Top Thirteen Reads of 2013 #3: Dash Shaw's three new books and one old one

Dash Shaw had a productive year in terms of books released, and quite the range, too: NEW JOBS, an Occupy-era political period piece photocopied mini-komix; 3 NEW STORIES, a 32-page floppy compiling three stories centering on imagination as emancipation; and NEW SCHOOL, an expansive comic book novel hardback about sibling rivalry and historicising memory. Shaw is one of the new komix peeps - Michel Fiffe and Michael Deforge being two more komix peeps of this generation - that grew up in the 90s reading and enjoying both indie artsy Gary Grothy komix and superhero mainstream Image Comics, and somehow found ways to develop a personal aesthetic informed by these two seemingly polar opposite aesthetics. All of Shaw's three new books tell naturalistic everyday stories that wouldn't be strange to find in the latest OPTIC NERVE or ACME NOVELTY LIBRARY, but while Tomine and Ware took their dramaturgical cues and storytelling techniques from pre1950s American newspaper strips, Shaw took his cues and techniques from Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane, Dan Jurgens's DEATH OF SUPERMAN - action and drama are given equal attention, often celebrated with splash pages and double page spreads; changes of scenes are often staccato; and though the writing is serious, well-thought-out, and sympathetic, the true star of the show is the art. The only thing I can't quite crack yet in Shaw's new works is his experimentation with colour: for all three books, he overlays his black line art with swatches and swathes of colours and patterns, sometimes outright photographs or magazine cutouts, often off register, as some manner of subjective expressionistic colouring technique. I wonder if it's all clear at least in his mind why he does this. It could all be bullshit, too, of course. But regardless, it's beautiful and it makes me think.

Top Thirteen Books of 2013 #2: THE FROM HELL COMPANION

There are lots to love about Moore and Campbell's comic book novel FROM HELL, but what sticks out when all is said and done is the sheer amount of research Moore and Campbell had done at the onset of the project and as it was happening. Moore's half of the research is given spotlight in the appendices of the FROM HELL proper as annotations for the book, and Moore's display of the thought and talent he applied in the writing of the book is as astounding and awesome as it is charming. THE FROM HELL COMPANION chronicles Campbell's half of the research and actual work done for the book: how he processed Moore's scripts, how he worked out the pages in thumbnails, how he developed the art style he eventually settled on, how his family life developed their routine around the daily production the book demanded, all the books he read not only to be on the same page as Moore was but also as research for all the crime scene reenactments, all the renditions of the people involved, all the room interiors and street exteriors of late Victorian London, and the negotiations and compromises that need to happen to make collaborations work. In short, THE FROM HELL COMPANION threshes out all the problem solving that needs to be done to make what is probably one of the best comic books so far in the history of the form.

Top Thirteen Books of 2013 #1: LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN - NEMO: HEART OF ICE

Moore, O'Neill, Dimagmaliw, and Klein continue their playful subvertions and feminist critique of the form and of the audience's expectations with the first part of the fourth permutation of their LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN. Equal parts more obscure references and more open to new audiences, NEMO makes an effort to deliver on several narrative threads opened in the earlier volumes while re-introducing and developing a character we've only glimpsed in fragments before. One thing that Moore, O'Neill, et al, unfailingly pulls off is to have the series constantly reinvent itself, so no surprise that NEMO does not fail to push the boundaries of the form and genre while at the same time pushing the idiom the title has set for itself in the previous volumes. The next volume, ROSES OF BERLIN, is forthcoming early 2014. What superhero comic books could be if it constantly strove to do something new and uprecedented in every issue without giving up its fealty to continuity.

BE A NOSE!, by art spiegelman

Bought from: McSweeney's.

spiegelman is a curious case: after a decade's steadily productive stream of formalistically inventive work, he makes a 180 degree turn to devoting the next decade to his dad's biography that also happens to be a documentary of the Final Solution that also triples as the writer-artist's confessional about his relationship with his dad, a book that goes on to win the Pulitzer Prize, then followed by a couple of decades of ... nothing.

