Warren Ellis takes a look at the history of comics using the metaphor of Jack Kirby’s Robot Head as the central metaphor and anchor for his free-associating path through the topic.
That doesn’t do the book justice, though. I don’t think any description ever will. Because one of the things that unifies Ellis’ disparate project tends to be his interesting in breaking down a form to its components and rebuilding it into something new.
Ten years, when this book was just a column on Bleeding Cool, he took that approach to a weekly essay on comics books. The days, you can see him deploy the same approach over on his website, courtesy of the way he’s thinking out loud about comic book publishing and developing his vision for a weekly newsletter in an ongoing web series.
I discovered this book by a circuitous route. I’d been a fan of Ellis for years, courtesy of his work on Transmetropolitan and his Authority comics for Image, and gradually followed him into fiction writing (go read Normal) and writing for screen (Go watch Castelvania on Netflix). Mostly, though, I became a fan of watching Ellis think out loud on his blog and in his newsletter, watching him interrogate ideas and chart his interests for readers who may be curious.
Do Anything was an old project by the time I latched onto his social media, but it would occasionally get referenced because it was written in a very particular way: an ongoing serial essay that was drafted in a reporters notebook, one long essay with the breaks inserted later, during the second draft as Ellis went back and coaxed a little more out of the seeds he planted.
I’m a sucker for anything notebook related, especially when it’s based upon changing up a process, so I went and sought the book out. It’s not available online, but the book is slim and cheap–essentially, it’s a 48-page comic format that just happens to be full of words instead of pictures.
There are books that leave their fingerprints on you, when you read them as a writer. Books that break open the way you’d thought about something and showed you whole possibilities you hadn’t seen. This is definitely one of them.
DO ANYTHING: THOUGHTS ON COMICS AND THINGS, WARREN ELLIS: Amazon (AUS | UK | USA)
From the top down: A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes; This Is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz; Tart, Lauren Dane; Return of the Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett
So here’s the thing about my reading habits: I tend to do things in lots of four. On novel by a male writer, one novel by a female writer, one non-fiction book, one short story collection or anthology. This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule; ebooks tend to fall outside this reading pattern at the moment, since they’re largely things I read on my phone. Books people lend me tend to get read fast too, lest they fall into the vast pit of my to-read pile and never emerge. Poetry gets read whenever I want, ’cause I’m much more likely to dip into a collection and read a poem or two than I am an entire book.
For the most part, though, the pack of four is my approach of choice. I have personal rules built up around it, the same way I have personal rules built up around eating out (when there’s pork belly on the menu, order the damn pork belly), buying drinks at a bar (always order the drink that comes in a tiki cup), and going to SF conventions (follow other people to panels they’re going too instead of picking the ones that interest you, ’cause that way you’ll actually see stuff that’ll surprise you). The logic of these rules isn’t always apparent, or even applicable to other people, but they’ve built up over time and work to ensure that I make sensible decisions that make sense to me.
This year I’m adding a new rule: blog about each four-pack of books when you finish them. Not ’cause I want to write reviews – I’m a fucking terrible reviewer – but ’cause I’m generally the kind of guy who responds to books and enjoys talking about them and really enjoys sharing the stuff I read with other people. And ’cause, in some ways, I actually miss having classes full of university students I can inflict books on when I want to talk about them.
Presumably this will be the last time I post a long explanation before I do this. In any case, this set of four, in the the approximate order that I enjoyed them:
This is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz (Short Fiction Collection)
Realistically, I should just carve my affection for this book into the side of a tree with a pocket knife, rendering PMB Hearts This Is How You Lose Her in bark for all eternity and/or until the tree grows enough to heal the wound. ‘Course, I don’t like trees that much, and I don’t actually own a pocket knife, so I’ll settle for just saying it here.
Junot Diaz is just one of those writers, you know? I came across his first short story collection when I was still at university and picked it up pretty cheap. I’m still not really sure why – odds are it was just one of those impulse buys you made when you were a writing student on the Gold Coast and the local bookstore was selling an actual, honest to god short story collection. Drown was fucking phenomenal too, although after that Diaz seemed to disappear from the radar up until he released Oscar Wao a few years back.
‘Course, this was all in the days when the internet was a thing I used for an hour or two when I went to university, and people having email addresses was still shiny and new, and you had to stay up late to watch Rage on a Saturday night in order to see your favourite video clips ’cause no-one had figured how to make something like Youtube work yet.
These days Junot Diaz has a goddamn website where you can find out what he’s up too and when his new books are coming out, and seriously people, screw the flying cars, this is the kind of thing that makes me happy I live in the future. I would have killed for this sort of shit when I was nineteen. KILLED FOR IT.
If you like short stories, read this book. It’s that freakin’ good.
Tart, Lauren Dane (Novel)
So here’s the thing: I spent years trying to find romance novels that I really enjoyed. Seriously, years, ’cause once you spend enough time studying genre fiction and seeing the class/gender divide at work in determining what got classified “good fiction” and what got classified “pulp”, it’s just the next step along the trail to start thinking “well, maybe all those years I told myself I hated romance, I was just being something of a sexist dick.”
And lo, somewhere along the line, I discovered the truth of that statement. A bunch of friends suggested Heyer too me, and Heyer was fucking awesome. Then I did my big request for female writers to read in 2010 or so, and someone suggested JD Robb/Nora Roberts, and she was fucking awesome too. Then I got linked to a bunch of romance review sites like Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and Dear Author in 2012 and I was off to the races. Suddenly my RSS feed was full of smart, funny reviews of books that sounded interesting, and for the better part of last year I started picking up the ones that sounded like my kind of thing and discovered they were (side note: one of the highlights of 2012? Hosting Sarah Wendell of SBTB at GenreCon. This is why my dayjob fucking rocks)
Which is, more or less, how I came across Tart and added it to my reading list, cause the idea of a menage/poly romance seemed pretty interesting and the review I read was entertaining enough to convince me it was worth buying.
