Just Patti

Patti Smith won a National Book Award. David Ulin writes smartly, and with feeling, about it.

She's an American treasure. Who'd have thought!

My Pet Bush

Some-body has a new memoir out:

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All You Need

Keef.

Hard Sci-Fi

This one is definitely NOT SAFE FOR WORK viewing, but shockingly funny, especially if -- like me -- you were a big fan of legendary science fiction writer Ray Bradbury back in high school. It's just too good not to share with you, valued reader:



S if for Space, L is for Love. Of course!

Think young comedienne Rachel Bloom might have made her own breakthrough to stardom?

A Really Bad Day for Bananafish

J.D. Salinger, genius influential, nutjob writer. I'm going with Asperger's. Seriously.

And the peoples' genius historian, Howard Zinn (of Brooklyn, of course).

#3, in this literary division?

Do you think they read each others' work?

Fanfic

At 9:01pm on September 15, 1967, flipped the channels around to watch a show coming back from commercial with several unusually clad men of the future materializing with an eerie whine on a craggy landscape I would soon learn was the planet Vulcan. In my Friday night boredom I had accidentally run across the Second Season Premiere Episode of Star Trek, "Amok Time." By 9:30pm, having witnessed the death of Captain James Tiberius Kirk at the hands of his First Officer and pointy-eared best friend, Spock, due to the primal mating fever of "pon farr," and then Kirk's miraculous resurrection thanks to the death-mimicking drug administered mid-battle by Dr. Leonard McCoy, I was a fan.

In the years to follow I was a loyal fan, a Trekkie, sure, but one who was more interested in science fiction as a whole genre, with Star Trek being the only 99% credible television version for decades to come -- I might argue until the new incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, although I'm sure many Next Generation and Babylon 5 fans would argue that point. I attended Star Trek conventions at the Commodore Hotel in NYC, stood awkwardly before Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhuru) as she signed a poster from her record album for me and the next year trailed her in full diva, tight red spangly suit and furry little dog as she made her way through the hotel hallway with what was geek press at the time in tow. I watched classic episodes on the big screen late at night -- nothing like watching McCoy leap through the misty Portal to Forever projected large above your head as you recline on the convention hall floor.

I say this not to call attention to my Star Trek cred in either praising or criticizing the newest incarnation, the feature film reboot called, simply, Star Trek, which I had the pleasure of taking my family to this weekend. I had indoctrinated my two boys a few years ago when G4 ran the uncut original episodes, all running over an hour thanks to the growth in commercial time since they originally aired. Even my wife attended, and if there's one thing she hates, it's sci-fi. The movie is praiseworthy for how well it connects our (my?) forty-years back emotional allegiance to the characters to this new cast, so that we can enjoy Kirk's brashness, Spock's logic, McCoy's irascibility all over again. The biggest success, among many, of J.J. Abrams and crew is that they've successfully refreshed the show's original character constellation, sense of optimism for the future (making me wonder how Terminator Salvation with fare in a week -- zeitgeist disconnect?) and, to a large enough degree, sense of cosmic scale. Nitpicks might include giving Scotty a cute Yoda-meets-Dobby sidekick and overuse of handheld camera in late-innings battle scenes. But what I was struck by after the new movie's rapidly churning events settled in my cerebral cortex was the memory of something from those dark Seventies when the push to revive Trek seemed all so in vain: fan fiction.

Back in the heyday of fan-generated Star Trek literature, reflecting a fandom desperate for new material beyond the mere 79 episodes that existed once the show was finally cancelled for good in 1969 after three seasons (the first 1.75 seasons generally being far superior to almost all that followed). There were mimeographed fanzines distributed by hand or by mail, the first of which, Spockanalia, appeared in the same year I saw my first episode.

Fan fiction was a way for viewers who had connected to the unique and imaginative vision of the show in, let's say, a profound way to create their own stories where NBC was unwilling to create any more. While a very few fanfic writers later made it to the "big leagues" years later with paperback deals for approved Star Trek novels, most of the work was amateurish, if enthusiastic and occasionally credible.

