Batmanboros

From the latest issue of Batman Inc.

(Via Douglas.)

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.

Polyp Asterios

Over the weekend, David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for the best graphic novel of last year. Here's the citation:

Mazzucchelli’s monolith is a beautifully executed love story, a smart and playful treatise on aesthetics, a perfectly unified work whose every formal element, down to the stitching on its spine, serves its themes. No wonder the main character is an architect finding his way back to his Ithaca and his Penelope: “Asterios Polyp” is an odyssey of design as well as writing and art and cartooning. Steeped in classicism and wholly modern, it’s a pleasure to read, and maybe even more of a pleasure to contemplate and discuss.

Douglas Wolk, Joel Rose, and I were the judges; what a treat! We read some amazing books, not all of which could even make it onto our shortlist. (The eclectic list of finalists included Luba, Footnotes in Gaza, the fifth Scott Pilgrim installment, and Gogo Monster.)

* * *

Part 2 of this post is kind of a mind-blower. Before Asterios Polyp, what I knew about Mazzucchelli was that he was one of two artists who worked on the (excellent) graphic novel adaptation of Paul Auster's City of Glass. I had my students look at the first few pages of the book (the adaptation) on Thursday, and mentioned that D.M. had recently published his masterpiece. I wrote the title on the board: "ASTERIOS POLYP."

As we were picking up our things at the end of class, one student remarked: "That looks like 'Auster, Paul.'"

!!!

Launch my Lady Gaga station!

I.
This was during Gaga’s “hair-bow” phase—that would be pre-hair-hat and pre-hair-telephone—and when I asked about the bow’s whereabouts, she rested her head on a pillow of her hands and said, “She’s sleeping.” —"Growing Up Gaga," Vanessa Grigordias, New York


II.
I’m just going to go ahead and pronounce the “Telephone” video by LADY GAGA (born 1986) and Beyoncé the most impressive avant-garde film of the year: nine and a half minutes of glorious, relentless WTF, all the star-power and spectacle and verfremdungseffekt of a Matthew Barney movie with zero tolerance for boringness. —Douglas Wolk, HiLobrow

Love and Polyps

This year's Los Angeles Times Book Prize has a new category this year: the graphic novel! I was a judge, along with Douglas Wolk and Joel Rose. It was fun! I love how different these books are from each other...

Here are the finalists:

• Gilbert Hernandez, Luba (A Love and Rockets Book) (Fantagraphics Books)
• Taiyo Matsumoto, GoGo Monster (VIZ Media)
• David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp (Pantheon)
• Bryan Lee O’Malley, Scott Pilgrim, Vol. 5: Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe (Oni Press)
• Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Co., LLC)

(Complete list of all categories here.)

Douglas points out some nice notices already about our list...check out this one to see the covers of the books in question.

When worlds collide

Lev Grossman comments on a Douglas Wolk piece.

Loneliness and beauty

I.



(From Lauren)

II. Wolk vs. Kant (in five minutes)

Alphabetical order

Dzyd Paul on George Herter in the NYTBR:

Herter’s magnum opus, though, was “Bull Cook,” a wild mix of recipes, unsourced claims and unhinged philosophy that went through at least 15 editions between 1960 and 1970. Herter claimed one million copies sold; Brown guesses it was closer to 100,000. Either number is impressive, and the wild curveball of the book’s opening lines remains unmatched in American literature: “I will start with meats, fish, eggs, soups and sauces, sandwiches, vegetables, the art of French frying, desserts, how to dress game, how to properly sharpen a knife, how to make wines and beer, how to make French soap and also what to do in case of hydrogen or cobalt bomb attack, keeping as much in alphabetical order as possible.”

Also in the NYTBR: Dzyd Douglas has the lowdown on some recent comics...

(...which reminds me, I need to read Incognegro!)

Graphic Mondays

Dzyd Wayne has a new column up at Coilhouse, called From the Continental Shelf, in which he
discusses his favorite European Comics. This installment features Dylan Dog...Dzyd Douglas has writes in the Times on the offerings from Los Bros Hernandez, some of which have crossed my desk (and one of which I've started and am enjoying). I approve of the usage of "Zeppo":

“Amor y Cohetes,” the final volume of seven collecting the first (1982-1996) “Love and Rockets” series, is a gallimaufry of 42 short pieces that don’t quite belong to either Jaime’s Maggie-and-Hopey continuity or Gilbert’s tales of the inhabitants of Palomar, aside from a pair of tales in which the brothers tackle each other’s characters. (There are also a few stories by Mario Hernandez, the Zeppo of the family.)

...Also in the NYT, a front-page piece on Feiffer's Explainers...This is not comics, but while we're reading the Book Review, the penultimate and antepenultimate sentences of David Thomson's take on an Astaire bio seems specifically designed to drive B. Kite bonkers:

Astaire is never going to be “rescued” for a trashy age by the revelation of a sordid private life. At the same time, his terrifying concentration and his refusal to acknowledge certain appetites lead to a conclusion seldom reached about performers in ballet or other musical forms: Fred Astaire was not human, not sexual, not sexed. But in his total disregard of the hardship and squalor of the ’30s, he let it be known that art need have nothing to do with life. That’s where “Citizen Kane” betrays itself. It is heavy-handedly about “America.” “Top Hat” and the others are strolls through Arcadia.

Because it is bitter, and because it is my art

Dzyd Douglas on Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko (in the NYT):

The portrait that emerges here is of an artist whose principles have ossified into bitter perversity. Bell relates stories of Ditko’s refusing to draw vampires because Objectivism rejects the super­natural; quitting a series because of a dispute over coloring production; and using a priceless old page of his original artwork as a cutting board.

Uke-box hero

Dzyd Douglas "Eisner" Wolk on the joys of the uke, with George Formby and Stephin Merritt footage.

(Via Dzyd Jen)

Weekend Table-Talk for July 26–27, 2008

Congratulations to Dzyd Douglas, whose Reading Comics has won the Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Book!...Where did July go?...Not me...Atmospheric disturbances: Ridiculously great over-the-top cloud formation in this photo by Brit in Brooklyn...Best correction (in the Sunday NYTBR):

Correction: July 27, 2008
An illustration with the Up Front column last Sunday was published in error. The Howard Hampton it depicts is the leader of the New Democratic Party of Ontario, not the reviewer with the same name who was profiled in the column.

This week's review features a review of Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them, by Charles Taylor...not that Charles Taylor!...Too high, too far, too soon? You decide! Mandy Moore's cover of "The Whole of the Moon" (via Whatever)...Dzyd Rachel in the Times on peope who don't want to leave town once college is over. Best quote, from a guy who graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in West African film and literature: “That’s pretty much saying: no jobs ever”...

Genius! Notes on the new Believer

From Dzyd Brandon's "A Blaze in the North American Sky," in the new Believer music issue:

A little over a year ago I went to the Norwegian city of Trondheim to attend a mostly indie rock, non–heavy metal festival so I could meet Snorre Ruch, a.k.a. Blackthorn, a black-metal musician likely best known in for his connection to the murder of another black metaller, Øystein Aarseth, a.k.a. Euronymous, on August 10, 1993.

Now that's a lede!

The cover is genius (can't explain it here), the CD (masterminded by Ross Simonini) is quite different from that of previous years but also genius in its own way, there are articles that are genius, it is an embarrassment of riches (Dzyd Douglas on "A review of the only known mechanically reproduced copy of a really great record"; Ange Mlinko! Haruki Murakami?!! Dzyd Paul on music and...dentistry??), I am perhaps overusing the word genius but last night I read the Barthelme story "The Genius" and hence that is our theme today! (Two things by Rick Moody! John Adamian's notes on liner notes! Lavinia Greenlaw......interview with Fugazi dude...) MORE!

Table-talk for April 18, 2008

Good morning! It is April 18, 2008! We are in New York City!



