Yatterings

I’ve just come across an argument on one of children’s mailing lists regarding Jaclyn Dolamore’s debut novel, Magic Under Glass. The publisher, Bloomsbury USA, have put a white girl on the cover of  a novel where the protagonist is dark-skinned which reprises the cover issues that Justine Larbalestier originally had for her novel, Liar.

The Reading in Color blog is apoplectic as are Ah Yuan and Aja Romano. All are calling for a boycott of Bloomsbury USA as one response and writing emails to the marketing department about this as another. Dolamore does not appear to have had any input to the cover but it does appear somewhat astonishing error from an American branch of the publisher, especially when done twice.

It does make me slightly curious as to how to approach this. I’m not sure that “don’t buy the book” is productive in the long term since it reinforces feelings that books won’t sell or that authors are difficult. Larbalestier, in the same post, questioned:

Are the big publishing houses really only in the business of selling books to white people? That’s not a very sustainable model if true.

I rather think, but do not definitely know, that the model is to sell to one demographic in this case, that these cases are more carelessness by designers thinking of standard covers. Larbalestier appears to have had a great Australian designer who “got” the book and reacted to it. Perhaps that was more luck than anything else.

Got a feeling that I’ll be ordering this through the library as its premise intrigues me.

The Guardian reports that another book in the seminal Gormenghast series is to be published in 2011. “Titus Awakes” was taken from notes left by Mervyn Peake byhis widow, Maeve Gilmore, who completed the book before her death which appears to bring the story to a natural conclusion. Sebastian Peake, who has championed his father’s work, comments “[t]he leitmotif of the whole thing is his search for some sort of final home”.

2011 is the centenary of Peake’s birth and sees the publication of a new edition of the original trilogy with 60 extra drawings as well as this novel.

Just a quick note to mention that the new term list for the Oxford Children’s Literature and Youth Culture Colloquium series of seminars has now been posted. I’ve presented and been to a couple of these and they really are good. Shame their not online afterwards though.

Jonathan Lethem is one of those writers whom I admire but don’t pretend to always “Get”. On and off, I’ve begun (re)reading his books which I’ve got on my shelf and I’ll probably try and get hold of his comic as well. I think I interviewed him for The Third Alternative (as it was then) for Fortress of Solitude but I can’t find the issue so I’ll assume it was my imagination.

Gaby Wood of the Observer has a great interview with him for his new book, Chronic City, in which he moves his attention to Manhattan from the previous attention to Brooklyn where he grew up.

What I had not appreciated fully was how much of a psychogeographer of his area that he is. Like Iain Sinclair or Peter Ackroyd on London, he delves into the known and personal histories of the city. New York become something tangibly different and deeply personal. I rather suspect that each reader sees a different city, one resonates differently to them. It’s not just a reader response but the way that he blends the personal and public.

There is something else that also intrigues me about him and also Michael Chabon (which I think China Miéville also does) and that is to write fiction that is aware of genre but not to worry about writing genre fiction. He happily moves through sf and the Western, film, music (Observer article on his dancing career here) and literature without appearing to worry about the boundaries. All that really matters is the best way to narrate his Story.

The publication of Chronic City has made me come back to him and to re-enjoy him. No doubt, like a favoured record, I’ll come across books that I really don’t ‘get’ or enjoy but perhaps I can take that in my stride.

Front Row interview (iPlayer so it’s on a limited time – sorry!)

I’ve started catching up on some favourite authors who I’d put down whilst trying to finish my own book and finally got around to reading Makers by Cory Doctorow. Right from the top, I think this is Cory’s best novel to date and his most accomplished. Makers is a generational musing on the idea of the hacker and how it has changed over last 20 or so years in a slightly stilted generational form which emphasises the time changes.

In the first part, we see Perry and Lester who invent things and an new economics, New Work. Initially it appears to work but bursts in gigantic bubble as it is commercialised, expanding far faster than anticipated. Bad decisions made for the best reasons come back to haunt the players as their worlds are adopted by players who don’t understand their ethic or technologies that they adopt.

Part 2 explores the consequence of that collapse and how the players deal with the commercalisation (or at least Disneyfication – he returns to his obsession with Disney and its rides) of the ideal. There are moments when his antagonism to the corporate antics of media companies does get in the way of the fine exploration of the way that the corporate creative economy tries to repackage commodified versions of the ideas without understanding their history. Sammy, the Disney exec, spends an inordinate amount of time trying to shut Lester and Perry down but eventually replicates their ideas but in locked format, leading them to rehack the idea and open it up again.

