Classic Book Club: "Tristram Shandy" AND Exciting News For All Readers

Sirs! Those of you who came along to talk about Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy will recall how hard to read we all found it. I managed to get 52 pages out of the way but cannot see myself finishing the book in any realistic timeframe. The book became this chore hanging over me, keeping me from other things – I began to think of all the lovely non-fiction books I could storm through in the time I was taking to read (or to not read) Laurence Sterne's opus.

What I find difficult about Tristram Shandy was its lack of any clear narrative thread. The book* seems to be just an endless series of digressions and rambling asides. I suspect that when you get into the book you learn to love the endless tangential moves, but I was finding that nothing about the book was making me go back to it or keep reading it – it was almost completely lacking in any unfolding plot that would call you back to see what happens next or how the characters develop. So I have given up.

One book this reminds me of, and one that has been compared to Tristram Shandy, is Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two Birds. That's another book I gave up on, as it just seemed to an endless rambling series of narrative meanders rather than anything resembling a true novel. Still, I found what I read of At Swim Two Birds to be more enjoyable, maybe because I could make more direct connection with what he was writing about.

Still rambling digression is not all bad – Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men In A Boat is almost all digression, with only the most shadowy connection to anything resembling a plot. But it is also a work of comic genius. Tristram Shandy feels like it is meant to be funny, but in the first 50 pages I was not feeling the roffles.

So to the next book. First things first – from now on, I am only going to send out notifications of classic book club stuff by e-mail. If you want in, drop me a line. This is the last book I announce here, and the book is… Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol. When I first floated Classic Book Club, some people expressed an interest in reading this, but then dropped out of our fold. Maybe putting this on the agenda will bring them back again.

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*or, at least, its first 52 pages seem

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Eskimo Panda???

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Indietracks 2010: Executive Summary

I will in due course talk about the Indietracks festival at great length. In the meantime, here are thumbnail comments on the bands I saw. If you are pressed for time, just read this and skip what comes later.

Veronica Falls: Doomy faux Goth, enjoyable.
Allo Darlin': Great name ruined by Bangles cover.
Everybody Was In The French Resistance… Now!: Look at them, they've got a side project; band of the festival.
The Hillfields: did not play 'Master of the Universe'.
Red Shoe Diaries: Weezer influence, run away.
Linda Guilala: Preprogrammed.
[REDACTED]: Whiny, insipid.
The Callas: Greek sunglasses art rock.
Betty And The Werewolves: shared taxi.
The Just Joans: Enjoyable Scottish miserabilism.
The Smittens: How can anyone be this perky without drøgs?
Cineplexxx: Snappy dresser, appealing folk-tinged iberophone sounds.
White Town: No platform for Fascists.
Ballboy: I remain unassimilated.
Tendertrap: Heard one, heard 'em all?
The Primitives: I wish they would stop killing me.
M.J. Hibbett: needs more self-awareness.
The Specific Heats: need to be saved from indiepop.
The Loves: "It's like T-Rex out there".
Internet Forever: Moustaches, Dire Straits Cover
Standard Fare: Anything but as run of the mill as their name suggests; possibly the best guitar band of the festival.
Secret Shine: Reformed Sarah shoegaze sensations.
Shrag: Star quality.
Slow Club: I liked them; they were funny and musically interesting.
The Pooh Sticks: E=MC5.
The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart: The indiepop Manowar.


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RIP Cedric

Cedric the Tasmanian Devil has been euthanised. The fierce little fellow had developed untreatable facial tumours which would ultimately have prevented him from feeding and let to his starvation. The plague of facial tumours is devastating the Tasmanian Devil community, but hopes had originally arisen that Cedric was somehow immune to the disease. This has proved not to be the case.

Tasmanian Devils spread the facial cancers to each other by biting each other while fighting. Scientists have suggested that if they do not moderate their behaviour there is a real likelihood that they will soon be extinct.

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Masked Man on Armoured Car

Commando: The Phantom's Revenge, by Norman Adams and Keith Page

You know Commando, the British library title for somewhat unreconstructed war comics. This one suggests that they are maybe running out of ideas for straight war titles, as it sees the Nazis squaring up against a mysterious caped and masked figure who undermines their occupation of Paris – Fantomas joins the resistance. Only the Phantom is actually a disaffected German officer in disguise! Sacre Bleu.

This is not great. The deviation from the more undemanding up-and-at-'em storyline does rather expose the limitations of the Commando writers, while the art does not capture the vaguely expressionist effects (shadows, rooftops, sewers, capes, etc.) that it is aiming for.

