Tag: review

Book Review: Understanding Hermann Hesse’s Glass-Bead Game

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 12 Comments

This review probably shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to those of you who read my entry “The State of my Blog.” You see? This is where digressions and tangents can lead you: to more book reviews!

I’d heard of Hermann Hesse in passing from a former coworker of mine before ever I picked up a copy of The Glass-Bead Game (or Magister Ludi as it is called in some translations). But it wasn’t until I found a copy of the book that someone was reading at a friend’s house that I actually looked through it and was fascinated by what I saw.

Imagine a game of Tetris that uses all of the world’s culminated and sum total of knowledge to create intricate and wonderful patterns of word, song, and image. That is what I first thought that the Glass-Bead Game–created and practiced by the Castalian Order–actually was. To be honest, we never really get a straight answer as to what the particulars of the Game actually are, but a whole lot of tantalizing generalizations do occur.

I suppose I will talk about the generalizations further before going into the characters. This story apparently takes place in the future–where wars have stalled for a while–and there seems to be a measure of global peace. A potent group of abstract scholars called Castalians have formed and “rediscovering the lost mysteries of the ancients,” gradually created the Glass-Bead Game: the ultimate in interdisciplinary reference-making. Again, that last statement is my opinion but it’s one that I wanted to make now before I make my other one.

Essentially, if you are a Humanities student or a University student of the Arts, this book will have some very eerie parallels to what is probably going on in your life right now. It also deals with a lot of issues as to what the importance of knowledge is to the world and how involved scholars should be in the world. It looks at that line between the university as a place to preserve knowledge, and as a place that shapes others to change the world.

But there are more personal connotations here than the age-old issue of knowledge and scholarship becoming stagnant or running the risk of becoming “corrupted by worldly politics.” There are three characters to consider: Joseph Knecht the protagonist, his teacher the Music Master and his rival Plinio Designori. Joseph starts out as a child chosen to become part of the Order and you get to watch as he has to wrestle with maintaining the code of his Order while alternatively having to challenge it within himself. You begin to see him grow as a person and as scholar into the Magister Ludi: or the Game Master and leader of the Order.

Plinio Designori, on the other hand, exists as an aristocrat student outside of the Order who still gets training by them because of his rank. He challenges Knecht’s potential orthodoxy at every turn with his knowledge and experiences of the outside world. At the same time, when his education is complete, Designori finds himself in a world that does not understand what he has learned, or care about the ideals he has argued with his friend and rival. In the end, his life becomes difficult as he is torn between two worlds: of ideology and reality.

Then you have the Music Master. He is one of the Order’s Masters that tests and ultimately mentors Knecht. He is a wise and serene old man–and much is made about him later being potentially a “Castalian saint”–but he was not always that way. There are four pages where the Music Master tells Knecht about his student days that are so reminiscent of how I felt doing my Master’s work at times that I almost cried: especially when he talked about suffering from a lack of focus and envying animals for simply being animals and not complicated human beings doing Master’s work. If it hadn’t been four pages long, I would have copied and pasted it for future reference as I read it over last summer when I was still doing my work.

This was an excellent book, but I’m not sure if it really could stand against the test of time. The Castalian Order is an all-male celibate order of intellectuals. There is no action in the narrative save for a whole lot of interesting philosophical debates with vague descriptions of the Game that can get confusing after a while. It was written in the 1930s and published in 1943 during a time of immense turmoil in Europe and when a lot of our contemporary institutions didn’t quite exist in the way that we recognize them now: an ironic statement to make because the book itself begins with its own historical digression on how the world and its perceptions have changed long after Knecht’s tenure as Magister Ludi. And it is long. It is very long to read and might not hold everyone’s attention.

It might not translate well as a film even though there are a lot of cinematic descriptions throughout the narrative: especially that very first scene where the old Music Master tests Knecht, as a young boy, on scale and the piano. Of course, I could be wrong. Films like Pride and Prejudice–based on their novels–do not have very many action scenes in them but can be excellent with expert cinematics and good acting. Certainly, a detailed display of scenery and the complex interplay between characters with good British actors like Derek Jacobi who plays as one of the characters in the radio play would make all the difference.

Yet I will say that as the winner of the 1946 Nobel Prize for Literature, this book was–and is–a masterpiece. It is a long one, but if you have a lot of time to read something and you find philosophical discussions interesting, this book is definitely one for you.

I think I will end this off by stating that Castalia is actually an ancient Greek name for a nymph that was changed into a fountain of pure inspiration. The thing to understand about a fountain though is that it has to keep flowing in order to remain one. For me, that is a pretty good warning against a place of learning, or a mentality of learning becoming too insular and specialized to the point where it has no relevance at all on the outside world.

It’s a good lesson to keep in mind no matter where you might find yourself. I’d give this book a four out of five.

Magic in Progress: A Review of Andrew Eckhart’s The Last Mage

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

I also posted this on Muse’s Success: a Wiki of serialized Web Fiction and reviews. I couldn’t recommend it highly enough. Check out Andrew Eckhart’s Web Novel at Last Mage or just look at my collection of Links on the right lower hand side of Mythic Bios. 

