Letters From Little Rock

Kirby: King of Comics was clearly a labor of love to Mark Evanier. Most people who read this blog probably have a pretty good idea of who Jack Kirby was, they probably know of a half dozen comic characters he created from Captain America to the Incredible Hulk to Darkseid. I would wager most of the people reading this blog probably don’t know much about Mark Evanier despite the fact that he is something of a celebrity in the world of comics having been a prominent presence at he San Diego Comic Convention pretty much forever (not to mention being the co-creator of Groo, one of the longest running creator owned comics of all time). Mark Evanier broke into comics as Jack Kirby’s assistant right about the time that Kirby left Marvel Comics for DC Comics and was present for the creation of some of Jack Kirby’s most innovative and beautifully designed comics ever. Kirby: King of Comics is not an in-depth biography of Jack Kirby, it is not a tell all expose, it is not even a thorough critical analysis of Kirby’s work. Of course it wasn’t intended to be either; it was intended to be a gorgeous art book that celebrates what was best about Jack Kirby and provides a certain amount of context for the pages (the many, many pages) of Kirby art that appear here. In that it succeeds wonderfully. It does, however, leave me wanting desperately to read the full biography that Evanier has been working on for years now. I’m not the sort of person that is eager to read all about a celebrity’s dirty laundry, but I would like to read a somewhat more candid account of Kirby’s side of several major conflicts that had an impact on the entire comics industry. I would also like to know a little more about Kirby’s response to the absolute abuse to which he and his work were subjected in the late seventies and early eighties. To me those are the interesting things that were either glossed over or not mentioned at all. The discontent Kirby felt during the end of his partnership with Stan Lee is well documented elsewhere and probably does not warrant much more mention in a book of this type and the dispute over the ownership of his original art is the stuff of industry legend so I can also understand that it didn’t receive full treatment here. But his response to the scorn and abuse that were heaped upon him at Marvel Comics after his return to the company in ’75 is something that has never really been put before the public. To be sure it is a small period of his career, but to return to a company that was making monstrous profits off of characters and concepts that were his (at least 85% of the entire output of the company at the time was the continuation of series and characters he had originated in the sixties) and to have Xeroxes of his current work defaced and posted on bulletin boards in the editorial offices must have been bitter indeed. Mind you this isn’t really a criticism. I’m certain that the full biography that Evanier is working on will give full treatment to these items; he has just piqued my curiosity to an unbearable degree, that’s all.

I feel I should reiterate that this is a gorgeous art book. My only real complaint is the complaint that can’t be helped; I wish there were more art in the book. When you stop to think about how many pages of Kirby art there are (he reportedly drew around 25 pages of comic art per week for over 25 years) you could easily fill ten books this size with rare and wonderful art. And I’ve seen a lot of this art before, but never reproduced this well or this large. It looks as though even some of the black and white art has been reproduced in full color. There are several pages that have paste ups and printers notes on them that show how carelessly comic book art was treated at times. I was especially glad to see so much of his pencil art reproduced here. As well regarded as his work is now it may need to be pointed out that in the seventies, even his best work was often dismissed as crude and ugly. Almost all of the positive criticism dealt with it as a progenitor of the psychedelic art of the sixties. It was certainly that, but that was a tiny part of what it was. For all of the talk about Kirby not being much of an anatomist, his characters all had movement and in many cases possessed more anatomical correctness than the static flayed figures of his peers. The flesh of a body is fluid in motion and Kirby captured that perhaps more fully than any other artist in any medium. It is also easy to tell from these full page reproductions of his pencil art that there are many types of shading that would have been impossible to ink for reproduction with the state of technology in comics printing in the sixties. To see those pages so lovingly reproduced here makes you stop to think what his work would have looked like if his peak had only come a decade or so later.

I’m not normally a fan of derivative works, but this particular use of the Garfield comic strip sends evil laughter roaring up and down my street, much to the chagrin of my neighbors. Actually I’ve always despised the strip. To be fair that is at least in part just my normal snobbish response to anything that is too popular for its own good. That and the soulless evil of the entire enterprise. Oddly enough I actually preferred U.S. Acres.

An odd little thing happened in my head about a week ago. Not to make too much of it, but it struck me rather forcefully. I was sitting in my chair listening to a little jazz and drinking a little coffee, basically following my after work routine as per my usual. I had picked up a book of Chinese poetry over the previous weekend and I was thumbing through it and enjoying the matter-of-fact expressions and descriptions of nature. I was drifting in the Zen zone when I was briefly interrupted by my dogs. Dogs have to go outside occasionally. When I got back to my chair, I picked the book up and realized with a start that I was in fact browsing through a copy of Raymond Carver’s collected poems. I had also picked it up over the previous weekend. Now, I know there isn’t much excuse for not being able to tell the difference between Raymond Carver and a comprehensive anthology of 3000 years of Chinese poetry, but in my defense the random opening of the book had put me in the middle of some poems that were not filled with telephones and automobiles or other obvious artifacts of modernity. Besides that the books are of similar heft and, though it’s hard to tell from the images in the links below, the dominant background color (especially on the back covers of the books) is a nearly identical light tan. Easy mistake to make.

