Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance, edited by Joshua Glenn & Carol Hayes

One day I got a bug in my butt about Lynn Peril, former zinester and writer of postcards to teenage me. I wanted to see what she was doing, if she had written any other books besides Pink Think; I wanted to get another piece of her as an adult. When this book came up in a search I felt like it would fulfill my craving for some good old zine-like autobio and maybe have some nice pictures too.

It has been months since I read this thing and only on object stayed with me: Lisa Crystal Carver’s sand-filled glass clown, a happiness charm from her ex-husband Boyd Rice. Their connection is not mentioned, but she does mention that she doesn’t like him (or the attributes of the clown). Somehow all that crappiness adds up to hope that one day she the charm will work. I have always loved this zine queen’s writing, even when I don’t agree, and her life story is really amazing. Her object is so ridiculous and her take on it so loaded—I guess that’s why I haven’t forgotten it.

The introductory essay reads academic with a whiff of book proposal. While the ideas are important and otherwise interesting, somehow it fell flat and seemed more like a justification for the pages that follow instead of a signpost to them.

The rest of the book includes objects of other stars of the underground, as well as a bunch of people who grew up or lived in Boston. Most of their stories are boring or similar—it’s the snapshots that really carry this book. Somehow, when transferred to the creamy pages of a Princeton Architectural Press book, these underdone personal stories just don’t carry the weight they would in a stapled n Xeroxed format. I guess knowing that the person who is telling the story also labored over the container was what really made it all come together.

I’ll keep this around for awhile, but I doubt it will become an object I need to have (like my Tales of Poe or I Wish I Was Sick) because it only points to the stacks of smeary paper I remember and love.

PS- Lynn Peril’s object was a scrapbook of pages torn out of 60s magazines that her now-husband gave her. Not exactly "unexpected" in her case!

Here is an article on cool stuff found in used books. (via kimbooktu)

The best part of working at the bookstore I used to was the finds. Every day in my first summer there my colleagues and I would find all kinds of things. Sometimes the donation boxes would reveal whole sagas; one box was filled with books on coping with the loss of a baby and later books on coming out and lesbian life with covers relying heavily on a aqua n' lavender color scheme. Inside one of those was a half-written letter lamenting a poorly-chosen expression of love and too much cocaine.

Some other cool finds:
1)Teenage love letters, in drafts
2)A b&w set of closeup photos of a man masturbating stuck in a copy of The Kingdom and The Power. They could be arranged as a flipbook.
3)Photographs from the early 20th century
4)Dollar dollar bills

What are your good finds?

Posting May Be Sporadic...

Here in tryharderland, the computers are all in a kernel panic, the family is beckoning and the books are piling up.

I'll do what I can, considering, but now may be the time to work on your contest entry and enjoy my favorite computer based pick-me-up.

Contest! Contest!

The challenge: Tell me a little something about summer fun.

Requirements:
In Words: 600 or less.
In Art: a one-pager that I can link to for a big size or something that will look ok on blogger.


The prize: 4 comic mystery pack by I Know Joe Kimpel artists and maybe a few other things.

The EDITED deadline: Monday, June 30th.

This could be you:

Last Friday, after my sometimes houseguest and fulltime friend The Prog Lady returned to the land of our birth, I tried desperately to adhere to the plans of the evening which included going to the ABCNoRio zine party mentioned last post. When my partying compatriots and I reached ABCNoRio the speakers had spoken but the band had yet to play. I only have four words for the rest of my time there:

PUNK ROCK DANCE PARTY!

It was the best and I hope I win the Rude Mechanical Orchestra's raffle of themselves. That would be the best bbq ever.

I also picked up a little zine from the Banard zine library on how to cite a zine for academic papers which I am sure will come in useful when I finally drag myself back to school. Pushes towards that goal are encouraged.

***
Skin flakes in my cereal:
A thought: Reading a book about crazy person obsessed with skin disease while you have dermatitis and family issues is an interesting experience. Finishing that book is a relief, but also a spell broken. More on that later.

