Bravura Analogizing

A round of Roulette produces three books of comics. First viewing of a film by one of my favorite directors. Keeping up with work by E.C. Segar and James Ellroy.

As usual I used a random number generator to determine the sequence of sections for this installment and it told me to kick off with Roulette, the part where I use that same random number generator to make three selections from the complete reading list I’ve maintained since 2011 until now.

Teens at Play: End of Innocence by Rebecca, read in 2017. I did some business with Fantagraphics Books in 2017 and would sometimes visit their warehouse around that time, occasionally leaving with free books. Since much of Fantagraphics’s output over the decades has included hardcore illustrated smut (which I have heard the company’s co-founder and publisher say essentially kept the outfit solvent during particularly tough times), it was probable that at least one of the books I nabbed would be a collection of comics pornography. I was living in a house full of roommates then and thought this would be a fun contribution to the coffee table, mainly as kitsch. (Rebecca’s material isn’t particularly stimulating to me personally but hooray for you if you utlilize it for any reason other than admiring Rebecca’s drawing ability.)

From what I understand all or most of Rebecca’s books are entitled Teens at Play/colon/subtitle. End of Innocence has no words and only one illustration per page, so I flipped through the whole thing in probably fifteen minutes or something. Rebecca is the nom de plume of a male artist who renders pinup-style full-page pen-and-ink pornographic drawings of teenaged girls undressing, prodding and licking one another. A cartoonist colleague who worked at the Fantagraphics warehouse told me that at comics events one can sometimes observe a gaggle of male Rebecca fans gathering to have their books signed and disappointedly being like “Where’s Rebecca…?” when they get to the front of the line and see some solitary guy seated at the table.

South Beloit Journal by John Porcellino, read in 2018. Porcellino is a prolific zinester and popularizing pillar of the subgenre of intimate autobiographical comics. For decades he has worked in a style that combines an aesthetic of Buddhist simplicity with true-to-life humor, raw honesty and deep emotional resonance. South Beloit Journal documents “the lowest point” of Porcellino’s life when he found himself “twice divorced, heartbroken, mentally insane, and living in poverty and isolation in a cold, grey cinderblock apartment in a small, gritty town in Northern Illinois.” The result was this simple, bleak and reflective book of daily newspaper-style strips about an artist cartooning through misery.

The Complete Peanuts 1955 to 1956 by Charles M. Schulz with an introduction by Matt Groening. The first decade of Peanuts strips, two years of which are covered by this installment in Fantagraphics’s Complete Peanuts series, is interesting for lack of a number of components that would become signatures of the Schulz aesthetic and Peanuts brand as we know them today. Back in the mid-Fifties Schulz was still using a firmer and rounder line instead of the jagged quake of his later strokes. He was also drawing the characters and their world in a more representational, three-dimensional-looking perspective; several years off was that dead-on, flattened-out profile view of everyone and everything in Peanuts that opened a divine channel for bizarre innovations like Snoopy sleeping, dancing and writing atop his doghouse. And Snoopy himself in 1955 was still basically just a sidekick of a beagle, albeit demonstrating traces of the cleverness and eccentricity that would spin him off into a global phenomeon in the following decade. It’s fun to track this first decade of strips, not least because they are so beautifully drawn but because central characters like Lucy are still rapidly evolving while fan favorites like Peppermint Patty are years away from making their first appearances, giving the strip a less crowded and more meandering feel. The strip ran from 1950 to 2000, so if you read them all you get to watch Peanuts shift and grow to reflect the breakneck developments in American society over an almost inconceivably tumultuous five decades of cultural advancement.

