More books I've read in 2009

Nowadays cosmos-spanning comic book epics are a dime a dozen, with some big industry-wide "event" with dozens of temporary deaths taking place several times a year. But back in the early 70's when Roy Thomas wrote the Kree-Skrull war in the pages of "The Mighty Avengers" we were seeing something we'd never seen before. How well does it hold up? Well, despite the fact that two vast universes are at war and earth is about to be destroyed just because it's in the way, what most people remember about this saga is when the tragic-romantic android the Vision is shot down by three cows (actually shape-changing Skrulls, a dangling plot thread from an early issue of Fantastic Four, nobody wrapped up loose continuity better than Roy the Boy) and then Ant-Man's fantastic voyage through his high-tech body, and that was really more of a digression from the main plot. Something I appreciated this time that probably went over my thirteen-year old head was the way Thomas drew a corollary between the politician who wanted all Kree and other aliens off our planet with Senator Joseph McCarthy and every other xenophobic, racist jerkwad who's followed in his footsteps (and we are certainly awash in them). Here are some words of wisdom from the Vision (before the cows attacked him):

"If first a man of the Kree can be detained for no reason, then detainment of androids will follow, next of mutants,then giants until, ultimately a left-handed man would fight a right-handed man to the death for the remains of a bombed out planet!"

Which reminds me of this poem by Pastor Martin Niemoller

"In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then... they came for me... And by that time there was no one left to speak up."

There's an interesting in-depth look at McCarthyism, and Witch-Hunts Through Captain Marvel Comics here.
So, there's a lot going on here, sometimes too much, and the war seems to come to an abrupt end -- by way of a deus ex machina, no less; I mean I still have no idea how Rick Jones was able to pull all those obscure comic book heroes of the 40s and 50s out of his brain and into reality. But even when the thing makes no sense, you've still got the stunning Neal Adams and John Buscema artwork. (Well, in the first few chapters you've got art by Sal Buscema, who evidently got a job as an artist based on the fact that his last name was Buscema.)


Kyle Baker can be funny ("Plastic Man" and "The Bakers" and the still-controversial, still-hilarious "Letitia Lerner, Superman's Babysitter") and he can be serious ("Truth" "Nat Turner") on "King David" he shows he can do both.
This is a retelling of the story (mostly from the books of Samuel in the Old Testament) of King David, his struggles with Goliath, King Saul, the Philistines as well as his own human frailties. This book is beautiful and I suggest you go here and take a look at it. Baker does mix direct Bible quotes with a lot of slapstick and borscht-belt comedy, which may not be everyone's cup of tea -- works for me, though. Actually what bothers me about this story has nothing to do Kyle Baker. It has to do with how David was idolized for being basically a mass murderer. "Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands" was what the Israelites said of David and it made Saul feel inadequate. And it's only after he falls in love with another man's wife, impregnates her and -- of course -- kills the husband, Uriah the Hittite, who for my money is the real hero here, if there is a hero in this book -- that he falls out of God's favor. Which seems to lay the groundwork for our whole ultra-violent, sexually repressed modern Christian American society?
Or am I reading too much into this?

I also read (reread maybe, I'm not sure) "The Partly Cloudy Patriot" by Sarah Vowell I first became aware of her for the work she did on PRI's "This American Life" but I think I like her even better on the page than the airwaves. These are personal essays, historical essays, and personal-historical essays. Vowell is a history nerd and although she calls it being partly cloudy (rather than a sunshine patriot, in the words of Thomas Paine) I think all true patriots love their country the way Vowell does -- not blindly right or wrong, but with anger and disappointment when America falls short of her lofty goals, and pride when she actually mananges to come up to a few of them now and then.

Happy Birthday, Zelda Fitzgerald

Happy birthday to Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Queen of the Flappers, ballerina, artist, novelist, playwright and muse, Daisy to Scott's Jay. She would have been 109 today if she hadn't perished in a fire at a mental institution in Asheville NC in 1948.