Did you know that ABCNoRio has a zine library?
Well, your chance to check it out is this Friday for their Zine Library Party. This time they are feautring comics creators as well as music from The Rude Mechanical Orchestra. Also, beer.

If I could draw a picture of how this makes me feel it would be as follows:
a sun with shiny rays
a big face with knocked-out tooth smile
a tree
an anarchy symbol

Hooray!

***
In other library news, Lynda Barry is going to be at the Philly Free Library to talk about her new book What It Is. Details here. Afterwards you can take a dip in Logan Circle fountain and yell thanks yous to all the people who have made your life better.

Rain? It's ok I guess...

Now all I need is a little sun.

The Killer: Volume 1 by Jacamon & Matz

While searching the New York Public Library’s website for Archaia Studios Press books, I came across The Killer. The book, translated from French and complied from single issues, is the tale of a contract killer, his progression from mediocre student to conscience-less murderer and his relationship with his fixer. From the beginning, the bespectacled killer spouts macho bullshit such as: “I got no time for other people’s problems. Everyone for himself, that’s the only way. You’ve got to take risks if you want to make it. And I don’t mean just get by. I mean live like a man, not like a pig or a cockroach.” Most of the thoughts we are given access to are similar rationalizations of his work, his lack of compassion and many border on philosophical—if your philosophy is being interpreted to you by a precocious, but unpopular 15 year-old.

The only women who appear in this book for more than a single panel are sex objects (or bodies). This lack of womanhood gives the story a simple quality that detracts from the writing, which tries to be so hardboiled. The art is fine, but just that.

The Killer offers up merely a sketch of the intelligent, literature quoting, but appetite-free killer without the spare beauty of a film like Le Samourai; I can never figure out why some artists find this archetype so beguiling when it is merely predictable and boring. I don’t think I’ll be looking for volume 2.

Boo!

Did you know that this year the Shirley Jackson Awards will be presented for the first time?

Here are the finalists and the blog.

I have read one of the finalists, Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand, and its choice (and the looks of some of the other finalists), it looks like the judges really took Jackon's legacy into account. She had the ability to recognize, and capture with absolute preciseness, the horror of living.

best comic feud ever

Ha ha ha!
(via journalista)

Do I have to mention again how much I love Kate Beaton? She asks the tough questions.

Big Book Sale Booty

above: paperbacks and paperweights

PHILADELPHIA-A few weekends ago

Every year the Friends of the Free Library of Philadelphia hosts a sale to benefit the library. Available are books gathered and sorted over the year by employees and volunteers of the Book Corner bookstore and everything from pristine copies of Barbara Taylor Bradford novels to obscure feminist texts could be had for mere dollars. At least, that was the protocol many years ago when I worked at the BC. I happened to be in Philly for the last day of this year's sale. This year there were no painstakingly applied colored dots on the sale books and, sadly, no good books to be found.

Inside, however, the stacks remained as stuffed and wonderful as I remember them. The floor looks nicer and there are more seating nooks than before, which, even though I was asked out on a date by a guy sitting on one of them not four minutes into browsing the fiction section, I think is a great idea. It seemed that a few of the malignant folks who hung around the store have found other places to be bad people; even so, i regretted to find that my kickass purchases still helped pay the salary of the horrible, book-ambivalent, staff-hating woman who caused my quick departure after her reign of mismanagement and arbitrary decision making began. I guess dreams don't come true, at least in Philly.

Sigh.

In New York, however, the reading continues.

How I feel when I try to write sometimes.

leftovers from 2007- the last

Now, time for the quick and dirty. These last two books were left until the end because, though I enjoyed both, I could never really find the right words for them.
The Sleeping Father by Matthew Sharpe

Wow. Just wow. I found this on the dollar rack at The Strand shortly after reading all of Sharpe’s other work in preparation for a review that I wasn’t able to sell. Since much of the coverage of Jamestown talked about how different it was from TSF. Well, I loved Jamestown so I wasn’t sure that a book about suburban family dynamics could really live up to that screaming, violent, romp of a book.

