![]() ![]() “Having lost his mother, father, brother, an grandfather, the friends and foes of his youth, his beloved teacher Bernard Kornblum, his city, his history-his home-the usual charge leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf… ― Michael Chabon, quote from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay ![]() Here its stock-in-trade was ironies, coincidences, and the only true portents: those that revealed themselves, unmistakable and impossible to ignore, in retrospect.” In the realm of human affairs, this type of enchantment was often, though not always, a sadder business-sometimes beautiful, sometimes cruel. What bewitched Bernard Kornblum, on the contrary, was the impersonal magic of life, when he read in a magazine about a fish that could disguise itself as any one of seven different varieties of sea bottom, or when he learned from a newsreel that scientists had discovered a dying star that emitted radiation on a wavelength whose value in megacycles approximated π. Not in astrology, theosophy, chiromancy, dowsing rods, séances, weeping statues, werewolves, wonders, or miracles. Not in the kitchen enchantments of Slavic grandmothers with their herbiaries and parings from the little toe of a blind virgin tied up in a goatskin bag. ![]() Not in the so-called magic of candles, pentagrams, and bat wings. “A surprising fact about the magician Bernard Kornblum, Joe remembered, was that he believed in magic. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |