the coffee philosopher

Posted on April 13, 2013November 12, 2013 by the coffee philosopher · 1 Comment

Devil Dinosaur

I read three different DC Comics: Aquaman (which I am about to give up on), Batman, and Action Comics (which I was going to give up on, but I have decided to power through).

So while I was buying a bunch, catching up after two months of inattention, I saw a familiar looking shape on the cover of an Avenging Spiderman comic.

Devil Dinosaur was a later seventies, Jack Kirby comic. It never really caught on didn’t even make to ten issues. And it’s my favorite.

He and his pre-human companion, Moon Boy, are occasionally introduced into other comics from the Marvel Universe, but too often, it seems, as a sort of joke.

But in this two issue, Spider Man story arc, he’s treated (though it’s also suggested that Devil is a woman) reasonably respectfully.

I can only hope this repeated.

Posted on April 13, 2013April 12, 2013 by the coffee philosopher

Core Samples From The World (New Year’s Resolution, Book Fourteen)

Core Samples from the World is a beautiful and disquieting book, though not always disquieting in a good way.

As part of the Folger’s poetry series, Forrest Gander read at the Philips Collection, against the backdrop of an exhibition of works by Jean Dubuffet, Alfonso Ossorio, and Jackson Pollock.

The exhibition itself was very good, though most of the Dubuffet’s and Pollock’s I had seen elsewhere. Ossorio was new to me, so kept my attention much more strongly and moved me much more deeply. His merging of a unsettling passions, representation, anti-representation, and a deeply conflicted faith is wonderful to behold.

Forrest Gander is a poet I had been meaning to read and I’m glad for the excuse. He read not just against intellectual backdrop of the exhibition, but also against the very real backdrop of projections of various works from the exhibit. For each slide, he read a poem he felt was in correspondence with the work.

Unfortunately, Gander’s poetry and the work of the three artists demand close attention and my ability to appreciate both the poems and the art were diminished by split attention. Frankly, I was barely listening to the poems by the end. Which is too bad, because he’s an excellent poet.

Local poet, Sandra Beasley, moderated the discussion. I like some of her work and she’s clearly knowledgeable, but she talked too much. By which I mean to say, when the questions you are asking, in a public discussion like this, are longer than the answers you’re getting, it’s time to think up better ways of the asking the questions. She also brought up that Gander is a relationship with another man. The context was a question about living with another artist, but the fact of his sexual orientation was somewhat awkwardly inserted and the way he dodged around the question suggested to me that he wasn’t very glad that part of his life was brought up.

But on to Core Samples from the World!

The poems are interspersed and, to some extent, done in correspondence with photographs by Raymond Meeks, Graciela Iturbide, and Lucas Foglia. Of the three, only Iturbide was familiar to me.

The good stuff. Gander’s a good poet. Some gorgeous turns of phrase: stopless winds or A butcher draws his blade against the plush throat of a goat

Read that last one again. The interior rhyme (it’s from a prose poem section) of ‘throat’ and ‘goat’ and strange, beautiful insertion of ‘plush.’ Great stuff, eh?

And in the third section, there’s a long series of prose poems about a trip to Bosnia-Herzegovina. It’s hard to explain, but it’s magical. I rather thing that he does so well here because it’s about a more purely western culture (though eastern Europe).

Finally, it ends with one of the best descriptions of the feeling of being drunk you’re likely to find outside of a Kingsley Amis novel.

But…

A lot of ‘buts.’

Gander is a very, very good poet. This is not a very good book.

It feels unsettlingly paternalistic. The poems a somewhat narrative, world-wearingly detailing his trips to writers’ conferences in places like China and Mexico (it can read like a melancholy, non-hyper Tom Friedman who has actually learned to write – not just poetry, but anything). He interrupts ‘his’ poetry with sing-song three lines stanzas that read like mediocre translations from Tu Fu, but which are clearly intended to be the voice of these strange, foreigners he meets. And in combination with some photos that resemble a bit of poverty porn (though not all – and in the middle is strange photograph of young, blonde dressed like an extra from a Raquel Welch movie about dinosaurs, only one of her tastefully nipple covering furs is actually a fox stole; go figure).

I almost feel like ripping out the photographs and forcing myself to read each section of the longer poems out of context, away from each other, just to enjoy the language and skill. But I can’t, can I? I can’t separate it, can I?

Posted on April 11, 2013April 10, 2013 by the coffee philosopher

Thursday Morning Staff Meeting – A Long Time Coming

The decline in book reviewing is older than you thought.

