bookblogging
Jul. 23rd, 2008 04:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ceruseeGraphic novels:
Huizenga, Kevin: Curses
(Kawy, Kawy, thank you for recommending this to me! You have such good taste in books. And at last! A D&Q book in which the characters are not all jerks! Like Kawy, I recommend this one.
I will be pondering Huizenga's vision of suburban life and its mysteries and fantasies. The ogre in the basement, the magic gasoline and the magic styrofoam take-home container, the plastic bag, the migraines, insomnia, bad joints...it's ironic of course, but it also works literally as a translation of fairy-tale structures into American suburban landscape and life; the everyday artifacts of your life infused with mystic potential. That's as ambiguous and weird as it is appealing, but clearly there's some love, too, in the story about insomnia, with the graveyard wandering and the nighttime bicycle rides along the wide, tree-lined streets. And hatred for the starlings, that fit so well into the suburban settings that they blight and pester. Oh, what a cool book! I took my time reading it, because it deserved that.
And la la la, I am a Universalist--Unitarian Universalist--so Jeepers Jacobs would not approve of me and my fundamental lack of fear of hell. What's not tackled in his story, as it is not an accepted part of evangelical worldview, is that feelings and heart and logic and one's personal relationship with God and one's personal idea about salvation and damnation are weightier and more significant outside of the question, "does this work with Scripture?" If you do not believe that Jesus was God, and that the Bible is the word of God, and that all religious faith is defined by its adherence to Scripture, your emotional reaction to a moral principle, and your logical examination of an idea ARE your tools for building a worldview. As they should be (says I, of course). What else should I use to understand the world, but my mind and heart? They are what my soul is made of--they are the essence of me, the part of me that matters the most, the part that is made clean or unclean by how I live my life, and is exalted or humbled or destroyed in the living of life.
One thing UUs do agree on--we don't have Scripture. We don't have dogma. There is no text. You can call it cherry-picking if you like, to read a lot and only accept the parts that we believe are true and right. To me, though, that's fidelity, and honesty: only accepting what rings true in my ears and feels right in my heart, never pretending to believe something that I don't. We UUs are long way away from our beginnings, I know, but I don't think we got here by following the path wrong, and we are on our spiritual journey as individuals and as a group because it is right to go seek truth, even if seeking truth takes you away from the home where you were born. I appreciate concern for my immortal soul--I mean that--but no one will be able to convince me of the danger of eternal waking torment in hell, not for myself or any others, because I don't believe in it.
If you do, and there is most certainly hell in your interpretation of faith, and rejecting hell means rejecting Scripture than yes, I am far from God in your eyes. But I will never be close to God in your eyes, because I am already close to God in my eyes, and when you find yourself close to God (even just metaphorically. I'm an agnostic, but very comfortably so), you don't turn away. I certainly don't like the idea of hell or anyone eternally in hell, but as a question of pure faith, it matters more that I don't believe in it, which is a lot of the thrust of the argument (something along the lines of, "it doesn't matter if you find hell repugnant and hard to reconcile with a God who is love; Scripture says it is so, and you don't get to pick what you like out of Scripture." Very logical and consistent, in its own way; I disagree utterly. My spiritual forebears were free thinkers).
For context: there is a story in this book near the end written about/from the perspective of an evangelical who's writing an article in dissenting against the rising rejection by evangelicals of the idea of eternal waking torment in hell for unbelievers and sinners. The story is serious in exploring the structures of those ideas (the rejection of hell, and the dissent to the rejection), but not a proselytization (there's no particular evidence to suggest Huizenga either believes or disbelieves them himself; I'm guessing not, although it's clear in any case that Huizenga has done some reading on this theological issue). It just got me thinking about the subject, and why the arguments Jeepers puts forth in the article he's writing don't mean anything to me. When you put yourself into the structure of evangelism, they're weightier, but outside of it, much more ephemeral. I always enjoy seeing the results of art created around a deliberate, self-imposed handicap, and following the logic of rhetoric and debate, so this is an interesting story just for that.
Yeah. Good book).
Vance, James, writer, Dan Burr, artist: Kings in Disguise
(oh...wow. Like Busman's Honeymoon, it's clear in places that this started life as a play...but it adapts into this form very well. Recommended.).
Menjivar, Jose: Cicada
(neuroses, serial adultery, suicide...the lighter side of comics).
Gross, Milt: He Done Her Wrong
(omg, this is my kinda wordless novel. Circa Lynn Ward, but possessing a sense of humor--a very broad and brilliant sense of humor, as all the best cartoonists have--and not another stinking woodcut book. Recommended!).
Kochalka, James: Fantastic Butterflies
(I am continuing to dig Kochalka).
Miles, Scott: Big Clay Pot
(oh, what a nifty premise, and what a sweet, sad little book).
Manga:
Takada Yuko: 3x3 Eyes: Blood of the Sacred Demon, 3x3 Eyes: Curse of the Gesu
(the former reads almost like a pilot in its own right. Now that would make a good series intro! But it's still not the first volume, and I still have no idea what the first volume is, or if my library even has it. I could Google it, but I refuse to, on principle. Starting with volume 1 shouldn't require research).
Hirano Kohta: Hellsing vol. 5
(...oh, I think I see some plot. Neato!).
