Fran
by Jim Woodring
Couch Tag
by Jesse Reklaw
-I wrote a long review of these, but I forgot to save it. I'll try to write them again sometime when I get some free time.
Saturday, November 09, 2013
Sunday, October 06, 2013
Thursday, September 26, 2013
Neurocomic
by Dr. Matteo Farinella and Dr. Hana Ros
-(They are listed as doctors on the cover.) This is a quick introduction to the physiology of the brain (very basic) in comics form, pretty quick and breezy (easily read in one sitting) but nicely put together, I thought. I enjoyed this a lot. No complaints!
by Dr. Matteo Farinella and Dr. Hana Ros
-(They are listed as doctors on the cover.) This is a quick introduction to the physiology of the brain (very basic) in comics form, pretty quick and breezy (easily read in one sitting) but nicely put together, I thought. I enjoyed this a lot. No complaints!
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Palookaville #21
by Seth
-This was really good. There's the next Clyde Fans installment, some "Rubber Stamp Diaries," and a beautiful autobio story about all the places he's lived, in his "sketchbook style."
I want to say something about the rubber stamp diaries.
Seth often draws autobio comics, and one day he had the idea to make rubber stamps of a few standard drawings of himself that he could use and re-use in his diary comics. Once he came up with the idea and intended to stick with it, he committed himself to a certain kind of form of comics. It is a good fit, because in a sense he had already committed himself to a certain kind of life, with certain types of concerns, and a comic book life where his tools are old technologies. His work is about an out-of-date business, centered on an out-of-date technology, the kind of business where rubber stamps were probably used in the office every day.
The rubber stamp in a formal comics context is paradoxical. It means that what is literally an “impression” made by the same object, what is literally a “rubber stamp” of itself, now becomes read as a returning over and over to the same view of the same “thing.” Yet it is also transformed into a new thing with each new impression. It changes not only in the sense that the quality of the image changes—little white bubbles appear, things like that—but also through taking their places within a network/system of comics panels, with different captions, and different relationships to the whole comic in which they appear.
(For anyone that has studied epistemology since Kant and Locke this all sets up an obvious, straightforward metaphor of one way of understanding how the mind works. "Sensory impressions" on a "blank slate." I don’t want to get into all that here, but I want to just mention that this metaphor, while certainly useful in many situations, is still highly artificial and should not be mistaken for its opposite, for non-metaphorical reality.)
The metaphor of a “rubber stamp” image in a comics context can be understood as meaning both a thing that does not change, panel to panel, and yet does change, because each panel is different. Each panel is a different moment, a different thought. So we could say: Seth commits to a comic book life where very little changes (he remains in the past, he tries to hold onto the past, in style and in his costume and his mind, via nostalgia, the beauty of “the banquet hall deserted”) yet there is always change, time always moves forward—this is built into the formal system of comics, like into the railroad tracks he walks, but through the use of the rubber stamp (and in his work in general) Seth tries to beat comics/time at its own game.
He takes walks, he concentrates his thoughts on some object. He moves his thoughts into the past, he thinks about the passage of time while moving through time, yet always glancing longingly backwards at the past, at his dark comfortable house and studio, which I suppose we could obviously say is a womb or at least “childhood”—the long days of aimless play, the “concerns” of games instead of the “real” concerns of “adulthood.”
In “Ghost” he walks outside and feels the present moment as timeless (this happens in several other strips, and ironically becomes a motif). The present moment is felt as connected to “all such similar moments in the past” (but not the future?). That night he dreams of his mother, and then he hears the train and imagines he’s still out there, on the tracks, but as a ghost, and the train passes through him. All the strips are about this struggle with time, to somehow grasp the present moment in its freedom and joy. But paradoxically this has to take place through the mediation of the objects around us—factories, trees, railroads—that clearly obviously have a past and point to that past, but somehow also seem themselves, like eternal things stamped on the present moment, the present panel.
An ultimate extreme of this form of comics could be imagined as a nostalgic comic, drawn in an “old timey” style, with rubber stamped images, which is nostalgic but also aware of this nostalgia, and rejects itself, both as form and as content, rejects the use of rubber stamps, yet uses them anyway, always searching for a more pure version of itself.
I have tried to represent this feeling of timelessness in the present moment in my own comics, especially in “Time Travelling” in Ganges 1. There I use the metaphor of the seeing behind the comics panel, of 2D becoming 3D, to try to get at the sense of being both in and out of time. Several John Porcellino comics also come to mind, such as in “Mountain Song,” one of my favorite comics of all time, where the last line seemingly comes at us out of nowhere and re-frames everything that came before and the whole world from the perspective of this kind of “transcendent” feeling, to see behind what we can see.
by Seth
-This was really good. There's the next Clyde Fans installment, some "Rubber Stamp Diaries," and a beautiful autobio story about all the places he's lived, in his "sketchbook style."
I want to say something about the rubber stamp diaries.
