Reading Comics: Peter Tieryas Liu on 100 Bullets
Welcome to the fourth installment of my new series: Reading Comics. I’m excited to report that I’ve got a bunch of great contributors lined up, and am myself working on a few entries. If you haven’t contacted me yet, but would like to participate, email me and let me know! Without further ado….here’s Peter Tieryas Liu…
100 Bullets are 100 issues packed with graphic brutality, tales of moral compunction, and the evolution of noir into a merging of both crime fiction and pseudo-history. Every gunshot exposes frailties in the cracks of a society pining for justice. The premise of the comic goes something like this. You’re the victim of an unforgivably heinous crime. Down on your luck, the mysterious Agent Graves informs you that the cause of all your suffering is Person X. He offers you an attaché case filled with a gun and 100 untraceable bullets that you can use in any way you want without legal repercussions. What would you do?
Random Ass Live Reading of Some Recent Books I Liked #7
You missed the live reading but you can still check out the books I read from if you are on the internet. Here they are, I recommend them all highly:
Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt [New Directions]
selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee by Megan Boyle [Muumuu House]
Beauty Was The Case That They Gave Me by Mark Leidner [Factory Hollow]
0.174 by Gordon Massman [New York Quarterly Press]
Simple Machines by Michael Bible [Awesome Machine]
The Trees The Trees by Heather Christle [Octopus Books]
The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus [Knopf]
The Hermit by Laura Solomon [Ugly Duckling]
Coeur de Lion by Ariana Reines [reissue, Fence]
How The Days of Love and Diptheria by Robert Kloss [Nephew]
Laura Kasischke v. John McCrae
The rondeau is a fifteen-line poem appropriated from a French form dating to the 13th century. Here is John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields,” the most famous rondeau in English:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.We are the dead; short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.Take up our quarrel with the foe!
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Note the straitjacket of the form — the AABBA AAB(refrain) AABBA(refrain) structure, and the refrain itself lifted from the first half of the first line.
Here is Laura Kasischke’s “Rondeau,” from the April 2011 issue of Poetry:
Small and panting mass
Of moonlight and dampness on a log
This glistening tumor, terrible frog
Of moonlight and dampness on a log
My small and panting mass READ MORE >
I existentialized via photoshop Adrian Tomine comic to commemorate preceding david fi卐hkind post; original after the break. “Seems bleak” or “fml” was supposed to be in thought bubble, but then I felt was it better with nothing.
I Honestly Feel Like They Purposefully Burned My Cappuccino
In Berlin, a city plagued by Bear figurines and expensive museums, and a lot of museums, I mean like, they have a museum on Currywurst, you find yourself (like most of the fucking people here, I mean do they even have full-time jobs in a social democratic parliamentary something something?) with a lot of free time. This free time can be spent sitting in your one-room apartment, provided by the university you attend in an egregiously uncool neighborhood, drinking beer and watching Netflix, going to the expensive (and seriously there are so many of them) museums, exploring the city and learning about a multicultural Westernized world post-tragic-history-of-division-and-exploitation-and murdering-of-minorities, or you can go to cafes.
There are almost as many cafes in Berlin as there are museums. I mean when I say cafe I don’t mean the place on the corner that sells Lucky Strikes and bad whiskey, because those are also cafes. What I really mean is cafés, but for my own peace of mind I will save myself the effort of Command+E-ing all through this report on my exploration of hunger, chemical stimulation, and extreme desperate urgency.
I seriously don’t know what I’ve been doing for two months. I read a few books and visited some of those museums and I did get very, very drunk several times, while also going through a severe mono-relapse and an uncomfortable weeklong bout of food poisoning. But here I am, leaving in another two months and I’ve barely had a chance to learn how to say “I would like” before I order my shitty cappuccino, which I think the barista purposefully burned.
OCEAN NOTES
several days ago i stayed up all night watching the ocean and telling myself that i will never go back. i felt that after that moment, everything would have to be different. i finally get it. i finally understand what it’s all about. i see everything now and i know what decisions must be made. what have i got to do to not forget this lesson? to not lose contact. in a few hours i will be zipped across this very sky on a plane en route to baltimore. i will ride it for free using the complimentary ticket i got when i wrote and faxed a four page complaint to american airlines—faxed so i could bypass the word limit on the website form (who said writing skillz aren’t practical?). i am afraid. i know that in baltimore i will not have the psychic or physical space to really sink into it and i’m wondering—does being around people desensitize you, force you onto a different wavelength, flatten your really intense visions and impulses? BECAUSE IF I AM TO WRITE I CANNOT BE DESENSITIZED. how am i going to write these books? to think, several days ago i was at the end of my life laughing, watching the waves crash into the rocks as the world expanded in every directions all around me. i was on this extremely long and lonely journey just to figure out that everything would be okay, and when i came to this realization everything suddenly opened up. i was inside my life in this totally different way—for the first time i wasn’t wishing i were somewhere else; wasn’t wishing i were smarter, better or more like this or that. mid-revelation a cop pulled up, parked his car, and stared me down. he wouldn’t leave. fuck that cop. and all other cops. you’re cramping my style. i stumbled away from the cop and into the gaze of a pack of drunk guys. they started yelling sexual comments at me and began to walk toward me. i was preparing myself to fight and was convinced i could take all of them down. just then my little brother and his friend showed up.
