Finger Gesticulating

Frank King,
June 2, 1910

Yam=Yam

Rumbling

This thoughtful and pointlessly melancholy man has been living for many years, by now, in the basement, because the house that rose above it has been destroyed or is uninhabitable. When the religious wars broke out, he had hoped it was a question--he was a foreigner in that country and practiced another religion--of the customary depravities to which that region's inhabitants were inclined, all of the sanguineous of dying in some noisy and exhibitionistic way, and of killing others with particular cruelty. He bore no love for that country, where he lived as the secretary to the ambassador of another country, where wars of religion were not waged. His country fought atheistic wars, scientifically based. At the moment when the wars of religion had broken out, the secretary had been unable to return to his native land, where a ferocious scientific war was then underway: a war concerned, at least in origin, with hexagons and acids, but which bit by bit had then expanded to the inclusion of nearly all the disciplines, with the sole exclusion of ancient history. Now, the secretary, whom you see in sober dress, has been said, in generic terms, to practice another religion, but there is also the possibility that he practices none at all. What his country most respects is allegiance to ideals upon scientific bases; he himself, however, has no great love of science, and if he had to choose a field in which to specialize, ancient history would be his choice. But since this is the only non-controversial subject, choosing it would have been regarded as suspect, and derided as cowardly. He would have been put to death. Fortuitously, the outbreak of the religious war had allowed him to give no response to requests for clarification that had come from his homeland, but at the very same time he had definitively exiled himself in the country of religious wars. For years he had ventured no more than a few dozen yards from his cellar; he was probably the only foreigner left in a country where massacre was pandemic, and becoming pedantic; a country that no longer had cities, but picturesque expanses of ruins awaiting the death of the last combatant, so as then to grow ivy-covered and be transported into History. Though he had never admitted it in so many words, he liked to live in that territory precisely for its being the theater of a war that was alien to him. So History was none of his doing, but was something perceived as a rumble to which he had grown accustomed; as a lover of ancient history and dead languages, he too looked forward to living--as had always been his dream--in a country made only and entirely of ruins among grasses that have no history.

--Giorgio Manganelli,
translated by Henry Martin,
from Centuria: 100 Ouroboric Novels

Also see this BLDGBLOG post.

Spider Spoke

The Spider Spoke is one of my favorite new minicomics, and #3 is the best yet. I was really inspired by this one. Tomu Smith can be reached at tomu_smith at symbol yahoo.co.uk.

Eternal Sonata

Chopin/Charlie Kaufman/RPG video game fans rejoice:

"Eternal Sonata [for the Xbox 360] follows the adventures of famed composer Frederic Chopin as he travels through his own dream world filled with colorful characters and stunning locales. In a land where music influences both combat and exploration, Chopin sets out on a journey not only of self-discovery, but also one of redemption."

Watch the incredible trailer here.

UPDATE:
Thanks to K. Thor who points out I had mistaken the title of the article for the title of the game. No Charlie K connection.

Paradoxes of Culture and Globalization

This came in the mail.

New Construction #1

I made this zine to inspire myself to finish other things.
48 pages
$2
Should be at MOCCA
next weekend, but I won't.
For sale soon at my
website and fine stores.

Exercise in Woodring

Here's the original. Looking at it closer, I think I missed some details. I couldn't resist it.

Shakespeare in the Wild West in the Park

During our last presidential election I made a vow (wrote it down in my vow/sketchbook) that if Bush won I would give up following political news and wean myself off sweet, sweet outrage and instead work at reading Shakespeare for the next 4 years. Like most election promises, this fell by the wayside. Would a bewilderment/outrage junkie miss out on these fat years?

But the other weekend I did go see "Much Ado About Nothing" with Ted and Sacha. I had a lovely time. It was free in Forest Park and the spin was What if...they talked like Shakespeare in the Wild West?! Claudio the cowboy. We sat toward the back, near the portable toilets. Their doors constantly opening and shutting behind us made a creaking, groaning sound. It was like being on a ship watching cowboys do Shakespeare. Also you could hear thumping dance music from an actual wedding somewhere else in the park.

100 years

Earlier this year I re-read Pragmatism by William James. It's not James at his best, but it's one of the main things for which he's remembered. I noted that Pragmatism was published in June of 1907, making this month 100 years. I thought about maybe blogging about that and filed it away.

Soon after I worked through most of Rorty and His Critics. Rorty was a follower of James and pragmatist. I had not read Rorty when I was in college "studying" philosophy. After Rorty and His Critics, I read some of Rorty's other books, not finishing any, but finding that he, like James, seemed mostly right on, as far as how I see and feel things to be.

Anyways late last night I saw that Richard Rorty has died, 100 years to the month after the publication of Pragmatism.

