Edifice: A Graphic Novel

 

Edifice: A Graphic Novel by Andrzej Klimowski
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was drawn in by a blurb written by the Quay Brothers. While they are my favorite movie directors of all time, they . . . might not be the greatest of graphic novel aficionados. Yes, I'm well aware of their background in graphic design, and I am rather fond of their Black Drawings. But with this blurb on Klimowski's book, I think they might have jumped on the hyperbole train.

I liked Edifice but did not love it. I appreciate the attempts to impart meaning or to deconstruct meaning through a series of darkly surreal, if fairly plain, charcoal sketches interspersed with some limited dialogue. Perhaps if I took phenobarbitol and listened to Penderecki and Ligeti while I read, I might have been in a more receptive mindset. But without sensory enhancement (or suppression), I see mostly a neat little graphic novel with rather ordinary (I'm talking execution here, not subject matter) charcoal drawings and the occasional clever twist of perspective and/or chronology. In other words, it's no Cinema Panopticon, Quay praise aside.

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The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

 

The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality by William Egginton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Anti-nomy: 1. a contradiction between two beliefs or conclusions that are in themselves reasonable; a paradox. 2. William Egginton's favorite word.

A work on logical brilliance requires a text that is logically brilliant. While most would agree that Jorge Luis Borges, Werner Heisenberg, and Immanuel Kant were among the most beautiful minds the human race has expressed, putting their works to the general public in a clear manner is a fool's quest. Or, at least I'm too foolish to try such a feat.

Egginton does. And while he excels in examining the biography of each of these thinkers, the explication of their insights becomes long-winded to the point of confusion. There is a reason the words "clear and concise" often appear together. Meandering about in such already-troubled waters as quantum physics, late-stage philosophy, and high-concept literature only causes paths to cross so many times that the reader can become lost. They recognize the path's they've already crossed, but approaching them from so many different angles in rapid succession is dizzying (for us dumb people).

Perhaps this is why I appreciate works such as Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid or Hierarchy Theory: A Vision, Vocabulary, and Epistemology so much. They are as long as they need to be. No longer. And while I admittedly do not fully grasp those works, I could always sense the thrust of their arguments - their beginning, progression, and goals - even if I didn't fully grasp the final product. There is a certain . . . pardon the pun . . rigor in these works that I found, not absent, but muddied in this book.

This is not to say that I didn't enjoy reading the work. On the contrary, I greatly enjoyed the biographical sections on each of these men, in particular. I've always loved Borges' fiction, for example, but knowing what I know now (from reading this book) about his biography, I think I've found a kindred soul in many ways. I won't go into details because I don't want to impugn anyone I might inadvertently "expose" (past or present). Let's just say that when you're in a foxhole "together," you become friends fast, and Borges feels like a friend now.

The sections on Heisenberg and the Nazi question are also insightful about the human desire to live and survive under a regime that is so far out of the norm of human decency; the ways that one "makes do" and subverts such regimes by subversion and careful deflection. While never excusing facism or its adherents, Egginton provides a nuanced analysis of Heisenberg's choices as a scientist and a human vis-a-vis the Nazi regime.

And Kant is presented as a man on borrowed time performing a philosophical race against the clock before death inevitably takes him. While somewhat speculative, the author does an admirable job of getting inside the philosopher's head and heart, turning one man's quest for the ultimate answers to being into a bit of a thriller.

In essence, though, the thesis of the book can be boiled down to Heisenber's quote: "We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning". This is repeated in many ways throughout the book, but the essence remains the same. We are only as smart and observant as our observational tools. We do not see reality, we see our sight of reality. I am reminded of the argument that in order to prove there is or is not a God, one must see everything, but one must do it all at once, in all times and all places, in order to prove, once and for all, that there is or is not a God. In other words, one must become God to prove or disprove God.

And that, my friends, is an antinomy.


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Death In Spring

 

Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Two threads tied me up in this book. 1) the cover: Yes, I am a sucker for good covers. And for some reason this one had echoes for me of Brian Evenson's The Wavering Knife (possibly my favorite short story collection of all time) and A Collapse of Horses , as well as my own Heraclix & Pomp, and 2) the recommendation by the always spot-on Sam Pulham of Sherdstube, the single best book-tuber out there.

Upon cracking the cover and peeling it open (I use this phrase quite intentionally - those who have read the book will understand the grim reference), I found that the surface impression of an affinity with Brian Evenson's work was something that ran much deeper. Surreal, bleak, and inexplicably violent, with a tone of Magic Realism gone horribly wrong, this book precedes Evenson's presentation of the same by a good many decades and makes me wonder if Brian hadn't read Rodoreda's text early in his career. If not, they both came to the same place, stylistically speaking, or at least in that signature tone. The book crosses the line between fable and memoir, but the memoir of a young (later older) man living in a village that is full of violent rites like the sewing up of the dying in the Dead Wood . . . after filling their throats with concrete so their souls cannot escape (like many of the bizarre traditions carried out here, it's never explained why the soul's escape is a bad thing).

