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Published November 18, 2013

Art Spiegelman: The Antibodies of Satire

Art Spiegelman talks to Tablet Magazine’s literary editor David Samuels about the retrospective currently at the Jewish Museum in New York, Mad magazine, and, inevitably, Maus.

While not exactly critical of Spiegelman, it’s one of the feistier interviews I’ve read with him recently:

Now, if you’re talking about nationalism, then you have to get to Duck Soup within a couple of seconds. And that impulse predates WWII, and it’s an outsider’s perspective on a culture, and there are still plenty of outsiders to this culture, and things will come from that still, I believe. That’s one point.

The other point, which is more to the point perhaps, is the impulse—I see it through Mad, because it’s the one that’s imprinted on me. Mad made the resistance to the Vietnam War even possible. And that seems really, deeply true, not just some kind of wise-crack true. Because the ’50s felt incredibly monolithic. The early ’50s was an incredibly oppressive place in America, very iconically represented by a decent-enough liberal chap named Norman Rockwell. It’s when we got this ‘In God We Trust’ on our money, it’s when we had our crazy McCarthy moments, we had all of these things happening, and yet there was room for a very effective antibody, which was this kind of self-reflexive, self-deprecating, angry response to the homogeneity from people who weren’t thoroughly homogenized in our culture, i.e., Jews. It led to something very fruitful, and we still have the aftermath of it, both positively and negatively.

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Published December 5, 2011

Monday Miscellany

As mentioned earlier, I was in Vancouver last week and I wasn’t able to post as regularly as I would have liked to. So to make up for Friday’s missing links, here are a few things of interest to start the week off…

Adrian Tomine (Shortcomings) discusses his latest work, Optic Nerve #12, and an unfinished graphic novel with Comic Book Resources:

When I finally sat down to work on my next comics project, I felt obligated to attempt a real “graphic novel.” I was looking at these giant tomes that some of my peers were working on, and I felt really envious of that kind of achievement. It also just seemed like that was the direction everything was moving in, and my old habit of publishing short stories in the comic book format was already an anachronism. So I pursued that for awhile, doing a lot of the kind of preparatory work which is actually the hardest part for me, and the whole time I had these nagging thoughts like, “Do I really want to work on this for ten years? Do I want to draw and write in the same way for that long? Does the material really merit that much of an investment?”

Hard Won — Yet another review for MetaMaus in The New York Times:

Spiegelman recalls the struggles of researching “Maus” at a time before scholarship was widely available to a mass audience. Pre-Internet, he depended on his parents’ collection of pamphlets written and drawn by survivors, and on research visits to Poland. On his second trip to Birkenau, in 1987, Spiegelman was baffled to find a perfectly preserved barracks where once there had been only rubble; it turned out to be a re-creation built for a Holocaust movie, left standing by Polish authorities because it looked accurate. He admits he was jealous of the moviemakers’ unlimited resources, when “every scrap of information I needed for ‘Maus’ was so hard-won.”

With It — Michael Farr, author of Tintin: The Complete Companion, talks about Tintin and discusses five books related to Herge and his creation at The Browser:

If you didn’t meet Hergé, you wouldn’t realise how funny he was – he saw the humorous side of almost everything. He was visually terribly aware, he didn’t miss anything which he saw. He was in his seventies then and I was in my mid-twenties, and I think that’s the reason why he agreed to see me. Younger, a French-speaking British journalist, I was slightly exotic and that intrigued him. Hergé was terribly young for his age. To use an expression that was used more then than now, he was very “with it”. When we got talking about music, he asked me what my favourite Pink Floyd songs were.

You see all this in the books. In many respects, Hergé is Tintin himself.

See also: Hal Foster, art critic and author of The First Pop Age (i.e. not THAT Hal Foster), on pop art at The Browser.

