I have a fantasy baseball team for the first time in eight years.  I’m thinking this was a very smart choice.  I got this guy in a very late round.

Oliver Perez has a lot of charisma and would be a first round pick if that were a fantasy baseball category.  That and hopping over foul lines.  I would give him a multi-million dollar endorsement contract if I owned a large corporation, even in a down economy.

I also have this guy from the Cardinals in my outfield. He hits lots of homeruns but here’s a video of him pitching.

I just got the first two books from DoubleCross Press’s Single Sheet Series.  They’re awesome.  Double Cross is a new press that has emerged from the depths of MC Hyland.  She makes all of the books herself on the letterpress monsters at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts.  The Single Sheet Series is a set of books, each made from a single sheet of paper (which does not mean a single page).  The first two are  I go by Edgar Huntly now by Joshua Marie Wilkinson and Sarah Green’s Hotel Winter. With just these first two, MC is putting on a display of what you can make when you make books by hand.  And Wilkinson’s book even includes a not-so-handy subway map (New York in the case of my copy).

Go subscribe to the Single Sheet Series here. $35 is a bargain for the work and fancy paper that go into this little books.

MC and I will be working on a project together later this year, which I’m getting excited about looking at what she can do with a letterpress.

Mark Leidner is funny – in the real and important sense.  I guess I haven’t checked in on his blog enough recently, because I went on earlier this week and it’s full of these amazing animations of twee-looking anime characters “reading” his poems in places like driveways and Thunderdome-looking arenas. (He made them using Xtranormal, and you can too!)  This is the coolest thing I’ve seen on a blog in a long time.  Go over and watch every one of his animations.

Mark Leidner leaves his home early in the morning to give a reading

Then go buy his chapbook The Night of 1,000 Murders from Factory Hollow.  It’s funny like Mark.

And then go read his poems in the new Action,Yes.

Recently, I’ve been writing a book on the train.  It feels good to be creating something purely textual; I feel like it’s been a while since I’ve done something that’s not in some way image-driven.  But, before I was working on this book, I had been doing movie still sketches on the train in the evenings – which I think I’ll get back to once this draft of the book is done. I drew them straight in ink, and it was a good practice in overcoming my hesitation and preciousness when drawing (although I still have a very long way to go to overcome this instinct). I got an iPod Nano last year and I basically use it as a white noise machine to drown other people’s over-loud headphones on the train.  (Go here to download some invaluable white noise tracks for your portable listening device. Great for sleeping or working – like Sigur Ros without the music.)  But I started putting movies on it and when you pause them on that tiny screen in really simplifies the images and deconstructs the composition for you immediately.  It’s a great education for comics artists who think in panels. Here are a few sketches I did from Hal Hartley’s spy thriller Fay Grim.

…in the English-speaking world. Good thing Gary Groth likes him and put him on the cover of Mome. This is old news to many, but when I first opened Mome 12 last fall, I was stunned by this quiet and fuzzy (as in “out of focus”) comic called “Hair Types” by Olivier Schrauwen.  Then I looked him up on the internet and learned he’s been at it for a while and I got angry that I never found this guy before.  This story in Mome is subtle and absurb and Beckettian and I want to read a lot more comics like it. It’s astounding to me how few of the comics published in Europe get either translated or distributed in America.  I’ve often considered problems with nationalism and regionalism in written literature (it was one of our main concerns when we started Action,Yes) but the geographic ghettoization of comics seems to be on another level all together.  I hope more publishers follow Fantagraphics and Buenaventura and D&Q’s leads and publish more non-American and non-commercial-manga comics.

(Check out our feature on the Canicola collective that was in Action,Yes several issues ago.  They’re an international collective of artists living in Bologna, Italy, including the Finnish cartoonist Amanda Vähämäki – her collaboration with fellow Canicola artist Michelangelo Setola Souvlaki Circus is a glimpse into what comics should and will become.)

…but Robert Walser did it about seven decades before I was born. If he didn’t, I would love to take a crack at writing an episodic novel about young man who goes to a boarding school for those training to be servants, where all the teachers are missing (they’re sleeping in a dark room together), and describe how he struggles to resist the affections and favor of the headmaster (and accept those of the headmaster’s tragic sister), while continually considering the love and admiration he harbors for the stern roommate he hates.

It took me too long to read Walser, but I’m glad I finally have.  I have a particularly affinity for these Twentieth Century modernist novelists from Europe whose legacies call in sick from the canon from time to time – Flann O’Brien, Italo Svevo, Bernhard, etc.