You tell ‘me, Noam!

“When it comes to book recommendations, [online] retailers have the literary sensibilities of a spreadsheet — they’ll just recommend the most popular books to me, or books that other people also bought, but they know nothing of the soul and sparkle of a great book.”

Posted on April 10, 2013April 9, 2013 by the coffee philosopher

Midweek Staff Meeting – Don’t Change A Thing

Perfect… just the way they are.

Chronicling The New York Review of Books.

Should Darwin have died?

The art of Occupy.

France will not abandon her bookshops!

Posted on April 9, 2013April 9, 2013 by the coffee philosopher

Rabelais

Rabelais died 460 years ago today. I feel like I should make a dirty joke in his honor.

Posted on April 9, 2013July 25, 2017 by the coffee philosopher

Knife Of Dreams (New Year’s Resolution, Book Thirteen)

Unlucky thirteen? Maybe. After hitting a rough patch, Jordan’s final books in the series have gotten a bit more compelling. This one was the last he completed before passing. Not his masterpiece perhaps, but a good way to go out, nonetheless.

I’m feeling more forgiving and almost appreciative of Jordan’s tics. Actually, they’re pretty good tics, it just that they’ve all been used a lot in the last ten books. But maybe because I can feel the end approaching, I am able to enjoy them again.

Mostly, I talking about this horror movie trope, where he shows you someone saying let’s go through that door and then shows the monster behind a door and then a show of someone turning the door knob.

Except, what he does is show the heroes prepare a cunning plan and then switches to a shot of some villain explaining how the hero is walking into her (and many of the villains, and certainly all the best villains, are women in these books – read into that what you will) trap.

The more or less hero, Rand al’Thor, the Dragon Reborn, is still kind of a whiny b—h. It’s really annoying, too. While using his magic, he still tends to get mopey and also car sick (I thought that when he cleaned up the male half of magical power, that was supposed to end?). And just in case he was in danger of becoming less irritating, Jordan burns his left hand clean off, so that everyone has an excuse to feel sorry for him and he can be an annoying tough guy. Ugh.

Mat, once again, figures prominently, but he’s in love and that makes him much less interesting.

Logain, the former false dragon gets some semi-prominent appearances. I can’t really explain who Logain is in the context of the story and mythology. I mean, this is book eleven. Eleven. I simply can’t go back and explain a whole muckety series of events and characters dating back ten books and roughly 8,000 pages. I have a life beyond this blog, you. I have hobbies. I have friends. Not many, but, you know, one or two. And I’m not a total nerd. I play D&D with real people. Grown ups, no less.

But my point: Logain is actually kind of cool, a little bad a– and seems relatively bright, competent, and good (morally speaking).

He almost makes up for Lan. Lan has been with us since the beginning, but Jordan has mostly ignored since the second book or so. Small scenes, but there’s been a definite effort to limit his importance. Which is good, because Lan is clearly a cheap knock off Tolkien’s Aragorn. I mean, a knock off to the point that, after reading the first book, you feel like Jordan should write a large check to the a charity of the Tolkien estate’s choice. As the series has progressed, Jordan has successfully created his own world, separate from Tolkien’s epic fantasy. But now, Lan as Aragorn is back. And, I guess it’s fine, but, it’s just irritating.

This volume’s immediate predecessor ended with a big set piece. Knife of Dreams ups the ante by incorporating several big set pieces in the last two hundred or so pages – and much less confusingly described so that the pay off feels much more worth the wait. Even better, some issues and concerns that have popped up over the last couple of books are resolved. Elayne becomes Queen of Andor. Perrin leads an army into battle to rescue his wife. Mat (as usual) has the best stuff – a couple of decently described tactical skirmishes and ambushes, culminating in a marriage to the heiress to the Seanchan imperial throne. Rand captures one of the Forsaken (that’s when he loses his hand), but (as usual), his set piece is less fun to read than the others. A couple of baddies get their comeuppance. Even better, almost every ongoing storyline but one gets resolved. I’m referring to the storylines of the main characters. Obviously, the final battle for the fate of the world hasn’t happened yet. It’s as if Jordan knew he would never complete another book and wanted to take responsibility for tying up a few fictional loose ends. And now I’m sad, because he’s gone.

I won’t lie. Some of my books lately have been shorter than others. Knife of Dreams is my return to something a little longer. And frankly, the last two books I read were disappointing, so it’s not like this is somehow less challenging or interesting. I’ll even say it’s better. Though I’m also hoping that the next book I read is better than Robert Jordan, in general.