Art Spiegelman

He is 78 years old, slight and scruffy-looking, with a grizzled goatee and wispy grey hair, and he can still talk faster than most people can think. He offers me a coffee when I arrive at his home on a sweltering June day, but then keeps getting distracted from making it by his own anecdotes. He takes me on an impromptu tour, showing me the living room that held Mouly’s huge, 1,000lb Multilith printing press, until they had a toddler and it became too dangerous to keep. There is a mural painted by the cartoonist Gary Panter on the living room wall, and another just above their bed, painted to replace a set of bookshelves that collapsed onto the couple when they were asleep, breaking Mouly’s nose and prompting a big book clear out. “Is this book worth dying for?” Spiegelman says they asked of themselves, a more hardcore alternative to Swedish death cleaning, but even so there are full bookshelves in every room, and pieces of art and curios everywhere. Sophie McBain, The Guardian

a settembre uscirà una nuova edizione di In the Shadow of No Towers di Art Spiegelman presso Penguin 

AUGURI!

Faccio a tutti coloro che mi seguono carissimi auguri di Buon Natale con questa divertente copertina del New Yorker, uscita il 17 dicembre (il giorno del mio compleanno, tra l'altro) 1988, firmata da R.O. Blechman, allora nostro ospite a Milano.

 

Why Does Coffee Make Me Poop?

Coffee is a complex beverage containing more than 1,000 chemical compounds, many of which have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. And determining how they affect the intestines is challenging. Alice Callahan, NYT

una domanda molto più inquietante:

Why do dead Jews play such a large role in the world’s imagination, and how does that distortion still affect us today? In her Tablet Studios podcast, Adventures with Dead Jews, author and host Dara Horn takes you on a ride through some of the most bizarre, disturbing, wondrous, tragic, and accidentally hilarious moments of Jewish history, and dives deep into their repercussions in the present.

infine una domanda bizzarra:

Is Superman Circumcised?, a study of the superhero’s Jewish influences, has resoundingly won the competition to be named “oddest book title of the year”. Alison Flood, The Guardian

Stanno uscendo gli elenchi dei migliori libri del 2021, qui i migliori di cucina:

The best food books of 2021, The Guardian

 

 

Olive Oil

Si è parlato anche in Italia di Extra Virgin Suicide, un fumetto che illustra la produzione del nostro olio d'oliva extra vergine. Le vignette, molto carine e sofisticate, sono di Nicholas Blechman, che è stato mio studente, alla fine degli anni '80, a Brown. Molto bravo nello studio - oltre che nel disegno - e piuttosto alternativo nella vita. nyt.

Bookforum intervista Jules Feiffer

And yet he made an interesting film! And a lot of that film works. I was lucky to work with wonderful people. I also did a film with Alan Resnais.

Bookforum: That’s what I meant about the range!

Jules Feiffer: It seems like heady stuff, and of course it was heady. But primarily, it was work I was interested in and work I loved and work that was challenging, and problems that had to be solved, and how to make something better, and how you get it right, not in the first place or second, third, or fifteenth place.

What you learn when you work with first-rate people, whether it’s Mike Nichols or Arkin, is that they are, invariably, except for Altman, less temperamental and less difficult than second-rate people, who always make a problem. The first-rate people are never defensive. And they are quite willing and happy to blame themselves when things get fucked up. bookforum.

Day Jobs of the Poets

 

Grant Snider illustrates the day jobs of famous poets.

MetaMaus

Twenty-five years ago, Art Spiegelman's "Maus" was published, opening a window into the depth and seriousness that comics as a form could tell. A chronicle of World War II in which the Jews are mice and the Nazis are cats, Spiegelman and his father, a Holocaust survivor, both figure in the text. After the conclusion, "Maus II," came out five years later, Spiegelman was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize.

But that was not the end of "Maus," which has been repackaged as a box set and as a single book. Now ... is "MetaMaus," a stunning hardcover book from Spiegelman about the making of "Maus," which includes a multimedia DVD. LAT.