Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbs Me
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1976
WEBSITE: http://www.adjameson.com/
CITY: Chicago
STATE: IL
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
https://adjameson.wordpress.com/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1976.
EDUCATION:Illinois State University, M.A.; University of Illinois at Chicago, Ph.D., 2018.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, video artist, teacher, and performer. Has taught at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Lake Forest College, DePaul University, Facets Multimedia, and StoryStudio Chicago.
WRITINGS
Has published in the Denver Quarterly, Fiction International, Brooklyn Rail, and Mississippi Online Review, among others. Author of a blog.
SIDELIGHTS
A.D. Jameson is the author of several works of fiction and also film criticism. His writings have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Fiction International, Brooklyn Rail, and Mississippi Online Review, and many other print and online venues. He has written four books: Amazing Adult Fantasy, 99 Things to Do, Cinemaps: An Atlas of 35 Great Movies, and I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture.
Amazing Adult Fantasy and Cinemaps
Amazing Adult Fantasy is a collection of sixteen short fiction works, the first of which declares, almost by way of a challenge, “Fiction may be the worst thing about the 21st Century. Nobody likes it.” Jeff Bursey, writing online at The Quarterly Conversation, found this book full of “extravagant prose” that is “far removed from fidelity to the world, from colorlessness, and from parsimoniousness imagery.” Jameson’s stories are replete with both fictional and nonfictional characters, but in this “multiverse,” Bursey observed, “real people . . . float free of their tethers.” Jameson reimagines their lives “with fresh language that catches you unexpectedly.” Bursey concluded that he has written a “fine book,” one “that places inventive writing at the forefront.”
The essays of Cinemaps cover such classic films as King Kong, North by Northwest, The Princess Bride, Fargo, and Pulp Fiction. The book is illustrated with hand-painted maps by Andrew DeGraff, charting the paths of the characters in each film. At Tor.com, a reviewer commented that this “atlas of beloved movies is an essential reference for cinephiles, fans of great films, and anyone who loves the art of mapmaking” and called Jameson’s essays “illuminating.” A Publishers Weekly critic found the maps “visually striking and conceptually innovative” but perhaps too complex. Readers, the reviewer noted, might pick up the book for the illustrations, “but Jameson’s essays are what keep the pages turning.”
I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing
In I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing, Jameson offers an overview of “geek art,” as evidenced in science fiction and fantasy entertainment as wide ranging as films, comic books, and video games, and discusses how the form found its way into the mainstream. Brian P. Kelley, contributor to the Wall Street Journal, suggested that Jameson “clearly lays out the qualities that geeks appreciate in their art: realism bolstered by a deep internal history and the sort of ‘world-building’ exemplified by Tolkien.” As Jameson puts it, geeks “don’t want the artwork to ever end.” Jameson believes that critics and the general public “don’t take geek culture seriously enough, being too quick to dismiss its artworks as stupid and frivolous.” Kelly argued that the films praised and prized by Jameson, “are given too much critical attention.” Indeed, there is one “great conflict that Mr. Jameson can’t grapple with: that to make better geek movies, Hollywood needs to make fewer of them.”
Kristine Huntley, writing in Booklist, described the book as “thoroughly engaging and enjoyable look at the evolution of geek culture.” In Kirkus Reviews, a correspondent reported that Jameson’s goal is to persuade readers to “re-evaluate them as legitimate, complex, uplifting, and profound art forms.” I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing, the critic noted, might appeal to “fellow gen-Xers . . . who have resisted . . . fantasy all these years but who now wish to learn what all the phantom menace is about.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Jameson, A.D., Amazing Adult Fantasy, Mutable Sound (Chicago, IL), 2011.
Jameson, A.D., I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York, NY), 2018.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 15, 2018, Kristine Huntley, review of I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing, p. 12.
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2018, review of I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing.
ONLINE
A.D. Jameson website, http://www.adjameson.com/ (June 29, 2018).
Chicago Review of Books, https://chireviewofbooks.com (May 8, 2018), Adam Morgan, “A.D. Jameson Finds Your Lack of Geekiness Disturbing,” author interview.
Mutable Sound, http://www.mutablesound.com/ (June 29, 2018), author profile.
Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (June 30, 2018), review of Cinemaps: An Atlas of 35 Great Movies.
Quarterly Conversation, http://quarterlyconversation.com (September 6, 2011 ), review of Amazing Adult Fantasy.
Tor.com, https://www.tor.com (October 23, 2017), review of Cinemaps.
Wall Street Journal, https://www.wsj.com/ (June 7, 2018), Brian P. Kelly, review of I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing.
A. D. Jameson is an author of both fiction and film criticism, as well as a teacher. He is particularly interested in narrative, realism, fantasy, geek culture, and experimental writing, as well as aesthetics and deconstruction.
Adam's fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Unstuck, Fiction International, Denver Quarterly, and dozens of other journals and sites. He also used to blog regularly for Big Other, Press Play, and HTML Giant (often about Batman movies and comics). He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Program for Writers in the English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Hi my name is A D Jameson. This is my website.
I'm the author of three books and many online articles. I also do readings.
I've organized all this information here, below.
You can click on a link to "jump" to the desired section: books, stories, articles, events.
You can also meet me online via Twitter (@adjameson) and Facebook (adjameson).
Thank you for visiting my website.
My Books
Amazing Adult Fantasy (Mutable Sound, 2011)
Giant Slugs (Lawrence and Gibson, 2011)
99 Things to Do When You Have the Time (Compendium, 2013)
My Stories
Coming soon.
My Articles
Here's a link to all of my writing on film.
Here's a link to all of my writing at Big Other.
Here's a link to all my articles at HTMLGiant.
Here's a series of articles I wrote on Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (in eight parts).
And here's a series of articles I wrote on the X-Men (in five parts)
More coming soon.
My Events
Coming soon.
A D Jameson is a writer, video artist, teacher, and performer. His fiction has appeared in the Denver Quarterly, Fiction International, Brooklyn Rail, the Mississippi Online Review, elimae, Lamination Colony, and elsewhere; it is forthcoming in Fiction International, Caketrain, PANK, Mad Hatters’ Review, and Action, Yes, among other places. His prose collection Amazing Adult Fantasy will be published by Mutable Sound in 2010. He recently finished a second prose collection (“Distress”) and a novel (“Giant Slugs”), and is currently hard at work on three more novels. Visit him HERE and HERE.
A D Jameson, quaint and childish, tired ex-wife of a rodeo angel, owner of an antique tortoise-shell comb, nice-mannered, respectable, having been seen crawling quickly across the dinette set, destined to someday become a vice president at the bank, and whom you long ago bought and sold, is nodding off. If you let him, he’ll fall fast asleep on the unread page in your lap. He’s still wearing the camisole that you gave him, the one embroidered with his initials. He still has the cameo that you stuck in his Christmas stocking.
His hands were too clumsy. He’s sorry about how clumsy his hands were, the butter he handled you with for a while. He didn’t know better. He didn’t know otherwise in those days, in the obsolete past, about how his ascot became unfastened, about the way his suspenders snapped, about how his penny loafers were always scuffed and broken. He couldn’t help that his fedora was missing a feather, or that his appearance was rendered old-fashioned by passing years. He’s still amazed that you let him touch you, that you submitted to his caresses. He wasn’t amazed when you finally flinched and said, “OK now, man, that’s enough.” And when you left him without any warning, his feelings weren’t ruffled. His feathers weren’t left out of sorts in a huff.
Since then, he’s tried to become more refined. He’s tried to shape up. He might have become a rodeo dancer, or maybe a college graduate—we’ll never know. To hear the tales, he might have entered a program at Harvard, then finished the program. But we can’t be certain about those tales: when questioned, he tore up his diploma and ducked out the back.
Because he was feeling hungry for Thai food, he moved to Thailand. He stuck the two halves of his degree in a steamer trunk, and he set out at once. He learned where to go to get the freshest coffee in Bangkok, the freshest pad thai. He scouted the neighborhoods there for two years, just asking questions, just riding the buses. Just keeping his mouth shut, taking in heat and humidity. Just learning to keep both his buttery hands to his little old lonesome.
He missed you while living there, missed you terribly. He talked with his neighbors, and swam and rode every bus in Bangkok. He wrote an essay about how it felt to live in Thailand, and live there without you. He knew you were waiting for that essay, that you were checking your mailbox each morning. But he’d forgotten the look of the English language, its punctuation and letters. He got angry about how the characters looked on the page. He tore that essay in half every time he tried to write it, and crumpled those halves, and stuffed those torn and crumpled halves in his steamer trunk.
He tried to forget you. He took the liberty of buying you a coffee; he remembered how much you like coffee, and how you bought a cup every morning. He took the liberty of dropping a red and white peppermint in it; he remembered how much you like red and white, and how they filled your Christmas stocking. He’s kept that peppermint coffee warm for you ever since, inside a Thermos that he bought at a weekend market.
While he was in Thailand, he became friends with a passing gumball for a while. He befriended a passing tortoise, also. He ate the tortoise when it begged him to, when it cried and forced its chewy fins in his mouth. He placed the gumball inside a locket, a scuffed antique with a broken clasp, which he scotch-taped together and wears round his neck to this very day.
Now he lives in Chicago, has been spied living there for four years. He wasn’t corrupted, not very much; he isn’t easily corrupted. He still has the money that you lent him, the shiny new hundred. He’s turned down his many chances to spend it. He’s felt little pressure. He’s found he can get by with very little. He can get by on no more than a tortoise’s winter rations.
Ever since then, he’s been hanging around here, half-asleep, his hair combed, his eye out for your arrival. He’s still in love with you; he loves people just like you—kind souls who can handle his minor corruption. A little corruption might be precisely what you will need—you can’t be so certain.
As soon as he spies you, he’ll smile and wake up and say, “Hello and good morning to you.” The moment he sees your oblong face and remembers your name, he’ll fold his hands and bow and whisper, “Sawasdee krap.” He’ll say, “While sleeping, I wrote a book of short stories for you—accounts of the dreams that I had while I missed you, while living in Thailand. I hope that you like them.”
Until then, feel free to take a closer look at him. You can stare. You can take a long gander. He’s resting his head on that dream-laden book; he’s using its stories as a pillow. He knows that you’re destined to return at any moment; he’s foreseen it. He’s dreaming about you. His lips shape your name. He expects you to be back at any minute.
A. D. Jameson is the author of five books, most recently I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture (FSG 2018) and Cinemaps: An Atlas of 35 Great Movies (with artist Andrew DeGraff) (Quirk 2017). In May 2018, he received his Ph.D. from the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
More:
my Amazon author page
Quirk’s page for Cinemaps: An Atlas of 35 Great Movies
FSG’s page for I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture
a guide to all of my posts at HTML Giant
a guide to all of my posts at Big Other
an inventory of all my writing on cinema
A. D. Jameson Finds Your Lack of Geekiness Disturbing
Meet the lifelong geek and Star Wars aficionado.
by Adam Morgan
May 8, 2018
Comment 1
Named after Margaret Anderson’s literary magazine founded in Chicago in 1914, The Little Interview asks Chicago poets and writers about their reading, writing, and relationship with Chicago.
A
. D. Jameson is a lifelong geek and a PhD candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois in Chicago. In I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture, he charts the rise of science fiction, fantasy, and superhero franchises like Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, Marvel, and Lord of the Rings, from their humble beginnings to their current hold on the box office.
How did you wind up in Chicago?
I was living in Bangkok (long story) and looking to return to the US. A lot of my friends from Illinois State University, where I did my Master’s degree, were by then living in Chicago, and they convinced me to come join them. As soon as I showed up, they all moved away, but I stayed.
What are you reading right now?
I’m currently teaching a creative writing workshop, so I’m mostly reading my students’ story manuscripts. Which I love doing: each one is like a puzzle that needs to be solved, and they’re all writing such different things.
Of all the books you could have written, how and why did you settle on this one?
It was the confluence of several interests. I’m a lifelong geek, having grown up loving things like Star Wars, Star Trek, and X-Men. I also just completed my PhD, where I studied the nature of art and the relationship between artworks and the market. And I write fiction, and teach fiction writing, so I’m extremely interested in storytelling. All of those interests led me to wonder why geeks like the artworks that they like, and why those artworks have become increasingly popular, as well as increasingly commercially successful, over the past twenty years. My book tries to tell that story.
What is your all-time favorite book about (or set in) Chicago?
At the risk of being boring, it’s a tie between Native Son and Sister Carrie. (If you’d asked me about movies, I could have been less conventional, and named the immensely underrated Poltergeist III.)
What under-appreciated book/film/series do you wish everyone would read/watch?
I guess I just named one! But if you’ll permit me another, keeping in the spirit of my book, I’d say the 1989–90 comics miniseries Nth Man: The Ultimate Ninja, published by Marvel Comics. It was written by Larry Hama, who’s probably best known for helping to create G.I. Joe. Nth Man is set in alternative reality where the US and Russia are fighting WWIII, and Hama filled the comic with his many passions: ninjas, time travel paradoxes, feuding brothers, and experiments with the comics form. I wish Marvel would collect all sixteen issues as a graphic novel.
Where do you usually write? Do you have any favorite public writing spaces in Chicago?
When I first moved to Chicago, I wrote at various coffeeshops—Bourgeois Pig, New Wave Coffee, Café Mustache—but these days I work more at home. I also write a lot while walking, using the voice recorder on my phone, so I guess you could say that I’ve written all over Chicago!
Do you think the current geek mega-franchises (Marvel, Star Wars, Star Trek, LOTR, Harry Potter) will still dominate the box office in 10 years time, or give way to new IPs? How about in 30 years?
In her great book The Frodo Franchise, the film critic Kristin Thompson argues that the star-oriented era of film production has given way to the franchise era. Essentially, production companies are now seeking to brand consumers as fans of particular franchises, then sell those fans oodles of related merchandise and experiences across a wide variety of media platforms.
