A Gap in Nature

Our book today is A Gap in Nature, written by Tim Flannery and magnificently illustrated by Peter Schouten. It's an oversized hardcover full of text profiles and stunning paintings of 103 species of extinct animals, so until the author and artist team up again for an even longer, more comprehensive edition, this probably qualifies as the saddest single book ever mentioned on Stevereads. Because Schouten is so talented, your first impulse is to flip quickly through the book, soaking in one vibrant illustration after another - but doing that makes the whole thing even more crushingly sad, since the panoply here is as varied and evocative as any gallery of currently-living animals ... until you reach the end and realize all of these particular animals are gone. Schouten makes them all look so alive that the heartbreak may well be worse than a book full of photos would have been (there actually are photos of some of these 103, but nothing to match the colors and expressions Schouten uses).

Flanner is a favorite natural history writer of mine, and here he has an unremittingly grim task, describing in case after case just what is known of these vanished animals and when they disappeared. This book concentrates species who've disappeared in the last 500 years - there are no woolly mammoths or giant sloths in A Gap in Nature, although there are still some familiar faces.

There's the Steller Sea Cow, for instance, an enormous (30 feet long, 10 tons) relative of the manatee:


And there's the humble passenger pigeon, whose flocks once famously numbered in the millions, the rumbling whirring of which could be heard sometimes hours before the approaching flock itself was visible in the distance:


And of course the most famous vanished animal of them all, the great Mauritius dodo, immortalized not only by Lewis Carroll but by the great, underrated science fiction author Howard Waldrop, whose dodo short story "The Ugly Chickens" is well worth the effort for each and every one of you to hunt down and read (if memory serves, it was in volume 7 of Terry Carr's great anthology series "Universe" - and in a Waldrop collection too):



There are less familiar species here too, such as the Small Mauritian Flying-Fox, which disappeared a little over a century ago from the Mascarene islands. Flannery makes a good point in this profile and in many others, which is that it wasn't just the animal that disappeared, it was also the animal's function in the broader ecosystem. In the case of the Small Mauritian Flying-Fox, who knows how many plant species on the island had evolved in tandem with it, relied on it entirely for pollination? The bat's disappearance threatens all of those plants as well, in ways and to extents we'll never know now, because Pteropus subniger is gone:


And there's the tylacine from Australia, the largest modern-day marsupial predator, bigger than a coyote and highly sociable:


Flannery writes about the final days of the last captive tylacine:

The last thylacine to walk the earth was a female kept in Beaumaris Zoo near Hobart. Personnel problems developed at the zoo during 1935-36, which meant the animals were neglected during the winter. The thylacine was 'left exposed both night and day in the open, wire-topped cage, with no access to its sheltered den.' September brought extreme and unseasoned weather to Hobart. Night-time temperatures dropped to below zero at the beginning of the month, while a little later they soared above 38 degrees celsius. On the night of 7 September the stress became too much for the last thylacine and, unattended by her keepers, she closed her eyes on the world for the last time.

I keep saying these animals are 'gone,' that they 'disappeared,' when the reality is in every single case far more pointed, far more personal. Flannery is mild and objective about it:

This sixth age of extinction did not begin, as you might imagine, with the arrival of the industrial era a few hundred years ago. Instead it first dawned at least 50,000 years earlier, when our species first left its African cradle an began its spread across the face of the Earth, precipitating other living forms into oblivion by the dozen. We cannot be certain, of course, about anything that happened so long ago, but evidence is growing that a common thread runs through the extinctions of the last fifty milllennia, and that Homo sapiens, either directly or indirectly, is that thread.

That's very well-mannered, but it pulls punches that should be allowed to land squarely. 'By the dozen'? Try 'by the tens of thousands' (in the time it's taken you to read this posting, mankind has 'directly or indirectly' caused the extinction of half a dozen more species; in the last five years alone, Rwanda, for instance, as stripped itself bare of rainforest). 'Directly or indirectly' doesn't begin to cover the sheer intentional murderous frenzy with which humans systematically depopulated every ecosystem they entered. 20 percent of the megafauna of Africa, 40 percent of the megafauna of Europe and Asia, 80 percent of the megafauna of North and South America, a whopping 95 percent of the megafauna of Australia - all wiped out by one species, by modern humans, who also, incidentally, wiped out all the other species of humans who once lived on Earth. A Gap in Nature could just as easily be called A Gap Made in Nature, to remove all doubt that this might have happened accidentally.

The book was published in 2001 - the world had tens of thousands of square miles more forest, jungle, and swampland in 2001 than it has today. In those eight years, almost 60 percent of the planet's frogs species, for instance, have died off, and their former ecosystems have been correspondingly damaged, probably beyond the ability of tardy humans to fix. Burgeoning population and technological development in almost every country in the world puts almost every animal in the world under explicit threat - all except these. In an odd way, that's one of A Gap in Nature's unexpected little mercies: these 103 species, after negotiating the twists and turns of the world for innumerable generations, are at last past caring. Who knows how big a new version of this book will need to be in a few years.

the New Yorker Fiction Issue in the Penny Press!

Well, the New Yorker Fiction Issue is here, and as you'd expect, there's plenty to hate.

I'm less disposed to that hatred than I was in previous years, mainly because I've just recently had a hand in helping to create a Fiction Issue myself (over at Open Letters - plenty of good stuff for you to enjoy this month! More good stuff, if I may be so bold, than can be found in this issue of the New Yorker), so I've experienced some of the frustrations and compromises any group of editors must face in pulling together a double-sized special issue like this one. A freelancer who's multiple-submitted a piece all over creation and hasn't told you, so you only stumble across the fact that you've been scooped two days before deadline, with no time to find an article to take the place of what is now yesterday's news? It happens. A long, scholarly piece that just germinates new typos, no matter how many editorial eyes scrutinize it? They exist. Writers who use the special mission of a Fiction Issue to heap praise on authors who don't deserve it? Oh yes. And then there's the most basic compromise of all, the one that faces every editor of any capacity not just with special theme-issues but all the time: not all writers are created equal. Some of them try their hardest, bless 'em, and only manage to produce marginally-readable prose, whereas others wait until the last minute and flash out brilliant patter. It all adds to the challenge of creating a Fiction Issue in the first place, and it gives me an added dose of empathy for the folks at the New Yorker.

Still, plenty to hate.

Yiyun Li turns in a brief meditation on what it meant to her to read Hemingway during her compulsory time in the Chinese Army - turns out the experience convinced her how much cooler she is than anything written by Hemingway, because books aren't real, because in the end they're simplistic, escapist things. As Li discovered, "All would be well if you lived in a novel." Great way to start a Fiction Issue. Yeesh.

The estimable Roger Angell writes another brief piece (pitched, as so much of his recent stuff has been, as though he himself were roughly 100 - and reminding me that such a sentimental it's-poignant-because-it's-me tone is tedious in any writer, no matter how distinguished, no matter if he really is 100) remembering books in his family's summer cottage in Maine. He turns in a good bit on the scorned art of re-reading:

There's a sweet dab of guilt attached to rereading. Yes, we really should be into something new, for we need to know all about credit-default swaps and Darwin and steroids and the rest, but not just now, please. My first vacation book this year will be like my first swim, a venture into assured bliss.

