"So, So Silver Age" is consistently one of the best written literary blogs; their insights have much to say about the rest of the world and not just to the sealed atmosphere of Otaku Land. Pay them a visit HERE.
This comment from me may be of wider interest to my fellow soldiers in the Culture Wars:
"As a lifelong Marvel guy I here publicly confess that DC has become the better company. Over the past couple of years, the tone of Marvel's flagship titles have become more and more vile, from the swiftboating of Gwen Stacy to the obscenity of "Marvel Zombies". The creators at Marvel seem intent on inflicting their own neuroses on the rest of us, no matter what it does to their bottom line-- "Emma Frost" in paperback is a HUGE hit with the high school girls, but I couldn't give the original away because of the cheesecake covers that had no relevence to the material inside."
"All the Stones the Builders Rejected" 
(And some days it takes more Stones than others...) Where Mythical Bestiary meets Contemporary Culture and Chews On Its Leg Until Covered with Slobber.
"STRANGERS IN PARADISE" by TERRY MOORE
Terry Moore started publishing “Strangers in Paradise” in 1993. The initial premise– cute short angry lesbian loves cute zaftig doofus— sounded like a rip-off of Hopey and the much loved Maggie in “Love and Rockets”. The series won prize after prize, I admired the cover art in passing, but didn’t bother to buy a copy until 2006, when the cover for issue 76 showed some kind of professional Houston asshole (Freddie) hugging a desperate woman (Katchoo) with a note that read “please shoot me”. Since that pretty much sums up the State of the Union, I thought what the hell and bought a copy.
The next day I started obsessively visiting the comic shop to find out what happens next. There are 17 paperback “Strangers” collections so far, making me personally responsible for employee raises and putting the shop owner’s daughters through college. Sure it’s a soap opera (Powell’s Books calls it "Bridget Jones's Diary" meets "La Femme Nikita") and not a cure for cancer, but the series is weirdly addictive.
Katchoo (Katina Choovanski) is a talented artist and corporate spy with a tortured childhood and a terrible temper. Moore’s fans love her, but I’ve had my share of borderline personalities in my life and find Katchoo’s behavior abusive rather than attractive. The world is full of Americans who fancy themselves as rebels, but never actually rebel against anything more dangerous than social mores (Henry Rollins has made a career of this). Katina is a whirlpool of anger and yearning, and as she takes on responsibility for her own little family of gallery workers and models she becomes more appealing.
David is a crime lord’s son and former yakuza whose relationship with his half sister Darcy might have been a little too close for Mrs. Grundy’s comfort. After the murder of an innocent, David drifts into the arts-- the community most accepting of "difference"-- and becomes a Christian pilgrim in the truest sense of the word, a saint not a prig, trying to forgive himself and others. He falls desperately in love with Katchoo: borderline personality, alcoholic, lesbian, another ruined soul like himself. I could have told him this is like buying your life a ticket on a roller coaster lined with razor blades while being sprayed with rubbing alcohol.
Francine is closest to “normal” of any of these characters, but as she is sucked into her boyfriends’ and Katchoo’s forty different kinds of crazy, Francine’s passivity becomes as emotionally destructive as the abuse suffered by the other characters. Francine is also bite-my-knuckles Sexy as Hell, and Moore deserves a special Eisner award for designing characters with more than one body type, each of them erotic in their own way. When will mainstream comics learn this lesson about the human body from Moore and Hernandez? The steroid abusers at DC and Marvel are costing sales, not helping them.
The “Strangers” character who goes through the most development— and surprised me by becoming my favorite character—is Casey, who starts as a stock character piece of fluff, a butt for jokes, and grows into the most sincere, loving person in the series. That Casey can love without being damaged by love makes her my g-ddamn role model.
Don’t forget the laughing psychopath Darcy and her stable of sex spies (just how well do you know your senator’s trophy wife?); Mary-Beth, known as “Tambi”, female weight lifter and assassin for hire; Mike, the cynical but bemused good cop in a bad town; Freddie Femur, the most appalling comic foil since Howard Hunter was chased by a mechanical alligator in “Hill Street Blues”; and Francine’s mom, a life-is-stranger-than-fiction avatar of Bettie Page. The minor characters, even the one-panel walk-ons, are wonderfully observed. My personal so-close-and-yet-so-far fantasies involve FBI agent and artists’ model Sara Bryant, and damn him, I think Moore knew it when he designed her.
“Strangers in Paradise” is available in either a three-volume pocket book edition, or for art junkies like me, in 17 large format trade paperback collections. Moore is winding down the series, with only 8 new issues to go. Oh, and someone's blowing up ambulances by planting bombs in the body cavities of heart attack victims...
