Michael Crichton Has Departed to the Great Amusement Park in the Sky

...hopefully, he will find it devoid of malfunctioning robots, genetically-cloned oversized lizards, talking apes, or pretty much anything else that has ever been featured as a plot device in one of his novels.


If you're looking for a fitting way to pay the man tribute, may we recommend reading -- you know, actually reading, rather than watching the movie version -- Jurassic Park? It doesn't have any of the cool CGI or the gosh-isn't-this-neat John Williams score, but it is a markedly better story, and one of the most intense reads you're likely to stumble across for a good long while.

LINK: RIP Michael Crichton (A.V. Club News Bulletin)

WEDNESDAY: Michel Gondry Book Launch and Signing

Tomorrow night the uber-cool "curated bookstore" Family on Fairfax will play host to filmmaker Michel Gondry, as he launches two new books -- one a do-it-yourself semi-memoir inspired in part by his film Be Kind Rewind, called You Like This Film Because You're in It; the other a comic book written and drawn by Gondry titled We Lost the War But Not the Battle, which Family describes as an "action-packed comic book [which] tells the story of four friends, the French army, and a beautifully horrifying conspiracy to take over the world. This one has it all: guns, girls, death, friendship, Mia Farrow, and so much more." The launch will be followed by a signing and a live DJ set from J-Lep.

For those in need of a brief refresher course in the sparkling hallows of Mr. Gondry's imagination, Tragically Hipster is once again pleased to oblige:


"Fell in Love With a Girl" (music video)


"Les Callioux" (music video)


"If You Rescue Me" (from The Science of Sleep)
WHERE: Family on Fairfax
WHEN: Wednesday, October 22nd 2008 @ 7:30p.m.
COST: Free, but you should probably buy something and support cool local businesses.
MORE INFO:Family website.

Finite; No Jest

David Foster Wallace on failure

David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, Broom of the System, and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, amongst many others, apparently hanged himself Friday night, according to the New York Times.

Wallace's work was, in no particular order: darkly absurd; were one to indulge in hyperbole, brilliant; obsessively grammatical; reference-tome-like; achingly referential; uncannily surreal; SNOOT-ish; oddly moving; satirized in The Onion; wryly observant; fetishisticly-footnoted; often excruciatingly long; and, as of Friday night, will be produced no longer.



Another Random Bit: The Perspective of David Foster Wallace
LINKS:
New York Times Article on Wallace's Death
"Roger Federer as Religious Experience" (article) by David Foster Wallace
"Good People" (story) by David Foster Wallace
"Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage" (article) by David Foster Wallace
Uncollected David Foster Wallace Stories (via The Howling Fantoids)
Girlfriend Stops Reading David Foster Wallace Breakup Letter At Page 20 (The Onion)

A Brief Appreciation of the Ingenious Design of McSweeney's 28th Issue

The latest issue of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern -- a magazine which began as a forum for short stories rejected by other publications but which quickly morphed into an oddly-swaggered beast devoted to playful surrealism, humanist storytelling and ingenuous presentation in about equal measure -- arrived at my doorstep earlier this week, and on a pure objet d'art-level, it's a stunner.

Though the content of any given McSweeney's issue can be hit-and-miss -- and sometimes far more "miss" than "hit" -- the design of the issues are roundly beyond reproach: inventive and sumptuous in equal measure. There was the issue on comics that featured a wrap-around dust jacket which folded out to become its own newsprint comics-section; the mail issue, which arrived as a bundle of letters, ads, and other postal-related ephemera; and then there was McSweeney's #16, inexplicably featuring an official McSweeney's comb. But even for a publication with such an extensive history of unique presentations, the latest volume outdoes itself.

McSweeney's #28 focuses on the "resurrection and reinvention of the fable," and as such features eight separate hardcover books, each containing one fable apiece and a handful of accompanying illustrations.


But it's the presentation of the books that really impresses. Packed in an oversize 11" x 9" flat box, a quartet of books are arranged on the upper level, their backs forming an image of a boy crouching down on a grassy field, listening intently to the earth below:


Remove those books, and beneath you find another layer, both metaphorically and literally:


Lay all eight books out with one image atop the other, and it creates an extended tableau:


The fables themselves are mostly light with a slight edge -- stories of selfish children and rebellious communities and lies that do not exactly eat the soul, but which don't sound particularly healthy for it, either. Here again the design elements are employed to great effect, with each volume being illustrated by a different artist.

