strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Jun 7 07: the avenging virgo writes a letter
Dear Spike TV:
Perhaps I am not your target audience. I’ll admit, I do enjoy the occasional megadose of CSI, and sometimes I even sit on the couch and watch a late-night episode of Star Trek: Voyager while updating the swim team’s website and my own blog and stuff. But I can’t stomach your many “ultimate fighting” shows; that ad where you showed some combatant getting an incisor knocked out in slow motion to the music of — what was that, Sinatra? — I found merely nauseating. Sure, half the fighters look like they could make a good living in the gay-porn industry, but hot though they may be I like my pinups with all their teeth.
Anyway, like I said: I’m probably not your target audience. I nonetheless feel obliged to point something out.
You have a new show: Guys’ Choice. In the phrase Guys’ Choice, there is a punctuation mark. You have left the mark out in all the show’s promotional spots, on its website — indeed, in all materials referring to the program in any form; so I am drawing your attention to the omission with this note. Let me explain: the choice belongs to the guys, in this instance the guys who vote on such world-shaking issues on which band kicks the most ass, or which, um, cybervixen is the most naughty. This posessive case is traditionally indicated with A FUCKING APOSTROPHE.
Please address this oversight at the earliest possible opportunity.
Yours,
AV
gift
Why am I going to Ithaca? Because there’s a reception I have to attend. The reception will be showcasing two gifts recently made to Cornell University.1 One of those gifts was mine; the letter below went with it.
The first comic book I ever bought with my own money was UNCANNY X-MEN #149. I picked it up in a drugstore in Elko, Nevada. I was not quite 11 years old, and my father had packed me and my sister into our car to go see the National Basque Festival. We are not Basque. I had never heard of the Basque. But drive we did, from my native San Francisco through the desolation of the Nevada flats and back again. That copy of UNCANNY X-MEN saved my young mind from succumbing to a boredom that would surely have cost me my sanity. I read it so many times that the cover nearly came off. I’d thumbed through a few random comics before, usually at the barber shop, but this was the first one I had a chance to study closely: who were these people? What were their histories? What were their powers? Why were they exploring somebody’s ruined underground lair in Antarctica? I spent the long drive home mining those 24 pages for every grain of data; between readings, I stared out the window and speculated about what had gone before.
I was never the same. For a narrative junkie like me, the world of comic books was uncut lightning. Within a few months I was tracking whole worlds full of outlandish characters, and every month something new happened. Much of my pocket money over the subsequent years went to feed my habit. After college I even worked for a while in the field, enjoying a brief position as an editor for an independent publisher before the vagaries of the speculator market triggered layoffs and ruination throughout the industry in 1993.
The collection I have given to Cornell now numbers over 5,000 individual issues, collected from that first day until just a few months ago. The engine driving the ongoing act of collecting has always been the same: to find out what happens next. Its contents trace the development of my tastes as a reader: in its early years, it was mostly concerned with heroic adventure in the most mainstream of veins; but as my tastes matured (and as the comic book industry diversified the kinds of stories it would publish), I let myself wander. Some of the stories in those many boxes is great stuff — Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking SANDMAN, Larry Marder’s bizarre and visionary TALES OF THE BEANWORLD. Some of it is… less great, schlock I convinced myself was palatable purely out of a need to see what was around the next corner for a beloved character. There are superheroes and gods; there are detectives and aliens and perfectly normal teenagers. There are queers and mutants and freaks of all stripes. I have loved just about every minute in their company.
But New York apartments are small, and 5,000-plus comic books take up a lot of space. And, love them though I do, who has time to reread 5,000 comics? I could have sold them, but the most valuable issues would have been cherry-picked and boxed away somewhere, leaving the rest to crumble into dust. And I want these to be read. I am thrilled, therefore, to give this collection to my alma mater. Comics as we know them today are an American art form that academia has only recently begun to study; and in order to study the field there must be primary source material for students to examine. Look at the development of the art, of renderings of the human form; look at the changing culture the stories reflect; look at what is being advertised, and to whom, and how. (It’s not just X-Ray Spex anymore.) I hope that future readers find as many things to enjoy in them as I did — even if sometimes it’s only the thrill of finding out what happens next.
