RULE 17: Omit Needless Words.

August 2012: In the beginning...

livebloggingtheapocalypse — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 22:15:00 -0500

FEATURED THIS MONTH:

Andy Scott

The Nerdistry of ~~Nicholas Clegg~~ Simon Pegg (Part 1)

Simon Pegg (Part 2)

Eric Meckley

Dreams Past, Dreams Future: On Steve Erickson’s Obama Novel

Thomas Breedlove

America’s Forgotten Man of Letters: An Appreciation of Robert Penn Warren

Blake Daniel & Eric Meckley

A Conversation: The Illustrated Man (Part 1)

Blake Daniel

On Bradbury and Good Writing

*Image Credit: “The New Religion: The Skull Beneath The Skin” by Damien Hirst

UNDER CONSTURCTION

livebloggingtheapocalypse — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 11:30:00 -0400

This site is currently being worked over… stay tuned for details.

On Bradbury and Good Writing

livebloggingtheapocalypse — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 20:47:00 -0400

by Blake J. Daniel

Ray Bradbury begins his last-published essay, a piece in The New Yorker (June, 2012), with these words: “When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents’ boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois.”

It’s telling that the late science-fiction author, who would have turned 92 this year, began an essay in the prestigious New Yorker not with a statement referencing his pedigree but rather with a hat-tip to both his youth and his grandparents. Such a man was Ray Bradbury! To be sure, any fan of Bradbury’s would nod in agreement at his introductory sentence, as it captures the author’s essential literary role as a “prophet of nostalgia” (to use Patrick West’s phrase). Whether you’ve read through Bradbury’s other-worldly stories like The Martian Chronicles or if you’ve picked up one of his this-worldly “Green Town trilogy,” Bradbury always had a knack for writing through the gold-colored lenses of his Midwestern boyhood experience.

I can relate to Bradbury’s sentiment. I spent many hours at my own grandparents’ houses pouring over books and magazines – some fiction (Great Illustrated Classics and Stephen King were a near-constant in my youth), some non-fiction (Reader’s Digest and Boys’ Life, anyone?) – much to the impatience of my more athletically-inclined older brother. The most formative years in my love for the written word were what we might call the Douglas Spaulding years, the latter years of Elementary School in which all the world seemed open and interesting and mine for the taking.

Like Bradbury before me, I would argue that all writers – or, more broadly, all lovers of good writing – are borne of fantastical childhood experiences. As Wordsworth wrote, “the child is father of the man.” And Bradbury so helpfully shows us that these experiences need not be restricted to the classroom; a love of good writing often springs forth where one least expects it. To be sure, words are fundamental in this process: one can surely encounter the beauty of writing in a literature class, pouring over Huckleberry Finn or Moby Dick for the very first time; or at the movie theater, listening to the sharp lines of dialogue spoken by Humphrey Bogart or Kevin Spacey against a swelling score; or in the pews, listening to a preacher expound the Gospel of John with clerical conviction. And for Bradbury, a love for writing was fostered at his grandparents’ boarding house while reading science-fiction magazines. Indeed, one delightfully imagines Bradbury sprawled out on the living room floor with his chin in his palms, adults stepping over him with bemused looks on their Depression-era faces.)

Yet Bradbury helps us see that a love for good writing also comes from the numinous, those events and encounters in life that bowl us over and surpass all pedantic understanding. It might be a hug from a distant father. A cold breeze at the onset of fall. A lightning storm. Sometimes after such an encounter one feels compelled to capture it, to put words to an experience that, indeed, defies comprehension. To yoke the sacred to the secular. To write.

As the 12 year old Douglas Spaulding exclaims in Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, “I’m really alive! I never knew it before, or if I did I don’t remember!” Writing – and reading good writing – is such a way to remember.

Simon Pegg Pt. 2

livebloggingtheapocalypse — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 20:42:00 -0400

by Andy Scott

Part II: An Examination of Spaced and Paul

If Benji Dunn was the first of Simon Pegg’s characters to inhabit my consciousness, then Tim Bisley is perhaps the closest of all Pegg’s characters to a personification of my own repressed and pseudo-nerd psyche. Tim is the slacker comic book artist from the short-lived TV series Spaced, Pegg’s first foray into mainstream British culture and his gateway into future work with various Hollywood projects. It is the character of Tim, as well as Graeme Willy of Paul that are the closest manifestations to Pegg’s own true geek, and these characters allow Pegg to publicly explore the various social influences that have been so strong in his formation. Most prominent in both projects are references to Star Wars, comic book enthusiasm and an interest in the paranormal.

It may seem odd to combine and review the two seemingly unrelated projects within Pegg’s film career, especially given the close ties Spaced holds with other of Pegg’s films. However, I find in Spaced and Paul the two characters Pegg represents that are the most consistent, and make them worth investigating at length. Also, this is not a proper review of either the show or film because I’m not entirely sure how to review a show or film. Therefore, I will call it an examination. Perhaps the imaginary reader in my mind will ask, “but why not include Spaced in a review of Pegg’s work with director Edgar Wright?” Ah, but I’ve already anticipated this question. It is true that Edgar Wright developed much of his style in Spaced, but there is a different social connection between the sort of nerd Pegg plays as Tim and as Graeme. Also, the argument that Spaced is just the first permutation of the Wright/Frost/Pegg trifecta takes away from the enormous contributions that Jessica Stevenson poured into the show. It is as much about Stevenson as it is about Pegg, and so it deserves its own consideration apart from Wright’s movies. This is not to say there is no significant connections between Spaced and Hot Fuzz or Shaun of the Dead, but we’ll get to that in due time.

