New artifact with stories from all yr favorites. Available at Sneaky Beans and from that cool girl in class that you can’t quite manage to talk to yet.

A new zine featuring work from lots of pretty amazing people. Look for it in stores near you this week!*

*A/k/a one coffee shop in JXN and maybe a street corner in Brooklyn.

Like zen, whatever you expect Practicing Zen to be, it will be different. Think of a source-book on the origins of zen, like the scholarly source-books that we use today to study zen’s origins in Chinese Buddhism and its coming to full flower in Japan. Such source-books are necessarily fragmentary, since much of the original writing has been lost. Now translate that source-book to the 25th century, and replace the fragments from China and Japan with fragments from the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the only remaining records of how a version of zen (called Easy) took over the U. S. Throw in a wildly humorous and semi-science-fictional version of history, and spice it up with anecdotes about and utterances by fictional zen masters, who quarreled among themselves.

You can get it at Amazon right now. My copy is wending its way Baton Rouge-ward and I’m looking forward to diving in to a book that is sure to be strange and disorienting—in the very best ways.

So—the new Oxford American special issue on southern literature is out, and, like most all issues of OA, it’s well worth your time. In addition to some smart and insightful essays, the new ish includes their top-ten “Best Southern Novels of All Time” list.

I was one of the judges for the list, and I thought it might be interesting to see how my ballot lines up with the final results. You can see their list and read some comments from judges at the OA website, but for the sake of convenience, here’s their top ten:

1. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
2. Warren, All the King’s Men
3. Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
4. Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
5. Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
6. Percy, The Moviegoer
7. Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
8. Ellison, Invisible Man
9. O’Connor, Wise Blood
10. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

On the one hand, it’s hard to complain about any single one of those selections. And it’s tough to begrudge Faulkner his three spots on the list, though it does make me wish the magazine had enforced a one-book-per-writer policy—if only because such a result was completely predictable and tends to make southern lit look narrower and more traditional, as though most southern writers are just scribbling in Faulkner’s margins, which already contain his handwritten annotations, so there’s even less room than you think. Also worth pointing out: Take Twain away, and all of those books were published between 1929 and 1961. Perhaps we should revise the frequently asked question from “What is southern literature?” to “When is southern literature?” Because this list makes it seem like it flowered briefly in the early-to-mid twentieth century and then went away. No plantation novels, no slave narratives, no excessive postmodern head trips. (Well, unless you read Absalom, Absalom! that way, which I do.) My own list is twentieth- and twenty-first-century heavy, so I can’t complain much about the absence of early work, although I did include Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl on my ballot for the nonfiction list—it didn’t make it.

I was pleasantly surprised to find Ellison’s Invisible Man on the list—the one work included that works to broaden the definition of “southern literature” toward something like “literature about the South” and dispenses with a lot of the familiar anxiety about regional exceptionalism and southern-fried bona fides.

So, my ballot. These are unranked—judges were given an option to single out a book as the #1 pick, but I decided against it:

William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
Eudora Welty, The Golden Apples
Lewis Nordan, Wolf Whistle
Jack Butler, Jujitsu for Christ
Randall Kenan, A Visitation of Spirits
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada
Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman
Colson Whitehead, John Henry Days

I suppose it goes without saying that there are10, 20, 30 other works that I could just have easily have chosen; I chose somewhat strategically, in hopes that my picks would nudge the canon slightly toward the current moment, but alas.

Judges were also given the option to cite one book that they felt was the most underrated work of southern literature. It will surprise no one that I chose our fellow contributor Jack Butler’s novel Jujitsu for Christ. The magazine ran a few sentences of the comments that accompanied my ballot, but they had to slice and dice it a bit*, so here they are in full verbosity:

