Geek Graf

The Art of Subliminal Autobiography

Subliminal autobiography is not a novel concept. I remember my first exposure to the idea while reading Ernest Hemingway, when I realized that his "fiction" was actually disguised or subliminal pieces of his life. Philip K Dick is another whose fiction fits this description: creating work that by no means creates a literal translation of life, but contains within it code that signifies the unique experience of the artist. In the case of Dick, the result was unintentional. I believe the same can be said of author Steve Gerber.

Creating a work, or body of work, of this kind is not limited to writers -painters, actors, and film directors also put this kind of coding into their work. Yet, since Gerber is a wordsmith, I can limit my scope to artists of this kind.

In Gerber's body of work, biographical details may or may not be there, and if so are not likely to be found in any literal form; thus the label of "subliminal." An exorcist that contains within himself the soul of the son of Satan, or a scientist who transforms himself into a muck monster: obviously Gerber is not revealing intimate information about himself with these characters!

Countdown to Gerber

Here at the onset of the Year of Steve Gerber, the world's greatest writer of funnybooks, already I find myself spending inordinate amounts of headspace in contemplation of his work. With a great deal of his catalog from the last thirty years recently added to my brain, it is fresh and easily accessed for study, as I query different highlights for signs and symbols of deeper themes. With such a thoughtful and insightful author as this, I know there is a larger picture to see. Recently during one of my ruminations I had a certain thought about that larger picture -only to find an echo of the same thought in Gerber himself.

If you go to a rack displaying new comics, you will find the latest issue of Countdown to Mystery, featuring the mystical superbeing, Dr Fate. Steve Gerber is authoring the adventures of Dr Fate. In this issue, the eponymous hero is mourning the apparent death of a woman who tried to help him. Her name was Inza Nelson. She was the writer of a comic called "Killhead", and in the pages of that comic Dr Fate searches for clues about her motivations as an artist. For several pages we are reading a comic-within-a-comic, and some provocative information comes to light.

"The comic book," thinks Dr Fate, "it's coded autobiography, isn't it?" He is thinking about Inza Nelson, but could just as well be a reader such as myself asking the same question about Gerber's writing. In fact, I have been entertaining that very thought. I was startled, to say the least, at finding such an accurate echo of my thought in the comic.

Dr Fate wonders which character the author identifies most with, concluding that "Maybe she thinks this stuff was funny...!" Could this be a code-within-a-code, telling us Gerber's true motivation?
It was a wonderful moment of insight, and one that helps further define my mission during the Year of Steve Gerber. In addition to touching upon highlights of his career, I want to explore the idea that his entire catalog can be viewed as a work of autobiography. Even the author himself suggests as much! We'll see where it leads....

The Year of Steve Gerber

Last year I discovered Steve Gerber. It happened quite by accident. I was at Seattle's finest purveyor of funnybooks, Comics Dungeon, and purchanced upon an issue of Howard the Duck. Dim memories of seeing the duck when I was a kid stirred slightly, and I picked it up, expecting a chuckle or two. What I didn't know was that I had taken the first step in a long journey.
Howard the Duck was not just funny, it was hilarious, a ribald mix of satire and situation comedy, all involving a cigar-chomping, perpetually indignant drake fowl named Howard stuck "in a world he never made". What I thought might be a couple chuckles turned into deep satisfaction -and I had to have more.

After devouring Steve Gerber's fantastic run on Howard, assisted on art by the peerless Gene Colan, I found that this was only a small part of his contribution to literature. I went on to read his other books created in the seventies, The Defenders, Man-Thing ("The Most Startling Swamp Creature of All!" -who knew competition was so fierce?), Son of Satan (Marvel Comics had a satan fetish during that decade), and Omega the Unknown. Best of all these, representing the very creme de la creme of Gerber's ouvre (which, contrary to popular belief, cannot be fixed with surgery), is the Elf With A Gun.

The Elf With A Gun appears completely at random in three issues of The Defenders. He appears out of thin air and for no reason, none at all; his appearances are totally disconnected from the plot. First time we see him, he shows up at the door while a couple is singing John Denver tunes, calls the man by name and shoots him: end of appearance. For subsequent appearances, he disguises himself as a cabbie and an indian chief before calling his next victim by their full name and blowing them away.

No explanation has ever been offered for the Elf With A Gun. His creator, Steve Gerber, has never gone on the record. And I love him for it.