One of the subgenres of fan fiction, however, was a kind of sexual compensation for what might have been latent but never, of course, explicated on the show. Why not show what happens with Science Officer Spock and the eternally pining Nurse Chapel behind closed doors when pon farr's in bloom. Or maybe Spock can't get the feral love he needs from the fair nurse, and instead there's a new crew member, a young woman who's highly intelligent but somewhat shy, of a hidden literary bent just waiting for the right Vulcan to remove her thick plastic spectacles...


Some SPOILERS ahead.





Then there's other unexplored crew matings. Why not Kirk and Uhuru following up on that turgid kiss in "Plato's Stepchildren" with some real black-on-white erotics. Or Uhuru and Spock. (If you've seen the movie, you see where I'm going with this.) And why stop there, what about exploring the depths of the emotional bond between the good Captain and his First Officer when it's just plain Jim, a sub-subgenre known as slash fiction. A heated dissection of whether Kirk and Spock could actually have an encounter appeared in a then-groundbreaking "letters zine" called The Halkan Council way the heck back in 1975.

The other key aspect of fanfic is that it is all, by it's very unlicensed nature, alternative universe (or "AU"). It's not the creator, or even the writers sitting in the room after the creator's been fired or moved on. The best thing about AU is that it allows you to take the characters wherever you want, freed from any formulaic restraints, the mind unfettered with new possibilities since it all off-canon. Maybe some writers aspire to canon, but the writing so very rarely cuts it. One of the main reasons the first couple seasons of the original series are still so great to watch is that so many of those early episodes were written by real science fiction writers with serious sci-fi cred: Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, Theodore Sturgeon, Fredric Brown, Jerome Bixby, Harlen Ellison, Norman Spinrad, Jerry Sohl.

The bummer about AU fanfic is that...it's off-canon. Who gives a rats ass what happens in any of those stories -- it doesn't count.

So what's interesting to me about the new movie is that it not only has a fantasy coupling off the original series, it also turns on a Lost-like (I am told) time-travel plot where we get Leonard Nimoy elevating the feature film reboot to canon, at the cost of an AU continuity solution. From this point forward, whatever happens with this Pine-led crew, isn't the story of the Shatner crew, so all bets are off. History will be written differently, historical events will be referenced for old fans to enjoys but entering in ways unaccountable to what's been filmed before. On one hand, it's a lazy way out for screenwriters not willing to do the voluminous -- endless -- research. On the other hand, why should we be forcing our 2009 screenwriters to stick to every script fix invention wedged into the canon by a fellow guild member sometime over the past forty years. What this movie proves is that you just have to get the heart(s) of the story bible right.

For all the Spock focus in the movie (very balanced, fascinatingly enough), my favorite addition to the mythos is a Kirk's. The filmmakers have him hanging by his fingertips three times in the story, the first as a young boy over a canyon, the second over Vulcan, the third in the Romulan spacecraft. The Abrahms/Pine Kirk is the embodiment of "cliffhanger" which is a lynchpin of cinema going waaay back to the silent serials. While I've heard criticism that the new movie plays like a high-budget pilot, I actually think one of the unsung reasons for it's success is that it is pretty visual, with a clever Scotty-in-tube throwaway slapstick gag, a recasting of the dino-on-dino surprise, and a Romulan bridge phaser firefight that feels surprisingly O.K. Corral.

So I have to give this to screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Krutzman. They have written what may be the single greatest piece of fanfic ever, the professionalization of a suspect genre, and sealed it with the real Spock himself, the flesh and blood actor the movie's biggest special effect. Since Vulcans live an average of 300 years longer than humans, they have the time to gain so much more wisdom, and Nimoy plays his oldest Spock (his 78 human years maybe 234 in Vulcan?) with an almost Buddhist purity of wisdom, 100% free of ego, clear and forgiving.

One other thing the movie gets right. I've heard it said that "this ain't your mama's Captain Kirk" and sure, this one's rock & roll. But he surely evokes Kirk's mental acuity and fluidity -- just like Shatner's Kirk, Pine's is completely read up but can make decisions on a dime when even the better read can't. He knows his stuff but he also knows how to lead, boldly. This young Kirk's boldness start being all about himself -- his joyride, his sudden jumping into service, his risk-taking to get on the Enterprise. His great feats of physical courage and action -- his cliffhanging. And finally he makes the bold decisions as captain necessary to finish the story satisfactorily, although I'll bet they can make a better movie now that they're past the origin(s).

