| news | 
|
CHABON WRITES INTRO FOR EISNER BIO
The book, published through Dark Horse's imprint M Press, was three years in the making and details the Eisner's life and career over six decades.
“As Will’s authorized biographer, I spent the last three years with the artist in his studio
and his home, as well as poring through his substantial archives at The Ohio State
University Cartoon Research Library and interviewing dozens of his colleagues, friends
and family,” Andelman said in a statement. “We should all be lucky enough to
have left such consistent and positive impressions on so many people for so many years.”
The book hits stores this September.
MUST READ CHABON PIECE ABOUT WRITING MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH
This was a parallel both deeply resonant and lastingly useful. I had just been through, in the years preceding my decampment for the West, a pair of summers that had rattled my nerves and rocked my soul and shook my sense of self—but in a good way. I had drunk a lot, and smoked a lot, and listened to a ton of great music, and talked way too much about all of those activities, and about talking about those activities. I had slept with one man whom I loved, and learned to love another man so much that it would never have occurred to me to want to sleep with him. I had seen things and gone places in and around Pittsburgh, during those summers, that had shocked the innocent, pale, freckled Fitzgerald who lived in the great blank Minnesota of my heart. WALDMAN CRITICIZES PRISON SENTENCES FOR PREGNANT WOMEN
In her newest Salon column, Ayelet Waldman criticizes the imprisonment of women in the United States who are in labor and delivery.
HAPPY 42, CHABON!Tuesday, May 24, 2005, 10:42 PM ET
Today's Michael Chabon's birthday, making him 42.
CHABON SUGGESTS SUMMER READING
According to the site, Warshow covered pop-culture movies, such as Westerns and ganster flicks, and comic books for Commentary and The Nation until his death at 37.
"He's the first serious critic to take popular culture serious," Chabon says in an audio clip at the site. "But underlying everything the great writing, the sort of ferocious point-opf-view, the sense of encyclopedia knowledge, underlying all of that is simply a love affair with the movies."
"He has I guess a somewhat well-known quote that 'a man watches a movie and the critic can't forget the man,'" Chabon continues. "And so his own conciousness as someone enjoying a movie is always a part of his writing about movies or comic books. He has a great a great essay in there about the comic strip Crazy Katz, and again this idea of plessure and subjectivity is very much a part of his approach to popular culture, which I think is the correct way to approach popular culture."
To see the picks of 10 other authors and to hear an audio clip of Chabon discussing his pick, click here.
WALDMAN QUESTIONS DRUGS INFLUENCE ON PREGNANCY
Salon has Ayelet Waldman's newest column, this time dealing with her pregnancy with Abraham and what influence depression drugs may have had on her pregnancy.
ESCAPIST UP FOR TWO HARVEY AWARDS
Michael Chabon Presents The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist received two nominations Sunday for the 2005 Harvey Awards, including "Best New Series" and "Best Anthology, the same category it received a nomination for in the 2005 Eisner Awards.
For "Best New Series," the Escapist will compete against Wildstorm's Ex Machina: The First Hundred Days, Drawn & Quarterly's Or Else, Top Shelf's Owly, and Marvel's 1602.
Competitors in the "Best Anthology" category include Image Comics' Fight #1, Gingko Press' Kramer s Ergot #5, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern #13, and Nickelodeon
Chabon wrote an essay in McSweeney's Quarterly #13, edited by Chris Ware.
Brian K. Vaughan, the new Escapist writer, received one nomination from the Harvey Awards, with "Best New Series" for Ex Machina: The First Hundred Days.
The winners will be announced June 11 by the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art.
Got news? E-mail me!
Friday, May 27, 2005, 3:00 PM ET
Source: Dark Horse Comics
Bob Andelman's Will Eisner: A Spirited Life, the late comic artist's official biography, will feature an introduction by Michael Chabon, according to a press release from Dark Horse Comics.
Wednesday, May 25, 2005, 3:30 AM ET
Source: The New York Review of Books
The most recent issue of The New York Review of Books features an incredible first-hand account by Michael Chabon of what brought him to write The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, now celebrating its 15th anniversary. I strongly recommend reading the essay if you have any desire to understand Chabon's influences and style back then and now.
There were two more crucial observations that came out of my reading of Goodbye, Columbus on the heels of The Great Gatsby. One was that Roth's book was a hell of a lot funnier than Fitzgerald's, which almost isn't funny at all, especially when, as in the famous Party-Guest Catalog, it tries its hardest to amuse. The second observation, of the most striking parallel between the two books, got me so excited, once I noticed it, that I rushed through the whole Mrs.-Patimkin-finds-the-diaphragm sequence, so that I could get up again and resume my caged-bear perambulations: both books, I noticed, coincided precisely with a summer.
To read the rest, click here.
Wednesday, May 25, 2005, 3:30 AM ET
Source: Salon
It is hard to figure out the philosophy, either articulated or presumed, behind treating women and their babies this way. As much as prison maternity policy can sometimes feel like an especially cruel and institutionalized form of child abuse, I doubt the individuals running the prisons of this country are consciously trying to harm the infants born to prisoners. Cristina Rathbone, an investigative journalist whose book "A World Apart: Women, Prison, and Life Behind Bars" follows the lives of four prisoners at MCI-Framingham, a Massachusetts women's prison, attributes the treatment of women in prison to a kind of unconscious cruelty. Because women are a minority in prisons, they suffer the rules that have been invented for violent men. California Department of Correction policies simply state that all inmates must be shackled when being transported to and from the hospital and while in their hospital beds. No exceptions have ever been made, not even for terminally ill or comatose prisoners, so none are made for pregnant and laboring prisoners. Until Assembly member Sally Lieber, the author and sponsor of the bill, took an interest, it simply never occurred to anyone in a position of authority that there was anything wrong with that.
To read the rest, click here.
Source: Exclusive
Tuesday, May 17, 2005, 7:05 PM ET
Source: Nextbook
Nextbook has Michael Chabon's summer reading pick: The Immediate Experience by Robert Warshow.
Thursday, May 12, 2005, 1:20 AM ET
Source: Salon
None of my children are perfect. There is one who bites her toenails, another who spends his free time working to achieve the perfect armpit fart. They have twisted baby toes and hooked noses, crooked teeth and ears that stick out. But these imperfections do not disturb me. I note them the way you see and remember everything about the topography of your children's bodies, but I don't worry about them. I don't wonder about where they came from or if they are symptoms of other, more serious conditions. Except when it comes to my youngest child, Abraham. I assess every one of my fourth child's flaws and minor disfigurements with the cold eye of a clinician, appraising and evaluating for tiny chromosomal mutations, subtle hints of genetic or gestational damage. Are the traces of fuzz on his upper lip and between his eyebrows signs of some underlying disorder characterized by unusually thick infant body hair? Is his small chin receding enough to be considered a birth defect? Why couldn't he breast-feed? Why does his foot turn out, causing a hitch in his step?
To read the entire piece, click here.
Monday, May 2, 2005, 1:20 PM ET
Source: Newsarama