Good prose, but the same crackbrained premise that underlies this whole Fiction Issue: that "summer reading" or "vacation reading" is somehow a legitimate category, that on vacation (and as I've pointed out before, so many magazines still craft issues like this one as though all summer reading were vacation reading, as though all of us were members of the 18th century London Ton and as soon as June rolls around, we shutter up our town-houses and decamp for three solid months of delicious frolic at our country estates, when in reality we're sniffing some fat-ass's garlic-breath on a jam-packed subway car with no air conditioning, on our way to our same old daily job, winter or summer) it's not only OK but expected to read lighter stuff. Needless to say, I hate this premise, since its most glaring implication is that non-summer reading is a boring chore, a duty we slog through dutifully but unhappily. Angell, firmly stuck in cranky-old-man mode, enthusiastically reinforces that premise, but I can assure you: there are new books on Darwin that would thrill you more deeply than any "beach reading" you're planning this summer. Angell knows this; he's just being a putz, denigrating reading right there in the middle of the Fiction Issue.



I thought I saw a glimmer of relief in the fact that the hugely talented David Grossman wrote an article about the hugely talented Bruno Schulz - but I was wrong! Schulz wrote some wonderful prose and led a fascinating, frustrating life (until it was ended in an anecdote too shopworn to need repeating here), but it turns out he's not the subject of Grossman's article: Grossman is. More specifically, the fact that Grossman used Schulz as a character in his novel See Under: Love. Grossman mechanically recites all the pertinent biographical details about Schulz, but he doesn't take much trouble to hide the fact that what he really wants to talk about is himself, his books, his writing process, etc. Schulz is just there as window-dressing, which is, upon a moment's reflection, a tad insulting for Schulz.

And that's nothing compared to how Thomas Mann would feel if he could come back from Hell and read Aleksandar Hemon's one-page confessional about how much Magic Mountain meant to him. The answer: squat. Reading his three columns of breathless prose, you quickly become aware that the only author who's ever meant anything to Hemon is that hugely talented criminally underpraised author, Aleksandar Hemon. Mann is entirely forgotten almost as soon as he's invoked. It's enough to make me wonder if the editors of this issue aren't playing a prank on the readers; "let's commission what-this-book-meant-to-me" pieces from writers who hate reading." Or something like that.

There aren't many such little pieces in the issue, thank gawd, but there's still plenty more to hate. Naturally, R. Crumb will always appear at or near the top of any list. For thirty years, I've been puzzling about this talentless moron's cult popularity, and now I get to match that puzzlement with outrage, because the talentless moron has apparently taken it into his head to illustrate the Bible. Excerpted here in the New Yorker is his rendition of the Book of Genesis, to which he appends the following assurance: "Nothing Left Out!"

Nothing left out, but plenty added in - not only Fat Ugly Amazon Women (they're expected, since they're in every single thing Crumb draws) but also a God with a long white beard and flowing robes, when no such spectacle is described in Genesis. And it goes on from there, cluttering up and uglying up the first chapter in the greatest of all books. In the accompanying brief preface, Crumb says that he occasionally turns to Ecclesiastes for insight, but never the Book of Genesis - because it's "too primitive." So he's got the irony thing down pat.



Wandering in such a desert, I naturally perked up at an article by Louis Menand. As far as deadline-writers go, he's in the upper ranks of those who usually do no wrong, and his subject here, the history of writing workshops in America, is promising. Unlike so much in this New Yorker, he doesn't disappoint. Right from the start, he's tossing the quips like a fine salad:

The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart.

Menand is a good deal more generous in his conclusions about writing workshops than I would have been. I have some familiarity with the phenomenon, and I've come to the conclusion that Kay Boyle was write: they should be illegal. Fully one-half of the rot that rivens the entire superstructure of contemporary fiction is caused by writing workshops carefully, lovingly molly-coddling crappy prose all the way to publication (the other half? Hordes of idiot readers clamoring for books to be video games - always completely new, always explosively over-stimulating from the first sentence, anything, as long as it's crack cocaine and not, you know, the boring old experience of reading - because really, who likes that?)(I have a dear friend who sometimes dabbles in this kind of idiocy, though she bloody well knows better; she'll finish a piece of poop by somebody like Yiyun Li and say, "Boy, reading that really made me want to meet the author," when she knows perfectly well good fiction will only prompt the response, "Boy, reading that really made me want to read something else by the author"). So the widespread growth of writing workshops can only be deplored, and Menand gets kudos for deploring in such a balanced, gentlemanly fashion.

And what, you ask, about the fiction in the Fiction Issue?

Plenty to hate.

There's the merely boring - Edna O'Brien turns in a story so long and pointless I kept checking to make sure it wasn't by Alice Munro. I find it hard to believe there were no bigger-name authors clamoring for a spot in the New Yorker Fiction Issue, and O'Brien's presence here makes me dread a Munro-Trevor one-two punch in the Atlantic's Fiction Issue.

And there's the gawd-awful - Jonathan Franzen writes a story called "Good Neighbors" that couldn't be more lazy or narcissistic if it were called "Jonathan Franzen, hung over, sits down to cobble something together for the New Yorker Fiction Issue." Franzen's story is nominally about some yuppies who move into a down-at-heels neighborhood and proceed to gentrify it, but who can concentrate on even so flimsy and gimmicky a plot as that, when you have to wade through cliches, idioms, and already-dated slang to get to it? The yuppies - the Berglunds - ask all the typical yuppie questions:

... how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief, and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture, and how to encourage feral cats to shit in somebody else's children's sandbox, and how to determine whether a public school sucked too much to bother trying to fix it.

Loathsome stuff, yes, and rendered all that more loathsome by the sickeningly solid conviction that it isn't really fiction at all, that it's just a barely-transposed excerpts from Franzen's own 'To Do' list. Reading this lazy, pointless prose tends to make me seethe, as I seethed throughout the entire self-indulgent monstrous length of The Corrections. I keep wondering what ever convinced Franzen that he was a writer, that this stuff he produces is worthy of general publication. I suspect there's a writing workshop at the heart of it.

But I can't only complain about writing workshops, since they sometimes produce gems. The best short story in this Fiction Issue - indeed, the best short story I've read anywhere so far in 2009 - so obviously comes from a workshop that I don't even need to know the biography if its author, Tea Obreht, to know she's spent a lot of time perched at a conference table, murmuring 'constructive criticism' about crapola. Her story, "The Tiger's Wife," is the issue's piece of debut fiction, and it's a stunning debut. Whether or not Obreht ever lives up to the promise of this story is an open question (she has a book coming out in 2010); certainly I've loved New Yorker short stories this much by authors who then disappeared, or wrote garbage for the rest of their lives.

But for now, I can only urge each and every one of you: read "The Tiger's Wife." Go out and buy the Fiction Issue of the New Yorker just for this story.



The tale is set during World War II - German bombs fall on a city somewhere in Europe, breaking open the wall of a tiger cage in the town zoo and setting free the scorched and bewildered tiger inside. He wanders through the chaos of town and eventually makes his way up into the mountain villages, slowly learning to listen to his instincts, slowly learning how to hunt and kill his own food rather than wait for his handlers to feed him. He takes up residence near a village which Obreht populates with characters who are intensely, unostentatiously real, and as they grow more anxious about the lurking presence of the tiger in the foothills, they decide to organize a hunting party. Obreht's story makes compulsive reading; her descriptive abilities are first-rate:

The day was intermittently gray and bright. A freezing rain had fallen during the night, and the trees, twisting under the weight of their ice-laden branches, had transformed the forest into a snarl of crystal.

