Ouch. That’s Hot.

Reading a Graphic Novel is like watching a movie. Sometimes you care about the words. Sometimes the pictures tell the story. Sometimes the pictures and words tell two different stories, play against each other, prop each other up then and tear each other down. Yes, it’s published like a book, but it’s more like a silent film with a big pause button. You can stop and stare at any page as long as you’d like. You can let your mind run, you can listen to your heart without interruption, without being rushed on to what’s next.

I read Maus not too long ago. It was very effective. But being a shallow suburban american kid who first fell in love as Nirvana exploded across the county, I liked Blankets a lot more.

And that’s my big concern with this book: If it wasn’t my life on display, would I have loved it so much? Is it universal? And that’s my big concern with this post: Why should I waste my time on a narcissistic yelping of “me too! me too!”?

But I’m stalling. I’ll return to these questions later. I’m shy to post. It’s my life, after all, that I read about in Craig Thompson’s novel. This gets personal!

Here’s the plot summary for you: Super-sensitive kid grows up in a small Wisconsin town, tries his best to balance Truth and Temptation, falls in love, and eventually finds his way to a big and windy city. Just like the fictional Craig in the story, I got out of high school in 1993. I grew up Midwestern Christian and went to Church Camps. I grew my hair as long as I could get away with. I took the words of the Good Book very seriously, seemingly more so than folks doing the preaching. I wanted to be a good kid, but the good kids wouldn’t have me. On the other hand, the bad kids were a lot of fun, but I was afraid of forever ruining my life with a toke or a poke or any other teenage kick. Like Raina’s family, I was dealing with Good Christian Parents working Faithfully Towards Divorce. Fake plastic smiles, unanswered theological concerns: adolescent life was shroomin’ fissures like an old log after a rain. As this book shows, that doesn’t make me special. There’s a million kids just like me. Watch the film Saved if you’d like to meet a few more.

But did I mention that I fell in love? Oh boy, did I fall in love. Fell hard enough to nearly re-track the course of my life and re-route my future. Needless to say, my reading brought back some memories. It didn’t only spark a recollection of things and events. Reading it was a revival of left-to-rot emotions.

That was then, this is now. I didn’t read this book to reminisce. I’m more than happy to Be Here Now. I read this book as a 33-year old with two kids. Two kids that are going to be those kids in the book before too long. Which makes me the dad. Which makes my misses the mom. Am I bound to make the same mistakes, to repeat the cycle? Can you really believe that Craig + Raina + 25 years = Their Parents? Is this both sides of love? Must this wheel come full circle? Can you tell that I’m approaching mid-life with a crisis?

And that’s why I’m so lost on this post: I want to have answers. I’m still no more comfortable with my doubts, with my limitations, with the shear messiness of life than I was in high school. I’m still stuck in the middle with(out) you.

So I’m left to embrace the one and only answer that Craig offers at the end of the book: “Doubt is reassuring.”

He picks up his Bible again after years of neglect. He notices for the first time the footnotes in the text. The possible translations, the contradicting sources: He sees the “or’s” amended to the passage. And he embraces the chaos. He finds release from the fight, both his earlier struggle to be as he thought he should, and his latter attempt to flee the ideals that he couldn’t attain. In the end, he finds contentment in a walk through the fresh snow:

“How satisfying it is to leave a mark on a blank surface. To make a map of my movement — no matter how temporary.”

In the end, it doesn’t matter that he burned his sketches in a fit of piety. It doesn’t matter that his painting on Raina’s wall was erased by the next tenant. Life comes and goes. Life changes — let it go. I’m not sure that’s enough, but it may have to be. “The journey is the destination,” right?

A professor of mine once told us that the point of literature, despite all the discussions of Truth and Beauty, Dulce et Utile, etc, was simply “To decrease the general loneliness.” If this is the standard, then Blankets meets the mark. I’m less lonely today than I was a week ago. And that feels good.

And somehow I’ve answered those questions above:

Is it Universal? It doesn’t need to be. If a work brings joy or understanding to one other person, it is well worth it. If the mere act of creation brings peace and joy to the creator it is well worth it. I know at least two people who have enjoyed Blankets. That is more than sufficient. (See: Mandala)

Why should I waste my time? There’s a lot of Ecclesiastes in the book, and yes, All Is Vanity. This blog is at least a semi-enlightened form of it, and perhaps if I’m lucky, it will spread the joy and understanding mentioned above. In other words:

“How satisfying it is to leave a mark on a blank surface. To make a map of my movement — no matter how temporary.”

And with that, I’m satisfied.

Since I can’t seem to finish the real posts I’ve been working on, here’s a few things I picked up from the latest Wired, posted here so you don’t have to.

