Mark Strand's "Eating Poetry" (Commonplace Book)

Mark Strand is a very good poet. Go get one of his books here.

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

A Scarf in Chris Bachalo’s Steampunk

Frank Quitely most often composes simple clean images; your eye is immediately drawn to the most important thing in the panel (Superman’s chest or Lex Luthor’s desk or whatever); only after apprehending the main part of the image does your eye go roving to the details (in JLA: Earth 2, on a world in which evil always wins, Green Lantern saves a dog from a beating and a few panels later, if you look closely, the dog is run over by a bus).

Chris Bachalo, also one of my favourite artists, goes violently in the other direction, often giving the reader a chaos that must be carefully examined before its content can be understood; using a lot of beautiful monotone colour doesn’t help any either. Many people find this maddening, but I think it is a lot of fun (plus Bachalo has great designs and draws cute girls like no man’s business). To help us find characters in the mess he puts them in he gives them simple distinguishing characteristics; in Steampunk, Laslo has a union jack scarf. In one amazing fight scene, 24 panels over a two page spread, Bachalo shows Laslo’s battle prowess – his ability to move fast and hit every target – by drawing him leaping across the panel grid to strike his targets. Alan Moore uses stuff like this to make meta-textual comments as an analogue to visionary experience: characters walk above the panel page because they know they are in a comic book and are using its "cosmic" rules to accomplish something. Bachalo uses a character jumping above the page to make a great fight scene, which I think is better, if only because it is less pretentious and less common. To follow Laslo we follow the path of his scarf, which is not drawn as a realistic item of clothing but appears as an icon. (Click the image for a larger version).


There are two schools of thought on communicating chaos – or dissonance or trash – to the audience: do you make your own presentation chaotic (dissonant or trashy) or do you make it clean (harmonious or polished) and get the effect you are after in other ways? The fights in Kill Bill, for example, are chaotic for the characters involved, but are filmed with perfect clarity; Batman Begins went the other direction, communicating chaos by making the fights impossible for the audience to see (as it must have been impossible for the thugs Batman was beating on to know what was happening). In this scene Bachalo gets it both ways (as he can in the comics medium): he gives us a chaotic presentation to show chaos, but we can sort through it given time; what Laslo is doing is initially disorienting, but we can follow the path of his iconic scarf and figure it out easily.

Saradani.com

Sara Reiss, my partner and website designer, has launched her own design and art site, saradani.com. Check it out. It's quite cool, and she looked at all of your sites (well the ones I knew about and linked to, anyway). Here is a quote from John Ruskin that I think captures Sara's sensibility as an artist; Ruskin says that all men

look back to the days of childhood as of greatest happiness, because those were the days of greatest wonder, greatest simplicity, and most vigorous imagination. And the whole difference between a man of genius and other men is that the first remains in great part a child, seeing with the large eyes of children, in perpetual wonder, not conscious of much knowledge,--conscious, rather, of infinite ignorance, and yet infinite power; a fountain of eternal admiration, delight, and creative force within him, meeting the ocean of visible and governable things around him.

Laurel Holloman

Laurel Holloman is an actress primarily known for playing Justine on nine episodes of Angel and for playing Tina on Showtime's The L Word. She has a breezy North Carolina charm that I thought worth pointing out. I see no reason why a blog dedicated to short appreciations of poetry and popular culture should exclude short appreciations of actresses, especially sleeper television actresses.

Holloman has crows' feet around her eyes and laugh lines around her mouth. The platitude that lines give a face character is actually true. Pretty 18 year-old girls -- as anyone who has ever hunted for porn on the internet can attest -- are all pretty in exactly the same way. Holloman has a specific beauty based in what appears to be a tremendous emotional intelligence. She has lines on her face because she has not attempted to avoid or erase evidence of emotional intensity. She is the ideal middle point between a real person who happens to be on television and someone grown in a studio-lab for maximum appeal. On Angel she was cast because her pain at the loss of her sister was instantly believable. On the L Word she has a friendly, searching sensitivity -- the kind of sensitivity that reaches for something rather than one that simply responds to something that has crossed its path. I find her genuinely touching.

Comics Out 2 August 2006

I didn't see anything interesting out this week, and the news from San Diego is winding down. With the break I wanted to say two things.

First, issue 13 of 52, out this week, will be my last. The series has been a chore -- a slog -- to read and I am not spending any more money on it. The only reason I read it is that Grant Morrison was listed as one of the four writers. Being generous that means he was only ever responsible for a quarter of the writing; with this week's issue 52 is one quarter complete, and as far as I am concerned my responsibility to follow it ends there. If I had to pick three things I hated about it most, it would be the rambling "and then something else happened" structure, the focus on minor characters I was not made to care about in 13 issues (and 13 is a lot -- an entire Ultimates run), and the decision to have the lesbian Batgirl be someone other than the cop I have been reading about. (That would have made a lot more sense). Also there was a glaring typo -- a big word bubble was printed twice in issue 12.

Second: what did people think of Grant Morrison's first Batman issue? I thought there was some interesting anxiety of influence stuff in the first few pages, in which Frank Miller's "psycho" Batman is invoked and dismissed, but I am going to withhold further comment on the issue as a whole. What did people think?