John Warner’s debut novel, about the rise and fall of an unnamed American comedian known only as “the funny man”, is a mulchy broth of satire, cultural commentary and La-Z-Boy philosophy that simmers away on lukewarm, only ever threatening to come to the boil, though not without ambition, before bubbling back into quiet soup, despite a satisfying crouton rising to the surface now and again.

By switching between courtroom scenes, where the funny man is on trial for murder, and flashbacks, where we learn of said funny man’s trawl through the dehumanising backstages of ‘the comedy world’, Warner, in his quintessential American voice, attempts to blend one too many disparate elements in fashioning an over-elaborate whole, without quite succeeding.

There are, however, moments of literary revving, a story that builds as shearing layers, but ultimately there is too much slippage, and the story’s foundations turn out to be a little uneven and cracked, perhaps even hurriedly laid.

It sounds simple enough: The funny man is happily married; he and his wife share a wry humour that feels warm and true. They also have a young son, of whom they are most proud. And in his work, the funny man is reasonably successful on the stand-up club circuit. But he wants more and more, to be a world-beater, worshipped as one of the greats (Bruce, Carlin and Pryor, in the funny man’s opinion).

After a gig he meets a talent agent who tells him he needs a “gimmick”, a thing recognisably his, to take him to the next level. His son unwittingly provides this gimmick – a most moronic one – yet the funny man becomes a runaway success, earning millions with his act. He is roped into making studio movies, then a sequel, all while having to do “the thing” that of course he comes to hate. Meanwhile, he becomes unassailably detached from reality. When his celebrity reaches unmanageable levels he begins to rely heavily on medication, which in turn leads to the breakdown of his marriage, an incident with his son that is hugely played up (but sags when revealed), and eventually, a secretive long-distance relationship with a female tennis star.

Warner provides some readable if often familiar asides throughout these aspects of the plot; on what happens away from camera; the anatomy of a cynically made Hollywood comedy; and the demands made on a touring comedian. His commentary sends up both the executives that fund the big-budget idiocy, and those people who pay to watch it. Though his message is often delivered with an over-inflated belief in the veracity and humour of his words, it does flow quite smoothly on the whole.

But too often it seems routes that could have been taken, to explore more dangerous or original ideas, were instead avoided. The novel reverts to platitudes (1. Be careful what you wish for, 2. Fame ain’t all that), along with the employ of some dry narrative devices (1. The unreliable narrator, 2. Observational stand-up bits disguised as conversation) which occasionally grind to a halt the reader’s enjoyment.

The social media aspect of the trial for example, is played for a couple of laughs. A theory from his lawyer, Barry, about “not guilty by reason of celebrity” is toyed with. Then there is the other musing, also from Barry, on there being no such thing as ‘emergencies’, only ‘eventualities’, and how the funny man believes this theory to “reconcile both free will and predestination” (an idea perhaps inspired by the later works of St. Augustine). Is it the occasionally patronising tone of some of its delivery that makes it unconvincing? Perhaps, because there is something that dims the message. Making it all sound a little beige. Like a book review based on ill-conceived soup and construction similes. Which brings us back to those courtroom scenes, unfortunately reading like those parts of a novel where one plot strain is indeed a strain to get through. Whole passages you want to skip over to get to the riper elements of the plot.

The second half further mixes in the possibility of the funny man’s delusions, taking the form of a classic reality/fantasy conundrum, as he is mysteriously blinked away to a celebrity retreat (or “advance”, as it is explained); a place recalling Patrick McGoohan’s surreal 1960s TV series The Prisoner, crossed with the titular utopia from Huxley’s parting gift, Island. There the funny man meets the love of his “second life,” Bunny, the tennis star, with Warner attempting to leave some mystery as to the fate of his protagonist.

Yet what Warner really is good at, turns out to be played down. The relationships and interactions between the husband and wife, and their child, are touching, full of feeling and honesty, transcribed as if straight from real-life. But the novel’s efforts to instead excoriate the minor components of a rotten corporate system, rather than explore the possible source of American society’s slide toward post-cultural obsessing, is a choice that eclipses the inherent humanity of this everyman journey.

Warner’s point seems to be that this fame thing happens to once-grounded individuals, but the impact of that message fizzles when the wayward nature of its plot must be elucidated. While doing little to explore the true cause of that delusional state of mind.

This is only Warner’s first novel-length fiction, and a misfiring run-out first time round is by no means disaster (look at HST’s The Rum Diary). There is space to develop, and potential to fulfil, demonstrated fully in this story’s ability to have you hooked, at times, be it not even necessarily the ‘style’ that does it.

And if there is a kind of moral here, in this more nibbling than biting satire, then at least efforts have been made to avoid it becoming a preachy one, which is admirable. (But now I’m the one being condescending.) Nevertheless I’ll still be trying out Warner’s follow-up. There are just enough tasty croutons here to warrant that.

How does one review a book like BibliOdyssey? This is not just a rhetorical question to open a book review, but also a genuine query. Because though BibliOdyssey feels like a book and looks like a (very handsome) book, is anything but.

It started its journey as bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/ a cabinet of curiosities of visual Materia Obscura, collected and curated from the depths of public internet archives, by PK from Sydney. When reborn in a book form, it retains most of the serendipity and adventure of its original form. The glorious randomness, the free association of thoughts, genres and timelines and above all the obsessive-compulsive joy of hopping from one breathtaking visual to the next. For all practical purposes, it’s hardbound internet with a gilded cover.

The kind of entity we all hoped internet would be when it grew up. A boundless sea of beauty, wisdom and surprises, where all you need to set sail is a blue boat of hyperlink.

The review tries to mirror that experience. Picking ten random pages from the book, I have paired them with ten random bookmarks from my personal collection. The only connection between them: those pages prompted me to look up these links, afresh. This is kind of coming full circle, as BibliOdyssey too, started its journey as a list of random bookmarks in PK’s computer.

May you bump into more and more wonder as you sail on the blue boat of hyperlink.

Bon Voyage!

[Please note: all images are hyperlinked to their sources. Happy clicking!]

Page 12: A Flying Ship and Alice’s Flight of Fancy

Flying Dutchman, © Sergey Tyukanov, 2000

Formally trained as a graphic artist in the far east of Russia, Sergey Tyukanov combines elements of myth, folklore and fantasy in his unique etchings and paintings.