-dude, from the Creation Museum

CART

A Cultural History of the Modern Age

Oh, Hans, it's true--we can get through 3 volumes of the Friedell's Kulturgeschichte, appreciating its idiosyncracies, its fine anecdotal style, humanism, and tragic vision, while noting its spotty misunderstandings, its exaggerations, and we can feel moved to write on the Internet perhaps a helpful review, a thoughtfully qualified 4-starred recommendation, hoping that somehow a reader or two (of two) out there in the English-speaking world may feel moved to hunt down this long out-of-print, strange, magnificent, entertaining history, but nevertheless, in the end, the pluto-oligarchy will stick it to us.

I got mine out of the St. Louis Public Library.
No luck here.
Here's an electronic Volume I, anyways.
Here's Clive James on Friedell.


and here is how it all ends.

.

Comic Book Stories

Hot new blog. Dave Kiersh celebrates some comics stories from the 70s and 80s.

Turtle

Today on the way home from breakfast I found a turtle in the road. To save him from being run over, I put him in my kitchen for a while. I woke Katie up to look at it. At first she thought it had got into the house on its own somehow. Then it crawled into the cat's food dish and sat there. We put it into a box and brought it to the park.

100 Most People In America

A Great Deal of Information about Wipers

can be found here.

One of our favorites lately, Juana Molina here on Episode 3 of Woebot TV.

Commuter

A middle-aged Glenn stuck in traffic, an illustration for a story in the New Yorker.

Article here
and a Herr Ziffer identifies with it here.

King Cats in the News

"When I came back from that trip and sat down to do King-Cat 44—it was probably the "Chicken Lady" or the "Shovel Lady" story—I had a physical, palpable sense of being self-conscious."

-John Porcellino from an interview at the Onion.

King-Cat 44 was my first one.

Starlings in the News

Those noisy harbingers of doom in last weeks NYTimes Magazine, and here Stephen Frug writes about our feeble attempts at comixifying a startled murmuration.

Photo by Richard Barnes

APE ETC

I'll be at APE
this weekend,
and Comix Experience
Fri., 5-7.

Bees in the News

and see here.

Everything Must Pass/Go

We'll be shutting down the Cat Shop soon. More details to come and checks in the mail. Looking for new ways to squander our time in a good way. New younger cartoonists closer to the toner are needed to setup, agonize, box up, ship, and a half. Others: Buenaventura, New Bodega, Global Hobo, P---sheet, etc.

Update:
To clarify: we'll still be taking orders for a while, but will not be taking new submissions.

I do a lot of subdividing

1.

"What interests us here is Lorenzo's approach to narrative. Although his chief subject is a Pietà—and not the representation we are used to—he has included in his work the suggestions of earlier events in the Gospels: the slicing of Malchus' ear, the payment of Judas, and so on, as well as presenting the objects of Christ's torture, such as the three nails and the pair of flails or cat-o'-sixtails. The various stories are reduced to symbols and laid out on a plane, like in a Wunderkammer. Fleeting occurrences are thus transformed into timeless types existing in space, easily recalled and devotional—an ars memoria in paint. And there is a real dryness about these objects; compare, for instance, Magritte's Sleeper. These hands are not beautiful; nor are they individuated, as Christ's hands are and must be. They are utilitarian, like punctuation, or like this pointer from a London street-sign.

... This is a metaphysical approach to painting. It wants to speak, but it is not interested in the dictates of physical form, nor in problems of representation."
- Conrad H. Roth

2.

"...Whereas cartooning is making a story happen with symbols … cartoon drawings are -just by nature of how they’re used as symbols - in a lot of ways not really drawings because the information that they have is so rudimentary, or conceptual."

[...]

GROTH: Do you run into situations, for example, where you only have so much space left in the last panel, and it’s the wrong amount of space?

WARE: I do a lot of subdividing.

-Chris Ware, interviewed by Gary Groth
The Comics Journal # 200, December 1997

(picked up here)

Missing

Ozick in the new (4/07) Harper's:

"...what was missing, and has long been missing, in American letters: criticism that explains, both ancestrally and contemporaneously, not only how literature evolves but how literature influences and alters the workings of human imagination...What is needed are critics who can tease out hidden imperatives and assumptions held in common, and who will create the contentious conditions that underlie and stimulate a living literary consciousness."

I tried reading it with "comics" inserted instead of "literature," go ahead, you try it, it's fun--but what's the comics equivalent of "literary?" "Cartoony?"

"a living cartoony consciousness"

"a living comic book consciousness"

"a living comical consciousness"

No. We don't have the word to say it, even if there are writers and cartoonists wanting to write/draw about it, which maybe there ain't.

Rugged Times for the Bench Hugger

This

Sorry no updates. I've been metablogging in my mind.

Gluyas Williams

Filboid on Gluyas.

Detouring the West Coast

"Original" Art For Sale

The Beguiling has a few more of my pages up for sale. In the next months I'll be sending them many more so watch that space, if you're interested. Thanks.

