Trials and Errors

A round of Roulette. I start properly reading that classic novel. Two children's books. A great picture. A small collection of motivational comics.

Roulette

Building Stories by Chris Ware, read in 2014. Easily one of the greatest accomplishments in comics that I have ever read. A box set of multiple different narratives in a panorama of differing formats and components, from zines to books to newspapers, that can be read in any order but all gradually build out and embellish the fictional life of a young female protagonist with a prosthetic lower leg and the details of her experiences in a small building full of apartment rental units and a diverse set of neighbors. “Building stories” suggests both the stories from within this particular fictional building and the act of building stories up from one’s imagination and exploring various narrative potentialities as suggested by the constraints and advantages of different comics media, something at the vanguard of which Ware is one of very few cartoonists working who possesses both the skill and vision to position himself. Building Stories is an awe-inducing piece of design, a masterfully-drawn exercise in great cartooning and a visionary promise of how many new ways to tell stories we have yet to explore as a civilization. Everyone should spend some time with this work.

Margaret & H.A. Rey's Curious George's Dinosaur Discovery, written by Catherine Hapka and illustrated in the style of H.A. Rey by Anna Grossnickle Hines, read in 2020. There this book sits on the complete reading list in 2020, right after The Trial by Franz Kafka and before Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Unlike those two I don’t remember anything about this particular Curious George book. But fortunately I think the title and credits pretty much rescue me from having to.

Maisy Goes on a Sleepover by Lucy Cousins, read in 2015. I gave a little background context on Cousins and her signature character Maisy in a recent entry but didn’t mention that from 2015 into 2017 I was on a Cousins kick, reading a bunch of her books and some of them twice. Maisy Goes on a Sleepover has the distinction of being the second one I ever read, coming on the complete reading list right after my first-ever Maisy dalliance Maisy Goes to the City.

Frienefactor Returns

Of all entries of One Could Argue in which I’ve written about multiple books (outside of the Roulette feature), this is very likely the first one in which not one of the books came from a public library, Little Free Library OR my personal ownership.

All four of the books I read or am reading for this entry were dispatched in care packages by the Frienefactor. Partly for her own selfish motivations so that I would read Don Quixote alongside her, but the joke is on her because that book has been languishing on my to-read list for years anyway. I’ve made it through the first two chapters of the Grossman translation of Don Quixote and I’m getting that feeling one gets when cracking into what has always seemed an imposingly dense piece of classic world literature and finding that it is readable, engaging and unpretentious. The reason I’m getting that feeling is because that is precisely what has happened.

I had no idea how straightforward, funny and suggestive the premise of this tome is and how Cervantes wastes no time kicking it in. Basically Don Quixote is just a fiftyish guy who has read so many “books of chivalry” that it broke his brain, gave him psychotic delusions that he himself was a knight errant and made him wander out with his skinny horse in search of non-existent adventure and pageantry. That’s all just in the first two chapters. Cervantes, who snarkily if elusively states that in telling this story “there is absolutely no deviation from the truth,” is basically like: here’s this guy, here’s his whacky deal, now let’s get him out and on his way and see what happens. Being pretty ignorant overall about the book itself, aside from knowing that Sancho Panza will show up and that windmills will be tilted at, I have absolutely no idea how Cervantes is going to fill up almost a thousand pages with this guy’s mental and emotional problems. I am sincerely very enthused to find out.

The other books from the Frienefactor Files were both children’s books I had never heard of and they were both good:

imagine from 2018 by Juan Felipe Herrera, illustrated by Lauren Castillo. A lovely and concise autobiographical poem-book telling the reader how Herrera was raised by migrant workers from Mexico and couldn’t speak English until he was moved to a city and began attending elementary school but fell so in love with language that he became a writer and eventually the Poet Laureate of the United States of America. The point is to suggest that in pondering this improbable-but-true story Herrera encourages the reader to “imagine what you could do.” Castillo is a skilled illustrator with a mature but evocative style that is well-suited to balancing the verisimilitude and whimsy that are equally important to this narrative.

