It’s true. He do read wierd stuff (sic).
Steve Lieber cuts a magisterial figure in a silk dressing gown and a pair of pinstriped trousers from a bespoke morning suit. He’s bracketed top to bottom by flawless white spats and a leopard-skin fez, that indispensible Excelsior! of sartorial whimsy. “Come in, come in!” he booms, stirring a cup of coffee. “May I offer you anything? Coffee? Port? A cigar?”
“Oh, no,” I demur, stepping into the airy chambers of Mercury Studios as one of the black-clad assistants takes my jacket. (Yes, it’s a hot summer here in Portland. But one doesn’t make points with Mr. Steve Lieber by dressing down.) “I’m fine.”
“Are you certain? They’re Cuban…”
“Couldn’t possibly.”
“Well then. What can I do for you, Mister, ah—I’m dreadfully sorry—”
Oh, how charming! As if it’s his fault he doesn’t remember nobodies like me. “Kip Manley, sir. Freelance critic of the paraliterary. I wanted to speak to you about your upcoming column, for, ah—” And here was a dicey dilemma. How to refer to the (rather rudely named) site without risking a disruption of our delicate decorum? Luckily, discretion was close to hand with a deft dodge: “Kevin Smith’s movie and pop-culture periodical?”
“Ah, that rascally World Wide Web site, Movie Poop Shoot dot com,” said Lieber, his voice and genial smile suggesting that, while its declassé taste was not an habitual one on his tongue, he nonetheless revelled genteely in the Rabelaisian wit of this misbegotten moniker. He continued to stir his coffee. “An argosy of acerbic articulations on (and analyses of) the arcana of that glorious business we call genre entertainment. How wonderful that a movie’s nebulous marketing scheme could, like Pygmalion’s statue or Frankenstein’s monster, take on a life of its own and go forth, into the world, to do what good it can. And how pleased I am to be able to steer its course with my few humble suggestions.” His spoon clinks against the cup, a merry sound against the industrious hullaballoo of the studio all about us: I can just make out shy, retiring Paul Guinan before he ducks back into the echoing gut of a hollowed-out 1887 knock-off of a vintage Reade Electric Man, brought it at no little expense for vital artistic reference; that bearded man taking tea beneath the windows with Ron Randall is, yes, George Lucas, here I believe to confer on the finer points of Imperial starship chandlery for the forthcoming third and final film (I try not to gawk); and in yonder corner—but no: I was sworn to secrecy as to the nature of the project being got up to there, and its participants, else I’d drop such hints as would make the whole comics industry sit up and slaver. —And this is a quiet day at Mercury.
“At any rate,” says Lieber, “if you’d care to step over to my workspace…” Stirring his coffee, he leads me to a sunlit corner laid with a hand-knotted Persian rug, defined by a pigeon-holed secretary desk to one side (quaintly archaic, its miniature writing-surface burdened with several precariously balanced stacks of leather bound books and brightly colored comics periodicals) and a sleekly modern, skeletal drawing table to the other (an ebony-and-teak tabouret, its dozens of drawers neatly shut, stands half under it like a faithful hound). A work table defines the third side, and it is here that Lieber pauses, looking a moment at the work of two black-clad assistants upon a sheet of bristol board, painted with black ink and strapped to a restraining frame. One of the assistants holds a bedraggled toothbrush, stiff with white paint, and shakes it at the board as if to admonish it for some imagined slight. “If you would,” says Lieber, holding out one hand and shaking back his rakishly unfastened French cuff. The assistant gladly surrenders the brush. “I think you’ll find,” says Lieber, holding the brush bristle-up and then whipping it with a subtle twist of his wrist, “that with white on black, a modified Wronski flip results in a more pleasingly scattered splatter. It’s just the thing for starfields—if a bit tiring for explosions. Here. Try it yourself.” The assistant takes up the brush again, and performs quite adequately. Lieber beams. “Now then,” he says, stirring his coffee. “Where were we?”
I should, perhaps, take this opportunity to steer the conversation back to our ostensible topic, but I’m distracted by the tantalizing mound of books. “Are these for upcoming projects?” I ask, picking up a much-loved copy of Eco’s Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language.
“Ah. I’ll be reading the chapter on symbol closely as part of my terminally in-progress response to McCloud’s Understanding Comics. While the semiotic dialect between signifier and signed is not the same thing as the closure of which McCloud speaks, there’s nonetheless a mischievous transference at play into which I wish to delve more fully. Plus,” he purses his lips, stirring his coffee, “there’s Dylan Horrocks’s piercingly trenchant Journal essay to take into consideration.” He sighs, stirring his coffee. “I’m afraid at this rate it shall be posthumously published, if ever.”
“And this?” I say, of a trade paperback edition of Anne Hollander’s Sex and Suits.
“Ah,” he sighs. “Don’t get me wrong. Wonderful book. But she has little to say on the subject of rep ties, about which I shall be doodling a little piece for Gentlemen’s Quarterly. I’m afraid the definitive history has yet to be written… Oh, and the Carter there—have you read Carter?”
“No,” I allow, momentarily spell-bound by the bizarre image on the cover, as provocative as the title: The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman.
“You must read Angela Carter. At any rate—and though it’s not officially hush-hush, I nonetheless really shouldn’t tell you—”
I perk up. He stirs his coffee a moment, drawing it out. Smiling.
“I’ve tentatively agreed to adapt that book for a publisher who as yet must remain nameless.”
“Excellent!” I cry, and then the next book in the stack catches my attention. “But Sex and Rockets?” I say, holding up the luridly jacketed hardcover. “Surely this is a bit lowbrow?”
“Not at all,” he says. “Work-product. It is the definitive biography of John Parsons, who made a brief appearance in the most recent issue of Alan Moore’s Promethea. I’m curious as to Parsons’ continued cachet as a black magician of some note when it’s quite clear from his own writings he wasn’t a terribly good one. A point I intend to make in my mostly favorable survey of the occultic history underlying that marvelous comic book—in an upcoming edition of my column, which is, I think, why you came to see me today?”
Indeed. Playtime is over. I pull out my notebook to begin the formal interview as he lifts his spoon from the coffee cup—it’s a delicate green cup, fragmented with delicate black lines, as if sketching an incipient fracture; Lieber will, in a moment, explain that it is a priceless example of the Japanese soma-yaki style. But at this moment he lifts the cup to his lips and sips. “Ah,” he says, smiling. “Just right.”
—But! Honesty compells me to admit that I have taken some few liberties with the truth. The “Wronski,” after all, is a quidditch maneuver, and those who know me will recognize that I loaned Mr. Lieber my own prized leopard-skin fez. As for the rest of it: oh, heck. Go read his damn column yourself and find out. It’s a hoot and a half, and if he isn’t really tackling obscure rocket-scientist magicians and surrealist erotomanic picaresques, well, he is writing about comics about bees and about non-linear road trip poetry and about skin-mites that live on Charles Darwin’s head, so I wasn’t too far off. Was I?
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