Friday, December 28, 2012

I Think DC Comics Is Breaking Up with Me

I returned to reading comics in the mid '80s, while I was writing my dissertation on attempts to define race in African American novels addressing the issue of racial passing. In hindsight, I can see how my interest in dual identities led me back to reading comics as a light relief from the scholarship, but I must acknowledge that two major factors were also at work at the time. Alan Moore was writing the mini-series Watchmen, and Frank Miller was offering a dramatically different take on Batman in his mini-series, The Dark Knight Returns. Both of these works were from DC Comics, publishers of the Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and Justice League comics. Radically different interpretations of a dystopian America, each prompted by the political inequities of the Reagan administration, Watchmen and DKR appealed to me, emphasizing the necessity for personal responsibility and resilience while also encouraging me to follow writers in a genre I had always loved but had put aside in my high school years.

This new engagement led to my continuing to follow specific writers' works and the works of related authors as I discovered them. Moore was involved in DC's Swamp Thing and Hellblazer, core titles of what would become the DC Comics' imprint, Vertigo, a line of comics intended for grown-up readers who were interested in reading horror, crime, and speculative works in the graphic format. Having been a long-time reader of Heavy Metal, a compilation magazine that at the time offered cutting-edge European comics, I found Vertigo a welcome experiment. When DC made the move of carefully segregating Vertigo characters from the mainstream universe, assuring, for example, that Swamp Thing would have only limited contact with the costumed heroes of the regular DC Universe, that the occult matters addressed in Hellblazer would stay in that title, limiting the aggravating tendency of grand, multi-title crossovers so common in the DC imprint, and that creator-owned, limited-series titles would assure a satisfying story arc in title after title, I became devoted to that imprint. I got to read Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man. I saw the horror and outrage of American culture reflected in Garth Ennis' Preacher. I suffered the serial heartbreak of Neil Gaiman's Sandman. Only rarely had the more mainstream comics affected me as these works had. I wrote conference papers about them and even published an article about Hellblazer in a national journal, an unusual but welcome addition to my professional CV.

(Permit me parenthetically to mention that I also followed the DC imprint Piranha Press, whose central title, Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, delighted me but exasperated my comics dealer at the time of its publication. Piranha was a writer's imprint that had a more outre feel than Vertigo. I miss it.)

Nevertheless, I find myself with the realization that while I have read and enjoyed Vertigo Comics for a generation now, the comics industry has changed radically in that time. Part of the change has come from its misapplication of its success in the '80s. Many in the industry, seeing the violence in DKR and thinking that it was the most marketable aspect of the work, permitted the ongoing mainstream series to rely more and more on violence as a primary selling point--rather than relying on authorship to complement its art, these comics began to play a game of chicken in seeing who could up the ante further with bloodbaths and ruthlessness, at the cost of character development and story. Entire issues of some comics would wind up being little more than a continued fight scene throughout. The other disturbing element of the industry, the more and more obvious tendency of the corporations to exploit their creators to the point of stealing their creations from them, hurt as well. Creators were dying in near poverty while huge corporations were garnering obscene profits from their work. Even DC, who gained a great deal of critical and commercial success from Watchmen, denied Moore royalties from products they labeled promotional rather than commercial. These issues, in concert with questionable editorial decisions such as forcing Rick Veitch to abandon a Swamp Thing time travel storyline where the title character was to encounter Christ and a telephone survey to determine whether the new Robin, Jason Todd, was to die in a Batman story arc, led to my understanding more and more the distinction between comics as product and comics as a means of expression. Of course, I side with the creators and grow increasingly resistant to overt editorial decisions to move mere product.

In the past year, DC has condensed the Vertigo line considerably, and, next March, DC will have ended the long-running Hellblazer series at #300--a twenty-five year run. Its doing so makes an abrupt shift in policy; earlier, in its relaunching its entire mainstream DC Universe line in 2011, DC took two characters long associated with Vertigo, Animal Man and Swamp Thing, and placed them in the mainstream DC Universe, but these characters did not have titles currently running under the Vertigo imprint at that time. DC's step of cancelling Hellblazer moves its main character, John Constantine, squarely in the DC Universe, no longer half in and half out as he has been since the introduction of DC's Justice League Dark. With Constantine, the title character will find himself set fully in the DC Universe. In diminishing Vertigo, DC Comics has made its choice to reduce the number of titles whose approach I prefer to read, a move intended to beef up its line intended for action-oriented readers. This move, along with its letting go one of Vertigo's most influential editors, Karen Berger, suggests to me that DC no longer considers me a part of the reading demographic worth its vigorous attention. DC is withdrawing from me.

