Bullets and Angles

I read more of Segar's comics. A friend gives me a signed copy of a children's book that he illustrated. I read more of Ellroy's fiction. I play a round of Roulette. I watch a short animated film.

Thirteen Bullets

Long story but Castor and Popeye solved the mystery of the “uncanny invisible force which exists around” the house of Professor Kilph and in so doing learned that Dr. Wattley, the man who was trapped inside the house, is the uncle of their old antagonist Snork.

Snork is out to fleece Dr. Wattley for some money and Popeye gets in the way, getting shot by Snork yet again before vanquishing him (but pointedly declining to kill him when he has the chance).

Popeye wishes to be left by the sea to die but Castor gets him into a hospital where the surgeons remove “all but thirteen” of the bullets in his torso. Popeye can’t countenance this because as a sailor he is superstitious about the number thirteen. He is mollified when Castor points out that he still has twelve other bullets in him from when Snork shot him previously. Dr. Wattley gives Castor and Popeye five thousand dollars apiece for rescuing him from Professor Kilph’s force field house but, to Castor’s disgust, Popeye goes down to the docks and blows all five grand shooting dice.

Playing the Angles

Gordon Silveria invited me over to his house to have lunch with him and his husband. It’s a beautiful home full of dozens if not hundreds of pieces of Gordon’s paintings, sculptures, installations, collages and books. One of those books is The Greedy Triangle, written by Marilyn Burns and illustrated by my man G.S. Gordon gave me a signed copy and I read it the other day. It’s a great children’s book from 1994 about a sentient triangle who gets bored and restless and goes to a professional “shapeshifter” to have another side added so it can become a quadrilateral and explore what life has to offer beyond triangulation.

Naturally the novelty of being a quadrilateral wears off and the shape starts going back to have more and more sides added to it until eventually it has so many that it approaches circularity so that its “friends couldn’t tell which side it was on and began to avoid the shape,” eventually leaving it “tired and dizzy, lonely and sad.” So it returns to triangulicity, realizing that adding superficial sides and tacking on novel affectations can only do so much to spice up one’s existence if underlying issues of self-acceptance, gratitude and confidence aren’t also addressed. It’s a great concept for a children’s book and incidentally a mantra of which I needed some reminding this past week while I’m dealing with some annoying bullshit in my frustrating gig at a poorly-run company and scanning the horizon grimly for some kind of direction of novel interest in which to advance. (I’m a sensation-seeking soul and this problem is a running theme in my life — not necessarily trying to modify my personality like the triangle, but definitely getting restless and hungry for novelty.)

What I dug most about The Greedy Triangle is Gordon’s illustrations. He did the whole thing in what looks like a synthesis of Thirties Deco, Sixties cartoons and Nineties street art using a lush palette of high-contrast pastels. Worth tracking down if you can; just don’t ask to borrow my signed copy (more on that below).

Getting back to White Jazz and another innovation therein to which I alluded last entry: this is the first Ellroy novel where the policeman protagonist isn’t just flawed or compromised or corrupt. LAPD Lieutenant Dave Klein is BAAAAAAAAAAAAAD news through and through, making him a bold choice for the story’s narrator. He’s not in the business of apologizing for being a mob-connected slumlord and murderer with a law degree and an incestuous interest in his sister who lies with impugnity to brother officers, snitches and superiors. He’s just telling you plainly that that’s who he is and how he operates. (Like Big Pete Bondurant, who makes his first on-page appearance as a minor character in White Jazz, Klein is also a Marine Corps combat veteran and sports a Japanese sword scar to prove it. Bondurant goes on to be one of the protagonists of Ellroy’s next two novels.)

Klein hates Chief of Detectives Ed Exley and has a wary respect for Dudley Smith. Like Klein playing both sides against the middle, Ellroy is setting up White Jazz to work in one of two ways depending on whether or not you’ve read the previous two books in the L.A. Quartet. If you have, you know that backstory of why the brilliant and seemingly inscrutable Chief Exley has such a rigid stick up his ass and why his interest in Smith extends beyond mere personal animus. If you have never read another word of Ellroy up until this point, it’s part of the surprise when Klein eventually figures out that Smith is far more nefarious than Klein himself, upending his sense of order when he and Exley pool their resources to go after Smith once and for all.

I’m about halfway through the book and I forget just how it finally arrives at that point; right now Klein is eyeballs deep in trouble, investigating a bizarre break-in at the home of a powerful criminal family who have a business arrangement with the LAPD, figuring out that that family’s daughter is mixed up in prostitution rackets, warding off a federal investigation crowding into LAPD jurisdiction, falling desperately in love with a dangerous woman Howard Hughes has hired Klein to follow and suborning a hitman associate to assassinate a fellow corrupt policeman Klein can’t abide. And this being an Ellroy novel, all of these threads get tangled up in the middle somewhere, to be unspooled in a cavalcade of violent double- or triple-crosses by story’s end.

Just on principle I do admire how far Ellroy is pushing the experimentally aggressive jazziness of the language, but this is definitely one of his two novels, along with The Cold Six Thousand, where he can be accused of sometimes pushing his style so far out that the comprehensibility of the content gets muscled into the back seat. Less so now than when I first read White Jazz as a teenager, and that’s me as an adult giving it my full concentration, but even that’s not quite enough with a few passages. Here’s Klein pursuing a lead on the prostitute/daughter at a hotel with “bungalows—no connecting door.” There are adjacent doors with “no mutual access. Side windows—the peeper could WATCH her. Hedges below, a loose-stone walk path.” This scene leads to Klein pulling a wire out of one room and into the other to figure out who is spying on whom but I re-read this sequence about eight times just trying to picture it in my head. I couldn’t make full sense of when and whether Klein was going in and out of windows and doors and bungalow rooms because there are so many scalpel-incised unpredicated sentence fragments. Jazz, baby.

Roulette

Poetry is Useless by Anders Nilsen, read in 2015. Nilsen is one of the greats among living cartoonists and has published several excellent books. He was doing a book tour in 2015 with my mentor-figure and friendly acquaintance Marc Bell (my favorite living cartoonist) and Marc and I had discussed the possibility of Marc and Anders crashing at my pad when they did the San Francisco tour stop. As it turned out that didn’t happen but I did go to the signing event and then went out for drinks and dinner with them and some other people that evening. At the event I bought both of their new books and had them sign them for me. Then years later a roommate in Seattle spilled coffee on my signed copy of Poetry is Useless when I lent it to him.

Poetry is Useless is a rich, well-curated monograph collecting pages from Nilsen’s sketchbooks (and other scraps of paper he happened to doodle on over a period of years). Nilsen is a great drawer with a subversive and outré sense of humor. He will spend pages demonstrating that he can draw representationally with great skill and then offer up small, simplistic comics that depict crudely-rendered characters exchanging funny and unsettling dialogue. I love the comics subgenre of published sketchbooks and this is overall my favorite one I’ve read.

Three Jewish Plays by David Mamet, read in 2017. I just wrote about this one a few entries ago. Short book of three unmemorable plays by an often-great writer who produces a fair amount of non-great material. I suppose in the case of a highly successful playwright there wouldn’t be a published book of plays that hadn’t been performed at least once (?), but I can’t remember if it said in the front of the book whether or not these ever have indeed been staged. Maybe I’ll reacquire the book from the library and launch a podcast where every episode is me reading one of these three Jewish plays and performing all the parts myself. I’ll use my trusty random number generator to determine which of the plays to read for each episode and I’ll release one episode a day for the rest of my life. As I mentioned above, I’m fed up with my day job anyway and I’m sure this concept has legs.

Knit Your Bit: A World War I Story by Deborah Hopkinson, illustrated by Steven Guarnaccia, read in 2017. Eight children’s books before this one on the complete reading list I apparently read another book authored by Hopkinson (though not illustrated by Guarnaccia) called Independence Cake, a book about the Revolutionary War and baking. Knit Your Bit has to do with knitting socks for our boys overseas in World War I, so I guess Hopkinson’s beat is patriotic illustrated books for children that involve a component of craftsmanship. I don’t remember reading either book but I can tell from where they fall on the list that both were read after I temporarily relocated from San Francisco to Seattle. While I did continue to volunteer as an adult literacy tutor for the Seattle Public Library as I had done for the library in San Francisco, the program in Seattle involved talking aloud in groups and reading from printed conversation sheets, no children’s books involved. So I know I must have read these books just on my own recognizance and not having to do with literacy tutoring. Sometimes a red-blooded American fella just has to read children’s books about wars.

A Short Piece of Pioneering Animation from 1933

A Night on Bald Mountain, directed by Claire Parker and Alexandre Alexeieff, 1933. I’m usually much more enthusiastic about old-timey experimental animated short films but I couldn’t quite get a grip on what this one was going for besides some notes that the restorers placed at the beginning about this “dizzlingly surreal pinscreen animation” using the title composition by Mussorgsky to explore “interplay between shadow/light, permanence/impermanence, motion/stillness, human/animal, and night/day.” Fair enough, especially considering that Parker was “the co-inventor of pinscreen animation” with Alexeieff, whom she later married.

There’s some nifty if muddled-looking grotesquerie and surrealism roving about in the grey mise en scène of this piece; it kinda reminded me of when you put a too-thin paper towel down on a thick spill of liquid and watch the spread of moisture as it overwhelms and thins out the paper. Recommended mainly as a marvel of technical ingenuity and noteworthy piece of film history that nevertheless isn’t as dazzling as other things of this sort that one often finds on Kanopy such as 1935’s Papageno.