Pg. 084: Unmasked By Facebook:

Scott Brown wrote this quick column on the former fragmentation of the self that one once enjoyed by spreading one’s persona across various social networking sites. You can’t do it so much anymore. We’re all linked up and the real you is bound to come through. Google one site, then another. You’re there somewhere, and that you’d better jive with the guy that you’ve been pretending to be at the office, at church, at the little league game. You get the idea.

Why does this interest me?

I recently took a stab at signing up for LinkedIn, the professional person’s preferred place to press the virtual flesh. I didn’t get very far as the concept left me cold. “That’s not me!” I wanted to scream at the screen. “I’m not that guy!” My credentials added up to something less than the sum of their parts, or so I felt. Call it pride, call it vanity, call it some sort of basic insecurity, I simply didn’t want to make a general announcement to all fellow alumni and assorted professional peers that this was me. That this was the new me, the real me, the Be All That You Can Be Me. I looked at it, and realized that my life is fragmented, and some of those cracks are killing me. Like the lemurs of Madagascar after the island cracked off of the African coast, I’d begun to evolve into two separate species, and I just don’t have the strength to keep up two lives. I need it all to be linked in.

Pg. 052: Take the Red Book:

Or, why sci-fi is the last bastion of philosphical writing, by Clive Thompson.

A friend recently described some of my sci-fi novels, beloved of an earlier era, as “Danielle Steele for boys.” That stung a bit, but the point was taken. That friend is a girl. And as this column points out, “many of sci-fi’s most famous authors have positively deranged notions about the inner lives of women.”

The bottom line is that sci-fi can’t seem to do everything right. It doesn’t handle romance (I remember wincing whenever Neil Stephenson would toy with “sexy lady’s dialogue” in the Cryptonomicon) but it does handle ideas really well. It runs an experiment in which you take reality and change a few variables and then run with it. No it’s not reality, but like an image in a mirror, it might reflect back some reality that you’ve been trying to miss.

I’ve been meaning to post a compare/contrast between The Sparrow and A Canticle For Leibowitz which will further explore some of this. Oh, stay tuned!

“I snogged the drummer,” she said. “That’s cool!” I replied, “Uhh, isn’t it?”

The conversation above was my second introduction to The Wildhearts. The first was watching them open for The Darkness a few years back. Justin and the boys are no more, but The Wildhearts (old timers by then already) still live on and are doing their best to burn out before they fade away. But, being forged of pure, brutal, UK METAL they seem to be built to last.

As Ginger said from the stage that summer’s eve: “We’re from England. It’s a tiny little country, with tiny little cars, and GIANT GUITAR RIFFS!” The eponymous latest album continues and improves on that tradition. I’m no metal guy, but there’s something here for any and every metal fan, nay, for any and every fan of Rock ‘n Roll!

If you think Heavy Metal’s gone down hill since Alice Cooper and Judas Priest, you’ll love this album.
If you miss the good old 80’s days of Megadeth and Metallica, you’ll love this album.
If you miss the good old 80’s days of Warrant and Winger, you’ll love this album.
If you grew up on the grungy, punky, industrial mix known as “90’s Alternative” you’ll love this album.

Mix in a few choruses that would make Cheap Trick proud and some guitar passages that would make Joe Satriani weep and you’re pretty much all set. The album is import only. So, fly yourself to Great Britain and check them out. If you’re lucky, you can snog the drummer.

… but they don’t like to be alone with me.

I thought I would be, but no, I’m really not at all. By Golly, I think I like ‘em!

Reading about music is like a box of chocolates: You never know what you’re going to get until you bite down. Fortunately, no one can make you swallow. Against Me! first came to my attention in a fawning Spin profile about the best bunch of emo brats to emerge from FLA, USA since Scott Stapp ruined Sunshine State Rock for the rest of us. Spin has spilled a lot of ink over the last few years on the likes of My Chemical Confessional and Fall Out Charlotte and a bunch of other high-schoolers tarted up with eyeliner and Feelings, Feelings, Feelings, oh, nothing more than Feelings.

I expected the same from these guys.

Despite some over-earnest adolescence in the lyrics and a vocal style that is too often Roger Daltrey at his most histrionic (think of the timbre of WE WON’T BE FOOLED AGAIN!! repeated for 3:35, maybe a little much…) these boys put together a very tight package of power-punked rock ‘n roll. Like many of the greatest Rock Bands, they’re capable of both the simple/effective (”Stop”) and the epic (”Ocean”) using the simple tools of the medium. I have a hunch they’ll still be with us after many of the current crop of state-side startups have faded away to a flashback show on MTV8.

Hand over hand, bloody-knuckled, bedraggled, and panting, I’ve been climbing back into the habit of reading. I flat-out gave up on it a few years ago and watched my mind and vocabulary plummet as a result. I’ve always had two sources of linguistic stimulus in my life. The first was a fantastic and mis-matched gang of like-minded friends that I ran with in high school and college. Every conversation was a good-humored contest of wits, a battle for the obscurest allusion and le mot juste. The second, of course, was reading (a drug I first tasted with Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O’Rourke essays in Rolling Stone.) I can’t see those old friends like a I once did, but the books are always available.

