Reb's academic reading challenge for 2017

Another year is almost done, which means it's time to release the chart for next year's academic reading challenge.  See below for rules, rationale, and a handy chart to keep track of your reading.  If you want a word doc with the chart on it, send me a message with your email address. As I get to the end of my own reading year, I'll do some summing up posts and invite report backs from anyone who finished the 2016 challenge.

 Rationale:

This is a challenge I created for academics who feel that their reading has become over-specialized and possibly joyless, who want to read more literature for pleasure, who want to broaden the way they approach their own research and teaching, who like to talk about reading with each other, who are interested in interdisciplinary reading, and who want to support their friends and colleagues by reading their books.  

  You don’t have to be a professor to do the challenge. Maybe you graduated from school but you miss reading academic books. Maybe you're a geek and you like to read scholarly literature. 

The challenge starts on January 1,  2017 at midnight and goes till Dec. 31, 2017 at 11:59!

. There are a total of 15 regular categories in the challenge with three “extra credit” categories for over-achievers.  There are also double-points available in a few categories.

Rules and guidelines:

The academic books must be at least 175 pages long

Novels must be at least 200 pages long

Books of poetry or special issues of journals must be at least 100 pp. long

One book can be a children's or YA book.

To decide whether a book is academic, look for something published by a university press.

Any book on the list, except where specified by category, can be a novel or a complete journal issue as long as it fits the general category

Books can only count for one category, but you can switch them from one category to the other before you’re done if you like.  (In other words, you can't count a book by your friend who wrote about food for both the food and "by a friend" category)

Only one book can be something you’ve read before

Audiobooks are fine as long as they are unabridged and the print edition is at least 200 pages long.

Books must be started no earlier than midnight 1/1/17 and finished no later midnight 12/31/2017.

Points: This isn't a competition, but if you're counting…

Total possible points for 1-15 without "double-point bonuses" : 200. 

If you do all the double-point bonuses and do extra-credit, you can get the maximum of 260 points.

Category	Author	Title	pages	Date finished	points
1. A book by a friend or colleague					10
2.  A book you first saw in a Social media post or heard about on a podcast, or radio show					10
3. A classic in your field or book you see cited often but have never read					10
4. An academic book about a (non-human) animal or animals					20
5. A book that you've started in the past but never finished					10
6.  A work of literary fiction published in the last five years (bonus points if it's published outside the U.S or the U.K )					10 (20)
7.  A book about a subject or field that you study, but in a country that you don't usually study (bonus points for books published outside the US/UK)					20 (30)
8.  A book about popular culture outside the United States or England					20
9. A book about an immigrant or migrant community					10
10.  A book by a prisoner or formerly incarcerated person					10
11,  A book in your field or current research project published since 2013					10
12.  A book in your field or current research project published before 1980					20
13. A book about religion					20
14. An academic book about sex, sexuality, sex work; OR about food, agriculture or food-service work (Double points if you manage to read one of each, or to combine them - a book about sexy food)					10 (20)
15. A book about teaching, pedagogy, or an ethnographic study of students and/or teachers					10
16.  Extra Credit:  A book that you loved as a child or teenager, but that you haven't read since then					10
17. Extra, EXTRA credit : Read a web comic every week for a year					10
18. Super Duper Extra Credit: A book that you bought on a whim   double points  if you experienced this whim a year ago or more but still haven't read the book					5 (10)

Reading Suggestions for the Electoral College

The electoral college chooses the president of the United States on December 19th. A number of arguments are being made about whether it would make sense to abolish the electoral college in the future, for the electoral college to act as "Hamilton electors" (and choose someone that nobody voted for) or for the electoral college to follow the popular vote and elect Hillary Clinton president. Now Drumpf has claimed, following conspiracy-theorist Alex Jones, that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote because "illegal" people voted for. her  This latest tweet storm suggests that for the Drumpf followers, many of us aren't "real" Americans at all.