The show itself is very funny, but not brilliant. Pegg and Stevenson excel in both writing and acting Tim and Daisy’s exploits, but somehow it falls short of being truly memorable. Most of the episodes of Spaced feel a bit like hearing an older sibling or cousin’s favorite joke and not being entirely in on the punch line. It’s funny, but certain aspects of what made the series so enjoyable are certainly lost to a decade of time and my relative youth. Perhaps the subtleties are lost simply because the show is very British. The filming takes place in London, and the story lines are concerned with the lives of young semi-professionals who try to get by with as little work as possible. The most enjoyable moments are when characters find themselves arguing and dissecting pop culture. Pegg spends nearly an entire episode arguing against The Phantom Menace, and Nick Frost’s militant has-been character Mike fantasizes scenes from Apocalypse Now in his bedroom. Like an episode of Friends on speed, Spaced takes the close-quarters tension of tenant living and introduces borderline manic personalities that all desperately want to be liked and accepted.

Perhaps this desire for understanding and inclusion is what drives the heart of Pegg’s chracters in both Spaced and Paul. Tim Bisley is in many ways an exaggerated and inflated version of Pegg, a comic book enthusiast who worships Star Wars and finds himself often immersed in fantasy sequences that show surreal figments from his subconscious or replay scenes from movies like Pulp Fiction. It is the simple joy of exploring comics and space opera folklore that connect Pegg’s Tim Bisley with Pegg’s Graeme Willy across space, time and medium. The fundamental difference and evolution in the character comes from the influence of Hollywood. Paul feels in many ways like Pegg and Frost’s other movies, full of dry humor and Ewok jokes. Their interactions are what one would expect of two nerdy best friends traveling across Southwestern America in search of aliens, comic books and Area 51. Yet the whole movie seems very packaged, tidy, and not nearly as raw or unique as Spaced.

One of the more surprising aspects in Paul is the veracity in which Pegg and Frost attack Fundamentalist Christianity. Using the presence of an alien as the fly in the ointment of literal seven-day creation theory, characters are constantly reprimanded for belief in a very shallow and hollow representation of the faith. This is not to say that the dialogue isn’t funny, but that the attacks seem to be more of Pegg’s intellectual exasperation against belief in the face of evolutionary facts, vis a vis, the presence of Paul. While it’s not surprising that Pegg and Frost, both avowed atheists, would relish a chance to rip on conservative Christian beliefs, its presence in a big-budget Hollywood film is unexpected.

Overall what the movie accomplishes is to bring characteristics of Tim Bisley to fruition. A struggling comic book artist and his writer friend meet with success after a chance encounter with a pot-smoking alien. It’s a scenario that would be welcome and at home in Spaced. While the ending of Paul is predictable, the rest of the film is an enjoyable reminder of why Pegg is so good at playing the nerd. It seems to be part of his ontology. Both Spaced and Paul achieve is a level of fantasy that brings the comic book enthusiast into a position of prominence, and remind viewers that we are all slightly neurotic, fairly awkward, and deeply in need of good friends.

Considering Simon Pegg (Part 1)

livebloggingtheapocalypse — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 12:36:00 -0400

by Andy Scott

A Review of Nerd Do Well [1]

Simon Pegg first came into my consciousness as Benji Dunn, the nerdy-capable tech whiz who aids and abets Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible series. Playing a lovable, dweeby scamp who shies away from violence in favor of technological trickery, Pegg navigated his way into my heart. And that was before he gave me zombies. Benji is an innocent nerd sucked irrevocably into a bigger story, and it is this same subtle but lovable nerdiness that Pegg explores and delivers in his autobiography, Nerd Do Well: A Small Boy’s Journey to Becoming a Big Kid. [2] In detailing the particulars from his upbringing in rural England to starring in some of our generations’ funniest movies, Pegg makes it clear that his journey from boy to kid was simply unavoidable.

Pegg, born Simon John Beckingham, was born to play the nerd. He changed his name to Pegg after his mother remarried, and it is the influence of his mother that is strongest in his narrative. It was her involvement in local theatre that prompted Pegg to take his earliest roles, and the backstage seems to be the crucible for many of his most valuable lessons about friendship and professionalism. More than anything, Nerd Do Well is a lesson in what Pegg would call circularity and fate. The most influential socio-cultural effects on his childhood come from the projects and passions that he is most involved in now. From the screen, Star Wars, zombies, and Dr. Who prepared a young Simon Pegg for his eventual involvement in space dramas, zombie rom-coms and even an appearance in Dr. Who.

This fantastical nerdiness is readily available through not only the stories Pegg tells, but in the writing itself. Each section of the book begins with a noir-esque tale of Simon Pegg–as-Bruce Wayne/Batman archetype who saves the world from evil (his editor, Ben). These brief scenes allow the reader to explore the hilarious inner nerd that Pegg has learned to guide and utilize so deftly, as well as offer a glimpse into someone else’s world of daydreams and what-if fantasy.