Jack Butler’s Jujitsu for Christ (1986) isn’t underrated in the sense that the people who read it don’t get it; rather, it’s that not enough people are reading it in the first place. This is because the novel is bizarrely, criminally, out of print. It would be irresponsible to speculate that it is being kept that way by a shadowy cabal of writers—not just southerners, either, but American writers generally and a few Swedes as well—who know that their work would seem dim and anemic compared to Butler’s, so I won’t do that. But I will say that the novel is funny, sexy, disturbing, heartbreaking, and completely unlike any of the books that you might think it would be like based on its title, cover illustration, or jacket description. There is something to delight or horrify on every page, but if you need to scan a few pages to be convinced, look no further than the section labeled “Summertime”: an accurate, hilarious, and devastating description of the uniquely hallucinogenic properties of a Mississippi summer. You’d be cheating yourself to stop there, though. The novel does not so much forge connections between apparently disparate topics such as civil rights, martial arts, science fiction, and Southern Baptists as it reveals how inextricably connected all those things, and dozens of others, already are in the first place. And maybe that’s the novel’s signal achievement: How it challenges assumptions about what can be said and what should be discussed about the South; how it reveals Mississippi to be a bigger, stranger, and more mysterious place than most people ever allow themselves to recognize.

*Just like when I wrote that impeccably argued 1500-word letter to West Coast Avengers editor Mark Gruenwald detailing the twenty-three reasons that Hank Pym should lead the WCA instead of that showboat Hawkeye, and then he only printed the first eighteen. It violated the delicately crystalline logical-rhetorical structure of the whole list! Item 12 doesn’t even make sense until it is retroactively refracted through item 22! I was so embarrassed.

Since I’m a poet, I naturally thought of a poetic form. What I came up with is a variation on an old standard, the heroic couplet (two lines of rhyming pentameter). My variation is eight lines or only four couplets long, way under the limit, but who wanted to say that much anyway? Naturally, I use the movement of speech to jazz up what would otherwise be the monotony of meter.

I’m writing them whenever the mood strikes, whenever a subject coalesces from the general furor and seems to merit a comment. A bonus: Though technically speaking I am sure I am just as powerless, the act of construction required to put my thoughts into a form, even a slight one, has done away with my sense of helplessness.

Here’s the first four. There will likely be others.

1. ELECTION

When Venus reached its height as evening star,
we chose a president, an exemplar,
we hoped, a quiet man who understood
no good comes of being up to no good.
What holds us all together is fair play
and mutual respect. It aint the U. S. A.
without the principles. Not shock and awe,
but truth approximated in the law.

2. STIMULUS

They’re slow and fat, easy to out-maneuver.
Let them filibuster till hell freezes over.
They’ll take the money, but swear they voted
according to principle. Duly noted.
How healthy would you be if you wrote off
ten percent of your cells, you had a cough
that wilted flowers, and you got no sun at all?
And speaking of health—here comes a new roll call!

3.HEALTH CARE

You told them, gathered together in that room,
that, like the banks, they were inviting doom,
the ax that would reduce their firms to kindling,
to wit: overvalued assets and a dwindling
customer base. Those are the facts of the case.
Oh call it universal health care, Ace,
who cares? Why not save what you can of your wealth
while getting credit for caring about our health?

4. BACK AWAY

from them there “entitlements” with your hands in the air.
Social Security doesn’t need your “repair.”
If it isn’t my money, what did you take from my check?
You want to tinker? Fine. First give it all back.
Won’t even charge you interest. What a deal!
You think we wouldn’t notice? Good buddy, get real.
You think you can keep your job behaving this way?
—Be sure and read my lips election day.

What I have in mind isn’t a list. What I have in mind is whys and wherefores, sort of the way professor fury writes about G.P.R.D.

Okay, define your category. Not to exclude other possibilities but so as to not waste time arguing over.

And the Oscar for Greatest Superhero Graphic Novel (or Series of Graphic Volumes Telling One Story (or World Evoked by a Complex of Interlinked Stories)) goes to . . .

First of all, the magnificent Willworld. This thing is genius from start to finish: The glorious colors, the scope of the imagination, the perfect drawings and inkings, the sense of space, the weird beings of a weird universe that somehow makes sense, just repulsive enough to be real, the looming menace of the floating heads despite all the comedy, the Holy Head Cheese, the little boy. Like they say, I could go on and on. I haven’t begun to touch on the subtleties, the echoes, the harmonics, the satisfactions. This comic is Alice in Wonderland quality. I go back to it regularly. My thanks to J. M. Matteis, writer; Seth Fisher, artist; Christopher Chuckry, colorist and separater; and Tom Orzechowski, letterer.

