new graphic books
August 26th, 2009 | Uncategorized
This great book just came out, A.D.: NEW ORLEANS AFTER THE DELUGE. Josh Neufeld, the artist, has been running installments of it on Smithmag.com for the past several years. It’s pretty amazing. Josh is one of a passel of cartoonists, including me, David Rees, Jason Little, and David Heatley, who all went to Oberlin College. But not at the same time. Or maybe they all went there together, I don’t know. I’m way older. Jeez, I’m so old that I forget if there are others…I think there are some other folks I’m forgetting.
As if the aftermath of Katrina were not a vast enough topic, here are some folks making a graphic novel out of the Torah. (Sample page above.) Here’s a video of Sharon Rosenzweig and Aaron Freeman talking about their Comic Torah project.
And here’s Best Erotic Comics 2009, which includes an old DTWOF strip of mine with a rather mild sex scene in it.
53 Responses to “new graphic books”
They all look wonderful! I do love graphic novels!
Will check out Neufeld especially. Thanks for the heads up, AB. Keep ’em coming.
The Comic Torah?! omg-d! 😉
Another (very youthful) Oberlin cartoon artist who is currently at CSS and whose work has a winningly guileless charm is Alec Longstreth (whom I discovered through his beard project).
I am REALLY looking forward to R. Crumb’s Genesis.
Those do look exciting. The comic book Torah- I kind of wonder. We read a book that’s all words, and our imaginations tend to supply a lot of context. So much maybe that we bury things we really should notice. We read a book that puts particular pictures with particular words, and we notice what the author wants us to notice. So the excerpt above can bring out the violence implicit in Deuteronomy’s divorce laws, violence which we might overlook if we are overly impressed by the prohibition against selling an ex-wife as a slave.
But doesn’t the author’s ability to force the reader to look at a text in a particular way also present a challenge to that author? Isn’t it harder to write a graphic novel that respects the reader’s intelligence than it is to write a words-only book that respects it? One of the things that so impresses me about FUN HOME and DTWOF is the freedom they give the reader. For me, the ability to grant that freedom is the chief thing that sets a gifted cartoonist off from a hack.
To continue a bit with what Acilius was saying:
It’ll be interesting to see how much these projects end up being the “Torah”, per se. That is my concern with projects like this is that end up being “Neat Stories from the Torah”.
As Acilius points out words are the main point here. A “graphic interpretation” of the Torah that skips, say, all the “begat table”, and the minutiae of the laws and legal issues (and, for that matter, the distinctions/differences in the Law as depicted in Leviticus and in Deuteronomy), something like that might be a lot more fun to read. But it’s not the Torah.
A book that commonly suffers this fate is the Odyssey. Most renderings of the Odyssey end up being a –usually heavily truncated– retelling of Odysseus’ trip home, complete with the cyclops, etc. But this is only a small portion of the book. All of the important –albeit less cinematic stuff– stuff is almost always skipped.
In short, I’m waiting in great anticipation; but without getting my hopes too hight. I think a true graphic rendering of the Torah would be wondrous thing to behold. Yet one more “classic comic book” retelling, not so much.
Re: #4 & 5: Concerned that my sister Karen and I (at ages 10 & 7 respectively)weren’t learning about the Old Testament in Unitarian Universalist Religious Education(it was never called Sunday School),my Jewish grandparents sent us a Golden Books children’s guide to the this weighty tome.I recall reading about Moses,Abraham,Jacob,Miriam,Esther,Sarah,et al,yet noticed that many more men than women were mentioned.I’d noticed the same thing when reading the entire Bobbs Merrill blue book biographies of famous Americans.
Karen and I attended a “sample Seder” designed to help kids understand what happened at an actual Seder. We were going to attend one in my dad’s hometown of Providence,but due to the sudden death of one of her brothers,my grandmother decided to cancel the event,which involved at least 80 people. But that’s another story.
In the 1980s,I became aware of the expanding fields of Jewish women’s history and literature,and delighted in reconnecting with my roots. The Tribe of Dina is one of the most influential anthologies I’ve read.
So I hope the new version gives the women their due,and I don’t think many people other than serious students of Judaeic studies would mind the omission of the minutiae NLC mentioned. Those that want the full story can go to the original sources. I thought the point was to make things more accessible to the average person.
