An Uncivilized Conversation

On this episode, Joe, Matt and Chris have a conversation about David B's newest English language release from Uncivilized Books, interviews, comics, Brian Evensen...stuff, you know. I hope you like it!

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[RM Rhodes]

Is the Lambiek Comiclopedia (http://www.lambiek.net/artists/g/giraud.htm) what Matt is looking for with regard to profiles of creators?

[Jeet Heer]

Great comics profiles: Lawrence Weschler's pieces on Ben Katchor and Art Spiegelman. Bob Levin's various books and essays (covering cartoonists ranging from Chester Brown to Jack Katz to S. Clay Wilson). Over the decades, the New Yorker has done some good cartoonists profiles including people like Dick Moores (written by Nate Hentoff) and Alison Bechdel. Washington Post once had a long, terrific profile of Johnny Hart.

My forthcoming book on Francoise Mouly is exactly what Matt is asking for here: a long survey of Mouly's life/career, with plenty of interviews with people who knew her.

[Chris Mautner]

Bob Levin is an excellent example of the type of thing Matt was talking about in the intro and I'm kicking myself for not having thought of him while we were recording.

[Jakob]

Is the Cliff Chiang article on the internet somewhere?

[Larry Vossler]

This conversation about David B and what makes him work and how he intertwines fiction and reality together to get to why I love his work. I LOVE comics and cartoonists who do that. Milo Manara does this tom but it's more with Hugo Pratt and films.

I'm happy Bolano got brought up and I'm glad he did. Because he's a great comparison to what David B is doing. And Nazi Literature is so fucking great; especially, the Wandering Women of Letter chapter. The short story of Irma Carrasco is one of Bolano's best short stories. Within 10 pages, Bolano gives an rich, complex and depth story about a poet woman who lives just a tragic life. At the end of that story, I felt I read a novella than a short story.

That's the thing about Bolano, what makes him so fucking special. He's amazing ability to capture a person's life, at any moment, and give us a tour of that person's life within a few pages. He did this in Distant Star with two different poets. Both chapters were not that long but it felt long. It felt like read a person's life in a handful of pages; not any writer can pull that shit off.

Also, Sammy, I just got into that comic and holy shit! Zak Sally's is doing an amazing thing with Sammy. Sally also has a great ability to give us strong characterization within a couple pages. And his art! I had a feeling that everything was about to fall apart, that every character is on their end and could fucking let loose (though some characters does so more than others). I love everything about it.

[wabby]

I second the mention of Bob Levin as a comics writer who is great at doing cartoonist profiles in a creative way that are almost like fictional short stories.

[Joe McCulloch]

For the whole episode, I was trying to recall the name of this one Parisian bookshop that embodied David B.'s portrayal... it was Un Regard Moderne:

http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/un-regard-moderne-bookstore

Tucker's Cliff Chiang profile is in two parts:

http://pulllist.comixology.com/articles/390/Transcript-of-Unaired-A-E-Special-On-Cliff-Chiang-Part-One

https://pulllist.comixology.com/articles/391/Transcript-of-Unaired-A-E-Special-On-Cliff-Chiang-Part-Two

[Joe McCulloch]

The best part of this episode is at the five-minute mark where you can hear Chris' phone vibrate. That's me asking IS THIS THE INTRO??

[Todd Murry]

I love Bolano (2666 is one of my favorite books). I'll bring up Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves as a pretty extreme example of this kind of fictionalized media/literary obsessive echo chamber. The story is told in layers (with different typesetting), with the ostensible "top level" author coming into possession of a manuscript which is a thorough exegesis of a documentary film about something weird that happened to a family in a house. The thing is heavily footnoted, and some of the footnotes are real/real, some are unfindable issues of actual publications/TV shows with faked contents, some are entirely fictionalized. This includes real/fake talk shows, people, popular magazines, movies, books, universities, etc. The "second level" author, who we meet only briefly at the top level, is an academic obsessed with the movie. It's a lot more extensive than the Archimboldi fake literary history (for example) but is more academically presented (the Bolano stuff "lives" more).

I've been fascinated with this stuff since I was maybe 11 and realized Killgore Trout wasn't real, only to later see a book by him in a bookstore (with a really odd jacket photo - I love the vertiginous feel). See also Robert Anton Wilson's heavily appendixed books of America's "secret" history, James Incandenzia's 108 film fake filmography in Infinite Jest, (as a reversal) Laura Palmer's Diary, and Lovecraft (was he the first to do that? Nah, "I found these secret papers that tell of a bunch of secret crap" was too popular in the 1800's for someone not to have made up a University and fake books that some readers thought were real).

[Todd Murry]

That's what I get for commenting before finishing the podcast - you make fun of House of Leaves readers later. My bad. And I left Pale Fire off the list, which is probably the literary height of this phenomenon.

[Larry Vossler]

Re-listened to the Sammy The Moue part and after re-reading it something hit me; the talking voice who talks to Sammy might be Zak Sally.

I have no evidence, it just came to me as a feeling. But this person (who has Godlike powers) who talks to Sammy, set pieces and characters (mostly Sammy)in place to move the story on. Sammy hates him because no matter what he does or says, he's going to do what the voice is teling him to do. So this might be tool for Zak to set pieces in the story together and get them moving. This weird, I created and I know you(Sammy) hate me for telling you what to do but you're going to be it because I'm your creator and I write/draw it all.

Another thing that's is, in vol 2, there's these disembodied voices and which we all see parts of the house they're living in. This could be (I'm probably 99% wrong and it's probably Carl and his wife) Zak talking to his g/f or wife. And the only way to take his edge off is to be cartooning Sammy.

This is just wild wild speculation from me. I feel a bit more confident about the voice talking to Sammy than the disembodied voices.

But what do y'all think of that?

[Joe McCulloch]

I like that; beating the same drum here, but that's VERY "Minds" - Sim's direct contact with Cerebus...

[Aaron]

Todd Murry, have you read Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum? It deals with an attempt to synthesize all the world's Rosicrucian-y ideas into one big Grand Unification Mystic Conspiracy Theory of Everything, and the pseudo-scholarship game-playing is thick and savory.

[AJ]

Just read the profile on Kaz by Ben Schwartz in Comic Art Magazine #9. And it made me think of this episode. Also reinforced for me the reason we don't see more great profiles on comics artists: they are really hard to do and require of surfeit of talent.