I have good books.

Gary Panter - Untitled (?)

2011-07-05T12:07:00.009-04:00

On Saturday I happened to be passing by one of my new favorite stores, Desert Island Comics, and decided to stop in on a whim. I left with a stack of books, including this collection of Gary Panter prints. I'm not quite sure what the deal is with this publication, as there's no information printed anywhere on it. I thought maybe it was called "The Waters Leading to Hell", but I think that's actually the title of the painting on the cover, rather than the book. But it's over-sized (about 11.5 x 15), staple-bound, printed on heavy paper, and looks awesome!

As a bonus, I was invited to choose from a box of "weird, 80s music trading cards" and managed to score this one of Harley Flanagan from the Cro-Mags. Pretty awesome (and yes, weird).

The Fires by Joe Flood

2011-06-01T09:00:00.002-04:00

At this point I've read a lot of books about the history of New York City, so much of the content of this book was nothing new to me (in fact, I recognized a lot of the material cited from Robert Caro's The Power Broker and Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities). However, its main thesis was rather unique--that the majority of the fires ravaging parts of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan in the '70s were caused by a flawed computer model, and not greedy landlords hoping to collect insurance money. In the '60s Mayor Lindsay teamed up with the RAND corporation, a think tank established to provide research and analysis to the U.S. army, to develop a way to govern the city more efficiently and statistically, starting with the fire department. But their methods were deeply flawed, resulting in severely reduced service in the neighborhoods that needed it desperately and new stations opening in sleepy suburban areas that really didn't need them at all. Added to that were lax building codes--it seems like most of the serious fires detailed in the book were made far worse because of illegal constructions the FDNY was unaware of--and firefighters' lack of proper training on how to approach a truss-style building.

The Fires doesn't really succeed much in painting a vivid picture of what conditions were like in the fire-ravaged neighborhoods. But maybe that's not really the point of the book. I'd never heard of the RAND corporation before, and found those aspects of the book to be pretty interesting.

2666 by Roberto Bolano

2011-05-31T09:00:00.000-04:00

My god has it been a long time since I've posted anything. No excuses, really, other than laziness--but I'm coming back with something good.

Robert Bolano's 2666 is a 900 page novel that was published posthumously as a boxed set of three paperbacks (as well as another edition in one volume). Such a beautiful package--I love the brown paper slipcase, the red lettering, and the design of each of the individual books inside.

Each of the covers wraps around from left to right to create one large image.

As for the content of the book, it's actually divided into five parts, each one loosely connected to the next, from a group of critics in search of a reclusive German author, to an untold number of serial murders in Mexico, to the Eastern front of World War II, and back again. I love a good literary mystery, and while it didn't follow that storyline for the entire book, I nonetheless enjoyed it. I didn't read it all at once, taking breaks between some of the sections, so that by the time I got to the end of part four I'd nearly forgotten how it started, but it didn't bother me. It may be sprawling, and at times feels a little aimless, but by the end the many plotlines come together.

I wish all long books were published in parts, as a 300 page paperback is much easier to cart around on the subway than a 900 page one.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

2011-04-04T22:18:00.000-04:00

Here's one I should definitely re-read. In Cold Blood is widely considered to be the first non-fiction novel, the story of a 1959 murder of an entire family in rural Kansas and its aftermath. Some have challenged the authenticity of the story, accusing Capote of changing some of the details to suit the book that he wanted to write. Whatever the true story might be, it doesn't change the masterfully chilling and elegant writing. I bought this copy without a cover at a used bookstore in Nashville, not sure which one, shown here with the spine. I wish I'd found one with a dust jacket.

Expelled from Eden by William T. Vollmann

2011-03-14T09:00:00.000-04:00

My first introduction to William T. Vollmann came in an interview in BookForum about five or six years ago. I was intrigued, and decided to start with the then recently published Expelled from Eden, which collects excerpts from all of his novels, as well as essays, journalism, interviews, and letters, providing a window into Vollmann's voice, style, and breadth of work. I'm not sure I read the whole thing (certainly not straight through), rather leafing through it, reading bits of it here and there. Since then I've endured a number of his books (I think endured is the right word--while beautifully written, the subject matter is often bleak and horrific) and intend to read more. Eventually. I haven't worked up the nerve to tackle Imperial yet (1,200 pages about the California county right on the Mexican border) but I'll get there.

Type and Typography by Ben Rosen

2011-03-09T09:00:00.001-05:00

I bought this typography book at an estate sale a couple of years ago. (Please excuse the slightly blurry and unappealing photo.) The books were so cheap that I just kept adding more to my pile (I walked out of there with more stuff than I could carry and it all came to about $8). A 1960s typography book? Why not? I'm not a graphic designer but I do have an appreciation of type and letters in general, and lately find myself paying more attention to the typefaces that I use and what they communicate.

A closer look at the logo on the front, which I love. Although I must say, I love the front of the paperback edition even more.

Most of the typefaces showcased in the book are pretty basic--this book was published nearly 50 years ago after all--though still widely used today. (By the way...I just noticed that the letter R appears twice in the above example. Anyone have any idea why?)

There's also something I find visually appealing about looking at all of these alphabets, especially when some of the letters are blown up to be very large.

There are also a few pages illustrating how type can be used in advertising and other commercial work, and that's where it gets a little more exciting.

The Lime Twig by John Hawkes

2011-03-07T09:00:00.002-05:00

The Lime Twig is a surreal, avant-garde novel melded with pulp crime fiction. (Many a review describes it as something like Dick Francis meets David Lynch.) The basic story—a race horse heist gone horribly wrong—is told in nightmarish, impressionistic sequences. The cover of the book, featuring a grainy, blurry mess of images that only come into focus when you really concentrate, is a pretty apt translation of my experience of the book.

I can't remember how exactly I first came across John Hawkes—in some chain of online links—but only a couple weeks later I found a copy of The Lime Twig in a used bookstore and excitedly picked it up, thinking it a nice coincidence. As I was paying for the books, the store owner stopped at The Lime Twig and got a funny smile on her face as she explained that John Hawkes had been her college writing teacher (which explains why the book was prominently displayed on the wall). I'm not really sure of the point of that story but it's what I remember most about the book when I see it.

The Friend of Madame Maigret by Georges Simenon

2011-03-02T09:00:00.000-05:00

Georges Simenon might be one my most read authors, maybe because he wrote so many books--around 200--and because they're so incredibly readable (and short). I picked this one up on a shelf at work not long after reading an article about him in BookForum, so it was a nicely timed find. One of 75 novels starring the fictional police detective Inspector Maigret, this one was written in 1949, about midway into Simenon's writing career. In an increasingly complex investigation, Maigret attempts to prove that a murder has been committed, even though no body has been discovered.

Revisiting this one makes me want to crack open another Maigret novel. I've got at least a few more unread ones on the shelf.

Kramers Ergot #5

2011-03-01T09:00:00.000-05:00

Kramers Ergot began as a self-published mini-comic and has grown into a full-sized, extensive comics anthology, and is only getting thicker and more extravagant with each new installment. The fifth issue includes work from twenty contributors, including Gary Panter, Marc Bell, Chris Ware, Ron Rege Jr, Tom Gauld, and Kevin Huizenga, among others. It's a pretty amazing collection.

I love how colorful this one is, particularly the spine.

The back.

Screw-Jack by Hunter S. Thompson

2011-02-28T09:00:00.001-05:00

Originally published in 1991 as a private printing of 300 collectors' copies and 26 leather-bound presentation copies, Screw-Jack was published for the general public in 2000. It's a short little book, consisting of three short stories, including a stream-of-consciousness chronicle of Thompson's first mescaline experience in 1969 and a demented love story ostensibly written by Thompson's alter ego Raoul Duke. It might not be Fear and Loathing good, but it's pretty good nonetheless. I love the cover, with the giant letters reminiscent of antique wood type.

Novels in Three Lines by Felix Feneon

2011-02-22T09:00:00.002-05:00

This is a collection of short news items that appeared anonymously in the French newspaper Le Matin in the year 1906, mostly about criminal activity and other strange occurrences. The anonymous writer proved to be Felix Feneon, a Parisian anarchist and art critic who, though he could have risen to greatness (he was the first French publisher of James Joyce and early promoter of Georges Seurat and the "Neo-impressionists," a term which he coined), preferred to preserve his anonymity, toiling away as an obscure clerk in the French War Department.

The book's introduction is written by Luc Sante, which, admittedly, is what first drew me to this book when I saw it on display in a store. Sante writes, "Feneon's three-line news items...are the poems and novel he never otherwise wrote...They demonstrate in miniature his epigrammatic flair, his exquisite timing, his pinpoint precision of language, his exceedingly dry humor." A few examples:

"Nurse Elise Bachmann, whose day off was yesterday, put on a public display of insanity."

A few articles down, the following appears: "A certain madwoman arrested downtown falsely claimed to be nurse Elise Bachmann. The latter is perfectly sane."

The bluntness employed here is almost comical: "'If my candidate loses, I will kill myself,' M. Belavoinne, of Fresquienne, Seine-Inferieure, had declared. He killed himself."

I love all the details that Feneon bothers to mention in the short amount of available space: "Weighed down with bronzes, with china, with linens, and with tapestries, two burglars were arrested, at night, in Bry-sur-Marne."

"With a four-tined pitchfork, farmhand David, of Courtemaux, Loiret, killed his wife, whom he, erroneously, thought unfaithful." So much is communicated in just one word, "erroneously"--it really changes the meaning of the statement.

Some of them really feel like poetry: "The schoolchildren of Niort were being crowned. The chandelier fell, and the laurels among them were spotted with a little blood." Who else would have described it in such a way?

There are so many more great ones. It is, however, not the type of book that you should read from cover to cover, in long sittings. After awhile they start to blur together, and the subtlety and artfulness begins to be lost as you quickly skim through them. Better to savor and ingest it a little at a time.

Candy by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg

2011-02-16T09:00:00.006-05:00

While perhaps best known for writing screenplays (Dr. Strangelove, Easy Rider, Casino Royale, etc), Terry Southern wrote several novels and essays. In the 50s he hung around in New York with the likes of Robert Frank, Larry Rivers, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and so on. During that time he wrote a short story "about a girl in Greenwich Village who got involved with a hunchback because she was such a good Samaritan" (that particular description of it comes from this interview). Several people, including the poet Mason Hoffenberg, felt this girl should have more adventures, and the two began writing alternating chapters that grew into the novel Candy.

Candy is loosely based on Voltaire's Candide, written as a kind of spoof on the dirty books being published at the time. Candy Christian is a buxom teenager who more or less spends the novel being raped by various people, including her uncle, although it somehow manages to be funny and zany in a dated 1960s sort of way. I was introduced to a number of ridiculous words for "vagina" that I'd never heard before, including "honeypot" and "lamb pit." And yet, I think I liked the book--it really is pretty funny. One of my favorite lines:

"'Uh-huh,' said the cynical cop. 'Dr. Caligari, I suppose.'
Candy didn't like this kind of flippant reference to an art film."

Inferno (A Poet's Novel) by Eileen Myles

2011-02-15T09:00:00.000-05:00

Reading a novel by Eileen Myles is always a bit of a confusing experience for me, as she tends to write them from the perspective of a character named Eileen Myles, who, much like the author Eileen Myles, grew up in Boston, moved to New York in the '70s, and became a lesbian poet. So it's a novel--which, by definition, is fictional--in which the main character is the author. Or maybe not.

In a video on her website, she says, "The first fiction is your name, I think that's why I use it in my books all the time...I prefer to use my own name because in a way, there's nothing falser than 'Eileen Myles.' And like everyone else, I really don't know who I am." Which really gets you started thinking about your own name, and how it's sort of an arbitrary couple of words that someone else chose for you, yet really comes to define who you are. But anyway...

