inspiration

the judge

From Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. This is a new brush version of this older pen one.

what I'm wanting

lord of the flies

the mechanical hound

"The mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the fire house. The dim light of one in the morning, the moonlight from the open sky framed through the great window, touched here and there on the brass and copper and the steel of the faintly trembling beast. Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubber padded paws.

Nights when things got dull, which was every night, the men slid down the brass poles, and set the ticking combinations of the olfactory system of the hound and let loose rats in the fire house areaway. Three seconds later the game was done, the rat caught half across the areaway, gripped in gentle paws while a four-inch hollow steel needle plunged down from the proboscis of the hound to inject massive jolts of morphine or procaine."

--Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

October. Finally.

what I'm whating

Music:

Dream Theater--Black Clouds & Silver Linings

Scale the Summit--Carving Desert Canyons

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds--Abattoir Blues/Lyre of Orpheus

Elvis Costello--Secret, Profane, and Sugarcane

The Mars Volta--Octahedron

Books & Comics:

'The Areas of My Expertise' by John Hodgman

'American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House' by Jon Meacham

'The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World 1788--1800' by Jay Winik

'Stel' by Moebius

Movies:

Election

This is Spinal Tap

The Evil Dead

What I'm looking forward to:

'Asterios Polyp' by David Mazzucchelli

'Parker: The Hunter' by Darwyn Cooke

'R. Crumb's Book of Genesis'

96-page Frank project by Jim Woodring

'The Marquis: Inferno' by Guy Davis

Acme Novelty Library #20 by Chris Ware

The Brothers Bloom

Moon

A Serious Man

Doctor Who specials

Porcupine Tree--The Incident

oppenheimer

I've been reading American Prometheus, a great biography of Robert Oppenheimer. It's just as depressing as you might imagine it would be.

wordless books

A fountain of inspiration. A re-dedication of purpose. A shot fired across the bow of awesome.

"The judge smiled."

Judge Holden, from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. For my money, just about the greatest antagonist in literary history...

What has Dax been reading lately?

the truth about the world

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being a fact among others.

Blood Meridian. Cormac McCarthy. The man is good, folks.

If I had the money...

...I would buy the heck out of these...

two books

I read these two books last week. They don't have a lot in common, except they're both great.

The Sorensen book is a great inside look at the Kennedy administration (among other things). I admit that I'm similar to Truman in that I tend to inherently distrust politicians that come from established, wealthy dynasties, but man, Kennedy sure picked some smart advisers--thankfully, when it came to the Cuban missile crisis, which was an even more lunatic two weeks than I had thought previously. Sorensen is the perfect example of a pragmatic idealist (i.e. the best kind of idealist).

As far as Cormac McCarthy's The Road, well, these two sentences illustrate how great it is:

"The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond."

book nostalgia

R is for Rocket--My first book of Ray Bradbury stories. Includes the classics "A Sound of Thunder", "The Long Rain", and "The Golden Apples of the Sun". I vividly remember reading "The Long Rain" and suddenly understanding metaphor.

Our Universe--One of the more popular geek books in my elementary school library (probably tied with the Gnomes book and a book on the Rankin and Bass Hobbit cartoon), and one of the heaviest as well. Some of the information in this book is now out-dated, but I loved the paintings of Greco-Roman gods heading each planet chapter, as well as conceptual paintings about how life might exist on other planets in the solar system. Thanks to this book I still remember the names of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter. And what a fantastic cover (by the late great sci-fi artist John Berkey).

Superman and Spider-Man--One of the first comics I owned, this over-sized special teamed up Superman and Spider-Man against Doctor Doom and the Parasite (the Hulk and Wonder Woman appear, as well). This comic is the reason it took me years to figure out that Superman and Spider-Man don't actually exist in the same continuity. It was also my first exposure to John Buscema's particular brand of anatomical dynamism.

"The last human being to occupy the White House."

Okay, I'm aware that this blog has turned into some kind of art/U.S. history hybrid. Through no grand plan of my own--I mean, I'm as surprised as you are that I wrote a blog about Taft. What was up with that?