Tyukanov is an artist fixated, among other things, on Alice in Wonderland. And who can blame him? Even Salvador Dalí could not resist the siren call of it. Here is an excellent hyperlink about a rare edition with original illustrations by Salvador Dalí.

Page 72: Victorian Music Sheet Covers and a Parisian Love Story

Matrimonial Galop, 1860s, and Tabby Polka, 1880, Spellman Collection, Reading University Library

Music sheet covers were big business in the 19th century. Changes in technology and social habits fuelled demand for illustrated sheet music, particularly among the Victorian middle class. Innovations in piano design meant that by the middle of the century, upright pianos became a focus of family entertainment in many homes, in a similar manner to the television set in the 20th century. At the same time, people were attending more choral society performances and public concerts, and informal pub sing-songs were giving way to dedicated singing saloons. There was a growth in purpose built venues – music halls – that greatly contributed to the appeal of certain songs and artists. People clamoured for the music sheets so they could hear the popular music of the day in their own homes. The development of the lithographic printing technique, in which images were drawn with greasy crayons onto lime stones, made reproducing vivid colour illustrations easier and cheaper. Subject matter for the covers ranged from the nationalistic and political to absurd and humorous. Satires and comical images were especially prevalent as a reflection of the often light hearted nature of the music hall songs.

This page made me think about the circular nature of things, i.e. music album covers being a modern day avatar of music sheet covers. It eventually brought me to book cover art. This hyperlink celebrates first edition book covers in the famed antiquarian books section of Shakespeare and Company, Paris, via a love story between a skeleton and a vampire victim. Directed by Spike Jonze, stunningly felt-animated by Olympia Le-Tan.

Page 86: Sleepwalking into a Orwellian Nightmare a.k.a. Robida’s Future

La Guerre au Vingtième Siècle, 1887, La Vingtième Siècle, 1883, Albert Robida, The Robida Association For The Future

French illustrator, Albert Robida, combined humour with an undercurrent of foreboding, in a trilogy of prescient futuristic books published in the last two decades of the 19th Century. He anticipated social advancements in the status of women, public transport and the quality of prisons; alongside improved mass killing machines, a polluted atmosphere and environmental destruction. His books were populated with imagined technologies and gadgetry – including installations of ‘television’ and ‘videoconferencing’ – but he seemed to suggest in his writing that there was no real progress ahead in the quality of life for the people. instead, there would be a continual need to adapt to a perpetual onslaught of unnecessary new devices. Robida’s ambiguous portrayal of a dystopian utopia suggests that he can be cast as either a luddite or a technophile, depending upon your point of view.

[The third book in the series was called La Vie Électrique (Electric Life) from 1892].

Robida’s predictions for a technological dystopia made my mind wander and latch onto this reader’s comment on a Guardian article about the future of books. While I am all for e-books, this comment makes my mind break into a cold sweat. May it never come true.

Page 94: Pre-History of Surrealism vs. the Future of High Art

Bizzarie di Varie Figure, Giovanni Battista Braccelli, 1624, Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Rare Book & Special Collections Division, Library Of Congress

Giovanni Battista Braccelli was an obscure Florentine artist who produced an enigmatic series of nearly fifty etchings for his 1624 suite, Bizzarie di Varie Figure. The paired acrobatic characters appear through the book to be fashioned out of random household and mechanical bric-a-brac such as plates, screws, rags, geometric shapes and even tennis rackets. Although associated with the tradition of mannerist grotesques, Braccelli’s playfully stylised figures were true originals. They are more closely connected to the cubist and surrealist movements of the 20th century than with any contemporary influences, except perhaps as parody. The capricious forms resist a single, or even necessarily, a simple interpretation. As human simulacra, they evoke a correspondence with puppetry, dance and pantomime scenes, and they have even been touted as precursors to man-as-a-machine cybernetic culture of more recent times. For whatever reasons after it was published, Bizzarie di Varie Figure drifted into a mysterious stream of esoterica known only to a select minority of artists and bibliophiles (Horace Walpole noted in his copy in the 1700s that the author had a ‘wild imagination’) and wasn’t rediscovered and republished for a wider audience until the mid-20th century. Consequently, there are less than ten original copies known to exist and only two of them are complete.

Is there a genome embedded into each piece of art that helps the eye map a connection between two pieces of art even if they are generations apart and look nothing like each other? If Braccelli can be related Picasso and Dalí, there are definitely more genome strands to be unfurled. art.sy is doing exactly that. It might change the business of art forever.

Page 109: When Maps are Not Just Maps

Geographical Fun, William Harvey (Aleph), 1869, The Map House Of London

The story goes that the brother of a certain fourteen-year-old girl was sick in bed and needed cheering up. The enterprising girl found an image of Punch (from Punch & Judy) riding a dolphin which she transformed into a comical map of England. This became the inspiration for her series of a dozen maps of European countries made out of stereotype caricatures and published in 1869, along with a short descriptive verse for each picture by the author, Aleph. In the introduction, Aleph tells of his hope that the amusing drawings will encourage young people to be interested in geography. Whether or not a fourteen-year-old girl was capable of developing all the sophisticated political and caricatural nuances portrayed is perhaps a moot point. Aleph was later revealed as the pseudonym of the journalist, William Harvey. Russia is formed by Tsar Alexander II standing back-to-back with a brown bear; Scotland is formed by the kilt-clad piper ‘struggling through the bogs’; and mainland Italy is represented by the revolutionary patriot, Giuseppe garibaldi, waving the flag and wearing the Cap of Liberty, while standing tall over the diminutive opponent of Italian unification, Pope Pius IX, as Sardinia.

Compared to the maps above these maps are science fiction. They track the tourist traffic in the whole world via geotagging the holiday photos on the net and colour codes it to help you travel off the beaten path. But both do the same thing actually , that is add a lot of fun into the drab life of maps.

Page 110: Elephants of Alphabets, Horses of Nudes

Kufic Script Animals, anonymous, 19th century, Professor Frances Pritchett, Columbia University

Arabic scripts have an intrinsic flexibility making them perfect vectors for a diverse range of calligraphic expression. Their curvilinear nature and and malleability inspired radical experimentation throughout history, but it wasn’t until about the 15th century, when the restrictions on religious iconography were loosened, the artists in Iran began to conjure shapes such as birds and animals from the script. The figural or zoomorphic calligraphy has traditionally incorporated text from the Koran. In the process of artistic abstraction of the letters into visual word forms, new layers of nuanced meaning may develop, where knowledge of the language is undoubtedly required for a complete understanding. The lion, bird and elephant images here are thought to be from a Kufic script from the 19th century.