Feminista (at 6) wrote:
the omission of the minutiae NLC mentioned […] I thought the point was to make things more accessible to the average person.
I think these are all good points; and to be clear, by and large, I agree with them.
My main objection is calling the end result “The Torah” (or “The Odyssey”; or, for that matter, “The Little Mermaid”). They’re not those things. And it’s a pet peeve of mine that people pretend –or believe– that they are.
…and more to the point at hand: Reading over material, I don’t get the sense that these folks are aiming at writing an “Accessible Torah”.
Rather they seem to be claiming to produce a “Graphical” Torah. That’s a something different thing. (And maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps they do a wonderful job. But we’ll see.)
NLC: I read a number of episodes,and they’re hilarious! Plenty of puns,word plays,DEFINITELY accessible. Co-author Aaron is a stand-up comic,among many other worthy occupations.
My favorite pun so far: Yes we Can-aan!
I would like to recommend a graphic biography called Isadora Duncan by Sabrina Jones. If you know Isadora Duncan only through the Vanessa Redgrave movie, it’s time to go into more detail.
@ Xena # 10, or we could read “My Life” by Isadora Duncan. But of course I want the Jones novel!
As someone who has lived in both New Orleans and Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi, (90 miles or 145 km to the east of New Orleans, and which was totally destroyed by Katrina’s direct hit), I was safely away from the area four years ago when Katrina made its final landfalls. As far back as the 1980’s, when I lived in the Algiers section of New Orleans on the West Bank, everyone in the city knew that the levees were a source of potential danger in case a major hurricane should hit the city. Anyone who says the levee breaks that flooded 80% of the city were a surprise is not telling the truth. And, as I tell my intro. geology students, New Orleans remains in danger with each passing hurricane season. Napolean reportedly called New Orleans “the Island Orleans” because of its isolation. New Orleans is mostly below sea level, and only remains dry because of the constant action of pumping stations throughout the city. Any rain that falls on the city remains as standing water unless pumped out. Topographically, New Orleans is lower than the surface of the surrounding marshlands, lower than the surface of Lake Ponchartrain to the north, and lower than the surface of the Mississippi River that flows through the city. When I lived there, it was not unusual to walk along the sidewalk below a river levee and see an ocean-going vessel approaching the Port of New Orleans steam past above your head. I try not to think about the city as it must appear now. The Ninth Ward, in many ways the heart of New Orleans, was destroyed in detail. New Orleans East and Slidell were essentially destroyed. A Katrina-like storm could happen again this year, or next. It almost certainly will happen again in the next 25 years, the average repeat time for major hurricanes to strike the north-central Gulf Coast of the United States. Twent years ago, I privately thought of New Orleans as the city waiting to die. I wish I had been wrong.
When I lived in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi, in the early 1990’s, it was not unusual to go to a local restaurant and hear people at the next table talking about the aftermath of Hurrican Camille, which at the time was the last major (Category 5, the strongest) hurricane to make landfall there. I vividly remember one person at the next table in a seafood restaurant telling his dinner partner about finding bodies in trees in the aftermath of Camille. Such was casual dinner conversation in hurricane country. I’m sure that people in coastal Mississippi now talk about Katrina in the same way.
I just bought another copy of Susan Vaught’s terrific novel Stormwitch for my classroom, set in Pass Christian in 1969, whose main character uses wisdom from her Afrcan-Haitian traditions to defend herself against segregationists, and then Camille.
I finally found a copy of John Porcellino’s book about Henry David Thoreau. It’s scored for younger readers, but it’s a doggone good introduction to the ideas of the “Walden” writer for those of us intimidated by walls of text.
I read the excerpts from the first several chapters of A.D. It looks incredibly good. But I had to stop because I felt like it was going to make me spiral into a depression. I definitely want to read the book, but I think I’ll wait until I’m feeling a little sunnier and can handle the sadness.
Hey Kate L,
I’m another New Orleanian. I haven’t lived there since I was very young, but I have a gazillion relatives there and along the MS Gulf Coast. Everything you wrote rings true. I’ve been back three times since Katrina for various family events, the first time was nine months afterwards, in May 2006. You couldn’t talk to anyone there for more than five minutes without them telling you their Katrina experience. I felt honored to listen, to receive their stories. Now it takes a bit longer for the stories to come out, but they’re there, not too far underneath the surface.