“Magic in Progress”

I’ve always been interested in Mages. Warriors can get very stereotypical in the Fantasy genre, and even the stereotypes of mages are a fascinating basis to start from. So one day, just on a lark, I typed in the phrase “last mage” into google to see what I would get: if it would be some kind of game or RPG stats for a variant class of spell-caster: because god knows there are a great many of those.

Instead, I found a story: the story that I am reviewing right now. In some ways perhaps it might not be fair for me to review Last Mage at this time. Even now that this story’s time as a Web Serial Novel is over–that Andrew Eckhart continuously worked on for twenty chapters and many more parts later–it has and it is a work in progress.

The fact of the matter is that Andrew wrote this novel as a work in progress. From the very beginning, he made no secret of the fact. So yes. There were spelling and grammatical errors, but nothing that couldn’t and can’t be easily fixed. Some names changed. Some character motivations were expanded upon. He made this a very interactive process. He asked for feedback and he got it. Even now, he has even stated that he is still in the process of editing this work but we–and some people even more so with email subscriptions–got to see it evolve before our very eyes. It is a rare and good thing to see the creation and creative process of a novel and it is even more doubly so with regards to Last Mage.

So what is Last Mage? Last Mage is a story about a man named Elijah Valentine who gives a writer an interview with regards to how he saved the entire Earth and all of reality. It is nothing more and definitely nothing less than that. But I still feel as though I’m not doing it Justice or–should I say–I’m leaving Law out of it and only Justice. 😉 Sorry I couldn’t resist, if you read the story you will get my reference.

As for the feel of Last Mage: imagine Dr. Who, mixed with a little Sandman, StarGate, X-Files, and some superhero elements for good measure. Imagine following a team of very human–if not completely human–characters and beings and realizing that one person’s story is only one focal point for an entire constructed world. This world can be unwieldy at times, but it is a work in progress and Andrew spends a lot of time, effort, and detail–particularly on the short stories he’s included on his website–to create a really varied and complex world. I would even venture for you to consider that his world is–in some cases quite literally–multi-dimensional and events function in it on many different levels with the echoes of personal consequences resonating through each and every facet.

In some ways, this is a very straightforward story, but it is also very complex with enough moral ambiguity, unstated stories and philosophical quandary to be considered quite human. Overall, I see Last Mage becoming something great: if it isn’t already and I just as I looked forward to reading each new part to the tale, I especially look forward to its sequel.

Andrew Eckhart is doing an excellent job because you know that a magical ritual–especially in fiction–is never ever quite finished.

Rating: 9/10

Film Review: Inglourious Basterds

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I’ve been making a lot of reviews lately, I know, but this film has made itself a special place in my heart. I also made a reference to it in one of my earlier entries–with regards to Marvel’s Nick Fury–and I guess compelled to actually say something about the film now that I actually watched the thing.

If I could sum up Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds into two words, it would be these:

Fuck History.

If I could get a mug or zippo lighter in the spirit of Garth Ennis’ Preacher with those words, I would definitely consider it. I think what I really liked about Tarantino’s film is the fact that it plays on your expectations–usually well ingrained film or plot-expectations–and then says “Nope,” and does something else entirely. There is something really exaggerated and almost lampoonish about Inglourious Basterds: from the portrayal of its characters, to the garishness of its iconography and all the way to the messed up situations that occur within it.

But while there are moments of hilarity–yes hilarity in a movie about a group of Jewish-American soldiers sent to kill, torture, and destroy Nazi soldiers in 1944–it is not a comedy or a parody. It is quite serious. It is a film that shows what happens to the best laid plans: especially in a war or an enemy infiltration situation and how quickly some interesting characters can die. It illustrates how evil wins when good men have their families threatened. In addition, it also shows how the “good guys” can be immensely but necessarily cruel in war, and how even an evil, remorseless antagonist can be one of the most captivating characters in the entire film.

There is something very … comic book action hero-like about this film and how it is put together. Tarantino himself stated that he wanted to create a World War II movie over the backdrop and ambiance of a spaghetti Western. There is definitely a resonance of Kill Bill in some of the seemingly ad hoc situations that arise in this film: complete with contemporary music set around a period piece and lots of gore and dead Nazis.

But I definitely think about super-hero comics when I think about this film now in retrospect. Hitler seems to have something of a cape, the American soldiers have a very brash gung-ho Americanism thing going on, the Nazi antagonist is very Machiavellian and over the top, and there is a very clear revenge scenario going on here. It feeds into your sense of blood-lust and satisfaction in watching something “evil” die. At the same time though, Tarantino subverts this. For all the protagonists portray the Nazis in the film as evil, and often most of the people in here are relatively two-dimensional–there are still moments of humanity from the “bad guys” that almost make you feel sorry for them being scalped, or having swastikas carved into their heads, or, you know, killed.

As for those people who think that this, well, obviously not historically inaccurate, consider my reference to action hero comics. Was it accurate for Superman to beat the crap out of Hitler? Was it also accurate for Captain America to have a few swings at him? Probably not, but I’m sure there was definite satisfaction in reading that and these comics–the result of war propaganda and good art–translated into Tarantino’s film very nicely.

But all that is either surface or merely part of the film. There is another aspect as well: more of the details. The multi-lingual segments of the film carried me through and gave me some more of the ambiance of that time. It left it no less charged. And then there is a meta-thematic element: that of film itself.