And finally…

Art critic Robert Hughes on his first visit to Rome, excerpted from his new book about the city, in The WSJ:

It was being gradually borne in on me by Rome that one of the vital things that make a great city great is not mere raw size, but the amount of care, detail, observation and love precipitated in its contents, including, but not only, its buildings. And it goes without saying, or ought to, that one cannot pay that kind of attention to detail until one understands quite a bit about substance, about different stones, different metals, the variety of woods and other substances—ceramic, glass, brick, plaster and the rest—that go to make up the innards and outer skin of a building, how they age, how they wear: in sum, how they live, if they do live.

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Published October 12, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Art or Death — Art Spiegelman on books, comics and technology at Publishers Weekly:

I would say that, in the future, the book will be reserved for things that function best as a book. So, if I need a textbook that’s going to be out of date because of new technological inventions, you’re better off having it where you can download the supplements or the update. If you’re going to read a quick mystery novel to keep you amused while you’re traveling, it’s fine.
None of this is about the business model. It has to do with the boutique nature of a book, the idea that, as McLuhan put it, when a technology is replaced by another technology, the previous technology either becomes art or it dies.

See also: Jeet Heer reviews MetaMaus for the Globe and Mail:

One way to explain the achievement of MetaMaus is to imagine a great architect like Frank Gehry offering a guided tour to one of his classic buildings, opening up the original plans, explaining the solutions he came up with for each problem. Such an act of self-exegesis is immensely rewarding, even if the creator’s genius is as enigmatic as ever.

And, on the subject of comics… A short interview with Alan Moore in Metro:

At the moment I feel an awful lot of my comic career is behind me, particularly all of the superhero stuff – the stuff that’s owned by American corporations. I want to distance myself from that, so the stuff I’m proudest of is what I own: From Hell, Lost Girls, The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I don’t read my earlier work because there are too many unpleasant associations with it. I don’t have a copy of Watchmen in the house. I’m glad the work is out there in the world, having an effect, but it’s like I’ve gone through a messy divorce.

Immersion — Author Neal Stephenson talks about writing and his new novel REAMDE at Full Stop:

I would say that people who like to engage with the details of the historical era or the technical concepts might find [my] books especially rewarding to read. For me it’s a pretty straightforward thing—you know, what readers are paying for, what they’re buying and what I’m selling is a particular kind of experience: essentially one of getting immersed in another world. And it could be a very different world (as in a science fiction book), it could be the history of our world, or it could just be a story that takes place today, like Reamde. And a way to do that — a way to create that feeling of immersion and get the reader feeling like they’re really there — is to supply a lot of details that convey a feeling of immediacy.

See also: REAMDE reviewed by Laura Miller for The Guardian.

And finally…

Filmmaker Gary Hustwit talks about his latest design documentary, Urbanized, with Print Magazine:

I love all the interviews in all the films, that’s why they are in the film. But there are definitely some that people respond to when they watch the film. Most of all Enrique Peñalosa, who is the former mayor of Bogota. He’s got some great lines in the film, like “There’s no constitutional right to parking.” He’s really charismatic and has some really common sense ideas about using the city as a tool to create equality, democracy and social equity. I also got to interview Oscar Niemeyer, the legendary Brazilian modernist architect. He’s about to turn 104 and is the oldest living architect in the world. He’s got his grandchildren working in his office. That was a big honor for sure.

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Published October 7, 2011

MetaMaus | Talk of the Nation

At some point I will stop blogging interviews with Art Spiegelman, but I’m still enjoying listening to him talk about his career, so here he is answering questions about MetaMaus on NPR’s Talk of the Nation:

“I wanted all the flaws to be on a one-to-one relationship with the reader so that it would feel more like looking at a diary, although it’s a forged diary, as you get to see when you’re looking at all the sketches and preliminary work.

“It wanted to have that feeling of handwriting. So I was working on stationery with a fountain pen and [correcting] with typewriter correction fluid. And I wanted it to feel like a manuscript because that would allow a kind of intimacy to it, and it would keep me from frill and decoration in the drawing.”

