What I'm Reading: Roundup

On Free Comic Book Day back in May, I picked up some of the sale books at my local comic shop. Let's go over a couple of those:

The Building Starting in 1978 with his A Contract With God, Will Eisner, already a legendary comic artist, pioneered what we now call graphic novels. He did about one a year until his death, mostly stories set in New York ethnic neighborhoods.

In The Building, Eisner interweaves four stories of characters attached to a 1920s Bronx highrise that's being torn down to make way for a modern office tower: an anonymous clerk who turns to helping children any way he can after a terrible accident, a former beauty queen who falls in love with a penniless poet, a ruthless real estate developer whose one sentimental attachment leads to a bad business decision, and an amateur violinist who always dreamed of playing music for a career. On the day the new building opens for business, the four have recently died, but their legacies (and possibly ghosts?) combine for one final surprising episode.

The only other of his graphic novels I've read is A Contract With God, which struck me as beautiful and profound. The Building is similar in form, with the interweaving stories and the same ethnic New York setting, but somehow this was thin and fairly predictable compared to that earlier book. I did like the story of the former beauty queen, Gilda Greene, who eventually settles for a conventional marriage to a wealthy man but never falls out of love with her poet. But overall, I didn't think this lived up to Eisner's first graphic novel. I'm not sure if I'll bother with any of his others at this point.

American Splendor: Another Day Harvey Pekar, who kept his day job as a file clerk at a Cleveland Veteran's hospital nearly until the end of his life, was for decades one of the most important underground comics creators. (I wrote about the American Splendor movie based on his comics and life here.) Harvey didn't believe in superheroes, fantasy, or power trips--his stories are all about the everyday problems of him and his friends. Neurotic, chronically short of money and self-confidence, but with a tremendous empathy for others, Harvey makes his way through his comics just trying to do the best he can.

This volume is from a period in the early 2000s I wasn't previously familiar with. After three decades of self-publishing his comics, Harvey did a four issue series with DC's Vertigo imprint. Other than possibly somewhat better production values, it's about the same as everything else of his I've read, though--closely observed stories of the small victories and defeats of his life, beautifully drawn by a variety of top underground comic artists. (Harvey only wrote the comics, but he had a who's who of established and up-and-coming underground pencilers and inkers in his rolodex, including in this volume Richard Corben, Bob Fingerman, Gilbert Hernandez, Chris Samnee, and many others.)

I think my favorite story in Another Day was the episode where he spent an entire Saturday trying to unclog a toilet, constantly on the verge of defeat and ready to call a plumber, but thinking through the problem and trying one new thing after another. Finally, after hours, he succeeds, and as the toilet successfully flushes, he lifts the plunger above his head and cries out, "Today, I am a man!"

I can heartily recommend this to practically anybody from teenagers on up (some profanity might make this unsuitable for younger readers, though, who are also likely to find the subject matter boring.) But if this volume isn't available, that's not too important. Practically anything by Pekar is more or less the same, but all more or less great.

What I'm Reading: 84 Paws: A Life with Old Labs

I've read another book by a fellow Writers of Chantilly author, this one titled 84 Paws: A Life with Old Labs, by Barbara Travis Osgood. This one is a memoir about Barbara's life with mental illness, and her life with a series of rescued Labrador Retrievers (twenty-one in total), and how adopting the dogs over the past twenty years or so has helped her overcome depression and despair to achieve a measure of peace in her life.

Each chapter tells the story of one of the dogs, often with a lesson Barbara learned from the dog about living her own life. One of my favorite chapters was about Hope, a female chocolate lab who had been a backyard breeder until her owners had no use for her anymore. When Barbara adopted her, she expected to find a defeated dog, ground down by the difficulties of bearing litter after litter, like many other abused breeders she had seen. But Hope was not that dog--Hope bore herself upright, with dignity, and instantly became the leader among the four dogs at Barbara's house. The other dogs instinctively knew to let Hope have her way in eating first, hopping up on the best spot on the bed, or any other doggy privilege. Hope never growled or bared her teeth, but when a younger rescue dog came temporarily to the house and tried to go first in the food line, Hope had him flipped on his back before he knew what was happening. In Hope, Barbara saw a model of perseverance for dealing with her own problems.

There are plenty of other dogs too--Raleigh, the ambassador, who made friends with everybody on their walks, including a homeless man who slept on a bench near a local shopping center; playful Buddy, who despite his advanced age and a history of neglect involved everyone in chases and games; curious Molly, another backyard breeder who has to know about everything going on and refuses to let her past burden her present.

