Paul Kirchner – Page 2

Riff on recent reading

November 24, 2015November 24, 2015 Biblioklept1 Comment

I can’t seem to muster language lately, to make the words do what I want them to do.

I’ve read a number of excellent (or really good) books in the past few months and haven’t been able to write more than the first few sentences of an ostensible “review” before giving up…mostly because those first few sentences usually resemble the kind of boring moaning dithering whining I’m doing now.

There were the two red books by Anne Carson: Autobiography of Red and Red Doc>. BLCKDGRD sent them to me back in September and I wolfed them down. Autobiography is the superior volume (which is saying something because Red Doc> is grand stuff too). What is it? What is Autobiography of Red? A novel? A poem? A history? An essay? Shall I get bogged down in description? No? Instead, let me be clear:

What I want to think/feel when I read is, How is this possible? How is this allowed?

–which is what I thought/felt reading Autobiography of Red.

From Autobiography of Red:

What else, what else?

Okay, so after the Carson I did manage a review Kazuo Ishiguro’s fantasy novel The Buried Giant—why did a review come out so much easier than anything on Carson, or, say, The Free-Lance Pall Bearers by Ishmael Reed (which I read after the Ishiguro)? Ishiguro’s book was familiar territory, fairly easy to describe—the Carson novel-poems and Reed’s picaresque performance are wholly different animals than the conventional novel.

The Free-Lance Pall Bearers by Ishmael Reed is, I hate to say, dazzling. I know what a lazy term that is, but the novella is just that—it dazzles. It zips. It zings and zounds and skips and scatters, and just when you think you have a handle on its allegorical outlines, it sticks out its tongue and jeers at you. The Free-Lance Pall Bearers is a mirthful and merciless satire on the USA written in a howling vernacular and set in an outhouse. It’s abject, picaresque, volatile, hysterical (in several of the senses of that word). I will relieve myself from summarizing the plot and instead offer this image of its perfect epigraphs:

Okay and so then I read Joanna Walsh’s collection Vertigo. The stories here hum together, evoking consciousness—consciousness’s anxieties, desires, its imaginative consolations. It deserves a full proper review (or just take my word and buy it from The Dorothy Project), but in the meantime, a wonderful passage from “Half the World Over”:

I also read two more by Le Guin: Rocannon’s World (I hope to have an exchange on it with the novelist Adam Novy posted some time in the not-too-distant future), The Dispossessed, which I’ve read three times.

Also: Paul Kirchner’s The Bus 2, which, again, full review in the not-so-far-off-future. But until then, a sample:

Paul Kirchner’s The Bus…and The Bus 2 (Books acquired, 10.03.2015)

October 10, 2015October 10, 2015 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Paul Kirchner’s The Bus is excellent. We know this, yes? Editions Tanibis sent me their copy of the surreal, philosophical strip’s first run. I’ve enjoyed going back through it again (bingeing, to be honest)—Tanibis’s volume is beautiful, crisp, and far more complete than the Imgur album that was such a hit this year.

Tanibis also sent along The Bus 2, which publishes late this month, and I’ll have a full review then (some time after Halloween), but for now, a teaser:

Reviews and riffs of August, 2015 (and an unrelated octopus)

August 31, 2015 Biblioklept5 Comments

I don’t like August and I’m glad it’s over.

I only wrote a few riffs and reviews in August, failing to write at length about Gordon Lish’s Cess and Victor Hussenot’s The Spectators and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Also: Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age, which I audited the audiobook of—great stuff, a novel that posits the book as a primary and insuperable technology. And some films too—Michael Mann’s Thief (amazing); Quest for Fire (why were the Baby Boomers so obsessed with cave people?); Ex Machina (a well-acted design-porn riff on Bluebeard that has no real ideas about its central theme, human consciousness).

I also watched and loved and didn’t write about the second season finale of True Detective—loved it—a tragic hyperbole, a big exclamation point, a sympathetic punchline to the season’s paternal anxieties. I found the final shot unexpectedly moving—the season’s female leads moving through the traffic of humanity, strapped with a child, knives, the future.

In August—

I riffed on season 2 of True Detective, arguing for its merits as a neon noir satire.

Ryan Chang and I talked about New American Stories, an anthology edited by Ben Marcus. We riffed on the selections, scope, and the first story, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s “Paranoia.”

I wrote a barely-coherent, probably incoherent review of Philip K. Dick’s novel Martian Time-Slip. The sub(or is it super?)text of the review is that I am a Permanently Paranoid American.

I also wound up writing a bit on Paul Kirchner’s trip strip The Bus yesterday. For years now, I’ve run some kind of regular Sunday post to anchor the site—it was death masks for a while, book shelves after…maybe something else I’m forgetting now (?)—but running The Bus was the most fun I had.

I’m not sure what I’ll run this Sunday for a new series, but something serialish so…

Promised octopus, by Utagawa Kuniyoshi—

The Bus, Paul Kirchner’s marvelous and surreal comic strip trip

August 30, 2015September 12, 2015 Edwin Turner18 Comments

For the past year, I’ve run a strip from Paul Kirchner’s cult classic The Bus each Sunday. The strips come from an album posted at Imgur full of high quality scans. I posted the last scan last week.

The Bus originally ran in Heavy Metal from 1979-1985; Kirchner’s done ~~a few~~ over 40 new strips over the past few years, as he notes in a recent memoir-piece at The Boston Globe. The new strips will be collected in The Bus 2 from Editions Tanibis. Editions Tanibis also has collected the original run of The Bus in an edition that’s more complete than the Imgur page.

I’ve enjoyed posting the strips tremendously. I first saw a few strips at an image forum I frequent, and quickly found the Imgur album. Posting one each Sunday was my way of, well, not bingeing on them.

WQlfiuH - Imgur

The Bus is a profound strange wonderful trip. Kirchner’s visions often evoke Escher’s paradoxes, and the best of his strips make us attend closely to what we’d otherwise dismiss. The Bus is subtle and sly, occasionally (very occasionally) dark, but also, I would argue, sensitive—there’s something deeply endearing about the strip’s central human protagonist, an often passive (even hapless) passenger, a kind of late-20th century Everyman. Continue reading “The Bus, Paul Kirchner’s marvelous and surreal comic strip trip” →