"Six Novels in Woodcuts": Art Spiegelman on Lynd Ward

The Paris Review currently features a short piece on graphic artist Lynd Ward written by Art Spiegelman, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic memoir Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. The 1971 meeting in upstate New York between scruffy young fan and established artist, as often happens, doesn't turn out as hoped but it did help spark Spiegelman's own graphic career. This fond memory is excerpted from his introduction to Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcuts, a two-volume set published by The Library of America on October 14, 2010.


... It seems natural now to think of Lynd Ward as one of America’s most distinguished and accomplished graphic novelists. He is, in fact, one of only a small handful of artists anywhere who ever made a “graphic novel” until the day before yesterday. The ungainly neologism seems to have stuck since Will Eisner, creator of the voraciously inventive Spirit comic book of the 1940s, first used it on the cover of a 1978 collection of his seriously intended comics stories for adults, A Contract With God. It was a way to distance himself from the popular prejudices against the medium, and he often cited Ward’s 1930s woodcut novels as an inspiration for his work and for the euphemism. But Ward’s roots were not in comics, though his work is part of the same large family tree, belonging somewhere among the less worm-ridden branches of printmaking and illustration.

... In 1970, I briefly met Lynd Ward at the opening of a small Binghamton, New York, gallery show of his prints. I was a twenty-two-year-old cartoonist and told him how much I admired his woodcut novels. As I recall, I was by far the youngest and scruffiest person at the opening (he was just a few years older than I am now), and he expressed surprise that I even knew the books. I asked what newspaper comics had been important to him, and he explained that he hadn’t been allowed to read them as a child. When pressed, he expressed appreciation for Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant, which he discovered as an adult.

I didn’t share his enthusiasm—I thought Foster’s work, with its captions positioned safely beneath each of the stately illustrations on his Sunday pages, was barely comics at all —but we went on to find common ground in our mutual esteem for the great old socialist cartoonist, Art Young, before he turned back to talking to his grown-up friends.

... When walking through that Binghamton gallery show back in 1971, I regretted that no original prints from Ward’s woodcut novels were part of the exhibit, but I remember slowing down to notice that a number of the prints on display depicted trees and forests. I thought about the poetry of patiently carving into a dead tree to make a print on paper that commemorated the once-living thing. One beautifully structured print stayed with me (I later found it again, reproduced in Storyteller Without Words): a panoramic treescape of a young man in shadows, groping and climbing through the dense neuronal wickerwork of dappled trunks and branches, carefully exploring and working his way through the maze of marks that surround him.

I’ve recently been told that it was intended to be a picture of the nature writer, John Burroughs, but I’d thought of it as a moving self-portrait of the artist embedded in the wood, seeking slivers of light in the darkness and carving out a new medium. The print was called “The Pathfinder.” ...

(Art Spiegelman's work also includes the startling Shadow of No Towers, a graphic novel about September 11, 2001. His most recent book of comics is Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!. Art by Lynd Ward reproduced from the Paris Review.)

The Alzheimer's Poetry Project, a 2008 blog from Literary Kicks

Sometimes it's good to dive into the internet archives of favorite sites -- great discoveries can wait in response to every click of the mouse, and the sheer volume of posts can seem daunting until one really stands out. Readers can determine a writer's influences, a casual mention of an author can open a whole new shared interest or provide an essential "aha" moment of understanding.

Levi Asher's Literary Kicks site has been rolling on since 1994, and the blog that began primarily as an exploration of the beat ethic has broadened into an expansive contemporary journal, with contributions by a large number of writers on many topics as well as Action Poetry, a freeform space for "speed, spontaneity and responsiveness to others in the room."

Here's an excerpt from Asher's 2008 post entitled "The Alzheimer's Poetry Slam." It's a blast to read and opens the door to a whole area of new thinking about literature and the way listeners respond to it, even those who are considered unreachable through disability or disease. The post originally appeared August 12, 2008.

The best poetry slam I've been to this year was in a room full of Alzheimer's patients at the East 80th Street Residence in New York City.

... I sat in a circle with more than twenty senior citizens, all of them suffering from moderate to severe memory loss and other symptoms of Alzheimer's or Alzheimer's-related disease, watching spoken-word poet and author Gary Mex Glazner work the crowd. Before beginning, he walked the circle, looking deeply into the eyes of each attendee and clasping their hands. Then he started in with the poems -- all of them classics, designed to burrow deep in the memories of the bemused listeners, who responded at surprising moments.

"Tyger, Tyger --" Glazner began.

