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I am still technically on hiatus because of grad school, but I’ve just finished my first semester and I have some time while I’m on winter break. I hope to get a few posts up before the spring semester starts in January, but I’m not promising anything!
Over the summer I learned that consuming too much metafiction, as with chocolate, wine, margaritas, cheese, berries of any kind, coffee, tea, cake, cookies, candy or anything else delicious and edible, can lead to headaches, indigestion and temporary loss of taste for that food.
I’m not saying Jack of Fables is a bad series. In fact, it does something completely brilliant by making the writing/illustrating process a kind of character in the books. I’m just saying that it’s a very bad idea to read eight volumes of it right in a row. This comic by Bill Willingham is a spinoff of one of my all-time favorite comics, ever, Fables. The books follow all our favorite fairytale characters in their lives in New York City after they were run out of their homelands by the adversary. And then other stuff happens. Jack of Fables spins off fairly early in the series, and follows a separate timeline.
The best way for me to describe the metafiction contained within is this:
Photo by Celeste Hutchins. Used under Creative Commons.
Many jokes are made about the authors creating the characters (and Jack actually turns fat and ugly and then into a dragon for making fun of the authors–see, the writing/illustrating process has agency in this text! Fracking brilliant!). Literary terms, genres and plot devices like science fiction, fantasy, literary, the fourth wall, the other three walls, deus ex machina, etc. become characters. In every issue (so several times a volume), Babe the Blue Ox gets a page or two to look out at the audience and make jokes.
For the first few volumes the story revolves around the Literals, a family of powerful individuals who created all the Fables. One of them tries to write the Fables and all magic out of existence, and so the Fables must prevent this from happening. The Literals are another way Willingham has characterized the writing process, and made it both hero and villain as certain members of the family fight for the Fables, and others against.
All of it is brilliant, and delicious, and if you read it all at once, thoroughly nauseating. Most of the devices and techniques Willingham uses here are fairly obvious, though the effects of those techniques are varied and as I said earlier, brilliant. My first reaction to this was to roll my eyes and say something to the effect of, “Cervantes was never THIS obvioius,” but I was missing the point.
Jack is a self-absorbed prick. Under normal circumstances, only other self-absorbed pricks would have any interest in reading an entire comic book series about such a douche bag. So by making the writing process itself a character, I could stomach Jack’s self absorption and laugh about it. It was especially funny to me as a writer, because sometimes your characters turn into assholes when you want them to be nice, and you’ve got to do horrible things like turn them into dragons in order to make them nice again.
Willingham obviously has a lot of fun with this series, and it’s a lot of fun to read.
That being said, don’t read it all at once.
During the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s first ever Winter Read-a-Thon, I read a total of 50 hours and raised a total of $235 for my library!
I read the following books (links are to my blog posts concerning each book):
- Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut (audio book)
- Don Quixote by Cervantes (I’m still reading this… I’m taking my sweet time with it)
- Scott Pilgrim by Bryan Lee O’Malley (You can read a review I did of these books here)
- The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris by Leila Marouane (I just finished this last weekend and didn’t really like it, but didn’t really hate it, so I’m not sure what to say about it beyond that; article forthcoming)
- Close Range by Annie Proulx (an audio book that took over Timequake’s spot in my car since I didn’t have any other metafictional audio books; I’ll have to work on that)
In addition to those 4 1/2 books (since I’m only halfway through Don Quixote), I discovered just how much time I spent reading blogs, newspapers and magazines. Those five minute breaks at work and when I’m waiting for something really add up!
The Read-a-Thon was a lot of fun and I’m glad I was able to participate. Now I’ve got the fun job of collecting all the money and getting it into the library by March 7. Hopefully I’ll be able to collect my thoughts on The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris enough for a real post next week (I was traveling over the weekend, hence the late post this week… sorry!). I had put a hold on House of Leaves at the library at the beginning of the Read-a-Thon but it just came in late last week so I expect to start reading it this week or next week, so there should be lots of fun stuff coming up here at The Narrative in the Blog!
Oh, and if you’d like to participate in the Read-a-Thon, it’s not too late to make a one-time donation. Just shoot me an email at narrativeintheblog@gmail.com and let me know how much you’d like to donate!
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February is Library Lovers’ Month, and Pittsburgh’s City Council will declare Feb. 15 “Love My Library Day.”