The thinking is that consumers bond emotionally with the characters and the story—say Optimus Prime and Bumblebee—then buy branded goods and services of all kinds in order to continually reexperience that emotional high.
So franchises like Marvel and Star Wars and Harry Potter probably aren’t going anywhere, even though the bloom might eventually come off the theatrical rose. In the case of Harry Potter, the Fantastic Beasts series seems to be struggling to get off the ground, but the Wizarding World theme parks are doing extremely well. Those attractions, along with the new Star Wars and Avatar theme parks, offer a different way for fans to relive their favorite fantasies.
I imagine that even if mass audiences tire of nonstop Marvel and Star Wars movies, they’ll still want to connect with the characters, stories, and worlds that they adore, and companies will keep finding ways to monetize that desire—through YouTube, mobile gaming, alternative reality gaming, social media…. And there will be new stories and characters—there always are—but their creators will face commercial pressure to turn them into franchises. Even with smaller indie movies, like The Babadook and The Love Witch, fans can buy things like posters, t-shirts, soundtracks, and assorted other collectibles. (And if the creators don’t make those products, then their fans will!)
NONFICTION
I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing:
Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture
By A. D. Jameson
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Published May 8, 2018
A. D. Jameson is the author of five books, including Cinemaps, a collaboration with the artist Andrew DeGraff. A former blogger for HTML Giant, his fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Unstuck, and elsewhere. He is a PhD candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture
Kristine Huntley
Booklist. 114.16 (Apr. 15, 2018): p12.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture.
By A. D. Jameson.
May 2018. 304p. Farrar, $26 (9780374537364). 791.43.
One glance at the multiplex or TV lineup will confirm that the geeky have inherited the Earth, but as Jameson observes in this lively volume, it wasn't always so. Back when Star Wars, the progenitor of todays geek renaissance, debuted in 1977, it was wildly popular but not considered highbrow in the way other hits of the era were. A child of the 1980s, Jameson grew up at a time when being a genre fan was something one kept hidden or shared only with like-minded friends. Jameson makes a passionate argument for the depth of these no-longer-fringe entertainments, pointing out the realism within the fantasy and how sf, fantasy, and superhero tales tackle issues personal and political. Genre currently rules supreme, with the Marvel, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings cinematic universes doing big business at the box office, yet Jameson points out that this isn't necessarily a boon for geeks, who obsess over the minutiae of their beloved franchises. A thoroughly engaging and enjoyable look at the evolution of geek culture over the past four decades.--Kristine Huntley
YA: Teen geeks will likely love this deep dive into their favorite movie and TV franchises. KH.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Huntley, Kristine. "I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2018, p. 12. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537268001/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9d8803d7. Accessed 5 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A537268001
Jameson, A.D.: I FIND YOUR LACK OF FAITH DISTURBING
Kirkus Reviews. (Apr. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Jameson, A.D. I FIND YOUR LACK OF FAITH DISTURBING Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 5, 8 ISBN: 978-0-374-53736-4
In defense of our new geek overlords.
Rather than offering a superfan's love letter to Lucasfilm, Jameson (99 Things to Do When You Have the Time, 2013, etc.) takes aim at the larger trends in entertainment media that Star Wars initiated. Geek art, whether involving sci-fi, fantasy, and/or superheroes, constitutes both a mindset and an aesthetic approach: the creation and consumption of imaginary new worlds with consistent internal logics. The author's mission is not simply to tell the story of how a series of "geek milestones"--like The Matrix or the liberation of superheroes from the dustbin of 1960s comics--transformed once-isolated interests into mainstream blockbusters. He wants us to stop scoffing at video games, sci-fi novels, comic books, collectible figurines, gamer culture, and superhero movies and to re-evaluate them as legitimate, complex, uplifting, and profound art forms (with the corollary that we also hail the rise of nerdcentric movies as the latest generation of great American cinema). Jameson takes umbrage at decades of uptight movie reviewers who have dismissed the undeniable popularity of Star Wars, especially those who accused George Lucas of irrevocably skewing the entire film industry toward such childish pleasures as outlandish storylines and happy endings. The author rejects the dichotomy between realism and fantasy, arguing that Lucas showed how the exploits of aliens in a far-flung galaxy can be just as detailed and realistic as the grittiest new Hollywood flick. Jameson rhapsodizes about his analog adolescence and the uphill-both-ways struggle that was pre-internet geekdom, but his college essay-level arguments won't win over those who sneer at the latest Marvel miniseries or balk at adult board games. Indeed, the book would probably most appeal to the group for which it is not written--i.e., his fellow fanatics, who probably know this stuff already but can never get enough.
