Some Sword-wielders You Can Always Count On

Notice how some stories tend to get told over and over again? They’re our myths, containing patterns and archetypes which nourish our ideologies and our imaginations. Comic books are overflowing with them. How many dozens of times has the origin of Superman been re-imagined? And that story itself is, of course, a collection of ideas and elements taken from mythology and various cultural histories. And sometimes, all you need is a slightly different perspective to bring out the power in one of these familiar tales. Take Outlaw: The Legend of Robin Hood (by Lee, Hart and Fujita) as a case in point. Naturally, it’s got the merry men, Maid Marian, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, sword fights, daring escapes, romance and archery contests. But it casts them in a darker, grittier light than you’ve seen them in before. Think a Robin Hood origin by way of Casino Royale and Batman Begins. The tone of the art is shadowy and dark, so much so that you can actually feel the chills wafting through those old stone castles, while the Hood’s struggle with corrupt authority is painfully appropriate for the here and now, too. Just the same, Robin is still very much a hero in outlook and deed. And heroes, of course, never really go out of style.

And speaking of tried and true heroic figures, character types that fit story after story and never get boring, how about a samurai? Better yet, how about a rabbit samurai? Hares have long been a symbol of cleverness and resilience (just ask Bugs Bunny) and samurai; well, I'm sure you know all about them. Usagi Yojimbo, Stan Sakai’s always impressive ode to Japanese history and comic book animals, is in the middle of his twenty-fifth year in publishing and has never been better. The thrilling sword battles (right out of a Kurasawa epic) and funny animal characters (right out of an Uncle Scrooge comic) might give the impression that the material is on the simplistic side. But using elements from Japanese history and mythology and through the deeply honorable and moral character of Usagi himself, Sakai always manages to put a complex and thoughtful spin on the most straightforward situations. With a large body of work, it can be hard to know where to start, but I’m happy to say that Sakai’s skill in writing an accessible tale is such that you can dive in almost anywhere. Among his very best are Usagi Yojimbo Volume 12: Grasscutter, a massive epic featuring loads of characters and plots coming together around an ancient sword of the gods and the battles fought to determine its fate. Also, Usagi Yojimbo Volume 23: Bridge of Tears, the latest installment, is a standout episode that finds Usagi contending with the Assassin Guild’s plot of revenge, featuring several of the characters from Grasscutter’s Tale.

You can’t go wrong with knights or samurai as far as I can see.

A question from one of our readers

This was sent in via email - please provide your opinions if you know the book!

Dear Guys,

Have any of you read this title [Michael Coleman's The Snog Log]? My son loved it, and as a (former) girl, I was just a little disturbed about it. I'd welcome any opinions that you have. I think I will buy it for my library, because it was pretty amusing.

Thanks!

Those without tears have a grief which never ends. --Mexican saying

"The driver of the DeSoto tried to pull out, but somebody threw a brick at his head. For a long time, I observed the beatings as if I were outside of everything, as if a moth of tainted wings floating over the steamed sidewalk. Then I felt a hand pull at my arm and I sluggishly turned toward it. Puppet looked squarely into my one opened eye. He had a rusty screwdriver in his other hand.

'Do it, man," he said. Simply that.

I clasped the screwdriver and walked up to the beaten driver in the seat whose head was bleeding. The dude looked at me through glazed eyes, horrified at my presence, at what I held in my hand, at this twisted, swollen face that came at him through the dark. Do it! were the last words I recalled before I plunged the screwdriver into flesh and bone, and the sky screamed."

That's Luis J. Rodriguez describing a gang initiation he went through around age 13 or 14, in Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. When his son encountered peer pressure to join a gang, Rodriguez "tried to get Ramiro to understand the systematic nature of what was happening in the street which in effect made choices for him before he was born."


And he wrote this book, a book to help show what happens in the street.

"At 18 years old, I felt like a war veteran, with a sort of post-traumatic stress syndrome. I wanted the pain to end, the self-consuming hate to wither in the sunlight. With the help of those who saw potential in me, I got out.