Maybe I should leave Commando comics alone. It is not clear to me who they are aimed at now. Everything seems a bit too basic for serious comics readers, but I would not have thought there was still enough of a kids' audience for comics to keep them in business. Any ideas?


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Colour by Numbers

Sweet Tooth #12, by Jeff Lemire

This is billed as a "great jumping-on point to Vertigo's Eisner-nominated buzz book". This means that if you have not been reading it up to now, they would like you to start reading it from this issue. In the world of comics, a "great jumping-on point" is an issue that can be read on its own without having to know everything that has come along previously, which usually makes it either a story that stands largely alone from what has hitherto happened or a story that to some extent recapitulates the basic set-up.

In this case we get the latter. For all that this issue does somewhat advance the plot and develop character, it is basically about letting us (or the hoped-for new reader who has jumped on) know what this is all about. We have a bit of a split narrative here, one that follows the strange hybrid child who is the book's eponymous protagonist, and then another in which the tortured Dr Singh records an audio diary that conveniently explains what has been happening – the sudden arrival of a deadly plague that rapidly started wiping out humanity, the collapse of society, then the first births of the animal human hybrids and finally the discovery of Sweet Tooth, who seems to be older than the plague and has no navel*.

The moral sense of this title is fascinating. The institution in which Sweet Tooth is incarcerated is a grim place, where the hybrids are experimented on to try and prolong the lives of the humans. Lemire throws out hints that at least some of the people there are however just doing what they can to survive, tortured by the betrayals of human decency they have committed. That at least is the sense we get of Singh himself and an unnamed orderly who gives the hybrid boy a bar of candy. The community among the hybrid children is also oddly touching, a camaraderie of the damned.

Maybe that is why I like this title so much. The apocalyptic setting is bleak, but there seems to be a thread of basic humanity lurking behind the darkness. I doubt that things will end that well for all the characters, but it still feels like there is something other than cruelty and despair going on here.

*one of the problems of great jumping-on points for new readers is that they can serve as spoilers for what was revealed gradually in previous episodes.

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Golden Nuggets

The Bulletproof Coffin #2 & #3, by David Hine and Shaky Kane

I am struck by how self-referential this comic is, both to itself and to the world of comics more generally. The main character, Steve Neuman finds a stash of old Golden Nugget comics, but they date from after these classic titles were all cancelled. In each issue he reads one of the comics, and we see the crazy issue he does. But then in the third issue he reads an issue of Ramona, Queen of the Stone Age (which tells of a large-breasted woman in a skimpy outfit who lives back in the time of dinosaurs and primitive savages), which in turn has a reference to an issue of Ramona inside it. On finishing it, Steve meets the actual Ramona and they realise that the comic has hidden within it the secret to saving the world from some unspecified catastrophe.

Or maybe Steve has gone mad and imagined everything – is it not a problem for comics fans everywhere that they lose touch with reality? But, then, who were the weird old people dressed as wrinkly incontinent old arse versions of Golden Nugget characters who showed up at the end of #2? They told him that because he had found the costume of The Coffin Fly (another Golden Nuggets character), he had been Chosen – he was now The Coffin Fly, doomed to ride the Bulletproof Coffin across a blasted post-apocalyptic landscape.

Aside from the meta-textuality and evident fascination with comics and the forms' history, the title has this sense of creepy dislocation in the here-and-now. The protagonist seems completely alienated from his wife (who thinks, perhaps correctly, that he needs psychiatric help), his blank and uncommunicative yet monstrous sons, and the ugly hairless and sexless dog. Maybe the ugly dispassionate despair of every day life is what causes Steve to retreat into the brutal yet fascinating world of the comics, or maybe there is only one world and later episodes will throw everything together.

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issue 2 cover

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Cops With Guns

Neonomicon #1, by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows

This is a sequel to The Courtyard, an odd comic that came out a couple of years ago. This one begins with two FBI agents going to a secure psychiatric institution to interview Sax, once one of their colleagues. He was the main character in The Courtyard, and was locked up after mutilating and beheading a number of unfortunates. The agents are investigating some similar slayings and hope that Sax will assist them, but he answers their questions with incoherent gibberish. Those of us whose reading interests run to the more outré recognise some of the words the prisoner uses: "Cthulhu", "R'lyeh", "Hastur", "Y'Golonac". We are in the land of H.P. Lovecraft pastiche.

The agents get nowhere and leave the asylum. This much appeared previously in a slightly unsatisfying preview of this issue. The thing really ramps up in the second half, where the agents join some others who are backtracking over Sax's investigations, trying to see what drove him over the edge and what linked him to the other killings. It is in some ways all very cop, with lots of undercover agents running around chasing suspects and waving guns, but the episode ends with a chilling rush of horror. This episode feels a bit like an adaptation of a Call of Cthulhu gaming session, with the ending seeing the players flunk their sanity rolls bigtime.