Part 3 follows the rise again of Lester and Perry getting back to the basics of what they like doing: making things. Suzanne, the blogger who has followed them since the beginning, charts them coming to an arrangement with Sammy.Perhaps nothing has fundamentally changed for either character, each living with their choices, but Doctorow uses them to explore the changing nature of hacking. Whilst Lester and Perry are true hackers and inventers, they open up the protocols to their rides for others to use and encourage remix culture. The nature of hacking therefore changes with the re-use of materials rather than seeing them making new things from scratch. Its a theme that Doctorow has come back to again, with the other editors, on BoingBoing and where he has an interest.

Doctorow also explores the idea of the changing society and is perhaps less optimistic, more sanguine about it that the earlier Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom or Eastern Standard Tribe. On his website he comments:

I wrote it years before the current econopocalypse, as a parable about the amazing blossoming of creativity and energy that I saw in Silicon Valley after the dotcom crash, after all the money dried up.

His view on society has certainly changed in the last few years, from what comes across as pehaps over optimistic to the pessimism of Little Brother. It seems here that he’s taken step back and to the better as his world is more nuanced.

It is still fresh and an exciting, thoughtful read. As ever there is a free download available on his website.

I’ve just watched Gerald McMorrow’s debut sf film, Franklyn, which I wanted to see when it came out by it appears to have by passed Oxford. It is an extension of an earlier short film, Thespian X, which featured the suicide attempt video. The film shows four characters – Preest (David), Emilia (Sally), Milo and Peter (The Individual) – who are all lonely and lost in their own worlds of stories.

In the final section of the film, Milo is in a cafe talking to the imaginary Sally when he comments that the story teller sometime gets lost in their own fantasies. McMorrow, who wrote the film a well as directing it, explores the way that so-called lost people interpret the world and make it their own. Doing so, they invent  a cast list who may or may not exist outside their imaginations and delusions. The most extreme delusion is that of Preest, a masked vigilante (Watchmen’s Rorschach perchance?)  who psychotically inverts the world to the point where he is ultimately totally lost and sees himself as the only atheist in a city of believers (even those building religions on the instructions for a washing machine!) as reaction to his own fahter’s faith.

As well as having that narrative, they are visually intertextual with the costumes and sets reminiscent of 1984, period drama and refections of each city in each other. Double Negative, the effects company who have also worked on Richie’s Sherlock Holmes and HP and the Half Blood Prince, have made a city which it is worth watching the film a couple of times to get the nuances and textures.

Essentially we see two cities, London and Meanwhile City, which are fluid and intertwined in the character’s minds (and perhaps McMorrow’s). The hard, alien London dovetails into the baroque, Dickensesque denizen city which reminds me a little of Proyas’ Dark City. Although Meanwhile is the imagination of Preest (David), it spills out into the less bizarre world of Milo and Emilia who are both dealing with loneliness on their own ways. Milo’s just been left standing at the altar and Emilia is still trying to get her head around the loss of her father through art projects centred on attempted suicides (which featured in Thespian X) and by chance come together as Milo’s imaginary friend, Sally, resembles Emilia. Even Peter’s story comes to a conclusion where the doubt and possible confusion is resolved.

This is a very European film, imperfections showing, which reminds me of China Miéville’s interest in cities.( I’d love to know if McMorrow has read his books.)  Arty and odd, it is a project driven by passion and, as such, is perhaps a little messy but rewarding.

Robert Jackson Bennett’s debut novel, Mr Shivers, plays out to a sound track of a demented Ennio Morricone or Nick Cave against the 1930s dustbowl. Marcus Connelly is hunting down Mr Shivers, a scarred man who leaves death in his tracks.

As he traverses across the rusty, dust covered arteries (the heart f’urring slowly under its accretions), Connelly gathers a band of fellow travellers equally bound on finding Mr Shivers but also scared of him. The band gradually falls apart amongst its own weight and iniquities, each finding the road more testing than it was previously thought. Perhaps it is easier to travel aimlessly rather than with such grim determination?

Bennett though delivers no straight appointment in Samaria nor equally straight god game. God clearly plays with loaded dice.

Connelly finds Mr Shivers but realises the appointment may not be with him but Connelly himself. Mr Shivers is equally scared of death, despite being the reaper. Yet Connelly’s journey is also one of preparation. Fighting with the hobos, dealing with crooked cops, nearly broken by the living incarnation of death, he sees the desperate side of life, descending through a modern version of the Inferno. Finding Mr Shivers fighting a bull in the moonlight, Connelly begins to see the real journey that he has taken. He has experienced the differing arterial flows of the industrial world but now sees the primal world of pulsing hearts, sticky, visceral flows and muscles. (Its almost like a Lorca play or what I’d imagine a Hemingway description of a bullfight to be.) Beaten, bloodied and even more scared, Mr Shivers draws Connelly into a crack in the mountain and lets him know of the deal which keeps him alive.