Often times, however, it’s not certain to whom Pegg is writing. The most convoluted section of his writing is early on in the descriptions of his sexual awakening. Details of his earliest sexual exploits may be funny to some, but ultimately serve little purpose to the grander narrative of his involvement in acting. It seems as though Pegg is writing what he assumes people will want to know about him rather than sticking to what he knows best. He does this without actually having to let the audience into his personal life, as he makes barely any mention of his wife and child. By focusing on his exploits of his childhood, a barrier of time and the privilege of name-changing anonymity give Pegg distance from the stories he tells, and gives him a chance to write in bawdy tones the details of his sexual awakening he assumes people want to read about. The trouble is that this does nothing to tell about who Pegg is as an actor, nor does it give any hint as to how Pegg went from nerdy schoolboy to faux nerdy actor. Instead, the narrative of Pegg’s early years is often bogged down with anecdotes that would feel at home only in British tabloids for horny 10 year olds boys. Whether or not Pegg feels that this is a helpful soul-baring exercise or merely perfunctory autobiographical writing is unclear. This line of self-giving and emotional outpouring is one in which Pegg dances across repeatedly. The history of his parent’s breakup, for example, is barely mentioned, although the pain of his father’s abandonment is evident in Pegg’s refusal to mention much about him. While Pegg’s storytelling is funny and engaging overall, moments of sexual exploits seem disingenuous and forced while the emotion he feels while acting or watching film seems raw and closer to whom Pegg really is.

This is not to say Pegg doesn’t have a purpose for telling his story in all its awkward and bumbling detail. In the end his book is truly about a small boy who realizes his dream. While the dream itself is ever evolving, the desire to perform, not fame or fortune, is what continues to drive Pegg. His performance is part of his story, and the anecdotes from his Gloucestershire upbringing offer telling if not hilarious lessons of what it takes to be an actor in the Big World. These lessons, from the backstage of the Brockworth community theatre, the Gloucester community pool to English drama schools, all are indicative of how Simon Pegg became Shaun Riley, Tim Bisley, Nicholas Angel and Benji Dunn.

What becomes abundantly clear from the onset of his narrative is that Pegg knows what he is talking about. Not only about his upbringing, comics, and Star Wars lore, but the broad socio-cultural impacts that film has on the psyches of young filmgoers. It is here that Pegg is at his finest. In two chapters dealing with his obsession and love of the Star Wars franchise (and his heartbreak over the prequels), Pegg traverses not only his own feelings and admiration for how film can impact viewers, but how it operates in a much broader cultural context. He offers very pointed and brilliant remarks about how the function of Star Wars in a very particular moment of American society allowed for it’s explosion as a cultural phenomenon. He also connects the work of George A. Romero (who would be sainted in Pegg’s world) with the importance of zombies in our society. This section of the book is all too short, and only offers glimpses of Pegg’s discerning and witty cultural commentary.

The dissection of film stops short of his own work, however, and it replaced by what seems to be the perfunctory thank-you to all the people who helped him along the way. The projects that made him immensely popular get nothing more than a passing thought, apparently because they are the culmination of his journey and not part of the evolution itself. Spaced, the show that brought Pegg into the limelight is barely mentioned other than the people who were involved in its conception and production. This is understandable on some level because the book’s purpose is to chronicle his upbringing, but is also disappointing in its omissions. Aspects of his friendship with Edgar Wright and Nick Frost are thin, leaving the reader wondering how the films that made him famous ever came to fruition. The book’s latter focus is instead on making sure everyone gets his or her due. Thanking everyone from Eggy Helen (an ex) to Chris Martin of Coldplay, Pegg offers salutations that bog down his writing and keep more interesting and relevant history out of his story. After adolescence, Pegg’s narrative becomes more of a quick skimming over various professional chances and auditions in which he is careful to mention nearly anyone who has helped him on his way. Clunky bits aside, the writing still is engaging and funny, and do offer some hints as to how the Pegg/Wright/Frost comedy trifecta came to be. Yet these moments are too far and few between however, and it seems as though Pegg’s exploration of his past stops after he ceases to be a small boy. In the end, this is an engaging, funny and enjoyable read. What Simon Pegg offers is a window into an actor realizing his dreams. Acting the part of the nerd has led Pegg to become a manifestation of his childhood dreams, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. What emerges from this his writing is a welcome departure from the myriad of self-congratulatory tomes produced by pop culture icons and scions. It reads honest and humble, and is worth picking up.

[1] Note: Readers looking for a review of the UK’s deputy Prime Minister’s biography will be disappointed. This is not about Nick Clegg, but Simon Pegg, the actor of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz fame. Interestingly enough though, both men are atheists. Perhaps it’s the double g at the end of their name.

[2] Nerd Do Well: A Small Boy’s Journey to Becoming a Big Kid

Gotham Publishing, June 2011. 368 pages.

Dreams Past, Dreams Future: On Steve Erickson's Obama Novel

livebloggingtheapocalypse — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 10:39:00 -0400

by Eric Meckley

On November 4^th, 2008 I was in my apartment in Evanston, Illinois. As far as I remember, I wasn’t watching the results of the Presidential Election. Whether I was paying any attention or not, the events of the night made little or no lasting impression on me. What took place that night hangs no more vibrantly in my mind than the facts I learned about the Whiskey Rebellion in fourth grade, the first time my particularly desolate corner of northwestern Pennsylvania was mentioned in our history book. I was nearing the nadir of my political disaffection. I did not vote in the election.

The first and last time I cast a ballot in a Presidential Election was 2004, when my roommate and I proudly displayed a blue Bush / Cheney sign in our Hyde Park apartment window. I’m pretty sure I took the train home to northern Indiana to vote for the man pundits liked to depict as a dim, half-wit – but who had seen the country through its worst tragedy in decades – instead of the slender gunboatman who may have been shot in the ass, and who looked like the narrator from Santa Claus is Coming To Town. Bush said he was a Christian, and I believed him. Cheney glared and growled a lot, enough for me to approve of him as “tough-as-nails” (an unreservedly positive attribute, to my 20 year old mind). And anyway, what does a VP even do? Kerry always seemed to have his eyes half closed, and I don’t even remember his running-mate. Such was the level of my political sophistication at the time. And I was enrolled at arguably the finest institution of higher learning in the nation, Ivies be damned.

