I’ve got a review of Daniel Clowes’ newly-reissued The Death Ray in the new issue of BOMB Magazine, and over on their site, an extensive, wide-ranging interview with him.

Clowes is, without question, one of the masters we have now, as a comics artist and graphic novelist. In discussing the new seriousness with which comics are treated, we have to begin with the seriousness artists like Clowes and Chris Ware and Los Bros Hernandez brought to comics starting back in the 80s and 90s and have kept alive until now, when they are enjoying a level of readership and respect I think most fanboys and fangirls never dreamed of back even 10 years ago.

Clowes and I spoke of everything from the origin of The Death Ray to his early days hanging out with Chris Ware to the idea of his comics as horror comics starring the self. The Death Ray is part of a trio of works from him to appear in the last year and a half, and completes his sense of his current body of work, he says in the interview–it was initially published as a comic in his Eightball series, and he is reissuing it to have it back in print, and as a bound book available to his new readership. These works, Mr. Wonderful, Wilson, and The Death Ray, together, give off a patchwork sense of a world in which all of them exist together, an alternate universe with an emotional realism that puts much of contemporary fiction to shame by contrast.

For more on Clowes, Tavi at Rookiemag has an interview with him that appeared yesterday. And for more on the contemporary comics scene, check out the excellent interview with Adrian Tomine, another favorite creator of mine, at The Rumpus.

Structure is on my mind a great deal of late. Earlier that evening I took a break to go and walk around in the moonlit city with my friend Merrill Feitell, author of the short story collection Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes. We were getting caught up after not seeing each other since AWP in Denver. Merrill has a long-standing interest in the structure of fiction, and so I ran by her some problems I’ve been solving for in my novel, regarding the inclusion of my character’s past, and how the conventional ways of dealing with backstory (I do not like this word) were not helpful.

Merrill suggested first printing out this troubling past of my character (about 50 pages of it at this point) and using a different color paper from the rest of the manuscript. I laughed, as I had in fact already done this, though by accident, due to a lack of white paper in the house, and the ink was even blue, due to a lack of black ink at the same time.

Next step: Lay it out, she said, and that way you can see with the color change a little better of how the sections interact with each other and where the breaks are.

As I left her, I looked up at the sky to see if I could see the air-craft-carrier-sized asteroid that was supposed to swing by the earth last night, but did not see it. A further irony awaited when I returned to my reading: Asterios Polyp organizes itself in relationship to time with color.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

Asterios Polyp, by David Mazzuchelli, is created out of two stories that eventually become one, or rather, it is one story made out of what I think the main character himself would call a Parallax: we move back and forth in time, though, as if we are viewing the story from a place where all time is visible. A first timeline begins when a lightning bolt strikes the apartment of the main character, an architect named, yes, Asterios Polyp, that sends him running into the subways, into a self-imposed exile from his own life. The second begins with Asterios’ birth, and is narrated by his stillborn twin, Ignazio, and takes us up to the moments just before the lightning strike.

Ignazio appears in the first timeline as a figure in Asterios’ dreams, an uncanny marker for the life that has slipped away from him. He speaks but is invisible in the second timeline.

The present timeline, born out of the lightning, is colored in yellow and purple.

The second, born alongside his birth and narrated by Ignazio (who of course is identical to Asterios) is either blue and red, when Hana, Asterios’ wife, is present, or blue and purple, before she appears.

The story has been described as “interwoven with flashbacks” but it is actually a kind of stereoscopic narrative, but across time, with two narratives, alternating with each other in equal parts and equal importance. In one storyline, we see Ignazio appear in dreams, often as an uncanny changeling, living the life Asterios no longer has–Ignazio the successful architect, and Asterios, the abandoned.

In the other storyline, Ignazio narrates from a knowing, affectionate teasing, bordering on scorn.

The result is a story narrated by a a brother only a brother could tell, but also a story only a ghost could tell. We see stereoscopically, either hearing Ignazio’s thoughts on Asterios, or seeing him, in Asterios’ story, haunting him. Asterios feels guilt at being the survivor, a guilt he doesn’t often describe. Ignazio appears to feel, well, envy, on a low burn. And soon it seems his intentions are not at all benign in telling the story, or being in it, either.

