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Published February 7, 2017

Chris Ware on George Herriman and Krazy Kat

The New York Review of Books has an essay by cartoonist Chris Ware on George Herriman the creator Krazy Kat, one of the most beautiful, poetic and inventive comic strips ever created:    

Krazy Kat has been described as a parable of love, a metaphor for democracy, a “surrealistic” poem, unfolding over years and years. It is all of these, but so much more: it is a portrait of America, a self-portrait of Herriman, and, I believe, the first attempt to paint the full range  of human consciousness in the language of the comic strip. Like the America it portrays, Herriman’s identity has been poised for a revision for many decades now. Michael Tisserand’s new biography Krazy does just that, clearing the shifting sands and shadows of Herriman’s ancestry, the discovery in the early 1970s of a birth certificate which described Herriman as “colored” sending up a flag among comics researchers and aficionados. Tisserand confirms what for years was hiding in plain sight in the tangled brush of Coconino County, Arizona, where Krazy Kat is supposedly set: Herriman, of mixed African-American ancestry, spent his entire adult life passing as white. He had been born in the African-American neighborhood of racially mixed, culturally polyglot 1880s New Orleans, but within a decade Herriman’s parents moved George and his three siblings to the small but growing town of Los Angeles to escape the increasing bigotry and racial animosity of postbellum Louisiana. The Herrimans melted into California life, and it was there that George, with brief professional spates in New York, would remain for the rest of his life.

But imagine knowing something about yourself that’s considered so damning, so dire, so disgusting, that you must, at all cost, never tell anyone. Imagine leaving behind a life to which you cannot claim allegiance or affection. Imagine suddenly gaining advantages and opportunity while you see others like you, who have not followed in the footsteps of your deception, suffering. Herriman, once he was considered white, didn’t even have a way of voicing this identity. Until he started drawing Krazy Kat.

Krazy, the new biography of Herriman by Michael Tisserand that Chris Ware mentions, was also recently reviewed for New York Times Book Review by Nelson George: 

Though Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” comic strip was admired in his lifetime, it wasn’t until years after his death in 1944 that his vast influence received widespread critical respect. Herriman’s depiction of the tangled relationships among the black cat Krazy, his white mouse tormentor and sometime love interest Ignatz and the bulldog Officer Pupp, set against a desert backdrop in fictional Coconino County (taken from a real area of Arizona), inspired several generations of cartoonists. Charles M. Schulz’s “Peanuts,” Ralph Bakshi’s “Fritz the Cat” and Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” all owe a debt to Herriman’s draftsmanship and poetic sense.

Schulz got turned on to “Krazy Kat” right after World War II, he said, and it “did much to inspire me to create a feature that went beyond the mere actions of ordinary children.” Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss), whose animal characters strongly resemble Herriman’s, told a biographer, “At its best, the comic strip is an art form of such terrific wumpf! that I’d much rather spend any evening of any week rereading the beautifully insane sanities of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat than to sit myself down in some opera house to hear some smiling Irish tenor murdering Pagliacci.” The iconoclastic Robert Crumb called Herriman the “Leonardo da Vinci of comics,” while the ambitious Spiegelman argued that “Krazy Kat” “crossed all kinds of boundaries, between high and low, between vulgar and genteel.” All this alone would have made Herriman worth serious study.

But then in the early 1970s, a quarter-century after his death, a birth certificate was found stating that Herriman was born “colored” to Creole parents in that 19th-century hotbed of miscegenation, New Orleans. Clearly his work had to be re-examined. Not to question its genius, but to see how much of it dealt with hiding a huge part of himself in plain sight.

If you haven’t read any Krazy Kat, seek it out. The strange language, the small, inky art, and the repetitiousness of the strips — collected together into numerous, beautifully designed, paperbacks by Fantagraphics — can seem a little intimidating at first, but it really pays off if you stick with it. 

From “Krazy Kat,” April 16, 1922.
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Published January 12, 2017

Brutalist Dreams

At the New York Review of Books, American architecture critic Martin Filler casts a critical eye over a slew of new books on Brutalist architecture: 

In addition to its echoes of art brut—Jean Dubuffet’s name for outsider art—New Brutalism was also an oblique riposte to New Humanism, a set of beliefs inspired by Geoffrey Scott’s hugely influential book ‘The Architecture of Humanism’ (1914). But Scott’s call for a return to Arts and Crafts design principles was scorned as escapist nostalgia by many young midcentury modernists. Among them was the period’s foremost British architecture critic, Reyner Banham, who with his scant empathy for the Arts and Crafts Movement’s focus on social reform issues belittlingly described New Humanism as “brickwork, segmental arches, pitched roofs, small windows (or small panes at any rate)—picturesque detailing without picturesque planning. It was, in fact, the so-called ‘William Morris Revival,’ now happily defunct….”

Yet it was not a utopian nineteenth-century dreamland that Brutalism countered as much as the thin, commercialized version of the International Style that after World War II gained ascendance through economic expediency. Brutalism’s striking departure from the steel-skeleton-and-glass-skin conformity of this routine, profit-oriented modernism was defined by its contrary emphasis on raw concrete (‘béton brut’ in French) in massive forms of imposing scale, idiosyncratic shape, rough finish, and uncompromising forcefulness, with a building’s inner workings and services—structure, plumbing, electricity, heating, and ventilation—unabashedly exposed. Brutalism soon became a worldwide craze, as this comparatively economical means of fabrication offered a cost-effective alternative to hand-riveted metal construction and allowed a broader array of sculptural effects than those obtainable with rectilinear frameworks.

One gets the sense Filler is no fan of Brutalism — at least its bleak British incarnation — so there is, inevitably, a reference to J.G. Ballard’s dystopian novel High-Rise:

This was never a style that attempted to convey warmth, comfort, intimacy, or other qualities we tend to associate with an enjoyable way of life, and thus it never won much love except from architectural specialists. Brutalism posited an unsentimental, not to say harsh, view of the modern world, and however heroic its unflinching embodiment of hard realities may have been, most people do not enjoy a daily diet of architectural anxiety and alienation, especially in northern climates under cloudy skies.

One of the first signs of rejection came in J.G. Ballard’s dystopian novel ‘High-Rise‘ (1975), which is set in a thinly fictionalized version of Ernő Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower in London’s North Kensington (1966–1972). (It is one of fifty-four sites highlighted in the ‘Brutalist London Map’, a useful guide to landmarks of the style in the British capital.) This thirty-one-story apartment block, commissioned by the Greater London Council, was based on Le Corbusier’s original Unité in Marseilles, although Goldfinger’s scheme is nearly twice as high as its prototype. Trellick Tower was well received by its first inhabitants, but as was also true of contemporaneous public housing projects in the United States, it quickly went to pot as funds for its upkeep and security were slashed, which resulted in a rapid descent into crime and squalor.

Neoconservative critics blamed the architecture, but as sociological studies have since proven, the claim that tall residential complexes breed social malaise is groundless. After Trellick Tower was privatized in the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher got the British government out of the public housing business, the building’s owner-residents increased protection from intruders, paid for long-delayed repairs, and it is now a highly desirable property rightly appreciated for its design quality. 

If anyone can point me to a review of these books by someone a little more sympathetic to Brutalism, I’d be much obliged. 

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Published September 9, 2016

Luc Sante on Jean-Michel Basquiat

basquiat-studio

New York Review of Books blog has posted Luc Sante’s reminiscences of artist Jean-Michel Basquait:

The last time I saw Jean I was going home from work, had just passed through the turnstile at the 57th Street BMT station. We spotted each other, he at the bottom of the stairs, me at the top. As he climbed I witnessed a little silent movie. He stopped briefly at the first landing, whipped out a marker and rapidly wrote something on the wall, then went up to the second landing, where two cops emerged from a recess and collared him. I kept going.

A month later he was famous and I never saw him again. We no longer traveled in the same circles. I was happy for him, but then it became obvious he was flaming out at an alarming pace. I heard stories of misery and excess, the compass needle flying around the dial, a crash looming. When he died I mourned, but it seemed inevitable, as well as a symptom of the times, the wretched Eighties. He was a casualty in a war—a war that, by the way, continues. Years later I needed money badly and undertook to sell the Basquiat productions I own, but got no takers, since they were too early, failed to display the classic Basquiat look. I’m glad it turned out that way.

