Isak

Literary & Media Indulgences - 3/30/2012

-- How much do I want to know what you think? So much! Be awesome and fill out this 10-question Isak survey!

-- Marx at 193: The London Review of Books revisits the, um, world's most well known Marxist.

-- A wonderful visualization of U.S. Census data compares how the country was measured in 1940 with 2010. See, for example, "how America has changed," how the questioning itself evolved over time, and key comparisons between the years.

-- My old pal Fred Chao has a lovely new comic up at Trip City: "The Regrets We Talk About." An image from it is above. Read it and be charmed!

-- Sure, this gallery of comic book World War II propaganda is fun, but I'm most intrigued that there was once a comic book hero known as Cat-Man.

-- Meg Wolitzer writes about "The Second Shelf" in The New York Times: "Bringing up the women’s question — I mean the women’s fiction question — is not unlike mentioning the national debt at a dinner party."

-- In 1983, Adrienne Rich wrote an essay about Elizabeth Bishop's poetry for The Boston Review. Alice Walker and Frances Goldin remember Rich on Democracy Now! Megan O'Rourke writes in Slate about how Rich changed American poetry.

-- Frank Rich's top-notch feature for New York Magazine: "Stag Party." Tagline: "The GOP's woman problem is that it has a serious problem with women."

-- Tom Hayden (one of The Michigan Daily's proudest alumni) writes about the fiftieth anniversary of Students for a Democratic Society, which he founded, and how the Port Huron Statement is echoed in today's Occupy Wall Street.

-- George Orwell wrote a book review of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. Yes. And you can read it right now. (H/t Bookslut.)

-- Rachel Maddow gives a fascinating interview on NPR's "Fresh Air with Terry Gross," discussing Maddow's new book, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power. John Powers, in his leisurely review of Drift, writes: "Maddow doesn’t merely want to win viewers over to her side—she wants to make them smarter and better informed." And have I mentioned my huge crush on Maddow lately? I'm hardly alone: there is such a thing as the "Hey Girl, It's Rachel Maddow" Tumblr. Hot!

-- The Storytellers of Empire: "Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie asks American writers why, 'Your soldiers will come to our lands, but your novelists won’t.'"

-- How do journalists create a narrative arc in their longform stories, while still, you know, being factual? Here are some ideas.

-- Dahlia Lithwick, whose work I admire so much, talks about narrative journalism, sob stories, and the Supreme Court with Nieman Storyboard.

-- I love that the excellent Center for the Art of Translation has a new podcast. Friends, Romans, countrypeople, meet "That Other Word." The first episode features an interview with Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review and translator of Edouard Levé's Autoportrait.

-- A two-part story by José Saramago begins unfolding in Guernica, translated by Giovanni Pontiero. It's called "Things."

-- Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa is donating his personal library of 30,000 books to his Peruvian hometown of Arequipa.

-- Dutch author Guus Kuijer won the 2012 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for children's literature. It is the world's richest literary award. Lindgren, of course, is the author of these treasures. Kuijer's citation reads in part: "Respect for children is as self-evident in his works as his rejection of intolerance and oprression. Kuijer combines ... razor-sharp realism with ... visionary flights of fancy."

-- Here are books that Anne Lamott loves.

-- I was already excited to read this book, but Michael Schaub has me ready to leap out of my chair and run to the bookshop.

-- "Who is Peter Pan?"

-- I'm thrilled to see Anna Holmes writing for The New Yorker. Check out her article on Judy Blume's books, as well as "White Until Proven Black: Reimagining Race in The Hunger Games."

-- David A. Bell on what we lost with the demise of print encyclopedias.

-- Literary critics in 1929 ranked American novelists, with some surprising results.

-- Jeffry Kaplan writes about "the gospel of consumption" for Orion.

-- Walking is political, writes Will Self. I'd add: it's fun.

-- The oldest natural history museum in the United States turns 200 this year.

-- "Science on the Rampage." Brought to you  by the New York Review of Books.

-- Wouldn't it be nice for someone to read you a story really, really well? You should be loitering around Selected Shorts.

