Blood Meridian, 2006 by Aaron Morse (b. 1974)
The Comics Journal’s lengthy write up of “The Best Comics of 2021” is up. Here’s my entry:
When I was a kid one of the greatest small joys of my short existence was reading the comics page in the morning newspaper, an experience that seems and quite literally is of another century. I loved Calvin & Hobbes, Bloom County,and The Far Side, but my favorite was Peanuts. While it’s not exactly the same as poring over the morning paper’s comics, I love to see Peanuts on this Day in my Twitter feed. So much has been written on Charles Schulz‘s genius, so I won’t wax more – I’ll just add that Charlie Brown’s strange defeated ever-reemerging optimism still brings me a weird dark hope.
I also continue to really dig Drew Lerman‘s Snake Creek series. Roy and Dav are perfect heroes for the 21st century, a new Vladimir and Estragon wandering through Weirdest Florida. Lerman publishes Snake Creek on Instagram. He collected the first few years of the strip in a volume that is now out of print. I hope he’ll reprint it and put out the latest strips in a paperback at some point soon.
Another artist I followed initially on a social media app (Tumblr) is Yvan Guillo, aka Samplerman. Samplerman’s collages initiate his audience into a new world of pop art surrealism where the Ben-Day dots of twentieth-century pulp transmute into a comic book you read in a dream when you were a kid. I picked up his 2021 book Anatomie Narrative (Ion Edition) and got lost in it again and again. The word narrative in the title asks the audience to understand story in a new way (or to take the title ironically, which I do not). The story here is pure aesthetics.
Another book I loved this year was Paul Kirchner‘s Dope Rider: A Fistful of Delirium (Éditions Tanibis), which collects the Dope Rider revival published in High Times from 2015 to 2020 (Dope Rider‘s initial run was in the ’70s). Great art, great jokes, great goofy fun.
I also spent way too much of the little free time I have going through old issues of The East Village Other. The scans I pulled from JSTOR are difficult to read, but the graphics are really what interests me. Initially I was looking for comix by folks like Bernie Wrightson, Art Spiegelman, Robert Crumb, and Kim Deitch – but I also love all the old ads for weird albums, concerts, films, and books. A digital scan of an old, weird paper with its own weird comix isn’t exactly the same as having the paper in your hand. But it’s better than nothing.
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon (the great-granduncle of American novelist Thomas Ruggles Pynchon) writes to the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. From the New York Public Library Digital Collections.
Via Pynchon supersite Vheissu:
Nathaniel Hawthorne publishes The House of the Seven Gables. Rev. Thomas Ruggles Pynchon (1823-1904) writes the author a letter, complaining about the ‘abuse’ of the ‘Pyncheon’ name. This rev. Thomas Ruggles Pynchon will become the ninth president of Trinity College in Hartford, Conn, where he teaches science and religion. In 1881 he publishes an Introduction to Chemical Physics. His brother William is the great-grandfather of author Thomas Pynchon.
Sakanoshita, c. 1834 by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858)
January, 1979 by Alex Colville (1920-2013)
☉ indicates a reread.
☆ indicates an outstanding read.
