Wed Reading Meme...

[shadowkat]

1.) What I just finished reading?

More X-men comics. Although will state that the Cyclops arc has got to be the most extreme character arc that I've seen in serials. To get a good idea of how extreme this arc is - all you need to do is compare the series: Uncanny X-Men - First to Last and Avengers vs X-men : Consequences. (By the way, the Avengers are written as smug self-righteous, somewhat inept, insanely stupid, hypocritical pricks in the X-men books. If you are a huge fan of the X-men -- it's hard to see the Avengers as anything other than idealistic and somewhat clownish poster boys for a racist regime. From the movies, Amazon reviews and flist, I have a feeling that are not portrayed in this manner in their own books.)

At any rate - ignoring that problem:



In Uncanny X-Men First to Last - Cyclops sacrifices himself for his team and Xavier's ideals. He goes out of his way to protect humanity. The High Evolutionaries want to kill humanity to protect mutants, but Cyclops states better to die than let that happen. They try to kill Cyclops for failing to be a leader and Cyclops works to stop his team from protecting him and finds a way to stop them. But the gist is that he is willing to die for both humans and mutants. It's not a great book - and sort of retcons some bits from early history. He's also fighting Magneto in the past - who believes that humanity will always hate and fear mutants and there is no hope. Cyclops believes there's always hope and they have to fight for it, to rise above, no matter what.

Avengers vs. X-men : Consequences - has a far darker version of the Cyclops character.
Cyclops is in prison for having killed his mentor and father-figure Charles Xavier. (Although it wasn't really murder so much as a battle - with the two pitting themselves against each other. Xavier lost. Xavier and the Avengers were a bit arrogant - they pitted Xavier against Cyclops who had been taken over by the Phoenix Force, a cosmic entity, which had the power to devour planets. Somehow I doubt that a telepath could take out the Phoenix - Xavier failed the last time he attempted it. And hasn't been successful with others of equal power, specifically the Scarlett Witch. But noo...let's pit him against Cyclops...that'll work. Made no sense and was so obviously contrived...that I wanted to kick the writers. Also, Xavier has been killed or allegedly dead so many times now, it was hard to care. Add to that, he'd been missing in action for a long time. This weakened the story's impact and made Steve Rodgers and Wolverine and the rest of the X-men look like idiots every time they moaned over it.) Anyhow, ignoring that problem, what's interesting is Cyclops has done a 180. Scott Summers aka Cyclops was pretty much a Steve Rogers character - he did not kill his enemies, and often protected them at all costs -- saving people who had attempted to kill him, and bringing them into the fold. He protected humanity. And if he committed a crime or anyone else did - they accepted responsibility and went to prison. Here, to be fair, he accepts full responsibility. But he takes issue with the type of imprisonment - particularly with the unethical treatment of mutant prisoners for profit. (Clearly a social justice statement about how corporations are currently making a profit from the mass incarceration of persons of color in various prisons around the country. Actually there's a lot of social justice statements in the X-men, hence the reason that the Avengers look like racist idiots. It's all about perspective.) In this regard the character has not changed. And it may well be the continued prejudice and discrimination against mutants (racist acts) that has pushed the character to the wall. While in prison, he befriends a rather harmless mutant, who has just come into his powers. And he agrees to let Tony Stark scan him -- in order to learn more about the Phoenix Force - as a means of thanking Stark for finding a way to help Hope save the mutant race through the Phoenix.

Cyclops and Wolverine have two interesting conversations. The first - Cyclops aka Scott sort of calls Wolverine on his bullshit - almost inciting Wolverine into attacking and killing him. Until Wolverine figures out that he wants it. "Only you could take all the fun out of killing someone," Wolverine tells him. Scott counters: "A lot of people have the right to judge me, Logan. You're not amongst them. You wanted to kill Hope - and if you'd succeeded in your aim, our species would be extinct not thriving like it is now. How do you live with that?" (Not well, he attacked him.)

The second occurs after the mutant that Scott befriended is killed by a human prisoner, while a human guard assists and takes Cyclops out of contention. Cyclops prior to this incident had told Magneto not to break him out of prison, that he would not let them turn him into a criminal. Cyclops had been on his way to a session with Stark at the time. Now, Stark has sent Wolverine to Cyclops to talk him down.