Seth often draws autobio comics, and one day he had the idea to make rubber stamps of a few standard drawings of himself that he could use and re-use in his diary comics. Once he came up with the idea and intended to stick with it, he committed himself to a certain kind of form of comics. It is a good fit, because in a sense he had already committed himself to a certain kind of life, with certain types of concerns, and a comic book life where his tools are old technologies. His work is about an out-of-date business, centered on an out-of-date technology, the kind of business where rubber stamps were probably used in the office every day.
The rubber stamp in a formal comics context is paradoxical. It means that what is literally an “impression” made by the same object, what is literally a “rubber stamp” of itself, now becomes read as a returning over and over to the same view of the same “thing.” Yet it is also transformed into a new thing with each new impression. It changes not only in the sense that the quality of the image changes—little white bubbles appear, things like that—but also through taking their places within a network/system of comics panels, with different captions, and different relationships to the whole comic in which they appear.
(For anyone that has studied epistemology since Kant and Locke this all sets up an obvious, straightforward metaphor of one way of understanding how the mind works. "Sensory impressions" on a "blank slate." I don’t want to get into all that here, but I want to just mention that this metaphor, while certainly useful in many situations, is still highly artificial and should not be mistaken for its opposite, for non-metaphorical reality.)
The metaphor of a “rubber stamp” image in a comics context can be understood as meaning both a thing that does not change, panel to panel, and yet does change, because each panel is different. Each panel is a different moment, a different thought. So we could say: Seth commits to a comic book life where very little changes (he remains in the past, he tries to hold onto the past, in style and in his costume and his mind, via nostalgia, the beauty of “the banquet hall deserted”) yet there is always change, time always moves forward—this is built into the formal system of comics, like into the railroad tracks he walks, but through the use of the rubber stamp (and in his work in general) Seth tries to beat comics/time at its own game.
He takes walks, he concentrates his thoughts on some object. He moves his thoughts into the past, he thinks about the passage of time while moving through time, yet always glancing longingly backwards at the past, at his dark comfortable house and studio, which I suppose we could obviously say is a womb or at least “childhood”—the long days of aimless play, the “concerns” of games instead of the “real” concerns of “adulthood.”
In “Ghost” he walks outside and feels the present moment as timeless (this happens in several other strips, and ironically becomes a motif). The present moment is felt as connected to “all such similar moments in the past” (but not the future?). That night he dreams of his mother, and then he hears the train and imagines he’s still out there, on the tracks, but as a ghost, and the train passes through him. All the strips are about this struggle with time, to somehow grasp the present moment in its freedom and joy. But paradoxically this has to take place through the mediation of the objects around us—factories, trees, railroads—that clearly obviously have a past and point to that past, but somehow also seem themselves, like eternal things stamped on the present moment, the present panel.
An ultimate extreme of this form of comics could be imagined as a nostalgic comic, drawn in an “old timey” style, with rubber stamped images, which is nostalgic but also aware of this nostalgia, and rejects itself, both as form and as content, rejects the use of rubber stamps, yet uses them anyway, always searching for a more pure version of itself.
I have tried to represent this feeling of timelessness in the present moment in my own comics, especially in “Time Travelling” in Ganges 1. There I use the metaphor of the seeing behind the comics panel, of 2D becoming 3D, to try to get at the sense of being both in and out of time. Several John Porcellino comics also come to mind, such as in “Mountain Song,” one of my favorite comics of all time, where the last line seemingly comes at us out of nowhere and re-frames everything that came before and the whole world from the perspective of this kind of “transcendent” feeling, to see behind what we can see.
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
The Cartoon Utopia
by Ron Rege.
-This book took me a long time to read. It's difficult, but it's also a comics masterpiece. Seeing it in terms of form and content is the key. I admit that I can get cranky and midwestern about this kind of subject matter and the difficult forms these comics take, but in the end I came around and can see the crazy experience of enlightenment shining through, the kind of thing that calls for this kind of presentation. It can be frustrating as the book jumps from weird thing to weird thing, your mind working overtime: "is dis a system?" "Huh?" That's the point, in a sense. It's like this...no--it's like this... How to explain something unexplainable, how to give form to a whole full bodied experience of being a half-crazy human being with ideas about peace and harmlessness and how one thing connects to the next? It's one thing to write this stuff, it's a whole other level to try and draw it in comics form. Ron is forced to stretch the comics language to communicate this overwhelming "material." Every aspect of comics warps or breaks, trying to hold on, readability, panel border, panel logic, etc. Utopia means "no place" and "the perfect world." You try drawing a map to it! RR is trying to really get some tricky stuff down on paper, and so the comics are tricky to read. What an accomplishment.
by Ron Rege.