1 Gosh, look. Well, at least they misspelled my name consistently.
out-getting
Late night tonight: first, at the office, trying to get a head start on tomorrow; then — wheee! — laundry and too much CSI. I need the head start on tomorrow because I can’t work Friday, and I’m trying to minimize the pile I’m dumping in the lap of an as-yet-unspecified coworker. (Whomever you may be, please accept this humble apology, should you ever see it.) After work tomorrow, I have a late-night dinner with a couple of old friends. And then Friday morning? I get out of town.
I’m off to Ithaca for the weekend. You know, I realized the other day that I haven’t spent a night off the island of Manhattan in six months? And I need it bad: the mood I was in today at the office was, um. Less than great. I felt like a pile of knives. I need some green hills. Maybe a swim by starlight.
Jun 5 07: a day off
I had yesterday off, which is not unusual at the Exceedingly Cool Freelance Gig. Herewith, some highlights:
10:30 AM: Housecall at the home of my former choral conductor. She is my only remaining IT client from my days of being Mac Guy at Large. Tech issues in her household tend to be of the help I can’t print or the what is this file on my desktop can I throw it away variety (invariably: plug it back in; yes), but I still help her out because (a) she’s a friend and (b) I get free voice lessons in exchange. Swipe a couple of throat lozenges out of the dish in her living room as I leave, because the weekend’s excesses have left me with that little postnasal tickle that sleep-deprivation etc. can bring on.
1:30 PM: 90-minute session with Ken O’Neill, Best Massage Therapist Ever.1 I’d been needing this for, um, months. Try not to make too many little throat-clearing noises as he restores something like an actual range of motion to my shoulders. Leave in that happy floaty just pour me into a bucket and put me in a taxicab headspace.
6:30 PM: Meeting with The Secret Cabal, my new writers’ group. Great bunch of folks. We don’t have a website yet, but sooner or later we will be taking over the world. You have been warned. Meeting is at Tea Spot, down in the village. Air conditioners/white-noise generators are loud enough to be kind of disruptive, but the hot tea offered by a fellow Cabalist (Caballero?) actually helps my throat.
8:30 PM: Home with a case of the Tea Janglies and a takeout quesadilla. Throat-clearing noises starting to annoy me.
11:30 PM: Ahem. Ahem. A-hem. Ahem.
12:45 AM: Ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem. Ahem. Ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem. Glass of water. Ahem ahem ahem ahem. Take Claritin in the hopes that it will staunch the postnasally thing. Ahem ahem ahem. Vigorous cough.
1:45 AM: Ahem ahem ahem ahem cough ahem cough ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem cough ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem oh dear god. Beat self into unconsciousness with copy of Absolute Sandman, the heaviest book in the room.
fin
1 212.580.6044
Jun 2 07: fun-having
It has been a loooong week. A long few weeks, actually, which is why I haven’t posted a damn thing in nearly a month; but this week has been particularly bonkers.
Got out of the office at 9:30 tonight (although don’t get me wrong; the job is still incredibly fun) with a desperate need to blow off some steam. God bless Randy, my fellow swimmer and dear friend, who has been living an eerily parallel life to my own. He was just as ready to rage as I was. So we started at some ‘mo bar or another in Hell’s Kitchen. After a couple of drinks we got a text message from Booty, who had gone to Pyramid for the Cyndi Lauper spectacular at 1984, their Friday night retro dance extravaganza. Booty, aka Peter, is a hardcore Cyndi fan, despite the fact that her first big single came out when he was… 3, I think. Bring everyone, his note said. Am all alone.
We danced our asses off, although we felt so terribly, terribly old. Before long, the room filled up, and a good time was had by all. “You realize we were about the only people there who actually remember 1984?” asked Randy, much later in the cab uptown. “When those songs were new, most of the people in that room were still breast-feeding. If that.”
He was surely right. Good thing the young’uns had us there to show them how it’s done, then.
Bed now. Long day tomorrow, too.