Wolverine - tells him that while Charles Xavier's kindness, and dreams healed him and inspired him, it was Scott Summers who was his role model and taught him how to be a better man. Whenever he loses patience - he asks himself what Scott would do, and pulls back, and doesn't kill the kid. He tells Scott not to quit, to be that man. That he can't stand idly by and watch Scott further sabotage himself. (I'm rather obsessed with the concept of self-sabotage. The world kicks us, we have to learn to turn the other cheek and not kick back. Which - is easier said than done.)

Scott asks Magneto to break him out. And frees all the prisoners. He sends the humans who killed the mutant to Limbo via Magick, and has Danger carve an X on the Warden's face reminding him that unethical racist practices won't be tolerated. Then he tells Wolverine - basically Magneto's speech to Xavier, and Wolverine's to Scott ages ago -- since you are now the better man, I have to be the man you once were. I can trust you to teach them. But I'll keep them alive.

The book is political in a lot of ways - and plays with a lot of social justice themes - specifically in regards to racism. But what I found interesting is the 180 degree turn in the character. After years of protecting humans from mutants, and teaching, and fighting folks who spouted revolutionary concepts...Summers is doing the exact opposite in some respects. While it would be easy to paint him as a villain, which both Wolverine, the X-men, and the Avengers attempt to do, it's not that simple.
Also in light of what has occurred to the character - his actions make complete sense. He's pretty much lost everyone he ever cared about. His species has been on the verge of extinction more times than he can count. He's witnessed numerous genocides under his watch. And he's wracked with guilt over the deaths on his own hands. Plus, prior to all of this - he was merged with an apolcalyptic mutant who believed everything was best resolved through violent means.

The arc to the casual reader may seem drastic or 180 degrees, but if you read all the books crucial to the arc, it actually tracks and makes sense. You also find it hard to judge him. I found myself thinking at one point...but for the grace of God go I.



2) What I'm reading now?

Still stumbling my way through Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. Although there is a light at the end of this tunnel. It appears I'll actually finish it.

I don't dislike the book. In places, it's rather brilliant. But, I think it is also a tad over-rated. Keep in mind, I read a lot of these types of books in my 20s and 30s, so the format isn't new to me. And well, it feels like I'm reading a lot of short stories, slices of life tales, and I'm not a fan of short stories -- as I explained recently to a friend, it takes me at least 50 pages to get into the characters, style, and story - and here, by the time I got into the story and characters - it ends. Abruptly. And I'm starting a new book. Also, even though the characters in this book are well-drawn, well-developed, and off the beaten path (ie. quirky), it isn't really character driven so much as thematically driven - the writer at times feels like he's sermonizing or philosophizing through his characters. Which is okay, but not really my cup of tea, as it were.

The book is broken up into a series of sections, each section fitting neatly into the next like a series of hollow chinese wooden dolls. In case the reader hasn't figured out that this is the writer's intent in regards to the structure, he tells you, in various sections of the story.
Mitchell doesn't trust his reader all that much, which to be fair - he may have a point, I have a feeling this structural point was lost on quite a few readers.

There's some great quotes in the novel - which pretty much tell you the theme and what the writer's purpose was in writing it. They'll also give you an idea as to the jumps in writing styles. One section, by far the most difficult, is written completely in dialect. (I didn't have too much difficulty with it - but I'm an old hand with dialect, having read Toni Morrison's Beloved, Mark Twain, Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and various other books where writers like to make up their own language or write dialect. One of the plus sides of having dyslexia - is you learn early on to figure out the meaning of words by context and what lies around them. You sort of used to seeing weird words and making sense of it. I don't recommend doing it yourself unless you know what you are doing and have mastered technique. Otherwise you'll lose the reader. Although I think Mitchell probably lost quite a few...I was aided in part, by having seen the movie which closely follows the book - at least from a plot perspective.)

The first quote is from the second section of the book - entitled "Letters from Zedelghem", they are basically letters by Robert Frobisher, a composer, to his friend Sixsmith, during the 1930s. He's apprenticing to the famous composer Ayres.