"Why should graves make people feel in vain? Somehow I can’t find anything hopeless in having lived.” Zelda Fitzgerald

One Artist

**Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions. Pass it on to 15 people you like and include me. Try not to repeat a song title. It's harder than you think.

Pick an artist: The Ramones

Are you male or female: Spider-Man
Describe yourself: I Believe in Miracles
How do you feel about yourself: Got a Lot to Say
Describe where you currently live: This Ain’t Havana
If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Garden of Serenity
Your favorite form of transportation: Rocket to Russia (Cheating just a little, since that’s an album, not a song, so sue me.)
Your best friend is: She’s a Sensation
What's the weather like: California Sun
Favorite time of day: Chasin’ the Night
If your life was a tv show, what would it be called: The Job That Ate My Brain
Feelings on high school: Teenage Lobotomy
What is life to you: I'm Not Afraid of Life
What is the best advice you have to give: Bop Till You Drop
If you could change your name, what would it be: Surfin’ Bird
Your favorite food is: Every Time I Eat Vegetables, it Makes me Think of You.
What did you do last night?: Makin’ Monsters For my Friends.
What're your plans for tomorrow?: I Wanna be Sedated.
How you would like to die: Somebody Put Something in my Drink
Your present condition: My Brain is Hanging Upside Down.
Your thoughts on your love life: Something to Believe in
Your motto: Learn to Listen

Happy Birthday, Tom Robbins

Happy birthday to Tom Robbins, born exactly 73 years ago today in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. I can honestly say that his books (specifically "Jitterbug Perfume" and "Still Life With Woodpeckers") changed my life for the better. Robbins' writing has always been a fascinating mixture of the polished and the freewheeling. He does not outline or revise, but he shines each sentence until it's perfect before going onto the next one. Some sentences take days. I can't imagine this method working for many other writers but it works for Robbins.

More Books I've read in 2009

Lately the books I've been looking forward to the most have disappointed me. Some of my favorite writers -- Jonathan Carroll, Mil Millington, Russell Hoban -- all had new books come out recently and none of them lived up to my expectations. Maybe that's my fault. Maybe my expectations are unrealistic. Maybe I need to pick up books without any expectations. I'm not sure how to do that with authors I like, but I had no expectations of "Whale Music" by Pauk Quarrington. I just picked it up to have something to read at the beach. It's a novel about Desmond Howl, who had a string of hits in the 60s about girls and cars, but lost his mind somewhere along the way, now living alone, spending a lot of time in his swimming pool and working on a pie-eyed project. If it sounds a lot like Brian Wilson that's not an accident. Brian Wilson himself has stated “Whale Music is the best book written about the Beach Boys”. But to me it's less of a story about music and madness and family and art, and mostly a love story. A young woman dealing with some psychological issues of her own makes some progress at drawing Desmond out of his cocoon, and he realizes he loves her right about the time he finally drives her away. Here he conquers his agoraphobia and asks a bartender if he's seen her:

"(She) has long golden hair. Her eyes are green, except for when she is angered, at which time they become tinged ever so slightly with a steely gray. Many people would call her mouth oversized, her lips too full, but this is a matter of taste, I myself would differ. She is slight of build, small-breasted, well-proportioned."

"Haven't seen her," Pete snaps.

"Her name is Claire."

"Means nothing," says Pete.

"Imagine a wheat field. A hot summer's day. Overnight a carnival has arrived, a Ferris wheel and hot-dog stand. A clown races around doing pratfalls."

"Oh, yeah," nods Pete. "She was in the day before yesterday."

I loved this book so much I was tempted to start it over and reread it as soon as I finished it. (I didn't only because I didn't want to hear all the teasing my sister, the Literary Terminator, would give me.) The only criticism I have of the book is that the female characters did not seem as three-dimensional to me as the male characters. Other than that, the only thing that bothered me was a minor nitpick. There's a guru character in the book named Babboo Nass Fazoo, and I just can't believe nobody ever said anything about the fact that his name would be pronounced the same as "Babboon Ass." Other than that, a magnificent book. I am now actively seeking out more of Quarrington's work. I'll try not to have any expectations of it, however.

More books I've read in 2009

I've enjoyed every Tom Perrotta book I've ever read, and it's a testament to how good a writer he is that not a lot happens in his books and still you keep turning the pages because he makes you care about his characters. In "The Wishbones" 31-year old Tom Raymond is still living with his parents, still playing in a band that's going nowhere except to the Holiday Inn for another wedding reception, still delaying growing up. One night he proposes to his long-time girlfriend almost by accident and immediately starts trying to sabotage it when she accepts. To me, this boook had a lot to say about love, growing up and music's ability to keep you young. My favorite scene in the book didn't involve the main characters but Buzzy, the happily-married, possibly-alcoholic bass player. Realizing he's never going to make it as a rock star but unwilling to completely relinquish those fantasies he tosses a 13-inch television out of his bedroom window, in a suburban homage to Keith Moon et al's hotel escapades.

More books I own in 2009

Continuing our tour of my bookshelves. We've gone from Art books to autographed art books. (And actually I need to back up for a second. When I mentioned how much I enjoyed the book "The Pinup Art of Dan DeCarlo, I said there was a second volume of Mr. DeCarlo's pinup art available that I would love to have, and then on Father's Day look what my daughter gave me:

Thanks, Leah. This volume was just as entertaining as the first one. I doubt there will be a third though since a lot of the cartoons in here are unfinished -- well, the art is finished and that's all that matters, but some have no captions and some have a couple of possible captions that DeCarlo was considering.

Okay, on to the autographed art books:

Frank Cho used to do a great comic strip called Liberty Meadows. Then people noticed that (unlike most modern comic artists) Cho could actually draw and Marvel backed a truck of money up to his house and got him to draw the Avengers and some other superhero stuff and Frank Cho became a lot less interesting. But in these sketchbooks he's free to draw whatever he wants to. And like most great artists what he wants to draw is dinosaurs and apes and beautiful girls in various stages of undress.

By the way, there's a fourth volume out if anybody feels as generous as Leah.

Gene Colan was my favorite silver age artist and although I didn't know it till the other night when we were playing a game and I had to answer the question "Who was your favorite artist of the 20th century?" much more than that. His art always seems so real, so textured and vibrant you feel like you could step right into. His run on Tomb of Dracula is one of the highwater marks in sequential art. Just unbeatable.

There's not a lot of art in "Shop Talk" mostly casual interviews the great Will Eisner (creator of "The Spirit") did with other comics greats. Eisner passed away in 2005 but his innovations are everywhere in comics today.That's all for now. More later.

More Books I've read in 2009

Mr. America: How Muscular Millionaire Bernarr Macfadden Transformed the Nation Through Sex, Salad, and the Ultimate Starvation Diet.

Don't feel bad, I had never heard of Bernarr Macfadden before either, but every American who lived in the first half of the 20th Century knew who he was. He was the more muscular of those turn of the century health reformers like Kellogg, Post and Graham, although like them he was obsessed with his bowels -- he even used to eat sand, figuring if it was good enough to clean glass bottles, it ought to be good enough to clean his innards. In addition to basically inventing American body building and strength training directly -- through his long-running magazine Physical Culture, his Healthatorium -- and indirectly (he inspired among others, Charles Atlas, Joe Weider and Jack LaLanne) he also can law claim or take the blame for creating tabloid journalism (his New York Evening Graphic, where Walter Winchell got his start is widely considered the worst newspaper ever) and inspiring reality television -- although it was reality magazines at first; Macfadden published True Story and True Confessions among dozens of other magazines. He was a millionaire, a mover and a shaker, friend of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, but he died broke and -- as you know -- is today largely forgotten. His obscurity is undeserved however. I don't read a lot of biographies but this one was fascinating. The author ever guinea-pigged himself out with some of Macfadden's more bizare health and fitness regimens with mixed (but often hilarious) results.