In discussing what makes something literary, I increasingly believe (and teach) that one quality is the protagonist also as antagonist. Ignazio isn’t, for all his anger at the surviving brother, really able to ruin Asterios’ life. He can only make Asterios aware that he himself ruined his own life.

What David Mazzuchelli does is set these up so that the two stories run side by side, each moving toward a climax of their own, and each climax informing the other. First the past story, in red and blue, and then the present time story, in yellow and purple. The climax of the past story is his divorce with Hana, not openly dramatized but witheld instead. The climax of the present is the murder of Ignazio, in a dream, by Asterios. When the third story appears out of the aftermath, with previous unseen colors, and with it, a third climax, we neither see Ignazio nor hear his voice. Asterios seems free in some new way.

In class, when I taught it, we spoke of much of this. We also observed that the two storylines are also reinterpretations of myths–Odysseus, in the story begun with the lightning bolt and Orpheus, in the story with Hana.

This structure, of moving between two stories about the same characters, is something I call a stereoscopic narrative, but conventionally it has been used within a particular present time–it does create a more multidimensional feeling, and I did, for example, use it in my first novel. Here it occurs across time. This has been done in two other novels I’ve read in recent memory–Chris Adrian’s The Children’s Hospital and Lev Grossman’s The Magician King. Margaret Atwood also does this to great effect in her novel Cat’s Eye, but in the first person.

David Mazzuchelli, the author, was previously known better for his work on popular superhero comics: Daredevil and Batman, in particular. And Batman is in fact a classic stereoscopic fiction example, the same story told twice from two or more points of view: the stories usually begin with the reader seeing the crimes that draw Batman in, and conclude with the villain giving his or her side of things.

What interested me here was how in most fiction, the story is a movement between the external and internal events of a character or characters, and a typical flashback is of a short duration, triggered by something in a character’s environment. The author describes it to evoke the psychology and mood of the character. Here, with these competing stories, what emerges is a fuller story of Asterios, one he himself could never tell about himself. This is often the case with stereoscopic narratives, but what was also interesting was the way he (and Adrian, and Grossman and Atwood) has used the stereoscope effect to create something that moves you forward across the present time and the past both, your knowledge of the past of the character becoming another story itself, and more than a subplot. The past is liberated from the character’s memories, which are of course limited, and given to the story, and the reader also. Any epiphanies happen for the reader and not the characters.

I have no idea if this applies to what I’m solving for right now, but I admit, I’m fascinated, and still thinking about all of it. For now, I’m diagramming it and seeing if some further insight emerges from that. “Is it playful with structure,” Merrill asked me, of my own novel, when I brought it up. “I don’t know yet,” I said. And I still don’t, not yet. “I want it to have an articulate complexity,” I said, “where the structure is intricate but the reader’s experience is not.” I have often felt this. Whatever I end up taking from this, in that regard, Mazzuchelli’s Asterios Polyp is one ideal.

For more by me on comics and graphic novels, reflections on a past syllabus, and an essay on comics and the racial unconscious. 

A friend wrote “What is this frenzy of activity?” Answer: I made a deal with myself that all posts drafted over 1000 words had to be considered as possible essays and finished as such and sent out to magazines and sites.

This has created something of a backlog in my life, but in any case, that’s what’s happening. It doesn’t feel like a frenzy, though. More like the I Love Lucy episode where the candies keep coming faster but there’s no time, writer’s edition. I think this is just life though. In the meantime, I am reading September 28th at How I Learned To Survive in New York at the Happy Ending, and at Penina Roth’s Franklin Park on October 10th. The Franklin Park event will be fun, and I’ll preview the novel I’m finishing.

2.

Other things you may wonder about: the novel I am finishing, perhaps. In any case, I’m working toward finishing this draft by Oct. 3rd and sending it to her. Some of you who are regulars here leave me great messages of encouragement, asking where it is sometimes. Thank you for this. This is helpful.

Do not lose hope, I will tell you, though, I nearly did, but around the time that I did, it was James Baldwin’s birthday, and I thought of all he wrote while the world was so terrible back then, and I realized it was lazy to use the idea of a terrible world as a reason to stop making things. Thre’s a word for this, accedia, also known as the sin of despair. It would only make the world more terrible to be someone who gives in to it, because, why be one more person who is like that? Why put even one more person on that team?

