Brute: poems by Emily Skaja

    Emily Skaja’s poem “Dear Katie” begins with the following line: “Understand I need these fragments. To tell it once is not enough” (25). 

    The line reads as emblematic of Skaja’s book Brute: poems. Examining Skaja’s biographical entries reveals an academic background in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, and that influence is clear in the telling of these poems. The poems orbit a number of related issues—domestic abuse, eating disorders, misogyny, sexual assault—and it is clear that “To tell it once” is not enough.

    The poems in the collection, in my view, were proficient and often had well-wrought motifs (at their best when speaking to one another), but the collection as a whole didn’t particularly excite my enthusiasm.

    That said, I want to focus on a few of the pieces I found most compelling. What is interesting to me in Skaja’s work is the way in which images and narrative are paired, giving the audience a taste of both. One can gather hints of connected stories between poems, most notably those involving relationships; several of the poems refer to an interchangeable ‘he’ that lets them read as a sustained exploration of the bond. These glimmers of narrative provide the audience a useful foothold for poems that can sometimes read more abstractly.

    My favourite example of a balanced poem are the opening stanzas of “Figure of Woman Coming Out of a Wall”:

& so it is, having slain the dragon Winter, I come to walk

the herringbone floorboards & the wet stairs of a nursing home

        out of the hall. Every day for a month I’ve said the words He left me.

At a wedding where I was happy for the couple, I declined to give the toast.

        I took his namecard from the table & told myself it wasn’t stealing—

That this name I loved belonged to me. At least.

         Through the window of the nursing home, I can see the gutter dripping.

I stand taller than the wingspan of a heron to suggest I’m an arrow. Which I point. (71)

I love these opening lines for their specificity of narrative. We’re provided a clear situation—or rather two—to help orient us for the more emotional exploration. The idea of stealing a name card from a table at a wedding is that precise kind of moment that is anchored in symbolism and so oddly resonant. It’s the kind of memory that lingers and is the perfect material for poetry. I also appreciate the imagery of its mirror image in the nursing home: “herringbone floorboards,” the “gutter dripping,” and the speaker standing “taller than the wingspan of a heron to suggest I’m an arrow.” Beginning the poem with such an interesting juxtaposition of scenes creates a resonant framework for the later two thirds of the poem. 

    “Figure of Woman Coming Out of a Wall” continues with the speaker visiting her senile grandmother, who “doesn’t always remember our name” (71) (I love how the ‘our’ unites them despite their clear disconnect). The grandmother’s reminiscences are replete with similarly specific moments that seem too real to be fiction, like “watching their father burn down the garage for the insurance money.” The mix-ups are gutting: “She thinks it’s my aunt’s birthday, that we have eaten golumpki / & set out the cake knife & we’re waiting for my grandpa, dead in 1987, // to rummage through the cabinets for the good floral plates.” Like other poems in the collection, this poem has some clever turns of phrase and imagery that capture the tone of the collection. In this case, she refers to how “March / has melted five blizzards down to floods” and how “There’s a parquet star on the floor. The moon is losing blood.” She continues, “When I cradle the skull of a vulture to my cheek, I remember / How once I was near-bride at the not-altar, how she sewed me a blue marriage quilt” (72).

    Individually, these images build a heart-wrenching scene and, taken on their own, are striking. Where the collection fails to land, for me, is that a lot of the poems seem to have a mix of metaphors that don’t evenly mesh with one another. The result is that the poems’ indistinct foci make them more difficult to latch onto. Rather than using metaphors to leverage one another, they are set up to battle for dominance.

    Of course, the broader sociological issues in Skaja’s poems are important and demand action. Skaja isn’t as abrasively polemical as some of her contemporaries, but the ethical impulse of the work is certainly clear. The poem “Girl Saints” stands out as a notable example in that respect. The poem almost certainly responds to the misogynistic undertones of religious discourse and the madonna / whore construction that so frequently traps women. “Girl Saints,” however, does not spend the majority of its time on brash deconstruction. Instead, there’s a surprising amount of rich metaphor and wordplay: “we were already stained in glass. // A circle of black flies biting / our arrival. Scales scraped off a fish. // Starved girls folded at a line from Leviticus” (23). A few lines later, Skaja writes, “Bring us the coat-check ticket for our eyes” (23) which I found such a mysterious and delightful phrase, anachronistic and decontextualized. The most explicit identification of the dilemma comes in just a few lines: “If ghost, if whore, if virgin – same origin story: // because X was a face too lovely, Y was a corpse in the lake” (23). I suspect the X and Y double as a wink to chromosomes, with the Y chromosome being the one that gets killed off in this framework.