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Published October 31, 2015

James Gleick on What Libraries Can (Still) Do

James Gleick (The Information, Faster) on libraries, and James Palfrey’s book BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google, at the NYRB Blog:

In the midst of an information explosion, librarians are still the most versatile information specialists we have. And the purest. In his new book, BiblioTech, a wise and passionate manifesto, John Palfrey reminds us that the library is the last free space for the gathering and sharing of knowledge: “Our attention cannot be bought and sold in a library.” As a tradition barely a century and a half old in the United States, it gives physical form to the principle that public access to knowledge is the foundation of democracy.

The problem of libraries now—and it is a problem—involves some paradoxes, which need to be sorted out. For one thing, as Palfrey says, librarians will need to cherish their special talent as “stewards” while letting go of the instinct to be “collectors.” Knowledge in physical form needs to be handled carefully, preserved, and curated. But with digital information pouring into iPhones and Kindles in petabytes—via Twitter and Instagram and YouTube, not to mention Amazon’s self-publishing factories—libraries need to rethink old habits. They cannot collect everything, or even a small fraction of everything. “That model is already too hard to keep up,” Palfrey says. “A network of stewards can accomplish vastly more than a disconnected (even sometimes competitive) group of collectors ever can.”

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Published August 11, 2015

NYRB: Publishing Serious Literary Books

Larry Rohter profiles the New York Review Books, the publishing offshoot of the literary magazine The New York Review of Books, for the New York Times:

“From the beginning, it was our intention to be resolutely eclectic, and build our classics series as different voices build a fugue,” said Edwin Frank, the house’s editorial director. “We set out to do the whole mix of things that a curious person might be interested in, which would take you back and forth from fiction to certain kinds of history.”

New York Review Books was founded in 1999, when the mainstream American publishing houses were shifting their focus to big frontlist titles and paying less attention to their back catalogs, sometimes allowing the rights to books that weren’t selling well to lapse, and also cutting back on literature in translation.

“We were picking low-hanging fruit, only no one knew the fruit was out there, hanging from the branches,” Mr. Frank said.

Over the years, the publishing house has revived work by English-language authors including Henry Adams, Kingsley Amis, Edith Wharton and Angus Wilson. In translation, it has issued works by authors like Adolfo Bioy Casares, Cesare Pavese, Raymond Queneau, Robert Walser and Stefan Zweig.

The writer and critic Ian Buruma, a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, which was founded in 1963 and is published online and every two weeks in print, said the publishing arm fills an important niche.

“Because they are smaller and more nimble, they can do things that larger houses would be less inclined to do,” he said. “They pick up books that maybe 30 years ago, the big publishers would have done but now have to be careful about.”

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Published June 20, 2015

Simenon’s Island of Bad Dreams

mahe circle

At the NYRB Blog, John Banville reviews Georges Simenon’s novel The Mahé Circle, translated into English for the first time and now available from Penguin Classics:

Simenon was a driven creature, who in his lifetime wrote more than four hundred books, drank and womanized incessantly, and, in his younger days, roamed the world in frantic search of he knew not what. His mother despised him; his long-suffering wife wrote a roman à clef in which she portrayed him as a rampaging egotist—“His voice rang through the house from morning to night, and when he was out it was as though the silence was awaiting his return.” Most calamitous of all, his daughter Marie-Jo, who adored and idolized him—as a child she asked him one day to buy her a gold wedding ring—killed herself at the age of twenty-five. He was, all his life, a spirit in flight from others and from himself, and he is present, often lightly disguised, in every one of his books.

Penguin are reissuing Simenon at an astonishing clip. Along side his ‘romans durs’ like The Mahé Circle, they are publishing new translations of all 75 Maigret novels with covers featuring specially commissioned photographs by Magnum photographer Harry Gruyaert:

shadow-puppet

Earlier this year, Scott Bradfield also wrote about the Belgian author for the New York Times:

In many ways, the Maigrets were a sort of comfort food — the books that Simenon wrote to recover from the physical and psychological stress of writing his better, and far less comforting, novels. In these non-Maigret “thrillers,” often referred to as the romans durs (but to most aficionados known simply as the “Simenons”), the central, usually male character is lured from the stultifying cocoon of himself — and his suburban, oppressively Francophile (and often mother-dominated) life — into a wider, vertiginous world of sexual and philosophical peril, where violence, whether it occurs or only threatens to occur, feels like too much freedom coming at a guy far more quickly than he can handle.

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Published May 25, 2015

Tim Parks on Where I’m Reading From

Where I'm Reading From (1)

At BOMB Magazine, writer Tim Park discusses his new book Where I’m Reading From, a collection of his essays from the NYRB Blog, with Scott Esposito (co-author of The End of Oulipo):

In a way, this book is an autobiography of someone brought up with a very particular relation to books, in a religious family, in an English literary tradition, who on becoming an adult, for private personal reasons, set himself literary goals that were gradually revealed as spurious. Also, it’s about a person from the literary center—English, London— who has spent more than thirty years in another country, Italy, that is out of the literary mainstream. And a writer who also, by chance, became a translator and went on to teach translation. My life has been a long process of awakening to the reality, the changing reality, of the contemporary book world, which is a million miles from the naïve vision I had when I started writing books at twenty-two. Since it is in the publishers’ interests, and indeed the University’s, to sustain a false picture of what the book world is like and what the contemporary experience of books amounts to, my articles were a response to this, and an attempt to get my own head straight about what I’m really doing and the environment I move in. One is seeking at last to be unblinkered about it all.

And, if you missed it, Park reviewed What We See When Read by designer Peter Mendelsund on the NYRB Blog earlier this month:

One of the pleasures of his book is his honesty and perplexity at the discovery that every account he offers of the process of visualization very quickly falls apart under pressure. We do not really “see” characters such as Anna Karenina or Captain Ahab, he concludes, or indeed the places described in novels, and insofar as we do perhaps see or glimpse them, what we are seeing is something we have imagined, not what the author saw. Even when there are illustrations, as in many nineteenth-century novels, they only impose their view of the characters very briefly. A couple of pages later they have become as fluid and vague as so much of visual memory. At one point Mendelsund posits the idea that perhaps we read in order not to be oppressed by the visual, in order not to see.

(Pictured above is the cover of the UK edition, published by Harvill Secker in December last year, of Where I’m Reading From designed by James Paul Jones. The US edition, which has a more utilitarian cover, was just published by New York Review of Books)

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Published April 30, 2015

Too Many Books

At the NYRB Blog, Tim Parks wonders if there are just too many books:

Is there a relationship between the quantity of books available to us, the ease with which they can be written and published, and our reading experience?

At present, for example, it’s hard not to feel that we are in an era of massive overproduction. Just when we were already overwhelmed with paper books, often setting them aside after only a few pages in anxious search of something more satisfying, along came the Internet and the e-book so that, wonderfully, we now have access to hundreds of thousands of contemporary novels and poems from this very space into which I am writing.

Inevitably, this tends to diminish the seriousness with which I approach any particular book. Certainly the notion that these works could ever be arranged in any satisfactory order, or that any credible canon will ever emerge, is gone forever.

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Published December 4, 2013

Barbara Epstein, David Levine, and Graydon Carter on Magazine Publishing


Monday’s edition of CBC Radio show Ideas featured Michael Enright in conversation with the New York Review of Book‘s co-founder Barbara Epstein, caricaturist David Levine, and long-time Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter:

CBC Radio IDEAS: Barbara Epstein/David Levine/Graydon Carter mp3

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Published December 4, 2013

Tim Parks: Life Transformed into a Series of Categories

Gustave Doré: Canto VII—Hoarders and Wasters, from Dante's Inferno

Tim Parks on literature and bureaucracy for the New York Review of Books blog:

