My first exposure to James was reading his Nebula award-winning novella “Mr. Boy”, which is included in this collection of stories. It was such a great story that I looked around for what else he might have written. ( Eventually I read a recent novel of his called “Burn” which was nowhere near as packed full of surprises as these stories are. ) There were no stories that out-did Mr. Boy, but “Standing in Line With Mr. Jimmy”, “Pogram” and “Itsy-Bitsy spider” were all top notch. In fact, the only story that failed to grab me was the one called “Heroics”, perhaps because it was more psychological fiction than speculative fiction. The title story “Think Like a Dinosaur” also won an award. Despite the whimsical titles this is definitely adult reading, because of its complexity and the thought provoking nature of it, vs. any XXX scenes.
“Mr. Boy” is about the only son of an extremely wealthy single mother, in a near future age where the wealthy can purchase distractions such as body modifications and AI companions. Mr. Boy has chosen to purposely stunt his growth through the use of a treatment which is applied once a year. He remains permanently 12 years old, as far as his body is concerned. In many ways his mind functions a bit like an adult, though, and the story exemplifies how these two human attributes are inextricably bound together, and prone to mature , however we attempt to dig our heels in and resist it.
I remember seeing Tom Hanks in the movie “Big” and this story reminds me of that in some ways. The main character is in a position to be a kind of male Paris Hilton, but has no interest in sex because of the age he has frozen himself into. He meets a young lady, and her more working class family, and begins to get intetrested in things that he has heretofore avoided. His child thoughts collide with his adult thoughts in novel ways, pointing out levels of awareness we all go through, that may be forgotten or taken for granted as we age. Kelly also gives his take on a consumer society taken to a logical extreme, with both children and adults showing ephemeral passions for unusual hobbies that new technologies have made possible. There is a lot of character development, and even the artificial intelligence companions evolve as the story moves along.
I give this an A.
ISBN 0-9655901-9-4
March 4th, 2007
I just finished Elizabeth Hand’s book “Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories”. She is also the author of “Waking the Moon”, “Icarus Descending”, and “Mortal Love” which all sound interesting. “Saffron and Brimstone” was my first by her, and so I can only tell you I’m intrigued by these others. One of the “strange stories” called “Cleopatra Brimstone” I had already absorbed in an obscure collection called Redshift awhile back. It is still the most memorable of the collection, being much easier to describe than the others.
A young woman who is fascinated by insects has moved away from home for the first time, having possibly lived a more sheltered life than some, due to a rape earlier in her life. She uses her knowledge of insects to get a job studying them at a natural history museum, and begins to stretch her own “wings” a bit, in terms of nightlife in the cosmopolitan town. There is a demimonde that she has accidentally discovered one night which both fascinates and repels her. She begin to see the men she meets as collectors see butterflies.
The other stories are much more difficult to describe. One is about the friends of a man who is dying, and how they mesh their feelings, strengths, and weaknesses around and about his last days. Another is about a woman who is aging gracefully and occasionally scandalously, as the celebrated writer of fantasy stories that had taken the world by storm, much as A.J. Rowling may do someday. Her daughter Ivy is the narrator, and one gets the feeling that Elizabeth Hand manages to insert some of her own experiences and musings into the details of their lives.
Hand has been described as “literary rather than literate” and others comment on how her book “succeeds as both a thriller and a meditation on the mysterious nature of inspiration”. The word “anti-hero” comes to mind when trying to describe some of her characters. It is to her credit that I find myself at a loss for words in describing her style, as there is little to compare it to, except perhaps in the world of poetry, although this is prose. Very original. A recurring theme is how a male or female Peter Pan would feel as the years went by. I would not be surprised to see Elizabeth do her own version of Dorian Gray someday.
ISBN 13:978-1-59582-096-9
March 4th, 2007
I had waited for the doors to open to the large room in back that had been set up for the audience. I knew that part of what we were going to see/hear was prepared ahead of time, vs. just people milling around and having conversations with the cartoonists. It turned out that there was very little time for chit-chat with the panelists. The people on the panel had the use of a slide projector or computer display, which they could use to throw examples of their work up on the screen. They sat under the screen, at a table up on a stage, or raised area, facing the packed house audience. I was pleased that cartoons had become popular enough to draw a good sized crowd, but I had to scramble to find a good seat after finally being let in. There were people who were already ensconsed in the room, who I assume were friends of the cartoonists. Alternatively they had located themselves there prior to the “Keep out - Soundcheck in Progress” sign being put on the outer door, and then “grandfathered in”. Moving quickly, I saw a table in front with a twenty something woman sitting at it and asked if I could join her. A jacket was draped over a nearby chair which she explained belonged to her boyfriend. Fortunately she said “yes” quickly vs. allowing the time to slip away whilst shyly explaining that she “would like to, however…” etc.