In 2008, I was finally coming to see that the Republican party had been bought out by vicious scoundrels (or perhaps, had been owned by them all along… this sneaking suspicion was confirmed later still), and I couldn’t bring myself to vote for the aged puppet they selected as their candidate, a hero and a moderate who had twisted himself into a caricature, a grotesque shadow of himself, in order to appease the party’s wolves howling at his door. Not to mention his partner in crime, whose selection had sparked a glimmer of hope in my heart – because I knew nothing about her and thought for sure that the selection of a woman was an inherently good thing – that was quickly snuffed into oblivion the moment she opened her mouth.

I was a Reagan baby and his poster was on my dorm room wall, and I yearned for the halcyon days of the party I was too young to remember and too stubborn to learn anything about. But the hold that mythology had on my heart was weakening, and no nail was hammered more vigorously into the coffin of my Republican youth than the one driven home by the colossal and astounding ineptitude and ignorance of a certain governor from Alaska. I didn’t want a wizened grandfather with dollar signs in his eyes and a beauty queen buffoon leading my nation. I wasn’t a man without a country, but I was a person without a party. I had been burned by those I had been raised to trust (at least politically) and burned bad. And so, when the HOPE campaign rolled into town I was disaffected, cynical, and skeptical, and guarding my hopes and my heart. I simply wasn’t ready to hop on board another train that promised to be bound for glory, but might just as well be headed straight to hell.

The summer a junior senator from Illinois moved into a Georgian-revival house on South Greenwood Avenue in Chicago, I was hunkered down in a two-bedroom basement apartment with two friends about six blocks away at 54^th and Ingleside, blissfully oblivious to the fact that I could have strolled past the home of the future President on any given day. Maybe seen him walking his dog or waved to his kids. The far-reaching implications of this reality never hit me until I read Steve Erickson’s new novel These Dreams of You and was reminded of the night that Obama won the election.

I had a handful of friends who hopped the El from Evanston into the city, to be in Grant Park when the results came in. “Insane” is the only descriptor I remember being attached to the experience by my friends. Maybe “amazing.” That’s it. That’s all I have to show for myself of that night. And it is only now, almost four years down the pipe, that I realize what a colossally stupid thing it was for me not to go along. It will be something that forever haunts me, an indelible little piece of regret leaning in the corner of my mind, taunting me from the shadows of the past and gathering dust.

I could have been amongst the thousands Alexander Nordhoc (Erickson’s central character, known as Zan throughout the novel) saw on the screen of his television, forever closer to that moment in his canyon on the edge of Los Angeles than I was, 14 miles up the shore of Lake Michigan, unable to see that history would have been happening right in front of me if I had simply mustered the energy to go next door. A friend from high school’s dad had snuck into “The Rumble in the Jungle” as a young missionary kid in Africa and seen Ali do the unthinkable. On this November night, I sat in my apartment like an asshole and failed to witness America “imagine its most unfathomable possibility” as Erickson puts it in the novel. Even if the man turned into a demagogue or worse, I could have sat back in my chair and nodded my head in self-righteous satisfaction that I knew the masses that night were merely fodder for the propaganda machine. There was nothing to loose and everything to gain, and I simply missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I am exceedingly proud of my country for bringing about the reality of that night, and one way I will do penance for failing to be a witness of that moment is to do everything in my power to ensure that my son doesn’t make the same sort of mistake.

It is entirely of a piece with the novel that the contemplation or witnessing of history leads to the concern and contemplation of children and child rearing. Children are the focal center of the book. Erickson’s novel opens with Zan in Los Angeles watching the live broadcast from Chicago’s Grant Park with his wife Viv, his son Parker, and his adopted Ethiopian daughter Sheba. In a fine bit of wry irony, Sheba – who “is the color of the man on the television” – “is the only one in the family not thrilled by the election result … the household’s sole supporter of the opposing candidate, a man the age of grandfathers and the color of snow, neither of which the small girl has known.” This humorous bit of detail leads to Zan’s attempts to account for or explain Sheba’s enthusiasm for this candidate. Is it because he reminds her of the pictures of her adopted mother’s father, that she’s just trying to mess with the family, or is it that “in her four-year-old soul she’s already come to believe the color of snow is preferable to the color of … well, pick your racist poison––chocolate? coffee? mud?” Parker, who is constantly hooked up to his iPod and listening to gangster rap, jumps for joy while his father watches in jubilant disbelief and then weeps with the exultant faces he sees on the television screen.

These sort of meditations on race, American identity, society, and culture are what make some of the great moments of the novel. They aren’t preachy, they aren’t clichéd, they demand personal involvement, contemplation, engagement. Erickson enters into these moments by centering the novel around how the precocity, the unpredictability, the incomprehensibility of children – especially in our particular American moment – is a beautiful, terrifying, and alternately painfully and wonderfully disruptive force that throws into sharp relief the realities and absurdities of our own lives, and of contemporary American modes of being. This particularly resonated with me, as I have been a part-time student / full-time dad for the whole of my son’s young life. I know what he means. I know how Zan feels towards his childless colleagues who thinks that “there was little comprehension of the infinite variables that children bring, the way that children lay waste to rational odds, how one always has to err on the side of the long shot. Someone who doesn’t have children may grasp the volume of time they take up but can’t understand the way children won’t be compartmentalized, the way children can’t be consigned to their own rooms in the city of one’s life.”