[...]



Oh I'm sorry—I thought I was talking to Duncan!

I. At the L.A. Times, Scott Timberg talks to me and two other editor-novelists...

NEW YORK—Is it possible to lead a dedicated literary life in the billionaire-filled, media-crazed New York of today? To be heedless of the material world as you burrow into novels and ideas the way the old Partisan Review gang did in the '40s and '50s, to come up with notions that rock the intellectual landscape? And if so, who exactly is still paying attention?

Those are questions three reasonably young men are asking now in much-awaited first novels that emerge over the next few weeks.

As a friend suggested, maybe a fact-checker made him slip "reasonably" in there....

II. Free Godzilla at the Guardian! (Via Dzyd Sam.)

III. Team Dizzies Member Izzy has a diverting piece on the longest poem in the world (or is it?), over at poetryfoundation.org. (Check out the cool illo as well.)

They came up with the idea in their 2003 self-help parody, This Book Will Change Your Life, which offers a self-improvement exercise for every day of the year. As Carey explained, "Helping to write the longest poem in the world was one of the tasks. It naturally seemed best suited to the web." They put the poem on their site in 2003, instructing their webmaster to use the line "Mercy, cried the popinjay to the Pope"—picked specifically because it was hard to follow.

[...]I think it's far to say that I've read more of "The World's Longest Poem" than anyone. In the interest of research, I scrolled through 500 pages on my Internet browser. I could fit 19 lines on a page, so I moved in units of nineteen, noting the last line on every page. When I gave up several hours later, I'd gotten about halfway through and counted 9,500 lines. I'd seen several themes develop: The antagonistic relationship between the popinjay and the Pope, recurring bits about badgers and penguins, various teenagers declaring their love, various teenagers abusing their classmates, a lot about soap (especially on a rope), and a running gag of declaring the poem over. I'd identified lyrics from R.E.M., the Pogues, George Michael, Public Enemy, Belle and Sebastian, and the entire Monty Python song "Every Sperm is Sacred." And I'd discovered that, like all open Internet forums, the content eventually turned dark, freakish, and threatening. I went to bed shortly after reading line 9,500 and had disturbing popinjay dreams.

IV. Levi's been blogging from London....Douglas is nominated for an Eisner for Reading Comics....and after protracted negotiations with ed-park.com, Personal Days got its own Facebook page!

Portland, Part 2

Walking around yesterday I saw a copy of Wilamette Week, the free weekly here in town—with Dizzyhead Douglas peering from the cover!

Just noticed that Small Beer's Gavin Grant is blogging at Bookslut! (And—just saw this—he links to my Gibson review!)

Am going to go outside now! It's remarkably overcast here in Portland!

Knock it off

Somehow I never tire of these articles about counterfeit Chinese Harry Potter books.

These include “Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Relative Prince,” a creation whose name in Chinese closely resembles the title of the genuine sixth book by Ms. Rowling, as well as pure inventions that include “Harry Potter and the Hiking Dragon,” “Harry Potter and the Chinese Empire,” “Harry Potter and the Young Heroes,” “Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon,” and “Harry Potter and the Big Funnel.”

Some borrow little more than the names of Ms. Rowling’s characters, lifting plots from other well-known authors, like J. R. R. Tolkien, or placing the famously British protagonist in plots lifted from well-known kung-fu epics and introducing new characters from Chinese literary classics like “Journey to the West.”

This reminds me of the way Darger had his Vivian Girls meet characters from The Wizard of Oz and other books. I'm also reminded of this bit in Dizzyhead Douglas's excellent Reading Comics, re the early success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:

Within months, comics stores' shelves were flooded with knockoffs and parodies and parodies of knockoffs—Adolescent Radioactive Black-Belt Hamsters, Aristocratic Xtraterrestrial Time-Traveling Thieves, Pre-Teen Dirty-Gene Kung-Fu Kangaroos (I swear I'm not making this up)...