This is an easy book to recommend to nearly everybody. In fact, I left the book lying on a table in my house one day, and with no prompting at all, my son and daughter started reading it and trading it back and forth to each other to compare notes on their favorite dogs. (That's one reason I'm only reviewing it now despite having bought it when Barbara published it last spring--it keeps disappearing in my daughter's room so she can read it!) The beautifully simple prose is complemented by one or more pictures of the dog in question in each chapter, with a gallery of dog photos at the end. It can be read beginning to end, or flipped through for a chapter here and there with equal satisfaction. And as much as the dogs have been a salve for Barbara, I think reading her wise stories of them may also prove a salve for a reader in need of healing, or at least a pick-me-up after a bad day.

What I'm Reading: Timaeus and Critias

I'm behind on logging my reading. Let's start with Plato's Timaeus and Critias, twin works that take place on the same day. Although Socrates is a character, as usual in Plato's dialogues, he does not take a starring role in these two. Rather, his young friends Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates, describing how they were inspired by the speech Socrates gave the day before on the ideal city (with Timaeus giving a summary of the speech that sounds an awful lot like The Republic, which I reviewed here), have taken it upon themselves to come up with speeches of their own.

Socrates is delighted at this, and agrees to listen. Timaeus is to give an account of the origin and nature of the universe, and Critias is to describe the ancient lost city of Atlantis and its war against a city much like that in the Republic: an idealized prehistorical version of Athens. However, only Timaeus finishes his speech. Critias's leaves off in the middle. This is not because, as happens far too often with ancient texts, we are missing the last part. No, we know that it was missing in ancient times too--Plato simply never finished it. Nor did he apparently ever get to the speech of Hermocrates, so we don't even know what the topic of the final speech was going to be.

Anyway, back to Timaeus's speech, which of course comprises the dialogue with his name. Timaeus attempts to do no less than describe the creation and fundamental nature of the universe. The Greeks believed there were four elements--earth, air, water, and fire--but in Timaeus's conception, these elements were formless until a creator came along and shaped them into the universe as we know it. Because the creator would have to be perfect, of course he would create a perfect universe, and it's only because he created the gods, and then the gods created humans, that we are less than perfect, as we're pretty far down the chain, and made later, after the best and most perfect of the raw materials had been all used up. But while our bodies are imperfect, we do have one perfect part--our souls, and if we act as close to divine as possible while on earth, meaning rationally, after our death our souls will go and join the divine among the stars.

Well, there's a lot more than that in Timaeus's speech, all about how the universe is made up of triangles (interestingly, this comes off as sort of a primitive atomic theory), and how these fit together to create the four elements, and how the four elements themselves join to create all the different substances and materials we find in nature, and the way in which our senses perceive things. Plato really attempts to sort things out here without resorting to mythology. For a modern reader, though, I'm not sure there's a lot to learn. Plato's other dialogues are more about ethics and living a meaningful life, and provide a lot to think about. His ideas about how the world works in a physical sense, however, have all been superseded by modern science and are little more than a historical curiosity.

Critias's speech is a lot more fun for a modern reader. It is about the lost city of Atlantis, the greatest city ever to exist, and how its people were overtaken by hubris and determined to conquer the world, only to be stopped by a highly virtuous city, the prehistoric Athens. The problem is, we only get ten pages of description, and never even make it to the war. The description is quite interesting though--Atlantis is a highly-engineered city, with a perfectly round island in the middle inhabited by its ruler and his family, surrounded by three perfectly circular rings of water, with perfectly circular rings of land in between them for the city's residents and public buildings. There is a massive covered bridge with a canal underneath so boats can reach each of the rings, and outside of the city the canal leads to the ocean. Everything is on a monumental scale and covered with silver and jewels and so forth, in such abundance that the citizens have no special care for it, except as pretty building materials. We also get interesting discussions of the type of physically and mentally superior people who live there (descendents of the gods) and how fertile the land is, and some of the amazing creatures and crops and orchards that grow there. But just when we're about to get to the action, it stops abruptly.

This was apparently the first mention of Atlantis in history, although it's presented in Critias's dialogue as being a vague legend everybody's heard of, but that his grandfather had learned the truth about on a visit to Egypt. In fact, we believe now that Plato made it up--Atlantis was pure fiction. That hasn't stopped people through the ages from trying to trace historical antecedents, or searching for the location of this mysterious sunken city. Even today, there's still apparently some scholarly debate on whether there might not have been some kind of legend that Plato based this on, and that maybe we've simply lost the sources for? But that's most likely wishful thinking.

