Pim & Francie – The Golden Bear Days

About a year ago, if you’ll remember, I posted a snippet from Al Columbia’s anthology Pim & Francie – The Golden Bear Days. Over Christmas in New York City, I dropped by the amazing comics shop, Forbidden Planet, and picked it up. I’m very late to the party here, and there have been plenty of reviews of it online, so I’m just going to quickly toss a few thoughts in and add to the chorus.

Because the book is a fragmented mess of half-completed, scrapped comics, maybe the best way to review it is through some sort of super-pretentious gestalt word vomit exercise. Here we go:

horror • disgust • unease • amusement • terror • awe • distortion • innocence • despair • zombies • lust • betrayal • paranoia • beauty • john lithgow • loneliness

Well, doesn’t this book just sound like a blast to read? In truth, the book carries huge emotional heft, even though a nothing resembling a narrative ever threatens to congeal from the mess of scraps. Columbia has an amazing talent for crafting potent images, and telling stories in very small spaces.

It’s all the stuff of nightmares: the death of a loved one, the fear of being lost, the terror of sleep paralysis when you can swear a knife-wielding monster is shuffling closer and closer to your door. The sensation generated is an overwhelming, macabre curiosity. You have to know what will happen on the next page, especially because it’s so uncertain of a particular storyline is going to continue to the next page.

When every artfully placed panel could represent a bleak ending, Columbia realizes that a few breaks are in order. Of course, you won’t find any positive thinking here – the brief reprieves from terror are mostly stocked with bravado, cynicism, lust, and the pure will to love to see another day. It’s not the best side of humanity represented here, by any measure.

So far, you should have picked up on two things:

1. this book is intense
2. you should buy this book on Amazon, because it is cheaper there and I will get some money if you do
3. you should also tell your friends to buy this book on Amazon, because I will make even more money

But there’s more to this review than adulation and greed. Just a little while ago, one of my friends pointed out an interview with Al Columbia that reveals how difficult it was for him to draw these comics and put the book together. Turns out, he’s not immune to the images he creates:

Intrusive thoughts of a violent nature haunted me, made me pretty sick, actually, for a few years. I couldn’t get them out of my head … it happened for a good three-year period, about three or four years ago, where I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t work on anything. I almost couldn’t function properly in everyday life. I never knew when it would happen. Not only were they scary images, but there was a spiritual quality to it that made me feel like something was in jeopardy, something wasn’t right with me.

via ComicsComics

I’d be lying if I said the result wasn’t fascinating. I talked in a previous blog post about sincerity. This book epitomizes it, in all its schizophrenic struggle. Get ahold of this book somehow—it’s a quick and unforgettable read.

Salt, The Caryatids, Books

Books, books, I buy too many books.  I have a strange relationship with books where I appreciate them so much as objects that I am often content to merely own them.  Sure I’d like to read them, but there are so many and I really struggle to maintain the patience required to read every night. Plus, when you consider the logical end of obtaining so many books, it’s not rewarding.  Jeff and Ann Vandermeer have to have huge book sell-offs annually in order to not die under the crushing pressure of paper and ink.  Owning books is sadly a losing proposition in the long run.

But I mean to say that the book I have stalled out on, Salt, is great, but I maybe only read 100 pages of it before life interfered and threw my pattern off.  Like Mad Men (at least for me), Salt is the sort of thing you have a hard time getting back into if you take a break, specifically because nothing ever really happens.  Sorry, Mad Men, your period detail is amazing but please can Don Draper do something interesting?

I say this because you should read Salt, by Mark Kurlansky—bestselling author of (wait for it) Cod: A Biography Of The Fish That Changed The World.  I’m something of a neophyte in the non-fiction world, and practically everything I’ve read is about food in some way or another.  But in spite of my poor attention span I can recommend this book because, uh, it’s fascinating.  It’s not just sodium chloride, table salt—it’s all sort of chemical salts, including, for instance, gunpowder.  People used to kill each other to get a little salt, and now people kill themselves by consuming too much salt.  I can’t say much more about it other than that a whole chapter describes olives, my favorite food, so I love it, but I’ll just leave with Kurlansky’s opening line, which just accentuates the romantic aura this surprisingly non-dorky book entertains:

“The search for love and the search for wealth are always the two best stories. But while a love story is timeless, the story of a quest for wealth, given enough time, will always seem like the vain pursuit of a mirage.”

