Catastrophe

So they decided to start enforcing the limits on how much space we can have over at USSCatastrophe, so all the Catastrophe sites are currently down. Should be back soon.

Meanwhile thanks for stopping by everyone who followed the link over at comicsreporter.com. Now go outside, take a walk or something, it's springtime!

Update: It's back up again.

By George

I don't think enough people know about these two books. Go get them here.

Page from CCS Booklet

Id, Ego, etc.

Seth: You had a period, like with the underground cartoonists, where they went through the whole taboo-breaking phase, and also attempting to show that comics could cover a wide range of material. But nobody really had any concrete literary aspirations. I think it took a little while, even in the the first part of the early '80s for cartoonists to come around to the idea that perhaps longer stories and more challenging content was acceptable. But it seems like it's the next step. As comics move forward, that's really the areas that can be pursued; not coming up with new gimmicks or clever characters, or not finding flashier ways to tell the story so much, as to try and actually infuse it with some content.

GG: That generally sounds like a pretty accurate historical assessment.

Seth: Although I'm a little worried at the moment. I really felt a couple of years ago that this was obvious to everyone working in the alternative market. But I've felt in the last couple of years that there's a bit of a swing back with the next generation of cartoonists toward this concept of "Fuck this boring shit! Comics are supposed to be fun!" Sort of a return to this idea that you don't want to get overly pretentious. Maybe it's a bit of a reaction to all of this autobiography.

-from an interview in the Comics Journal #193
Feb. 1997

I'm feeling peer-pressured by my pals Dan and Ted, who are blogging blogariffically, to add more images and commentary to hold up my end of the USS Blogtastrophe. So here's the cover of the booklet I've been working on these last few months, for the Center for Cartoon Studies.

Two fish I drew for my dad, by request. Don't tell him, but I screwed up the pectoral fin on the Largemouth Bass--it's a bit high.

James Wood vs. Richard Powers

And compare that Richard Powers quote with this (from here).

At present, contemporary novelists are increasingly eager to "tell us about the culture," to fill their books with the latest report on "how we live now." Information is the new character; we are constantly being told that we should be impressed by how much writers know. What they should know, and how they came to know it, seems less important, alas, than that they simply know it. The idea that what one knows might – to use Nietzsche's phrase – "come out of one's own burning" rather than free and flameless from Google, seems at present alien. The danger is that the American fondness for realism combines with this will-to-information to produce a hyperliteralism of the novel: you can see this in Tom Wolfe....

By "hysterical realism" I have meant a zany overexcitement, a fear of silence and stillness, a tendency toward self-conscious riffs, easy ironies, puerility, and above all the exaggeration of the vitality of fictional characters into cartoonishness. The dilemma could be put dialectically: the writer, fearful that her characters are not "alive" enough, overdoes the liveliness and goes on a vitality spress; suddenly aware that she has overdone it, she tries to solve the problem by drawing self-conscious attention to the exaggeration...But the self-consciousness, far from healing the wound, merely makes it bloodier.

[...]

My second critical preoccupation flows from the first: there is a generalized overemphasis on a certain kind of intelligence in fiction – now habitually and tellingly renamed "smartness." We are now so convinced of the terrifying complexity of our culture that we tend to flatter those writers who grapple with it at all, certain that they must be very brilliant just to be attempting it. But Proust rightly said in Contre Sainte-Beuve that to say of a novelist "he is very intelligent" is no different from saying "he loved his mother very much."

-James Wood
"Reply to the Editors,"
n+1 #3

Wood's use of "smartness" there is a signal that he's referring to what Zadie Smith has said somewhere about how she's impressed by David Foster Wallace and writers of his ilk (Wood calls them "hysterical realists") being so "smart." Wood likes Smith best of the "hysterical realists," as far as I can tell.

Sort of related--I just finished DFW's book on infinity and math Everything and More. Footnotes and half-manneristic scholarly formatting is par for the course with DFW but in this book it's just too much. The ironic stylistic tics that are interesting for their own sake in his fiction aren't appropriate in non-fiction where the goal is clarity. It's like too much decorative trim and it makes reading frustrating. And there was too much writing about the writing--apologies for complexities, apologies for long sentences, footnotes referring to previous unnecessary footnotes--too much teasing and cuteness. Admittedly he does a good job--he sure is smart!--when it comes to the story of how Georg Cantor solved the problems of infinity going all the way back to Zeno, which is fascinating stuff, and it's told with enough clarity and suspense that it kept me interested enough to wade through a lot of math--which is not at all "my thing"--and finish the book, but I felt the reading experience was more frustrating than necessary. I suspect the book's editor would have reined in the style more if DFW wasn't DFW.

Richard Powers on How To Write Nowadays

Interview with Richard Powers

RP: That's just it; the economics of higher education now prevent the kind of interdisciplinary vision that I'm describing. I think that a literary critic's work would only be enhanced by a more sophisticated sense of, say, evolutionary paleontology, or molecular biology, or cognitive science, or cosmology. We want to be able to ask answerable questions, but we also want to be able to situate those answers in a broader geography, an engagement of the larger human questions. And that's how my books work; they work by saying you cannot understand a person minimally, you cannot understand a person simply as a function of his inability to get along with his wife, you cannot even understand a person through his supposedly causal psychological profile. You can't understand a person completely in any sense, unless that sense takes into consideration all of the contexts that that person inhabits. And a person at the end of the second millennium inhabits more contexts than any specialized discipline can easily name. We are shaped by runaway technology, by the apotheosis of business and markets, by sciences that occasionally seem on the verge of completing themselves or collapsing under its own runaway success. This is the world we live in. If you think of the novel as a supreme connection machine -- the most complex artifact of networking that we've ever developed -- then you have to ask how a novelist would dare leave out 95% of the picture.

The Original Soundtrack on Eno and cooking

George Saunders on becoming a prude

There are two ways of writing stories, one in chapters, lines and words, and that we call 'literature,' or alternatively by a succession of illustrations, and that we call the 'picture story.' [...] The picture story to which the criticism of art pays no attention and which rarely worries the learned has always exercised a great appeal. More, indeed, than literature itself, for besides the fact that there are more people who look than who can read, it appeals particularly to children and to the masses, the sections of the public which are particularly easily perverted and which it would be particularly desirable to raise. With its dual advantages of greater conciseness and greater relative clarity, the picture story, all things being equal, should squeeze out the other because it would address itself with greater liveliness to a greater number of minds, and also because in any contest he who uses such a direct method will have the advantage over those who talk in chapter.

-Rudolphe Topffer, Essay du physiognomie, 1845(?)
Quote taken from The Experiment of Caricature, Chapter 10,
E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961)

Comic about an imaginary Brian Eno

Hot Blog
http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/

I don't know if this is going to work.

"The Of And a To"

See also The 500 Most Commonly
Used Words in English

Becky Carter Digital Photography

Anthony Braxton's Liner Notes
for "For Alto"

The Eater of Meaning

Meteor crashes through guy's ceiling in Park Forest, Ill., then bounces
off the wall.
(via-Astronomy Pic of the Day)

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Here's a link test.

This is a really nice drawing by Christophe Blain
Here's more:
Here's his main site:

This is a test.