To celebrate and show my support, and to wish the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh a happy Valentine’s Day, I am sharing all the reasons I love my library. Please share why you love YOUR library in the comments!
One of the dinosaurs you can see from the library. Photo (c) 2008 Kelly Thomas
1. On the second floor of CLP Main in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Oakland, a bank of windows let you look into the dinosaur exhibit of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. There are a ton of great nooks up here to browse some books, check out the dinosaurs and watch all the kids stare up in awe at the giant skeletons.
2. CLP has an enormous book collection, and you can request books from any CLP library and have them sent to your neighborhood branch for easy pick-up and drop-off. My local branch is one of the smaller ones, but thanks to this feature I can get any CLP book, and walk a few blocks to pick it up. Pittsburgh has more than 80 neighborhoods, and while there aren’t 80 library branches, wherever you live in the city you’re never too far from one of the 19 neighborhood branches.
3. It takes me about 10 minutes to walk to my local branch, the Allegheny Library. The Allegheny Library was actually the first Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1895. It was housed in its original building until 2006, when lightening struck the clock tower and caused a lot of damage. (No, seriously, it happened! Read about it in the Post-Gazette and Tribune-Review.) In 2009 a new Allegheny library opened up the street. I attended the grand opening, and I got to sign the original 1895 guest book, which has the signatures of everyone who attended the opening in 1895, the signatures of everyone who attended the centennial celebration in 1995, and now everyone who attended the grand opening of the new building. Pretty cool, huh?
4. The Pennsylvania Room on the third floor of the main branch is the first place I go whenever I want to learn about my adopted city. I especially love the books of old photos, or the ones like Pittsburgh Then and Now which shows photos of various Pittsburgh locales in the past and the present. Another of my favorite finds from this section is The Steps of Pittsburgh, which in addition to detailing the history of the city’s more than 700 public staircases, provides walking tours for many neighborhoods.
5. CLP also has a large multimedia collection. DVDs, CDs, ebooks, audio books, eaudio books and more. I just bought a Sony eReader, and the ability to borrow electronic books from my library was a big factor in my decision. I especially love CLP’s collection of foreign movies. A few years ago I worked my way through most of the Spanish movies and found a lot of gems. They even have anime, documentaries, TV shows and work out DVDs.
During the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s 2011 Winter Read-a-Thon, Jan. 8 – Feb. 19, I will be blogging about the books I read. For more information, to see a list of books I’m reading, and to make a pledge, go here.
- Hours read as of 2/14: 42.75
- Funds raised as of 2/14: $202.38
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When watching television or reading books like Scott Pilgrim that draw heavily on pop culture, I have to ask myself: Has metafiction become “cool”? Does its use at random points in an episode or chapter indicate to the intelligent that the show or book is smart, and because it’s smart, funny as well?
The answer, I’m afraid, is a resounding yes. At least when it comes to this comic book by Bryan Lee O’Malley.
Be forewarned, there are tons of spoilers for the comic ahead. If you haven’t read it, you may want to go read it right now, and then come back and read this post. And no, watching the movie doesn’t count, because they hardly have anything in common. Despite what I’m about to say, I really did enjoy Scott Pilgrim (book and movie), so if you haven’t read it, do so!
Throughout the six-volume Scott Pilgrim, the characters make reference to previous volumes. In book six, for instance, Scott’s band mate Stephen Stills reveals that he’s gay to Scott, saying that it shocked everyone when he came out in volume five, but Scott seemed really busy so Stephen didn’t mention it.
In earlier volumes, whenever Scott’s other band mate Kim asks him what happened, Scott tells her to “read the book.”
On one hand, I really enjoyed these little moments because they are meta and worth a chuckle. They also add to the general goofy, fun, entertainingly awesome feel of the book.
But on the other hand, they don’t DO anything. They are useless, other than proving that Scott Pilgrim is not only pop culture savvy, but intelligent. If you removed them, the book would not lose anything. It would still be a book that breaks a ton of fiction writing rules and gets away with it because it is awesome (even if I had trouble getting behind Scott and Ramona, the story itself was great).
Another metafictional joke in volume 6.