Branching out from the central meditation on the effects of children, the book grapples with Obama’s election and American politics and racism, the sub-prime mortgage crisis (and as such, not only the predatory practices of the banks, but also the wild irresponsibility that so many have fallen into in order to support what they believed was a necessary lifestyle, which is itself an indictment of American material culture), the fading job market, the culture of professionalism that increasingly finds family and children inconceivable in light of the never-ending quest for self-fulfillment, and the deep desire we have to organize, control, and contain our lives, which seem (because of all these factors) to be spinning helplessly out of control. The central question of the book has two sides: “How can we regain control?”; or, “How can we live with being out of control?” And so the story eventually finds the Nordhocs embarking on a search for Sheba’s true origins, her biological family, which pulls them from their foreclosed home in Los Angeles to London and Ethopia, Paris, Berlin, and back again, by way of a novel-within-the-novel, James Joyce’s Ulysses, David Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, and the 1968 presidential campaign.

These facts should come as no surprise to fans of Erickson. I have only read Zeroville, and came by that only by chance (it was, quite literally, the single most perfect book recommendation I have ever received), but it was one of the most extraordinary books I have read. In that novel, like this one, Erickson hangs fiction and fantasy on the hook of reality and history, and the result is a wild, wide-open window into the stuff of life, a playground for the imagination, where ideas can run fast and free. I was disappointed in These Dreams of You because it didn’t have this same freedom and playfulness, and that hurt the story that was struggling to make itself heard. I was disappointed because I know Erickson is capable of better: a more subtle artistry, a less conventional, less linear virtuosity that weaves time, memory, reality, and fiction into a more balanced and engaging, enrapturing piece of work. Vikar Jerome, the globetrotting “cineautist” voyages through history fragmentedly, crazily, and sometimes unbelievably (at least when you think of the colossal coincidences that would be necessary to get him into the situations we find him in), but it never feels as forced or outlandish as the events of These Dreams of You can feel.

My critique thus comes not on the level of style, nor content, but with regards to organization, arrangement, and editing. I think that the accessibility and the linearity of this novel are to the detriment of its power, the force of the story that is trying to get out. It is almost as if the American insistence on control and continuity in the face of terrifying, uncontrollable, mystical and unexplained reality (and here we are reminded of children again) has taken hold of the novel and shaken it into an all too familiar order that is more manageable, but stripped of its vital power. In These Dreams of You, Erickson moved the most incredible in the story from the periphery (where it stood in Zeroville) to the center of the novel, and rather than deepening its relationship to the story and heightening the cosmic mystery, it had precisely the opposite effect. The result is that this novel is not so mythological, but threatenens to be cosmically coincidental, as if the election of America’s first black president – like the origins of their adopted daughter Sheba – was merely an accident of unbelievable chance, rather than the outcome of the rational and concerted effort of millions of people choosing a different future, the impossible possibility, for their nation.

Flawed though it may be, These Dreams of You is still a deeply important novel well worth your time. You ought to know going in that things will bog down when the story shifts from the Nordhoc’s journey to London and beyond to ’68, and then the Bowie story line, but press on. Reading this book called up so many thoughts and reflections about myself, this country, our world (as I tried to illustrate in the opening of this essay) that I see as indispensible to who I am – and who I am becoming – as a person, a citizen, an aspiring academic in the field of literature, and as a Christian, and essential to my figuring out how to live in 21^st Century America. If you’ve read Zeroville or another of Erickson’s “less conventional” books, prepare for this novel not to be what you hope it will be. But don’t let that discourage you. And if you’ve never read any Erickson, this is potentially a fantastic place to start. You may love it, as many did, and you may enjoy it but desire something more, in which case you can move onto the masterpiece that is Zeroville, and beyond (especially if you love film or 70s punk rock… if either of those are true of you Zeroville is absolutely an essential read). Steve Erickson is woefully underappreciated, much to the detriment of his potential readers and the literary culture of America today. He is a treasure, a brilliant artist with deep insights into the psyche of this nation. He deserves to be read, needs to be read. Near the end of the novel, Zan thinks to himself:

This was the great test, whether there was a song the country could sing in common. Instead, more than ever it’s a country of many songs all of them noisy, without a single melody that anyone cares about carrying. The country is a babel on not just melodies that no one shares but memory; and as Babel fractured language into thousands, the country is the sum total of a memory fractured into millions, not one of them a memory of the country as it actually has ever existed.

There is a melody in this book, and in Zeroville as well, a song of wonder and hope, that catches high on the winds of history and is blown to and fro around the globe, back and forth through time. The question is: will you take the time to hear that melody, to have its cadence set the tempo of the drumbeat to which you march through life, will you allow your memory to be shaped by it and so together sing the next impossible possibility? My answer is: I hope so.

Robert Penn Warren: An Overdue Appreciation

livebloggingtheapocalypse — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 09:46:00 -0400

by Thomas Breedlove

(I should note here, on the outset, that this is not a real book review. There are a number of good and bad reviews of the book already available, including the New York Times 1946 review.)

There are really only two reasons to write a review of a National Book Award winning novel published in 1946. One is to celebrate the author. The other is to ask why we’ve stopped reading the book. In All the King’s Men those two purposes meet hand in hand. When we begin to extol Robert Penn Warren and consider the extent and variety of his success, we must ask why he is fading so quickly from prominence.

