Thursday, September 6, 2007

Brainiac's bedside table

"Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work And What They Mean" (Da Capo), by Douglas Wolk, is -- I hate to admit it -- a fine book. (Like everyone else who's spent decades been encouraging Americans to take the medium of comics seriously, I perversely dislike it when Americans actually do so. Last month, I cringed when the New York Times instructed readers (reg. req.) to honor the legacy of superhero artist Jack Kirby. But I have to get over it.) Wolk does a terrific job of distinguishing between "art comics" and what are sometimes called mainstream comics, while insisting that readers should not divide themselves into hostile factions. He deftly argues that there are good things about "bad" comics, and bad things about "good" comics. And then he illustrates his points with close analyses (many of which he originally published in The Boston Phoenix, not to mention The Believer, Salon, and The Village Voice) of works by artsy and mainstream masters of the medium like David B., Alison Bechdel, Chester Brown, Charles Burns, Steve Ditko, Will Eisner, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, James Kochalka, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware. If you've been feeling behind the curve on the whole graphic novel phenomenon, Wolk's book provides a turbo-thrust.

Speaking of comics, Fantagraphics has issued the latest volume in their beautiful "Complete Peanuts" series. It spans the years 1965 and '66, during which time Snoopy first takes on the Red Baron, and Peppermint Parry rocks Charlie Brown's world. I scanned the panels above only because they confused me when I was a kid. ("Sydney or the Bush is an Australian phrase urging that total success or failure be staked on one risky action. In this case, Charlie Brown beating up a bully who teased his sister.) Get rid of those cheapo, incomplete paperback "Peanuts" collections from the '60s and '70s -- the ones whose spines are cracked -- and pick up this collection. You won't regret it.

Also from Fantagraphics: "Devilish Greetings," a collection of vintage postcards featuring images of the devil. Designer and cultural archaeologist Monte Beauchamp has been showing off these flea market finds for years in the pages of BLAB!, the graphics-illustration-comics annual he founded and edits. Now they're collected in one devilishly enjoyable book.

And now for something completely different. "Prehistoric Digital Poetry" (Alabama), by New Jersey Institute of Technology's C.T. Funkhouser, is an "analytic history" of digital poetry -- which is to say, computer-assisted poetry composition. An offshoot of "constraint-based writing" (think of Georges Perec's 1969 Oulipo novel "La Disparition," which doesn't include the letter "e," or Michel Thaler's 2004 novel "Le Train de Nulle Part," written without verbs), digital poetry takes advantage of the programmable nature of the computer to create poems. Why "prehistoric"? Because computers were being used to program poems as early as 1959, according to Funkhouser... and Oulipo wasn't founded till 1960. This is an exhaustive study. Hats off to the author.

Until yesterday, I'd say the best fictional treatment of the mythical Amazons I've ever read -- besides the first few issues of "Wonder Woman" -- was Heinrich von Kleist's "Penthesilea," a tragic drama in which Amazons interrupt the Greek siege of Troy and nearly capture Achilles. But now, I've got a new favorite: "Les Guérillères," an experimentalist 1969 novel by the French author Monique Wittig, newly translated by David Le Vay and published on these shores by the University of Illinois Press. The titular guérillères are a tribe of contemporary warrior women who seek to subvert and destroy patriarchy using whatever means necessary, from japery to linguistics to bullets. They form a temporary autonomous zone and, in this violently humorous passage, defend it:

The male besiegers are near the walls, indecisive. Then the women, at a signal, uttering a terrible cry, suddenly rip off the upper part of their garments, uncovering their naked gleaming breasts. The men, the enemy, begin to discuss what they unanimously regard as a gesture of submission. They send ambassadors to treat for the gates to be opened. Three of their number fall struck down by stones as soon as they are in range.

Mary McCarthy called the book "a delectable epic of sex warfare," but it's not a particularly racy novel. It's utopian, incantatory, visionary. Good stuff!

Another fascinating new example of 1960s-era French utopianism: "Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960-1970" (MIT), by U. Arizona art historian Larry Busbea. During the period in question, French and non-French architects and artists alike were intensely engaged in the quest for an ideal city of the future. A city whose inhabitants' material needs would be met by automation and technology, a city whose buildings and streets would be works of art, a city that might actually float in the air. C'est magnifique!

Coming in October: "Dear Future Me" (F&W), edited by Matt Sly and Jay Patrikios. Sly and Patrikios are the founders of FutureMe.org, a website that permits you to send an email to yourself, to be delivered at whatever point in the future that you choose. I think this is a great idea, so I blurbed this book (shortly before the Globe instructed its freelance writers that we shouldn't blurb). Here's what I wrote:

"The Child is father of the Man," according to Wordsworth; in response, Hopkins demanded, "How can he be?" Both poets are right. The relationship between Present Me and Future Me is too often a parental one: I'm forever making decisions on behalf of Future Me, who I treat like an incompetent man-child -- leaving to-do lists where he'll find them, signing his name to employment contracts and bank loans, educating him, tattooing him, and fattening him up. But must things go on this way forever? Shouldn't the Me's have a more evolved relationship? Absolutely, insist the contributors to "Dear Future Me," who may sometimes lecture their self-to-come, but who more often treat that special someone as a confidant, comrade, accomplice, collaborator, maybe even a pal. "I know you'll badmouth me sometimes, and I'm sure I deserve it," one emailer writes. "But I'm pulling for you." Spoken like a true friend.

The book looks very attractive, indeed, but the silver metallic cover doesn't reproduce well on Amazon. So I've posted a photograph, above.

PS: Glad to know that someone reads this Brainiac feature!

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 11:40 AM

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