TSF is much quieter, and instead of investigating exploration and plunder, it talks about fragility and family and love. The book’s action begins with the stroke of Bernard Schwartz, a sad and lumpy divorce and father of two, whose subsequent coma and recovery focuses all the suffering of his family and caretakers into a storm that threatens the small town Connecticut sky overhead. Sharpe’s teenage characters are good, especially the daughter Cathy who aches to find a shape for her pain the world is not right and so goes running for the delicious suffering of Catholic saints and self-repression. The idea that people who suffered so much, often on purpose, have secrets to the world is such a seductive, teenaged idea.

There are a lot of characters in this book but each stands out without poorly rendered quirks or tics. For every sad, punch-in-the-gut moment, there is a funny jab that comes unexpectedly and the narrative never settles into a rut, which is a feat, considering how much of the book happens in the characters’ heads.

If you come across this somewhere, snatch it up!

The Mount by Carol Emshwiller



I got this book as an afterthought in an internet purchase. The cover, painted by Shirley Jackson, caught my attention immediately and the fact that Small Beer Press publishes it was definitely a point in its favor.

Emshwiller imagines a future Earth where an alien invasion led to the human race becoming enslaved to the invaders, a race of lemur-like creatures with fragile legs and strong ideas about thoroughbreds called the Hoots because of the sounds they make to control others. At this point on the timeline, humans have become specialized pack animals for the Hoots, bred like animals, with allegiance only to the aliens they serve and the pack they belong to.

This world is made amazingly real by Emschwiller’s attention to detail (my favorite parts are the descriptions of nature in a place I imagine to be upstate New York) and ability to explain the bizarre motivations of the characters without being too show-and-tell. The main character Charley, a mount-in-training for the prince of his town, tells much of the story and he is 12 or so when the book begins. The way he things about things is necessarily childlike but I think Emschwiller relies on his ignorance and naiveté a little too much when trying to drive home the negative effects of the Hoots’ “human conformation” plan (slavery, my good friends. Slavery in the name of benevolence) on Charley and the humans around him.

If you are looking for a good example of world building then this might be just the thing for you—but be prepared for a few sections of exposition and dialogue that dance like a dead drunk.

I am still here, I'm just in the midst of a few projects such as Closet Rebuild 2008, Clean up Apartment for America (and baby A) and June Book Review Extravaganza!. Also, one of my longish time projects is shutting down as of this month and I am trying to decide what to do next. In the meantime, here are some cool things to check out:

MoCCA program
You're going, right?

An essay on my fave oral historian, Studs Terkel

A. M. Dellamonica's site
It is ugly, but it will lead you to some great science fiction. I haven't thoroughly checked her stuff out but the stories I have read so far, like "5 Good Things About Meghan Sheedy", have been excellent.

Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity by Virginia Smith

I am a picker. I run my hands over my body all day feeling for lumps, bumps and zits to prod and scratch. Ingrown hairs get me excited and the release of pus in any form is a high priority. If I happen to love you, or at least like you enough, it is very possible I’ll want to grab my tweezers and crawl all over you too.

Don’t be alarmed; it’s natural according to Virginia Smith. Her examination of cleanliness, hygiene and purity begins with our buddies the chimps. Turns out that all that bug picking creates alliances, soothes over tensions and keeps simian relationships strong, besides keeping the skin and body healthy. And it is no surprise—only when humans come into the picture things get weird.

From Neolitithic body painting to Christian mystics’ radically foul stench to Locke’s 18th century cold bathing plan for kids (“Plenty of exercise and sleep, plain diet, no wine or strong drink, very little or no physick, not too warm or straight clothing, especially the head and feet kept cold, and the feet often used to cold water, and exposed to wet”. Whoa!), Smith tells us how arrived at today’s constant worry about pollution, contamination and age.