I like BookForum's review of the book, as it really sums it up pretty well, so I'm going to post some of that here:

"Loosely, Inferno tells the story of Myles, who left Arlington, Massachusetts, where everyone "lived in a roughly catholic world," to make her way as a writer in New York City. As the title suggests, the book owes something to Dante's Divine Comedy. Instead of a dark wood, though, we start out in a college lit class learning Pirandello from a woman with a beautiful ass, "perfect and full," and from there the tour—gossipy, funny, crass, earnest—continues.

Hell is scraping to pay the rent, working as a bouncer at a bar up by Columbia where you can still feel the aura of '68. It's being trained to give handjobs at a massage parlor. It's "inspecting lesbians because I was pretty sure I was going to be one. But I wanted to be a poet first." Purgatory is taking speed and working for James Schuyler. (See Myles's 1994 Chelsea Girls for more on both.) It's Deleuze's Masochism, grant applications, and a dog named Rosie. It's when "I didn't look like a woman or a man and didn't live here or anywhere." A clash with Amiri Baraka. A crush on Nan Goldin. St. Mark's Poetry Project. Touring Germany with Sylvère Lotringer and other Semiotext(e) writers, getting upstaged by Kathy Acker, peeing on Goethe's lawn.

Heaven, though, is Alice Notley and Ted Berrigan's kitchen. It's roaming the city with flyers for poetry readings. It's sex in a tent in a loft. René Ricard buzzing your apartment in the middle of the day...The prose often goes loose and raggedy, yet it always stays in focus. It's a novel in the way Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights and Renata Adler's Speedboat are—that is to say, on its own terms."

A novel on its own terms. I think that's a pretty good way of characterizing what I was getting at at the beginning of this post.

Also, I feel the need to mention that you can actually choose between two different covers for this book. It's an interesting idea--and I'm glad that I got to choose this one, as I really did not care for the other one--but at the same time, I kind of think a book should have one cover. Or, since publishers are always repackaging books, at least one cover at a time. (Actually, I guess I should say one American cover at a time, as almost always the international editions of a book will be published with different covers.) A book cover is so visually defining, and I like the idea of the cover art being really iconic and in a way contributing to the book's identity. Which I guess must be a scary thought for the writer.

To Be Young, Gifted and Black by Lorraine Hansberry

2011-02-14T09:00:00.002-05:00

I actually just finished reading this for work (I'm officially on Facebook now but strictly as part of my job) and it was pretty great. When I first picked it up, I thought it was going to be more of a memoir. But rather, it is comprised of passages from Hansberry's plays, interviews, letters, etc, so that the structure is a bit less conventional. Which I think works in its favor. I underlined quite a few passages:

"I can be all filled up that day with three hundred years of rage so that my eyes are flashing and my flesh is trembling--and the white boys in the streets, they look at me and think of sex. They look at me and that's all they think. Baby, you could be Jesus in drag--but if you're brown they're sure you're selling!"

"Do I remain a revolutionary? Intellectually--without a doubt. But am I prepared to give my body to the struggle or even my comforts?...I think when I get my health back I shall go into the South to find out what kind of revolutionary I am." (Sadly, she did not get her health back, and died of cancer at the age of 34.)

There are a number of photographs, documents,

illustrations, newspaper clippings, and more dispersed throughout the book.

The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman

2011-02-08T09:00:00.001-05:00

Maus might be one of the most well known modern graphic novels. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize, widely studied in schools, and generally lauded in not only the graphic novel world but in the world of literature in general, it is the subject of both praise and controversy. This edition collects both Maus and Maus II in one volume.

Maus tells the story of Art Spiegelman's parents' life under Nazi occupation, as told to him through interviews with his father. The book alternates between modern-day Rego Park, Queens, depicting Art's interactions with his elderly father, and the elder Spiegelmans' life (or lack thereof) in the Warsaw ghetto, and later in the concentration camps.

What is perhaps one of the most famous and iconic aspects of the book is that the characters are drawn as animals--the Jews as mice, the Nazis as cats, the Poles as pigs, and the Americans as dogs. I've read some criticisms of his characterizing Poles as pigs, but it doesn't really bother me. Spiegelman certainly doesn't believe that Jews are really vermin--it's more the symbolism, and the ability to distance oneself from the story by seeing them represented as animals, rather than people.

Flipping through the book I was struck by this panel, in which a fork in a road is drawn in the shape of a swastika.

There is one section of the book in which the characters are drawn as humans, a comic book within a comic book, called "Prisoner on the Hell Planet," the title of which brings to mind sci-fi comics from the 50s. It tells the story of Art's mother's inability to assimilate back into the world after surviving the concentration camps, leading up to her eventual suicide. It's a pretty chilling sequence, which reminds readers that the story isn't really about mice and cats but about the devastation of an entire population of human beings.

The Maus symbol on the book board underneath the dust jacket is rather striking.

The end papers, depicting rows upon rows of prisoners, whose eyes are still pretty haunting despite their being drawn as cartoon mice.

Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby Jr.

2011-02-02T09:00:00.000-05:00

Just finished watching the movie version of this book and I feel a little nauseous. I mean holy shit. This is a portrait of the depths of human misery, of a lonely old woman's addiction to diet pills, fueled by an obsession with being on television, and her junkie son, who's convinced that if he can acquire a "pound of pure," all his troubles will be over. It does not end well.

I got really into Hubert Selby, Jr.'s work during my freshman year of college--it may have started after I saw this movie the first time, actually. I'd also just started college in Brooklyn, the setting of all of these books, which might have piqued my interest as well. I read Last Exit to Brooklyn and Song of the Silent Snow, although I strangely have no actual recollection of reading Requiem for a Dream (though I know that I did). I wonder how it would hold up for me if I read it again now.

I recall that Selby's punctuation was unorthodox, though consistent, something that didn't exactly bother me though I didn't quite understand the point of it. He used forward slashes instead of apostrophes, eschewed quotation marks altogether, and often neglected to indent paragraphs, simply dropping them to the next line. Now that I look it up, it seems that he preferred forward slashes to apostrophes because they were just a little bit closer on his typewriter, which kind of paints a picture of someone furiously typing, trying to get out the story as fast as possible before it's gone. Which I kind of like.

Tooth and Claw by T. C. Boyle

2011-02-01T09:00:00.000-05:00

This is the very first book I found on a "take shelf" when I started working at Penguin and I remember it was so exciting to just be able to take a free book. I'd read the title story in The New Yorker, as well as one other short story ("The Hector Quesadilla Story," from the Paris Review anthology), but otherwise it was my first introduction to Boyle's work, which often incorporates elements of satire and magical realism. "Hector Quesadilla" stands out in my mind as the stronger and more memorable work, so I think I might have to try Boyle's 1985 short story collection, "Greasy Lake & Other Stories," in which that one appears.

Printing by Hand by Lena Corwin

2011-01-31T09:00:00.001-05:00

I've been wanting to delve more into textile printing lately, so I dug out this book that I've had sitting in my closet, more or less untouched, for about a year. I felt a little silly, as most of the techniques outlined seem so simple and easy that the fact that I haven't been using it points to pure laziness.

This spiral-bound book outlines various printmaking techniques, from stamping to stenciling to screenprinting, with basic descriptions of and suggestions for each method,

as well as specific projects employing each one.

The careful and clear step-by-step instructions also feature accompanying photographs.

I like the photos of all the various materials needed for each technique.

There's a little pouch in the back of the book containing all of Lena's designs, should readers wish to use them in their printing projects. While I like to come up with my own, it's a nice touch to include them--and a lot of the patterns are pretty nice. (My favorite is the one in the second image in this post.)

Now I just have to sit down and get to it.

Lithium for Medea by Kate Braverman

2011-01-26T09:00:00.000-05:00

Here's another author I was introduced to by a college teacher, through a few photocopied short stories distributed in a class. I decided to check out Braverman's first novel, a tale of addiction, unhappy relationships, and dysfunctional families in 1970s Los Angeles. At the time it was out of print (it's since been reissued), but I found this first edition copy online somewhere. The cover seems weirdly minimalist, though maybe that was the design trend at the time. (I do like the type treatment, but not the font of the author's name.)

A very young photo of the author on the back.

Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli

2011-01-25T09:00:00.000-05:00

Asterios Polyp, is a professor and architect (though none of his designs have actually been built). After his home is struck by lightning and burns down, he flees to become an auto mechanic in the middle of nowhere, both location and occupation seemingly arrived at randomly.

The book alternates between present and past, including scenes from his childhood and failed marriage, as well as more abstract and imaginary scenes, such as those narrated by his stillborn twin brother, Ignazio, and digressions on aesthetic philosophy.

The characters are associated with a particular drawing style, color scheme, and visual motifs. This page makes me think of Will Eisner, maybe because of all the rain.

Also, I have to say that the characters have some pretty fancy digs. Even Asterios's parents live in an amazing midcentury house with Saarinen chairs and whatnot.

This seems like the type of book that you need to read a few times to absorb all of the layers and depths of meaning. I'm only on read #1. I'll have to let you know when I manage to find time for read #2.

No Exit and Three Other Plays by Jean-Paul Sartre

2011-01-24T09:00:00.000-05:00

Of all the books I've read over the years by Sartre, I think "No Exit" is probably the one that I was most engaged by. It's probably his most accessible, and maybe I was intrigued by the "Hell is other people" aspect. Though apparently that line has been misunderstood for years. According to Sartre:

"'Hell is other people' has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because. . . when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves, . . . we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves. Into whatever I say about myself someone else’s judgment always enters. Into whatever I feel within myself someone else’s judgment enters. . . . But that does not at all mean that one cannot have relations with other people. It simply brings out the capital importance of all other people for each one of us."

First Stop in the New World by David Lida

2011-01-19T09:00:00.001-05:00

I've never been to Mexico, even though I lived about four hours from the border for several years. After reading this dissection of the culture, politics, and mindset of Mexico City, I'm interested in checking it out, though I'm pretty sure I don't want to live there.

The author, David Lida, did just that--an American journalist, he decided to do some sightseeing during a layover at the airport, fell in love with the city, and within a few years he had moved there permanently. That was in 1990; the book is written with 18 years of experience, from the unique perspective of one who is both an insider and an outsider--someone who deeply understands the place and its inhabitants, yet who is not really of them exactly. From the lively outdoor markets and cantinas to the wave of kidnappings by people posing as taxi drivers (this happened to Lida, though he got lucky) to extreme sexual harassment ("I have heard three separate stories of women whose backs were the recipients of the ejaculate of guys who masturbated while riding [the subway]") to the cult of Santa Muerte, Lida portrays a place that sounds completely insane, in both good ways and bad.

Maps: Fields, Paths, Forests, Blocks, Places, and Surrounds drawn by Nigel Peake

2011-01-18T09:00:00.001-05:00

I've been watching the work of illustrator Nigel Peake for a little while now--I've previously written on here about his Ghost Houses and one of his zines. This short collection of drawings is themed on maps, which I'm particularly interested in--though Peake's maps are not the typical kind.

From the book: "Documenting small time adventures and excursions outwith a mile radius from where I call home. From train rides facing backwards, to crammed bus rides in tiny hill-top towns, to bike rides through the backyards of Europe. Records of the vast, unyielding concrete miles of Shanghai, to the paths between mountains and forests in late night French countryside to the old paint splattered wooden floor in London that I sleep on from time to time. In addition to this there are also some imaginings of possible places - cities built from train tunnels and underground arches to invisible concrete cities."

I love the illustrations, the different interpretations of maps, the watercolor lettering, the colors.

"What makes Nigel's maps so beguiling is the delicate poise between politics and imagination. Each map, he says, is a 'fictional reality.'" (From an essay in the middle of the book)

Mystery Train by Greil Marcus

2011-01-17T17:34:00.000-05:00

Originally published in 1975, Mystery Train is Greil Marcus' first book, an examination of six bands and musicians, the overall thesis being that rock and roll provides a lens through which American culture can be interpreted. The subjects are divided into “ancestors”--a fairly unknown one-man band from the 30s and 40s named Harmonica Frank (Sun put out some of his records in the 50s), and legendary bluesman Robert Johnson--and “inheritors"--The Band, Sly & the Family Stone, Randy Newman, and Elvis Presley.

