The first selection for the 2010 Culturology I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer Bookclub has been made: China Mieville's The City & The City. So run out to your local independent bookseller and hop on board the CIKWYBLSB train! The City & The City, though I haven't started reading it, is a work of speculative fiction, and a police procedural. Online reviews, just glossed by me, like to compare it to Kafka & Dick (that's Philip K. Dick, who you might recall from 2009's Summer of Booklove Bookclub). Perfect summer reading! I'll look to write it up shortly after the solstice, so let's shoot to have it read by then.
And we (I) hear in Culturology's Miami Bureau (Culturology's only bureau) should also have some other literary treats in store for you later this month as well, so it should prove to be a most not heinous summer.
But what to blog about in the meantime. It's been a lousy spring for culture. I've mostly been wrapped up between work, teaching an undergraduate creative writing class, and plotting out the upcoming (only a month and a half away!) Time Log web comic with Nick (which, by the way, is going to be awesome, if I do say so myself). I think co-writing a comic gives me some decent street cred with my students, though I'm mostly trying to teach them about the wonders of poetry these days. Why? Because you know what many of my students seem to really like? Manga. Back when I was at Carnegie Mellon, I thought it was just a nerd-college thing that people would, like, like manga. But apparently not. Even at a giant public university in South Florida with, by my count, very few nerds, manga reigns supreme.
Which is not to make any judgment on manga one way or the other. As a matter of fact, the only manga I've ever read was the complete Akira (while at CMU, as a matter of fact). And I thought it was great. I also recall, a couple of years ago now, as Nick and I were still in the process of making Time Log happen, Nick mentioning that manga was, like, really popular, and that the easiest way to get TL made would be to make it a manga (which, as you now know, didn't happen). But now my students know that 17th-19th century British poetry is way cooler than comics!
There being some compulsion which I'm missing, to try and make poetry new and vital for my students, and use even vaguely contemporary examples. But my general opinion is that any poem worth its salt makes itself new and vital again and again across time. Of course, explaining this notion to modern students isn't easy, since it seems pretty arbitrary to them why one poem and not another would be chosen. And that's actually a really valid complaint, since who cares what a bunch of old bearded white men decide what makes for good poetry? Except that canonization is an inevitable process--and one could point this out with manga, or comics in general as well. As I've stated plenty of times before, some cultural things become recognized as being good because they are good. Or because they're good for good reasons. And it's a human enterprise; we've got to take someone's word for it. It's just a matter of not taking it for granted when we do partake of canonical pieces of the culture, and be sure to actively engage it and be able to decide for ourselves if it's worth passing on in our own personal canon of recommendations.
And so, yes, I would recommend both Akira and The Prelude. And now I command you to read The City & The City!
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