And what of my son? Recently, Ramiro went up to the stage at a Chicago poetry event and read a moving piece about being physically abused by a step-father when he was a child. It stopped everyone cold. He later read the poem to some 2,000 people at Chicago's Poetry Festival. Its title: 'Running Away.'

There's a small but intense fire burning in Ramiro. He turned 17... ; he's made it so far, but every day is a challenge. Now I tell him: You have worth outside of a job, outside the 'jacket' imposed on you since birth. Draw on your expressive powers.

Stop running."

It is a powerful story. Note that there is a helpful glossary in the back that explains the Spanish slang terms, which I failed to notice until I finished the book! If you like it and want more, try Gang Leader for a Day, by Sudhir Venkatesh, or Brothers and Keepers, by John Edgar Wideman.

Some People Can't Surf

Back in the day, when people read newspapers with some regularity, it was said that only something like 7% of the male population didn't read the sports section. I was part of the 7%. It was around the same time that my junior and senior high classmates began schlepping the sports section to homeroom that I began trolling the art and graphic design sections of bookstores and libraries hungry for some visual stimulation. Uneducated and unfamiliar with the art world, and with no finer appreciation for museums, I loved pulling out something that looked interesting and pouring over the glossy pages at images that inspired.

As a result, I became more aware of the graphic design of everyday life: the covers of alternative newspapers, the flyers for punk bands on the telephone poles, the zine piled in the entry ways of music stores. That love of graphics and the photocopier lead me to create zines and design letterpress books, and foundered a lifelong love of both high and low art. It also taught me that there was gold to be discovered in the bookshelves, if you knew where to look.

For my money, one of the best practitioners of 1990s was Art Chantry. While many (many) amateur graphic designers cut their teeth in the trenches of post-Sex Pistols punk rock show posters, Chantry bent and pushed and burned and mutilated the medium to its extremes. To be fair, what the Sex Pistols were doing was little more than aping the detournement of the French Situationists (who in turn were borrowing the Dadaist approach to found collage) so there is a long-standing tradition of image manipulation within art and politics. Nonetheless, Chantry took the low-budget, high concept approach to word and image and put a stamp on it that was at once sophisticated in it's thievery while appearing completely naive.

Some People Can't Surf: The Graphic Design of Art Chantry is the first survey of Chantry's work and is the sort of thing a teen might find pretty darn inspirational. Based in the Pacific Northwest, one could argue that he was the graphic face of the grunge movement. His work for Sub Pop and Estrus records, among many other small bands and labels, will be readily familiar to fans of music from that era. Unlike other artists who spring from pop culture, like Shepard Fairey and his Obey industries, Chantry has no single iconic image or style yet there is a unique look to all his work that nonetheless feels part of a whole.

"An art book? That counts as reading?" Yes, I admit, it is tempting to pick up a book like this and simply look at the pictures. But I believe that one of the mysteries of the adult world to teens is in the arts where often we only know what's presented to us (or covered in the tabloids). How an artist lives and creates, what inspires them and influences them, tells a younger reader a lot about what it means to follow that path. Outsiders, often living on the margins, artists have to learn how to improvise not only with their art but with survival. Sometimes all it takes is a book like this to ignite the spark in a reader's mind: Oh, yeah, someone had to create that? And how did they do it? And what were their influences? A book that opens the door to questions and perhaps inspires a reader into action counts by me.
An artists' retrospective, like Some People Can't Surf, reads like a biography with documentation. Instead of photos of the subject posing on vacation abroad we see their growth as an artist visually while reading about their struggles to meet deadlines and working with no budgets. They're like a picture book where the words and pictures compliment each other, and provide a window into the world of a working artist.

Chantry has been exhibited in The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, The Smithsonian, and the Louvre. That's a trifecta in my book.

Some People Can't Surf:
The Graphic Design of Art Chantry
by Julie Lasky
Chronicle Books
2001

GLW Shortlisted for BBAW

Hey, everyone! Guys Lit Wire has been shortlisted for a Book Blogger Appreciation Week award for Best Special Interest Blog. There's a rather dauntingly long list of categories, but if you go check out the post with nominees, you'll have a chance to vote online for GLW and any other favorite blogs that made the cut. And, if you're like me, you'll find a whole slew of intriguing sites about books and reading that you might not have visited before. Check it out!