I've tried to read some Plato (or last summer, Xenophon) every year for the past several years. When people have seen me reading it, they often say something like, "Isn't that really difficult to read?" And the answer, until now, has been no. They're just dialogues, meaning conversations, among Socrates and his companions. They're not hard to read and they're often kind of humorous. I don't think I can say the same about Timaeus. There's a lot of geometry and long chains of logic in it as Plato tries to explain his somewhat esoteric theories about the universe, and it took some real effort to follow. Nor was it that rewarding, as, like I said, science by now has passed Plato by. Critias, however, was a fun read on a subject that's since driven a lot of speculation, although it was disappointing that it ended in the middle. I don't think I could recommend these two works except to people with a truly endless interest in ancient Greece or ancient philosophy.

Ranking: Dark Phoenix

This is the second time Marvel has made a film version of Dark Phoenix, the greatest X-Men saga of all time. The first attempt was X-Men 3: Last Stand, which was an awful movie, overloaded with pointless special effects and actors phoning in their performances, and culminating in a visually impressive but logically dubious fight scene in San Francisco Bay. This attempt is better than that one, although still not a great movie. I've ranked it Okay.

On a mission to save the space shuttle, X-Man Marvel Girl (civilian identity: Jean Grey) is exposed to a weird cosmic force which her body absorbs, the Phoenix Force. This gives her access to a cosmic level of power, but due to her traumatic past, Jean isn't mentally stable enough to handle it. Fearing her own abilities, Jean flees the X-Mansion and returns to her childhood home, where her father is not especially happy to see her again. When the X-Men come and try to persuade Jean to return with them, things soon escalate into a physical confrontation where Jean accidentally kills teammate Raven. Now on the run and convinced that even her closest friends are against her, Jean is vulnerable to persuasion by the bad guys, members of a shape-shifting alien race called the D'Bari, who wish to take the Phoenix Force for themselves.

I think the biggest problem here is that in the comics, the main villains for the Dark Phoenix saga are the Hellfire Club, a sort of Victorian social club of rich and powerful members, each of whom also happens to be an evil mutant. They're a pretty awesome group of villains, but the X-Men films already used them, in the X-Men: First Class movie. This movie uses instead the D'Bari, who are pretty generic. I found it difficult to find the D'Bari a real menace, or compelling in any way when they were on screen. Do the X-Men manage to defeat them and save Jean at the end? Probably, since there's no reason to think the D'Bari are sticking around.

I have previously ranked Ant-Man and the Wasp, Aquaman, Avengers: Endgame, Avengers: Infinity War, the Avengers movies, the Batman movies, Black Panther, Captain America: Civil War, Captain Marvel, Dr. Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Logan, Man of Steel, the Man-Thing, the non-Marvel and non-DC comic movies, the other DC movies, the Spider-Man movies, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the summer 2015 comic movies, the Superman movies, Thor: Ragnarok, Wonder Woman, and the X-Men movies.


As ever, my ranking system is
Green=excellent  Blue=pretty good  Black=Okay  Red=avoid
_______________________________________________________________________________

Here's the master list of all comics movies I've rated so far, in order from best to worst:

Crumb
American Splendor
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Iron Man
Heavy Metal (1981)
Spider-Man 2 (2004)
Avengers
Superman (1978)
Captain America
Wonder Woman (2017)
Batman Begins (2005)
Captain America: Civil War
Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier
Avengers: Endgame
Spider-Man (2002)
Aquaman
X-Men 2: X-Men United
X-Men: Days of Future Past
Superman II
Batman (1989)
Ant-Man
Ant-Man and the Wasp
Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
Dr. Strange
The Dark Knight (2008)
Logan (2017)
Iron Man 3
The Wolverine (2013)
Guardians of the Galaxy 2
Sin City (2005)
X-Men: First Class
X-Men (2000)
Captain Marvel
Black Panther
Man of Steel (2013)
Avengers: Infinity War
Avengers 2: Age of Ultron
Swamp Thing (1982)
Spider-Man 3 (2007)
Iron Man 2
Watchmen (2009)
Batman Forever (1995)
Superman Returns (2006)
Thor 2: The Dark World
Dark Phoenix
Incredible Hulk (2008)
Mystery Men (1999)
Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Man-Thing (2005)
Superman III
Supergirl (1984)
Thor
X-Men 3: Last Stand
Hulk (2003)
Fritz the Cat (1972)
Batman and Robin (1997)
Batman Returns (1992)
Superman IV

Amazing Spider-Man (2012) (Haven't seen)
Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) (Haven't seen)
Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) (Haven't seen)
Batman (1966) (Haven't seen)
Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (Haven't seen)
Catwoman (Haven't seen)
Constantine (Haven't seen)
Deadpool (Haven't seen)
Green Lantern (Haven't seen)
Hellboy (Haven't seen)
Judge Dredd (Haven't seen)
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014) (Haven't seen)
V for Vendetta (Haven't seen)
X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Haven't seen)

What I'm Reading: This Is Not a Love Scene

What a treat, a book by my fellow Writers of Chantilly writer, S.C. Megale! This Is Not a Love Scene is Megale's first published novel, although she's well known at the writer's group table for a number of books she's read to us over several years, each done with passion and skill. Unlike most of what I've read from her before, which tended toward fantasy or science fiction, this novel is realistic and set in the contemporary era. It follows Maeve, an 18-year old senior in high school who is taking a film class and hopes to enroll the following year at UCLA in film. She's fallen in love, or at least lust, with the school's top actor, Cole Stone, who is tall and good-looking, and has come up with a film project for her class involving Cole for possibly mixed reasons. And, oh yes, Maeve is in a wheelchair with a degenerative spinal disease for which there's no cure.

Maeve has a disappointing dating history--boys who go out with her to be nice, but have no intention of becoming more involved with her. A succession of guys who are "just...not able to go there." Cole is different. He's hard to read--teasing, alternating between flirtatious and distant, often monosyllabic. But he also seems to have a real romantic interest in Maeve, and over a series of awkward (but funny!) dates and encounters, they gradually learn how to translate their mutual sexual desire into physical affection.

Maeve also has a close group of friends to help her out--BFF Mags, who's pretty and romantically experienced and unfortunately currently dating Nate, who resents the attention Maeve gets from his girlfriend; Elliott and KC, two fellow students in her film class; Quinten, an older man and retired FBI agent who lives at a local nursing home; and of course Francois, her faithful service dog.

Together, the friends help Maeve navigate the myriad adventures of an active, lusty, wheelchair-bound teenage girl--filming a fifteen-minute film project that requires multiple on-location shots, confronting the pushy local director of a special-needs camp who seems to think Maeve owes her involvement, acquiring the unusually delicious ice cream at a local store that was built before handicapped-accessible laws.

In the end, though, it's Maeve who has to help one of her friends in a dangerous situation when no one else can. Will she survive? Will she get accepted to UCLA so she can pursue her dream of directing movies? And most importantly, will she get laid by Cole Stone?

Ranking: Avengers: Endgame

I've now seen Avengers: Endgame twice. It is the second part (not a sequel) of last year's Avengers: Infinity War (which I reviewed here). It is the culmination not only of the two-part Avengers movie, but also of the entire 22-movie Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), which has been building to this point since Iron Man in 2009.

At the end of Avengers: Infinity War, cosmic bad guy Thanos had assembled the all-powerful Infinity Gauntlet, with its six power gems that have played a role in so many previous Marvel movies. Using the Gauntlet, he snapped his fingers and wiped out half of all life in the universe in one moment, including half of our heroes. Near the beginning of this movie, the narrative advances five years and we see how our remaining heroes and other characters are coping with their incredible losses. The answer: some better than others, but on the whole, not well.

When a freak accident causes Ant-Man to return from the quantum realm, where he's been stuck since the end of his movie from last summer, set just before Thanos's finger snap, he realizes that five years on earth was only about five hours for him. Time works differently in the quantum realm, and after describing his experiences to Tony Stark and Bruce Banner, our heroes theorize it might be possible to manipulate entrances and exits from the quantum realm to travel through time. That is, it might be possible to go back before Thanos assembled the power gems and rewrite history. Whether that works out or not, I will not reveal

I found Avengers: Endgame to be highly satisfying--not quite Excellent on my rankings list, but near the top of the Pretty Good movies. It's amazing how much the screenwriters and directors were able to put in--practically every character in the MCU has at least one meaningful scene--including some characters you may have nearly forgotten about--and yet it doesn't feel particularly over-stuffed. Thor and Hulk especially had some really fun character-building scenes. I'm not quite sure I can recommend it to everybody--if you haven't seen any previous Marvel movies, you have some serious homework to do before taking this one on. But for those already familiar with the MCU (you don't have to have seen every movie to date), this is a really fun movie.