I don’t know why this was such a total discombobulation to me, but it was. I guess the thing that bothered me so much was to know just how differently a person’s expectations could affect his reading of a poem. As a poet it would kind of bother me to know that someone who expects a poem noir experience might open one of my books and discover precisely what he expected despite the total absence of any intent or content of that type in my work. I understand how important context is, but without overstating it Raymond Carver’s poems really were ancient Chinese poetry there for a little while in my mind at least and I have a suspicion I might have performed the exact opposite feat of mental gymnastics if I had opened the Chinese anthology to Han Shan while expecting Carver. I’d like to think that the choices I make in diction and meter make a difference in the meaning of my poems, that the entire meaning of the poems I write is not dictated solely by a reader’s false impression and preconceived expectations. The very idea that I could be read as anything other than what I am distresses me. I don’t very much wish to be thought of as a beat poet or as a surrealist or as a post-modernist. I’m not sure why it would bother me to be misread so badly, but it would. So please don’t make the mistakes I have made, read the name on the cover twice before you crack the book open, and if you like a little splash of something-something in your coffee, at least splash it in after you’ve certified your reading expectations and reading material are cohabitating the same mental landscape.

On the other hand experience is real whether you understand it or not. In fact, I’m willing to state that Raymond carver is currently one of my favorite Chinese poets and probably always will be.

The job is starting to be a major source of stress again. It seems like we go through this every couple of years. Reorganization that is. Or disorganization. What ever you want to call it, it has made me stop and think, “five years ago when I thought this place was @#&@*! up like a football bat, those really were the good old days.” I guess a lot of it has to do with the fact that every time we think there is a light at the end of the tunnel it turns out to be just another train on a collision course with ours. I have sneaking suspicion that every job feels that way a lot of the time if you are the kind of person who has a modicum of dedication and feels obligated to earn your pay, but lately I think we’re even stressing out the slackers.

On the other hand my next book is coming along nicely. I had planned to have it out in the spring of this year, but I may hold off until fall. There are a couple of things that I have already grown to question about it and I think it is really a kind of transitional work in a way. It’s hard to think of it like that when it isn’t even complete, but I see a lot of subtle changes in it that are probably not going to be obvious to the casual observer. Mostly it’s that I have a broader view in this than in my other two books, but at the same time a sharper focus.

I think.

I haven’t written anything new in a couple of months and that is usually a pretty good sign that I have gotten something out of my system so I can move forward to a new mode of expression so I’m a little nervous and expectant about what the new phase may turn out to be. Maybe that is what is exacerbating the work stress. I have coworkers who are more directly and negatively affected by what is going on because they have had to work seven days a week except for a handful of holidays for almost a year and a half now. When you do that your body becomes almost immune to the elevated background level of adrenaline. I know because 2005 was a similar sort of year and it took me almost all of 2006 to actually relax and enjoy a weekend off from work. Working 60 and 70 hour weeks is not just counterproductive, it’s a waking death. I hope we have found another light at the end of the tunnel, and I hope this one will not turn out to be the midnight ghost. Even first class freight trains are a bummer of a ride when they’re on the wrong track.

After my last WordPress upgrade I had technical problems that resulted in the loss of a number of posts. Since work was rather busy at the time and I was working on a book as well, I didn’t take time to figure exactly what was wrong. Basically I just put the blog on hold until I had time and energy to devote to some fairly serious trouble shooting. When I began fiddling around with my files prior to upgrading to WordPress 2.3.3 I figured out what was wrong and corrected it. Somehow I had created two admin folders with appalling results. At any rate, work has slowed down (sort of), my book is completed and released for sale, and I’m blogging here again as though it were of consequence to anybody but me. I plan to steer clear of sports blogging in the future since it’s addicting and ephemeral. With the exception of course of my fantasy football league; I’ve just joined a league for next season and they seem rather fanatic about it. I’m sure I won’t be able to resist occasionally praising (or lamenting) my acumen as an evaluator of talent.