So then, what to read? Why, Everything, of course!

My better half has joined a book club. I am not invited to attend as I am anatomically insufficient. I am a man. This club is strictly ladies only. See what the ERA era hath wrought! I decided to stop being bitter and just read the books anyway. This month that book is Fire In The Blood, by Irene Nemirovsky. It’s notable as it was long lost while the author became fuel for the fires of Auschwitz after being seized and deported from France. This fate is doubly horrible as she was only in France because, as a Russian Jew, she high-tailed it out of her homeland in 1917 as the Bolsheviks were doing their best to smash anything that didn’t fit into the Wonderful Worker’s Paradise.

It’s a slim novel. It had the worrisome stench of Romance about it when I first picked it up. There were a few pages in the middle that flipped-flopped the relationships and laid on the revelations faster than General Hospital. But taken as a whole… it’s near-perfect in its pacing. The facts are merely a framework. The heart of the work is the worn-thin soul of the old Frenchman who narrates the details of the lives of his rural relations.

A few observations:

1. How much must an author experience to write realistically? Silvio, the aforementioned old man, is written with extreme clarity. We’re in his head for 200 pages and his words never strike an off note. He’s the sort of character that Irene encountered frequently while living in France, but she was neither old, nor a man, nor French. Secondly, the story is wrapped up in affairs — short term, long term, easy, disastrous. How true was Irene to the man that typed up her manuscripts and hid her work during the panicked end? Perhaps these questions are illegal: Be a New Critic. The Work stands alone, right? Whatever…

2. One could argue that the central character is not a person at all but rather the titular concoction, the “Fire In The Blood.” Roughly the passion of youth, this Fire leads the rational to crazy, temps the responsible to reckless, boils over when it recognizes itself in another. However, this is a moral novel. It’s not just about sex. It’s moral not in a “do the right thing” kind of way, but rather it is morally complete in its understanding of the complexity of what may be mistaken as lust:

“It wasn’t just about the pleasures of the flesh. No it wasn’t that simple. The flesh is easy to satisfy. It is the heart that is insatiable, the heart that needs to love, to despair, to burn with any kind of fire…”

This Fire is madness, of course. We only allow it to happen behind closed doors, in far-away locations. It is hidden in the attic like a crazy aunt. It is not spoke of. But the question that the novel begs is this: What is real? The days spent working, planting, tilling, raising crops and children, or is this madness also a reality? Is this Fire that we carry around in our hearts and minds — a Fire that not only opposes but is lethal to Responsible life — is this Fire even more real as the spirit is more real than the flesh? As Heaven, though unseen, may be more real than Earth?

3. Not to ruin the end, but the last line leaves questions. The last line is a warning. The last line reminds us that fires burn, consume, and die out. It is their nature. A life may last a hundred years. A fire comes and goes in a day, in an hour:

“We didn’t move. She seemed to be drinking me in, breathing in my heart. As for me, by the time I finally let her go I knew I had already begun to love her less.”

So ladies, thanks for a good read. See you next month!

Half our fence fell prostrate before Mother Nature as She decided that 50 degrees was too magnanimous a December fortune for Her children in Ohio. The error was sternly corrected with a high-winded 30 degree drop over the next few hours.

My neighbor and I meet the next day to walk the line, one to a side. “It never was a good fence,” I tell him. He says it doesn’t matter that it’s down for awhile. “I can take Duke out on a leash,” he says. “Don’t worry, he can poop in my yard,” I reply.

A New Year dawns, the temperature stretches for 60 to greet the second week. Remembering my duty, I apply hammer to nail and stake to earth to raise the fence back to a useful, if not perfect, condition. I rejoice in the afternoon spent in the sun. I remember back to earlier existence when I purchased these same boots, this Carhartt jacket. When afternoons and often whole days were lost in the silence of the woods. When I earned my paychecks turning trees to cord wood, wrestling boulders, caring for the saplings of another harvest. Though today I’ve neglected most of my responsibilities, I sleep the deseved sleep of satisfaction in work well-accomplished.

But Mother Nature disagrees. She does not think that a few e-mails should be sufficient to cover my ass. She sends Her winds again. She taunts me with Her warmth and then sends Her storm. Feeling the fear of a five-year-old as the house shakes/shudders/moans, I scramble to the safety of sleep with covers pulled high over head and dread blowing all around me.

I awake to find my fence face-down again, genuflecting to its Mistress. My still-sharp stakes torn up and strewn about. Like shark’s teeth on the beach, they give evidence to a once great creature, now no more. Today, I must mend the wall again. Armed with twice the nails, deeper stakes, but a broken will, I buttress again without complaint.

It never was a good fence. And now there is poop in my yard.  But I am happy.