    Let’s return to the poem which lent its opening lines to the start of this review since “To tell it once is not enough”. In “Dear Katie”, we see an elucidation of central key themes: there’s the religious “I have a hundred holy objects, everything looked upon, to break”, the temporal meditation “Time will pass, time will pass me, attaching mile-marker threats // to every causeway”, issues with mental health and eating disorders like “You are the only one who ever asks me Are you eating?” and the challenges of gendered expectations like in the line “when did I begin to choose this type of man who loves to ‘protect’ me // from himself?”. The fact that so many of these different motifs are placed into the same poem is perhaps representative of the internal competitions within poems—or, more generously, representative of the intersectional approach in Skaja’s work. The tangible lines of “Dear Katie” are then supplemented with the more oblique lines that are more evocative, but perhaps draw the focus somewhat: “Remember the dead dog as we found on the bridge road. A coyote, I said. / Raised as I was near a cemetery, I always assume some authority // over the departed. Stray magic. Lies about the natural world // comfort me, I admit. Like if a tree feels something / when another tree is fucking up her life. I believe in patterns. Shapes” (25). Personally, I prefer the more obscure lines, especially when taken from their context. The idea of “stray magic” in such close proximity to a reference to a dog is a clever layering, for instance.

    Cleanth Brooks, an unlikely critic to reference here, has a book called The Well Wrought Urn in which he talks about how poems are like well-wrought urns where everything cohesively fits together and that no piece of a poem can be changed without changing the whole. To me, Skaja’s poems may be well-wrought, but not in the same sense. In many cases, I think the base of each poem is well-constructed on a foundation of sociological critique and is then painted with its more lavish, if obscure, flourishes. It’s almost as if the stylized flourish could be lifted and the core of the poem would remain, for better or for worse.

    If you’re a fan of societal critique and social justice poetry, Skaja’s work nicely elevates the mode, even if it sometimes doesn’t quite hit the spot for me. Skaja cites her influences in the form of epigraphs before the different sections of the book, and the one that seems most clear to me is the reference to Sylvia Plath. Plath and Skaja are joined in a project of exploring deep issues, particularly as they pertain to feminine experiences of the world. This is an overly verbose way of saying: if you like Plath, read Skaja, too. 

    Thus concludes my first review in quite some time. Hope it was worth it!

    Happy reading!

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

    Mysterious forces often drive human behaviour. I’m not clear what compelled me to, after so thoroughly hating The Turn of the Screw, to pick up such a lengthy Henry James novel: The Portrait of a Lady. While both works exemplify James’ drawn out, multiple-claused sentences, the slow burn of James’ courtship-driven novel was a surprisingly pleasurable experience. Don’t get me wrong—I still wouldn’t skyrocket James to the top of my must-read novelists, but the novel took some surprising turns that gave me pause to contemplate the nature of the craft.

    Before delving further, an outline of the plot would be helpful. The novel’s focus is Isabel Archer, an American woman visiting London, and her particular affectations (and affections) in navigating the world. Miss Archer is a deeply independent free-thinker, which (some might argue) problematizes the trajectory of her life. For instance, she continually turns down marriage proposals because she does not want to give up her life to others. While The Portrait of a Lady is largely a run-of-the-mill courtship and marriage novel in that respect, it’s the inversion of tropes that sets James’ novel apart.

    The first surprising inversion is just how early and consistently marriage proposals are offered to Isabel and then when Isabel ultimately decides to marry Gilbert Osmond, who for all my money was the least likely candidate, James glosses over the courtship and rationale. For a book so committed to exploring the interiority of its characters, Isabel’s love of Osmond is given remarkably little attention. The most intimate and romantic moments in the book all occur with her other suitors—Caspar Goodwood, Lord Warburton, and, even her cousin Ralph Touchett, with whom she has debatably romantic moments. For someone so adamantly opposed to marriage to finally accept from the most banal candidate with no fanfare is a shocking turn in the book and it’s a perfect commentary on the mysterious internal forces that govern us. Not disclosing the love is one of James’ most radical moves in the book and my preference would actually be to remove the part a hundred pages later that retroactively justifies the marriage.

