E. E. Cummings Lived In Pretty Krazy Town

E.E. Cummings Essay On George Herrimen's Krazy Kat (Excerpt from "A Foreword to Krazy" from A MISCELLANY REVISED by E. E. Cummings)

"What concerns me fundamentaly is a meteoric burlesk melodrama, born of the immemorial adage "love will find a way". This frank frenzy (encouraged by a strictly irrational landscape in perpetual metamorphosis) generates three protagonists and a plot. Two of the protagonists are easily recognized as a cynical brick-throwing mouse and a sentimental policeman-dog. The third protagonist -- whose ambiguous gender doesn't disguise the good news that here comes our heroine -- may be described as a humbly poetic, gently clownlike, supremely innocent, and illimitably affectionate creature (slightly resembling a child's drawing of a cat, but gifted with the secret grace and obvious clumsiness of a penguin on terra firma) who is never so happy as when egoist-mouse, thwarting altruist-dog, hits her in the head with a brick. Dog hates mouse and worships "cat" hits her in the head with a brick. Dog hates mouse and worships "cat", mouse despises "cat" and hates dog, "cat" hates no one and loves mouse. Ignatz Mouse and Offissa Pupp are opposite sides of the same coin. Is Offissa Pupp kind? Only in so far as Ignatz Mouse is cruel. If you're a twofisted, spineless progressive (a mighty fashionable stance nowadays) Offissa Pupp, who forcefully asserts the will of socalled society, becomes a cosmic angel; while Ignatz Mouse, who forcefully defies society's socalled will by asserting his authentic own, becomes a demon of anarchy and a fiend of chaos. But if -- whisper it -- you're a 100% hidebound reactionary, the foot's in the other shoe. Ignatz Mouse then stands forth as a hero, pluckily struggling to keep the flag of free will flying; while Offissa Pupp assumes the monstrous mien of a Goliath, satanically bullying a tiny but indomitable David. Well, let's flip the coin -- so: and lo! Offissa Pupp comes up. That makes Ignatz Mouse "tails." Now we have a hero whose heart has gone to his head and a villain whose head has gone to his heart. This hero and villain no more understand Krazy Kat than the mythical denizens of a two dimensional realm understand some three dimensional intruder. The world of Offissa Pupp and Ignatz Mouse is a knowledgeable power-world, in terms of which our unknowledgeable heroine is powerlessness personified. The sensical law of this world is might makes right; the nonsensical law of our heroine is love conquers all. To put the oak in the acorn: Ignatz Mouse and Offissa Puppers all. To put the oak in the acorn: Ignatz Mouse and Offissa Pupp (each completely convinced that his own particular brand of might makes right) are simple-minded--Krazy isn't--therefore, to Offissa Pupp and Ignatz Mouse, Krazy is. But if both our hero and our villain don't and can't understand our heroine, each of them can and each of them does misunderstand her differently. To our softhearted altruist, she is the adorably helpless incarnation of saintliness. To our hardhearted egoist, she is the puzzlingly indestructible embodiment of idiocy. The benevolent overdog sees her as an inspired weakling. The malevolent undermouse views her as a born target. Meanwhile Krazy Kat, through this double misunderstanding, fulfills her joyous destiny."-E.E. Cummings

Anyone Lived In A Pretty How Town: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15403

Sometimes The Cover Is Better Than The Book

"Ghanavision" is a book I only became aware of recently and has been putting a smile on my face for several days now so I thought I would share the warmth. Here is the description from Amazon, "Against today's copyrighted-to-the-gills Hollywood movie industry, the wacky world of Ghanian movie posters comes as a joyous relief, with its absolute lack of respect for not only the directors and even stars of Hollywood, but especially the official iconography that accompanies such films. With the arrival of the video cassette in West Africa in the 1980s, a type of mobile movie house was born, typically consisting of a TV, a VCR, an electrical generator and a car, sometimes presenting blockbusters, sometimes underrated and nearly-forgotten movies, most of them Hollywood-produced. To promote these screenings, artists were commissioned to handpaint posters, often with only a few stills to guide them as to the movie's subject, and with a completely free hand as to the posters' content--they were at liberty to add or change scenes, toss in a few mutant monsters, anything to catch the prospective customer's eye. By applying this basic rule of packaging, artists created bizarre images in which monsters mixed with naked women and superheroes, pitched against naively painted and weirdly proportioned African landscapes. Sadly, this window of copyright-free anarchy lasted only a short time, and by the end of the 1990s the mobile cinema business had declined as television became more widely available in Ghana. Proof that naked mutant superhero monsters are always where it's at, this wonderfully illustrated volume commemorates a glorious moment in popular art."

The Best Novel Of 2007

"Want to know what an X-Man feels like? Just try being a smart, bookish boy of color in the contemporary US ghetto."
-The Brief And Wonderous Life Of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

One of those miraculous reads that just clicks, and one of my favorite novels as soon as I finished reading it. Diaz combines cultures and languages the way only those in cross ethnic, cultural, and national lines can. Those who can't speak Spanish might not understand certain portions and passages of the book, just as those not well versed in all manner of 20th century nerdom (comics, movies, anime, tv shows, sci-fi novels, card games, etc), might be just as lost in the endless wave of pop culture references. If that's not enough Diaz captures modern slang vernacular just as expertly as all the other dialects floating through this book, which is at once a modern tale about genre obsessed and alienated youth, one families struggles through curses, totalitarian regimes, and history repeating itself, as well as a general history of the modern Dominican Republic. It sounds like a mouthful and it is, but it is also a humane, funny, perfectly structured and manged, amazing read, that's as good on a literary level as it is a pure delight to read. Best book of the decade as far as I'm concerned, hands down.