Huizenga, Kevin: Curses
(Kawy, Kawy, thank you for recommending this to me! You have such good taste in books. And at last! A D&Q book in which the characters are not all jerks! Like Kawy, I recommend this one.
I will be pondering Huizenga's vision of suburban life and its mysteries and fantasies. The ogre in the basement, the magic gasoline and the magic styrofoam take-home container, the plastic bag, the migraines, insomnia, bad joints...it's ironic of course, but it also works literally as a translation of fairy-tale structures into American suburban landscape and life; the everyday artifacts of your life infused with mystic potential. That's as ambiguous and weird as it is appealing, but clearly there's some love, too, in the story about insomnia, with the graveyard wandering and the nighttime bicycle rides along the wide, tree-lined streets. And hatred for the starlings, that fit so well into the suburban settings that they blight and pester. Oh, what a cool book! I took my time reading it, because it deserved that.
And la la la, I am a Universalist--Unitarian Universalist--so Jeepers Jacobs would not approve of me and my fundamental lack of fear of hell. What's not tackled in his story, as it is not an accepted part of evangelical worldview, is that feelings and heart and logic and one's personal relationship with God and one's personal idea about salvation and damnation are weightier and more significant outside of the question, "does this work with Scripture?" If you do not believe that Jesus was God, and that the Bible is the word of God, and that all religious faith is defined by its adherence to Scripture, your emotional reaction to a moral principle, and your logical examination of an idea ARE your tools for building a worldview. As they should be (says I, of course). What else should I use to understand the world, but my mind and heart? They are what my soul is made of--they are the essence of me, the part of me that matters the most, the part that is made clean or unclean by how I live my life, and is exalted or humbled or destroyed in the living of life.
One thing UUs do agree on--we don't have Scripture. We don't have dogma. There is no text. You can call it cherry-picking if you like, to read a lot and only accept the parts that we believe are true and right. To me, though, that's fidelity, and honesty: only accepting what rings true in my ears and feels right in my heart, never pretending to believe something that I don't. We UUs are long way away from our beginnings, I know, but I don't think we got here by following the path wrong, and we are on our spiritual journey as individuals and as a group because it is right to go seek truth, even if seeking truth takes you away from the home where you were born. I appreciate concern for my immortal soul--I mean that--but no one will be able to convince me of the danger of eternal waking torment in hell, not for myself or any others, because I don't believe in it.
If you do, and there is most certainly hell in your interpretation of faith, and rejecting hell means rejecting Scripture than yes, I am far from God in your eyes. But I will never be close to God in your eyes, because I am already close to God in my eyes, and when you find yourself close to God (even just metaphorically. I'm an agnostic, but very comfortably so), you don't turn away. I certainly don't like the idea of hell or anyone eternally in hell, but as a question of pure faith, it matters more that I don't believe in it, which is a lot of the thrust of the argument (something along the lines of, "it doesn't matter if you find hell repugnant and hard to reconcile with a God who is love; Scripture says it is so, and you don't get to pick what you like out of Scripture." Very logical and consistent, in its own way; I disagree utterly. My spiritual forebears were free thinkers).
For context: there is a story in this book near the end written about/from the perspective of an evangelical who's writing an article in dissenting against the rising rejection by evangelicals of the idea of eternal waking torment in hell for unbelievers and sinners. The story is serious in exploring the structures of those ideas (the rejection of hell, and the dissent to the rejection), but not a proselytization (there's no particular evidence to suggest Huizenga either believes or disbelieves them himself; I'm guessing not, although it's clear in any case that Huizenga has done some reading on this theological issue). It just got me thinking about the subject, and why the arguments Jeepers puts forth in the article he's writing don't mean anything to me. When you put yourself into the structure of evangelism, they're weightier, but outside of it, much more ephemeral. I always enjoy seeing the results of art created around a deliberate, self-imposed handicap, and following the logic of rhetoric and debate, so this is an interesting story just for that.
Yeah. Good book).
Vance, James, writer, Dan Burr, artist: Kings in Disguise
(oh...wow. Like Busman's Honeymoon, it's clear in places that this started life as a play...but it adapts into this form very well. Recommended.).
Menjivar, Jose: Cicada
(neuroses, serial adultery, suicide...the lighter side of comics).
Gross, Milt: He Done Her Wrong
(omg, this is my kinda wordless novel. Circa Lynn Ward, but possessing a sense of humor--a very broad and brilliant sense of humor, as all the best cartoonists have--and not another stinking woodcut book. Recommended!).
Kochalka, James: Fantastic Butterflies
(I am continuing to dig Kochalka).
Miles, Scott: Big Clay Pot
(oh, what a nifty premise, and what a sweet, sad little book).
Manga:
Takada Yuko: 3x3 Eyes: Blood of the Sacred Demon, 3x3 Eyes: Curse of the Gesu
(the former reads almost like a pilot in its own right. Now that would make a good series intro! But it's still not the first volume, and I still have no idea what the first volume is, or if my library even has it. I could Google it, but I refuse to, on principle. Starting with volume 1 shouldn't require research).
Hirano Kohta: Hellsing vol. 5
(...oh, I think I see some plot. Neato!).