I forget who said, ‘it is the work of children to play’).  Again, those toys were priced in a child’s budget, and available at any department store.

I stood in a comic store one day, with a friend, marveling at the artistry and detail of today’s toys, and we both got wistful thinking how amazing it must be to be a kid today.  It only took a moment to realize we were missing the point.  These toys were priced for adults, in a shop in the business district, and were meant to be left intact in the packaging and placed reverently on a shelf.  More pointedly, I saw a human interest piece on TV a while back, about a nerdy couple and their vast toy collection.  They gave the camera a loving tour of the climate controlled toy room and towards the end of the piece laughed that the only downside was their kid’s constant complaining that he wasn’t allowed to touch them.  I’ll repeat, the child is not allowed to play with the toys, and they were laughing about it.  It was ghoulish and frightening. These are the monsters of kid’s stories: the Grinches, Selfish Giants and the Hooded Fangs.  Except in those stories, this kind of characteristic is a defect rectified by the end of the story.  

It often seems the comics these toys are based on have gone the same way.  Adults, sequestering and hoarding childhood, simultaneously transforming it into something with no more child-like wonder and ironically, no longer intended for children.

I started off on this tangent thinking about a super hero television show called The Cape.  I’m surprised it hasn’t already been pulled from the air, considering the amount of vitriol, disdain and hate it’s getting.  It’s gloriously ham-fisted, bombastically over the top, and gleefully nonsensical.  It’s a bit stilted, a little bit purple and is filled with rogues on both sides of the good and evil equation.  It reminds me of everything wondrous about any comic book that comes from the golden age, or the early days of the silver age.  In this sense, it is very perfect and very precious.  Adults (who watch super hero shows) hate it.  I don’t mean it doesn’t take their fancy and so they watch something else; I mean they hate it and want it off the air.  These are the same people who want each and every comic book movie to be darker, grittier, edgier.  It doesn’t occur to them, that the hero--The Cape--fills an urgent need for the little boy character on the show.  The tales and the way the tales are depicted are for kids.

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying childish things—have you ever watched adults in a Toys’R’Us store?  But there is something terribly tragic about clinging to childhood loves so desperately that they are warped out of any shape where they are still in fact for children.  The funny thing too, is that the broad strokes and simplistic stories and the private child spaces allowed a mythic-ness that is the very reason we retain an abiding love for the form.  It’s the reason those old comics can be read with innocent pleasure or with rich analysis.  Will today’s comic culture germinate an abiding love in today’s children?

CBRIII #2-3: Little Things and Funny Misshapen Body by Jeffery Brown

Jeffery Brown is a bit of an enigma.  In photos, he looks a big strapping handsome man of Scandinavian descent and he has a MFA from a prominent school.  But his fame and stock in trade are crude uncertain drawings depicting a small boyish person consumed by neurosis.  A self proclaimed autobiographist, he purports to render a relative truth.  I guess he could be lying.  Or else, his drawing style, his self personification, and the clipped moments of insecure life he depicts might demonstrate the vulnerability in us all.

I’m a long time fan of brown’s work, and I often have a hard time putting my finger on anything justifiable about it.  It’s easier to say it is badly drawn and overly focused on teen-age like melodrama than to argue for it being penetrating, engaging and memorable.  For that reason, if I had guilty pleasures, his work would be in that bag.

But for the most part, Brown does remarkable things.  He displays great humility in not justifying his protagonist.  He also teases out an earnestness, a sincerity that cuts through the distanced hipster stance that might be expected among his peers.  He’s never short of a humour with warmth and intimacy, never lowers himself to a cheap or bitter laugh.  He allows moments to hang in the air.  He allows things to be unsaid.  He’ll take a risk trying to convey pages in a single glance.  And as portrayed, he’s danmned likable.

All that said, Little Things was tremendously disappointing.  I felt I had been conned into purchasing cast off half starts.  Meaningful silence was replaced with empty moments.  Carefully ugly drawings were replaced with overworked pages depicting nothing.  Stories that end hung in a precious moment were replaced with fitful cut offs that made no sense and engendered no feeling.  I highly recommend not buying it ever, unless you are a die-hard fan/stalker type.  (I’m not that type, I was just ignorant of the book).

Now, all that said, Funny Misshapen Body rolled off the press a year later and delivered not just the Brown I love, but a more mature and reflective Brown. A balance of stories, in his usual anti-chronological way that swirl together to create a full novelistic image of people, places and developments, working with new themes, and yet tied to the old and magnifying the scope of his storytelling.   

There’s also a greater range in the artwork, combining the early simple scrawl with the burdened later ink.  We see the rest of Brown’s protagonist’s life (I realize that is cumbersome, but I differentiate between an author and his alter ego): his childhood experiences, his life with art, his schooling, a troubled medical history, his jobs, his solo adventures.  We see the Brown who isn’t simply hung up on a girl. And it is captivating.

Brown’s “love trilogy” sold because he underlined every unsaid thing that never makes it to relationship stories, but that we all relate to.  He could easily keep selling books on this ‘schtick’.  But instead there is this incredible expansion.

I don’t know how to reconcile the two books.  I suppose one way would be to say I read them both in two days, some 700+ pages of work—the same pace for both the book that made me angry I spent money on,  as the one that was warm and alive in my hands.  Could be my mood, I am mercurial.  Either way, I was compelled to read on.

All of brown’s stories always have to do with a shortlist of topics—loneliness, connection, love affairs, struggle and confusion, strife and understanding.  His recent stories paint a vivid portrait of the young man as an artist rather than the artist as a young man and that has added a dimension to the tale. 

I hesitate, but will compare his work to the Alec tales of Eddie Campbell, who also utilized a difficult style of drawing and catalogued random, sometimes pointless and often humiliating experiences and worked up an unmatched  magnum opus of growth and life.  Brown has a long ways to go to reach up to those heights, but then he has a lot of time too.  I think Jeffery Brown is still just getting started and still just shaking off the discomfort of youth.

CBRIII #1: Trickster, An Anthropological Memoir by Eileen Kane

Eileen Kane is a professional anthropologist, with the fieldwork to prove it, but she made her mark in the world educating the rest of us shmucks, not the cognoscenti.  I think that was probably more valuable to us.

Her memoir of her first foray into fieldwork is replete with humour, detail and wisdom.

She spins the tale of a young female anthropologist venturing out with insecurity into a male dominated world, in 1964, right after her marriage, risking everything, including the cross looks from folk in her home town.

I am not an anthropologist, but if I was, I would prescribe this book as a primer to let people know how different the classroom is from the sloppy mess of real life.  Even for the anthro students, it paints a vivid picture of the changes going on in that field at the time.  She is sent to catalogue a language, make a census, and categorize a people.  Instead, she plunges deep into the qualitative world of understanding a people.

I will not reveal anything of her journey here, except to say that like any transformative journey, trickster was along side.  Here, you can just taste the beginning.

She arrives in a tiny impoverished town, to interview and catalogue the Paiute Indians.  She may as well have parachuted.  She is on her own, her letters of passage are lost, or hidden by mischievous helpers.   The only thing provided by her university is a vehicle, and they provide a labeled police car.  Very useful in earning the trust of her subjects.

No one adopts her in the cinematic fashion.  Everyone toys with her, and the children follow her and ply her with lies.  The elderly tempt her with hints of history and language, constantly delaying so as to retain the company and amusement.  They mislead her and send her on dead end hunts with their mytho tales.

And there is no malice.  The narrative weaves itself into a world where everyone plays at being simple country folk while all having, if not nefarious agendas, complicated and playful agendas.  They are heartfelt in wanting to help her, but it is the definition of help that is in question.  They dole out lore ever so slowly, as if enjoying her hunt.  They delight when she sweats about not being able to get her answers.

Kane uses the powerful tool of reflection to juxtapose the history of her own colourful town, and her emerging feminist awakenings with the stories she learns in the dusty town.

I cannot attest to whether she is a good anthropologist, but I can say she is a master of layering the complexity of experience and fully imbuing it with the mighty spirit of the trickster.  In this volume we get an ethnography of the Paiute, a coming of age tale, a story of feminist coming out, mischievous and magical tales of coyote, and a sober reflection of lessons learned young as reviewed by an elder.

I feel lucky to have only accidentally discovered this book (trickster laughs).  I am working hard at selling it to a professor for a paper.  I’d say wish me luck, but I can hear the snickering and trust the wind to go where it wants.

Find it here:

Chapters

Amazon

Cannonball III

Pajiba, the site of Scathing Reviews and Bitchy People, annually commences a marathon of reading—peculiar if you ask me as it distracts from watching movies and television, which is their main source of bread and butter—and it is that time of year:  The Cannonball Read 3.0

Anyone and everyone are encouraged to join in.

The seed idea is to read 52 books over the course of a year and post a review of each book to a blog.   The review doesn’t have to meet London Review standards.  It can be just a few paragraphs about the book and what the reader thought of it.  Pajiba provides links to all the nerdy bookworm’s blogs, and once or twice a week will post a particularly yummy review up on Pajiba.  For every participant who uploads 52 book reviews to a blog, Pajiba makes a donation to the education fund for the child of beloved passed-away member, Alabama Pink who was an inspired reader and eloquent commenter on the site.  By the time that kid grows up, not only will a hoard of strangers get her to college, but said hoard will be less illiterate and more connected too.

Evolving to address the needs of a busy overtaxed populace, the Cannonball Read wants everyone who ever has ink stained fingers to feel welcome and will accommodate those who only feel bold enough to shoot  for a half(26) or quarter(13) cannonball. 