A book that might prove useful to fellow gen-Xers who find themselves outside geek culture or those who have resisted the force of fantasy all these years but who now wish to learn what all the phantom menace is about.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Jameson, A.D.: I FIND YOUR LACK OF FAITH DISTURBING." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532700505/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=53e8d788. Accessed 5 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532700505
Amazing Adult Fantasy by A.D. Jameson
Review by Jeff Bursey — Published on September 6, 2011
Tags: postmodern fiction
REVIEWED:
Amazing Adult Fantasy by A.D. Jameson. Mutable Sound. 168 pp. $12.95.
Published in Issue 25
We’re in an unimaginative period when many readers prefer memoirs to fiction. Perhaps there’s something in Canadians and Americans that demands fiction to mirror life, to provide a perspective on how to live, like one would download an app designed to locate chain restaurants in foreign cities. Imaginative writing, so newspaper reviews would lead one to believe, has its best home in science fiction and fantasy titles. The serious novels—written by Philip Roth and James Ellroy, for example—don’t stray far from realism, unless you’re Spanish, South American or Salman Rushdie. When was the last time you picked up the local paper and saw a long review of a book that didn’t pretend to tell you exactly how this or that occupation was carried out in the 1540s, or describe minutely the way clothes were worn in 19th-century Wales? When was the last time an author’s style, above all other elements of a book, received praise in that same paper for its vocabulary, fresh metaphors, complex sentences, and the use of adverbs and adjectives, without once mentioning plot?
In the first volume of his four-volume set of criticism, Sheer Fiction (1987), Paul West has an essay titled “In Defense of Purple Prose,” and in it he says:
Certain producers of plain prose, however, have conned the reading public into believing that only in prose plain, humdrum, or flat, can you articulate the mind of inarticulate ordinary Joe. Even to begin to do that, you need to be more articulate than Joe, or you might as well tape-record him and leave it at that. This essentially minimalist vogue depends on the premise that only an almost invisible style can be sincere, honest, moving, sensitive, and so forth, whereas prose that draws attention to itself by being revved up, ample, intense, incandescent or flamboyant, turns its back on something almost holy, and that is the human bond with ordinariness. . . . Surely the passion for the plain, the homespun, the banal, is itself a form of betrayal, a refusal to look honestly at a complex universe, a get-poor-quick attitude that wraps up everything in simplistic formulas never to be inspected for veracity or point. Got up as a cry from the heart, it’s really an excuse for dull and mindless writing, larded over with the speciously democratic myth that says this is how most folks are. Well, most folks are lazy, especially when confronted with a book, and some writers are lazy too, writing in the same anonymous style as everyone else. How many prose writers can you identify from their style?
Based on this first book of fiction pieces by A.D. Jameson, I can say that though I think he could write like a realist, he has greater ambitions than devising a plot (though now and then one pops up) or developing a character you could care about. In fact, it would go against everything in the mood and nature of Amazing Adult Fantasy if a reader invested himself in what happens to the swirls of black on white that make up Ota Benga, Melissa, Nok Yai, and other figures. The opening piece, “Fiction,” occupies only one page but promises much, while addressing certain illusions we might have about what fiction ought to offer: “Fiction may be the worst thing about the 21st Century. Nobody likes it. Everyone has better things to do than pretend to care about who does what to whom, considering that these people aren’t even real. You think we would have learned our lesson after the 1800s, definitely after the 1900s.” This concludes with: “It’s no shame that this book was lost soon afterwards in [a fire]. Still, everyone was terribly disappointed.” What will his magically recovered version of fiction contain, then, if what appeared in two hundred years of creative writing is left out? Not real people (or not precisely, as we’ll see), not rounded characters, little plot, no dramatic arc; instead, we’re given style and the kind of playfulness one feels in Raymond Queneau’s The Sunday of Life. No wonder people were disappointed.
There are 16 short pieces (some are job ads for waste extraction workers, others summarize a television series), and a seven-part sequence titled The Solar Stories. A good example of Jameson’s extravagant prose can be found in “Rock Albany!,” the fifth of the Solar Stories:
Rock laughed and shook his head, then dove into the lake far below. He swam easily to the far shore, where he dressed, then strolled down a path. He walked swiftly, with a loose, lazy expertness of motion. He walked down the long road on the sun, the sun’s only road. The sun was his home. He had lived there for seventeen years. Most men would die if they tried to live on the sun. They would burn up at once. Rock laughed at this thought. He found the sun charming. The sun, he thought, has been waiting here just for me. Waiting to be ripped apart by my dynamite and drill. Waiting for the new shape my hands will give it. He would paint it pigeon blue. He would install a Pekinese buttress. He would hand-raise pudgy canaries. Rock liked canaries. [italics Jameson’s]
It’s clear that we are far removed from fidelity to the world, from colorlessness, and from parsimoniousness imagery. We stop at one word in particular: if “most” men would burn up on the sun, then not all will, allowing an impossibility to be possible for a moment. Or forever, since multiple readings will allow us, theoretically, to entertain that conceit eternally. Both the possible impossibility, or impossible possibility, and its longevity, are qualities found in fantasy, myths, legends, and tall tales. Rock could be the Paul Bunyan of Sol. What we also see here is the cruelty we associate with gods, demi-gods, and those touched, or afflicted, by the gods. Rock has no second thoughts about dynamiting, pillaging, defacing, and remaking the sun.