I’m looking forward to reading A.D.’s book sometime soon.
[snip]
@ Kate L (12) and Louise (16): Thank you for your posts! As a fellow (former) Southern Louisianan, I too keep Katrina close to mind, especially this time of year. I grew up mostly in Kenner, Slidell, and Baton Rouge, but now live in New England. Kate, you are right on about the levee weaknesses being the anti-surprise… I remember walking on them as a child. They’re just mud and rocks. Like they could stop a hurricane! After Katrina I was talking to my stepmother, and she reminded me that she recalled back into the ’80s the “emergency plan” for a Cat 5 was always the Superdome. How idiotic, even then, and even for LA officials, to think the Dome, without electricity and water in June-Nov heat would be a solution. And how stupid of the federal gov’t – including FEMA – to not pay attention.
My friends still in NO and LA say that’s it’s all so different now. I know when I was there in January of 2006 it was just super depressing; the French Quarter was the only “lively” part of the city, but it felt so fake. And there was so much construction/repair, even there. And when my friends drove me around the neighborhoods near the Lake, it was so sad… they were so abandoned. It was like a ghost town. Baton Rouge has changed significantly, not only because of damage, but also because of the doubling/tripling of the population overnight.
I can’t wait to read A.D.!
@Petunya #17
Gee, maybe somebody should do a graphic novel based on “Women, violence, and war: wartime victimization of refugees in the Balkans” By Vesna Nikoli?-Ristanovi?.
above should have read Nikolic-Ristanovic. cut and paste did not work today….
re: NOLA
I’ve been in New Orleans a few times, but not since Katrina. I surmise that the long history of NOLA as the decadent playground in the straight-laced Catholic French colony, later sold to the US as the Louisiana Purchase, has affected the ethics and behaviors of the populace and government.
New Orleans is where the French headed for libation and licentiousness, and Americans followed suit. We still head to NOLA for Mardi Gras, where we drink too much and flash our boobs for beads.
Louisiana politicians have been widely noted for corrupt behaviors and absolute control, going far back into their history. They put their Chicago politico brethren to shame for their brazen corruption and failure to deliver services.
At least the corrupt Chicago pols made Chi-town “The City That Works” with their corruption. Chicago politicians corruptly doled out city services, but at least they provided them. New Orleans was always the political equivalent of a banana republic. It never delivered services to the population.
Interesting reading about the changes wrought in New Orleans by the Obama Administration:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5h-PgWG_iMhEimHD6WGzcnCsMF_OwD9ABIL5G0
Even Louisiana GOP Gov. Bobby Jindal has praise for the Obama Administration’s handling of rebuilding post-Katrina. Yeah, that Bobby Jindal. The one who derided volcano monitoring in his GOP rebuttal speech to Obama’s address to Congress.
Quoting from the article:
—
Gov. Bobby Jindal, R-La., says Obama’s team has brought a more practical and flexible approach. Many local officials offer similar reviews. Even Doug O’Dell, former President George W. Bush’s recovery coordinator, says the Obama administration’s “new vision” appears to be turning things around.
Not too long ago, Jindal said in a telephone interview, Louisiana governors didn’t have “very many positive things” to say about the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
But Jindal said he had a lot of respect for the current FEMA chief, Craig Fugate, and his team. “There is a sense of momentum and a desire to get things done,” the governor said.
Added O’Dell: “I think the results are self-evident.”
—
This is for Kat, Freyakat, and I forget who else inquired about The Roasting Plant in an earlier thread:
Tonight I finally made the caffeine pilgrimage to The Roasting Plant. It’s located on the southwest corner of Greenwich Ave and Seventh Ave, on that weird triangular corner where Greenwich, Seventh, W.11 St, and Seventh Ave South all converge, directly across from the St. Vincent’s Hospital emergency room. It’s next door to Two Boots Pizzeria. Those of you who recall AB’s self-photo by St. Vincent’s Hospital when she was in Manhattan for the Ferro-Grumley awards, it’s about two blocks away.
This is a real Rube Goldberg contraption. I’ll do my best to describe the system. Alas, I neglected to take my camera. The barista on duty was very helpful in describing how the system works.
