Joshua Malbin

I was waiting on the platform at Atlantic-Pacific when I realized that the woman beside me who just got off the express to also wait for the local was Sarah Vowell. She was editing something in green pen. I had something I wanted to edit myself, but I felt like if I pulled it out and started on it, it would look like I was copying her. Or something equally neurotic. I left it in my bag and stood there for a really long time with nothing to do.

Then I got home and looked up Sarah Vowell’s picture, and sure enough, the woman on the subway platform wasn’t her.

Share on Facebook

It’s about eggs, and chickens, with some ancient Greek rape and torture. Enjoy.

Share on Facebook

John B. Cannon is exactly right about the unpleasantness of California winters:

Now the problem with California winters is that, since it never gets that cold, most houses are not properly constructed for heat conservation. They are poorly insulated. Windows often have gaps (and storm windows are not to be found). Instead of central heating, the average home in the Bay Area will have one or two rinky-dink wall heaters. What makes matters worse is that most native Californians are kind of macho about heating. They don’t think it should be on except for the two or three coldest days of the year, and they don’t even bother to close windows consistently. To me, an open window in November is an anomaly – not out of the question, but always to be remembered and closed at the earliest moment a nice day turns cold. I like being macho about going for long walks in the cold in Kansas. I hate being out-machoed (and therefore being what, weak and soft?) about feeling cold in my house in California.

I had a lovely November day today, as I made a cup of tea and broke my reading fast (more on that tomorrow) in the dim midafternoon and the need for a sweater. But soon it will be chilly inside all the time, when it should be toasty inside and chilly outside.

Share on Facebook

It’s almost not fair for me to review Insomnia Café, by Turkish illustrator M.K. Perker (best known as the artist for the highly successful series Air). It pushes too many of my buttons: it’s about books and being up in the middle of the night. You might think this would lead me to love it automatically, but in fact I’m more worried that the things I don’t love about it are nits I’m only picking because it invites me to get to invested in it too deeply.

Peter Kolinsky, the main character, was once an expert appraiser of handwritten manuscripts. Then he helped some gangsters fence a stolen book, got caught, and lost his job. He also testified against the criminals, so now they’re after him, or at least one of them is. He stays up all night drinking coffee and visits the Insomnia Café for “lunch” every day at 3 a.m., where he flirts with the waitress. This makes him late every morning for his current job, which he hates.

The gangster who’s after him is named Oblomov, explicitly after the eponymous main character of Goncharev’s 19th-century comic classic. It’s a strange choice, since the conceit of Goncharev’s book, as I understand it (having not read it), is that Oblomov is so lazy he no longer gets out of bed at all. The gangster Oblomov here is active all the time. I guess there’s some kind of irony intended with the theme of insomnia, but it seems to me that if you’re going to make a comparatively obscure literary reference it ought to do more than provide some free-floating irony.

Anyway, Oblomov insists Kolinsky must do one more job for him as payback for his betrayal, and when Kolinsky refuses he batters Kolinsky’s nose with repeated head butts. Kolinsky tells his sob story to the waitress, who brings him to a place called The Archives, where every partially written book in the world is housed, magically, until its author finishes it. Perker is aware this is a familiar idea: Kolinsky mentions Richard Brautigan’s The Abortion, where the main character curates a library of unique works never published, all donated by the authors. Closer to home, he might have mentioned Hicksville, by Dylan Horrocks, in which a secret library holds the unknown comics written by the 20th century’s greatest painters. Or perhaps James Turner’s Rex Libris, whose library contains all the books ever published. Or the infinite-monkey library in Borges’s “Library of Babel,” or the registry of all persons living and dead in José Saramago’s All the Names.

All of these stories, though, accomplish something Perker does not: they pursue the idea of the library past its initial premise, exploring its implications. Perker does little of this apart from having Kolinsky decide to steal an unfinished Salinger novel to placate Oblomov. In fact, Perker short-circuits the idea and at the end suggests Kolinsky has been not just delusional but dangerously mad all along.

