Hellboy: An African Myth about a Frog

Mike Mignola's Hellboy is a fantastic idea for a comic book and a world fantastically designed: a heady mix of Lovecraft, Alex Toth, Jack Kirby and world mythology. One chapter of Hellboy: Seed of Destruction, a chapter about frogs and frog-men monsters, opens up with An African Myth about a Frog, one that knocked me out when I read it (I include Mignola's image from the page):

On a day when little water was to be found Man spent awhile in thought and realized that he might one day die, never to rise again. Man sent Dog to God to ask that he might come back to live again, like the flowering plant, after death.

Dog went off and followed his nose toward God. He was soon distracted by the smell of soup, and followed his hunger toward the source. Leaning close to watch it boil, Dog was content and forgot his mission.

Seeing that Dog was lost, Frog took it upon himself to go to God and tell him that Man did not want to live again. If Man were to be reborn, thought Frog, he would soon muddy the rivers and destroy the birthplaces of frogs.

Dog finally arrived to tell God Man's message. Leaning low, he crooned Man's need for rebirth in the song of his howl. God was touched by the devotion of Dog for Man.

But God granted the frog's wish, because he got there first.

This story is similar to James Tate's Goodtime Jesus, about which I have already posted. It imagines, where we would expect a necessary origin, an arbitrary, accidental one. On a cosmic scale the idea of "well that's just how it happened, it could have happened another way," the idea that the dog is just stupidly late, and that this effects all of creation, is terrifying. Mignola uses it to establish that frogs are evil, are man's enemies, but it also must speak to the creator of the world of Hellboy, in which world mythology collides with the absurd figure of a hulking red daemon with a trench coat, an old fashioned pistol, and a badly functioning jet pack. The arbitrary is a form of freedom as well as doom.

From Charles Wright's Buffalo Yoga Coda III

I want to glance at a single sentence in Charles Wright's poem Buffalo Yoga Coda III from his 2004 book Buffalo Yoga. I first discovered Wright because my favorite literary critic Harold Bloom blurbed the back of his book; Bloom is a bit of a crazyman, but this blurb is him at his most audacious:

Black Zodiac concentrates Charles Wright's considerable poetic endowment into a new poignance that has to be termed religious. Some of these poems achieve an authentic gnosis in a rapt mode of negative transcendence.

Now I know Bloom very well, and I barely know what that second sentence means: "gnosis" is a kind of special spiritual knowledge -- an identification with a distant alien Gnostic god -- reserved for those who understand the world is fallen and evil, a kind of prison; "negative transcendence," I think, is like regular transcendence (going above the merely physical world), except that instead of discovering something (say God) you discover nothing -- you discover that there is nothing, that you are totally free, that nothing is real but your self. What knocks me out about the blurb is that it is a blurb: this deeply obscure statement is on the back of the book, to encourage people to buy it (and figure out which poems do or do not achieve an authentic gnosis in a rapt mode of negative transcendence, I guess).

Here are the Charles Wright lines that I wanted to point out:

Under the low hum of the sweet bees,
Under the hair-heavy hoof of the warrior ant,
Under the towering shadows he must go through,

and surface from,

Under the beetle's breast and the grub's,
The future is setting its table,

its cutlery dark, its mirrors anxious and blank.

The vision of the insects reminds me of the quintessential David Lynch shot from Blue Velvet: the camera explores a beautiful suburb, then (when a man watering his plants has a stroke) zooms in too far into the grass and catches the violent struggle of (insect) reality underneath the simple surface. This vision of insect life in Wright suddenly yields to an unsettling vision of the future as an ominous dinner party that has not yet begun. Where we would expect the host to be anxious because no one has arrived, it is the mirrors that are anxious because they see no one, reflect no one. If the mirror "reflects" this aspect of the future (the host), we are left with the idea that the future is also "blank," unwritten but also impassive, uninterested, inhuman. As with vampires the mirrors don't reflect the action of the future setting the cutlery (the sound "cut" makes it sound more dangerous than "silverware"). The image suggests both danger and freedom. If anything is an authentic gnosis in a rapt mode of negative transcendence, surely this is.

Lex Luthor's Desk in JLA: Earth 2

Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's JLA: Earth 2 is the best part of Morrison's JLA run, a fantastic comic book. In a smart move -- one unfortunately not emulated by Marvel Comics for Morrison and Quitely's New X-Men -- DC comics released this as a stand alone graphic novel. It could have been part of Morrison's JLA run, which he was doing at the time, but the graphic novel form better accommodates Quitely's speed. I want to draw attention to a small but brilliant Quitely detail: Lex Luthor's desk.

Punch Drunk Love opens with a calm morning and suddenly out of nowhere a car crashes. The crash is not part of the story of the film; it is there to establish, as economically as possible, the universe of the film: you IMMEDIATELY get that this is a universe where violence can come out of nowhere and you begin to fear for your main characters (a brilliant way to jack up the stakes of the romantic screwball comedy, which is what Punch Drunk Love is). Lex Luthor's desk has a similar brilliant economy: this is the first time we see Luthor in the book and you look at that image, the cavernous room with the empty desk carved from an endangered redwood tree (we must assume) and you know EVERYTHING you need to know about this character: he is rich, wasteful, arrogant, powerful, has very good taste, and doesn't love anything (nothing personal is in the room or on that desk).

Interview on Astonishingtales.com

I have an interview up at astonishingtales.com. Click here to read it. This is how Dan Liebke, creator of the site, describes it:

No regularly scheduled update of Grant Morrison's run on the JLA comic today. Instead, I present an interview with somebody who knows a lot more about the subject than I do. Geoff Klock, author of How To Read Superhero Comics And Why discusses the JLA along with the relationships between text and subtext, hair and baldness and J'onn (Martian Manhunter) J'onzz and David (Angel) Boreanaz.

I forgot to mention in the interview that I found out about Morrison's Alan Moore-Manhattan Guardian connection because Morrison himself told my friend Brad Winderbaum (www.thefuturistmovie.com) when they met in LA. Actually many of my comics observations here are spun out of my weekly conversations with Brad, as was the suggestion to do a blog in the first place; blogs don't generally have an acknowledgements page, but if they did Brad would be at the top, as would Sara Reiss, my partner and website designer.

Russell Edson's The Fall

Russell Edson is a peculiar prose poet, writing weird little quasi-parables. I saw him at a reading once and he flipped through his own book, looking for something to read and said into the microphone "oh, this is a good one," as if he had just discovered a new good poem by someone else. Here is his poem The Fall from his 1969 collection What A Man Can See (though I got it out of The Tunnel: Selected Poems):

There was a man who found two leaves and came indoors holding them out saying to his parents that he was a tree.

To which they said then go into the yard and do not grow in the living-room as your roots may ruin the carpet.

He said I was fooling I am not a tree and he dropped his leaves.

But his parents said look it is fall.

Hilarious, obviously. That this is a "man" and not a child is important. I imagine someone in their late twenties still living with his parents and acting childish. He comes in and begins to play a game, he is a tree. His parents use the game as an excuse to kick him out of the house, playfully (but with a serious undercurrent) threatening him with expulsion. He sees this and feels threatened and ends the game, dropping his leaves. But his parents -- clever -- interpret his refusal to play as another part of the game, and now he is trapped in his own metaphor, unable to escape. The fall, of course, is the season in which things are done ripening and are ready for harvest, just as it is time for him to leave home. Games and metaphors are always more insidious than we know.