Your Turn

We're nearing Isak's six-year anniversary (!), which means it's time to check in with you, readers both regular and occasional. Please take a moment to fill out this super-easy 10-question online survey.

What are you drawn to on Isak? What leaves you uninspired? I'm curious about your ideas, and about you. While I understand this space to be pretty singularly coming from my mind and heart, evolving as I evolve, this opportunity to learn from you is important to me. I'll share your responses next week when I put together my annual hyper-detailed birthday post (see "Five Years Fierce").

I hope you'll take the time to respond, even if it's simply to wave hello. My heart alights when I hear from you.

A New American Poet: Introducing Robert Frost

A 1915 article in The Atlantic was written about an unknown poet who had found an admirer confident enough in his abilities to trumpet his debut to American readers.

... I found on a London bookstall an odd number of The Poetry Review, with examples of and comments on "Modern American Poets,"—examples which whetted my curiosity. But the few quotations given appeared to me literary bric-à-brac, the fruit of light liaisons between American dilettantism and European models. Such poetry, aesthetic or sentimental,—reflections of vagrant influences, lyrical embroideries in the latest designs, with little imaginative insight into life or nature,—abounds in every generation. If sufficiently bizarre its pretensions are cried up in small Bohemian coteries; if sufficiently orthodox in tone and form, it may impress itself on that public which reads poetry as it looks idly at pictures, with sentimental appetite or from a vague respect for "culture." Next I turned to some American magazines at hand, and was brought to a pause by discovering some interesting verse by modern American poets ... I learned indeed from a magazine article that the "New Poetry" was in process of being hatched out by the younger school; and, no doubt, further researches would have yielded a harvest, had not a literary friend chanced to place in my hands a slim green volume, North of Boston, by Robert Frost. I read it, and reread it. It seemed to me that this poet was destined to take a permanent place in American literature. I asked myself why this book was issued by an English and not by an American publisher. And to this question I have found no answer. I may add here, in parenthesis, that I know nothing of Mr. Robert Frost save the three or four particulars I gleaned from the English friend who sent me North of Boston.

It is a particular delight to see how the writer wrestles with Frost as an unconventional poet, when, for so many contemporary readers, Frost has come to embody convention's comforts.

"Mr. Frost is a true poet, but not a poetical poet," remarked a listener to whom I read "A Servant to Servants," leaving me wondering whether his verdict inclined the scales definitely to praise or blame. Of poetical poets we have so many! of literary poets so many! of drawing-room poets so many!—of academic and dilettanti poets so many! of imitative poets so many! but of original poets how few!

Look also for Rabindranath Tagore, Goethe, Herman Melville, Alexander Pushkin, and Nathaniel Hawthorne to make cameos in this piece.

What Adrienne Rich Wrote

My whole heart aches at the news of her death, this great poet, fierce essayist, loving activist, this woman I never met but who reverberated in my mind and body. I feel shaken. I may have more to say about her and her life's work. But for now, let me back off. Let Adrienne Rich speak for herself.

I know that "capitalism" is an unfashionable word. "Democracy," "free enterprise," "market economy" are the banners now floating above our economic system. Still, as a poet, I choose to sieve up old sunken words, heave them, dripping with silt, turn them over, and bring them into the air of the present. Where every public decision has to be justified in the scales of corporate profits, poetry unsettles these apparently self-evident propositions -- not through ideology, but by its very presence and ways of beings, its embodiment of states of longing and desire.

[...]

You will remember the pictorial names (of birds) as you won't the Latin, which, however, is more specific as to genus and species. Human eyes gazed at each of all these forms of life and saw resemblance in difference--the core of metaphor, that which lies close to the core of poetry itself, the only hope for a humane civil life. The eye for likeness in the midst of contrast, the appeal to recognition, the association of thing to thing, spiritual fact with embodied form, begins here. And so begins the suggestion of multiple, many-layered, rather than singular meanings, wherever we look, in the ordinary world.

[...]