Muslim script animals apparently are neighbours of Hindu animals made up of nudes (point 2, nari ashva). Why else would they share adjacent alcoves in my mind? Though they have completely different spiritual interpretations, we should love all the animals equally, irrespective of their religion.

Page 120: Napoleon, the king of cliches

Blicke in die Vergangenheit und Zukunft (Views of the Past and Future) and Das ist mein lieber Sohn, an dem ich Wohlgefallen habe (Thou Art My Beloved Son, In Whom I Am Well Pleased), anonymous, 1814, Division Of Rare And Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library

At the beginning of the 19th century, a unique array of political and artistic circumstances conspired to produce one of history’s great targets for the caricaturist’s pen in the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte. Although subversive cartoons were hardly a new phenomenon, the military campaigns threatening Europe and the Middle East, combined with the megalomaniac and self-promotional tendencies of the great man himself and the widespread belief that an invasion of England was imminent, fuelled an industry of satirical illustrators led by James Gilray. English anti-Napoleonic caricatures in prints, newspapers and handbills were very efficient in arousing national patriotism, and the thematic and stylistic elements significantly influences the popular illustrative response in Europe. The rare German prints seen here date from the year prior to Napoleon’s eventual defeat at Waterloo. They are fairly vicious in their symbolism, casting Napoleon as the devil’s spawn and suggesting a legacy built on the deaths of his victims.

From Napoleon caricature to a Napoleon painting is not a big leap. But it brought back all the memories when I was standing in front of this painting in the Louvre and the excellent guide was doing a vivid art historical sketch about how the king was a royal arsehole and the painter was no better, despite being magnificent at their respective jobs.

Page 122: Reading with Taccola and Eating with Vinci

De Ingeneis, Mariano Taccola, 1449, Kinematic Models For Design Digital Library, Cornell University

Mariano Taccola was known as the Archimedes of Siena and produced some of the earliest examples of the new illustrated style of engineering and machine manuals, that came into vogue during the Renaissance. Taccola’s training as a sculptor honed his drafting skills, and the social realities of Siena – lacking a stable water supply and being in a semi-permanent state of war – provided the technological subject matter for his imagination. The sketch book images here are details from De Ingeneis (The Engines), and Taccola was not averse to including whimsical drawings alongside the more serious creations. He has been variously credited with inventing pumps, bridge building and transmission systems, underwater breathing devices, water and windmill axle mechanisms and less likely, the trebuchet and catapult. Despite any difficulties we have now in attempting to identify specific inventions by Taccola, his manuals are important for their documentation of the innovative excellence of the Sienese engineers of the time period. Leonardo da Vici was known to have viewed some of Taccola’s manuscript work prior to sketching his own series of machine technology masterpieces.

A foiled plan to visit Vinci, Leonardo’s village of birth, while I was in Tuscany is what is behind this bookmark. If you are ever there, don’t forget to dine well. I will be sighing over here.

Page 143: The Cat Out of the Bag and into the Rain Cloud

The Comic History of Rome, John Leech, 1852, Poaner Memorial Collection, Carnegie Mellon University Library Special Collections

Many ancient history students will be familiar with the parade of visual gags displayed in the 1852 classic, The Comic History of Rome. This was the second collaboration by two members of staff at the humorous Punch magazine: Gilbert a Beckett and John Leech. Their first outing had similarly combined fact and satire in retelling the history of England. Beckett openly pitched the texts at people ‘willing to acquire information [and] in doing so as much amusement as possible’. Leech was very much a contemporary of George Cruikshank, and another inheritor of the caricaturist mantle from the school of Hogarth, Rowlandson and Gilray. His illustrative output for magazines and books (including Dickens) tended to be a little less severe and sarcastic than the work of his predecessors. The image here of Fulvia, the Roman political operative and third wife of mark Antony, is one of a large number of amusing intertextual details dotted throughout the book.

It’s one thing making up fake histories behind proverbs and it’s quite another to actually believe in them. Snopes shreds these urban hoaxes to pieces.

Page 156: Of Ghost Tracks and Bird Clouds

Thought-Forms: Mendelssohn and Gunod, Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, 1901, The Culture Archive

Annie Besant was a prominent advocate in Britain for social reform and the advancement of women. Her intellectual development took her from Anglicanism to workers rights and strike organisation, through Fabianism and socialist politics, to birth control promotion, secularism, theosophy and home rule campaigning in India. She was a friend to the likes of Shaw, Krishnamurti and Gandhi and became both president of the Theosophy Society and the Indian National Congress Party.

Her theosophical beliefs were influenced by a meeting with Madame Blavatsky and the present work – Thought-Forms – was an attempt to depict ‘the forms clothed in living lights of other worlds’ and “changes of colours in the cloud-like ovoid, or aura, that encompasses all living beings”.

The thought-forms reminded me of many paintings of Wassily Kandinsky and Joan Miró but this one by Lyonel Feininger is, dare I say, spiritually the closest? They would have liked each others company too, I guess. Or not.

Life Magazine called Judy Collins the “gentle voice amid the strife” when it put her on its cover in 1969. The next year, her sublime voice brought the 18th-century hymn ‘Amazing Grace’ to the top of the pop charts.

I first remember hearing Judy’s voice in 2004, when Bill Moyers did a piece on her for his show Now with Bill Moyers. Bill had become friends with her after she participated in a documentary he did for PBS about the hymn. She sang it in St. Paul’s chapel at Columbia University, where she had recorded the chart-topping rendition.

Many people miss the darker meaning of the words of ‘Amazing Grace’, and its suggestions of complete hopelessness and ultimate salvation. Judy Collins has had an extraordinary life, with many tragic turns – the many tragedies she’s had amid her gentle voice. And she’s detailed them, along with many of the better times, in her new memoir, Sweet Judy Blue Eyes.

The title is a play on the song her then-boyfriend Stephen Stills wrote about her. They dated in the thick of the strife, in 1968-69. It’s there where the book begins, and while the book covers Judy’s entire life, most of it goes from roughly 1955, when she discovered folk music, to 1978, when she got sober.

Up until 1955, she was a pianist (there’s a picture of her playing a duet with George Shearing), but drifted towards folk music largely thanks to T.D. Lingo. Lingo was a radio host in Denver who was friends with Judy’s father (who was also a radio host). He had a mountaintop ranch where he and a group of friends would gather and play folk music. Judy would meet her first husband, Peter Taylor, at his ranch.

Judy began her folk music career in Denver’s folk clubs in the late 1950s. She was the star of the Exodus club in Denver, the main folk music hangout when she was signed to Elektra records and brought to Greenwich Village. One night at Gerde’s Folk City, where she was a regular, a young man came up to her and told her he liked her set. She described him as having hair that was “unkempt, but soft like a child,” and his face as “full of contradiction, a combination of innocence and arrogance.” The man’s name was Bob Dylan. She introduced herself and he gave her a look like they had met before. She didn’t know it, but while playing at the Exodus, Bob had sat in on her playing.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGGSo530bdA

Judy has similar poetic descriptions of others she’s met along the way, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, Suze Rotolo, Odetta, Leonard Cohen, Pete Ochs and many others. She tells the story of her appearance as a defence witness in the ‘Chicago Seven’ trial. She began singing ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’ and one of the guards put his hand over her mouth, while the judge told her he didn’t allow singing in the courtroom.

Judy has written before about her struggles with alcoholism. It got worse through the 70s before she hit bottom in 1978 and went to rehab. She had tried other forms of treatment earlier – naming the psychiatrists who didn’t help her. Judy says that she was drinking almost nonstop by 1977 and it was affecting her voice. She had surgery on her vocal chords a few days after her guest appearance on The Muppet Show and she notes that her alcoholism almost kept her from performing with Snuffleuppagus – she’s appeared on Sesame Street a few times over the years, most notably with Snuffy performing the alphabet.

Collins also has more words about her son Clark, who also came down with alcoholism. Clark went to the Hazelden clinic in Minnesota for treatment, recovered and relocated to St. Paul. But in 1992 he relapsed and committed suicide. Her last book, Sanity and Grace is about her grief and recovery from that, along with her memories of Clark.

The cover photo is similar to the cover of her 1975 album Judith. Judy looks off in the distance with the bright blue eyes that Stephen Stills had written about. Judith came out as she was nearing the bottom, and she has a slight frown.

On the book, she has a wistful smile.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzF_MoXOU1E

If Camus had been at all interested in the crime or noir genre, then you could imagine he might produce something vaguely comparable to James Sallis’ novel Drive. Trotting in at a similar duration to Camus’ classic The Fall, Sallis also plays with the unfolding napkin of time in this narrative, in what he might be hinting is the only time-signature we’ve come to understand, that of film – intercuts and reversals, flashbacks and action sequences. Cinematic, in a word, which seems understandable that it was made into “a major motion picture”, as my copy reminds (yes, I’m five years too late). But that word ‘cinematic’ wouldn’t really give enough of what is due when considering Sallis’ steady metronomic delivery. He is far less erratic than a camera-toting Hollywood director, or his subsequent intercut-loving editor.

The story follows a character known only as Driver. Driver works in the movies. He also works on the occasional heist or robbery, for all of which, it is made clear, he wants only to do that one thing that he is known for. We learn that following some severe familial disturbances, young Driver’s mother has been institutionalised. Then as a teenager, he goes out on his own, leaving his foster parents’ home, taking their car, moving to Los Angeles to find work. The plot opens in medias res, blood running on a bathroom floor, before weaving back and forth through the young man’s troublesome upbringing in Phoenix, then onto his successes amongst the movie crews, and his neighbourly relationship with a Latina and her four year old son, at a point in his life when he does the closest thing to ‘settle’ that he can manage.

In the movies, the stuntman is a stand-in for the actor and the actor is a stand-in for the person. Who the person is a stand-in for seems to be a question unanswerable but posed in Sallis’ Drive (the tenth of his thirteen books), the narrative can be read straight or taken as a mini-handbook for modern alienation. This double-removal from filmed reality, a removal in itself, is the ghostlike angle that Sallis works from when he assembles the body parts of his character, Driver. A kind of fleshy ghost haunting the LA landscape, he can only been seen by a few people. That word that has been attached to his work, “existential”, chimes on every page, possibly for good reason. There seems a kind of two-lane flow of traffic where the prose can be read either quickly as an entertainment or, if it is to be taken more seriously, as a darkly philosophical tract. Then the action takes on a meditative slant, the story of a man chased by time. We’re given a neo-Western gunslinger, just one that never uses a gun. Instead he’s reworked into a driver, a slick operative of that other of man’s modern machines.

Driver does not think, only acts. Always taciturn, he is attempting to reach the state of ‘grace’ where thought or meditation is transcended. In between he drinks, makes deals with presumptuous men, pays them back.

There is that feeling that Driver’s story is fabricating unplanned as it hums along. Intentional or not, this method does give the text a kind of wandering, unpredictable quality that is both intriguing and admirable. The form functions well with his theme; Sallis has a style akin to that of a Cormac McCarthy, or a printed-word Coen Brothers production; the familiar voice of a wizened cowboy sipping bourbon in the darkest recess of a grotty, empty saloon, whispering old-timer wisdom about the nature of existence, the slew of time. But Sallis writes as if in slow bursts of energy, with a feel for narrative and rhythm that stays fresh by returns, intervals and intersections.

And setting much of this in Hollywood, a place Sallis seems to agree is as vacant and empty, even nihilistic, as its fame-hunting inhabitants, a city of life-substitutes, full of avaricious death-ready hollow men, is no mistake. His hero too is suited to the wide-open highways of Los Angeles, the reliability of the streetlights leading irreversibly to an eventide of gunshots, throat-slices and getaways. The sheen that Sallis gives to his world’s reality wraps like aluminium foil over his prose. There seems to be an idea in his head that has formulated into the novel. What the message is, is hidden, but a story emerges.

Driver marvelled at the power of our collective dreams. Everything gone to hell, the two of them become running dogs, and what do they do? They sit there watching a movie.”