I wish I could give more DC comix a nod, because I grew up with DC, but I can’t think of any others I would call great. Classic, yes. Great, no.

Batman is the victim of the age’s preconception of the hero. He’s been seriously modified in response to Frank Miller’s Dark Knight. No matter who writes or draws Batman nowadays, he’s portrayed the same way: with the aloofness, the hauteur that Miller contributed, but with a good deal less brutality. This Batman never feels doubt and is always right, but is so distant from people that what is conviction comes off as arrogance. Nevertheless, his friends forgive him. Come to think of it, this Batman is a whole lot like John McClain. He is also, like McLain, capable of incredible feats of athleticism and control. He’s a master of many esoteric physical disciplines which confer such physical abilities on him. Never mind the fact that it would be impossible to be adept at any one of at least half a dozen of those disciplines and yet allow oneself to continue the mental suffering that Batman supposedly routinely endures on behalf of his murdered parents.

One thing I think that demonstrates is that the narrative preconceptions of the age seldom rise to greatness. No age reads itself accurately.

The early Batman was, well, cartoonish.

Superman is harder to say no to. I love Superman. Superman has always been my favorite. But nope. There aint any great stories. There was one that came close, was it called Secret Identity? In the world of the story, Superman is a character in a comic book—but there is a “real” Clark Kent, living in Kansas, who has been affected by a meteorite, and develops the same powers. He takes the identity of the comic character, is hunted by a secret government agency, comes to an agreement with them, keeps his freedom and powers. But he ages, and it is clear he is going to die and knows it. But he has a child, and the child has powers. Last panel, he’s hanging in front of the sun in space, thinking it over. I can’t give the names because I don’t have the book any more.

Damn good comic. But not transcendent.

A more recent Superman candidate might be Emperor Joker, by a whole crew of writers and artists I’m not patient enough to list. It works, it’s impressive visually, it’s a damn good book. But there is just that little tootle of vaingloriousness which dooms most superhero comix nowadays. Infinite City, by Mike Kennedy and Carlos Meglia, is a fine inventive story, a lot of fun. No vaingloriousness—what there might be is handled with humor. I really like it. But not what I mean by masterwork.

The continuing sagas of The Authority came close for a while, but then it began to seem the heroes gloried a bit much in the slaughter they habitually wrought—always on those who deserved it, of course. Lovely images of skulls knocked out of skins, brains out of skulls, spines out of bodies. Soliliquies in which the characters justify their carnage with righteous outrage. Realpolitik, no doubt.

Over to Marvel. My favorite is Spiderman. Read a lot of Spiderman. Prefer the modern one. The old Stan Lee stuff looks awful now. Yay for computer graphics. But I am getting sick of wisecracks from impossibly wise and cute and big-eyed teens and I don’t buy the whole older and married bit and House of M is just an attempt to drum up importance from what was a godawful idea in the first place, The Civil War. Not much use for X-men and I despise supersecret superpowerful government agencies who know what’s best for us all and will, albeit it sadly, do the most horrible things if that’s what it takes to keep America free, so you can guess how I feel about S.H.I.E.L.D. I like Wolverine, but as it turns out only one book. I don’t have it anymore, keep meaning to buy it. Can’t remember the name. It’s the one where he’s short and grubby, isn’t with the X-men, and doesn’t wear a uniform. The cover has him astride a motorbike under a sign with the name of the town. The name of the town is the name of the book. That’s the one Wolverine that seems to me to do a genuine job of imagining what it might be like to actually be someone like that. The next one, where he crosses the Rio Grande and gets involved with a murderous female drug dealer and causes her death but rescues her child, is pretty good. Different artist. The conception stems from the previous one but seems more weakly realized somehow. The others are all full of hoo-hah superspook supersoldier crap.

