They just walked through my door - honest! September acquisitions, Part the Third

Part the third of my new resolution to keep track of all things literary that make their way into my personal library!
In which the Mooch avalanche roars unabated,
and I make the very grave error of entering a bookstore.

Mooch Acquisitions:
  • Donald Duk by Frank Chin
    • I am not entirely sure where I heard about this book, or what created such a mammoth desire in me to own it, but it looks potentially delightful. From the description on the back, it seems to have much in common with the acclaimed by others but not entirely loved by me American Born Chinese. The unfortunately named Donald Duk, a twelve-year-old San Franciscan, comes to terms with his resentment of his Chinese family and heritage through dream conversations with an imaginary mentor, Fred Astaire.
  • Crusader's Cross by James Lee Burke
    • The first of the Dave Robicheaux mystery series, set in the Louisiana Bayou. As you might remember, I became fascinated with James Lee Burke after reading a series of interviews relating to the influence of Hurricane Katrina on his latest book.
  • Jazz by Toni Morrison
    • I have read Beloved, the first in a trilogy of novels in which Morrison is said to evoke the structure of Dante's Divine Comedy, and I own Paradise (which, as you might gather, is the third). Now, at long last (I have been putting off Paradise for several years - take that statement as you will), I have the Purgatorio section: Jazz.
  • Tamora Pierce's First Test
    • I LOVED Pierce's Alanna series when I was in middle school. I mean, I loved it with a passion for a fictional world that I fear I lost in the cynicism of my high school and adult selves. I wanted to BE Alanna, the woman knight. My fondest dream was that someone would make a movie of the series, and cast me as the heroine. Now I am afraid to return to it in case my cynical self is disappointed with it. Pierce has written prolifically beyond Alanna's "Song of the Lioness" series, while staying in the same fictional world. So perhaps I will try out less emotional frought reading territory by exploring some of her other characters. This is the first in her Protector of the Small series.
  • If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name by Heather Lende
    • An account of life in small-town Alaska by a Morning Edition contributor, I can chalk this one up to the zeal for quirky non-fiction that was born of my early love for Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals.
  • The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett
    • Although I didn't enjoy Pratchett's first Discworld novel (The Color of Magic) as much as I had hoped, I have been anticipating the arrival of this, the second in the series, with an unsettling degree of excitement. Everything about this series, it would seem, has become associated for me with an impossible ideal of fun and relaxation in reading. So I might not be able to keep from skipping it in front of some of the more serious reads in my TBR queue.
  • Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden
    • Advertised as a reinvention of the "Great War epic," which, given my current, intensive relationship with the Iliad, intrigues me immensely. At its heart this novel is apparently about the relationship between an Oji-Cree medicine woman from Ontario and her only surviving relative, who has just come back from a scarring time in the European trenches.
  • Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
    • I already own a much later volume from Maupin's "Tales of the City" cycle, but have been (I'm sure you understand) reluctant to start it before reading the earlier books. Why did I buy a book from the end of the series, you ask? Well, I think my book buying compulsion has become painfully obvious to readers of my blog in recent weeks. I have a particular interest in Maupin's work, because, like me, he had formative experiences living in DC and North Carolina, and went to UNC. Unlike me, however, he was mentored by Jesse Helms, although this mentorship did not continue into Maupin's time in gay rights activism. I can't say I really envy him the Helmsish aspect of his biography.
Bought:
  • All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot
    • Although the Herriot-inspired words "It's the sheep! They won't stop wommiting!" have been bandied about in my family since time immemorial, I have never read anything from this series or seen any part of the famous television adaptation about the adventures of a British veterinarian. And now I hang my head in shame. For some odd reason, my library includes All Things Wise and Wonderful, but not this, the first omnibus of three in the series. Apparently "wacky out-of-order series acquisition" is the theme of today's post.
  • The World since 1945: A Concise History by Keith Robbins
    • I am determined to beef up my contemporary history chops, since this is in fact the period of theatre I study. And those crazy playwrights just insist on reflecting on current events, curse 'em!
  • Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
    • A hardcover Everyman's Library edition of a novel I did not enjoy to replace the wee battered paperback version I read in college. Does that make any sense as an acquisition? I can only explain it with the feeling that it is SO classic that perhaps some day I will come to see its genius. Ah, the snobbery of the literary canon at work!
  • A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong
    • I find the Canongate Myths series, of which this is the first volume, to be a witty, ambitious idea, although I didn't particularly enjoy the first installment that I read (Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad). I have been lurking about, waiting for a cheap copy of Armstrong's introduction (which was apparently the largest simultaneous publication in history, appearing in 33 countries on a single day) to show up, and here at last I found one.
  • Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey edited by Karen Wilkin
    • Recommended by J.; I do love Gorey!
  • The Little Disturbances of Man by Grace Paley
    • I have never read any of Paley's work, and this is one of those sad cases where the news of her recent death (in August) brought this oversight imperatively to my attention.
  • A Brief History of the Smile by Angus Trumble
    • A whimsical purchase, but I can rarely resist these strange specialist histories. And, as you can see, I have quite the weakness for books that describe themselves as "short," "concise," or "brief" histories.
  • Stigma by Erving Goffman
    • I need to read this for work, and it is always recalled from me when I get it from the library. So how could I NOT buy a copy (albeit a very marked up one) for $1.50??
  • The Unmasking of Drama: Contested Representation in Shakespeare's Tragedies by Jonathan Baldo
    • Another research related purchase.
  • The Columbia History of the Twentieth Century ed. by Richard W. Bulliet
    • Not as delightfully concise as I apparently like my history, but still a seductively useful looking tome.