I have previously ranked Ant-Man and the Wasp, Aquaman, Avengers: Infinity War, the Avengers movies, the Batman movies, Black Panther, Captain America: Civil War, Captain Marvel, Dr. Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Logan, Man of Steel, the Man-Thing, the non-Marvel and non-DC comic movies, the other DC movies, the Spider-Man movies, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the summer 2015 comic movies, the Superman movies, Thor: Ragnarok, Wonder Woman, and the X-Men movies.


As ever, my ranking system is
Green=excellent  Blue=pretty good  Black=Okay  Red=avoid
_______________________________________________________________________________

Here's the master list of all comics movies I've rated so far, in order from best to worst:

Crumb
American Splendor
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Iron Man
Heavy Metal (1981)
Spider-Man 2 (2004)
Avengers
Superman (1978)
Captain America
Wonder Woman (2017)
Batman Begins (2005)
Captain America: Civil War
Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier
Avengers: Endgame
Spider-Man (2002)
Aquaman
X-Men 2: X-Men United
X-Men: Days of Future Past
Superman II
Batman (1989)
Ant-Man
Ant-Man and the Wasp
Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
Dr. Strange
The Dark Knight (2008)
Logan (2017)
Iron Man 3
The Wolverine (2013)
Guardians of the Galaxy 2
Sin City (2005)
X-Men: First Class
X-Men (2000)
Captain Marvel
Black Panther
Man of Steel (2013)
Avengers: Infinity War
Avengers 2: Age of Ultron
Swamp Thing (1982)
Spider-Man 3 (2007)
Iron Man 2
Watchmen (2009)
Batman Forever (1995)
Superman Returns (2006)
Thor 2: The Dark World
Incredible Hulk (2008)
Mystery Men (1999)
Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Man-Thing (2005)
Superman III
Supergirl (1984)
Thor
X-Men 3: Last Stand
Hulk (2003)
Fritz the Cat (1972)
Batman and Robin (1997)
Batman Returns (1992)
Superman IV

Amazing Spider-Man (2012) (Haven't seen)
Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) (Haven't seen)
Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) (Haven't seen)
Batman (1966) (Haven't seen)
Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (Haven't seen)
Catwoman (Haven't seen)
Constantine (Haven't seen)
Deadpool (Haven't seen)
Green Lantern (Haven't seen)
Hellboy (Haven't seen)
Judge Dredd (Haven't seen)
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014) (Haven't seen)
V for Vendetta (Haven't seen)

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Haven't seen)

What I'm Reading: Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade

Medieval Cities, by French professor Henri Pirenne, was published in 1952 but is the synthesis and culmination of lectures he had been building on since the 1920s. I believe Dr. Pirenne was the one who came up with the theory that it was not the fall of the western Empire after Rome was sacked in 470 that caused the decline of urban civilization in western Europe. He believe the Ostrogoths and Visigoths who took over from the Romans largely left the old economic structures in place. They didn't want to destroy the Roman empire, they wanted to share in its prosperity, and in fact, did so.

Rather, it was the spread of Islam across north Africa in the eighth century that disrupted the ancient trade routes, cut western Europe off from its grain and luxury sources, and caused the real "fall" of the old Roman empire (in the west). It was in the eighth and ninth centuries (not 200 years earlier) that trade ebbed to almost nothing and economies, such as they were, became dominated by a feudal system where great lords ruled over estates and everything the people lived on, rich or poor, was produced locally on those estates.

I believe attributing the decline to the spread of Islam is fairly standard now in medieval studies, but at the time it was revolutionary. Dr. Pirenne builds up quite a convincing argument, even if he's a bit breezy with the evidence at times. Moreover, that's just the first couple chapters. In the rest of the book, he continues the story of the re-sparking of urban life in the tenth and eleventh centuries, after the threats from the Vikings and other barbarian invaders had receded. He traces the origins of merchants, the middle class, market towns, and medieval economic institutions in, initially, the Netherlands and northern Italy, and spreading during the High Middle Ages into England, France, and Germany. He explains his particular view that for security purposes, the new trading centers developed at first as suburbs of the episcopal and political centers of the feudal age, but gradually supplanted them in population and wealth.

This book was right up my alley, with some of my favorite subjects--cities and European history--and told in a grand sweep by an author who seems to know everything possible about the topic. There are interesting observations or opinions on practically every page. Of course, it's an academic work written in an elevated style, but for those who share my particular fascinations, I highly recommend this classic work of history.