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The Drunken Odyssey

~ A Podcast About the Writing Life

The Drunken Odyssey

Monthly Archives: April 2015

Shakespearing 32.1: More thoughts on Coriolanus

17 Friday Apr 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespearing

≈ 1 Comment

Shakespearing 32.1 by John King

More thoughts on Coriolanus

I confess: I don’t get Coriolanus. Not on a gut level, anyway.

Coriolanus Folio

Perhaps one has to be a soldier to see into the hero’s spirit properly. A soldier before the modern epoch. Certainly before Ulysses S. Grant.

The idea that one’s identity can be granted stature and honor through killing on the field of battle seems like an atavistic ideal, when a soldier’s survival seemed less random, before bombs and IEDs and the fog of war would make survival seem miraculous, and reason to rejoice, and mourn, considering all of one’s comrades who did not survive.

Coriolanus has a hawkish worldview and was protective of empire, just like Dick Cheney, except that unlike Cheney, Coriolanus fought firsthand for his ideals rather than let other people risk their lives for his desire for desolation and violence.

And yet.

If valor is the chief virtue, then Coriolanus would have been named consul. Not dictator, like Caesar, but consul. But he didn’t love the common people.

The common people of an empire that he risked his life and honor for on the battlefield. The common people he has tacitly fought for. The common people who would rebel against the empire in times of peace, and let empire protect them in times of war. They are “dissentious rogues.” They are “curs that like not peace nor war.”

One has to wonder—as the mind (my mind anyway) drifts from the story, since I don’t quite care about Coriolanus, or his worthy adversary Aufidius—whom Shakespeare felt empathy for in this play. Both the citizens and Coriolanus seem to have too much pride, even if Coriolanus seems to have more legitimate cause for pride. As David Foley said last week, “Coriolanus is [Shakespeare’s] most problematic avatar of nobility yet.”

I don’t care, usually, about Macbeth either. In Othello and Hamlet and Twelfth Night, I care about all of the characters. In Macbeth I sort of like the porter. The rest are annoying, and it is a fine cast indeed that can entertain me. Coriolanus is much the same way.

Except that Coriolanus has a drinker in it: the Roman patrician Menenius.

Menenius is in the thick of Roman political life, but paradoxically strives to be above the hypocrisy of the capital by quipping his honest way like a classic Shakespearean clown, without the costume. When he encounters two tribunes of the people and anticipates their resistance to Coriolanus’s consulship, he becomes combative:

BRUTUS

Come, sir, come, we know you well enough.

MENENIUS

You know neither me, yourselves nor any thing.

He soon takes his leave by telling them, “more of your conversation would infect my brain.” Politics is folly.

Menenius’s abhorrence of cynical and hypocritical politics, his inability to serve officially and hold his tongue, puts him in the same category as Benjamin Franklin in this country.

Politics, for Menenius, is tragic folly. He cannot keep Coriolanus, having joined with Aufidius, from ravaging Rome. Menenius’s sense of identity, as a Roman, is annihilated by this.

The emotional gymnastics that bring about Coriolanus’s climactic change of heart are inexplicable to me.

If only the play had been called Menenius.

_______

1flip

John King (Episode, well, all of them) is a podcaster, writer, and ferret wrangler.

Episode 148: Jennifer Hoppe-House!

17 Friday Apr 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Theater

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Jennifer Hoppe-House, Orlando Shakespeare Theater

Episode 148 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I talk to the playwright Jennifer Hoppe-House, whose debut play is experiencing its world premiere at Orlando Shakespeare Theater,

Jennifer Hoppe-House

plus Lori D’Angelo writes about discovering The Scarlet Letter as a teenager, and reading it in a way probably not endorsed by her high school curriculum.

Lori

TEXTS DISCUSSED

Bad Dog PosterThe Scarlet LetterMirrorsThe Tin DrumSHOW NOTES

Ginger Lee McDermott as Molly in Jennifer Hoppe-House’s Bad Dog (Photo by Tony Firriolo).

Ginger Lee McDermott as Molly in Jennifer Hoppe-House’s Bad Dog (Photo by Tony Firriolo).

Check out Jennifer Hoppe-House’s Bad Dog, playing at Orlando Shakespeare Theater through May 3rd.