I’ve been seeing more of an old friend lately, hadn’t seen him in almost twenty years even though I’d heard he was back in town. We have a few things in common, similar taste in music (we both have an affection for roots music of various sorts, folk ballads, bluegrass(he actually plays in a fairly successful bluegrass band called Runaway Planet), dead hillbillies of all sorts, that kind of thing), similar taste in pop culture, similar taste in literature apparently. The thing we have most in common though is that we’ve never met anybody’s expectations. I didn’t go to college despite the decent ACT score and scholarship offers, he went to college but unlike most folks of our generation didn’t fall prey to the mercenary approach to a degree and a profession and instead went to Germany to study philosophy. Most of my friends from high school are highly successful and would have been successful in almost any field they chose. There are a disproportionate number of engineers in our little circle of friends, but most of them could just as easily have gotten medical or business degrees and their lives wouldn’t have been much different. Me and old Steve took a different path and that kind of ties us together in some way.

I spent the fourth hanging out with him, mostly just conversing about balancing the creative and commercial aspects of grown up life, but also exchanging opinions about a lot of music and books that nobody else I know even cares about. With Steve it doesn’t take much to go from Segovia to Bobby Thompson to Seldom Scene to the Violent Femmes and from there it’s just a short hop to Knut Hamsen by way of Bukowski. It’s funny how much of that comes from having watched the same reruns and read the same comics in high school. He’s still one of the handful of folks who actually laugh at my jokes. I normally don’t talk too much, most of my conversation is expended on phrases like “is that so?” and “really? I did not know that”. I actually talked myself hoarse that night. To the point that I willingly drank water. Most of the people I can talk about music with are not into the same kind of things that I am, mostly they are younger and get excited about things like Nine Inch Nails and Smashing Pumpkins that just seem so tame and by the numbers to me that I kind of glaze over and find myself thinking about people like Lou Reed and The Stooges and actually that’s the only point of intersection I seem to share with the twenty-something’s out there. Now if they will only do their homework and pick up some Freddie Hubbard or Lee Morgan we’ll really have something to talk about. Well, Audie of course knows all when it comes to music (Back when he worked at Barnes and Noble he shocked me one night by not only knowing who the Skillet Lickers were but by knowing that they might be shelved under Gid Tanner instead.) but he’s so much younger than me that we don’t share a lot of common experience as a frame of reference. With Steve it’s not just the fact that we grew up on the same reruns when reruns were actually reruns and not the sole content of a hundred cable channels, I think it’s also that we both knew what it was like to live outside of the main current of American culture from a fairly young age. Maybe it’s just that we’re both a little weird. After all the first thing he noticed the first time he was in my house was that I had ear plugs on the kitchen counter and this struck him as perfectly normal and didn’t require any comment other than, “you too?”

Yeah, me too.

Well, I’m still making good progress towards being a grouchy old man. I came home from the grocery store to a yard full of kids playing ball, and within twenty minutes or so I felt compelled to ask them to “go play ball in someone else’s yard”. I normally would have put up with it for a while longer, but my neck is out pretty bad again and I didn’t sleep at all last night.

Let me back up a little, yesterday when I got up I threw my neck and shoulder out just in the act of getting out of bed. That’s pretty depressing. I suffered all day at work, and when I got home I had no intention of doing anything but going straight to bed. However my dog had a severely swollen face. Just on the right side. My first thought was an insect sting of some kind, but I wasn’t sure if there wasn’t a chance that it was an abscessed tooth. I fed her a couple of crunchy treats and she wasn’t shy about eating on that side so I figured bug bite it is and gave her a couple of benadryl and figured I’d wait and see if the swelling went down. Of course I stayed up a couple of hours to see what the effect was (it didn’t seem to change at all) and didn’t get to bed until about three. I had a previously scheduled appointment with my chiropractor that I was looking forward to at nine so I didn’t expect to get a lot of sleep, but what I actually got was almost no sleep. My neck felt like it was being de-boned every time I moved. I took a couple of aspirin and got out the heating pad and if anything it made the pain worse. Well after I got out of the chiropractor’s I decided to take the dog to the vet (she’s doing nicely now, some anti-inflammatory pills some antibiotics and eighty-five bucks later). Needless to say that by the time I got home I was dog tired myself and starving, so I went to the grocery intending to stock up on hot pads and Doan’s pills, which I did. I was looking forward to a light snack and some rest only to find I had a yard full of kids whooping and hollering. Not hurting anything but all the same, I don’t have kids and I was very tired so I pulled a Mr. Wilson on them and asked them to “go play ball in someone else’s yard”. What a grouch. Most days I’m not at home when they’re out there and it doesn’t bother anybody. They don’t get up to any mischief and it’s probably a pretty good crime deterrent to have a yard full of kids. And of course I did the same sort of stuff when I was a kid, private property is pretty near invisible to most kids. But sometimes when you get just a little older, there’s nothing as important as a nap.