In retrospect, the guy who introduced the panel actually stole the show, to some extent. He was dressed in clothes that were “office appropriate” and for some reason someone in the audience had pointed this out, I think. In any case, this caused him to explain how he had come to the show directly from work, and that this was a passion of his, but not something which paid the bills. Somehow or other, he was able to run with this theme of the conflict between these worlds for ten minutes or so, extemporaneously, and the crowd enjoyed him. He had a gift of gab. I think a lot of people identified with him. He alluded to the fact that “underground cartoons” often elaborated on this same theme. Of course, Harvey Pekar had built his comic up by taking the novel approach of making it about his life, and about how he was often challenged by this same familiar conflict of having to work for some bureaucracy by day, and be creative in his “spare time”. Harvey shows all this in a downbeat way, whereas our introducer was more like an enthusiastic stand-up comedian, putting down “the man”, but laughing at himself a little bit, too.
I sat down and wondered if the boyfriend would try to contradict my table mate’s seating permission later, when he arrived; but fortunately he was a friendly sort of guy. It was a cartoonist get-together after all, and not a Vegas boxing match. He finally joined us just before the presentation began. She explained as we waited that she worked for the company that had published the hardcover book, which had all the cartoons in it, and that her boyfriend knew someone up on the stage. We talked a little about artists we liked, and then I shamelessly tried to “network”, having found myself with an actual publisher “contact”. Then she explained that her position had nothing to do with assisting newcomers, and I believed her. Just as we started to run out of other things to talk about, the presentation began. It was fortunate that I decided to sit in the front with her, as the projected cartoons often had small panels or captions that were tough to make out even at that distance.
The first cartoonist to talk held the floor for quite some time. His work seemed to be mostly vignettes about his life, and often showed him in embarassing situations. Trying to seduce women and failing at it was a common theme, and he seemed mostly self-deprecatory at first. As time went on, one could see the silly side of the people he was interacting with also. The art itself was very simple, and “stick figure” like. With him it was more about the writing. He explained the back story behind each panel of the cartoon, and then signaled the person temporarily in charge of advancing the screen to the next page full of strips. He was good for all the people in the back who couldn’t see the word balloons, as he gave a thorough verbal microphone summation of everything on the pages that were selected.
I don’t remember the order of the people who followed, but I know that at least two of them were the exact opposite. Their presentations were not that long, and the art was mostly more of a factor than the writing. One artist in particular had a lot of scenes with no exposition or dialogue whatsoever, showing a post-apocalyptic world with a person drifting through vast desolate expanses. It was either a desert or a snowy place like the South pole, where much of the interaction was non-verbal physical encounters and interpreting the expression on the faces of people etc. In the spirit of the art, this cartoonist was conservative about how much explaining he thought necessary.
( I’ve waited and procrastinated so long telling this part of my visit that I don’t remember a lot of the details, unfortunately. ) Eventually the presentations were over and the panel was open to taking questions from the audience. I held up my hand and was called upon. I didn’t have the wording of my question precisely formed in my mind. Lots of times if you ask an open ended question or make a statement that people can relate to, the speakers ( or person answering you ) can take that somewhat minimal amount of tinder and make a fire out of it, so to speak. Embarassingly for me, that was not to be the case here.
In the work of two artists who were more visually focused I had seen strong traces of a style I first noticed with Edward Gorey, who was a cartoonist/writer and book illustrator that I liked. I thought if i raised his name, people might say “Oh yeah, I was very inspired by him. My favorite piece of his was yada yada, and my so and so was probably the piece of mine most strongly influened by him, etc. ” That kind of thing, you know. Really just something to break the ice and get a dialogue flowing between the two areas.
I had two things going against me. Firstly, many artists apparently would like the public to believe that their inspirations are not things that can be named, and that, therefore, asking them about “so and so” as an influence of theirs is somehow detracting from their uniqueness. Very few of us grow up in a vacuum, and so I would venture to say that lacking complete and total originality is a common enough trait that it shouldn’t be held against an artist. Not unless they shamelessly attempt to mimic exactly the same work as the previous art being referred to. Conversely artists typically despise the question that assumes they did appear from nowhere, by asking the inane question “Where do you get your ideas ?”
