LUST News! Very Exciting Advance Copies!!!

I just drove up to Fantagraphics and got a couple hot-off-the-press advance copies – yay!!! – and I have one in my paws AT THIS MOMENT (…and, that’s a Spongebob band-aid on my thumb).

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And here it is, ON MY SHELF! There’s a gold foil on the spine, too. I love a good spine!

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Also: Playboy.com included LUST in their 2007 Holiday Gift Guide. Er, it isn’t supposed to be in stores until January. But anyway!

LUST News! Very Exciting Advance Copies!!!

WORDS AND PICTURES

When words and pictures are combined to tell a story, one medium or the other usually ends up doing most of the heavy lifting.
Personally, I prefer art where the picture plays a more important role than the words. But the People In Charge of Handing Out Awards seem to have a different view.  The most honored graphic novels often combine powerful words with weak drawing.

Take for example Alison Bechdel’s excellent book Fun Home, Time Magazine’s No. 1 Book of the Year and a National Book…

WORDS AND PICTURES

Advice for travelers

Stop for a good night’s rest: good advice for anyone doing a long-distance drive this Thanksgiving weekend.

Close cover before striking: good advice for us all.

Wikipedia: Williams, Arizona was “the last town to have its section of Route 66 bypassed.”

My son Ben found this matchbook on the street. Who could’ve dropped it? Someone who just stepped from a time-travel machine?

Other posts on ephemera
Found
Invitation to a dance


Advice for travelers

Goodbye Madame Butterfly

Bookslut’s Colleen Mondor brought Goodbye Madame Butterfly and Chin Music Press to my attention. Like the hardcover of Dave Eggers’ What is the What, there’s no dustjacket – the illustration is imprinted directly on the cover. Check out the beautiful endpapers. And how cool is this: “The full-color illustrations on the cover, the endpapers and the table of contents were found in the musty stacks of Japanese used bookstores in the Jimbocho district” (from the Chin Music site). Wonderful.

Goodbye Madame Butterfly

Emblems from the Pentagon’s Black World

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CIA paparazzo Trevor Paglen is a thorn in Uncle Sam’s side. Known for snapping telephoto candids of CIA planes and Area 51, the artist also gathers “patch intel,” which he’s collected in this provocative book (main title: “I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me”). The fruit of several Freedom of Information Act requests, Paglen’s book proves that classified black opps concoct esoteric team insignias just like other military divisions. The photo-driven work…

Emblems from the Pentagon’s Black World

Audiobooks are my e-books. … Audiobooks take the content from a novel and turn it into something else – something I can use when I can’t read a novel. That’s what these e-book readers seem to miss. I want to search text, transform it, cut and paste it, and listen to it. If I want to sit and read it, I’ll go with the actual book. They’re about fifty times cheaper, more durable (do you think you can read a Kindle if you bury it in the mud for 1000 years?), and far more lovable than some plastic box with a bunch of buttons on it.