April 3, 2015 In Memoriam Adrift: Remembering Yoshihiro Tatsumi By Chris Oliveros Tatsumi in Tokyo, November 2012. About a dozen years ago, while I was on a business trip to the Bay Area, the cartoonist Adrian Tomine asked if we could meet to discuss an idea he had of publishing the work of an obscure, mostly forgotten Japanese cartoonist named Yoshihiro Tatsumi. At that point, only one collection of Tatsumi’s comics had been translated and published in English, and that edition, from 1987, wasn’t produced in the best of circumstances: it was a bootleg, published without Tatsumi’s permission, featuring poorly reproduced artwork and somewhat stilted dialogue as a result of a subpar translation. And yet somehow that lone volume managed to find its way to Sacramento in the late 1980s, into the hands of then-fourteen-year-old Adrian Tomine at precisely the moment when his own sensibility as a cartoonist was beginning to take form. During our meeting, Adrian showed me this book, as well as many more untranslated pages that he had managed to track down. It didn’t take much (if any) convincing on his part: I was immediately impressed with Tatsumi’s stark artwork, and there was a definite appeal in the narrative representation of the dark underside of late sixties Tokyo. Drawn & Quarterly managed to secure the rights and commission proper translations, which led to the publication of several volumes of Tatsumi’s short stories, with Adrian working very closely on every aspect—as editor, designer, and even letterer of the series. We were little surprised when the series received immediate acclaim. After all, the everyday realism portrayed in Tatsumi’s comics has a particular affinity with literary graphic novels of North America, with one important exception: Tatsumi’s comics (which he called gekiga, meaning “dramatic pictures”) predated any similar material being produced here by at least a couple of decades. Read More
April 3, 2015 On the Shelf Poor Judas, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Giovanni Canavesio, The Remorse of Judas (detail), 1491. Poor Judas. He just can’t seem to catch a break—his is perhaps the most reviled name in history, even though he’s the only one of the apostles who has any identifiable human qualities. “At the ancient French Catholic shrine of Notre-Dame des Fontaines, Giovanni Canavesio’s 1490s fresco was undoubtedly the most horrifying depiction of the traitor I came across … Judas hangs from a rope, looking deranged, eyes flashing madly, half in fear, half in threat, his hair a spiky mop … As he breathes his last, a stream of sweet-potato-like entrails spills out of his open stomach, as well as (with Christianity’s usual scant regard for science) a miniature adult. A golden-winged demon is on hand to catch the newborn, with the implication that it will continue to sow the seeds of Judas’s treacherous legacy into future generations.” A refutation of yesterday’s claim that thrillers are conservative and crime novels leftist: “Consider the supreme master of the spy thriller, John le Carré. His cold war novels stood against the mindless jingoism of the period, resisting the Manichean equation of east-west with evil-good … that kind of fury is typical of the fuel that burns through many thrillers. This is a genre whose most frequent theme is injustice: the urge to right a wrong.” “Lewis Carroll, like many other Victorian ‘innocents’, was obsessed by the beauty and incorruptibility of young girls. The camera was a fairly recent invention. He used it to make images of girls dressed as princesses or beggars or—the clearest image of innocence—naked … Carroll’s maneuvers were awkward on the edge of innocence. In 1880 he mistakenly kissed the daughter of one of his Christ Church colleagues who turned out to be seventeen years old. His amusing ‘apology’ to her mother was ill-received, and not long after that he gave up taking photographs.” Mark McGurl on Tom McCarthy and the convergence of avant-garde fiction and lyrical realism: “To produce genre effects is to send up a flare to distracted readers, reminding them of fiction’s capacity to produce its version of the richly artificial pleasures on offer everywhere else in contemporary mass culture. It is to show off the sheer power of fiction to alter the real, to brighten, re-order and re-color it, as in a children’s book. Ironically, this is especially true of the ubiquitous postapocalyptic variant, which imagines profoundly awful, even starkly depopulated worlds … It turns out to be easy for a novelist to kill off almost everyone. This clears the way for the apparently much harder task of rebuilding the social world in terms other than straggling, incipiently fascist authoritarianism. In this mode, every novel is epic again.” Adventures in surreal estate: talking to the developer of a new luxury condo building in Canarsie, at the far end of Brooklyn. “We call it Loft 87 because it’s a little bit more contemporary-sounding … It’s obviously a regular apartment … I’m bringing everything you would see in Bushwick for half the price.”