Why do poets ever fawn or clown or archly undercut their work when reading before audiences, as if embarrassed by their own claims to be heard, by poetry's function as witness? Why do some adopt a self-conscious shamanism, as if the electrical thread from human being through poem to other human beings weren't enough? Why are literary journals full of poems that sound as if written by committee in a department of comparative literature, or by people still rehearsing Ezra Pound's long-ago groan  I cannot make it cohere -- a groan that, after so many repetitions, becomes a whine? Why do so many poems full of liberal or radical hope and outrage fail to lift off the ground, for which "politics" is blamed rather than a failure of poetic nerve? Why have poets in the United States (I include myself) so often accepted that so little was being asked of us? asked so little of each other and ourselves?

 

From What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, updated edition. I've told you before how much I love this book.

 

Image Credit: Metro Weekly

Title IX Goes to the Movies

Kate Hepburn as a pro golfer? Elizabeth Taylor as a jockey? "Bad News Bears" as a Title IX satire? And what the heck is Helen Hunt doing in a film called "Quarterback Princess"? My new feature for Grantland tells the story of women in sports by looking at the movies -- how sports films from 1937 through 2009 depict the oddity that is a female athlete. Here is an excerpt:

Hollywood reveals the still-limited understanding of women's sports. Films about female athletes are often explicitly about being a competitive girl in a traditionally masculine world. Compared to male sports movies, they feature individual sports more often than team sports — think Blue Crush, Ice Castles, The Cutting Edge, Soul Surfer, Girlfight — even though team sports are by far the most popular among female athletes. Love interests are more prominent plot points in sports movies about women, and women are hardly featured in a proportional number of sports movies overall.

Among the persistent tropes in sports movies about women is the guy whose coaching of female athletes signifies how very low he's fallen. He's a drunken ex-athlete himself (A League of Their Own), or a bitter former competitor whose success was cut short (National Velvet); he seethes with resentment because he missed his chance to coach men (Personal Best), or he "doesn't train girls" and looks for any possible way out (Million Dollar Baby). Going by the typical storyline, the coaches will soon enough have a revelation: "Hey, this woman's game is interesting and worth my time!" But the sheer ubiquity of the trope indicates that this is a lesson we have to learn again and again.

Women's sports of today? They are at once prominent and on shaky ground. It's a back-and-forth mirrored at the movies. And it's a story worth watching. Here, then, is a tour of sports films from the pre-Title IX era through today. Together, they reveal what has — and hasn't — changed about our real-life expectations of female athletes.

It's a full-on gallery of sports films and history. It was a joy to write this piece.

 

Related:

• Top Ten Reasons Why This Feminist is a Sports Fan
• Her Life Depends On It
• To Be a Title IX Dad
• Expect Great

Poem: "September 8th"

Did I mention that I got myself a copy of The Captain's Verses? Pablo Neruda's Los versos del capitan? I  did, and my life is better for it. Neruda finished writing these poems in 1952 while living in exile on the island of Capri, though he didn't publish them publicly until 1963. This set of passionate, loving, ecstatic, anxious, kind-hearted poems written to Matilde Urrutia. They have me thinking on the animating art of the love poem, the movement in its glancing and shadows.

September 8th
By Pablo Neruda
(Tr. Donald D. Walsh)

Today, the day was a brimming cup,
today, this day was the immense wave,
today, it was all the earth.

Today the stormy sea
lifted us in a kiss
so high that we trembled
in a lightningflash
and, tied, we went down
to sink without untwinning.

Today our bodies became vast,
they grew to the edge of the world
and rolled melting
into a single drop
of wax or meteor.

Between you and me a new door opened
and someone, still faceless,
was waiting for us there.

Speaking: Mary Gordon

 

"And I think one of the most dangerous linguistic or epistemic phenomena in the world is the either/or. Because we are hybrid creatures. We have bodies and souls. We have appetites and duties. We have many, many things that contradict. We're spirit and flesh. And, so it seems to me, the work of the writer is always, to use a religious term, incarnational. How do we witness to the mix of being human? How do we witness to the inherent contradiction of being human? And also, I believe that if a writer can do her or his work, it is to try to imagine the other, not the comfortable other."