When I mentioned to Dave that I was reading it, he very decidedly asserted that "I hate him." Seems he was deeply offended by Marcus' book Lipstick Traces, which compares the Sex Pistols to Dadaists, and stated that Marcus draws uninformed comparisons and writes it off as brilliance, and generally is very pretentious.

Some of that might be true, and since I haven't read Lipstick Traces I can't say for certain. Mystery Train might be pretentious, but I enjoyed reading it--there's a bit of that comparison-drawing I just mentioned, but the writing is colorful and engaging, bestowing an almost mythical quality on the subjects. Sly Stone becomes a 70s-era Stagger Lee, and there's enough lore behind Robert Johnson's story before Marcus even gets to him. I might steer clear of Lipstick Traces, but this one's a keeper.

Grounded by Seth Stevenson

2011-01-13T09:00:00.000-05:00

Slate writer Seth Stevenson and his girlfriend spent several months traveling around the world without ever leaving the ground--crossing the Atlantic on a cargo freighter, driving through the Australian outback, traveling the Trans-Siberian Railway, bicycling in Vietnam, and so on. The concept of this book seemed really interesting, but I have to say I was pretty disappointed in the execution. Most of the book is spent describing the modes of transportation, which is certainly important to the story, but there's not a whole lot about the places they visited, namely because they never seemed to have enough time to actually see anything. They went out of their way to go to New Zealand, only to have about two hours to race around the city, mostly trying to find some clean clothes to buy. I guess it just goes to show you that air travel, while less romantic, is a bit more practical. At least that way you actually have time to see the place you're traveling to!

Of Walking in Ice by Werner Herzog

2011-01-12T13:35:00.001-05:00

In November 1974, film director Werner Herzog learned that a friend of his, Lotte Eisner, was on her deathbed. Eisner, a concentration camp survivor, was a legendary German film critic who had worked with Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinemateque Francaise. Herzog avowed that "This must not be, not at this time; German cinema could not do without her now." He somehow became convinced that if he walked from Munich to Paris—about 500 miles—to visit her, she would be saved.

And so he decided to make the three week trek through Europe on foot, in early winter, armed with a small rucksack, a compass, and a new pair of boots, stating that "I want to be alone with myself." Which just seems so quintessentially Herzog.

He documented his experiences in a diary, published a few years ago as Of Walking in Ice. I love how austere the packaging is—the plain white cover (perhaps emblematic of the snow and ice he traveled through), the matte finish cover, the small understated type.

As one might guess, the journey was extremely physically unpleasant. Herzog endured rain, ice, snow, and wind, suspicious farmers, and of course fatigue: "Hail and storm, almost knocking me off my feet with the first gust...Along with the storm and snow and rain, leaves are falling as well, sticking to me and covering me completely. Away from here, onward."

At one point his thoughts turn to Eisner—"How is she? Is she alive?...If I actually make it, no one will know what this journey means." But mostly they are dark, gloomy, and a little bit existential. "Unimaginable stellar catastrophes take place, entire worlds collapse into a single point. Light can no longer escape, even the profoundest blackness would seem like light and the silence would seem like thunder. The universe is filled with Nothing, it is the Yawning Black Void."

With only one side trip, to the birthplace of Joan of Arc, Herzog did make it to Munich to see Eisner. And she went on to live nine more years until her death at the age of 83.

Barry McGee

2011-01-11T09:00:00.000-05:00

This 90-paged full-color book (which doesn't seem to have a title) is a record of a 2004 Barry McGee installation at Brandeis University. McGee, a San Francisco-based painter and street artist who is associated with the Beautiful Losers scene, has been influenced by Mexican muralists, hobo graffiti, skaters and surfers, and it shows in his art.

The book reflects the various aspects of McGee's work--his graffiti and paintings, alongside snapshots of detritus, urban blight, and desolate street scenes.

I love this one on the right.

The photos and graffiti help set the tone, but the best part is the paintings, the weird, abstract faces,

juxtaposed with bold geometric patterns.

This is a gorgeous book, full of color and life.

Paris and Elsewhere by Richard Cobb

2011-01-10T09:00:00.000-05:00

I can't remember where I first read about this book--I was convinced it was in some essay or review by Luc Sante but now I can't find it (though it makes a lot of sense why I would think that). Richard Cobb was a British-born historian who, after a brief stint living in Paris just before college, became a devout Francophile. His interests lay in the history of people and places on the fringes of society--that of murderers, prostitutes, dives, flophouses, and the like. This collection of essays offers the reader a glimpse into a side of 1950s Paris unseen by most, providing a picturesque, richly detailed portrait of a bygone time and place.

This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff

2011-01-07T09:00:00.000-05:00

I was introduced to the work of Tobias Wolff by the movie adaptation of his memoir This Boy's Life, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Deniro. It describes the author's adolescence as he and his mother travel the country in search of a better life, fleeing one abusive husband for another one. I saw the movie by chance on TV when I was in high school so I'm not that sure if I would still be particularly moved by it today, but it inspired me to read the book, which inspired me to read the rest of his fiction. As I've said before in this blog, Wolff was a huge influence on my writing while I was in college. I haven't read anything of his in awhile but maybe it's time to pick up a short story again.

The Dwindling Party by Edward Gorey

2011-01-06T09:00:00.000-05:00

I gave this book to Dave for Christmas a few years ago. It tells the unfortunate tale of the MacFizzet family, who one by one disappear during a visit to Hickyacket Hall. The best part of the book, after the Edward Gorey illustrations, is the fact that it is a pop-up book, with monsters and structures practically leaping out of the pages. It's very sadly out of print, but hopefully this will be corrected soon!

Dear Andy Kaufman, I Hate Your Guts!

2011-01-05T09:00:00.003-05:00

In 1979, Andy Kaufman wrestled a woman on Saturday Night Live as part of his act. Proclaiming himself the "Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion of the World" and taking on a classic villain wrestler persona, he offered to shave his head and pay a $1,000 prize to any woman who could pin him (he later also said she could marry him).

This book collects some of the hundreds of letters sent to Kaufman by women who wanted to take him up on the challenge. Some seem to be in on the joke, others not so much. It's amazing to see the variety of correspondents, from young girls ("I can beat you easily...P.S. I'm only ten") to tough broads to sex kittens, as well as the range in tone, from polite ("If I'm chosen I'll do my very best") to lonely ("It'll probably be the closest I get to a man all year") to vitriolic ("I'll give you a tracheotomy with my bare hands!"). He also received a few letters from men ("I've seen bald women in porno mags and they're kind of kinky!").

I love Andy Kaufman, these letters are hilarious, and the whole book looks awesome. Great stuff all around.

All My Friends Are Dead by Avery Monsen and Jory John

2011-01-04T09:00:00.001-05:00

Dave gave this to me as a stocking stuffer for Christmas because it reminded him of the dinosaurs we visited about a month ago. It's a tiny little book, perfectly sized for the aforementioned purpose.

It takes about two minutes to read, but it is a two minute roller coaster ride of hilarity. (Sorry for the lame description.) The back of the book describes it as the "saddest funny book you'll ever read", which is pretty true. At every page I find myself laughing and "ohhh"ing at the same time. See below...

I like the dinosaur end papers.

The Road to Los Angeles by John Fante

2011-01-03T09:00:00.000-05:00

I was tipped off to John Fante by a teacher who said if I liked Bukowski I'd be into Fante, who was an influence on the former. That and the 1930s-'40s Los Angeles setting was enough to convince me to give him a try. The Road to Los Angeles was the first book of his that I read, and it was also the first book that Fante wrote. Much like Buk's Henry Chinaski, Fante's fictional alter ego was Arturo Bandini, a character he returned to many times throughout this novels. The Road to Los Angeles introduces Bandini as a young man struggling to become a great writer as he works odd jobs to make ends meet. It's not Fante's best but as I said, it was his earliest novel, written when he was 24 years old, with far better things to come.

Christmas themed books (and one audio recording)

2010-12-24T09:00:00.000-05:00

I wanted to post something holiday-ish today but I think I went through my only two Christmas-themed books last year. So in case you missed them, here's a look at Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris and The Twelve Terrors of Christmas by John Updike.

And finally, here's my real Christmas gift to you. I linked to a print version last year, but I'm taking it up a notch this time with an audio recording (you can ignore the weird video montage someone has put together) of "Six to Eight Black Men" by David Sedaris. A word of warning: do not watch while sipping egg nog or hot cocoa, as you may spit it out in a fit of laughter. Not kidding.

Henry Darger's Room

2010-12-23T09:00:00.002-05:00

Henry Darger is the quintessential outsider artist. He grew up an orphan, escaped from the asylum for "feeble-minded boys" at age 16, led a mostly solitary life working as a janitor, and lived alone in a one-room apartment in Chicago for 40 years. Upon his death his landlord discovered that the tiny room contained more than 30,000 pages of manuscripts and several hundred watercolor paintings. Most of them comprise his most famous work, In the Realms of the Unreal, the story of the Vivian girls, seven sisters who assist a daring rebellion against an evil regime of child slavery.

What most people remember about the paintings is that the little girls have penises. I'm not a betting woman but if I had to put money on it I'd guess that Darger just never learned that girls don't look the same as boys. But I digress...the important thing is that he was a total unknown with an incredible secret life, spending decades writing and painting his life's work without another soul even realizing it.

I first heard his story about ten years ago, and became fairly engrossed in it. I was at first disappointed to learn that the In the Realms of the Unreal has not been published in full (although, quite frankly, how could one publish a 15,000+ page book--and more importantly, who would read it?) but did manage to find a volume excerpting sections of it at the Pratt Library, where I worked at the time.

Anyway...about a year ago I was in the PS1 book store and noticed this on the shelf. It was a little bit pricy but it was well worth the purchase. It's a beautiful little book of, yes, photos of Henry Darger's room, which his landlord has faithfully kept nearly just as it was when Darger died in 1973.

It starts with a series of black and white shots, taken in the 70s just after Darger's death. I like the inspiration wall on the right. Darger was obsessed with protecting children, which, knowing just a bit about his history in the asylum, seems pretty understandable.

Most of them were taken in 1999 and are in color, with this almost golden sepia tone to them. I love how his paints are still strewn out on the table, as if he might come back to them at any minute.

Some original manuscripts of Realms. Some of them were bound by the artist; the rest are tied with twine. I like the wallpaper covers with hand painted titles.

Darger loved children's books with girl protagonists. He owned 13 first edition copies of the Oz books.

Photos of little girls and religious images on the mantelpiece.

Confessions of a Crap Artist by Philip K. Dick

2010-12-22T09:00:00.002-05:00

The “crap artist” of the title is Jack Isidore, a socially awkward man who seems a bit obsessive compulsive, fanatically cataloging old science magazines and collecting random objects. He believes that the earth is hollow, that sunlight has weight, and other disproved theories. Broke, he moves in with his sister’s family and joins a religious group that shares his interests in ESP, telepathy, and UFOs, believing the world will end on April 23, 1959.

While the details of the novel involve some paranoiac elements, this is actually a straight fiction novel--nothing otherworldly occurs. Dick wrote a few other mainstream novels early on in his career, some of which were recently reissued by Tor, but for awhile this was the only one of them in print. While I definitely love some of the stranger PKD novels (Ubik is hands down my favorite), this one is certainly worth checking out.

P.S. To the people at Vintage: please repackage these books! They're ugly as sin! Thanks. (Although I guess there is a kind of charm in this level of hideousness. It's almost a way of weeding out the poseurs—only a true fan would be willing to be seen purchasing something that looks like this.)

