GREAT LINES:
“Why did you come to Gorazde?”
“Why? Because you are still here, not raped and scattered, not entangled in the limbs of thousands of others at the bottom of a pit. Because Gorazde had lived.”
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Joe Sacco’s explanation for why he came to Gorazde, one of the UN-declared “safe areas” in Bosnia, which I quote above, flutters down the page in small rectangles of text across a two-page drawing of life going on – two men and an elderly woman chop firewood, a group of boys circle a soccer ball, two young women wearing knapsacks amble past tight hay mounds, while above the people small apartment blocks bear pockmarks from shrapnel and bullets. Joe Sacco started doing comics in the 80s, crafting wild tales of indie rock bands. He reinvented himself as a war correspondent, starting with a series on the intifada in Palestine. Sacco’s informants in Gorazde often seem as baffled as anyone as to how their home became a battleground. Many remember strong friendships that crumbled when ethnic lines became sharpened and uncrossable. Visual detail is often striking, from the weary faces to burnt-out cars in the street. On one page Sacco draws a series of ad hoc water wheels tethered beneath a bridge. “They were fashioned out of wood, barrels, parts of cars, bits of washing machines … Electric wire brought a modest current to a small percentage of Gorazde’s homes.” A portrait of war emerges from many stories, some modest, some harrowing, some merely eccentric. Whether the stories add up to an explanation for the killing, it’s tough to say. But there we go, trying to make sense out of it all.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Safe Area Gorazde
GREAT LINES:
At 4:00, maybe 4:30, in the morning, they were standing in our room: Rolf Isaakson, another Jewish snatcher, and two SS men. They had come in through the bathroom window of the ground floor apartment, and their weapons were pointing at us.
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Gad Beck was born in 1923 to a Jewish father and Christian mother in Austria and as he grew so, too, did fascism, the Nazi Party, and the persecution of the Jews. His sexual awakening came without hang-ups, he says. One afternoon he rushed home to his mother and giddily announced that he’d hugged his gym teacher. “’Aha, I thought so,’ she answered dryly.” That Gad Beck came of age in a peculiarly frightening time, doesn’t mean he doesn’t also remember fights with the parents, first love, and looking for a way to fit in, the sorts of things we all go through. On the other hand, most of us aren’t growing up in a war zone, with friends and family among both victims and perpetrators. Beck’s voice is personal and lively and it’s easy to get the feeling he’s telling you about something that’s just happened. He disguises himself in a Hitler Youth uniform (“It was at least four sizes too big … As makeshift alterations I tucked the sleeves and legs up on the inside.”); he makes arrangements with a smuggler (“Strunck was hardened and venal. It didn’t mean anything to him that he was saving Jews. He wanted thousands of marks per person.”); he laments the capture of a colleague bearing a list of people in hiding (“When I was in charge, there never even was a list; I always had all the names and addresses in my head. But of course, no one was really in charge anymore.”). A gay Jew in Nazi Berlin? A leader in the resistance? It is not a long book, but it gets intense. There were times I had to look again at the author photograph to reassure myself that he had survived.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: An Underground Life
GREAT LINES:
Any way you look at it, she’s dead, and you’re standing here a rich man on this glorious Southern California day. What I’m sayin’ is, buddy, as far as my client – and so far as I’m concerned – you’re already guilty.
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A wealthy woman hangs from a ceiling fixture, eyes wide, staring, dead. Her husband stands on the rug below while police detectives snap photographs and paramedics carry in a ladder. The suicide’s brother rushes into the room, shouting, “You! You did this to her!” Writer and artist David Lapham says he wrote his first graphic novel as an homage to classic film noir where “passions burn, shadows fall just right, and women are beautiful (and usually deadly).” And, I might add, even if the suspect isn’t guilty of the crime, he (or she) is no innocent. An old flame, blackmail, drugs, at least one murder with a big kitchen knife, and a reversal of fortune or two, Lapham made a page-turner of a noir.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Murder Me Dead
GREAT LINES:
[T]heir chief enemies knew how to write, whereas the Vandals despised the art of writing to the end of their days. Whatever information we have about the Vandals … is inevitably less than favorable.
