Leaving the Atocha Station

 
Leaving the Atocha Station

by Ben Lerner

Granta

2012

 

 

Leaving the Atocha Station really did not do much for me. It's a short literary novel about an aspiring poet. The narrator is a whiny White American guy spending his first year out of undergrad in Spain on a fellowship. 

 
The narrator lies about himself compulsively. He tries to act enigmatic in the hope that people will fill in his gaps with their imaginations, and that their image of him will be better than the truth. He writes a little poetry, takes a lot of drugs, and spends most of his time trying to impress two different Spanish women. He does want to get in their pants, but I think it's even more important to him that they think he's a cool, mysterious genius.

 
He worries that he's a fraud, and honestly, it seems like he is.

 
I think one appeal of the books for writers is maybe recognizing themselves or their colleagues when they were just out of college and felt like imposters. Another appeal probably is the ideas about poetry that the author, Ben Lerner, gives the guy. He thinks a lot about how poetry fails to emotionally affect him and how what does emotionally affect him is his lack of response to this art that other people seem affected by. Yes, there's a parallel between what he says about poetry and how he tries to portray himself as interesting via absences and blank spaces he hopes others will fill with their own meanings.

 
The narrator's trip to Spain coincides with the 2004 Madrid transit bombing, which affects the country somewhat like the way 9/11 affected the US.

 
The book's two saving graces are that Lerner doesn't defend the narrator and shows that he's aware of the guy's self-delusions, so at least I get to feel my contempt without encountering defensiveness, and also it's pretty short.

 
I've seen a lot of praise for this one, and like I said, it might appeal to professional writers more than it appealed to me, but I still think it's over-praised. It also has a really cool looking cover that somehow led me to expect something different than what I got.

Iranian Love Stories

 
Iranian Love Stories

by Jane Deuxard
art by Deloupy
translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger
Graphics Mundi

2021

 

I've started wondering if keeping this list is changing the way I read, or if I always had a rhythm of reading a few longer works and then several really short ones in a row. I'm not really doing it just to 'get my numbers up' - but keeping track like this almost makes it seem like I am!

 

Iranian Love Stories is a non-fiction comic that depicts 10 interviews between 'Jane Deuxard' (actually a dating couple who are both journalists) and young Iranians conducted shortly after the election of President Hassan Rouhani in 2013. The failure of the pro-democracy Green Revolution movement of 2009 is also very much on most interviewees' minds.

 
The journalists interview some couples, some individual women, and a couple individual men. What they mostly find are people in their 20s and 30s who, even if they are in love and in a committed relationship, are afraid to have sex before marriage because the man's family could insist on a 'virginity inspection' before the wedding, and who rarely even get a chance to kiss or hold hands because there's nowhere they can go where they aren't being watched. Surveillance by their own family members, the uniformed police, and I think at least two different kinds of plain-clothes 'morality police' is omnipresent. Almost everyone is afraid and feels powerless to change anything.

 
One young woman who seems very foolish goes on and on about how wonderful Iran is for women since she is never 'forced' to work for money. One woman says she might be a Muslim if she were born somewhere else, but in Iran she sees the religion as 'all lies' told to benefit the mullahs who form the country's ruling class. Another man alleges that it's easy for the mullahs to forbid sex since they can visit prostitutes while traveling internationally.

 
Half of Deloupy's art depicts the interviews and half illustrates whatever the person is talking about, sometimes literally but usually metaphorically. The image of eyes watching from the shadows represents the ubiquity of surveillance. We also see mullahs like giants eating platefuls of ordinary people, running over them with railroad trains, etc, as representations of their political power.

We Only Find Them When They're Dead 1

 
 
We Only Find Them When They're Dead 1

The Seeker

by Al Ewing

art by Simone Di Meo

Boom! Studios

2021

 

 

We Only Find Them When They're Dead is a scifi comic about the crew of an 'autopsy ship,' one of dozens, perhaps hundreds, that works to mine resources from the corpses of dead gods. 

 
The gods are the size of Galactus, but dressed more like Thor and Loki. They're found floating in deep space at the very edge of the galactic rim, and, as the title indicates, they are always found dead. The autopsy ships are specialized mining vessels, little bigger than houseflies compared to the gods. They harvest meat, metal, and other valuable substances from the giant corpses.

 
The crew we follow has a plan to go deeper into space, into the void between galaxies, to try to find a god that's still alive. They're pursued by a policewoman with a longstanding personal grudge against the autopsy ship's captain. Their confrontation comes to a head on the body of a dying god. In the end, the captain goes even further alone, and on the last few pages, makes a very surprising discovery about the gods' origin.