Hobo

I'm posting here b/c for some reason I can't post to the drawing club blog anymore. The theme was hobos.

Trouble Sleeping Part 3 last part (for blog)

Moths Drink the Tears of Sleeping Birds

A species of moth drinks tears from the eyes of sleeping birds using a fearsome proboscis shaped like a harpoon, scientists have revealed. The new discovery – spied in Madagascar – is the first time moths have been seen feeding on the tears of birds.

New Scientist

UPDATE

Fictional and Cartoony

These'll be in "Famous Fictional" next Friday, Jan. 5. at Mad Art Gallery.
Some St. Louis artists were asked to do 2 "pieces" of the same size,
one of a fictional character (from books) and the other a cartoon character.

Trouble Sleeping 3.5

Trouble Sleeping Part 3.4

Correction

The other night at the signing at Quimby's I said during the Q&A session some nonsense about "you can't think yourself into writing about action, you can only think yourself into writing about thinking."

Since then I've learned that the actual saying I was referring to is "You can't think yourself into right action, you can only act yourself into right thinking."

So I was a little off. I apologize for any confusion.

How did I screw this phrase up so badly? If you have nothing better to do, listen up.

Over a year ago, while in a hospital waiting room, I picked up the Feb. 14 & 21 double issue New Yorker (with Chris Ware's sequentializing of the iconic Eustace Tilley cover).
I started reading the Mark Singer's profile of TV writer David Milch. I became fascinated with Milch and his ideas, and made plans to watch his HBO series Deadwood.

(Sidenote: I just finished Mark Singer's book Mr. Personality which collects some of his profile pieces for the New Yorker and which I enjoyed very much, though in the copy I got out of the library, the introduction ends mid-sentence and I couldn't figure out if it was a joke or a first-edition blunder. Also related: Singer wrote a profile of Ricky Jay in a different NYer which inspired me to read Mr. Jay's awesome Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women. Also, Ricky Jay plays a character on the show Deadwood.)

So in this profile of Milch he says:

"I try consciously to frustrate the impulse to think about a scene before I sit down to it, because--you know the highfalutin' expression 'You can't think your way to write action; you can only act your way to write thinking.'"

Now I've read this article 3 times since that waiting room, yet somehow this "highfalutin' expression" was transmogrified in my brain into

"You can't think your way to write action; you can only *think* your way to write thinking"

and I thought this diagnosed flaws in my own fiction writing. Yeah, I thought, that's right: I tend to overthink my stories and my stories tend to be about thinking, not action. Gotta work on that.

So the other night at Quimby's I was talking to the crowd about flaws in my work, and I mentioned the highfalutin' expression, by now totally telephoned into something else completely--no longer an expression of pithy pragmatism but dubious writing advice.

Today while inking I'm watching/listening to an interview with Milch (by now I'm a big fan) he says

"You can't think yourself into right action, you can only act yourself into right thinking."

and I clearly hear "right" instead of "write" because of the context and it suddenly clicks. That makes more sense! (And I could suddenly connect it to Milch's interest in William James.)

So I go back to the Singer profile to find the original quote thinking "how did I get that so wrong?" My only guess is that in the profile Milch is making a joke--he's punning on the "right" saying to say something about his own writing method. He doesn't think about his writing until he sits down and starts. The "write" saying works too, and makes perfect sense, though conceptually it isn't strictly symmetrical, and so that's maybe why my brain couldn't make sense of it until I distorted it to fit my own situation. Maybe for me the saying should be

"You can't read your way to right jack shit."

Trouble Sleeping Part 3.3

Trouble Sleeping Part 3.2

Signings in St. Louis and Chicago

I'll be signing books at
Star Clipper Comics
next Wednesday
December 6
and
at Quimby's in Chicago
on Thursday
December 7

with

Mr. Anders Nilsen
and
Ms. Gabrielle Bell

Trouble Sleeping: Part 3 Chapter 1

Press Conference

Though this goes against absolutely everything I believe in and hold dear in this sad sorry world, I'm going to insult your intelligence and try to make something clear so there's no question...

The other day I was asked whether the title of my book,"Curses," is like as in "...foiled again." No it is not. The title "Curses" refers, first of all, to the flock of starlings pictured.

In the book, the birds are curses.

In the story "The Curse," Glenn Ganges is cursed with a flock of starlings that perch in the trees outside his house, and their deafening squawking and voluminous shitting destroy Glenn's and his wife's lives.

The Great Plains

-from "The Story of the Great Plains"
which is part of a series of "the story of..." books, including "The Story of California" and "The Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch," all illustrated with lithographs by C.H. Dewitt.