Virginia Dare by Fielding Dawson

2010-12-21T09:00:00.001-05:00

I first heard of Fielding Dawson in an article about him in The Believer a few years ago, which definitely got me interested. A beat-era writer and painter, he studied at Black Mountain College and hung around with Franz Kline and Philip Guston. (A favorite detail about him is that he pitched for the Max's Kansas City softball team. I especially love that there was a Max's Kansas City softball team at all.)

I came across this book when I wasn't looking for it, at Robin's Books in Philadelphia. (A signed copy by a dead author on a now defunct* legendary press...for $8.50. Go figure.) In the book's introduction, Dawson announces that "this book draws to a close my involvement with the first person and autobiography" and that it marks his "entrance into third person fiction, and open endings through transitions," as well as his intent "to undo the corset concepts of beginning, middle and end, as well as lucid description and dialogue in 123-ABC type progressions, and the mistaken dogma that novelistic completion brings, or ties, all loose ends together." Many of the stories are extremely short, a page or two, or even just a paragraph.

I remember feeling disappointed as I read it, but less disappointed in the book than I was with myself for not "getting it." Flipping through it now, the stories kind of remind me of a more beat-like Raymond Carver. I'd like to give it another try, or at least check out another of his books.

Dawson was also a painter and collagist, and there are many photographs and collages scattered throughout the pages of this book, as well as on the front cover.

*I've just learned that though John Martin did retire in 2002 and sold the rights to the works of Charles Bukowski, Paul Bowles, and John Fante to HarperCollins, he then sold the rest of his inventory to David Godine for $1, and Godine now not only distributes the remaining Black Sparrow stock but also publishes new titles under it as an imprint of his own publishing house. But for all intents and purposes, Black Sparrow is, in the classic sense, still defunct in my eyes.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carre

2010-12-20T09:00:00.000-05:00

This is, as far as I can remember, my first foray into spy novels, and it's a pretty good one--Graham Greene said it was "the best spy story I have ever read." Alec Leamas, a British agent in early Cold War Berlin, is called back to London by Control after his last double agent is killed. Instead of being dismissed, he is given a rather dangerous assignment: play the part of a disgraced agent, a defector, as part of a plot to bring down Mundt, an assassin for the Abteilung, the East German Secret Service.

The novel is of course suspenseful and entertaining, but it also seemed somewhat more literary than I had expected. It's well written and carefully plotted, and Leamas is more of an anti-hero, hard drinking and disillusioned, than some kind of slick action hero. Good stuff all around.

Hunter & Painter by Tom Gauld

2010-12-14T09:00:00.001-05:00

Not long ago I spotted this short staple-bound comic by Tom Gauld and quickly snapped it up. I loved his The Gigantic Robot, both for the drawing style and deceptively simple and humorous storytelling approach.

Hunter & Painter tells the story of a cave painter who decides to try a different subject matter, which proves unpopular with his fellow cavemen.

I love the woolly mammoth.

The Way through Doors by Jesse Ball

2010-12-13T09:00:00.001-05:00

This is Jesse Ball's second novel. I read his first book, Samedi the Deafness, simply because I liked the cover art, but was pleased to find that I enjoyed the story as well. The Way through Doors also has a lovely cover--the rectangle within a rectangle within a rectangle, the words of the title cut in half, aptly symbolize the structure of the novel itself.

When a pamphleteer sees a woman run down by a taxi, he takes her to the hospital and lies that he is her boyfriend. He must keep the woman awake, so he tells her stories all night, attempting to revive her memories in the process. At this point the book launches into a rather unconventional story arc, with the novel beginning again, the narrative folding in upon itself, breaking off in new directions while leaving the earlier story unfinished each time. In every version, he seeks to learn the woman's identity.

This is a complex, many layered, comically absurd novel, written with poetically skillful language. I'm excited to see that he has a new novel coming out in June, called The Curfew.

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

2010-12-09T09:00:00.000-05:00

Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom was a star high school basketball player, which was pretty much the highlight of his life. It's all been downhill from there. Now he's a little older, and his job and marriage are miserable and unfulfilling. One day on a whim he gets in his car and keeps driving. Except then he turns right back, but instead of going home shacks up with someone else for a few months, while a priest keeps trying to get him to reconcile with his pitiful wife.

I bought this book in a used bookstore in Kansas City, along with a stack of other old paperbacks. The owner commented that this one was "excellent" (the only other title that received a comment besides that was George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, which is allegedly also "excellent").

Other than one short story, I'd never read John Updike before, and I had a really hard time getting through this book. I couldn't stand any of the characters, except for maybe Ruth, the former prostitute. (Which I suppose doesn't necessarily make for a bad book, but that wasn't my experience this time.) Rabbit's wife is completely helpless. I pictured her as some kind of a pathetic blob of a human being, and quite frankly, I wish Rabbit had kept running that very first day and hadn't turned back. Although at the same time I didn't particularly like Rabbit either.

I have to assume Updike's work developed over time considering his literary reputation but this book did not make me want to read anything else of his.

By the way, I had no idea this had been made into a movie. Starring James Caan, no less!

The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace

2010-12-07T09:00:00.000-05:00

This is David Foster Wallace's debut novel, which takes place in 1990 in an alternate Cleveland, OH. At some point in the past, the government decided that Ohioans would benefit from having a desert--a place to wander alone and reflect, free of shopping malls and civilization--and so they engineered the Great Ohio Desert, or G.O.D.

Our heroine, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, is the daughter of the wealthy owner of a baby food company but chooses to work as a switchboard attendant at a publishing company. Her great-grandmother, a former student of Wittgenstein who cannot survive if the room temperature is below 98.6 degrees, has just disappeared from a nursing home, along with 25 other inmates. Her boyfriend, who's also her boss, is insanely jealous and possessive. And her pet cockatiel has begun speaking a mixture of sexual and religious psychobable, which may propel him to stardom on a Christian broadcasting network.

There's a lot going on in the story, but it didn't seem as difficult as his fiction is made out to be. (I'd previously only read his nonfiction.) Granted, many reviews say it is much more accessible than Infinite Jest (which I do intend to take on at some point, though I don't look forward to having to lug that thing around with me on the subway).

The book is bizarre, funny, and highly imaginative. It ends in the middle of a sentence, which feels a little dissatisfying, as though the story should keep going but we are only revealed a slice of it. But that feeling wore off after awhile.

There's a new edition of the book with Vlad the Impaler (the cockatiel) on the cover, which is all well and good, but I really prefer the one pictured above. It features an aerial view of the Cleveland suburb where the story takes place, a town that was designed to look like Jayne Mansfield's head from above.

The Petting Zoo by Jim Carroll

2010-12-06T09:00:00.000-05:00

I can't believe it's been almost a month since I last posted anything. I guess I've been taking a bit of a break. But now I'm back (hopefully more regularly).

The Petting Zoo, which was released just last month, is Jim Carroll's first and last novel. He's of course published many volumes of poetry and two collections of his journals--the famous Basketball Diaries and the perhaps lesser known Forced Entries (I actually prefer the latter one). He died a little over a year ago, after turning in a draft and revising the first two parts of The Petting Zoo. A literary scholar was able to finish revising the novel based on Jim's detailed notes.

I'd seen him read part of this book about nine years ago, and according to his website, he first began reading pieces of it aloud in 1989. In other words, the book has been a very long time in the making, and I was really looking forward to reading it.

The protagonist, Billy Wolfram, is a painter who has achieved a high level of wealth and celebrity in the 1980s New York art world. Some say he's essentially a version of Jim Carroll without the sex, drugs, and rock n roll. Yes, Wolfram is a hugely successful artist...and a 38 year-old virgin, due to unresolved sexual neuroses dating back to his mother walking in on him during his first and only attempt at jerking off. (I've purposely left out a few amusing details...you'll have to read it to find out the rest.)

I hate to say it, but I was disappointed with this book. It may be a result of others having to finish it for him, or, similarly, perhaps the book would have required a lot more rewriting on Carroll's part had he lived longer, but was published prematurely upon his death. The writing style feels flat, lacking the kind of poetic virtuoso one might expect from him, and the dialogue seems unnatural and a bit stilted at times. I'm also not sure how I feel about the talking, immortal raven that keeps appearing throughout the story (there seems to be an implication that it's the same one that knocked at Edgar Allan Poe's chamber door).

On a more positive note, the cover art was illustrated by Raymond Pettibon, which might be the only reason I'm keeping the book.

The Acme Novelty Library #16 by Chris Ware

2010-11-09T09:00:00.000-05:00

Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library #16 marks the first appearance of Rusty Brown, who is depicted as both a lonely adult with a lifelong obsession with collecting action figures, and as an awkward young boy fascinated by superheroes for their ability to protect the weak and vulnerable. At this point there have been several more stories featuring Rusty--I'm sure we'll one day see a full length book a la Jimmy Corrigan.

I love how the inside cover looks like an old textbook. So familiar-looking.

Ware's drawing style and layouts are instantly recognizable--really unique within the scope of contemporary comic artists. It's kind of amazing to me that others haven't tried to imitate his work. Or maybe they have, but unsuccessfully.

He really excels at conveying emotion in his illustrations, even in the simplest of objects. I don't know why but there's something so sad about that single mitten hanging up to dry.

The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair by George Plimpton

2010-11-08T09:00:00.001-05:00

At some point I became a little obsessed with The Paris Review, partly from literary nostalgia, and partly for their great interviews with writers, and began collecting back issues of the magazine.

The Paris Review is what led me to buy this collection of articles by the founding editor of the magazine, George Plimpton, who is also often credited as a pioneer of participatory journalism. This collection was published about a year after Plimpton died, and I get the impression that his earlier work is a bit more dramatic. It's not a bad collection, but the only one that really stuck in my memory is the title essay, about a man who strapped 42 helium balloons to a lawn chair and went for a ride.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

2010-10-20T09:00:00.001-04:00

I read this book for my high school AP English class. We also read Beloved by Toni Morrison, and afterwards the teacher asked us to write a paper on which one we liked better and why. Which seems a little odd. But the point is that I was only one of two people in the class who preferred The Sound and the Fury, which I find kind of interesting.

It's a notoriously difficult book, but I remember that once I started reading a particular section and really got into the rhythm and feel of a character's thought processes, however confused and tortured they might be, I could actually kind of follow it. (I'm sure I missed some details here and there.) I'd never read anything like it, that was for sure.

I started to re-read it about five years ago but never finished for some reason. I should try it again.

No Wave by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley

2010-10-19T09:00:00.001-04:00

This oral history of the small, short-lived, yet influential No Wave scene includes contributions from the likes of Lydia Lunch, James Chance, Arto Lindsay, Glenn Branca, Diego Cortez, and so on, with longer written sections by Byron Coley, and many black and white photographs and fliers throughout the pages.

The late 70s/early 80s was a time in New York history that will never come back, a virtual madhouse where you could live cheaply and do what you wanted. In Luc Sante's essay "My Lost City" (which I am forever quoting), he writes of a feeling of nature taking back the city, of feral dogs and vacant streets, how "in the 1970s New York City was not a part of the United States at all. It was an offshore interzone with no shopping malls, few major chains, very few born-again Christians who had not been sent there on a mission, no golf courses, no subdivisions." This is the landscape that the no wave scene was born into, and it's one that I am forever pining for, wishing that I could have lived through, despite knowing in the back of my mind that it must not have been as romantic as it sounds on paper.

In the book's Foreword, Lydia Lunch writes, "The anti-everything of No Wave was a collective caterwaul that defied categorization, defiled the audience, despised convention, shit in the face of history, and then split..No Wave was the waste product of Taxi Driver, Times Square, the Son of Sam, the blackout of '77...and the desperate need to violently rebel against the complacency of a zombie nation dumbed down by sitcoms and disco." (There's a longer list in between ellipsis but you get the point.)

A family tree of bands at the beginning of the book. It may look like a lot but a lot of the same people were in the various groups.

