Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? A Memoir

#1097
Title: Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant? A Memoir
Author: Roz Chast
Year: 2014
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Pages: 240

Roz Chast joins the ranks of those who demonstrate the capacity of cartoons and graphic memoirs or novels to provide a sophisticated, poignant story.

Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?chronicles the decline and death of Chast's parents. For anyone who has been through this or is close enough to experience fearful anticipation of the lead-up, loss, and aftermath, this anxious, ruminative, funny, freaked-out, overburdened account will feel by turns familiar, squirmily horrible, and perhaps, ultimately reassuring in the existential companionship it provides.

It's probably too much for someone with a very recent loss, but captures well the concern, ambivalence, relief, loss, and broad spectrum of this particular grief process. And it is funny, though sometimes more grimly absurd than slapstick.

Birds: Mini Archive with DVD

#1037
Title: Birds: Mini Archive with DVD
Author: Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon
Publisher: Harper Design
Year: 2011
288 pages

 A pleasing collection of bird paintings. It's interesting to compare these rather stiff renditions with sometimes-inaccurate body types to those more lifelike portraits painted by Audubon. The book comes with a DVD of the images, which is fun. Also fun is reading the end matter, since the names at the time of initial publication sometimes don't correspond with contemporary common name, genus, or species.

The Photographer

#1034
Title: The Photographer
Author:  Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre, & Fréderic Lemercier
Publisher: First Second
Year: 2003/2009
288 pages

An excellent use of pastiche, with many very wordy pages broken up through the use of both photos and photo-based illustrations. The narrative was engaging and the images really brought it to life. A great addition to your graphic memoirs/non-fiction shelf.

Escape from "Special"

#1029
Title: Escape from "Special"
Author: Miss Lasko-Gross
Publisher: Fantagraphics
Year: 2007
136 pages

An interesting graphic novel/autobiography (or, perhaps, graphic short story/short "essay"). It's more disjointed than many, but I found that this storytelling/storyshowing style underscored the protagonist's cognitive differences and evoked in the reader a similar frustration about communication. I would think that many kids who were seen as weird or different by others, while seeing themselves as unique but not extraordinarily weird, would empathize with her. In some ways, this is Suzuki Beane Goes to School (And How Other Children and Schools Destroy One's Spirit).

A Game of You (The Sandman #5)

#1027
Title: A Game of You (The Sandman #5)
Author: Neil Gaiman
Illustrators: Shawn McManus, Colleen Doran, Bryan Talbot, George Pratt, Stan Woch, Dick Giordano
Publisher: Vertigo
Year: 1992/2011
192 pages

A mirror of the previous volume, which was grand and mythological. Though broad in implications, this is a more humble perspective--that of a dreamer and her worlds. Read Delany's introduction afterward. It's worth reading, but is filled with spoilers and lit crit-dense.

Season of Mists (The Sandman #4)

#1025
Title: Season of Mists (The Sandman #4)
Author: Neil Gaiman
Illustrators: Kelley Jones, Malcolm Jones III, Mike Dringenberg, Matt Wagner, Dick Giordano, George Pratt, P. Craig Russell
Publisher: Vertigo
Year: 1991/2011
192 pages

Morpheus must acknowledge and correct an old wrong, and Lucifer makes a surprising decision with entertaining ramifications.

A pissy little intro by Harlan Ellison, without whose commentary one might arguably be better off.

The Conference of the Birds

#1024
Title: The Conference of the Birds
Author: Peter Sís, Farīd al-Dīn ʻAṭṭār
Publisher: Penguin
Country: Czech Republic
Year: 2011
160 pages

Lovely use of the poem, lovely artwork, beautiful production. A great pleasure.

The typeface used, and some of the smaller illustrations, give it at times a strange resonance with Edward Gorey's work. 

Dream Country (The Sandman #3)

#1019
Title: Dream Country (The Sandman #3)
Author: Neil Gaiman
Illustrators: Kelley Jones, Malcolm Jones III, Colleen Doran, Charles Vess
Publisher: Vertigo
Year: 1990/2010 (recolored edition)
160 pages

An enjoyable set of nominally linked stories. This arc seems like Gaiman is really getting the full feeling for his characters and settings.

The Doll's House (The Sandman #2)

#1011
Title: The Doll's House (The Sandman #2)
Author:  Neil Gaiman
Illustrators: Mike Dringenberg, Malcolm Jones III, Chris Bachalo, Michael Zulli, Steve Parkhouse
Publisher: Vertigo
Year: 1990/2010
232 pages

Cheap thrills with patterns in the universe: I ordered this book and Jim Henson's Tale of Sand from SFBC. On receiving the box and flipping open The Doll's House, I see that the first section is titled "Tale in the Sand." What pleasing synchrony.