His Driver is involved and not involved in life, there and not there. And the sudden violence of Driver’s actions when they happen, often shocking in retrospect, read as if they are not happening at all, or happening too quickly to mean anything in the ‘grand scheme of things’. A blip. Everything is written in unceremonious and unrelenting measures, where one note is equally as important as another. Driver, like Sallis’ other creation, Lew Griffin, creates himself from nothing. He is meticulous and careful. Assembling his life as if assembling a gun. And when the violence is done with, the lessons follow:

Maybe he should turn around. Go back and tell them that’s what life was, a long series of things that didn’t go down the way you thought they would.

Hell with it. Either they’d figure it out or they wouldn’t. Most people never did.”

One short chapter after another, Sallis delivers the occasional asides on the Hollywood system, its producers, writers, and stars, with a cast of recidivist poor people that are the only real ones worth saving. No, it’s not revolutionary, but it is entertaining:

TV’d been turned on but blessedly you couldn’t hear it. Some brainless comedy where actors with perfect white teeth spoke their lines then froze in place to let the laugh track unwind.”

Drive reads as if it was a bit of fast fun in between other projects. Which makes it all the more impressive. This is genre-fiction elevated somewhat by a writer who is clearly familiar with the genre that he is subverting. Sallis doesn’t believe in the long manipulation to wrench out a little emotion from his characters. He achieves it quite smoothly without really showing you how. He dashes off a backstory of a character, and his future, in a single breath. Sallis doesn’t try to con you into believing there is more depth than there is. He lets you decide. And he’ll let you decide again when the sequel, Driven, arrives in 2012.

“I was born inside the movie of my life.” That sentence starts off Roger Ebert’s new memoir, Life Itself. The first chapter, ‘Memory’ – which is numbered zero in the table of contents – shows the great arc of his life from the beginning to now. It touches on the essential moments, the essential people, and demonstrates why writing a memoir now at the age of 69 is just the right time. The life Ebert ends up describing, most of it spent as the film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, is an extraordinary one, and what makes the memoir so much fun is that it seems like Ebert is just as astounded by it as any chronicler of it would be.

Ebert was an alcoholic when he won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, the first film critic to win it. He has lived the last five years with just as much vigor and worked with the same enormous industry as before, despite being unable to speak, eat or drink and thanks to corrective surgery, it is painful for him to stand and hard to walk. And after starting his blog, his voice has been even more powerful. Any of these things could easily make a somber, melancholic memoir just by themselves, but Ebert tells his life story – all those things and more – with no cynicism or anger.

Chicago magazine had a long piece on Ebert several years ago that pointed out that he had lived an extraordinary life without making enemies. One of the most moving chapters in the book is about his rival, who eventually became his great friend, Gene Siskel. Siskel was the film critic at the Chicago Tribune, and was given the job to rival Ebert. They were fiercely competitive with each other and when WTTW wanted them to host a show about the movies, neither of them wanted to do it. The show made them famous, in part because in almost every respect they were the opposite of the other. When Siskel died in 1999, Ebert dedicated a show to him, sitting in his usual spot, while Siskel’s seat stayed empty. In a recent profile by CBS Sunday Morning, Ebert said that he “misses [Siskel] terribly every day.”

Much of the book is pulled from the most personal writing that’s appeared on Ebert’s blog, with some editing. There’s a chapter on the Eyrie Mansion, where he stayed while in London that first appeared in 2010 when it was torn down. His chapter on Russ Meyer includes the tale of Who Killed Bambi, the never-made film that would’ve starred the Sex Pistols. He had posted his original script and retold the story when Malcolm McLaren passed away. His stories about O’Rourke’s, where he would go every night after work when he drank, read poetry, sang songs and interviewed movie stars also first appeared on his blog. Some of the people he interviewed there like John Wayne and Robert Mitchum get their own chapters.

This isn’t a criticism. After all, the best stories are told many times.

Before the surgeries that took his voice, Ebert produced a stunning amount of work: six movie reviews a week for the Sun-Times, a weekly TV show, a Great Movies column and an Answer Man column, to say nothing of the features, interviews and opinion pieces he would do for the Sun-Times and various other places. He still does all of them, albeit he produces the show instead of co-hosts. I’m convinced he’s possessed by the same demon that Studs Terkel said possessed Mike Royko that made him write so much. Those two great Chicagoans get tributes and memories in the book.

The most moving stories he tells are the ones Ebert leaves until last. His memories of Gene Siskel at the end and his tribute to Studs Terkel. He also has a loving tribute to his wife, Chaz, who has saved him from living out the rest of his life alone. He closes with a chapter on his beliefs about religion and another about death. His religion is what Richard Dawkins would call “Einsteinian,” in that the experience of the universe, from the grandness of it to the smallest of intricacies gives him the ecstasy others find in a personal God. And death – which he’s already stared in the face – is nothing to fear.

Publishing details for Roger Ebert’s Life Itself at Grand Central Publishing

Norman Mailer hated television. He distrusted email. He even hated plastic. Marshall McLuhan was probably right, to some extent, to suggest that Mailer had a Victorian attitude towards technology. Other critics, past and present, will probably find sympathy with Mailer’s assertion that man’s relationship with technology is some kind of Faustian pact. You can watch them arguing about it all – two minds running on autopilot, having two different conversations – online after reading this article, on a web-based magazine, of a book I read as a PDF. Chances are, Mailer would hate all of this too, and we can probably guess his reaction to his books being available on Kindle. But chance, guesses and that repeated ‘probably’ are the key to the (e-)book under review; as Future Media is a collection of sci-fi fiction and non-fiction all concerned with the effects of media on its users and its ultimate potentialities – and is, thus, a collection more in the school of future, rather than media, studies.

There are several problems with this; predicting the future might be ‘fun’ but those predictions are very often wrong. Think of Herman Kahn and nuclear disasters or think, more pertinently, of McLuhan’s theory that technology would ultimately cause man to – somehow – revert back into a form of tribalism. As a lay reader of media studies, it’s hard to see how this relates to his other famous theory of the ‘Global Village’. Future Media is book-ended, appropriately enough given his lasting influence on media studies, by McLuhan’s work, but this is not enough to give a clear picture of what McLuhan was actually getting at. Often misunderstood even when read at length, in such small doses as this his work simply leaves you wondering whether either you’re to dumb to grasp the ideas or if he was a mere peddler of jargon.

