Hauling the rug

It’s the only comic book (American Splendor #2) I bother keeping in one of those archival sleeve things. There was an epic story in it about Harvey and two friends just hanging out one night. It goes on for pages and pages, and the only thing that really happens is that they move a rug from one guy’s house to another guy’s house. The guys are all at loose ends–one’s a Vietnam vet who just got fired from his job, one has been unemployed for years. And then there’s Harvey with his “flunky government job” as a file clerk. They haul the rug—which is waterlogged and smelly from being left in the rain—all the way across town and up to the guy’s apartment. But then he decides it was a mistake, and they have to haul it out again, to his back porch. It’s a perfect story about nothing, and everything, and it started to give me ideas about autobiography. You don’t need to engineer some grand sprawling thematically dense narrative. If you write honestly about everyday life, all that stuff will automatically be there.

—Alison Bechdel on Harvey Pekar

THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT!

I HAVEN'T HAD TIME TO SCRUTINIZE ENTERTAINMENT WAIT THIS IS ALL CAPS——— KEEP GOING? SURE! ———I HAVEN'T HAD TIME TO SCRUTINIZE ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY'S 'NEW CLASSICS' LIST BUT ANY LIST THAT HAS ALISON BECHDEL'S FUN HOME IS AT LEAST 1/100TH A-OK IN MY BOOK!!

I'M SURE I'VE USED THAT HEADLINE BEFORE

Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Monday, July 23

I keep saying "woah" while reading this piece on Sontag by Eliot Weinberger.

It is a Hollywood cliché that a beautiful actress needs an element of ugliness to become a great star, and one might say that a genius needs an element of stupidity, or something wrong, to become a great imaginative writer. Sartre certainly had his. But Sontag seems to have had nothing stupid about her at all. Arguably the most important American literary figure or force of the last forty years, she may ultimately belong more to literary history than to literature.

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Our "Title Bouts" are over, but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy a recent submission from the great Poundstone. Dig in!

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"It’s sort of like a surrealist game." —Alison Bechdel on web research (what a beautiful way of thinking about it! I am always playing surrealist games these days!)

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Love this poem: My old teacher Bruce Smith's "Devotion: Baseball" is featured in the summer issue of Poetry.