MARCH 31, 2008
The new issue of Carousel is now available. It's the "hybrid lit" issue, and it features my comic short story "Try To Sleep" and a lot of other great stuff. Carousel is a consistently stunning arts and literature magazine (and there is an emphasis on the graphic, which is still a rarity in the lit mag world) and is definitely worth picking up whenever a new issue comes out. Mark Laliberte and the other folks up in Guelph, Ontario put a lot work into making each issue a work of art in itself. Click here to see what's available in the new issue.
You can probably find Carousel at your local independent bookstore (or even at some newsstands in NYC), but here's a list of vendors.
from "Try to Sleep" in Carousel #22
MARCH 28, 2008
I received a gift in the mail today from my friend Ben.
(The woman in the foreground can be lifted away.)
Click here to see an expanding gallery of Ben Brookshire's collages.
MARCH 27, 2008
I just read Jason's Why Are You Doing This? and I haven't been so excited about a novelist since reading Thomas Bernhard's The Loser. Jason's graphic novels have been long recommended to me, but perhaps because there are so many, or maybe because he doesn't have a "signature" book, it's taken me a while to finally read something by him.
Jason's character's all have dog and bird heads. His simple lines and muted colors suggest Herge's ligne clair foreground style. (Jason's backgrounds maintain the same simplicity unlike Herge and his contemporaries'.) His anthropomorphic characters create a beautiful tension with the sullen mood and tragic events of the story.
Why Are You Doing This? is built around a murder mystery. But Jason borrows from the noir tradition in the same way that Paul Auster does in his New York Trilogy, using it more to upset his readers' expectations rather than using mystery and plot subversion as a way to "hook" the reader. The novel does have a proper beginning, middle and end, but the sublimity of Jason's work exists when he shows his characters, Alex, Geraldine and the Nicholas Vandoren, in particular, pursuing action because of some other personal void. This novel is not so much about that actions that compose the plot, but about the absences that Jason's characters try to ignore or fill through their movements and choices. (This also reminded me of Auster.)
Jason is Norweigan but lives in France, and his work is very much a result of the French album tradition, which requires creators to regulary publish full-length books. Most artists in this tradition produce serials featuring regular characters, but, as far as I can tell, Jason's regularity is in his simple drawings style and his characters' animal heads, not in the characters themselves. I'm interested to read more of his work to learn how his stories function as a body. His newer novel, I Killed Adolph Hitler, was recently recommended to me. Perhaps I'll continue there...
<I've also just learned that Jason's work is currently running as a serial in The New York Times Magazine's "Funny Pages" feature. (That section name makes be cringe every time I see it. I get the irony - comics are NOT just kids' stuff - we get it. The NYT editors are pleased as punch with themselves because they refer to comics without super heroes as"graphic novels.")>
MARCH 9, 2008
I spend too much time reading blogs about the New York Mets and getting excited about a baseball team that has done nothing since committing the worst choke in Major League Baseball history last season. My blog of choice has always been Matthew Cerrone's MetsBlog. Cerrone's coverage is corny and earnest, but, if you skip his italicized commentary, MetsBlog is a great source of trivial news about the team. Recently, though, Cerrone has partnered with SNY, the Met's cable network, and basically become a shill for the team. His blog's content is now quite similar to the boring content found on official team sites, and he skips any negative press (like this NY Post feature about Pedro Martinez and cock fighting, written by James Fanelli).
So I've found a new blog for my Mets fix. It's called Mets Mole, and the site's proprietor, known only as 'Moley,' actually has a sense of humor and a lurid obsession with Met's #4 starter Oliver Perez. He also put up this hilarious post about Cerrone. Mets Mole doesn't get a lot of hits judging from the empty comments sections on most of his posts (and the fact that Cerrone, arbiter of the Mets blogosphere, has given him a link only once). So, if you care about regular esoteric Mets updates, then read his blog.
MARCH 3, 2008
This year's issue of American Letters & Commentary is now available. It includes a special section of collaborations. My comic collaboration with Kristen Iskandrian can be found there. It's called "5 Cats" and it's our skewed vision of a children's story. And the new issue even includes a bookmark with one of my drawings on it.
There's also some collaborative work by Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson that they created right after their daughter was born. That's some pretty profound collaboration...
MARCH 1, 2008
I'm pretty excited about the new reading we've posted on Apostrophe Cast this week. It's our first translation contribution, which is something I'd like to feature more often. We feature Michael Swierz and Ying Xu's translations of Shu Ting's poetry. Shu Ting is a pioneering female poet in the PRC. Her work was particularly influential in the 1980s when her romantic sensibility evolved into a more modernist aesthetic. The reading is in Chinese and English and well worth listening to.
