Reviews: poetry, Dzur, yaoi

[rivkat]

How's that for a spam heading?


Stephen Burt, Parallel Play: Steve is a good friend and a genius who knows something about almost everything. His poetry is precise and heavily influenced by popular culture, including WNBA and Buffy. (“Scenes from Next Week’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer” is one of the poems, as is “Self-Portrait as Kitty Pryde.”) The juxtapositions are unexpected, but often seem inevitable once he’s made them:

So once again, they’ve run you out of
Town on a toy train. It all seems pleasant:
These clapboard shrubs and candybox pastels
Part where the heathers wave back at us. Do they know?
A folded hillside saves snow; it shines like diapers,
Parts and shows
The larch you noticed the last time you wet your pants.
It was a Thursday. The tall teacher cleared the room
As sunlight shocked the prurient glass doors …

There are some notes for the more obscure references in the back, which helped me. There’s a lot of variety, using several different forms and influences, and even some love poetry. I don’t read an awful lot of poetry and I’m a biased observer, but I enjoyed looking for the fresh metaphors (“Above the New York Eye/And Ear Hospital, the dawn/breaks promises, its coffee turns to cream,/The bubble machine/Steals summer from its balcony …”) and rhythmic sequences.

Steven Brust, Dzur: In which Vlad returns home and braves assassination and other forms of death, in order to do a favor for Cawti she doesn’t want and will only drive them further apart. I would have benefited from rereading some earlier Vlad books, but I couldn’t wait. Brust makes a meta gesture towards the fact that it’s been a really long time since we’ve had a new Vlad book, and doesn’t even get as far as “no, it is too complicated. I will summarize,” so unless you have a crystalline memory for the series, don’t do what I did. It’s not like reading a Vlad book is painful. This one uses recipes rather than aphorisms for each chapter, which matches the more diffuse feeling of the narrative. Vlad’s got so much more power now, and plans more in advance, so his dangers are more theoretical than they were. I enjoyed it because it’s Vlad, but I do hope Brust continues the series so we can see what this book was setting up.

Kimi Shiruya, Dost Thou Know?: Reason #237 I love my job is that a colleague sent me this yaoi manga after a conversation we had at a conference. (See here for her Wired story on doujinshi.) Sadly, this wasn’t the right book for me; it’s about two guys who are rivals at kendo, and I have trouble getting interested in individual sports. I have a teamwork fetish, and I love a training montage something fierce, but the one-on-one bouts of kendo depicted didn’t qualify. Anyway, there’s a poor dark-haired guy who goes to public school and a rich blond guy who goes to private school; they both have younger brothers who look lots like them, and who are also kendo rivals. I had trouble both with artistic conventions (somewhat naturalistic until moments of strong emotion like surprise and anger, at which point the faces turn into cartoons, including steam coming out of nostrils) and narrative conventions (the boys felt immediate overwhelming attraction, against which they struggled terribly, until they surrendered, and I didn’t get the motivations for the struggle or the surrender). I feel like I’m missing too much to really enjoy the form. Conversations seem to start and stop at random, with background assumptions I don’t share. Although I’m intrigued by Urasawa’s Monster, I know I’m not getting the most out of it, and I’m still struggling to figure out whether I should make the investment to learn more manga conventions.

Comments

[shiba-inu.livejournal.com]

I think Vlad is going to end up joining the Lavodes.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

One-shot yaoi is not generally known for convincing motivations, by the way; it tends toward plot? What plot?

You might try Death Note, which is psychological suspense and which doesn't use any of the more stylized conventions that tend to trip up beginning manga readers. Ditto Blade of the Immortal, a gorgeously drawn manga about an immortal swordfighter and the teenage girl who drags him into her quest for revenge, with dialogue straight out of Quentin Tarantino.

Personally, I started with anime, which introduced me to and hooked me on some narrative and characterization conventions, and did not require me to follow page lay-out.

[boniblithe.livejournal.com]

Absolutely, Rivka, you will enjoy Death Note. If you still lived in NY I would loan you my copies :)

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

I am going to be the cranky dissenter who says Death Note doesn't live up to its promise. But I do think Rivka might like Eternal Sabbath, which is another thriller that avoids the chibi stylistics and has an interesting female scientist as one of the leads, and Saiyuki, with the usual disclaimer that the writing improves vastly around V4 and the art around V5.

[boniblithe.livejournal.com]

doesn't live up to its promise

It helps if you stop reading at Ch 58 :)

About those motivations

[rmthunter.livejournal.com]

It seems as though instant lust is one of the conventions of yaoi, which is fine: that's generally only the beginning of the story. On the other hand, I detest the chibi frames as much as anyone does -- they very seldom work.