It is no coincidence that the build-up and the climax of Inglourious Basterds takes place in a film theatre, is centred around the viewing of a propaganda film, is subverted by a “revenge film” and whose antagonists are ultimately destroyed by film–by a moving sequential account of history ignited by the flames of war–itself. Because while many of the events in this movie did not happen, and many of the characters didn’t even exist, I feel like that the enemy’s “death by film” symbolizes a much greater artistic achievement over fascism: that when you seek to destroy something with art, art can ultimately change and destroy you as well.

On the television, Inglourious Basterds didn’t get any stars–which is a shame–but that only suits its personality. It’s not here for the glory, and it is not ornate or nice, but definitely has a lot of very kick-ass–literal and otherwise–moments. I think that I will give this film a five out of five.

Comics Review: Chester Brown’s Paying For It

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

One weakness I have as a writer, that I always have to work on, is that once I start talking about really abstract concepts–like my last post on Craig Thompson’s Habibi–it can become very unrelatable. And if something cannot be related to, a reader will be less inclined to want to unless they are part of a specialized reader-audience: and even then readability is important. It is key. There are very few things more asinine than talking about how elitist some knowledge-bases are while at same time bandying about its jargon like it is a matter of course and not even bothering to explain what it means in context.

For me, a dialectic is a structure where two or more concepts are pitted against each other: or at the very least a structure of, or narrative argument. I also think it can be more complicated than the above and can say more than one thing at the same time. So, really, mentioning all of that in this review is appropriate given that the book I want to look at is called Paying For It.

Chester Brown is a fascinating cartoonist. He and Craig Thompson have a few things in common: in that they came from some relatively religious backgrounds and have delved into some esoteric subject matter from time to time. Brown himself really likes to make “weird stories” in addition to the esoteric stuff and examines human relationships in a very analytic, detached, but thoroughly detailed way. If you want to look at a wide variety of Brown’s work, I would suggest reading his collection The Little Man.

As for Paying For It, I came across it a year ago when I went to the previous session of the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. I bought the book and had Brown sign it whereupon I was exposed to another very fascinating dialectic with some interesting implications. First of all, it is an autobiographical work. This is no new thing given that Brown has drawn autobiographical comics before, but this time he gets honest: sometimes brutally honest. You know, that kind of honesty where you show yourself in wide natural human spectrums of intelligence, decency, and ugliness.

Chester Brown essentially creates a comic about his experiences with prostitution: with sex-workers. However, he doesn’t stop there. No, Brown doesn’t really defend his actions–or his depicted thoughts–so much as advocate prostitution as a natural form of human monetary, social, and personal interaction. He depicts this through interactions with his friends as well as the women that he makes sessions with and a very long Appendices of actual information and figures at the back of the book.

Like I always like to say as a catch-phrase, this is no new idea. Prostitution has been called the oldest profession in the world for a reason. The aesthetics of Brown’s graphic narrative definitely affects how his argument: and story because the argument is merely one facet of the thing. It is flat background with simple small square panels on which the characters are small. The sexual acts are quick and to the point and almost clinical. The sex-workers’ faces are never seen at all–which Brown explains is to protect even the hint of their identities–and he even admits that has changed their names. Some other reviewers have commented on this and I can see different interpretations of how this can be perceived by the reader.

One might say that he is objectifying these women by what he does with them, and by depicting them in his story, yet you can also make the argument that by reducing everyone–including himself–into these small caricatures he shows that the issue is either bigger than all of them or it is something that in the grand scheme of things the universe doesn’t really care about. I myself really feel a little unsettled about sex and the body being treated as a very clear commodity: which is even reflected in Brown’s internal monologues. At the same time, there are also depictions of humanity: of affection, and warmth, and questions. He shows, despite their lack of faces and names that these women are human beings who notice if someone hasn’t been around, who are curious about a person, who sometimes forget to take money, who at times will let it known that they are uncomfortable, have their own loves and insecurities, and, understand that fear can go both ways between client and employee.

Brown makes it clear that for all money is involved, as long as human beings are involved feelings of some kind–even something ideal like basic common courtesy–can always be there. Those little touches are what make this book and what add to the strong themes inherent within it. Paying For It also makes you ask some questions about what relationships actually are.

I think the crux of it for me is when Brown talks about how he hates romantic relationships and how romantic love is a faulty concept that we have built our society around. He goes on to state that romantic relationships breed jealousy and a fear of loneliness that is the price to have emotional and sexual needs gratified. When Brown talked about these romantic relationships, as a few people in society will say, he tends to refer to exclusively monogamous ones: as if the romantic somehow automatically equals monogamy.

The concept of what is “the romantic” is a very fascinating subject that scholars and people have always debated amongst themselves. Brown himself depicts himself as reading a book by Denis de Rougemont called Love in the Western World: an account of how the early “courtly-love” ballads–arguably integral to a conception of romantic love–may have been secret Cathar messages created to symbolize “a particular love for the divine” instead of for a particular individual. Notice how Brown–like Thompson in Habibi–brings in an esoteric element with regards to this dialectic of what love is: something that I’d only realized they both had in common today. Brown himself posits the idea that people did not grasp the hidden message and went with the overt love message of “love with one person in an established relationship” instead.

