On HU
Featured Archive Post: Bill Randall on YKK and Japanese reactionary politics.
Me on grief and Marley’s Dokebi Bride.
Darryl Ayo on rereading comics.
Ng Suat Tong on the low price of original art from Frank King’s Gasoline Alley.
Darryl Ayo on how Michael DeForge destroys his sketches.
Chris K on loving Kirby because of his flaws.
Kinukitty on 50 Shades of Grey and porn for your kindle.
Me on why comics have no value.
Robert Stanley Martin on Made in the USA and everything bad about Godard.
Me on Dara Birnbaum and Wonder Woman’s capitulation to capitalism.
And a downloadable mix of black metal, plus Donovan.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At the Chicago Reader I talk about how anti-slavery ideology fed imperialism.
At Splice I argue that there’s probably nothing especially damning in Romney’s tax returns, which is all the more reason to distrust him.
At Splice why Romney’s incompetent campaign makes me nervous.
At Splice I explain that no one likes Paul Ryan, but it’s not his fault.
At Splice I explain that Obama’s an arrogant asshole just like all other Presidential candidates.
Other Links
Craig Fischer on Kamandi.
James Romberger interviews Gabrielle Bell.
Jacob Canfield on putting together a college comics magazine.
Daniel Larison on why the GOP has no one to turn to with foreign policy experience.
Erica Friedman’s Okazu is 10 years old — a couple centuries in Internet years!
What I’ve Been Reading
Thought I’d add a section on what I read this last week, and encourage other folks to say what they’ve been reading in comments. If people like it, I’ll keep it; if nobody cares, I’ll drop it, but we’ll try it for a couple weeks anyway.
So; what I’ve been reading this week. I’m rereading Ai Yazawa’s Nana. I’m in the middle of Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Equality. I read for review Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen’s new book Darkest Africa: Black Minstrelsy From Slavery to Hip Hop. And Poked around in Lilli Carrés Nine Ways to Disappear.
I’m in the midst of reading two books, one for fun one for not. The fun one is John jeremiah Sullivan’s book of essays “Pulphead.” Sullivan is a totally badass writer, I’d kill a small puppy to be able to churn out sentences as good as his. In particular, his pieces on Michael Jackson and going to a week-long christian rock festival are wonderful. I will say that I’m not *as a collection* the book entirely works. I feel like I get what he’s doing and I really admire it, but I’m starting to feel a bit disengaged with each new piece I read in it. They’re all on different subject matter and he has interesting things to say, but instead of fitting together into a cohesive book, it feels a bit like the same thing over and over again. So I think the right way to approach it is to read an essay or two in between other books.
The other book I’m reading is Evan S. Connell’s “Son of The Morning Star” which is a one-volume history (exegesis, really) of Custer’s Last Stand. I’m reading this one for my own book, to look at how Connell (who is probably most famous for his wonderful novel Mrs. Bridge) fits these different conflicting points of view together. because, of course, no survivors of Little Big Horn are alive today, and there is no definitive truth that we can know about what happens. So watching how he plays with these conflicts, how he places different reports and points of view alongside each other, that’s what i’m going for. The book is also a big influence on Tim O’Brien’s “in The Lake of The Woods” which is one of my favorite novels.
It is also… very very dry. It’s not a book I can read for pleasure. It’s a book where I can read 20-30 page chunks in a day, if I’m lucky.
Right now I`m reading The Guilty Are Afraid by James Hadley Chase, because similar to that book, temperature here is above 30°.
Also rereading Bettgeschichten (Bed Stories) and Arthur Schnitzler´s Reigen (La Ronde)for reviewing purposes. Bettgeschichten is an anthology featuring erotic and pornographic comic short stories by independent artists of german language or heritage like Nicolas Mahler (Angelman), Reinhard Kleist (Cash – I see a darkness)or Steffi Schütze and Christian Nauck, who did two of those Avengers Art Appreciation Covers for Marvel recently: http://www.comicheronews.com/sneak-peek-avengers-art-appreciation-variants/
Like in La Ronde, Bettgeschichten´s providing a constant (artistical) change on one unchangeable subject (which is of erotic nature). I´m not so sure if it´s also a swan song to modernity like La Ronde, but right now my main concern is the increasing heat from different sources.