I was most attracted to the early stuff, Aztec tooth art, an ancient Roman physician’s mostly-lost 4-volume work on cosmetics (including entries on tongue scraping and false hair) and those ever influential Greeks—from the goddess of hygiene to the use of slaves to maintain “white armed” female beauty, but found that as the time line unwound, there was much to be found in the stinky and plague-ridden arms of Europe, including America’s damply stern momma—England on which the latter part of the book focuses. Another subject that appeared over and over in the book, public baths, are revealed to have an extensive and fascinating history. Who knew? Thanks to the extensive chapter notes and adequate index, even the tantalizing one sentence examples could lead to a world of reading guaranteed to stop any casual conversation in its tracks.

For a non-academic, non-nonfiction-lover a book like Clean could have ended up being intimidating or at worst, boring. Instead, I read it twice. The only thing not to like is the stupid cover image of a white lady's almost-boob, where the publisher uses the same techniques to draw readers to the book that the author half-heartedly decries in the final chapter. To me, the cover looks like an Ivy League anorexia n' booze memoir-- incredibly unappealing.

***

Only 2 more novels to review to complete 2007. What? Gonna slap me with a tardy?

Can I tell you about the joy of making stuff grow?
A little viola patch for B, planted around some newish clematis:

Some lady fern fronds:

A red begonia in my lonely hanging basket:

Some bleeding heart buds:

The first flowering vinca vine:

Mini-hyacinth village:


Gah! More reading stuff once I wash the dirt from my hands.

The long lost Prog Lady is back on the scene with a new radio program called No Pussyfooting out of East Village radio. As she says:

"It's mostly prog rock. Tune in if you're
interested! If you like the show, it'd be great if you could subscribe
to my podcast. To do so, you'll probably have to set up an account on
the station website (it's no big deal) then click on the podcast
button on my page. It'll give you a code for you to copy. If you use
itunes, go to "Advanced" then "subscribe to podcast" and just paste in
the code. OR you can just stream the show by clicking on "listen to
the most recent show." I hope that this makes sense. Please let your
friends know too!"

Go to it and let my favorite lady make your ears happy.

In the middle

I am in the middle of at least 3 books right now and nothing is really holding my attention. Maybe I have reader's fatigue. Doing best is A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain, but it is so episodic that I can't quite get sucked in. I am, however, enjoying the many 100-year-old ethnic jokes buried within. I'd write one out for you except that each is almost an entire chapter long and no less enjoyable for it.

I found this book in a stash of my old library (now scattered across the quad-state area) at my parents' house after living through the horror of forgetting a book for my trip. Luckily, among the King and Kingston there were a few books I never got around to. From the orange dot on the front page and the general good condition, I believe this copy was from a PPL sale maybe eight or nine years ago. Besides the desire to reorganize all those books next time I return to the Rox, I am left with one question: Why did I rebuy all that Evelyn Waugh?

The library is beckoning. I paid the $40 fine and now I am ready to search and click my way to a ridculous list of choices. Any suggestions? Nothing over 40 years old please. In fact, how about nothing over 5 years old.

Edited to Add: Extra points if I can get it from the library.

Let's pretend it is nice out...

The only daffodil that bloomed, much to B's disappointment:


The first little sprig of cat mint, which does indeed attract cats, but none that can't be scared away (yet):


Some pretty primroses from the Greenmarket. I became obsessed with these while in London. They are everywhere there in the early Spring:


Some clematis bravely trying to scale first the stick and then the chain link in order to get to the delicious, delicious sun:



And watching over it all (including my neighbor's mess) is the freecycled owl lantern:



Who wants to have a garden party?

Dear Brother Man,

A few days ago you would have turned 24, but I think you may have liked April Fool’s better. Also, since I was hanging at our parents’ house on your actual birthday there was no way I would have been able to compose a letter to you and keep my own sanity. Posting it here would have been impossible as well with the dial-up and all. They still keep the computer you built downstairs, even though the insides have been redone a few times and the monitor is the one you brought back from college. Everything went out of date so fast and you aren’t here to keep us current; I hate having part of my heart stuck in the heat of that August night forever.

I still feel part of myself pulling away to find that piece, always searching for you. It feels like my rib cage is cracked, hanging open and my guts are straining to get out and smack you in the face. All that love has turned into something heavy and black. That makes me so tired.

Still angry,
Your sister