Read my Portland Review essay about Sylvester Stallone here.


Episode 148 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

The Curator of Schlock #84: Batman & Robin

17 Friday Apr 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in The Curator of Schlock

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The Curator of Schlock #84 by Jeff Shuster

Batman & Robin

B&R1

When you’re young and foolish, you do foolish things. Like going to see Batman & Robin because you’ve seen every Batman movie in the theater including the animated Batman: Mask of the Phantasm and excluding that 1960s Batman movie since you technically hadn’t been born yet.

The movie starts. Robin makes a joke about “chicks digging the car.” A hearty chuckle ensues. Maybe this movie won’t be so bad.

You see George Clooney as Batman. Later in the fall, you’ll be in a film class where the professor will ask who is Superman’s arch nemesis. A student will then answer Lex Luthor. The professor will then ask who is Batman’s arch nemesis. Another student will reply George Clooney. But you’re not in that class yet. You’re still, alas, watching Batman & Robin for the first time.

Batman and Robin are fighting a new villain named Mr. Freeze and his hockey team from Hell/

B&R3

You hear the first bad one-liner from Ahhhnold and hear the first Hannah Barbara sound effect. One of your friends starts screaming, “This sucks! This sucks! This is stupid!” right in the middle of a crowded theater. He’ll continue doing this for the rest of the feature. You don’t bother to silence him for being rude. He’s right. No one else in the theater tries to silence him because he is so right.

BR6

They’re really isn’t any part of this movie that doesn’t suck. Director Joel Schumacher will apologize for this travesty, but it won’t be enough. Every rubber suit in this movie has nipples. Even Mr. Freeze’s suit has nipples, and he’s impervious to the cold!

What is with all of these stupid one-liners from Ahhhnold.

B&R5

You are not sending me to the cooler? Cool Party? Stay cool, bird boy?

Other movies would come out that summer of ’97 to help you forget. Movies like Con Air, Air Force One, and Air Bud. And Face/Off! You’ll never forget Face/Off, the one where Nicholas Cage and John Travolta get their faces removed and stuck on each other. You’ll see that one three times in the theater because you’ll go with different groups and don’t want to be the party pooper. You’ll kind of only need to see Face/Off once because the whole face off and on thing will where thin on repeated viewings. In fact, the gimmick was plagiarized from Diamonds Are Forever.

B&R4

One day, you’ll be traveling to Dallas by train to visit a friend. You’ll have to catch a bus in Houston to make it the rest of the way to Dallas. While you wait in the bus station, a movie will be playing: Batman & Robin.

BR7

You’ll suffer through all 125 minutes again (That’s over two hours!). When the movie is over, the bus station attendant sticks another movie into the videocassette recorder. It’s Wild Wild West!

Your bus arrives just in time.

Five Things I Learned from Batman & Robin

  1. Plastic ice looks exactly like plastic ice.
  2. Jessie Ventura was in a Batman movie.
  3. You can judge a movie within the first two minutes.
  4. Summer blockbusters of 1997 are a reminder of why I got into independent movies.
  5. This movie really needed Jim Carrey.

Photo by Leslie Salas.
Photo by Leslie Salas.

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, and episode 131) is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida.

Heroes Never Rust #89: Dream Sequences

15 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Heroes Never Rust

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Alan Moore, comic books, Creative Writing, Watchmen

Heroes Never Rust #89 by Sean Ironman

Watchmen: Dream Sequences

When I took Introduction to Creative Writing as an undergraduate student, I was given a list of things that I could not use in my writing. I was told that my stories would be stronger if I did not include certain things, at least as a beginning writer. I have forgotten most of the list, but a few of the items were: flashbacks, drug-addicted protagonists, and dream sequences. After reading the list, I was pissed off, as many undergraduate students seem to be when given constraints for their writing. But, as I get older and more experienced as both a writer and a teacher, I believe my instructor was right in restricting the content of our work. Yes, those items I listed are used in many stories, but as a student it was important to limit the playing field so that I could learn certain craft elements before moving on to more complicated elements. I still have a habit of trying to avoid elements such as dream sequences in my own work, but when used well, they can strengthen a story in unique ways.

