The First Post

From Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in fiction:

"In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini. "To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing," he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angouleme or to the editor of The Comics Journal. "You weren't the same person when you came out as when you went in. Houdini's first magic act, you know, back when he was just getting started. It was called 'Metamorphosis.' It was never just a question of escape. It was also a question of transformation." ... His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air."

Hopefully after reading that you'll do yourself a favor and go out an buy this book. I read this exact section at the local Barnes & Noble here and immediately took it up to the counter. I can only think of one other book that struck me on the first page and that was McCarthy's The Road and that book rocked the foundations of every thing I had considered good literature beforehand.

In writing classes you hear a lot about tone, voice, and rhythm and if you want a good example of how to do it and how to do it to perfection, look no further than Chabon. But what drew me in much more than his eloquence, was his opening theme of transformation. The image comparing Superman to Houdini is so unique and beautiful and the idea excites me as to where Chabon is going with his prompting that effective literature—good literature—is transforming of its audience. I look forward to the rest of this.

Cheers.

P.S. Welcome to the new blog. I am finally discontinuing the French Fry Filosophy after failing to revive it. I think it just held too many things irrelevant to my life now. However, it's still up and I might even refer back to it every once and a while, but everything will be done here now. 

My initial instinct was to do a post solely for introductions but after speaking to my good friend Jarrett a few weeks back, I was convinced that's just a waste of words. Much better to get into what this blog is for, and that's sharing good art and news.