    The next turn comes with the narrative focus of the novel. Following Isabel’s marriage, roughly halfway through the book, the focus moves away from her and shifts towards her step-daughter Pansy’s own courtship woes. The novel is much more about her suitors and her father’s response to them. Again, James pulls the rug from under us; unlike the marriage plots propounded roughly thirty years earlier through figures like the Brontёs, which were like Bildungsromans centered on a key figure’s life, James absconds with the plot of the book and hands it over to Pansy. 

    These moments of deviation from standard Victorian plots, in mind, speak to an early modernist ethic and hint at something more in James’ ambitions for the book. A moment ago, I suggested that James absconded with the plot and I use that phrase to attribute him a strange omnipresent quality on purpose. One of the other strange approaches of the book is that it is, for the most part, narrated from a third person omniscient perspective, sometimes excessively exploited to explore the interiority of characters. Yet, a few hundred pages in I started to notice more first person commentary cropping up. The narrator is ambiguous: sometimes a character’s innermost thoughts are revealed while later the narrator says something like “I cannot say” or “we cannot see” over a character’s shoulder while they read a letter. There is a blur of authorial construction, audience complicity, godlike powers, and so on. Imagine italics and all caps for the question “who is narrating this thing?!” I don’t know how significant these fast and loose narratological strategies James meant this to be, but it feels like a strangely subversive move.

    Incidentally, the novel becomes more predictable as it wears on. Most chapters are pages of (overlong) interiority, analyzing all aspects of a character’s thought process followed by a few pages of dialogue. James then rinses and repeats. The pattern wears a little thin, but ultimately I think the book follows Brian Cox’s advice as Robert McKee in Charlie Kaufmann’s 2002 film Adaptation: “You can have flaws, problems, but wow them in the end, and you’ve got a hit.”

    Surprising to me is that, especially early in the novel, the dialogue has a pseudo-philosophical quippy-ness that is the prototypical British register. I was going to suggest that James was drawing from the Wilde popularity of his contemporary Oscar, but it appears to me that most of Wilde’s works were staged after the publication of The Portrait of a Lady. What makes that even more peculiar and exciting to me is that Wilde is famously an aesthete who cares only for the finer things in life, which is the case for Isabel Archer’s husband Osmond, who is just the worst. In Wilde, the cleverness is an extension of his aestheticism. Here, the aesthete character is misaligned with cleverness, so it’s an odd disconnect that warrants further academic exploration in the many lives I don’t live.

    On the topic of unlived lives, it’s painful to watch Isabel Archer’s life play out for the worse when so many other possibilities existed for her. In particular, her bond with her cousin Ralph is the most beautiful connection in the book. Ralph admires her spirit and when his father dies, he convinces him to leave her a significant amount of his wealth. In Ralph’s mind, it liberates Isabel. If she marries, he wants her to marry without a financial incentive, but he also doesn’t want her to know that he has made these arrangements for her because her independence will reject his support. The tenderness of Ralph’s care is beautiful, albeit ill-fated: having money is precisely one of the draws of Isabel for Osmond, who can expend her wealth adding to his collections. In my notes for the book, I wrote that I would have liked to have seen the fake inheritance storyline developed more fully. I wanted to see that confrontation, but the thread was unaddressed—like the rationale for marrying Osmond, like Isabel’s miscarriage. Ironically, the thread was picked up hundreds of pages later and it does form a central turn in the book when Isabel learns that Ralph had manipulated her fate.

    Despite Ralph’s loving gesture backfiring, and despite him not really being a suitor to Isabel, their love was the most wonderful part of the book to me. To return to the idea of “wow[ing] them in the end,” the last act of the book is a tour de force. Ralph is dying back home in London (Isabel is living in Italy by this point) and she is determined to go see him before his death. Osmond forbids it, intimating that the split will be everlasting. Isabel thus steals away secretly and her goodbyes to the nunnery-ified Pansy are beautifully done. Before, she learns some other secrets that I won’t spoil, and while the particular revelations are a little lacklustre by today’s standards, the ending nonetheless feels powerful. Her reunion with Ralph and his death are a tragic, but fitting, end. Ultimately, the book ends with a sense of irresolution, but that seems completely consistent with the point of view James has demonstrated towards life throughout the rest of the book.