With that said, here are my suggested readings for the electoral college.

Frances Fox-Piven is a bugbear for the far-right, but that is only because she presents such compelling arguments that they cannot get her on evidence, thus they resort to conspiracy theories and ad-hominem attacks. Since her famous book with Richard Cloward, Why Americans Don't Vote, she has produced two updated works, first Why Americans Still Don't Vote, and most recently, Keeping Down the Black Vote: Race and the Demobilization of American Voters. Since false claims of voter-fraud have played a significant role in this election, this may be the first stop for the electoral college in deciding how democratic this process of election has really been, and where exactly the Constitutional crisis began.

Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night concerns the dynamics of collaboration with an evil regime, regardless of intention, with the moral that "we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." I haven't read the book, but came across it in a discussion of the German physicists who continued to work for the Nazis throughout the war, and how it was they believed that what they did wasn't as important, as what they meant. But no, I agree with the author, what people actually do is much more important than how they feel about it, or what they mean deep inside.  Along with this, they might also read Hannah Arendt's famous essay, Eichmann in Jerusalem.

This is a long one, but seems important in light of the recent laser-focus on the electoral college and the possibility that voting otherwise than in recent past-practice would provoke a Constitutional crisis that could imperil democracy (more so than the threats presented by the president elect). Michael Klarman's Framer's Coup explains how the Constitution was meant not to increase, but to deter democracy. It builds on arguments first put forward by Charles and Mary Beard, popularized for this generation by Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, and then more recently explained in detail by Woody Holton who is also the author of one my favorite books on the American Revolution,, Forced Founders.  According to the review linked above, Klarman presents more documentary evidence than the prior accounts.

And finally, for the specific threat posed by Drumpf himself, perhaps they might want to read this book, Trump Unveiled which is currently on sale for just $1 from OR books.

And for the listening portion of this edition of reading & listening, here is the German band Die Artze, whose anti-fascist song of the 1990s, "Schrei Nach Liebe" gained new popularity in Germany following fascist attacks on Syrian refugees last year.

What I'm reading now. - back to school reading blog

  I ran into one of this blog's regular readers at the bookstore the other day, and he wanted to know what I am reading now. It's rare that someone who's not your student actually asks for a copy of a syllabus, so this reminded me that I've been negligent about posting here. I don't have much of an excuse. I'm 6 books behind in my Goodreads challenge.  One of my bad habits is reading too many books at once, which often means that I don't finish all of them, but I do try to keep reading in a few categories at all times.

For teaching, I just finished reading a book that's really valuable for anyone teaching the hard to define introduction to American Studies class, Paul Lauter's book From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park. Lauter is an American Studies veteran. He's an emeritus professor at Trinity College in Connecticut, has been the president of the American Studies Association, and also general editor of the original and now legendary, Heath Anthology of American Literature. This is a collection of essays published in 2001, based on essays and talks given at various spaces during Lauter's long academic career.. For anyone teaching American Studies, or American Literature, it's very helpful not necessarily as a source of essays to put on your syllabus, but because of how it prods reflection about what your overall objectives in a course might be. That is, how do you want to help students approach texts? What kinds of questions do you want them to ask? What are the politics of teaching and reading literature - what are the politics, conscious or unconscious, of your own course?  The essays cover a variety of topics, including critical readings of texts, discussions of real-world academic labor unions, and the contemporary state of the field in American Studies, including a somewhat unorthodox take on academic priorities of transnationalism and exceptionalism. If I were teaching an American Studies pedagogy class at the graduate level, this would be on my syllabus. This would also be a book I would choose for a faculty group who wanted to learn more about the field.