(Junot Diaz)

Excerpts:

• "Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody's always going on about - he wasn't no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock.

And except for one period early in his life, dude never had much luck with the females (how very un-Dominican of him).

He was seven then.

In those blessed days of his youth, Oscar was something of a Casanova. One of those preschool loverboys who was always trying to kiss the girls, always coming up behind them during a merengue and giving them the pelvic pump, the first nigger to learn the perrito and the one who danced it any chance he got. Because in those days he was (still) a "normal" Dominican boy raised in a "typical" Dominican family, his nascent pimp-liness was encouraged by blood and friends alike. During parties - and there were many parties in those long-ago seventies days, before Washington Heights was Washington Heights, before the Bergenline became a straight shot of Spanish for almost a hundred blocks - some drunk relative inevitably pushed Oscar onto some little girl and then everyone would howl as boy and girl approximated the hip-motism of the adults."

• "Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his own private Mordor; not only did he lock the country away from the rest of the world, isolate it behind behind the plátano curtain, he acted like it was his very own plantation, acted like he owned everything and everyone, killed whomever he wanted to kill, sons, brothers, fathers, mothers, took women away from their husbands on their wedding nights and then would brag publicly about “the great honeymoon” he’d had the night before. His Eye was everywhere; he had a secret police that out-Stasi’ed the Stas..."

• "What had hurt, however, was when Maritza dumped [Oscar]. Monday after he’d fed Olga to the dogs he arrived at the bus stop with his beloved Planet of the Apes lunch box only to discover beautiful Maritza holding hands with butt-ugly Nelson Pardo. Nelson Pardo who looked like Chaka from Land of the Lost! Nelson Pardo who was so stupid he thought the moon was a stain that God had forgotten to clean. (He’ll get to it soon, he assured his whole class.) Nelson Pardo who would become the neighborhood B&E expert before joining the Marines and losing eight toes in the First Gulf War. At first Oscar thought it a mistake; the sun was in his eyes, he’d not slept enough the night before. He stood next to them and admired his lunch box, how realistic and diabolical Dr. Zaius looked. But Maritza wouldn’t even smile at him! Pretended he wasn’t there. We should get married, she said to Nelson, and Nelson grinned moronically, turning up the street to look for the bus. Oscar had been too hurt to speak; he sat down on the curb and felt something overwhelming surge up from his chest, scared the shit out of him, and before he knew it he was crying; when his sister, Lola, walked over and asked him what was the matter he’d shaken his head. Look at the mariconcito, somebody snickered. Somebody else kicked his beloved lunch box and scratched it right across General Urko’s face. When he got on the bus, still crying, the driver, a famously reformed PCP addict, had said, Christ, don’t be a fucking baby."

And Now For Something Completely Different

And Now For Something Completly different is the portion of our broadcast, I dedicate, something that is't a movie, and today's spotlight falls to Osamu Tezuka's "Apollo's Song".

Osamu Tezuka is the Walt Disney of Japanese comics or Manga as they popularly known. He created many of the mediums aesthetics those big eyes and simple cartoonish characters in front of photo journalist backgrounds, etc. Though he is internationally respected, very little of Tezuka's huge body of work has been translated into English. This book, "Apollo Song" is a stand alone graphic novel, not connected to any series, unlike other Tezuka works, like the better known "Astro Boy" and "Buddha" collections.

I'm not too familiar with manga, I guess I always associated manga with those sad lonely creatures I saw in comic book stores, huddling around the anime section and eager to play WarHammer or some such game (In my younger years, there were even things I considered too nerdy and Manga was one of them). I am happy to report back that the younger me was an asshole, who knew nothing about what he was talking about, because "Apollo's Song" is a very good book. Psycho-analysis, mythology, sex, the difference between men and women, social satire, reincarnation, the nature of artifice, and enviornmental concerns all find their voices in Tezuka's crisp black and white drawings.

The story begins with an epilogue where countless scores of men/sperm prepare to race towards a large floating egg with a woman floating inside, where we are told that this is the endless tragedy and primal relationship that has been played out since the dawn of man, and that this is the most basic of all stories, from which all other stories spring.

The first chapter then tells the story of a young man named Shogo who has violently psychotic reactions to any signs of affection. If he sees bees buzzing near flowers he tramples them, if he sees a mother and her kittens he drowns them, etc. What starts off as violence against animals soon escalates to attacking young couples in public until Shogo is eventually arrested and detained for psychological evaluation. In the hospital after several more outbursts Shogo receives shock treatment.

The shock treatment seems to dislodge Shogo's mind completly because the next scene is in the palace of a Greek Godess who curses Shogo for his inability to love, that he may love the same women again and again and always lose her forever. Then our hero begins waking up in different places and different points in time, like as a Nazi soldier loading cattle cars headed to concentration camps, a long distance runner trainer in a reclusive woodland hideaway, a shipwrecked traveler on an island of pascifist talking animals , an assasin in a dystopian future ruled by synthetic humans, and in each of these lives, he encounters and losses the same women but slowly begins to understand the intricacies of love and human affection.


Tezuka is a master of the comics form and knows how to play with and communicate large amounts of information through the simplest renderings. The story telling is heartfelt but also inventive enough to keep you turning through the 500 pages to the end. For those who have never read a Manga and want to see what all the fuss is about I would recommend this as a good introduction. It's adult comics working with a childs fervent imagination, and is about as good of reading material as your likely to find anywhere. A little difficult to get your bearings in this story because the nature of reality and dream are pretty unstable, but if you can stick it out the rewards are great.