Watchmen VII

Issue seven of Watchmen is focused on Dan Drieberg (Night Owl II) and Laurie Juspeczyk (Silk Spectre II). Up until this issue, the two have mainly reacted to the story’s events, staying on the sidelines. But, now, they are reinvigorated and put on their costumes that have gathered dust over the years since their retirement and they go out into the night and rescue tenants from a burning building. And, in the end, Dan decides that they need to break Rorschach out of prison. Watchmen has entered its second half and it is time for the characters’ stories to come together.

The difficulty in this issue lies in getting Dan and Laurie to put their costumes back on. They have been retired for years. In a comic, at least in this one, there is no interiority, no thought bubbles. And while that may be different in prose, point of view could prove limiting at times, and it may be more interesting to show something than to tell. Here, Dan falls asleep and the reader is given a one-page dream sequence (although there are two panels of the dream sequence on the next page). In the dream, he runs to a woman dressed in a black vigilante costume. She removes his skin from head to toe to reveal that he is Night Owl, and he in turn removes her skin, revealing Laurie. They go to kiss, but a nuclear explosion behind them obliterates the two lovers. The dream itself is very obvious in its metaphor. Deep down, Dan is a superhero. So is Laurie. He was not Dan Drieberg pretending to be Night Owl. He was Night Owl pretending to be Dan Drieberg. And now that he has found happiness with Laurie, it is too late. The world will be destroyed. Finding happiness does not really mean anything. He has to protect the world or else his happiness will be destroyed. Because of this dream, he decides to suit up, and along with Laurie in her Silk Spectre costume, they head out into the night to protect the city.

WatchmenDream

The dream sequence works on a technical level because the sequence changes style from the rest of the comic. Most of the comic is told in a nine-panel grid (3×3). But, the dream sequence is told is many more panels, which are thinner. There are two rows of six panels, and the final row has four dream panels and one panel (the size of two dream panels) of Dan waking up from the dream. The reader should not be tricked. The reader should not turn the page and think what they are seeing is really happening in the story. By changing the structure and the style of the panels, the comic signals the reader that there is a change. The pacing picks up. It takes a shorter amount of time for the reader to absorb smaller panels than larger ones. Then, in that final panel of the page of Dan waking, the reader stops, hit with the same intensity that Dan is. There is no other page in the issue that is set up like this dream sequence. And it works because of just that. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons makes the dream crucial to the story, stylistically different so that readers know it’s a dream, and a combination of easy to understand and weird to take advantage of a dream state without losing the reader.

_______

Photo by John King

Photo by John King

Sean Ironman (Episode 102) earned his MFA at the University of Central Florida. Currently, he teaches creative nonfiction and digital media at the University of Central Arkansas as a visiting professor. His work can be read in The Writer’s Chronicle, Redivider, and Breakers: A Comics Anthology, among others.

The Global Barfly’s Companion #3: Virgilio’s

13 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in The Global Barfly's Companion

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The Barfly’s Companion to Global Boozing #3 by Susan Lilley

Bar: Virgilio’s

Location: 524 Duval St, Key West, FL

If you are fortunate enough to stumble into Virgilio’s, off Key West’s raucous Duval Street and a few steps down Appelrouth Lane, you should pause and savor your entrance to this velvety refuge. This is a grown-up bar. There will be (thanks be to Bacchus) no underage college students with fake IDs doing shots and urinating in the corners. Key West has plenty of those places. Most bars in Key West are open-air, windowless watering holes with boundaries so non-existent you can throw your drink in the face of an offensive lout out on the street without leaving your seat.

IMG_3518But not at Virgilio’s! Here in an airy yet enclosed garden setting you are cushioned, coddled, and bathed in dim, flickering cocktail light. Although you can get anything you want to drink here, you’re a fool if you don’t order one of their signature martinis. The generous, perfectly concocted Virgilio’s martini (preferably a classic, non-sweet one) is served in a traditional stemmed glass along with MORE of the same in a crystal beaker partially submerged in a mini-ice bucket for you to refill at your pleasure. NOTE: Key West, in case you didn’t know, is a partying town. Care must be taken if imbibing other adult beverages during the evening, and it’s best to save metabolic space for this particular bar hang. Careful pacing can help you avoid the uniquely piercing pain of the hangover P.G. Wodehouse called “The Sewing Machine.”

