Long Day's Journey Into Night

The canon is a problematic concept. Its attendant implications of an homogenous heritage and dominant cultural norms tend to legitimate only a fairly narrow field of experience. But there can be canons cultural and personal. My high school English class reading lists featured the occasional play, always Shakespeare or Miller. For the most part, I was on my own to explore the rich history of the form, sometimes latching onto famous titles and but open to anything that looked interesting. The core requirement as my personal canon formed was that a work resonated in such a way that it became essential to my understanding of the form, resulting in a list that encompassed everyone from Ibsen to Joe Orton and Christopher Durang. And of course, there were the plays that bridged between the personal and common canons. Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night is an undisputed monument of American drama, but it was just another play when I first encountered it.

One of the most valuable services provided by a cultural canon is the expectation of a shared familiarity with a given body of works. Knowledge of a certain set of material provides a necessary basis for approaching new works. It would be impossible to pass judgment on where within the form a contemporary play about strained families falls without grounding in Long Day’s Journey. O’Neill is as essential to understanding works like Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County—laden as both plays are with concerns about parents, siblings, addiction, and secrets—as Howard’s End is to reading Zadie Smith’s On Beauty.

But there’s a more personal value to works of literature, too.

A Fate That Sometimes Protects Idiots

I don't know... this book doesn't have any vampires or werewolves or zombies. Who'd want to read a book like that?

Well, YOU might. How Angel Peterson Got His Name, by Gary Paulsen, is dedicated by the author "to all boys in their thirteenth year; the miracle is that we live through it."

Paulsen writes about some of the stunts he and his friends tried at that young age: shooting a waterfall in a barrel (He would have drowned, but the barrel hit a sharp rock and shattered.), breaking the world speed record on skis (pulled behind a car), hang gliding with an army surplus kite, inventing the skateboard, jumping a bike through a hoop of fire, and, well, you get the picture, right?

His buddy, Wayne, received a shock from the family's new television, which "slammed him back into the wall and left him unconscious for several minutes. He later claimed that the incident was what made him the only one in our group who could actually talk to girls."

The Politics of Life With Zombies

The zombie apocalypse has happened.  Never mind how, it just did, fourteen years ago when Benny was eighteen months old and was spirited away from his parents by his half-brother Tom before they became victims themselves.  Since then, the living have taken to enclosed cities and let the undead roam in what is now called the Rot and Ruin.

Fifteen is the age of maturity, and that means getting a part-time job in order to continue receiving rations. Benny, like many teens, doesn't really want to work, and he certainly doesn't want to take up the family business of becoming a bounty hunter of the undead.  Worse, his brother Tom is legendary, but all Benny knows and remembers of his much-older brother is that he was a coward who ran away and left their parents to become zombies.

There are plenty of other bounty hunters though, guys like Charlie and The Hammer who told war stories of their times in the Rot and Ruin and talked up their kills in ways Tom never did. Benny could never understand why his brother never talked about work, or why Tom was so revered by town elders, but he finds out quick enough when he finally agrees to become his brother's apprentice after failing at pretty much every other job he attempts.  One trip into the Rot and Ruin changes everything Benny ever knew, or thought he knew, about what it means to be human, both living and undead.

WEREWOLF HAIKU by Ryan Mecum

Remember ZOMBIE HAIKU, with all its humor and gorey details? Well, Ryan Mecum returns to that particular form with WEREWOLF HAIKU, in which a mild-mannered mailman is bitten by a (not) dog while on his daily rounds and finds himself a werewolf.

Turns out there are pros and cons to being a werewolf:

I can hear better,
even though both my ear holes
are clogged with whiskers.

Spiders have eight legs,
each of which I hear stomping
on my hardwood floors.

With heightened hearing,
current pop songs hurt my ears
more than they used to.

The poor mailman develops a unibrow and a lot of other hairy areas - ears, chest, tongue. And a tendency to chase cars and rabbits, howl at sirens, and hump legs. He's also become more of an attraction for dogs, which now follow him like the pied piper.

A Novel Approach to Cinema - starring Charles Bronson & "Rowdy" Roddy Piper

Soft Skull just sent me a couple of very cool little books: THEY LIVE by Jonathan Lethem and DEATH WISH by Christopher Sorrentino. These are the first two books in the new "Deep Focus" series which takes self-defined "hip" authors and gives them carte blanche to write about any film they want. Lethem talked to NYMag recently about his choice and how delighted he was to get the go-ahead on writing about the B-movie classic:

It's a great movie — we're talking about it, and not just because I wrote this book. Go and look at its cultural life as traceable on Google. Look at what it does to people, look at how it emboldens and provokes. It's just not a classy or comfortable or ennobling experience to watch it. It's disturbing and ridiculous and outrageous and uncomfortable, but I think it's the kind of great movie that doesn't really need defense, it just needs to be given the air.

Cover Question: WIll teen boys pick this one up...

...or has the publisher just released a book with a male teen protagonist that is really aimed at female readers? Here's the description from the pub:

Across four sun-kissed drama-drenched summers at his family's beach house, Chase tries to come to grips with his family's slow dissolution while also finding himself in a chaotic love triangle, pitted against his own brother in pursuit of the girl next door. Invincible Summer is a gritty, sexy, page-turning read from a talented teenaged author that readers won't want to miss.

Or is this a cover that boys will actually love?

[Invincible Summer by Hannah Moskowitz, due from S&S on April 19, 2011.]

