Bookstack, March 08

I’m liking this Bookstack idea. Here’s March 08.

First, I realized how wrong I was about Joann Sfar’s Vampire Loves. Its weird meandering nature, it’s mixing of characters all searching for something is really really charming… The Rabbi’s Cat I was already sold on, and reread it last month. Just finished Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up, which is so intelligent and good-hearted, his quest so rigorous and serious. Thanks, Tim Kreider. (I’m trying to feel regret or envy that the book shows a case of super hard work and dedicated intelligence as a path to commercial success. I’d like to believe those qualities are in fact, valued in our media world.

Finally read Calvino’s the Non-Existent Knight, which had a great minimum of characters and bizarre, meta-situations. I think I might not get to The Cloven Viscount before I return the book. Above that, a stack of student work, which I managed to get through and notate. Points of View is a book of short stories organized by narrative strategy, that inspired me to think on that subject a bit more widely, and also construct a few exercises for my students… Atop that, finally reading Don Quixote all the way through, but yes, that’s an abridged version… I am unashamed.

Atop that, notes for a new project. Why can I no longer find metal recipe cards boxes?

Lileks’ section on comics and funnybooks

Few sites raise joy in my dark heart like James Lilek’s Institute of Official Cheer. This panel is from his subsection on Big Little Books in his “Unimpressive Examples of the Sequential Art” section.

My bookstack, Feb 29

The new trend seems to be posting ones “BookStack.”

That’s Nabakov short stories, hidden by the glare. Leela is fond of being surprised that I’m not finished with it yet, as I’ve been reading it off and on for 8 or 9 years. Of course, that’s the way to read some short stories. On the bottom is a stack of short stories pulled from the New Yorker; that stack is the unread pile. I finished 100 Years of Solitude recently but it’s still reverberating around in my head so I include it here. And that’s Tsuge, above Marquez. Luckily, some of those are in the scanlations I’m reading, see below.

I realized posting this “BookStack” that A) it should also involve a shot of the folder of scanlations I’m trying to make it through (image below) and that B) what I really would need is a “CultureStack.” Said CultureStack would incorporate the Messiaen concert I went to with Jon Lewis, “Shortbus” by John Cameron Mitchell, the Lucien Freud exhibit at MOMA, my printmaking class with Bruce Waldman, the amazing Monica Hunken and Judith Malina at the Living Theater, and maybe even the obsessive games of Just A Minute I’ve been playing with Brendan Burford and other friends. Would it involve the conversation I had with Josh Bayer about Jack Kirby, dovetailing into our investigations into the neurosis of some processes of cartooning, dovetailing again into the Bayer’s description of “dangerous and farcical masculinity” in some films he’s been seeing?

All these wonderful things are keeping me from and feeding my work of cartooning and teaching. But who has time to blog about it?

Shaenon Garrity on Popeye and Olive Oyl

Genius Shaenon Garrity on Popeye and Olive Oyl.

Matt Madden’s Pantoum

Matt Madden has been studying poetry forms for some time; he digests them and creates new sequential art forms with them, or creates their equivalent. Matt’s latest exercise in the arena is the “pantoum.” Matt describes:

The pantoum structure is one of interlocking quatrains where the first and third line of one stanza become the second and fourth lines of the following one. The last stanza ends with the very first line of the poem and has the third line in the third-to-last position.

Here, he takes a three page story I made in 2001 (written in Lynda Barry’s workshops, for what it’s worth) and turns it into a 6 page festival of mud lust and paranoia.

Take a look at his posting and read the full comic here.

On a related note, Gary Sullivan chimes in about “Poetry in Comics” on my comments page here, and on his own blog, here. This seems to be spurred by Austin English’s letter in The Comics Journal a few weeks back, and Bill Randall’s published response.

R.I.P. Alain Robbe-Grillet

I missed the death of Alain Robbe-Grillet, novelist and theoretician about novels. I found his “For A New Novel” in an Austin bookshop and devoured it, or the first half of it anyway. It was a series of essays and the first few were so powerful I never went on to finish the rest. Robbe-Grillet argued for a novel that was cleaved from character and plot, those were holdovers from drama. What a novel should do is use language to trigger events, images, etc. in the mind. He was especially drawn to the image, to seeing and describing, in cold detail, what was seen. An apple is no different than a cat, or an adulterous wife.

I wrote about that book on my teaching page here.

His novel Jealousy (La Jalousie) remains my favorite. Through sheer concentration of visual detail, and repetition of moments, he created a manic, frightened, furious book. A book filled with emotion, stemming mostly from a feeling of paranoia. It’s one of my favorite books ever.

I never could figure out In The Labryrnth but I’m determined to try it again some day.

Robbe-Grillet wrote the script for Last Year at Marienbad. What most people don’t realize is that script was EXACTLY how the movie turned out. That wild, cryptic movie was not trick of editing, or a product of an explorative process. It all came out of Robbe-Grillet, exactly as you see it. What a nut.

Today I value just the opposite in art. I did then, too, when I was reading his book. I value happy accidents and sloppy creation ,but his goals and my values are the same: absolute belief that something else is available for this form.

The only person I ever met who had read Robbe-Grillet (whom I didn’t foist it onto) was a cook in Austin named Flash- one of the grouchiest guys I’ve ever met. He saw me reading The Erasers, I think, and assumed it must have been for class. He told me about the half dozen of his books he had read, crushed his cigarette out and went back to angrily mashing Sunday’s eggs and ham around the grill.

Links:
NY Times article
LA Times
google search

Lynda Barry cartoons and images

Have you caught on to
Lynda Barry’s myspace page? Full cartoons and other art there. See! One of America’s greatest treasures!

Kreider Draws Me Again

Genius Tim Kreider draws me in The Pain- When Will it End again. Tim says in his artist’s statement that I’ve taken the place of some previous friends who act as a calm voice of reason (or something.) What we discuss in person is how my loving graceful, glowing personality is hard to get across by drawing the hard features of my otherwise charming face.

Some December press and accolades

Erotica genius Polly Frost interviews me here:
http://pollyfrost.wordpress.com/2007/12/03/tom-hart-interview/

Cartooning Genius Dave Lasky draws me
HERE

While I’m at it, here’s an old interview by Tom Spurgeon with me

Rev Billy Movie this weekend!

This weekend! WHAT WOULD JESUS BUY? The Reverend Billy movie is out! It needs people to get out off their butts and into theater seats! (Or something.) Go see it!

www.wwjbmovie.com
http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/whatwouldjesusbuy/