This raises a question about Future Media itself: who is the book for? There’s no general audience for a collection of, on the one hand, science fiction – Huxley and Bradbury are here – and, on the other, non-fiction about media. However, if it’s for media studies students, and I have no idea how those departments are run, are they permitted to quote sci-fi stories in essays?

A collection like Future Media is the book equivalent of a search engine: chapters culled from their original body to prove/illustrate a point instead of immersing yourself in the original work – much like looking for information online. Information overload and the disposability of this information are just two consequences of the pact with technology – as Norman Mailer (again) said, “if you want to learn something, get thee to a book”. Yet the benefits of technology are so apparent that need not be mentioned here. Mailer’s point, however, is discussed in Future Media by Nicolas Carr in ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ This is one of the standout (non-fiction) pieces and describes the “chipping away [of] my capacity for concentration and contemplation” – something which most people will surely be able to relate to. Who isn’t a wizard when it comes to collecting snippets of information on anything from here and there and piecing them all together to suit our purpose, rather than spending valuable time reading a book? Carr informs us that this is known as “power browsing” and is fast becoming the dominant way in which users access information. He also highlights that due to this rapid information gathering – which includes text messages, emails, etc. – we are all probably reading more than ever before in history.

This is, of course, a different type of reading. The Kindle was mentioned earlier and indeed it, and any other ‘reading device’, is a more superficial form of reading. It may be convenient to have hundreds of books on one device but once you’ve got your free complete Shakespeare downloaded next to your other holiday-reads, will you ever look at them? Harold Bloom, the great literary critic, called digital books the “death of education” and in an age when reading is more and more superseded by television, video games and the internet, digitalisation will make books even more disposable – just as the MP3 killed the album.

Future Media has a lot of interesting work in it but probably – dare I say? – nothing you couldn’t find with a search engine, if you were interested. The ultimate trouble with futurology, besides the low success-rate, is that most of the things predicted are never as wondrous, elegant, or, even, horrific as the ultimate product. Consider the future idylls conjured up by the sixties; jet packs, flying cars, homicidal robots, computers bigger than the underwater houses they serve? You can keep them. I’ll stick with my iPhone.

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Marshall McLuhan and Norman Mailer take on the future

Not every book looks and feels like an artefact when you pick it up. Oftentimes it is just words printed across cheap paper, the literal form of it separated from its content, cased in a merely functional cover with some gluey binding. But with Five Wounds, an “illuminated novel”, the very object itself is part of its mythology and there is a sense of something big, something heavy within it, if you have the time.

It is not very often that a review of a book demands also a review of its physical presence. Crossing genre and classifications, both narratively and visually, and switching tone between allegory and playfulness, the book is clearly a labour of love for its writer, Jonathan Walker, and its illustrator, Dan Hallett, in what is the pair’s second collaboration. It is undeniably a sublime thing to behold. The first time you pick it up and turn it over in your hands is, as Walker and Hallett have intended, like reading the first lines of its mystic story. An impressive hardback almost biblical in feel, its appearance matches, too, its biblical layout of chapters and verses.

The story follows the escapades of five fairytale characters inhabiting a composite Venice made of historical and modern snatches of the city, strikingly illustrated by Hallett based on, among other things, Goya’s etchings. The designs are impressive and densely detailed throughout, with a glossy series of 18 plates in the centre pages occasionally referred to in the text. We are first introduced to Cur, a beast-like man and leader of a pack of dogs, being photographed by Magpie, a thief and daguerrotypist. An interweaving, lattice of a story emerges which involves a devious ‘saviour’, Crow; the hero origins of Cuckoo, a gambling man with a face of wax; as well as a de-winged angel, stolen identities, kidnapping, murder, and some questionable cuisine.

Five Wounds makes the admirable move of not taking itself too seriously, which certainly works in its favour. There is a vein of quaint humour that runs throughout; revisions and asides are scribbled upon the page as if the work was still incomplete; arrows point at things and comment upon them matter-of-factly (“Not a whale”); surreal events transpire through droll, imaginative wording; and it is all set off by a dedication that reads: “To whom it may concern”.

But intermittently there seems inhibited intrigue to a story built as if by Calvino dealing tarot cards at random, that stakes everything on its desire to be deciphered. By so blatantly attempting to lure the reader into interpretation, the result is a story that has a hint of hollowness if insufficient effort is dedicated in reading to create an interpretation. Too often we become aware of Walker’s knowing lack of intention. Events go from one to the other in a sometimes repetitive, staccato rhythm reminiscent of faux parables and, though it reads like a writer having fun, it occasionally ends up giving the story an odd dashed-off feel that is incongruous with the meticulous nature of the book as an artefact. The book is now leering at me accusingly, for being too lazy.

Of course, all of this could work in the book’s favour, to add to its ‘world-building’ design. We know that the story has the purpose of creating multiple meanings, and its style possibly works as a part of that. But as a storytelling experience, something seems missing. This illusiveness makes the story of Five Wounds somehow less exciting to read, somehow less absorbing, as we are too aware of the writer’s and the reader’s roles though perhaps this method, in theory, functions as a comment on the book that it imitates and, conceivably, parodies; the Bible.

But this comes in waves. For the majority of its telling, particularly warming into the second part, the writing alternates between robust allegory and surreal, comical fantasy, with the highlight being Cuckoo’s journey to claim himself a face. His tale is something ghostly, like the daguerrotypes of the long ago buried, with Walker’s words taking on some of the lore the book is torn from, as he deals in his grainy haunted images.

If you have the time to commit to this book, there is surely reward for what you put in. And you know a writer is doing something right when you seek out his previous work, hints of which are revealed in this novel, where the historical accounts are genuinely fascinating and always communicated with gusto. The punk history biography, Pistols! Treason! Murder! also illustrated by Dan Hallett, about the 17th-century Venetian spy, Gerolamo Vano, was the first part of their developing partnership. It is waiting patiently on the shelf.

Further Resources:

• The design of Five Wounds at Spike Magazine
• Jonathan Walker’s incredible Five Wounds website
• Jonathan Walker’s blog (including a free sample chapter of the book) and further fascinating insights

Frank Zappa once said “most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.” However true that might be, Paul Nelson was one who most definitely could write. And he interviewed people who could talk, and plenty of people read what he wrote.