    Let me focus for a moment, though, on Ralph. The sickly figure perseveres for the sake of Isabel. The devotion to her feels so sincere and pure: “He wanted to see what she would make of her husband—or what her husband would make of her. This was only the first act of the drama, and he was determined to sit out this performance. His determination had held good; it had kept him going some eighteen months more, till the time of his return to Rome with Lord Warburton. It had given him indeed such an air of intending to live indefinitely that Mrs. Touchett, though more accessible to confusions of thought in the matter of this strange, unremunerative—and unremunerated—son of hers that she had ever been before, had, as we have learned, not sculpted to embark for a distant land. If Ralph had been kept alive by suspense it was with a good deal of the same emotion—the excitement of wondering what state she would find him—that Isabel mounted to his apartment the day after Lord Warburton had notified her of his arrival in Rome” (392). First, see what I mean by the many-claused sentences? Second, I love that Ralph sees the position as one of suspense. 

    The ultimate moment is when Ralph is returning to London to die. The most romantic passage in the book, and the most beautifully tender passages I’ve read in some time is not even one of Isabel’s suitors:

    “They stood together a moment; both her hands were in both of his.

    ‘You’ve been my best friend,’ she said.

   'It was for you that I wanted – that I wanted to live. But I’m of no use to you.'

    Then it came over her more poignantly that she should not see him again. She could not accept that; she could not part with him that way. ‘If you should send for me I’d come,’ she said at last.

    'Your husband won’t consent to that.’

    'Oh yes, I can arrange it.’

    'I shall keep that for my last pleasure!’ said Ralph.

   In answer to which she simply kissed him.” (497).

The intimacy in their friendship is so loving and Ralph expressing his devotion to her is Cyrano-level sweetness. The fact that he reserves his last living pleasure as their reunion is just the most heartbreaking-slash-heartwarming moment that feels contemporary despite being from a dry 19th century novel. 

    Aside from the romance, there are a number of ethical dimensions to the work. In my Philosophy of Literature course during my undergraduate, I remember an essay (title and author pending—sorry, folks) that was discussing what made art good. The author examines the ethical dimension of art and elevates Henry James’ The Golden Bowl as a moral work from which we can learn, beauty not necessarily withstanding. In The Portrait of a Lady, we are presented with some models of ethical behaviour and their consequences, sometimes for better and sometimes for the worse. For instance, Pansy has a devotion to her father’s wishes and when she shows the least sign of disobedience she is shipped back to the nunnery.

    There are two central ethical dilemmas that were most compelling. The first revolves around Lord Warburton, one of Isabel Archer’s former suitors. Long after being rejected, he visits Italy and meets Isabel’s step daughter Pansy. He falls in love with her and wants to pursue her marriage. Meanwhile, Isabel has to navigate the intricacies and contingencies of the situation. James writes, “If he was in love with Pansy he was not in love with her stepmother, and if he was in love with her stepmother he was not in love with Pansy. Was she to cultivate the advantage she possessed in order to make him commit himself to Pansy, knowing he would do so for her sake and not for the small creature’s own—was this the service her husband had asked of her? [...] She asked herself with dismay wether Lord Warburton were pretending to be in love with Pansy in order to cultivate another satisfaction and what might be called other chances” (419). There’s a peculiar dynamic here where Isabel has to decide whether Lord Warburton is not pursuing Pansy duplicitously. Isabel must decide whether to use Pansy as a pawn and essentially sacrifice her to marriage with Lord Warburton to ensure that his advances are not directed her way. It’s the sort of Kantian ethical impulse to decide whether we use people as means to ends or as ends in themselves.

