Tom Stoppard: Complete Plays Volume 2

 It is in the fabric of this volume, consisting as it does only of dramas written for radio, that it feels somehow more and less complete than Stoppard's fully staged works.  There is something liberating about not being beholden to visualization.  The fact that these plays are entirely auditory means that there is no imagination required.  What is on the page is all there is, unlike staged works which are designed to incorporate the additional elements of set, lighting, costume, etc.  The mind needn't wander.  The writer has possibly even more freedom.  He needn't ask himself while writing, "Is is possible to do this even?" It is all possible.

And yet these freedoms from constraint are also limitations.  The first apparent of such limitations is that of length.  So many of the ideas Stoppard considers here are left undeveloped, with the possible exception of "In the Native State," the longest of the radio plays.  It is a great comfort to know that there are three stout volumes filled with his other works on my shelf, and plenty of room for these ideas to blossom.  The other unique feature of these plays, however, is analogous to the limitations of reading a fully staged work.  Stoppard so often relies on the main creative tool allowed to an audio drama: simultaneity.  It is manifestly impossible for me to experience the words on the page in parallel as they were intended, and, as with other dramatic works, there is simply no substitute for the experience of the finished product.

Scott McCloud (ed.): 24 Hour Comics

 The nature of this book is such that the project/concept itself is more open to interpretation and reaction than the works it inspired.  Certainly certain among the offerings in this collection are outstanding in their own right.  Neil Gaiman and Steve Bissette, unsurprisingly, contributed my favorites and the latter in particular hit a little too close to home--in exactly the way good art and literature do.  

However it is the phenomenon itself that is most revealing to me.  The idea that extreme time constraints force something out of your subconscious that maybe would have remained buried if you were more at leisure, and that works that come from that deep well are often more vivid and real than things which are more conscious and deliberate, well this idea has a great deal of support from my own personal experience.  I'm sure it's no coincidence that a few days after reading this collection an idea for a short graphic novel sprang fully formed into my consciousness, and I have begun giving birth to it.  It's a shame that my artistic skill is not uup to the task of completing it in 24 hours. 

Angela Carter: The Bloody Chamber

 It strikes me as a little odd that I don't have a lot to say about this groundbreaking and important work.  In fact, that's largely what I have to say about it: that it was important and groundbreaking.  If I didn't know better, however, I would assume that it was one of the author's early works.  It is vivid, engrossing, and wildly passionate.  Her strengths are on full display: creating a mood, scene, and images that work together to create the equivalent of a painting on the page.  Nonetheless, the additional elements that one might expect of a mature writer are somewhat lacking: clarity, flow, thematic development, cohesion . . . the impression is very much that of a gifted young writer with a great deal of promise, but room for growth.  One wonders if she ever took the themes that she obsessed over in this mid-career work any further, and lived up to its potential.  I'm very certain that it is worth reading her later works to find out.