Nice interview in the latest edition of Bookslut with Dave Housley, the D.C author of the short-story collection Ryan Seacrest Is Famous (we profiled him in November '07) and coeditor at the literary journal Barrelhouse (which disclosed its Patrick Swayze anxiety in our pages last April). He talks a little about Barrelhouse, the story collection, and Swayze, but the best exchange involves a hypothetical scenario:

You are in a little room with Ryan Seacrest, 40 copies of your book, and an oversized toothbrush. Ryan Seacrest has a cellphone with your mother's number in it. He also has a squirt tube of skin bronzer in his tight jean pockets. There are no windows or doors in the room, but there is a TV, and Ryan Seacrest is trying to watch TV. What's going to happen?

Now, the most interesting part of this is that squirt tube of skin bronzer. I really feel like he might have that in his tight jean pockets. Do you think when he leaves the house he actually might have a squirt tube of skin bronzer? He probably would carry it in a little man-purse, or he'd have an assistant carry it for him and he'd shout "TAN" every now and then, and the assistant would have to come rub bronzer on Ryan Seacrest, and then by the end of the day, the assistant's $500 jeans would be the exact color of Ryan Seacrest's hair, because he's been given nothing to wipe his hands on, other than Ryan Seacrest.

Photo of Dave Housley by Darrow Montgomery

Art Taylor, a local writer, critic, and George Mason University English prof who also works on GMU's annual Fall for the Book Festival, has been making a few revisions to his novel in progress. The book is set in 1984, so he's been careful about matters of historical authenticity. Very careful: In a blog post he explains why he had to replace the word dickwad with the word dickweed in a passage. Dickwad only came into circulation in 1989, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, while dickweed started making the rounds in 1984, made famous two years later in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure ("You killed Ted, you Medieval dick-weed!")

No word on the provenance on dillweed, though I'd guess it was a way for Mike Judge to get dickweed past MTV's censors, in time making the word safe for AT&T ads:

This project will build a working “SimCity” model of Washington, DC, visualizing the federal buildings and placing avatars of elected and appointed officials in and around them. Based in open source tools such as Blender and the Python language, the environment will be built from the ground up with hooks to work with other open source data-driven projects as well as social networking sites. (The interface and engine can be brokered to model any state's capitol, or any city in any state or nation.) Beyond the platform interface, the goal is to attach vast databases of public information: The effects of federal policies/politics on local policies/politics; the structure of financial relationships and their effects on policies/politics. Strong journalism – print, broadcast and new media – that relates these communities to Washington will be easy to find and new audiences will appreciate the relevance to their communities.

This may be an improvement over hiring a smart reporter in a D.C. bureau. I can't see how, though.

Fiction
Sway by Zachary Lazar
Indignation by Philip Roth
World Made by Hand by James Howard Kunstler
Peace by Richard Bausch
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, translated by Richard Pevear
Roseanna, The Man Who Went Up in Smoke and The Man on the Balcony by Maj Sjowall and Per Waloo

Nonfiction
Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt
Like a Rolling Stone: The Strange Life of a Tribute Band by Steven Kurutz
Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@*#! by Art Spiegelman
Washington Burning by Les Standiford
God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 by David Levering Lewis

I've let VOA Special English fall out of my regular listening habits for a while, but Comics DC reminds me of reason to tune in again: Yesterday the network aired a lengthy feature on comic books that includes quotes from staffers at Springfield's NOVA Comics and Games. An excerpt from the show should give you an idea of how simple the storytelling is:

Comics use drawings and words to tell stories that can be funny or serious, or a little of both. Comic books grew out of comic strips in newspapers.

One of the most successful early comic characters in America was Mickey Dugan, better known as "the Yellow Kid." He wore a yellow coat that was too big for him.

He was a character in a comic strip in New York called "Hogan’s Alley" by Richard Felton Outcault. It provided social commentary on the problems of cities.

But you really have to listen to the report to get the full effect. True, you may fall asleep on the Metro while listening to it. But that's a small price to pay for utter peace.