Like I have been saying a lot throughout this post, it is a fascinating idea but I think one that is not unchallengeable. First of all, Western culture is not a monolith. There are–and there have been–different cultures in its structure. The fact that something like the Cathar movement, though problematic because they were exterminated as heretics–is proof of that. Also, you have to look at how the word “romantic” has evolved: from the sublime and terrifying in Nature, to love between two people, and really love itself. I myself  don’t believe that romantic love is “evil” and that it can be interpreted in many different ways by our era: just as it has changed over the centuries.

It is true that love in a marriage and an established relationship is a relatively new (by some centuries) ideal. Also think about like this: in ancient times, only marriage was seen as a legitimate and lawful sexual relationship where property and political alliances were the key. It is only later that relationships outside of marriage, even those with the proviso of potentially leading to one–became more accepted and mainstream. I won’t even go into the different conceptions of what love is because that is a whole other subject matter.

Brown even admits later that perhaps romantic love isn’t so bad and can be adapted. I do find it very intriguing–however–that Brown and Thompson in talking about two only somewhat-related subjects ultimately go into a dialectic or meditation of what love actually is. One might think that talking about prostitution would exclude any mention of the word “love,” yet Brown manages not only to dissect himself and his own motivations in Paying For It, but he also critiques societal norms with regards to love and sex. Brown seems to ask the question what a society would be like if prostitution was commonplace and fully accepted. I think that such a society would have to have a very radically different idea and attitude towards sex, the body, and love. I don’t think our society is at that stage–and I’m not sure if it ever will be–but it is definitely something to think about.

I also wonder what another account of prostitution would be like from a sex-worker’s perspective: even as a comic. I think that, whatever people may say about Chester Brown and this work, that this was definitely a work of art and meditation. It is probably not for everyone and I can imagine some people having an adverse reaction to it, but to anyone else it is definitely worth pondering over. I myself am still not sure what to think of it, but I would definitely give it a five out of five: for making me think.

Addendum: Someone should definitely do a paper on Plato’s Symposium, Chester Brown’s Paying For It and Craig Thompson’s Blankets and Habibi with regards to love, but that person probably won’t be me.

Comics Review: Craig Thompson’s Habibi

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

I read Habibi during the Toronto Comics Arts Festival over a month ago after hearing about it, and even seeing it in bookstores for even longer. It was this very thick book filled with immensely detailed black and white drawings ranging from thatch-lined to the lushly illustrated.

This does not surprise me. Thompson’s graphic novel Blankets used a very similar style: to the point where one could even see the influence or resonance of Bill Watterson’s cartooning in there as well (according to Nevin Martell in his book Looking For Calvin and Hobbes at least). However, while Blankets focused on Thompson’s autobiographical account of discovering his first love while growing up in a fundamentalist Christian family and society, Habibi is something that … covers quite a few themes.

The story itself is about two runaway child slaves–Dodola and Zam–spanning from slave markets, deserts, palaces, and harems all the way into polluted villages and industrialized cities that threaten the environment. Thompson attempts to link all of these backgrounds and elements together in the form of a love story: sometimes a very brutal, very esoteric and ecological but also spiritual love story.

I will say that Habibi–the title derived from the apparently Arabic word for the masculine “my beloved”–was a very grandiose narrative filled with Arabic and Islamic history, lore, poetry, mystical, and even Christian references: or at least from what I could glean of it given that I am not an expert in many of these subject areas. However, there are some flaws within it as well: at least to my mind. Details such as very long-winded expositions, areas and situations that didn’t seem to match other places in the world Thompson creates, one very over-long internal monologue that would have been too much even in a work of prose, and some trite moments did take away from the book a bit. In fact, I believe that it could have been culled down a lot more in some ways.

Even so, I’d say that my biggest criticism of the book is something that, in the end, is very difficult to define. Every narrative work has a pace or a rhythm to it. This is especially true in a comic or graphic narrative: whichever term you prefer. It was Scott McCloud, I believe, who said that the panel makes up the grammar of comics narrative. I think that Thompson’s piece functions well with all of the above details I mentioned, but it is very important in a comic to align your panels on the page, with each other, and with their own subject matter in such a way that you have a sense of continuity or flow. Essentially, I think that–in part–Habibi is an ornate piece whose rhythm is just a little off.

Yet there is something very special about Thompson’s narrative as well. Firstly, I like how he uses Arabic calligraphy–or at least the seeming of it–to link his words and images together. From my limited understanding in addition to my own aesthetic sense, it is truly inspiring. The calligraphy is blood, water, trash, djinn, and God all at the same time. It surrounds and binds the myths and legends and parables of Solomon, Abraham and the Middle-Eastern folktales that Dodola tells Zam at night. I really enjoyed looking at the calligraphy that represented the concept of God and just how complex and intermeshed it was. It looked like a greater, more powerful, inhuman, beautiful being that interlinks with more than one symbol in a figurative and literal sense.

And I think one reason I loved what Thompson did with this calligraphy–whether with cultural knowledge or no–is how he shows as a special intermediary between words and images. The Arabic calligraphy resembles words as the symbols we understand–whose own numbers influenced and informed our own numbering and scientific systems–while at the same time they are flowing and powerful images seemingly moving from a divine origin. It is no coincidence that many cultures throughout time have considered certain kinds of writing sacred. Comics too, in a sense, are an intermediary between the written and the illustrated and–like this form of calligraphy–it takes a different perception or frame of mind to immerse yourself in its depths.

This leads to the other reason why I liked Thompson’s use of calligraphy because of how he gets it and his subject matter–including the depictions of parallel Biblical and Koran accounts of Abraham and Isaac and Abraham and Ishmael (and how the represent two different but similar cultures)–unified under the overarching narrative of love that he creates: that of a need for unity. If love is a unity of disparate, parallel, and even oppositional stories, views, and people–or even the intense yearning for physical, spiritual, and environmental wholeness–then Habibi is an apt title for this piece.

I confess, I still have mixed feelings about it long after reading it. It is almost like Craig Thompson attempted to create a mystical illuminated text that is a unity of Judeo-Christian and Islamic elements–along with Middle-Eastern esoterica–to say something about our relationship to a world made of divine Words through the interactions of the two protagonists. If so, I can suspend some disbelief. However, even with the proviso that the overly exotic Eastern or Orientalist world he makes is “not quite our world,” I feel like it is something of a cop-out in saying what he wants to … or seems to want to … about our world as it is. I also think that the interaction between the two protagonists is somewhat cliche and I couldn’t always relate to them.

Nevertheless, I’d still give Habibi a three bordering on four out of five. Thompson does some brilliant work and innovation in a graphic and medium sense in the construction of the piece and I always enjoy his art-work. It is certainly something to be looked at more than once and by varying experts. I don’t know how helpful this review was to anyone completely unfamiliar with any of this, but I hope–like the rest–that this one was interesting.

This Land Like a Mirror Where I Met Gwendolyn MacEwen

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 2 Comments

I met Gwendolyn MacEwen after she died in 1987. In fact, it was many years later in the early twenty-first century at York University back when I was in its Creative Writing Program. My teacher read us–and then had us read–some of her poems. She chose Dark Pines Under Water and it really left a powerful impression on me.

I recall trying to talk with my teacher about that at the time and I wasn’t even able to remember the poem’s name. I was so ashamed of that fact that when we had to memorize a poem for an assignment, I choose the above. Over the following years, I read all of Gwendolyn’s poems that I could find: though reading poetry is quite different from prose and sometimes difficult to read never mind even explain.

Gwendolyn was a poet deeply concerned with her craft and the power of mythology and the mythopoeic. She approached matters of mysticism along with darkness, sensuality, and a profound sense of psycho-geography: of history and the echoes of all people in the land they used to–and still-live in. Gwendolyn wrote many books of poetry and two published novels: Julian the Magician and King of Egypt, King of Dreams: both of which are dense but incredibly charged and multi-layered stories. An ex-girlfriend of mine bought me the last book as well as two of her selected poetic readings.

What really gets to me, however, is that this woman–who was shy, quiet, small and sleight with a round face, dark hair, and kohl-lined intensely dreamy blue eyes in her youth–was born and lived in Toronto. I think about it sometimes: that she once walked and biked to many of the places I’ve walked or drove on the bus past. She lived in the places that I visited and somehow made poetry and art there. From the sixties to the eighties she did this: learning Kabbalah, a multitude of languages, and she read her poems a loud. And while she did travel from time to time: to Israel, Egypt, Greece and England she tried to find herself–and find–Toronto’s spirit. Her series of short stories in Noman and Noman’s Land are some of the best Canadian literature I’ve ever wanted to read. I remember my time taking those books out of York and the Toronto Public Library fondly: especially since they meshed so well with the mythological writing I was doing, developing and planning on doing.

She was a complex character in herself, something that Rosemary Sullivan explores with a certain creative flair in her Shadow-Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen: a book that I liked for the most part, though there were some psychological intimations on some of Gwendolyn’s behaviour on Sullivan’s part that I found to be very reductionist and necessarily the result of simply one particular potential trauma. Nevertheless, I really liked how she incorporated Gwendolyn’s life and works together into her narrative and it gave me another glimpse of the emerging literary scene and talent in Toronto at that time.

I won’t lie. Gwendolyn MacEwen and I have a lot of similarities, and despite years and death I sometimes felt close to her in a way. We both really like Star Wars and, as she knew it, the Marvel Family: though I wonder what she would have thought of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman’s interpretations of the latter. She even wrote a poem about it called Fragments From a Childhood: a superhero poem which I found online and fell totally in love with. It is also no coincidence that I wrote a glosa in undergrad of her poem Shadow-Maker: something I won’t show here … at least not for some time.

I wanted to write a story somehow from all I learned about her. I still have that idea. I spent a significant amount of time at the Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto going through the collection of manuscripts and notes that she left open to the public: including an unpublished novel about a female musician’s life growing up in the early years and turmoil of modern Israel called Gabriela. It was so strange to see someone writing about a culture that I grew up in, something that she did not grow up in, and yet get many of the nuances that were there along with some insights I’m not sure even I knew about.

When the Fisher was open until the evenings on Thursdays, I would spend many a time holding the very pages she did when creating her own works as the light of the afternoon sun turned into evening. It was some of the most peaceful and exciting times I had traveling to St. George campus to take a look at her works and hold them in my hands.

I wish I could have met her. I think we would have had a lot to talk about. I also know that she was a genius and she deserved to be acknowledged as such. She did a tremendous amount of research for her second published novel King of Egypt, she wrote prolifically and she did and learned to do so many things having not even been a high school graduate. Although she gained praise from her peers, I feel she deserved much more than she got. Gwendolyn MacEwen, as far as I am concerned, is one of the best Canadian and Torontonian creators we ever had and it is a shame that she’s gone and her work is not that well-known outside Canadian writer and academic circles.

Sometimes I thought about visiting her in the Mount Pleasant Cemetery, but I’ve never gotten around to it and I’m not sure I ever will. I am glad that I looked through her Fonds at the Fisher however. I wish I could convey how it felt to look through the notes, drafts, and unpublished manuscripts of a writer and person that I respect: who influenced me so much and came into my life long after her own had ended so unexpectedly and easily like she was always there without it sounding creepy and ridiculous. But there it is. People come into your life for a reason and I believe she made my life richer for it.

In case you are interested, Gwendolyn’s collection can be accessed by anyone with a registration card at the Fisher. You just need to go and provide an address and ID and you are all set. I really recommend Gabriela because it is still very relevant and timely to today: especially with continued Israeli-Palestinian and Arabic relations being as they are. I wish it had been published, but I also loved reading it in that lovely Reading Room with the miles-high levels of bookshelves that the Fisher possesses.

I also want to link you to a review I did on Julian the Magician–Gwendolyn’s first published novel–on my Goodreads profile. It does get full of a bit of literary jargon, but I am pretty proud of it and what I got out of it. Sometimes I wonder if Neil read Gwendolyn, and if he hasn’t he definitely should.

Finally, I would add that Gwendolyn loved to read her poems aloud and at gatherings such as those at the Bohemian Embassy Club. There is a documentary made about her called Shadowmaker: The Life and Times of Gwendolyn MacEwen by Brenda Longfellow that has some filmed shots of her giving interviews and reading her poems. She has a melodic, resonant voice. It is worth seeing and listening to because her works make up a land that does, in the end, turn you inward.

Without Words: Sarah Howell’s Untitled Squishface Booklet

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 5 Comments

I know that’s an ironic title considering that this is a writing blog, but it is also about a comic and I rarely use graphics on here anyway. The comic I want to talk about–created by Australian artist and cartoonist Sarah Howell–is challenging in this way to say the least.

In fact, I will be honest and say I never heard of Sarah Howell or the group she co-founded Squishface Studio, but I’m glad that I did. I didn’t actually run into Sarah or her work until after the Toronto Comics Arts Festival (or TCAF) a month ago. I’d finished my Volunteer shift there–mostly moving, taking apart boxes, and cleaning stuff up or what I really like to call the Teardown Shift–and after some dinner that was way too expensive I went to Lee’s Palace (which some of you might know from Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim, or just by living in Toronto in general) for the post-volunteering celebration.

It was actually Sarah who started talking to me first when she saw my rather bright sort of orange-pink TCAF shirt. She introduced me to her husband and collaborator David Bluemenstein and the rest of her team. They had apparently been on the Caravan of Comics Tour: an event in which Australian cartoonists traveled to comics events throughout the North-Eastern USA and Canada. So then over some very loud conversation and music we somehow managed to cover a wide area of subject matter. And yes, Neil Gaiman did come up. In fact, the ideas that formed my earlier Blog post about Jeff Smith and Bill Watterson came–in part–from our conversation at Lee’s Palace. Really, it was the most I’d talked with anyone at the Festival: before or after.

But at one point myself and another Volunteer asked her about her work (at least I think so over the noise, err music) and she placed in front of me this small chapbook. And now here is where the challenge really begins. Basically, Sarah’s comic is about a 16-paged booklet–double-spaced–with a scene on each page. It has no title and in fact it is a wordless sequential story: a wordless comic.

This is a concept that has fascinated me. I have seen really old woodcuts and copies of said woodcuts that do something very similar in just telling a story in pictures and little or nothing else. In fact, the only words in it were “The End” and Sarah’s professional email addresses on the very back of the booklet. Also, the way each sequential image is on its own page–instead of on different panels on one–is reminiscent of an illustrated book: except without words.

The figures in the book are drawn like glyphs. There is something very elemental and–if I had to choose another word–essential about them. I really wish I could find more bibliographic information on this untitled, wordless comic or even post a link to the comic itself because I feel that by describing it in words, I’m really not doing it justice. I feel also feel like Nevin Martell and his Looking for Calvin and Hobbes book that has no illustrations from the comic strips whatsoever, only even worse because I don’t have anything to really show here from it. It does figure these two characters–these snippets taken from Sarah Howell’s website–in the first and third pictures. There is also another picture in the Gallery of her site, but I don’t want to link to that because I don’t want to create any intentional spoilers. I will say though that the character resembles a well-known comics super-villain but it is not that being.

