Category: literature

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Crumbs

It’s entirely possible that I have brain damage. In the main, I see virtually everything abstract in terms of geometry and/or symbolic logic. Listening to a baseball game on the radio, I’m rarely visualize anything more than a standard scorecard diamond. Any hit to right or left field only travels along the foul line.

Storytelling, I make some pretense at imagination, but I usually over-engineer stories to make them “airtight,” to ensure they fit unobtrusively in the world at large. I spend so much time considering the implausibilities and details that the stories themselves end up lifeless. Maybe that’s why I’ve gained some interest in photography; at least there I’m capturing something that already exists.

(Maybe I’m also still guiding myself through depression and denigrating myself a bit much.)

In my Salinger post two weeks ago, I included a video excerpt from Crumb, the documentary by Terry Zwigoff about Robert Crumb and his brothers. If you haven’t seen it, go check it out, even if you’re not into cartooning. It’s one of my favorite movies, exploring notions of art and sex via unforgettably and entertainingly messed-up characters. (There’s also a cringe-worthy segment with Trina Robbins complaining about Crumb’s cartoons’ meanness toward women, but it was 1994, so hey.)

This recent post by Frank Santoro put me in mind of one of the best scenes in Crumb. Santoro writes about a 1992 NYC in-store appearance by the great French cartoonist Moebius. At first, he was amazed at how perfect and quick Moebius’ sketches were as he illustrated the front pages of fans’ books. But then he noticed some of Moebius’ sketchpad pages:

The loose pages were finished pages for a new Major Grubert story. I knew he drew “automatically” out of his head, with no pencils, but I wasn’t prepared to see how precise and loose his originals were. They were made without ANY discernible hesitation.

There was one page and one panel in particular that really stayed with me. It was a canyon rock wall that curled away in the distance. Floating along in it was a boat with a shadowed figure in the front. I remember it so distinctly because the marks that comprised the boat were like an intricate latticework, like a wicker chair. The sheer number of lines made the boat dark and it stood in relief of the canyon. It didn’t look drawn and shaded, it looked etched into the paper. Did he lightbox those lines? There were no pencil lines at all. Even the handwriting was eyeballed in straight pen. The page was perfect. I was in awe.

Read the rest of it, which includes Santoro’s encounter with that very page when he picked up a Moebius book on a recent trip to France. (Oh, and here’s my pic of Frank from the 2009 Toronto Comic Arts Festival. Hey! You all should come to this year’s TCAF! Amy & I will be wandering through!)

Which brings me back to Crumb. I hesitate to call this segment the centerpiece of the movie, but it is one of the more illuminating examples of what art is, and how it differs from whatever it is I do. In the scene, Crumb looks through the sketchbook of his son Jesse and the two of them compare drawings they’ve made from an old photograph.

Clip copyright 1994 Superior Pictures, “Crumb“, until they make me take it down.

At the end, we get the following exchange:

Jesse: YOU didn’t go to art school and look, you’re rich and famous!

Robert: [laughs] We’re not talking about rich and famous; we’re talking about learning to draw.

Unspoken — or just barely hinted at in Robert’s “heh” preceding that comment — is, “Well, son, I’m a genius and you’re not.”

“Genius” isn’t a shorthand way of describing Crumb’s art is naive or unschooled. He possesses a virtuosity that comes from countless hours of labor (instigated by his brother Charles, shown in that clip I used for the Salinger post), but his genius, as displayed in that clip, comes in knowing what to exaggerate, in knowing how to see.

How does the eye then see inward? How do artists like Crumb and Moebius reach the point where the imagined is evoked so surely and beautifully?

Sometimes, I think they’ll examine my brain after I die and discover that I was missing some important piece, like the way Pete Maravich turned out to be missing a chamber of his heart.

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What It Is: 2/22/10

What I’m reading: Consider the Lobster and In The Shadow of No Towers, Art Spiegelman’s 9/11 comix.

What I’m listening to: Night and Day, by Joe Jackson. Started 69 Love Songs, by the Magnetic Fields, but it wasn’t good car music. I’ll have to give it a listen at home.

What I’m watching: The Brothers Bloom (meh), The Ricky Gervais Show (I almost peed myself with laughter), The Life of Tim (I wish I was stoned), the end of Tracy McGrady’s first game with the Knicks (David Lee is terrible on defense), and A Serious Man (wow; I’m not quite sure where it’s going to fit in my Coens pantheon).

What I’m drinking: Miller’s & Q-Tonic, and Hendrick’s & Q.

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Attending a Sunday greyhound meet & greet at the Petco in Kinnelon, NJ. Otis was a little overwhelmed by the scene, and really wanted to go after the smaller dogs that customers brought in. Oh, and it was not funny to have a cat adoption event right next to the greyhound group.

Where I’m going: No travel. Gotta buckle down to finish the March issue this week.

What I’m happy about: Dad reached his 72nd birthday yesterday.

What I’m sad about: I’ll never dress anywhere near as well as The Style Guy.

What I’m worried about: My mid-life crisis will be nowhere near as bombastic as Jack Kirby’s.

What I’m pondering: Buying a Bamboo Fun tablet for my desktop computer.

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Catcher

I’m not too sure what the name of the song was that he was playing when I came in, but whatever it was, he was really stinking it up. He was putting all these dumb, show-offy ripples in the high notes, and a lot of other very tricky stuff that gives me a pain in the ass. You should’ve heard the crowd, though, when he was finished. You would’ve puked. They went mad. They were exactly the same morons that laugh like hyenas in the movies at stuff that isn’t funny. I swear to God, if I were a piano player or an actor or something and all those dopes though I was terrific, I’d hate it. I wouldn’t even want them to clap for me. People always clap for the wrong things. If I were a piano player, I’d play it in the goddam closet. Anyway, when he was finished, and everybody was clapping their heads off, old Ernie turned around on his stool and gave this very phony, humble bow. Like as if he was a helluva humble guy, besides being a terrific piano player. It was very phony — I mean him being such a big snob and all. In a funny way, though, I felt sort of sorry for him when he was finished. I don’t even think he knows any more when he’s playing right or not. It isn’t all his fault. I partly blame all those dopes that clap their heads off — they’d foul up anybody, if you gave them a chance.

Two weeks ago, I mentioned that I read The Catcher in the Rye under some degree of duress as a high school sophomore. (My English teacher insisted I make it the topic of my term paper.) I decided to go back to Catcher this week. (I read Salinger’s Glass-works last year around this time and didn’t feel like going back to them.)

It wasn’t as embarrassing a read as I feared it would be. I loved the pieces of New York he evokes, although I have to admit I simply can’t fathom the chronology of the first night. There just aren’t enough hours in a night to do everything that Holden Caulfield did: stay up late waiting for his roommate, get into a fight with him, hang out with Ackley, pack up, take train from Pennsylvania private school to NYC, find a hotel, dance with ugly girls in a bar, go to Ernie’s club in the East Village, walk 2 miles (“41 gorgeous blocks”) back up to the hotel, get weirded out by a prostitute, get into a fight with her elevator-pimp, take an hour-long bath, sleep “not too long” and wake up at 10 a.m. Tell me if I missed anything.

The bigger problem that I had wasn’t with the book itself, but rather with how we (okay, I) read it. No matter how much I tried to read Catcher as its own book, to get enmeshed in Holden’s deteriorating life, I found that I was looking for clues. I kept noticing little fragments — as well as longer passages (see that introductory quote above, from Holden’s experience at Ernie’s) — that may have helped predict Salinger’s decision to go into seclusion and cease publishing. Of course, while reading the book, I also re-read Ron Rosenbaum’s 1997 essay about Salinger. I wouldn’t say that my literary sleuthery holds a candle to his, but I admit that I couldn’t not read this book as a phenomenon of Salinger’s silence. (Sleuthery holds candles?)

Sure, Catcher doesn’t have the religious wackiness of his Glass stories, and when he wrote and published it, I doubt he was consciously thinking, “This will be such a huge success that I will abandon NYC and spend the rest of my days in Zen.” But it’s also written in a much more natural voice than that of Salinger stand-in Buddy Glass. Is there any other contemporary-ish writer whom we read with such . . . suspicion? I don’t think Thomas Pynchon’s brand of seclusion evokes the same detective-reading; that is, I don’t think people read his work with an eye to understanding why he avoids the public eye. But that’s because he still publishes (even if I don’t still read him). Even during 17 years of near-total silence, there were rumors that Pynchon was working on something big.

With Salinger, it’s a legitimate question as to whether he fed his post-1965 work into the furnace after it was “finished.” Or did he become like Charles Crumb, obsessively writing the equivalent of wrinkles and drapery and losing sight of everything else?

The answers will come soon, I’m sure, but how will they change the way we read him in the future?

Clip copyright 1994 Superior Pictures, “Crumb“, until they make me take it down.

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Lucky Seven

On this day seven years ago, I was

Now I’m

  • married,
  • living in my ancestral home, with lots of room for books,
  • keeping my weight around 40 lbs. below its peak,
  • retired as a book publisher,
  • working on the 100th issue of my magazine,
  • not planning any major trips,
  • starting Eddie Campbell’s Alec: The Years Have Pants, and
  • glad that I finished reading Gould’s Book of Fish, even though the other two books fell by the wayside.

And seven years ago today, I started this blog.

The world and I have gone through plenty of changes since that day. I’m happy that I’ve had Virtual Memories to help me try to chronicle it. To paraphrase Tony Kornheiser, I’ll try to do better next time.

Bonus: And we’re celebrating by having some glass guys remove the big smoked-mirror wall in our living room (installed by my dad, c.1989). Good thing they didn’t break any of those panels, or it’d be seven years of bad blogging ahead!

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Unrequired Reading: Jan. 29, 2010

Yeahyeah: first post in a while. I’m still struggling with my thoughts, writing, etc. I got re-walloped a few days ago by the news that a pal of mine from St. John’s dropped dead of an aneurysm at 36 last week (she was an undergrad when I was there as an, um, overgrad.) I have ups and downs, but I’m trying to get back to the regular posts — Unrequired Reading and What It Is — and hope to get around to some other stuff.

So just click “more” already!

Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Jan. 29, 2010”

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Enjoy the Silence

I was 16 and my high school english teacher, Rocco Gratale, was assigning term papers for the spring. I read over the list of novels that we could select for our subjects, and tried to go off the reservation. At the end of class, I asked him, “Do you mind if I do The Razor’s Edge, by Somerset Maugham?” My mom had that book on our shelf for years, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to read it.

My teacher said, “No, Gil. I think you want to do your term paper on The Catcher In The Rye.”

I’d never heard of it. I was all about the science fiction and the comic books back then. We were on pretty good terms, so I told him, “Geez, I’d sure like to do that Maugham book, Roc.”

“No, Gil. I think you want to do your term paper on The Catcher In The Rye.”

“Yes, Rocco. I’d . . . like to do my term paper on The Catcher In The Rye?”

I shudder to think of what aspects of my personality led him to “suggest” that book.

Now go read Ron Rosenbaum’s wonderful 1997 essay about Salinger. I never did get around to The Razor’s Edge, but I did see the movie a few years later.