From the exterior looking through the window, the first thing you’ll notice on the extreme right hand side of the storefront is the roasting machine. It’s one of those hot air roasting machines, similar to what you see in Whole Foods (at least in the Chelsea branch of Whole Foods). Like the Whole Foods roaster, it has a clear polycarbonate (Lexan) cylinder where you can see the beans roasting.
Along the right hand wall of the shop are a series of 22 clear polycarbonate cylinders, each about 6″ (15cm) in diameter and about 6′ (180cm) tall. Eleven of them are filled with raw coffee beans, eleven are filled with roasted beans, all of varying levels. Each cylinder contains a different variety or blend of beans. At the base of each cylinder is a metal spout where beans can be dispensed for sale. Customers can purchase raw and roasted beans.
At the top of each cylinder is a clear polycarbonate pipe, about 2.5″ (6cm) in diameter. Each of the eleven pipes for the roasted or raw bean cylinders connects to a flat silver disk-shaped manifold; there’s one manifold for raw beans and one for the roasted beans. A pneumatically-controlled selection valve opens and closes the ports on each manifold to control the flow of beans.
The whole system is called Javabot and is a pressurized “push” system for controlling bean flow.
The process starts with the raw beans. The barista uses the Javabot control system to send a load of beans to the roaster. Pressurized air is sent through a polycarbonate pipe to the raw beans manifold. The pneumatic selector valve opens the ports for the selected bean cylinder(s), which feeds the pressurized air at the top of the selected raw bean cylinder(s). This shoots the beans from the bottom of the cylinder(s) via a clear polycarbonate pipe to the roaster. The roaster fires up and heats the air in the roasting chamber, and the beans are roasted for a predetermined time.
When the roasting is complete, the roasted beans are sent from the roaster via a clear polycarbonate pipe to the roasted bean manifold. The pneumatically-controlled selection valve opens the appropriate port, and the beans flow into the top of the bean cylinder for that variety of roasted bean.
When a customer orders coffee, s/he is given a choice of coffee varieties (displayed on large LCD monitors at each brewing station) and a choice of three sizes. The customer can select up to three different types of coffee bean for a custom blend.
Once the type and size of coffee is selected, the barista enters this into the Javabot control system (a touchscreen LCD display running on a Mac OSX POS system). Pressurized air is forced through the polycarbonate pipes and manifold at the top of the selected roasted bean cylinder(s), which forces the appropriate amount of beans at the bottom of the cylinder(s) through a clear polycarbonate pipe to another manifold which directs the beans to the designated coffee brewing station and machine. There are four brewing stations, each with two brewing machines.
The brewing machine grinds the coffee and brews it. There is some crema on the top of the coffee, just like an espresso. The machines are made by Egro. I believe the barista said they were Swiss-made. The used grounds are automatically deposited in a container which the barista periodically empties.
They have a small but nice selection of pastries and chocolate things to munch on with the coffee, including chocolate-covered matzo. I opted for a chocolate chip cookie.
Now for the coffee itself. I chose the house blend in the largest size, which I’m guessing was about 12 or 14 oz (350 or 400 ml). It was excellent, not burned like that yucky stuff at Starbucks. The brew tasted very much like a French press or Aeropress, not acidic at all, very balanced.
The coffee and cookie, with tax, were $4.86. There are a few seats at the brewing counter, and some low padded couch-like seats along the left hand wall. There’s also a low bench outside on the street.
The Roasting Plant is open 24/7. Recommended.
De-clique-ification note: Rube Goldberg was an American cartoonist who created wacky complex machines to perform simple tasks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg
Thanks to Wikipedia, I’ve since learned that cartoonists in other countries and languages also created similar crazy machines, and many of them have entered the local lexicons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_Machine
I knew about Heath Robinson and Japanese Chind?gu, but I had no idea about equivalents in Bengali, Turkish, etc.
It appears WordPress didn’t like the long ‘O’ in Chindogu.
Note to Alison AG… I got the WordPress equivalent of a stack dump when I posted response #23 above. Error message read as follows: WordPress database error: [Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_general_ci,COERCIBLE) for operation ‘=’]
No UTF-8 allowed here, only straight ASCII?
I’m guessing Renee S. got a similar message when she did her cut/paste on the Nikolic-Ristanovic book.
While the other news organizations in the United States have been covering the funeral of Senator Edward Kennedy, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel has been busy with…. well, you got to see the clips to believe it. Here is a link to a Huffington Post article with embedded clips from recent episodes of the Glenn Beck Show on Fox News Channel. I’m begining to think that my not being able to watch Rachel Maddow on MSNBC while Glenn Beck and Fox News come in clear as a bell means that I’ve died and gone to one of the more severe circles of Hell.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/28/as-sponsors-flee-the-igle_n_271321.html
[snip]
[snip]
[Since being subtle hasn’t helped, let me address this to “Petunya Jones” directly. (To others folks, my apologies; please skip the following.)
1- If, despite previous warnings, and the enormous leeway you have been shown, you insist on showing yourself unable to post in a civilized, reasonable manner –regardless of the content of those posts–, then you will not be permitted post here. Period.
2- Despite your claims to contrary, the nature of the overwhelming majority of your posts have been neither “mild” nor “reasonable”. (Except perhaps in the limited sense of “not as outrageous” as some of the posts that have gotten you repeatedly thrown off this list in your various guises –and which, as a minimal web-search will show, is also true of a number of other lists as well.)
If you genuinely do not understand why the nature of your posts are problematic, I invite you to either reread them and think about this more carefully; or to find someone to preview your posts and explain it to you.
3- In short, your behavior has shifted the burden of proof: it’s now up to you to prove that you are capable of abiding by these minimal guidelines.
(And here’s a hint: Ensuring that I need to spend my Sunday mornings sweeping up after your messes is not the way to go about this.)
–Mentor]
Re #27: Me too. We all know the US Army is full of good Christian men who would never rape and kill innocent civilians. I just thank God everyday that they are here to try and keep the entire world safe. Bless you Petunya Jones for making such amazing points that otherwise would have gone ignored because we have all become so stupid by reading too many comic books.
please don’t feed the troll.
My bad, just one of those days, it won’t happen again.
Thank you Mentor for spending time on this lovely Sunday morning policing the detritus which oozed on this thread overnight.
I read our pal’s remarks this AM, and closed the Firefox tab in disgust.
But it got me thinking about folks who are angry and upset with their own lives, and who, for some reason, attribute all that is wrong in their lives to the actions and influences of others. Especially to “The Other,” that group or ethnicity or country or whatever that isn’t “like them” but who somehow controls everything.
Savvy politicians, governments, and movements tap into personal life anger and channel it for their own purposes.
Ask some guy drinking Colt 45 on an urban street corner why he’s unemployed (and unemployable), and he’ll tell you it’s “The Man” keeping him down. Gee, ya think being stinking drunk in the middle of the day and incapable of showing up for a job with skills an employer could use might have something to do with it?
Ask an Afghani Taliban peasant why his family is impoverished, and he’s likely to blame Israel, the US, or the West. Ask him to show you those places on a map and chances are he can’t do it. Gee, ya think his support of a system of corrupt tribal warlords, a corrupt weak government, and the lack of decent free education might have something to do with his poverty?
Ask an angry white male devotee of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, et al. why he thinks he’s under assault from gays, feminists, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, liberals, Jews, the East Coast establishment, you name it. He’ll likely blame all his economic and personal woes on these folks. Somehow, every bad decision he made in his life, from the adjustable-rate mortgage he can’t afford, to the gas-guzzling SUV he leased, to the house full of consumer crap he charged on credit cards with usurious rates, is someone else’s fault.
Gee, ya think some personal responsibility might be in order here? No, that only applies to teenage single mothers, black males, and the poor.
It’s the ultimate victimhood cult. Oh woe is me, and it’s all someone else’s fault. I can’t get ahead in my job, they won’t promote a white male because of EEO. My wife hates me because gays want to get married. I can’t afford my mortgage because Fannie Mae eased lending terms to appease minorities at the insistance of that faggot Barney Frank.
You get the drift. It’s always easier to blame an outside source for his travails than to look inward. It’s always easier to blame the outside source because he can’t change it, that takes no work at all. To actually change his life would require looking inward, doing the hard work, making some sacrifices, and delaying gratification.
But no, he’d rather sit in front of the Fox News idiot box with a six-pack of beer and grouse about how [insert name of “other” here] is ruining his life and his country.
Feh.
I keep wishing these folks would wake up one day and see how they are being used as mindless pawns in a power game. They are piling into health care town hall meetings with scripted protests as if they have been brainwashed. Trust me, if there weren’t money to be made (and plenty of it) by the health insurance companies, there wouldn’t be a peep from the right-wing against a government option that people could actually afford.