In the short pieces that precede these stories, Jameson has us meet Indian Jones, who bears a resemblance to a film character, yet his career and old age are not what we would have expected: “By now he’s a very old sculptor who can’t remember anything, who sits all day in a courtyard, drinking grappa.” His dog “feels like a goddess of memory on Olympus,” and “Indian Jones is God.” Not quite what the movies tell us, though of course there are movie gods (and screen sirens). Oscar the Grouch, who meets the narrator in many different ways (myths begetting littler myths, ad infinitum), Big Bird, and others who show up don’t do the things you’d expect, though their behavior isn’t entirely unfamiliar. They just seem to have wandered over to the dark side.
In Jameson’s multiverse, real people also float free of their tethers. This suits those whose stature is larger-than-life. In “Buzz Aldwin” Jameson riffs on Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong (renamed “Neal”). As iconic figures go, these two are near the top, and you have to admire a writer who steps in to mess around with their lives, substituting surrealism and soap opera for factual biography and science. The result is a warped version of their lives that mingles mystery and despair with “odor-starved dogs” and “a ten-thousand-word typewritten love poem.” The figures don’t come across as cartoonish because they were never people to begin with. (It also might be that Aldrin’s achievements, in Jameson’s view, raise him above the level of the ordinary person.) In a similar way, fun is had in “Bonnie Raitt, I Am Coming to See You.” While there is a resemblance to the real-life musician, it’s doubtful she’s aiming to “master the art of ceramics, ceramic music” that her obsessed fan, verging on a stalker, insists is her next step. (Jameson doesn’t mention Raitt’s healthy love for the music of NRBQ, though, which is a shame.)
All the well-known figures populating Amazing Adult Fantasy, some whose achievements are part of history, some whose existence flickers in the mind as part of a soundtrack or a celluloid memory (including the casts of Star Wars and Star Trek: The Next Generation), were mythical before Jameson wrote about them, but he transforms them, re-imagining them—“Waiting for the new shape my hands will give it” indeed—for his pleasure, and for our times. He does so with fresh language that catches you unexpectedly. Rock Albany has “the mouth of an executed saint”; Goths “stank of mirrors”; a young boy named Peter who’s an intuitive cook “makes the meats he uses look like a suicide.” Alternatively, in “7 Movie Reviews,” Jameson blandly presents the contents of movies, uses the same character names over and over, and only occasionally forces out a sell line, so that the lack of energy and invention become the very things that seem to be missing. It’s as if he’s saying, “Watch, I can rein myself in.” He can also be crude and stereotyping in reverse, as when, in “My Parents Tried to Make Me More Popular,” the male character complains his “nice Irish girl can’t get knocked up worth shit.”
Two things struck me about the fireworks, off-beat remarks and jazzy phrasing. First, Jameson’s craft hides the effort behind writing freewheeling prose and knowing what fanciful conceits to retain. Second, while the stories contain humor, they aren’t sunny, and the Muppet-inspired pieces certainly aren’t for children. For all its lighthearted exterior, a grimness rests inside Amazing Adult Fantasy. A phrase from “Big Bird and Snuffy” applies to this book: “hidden deep inside a forest . . . uneasy things enjoyed themselves.” Those vague beings come out in the open suddenly, make their mark, and then retreat. Menace and foreboding help comprise the atmosphere of myths. But Jameson isn’t offering a glum view of the world because he isn’t offering the world at all. He’s written a book that places inventive writing at the forefront and come up with a work of fiction that looks breezy and contains much unpleasantness. His myths, in keeping with 21st century writing, don’t offer a lifeline to anyone. As Gilbert Sorrentino said, “Art cannot rescue anybody from anything” (The Moon in Its Flight), and I think Amazing Adult Fantasy is reminding us of that. There’s no life-changing message here, but perhaps by merging the poetic and the absurd we can tell our stories in new styles. Yet even that small solace is a source of tension, and may be denied by A.D Jameson when, on the last page of this fine book, a character who has gone through several adventures advises or warns of fiction’s follies:
But even still, before we knew it, our time had come and gone. Now, at the end, we have to admit that we haven’t enjoyed ourselves. No one has had any fun. Our lives haven’t turned out at all the way we planned. Our lives haven’t turned out at all the way we wanted. Our stories, we have to admit, have been the cause of all our problems. Fiction, I’d like to insist, has been to blame.
