How to Read Marx's Capital by Stephen Shapiro

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Basically a summary of Capital. Solid, readable, but nothing new. Lacking in the kind of analysis and contextual material that one would expect from a book titled "How to Read," but still, useful. Not as in-depth as David Harvey's "Companion to Marx's Capital" but worthwhile for teaching undergrads or general readers.



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Dune by Frank Herbert

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Re-reading this book for the first time in over 15 years, I realized how much the film versions (David Lynch's & the Sci-Fi Channel mini-series) governed my memories of the story. The novel is significantly different in a number of ways. Not only because the world of the novel is far more developed than that of the film versions, but the novel is both far darker and far more concerned with issues of ecology.



A few examples: The Bene Gesserit are more deeply machiavellian and far less mystical in the novel; that is, it is clear in the novel that they function under the guise religion which they employ to suit their own ends. This extends to the Lady Jessica, who is more conscious and more cynical about the way she and Paul manipulate the legends of the Fremen for their own purposes. Paul's father, Duke Leto, is also much less of a one-dimensional "good ruler" in the novel; he is, certainly, heroic in comparison with the Baron Harkonnen, but he is also a flawed, ambitious, stubborn, and sometimes violent man. Speaking of the Haronnens, the relationship between the Baron and his nephew & heir Feyd-Rautha is more complex and fraught than in the film versions, something that I very much appreciated. And, finally, many of the lesser characters play a larger role in the novel (Thufir Hawat, for example) than in the films, while Paul himself is presented as less of a bad-ass than in the films.



OK, enough about that: It is a great book. Herbert has a wonderful style of writing: he's able to mix the mystical with the scientific, to create a fascinatingly complex and believable world, to create a sense of mystery and tension. He had a penetrating insight into the interrelations between politics, economics, and religion. And the universe of Dune is both strange and imaginative as well as bizarrely familiar and even antiquated. I would say more than anything, he has a keen eye into what motivates humans to wage war and seek power, and what forces in human nature lead to stagnation and decay.



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Promethea: Book Five by Alan Moore

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The final volume. Moore somewhat redeems the series by abandoning most of the new age mystical crap and telling an exciting story about the Apocalypse. And, it's a rather neat twist on the Apocalypse: the world doesn't end, but rather everyone is given a new and more complex perspective on the nature of reality. I like that idea, but Moore still manages to ride his simplistic occult hobby-horse through the proceedings. Moore's idea of enlightenment is, as I've said before, totally juvenile. It's things like, "why can't I pray at a Baptist church to Jesus but also worship a Roman snake god named Azacul? It's all, like, spiritual man!" That's not a direct quote, but it's a fairly accurate paraphrase. The final issue is, yet again, an example of Moore and Williams' brilliance in graphic design: a 32 page series of individual images of Promethea that combine to form a single, complex poster. But, each one is also full of stupid little bites of pothead wisdom, things on the order of "The human body is 70% water... AND SO IS THE WORLD!" or "There are X number of molecules in DNA... and there are the same number of stars in the galaxy!" Whoa, deep man. You just blew my mind.



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Promethea: Book Four by Alan Moore

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


The weakest of the series. Upon my most recent re-reading, I actually couldn't make it through much of this book. It was simply too boring. Those parts that deal with the crisis on earth are still entertaining, but the cosmological/spiritual kabbalistic allegory is just... well, stupid. This is all the more tragic given how inventive the layouts are in this and the last volume. Moore and Williams play with shape, color, perspective... they manipulate the design on the page so as to create multiple, interacting timelines within one set of images... it's really a tour de force. Anyone interested in design should be required to study these texts. But anyone interested in philosophy or thoughtful verbal storytelling should stay far away.

One example of the ridiculousness of Moore's occult system: he seems to believe that hermetic magic is an authentic school of thought from ancient Egypt, and much of his schematic understanding of the allegorical significance of various elements, objects, archetypes, etc. rests upon its ancient authority, within which he subsumes Judeo-Christian and other European systems of occult philosophy. But, it's been known for a few hundred years at least that hermetic magic was a construct of early Christian mystics, an attempt to create some sort of ancient source that pre-figured and predicted the rise of Christianity as the "truth". Hermeticism coincides with so much Xian and Judaic mystic thought because it was created to do so. D'oh.