To cool down (thematically) I´m reading bad translated German reprints of DC´s old Young Love comics from the 1960s and 1970s as well as some newer stuff by the same publisher, like Jeff Lemire´s Animal Man. Oh, and there´s another big american publishing house of course, Image. They release Prophet by Brandon Graham, and I read it because it reminds me of some of the Heavy Metal artists I grew up with, like Philippe Druillet, Moebius and Vaughn Bodé.
Non-fiction: been slowly making my way through A History of Chinese Civilization by Jacques Gernet and more rapidly through A.N. Wilson’s recent The Elizabethans.
Fiction: I finished One Lonely Night by Mickey Spillane, probably the worst thing that I’ve read since The Mysteries of Udolpho a few years back. Last night I made it 2/3 through Wallace Shawn’s last play, Grasses of a Thousand Colors. I’ve also been reading Little Women and re-reading Homage to Catalonia at a rate of a couple chapters a week.
My wife and I have been taking turns reading out loud to each other. This week we finished Valley of the Dolls and started Cabal.
I skimmed and took out of the library two books on Shakespeare by Rosalie Colie but I’ve got a little too much going on right now to really dig in yet.
Thursday after work I spent a few hours at the art library looking at various odds and ends. The french edition of Hokusai’s 100 views and my favorite works of Luo Ping, ‘Insects, Birds and Beasts’ and ‘Ghost Amusement.’ “Collage novels” by Max Ernst.
rereading, alas: Blake et Mortimer … Carpentier’s Lost Steps …
Feeling virtuous for finishing three vols. of feminist theory this week (teaching a seminar in a couple of days)–though I started one of them several weeks ago. Mary Daly’s Gyn/ecology, Luce Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One, and bell hooks’ Ain’t I A Woman. All pretty good…Daly, in particular, is so angry and radical that it makes me hate myself for being a man. Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s Woman, Native, Other–through which I am about one half—is more academicky and jargony and boring—despite her critique of all those things. Also read Gilbert Hernandez’s all-ages Adventures of Venus, which has some great moments (and some really weird ones)…. I also read one Grace Paley short story, “Samuel”–yesterday. My last minute attempt to read all of the theory I assigned before the semester starts is sadly going to fail…unless I finish Trinh and read three more full-length tomes by Monday. Not going to happen—
I just passed page 400 on an 800 page biography of Richard Brautigan called “Jubilee Hitchhiker”. It’s kind of an exhausting read as the author often gets sidetracked or bogged down in detail, I end up having to skim parts.
I’m also halfway through a reread of volume 1 of Kazuo Kamimura’s Dousei Jidai (in the French translation as Lorsque Nous Vivions Ensemble), which I started rereading for an essay I’m writing on Hayashi’s Red Colored Elegy (the two contrast nicely).
And I’m probably a third of the way through Daniel Levin Becker’s Many Subtle Channels, which is about the (mostly) French writing group, the Oulipo, one of my ongoing reading interests.
Also, about halfway through a reread of Bart Beaty’s Comics Versus Art, which I recommend highly.
How’s Nana holding up on reread?
I should try Mary Daly again maybe…I tried at one point and found it pretty unconvincing/uninteresting, but maybe I read the wrong thing….
Oh…and Nana’s still great!
(re)read Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga (still funny) and a random volume of Little Lulu (ditto); read Like A Sniper Lining Up His Shot (I like Tardi, but I don’t quite get the adulation?) and China Mieville’s Un Lun Dun, which was fantastic. Really inventive, a lot of fun, and also basically one long “fuck you” to Harry Potter and every other shitty kid’s fantasy book; the only way it could have been more overt about it is if that had been the title, Fuck You, Harry Potter. We need more Marxist fantasy. Working my way through Little Orphan Annie vol 7 (I’ve become obsessed with this strip) and Li’l Abner vol. 3 (Capp drew eyebrows like nobody’s business) and, uh, super-guilty pleasure Showcase Presents All-Star Squadron (Roy Thomas…I’m not proud of myself).
In conclusion, I’m not nearly as classy as everyone else.
No reading for me, I’m in crunch time on my dissertation. Multilevel model is looking pretty good! Playing with numbers is fun, I enjoy it, but I don’t think it’s right that I still have to write as many words as the folks who are just playing with words to begin with.