3.

This is of course also the topic of an essay I’ve been writing off and on for years, and have never finished thus far because each time I think about despair, it is, well, difficult.

Yes, irony.

4.

In the meantime, I direct you to this beautiful trailer for Paul Hornschmeier’s new book, Life with Mr. Dangerous. He is a genius, and you should get this book.

5.

Other things outside of writing: For two weekends this month, I went to weddings. The first in Buffalo, the second in the Catskills. Both left me deeply moved. An essay idea I gave up on came back to me while on one of them, and I thought of a story for a story cycle also on another (now we are back in the I Love Lucy episode). I took notes and moved on back to the other commitments. But more importantly, congratulations to Jeb and Janice, and Keith and Chris, and long may love reign over you, your lives, your loved ones and all of us who know you.

6.

Something I discovered to the side of both weddings: If you wonder what will happen in New York state if a disaster hits, the answer is, terrible things, for now. New York is not remotely prepared. On our drive to Buffalo earlier this month the levee outside Binghamton broke and flooded the town. We were caught in the evacuation traffic. The method of getting road information that was most successful involved standing in convenience marts and listening in while 17 volunteer EMT guys tried to give directions to one attractive young woman. No one else had any information whatsoever. Not on the radio, not on the web. A friend recounted calling the Sheriff’s office and listening as they yelled at each other about roads that were closed.

Worse, the information we got this way turned out to be wrong. Only by second-guessing the volunteer EMTs did we get around the flooded roads on the way back and avoid massive delays that would have come from taking their bad advice. But this, of course, was just part of the Republican fantasia that exists now, it seemed to me, something turning us into a people wandering across a crumbling infrastructure trying to escape dangerous waters released by melting ice caps that are now in the storm cycles, with no public services due to austerity cuts, all while these right wingers make us argue gay marriage as the world burns. This is why, for example, the volunteer EMTs were the one offering directions. There were almost no policemen on the road, and the ones we saw were directing traffic silently, and looked impatient to get away themselves. They said nothing to us as we passed them slowly on the highway.

7.

Other things on the surface of my mind: Troy Davis would be alive if he was a white man. I can only hope his death brings with it real change in our country for the better, because his death happening as it did, with him waiting strapped to a gurney for hours while the Supreme Court met on his emergency appeal, dishonors us all. My heart goes out to his family. Gary Trudeau’s review of the Palin biography is genius. I’ve long known that Homophobia turns all boys against each other, for the way they fear being gay, whether they are or not, but here’s a study proving how this crushes their relationships with each other, friendships they desperately need. If you were thinking meanwhile “How can I get an ebook edition of that study from an indie bookstore?” here is a list of indies that sell Google editions. And if you want to escape the Republican fantasia with me tonight (the debates are on, and they’ll likely applaud the death of Troy Davis like, oh, I don’t know, Orcs?), I’ll be at Pete’s Candy Store, watching Emma Straub read with her idol, Jennifer Egan, who is a hero to me also.

About once a month, I get asked by a colleague or friend for the syllabus I used to teach my seminar on the Graphic Novel at Amherst. Included below is a list of the texts that I used to teach students. In that seminar I allowed optional creative exercises and finals, and that led to me teaching tutorials in the making of comics, which led to me advising two graphic novel theses to summa honors. I’m very proud of those students, who were both also awarded the English Department’s prize for best thesis. Amherst’s English department was very generous and supportive in the teaching I did there throughout, and I’m incredibly grateful for the hard work of all of my students.

I taught the class as an experiment, even an expedition of a kind, and so it was never the same every time. I began teaching it because more graphic novels have been published in the last ten years than in the 30 years prior to that—it is without question an explosion and so I had questions about this explosion. I’d been reading into the history of comics just on my own (as a fanboy going back to age six), and found that the German Expressionist Picture Novel, an important forebear to the modern graphic novel, came of age in Germany in the age leading up to the Nazi Party’s takeover of the government. I wanted to know if there was a relationship.

We live in an anxiety about language now, I think, that has created this boom, an Age of Euphemism, and I do think there’s something about the comic that can move through the lies and subvert the euphemism in what we as readers experience as victories for truth. Linda Barry, in her masterpiece, What It Is, included here, describes an idea of art, the making of it and the experiencing of it, as part of our immune system, and I like thinking about this idea. It’s part of why I introduced the making of comics into the teaching of them.

