Posted in Literature, Media, tagged Ben McNally Books, book retailing, Books on May 8, 2008 | 2 Comments »
It took me nearly a year to notice this place, despite the fact that it’s located about half a block north of my office. Maybe it’s because I don’t frequently walk north (the GO train lies in the opposite direction); maybe it’s because there’s no glaringly bright signage announcing its presence (if you don’t look [...]
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Literature, Media, tagged Fredric Wertham, Michael Chabon on April 8, 2008 | 2 Comments »
In an article for Slate, I took a deeper look at the controversy surrounding Fredric Wertham and the postwar anti-comics crackdown. During the course of my article I made reference to Michael Chabon’s much-loved novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (where Wertham figures as a very minor character). Somewhat to my surprise, Chabon took umbrage [...]
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Literature, tagged Art Spiegelman, Guy Davenport, Joseph Epstein, Peter Ward on April 2, 2008 | 5 Comments »
I like to read and I like public transit. So I spend a lot of time reading on buses, trains and subways. In general reading in public doesn’t cause problems, although when I was on a subway in New York, a group of teenage boys started pointing at me and smirking while I was making my [...]
Posted in Literature, U.S. Politics, tagged William F. Buckley on February 27, 2008 | 13 Comments »
William F. Buckley.
The death of a man at age 82, after a productive, successful, event-filled life enriched by an unusually close-knit family and an enormous circle of friends and admirers, should hardly be the cause of sadness. I do have to say though that the passing of William F. Buckley, whose death has just been [...]
Posted in Literature, tagged John Updike on February 12, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Porky Pig: Famous Stutterer
John Updike is addicted to alliteration and suffers, sporadically, from stuttering. Are those two facts connected?
Alliteration is everywhere in Updike’s work, most prominently in the titles he gave to his two famous multi-volume series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit is Rich; Rabbit at Rest; Bech: A Book; Beck is Back; Bech at [...]
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Literature, Popular culture, tagged Krazy Kat on February 7, 2008 | 6 Comments »
Chris Ware’s cover for the new Krazy Kat book.
If you live near a decent book store, you can now buy a copy of George Herriman’s Krazy & Ignatz 1941-1942: “A Ragout of Raspberries”, which gathers together two years of great full-page, colourful Krazy Kat comics. Beautifully designed by Chris Ware, the book also has a substantial essay [...]
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Literature, Popular culture, tagged cartooning, Guy Davenport, Hugh Kenner on January 30, 2008 | 4 Comments »
(Guy Davenport drawing, from his book Tatlin!)
Note: This essay is slightly revised from the original version which ran in The Comics Journal #278 (October 2006).
Guy Davenport, cartoonist. Perhaps this is too confident a statement and needs a more tentative punctuation. “Guy Davenport: cartoonist?” After all, Davenport wasn’t mainly known as a cartoonist, and the world of comics has [...]
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Literature, tagged Nathaniel Hawthorne on January 29, 2008 | No Comments »
Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Long dead and safely buried, Nathaniel Hawthorne is now securely ensconced as a benign classic. The Scarlet Letter and Hawthorne’s short stories are often taught to high school students. But in his own lifetime and for years after his demise, Hawthorne was a divisive figure in American letters, widely reviled for his satire on the [...]
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Literature, Media, tagged good prose, Sarah Boxer on January 25, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Sarah Boxer’s new book.
Last fall while visiting Boston, I met up with my friend Sarah Boxer, an excellent cultural journalist and cartoonist. Over an appropriately American lunch of hamburgers and coke we chatted a bit about her upcoming book Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web, an anthology of strong blog writing. The problem with such [...]
Posted in Literature, tagged literary criticism, Philip Roth on January 24, 2008 | No Comments »
Those who care about criticism, admittedly a rarefied concern, find it useful sometimes to review the reviewers. For movies, it’s an easy enough game: just watch a flick and then go to Rotten Tomatoes and find out what the peanut gallery is up to. If you do this a few times, you’ll discover that there’s a [...]
