Filed under: Books, Chicago Writers, Comics | Tags: A Funny Misshapen Body, Jefferey Brown
Jefferey Brown’s graphic memoir A Funny Misshapen Body finally came in the mail a few days ago. I bought this book with hesitation since I sold my copy of Clumsy not too long ago. Missapen Body is a quick read, like all Brown’s books, straightforward and drawn in his typical bare bone style. The story describes his struggle to become a cartoonist. From childhood marvel comics to his diagnosis with Crohn’s disease and disillusionment at the School of the Art Institute (where I was tickled to see Jim Trainor) including his relationship with his mentor, cartoonist, Chris Ware. The plot veers, turns and cuts off at points without pretending to be anything more than a memoir chronicling the early failures of a young artist. The story is full of embarrassing gag moments, body fluids and augury flashes of “artistic” talent.” It’s endearing for anyone who’s ever wanted to venture out into the art world with a heart on their sleeve. Inspirational at best, but captivating till the last page.
Filed under: Authors, Books | Tags: Latin American Writers, Roberto Bolaño
Roberto Bolaño “won the prize for The Savage Detectives, his exuberant account of two Latin American poets over twenty-some years, which made him a literary celebrity and established him as one of the most talented and inventive novelists writing in Spanish. Bolaño was routinely asked in interviews whether he considered himself Chilean, having been born in Santiago in 1953, or Spanish, having lived in Spain the last two decades of his life, until his death in 2003, or Mexican, having lived in Mexico City for ten years in between. One time he answered, ‘I’m Latin American.’ Other times he would say that the Spanish language was his country.”
A story from the New Yorker, “Meeting with Enrique Lihn”
South African animator William Kentridge showed at the MCA Chicago a few years back, 2004 or 2003. That was the first time I saw charcoal animations. He animated the drawing by erasing and redrawing the lines as long as it took him to animate a scene. I remember when I saw one of the panels I was surprised how large they were, about 45 x 45 inches or more, so animating required Kentridge to work on his feet-kind of unusual for an animator. Since charcoal is not very forgiving erasing left a vestige of lines that stayed on like shadows. In effect his animations are slow-moving and unclear, like a memory or a dream. The sound adds to the effect. Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old from 1991, is one of his earlier pieces.
The animation is part four of the Nine Soho Eckstein Films by Kentridge. Made just before the first general elections in Africa the animations chronicles the battle between Soho Eckstein (property developer extraordinaire) and Felix Teitlebaum (whose anxiety floods half the house). Soho’s empire collapses, buildings implode, the crowds march over the horizon. In the face of a storm-racked government, Soho longs for a calm domestic haven.
from Kafka’s Diary (the self instructive disciplinarian)
September 15th, 1917
“You have the chance as far as it is at all possible, to make a new beginning. Don’t throw it away. If you insist on digging deep into yourself you won’t be able to avoid the muck that will well up. But don’t wallow in it. If the infection in your lungs is only a symbol, as you say, a symbol of the infection whose inflammation is called X and whose depth is it’s own deep justification, if this is so, then the medical advice (light, sun, rest) is also a symbol. Lay hold of that symbol.”
Filed under: Animators, Old Favorites, Russian Animations | Tags: Yuri Norstein
Still one of the most beautiful animations I have seen, Norstein’s Hegdehog in the Fog. Norstein is of out of reach, working on an adaptation of Gogol’s Overcoat- a masterpiece that like Moby Dick has been cursed with countless mediocre adaptations. Clips from Norstein’s progress float around on the web, but with a literary band around his finger and Gogol’s Russian sensibility for long narrative it might take longer than a lifetime to complete the entire story.
Filed under: Animators, Archives, The Nightingale, Video | Tags: Cable Access Television, Daniel Barrow, Winnipeg Babysitter
A year ago in”Every time I see your picture I cry” I watched an animation done on high school science apparatus ( the projector) take life in a reading about a garbage man with a flaring eye infection who tries to compile a town history from people’s garbage.
Here is a short music video featuring Barrow’s animation, the Hidden Cameras.
Yesterday Barrow was back in town to show the (Winnipeg Babysitter). A little different visually and thematically than his previous work, this one was a video compilation of vanished but much loved characters from local cable access television stations in Winnipeg, Canada. Interesting historical footnotes were projected on the screen to inform the onlooker about the vanished characters- the theme: the lost medium of cable access TV.
I was especially moved by story of The Cosmopolitans, one of Winnipeg’s legends,two women who fought an especially hard battle to be rescued from the trash heap. Here is more about them from SheenaVision.
” They were band-mates, friends, and life partners. They came to Canada to escape social persecution when they attempted to live as a couple in their homeland. They struggled but ultimately carved a place in Winnipeg society with their community service and music. They pushed envelopes back then. Not only with their life choices but by mixing Led Zeppelin and the Beatles in with the polka standards they loved best on a show that ran on the air of Winnipeg TV for 25 years. They sang in old folks homes, had a talk show and took phone requests of the songs they played live on the air.
The recorded material was possible only because of the efforts made to unearth the homemade copies of the shows destroyed by the channel owners.Marion Clemens, the surviving member of the band has her own column. “
Filed under: Poetry in Translation, Polish Writers | Tags: Contemporary Polish Poetry, Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn- Dycki, NIKE 2009
Media shy,but endearingly charismatic Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki is reluctant to give interviews and dispel a handful of myths circling around about his writing and person. Of the little that is known, Dycki, born in 1962, spent most of his childhood in small Polish city just outside the Ukrainian border. Dycki tore close family loyalties when he learned to speak Polish at 15 and subsequently went on to study Polish literature at the University of Lublin.
Language became a major preoccupation in his work. His poems, structured almost always in two or three stanzas are without marks of any kind and are titled ( for the most part) only with roman numerals, the poems repeat phrases and symbols in a hunted like psalm that echoes voices from a forgotten historical link.
Like the baroque poets of the 17th century to Dycki death is one of the most common subjects in his work. Obsessive symbols that evoke the body and homosexuality are strewn around the poems like relics. Punctuated by repetitious rephrasing and re-writing of lines that lead one to argue that the complete body of Dycki’s work is in fact one long poem. A road map left for the living.
Translated by Bill Johnston, a poem from From Towards a Science of Non-Existence and here is a short clip of Dycki in 2009 accepting the NIKE prize for poetry. Profoundly endearing.
Biuro Literackie recently made a short video with Dycki, He talks about his childhood outlining major influences on his work- the lost generation after WWII.