AU, okay. But they remembered to honor the opening words of the show every week, the closing words of this movie, the inspiring thing.

"To boldly go..."

Zeitgeist?

Visionary

I'm ashamed to say I've only read three of J.G. Ballard's visionary novels but I think I've always thought I'd read more, they'd be there for me. Well, as of today the author isn't, as Ballard died after several years with prostate cancer at 78 in England. Something interesting said about his work:

His influence stretched across a modern world that he seemed to see coming years in advance.

His dark, often shocking fiction predicted the melting of the ice caps, the rise of Ronald Reagan, terrorism against tourists and the alienation of a society obsessed with new technology.

As Martin Amis once said of him: “Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different – a disused – part of the reader's brain.”

The bands Joy Division, Radiohead, The Normal, Klaxons and Buggles all wrote records inspired by Ballard stories.

I read High Rise decades ago, which Stanley Kubrick should have made into a movie, the story of a fall of a great new modern building, new yuppies and better off increasing to the highest levels, which drifts into primordial chaos as the floors begin fighting each other. Like watching a slow motion car wreck, which is fitting with Crash (made into a sleek, disturbing flick by David Cronenberg) all about auto accident fetishists, and the second one I read about seven years ago, Concrete Island, about a businessman who crashes his car on the way home one weekend and ends up dropping out of civilization by not leaving that piece of highway for a very long time.

His most adventurous piece is evidently The Atrocity Exhibition (that title used by Joy Division) which is actually a number of separate pieces deconstruction and reconstructed together, including his riff on the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the main character's psychosis brought on by mass media causing his mental illness.

By coincidence I read his first novel, The Wind From Nowhere, published after short stories and other pieces in 1961, which has never gotten a lot of press. I found the vintage edition in a used book shop, and while his work certainly deepened, it's a wild ride, very hard to put down. There's a wind that's been building for a few weeks, growing every day, imagine a single wind blowing West to East around the world, non-stop, unidirectional. Pretty soon pieces of buildings start breaking off and water bodies move, flooding begins, the decimation of houses, the inability to go out doors without being swept away. Relentlessly building, as we follow several intersecting characters in different parts of England, desperate to find a safe place, no end in sight.

I can't wait to read my next Ballard book, and while his death is sad it'll surely renew interest in his books. And the movies from them -- Steven Spielberg's adaptation of his memoir, Empire of the Sun, about how he survived gamely as a child during the WWII Japanese invasion of Shanghai. There's a load of Ballard material here, albeit laid out all Anglo-techie, and a clip of him interviewed very cool montage style embedded with this obit.

I'm reminded of writing about the passing of Polish visionary writer Stanislaw Lem a little over three years ago, soon after I'd started this blog. It's a bummer to be marking the passage of time like, by losing another seminal literary hero. But, of course, there will be more.

Ballard knew how to commit and his visions were lucid. So considering his subject matter, the degree to which our veneer of civilization can easily strip down to primal savagery, meant he was transgressive, especially to his times. And I'd say there's a Fight Club because there was a Ballard and maybe a Caprica.

Dangerous prose, so highly readable.

Since Dickens

When I was in high school reading Great Expectations by superstar 19th Century novelist Charles Dickens for the first or second time (9th Grade + 12th), as we got wrapped up in Pip, Estrella and Miss Havisham, I remember hearing a few times about how Dickens wrote in serialized form, and in a kind of height of the printed word distribution technology, people would read the chapters as soon as they came out.

The anticipation surrounding the final chapters of The Old Curiosity Shop, and the fate of the ill-starred girl at the center of it, was unprecedented:

In January 1841, passengers arriving in New York from Europe would be greeted by anxious people on the docks. They all had the same question: "Is Little Nell dead?" Such was the hysteria created by Charles Dickens' novel The Old Curiosity Shop.

Back then, of course, consuming media meant reading, but today that activity is for the minority of media consumers. Except for this:

Copies of the final Harry Potter book have already been shipped to customers by one U.S. online retailer, U.S. publisher Scholastic said on Wednesday, and purported copies of the novel have flooded the Internet...

...Photographs have also been posted on the Internet of what is claimed to be each page of the book, but Scholastic would not comment on whether they were real. Links to the pictures quickly flooded Web sites around the world...

...Rowling fueled speculation about the ending of the last book when she said last year that at least two characters would be killed off and a third got a reprieve.

Tight security has surrounded Rowling's eagerly awaited final novel about the teenage wizard. The first six books have sold 325 million copies worldwide.

Potter fans reacted angrily to purported Internet leaks...

So many people are so passionate about a book?

Has my whole world turned upside down?

I'm reading about literary authority Harold Bloom getting his panties in a knot because kids are reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows instead of The Wind in the Willows. For his information, the latter bored both my kids, no matter how much I loved it in 1964. However, I'm up to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire with my 7-year-old, and we're having a grand time.

(Personal favorite character: Sirius Black, and not just because Gary "Sid Vicious" Oldman portrays him in the moveeeez.)

I'm sure I'll get spoiled by spoilers before my son and I work our way through the next two books and several thousand pages to even start this final volume but who cares, it's amazing that people are going so nuts for a plain ol' epic story, one told with style, intelligent character development, and imagination by a caring author.

Notoriously tough New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani summarizes this book and the series in her thoughtful review today:

The world of Harry Potter is a place where the mundane and the marvelous, the ordinary and the surreal coexist. It’s a place where cars can fly and owls can deliver the mail, a place where paintings talk and a mirror reflects people’s innermost desires. It’s also a place utterly recognizable to readers, a place where death and the catastrophes of daily life are inevitable, and people’s lives are defined by love and loss and hope — the same way they are in our own mortal world.

Congratulations, Ms. Rowling, on an epic achievement. Enjoy this time of glory and the loooong tail to follow.

But most of all, good luck and godspeed on your next creative adventure.

Optic Nervous

The date in the small print on the inside cover of Adrian Tomine's Optic Nerve #9 is 2004. It was the first part of a three-issue story that continued in 2005 with issue #10 and has finally, after an agonizing wait, concluded with issue #11 right here in the middle of 2007. The wait was worth it.

In October his publisher, Drawn & Quarterly, will put out the collected issues, as story once entitled "White on Rice", as a hardcover now entitled Shortcomings. You can pre-order your copy here, and unless you've bought or are planning to buy all three comic book issues, do it.

Tomine, 33 years old, recently moved from his longtime Berkeley home to Brooklyn, and while he hasn't changed his deadpan, wry, semi-tragic story voice, he's upped the ante bigtime.

Tomine's original Optic Nerve comics were usually four stories, give or take, each in a kind of post-punk, post-grad Raymond Carver style where, as Elizabeth Chou writes:

Adrian Tomine has a way of taking his already lonely characters and ripping them even further away from society, even as they attempt in socially weird ways to reach out. With the exact same motion, he sets up a psychological wind tunnel that pulls unsuspecting readers into the minds of those isolated characters. Though I wouldn’t call this a formula of his, this is usually the thing about Tomine’s work that gets me.

That's his meal ticket, such as it is. The first major descendant of 50% of the Love & Rockets team, Jaime Hernandez, and somewhat mentored by Dan Clowes of Ghostworld fame, Tomine combines a graphic black & white look (no greyscale, just crosshatching) that strives for perfection with a flirtingly cynical realism about modern lives and our countless tiny deaths of the spirit.

Ben Tanaka, the emotionally stunted protagonist of the three-issue series, is a West Coast American of Japanese descent, like Tomine himself. He's living in a relationship with a young woman of similar ethnicity who's helping put on Asian-American film festivals and thinking of bigger things. Ben manages a rundown movie theater and acts like the bitter moral superior intellect in his world, clearly afraid of growing up but pretending that through his cynicism he's already there and doesn't have to actually allow himself to be touched, the way we all must in order to grow.

At the end of the first installment Ben's girlfriend, Miko, leaves for a promising internship in New York City, and during their "break," in the second issue, Ben indulges his hankering for white girls all through his ongoing debate with his best friend, a grad school lesbian named Alice, about his heavily sublimated racial issues. What's been clear from the start is that Ben's narcissism is the mirror of his self-loathing, kind of a modern Asian-American version of Jewish self-loathing.

It's Alice's move to NYC and a call to him from the streets of Manhattan with "something here that you have to see with your own two eyes," that provides the turning point into Act III, Ben joining Alice (now co-habitating with a half-Asian lesbian professor) in New York to track down Miko, who hasn't been returning his phone calls, and coming to face his worst fears.