Here's Brian Eno, who was more of an early adopter of No Wave than a pioneer. But he's still a pretty cool guy.

I really like the simple typographic flier.

Lydia Lunch: the baby-faced killer.

James Chance attacking Village Voice writer Robert Christgau, who apparently was unfazed and continued to praise the Contortions.

On the left, the Contortions playing on a roof somewhere; on the right, Mirielle Cervenka (older sister of Exene and one-time member of DNA) on the subway. (You may recall the scene in The Decline of Western Civilization when Exene learns the news of her sister's death.)

Three Beds in Manhattan by Georges Simenon

2010-10-18T09:00:00.000-04:00

One of Simenon's romans durs (the current NYRB edition has been retitled to Three Bedrooms in Manhattan for some reason), in which two lonely and desperate people meet late one night at an all-hours diner in New York. Together they move from one bar to another, and then from bedroom to bedroom around the city (a hotel, hers, and then his). You can almost visualize the thick haze of smoke, whiskey, and desperation present throughout the book. The writing is hard, unsentimental, and spare--romantic and yet not. The noirish elements might almost be a bit much--it definitely doesn't live up to The Widow, which is still my favorite.

Simenon's many praises.

Demonology by Rick Moody

2010-10-13T09:00:00.000-04:00

Not too long ago I read Rick Moody's latest novel, The Four Fingers of Death, and I wasn't all that crazy about it. It's ambitious, for sure--three novels in one, using satire and humor to explore themes of ennui and interpersonal relationships (in this case, on the planet Mars), but it just didn't do anything for me. I can't really say why. Helpful, I know. But I loved his earlier work when I first read it--for instance, this collection of short stories, Demonology, which I remember first reading and wanting to do that. One of my favorites in this volume is "Wilkie Fahnstock: The Boxed Set," in which the story of a man's life is told as a series of music tracks and accompanying liner notes. ("Tragedy struck in 1970, when Elise Fahnstock's marriage to Stannard Buchanan Fahnstock ended in acrimonious divorce--to the sounds of Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water.") It's a pretty good mix.

Atlas #1 by Dylan Horrocks

2010-10-12T09:00:00.000-04:00

I loved Dylan Horrocks's graphic novel Hicksville, so when I noticed that there were a couple of issues of a new series on the shelves at my (at the time) local comic shop, I was pretty happy.

Leonard Batts, the reporter from Hicksville, returns, this time traveling to the fictional nation of Cornucopia to do a story on legendary cartoonist Emil Kopen.

According to the website, the series will cover "from Kopen’s peasant childhood in the mountains of Cornucopia to the cartooning sweatshops of New York in the late thirties; from the horrors of Nazi occupation to the hope and disillusionment of postwar Europe." Unfortunately, it seems like Horrocks has abandoned the series for the time being. Only three issues have been published, the last one having come out over three years ago. Hopefully he comes back to it at some point. I'd like to read the whole thing one day.

As always, such lovely uses of black.

American Surfaces by Stephen Shore

2010-10-04T13:43:00.001-04:00

In the early 70s, photographer Stephen Shore embarked on a series of cross-country road trips, documenting what he found along the way. These photographs, which are comprised mostly of images of meals, hotel rooms, and people he encountered, as well as decrepit-looking storefronts, are collected chronologically in American Surfaces.

Despite the banality of the subjects, the striking colors and composition transcend them beyond the typical vacation snapshot. The extremely saturated colors, coupled with the subjects themselves, remind me a lot of William Eggleston's work.

While You Please Be Quiet Please by Raymond Carver

2010-09-16T09:00:00.001-04:00

At one time I really wanted to write like this--sparse, economical, and evocative, chilling in its ability to communicate what is just below the surface without actually saying it. In the critical introduction to my senior thesis (hilarious that such a thing exists) I named Carver as one of my primary influences, along with Mary Gaitskill, Amy Hempel, and James Salter (I had to dig it out of a filing cabinet to confirm this; I also praised Carver for the lyrical effect of his dialogue). Nowadays I'm more of a surrealist crime fiction kind of a girl, so it just goes to show you how much your tastes continue to change.

I see that all of his books have been repackaged. I'm not that big of a fan--it's just different photos taken at dusk of houses with the lights on, and I'm also not too crazy about the font--but it's a definite step up from this. Although I do love how the text gradually gets smaller on the older version, which was not kept in the new cover.

How to Talk Dirty and Influence People by Lenny Bruce

2010-09-15T09:00:00.001-04:00

I picked up this book about a month ago in a used bookstore in Kansas City and the pages were so brittle that it literally started to crumble in my hands as I read it (hence the scotch tape on the lower left).

Published originally by Playboy at the behest of Hugh Hefner himself, this is the autobiography of legendary comedian Lenny Bruce, written just a few years before he died at age 40. It starts off with a little bit about his youth and stint in the army, but mostly focuses on his obscenity trials, including a few maddening courtroom transcripts. Parts of the book feel slightly dated, which is inevitable, but it still made me laugh.

It also made me glad that I didn't live through that era. (Watching Mad Men has the same effect.) As much as I'd love to have been able to see the Velvet Underground play Max's Kansas City or buy property in Manhattan when it was cheap (or see Lenny Bruce perform stand-up, for that matter), it's also nice to live in a world where you can say "cocksucker" in a public forum without worrying about being arrested.

The Eye by Vladimir Nabokov

2010-09-14T09:00:00.000-04:00

The Eye was Nabokov's fourth novel, written in Russian in 1930, but not released in English (in this edition you see above) until 1965. It's a very slim novel, just over 100 pages, written about a group of Russian emigres living in Berlin (which makes a lot of sense considering that in 1930 Nabokov himself was a Russian emigre living in Berlin).

I came across this copy of the book in a small crowded store in Northampton, MA. It's not in perfect condition but I love the cover art. Even better than the recent repackage.

I pulled off the dust jacket, revealing this mostly plain woven cover. I love Nabokov's signature embossed into the lower right.

There are a number of notes written in the margins in pencil. It's always interesting to me to read these kinds of notes, wondering what train of thought drove the person to write them down.

The Unlimited Dream Company by J.G. Ballard

2010-09-13T09:00:00.001-04:00

One day I was wandering around The Strand, and saw some of J.G. Ballard's books out on display on a table. I was drawn to the street art style of the stencils, and the rainbow colored gradient of squares. I'd been curious about reading Ballard's novels anyway--weird, dark surreal science fiction. All that and the $6 price were enough to convince me to buy the book.

Then I read it. And while it's kind of hard for me to admit this, I think it might be a little too weird for my tastes. A man steals a plane and crashes it in the Thames river, is underwater for ten minutes, then emerges apparently unscathed. He is now seemingly trapped in the small London suburb of Shepperton, which is rapidly transforming into a jungle, with palm trees sprouting, marmosets showing up, etc. Whether the man has died and risen as a kind of messiah, or is about to die and has some kind of pre-death vision that seems to last weeks but is only a few seconds, is deliberately ambiguous.

Really, the book is kind of boring. It starts out with an interesting enough premise, but peters out pretty quickly. Plants grow out of nowhere, strange animals show up, and there's a little too much semen being shot all over the place (no kidding) by the narrator, who is naked even though nobody else knows it. This is essentially the plot for the rest of the book.

A Life Force by Will Eisner

2010-09-08T09:00:00.001-04:00

A couple years ago I attended a work luncheon about graphic novels and picked up a free copy of this book (best table centerpiece giveaway ever). I had gone on a bit of a Will Eisner kick awhile back while working at the Austin Public Library, reading A Contract with God, Dropsie Avenue, and Comics and Sequential Art in quick succession, but this one was new to me.

Of course, I didn't actually get around to reading it until a few weeks ago.

A Life Force tells the story of an out of work carpenter living in the Bronx and his rise to success, set against the backdrop of the Great Depression, the rise of Nazi Germany and the mafia.

Besides being one of, if not the, first comics artists to use the medium to tell more literary stories, one of the things that really set Eisner apart from his contemporaries was his style of layouts--he didn't stick to the typical grid, freeing himself to experiment, using the layout to aid in his storytelling. (Comics and Sequential Art delves a bit into these techniques.)

He is often called out for his portrayal of women (usually as hideous/shrill/social climbers/etc), and in the case of his Spirit comics, black people (the typical stereotypes of the era). It's certainly not excusable, and to be honest, his comics aren't even my favorites as far as the stories are concerned. But regardless of his flaws, Eisner was ahead of his time in many ways, which deserves to be acknowledged. Blah blah blah.

Role Models by John Waters

2010-09-07T09:00:00.000-04:00

First things first: I love the cover. Love it. The crude line drawing, the touch of green on his socks, the framed pictures scattered about at his feet, the bright white background that will undoubtedly get a little dirty as time goes on (I'd probably be annoyed by this if it were any other book). It's perfect.

Role Models is a collection of essays about the people who have inspired John Waters, and it's a pretty varied group of people: Johnny Mathis, Tennessee Williams, former Manson girl Leslie Van Houten, local Baltimore eccentrics such as a lesbian stripper named Lady Zorro, amateur gay pornographers, and so on. The writing is very conversational, as though you're having a chat with him (albeit a very one-sided one). On the one hand, it's not exactly new territory if you're a Waters fan, but it's still entertaining.

One of the more memorable, if rather divisive, chapters concerns Waters's friendship with Leslie Van Houten. He befriended her in the 80s after interviewing her for Rolling Stone, and has advocated for her release ever since. Which is where the preachy parts come in, but they don't really bother me (I think he makes a pretty convincing case). What might be my favorite passage in the book is found in that chapter: "When the cops finally caught the hippy killers and I actually saw their photos ("Arrest Weirdo in Tate Murders", screamed the New York Daily News headlines) I almost went into cardiac arrest. God! The Manson Family looked just like my friends at the time!...'The Manson Family' were the hippies all our parents were scared we'd turn into if we didn't stop taking drugs."

The Bald Soprano & Other Plays by Eugene Ionesco

2010-09-06T17:42:00.003-04:00

I read this book for a class during my sophomore year of college, and it sparked my brief stint as an absurdist playwright. I can't even remember what "The Bald Soprano" was about in the first place, or what I found so interesting about it, but that year I sought out other works of the same ilk--"Waiting for Godot" and "The Rhinoceros," for instance--and when we were assigned to write a one act play for the same class, I decided to go the absurdist route. I recall that it was about how people will see what they want to see no matter what is really there. (So profound.) It received a positive response from my teacher and classmates, who still brought it up from time to time the following year. But in the end, I really can't imagine that it was particularly good, and I can't find a copy of it to find out. Which is probably a good thing.

Cool for You by Eileen Myles

2010-08-30T09:00:00.002-04:00

I often see this book referred to as an "autobiographical novel," which seems like an odd term to me. The character's voice and circumstances feel awfully similar to Myles's own voice and circumstances (from what I know of them, at least)--she's a working class Irish girl growing up in Boston, a tomboy, grappling with her sexual identity, and becomes a poet--not to mention that her name is Eileen Myles. So maybe the facts aren't 100% accurate. It's still kind of a strange category. Aren't most novels a bit autobiographical, in that the author can't help but include part of themselves in it in some way? And I'll bet that most memoirs aren't wholly accurate either, simply because memory is funny in that way.

Regardless of category, whether fact or fiction, this book is moving, insightful, funny, lyrical--all those adjectives you use in book reviews. Told in a series of snapshots, moving back and forth through time, it definitely feels like a novel written by a poet (which it is, obviously), but this is a good thing.

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut

2010-08-27T17:20:00.000-04:00

Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano is also one of the first Vonnegut novels that I read. It is a dystopian novel that takes place in a near-future society that has eliminated the need for human workers through near-total mechanization. The upper class are the engineers and managers who keep things running, while the lower class, whose skills have been rendered useless, drink away their days with a sense of purposelessness. But a rebellion is stirring up.