Happy Birthday Library

It was on this day in 1731 that Ben Franklin founded the first circulating library, a forerunner to the now ubiquitous free public library. He started it as a way to help settle intellectual arguments among his group of Philadelphia friends, the Junto, a group of civic-minded individuals gathered together to discuss the important issues of their day.Each of the 50 charter members bought an initial share into the company (40 shillings), which helped fund the buying of books, and then paid a smaller yearly fee (10 shillings) that went to buying more books and maintaining the library. In exchange, the members could borrow any of the books. Donations of books were gladly accepted.They called their charter the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the next year, Franklin hired America's first librarian, Louis Timothee. At first, the books were stored at the librarian's house, but by the end of the decade, they were moved to the Pennsylvania State House, which is now known as Independence Hall.

More books I've read in 2009

Despite what my sister the literary snob will tell you I do still read and enjoy books. I just haven't had a s much time to read since I changed jobs. (I used to do most of my reading at work, on company time.) And now I have even less reading time since I've started working out during the free time I have.
But I do still read and here are a few books I've finished recently.
ICON: A HEROES WELCOME Back in the early 90's Milestone became the first all-black comics publisher. I liked some of their stuff -- like Static -- but I loved Icon. He had a lot in common with Superman, I guess, he was from another planet and all. But he was also a shapeshifter and when he landed on earth in the 1840's to a family of slaves, he altered his appearance to look like his adoptive parents. Now he's a wealthy lawyer. A poor girl named Raquel convinces him he needs to use his powers to help people -- and also take her on as his sidekick, which he does. Thus was born Icon and Rocket. I remember trying to convince people to give these comics a try back on those early internet forums and people always assumed I was black cuz I read these comics, despite the fact that I've been caucasian all my life. I just love great comics.
I wanted to see if Icon was as great as I remembered, and I'm happy to report it holds up very well. As usual my favorite part of the series is not about the superheroics but about the relationship between the characters, specifically Icon and Rocket, and how they help each other grow. Icon gets her to see how much growing up she has to do and she shows him that his conservative views about the world are not how things are in her reality. Dwayne McDuffie is one of the best writers in comics today and I'll pick up anything he writes. Even this early in his career he was a master at getting you to empathize with and relate to his characters. This is the page right after Raquel tells her boyfriend -- the inaptly named Noble --- that she's pregnant, and he says "How do you know it's mine?"
I read Dai Sijie's "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" a couple years ago and loved it. It was such a powerful look at how important books are, and why people willingly risk their lives and their freedom to read them. It was also a love story with an unexpected twist.
I had high hopes for this one by the same author but I only liked it. A Freud-obsessed young Chinese man who has been living in Paris returns to China to try to get the girl he's a had a crush on since college out of jail. Her name is -- no kidding -- Volcano of the Old Moon, and she got in trouble for selling a photograph to a western media outlet. A bribe to the judge doesn't work -- he wants a virgin, and Muo sets out to find one, but there aren't many and he travels around interpreting dreams to finance his search. This was a satire on Chinese justice (if you can call it that) and since I don't know much about China and I found the main character hard to relate to, I didn't love this book.


I always have high hopes for a new Russell Hoban book, even though "Linger Awhile" didn't do much for me. Neither did "My Tango With Barbara Strozzi". A woman with some major issues -- most pressing an abusive ex-boyfriend -- tries to begin a relationship with a writer, but she keeps breaking up with him to return to her creepy old art professor, and even though the two are together again at the end, I have no reason to believe that they will be for long. As usual, plenty of great asides about art, literature and music make this book worthwhile even though the narrative is a disappointment.

Bare feet and black oaks

Everything reminds me of something else.

