Monthly Archives: May 2010

THE SHAKESPEARE RIOTS: Revenge, Drama and Death in Nineteenth-Century America by Nigel Cliff chronicles how the rival New York Shakespearian performances of American-born stage star Edwin Forrest and British William Charles Macready triggered a series of aggressive stunts by Forrest’s supporters (who regarded the dominance of English actors on stage as a form of cultural imperialism), that then turned violent in response to a police crackdown. Cliff shows that the violence had less to do with the performances themselves than generally sour Anglo-American relations and class warfare (deriding popular actors was one of the ways the lower classes were allowed to blow off steam and they didn’t take lightly to having it cut off); he also goes into the basics of 19th century Shakespearian acting (Macready was a groundbreaker in trying to develop his character from his own inner resources rather than stock gestures), the actors’ life, and Shakespeare’s popularity in America during this period, which Cliff sees as the last gasp before the 19th century fossilized him as a fusty classic.
THIRD CRY TO LEGBA: Selected Stories of Manley Wade Wellman Vol. 1 gathers together all of the Lee Corbett stories (most of them I already read in VALLEY SO LOW) and Wellman’s 1940s stories of New York-based occult investigator John Thunstone and his battles with Crowley-clone Rowley Thorne, the nonhuman Shonokin (who also showed up in one of Silver John’s novels) and the sinister School of Darkness. The Thunstone stories are good, but suffer by comparison with Silver John’s first-person narration and Appalachian setting; a bigger problem is that the powers of darkness come off ineffective: A stab of Thunstone’s silver sword or a puff of tobacco laced with shaman’s herbs will usually dispel them.
STARDUST LOST: The Triumph, Tragedy and Mishugas of the Yiddish Theater in America by Stefan Kanfer looks back at the Yiddish-language theater that began a little over a century ago, largely due to the efforts of matinee idol Boris Thomachefsky (whose name has now been preserved as the mentor of Max Bialystock in the PRODUCERS musical) and eventually expired late in the 20th century (by which point English was the default language even for Jewish playwrights). Kanfer portrays a familiar mix of outsize egos, backstage feuds and politics (Zionism and Bolshevism mostly) plus the challenge of catering to an immigrant audience with little familiarity with theater, so that low-brow “shund” went over far better than anything good (years before Fiddler on the Roof, Sholom Alecheim’s tales of Tevya were rejected as too serious and thoughtful to work); Yiddish theater, did, however, manage several impressive productions, including Jewish versions of King Lear, Hamlet (with a woman duplicating Sarah Bernhardt’s turn in the role) and Merchant of Venice (the first recorded instance of a Jew taking the lead). Kanfer argues that while Yiddish theater has Gone To Dust, it’s influence is still alive and kicking, ranging from influential graduates (Stella Adler and Paul Muni) to Jewish shticks that carried over into the mainstream.
THE LITTLE STRANGER by Sarah Waters has the feel of an M.R. James story expanded to novel length as a doctor in post-WW II Britain notices an increasing level of weirdness surrounding a local Stately Home and the shabbily genteel family struggling to keep it afloat (very much in tune with the real-world situation chronicled in Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy). Stretching M.R. James to 400 pages doesn’t work so well, and the personal drama which is meant to be the heart of the story didn’t work for me at all.
BPRD: The War on Frogs is a TPB collection of retcons set during the BPRD’s battles with the monstrous spawn of the Jaghru Ogad, and giving us new looks at Roger the homonculus and Capt. Daimo; the best is the medium Joachim trying to help the devil-frogs’ ghosts go into the light.

As I work through the Essential Avengers Vol. 3,I reached one of my favorite stories, Avengers Annual 2. In it, the Avengers (Goliath, Wasp, Black Panther, Captain America, Hawkeye) return from a time trip and discovers the Scarlet Centurion (aka Kang the Conqueror) has altered time so that the original Avengers team (Giant-Man, Wasp, Thor, iron Man, Hulk) have become dictators. The current Avengers, naturally set things to rights.
One thing that struck me rereading the story was that the regular team is absolutely freaked to discover they and the world they knew no longer exist. These days that sort of cosmic weirdness is taken so routinely, it was refreshing to see them react the way most people would.
Another thing was that Marvel’s concept of the multiverse, as fleshed out in the 1980s, pretty much kills the story. As developed by then editor/writer Mark Gruenwald, every major event splits off in two ways (Galactus eats the world/Galactus doesn’t eat the world; Spider-Man lets the burglar go/Spider-Man catches the burglar and Uncle Ben lives) and no timeline can be erased: The Avengers returned to “reality” but the oppressed Earth endured behind them.
This makes their triumph a lot less satisfying, since there’s no sign the evil Avengers will lose their grip on the world.
And more generally, it’s a lousy idea. As Larry Niven pointed out in “All the Myriad Ways,” if every event diverges, then nothing we do amounts to everything. Every triumph is matched by a defeat; every survival is matched by a death. Victory is meaningless, nothing but a blind roll of the quantum-mechanical dice, if it’s paired every time with defeat.
Comics have always assumed that some events would split reality in two, but making it every single possible event just never worked for me.
Funny, I thought I had more of a post in mind, but I think I’m just rambling. So I’ll stop now.

