A Visit to the Circus

Travis isn’t the only one with associates.

I’m the one member of the staff here without a degree from Bowling Green. I fell in with these other motley characters when Alex and I met at grad school at the University of Chicago. And I still remember the first day our precept groups convened–there was a tall, thin, earnest man in my group who discoursed at length but so wisely, never with a trace of boredom, about all of our discussion topics that in a single moment I realized I had to step up my intellectual game more than ever, if he represented the standard for our program.

Later, he told me he just talked a lot when he got nervous.

That was after Adam Osborn and I had become friends. He actually lived in the Addison vicinity after we all finished school, only moving for the greener, brighter pastures of Auburn for doctoral work, but we have never lost touch and I’ve followed his work with much pleasure.

Recently, I read a book partly on his recommendation which captivated me in ways I didn’t expect. For certain reasons you’re about to hear, it is a book designed to be a very personal experience…and for that reason I wanted to discuss it with one who had also gotten enraptured by its magic. So on what happened to be my parents’ 34th anniversary, we hopped on GChat and had a three-hour conversation on Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus.

What follows is a transcription, slightly edited…particularly our tangential expression of frustrations over George R. R. Martin.

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How to Tell Another Person’s Story

My excellent colleagues have all published equally excellent articles since our endorsement by the AV Club, and I have regrettably been the last to the party. I’m upset about this; the Recorder is one of the finest things I do in my life and the company I keep with it is wonderfully rewarding. That being said, I have an excuse: I spent the past month and a half hard at work on my second graphic novel.

(For those interested, and I don’t think the guys would mind me making a little plug, I’ll be signing copies of my first graphic novel, An Elegy for Amelia Johnson, at the Archaia Comics booth at C2E2 in two weeks. Come by and say hello!)

In the process of writing this work, I’ve been doing a fair amount of reading which led me to a particular observation.

My new comic is modeled on the (auto)biography, the life story, and as an aide and inspiration to the writing process I dove headlong into a variety of renowned books from the genre, some of which I’d read before, most of which I hadn’t. Those who remember my piece on Lytton Strachey know that part of the article involved chronicling Strachey’s variations on the traditional model of the biography: treating it as a closely-structured satire, heavily-detailed series of specific impressions, and stagelike grand romance. But further reading has shown me that there are variations within variations, and the traditional model itself, the straightforward life-to-death narrative, is not that straightforward.

Indeed, given its popularity on the bookstore shelves in subsets ranging from scholarly historical documents to more salacious memoirs, the biography at first glance seems an easier task than the novel: you have a ready-made structure and you get to work with known facts instead of making things up. But writing a biography is a messy task, especially when you don’t know the subject, especially when the subject is long dead, and even those who did know the subject may be hindered by agendas, excessive reverence or disdain, or just a plain inability to write. (James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson becomes more and more, in my eyes, the most miraculous book ever written every time I think about it: a writer very close to the subject who could write within the conventions of his time while still slipping harder truths between the lines, and writing with a magnificent, inviting, yet still complex style.)

Equally amazing that a man who had at least fifteen cases of gonorrhea in his life found the energy to write a masterpiece

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One Last Ride on the Wheel of Time: Review of “A Memory of Light”

A-Memory-of-Light

Imagine, if you will, that you are cordially invited to the opening of a new theme park. Let’s say for the purposes of this metaphor that this new wonderland of amusement is called “Robert Jordan’s Fantasyland”. You arrive at this theme park eager to check out all of the new rides, having been to previous such parks as Middle-Earth, Narnia, and the World of Shannara. In this particular theme park, there are fourteen rides and one ducky pond (helpfully titled “New Spring”) for your enjoyment, but while visiting this park, you must ride the rides in a prescribed order, so as to fully maximize your experience. At the same time, some of the rides are continually under construction, so you don’t really have a choice except to follow the park’s guidelines (even though you can see some of these rides from a mile off and already know what’s up). Also, each ride has a boarding cost of $7.99, except for the mysterious ride #14, which is $34.99, but from what you can see from the street, looks incredibly awesome.

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Recorded Conversations: New Favorites from 2012

To ring in the New Year on the Recorder, we look to our recent past and ask “What new thing (or things) that you discovered in 2012 has become one of your favorites?”