I read quite a lot of this type of book--the dystopian science fiction novel, that is--when I was in high school, counting the likes of 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Brave New World* among my favorites. I don't know what the appeal was, but I'm certainly not alone--a recent New Yorker article discusses the recent trend of dystopian novels for young adults. I guess it's the ideal genre for angsty teens.

*Speaking of which, in a 1973 Playboy interview Vonnegut says that in writing Player Piano he "cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We." (The latter of which I have not read.)

Low Life by Luc Sante

2010-08-25T22:25:00.000-04:00

Luc Sante's portrait of New York City in the 19th and early 20th centuries is quickly becoming a classic. It explores the city's, for lack of a better term, "seedy underbelly" in four parts, focusing on layout and topography, sources of illicit recreation, people in positions of power, and people living on the edges of society.

In his essay "My Lost City," which appears as an Afterword in this edition of Low Life, Sante says that "Instead of disappearing, local history has been preserved as a seasoning," which has always struck me as a pretty apt description. Vestiges of the city's past remain in the form of architectural details or old signs (like the faded ghost billboards you sometimes see on sides of buildings), so you can almost imagine what it might have been like. And at the same time, it seems unfathomable to imagine the New York depicted in this book.

There are a number of black and white photographs reproduced throughout--above depicts a lodging house situated on a barge, and hobos riding atop train cars. Ah, the good old days...

David Holzman's Diary by L. M. Kit Carson

2010-08-24T09:00:00.000-04:00

I came across this screenplay for David Holzman's Diary at a street vendor's table. The movie is scripted, but attempts to mimic an off-the-cuff diary entry--the title character, David Holzman, films himself, thinking that by observing the patterns occurring in his life, he will come to some greater understanding of their meaning.

Of course, it doesn’t really turn out that way, and he ends up scaring off his girlfriend, Penny (pictured above), in the process. It's an interesting look at how people react to being filmed: Penny is upset and disturbed by David’s project, while others don’t seem to mind, playing up for the camera.

The movie version features some rather innovative technical effects considering when it was made, such as a sped up montage of images from David’s evening TV viewing, and voiceovers accompanying photobooth pictures. These black and white images appear throughout, which make for a visually appealing book.

Here's the main character testing out a fisheye lens--the effect, as he walks while holding the camera above his head, makes you feel a bit off-kilter while watching it.

It's kind of a strange movie to read as a script--I wish there were more essays, other than the very brief introduction, whether about the impetus for making the film, or its thematic content. Regardless, it's a nice little companion to the movie, and as I stated before, the black and white stills that are reproduced throughout the pages look pretty cool.

Where I Was From by Joan Didion

2010-08-23T09:00:00.000-04:00

I can't believe it's been nearly a month since I last posted anything here. The days have just gotten away from me, I guess...

It's probably the fact that I've never lived there, but I've always harbored a bit of an obsession with California. While my own mental picture is more on the romantic side, Joan Didion, who grew up in Sacramento and lived in L.A. for years before moving to New York, looks to her home state with both fondness and discontent. Combining reportage, memoir, and literary criticism, she sharply examines her life and work, weaving together a narrative that touches on her pioneer ancestors (incredibly, she can trace her heritage back to the 1700s*), California’s debts to railroads and aerospace, the infamous Spur posse, California writers such as Jack London, Frank Norris, and herself, "painter of light" Thomas Kinkade, and more, to create a cohesive portrait. As always, her work is shrewd and insightful, both journalistic and very personal.

*"I know nothing else about [my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother] but I have her recipe for corn bread."

Once Again to Zelda by Marlene Wagman-Geller

2010-07-28T09:00:00.000-04:00

This lovely paper-over-board book (kind of like a hardcover without the dust jacket) collects the stories behind the dedications at the beginning of a variety of books, both classic and contemporary. Sylvia Plath dedicated The Bell Jar to her friends who offered her refuge after the end of her marriage ("To Elizabeth and David"). Jacqueline Susann dedicated Valley of the Dolls to her poodle ("To Josephine, who sat at my feet, positive I was writing a sequel). And of course F. Scott Fitzgerald dedicated The Great Gatsby to his wife Zelda.

It's not exactly scholarly literature but it's an interesting concept and a breezy read, with a short chapter allotted to each story. It's somewhat troubling that most of the sources at the back of the book are from wikipedia, but if you can get past that, it's worth checking out.

Ghost of Hoppers by Jaime Hernandez

2010-07-27T09:00:00.000-04:00

In one of the most recent installments in the long-running Love and Rockets series, Maggie is recently divorced, working as the manager and handy-man (err, person) of an apartment complex. She returns to her old neighborhood in L.A., the fictional (as far as I can tell) Hoppers, where she runs into her old friend (and sometimes lover) Hopey, who now wears an eye patch. There's also some slightly supernatural stuff going on, which is nothing new for the series.

This story also introduces the character Vivian (see above), who is not to be fucked with.

I love how Jaime Hernandez has aged the characters over the years. They started out as teenage punks, and with each new issue they become noticeably older--in Maggie's case, heavier--and more complex, often reminiscing about the old days.

The Age of Reason by Jean Paul Sartre

2010-07-26T09:00:00.000-04:00

As is typically the case, I think, Sartre is another writer who I more or less exclusively read while I was in college. This is the first novel in a trilogy, a portrait of a Parisian bourgeois living in the shadows of fascism. It's written in a fairly straightforward style, focusing on three days in the life of a philosophy teacher who needs to find some money to pay for an abortion for his mistress. I never managed to read any of the other books in the trilogy, though I've had one of them, Troubled Sleep, sitting on my shelf for about eight years. Maybe I need to ease off the hardboiled mysteries and read more intellectual novels for a change.

I love the Sartre seal on the front cover and the ornate type on the spine.

Weegee's New York

2010-07-22T09:00:00.000-04:00

A few years ago I bought this book of Weegee's photographs of New York on a whim. I'm not sure why, not because his work isn't great, but because this is more of a postcard book than a nice photo book, which is probably what I should have held out for. (Maybe I'll upgrade one of these days.) Regardless, it contains some classic images.

Weegee was the pseudonym of a photographer working in the Lower East Side in the 30s and 40s, who got his name because he seemed to have an almost clairvoyant knowledge of when and where a crime, fire, or accident would occur, arriving on the scene mere minutes after anything had been reported to the authorities. His photographs largely depict the seedier side of life, of people in the back of a paddywagon, drunks, car wrecks, and murder victims.

He also photographed the upper crust, but in such a way as to convey a somewhat sinister or unflattering quality.

I love this one, of a cab and what I can only guess is part of a Macy's parade float--two otherwise innocuous elements, but together they look terrifying, like a giant monstrous hand is reaching down to grab the car, the driver desperately speeding away.

This of course is the best one by far. The bagel man coming out of the shadows, bringing the morning delivery. A beautiful sight (even though the lighting is a bit creepy).

The Magic Christian by Terry Southern

2010-07-21T09:00:00.001-04:00

This very short, somewhat dated-feeling, yet amusing novel is about an eccentric billionaire whose only goal in life is to use his vast fortunes to create disorder, and prove that people will do anything for money, no matter how degrading or distasteful--even crawl into a pit of steaming offal. This is a man who really likes not just to piss people off, but to completely mystify them in the process--kind of a mindfuck, if you will.

I love this cover, how Ringo Starr just blends right into the wallpaper. His character was created solely for the movie adaptation of this book (it was written solely for Ringo, in fact), so it actually makes sense that he's sort of nonexistent, as he doesn't appear once within its pages.

Apparently Peter Sellers (also seen on the cover) loved this book so much that he sent it to Stanley Kubrick, who was inspired to hire Southern to write the screenplay for Dr. Strangelove. Good instincts, Peter.

American Splendor by Harvey Pekar

2010-07-20T09:00:00.002-04:00

I was really sad when I heard that Harvey Pekar died last week. When I saw the obituary notice I think I audibly gasped and let out an "Oh no!" at my desk at work. He was only 70, which seems far too young to me, and he was still working, still creating comics, most recently with the Pekar Project (the latest story was posted just under three weeks before his death).

Admittedly, I'd never heard of him until the movie American Splendor came out. After that I of course wanted to read his comics (how could you not?), and sought out this collection. At the time I'd say I was mildly interested in reading graphic novels, and I guess right after that I became a bit obsessed, hunting down anything that seemed mildly interesting (luckily I worked at a library at the time). I don't think it was a direct result of reading American Splendor, though at the same time maybe I was inspired to seek out even more.

Anyway, if you've somehow not seen the movie, Harvey Pekar was a working class guy from Cleveland who had the good fortune of meeting R. Crumb, whose work gave him the idea to use words and pictures to tell his own story. And because Harvey couldn't draw, Crumb agreed to take Harvey's words and make them into pictures.

As you can probably guess from this strip, they met through their love of record collecting. (Sorry about the blurriness--still figuring out my new scanner.)

This page is from a hilarious story that was brought to three dimensions in the film.

Throughout the years American Splendor was drawn by a variety of artists. Here Gerry Shamray illustrates a scene from the office where Harvey worked as a file clerk for many years. His answer to why he never brings in any food for his co-workers is pretty great: "I don't wanna give, I just wanna freeload."

Harvey ponders man's existence. I love his contemplative look in the last panel. His writing could be philosophical, thought-provoking, moving, or just plain funny. Or all of the above.

A view of the Cleveland train yards (I think).

The Comics Reporter invited a variety of comics artists to give their thoughts on Harvey, collected here, but I thought Seth said it the best: "[Harvey was] probably the first person who wanted to use the comics medium seriously as a writer. Certainly the first person to toss every genre element out the window and try to capture something of the genuine experience of living: not just some technique of real life glossed onto a story--not satire, or sick humor or everyday melodrama--but the genuine desire to transmit from one person to another just what life feels like."

I also love what Phoebe Gloeckner says: "I feel like Harvey can't die." And maybe in a way that's true--as cheesy as it sounds, he'll always be alive on the pages of his comics. But it's still so damn sad that there won't be any new ones.

Monsieur Monde Vanishes by Georges Simenon

2010-07-19T09:00:00.000-04:00

A few months ago I visited the town of Marfa, TX, and realized that I had somehow managed to not bring enough reading material with me to last the week (this particular vacation was the kind that involves a lot of down time, like reading in hammocks--not the kind of vacation I'm used to). So I ventured over to the local book store and came up with this book by Georges Simenon. Like most of his repertoire, it's a slim volume, one of the recently repackaged "romans durs"--dark, noirish, economically written novels.

On his 48th birthday (which no one has remembered), a "successful" Parisian businessman realizes how unsatisfactory his life has become, and on a whim decides to withdraw 300,000 francs from his account and disappear to the French Riviera, where he makes a new life for himself cavorting with prostitutes, drunks, thieves, and other assorted low-lifes. At first he finds himself unaccustomed to this lifestyle, having been used to the finer things for so many years--"and yet there was something pleasurable about this slight pain," as he says. Of course, his old life invades the new one, and he ends up being pulled back, returning as suddenly as he'd left.

Mao II by Don DeLillo

2010-07-12T09:00:00.000-04:00

Have you ever read a book, knew you enjoyed it, but have no recollection of what it's about, or of the experience of reading it? Or maybe this only happens to me. I've had this book scanned and uploaded for two months but have been avoiding it because I have no idea what to say about it. Ever after reading a plot summary, nothing jogged my memory of it. I don't know what that says about me, or the book, but I've decided I need to just post this and move on with it. Maybe I'll try to read it again, but maybe not.

According to the back cover copy, "At the heart of the book is Bill Gray, a famous reclusive writer who escapes the failed novel he has been working on for many years and enters the world of political violence, a nightscape of Semtex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms. Bill's dangerous passage leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott, and the strange young woman who is Scott's lover--and Bill's." (I love how that little bit at the end is supposed to be such a twist.)