The above, an Ukiyo-e woodblock print by Kuniyoshi, is one of the pieces of art that led me into my interest in the graphic novel. The visual pun at its center emits a narrative force, a dramatic irony—you are drawn into the story about to happen, the idea that the fox has cast this illusion around it and has not yet been caught by anyone except the artist and the reader. Comics and graphic novels at their best play with this and the other forces a visual pun brings to bear. It’s one of the things a comic or graphic novel can do that prose alone has to play catch-up with—creating in the mind of the reader simultaneous contrasts, the fox as woman as fox as illusion.

I mention this because I am frequently challenged on the idea of teaching the form, much less reading it. Also, some of my students mistakenly think of graphic novels progressively, i.e., they will write papers for me saying why they are “better” than prose literature, as if that is our class mission. But it isn’t and wasn’t. My sense of the form is that it is capable of uniquely expressing something, in a way that sets it apart from either prose literature, poetry or film. Discovering and articulating that capacity is among the class missions. There was never only one mission.

For me, Marjane Satrapi explained “why comics” best, when she said, at an appearance at Smith College, “I write what I can’t draw, and I draw what I can’t write.” This struck me as an important way to think about the artist-writer creator (a clumsy way to say “someone who can do both”). Most of the texts I taught were written by people of this category, but there are writers for the form, like Frank Miller and Alan Moore, who do not do their own drawings and it would be disingenuous at best not to include their cooperative works with artists, in terms of their cultural impact, but the distinction does ask important questions.

While the field is considered new at best (it is routinely dismissed as unserious by many) the boom also means that I could have easily taught the course as a year-long class, with a “History of Comics” first semester and a “Graphic Novel” second semester, and if the post I had at Amherst had been tenure track, I might have considered it, and could easily have filled it. Teaching the graphic novel typically means you’ll be popular with students but potentially controversial with colleagues, to be clear—and on the job market, it has been both a plus and a minus, with faculty both intensely interested and intensely repulsed. It is a polarizing form to teach right now, more so than creative writing, which still suffers in the esteem of many academics, despite its popularity.

Of course, in my experience over the years, there are few things more politically dangerous within an English Department than teaching something popular with students. It makes whatever it is both valuable and suspect.

Having said that, for those interested in teaching this sort of course, or in just reading more of the form, here is…

The ENGL 74 Amherst College Memorial Reading List:

American Born Chinese, Gene Yang
Shortcomings, Adrian Tomine
Mother Come Home, Paul Hornschmeier
Jimmy Corrigan, Chris Ware
Pyongyang, Guy Delisle
Exit Wounds, Rutu Modan
Aya, Margaret Abouet
Blankets, Craig Thompson
In the Shadow of No Towers, Art Spiegelman
Maus, Art Spiegelman
Lucky, Gabrielle Bell
Jar of Fools, Jason Lutes
Curses, Kevin Huizenga
Life Sucks, Jessica Abel
La Perdida, Jessica Abel
Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, Jessica Abel & Matt Madden
Ghost World, Daniel Clowes
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller
Ronin, by Frank Miller
Night Fisher, R. Kikuo Johnson
Watchmen, Alan Moore
Top Ten: The 49′ers, Alan Moore
Black Hole, Charles Burns
McSweeney’s 13, edited by Chris Ware
Scott Pilgrim 1, Brian Lee O’Malley
Battle Angel Alita 1, Yukito Kishiro
Banana Fish vol. 6, Akimi Yoshida (Volumes 1-19 exist)
Lone Wolf and Cub Vol. 1, Kazuo Koike
Astonishing X-Men, Vol. 1, Joss Whedon
The Tale of One Bad Rat, Bryan Talbot
Blue Pills, Frederik Peeters
Ordinary Victories, Manu Larcenet
Prosopopus, Nicolas de Crécy
Dogs and Water, Anders Nilsen
Monologues for Gauging the Density of Black Holes, Anders Nilsen
Poor Sailor, Sammy Harkham
Persepolis, Marjan Satrapi
Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
Epileptic, David B.
Powr Mstrs Vol. 1
What It Is, Lynda Barry
The City, Franz Masereel
Incognegro, Mat Johnson
7 Miles A Second, by David Wojnarowicz
MOME, various issues (a quarterly journal of comics)

I taught the class using a variety of texts to the side, like Freud’s essays on the Uncanny, Jokes, Screen Memories and Dreams (Freud even made a comic called “Dream of the French Nurse” as an illustration for his work on dreams, without even feeling the need to describe why he thought comics were perfect to reflect dreams), and Simone Weil’s The Iliad or a Poem of Force (Greek gods being the early cultural prototype for super heroes).