See Also: GRAPPHIC LOVE: Comic Reviews Prologue
GRAPPHIC LOVE: PROLOGUE
I collected comics as a child, assembling complete or near complete runs of “Spider-Man”, “X-Men”, “Fantastic Four” and other Marvel titles. It was the 1960s, and you could find missing issues at second hand shops three-for-a-quarter instead of hundreds of dollars. When I graduated from high school, I put away childish things, or so I thought, and sold the entire collection-- more than 500 comics-- for 350 dollars (weep for me).
In the 1980s, I was teaching myself crosshatching and pen and ink work and went to a comics shop to study Jim Steranko’s work on “Nick Fury” and Michael Kaluta’s work on “The Shadow”. While chatting with the owner about Why I No Longer Read Comics, he introduced me to Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez’s “Love and Rockets”. I fell in love with ink and paper again, and was there for Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman.
These days I buy mainstream comics for my classroom-- the students most likely to borrow a comic are invariably the most literate, most likely to read for pleasure. Sometimes I convert non-believers with books like “Bone”, “Asterix”, or “Persepolis”. I buy alternative, “adult” titles for myself, and the pleasures of comic reading-- art and text combined-- make a delicious leaven between more traditional texts. (This is reportedly the pattern for readers in Japan, where adult and all-age comics sell millions every week.)
This is a blog about enthusiasms, political, literary and artistic, and I’m happy to share my current obsession over titles like “TopTen”, “Promethea”, “Y, the Last Man”, “Fables”, “Strangers in Paradise”, and others.
COMMONPLACE BOOK, Current Extracts and Quotations of Interest
"I have no problem with the demonstration, but this is a business. Couldn't they have protested in the morning before work? Couldn't they have protested in their hearts?"
CHARLEY BOHLEY, a restaurant owner who fired 10 workers after they attended an immigration rally, quoted in the NYT April 15, 2006
***
Gwenda Bond, “Fantasy Goes Literary”, article at PublishersWeekly.com:
"Great writers have been incorporating fantasy, science fiction and horror in their fiction for a very long time," says Tina Pohlman, editorial director of Harcourt's Harvest imprint. But she concedes, "I realize that the contemporary literary world tends to equate literary fiction with narrative realism, so maybe there is something in the air."
.... "It's more of an aberration," says Brockmeier, "that those elements were stripped out of literary fiction in the first place. No one is rejecting realism, but there is a greater openness to accepting fantastic fiction as a form of literature."
....Kastenmeier, however, does view these latest developments as a sea change. "What is unique to our times is the fluidity of the borders between genres," he says. "There's always been fantasy in literature, and children's literature was accepted as literature, but now we're seeing people incorporate fantasy aspects into mainstream literature without being marginalized."
***
Jane Smiley, “Notes for Converts” in The Huffington Post:
“Bush is a man who has never been anywhere and never done anything, and yet he has been flattered and cajoled into being president of the United States through his connections, all of whom thought they could use him for their own purposes. He has a surface charm that appeals to a certain type of American man, and he has used that charm to claim all sorts of perks, and then to fail at everything he has ever done. He did not complete his flight training, he failed at oil investing, he was a front man and a glad-hander as a baseball owner. As the Governor of Texas, he originated one educational program that turned out to be a debacle; as the President of the US, his policies have constituted one screw-up after another. You have stuck with him through all of this, made excuses for him, bailed him out. From his point of view, he is perfectly entitled by his own experience to a sense of entitlement.”
***
***
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” -- Gustav Mahler
***
“I’ve long resisted the idea that the modern limitated-liability corporation, considered as an “individual” (as it is, under American law) is in fact—no matter how good and kind the people inside it—a sociopath. But the older I get and the more I see, the more I suspect that’s essentially the case.” – Patrick Hayden
***
“An Easter Turducken consists of one Cadbury Cream Egg, surrounded by marshmallow Peep, crammed deep inside the body of a hollow chocolate bunny. "It is my policy to avoid ingesting foods that contain the letter sequence 'turd,'" says one commenter...” – Xeni Jardin, at BoingBoing
***
“... The cartoon generated so many positive responses that [Stephanie] McMillan decided to auction it off on eBay and donate the proceeds to help keep abortion safe and legal in South Dakota. The bidding started at 99 cents, but by the time the auction closed on April 5, it had jumped to $2,201. McMillan is splitting the proceeds evenly between Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Oglala Sioux Tribe. Oglala Sioux President Cecilia Fire Thunder recently confirmed plans to build a women’s reproductive health clinic on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where the South Dakota state government has no jurisdiction.
