Los Angeles Times Book Award b/w "On Baseball"

I. The Los Angeles Times Book Award finalists have been announced! Fiction, biography, blah de blah...what you're really wondering is: Which artists are in the running for best graphic novel?! (Once again, I had the honor to judge, along with Douglas Wolk and Joel Rose.)

Here is the tantalizing list:

Graphic Novel
Adam Hines, "Duncan the Wonder Dog: Show One" (Adhouse Books)
Dash Shaw, "Bodyworld" (Pantheon)
Karl Stevens, "The Lodger" (KSA Publishing)
C. Tyler, "You'll Never Know, Book Two: Collateral Damage" (Fantagraphics)
Jim Woodring, "Weathercraft" (Fantagraphics)

Who will win? You need to wait till April 29...

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(I might post, later, some thoughts on other really strong titles...or maybe just the names...there was a lot of good stuff...)



II. Poets Jane Yeh and H.L. Hix are featured on the site Like Starlings, going mano a mano, poetry-style! Here is the first part of her new poem, "On Baseball":

My mechanics are almost entirely self-taught.
Hawking and strutting, I hit my spots.

Nobody talks to me, they are all afraid.

The nature of perfection is half fluke, half
Fiction, like the mighty appaloosa

That haunts the hometown lake. I'm from one of those states
That never got finished, that just sort of unravelled, like the sound

Speed makes as it blows right past you.

(Jane is a die-hard Yankees fan.)

Now I remember...

...why I called the column "Astral Weeks"!



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An archive of sorts is available at the L.A. Times site; there are numerous omissions, alas.

Some of my favorite columns concerned a Charles Fort biography; an 1881 New Zealand novel; a discursus on the Ouroboros; secret histories; structural vertigo in Catherynne M. Valente; Joe Haldeman; wow I wrote a lot of columns!; repetition (via Robert Silverberg and Osamu Tezuka); Christopher Miller's overlooked PKD takeoff, The Cardboard Universe; the forgotten pulp writer/physician Miles J. Breuer; Dash Shaw's Bodyworld; a DeLillo rarity; D&D stories; John Crowley (and again).

And then I wrote some things that could only loosely be called "columns": a cento; a J.G. Ballard abecedary; a two-part meditation on short stories; notes (and notes on notes). Editors David Ulin and Nick Owchar were always willing to go with these somewhat unorthodox formats—amazing!

Megalopolitan Diary, or A Dash Shaw catchup kit (for you and for me):

I reviewed Dash Shaw's great graphic novel Bodyworld on Sunday—here is some stray Shavian stuff!

I. A link to his IFC series The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century. (The storyboards, and other stories, including one of particular interest to "Dizzyheads," are collected in last year's book of the same title.)

(Via Eric Reynolds)

II. Poster for screening of Stanley Milgram's shocking Obedience:

(Via L.G. Thos.)

III. Douglas Wolk reviews Bodyworld (NYT)—an important point about the layout!:

The first sign that “BodyWorld” doesn’t play by the rules is that the book’s spine is at its top. The overall motion of Shaw’s story becomes a downward scroll rather than a rightward stroll. The climax of that slow 380-page dive is a remarkable sequence toward the end — seven pages devoted to a single gigantic panel that pulls the reader’s perspective downward across the architectural landscape of a future megalopolis, after which the movement of the story bounces back up into the stars. This is a disorienting, distracting funhouse of a book: there are long hallucinatory passages, near-abstract images, drawings overlaid on one another until they’re nearly incomprehensible.

IV. I might have posted this before—trailer to The Ruined Cast:

"The Ruined Cast" / Dash Shaw - demo teaser from Howard Gertler on Vimeo.

"An irony-free synaesthetic experience"

My latest Astral Weeks column at the L.A. Times looks at Dash Shaw's phenomenal Bodyworld:

Though Panther upends the social order, disastrously, in his quest to pin down the plant's psychotropic qualities, he wears his heart on his sleeve. "I just want to meet a nice girl who's into 'Tarnsman of Gor' and settle down," he explains, with helpless, hilarious sincerity. In one of many bravura backstories, we learn that a once-suicidal Panther fell into his line of work thanks in part to his aching response to some Viagra spam; ignoring its meticulously mangled language, he discerns a painful truth about his lack of bedroom prowess.

Graphic Fridays

I.
The smoke from Krazy Kat's chimney.

II.
Just discovered: Dash Shaw's BodyWorld.

"They have a team of interns who screen blogs for information regarding possible previously undiscovered or untested plant life."

III.
The most heartbreaking Pinakothek yet.

IV. Another day, another (almost) Ouroboros?