Warren is the only author to receive a Pulitzer Prize for both fiction and for poetry. His three Pulitzers place him second (behind four others) on the all time list. He was selected the national Poet Laureate in 1945. All the Kings’ Men won the National Book Award, and the collection Promises won the National Book Award for Poetry. He was selected for the Jefferson Lecture, rewarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and elected as a MacArthur Fellow. Yet now compared with his contemporaries – the great American novelists Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck and Faulkner – Warren has almost disappeared from our literary history, relegated to the occasional odd course on Southern American literature.

There is nothing singular about authorial decline. Warren’s Vanderbilt roommate, Allen Tate, was hailed in his twenties as the Southern T.S. Eliot, praised for his dense, imagistic poems which quickly gained notoriety. Almost as swiftly, all but one of Tate’s poems [1] were summarily forgotten.

But unlike Tate and other such examples, Warren’s celebrity came neither from ascribed potential, nor from participation in a single literary movement. Warren’s esteem increased with age and his most significant awards were won in his 40’s and 50’s. Far from aligning with any stylistic or cultural moment, the variation in his body of work ascribes an almost protean quality to Warren, the author.

This variation is apparent in both form and substance. Warren’s forms fill the spectrum of literature. He wrote essays, plays, children’s books, novels, verse, textbooks and biography, but his variation in substance is more telling for understanding his work. This is nowhere more apparent than Warren’s flip-flop on the issue of segregation. Warren’s first publication was an essay contributed to the Southern Agrarian’s manifesto I’ll Take my Stand. That essay, “The Briar Patch,” outlined a progressive view of equality but maintained the conservative Southern values of segregation and agrarianism.

Warren is sometimes remembered for this early stance as an antiquarian and closet racist. He is remembered for this despite the concurrent liberality of his civil rights views, and despite his reversal on segregation two decades later in Segregation: The Inner Conflict of the South and Who Speaks for the Negro?, a compendium of interviews with civil rights activists.

This difficulty in pinpointing Warren might well explain the unmoored nature of his career. His writing was too varied to fit neatly as a must-read example of any moment in our literary history. He was born in 1905––too late to be an authentic voice of the Civil War and Reconstruction, but too young for the World War I, and subsequently too old for World War II.

The very breadth of his writings and life have spread his influence thinly in any given place. Though he is a great novelist he is certainly not the finest of his generation, though a great poet certainly not the American poet of the mid 20^th century, though a voice of the South, come too late to be integral in understanding that time and place which figure so strongly in our national identity. But what remains in all this shapeshifting is essential to understanding why we should hesitate to let a writer such as Warren disappear from readership, for in the enigma of his place we are able to see his life and work as a microcosm for the quicksilver nature of our culture.

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I volunteered to write this review as a sort of finishing salvo in a recommendation for All the King’s Men. I didn’t realize, until I began a week later, that I had crossed one of my only cardinal lines in academia. In all circumstances I avoid writing critically on any piece of Southern literature.

The simple reason for this aversion is that I first read Faulkner and Welty and O’Connor and Percy outside of academic settings. I want to find them each time as I left them, not for arguments or essay fodder, but for comfort. The complex reason is a fear that something will change with criticism. I’m afraid thinking critically will rob the magic from my favorite books. That magic that they have in their temporal and cultural and geographic identity, that their magic, which smacks so loudly in my ear of family and grandparents, will rub away like the gold of an arcade coin. Or I fear that there is no correspondence between what I believe is my heritage and the heritage of these books.

This confession risks diverting this essay into something as self-serving and uninteresting as a catalogue of crushes. But those who have read All the Kings’ Men are perhaps already aware of the correspondence between my vain little idiosyncrasy and Warren’s novel. Beneath the novel’s higher dramas of politics and murder and blackmail, Jack Burden narrates his forced confrontation with his own heritage and the process of understanding what it means to him, how he’s indebted to, and injured by it.

Through Jack, Warren taps into the curious relationship we have with the things, stories and memories that exist in the periphery of our lives, between us and our families, between us and the places we live or used to live. This is a far stronger relationship with the past than what I invoke with Southern Literature. Warren is not interested in Jack’s identity, not in that elusive post-modern ecstasy of “finding one’s self.” Perhaps the novel’s most salient philosophical affirmation is that identity is not found in catalogues, family trees or books but in choices of moral responsibility.

Despite this insistence on moral independence, Jack Burden, as his name signifies, must bear his history as a part of himself. The novel equally condemns those who gloss the shortcomings of their history and those who attempt to sever its connection to them. For Jack the present is always a mediation between the past and the future. This predicament recalls a moment in Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, a triumphant scene where the brothers free themselves, literally and symbolically, tossing their deceased father’s baggage as they board a train. This scene is positive, liberating; it’s perhaps the first thing in the movie the brothers get right relationally.

It also represents a modern possibility that Warren denies to his characters. Jack cannot jettison his burden and exit into the blue yonder. His past is bound to him as surely as the symbolic name which distinguishes and separates him from the other characters. There is a world of typical names: Adam and Anne Stanton, Judge Irwin, and Sadie Burke. There is the world of names that might populate modern gangster flicks: Tiny Duffy and the Young Executive and the Boss and Sugar Boy. Alone amidst these is Jack Burden, attempting by one theory after another to make sense between history and the present, or status quo and progress, or heritage and self.