[Stephanie McMillan says] “.... Once the thought occurred to me, and I found his numbers on the Web site of the South Dakota legislature, there wasn’t any question-- I had to do it....His recent comments about rape are so offensive that many people are appalled that someone like him is attempting to control women’s lives. After his creepy detailed description of rape, I suspect that his sensibilities are not very delicate-- he can probably handle rough language. His righteous indignation sounds like a put-on. What’s really obscene is his effort to force women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, even if they’re victims of rape or incest, even at the risk of their health, regardless of their desires or circumstances.... The funniest [question] that someone told me she asked was: Tampons or pads?”
***
“To be a member of the ‘Comics As Literature’ canon, a work has to fit two of three descriptions, other than being a work of sequential art:
1. boring and/or incomprehensible
2. autobiographical, semi-autobiographical, or featuring a character with the same name as the author
3. about genocide or mass murder”
-- Franny Howe at “So, So Silver Age”
***
“In 1996 and 1997, Abramoff billed the Marianas for 187 contacts with DeLay's office, including 16 meetings with DeLay. In December 1997, DeLay, his wife and their daughter went on an Abramoff-arranged jaunt to the Marianas. DeLay brunched with the Marianas' largest private employer, textile magnate Willie Tan. Tan had to settle a US Labor Department lawsuit alleging workplace violations. According to the book "The Hammer" by Lou Dubose and Jan Reid, among the violations common on the islands is forbidding women to work when they are pregnant, thus leading to a high abortion rate.
“Evidently, DeLay didn't have time to look into such allegations, since he was busy playing golf and attending a dinner in his honor, sponsored by Tan's holding company. According to The Washington Post, it was at this dinner that DeLay called Abramoff "one of my closest and dearest friends." He also reminded those present of his promise that no minimum wage or immigration legislation affecting the Marianas would be passed.
"’Stand firm,’ he added. ‘Resist evil. Remember that all truth and blessings emanate from our Creator.’ He then went with Tan to see a cockfight.” -- Molly Ivins
***
".... our study found that more young people reported self-harm before, rather than after, becoming a goth. This suggests that young people with a tendency to self-harm are attracted to the goth subculture," says Robert Young, who led the study.
"Rather than posing a risk, it's also possible that by belonging to the goth subculture, young people are gaining valuable social and emotional support from their peers." But he cautions: "However, the study was based on small numbers and replication is needed to confirm our results." Only 25 participants felt strongly associated with goth culture. – Gaia Vince, New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8996&feedId=online-news_rss20
***
Theoretically we have lots of technology to teach people [fill in the blank, prioritize as you like] whatever. But more often every day I get the terrifying impression that it's just not sticking. And I live in the Northeast surrounded by colleges and college towns. I know it's Allentown and not Princeton, but still. Then I start projecting outward. Planet population of what, 7 billion? What percentage of that number is below the age of 30? Below 20? Below 10? Forget Atlas Shrugged fantasies and religious apocalypse scenarios. We're not birds or fish who get most of what we need to survive and thrive hardwired into us. Our quality of life is predicated on a certain percentage of the population being around and able to pass knowledge on to the next generation in sufficient quantity to sustain and expand and enrich that culture. ... I really hope I'm wrong and I'm just beginning to lapse into "hey you kids, get off my lawn!" mode. That would be ok. Not fun, but tolerable. But if we're literally going to drown in our own uneducated, well then Dan doesn't have to be right about much before things are going to start sucking pretty hard and most of the time.
- Barney Dannelke
***
“The Republicans will probably win again. Good luck to them. Who wants Democrats to get in, just to run a better police state, the way Blair and New Labour have in Britain, where, last time I looked, the government was planning togas every badger from Lands End to Cape Wrath?
“Who wants Democrats to get to run a better Empire? In the Bush years Latin America is seeing a new dawn, with Hugo Chavez publicly deriding our Commander in Chief as a drunkard and sending cheap heating oil to the poor in the Northeast. In the Bush years two professors, from Harvard and the University of Chicago, have published an eighty-three-page paper outlining exactly why slavish deference to the Israel lobby is hurting America. I don’t think that would have happened in Clinton’s time. At some level, there’s a lot to be said for having morons in charge—at least until the sort of people I was talking to last Saturday can organize a party to take over, and start the long process of returning the country to sanity. Feingold should make a break for it now, split like LaFollette and really stir things up. God knows, we need it.