Where the typical appointment would see Connelly fighting and perhaps dying, Bennett makes him become death. So the concept, notion of death becomes one of change. The 1930s is giving way to the 1940s, and Connelly’s shadow is one of incomprehensible amounts of death rather than the more individual touch of the previous owner. He embodies a certain attitude of allowing change, even if it is largely unwelcome. Taking on the mantle of death, Connelly strides out certain in his duty. His appointment is not to meet but to become death, he does not run away but has come to actively accept it.

Meditating on the ebb of life and death and the nature of change, this is a deep debut which deserves a wider readership than just a horror market. Bennett’s feeling for the characters and their individual desperations, his way of making the reader see the world differently makes this a book that is worth reading. Mixing the social novel (like a gentler George Orwell circa Coming up for Air) with horror, Mr Shivers is not a comfortable read and challenges the reader to step into shoes which become increasingly hostile. It appears strangely apposite in the current recessional state of Britain (and possibly the States but I’ve not been there in a while), that we are waiting for a change but will not necessarily readily accept. However once the change has taken place, the blood will find new arteries through which to flow.

Catching up at the moment and heard that Russell Hoban has a new children’s novel coming from Walker books in 2011 called “Soonchild”. The Ocelot Factory website has further details and carries a very brief extract (three paragraphs) but it appears to a fable. Bloomsbury are publishing Angelica Lost and Found next year.

I read Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (Fourth Estate, London 2007) which I’ve had on the reading pile since it came out. There are many elements that I perhaps don’t understand or see yet but the abiding reference is where Bina compares life to the cartoon characters running in the air whilst thinking that the ground is still beneath them.

Perhaps Chabon sees, as his lead character does, that home is what we make it. A mediation on post-colonial literature and the meaning or definition of home, the Yiddish Policeman’s Union is a noir novel that moves between its homes.

Dave Eggers The Wild Things is a retelling of the Maurice Sendak book that dovetails and segues from the forthcoming Spike Jonze film. Rather than trying to retell a classic story, Eggers explores what the Wild Things are and how Max re-appraises his world.

Max is coming to terms with his parents’ divorce and their new relationships. After soaking his sister’s room, he runs away and eventually finds a boat and travels to the island where the Wild Things live, becoming their king.

Patrick Ness’s review in the Guardian complained that “the powerlessness follows him[Max], and the island becomes not an escape from the world but a representation of it” (Patrick Ness, The Guardian, October 24th 2009) but carried on to write that he’d see us there. Max comes to realise that he is powerless as Alexander scoffs “[y]ou’re just a boy pretending to be a wolf pretending to be a king” (Dave Eggers, Where the Wild Things Are (Hamish Hamilton, London, 2009), p 256) and screams “[y]ou don’t even know who you are” (Where the Wild Things Are, p 256). That’s a key to Eggers’ version of the story: Max is trying to find his won place in the world. He feels isolated by his parents and sister’s friends and opportunisitcally remakes the world around himself, learning that actions have consequences.

The Wild Things are analogous to the Lost Boys in Peter Pan, a tribe of lost and scared children (of all ages), who are trying to find their own strengths and characteristics. The Wild Things are the Lost Boys who become ourselves (a link I’ve only just thought about – d’oh!). Max is not allowed to really play, his life is bounded by parents’ fears as he is stopped cycling to school. He echoes Michael Chabon’s essay, Manhood for Amateurs, where Chabon questions what world we are leaving children if they cannot play and maps out the way that their lives are continually bounded and those boundaries are getting narrower. In the face of this, Max explores and lives with an unbounded life and realises that total freedom is equally dangerous.

His, perhaps unfortunate, reign teaches him this as he also learns the other children are equally frightened and scared. Max listens to the other Monsters and learns something about himself. He comes back from the island into the world and is not the king any more, except of himself and moves his mother’s glasses so that they won’t break as she sleeps.

One of the issues of rewriting such a well known story is that choices to make the story the writer’s own is limited and so Eggers fleshes the story out. He extends Sendak’s orginal story where he accepted that the world was frightening and monstrous but manageable. Ness’s reaction still shows that the monsters and the story still frighten us and that is a good thing because both Sendak and Eggers (and I suspect Jonze will) show us that the world can be understood. The island is a temporary refuge but still part of the world.

Perhaps there is only one real response to the story: ARRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO