Adventures of a Cultural Omnivore: 2015

Each December, I try to put up a post on the best media I encountered throughout the year. This year, my omnivorous appetite for culture concentrated on music more than anything, but I did all right in other categories as well.

 

Books

I didn’t neglect fantasy (George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire) or science fiction (Warhammer 40K), but as usual, the classics made the biggest impression. Joseph Conrad’s portrayal of the British Empire in Heart of Darkness connected in my mind with W.E.B. Du Bois’s comments on colonialism and racism in “The Souls of White Folk,” and I almost got around to a whole series of posts on it (previous post). Honorable mentions would include Franz Kafka’s The Trial, for its absurdist take on the workings of bureaucracy, and Hemingway’s Men Without Women. Every time I read Hemingway, I wonder why, if he had such an impact on English style, more authors don’t write like he did.

 

Comics

I would recommend He-Man and the Masters of the Universe from DC Comics to anyone who enjoys fantasy, and I would highly recommend Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham’s run on Miracleman from the Nineties, now being brought to digital format by Marvel. However, nothing could top Ms. Marvel this year.

Kamala Khan is a Pakistani-American high school girl and a Muslim. After a weird gas gives her the ability to stretch her body, she starts fighting Jersey City’s bad guys and, completely without permission, adopts the name Ms. Marvel, which once belonged to her idol Carol Danvers, currently known as Captain Marvel. For her costume, she redesigns a burkini.

 

 

Kamala gained a lot of press as DC’s first Muslim character with her own title, and her cultural and ethnic background is important, but she’s also just a high school girl running the teenage gauntlet and trying to figure out who she wants to be--and it isn’t anybody but herself. She doesn’t have her parents’ roots in Pakistani culture, she isn’t as religious as her brother, and she isn’t like the other kids at her typical American school either. She has squabbles with peers and falls in and out of love and is painfully self-conscious and unsure of herself.

Literature is full of cookie-cutter caricatures along those lines, but writer G. Willow Wilson brings Kamala to life in ways that resonate across cultural and generational divides, and Adrian Alphona’s art is unique, effective, and frequently hilarious. Together, the two serve up everything from typical superhero exploits to tear-jerking drama--and at least one moment among the most powerful I’ve ever read.

Early in Volume 1, Kamala’s powers are fluctuating wildly and she suddenly finds she has transformed to look exactly like her hero Captain Marvel, a classic buxom blond beauty whom Kamala sees as perfect. But a mere 23 pages into the series, I had already come to understand and care about Kamala so strongly that I only wanted her to be who she is--a short, sometimes clumsy brown-skinned girl with unruly black hair. That’s part of her beauty, and watching her turn white felt wrong, wrong, wrong.

 

 

I was so impressed by Kamala Khan, and have been so unimpressed with most of the 2016 presidential candidates, that I even whipped up a couple memes featuring her. Nothing mind-blowing, but feel free to share:

 

I love it when she embiggens her fists:

 

Movies

Early in the year, I continued a stretch of films from director Jean-Luc Godard. Then after my son started leaving the house each day for kindergarten, I was actually able to hit the movie theater every now and then! Spectre and Star Wars: The Force Awakens were both excellent, but it was Mad Max: Fury Road that inspired me most. The result was a series of blog posts examining the movie from the perspectives of feminism, Christian myth, and Marxism:

     Mad Max Feminista

     Jennifer Blood Feminista
     Mad Max: Of Hawks and Doves
     Mad Max: Out of Eden
     Mad Marx: Frederick Road

 

Television

I also found the time--I have no idea how--to watch more TV this year. Penny Dreadful and Outlander were entertaining, while Supergirl was just the fluff I was looking for. The show has problems, but Melissa Benoist isn’t one of them. She’s fairly wonderful, and watching her deal with her life as Kara Danvers is one of the highlights of the series. Meanwhile, Game of Thrones continues to engross and Syfy appears to have a quality space opera in The Expanse. However, Mad Men really was the best show on television, and the question needs to be asked: Has there ever been a better show on television?