So could it be—and this is the question I really want to ask—that however much literature may appear to be opposed to bureaucracy and procrastination, it actually partakes of the same aberration? Balzac’s Comedie humaine with his declared ambition to “compete with the civil registry”; Proust’s monstrous, magnificent Recherche, which he likened to a cathedral, tediously extending the analogy to every section of the work; Joyce’s encyclopaedic aspirations in Ulysses, his claim that Finnegans Wake would be a history of the entire world. Or go back to Dante, if you like, and his need to find a pigeonhole in hell for every sinner of every category from every sphere of society. Or fast forward again to Bouvard and Pécuchet, Flaubert’s two incompetents who react to practical failure by becoming obsessive copiers of literary snippets. This without mentioning the contenders for the Great-American-Novel slot, so eager to give the impression that their minds have encompassed and interrelated everything across that enormous continent (one thinks of the interminable lists of contemporary paraphernalia in Franzen’s writing). In each case, however different in tone and content the texts, life is transformed into a series of categories, made more mental, more a matter of words and intellect; we revel in the mind’s ability to possess the world in language, rather than to inhabit it or change it.

(pictured above: Gustave Doré: Canto VII—Hoarders and Wasters, from Dante’s Inferno)

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Published September 5, 2013

Robert Walser: The Monotony of Things

Colors fill up your mind too much with all sorts of muddled stuff. Colors are too sweet a muddle, nothing more. I love things in one color, monotonous things. Snow is such a monotonous song. Why shouldn’t a color be able to make the same impression as singing? White is like a murmuring, whispering, praying. Fiery colors, like for instance Autumn colors, are a shriek. Green in midsummer is a many-voiced song with all the highest notes. Is that true? I don’t know if that is right. Well, the teacher will surely be so kind as to correct it.

At The New Yorker, Ben Lerner considers the writing of Robert Walser:

There is the typically Walserian statement “I love things in one color, monotonous things.” Praise for the monotonous, the uniform, the mundane, the insignificant—such sentiments are everywhere in Walser’s work, and maintain a crucial ambiguity. On the one hand, they are expressions of poetic attunement to those aspects of the world we too readily overlook, and for which writers concerned with heroic exploits often have no time. On the other hand, Walser’s celebration of the monotonous or uniform returns us to his fascination with subservience, with relinquishing all personality to imposed order: “Modestly stepping aside can never be recommended as a continual practice in strong enough terms.”

The force of Walser’s writing derives from this simultaneous valorization of irreducible individuality and of sameness, smallness, interchangeability.

Lerner has written the introduction to a new NYRB collection of Walser short stories, A Schoolboy’s Diary and Other Stories, translated by Damion Searls.

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Published July 26, 2013

Martin Scorsese: The Persisting Vision

The August issue of New York Review of Books has a wonderful essay by Martin Scorsese on the history and language of film, Vertigo, and cinema as a great American art form:

As in the case of many great films, maybe all of them, we don’t keep going back for the plot. Vertigo is a matter of mood as much as it’s a matter of storytelling—the special mood of San Francisco where the past is eerily alive and around you at all times, the mist in the air from the Pacific that refracts the light, the unease of the hero played by James Stewart, Bernard Herrmann’s haunting score. As the film critic B. Kite wrote, you haven’t really seen Vertigo until you’ve seen it again. For those of you who haven’t seen it even once, when you do, you’ll know what I mean.

Every decade, the British film magazine Sight and Sound conducts a poll of critics and filmmakers from around the world and asks them to list what they think are the ten greatest films of all time. Then they tally the results and publish them. In 1952, number one was Vittorio de Sica’s great Italian Neorealist picture Bicycle Thieves. Ten years later, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane was at the top of the list. It stayed there for the next forty years. Last year, it was displaced by a movie that came and went in 1958, and that came very, very close to being lost to us forever:Vertigo. And by the way, so did Citizen Kane—the original negative was burned in a fire in the mid-1970s in Los Angeles.

So not only do we have to preserve everything, but most importantly, we can’t afford to let ourselves be guided by contemporary cultural standards—particularly now…We have to remember: we may think we know what’s going to last and what isn’t. We may feel absolutely sure of ourselves, but we really don’t know, we can’t know. We have to remember Vertigo…

(New York Review of Books)

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