{"id":1460,"date":"2011-07-21T01:14:02","date_gmt":"2011-07-21T05:14:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/?p=1460"},"modified":"2011-11-15T01:25:47","modified_gmt":"2011-11-15T05:25:47","slug":"read-this-my-freelance-harmonic-convergence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2011\/07\/21\/read-this-my-freelance-harmonic-convergence\/","title":{"rendered":"Read This: My Freelance Harmonic Convergence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"600\" height=\"371\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/GmzvsOcP1pA\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Yesterday was an interesting day: Three of the book-related posts I&#8217;d written for other websites were published within a few hours of each other, giving me a lot to talk about that afternoon. &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.inreads.com\/blog\/2011\/07\/20\/video-whatcha-reading-jennifer-weiner\/\" target=\"_blank\">Whatcha Reading, Jennifer Weiner?<\/a>&#8221; is the latest in my regular series of short interviews for inReads.com&#8212;I&#8217;d conducted a more extensive interview with Jennifer about her latest novel, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.powells.com\/partner\/29017\/biblio\/1451617720\" target=\"_blank\"><i>Then Came You<\/i><\/a>, for a <i>Beatrice<\/i> project that&#8217;s still in development, but I used a few minutes at the end to get her talking about <i>The Kid<\/i>, Sapphire&#8217;s long-awaited second novel. She does such a good job of &#8220;selling&#8221; the book that one of my friends on Twitter said that watching the video made her want to buy it and read it. And that, as I&#8217;m sure I&#8217;ve said somewhere before, constitutes a successful day as far as I&#8217;m concerned.<\/p>\n<p>Then there was my weekly post for USA&#8217;s Character Approved blog, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.characterblog.com\/2011\/07\/tea-obreht-a-young-authors-prize-winning-debut.php\">focusing on T&#233;a Obreht<\/a> and her debut novel, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.powells.com\/partner\/29017\/biblio\/0385343833\" target=\"_blank\"><i>The Tiger&#8217;s Wife<\/i><\/a>. I&#8217;d been hearing great things about this book for several months, and the Orange Prize that Obreht won last month kept it on my radar, but I&#8217;d never quite found the time to read it until last week. I&#8217;m glad I did: It&#8217;s a fascinating hybrid of a novel; Obreht&#8217;s young first-person narrator describes the chaotic impact of civil war on her Eastern European homeland, but she also shares stories from her grandfather&#8217;s life that inject a welcome dose of fantasy. I found myself equally caught up in both halves of the novel, and I was delighted by how Obreht ultimately tied everything together. I&#8217;ll be looking forward to seeing what she does with her next book.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/supergods-cover.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"Grant Morrison&#039;s Supergods\" width=\"225\" height=\"339\" align=\"right\" \/>Finally, over at Tor.com, I reviewed two books about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tor.com\/blogs\/2011\/07\/morrison-chopra-supergods\" target=\"_blank\">superheroes as our newest archetypes<\/a>, but really only one of those books was any good: Grant Morrison&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.powells.com\/partner\/29017\/biblio\/1400069122\" target=\"_blank\"><i>Supergods<\/i><\/a>. Of course, I have to confess that I&#8217;ve been a fan of Grant Morrison&#8217;s comic books for just over two decades now, and series like <i>Doom Patrol<\/i> and <i>The Invisibles<\/i> have become significant touchstones in my creative philosophy. So I was predisposed in some ways to like this book, which starts out as a sort of cultural history of American comic books&#8212;the comparison I draw in the review is to Greil Marcus&#8217; <i>Lipstick Traces<\/i>&#8212;which takes on an autobiographical perspective about halfway through, and eventually works its way to Morrison&#8217;s theories about extradimensional intelligences who might view our reality in the same way that we view the world(s) depicted in comic books.<\/p>\n<p>But while <i>Supergods<\/i> is powerfully inspired, I did find myself wanting more in some places, especially the lost opportunity to go into detail about Morrison&#8217;s specific approach to the Batman character over the last half-decade. I&#8217;d also say that while the book is loaded with incisive descriptive analysis of comics from the first appearance of Superman right up to the present day, it feels a bit rushed at the end, as if the threads weren&#8217;t tied together quite as tightly as they could have been. Still, there&#8217;s a lot of amazing stuff crammed in there, more than I was able to fit into my review (especially since I had to spend some time on a book that got wrong nearly everything <i>Supergods<\/i> got right).<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d have loved, for example, to delve into Morrison&#8217;s application of the chaos magic technique of &#8220;hypersigils&#8221; to his comic books, a topic I&#8217;ve previously tackled in <a href=\"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2009\/12\/02\/secrets-lost-symbol\/\">an essay about Dan Brown&#8217;s <i>The Lost Symbol<\/i><\/a>&#8212;one of several aspects of <i>Supergods<\/i> that are driving mainstream critics at places like <i>The New York Times<\/i> and <i>The Wall Street Journal<\/i> nuts. (They&#8217;re also shocked and outraged that Morrison is unapologetic about those occult practices and the intersecting drug use.) But I see that the University Press of Mississippi has a book about Morrison coming out later this year; maybe that will give me another chance to expand on some of those ideas&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday was an interesting day: Three of the book-related posts I&#8217;d written for other websites were published within a few hours of each other, giving me a lot to talk about that afternoon. &#8220;Whatcha Reading, Jennifer Weiner?&#8221; is the latest in my regular series of short interviews for inReads.com&#8212;I&#8217;d conducted a more extensive interview with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[205,65,204],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1460"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1460"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1552,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1460\/revisions\/1552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}