"Burning bright", a man in the back shouted out. They remember William Blake at the Assisted Living Care center on the Upper East Side, and they also remember William Shakespeare, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. That's really the whole concept: victims of Alzheimer's disease might not remember what they've done four hours ago, but they remember classic poetry, and anybody who doubts how much this might mean to them only has to sit in this circle and watch each person's eager, satisfied response.

... Like any good slam poet, Glazner doesn't work in isolation; he'd brought a gang of eager young poets from Study Abroad on Bowery's "Summer Institute of Social Justice and Applied Poetics" to work this room with him, turning the session into an encounter between multiple generations. The visiting poets read some of their own work and helped keep the "call and response" going, encouraging the sometimes confused patients to repeat, respond to and cherish each individual line they heard. Cherish they did.

.... The Alzheimer's Poetry Project is a growing movement -- you can find more information about it here.

The post brought a number of responses, moments of recognition from readers who had similar experiences with friends or relatives. One comment summed up the power of poetry to remain in memory, a far stronger connection even than the written word: Poetry exists in breath. It tends to remain, as they say, on the tip of the tongue. For millennia, that is how it has stuck around, especially before, but also after, the advent of written language. The APP's obvious success is another kind of proof of the idea that poems are easier to remember than most other things.

(photos of Gary Mex Glazner and the Study Abroad group by Levi Asher)

Gary Snyder, Jim Harrison, and "The Etiquette of Freedom"

"The archaic religion is to kill god and eat him. Or her."

(Gary Snyder, from "Grace," in The Practice of the Wild)

"I had read somewhere that in the Middle Ages hell was envisioned as a place without birds."

(Jim Harrison, from The Road Home)

Luckily there are still birds along the California coast. Jim Harrison and Gary Snyder join together in a new book of conversations and an accompanying documentary, The Etiquette of Freedom, in which the two discuss ideas of poetry, art, and God (and, occasionally, Google) while trekking the California wilderness. The largely untouched wild makes a beautiful case for leaving well enough alone, but both men realize that man's imprint continues to shape the land and that one's own conscious attitude is a necessary tool of conservation.

Both writers are acutely aware that even in an age when global economies are seen as increasingly contracting, the world's energy consumption continues to explode with an unstoppable demand for new resources. The political aspects inherent in twenty-first century stewardship of the land, however, are not the focus here. These talks are a give-and-take primarily on the individual's role in developing a stewardship of place and a larger sense of belonging through awareness.

A participant of Kerouac's original "rucksack revolution" foretold in On the Road, Snyder remains one of its eloquent spokesmen. The countercultural movement away from the cities and to more rural settings in the 1960s and '70s found the poet's essays essential reading and his poems an expression of tangible beauty that became increasingly difficult to find in the suburban sprawl along the interstate. Harrison's novels and poems of the American midwest are a naturalist approach toward family and place -- particularly in Legends of the Fall -- that echoes Snyder's larger themes. Together the conversational dynamic is pretty sprightly as the two strike sparks from each other.

Zen teaching is a common thread in their conversation, but the east-meets-west combination of Eastern philosophy and Western culture can require some heady, imaginative leaps for the reader. Here's one exchange:

JH: D. H. Lawrence said, "The only aristocracy is that of consciousness."

GS: What do you think he meant?

JH: I think he meant that the person who is most conscious lives most intensely -- if "intensity" is the real pecking order, since life is so limited in length, as we are both aware of recently. That the person who experiences life most vividly --

GS: The most vividly? I'm not sure I agree with how he meant that, but that's a good question --

(Director John J Healey, Snyder, Harrison, and S.F. Film Society executive director Graham Leggat at the May 5, 2010 screening. Photo by Steve Rhodes)

JH: Why would you disagree?

GS: Oh, because it's too spectacular, too romantic.

JH: Well so was he.

GS: Of course. At any rate, you could set that beside an East Asian idea of the aristocracy of consciousness, and a Chinese or Korean idea of that would be much calmer, much cooler. Not like a hard glowing gemlike flame, not like a flaming candle burning out --

JH: That's what Kobun Chino Sensei said; they criticized his friend Deshimaru because he said, "You must pay attention as if you had a fire burning in your hair." And Kobun said, "You must pay attention as if you were drawing a glass of water."

GS: Oh, that's better.

JH: This concept of the divine ordinary --

GS: Exactly. There's two sides of Zen, right there. Deshimaru's statement about hair on fire is something you might say to a koan student. You'd say, "This is in the literature; it's like you had a glowing red ball stuck in your throat. And that's how serious you have to be in order to do koan study. But, in the long run, you don't want to burn your tongue off."

