movies give you jump scares. cheap. easy. predictable.

scary books, the real scary ones, create a world that is so real in your head that you experience the terror as if it was happening to you. This happened to me with several Stephen King books in my teens. It also happened with clive barker's first books of blood short stories. when I got older I read HOUSE by Mark Danielewski and, while not horror per se, that book scared the shit out of my inner mind. books freak you out for far longer than a film can.

some writers are important because their use of the language is second to none. (Most of these writers I could give a fuck about. fuck your use of language. I hate florid shit. I want to read a story, not a fucking dipshit showing off how many gerunds he can disseminate)

some writers are important because the subjects and themes they write about had never been done that way before. (Lovecraft is this way. so is Twain, so is conan doyle. Lovecraft was not a good prose writer. no one claims that. his work is more like reading a news account of horrible shit happening. Conan Doyle had very utilitarian prose, but he created the form of the detective novel as we know it. Twain was the best writer of the lot I mention by FAR, but even he is not praised for his prose as much as he is for his ideas, humor, and observation of human nature)

Poe was both. he crafted precision in his stories, but he also created whole genres out of thin air.

poe was the king of the cats

One of my all time favorite creepy books is Wild Palms by Wm Faulkner.

Oh! "That Evening Sun."

Black washerwoman Nancy Mannigoe fears that her common-law husband Jesus is seeking to murder her because she is pregnant with a white man's child. Her employers, The Compsons, are mostly indifferent. 75% scary, 25% really sad.

Ok ok, I was exaggerating for effect. What I really meant was modern horror owes a lot to Lovecraft. Stephen King, Clive Barker, who’s the other one? The other “big” one? Whatever... anyway, all of them just worship on the altar of Lovecraft. But of course not all horror is influenced by him, because he was not the first horror writer (or anywhere near the first).

If he actually *pioneered* anything it was the Weird genre, along with Mervyn Peake (in a much different way), and some others who have really excellent anthology SF/horror stories from the 20s-50s whose names escape me at the moment.

I exaggerated. Sorry. Blah.

One of the scariest stories I’ve ever read is “The Foghorn” by good old Ray Bradbury. There’s a definite element of Lovecraft in that ending (won’t ruin it for anyone who hasn’t read it). Not really *scary* in the way that makes you check your windows, but tense and thrilling and larger than life and kind of apocalypticly awesome.

oh ha ha ha ok i believe you now.

i got the ambrose bierce ebook off gutenberg the other day and gonna read those stories and see what’s up

had a superlong day on the road yesterday and i need a break. fiction for breakfast is a good thing.

ambrose's stories are not my fave, b ut his devil's dictionary is the epitome of SNARK!

I’m honestly not sure I’ve ever read anything else.

EDIT: OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK! Definitely read that one. Probably some others, but yeah. Good story.

I’ve been reading Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” comics, which are really almost more novel than comic. I never read the full series before, and still haven’t, because why would I read a *comic* by an author I love when I could read a *book?* (No, not even I am that nerdy, though I do love me some comics).

But I think it’s on par with some of his novels. Definitely top-notch for comics. I’d place it next to Watchmen or MAUS in the pantheon of comic books that deserve to be called “books.”

sandman rules.

jeezus crackers sandman is the best fucking comic on the planet

if anything ever convinced me comics were worth a second look after childhood, it was that glorious masterpiece

just fucking brilliant

way better than maus. i mean, maus was a heavy subject but not a great plot. just very serious for a comic. i’d rather read viktor frankl or primo levi on the subject

i didn’t like watchmen because i had read borges first and that ruined the suprise of the literary devices they use in it. and i don’t know, i didn’t like the characters either or maybe the capes turned me off. dunno.

but sandman. holy shit. hoooo-leeeeee-shitttttttt. sandman!!!!

Sandman definitely > Watchmen, but Watchmen ain’t about capes. I think that book warrants at least two reads.

MAUS is more like Persepolis. Different kind of thing altogether, even from these comics, which are very different kinds of things altogether from regular comics.