-This book took me a long time to read. It's difficult, but it's also a comics masterpiece. Seeing it in terms of form and content is the key. I admit that I can get cranky and midwestern about this kind of subject matter and the difficult forms these comics take, but in the end I came around and can see the crazy experience of enlightenment shining through, the kind of thing that calls for this kind of presentation. It can be frustrating as the book jumps from weird thing to weird thing, your mind working overtime: "is dis a system?" "Huh?" That's the point, in a sense. It's like this...no--it's like this... How to explain something unexplainable, how to give form to a whole full bodied experience of being a half-crazy human being with ideas about peace and harmlessness and how one thing connects to the next? It's one thing to write this stuff, it's a whole other level to try and draw it in comics form. Ron is forced to stretch the comics language to communicate this overwhelming "material." Every aspect of comics warps or breaks, trying to hold on, readability, panel border, panel logic, etc. Utopia means "no place" and "the perfect world." You try drawing a map to it! RR is trying to really get some tricky stuff down on paper, and so the comics are tricky to read. What an accomplishment.
Friday, August 23, 2013
Saturday, August 03, 2013
The Liberation of Tolstoy
by Ivan Bunin (ed. Thomas Gaiton Marullo and Vladimir T. Khmelkov)
-Got this on the library sale table and read it off and on to fall asleep. It's basically only for the diehard--I didn't enjoy it and kept reading only because it put me to sleep easily with its lack of structure and jumping from one thing to the next. The obsessive endnotes by the editors are longer than the actual book (!) which is an impressionistic "spiritual" biography of Tolstoy by Bunin (the first Russian to win the Nobel for literature). Both the notes and the actual book jump around Tolstoy's life, quoting him all the time about this and that, and generally I thought the whole thing was confusing and Tolstoy comes across like an emotional spaz and half a flake with a crazy family life and a crazy celebrity life. I guess it's great how he stands up to the church and the authorities. He seems like he fought with his own massive ego all his life and did what he could to try to help people and was a genius. He tries to be a good pig farmer at one point, but then starves the pigs basically to death so they wouldn't squeal so much. A lot of the book deals with the end of his life, where he's dying but his wife is driving him so insane that he sneaks out of the house so he can go hide somewhere and die in peace! She fakes a suicide attempt to try to get him to come back! Tolstoy got into Buddhism too, I guess, along with the rest. I didn't know that.
Tuesday, July 09, 2013
The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain
by Terrence W. Deacon
-This is an incredible book. I heard about it in that "This Explains Everything" book when someone mentioned it as having huge explanatory power. It really does -- I learned a lot, about Peirce and about the brain (I have only read a few books about the brain, and the anatomy and lobes can get p. boring, but I feel like I'm getting more of a sense for the territory, and now it's actually getting exciting to read about) and evolution and animals, and so much of what I've been learning this year felt like it came together in this book: brains, language, evolution, and even Buddhism (which is not in the book--that's my own spin on it). The writing is very dry, but I didn't have any problems because each chapter was fascinating, almost breathtaking. There's so much ground covered in this book that you feel sometimes like he's asking you to take his word for a lot of things that aren't really "proven" in the book, but I didn't have a lot of problems with that. It was enough to watch the whole argument come together, its scope and logic. I haven't followed up yet or read more about Deacon or the book (it came out in 1997) so we'll see what I find as I read more recent work by him or other people on these matters.
Some ideas in the book:
-Finally learned about Peirce and icon-index-symbol triads. (Can't believe it took me this long).
-Language undergoes its own evolution in order to better fit the environs of the human brain, and vice versa.
-Children learn language so easily, not because of a "grammar module" built into the brain, but because human brains and language has evolved to better take advantage of the strengths and weaknesses of the human brains of children, as they develop, and vice versa.
-The proportionally large human cortex changes the statistics (the "votes") of neural connections in the brain such that the brain is more connected to itself, and this allows more dialectical patterns which give rise to thinking in symbols.
-Humans have more frontal cortical control over our breath, and thus our level of arousal and speech, than animals do, probably because of evolutionary pressures once spoken language came on the scene. ("focus on the breath...") For the same reasons our larynx has changed to allow a wider range of tones.
-His theory is that the earliest symbol use arose out of the problem of how to arrange mating pairs in groups of proto-humans. This part seems pretty speculative. When the advantages of larger group sizes for hunting came into conflict with the problems of how to arrange mating pairs (avoiding cuckolding, sharing child-rearing, etc.) he thinks a kind of early marriage ritual, a kind of "social contract" emerged. This ritual behavior opened up the space for symbolic thinking. (Very fitting ideas for this blog!) "The near synchrony in human prehistory of the first increase in brain size, the first appearance of stone tools for hunting and butchery, and a considerable reduction in sexual dimorphism is not a coincidence. These changes are interdependent. All are symptoms of a fundamental restructuring of the hominid adaptation, which resulted in a significant change in feeding ecology, a radical change in social structure, and an unprecedented (indeed, revolutionary) change in representational abilities."
-Recognize that the distinctions between conscious/nonconsciousness, mind/body, intentional/mechanical, and human/animal do not all line up vertically with each other. Animals have minds and thoughts, and a kind of consciousness, but they are not able to use symbolic languages, though a few chimps have shown limited but real abilities to think symbolically.
This last idea--that some chimps, named Sherman and Austin, actually learned to think symbolically--is leaned on heavily in the argument of the book. I don't know anything about these experiments or how accepted they are.