    James approaches a similar question from a different angle in the marriage between Isabel and Osmond. When James ultimately expounds on Isabel’s rationale for marrying Osmond, he describes his “indefinable beauty” (422) but that at the same time he was “helpless and ineffectual.” She then experiences contradictory sensations towards him, feeling “a tenderness which was the very flower of respect.” James embellishes the description, calling him “a sceptical voyager strolling on the beach while he waited for the tide, looking seaward and yet not putting to sea” (422). She then takes a “maternal strain” towards him. She reflects that the money bequeathed to her was at the core of her care for him, but in her generosity there’s also a self interest: “At bottom her money had been a burden, had been on her mind, which was filled with the desire to transfer the weight of it to some other conscience, to some more prepared receptacle. What would lighten her conscience more effectually than to make it over the man with the best taste in the world?” (422). There’s a contradictory impulse within her: she wants to provide for Osmond, but at the same time in doing so she relieves her own burden. In moments like that, it’s curious whether they are treating each other as ends or means. (Subtitle for another boring essay I’ll never write: “Kantian Ethics at Work in the Work of Henry James”). 

    Truth be told, I hadn’t intended to write such a lengthy review of a book that is, in many ways, a straightforward and simple story. Perhaps it’s just because the book is so long and I was forced to spend so much time with it, but I think the more charitable approach is to give Henry James credit where it’s due. The Portrait of a Lady has a number of subtle, nuanced components that make for a ‘classic’ novel. While James seems to be falling from favour in the academy (correct me if I’m wrong), there are still some quiet innovations in his work that are worthwhile for book enthusiasts to explore.

    Happy reading and happy exploration!

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made by Jason Schreier

    Following on the heels of reading Sellout: The Major Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore 1994-2007, I felt compelled towards another journalistic book that explores the history of creative projects. Rather than going once more behind the music, I opted instead to read Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made by Jason Schreier. Schreier’s text explores the stories of relatively recent video game industry history, focusing on ten games that serve as touchstones for particular types of turbulence in game development.

In particular, Schreier writes about the following games:

-Pillars of Eternity

-Uncharted 4

-Stardew Valley

-Diablo III

-Halo Wars

-Dragon Age: Inquisition

-Shovel Knight

-Destiny

-The Witcher 3

-Star Wars 1313

I admit that I would have liked to have read some more about the ‘early’ history of gaming or stories for games I have more of a personal connection to (I can only imagine, now, the disasters that might have befallen some of the massive RPGs I’ve loved over the years), but the stories are pretty compelling on their own.

    One of the strengths of this collection of articles is how they put projects into relationship with one another. For instance, the first chapter (Pillars of Eternity) delves into the financial realities of game design. I learned about how developers often estimate budget by multiplying the number of employees by $10 000 multiplied by number of months. When breaking it down that way, it’s wild to think about how much money goes into making a game and how big of a gamble that makes every venture. Setting that framework early is useful for seeing how projects like Destiny can go wrong so easily and, conversely, just how impressive Stardew Valley is, being created by one man alone.

    Some common threads emerge between the stories. There’s the drama of financing, the frustrations of the ‘crunch’, the fiascos of publishers interfering with developers, the last-minute game-changing decisions, the frustrations of marketing demo versions, and the highs and lows of the creative process.

    As I mentioned, the chapter on Pillars of Eternity dealt largely with the financing process to get new projects off the ground. After, the section on Uncharted 4 dealt with when to end a story. The franchise needed to reinvent itself in order to stay fresh, and a number of ideas were thrown out there (e.g. not being able to use a gun for ¾ of the game). The project was moving forward but some of the senior developers wanted to abandon the project or they were fired, which meant the game needed to be overhauled. The conflict in vision for the series is intriguing to me, not because I have a particular connection to the Uncharted series (I’ve played #3, but Tomb Raider is forever superior in my mind), but because it leads to some compelling questions about the creative process of an artist and of collaborative artists.

    By contrast, the chapter about Stardew Valley focuses on a solo creator, Eric Barone. Juxtaposing those chapters is a clever move on Schreier’s part, inherently posing the question of whether it’s better to be creative in isolation or as part of a larger team. Schreier describes Barone’s efforts to build a cozy game from scratch modelled after Harvest Moon. He worked for years by himself, drawing and redrawing the sprite animations, creating game features, writing code, and so on. His wife had to support him throughout the process and it’s a real underdog story to hear about Barone’s depressive episodes and to see how wildly successful the game has been. In many ways, it’s the universal story of creators: a long grind in isolation, hoping that what you do is meaningful to others. Like many other artists, Barone experienced the obsession of completing the work, hating the work, wanting to redo the work, and the strife of never knowing when a project was done.