... and her comic timing - that rarest of writerly gifts - is well-nigh flawless, as in this moment when the shooter's first shot misses the tiger and it bounds across a frozen lake straight at him:

The tiger was almost over the pond, bounding on muscles like springs. He heard Jovo muttering, "Fuck me," helplessly, and the sound of Jovo's footsteps moving away. The blacksmith had the ramrod out and he was shoving it into the muzzle, pumping and pumping and pumping furiously, his hand already on the trigger, and he was ready to fire, strangely calm with the tiger there, almost on him, its whiskers so close and surprisingly bright and rigid. At last, it was done, and he tossed the ramrod aside and peered into the barrel, just to be sure, and blew his own head off with a thunderclap.

In a perfect world, the special Fiction Issue of the New Yorker would be filled with such gems as "The Tiger's Wife," but no. You have to hunt for such great stuff, sifting through crap in a dozen different magazines, always hoping you'll find something that glows in the dark. It almost never happens, but oh, it's so sweet when it does. Maybe the next Fiction Issue will do it again. I'll read it, and I'll let you know.

Comics: Batman Confidential!

Gawd only knows what's going on in DC Comics' various Batman-related titles nowadays, since Batman was deep-fried at the end of "Final Crisis." The double lunacy - that the 'Crisis' in question was in any way 'final,' and that the character of Batman could actually be dead - made it understandably hard to pay attention or to care, and I think I share that in common with a good many editors of Bat-titles, many of whom seem to have been caught on the odd hop by the sudden directive from on high informing them their main character is, um, dead.

The ridiculously spurious Bat-title "Batman Confidential" (who thinks these things up? Why on Earth would anybody think the universe, nay, the multiverse, needed anything more than "Batman" and "Detective Comics" every month? Yeesh) is a perfect case in point, wasting perfectly good "Final Crisis" tie-in space by burning off stock stories set in a blissfully uncomplicated pre-Crisis continuity in which the Caped Crusader is still alive and kicking.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you. Stock-stories are usually everything all comics should be all the time: fast-paced, self-contained, and no exigent threat to all known facts about their central characters. You won't see Superman get transformed into a big gay lightning-bolt in a stock story - instead, you'll see him fight the Parasite, almost lose, figure out a clever way to win, and win. The fact that today's comics fans could look at a description like that and snicker spittle all over ratty black "Death Note" T-shirts shows you how much damage the last twenty years of multi-part overhyped fan-frantic 'epic' storylines have done. Nowadays, the 'deaths' of major comics characters has become such a cynical staple of any kind of plotting that nobody would dream of presenting a 'serious' story arc without a body count. The resulting distortion of good simple narrative has reached such ridiculous proportions that a sloppy little disaster like "Final Crisis" opened with the offhand execution of the Martian Manhunter, an established character with 50 years of continuity behind him. In the world of comics right at this moment, Aquaman, Batman, and Captain America are all 'dead.' Absurd.



So: stock-stories are good! In this one, a traumatized former Gotham City cop has the bad luck to share a cell-wall at Arkham Asylum with "Unknown Patient 0001" - otherwise known as the Joker. Former detective Shancoe is driven over the edge by the Joker's ranting, and that, plus the fact that Shancoe himself is a bit deranged, is enough to set him escaping from Arkham and going on a rampage against the Gotham PD. The Hannibal Lecter-style twist of having the Joker motivate somebody else to commit crimes rather than commit them himself is neatly handled here by writer Andrew Kreisberg, but the real joy of this issue (the story concludes next issue, as all comics stories should) is the glorious artwork by Scott McDaniel.

As I've stated in the past, I consider McDaniel the quintessential living Batman artist - and he's certainly in top form for this little "Bad Cop" story. His panels are absolutely alive with tension and implied movement (one full-page panel of Batman leaping to the Batmobile to answer the Bat-Signal is a mini-masterwork of detail)(the setting of that panel - taking place as it does right after Bruce Wayne's had sex with some anonymous female at Wayne Manor - checks off all the 'cool' boxes but leaves lots of questions behind that perhaps Kreisberg hasn't fully thought out - like, for instance, what's the protocol here, when a one-night-stand suffers Bat-signal interruptus? Alfred the butler hands her a wad of bills and chauffeurs her to the Marriott?), a joy to look at. There's one panel where a quivering Arkham janitor tells Batman policy forbids him 'interviewing' Joker alone in his cell, and a towering, genuinely creepy-looking Batman says "Do you believe that word means anything to me?" It's a better moment than most of the Bat-books have provided in many weeks of more serious, more grim and gritty trying.



So I'll savor this issue and the next, and although I'll keep an eye on the epic goings-on in the mainstream Batman continuity (of course I'm curious), I'll continue to miss the days when all comics were this simple, this well-done, and this satisfying. I'm guessing several Bat-characters will die in the course of those epic goings-on; I'll try not to yawn.

Procurator!

Our books today are the three in Kirk Mitchell's "Procurator" series, based in an alternate history of his own devising, one in which Pontius Pilate listened to the cautions of his wife and spared the life of Jesus Christ, thereby assuring the Empire two thousand years more of life. The series started in 1984 with Procurator, continued in 1986 with New Barbarians, and petered out in 1989 with Cry Republic, and the three books star Germanicus Agricola, who gradually rises from the procutatorship of the first book to the height of power in this unfallen Rome. Germanicus is an old-fashioned stand-up hero, an action-ready military man with a nimble brain and a Jim Kirk sense of humor.

Mitchell teams Germanicus with a trusty German aide and a series of interesting women who serve as love interests, and Mitchell enjoys a great David Drake-style ability to write action well, to keep his plots (Germanicus against the Muslims, Germanicus against the Aztecs, Germanicus against the Japanese, with lots of internecine machinations thrown in along the way) constantly bubbling.

The central idea is a bit odd - but then, all 'what if Rome didn't fall' central plot ideas are a bit odd, since they usually misunderstand the causes of that fabled event rather fundamentally, as Mitchell (I'm guessing wilfully, since his straight-up Roman historical novel A.D. Anno Domini, in addition to being really good, shows that he knows his Roman history quite well) does here. With all due respect to Gibbon, Christianity didn't bring about the downfall of the Empire, as Mitchell's Pontius Pilate scenario implies - slavery did the deed, as it would certainly have done for the British Empire and 19th century America, if those countries hadn't learned (with differing degrees of reluctance) from the Roman example.

But that's not important, as Mitchell must know perfectly: he barely touches on this central conceit before bolting onward to his slam-bang stories. These books are enormously enjoyable page-turners full of great plot developments, great characters, and, sprinkled here and there, some great insights into the actual Roman experience, as when Germanicus and his lady-love Colonel Crispa are eating an improvised meal in an abandoned room:

She slowly nodded, eyes glistening, then let her gaze drift over the food on the table. "This is what it is to be Roman, isn't it?"

"What do you mean?"

"Always sitting down to someone else's table."

"Yes," he said simply. He had long since stopped trying to deceive himself.

In New Barbarians, Germanicus gets drawn into a war between Rome and the Aztec Empire, and at the climax of that book he finds himself burdened with more authority than any man has carried in long centuries. Mithchell is practiced enough to know the moment is right for a bit of comic relief:

"Now that the war is done," he [Germanicus] said in a tired but firm voice from his curule chair, "it is time to rebuild and reshape ..."

Suddenly, in the space that separated Germanicus from the assembly, a jaguar padded across the floor. This greatly alarmed the Anasazi headsmen for, as Germanicus later learned, they were convinced the animal was Tizoc's ghost. It halted, glared at Germanicus, who steeled himself to betray no fright, and then continued on its way out of the lord general's feasting chamber.

"One of our first orders of business," Germanicus broke the unpleasant calm, "will be to repair the walls of the royal menagerie."

There was tentative, then boisterous, laughter.

