Category: Books

When reading classic literature, I often stumble at the introduction and never make it to the text itself. So I have mixed feelings towards introductory materials.

However, Gene Luen Yang wrote an amazing foreword. It was concise but heartfelt. He spoke of himself, but captured a moment that included me.

He nailed the rootlessness that I sensed as an Asian kid growing up in America. My mom also read the Journey to the West to me and my sister. Monkey, Pigsy, and Sandy were integral parts parts of our childhood in a universe where they didn’t exist outside our home.

Unlike Gene, I never fell in love with comic books. I never thought I had a favorite superhero, until I realized I did all along. This ridiculous monkey had settled deep into my psyche and never left.

Like us, Sun Wukong was an outsider navigating a strange land. I never had his brashness, but I wish I did! (If I ever get a tattoo it would be 齊天大聖 , Great Sage Heaven’s Equal)

One of the best introductions I’ve ever read. But I’m biased since Gene wrote it just for me.

~

I drafted this note two years ago, before reading the book. I will always be in debt to the Lovell abridgement because it lead me to read the full translation by Anthony C. Yu, which I prefer. The story is a classic but the experience is incomplete without the poetic interludes in the novel.

I bought this book for freshman rhetoric (or art history?) to fulfill one of my English requirements at Berkeley. I kept the book because loved his essay about professional wrestling and I finally read it over the pandemic.

The book has a surprisingly contemporary feel, since it’s a series of short essays with a deep analysis at the end of the book. In our contemporary era, this would be a collection of posts with an extended coda.

Then again Barthes was French so the essays are deeper than your typical tweet-storm and the closing discussion on semiology was an absolute ass whupping since I haven’t tussled with high theory since 2006.

I’m fortunate to have taken those grad school theory courses before reading that last essay. I don’t remember much from Houston, but I knew just enough to roughly grok his game.

Barthe posits that “mythology” is a second order semiological effect. The “full” Sign of language becomes the “empty” Signifier for myth which is paired with an unspoken Signified to create a new Sign.

The main effect of myth is to distort knowledge in the service of power by making dominant values invisible. Myth makes ideology natural.

In contemporary parlance, mythology hides privilege.

The duty of the mythologist to untangle the web of obfuscation and expose such rhetoric for analysis.

I might be 23 years late to the game, but it was totally worth lugging across the continent and back again.

~

Two years later, my current reading obsession is “ancient wisdom”. Editing this draft reminds me that I need to re-read of this book — the ancients were no less susceptible to corruption than we are today. And if I’m gonna keep writing these notes, I should grab his baton to question today’s mythologies.

The art is lovely, the story is evocative, but it brings up a problem I’ve noticed in some graphic novels — density.

It’s short story in a book format. Nothing wrong about that, but it left me feeling a little empty. One might argue that Dahm preserved liminal spaces for the reader to insert themselves, but I’m not yet ready to give it the benefit of the doubt.

Part of the problem may be that it’s a serialized piece of fiction. Maybe the openness was to make room for the author to infill in future volumes.

Still, this book is a fun read, worth checking out at the library. Maybe my opinion will shift after I’ve read volumes 2 and 3. I’ve put them on hold at the library, it’s certainly earned that.

Opus is Kon’s famously unfinished manga. He was lured away by the big screen and then tragically snatched away by pancreatic cancer.

I had mediocre expectations for an incomplete work by someone who earned their fame in a different medium. Wrong. This book is great, especially with the rough pencil-sketch coda that was discovered after his passing.

I’m a sucker for authorial gimmicks and the conceit of the artist being dragged into his own story was handled expertly. Given that this was written before he started making movies, I would have forgiven a ham-fisted approach by a young creator (Grant Morrison was mediocre in Animal Man), but Satoshi Kon had already developed a strong command of the craft, which was further distilled in his animated work.

No doubt, this book is famous because of its legendary creator. But it should be more famous than it is. Opus stands on its own.

~

I first read this as an ebook on my iPad. I finally bought it for my birthday. So much better reading it on paper!

However, the story has a dark plot twist. The art isn’t graphic, but it’s not suitable for young children, so I hid the book (along with my Sandman graphic novels).

We moved to Vegas ten years ago but still haven’t settled into a permanent home. One day, we’ll find that home, and I’ll build nice bookshelves to display all the boxes of books that have spent the past decade in our in-law’s garage. By the time that happens, the kids will be old enough to read these novels…if they’re still at home!

~

After cleaning up this two year old draft for publication, we went to the library. My daughter handed me The Panda Problem by Deborah Underwood and Hannah Marks. Now that’s breaking the fourth wall!

Synchronicity is all around you! <insert CTA here>

The story of man versus fauna in America is a dreary one, starting with the ancient forebears who came across the Bering Straits, the spread of Europeans in the 1800’s, and the industrialization of death in the 1900’s.

The one bright spot amidst the devastation has been the coyote, which has used its persecution in the 20th century to spread throughout the nation, entering its final state (Delaware) in the continental United States during the 2010’s.

Having evolved as both predator and prey, they can’t rely upon their alpha physique like wolves. Instead, coyotes are whip-smart. They’ve developed a unique social mobility with “Fission-Fusion” tactics, being pack animals when it suited them and becoming loners if necessary. Howling is their means of long distance communication, which influences the local coyote density affecting their litter sizes (ranging from two to nineteen!).

Aside litters from nineteen, the coyote’s story is quite similar to ours — chatty creatures in the middle of the food chain with a wide range of social flexibility.

Unfortunately, we also mirror the coyote’s ingeniousness with our deranged attempts to eradicate these “prairie wolves”. It’s a story of brash humans coalescing government power, aiding corporate cronies with cruel policies. As always, it’s appalling to read about our blindness to the destructiveness of our obsessions, even if things have slightly improved with the rise of the environmental movement in the 1970’s.

Through it all, the coyote survived and spread. It was ranked lower than a cockroach in the 1950’s opinion polls. Now it has admirers among city slicker liberals. It is regaining its place as an avatar god of this land, even among the colonizers of this new world.

Unlike most nature books, this one does not end on a dreary note. But that’s no credit to us. Almost every other creature has disappeared under such slaughter. This time, we’ve been outwitted by the trickster, much to our delight.

~

I started the audiobook at 1.5x but slowed down to 1.0x before the introduction was over. Even though the high speed narration was perfectly intelligible, some books are meant to be savored. It would be disrespectful to rush through such a well told story.

I wrote the initial draft of this note this two years ago and publishing this post reminds me to listen to it again. It’s still a two month wait at the library, not bad for a book that’s been out for seven years.

~

As a complete tangent, I just stumbled across the album Prairiewolf. It has nothing to do with coyotes, but it’s a chill groove and I hate to ignore synchronicities.

Eight books for age 4+4

• Opus, Satoshi Kon
• Boring Postcards USA, Martin Parr
• World Atlas of Cheese, Nancy Eekhof-Stork
• 99 Variations on a Proof, Philip Ordlin (the last two were recommendations from post.news over the past few months)

Not shown:

1. In the West, Avedon, a big birthday splurge (let’s hope the “cheap” $100 copy from Amazon isn’t totally beat up when it arrives)
2. How to Say Goodbye, Wendy MacNaughton. The preorder was just announced. Unfortunately this subject will be all too relevant as I cross through my mid 40’s.
3. Absolutely on Music, Murakami & Ozawa
4. I Think, Therefore I Draw, Cathcart & Klein (the last two were lucky library finds from yesterday’s excursion).