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Promethea: Book Three of the Magical New Series by Alan Moore

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Moore's interest in the occult takes over the book, and its quality suffers a great deal as a result. The "plot" still exists in some form, as Sophie travels up the kabalistic tree of creation, but it is second to Moore's attempt to synthesize Egyptian, Judaic, Roman, Greek, Norse, Christian, etc. mythologies into a complete system for understanding the world. It really starts to fall into the morass of new age mysticism and hippie simple-mindedness, complete with faux-insightful comments such as, "It's like, we don't have emotions; emotions have us, you know?" That's an actual quote. Moore seems to be very impressed with himself, even having the characters compliment each other on their "deep thoughts" by saying -- and again, this is an actual quote -- "Wow, that's really deep!" I would love to think that this is all just Moore taking the piss, but I know that, unfortunately, he thinks that this stuff is actually meaningful. It's not that various occult systems are not interesting objects of study; all the ways that humans attempt to organize and interpret reality are interesting. Moore just takes it all so seriously despite the fact that his "insights" are so obviously fabricated and require him to stretch and distort various mythological systems to conform to what is essentially a very conventional, and essentialist, Western understanding of human nature. The identification of an essential "father-masculine" force and "feminine-mother" force as the motive powers of the universe is perhaps the most egregious example of his anthropomorphic, heteronormative, and Euro-slash-JudeoXian perspective. But, the artwork by Williams continues to excel and, despite the story's major weaknesses, the graphic storytelling is truly cutting edge. It's just sad it doesn't serve an interesting plot.



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Promethea: Book Two of the Groundbreaking New Series by Alan Moore

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The volume where Moore's work begins to slide. The weakest part of this volume is the final issue, the Tarot issue. In it, Promethea is given a lesson in the significance of the Tarot cards -- each one "represents" some moment in the creation of the universe and signifies a step in the path to enlightenment.



Yeah, whatever.



The issue itself is quite well-done, combining multiple levels of visual and verbal narration. There's one thing you can't deny about Promethea as a series and that's that it pushed the limits of graphic story-telling in fabulously inventive ways. But the structural schematics of Moore's cosmology is, at base, crude, over-simplified, and frankly, very juvenile. As with all attempts to map reality onto a human-made conceptual framework, the supposed "discoveries" of the "truths" within the Tarot are, in fact, projections of Moore's own cultural vocabulary. That is to say, he doesn't uncover any meanings in the Tarot, he creates them based on ideologies that organize his thinking.



But besides this one hiccup, the series itself is still quite good at this point. As a meta-fictional tale about the nature of imagination, it's insightful, if not earth-shattering, and Moore's sense of humor and imagination, when he gives it full rein, is wonderful. He should probably get an award for the single greatest creation ever, the Weeping Gorilla. It's a comic-strip within the world of Promethea; each one is just a sad Gorilla crying while thinking about some utterly banal inconvenience of life that is so pathetic as to be tragic. Example: "Everyone said I should upgrade to Windows 95." Love it.



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Promethea: Book One by Alan Moore

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The premise: Sophie Bangs, college student, is writing her undergrad thesis on a recurring literary character named Promethea. A powerful female figure associated with imagination, Promethea keeps popping up in seemingly unrelated texts as well as in real life events. Sophie discovers that Promethea is real; she is the embodiment of the power of Imagination and dwells in the realm of the Immateria, the world of fiction, fantasy, and creativity. Sophie is on tap to be the new Promethea as the world is coming to a major crisis, but this makes her a target of demonic powers, psychotic super-villains, and religious fundamentalists.



This is by far the best volume of the series. The writing is clever, the story is fast-paced, and the art by J.H. Williams III is simply beautiful. Most importantly, though, Moore doesn't let his own interest in magic and the occult overwhelm the story. Moore has long been a practitioner of various forms of occultism -- kabbalah, hermeticism, etc. -- and this series was his narrative presentation of his ideas about the magical nature of reality. In the early stages, though, he was just telling a complex yet entertaining supernatural story about imagination and creativity. Later volumes would become rather tedious.



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