JH: It's like Rene Char says, if you are a poet, all you have to do is be there when the bread comes fresh from the oven.

GS: I like that.

"Are you going to try to improve yourself, or are you going to let the universe improve you?" Snyder quotes Dogen Zenji at one point, nudging us to the realization that we all still have that choice to make.

It's wonderful to read as the two old lions occasionally roar back and forth at each other, trying to top one another as they make universal connection. "The practice is the path," another quote from Dogen Zenji, appears early in the book, and serves as a helpful guide to the two writers' sometimes oblique tangents; we are all learning as we go. The book (and one supposes the documentary too) is a reminder that old ideas may not be dead after all, and that the old mysteries are still alive to be solved in all of us.

"Tab Lit": publishing trips down another slippery slope

Autumn is a silly season, bringing new attempts at snagging the public's lingering summer-doldrum attention spans with new twists on everything from television to politics to publishing.

Sometimes it's all connected in one glorious publicity moment, as when CNN captured an eager author at a weekend rally tossing his own book onstage to -- or at -- President Obama in the hope it would wind on the bedside table at the White House. As a Presidential commentary it says a lot: apparently we've moved on from shoe-tossing to book-throwing, which may only be fodder for those who claim Obama's book-reading elitism. At least the writer wasn't naked, as was someone else at the same rally to cash-in on an advertising stunt.

A streaker at a Presidential rally seems hardly out of bounds these days when it's becoming more difficult to differentiate between reality and reality TV. Maryann Yin at GalleyCat at MediaBistro this week reports on the other trend of the moment, the book mash-up that combines Jane Austen with vampires, Anna Karenina with androids, and now Chekhov rocks the mash-up ... with Lindsay Lohan's mother.

Over at The Daily News last week, Frank DiGiacomo writing as The Gatecrasher dubbed Celebrity Chekhov "tabloid lit," and the perpetrator, New Yorker editor Ben Greenman, makes appropriate throat-clearing remarks about the "similar pressures" shared by celebrities and Chekhov's characters, though he does frankly admit Chekhov is a little out-of-date with "a lot of coachmen and gas-lamps."

The trend is obviously becoming all very Hollywood high-concept -- If there is a real, disturbing factor in all of this, it may be that the slippery slope downward in mash-lit has already been tripped over. It's going to be a short way down to Captain Ahab meeting Arthur Fonzarelli jumping the Whale -- you decide, but I'm securing those rights to Fonzie's character ASAP. Yin writes:


Russian short story writer Anton Chekhov has joined British novelist Jane Austen on the mash-up victims’ list. New Yorker editor Ben Greenman has published Celebrity Chekhov, taking Chekhov’s writings and adding celebrities. Not to give away too much, but actress Lindsay Lohan receives a flogging on the command of her reality star mother, Dina Lohan.

The Daily News explained how Greenman conceived this idea for “Tab Lit:” “Greenman determined that the best way to update Chekhov’s dramas of love, loss and pride was via our national obsession with fame. ‘Aren’t celebrities fictional characters anyway?’ he asks. Besides, he points out, celebrities face ‘similar pressures’ to Chekhov’s characters: Many of the stories deal with the divide between public and private.” Earlier this year, Greenman released What He’s Poised To Do, a collection of fourteen short stories about love and letter-writing.

Chekhov was renowned for his short stories and plays, especially his four major plays: The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. He also practiced medicine and maintained a busy career as a physician. According to the publication Letters of Anton Chekhov he once said, “Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress.”

The publisher Quirk Books gained quick success with its line of literary mash-up titles. The first came from the release of Seth Grahame-Smith‘s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Soon the sequel Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters followed. Moving away from Austen meant a poke at the expense of Russian author Leo Tolstoy with the release of Android Karenina. They followed up with Night of the Living Trekkies, which is described as “Galaxy Quest meets Dawn of the Dead when all hell breaks loose at a Star Trek convention.”

And for readers who prefer to read about real historical figures doing battle with the undead, there's Grahame-Smith's Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter. You really, really can't keep a good man down.

"The Last Speakers," K. David Harrison: preserving language in the internet age

The idea that the world is quickly becoming one vast internet-connected village of ideas and commerce is always challenged by the reality of the situation. On a planet of six-billion-plus human beings there are pockets where the very meaning of "civilization" requires no laptop, no electricity, and no connecting thread but a common language. No matter how few the number of speakers, language makes a community.