Live music is another reason to hang your straw hat at Virgilio’s for a few hours, especially on a good night. I have heard blues, jazz, reggae, and a night devoted to Frank Sinatra. But you will never know in advance, try as you might. It’s the luck of the draw. Last trip, the band featured a vocalist so devoted to the idea of Bonnie Raitt that she had a big white streak in her hair and opened with convincing impression of Raitt’s cover of “Runaway” by Del Shannon.

IMG_3519(1)Hey, maybe it WAS Bonnie Raitt! Not sure. Damn those mega-martinis.

 _______

Susan LilleySusan Lilley (Episode 82, Episode 85) is a Florida native. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Poet Lore, The Southern Review, Drunken Boat, Slipstream, Sweet, The Apalachee Review, and The Florida Review, among other journals. She is a previous winner of the Rita Dove Poetry Award and her chapbook, Night Windows, won the Yellow Jacket Press contest for Florida poets. Her chapbook, Satellite Beach, is out from Finishing Line Press. She was stunned to be voted top choice for Best of There Will Be Words prose reading series in Orlando for 2013, which resulted in a chapbook of memoir essays called When We Were Stardust.

Shakespearing #32: Coriolanus

12 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespearing

≈ 2 Comments

Shakespearing #32 by David Foley

Coriolanus

32 Coriolanus 3

Coriolanus is an anxious play. I’m not scholarly enough to know how closely it reflects the anxieties of its times, but it certainly reflects the anxieties of ours. First of all there are the people. What to do about the people, those “woollen vassals”? All very well to get sentimental about them when they’re marching with Henry V through France, but what happens when they turn into a mob “whose rage doth rend”? What happens when the native good sense of the people shows up at a town hall and starts screaming about death panels? Or Shariah law? Or birth certificates?

Like a lot of things in Shakespeare, his attitude towards the people is marked by an unresolvable tension. On the one hand, he’s got a commoner’s appreciation for their canny wit and a humanist’s sympathy for their burdens. At the same time, the people are fickle, easily swayed, subject, as a group, to such irrational shifts of loyalty and opinion that their movements become as senseless as a natural force. (The rest of the above quote says, “Whose rage doth rend/Like interrupted waters.”) Their persuadability without sense makes them, in Coriolanus, a pliable force for ruthless, boneheaded politicians. (It’s the combination of ruthlessness and boneheadedness that makes Sicinius and Brutus feel so contemporary.)

But matching Shakespeare’s queasiness about the people is his queasiness about nobility. Coriolanus is his most problematic avatar of nobility yet. This scarred and indomitable warrior has all the qualities of the noble soul—including a conception of honor, world, and self so abstractly elevated that he is unable to imagine his way into an understanding that doesn’t reflect his own. It’s no accident that his most passionate relationship is with his enemy, Aufidius, who, when Coriolanus shows up at his house, cries, “Let me twine my arms about that body.” (You can have some queer fun with Coriolanus, a man’s man whose second most intense relationship is with his mother and who’s always ready to “clip” another warrior in his arms.)

From a dramatic perspective, Coriolanus allows Shakespeare to do what Shakespeare does best: create drama out of the clash of immovable entities. Coriolanus gets off to a slow start—you have to work your way through some not very interesting battles that mostly set up Coriolanus’s terrifyingly inflexible nature (“Boils and plagues/Plaster you o’er,” he yells at his recalcitrant soldiers.)—but once the play gets going, Shakespeare gets a lot of dramatic and even comic juice out of Coriolanus’s inability to react to any circumstance except by the laws of his own monolithic nature.

Wherein the anxiety. Not only are there no good choices here—the people, the politicians, the nobility are all alike incapable of governing themselves much less the state—but they’re incapable of finding some common understanding by which they might proceed together. And, if they can’t do it, the barbarians, the Aufidiuses, will have the run of the place. I’m trying to think if there’s another Shakespearean tragedy that ends without some sense of a restored order, a new regime to seam together the divided state. Rome has been saved from destruction, but no one on hand seems capable of pulling the nation together. We don’t even return to Rome. The last scene takes place in Corioli, the Volscian city from whose defeat Coriolanus earned his name. After they murder Coriolanus, the Volscians bear him off, now a “noble memory” and, for them, a trophy of a civilization that was supposed to work but didn’t.