At this point, it is still withdrawal. There are still great Vertigo titles, most notably Fables, a consideration of how iconic figures of legend continue to interact in the current world. Vertigo will also soon offer a mini-series written by Neil Gaiman that offers more background stories about Morpheus, the lead figure of Sandman. Grant Morrison is currently writing solid Superman and Batman stories, although his involvement with Superman ends in early spring 2013. Further, as a life-long Batman fan, I cannot help but continue to pick up Detective and Batman (Scott Snyder's writing on the latter title engages me). I have also found that Dark Horse Comics offers some titles that have the feel that Vertigo has maintained, so I am also following Mike Mignola's work involving Hellboy and BPRD. I am not quitting comics cold turkey, but I see my pull list dwindling, down to a third of its former length, and I cannot help but sense that the comics industry is cycling me out.

Monday, December 17, 2012

Newtown and News

My heart goes out to the community of Newtown.

I wrote this material in reply to an e-mail I received Saturday morning, as my colleagues and I were closing a semester and coping with the news from Newtown. My comments about gun violence, weapons fetishism, and the like are elsewhere, not hard to find. I write here about the media. I have made a few editorial changes from my original e-mail.

Good morning, everyone. I am on campus—I got here early, thinking I would get some writing in before attending the convocation, where I will be editing an article while the names get called out. I will be in DJ mode there, the way I used to work in my hometown country station, listening just enough to catch the cue for the next action. In this case, rather than waiting for a song’s end before starting the next track, I will kind of wait for student’s names I recognize to see them walk with the empty diploma holder in hand.

Last night, Middlekid took a field trip to Knoxville to hear a symphony concert of Christmas music. His band teacher made the arrangements. At home, Firstkid took over one of the couches and stayed online while Dotter watched a newly-released director’s cut of Little Shop of Horrors. In this original version of the musical, not widely released because it tested poorly with contemporary audiences, the heroes die near the end, before the giant alien carnivorous plants take over the entire world to doo-wop-influenced eighties synth. Betterhalf worked until 8:00, because her company installed new programming, and she along with two other women were getting all the files straight so doctors and health providers in the area could get paid as they should.

This morning, while on campus, I checked. Our Department of Communication does offer a course in journalistic ethics. It is a sophomore-level class.

Over the past day, I have seen nationally renowned networks place seven-year-olds on television to discuss hearing shots. I have read how the networks got the name of a suspect wrong, sending the misinformation out globally before getting the information right, and completely misrepresenting the shooter's first victim, his mother, and her relationship to the attacked elementary school. At least one journalist started approaching relatives of victims through direct messaging them on Twitter; someone called the grandmother of the shooter to ask her what she thought before she had gotten official word of the incident; the estranged father of the shooter was ambushed with a microphone, completely oblivious to the reason why until the “reporter” shoved the microphone on his face. Opinions of people on the street are everywhere, and, of course, to preserve themes, some of them are even saying that somehow the shootings are more horrible because they have occurred during a holiday season, as if it would be better had it occurred in August.

These are the networks who, in their rush to be first, told us that in the Sago Mine disaster, only one person had died and the rest of the trapped miners had survived, when it was the other way around. These were the networks who prematurely reported that the Supreme Court had determined that the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional, when the findings were the exact opposite. These are the networks who declared George W. Bush the winner of the 2000 election, networks that accepted the notion of “embedded” reporters without fully considering that embedding reporters means that someone is controlling their access to events, networks that were considered heroic when they were doing their jobs by showing the neglected atrocities of Katrina’s aftermath, night after night for almost a month. These are the networks that devote hour upon hour to pundits and commentators because, even when a newsworthy event occurs, the rush to get footage on the air conflicts directly with the need to digest the information, check it for accuracy, and explain what has happened. They apparently feel pressured to rush content, because anyone with a webcam can offer opinion, too, ranging from the distressed call for everyone to love everyone else to the declaration that we should put concealed weapons on kindergarten teachers to prevent situations like yesterday’s from happening in the future. The internet makes it possible to find someone in agreement with just about every opinion imaginable.