“Follow the money,” was Deep Throat’s advice to Woodward/Bernstein. I’ll bet there’s a trail of greenbacks to the Limbaughs and Becks of the world, just as there was found to be a trail of money to Armstrong Williams from GW Bush.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_administration_payment_of_columnists
thanks for letting me live vicariously through your caffeine experience, hairball!!!
(Happy Monday to Mentor… thanks)
@Kat #32
Shame I couldn’t have had your company over the coffee. I was initially concerned that the novelty of the Javabot system was the main draw for The Roasting Plant, and that’s not a good long-term strategy for a coffee joint. After all, we tend to go to the places that are conveniently located, which have ambiance or seating that’s conducive to a 20 minute respite from our crazy days, not to watch handfuls of beans zipping through pipes.
I was pleasantly surprised that the coffee was really good. Not just because it was properly roasted (not burned like Starbucks), but it was really fresh and ground to order. Their machines brew a good cup, tasting very much like a French press cup. After 35+ years of using a Melitta, I switched to an Aeropress last year and I’ve really become a fan of the taste.
One thing I didn’t really note until later reflection is that the place doesn’t smell like coffee. All those pressurized pipes flowing beans are a sealed system, and none of the aromas escape into the air. Not even at the brewing machines, which use compressed air to discharge the used grounds into a container.
Yes, one day I shall have to get back to NYC….To some extend I’ve been stubbornly avoiding it (the number of singers who flock there FAR outweigh the amount of work available, while in the SF area, the number of singers only slightly outweighs the amount of work, and frankly there’s more of it here, so I like the ratio better!)…
I would probably be jumping up and down like a gleeful child at all the tubes and whooshing sounds and such. Though I don’t know how I feel about a coffee place that doesn’t taste like coffee!
I’m pretty sad to be back from Seattle, actually. The coffee stand that we frequented while at the workshop was literally that, a stand. Well, more of a tent. Run by a lone woman who gets to know her clientel (how do you spell that??), makes FANTASTIC espresso drinks, and hands out chocolate covered coffee beans that she calls vitamins.
Now back to Berkeley where the coffee tastes really burnt…I hadn’t recognized that about Peet’s before, but now it’s really bothering me.
As for the healthcare shit (pardon my language), I’m so sick of hearing arguments that are so false and downright ridiculous that any thinking person should see right through them.
Maybe it’s my constant exposure to people who know what universal health care is really like (but I doubt that’s it), but why is it sooooo obvious to me that the right wing is money driven and shamelessly lying to cover it?
Alright, time to get up and ready for the first day of children! (school starts tomorrow but today is open house day)
If only that were exciting and not terrifying.
(if anyone believes in a deity or many, or whatever, pray for me. There are 6 kids in our class who don’t turn 3 till November/December…..That’s right, 3. At a rigorous, “academic” preschool. Where they spend the day learning a foreign language. Dear goddess help us!)
good god that was a self-centered post…..sorry!
Y’all are right that Starbucks coffee is burnt, but Peet’s is even more burnt. When I lived in Oakland several years ago, Peet’s was the nearest coffeehouse, and I could not understand the fact that people were lined up to buy this coffee that tasted terrible to me. My other complaint was that most coffeehouses in Oakland-Berkeley were closed by 7 or 8 pm, when my desired hours to hang out there are 9 to 11 pm.
Now that I’m back in Austin, I never have to drink chain coffee…there’s an independent coffeehouse open til 11 on every other corner. And some of them have excellent coffee.
Good luck with the kiddos, Kat! At 2 and 3, I’m betting a bunch of them aren’t even adequately potty-trained yet. And good luck to all the other teachers/school workers, too!
I’m being encouraged once again to fill out my ballot for the Harvey Awards. I receive one because I am, by their over-generous definition, a comics journalist, but despite spending an extravagant amount every week on comics as well as receiving the occasional freebie, I’ve never heard of half the stuff on the ballot! Even if I had a favored work to champion, I wouldn’t feel comfortable voting for it over dsomething I haven’t read.