_______

David Foley

David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.

Episode 147: Scott Bailey!

11 Saturday Apr 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Poetry

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Tags

Bad Dog, Chad W. Lutz, David Kirby, Erin Belieu, Jennifer Hoppe-House, New York Quarterly Press, Orlando Shakespeare Theater, Philip Levine, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, Scott Bailey, Sharon Olds, stephen king, Thus Spake Gigolo

Episode 147 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I talk to the poet Scott Bailey, whose work is newly banned in South Korea…

Scott Bailey

Scott Bailey and Raquel Obando.

plus Chad W. Lutz writes about Stephen King’s novella “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.”

Chad Lutz

TEXTS DISCUSSED

Thus Spake Gigolo

Different Seasons

Life StudiesNOTES

The music accompanying Chad W. Lutz’s essay was “Crater” by The Spanish Donkey.

Bad Dog

Ginger Lee McDermott as Molly in Jennifer Hoppe-House’s Bad Dog (Photo by Tony Firriolo).

Check out Jennifer Hoppe-House’s Bad Dog, playing at Orlando Shakespeare Theater through May 5th.

The Curator of Schlock #83: Batman Forever

10 Friday Apr 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, The Curator of Schlock

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The Curator of Schlock #83 by Jeff Shuster

Batman Forever (Batman Forgotten)

Batman_Forever_Teaser_Poster

I tend to wax poetic about the 1980s, but the 90s were pretty awesome in their own right: Mystery Science Theater 3000, Surge Soda, and Stone Cold Steve Austin to name a few things. But above it all was Batman: The Animated Series, one of the greatest cartoons of all time. If you wanted a Batman fix, it was there for you everyday after school. They even had Mark Hamill voice the Joker, the last guy on the planet I would have picked to voice the Joker, but his Joker is now classic.

Joker

Time passed and, alas, the show had run its course. You could only watch so many reruns of the episode where Batman fights his robot double. They showed that one over and over and over again! Still, who needed more episodes of an Emmy Award Winning cartoon when Warner Bros. could just slap together a star-studded extravaganza!

This brings us to 1995’s Batman Forever from director Joel Schumacher. I liked The Lost Boys well enough. I even liked his adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera with the GQ Phantom. But I must have blocked Batman Forever out of my head.

I remember that music video with Bono where he fancied himself a Batman villain: Captain Lucifer or some crap like that.

There was that Seal video about gray roses kissing. Years later, I caught a VH-1 host singing the praises of that Seal song while exclaiming that he’d seen soft porn that had better plots than Batman Forever.

How can this be? I remember everyone I knew loving Batman Forever at the time. Right? I asked my sister what she thought of it.

“Is that the one with Michael Keaton?”

“No, it’s the one with Val Kilmer.”

“Yeah, it sucked.”

So I decided to spend the afternoon revisiting Batman Forever.

BF2

Val Kilmer isn’t the problem with this movie. I’ll be blunt: who really cares who plays Batman? Any leading man can play him. Nicole Kidman is the love interest, Dr. Chase Meridian. She has that classic Veronica-Lake-Hollywood-glamour look going for her in this film.

BF5

Chris O’Donnell plays Robin, the Boy Wonder. He was about the best we could have hoped for, probably due to the fact that studio executives never would have approved a Robin that was 10 years-old. So we got a college age Robin like the one on Batman: The Animated Series. In fact, I would say he was playing a classic Dick Grayson, albeit annoyingly, but he tried.

Chris Odonnell

Next up, we have Jim Carrey’s The Riddler. This is where the similarities to the cartoon end. You see, on Batman: The Animated Series, they made The Riddler cold and calculating, a personality trait that would separate him from a lunatic like the Joker. Not so with Jim Carrey. He’s completely bonkers here. That being said, his performance is fascinating to watch. There are times where I presume he’s totally off script (which may not be a bad thing). The Mask was a pretty good movie.

