Lost places remembered

BLDG Blog excerpts an interview from Ballardian with photographer Troy Paiva, author of the Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration. Here's a bit that has really stayed with me:

When I was 13 my family went on a road trip, one of many, and we somehow found ourselves bouncing down 15 miles of bad dirt road to the classic "wild west" ghost town of Bodie, arguably the most authentic ghost town in America. Today Bodie is kept in a state of "arrested decay" and is a major tourist destination. Much of the road is paved and the parking lot is filled with tour buses, and in the summer the town is crawling with thousands of tourists from around the world. But back in the early 70s you could drive right into the center of town and park. When we climbed out of the car we found we were the only ones there! I wandered that town alone for hours, slack-jawed at the thought that people would just walk away from furnished houses and businesses, a whole city, and never come back. I was hooked for life.

[Image: ‘Joshua Says GO!’ by Troy Paiva. ‘A 30s twin-tail Lockheed Electra does the big sleep at Aviation Warehouse. Night, full moon, red-gelled strobe flash. Canon 20D.’]

Eliot Asinof, Rest in Peace

From the NYT obituary:

Eliot Asinof, whose journalistic re-creation of the 1919 Black Sox scandal, “Eight Men Out,” became a classic of both baseball literature and narrative nonfiction, died Tuesday in Hudson, N.Y. He was 88 and lived in Ancramdale, N.Y.

Eight Men Out was one of the best books on sports I've ever read. It's an absolute must read for fans of baseball; this is the episode that changed the game in fundamental ways and certainly inaugerated the era of modern baseball (with all the good and bad that has brought). More from the NYT:

The book is an exhaustively reported and slightly fictionalized account of how eight members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox allowed their anger at the parsimonious team owner, Charles Comiskey, to corrupt their integrity, leading them to welcome the overtures of gamblers, who persuaded them to throw the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. A seminal event in the history of the game, it led to the appointment of the first baseball commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

Mr. Asinof spent nearly three years researching the book, including interviewing the two members of the team, Joe Jackson and Happy Feltsch, who were still alive. In the end, “Eight Men Out” was a book that made plain the connection between sport and money and between sport and the underworld. “Here is the underbelly of baseball vividly dissected,” said Fay Vincent, the former baseball commissioner.

Porcellino writes about his Thoreau graphic novel

Over at Containing Multitudes, a blog run by the School of Amercan Studies at the University of East Anglia, John Porcellino talks about his forthcoming graphic novel about Henry David Thoreau, titled Thoreau at Walden, coming soon from the Center for Cartoon Studies. I've seen an advanced readers copy, and I can't think of a better cartoonist to depict the iconic American writer and philosopher.

If you've seen either the Houdini or Satchel Paige graphic novels from the Center for Cartoon Studies, then you know what a cool, informative, and out-of-the-ordinary series of biographies these books are. They tackle the material in ways that break out of the typical "life story" box to bring something new to the table, and really open up the lives and times of the subjects.

What's fascinating here is to see how a writer and artist approaches adapting someone elses words and ideas:

"Thoreau has been a major inspiration to me since my High School days, and to get the chance to immerse myself in his work and life, and then to try to bring that out in a way that would be accessible to contemporary readers was really a dream come true for me, pardon the cliché."

More at the link!

NYC dystopia x2

dys·to·pi·a ~noun. a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.

Well, there's plenty of that going around in a pair of books I'm featuring today, both of them set in New York City but written 40 years apart from one another.

First up is the dead and the gone, Susan Beth Pfeffer's sequel to Life As We Knew It. As with the previous book, the events that follow occur after an asteroid has hit the moon, knocking it out of its former orbit. Where Life As We Knew It was set in rural Pennsylvania and followed closely the struggle for survival as seen from a teen girl's perspective, the dead and the gone shows us how events unraveled through the eyes of Alex Morales, a seventeen year old boy living in Manhattan.

Alex is the second-eldest of the divided Morales family; his older brother Carlos is a Marine stationed on the West Coast; his mom is a nurse on night duty when the book begins, possibly on her way home via the subway; his father is in Puerto Rico attending the funeral of Alex's grandmother; and at home, Alex's two younger sisters wait for him to return from his night job working at a pizza parlor. In the beginning the news of the asteroid's collision course is peripheral at best; most people are listening to the baseball game.