Preacher is also some baller ass shit. Not sure if you’ve read that, but it’s worth it. Show’s obviously great, but the book is great in different ways.

i recommend fish. especially small fish at the bottom of the food chain. sardines, herring, anchovies. also apples. also walnuts. all good for memory! also relaxation exercises. reduce stress. clears the head = recollection.

don’t you remember you and i talked about a year ago (maybe less, maybe 6 months ago) about preacher the tv show and you liked tulip and all that? and i told you season 1 was a prequel to the actual comic? ok i won’t get sore. but we talked about it extensively! compared it to the comic! ok.

so, yes, i’ve read fucking preacher and it’s fucking awesome and you’re right it’s fucking great great great.

persepolis vol 1 for my taste beats vol 2 by a million miles. vol 1 is all about escaping and adventure. vol 2 is about, ugh, getting back to prison. a little too bitter for me and lacking structure. but 1 was magick.

the problem with maus for me is that it lacks a compelling plot. this happens, this happens, this happens— it’s a document. it’s an important document no doubt, but it’s a document.

persepolis documents history as well but i has an actual plot—there is tension in the narrative and it moves you forward. the thing that moves you forward in maus is spiegelman’s inherited neurosis. which, i don’t know, he doesn’t really delve into it. he’s a little cold about everything, a little distant. a little too detached, too american.i was disappointed when i read it.

you want to delve into jewish neurosis and historical trauma in the present, read jacobo timerman on the lebanon war. holy mother of fuck. it’s gut-wrenching. he’s argentinian so he doesn’t hold back— he spills his guts in front of you. a brilliant book. a meditation on the horrors of history and about going from victim to perpetrator. deeply, deeply felt.

anyway where was i going with this after 7 vodkas? hm... er... yes! plots. right ways of telling a story. a story says this happened first this happened secod this happened third. a plot tells you the story in a more interesting way.

and sandman— sandman is the mother of all plots. sandman is full of amazing surprises. sandman takes you one way then takes you another way then you arrive to a place and say huh? and wow. it’s just spectacularly well told. seriously. such a well-told story. masterful.

also i know that watchmen is not about capes, it’s about, uh, superheroes being flawed, and borgesian fake documents, and literary devices that were experimental 40 years before the comics. anyway i didn’t like it. i couldn’t like it. so i didn’t like it. and that’s how i didn’t like it. i got it. and still didn’t like it. couldn’t like it. won’t like it. can’t. not interested unfortunately. way the cookie crumbles.

a book that warrants at least 2 reads might be, hm, let’s see, borges’s ficciones. everyone should read that at least once. whatta book.

also, speaking of adult comics, the first several volumes of FABLES were fucking amazing. later it sort of spun off into a bland mess and i stopped buying/reading, kinda like they were milking their earlier success. but fables holy fuck so smart and so epic. the way the characters got reinterpreted into adulthood was a masterstroke. that alone, what it does for the mythical imagination, hasn’t been valued enough yet. sure it has been copied some in some tv shows, like, grimm or something? they attempt something like that? but no. fables. wow. it destroyed my childhood in all the right ways. it said: these characters grew up with you.

I'll have to re-read MAUS to make sure--it's been at least 15 years--but I'm pretty sure you're totally wrong. ;-)

But I've never heard of Jacobo Timerman and will explore, so thanks, and you may continue to live.

i dont know what it was about maus. i thought it was very good, but somehow i had been expecting more. i think i have problems with the art character. basically i didn’t like him i suppose. he spoils it a bit for me. the dad’s story is amazing. but the son kinda ruins it for me, the fucking brat, ha ha ha ha. i don’t know. he gets in the way of the dad for me i suppose. i really just don’t know.

timerman’s family fled to argentina from russia pre-holocaust. he grew up nevertheless as a refugee and supported by jewish charities to an extent. throughout his life he dealt mostly with latin american politics and wrote about them as a journalist. in the late 70s he’s imprisoned and tortured by the argentinian junta that tortured murdered and “disappeared” some 30,000 people. israel intervenes, they save his hide, take him home (he had been a zionist all his life). he gets there and blam, the lebanon war happens.

he then proceeds to bite the hand that feeds him and writes THE LONGEST WAR, where he condems israel and its treatment of the palestinians, mixing recolletions of his refugee childhood with what he’s seeing happen in front of his eyes, and constrasts this mess with the zionist ideals he grew up with. he took a lot of shit for it but wow—it’s a potent read.

ETA: oh, the book was mostly ignored at the time of publication and israelis dimissed timerman as in ingrate who didn’t know what he was talking about, so it’s not a famous book by any means and i don’t think it won any awards. but read it and see.

Hmm. I’ve never read, but will consider it. Thanks for the history. That’s not great luck.

watchmen is about the myth of the do-gooder hero. it rules.

We’ve had this conversation before, but it’s aboit a lot of things. Just not really about superheroes. Partly because there’s not a fucking single shred of heroism or altruism exhibited by any of the “masks,” and partly because, while the story may include at least one “super” person, it’s absolutely not a hero’s journey in the Campbellian sense.

But yeah, it’s more about the cold hard truths of the world. The “heroes” as depicted in normal comic books are fundamentally at odds with civilization and, y’know, its discontents. In reality, a hero is a human at a point in time before they have become corrupted, either by their own baser instincts or... well, basically fascism.