The cycle of violence goes through many manifestations and rituals, all of them unexplained, just cultural "givens" that one lives with. I suppose this has something to do with the genesis of the work in Franco's Spain. Populations under dictatorships tend to merely accept the violence imposed upon them with that familiar phrase (which I hate) "it is what it is". The inhabitants of Rodoreda's Death in Spring are no different. Imagine an entire society of Kafka's antagonists, all in on the game, but no one knowing why the rules are what they are.

This vortex of ritual violence also takes what, in other hands, would have been a simple "coming of age" story and twists it back in on itself in such a way that the antagonist "grows up" to become his father (whom we witnessed sewing himself up in a tree in an act of self-annihilation before being "rescued" by the villagers, if only long enough to pour cement down his throat and inter him in the tree again). Even the "boy's" step-mother becomes his wife (so far as I can tell) who abandons him when their child is killed by other children in the village - by this time, the boy has become a man resembling his father in most every way, most notably by the disfigurement of his face from being forced to swim the river that runs beneath the village (to ensure it will remain stable) and having his forehead torn off on the sharp rocks in the dark tunnels under the village.

This one is not for the faint of heart. Nor for the overly empathetic. If you are currently struggling with depression, this is NOT the book for you.

If you are ready to dive in, though (pun intended), to a book that will move you in strange ways and that contains some beautiful poesis. Perhaps it's time. And time. Again. And again. And again.

I'll leave you with a beautiful bright spot (there are a few, despite the overall angst of the work), something wistful and sweet (n.b., "Mourners" are a kind of bird, named for reasons that you can gather from your reading):

I jumped back into the river. The water that enveloped my legs still seemed to hold her. We had been in this water together. Mourners were flying above the blue and purple river, beneath the branches, searching for mosquitoes and soft grass. Night arrived, and suddenly I scarcely knew my way back to the village: from Pedres Baixes to the slaughterhouse and from the slaughterhouse to the Pont de Fusta, where the river beneath the bridge transported stars and pieces of moon.





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Stones Beneath a White Star

 

Stones Beneath a White Star by Martin Locker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was speaking with someone recently about teaching young children complex concepts. This friend is a teacher of very young children (three- to five-year olds) and is tasked with teaching them some advanced concepts. She was concerned that these kids were never going to remember these principles, though they might integrate them subconsciously, the same way that back in our secondary-school grade introduction to trigonometry and pre-calculus, we all said "we're never going to use this stuff". That turned out to be true for most of us, though our brains were permanently rewired, ever so slightly, to form thoughts in a new and different way than we had done before. All of this aside, we agreed that while these young kids probably won't remember a thing about what was said to them, they absolutely will remember the way they felt when they were being taught. I can attest to this. I remember my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Wells, not because of the things I learned, but because of her kindness and patience and her great sense of humor. I remember her reading us the Winnie the Pooh stories and her spot-on voices (with the Disney movies as her template). And I remember her encouraging my reading, even recommending me to what they called the "talented and gifted" readers program for reading and writing. I didn't even fully comprehend what that meant, but I remember the way she made me feel: special, recognized, an individual. I'll never forget her. I can't even name my second or fourth grade teachers, but Mrs. Wells; she was an icon.

I share this because of the way Martin's book Stones Beneath a White Star made me feel. If someone asked me what the book was "about," I would stumble and mumble my way through an answer. Something about friends and loss and mysticism and mountains and reconnecting with the past . . . mumble mumble mumble . . .

It's tough to pin it down. But I know how the book made me feel.

Excuse me while I get a little personal. I'm hardly on social media these days (intentionally), so I don't spill my guts like some people do regularly. So, humor me. I'll try not to be boring. And maybe this indulgence will say a bit about the book. One caveat: I am a pen pal with the author. We write each other, pen and paper, yes, the old-fashioned way, irregularly. As a result I've gotten to know Martin a little. I apologize if you think this shades the review in any way, but hey, it can't be helped now, can it?

What I didn't say about my experience with Mrs. Wells above is that I was living in Italy at the time. My dad was military - I was what is colloquially called a "Military Brat" (hey, if the shoe fits . . .) - so I lived in a lot of different places through my life. I sometimes wonder if Air's song "Universal Traveller" wasn't written for me (did I mention the word "brat"?). I've been around . . .

