Prairie Schooner

This is the sixth in a series of guest posts by Hali Sofala and Eric Jones on the connections between gaming (video and otherwise) and the literary.

I watched as Kazandria, my Kajiit warrior, labored up the winding path to Whiterun’s Cloud District in the aftermath of the war. She had lived in the central city of Whiterun, a mecca of trade and industry in the medievalist supernatural world of Tamriel, for nearly three months since Skyrim made its debut in November of 2011. She had “made friends” with her female blacksmith neighbor who had become Kazandria’s primary resource for weapons and armor trade. Now Kazandria was responsible for setting the woman’s house on fire along with almost everyone else’s in her cherished town. I laughed uncomfortably to my fiancée and co-author, Eric, knowing how silly it was to feel so terrible.

Marianne Kunkel is the Managing Editor of Prairie Schooner and a Ph.D. student in poetry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, with a specialization in women’s and gender studies. Her poems have appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, River Styx, and elsewhere, and her chapbook, The Laughing Game, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

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This is the sixth installment of an ongoing series written for the blog by Richard Graham. Richard is an associate professor and media services librarian at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he studies the educational use of comics and serves as the film and art history liaison. His posts examine UNL’s, Nebraska’s, and the larger literary world’s connections with the comics medium.

Gerry Shapiro was an absurdist with a sentimental streak. His fiction never warped so far into fantasia as the literary vaudeville of S.J. Perelman and Woody Allen’s early New Yorker stories, but he did practice his own brand of mordant slapstick. His urban and suburban worlds could almost pass for normal, and most readers can likely relate to his characters’ various predicaments--and, indeed, many of his finest stories were inspired by his own personal experience. What results from this mix of portraiture and comic distortion is not unlike Inge Morath’s series of photographs depicting everyday people in everyday poses, but wearing paper bags over their heads--paper bags with cartoon faces drawn by Saul Steinberg. The effect is sad and lackadaisical, charming and distressing, arrestingly artificial and profoundly human, all at once.