 

Video Games

The only video game I played this year, aside from a little Relic Run (Tomb Raider) on my iPhone, was Silent Hill: Downpour. I felt like it was a return to form for home console games in the series, after Homecoming was so bad GameStop salespersons encouraged me not to buy it. I should have listened. Downpour doesn’t try to break or even bend the template for Silent Hill, it just tries to get it right and succeeds.

 

Music

This year, I learned that scores of bands I’ve never heard of are pumping out some incredible metal: Barren Earth, Khemmis, My Dying Bride, Tribulation, Krisiun, Avatarium, Sylosis, Sulphur Aeon. However, the bands that really struck a chord with me this year lay in a completely different direction. One was Siouxsie and the Banshees. I can’t believe I didn’t discover them earlier. They belong in the company of alternative music greats like U2, R.E.M. and The Cure, and you may put “Night Shift” on my list of coolest songs ever:

 

Then one morning I put on some Jefferson Airplane and Grace Slick’s voice in “Somebody to Love” electrified me. Of course I’d heard the song countless times, but this time I really heard it. Now Jefferson Airplane is an obsession. I’m still just wading in, but the water promises to get deep as I explore more of their music and the movement out of San Francisco that they were a part of:

 

And there you have my favorites from 2015. Let me know yours. This cultural omnivore is always looking for something else to eat.

 

Related posts:

Twilight of the Cultural Omnivores
Best in Comics 2014
Best in Music 2014
Best of Books 2014
Best in Movies, Video Games, Comics 2013
Best in Music 2013
Best in Books 2013

To Stephen King’s Dark Tower Came I

*There are spoilers ahead.*

 

I’m not surprised that shortly after declaring a blog slowdown, I’m back with another post. Having just finished reading Stephen King’s magnum opus, the Dark Tower series, I feel moved to post a retrospective.

I was in middle school or junior high when I first stumbled across a hardback copy of The Gunslinger (1982), the first book in the series, on display in the dusty old public library of Tipton, Iowa. The novel’s blend of dark fantasy, science fiction and Western appealed to my boyish imagination, and scenes like Roland’s slaughter of an entire town and copulation with a succubus were more graphic than anything else I had read. The illustrations by Michael Whelan were also captivating. The one on the cover of the first edition shows the moment before Roland, in his single-minded pursuit of the Dark Tower, lets the boy Jake drop to his death.

 

After a move to another small town in the Midwest, I ran across the next book in the series, The Drawing of the Three (1987), in a different public library, and spent hours there, tucked back in the stacks, reading the B-format paperback illustrated by Phil Hale. Despite publishing other books at a good clip, King spaced out much of the Dark Tower series, going as long as seven years between volumes, before releasing the last three in quick succession from 2003 to 2004. By then, I was a working stiff undergoing some early mid-life tumult, so I never made it to the final volume until now.

Stephen King long ago established his place as a master storyteller, but I simply didn’t enjoy Song of Susannah (2004) either time I read it, and I felt the earlier sections of The Dark Tower (2004) labored under the same problems--clunky plotting, too much of the made-up High Speech, a digressive writing style, and a lack of forward thrust. Nonetheless, the novel finds its groove partway through--and the results are unforgettable.

One highlight of the book was the new character Irene Tassenbaum. Character is one of King’s greatest strengths as a writer--novel-length psychological portraits by other writers rarely come close to what he can accomplish in a few pages--and it doesn’t take long to feel like you know Irene. She’s a bored and pampered housewife excited by Roland and possessed of grit equal to the challenges of her adventure with him.

 

While Irene was a pleasant surprise, I was reading from page one in expectation of what would pass between Roland and Jake. They’re linked by fate rather than blood, but there are heavy father-son issues there. I would never forgive King if he let Roland kill Jake again. In the end, King handles this deftly and with little fanfare. I won’t give away what happens, but I will say that as I read the epilogue, I had tears in my eyes like I haven’t when reading a book for a long time.

And of course there is always the Dark Tower itself, the nexus of all worlds. Roland Deschain of Gilead does indeed reach it and climb to the room at the top of the stairs. Having read some whining by readers online, I was prepared to be disappointed, but no, King delivers admirably on the promise contained in the The Gunslinger. It is truly epic in the sense of “very great or large and usually difficult or impressive” as wells as in the sense of “relating to, or having the characteristics of an epic <an epic poem>” (Merriam-Webster)--and indeed, the series was inspired by the poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” by Robert Browning.

