The Comics Journal
Pornhounds 2

A Comics Journal review of Pornhounds 2.

Based in research of museum design, and memorialization, Slot’s narrator moves inside public landmarks dedicated to various disasters—9/11, slavery, Hiroshima, the Holocaust— and explores ways memorialization acts on conscience and memory, interrogating the urge to abstract, label, and catalogue suffering. Read the rest of this entry »

This offer is only good for the rest of the month, because then we’re switching ad servers to Litbreaker. We’re going to have to see how we sell ads after that. Maybe nothing will change. But right now you can buy 500,000 page views for $750. That’s $1.50 eCPM, for those who know the lingo (I think…). We need your ads in two formats, 728×90 and 300×250, images plus URL. The images can’t be more than 100k.

If you’re interested contact stephen AT therumpus.net.

This will enable us to get rid of these ugly Verizon ads you might currently be seeing.

The world’s most interesting man is no more. (via Atlas Obscura.)

You guys! Steam planet! Steam planet you guys!

Dept. of this-is-a-thing: Occupy Riverdale.

Way to find a hidden 298 million year old forest scientists.

Now let’s take a moment to ponder unsolved mysteries of WWII.

These cactus are so phallic.

This is what I say to Andrew in the early moments of what will spread into an entire February day spent wringing the narrow backroads of Puerto Rico. We’re just coming out of Arecibo after visiting the world’s largest telescope, rounding another bend in the road, when a knotty constellation of Prickly Pear bursts from a cliff of burgundy dry soil. Read the rest of this entry »

A new Twitter project called I CHECK AFTER calls on us to list one thing we do before checking our phones and computers in the morning. If we can’t think of a single thing, it’s our chance to pledge something into existence and loosen our technological chains.

Mother Jones converses with Dan Savage about his long-term vision for the “It Gets Better” campaign and his new MTV series. Savage also dishes on whether reading about “freaky stuff” makes someone freaky, and shares anxieties about Santorum’s recent surge.

“The goal is to build and maintain these videos and all the support in them for LGBT kids who are growing up right now: 13-, 14-, and 15-year-olds; people who are nine years old right now but who will see these videos in five to six years. We want to make sure that videos are still being made and that LGBT kids know how to find these videos, how to find us.”

Several not-to-be-missed essays appeared over the long weekend: Julia Goldberg’s “Wrinkles and Time,” Lauren Cerand’s “On Elegance,” and Ted Wilson’s review of circles.

My lung was fair at least out there, here where I’ve been for the last fortnight. I’ve not been able to see the doctor. But it can’t be so bad considering for instance that I was able – holy vanity! – to chop for an hour and more without getting tired, and yet was happy, for moments.  – Letters to Milena (1917) Read the rest of this entry »

Rumpus contributor Daniel Roberts has two pieces on David Foster Wallace in honor of what would have been his 50^th birthday. This Berfois essay examines The Marriage Plot‘s Leonard Bankhead character as a representation of DFW. And, at Salon, Roberts asks us to consider Wallace’s journalism.

“Whether or not Wallace fully believed in the shtick he created, the evidence — his outstanding reportage — speaks for itself.”

Rumpus columnist and Book Club author Peter Orner’s Esther Stories will be presented by Word for Word, “San Francisco’s premiere producer of short stories on stage.” The event will take place at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco on Monday, Feb 27 at 7:00 pm. Click here for tickets.

“This idea of the older generation as strange, insistent shadows moving closer and closer to substance as time went on, the idea that I was writing, pushing myself to work, almost because they could not or did not, that I was inspired by their silence, has echoes in the work of other writers.”

At The Guardian, Colm Tóibín focuses on relationships between writers and their parents, starting with his own family and finding congruencies in the work of a number of prominent authors.

Daniel Alarcon, author of War By Candlelight and Lost City Radio, is starting a radio program. From the website:

“Radio Ambulante is a monthly Spanish-language radio program showcasing compelling human stories from around Latin America and the United States. It is the first of its kind in Spanish, and will be launching soon.”

Donate to the Radio Ambulante here. A video of Daniel Alarcon explaining Radio Ambulante after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

THE BINS: Doctor Toothy

Another fantastic Rumpus Comic from Lucas Adams.

Today is David Foster Wallace’s birthday. He would have been 50 years old.

What was until recently one of the world’s oldest things, is no more.

NY phone booths as tiny libraries.

How do snakes drink (this is something I wonder every day).

19th Century ghosts.

Your awesome photography for the day: volcanoes and auroras huzzah.