Obama’s an arrogant asshole, but I like it when he’s on the nose:
“The views expressed were offensive. Rape is rape. … What I think these comments do underscore is why we shouldn’t have a bunch of politicians—a majority of whom are men—making health care decisions on behalf of women.”
— President Obama today on Rep. Todd Akin
Yeah, man!
Totally agree with your Obama article by the way! Have long suspected this about Clinton (the ex-president one, not the current Secretary of State) and that this is where the Right’s irrational dislike/fear comes from. It’s not that you have or want the power, it’s what you do with it once it’s yours and who you surround yourself with can stop you if it’s not a good idea. (The thing Clinton did that was super-egregious was taking all the breaks off the US/world economy, also bombing the Yugo plant in Yugoslavia.)
I’ve been reading “Cloud Atlas,” by David Mitchell.
Comics-wise, I’m reading “Finder” by Carla Speed McNeil.
“The thing Clinton did that was super-egregious was taking all the breaks off the US/world economy, also bombing the Yugo plant in Yugoslavia.”
Yep. The whole Serbian/Kosovo intervention was kind of a nightmare, as far as I can tell.
I have not reread anything this week…ironically.
I’m still staring at that swaying tower of loaned graphic novels. If I climbed to the top of it, I’d get dizzy @_@
The most interesting thing for me to read was Jesse Jacobs’ “By This Shall You Know Him,” which is a gorgeous visual journey, made of cubes and rough-hewn textures. I read an X-Men comic about Rogue and stared at it really hard. The only non-comics I’ve read (technically) is this Comics Journal #300, one of those all cartoonist-on-cartoonist interviews. That’s a really good one because despite some excessive back-patting and mutual flattery, the discussions were informed and provocative.
Speaking of Comics Journal #300, that’s when they reviewed Asterios Polyp. I know some of you hated that. I really enjoyed it, personally. I am not sold on the book’s detractors but I confess that the rather breathless review kind of provoked me to determine that I should reread that book.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Thought I’d add a section on what I read this last week, and encourage other folks to say what they’ve been reading in comments. If people like it, I’ll keep it; if nobody cares, I’ll drop it, but we’ll try it for a couple weeks anyway.
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I like it, and hope it stays! (For what that’s worth.) Gives people a chance to write informal micro-reviews; gives more of an insight into others here.
Alas, no comics in my batch; a 60% drop in income over almost the last three years slashed my comics budget to near-zilch. I think the only titles in my “pull list” are “Love and Rockets” and Joe Hill/Gabriel Rodriguez’s “Locke and Key.”
Been hitting the library pretty regularly. Just finished Len Deighton’s “Bomber” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_%28novel%29 ). Having read several of his fine Bernard Samson spy novels (and working my way through another at present), I thought I’d check “Bomber” out when I spotted its spine amongst the other of his books on the shelf.
My curiosity was further piqued because I’d read a “thumbs down” review of the book by Kurt Vonnegut in a newsweekly when it came out. (Seeing the book’s copyright date, I saw that was, yikes! Over forty years ago! Truly, “time flies whether you’re having fun or not…”
All I recalled of the critique was Vonnegut quoting a scene where a hapless RAF crewmember, thrown from his plane sans parachute, encounters terra firma. And Vonnegut complaining about the scene’s mechanistic depiction of death, “the prose clanks and clunks like that.” Reading the book, I grew irritated about how Vonnegut had utterly missed Deighton’s point: that though the extraordinarily researched book humanizes its huge spread of protagonists (on both sides of the conflict), when death comes along, its destruction is a brutally physical process. The ravaging an artillery shell wreaks upon the machinery of a Lancaster bomber is described in a similar fashion to what it does to flesh. It’s a grotesque, harshly unsentimental view; no Gypsy violins playing here!
But, I thought I’d see if mighty Google could turn up “kurt vonnegut review of len deighton bomber,” and it did! Not in “Time” or “Newsweek,” but in “Life”; and sonuvagun, after voicing the complaint I recalled awfully well through the decades, it turns out Vonnegut did “get it”:
“Then I caught on to what Deighton was telling me obliquely…” (See the critique at http://tinyurl.com/8m334gh )