NPR TALK OF THE NATION: ‘MetaMaus’: The Story Behind Spiegelman’s Classic

 

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Published October 7, 2011

Something for the Weekend

Innovation Starvation— SF author Neal Stephenson at World Policy Journal on why the big stuff doesn’t get done:

SF has changed… from the 1950s (the era of the development of nuclear power, jet airplanes, the space race, and the computer) to now. Speaking broadly, the techno-optimism of the Golden Age of SF has given way to fiction written in a generally darker, more skeptical and ambiguous tone. I myself have tended to write a lot about hackers—trickster archetypes who exploit the arcane capabilities of complex systems devised by faceless others.

Believing we have all the technology we’ll ever need, we seek to draw attention to its destructive side effects. This seems foolish now that we find ourselves saddled with technologies like Japan’s ramshackle 1960’s-vintage reactors at Fukushima when we have the possibility of clean nuclear fusion on the horizon. The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rules. It’s the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments. Too bad we’ve forgotten how to do it.

See also:  Stephenson’s new book REAMDE reviewed by The A.V. Club and the NY Times.

Stealing from Dr. Strange — Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians and The Magician King, talks to Graphic Novel Reporter about comics:

Watchmen (and, just as much, Miracleman) changed everything for me. [Alan] Moore attacked and undermined everything that was sacred about the superhero story, and in the process he wrote the greatest superhero story that had ever been written. I never forgot that. A lot of those lessons show up in The Magicians: When you question the basic assumptions of a genre, you make that genre stronger, not weaker.

Also, I steal a lot from Dr. Strange.

And on the subject of comics… Ruth Franklin reviews MetaMaus by Art Spiegelman for The New Republic:

This writer is not Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi, though his work, like theirs, is based in testimony. He is not Piotr Rawicz or H.G. Adler, though he shares their interest in viewing real events through a filter of surrealism. He is not Thomas Keneally, though his work has a quality of the “nonfiction novel” about it; nor is he W.G. Sebald, though his books, like Sebald’s, have been described as a mix of fiction, documentary, and memoir. He is Art Spiegelman, and he has done more than any other writer of the last few decades to change our understanding of the way stories about the Holocaust can be written.

Edges — Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, on what remains of books:

One of the essential characteristics of the printed book, as of the scribal codex that preceded it, is its edges. Those edges, as John Updike pointed out not long before he died, manifest themselves in the physical form of bound books – “some are rough-cut, some are smooth-cut, and a few, at least at my extravagant publishing house, are even top-stained” — but they are also there aesthetically and even metaphysically, giving each book integrity as a work in itself. That doesn’t mean that a book exists in isolation — its words, as written and as read, form rich connections with other books as well as with the worlds of nature and of men — but rather that a book offers a self-contained experience. The sense of self-containment is what makes a good book so satisfying to its readers, and the requirement of self-containment is what spurs the writer to the highest levels of literary achievement. The book must feel complete between its edges.

And finally…

In The Wall Street Journal, Lee Marshall looks for Fellini’s Rome:

Sometimes Fellini’s Rome and Felliniesque Rome live in close proximity. The apartment that Federico and Giulietta shared (Via Margutta, 110) is on a small, charming street where Truman Capote once lived and Puccini composed. There’s not much to see except a plaque on the building with caricatures of the pair and a commemorative poem in Roman dialect. But notice the number on the door of the palazzo: above the 110, it says “Già 113″—formerly 113—a very Felliniesque address.

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Published September 22, 2011

“Why comics? Why mice? Why the Holocaust?”

Cartoonist Art Spiegelman talks about his new book MetaMaus:

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Published August 19, 2011

MetaMaus | Bookworm

With the release of MetaMaus later this fall, Art Spiegelman discusses comics and the original two volumes of Maus with Michael Silverblatt in an archive interview for Bookworm in 1992:

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