I wanted to write about my first concert, Black Oak Arkansas at Charleston County Hall in the Summer of '72. Then I remembered that it wasn't actually my first concert, that distinction belongs to B.J. Thomas, whom I saw with my Dad at a high school auditorium in Wilmington, North Carolina. I don't remember much about it, other than being shocked at one point when Thomas took off his jacket and said "All right, time to raise a little hell."

So, thinking about the first concert I went to sans parent got me to thinking about WCSC radio and their brief trip underground. Back in those days of course there was no FM -- much less XM or Sirius -- your choice was between staticky Top 40 and staticky country and western. WCSC was a top 40 station, never as popular as the other top 40 station WTMA. And for a while in an attempt to lure listeners they did what they called "going underground". When the sun went down, they put away the Osmonds and Jackson 5 records and started playing Led Zeppelin and Uriah Heep. Still staticky of course. I think I may have been the only person in Charleston who listened to this underground AM station, and I say that because before the Black Oak Arkansas concert they gave away a BOA picture -- no free tickets, no other cool swag, just a picture. All you had to do was answer the question "How many guys are in the band Black Oak Arkansas?" I had seen a picture of them somewhere and I ran to the phone, called, got through and said, "Six."

And the DJ said, "That's the correct answer, but it's not the answer I'm looking for." So I hung up, sat down and tried to figure out how the hell that was possible. It took me a couple minutes but I eventually remembered that earlier the DJ had said something on the air about there being "twice as many as a trio" in the band in question. So I called back, got through (probably woke the guy up) and said "Twice as many as a trio." And he said, "You win."

(Maybe the reason I was the only person who listened to this station was because they made you jump through hoops to win a crappy unframed picture.)

Anyway, that was not the only piece of BOA memorabilia I owned. I read in either Circus or Creem magazine that if you wrote to the Oaks they would send you the deed to one square inch of land in Arkansas, which I of course did. And that was when I learned that being a landowner did not impress the ninth-grade ladies.

So, I went to see Black Oak Arkansas at County Hall, which led to a fight with my father cuz I wanted to go barefoot like my friends Bruce and Buddy; he wanted me to wear shoes. He drove us to the show and I had a great idea. He was going to pick us up too by which time it would be too dark to see my feet, so I shoved my shoes up under the back seat intending to retrive them on the ride home and be properly shod by the time we crossed our threshold.

How was the show? Eye-opening. In my neck of the woods, over the ear was still considered long hair. These guys had long-flowing manes that they swung around like nothing I'd ever seen before. They also played things I'd never thought of as musical instruments -- like washboards.

Tom Waits's voice has been described as sounding like "(H)ow you'd sound if you drank a quart of bourbon, smoked a pack of cigarettes and swallowed a pack of razor blades. . . . Late at night. After not sleeping for three days." And if you screamed at the top of your lungs with a voice like that you'd sound like Jim Mangrum, BOA's lead singer. I honestly don't know if I liked the concert or not. But I do think now that these guys don't get near the credit they deserve. They basically invented southern rock and paved the way for Skynyrd and everybody else. (Don't even talk about Gram Parsons or Poco or the Eagles that's not southern rock; that's Southern California rock.)

And of course my Dad was a lot smarter than I gave him credit for. I should have wornm shoes cuz I stepped on a lit cigarette and blistered my foot. Then when I got back in the and reached up under the seat my shoes were gone. He'd taken them out of course. My punishment -- besides the burnt foot -- was that I was not allowed to go to the next concert which just happened to be the greatest concert ever in Charleston. I'll tell you about that some other time.

Cleaning out my cell phone camera

Here's something I'd never seen before today -- a man steam cleaning a telephone pole:

Whenever my co-worker Dallas has to work and I don't I love to torment him by sending him pictures of me drinking beer at the beach.

He's off next week but no chance of retaliation. He's not smart enough to take a picture with his camera, much less send it to me.

As I've mentioned before it has somehow become a tradition at family gatherings to take a picture of me with my niece Emily even if no other pictures are taken. This is from lunch on Tuesday, with Emily, my mom and my sister.