    Speaking of projects never being done, let’s address, briefly, a running joke in the gaming industry. Publishers release unfinished, buggy games all the time, sometimes in a hilariously memeable way. Schreier’s account of the video game industry, though, really helps to explain why that phenomenon exists and promotes a great deal of sympathy for the people responsible for these projects. In so many of the chapters, we see how programmers needed to develop contingencies—what will get cut when the pressure is on, what other parts of the game will fall apart when another piece changes.

    What’s even more fascinating, though, is how the video game industry is at the forefront of what will certainly be a revolution in creative industries. The video game relies on audience feedback, often at every stage of the process. When games are conceptualized and funded via Kickstarter, for instance, you really have to know what will appeal to people in order to get it off the ground. In a number of the chapters, developers talk about pouring over message boards like Reddit to get feedback on their games after demos are released. Then, after games come out, they are still in development and draws on response to make changes.

    The most notable example of the evolution of creative arts is introduced in the Diablo III chapter, but is another common trend. When Diablo III was first released, it was largely unfinished and many players couldn’t even open it at all. Schreier notes the fall of Diablo and then the rise when it was rereleased as Reaper of Souls, which changed core game mechanics based on feedback to the initial release. For example, they totally revamped character scaling and revised the idea of randomness (turns out people don’t love real randomness; there has to be some parameters). Shovel Knight and Destiny had similar fates; unfortunately for the Shovel Knight team of compelling underdogs, they had to fulfil commitments they made during their Kickstarter campaign years after they felt compelled to move on. 

    These elements give a new spin on the “unfinished” games that get released. It’s fascinating to consider how that will affect the creative process in other fields. It’s not unthinkable that a poet, for example, would release a collection and then redraft poems based on reader feedback. Similarly, musicians that release an EP of four songs might find that two of them flop and no longer fit on the next LP. As we move further forward into an audience-centric creation model [e.g. TikTok creators having to make short videos to command attention using the trendiest sounds], Schreier’s account of the video game industry actually offers a more optimistic spin. The developers seem sincere, genuine in their efforts to make changes on behalf of the consumer—even, potentially, when it’s against their initial vision.

    Of course, that sometimes leads to conflict. In the development of Destiny, an entire story was planned and then scrapped as embarrassing and nonsensical. The complex storytelling demanded by the medium present itself entirely differently. When the game was marketed, demos were necessarily incomplete and there was a fair amount of backlash from key employees. The clash between the marketing team and the actual developers is perhaps a necessary byproduct of the industry norms, but it certainly leads to dramatic firings and anger from fans.

    When it comes to the massive RPGs like Dragon Age: Inquisition and The Witcher 3, Jason Schreier, like myself, has a clear bias in their favour. He delves into the massive size of the games and the challenges it presents. For Dragon Age: Inquisition, this becomes a mixed bag. It was an impressive feat in response to complaints from fans that Dragon Age 2 didn’t have enough content, and yet advances in technology were perpetually causing it issues. They had to change to different game engines, and that led to a buggy release. The Witcher 3, emerging from an interesting historical context where a Polish developer emerged following a time of bootlegs and illegal software sales, had a similarly compelling creation. The sheer number of hours developers spent testing the game numbs my mind. They would go through massive maps, and add content in basically every one minute path from the point you’re in. 

    These massive projects demand, as Schreier notes, “a certain type of workaholic personality.” To me, there’s a few overlapping features worth exploring more philosophically: the relationship of creativity to an artist and audience, the role of capital in creating entertainment, the duality of work and play that goes into the creation of these games, the purpose for technology in our current age, and so on. While Schreier doesn’t himself delve into those issues in a philosophical framework, he nonetheless offers a lot of food for thought. Even when it comes to considerations of labour movements, these developers continually reference the late nights and sleepless hours, the crunch where they work for months and miss out on their children’s lives, the pressure, etc. It is less glamorous than one might imagine for an industry that is billions of dollars. This makes it even more heartbreaking when publishers stop believing in projects. The book ends with Star Wars 1313, a project that was ultimately cancelled. It went through a number of iterations—for instance, there was a time when it was pitched as a Grand Theft Auto style game set in the Star Wars universe. Star Wars bores me, but I’d play that game. 