ETA: Also don't miss that we were nominated for Most Altruistic Blog in recognition of the Book Fair for Boys!

Also, psssst!, don't forget about this year's Cybil Awards, which are kicking into gear with a new 2009 logo and a new crop of panelists--stay tuned to the blog to find out more.

Lighting the fuse on A Bomb Built in Hell

I've just finished reading the bookends of one of my favorite series, the "Burke" novels by Andrew Vachss. After 18 books in 23 years, he completed it with the release of Another Life in 2008. Meanwhile, his website has the free PDF of his first, unpublished novel, a sort of prelude to the Burke series titled, A Bomb Built in Hell.

To call Bomb "disturbing" is an understatement. Written in 1973, it deals with Wesley, a supporting character in the Burke series, one who's so scary even mentioning his name terrifies people. He's an amoral hit man who, weary of his life, decides to take out the next generation of those he blames for making his life what it is. But his judgment, needless to say, is a bit twisted.

What skews it, as in all Vachss' novels, is Wesley's tormented childhood at the hands of the government. Abandoned at age four, he's raised by the state and becomes a petty teen criminal. In the first few pages he refers to reform institutions as "upstate sodomy schools," and thinks no more of going to jail than a normal person would going to Wal-Mart. He's desensitized, an empty vessel waiting to be filled.

His prison mentor Carmine does just that, teaching him the ropes and preparing him for life outside as a hit man. Upon his release, Wesley avenges Carmine on the mobsters who let him rot in prison. When that's accomplished, he decides to seek a more personal revenge, not against individuals but against an entire class of people. I won't give it away here, but what Vachss wrote about in 1973 came to pass in an almost identical event in 1999.

In the author's notes on his website, Vachss says publishers repeatedly told him, "the book was also 'too' hard-boiled, 'too' extreme, 'too' spare and violent. I heard endlessly about how an anti-hero was acceptable, but Wesley was just 'too' much."

And maybe, dare I say it, they were right about that last bit. Burke narrates his own stories; while the other characters see only his carefully-chosen front, we are privy to his thoughts, feelings and motives. Bomb is written in third person, so that the reader sees Wesley the same way the other characters do. There's very little sympathy for him, especially as he closes in on his greatest hit at the climax. In fact, if Bomb were written and published today, the outcry would probably be massive; Vachss might even disappear at the hands of Homeland Security for appearing to advocate (and describing in detail how to accomplish) such extreme acts.

But despite being a period piece in a sense, "Bomb" still resonates with the thing that makes all Vachss' books so powerful: the sense that there's reality in the details, no matter how outlandish the characters or plot might seem. Vachss has spent his life in the trenches, and if he says this is how something should be done, I wouldn't doubt him.

I'm not exactly "recommending" this book to teen boys; it's certainly not written for a YA audience and as I said, it could be misconstrued as advocating what it depicts, although that's truly not the case. But it does show how the juvenile justice "system" often does far more damage to those it's supposed to help. And I'm not saying Bomb is a "scared straight" work, either. I guess what I got from it, and what I hope teen boys would, is the sense of how those deprived of family will always seek one out. It happens in gangs all the time. But maybe here, writ large and in a sense absurd, readers can see the process in such sharp relief they'll be motivated, somehow, to break the chain. Before that same process produces a Wesley for real.

Download A Bomb Built in Hell for free here.

Read Andrew Vachss autobiographical essay here.

The Morgue and Me -- John C. Ford

The Morgue and Me begins:

When you're eighteen years old and you shoot somebody in a public place at two in the morning, of course you expect some attention. Especially when it's the person I shot, and especially when you're found right there on the scene with that person at your feet, gasping away in a pool of blood that seeps around your shoes. Still, I find it really embarrassing.

The summer before his freshman year of college, photography enthusiast and aspiring spy Christopher Newell gets a summer job at the morgue. He was supposed to work at the NWMU astronomy department, but that fell through when... well, it's a long story.

Anyway, the morgue. While snooping (there's really no other word for it) in the coroner's office, he finds $15,000 in cash. Which is weird. But then when he realizes that the coroner falsified his most recent report... well, Christopher Newell is pretty good at math.