 

-- Mary Gordon, interviewed in 2006 on Bill Moyers Journal

 

Mary Gordon is an author and Barnard College professor who often examines how two great forces in her life -- her Catholicism and her feminism -- play out in day-to-day lives. She is an ambivalent writer, in the best of ways. The Company of Women was her first major novel. She is also the author of a book of collected stories (lovely), The Love of My Youth, Circling My Mother (a memoir), Reading Jesus: A Writer's Encounter with the Gospels, and the well-loved Pearl, about a former student radical whose twenty-year-old daughter chains herself outside the American embassy in Dublin with the intent to starve herself in a sort of political and religious martyrdom. Gordon also wrote an introduction to Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own -- you can read "The Fate of Women of Genius" here. See also this lovely 1981 interview with Gordon in the New York Times, in which she speaks of the idea of vocation.

Get Up and Get Out: Women, Action & the Media - Detroit

Join the brilliant Nichole Christian and myself at WAM-Detroit, the local incarnation of Women, Action & the Media's decentralized event series that is spotlighting the intersection of gender and media. This is your chance to connect with freelancers, journalists, activists, advocates, academics, and other leading voices in the Detroit/Ann Arbor area -- for free! We'll also integrate part of our Detroit conversation into the larger WAM dialogue about "creating spaces and places where women's words matter" as it unfolds across the U.S. and Canada. Both newbies and the battle-worn, and everyone in between, are welcome. We've got to help each other out ... and we're committed to having fun while we do it. (By the way, see Nichole riff on this beautifully over at Shetroit.)

Details on the Detroit events, and the online WAM! events, are below the jump. I'll see you soon.

Benjamin Busch, and What's Up With The Memoir These Days

Memoirs are odd birds. They can be powerful, even revolutionary animals, merging the introspection of autobiography with the vision of a novelist. I include The Autobiography of Malcolm X in this camp (here's me in process of reading it), and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club. Hell, we could count The Education of Henry Adams in the group too, and Art Spiegelman's Maus (my review) and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home (thrilled commentary one, two, and three). The worth here is in well-told stories where the author is able to look both ways: the intimacy of his or her personal story, and the broad context that is beyond the bounds of their own lives.

Memoirs can also be dead-on-arrival: awkwardly extended diary entries, where introspection mutates into narcissism and a series of anecdotes are presented as story. I came across a lot of these when I was reading submissions for Kore Press. The publisher provides readers with individual feedback on their manuscripts, and so I had to find a way to explain this to the writers -- who were often very talented -- in ways that wouldn't be translated as me as saying "your life is boring and not worth writing about." Because that is not what I meant. Rather, I wanted to bring an itch to their ambition. The memoir invites a sense of relativity (everyone has a story, every story matters) that turns limiting (just write what happened); would-be memoirists might be brave enough to risk scope in their stories.

Across this scale of revelatory and redundancy, memoirs have found an outrageous popularity. I'm intrigued by this, and by the conversations about how memoirs can, and do, work. For my part, I come down with this fantastic piece by Neil Genzlinger in the New York Times on why most memoirs are terrible. It begins: "A moment of silence, please, for the lost art of shutting up." Among his guidelines to "restore some standards to this absurdly bloated genre", he suggests:

That you had parents and a childhood does not of itself qualify you to write a memoir. [...]

No one wants to relive your misery. ... That’s what happens when immature writers write memoirs: they don’t realize that an ordeal, served up without perspective or perceptiveness, is merely an ordeal. [...]

If you’re jumping on a bandwagon, make sure you have better credentials than the people already on it. Imitation runs rampant in memoir land. [...]

If you still must write a memoir, consider making yourself the least important character in it. ... Maybe that’s a good rule of thumb: If you didn’t feel you were discovering something as you wrote your memoir, don’t publish it. Instead hit the delete key, and then go congratulate yourself for having lived a perfectly good, undistinguished life. There’s no shame in that.

Coming in at the other end of the conversation is Deb Olin Unferth, who offers up a "memoir manifesto" over at Guernica. Her opening call: "Let’s have no more insults hurled at the memoir, shall we?"