And, to top it off, yesterday Rupert Murdoch was communicating his dismay. Since he owns Fox News, perhaps he could exercise some editorial direction and influence that network’s take on the events. Because, after all, in a world where we are quick to blame a couple of Australian shock jocks for causing a British nurse’s suicide with a telephone prank, perhaps even a global media magnate could consider that airing inflammatory viewpoints for profit and political sway could contribute to a climate where horrors become a part of the new normal.

One of my colleagues noted that one of his mythology students was dismissive of the course content because those gods are "not real, anyway," while my colleague had attempted to demonstrate that those unexplainable forces still exist, that our human impulse to embody explanations persists. In the wake of this heart-rending incident, many commentators were quick to refer to the shooter as "pure evil," participating in that cycle of attempting to put a face on a combination of factors difficult to weigh, measure, and confront. Sometimes the resonance of a story, especially as it gets repeated in various forms, does not become immediately apparent. Only rarely have I seen immediate effect from whatever I accomplish in a classroom.

I’m heading over to an event filled with hope and relief. It’s time for convocation.

Friday, November 23, 2012

Thanksgiving 2012

Actually, today is Black Friday. Wal-Mart workers are on strike, two of the three kids (they are all home) are still asleep, and Betterhalf is about to slip out to her favorite store for a little shopping. I have not written a blog entry in months, but I have some things on my mind. Let's unpack for a while, shall we?

First of all, this holiday has not been as expected. I have pneumonia this year, brought on, at least in part, by my pushing too much to get a lot of work done this semester, teaching an extra class, presenting three conference papers, attempting to complete a book (still working on securing rights to quote lyrics, by the way), and carrying on the usual teaching and administrative responsibilities. It has been a long ride, but the semester is almost over, and I am looking forward to the spring.

I have had some modest success in publication this year, as well.

But, more important than work, always more important than work, is seeing how well my family is doing. My parents are in good health, my kids are flourishing, and my wife just loves the job she started last January. It is a pleasure to see them so happy and engaged in day-to-day life--they all have something to look forward to, and I can think of little more important than that.

I wish we could have travelled this weekend, but this little Thanksgiving has meant a great deal to me, too. I am about to start grading essays, I will get to teach again on Monday (I have been out for two weeks), and, surely, I will eventually begin enjoying the creative effects of codeine that Coleridge supposedly enjoyed--all right, that last part is a lie. I will recover from this bout of pneumonia just as I always have, and I will establish a new normal to adapt.

I hope you all have enjoyed a restful, satisfying holiday.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Long Summer (So Far) of Writing

It's been a while since the last post, but life has been pushing, and I have been pushing back. The summer began with my department's having to evacuate our building, so I have been working in a space that looks like the set for Sanford & Son, and it's been difficult to focus on composing while thinking of the moving job to come. At the same time, though, I have been writing chapters of a book to be published this fall--I am co-editing a volume of essays about the interaction of country music lyricists and American culture. My co-editor, Roxanne Harde, and I have been bearing down on this project for the last year. I am down to tweaking a chapter on Cindy Walker and Lyle Lovett (I have already written chapters on Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard, as well as co-writing the introduction with a discussion of The Dixie Chicks) and securing the publishing rights to reproducing some lyrics. I will make a big announcement when it appears.

There have been other writing projects, as well. I have been writing some poetry, and I have managed to place some, as well. I also received a few days ago Louisiana Literature's spring 2012 issue, which contains my two poems "Jones Valley" and "Copperhead." My blog's title comes from a line in "Jones Valley." I have poems accepted at a handful of journals, including Cape Rock Journal, The Connecticut Review, and Stoneboat, among others, and I will have two poems in the "Tennessee" volume of The Southern Poetry Anthology, due next year. I am also revising a couple of academic articles that will appear in scholarly journals in the next year, and I am scheduled to present two papers this coming fall semester.

Did I mention that I'm taking mandolin lessons, too?

I just want to assure you that absence from the blog does not mean I am slowing down. I'm pushing harder.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

End of a Difficult School Year

A friend commented a few days ago that I had not posted a new blog entry for a while, and, frankly, I confess that I have not felt as if I had much blogworthy to describe. The past nine months have been whiplash ups and downs, and I am seeing so many changes in progress that bearings get more and more difficult to determine.

