books, densely written

Spent part of my weekend reading John Hawkes' The Cannibal. Prior to that, I took on Franklin Bruno's entry in the 33 1/3 series -- in this case, his book on Elvis Costello's Armed Forces. They made for an oddly synchronized double feature. This was the first book of Hawkes' I'd read -- I picked it up secondhand when in Seattle earlier this year after reading a long essay on the author in an issue of The Believer. It's a far cry from being an easy read, but it's nonetheless compelling; an ominous totalitarianism hovers over it.

Bruno's book dissects fascism in places as well -- it's almost obsessively comprehensive, covering everything from British nationalist movements to pop song structure. And, if nothing else, the moments where these two generally unrelated books began to overlap -- the politics evoked, the circular structures, the presence of people named Cromwell -- made me shiver just a little bit.

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Creepy-ass postscript: when looking for a link to the specific Believer issue in which the piece on Hawkes ran, I noticed that said issue also contained an article by one Franklin Bruno. Very odd, and almost certainly coincidental.

random notes about comics

Picked up the first issue of Karney earlier today. It's....pretty twisted. Reading it put me in mind of Robertson Davies's World of Wonders at times, if only because, well, both involve sideshows.

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Also on deck for reading: the third volume of the Walking Dead trades.

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In the non-comics world, I've got some travel coming up; my plan is to attempt to read some of the longer books I've had on my shelf for far too long. First up: Charles Palliser's The Quincunx, which I borrowed from my mom at around the same time I moved to Brooklyn...

more love for 33.3

For those of you reading this in NYC, it's worth mentioning that a good friend of mine's put together a reading relating to Daphne Brooks' Grace tomorrow evening; details can be found here.

get your batmobile on

I've been sporadically checking out the Huffington Post since its launch earlier this week; Slate's Jack Shafer had an interesting piece on it yesterday. Nonetheless, this post from Get Your War On author David Rees is the funniest thing I've read in a long, long time.

(Also, John Cusack is blogging there as well, which I can't think isn't a sign that things are right in the world.)

Ellis on Stories

Highly recommended: Warren Ellis on storytelling.

college rock and fishhooks

Ed Brubaker is fond of the phrase "slacker noir". Sean Stewart's novel Perfect Circle would, I'd say, fit this description almost perfectly. "Almost" because, well, his protagonist chats with dead folks. Yet ultimately, this book seems closest in tone to the books I've read about accidental P.I.s caught up in events far out of their ken. (Think George Pelecanos's A Firing Offense in terms of the tone, and you're not far off. Except, you know, with ghosts.)

I haven't read Stewart's work in years. A friend and I both read his first few novels -- offbeat work that subtly tweaked genre conventions, if memory serves -- but somewhere along the line, he fell off my radar. I know that he had a hand in the amazingly complex website for the film A.I. a few years ago. Needless to say, I'm going to need to revisit the man's work before too long.

Perfect Circle takes its name from the R.E.M. song of the same name; when this became apparent, I realized I was in good hands. In these pages, you'll also find tips of the hat to the Meat Puppets, the Gun Club, and Tom Waits. Stewart's protagonist, Will Kennedy, is the sort of guy who'd show up in an X-Files episode scripted by Nick Hornby. It's a terrific book, and it's left me with an urge to visit Houston.

pictures gone sequential

While standing outside beneath a rear-garden tent at a horrifically crowded East Village bar this weekend, I found myself talking comics with a friend of mine. Specifically, Sin City opened things up, which led to a more general talk of writers and artists who explore the potential of the medium.

(Side note: in the "food for thought" department, here's a take on the film, and comics in general, from the folks over at Bookslut that I don't agree with 100%, and here one can find Matt Fraction and Joe Casey discussing the film and its adaptation. Fraction's a filmmaker who's also written some remarkably good comics, and Casey himself crosses a number of disciplines).

