The Knockout, c. 1921 by e.e. cummings (1894–1962)
I’m a big fan of Drew Lerman’s work, and I’m always excited when he puts together a new collection. His latest is Conversations with Don DeLillo and Other Conversations, collecting his recent strips. I would describe these strips as functioning in the mode of pseudoautiobiographical postmodern literary interrogation, only that makes them sound pretentious, which they aren’t. They are very funny and very niche, and I often feel like I am Lerman’s ideal reader. This is my niche.
Each one-page strip features (a version of) Lerman encountering (and often trailing) a writer (DeLillo, obv., but also Joy Williams, Jonathan Franzen, Gordon Lish, William T. Vollmann…); the conversations are often very one-sided and allow Lerman to interrogate his subject on the kind of minutiae that often overtakes our ability to see the forest for the trees, so to speak, when it comes to art. In one of my favorite bits, for example, Lerman critiques the implementation of (“middle school book report-ass”) Courier New Unjustified as the font for DeLillo’s novel The Silence. I could go on but I should save it for a proper review.
Conversations with Don DeLillo also features a great negative blurb by a certain grouchy “Myron Circle”:
And maybe this is corny of me, but I love that Lerman used Chris Ware stamps to mail me Conversations with Don DeLillo. (Chris Ware shows up in Conversations, btw — he tries to give Lerman a bunch of his books and tell Lerman how much he loves Snake Creek
More thoughts to come.
RIP Marjane Satrapi, 19-2026
I was saddened to learn today of the death of the artist Marjane Satrapi. Satrapi was only 56.
Satrapi is probably most recognized for her first published work, Persepolis, a graphic novel she completed in 2003. Persepolis was one of the first books I wrote about on Biblioklept, way back in 2007, when this blog was not half a year old. Here is the entire post:
“It was funny to see how Marx and God looked like each other.”
Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis makes a nice introduction to the graphic
novelautobiography for anyone who hasn’t read one before. Marjane’s memoir weaves the political turmoil of the Islamic Revolution with the everyday stuff of childhood experience. As the the repressive Islamic regime revokes liberal freedoms, Marjane’s folks (secular intellectuals, of course) smuggle Iron Maiden posters back from Turkey; young Marjane sneaks cigarettes and rock music to a backdrop of political assassinations and war with Iraq.Persepolis succeeds by engaging the reader in a personal experience of revolution and cultural alienation. It works as a history lesson and as a coming of age story. Readers who try something different (maybe suspend some prejudices?) will be rewarded with an enriched perspective on a political/cultural upheaval still affecting global politics today.
I wrote that twenty years ago, and there are any number of things I could pick at, I think my defensive tone is the most interesting to me. I think that general audiences have come to understand that comics, just like any other medium, can express the highest ideals of art. Persepolis, now a staple on many school reading lists, contributed to that cultural shift.
I looked around for my copy, but then realized that my daughter took Persepolis with her when she left for college last year. I remember reading the book to her when she was little; later she read it herself. We repeated the process with our son. And then we watched Satrapi’s 2007 film adaptation together a few times.
We also watched her film adaptation of her graphic novel Chicken with Plums. The film is good, but the book is better. My 2009 review of the paperback edition again highlighted an anxiety that mainstream audiences held prejudices against the comics medium:
Casual readers to comics often make the error of supposing that the medium is merely words with accompanying pictures. Satrapi’s deft work here might do wonders in correcting this ignorance. There isn’t a wasted panel in Chicken with Plums, and Satrapi commands intense emotion from her thick, black lines. There’s a seamless quality to Chicken with Plums; the text and the pictures, indivisible, add up to more than the sum of their parts. Satrapi knows when to hold back and let her simple black and white images tell the story. There is a certain economy of storytelling that great comic writers can achieve in ways entirely possible in prose, and here Satrapi has surpassed her earlier work in Persepolis, which, while great, often relied heavily on textual exposition. In Chicken with Plums, Satrapi’s evocations of troubled family life, unfulfilled love, the perils of Iranian immigration to California, and Sufi mysticism all blend into a poignant, often-funny, and occasionally devastating portrait that exemplifies the best of the comics medium.
While comparisons to her Persepolis series will undoubtedly hang over all of Satrapi’s work, Chicken with Plums is a wonderful successor, and in some senses, a more achieved work. Although it doesn’t convey the first-person immediacy of Persepolis, nor that memoir’s dramatic scope, the story of Nasser Ali is intimately detailed and achieves something rare in an age of overstuffed books: it leaves its readers hungry for more.
The plot of Chicken with Plums is devastatingly simple. Nasser Ali, a renowned Iranian musician (and Satrapi’s great uncle), elects to die after his wife destroys his beloved instrument. He quits eating and refuses to leave his bedroom. The story is very much an extrapolation of hazy events revealed in dreams and flashbacks, with a tint of magical realism.
I was a bit taken aback, given the plot of Chicken with Plums, while reading the following detail from Satrapi’s obituary in Le Monde today. The French newspaper reported that those close to the artist declared that, “Marjane Satrapi died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life.” How very sad. I hope she has found some peace.
From “Sexy Guns” by Helge Reumann. Published in Kramers Ergot #9, 2016, Fantagraphics Books.