 
Both the strangeness of the premise and the way the plot unfolds reminds me a lot of an episode of The Twilight Zone. The art is all digital painting, and makes use of full-page images and two-page spreads to help convey the enormity of the dead gods. The glimpses we see of the 'autopsies' are grotesque, and the whole situation implies something really macabre about the unseen human civilization that sends all these spaceships out to mine the corpses of transcendent beings.

Good Mail Day

 
 
Good Mail Day

A Primer for Making Eye-Popping Postal Art

by Jennie Hinchcliff and Carolee Gilligan Wheeler

Quarry Press

2009

 

 

Good Mail Day is a craft book - half photos of art, half instructions for making similar art yourself. In this case, it's 'mail art,' which refers to any sort of stationary and envelope that are in some way decorated or embellished by the sender. Good Mail Day also has advice for forming pen-pal relationships with other mail artists, and joining what they call 'the Network' of mail artists nationally and globally.

 
Hinchcliff and Wheeler favor a style of mail art that takes advantage of collage and assemblage of found objects, cut up and reassembled to make your own envelopes or paper, or as decorative accents. They also use hand-carved rubber stamps to add an extra pop. They favor immediacy and contingency - look for interesting papers around you as you go about your day, collect them, and use them to make your next mail art. 

 
They argue that working quickly, rather than trying to craft a perfect letter, makes it easier to send out more letters, and makes each mail art project indelibly 'of the moment' because it bears the mark of wherever you were and whatever you were doing when you made it. They think this also encourages you to go out more and see more new places so that you can find more materials.

 
Mail art can simply be traded back and forth between pairs of artists, or one can put out a call for submissions. The most famous submission-based mail art project, although not mentioned here, is probably Post Secret. The Good Mail Day book itself is also full of examples of such submissions.

 
It's a fun, inspiring book, and reminds me of Nick Bantock's epistolary novels made up of his decorative letters. Hinchcliff and Wheeler's aesthetic recommendations (and the reasoning beind them) remind me the Dadaists, Surrealists, and Situationists, with their use of cut-ups, collage, and found objects.

A Winter's Promise

 

A Winter's Promise

by Christelle Dabos

translated by Hildegarde Serle

Europa Editions

2018

 

 

A Winter's Promise is the first book in the Mirror Visitor quartet. It's a YA fantasy novel, and imaginative in a way that feels like descending into a dream. 

 
The book takes place on a ruined future Earth that has been shattered into hundreds of 'Arks,' which seem to be like habitable asteroids with breathable atmosphere, all orbiting each other and the old planetary core. This was a magical apocalypse rather than a scientific one, and so each Ark is its own little society full of people with magical powers.

 
We follow Ophelia, who can 'read' the history of objects by touching them and also travel between any two mirrors that she's previously seen her reflection in, as long as they're close enough together. Ophelia's family arranges a marriage between her and Thorn, a man from the distant Pole ark. Ophelia and her chaperone aunt get bundled off to the Pole to live with Thorn and his aunt, Bereldine, to wait out the six-month engagement before getting married.

 
The Pole turns out to be a real nest of vipers. Everything is covered in illusions that make it look beautiful and refined, but the people are all vicious and cruel, possibly including Thorn and Bereldine. Thorn insists on keeping the engagement secret for Ophelia's safety, then leaves her alone to continue his work as his Ark's treasury. As an additional precaution, supposedly, Bereldine gives Ophelia a disguise as a mute butler.

 
Ophelia gradually learns about various forms of intrigue, including an ancient book that Bereldine might want to use her to learn the history of, a plot by a jealous illusionist to cause Bereldine to miscarry the royal baby she's carrying, and various attempts by Thorn's other family members to either kill Ophelia or get her thrown in the dungeons. Ophelia befriends a couple other servants and slowly begins to learn to navigate the treacherous social world of the Pole. This volume ends with several intrigues coming to fruition, and Thorn introducing Ophelia to the court to make their engagement official.

Burning Chrome

 
 

Burning Chrome

by William Gibson

Harper Collins

1986, reprinted 2003

 

 

Burning Chrome is William Gibson's first collection of short stories. I read it because a friend recommended "Hinterland" to me, and then I kept going. "Hinterland" is a much darker take on the same premise as Frederick Pohl's Gateway, about future humans finding alien transportation technology, and traveling far away to search for science treasures.