-- Alexander Cockburn in The Nation
See Also: Why am I being played by a 16-year-old lipgloss model?,
"He was like a murderer annoyed at being called a shoplifter",
"I've had far more sex than I've had fights on water towers against guys with super powers"
CHARLEY BOHLEY, a restaurant owner who fired 10 workers after they attended an immigration rally, quoted in the NYT April 15, 2006
***
Gwenda Bond, “Fantasy Goes Literary”, article at PublishersWeekly.com:
"Great writers have been incorporating fantasy, science fiction and horror in their fiction for a very long time," says Tina Pohlman, editorial director of Harcourt's Harvest imprint. But she concedes, "I realize that the contemporary literary world tends to equate literary fiction with narrative realism, so maybe there is something in the air."
.... "It's more of an aberration," says Brockmeier, "that those elements were stripped out of literary fiction in the first place. No one is rejecting realism, but there is a greater openness to accepting fantastic fiction as a form of literature."
....Kastenmeier, however, does view these latest developments as a sea change. "What is unique to our times is the fluidity of the borders between genres," he says. "There's always been fantasy in literature, and children's literature was accepted as literature, but now we're seeing people incorporate fantasy aspects into mainstream literature without being marginalized."
***
Jane Smiley, “Notes for Converts” in The Huffington Post:
“Bush is a man who has never been anywhere and never done anything, and yet he has been flattered and cajoled into being president of the United States through his connections, all of whom thought they could use him for their own purposes. He has a surface charm that appeals to a certain type of American man, and he has used that charm to claim all sorts of perks, and then to fail at everything he has ever done. He did not complete his flight training, he failed at oil investing, he was a front man and a glad-hander as a baseball owner. As the Governor of Texas, he originated one educational program that turned out to be a debacle; as the President of the US, his policies have constituted one screw-up after another. You have stuck with him through all of this, made excuses for him, bailed him out. From his point of view, he is perfectly entitled by his own experience to a sense of entitlement.”
***
***
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” -- Gustav Mahler
***
“I’ve long resisted the idea that the modern limitated-liability corporation, considered as an “individual” (as it is, under American law) is in fact—no matter how good and kind the people inside it—a sociopath. But the older I get and the more I see, the more I suspect that’s essentially the case.” – Patrick Hayden
***
“An Easter Turducken consists of one Cadbury Cream Egg, surrounded by marshmallow Peep, crammed deep inside the body of a hollow chocolate bunny. "It is my policy to avoid ingesting foods that contain the letter sequence 'turd,'" says one commenter...” – Xeni Jardin, at BoingBoing
***
“... The cartoon generated so many positive responses that [Stephanie] McMillan decided to auction it off on eBay and donate the proceeds to help keep abortion safe and legal in South Dakota. The bidding started at 99 cents, but by the time the auction closed on April 5, it had jumped to $2,201. McMillan is splitting the proceeds evenly between Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Oglala Sioux Tribe. Oglala Sioux President Cecilia Fire Thunder recently confirmed plans to build a women’s reproductive health clinic on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where the South Dakota state government has no jurisdiction.
[Stephanie McMillan says] “.... Once the thought occurred to me, and I found his numbers on the Web site of the South Dakota legislature, there wasn’t any question-- I had to do it....His recent comments about rape are so offensive that many people are appalled that someone like him is attempting to control women’s lives. After his creepy detailed description of rape, I suspect that his sensibilities are not very delicate-- he can probably handle rough language. His righteous indignation sounds like a put-on. What’s really obscene is his effort to force women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, even if they’re victims of rape or incest, even at the risk of their health, regardless of their desires or circumstances.... The funniest [question] that someone told me she asked was: Tampons or pads?”
***
“To be a member of the ‘Comics As Literature’ canon, a work has to fit two of three descriptions, other than being a work of sequential art:
1. boring and/or incomprehensible
2. autobiographical, semi-autobiographical, or featuring a character with the same name as the author
3. about genocide or mass murder”
-- Franny Howe at “So, So Silver Age”
***
“In 1996 and 1997, Abramoff billed the Marianas for 187 contacts with DeLay's office, including 16 meetings with DeLay. In December 1997, DeLay, his wife and their daughter went on an Abramoff-arranged jaunt to the Marianas. DeLay brunched with the Marianas' largest private employer, textile magnate Willie Tan. Tan had to settle a US Labor Department lawsuit alleging workplace violations. According to the book "The Hammer" by Lou Dubose and Jan Reid, among the violations common on the islands is forbidding women to work when they are pregnant, thus leading to a high abortion rate.