He teams up with Tina, a Trans Am driving, fishnet wearing, drinking, smoking, big mouthed (and extremely attractive) young journalist -- he wants to solve the mystery, she wants a big break -- and before the two of them know it, they're up to their ears in an investigation that seems to involve every single powerful person in their Michigan town.

And powerful people do not usually take kindly to being investigated: especially when that investigation is conducted by a couple of nobodies and involves corruption, blackmail and murder.

Christopher's narration definitely brings to mind a hard-boiled detective -- not because he is one (or acts like one), mind you, but because he wants to be one -- and it especially comes out in some of his descriptions of people:

I've heard that lots of movie stars have huge heads. I don't know about his acting skills, but Corbett was qualified in the head department. His giant helmet of black hair was gelled so thick I could almost see a reflection of the clouds in it. On his feet he wore tiny black loafers, equally shiny. In between, there was lots of tailored clothing.

His relationship with Tina is especially well done. He has to remind himself to stop drooling every time he looks at her even though he knows it is SO not going to happen -- and that attraction persists throughout the book, even as their working relationship develops into a genuine friendship. And, very importantly, they're rather hilarious:

"See?" Tina said. "You lurk a little, you get your answers."

"I'm not sure it was the lurking. I think it was more the asking."

"Whatever. We're lurking till I finish this drink."

And while Tina easily could have become a two-dimensional stock character (because it isn't like we haven't met the brash and brassy type many, many times before), she didn't. As the book progressed, as she and Christopher got to know each other, she became more and more real. By the end of the book, I felt like she was as much a main character as he was.

Big thumbs up here -- it's a strong mystery (minus one plot point that felt really, really wrong) that feels both classic and contemporary. It was suspenseful and twisty and funny with strong secondary characters and just good all around. I know I always say it when I find one, but here I go again: I'm so glad that we're starting to see more noir-ish crime novels written for and marketed to the teen audience. __________________________________________________________________

Book source: My local library.
__________________________________________________________________

Cross-posted at Bookshelves of Doom.

A Short History of Guys Lit Wire

Ever wondered how this site came to be? No, it didn't just appear fully-formed like Athena out of Zeus's forehead. There's a whole history behind it, and site mastermind Colleen has shared it with the readers of Crossed Genres magazine. Here's just a small sample of the article:

"The story of Guys Lit Wire and the notion of creating a blog solely to recommend books for teenage boys begins with the NEA Study on Reading released in November 2007. While much of the media focused on reduced reading numbers among adults, in a segment of the lit blogosphere we were fixated on the figures related to teen boys. While younger children show parity between the genders on reading tests, boys begin to noticeably lag behind girls as they grow older. A boisterous conversation ensued online as we discussed what this might mean..."

Read the rest of Colleen's post here, and find out for yourself how we got to where we are today. (And, go, Colleen! W00t!)

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Visit Stockholm, Sweden and you'll be entranced by cleanliness from the moment you arrive. Brightly-hued flowers mingle with the beauty of Old World brick and stonework while freshly-scrubbed Swedes wind their way to work. Even in this modern metropolis, you cannot but marvel at the effort taken to present such an immaculate, crisp image to the outside world.

But Stieg Larsson knows better.

First published in English a year ago, Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has garnered considerable praise for its deft characterization in service to a high tension mystery/thriller plot. Yet it's not the usual thriller trappings that enthrall readers entirely. This is no banal police procedural or run-of-the-mill locked room mystery (though elements of both figure prominently in the novel). Instead, there is something simply riveting about what Larsson reveals about his native Sweden - things which, I suppose, most Swedes already know, but which Americans could not even begin to fathom.

Calling Larsson's Sweden "seedy" just isn't the right term. Take the image of a 1970s-era Times Square completely out of your mind. Likewise, drop your noir-driven conceptions of cheesy first-person narrative. These are crimes, criminals and environments of an entirely different nature.