I just recently read (and re-read, and re-read) Kimi Shiruya, and found it a good, strong story, mostly under the surface, and much more erotic than the general run of school-boy romances, even without the obligatory sex scene. I can see, though, where you wouldn't be grabbed by it if individual competition leaves you cold: that's an essential component of the characters.

For a one-shot yaoi, I can recommend Seven by Momoko Tenzen -- it's beautiful and the emotional context is fairly tough -- and motivations make sense. I can also recommend Hyouta Fujiyama's two-volume Sunflower -- she gives herself enough room to develop the story fully, and the side story at the end of vol. 2 is quite good. It's also her best graphic work.

I started with shoujo manga -- Vampire Knight, I think -- which got me used to the conventions pretty quickly. Now I'm getting way too enthusiastic about anime.

Re: About those motivations

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the recommendations! I will keep an eye out.

Re: About those motivations

[rmthunter.livejournal.com]

My pleasure. I've been immersing myself in yaoi over the past six months, and am finally, I think, getting some perspective on it as a genre.

Re: About those motivations

[rmthunter.livejournal.com]

Another thought or two on this:

This only just popped into my conscious mind this morning, thinking about Kimi Shiruya again: evocation. The point is not to portray an event, but to call forth an image of the event. It's an idea I picked up from studying butoh, and I think it carries over here. I think you're going to find that key to getting a handle on shoujo conventions in general.

It might also give you some help with action sequences in general: you don't really need to be able to read them in detail, it's enough to get a sense of the motion and exertion and passion that's happening. (I find that idea helpful in something like Vassalord, where action sequences are truly chaotic and usually incomprehensible.)

I'd also say give yourself another go at Kimi Shiruya at some point -- aside from the fact that I'm very impressed by it, it occurs to me that most of the story is related by inference, and that's also where a lot of the eroticism comes from (and it's about the most truly erotic yaoi I've read). The empahsis on kendo is simply because that is the central metaphor for the characters and the story: this isn't a courtship so much as a duel -- something that's all too common in relationships between men. (And in spite of the surface reading of the ending, it's really hard to know who won -- look again at the expression on Katsuomi's face.)

Gah! Stop me! I could go on all day.

[pinkfinity.livejournal.com]

She did a few articles from Japan, didn't she'll I thought they were all interesting and had that glint of being "in the know" to them.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

I hadn't seen her writing before. I do find the whole doujinshi thing fascinating because it's such a different model of how to let a creative sector work. Of course US society as a whole is so much more litigious than Japanese that it's not necessarily a helpful lesson.

I finally read that new law review note and ended up thinking it was pretty unhelpful (not to mention typo-ridden). Regulating C&D letters won't do a thing unless something is done about damages.

[pinkfinity.livejournal.com]

I'd noticed some typos too but I'd wondered if it was possibly a pdf-ing problem rather than her errors.

I wonder if she wasn't thinking from the perspective of the fans, like those hit with the c&d's from the mpaa last year who changed their rating systems without a second glance because the mpaa put the fear of litigation into them - more a focus on the damage done by fear-mongering than anything else.

From an on-and-off lurker

[kurage-no-fic.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, doujinshi! You quite possibly know this already - Granick hints at it, but never states it outright - but one of the reasons most companies are willing to tolerate and even encourage doujinshi is that fact that today's doujinshi artists are tomorrow's professional mangaka. One of my Japanese colleagues - himself a sometime-creator of doujinshi - described Comiket as the "manga industry's reserve corps."

Of course, even in Japan there are occasional lawsuits over the creation of secondary material, the famous one being "Nintendo v. The Poor Sick Fan Who Just Had to Draw Ash Raping Pikachu."

Anyhow, I'm mostly commenting because nothing thrills me more than seeing smart fans dipping their toes into the world of anime and manga. Death Note is certainly far more interesting and well-done than the ilk of she-wank material like Dost Thou Know, and I would join the ranks of those recommending it. A few other good titles that leap to mind are Tokyo Babylon, which is full of angsty pre-apocalyptic goodness; From Eroica With Love, which chronicles the snarky adventures of a very gay art thief and a very repressed spy (warning: the art style is very "late-70s shoujo," and may be a bit off-putting); and especially Pet Shop of Horrors, which is beautiful and smart and heartbreaking.

In general, I find anime more accessible - and frankly, more enjoyable - than manga. (Not when it's dubbed into English, though. Then it becomes an abomination.) Some of the recent shows that have more or less earned their excellent reputations include "Fullmetal Alchemist" and "Samurai Champloo." If you get the chance, you should definitely check them out.

Re: From an on-and-off lurker

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the recommendations. I am still a bit chary of learning a whole new set of artistic conventions, not to mention the social things I don't get, but I am willing to keep trying, slowly.

Re: From an on-and-off lurker

[boniblithe.livejournal.com]

Death Note is more Westernized in style so you needn't fear.

/pimp