But probably the best moment in the whole series (I guess we have to call it a trilogy, since it's unlikely Mitchell will be returning to it, although he should - in the twenty years since he wrote these books, the whole sub-genre of alternate histories has blossomed beyond imagining) comes toward the end of the third book, Cry Republic, when Tora, a character from the other side of Rome's world, measures his distance from the city of Germanicus by how distant the echoes become:

The garrulous Bithynian sailors who had conveyed him across the Pontus Euxinus to the principality of Colchus repeated all the latest rumors about Antonius Nepos, Claudia Nero, and the "most likely rotting" Germanicus Agricola. But the taciturn muleteers who conducted him over the towering Caucasus Mountains seemed remarkably unaware of the turmoil in the empire on which they bordered, and one of them spoke for the first time in two days to ask: "Who be this Autun Neppo you revile?" To avoid any Roman agents in Parthia, Tora crossed the Hyrcanian Sea on a barge loaded to the gunwales with tin ore, and when he landed on that citiless shore claimed by no country, he no longer heard the word Rome in any variation. A week farther to the east, a holy man, who claimed to be the most widely traveled member of his impoverished tribe, admitted that he had never heard of Rome, but he was familiar with "the Empire of the Eagle," having met a ten-foot-tall stranger from that land. The caravanners Tora joined soon after were aware of the "Men of the Eagle" but had never heard of an empire by that name. However, these squat, sepia-complected men with slightly-tapered eyes had been well briefed about the latest happenings in the Serican Empire. They had even referred to it by its proper name: the Xing Dynasty.

At that moment, while lurching atop a musty-breathed camel with his and the beast's combined shadows stretching out across the late afternoon sands, Tora realized that he had turned the corner of the world.

And now on a breathlessly hot morning, departing on the back of a pony from the sprawling and fly-ridden mud city on the Xing frontier, he smiled at what the women of the shining black braids and joined eyebrows had told him: They had never heard of the Men of the Eagle, but they knew of beasts half-eagle and half-human who resided in the same nest the sun used at night. These beasts were called Rumahn.

These books are fantastic fun reading, but they're frustrating too - not only because they're all out of print (needed you to even ask?) but because they automatically get you dreaming about other novels in the series - Germanicus against those Xing, for instance, or Germanicus - and his allies, one imagines - against an alien invasion of Earth, etc. In lieu of those never-to-be-written subsequent volumes, I'd settle for one gorgeously-produced fat trade paperback collecting these three volumes, maybe with a new introduction by Mitchell, if he's still willing and able. I'd buy it.

May's GQ in the Penny Press!

I know it's anachronistic of me, but I can't help it: I read magazines, lots of them, and I read them regularly, attentively, and thoroughly. I did this even before I became so happily involved in the monthly goings-on at Open Letters Monthly (a gigantic new issue of which has just been published, for those of you who might want to spend some thorough attention yourselves), and in the last few years I've had all the more reason to respect the wit, reach, and sheer amount of work involved in pulling off a monthly publication of any quality at all (and for all I know, even the ones with NO quality are still Hell on wheels to bring to term - it's still a gigantic amount of verbiage needing to be massaged and finessed, after all).

Take the May issue of GQ, for instance. I know there are those among you (you know who you are) who deride the very idea of reading a magazine like GQ, but nevertheless: every issue comes bearing several items of interest or genuine worth. This issue features a cover story about world-class infantile moron Christian Bale (whose infamous tirade on the set of Terminator should have terminated all public interest in him of any kind), and despite such an unpromising opening, I read the whole thing scrupulously, cover to cover - and once again, I wasn't disappointed.


Some of the items in the issue were admittedly trivial (jebus gawd, the amount of space they waste talking about idiotic stuff - utterly fad-driven things and gadgets I guess the magazine's target demographic really is wealthy and stupid enough to amass and care about amassing), like the squirt of irritation I felt seeing that stupid Gillette ad that shows the same ass-faced young douchebag in like fifty different iterations of douchery - or the fond smile I cracked at another ad, featuring the very same all-grown-up tobacco addict Alex Pettyfer who is, as all the world knows, the idee fixe of my esteemed (and hilarious) fellow-blogger Vera, and I laughed out loud at transcribed chatter between GQ's "in-house Twilight enthusiast and Pattinson-picture-kisser" Raha Naddaf and a random bunch of Twilight fans contacted at a sleepover:

What do you think about the rumors that Pattinson dated Camille Belle?
[Thirteen seconds of mortified screaming]
Olivia: We don't like her.
[Three-minute conversation about the Jonas Brothers, with one girl concluding, "They wear promise rings, but that doesn't mean anything."]
Now for the big question: Do you ever imagine yourself making out with Pattinson?
[Again with the silence]
Abigail: We're only 12.

Hee.

There was also a throwaway photospread of a brand-new pro quarterback named Alex Sanchez, who was convinced to pose in a series of Baywatch-dorky beach outfits, presumably in exchange for permission to manhandle the vacant-eyed young thing posing in the photos with him. He doesn't seem able to fully shut his mouth, so he probably has a bright NFL career ahead of him.

But the issue wasn't all fun and games. Peter Savodnik turns in a riveting freelance piece on the Russian "Maniac" serial killer Alexander Pichushkin, who lured dozens of men and women into the woods of Moscow's Bitsevsky Park (three times the size of Central Park), killed them, and then dumped their bodies down municipal wells, where the sewage system washed the remains varying distances from the scene of the crimes (in typical serial killer fashion, Pichushkin got sloppier and sloppier the longer he went unsuspected and uncaught - which guaranteed he'd eventually be suspected and caught). Savodnik's article is very good - if grisly - reading, except for one odd bit of reaching he does that had me scratching my head:

... the detective who led the investigation ... rules out the possibility that the Maniac is homosexual. He says Pichushkin doesn't have any sexual longings for men; he just doesn't care about women.

But there's something else: In Russia, which remains violently homophobic, it may be that people have a hard time believing a gay man is capable of the kind of power or force of will that defined the Maniac. The Maniac is a maniac, and he's evil, and no one disputes this, but he is also very much a man in the way Russians think of men.

Hard to know what Savodnik is getting at here - so Pichushkin might be gay because his investigators might be typically bigoted Russians? He displays the absolutely textbook serial killer lack of any sexual identification, and suddenly that's enough to cast a doubt? Granted, I'm not the expert on the Maniac that Savodnik undoubtedly is by this point, but this still seems like a weird bit of projecting to me. Sometimes, a maniac is just a maniac, after all.

And only a couple of pages from the retailing of Pichushkin's homicidal horrors is a story about a real murderer, a serial killer of a scope and professionalism that makes the Maniac look like a piker: former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld is profiled by the very talented Robert Draper, with predictably chilling results.

As I read the piece, as I encountered quote after quote like this one:

"What Rumsfeld was most effective at doing was not so much undermining a decision that had yet to be made as finding every way possible to delay the implementation of a decision that had been made and that he didn't like"

I gradually realized that I know Donald Rumsfeld - I used to work with him. I had a co-worker who was every bit as mulishly self-absorbed and vigorously un-helpful as Rumsfeld is everywhere portrayed here as being. That co-worker could absolutely 100 % be relied upon to make any - and I mean any - work-related thing, no matter how big or small, no matter how important or trivial - more difficult, more annoying, more of an issue. You'd be off doing something else, and you'd suddenly realize the phone had been ringing for fifteen minutes - and when you hurried over, absolutely frickin guaranteed this co-worker would simply be standing there, obdurately ignoring the phone - and if you were dumb enough to ask why, he'd have a long, breathlessly self-centered rationale for why he'd been ignoring the phone, and it wouldn't matter what the Hell it was, because by the point of you being dumb enough to ask for it, you'd be stuck in it, trapped in the cramped, sweaty little mental world of somebody who's just one compass-tick north of being genuinely, helplessly, institutionalizably insane. Like that co-worker, the Rumsfeld in Draper's article gains absolutely nothing by his reflexive, non-stop obstructionism - and like that co-worker, the only reason his knee-jerk adamantly petty assholery didn't get him fired instantly is because nobody sane wants to interact with him long enough to get that firing done, because interacting with such a useless piece of cowdung, such a pathetically arrested 5-year-old, is intensely soiling. Reading this article, it was no shock to me that President Bush fired Rumsfeld on live TV, far away from the man himself. No shock either that at the man's farewell dinner, he intensely creeped out his guests - he probably ate every last morsel of the free food, too.