When Meakin Armstrong of Guernica brought up the possibility of my guest-editing a section, I immediately knew what I wanted to do: a section on innovative memoir. Let’s once and for all dismiss the notion that the memoir is a lesser form.

The writers I chose each explore memoir in a decidedly contemporary manner, while at the same time showing an understanding of the past tradition.

Other interesting weigh-ins on where the memoir is at these days? Ruth Franklin evaluated "the art of writing about captivity" on the occasion of Jaycee Dugard publishing her memoir. When Alexandra Fuller released Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness (not her first memoir), Katherine A. Power considered how memoirs are written by white Africans who lived through the fall of their sovereignty. (Fuller is Kenyan: her Scottish mother came of age during the Mau Mau uprising.)

And in the meantime, there is Benjamin Busch -- you might know him from HBO's "The Wire," or as a Marine Corps combat veteran, or an acclaimed essayist and NPR contributor, or as a filmmaker, or as the son of novelist Fredrick Busch. The multi-faceted artist publishes Dust to Dust this week, an interesting take on the memoir. From my profile and interview with him (alas, much abbreviated!) in today's Detroit Free Press:

"Dust to Dust" is a contemplative and haunting memoir that centers on what it means to look back and forth between the living and the dead. Busch, the son of liberal parents who once protested the Vietnam War, grew up to be a soldier, and though his book hinges on the harrowing stakes of war, it also puts other areas of his life into context -- everything from boyhood play in the cornfields of upstate New York to high school football to his work as an artist and actor.

Rather than moving from youth to adulthood, Busch opts to tell his story by way of elemental-themed chapters that cover water, metal, stone, blood, bone, wood, soil, arms and ash. Like Busch, "Dust to Dust" resists being categorized as any one thing.

By grounding the story in elements, Busch is able to refute the strict chronology of traditional memoirs, and presents a much more intersectional way of telling a story -- a way that elevates the chaos of memory. As he told me:

We're used to conventional memoirs, which generally take a well-established course. The narrative arc begins in youth, and it's a very linear progression. That's not the way I see and not the way I remember. I wanted this memoir to replicate the path we follow when we remember things. For me, it's so rooted in the environment. My whole life has been about water and stone and soil. All the elements, I could trace my life back to. I'd always paid attention to them.

I liked it. I liked this haunting, introspective book, riven with both violence and laughter, and grounded so emphatically in the elements of our living and dying.. Busch does not fall into the easy game of recounting first-this, then-that, with a little added flourish for the anecdotes from the realms where he has achieved his greatest fame. No. Instead, he wrote a book.

By the way: Busch is igniting a 50-state book tour this week. Detroit-area friends can find him at Nicola's Books in Ann Arbor this Tuesday. I encourage you to check him out.

When "Tales and Truth" Get Mixed Up

News broke this afternoon that Mike Daisey's famous monologue on the atrocious working conditions in Apple's Foxconn facility in China -- aired to immense popularity on PRI's This American Life -- contains serious fabrications. Rob Shmitz from Marketplace uncovered the (true) story. This weekend, This American Life is dedicating its entire hour to the retraction, and it has released a statement that says that Daisey blatently lied to host Ira Glass and the show's fact-checkers.

We're horrified to have let something like this onto public radio. Many dedicated reporters and editors - our friends and colleagues - have worked for years to build the reputation for accuracy and integrity that the journalism on public radio enjoys. It's trusted by so many people for good reason. Our program adheres to the same journalistic standards as the other national shows, and in this case, we did not live up to those standards.

This is significant -- the broadcast of Daisey's story became This American Life's most downloaded podcast, and it played a huge role in drawing scrutiny to Apple's labor practices, as well as the tech industry more broadly. It led to Apple -- for the first time ever -- permitting third-party investigations into its factories, and releasing the names of its suppliers. Daisey, for his part, argues that since his monologue was intended as a theater performance, he wasn't beholden to the expectations of journalism. He continues to perform his one-man show around the nation, though there have (so far as I know) been no indications that his performance was anything less than a dramatic rendering of a factual story.