But I am trudging forward with another book I started a few months back – Bruce Sterling’s The Caryatids.  Hey look, that’s the cover right up there.  I had heard some pretty rave things about this when it first came out, but a cursory glance at Amazon makes it appear like people mostly want to shit on it.  Which I sort of understand, even if I don’t agree. Some of the main critiques levied against it are that there’s a lack of characterization, a lack of plot, it’s too preachy, and that perspective shifts around too frequently to get a handle on what Sterling is even trying to say.  Well, slow down, mister, I’m only one hundred pages in.  But it definitely possesses the distinct reek of a work produced by a technofetishist. In this way, it reminds me of Charles Stross’ Accelerando, which was bursting with cool ideas but swept plot under the rug, or most of what I’ve read from Cory Doctorow.

I love this stuff.  It’s popcorn, but it’s smart popcorn, and it’s undeniably a product of our specific era in a way other sci-fi isn’t.  Near-future sci-fi has never been as close to the present day as it is now, and god, I could come up with a better way to say it but there it is.  I actually got back into The Caryatids after thinking all week about augmented reality, and I wasn’t really surprised when it turns out to potentially be a major plot point in the story.

Like I said, I’m only 100 pages in, thus far.  But with the disclosure that I love some good technoporn (and what nerd doesn’t?), you have another recommendation based on the strength of Sterling’s ideas here (and some pretty entertaining dialogue) and his surprisingly rewarding refusal to have people blow shit up to make things more exciting.  Yeah, that’s right – there haven’t been any explosions yet.  So you decide.

May is surrealism month

Upon finishing The Physiognomy, I was suddenly filled with an unexpected and unshakeable need to re-read Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.  I immediately called the Borders on Ponce and checked to see if they had it in stock, and then drove there while listening to this song (World’s End Girlfriend – Satan Veludo Children).  I arrived exactly four minutes and twenty seconds after I left—coincidentally where a lull appears in the song after an early crescendo—and walked inside to find my book.

After picking it up I decided to meander around, and I happened to stumble into a collection of Borges’ fiction, misfiled far away from its alphabetical port of call.  I’ve never read Borges but have always wanted to, and accidentally finding it amid thousands of other books seemed like way Borges was meant to be discovered.  So I purchased The Book of Imaginary Beings too.  It seems to me like they should make a pretty good couple, at least in theory.

Then I glanced at the magazines and picked up the latest issue of Hi-Fructose, where I flipped open to an article on the art of Thomas Doyle.  Doyle’s work felt like something out of a Kelly Link story or Mark Z Danielewski’s House of Leaves:

See what I mean? It’s incredible stuff. Check out his site here (I’m linking it twice so you’ll actually go.)

Then I drove home through a sea of green lights, picking up where I left off in the song, and arrived home exactly four minutes and twenty seconds later, which is again, coincidentally, exactly the point at which the song ends.

Life is strange, sometimes, in its symmetry.

Psychiatrist

Or, my impression of a Haruki Murakami story:

I was parched. I took a sip of water from the red plastic cup on the coffee table.  I could feel the Elmo face tactile against my calloused palm.  I hadn’t sipped water out of a cup like this since I was a baby.  Perhaps that was the point. Regressing.

“Percival,” I cleared my throat.  “What was it you wanted to see me about?”

This was something of new setting for me, and I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the way the furniture in the room had been rearranged.  For starters, the aura was all wrong. The cherry wood desk Percival sat on was set perpendicular to the back of the room, running into the floor-to-cieling windows to my left.  The carpet, a mossy berber that probably had grown dark over the years from dropped ash and spilled herbal teas. The whole room felt vaguely funereal. The old chair I sat in was reupholstered in a dull floral print, and smelled like Chanel No. 5.

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the kleptomaniac apocalypse

So Maps and Legends was all right.  It has an amazing cover, for sure.  There was nothing terribly thought-provoking about it, but Chabon’s review pieces were generally pretty entertaining and his essay on The Road goaded me, at last, onto the Oprah bandwagon.  So I’m now reading through Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I am almost a little weirded out and embarrassed by how much I’m enjoying it.  It’s a fast read – I’m about halfway through -  and it’s very engaging.  People say it’s bleak, and I guess it is – I already know how it ends, by the way – but I am just enraptured by the depiction of scrounging for supplies.  What a weird thing to get all caught up in.  The idea of the post-apocalypse as a picked-over shopping mall, a scrounger’s paradise, where kleptomaniacs can finally find justification for the urges they always attempted to suppress.