But as disagreeable as that article's subject might be, the article itself was a thrill to read - and it wasn't alone in this issue, and every issue of GQ is like that. So I keep reading, even though I don't know a Blackberry from a blueberry and couldn't tell you what kind of wood is best for your $500 loafer-tree.

Emperor!

Our books today form the "Emperor" series written by Conn Iggulden - all the paperbacks of which bear the same ominous blurb, "If you liked Gladiator, you'll love Emperor!"

I liked Gladiator, but a blurb such as that on a piece of Roman historical fiction is indeed ominous - because Gladiator was almost pure fantasy, playing almost as fast and loose with the facts of Roman history as the HBO series "Rome" did ... and seemingly advertising a similarly cavalier attitude toward facts is a mighty odd way of praising a historical novel.

Or maybe it isn't. Why do we read historical fiction, anyway? Since it's not solely to bone up on the facts of history (for which, er, boning we have many first-rate history books, including many that've had their day in the sun here at Stevereads), it stands to reason we come to this type of fiction for more - we want the writer to take all that historical research and do what the historian can't: neaten it, sharpen it, use it, in a way the ordinary sprawl of daily life would make impossible.

Virtually everybody who's ever written historical fiction quickly comes to this realization, and then they start doing things with the facts (scholars for the last four hundred years have been saying this very quality makes ancient writers like Livy - who liberally sprinkle their allegedly historical accounts with long speeches and long interior monologues that can't possibly be accurate - the forefathers not of history but of historical fiction)(which is mighty condescending thing to say, but I can't help but wonder how Livy would have responded to it). They start shaping the facts to fit the stories they want to tell. This is a very different thing from simply making mistakes about the facts.

It can be a maddeningly fine line. In the first half of The Alienist, Caleb Carr draws a vivid, memorable portrait of Theodore Roosevelt - but he's constrained by the historical record of Roosevelt's days as New York Police Commissioner. But in the second half of The List of 7, Mark Frost hauls Roosevelt onstage and has him chomping on a cigar, something the real Roosevelt never did - and Frost does this because he wanted to stress the 'big and bluff' side of Roosevelt's personality, in one scene. Same man, same facts, two different writers going to two different lengths to make their stories work.

Clearly, Carr's method is better. To the fullest extent possible, the facts you read in historical fiction should correspond reliably to the facts you'd find in Gibbon or Parkman. Custer shouldn't be described as tall if he was short; Jugurtha shouldn't be described as black if he was only swarthy; Cleopatra shouldn't be described as beautiful, period, since every ancient source and her own coins agree she wasn't. It might look as though that places intolerable restrictions on responsible historical fiction, but that's the wrong way of seeing it: think of it instead as a test for the cleverness of the author. The trick is to come up with ways to let the 'fiction' trump the 'historical' without doing it irreparable violence.

There are some tried-and-true methods for doing this, the easiest and most popular of which is to cast the whole of your story into some setting, some special circumstance, that you can come right and say would never, of course, find its way into the historical record (usually, books like this feature a scene toward the end in which one character stands up the table and says, "Gentlemen, we must never speak of this to anyone"). In Goodnight, Sweet Prince, David Dickinson wants his main character to solve the murder of Queen Victoria's grandson Prince Eddy - but Prince Eddy died of pneumonia, which is unhelpful. So Dickinson links Prince Eddy and his murderer with a scandal and has the Royals cloaking the whole thing in obfuscation - which is not only plausible but gives him an entirely free hand. I, Claudius, The Sword of Pleasure, and countless other novels give us the creaky-but-effective gimmick of the lost or doomed-to-be-lost secret manuscript (emboldened, no doubt, by the fact that such manuscripts have always, in fact, existed in real life - by happy chance, we have not only the official, public things Procopius wrote, for instance, but also the secret account he couldn't stop himself from writing, even though its discovery would have meant his very messy execution).

Another reliable way to write such books is to find some blank space in the historical record - and then swarm in to fill it. Iggulden does exactly this in his "Emperor" books, because despite the fact that Julius Caesar is one of the most famous individuals in the history of the world, we don't really know all that many details about his boyhood and youth. Iggulden knows this and freely admits in his Author's Notes that he's made liberal use of his imagination - a canny move that both exonerates him from anything readers might dislike and effectively de-emphasizes the very large amount of research that went into these books.

He's clearly angling for a wide popular audience, and there's nothing wrong with that. He almost always refers to his characters by one name only (and what he considers 'first' names - Agrippa is 'Marcus,' for instance, and of course Caesar himself is 'Gaius'), he centers everything on the vicissitudes of one boy growing up into a man, and he loads the books with action sequences - and he's quite good at writing action sequences.

He keeps everything small-focus and personal, as when our young heroes are enlisted in the army of General and Dictator Marius:

At first, the main roads emptied as the early-rising workers stood well back for the soldiers. Gaius could feel their eyes on them and heard angry mutters. One word was repeated from hard faces: "Scelus!" - a crime for soldiers to be on the streets. The dawn was damp and cold and he shivered slightly. Marcus too looked grim in the grey light and he nodded as their eyes met, his hand on the hilt of his gladius. The tension was heightened by the clatter and crash as the men moved. Gaius had not realised how noisy fifty soldiers could be, but in the narrow streets the clank of iron-shod sandals echoed back and forth. Windows opened in the high apartments as they passed, and someone shouted angrily, but they marched on.

"Sully will cut your eyes out!" one man howled before slamming his door shut.

The books follow Caesar from his young boyhood to the edge of world-domination, and they've taken their share of lumps from critical readers (who were no doubt primed by that Gladiator tag ... future editions of the books really ought to drop it), but this is partly because the books are Roman historical novels, a particular sub-genre that tends to bring out the petty-ass factchecker in otherwise easygoing readers. Such readers are unlikely to be satisfied by anything less than notarized videotape.

The rest of you might want to give the "Emperor" books a try. They're quite entertaining.

Dracula!

Our book today is Dracula, Bram Stoker's immortal, undead, paradigm-shifting 1897 novel that has changed the shape of Western pop-culture more than anything published since. The book was a gigantic financial hit for Stoker virtually from the instant of its publication, and it's been imitated, parodied, adapted, and interpolated endlessly ever since.