***
In addition to the graphics and color work in this edition, I really enjoy how much the Sandman series (at least, thus far) focuses on ethics, balance, and rectifying errors. Though it often dips into Lovecraftian horror/fantasy, it is about putting the world right rather than tearing it apart. It is sometimes a new construction rather than a reconstruction, but ultimately reflects motion toward harmony rather than destruction.

This episode weaves together stories that at first seem distant and unrelated, and I do love the trope that the Sandman's incarceration caused the sleepy sickness (encephalitis lethargica) and his freedom (rather than Oliver Saks and a bucket of L-dopa) brought about its remission.

The Book of Genesis

#993
Title: The Book of Genesis
Author: Anonymous
Illustrator: R. Crumb
Publisher: Norton
Year: 2009
224 pages

     Through his illustrations, Crumb draws attention to parts of Genesis we might otherwise elide over or interpret differently. The amount of pagan worship apparently engaged in by our protagonists is highlights by, for example, the number of times oil is poured over just-erected standing stones. The visual approach showcases the weirdness of some of the stories, and the dual narrative structure of Genesis as well.

The Birds of America

#934
Title: The Birds of America
Author: John James Audubon
Publisher: Sterling
Year: 1947/2012
448 pages

Purchased on sale at Barnes and Noble for a ridiculously low price.

A beautiful book, created by taking apart original materials and digitally photographing them. I can see the difference compared to earlier books that include Audubon prints. The colors and lines are clear and the paper stock is pleasingly thick. Audubon's bird portraits not only represented a shift toward naturalistic depiction, but are in some cases lovely enough to make me tearful.

Ornithology nerds will enjoy comparing Audubon's Latin and common names to contemporary nomenclature. 

Are You My Mother?

#911
Title: Are You My Mother?
Author: Alison Bechdel
 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Year: 2012
289 pages

As Bechdel and her mother agree late in the text, this is a meta-book. Unlike Fun Home, there's a distance or caution about it, though Bechdel punctuates this with moments of great anguish. Some possible contributors to this distance:
--Bechdel's mother is still alive, so the negotiation about the book must include her, whereas in "the dad book," her father had died and her mother was an arbiter of his story.
--The story of Bechdel and her mother is still unfolding, rather than concluded and summed up.
--The revelatory content of the book is learning about what's missing in the relationship, whereas the discovery in Fun Home was of content-rich secrets.
--The book, as a self-conscious meta-book, distances the reader from the contents.
--The book is about processes more than about information.

Not that this distance is a bad thing (and it might make the telling more effective). However, one effect of this structural choice is that it's probably less appealing to memoir readers in general, though more appealing to analytic geeks such as myself.

I was completely absorbed by this memoir and very much enjoyed the overdetermination and synchronicity of meaning Bechdel creates, as in Fun Home, through her narrative, dreams, illustrations, and citations. The latter includes scaffolding by Winnicott with major appearances by Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and essays, Freud, Lacan, and others. (I should say as well that the ghost in the machine, the repressed content, is the chilren's book Are You My Mother?, from which the title presumably derives.)

All that plus a lot of analytic psychotherapy and it created some startling points of connection with my own life and processes. Much like Maso's The Art Lover, I frequently had the experience of reading about my twin separated at birth, and with her own experiences, but with a strange and brightly mirrored resonance with my own.

I also enjoyed reading this as a therapist. I frequently interrupted my partner (also a therapist) to point out frames that are so true to the therapeutic relationship that they made us laugh with recognition and admiration for Bechdel's observational skills.

I'm a great fan of Winnicott, too, so it was great fun to see him as a central meta-character in Bechdel's memoir. It's a fine use of introjection and a transitional object. He'd have liked that.

Jim Henson's Tale of Sand

#901
Title: Jim Henson's Tale of Sand
Authors: Jim Henson & Jerry Juhl
Illustrator: Ramon Perez
Publisher: Archaia Entertainment
Year: 2011
120 pages

A rather sophomoric script by the late Jim Henson brought to life by clean, interesting graphics with good use of space, frame, and color. Fragments of Henson's typed and amended text appear in some sequences, to good effect. Fun for an afternoon; not a work for the ages.

The Simpsons/Futurama Crossover Crisis

#892
Title: The Simpsons/Futurama Crossover Crisis
Author: Matt Groening & Bill Morrison
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
Year: 2010
208 pages

As others have remarked, both The Simpsons and Futurama are funnier in motion than statically presented. However, the comic format allows time to explore visual details. The production on this volume is of high quality with crisp inking. Line, color, and composition seem slightly pitched toward the Simpsons style.