Aaanyway. I just wouldn’t call it a superhero story. At all. A story with so-called “super-heroes” in it? Sure. But all those “heroes” are either deviants, cowards, sociopaths or charlatans (eg deeply flawed, like people).

Also Cold War stuff.

i read watchmen as a grownup having already had my adolescent dreams dashed and seen political ideals betrayed, friends corrupted, and so forth, so to see a masked hero acting like a deviant coward charlatan (the book indeed does show them that way) came at no surprise to me at all, i took it as a given—i was already more cynical than the novel.

maybe if i had grown up reading superhero comics in my teens and then discovered watchmen before entering the “real” world this it would have had a different effect on me. kinda like wehn i found the bill my dad was paying for santa’s gifts (except that was nice, i appreciated what he was doing—it was a happy disillusion).

but yeah i kinda grew up seeing captain america as an agent of “yankee imperialism” ha ha ha. true story. therefore, etc.

it matters WHEN things are experienced.

I read Watchmen when it came out. It was the densest, most re-readable comic I ever saw. The marriage between the insane art of gibbons, and the dense, literary writing of Moore blew me away and still does. There is nothing better.

I read Dark KNight Returns when it came out. That shit scared me. It has now infiltrated mass consciousness to the point where the pop view of Batman is the one presented by frank miller, which is beside the point of the whole Dark Knight Returns.

yes!

Yes, and yes.

Dark Knight Returns is shit as a Batman summary. It’s awesome as a *possible* future that may or may not ever come to pass.

Anyway, you’re totally right about Watchmen. I read it in my early 20s — after years and years and years of reading Batman and Superman and loving the shit out of both, and loving the escapism of comics. Still, they were a childhood thing (they’re not really anymore), so Watchmen scared me. More than Dark Knight Returns did. Watchmen seemed so bleak and nihilistic (it kind of is!) that I actually gave up on it a couple times before reading it in full, and even then, while I recognized it was good literature, I wasn’t sure I *liked* it.

And I’d been reading “adult” comics — little bit of Sandman, some underground stuff and Moore’s Swamp Thing and V for Vendetta — for a while by this point. But Watchmen unnerved me.

I’ve re-read it twice since then (actually, maybe more than that), and each time it leaves a bigger impression. I don’t think it’s the best graphic novel ever, but I think it’s essential reading, and I actually have some mild affection for some of the characters at this point. Like Veidt, actually, and even Alt-Right vigilante Rorschach, (though he shouldn’t have killed those dogs... that was fucked up).

I was kind of replying to you and Rob with my above message, btw.

But if tl;dr then: I was also older and pretty jaded by the time I read Watchmen, and I *did* grow up reading comic books, balancing my political awareness with their escapism and idealism, and I had a different reaction in the long run.

Neil Young Special Deluxe, A Memoir of Life & Cars:
"All you have to do is step back and take a look at corporate-run
government to begin to understand why the media has not presented
global warming and its cause to the public as the real story of our times.
Because of the corporate-occupied Federal Communications Commission,
network television and printed media are now serving the corporations
by not exposing the true story of climate change and the future of mankind.
There are brave representatives and senators who oppose these laws, but so
far seem unable to overcome the forces they are up against. The people themselves
will have to drop their complacency and rally behind fundamental change, take their
country back, and support brave leaders.
However, this is a book about cars." - page 321
Kim Gordon Girl in A Band...both of these musician/artist-driven memoirs are real balls of yarn...
also:
Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything by Lydia Kang, MD & Nate Pedersen

yes but did you ever see stuff like this before watchmen?




in the 3rd world you see this type of thing often. superheroes agents of the american government? no kidding!

anyway latin america has had a bunch of different responses to american superheroes but the most enduring and significant one has been this



el chapulín colorado

you may have seen a bad copy of it on the simpsons but that’s totally lost in translation. do not/cannot compare based on looks.

chapulín colorado fits the latin american mythical imagination perfectly. he’s not an earnest overpowered bully with supreme weapons and bruce wayne/tony stark’s money. instead he’s a bumbling fool in cheap-looking costume, full of good intentions, and totally incompetent.

his weapons are a squeaky plastic mallet and some shrinking pills that get him in more trouble than they solve. as superheroes goes he’s supercowardly, but a mexican would tell you that más vale un cobarde vivo que un valiente muerto.

he wins in spite of his shortcomings through sheer luck, which he boast is cunning in front of others. he’s got a number of catchphrases that are just a bunch of bungled popular sayings, so he sounds like a well-meaning idiot.

he’s the perfect symbol of underdevelopment—cheerful and determined in spite of a great povery of material, moral and intellectual means.

like cheeto said, WHEN you read things is important— but also WHERE you read them from. perspective is everything, and it’s a big big big world of meaning out there.