Sunday, June 09, 2013
The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination
by Matthew Guerrieri
-I saw Guerrieri on the Colbert Report (you can watch his appearance here), and this book sounded like it was right up my alley -- I'm working on my 5th Ganges symphony, I'm obsessed with formalism and abstractions and "organic wholeness," and I had literally been thinking about the concept of a "hall of mirrors" as one of the formal organizing ideas for Ganges 5. So when he talks on Colbert about how the Romantics and esp. ETA Hoffmann adopt the Fifth as their anthem because it fit their ideas about achieving an organic unity of life, after passing through a "hall of mirrors" of repetition, twinning, doppelgangers, etc., I was very excited to read this. And it's pretty good. It wasn't as heady a read as I was expecting, it's more written at a magazine article level. Sometimes he draws connections that seem pretty forced, but that goes with the territory. It reminded me at times of Nicholson Baker's "Lumber" essay (which I recently read), where the forced connections between disparate echoing forms is the logic of the writing, both the form and the content of the writing, which creates an exhilarating hall of mirrors effect, and points to the hall of mirrors of nature that writing itself is. I'm guessing this was the original impulse for writing this way about the Fifth in the first place, but the effect is not as evident or intense as "Lumber." I enjoyed the short but sweet discussions of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Adorno, and also the use of the Fifth in WW2, which I didn't know anything about. Also there's Charles Ives, EM Forster and Ralph Ellison, the whole Beethoven was black thing, commercial jingles, etc.
Friday, May 31, 2013
Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning
by Benjamin K. Bergen
-This is a book by a student of George Lakoff about the experimental evidence for the Embodied Simulation Theory of meaning. The idea is that when the brain is trying to decipher the meaning of language, as heard or read or etc., it makes use of brain systems whose original functions pre-date language: systems for memories of motor control, for locating things in space, for sensory information, etc. These systems run a sort of "virtual reality" simulation to try to "picture" or "feel" what it would be like to experience the world according to the language before it. Bergen talks about the brain using systems built for motor control and "bootstrapping" them up into use for language. I'm not sure what to think about all this. On the one hand the experiments seem convincing, I guess, though it got pretty tedious reading about experiment after experiment (these guys love their experiments, and bless them for it), and it "feels" sort of right--an organism develops a brain to organize bodily systems and respond to its environment, and then the brain develops the power to turn on itself and include itself in its models, and this recursion and modeling kicks into overdrive with the development of language as a socially shared modeling system--but all the while reading the book a little voice in my head kept saying that something wasn't adding up. I don't have the energy right now to think this through but it seems like there's some intro to philosophy type questions being side-stepped? Or maybe not? Out of my depth.
There's a bit in the book about abstraction and metaphor that was interesting to me. Bergen says that they don't yet understand how embodied mental simulation works when we talk and think about abstract language. We seem to easily understand abstract concepts in metaphorical terms, and abstractions seem to be made up of a lot of dead metaphors, but the mental simulations of metaphors and abstractions seem somehow different than simulations of more concrete scenarios. But it seemed to me like, aren't we able to make simulations of simulations? Models of models, maps of maps? And we go from there? We think in mental simulations, but we can also take those simulations and treat them like objects to be simulated. We seem to be able to nest them within each other? I don't know, I'm out of my depth again.
Saturday, May 11, 2013
This Explains Everything
ed. John Brockman
-"Edge.org presents original ideas by Todays Leading Thinkers." Q: What is your fave deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation? This was fun to read! I picked it up at the library, then ended up reading it all the way through. The order of essays sometimes let's you picture them nested within each other in beautiful ways, for which I guess we can thank John Brockman. Many of the answers are versions of Darwin: adaptive systems, emerging complexity from simplicity, even within physics and mathematics, no surprise -- but the way they all play off each other is a real head trip. I have nothing negative to say. It ends with "empiricism" itself as a sort of ultimate self-adapting system. At some level of abstraction I suppose you just end up back with "us" as the explanation for everything, a hall of mirrors?
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Reading list: Spanish Masters exam
This is what I read over the past 4 months for my master's exams in Spanish:
Plays
Sánchez, Florencio. Barranca abajo
Usigli, Rodolfo. El gesticulador
Lope de Vega. Fuenteovejuna.
Pedro Calderón de la Barca. La vida es sueño.
Leandro Fernández de Moratín. El sí de las niñas.
José de Zorrilla. Don Juan Tenorio.
Duque de Rivas. Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino.
Federico García Lorca. La casa de Bernarda Alba.
Alfonso Sastre. Escuadra hacia la muerte.
Antonio Buero Vallejo. En la ardiente oscuridad.
Essays
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino. Facundo (fragmentos).
Acosta de Samper, Soledad. Las mujeres en la sociedad moderna.
Rodó, José Enrique. Ariel (fragmentos).
Ocampo, Victoria. La mujer y su expresión
Paz, Octavio. El laberinto de la soledad.
