Audrey Niffenegger's Night Bookmobile

Between 31May and 27Dec 2008, the UK Guardian published an intriguing Chicago-based graphic novel, one page every Saturday. Their page layout sucked mightily, so I've shortcutted the good stuff below. The 1st set of links goes straight to the jpegs, but I'm not sure the URLs are stable. The 2nd set goes to the zoomed images, and don't work right in Google Chrome. The sucky interface is here.


author: [Wikipedia]


reworking of short story [cite]



Direct images:

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Zoomed html pages:

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Autobiographical showtunes

bingeing on pynchon
it occurs to me
that complex autobiographical situations
can be effectively simplified
by picturing characters
singing-it-out as a showtune

foregrounding a minimalist emotional skeleton

even if your goal is
something far more serious
reclothing that 'showtune skeleton'
in more conventional prose

(a completely different heuristic:
how has each character
internalised the myth/con of original sin?
what chinks in their self-confidence
led them to sacrifice which freedoms?)

.

Proust on the novelist's art

"...none of the feelings
which the joys or misfortunes
of a 'real' person
awaken in us
can be awakened except through
a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes;
and the ingenuity of the first novelist
lay in his understanding that,
as the picture was the one essential element
in the complicated structure of our emotions,
so that simplification of it
which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple,
of 'real' people
would be a decided improvement.

A 'real' person,
profoundly as we may sympathise with him,
is in a great measure perceptible only
through our senses,
that is to say, he remains opaque,
offers a dead weight
which our sensibilities
have not the strength to lift.

If some misfortune comes to him,
it is only in one small section
of the complete idea we have of him
that we are capable of feeling any emotion;
indeed it is only in one small section
of the complete idea he has of himself
that he is capable of feeling any emotion either.

The novelist's happy discovery
was to think of substituting
for those opaque sections,
impenetrable by the human spirit,
their equivalent in
immaterial sections,
things, that is,
which the spirit can assimilate to itself."

One of Pynchon's girlfriends praised this quality in his company-- everything they did together seemed transformed into a movie.

And Joyce's method, after extracting an epiphany from its arbitrary context, was to re-clothe it in a "decor ideal".

.