EDWARD GAUVIN

Dude, I’m in New York Magazine. Color me astonished. Between Lou Reed and Nicole Kidman. Check it.

Kudos and thanks to Mr. Pedrosa and the team at First Second.

A much belated announcement that the Okko hardcover, collecting the four gorgeous issues of the Cycle of Water, has been out for two months from Archaia Studios Press, so why don’t you own it yet? It is sumptuous, handsome, and in the right lighting, or understanding hands, even sensual, redolent of such Eastern spices as were bestowed upon the Lord by road-weary heathen kings. It fine binding creaks discreetly when you open it for the first time, and inside a voyage awaits like that of Keats looking into Chapman’s Homer. The dun and beige scheme of its covers mimics brass plate that gives burnished reflection of the wondering reader.  Preview the first issue of the next arc, the Cycle of Earth, here. Everything Archaia pretty much available here.  Support my colleagues and an indie comics company.

Maestro Alexis Siegel namechecks me in an insightful article, chock full of excellent examples, on the puns and pratfalls of comics translation, at the First Second blog. Love from the sensei humbles the student. An excellent link may be found therein to an Anthea Bell article from The Telegraph. This woman is responsible for the English rendition of one of my favorite books, Sebald’s Austerlitz. But before that, she was all about Asterix–in the comics world, translations legendary as Beckett’s own of Godot. There is something in these two pieces that points toward the hope and possibility of actually helpful essays on this admittedly very specialized subgenre of a marginalized literary activity. The possibility of saying anything useful in the field had defeated me, but once again, teacher shows the way. I liken it to the pointer-laden craft approach of this article.

Staying with First Second Books for a moment, my lucky editrix will be leaving the company to pursue a full-time children’s dream at Roaring Brook. Sniff! I’ll miss her. She’ll be gone by the time Cyril Pedrosa’s Three Shadows comes out in April, right before NY Comic-Con. Congrats to the French original which was one of five to pick up an audience favorite prize, the Must-Read, at Angouleme: the biggest comics festival in the world.

Last but definitely not least, the new February Words Without Borders, the second graphics issue in what may become a n annual tradition, is a treasure trove featuring an interview with Gipi and a Korean childhood favorite from Heinz Insu Fenkl.  Editor Samantha Schnee struts out two South American comics, and Dupuy (of Dupuy & Berberian, the team behind Monsieur Jean, who took Angouleme’s top prize this year), has a whimsical confection about a world-traveling rabbit.  I’m elated to have two new comics translations, collage from Lebanon and comedy from Gabon, appear amongst such riches (at this point there are still some typos in them).

In fact, “We Are Not Alone,” the story by GB Tran and myself in last fall’s Awesome! anthology has drawn some praise.  Innumerable thanks to those reviewers who thought it worth mention:

Adam McGovern of Comiclist says “in ‘We Are Not Alone’ (a lifegiving urban fantasia of flying-saucer samaritans) [we] particularly make the most of the collection’s black-and-white format for a graphic brevity and painterly abundance of shadow and tone.” 

Matthew J. Brady at Indiepulp says we “contribute a really beautiful-looking story that I don’t understand at all which seems to be about alien water towers providing awesome water to a city.”

And with some help from Babelfish, the Greek site Comicdom (του Αριστείδη Κώτση) puts our tale among the “most impressive drawn comics the anthology [sic],” with Keith Champagne and Dev Madan, Jamie Burton, and Robin and Lawrence Etherington.

Two other reviews of Awesome and our fellow contributors to be found here and here.  Many thanks again to all reviewers.

The song “San Fernando Valley,” made famous by Bing Crosby late in War II, has been on my mind since breakfast today (chocolate chip pancakes). A highlight of living alone is you can sing anywhere, not just the shower. The song’s blithe and merry 40s jauntiness is given a whole new subtext both pointed and poignant by that titular farmland’s transformation into suburb and subsequent porn capital. For instance,

I’ll forget my sins (yes yes), I’ll be makin’ new friends (yes yes),
where the West begins (yes yes) and the sunset ends
Cause I’ve decided where yours truly should be
and it’s the San Fernando Valley for me.

Somewhere, some latter-day Wildean soul is delighting in the facile subversion of this very song played over footage of a footloose woman, young and buxom, westward bound in pink halter top and tough jean cut-offs with a jacket over her shoulder, clicking the heels on the very kind of boots Nancy Sinatra claimed were made for walkin’. It’s the kind of wink wink nudge nudge on the simple past we wised-up postmods so enjoy. More fun than reviewing old Scooby episodes for Mary Jane in-jokes.

In my curiosity, I got hold of the radio episode of Autry’s Melody Ranch featuring his rendition of the song. I’ve always wanted, as a nod to the naked geriatric trampoline philosophizing in Ninety Two in the Shade (one of my favorites—not the movie), to score a sex scene with Autry’s genial warbling of his signature “Back in the Saddle Again,” only to have the lady involved call a screeching halt to the proceedings because fucking to this music is just too weird—more ludicrous than naked men in socks. It’s hard to tell, listening to the delivery on Melody Ranch—two cigar store Indians could not give more wooden readings—whether the bland songs are an excuse for the inept Wrigley gum pitches, or vice versa, for the two alternate with leaden regularity. Avis à tous ces littérateurs qui aiment tant proclamer que la condition humaine n’a changé en rien depuis Tolstoy : oh yes it has. Take advertising—please.

