pictures in sequence," I kept finding so many other things that fit the definition which were clearly not comics. It was absurd, I thought, to think a gallery exhibition, a magazine article, or a cereal box all fit the formal definition of comics. But then after reading Nelson Goodman (via WJT Mitchell) I came to see that what was important wasn't so much the marks on the paper, it was how you read them. It's embarrassing to admit, but I remember my mind being blown by the realization that what we call "comics" wasn't best defined as a form, but as part of an ongoing historical process, the messy forces of culture and commerce driving image-text combos to evolve into a particular species of art form, which is still evolving. At the time I knew very little about biology, but now I see how the development of comics resembles the inelegant trial and error and "act of God" forces at work in biological evolution. Or maybe comics is something more like the development of an ecosystem?
"[the print] does not imitate the continuous flow of topical events so much as it arrests the progress in a series of "stations" functioning as isolated, diagrammatic allegories...the labels [proto word balloons] inhabit an abstract hieroglyphic space generally incompatible with a dynamic narrative...the captions, not the labels, are leading the tale."
PBS: Although for years comics have been denigrated as a so-called "low art" category, it appears they're becoming more widely accepted and perhaps even validated as a form of art and a long literary narrative. Would you agree with this? Is "form" the right word here? Do you think that this kind of validation is inhibiting in any way, that comics are in danger of becoming less rebellious or creatively free because they're more accepted and being published in the mainstream?
Chris: "Form" seems fine, and sometimes I use the word "language," and while I am genuinely happy that I don't have to explain that I'm not an animator anymore when someone asks me what it is I do, I do worry that beginning cartoonists could feel somewhat strangled by the increasing critical seriousness comics has received of late and feel, like younger writers, that they have to have something to "say" before they set pen to paper. Many cartoonists feel even more passionate about this idea than I do, vehemently insisting that comics are inherently "non-art" and poop humor or whatever it is they think it is, but that attitude is a little like insisting that all modern writing should always take the form of The Canterbury Tales.
I'm all for anything and everything in comics; I started drawing them with the specific goal of finding out whether or not they were capable of expressing things other than jokes and contempt. To me, Robert Crumb is a perfect artist because he's one of the most visually sensitive people alive yet he's widely also known as one of the world's great curmudgeons, simply because his emotional range is so wide and his ability to see the world so perspicacious; all artists should hope to be so pluralistic. I do worry that museum shows and literary magazine appearances might start to cloud the general readership's ability to see comics clearly, as anything that's presented as high art immediately blurs a viewer's perceptions with thinking and theory, but I think it also means that more talented and thoughtful people will be attracted to it as a medium.
-Chris Ware, interviewed at pbs.org
What about Art Spiegelman’s work, which you’ve parodied several times?
RYAN: I do appreciate the comic magazine Raw that he put out in the ‘80s. I was a fan of that. Maus, I just thought was okay. Other than that, I guess, I kind of dislike the drive to make comics fine art and fine literature that he seems to promote.
What type of comics are you trying to promote?
RYAN: The other end of the spectrum. I’m doing trashy, weird, crazy, strange, bizarre, disgusting, filthy, horrible stuff that you wouldn’t see in a museum.
-Johnny Ryan interviewed at Wizard
During spring in Denmark, at approximately one half an hour before sunset, flocks of more than a million European starlings (sturnus vulgaris) gather from all corners to join in the incredible formations shown above. This phenomenon is called Black Sun (in Denmark), and can be witnessed in early spring throughout the marshlands of western Denmark, from March through to the middle of April. The starlings migrate from the south and spend the day in the meadows gathering food, sleeping in the reeds during the night. The best place to view this amazing aerial dance is in the place called "Tøndermarsken," where these pictures were taken (on April 5 from 19.30 to 20.30 local time).
-from Earth Science Pic of the Day
Click the image for a desktop sized pic.
If you'd like to read more about starlings, my book CURSES will be out in October.