Flower in a Stream, c. 1989 by David Cloud Berman (1967-2019). Originally published in Caliban #8, 1990.
Timoclea Kills the Captain of Alexander the Great, 1659 by Elisabetta Sirani (1638–1665)
Untitled (Christian’s Birthday), 2023 by Gerald Lovell (b. 1992)
The pic above doesn’t really show how massive Heaven & Hellhound is. This 800 pager is by the pseudonymous B. Authentick, and purports to be a “tale of metaphysical realism.” You can learn more about the book (and download it for free) at its website. Blurb:
Heaven & Hellhound is a work of dark literary fiction that weaves together the occult, esoteric philosophy and the eternal struggle between light and shadow. Volume One – The Page of Wands – breaches the eternal threshold where ancient mysteries collide with modern consciousness. Drawn from that liminal space, what divides the sacred from the profane dissolves into something unspeakably horrifying. But for the lantern’s light, the dark night of the soul enshrouds.
Written by B. Authentick, inspired by the engravings of Gustave Doré and the ferocious vision of Vincent van Gogh, this tome is more than a book – it is a talisman, a portal and a companion for those who dare to peer through the veil.
A Trans-Atlantic tale set in 1964 in England and California, the tale channels the esoteric traditions of the Western mystery schools through the lens of Metaphysical Realism, a novel literary mode. It affords a means to storytelling in which the occult is not decoration but physics, the muse is not metaphor but visitor, and the body’s toll is commensurate to the malediction which afflicts its soul. Heaven & Hellhound is a work of literary innovation, published as the foundational text of Metaphysical Realism.
A page from Inner City Romance #3 by Guy Colwell, Last Gasp, 1977. Reprinted by Fantagraphics, 2015.
A Passion Like No Other, 2012 by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977)
Circle Study #10, 1972 by Benny Andrews (1930-2006)
A page from Laid Waste by Julia Gfrörer, Fantagraphics Books, 2016.
Portrait of Man Reading, 1977 by Malick Sidibé (1936-2016)
I dug Grace Krilanovich’s “Slutty Teenage Hobo Vampire Junkies” novel The Orange Eats Creeps, calling it good gross stuff in a 2020 review.
Her follow up, Acid Green Velvet, is forthcoming this summer from Two Dollar Radio. Their blurb:
In the late 19th century on the central California coast, two wayward young hoboes — Paulette and Kenneth — threaten to kill a menacing man who wronged them: Paulette’s father, Rodney Eligon.
A handful of years later, the town of Anzar has become the stomping grounds for all manner of cults, eccentrics, earth religions, and communal living. Presiding over the town from the luxe frivolity of their family manor, the Hasleys have ruled Anzar for generations. Their grip on the town is threatened by the rise of the working class, and their union with the itinerant population. Meanwhile, Paulette has taken up residence in the home of Johnny Hasley, a wealthy faux-socialist poseur, hoping to become his wife. Her plans are complicated by boot-prints in the garden signaling the arrival of Kenneth, who carries with him a dark secret that poses a grave threat to both of them.
In Anzar’s cracked mirror, Californian freakiness meets Victorian preoccupations with the domestic, pollution and filth, haunted houses, fringe societies, living death, spiritualism, vampiric women, and class parasites. Acid Green Velvet is a surreal powder keg of nihilism, fathers and their failures, manifest destiny, and American identity, penned in rapturous prose by the fiercest writer of her generation.
Manhattan Landscape with Figures, 1968 by Sylvia Sleigh (1916 – 2010)
Cover for Good Girls #3 by Carol Lay, Fantagraphics Books, 1988.
In answer to the question: “Why do you write?”
Because art blows life into the lifeless, death into the deathless.
Because art’s life is preferable, in truth, to life’s beautiful terror.
Because, as time does not pass (nothing, as Beckett tells us, passes), it passes the time.
Because death, our mythless master, is somehow amused by epitaphs.
Because epitaphs, well-struck, give death, our voracious master, heartburn.
Because fiction imitates life’s beauty, thereby inventing the beauty life lacks.
Because fiction is the best position, at once exotic and familiar, for fucking the world.
Because fiction, mediating paradox, celebrates it.
Because fiction, mothered by love, loves love as a mother might her unloving child.
Because fiction speaks, hopelessly, beautifully, as the world speaks.
Because God, created in the storyteller’s image, can be destroyed only by His maker.
Because, in its perversity, art harmonizes the disharmonious.
Because, in its profanity, fiction sanctifies life.
Because, in its terrible isolation, writing is a path to brotherhood.
Because in the beginning was the gesture, and in the end to come as well: in between what we have are words.
Because, of all the arts, only fiction can unmake the myths that unman men.
Because of its endearing futility, its outrageous pretensions.
Because the pen, though short, casts a long shadow (upon, it must be said, no surface).
Because the world is re-invented every day and this is how it is done.
Because there is nothing new under the sun except its expression.
Because truth, that elusive joker, hides himself in fictions and must therefore be sought there.
Because writing, in all space’s unimaginable vastness, is still the greatest adventure of all.
And because, alas, what else?
From Delta #28, June 1989; republished in Conjunctions.
Biblioklept 