The Last Speakers A team of linguists who have discovered in India a distinct patch of language that extends to a group of residents in four bamboo huts. Its speakers share only nine percent of a common vocabulary with the surrounding inhabitants. As the article makes clear, language remains a carrier of common history and culture.

The number of disappearing languages is increasing, and in this interconnected age there is still the surprise in finding new speech and new ways of expressing shared ideas. Here's an excerpt from the article written by Times writer John Noble Wilford.

Two years ago, a team of linguists plunged into the remote hill country of northeastern India to study little-known languages, many of them unwritten and in danger of falling out of use....

At a rushing mountain river, the linguists crossed on a bamboo raft and entered the tiny village of Kichang. They expected to hear the people speaking Aka, a fairly common tongue in that district. Instead, they heard a language, the linguists said, that sounded as different from Aka as English does from Japanese.

After further investigation, leaders of the research announced last week the discovery of a “hidden” language, known locally as Koro, completely new to the world outside these rural communities. While the number of spoken languages continues to decline, at least one new one has been added to the inventory, though Koro too is on the brink of extinction.

“We noticed it instantly” as a distinct and unfamiliar language, said Gregory Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in Salem, Ore.... A scientific paper will be published by the journal Indian Linguistics.

When the three researchers reached Kichang, they went door to door asking people to speak their native tongue — not a strenuous undertaking in a village of only four bamboo houses set on stilts. The people live by raising pigs and growing oranges, rice and barley. They share a subsistence economy and a culture with others in the region who speak Aka, or Miji, another somewhat common language. ...

Listening, the researchers at first suspected Koro to be a dialect of Aka, but its words, syntax and sounds were entirely different. Few words in Koro were the same as in Aka: mountain in Aka is “phu,” but “nggo” in Koro; pig in Aka is “vo,” but in Koro “lele.” The two languages share only 9 percent of their vocabulary.

... In The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World’s Most Endangered Languages, published last month by National Geographic Books, Dr. Harrison noted that Koro speakers “are thoroughly mixed in with other local peoples and number perhaps no more than 800.”

Moreover, linguists are not sure how Koro has survived this long as a viable language. Dr. Harrison wrote: “The Koro do not dominate a single village or even an extended family. This leads to curious speech patterns not commonly found in a stable state elsewhere.”

... The effort to identify “hot spots of threatened languages,” the linguists said, is critical in making decisions to preserve and enlarge the use of such tongues, which are repositories of a people’s history and culture.

In the case of Koro speakers, Dr. Harrison wrote in his book, “even though they seem to be gradually giving up their language, it remains the most powerful trait that identifies them as a distinct people.”

A lyric for Columbus Day, and a spot of trouble

It is the Columbus Day holiday, and history notes that a New World was discovered on October 12 in 1492 -- well, by Europeans, at any rate. As is often the case in the writing of history there are some subtleties about such occasions, unpleasant ones, that must be omitted from the history books. Later, much later, it may be possible to admit that perhaps everything did not turn out for the best. The rest is comedy.

Here is a lyric written for the comic operetta based on Voltaire's Candide, produced in New York in 1958, and written by the poet Richard Wilbur. Dr. Pangloss is the optimistic philosopher who assures his friend, the ingenuous Candide, that all evils, even syphilis, are for the best, and that this is the best of all possible worlds. The "love disease" may be a small price exacted when one considers the solace of tobacco.

Pangloss's Song

(Richard Wilbur)

Dear boy, you will not hear me speak
With sorrow or with rancor
Of what has paled my rosy cheek
And blasted it with canker;
'Twas Love, great Love, that did the deed
Through Nature's gentle laws,
And how should ill effects proceed
From so divine a cause?

Sweet honey comes from bees that sing
As you are well aware;
To one adept in reasoning,
Whatever pains disease may bring
Are but the tangy seasoning
To Love's delicious fare.

II

Columbus and his men, they say,
Conveyed the virus hither
Whereby my features rot away
And vital powers wither;
Yet had they not traversed the seas
And come infected back,
Why, think of all the luxuries
That modern life would lack!

All bitter things conduce to sweet,
As this example shows;
Without the little spirochete
We'd have no chocolate to eat,
Nor would tobacco's fragrance greet
The European nose.

III

Each nation guards its native land
With cannon and with sentry,
Inspectors look for contraband
At every port of entry,
Yet nothing can prevent the spread
Of Love's divine disease:
It rounds the world from bed to bed
As pretty as you please.