Unraveled is the best way to describe events that follow. As the shifting of the moon has profound effects on the planet's delicate ecosystem, tides flood the subways and knock out all satellite transmissions. Without his parents there to guide them Alex quickly moves into survival mode in order to protect his sisters and keep the family together. When his sisters ask about the safety of their missing parents Alex reassures them without hesitation that everything will be okay. Alex is as pragmatic as he is protective, shunting his emotions in order to assure their survival.

As things progress, Alex's attempts to keep things normal at home run counter to what's happening all around him. Yankee stadium becomes the repository for people to claim unidentified family. Alex's trip to the makeshift morgue tugs at his emotions - he'd like to know what happened to his mother, but he also doesn't want to know if she's dead. Without phone service he is unable to contact relatives in Puerto Rico to check on his father, so without proof he assumes his father is alive despite reports of the island being struck by a massive tidal wave. Alex and his sisters continue to go to school and remain as normal as possible under the circumstances, while bit by bit it becomes clear that things will never be normal again.

Where events felt more ominous in Pfeffer's previous exploration of this disaster scenario, here in New York City the events that unfold seem merely to hasten the inevitable. As the food shortages and flu epidemic spread, as stifling heat gives way to mountains of snow, as the rich get out of town and the poor are trapped on an island left for dead, New York comes to represent the ultimate failure of the urban model of living, an unsustainable wasteland. Alex casually learns to lie and steal and, in the end, manages to get himself and one of his sisters successfully out of New York and toward a promise of a new life further inland. It's a somewhat bleak ending, but it feels genuine and hopeful at the same time.

* * * * *
Recently released for its 40th anniversary, Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! gives us another version of the Big Apple in decay. The events are no less ecological, though the cause is man-made this time.

It's the future, the end of the millennium. You'll have to forgive a book written in the 1960's for getting the future of 1999 wrong, though in many ways the book does correctly understand some of the problems we're facing today. Harrison's premise was that the US was unconcerned with population control and that short-sidedness led to a planet where the people outstripped the resources. Greenhouse gases have ruined rich agricultural farmland, food and water is scarce, New York city is under a constant heat wave. As Harrison paints it, only the date of this scenario might be wrong as we may still be headed in this direction under global warming.

I have to break the review here to interject that this book was nothing like I had remembered it to be. I had this strange sense of double deja vu because there are familiar elements in the story that echoed both a movie adaptation of this book and the sudden realization that my disappointment was the same I felt when I first read this book as a teen. The movie was Soylent Green, and the disappointment I felt then as now was that there is no such thing as Soylent Green in the book. That is to say, if you've seen the movie and you think you know what the book is about, you don't.

Harrison tells the story of a police detective named Andy Rusch who investigates a case of murder that was nothing more than a crime of opportunity. The problem is that the corrupt politicos believe there's something deeper going on and Andy's forced to follow-through on the investigation beyond when it should have been dropped. There's a girl involved, a gangster's moll, who takes up with Andy once she's out of her meal ticket. And darting through the story is the thug on the lam who shows us the seamier underside of a New York Harbor clogged with decommissioned Liberty Ships used as emergency housing for the world's refugees.

What Harrison has done is graft a noir-ish crime story onto a New York City that has collapsed under the weight of its population. It's a dirty, ugly world with rationed water, no electricity, a black market for produce and meat, and corruption at every level of government. Where the dead and the gone gives us the quick death of NYC Make Room! Make Room! gives us the tail end of the long, slow demise. Both versions, as written, are equally plausible portraits of a metropolitan city in decay.

But in a head-to-head grudge match it's Pfeffer's book hands down as the better read. Pfeffer's book continues to draw out the disaster in diary format, one day at a time, inviting the reader to put themselves in Alex's shoes in deciding whether or not he's made the right decisions. the dead and the gone deals somewhat flatly with Alex as a protector of his sisters and there is little for him emotionally. Harrison's book has a more balanced emotional story at it's heart with Andy questioning love and what it means to live in this rotten world, but in imagining the worst aspects of his world into our future he retained some ugly racial and sexist stereotypes that, while "authentic" for a reader back in 1966, detract from the story.

the dead and the gone
by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Harcourt Children's Books 2008

Life As We Knew It
by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Harcourt Children's Books 2006

Make Room! Make Room!
by Harry Harrison
Tor Books 2008

Cory Doctorow's graphic novel for free!