Abandon the Old in Tokyo (1970)

This is a different world from the one I have been used to seeing in manga. In this, the second volume in Drawn and Quarterly's collection of Yoshihiro Tatsumi's work, someone vomits in virtually every story. Sometime it is pregnancy, sometime drunkenness, sometimes self-disgust, sometimes fear, but this is a world of retching and churning.

Tatsumi himself was the first to declare the difference between his fictional-realist world and the performance of dignity that often takes precedence in Japan's self-conception through manga. In 1957 he coined a new term to set his work and other alternative comics traditions in Japan in opposition to manga: gekiga. These were comics for adults, distributed differently (through lending libraries) than manga, dealing with uncomfortable subjects - brutal sexuality and violent alienation.

Indeed this is a world permeated by sexual anxiety, and unmediated by dream or fantasy. It is a world in which secrets are stripped bare: in one story a window washer witnesses his daughter's affair with her boss through a newly clean window and reacts (naturally!) by ripping her clothes off when she comes home and shoving her into a shower to be scrubbed down. In another, a comics artist can only find inspiration from the bawdy graffiti scrawled in a public bathroom (whose design - a flowing canal over which the user squats - seems more metaphorically direct about the scatological quality of artistic creation than the toilets we are accustomed to would be), and is caught sketching there by a total stranger. These are lives of tangled claustrophobia, filled to painfulness with other people and yet utterly lonely. The only people who ever reach out to the isolated everymen who fill Tatsumi's pages turn out to be whores.

As you can probably tell from these brief descriptions, there is often something contrived about the plots of these stories, which make up for their obviousness in abundant unpleasantness. The great strain seems to be in creating these harsh plot-lines, in violating the taboo, rather than in making the violation intricate. Drawn and Quarterly has laid out a project that involves publishing, each year, a collection of comics from one year of Tatsumi's career. The first was The Pushman and Other Stories (1969, publ. in English by D&Q in 2005), and this book represents 1970. I hold out hope for future years, for a boldness already present, matched with an intricacy sadly missed.


Abandon the Old in Tokyo (1970)
Yoshihiro Tatsumi
trans. from the Japanese by Yuji Oniki (2006)
***

Sing, Blog Muse, of the exhaustion of Sycorax Pine...

Sunk in preparations for tomorrow's class on a unconscionably huge chunk of the Iliad. It seems like every Monday through Thursday this semester is going to be dominated by course preparation from 8 a.m. to 10 or 11 p.m. I haven't had a moment to read for pleasure or watch even a snippet of a film. ARGH!

Luckily the Iliad just gets better and better the more time I spend with it and the understandably massive amount of literary analysis it has attracted over the thousands of years people have been reading it. Tomorrow we will probably spend not a little time discussing Helen and how sympathetically she is portrayed by comparison to the later tradition of her character. She does have a bit of a self-esteem problem for the most beautiful woman in all of history, which manifests in a tendency to refer to herself as a slut. Of course, that may just be a pity-inducing mode of flirtation. Most interesting, perhaps, is the utter disgust she shows for Paris (perhaps an echo of her own self-disgust). It remains unclear where her personal choice lies in the back story of the Trojan War. We'll see what the class thinks.