I think there are three reasons why the concept Stoker hammered out and popularized caught on with such unprecedented drama (aside from the awkward, furniture-upsetting vigor of his prose, that is): first, he gives us a jim-dandy cast of characters - a good girl, a bad girl, a cowboy, an intellectual, a bland good guy, an aristocrat, a crazy old Yoda-figure, and of course the world's greatest villain, the perfect combination of plotting fiend and ravenous beast; second, he gives us that most emotionally satisfying of all plot under-structures - the invasion story ... Dracula has one goal in mind from the book's onset -- he wants to infect England with his undead virus, wants to begin turning the country (as I've done many times in the past, I whole-heartedly recommend Kim Stanley Newman's Anno Dracula, a book that has its own killer premise, that Stoker's novel is itself an alternate history, that in reality Dracula's plan worked), with only our band of heroes standing in his way; and third, he gives us a bad guy who's offering something just a little bit alluring. True, newly-turned undead must serve Dracula - but they get to live forever, outside of conventional strictures of morality. I've always considered it one of Dracula's rare important weaknesses that we never really see that allure championed properly - the Count's foremost servant, Renfield, is insane, and Lucy is a dimwit. But Lord knows, subsequent handlers of Stoker's material have spared no effort to show us that allure in all its dark glory (including most recently and most famously the Twilight saga, in which the winsome heroine pleads with her undead suitor to turn her, so she can be "free").


Sometimes, when I really love a book, I find my appreciation increases just a bit with every really good or interesting edition I find, and that's certainly true of Dracula - it's apparently endless commercial viability guarantees a fresh crop of repackagings every year, and some of them are worth having. Of course there's the Oxford World's Classics paperback with its great binding and its great notes (and the apparently requisite photo of Bela Lugosi on the cover), and there's the dorky old Magnum Easy Eye edition (also with Bela) for those who scorn any kind of scholarly apparatus.



At the hilariously, frantically overdone other end of the 'scholarly apparatus' spectrum, there's Leonard Wolf's epic 1975 Essential Dracula (it's got a still from Nosferatu on its cover, but don't worry - it's dedicated to Bela), which features the text of the novel onto which an encrusting, clambering moss of footnotes has clapped with joyful tenacity. Wolf footnotes absolutely everything in the book, and unlike so many equally annotated volumes of other classics (and the recent annotated volume of this one, which is as thorough as it is boring), Wolf's notes are always bristling with opinions. Sometime they very nearly end up being more interesting than the passages they explicate, like this little swipe at the token American:

Quincey Morris is a frequent window gazer. Presumably, this is part of his frontier American heritage. Stoker, no doubt, meant the trait to imply a huntsman's alertness. Ironically enough, this man of action rarely accomplishes anything.

Or this, about the recurrent wimpiness of Jonathan Harker, the book's main protagonist:

Mina here takes note of a pervasive weakness in Harker. The reader, more than Mina (one supposes), has seen a good deal of Harker lying passive and supine: most notably, of course, in his nearly flirtatious lassitude in the presence of Dracula's women; his swoon; his doze; and for a full six weeks he lay bedridden in Budapest. Mina, on August 24, reports that he was "so thin and pale and weak-looking ... He is only a wreck of himself ..." It is with this wreck that Mina spends her wedding night.

(fans of Buffy the Vampire-Slayer will read that "nearly flirtatious lassitude" and immediately think of Giles' own encounter with Dracula's women ... and, recalling it, most likely laugh out loud)



Dracula has naturally had countless adaptations to more visual formats over the years. The character had a long and very entertaining run in a Marvel Comics adaptation drawn by the great Gene Colan, and Mike Mignola's four-part comics adaptation of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula is so visually stunning it almost compensates for the idiocy of the movie itself. And there've been many, many illustrated versions of the novel. Penguin brought one out in 2006 featuring both color and black and white drawings by an unusually restrained Jae Lee, and just last year Sterling kicked off its All-Action Classic series with graphic novel adaptation scripted by Michael Mucci and drawn with distinctive, idiosyncratic energy by Ben Caldwell.




And there'll be more, that goes without saying. Stoker hit upon the same creative gold that was found by Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Rice Burroughs did with Tarzan, so interpretations and re-interpretations will always be with us. This can usually be extremely frustrating - it's frustrating that Tarzan is currently creatively quiescent, it's more frustrating that Holmes is about to be debased beyond recognition into a gay kickboxer, and probably it'll be equally frustrating when details of the 2011 Hollywood version of Dracula come to light (I'm guessing the Count will be played by somebody under 25 - Michael Pitt's my frontrunner at the moment).

With any luck, in the meantime there'll be a nice meaty BBC TV production to sink our teeth into.

Forewards and Afterwards!

Our book today is Forewards and Afterwards, the collection of incidental deadline-prose written by celebrated poet W. H. Auden and published together in 1973. I'm told, by those who know, that Auden is a considerable force as a poet - I've scarcely liked a single line of his I've ever read, but then, poetry and I mostly parted ways with Kipling (my occasional forays into Poetry Class notwithstanding!). And certainly in this book he's working in a long tradition - poets have made consistently interesting and often powerfully original literary critics through the centuries. Every time I pick up Forewards and Afterwards (or its companion volume, The Dyer's Hand), I reflexively feel the same little anticipatory thrill that goes through me when I pick up Johnson's Lives of the Poets or Doyle's Through the Magic Door or the literary chunk of Gore Vidal's United States (the same thrill I'd feel in spades if Henry Adams had ever got off his reedy ass and actually compiled the similar volume he promised friends for decades).

And I'm disappointed every time, because Auden is something of a moron. At least when it comes to writing hack-criticism on deadline. Especially when he's writing about subjects other than poetry, which happens often in this collection.

Every time, I go in wanting this book to be the classic it's so clearly not. I open it at random, hoping that this time the great insights will outweigh - or hell, even temporarily occlude - the boneheaded groaners. But then I come across something like this:

It is not often that knowledge of an artist's life sheds any significant light upon his work ...

or this:

So far as I know, Goethe was the first writer or artist to become a Public Celebrity. There had always been poets, painters and composers who were known to and revered by their fellow artists, but the general public, however much it may have admired their works, would not have dreamed of wishing to make their personal acquaintance.

or this:

Others have been concerned with the corruptions of the big city, the ennui of the cultured mind; some sought a remedy in a return to Nature, to childhood, to Classical Antiquity; others looked forward to a brighter future of liberty, equality, and fraternity: they called on the powers of the subconscious, or prayed for the grace of God to inrupt and save their souls; they called on the oppressed to arise and save the world. In Kipling there is none of this, no nostalgia for a Golden Age, no belief in Progress.

And they just keep coming, like rocks hurled through a series of stained glass windows - not just contentious opinions (we're all entitled to those, after all) but weird-old-fart crank-ass assertions that wouldn't have made it past the second draft if they'd been written by some unknown freelancer churning out his thousand words to obtain his review copy. When Anthony Burgess writes book-essays like these (and I'm told he wrote about 100 times as many of them as Auden - or anybody else in the history of the world - ever did), he never fails to earn his supper: there's at least one memorable line in virtually every piece. But with Auden, most of what I come away remembering are the disasters, the crackpot stuff that isn't even worth arguing about.

Even when he tries for the more human tone of faux-humility (and it's always faux - the guy quotes from his own poetry during his reviews), it goes horribly awry:

Mr. Pope-Hennessey is probably the only person now living who has read all of Trollope's sixty-five books, the majority of which are in two or three volumes, and he devotes a good many pages to describing and assessing the little-known ones. For this I am most grateful to him. Like everybody who reads Trollope at all, I have read the Barchester novels and several others, but I had never even heart of He Knew He Was Right, which Mr. Pope-Hennessey thinks one of the best, and what he says about it makes me eager to read it at the first opportunity.

Yeesh. Confession may be good for the soul, but confessing (with such smug subdued pride - "As soon as I manage a spare moment, I'll straightaway ring up my lending library and ask them if they have this fascinating-sounding book I've just learned about") that you've never even heard of He Knew He Was Right - in the middle of writing about a Trollope biography - doesn't endear you to your readers ... it completely annihilates their faith in you.