Galeano, Eduardo. Las venas abiertas de América Latina.
Fernández Retamar, Roberto. Calibán.
Ferré, Rosario. Sitio a Eros.
Short stories
Echeverría, Esteban. "El matadero."
Gutiérrez Nájera, Manuel. "Memorias de un paraguas."
Darío, Rubén. "El rey burgués."
Lugones, Leopoldo. "Yzur."
Quiroga, Horacio. "El hombre muerto" y "La insolación."
Bosch, Juan. "La mujer."
Arguedas, José María. "Agua."
Céspedes, Augusto. "El pozo."
Bombal, María Luisa. "El árbol."
Borges, Jorge Luis. "La muerte y la brújula," "La biblioteca de Babel" y "El hombre de la esquina rosada."
Onetti, Juan Carlos. "Bienvenido Bob."
Rulfo, Juan. "El hombre."
García Márquez, Gabriel. "Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes."
Cortázar, Julio. "Autopista del sur," y "Cartas a mamá."
Bryce Echenique, Alfredo. "El descubrimiento de América."
Arenas, Reinaldo. "Bestial entre las flores."
Skármeta, Antonio. "A las arenas."
Piglia, Ricardo. "El gaucho invisible."
Valenzuela, Luisa. "De noche soy tu caballo"
Novels
Isaacs, Jorge. María.
Cambeceres, Eugenio. Sin rumbo.
Azuela, Mariano. Los de abajo.
Bioy Casares, Adolfo. La invención de Morel.
Rulfo, Juan. Pedro Páramo.
García Márquez, Gabriel. Cien años de soledad.
Cortázar, Julio. Rayuela.
Vargas Llosa, Mario. La ciudad y los perros.
Puig, Manuel. El beso de la mujer araña.
Peri Rossi, Cristina. Solitario de amor.
Piglia, Ricardo. Respiración artificial.
Zapata Olivella, Manuel. Chambacú, corral de negros
Poetry
Anónimo. Poema de Mio Cid.
Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita. Libro de buen amor.
Prose
Alfonso X el Sabio. Prosa histórica.
Don Juan Manuel. El conde Lucanor (o Libro de los enxiemplos del conde Lucanor et de Patronio).
Libro del caballero Zifar. )
Fernando de Rojas. La Celestina. Ed. Dorohy Severyn.
Diego de San Pedro. Cárcel de amor. Ed. Carmen Parrilla.
Juan Luis Vives. Diálogos [in Selecciones].
Anónimo. Lazarillo de Tormes. Ed. Francisco Rico.
Miguel de Cervantes. Don Quijote de la Mancha.
Teresa de Jesús. Las moradas.
Francisco de Quevedo. El Buscón.
María de Zayas y Sotomayor. Desengaños amorosos.
Benito Jerónimo Feijoo. Teatro crítico universal.
José Cadalso. Noches lúgubres.
Mariano José de Larra. Fígaro.
G.A. Bécquer. Leyendas.
Leopoldo Alas. Su único hijo.
Benito Pérez Galdós. Fortunata y Jacinta.
Benito Pérez Galdós. La de Bringas
José María de Pereda. Pedro Sánchez.
Emilia Pardo Bazán. Los Pazos de Ulloa.
Josefina Aldecoa. Historia de una maestra.
Ana María Matute. Historias de Artámila.
Esther Tusquets. El mismo mar de todos los veranos.
Mercé Rodoreda. La plaza del diamante
Plays
Sánchez, Florencio. Barranca abajo
Usigli, Rodolfo. El gesticulador
Lope de Vega. Fuenteovejuna.
Pedro Calderón de la Barca. La vida es sueño.
Leandro Fernández de Moratín. El sí de las niñas.
José de Zorrilla. Don Juan Tenorio.
Duque de Rivas. Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino.
Federico García Lorca. La casa de Bernarda Alba.
Alfonso Sastre. Escuadra hacia la muerte.
Antonio Buero Vallejo. En la ardiente oscuridad.
Essays
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino. Facundo (fragmentos).
Acosta de Samper, Soledad. Las mujeres en la sociedad moderna.
Rodó, José Enrique. Ariel (fragmentos).
Ocampo, Victoria. La mujer y su expresión
Paz, Octavio. El laberinto de la soledad.
Galeano, Eduardo. Las venas abiertas de América Latina.
Fernández Retamar, Roberto. Calibán.
Ferré, Rosario. Sitio a Eros.
Short stories
Echeverría, Esteban. "El matadero."
Gutiérrez Nájera, Manuel. "Memorias de un paraguas."
Darío, Rubén. "El rey burgués."
Lugones, Leopoldo. "Yzur."
Quiroga, Horacio. "El hombre muerto" y "La insolación."
Bosch, Juan. "La mujer."
Arguedas, José María. "Agua."
Céspedes, Augusto. "El pozo."
Bombal, María Luisa. "El árbol."
Borges, Jorge Luis. "La muerte y la brújula," "La biblioteca de Babel" y "El hombre de la esquina rosada."
