A selection of art & photo books for summertime reading

These previously-reviewed titles at Bellemeade Books are a good reason to enjoy summer indoors on the couch: from a rediscovered story by William Burroughs getting the graphic-novel treatment, to the photography of North Carolina photographer Joe Webb. There's still plenty of summer left to be lazy and entertained, too.

Above: Everyone's favorite cranky Uncle Bill, William S. Burroughs, continues to battle the forces of Control years after his death. The author gave name to heavy metal, provided inspiration to underground writers everywhere, and pissed off an entire generation of academic critics, and now his forty-year old "bedtime story" Ah Pook Is Here is re-published in a deluxe edition by Fantagraphics Books: "Ah Pook Is Here is a consideration of time with respect to the differing perceptions of the ancient Maya and that of the current Western mindset. It was Burroughs’ contention that both of these views result in systems of control in which the elite perpetuate its agendas at the expense of the people. They make time for themselves and through increasing measures of Control attempt to prolong the process indefinitely."

The Work of Joe Webb: Appalachian Master of Rustic Architecture (Jargon Books, distributed by the University of Georgia Press) is work that celebrates the craftsmanship of the Highlands, North Carolina woodworker and builder who created nearly thirty log cabins in the 1920s and 1930s. Cox's contemporary photographs -- taken with a large-format field camera -- reveal the houses in current states of repair, disuse, or unrecognizable renovation: a review in Blueprint calls the images "hallucinatory ... balustrades of thick, twisted twigs minimizing thickets; staircases constructed with random patterns of interlocking laurel or rhododendron branches."The North Carolina artist whose website offers a welcome and a request ("welcome to my mosque ... please wipe your muddy mind before entering") is a photographer, luthier, portraitist; his photo subjects range from the ephemera of the soul to whorls of river water to the graffiti-plastered walls of the now-closed CBGB's, documenting the passage of the temporal in sharply-rendered images of both beauty and clarity.

The University of Texas at Austin recently offered a rare opportunity to see an image considered to be "the world's first photograph." Taken in 1826, the shadowy, indistinct image is almost invisible to the eye, but it is the centerpiece of a grand collection of 35,000 photographs, nearly 200 of which were displayed at the Harry Ransom Center on the Austin campus. The University of Texas Press is publishing a companion volume with 125 plates selected from the Gernsheim collection. From the book's preface: "The collection’s clearest strength remains its holdings in nineteenth-century British photography, including hundreds of images by such masters as David Hill and Robert Adamson, Lewis Carroll, Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton, and Henry Peach Robinson. The Gernsheims carried their passion for the medium into the twentieth century by also collecting significant works by modern photographers, such as Alfred Stieglitz, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Man Ray, Paul Strand, Albert Renger-Patsch, Edward Weston, and Henri Cartier-Bresson."

For whatever reason, some books just stay with you. Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste by Gillo Dorfles is one of those books. While the line separating art from kitsch is exceedingly fine, one man's trash is still saved from being another man's treasure by context, or (more rightly) kitsch's complete lack of one. Da Vinci's Mona Lisa appears much less inscrutable on a plastic shower curtain. Mass production has made the irony of "authentic reproduction" available on a grand scale.Some of the academic essays have not aged well -- the book was originally published in 1968 -- even if the gently tortured Italian-into-English translation has its own charm: "And obviously before long (and even now in fact) we will witness the anti-family kitsch, the kitsch of hippies and long-haired youths, the kitsch of addicts and beatniks,"writes Dorfles -- foretelling Nirvana's cover version of Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World" by a good 20 years.

"Ulysses Seen": Bloomsday online in a graphic novelization

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan can now safely come down from his tower with his robe ungirdled. 

 

It appears as though James Joyce's Ulysses, after having won the battle for literary expression in 1933, is continuing to win the war -- this time on the web, and almost ninety years after the book's first publication. Ulysses Seen, the graphic novelization of Ulysses (online, with an accompanying reader's guide, and created by illustrator Robert Berry) ran into trouble when it was submitted as an iPad application. According to business manager Chad Rutkowski at Throwaway Horse, "I don't think the Apple representative that I first spoke with even knew what Ulysses was."



Apple, apparently, at first decided the graphic novel was a little too graphic and requested Throwaway Horse remove several offending panels depicting partial nudity ("partial nudity," of course, is a salacious, tantalizingly vague oxymoron from an era of more delicate sensibilities). Throwaway Horse complied. 

 

Then representatives at Apple -- after having received the modified app -- looked again at Ulysses Seen and reversed their previous decision. Now both apps are available, just in time for Bloomsday, June 16. And in the same spirit, Apple has agreed to publish a graphic novelization app of that other succes d' scandale, "The Importance of Being Earnest," by Oscar Wilde. Molly Bloom would doubtless approve, and waits breathlessly.

