News
On Monday, Richard Cook and I are going to liveblog the final Presidential debate. Can comics critics be as ignorant and irritating as political pundits? Direct your browsers this-a-way on Monday October 22, at 9 PM Eastern and find out for yourself.
On HU
Featured Archive Post: Caroline Small on the prose of Eddie Campbell’s Pants.
Nicolas Labarre with a comics summary of horror film Redneck Zombies.
Me criticizing Ben Schwartz’s Best American Comics Criticism.
Rory D. on the ultraviolence of Go Nagai’s Devilman.
Oliver Ristau on Blexbolex’s No Man’s Land.
Me on Geoff Johns’ godawful Teen Titans.
Richard Cook expresses skepticism about David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.
Russ Maheras on Steve Ditko and the greatest Spider-Man arc ever.
Me with a look at Fantagraphics early Ditko anthology.
My incredibly talented eight-year-old gives you pictures of dragons behaving like cats.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At the Atlantic, I talk about Brandy’s new album and the sad fate of the pop star auteur.
At Splice I talk about America’s terror that their kids might learn something at school.
Also at Splice I argue that America needs fewer political visionaries.
Other Links
Ben Saunders on the Peanuts exhibit at the University of Oregon.
Salon on the deceptive biography of an education reformer.
The Atlantic on Violentacrez and trolls; also a great comment from that Atlantic article about mainstreaming sexism and other matters. Millicent Somer on Violentacrez’s ruined life and gendered privacy and identity; Zeynap on Violentacrez and (related) Salon on Anonymous tracking down Amanda Todd’s harasser.
This Week’s Reading
Read the Geoff Johns Teen Titans volume I reviewed this week, Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, and started Henry James’ The Golden Bowl.
Read Womanthology: Space #1. Featured some nice art but suffered from weak plotting. First half of Vertigo’s Mystery in Space #1 has somehow similar problems and Dial H (#4 & #0) by China Miéville doesn’t know where it’s heading or it hasn’t any direction at all. Overall I guess I’m in a SF mode.
I read a Henry James story for the first time ever recently and I cant stand his style, it certainly doesnt help with my ocd reading problem. I doubt I’ll give him another chance for many years.
I love the style, but it’s obviously not for everyone. It’s kind of a fog of archness….
It obviously takes a lot of skill to write like he does, but as I’m someone who is crippled by obsessions, it seems all the more annoying. I really have the same problem with him as Stephen King and people who compulsively tweet and facebook everything they think or do, or myself for overthinking things or being too precious about certain things. James can do beautifully nuanced and precise descriptions but there is also a barrage of stuff I think he should have gotten rid of. The more books and films I consume and am bored by, the more I realize it is better to ruthlessly edit things down. Life is too short to endlessly consider everything that comes into your head.
Time was different in Henry James’ era.
That is true and I had thought about that quite a bit, that his likely readership would have had less stuff competing for their attentions. But I also know that Stevenson and some others had something against his approach.
I usually find Henry James to be a struggle…. Since I last did this, I finished the Rushdie memoir (good…if a trifle on the name-droppy side), Building Stories, The Last Policeman (by Berlatsky cousin Ben Winters—it’s a plug!), and an assortment of short stories (“The Dead” by Joyce, “The Hunger Artist” and “Metamorphosis” by Kafka, maybe a couple more).
On Brandy… Very few big ’90’s artist maintain any sort of sales or critical cred, do they? Mariah Carey can still shift units…Mary J. Blige still has some degree of popularity/credibility, I guess… Green Day still has a following…maybe Gwen Stefani/No Doubt (though, I think that’s mostly over). Other than that? ’90’s getting to be a long time ago for pop music.
You Berlatskys will own the world soon! Mark my words!
I just started KJ Bishop’s The Etched City. Mainly i’ve been playing videogames this week. I still can’t get over the fact that the speciality of the love interest in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time – the thing she does that the main character can’t do – is *being thin enough to squeeze through small cracks*. Arrrrrgh.
The Guardian recently ran an article on British girls’ comics, have you seen it?
“The truth is that contemporary R&B doesn’t have any mechanism whereby radio divas can leverage critical cred to turn themselves into indie darlings”
Erykah Badu
Did you like “Footnotes in Gaza?” Probably not, I bet. Too bad.
I linked to this post I made of Ron Embleton girls comics a few weeks ago but here it is again…http://idemandreprints.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/ron-embleton.html
…I’d kill for a full reprint collection of these, they are extremely hard to find.
The thing with British comics is that I think they reflect the country more unpleasantly than any comics from any place reflect themselves (that I’ve seen so far) and I dont think its just because I’m british. I always found that in even american/european influenced stuff like 2000AD. But the girls comics I bought had a lot of the terrible stuff you see in todays gossip/celebrity/royalty/fashion magazines, but with way more repression.
British people often lament Americanization but I think it has been for the better in some ways. I once watched a documentary about britain in 40-70s, and even as a 80s/90s kid I recall the tail end of a lot of the greyest, most dull aspects of british culture that makes even some of the most nauseating american things seem preferable.
When I see bratty obnoxious kids with their Nu-metal/emo clothes, I feel grateful that I dont have to see the sickening sight of boys with perfectly combed hair in grey shorts glueing together miniature military vehicle models and saying “crikey”, with his pipe smoking mustached dad slapping him on the back of his head. PUUUUUUUUKE!
But I guess there are lots of amazing things about old british culture too.
I have KJ Bishop’s Etched City sitting in my book pile.
Steven, Erykah Badu is neo-soul. Significantly different…and the difference is basically that neo-soul has credibility.
And I’m hoping to write about Footnotes in Gaza sometime soon, so I’ll save my comments for then.
Robert, suggesting that Henry James should have edited himself and gotten more directly to the point seems kind of bizarre. The point in Henry James is the fog; it’s the nuances of nuances, and their endless investigation, that he’s interested in/obsessed with. It’s totally reasonable not to have any interest in that yourself, or even to feel like it’s an aesthetic flaw. But it’s a flaw he very much chose deliberately. More than many authors (certainly more than Steven King), James is his style. To say he should have written more tersely is basically to say he shouldn’t have written at all. (Which, again, there’s nothing wrong with holding that opinion.)
Do you not think his stories would have stood up without it?
I don’t really know what the point would have been without his style. He doesn’t generally write page turners. I mean, the Golden Bowl, the book I”m reading, is basically nothing but characters analyzing their own analysis of each other’s motives for 500 pages. If you impose Hemingwayesque taciturnity, there wouldn’t be anything left.
I heard a writer say recently that he had been reading it for 10 years to enjoy it better that way.
My wife and I were laughing this week at commercials for one of the variants of CSI that touted a new Green Day song (or songs?) being played during the episode, presumably in the background of the show. That’s not something anybody expected back in 1995.