The Book of Mistakes from 2017 by corinna luyken. Clever children’s book with a metanarrative structure — luyken is out to establish a point about the necessity of making mistakes, and learning from them, by making some on the very page on which she is illustrating her book and then building out her characters and environments from there. With a little creativity and open-mindedness, each mistake becomes what with a broader perspective appears to be an indispensable part of a larger whole. Mistakes beget growth, which begets more mistakes, which and so on. luyken’s style is pleasantly anodyne and is competent enough to carry across her message, a moral which is as valuable as Herrera’s. As someone who makes a lot of mistakes in life and is eager to be better about learning from them, this moral is one of keen interest to me personally.

Film Selection: The Second Great Picture from 1994 That I’ve Watched in a Row

This was my second time watching the Joel Coen-directed 1994 film The Hudsucker Proxy, produced by Joel’s brother Ethan and written by the Coens in collaboration with their old buddy Sam Raimi. But it was my first time even beginning to fully understand it and, by extension, to absolutely love it.

The story itself is fairly simple-yet-elegant in the way that the best Golden Age Hollywood pictures, of which The Hudsucker Proxy is a loving pastiche, tended to be: in a hyper-stylized and lightly reimagined version of 1958 New York City, the industrialist President of Hudsucker Industries intentionally plunges to his death in the middle of a board meeting. The board, led by nefarious member Sidney J. Mussburger played by Paul Newman, conspires to install an unintelligent stooge as President so as to depress the price of their valuable stock just long enough for the board themselves to buy it all up. The man who stumbles from the mailroom into the boardroom and on into the President’s office, but is nurturing a market-upending idea of his own that turns out to be a phenomenal success and confounds the intentions of the board, is the “Hudsucker Proxy” of the title. He is played by an equally-well-cast Tim Robbins.

For this viewer, though, there is one performance that stands above this array of uniformly well-cast and exquisitely-performed performances and it is by Jennifer Jason Leigh as an ace reporter who is sent by the chief of her otherwise-all-male newsroom to infiltrate Hudsucker Industries and sidle up to Robbins’s character for a scoop. This is Leigh, with the benefit of the cracklingly fun dialogue that’s been precision-molded for her character, doing an unapologetically direct rendition of the Dame with Moxie film archetype typified by Rosalind Russell, Barbara Stanwyck and Katharine Hepburn; she has the sense of humor, classical look and limber acting skills to devour this responsibility whole. She’s got the voice and the mannerisms down, is deliriously funny and charming and also gets arguably the best outfits in a film overrun with great period costuming.

In fact every square inch of this picture is characterized by a loving and detail-obsessed tribute to mid-century modern and art deco styles, and I would argue that this is one of two key Things This Film Is Really About. In this screwball-capitalist postwar milieu, style is reality. Physics, perspective, emotion, morality, law, time and commerce are all subordinate to the logic of this gleefully exaggerated vision of what New York City sort of, kind of looked and sounded like in 1958. The sinews of this particular cartoon universe are a system of rules whereby a set of period aesthetics for which the Coens obviously have a wry but bountiful affection are coterminous with reason and with reality itself. In The Hudsucker Proxy, style quite literally is substance.

The other Thing that I think This Film Is Really About is the shaggy dog MacGuffin of the Hudsucker Proxy’s invention. In the fictional universe of this film it was he who invented the hula hoop, though it takes everyone else in the film and the viewer quite a while to figure out that that’s what he’s pitching. If I had to guess, I think the Coens and Raimi came up with this plot device early on and worked their way backwards from there: they probably picked the stupidest and most ubiquitous mass market success they could think of and then set about reverse-engineering an origin myth from it. (“If you think about it, just where does something as insipid as a hula hoop come from anyway? Hey, what if…”) Such a universally ridiculous and ridiculously universal feature of our culture becomes a symbol of the bumbling fail-upwards extravagance of postwar capitalism and industry. If something that dumb is in need of an origin mythos, then it may as well get one that comprises a fun story, screwball cartoon and loving genre pastiche. In 1994 the Coens set out to deliver precisely such a picture and executed it to perfection.