Or rather, nothing much, as spiegelman did come out with a book here and there every once in a while - some kiddie books, one big book on his reaction to 9/11, quite a number of covers for THE NEW YORKER (where his wife and daughter work in the art editorial), a book of annotations on MAUS - but nothing along the lines of MAUS or even BREAKDOWNS. It seems after an astonishingly aggresively creative first two decades, spiegelman lies wiped out, making notes, stirring his inkpot every once in a while.

It's an interesting production, it has to be said, all this ephemera coming out, although it should be mentioned that BE A NOSE! consists of ephemeral work produced peripherally around MAUS, the sketchbooks bearing spiegelman's heavy anxieties in the wake of all the critical attention MAUS had initially earned, and all the fallout following it: it is never mentioned directly, but the fact that all three sketchbooks are all unfinished and spans quite a number of years between them can be seen as evidence of the creative, intellectual, social, and critical weight that MAUS had unloaded on spiegelman's back, and all evidence points to his back breaking under the weight.

BE A NOSE! is a very interesting essay on the perils of walking down from the pinnacles of artistic genius.

BETWEEN PAGE AND SCREEN, by Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse

Bought from: Amazon.

Once you accept that words are naught but abstract concepts made concrete in arbitrary and subjective ways and that literature is naught but abstract concepts made concrete in arbitrary and subjective ways, a book of poems represented as pixel sigils that can only be read via webcam and only on the poets's website is a book that all of literature had been waiting for.

THE FUTURE DICTIONARY OF AMERICA, by various people

Bought from: McSweeney's.

The act of defining words as a means of protest at a time when splitting hairs on semantics was a show of political colour, when key terminology is redefined to sway public opinion. A beautiful book, but it's already been on sale in McSweeney's for some number of years and I open it randomly and a word sticks out talking about something politically awful yet so imminently forgetable happening on one of a dime-a-dozen countries who despise America. Has it influenced legislation? Has it changed someone's life? Was it funny? Was it cool? Sad realisation that words may be cheap, but we still can't afford them.

SONG READER, by Beck

I've never been a good musician. I only really know how to play the guitar, and I used to play it well when I was in high school and my only concern in life was learning to play Weezer's complete discography (which by then consisted of only two albums and maybe a dozen singles), and even back then, my only actual skill was a good ear for deciphering chords and chord patterns as I hear them played. Not a bad skill to have, and I still have it, but it doesn't have the professionality of being able to not only read actual notes on paper but also knowing how to play them on actual instruments, which is the measure of a true musician, as most people will say.

And so I've only come to enjoy Beck's SONG READER in two ways: one as a beautiful artifact, and the other as an album whose main concept - its entire raison d'etre - I can merely enjoy vicariously by watching and listening to other people reading and playing it. And I find that endlessly frustrating, not being able to play these songs, as someone who had been for fifteen years playing Beck's more folksy guitary songs not only from MELLOW GOLD and ODELAY, but also a few tracks from STEREOPATHETIC SOULMANURE and ONE FOOT IN THE GRAVE.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not an absolute idiot musician, I know what the notes mean when they're placed where they're placed. My problem is, I can't hear them in my head, thus I can't play them on my guitar (or melodica, for that matter). And truth be told, what really burns me up are the notations for the singing, as that's where the song is blasted to absolute abstraction, where not even the chords are helping.

It's endlessly frustrating, but it's a curious frustration: I know what the symbols mean but at the same time, I can't understand them. It's like mathematics, that way, or some performance art, but unlike math and performance art, I can't laugh SONG READER away as just like any Beck album, I know I'll love it once I get into it, and I always get into Beck album's on the first listen, and most especially when I get to learn how to play the songs (god knows how often I've played "Nitemare Hippy Girl" while pining after girls since highschool). And this is the root of my frustration.

I love Beck's SONG READER, but it's starting to feel like my love for 11-year-old Natalie Portman: merely one-sided, and it'll never be consummated.