From Boing Boing:

IDW have just published the collected issues of "Cory Doctorow's Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now," a six-edition series of comics adapted from my short stories by an incredibly talented crew of writers, artists, inkers and letterers...s with all of my books, this one is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial license, meaning you can copy it, share it, remix it and play with it, provided it's on a non-commercial basis. I've uploaded the full book in high resolution as a PDF and CBR file to the Internet Archive, for your downloading pleasure.

Collected in this volume are adaptations of my award-winning stories "Craphound," "Anda's Game," "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth," "After the Siege," "I, Robot" and "Nimby and the D-Hoppers."

"Anda's Game" in particular impressed the hell out of me - I couldn't believe what I was reading but some checking on the internet showed that yeah, some of the kind of flat out insanity he wrote about in that story really is true. If you want to read that story in its prose form, get a copy of the new SF anthology Starry Rift. To download the graphic novel for free, go here.

Crime, Punishment and Robert Frost

Last December a bunch of teens had a very rowdy party in poet Robert Frost's old summer house in Vermont. (It is now a museum.) There was a lot damage and the judge in the case just got creative about how the defendants are not only going to pay for what they destroyed but also learn a bit in the process. As the NYT explains in a recent editorial:

The criminal justice system in Ripton, Vt., prescribed poetry, of all things, as punishment — and we hope rehabilitation — for 25 teenagers (townies all) who broke into Frost’s old summer house in the woods last December. They trashed it during a snowy night’s bout of drinking and partying.

Skeptical at first, Mr. Parini, who teaches at nearby Middlebury College, accepted the invitation to teach the wayward teens. He did not pull any iambic punches in class last week.

One lesson was built around “The Road Not Taken,” Frost’s caution on the fateful choices that crop up in the dense woods of life. Harsher still was the choice of “Out, Out,” Frost’s account of a youth’s precious life spilling away in a sawmill accident amid the heedless glories of Vermont.

“They seemed shaken to their foundations,” said Mr. Parini, not that surprised. “A wake-up call: don’t waste your life.”

The young perpetrators must also do hours of community service, but the professor knows Frost’s words struck home best. “Poetry is about life and death and who you are as a person,” Mr. Parini explained, quoting the prose line from Frost “that really drove me towards these kids.” It’s from the essay “Education by Poetry,” in which the poet warned, “Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.”

A Kiss Before the Apocalypse by Thomas E. Sniegoski

Want a great action-adventure story with both legendary swordfights and present-day crimesolving? Check out A Kiss Before the Apocalypse by Thomas E. Sniegoski, where the leading man is part angel, part film noir detective, living in modern times.

Sniegoski's one of my favorite novelists. He's able to combine legends and mythology with comedy, and he creates complex characters, both heroes and villains, who square off in kick-butt action sequences.

Don't just take my word for it - Check out author Christopher Golden's praise of the book: "The most inventive novel you'll buy this year. A hard-boiled noir fantasy by turns funny, unsettling, and heartbreaking. This is the story Sniegoski was born to write, and a character I can't wait to see again."

Here's the official summary:
Boston P.I. Remy Chandler has many talents. He can will himself invisible, he can speak and understand any foreign language (including the language of animals), and if he listens carefully, he can hear thoughts.

Unusual, to say the least - for an ordinary man. But Remy is no ordinary man - he's an angel. Generations ago, he chose to renounce heaven and live on Earth. He's found a place among us ordinary humans; friendship, a job he's good at - and love.

Now he is being drawn into a case with strong ties to his angelic past. The Angel of Death has gone missing - and Remy's former colleagues have come to him for help. But what at first seems to be about tracing a missing person turns out to involve much more - a conspiracy that has as its goal the destruction of the human race.

And only Remy Chandler, formerly known as the angel Remiel, can stop it.

If you dig A Kiss Before the Apocalypse, you'll also enjoy Sniegoski's series The Fallen. It too offers good guys, bad guys, mythological characters, and loyal canine companions. You may have seen the TV series on ABC Family last year and the year before that - These are the books upon which that show was based, and the books are even better than the series. More action, more angels, more twists and turns.

Go pick up Sniegoski's stories. You won't be disappointed.

Tough Boy Sonatas

Last year, it was my pleasure and my chore to read the poetry collection Tough Boy Sonatas by Curtis L. Crisler, illustrated by Floyd Cooper. It was a pleasure because Crisler has put together a collection of poetry specifically for teenage boys, and more specifically, for kids who come from the 'hood or the wrong side of the track (or those who feel that way, wherever they may be from). The collection includes stories of innocent kids in a bad neighborhood and stories of kids dealing with massive life issues: drugs, crime, racism, social isolation, politics, religion, and more.