BF1

This brings us to Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face. In the comics and on the cartoon, Two-Face is a tragic character, a good man who fell from grace. In Batman Forever, he is yet another Joker wannabe. The make-up job on the left side of his face is purple. And don’t get me started on Tommy Lee Jones’s performance. It’s not only the worst of his career, but it’s the worst by any actor in the entire history of cinema.

He calls Batman a “pointy-eared night rat” in one scene.

Here’s a riddle: who wrote this piece of crap movie?

Hmmmm…

Is there a point to this review? As I said in the beginning, I was a huge fan of Batman The Animated Series and I felt that Batman Forever stole its cultural thunder. I remember getting criticized for still watching a kid’s cartoon in high school, but at least the minds behind Batman: The Animated Series gave it their all. I’ll take Mark Hamill over Tommy Lee Jones as my villain any day of the week.

5 Things I Learned From Watching Batman Forever 

  1. Batman gets drive thru.
  2. Alfred makes a sweet hamburger.
  3. Drew Barrymore was in a Batman movie.
  4. Joel Schumacher is obsessed with rubber.
  5. Congo was the best summer blockbuster of 1995.

_______

Photo by Leslie Salas

Photo by Leslie Salas

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, and episode 131) is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida.

Heroes Never Rust #88: Turning Exposition into Plot

08 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Heroes Never Rust

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Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Dr. Malcolm Long, Exposition, Heroes Never Rust, Plot, Rorschach, Watchmen

Heroes Never Rust #88 by Sean Ironman

Watchmen: Turning Exposition into Plot

At the end of the fifth issue, Rorschach was caught by the police and unmasked. The sixth issue of Watchmen deals with the fallout and gives Rorschach center stage. While the other characters kind of sit around, Rorschach is the active one. He is the only one concerned with who killed The Comedian. So far, he has been the hero of the comic. At the same time, Rorschach is screwed up. He’s barely sane. No one seems to want much to do with him, including his ex-partner, and he slinks through the shadows in his mask and trench coat. But, readers have yet to find out why. Why is Rorschach the way he is? Readers, at times, do need to understand why the characters readers are following act the way they act. Character motivation is important for readers to know. But, the issue with backstory is that exposition is boring for readers. Get back to the murder mystery. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons have their cake and eat it too. They get to keep the story moving forward and reveal Rorschach’s backstory by introducing another character.

Watchmen06

Say hello to Dr. Malcolm Long, Rorschach’s prison psychiatrist.

When Doctor Manhattan was given a focus in issue four, he was the main character of that issue. But, in issue 6, Rorschach’s issue, Dr. Malcolm Long is the main character. Rorschach is relegated to a supporting role. Think of it like a novel that is told from multiple characters’ point of views. When one character takes over, the others become supporting characters for the chapter. The issue is refocused so that the story is no longer Rorschach dealing with being in prison but now it is Dr. Long’s attempt to understand and help Rorschach. This allows backstory to be given directly to the reader and still keep the story going because as we learn more about Rorschach, Dr. Long is getting closer (or so he believes) to his goal. The issue basically acts as a mini-story in the larger Watchmen comic.

Watchmen EP 6 Page 1

Scenes in which Dr. Long does not appear in are from notes he is given after the fact. For example, a scene depicting Rorschach in line for food beat another inmate after said inmate attempts to stab him. The reader is shown the scene as if the reader was following Rorschach, but the scene is introduced with a narration caption from Dr. Long’s point of view. “The Deputy Warden just called. Apparently Kovacs was involved in an incident today, just after he’d seen me. It happened during lunch, in the canteen…” The comics medium allows for the scene to be presented in a visual manner and not stay in Dr. Long’s language. There is more leeway here than in prose, but the concept remains the same. By introducing the scene from Dr. Long’s point of view, the story stays focused on showing Dr. Long’s analysis of Rorschach, rather than just giving readers Rorschach in prison. There is a story to follow.