Last December City Paper editor Erik Wemple launched a series on City Desk called "Bad Gift Idea," which catalogued some of the worst things you could possibly give to your loved ones during the holidays. It proved to be one of the biggest features ever on this blog---gathering, at one point, more than 8 million pageviews daily.*

Its sole failing was launching a little too late---I've been getting wish-list requests since Halloween. So there's no time like now to start talking about bad gift ideas. To be fair, The Oxford Book of Death isn't exactly pitching itself as a great gift. But the timing of its publication in the United States---Dec. 15---suggests that it may catch the eye of a few last-minute holiday shoppers. Seems weighty. Looks smart. But totally inappropriate for SAD times.

If you're still tempted, OUP's blog has a few selections of famous last words from some historical figures. For my money (which won't be spent giving this book to a close friend or relative!), Andre Gide's is the best of the batch: "I am afraid my sentences are becoming grammatically incorrect."

* Totally made up. But what media organization is being honest in public about its Web traffic?

Years before it was a Sunday newspaper supplement that presciently united John McCain and a certain Sarah Palin lookalike, Life was a weekly newsmagazine that was the gold standard in photojournalism. Though it's probably bad news that signals the hastening death spiral of glossy news magazines, it's still interesting to look at the Life photo archive, which Google has just put online. Searching on the keywords "Washington DC" turns up some fun stuff, including the picture above of moving boxes at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, taken around the time of its opening in 1974.

If the sanctuary was largely filled with people concerned about the state of public education, the sidewalk outside the church was filled with folks who aren't letting go of Ayers' connection to the Weather Underground. Raoul Deming, a bearded, middle-aged man who drove to the event from Philadelphia, held up a sign reading, "AYERS LIED PEOPLE DIED NO JUSTICE NO PEACE." The end of the election cycle hasn't lessened his anger at Ayers' attachment to terrorist activity. "These people killed people," he says.

Conservative rageblog the Jawa Report has footage of Deming and a few other protesters in front of the church:

Due to the large number of people and media who want to attend the event with William Ayers, we have moved it to a venue that can accommodate a larger audience. It will be held at: All Souls Church, 1500 Harvard Street NW, Washington, DC 20009. The entrance is on Harvard between 15th and 16th. Street parking is available and it is walking distance from the Columbia Heights Metro.

The reading starts at 6:30 p.m. Should be interesting to see how much heckling takes place in a church...

The violence-embracing Marxist is on the lecture and media circuit, hawking his repackaged memoir, promoting a new book on race, and basking in all the post-Obama victory attention.

While pondering the idea of how glorious it must feel to bask in all the attention you'll get at a reading at Busboys & Poets---on a Monday night!---scroll through the comments of Malkin's post, which ponders shooting Ayers for treason or bombing his house. Must be part of that Republican party-rebuilding effort I've been hearing about.

There's a big missed opportunity here, though. There are plenty of Mailer scholars---or just garden-variety lit nerds like myself---who'd love a peek at the file. So why won't washingtonpost.com, which prides itself on pioneering new ways to make stories sticky and engaging online---post a few jpegs or PDFs from it? If nothing else, I'd like to see the FBI agent's attempt at a review of Mailer's book about the '68 conventions, Miami and the Seige of Chicago. "It is written in his usual obscene and bitter style," the agent explained.

That's something the comic artist kept stressing to me when we spoke by phone about a week ago. But Spiegelman---best known for his two-volume graphic novel about his father's experiences during the Holocaust, Maus---in't about to deny his influence, either. In the Q&A below, he discusses his recently reissued 1978 collection Breakdowns (reviewed in this week's City Paper), the grammar of comic art, the legacy of his work, and more.

Spiegelman will discuss Breakdowns on Friday, Nov. 7, at 7 p.m. at Politics and Prose.

What prompted Pantheon to take an interest in republishing Breakdowns?

My editor became aware of the book when I was running around like Willy Loman with his sample case on a book tour for In the Shadow of No Towers. In talking about that work, it was necessary for me to bring up the work from that period in Breakdowns. The kinds of things I was doing with comics in Breakdowns were kind of being subsumed and run in reverse in Maus, so that one wouldn’t notice that it was a complex comics-page structure that was delivering a narrative in Maus---but in Breakdowns, it was all about its structures.

In order to talk about the No Towers book, which returned to that---I don’t know what to say---grammar, visual grammar---I had to refer back to the earlier work. My editor at Pantheon said, ‘So what’s this Breakdowns thing?’ So I showed it to him and he said, “Oh, we’d love to publish that.”