One problem with having been around is that some of the places I lived, I can never visit again. The Air Force base I was born at in Germany is now a US Army base, the base where we lived in Italy, San Vito, is abandoned and off-limits, the base in England where I spent most of high school is now a British spy base (though I can, and did go on a tour of some of the base a few years back, "my" house is strictly off-limits), and the house I lived in when we were in The Philippines was buried under volcanic ash and the base abandoned by the US military. In essence, a lot of my childhood stomping grounds are either inaccessible to me or just plain don't exist anymore, though I have written a bit about my dream-life in one of those places.

This makes me a little melancholy. While many people can just drive (or even walk) to their childhood home, I just can't. I can get bits and pieces and visit places near some of those places, but time and circumstance have effectively banished me from my own childhood. It's a little more than mere nostalgia. I am haunted by the ghosts of the places of my past.

And here we have a segue into why I feel the way I feel about this book. Stones Beneath a White Star is the most profound work of Psychogeography I have ever read. It is about the spirit of a place, in this case, the Pyrenees Mountains (where, incidentally, my ancestors on my father's side hail from, generally - though they lived in the Basque regions, while this work takes place largely in and around Andorra). The religio-mystical history of the region is dealt with in encyclopedic depth. The book as historical treatise on the area is exhaustive, thick with referents and nuances that I admittedly know little or nothing about. But this didn't affect my reading, outside of wanting to know more about the people, events, and places portrayed.

The real rub of the book is the intimate connection of a few close friends and fellow-believers to the land itself. Their connections to each other (and some of those who have passed on before them) provide the engine for the story (such as it is). These relationships, between people, the land, and the history of the land, is absolutely immersive. I cannot say what the book is "about," nor do I care. This is the kind of book you just live in, for the moment, a meditation on friendship, loss, and retrieval, of the fluctuating bonds of love despite the catastrophes and disappointments of living life on this planet. It is a novel about the resilience of friends finding peace in a broken world.

You can probably see where this is heading . . . I live in a world of broken memories, unretrievable. I'd like to think this isn't just a function of mawkish nostalgia. I literally can't go back. But the memories still haunt me. Needless to say, this book affected me . . . deeply.

Thank goodness that while much of my past is bricked off (or behind barbed wire), one thing persists, despite location, and that is meaningful friendships. I've made and lost many friends throughout the years (as I get older, I lose more and more), but as I retain some ties over the decades and form new friendships with people I've not known before, whether intentionally or through pure happenstance, there is connection. And this connection is something to be nurtured, something sacred.

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The Hashish Films of Customs Officer Henri Rousseau and Tatyana Joukof Shuffles the Cards

 

The Hashish Films of Customs Officer Henri Rousseau and Tatyana Joukof Shuffles the Cards: by Emil Szittya
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I picked up this collection of Emil Szittya's prose poems(?) on a lark while visiting my favorite bookstore in the state of Wisconsin, Within Things. I had gone up there to pick up an album by new-to-me experimental ambient artist Elodie and came away with the album, a copy of Damian Murphy's The Bastion Overwhelmed, a friendship with the owner and his wife, and a copy of The Hashish Films of Customs Officer Henri Rousseau and Tatyana Joukof Shuffles the Cards: (A Novel against Psicho-Analise). A nice little haul on a wonderful summer day up in Door County.

As is usual with Wakewood Press offerings, we start with another great intro by translator W.C. Bamberger. I have been impressed with their opening essays time and time again. I would love to see a collection of Bamberger's short essays, each of which is a gem of information and erudite literary analysis. I could read his essays all day long, they're that good.

With Szittya's work, we begin in the border regions of Surrealism, with Dada on the horizon, but not quite free of the grasp of "traditional" writing. In short, it's getting weird, but not weird enough to be really interesting or compelling.

Out of my sadness I paint garish posters for illuminated dilapidated houses. My train has just steamed off with a spring landscape. It is hateful to be a clown.

"Gabriele's Opinion of My Hashish Hours" is the first section of this book that lives up to the promise of the surreal as a mechanism for breaking through to a more honest world by crashing through the gates of semi-structured nonsense into the ridiculousness of existence. This is over halfway through the volume, so it's a slow start. I'm fine with slow starts, in fact there are places where I prefer them. But for such a short book, the velocity just isn't fast enough for this reader.

"The Bordello," following immediately, is a more coherent prose poem. I had hope that the book might be picking up some speed.

The work gained momentum (and elicited more emotion) as it went along. "A Stroll (for Rita Kirsten)" is particularly moving. The sense of melancholy is not stilted, as in the earlier pieces, by absurdity for the sake of absurdism.