The Elf With A Gun has no precedent, is seemingly meant to be absurd, a non-signifier, and any time he appears the reader is given a breath of fresh air, as if the elf is reminding us, hey, don't take life so damn serious, huh? I would argue that this is Steve Gerber's underlying proposal in everything he writes. Nowhere in his decades of service is this philosophy made more obvious than the Elf With A Gun.

There is so much more Gerber has contributed, and I want to cover those in following entries, including the Woman Who Doesn't Exist, GodCorp, and The New Superhero. I am considering this the year of Steve Gerber and will be taking copious notes.

For current news and thoughts from the man himself, he regularly updates his blog.

Who Loves Reagan?

Have to admit I am enjoying the Clinton/Obama debate. It reminds me of being back at school and watching two of the smartest kids stand up on opposite sides of a question. Honestly, I am rooting for both of them, not to mention feeling grateful that we have some great candidates running for office this year.

All Thanks This Day to Our Sisters and Brothers in New Hampshire

The role of upstart this election cycle is being handled very capably by Barack Obama, and I'm excited to see him nominated to the Democratic ticket -in 2012. What he proposes to do if elected sounds like a bad idea: purging all the old cronies from Baghdad didn't work out too well, did it? Why should we think it is a good idea for Washington? You're left with a bunch of neophytes who don't know what they're doing and everything just stops for four years. Bill Clinton was certainly guilty of that mistake. I want a more seasoned Obama, when he's spent more time reading the currents at DC and knows better who should stay and who should go.

Mike Huckabee is not so much an upstart but a non-starter. Folks, the man is to the right of George W Bush when it comes to tax cuts. His national sales tax proposal would increase the share of taxes paid by the middle class. Aren't we trying to get away from that?

I'm encouraged by John McCain's edge up in New Hampshire, as well as Hillary Clinton's; these are the two best candidates running. He is a figure of staunch political will and has proven time and again that he can bring together disparate views for positive results -corporate reform during the current administration was a well-nigh heroic achievement, given the prevailing love affair with the private sector.

A contest between he and Clinton is the kind of presidential race our country deserves, and certainly will be the most compelling we've had since 1992. Hillary Clinton is the woman to win the Democratic nomination, a politician of reform values; it is criminal the way Obama demonizes her for her politics, calling them the "old Washington", when in fact she is as progressive as he is. It's like he's calling the kettle... well, nevermind.

I despaired for our country in 2004, when we had such a pair of shlubbs vying for the executive, an incumbent who was slowly and steadily dismantling the gains of thirty years, and a challenger whose only distinction was his service. Let's have some real candidates this year, please!

The Algebraist

The grandiloquent Iain M Banks is a science fiction sensation in the UK. His is the kind of space opera that picks up where Frank Herbert left off, with the brand of byzantine politics done so well in the Dune series. Banks' latest, published three years ago, has so far not grabbed me, not like his earlier work, Feersum Endjinn. He has a poetic style that reminds me of my friend Jeff Overstreet's style, only here tasked to a galactic scale. The flights of language are wonderful, but where Jeff's plotting is easy and satisfying to follow, with Banks I am struggling to comprehend what exactly is going on.

JUNO!

MOVIE!

OF THE!

YEAR!

The Hanging Garden

Doesn't everybody love the Cure at some point in their life? 1995: listening to Pornography every day, "What does it matter if we all die?" My cheeks were stained with tears of boiling pitch.
Which really has not much at all to do with the popular Rebus series, by Ian Rankin, other than the title of the latest I'm reading and perhaps a bit of the angsty pop soul of the author.
Everything revolves around Edinburgh in these books, and I think that's a huge part of their appeal. Works for me. Back in 2003, during my brief visit, the tight closes and corners of the city seemed a perfect setting for what is commonly regarded as the local genre, Tartan Noir.
The intrepid John Rebus is the other common thread. I don't he ever listens to the Cure (unless he does in this book and I've not gotten to that part); he's a Stones and Zep fan.

Watt

Mr Samuel Beckett, personal secretary to James Joyce during the late years of that great author's life, has a raft of novels that were not discovered until the success of Waiting for Godot. Like Joyce, he displays unholy adoration for minutiae, a literary styling that would later be termed "hysterical realism" when it reached full flower with David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. There is much to be amused by here, as we enter the short unhappy life of a manservant in Dublin. Watt considers endlessly the causal relations between possibilities and things, leading to such excursions as a five-page unbroken paragraph exploring one Irish family, the Lynches, and the various diseases and malformations that each of the more than two dozen members suffer from. Strangely enlightening.

The Brothers Miser

My friend Katy Shaw has the coolest Christmas ornaments on the planet: the Miser brothers from "A Year Without Santa Claus"!

