Rip Hunter said in the recent JSA/JSA team-up that he's not really Rip Hunter. They both have blond hair parted to the right. Will Rip Hunter show up and take Booster away? OR (and as you can tell, this is a big OR) is Booster Gold actually Rip Hunter? Think about it. So what I'm saying is that Booster Gold is now a time anomaly, like the Legion of Super-Villains from the recent Superman/Batman arc and the stuff that was happening in JSA. Will there even be a 25th C as we've seen Booster's time to be? Or will be a Kamandi World where Apes and Dogs rule? Does the current Legion even use flight rings? One of the items in his arsenal is a Legion of Super-Heroes Flight Ring (which was somehow explained by saying one of them had travelled back in time and forgot their ring or something). He was a disgraced football player who stole a bunch of artifacts from the superhero museum was a security guard at, and travelled 500 years to the past to use those artifacts to be a hero and make some money. "Costello" forces the reader to think about who and what she is.He's from the future, the 25th Century (which isn't as distant as it was in 1986 when he first appeared), to be semi-exact. But in the novel, Coetzee demonstrates that the conventions of metafiction can be turned to explosive moral purpose in the production of rigorous, high-stakes art. The meta-lectures in "Costello" invited the charge that Coetzee was trying to evade responsibility for his character's extreme formulations. Coetzee reworked his original lectures in "Costello," while Smith tells us her lectures are published in "Artful" "pretty much as they were delivered." Still, Coetzee's lectures also take the form of stories in which a fictional proxy is delivering a lecture. Coetzee's novel "Elizabeth Costello," which began as the Tanner Lectures given at Princeton. I suppose part of my frustration with "Artful" stems from my admiration of the work it most resembles, J.M. Ballard suggests … when Forster writes about how Gertrude Stein … with Proust making the act of remembrance … with Joyce making an epic forever … Dalloway … Forster says … Saramago points out … Juan Pablo Villalobos's 2010 novel … the Roman historian Sallust could write … what J.G. The lecture is ostensibly "On Time," so Smith (or her proxy) spews forth a free-associational stream of cool stuff that people have said about time:Īnd when I think of Forster's tapeworm, I can't help thinking of the Nicola Barker short story … as one of Mansfield's characters in her story … The wanderings of time in Mrs. She has some smart things to say about some of these quotations, but the main impression is that of a canonical pile-up. And she throws in Damien Hirst for good measure. In the space of five early pages, Smith (or her dead proxy, in her notes) quotes José Saramago, Katherine Mansfield, Michelangelo, Eugenio Montale, "The Epic of Gilgamesh," Czesaw Miosz, Edwin Morgan, Matthew Reynolds and Rainer Maria Rilke. Every lecture in the humanities is liberally sprinkled with quotations from literary and critical heavyweights, but here they seem less buttresses of thought or even displays of erudition than means of filling up blank paper. This is unfair to the comic exuberance and insight of these whatever-they-are - the narrator's conversations with her therapist are a small triumph - but "Artful" would be easier to enjoy if it were less slapdash. Smith hints as much when the narrator recalls her dead partner's "writing the last couple of those talks - well, when you were trying to, but were, you said, stuck, blocked." If you're like me and wish that people would go back to giving lectures that resemble, like, lectures, you might find it all a bit stale.īut as much as I admire Smith's voice and the lightness with which she wears her learning, "Artful" too often recalls the old beginning-poetry-workshop standby, the poem about not being able to write a poem. The unnamed narrator is literally haunted by the dead lover, who says things like "What is it, again, time?" If this sort of recursive cleverness is your bag, your bag is this sort of recursive cleverness. The lectures turn out to be "discursive stories," as the jacket copy has it, narrated by a character who discovers her (or his it's unclear) dead lover's notes for a series of lectures. Ali Smith's new collection, "Artful" - the text of her Weidenfeld lectures, delivered at Oxford last February - isn't bad, but it's no "Duck Amuck." At its best we get "Don Quixote," "Tristram Shandy," Jorge Luis Borges' stories, Chuck Jones' "Duck Amuck." At its worst we get Paul Auster. At least since whoever wrote "The Arabian Nights" invented postmodernism, we have been visited by metafiction - literature folding in on itself to address its own fictionality.
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