    Back in my day there was what was referred to as the console wars: Nintendo and Sega doing everything in their power to sell competing video game consoles. In more recent times, Schreier references several times how publishers were hesitant to develop games for consoles, concerned that with the rise of mobile gaming there would be little demand for Playstation 4 or XBox One. Based on my knowledge of Playstation 5 and how competitive it is to get one, it seems that these publishers were just flat out wrong. 

    Blood, Sweat, and Pixels is an interesting collection of stories, but what’s most compelling to me is how it reflects the creative process in general and some of the questions it raises. It makes you wonder, too, what games never get made—the gold that never gets mined for the market. Moreover, it makes you wonder how games ever get made at all. With the industry standards exposed in this book, making a game comes to seem outright impossible.

    Here’s to miracles! Happy reading (and gaming)!

Green Shadows, White Whale by Ray Bradbury

    Ray Bradbury is known primarily as a writer of dystopian science fiction stories, so the cover of Green Shadows, White Whale may strike you as a surprising departure, conceptually and geographically. Unlike some of Bradbury’s other works, this book is more grounded in realism and the cover offers the subtitle A Novel of Ray Bradbury’s Adventures Making Moby Dick with John Huston in Ireland. If you’re uninformed like me, you had no idea that Bradbury worked on the film for Moby Dick. What a multifaceted fellow!

    Green Shadows, White Whale abandons the bite of Bradbury’s satire while retaining his humour for what becomes, ultimately, a more light-hearted project. His biggest joke, though, may be on his audience.

    One might expect that the book is more of a memoir, but it’s unclear how much is real and how much is fictitious. Branding the book as a novel is also dubious. There’s very little through line, other than some repeated characters and a common setting. A more honest assessment of the text is that it’s a collection of short stories masquerading as a novel. Even the idea that it’s a novelization of making Moby Dick is laughable, because only a few of the chapters even mention Moby Dick; hunting the white whale becomes completely tangential, Bradbury’s attempt at a script splashing through the surface once in a while. To be fair, as the book progresses there are a few more references and arguably the climax of the book is Bradbury finishing the script.

    In Green Shadows, White Whale, Bradbury once again presents himself as a conceptual writer, despite it not being a science fiction book. The premises of many of the stories are their point. The characters populating the stories are essentially flat placeholders for the comic moments at the expense of the realism. The key characters are a group of regulars at a local pub, many of whom tell stories Canterbury Tales style, which Bradbury records—and not to make accusations, but this would be an excellent framing device for presenting complete fabrications and getting away with it.

    Some stories land beautifully. One of them deals with a toxic couple living in sin trying to get married. There’s some entertaining dialogue with the priest, but the real highlight is that the wedding needs to be delayed and, trying to save on costs, they keep the wedding cake around for another week or two. The story culminates with the cutting of the cake and Bradbury’s account is wonderfully unbridled. The cake completely shatters apart and the hyperbolic comedy is fantastic.

    By far my favourite story, though, is a farce of Irish rebellion. One of the pub-goers gives an account of going to an Irish Lord’s home with the intention of burning it down. The mob arrives to find Lord Kilgotten is home. They inform him of their intention to burn his house down. Lord Kilgotten says that they have a soiree planned with friends and kindly requests that they burn his house down later. So, they go about scheduling an appropriate time—but wait! There is so much priceless art in the home; they wouldn’t want to burn the art with the home, too, would they? So, Lord Kilgotten leads the mob through the home, offering them pieces of artwork to take home. A particularly funny moment is when they arrive at a portrait of Lord Kilgotten done by his wife and he doesn’t offer it to anyone. Its understatedness is what makes it such a funny moment.

    The downside, in my mind, is that Bradbury sometimes goes too far in solidifying the joke. Rather than trusting his audience, there are moments where it feels like Bojack Horseman doing stand up and asking if the audience gets the joke. Towards the end of the story mentioned above, it’s revealed that the mob, stealing the heavy artworks, start to sink in the swamp and so they ditch the artwork. Lord Kilgotten ushers them back, but then takes his wife’s portrait of him and throws it out into the swamp. It takes the joke a step further than necessary.