Jesus. That’s my Jesus they’re talking about. Yikes.

Also, copyright infringement, but I doubt anyone’s worried about that.

No. No I can’t say I did grow up with anything like this. Though my parents did accidentally buy me a pornographic Spider-Man ripoff comic, to hear them tell it.
I wonder if it wasn’t just a regular comic and, it being the ‘80s, they were shocked at the amount of skin? Who knows.

ha ha ha.

right, your jesus is seen as an agent of american imperialism, just like the jesus of the 700 club when it gets dubbed and broadcast internationally (for real).

same with captain america, wonder woman, etc.

since they’re all us-centric and dressed in red white and blue they’re seen as spreading and promoting american values around the globe. whcih, in fact, they are. but unless you’re immersed outside the world of american values it’s hard to see that. theyr’e unbeatable, like nukes and advanced fighter planes, and protect and normalize the corporatocracy.

i wouldn’t be surprised if alan moore was influenced by 3rd world readings of american superheros when he wrote watchmen. plus the fact that the book is straight-up borgesian... hmmm (borges was a right winger though, lol— not everyone from the same continent thinks the same way).

anyway. my job here is done i guess lol. perspective and what not.

thanks for the morning’s procrastinations, now i gotta get back to moving house.

Borges was also deeply weaksauce physically, very un-superman...hahhahaha

El Chapulin Colorado was my favorite show when I still lived in Puerto Rico (1973-1980). I used to watch it religiously, and y favorite toys were the springy antenna and a plastic replica of his hammer that I would bop on my lil brother's head.

I used to watch it from the eye of a child though, and to me he was very much a superhero, but one that was comedic. It was not until I got much older and re-watched the show that it struck me how odd it is that the most popular Mexican superhero character is one that actually sux as a hero. To me that seems to expose the massive inferiority complex that Mexico and Mexicans seem to have in regards to us assholes in amerikkka.

In a land where the "self-made person" is the epitome of greatness (USA), a person who has great powers and uses them for good is a superhero. someone who has great powers and uses them for evil is a supercriminal. It is about the internal moral choice, and of course those powers must be used to affect the greatest number of people.

In latinoamerica, with it's deeply inbred mentality of class structure and what essentially is an uncommunicated caste system depending on your wealth and light skin, the idea of a normal human becoming a great superhero seems ridiculous, because to them, it IS ridiculous. I think that is why the ideaof superheros whose whole existence is devoted to the betterment and protection of humanity could only come from the USA as it existed in the early 20th century. Eternal optimism, eternal reinvention, eternal justice and morality....

Chapulin Colorado's USA equivalent is the Greatest American Hero, a bumbler who can barely control his powers, but who manages to right wrongs regardless. Cahpulin only fights crime in poor neighborhoods (because the poor do not deserve a true hero? hmmm or because a poor, low-caste crimefighter would undoubtedly be a bumbling idiot?). he also is not provided a dichotomy in an arch-enemy. Superman (all-good, all powerful) has Lex Luthor (all-bad, no powers, only his evil genius). Batman (rigorous and methodical crime fighter) has The Joker (irrational and wholly insane criminal for crime's sake).


I always wanted to believe tjat Chapulin's alter ego is El Chavo del Ocho.

You know what is sad? Chavo does not have a real name, and no one seems to give a fuck that he sleeps in a fucking rain-water barrell. No one in that fucking condado ever asks him to sleep indoors, or takes him in and raises him, or in any other form really care for him. That's latinoamerica to a T!

Began Albert Camus' The Stranger yesterday.

Isn’t Moore kind of a semi-right winger too, though? I think he’s gone back and forth a little. He’s not a far-righter, but I don’t believe he’s a “snowflake” in any sense. Maybe I’m mis-remembering things though. Hmm.

Weekend progress update: Goodreads says i'm 53% through Fellowship. Page 213 of 398 for the copy I have.

You must be reading a trade paperback rather than a mass-market pb. The cheapo editions are 550 pages easy. Not sure why I’m even saying this, but I am.

I got a box set and one that very purposely avoided movie tie-in designs. I didn't want any photo inserts in the middle of the books, etc.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bdn5xGeAhHI/

https://www.instagram.com/p/BeOQgbmgsge/

I also noted font size and such, with how much they pack in per page.

Cool. I love TPBs. I only ever read mass markets for convenience.

Just finished Paradoxes of Free Will by Gunther S. Stent. http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2018/0...d-all-its.html

Don't think you can get this book with this cover anymore.