Tinieblas

It means "darkness" in Spanish, as in the darkness of Genesis:

Y la tierra estaba desordenada y vacía y las tinieblas estaban sobre la faz del abismo.

(And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. 1:2, KJV)

My dad was always bringing home boxes of books from yard sales and thrift shops. Lots of crap, of course, but enough gems to keep us interested. One of the most memorable was a contemporary paperback novel with a loud red cover and weird art by a guy named R.M. Koster. It was called The Prince, in deference to the famous tome from Sig. Machiavelli, but being a mere lad of thirteen at the time I wasn't too hip on Renaissance literature. It was one of those books that held sway over me--I kept trying to read it but could not. It was too strange, too daunting. My tastes in those days tended to Alistair MacLean, Isaac Asimov, and MAD Magazine. The book began with a listing of all the rulers of the fictional Republic of Tinieblas and their succession of terrible fates, the most benign of which were "deposed." Then there was a dreamy opening sequence, a fantasy of revenge and torture involving a well-lubricated revolver and a hog-tied victim. It was heady stuff for a kid, even if it was the seventies. I was not ready for Mr. Koster and his twisted protagonist Kiki Sancudo. Eventually, when I'd just about finished high school, I decided to read the entire thing. And it blew my underdeveloped Catholic schoolboy mind. After Kafka, in college, I read it again. The book and its two successors (now called The Tinieblas Trilogy) were re-issued in 1989, and I read The Prince again. As well as The Dissertation and Mandragon, the concluding volumes. Both were, to no surprise of mine, brilliant.

Overlook Press is re-issuing the set.  I suggest you get your hands on these books and read them, they are unique, and fittingly, overlooked. Part fantasy, part noir, part political thriller, part fable, part crime caper, The Prince is wildly audacious, searingly funny, achingly sad, and strikingly original. It has swagger, bluster, and machismo aplenty, but it is also chest deep in the terrible tragedy that is Latin American democracy, and you can't help but feel the suffering of the real people that live in real places not much different than Tinieblas. Mr. Koster is 79 years old and says another book is coming. I can't wait. The rest of you have some reading to do.

Earthbound

"He has no place to go, no home but the earth."

Thus concludes Charles F. Park, Jr. in his 1975 book Earthbound: Minerals, Energy, and Man's Future. I'm a big fan of space exploration, manned spaceflight, and science fiction stories, but it is unlikely anyone I will ever know will live on another planet. Visit, sure. But live? Be part of an alien ecosystem? No. That's not going to happen soon. We are stuck here on the earth and have to make the best of it. The Andromedans or Cassiopeians or Alpha Centaurians are not going to suddenly appear and give us free, limitless, non-polluting energy. We'll still have to farm our food and we'll still need all the other stuff we currently grow. And, like always, we'll  have to mine the rest. I'm interested in things and how they get put together. Where does the lead for my car battery actually come from? How is it transported and processed? What does it take to turn rocks into something like a toaster or a hammer? Earthbound may have been dated, but it piqued my abiding interest in economic geology. I suppose growing up surrounded by things like seaports and oil refineries got me thinking along those lines. I wonder about the connections necessary to put an iPad in someone's hand, the actions and events along the way, the myriad of both social and physical structures required. No matter what, when you follow the chain to the end, there's always some guy digging a hole in the ground and pulling out some useful chunk of the earth. I want to know more about that guy, that hole, and the treasures buried there.

New books!