In short, Insomnia Café is full of intriguing ideas—persistent insomnia, a waitress writing a book on insomniacs, a coworker who’s a compulsive liar, a highly active gangster named after a legendarily slothful nobleman, Kolinsky’s job, and the library itself—none of which gets enough attention. Plus Kolinsky comes off as a massively self-centered asshole, and it’s hard to like a book when you don’t like the main character even a little.

I did like the drawings. We often see action from odd angles, and characters make small shifts from one post to another over many panels.

Previews below the fold.

(continue reading…)

Share on Facebook

Mayor Bloomberg has sealed his deal to buy Joe Sitt out of Coney Island, buying seven of the speculator’s 12.5 Coney holdings for a whopping $95.6 million.

…

The [New York] Times described the purchase price of $300 per square foot as “a huge amount in the current market.”

Ahem. I believe someone may have said something about this happening in the end.

After the term limits thing, developer-coddling was the second major reason I voted against Mike Bloomberg.

Share on Facebook

Matt Kindt’s 3 Story tells three tales of a giant: the accounts of his mother, wife, and daughter. In childhood Craig Pressgang is normal-sized, but he keeps growing and growing until by his middle adulthood he’s three stories tall.

The mother’s story, the first one in the book, put me off a bit. I didn’t like the enforced simplicity, short sentences and sentence fragments broken across panels or by ellipses within panels. It struck me as an attempt to heighten the drama artificially. Also, the mother’s story was the most purely retrospective, and not, seemingly, very important to the whole.

With the wife’s story, though, the book started to grow on me (so to speak). There’s a lot more dialogue, which breaks up the repetitive short phrases, and a greater attention to the increasing problems of being huge, not just practical matters like how to get clothes or where to take a dump, but Craig’s progressively worsening disconnection from the world below him. This is presented not merely as an emotional detachment but also a physical one, as his nerves grow too long to carry sensation to his brain quickly. Eventually he can barely hear his loved ones even when they shout. He accidentally steps on a person and decides he needs to go away before he hurts his family.

In the third story the giant’s daughter, grown up now, tracks where he went after he left them. Here the narrative returns to the style I didn’t care for before, and again I’m not sure what is added to what we saw from the wife.

3 Story, then, is one pretty good story sandwiched between two lesser ones. The one in the middle takes up most of the book, so that’s okay.

The art matches the naive voice well, although I didn’t particularly love it  in its own right. There’s very little depth to any of the drawings, and the backgrounds are often washes of a single color.

Preview below the fold.

(continue reading…)

Share on Facebook

In a longer post in part about the current state of play in the House and Senate on Bart Stupak’s odious antichoice amendment, Chris Bowers discusses the Massachusetts Senate race, where Democratic frontrunner Martha Coakley has declared she would have voted against the entire bill if the amendment were not stripped out. Her Republican opponent Mike Capuano has issued a statement criticizing her. Bowers notes that all the Representatives who voted for the Stupak amendment were men, and many female Democratic Representatives now appear to be organizing to get it stripped out of the final bill. He writes:

Returning to the Massachusetts Senate race for a moment, Mike Capuano appears tone deaf to this gender divide. 58% of the Massachusetts primary electorate is female, and it is highly unlikely they are going to turn against Martha Coakley for a statement like this.

This betrays a pretty common misunderstanding of the politics of abortion, namely, the assumption that women are more likely to be pro-choice than men. The truth is, the views of men and women on abortion are more or less statistically indistinguishable. (See, for example, this major 2003 CBS poll, or pretty much any of the other polls listed in Wikipedia.) Now, the Northeast is more pro-choice than other regions so Bowers might be correct in the final analysis, but his gender thinking is off.

