Advertising age

Today, James at Grognardia reflects:

When I entered the hobby, if you played a science fiction game, you either played Traveller or Space Opera. I was a Traveller man back then, so Space Opera was one of those games I noticed on game store shelves and whose ads and articles I saw in the pages of Dragon but which I never actually played.

I've already written about how I didn't actually play D&D that much (though I was fascinated by the rulebooks), but I have such strong memories of reading the ads in Dragon—for games I'd never play, for games that I'd never even seen on the shelves. I'm coming to believe that, in their unavailability—shall we call it invisibility?—they were as fascinating to me as the few games (D&D, Gamma World, Top Secret, a few others) that I did play.

Part of the fun of reading Grognardia is that James (who I gather is around my age) will frequently review a game that I recall seeing ads for in Dragon: Bushido (RPG of feudal Japan), Superhero 2044, et al. It's like hearing the other half of a conversation that got broken off decades ago.

D&D or the Memory of Childhood

The Complete Review takes a look at Sean Manning's anthology Bound to Last, which features my piece on the Dungeon Master's Guide.

Among Park's observations: the influence of Appendix N, "Inspirational and Educational Reading", where: "Gygax lists 28 authors who had the biggest influence on the creation of D&D" -- many of whose books Park later sought out, though he notes: "The titles were enough. Playing D&D could create the adventures like the ones contained in those novels." (Amusingly, Park also notes he didn't actually play the game that much -- but that the book about it so fascinated him.)
Park also has a nice observation on the lingering influence of such influential works read in youth:

I keep meaning to read Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual. But I don't, maybe because I want it to be the Dungeon Master's Guide.

Eschewing hundreds of years

From Time Out Chicago, a nice review by Jonathan Messinger of the anthology Bound to Last:

One of my hands-down, unbreakable, no-foolin’ rules for survival is to do my best to avoid writers writing about writing. It’s fine for instructional purposes, I suppose, but usually the navel-gazing seems so reflexive that I grow wary the universe may implode. The flip side of that is the simple joy of reading a writer you admire write of an author he or she gets down with.

Part of the beauty of this book, too, is the leeway the authors were granted. Ed Park (Personal Days) eschews hundreds of years of literary history to instead extoll the virtues of Gary Gygax’s Dungeon Masters Guide, the handbook to hours of enraptured childhood gaming, written in the style of an RPG manual...

Disambiguations™ for November 12, 2010

I. Bookforum's Paper Trail catches up with Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Books, and focuses on its most surprising and important piece:

Published last month, Bound to Last is a new anthology for which thirty authors pay homage to their "most cherished books." There are some excellent and in some cases deeply inspired entries: Ed Park geeks out over the Dungeon Masters Guide; Nick Flynn assembles a series of personal, melancholic fragments about Ryszard Kapuscinski's Shadow of the Sun. But the most personal essay is by artist Karen Green, the widow of David Foster Wallace. Her topic is The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, but the essay basically uses quotes from that book as a framework for her reflections about DFW's suicide—about selling the house that they shared, about describing what had happened in the house, about talking to her late husband's psychiatrist. "I was asked to contribute to this anthology because I am the widow, via hanging, of David Foster Wallace," she writes, "whose writing I enjoyed very much, but whose made-up potty humor songs on a road trip I liked even better." Green's humor is on a par with Hempel's: Her description of the gift shop at the L. A. Coroner's Office is both skewed and also, somehow, respectful of life. The piece is the most moving thing we've read about Wallace's death yet.

II. Dullblogger Mike 'fesses up: He loves Magical Mystery Tour! And if you read his post...you start thinking...Hey...

In a related heresy, I always cringe a bit when people call the White Album their favorite. They're free to, of course, but it's a bit alienating because I wonder what they're hearing. I hear all the great raw material of India filtered through a brutal six months of international bloodshed, heroin paranoia, rockstar hubris and internal discord. I suppose what I hear is the conditions that allowed The Beatles to arise—in the Buddhist sense of this phrase—beginning to dissipate. White has some superb tracks and I enjoy those, but it's one long bad vibe for me. I hear the group starting to sicken and die, and it's the group that I love most about The Beatles.

(Side note, love how MMT enters The Social Network. Great moment in that movie.)

Book Notes™ With Ed Park

I. Closing out my D&D/RPG "trilogy" of tales (thus far comprising "Welcome to Tyosen™!" and "Cow Vase") is "Dungeon Masters Guide," my contribution to Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book! (Sean Manning put it together.) Pub date is October 26. The interviewer inside my head wants to step in for a moment.

Q: Are all these pieces part of some greater work?

A: I can't answer that right now, I'm sorry!

II. Speaking of "Cow Vase"—it will be included in the forthcoming book Significant Objects (Fantagraphics, 2011)!

III. F.S. Yvonne Woon's YA novel Dead Beautiful is out—what a cool website!

IV. Jenny D on her Kindle experience.

V. Lev G on his Yale experience.

VI. My sister went to Montreal and got me this Ed the Happy Clown comic. Someone should write something about Chester Brown's notes on his old work—the notes are equally fascinating!

VII. I think that's all for now...