First Viewing of a Film by One of My Favorite Directors

Summertime, directed by David Lean, 1955. Katharine Hepburn plays an eager, confident American tourist who has never before been abroad and, the movie seems to suggest, has never had sex. The artful and subtle implication seems to be that Hepburn’s signature onscreen traits of sovereignty and independence are important values to her character in Summertime and that she has reached middle age having been unwilling to risk compromising them by getting attached to or hurt by a man. On a trip to Venice she finds that her enthusiasm and charisma can only endear her so much to the married and/or otherwise entangled residents of her pension; they also give her a taste for the Continental ways of love, lust and heartache, which encourages her to drop her guard and develop genuine feelings for a handsome Venetian stranger played by one Rossano Brazzi.

All of this is intercut with rather languid and patient roving images of the canals and architecture of Venice in lush Technicolor. The film takes its gentle time establishing its themes and getting to the key decision points that alter the protagonist’s life and outlook. Hepburn’s empathetic and nuanced performance guides the proceedings buoyantly toward a denouement depicting the kind of thing we all have to go through once or twice in life: a love that is passionate and genuine but unsustainable.

Lean played with the same theme in a markedly different context and style in his 1945 film Brief Encounter, one of my very favorite movies ever. But to say that Summertime isn’t as exceptional and perfect as Brief Encounter isn’t to say that Summertime isn’t worth a close look, which it very much is. Highly recommended.

Generally Finishing What They Begin

Castor Oyl and Popeye part ways for a time and Castor and his African whiffle hen Bernice make for mainland Africa. Popeye tracks them down and saves them from getting killed. “Matey - dontcher never leave me like that again - don’t never do it,” Popeye says with a trusty hand on Castor’s shoulder. “Blow me down, I won’t,” replies Castor happily.

But in the very next strip things get still more complicated. Just when the gang is all back together a crack forms from a different angle. (Segar is great at chucking in narrative wrenches that redirect the storyline into territory possibly unforeseen even to himself.) Bernice, being in her natural habitat, falls in love with a whiffle ROOSTER and has to choose between staying in love with him or sticking by her pals who need to set sail for home. At this point it appears that Bernice, like Hepburn’s character in Summertime, is in for some measure of heartbreak no matter what she chooses.

Castor and Popeye set sail with Castor gazing bereftly landward: “Bernice, my lucky whiffle hen, will become accustomed to the ways of the wild and forget me.” But Bernice belatedly chooses to stick with her human friends and chases them out to sea where she is joyously reunited with Popeye and Castor.

The whiffle rooster is so devoted to Bernice that he flies ALL THE WAY FROM AFRICA and right in the Oyl family’s living room window. He promptly pecks Castor on the face, making an enemy out of him. The gang is reunited with the addition of this new hanger-on and Castor is back where he was before he met Popeye, trying ineffectually to slaughter a whiffle bird.

This brings into the Oyl orbit the eccentric Professor Kilph who wishes to buy a whiffle egg; he ends up hiring Popeye and Castor for a new mission because he has “learned from the papers” that they “are Castor Oyl and Popeye” the “world famous adventurers.”

This turn in characterization finds Segar really getting into a swing and falling for his protagonists not just as goofy cartoon archetypes but as a dashing pair of best-buddy oddball peripatetics. Over the succeeding few weeks Professor Kilph mentions that Popeye and Castor “wouldn’t quit - they have a reputation for finishing what they begin,” and when he tries to talk them out of the assignment he’s given them and offers to pay them anyway, Castor exclaims: “Get this, Professor Kilph, Popeye and myself generally finish what we begin - it isn’t a question of money now - we’ll enter your old house some way in spite of the uncanny invisible force which exists around it - we won’t quit!” An ethos every cartoonist needs to keep in his back pocket.

I Finished Re-Reading L.A. Confidential

The innovation that L.A. Confidential brought to hard-boiled noir is that there isn’t one mystery to get to the bottom of but literally about ten or twelve of them. The central Nite Owl Massacre turns out to be both a hit job and a case of mistaken identity and has tendrils into schemes involving character assassination, political chicanery, pornography, burglary, extortion, kidnapping, torture, serial rape and murder, regular rape and murder, prostitutes who have undergone plastic surgery to look like movie stars, experimental drug compounds, a jailyard shivving, a catastrophic prison train “crash-out” and the suppression of a horrifying case of child murder and filicide that implicates Exley’s father and his friend Raymond Dieterling (Ellroy’s fictional stand-in for Walt Disney). Exley, Vincennes and White are unwittingly swimming deep in these streams of corruption long before they even realize there is a current to kick against.

The streams flow into and out of a prologue in which Dudley Smith kills Meeks and recovers the heroin from The Big Nowhere. This indicates to the reader from the beginning, in case she hasn’t read The Big Nowhere or Clandestine, that Smith is diabolically corrupt and lethal and connected to this cache of narcotics that becomes central to the elaborate saga of L.A. Confidential. So even if one has never read a page of Ellroy before, you know going in that Smith’s not to be trusted and that he’s somehow pulling some of the strings that the three policeman protagonists are fumblingly trying to snip.

In The Big Nowhere Meeks, Upshaw and Considine have to overcome their weaknesses and fears to bring some measure of justice to culpable actors like Smith, but L.A. Confidential inverts this construction: E/V/W realize that they can’t avoid severely implicating themselves in that culpability if they want a shot at the big-bads like Mickey Cohen and Dudley Smith and Smith’s sub rosa business associate Pierce Patchett and Patchett’s old associates Dieterling and Exley père. L.A. Confidential has the protags facing down demons not of frailty and vulnerability but of blameworthiness and self-loathing. It also demonstrates significant jumps in scope, complexity and time-frame from the previous novel. Ellroy loves classical music, so call The Big Nowhere an elegantly-constructed Mozart concerto while L.A. Confidential feels by comparison like a bid for the scale, grandeur and depth of a Beethoven symphony. I suspect Ellroy would not disagree with this bravura analogizing and I possess receipts from the beginning of White Jazz, the final installment in the L.A. Quartet, to substantiate this asssertion.

The first is in the title: jazz is gonna be a theme, boychik. I’m twenty-three percent through the text and jazz has already come up in about five or six plot points. That plot finds the protagonist/narrator rogue LAPD Lieutenant Dave Klein pointedly IMPROVISING his way through sticky situations right from the opening pages. This becomes a leitmotif as Klein intuits his way into and out of trouble of various sorts.

Ellroy even tips his hand in the book’s epigraph; before reading one word of the story the reader is treated to a quotation from someone named Ross MacDonald stating that “In the end I possess my birthplace and am possessed by its language.” White Jazz is the book where Ellroy stripped and rewired his writing style from the baroque and mannered tone of his earlier works to a marauding, relentless, pseudo-abstract hard bop: “Darryl Wishnick, a cute MO: peep, break, enter, rape, watchdogs subdued by goofball-laced meat—too bad he kicked from ‘syph in ‘56. One flash: peepers played passive, my guy killed badass canines.” Klein’s first-person narrator verbal style hums, rhymes, alliterates, dances out on limbs that snap back on themselves and splinter into new lines of reasoning. White Jazz is an announcement of its author graduating from the classically and romantically Ellrovian into the yearning, seething uncharted territory of literary jazz. J.E. with language and Lieutenant Klein with police corruption are playing traditional instruments but improvising new kinds of riffs upon them.

Could the title suggest in part that the white man’s jazz is the improvisatory and freewheeling nihilism and brutality of the deeply-flawed Klein and his fated collision course with the even-worse Dudley Smith? And/or does the “white” of the title mean something with reference to the color white? If the latter, what does it mean for jazz to be colored white as opposed to any other color?

Or did Ellroy or his agent or editor or publisher just know they needed another monosyllabic word before “jazz” to make for a cool title? I’ll see what I can figure out and get back to you, but for now you can bank my Mozart/Beethoven/jazz analogy. I know from having read this book before roughly where this riff resolves itself but I’m deeply intrigued to see how J.E. slashes and burns his way there. More on that next.