Some thoughts about Understanding Comics

- Was McCloud's choice to present his ideas in graphic form successful? Did the subject matter lend itself to this purpose? Could he have pulled off a book about microeconomics in graphic form?

- What do think of McCloud's theory about the six steps of creation? Is his process universally true in all cases?

- Do you read comics now differently compared to when you where a child? Has there been a change?

- What is the relationship between popular art and "high" art? How does art go from the "people" to the museum or the academy?

Come discuss Understanding Comics Saturday November 20th at the Main Library in the 3rd Floor Program Room at 11am. Feel free to bring food and drink

Our next book is Understanding Comics...

Now for something completely different:

A comic book about comic books = Understanding Comics. In an incredibly accessible style, Scott McCloud explains the details of how comics work: how they're composed, read and understood. More than just a book about comics, this gets to the heart of how we deal with visual languages in general. Exhaustive in scope, this detail-packed book includes a history of comics that reaches back to pre-Columbian picture manuscripts and Egyptian monuments, an explanation of how sequential art is constructed and why, and a running analysis of comics as art, literature, and communication.

Come discuss Understanding Comics Saturday November 20th at the Main Library in the 3rd Floor Program Room at 11am. Feel free to bring food and drink.

Some thoughts about The Atrocity Exhibition

- Is Traven (etc.) insane? 

- What do you think of Dr. Nathan? Is he complicit in T.'s "crimes"?

- Dr. Nathan says (pg. 13): "Yet these designs were more than enormous replicas. They were equations that embodied the relationship between the identity of the film actress and the audiences who were distant reflections of her. The planes of their lives interlocked at oblique commerical angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies. The presiding deity of their lives the film actress provided a  set of operating formulae for their passage through consciousness." Really?

- Is Karen Novotny a  victim or a willing participant in T.'s "crimes"?

- Does mass psychosexual pathology play a role in historical events?

Come discuss The Atrocity Exhibition Saturday September 18th at the Main Library in the 3rd Floor Program Room at 11am. Feel free to bring food and drink.

Our Next Book is The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard

First published in 1970 and widely regarded as a prophetic masterpiece, this is a groundbreaking experimental novel by the acclaimed author of Crash and Super-Cannes. The irrational, all-pervading violence of the modern world is the subject of this extraordinary tour de force. The central character's dreams are haunted by images of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, dead astronauts and car-crash victims as he traverses the screaming wastes of nervous breakdown. Seeking his sanity, he casts himself in a number of roles: H-bomber pilot, presidential assassin, crash victim, pscyhopath. Finally, through the black, perverse magic of violence he transcends his psychic turmoils to find the key to a bizarre new sexuality.

Come discuss The Atrocity Exhibition Saturday September 18th at the Main Library in the 3rd Floor Program Room at 11am. Feel free to bring food and drink. 

Some thoughts about Blood and Guts in High School

- What is punk?

- What is obscene? Would be okay if this book was banned from a high school library?

- Is Janey mentally ill? Does she want to get better? Can she get better?

- Is the plot literal, or its it symbolic of processes in Janey's mind? Is it symbolic of processes that happen on a social level?

- By the end of the novel, is Janey empowered or is she a victim?

- Why is the book titled Blood and Guts in High School?

Come discuss Blood and Guts in High School Saturday July 17th at the Main Library in the 3rd Floor Program Room at 11am. Feel free to bring food and drink.

Our Next Book is Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker

Jamey lived in the locked room. Twice a day the Persian slave trader came in and taught her to be a whore. Otherwise there was nothing. One day she found a pencil stub and scrap of paper in a forgotten corner of the room. She began to write down her life...

Kathy Acker, whose work has been labeled everthing from post-punk porn to post-punk feminism, has created a brilliantly subversive narrative built from conversation, description, conjecture, and moments snatched from history and literature.

Come discuss Blood and Guts in High School Saturday July 17th at the Main Library in the 3rd Floor Program Room at 11am. Feel free to bring food and drink.

Some thoughts about Billy the Kid...

- Who is the narrator of this book?

- My copy had blank photographs in it. I had the knee jerk response to an experimental form, "is this a typo?" What were the blank photographs, or whatever they were, about?

- Ondaatje started his career writing very nonlinear texts like Billy but slowly his works came to have more straight forward narratives. Are artists by nature more daring at the beginning of their careers?

- It feels to me that Billy the Kid has lost some of his mystique since the 19th century. Does the American West have the same appeal as it used to, or have we deconstructed it beyond "repair"? Do we have any contemporary figures that youth simultaneously look up to or are afraid of in equal measure?

- Can you define "cowboy psychedelia"?

Come discuss The Collected Works of Billy the Kid Saturday May 15th at the Main Library in the 3rd Floor Program Room at 11am. Feel free to bring food and drink.