My sister spent the whole lunch taunting me for not reading much lately, but when I saw this picture and said I looked like Poopdeck Pappy, she did not know who he was. Now what literate person in America does not recognize Popeye's father?

Quote from today's NY Times

"These people are not seeking a revolution. We don’t want this regime to fall. We want our votes to be counted, because we want reforms, we want kindness, we want friendship with the world."
ALI REZA, a young actor who watched a long river of protesters march silently in Tehran.

I know how you feel, Ali. That's how I felt all during the Bush years.

Imagine all the possibilities

Art (Continued)

Now we've actually come to the end of the art section of my book collection and you would think that we'd be venturing into autobiography, but we're not -- not yet anyway; there's still a lot of art books left to look at. Howzat? Well, I actually have four book collections -- I have my regular books, I have autographed books, I have almost an entire bookcase of unread books, and I have books that won't fit on any of my shelves except this one (picture missing cuz Kim took the camera to Florida)

my topless bookshelf and that's where I keep the -- what else?-- oversized collection.
So let's look first at autographed art books.In my day , kids usually start off reading DC comics -- Superman, Batman, Flash, those guys -- and then when they got a little older they graduated to the more mature (or at least somewhat less hokey) Marvel comics group -- Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer, those guys. Of course I did it just the opposite. I started out reading Marvel and I read very little other than Marvel until I became an adult and started discovering how much I had missed by turning my nose up at DC Comics. One of the things I missed was the art of Nick Cardy, who is probably most famous for his work on Aquaman and Teen Titans (his Wonder Girl was so sexy it's amazing she made it past the Comics Code Authority). And actually now that I think about it, I didn't really miss out on all of Mr. Cardy. Some of those early 70's DC covers were so compelling and so beautiful I just had to buy them and hope Stan Lee didn't see me doing so. And those covers were all by Nick Cardy -- well, Nick Cardy or Neal Adams, damn, maybe I liked DC more than I thought. Covers like these:

This book has lots of Cardy's comic art, but also movie posters and book covers and some fine art too. He's a talented artist -- and a nice guy, too. He signed my book for me at the 2002 Heroes Convention in Charlotte.

I've been winnowing down my comic book collection lately. Most of the stuff I'm keeping is because of the creators -- writer or artists and sometimes (though rarely) a great writer-artist team. There are very few characters that I'll keep no matter what. Mike Allred's Madman is probably at the top of the list, Baron and Rude's Nexus is way up there and so is Paul Chadwick's Concrete. Concrete is the most intelligent, thoughtful, philosophical comic I've ever read. Former speech writer Ron Lithgow is imprisoned in concrete as part of an alien experiment, but the stories are about his interactions with people, especially with his assistant Larry and Maureen Vonnegut who was assigned to study him and with whom Lithgow is in love. Mister Chadwick is not prolific, but when he puts out a new Concrete book it's always worth waiting for. The last one "The Human Dilemma" really took me by surprise and I can't wait to see what happens next --- although I'll have to since as I said he's not prolific. I've never met Mister Chadwick though I hope to meet him someday. I bought this book directly from him by mail.

More soon.