Considering that Tomine's seductive line imagery and hard blacks often draw us into a claustrophobic psyche, while never showing us more than the surface of actions (no internal monologues or Freudian dream sequences), it's a relief to have a whole issue where he's freed himself from Northern California and opened up into New York locales. While his pages still lay out like Edward Hopper in Bento boxes (each ingredient just as delicious and just as spare), the character bar has been raised, with rays of actual truth coming from Alice's girlfriend, Meredithe, and in the climax itself.

As for the ending, Metamorphostuff has something to say about another Tomine trademark:

And they all lived happily ever after.

Or not. Adrian Tomine doesn't do happy endings. He barely even does "endings" in the usual sense: His stories tend to be snapshots, moments in the life of the protagonist that keeps going on after the story ends. Epiphanies and revelations are in short supply, and those that do come along don't always change someone's life for the better. Often, the life-changing moment comes only in the final panels, and the audience never sees what effect it ultimately has.

It's almost always an emotional Rorshach Test with Tomine, sometimes less successfully, more obscurely than others. When it works, it's a masterly counterpoint to his clean drawing style, the graphic look a secret weapon driving home his cold, lean knife into the reader's heart. This one is more Kuleshov Experiment, your reaction to the final page based on your reading of whether or not Ben has cut through all his anxiety and shown maybe a glimmer of true understanding.

Yep, this is Tomine's best work to date, and since all of his work is good, that's great news.

The reason for this artistic development, and maybe why it took a span of four years to write, draw, ink, letter and publish the story, comes from Tomine in a Nichi Bei Times interview last September:

NBT: Last year you said in an interview that the material for your three-part story (formerly titled “White on Rice”) had been in your head since college. What is it about the story that’s stuck with you over the years?

AT: The biggest motivation for doing this particular story was my frustration with the fact that I’ve spent my entire career very much in the shadows of my influences. I always felt like the kind of watered-down, less interesting version of the cartoonists I learned from. And I know first-hand that it’s nearly impossible to just snap your fingers and suddenly come up with a completely original way of drawing. Believe me, I’ve tried and it just doesn’t happen for me. So I think I probably tried to focus more on the content of my work, and searched for a story that those other guys would never write, just because of the fact that the particulars of the story are so tied into my own life experiences.

There you have it. A master draftsman telling his most personal story to date. Maybe it took four years because its literature.

A Better Mark

Sure, he was born Samuel Clemens, but since he took the name "Mark Twain," I've always felt a special warmth towards this great, maybe greatest American writer, since a young boy. I saw Hal Holbrook perform his Mark Twain Tonight on a television special back in 1967 (I believe he last performed it in 2005 at age 80, finally over 10 years older than Twain when he died) and while I've long forgotten the words, I still remember the greatness.

Twain's great gift, of course, was to bring truth to narrative print. And for Memorial Day there's a new animated video of his first rejected for publication in 1905 then finally published in 1923, thirteen years after his death, because as Twain wrote to a friend:

"I don't think the prayer will be published in my time. None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth."

The War Prayer film was masterminded by Markos Kounalakis in San Francisco, with Peter Coyote reading beautifully and legendary Beat poet and bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti (born nine years after Twain's death, i.e. 88 years old) as well as West Coast radio dramatist Erik Bauersfeld taking roles. The animation is reminiscent of a certain Post-WWII War style, completely drawn, with the camera doing any of the animation.

It tells of a church service climaxed with a sermon in support of the widespread war movement, the people reacting like sheep, and the arrival of a stranger with a terrible warning. It's basically a harrowing bullet about how church and state work together to gin up war support, appealing to base and selfish emotion over greater consideration of pain and anarchy such as is always unleashed.

It sounds oh so 2003.

Kevin Drum has more background on the piece, as Kounalakis publishes him online in Washington Monthly. As a commenter on Drum's post, frankly0 writes,

What I found interesting about Twain's poem is that it bases its appeal only on the damage wrought by a successful war, and only to the opposing side.

Not even spoken is the possibility that the war might be a failure, or entirely without point, or that harm might come to the loved ones sent off to fight.

Mark Twain: still ahead of our time.