I am in a public restroom off 95 in southern Maine, wondering what makes a man and also if I can muffle my piss stream with balled up toilet paper so as not to draw attention to myself. Will I ever be able to walk into a bathroom and not think about the sound of urine on porcelain? Read the rest of this entry »

CIRCLES
★★★★★ (5 out of 5)

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing circles. Read the rest of this entry »

This week in San Francisco – pepper the week with shows by indie artists for Noise Pop’s 20th birthday. AAAnndd….:

Monday 2/20: Bender‘s kicks off a week of happy hour free shows in partnership with Noise Pop. 4-7pm drink specials and local bands.
Read the rest of this entry »

Pornhounds Vol. 2 (Sharon Lintz and various artists)
Self-published
$6, 60 pages

Reviewed by Rob Clough

It’s rare that comics created via collaboration between a separate writer and artist attain the level of quality of Sharon Lintz’s Pornhounds series. Part of Lintz’s success, I think, is due to her remarkable ability to write to the strengths of each of her artistic collaborators. Part of it is that the artists she selected are quite talented. It’s astonishing that she’s able to treat the subject matter of the first part of this comic (working as a writer/editor for a porn magazine) with such sensitivity and respect while at the same time finding new angles to discuss in the second part of the comic (her experience with breast cancer). Lintz’s attention to detail extends to every aspect of the comic, from its design to the illustrations chosen for the front and back covers.

Let’s unpack those for a moment. The cover image by Nic Breutzman (the artist with whom she shares a connection that is honestly reminiscent of the early Pekar-Crumb collaborations) is of a nude woman, sitting back on her legs and wearing high heels. It’s a sexualized pose, yet once it becomes clear that this woman has had a double mastectomy performed it becomes an unsettling image, one where objectification is suddenly muddled with sadness and perhaps shame. At the same time, there’s a bone-dry sense of humor to it, a humor that is present throughout this comic. The back cover (by the great Danny Hellman) is a “visible woman” image of a cancer patient on a stripper’s pedestal, ogled and leered at by various medical professionals. It’s funny and unsettling in a different way, but in a manner that also reflects Lintz’s experience of feeling like meat as a cancer patient.

The comic opens with Lintz revealing that in her former job working at that porn magazine, she was the “ghost writer” for porn star Cytherea. That meant not only penning monthly “publisher’s statements” but also answering mail and reviewing porn DVDs wearing another woman’s identity. Trying on different identities and roles is a repeating motif in Lintz’s work, something that comes with a certain sympathy with the outliers of society. Her story about the letters she received is surprisingly touching (and frequently hilarious), as is the way she responds to people (in Cytherea’s voice) in an effort to make them feel like their voice has been heard.

The comic kicks into high gear with “Daily Office Life” and “Photo Meetings”, the two chapters illustrated by up-and-coming cartoonist Breutzman. He captures both the sleaze and the quotidian dullness of office life as described by Lintz, though porn provides a number of hilarious but incidental laughs. (Lintz’ idea for a porn based onThe Crying of Lot 49 made me laugh out loud, but not as much as the bizarre tattoo found on one naked actor in an orgy scene.) Transformation is a motif in this comic, first communicated in the scene where the “dirty diaries” she writes become increasingly bizarre and sci-fi oriented, like one based on Alan Moore’s The Courtyard where the attraction to Ancient Ones results in women getting eight extra vaginas. “Photo Meetings” is a feverish chapter that alternates the boredom and politics of sitting through a meeting looking at photos the magazine might buy with memories of her mother losing her mind in a mental hospital and watching “stag films” with her friends as a teen.

The first chapter about cancer is the most conventional in this comic, due in part to the bland renderings of Nathan Schreiber. Even here, Lintz manages to draw laughs by talking about her obsession with getting a C-cup with her breast reconstruction while at the same time connecting this experience to her father receiving a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. ”Tampa/Reconstruction”, drawn by Joan Reilly, adds a bit of grit and detail to her experiences, with Florida acting as a sort of fever dream backdrop. The mutation and transformation of flesh is once again raised; at one point, Lintz notes feeling “like a cyborg,” referring to the implants that were part of her reconstructive process.

The Ellen Lindner-drawn chapter “Chemo” continues in this vein, as Linder draws Lintz with glowing eyes when Lintz notes that “after chemo, you feel like a heated piece of foil.” The elegance and density of Lindner’s line is a perfect counter to both the rattier line of the Reilly story that precedes it and the thinner, Crumb-influenced line of Ed Piskor in the following story. Lintz reflects on her side career as a teacher, where she assigned works, like Hamlet, that focus on death. After having stared death in the eye, this work struck close to the bone (as it were). In some respects, Lintz reached the “acceptance” phase of the five stages of grief without actually dying, giving her a certain earned serenity.

The final chapter, “And By The Way…What Is Cancer?”, neatly ties together the themes of both halves of the book. Lintz cleverly ties the cellular effects of cancer (it is, in essence, a detrimental cellular mutation) with the theme of transformation and her own science fiction fantasies. She first does this by comparing cancer to horror films, which she notes tie directly into our fear of disease and our own bodies. Then she brings upVideodrome, which is all about the way in which a tumor gives a man visions. Lintz spins that into imagining a future where her tumor was genetically modified into becoming a new kind of sex organ, which made her “the most famous porn star in the universe,” chanting “Long live the new flesh!”