‘Course, if I’m honest, I really hated the first third of this book. It was pretty firmly not my thing in terms of the approach to storytelling and characterization and I started fretting a little, ’cause I’d been having a pretty good run of picking up romance novels I was really digging ’til that point.
Fortunately Tart pretty much stormed home with the last two thirds of the book, which I devoured in the space of a day once my Holiday break began. It’s readable, it’s engaging, and it proved to be way more endearing than I expected after the set-up. Probably not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, and I’m sufficiently ish-ish about making blanket recommendations that I don’t do it; I will, however, post a link to the review that originally convinced me to give Tart a try so you can make up your own mind.
A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes (Non-Fiction)
I’ve blathered plenty about this book prior to this, so I won’t bother to repeat myself here. Suffice to say that there are bits that are brilliant, bits that are less brilliant, and bits that are so obstreperously dense that I couldn’t really be arsed trying to decode them.
And seriously, given that I kinda adore semiotic theory, that’s saying something.
Still, I’ve finally read the entire book, and the second half is just as heavily dog-eared as the front half, with plenty of notes taken to use as the basis of stories at some later date. I’m pretty sure I’ll come back and re-read this again in a couple of years, after I’ve had a chance to pick up and familiarise myself with a bunch of the work that serves as the basis of Barthes’ analysis.
Return of the Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett (Novel)
So I kinda adore the first Thin Man novel Hammett wrote, and the movie that was made from it. It’s a smart, funny piece of hardboiled detective fiction from one of the icons of the form, and it’s all the more brilliant for shucking off the weary disillusionment most hardboiled protagonists feel and replacing it with a couple who a) actually like each other, b) enjoy what they do, and c) have some of the best goddamn banter in fiction.
Return of the Thin Man advertises itself as a collection of the two novellas that served as the basis for the second and third Thin Man films, and objectively you can’t really argue with that. Subjectively, though, that isn’t really what your getting – the novellas were put together by Hammett under contract with the film studio, fleshed out enough that they could serve as the basis of a script, and the result is that you’re looking at something that feels like a framework rather than a polished piece that’s enjoyable in its own right.
Which isn’t to say that I regret picking this up – its fascinating as a historical document and a chance to see a work in a formative stage. It’s just that the book I got wasn’t the book I was expecting after reading the back cover blurb, and it proved to be the toughest read of the four (which, given that this four-pack included A Lover’s Discourse, is saying something). I just kinda wanted…more. Or a different presentation of the content, that enhanced the historical enjoyment a little more.
Next Up
Gods only know how long it’ll be before I post the next one of these, but the four books on my list that I’m hoping to get read before the end of January are:
Moxyland, Lauren Beukes Sacred, Dennis Lehane Midnight and Moonshine, Angela Slatter & LL Hannett A Horrible Experience of Unbearable Length, Roger Ebert
My goal is to read 104 books by the end of 2013, not counting re-reads.
Last night I started reading Laura van den Berg’s short story collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, which became one of those books that you start reading at a reasonable hour and stop reading in the wee hours of the morning, many hours after you planned on going to sleep.
It’s not simply that it’s a good book, more that it’s fiction that’s brushed with that touch of magic that great short stories are capable – brief and delicate and surprising and altogether beautiful. Not quite fantasy stories, but certainly on that strange intersection of literary and almost-fantasy-but-mostly-weird where all sorts of interesting things happen.
It reminds me very much of reading Miranda July’s short story collection for the first time, or the peculiar rewriting of the familiar that comes from your first exposure to Kelly Link.
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I may be a little scarce online this week. I’m trying not to be, of course, but the Third Edition of the Mutants and Masterminds roleplaying game landed in my mailbox over the weekend and that means the next week or so will be a frenzy of updating my old superhero campaign notes and preparing for the resumption of the superhero game I’m playing with some friend on Thursday nights (temporarily on hold due to teaching commitments).
Yes, this is quite possibly the geekiest thing I’ve ever put on my blog, but it’s not like that should come as a surprise to anyone. I am, after all, a huge freakin’ nerd and roleplaying games where I get to create my own superhero universe from scratch are my kryptonite.
If you need me, odds are I’ll be over in the corner of my office, giggling to myself while I try to figure out how many ranks of fighting and agility guys named Shadow Boxer and Archon should have while Justice League: Umlimited is on the television in the background.
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I found todays post on unemployment and the creation of a perpetual youth underclass on Tiger Beatdown kind of fascinating, especially since it touches on the same issues that were brought up by an Alain de Botton talk that I saw on (I think) TED some time last year.
The gist of Botton’s talk went something like this: the idea of living in a meritocracy is actually kind of terrifying, because if you’re being rewarded for your hard work and achievements, what does that mean when you fail? The shadowy side of a merit-driven culture is that those people on the bottom have only got themselves to blame.
I gather the ideas are explored in further depth in his book , which I’m probably going to unearth from my to-read pile now that I’ve been reminded of its existence.
It’s never really been a secret that these kinds of issues were going to become a problem, culturally speaking. Graying populations, massive changes in the marketplace, the class divides growing wider and wider – this things have been occurring for the better part of my lifetime and the solutions proposed have been stop-gap at best.
For all that SF have moved away from its tropes, these kinds of issues suggest it’s still a cyberpunk kind of future we’re facing.