At one point Auden proclaims, "No critic, however pontifical his tone, is really attempting to lay down eternal truths about art ..." Forewards and Afterwards would be a Hell of a better book if he'd really believed that, instead of trying to preach to his cake and eat it too. As it is, I don't really know why I keep going back to this wreck, this folly out in the yard. I just keep hoping it'll be better than I know it is. So come to think about it, maybe it's a good thing Adams never wrote his book ....

Comics: Several Blasts from the Past!

It was like stepping into a time machine last week at the comic shop (and not just any comic shop - the great Comicopia in Boston, which sports not one but two stunning rarities for comic shops: the owner is a comics-biz nerd who's actually interesting to talk to, and the staff is largely comprised of really smart, really funny young women who are all also gorgeous)(if you're in the neighborhood, feel free to stop in, chat, and ogle!)(and buy something, of course...): everything old is new again.

Well, not everything - the Legion of Super-Heroes is still frelled up. But at least three things are!

First: the New Mutants. This one harks back to the early 80s, when Chris Claremont and excruciatingly static artist Bob McCleod created a weirdly-sized, oddly-bound oddity called a graphic novel (it was like the third one every published - who knew it would catch on?) starring a younger generation of mutants, some 'gifted youngsters' to fill out the ranks of Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters mutant training-facility. At the time, of course, I intensely disliked this idea (as indeed I intensely disliked Claremont's all-new all-different additions to the core X-Men team shortly before this): at the time, I wanted everything Marvel comics to remain entirely static in terms of time - no babies for the Fantastic Four, no high school graduation for Peter Parker, and likewise no graduation for the original X-Men. But Claremont envisioned a comic about a group of freshly-recruited young mutants who Xavier never intends to forge into a crime-fighting super-team; they're only at Xavier's to learn how to control their powers.

The new team had one thing in common with the old team: both were seriously weak-ass in the super-powers department. There was Cannonball, who could blast off like a rocket but couldn't control his flight path; there was Sunspot, who could absorb sunlight to increase his physical strength - for about five minutes, then he fainted; there was Wolfsbane, who could turn into a wolf (not a werewolf, just a big dog); there was Mirage, who could create images of people's worst fears (but since they could see that's what she was doing, welllll...); and there was Karma, who could possess the mind of another person (but only one person at a time, and she herself is just standing there like an archery target the whole time). Clearly, Claremont drew these limitations intentionally, to enhance the drama - but it mainly ended up enhancing the boredom, and within the first year of the resulting series two things happened: the kids' powers were slightly increased, and new members were added. There was Doug Ramsey, who could instantly translate any language (and whose floppy hair and combat inefficiency translated into "gay" about ten years before any other mutant came out of the closet); there was Warlock, a annoying techno-organic lifeform from space; there was Magma, a girl from a hidden ancient Roman civilization (...) who could kinda-sorta channel molten magma into molten magma-blasts, and there was Magik, who could teleport and act creepy.


Distinctly underwhelming adventures followed, and eventually other writers broke up the team and messed around with the characters (Cannonball gained control of his flight, Wolfsbane learned to turn into a bad-ass werewolf, Mirage got adopted by some Norse Valkyries .... you know, normal comics stuff). And now, after twenty five years (yeesh), Marvel brings the original band of characters back together in the new first issue of New Mutants.

And it's still underwhelming! Writer Zeb Wells does a solid enough job, gets in a few good lines, but there's nothing arresting here, and he's certainly not done any favors by the artwork - it's distinctly journeyman stuff, even though the artist - Diogenes Neyes - has the single coolest artist name imaginable.

The problem here is the same one that plagues the entire X-Men continuity: too much damn water has gone under the damn bridge. If this were a re-telling of the team's original adventures, a good writer could mine all the potential Claremont studiously ignored, but an almost un-synopsizable amount of stuff has happened to each of these characters in the intervening quarter-century, and this book tries to have it both ways, giving us a simple team-reunion ... but with the adult versions of all the characters. Either one of those things might work separately, but they can't possibly work together. Fortunately, this wasn't Marvel's only recent attempt at delving its own past! There was also:


Tales from Asgard - no doubt spurred by the recent sales success of the relaunched Thor (just follow the tags, everybody! that's why they're there!), Marvel here reprints the one-shot "Tales of Asgard" collection from 1964 - but oh! what a reprint job! The colors and textures of Jack Kirby's original artwork have been incredibly revivified - amplified, so that this is one reprint that's actually visually superior to its original material. I don't know how Marvel did it, but I'd sure as Hell like to see everything they've ever published revamped in this way.


The tales themselves are stirring, stupid stuff - basically Stan Lee retelling some of the greatest hits from Roger Lancelyn Green's Tales of Asgard and throwing in a little Lord Dunsany along the way. There's humor, pathos, derring-do, and plenty of mythological mumbo-jumbo of the kind that had those of us who gave a crap forty years ago wondering why a Norse god of thunder would ever even bother to hang out with mortal heroes like the Avengers. No, it's the visual remastering that's the star of the show here, and it has that in common with our last item:

Nexus! We're back in the early '80s again for this one, a 'remastered' version of a remastered revamping of a character's stand-alone origin issue, which itself was issued a decade after the character's first appearance .... yes, a bit confusing - as is pretty much everything about Mike Baron and Steve Rude's signature and beguiling creation, Nexus, executioner of mass murderers.


This is Nexus' origin story, and it was originally issued in 1992 on good-quality paper with high-definition color (the collaborating creators even go so far as to use the front cover of that issue as the back cover of this issue), which started me wondering why it would need to be re-re-issued in 2009. Granted, it has a new cover (although not that new - it's a mirror-reverse image of a Nexus comic book cover from way before 1992)(go figure) and a few digital brush-strokes of new color or definition on the inside artwork ... but hardly enough to justify this issue, which means something else must be justifying this issue.


Aside from its convenience as a tie-in to the ongoing (and somewhat pricey) series of hardcover Nexus reprints, it's not hard to see what that justification is: Mike Baron and Steve Rude must on some level realize that they're not two strapping lads from Madison, Wisconsin anymore, and that Nexus and the wonderfully fertile mythology they built up around him ("Great Goulessarian!") are almost certainly their claim to comics immortality. That both of them see this is reflected in this constant returning to and fussing with their epic creation; that both of them resist it is reflected in the consistency with which they refuse to simply buckle down and regularly produce new Nexus material (for obvious reasons, we'll call this the Mike Mignola Syndrome).

In any case, though, it's a treat to revisit this great story about a man who's given tormenting dreams of mass murderers - and who's given the vast cosmic power necessary to bring them to final justice. And since Steve Rude's artwork is some the best in all comics history, even a marginal improvement in what was already top-notch color reproduction is sufficient excuse to pour over every electrifying page.

All trips down comic book memory lane should be so much fun! Atari Force, anyone?

Troilus and Criseyde!

Our book today is Geoffrey Chaucer's 1380s masterpiece, the magnificent long poem Troilus and Criseyde. The semi-mythical 'common reader' of today will not have read this great book, although that same reader will almost certainly have been forced to read segments of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales at some point in school. Unlike that reading-list book, Troilus and Criseyde is complete right down to the last fine detail.