Been thinking of my grandfather, whose wayward brilliance skipped my father's generation. Once he showed me an acquatint of a certain Siamese temple. Don't recall it's name, but ever since a discile of the Buddha preached on the spot centuries ago, every bandit king, tyrant, and monarch of that kingdom has enhanced it with marble towers, scented arboretums, gold-leafed domes, lavished murals on its valuted ceilings, set emeralds into the eyes of its statuettes. When the temple finally equals its counterpart in the Pure Land, so the story goes, that day humanity shall have fulfilled its purpose, and Time itself shall come to an end.

To men like Ayrs, it occurs to me, this temple is civilization. The masses, slaves, peasants, and foot soliders exist in the cracks of its flagstones, ignorant even of their ignorance. Not so the great statesmen, scientists, artists, and most of all, the composers of the age, any age, who are civilization's architects, masons, and priests. Ayrs sees our role is to make civilization ever more resplendent. My employer's profoundest, or only, wish is to create a minaret that inheritors of Progress a thousand years from now will point to and say, 'Look, there is Vyvyan Ayrs.'

How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because if one didn't the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner.

The same could be said about writing stories for that matter. Or blog posts. Or poetry.

The next notable quote, deciphers the title for the less than savvy reader. This is from the section that is in dialect entitled "Sloosha's Crossin' An' Ev'rythin' After". Mitchell does make his reader work for it, I'll give him that. This section takes place in the distant future, a dystopian/post-apocalyptic world. Told by Zach to his son, who retells it as an unreliable yarn. This section refers to the one before it - an Orison of Somni-451. Somni in this section is God. In the previous section she's merely a fabricant freedom-fighter/matyr.

I watched clouds awobbly from the flor o' that kayak. Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an'tho'a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds.

Yay, my Hole World an' hole life was shrinked 'nuff to fit in the O o' my finger'n'thumb."

The way to figure out what was written above is to put in the missing consonants.

"I watched the clouds awobbly from the floor of that kayak. Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an though a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud and so is a coul."

At any rate, it's talking about how who we are, our souls, our stories, cross time and space, like a cloud, with little substance, shifting and changing constantly. Yet are memorable and still a story, still us, all the same.

The stories in the book may seem different, but they are of the same substance, the same mind, drifting and shifting in and out of each other.

The third notable quote is from the section entitled "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish" (which is actually my favorite section next to the Frobisher bit). This section is about a London book editor who gets trapped in an old folks home.

Mother used to say escape is never further from the nearest book. Well, Mumsy, no, not really. Your beloved large-print saga of rags, riches, and heartbreak are no camouflage against the miseries trained on you by the tennis ball launcher of life, were they? But, yes, Mum, there again, you have a point. Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

True enough. My mother said much the same thing to me recently.

And, more notably, and far more philosophically associated with the title, just in case we didn't catch it...

Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides...I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life's voyage. I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.

Which is a slightly different interpretation of the previous quote about an atlas of clouds, yet the same.

And..

Middle Age is flown, but it is attitude not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all. Outside, fat snowflakes are falling on slate roofs and granite walls. Like Solzhenitsyn laboring in Vermont, I shall beaver away in exile, far from the city that knitted my bones. Like Solzhenitsyn, I shall return, one bright dusk.

Finally, the section that I'm currently on, Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery - which reads like a satire of a 1970s corporate espionage thriller. This quote is from various bits written in Issac Sachs notebook on a plane. Before he is killed by the bad guys. Luisa is an investigative journalist.

One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each "shell" (the present) encased inside a nest of "shells" (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of "now" likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future.

Which explains the structure of the novel in a nutshell or what the writer was aiming for.

It's tough going. I didn't like the science fiction sections, which frankly worked better for me in the movie than in the book - mainly because too much emphasis was on style and too little on character and story. And I found the style used rather silly and off-putting. I don't mind dialect, when it is done well and not as gimmickry. (See Faulkner in Sound and The Fury - where dialect is used to get across a specific character - a mentally challenged man's perspective. Or Huck Finn - where it get's across an illiterate boy's point of view. Here...it felt like he was trying to get across how illiterate and under-educated these people were...which didn't quite work for me.)
But, I like the other sections well-enough.