The Dream-Quest of the Unknown Kadath

Even as a teenager, this passage terrified me, the image especially that Lovecraft paints, of shuffling, chaos-gnawing collossi ranging behind the mountains in a red-tinted, non-euclidean gloom; a totally absurd passage (monsters wearing mitres?) made all the more frightening by its absurdity and the shattering silence in which the tableau is beheld:

Carter did not lose consciousness or even scream aloud, for he was an old dreamer; but he looked behind him in horror and shuddered when he saw that there were other monstrous heads silhouetted above the level of the peak, bobbing along stealthily behind the first one. And straight in the rear were three of the mighty mountain shapes seen full against the southern stars, tiptoeing wolflike and lumberingly, their tall mitres nodding thousands of feet in the air. The carven mountains, then, had not stayed squatting in that rigid semicircle north of Inquanok, with right hands uplifted. They had duties to perform, and were not remiss. But it was horrible, that they never spoke, and never even made a sound in walking.

Cat's Cradle

In Kurt Vonnegut Jr's seminal novel of WASP SF (the ivy league version of Star Trek), many new phrases and words are introduced to the English language, not least among them:

boko-maru

A union of two souls achieved by placing the soles of two people's feet together. It is a Bokononist ritual that is taboo and forbidden on the island of San Lorenzo, referred to as "footplay".

Isn't that beautiful? What follows are more pertinent entries, all relevant to Vonnegut Jr's invented religion, Bokononism, which is really humanism-in-a-leotard:

Borasisi

The sun.

Pabu

The moon.

duprass

A karass made of two persons. "A true duprass can't be invaded, not even by children born of such a union." Members of a duprass usually die within one week of each other, as shown in the book Cat's Cradle.

foma

"Harmless untruths" (e.g., "Prosperity is just around the corner"). Bokonon describes his own religion as foma, created for the purpose of bringing comfort to the people of Bokonon's island. The people of San Lorenzo live under a poverty-stricken Third World dictatorship, but thanks to the comforting untruths of Bokonon's foma, they are better equipped to face reality (following Vonnegut's early theories about the true usefulness of religion).

granfalloon

A false karass. People who identify themselves by state or country of origin or in other various ways to form a group, when in reality such people may have very little in common or even turn out to be enemies or ideological opposites. There is much granfalloonery in the world. To quote the book, "If you wish to study a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon."

kan-kan

The instrument which brings you to your karass.

karass

A group of people who, unbeknownst to them, are collectively doing God's will in carrying out a specific, common, task. A karass is driven forward in time and space by tension within the karass.

sinookas

Tendrils of life that intertwine with other Karass member's tendrils.

sin-wat

A person who wants all of somebody's love. Bokononists believe love should be freely shared.

vin-dit

The force that first pushes a person in the direction of accepting Bokononism

wampeter

An object which is the focus of a karass; that is, the lives of many otherwise unrelated people are centered on a wampeter (e.g., a piece of ice-nine in Cat's Cradle). A karass will always have exactly two wampeters: one waxing, one waning. The term first appears on p. 52 of Cat's Cradle (in the 1998 printing by Dell Publishing). It is analogous to a MacGuffin.

wrang-wrang

"A person who steers people away from a line of speculation by reducing that line, with the example of the wrang-wrang's own life, to an absurdity." In the book, the protagonist begins to speculate that everything may be meaningless and take the first steps toward a belief in nihilism. But he encounters a nihilistic wrang-wrang who commits actions so repulsive and horrific to him that he subsequently wants nothing to do with nihilism.

zah-mah-ki-bo

"Fate - inevitable destiny."

A Coenenberg Film

Last night finally got around to see No Country for Old Men -I say "finally" because this has been in theatres far too long (two weeks, at least) unseen by me, a dyed-in-the-wool maniac for film just like this. Plus I read the book and heard this was a good adaptation, maybe even better than Silence of the Lambs.

There is a visual nod to Silence. Did you catch it?

I also saw what I thought was an homage to Warhol, to his Elvis print specifically, the one where the King is duded up in cowboy gear and brandishing a pistol. It's the shot in the film where Ed Tom Bell is looking into the hotel room where (no spoiler) was killed, headlights behind him casting a double shadow on the blood-splattered wall.

Lots of blood gets splattered in this film.

I don't think it's a better adaptation than Silence -a film that captures the source novel to perfection- mostly due to choices by the Coen Brothers. They want so very much to be making a David Cronenberg film that it creates a weird style melange onscreen; the cold clinical Cronenberg imported for scenes of brutal body horror. These scenes are not native to the Coens, and they put them to excellent use.