Sarah Howell’s comic was about two beings that meet and get to know each other: but when one seems to unwittingly overreach everything changes and it takes the third character to step in and change things some more. And he does not change things in the way that you may think he does when you first see him. That is all I can really say: that and even in the relative darkness of the Club, from what I could see then the story was touching enough to still make me cry a little.

It was a beautiful silent comic. Of course the term “silent comic” is a misnomer or a bit of wordplay in itself. After all, even written words do not have sounds unless they spoken verbally. I said something similar in an earlier review I wrote about Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel Signal to Noise. In a lot of ways, and I’m sure Scott McCloud has said this to some extent, comics is a silent art: as is writing in a lot of ways, but works like Sarah Howell’s here are all the more so.

Sarah Howell let me keep this sample of her work after she showed it to me and I will treasure it always. I’m not sure how or if you can order some of them, but I imagine if you query her on her website she will let you know, or have some kind of FAQ that might deal with it. I wish I could be more helpful. In a lot of ways, this comic is one of the most simplified but mysterious ones I’ve come across. If anyone has more direct information, you are more than welcome in posting it here. Also, you should definitely check out Sarah Howell’s works–and works in progress–at her above website.

Whatever the details, I’m glad I have it. I learned new things, met new people and got a comic. It was one of the highlights of my time at–and after–TCAF.

Comics Review: Jonathon Dalton’s Lords of Death and Life

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 1 Comment

I know I’m not doing very much Creative Writing on this site yet, but I want to write about this particular work before I forget. I’ve always been interested in comics: both in particular stories and in comics as a literary art-form and accepted medium. A lot of my own academic studies focused on certain comics works, though I will also admit that I’d been studying them long before I ever applied to York’s Humanities Graduate Program.

So this is going to be a comics review: which is something that I like to do from time to time. Like I said in my last review, I appreciate the difficulty in analyzing a comic: especially when you don’t feel comfortable copying or pasting parts of it for others to see in your review. However, I will do my best to make clear references here, but to also not spoil any of the details.

Unlike my last review, which looked at an examination of a cartoonist creator of a comic strip, this review will focus on a comic I picked up not too long ago. I found Lords of Death and Life at this year’s Toronto Comics Arts Festival at the booth of its creator Jonathon Dalton. The cover struck me first: with a fallen Mayan man and a priest above him with an obsidian dagger. They are surrounding by Mesoamerican glyphs or pictographs. It looked like the cover of a children’s storybook or an introductory junior level book into Mayan or Aztec culture: much like something I would have looked at in back when our class examined the Aztecs back in elementary school.

It’s storybook illustrations did catch my eye, but I admit I almost didn’t buy the book: even when talking with its creator for while. Very few books at this year’s Festival intrigued me enough to buy anything with the little birthday money I had left over. However, something called me back to it. And I noticed there was a small review by Scott McCloud on the back cover talking about how Dalton’s book was “an intoxicating fusion of ancient design and modern imagination.” Scott McCloud is not only a well-known cartoonist in his own right, but he is also a comics-scholar that wrote a series of books talking about the comics medium in and through the comics medium–as comics themselves–such as Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Making Comics and the rest.

The reason I mention this is that he, along with the legendary comics creator legend Will Eisner–considered by some to be the grandfather or godfather of the comics medium–point out that many ancient cultures possessed a sequential pictographic format of telling stories, or recording language. I believe both Eisner and McCloud look at Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mayan friezes as examples of a “sequential art” used to depict stories and record information.

This is another thing that I found so fascinating about Dalton’s comic. He actually incorporates Mayan or Mesoamerican glyphs into his comic. There is an entire section of panels that tells a part of the story as if the reader is looking at a Mayan frieze. At first, this can be very confusing until you realize that he has a very handy glossary at the end of his book which also tells you which glyphs he had learned and which ones he also had to make some creative approximations or guesswork for. If you don’t know about this, however, the beginning can be very confusing: especially when the main character Mol Kupul keeps referring to the date of each day from the Mayan understanding of time.

I also don’t know what to say without spoiling the story, but as I read on I was greatly impressed with where the plot went. You begin to see that a series of seemingly unrelated events are actually quite related and there is a truly epic battle at the end of the narrative, followed by an ending more bittersweet than Mayan chocolate drunken out of a golden cup of blood: so much so that I think it really opens itself up to the potential for a sequel and one I would definitely not mind reading.

If Lords of Death and Life has any more issues, it would be that there are many Mesoamerican cultural references and names of which many readers might not be familiar and would have to greatly pay attention to or reread carefully to get full reading comprehension. Also, the speech of the spirit character in this work–the uay companion spirit–is more than a little over the top and sometimes choppy. However, Dalton does succeed in bringing you into a whole other world with the interaction between Mayans and Aztecs and he definitely plays with your expectations as to what will happen. Also know that by the time the story begins, it is already over and you as a reader are only beginning to find out how everything transpired. It is an excellent storytelling device and it gives you a peak into how an ancient Mesoamerican mindset functions as well.

I am very impressed with Jonathon Dalton’s work here. He manages to make a comic that goes back to the basics or the essentials of the form’s creation, and tap into that place where ancient pictographs and modern comics both parallel each other and meet. He has made something special and I wish I had talked with him more about it: though I take solace in that he signed the book I bought from him with an ancient Mesoamerican monster growling out my name. I think more people need to know about his work and more of it–along with information about him–can be found on his website here: http://www.jonathondalton.com/ where he has a few more comics and a work in progress.