From one of the realms I would least have expected it, though, comes number 7 in the Ultimate Fantastic Four, God War. I quit reading FF quite a few years ago, when I realized how silly their abilities were, how much based on cartoon reality and not physics. Now this new series, by an impressive succession of the very best writers and artist. The whole series is smart, well-imagined, beautifully drawn, consistent, a delight to read.

There is a bit overmuch of scientificish, the opposite error to cartoonish. RR is given to babble ceaselessly in pseudotechnical terms that seem to offer glimmers of insight into how things actually work but are actually the window-dressing we demand before we will accept the miracles. I find it unsurprising that in an age which considers itself scientific, we require these litanies of apparent technological chatter. I say apparent. Surely no one would argue this is real science? But if it isn’t real science, why is it there? I say to suit the taste of the age.

But number 7. Number 7 is something else. Written by Mike Carey, art credited to Pasqual Ferry, and credits to a whole host of others, who again, I have not the patience to list. Since this is unofficial, don’t guess it matters, huh?

Anyhow, the stunning visuals that make incredible beings and abilities seem real, the profligate invention and yet consistency. I respect minds that can evoke—not merely suppose, but evoke—worlds, realms, orders of existence wholly different in organization to our own, and yet consistent enough and familiar enough to make me want to inhabit them. This is a hell of a book, deeply cross-connected and involving. I love what it implies for hope, love, beauty, fierceness, ability across the range of universes.

I’ll close out, weary at having gone on too long, with the Local Cluster that is the assembly of galaxies including Top Ten, Smax, and The Forty-Niners. Can’t do them justice with the energy I have left, but the sympathy combined with comedy, the stimulating and wildly imaginitive mix of beings, the easy way with translating the essence of the police procedural to a wholly fantastic realm, the evoked reality of the worlds set forth, the interconnections, the layers and layers and layers of implication and joke and cross-fertilizing concepts: the cross-over war of the supermice, you think all us blue guys know each other, the beautiful pathos of the death of the western cavalry. Then to move to the imagined prestory of the Forty-Niners, which seems to have been implicit all along when one revisits the two volumes of Top Ten. Or to the high comedy of Smax, the absolutely delightful imaginings of the magical world Jaffs Macksun has come from, somehow featherweight humorous fantasy easily balancing all the darkness that shadows the equally wonderful but grimmer humor of Top Ten.

Everybody knows Alan Moore is tops, of course. There are quite a few artists responsible, most notably Gene Ha and Zander Cannon. What a satisfying world they have created.

The Tom Strong series is delightful, as are the ABC comix. Love the droll humor of Jack Quick (takes a thorough conversance and fascination with physics to play such jokes with it), the B-grade melodrammer of Greyshirt, the social and comix satire of First American.

I know most people would nominate League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Watchmen or V for Vendetta, but me, not quite. LEG is a blast, and very satisfyingly brought to life. It is the best of adventure stories, but doesn’t rise above the genre.

Watchmen seems to me a tour de force by someone of unmatchable ability, but it doesn’t have the heart or wit of the Top Ten group. I am offended by the Comedian, yes, which does not mean I do not think such a behavior would be possible, given the world. The Nixon-forever background brings back my nightmares from the late sixties and early seventies. But I do not believe, as Ozymandias appears to, that human history is deterministic, and can be predictably guided with just the right push, his justification for killing half a million. And I don’t think the book is clear enough about his error. On the whole, it seems a parade of grimness to impress. As for V—impressive. Impressive. Don’t think the opposition of 1984 to Shakespearean fatedness and beauty quite takes. The formal structures do not quite mate with the would-be serious theme. But it nevertheless gets at some pretty profound stuff. And he was how old? Twenty-Two?

Okay. Out of words and ideas. See you in the funny-papers.

(a memoir of the downfall)

‘Twas Bush league, and the slimy toads
Did lie and gamble with our fate;
All flimsy were the moral codes
That should have kept them straight.

“Beware the Ubergeek, you con,
The tongue that speaks, the mind that thinks;
Avoid the democrats, and shun
Decent people as dinks.”