I believe, the idea is that even if you only manage to read and write on 3 books over the course of a year, that’s still pretty cool, literate, and interactive.  Unlike job interviews and dodging traffic, at Cannonball success is inconsequential and effort and enthusiasm are everything.  Completion is just gravy.

When I was only knee-high to a house, I used to read 2-3 books a week, but then other responsibilities kicked in and knocked it back to less than 1 per week.  Recent years of exhaustion have driven me to that ultimate narcotic, the television, and I am lucky if I read a dozen books in a year that are not scholastically related.  So, in a fit of disgust for my cathode ray wallowing  filth (what, I can’t afford a flat screen), I’ve signed on to the good ship Cannonball.  I am one lazy sumbitch so I am holding firm on the enthusiasm clause.

Feel free to follow or join in.  Crack open a book, and like Pandora famously quipped, “What harm can just opening it do?”

300 Years of Fossil Fuel Addiction in 5 Minutes

Here's a short film narrated by Richard Heinberg.  It is the most efficient introduction to industrial/environmental/economic issues ever, but I am mostly posting it to see if i can figure out how to post a video



The video is part of promotions for the Post Carbon Institute's brand new Post Carbon Reader.  Selections from the book are available here if you are curious.

Indigo Vertigo

I have a friend who sometimes unleashes eloquent yet antagonistic micro rants toward the Chapters-Indigo chain of bookstores.   It’s been stuck in my craw of late, mainly because I recently read a bitchy scathing article viciously lambasting Chapters.  Some of the sentiments reminded me of my friend’s ired laments, though the article had none of the pith and persuasiveness my friend comes up with.  It got me thinking. More accurately, it got me defensive, as not only am I overly fond of my bloated book brothel, but i get defensive easily too.

Obviously, the modern parable about the big corporate bully driving the little guy out of the sandbox has some merit. But I never feel that argument in Ottawa—Ottawa is so bleeding rich and full of colleges that there are still a bunch of little independents and used stores.

But I still remember a long time ago, how very exciting it was to travel to Montreal and visit the 3 story tall Coles on St. Catherine Street.  Soooo many books.  Things I desperately hunted for among used shops, thinking of as rare books, sat humbly and affordably on their shelves, in print.  Who knew this stuff was in print?  Not me, there was no internet back in those days when you still had to be wary of raptors.  Ottawa had its little shops and it's proto chains: Smiths, Prospero’s and mini Coles.  They may already have amalgamated, I don’t remember.  The "good" bookstores were fairly limited in shelf-feet and the chains were stocked with bestsellers, self-help books and those ubiquitous treekillers: the coffee table book (motorcycles, dead painters, technicolour recipes).   What I did not have access to were big sections on philosophy, religion, science, geopolitics, sociology.  I didn’t have an ocean of literature; I didn’t have access to any graphic novels.

(Creepy serendipity:  I just turned on my radio and there is an interview with someone about book retailing, the rise of chapters and the fate of the independent.  Update 15 minutes later, now Stuart Mclean is calling up book store owners to chat.  Ahhhh, CBC.  )

One complaint I hear about Chapters is the floor space devoted to “not books”.  They sell fancy candles, teas and soaps as well as other over-priced pretty things.  I see these things --within the parameters of consumerism--as items people buy for nurturing and slowing down their worlds, and things they buy as precious gifts for people they care about.  This strikes me as relatively benign.

Also in the category of “not books”, are untold diversities of notebooks (the premium priced Moleskin, so costly you fear writing something unworthy in it), scrapbooks, and day planners.  Again, I see this as addressing and supporting a market for an active life as creator instead of simply encouraging passive consumption of culture.  I also see this as providing people/customers with viable alternatives to complete cyber enmeshment > screw the  word processor and outlook calendar, here is a paper calendar with photos of jazz artists, and a cozy diary with literary quotes that you can curl up in bed with.

Beyond that they sell a plethora of bizarre and unique board games.  Again, I embrace this as a commodity designed with the function of getting people together in real live social activities. A real plus in a world dominated by "social media".

Chapters also recognizes that a crucial component in a functioning civilization is regular easy access to quality amphetamines.   To meet this requirement every chapters has a Starbucks—another corporation people take potshots at despite their fair trade price purchasing policy and their unionized employees.  Politics of commerce aside, Starbucks brews serious joe.

I remember when Chapters first rolled into town, there was cry of doom.  Service would be poor; the stores would be cold and anonymous.  And once they had their stranglehold and had killed all the shops, all that delirious selection would vanish.  None of that happened in Ottawa.  They hire friendly talkative bookworms.  They provide seating and you can sit there all day and read a book and no one will come bug you that "the books are for purchasing".  Selection is still rich and while they did push a bunch of stores out of the market, many remained.  They just aren’t a Walmart Death Machine.

Two disclaimers:  1. Idleprimate received no bananas from Chapters for writing this piece.  2.  Idleprimate was not practicing assignment avoidance by writing this piece.