Very interesting, Fred - I haven't read H. but am now tempted to try,
and as far as graphic novels are concerned have only recently started
reading Gaiman's Lord Morpheus series. Recommendations, please. Nor have
I ever read a word by Steve Erickson - which one do you recommend to
start with? There a very charming interview here that I just googled-
http://rakesprogress.typepad.com/rakes_progress/2005/02/qa_with_steve_e.html
- don't know if you've read that.
The poem, "Innocence" is disturbing & occasionally magnificent: lines like
"Women peer
through slits in robes and doors,
men flee and fire, and the soldiers move
into the mind and landscape of the future"
are unforgettable (here Dom's "comic book realism" idea is insufficient because there are very intense strictly poetic qualities to the writing); the whole Keith Douglas alternative reality passage with the ancient Wilfrid Owen is tremendously suggestive - their unspoken dreams are our history. Part 5 is the most pulpy, shot through with a mordant irony & poetic resonances; the last two lines are killers. Thanks.
Martin
Frederick Pollack wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dominic Fox" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2006 5:16 PM
> Subject: Re: "Innocence"
>
>
>> I was looking for a descriptive term for this; "comic book realism"
>> was the closest that came to mind - the stylisation, the ever-present
>> awareness of and gestures towards a pulp media context (horror movies
>> and so on); the hard-boiled, sardonically un-PC Frank Miller aspect;
>> the morose delectation in the face of violent passions and acts. These
>> are Houellebecqian traits as well, although sex is more his thing than
>> violence.
>>
>> I suspect you could do pretty well as a comic book writer. I'm serious
>> - and I'm quite a fan of those sorts of comic books...
>>
>> Dominic
>>
>
> I am too. Every semester in my intro creative writing courses, I cite
> graphic novels as models of compressed, suggestive narrative, and it
> distresses me that few students are aware of them. For some years
> I've imagined a collaboration - a comix version (or "illumination") of
> some of my poems. But I've made no effort to contact someone in the
> field; really I don't know whom to approach, or how.
>
> Houellebecq is one of two novelists each of whose new works I
> automatically read (the other is Steve Erickson). Currently I'm
> halfway through "The Possibility of an Island." In a sense, sex isn't
> H's thing, love is; but love for him is the great impossible.
> Consciousness is kept from aspiring to it by obsessive narrow selfish
> reasoning. Market calculation as Kantian category, a synthetic a
> priori -- H's repudiation of political hope does not make him less
> politically revealing. The mind in H is trapped by its own lucidity
> in the horizon of the body - a horizon mercilessly defined by age,
> inadequacy, and death. It's a vision more medieveal than postmodern.
> I intersect with it at some points but I'm more of a romantic.
--
The older I get, the more I agree with Shakespeare and those poet Johnnies about it always being darkest before the dawn and there's a silver lining and what you lose on the swings you make up on the roundabouts. Bertram Wooster, Esq.
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