Patsy Cline on Writing
I got me a hit record and I ain’t never made a cent from it.
His hug is his beer in a frosted mug.
I don’t apologize that I don’t sing through my nose.
Sitting around the house playing the wife and mother is driving me crazy.
I thought I loved him but he’s dull.
I’ll die before I go all the way pop.
That applause don’t help you any when you’re laying in that bed at night being totally ignored.
I’ll screw the boots off of you.
I’ve become a captive of my own ambitions.
They said I would be the Hemingway of music. I would have my own style.
I got to change my firecracker!
Most lyrics don’t have any balls.
It’s like things are creeping on me and I just want to lay low.
I go to church on Sundays, the vows I make. I break them on Monday.
I don’t give a goddamn!
I’m gonna walk a little bit of dog.
Something Film Understands but that Literature Doesn’t
I was talking with Jeremy M. Davies recently (actually, we were on our way to see Drive), and the topic of genre as art came up. Now, Jeremy and I are both huge into genre, in all media. We’re nuts over spy thrillers, sci-fi, and fantasy, for instance—not to mention Batman comics. (Only the good ones, though, natch.)
And of course lots of people in various lit scenes (all over) don’t think that genre fiction can be art. They’re really wedded to that “high art / low art” divide. (Or the “literary fiction / all else” divide, as it’s so commonly called.)
Me and J, we were saying how we don’t get it. How can someone read, for instance, Patricia Highsmith’s Ripliad and not recognize it as total artistic brilliance? Or Philip K. Dick’s VALIS, which is one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, hands down? And of course I’d argue that Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns is one of the finest things published in the 1980s, “despite its being” a comic book. (I didn’t spend all that time analyzing it at Big Other because I thought it was merely cute.)
Anyway, I came to a certain conclusion…
FictionSpeak 2: Dialogue
I was trying to write dialogue the other day. Then I was trying to write about dialogue. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal back in February called “Talk That Walks: How Hemingway’s Dialogue Powers a Story,” by John L’Heureux. I found this article because I had just read “Hills Like White Elephants.” I don’t feel like talking about Hemingway. Though his dialogue is masterful, I really hate his treatment of the girl. I also hate L’Heureux’s treatment of the girl for different reasons, but I like what he says at the conclusion of this article:
“Dialogue suggests what people mean by what they’re saying, even if they themselves aren’t fully aware of it. Sometimes, of course, the most effective dialogue culminates in silence. This is more than irony. It is what characters do to one another.”
Because the writer is god, she knows what her characters mean. I don’t know about that. I like Silence. I’d like to know about un-dialogue please. When I was thinking about dialogue, I started writing this:
What is dialogue but the memory of nothing-ever-said? How many palettes from which to choose? You say this, you dothisthingtome. I say something back, which is worse in my mind than knifing a dying dog. I want to write about a conversation had. A once-had conversation. But it’ll never work. Nothing works but the working, someone said, out of darkness. Nothing but the eventual loss of a thing. Loss of a pain, loss of a memory. Is it or is it not the same face on the coin? The same face before bed beckoning.
I wake up angry. Wanting a fight. Which I’ll never get, which you’ll never give me. Ever-heaver. Ever-body-distiller.
Dialogue is a thing we do in stories. Or a thing smug people do in offices with bright lights.
“Let’s have a dialogue about this.”
“Fuck you.”
And then the piece turned into something else entirely. I was trying to teach freshman writing students about dialogue a few weeks ago, and I gave them a bunch of revision checklists. I asked questions of them like, “Is the dialogue natural? Does your dialogue portray personality? Is your dialogue interesting? [what does that mean?] In class, we’d read “Hills Like White Elephants” aloud. We talked about mystery, about saying, not saying, about how things are said. I didn’t teach these kids a goddamn thing, though a few of them caught on.
My question is this. I don’t want dialogue. I want not-dialogue. What are the best books that make minimal but insanely good use of dialogue?
Reading Comics: Bradley Sands on Superheroes & Superhero Comics
Welcome to the third installment of my new series: Reading Comics. I’m excited to report that I’ve got a bunch of great contributors lined up, and am myself working on a few entries. If you haven’t contacted me yet, but would like to participate, email me and let me know! Without further ado….here’s Bradley Sands…
Why I Like to Read Superhero Comics but Don’t Really Like Superheroes
I am 32-years-old and I have been reading comics since I was in elementary school. Although I enjoy “alternative comics,” the kinds of comics that intrigue me the most are the mainstream superhero comics published by Marvel and DC Comics that I’ve read off and on since childhood. Although the idea of superheroes excited me when I was young, they no longer have this effect on me. But what intrigues me about the comics being published by these two companies are qualities that no other narratives share (except for perhaps soap operas to a small degree, although I find them unwatchable).