This incident provoked me into responding via a series of tweets on the nature of mixing up "tales and truth." (It's a conversation that's also gotten play with the whole "Lifespan of a Fact" madness.) What follows is an amplified excerpt of what unfolded over the course of an hour, with grammatical and clarity clean-up, for your reading pleasure. All tweets are authored by me unless otherwise indicated.

 

PEOPLE: PRI distributes This American Life, not NPR. Also, let's take this Daisey debacle as an opp to value facts again, not just stories.

It's fashionable to bash objectivity. But objectivity is an exercise, not a reality: practicing skepticism and self-questioning because we value facts.

There's a place for point-of-view and interpretation in media (I practice this!). But our pact as journalists is to be grounded in real world.

There's also truth that *cannot* be told in true, fact-checked articles and radio features. This is why we have art.

RT @JDK12Reporter @annaleighclark To me it reemphasizes that reporting is real, hard work. That it's so much easier to fake makes real thing more worthwhile.

Daisey claims that b/c his story originated in theater, he could blur facts in ways journalists wouldn't. But this misunderstands hybrid art.

I think it underestimates power of art. Apparently, Daisey thought that if listeners didn't think story was *fact*, they wouldn't be moved.

But literature & theater are full of stories that resonated in real world news: The Jungle, Death of a Salesman, Lynn Nottage's Ruined.

RT @JDK12Reporter The easiest counterexample to that line of thinking is The Wire or Treme. Reported fiction has a long, proud history.

Daisey could've gone that route: chosen art, in its full potency, to tell the story he wanted to and have real-world resonance.

But he didn't.

He chose to present his story as verifiable reality: effectively journalism well-told and with a point-of-view. Okay, then.

Even as times are a'changin' in journalism, there are different expectations than in art. Here, stories come from the world we share.

If I make up quotes, stories, and present them as "real" to you, it's an act of violence against communities I pretend to portray. And to you.

RT @matthewjsimmons @annaleighclark Isn't his argument here that he chose to present his story as "theater," though? Not as verifiable reality or journalism?

@matthewjsimmons Yup, but he didn't make that plain til now. He worked with a news org and fact-checkers to tell his story in this incarnation.

@matthewjsimmons What's weird is that TAL *does* air fiction, theater, non-factually based stories. But he didn't go that route.

Awful things happen at Foxconn. But Daisey still fabricated their reality, *used* them to present a reality he imagined not as art, but news.

Foxconn employees deserve better. As @JDKReporter put it, reporting is hard, hard work. We need more people up for the job.

Oh, and hey: YOU. You people who care about the real world, real people, real injustices, real stories. You deserve better too.

Final words: Daisey did not value the potency of art, the truth that comes from stories that are not true. We need them too.

Daisey also did not understand how we the people still want, need stories grounded in the verifiable world that you and I share.

If we are to truly *know* this world, to discover it more and more through journalism, we must be honest about what we see. And don't see.

Anything less exhibits a lack of loving respect for the world, and its people -- both those whose stories we tell, and those we tell them to.

And -- most relevant to Daisey's best intentions -- it hinders our ability to right wrongs. I want truth to motivate me, not propaganda.

I want art to motivate me. Not fictions cloaked as news that make me feel demoralized -- both as an audience of art and of journalism.

I have a whole website dedicated to "celebrating tales and truth." I love both. But I get that they are different things...

... both worthy of our attention, our scrutiny, our skepticism -- our curious and joyful discoveries.

BOOK REVIEW: Finder, Volume 1 by Carla Speed McNeil

The first thing to know about Finder is that it is really weird. Carla Speed McNeil began crafting this story in 1996, self-publishing it for more than fifteen years before Dark Horse collected her first three Eisner Award-winning story-arcs into a single colume, released a year ago. (Here is McNeil telling the story.) The new edition is a finalist for the LA Times Book Prizes, which will be given next month.