Some caveats for those attempting to teach these texts in the classroom: Comics may be thought of as inexpensive, but 4-color art illustrations on good paper means the average graphic novel is expensive. The class was a financial burden to some students, and while some texts can be bought second hand, consider approaching your library with your list in advance and having the books purchased and placed on reserve during the class.

Also, you will attract a mix of students, typically, some who know only a few of the most famous recent graphic novels, and, as a friend mentioned with her trial class recently, a group who may be more knowledgeable than you in terms of comics history. These people may even believe a mastery of arcana is necessary to even teach the class (not true). Comics Arcana is the gang handshake of the “fanboy/fangirl” as these readers are called (and yes, I fanboy). Comics fans are a fierce claque, comparable, I think, only to opera fans in terms of the withering scorn they can bring to bear when you come up short. Just remember that with a seminar you are reading to learn as much as there to teach, and encourage an atmosphere of group discovery. A series of midterm presentations can be informative and also allow those who invariably feel they should really be teaching the class a moment to express their nascent egotism creatively. I.e., to share their knowledge base with their peers (and you). They don’t really want to teach the class—they want to learn something from you. But to do that, they need to respect you, and if you indicate you respect the years of obsessive reading they’ve done to the side of their main course work, unexpressed until this class, it’s usually a win.

Of the student favorites, it appears I made lifetime readers of Ronin, Astonishing X-Men, Scott Pilgrim, Battle Angel Alita and Lone Wolf and Cub. Epileptic was a crowd pleaser, as was Shortcomings. Anders Nilsen’s two books are the absolute favorites of the comics creators students, also Blankets, Poor Sailor and Mother Come Home—the students who wanted to make comics had very specific loves apart from the critical favorites. Students in general hated Gabrielle Bell, sadly, which I personally love, and reaction to Jimmy Corrigan was mixed, with some finding it brilliant and others maddening and depressing.

Note: I didn’t teach all my favorites, I’d add, so they aren’t on this list. I did teach what I think of the as the “warhorses” despite personal preferences: The Watchmen, for example, which I find a bit hammy as a reader, is good to teach, though be prepared for how your students will know nothing of the Iran-Contra scandal. I teach it because it was ground-breaking, and much of what followed was heavily influenced by it. It completely changed the way creators dealt with even the idea of a superhero. Scott Pilgrim was hilarious to teach because students initially believed it to beneath the class’s attention: “All of my friends talk like this,” one of my students said. “Why are we reading this?” But that, of course, was why: Scott Pilgrim was a story created with and even within the vernacular of their generation, something they wanted to do, and so I felt it mattered, and included it.

Also note: On teaching students to make comics, I found the most important thing to do first was get them over the idea that they needed to be great artists to make comics, and focus instead on how they needed to create a visual vernacular for their story, write a script and do character design.

Banksy’s Simpson credits have made a bit of a splash because he’s an art sensation, but watching it I understood he meant to dramatize the role inexpensive North Korean animation labor plays in the creation of much of what we see in animated film and television today, including, possibly, the Simpsons. The subcontracting of the creation of the animation cells for American programs to French companies—who are allowed to contract labor in North Korea, unlike the Americans—is the subject of Guy Delisle’s groundbreaking graphic travelogue, Pyongyang. There’s very little information on how many American shows and films are made this way as a result. Typically this labor is used to create the time-consuming cells in between the major still moments. According to Pyongyang, the major cells for those moments are done by more expensive Western labor and are sent to North Korea with a Western supervisor (Delisle’s job, for example, during the trip he dramatizes in his book).