Secondly I had my age going against me. When I name an artist I am familiar with, it may be someone who they have honestly never heard of, but who nevertheless influenced them because he or she influenced someone who did influence them, further down the chain, or path. Is “Who influenced you?” a better question therefore ? Perhaps it would be, but doing it in this way I get to feel more like I, too, am part of this same pathway, or “show off” a little, if you will have it that way.
I put the question to the lady who was choosing which audience members to speak, but in truth it didn’t matter to me if someone else on the panel wanted to answer. This is another hang-up that can happen in thse situations, because the group often wants to know specifically who you want to answer the question, and I hadn’t named any names. I just said “I’m seeing some Edward Gorey influence here”, and there was this awkward silence, which preceded one person saying “Who?” and another saying “What about him ?” There was an awkward moment as we all looked back and forth at one another, unsure who was to speak next. Finally the young man who had done the cartoons about the desolation spoke up and said that he had enjoyed Gorey in the past, and we left it at that. I felt somewhat foolish for a while, but got over it, and was raising my hand again in a half hour or so.
Some questioners wanted to return to the original theme of “day job’ vs. “hobby” and asked the panelists how close they were to doing cartooning full time. Not surprisingly to me, none of the young artists claimed to be close to this Holy Grail. I was still sulking a bit, then, thinking “My question was so much better than these.” I looked back towards the rear of the room, where some of these gems were originating, and I remembered that these guys couldn’t even see the graphics very well, and so I shrugged my shoulders, grudgingly cutting them a little slack in my mind. ( Then again, my eyesight is not what it once was, and so maybe there was no problem seeing the details from back there. )
Next up was questions about the modernization of comic books and cartooning. People wanted to know about graphics videos and the internet. These were good questions, I thought, and the answers were surprising to me in their consistency. I believe Harvey Pekar took the lead on this, and perhaps his opinion influenced the younger artists, but I did not sense any undercurrents of dissent. The general response could be summed up in one sentence. “Video did NOT kill the radio star.” In other words, all of the artists preferred comic books, with their limitations, to full motion cartoons in a way. Or they at least felt that there was no question whatsoever of one replacing the other, like silent movies vs. “talkies”. Harvey said he liked the idea of being able to lie back on a bed or couch with a comic book and read it, without having to be seated in front of a monitor or TV screen etc. It was felt that there were advantages to seeing the graphics in a “stop motion” style, such as what you see in cartoons. The comic book artist theoretically has the choice ( depending on the editorial culture of the publication etc. ) of showing what amounts to a peek at a frame of a film ( interrupted ) every 40 frames or so, or to stretch it out longer.
When looking at a “graphic novel” vs. a cartoon/comic book, an artist could theoretically spend a great deal of time on detail of each picture vs. having to repeat that detail over and over again. As time goes on, some of the video graphics engines allow someone to summon up accurate flesh tone and so forth, without such handicraft-intensive requirements, but there is still a visible difference between a well-done computer graphic vs. a well done hand drawn image. I wonder how people will feel if this ever changes.
A comic book may imply a cinematic approach without actually being a movie, as in the work of Jim Steranko. I raised my hand to speak about this, but I was not called upon again that night.
The artists were united in their feeling that full motion cartoons will be popular in their own right, but will never replace “snail” comics and cartoons. I understood their point, that the two were different in kind vs. process, but I wondered at how future generations might answer this. Its kind of like an artist having temporary control of the “pause” button, in a way.
I looked around the room as the night went on and saw Lynda a few times bringing beer from one location to another. I wondered if she was going to be called up on the stage at some point, but she was able to keep the low profile that she wanted, apparently.
Eventually the time ran out for our “cartoon evening” and it was time for the endgame. There was a brief flurry as Harvey signed some more books for people, but the announcement had mentioned that people had to get going, and so that didn’t last long. I never had another opportunity to talk to him that night. I said “goodnight” to my table mates and I went up front to see if Lynda was still busy being a “Bar Back” or whatever her temp position was called.
She was still busy with the hustle and bustle of beer transport and also catching up with people she knew much better than me. I awkwardly tried to hang around some of these conversations, hoping to renew our dialogue, but the seats were all occupied by peoiple who had either not been part of the previous audience, or who had taken advantage of one of the few benefits of having been stuck in the rear of the room. The night was still young, and I could have hung around, but I was so broke that I decided to leave. A lady who had been there as I first arrived said “goodbye” at the door, and asked me if it had been worth it to arrive so early. I said “yes” hurriedly and went back to my world, thinking maybe i would send Lynda a letter.
As I write this, months later, I have yet to do so …but it may happen yet….
February 14th, 2007