The Courtyard was one of the most striking pieces of Lovecraft-inspired writing I had seen in ages. This is shaping up to be a worthy successor. I am increasingly fond of Jacen Burrows' art. Before I thought it a bit basic but nevertheless functional. On reflection, though, this kind of competent un-flashy work is a lot more effective than the kind of lurid psychedelia that Lovecraftiana can sometimes attract.

There are oddities here, though. The title is set in something a bit different to the world we live in, with domes of some sort appearing to be in place over cities for reasons that are not explained. I wait to see where that goes.

Alan Moore and H.P. Lovecraft are very different writers, but this melding of their concerns works surprisingly well. Lovecraft's vision of hidden powers greater than humanity can comprehend meshes well with Moore's own occult obsessions. And Moore manages to bring his own preoccupations to the table. One of the FBI agents is a sex addict, an intrusion of his recurring idea that human sexuality is unfathomable and uncontrollable. That it should be the female agent who is stricken with this comedic ailment chimes with some other of his recurring themes.

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Comics Meta

You may have noticed that I have not written anything about comics for a while. I have been feeling a bit dissatisfied with my comics writing. One obvious problem was that no one was really reading what I had to say on the subject (apart from comics creators googling their names). It only seems to be my friends and acquaintances who read Inuit Panda, and they have all either outgrown comics or never liked them in the first place.

Not having any readers is not an insurmountable problem, as writing about comics is still useful for me as a way of organising my thoughts. A bigger issue is that I was finding it difficult to say anything that was that interesting. I was attempting to review every issue of every comic I bought. On the face of it, this would seem like an ideal blog thing to do, as it provides a ready made continuous resource of things to write about. In practice, though, most issues do not work as self-contained things, and they are largely created as sections in an ongoing story. When an issue is chapter three in a five part story it is difficult to say anything interesting that is not basically a rehash of what was said about chapter two.

So, what I will do henceforth is write only about individual issues of comics when they are particularly noteworthy – in a good or bad way. I might also do overviews a title when a story finishes or perhaps try to sketch an image of where one is going from the opening issue. Hopefully this will be a bit more interesting.

I am also hoping to contribute material to a comics culture website that noted comics person Martin Skidmore is going to be producing. For that I will need to seriously up my game, as he has some heavy hitters signed up and I do not want to stand out too much as some subliterate bozo. When that gets going I will post a link to it.

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Cuba: la historia continua

that's right, I am still going on about my holiday in Cuba


We also went to the ballet in Havana. This was very exciting, as I have never been to proper ballet before. Ballet is huge in Cuba, partly because of the influence of crazy lady Alicia Alonso, a Cuban ballerina and subsequent head of the country's biggest ballet company. I gather that she is responsible for making ballet as big as it is there, but also has deployed a rather conservative dead hand to largely isolate the country from innovations in the form.

The ballet we saw was called Le Chevalier de Saint-George. It told the story of some mixed race wunderkind from one of those French sugar islands in the Caribbean. As well as raising a regiment to fight for the French Revolution, he also composed music, music used in this performance.

Ballet seems to be a funny old business. It is a narrative form, but done through dance*. It is not like they mime out what is going on, more that they start jumping around the stage to express emotions where, in an opera, say, they would launch into an impassioned aria. The story in this one was maybe a bit slight, but it did provide plenty of opportunities for astonishing athletic feats by the dancers. One great sequence was supposedly some kind of hoe-down at Versailles, and it allowed the company to serve up an almost endless sequence of ever more baroque pieces of ensemble dancing.

One funny thing about all this was the way the male dancers' costumes made them look like they were wearing jackets but were naked from the waist down – porky pig style. I was also rather surprised by the big thumps the dancers made when they landed after a jump. Most surprising, though, was how unfavourably the ballet treated the French Revolution and the execution of Marie Antoinette – the whole things seemed like an uprising of yobbos, with the Queen's execution shocking Saint-George ot his core. This was not how I would have expected the state ballet company in a socialist country to depict such things. It also jarred with the historical details of Saint-George's life – as already noted, he was a keen supporter of the Revolution.



OK, that's enough about Cuba. My last word is this – if you go to Cuba, make sure you go to the dinky little town of Viñales, and there go and visit the Parque Prehistorico, behind the baseball ground. Both it and the guy who runs it are amazing. This is not the same as the prehistoric wall, which is out of town.

* In other news, the Pope has been revealed to be a member of the Roman Catholic Church.

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