Anyways, here I go again. I've been reading two books concurrently, the book by Daniel Ellsberg about his experience in Vietnam and with the Pentagon Papers (mentioned here way back when), and a great collection of interviews with Harry S. Truman that I try to re-read every year, Plain Speaking.

Merle Miller, who conducted the Truman interviews, once called Truman "the last human being to occupy the White House". So he's not exactly an unbiased guy...however, since most of the book is straight from Truman's mouth, you don't really have to worry about Miller distorting reality because of his natural bias towards Truman. For instance, I once read a biography of Eisenhower where the author was so obviously enraptured by Ike that I couldn't really read the book as serious nonfiction.

Speaking of Eisenhower...boy, Truman really disliked the guy. "The fella that followed me" gets a lot of attention from Truman, from Ike's swearing to Truman point-blank that he didn't have any political ambitions (Truman couldn't suffer liars) to Eisenhower's not walking up the White House steps to greet the outgoing President on Inaugural Day (the only other times that has occured were with John Adams and Thomas Jefferson--Adams had already left the White House by the time Jefferson arrived--and FDR and Herbert Hoover--FDR couldn't physically walk up the steps).

See, one thing that comes across in the book is the feeling that Truman just plain doesn't lie, which is stunning for a politician. He's very candid (Nixon gets called "a son of a bitch" more than once) without sounding cranky. He's also incredibly well read...he goes through a list of presidential history at one point, from William Henry Harrison to James Buchanan, with the factual certainty of a scholar. He also brilliantly sums up Chester A. Arthur in one sentence ("the man with the side whiskers and striped pants").

Of course, I'm just as biased towards Truman as Miller is...he's maybe my favorite president, despite a few things that started in his administration that I think were huge mistakes in retrospect (most presidents seem to have a few of those).

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I'm not finished with Ellsberg's book, Secrets, but I came to a pretty stunning excerpt in the book yesterday. While talking to Bobby Kennedy about the Vietnam War (this was a year before Bobby was killed), Ellsberg asked him what he thought JFK's handling of the war would've been like if he had lived. Bobby point-blank says that JFK always privately said that he would never send U.S. ground troops into Vietnam--he would settle the issue the same way he did with Laos if it came down to it (meaning: diplomatically). Kennedy, showing surprising foresight at the time, thought that any war the U.S. undertook in the region would end up just as it did for the French.

So far Ellsberg's book has crystalized in my mind just how similar in many respects Vietnam is to our current situation in Iraq, especially in how the administrations of those respective times chose to handle said situations. And how they chose to ignore lessons of history.

Here's a sketch of Ellsberg, derived from a somewhat recent photograph of him that's printed inside the book.

"Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."

Stuff I've been reading lately:

--Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, by Daniel Ellsberg. A very detailed account by Ellsberg of his years working for the State and Defense departments, leading to his disenchantment over the Vietnam War and his leaking of top-secret documents detailing the history of the United States' political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1971.

--His Excellency, by Joseph J. Ellis. A biography of George Washington. When Washington put aside talk inside the army of him becoming king, and resigned his commission and turned his army over to the legislature at the end of the Revolutionary War, King George III of England was said to reply, "If he does that, he truly is the greatest man alive." What's fascinating about Washington is that, even when you consider his faults, he really was just about as impressive as his sizeable reputation.


Houdini, The Handcuff King, by Jason Lutes & Nick Bertozzi. Nice little book about a particular day in the life of Houdini. Lutes remains one of the very best layout men in modern comics, and Bertozzi adds an energetic, loose quality to the work. I like the historical notes at the end.

--Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus Vol. 1. You may have gotten the impression from my previous post that I love this book. Let me add to that: I really, reeeaaaallly love this book. I've been waiting/hoping for a quality collection of Kirby's Fourth World comics for a long time, and this is just about perfect. The paper stock, reproduction, and color quality are all top-notch. In fact, the only blemish in the whole thing are all those unfortunate Al Plastino/Murphy Anderson Superman heads (DC had artists redraw all of Kirby's Clark Kent/Superman/Jimmy Olsen heads--as well as some figure work--because they wanted Superman and Jimmy to retain a certain established in-house look).

Example:

But a giant green Jimmy Olsen clone and a guest appearance by Don Rickles goes a long way to make up for all those heads.