What, again, is denied the narrator is the possibility of cutting loose from the past. It’s misguided to assume that such action would occur only to the modern thinker. The notion of complete independence is at least as old as Descartes. Being and Nothingness was published in 1943, and the belief in singular autonomous identity was growing in popularity. In Warren’s insistence that the past is inescapable, we see his refusal of such a notion, his rejection that an individual can escape the zodiac of their own history.

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Perhaps we have stopped reading Robert Penn Warren because his career was too long, his output too varied to fit neatly into any moment of which he could be an indicative and necessary read. Warren’s enigmatic career of timelessness [peut-on l’utiliser comme ca?] is paralleled by his insistence of the past’s importance in the present. His works all seem to recall some other time, to remember, or celebrate or lament another period, to the point that they have no singular home in our literary history.

It’s for this reason that we should pick up the novel. In a cultural moment fixated on progress and change and growth, Warren reminds us that we are not the first generation that exists or matters. When we pick change over status quo or progress over past we are foolish to think that history starts anew from each decision.

Of course, Warren didn’t write All the King’s Men to teach lessons or improve society. He didn’t write it to fix our cultural obsession with newness, or to fix any cultural obsession. But the world of All the King’s Men is as familiar in ways as it must have been to post-Huey Long Louisiana. In Jack’s sometimes overwrought but always inventive language, we see the political as an echo of the personal.

This is reason enough to pick up the book. The fullness of the language (even when the fullness threatens to strangle the plot and itself) is reason to return to it. To return to Jack’s monologue, where despite every effort to sever the old and start anew, “Everything seems an echo of something else.”

[1] Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” is still well anthologized and read.

A Conversation: The Illustrated Man (Part 1)

livebloggingtheapocalypse — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 23:43:00 -0400

by Blake Daniel & Eric Meckley

In this, the first of our monthly conversations, we discuss the late Ray Bradbury’s masterful short story collection The Illustrated Man. Blake & I set out to cover the book in one sitting, but discovered we just had too much to talk about… So, this will be the first part of a conversation carried on throughout the month of August. Click the photos above to learn more about Bradbury or order the story collection.

Eric: So, what’d you think of the collection? Have your read any Bradbury before?

Blake: I read Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes back in high school.

Eric: Oh wow great.

Blake: I’m happy to say that both were required reading. And, perhaps more importantly, I had a buddy who was really into Bradbury. He was always talking my ear off about Bradbury.

Eric: That’s fantastic. I think my younger brother read 451 in high school.

Blake: Nice. But not you?

Eric: Sadly, no. Somehow (unsurprisingly) my high school thought it would be better for us to read Heat and Dust about the love affairs of British colonialists in India, rather than one of America’s great contemporary writers.

Blake: Ahh, I see…

Eric: But oh well. My one consolation is the fun I’ve had reading him now for the first time. And I’ve got lots to look forward to…

Blake: So is The Illustrated Man your first encounter with Bradbury?

Eric: Yes. And actually, I didn’t even read it initially, but rather listened to the audiobook via audible.com while mowing the lawn. I got it through one of the various free trials I’ve done through the many years under different screen names.

Blake: That is an image of which Bradbury would be proud!

Eric: I know it! There are few things better than battling an overgrown lawn with an old-style manual push mower, waiting for the immenant alien arrival. Excuse me, Martian. He loves Mars.

Blake: Progressive and pastoral! … I’m grateful you recommended it to me. I started out reading it on my iPad before checking out a 1951 edition of the collection from Perkins.And I found it to be immanently readable - the before before-bed short story night cap.

Eric: Yeah, that’s perfect. How did this Bradbury voyage compare to others?

Blake: I’m tempted to say it’s more akin to F451 than anything, but in truth I hardly remember that story!

Eric: Yeah, I can see that. That makes me even more excited to read 451!

Blake: It has echoes of Something Wicked This Way Comes in terms of its pastoral, early-20th century, small town, nostalgic feel, but that text favored fantasy and horror over science fiction.

Eric: Interesting…

Blake: What really primed the pump for The Illustrated Man was reading a short story called “All Summer in a Day” back in high school.

Eric: Yeah, what was that about?

Blake: It’s a wonderful morality tale set in the rains of Venus.

Eric: Ohhhhhh, to which we return in a much darker and more horrifying way in The Illustrated Man.

Blake: Yes. A group of school children crowd around their classroom window waiting for the 7-year-long Venusian rains to cease.

Eric: Fascinating. So they are like, in one of the Sun domes?

Blake: It seems like it! Their plight parallels that of the explorers in “The Long Rain” Perhaps that story is a prequel, of sorts.

Bradbury’s short story “The Long Rain”, follows astronauts stranded on Venus during a mission to the planet intended to aid in its colonization. It is always raining on the planet, and the men are seeking shelter in an outpost known as a “Sun dome”, each of which contains a replica of the Sun, as well as food and clothing.

Eric: Sure… before the Venusians wreck the sun domes and colonization efforts.

Blake: Right! Those crazy Venusians!

Eric: “The drowning takes hours…” That’s one of the terrifying lines I (more or less) remember… The storm description in that story, where Bradbury likened it to a giant creature walking on electric legs was particularly visceral to me.

Blake: Yes. He really crafts some poignant and terrifying images in this collection.

Eric: I think it captures his abiltity to take the familiar and write it in ways that just blow the lid off things.

Blake: I was particularly struck by his description of the rains of Venus turning everything into gray mush.

Eric: Yeah, like the faces of the men… and if they lay down even a minute they began to be overgrown by vegetation.