The Real Cool Killers, Chester Himes ☆
The Bachelors, Muriel Spark
Bina, Anakana Schofield
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville ☉☆
Margaret the First, Danielle Dutton ☆
The Florida Keys, Joy Williams
Passages, Ann Quin☆
V., Thomas Pynchon ☉☆
Notes from Childhood, Norah Lange (trans. by Charlotte Whittle)
Albert Angelo, B.S. Johnson ☆
Trawl, B.S. Johnson
House Mother Normal, B.S. Johnson
Outline, Rachel Cusk
Perfume, Patrick Süskind (trans. by John E. Woods) ☆
The Unfortunates, B.S. Johnson
Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo, Ntozake Shange
The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, Dawnie Walton
Dope Rider: A Fistful of Delirium, Paul Kirchner
The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain ☆
By Night in Chile, Roberto Bolaño (trans. by Chris Andrews) ☉☆
Cowboy Graves, Roberto Bolaño (trans. by Natasha Wimmer)
Double Indemnity, James M. Cain
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino (trans. by William Weaver)☉
If on a winter’s night a traveler…, Italo Calvino (trans. by William Weaver)☉
The Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino (trans. by Archibald Colquhoun) ☉☆
Mister Boots, Carol Emshwiller
Permanent Earthquake, Evan Dara
The Woman in the Dunes, Kobo Abe (trans. by E. Dale Saunders)
The Slynx, Tatyana Tolstoya (trans. by Jamey Gambrell) ☆
The Shape of Content, Ben Shahn
Anecdotes, Heinrich von Kleist (trans. by Matthew Spencer)
Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor (trans. by Sophie Hughes) ☆
Sixty Stories, Donald Barthelme ☉☆
Hiding Man, Tracy Daugherty☉
Body Count, Francie Schwartz
The Old People, A.J. Perry
Carmen Dog, Carol Emshwiller ☆
Remain in Love, Chris Frantz
The Witchcraft of Salem Village, Shirley Jackson
In the Eye of the Wild, Nastassja Martin (trans. Sophie R. Lewis)
Rough Day, Ed Skoog
Letters from Mom, Julio Cortazar (trans. by Magdalena Edwards)
Under the Jaguar Sun, Italo Calvino (trans. by William Weaver)
The Nonexistant Knight, Italo Calvino (trans. by Archibald Colquhoun)
The Cloven Viscount, Italo Calvino (trans. by Archibald Colquhoun)
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Claudia Rankine
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy ☉☆
Black Square, 2008 by Gillian Carnegie (b. 1971)
Lecture Diagram: Perspective Representation of a Triangle, c. 1810-27 by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851)
Three Circles, 1964 by Kim Ku-lim (b. 1936)
Young Pioneers, 2018 by Jia Aili (b. 1979)
The question was then put as to whether there were on Mars or other planets in the void men or creatures like them. And at this, the judge who had returned to the fire and stood half naked and sweating, spoke and said that there were not and that there were no men anywhere in the universe save those upon the earth. All listened as he spoke; those who had turned to watch him and those who would not.
The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe is no narrow thing and the order with it is not constrained by any latitude of its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.
A passage from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.
Stag at Sharkey’s, 1909 by George Bellows (1882-1925)
“Mamsell Fredrika”
by
Selma Lagerlöf
translated by
Pauline Bancroft Flach
It was Christmas night, a real Christmas night.
The goblins raised the mountain roofs on lofty gold pillars and celebrated the midwinter festival. The brownies danced around the Christmas porridge in new red caps. Old gods wandered about the heavens in gray storm cloaks, and in the Österhaninge graveyard stood the horse of Hel. He pawed with his hoof on the frozen ground; he was marking out the place for a new grave.
Not very far away, at the old manor of Årsta, Mamsell Fredrika was lying asleep. Årsta is, as every one knows, an old haunted castle, but Mamsell Fredrika slept a calm, quiet sleep. She was old now and tired out after many weary days of work and many long journeys,— she had almost traveled round the world,—therefore she had returned to the home of her childhood to find rest.
Outside the castle sounded in the night a bold fanfare. Death mounted on a gray charger had ridden up to the castle gate. His wide scarlet cloak and his hat’s proud plumes fluttered in the night wind. The stern knight sought to win an adoring heart, therefore he appeared in unusual magnificence. It is of no avail, Sir Knight, of no avail! The gate is closed, and the lady of your heart asleep. You must seek a better occasion and a more suitable hour. Watch for her when she goes to early mass, stern Sir Knight, watch for her on the church-road! Continue reading “Read “Mamsell Fredrika,” a haunted Christmas tale by Selma Lagerlöf”
Biblioklept 