Things I Read Today

Henning Nelms' "Magic and Showmanship: A Handbook for Conjurers":
"The Japanese define an artist as 'one who has the ability to do more and the will to refrain.' This definition covers showmanship as well. Showmanship adds glamor and drama. However, if we try to give any routine more importance than it will bear, we destroy the illusion and may reveal the secret."

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William Gibson's "Spook Country":
"She was fascinated by how things worked in the world, and why people did them. When she wrote about things, her sense of them changed, and with it, her sense of herself."

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Grant Morrison's "Final Crisis" (Issue #5):
"If your superheroes can't save you, maybe it's time to think of something that can. If it don't exist, think it up. Then make it real ...

Was there ever a word you tried to imagine? The sort of word that could remind you who you truly were inside? Maybe it's more than a word ... it's a face, a scent, a voice. Like a memory of a place where someone cared only for you. A name."

Buried Treasure

The Graveyard Book
by Neil Gaiman

Nobody Owens, more-familiarly known as "Bod", finds life in the graveyard – and finds life good. The graveyard is his whole world; where he plays with friends, where he sleeps in his adopted family’s home, where he learns what he needs to survive. His friends and family are the buried dead of the graveyard whose spirits live on eternally.

Orphaned as a toddler by a mysterious man named Jack, Bod grows up among the spirits and other beings (most especially his guardian, Silas) who watch over Bod, teach him their ways and, as best they can, the ways of the world outside the iron fence. Too soon for all concerned, the ways of that outside world intrude in a dangerous way and Bod must learn his final lesson from the spirits: how to live.

Author Neil Gaiman (Coraline and Stardust, among others) wrote this Young Adult fiction as a take on Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book”. Being more familiar with the Disney cartoon than the actual stories, I do not find too many exact, one-to-one, characterizations here -- and that is not a bad thing at all. Sure, “Jack” is Shere Khan the Tiger, Silas is most-likely Bagheera, while Bod is, of course, Mowgli – but in the end, it does not matter.

Here is what matters:

Silas said, "Out there, the man who killed your family is, I believe, still looking for you, still intends to kill you."

Bod shrugged. "So?" he said. "It's only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead."

"Yes," Silas hesitated. "They are. And they are, for the most part, done with the world. You are not. You're alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you're dead, it's gone. Over. You've made what you've made, dreamed your dream, written your name. You may be buried here, you may even walk. But that potential is finished."

An exciting and clever book, nevertheless "The Graveyard Book" really won me over with its great heart and honesty. There is no sugarcoating the terror, and the trickster Bod often falls over his own faults. His foibles are not necessarily well-intentioned ones, either.

It is a book in which the experience of reading it winds up like life itself. At the end of our own time, many most likely do not want an end. We would want to keep going or sometimes would even want to start over. I felt a strong urge to start re-reading “The Graveyard Book” again at the end of the final page. If not for the fact it also makes me want to get out there and live even more. No time for someone else’s stories -- live your own.

What rushes through our veins

I read this a little too quickly last year, but some of its scenes keep cropping up in my head...

In Warren Ellis' Crooked Little Vein, the search is on for the Secret Constitution of the United States, dragging private detective Michael McGill through all the dark secret places crawling beneath America's red white and blue crust. But despite the prevalence of perversions and addictions there's a bump in the road that sticks with me in this election season:

McGill and his guide Trix travel through the sexual and pharmaceutical byways of the nation and eventually the clues take them to Las Vegas, to the newly-opened Freedom Hotel. The Freedom is shaped like Rio De Janeiro's giant Jesus, but in the Vegas version Jesus is dressed in an Uncle Sam suit. And all the flag-waving grows tackier from there. It's the kind of a place where they'd have red, white, and blue toilet paper.

Trix gets upset with the receptionist and McGill drags her to the elevator:

"These people just work here. They didn't build it." explains McGill... "you want to kill people for being dumb?"

Trix answers in the affirmative, so McGill continues:

"Look," I said. "You don't get to keep the parts of the country you like, ignore the rest, and call what you've got America. You didn't vote for the president, right?"

"Fuck no."

"No, I bet she did. Half the people in America did. More than half the people in America believe in God. You don't get to just ignore that. I know you like telling me about new stuff and showing me that there's a whole other society in America and all that shit. So now I'm showing you: this is what the rest of the people have, okay?"

And this is not the point of the book, it's just one of the points along the way. Read it for yourself.

We're one side of things from others, but if all we see is our own truth, then how are we better than those "narrow-minded idiots" we see skulking around on the "Other Side"?

Flipping through channels: Bill O'Reilly had on some woman who was a born-again Conservative of some kind, shaking her head that she found she was lying to herself all the time she was "Liberal" and she couldn't live with the lies anymore, so she became saved by Conservatism. I don't know who she was and I don't really care: she could have been someone interviewed by Keith Olbermann about how they couldn't live with the lies of being a Conservative. The sincerity was the same.

This isn't mathematics where only one answer is possible, this is people-stuff where answers are neither neat nor permanent.