 
Most of Gibson's stories either explicitly or plausibly take place in the same kind of depressing near-future America, although none of the characters or locations are repeated. Gibson's signature technology, which shows up in nearly every story, are computers that can plug in to the human brain, with the merger providing more processing power than either could achieve alone. This leads to 'feelies' becoming the most popular form of entertainment - recordings of another person's subjective experiences, what it 'feels like' to be them.

 
His most common story structure is an unfolding present day scene intercut with flashbacks that eventually provide the context you need to understand the conclusion of the present.

 
The best stories, probably, are "Burning Chrome," "Winter Market," and "Dogfight."

 
"Burning Chrome" is part of the so-called Sprawl trilogy, along with "Johnny Mnemonic" and "New Rose Hotel." It's maybe the quintessential cyberpunk hacker story. A pair of hackers get some stolen military tech and use it to boost their computer setup to the point where they can successfully hack an organized crime boss. One of the hackers has an unrequited crush on a woman who wants to get her eyes replaced with cameras so she become an actress in the feelie industry.
 

"Winter Market" is about a video editor who has an unrequited crush on the feelie artist he edits for. In flashbacks, she's dying of a terminal illness and working on her magnum opus, a recording of her sadness and rage about dying. In the present day she's dead, but also maybe digitally immortal, having used the proceeds of her opus to pay to have her mind uploaded onto a giant corporate computer.
 

"Dogfight" is about an unemployed drifter who decides he wants to win at video-games, specifically a WWI-era biplane dogfight simulator that uses brain-merger controllers and displays as holograms projected into the playing space. (A little bit like the game Data plays in the ST:TNG episode "Peak Performance.") Most of the players are veteran pilots with actual combat experience and superhuman reflexes thanks to the dangerous drugs the military gave them when they actually flew. The drifter befriends a college student, but when he has the chance to win an 'important' game, rapes her and steals her stash of performance-enhancing study drugs. His win takes away his veteran opponent's last reason to live. To his credit, Gibson is aware that this protagonist turns himself into a monster to win, and that his victory is both meaningless and hollow.
 

Most of the other stories are good, but I'd skip "The Gernsbach Continuum," "Ten Fragments of a Holographic Rose," and "The Belonging Kind." "Red Star, Winter Orbit" is kind of on the cusp of being worth it.

Banding Together

 
 

Banding Together

How Communities Create Genres in Popular Music

by Jennifer Lena

Princeton University Press

2012

 

 

Banding Together is a sociological study of the development of musical genres. Lena looked at the histories of 60 different musical styles and develops a theory by finding commonalities in the ways they changed over time.

 
The most common trajectory for a (successful) musical style is to start as a small Avant-Garde of people who innovate musically, to grow into a local Scene with multiple groups and a dedicated fanbase, succeed as a nationally popular Industry-based style, and eventually become the subject of a Traditionalist revival.

 
Lena also observes that the size of the genre and its available resources (performers, audience members, performance and recording space, money, etc) also affect the cultural and aesthetic debates within the genre. Every avant-garde is against the current establishment, every industry-based style is part of that establishment. Scenes argue about what the style ought to try to sound like, traditionalists argue about what sound is most authentic.

 
Although Lena's data only comes from music history, it's easy to imagine that other forms of cultural production might adopt similar forms and follow similar trajectories.

Factory Summers

 

Factory Summers

by Guy Delisle

translated by Helge Dascher and Rob Aspinall

Drawn & Quarterly

2021

 

 

Factory Summers tells the story in three chapters of Delisle's three summers working in a paper factory as a teenager. Delisle learns how the factory works and gets a bit of skill at his job, sees glimpses of the lives of the men who work there full-time, practices his drawing and begins his path to becoming a professional artist, and occasionally interacts with his divorced father, who is an engineer at the factory. It's a short, compact story, only a portion of his coming-of-age, but it's told effectively.

 
Dilisle's art is deceptively simple. The books is black and white with a couple shades of grey and certain details picked out in yellow, often shirts or the factory's smoke. He draws his teenage self as an almost blank cartoon, the other workers more expressively, and shows the machinery of the factory in a way that is at once realistic but somehow not much more detailed than the people.

 
After the three main chapters are two short epilogues. One shows teenage Delisle starting a job at an animation studio rather than returning to the factory, and the other shows an event from 2019 or 2020, presumably the event that inspired him to draw this comic, of Delisle and his brother visiting their father's apartment after his funeral, and Delisle discovering that his dad had copies of all the comics he's published.