But look: A supple mind commands
The field, and bullies must obey:
They robbed us blind, but now their kind
Has had its brightest day.

Like crawfish in the bottom mud,
They stirred up clouds of murk and muck;
They hadn’t tortured, pillaged. They were good.
And what kind of a name is Barak?

They never thought the time would come
When brains and courage came on strong
And decency beat villainy:
To them we call, So long.

“And hast thou lost to ubergeeks?
Go to your cells, you thieves and crooks.
O blessed day, let habeus stay!
A Potus who reads books!”

‘Twas Bush league, and the slimy toads
Did lie and gamble with our fate;
All flimsy were the moral codes
That should have kept them straight.

Years ago I was watching one of the worst and most unintentionally funny movies ever made, John Wayne playing Genghis Khan in something called, I believe, “The Conqueror.” I do hope some of you have seen this thing. Okay, it is funny enough already, the very concept. But what if I tell you that in at least some parts of his dialogue Genghis orates in unmistakable blank verse—as I remember, when they are trying for grandeur. Think of it: not only John Wayne in a bathrobe as Genghis Khan, but delivering his lines in blank verse. Wayne is perfectly unaware of doing so, of course. I suspect some deeply frustrated screenwriter exorcising the ghost of his master Shakespeare, placing the cadences where he is certain nobody will ever notice.

But if you have any ear at all, you cannot mistake the sound of the stuff. Truly. Take a listen.

Then, just recently, I re-read “V for Vendetta,” and lo and behold, Alan Moore has V orating in blank verse. My ear had been sharpened by watching and listening to Branagh’s “Hamlet,” a magnificent and faithful production (I have small patience with those who “modernize” Shakespeare by trampling on the pentameter or ignoring it or deleting it—”Hamlet” is so perfectly written there is not a single scene I can imagine excluding). In case you doubt me, let me quote a few lines from Chapter 2 of “V for Vendetta”: “You see, my rival, though inclined to roam/possessed at home a wife that he adored./He’ll rue his promiscuity, the rogue/Who stole my only love, when he’s informed/how many years it is since first I bedded his.” Okay, the last line is hexameter, but isn’t the regularity of the meter unmistakable? You can find metrical patches like this all through the comic. Inevitably, there is a concomitant antique character to the diction. Moore makes no secret of his admiration for Shakespeare, so I am not surprised to find these imitations.

It takes a mighty prosody to write pentameter as plain as speech, yet keep, as casually as if it cost no effort, the rhythm of a five-beat line. Shakespeare could do it. Alan Moore was wise to turn to other more natural cadences.

I might not have noticed, since I am far from a true scholar of Shakespeare, but he is quite literally the writer who moved me to poetry in the first place. I have learned to read and follow him as naturally as contemporary conversation, and have written pentameter consciously for better than forty years.

Cannot finally resist talking about the most cringe-inducing blank-verse-related moment I have ever experienced. In spite of thinking that Al Pacino is a bombastic, melodramatic, overrated actor—in fact, the very type that Hamlet makes fun of to the first player, a scenery-chewer, bellower, and waver of hands—I decided to rent “LooKING for RICHARD” (get it?), Pacino’s documentary on his attempt to do the Shakespearean play. The thing turns out to be a vanity stunt, an excuse for Pacino to portray himself as the great actor who wants to put on Shakespeare, but finds himself impatient with all that stuffy nonsense. The implication is that Shakespeare, the lesser, has been waiting centuries for such a genius as Pacino, the greater, to transform his scribblings into art.

In his egregious rummaging around, Pacino consults an academic, an expert on Shakespeare. The poor woman, obviously far more learned and intelligent than Pacino, but just as obviously intimidated by his money, power, or fame, says to Pacino, after he fulminates about the meter, something like “Well, it doesn’t matter. You have the blank verse of the heart.” That last sentence is an exact quote.

The blank verse of the heart. Christ Almighty. Pacino, you deserve a few centuries in limbo—shall we say four?—for bringing another human to such an embarrassing moment.