Today, though, I am going to dwell on the positive events. I am going to leave out the usual good stuff for which I am grateful, the good health of my family and friends, the network of kind feeling, and the other award-acceptance kind of stuff that one has to acknowledge. Consider those things acknowledged. Here are the positives:

  • My wife and kids have gotten opportunities that have made them happier. Betterhalf got a better job where she feels challenged and appreciated. Firstkid is doing well off at that out-of-town university. Middlekid feels confident in what he is doing, taking to books and band. The Dotter's talents are starting to blossom--she placed in a poetry contest, she draws all the time, and she's excited that she'll be playing flute in band next year. Things seem to be paying off for all of them.
  • This past spring, I had the single best teaching semester I have had in more years than I can remember. I taught a senior-level novels class filled with bright, articulate students, many of them talented writers, as well. I also taught a graduate-level novels class that taught me a great deal in return. After a difficult fall semester, this past spring semester offered a great deal of relief.
  • I actually began feeling more like a writer this past year. I had some modest success in getting poems accepted to some respectable journals, I am co-editing a book of essays about country music lyricists (due out at the end of this year--wait for the announcement), and I have placed other pieces. My goal for next year is to feel more like an accomplished writer.
  • I am getting closer to a sense of where I fit in my work as a teacher and as a semi-administrator. I think I am finding the balance.

That's about all to blog about now. I am seeing some light.


Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Springsteen's Back, and He's Pissed

Hello, all. I have been performing feats of administrative calibration and entropy for the past few weeks, and I have not, aside from some embarrassing personal stuff and revelatory wakefulness, had that much appropriate to write about for great public consumption. I have also been waiting for weeks for Bruce Springsteen to release his promised new album, Wrecking Ball, and I have listened to it more than a couple of dozen times over the past few days. I think it is time to share some opinions with you, and, Boss, if you read these comments, know that they are from the heart. I will not make these comments pretty. I bought Working on a Dream, and, while I enjoyed some of the tracks and appreciated your paying tributes to all kinds of pop music (especially your tribute to The Byrds, "Life Itself," and the Orbison tribute of "Queen of the Supermarket"), and I thought that a couple of tracks really belonged on Magic (the title track and "Queen"), I just could not find myself loving the album as a whole. I was particularly let down by having the heavenly, loving "The Last Carnival" followed by the bathetic "The Wrestler." I realize you earned an Academy Award nomination for that song, but the repeated images of "one" as disability, culminating in the one-legged dog image, became pitiful to an absurd extent.

Because, I have to say, I think Magic is the single best album you've released in the latter part of your career, even better than The Rising, another album I deeply admire. While The Rising offers us encouragement in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon, it also expands our concepts of hope. I believe when I hear that album that you have distilled the urgent need so many of us felt for assurance in our capacity to endure and revive. I think Magic surpasses The Rising, however, in that you voice the disgust many of us feel in having been flimflammed through our attempts to survive those losses. Your songs do not always overtly attack the empowered administration at the time ("Magic" itself offers a subtle yet sharp attack), but the entire album harnesses that frustrated energy of Born in the U. S. A. and demonstrates, often with kindred musical stylings but always with the same intensity, that even a generation later we wind up resisting those same strangling, impersonal "leaders" who screw us at seemingly every turn. I have got to say that as an album, Magic stands up, track to track to track. I can and have listened to it for hours.

Oh, I'm writing as if Springsteen is reading this note. Let me back up a bit. Wrecking Ball takes all the intensity of an E Street Springsteen and broadens the sound by augmenting it with Seeger Sessions instrumentation. As a result, many of these songs are more amplified folk than rock. It works, making Wrecking Ball an Americana album pulling from all kinds of American song traditions and making a rompin', stompin' breakdown/hoedown of an album. The great majority of the album offers political commentary as the Boss takes stock of America in its second decade of the new century. By the Boss's reckoning, we are in rough shape. The majority of the songs have a setting of financial woes--even the moving love song, "This Depression," repeats "I need your heart," as if the only sustaining factor in our times is love. "Easy Money" at first sounds like carefree encouragement to make a quick buck until the lyrics reveal criminal intent. The desperation of "Jack of All Trades," which begins with a list of skills held by the singer and the jobs he can do, ends with his assertion that he would also be able to kill those responsible for causing the hardships. More often, though, the songs offer encouragement, a call to faith, persistence, and courage as well as a confidence in heart and persistence. From the comic image of the dead's waiting to reclaim their own in "We Are Alive" to the open defiance of "Wrecking Ball," "Death to My Hometown," and "We Take Care of Our Own," to the promise of "American Land" (the final track sounding like the best Pogues imitation ever), Springsteen calls on us to persist and withstand the hard times. Sometimes a rock chant makes me believe that will work. In this album, it does.