Ziesing's is my favorite place to get books. Just got a shipment today, in fact, and I've got them stacked on my desk by thickness. The thinnest one on top is The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon--only 152 pages! I think I can make my way through that one. Then a Stark House reprint of Mercedes Lambert's Dogtown and Soultown. The new edition has a foreword by Ken Bruen, which is how I got interested in the books. I like everything he writes, so I figure I'll like everyone he writes about. Next is a novel from the great Charles Willeford, The Shark-infested Custard. Apparently he couldn't find a publisher for it in the 1970s and it languished until after his death in 1988. Brian Aldiss follows with his novel of that same year, Forgotten Life. I was captivated by Somewhere East of Life (1994) and this one is supposed to be part of the same loose tetralogy ("The Squire Quartet") with that one. I imagine I'll track down the other two at some point. Something new (2010) called Stories caught my fancy because one of the editors is superstar fantasist Neil Gaiman. People like Walter Mosley, Lawrence Block, Joe R. Lansdale, Chuck Palahniuk, Tim Powers, and Gene Wolfe contributed to the collection. I always enjoy good short stories and this looks like a great anthology. One writer who seems terribly under-appreciated to me is the late Thomas M. Disch. His The M.D. is next on the pile and calls itself "a horror story." Last but not least is the massive Nightmares & Dreamscapes collection by Stephen King. I've been reading him for a long time and I've come to really appreciate his short works. This one has more than twenty stories and is over 800 pages long!

What's on your book pile these days?

Z-books

Some folks like e-books. Others like iBooks. But I'm a Z-books man. As in Ziesing Books. Mark and Cindy Ziesing have been peddling books for a long time out of their home in Shingletown, California. That's State of Jefferson country in case you don't know. Shingletown is an unincorporated little burg in Shasta County just east of Redding on State Route 44 on the way to Lassen Park. The Ziesings have a print catalog and a website jam-packed with lots and lots of weird and wonderful stuff. They used to publish books as well, and I have maybe a half-dozen lovely hardcovers with the Ziesing imprint--John Shirley, Tim Powers, Iain Banks, Lucius Shepard and the like. I've been shopping at Ziesing for about twenty years and in all that time have never talked to an employee, salesman, or customer-service rep. When you call on the phone either Cindy or Mark will answer. Same when you email. You get hand-written notes from them in your packages. This is a real, live, mom-and-pop operation. I once had a shipment of Z-books stolen from my post office box. When I called Ziesing, Mark sent me replacements without hesitation and charged me only the shipping! (There were, if I remember, a few one-of-kind items that I'd ordered that were lost forever, but the bulk of it was indeed replaceable.) He certainly did not have to do that, and I certainly did not ask him to, but he made me a customer for life nonetheless. Those low-lifes who stole from me (and them, by extension) would obviously never appreciate the literary bonanza they stumbled upon or the grace and class of the Ziesing operation.

I just received my latest order. It was preceded, of course, by an email from Cindy letting me know it was in the mail. All four books were individually paper-wrapped before boxing--you think Amazon does that? I got two hardcovers, The Right Madness by the late James Crumley and Leather Maiden by Joe R. Lansdale. Mr. Crumley is considered by many as a modern noir master and this is my first foray into his oeuvre. The book was listed as "Fine in Fine dust jacket." That means it is a new book that has sat on a shelf for a while (it's from 2005). That one set me back five bucks. Mr. Lansdale is a well-known and accomplished horror and crime fiction writer, and I've read several of his excellent short stories. This is my first Lansdale novel. The book is new, a 2nd printing from 2008, and it cost four bucks. I'm cheap--I scour the "sale" section. I challenge anyone in bookstore meccas like Berkeley or Portland to find better deals with less hassle than that. I also picked up a vintage paperback from Ballantine (it looks like a 70s edition) of Theodore Sturgeon short stories (E Pluribus Unicorn) for two bucks, and a new mass-market paperback from Joe McKinney called Flesh Eaters. The new book was $6.99, the most expensive item on the list! I interviewed Mr. McKinney a few months ago for the Gutter Books website--another small, local, independent venture. Flesh Eaters is one of his apocalyptic zombie books. The Sturgeon was a real find as he is one of the all-time SF greats.

When you are weary of shopping at soul-less box stores and giving your Visa number to mega-corps, check out Ziesing Books. In fact, don't wait until you are weary. Shop there now. Besides, they are also Giants fans.

Even MORE new books!