This has probably been the busiest couple of weeks I’ve had at work since I don’t know when. I used to have a couple of fellows in the office with me who had the same job duties I have but in different departments. We were all under different managers, but the same director. Those two lucky bums are both on dayshift right now and my lot in life is to be the last man standing on second shift. It wouldn’t be so bad but we are currently trying like the devil to iron the kinks out of a new engineering/manufacturing process and still not run afoul of the FAA, so things have been a little hectic the last couple of weeks. I’m not normally the type to stress out too much about work or take it home with me, but I have to admit I’ve been bugged and it’s creeping into my dreams lately.

I can usually tell when things are getting me down because for some reason I always have dreams about school when I’m stressed. Usually though it will be some weird combination of school and work. There were times back when I worked at a warehouse and had to work a lot of twelve and fourteen hour days, that I dreamed I had to pass a spelling test or something before I could load pallets on a truck, or maybe I would find myself in dispute with my supervisor and wind up having to go to detention hall. I’ve had that type of dream abut every other night for the last two weeks. I barely remember the one I had last night, but the general gist of it was that my high school friends and my coworkers and I were all employed at some kind of boy’s ranch/flying boat excursion service and there was some danger of not going to college if we didn’t make our flights on time. It was pretty neat to watch the flying boats take off because they were roughly the shape of a paddle wheel boat except with big stubby wings and a tail. They pulled a kind of Disneyland stunt on the passengers. They would take off from an ocean front area and fly around the city for a while then the pilots would pretend they were having engine trouble and make an “emergency” landing in a canal and boat their way around the city and wind up back at the harbor. Meantime me and my buddies were trying like the devil to get one up and running and someone cheated on a true false question and the flying boat took off with one of its wings held on with duct tape or something. Needless to say it crashed. The odd thing was that we weren’t really upset about the fiery deaths as much as the idea that we would have to repeat a grade and not make it to college on time.

Weird little dream. I didn’t get to finish it though because someone was making ungodly racket on the street in front of my house at 7:00 in the morning. I couldn’t figure out what it was but it sounded like someone dragging a metal trashcan down the asphalt.

I was thinking yesterday while I was at work that I was overlooking something. For years I used to work in a warehouse that expected us to be at work before sunup and stay until after sundown most days. There were plenty of days that it was rather like working in a cave, especially during the winter months when the days were short anyway. Unless I made an effort to go outside on break it was easy to lose track of the weather entirely. There were several occasions I worked through tornado warnings and never even realized we had had more than a friendly little shower. I was thinking about that without really paying much attention to what I was thinking. What I was really thinking was about how far away some of the departments I have to visit on a nightly basis have become. The business I work for is expanding and the footprint of the facility keeps becoming more and more splayed out. I have to walk further and further to perform the basic functions of my position. Despite the fact that I have basically a desk job at this point I probably log more miles than I have since the days when I was working in a warehouse. However most of those miles are outdoors now. It’s something I might not have noticed or appreciated if it hadn’t been raining. It’s hard to explain to a lot of folks that one of the perks of the job is the occasional stroll in the rain. Heck, sometimes there’s even freezing rain, you can’t get that working inside.

Once again I’ve been outsmarted by an appliance. A couple of weeks ago at work I was discussing food with a coworker and the subject of rice came up. I’ve been a single man for a long time now and for years I really couldn’t afford to eat out very much so, fact is I’m a pretty good cook by this time. One thing I mentioned to him that always has been pretty hit or miss with me though is rice. I like rice to be perfect. My mother always cooked rice until it was a sticky soupy mush that I didn’t care a whole lot for. I always tend to go to far the other direction and use not quite enough water. I’ve gotten to where I can make rice like I like it about 85% of the time and my co-worker said I should buy a rice cooker. Makes perfect rice every time. His wife is Filipino so he frequently shops at Asian food stores and he told me that was the best place to buy a rice cooker because the models they have are better than the ones you can buy at the average department store even if they are a little more expensive. I got impatient and went ahead and bought a medium priced one at Target. My first time using it, I discovered that, while the rice it makes is pretty nearly perfect, it forms a kind of a skin on the bottom of the cooker. It’s no big deal, but it seems like a waste. I mentioned it to my coworker and he assured me that this was not normal and I should have bought the more expensive kind.

Well, I did the next best thing. Next time I was in Target I bought a cheaper model. My thought was that it was only fifteen bucks and there was a possibility that the first one I bought was defective, so I’d try the cheaper one, if it worked to perfection I’d take the more expensive one back, if it worked the same, well, it was only fifteen bucks right? What I did was I cooked rice in it tonight and found that yep, there was that same skin. It doesn’t affect the flavor of the rice so I went on about my meal and when I was cleaning up I discovered something. Namely, I’m an impatient idiot. The skin apparently is a temporary thing that disappears after the rice sits for about ten minutes. So now I have two perfectly functioning rice cookers sitting side by side and laughing at me.