Maybe it’s just that I’ve also been playing Fallout 3, where if you’re not picking through every little box or corpse looking for bottle caps or ammunition you’re Not Doing It Right.  But when Papa goes looking through some burned-out homestead for a tin of food, I’m totally there with him.  [yo, make sure u check under de bed, there might be a safe there u can lockpik. o shit raiders!!1 equip ur nailbat] I’m not sure if McCarthy could have understood how this video game-influenced perspective affects a reading of his novel.  Or maybe it doesn’t.  Maybe this is the way everyone with a bit of survivalist in them, a paranoid little sprite pacing about with a shotgun and a gas mask, reads these passages. You could, I think, make a very thrilling game out of The Road, and I’m not sure that would be missing the point. It’s about resource management, evading attention, and melee combat.  Sort of the ultimate survival horror game.  Apparently someone else has already drawn this comparison in a more thorough blog post than yours truly.

But I have half a book to finish reading.  I’ll have to come back to this later and flesh it out in more detail…

the seattle central library

Thank you, Rem Koolhaas.

And there’s more to be seen on flickr with the tags ‘seattlelibrary‘ and ‘seattlecentrallibrary‘!  It felt like I was walking around Mirror’s Edge, but thankfully I was able to restrain the urge to attempt some spontaneous parkour.  I suspect this is the beginning of another level in my obsession with postmodern architecture, bright colors, and lowercase Futura bold.

Evidently there is quite a bit of controversy surrounding the building in architectural circles, or so wikipedia tells me.  It’s pretty mind-blowing when you walk in, so maybe I wasn’t noticing things like usability as much as I should. Seattle P.I (R.I.P., LOL) Architectural Critic Lawrence Cheek reversed positions on the library in this insightful if not entirely persuasive retrospective piece:

This one feels, in varying places, raw, confusing, impersonal, uncomfortable, oppressive, theatrical and exhilarating. Ponder any spot in this vast building, and two, three or more of those adjectives inevitably swirl together. That’s the first indicator of trouble. If this building were fulfilling the showers of acclaim heaped onto it, all we’d be talking about is joy.

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obligatory post-prandial minipost

The feast, of course, being the experience of seattle.  I haven’t posted over the weekend because I was busy absorbing the excellence of this particular city in the pacific northwest.  Great coffee, great food, great typography (!), and great weather while I was there.  I’ll have to post more about the details this week as I sort everything out in my head and readjust to work-life.  Thanks V, Al, J.

In the meantime I am now reading Michael Chabon’s Maps And Legends, which has a simply amazing cover – or three of them, actually, that layer – but is mostly meditations on books and comics and is really short. [Seattle also has the most impressive library in the world.  And I've been to the library of Alexandria*.  This is better.]

*Not the original, dumbass.

Fetishable Books

The Book Cover Archive

I could, and have, spent hours looking through this collection. Like many amazing things, it comes from the casual optimist.  from the interview I excerpted earlier: an exchange that I thought was actually very insightful and changed my mind about e-books:

E-book detractors have of a strange idea of what most books are. Those beautiful dusty old encyclopedias, that rare first-edition of Ulysses, even your fancy new Vintage paperback? That is not most books. The Grisham and Grafton paperbacks at the airport, Chicken Soup for the Spirit, college textbooks — that’s most books. Does anyone really care if the next Janet Evanovich thriller has no corporeal form? Wouldn’t that be an improvement?

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good sci-fi book covers? c’est impossible, non

Oh, this is what I want to do:

Turn this:

into this:

Eric: I’m very excited about the new promotional work that Gollancz/Orion has been putting out, the Future Classics and Totally Space Opera series. Besides being surprisingly conceptual and classy takes on genre fiction, I think they point at a trend toward collectible and fetishable books as a revenue stream for authors and publishers. I hope we’ll be seeing more of these kinds of editions soon. More on this in a below.

Full gallery of 8 covers below the jump.  The link below is just so cool and so worth reading you basically have no choice but to check it out.  I will even link to it again right here.  I could run an entire blog just posting things from this blog but that wouldn’t be very original of me, even if it was way more interesting.  I’ll have to make another post drawing together different ideas on fetishable books because, I agree that’s where it’s at.

via casual optimist

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