I’d definitely give Dalton’s Lords of Death and Life a four out of five stars. I just find it incredible that one person could have done this much illustrative and written work along with all of the research to get there.

Now, hopefully next time, I will have a story of my own to begin here. Perhaps even a series.

First Review: Nevin Martell’s Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and His Revolutionary Comic Strip

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Let me begin this by saying that I grew up with Calvin and Hobbes. In late elementary school, a friend of mine was fascinated with the antics of the crazy childhood six year old genius and his lucid–though hungry–tiger friend. I actually didn’t start reading strips through the newspapers–at first–but actually bought Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Snow Goons book from my school’s affiliation with Scholastic Books … and I never looked back.

I loved that book because aside from the other philosophical, silly, wondrously illustrated, touching strips, there was a series of strips that depicted the boy Calvin creating a snowman and bringing it to life: with “dire” consequences. Throughout a series of strips, this snowman builds itself into a mutant “snowgoon” and proceeds to create more of its kind to terrorize Calvin and Hobbes. I think in a lot of ways, this is what others–like Nevin Martell attempted to do by searching for more biographical information on the strip’s creator: Bill Watterson.

Let me just say off the bat that originally I gave Martell’s book five stars out of five. I even disagreed with other reviewers about how he created nothing new in his book. Certainly the work suffered because Watterson declined to let himself be interviewed by Martell–as he had so many others before him–but that was not Martell’s fault. In fact, from his own account of the journey to know more about Watterson’s life, he tried everything but the kitchen-sink to get more information from Watterson himself without any success. I can even understand why Martell didn’t include any visual samples or copies of the strips in the body of his work because Watterson owns all the rights to his creations and–again–seemed less than inclined to even speak of Calvin and Hobbes never mind offer permission to let them be used in another work even in a scholarly fashion. Instead, Martell describes the strips in a written format and references them: something that I can emphasize with as a scholar as well when I referenced comics works in my own papers.

I was intrigued by the process of journey that Martell undertook to understand Watterson: talking to his peers, family members, friends, gleaning as much of Watterson’s own words from his other statements and his Calvin and Hobbes works as he could to make his points, actually going through Watterson’s cartoon archives, and even looking at the area of Chagrin Falls in which he grew up in: which was ironically deep in snow by the time that Martell came there … the same primordial snow from which many of Calvin’s most creative snowmen–and the Snowgoons–sprang from like cartoon spartoi soldiers created by sowing the dragon-teeth of ideas.

This creative conceit aside, I fortunately–or unfortunately depending on your perspective–cracked open a copy of The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book and realized something: much of what Martell says about Watterson’s innovations with regards to the comic strip form, medium, the message of his strip, and his own issues with newspaper publishing and intellectual property was already and very succinctly said by Watterson himself. I also suspect that Watterson has gone into considerable depth on the matter of Calvin and Hobbes in his interview in The Comics Journal and The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. This fact in itself wouldn’t be so bad, except for the fact Martell’s focus is on Watterson as a figure that he wants to write a book on. Instead, Watterson becomes something that he writes a book around: making points that Watterson had already made about the work he left behind a long time ago.

It didn’t have to be that way. Even though Watterson would probably have not given an interview on something he deemed a finished and long-discussed part of his past, Martell could have made this journey into something else entirely. For instance, he has an entire section on how Watterson’s work has affected not only comic strip publishing and the medium itself, but also how his peers perceived him and how he influenced future generations of comic strip and graphic novel writers as well as other artistic figures. It would have been even more interesting if Martell had looked at how Watterson affected popular culture with regards to all of the above subjects.

I was going to say that this could have been summarized into a paper instead of a book, but I actually liked seeing Martell talk about his own journey and dealings with attempting to find out more about Watterson and his creation. In fact, I disagree with one reviewer in that Martell’s book is not at the Undergrad level, but rather at Grad School level. I think that if he had just briefly looked at the elements he could glean from Watterson’s life (with his digressions on trying to contact Watterson) and then moved on to look at a broader perspective–he would have had a different but really interesting book. He could have actually been “finding” Calvin and Hobbes beyond its creator and into the public and artistic consciousness.

Instead, he wrote a book that makes the reader believe he is talking about Bill Watterson and instead talks about himself, other cartoonists, people and other digressions. I mean, I still to some extent respect what he tried to do by trying to piece together facts to say something about Watterson but still maintain the mystery and elusiveness around him–and in that it is unconventional–but I think this happened more from a lack of the facts beyond what already exist than anything else. Martell’s attempts to create a unique snowman from pre-existing material ends much in the same way Calvin’s own attempt does: in something that keeps building on itself and moves further away from its intended purpose though unlike Calvin’s snowgoons or the cartoonists after Watterson, this does not inspire anything more interesting.

At the same time, I still admire his attempt–especially in showing how Watterson’s work related to him … much like I also did in the beginning of this review–and I think there are things in this Frankensteinian thing that can be worked into something about the Spirit of Calvin and Hobbes in culture. So I will give this book a three out of five.

And thus ends my first critical review on this site: though I am sure it will not be the last.