More books I've read in 2009

For a while when I was trying to figure out how to get published in Fantasy and Science Fiction I used to review every story in every issue. Here is my review of a Paul DiFilippo story from the February 2000 issue:
Stink Lines by Paul DiFilippo. A wonderful tribute to the good duck artist. An inventor named Gyro Gearloose creates a fog that makes word balloons, speed lines – and less popularly – readable thought balloons. A living comic book. It’s supposed to be confined to the Barksian amusement park Duckburg but is loosed upon the outside world. Gearloose – with help from his assistant L’il Bulb – eventually figures out a way to solve the problem while creating a much bigger one. A love story – all this was to impress a girl named Ginger Barks – that is laugh-out loud funny. A+
And most other stories I've read by Filippo got similar raves. So why was I reluctant to read Top Ten: Beyond the Farthest Precinct? Because I just don't believe there's anybody who can fill Alan Moore's shoes. So I had to wait a suitable length of time till I could be sure I was judging it on its own strengths and weaknesses and not comparing it (much) to Moore. DiFilippo's Top Ten is more lighthearted than . . . uh, that other guy's. The plot is incomprehensible --- something about robots gaining access to some cosmic time-stream mcGuffin, but the fun is in picking out background characters -- everybody from Snoopy to Tintin to Wonder Woman shows up in Neopolis. As it turned out I had no problem with the writer. DiFilippo was a worthy successor to what's his name, but I did have an unexpected problem with the art. Jerry Ordway's workmanlike art was just no match for the memory of Gene Ha and Zander Cannon.As you may recalll, I didn't love Tom Robbins's new book "B is For Beer" but I loved it enough to want to read more Robbins. So I picked this one up. I swear I think when Tom Robbins decides it's time to write a book he just sits down and starts talking to himself with a keyboard about whatever it is that's on his mind -- in this case what was on his mind was tanukis, tightrope walkers, soldiers missing in action -- and of course sex and religion. And that's a good thing, cuz it is always a joy to follow Robbins's mind as it meanders.

More Art books

Theodore Geisel had a long career writing and illustrating for humor magazines in the 20's and 30's long before he became Dr. Seuss. This collection of pieces is fascinating to me cuz it's interested to see how the good doctor's ideas developed over time. (For example, that animal pulling the plow -- sorry, plough -- on the cover looks a whole lot like the title character in my favorite Seussian epic "Horton Hatches The Egg". ) There are essays here, educational charts, tons of cartoons. Not all of it is polished or politically correct, but all of it is interesting -- and still funny after all these years.
Not many people can say they invented a genre -- Siegel and Shuster, Jimmie Rodgers are all I can think of offhand. Oh, and Reed Waller, whose groundbreaking "Omaha the Cat Dancer" introduced the world to a soap opera with hardcore sex and all the characters are members of the animal kingdom. A bunch of books sprung up to imitate this original. I believe the genre is called "Furries" but I've never been interested in any of the copycats. The original is amazing though. (And there will be more about Omaha when we get to the graphic novel section.)

BTW, one reason I've undertaken this project is to straemline my collection some. I'm taking them all off the shelves and revisiting each and every one of them. Some of them I realize have served their purpose here and can go live somewhere else for a while. Such was the case with the book "How to Draw Caricatures."
Caricaturing is one of many things I'm interested in, but this book doesn't hold much appeal to me, as I don't like the artist's style very much. So I let it go.

BTW, this should be the end of the art section but it's not. I'll explain why next time.

More book stuff

Continuing my look at the stuff on my bookshelves, starting with the ART category:

This book has close-ups of famous fannies from the world of art. You're supposed to see if you can identify them and they have reproductions of the paintings in the back of the book. I couldn't identify any of them, but it's fun anyway. I would love to have the Scottish edition of this book because in Scotland it's got a much better title:When it comes to cheesecake Gil Elvgren is the man. He somehow mastered the art of combining the wholesome with the erotic. His girls are always getting their skirts lifted by wind or machinery or something, and they all look shocked and delighted.


(If that puppy had pulled just a tad harder this picture might have made it in "The Arse in Art.")

After all those posteriors and pin-ups I'm starting to feel a little lowbrow. Thank goodness our next book is from a genuine fine artist:Although Gustav enjoyed a shapely rear as much as anybody.
His most famous painting is "The Kiss." I gave a copy of this work to my wife early on in our relationship and it still hangs in our bedroom.
More later.

Happy birthday to my second favorite baseball player of all time -- Kirk Gibson, still the only man to have ever wrapped up an entire World Series with one swing of a bat -- stomach virus and injuries to both legs notwithstanding.If God and the devil ever play a baseball game to see who gets my soul and I get to pick the player who bats to settle where I will spend eternity, this is the guy I want.