    Subtlety is key. Yet, a few other stories deliver the punchline too directly. In one story, a notoriously careful driver starts driving like a maniac following Lent. It’s obvious that giving up alcohol has led to this comic inversion. The basis of the joke is obvious, but Bradbury takes it too far: “Tonight, for the first time in all the nights I had driven with him, Mike was sober” (139). Obviously. Another chapter is so outlandish where there’s basically an eternally youthful man in the body of a baby who is used as a prop across generations of women beggars in Ireland. It’s moments like this that make the “novel” so impossible as a memoir and a bit too extreme to be my brand of comedy.

    Peppered in between the sillier moments Bradbury is in full force with one chapter so compelling and psychologically riveting that it’s a complete shock in such a collection of tales. Bradbury remembers his time with Nora, a woman with whom he has a (would-be?) affair. She owns a large home in Ireland and the two visit it. What emerges is a story compelling in its darkness: the home burned down and Nora painstakingly recreated it. She spends years commissioning replicas and rebuilding the home. Essentially, it’s the story of a haunted house, but in much more psychological terms. The unstated central question is essentially: ‘if we rebuild the Ship of Theseus piece by piece, do its ghosts still linger?’. Throughout the story, it’s beautifully ambiguous how much Nora is projecting onto the home and how much is the story of a genuine haunting. There’s even some question, in my mind, whether the house actually even burned down. Nora is the most compelling character in the text, longing for an impossible past but also trying to usher Bradbury into a dreamed-of future, gallivanting around the world and disappearing before morning (as if she were the ghost all along). The chapter is completely engrossing.

    That story also exemplifies Bradbury’s style of clean prose with moments of flourishing style. One page of Bradbury’s prose stands out as the most beautiful, elegant, and energetic section. In describing his relationship with Nora, Bradbury writes, “Or it was as if at high noon midsummer every year or so we ran off up the vital strand, never dreaming we might come back and collide in mutual need. And then somehow another summer ended,a  sun went down, and there came Nora dragging her empty sand pail and here I came with scabs on my knees, and the beach empty and a strange season gone, and just us left to say hello Nora, hello William, as the wind rose and the sea darkened as if a great herd of octopi suddenly swam by with their inks” (97). Gorgeous, understated tenderness with that undercurrent of tragedy. Excellent. It then continues: “Somewhere back in time there had been one moment, balanced like a feather trembled by our breaths from either side, that held our love warmly and perfectly in poise” (97). That image of the fragility of their relationship is simply excellent. The wistfulness of the following passage culminates the description: “Somehow our mouths had been too busy with each other to ask permanence. Next day, healing our lips, puffed from mutual assaults, we had not the strength to say forever-as-of-now, more tomorrows this way, an apartment, a house anywhere!” (97). The optimism runs so counter to the haunted nature of the story that it forms a perfect tension, a feather in balance.

    Towards the ending of the book, Bradbury delves into his writing career a bit more. In one chapter, his work receives a review that John Huston reads aloud, inventing criticisms that wound Bradbury deeply. In another, Bradbury receives an award and takes it to the bar, only to be shamed and leave feeling lousy. In yet another, Huston challenges Bradbury on his progress on Moby Dick and then Bradbury writes a story about him and Huston. The effect is fractal-like: this fake novel includes a story wherein Bradbury writes a story, which is included in its entirety. The story itself is neat; it’s a creepy little tale of a banshee trying to seek revenge on a John Huston-like lover. The novel eventually ends with Bradbury having a breakthrough and there’s a frenetic section wherein he completes the script for Moby Dick. 

    Since the book leaves Moby Dick in the background most of the time, the ending ultimately feels a little unearned. There’s very little build-up, so the ending doesn’t really deliver to my satisfaction. It’s another vignette. I guess that’s more true-to-life life, really, but maybe not as well-suited for a novel, or even a “novel.”

    Ultimately, Green Shadows, White Whale is an acceptable collection of short stories with a loose thread in the undercurrent. I’d suggest that Irish literature tends towards absurdity in its humour, and Bradbury seems either well-aligned in his style for his Irish-set book or perhaps he absorbed their style by osmosis and authentically replicates it here. Depending on your humour, you may find a great deal of value in these stories. If nothing else, read chapter 15 as a standalone—it’s well-worth reading the haunted house story Bradbury snuck into this collection.

    Happy reading and have fun!