Onetti, Juan Carlos. "Bienvenido Bob."
Rulfo, Juan. "El hombre."
García Márquez, Gabriel. "Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes."
Cortázar, Julio. "Autopista del sur," y "Cartas a mamá."
Bryce Echenique, Alfredo. "El descubrimiento de América."
Arenas, Reinaldo. "Bestial entre las flores."
Skármeta, Antonio. "A las arenas."
Piglia, Ricardo. "El gaucho invisible."
Valenzuela, Luisa. "De noche soy tu caballo"
Novels
Isaacs, Jorge. María.
Cambeceres, Eugenio. Sin rumbo.
Azuela, Mariano. Los de abajo.
Bioy Casares, Adolfo. La invención de Morel.
Rulfo, Juan. Pedro Páramo.
García Márquez, Gabriel. Cien años de soledad.
Cortázar, Julio. Rayuela.
Vargas Llosa, Mario. La ciudad y los perros.
Puig, Manuel. El beso de la mujer araña.
Peri Rossi, Cristina. Solitario de amor.
Piglia, Ricardo. Respiración artificial.
Zapata Olivella, Manuel. Chambacú, corral de negros
Poetry
Anónimo. Poema de Mio Cid.
Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita. Libro de buen amor.
Prose
Alfonso X el Sabio. Prosa histórica.
Don Juan Manuel. El conde Lucanor (o Libro de los enxiemplos del conde Lucanor et de Patronio).
Libro del caballero Zifar. )
Fernando de Rojas. La Celestina. Ed. Dorohy Severyn.
Diego de San Pedro. Cárcel de amor. Ed. Carmen Parrilla.
Juan Luis Vives. Diálogos [in Selecciones].
Anónimo. Lazarillo de Tormes. Ed. Francisco Rico.
Miguel de Cervantes. Don Quijote de la Mancha.
Teresa de Jesús. Las moradas.
Francisco de Quevedo. El Buscón.
María de Zayas y Sotomayor. Desengaños amorosos.
Benito Jerónimo Feijoo. Teatro crítico universal.
José Cadalso. Noches lúgubres.
Mariano José de Larra. Fígaro.
G.A. Bécquer. Leyendas.
Leopoldo Alas. Su único hijo.
Benito Pérez Galdós. Fortunata y Jacinta.
Benito Pérez Galdós. La de Bringas
José María de Pereda. Pedro Sánchez.
Emilia Pardo Bazán. Los Pazos de Ulloa.
Josefina Aldecoa. Historia de una maestra.
Ana María Matute. Historias de Artámila.
Esther Tusquets. El mismo mar de todos los veranos.
Mercé Rodoreda. La plaza del diamante
Sunday, April 14, 2013
The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber
by Nicholson Baker
-The section of essays labeled "Mixed" was a waste of space. One essay is just a collection of typos he's made and saved in a file on his computer. Another terrible piece is written high on pot, which might not be a problem, but it's just stupid fancy vocab words and nonsense. But I enjoyed the rest, more or less. I liked this least when Baker tries too hard to be fancy and "writerly" with his descriptions and vocabulary. But "Lumber," the huge essay that ends the book was really fun to read, and the library science section was, too. I recommend those, if you like the kinds of things I like. Of course I really like it when Baker is sensitive to the potential to go "meta" and play with recursion in any subject, and which he really piles on in the amazing "Lumber" essay, and you find it also in "Model Airplanes" with the model-making machine that might make models of itself.
Monday, April 01, 2013
Zen and the Brain
James H. Austin, MD
-I don't know about this book. I started reading it because I was looking for exactly something that talked about meditation in a scientific context, and came across this book at the library. It's 697 pages and obviously a labor of love. I skimmed a lot of the brain stuff, which was not really for a general reader, even though it wanted to be. The rest of it...I can't really recommend reading the whole thing, though I learned a few things. If you're interested, you can really just skip to the summary chapters, written in Q&A form. The main point seems to be that meditation, over years of practice, desynchronizes the many systems of perception and awareness which are woven together in the brain in egocentric and delusional ways, and allows them to loosen up their patterns, which improves things, and at some point these systems can, possibly, snap back together in a simpler and awakened enlightened state. I have more to say but I'll leave it there for now.