Black Hole Sun -- David Macinnis Gill

Other than his own admittedly impressive¹ combat skills, his even-more-impressively-skilled partner and a cheerful obnoxious poetry-spouting AI implant in his brain, 17-year-old Durango (that would be his age in Earth years, in Mars, it's calculated differently) doesn't have a lot going for him. His father is in prison, he doesn't have enough money to eat regularly, and his status as a dalit marks him as the lowest of the low.

Despite that, he holds firm to the Regulator tenets of honor. He protects the weak even if they can't pay well, he is loyal to his crew, he always fights fair.

Well... he mostly holds firm. After all, one isn't made dalit for a minor deviation from the Regulator code.

Adios, Nirvana by Conrad Wesselhoeft

Adios, Nirvana by Conrad Wesselhoeft
"When you piss off a bridge into a snowstorm, it feels like you’re connecting with eternal things. Paying homage to something or someone. But who? The Druids? Walt Whitman? No, I pay homage to one person only, my brother, my twin.
In life. In death.
Telemachus.

Since the death of his brother, Jonathan’s been losing his grip on reality. Last year’s Best Young Poet and gifted guitarist is now Taft High School’s resident tortured artist, when he bothers to show up. He's on track to repeat eleventh grade, but his English teacher, his principal, and his crew of Thicks (who refuse to be seniors without him) won’t sit back and let him fail."- summary from Amazon

Before I start to get in too deep, the last sentence of the summary makes this book sound much more after-school special than it really is. This is a thoroughly realistic debut that doesn't sugarcoat anything and does a great job of dealing with Jonathan's emotions regarding his twin brother's death and the pressure he feels from everyone around him.

However, I will say there were times where I was thinking to myself "Oh my god, just get over it already and stop moping around!" but having not lost someone that close to me, I feel like I have no place to say anything.

I really loved the musical and poetic aspects of the novel because it made the character richer and more three-dimensional. But at the same time, Jonathan was so wrapped up in himself and his problems that the people most important to him (his friends and mother) kind of fell by the wayside, which meant way less characterization of them. The new people he meets at Delphi, a hospice, are given more room to be fleshed out.

The climax of the book seemed to be written almost stream-of-consciously and it just flowed so well. That's one thing I loved about the prose in the book- it was accessible but philosphical and just superb.

Incorruptible by Mark Waid and Jean Diaz

Way back in February I wrote about Mark Waid's Irredeemable, a twist on the classic Superman-style superhero comic where the pristine, nigh-indestructible good guy (called The Plutonian) finally gets fed up with the world and unleashes all of his pent up demons upon it. Irredeemable is an object lesson in the old adage, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely," and it works because of its willingness to pervert our notions of good and evil.

While Incorruptible continues as a monthly series (and a nice back library of collected trade paperbacks) Waid has added another title and storyline to the mix with Incorruptible. Occurring at the same time and same continuity as Irredeemable, Incorruptible tells the story of Max Damage (where does he get these character names?) another indestructible, super-strong character who has devoted his life to debauchery, crime and a general maladjusted sense of self. At least, Max DID live a life of crime, until The Plutonian nutted up and destroyed an entire city. Max disappears following the disaster, only to return a significantly changed man - no more illicit sex (with his underaged sidekick, no less), drugs or crime of any kind. In most respects, Max undergoes a religious transformation, minus the religion (Waid may eventually take the series in this direction, but don't look for it in the first collected trade). He returns, in essence, as a super powered monk.

Never one to let a character off the hook easily, Waid challenges Max's transformation over and over again with multiple temptations. Turning good, it seems, has as many negative implications as suddenly becoming evil, and there are few, if any, who accept or believe in Max as a newly-incarnated super-savior. Thus, this new series allows Waid to further explore the odd, often unstable line between what we consider good and bad, right and wrong, and our own willingness to accept change in others.

It's not a perfect series, and in many ways it is inferior to Irredeemable - most notably because it all but requires that you have read the other series - but it is intriguing to see Waid play out a "Saul of Tarsus"-like conversion in a landscape filled with comic book conventions. Can we accept that someone so bad can suddenly embrace goodness? If we can't, what does that say about us?

Through a Mirror, Darkly

In the opening scene of Reckless, the first volume in Cornelia Funke’s new series, we are introduced to Jacob Reckless whose father has disappeared. Jacob, feeling abandoned and angry, searches his father’s room for clues as to what might have happened to him. What he finds instead is a mirror which serves as a portal to another world. As soon as crosses into this world, he is attacked by a grotesque spider like being. He barely escapes and finds his younger brother, Will, afraid, searching for him back in his own world.

The story then jumps ahead twelve years. Jacob, not deterred by the violence he met in the Mirror world has, over the years, spent more and more time there. The Mirrorworld is a place full of dangerous and enticing magic. In his time behind the mirror Jacob has become a successful, even famous, hunter of magical treasures and, like his father before him, has largely abandoned his family in his home world, forever making excuses for his long absences. But one mistake has allowed his brother to follow him through the mirror and tragedy has struck. A race of stone-skinned people called Goyl, at war with various human nations, has attacked the Reckless brothers and, because of the curse of a dark fairy that the Goyl use as a weapon of war, Will is slowly growing stone skin himself, turning into one of the creatures out to destroy the Mirrorworld’s humans. Jacob is certain he can find a cure for his brother, but the skin is changing quickly and with it Will is losing his human mind and soul.