And this highlights my biggest problem with the work. Szittya sometimes wears his heart (or intellect) on his sleeve too much. It's as if he referred to The Dada Manifesto every other paragraph to make sure he was staying "on message," though said manifesto didn't appear in print for another two years. Perhaps he wasn't adhering to the party line so much as inventing it.

Regardless of provenience, the work shows hints of "soul," but often times lacks just that. If you are looking to jar your brain into discovering new ways of thought, by all means, you've found it. I just want a little more flow to my explorations, something with a bit more soul.

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Iberian Swordplay: Domingo Luis Godinho's Art of Fencing

 

Iberian Swordplay: Domingo Luis Godinho's Art of Fencing by Domingo Luis Godinho
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I started picking my way through this work a couple of pages at a time, as the archaic language and the author's assumptions about the reader were very difficult to parse. Of course, this is a manual on a certain style of swordsmanship, not a novel or essay or short story, but a textbook. The glossary in the back was somewhat helpful, but as often as not it is self-referential, again, assuming much about the reader's background knowledge and experience.

I've been fencing, off and on, since college - foil, epee, rapier & dagger, and, most recently, messer. I'm not great, but I had good coaching (my first coach was an olympic bronze medalist), and I would feel pretty comfortable if things came down to a real duel with just about anyone (sharp blades make one sharper, as they say). But I admit that learning fencing theory was never my strong suit. So, this one was a bit of a struggle.

At a certain point, after nipping and poking at the work, though, I decided I needed to just plunge in, read, practice some of the techniques, as I understood them. That did seem to accelerate some of my learning, much the same as learning German or Latin or Swahili - immersion is the key.

Part one of the book, on "Sword Alone," was definitely the most tedious, but also the most foundational, as one would expect. A brief introductory chapter by Tim Rivera was definitely helpful, but if I could have any wish about this book, it would be that it was thoroughly annotated and illustrated by Rivera. Swordsmanship is something done in space, and trying to translate the written word into spatial movement in real-time is nearly impossible without some kind of visual representation. This was my biggest complaint about the manual - and it is a HUGE complaint.

Part Two: Sword and Shield, can be summarized: protect your hand, slash at your opponent's legs or stab him in the belly, and whatever you do, do it really, really quickly, like a snapping turtle.

There are other sections on a variety of topics, not all of which I will mention. Some standouts, though, were:

Part Four: Two Swords. Need to know how to clear a street? It's in there. Surrounded by enemies who are threatening your treasure or your lady? There are solutions to that.

I should note here, also, that in both the section on Two Swords and in Part Six: The Two-Handed Sword, there are very clear instructions on how a bodyguard should defend an individual in his charge, and there are a lot of details beyond just the proper footwork and cutting or thrusting techniques that I just would not have thought of. Things like: Where is it best to place your back (or not) at a four-way intersection? What if your back is literally against the wall? How do you defend yourself and another in those circumstances? And so forth.

I always wondered why those beefcake sword and sorcery covers and frontispieces (see: almost every issue of Savage Sword of Conan) had the hero standing and a woman kneeling or sitting at his feet. Turns out this was how people were trained to defend a woman from a crowd (royal bodyguards and such). When surrounded, you have to swing in wide arcs. If she's standing behind or beside you . . . well, it's bad optics, at the very least, to accidentally decapitate the person you're trying to protect.

Part Eight: Self-Defense and Tricks, might just as well have been titled "dirty tricks". Literally dirty, like keeping a pocket full of fine sand to cast into the eyes of an opponent who "has greater advantage" or to use against multiple opponents who justifiably want to kill you because you are a scumbucket. Godinho essentially says the quiet part out loud about how you got yourself into this stupid mess, here's how you get out, but in a more refined way. Screw honor, you've got to defend yourself! By far the most entertaining section of the book!

Will I stop reading fencing/swordsmanship manuals? Heck no. I benefited greatly from reading Cappo Ferro's Gran Simulacro multiple times in the past, and I am very much looking forward to tackling Hans Lecküchner's work on Messer fighting. I am unlikely to return to Godhino's principal work on Sword Alone (though I've taken a couple of small lessons from it), but the sections on Two Swords and Two-Handed Sword are gold - if only they were clearly illustrated.

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Censure forthcoming from Zagava

 I am thrilled beyond measure to announce that Zagava is publishing my short story collection Censure in 2026, first as a very limited slipcased hardbound edition, then as a paperback edition. 15 dark tales, 4 of them previously-unpublished, the rest from a bevy of obscure and difficult-to-find editions (some of them also very limited). The cover art is by one of my favorite artists: Odilon Redon, the Symbolist master. Exact publication date is TBD, but here is a taste of what's coming:

Link to the signed and lettered edition is here!

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