Jimmy Corrigan review

Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth is possibly the saddest book I have ever read. Pretty much go off of the assumption that if anything good happens to Jimmy, it will eventually be reversed over the course of the book.

Chris Ware's comic follows sad sack, middle-aged, agonizingly normal Jimmy Corrigan as he goes through his day unappreciated, lonely, and bored. The piece begins with Jimmy receiving a letter from his biological father trying to get in contact with Jimmy for the first time in their lives. The story then follows Jimmy as he heads off to meet his father, grandfather, and half-sister. Along the way, we view the variety of dreams going on in Jimmy's far less ordinary imagination, including robots, superheroes, sexual encounters, etc. We learn that only in his dreams is Jimmy the "smartest kid on earth."

Alongside this continuous narrative, we get flashbacks to the youth of Jimmy's grandfather, whose story is equally if not even more depressing. Jimmy's grandad is a sad, lonely little boy who tries to make friends at school via acting like the cool kids. Essentially, this means ditching his Italian friend, following his crush, the red-headed girl, in her juvenile rambunctiousness, and trying like mad to attend the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. As he fails to succeed in making a single friend, Jimmy's grandad lives in increasing poverty with JImmy's great-grandfather, an abusive and angry man.

If that weren't enough sadness, there's also suicides, surprising other deaths, the oppressive nature of Jimmy's mother's clinging loneliness, racism, and rape. Also, a lot of snow, just in case we didn't get the fact that this book is one hell of a sad experience.

In addition to its melancholic storyline, there are some pretty solid square and rectangle-based panels to display the art of the book, which is highly reminiscent of 30's/40's Detective Comics serials. The colors vary greatly between Jimmy's daydreams with traditional primary colors of the superhero genre, the present gray-based life of Jimmy, and the brown hues of Jimmy's grandad's life. Throughout these, the font also changes, with a particularly difficult to read cursive for the flashbacks of Jimmy's grandfather.

Granted, the book is speaking a great deal to the imaginary nature of the superhero genre. Ordinary superheroes, such as the one pictured early in this comic, are more likely to comic suicide by jumping off of a building than to go sailing into the sky. The actual Clark Kent lived a life of quiet desperation, merely dreaming himself a Superman alter ego that never made it to the real world. Real people don't have a Fortress of Solitude or Batcave and infinite time and resources to go out saving people. Jimmy wants to help people, but he is too busy living his sad life.

Be prepared to feel punched in the soul when reading this comic. But read it nonetheless.

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Review from Goodreads: Underground

Underground by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Underground is half of Murakami's attempt to deal with the sense of alienation he explains experiencing upon viewing catastrophes that hit Japan whilst he was living outside of his homeland. While his story collection, after the quake, deals with the events surrounding the 1995 Kobe earthquake, Underground acted as an attempt for the author to come to terms with the 1995 sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway.

Murakami's Underground, one of only two nonfiction books published by the author thus far, is composed almost entirely of edited interview transcripts. The book is divided into many sections, delineating between survivors and former/current members of Aum Shinrikyo (Aleph), the group responsible for the attacks. The book is further broken down to include where survivors experienced the attack (which trains, what direction, what line, etc.) and overviews of the day's events. There are additionally three passages in which Murakami speaks to his own motivations and hesitancies in completing these interviews.

One of the explanations Murakami muses as a cause of the attacks is the alienation of youths in urban Tokyo. In the interview section with Aum members, he highlights that many of the interviewees and persons involved with the sarin attack were ostracized in school or otherwise found themselves unable to enter social environments. He describes the apathy that accompanies this separation, yet only after readers have spent 250 pages reading interviews with victims of the attack.

It is this effect that makes Underground such an important read. For when we begin to read about this lack of empathy, we may have already noticed the lack of feeling eventually accompanying our readings of the survivor interviews. The stories of the sarin attack become mundane and repetitive, yet just as soon as we make it past, we are made to realize that in losing our empathy for the survivors we have been made to feel some degree of empathy for the perpetrators.

It is a difficult piece if only for this reason alone, but an extremely significant intervention in the apathy epidemic of the modern age.

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Descent of Alette review

The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In her introduction, Notley explains the quotation marks as both intended to slow the reader down and to distance herself from the character of Alette as storyteller versus protagonist.  Yet, this punctuation has a tertiary effect of “air quoting” the text enclosed, suggesting a degree of irony (and sometimes thinly veiled innuendo) in presumably unintended locations.  Incidentally, the reader may find herself laughing at points that would otherwise be, well, depressing.  Example: “Yes, these woods are” “full of beings,” “primal beings.”  Does Notley mean to say that there are actual primal beings in the forest or “primal beings,” possibly alluding to toddlers or mothers-in-law?

Yet it is perhaps this ambiguity that helps one bear out the otherwise exhausting persistent presence of quotation marks.  The Descent of Alette is a text driven by the ambiguous.