Apparently talks have been going on for years regarding possible television and film series--and the graphic novels are impressive--but as nice as those things might be, are they that nice? I began the series in libraries whose books were an important part of their character, and I still believe books are one of the best ways for people to acquire character, too. Today, our world has “moved on” much like All-World in the Dark Tower series, leaving us hungry for the sustenance books can provide but all too often seeking it in flimsier, easier media.

The Dark Tower books are entertaining and inspiring, impressive and sometimes frustrating, genre-blending and mind-bending, and, ultimately, rewarding. I would recommend the series to anyone who loves imaginative fiction and strongly encourage also reading the standalone novel The Wind Through the Keyhole (2012). I may be skeptical about the value of bringing the series to the silver or small screens, but I would gladly read more Dark Tower from Stephen King.

 

Other retrospectives:

The Trials of Dune
A Look Back at Me and U2

My Personal Best of 2013 in Books

Some friends and I have a yearly tradition of sharing our favorite media with each other, and since life hasn’t been kind enough to allow me time to think, much less blog, about anything heavier in recent weeks, I thought I would expand upon my favorites here at The Gleaming Sword, beginning with books.

In a year when a new Robert Jordan book comes out, nothing else stands a chance, and that was true in 2013 as well. Each of the last three installments in the Wheel of Time series, completed by Brian Sanderson based on Jordan’s notes, has been excellent, and A Memory of Light, the fourteenth and final book, was among the best in the whole series. Somehow, Sanderson brought the biggest plot spread and largest cast of characters I’ve ever seen to a satisfying conclusion. I remember seeing The Wheel of Time on a list of books adults should grow out of, but I have to disagree. Its stark vision of Good versus Evil is just as satisfying to me as an adult as it was when I began reading almost 20 years ago in college.

 

Instead of jumping from series to series this year, I tried to follow some straight through to the end. One such sustained reading project was Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series--which even got a blog of its own (blog). The true enjoyment of this series lay in the concept of all humanity resurrected along the banks of a massive river and in learning about the historical personages who appear throughout the series, from Sir Richard Francis Burton and Alice Pleasance Liddell to Cyrano de Bergerac, King John and Hermann Goring. Unfortunately, after the phenomenal first book, I found the series frustratingly uneven, with little in the way of prose style and only infrequent glimpses of the engaging characters, gripping events and insightful ponderings with which the series began.

But it was an interesting series, and it led me to learn more about Sir Richard Francis Burton by reading Fawn M. Brodie’s biography The Devil Drives. Burton was a soldier, explorer, poet, linguist and translator, most known for discovering Lake Tanganyika and translating One Thousand and One Nights. In some of that--his penchant for study, travel and translation--I can’t help but feel he was something of a kindred spirit, but if he was, he was certainly a much higher specimen of our type. The Devil Drives was interesting for its insight into Burton, but also for its glimpse into a time when the world was still being discovered rather than simply covered.

 

If Richard Burton was something of a kindred spirit, my next big subject of interest--with his drugs, alcohol, guns and wild pranks--was certainly not. As I read the biography Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson, I was fascinated, but disconcerted by a mind both unglued as well as genius. I can sympathize with his political leanings, but his way of living positively frightens me. Nonetheless, it is hard to imagine he would have delivered up such classics as Hell’s Angels and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas without continually living on the edge.

The real treat in my exploration of Thompson this year was Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. It spends over half its pages on the Democratic primaries, dives deep into the Democratic convention, and, almost as an afterthought, as a shrug, comments upon George McGovern’s loss to Richard Nixon. The book is Thompson in high style, slewing from serious reporting and interview transcripts to colorful anecdotes, invective and surreal fantasy--and it leaves one sad that a man as good as George McGovern should be forgotten to most:

 

Projects for 2014 include continuing a thread of reading in the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory with Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, with lighter reading in the Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson Dune books and Michael Moorcock’s Elric books.

More on those next year, perhaps.