* * *

In other news: Woah, the reading tonight has been written up at this cool blog called NYTimes.com!

And—New York mag likes the New-York Ghost, calling it "a wonder of both style and substance"!

Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Sunday, July 22

From the L.A. Times: "Wolk's close reading of the drawing style of Jaime Hernandez is a work of art in itself." (N.B., Wolk's Reading Comics features his great piece on Dave Sim's Cerebus, originally seen in ye olde Believer.) (There's a nice review in the Globe and Mail, too.)

* * *

In other graphic novel news—also in the LAT: I take a look at a g.n. that (alas) misses the mark. (UPDATE: Link fixed.)

* * *

"Korean emotional blitzkrieg": Atkinson on Bong Joon-ho's The Host.

Reading Comics, Thinking about Harry

Dizzyhead Douglas's new book, Reading Comics, is a must for anyone (Chrita? Singer?) who takes the medium seriously—for example, now I'm going to be hyperconscious that I use "medium" instead of "genre" when talking about comics!

I dig the premise (or one of the premises): That the Golden Age of comics is...right now.

Largehearted Boy has his soundtrack and many useful links up. And here's a great interview our own Chrita conducted with him a while back.

* * *

I talked to Scott Timberg of the L.A. Times about what makes the Harry Potter books so appealing to adults. (I'm wedged between Lee Siegel and Laura Miller.)

So, Park, continued, we have the kind of fantasy people typically harbor: "I am special, I come from great, even legendary forebears, everyone is concerned with my well-being / life, and perhaps even secretly worships me."

Just for fun, here are my previous musings on the Potteriad—film reviews (from the PTSNBN) of the Chamber and Goblet adaptations.

Dizzies Newsfeeds™

Over at the L.A. Times, Dizzyhead Dennis looks at two of my favorite recent Japanese movies, Linda Linda Linda and (all-time Dizzies fave?) The Taste of Tea. To my great relief, it looks like he enjoyed both of them.

At Salon, (d)Izzy Grinspan's article about the performance art aspect of trashing your wedding dress draws dozens of letters...as did the excerpt from Douglas's new book, Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean...(On the other hand, a grand total of five people chimed in on my Ian McEwan review!)....Jenny D has news about her novel, musings on George Herbert's "The Temple," and a preview of an excellent upcoming Luc Sante piece. And at Weekend Stubble, Paul looks at the future of bookselling. (After you get depressed by that, watch the Conchords video on his blog to cheer up.)...In the Times: “We’ve never seen this guy,” Mr. Voorsanger said, speaking of the imaginary client as if he were real—and elusive. “He refuses to see us. He just writes us letters and communicates through e-mails. He said he was enormously moved by Cormac McCarthy’s new book, ‘The Road,’ in which everything is black. Chip Kidd did the cover.”...In the latest Modern Painters I was reading a piece by Mike Atkinson about CGI and was bowled over when he quoted my immortal Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow review...that really was a good movie, wasn't it? I mean for what it was?....A blurb on the front page of the acoustic version of Friday's NYT said A.O. Scott thinks Ratatouille is one of the best portraits of the artist put onscreen—does he say that in the review?!...RIP Edward Yang..."In the age of the iPod, do the Beatles still matter?" Umm...Brian Eno is great....So is Can—in theory! (Via Dennis)....

TECH NOTES: If you double click in the space between two words, both words will be selected.

The Year of the Cat

Via Paper Thin Walls, a great Frog Eyes tune to download, Dizzyhead Douglas's brief appreciation of the Huxtables, and a nudge to check out The Onion's latest "Random Rules," in which Chuck Klosterman hits shuffle and comments on whatever comes up. (Interested parties could also check out Joshua Clover's iPod shuffle essay in one of the old issues of the PTSNBN.)

Lisa Loeb, "Stay"
CK: This is, of course, on the Reality Bites soundtrack. I was always a fan of Lisa Loeb, particularly because you kind of get the impression she sang every song either about or to her cats. They seem to be the driving force in most of her creative process.