I always mean to plop down my credit card and pick up a generous assortment of nomines, but never seem to find the time and energy to chase them down. Maybe next year…
Decliqueification: The Harveys are the second most prestigious awards in comics and graphic novels, the most prestigious being the Eisners. When Fun Home came out, it won an Eisner but not a Harvey.
@Kat(34): Good grief! My sister’s got a son that age and she’s only just started teaching him English! Well, started on the wonderful journey that is literacy, anyway. Although I have heard that children of that age can cope quite well with being taught two languages without any preconceptions about them.
hairball of hope, #31:
Ask an Afghani Taliban peasant why his family is impoverished, and he’s likely to blame Israel, the US, or the West. Ask him to show you those places on a map and chances are he can’t do it. Gee, ya think his support of a system of corrupt tribal warlords, a corrupt weak government, and the lack of decent free education might have something to do with his poverty?
Well, this works in a lot of directions. I’d remember, first, that the Taliban attacked and basically beat the corrupt tribal warlords. They didn’t attack the US, Israel, or the West. Second, I’d remember that the US and “the West” do bear a certain amount of responsibility for conditions in Afghanistan. A convenient starting place would be the US funding and supporting the corrupt tribal warlords in the late 1970s, in hopes of making trouble for the USSR. (That was the Carter administration; Zbigniew Brzezinski bragged about the intervention later on.) Then the Reagan gang supported the corrupt tribal warlords to attack the USSR. Then the Bush junta turned the country over to the corrupt tribal warlords. The US does not bear total responsibility for what happened in Afghanistan over the past 30 years, but its/our hands are far from clean. (And of course, how many Americans can find any country on a map?) That Afghan peasant you dismiss so lightly might well be better informed, for all his limitations, than most Americans on this subject.
You might also have mentioned the “why do they hate us?” trope so popular among many Americans who can’t imagine why not only Afghans, but many other people around the world, might not view us as their friends. (Why wouldn’t the Iraqis, for example, view us as their friends and liberators?) So we get the “They hate us for our freedoms” line. We’ve got Barack Obama taking the Bush junta line on Iran, for example: for some inexplicable reason, Iranians, even those who do not like their current government, do not consider the US to be a force for freedom and democracy where their country is concerned. Why? Who knows? It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the US overturning a democratically elected Iranian government in 1953, installing and supporting a brutal dictatorship for 25 years, then conspiring with the new Islamic regime in order to support US terrorism in Nicaragua while also supporting Saddam Hussein in a horrific war that lasted through most of the 1980s and killed hundreds of thousands of people, and now threatening Iran on the basis of a wholly invented threat — could it?
And then I could point to American liberals who think that the Bush junta initiated the use of torture and aggression, something never seen before in our history, thus squandering post-9/11 goodwill toward America and ruining our image overseas. These people never seemed to think that in supporting Obama they too might be pawns of big money, even when Obama showed his true colors (as he did during the campaign, if you were paying attention. I share your contempt for the American right, but the American middle doesn’t get off scot-free in my book.
Heidi, there are a couple of places close to Cal that stay open late….you’re right, though, it can be a pain.
Ian, language acquisition is easiest for young children, but studies to suggest that in order to absorb a new language, children need to be fully competent in their native language. I think this might be different for kids who grow up bilingual….not sure.
What I’m most concerned about, though, is that our program is developmentally appropriate for about a 3 1/2 year old, and there’s a huge difference in that year.
We met the kids today and some of them seem sooooo young. Baby young. Still scared….
Speak it, Ian! Truth! Truth! (hear! hear!)
I’ve missed you guys.
@ Hairball of Hope 31 and Duncan 39: I think responsibility and blame are very complex issues on both a local and international level. Who are to blame the elected or the voters or even the non voters who allowed them power?
There is a cred T-shirt my partner wore that says “How you spend affects what happens on the planet. Each purchase we make has the potential to bolster corporate un fair practices detrimental to national and international producers or support ethical trade that in turn supports local communities.
I feel that apart from letter writing the way to trully lobby is to think about how we spend our money. There is a lot of talk about coffee shops in this post – which trully do smell delightful – but is your first consideration the taste of the coffee or the ethics of the company/ owner you are buying the coffee from? Is it fair trade – what sort of life have the producers and the workers had in providing it at that price? Thankfully now fair trade products are more available and better quality – it is not always a choice between quality of production and quality of product.