Update 2:
"I confess to some dissatisfaction with the next two stories, the Glenn and Wendy story with the "Ten Little Indians" adaptation, and the adaptation of The Beatles' "She's Leaving Home." With the first, the adaptation seemed to be filler to add some zest to what was a perfectly fine little exchange with the couple. With the second, I think that most who know the song would recognize what you're doing as soon as the couple speaks, and once recognized, there's little of lasting interest in the exercise aside from the Glenn and Wendy stuff afterwards. What were you trying to do with these, and do you feel satisfied with them?"And there were more questions like those. It's not evident in what they posted because a lot of the questions have been edited or re-stated. Eventually I told him to forget about the whole thing. He then apologized for his "bluntness." "I didn't even consider that you might not have any interest in my personal feelings about your work" he wrote. Really I would be thrilled with any opinions of my work--negative, positive, blunt, or whatever--if they were also insightful, or even interesting. It wasn't because his questions were challenging my choices or even sometimes negative, but because I got impatient with his feeling that I have to defend myself against his own "dissatisfactions" and "disappointments" and ad hominem criticism, such as that I write a certain way "just to keep myself interested" or that something was "filler to add some zest" or that perhaps I padded out "Time Travelling" because I had extra space to fill. Also, he often gave away the plot of my stories in his questions! (He fixed that after I pointed it out.)
"I found the missing kids story terrific until Glenn and Wendy showed up, which threw me right out of it, despite me enjoying them every other time. It just felt like they didn’t belong in the same story. If you want to discuss why you felt the need to bring them in, I’d be interested."
"I also found Or Else #4 the most disappointing thing I’ve read from you. I’m perfectly willing to admit I just didn’t get what it was supposed to be about and I’d like to know; all I noticed were connections made to trivial things."
"If you put your copy of Lost in Translation, your Death Cab for Cutie albums, and your hoodie collection into a comicbookization machine, this would the daydreamy, meandering, doe-eyed result."How did he know! That is exactly what I did. I guess he didn't read the second half of the book, the slow-zooming, emotive soul pop vibe, nuevo-retro professorial result of my copy of Ken Burns' The Civil War, my Billy Ocean albums, and my corduroy blazer collection? Anyways, Hodgman says some kind things about Ganges and even made me see things in the stories I hadn't seen before.
"Through the poor filmmaking and ridiculous storyline, we are left with a pretty good shark performance. [?] This is based solely on the films complete use of real tiger sharks. There are no mechanical or computer generated fish to be seen. While this is intriguing, it in no way makes it a better film. I don't know if it scientifically accurate, but this shark rarely breaks water. We are never treated to a shark fin, a staple of the genre."
The critic James Wood appeared in this paper last Saturday aiming a hefty, well-timed kick at what he called "hysterical realism". It is a painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in novels like my own White Teeth and a few others he was sweet enough to mention. These are hysterical times; any novel that aims at hysteria will now be effortlessly outstripped - this was Wood's point, and I'm with him on it.-from here, way back in 2001.
[...]It's all laughter in the dark - the title of a Nabokov novel and still the best term for the kind of writing I aspire to: not a division of head and heart, but the useful employment of both. And I could mention dozens of novels (I haven't been writing, but boy, I've been reading) that create a light in my head in between the news bulletins. Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich - a miniaturist tale of a bourgeois man dying a bourgeois death - every time I read it, I find my world put under an intense, unforgiving microscope. But how does it work? I want to dismantle it as if it were a clock, as if it had parts, mechanisms. I wonder if Wood will take that question, then, as a replacement for my earlier one. Not: how does this world work? But: how is this book made? How can I do this?
But he might see even that question as too intellectual in approach. I think Wood is hinting at an older idea that runs from Plato to the boys booming a car stereo outside my freaking window: soul is soul. It cannot be manufactured or schematised. It cannot be dragged kicking and screaming through improbable plots. It cannot be summoned by a fact or dismissed by a cliché. These are the famous claims made for "soul" and they lead with specious directness to an ancient wrestling match, invoked by Wood: the inviolability of "soul" versus the evils of self-consciousness and wise-assery, otherwise known as sophism.
Well, it's a familiar opposition, but it's not very helpful (it's also a belief Oprah shares, and you want to be careful which beliefs you share with Oprah). I wonder sometimes whether critics shouldn't be more like teachers, giving a gold star or a black cross, but either way accompanied by some kind of useful advice. Be more human? I sit in front of my white screen and I'm not sure what to do with that one. Are jokes inhuman? Are footnotes? Long words? Technical terms? Intellectual allusions? If I put some kids in, will that help?
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.
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.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
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.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.
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.