The plot is anything but simple, and readers may be initially put off by the complicated Vanger family tree that greets them inside the front cover. For what it's worth, I never needed to refer to the family tree, and I imagine most except the most retentive readers won't have to. Beyond this superfluous map, the novel begins with quite a paradox of reading conditions. I defy anyone to read the prologue and not be immediately captivated by the vague mystery presented. In contrast, the first few chapters past the prologue are enough to drive away all but the most devoted reader. It's an odd pairing, to be sure, but I encourage tenacity - the layers of this mystery may peel back slowly, but the payoff is worth the wait.

Any attempt at summarizing the novel runs the serious risk of spoiling all the fun, so suffice it to say that troubled journalist Mikael Blomkvist is offered an opportunity to solve a decades-old crime, and along the way teams up with a research assistant who is at once deeply troubled, yet undeniably brilliant. This is oversimplified, of course, but there is no way to effectively communicate the thematic depth of the novel without perverting the reading experience.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's raison d'etre is not only to scrape the white-washed veneer from the surface of Sweden's image, but also to explore the hidden malevolence directed at women from within the nation's bounds. At this, Larsson succeeds superbly by presenting a wide array of female figures. And while some of these may be physically and emotionally weak, most are intellectually and morally empowered to do something about the men who would subjugate them.

Long after the mystery at the heart of the novel had passed, I found myself not wanting to tear myself away from these strangely compelling characters. By deliberately standing aloof from his characters, and by presenting them in an almost simple, journalistic, fashion, Larsson imbues them with a psychological depth and realism they would never have otherwise. The mystery, it seems, has less to do with the enigma Blomkvist is hired to solve and more to do with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - or is that The Girl Who Played With Fire?

Get Mechanistic

If you've read this site regularly, you've heard the term "steampunk" used here and there, but here's a little refresher if you need it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk

In Mainspring, Jay Lake has gone a bit beyond the typical steampunk world. His book is set in Victorian times, opening in America which here is still under English rule, but that's the least of what's unusual about the world compared to our own. The solar system in this book is purely mechanical, operating like an enormous clock. Each of the planets, including the Earth, rotates by means of gears and orbits the sun on a massive circular brass track hung somehow in space. The sun itself is a massive lamp in the center.


he story opens with Hethor, a clockmaker's apprentice, who is visited one night by a Brass angel calling itself Gabriel. Gabriel tells Hethor that the world's spring is in need of winding, and that he must find the Key Perilous which can wind up the world before everything grinds to a halt. As evidence of his visit Gabriel leaves Hethor with a silver feather. Despite some trouble in getting anyone to believe this tale and instead being accused of theft, Hethor takes it at his mortal duty to accept and carry out the task that God has apparently set before him. He commences a journey that will take him to the ends of his mechanical Earth.

Hethor's world is monumentally strange, full of odd men who form strange societies, bizarre and forgotten inventions, and everywhere, metal--springs and gears and plates and joints. But it is also a familiar one. For help, for instance, he visits the library at Harvard. He struggles with prosaic Victorian religious and sexual guilt. He finds his way often blocked by the simple class issues and politics so common to our world.

Driven on by both his faith in God and his empirical observations (Hethor is especially gifted at picking out the mechanical sounds that this wind-up Earth emits; he can hear its healthy ticking, as well as its painful groaning and grinding) he eventually finds his way aboard an airship, the Bassett, headed for the Wall, a massive structure wrapping the Earth's equator and meshing with the track upon which it circles the sun. On the other side of the Wall is an entirely different kind of world, one in which various humanoid creatures--some ape-like, some bird-like, and some really really tall--live more in tune with nature, both with its bounty and with its violence.

Mainspring is a great adventure. It's hero is anything but flashy, but he is stubbornly determined and you can't help but get behind him as he tries to do God's bidding even in the face of ridicule, imprisonment, mind-bending puzzles and deadly battles. But Mainspring is also an allegory which pits an intellectual, mechanistic, and puritanical view of the world against one which is organic, intuitive and magical. As Hethor negotiates these two extremes, his mind opens up to myriad possibilities of what God might be and how God might work.

It takes a bit of effort to get into Mainspring. The period-specific language is odd, a bit dense and distancing at times, but your effort will be paid off by fantastic imagery and enlightening ideas.