The animators there then also use their talents to make their own shows, such as this North Korean animated television show for children, (“subtitled” by someone with a subversive, anti-North Korean, misogynistic sense of humor).  Watching it, you can get a little of a sense via reverse-engineering for what shows might be involved.

During the semester I read approximately 250 pages a week, to as much as 600, if it’s thesis season–and that doesn’t even include my own writing or my email. But I also don’t notice it–I just do it, like breathing or drinking coffee or noticing where I’m walking. I did take an old-fashioned speed-reading course in grade school (described in my first novel, Edinburgh–yes, this is among the autobiographical parts) and so that is part of it (we were not taught to skim, but shown the lines at high speed via a slide projector), but all the same it can be hard to muster the energy to find books not related to my research or my curriculum. Books for pleasure, in other words.

This, of course, is a trap, and should be fought. So today I fought.

I’d gone out to the Post Office today for an errand, to find it dark due to Veteran’s Day, and with the time I’d allotted, went to my local bookstore, Amherst Books, where I found Refresh, Refresh. This is a graphic novel, based on a story by Benjamin Percy, and tells the story of the sons of three soldiers, all friends, and the turmoil of living life with a father who’s off at war. It’s one of the most honest things I’ve read about what the lives of these boys are like, and the ending is devastating. I’ve just met Percy recently and am now also looking forward to his new collection, of the same title.

Yes, all you’d have to do is watch CNN to decide you were never going to use Twitter–few things make me despair like seeing an anchor read reactions off Twitter–but for writers and literary feeds, if you use it right, it’s like having a crowd as your research intern–researching what you don’t know or wouldn’t think to look for but still want to know. Think of each entry as being like an electronic catalog card, for something you weren’t looking for explicitly but are happy to find. This is more true now with the list function. Today for example, Matthew Hunte shared a find from the Believer–Donald Barthelme’s syllabus, 81 books he wanted his students to read (pictured here). Matthew is, in the short time I’ve known him, one of my favorite people on there, and I highly recommend following his feed.

Many of the titles on the Barthelme list were familiar, but there was one I noticed I’d always seen but never read: The Changeling, by Joy Williams. I’m something of a Williams Completist, owning even the guide to the Florida Keys she wrote, but this had always escaped me, and it turns out, from this post over at Paper Cuts, there was a reason: when it came out, Anatole Broyard destroyed it in a review, and it faded out of sight. Last year, though, the Fairy Tale Press brought it out again in a 30th Anniversary edition. And soon it will be mine.

If you’re interested, here is an interview at Bookslut with Tao Lin interviewing Joy Williams on the occasion of the reissue. Kate Bernheimer, the publisher at Fairy Tale, is the one who edited me in the anthology Brothers and Beasts, with my essay “Kitsune”, about the fox demons in Edinburgh.

Yesterday I looked in on a Twitter chat about character flaws that seemed to circle around these statements: “flaws! Yes! Characters have them! What about addiction?” and the whole thing looked just a bit too much like the reason people make fun of Twitter.

Though there were standouts, like Eugenia Kim.

I was observing because I like to watch for new uses for social media and writing, no matter how much eye-rolling is happening around it–technology does occasionally provide more than distractions–and while there may have been something to the 140 character limit that made the whole thing a little blunted, I gave them credit for trying. But in general I’ve lately been greatly discouraged by the way I feel like the contemporary rhetoric about creative writing meant to aid writers too often guides them into sad little corners, where they end up too much like Roombas that can’t turn themselves around. This of course is why Joseph Conrad was afraid of Ford Madox Ford’s pursuit of knowledge around writing–he feared it would harm more than it would help to know what exactly what one was doing. And I do think there’s a kind of advice that doesn’t help, and nowhere do I see this more than with the idea of the Flaw in character design.

Consider instead Adrien Tomine’s Shortcomings, a tiny modern masterpiece (to my mind) about Ben Tanaka, a bitter young man who drives everyone out of his life with his attempts to shore up his insecurities. Part of what is fascinating about the book is how Tomine allows the reader into the gap between who Ben wants you to think he is and who he really is. On one page he’s loudly complaining to his girlfriend about having to see a film on Asian American identity, and on another, he’s upset because she’s leaving him for a white(ish) man. He goes from loudly deploring someone for using being Asian as a way to complain constantly about everything in his life to bitterly fearing rejection by a potential lover for being Asian. He lacks that famous other creative writing hobgoblin, character consistency, in one way–he is absolutely inconsistent in his views–and yet that ends up being what the book is about: he has no core, except a shame at who he is that destroys all his relationships. THAT is his consistency, that is his ‘flaw’. And what’s more, this gap is precisely what creates the dramatic irony that moves the whole book along.