For research: I just cracked open Stanley Fish's Is There a Text in this Class? I'm kind of embarrassed that I never read this when it came out, and though I thought it was old hat, it seems as if reception studies may be making a comeback. I was recently instructed by an anonymous reader of an article I'm working on that I need to read more reader-response criticism to frame my findings in my own reader-reception study project, so I decided I should make my way through it. I often find Stanley Fish's writing about academia and politics to be pompous and odious, but I'm already finding much of use in this book regarding the process of reading, and I hate to say it, but I think that given my argument in my own work-in-progress, that I will probably also read his newest book Winning Arguments and find it useful. Earlier in the summer, I read Janice Radway's Reading the Romance, which I had partially read in graduate school in the 1990s, and found it refreshing and still relevant. Radway has also written a more recent essay that appears in a good and wide-ranging edited collection New Directions in American Reception Study. What I especially like about this field of interdisciplinary scholarship on literature is how useful it is for thinking about students' encounters with texts.

   For my book project, I've just started, and am impressed by, but have little to say yet about Laurent Binet's historical novel, HHhH, about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.

For the Academic Reading Challenge:

  For the category of a book about places that are being discussed in the presidential election foreign policy debates , I'm reading Patrick Cockburn's collection of reporting on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the production of ISIS: Chaos and Caliphate.  Cockburn writes for the British newspaper The Independent.  At 90 pages in,  this selection of his writing from the 1990s to the present, makes it clear that Americans have too easily forgotten and ignored the horrors of the pre-2003 sanctions regime in Iraq, as well as the subsequent and ongoing wars. This book is valuable because it both offers vivid reporting of how the ongoing wars have affected individuals as well as the larger international relationships, leadership decisions, and political conflicts that are driving the situation. 

Poetry: Inglan is a Bitch, You Better Face Up to It

I started my morning by reading a post at Slate about why Yale students should not call for the abolition of the two-semester pre-requisite for English majors. This freshman seminar in  Major English Poets, is a sequence that includes the writing of the following eight poets: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser and Donne in the fall and Milton, Pope, Wordsworth and Eliot in the spring. Yale describes this English poets seminar as a unique and definitive element of their curriculum. Certainly, I can imagine that many students appreciate spending an entire year reading the work of these poets, but I can also imagine exactly what the students behind the petition describe, that many students find the course to be an alienating entry-level course for a major in English literature. Two professors who teach the course have agreed with the students and say they would welcome an opportunity to rethink the curriculum in a story about the petition in the Yale Daily News.

Katy Waldman, the Slate writer whose piece is linked above takes students to task for what she sees as a "stay in your own lane" approach to literature that narrowly rejects the capacity of writers to empathize and describe universal truths about the human condition. But despite the calls for abolishing a course focused on "dead white men" this is not about students failing to appreciate Shakespeare or Milton's impact on literature, or trying to erase history by replacing the past with a fantasy of diversity and inclusion. It's a failure of empathy on Waldman's part to refuse to acknowledge what the students, and the supporting faculty are saying about the impact of a remarkably narrow core curriculum on beginning students who want to declare an academic major.

    This argument about literature's capacity to reveal universal truth also  misunderstands the historical nature of literary canons and their relationship to national identity. I am ambivalent about calls for inclusion in core curricula, which can be merely additive and often are based on ahistorical representations of people in the past (Chaucer was not "white").  On the other hand, canons of national literature exist to celebrate a particular vision of what "culture" is and can serve to extract literature from any historical or cultural context. On the question of the historical and political context of literary production, I still find Edward Said indispensable. On canons more generally, people who care about debates like this should review the arguments made when this was  a hot subject twenty years ago, by John Guillory in Cultural Capital: the Problem of Literary Canon Formation. They might also be interested in this book: From Outlaw to Classic,  about canon formation in American literature that was published a few years ago.

As the Yale Daily News has reported:

English Professor and Associate Director of Undergraduate Students Jill Richards said she is proud of these student activists and hopes their demands for a diversified curriculum are heard in the wider English department.

“It is unacceptable that the two semester requirement for all majors routinely covers the work of eight white, male poets,” Richards said.