I'm stocked up for the New Year. The last shipment arrived yesterday--this time from Amazon. I've been trying for a year to find the rest of the fabulous Criminal series by Ed Brubaker (writer) and Sean Phillips (artist). I had volumes 1, 3, and 5, but my nearest comic shop (Ashland) never seemed to stock the rest of the set. So I simply ordered volumes 2 and 4 on-line. The stories are standalone but also overlap, and are told with multiple flash-forward-and-back sequences, but they never lose their grip on you. The colors by Val Staples are pitch-perfect and bring the whole thing to life. If you are looking for noir, look no further. Brubaker is a master storyteller and the illustrators capture the characters and action perfectly. I'm a big John Shirley fan, and ordered his latest--Bleak History--as well. Mr. Shirley is not an easy guy to pigeon-hole. Sure, most of his stuff is fantasy/horror/sci-fi, but that's like saying James Joyce wrote about Irish people. It's true, but useless. John Shirley writes brilliant fucking shit that will explode your brain. How about that?

What's on your book pile?

Graphic noir

This collection from Dark Horse is only 5/8 of an inch thick--120 pages in 6 x 9 format. I was trying to think of something bad to say about Noir, and that was all I could come up with. Simply put, there's not enough of it! I had to read it twice to really savor all the stories and great art. David Lapham's "Open the Goddamn Box" starts things off brilliantly with a savage twist on junvenile delinquents, Chris Offut crisply re-works an old story with "The Last Hit" (illustrated by Kano and Stefano Gaudiano), and Gary Phillips smoothly fuses noir and SF with "The New Me" (illustrated by Eduardo Barreto). Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips contribute a sinister Criminal emission called "21st Century Noir," and Brian Azzarello teams up with Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá for the last piece, a sucker-punch called "The Bad Night." That's only 5 of the 13 offerings. It's great stuff, and it was one of my many fabulous 50th birthday presents (thanks, J&R!). I'm going to try to turn 50 again next year since it worked out so well this year.

Blu-ray debut

I bought a Blu-ray player (a PS3!) and my first Blu-ray movie was Richard Linklater's A SCANNER DARKLY. Based on the 1977 novel of the same name by SF master Philip K. Dick, the film is notable for its use of rotoscoping, and particularly Flat Black Films' proprietary Rotoshop software. It would be a shame if that was the only memorable thing about this brilliant and engrossing movie. Set in a near-future world of total surveillance, undercover cop Keanu Reeves discovers that he has become the subject of his own investigation. The paranoia runs deep, and the layers of betrayal and double cross overlap and force him, ultimately, to question his own identity. The drug culture is dominated by a new scourge--Substance D--which gradually makes its users unable to distinguish reality from fantasy. The War on Drugs has enlisted a corporate partner--New Path--to provide incarceration and rehabilitation of the legion of D-junkies on LA's streets. The movie manages to be hilarious at times, like when the zonked-out druggies argue about whether a stolen mountain bike has 8, 9, or 18 gears, or when Robert Downey Jr. claims to have invented a pistol silencer, only to make the blast louder. Mostly, though, it's dark, like the title suggests. It has lots of noir elements, like the low-life characters and their aimless schemes, but it lacks noir's melodrama and brisk pacing. The colors and animation (like a filmed comic book) are gorgeous and perfectly suited to the futuristic setting. It is a highly unusual film, and not for everyone, but I found that it captured the sense of loss and devastation of the Dick novel, yet had a smart, contemporary take on the futility of drug politics and law enforcement. There's an ominous foreboding throughout the story, as if the truth about the state of things will be too great for any one person to bear. In the end, that spirit-crushing revelation comes as no surprise to our washed-up hero, yet he manages to find a shred of hope and still looks to the future for redemption. I think you should watch A SCANNER DARKLY.

