Brimming with creativity and the art has a psychedelic punk flavor that I really like. Always fun when you can tell something was borne out of a hyperBrimming with creativity and the art has a psychedelic punk flavor that I really like. Always fun when you can tell something was borne out of a hyper-specific time period without checking. This here is a real-deal, chemically pure work of art from the Year of our Lord 2007. No later, no earlier. These comics crawled out of the primordial ooze of Pac-Sun and chunky DC shoes, Newgrounds and ebaumsworld.com. You can almost smell the generalized hatred of George Bush on the paper. As much as I love the aesthetic and philosophic ethos of this collection, I must address the elephant in the room...which is that it's a complete mess. The attempts at narrative are very amateurish and bad and actively detract from the overall experience. Luckily, I have an ace up my sleeve that allows me to overlook this major fault: not caring. I'm choosing to view this weird and incoherent book as historical artifact rather than as a serious, polished artwork. What are you going to do about it? Call the cops on me? Tell them to shoot me dead?
Adapted from Proverbs 23:7, James Allen’s influential philosophical pamphlet asserts that your life circumstances steFail to reject null hypothesis.
Adapted from Proverbs 23:7, James Allen’s influential philosophical pamphlet asserts that your life circumstances stem directly from the character of your thoughts. Good thoughts beget a good life and evil thoughts beget suffering. The premise is sound (after all this same logic underpins all Western Judeo-Christian morality), and, by and large, As A Man Thinketh is effective as an endorsement of this moral system.
However, I would have liked Allen to scrutinize this premise further, exploring some of the wrinkles that complicate that claim. It’s all well and good to claim that “blessings befall the mentally righteous,� but in 1903 you could only fantasize for so long before the ugly realities of Tammany Hall and Standard Oil Co. slapped you awake.
Unfortunately Allen sort of hand-waves away the issue of evil rich counterexamples, arguing that material possessions matter little in the evaluation of one’s life and of one’s soul. I don’t deny there is validity to this answer, but to me it’s a flimsy one, as it seems to offer no rebuttal for those individuals that spend their entire earthly lives contradicting Allen’s hypothesis. In a later passage, Allen writes:
“…an employer of labor who adopts crooked measures to avoid paying the regulation wage…is altogether unfitted for prosperity, and when he finds himself bankrupt, both as regards reputation and riches, he blames circumstances, not knowing he is the sole author of his condition.� (14, emphasis added)
I might be jaded by late-capitalism induced-cynicism, but it is altogether very twee and facile to assume the crooked rich eventually receive their just deserts in any capacity other than in the Judeo-Christian afterlife. In reality the “when� should be an “if� couched with some healthy skepticism.
Overall, As A Man Thinketh is quite interesting to reflect on, and I certainly recommend reading it simply for that reason. It’s an effective treatise on taking responsibility for your own mental and moral development, even if its prescriptions are too broad for me to fully cosign. I also take some issue with the mechanics of Allen’s writing: this work would be much stronger with better supporting evidence (even quoted scripture would have sufficed) and fewer tautologies, which riddle certain sections like smallpox. 2.5/5...more
More excellent short writings from an author rapidly carving himself into my personal Mt. Rushmore. I’m not one to wring hands over bygones, but AmeriMore excellent short writings from an author rapidly carving himself into my personal Mt. Rushmore. I’m not one to wring hands over bygones, but America really enjoyed an era where just about every small newspaper had an E.B. White-caliber writer on the books as a columnist. Nowadays, NYT opinion pieces are like “Why hitting brown people with rakes isn’t as bad as you think� and “IDF Girlboss Alert! Meet the first female pilot to blow up a hospital�
Anyway, in this book White makes several forays into other genres besides the essay (such as poetry, sci-fi short stories). They're a mixed bag––often clunky––but it’s also evident that White was not taking these experiments as seriously as his usual stuff. They are effective insofar as they allow him to discuss then-tired topics from fresh angles. One example sees White use sci-fi allegory to comment on the United Nations� impotence in mitigating conflict. I also wonder if these experiments may have been an attempt to engage with readers ‘checked-out� of the political problems of the day.
The meat here are White’s ruminations on the distempering effect of the Cold War on domestic culture, and the environmentalist angle he brings to urban observation “Death of a Pig� remains one of the most moving essays I have ever written, and it was a genuine treat to re-read it as the last entry in this collection. Go find an online .pdf of this story and read it––it really is fantastic.
At the end of the day, The Second Tree from the Corner is not as consistently great as the much-later published Essays of E.B. White. But to expect that (as I did) is ridiculous. Here, White represents the voice of the everyman in post-war America––when even modest attempts at pre-war pastoral life were upheaved by vertigo-inducing technological change and constant political paranoia. What this collection lacks in polish is made up for in both its deep earnestness and prescience. 3.5/5...more
TL;DR: You can still burn a cake in an EasyBake oven.
Stargirl contains all of the tropes of a successful YA novel: lonely, awkward, navel-gazing teenTL;DR: You can still burn a cake in an EasyBake oven.
Stargirl contains all of the tropes of a successful YA novel: lonely, awkward, navel-gazing teens, a school culture of ruthless conformity, a weird non-parental adult mentor, a pet rat. Only a few years later, John Green would bring his bucket to this well, and walk away toting Looking for Alaska and boatloads of cash.
So why does Stargirl feel like a clunky pastiche of its thousand imitations? A premise like this should have been an easy dunk for an author of Spinelli’s caliber. It was baffling at first. Reading this I felt like a beachcomber finding old WWII ordnance. Why is this here?Why hasn't this blown up?Is it a dud or live, left dormant by chance?
To me, the lion’s share of the blame lies with Spinelli’s twee, optimistic portrayal of high schoolers. I’m not sure what high school was like in Spinelli’s day, but when adolescent social structures are the central mechanism of your novel, it feels like a massive disservice to portray it like this. These are not high schoolers, in all their casual cruelty, stupidity and caprice, kindness and humor. No. These are the kind of 1950s milquetoast patsies that bring apples to their teachers and read The Family Circus religiously. I’m not buying these people as the supposed prevailing orthodoxy on what’s cool in school. And it’s a shame, too, because the effect is a cheapening of Stargirl’s stakes and thematic message. I found it hard to earnestly root for Stargirl because the antagonism she receives from her peers is so goofy, banal, and unrepresentative of actual bullying it only accentuates how much of a caricature she is in her own right.
Also worthy of some blame is the climactic prom night, a potentially rewarding payoff so dreadfully bungled and cringe I’m not going to get into it. Not my place. Just have to roll my eyes and move on. Anyway.
Some people have laughed at this being an example of the “manic pixie dream girl� trope. These people have lost the plot. That’s not the problem, here. In fact, I feel it’s extremely natural and appropriate to use the MPDG trope in this application. That's like yelling at a seascape painter for using the color blue. Grow up. Additionally, the trope lends well to one of the more interesting readings of Stargirl: as a lesbian coming-of-age story.
Final thoughts: I admire Jerry Spinelli a lot. His books meant a lot to me growing up. This one let me down though. It’s a story crying out for a PG-13 rating, caged up as an anodyne G.
I think Stargirl might have benefitted from a shift in genre (magical realism, perhaps?), as played straight as realistic fiction, its über-simple character relationships and clumsily rendered setting distract from its noble message. 4/10...more
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