Canadian writer Jeff Bursey has written reviews and articles for journals in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. His first book, Verbatim: A Novel, was published in October 2010 by Enfield & Wizenty.
Cinemaps: An Atlas of 35 Great Movies
Andrew DeGraff, essays by A.D. Jameson. Quirk, $29.99 (157p) ISBN 978-1-59474-989-6
MORE BY AND ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Illustrator DeGraff follows Plotted: A Literary Atlas with a new batch of intricate and inventive illustrations, this time geared toward movie buffs. DeGraff uses his fondness for creative cartography to plot key scenes in 35 of his favorite films, including classics (North by Northwest), westerns (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), indies (Rushmore), rom-coms (The Breakfast Club), and horror films (The Shining). His maps serve as visual interpretations of films. He diagrams characters’ journeys through the plot lines or key scenes, creating a dense and dreary industrial cityscape with gouache lines and charcoal for the movie Metropolis and trippy, colorful, psychedelic aerial view of Oz for The Wizard of Oz. While visually striking and conceptually innovative, many of the maps are so detailed that they are hard to follow and they don’t always connect to the movies in a clear or meaningful way. For example, the map for Clueless is pink with several blue buildings and a few bike roads with bikers pictured, which conjures up no scenes from the film. Luckily film critic Jameson’s corresponding essays add clarity by summarizing each movie plot, and sharing bits of trivia (how Metropolis influenced Babe: Pig in the City) as well as thematic discussions such as on the varying uses of labyrinths and puzzles in the film Labyrinth. Readers will come to the book for DeGraff’s illustrations, but Jameson’s essays are what keep the pages turning. (Oct.)
ART AND ILLUSTRATION
Travel Along with Mad Max: Fury Road in an Illustrated Map
Tor.com
Mon Oct 23, 2017 9:00am Post a comment Favorite This
Oh what a day, what a lovely day!
After tackling the world of literature in Plotted: A Literary Atlas, artist Andrew DeGraff has set his sites on movies with Cinemaps—visualizing the stories of 35 films as singular landscapes, charting the progression of their characters throughout. The results are beautiful maps that enhance classic films like North by Northwest and Fargo, as well as genre favorites from King Kong to Back to the Future.
We were especially thrilled by this glorious take on Mad Max: Fury Road. Witness!
Follow the action as Furiosa leaves the Citadel in the War Rig, and her mad dash across the desert with the Wives—pursued by Immortan Joe and the War Boys, plus the armies from Gas Town and the Bullet Farm…
Click here for the full 3MB version
Cinemaps: An Atlas of 35 Great Movies is available October 24th from Quirk Books.
BUY IT NOW
This beautifully illustrated atlas of beloved movies is an essential reference for cinephiles, fans of great films, and anyone who loves the art of mapmaking.
Acclaimed artist Andrew DeGraff has created beautiful hand-painted maps of all your favorite films, from King Kong and North by Northwest to The Princess Bride, Fargo, Pulp Fiction, even The Breakfast Club—with the routes of major characters charted in meticulous cartographic detail. Follow Marty McFly through the Hill Valley of 1985, 1955, and 1985 once again as he races Back to the Future. Trail Jack Torrance as he navigates the corridors of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. And join Indiana Jones on a globe-spanning journey from Nepal to Cairo to London on his quest for the famed Lost Ark. Each map is presented in an 11-by-14-inch format, with key details enlarged for closer inspection, and is accompanied by illuminating essays from film critic A. D. Jameson, who speaks to the unique geographies of each film.
‘I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing’ Review: The Geeks Strike Back
The “Star Wars” franchise and Marvel’s superhero films reign supreme in today’s Hollywood. How did that happen? Brian P. Kelly reviews “I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing” by A.D. Jameson.
Fans attend the premiere of CBS's "Star Trek: Discovery" in Los Angeles last year.
Fans attend the premiere of CBS's "Star Trek: Discovery" in Los Angeles last year. PHOTO: TODD WILLIAMSON/GETTY IMAGES
By Brian P. Kelly
June 7, 2018 7:11 p.m. ET
The small cinema closest to my apartment is a paradise for fans of a certain sort of film, currently showing “Avengers: Infinity War,” “Deadpool 2” and “Solo: A Star Wars Story.” This onslaught reaches into our homes too, as shows based on Marvel Comics characters continue to roll out on Netflix and superhero rival DC gears up to launch its own streaming service. We are truly living in the golden age of geekdom—Comic Book Guy from “The Simpsons” would be thrilled—but how did the obsessions of Trekkies and Dungeons and Dragons players rise to the level of a pop monoculture? Readers seeking an explanation will find a partial answer in A.D. Jameson’s “I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture.”