 

Like Alex, it is nigh but impossible to limit myself to just one thing. But it becomes even trickier in my case because I’ve already written at length on the Recorder about many of the greatest experiences I had this year, including developing my obsession with the Grateful Dead (and by the way, the concerts in the Spring 1990 box, all of which are available online for free, contain some of the most inspired, heartfelt, and really damn fun rock/country/blues/folk music you will ever hear, much the same way Alex feels about bluegrass), and the 31st/5th season of Doctor Who (although this too may be surpassed by the current 33rd/7th season and the pairing of Matt Smith with Jenna-Louise Coleman, if “The Snowmen” is any indication). But besides having to use so many parentheses, who wants to hear my repeat myself, especially when I do so a lot in real life?

 

But in looking back, I found that the sheer limit of time and space kept me from celebrating everything which made 2012 such a delightful cultural year, more so than 2011 even, and I found three things in particular.

 

No jokes about the name, please.

Even more nineteenth-century novels

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Recorded Conversations: New Favorites from 2012

Welcome to “Recorded Conversations,” an occasional feature where all the Addison Recorder editors contribute their thoughts about a question, idea, or prompt. Everyone will chime in, and then we see where the conversation wanders.

Question: To ring in the New Year on the Recorder, we look to our recent past and ask “What new thing (or things) that you discovered in 2012 has become one of your favorites?”

I need to limit myself on this one. When this idea first trickled across my brain it was as an idea for a full-blown article, not a shorter Conversation piece, so my apologies if I try to cram too much in. I have three distinct answers, and I have no idea which would win out above the others, so…I’ll tackle all three!

1. Bluegrass (and bluegrass-inspired) music

She’s from Southern California, but damn if she doesn’t sing like she’s from a coal town in Appalachia.

I’m starting off with this because I don’t think I have ever written about music on the Recorder before. Honestly, it’s just not a medium that gets a lot of deep thought out of me. If I like the music, then grand. If not, well, why annoy myself by listening? I don’t really get far beyond that because my interests are much more tied to narrative and visual forms of expression. Music is a bit too esoteric and pattern-based for my math-hating brain to really embrace as anything but a mood-setter.

However, I spend all day at work in front of a computer, which means I have lots of time to listen to music while my brain is occupied with other things. With the aid of Pandora and Spotify this has meant that I have been noodling around with the musical genres and forms that I like, finding new artists and other albums to fill in my day. Last year, urged on by my pre-existing love for Gillian Welch and the TV show Justified (which is back TONIGHT; gadzooks, I may need to write about that), I delved deeper into the sounds of bluegrass and its associated styles.
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The War and Peace Post

Right now, we live in a tumultuous nation, filled with internal strife emanating from Washington and, though ostensibly at peace, always kept on a footing for war thanks to both all of the international actions undertaken by our awe-inspiring military and the national security mindset of a post-9/11 world. To say that it can be difficult sometimes determining how to live our lives in this climate is an understatement.

But as 2012 comes to a close, again, it is good to think about another country similarly torn by crises on a grand scale. 200 years ago, Napoleon Bonaparte and his Grande Armee invaded Russia with a goal of conquering the superpower and got as far as laying waste to Moscow…only Napoleon had suffered his most staggering military action yet before reaching Moscow, at Borodino, and unprepared to face Russia’s winter and vastness, he was forced into a retreat which slashed his forces and laid the groundwork for his two great defeats and total loss of power.

Remember, you never get involved in a land war in Asia, and Russia stretches all the way through…

Fifty-seven years later, a veteran of another Russian war—the Crimean—who had fought in the endless and draining siege of Sevastopol wrote a book about the before, during, and after of Napoleon’s assault on Russia. That veteran’s name was Leo Tolstoy, and his book was War and Peace. [Read more…]

Why Strachey Matters

Lytton Strachey.

Who?

I would imagine that few people could tell exactly who Lytton Strachey was and what he did, even those who recognize his name; with a few exceptions in scholars, academics, and devotees of Bloomsbury and Strachey’s close friend/ex-fiancee Virginia Woolf. This is a mistake. It is more than that Strachey was, by the time of his death in 1932, something of an international celebrity, cutting a distinctive profile with his massive but gaunt body, long beard, and reedy voice. For at the same time Woolf was revolutionizing fiction alongside Joyce, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and other contemporaries, Strachey was reinventing full-length non-fiction almost overnight.

He also knew how to rock a beard.

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