Monday, March 04, 2013
Vic Chesnutt suggested mix
Warm -North Star Deserter
Wallace Stevens -North Star Deserter
What Do You Mean? -Ghetto Bells
Prick -The Salesman And Bernadette
New Town -About To Choke
Little Vacation -About To Choke
You Are Never Alone -North Star Deserter
Mystery -Dark Developments
And How -Dark Developments
Onion Soup -Is The Actor Happy
Gravity Of The Situation -Is The Actor Happy
Forthright -Ghetto Bells
Teddy Bear -Dark Developments
We Are Mean -Dark Developments
Stop the Horse -Dark Developments
Glossolalia -North Star Deserter
Bilocating Dog -Dark Developments
Flirted With You All My Life -At The Cut
See You Around -About To Choke
(It's No Secret) Satisfaction -About To Choke
We Hovered With Short Wings -At The Cut
Warm -North Star Deserter
Wallace Stevens -North Star Deserter
What Do You Mean? -Ghetto Bells
Prick -The Salesman And Bernadette
New Town -About To Choke
Little Vacation -About To Choke
You Are Never Alone -North Star Deserter
Mystery -Dark Developments
And How -Dark Developments
Onion Soup -Is The Actor Happy
Gravity Of The Situation -Is The Actor Happy
Forthright -Ghetto Bells
Teddy Bear -Dark Developments
We Are Mean -Dark Developments
Stop the Horse -Dark Developments
Glossolalia -North Star Deserter
Bilocating Dog -Dark Developments
Flirted With You All My Life -At The Cut
See You Around -About To Choke
(It's No Secret) Satisfaction -About To Choke
We Hovered With Short Wings -At The Cut
Saturday, March 02, 2013
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
by Marcel Proust
trans. James Grieve
-“what had been my life up that moment had suddenly ceased to be all of life, had turned into a small corner of a great space opening up for me, which I longed to explore…because what was laid out now before my eyes was that extension and potential multiplication of the self which we know as happiness…”
by Marcel Proust
trans. James Grieve
-“what had been my life up that moment had suddenly ceased to be all of life, had turned into a small corner of a great space opening up for me, which I longed to explore…because what was laid out now before my eyes was that extension and potential multiplication of the self which we know as happiness…”
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Friday, January 04, 2013
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
World Enough and Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down
by Christian McEwen
- Gave up on this after 150 or so pages. I certainly sympathize and identify with the subject of the book, but the writing and organization of the material wasn't working for me. Too straightforward, passionless, superficial...the examples too obvious -- kids don't go out enough, we don't write letters anymore, that Thoreau was something else, huh? etc. "Hey, maybe try meditating?" Check out this poem. Maybe I'm too familiar with the subject and the standard moves. This book might be more valuable to someone newer to dealing with "hurry sickness" or lack of inspiration.
by Christian McEwen
- Gave up on this after 150 or so pages. I certainly sympathize and identify with the subject of the book, but the writing and organization of the material wasn't working for me. Too straightforward, passionless, superficial...the examples too obvious -- kids don't go out enough, we don't write letters anymore, that Thoreau was something else, huh? etc. "Hey, maybe try meditating?" Check out this poem. Maybe I'm too familiar with the subject and the standard moves. This book might be more valuable to someone newer to dealing with "hurry sickness" or lack of inspiration.
Essays of E.B. White
-Nothing wrong with this. Really loved reading these, and sad to be finished. This and One Man's Meat may have given me the purest reading pleasure I've come across in my past couple of years of aimless reading. I'm not even interested in farm stuff or New York City! He could write.
-Nothing wrong with this. Really loved reading these, and sad to be finished. This and One Man's Meat may have given me the purest reading pleasure I've come across in my past couple of years of aimless reading. I'm not even interested in farm stuff or New York City! He could write.
Monday, October 29, 2012
The Man Who Grew His Beard by Olivier Schrauwen
- yes
The Understanding Monster by Theo Ellsworth
- hmm
(my version of TheJMaqExperience's "One Word Or Less Comic Reviews")
Also, good comics from SPX:
White Clay by T. Herpich
Lose #4 by DeForge
Team Society League by et.al
Pompeii by Santoro
White Mountain by Dakota McFadzean
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Citizens of No Place: An Architectural Graphic Novel
by Jimenaz Lai
-This is a collection of short speculative comics by an architecture professor about speculative architecture and urban planning. It's influenced by manga and, to my eyes, Dash Shaw, though he isn't mentioned, nor are all the other cartoonists who work in speculative architectural comics––Schuiten and Peeters, Ware's Building Stories, Katchor's Metropolis strips, Tom Kacznyski, Marc-Antoine Mathieu, etc. but instead the introduction talks about fucking Crisis on Infinite Earths. The packaging really tries to reach for profundity and significance, smh. I wanted to like the thing and I'm sympathetic to the aesthetic in spirit, and OK it's interesting at times, but it's all together too underdeveloped, and with the packaging and academic posturing...it's not doing anyone any favors.
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Friday, July 27, 2012
You Are Not So Smart
by David McRaney
-see here
by David McRaney
-see here
Sure, I had issues with this book. Studies have shown, "science tells us," that kind of thing. OK...? So slow down, check your work, make sure you're not fooling yourself. And don't trust everything you read...says the popular science book. Be careful out there, everyone. I guess this was a more accessible Thinking Fast and Slow.