The Ice Storm by Rick Moody

2010-07-09T09:00:00.002-04:00

With one exception, I've read all of Rick Moody's books and this is still my favorite one. Set in the affluent town of New Canaan, CT, the novel centers around one dysfunctional family over the course of one night in winter of 1973. Parents swap partners--I'm pretty sure this book first introduced me to the concept of key parties (not that I've ever participated)--while their children experiment with sex and drugs, and an ice storm, both literal and symbolic (how d'ya like that one?), sweeps through the area. Yet another one to revisit some day.

The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller

2010-07-08T09:00:00.002-04:00

Just as war was breaking out in Europe, Henry Miller went to Greece, traveling around the country with the writer Lawrence Durrell, who lived there at the time. This account of his journey there is brilliant and intense with his feeling for the country and its people. As he describes it, "Greece is the home of the gods; they may have died but their presence still makes itself felt."

I love what he says he looks for in his travel accommodations: "I like hotels which are second or third rate, which are clean but shabby, which have seen better days, which have an aroma of the past." Words to live by!

Story by Robert McKee

2010-07-07T09:00:00.000-04:00

I had to read this book for a screenwriting class, which was happening right around the same time that that awful movie Adaptation came out. In the movie Nicolas Cage goes to one of Robert McKee's screenwriting seminars (though it's not actually McKee; he's played by the actor Brian Cox) and manages to arrange a one-on-one with him. I'm not sure if that's why the teacher chose this book for the class—he specifically mentioned Adaptation when introducing the book—but it's actually a pretty great tool if you're trying to write a screenplay. I guess that's what I'm trying to say—even though the author is portrayed in a terrible movie (I realize a lot of people really like it—they're just misguided), his book is pretty useful for people who wish to avoid writing terrible movies.

The Books by Raymond Pettibon

2010-07-06T09:00:00.000-04:00

This book collects the zines and artists books that Raymond Pettibon made between 1978 and 1998, encompassing his early days drawing flyers and record covers for L.A. punk bands, to the recent past, by which time he'd been accepted into the art world, showing at galleries and world-renowned museums.

The book is pretty thick--about two inches.

Consisting entirely of black and white pen and ink drawings (with a few black and white xeroxes thrown in), Pettibon's imagery is dark and violent, but with a sick sense of humor. I've erred a little more on the conservative side with choosing images for this post (never know who might be looking at it...). Unfortunately the book is pretty hard to come by at this point but if you can get a copy of it I highly recommend it!

The Atlas by William T. Vollmann

2010-07-05T09:00:00.001-04:00

This is a collection of short vignettes that take place in every corner of the world, from Thailand to San Francisco to Bosnia to Cambodia, a sort of meandering travel journal of dissociated experiences. In Northern Canada he meets a woman being eaten alive by mosquitoes; in San Francisco he watches a prostitute build a crack pipe out of a broken car antenna and a Brillo pad. As in all the other books of his that I've read, he seeks out people living on the edges of society, finding beauty in ugliness.

The Third Man by Graham Greene

2010-06-21T09:00:00.001-04:00

This novella by Graham Greene was written with the sole purpose of being adapted into a screenplay. In the book's preface, Greene states that "a film depends on more than plot, on a certain measure of characterization, on mood and atmosphere; and these seem to me almost impossible to capture for the first time in the dull shorthand of a script." Which is an interesting observation, though I'm sure that there have been plenty of incredible films made since then without being written out in novel form first. Regardless, The Third Man is a classic film, full of suspense and intrigue and atmosphere, so I suppose Greene's methods worked for him. As a novel it is not Greene's strongest (it wasn't really intended to be a novel in the first place), but worth reading if you like the film (I'd start with that first though).

Ghost World by Daniel Clowes

2010-06-17T09:00:00.001-04:00

My introduction to Daniel Clowes was actually for a college assignment--one of my first college assignments, in fact. (I remember thinking something along the lines of "Man, art school is awesome...they make you read comic books.") I recall the teacher saying that he found it so remarkable that a middle aged man had captured the voices of these two teenage girls so convincingly.

It was probably one of the first comics of its kind that I'd read (other than maybe Evan Dorkin comics like Milk and Cheese or Dork, although that's still not quite the same type of storytelling).

While Ghost World is a bit more realistic than some of Clowes's other work, there are still some random bizarre details, like the girl with the giant goiter on her neck (more like taking over her whole face).

Another great detail is all the self-referential "Ghost World" graffiti around the town.

I kind of love how these girls are total assholes, even though they do grow up a bit by the end.

The White Album by Joan Didion

2010-06-16T09:00:00.001-04:00

I love Joan Didion. The White Album was the first of her books that I read and is definitely one that I should read again some day. This collection of essays touches on L.A. in the 60s, the Black Panther Party, a Doors recording session, prison meetings with Linda Kasabian, a former follower of Charles Manson (Didion had actually known Sharon Tate), Didion's own psychological issues, California politics, the John Paul Getty museum, second-wave feminism, traveling through Colombia, and so on. There's something about California in the 6os that is so fascinating, and Didion's spare and elegant prose style makes it all the more compelling.

Funeral Rites by Jean Genet

2010-06-15T09:00:00.000-04:00

This is the first and only book I've ever read by Jean Genet. I've been meaning to read A Thief's Journal for awhile now but for whatever reason never got around to it. I became particularly interested a number of years ago when one of my college classmates was assigned to do a paper on it and was so offended by the content that she asked the teacher for another assignment (and was denied).

After reading this I think I might have an inkling why (although at the same time it seems silly to make such a fuss over a little explicit gay sex). Both sensual and brutal, Funeral Rites follows Genet's grief for his lover Jean, killed in the Resistance during World War II, and his perverse attraction to the collaborator Riton. As the cover copy on a later edition states, it is a "dark meditation on the mirror images of love and hate, sex and death."

I love how the cover has no title or author--just this great photograph of Genet taken by Brassai. (I've included the spine in the above image as well).

Journals by Keith Haring

2010-06-14T09:00:00.000-04:00

This new edition of Keith Haring's Journals marks the 20th anniversary of Haring's death. After a few years working in publishing, the cynic in me imagines some editor looking through the backlist catalog and saying, hey, next year we can publish a fancy new edition of this book and call it a 20th anniversary edition and sell a lot more copies! Of course, the upside is the renewed attention to Haring's work that this brings about.

Anyway, it really is a beautiful package--the drawings on the front are debossed (that is, indented into the paper), which creates a lovely tactile sensation. As for the contents of the book, the journals span from 1977 to Haring's death in 1990. But they skip about quite a bit until 1986, when Haring began writing more regularly (1983 and 1984 only take up two entries and there are none for 1985). As a result, the bulk of the book covers the years when Haring was already famous. There's not much of a gradual rise to prominence--suddenly it's just there. I would have liked to read a little more about his early years in New York, before he was running around the world creating high profile murals and museum shows; at the same time, his voice does not change from beginning to end. His opinions and feelings seem unaffected by it all. Much of the entries read like a tedious cataloging of his shows as he travels the globe to create art, but are made interesting by his observations of people, politics, and art.

Here's one of the French flaps. You can see the indentations from the debossing all the way to the right.

One of Haring's early drawings from the late 70s. I really like this one, even though it's not indicative of his more well known style.

I love this picture, how he's literally painted himself into a corner.

An illustration from 1984, in Haring's classic style.

His illness is hardly mentioned at all in his journals. It is first brought up offhandedly when a dentist accosts him for not mentioning it before he begins to work on his mouth, and then again in September 1989 (five months before he died) when he says "In light of the new information I received last week about my health, I know I owe it to myself to think for myself for a change." That is about the most in-depth he goes in expressing any worries about his illness and mortality (though I imagine he must have had much more serious thoughts about this--just not on the page). He died incredibly young, and yet he had such a prolific career, despite its brevity. And yet, one has to wonder what might have been had he lived.

The Floating Opera and The End of the Road by John Barth

2010-06-07T14:00:00.000-04:00

This is a collection of John Barth's first two short novels. The Floating Opera is written from the perspective of the main character Todd Andrews, on the day he has decided to commit suicide. However, in the first pages it is disclosed that this day took place 16 years earlier, thus revealing that Todd did not end up commiting suicide after all. Despite taking all of the suspense out of it right away, you get to read about drunken sea captains, love triangles, legal disputes, and so on.

The End of the Road also involves a love triangle, but with a much darker outcome. It takes place on a college campus, but the academic setting is rather incidental to the plot. In fact, the whole plot is rather incidental to the philosophical themes that Barth is trying to tackle.

I read The End of the Road first, for a college class, and I recall preferring that one to The Floating Opera. But this is yet another instance where I'd be curious to go back and re-read each of them.

Des Constructions de Panneux Publicitaries Dessines pour une Ville Francaise by Nigel Peake

2010-05-25T09:00:00.002-04:00

I'm pretty excited about this new zine from Nigel Peake. The title translates to "Billboard constructions for a French town," and while there is no accompanying text or introduction, it seems to be a collection of line drawings of imagined signage in an imagined French town.

The concept and execution are fantastic. The drawings are copied onto pastel colored papers, with a solid black cover and stitched spine.

I especially love the more fanciful signs. I'd love to see a giant hat on the side of the road somewhere, in France or otherwise.

You can purchase a copy here.

Nine Ways to Disappear by Lilli Carre

2010-05-19T15:54:00.000-04:00

Another book by one of my favorite new comic artists, Lilli Carre, author of Tales of Woodsman Pete. This book is pretty tiny, about five inches square, which makes it extra adorable and lovely.

I love her drawing style, and the storytelling is strange and whimsical and weirdly funny. The stories in this book are exactly what the title describes: nine short vignettes, each about objects and people drifting out of sight.

From things flowing down a storm drain, to shrinking people, the stories and illustrations are beautiful and surreal. I probably read this all in one sitting, and the more I flip through it, the more I'd like to read it again.

The Long Fall by Walter Mosley

2010-05-17T13:54:00.001-04:00

I'd never read anything by Walter Mosley before, but I've lately been more and more interested in hardboiled crime fiction, and had been curious about this new series about an aging, hard-drinking, ex-boxer New York P.I. named Leonid McGill. McGill has spent most of his career working for criminals, involved in countless shady deals, wrongly setting up innocent people, taking bribes from hitmen, and so on. Now he wants to change "from crooked to slightly bent." Flawed characters are always more interesting than "good people," so the bad guy as the hero angle works pretty nicely. I wouldn't call it a masterpiece but I enjoyed the book and look forward to the second in the series, Known to Evil.

We're Desperate: The Punk Rock Photography of Jim Jocoy

2010-05-12T09:00:00.001-04:00

This is a collection of photographs of punks. Taken in the late 70s in San Francisco and Los Angeles, they serve as a great portrait of the era--the characters, the venues and hang-out spots, and the style. Or many styles, maybe. The great thing about punk in the late 70s (okay, not like I was actually there) was that there really were no rules, no cookie cutter music conventions, no uniforms. And so the looks are wildly different, totally original and outrageous, from thrift store duds to plastic bags to impeccable suits. I also love how the musicians and artists are given the same treatment as the fans--really, they were all fans. But unless you know them by sight, you can't tell Alice Bag or Tomata DuPlenty from the random chick with the zebra print coat (and maybe she was in a band too, who knows).

Another great thing about the book is how you get to glimpse into the bathrooms and dark graffiti-covered corners and alleyways of all the storied punk venues you see on flyers. Where else would you get to see those places?

I love the random flotsam on his shirt--the button, the photo attached with masking tape, the spraypainted circle, the bleach spots. It's like a little collage.

The mirrors do great things to these photos. It feels like a funhouse or something.

The legendary Claude Bessy.

How awesome is John Waters? It's kind of perfect that he's standing next to a toilet. (Maybe that's on purpose.)

So not all of the outfits in the book are anything you'd want to actually wear. W-T-F? (Note that I never use silly abbreviations like that. This is what this lady's get-up has done to me.)

P.S. Dave would like me to mention that this is ~~technically~~ his book.