Comics to Close

Frienefactor, who knows that I love Peanuts and have read all fifty years’ worth of the original newspaper strip in chronological order, also came through with Be Kind: Peanuts Wisdom to Carry You Through by Charles M. Schulz. This small novelty-item book, credited to Schulz but as the indicia shows with “pencils by Vicki Scott, inks by Paige Braddock” and “colors by Alexis E. Fajardo,” is a list of good adjectives one should “Be” with snippets of classic Peanuts dialogue and attendant standalone drawings to illustrate the points. Let’s enumerate this book’s injunctions and see how I’m rating.

• “Be Appreciative” - I try to practice gratitude even when I’m grouchy. Actually especially when I’m grouchy. Could use more work on it.

• “Be Considerate” - I’m pretty good on this one. Better than I used to be, anyway.

• “Be Humble” - Context-dependent.

• “Be Caring” - If I like you, sure.

• “Be Pleasant” - Pretty good on this.

• “Be Patient” - Can’t be, won’t be, should be.

• “Be Cool” - Actually two people have told me recently that they think I’m cool but they don’t know me that well.

• “Be Sensitive” - As quite an overly-sensitive person, this one is not necessarily great advice for me.

• “Be Accepting” - In the context of this book it is made clear that this refers to being accepting of others, and I certainly try to be that way.

• “Be Accommodating” - I’m good at this.

• “Be Thoughtful” - And this.

• “Be Thankful” - See above re “Be Appreciative.” Trying to get better.

• “Be Dependable” - I will give myself credit for scoring well on this one and I think most people who know me would back me up.

• “Be Endearing” - Room for improvement.

• “Be Forgiving” - It’s complicated. As someone who definitely fucks up a lot, I would like to believe in second chances, even if they are out of fashion these days.

• “Be Peaceful” - Certainly more now than when I was a lad.

• “Be Hopeful” - Got one or two things I’m really hoping for right now, as it so happens.

• “Be Happy” - As it has become fashionable to say, I generally prioritize contentment over happiness. But yeah, I should jerry-rig more happiness in my day-to-day.

• “Be Charming” - Possibly my only true talent.

• “Be Supportive” - Again, if I know you and like you, then most certainly.

• “Be a Friend” - I could use more people to Be this for!

• “Be Respectful” - Agreed.

• “Be Polite” - Agreed.

• “Be Welcoming” - I am, rather to a fault. I get the impression guests get a little annoyed by my sometimes asking too persistently if all their needs and preferences have been met.

• “Be Helpful” - Sure.

• “Be Cooperative” - Sure.

• “Be Witty” - Buy me a drink and try me.

• “Be Positive” - How about “Be Optimistic in the Deutschian Sense of the Term”? But how I’d love to see the Peanuts gang used to illustrate that injunction.

• “Be a Role Model” - No one really wants that from me nor should.

• “Be Loyal” - This gal I was dating earlier this year actually made an interesting comment that no one else has ever made to me. “I think loyalty is really important to you,” she said, and I think she was on to something.

• “Be Grateful” - Alright, alright, I get it — be Appreciative/Thankful/Grateful.

• “Be Admirable” - I’ll look into it.

• “Be Civil” - Yes, and more of that is badly needed all over the shop these days.

• “Be Handy” - If only. Things break when I touch them.

• “Be Free” - I have tried in my way.

• “Be Terrific” - This just makes me think of the end of that one Mr. Show with Bob and David sketch where David’s character exhales with delight and exclaims “WE’RE TERRIFIC.”

• “Be Yourself!” - Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m working on it, leave me alone. And also be my best friend.

Now let’s all go listen to the Faith No More song “Be Aggressive.”