Zoo in the head

Travis Bickle, thou shouldst be living at this hour

On Tuesday, the Curzon Soho cinema held a speed-dating event in combination with a screening of Shame, a film - so one hears - in which sex is depicted exclusively in a context of anomie, humiliation and self-loathing. (Does sex happen in any other context? you ask. Or I ask, anyway.) Peter Bradshaw, in the Guardian, describes the film's idea of a date as "an uncomfortably real transcription of a supposedly romantic evening: another long, static camera shot. It starts with stilted conversation, ends with a spark, but is followed by a catastrophic tryst in which there is nothing but emotional degradation."

The reason I know about the Curzon event is that a friend of mine was invited along to it; she made her excuses - she'd already seen it - and left.

I suppose there are worse date movies: inordinately long films, films about the Shoah (Claud Lanzmann's Shoah itself, all nine-and-a-half hours of it, may be the greatest bad-date movie), and films involving sexual violence or perversion (Irréversible, Cronenberg's Dead Ringers). It's interesting to note that Hollywood has already come up with some suggestions: in Annie Hall Woody Allen tries to drag Diane Keaton to Marcel Ophuls' The Sorrow and the Pity; and there's the best bad date-movie scene of all. It leaves me feeling I need to scrub myself down with Milton:

 

What I did in the holidays

Being a complete list of all the secondhand books I bought during my summer holiday in Norfolk, with my "reasons" for buying them:

The Pattern of English by G. H. Vallins Pelican 1957
“The developments in the construction of the English prose sentence from the earliest times to the present day.” I’m unsure now why I thought this was worth buying, except to make up the numbers on a five-for-a-pound deal at a village fête.

Hear us O Lord from heaven thy dwelling place by Malcolm Lowry Penguin 1969
The cover has an attractive woodcut by George Tute; I like inscriptions: this one has the owner’s name, N. Ingpen, and the enigmatic note “(W.T.C. October 1970)”.

Common Sense by Thomas Paine, ed. with introduction by Isaac Kramnick Penguin American Library 1982
Nice cover: the Bennington Flag of 1776. You can’t have too many copies of Common Sense, and I only have two.

High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes, Panther 1979
I’m writing about Hughes for the LRB, and needed a reading copy. This is an ugly commercial paperback; the main feature of interest is the jacket copy, which consists mainly of endorsements from Hugh Walpole, Cyril Connolly and Arnold Bennett - who, in 1979, gave a fig for their opinions?

Mario and the Magician and Other Stories  by Thomas Mann Penguin Modern Classics 1975
Cover badly creased but I wanted the opening story, “A Man and His Dog”, because I’m working with Tim Dee on a series for BBC Radio 4 about dogs in literature and life, to be broadcast late next year.

The Friendly Dog: An Anthology ed. J. Parson Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd. 1912
See above

Cruel universe

Since coming across this via William Gibson (GreatDismal) on Twitter, I have been brooding incessantly on the injustice that saw me born on the wrong side of the Channel and 20 years too late to have a torrid affair with Françoise Hardy.

Ktang!

This is one of my favourite ever pages from a superhero comic - from Captain Marvel #17, October 1969, courtesy of the Giant Size Marvel blog, which has been celebrating the art of Gil Kane.

Kane's work is instantly identifiable from the absurdly over-defined muscles, the exaggerated lines of eyes and cheekbones, and the wing-like flicks of hair he liked to give his characters. As Richard Guion says, his re-design of Captain Marvel's uniform - the deep blue and red, the exploding star, the nega-bands on the wrists, and the half-mask showing off the silver hair - is the last word in superhero chic.

Kane's outstanding work was on Captain Marvel and Adam Warlock, a golden-skinned Messiah figure with a soul-devouring gem in the centre of his brow. In hindsight, it's interesting to note the political undertones in both characters. Mar-Vell was, you'll recall, a warrior of the Kree, blue-skinned extraterrestrial racial supremacists, suspect because of his pink skin: perhaps the idea of a white man being a racial outcast seemed radical back then. Warlock was a kind of perfect human, created by rogue geneticists, and then endowed with godlike powers by the High Evolutionary (a Dr. Moreau knock-off whose main hobby was turning animals into man-beast hybrids via a "genetic accelerator"); the whole thing was a very weird sci-fi amalgamation of the New Testament and Nietzsche. It makes a sort of sense that Kane later drew a comic-book version of Wagner's Ring.

Where's the beef?

Here, bizarrely, is the beef:

You won't need telling that this is Sabretooth, Wolverine's arch-enemy, who obviously takes care of himself - or not so obviously, given that, like Wolverine, he can mistreat his body all he wants and it will just repair itself. But let's talk about the source: Shirtless Superheroes, a blog dedicated to beefcake of the kind that has been pumped up by gamma rays, radioactive spiders, super-soldier serums, nega-bands, and so forth - super-porn.

It's no secret that superheroes are partly, and maybe completely, about sex - all those revealing costumes, the shadowy ripples and bulges, together with the constant anxiety that there are parts of yourself the world must never know about: oh yes, I remember that feeling. There are even occasional delicate hints - as here - of sado-masochism. Michael Chabon's novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay played with sexuality and superheroes to marvellous effect; so did Alan Moore's Watchmen ("Did the costumes make it good?" Silk Spectre asks Nite Owl after they've just got it on in his Owlship).

Shirtless Superheroes doesn't have time for all that pussyfooting around with cleverness and irony: they just swallow their beefcake whole, and lick their lips. I always find it worrying when somebody gets over-excited about people who aren't real; when the unreal people are people I get moderately excited about myself I feel worried and sordid. I won't be going back to Shirtless Superheroes. Or if I do, I won't be telling you about it.

Pay attention: this is the most important information you will ever hear

via Chris Sims, the "Critical Reception" section of the Wikipedia entry on the Pokemon character Bulbasaur:

CNN reporter Dennis Michael described Bulbasaur as one of the "lead critters" of the games and "perhaps the Carmen Miranda of Pokémon figures." Joyce Millman's impression of a Bulbasaur was that it looked like "a dinosaur thingy with what looks like a large garlic bulb growing out of its back." She did not know how it defeated its opponents but speculated that "perhaps [it] overpowers them with a strong batch of pesto."

Bulbasaur was selected as one of the top ten Pokémon by fans who voted at Pokemon.com. According to a panel of 5 - 8 year olds assembled by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in 1999, Bulbasaur was one of the children's three favorite Pokémon. A writer for the University of Notre Dame's The Observer noted that Bulbasaur was the the third most popular Pokemon to pick after Charizard, who was "was sleek, powerful, and utterly destructive", and Squirtle, who "would evolve into Blastoise, a tank of a turtle with huge water cannons on its back." Next was Bulbasaur, "which would become Venusaur, a clumsy-looking lout with a giant flower growing on its back." He speculated that the people who chose Bulbasaur were ones who "knew how it felt to be picked last in gym class." In a The Ohio State Sentinel point-counterpoint, Matthew Thomas Gross felt that Charmander is superior to Bulbasaur, saying Bulbasaur has "shown evidence of sloth and laziness," and has lower speed rating than Charmander. In contrast, Clark Helmsley feels that Bulbasaur is superior, noting that it is higher in four of the six main Pokemon statistics (HP, Defense, Special Attack, Special Defense). Helmsley also feels that Bulbasaur's loyalty is more important than Charmander's abiltiy to evolve into the powerful Charizard.

For reference, Bulbasaur looks like this:

The comments following Sims' post lead to this:

Covered in glory

Caustic Cover Critic has nominated this blog for a Splash award, with the following explanation:

The Splash award is given to alluring, amusing, bewitching, impressive, and inspiring blogs. When you receive this award, you must:
1. Put the logo on your blog/post.
2. Nominate up to 9 blogs which allure, amuse, bewitch, impress or inspire you.
3. Be sure to link to your nominees within your post.
4. Let them know that they have been splashed by commenting on their blog.
5. Remember to link to the person from whom you received your Splash award.

I'll have to have a cup of coffee and a think about who to nominate; in the meantime, can I note my pleasure at being nominated alongside Eddie Campbell. Rifling through the chest of mouldering comics that sits underneath several boxes of bicycle tools and spare parts in a corner of my office, I find - nestled among old copies of Badger, Tales from Gimbley and American Flagg - the first half-dozen issues of Deadface:

 

Deadface is the god Bacchus - immortal, of course, but looking a bit rough on account of "wine, women and song", also of course: Greek myth meets gangster noir. I'd love to find out where the story went after issue #6.

Also via Caustic Cover Critic:

I've come to the Neglected Books Page, which offers a really broad and interesting selection of titles (though I'd quibble hard with the idea that either The Third Policeman or Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate are neglected - both in print, both recipients of plenty of critical attention). I second their recommendations of Augustus Carp, Esq. - a book that gets revived, in a minor way, every couple of decades - and Michael Frayn's Sweet Dreams, a vision of heaven that is one of the coolest satires on bourgeois liberal morality ever written. They also recommend Frayn's early volume of philosophy, Constructions, which I happened to come across in a shop yesterday - now back in print, I suppose because of the attention paid his more recent The Human Touch.

And I discovered the GenderAnalyzer, which claims to be able to discern the sex of the author of any homepage. GenderAnalyzer says: "We guess http://roberthanks.typepad.com/zoo_in_the_head/ is written by a woman (53%), however it's quite gender neutral." I'd always thought I was quite butch, and don't know whether to feel chuffed or humiliated.

Dark Brown

As a child I collected Charlie Brown books, before moving on to superheroes. In my twenties, when I had done a pretty good job of kicking the whole cartoon habit, along came Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns to mess me up all over again. So this, applying the style and sensibility of Miller's Sin City to gentler matter, unites all my yesterdays:

Perfection makes commentary superfluous. Details and further links here. (And hat-tip: Andrew Sullivan.)

And by way of a palate-cleanser, here is what Chris Sims at The Invincible Super-Blog has nominated as possibly the single greatest piece of dialogue in the English language:

Can you seriously disagree?

Mutations, I

Over at Crooked Timber, John Holbo is understandably excited about having been given a copy of this book by his wife, clearly an understanding woman. I too am excited because, as I've already explained in the comments thread over there, this is one of the most important books in my life: in 1982, when I went for interview at Oxford, the trio of dons confronting me asked me what I had been reading lately. Rodent Mutation, I told them. A scientific treatise? they wondered (I was an arts candidate). Not exactly, I said: it's about giant radioactive beavers teleporting themselves around the country and smashing things with their tails (I had forgotten until Holbo mentioned it that they were also telepathic). Aha, they said, and we moved on. One of my teachers told me later that in the report sent to my school I was described as a "slightly strange" candidate; but I ended up going there, and it's where I met my wife and everything. Objectively, it is an appallingly silly and poorly written book; but I'm in no position to be objective.

Footnote: Bron Fane is one of the many pseudonyms of the Rev. Lionel Fanthorpe, the motorcycling vicar who used to present Fortean TV on Channel 4, and who was never as interesting or amusing as that description makes him sound.

Why you shouldn't go on the web while mildly drunk

You end up buying stuff like this:

Which is wonderful, obviously, but also available to read free online and have you any idea how lousy the dollar-sterling exchange rate is right now and what shipping from the US to Britain costs? Here's me supposed to be saving money.

There are some positives here, the biggest being that El Gorgo is an 800lb gorilla luchador with an Einsteinian-level intellect who battles Lovecraftian sea-gods across space and time to prevent them seizing world dominion, when he's not playing surf-guitar. Also, it's a wonderful spoof of/tribute to Jack Kirby (the man who created Captain America, the Silver Surfer, etc.) - Tamas Jakab's art gets the suicidally bold line, the awkward poses and the gaudy colour-schemes; and Mike McGee seems to have channelled Kirby to achieve the Donald Wolfit theatricality of his dialogue ("Do you think me blind, man?! Outnumbered thus, even a hero out of legend itself cannot hope to prevail!!"). And my copies are signed by McGee and Jakab.

On the other hand, I know perfectly well that I should have stopped being excited by this stuff when I was 12. 

(Hat-tip: I came to El Gorgo! through Chris Sims.)