Nevertheless I had this nagging feeling that I'd seen this film before. It wasn't until morning that I realized what had been bugging me, that in many ways No Country is not only an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel but it also seeks to transmute Cronenberg's A History of Violence.

Laudable, to be sure, but distracting.

My highest praise for the film is the very effective "capture" of being in a McCarthy story, of being in his universe, as it were. Environment is paramount to everything in his work. The apocalyptic imagery (burning cars, corpse-strewn roads) and great sweeping cosmic emptiness found there is translated brilliantly by the Coens, to such effect that you feel the author's entire philosophy of art and existence coming across.

Chigurh choking on candy is a very nice and totally genuine Coens' touch.

And Stephen Root! A man born for the Coens, and one of my favorite actors working today.

And I love the dog chasing Llewelyn down the river, a scene which I alone in the crowded auditorium found worthy of an outloud laugh. So it was.

Norstrilia

Written in 1960, Cordwainer Smith's charming (and only) SF novel, Norstrilia, might contain the first usage of "Instant Messaging". Wouldn't surprise me. There's so much in the book, amidst the cat people, thousand-ton sheep and assassin kookaburra, that is out of step with the times -stepping forward from the times- that the author pulls off a very convincing performance as prestidigitator.
He coins instant messages as "instantaneous, interplanetary communications," which is sort of similar to what we have on the 'net today. Not yet between planets, but instant nonetheless. They are mentioned twice, hardly a major plot point.
Prognostications aside, I do recommend the book to fans of the serious-minded SF, for elements of future politics and economies. While not aspiring to space opera, like Asimov or Herbert, elements of galactic adventure are plentiful. Mostly it's a tale of a boy who buys the planet Earth and his encounters with colorful characters who would be at home in a romp, Douglas Adams-style.

International Sister Celebration Day

This morning I woke up and decided that today I was going to celebrate International Sister Celebration Day, whether today is actually that day or not (or even if such a day exists, and if it doesn't, it should). Let the world join together as one and join me in celebrating she who is the one I call... sister.

"So, you have a twin sister..."

"Sorry to interrupt, Darth, but actually um no, she's not my twin, not technically at least, but I love her anyway."

One of the things I really appreciate about Rachel, she who is my one sibling, my one copatriot, is every time she leaves a voicemail, it always starts with a quote from that 1984 scifi cheesefest The Hidden; she asks, "Yo, hippy, what kind of dude are you?"

Well, Rachel, I googled that question and here's the first thing I got:
That's just the kind of dude I am, I guess. Here's to you, sister!

Nextgen Vince Guaraldi?

As my friend Jonathan Marzinke points out, there's a contender for best yuletide soundtrack. I have to agree; this multidisc offering from Sufjan Stevens is essential.

Book Update

Changed the title from "Total Mass Retain" to...

"Fugitives"

Doesn't that sound more marketable?

How I Know I'm a Yankee

We United States folk have our identity tied up in so many different beautiful things. At the yuletide season, one of these beauties in particular stands out, something without which the season would be barren: the music of Vince Guaraldi.

I've never asked any of my friends abroad if they listen to Guaraldi during this time of year, though I feel like the answer is that they do not. After all, why would they buy into the idea that piano jazz is the best music for winter solstice; accompanied by a children's choir, no less? Add in that the music is soundtrack music for an animated television special and you have a uniquely "new world" concoction.

Listening to the ever-optimistic Guaraldi might be the nearest to a patriotic sensation I feel this year.

History of the Thirteen

Honore de Balzac is said to have died from drinking too much coffee. Perhaps there is a lesson in that for all of us. He had only recently married his lover, to perish five months later.
His working style was unique. Balzac ate a light meal in the early evening, retired until midnight, then rose to write for periods of up to fifteen hours straight. He kept this routine for most of his life, and we can see the benefit in his epic catalog.
The Balzac legacy is intimidating; over a hundred works compose his study of Parisian life, La Comédie Humaine. The author, no stranger to ambition, proclaimed that in fact all of his writings could be lumped under the banner of the Human Comedy. Without Balzac, it is arguable that Marcel Proust, no stranger to cathedral-like prose, would have lacked the necessary precedent in literature.
Balzac was influential in various institutions, not least among them philosophy. Frederich Engels said of him, "I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists and statisticians put together."
The last person to see him alive was Victor Hugo, another promethean of letters, though it is not extant whether Hugo shared Balzac's taste for the bean.
As a former barista, I suppose it's only fitting that I read this author. If I start keeping weird hours, you'll know why.