Mr. Jameson begins in 1977 with “Star Wars,” but the story accelerates with that franchise’s re-release 20 years later and the succession of popular geeky films that followed, including the “Matrix” trilogy, the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and, later, Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, to name just a few. That said, Mr. Jameson is less concerned with writing a history of this movement than crafting an explanation of and apologia for geek culture.
Mr. Jameson clearly lays out the qualities that geeks appreciate in their art: realism bolstered by a deep internal history and the sort of “world-building” exemplified by Tolkien. But in Hollywood “Star Wars” changed the game thanks to its verisimilitude, “which immediately and thoroughly convinces viewers that they are watching humans and aliens skip from planet to planet in a vast, crowded other galaxy with its own detailed history.” Similarly, the biological background of the “Alien” series includes Xenomorphs “whose intricate life cycle can be described from beginning to end in grisly detail.” Books like “The Star Trek Encyclopedia,” in which the show’s designers document “all the alien planets and species that they’d invented” and present starship engineering schematics, are quintessential works of geek culture.
Detail is important to geeks, the author suggests, because they want a fully believable, escapist experience without “any boundaries, any limits. . . . They don’t want the artwork to ever end.” Whether it’s playing a tabletop game filled with lore about previously unknown characters from the “Star Wars” galaxy or reading a “textbook” to study the fantastic beasts of the “Harry Potter” world, geeks want to believe—at least for a bit. As Mr. Jameson says, “geeks have long thought of artworks as places where one can hang out.” That’s one reason why single films have given way to trilogies and why characters have cross-populated to create Marvel’s seemingly endless “cinematic universe.”
‘I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing’ Review: The Geeks Strike Back
PHOTO: WSJ
I FIND YOUR LACK OF FAITH DISTURBING
By A.D. Jameson
FSG, 288 pages, $26
Mr. Jameson writes as a fan of geek culture and has a bone to pick with what he calls “prestige critics,” arguing that they, and the public as a whole, “don’t take geek culture seriously enough, being too quick to dismiss its artworks as stupid and frivolous.” If anything, though, films of the sort he praises are given too much critical attention. Geeky films certainly aren’t absent at the Oscars—Best Picture nominees have included “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015) and “Arrival” (2016). And films from “Iron Man” (2008) to “Black Panther” (2018) have earned critical raves, establishing themselves as high points of the superhero genre.
But Mr. Jameson has a more troubling blindspot. He might be happy about geekdom’s recently found popularity, but he doesn’t seem to realize that these films crowd out creative competition. He acknowledges that “entertainment companies are increasingly turning to the franchise model in order to minimize risk” but fails to see that, as a result of hanging their earnings on tent-pole franchises, studios are unwilling to take a chance on outlandish ideas or off-the-wall stories. Geeky universes are far from insulated from this artistic lethargy, as major entertainment companies try to acquire as many geek-related properties as they can afford, bringing the creative futures of the storylines under risk-averse, profit-maximizing corporate control. Disney, for example, now owns both Marvel and Star Wars. That might make for good business but certainly not for good art.
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The irony is that we have seen this film before. Indeed, Mr. Jameson praises the original “Star Wars” as “a product of the New Hollywood”—the period in the mid- to late 1960s when traditional studio systems broke down and censorship rules were loosened, allowing the likes of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese to experiment. While those directors were bringing new modes of storytelling to the depths of Vietnam or the rundown streets of New York, George Lucas was doing the same, only in a galaxy of his own invention. A vision as elaborate and idiosyncratic as “Star Wars” could not have been formed under the failing studio system.
As Mr. Jameson says, “Star Wars was Lucas’s means of remaining independent.” Mr. Lucas knew that if he had worked within the old system, he’d be “doomed to know what art was but surrounded by an Empire that didn’t care.” Thus in Mr. Jameson’s somewhat melodramatic portrayal, the film’s destruction of the Death Star is nothing less than the destruction of the Old Hollywood.
Today, though, we find ourselves in the same place—only it’s Disney playing the Evil Empire. To move forward, a new Rebellion may be needed, in order to liberate filmmakers’ creativity. That seems to be the great conflict that Mr. Jameson can’t grapple with: that to make better geek movies, Hollywood needs to make fewer of them.
Mr. Kelly is the Journal’s associate Arts in Review editor. Follow him on Twitter @bpkelly89.