This was an ingenious way to tie in the imaginative and transformational powers of porn into her own imagination as a writer and her experiences literally experiencing the transmutation of her flesh at both a visceral and cellular level.  Lintz went from being a thinker and dreamer who “feels alone in the world” to someone who was forced to connect to her body, her community, and her world. This comic might have had a greater impact if Breutzman had drawn the whole thing, though the Reilly-Lindner-Piskor trio did a fine job of conveying different aspects of her experience with their unique visual style. That said, this comic is an astounding leap of quality from the first issue, which in itself was an assured debut by Lintz as a comics writer. I’m excited to see her branch out into genre work as well as continue to write about her own life in such a humorous, self-effacing and ultimately warm manner.

Check out some other stories now featured at The Comics Journal:

An interview with artist Jim Shaw on his long-gestating My Mirage project.

An interview with 1-800-MICE creator Matthew Thurber.

I have a theory that elegant people have an aura of impenetrable private sadness, and that good taste and impeccable manners are life’s consolation. Perhaps they conjure sprezzatura, the Renaissance ideal of artful nonchalance, that makes it all conceivable.

Read the rest of this entry »

Roxane Gay’s debut collection Ayiti is a touching patchwork of stories, lists, modern fairy tales and poems, cataloging and exploring the author’s relationship with Haiti. Read the rest of this entry »

This week in New York, Beatrice.com hosts Blogger/Author; Critics Circle on the Oscars; The Rumpus: Letters in the Mail at Housing Works; How I Learned to Chill the F@#k Out About a Lot of Things; Sideshow Goshko; 2-year of The Soundtrack Series; Tom McCarthy reads from Men In Space at 192 Books; Floating Kabarette at Galapagos; and Jean Strouse and Colm Tóibín on Alice James.

Read the rest of this entry »

Happy President’s Day you guys. We’re going to keep things low key and see y’all tomorrow.

Artist extraordinaire Jon Adams brings us a very important message from our 16th President: Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes, there’s so much cool stuff happening close to home, that a girl has to give in to Rumpus self-referentiality:

1) This has been Cheryl Strayed week, pretty much.  If you’ve been down with dysentary since before Valentine’s Day, you may not have heard that Cheryl is Dear Sugar.  You can read every single thing your heart desires about that freaking awesome news, here.

Cheryl’s memoir, Wild, scared the hell out of me.  In it, a much-younger-and-more-fucked-up Cheryl hikes the PCT solo.  If you’re like me, and would have been the first member of the Donner party the others sacrificed because of your wilderness uselessness, you will read this book on the edge of your seat.  You may emerge thinking Cheryl is a little bit crazy, even.  Which is, of course, where she gets the immense, bottomless heart necessary for a gig like Sugar.

Cheryl and I have had a few interesting exchanges about the fact that Sugar is “nicer” than Cheryl is.  I’ve been a fan of Sugar’s for a long time, predating knowing her true identity, but my favorite thing lately has been Cheryl’s self-awareness about the differences between a created persona and a real self, and her ability to maintain these differences while being consistent and authentic in both spaces.  Sugar wouldn’t have such a following if she were inconsistent–if she weren’t very much a Real Person.  And yet, Sugar isn’t “Cheryl,” precisely. It’s cool.

Cheryl and I talk about this and a bunch of other stuff in an upcoming Bookslut interview–I’ll keep you posted.

2) The first Sugar–who turns out to be Steve Almond–also continues to rock it in these parts with his new, hybrid fiction/historical essay column.  Steve is required reading for humanity.  That’s my final word on the matter.

3) Rumpus editor, Roxane Gay, also knocked it out of the park yet again this week.  Nothing slips by Roxane.  (Me, on the other hand: I didn’t even know who Chris Brown was when I first read this.)  But the thing is, you don’t have to know jack about Chris Brown, or keep up with music celebs for this piece to be pertinent.  The glorification of violence is everywhere in our culture, of course.  It’s not just in the way dating/domestic abuse is romanticized, or in young girls’ hunger for any form of attention, or the way “famous” can get away with anything . . . Roxane calls us all out, in a good way, to pay more attention.

Happy Sunday.

Two roads really did diverge in a wood near the townhouse complex where I spent my ‘tween years. On one side of the road was suburbia: bland and uniform, dozens of doors with numbers and letters and little else to distinguish them. We were 14-B for many years—a ground-floor two-bedroom apartment—until a fire caused us to relocate into an identical townhouse closer to the complex’s main entrance.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Crab Nebula may be acting as a fast particle accelerator.

If you’re going to take a picture of a black hole, you apparently need a telescope the size of Earth. So some scientists are building one, sort of.

Tasmanian Devils are in danger of becoming extinct because of a contagious cancer. Scientists are studying their genome in hopes of not only stopping the disease, but to learn more about contagious cancers in general.

Tiny chameleons!

A brief history of the Wow! signal and the push to continue investigating it.