comichael

Then We Came to the End / The Dinner Party

I just read Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris and  loved it. It’s written – uniquely – in the collective first person; a device which was well sustained through the book and never felt gimmicky. Then We Came to the End takes place in an office amid the global recession, and is satirical of office life, and extremely funny.

I met Joshua Ferris at a recent Bookslam event, where he was reading from his new book, The Unnamed (now in a queue on my shelf), and he signed my book. He was very gracious and sincere; was grateful when I complimented him!

I’d like my next book to be a kind of Credit Crunch Catch-22, and I hope it can be half as good as this book.

I first discovered Joshua Ferris through this story, one of my favourite published in The New Yorker during 2008. Enjoy.

“She was game, his wife. She spoke to him in bad taste freely and he considered it one of her best qualities.”

Thank you and good afternoon

I am saddened at the death of Dick Giordano, aged 77. When I was falling in love with comics in the 1980s, he seemed to pop up all over, inking a Batman here, a Wonder Woman there; the epic Crisis on Infinite Earths. Before Batman had fully supplanted Superman in my affections (a pivotal moment in my life…), he inked John Byrne’s Superman re-launch The Man of Steel. It was only later that I discovered his famous earlier work – his inks on Denny O’ Neil and Neal Adams’s groundbreaking Green Lantern/Green Arrow and Batman.

As I understand it, by the 1980s the art was just a sideline for Giordano – in his day job he was DC’s Executive Editor, leading its creative output, and helping to drive some of the most important comics of the past 30 years including Crisis On Infinite Earths and Watchmen.

As part of this role, Giordano used to write a column appearing in each DC comic, called Meanwhile, and I will probably remember this even more than his beautiful inks. He’d write about the comics DC was publishing, about their future plans, about the creators, about whatever tickled his fancy, really. He used to sign it off “Thank you and good afternoon”.

Whatever your hobby, interest or passion, it thrives if you are in a community of likeminded enthusiasts. I had few friends who collected comics, especially after I moved from Cape Town to Johannesburg in 1983 (I had to convert some friends into comic collectors!) Meanwhile made me feel as though I was part of something. I would not have used the word then, but I was in a sub-culture; a secret club of collectors, enthusiasts, intellectuals, aesthetes, imaginauts.

Thank you, Dick Giordano, and good afternoon.

Peanuts Watchmen

Two of my favourite things. I particularly love Snoopy Rorschach. Thanks to Sonantics.

Fantastic

The Origin of the Fantastic Four
By Norm MacDonald. Hilarious.

The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a business man

Lovely quote from Roald Dahl (thanks Sonantic)

“The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a business man. The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock. The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.” — Roald Dahl (Boy – Tales of Childhood)

A man at night on a dead-quiet street

I love this picture, by Gregory Crewdson. I feel as though I could stare at it for hours. It makes my mind sing. I need a print.

It makes me feel deeply sad – suggesting regret, loss, alienation, dispossession; but it also makes me feel exhilarated – it seems to speak of free will;  the strange uniqueness of people, places, life, and our endless capacity to experience these.

Complicity by Julian Barnes

Possibly my favourite short story in The New Yorker this year.

I love how intimate the story is, how artfully Barnes draws you into it with his narrator’s digressions and remembrances; how he makes you complicit in his story (complicit per his definition, which I also prefer!)

Some great insights too – like the best fiction, it is true.

I haven’t read any Julian Barnes before, but intend to now.

District 9 (2009) (Neill Blomkamp) 8/10

District 9 has a well-drawn story, which despite my fears, does not lose its way at the end. As ever in Sci Fi, there are some plot holes, but I will not bore my reader with these.

It features as its protagonist a yokel South African everyman, played by rookie film actor Sharlto Copley, who has a rollercoaster story arc. At first I thought him comical, but I grew to root for him very much.

Despite its themes of race and tolerance, its South African setting, and its name, which points us to District 6, District 9 tells us nothing new about Apartheid. To my mind, its allegorical subjects – if specific political interests are even intended – are immigration and refugees.

District 9 made me think of many other films – ET, The Fly, Men in Black, Enemy Mine, Starship Troopers. Nonetheless it is fresh, and best of all unashamedly South African, which is rare in these days when American actors are made to play every nationality.

Not outta the woods yet: sovereign defaults, rising interest rates, unemployment

Interesting article in The Telegraph.

The printed page is the best place for words

Anyone who knows me will recognise the black bag I carry with me anywhere and everywhere (FYI: it’s always a black bag from my favourite comic shop Gosh!, but not always the same bag). The bag contains the novel I am reading at any point, and I am always reading a novel.

In fact, I have a fierce aversion to going on public transport without a book. It isn’t so much that I have a short attention span as that I hate to waste time I could be using to read (I read while brushing my teeth). Anyway, this morning – horror of horrors – I somehow (who knows how) – managed to leave my book at home.

Luckily, in anticipation of just such an eventuality, I have saved several books in electronic form on my iPhone, and so I read a chunk of Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson which I thoroughly enjoyed, not having read it since I was nine or ten.

However, I didn’t enjoy reading it half so much as I would have if it had been in paper format. Call me a sad old technophobe, but I love books in printed, paper format. The late, great John Updike said it best here. The printed page is the best place for words.

I don’t need books to be printed forever. Just another 50 years or so.