Men worship Venus everywhere,
As plainly may be seen;
The decorations which I bear
Are nobler than the Croix de Guerre,
And gained in service of our fair
And universal Queen.

Jonathan Williams on Cocteau's "La Belle et la Bête"

Josette Day as Beauty, and Jean Marais as The Beast, in Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête.

When weather turns cold and thoughts run to darker recesses of the psyche, the chills of a Halloween season must not be far away. I am wary of the current desire to be scared out of our wits 365 days a year in reading and at the movies -- like much else these days, easy availability of things once reserved for a turn in its own season, like Halloween, makes for duller thrills when the time is right.

Last night I saw The Exorcist -- for the first time. As my host burst out when I told him I had never seen it, "You've never seen The Exorcist! What the hell have you been watching?" My excuses must have seemed weak and weary: looking back to the early 1970s there was Fellini and Scorcese, Coppola, Altman ... Last Tango in Paris ... so yeah, I skipped on seeing The Sting. The Exorcist? Not that either. Meekly I offered Fantastic Planet and he drew a blank. No, he hadn't seen that one. Cue the Exorcist credits.

I'm glad I saw it, but I watched it as a film fan would watch Bela Lugosi in Dracula. It was mildly interesting but thoroughly filled with hoke, and just as theatrically staged for maximum audience chills as "I never drink ... wine" was for an earlier age. I admired Friedkin's craft -- wonderful stuff, absolutely top rate, he can make a bed shake like no other -- but the story -- pffft. As a recovering Catholic, maybe I just have never been scared of the Devil or his minions. Who can say.

There are other movies, though, that continue to thrill in a Halloween season. Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bete, from 1946, is one. No blood or gore or pea-soup in this black-and-white telling of Beauty and the Beast, but a spectacular and haunting film to this day. Here's Jonathan Williams, sage of the Jargon Society and Scaly Mountain, North Carolina, describing one of my favorite seasonal films. He begins by roundabout route, with the admission that it’s dangerous, going back to films you adored when you were 18 or 20, and then meanders his way to the subject by way of one film that -- to put it discreetly -- has at least stood the test of passing young Williams's time. When he gets to the wind-up, it's great to read his words on Cocteau's incomparable visual poetry. I might not ever make time for The Exorcist again in Halloween-time, but La Belle et la Bête will forever be on the schedule as one of my favorites. Williams writes:

... The thing is, however, La Belle et la Bête, though it creaks a little technically and must have been made with hardly any budget at all, remains as compelling a fairy tale as ever. It is “Once upon a time” from beginning to end, childhood’s open sesame. Cocteau kept a journal of the film and it’s been sitting on the shelf, essentially unread, for 46 years because my French has never developed past knowing the names of foods and drinks. With a dictionary and the investment of 15 minutes of my friend Tom Meyer’s time, we can offer you this paragraph from Cocteau:

“My method is simple: I let the poetry alone; it comes on its own. It can only be called untameable. I’ve tried to build a table for the poetry. And for you, then, to eat there, to talk to it, or build a fire with.”

One would love to see the Beast’s chateau dans le fôret, but Cocteau’s journal makes it unclear to me whether it is named Rochecorbon in the Touraine, or Raray, north of Paris near Senlis. Most of the book appears to be about visits to doctors and dentists between rare moments on the set.

What one remembers with astonishing clarity are some of the great visual moments: the hall of candelabra held by human arms; the living caryatids with fiery eyes and smoke coming from their nostrils; the balustrade of animals in the Beast’s park; the door that tells Beauty that it is hers; the mirror that tells her it is hers alone. I have never forgotten the magic password: “Va ou je vais, le Magnifique, Va—va—va!” And the wonderful scene where Beauty’s wicked sisters, Felicie and Adelaide, hanging up the sheets on the washline, are dressed in great hats that make them silly goose girls. Henri Alekan‘s cinematography is luminous. You can’t hear much of Auric’s music on the soundtrack, but what’s there is very good.

Diana, goddess of the hunt, in La Belle et la Bête

Josette Day is enchanting as Beauty, and Jean Marais convincing as the poor Beast. He is at his best when he reveals to Beauty the secrets of his magic power in truly incantatory fashion: “My horse, my glove, my golden key, my mirror, and my rose!” It’s a real downer when he changes into Prince Charming—so big and butch, straight from the pages of the French equivalent of Physique Pictorial. But, that’s the look Cocteau and Genet liked in those dim days of yore. Treat your imagination to 90 minutes in “ce vague pays des contes de fées.”