This comic relies on video game tropes to give its story a back bone. Scott’s life essentially IS a video game. He has to defeat a series of increasingly difficult “bosses” in order to win Ramona’s love. Weird things happen, like traveling on “subspace” highways that are never properly explained. The lack of explanation is okay because that is the expectation the author sets up right from the beginning.
It’s also heavily influenced by Japanese manga and video game fandom in general. If you’ve never played a video game or at least watched someone play a video game, you probably will have a hard time swallowing Scott Pilgrim.
Because of the video game, manga and fandom influences, it’s a “cool” comic — in the nerdy way, of course. (But hey, being a nerd is “in” now, anyway.)
So, as I stated above, the self-awareness of the book adds to its over-the-top, ridiculous style. I mean, Scott already has to fight a dancing Indian man, an ex-skateboarder, a butch lesbian ninja (I’m sorry, half-ninja), and an evil overlord who rules the indie music scene with an iron fist and also keeps his ex-girlfriends in a weird tube-thing. So what’s a little metafiction?
Kind of stupid, actually.
You could argue that the book’s self-awareness points out how ridiculous Scott’s life is and that it’s funny. But seriously, does it really need a giant blinking arrow pointing to that? No, no it does not. That would be, as they say, beating a dead horse. And, the book is plenty funny without the “go read the book” lines.
Whether or not being funny is enough, the metafiction jokes rubbed me the wrong way. They fell flat. They didn’t add anything except easy, cheap laughs. Based on the rest of the writing, which really was good, Bryan Lee O’Malley is better than that.
During the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s 2011 Winter Read-a-Thon, Jan. 8 – Feb. 19, I will be blogging about the books I read. For more information, to see a list of books I’m reading, and to make a pledge, go here.
- Hours read as of 1/31: 24.75
- Funds raised as of 1/31: $121.38
I love my library. I love reading. This is going to be the best fundraiser, ever.
It works like this: Between January 8 and February 19, I read as much as I can (I’m shooting for 50 hours). You sponsor me by pledging to donate a certain amount of money for each hour I read. The more I read, the more money the library gets. More information at the official website here.
To make it even better, I’m going to read metafiction. Metafiction that I get out of the library. And once I read it, I’m going to blog about it, right here!
Here’s my reading list, although the order may change, depending on availability of individual titles. I also can’t guarantee I’ll get through all of these during the Read-a-Thon as some of them are pretty lengthy, but I am sure going to try!
- Don Quixote* by Cervantes (in English this time!)
- House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
- The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris by Leila Marouane
- Timequake* by Kurt Vonnegut (abridged audio book)**
- Scott Pilgrim by Bryan Lee O’Malley (comic book)
If you like my blog, if you like me, if you like metafiction, if you like books and/or if you like libraries, please consider sponsoring me, or supporting this effort by reading my Read-a-Thon related entries (they will be tagged with clpreadathon11) and commenting on them.
The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh is one of the oldest public library system in the United States, but its facing some major financial issues. We have to make sure our state government knows how much the library means to us and how it important it is to our community — and that is only one of the reasons I’m participating in the Read-a-Thon and blogging about the books I read. CLP is working on a major initiative to find a sustainable source of funding, and public support is one branch of that.
I, for one, am proud to support and use my library! (And so are the 2.6 million other people who visited the library in 2008.)
If you’d like to donate, please leave a comment or send an email to narrativeintheblog@gmail.com. I can’t take electronic submissions, so at the end of February I’ll give you my address so you can send me a check (made out to the library, of course!).
I’ve done the math for you already:
- $.10 x 50 hrs. = $5
- $.25 x 50 hrs. = $12.50
- $.50 x 50 hrs. = $25
- $1.00 x 50 hrs. = $50
- $2.00 x 50 hrs. = $100
Between a few friends and my family, I’ve already got three pledges for a total of $80 (assuming I meet my 50 hour goal). Not a bad start! If you’d rather make a one-time donation, you can do that, too. You can also set a donation limit if you’re making an hourly pledge (so if you would like to pledge $1/hour but can only donate up to $50, you can set your limit at $50).
*I own these two, so I won’t be getting them out of the library. The other three will be library books.
**I hate abridged books, I really do. I’m making an exception on this one because it was FREE and it’s getting pretty hard to find audio books on TAPE. And listening to audio books on tape in my old school (read: lame) car is the only way I stay sane while delivering newspapers as part of my duty as assistant editor of The Northside Chronicle.