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

2010-05-11T09:00:00.000-04:00

Thomas Pynchon's latest novel is a bit of a departure for him. For one thing, it's only 384 pages--practically a short story. Set in California in the early 70s--the seedy, LSD-laced, post-Manson era--it's written as a noir detective novel, starring a hippie P.I. named Doc Sportello. The writing is recognizably Pynchon's, with its countless subplots and counterplots, though it is on the whole much more casually readable than most of his work. Parts of it reminded me a lot of The Crying of Lot 49, stylistically.

Overall, it's not one of my favorites of his. I think I might have overhyped it in my mind. I wanted to love it--the premise sounded so good--but while I found it enjoyable it was also somewhat forgettable.

The Cat Inside by William S. Burroughs

2010-05-10T09:00:00.000-04:00

I saw this one on a shelf at work. I love the collage style cover. I also love that it's a book about cats by William S. Burroughs. This series of prose poems, written when Burroughs was in his early 70s, shows a gentler side of the author of Junkie and Naked Lunch, as he reminisces about the many cats he has known, and ponders man's relationship to cats. It's a rather slim volume--I read it in a sitting.

Pulp by Charles Bukowski

2010-05-05T14:17:00.000-04:00

This is Bukowski's last novel, but the first one that I read. I remember seeing it out on a table at The Strand and being drawn to the striking cover. I'd heard of Charles Bukowski, though I didn't know much about him, but I decided to check it out.

Pulp is a strange introduction to his work—definitely not characteristic of the bulk of his novels and stories. It's more of an homage to classic detective fiction like Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, with quite a few literary references—the main character, Nick Belane, is asked to find the author Celine, whom Bukowski has called "the greatest writer of the last 2,000 years"; he's also hired by a man named John Barton to find the Red Sparrow (undoubtedly a salute to his Black Sparrow publisher John Martin), and visited by two thugs named Dante and Fante (after Dante Alighieri and John Fante). Bukowski died shortly after writing this book so perhaps this was his idea of a farewell and salute to his literary heroes.

I don't actually remember much about reading it but I certainly liked it enough to keep reading more of his books. But maybe it's not generally the best place to start.

Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris

2010-05-04T09:00:00.001-04:00

The five movies nominated for Best Picture of 1967 were Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, and Dr. Dolittle. Pictures at a Revolution profiles each of them from conception to release and beyond, providing not only the stories of the making of each individual film, but a broader picture of Hollywood in the 60s, not to mention the overall culture and atmosphere of the era. That year marked a kind of turning point for American film-making, heralding the coming decade of the 70s--and some of the best movies to ever have come out of the Hollywood system. The five nominees nicely represent both the new and the old, the generational divide sharply on display.

The book provides a fascinating if not exhausting look at how hard it is to get a film produced, as well as the rather arbitrary forming of the cultural landscape and icons of the day. At one point Bonnie and Clyde was to be directed by Jean-Luc Godard, who wanted to film it in New Jersey in the middle of winter with Elliott Gould starring as Clyde Barrow. (I actually kind of wish that had come to fruition.)

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

2010-05-02T17:02:00.004-04:00

This is Nabokov's memoir, an impressionistic tale of his youth—or rather, his remembrance of youth—in an aristocratic family living in Saint Petersburg and their country estate before the Russian Revolution. His family escaped from the Bolsheviks in 1918, with the book touching lightly on his European exile during the 1920s and 30s and ending with this departure for the U.S. in 1940.

The inside pages have this great map of the Nabokov estate, with a drawing of a butterfly in the upper left (obscured by the bookplate left on by a former owner).

Maigret S'Amuse and Maigrez Chez le Coroner by Georges Simenon

2010-04-29T09:00:00.000-04:00

I recently spotted this pair of French editions of two Inspector Maigret novels by Georges Simenon, and even though I don't know the language I loved the cover art, not to mention the coordinating aspect, so much that I couldn't help buying them. The iconic silhouette of the pipe, the man on the back, the rings of smoke. Maybe I'll teach myself French so I can read them. (Probably not.)

If you open the book and lay it face down it looks like Maigret is smoking his pipe. Pretty awesome.

A Nest of Ninnies by John Ashbery & James Schuyler

2010-04-28T09:00:00.001-04:00

I saw this book sitting out on a table at the Montague Book Mill in Western Massachusetts and was immediately intrigued by the fact that it was a novel written by two New York school poets. Then when I realized that the cover was designed by Joe Brainard, I was sold. The back of the book divulged nothing about the plot, but I didn't let that deter me. Even when the lady at the register told me the book wasn't "nearly as fun as you want it to be," I still bought it.

Written by Ashbery and Schuyler one sentence at a time over a number of years, this supposedly comic novel explores the pretensions of the suburban upper middle class--in this case, in Westchester County. More or less plotless, not too much happens beyond these people going out and eating and drinking and talking. I guess the next time a salesperson tries to deter me from actually making a purchase, I'll listen. At least it has an awesome cover!

Blackstock's Collections by Gregory L. Blackstock

2010-04-27T09:00:00.001-04:00

This is a collection of drawings by a retired dishwasher from Seattle, known for playing his accordion around town, who is also an artistic savant. His work consists of detailed drawings of objects, animals, and vegetables, each page devoted to the many varieties of each item.

From shoes (on the back),

to insects,

to tools, to plants, knots, instruments, fish, and the like, Blackstock's incredible undertaking of cataloging the minutiae of everyday objects is reminiscent of old field guides or biology books. His "visual lists" are not necessarily interesting simply because he is autistic, nor is his autism the driving force of his work--the drawings have a simple beauty all their own, and the dictionary-like quality is also kind of appealing.

The inside cover and flaps on each side feature handwritten soup recipes, of all things. I'm not sure how I feel about pineapple and cream of peach soup, but I like the sentiment all the same.

Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun

2010-04-26T09:00:00.001-04:00

Set in the Bronx in the 80s, this debut novel is centered around Joon-Mee, a 12-year-old Korean-American girl who leaves her troubled family for a life on the streets. Over the next six years she lives in a homeless shelter, abandoned buildings and squats, finds work as an escort, a dancer, and an Avon lady, falls prey to drug addiction and petty crime, and tries to turn it all around. It's a bit depressing and bleak, but in a wholly compelling way. I really loved this book.

The book's small size--what I've found to be the "precious literary gem" size that publishers use when they want to speak to a certain audience--along with the spare understated design, lends it a reserved, elegant quality. (The gem size works!) And for some reason I love the hints of buildings peeking out at the top.

The Adventures of Sock Monkey by Tony Millionaire

2010-04-19T09:00:00.000-04:00

Tony Millionaire is one of my favorite comics artists. Perhaps best known for the darkly comic and violent Maakies, about a drunken monkey named Uncle Gabby and an even drunker crow, aptly named Drinky Crow, he also has drawn several comics for children, adapting his Maakies characters into lovable stuffed creatures. There is no violence or suicide or venereal disease (unlike in Maakies). But there is still something a bit subtly unsettling about The Adventures of Sock Monkey, and I think I might like them even more for that.

Millionaire drew much of his income in his early years from drawing people's houses, which shows in his work. There are always these incredibly detailed opening shots of beautiful Victorian homes.

He also has a propensity for drawing ships. Quite appropriately, he recently illustrated the cover of Moby Dick for the Penguin Graphic Classics series, and even though I'm not that interested in that book I am thinking about getting this poster.

Though his name in this book is Mr. Crow (not Drinky Crow), he does indeed love a good flask of whiskey. Again--not sure if these are really for children or not. But if there ever was a more poetic journey into drunkenness, I haven't seen it.

That might be one of the best aspects of the writing--a couple of toys with an old-fashioned and lyrical vocabulary. "A thousand pardons, sahib."

This page is a nice example of some of the situations Uncle Gabby and Mr. Crow tend to get themselves into--they mean well, but sometimes don't have a complete understanding of their surroundings. And I love that the little figures know the Latin for "Rodent-eating bat." And that the mouse is named Smalls.

This is really one of my favorite comics series!

Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen

2010-04-15T09:00:00.000-04:00

Just a couple of weeks ago I noticed some very familiar-looking scenes on the Google home page and realized they depicted several of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales. It turns out April 2 was Andersen's 205th birthday, and by a nice coincidence I happened to have been reading his fairy tales that same week.

As for the book itself, it's yet another one of Penguin's deluxe classics. I grabbed it off a shelf at work mostly because of the cover design--I love the illustrations.

The introduction to the book is one of the better ones I've read--it actually doesn't give away major plot points and sheds a lot of insight into Andersen's psyche, what drove him to write the stories he did.

Much like the Grimms' fairy tales, these translations are a bit darker and more violent than the more commonly told versions today. The little mermaid's tongue is cut out in exchange for her legs (which feel like sharp pins every time she walks on them). And I don't even want to tell you the real story of "The Red Shoes" (the basis for the 1948 movie about ballerinas).

Maybe the best part of the book is the paper cutouts (made by Andersen himself) accompanying each story. Above is "The Snow Queen" (perhaps my favorite of the fairy tales)

and here is "The Red Shoes."

Yeti Seven

2010-04-13T09:00:00.000-04:00

I already wrote about the sixth issue of Yeti magazine, and I'm happy to say that the seventh issue is just as good, if not better. Featured inside are interviews with comic artist Jim Woodring, San Francisco-based bands the Nodzzz (by way of New Jersey) and the Wooden Shjips, book cover designs by Joe Brainard, a rare manuscript by Abner Jay, and more. Plus, the cover art is by Mingering Mike (apparently it's supposed to be President Obama as a boxer).

One of the more fascinating articles is about Nancy Dupree (illustrated above), a Rochester music teacher who recorded her students singing original songs about James Brown, Martin Luther King, civil rights, and other issues that were relevant to them. (At the time it was released on vinyl as Ghetto Reality, and can be purchased here on CD or mp3 from Smithsonian Folkways.)

And I couldn't resist including this, even though it's actually an ad found towards the end of the issue. But maybe the best ad ever.

Conquest of the Useless by Werner Herzog

2010-04-12T09:00:00.001-04:00

First published in English last year, this is a diary kept by Werner Herzog during the making of his 1982 film Fitzcarraldo. The production of this film is legendary (it involved moving a 320-ton steamship over a mountain without the use of special effects), notoriously plagued with myriad troubles involving actors abandoning the project, Klaus Kinski's infamously difficult behavior (allegedly the Indians offered to kill him), grueling conditions in the jungle, and of course the task of moving a 320-ton steam ship over a mountain.

The text on the back (see above) is fairly indicative of the tone of the book: at once beautiful and bleak, somewhat hallucinatory and feverish. One of my favorite entries, hilariously terse, is from July 20, 1979: "San Francisco. Emptiness." Even July 13, 1980, "a beautiful, fresh, sunny morning," ends in tragedy when one of two newly hatched chicks drowns in a saucer containing "only a couple millimeters of water," the other one getting its leg and a piece of its stomach bit off by a "murderous" albino rabbit. "A sense of desolation was tearing me up inside, like termites in a fallen tree trunk." Oh, Werner, how I love your somber observations on the world. I'm reminded of a voiceover in the 2005 documentary Grizzly Man: "I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder."

Overall, though, the point of Conquest of the Useless is the attainment of a dream in the face of impossibility. So it kind of has a positive moral.

On a Wave by Thad Ziolkowski

2010-04-05T09:00:00.000-04:00

Thad Ziolkowski was my writing teacher during my freshman and senior years of college. He could sometimes be a bit harsh in his criticism but I learned more about writing in those two years than any other time in my life.

This book is a memoir of his adolescence, of the disintegration of his family, and growing up in Florida in the 70s. But mostly it's about his passion for and obsession with surfing. I remember reading it in two or three days--it was totally engrossing, and not just because I was reading about someone I knew. A Google search reveals that he was a Guggenheim fellow in 2008, which he used to work on a novel. I look forward to reading it when it is published.