Blake: That’s right. I just found the quotation:

“They were as white as mushrooms, as white as he was. Venus bleached everything away in a few months. Even the jungle was an immense cartoonish nightmare, for how could the jungle be green with no sun…?”

Eric: That’s it right there. So simple, but so horrifying.

Blake: This is, in my mind, one of the few times in The Illustrated Man that a foreign landscape itself proves insidious.

Eric: I think there’s a lot of room for interpretive play there, especially along the lines of what Toni Morrison does in her book Playing in the Dark. She looks at ways black and white are used as signifiers in American literature.

Blake: Interesting. I’m not familiar with that work.

Eric: I was really struck and impressed by the ways that Bradbury sort of defined the “conventions” that Morrison identifies. In that book she looks at ways that whiteness in particular is used to signify the horrific.

Blake: Oh, wow.

Eric: Like in Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, there is this huge white ice monster encountered at the South Pole, and this for Morrison, hugely significant.

Blake: And these astronauts are literally pummeled into mushy whiteness.

Eric: Right. Their grotesque whiteness, it’s literally a symptom of their lust to colonize and dominate, same as in Pym, it’s fascinating.

Blake: Wow, okay.

Eric: I really think Bradbury deserves way more credit in this area than he gets.

Blake: Speaking of which, what did you think of “The Other Foot”?

Eric: Yeah, for me, I was just blown away by that story.

Blake: Here Bradbury addresses the bleak history of Jim Crow by discussing a Martian colony…comprised entirely of black citizens!

Eric: I think it’s just brilliant. And I love the fact that THEY leave earth. They aren’t sent there, they go of their own volition.

Blake: Yeah. Bradbury likes to subvert “our” norms.

Eric: I know it. think there’s a ton to be done critically with that story and others of his. To write that story in 1950 is to me both incredibly prescient and bold.

Blake: Considering that he’s writing in the “heat” of the Cold War, he likes to acknowledge the hubris of American ideologues.

Eric: Right! I think he really saw the way America was “colonizing”, acting like an empire, in ways that it took many other people a long time to figure out.

Blake: It’s telling that this story comes right before “The Highway”, another story which causes white readers to reexamine their definition of the world (and its potential end).

Eric: Oh yes, that one I really didn’t get the first time through, but really loved on second go ‘round.

Blake: It’s last line is spoken by a Mexican farmer:

“What do they mean, ‘the world’?”

Like “The Other Foot”, it forces the white reader to take a step back.

Eric: Right. This is, in many ways, a book that just lays the wood to the white, upper-middle class… heterosexual, parents.

Blake: Yeah. And I like the way Bradbury keeps “The Other Foot” from becoming merely a revenge fantasy.

Eric: Yeah, he says, “Look, the blacks could potentially lay aside the lynch mobs, the Jim Crow, the separation, and extend forgiveness.”

Blake: He spends most of the story gearing up for acts of vengeance –- black citizens of Mars preparing to lynch these white “rocket men”… only to decide, at the last minute, that the cycle of violence must end. It’s damning!

Eric: He also, incidentally, predicts Google Maps and its functionality, but that’s neither here nor there, haha!

Blake: Does he? Ha!

Eric: Yeah, it’s brilliant! And it is tied to the way that the cycle ends, which I absolutely love. It took a second listen to wrap my mind around it…

Blake: I’ll have to give it another go, too.

Eric: …But the wife of the guy who is leading the charge for revenge, she asks them to tell about places on earth that were destroyed.

Blake: Ah, yes. The purge.

Eric: And so they call up the street, the place where her husband’s parents were lynched, Google Earth-style… and they look it up on the ship and…

“The old man spoke over his shoulder to someone within the ship. A moment later a photographic map was handed out and the man held it, waiting.”

It’s all gone. Memphis and Birmingham and little towns in Georgia…

Blake: “New York City.”

“I had a store in Harlem.”

Eric: Right. Harlem.

Blake:

“Harlem, bombed out.”

Eric: YES!

Blake: Haunting!

Eric: The dialogue and the moans of recognition are really just stunning…

Blake: Yeah, like a new kind of Spiritual. Except on the surface of Mars in lament for the centers of black culture and praise for the centers of slavery.

Eric: Right… and realizing that now that things are on the other foot, they have the chance to do what they’ve done for so long… better. To do good. And to do good in a way that utilizes power lovingly and gracefully, rather than manipulatively, coersively.

Blake: Yes. It’s an interesting look at justice and judgment, too. The rest of the world has done themselves in. It’s as though judgment was not for the “martians” — these black citizens, but rather for God alone.

Eric: The course we’ve set for ourselves has us heading straight to hell. And God will let us go our merry way…

Blake: The white earthlings wrought their own destruction.

Eric: Right. And actually, other ethnicities are included too…

Blake: On Mars?

Eric: No in the destruction.

Blake: Ahhh…

Eric: It’s only the African Americans that get out. And I think that says that Bradbury was very perceptive about the unique character of African American experience and perspective.

Blake: Oh man, sure.

Eric: All of the implications of that still need to be teased out, but I definitely think there’s something there that is really important… Well I am loving this, and I hate to cut this short, but I need to run to the airport.

Blake: Oh no! OK…

Eric: What say we make this like a multi-part convo?

Blake: Sure thing!

Be sure to check back later this month for more discussion of The Illustrated Man as we look into Bradbury’s view of technology, the way the horrors (and apathies) of the present may shape the future, parenthood, and other unexpected avenues of thought opened up by this fantastic collection.

TO BE CONTINUED…