The new episode of Apostrophe Cast is up and it’s actually a tie-in with a piece in the new Action,Yes. Matthew Kirkpatrick reads his story “Crystal Castles” which features two concurrent narratives, and his recording is presented thusly.  Go listen – it’s really cool.  (I really appreciate Apostrophe Cast readings like this one that take advantage of the possibilities of an online reading, rather than a live one.) He also reads another excellent story, “Nevada,” which continues his exploration of existing beneath the ground.

I went to an amazing reading last night.  Derek White, who runs Calamari Press, returned from Nairobi and organized this reading at Word Books in Greenpoint, featuring three writers he’s publishing.  It was great to meet Blake Butler, who read from his beautifully disturbing Ever (whose praises I’ve sung here).  Even without voice distortion, his reading was unsettling, and even funny – he brought something new and light (in Calvino’s understanding of the term, not the marshmallow fluff definition) to the text in his presentation.  Blake’s introducer described Ever well when he said that he read the book on the subway and it made him feel “physically ill – in a good way.” (Blake’s got a bunch of readings coming up.  If you live in a town he’s in, don’t decide to stay in the night he’s reading; that’d be a mistake.)

Gary Lutz also read.  Which was a big deal for me.  Stories in the Worst Way is one of those handful of books that sits on top of brain every time I write or draw. The first time I read it, it totally destroyed my idea of narrative.  The piece that Lutz read last night shows that he’s still tearing stories apart – it was this wonderful series of tangents  built around the narrator’s meditation on his marriage (I think). Lutz’s story was an appropriate follow-up to the first reader Robert Lopez’s story, which included several retellings of a domestic scene including a man, a wife, and an erection presented in various states.  Lopez’s work is new to me, but I’m interested to read more.  The trope that drove his story is similar to the one that Steve Dixon uses in Interstate or I., and he employed it hilariously (which is not a word that would apply to those particular works by Steve).

Oh, and Derek showed me a copy of his new reissue of Stories in the Worst Way.  It looks awesome. It’s has that compact size that most of the Calamari books have and there’s something about the containment in a book that size that seems right for Lutz’s stories.  (The book was previously published by 3rd Bed, the back catalogue of which Derek has thankfully bought and saved. Why did 3rd Bed have to die?) It includes one of Derek’s amazing collages, so it’s worth getting just for that, even if you have the original edition.

Over at Comics, Comics, Tim Hodler has started a great discussion on the use of the word ‘literary’ to describe comics and the lack of an adjective to describe things that function like comics.  We have words like ‘cinematic,’ ‘concrete,’ and ‘painterly,’ but no word meaning ‘comic-y.’  As such, we rarely ask what defines comics as its own form.  We’d rather praise certain artists for understanding other forms and using this understanding in their comics, particularly an understanding of cinema and camera-work, and less often, an understanding of literature and the written word (Dan Clowes probably gets this accolade most often). Comics are also often criticized for being “photographic” (which means stiff and overdrawn). But we need to find a vocabulary that will let us grow beyond these often limiting descriptions.

As an English professor who teaches comics, I run into this problem almost daily.  I have to dance around the word “literary” and the abuse of the term “graphic novel.” But, unfortunately these words are shorthand for legitimacy in the academic system.  If I want to write a proposal for a comics practice course (as a Creative Writing workshop) I will surely have to use both terms liberally, if I hope to get it approved.  (Luckily, the obvious jargonism of ’sequential art’ has practically relegated that term to the trashcan – apologies to Will Eisner.) While we assume the prejudice against the comic form is past us, and, rather, there’s an unfettered zeal for the medium (in publishing and academia), we are now at the next stage where we are dealing with prejudice from those who see themselves as supporters of comics.  There is an insistence on adopting the terms of canonical literature and “high art” and using those to validate comics, a medium that has always been mass-produced and easily available (before Kramer’s Ergot 7), and should be understood in the context of its own history rather than those of other forms.  Formal comparisons are always useful, especially for those learning the ins and outs of a new form, but these comparisons should in no way bee taken as definitive.

Take some time to read the comments in response to Hodler’s post.

I finished Dash Shaw’s Body World.  Go read it if you want to understand a comic that is comic-y.  It shows Shaw’s feel for comics as it’s own form, it is certainly not dictated by another form (although some great comics are). His strongest work yet, and it’s free.

Oh, and it seems Frank Santoro (with Dan Nadel and comics critic Jog) has started a new blog: Graphic Novels, Graphic Novels.  Should be an interesting one to follow.

The snow’s has been coming down for hours and hours in Brooklyn, with no signs of letting up.  School was canceled today.  Nina’s waking up from her long morning nap. It’s a good day for drawing (and a good day for reading Calvin & Hobbes).