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Wisława Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996. Don’t let that scare you. This is a breezy, charming collection of responses to reading – don’t call them book reviews, she pleads. Think of “Nonrequired Reading” as a blog between covers. In the first essay Szymborska lets herself feel superior to scientists who have made their names discovering chloroform or proving the germ theory. “[D]id I ever forget to show up at my own wedding like Pasteur?” In an essay about terrariums, Szymborska protests that she can’t stand the creepy crawlies that live in them. “I’m not this book’s ideal reader. I’m reading it only because since childhood I’ve derived pleasure from accumulating useless knowledge. And after all, who’s to say what’s useless and what isn’t?” Knowing how to pack a frog for mailing might come in handy one day, right? Szymborska takes issue with authors who say the clothing one wears reflects the type of society in which one lives. In Rome, she protests, “[i]t wasn’t easy to tell a slave from a free man on the street; a slave might strut covered in gold, whereas free citizens just tossed on any old thing.” All the pieces are short, a page or two. If you have no interest in the topic at hand, well, maybe Szymborska doesn’t either and uses it as an excuse to talk about something else, some mishap from childhood, say, or how unfair it is that widgeons have yet to appear in poems. Szymborska is an intellectual, well-read and thoughtful; rarely, however, does her chatty, chiding, bemused voice talk down to us. A fun read and, possibly, you’ll find fresh leads through Szymborska’s reading to more of your own.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Nonrequired Reading
GREAT LINE:
Knowin’ myself, I could always find something to get shook up over and write about.
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Before I encountered Harvey Pekar’s “American Splendor,” the comics I read featured colorful fantasy with slam-bang action and the obligatory battle against world-endangering aliens. Harvey Pekar wasn’t into that. In Pekar’s comics, as collaborator R. Crumb writes in a preface, “Hardly anything actually happens. Mostly it’s just people talking, or Harvey by himself, panel after panel, haranguing the hapless reader.” The people in the stories are office workers or people Pekar meets on the street or friends down on their luck. The title of one of the pieces is “Standing Behind Old Jewish Ladies in Supermarket Lines.” Ye gods, I remember thinking, why would anybody want to read that sort of stuff! Escape from a boring life, not to get mired in one, that’s the thing, yet here Harvey Pekar was plodding through an ordinary life without benefit of cape, x-ray vision, or pointy ears. His problems had less to do with space aliens than with alienation right here on Earth. “My name has been a matter of some concern to me over the years,” Pekar says in the first story. He talks about how kids twisted it to tease, how he figured the name must be unusual, yet when he got his first telephone there were two other Harvey Pekars in the book, and finally, he asks, as though the name itself were as much a mask as any Batman wears, Does a name hide as much as it reveals? “Who is Harvey Pekar?” When R. Crumb illustrates his own writing he tends to the fantastical with bird-headed girls or melting heads, but the work he does for Pekar presents the world as a bit shabby, the people rumpled and pudgy, the only thing hiding in the shadows is tomorrow or maybe yesterday. Am I making Pekar sound like a downer? Well. He is. Sorta. But Harvey Pekar is also an optimist. He’s an optimist in the way somebody must be who every day gives life a good eye, and tries to figure out what exactly can be done with it. He always figures out something. When alien invaders and flashy costumes pall, Pekar’s practical dao is one true way through the city’s littered canyons.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: American Splendor Presents Bob & Harv’s Comics
GREAT LINES:
Life is a hospital where each patient is possessed by the desire to change beds. This one would like to suffer facing the stove, that one believes that he would be cured next to the window.
– Stephen Mallarme
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The youngest poet in the anthology was born in 1900 and none is still living. “Modern” does not mean contemporary or even recent, really. They were modern for their time, right? And, as Moderns, they were all about the new, breaking with tradition, ensuring art resonates with the times. Shocking stuff like that. Editor Louis Simpson’s Moderns include Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Stephane Mallarme, Pierre Reverdy, Tristan Tzara, and Andre Breton. As I am not fluent in a language other than English, I cannot vouch for the word-for-word accuracy of these translations, I can only say whether the results are poems in this language. Louis Simpson, a poet himself, has crafted poems that bring new styles into English and poems that show to advantage his own sense of the language. With lines like “Night is at hand, the criminal’s ally, / Entering with a wolfish step. The sky / Closes slowly like the door in a wall,” one can be intrigued by Charles Baudelaire. Paul Verlaine says, identifying with night’s abashment before a beautiful woman, “Evening fell, equivocal, dissembling.” And the poetic prodigy Arthur Rimbaud, speaking as for a boat, enjoys the ravages of the sea, “I stood my night watches blessed by tempests … Without needing a lighthouse’s silly lights!” If you want to know why Patti Smith and Jim Morrison worshiped Rimbaud or wish to mark dreamtime with the original Surrealists, you’ll get a good start here. The French originals appear opposite Simpson’s English versions.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Modern Poets of France
OPENING LINES:
No one knows what brought the huge animal down. … At some point its knees buckled and it dropped to the ground with a seismic thud … It was almost certainly still alive …
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William Northdurft weaves together two narratives, German paleontologist Ernst Freiher Stromer von Reichenback’s 1911 discovery of fossil dinosaurs in the Egyptian desert and the expedition of a group of contemporary paleontologists hoping to rediscover that fossil bed. Stromer had been the first to describe many of the species he brought back to Europe. Yet Stromer’s entire collection was obliterated during allied bombing raids in WWII, and no one any longer knew quite where his dinosaurs had been found. For a non-scientist looking over facts and diagrams science can look staid, but when you get into the history it takes on more color – the fleas in the tents, the gigantic bones poking out of a hillside, the denunciations of rivals, the thefts. Nor does Northdurft neglect the old monsters themselves. Did those long-necked dinosaurs munch from tree tops like giraffes? Or was it more efficient for them just to keep their heads low and turn their bodies in a gigantic arc, eating and eating and eating without hardly having to move a step? An engaging mix of travelogue, history, and science.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt
GREAT LINES:
Open the shoe-store door
and a bell rings:
two shoehorns on a shoelace
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Purely as an image it’s a homely one, a handcrafted welcome/alert that the door activates as a customer enters, or exits; the customer hears the bell and looks up, the tongue-shaped shoehorns ringing against each other, the stout shoelace knotting them loosely in place. We are accustomed to hearing a door chime in a retail store, but rarely notice the bell. Among fourteen words chosen for the poem “shoe” appears three times, each time part of a compound: shoe-store, shoehorn, shoelace. Although the word doesn’t hit the ear with a bell-like sound, it recurs in a bell-like fashion, the ringing of repetition. The sh-sh-sh hints at a shoe-like shuffle, perhaps, not out of place in a shoe-store. Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser wrote the poems of Braided Creek in a collaboration not quite spelled out. Let’s reject the “continuing cult of personality,” they say, telling readers it doesn’t matter which of us wrote what. If you know their work already (both Harrison and Kooser have many books of their own) you may be able to tease out one style from the other. Harrison writes novels and to me some of the pieces suggest prosier habits, for example. But, never mind. Braided Creek is a pleasing meditation on a quieter life, often nature-surrounded, wisdom in crafted, palm-sized bits, some fleeting thoughts, many amusing observations, a series of small events, haiku-like in their simplicity and precision. “The butterfly / jots a note on the wind / to remind itself of something.”
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Braided Creek
GREAT LINES:
I’d just about convinced myself that everything I thought I’d seen in the basement had all been a dream, when I idly slipped the small painting out of the paper bag. It took everything in me to keep from crying out in shock!.
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Remember Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop cartoons? Or the mischievous Felix the Cat? Kim Deitch’s graphic novel ought to remind you of them, as The Boulevard of Broken Dreams whirls us back to the madcap pre-psychedelia of those old cartoons. Deitch got his start as an underground comix artist, but with this linked collection of short stories he builds a fictional biography of the 30s-era animated box office sensation, Waldo the Cat. From drug visions to hoary old vaudeville routines, Waldo and his anthropomorphized pig, elephant, and monkey friends lead us back and forth through the decades and the success (and failure) of their creators. By the end, Waldo’s no longer the charming scamp but a belligerent hallucination who haunts the artist’s alcoholic fade. The art by itself is quite a show, loaded with meticulous whimsy, but Deitch weaves a human story, too, stretching history and dreams – the hopeful kind and the nightmare – into one tapestry.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Boulevard of Broken Dreams
GREAT LINES:
Spock, a dolphin at Marine World, approached the head trainer, Jim Mullen, with a piece of paper and was promptly given a treat. Then he kept showing up with piece of paper, which he would exchange for treats. In essence Spock had discovered the use of paper money.
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Everybody loves a good escape artist and that’s why the octopus and the orangutan get title billing in this book. If you didn’t know that an octopus can wander around out of water (so long as it’s careful not to dry out), you will be surprised to learn that an octopus at the aquarium may happily climb out of its tank at night when no one is around, curl across the linoleum to the tank across the way, grab a tasty crab, and sneak back, leaving the aquarium keepers to wonder who has been stealing the displays. The octopus may do this even if its tank has a latch, as octopuses have been known to figure out how do undo those. Then there’s the orangutan who used a piece of wire to pick the lock on his cage. Where did he get the wire? From a neighboring cage where the resident orang had dismantled a light fixture. She traded the wire to the escape artist, it seems, for a few nice biscuits as she was quite stout and the keepers had (no doubt unjustly) put her on a diet. In an earlier book on nonhuman intelligence, The Parrot’s Lament, Eugene Linden reviewed the experimental literature. Here he focuses on telling stories and on pondering what, in fact, “intelligence” is. Whatever intelligence means, exactly, being smart enough to get one’s needs met and take care of one’s offspring and not walk off a cliff, looks like greater intelligence than I can muster some mornings.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Octopus and the Orangutan