Gangland

Who says you can't judge a book by its cover? I bought this comic collection from DC/Vertigo precisely because I liked the Tim Bradstreet cover. He also illustrates the first story, "Clean House" by Brian Azzarello (100 Bullets), which is my favorite in the bunch. Jamie Delano of Outlaw Nation contributes a story as well, I'm in the middle of that sprawling saga right now. Dave Gibbons (the artist for Alan Moore's Watchmen) writes and draws one of the tales also--I love his style, it has the feel of the old EC adventure comics. A particularly interesting story by SF/fantasy writer Lucius Sheperd, "Platinum Nights," is drawn by James Romberger in a more modern, frenetic style but perfectly suited to the material. I also liked Ed Brubaker's "Small Time" (art by Eric Shanower). The whole thing is only 1/4-inch thick (108 pages), compiling the first four issues of Gangland. There's a nice mix of styles, and the stories have a broad range that includes gritty urban realism and even some SF/fantasy and horror elements. There's a lot in a small package! I'm only beginning to discover the world of noir and crime comics, so stay tuned for more.

Sin City

How do you describe something like Sin City? I mean the comic by Frank Miller, not the film--that will be the subject of another post. Speaking of post, that's where we live in 2009, the post-modern world. In the post-modern world, everything has been deconstructed. All the modes and tropes of popular art have been re-worked, re-imagined, re-invented, and re-applied. When you dive into a form like a detective story, or a crime novel, or a film noir, you've got a lot a cultural detritus around. There's a fine line between clichéd and clever, between parody and homage. Which brings me back to Mr. Miller. There are enough booze, broads, bullets in Sin City to make any hard-boiled fan happy. The art is almost all black and white, with the broad strokes, sharp contrasts, and long lines of those low-budget 50s films we now know as noir classics. In fact, it's mostly art--there is very little in the way of narrative or dialogue. Tough guys and their hooker allies take on all sorts of corrupt cops, scheming politicos, and evil geniuses in the dark and dangerous world of Basin City, but they don't say much. The stories, despite the convoluted timelines and overlapping characters, are pretty simple, and go by a little too fast. They go by fast because Sin City is mostly a picture book. Sure, it's a comic, I get it. You are supposed to look at the pictures. And Miller is in a soft-core mood throughout the series--there are lots of naked girls to look at. The rest of the time, these curvaceous femmes, whether victims, heroines, or villianesses, are bursting out of their fishnets, bustieres, and unmentionables while kicking ass or getting their asses kicked. It's a Joe Bob Briggs breast festival--nipples popping up everywhere--and a pouty lip parade that'd shame Angelina into another round of botox. Miller is famed for his Batman work: The Dark Knight Returns is both brilliant and brutal, simmering with apocalyptic rage and dystopian longing. He's also known for 300, his fabulistic re-telling of the Spartans and Persians at Thermopylae. It's another flesh-fest, this time sweaty, over-muscled, nearly-naked Greek men in a glorious crescendo of suicidal violence. Both these rivers run through Basin City. The underworld denizens move around in impossible, super-hero leaps and bounds, with either a fatalistic nonchalance or an insatiable sadistic lust. It's a heady brew. The best parts are the unique angles and interesting perspectives Miller uses to draw many of the scenes. I also love his sounds. KREK. FUPP. WHUUNG. SPAK. KRNCH. The whole Basin City layout with Old Town, the Projects, Sacred Oaks, The Docks, The Roark Farm, Kadie's Club, and the Santa Yolanda Tar Pits is nicely imagined, making the setting a sort of über-American pastiche. Perhaps it's the hodge-podge nature of the work that ultimately left me a little unsatisfied. It was a fun ride, but it had nowhere near the visceral and dramatic intensity of Dark Knight, and suffered, like 300, from some over-blown adolescent-fantasy imagery. I'm going to give the movie--which I remember liking quite a bit--another go here pretty soon, so I'll be back with more on Frank Miller and Sin City.