April 2, 2015 Look Night Time By Dan Piepenbring Hans Op de Beeck, still from Night Time, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, NY. © Hans Op de Beeck The Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck’s new show, The Drawing Room, opens tonight at Marianne Boesky Gallery. Among its sculptures and watercolors—painted after nightfall, when “all of the machines in his studio were switched off, the phones stopped ringing, and his staff had left”—is a fifteen-minute animated film, Night Time, produced from some six years of paintings. These three stills give a sense of its perturbing, placid, faintly vatic style: they read as a series of nocturnal establishing shots, each a study in tranquil desolation. They put me in mind of Daniel Lopatin’s synthesizer composition “Zones Without People.” “I just like the spectator to be on his or her own,” the artist told Elephant Magazine in 2011. “Having a fictional or fantasy character sitting there would be like an interruption.” The Drawing Room shows through May 2. Read More
April 2, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent My Mistress’ Face By Sadie Stein Albert Gottschalk, Eftermiddag i april (Afternoon in April), 1897. The variable nature of April weather has long made it fodder for poets. (Or for poets in temperate climates, at any rate.) If you’ve come into contact with any choral pieces in your time, chances are you’ve come across this Thomas Morley pastoral: April is in my mistress’ face, And July in her eyes hath place; Within her bosom is September, But in her heart a cold December. The popular madrigal, if that’s not a contradiction in terms, was published in 1594; it’s believed to have been based on the work of the Italian baroque poet Livio Celiano. Orazio Vecchi, who set the poem, was a well-known composer; his “Madrigal Comedies,” sort of a cappella proto-operas, were all the rage amongst the late sixteenth-century nobility. Read More
April 2, 2015 The ‘Mating’ Book Club 5: “If I Overdwell on This It Can’t Be Helped” By Mark Krotov From “Grace Acts” through “Grace, Again,” pp. 90–116 This is the fifth entry in our Mating Book Club. Read along. “So here he is, after all this setup: Denoon.” That’s how Joshua Cohen began his post last week, and the moment when we finally confront our “genuinely goodlooking man” does feel exactly that dramatic. It’s a strange kind of meet-cute: girl meets boy at furtive political symposium; girl is foisted on boy by boy’s not-quite-ex-wife. This section takes in two run-ins between our narrator and Denoon: the first inside the guesthouse of the USAID director’s opulent home, the second near the outhouse on the Tutwane family plot in Old Naledi. After this, our narrator shares a meal with Grace, the not-quite-ex, at the humble Carat Restaurant, “which was doomed to fail because they gave you too much food for your money.” Cohen wrote that last week’s one-act “operat[es] on multiple time lines,” but so does the novel as a whole: our narrator writes from an undefined future, looking back on life pre-Denoon until we “plunge into Denoon and what followed.” As hints accumulate of the disagreements, passions, and disappointments ahead, our expectation grows fevered, even as the details of the meeting itself remain wonderfully unknowable. Even though we’ve been working our way toward this encounter, and even though we know that this is where the story truly begins, the moment still feels wildly significant. The narrator speaks of “a feeling of fatedness”: “The feeling was that this was supposed to happen, according to the stars in their courses.” Read More
April 2, 2015 Correspondence You Too Can Be a General By Dan Piepenbring Hemingway with Lanham on September 18, 1944, after the breakthrough of the Siegfried Line in Western Germany. From Ernest Hemingway’s letter to Colonel Charles T. Lanham, April 2, 1945. Hemingway described Lanham as “the finest and bravest and most intelligent military commander I have known”; he did, in fact, go on to make general. Original spelling and punctuation retained. Now I just feel homesick, lonely and useless. But will pull out of it. Because have to. Also have cut out heavy drinking … and since Liquor is my best friend and severest critic I miss it. Also have explained to my old girls there is nothing doing—and this light drinking, righteous Life isn’t comparable to always haveing at least two bottles of Perrier Jouet in the ice bucket and the old Kraut Marlene [Dietrich] always ready to come in and sit with you while you shave […] Read More