Is Wrecking Ball as good as Magic? I still prefer the older album. First, "You've Got It" is a straight love song, and that fact makes it different from every other song on the album--even "This Depression" emphasizes the financial characteristics of that song's setting. I also wish there had been one good close harmony like on "Gypsy Biker" from Magic. That last is a matter of taste, I admit, but the sadness on Magic has a grim defiance to it that the elegaic songs on Wrecking Ball could sometimes use.

But if Springsteen and/or his people find this blog, I also find myself asking if there is an intended but unacknowledged ambiguity in the opening track, "We Take Care of Our Own." In the lines "Wherever this flag's flown, / We take care of our own," and the lines, "There ain't no help, the cavalry stayed home," especially in the contexts of mentioning New Orleans and "shotgun shacks," it seems to me that a couple of things are happening. First of all, the song appears to assert that the government has not helped the poor enough (if "the cavalry," so often a symbol of help in desperate times, doesn't help, then we must rely on each other in our own communities). I also noticed that all the places mentioned in the song are American places. The fact of the matter is that with our many international obligations and engagements, our flag flies all over the world. Springsteen's song appears to be making the comment that we Americans are always looking out for American best interests, no matter what our overseas engagement happens to be and what the consequences might be to the indigenous people. I suspect that Springsteen intends for these comments to remain subtly in his work, and I am surprised to hear that the Obama re-election campaign may be considering it as one of its rallying songs. "We Take Care of Our Own" sounds to me like something the singer of "Born in the U. S. A." would be singing a generation later.

I am awfully fond of Wrecking Ball as an album, and I will likely listen to it as a complete work again and again. When Bruce delivers a state of the union album, it is spot-on and worth listening to. It's time to listen again.

Saturday, March 3, 2012

My Sense of Time Is Slipping

As March begins here in east Tennessee, we have already seen spring-like temperatures, there are budding plants in my front yard, and the grass could use a mowing. I am grading essays and realize that the semester has already reached its midpoint. I have been writing regularly, submitting regularly, and attending more meetings than I can remember. I am not certain how so much gets accomplished, and I can always think of more to do. I find myself in this situation every semester, and work offers only a version of what I see at home.

There are times when all I can do is look at my kids and try to see where they went. Firstkid is off at college, and he stands assured and happy in that part of his life. Middlekid is taller than his mom, and those baby cheeks from only last year are gone. Thirdkid has started losing that awkwardness of being too tall too fast, and I am pleased to see how comfortable she has become with herself, hoping she can keep that confidence as the added pressure of middle school starts.

I'm just checking in now. I got an idea for some writing that I need to pursue, and I have some personal editing to do--not only in my writing but in the way I will face the end of the semester. My window is open today.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Where I've Been

The break between semesters had me working hard, and I am just now returning to creative writing (I wrote a so-so draft of a poem today, but at least I wrote something). In the past five weeks, I graded a lot of final exams, polished part of an intro for a collection of essays due out late this year, finished one of the essays and wrote another one from scratch, wrote two conference papers, and made it through the first Christmas holiday with the experience of having Firstkid home from college along with the new teen and the restless tween. It was a busy time all those weeks, but here I am on the other side, wife happy in her new job, kids happy to be back at school (yes, all three of them), I happy to be back in the routine, as of five minutes ago the proud owner of a brand new rejection slip (not even a letter) from a journal whose initials spell a negative conjunction.

This afternoon, I get to re-read passages of Moby-Dick and Sister Carrie to prepare for the classes I teach tomorrow.

My department is hosting a poetry open mic event tonight, and I am looking forward to participating. I could use some creative recharging.