Preacher

I've enjoyed a lot of stuff from DC Vertigo over the years, and today I just finished the Garth Ennis/Steve Dillon creation Preacher. Is it noir? It is certainly dark, but the cosmic scale and fanatastic elements push it closer to SF. In the end, without giving too much away, it is a love story. The Reverend Jesse Custer and Tulip O'Hare are doomed to be together, forever, no matter what happens, and neither one wants it any other way. I can't blame the fella, she's quite a catch, one of my favorite fictional femmes, for sure. Proinsias "How're Yez?" Cassidy, an Irish vampire, completes the twisted triangle. They smoke and drink a hell of a lot, like any self-respecting hard-boiled tale, but they battle God, demons, the Holy Grail, the marines, alligators, psychotic hillbillies, you know, the usual stuff for comic books. It's an adventure story--a hero's quest--with a meditation on friendship and a rant against the gods along the way. I loved it, I found that it engaged me completely when I picked it up. It was incomparably illustrated with gorgeous colors, that made it easy. It was at turns funny, twisted, bizarre, scary, wild, and just plain brilliant. Whatta yez waitin' for, ya bleedin' gobshites, read the bloody fookin' thing!

(T'anks to me mate JCP for the loaners)

New month, new cyber-hell

I thought it was bad when I started blogging, then I made an experimental foray into the dreaded MySpace, and now I've taken the Facebook plunge. Yikes, like I don't spend enough time on-line already? I remember Bruce Sterling (one of my fave SF guys) once being credited with the 21st-century credo: if you're not jacked in, you're not part of the future. Except for the fookin' mobile glued to my ear, and the lack of texting skillz, I'm pretty fookin' jacked in these days. I mean, I can hardly watch a ball game anymore without Gameday and PITCHf/x at my fingertips. I still use topo maps and a compass, fer chrissakes, but I am really and truly planning to buy a GPS device. That way I'll know exactly where I am when I get lost in the woods. It is great living here in the State of Jefferson. We've got seriously old school folks everywhere. Oh sure, there are cowboys roaring around town in their F-250 diesels sippin' lattes and doing the hands-free phone thing, but then there are acres and acres of country where a tin can telephone would be high-tech. I'm going to be 50 this November. I remember learning to program in FORTRAN using punch cards when I was a freshman at Cal in 1977. When I did my student teaching in 1983 we taught "computer science" to 8th graders using Commodore PETs. Now every kid is a "digital native" and the rest of us are just immigrants. I wonder what new and wondrous things the future will bring. In the meantime, I'll try my best to keep up.

Synchronicity

I'm not going to get all-Jungian on you, don't worry. Most of that "meaning" stuff is, in my view, ascribing more significance to events than they deserve. But I'm a skeptic, and a bit of a crank, so take it for what it's worth. Regardless, WordMan™ digs "synchronicity" because of its Greek root: khronos. The word means "time" or "age." According to Partridge, the verb form is khronizein, and that forms a compound with sun- (with, together) to make sunkhronizein. Thus we have "synchronize" in English, whence comes "synchronicity." Recently, for reasons I'm not quite sure, I became interested in a film I saw many years ago called Dark City. It is a unique piece of work: part noir, part fantasy/SF, part philosophical rumination. In all, it is enjoyable and engrossing. The central theme is illusion vs. reality. The main story line is the creeping awareness by one individual that something is wrong with his life--his memories have been suppressed, and his gradual awakening shatters his safe, comfortable world and forces him on a quest for the truth. I also recently picked up an old paperback novel, Time Out of Joint, by the SF master Philip K. Dick. It was written in 1959--my birth year--and the central theme is illusion vs. reality. The main story line is the creeeping awareness by one individual that something is wrong with his life--his memories have been suppressed, and his gradual awakening shatters his safe, comfortable world and forces him on a quest for truth.

Coincidence? Or synchronicity?

Actually, I could give a shit. But it was pretty cool. Both works, the movie and the novel, were not only well made, but fun and thought-provoking. By the way, the PKD site I linked to above is excellent. I'm going to add it to my list.