Kevin Avery certainly read what Nelson wrote, and has now written Everything Is An Afterthought (Fantagraphics, who usually publish comics), which is both a biography of Nelson and a collection of his work, including some pieces that have never been published. The book is covered in praise for Nelson, both on the jacket and throughout the book, from other people who read his work and were inspired by it. They’re from the people he wrote about, his friends, colleagues, fans or some combination of the three: Jon Landau, Robert Christgau, Jackson Browne, Greil Marcus, Rod Stewart, Cameron Crowe and Bruce Springsteen are just a few of the people quoted.

Nelson was born and raised in Warren, Minnesota, a town in the northwestern corner of the state with a population of around 2,500. He went to the University of Minnesota where he started The Little Sandy Review with Jon Pankake. It covered folk music, which Jon loved. They reviewed new releases from national folk labels like Folkways and Prestige along with local artists like Tony Glover (who later joined the ‘zine as a contributor), Spider John Koerner, Dave Ray and Bobby Zimmerman.

Nelson’s work caught the eye of Irwin Silber, the editor of the magazine Sing Out! Nelson moved out to New York when he graduated in 1962. He covered the folk scene in Greenwich Village, populated by the same folks he wrote about in Minneapolis, including Zimmerman, who by now was going by the name Bob Dylan. He wrote for Sing Out! until 1965, when he parted ways with them over Dylan going electric at Newport. He was one of Dylan’s few defenders from within the folk community.

Nelson moved to Mercury Records where he worked as an A&R man. His most famous act there was to sign the New York Dolls for their first recording contract. He also released the album 1969: The Velvet Underground, the band’s last album.

He then moved on to Rolling Stone, where he took over the mantle of the reviews editor from Jon Landau. He stayed at the magazine until 1982. For the next 24 years until his death in 2006 he ran a video store, worked on projects and his name hardly appeared in print. One of the few exceptions was a 2000 interview he gave to Steven Ward which starts with the same question that the press release for Avery’s book starts with: ‘What ever happened to Paul Nelson?’

Avery fills in these missing years, describing what Nelson had been up to, much of it pieced together by works collected from Nelson’s apartment after he died. Among the things he worked on were long articles about Clint Eastwood and a biography of Neil Young called Rust Never Sleeps, which he never finished. He co-wrote a book about his good friend Rod Stewart with another good friend, Lester Bangs. He also labored over a screenplay, something he had wanted to do ever since he started his writing career.

In these, Nelson shows himself as a first-rate writer, who didn’t stand at a distance when critiquing artists. All too often he was – or would become – friends with the people he reviewed. They provide intimate portraits of the artists and Nelson shows an immense respect for his subjects. He held an intervention for Warren Zevon, who was suffering from alcoholism, and described the experience in his famous 1981 Rolling Stone Piece ‘How He Saved Himself from a Coward’s Death.’

Like the best critics, Nelson was primarily a fan of what he wrote about, subjects that struck a chord with him. And here’s a bio and a collection of his work written by a fan of his.

Note: Avery has another book of Nelson’s collected writings that came out around the same time as this one, Conversations with Clint, (published by Continuum) which collects a series of interviews he did in the late 70s early 80s with Clint Eastwood.

Long relegated to history’s vast nether regions of obscurity, the twentieth president of the United States, James A. Garfield is best known for two things: he was the last of the American presidents to be born in a log cabin (in Ohio in 1831), and he was the second American president to be killed by an assassin’s bullet while in office (the first being Abraham Lincoln, sixteen years earlier in 1865).

Candice Millard does her best to lift this once highly regarded, entirely self-made paragon of late-19th-century American politics out of anonymity in her new book Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President. Millard traces Garfield’s rise as a poor yet precocious child whose father died before his second birthday to his reluctant ascension to Republican presidential nominee and victor of the election of 1880.

“I have never had the Presidential fever; not even for a day,” Garfield said at the time, but in a day when the Republican Party was rife with conflict between the old guard “stalwarts” who believed in the patronage system of rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies, and reform-minded “half-breeds” who favored a government and civil service based on merit, Garfield did not back down from what he saw as his noble duty for his nation.

Solidly behind the “half-breeds” Garfield appointed his former rival and fellow reformer James Blain as his Secretary of State (after he made Blain promise him that he would never again run for president, a promise that Blain, ultimately, broke) and aimed to take Washington by storm and shake up the stagnant and corrupt political system that had washed over the government of late-nineteenth-century America.

While much of the United States was behind Garfield’s reformist agenda, fate unfortunately was not. Less than four months after he assumed the presidency Garfield was shot, at close range, by the fantastically deranged eccentric Charles Guiteau in a Washington, DC train station. Less than three months later Garfield was dead.

Millard, who expertly sets the stage leading up to Garfield’s assassination on July 2, 1881 by introducing her readers to a cast of vivid characters – from the famed and dogged inventor Alexander Graham Bell, to the flamboyant stalwart Republican senator Roscoe Conklin and his toady Chester Arthur (who also happened to be Garfield’s Vice President thanks to a compromise that the stalwarts and half-breeds entered into at the Republican convention), to Lucretia Garfield, the president’s shy yet keenly intelligent wife who Garfield had grown to adore over the years. Yet none of Millard’s characters are as remarkable as Charles Guiteau.

Truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction and Millard seems to relish her opportunity to write about a subject who, if created for a novel, would seem completely unbelievable. After an odd childhood Guiteau attempted to gain admission to the University of Michigan but when he couldn’t pass the entrance exam he instead joined the Oneida utopian society in upstate New York, famed mostly for its acceptance of free love and the fact that its members included two presidential assassins (the other being Leon Czolgosz who killed President William McKinley in Buffalo, New York in 1901).

Despite its free love mentality, the women of Oneida did not warm to Guiteau (in fact, as Millard notes, they took to calling him Charles “Gitout”) and after five years in utopia he left and later filed a lawsuit against Oneida leader John Noyes. After floating around New York and Chicago, Guiteau, who was an expert at sneaking out of hotels without paying his bill and “borrowing” money from distant relatives who he never intended to repay, somehow obtained a law license and began practicing, first in Chicago and later in New York. Never very successful, he regularly enraged his clients by making nonsensical arguments in court that had little to do with their cases.