Early in the work, Alette comes across a young veteran who falls asleep on the train.  This soldier speaks in his sleep, saying, “’I need a dolor” “a few more dolors.”’  The use of the word “dolor” may simply be the pronunciation of “dollar” with a seeming Latin@ accent, yet may instead or additionally be the word “dolor,” meaning pain, in Spanish.  The narrator consistently makes use of the word “disappeared” to refer to the manner in which people leave the scene.  In the context of a place beneath the ground ruled by a male tyrant, the entire piece suggests a Latin or South American nation domineered by a vicious ruler who “disappears” his political opponents and leads his people to die in war, either civil or abroad.

As with all aspects of the text, no explanation or background is given.  It is this openness to multiple interpretations and symbolism that makes The Descent of Alette an epic, an almost biblical text.  Even Joseph Campbell’s monomyth can be applied to the text, the journey originating in a call to adventure (to kill the tyrant) and concluding with the death of the tyrant and return to the upper world.

Notley’s work may be intended as a comment upon the monomyth and the patriarchal nature of the hero’s journey.  In fact, The Descent of Alette seems to act as a response to Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey and the need to focus more on female heroes and their journeys both in traditional literature and the need to write more of such tales in the contemporary age.

Alette’s journey is just as confusing and steeped in metaphor as Odysseus’.  Even more importantly, the tale doesn’t tell of men going to wars with men, but Alette’s work to destroy a wicked, male tyrant, who may even represent a death of the monomyth’s misogynistic nature.  The male-based hero’s journey may appear as entwined with literature as the tyrant’s body is interlaced with the subway system and upper world, but in the same manner it can be destroyed and the world, epic literature, lives on.  In destroying the monomyth, Notley has freed the literary epic from its male-dominated origin story, and allowed women’s to rightfully take their place as the protagonists of the hero-based myth.

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Sidetracked?

Well, I've been sidetracked from the Fiasco project.  I've got it started, but I think I'm going to change my rules.  Honestly, some of my favorite movies have boring elements that I didn't realize until now.  I keep hoping there'll be some more interesting relationships, but I've mostly just got two interesting ones:

1. Knife thrower/ target
2. Private detective/ actor with role as private detective

Oh!  I also had these two:

1. Would-be-murderer/ intended victim
2. Crime boss/ wet works man

I can't think of any community-based relationships.  Maybe I'll just focus on extreme examples.  Then I'll have super out there things (although potentially fanfic) with:

1. Time traveller/ Queen Victoria
2. Greatest wizard evuh/ king who wants to kill all magic people
3. Guide to the afterlife/ recently deceased person
4. Fairy guide/ hero of destiny
5. Doggy goddess/ village drunk who takes credit for all the goddess does
6. Last person on earth/ dying radio

Anyway, I'm working on it.  But then I had a dream about doing a time traveller mystery short story with a romance twist, so I might do that first.  Whenever the time appears...

It's a Fiasco!... writing game?

I do love writing games (without whimsy, wherefore would we write?).  Anyway, watching the folks at Tabletop play Fiasco made me want to write a small-plan-gone-wrong-esque thing with some mean ass characters.  If you haven't seen it, please do enjoy the imbedded vids below, and especially note the amazingness of Bonnie.


Anyway, I love the way the roll of dice affects what story will be told. It's lovely, isn't it?  Taking the tricky bits of coming up with plot away from the whole ordeal of story making.  ... Well, you know what I mean.  Sometimes, just coming up with a plot is death (though Chris Baty tells me it's "no problem.").  I think it would be amazing just to write out these guys' Fiasco storyline, but I bet some other geek's already on it- that's how we roll in geekland?

I'm going to first try it just by plugging in some "ends in disastuh!" type films' (that I actually like...) info, then roll and start plotting.  Will update when there is... more to update?

This blog post kinda has terrible writing in it. In case you didn't notice.

meta...

Cricketing

It is one of those days where I feel I should sink into the earth.  Not necessarily a bad thing, this emotion propels me forward on the pavement with the notion that my feet are being touched by strange vining hands.

Yawning in public and covering the mouth.  Wearing a large sweater though it is warm outside.  Feeling suddenly quite old and marveling at parking structures.  Secluding oneself in a corner and typing.  Wanting paper but knowing it would feel corpse-like in this day.

It sounds depressing, but it isn't.  It is merely exhausting.  I want to sleep but be enveloped in doing so.  I want intense warmth, I want to feel feverish in this heat.  The language sounds sexual but the experience is not.

I can assume this experience comes of having strange dreams.  But I am unable to connect today and have such a desire to return home and sleep.

For now, I imagine and drift away from conversations.  Today, it will suffice.

The Fire

The Fire

A man said to me, “my head is on fire.”
I took it to mean he had a fever
or that his mind was so full of ideas
he had to depend on such metaphors.

But no, the man’s head was on fire
and the fire burned with such splendor
I understood him to be bragging,
for which, I feel, he had every right.

He had piled those many sticks
upon his metal, maybe gold, crown
the embers biting into his brain,
the fire itself shooting up, his hair.

Despite this, he is calm, noble,
he wears a lovely pendant regally
and stands so very straight
as his waxen neck melts away.


 -- anyway, I have no idea where this came from...