It's odd that young people don't read this book, because it's one of the most moving (and unsparingly accurate) depictions of what it's like to be young and passionately, hopelessly tormented by love. While he was composing the poem, Chaucer's life was crowded to the rafters with responsibilities - he was a fixture at Court, Comptroller of Petty Customs (a silly-sounding name to us now, but oh, the money that flowed past your fingertips when you held such a post), Justice of the Peace for Kent, member of Parliament for Kent ... most men in such dizzying demand barely had time to bolt down a bit of cold mutton every day, but Chaucer had the knack for work. It was a refuge for him, a welcome that greeted him every time he closed his study door. People who embrace their writing rather than fight it often find themselves feeling this way; Chaucer wasn't the first to feel it (the Venerable Bede used to hum in sheer happiness when the writing was going well), and he had some pretty good external motivation - he was a favorite with the Court readers, especially the ladies (he'd been stunningly good-looking in his twenties and retained a lot of it even now, in his forties), and especially the queen.


(and just maybe, when he thought about the hectic pace of his life, he began to realize that he could never go back to the headstrong and happy love-stung antics of his teens and early twenties ... maybe that's exactly where Troilus and Criseyde comes from)

By the time he wrote Troilus and Criseyde, he'd been to Italy, absorbed the burgeoning literary scene there, and was quite openly chaffing at the traditional limitations of English letters. He was already a well-known author (for The Book of the Duchess) and translator (for his version of Roman de la Rose, among many other things), and he was impatient, as only people lit from inside by true writing talent can be. And so he looked to Homeric pastiche.

He didn't know it as that, of course; Homer was virtually unknown in the West at the time. Chaucer got his Troy materials from two slight but entertaining purportedly ancient accounts, one by Dares and one by Dictys (it's a shame Penguin hasn't seen fit to publish these in one fat volume with lots of notes - they could call it Chaucer's Homer and market it to schools - I'd buy one), plus a French poet named Benoit who wrote a long and boring Roman de Troye, plus a Sicilian writer named Guido who wrote another Historia Trojana. And then there was Chaucer's biggest source: Boccaccio, whose Il Filostrato is echoed everywhere in Troilus and Criseyde, often line for line.


Critics over the centuries have come up with lots of reasons why Chaucer never so much as mentions Boccaccio's name (and the omission doesn't just happen here - he uses Boccaccio just as heavily in The Canterbury Tales, also without a nod), but to my mind, the best summary of the state of affairs in Troilus and Criseyde comes from the great Chaucer scholar Don Howard:

When Boccaccio wrote Il Filostrato he was, we should remember, barely over twenty, an unknown poet in Naples, where he had been raised, trying to attract the attention of the Angevin court. Chaucer, on the other hand, had a courtly education and extensive exposure to courtly ways, and he understood the conventions of courtly culture quite well enough to see that Boccaccio had them wrong. This was probably why he never mentioned Boccaccio by name; there may have been other reasons, but this was reason enough.

Whatever the reason, Chaucer took that plump twenty-year-old's basic story, swirled it around in Dares and Dictys and Benoit and Guido, and then did what, reading him, you realize he so often did: made something stronger, more remarkable, and just plain better than all of it. Filostrato is a fairly conventional little evocation of courtly love; Troilus and Criseyde is a bursting, singing encyclopedia of humanity, the full realization of the character-heavy drama that's only hinted at in what we have of The Canterbury Tales, and the most thorough anatomy of love since Ovid finished his Ars amatoria. If you're reading along chronologically in Western literature, you eventually come across Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and suddenly realize it'd been 2000 years since the last time somebody wrote about actual people.

But here they are, in all their three-dimensional glory: there's pretty young Criseyde, even prettier young Troilus, and older, wiser Pandarus trying to bring them together in the midst of the Trojan War. The young lovers aren't the brightest bulbs in the chandelier (although Troilus is smart enough to care how convincingly he acts smitten, and Criseyde is smart enough not to want anybody to know that she knows how pretty she is), but this is more than compensated for by the incredible invention that is Pandarus, a seasoned loser in love who's secretly so proud of being in a position to dispense love-wisdom that willfully blinds himself to the damage his advice is doing. The lovers flirt, agonize, meet, fornicate, sleep it off, fornicate lots and lots more (Chaucer had an audience to entertain, after all) - then they're parted, first by the politics of war and then, amazingly, by Criseyde's 'She's Just Not That Into You' change of heart when she decides to be infatuated with the Greek warrior Diomede instead.



(This last was such an enormous departure from the forms and expectations of courtly love - a woman deserting one passionate himbo for another! trading up to the winning side! scandalous! - that the ladies all pretended to be outraged, and the Queen 'ordered' the grinning poet to write an entire work on the worthiness of women, as an apology)

It's all spectacularly, subversively good, and it's almost heartbreaking that most modern-day readers would never dream of looking at it. With poets I can almost understand this (Pound wasn't the only one to dolorously acknowledge that the more you read Chaucer, the more you see how truly great he is), but what's everybody else's excuse?

Part of the problem is that Chaucer sits right on the translation divide: if you study a thin manual for a few weeks and squint a bit while you're turning the pages, you can read him today just as he put the words on the page eight hundred years ago - but it's an effort. And scholars and teachers, proud of their own efforts to master Chaucer's English, have perhaps too stubbornly insisted that everybody do the same work - often even to the point of preserving Chaucer's exact spelling and syntax, something we certainly don't do for Shakespeare, who wrote centuries later than Chaucer. It's confusing, and it can be frustrating for those of us who, while rejoicing in Chaucer's original form, very much want him to have modern readers.

Take a quick example, one of the many times we see into Troilus' private anguish over Criseyde:

Wher is myn owene lady lief and deere?
Wer is hire white brest? Wher is it, where?
Wher ben hire armes and hire eyen cleeere,
That yesternyght this tyme with me were?
Now may I wepe allone many a teere,
And graspe aboute I may, but in this place,
Save a pilowe, I fynde naught t'enbrace.

(and that's a fairly painless choice, needing, as it does, virtually no trots on vocabulary)

That halts a modern reader right to the point of dropping the book altogether, or past that point - and so needlessly! With all due apologies to those professors and poetical sticklers, fully four-fifths of the fourteenth century anachronisms so lovingly preserved in that passage - and all through Troilus and Criseyde - preserve absolutely nothing worth preserving at the cost of even one potential reader, much less almost all of them.

Modern 'translations' often aren't much help either. Take the one by Philip Krapp from 1932:

O where is now my lovely lady dear?
Where are her breasts so white, O where, O where?
Where are her arms and where her eyes so clear,
Which yesternight were solace to my care?
Now I must weep alone in dark despair,
And blindly grope, but nothing in this place,
Except a pillow, find I to embrace!

Yeesh. And the estimable Neville Coghill's 1971 version isn't much better:

Where is my own, my lady loved and dear?
And where is her white breast? Where is it? Where?
Where are her arms? And where her eyes so clear,
That this time yesternight were with me here?
Now I may weep alone, full many a tear!
And wildly grasp about, but in her place
I only find a pillow to embrace.

You see the problem. In attempting to bring Chaucer alive to modern readers, both Krapp and Coghill mostly manage to hit him in the head with their shovels and then proceed to bury his still-twitching corpse. The solution is as simple to see as it is to obtain: what's needed is for a first-rate poet to simply and clearly comb Chaucer's diction into modernity, without getting in his way with where, O where's and the like. Even through the antique spellings, you can see immediately from that first excerpt that Chaucer was exulting in a rhythm his later adapters either don't hear or can't figure out how to match; we can only hope somebody will come along who hears and understands.

I hope it happens soon, because every year fewer and fewer passionate young people - who would learn from and love Troilus and Criseyde more than anybody - bother to read it. When I tell such young people that their various school educations have given them no real idea of the strange, vital, utterly living things the 'classics' of Western literature are, Troilus and Criseyde is always on the shortlist of such classics I have in mind. I just re-read it yesternight.