“Evidently, DeLay didn't have time to look into such allegations, since he was busy playing golf and attending a dinner in his honor, sponsored by Tan's holding company. According to The Washington Post, it was at this dinner that DeLay called Abramoff "one of my closest and dearest friends." He also reminded those present of his promise that no minimum wage or immigration legislation affecting the Marianas would be passed.
"’Stand firm,’ he added. ‘Resist evil. Remember that all truth and blessings emanate from our Creator.’ He then went with Tan to see a cockfight.” -- Molly Ivins
***
".... our study found that more young people reported self-harm before, rather than after, becoming a goth. This suggests that young people with a tendency to self-harm are attracted to the goth subculture," says Robert Young, who led the study.
"Rather than posing a risk, it's also possible that by belonging to the goth subculture, young people are gaining valuable social and emotional support from their peers." But he cautions: "However, the study was based on small numbers and replication is needed to confirm our results." Only 25 participants felt strongly associated with goth culture. – Gaia Vince, New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8996&feedId=online-news_rss20
***
Theoretically we have lots of technology to teach people [fill in the blank, prioritize as you like] whatever. But more often every day I get the terrifying impression that it's just not sticking. And I live in the Northeast surrounded by colleges and college towns. I know it's Allentown and not Princeton, but still. Then I start projecting outward. Planet population of what, 7 billion? What percentage of that number is below the age of 30? Below 20? Below 10? Forget Atlas Shrugged fantasies and religious apocalypse scenarios. We're not birds or fish who get most of what we need to survive and thrive hardwired into us. Our quality of life is predicated on a certain percentage of the population being around and able to pass knowledge on to the next generation in sufficient quantity to sustain and expand and enrich that culture. ... I really hope I'm wrong and I'm just beginning to lapse into "hey you kids, get off my lawn!" mode. That would be ok. Not fun, but tolerable. But if we're literally going to drown in our own uneducated, well then Dan doesn't have to be right about much before things are going to start sucking pretty hard and most of the time.
- Barney Dannelke
***
“The Republicans will probably win again. Good luck to them. Who wants Democrats to get in, just to run a better police state, the way Blair and New Labour have in Britain, where, last time I looked, the government was planning togas every badger from Lands End to Cape Wrath?
“Who wants Democrats to get to run a better Empire? In the Bush years Latin America is seeing a new dawn, with Hugo Chavez publicly deriding our Commander in Chief as a drunkard and sending cheap heating oil to the poor in the Northeast. In the Bush years two professors, from Harvard and the University of Chicago, have published an eighty-three-page paper outlining exactly why slavish deference to the Israel lobby is hurting America. I don’t think that would have happened in Clinton’s time. At some level, there’s a lot to be said for having morons in charge—at least until the sort of people I was talking to last Saturday can organize a party to take over, and start the long process of returning the country to sanity. Feingold should make a break for it now, split like LaFollette and really stir things up. God knows, we need it.
-- Alexander Cockburn in The Nation
See Also: Why am I being played by a 16-year-old lipgloss model?,
"He was like a murderer annoyed at being called a shoplifter",
"I've had far more sex than I've had fights on water towers against guys with super powers"
MICHAEL FOUNTAIN READING NEW STORIES MONDAY NIGHT AT THE RED LION PUB, CHICAGO
MONDAY NIGHT, APRIL 10 at TWILIGHT TALES, Upstairs at
THE RED LION PUB
2446 N LINCOLN AVE., CHICAGO
(773) 348-2695
Yrs. Truly (Man About Town, Student of Mystery, White Bluesman, Editor of Ormondroyd's Encyclopedia Esoterica, and Love Child of Beatrix Potter and Edgar Allen Poe)
will be reading:* A new crime/horror story, "Binky Wasn't Ever Going to Get Up"
* A non- fiction excerpt illustrated with pretty pictures, "Tarot Without Superstition"
* And a short fantasy: "Ogopogo, or the Sea-Serpent Redemption"
Also appearing will be JJ PIONKE with
"Gender Bending Gaijin Dreams with Poetry-- A fiction-writing academic, JJ brings Twilight Tales a mix of everything Monday night."
CHICAGO'S RED LION PUB:
* built in 1882 when Lincoln Park and DePaul were nothing but farmland
* haunted by a score of Chicago's finest ghosts
* just across from the Biograph Theatre, where Dillinger was fingered by the Lady in Red and shot in the alley by G-Men
* Reputedly inhabited by eight (8) count 'em eight ghosts-- including the retarded girl who smells like lavendar, Sharon who blocks the door to the upstairs ladies room, the dark bearded man killed over a gambling debt
THE TROUBLE BEGINS AT SEVEN.
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