My book "Curses" is going to come out in a month or so, and reprinted in it are the 3 stories that originally appeared in Drawn and Quarterly Showcase Vol. 1. (The first of those stories is reprinted here.) Back when that book was being put together, before Anders Nilsen's story (what became Dogs and Water) grew too large for the book, Kelly Link was asked to write an introduction. After the book was changed around somewhat, Nilsen and Link were left on the cutting room floor.

So, for the first anywhere, here's the last part of what she wrote:

(Spoilers)

...Lastly, there’s Kevin Huizenga’s three stories about a character named Glenn Ganges, who lives with his wife Wendy in suburban Michigan. I love Kevin Huizenga’s work, although I think those aliens would have a fair amount of trouble deciphering it [refers to something earlier in the intro obvs]. He reminds me of a deadpan, slapstick, surreal, suburban Herge. These are magical stories. “The Curse” manages to conjure up deafening noise, acrid stench -- the two senses that you wouldn’t think a graphic artist could capture. “28th Street” is one of the best fairytale retellings I’ve ever read. The third story, about lost children, says more sensible things about pictures and narrative than I’ll ever manage. “You can’t help but try to form a story in your head,” the narrator, Glenn Ganges, tells us about the pictures of missing children on advertisement fliers. “It adds up and becomes like an accidental graphic novel, whose story is mostly hidden, though sprawling landscapes and tragic scenes are hinted at. Every week two new faces and you imagine the scenes in between.”

Like the fliers, which are full of imagined transformations, helpfully depicting children who have aged -- even while missing -- listing information about parents and locations, Huizenga’s panels are signposted with words and names. There are the suggestive, diminished names of stores -- there’s Eden’s, and Paradise Bagels -- and slogans on t-shirts, newspaper stories about Sudanese refugees, historical and observational data about starlings and suburban sprawl. There are wordless transformations, too. Pictures of the missing children suddenly lift into the sky and become a murmuration of starlings. A curvy suburban road branches off and in the next panel it’s a tree full of noisy bird -- starlings again. A Mega Mart is a President’s Palace, or possibly the entrance to the feathered ogre’s subterranean cave. Squirting gasoline from the pump straight into the eyes, rather than the tank, brings on visions that change a strip mall into a scene out of Hieronymus Bosch, with Lovecraftian beasties, Native American-style totem animals with wings and hooves and staring eyes, and even those uncanny ghosts from Ms. Pacman. The panels begin to seep and drip darkness, like a kind of smog out of which appear starlings, a moon like an enormous egg, and finally, the strangest thing of all: Eden’s, the Mega Mart.

Like the other two artist/writers in this anthology, Kevin Huizenga is writing about a quest, a journey. Along the way, the narrator discovers a styrofoam take-home container is an enchanted, battery-operated doggybag of plenty. A monster explodes with rage, and breaks into dozens, hundreds, thousands of starlings, all of them croaking curses (except for one, which says “cheep”. After all, they are in the basement of the Mega Mart.) The stories are crammed with other visual jokes and references, like the guy with a moustache in the advertisement on the back of a missing children flier, paid to appear “thrilled with modernistic carpet cleaning”. He looks familiar to Glenn. He looks familiar to us as well -- maybe he’s the neighbor, Karl, from down the street in one of the other stories, “Curses”, who recommends using a bottle rocket to get rid of the starlings. And of course, maybe getting your carpet cleaned will help locate a missing child, the way praying to Baal, or stealing a feather from the ogre will break the curse so that Glenn and Wendy can have a child of their own.

Meanwhile, while Glenn is fretting about the missing children, the Sudanese refugees -- the “lost boys” -- who have been brought to America, are lost again, right under Glenn’s nose. They’re trying to navigate their way through the suburban landscape. It isn’t easy. So why do you even bother?

It all comes back to whether or not Glenn and Wendy will manage to have a baby. In the end, will everyone’s problems be solved? Sure. The waitress, the gas station attendant, the Sudanese clerk at Eden’s, Glenn and Wendy, everyone gets a piece of what they need. But even when you’ve stolen the ogre’s feather to break a curse, and you’re all set to live happily ever after in the suburbs, there are still difficulties. When you break a curse, it just breaks into smaller pieces, after all. The new baby won’t stop crying, and all the starlings (little, black curses) have come home to roost in the trees in your yard. But, as the narrator reminds us, the starlings aren’t just a curse. It isn’t just noise. They sing. They’re performance artists. They can mimic cell phones, dogs barking, car alarms, Latin and Greek and Mozart: all the same kinds of things, both magical and decidedly unmagical, that an artist/writer can draw on. In “28th Street,” it’s a starling who gets to have the last word of the story -- “The End” -- but it’s Kevin Huizenga who set him to sing.

-Kelly Link, from the unpublished introduction to Drawn and Quarterly Showcase #1.

(I highly recommend her wonderful short stories, especially the title story of her collection Magic for Beginners. Many stories from that collection made a big impression on me and have really burrowed into my head.)