The reason this is dangerous, I believe, is that it leads Democratic activists and political strategists to assume that abortion politics are largely responsible for the gender split in party preference, which in turn leads to mistaken assumptions about how to run effective races and issue campaigns.

I don’t always like Amanda Marcotte, but I think her approach to the issue is much clearer and smarter, without sacrificing any of the outrage. It’s not just about men trying to regulate women. It’s also about some women trying to regulate Other Women.

UPDATE: Mike Capuano is of course a Democrat, and Bowers is talking about the Democratic primary. I don’t think that makes any difference to what I was saying, it’s just that I’m an idiot.

Share on Facebook

I’ve only ever heard the term “obscurantist” used pejoratively, which makes it sort of strange when Hans Rickheit uses it in his book jacket copy to describe himself: “The Squirrel Machine is the legendary obscurantist cartoonist Hans Rickheit’s most ambitious graphic novel to date.” To me “obscurantist” means someone who goes out of his way to obfuscate or otherwise hide his meaning, and I’m not sure why Rickheit would claim that’s what he’s doing.

If anything I think “meaning” is secondary to Rickheit’s project. Usually I start these reviews by concentrating on a comic’s story, but in The Squirrel Machine the images and the impressions they create in series matter a lot more than the story, which is often deliberately nonsensical, or at least has nonsensical sections bridging otherwise narrative sections. These are stark black-and-white drawings made to look a bit like etchings, sometimes depicting scenes a little like the wildly popular Flash game Submachine. There are also decaying and mutilated animal carcasses, some connected to monstrous musical instruments that remind me of Manhog from Jim Woodring’s Frank.

The effect overall is often something like the Black Lodge scenes from Twin Peaks.

The carcass instruments are built by a pair of brothers in 19th-century New England. There’s a woman who keeps a herd of pigs and introduces the boys to sex and disgust, and a door under their bunk bed that leads to a world in which they themselves become part machine.

I don’t think I can explain the story any more than that, though, without doing it an injustice. You’ll like it if you didn’t feel the need to explain the one half of Mulholland Drive as a dream of the other half (which it wasn’t, you know). Otherwise you’ll just think Rickheit’s being an obscurantist.

Preview here.

Share on Facebook

I finally got around to watching Watchmen, and as expected it was terrible. I expected to hate the changed ending, though, and I didn’t. It was a reasonable kludge to deal with the fact that Moore’s plot point of faking an alien invasion depended on a bunch of the intertextual insertions that couldn’t be reproduced in the movie, especially the pirate comics.

It was bizarre how needlessly graphic the violence was, though, and by god it was sloooooooow. Frankly the movie version needed to be far less faithful to the graphic novel, which reenacted and twisted the history of Golden and Silver Age comics. That history took forever on screen and probably made no sense to most viewers. Far better would have been to retain the core premise—villain wins in the end because he is right—and figure out some way to send up the recent history of comic-book-based movies.

Plus the acting was mostly crap.

Share on Facebook

In the aftermath of the Fort Hood shooting, we hear the following:

Reports suggested Major Hasan may have yelled something like “Allahu Akbar” — Arabic for “God is great” — just before the shooting.

These reports may be complete bunk crossed with paranoia. But I’m going to assume for a moment that they are true in order to point out something that’s been wrong with the “War on Terror” formulation from the beginning, and continues to be wrong to the extent that American media continues to use the formulation reflexively. (Obama himself has mostly avoided the phrase itself, if not, arguably, the mindset.)

If we are in a war, and Major Hasan is a recruit for the other side, then we need to concede that an Army base is the most legitimate of all possible targets.

It’s fairly obvious, however, that we’re not going to concede that, and we shouldn’t, because in truth, no matter what his motivations were Major Hasan didn’t carry out a military operation, he committed mass murder. Terrorists are criminals, not warriors. From the beginning we have granted them a legitimacy they never deserved.

Except when it came to the Geneva Convention, of course. Then we decided they were neither fish nor fowl.

Share on Facebook