Friday, July 13, 2012
Best of Enemies
by Jean-Pierre Filiu and David B
-I did not like the form of comics storytelling this book takes. This is an approach to comics nonfiction that handicaps the powers of text on the one hand and images on the other. If I were drawing a comic right now using this approach, the previous sentence would be at the top of a panel written in a font made from my handwriting, and it would be accompanied by a cartoon drawing of a generic comics page with two large hands coming out of it, one hand holding the word "text" and the other some generic image, and both of these would also somehow have arms and hands and one arm of each of these would be tied behind it's back. The effect is silly and exhausting. And I think David B is one of the best illustrators in the world! There are many beautiful illustrations in this book. But at times all the whimsical compositions of people and weapons and machines seemed a weird way to put across a very serious story of geopolitics. I'm not qualified to comment on the actual content of that story. I didn't know a lot of it.
West Coast Blues
by Jean-Patrick Manchette and Jacques Tardi
by Jean-Pierre Filiu and David B
-I did not like the form of comics storytelling this book takes. This is an approach to comics nonfiction that handicaps the powers of text on the one hand and images on the other. If I were drawing a comic right now using this approach, the previous sentence would be at the top of a panel written in a font made from my handwriting, and it would be accompanied by a cartoon drawing of a generic comics page with two large hands coming out of it, one hand holding the word "text" and the other some generic image, and both of these would also somehow have arms and hands and one arm of each of these would be tied behind it's back. The effect is silly and exhausting. And I think David B is one of the best illustrators in the world! There are many beautiful illustrations in this book. But at times all the whimsical compositions of people and weapons and machines seemed a weird way to put across a very serious story of geopolitics. I'm not qualified to comment on the actual content of that story. I didn't know a lot of it.
West Coast Blues
by Jean-Patrick Manchette and Jacques Tardi
Saturday, July 07, 2012
Wednesday, May 09, 2012
Critical Questions: On Music and Letters, Culture and Biography, 1940−1980
by Jacques Barzun
ed. by Bea Friedland
-A weird book, with weird selections and a lot of typos. If you can make it through all the Berlioz in the front half of the book, (I couldn’t, but seeing such a deeply devoted fan is always heartwarming) and if you can forgive the ranting in the second half of “Liberalism and the Religion of Art,” where among other head-scratchers anti-fluoridation gets a cameo, there’s some stuff I found helpful.
“[Esthetics] is at once too personal and too social for abstract thought to seize upon any regularities. If the example of history and the historians is invoked — for here too one faces a chaos of facts and beliefs — it is of no avail, for historians succeed in creating order through detachment, which the very nature of art forbids. A philosophy of art on these terms would be but a catalogue of techniques and devices, and even these would be misrepresented, for they have no independent meaning, only a functional one as triggers of meaning.
Fortunately “philosophy” can be understood in at least two senses. It can denote a system, a theory strictly so-called, that is: the most complete and most general view of a subject. It can also mean philosophizing. Not being a philosopher in the first and strict sense, I have taken the liberty, all my life, to philosophize in the second sense — to try to think straight about the subjects that have interested me. What can philosophizing about the arts do for us? The answer I would propose here is not a series of conclusions, even tentative ones, but rather a series of topics or issues about which straight thinking might, in addition to the pleasure of the thing, do some good. What good? Well, such good as this: clearing up the confused vocabulary of criticism for educated minds, and gradually building up a set of commonsense maxims — guidelines — by which sincere people who wish to converse about art could avoid the fumbling and stumbling now caused by what they have been taught — the “ideas” or fashionable cant — thus inducing a wider tolerance through showing how the casual or formal creeds of art-lovers are linked to temperaments and visions of the world.
These endeavors, if they were achieved, would liberate many good souls from the oppression of having to admire what they don’t admire and having to repudiate what they secretly love — a net increase in the freedom and happiness of mankind.”
I dunno that a “catalogue of techniques and devices” would necessarily be such a bad idea, though. Ever since I got into William James (thanks to Barzun), it always seemed to me that the “Varieties of ____” approach is a good one. And making distinctions among the varieties of a thing always seemed more practical as a way forward, intellectually, than taking a step back and saying, look, it's all connected.
But in another essay, on the topic of “Cultural History,” Barzun says:
“...the periods of culture have troublesome historical names — Renaissance, Baroque, Puritan, Classical Romantic, and the like — which cover multitudinous manifestations of spirit. In using these names to denote men or periods, one cannot avoid trying to disentangle appearance from reality and prejudice from fact. But there is danger to truth in wanting things too clear; in wanting to make the names cover absolutely homogeneous ideas or persons. I for one see no use and great harm in those refined distinctions that profess to sort out eighteen kinds of Romanticism, or Humanism, or Pragmatism. I doubt whether the maker of such distinctions could himself respect them in an extended narrative; and supposing that he could I fail to see what he would accomplish as a historian — unless it were to reduce the battle of ideas to a regulated ballet. To put intellectual order in place of the intelligible disorder of history is to apply the geometrical spirit to a subject that calls for the spirit of finesse.”Maybe the problem for Barzun is that the catalogue-making tendency reminds him of the system-making tendency, and both remind him of his enemy, the mechanical (see "Toward a Fateful Serenity")? I have a lot of the "geometrical spirit" in me, I admit, but I'm not a mystic whacko about it or anything.
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