I was about to type, "I'm a fan of comics" just now, except that typing that reminded me of Saturday's conversation: specifically, that comics are a medium, as prose or film or theatre might be. And while one can certainly say, "I'm a fan of music" or "I'm a fan of film", it's a little bit strange to do so. Citing genres makes perfect sense, but there's a tendency -- even among those of us who dig comics, I suspect, to treat comics as a genre as opposed to a medium. And that's where the problem comes in. The works of Chris Ware, David Lapham, and Jack Kirby all fall under the umbrella of "comics". All are respected creators in the field. And yet, one's not going to find a lot of commonalities among the three.

Finding innovative work is equally hard: Eisner, Ware, and Clowes are obvious names, but on the more genre-oriented side of things, writers like Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis are pushing the form in other ways. It seems to me that the more (for lack of a better word) literary creators -- generally writer/artists -- are noticed for this more frequently. What I don't know is whether the auteurity (yes, I realize I made that word up) causes certain innovators to be noticed and others to be passed over. Alan Moore is one of the few writers I can think of who gets relatively glowing mainstream coverage. (Neil Gaiman as well, come to think of it -- though I'd contend that Moore's take on the medium is more experimental than Gaiman's.)

I could be off my gourd here, though, conjuring up hypothetical media scenarios; as a counterpoint, I could bring up the fact that Arthur has put both Morrison and Moore on its cover. I could also take this argument with myself further and point out that none of these writers writes comics exclusively: Gaiman has several novels out, Moore's novel Voice of the Fire was reissued last year, Morrison's written short fiction and plays, and Ellis's first novel will be out later this year.

I fear that this post may have reached the point of irrelevance, so I'll conclude with this idea. No one finds it odd for a writer or director of films to cross genre lines, but if the same thing took place in comics -- if Chris Ware undertook a project similar to Transmetropolitan, or Morrison began a moody, open-ended psychological drama -- readers would be baffled. Even in Europe, it seems that someone like Enki Bilal can pull this off with ease; stateside, the same does not seem to be true. Yet.

(And that's not even touching creators like Lapham, Paul Grist and Andi Watson, who seem to fall somewhere between the two "camps" -- but that's a digression for another time.)

records gone textual

Via the excellent the music issue, I've found a blog entitled 33.33, maintained by editor David Barker of Continuum Books. I've waxed ecstatic here before about my fondness for the 33 1/3 series of books, and the blog linked above is pretty much candy to a fella like me: excerpts, stories about how the books were written, and an upcoming release schedule. (Nice to see a Springsteen book is on the horizon; now, how about Nebraska?)

The next trio of releases consists of books on R.E.M.'s Murmur, Jeff Buckley's Grace, and Elvis Costello's Armed Forces. Am I excited? Yessir.

books gone digital

The New Republic's David A. Bell offers up this piece (registration required, I believe) on the possible effects of e-books on academic publishing. Although the main focus is on scholarship, the implications are fairly widespread. Bell makes two critical points: one is that electronic publishing is steadily becoming a reality for a number of academics, as university presses begin to shift to more commercial models; the second is that digital books haven't caught on in the way that digital music has because bound books are, well, comfortable. Bell points to Sony's LIBRIé as a significant improvement over reading devices that have come before.

Bell is relatively certain that the transition over to what he calls the "bookless library" is inevitable, and offers some speculation as to how the publishing industry might react to it. And it's here that I find myself at a loss for how to reply, because I'm something of an anachronism: while I have purchased a number of songs through iTunes, I'm in no hurry to rip my record collection to my hard drive and sell off the CDs. Similarly, I can't see myself doing something similar to the books I own five or ten years down the line.

Some of this comes from the fact that I'm a fan of good presentation. Show me a well-designed book jacket (or album cover) and you'll at least get me to turn my head. The digital treatment works for something like the iTunes store, where clips of different songs can be sampled. I don't honestly know if a similar model would work for books ("click here to read the first fifty words of chapter 14"?). On the creator side, however, it does imply that works could stay in "print" indefinitely -- an issue encompassed by the debate over printing on demand as well. Will the potential rise of e-books make printing on demand a moot technique? It's that gray area where futurists and observers of the publishing industry cross paths...