Yes.

(images from UlyssesSeen, rendered by Robert Berry at Throwaway Horse, LLC)

Dante's "Divine Comedy" gets a graphic novel & video game: good news for swaggering hero-poets

Bowler hats, tommy guns, and spats: illustrator Seymour Chwast's updated Dante's Divine Comedy: A Graphic Adaptation looks like a 1930s Hollywood detective movie, telegraphing Dante's ultimately hopeful message in cinematic black-and-white. If Chwast's version of theDivine Comedy begs no comparison to the art of illustrator Gustave Doré, well, it's a safe bet the 19th century engraver never imagined Dante as a Dashiell Hammett character, either.

Chwast's first graphic novel is full of innovative and clever images, although high-school Miss Grundys may wail at the simplified story. "Captain" Charon's lake is now a neon-lit chasm he zooms across in a speedboat and floozies of Florence lounge in cocktail dresses. The damned wear Yale varsity sweaters. Dante still searches for the truth with the poet Virgil, now as his guide in a tuxedo and bowler.

Some things, however, stay true to the original: for most readers, as well as the artists that have illustrated the Comedy over centuries, the torments of Hell are still more thrilling to depict than the transcendence of Heaven -- and for Chwast make for much wittier visuals.

Not to be trumped by mere words and pictures on a page, Electronic Arts has developed a videogame of Dante's Inferno that ratchets up the action to make Dante a fallen crusader swaggering his way through hell, battling Satan himself for the love of Beatrice.

"He fundamentally mapped hell with this poem," says Jonathan Knight, the game's executive producer. "He's created a visual topography, and there's a tremendous amount of structure, geography, weather — and monsters."

A graphic novel and a videogame based on the work of a 14th-century visionary seem a victory of sorts for the image of fearless and swashbuckling hero-poets, if not for truth in literature. It's unlikely there'll be corresponding releases for Purgatory or Heaven -- spiritual redemption is less exciting for gamers, presumably. Who knows -- that still leaves the battle for Heaven in Milton's "Paradise Lost" for some enterprising game company to try.

Bloomsday

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan can now safely come down from his tower with his robe ungirdled. 

 

It appears as though James Joyce's Ulysses, after having won the battle for literary expression in 1933, is continuing to win the war -- this time on the web, and almost ninety years after the book's first publication. Ulysses Seen, the graphic novelization of Ulysses (online, with an accompanying reader's guide, and created by illustrator Robert Berry) ran into trouble when it was submitted as an iPad application. According to business manager Chad Rutkowski at Throwaway Horse, "I don't think the Apple representative that I first spoke with even knew what Ulysses was."



Apple, apparently, at first decided the graphic novel was a little too graphic and requested Throwaway Horse remove several offending panels depicting partial nudity ("partial nudity," of course, is a salacious, tantalizingly vague oxymoron from an era of more delicate sensibilities). Throwaway Horse complied. 

 

Then representatives at Apple -- after having received the modified app -- looked again at Ulysses Seen and reversed their previous decision. Now both apps are available, just in time for Bloomsday, June 16. And in the same spirit, Apple has agreed to publish a graphic novelization app of that other succes d' scandale, "The Importance of Being Earnest," by Oscar Wilde. Molly Bloom would doubtless approve, and waits breathlessly.

Yes.

(images from UlyssesSeen, rendered by Robert Berry at Throwaway Horse, LLC)

Kafka's little fable gets some ink, and Eric Hoffer's lesson on what really matters

Kafka's "A little fable" at The Modern Word


The work of Franz Kafka seems a good source for graphic novelization, and Vincent Stall's 2004 illustration of Kafka's "A little fable" is featured at The Modern Word. By way of introduction The Modern Word's editorial director Allen B. Ruch writes:

“A Little Fable” (“Kleine Fabel,” in the original German) is a paragraph-long short story masterpiece by Kafka. I ran across a wonderful mini-comic adaptation of it by the American comic book artist Vincent Stall around 2004. I contacted Vincent, who graciously allowed us to re-publish the comic online here at The Modern Word. I was planning to post it when Vincent’s graphic novel, Brass Tack, was to be published, but when Brass Tack got delayed this somehow fell through the cracks, as well.

"I have written a number of good sentences"

Good writers write, and great writers think of nothing else but writing. That's the writer's craft, the equivalent of the pianist's "practice, practice, practice." Learning how to string words together in entertaining and thoughtful order is a matter of diligence and, if a writer is lucky, some amount of talent.

The internet has given a springboard to much of this talent, much of it woefully unpaid, but good writers usually achieve some recognition beyond the computer keyboard, and the great writers -- well, the truly great will always care more about expression than recognition. Still, as Dorothy Parker once remarked, the two most beautiful words in the English language are "check enclosed."

Patrick Karp writes often, and writes well, in his blog Anecdotal Evidence about the intersections of life and art, the demands of daily living and the needs of the artist. Here is an excerpt from a post in which Karp describes one writer's utterly simple yardstick of measure.

In every realm of human endeavor I’m increasingly attracted to the informal, amateur, self-driven, wayward, unregulated and independent, particularly in writing.

In 1977, six years before his death at age eighty, Eric Hoffer writes in his notebook: “Disraeli felt that `nothing could compensate his obscure youth, not even a glorious old age.’ Practically all writers and artists are aware of their destiny and see themselves as actors in a fateful drama. With me, nothing is momentous: obscure youth, glorious old age, fateful coincidences--nothing really matters. I have written a number of good sentences. I have kept free of delusions. I know I am going to die soon.”

I most admire Hoffer’s freedom and the way he revels in it and uses it so productively.

Also on Anecdotal Evidence, Karp posts about a charming story told by Jacques Barzun of youngsters hop-scotching their way across a playground-graphic computer keyboard, giggling and tapping out a four-letter word. "Did they spell it right?" the teacher asks.

Art Spiegelman meets Lynd Ward, 1971: "slivers of light in the darkness"

The Paris Review features a short piece on graphic artist Lynd Ward written by Art Spiegelman, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic memoir Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. The 1971 meeting in upstate New York between scruffy young fan and established artist, as often happens, doesn't turn out as hoped but it did help spark Spiegelman's own graphic career. This fond memory is excerpted from his introduction to Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcuts, a two-volume set published by The Library of America on October 14, 2010.

... It seems natural now to think of Lynd Ward as one of America’s most distinguished and accomplished graphic novelists. He is, in fact, one of only a small handful of artists anywhere who ever made a “graphic novel” until the day before yesterday. The ungainly neologism seems to have stuck since Will Eisner, creator of the voraciously inventive Spirit comic book of the 1940s, first used it on the cover of a 1978 collection of his seriously intended comics stories for adults, A Contract With God. It was a way to distance himself from the popular prejudices against the medium, and he often cited Ward’s 1930s woodcut novels as an inspiration for his work and for the euphemism. But Ward’s roots were not in comics, though his work is part of the same large family tree, belonging somewhere among the less worm-ridden branches of printmaking and illustration.

... In 1970, I briefly met Lynd Ward at the opening of a small Binghamton, New York, gallery show of his prints. I was a twenty-two-year-old cartoonist and told him how much I admired his woodcut novels. As I recall, I was by far the youngest and scruffiest person at the opening (he was just a few years older than I am now), and he expressed surprise that I even knew the books. I asked what newspaper comics had been important to him, and he explained that he hadn’t been allowed to read them as a child. When pressed, he expressed appreciation for Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant, which he discovered as an adult.

I didn’t share his enthusiasm—I thought Foster’s work, with its captions positioned safely beneath each of the stately illustrations on his Sunday pages, was barely comics at all —but we went on to find common ground in our mutual esteem for the great old socialist cartoonist, Art Young, before he turned back to talking to his grown-up friends.

... When walking through that Binghamton gallery show back in 1971, I regretted that no original prints from Ward’s woodcut novels were part of the exhibit, but I remember slowing down to notice that a number of the prints on display depicted trees and forests. I thought about the poetry of patiently carving into a dead tree to make a print on paper that commemorated the once-living thing. One beautifully structured print stayed with me (I later found it again, reproduced in Storyteller Without Words): a panoramic treescape of a young man in shadows, groping and climbing through the dense neuronal wickerwork of dappled trunks and branches, carefully exploring and working his way through the maze of marks that surround him.

I’ve recently been told that it was intended to be a picture of the nature writer, John Burroughs, but I’d thought of it as a moving self-portrait of the artist embedded in the wood, seeking slivers of light in the darkness and carving out a new medium. The print was called “The Pathfinder.” ...

(Art Spiegelman's work also includes the startling Shadow of No Towers, a graphic novel about September 11, 2001. His most recent book of comics is Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!. Art by Lynd Ward reproduced from the Paris Review.)

Joyce's "Ulysses" gets an online graphic novelization and an (uncensored) app

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan can now safely come down from his tower with his robe ungirdled. It appears as though James Joyce's Ulysses, after having won the battle for literary expression in 1933, is continuing to win the war -- this time on the web, and nearly 90 years after its first publication.

Ulysses Seen, the graphic novelization of Ulysses (online, with an accompanying reader's guide, and created by illustrator Robert Berry) ran into trouble when it was submitted as an iPad application. According to business manager Chad Rutkowski at Throwaway Horse, "I don't think the Apple representative that I first spoke with even knew what Ulysses was."



Apple, apparently, at first decided the graphic novel was a little too graphic and requested Throwaway Horse remove several offending panels depicting partial nudity ("partial nudity," of course, is a salacious, tantalizingly vague oxymoron from an era of more delicate sensibilities). Throwaway Horse complied.

Then representatives at Apple -- after having received the modified app -- looked again at Ulysses Seen and reversed their previous decision. Now both apps are available, and readers can move on to now to another perplexing choice: which print edition of Huckleberry Finn to read.

In the same spirit, Apple has agreed to publish a graphic novelization app of that other succes d' scandale, "The Importance of Being Earnest," by Oscar Wilde. Molly Bloom would doubtless approve, and waits breathlessly.

Yes.

(images from UlyssesSeen, rendered by Robert Berry at Throwaway Horse, LLC)

"The Canterbury Tales," an illustrated version by Seymour Chwast

When I was in school I actually read most/some/not all of the books I was required by well-meaning English teachers, who were sure that if a class of 30 bored sophomores would just read far enough into -- oh, let's say, John Knowles's A Separate Peace -- we would all be better citizens. I can't believe that novel of teenage longing and (eventual) sadness was the first book title that popped out of my memory bank, but there you have it.

Childhood reading is such a tricky and untamable undertaking. I don't even ask these days what the required classroom reading might be for my nephew's 14-year-old Sophie and 10-year old Aidan. But they live in Seattle, a pretty literate town, so I'm not worried, much.

One of the unexpected benefits of graphic novels (and I'm dancing on a limb here, I haven't read many -- there are still far too many actual novels to read before I get to novels in panel form) is that an entire generation of pen-and-ink artists has expanded the canon of what can be considered worth illustrating: I'm thinking, again immediately, of Paul Auster's City of Glass, but if I checked I would find there are now too many real surprises to name.

These aren't the Sunday-comic form of illustrated novels in the old, Classics Illustrated sense (Treasure Island, Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Three Musketeers). Contemporary novels, imaginatively drawn by top-notch graphic artists, offer readers young and old at least a glance at fiction they may have never looked at otherwise. The surprising effect of the growth of graphic novels is that even unexpected classic now are being re-imagined for a new generation by superb artists like Seymour Chwast.

Seymour Chwast's Push-Pin Studios is one of a kind -- as an illustrator and graphic artist Chwast is responsible for some of he iconic images of the past fifty years: a 60's Dylan poster was pure pop, and his work has influenced everything from advertising to album covers to publishing design.

He's turned his focus to illustrating a body of classics that rejuvenate the works for the 21st century.In 2010 he published The Divine Comedy in a witty retelling that imagined Dante and Beatrice in a 1920's world of gin joints and flappers, spats and tommy-guns: Charon took his charges across the River Styx in a motor boat. It may not have been exactly what a ninth-grade teacher may at first suggest to a class, but it was intriguing enough on its own that kids may have found it a goofy and funny introdunction to a musty, if epic, poem.

Depending on your point of view, his latest is even more striking, or unnerving: The Canterbury Tales (Bloomsbury) reintroduces The Wife of Bath and The Miller, The Knight and the Princess as they go their way from the Tabbard Inn. The twenty-four tales are twisted into modern form: here the pilgrims who tell the tales ride motorcycles, with the artist himself as the host and Chaucer waving from a sidecar. They spin stories of lust in which characters seduce each other with jaunty language: “Hey, babe, let’s party!”; “Come here, big boy. Show me your stuff!” Yet Chwast recognizes that he is doing in large part what Chaucer did, “writing in the English vernacular of the time.”

The result, again, may not make a required-reading list in a literary sense. But the humor and wry commentary on the human condition are certainly effects that Chaucer would recognize. Just as his religious pilgrims broke all the pious rules on their way to see the saint, the illustrated tales with their contemporary echoes contain the same pointed humor.

Filled as it is with profound differences between men and women, romantic betrayal that barely pays lip service to monogamy, jealousy taken to lethal extremes and the medieval love of fables, the Canterbury Tales are as modern as Chwast's fine artwork. There are plenty of beheadings, repeated bursts of flatulence and, as the cartoon Chaucer explains, action “complete with swash and buckling.” There is also a cross-cultural expanse to the epic storytelling, with biblical figures, Greek gods, Roman emperors and Arabian legends all represented within this graphic condensation of Chaucer’s classic into tales that are often as little as a few panels each.

This version of The Canterbury Tales, like Chwast's The Divine Comedy before it, is certainly not for purists -- the eternal argument when artifice meets true art. But then again, the Tales have a 600-year history of entertaining readers, and who's to say that an illustrated version -- with cartoon swash and buckle -- isn't intended to take the human condition any more seriously than Chaucer did?