She added that although the later half of the series allows professors to choose one additional poet, who might contribute to the diversity of the course, this elective addition is not always taken, nor does it necessarily depart from the entirely white male tradition that came before.

      Yale has a number of courses representing global literature in English, including American literature, and many of those faculty would probably also welcome the opportunity to revise the curriculum to be more global and less Anglo-centric.
  The current English curriculum treats all of these courses essentially as electives. According to the department website: the major includes the two semester poetry sequence (or four other courses on English poets) + 2 other introductory English classes. After that, they must take an additional three courses in pre-1800 English literature, one in pre-1900 English literature, and one American literature course, and two additional seminars, which may or may not be on pre-20th century literature. That leaves them with six additional English courses to play with. It's not nothing, but as the students say, the core of the program emphasizes English literature from England, and requires much early coursework in pre-20th century literature.

For those who are writing about the students need for empathy, it seems patently clear that they cannot themselves imagine for even a second what it feels like to sit in a room where the national culture of a people who have colonized your people is celebrated and honored as the origin of all civilized thinking, universal human truth, and linguistic innovation.

 What else could Yale do? If they must stick with a two-semester poetry sequence, there's quite a bit, particularly in the second semester.



The early period is a tough one. Chaucer, lived from around 1343-1400. It's not a period when there was mechanized printing or from which we have a huge number of extant works written in English that were influential on other writers. However, there are two significant literary works from this period: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a precursor to Arthurian legend and the Irish Kildare poems, which include the Land of Cokaygne, a satirical commentary on wealth and power that is also at the root of a radical tradition of historical significance.  This is not to say that Chaucer is some establishment figure, but to recognize that the 14th century was not just a vacuum in which only one writer existed, and to acknowledge that students might relate to reading poems from folk traditions that have also had great impact on the history of literature (the Utopian imagination, and the entire genre of fantasy as influenced by Arthurian legend).

The bulk of  the work taught in the first semester comes from the 16th-17th centuries. Edmund Spenser lived from 1553 to 1599, Shakespeare from 1564 until 1614., John Donne from 1572-1631 and Milton from 1608-to 1674. There was a huge burst of creative energy during this period, and there are indeed other poets who wrote in English. However, it would not be so bad, in my view, if one semester of a course like this focused on these poets.

The second semester is much less defensible.  It includes, in addition to Milton, the following writers: Pope (1688-1744); Wordsworth (1770-1850) and T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), the only American in the group, and the only representative of 20th century literature. I understand that it may be impossible to get students to read pre-20th century literature without requiring it. However, it's not as if there aren't other major poets writing in English during this time period.  Pope, Wordsworth and Eliot are not just "dead, white men" they are dead white men with notably conservative responses to the movements and great historic transformations wrought in their own times. Milton was at least opposed to monarchy.
Why teach Wordsworth - but not William Blake? or Shelley, Burns, the Brownings or anyone else from the more democratic or radical political tradition in English Romanticism? These are hardly marginal figures.

And as for the only representative of 20th century poetry, or American poetry being T.S. Eliot, there really is no excuse.



Why teach the American, T. S. Eliot, but not the Nobel-Prize winning subject of the British empire,  Rabindranath Tagore?
Another more British contemporary of Eliot was the great Dylan Thomas
Or the former British subject, Claude McKay, who had a shorter career, but was remarkably influential on a whole generation of writers.
Or, since Eliot was American, it goes without saying, the incredibly influential poet, Langston Hughes?
    As for women poets, there have been many.  English literature is global, as the editors of the Norton Anthology of Poetry figured out a long time ago.