One of my reasons for wanting to write about poetry for Guys Lit Wire is kinda summarized in the title of one of my favorite poems from the collection: "Boys Love Words".


boys love words
by Curtis L. Crisler

we slog to library to
do reports on satchmo
in rustic brick-red after-
school afternoons. little
brown-faced hood rats
sneaking chocolate-
covered donuts into library.
don't got milk or red cream
soda to stop-stick to roof
of mouth. half in study --
laughing, hungry amontst
tart, stale smell of old
books, cedar chairs -- dead
authors and miss library
lady-- she looks beyond
her white, cate-framed
glasses like we stink
of piss. we too breathe
the once dank lines of
whitman, the open pores
of petrarchan lady who
makes shakespeare sweat,
and we try nhot to sigh
when we open the hard
backs. she knows we
can smell the sex
bonded and glued,
sandwiched between
black and white lines--
no short attention span,
it's our curiosity in love
w/ the words she oversees,
checks in, hands out, in
love w/ what trickles out
our mouths, we flush her
cheeks, flex our callow
pecs-- callous lotharios
tugging at that new
itch in genitalia.

This is just one of the 39 poems that make up the collection, and it comes from the third section of the book, which is entitled "Tough Boy Sonatas". The first two sections are "Gary" and "Son of a City". The language used is indicative of the sort of rawness that appears in many of the poems, some more dark or violent, others more blunt or sexual. Each poem in this collection packs a bit of a punch.

This book is a great collection for teens interested in looking at edgy poetry for their age group, or who are interested in writing (in poetry or otherwise) about some of the inequities that still exist in today's American society, including racism, poverty, education and societal expectations. Most of the poems in the collection are serious poetry, almost all of them touching on serious issues, although with an infusion of sly humor now and again, as in "The Black of Gray", when Crisler writes:

. . .I prayed to the prototype
re-creation reprint of Jesus, never knowing this
dude was Michelangelo's relative or running
buddy or model . . .

Or in "Day Dreamer", which starts

In third grade on first floor of bliss
or was it hell? at David O. Duncan School

I'd lose chatter of overzealous teacher
talking-talkity-talk 'bout someone famous, white,

and dead or how many manias lived in texbooks--
how history declares, "Columbus revealed America"--

and we knew Indians gave Chris's ass a little help. . . .

The poems in Tough Boy Sonatas will challenge readers and make them think, which is probably one of the reasons that this book is on the 2008 ALA list of Best Books for Young Adults. The illustrations by noted illustrator Floyd Cooper contribute to the ambience of the book.

***All excerpts from Tough Boys Sonatas by Curtis L. Crisler, illustrated by Floyd Cooper (Wordsong/Boyds Mills Press, 2007)

Soccer fans take note

As the European Soccer Championship gets under way, Slate rounds up a a bunch of sites to help you keep on top of things and also provides some literary selections for those who can't get enough of the game. One in particular caught my eye:

A more serious read is Soccer in Sun and Shadow by Uruguayan novelist Eduardo Galeano. Originally published in 1998, it is an eloquent, occasionally bombastic love letter to the game, comprising dozens of short essays with titles like "The Language of Soccer Doctors" and "The Perfect Kiss Would Like To Be Unique." Galeano has a fatalistic, purist take on the sport: "The history of soccer is a sad voyage from beauty to duty. When the sport became an industry, the beauty that blossoms from the joy of play got torn out by its very roots." But there is joyful play in Galeano's writing about great players and great goals, even in these fallen times. Of Italian striker Roberto Baggio, a star of the 1980s and '90s, Galeano says, "His legs have a mind of their own, his foot shoots by itself. … Baggio is a big horsetail that flicks away opponents as he flows forward in an elegant wave."

Steampunk Animals

From artist Jessica Joslin's site description of her new book, Strange Nature:

The creatures that make up Jessica Joslin's world are specimens of unknown species, captured from the collision of myth and science. They are constructed and formed through an intricate fusion of bone, brass, antique hardware and other delicate fragments. This finely wrought craftsmanship is displayed with exquisite full-color photography throughout. Jessica Joslin: Strange Nature is an opportunity to enter this artist's eccentric and wonderful world.

I've never seen anything like this - way way too cool. (original link via boing boing.)