Virgil Walker, Arthur Bradford's charming tale of an unexpected octopus baby and his fight for freedom, is accompanied by the drawings of Jon Adams:


Easily my favorite fable of the bunch is Brian Evenson's The Book and the Girl. It starts off a quaint story of a girl and her favorite book, but soon develops a dark current of melancholy and dread when an unspecified apocalyptic event befalls the world, hauntingly rendered by Phillip Fivel Nessen's images:


Evenson's story -- which probably wouldn't run longer than a page when typed out -- struck enough of a chord with me in its closing moments that I went ahead and ordered a copy of his short story collection, The Wavering Knife.

A beautiful design and a writer whose work I'm eager to explore; there's really not much more I can ask from a magazine.

LINKS:
McSweeney's Internet Tendency
McSweeney's Quarterly Concern Issue 28

In honor of Comic-Con... A book review!

So...
Comic-Con 2008 kicks off today down in San Diego...And while the culture of Comic-Con facinates me, I have no intention of going. And I also have no intention to make this a blog entry about Comic-Con. But I did think that it would be a great time to post a graphic novel book review!

SIDE NOTE:
For those of you who have been living in a pop-culture bubble, Comic-Con is short for Comic Book Convention, and this particular convention has become the MOTHER OF ALL COMICS CONVENTIONS drawing over 100,000 visitors! If you want to find out info about Comic-Con... I won't be talking about it... Instead you can go here - iFanboy ComicCon episode - or - ComicCon website

So here's my review of the "Abadazad" series:
Abadazad: The Road to Inconceivable (Book 1)
and Abadazad: The Dream Theif (Book 2)
written by J.M. DeMatteis and illustrated by Mike Ploog.


I must say that I was initially quite skeptical of this series. My wife purchased the first book after hearing an interview with the author on NPR almost 2 years ago. She read it quickly and recommended it to me, but "I don't read comics" and the whole thing seemed so young, so I never really paid much attention... A year and a half later, I have finally picked it up... and I could hardly set the books down! Not that they have the intense page-turning allure of a great thriller, but they have an enchanting fun quality that is utterly captivating.

The Abadazad series is a strange beast, very difficult to cleanly categorize, and therefore also very difficult to describe (not that it will keep me from trying).

The primary narrative is based around a contemporary character (14 year old Kate) in something of a fantasy/mystery/adventure story; and while the book is self-purported to be wholly the published diary entries of our heroine, the format in truth is a melding of styles. The traditional diary text flows into and out of more conventional graphic-novel/comic-book styles, and just to make things really interesting we are also introduced to pages "extracted" from a fictional 19th Century fantasy series also written about Abadazad. While all of this sounds incredibly complex (and it is), DeMatteis and Ploog make the labyrinthine interwoven narratives feel seamlessly united in an easy read.

Aside from the unique format of the storytelling itself, it is just as difficult to pin down the intended audience. The writing style is very simple and easy to read (as would be appropriate for the diary entries of a teenage girl) and the author so well captures the point of view of our protagonist, that it seems likely female readers of a similar age and temperament (angsty teen girls) would most strongly connect with her telling of this story. But by the same token, the book is so rich with cultural and literary references that I can't image such a young reader having the breadth of experience to pick up on all the allusions made by our culture savvy author (from Barney, Botox, and The Beatles; to C.S. Lewis, L. Frank Baum, and Tolkien; and from Disney movies to The Matrix; and more)! The result: a book likely targeted and marketed to a younger audience, but one that is no less enjoyable for adult readers.

Now for the bad news...
As of now the story is left unfinished... at least in the United States (more books have been published in the UK). The original story arc was planned for three books with the hope of many more stories to come, but only two books have been published in the US so far, and it is my understanding that no announcement has been made for a pending publication stateside. So... I have been left hanging... just as the adventure was really getting moving!

For the moment, I am trying to get my Abadazad fix through imports (books 3 and 4 have been published in the UK), but even that is proving difficult to find. I am hoping that as word spreads about this smart little series, we can encourage quicker action on the part of our American publishers!

p.s. - For any of you ComicCon nerds who are still hangin' on hoping for more about the convention... I still can't help you. But I will throw out this little nugget: both J.M. DeMatteis and Mike Ploog are in fact bonafide comics artists... DeMatteis has written for Captain America, Justice League, and several Spider-Man series; and Ploog has drawn for several Marvel comics. So there.