 

Read Locally...Books Set in New York City: Borough By Borough

   The other day, when I was listening to a podcast that shall remain nameless, I heard someone ask for recommendations for what her college-age daughter should read when she moved to New York City.  It's thought-provoking question to a person who loves to be where they live in every way.  Reading books, regardless of topic, about a place you're moving to, or just visiting for the first time gives you a perspective on the place that's different from what you'd get from tourist guides. It can surround you in the atmosphere of that place before you get there, creating an imaginary landscape that you can be more thrilled about seeing "for real"when you finally set foot there.  Reading older books about what happened where you are before it became the place you see before you, makes you conscious of how history changes the geography of our everyday lives. And, if you're going to read anyway while you're visiting somewhere, why read about some other place?
 Sit on that damn subway reading about other people doing the exact same thing, walking the same streets.
   The first couple of trips I made back to my old NYC stomping grounds after having left, did include reading books set there: First, I read Teju Cole's meditative masterpiece, Open City, set up and down the upper-West Side, and then the following year, made my way through  Kimberly McCreight's adolescent thriller, Reconstructing Amelia. McCreight's book was pretty bad, but said interesting things about rich teens in Park Slope. Since I used to live near Park Slope, I saw those white uniformed kids as they got out of school, crowded onto the subway, and poured into Connecticut Muffin in packs. I have no idea if anything that McCreight says about them is accurate.
   Before the internet, I remember that what I used to do when I moved to a new town was to scour the alternative weeklies and local newspapers to get a feel for what was going on. I still remember an afternoon I spent at the Egg & I in Minneapolis reading about the murder of  a local politician and dangers of cruising in Loring Park the Twin Cities Reader and the City Pages.  I was too busy being a graduate student in Minneapolis to read many novels after that, but soon after moving to Atlanta, I spent several hours listening to an audio recording of Nathan McCall's Them, about the gentrification of the Old Fourth Ward, and then later to an actually cringe-inducing audio-recording of  BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family. I have yet to read Pearl Cleage, but she is obligatory for Atlians. That other famous book written about this place is not worth re-reading.

  Without further ado, here's a reading list for visitors and newcomers to my favorite of all cities, organized by borough.

Manhattan:

Lynne Tillman, No Lease on Life. On the Lower East Side in the era of heroin and crusty-punks, this is a novel that takes place in a 24 hour period, focusing on one woman's concerns, and is filled with jokes. This book vividly captures the energy of the LES just before it was taken over by yuppies and NYU-student partiers.

 Anything by Joseph Mitchell, but Up in the Old Hotel collects most of the work that Mitchell wrote about New York for the New Yorker magazine. He was famous for his lyrical portraits of the odd characters of the Bowery. After that, try Benjamin Kunkel's new biography of Mitchell, which reveals some disturbing facts about the creation of some of these memorable characters, like maybe he kind of made them up.

Piri Thomas, Down These Mean Streets tells a beautiful, angry story of growing up in Spanish Harlem in the 1950s-1960s, when Malcolm X was still speaking on street-corners.

Anything by Edith Wharton. In contrast to the books above, Wharton writes about the city's Knickerbocker elite. It's the world of intrigue and reputation-maintenance as established in parties and late-night card games.  An easy start would be her New York Stories, now in a collection from the New York Review of Books Classics collection, but the Age of Innocence and the House of Mirth are her most famous novels. Both are set in New York, and both will break your heart.

Robin D.G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original. If you're interested in the history of Black New York City or of music, this biography captures both through the prism of one man's life, as music moved up and down the island, from Harlem to downtown Jazz clubs.

Ralph Ellision, The Invisible Man. This Great American novel includes some of the best description of New York's streets that you'll ever read. It's great for other reasons too. Take it on the subway, or read it on a park bench, and someone might even talk to you about how much they loved it and what they were doing the first time they read it.

Brooklyn:

Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn  Before Spoonbill and Sugartown, Williamsburg was a land of immigrants. Before the quick-to-market YA plucky girl story, there was literature with young protagonists. This is a novel about a young bookish girl growing up in a German immigrant family at the turn of the century.  It was the first book I read when I moved to Brooklyn, and as I was riding the train from Park Slope to Brighton Beach over the elevated section of the train at dawn before teaching a 7:00 am remedial writing class to the contemporary generation of NY immigrants, I found this book still relevant and alive.

Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones, another classic tale of a young girl growing up in an immigrant family in Brooklyn, this time Caribbean, and in the 1940s. You can get this book with great introductions and afterwards by Mary Helen Washington and Edgwidge Danticat.

Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn. Lethem has written many books about his love for this borough, but this one is the first, set largely around the Gowanus Canal, pre-gentrification it's the story of a detective with Tourette's syndrome, a Buddhist temple, and a memorable group of sinister Japanese businessmen.

Mandy Keifetz, Flea Circus, might seem to have a light-hearted title, but the fleas in this book are real and not amusing; this is one of the darkest books you'll ever read. An experimental novel where each chapter uses one letter of the alphabet, and it features Sunny's bar in Red Hook.

Queens
   With the exception of Maus, I have not read a single book set in Queens.  However, based on what others say about them, and the fact that Native Speaker has been sitting on my bookshelf as "to-read" since it first came out, and because I love Sam Lipsyte, my next NY trip will feature one of the newer books below:

Art Spiegelman, Maus This is a graphic novel about the Holocaust, as told to Speigelman by his father from his apartment in Rego Park, and interlaced with the younger Speigelman's memories of his childhood and young-adulthood. Despite its travels to Europe, it's a  very New York comic in many ways, reflecting on the history of the comic underground in sections about Spiegelman himself.

Chang Rae Lee, Native Speaker about Korean-Americans in Flushing, a spy story and now considered a modern classic.

Sam Lipsyte, The Ask. Sam Lipsyte is one of the funniest, and also darkest writers I've ever read, and for that reason, this book has been on my to-read list for a while. If you liked Confederacy of Dunces, you will probably like Sam Lipsyte.

Matt Burgess, Dogfight: A Love Story and Uncle Janice, both novels about working class families and /or cops in Queens.  Based on the reviews alone, these sound a lot similar to Richard Price's books, about which, see below.

The Bronx

Again, I must recommend Hip-Hop Family Tree, just a brilliant re-telling of the story of hip hop's birth in the Bronx.

Richard Price, The Wanderers is his first novel. It's not as good as his later novels (Clockers, set in New Jersey), or what he's done for television and film, but it is about the Bronx.

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family: Love, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx; this is a journalist's account of two young women, their boyfriends, and their families. It has its problematic and voyeuristic moments, but it is an unforgettable story about race, sex and class

Staten Island
  
Just as the linked New York Times article suggests, all I could think of about Staten Island was cops and mobsters.  However, there is a new literary novel by a guy named Eddie Joyce. It's called Small Mercies.

Reading and Listening for a Rock Festival

On occasion, I read books at rock concerts.  I don't really do this as a rule, only in special circumstances, like if I'm at the rock concert by myself for a while, or I'm standing in line. I usually got there by public transit, and I never take public transit without at least one book, and perhaps an alternate book in case my mood wasn't right for the first one. When I was in high school, I often pulled out the collected essays of Franz Kafka while hanging around at punk shows, possibly because I thought it was really cool and punk rock to be reading Kafka. In the most uncool and unpunkrock thing I may have ever done, I recall one hot day at the Siren fest in Brooklyn when I was waiting for my brother to show up, and just had to dip back into whatever new Harry Potter book had come out. It was unwieldy, but I don't think I was the only one.

Here are my suggestions for books to read at (outdoor) rock concerts, where the light is good and when your friends are in line for beer and stop to chat with someone they run into, and you're just hanging out on the blanket by yourself.

Especially if you're seeing Thurston Moore's new act, bring along your copy of Kim Gordon's memoir, Girl in a Band. So far, I've read about 30 pages, and it's pretty good. Gordon had what sounds like a very happy childhood with groovy academics for parents. I look forward to the part when she's writing about the NYC scene of the 1970s and 1980s.

