Books Read in 2021 # 29-32 - Classics of a sort

29. Penguin Classics Aeschylus Prometheus Bound, etc. - This is a collection of of plays that aren't the Orestes and the weird thing about Aeschylus is that he's the boring nothing of Greek Tragedy playwrights. Sophocles wrote the quintessential tragedies that formed the basis of Aristotle theories on what makes a tragedy. Euripides added psychological complexity. Aeschylus could write FIRST in the comments sections.

So these plays are about as meh as I expected. They are all about speeches without much drama. Prometheus Unbound has a lot of bitching from Prometheus and Mercury coming in to say "fuck you, you pissed off Zeus". The Suppliants has a happy ending. Seven Against Thebes mostly just serves as a lot of people staying that they are fighters. Then the brothers die. Antigone shows up. The Persians is a play gloating over winning against the Persians.

30 Daredevil Born Again by Frank Miller & David Mazzucchelli - Once upon a time Frank Miller wasn't full of shit. NO really. Ok, there was some bullshit but it wasn't the pervasive rightwing jingoism. This story is a little too comic book when it comes to Daredevil losing everything and building it up. Karen Page has turned into a junkie hooker (so Frank Miller was still Frank Miller) and she gives up his identity. Then Kingpin does his work of destroying Murdoch. It's a pretty simple morality tale but Miller does go pretty far in Matt's degradation. Maybe too far since it seems strange when Daredevil comes back.

31. What We talk about when we Talk About Love by Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish - Lish can fuck off. But on the other hand, the fault can also lie with Carver himself. Halfway through this book I was thinking of writing a blatantly promotional Medium article where I mentioned THis Other Eden by Michael Hemmingson every paragraph. It kind of fits. After all, one of the stories in Michael's collection has a character that's basically Lish teaching a creative writing class and exhorting the students to only keep in the sentences that they can completely justify. I also edited a story in a way that was as pushy as Lish when I added a couple paragraphs. Actually that's the anti-Lish since Lish loved to chop out scenes and sentences and nuance. In my editing I added a paragraph where the lottery winner remembers how it was with his bitch ex-wife when they were still young and in love and scared of pregnancy. I kind of had to do it (with Michael's permission) because that story was way too harsh. It's about a guy who wins the lottery only to find out that everyone wants a piece of him. It's pretty fucking bleak and while bleak is good I felt it needed something to mitigate the outright shittiness of all the characters. So a flashback with the protagonist and his ex-wife being sweet to each other. So it's a tragedy instead of an EVERYTHING SUCKS story.

Anyhow, by the end of this book fuck Carver. Fuck Gordon Lish. Fuck that pretentious guy that I met at a party in college who spoke in the most affected tone about how he was going to go to the University of Iowa Writing program and how much he loved Raymond Carver (although that dude's mom died shortly afterwards so well I hope he's well now, but fuck the guy he was) and fuck the University of Iowa writing program.

Anyhow even the title story isn't terribly compelling. According to a Stephen King essay Carver is way more emotional and interesting without the Lish edits. Lish turned his stories into Bad Hemingway contest entries. THe characters drink. Something happens. They talk a bit but then they drink some more. Then the story ends and you're supposed to figure out what happened by context clues, but Lish took most of those damn clues out.

32. Pogo's Will Be That Was by Walt Kelly. I don't get Pogo. I think that I should find this funny but I don't. There are jokes about the space program and the South but it's all kind of dated. At least it's not outright racist shit like Al Capp but it's got a very "guess you had to be there" deal like the Owl story from Canterbury Tales.

Books read in 2021 # 33-35 - More sort of kind of classics

33. Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne Valente - This is from the Palimpsest era as far as I can tell. The part where Catherynne was still writing prose poetry but there were actual plots emerging. So as much as I might have turned away from the prose poetry stories that Catherynne wrote at the beginning of her career (and which I actually bought for SHe Nailed a Stake Through His Head) I can still enjoy this one because it does have something going on beyond the pretty words. Basically it's a weird romance between an AI and a series of family members that is reminiscent of Bicentennial Man but with less Robin Williams. It's quite beautiful but also heartbreaking.

34. Scooby Apocalypse, vol 2 by Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis - This reminds me of the ways that Archie comics decided to turn everyone into a realistic type character for the zombie stories. They didn't necessarily work because the characters were changed with Jughead being a bitter asshole. The TV show pulled back a little and the comics brought back versions of Archie and Jughead that actually kind of fit. Anyhow most of the characters are about the same except for Shaggy. Shaggy is a hipster. Shaggy is pretty normal and you know that he's working at a coffeehouse and listening to the hippest bands. Oddly enough Jughead was the character most violently fucked over in this transition to realism. I guess these comics can't deal with the comic relief. The rest are mostly the same with Velma as the maker of the apocalypse with nano technology that turns everyone into monsters. It's got some cool scenes like future Velma as a dominatrix running the show and Scrappy Doo killing puppies to save them from his fate.

35. Classics of Western Literature Bloom County 1986-1989 by Berke Breathed - Unlike Pogo this mostly holds up. Not all the jokes are funny. Trump possessing Bill the Cat is unwelcome because fuck Trump. There's also a cartoon where the one character buys Ebony and the other character asks if they have Ivory - the joke being that Ebony is a racist magazine - as if racism would be totally over without magazines like ebony and White Supremacy isn't a thing. But for the most part it's a pleasant trip into 1980s nostalgia if you want to be nostalgic for that shitty decade.