In Which Some Shit Is Said About Graphic Novels And Nudity

The graphic novel version of the Paul Auster book City of Glass does an interesting job expressing visually the original work's mirror-filled meta-texture. Like that stab at being clever at the end of the last sentence, the original book in retrospect seems a little too clever — I'd say too clever by half, if I fully understood what that phrase meant [OK, I googled it, I think I've always understood it in basically the accepted way].

To walk that back somewhat, I read City back in either high school or college and thought it was good but didn't really understand it and moreover didn't really know what I didn't know. As an adult I'm more comfortable knowing what I don't know; I just don't care at this point. Rereading the graphic novel form of Glass, I remembered I never read Cervantes (it ostentatiously refers to Don Quixote). Once in a while, usually when I try to avoid using the word "quixotic" (which is only because I've never read Don Quixote) (even though it's a handsome word, what with that "x"), I think maybe I should read it, but of course never, ever would.

I mean, look, Paul Auster is a genius or whatnot, I get it. And I read some of the other stories in the trilogy. Or at least I think I did. Who knows, maybe I just saw the movie Smoke one night on IFC and believed I read more Auster than I actually did. Whatever it was, other stuff didn't seem so purposefully annoyingly heady.

I will say this — and the memory came back to me while I read the graphic version of of Glass — I remembered the vague outlines of the story: the child raised without language, the weird PI cosplay, and then especially the parts where the protagonist needs to get down to business and act serious and really start writing so he strips naked. For a time I assumed this meant that you had to be naked to get real work done — not the obvious work but smart work, like writing mystery novels or preparing taxes. Around the same time (or sort of around the same time, or at least within five or ten years of that time) I got obsessed, as a lot of others did, with the Silos' Cuba LP. The flip side of which features a zoomed out image of a dude on a bluff of some sort playing a Stratocaster — plugged into an amplifier (!) — and singing/strumming into the misty overlook. It's inspiring (the image is here). At the same time you're (read: I'm) also like, Why in the hell are you up there naked? What is this late 80s utopia where people are empowered to strip naked and create art? And why is this so? Do people really do their best work naked? It's occurring to me that I remember reading how U2 recorded something (The Unforgettable Fire) (Also, what a fucking obnoxious title for a fucking album, no?) naked. Why? Really, why?

So anyway, yeah, that part of City where the protagonist strips down and smears his lousy dirty ass on a perfectly reasonable chair in order to "focus," I remembered that part. Other parts, not so much. Especially with this — digging back into that "meta-texture" gem above — kind of weird author within author layers of meaning and there's something obvious but which is not immediately obvious but kind of "impressionistic" (the same word your friendly high school English teacher used to try to pawn off Heart of Darkness on you). Or whatever.

Which brings us to the graphic novel version of City of Glass: it's good! I mean, it's not a bad thing to tackle a laden piece of text this way — and the mopey tone and tenor of pre-Pixar comic storytelling is enigmatically suited to the tone of the book. But there were moments when it seemed like a storyboard for a movie of some sort. And that's the post-Pixar me seeing it as a reader. The DIY comics of the era felt right — conflicted (Clinton-era psychic malaise), personal (humble, yet outsized) and xeroxed (before the internet). The tone and tenor is local, lo-fi, incremental — which feels right for this atmospheric writing.

And then at the same time it seems trapped in that pre-internet, pre-Pixar moment. "Pre-internet" being salient because the internet made everything wider, bigger, more awesome, more biggerly staged, which is the complete antithesis to the hand-drawn comics scene in days of yore; this era was the opposite of clickbait. And "pre-Pixar" being salient because, Jesus fucking Christ, animated storytelling has been blown so far open now, and is so incredible and elegant and human and smart that those black-and-white panels of years ago kind of don't capture it. I understand there was a vacuum before the millennium but stuff — all stuff, from comedy to drama to action stuff, seems smarter and more with it. Wasn't that way before. Now it is. Which is where the storyboard slag comes into play: Art Spiegelman, in his intro to the graphic version of Glass, mentions that Auster told him that various potential film versions of the book were disasters. Now you can imagine these elegant black-and-white boxes turning into a miraculous animated film. Sorry, I think that. It's not a pleasant thought. I know that cassette tapes are experiencing a renaissance, but, really, the future is here, people.

