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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.
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.
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From:
Re: About those motivations
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.