Though you say in the new afterword that you expressed a little resistance to that.

I just felt it couldn’t be reprinted. But then I’m just an old hick.

How long had it been since you spent time looking at the works in Breakdowns?

I don’t know how much time passed, but I’m always aware of the work. Because I don’t think of it as juvenalia. I think of it as the core of my work. Maus grew out of it. Everything else grew out of it. Those were works that I was grateful to have been able to make at the time.

In the opening of Breakdowns you describe bursting into tears when thinking about “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” in 2005…

Those scars close up, but they don’t heal over. Which is why I always wonder when people ask, “Do you think what you do is some kind of therapy?” If it is, it’s the world’s most failed therapy I’ve ever entered into, even though I had no belief that it would make me feel better.

Did you see the piece in Slate about Breakdowns? [Sarah Boxer’s slideshow-driven essay opens by asking, “Is it really possible for Art Spiegelman to make comics after Mauschwitz? That question hangs over every comic strip and book that he has penned since Maus."]

I just read it this morning. It’s interesting. It’s got a lot of barbs to it, so I still have to try to understand aspects of it. I think that in some sense, Maus, as I’ve said in various self-aware, self-conscious works of my own, is this kind of large monument to the shadow I live in, the work of which was done on the piles of the dead. But in some ways, that shadow that I’m wandering in---if you’ll forgive me for sounding arrogant---is the same shadow that is cast over, a) a century, and b) certainly every other comics artist trying to make ambitious comics in its wake.

There's a shadow over every other comics artist....?

Oh, it’s a big shadow: “Oh, that’s interesting, but it’s not Maus.” They have to live with that also. Another writer who lived with that in a different way is Joseph Heller, where whatever he worked on, he was told, “Yes, but it’s no Catch-22,” and then shrugged and said, “Yes, but what is?”

So there’s that. I think that the work in Breakdowns, maybe because it’s this morning and I’m being interviewed after having read that Slate thing, I’m thinking “Yeahhhhh, but you’re not taking the measure of that work, Ms. Boxer, of Breakdowns. The work in the ’78 Breakdowns made a lot possible even if Maus hadn’t happened.

For you personally or for all comic artists?

I think both. I’m sorry, I’m going to sound incredibly arrogant---maybe that’s a form of defensiveness, I don’t know. But I believe that the work actually changed the terms under which things were getting made.

Can you unpack that a little?

I can, but I gotta keep apologizing because I know that on some level it’s not polite to say this about one’s own work. Somebody else is supposed to say that. If you did an interview with Scott McCloud, he would point to, at least as I’ve heard from him directly, that the essay “Cracking Jokes” made Understanding Comics possible. I’ve done the postgraduate, un-understandable Understanding Comics.

Do you have a favorite among those pieces?

I think that “Hell Planet” is the essential piece that made a lot happen for me. It really was diving into the heart of my darkness and also the heart of reworking what comics’ grammar could make possible by changing the terms of everything from drawing styles to how the breakdowns---meaning the page layouts---might work. As well as whatever there was in that subject matter.

But on the other hand, I would say that the most sophisticated piece I did---and I’m still as proud of it as anything I’ve done---is “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” Probably because it’s the most difficult. Which isn’t to say that nobody looked at it and understood it, because other comics artists have found that a useful place to build from. [laughs] This is such a complex conversation because I’m really terrified of sounding like some kind of idiotic, bragging, “I did that! And I did that!” And yet I’m trying to deal with this stuff and what I’ve been able to make.

Clearly it was a crystallizing moment in your career.

I mean---yes, Chris Ware, yes, Alan Moore, yes Scott McCloud, and a number of other things have come more obviously from Maus in the years since. They’re all engaged with certain things that I’ve been able to wrench out and put down. There’s this phrase I keep hearing without ever having read the essay it came from: the anxiety of influence. I think I tried to make as clear as I can the debts I owe to other artists: Robert Crumb, Justin Green, who did the Pinky Brown comic, to Harvey Kurtzman and beyond. I couldn’t have done anything like what I did if those things weren’t present for me to work from. Breakdowns added something that other artists needed in order to make the kind of work they did, so it’s fine to have it back out in the world.