Among the strategies I teach for character design is an idea I got from the writer Rachel Pollack, a friend and former colleague. Rachel is a fiction writer and also one of the world’s foremost experts in the Tarot. I’d seen her use the Tarot to great effect in her classes on writing and I came up with this from discussing with her how she would use the Tarot with her own work.

The idea here is for the writer to ask the questions a Tarot reader asks the cards of the querent, but to apply them to the character.

All Tarot card readings begin with a card that represents the Querent. Across this card is another representing the Situation. Then cards are rapidly laid out: What is leaving the situation? What is entering? What crowns it, i.e., what is the querent aware of? What underlies it, or, what is the querent unaware of? What is the way this looks to the world around the querent? What ally do they have that they are unaware of? What is the unexpected that is entering the situation? And what is the outcome?

Some readings include the question “What is the outcome if the querent does nothing?”

Replace “character” for “querent” inside this and proceed. And, if you own a Tarot deck, for bonus points,  perform a reading for the character yourself and engage in some Jungian coincidence experimentation (somewhat related, the tarot reading in my first novel, Edinburgh, is one I drew for that character).

Part of what this exercise emphasizes is how one way of looking at a novel as you write it is to see it as the life of a situation over time. But more, to my mind, every character is a mix of what they are and what they think they are, what they can change and what they cannot change, what they desire and what they fear. And what this exercise does is to draw lines between these forces, and put them into conversation. And it works best when a writer has written a scene they like but otherwise don’t know where it goes, though it can also work well with material that is perhaps too familiar. Because what I like about this exercise is that no matter what you think of fortune-telling, it works from the writer’s relationship to mystery, using the Tarot and the Tarot cards as metaphors for structure, and as links to archetypes. And it draws the writer’s attention into the rest of the story, out of the Flaw.

*                     *                     *

At the gym, where I watch TV news, I could only find news on how a famous black man was arrested in his home or news of how a famous black man was murdered in his home. And then footage of people photographing the famous black man arrested in his home, having beer with the arresting officer, and the president and vice president.

Bud Light discovered they were no longer an American beer more or less at the same time the rest of the country did.

Race has somehow become a cover story, a way to avoid a deeper discussion about anything, even race.

*                     *                     *

Three weeks ago I have a dream. Grandfather Chee on a street in New York, holding flowers for me, laughing and smiling as if he isn’t dead. As if his death were one of his tricks, like pretending to be sick to get us to visit Korea.

I make my way across the street and wake up before I get to him. I open my eyes feeling bereft.

He’s been gone a little over a year. My other grandfather, Grandfather Goodwin, has also appeared to me in a dream, once. In that dream, he led me through an enormous, impossibly beautiful garden.

I don’t know what it is about my grandfathers and flowers.

*                                   *                                 *

In Italy, an Italian friend tells me, stories begin with one sentence in the past tense and then the rest in the present tense.

I immediately think of the way so many stories begin in America. “So I was at the store and this guy behind me says…”

The present tense is often maligned wrongly. I think people believe you can’t represent the past through it. That you are writing a character who exists as I-Character only, and not as both I-Narrator and I-Character. But this is wrong. All across the world people tell stories this way to the other people in their lives and everyone understands them. For some reason it becomes confusing on the page.

This may in the end be why ancient Greeks mistrusted written language.

*                                   *                                 *

In Greece 2 weeks ago, I make begin making a comic. Here is a sample page:

My pre-internet brain returned somewhere in the plane from London to Athens, and on Sifnos, I read books whole in a day or two, as I used to do when I was younger. I draw, do yoga, swim. I feel as if I’ve picked up again with the person I was when I was 19.

When I leave, my life feels interrupted again. I try to understand how to fix this on the plane back and in the days after leaving the plane.

*                                   *                                 *

You might notice I haven’t been on twitter, a friend says, when I run into him over the weekend in New York.