Finder is a book full of beginnings, a provocative pile-up of crushing characters -- both human and human-ish -- living in and around the far-future domed city of Anvard. Here you will find familiar elements of great stories: a family strained by secrets, a man haunted by the mysterious and brutal legacy of his father, debates about how integrated we should be with our technology, political maneuvering, seduction. And here, also, you will find things wildly strange: sin-eaters, women with the heads of lions, yellow eyes, a "painwright" gallery where an oracle will barter with you for information on the pain of others if you share with it your own pain.

The "Finder" of the title is named Jaeger. Such a thing is described like this in the text:

Finders are now mainly forgotten. They were hunters, and trackers, and more. They lived secret lives. . . . It was the way of the Finder to help his people by standing apart from them, seeing them as only an outsider can.

It is Jaeger's thread -- and his other, darker identity -- that ties together the wide-ranging storylines, though he is hardly the only narrator; he shifts in and out of the foreground as the cast itself overlaps, shifts, ages. Jaeger is among the characters who bring humor to the pages, weaving an enigmatic but wry voice into a story that traffics in ideas about cities, media, family, individuality, human nature, guilt, redemption, conforming ideals, and art. (I might add that it is McNeil's art, too, that leavens the story: dynamic without being indulgent, fascinating without being cryptic. It certainly carries its share of the storytelling subtlety and momentum.) As another reviewer pointed out: unlike many other science-fiction narratives, the fate of the world is never at stake in Finder. It is interesting, then, how tectonic this plated story feels.

What makes this world so utterly consuming, so glaringly immersive, is that it does not make sense. This is a world that is unexplained. (There are unnumbered endnotes, but I read for the first time without them, an experience I recommend.) Symbols will catch your eye, but have no apparent follow-through. Storylines flow deeply, but take abrupt turns, loose threads a-flying. There is no here-to-there narration. There are no instructions on how to make sense of these strange places, and the creatures in them. This, then, is what makes the weird Finder comics an ultimately realistic story: you must take what you are given. It is as it is. Move forward, and fall in love all the same.

"Talisman" is the section near the end that is dedicated to "the kid with the book, wherever and everywhere." Perversely, I wanted this part to be merely on par with what had come before -- the back cover informs me that this section is a "fan favorite," and so there I was pre-emptively asserting my uniqueness. But in fact, the resonance of the pages burned, partly fueled by the circuitous journey I'd already been on with this strange story. My reading slowed. This is the section narrated by Marcie, who had been a young child and a secondary character thus far. You half-wondered if she really could do magic by the time you got to her section. The first lines in the first full chapter of "Talisman" read:

The greatest gift I was ever given was a book. It was given to me by a friend of the family who often turned up unexpectedly, like a neighborhood cat.

This friend, of course, is Jaeger. And over the panels, there is this lovely moment where he is reading the book to Marcie in his "gravelly" voice and you see how the hieroglyphs she can't decipher transform into full-blooded dreams as he narrates them, line by line. Marcie falls head-over-heals for the madly beautiful stories in the book, but Jaeger leaves before he finishes the book. Before she is able to read herself or find someone who can read the book "right" to her, it is thrown out. She goes on to fight a long battle in trying to learn to read handheld books herself (a neglected, artisan practice in Anvard), and then to struggle to write the stories she loves, that light her imagination aflame, that trail her like ghosts. There are so many empty spaces and blank pages. And screams. There is real pain in her difficulty in translating the transient but potent stuff of her mind into stories that make others see -- see! -- even as her real-life world creaks with duties and rages that have become ordinary. "It is in my nature to love chasing thngs that can't be caught," she tells us. "My book may be blank, but it will never be empty." I was barely begun with Marcie's story before I felt a full-body ache, a catch in my throat. It's beautiful.

I literally gasped when I turned the page and found my book finished. I had a healthy number of pages in my right hand still -- all endnotes, which I will dive into as soon as I sign off on this review, and color plates of the original Finder covers collected here. I gasped. I was reading in the bath, and I leapt out, and here I am, still warm-flushed, to call to you. This book shudders with both great pain and joy. It bristles with uncertainty. You don't get to know everything you want to know. It's feathered with nods to other texts. Its characters beat powerful drums, every one worth hearing.

This story is ongoing, as yet incomplete, and that feels right.