The best shows for reading are kind of droney and atmospheric and maybe a little cerebral, without lyrics that you need to pay a ton of attention to, and without inspiring you to get up and dance.  I could probably read almost anything while listening to Tame Impala, who I like, but am not blown away by.  If I were at their show, maybe I would bring something like Malcolm Bull, Anti-Nietzsche.

These days, as you know, a lot of bands are getting back together and touring. Last night I saw a little of Jane's Addiction doing Ritual De Lo Habitual and it kind of made me sad. I left early. For such retro-shows, try hauling out City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg, who is too young to have lived through the time period he's writing about, sort of like that kid I saw at the Rock festival yesterday wearing a Jane's Addiction t-shirt.

I'm planning to see Son Little this afternoon, and I will be toting a lightweight paperback of Octavia Butler's Dawn with me to read on the train/lines.  To be honest, I will probably not be reading during this show, alone or not.

If you're going to see some new band and they might be kind of good,but you're not sure whether you're going to like them or not and you just want a book along for insurance, and maybe you will read it on the way there and the way home, bring along Patti Smith's Just Kids because Patti Smith would not steer you wrong and there will be someone there who's read it and will want to talk to you about how much they loved  it.

Reading & Listening : Hip Hop Family Tree

Today's entry is short and sweet. If you're reading Hip Hop Family Tree and want the soundtrack, here it is, brought to you by Ed Piskor, on Youtube:

Reading and Listening: Comic Book Edition

It's not quite true that school's out for summer, but to revel in that marvelously relaxed and irresponsible feeling that summer weather evokes in me, I'm reading comics I picked up yesterday at Criminal Records for Free Comic Book Day. I spent more money than I should have, but I was lucky to carry home a copy of Drawn and Quarterly's 25th anniversary collection, which I had been longing for.
 Drawn and Quarterly is the publisher that puts out some of my favorite comics: feminist artist Julie Doucet's diaries,  Adrian Tomine's stories about race, identity, and relationships, and Jason Lutes' Berlin series, an imaginative historical fiction of the Weimar period and the rise of Fascism  through the eyes of a cast of artists, radicals and intellectuals.

The biggest surprise of the day for me was finding a somewhat new DC comic, The Movement in two omnibus collections "Class Warfare"and "Fighting for the Future." It tells you something about the renaissance going on in comics today that DC has a comic about class warfare! I haven't finished it yet, but it starts with a promising critique of the police, showing the heroes going after two cops who wrongfully search and intimidate a young couple in an alley, sexually harassing the girl. One of the movement heroes, a masked Black woman named Virtue,  has this classic line "Don't be too proud of your prisons.."

I also found discounted 3rd and final volume of Phonogram, a comic all about phonomancers who do magic with music and time, written by someone who may be a little too obsessed with Brit-Pop. That's clearly a must for a "Reading and Listening" post.  Also music related, is the fantastic Hip-Hop Family Tree which I didn't buy at Comic Book day, and am still only halfway through.
   For music, my all-time favorite references for comics music are Love and Rockets which is a legendary comic of my own generation. For a playlist related to the comic, see this blog .... and the also legendary Dan Clowes'  Eight-Ball, later made into the movie Ghost World, whose characters hang out in record stores and pine away over some really eccentric sounding music. In the movie, they recreate this little scene from the comic. Enid Coleslaw had said that if she couldn't find this record she'd be "lachrymose,' but it seems like that happened anyway.  That is some poignant shit, man.

NSFW, the song linked on youtube below is not mentioned specifically in the comic, but it should be. So in my own soundtrack for my favorite current comic, Sex Criminals, here's the Buzzcocks:

I didn't get any new Sex Criminals because I'm up to date on that one, but I did pick up a collection of another Matt Fraction comic, Cassanova, along with a missing issue of Papergirls while I was there. Papergirls is new. It seems at first like it's going to be a straightforward girls vs. boys story about riding bikes around the neighborhood, but then it has outer-space monsters and zombies. Whoa!

and with that, I've gotta get back to reading before the sun goes down.