I would just love coffee chains to not just supply one fair trade option but commit to only fair trade products. Sainsbury’s and Coop supermarkets in the UK own brands of Tea and coffee and chocolate respectively are now only fair trade and show it is possible at a great price. Wouldn’t it be amazing if starbucks not only stopped producing coffee that tasted burnt but also committed to serving only fair trade drinks.
@R2A(41): I think you meant Duncan! 😉 But I second your emotion. I think Duncan was bang on the money about Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. It’s a shame more of the US (and rest of the world for that matter) MSM doesn’t report more along those lines.
Dang if I’m getting all the menfolk on this blog confused! (smile – said with great warmth 😉
(Kate desperately attempts to deflect attention away from Kansas). I was just watching last night’s Rachel Maddow Show on-line (thanks for the web address, hairball!), and I picked up on a bit of Texas secessionist craziness that Rachel apparently missed in her feature on the radical right-wingers who want to take the Republican Texas governor up on his recent suggestion that Texas leave the United States. One of the separatists protesters was carrying a sign with a map of “Greater Texas” on it that contained distinctly different borders than the the present state of Texas. The map on the sign being carried around included a lot more territory to the west and north… much of eastern New Mexico, the entire panhandle of Oklhaoma, southwestern Kansas (which, perhaps not incidentally, contains one of the world’s premier natural gas fields), and even southeastern Colorado. I don’t know of anyone, native american, hispanic, anglo or other, in those neighboring states who is agitating to become part of some Republic of Texas. Perhaps the secessionists’ slogan is, “Today Austin (the state capitol of Texas), tomorrow Santa Fe (New Mexico), Guymon (Oklahoma), Liberal (Kansas) and La Junta (Colorado)”? Attached is a link to a recent news article from The Onion (“America’s Finest News Source”) that shows how illegal yankee immigrants might be kept out of Greater Texas. http://www.theonion.com/content/news/texas_constructs_u_s_border_wall
@KateL(44): Do you think that’s actually an admission on the part of the secessionists that Texas isn’t in fact (gasp) big enough? 😉
I can’t believe how much attention this secessionist thing is getting. That rally drew about 30 people, while the health reform rally the same day drew over 1,200. I haven’t met a single Texan who takes the idea seriously. Even my very conservative relatives are embarrassed by it. The local media is ignoring it, but I guess the national media is looking for some comic relief!
Still, if these nutcases can do anything to take votes away from Perry, I will LOVE them for it! And yeah, the Onion article was funny.
Alison, thank you so much for mentioning The Comic Torah here. I was very interested to see what you selected, and how your readers responded. I was thinking THIS would be a favorite:
http://afreeman.com/52portions/behar08.htm.
It’s probably too late to jump into the fray here, but our Torah comic is structured in a specifically Jewish way. Jews divide the book into portions such that we get through the whole thing in a year, with Jews around the world reading the same “parsha” each week. We made a 2-page comic on that schedule for 3 years. Unlike Crumb, who committed himself to every word of Genesis, and assumed a reverential, straight illustration stance, we read the portion each week looking for jokes. We focussing whenever possible on the romance between Moses and YHWH, which became a love triangle when The Land entered the picture.
Ours is a completely personal, idiosyncratic take, but it’s also all Torah true. People sometimes can’t believe what happens in the comic and pick up the original to see if it’s really in there. It is! Except for the part with Zeus. That was commentary.
Ian (#46)
Yes, the Texas separatists were expressing a desire for cowboy lebestraum. And, a consortium of Texas businessmen is now suing the state of Kansas over my home state “winning” the selection process for the new biowarfare lab known as the NBAF (the National Bio- and Agro-Defense Facility, a replacement for the lab currently located in isolation on Plum Island off the northeastern coast of the United States). The Kansas site for the lab is about one mile from my home (gasp!). The Texas group would much rather have it built in downtown San Antonio. The late President Eisenhower (a Kansas native) was the first to warn of the military-industrial complex (he even coined the term in his farewell address as president). He must be turning in his grave now that his home state has been chosen to host the embodyment of what he warned Americans against.
The site is displaying very oddly today on my system (Macintosh / Safari). The posts are centred rather than left-aligned and have shifted to the left of the screen. The right hand column has disappeared altogether.
Ooh, it’s all changed again. Sorry -please ignore the above post. You must be updating the site at a quiet time – it’s daytime here in the UK!
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