I nod. Yes, I said. What’s up with that?

I realized all that time I spend on those things, I could be working on my loan or writing something that I can sell for actual money, he says, and chuckles.

Yes, I say.

July 11th, the Asian American Writers Workshop will be hosting a day of events and speakers on Asian American comics. This is going to be a major event, groundbreaking and

This is at the new Museum of Chinese in America, 215 Centre Street in Lower Manhattan, from 10AM to 5PM. This is a must for any comics geek, and I’d be there if I could (I’m in Greece). Tickets are 25.00 for the day, 75.00 for VIP passes. Get it while it’s hot.

Meanwhile, more on Ford Madox Ford and Jean Rhys shortly.

A truly slavish adaptation would have been better, if 4 or 5 hours long—and would have included the Black Freighter story, released as a kind of special feature the week the film went out, and which had no intrinsic value on its own. “Am I supposed to bring it into the film and watch it on my hand-held at the appropriate moments,” I remember complaining to a friend who understood, and shook his head at the idea also. The film that came out was anything but a slavish adaptation—it was a hammy, unironic imitation of what the book meant to critique. The Watchmen wasn’t supposed to be a spectacle on the scale of last year’s Iron Man, and so I knew there was a problem when it was billed to us as if it would be. The original comic pulls the very idea of Iron Man apart critically, even as it reaches towards a very earnest ending.

To be clear, the Black Freighter storyline, in the comic, functioned as a narrative intervention that also enlivened the narrative at the same time. In the comments section of various reviews, people arguing about this have complained that The Black Freighter takes them out of the story but…it’s supposed to, as a way to make the story about something larger. The Watchmen as a comic is a fragmented narrative, and the purpose of fragmenting a narrative is to break the it into pieces so it can fit around something much larger than what a facile whole narrative can contain. It implies more than it describes as a result, and the reader, when this is successful, feels the touch of something greater than the story can provide otherwise.

With this fragmentation removed from the story, the satirical aspects collapse and fall away, and the faux-naive story it became comes forward. And thus, all was quite literally lost.

Also, in all the noise from critics about how being so slavish to the book the film was destroyed–a conversation that tried to pin what was bad about the film on fanboys instead of on the people who actually made the film–what went missing was that the film was actually another case where Zack Snyder evacuated the book’s content and inserted a narrative that is about his love of the male figure and his anxiety about openly gay men.

Coming up next, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World promises to be one of the best comic-to-film adaptations yet. Directed by Edgar Wright, the director of Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, two of my favorite films ever, the story is in basically the most perfect hands it could have found. The Scott Pilgrim comics are a meatloaf of everything you could think of in pop culture: indie music, kung fu films, video games and D&D. Scott runs into “save points” at various times throughout the book, has to fight and defeat his love interest’s 8 evil exes in order to date her, and when he wins these battles receives mysterious piles of spare change, much like how in a video game you receive points you can spend as money after vanquishing a foe. At one point, a bonus is a Mithril Skateboard, which vanishes when Scott lacks the skills to use it. The Scott Pilgrim story is also drawn like a Manga comic, and yet features such real-life crises as room-mate drama, and what to do when you don’t have enough money for the bus. Or how to handle it when  your evil ex-girlfriend becomes a huge star.

Scott Pilgrim also does what The Watchmen did–uses superheroes to comment on the human condition–but it does so with humor, not moralizing, and the result is that amid what seem like colossally vapid stories, some hilarious and yet breathtaking truths about life emerge. When I teach The Watchmen, I teach it to my students as a forerunner, something that at the time was a pioneer, and that in retrospect seems a little leaden. And part of the problem with how posterity treats such things is that you can’t imagine what life was like before this or that book altered our consciousness forever. The terrible irony of the Watchmen film now is that something made during the Iran-Contra era and meant to comment on it–especially the idea that millions of human lives could be the “cost of doing business”, or that national security programs often leave us less safe rather than more so–comes out at a time when it is both most needed and least wanted as a vision of how we live now. And so the glossy toothless apparition is dismissed, and the message of it, lost to the audiences who only ever will see the film. But it is also true, I think, that the Scott Pilgrim comics are the wacky great-grandchildren of The Watchmen.

Next up for Wright is… Ant-Man.