After abandoning the law, Guiteau dabbled in theology briefly before finding his true calling around the stalwart Republican fringes. This is where Guiteau is at his most fascinating and where Millard shines at capturing his chilling persona. It was during the 1880 presidential campaign that Guiteau convinced himself (and likely nobody else) that he had helped to elect Garfield president by delivering an uninspiring (and little-heard) pro-Garfield speech one time in New York City. It was also during the campaign that Guiteau struck up a one-sided “friendship” with the vice presidential nominee Chester Arthur and other members of the Republican Party, writing largely unanswered letters to them – including Garfield – that took a familiar tone as if he had been friends with them for years.

Once Garfield was elected, Guiteau was convinced that he would be given the ambassadorship to Vienna as his prize for electing the president (later deciding that he preferred Paris instead). Despite the fact that Guiteau never did anything to legitimately help elect Garfield, and that neither the president nor any member of his inner circle had a clue who Guiteau was, he continued to write chummy letters to Garfield and members of his administration. He even joined the throng of office seekers who flooded the White House (a common practice in the19th-century political landscape) after Garfield took office to make sure that the president was aware of his request.

One day, while visiting the State Department to inquire about when he could finally take up his new post in Paris, Guiteau crossed paths with the new Secretary of State himself. Blain, in no uncertain terms, told Guiteau to get lost and abruptly walked away. Crestfallen yet undeterred, Guiteau decided that he had to warn the new president about his Secretary of State who clearly wasn’t aware of how important Guiteau had been to Garfield. But when his warnings went unanswered, Guiteau concluded that the problem ultimately rested with Garfield himself and, with the full backing of God – whom, by this point, Guiteau believed wanted him to kill Garfield – his task was set.

The assassination itself was a relatively simple task in the days before presidents had a protection detail and walked around openly in public places. Guiteau shot the president in the middle of a crowded train station minutes before Garfield was scheduled to board a train to the seacoast of New Jersey and he was apprehended moments later by police.

But what Guiteau thought was his crowning achievement – indeed the very work of God – was actually just the beginning of the end for Garfield and an American public shocked at the news of their mortally wounded leader. Millard then enters the next phase of this tragedy, describing in vivid detail how Garfield, ever cheerful even while enduring extreme pain and facing death, had his recovery thwarted by the antiquated medical practices of a particularly arrogant physician.

While the assassination of James Garfield has largely been lost to the passage of time, Candice Millard’s page-turning new book has brought it back to life in a remarkable way. Adeptly weaving together the stories of fascinating characters to create movie-like scenery, Millard reintroduces us to this truly American tragedy.

Greg Houle is a freelance writer who lives in New York City. Find out more at www.greghoule.com

Opening with the familiar visions of snow from the likes of Wait Until Spring, Bandini and Dago Red (‘Bricklayer in the Snow’), Dan Fante kicks off, like Svevo and Arturo of his father’s novels, buried in an image of purest white. But this is a damned and dark tale, swirling in sweat and alcohol, of depression and addiction, with some genuine pain and angst behind it.

And instead of the cold winters of John Fante’s Colorado, we open with Dan’s grandfather, Nicola, struggling to make a living in the Abruzzi mountains where the only way to make it is with one’s hands, mostly laying brick. Nicola’s father escapes to America, where eventually he’s tracked down by his son, discovered in the back of a bar drunk and broke. “Gimme a buck, kid. I need a drink.” These are the first words he hears out of his father’s lips in ten years. So begins a cycle of misery fuelled by alcohol that Nicola Fante visits on his son John, and that John pays forward to his son, Dan, earning the book the subtitle: ‘A Family’s Legacy of Writing, Drinking and Surviving’.

Dan recounts in his own uncomplicated, straight-talking (occasionally repetitive) language his father John’s rise to literary fame, his encounters and friendships with the literati of his time, exchanging correspondence with H.L. Mencken and William Saroyan, before being dragged down by a lust for the good life becoming a hack screenwriter in Hollywood. This is the source of John Fante’s bitterness, his disgust with himself for ‘selling out’, putting this dedication on his short story collection Dago Red:

From that Hollywood whore, that stinking sell-out artist, that sublime literary pervert, that thwarted lyricist – that stinking scene artist, that Paramount cunt-lapper who gets paid for the sweet scented vomit whispered by Dorothy Lamour – Dedicated with the hope that someday soon he can write some less bitter inscription on the flyleaf of a really great book.

Meanwhile, Dan was growing up. And the opening of this autobiography, which reads a lot livelier, perhaps refreshed with some choice tweaking of events, tells of his dyslexia, his troubles with his older academically gifted brother, Nick, and his first experience with alcohol at the age of four:

Many years later, when I got sober, I would remember the event vividly and mark it as a major transition in my life. Alcohol had become a life-changing elixir.

Finding it difficult under the same roof as his father, Dan begins moving around a lot, leaving LA and getting involved in the New York political scene in the 1960s while paying the rent by driving a cab, before eventually squandering a playwriting deal on the radio that could have seen him become a big name, like his father, a lot earlier on. Depression, insomnia and several suicide attempts follow:

Because sleep was impossible, I began walking again at night to exhaust myself. Forty or fifty blocks. The East River to the Hudson River and back again. Sometimes I would stop to get a blow job from whatever Times Square guy was handy, then return to my hotel and drink myself to the point where I could pass out.

A darkness had come to my life, a despair that only those who have known the unendingness and bottomlessness of their own psyche can understand. No matter what I did or what female hostage I took in a relationship, I knew that sooner or later I would die from suicide. And, as it turned out, I would continue to drink for at least another fifteen years.

It’s anecdotes like these, admittedly even with the disclaimer (“bearing in mind that I suffered from active alcoholism for years”), that make this a mildly enlightening, though often numbing, read. We get a decent insight into the family life of a frequently bitter but always mercurial writer, and the understanding that the father and son come to toward the end of John’s life.

You may find yourself skimming through some of the latter chapters about Dan’s time working as a carnie, or as a limousine driver, or a telemarketing exec, as sections of ‘Fante’ are rehashed from material he’s covered thoroughly in previous books, almost word-for-word.

Nevertheless, his recollections blended in throughout on the rough relationships of the Fantes are always strong, emotive and honestly written which makes it a shame that it tapers off toward the end, though it would be easy to understand. Some of these experiences must have been painful to recall. But catharsis through words has always been Dan’s way. To him, writing is vital. And both John and Dan’s stories are vital ones, certainly worth telling, and certainly worth reading.