In The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerane in Medieval Spain, Maria Rosa Menocal describes how the Muslim conquerors of “al-Andalus” took seriously Islam’s teaching that Christians and Jews should be welcomed as people of the book; for several centuries this led to Christians and Jews playing important roles in Muslim states. Menocal argues Arabic was a key part of the bonding, since although the language of holiness like Hebrew and Latin, it could also be used for poetry and secular works, which opened new vistas to the non-Arabs of Spain (a flowering of Hebrew poetry, for example). A book that lives up to its critical praise—and has inspired me to write a story set in this era, eventually.
REEL V. REAL: How Hollywood Turns Fact Into Fiction by Frank Sanello only goes to show that writing a serious book about historical films is tough (there’s only a couple of the many I’ve read that I liked)—though in fairness, I’ve read enough on the subject that my disinterest is because much of what Sanello says is familiar to me. That being said, some of his criticism is silly (objecting to the musical 1776 as unhistorical reminds me of the people who said The Pajama Game didn’t represent the real state of labor negotiations in the garment industry) and some is just baffling (the fact that Antitrust has a Bill Gates-knockoff as its villain hardly justifies treating it as a “based on truth” film).
Scotland Yard is hot on THE TRAIL OF FU MANCHU in the wake of Sax Rohmer’s previous book, as the Devil Doctor is cut off from his resources and forced to go to ground in England, though playing defense doesn’t stop him playing such trump cards as re-enslaving Petrie’s daughter and manufacturing gold out of human flesh (not to mentioning poisoning Fah Lo Suee, though I won’t bet on it lasting). A good one, though the constant hints about Fu’s Egyptian ancestry are sometimes a strain—are there really that many people who could recognize that he looks like Pharaoh Seti I?
SHARPE’S BATTLE: Spain, 1811 was the first of Cornwall’s retcons (though given how much detail he goes into on Sharpe’s India years, I suspect he was laying plans for the others already), in which Sharpe’s decision to execute two French soldiers caught mid-rape leads to a clash with the ruthless French general Le Loup, a politically-inspired court-martial and a desperate attempt to redeem himself at the battle of Fuentes des Oñoro. A good one, and I’m fairly sure the spymaster Ducos (here trying to sow dissent among the Irish troops) returns in later books.
AT THE WATER’S EDGE: Macroevolution and the Transformation of Life by Carl Zimmer is an excellent science/evolutionary history of how our ancestors left the water, how some of them wound up going back and how researchers put the picture together. Of great interest to me for showing how many theories have been revamped since the days I was a bio major—lungs, it turns out, actually preceded swim bladders instead of evolving from them (“The fact that the fish line with swim bladders came to vastly outnumber the lungfish confused the issue.”) and the development of hard-shelled eggs is no longer what made it possible for tetrapods to move from the amphibian phase (“Amphibians have a variety of means for laying eggs on land.”).
SPIDER-GIRL: Who Killed Gwen Reilly? is a TPB from the Marvel’s Spider-Girl series, in which the daughter of Peter Parker (in a parallel world where the Marvel Universe has aged roughly 20 years) must cope with a clone moving in and becoming her sister, the return of the Green Goblin’s disciple Fury and a gang war erupting in New York. As always, an entertaining read.
E.C. SEGAR’S COMPLETE POPEYE: Well blow me down is the second volume in Fantagraphics’ reprint of Segar’s Thimble Theater strip, wherein Popeye copes with third-world revolution, his romance with Olive Oyl and the meanest town on the Wild West. Definitely taking the shape I’m familiar with as Olive’s brother Castor fades away while a new character called Wimpy steps on-stage (“I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.”) Still fun, 80 years later—it’s remarkable how much entertainment Segar could get just out of Popeye’s ability to take a licking and keep on ticking.
WITCHFINDER: In the Service of Angels by Mike Mignola is a spin-off from the Hellboy series in which Victorian occult investigator Edward Grey discovers an archeological expedition has unleashed the ghost of a subterranean monster which has returned to London to kill, and kill, and kill again! Not as much fun as Mignola’s pulp crimefighter, Lobster Johnson, but still well worth reading.