THE VOYEURS and SAN DIEGO DIARY, by Gabrielle Bell

Bought from: Amazon and Forbidden Planet NYC.

I've long been thinking about the value of autobiographical texts, primarily as something to do and secondarily as something to read, especially when it's along the vein of diary-like autobiographical texts, especially with autobiographical diary texts written by young women being read by me, a virile young man mostly living alone in a biggish house. What is the value of baring your emotions in front of everyone in a supposedly raw, unfiltered manner and have it be called "art?" What is the value of reading such public and gilt displays of emotion? Are we all rubberneckers at heart in the same way that we are all exhibitionists by heart? Or am I just lonely and creepy?

I ask as my primary reason for enjoying Gabrielle Bell's THE VOYEURS is the same reason why I enjoy Suicide Girls: it's an occasion to be intimate with an attractive, creative, smart, emotional young woman with the only commitment being the payment of the standard retail price, and yes, it really sounds prostitutional as the dynamic really is prostitutional with autobiographical diary texts and its readers - regardless of gender - more prostitutional than masturbatory, as the common criticism to autobiographical diary texts go, as you don't just watch someone performing intimate acts: you pay for the opportunity to watch someone perform intimate acts, and with dynamics of reading (one person getting into the mind of another, one seeing through another's eyes), the intimacy is heightened, nearly just as good as actual kissing and screwing, some would say it's a closer, better intimacy than sex.

And make no mistake, it's real intimacy on the page: details of itineraries of travels with friends, of sleeping patterns, of delicate love lives waxing and waning before your very eyes - there are moments when I caught myself comparing my manly qualities against Bell's boyfriends in the book (Michel Gondry and Ron Rege, Jr, (and for what it's worth, I'm more a Ron man myself)). I'm a writer, an artist, a musician, I love books, I have a regular job, I facilitate workshops every once in a while, I write criticism every once in a while, I believe I'm fairly intelligent (more intelligent than most, in my humblest opinion), my first book won an award a few years back, I love comics, I love cats, I have a more than average-sized penis for a third world Asian man ... aren't I just as good a catch as Ron and Michel?

And then I snap back into place, climb out of the couch, scratch my butt, stretch my back, feed the cat, start my day, still alone, alone again.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE - THE LAST INTERVIEW AND OTHER CONVERSATIONS, by Melville House Publishing

Bought from: an airport bookstore.

Read in nearly two dozen shittings, from the last interview back to the earliest published in the book. I'm a very big DFW reader, so I was very happy to find that I had only previously read two of the six interviews in the book, both interviews I was very happy to reread. Curious feature in the book, chronicling six interviews from between 1996 and 2008 the editor and publisher deemed important enough to include, was how DFW moved from wide-eyed yet pensive philosopher to nervy irate/impatient thinker who'd rather be left alone with his dogs; or more pedestrianly, from guarded generosity to a guy forced to make and share his reflections in a Catholic school retreat.

Interesting revelation was how DFW's essay work were all hackwriting assignments given to him by a generous editor in Harper's. His typically detailed descriptions of his struggles with editors always make for interesting reads, and the book is peppered with them, glimpses of which to be found even in the smallest places (a bit where he explains preferring written interviews to spoken as he gets to be draft-happy and thus more eloquent in written-form than in actual personal audio-video interviews).

What I love about the interviews is that DFW gives no practical advices about writing, no real kernel of wisdom deployed as packaged digestible pithiness, in large part because he outright refused to give any practically every time he was asked in the interviews included precisely for the pithiness required when giving kernels of wisdom.

Ultimately, nothing is said in the book that devoted DFW readers - my perceived target market for the book - haven't already read from the more expansive DFW interviews or reviews (the older interview from REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION (Vol 13, No 2, from twenty years ago, my goodness, Spring 1993), or his famous TV/fiction essay published in A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I'LL NEVER DO AGAIN), but maybe the weekend DFW reader will find this a touchstone read. One can definitely do worse when looking for something to read while taking a shit.