The cruel man instinctively understands that humanism is the senile daydream of winded nations who haven’t enough strength left to come to terms with the idea of universal hatred, who cannot bear to think history condemned to repeating the tragedy of Cain and Abel.

The cruel man believes the most contemptible of men is he who needs the respect of others in order to respect himself.

The cruel man puts us on our guard: girls are dangerous playthings. Even the sweetest leave a bitter aftertaste.

The cruel man concedes a single merit to literature: to raise the reader toward the heights of lucidity, only to hurl him into the void.

The cruel man detests memories, especially good ones.

The cruel man recommends suicide to all when they no longer find favor in their own eyes.

The cruel man aggravates his wound.

The cruel man deems it shameful to cling to life. The best thing to do upon finding oneself alive is to bow out.

The cruel man knows he will not overcome his own suffering by trying to ease that of others. Thus he pays but vague attention to it.

The cruel man always feigns the feelings he gives the illusion of actually experiencing, and never experiences what he manages to feign.

The cruel man abhors the cynic’s every pose, starting with his own.

Roland Jaccard, Cioran et compagnie (Presses Universitaires de France, 2005)

“Isn’t it this building over here?” GB caught my sleeve as I headed for the awning that said National Arts Club. He pointed to the building two doors down, on the corner.

“No, that says SVA. And it’s number 17.”

I turned back for the brownstone with the awning as GB checked the post-it note in his hand. A boy in a white watched us from behind the many tiny panes of a mahogany door, a double row of buttons on his jacket gleaming gold.

“But this building doesn’t look like it has eight floors.” » Read the rest of this entry «

Pourquoi Pierre Menard est-il le traducteur parfait?

a) Parce qu’il respecte les mots de l’auteur au point du plagiat

b) Parce que son travail demeure inachevé—car une traduction n’est jamais finie

c) Parce qu’il fait un travail de recherche minutieux

d) Parce qu’il se soucie de ce que l’auteur veut dire tout en tenant compte du nouveau contexte auquel il livre son ouvrage

4. What is your intended field of study?

I’m interested in retro: the roles of progress and technology in birthing a late 20th century style whose defining trait is technological obsolescence. In steampunk’s Victoriana, in Gernsback’s streamlined utopias, in the fetishized defunct device, in postapocalypse-scapes of industrial leavings screaming the futility of science, retro is the future we left in the dust, the cyborg pastoral we’ve lost, a past of man-and-machine harmony.

One casualty of quickened progress is the failed prediction. When did the “future”, which by definition has not yet happened, become a thing that will never happen, so that we can say of it “What happened to my future?” or “They’ve got our future“, as though it were a thing that could be stolen or left behind. Probably when time travel became banal, and multiple realities commonplace. Today, the utopian or merely hopeful predictions of midcentury—a very recent yet altogether distinct age of scientific enthusiasm, if not triumphalism—seem as much a target for mockery as the forecasts of Nostradamus, and yet, freed from the burden of becoming real, and far from being forgotten, such images as the flying family car and the O’Neill cylinder are instead part of what George Steiner calls “a compost of dreams and longings” informing design, literature, and taste. Thomas Browne called science “a dream and folly of expectation”. Expectations, like all creatures of man, have lives of their own. » Read the rest of this entry «

A thought from two years back (pre-blog), recently revisited in another context:

Great efforts have been lavished on the interpretation of the scenes and stories that visit our sleep, in which nothing is ever what it seems, instead dissimulating, or so we fervently believe, some profound, ludic, or even prophetic meaning. Something insists the chamber we pace is our childhood bedroom, though it seems an unfamiliar apartment; we are certain the traveling companion suddenly beside us is our father, though he wears the youthful face of a college friend. » Read the rest of this entry «

For the second year–but not in a row–my brother joined me in New York for the turkey days. At Harry’s Steak they stuck us in a back room like a vault made of wood, away from all the round, convivial tables with their centerpieces. The cherry finish framed frescoes of peasant revels: monks and villagers in wine cellars of massive barrels. As we sat down, half a family of Latinos—a father, two children, and his mother—was just getting up to leave. The old lady was being slow—inching along the bench to where she might heave herself up—and her grown son curt. He gave the jacket he was holding out to her a limp shake: bored matador and tired cow.

Beyond them, further steps descended to an alcove whose exposed brick had been painted white and shelved with magnums and bottles. There were candles lit on all the tables. No one came to sit there all evening. We were later attended by a rotating staff, none of whom were Latinos.

In the corner of our room was an attractive couple; much to my brother’s envy, the man, who spent the night expostulating to his date, ended slumped across the banquette, jacket open as if in illustration of the digestive ease afforded by his posture, but the blonde remained upright, chin in her hands, tasseled earrings swinging just below her clipped hair. I make his laissez aller sound a gross lapse of decorum, but in fact the hush and tastefulness of the surroundings—the panels of menu slate behind them awaiting the day’s chalked prices—lent everyone class: the little girls all decked with frills and teenage sons in college sweatshirts, the calculated outfits of girlfriends brought home for the holidays, Asian or Indian every one, who passed through, the Emperor’s or Maharajah’s children in parade review, on their way back from the unlimited dessert bar to still further rooms, pumpkin mousses dainty on saucers. » Read the rest of this entry «