Plenty of Nothing

Pages to Close

In case you hadn't noticed the continuing going-to-hell of the Canadian book business, here's your final proof. Sequential is reporting the imminent closure of Pages on Queen Street in Toronto.  Pages seemed to achieve effortlessly what no bookstore in Ottawa has ever managed to do -- be cool.  A large part of its appeal came from the decision to hire illustrator Michael Cho to do all the in-store signage.  I hope some Toronto blogger has the foresight to go through there with a camera and post the section signs.  Douglas

Overqualified, by Joey Comeau

All Maritime literature is about, at some level, alcohol.  When you read Joseph Howe, you have to bear in mind the punch bowl on the sideboard, or David Adams Richards, the stack of empties in the mud porch. Even Anne of Green Gables gets drunk on raspberry cordial. In Christy Ann Conlin's Heave, Serrie the recovering protagonist wonders exactly what it is Maritimers are supposed to do when they stop drinking.

Joey Comeau's Overqualified fits right in there.  The epistolary novel takes the form of a series of job applications, the applicant Joey Comeau's strategy being to lie in the resumé and tell the truth in the cover letters.  Though for "tell the truth" read "unveil manic fantasies of revenge".  Many of these letters have the belligerence you might meet in a tavern parking lot.  Biographical details sift out about a dead grandfather, a broken relationship, and a brother killed by a drunk driver.  By the end the narrator is no closer to a job, but you are closer to understanding why.

But aggressive truths are still truths.  Here he is applying to Absolut Vodka:

You don't know what I mean, do you, Absolut?  Your commercials are all pretty pictures and clever design. They're very attractive.  I'm applying for a job, because I don't think you understand what it means to be cool or strong or invincible.  You of all people should know.  That is what alcohol does.  It makes you strong.  You can fight anyone.  You can seduce any woman.  You can drive faster than death.

Cross Promotion

Nice piece of cross-promotion here.  The LCBO has loaded up on gift boxes for the holiday season, and one of them is this all-Edinburgh tandem of Deuchars IPA and Rankin's detective John Rebus.  The beer's all right, though more oaty than I'd expect from an India pale ale.  The novel is ... meh.  Maybe Rebus gets sharper in the sequels, but God he's a shitty detective in this one.  His only advantage as a cop is that he's sleeping with a coworker who knows what's going on.  The rest of the time he's drinking.    Here's the crucial moment for me, on page 194, just as Rebus has figured out the identity of the psychopath who is about to murder his daughter: "Rebus, shivering, entered a pub for the hell of it and ordered a triple whiskey."  Dude!  Catch the guy!  Douglas

Obama and Walcott

Bookninja is in a faint because President-elect Obama has been spotted with a copy of Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott's collected poems.  The last president to show any grounding in poetry was Kennedy who had Robert Frost over for his inauguration and who, like Obama, knew how to speak.  To be fair, though, the copy Obama is holding in this Reuter's photo looks fairly pristine, as if it has just been handed to him by some staffer who'd learned via the intertubes that Walcott has written this poem.

Jet Fuel

I finished two books yesterday: Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero and Spent by Joe Matt.  Divisadero is unlikely to unseat The English Patient as Ondaatje's best-known novel, but it might be his most Ondaatje-esque work.  There are reminders of his earlier books throughout, and he satisfies the scar/river/dog requirement by page 17.  At one point I seriously expected Caravaggio to step into the action.  The structure feels especially diffuse, but there's a lot of doubling going on, and one character's dilemma will get picked up by another character in another time or place (or book).  Spent also sits in the middle of a group of other books, in this case graphic novels in which Matt, Seth and Chester Brown draw themselves hanging around together in Toronto.  Some day there will be a show about it at the AGO.  Matt is an R. Crumb devotee in style and content.  By coincidence both Matt and Ondaatje mention a Toronto coffee house, Jet Fuel.  Douglas

Making Libraries Safe For Books

 
A couple of comics have made it onto the shelf here at our digital journal Plenty of Nothing that presage nothing short of the survival of the book and that temple of literacy the public library. Rex Libris: I, Librarian, by James Turner, features the titular Rex Libris, a Eugene Levy lookalike who crosses time and space to collect overdue books and return them to the Middleton Public Library.  His methods are both crude and high tech -- he thinks nothing of leaping from low orbit to trade knuckle sandwiches with delinquent borrowers -- but his motivation comes from personal knowledge of the burning of the Library at Alexandria, where he used to work.  The comic, paradoxically, is totally computer generated.  Simultaneously comes Read or Die by Hideyuki Kurata and Shutaro Yamada, a manga starring Yomiko Readman, a paper master who similarly kicks ass in the name of recovering rare and collectible seventeenth-century editions.  The faith these stories place in calfskin and ragpaper is quaint, but it points out an interesting oxymoron: increasingly as readers move to the internet for their reading, it's the comics that keep them coming back to the bookstore or the library.  Maybe literary publishers ought to consider returning to including half a dozen illustrations in each novel, as they did a hundred years ago.  The comic book collector is not so far from the rare book afficionado.   Douglas

Trifecta of Sorts

When I bought Whiteout I knew that it would fit into two sets of (book and mental) collections--Antarctica and comics--but the whole DTOWF connection was a hoot out loud surprise.

(Apparently Kate Beckinsale plays Carrie in the upcoming movie version. Strikes me as odd casting.)

There's a nice MA thesis waiting for someone out there who looks at the tendency of fictions set in Antarctica to focus on murder. (Preliminary bibliography here.)

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Other People's Reading

I sometimes save the bits of paper I find in library books.

This I found in Cheri.

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Baggins

Hobbits like to snack.  In the Prologue to The Fellowship of the Ring Tolkien writes, "And laugh they did, and eat, and drink, often and heartily, being fond of simple jests at all times, and of six meals a day (when they could get them)."  In "An Unexpected Party", the first chapter of The Hobbit, a dozen uninvited dwarfs strain but fail to defeat Bilbo's abilities as host, and still leave enough food in the larder for Bilbo's breakfast the next morning after they've left.  In all, the meals tea, supper, breakfast and second breakfast are mentioned.  The screenwriters of the film version of The Fellowship of the Ring supply the following piece of dialogue, nudging the daily total of meals to seven:

Aragorn:  Gentlemen, we do not stop till nightfall.
Pippin:   What about breakfast?
Aragorn:   You've already had it.
Pippin:   We've had one, yes. What about second breakfast?
[Aragorn turns and walks off in disgust]
Merry:   I don't think he knows about second breakfast, Pip.
Pippin:   What about elevenses? Luncheon? Afternoon tea? Dinner? Supper? He knows about them, doesn't he?
Merry:   I wouldn't count on it.

Bilbo Baggins, the first of Tolkien's hobbits, provided the template for the rest of his hobbit protagonists, all of them homesick though venturesome, and food-obsessed.  Even his name encodes who he is and what he's doing.  A bilbo is a small sword, like his weapon Sting.  Baggins suggests a burglar's bag, and is also associated with his home at Bag End, Tolkien's pun on cul-de-sac.  But Baggins also carries the sense of snack.  Map L56a of The Linguistic Atlas of England illustrates the variety of English dialect words for snack.  In much of Lancashire and Cheshire the predominant word is bagging or baggings.  (Other English dialect words are biting on, crib, crust, elevenses, lunch, nammet and ten o'clock).  Did Tolkien hear the word baggings as a child in Evesham, a county or so south in Worchestershire?  Evesham falls in the lunch zone, on the far side of elevenses from bagging, but perhaps.  Food for thought.  Douglas

Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist

One of the pleasures of March was reading the beautifully produced Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist.

Independent scholars come to their books in odd ways: Nancy Goldstein began with a doll. Made of plastic, the Patty-Jo doll stood 18” high and was marketed with her own range of clothes. Manufactured between 1947 and 1949 the dolls were designed and in some cases hand-painted by Jackie Ormes who also included multiple references to the doll in one of her comics.

The most striking and valuable thing about this biography are the dozens of reproductions it includes. It’s clear that Goldstein spent hours in the microfilm room recovering what remains of Ormes work. Paper copies of Ormes' work are long gone: either suffering the fate of much mid-century newsprint or destroyed by librarians overly enamoured of microfilm. The images Goldstein has found have been patiently cleaned up and carefully annotated.

Jackie Ormes (1911-1986) wrote and drew four separate comic strips—all of which feature African American women or girls. The comics appeared weekly in the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier,  African American news papers with national distribution. Torchy Brown in Dixie to Harlem, a black and white, three or four panel strip ran from 1937 to 1938 in the Courier.  Candy, a single panel comic, ran in the Defender for several months in 1945. Patty-Jo ‘n’ Ginger, also a single panel comic, ran in the Courier from 1945 to 1956. Torchy Brown Heartbeats, a full-colour romance comic in the Courier from 1950 to 1954 and was accompanied by a series of Torchy paper dolls and clothing.

What struck me most in looking at the comics was the pin-up style of the drawing of the female characters. While pin-up figures of Torchy Brown or Candy aren’t particularly odd for comics or for the period, the contrast between five-year-oldish Patty Jo’ and her older sister Ginger constantly startled me. Ginger is fashionplate, Vargas cheesecake.  The strong contrast between a hyper-sexualized adult female body with a just past toddler body is more dissonant than the contrast between entirely silent adult and overly-knowing child who comments on the social and political events of the day. Patty-Jo ‘n’ Ginger is a fascinating combination of fashion and politics.

In the end, Goldstein’s account of Jackie Ormes life is hampered by a lack of primary documentation. While Ormes kept some of the business and social correspondence she received, few if any of her letters or original art survives. Goldstein reconstructs Ormes' life from family memories, an admittedly inaccurate interview given shortly before Ormes' death, and some public records.  There are odd elisions—why did the Ormes leave the Sutherland Hotel in 1956 the same year Jackie Ormes stopped drawing comics? And odd gaps—how did Torchy Brown, as a romance comic, compare to others of the period or how did Ormes’ work compare to that of other African American comic artists of her period?

There’s more work to be done in collecting Ormes work and placing her in the social, political, and artist context. But this is a fine beginning, the product of much care and attention.

Some links

• Short film of Ormes in her studio
• Salute to Pioneering Cartoonists of Colour
• Archive of Golden Age Romance Comics (via Journalista)
• Publishers Weekly Review
• Interview with Nancy Goldstein (via Torchbearers)

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