Enemy

     On the surface, Enemy is a movie about a history professor who sees an actor in a movie who is him.  He tracks down this actor and their confrontation has consequences.  On a deeper level, Enemy is about something going terribly wrong with the universe.  Based on the novel The Double by Jose Saramago and directed by Denis Villeneuve (director of the very good Prisoners), the film is reminiscent of Lynch and Cronenberg in their prime mind-bending years, but has a look, tone and voice distinctly its own, in no small part thanks to the riveting work of Jake Gyllenhaal.  If you don't like spiders, completely disregard everything I said about the movie, because you must never, never see it.

The Town That Wasn't

     If you think about it, maps could be pulling a vast hoax on us.  How many of those places we pass by do we ever actually visit?  How many little towns, villages and hamlets whip by us on our way to somewhere else that we never see?  There's story potential here: a map filled with the names of imaginary places meant to convince some poor traveler that the world isn't actually empty.  But it appears that reality beat fiction to it in this case.  This recent article from The New York Times explains how the town of Agloe, New York has appeared for decades on road maps and even inhabited a spot in the digital world of Google Maps, all without ever really existing.  Theoretically included on maps as a protection against copyright infringement (if the name appeared on other maps, the owners would know information had been lifted from the Agloe-inclusive map, since these other map makers would never have come across an Agloe to include it), it certainly manages to pique the imagination.
    An amusing footnote: the print version of this article appeared in the March 29, 2014 edition of The New York Times.  It ends at the bottom of page A16 with the words "Last week, a reporter for the New York" and then explains "Continued on Following Page."  But on page A17, there is no sign of the continued article.  The story has, like the town itself, disappeared.

Spring Break

     Beyond Where You Stand is going on Spring break.  New posts will return starting Thursday, April 3rd.  Have a lovely beginning of Spring.

Gateway Superhero Comics

 Booklist, which spotlights graphic novels.  A longer version of the article is available at Booklist Online; right here to be precise.
    I wrote an article titled "Core Collection: Gateway Superhero Titles" for the March 1st issue of

The Sameness

    Both as writer and reviewer, I am familiar with the practice of taking an excerpt from a review and putting it on the cover of a book.  Sometimes it's just a word ("spectacular") or a generic thought ("I couldn't put it down," "a real page-turner"), sometimes it's a bit longer and more specific ("fluid writing and thoughtful characterizations help make this a captivating read").  At any rate, the motive behind the cover excerpt is clear and relatively unassailable (from a marketing perspective, at any rate).  But often enough, the chosen excerpt (and not generally chosen by the author, I might add), focuses on how the work in question is just like something else.

     The quote on the cover of the paperback edition of Those That Wake, for example, is "[Karp's] Global Dynamic smacks of Asimov's psychohistory while the entire tone seems like something out of Philip K. Dick."  Now, the review this came from (School Library Journal's) also included phrases like "Karp has created a terrifically gloomy set and peopled it with ... very real characters" and "plenty of action, challenging ideas, and bizarre antagonists" and even "should appeal to a broad section of teens."  Other reviews (like Booklist's), meanwhile, even went so far as to say "intriguing, original and thought-provoking."
     A quote from a review I wrote for Booklist for the book Pang, the Wandering Shaolin Monk Volume 1 by Ben Costa appears on the cover of Volume 2 and reads "Usagi Yojimbo if illustrated by Art Spiegelman," referring to two other names in the comic book galaxy that potential readers are likely to know.  This was chosen from a review that included such possible excerpts as "a charmingly human character" and "astonishingly animated action sequences."  My book and Mr. Costa's are, of course, just two examples from a much larger pool. 
     While it is surely flattering to be compared to the likes of Asimov, Dick, Sakai (creator of Usagi Yojimbo) and Spiegelman, and while such comparisons are fair enough and might be helpful in a review (I did, after all, make the comparison in the first place), what I'd like to call into question is the idea that the work's similarity to another is the most salient, positive or helpful thing you can say about it.  I mean, if you're going to focus on one thing to support the fact that this is a worthwhile piece of work and to attract new readers, is the very best you can do to say that the work in question is just like something else?  This seems rather cynical to me, highlighting sameness, rather than distinctiveness, or even just general quality.  Is that all we're looking for as readers, something that is comfortably familiar?