This may return to the arrogance question, but you write in the afterword that with Breakdowns you were “breaking the one taboo left standing: He dared to call himself an artist and call his medium an art form."

The taboo was to call oneself an artist, not to make art. There’s been great art in comics, from the 1830s till tomorrow. But there’s something about the legacy of comics that has to do with its ephemeral nature that was, I think, embraced in the underground comics, from the format on down. A newsprint pamphlet---if you reread it it’s because you’re so stoned you forgot you read it the first time.

There was a nobility in being ephemeral.

Yeah. Because a lot of people who were doing it were refugee art students. I never came quite from that place. They were people who had gone to Pratt, let’s say. There were artists who never went to college---I don’t think Robert Crumb did, and he never wondered twice about what he was doing. He was drawing comics as a prodigy, as a preteen that were better than what most people accomplish as adults. Certainly Bill Griffith, and I think Justin Green and Kim Deitch were all refugee art students embracing this underground comics thing without having to wrestle with it as I did.

I think because it was imprinted on me late, like when I was 20, after I had absorbed my Mad comics lessons, I was interested to see how this could graft back into what comics could be. I was careful with my language. It’s not that I thought I was the first person to think that comics might be art---that would be insane.

A lot of the artists you mentioned got their start in underground newspapers or alt-weeklies. What are the best options for a young artist now to get their work seen?

Right now there are more possibilities than there ever have been, with more of an upside than in most of my memory. Which is to say that there are still alternative weeklies, and they do still run comics, but the whole adventure of print on paper is in jeopardy. That being said, there’s the result of this faustian deal---comics either become higher culture or disappear---which has allowed them to come into libraries, museums, bookstores while they exist, and academia, so they can do much more. They’ve been given permission to do much more and an audience that will allow them to do much more. A young artist starting now is either going to start out publishing little book-object-zines and networking through that subculture. There’s one near you in Bethesda…

Small Press Expo.

Yeah. And there’s one in San Francisco and there’s one in New York, and some really juicy stuff is coming out of that world. It leads from self-publishing, to smallish publishing to medium publishers to publishing. I’ve seen that happen for a number of artists over and over again.

On the other hand, there’s that damn Web. It’s a total crapshoot as to whether you can find and attract an audience. It’s possible. I was listening to a panel on Web comic artists last year at the New York version of SPX, MOCA fest. Panelists were saying they’re more interested in putting their comics on the Web than in making Web comics. Because those can be retrofitted into print, and some of that has become very successful. Gene Yang made a book called American Born Chinese. It appeared on the Web, and then a publisher called First Second. Diary of a Wimpy Kid is one of the most successful young adult books out there now.

Have you been experimenting on the Web?

Oh, no. I’ve been very resistant about falling into that particular rabbit hole.

Why is that?

I love paper. And printing on paper. And the process of printing---it informed Breakdowns, some of it’s about the printing process. So as long as they’re making paper and they’ll let me use it, I’m there. Even though I’m not a luddite. I now have no comics originals to speak of. I have piles of rubble that form themselves into the proper configuration of pixels to become the next work. I used to draw on Bristol board and have it photographed. Now, I just draw on scraps of paper, I work directly on the computer, and print it out and trace it over and refine it that way. The original underlying work no longer looks like an original page of comics art.

What will you’ll be discussing at Politics and Prose?

Unlike, say, the Maus books, and unlike, say, No Towers, where I at least had world-historical events to show on slides and talk about, here the content is quite complex and elusive---and in a way is hermetically sealed in the new Breakdowns book that contains the old Breakdowns book. It’s the cream inside the sandwich. But I did spend two-plus years after my editor said, “Let’s do Breakdowns” finding a way to make something that was worth putting out again. As a result, I’m left with either talking about me or talking about comics, and from comics talking about how one is wired and how one thinks---not me, but how one thinks, and why comics have been so central, where I’ve remained no matter what.

It’ll be a dense talk, probably, about comics and me and how cartoons function in the brain. But without knowing what form it’ll take till I get there, because I’ve been doing something different each time out. Is it after the election or before?

After.

So either I’ll come down and be very fluid, happy, and talking. Or I’ll be catatonic.

Of course you can. Black Plastic Bag contributor Brandon Wu has a great batch of images up on his Flickr page.