And really, shouldn't a "graphic novel" really refer to a story that is explicit and/or violent? That euphemism/moniker always seemed a little pretentious, though having heard it so much it's become what it is (like "server" versus "waiter" or whatever else). I can't tell you the last time I read a graphic novel. Actually, I can: it was Chester Brown's Louis Riel, which we read for book club in 2009). It was OK. Moody. Cartoon-like. Sort of.

Botheration! Middle-Aged Little Function

Not to sound belitting, but The Romance of a Shop by Amy Levy is an interesting artifact. I mean, it is from like three centuries ago (1888), and a lot of old stuff is of an era, whatever era, and isn't really destined to be timeless, so . . . I don't feel bad about it.

It revolves around four young women who lose everything when their father dies and choose to make a go of it by starting a photography business, which is this crazy new technology in Victorian England. They soon find success. Things are good. It reads like a Nora Roberts book (or at least the one we read for book club, which was about four plucky young women who start a business [arch eyebrows] . . . hey, wait . . .). Then there are ups and downs and tragedies and life happens. But I guess the point is that they find a middle ground between on the one hand, independence and financial and professional respect and then on the other hand, finding a husband.

Set in Victorian England, it's amazing how "Victorian" it comes off. You're always waiting for some glimpse of a particular era that surprises you or confounds your expectations and in this case it just never comes. I'm feeling faint! Pass the smelling salts! That kind of thing.

Some of my favorite lines included these:

"I say, Gerty, all this is delightfully unchaperoned, isn't it?" [Phyllis the libertine to uptight Gertrude; next line "'Phyllis, how can you?' cried Gertrude, vexed."]

"We all know," remarked Lucy, with a twinkle in her eye, "that it is best to begin with a little aversion!" [Uh, no means no?]

"I particularly detest that sort of eye; prominent, with heavy lids, and those little puff-bags underneath." [In retrospect, this seems like a sort of foreshadowing, but it struck me at the time.]

"Botheration!" [A great word I had to look up. It's what it seems like it should be: the noun form of bother, but mostly used as an interjection. I wondered whether the noun form of bother — as in "it's not a bother to look up stupid shit online" — is a (relatively) recent thing (see here for lingo-y examples).]

"Gertrude worked like a slave that day, which, fortunately for her state of mind, turned out an unusually busy one." [I don't think you need to be particularly woke to cringe when you read "work like a slave"; there was still a lot of actual slavery going on around the world in 1888.]

"'What is this a little bird tells me, Lucy?' she cried archly, for Mrs. Pratt shared the liking of her sex for matters matrimonial." ["The liking of her sex for matters matrimonial" — makes you want to scream "ACK!"]

"It was a sober, middle-aged little function enough, and everyone was glad when it was over." [At some point it seems like Victorian era is mostly just Maggie Smith's lines on Downton Abbey.]

"Edward Marsh suffered the usual insignificance of bridegrooms; but did all that was demanded of him with exactness." [Just bridegrooms. Some things never change.]

"He had taken her in his arms, without explanation or apology, holding her to his breast as one holds a tired child." [This is when Lord Watergate snags Gertrude at the end of the book — kind of a odd scene where you're not too clear how self-aware the writing is supposed to be: is the author showing him being weirdly paternalistic (or appropriately weirdly paternalistic for the time, or remarking on the weird paternalistic, uh, paternalism of the time) or is she expressing what all people thought? It's the problem with parachuting into a text like this . . .]

[Also, I don't know why the brackets.]