October 09, 2009
Rain Taxi Book Festival & Fallcon
L.A. Diary by Gabrielle Bell
A confluence of events almost as portentous as the alignment of the sun and the galactic center heralding the uncertain events of 2012 have caused the Rain Taxi Book Festival and Fallcon to share the same moment in time if not the same space. Both events will compete for your attention between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. tomorrow (Saturday, Oct 10th) and I will attempt to have a table at both. At the Rain Taxi event, I (as Uncivilized Books) will be sandwiched between Big Brain Comics and Zak Sally's La Mano Books. Several great authors are scheduled to appear (Nicholson Baker, Lorrie Moore, Andrzej Zagajewski, etc.) but the main event as far as I'm concerned will be cartoonist Gabrielle Bell. In addition to gracing the Book Festival, Gabrielle teamed up with Uncivilized Books to produce a special mini-comic: L.A. Diary. The comic is a collection of diary strips published on her blog. It also contains sketches and an unfiltered glimpse at her real sketchbook diary. We also teamed up on a small Gocco print (pictured below). They will both be available for sale at the Rain Taxi festival and eventually next week copies will be made available online. Of course my comics will be available for sale as well, including the recently released Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009.
Meanwhile, I will also be tabling at Fallcon (Peter Bagge will be there!). On Saturday my presence will be limited, but on Sunday I will be joined by Gabrielle Bell and we will have her above mentioned mini-comic (and print) for sale in addition to my usual junk. Stop by and say hi!
Silver Gocco print by Gabrielle Bell
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April 19, 2009
R.I.P. J.G. Ballard
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January 16, 2009
Looking Backwards 2008: Books
Most of these books haven't actually been published in 2008. But, I read them in 2008 so they're here.
The Red Atlantis by J. Hoberman. It's been less than 20 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and it's cultural output already resembles impenetrable artifacts from an ancient lost civilization. This book is a great archaeology of Soviet culture in general (and Soviet cinema in particular) refracted through the prism of an American film critic.
Schulz & Peanuts by David Michaelis. A towering figure like Charles Schulz will have his life written (and re-written) several times over and I look forward to future efforts. This one was very readable if somewhat controversial. It was especially interesting to get a glimpse of Schulz's Minneapolis and St. Paul… even if it meant weeping over so many great things the Twin Cities lost to time and the automobile.
The Weapon Shops of Isher by A.E. Van Vogt. A sci-fi novel by the author the the amazing Slan that takes the right to bear arms to an insane extreme. A kind of libertarian dream/nightmare where individuals are protected by magical all-powerful weapons (which can be used in defense only) against the entire might of an interplanetary empire.
The Crack in Space by Philip K. Dick. This was the secret history of the US 2008 election written by a precog in 1966. An African-American runs for the presidency of the United States and promises to solve the world's problems by opening up a space-time rift. Sound like Obama?
The Road by Cormac McCarthy. This Road is hard to write about. I think I agree with Steven Shaviro that it "actively repels commentary." Still, it lingers in my head so it makes the list.
Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling. This one was a genuine surprise to me. I was aware of Bruce Sterling more as futurist and commentator but I'd never read his science-fiction before. Now I plan to read more. Data havens, ubiquitous networking, single cell protein cheaply mass produced in "vats swarming with bacteria" (aka. scop), nuclear terrorism, mysterious insurgency manuals, etc. The novel felt really relevant to the current world wide situation despite having been published in 1988.
Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia by John Gray. This is an extremely anti-utopian book. John Gray lays out the case that much of the evil done in the the world is done in the name of the greatest good. The "utopian" projects of the 20th century turned into minor apocalypses in the hands of Hitler, Stalin, Neocons, etc. It's hard to disagree with him... for the most part. While reading this book one gets the idea that John Gray takes all the utopian sounding rhetoric (for example of Neocons' project of global capitalist gunboat democracy) at face value, as genuinely utopian, instead of a cynical ideological ploy to mask imperialist projects. In the book he calls for more dystopias (1984 etc.) because utopias have gotten us so consistently in trouble. I would say that it's precisely utopias that are missing today. We have no problem with imagining apocalyptic futures, but we have lost the ability to imagine positive alternatives to the dystopia of now.
Which is why I enjoyed In Defense of Lost Causes by Slavoj Zizek so much. He takes the exact opposite position to John Gray and argues for the triumphant return of the universal. Actually, I shouldn't say that I didn't enjoy Black Mass, I did. But it was a very antagonistic enjoyment.
Next: Blogs
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December 20, 2008
Left Hand of Darkness
Minneapolis is covered by a thick blanket of snow. The temperature is dropping. Winter has arrived for real. It's the perfect time to (re)read Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness again. We're all Gethenians.
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October 26, 2007
Empty Closets
I just found that (the excellent comics academic) Jeet Heer has a blog. Good news!
His latest post is a brief history of classics scholarship. He demonstrates it to be in large part the sublimation of hidden homoerotic desires into scholarship. But, after a couple millennia of Christian (and Jewish and Islamic) prohibitions of same-sex desire, the closet has been thrown open and the repressed sexual energies have dissipated. Are we at an end of the classics now that repressed desire is no longer channelled into mastering difficult texts? (This is a very truncated go read the whole thing and come back).
Jeet states in his post that we got the classics from the Greeks. Via Michel Foucault we are told that the Greeks didn't have the same hang ups about same-sex-sex as we do. The dynamics of sexual relations were dictated by active or passive categories, not male or female ones. This maybe a minor quibble, but how did the Greeks leave us with all those great classics if they weren't trapped in the closet? Clearly sexual sublimation finds other channels. Classics scholars maybe (largely) out the closet, but we're not yet in a perfect age of desublimation. Perhaps this somewhat misanthropic quote from another Frenchman, Michel Houellebecq, points towards something: "Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those a little fed up with the world." (from H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life) Lets hope most theoretically-no-longer-sexually-repressed classics scholars are still a bit fed up with the world.
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September 16, 2006
The Story of Utopias
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September 13, 2006
The Morning of the Magicians
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September 10, 2006
The Martian Chronicles
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Economy of Cities
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