WatchmenPrison

If Dr. Long’s story only featured Rorschach, the issue would fail. If it is indeed supposed to be Dr. Long’s story, then readers need to be given his whole story. He needs to become a real person and be just as well rounded as the other characters in Watchmen. Throughout the issue, readers are presented with scenes from Dr. Long’s personal life. It begins innocently with Dr. Long working late hours at home and his wife makes him take a break. A few pages later, the scene is repeated. Only this time, Dr. Long refuses to take a break and his wife goes to bed angry. The story readers are following quickly becomes not one of Dr. Long helping Rorschach but one of Dr. Long being corrupted by Rorschach. He begins to see only the horrors of the world, like Rorschach, and stop believing in the goodness of people. At the end of the issue, nothing has changed with Rorschach—his own plot has not been moved forward. But, Dr. Long is broken. The final sequence features Dr. Long staring closely at a Rorschach test in the dark and the comic ends with an all black panel. “We are alone. There is nothing else.” The issue is not taken totally away from Rorschach, however. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons understand still that this issue is one piece of a larger story. By having Rorschach be the reason this seemingly fine doctor breaks down makes Rorschach’s own journey more interesting and relatable. Readers are put in Dr. Long’s place. We are also trying to understand Rorschach. And at the end, just like Dr. Long, we too could not handle the horrors Rorschach faces.

_______

Photo by John King

Photo by John King

Sean Ironman (Episode 102) earned his MFA at the University of Central Florida. Currently, he teaches creative nonfiction and digital media at the University of Central Arkansas as a visiting professor. His work can be read in The Writer’s Chronicle, Redivider, and Breakers: A Comics Anthology, among others.

Buzzed Books #24: Collage of Seoul

07 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books, Poetry

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Buzzed Books #24 by Amy Watkins

Collage of Seoul by Jae Newman

CASCADE_Template

I should tell you upfront that Jae Newman is my friend. I don’t want you to read the glowing review I’m about to write about his first poetry collection, Collage of Seoul (Cascade Books, 2015) and later feel you were tricked by a biased reader. This is going to be a glowing review because Collage of Seoul is the kind of poetry that I love: narrative but not literal, introspective but not indulgent, intimate but still mysterious.

In the first poem, “Loran,” we meet the poet-speaker, an adoptee who says that this is not a story about finding himself, but rather about finding his way to a place of confidence and faith:

        Charting without genes, without you,

        I find it hard to trust the maps and stars

        of other men. If I follow anything,

        may it be the sound I cannot hear […]

This sort of travel imagery is repeated throughout the book until it becomes a sort of deeply personal symbolism. The poems are incredibly intimate, as the poet-speaker wrestles with questions of faith, both spiritual/religious faith and faith in love, faith in himself.

The book’s first two sections recount vivid dreams about the speaker’s birth and adoptive mothers. He seems on edge, as though he could fall apart, but there are flashes of humor, and we begin to catch glimpses of the love of his life:

        […] my heaven is always only

        an inch away from the world.

        It is the distance my fingers travel

        when I touch your spine,

        the center of the universe,

        reciting those archaic words, I love you.

Although he uses the same imagery to write about his wife, she grounds him, gives him a place of safety to begin mapping his universe. When his daughters appear near the middle of the book, it’s as if he has discovered a new continent:

        […] We could plant a tree,

        I say. Where?

        she asks. Pointing all around me

        and then towards her heart

        everything is limitless again […]

There’s a really delicate and lovely symmetry to the book: the mothers, the children, the lovers matching up like the folds of an origami sculpture. In the second half, the poet-speaker exchanges some of what he’s imagined for new knowledge. He finally travels to Korea and meets his birth mother. Those poems are some of the most concrete and beautiful in the collection, ending with his mother boarding a subway and the poet-speaker reaching for his wife’s hand, an image that by now embodies all the certainty he’s longed for.

I admit that the story arc sounds conventional–a man finds purpose and peace through the love of a good woman–but in Collage of Seoul, all the risk that love implies is as vivid and real as the homecoming the book earns:

        […] For the labors we have fought for,

        for our love that has grown upward,

        facing the sun,

            I can see tiny orange slivers on the nightstand, sitting still,

        waiting for me,

        while she runs her orange-soaked hands through my graying hair.

 _______

profile

Amy Watkins (Episode 124) grew up in the Central Florida scrub, surrounded by armadillos and palmetto brush and a big, loud, oddly religious family, a situation that’s produced generations of Southern writers. She married her high school sweetheart, had a baby girl, and earned her MFA in poetry from Spalding University. Her chapbook, Milk & Water, was published in 2014 by Yellow Flag Press.

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