Quentin's Weeknotes 2/9/19-2/15/19

This Week:

• I finished reading Dr. Sheena Howard's Encyclopedia of Black Comics, an eye-opening compendium of African-American comic and sequential artists that shines a light on a hidden history of something I thought I already knew pretty well.
• I watched two great things on Netflix:
  
  • The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which sits with best of the Western tradition of exploring the complexities of violence and national identity. Also, "The Mortal Remains" is probably the most Aickman-esque piece of filmmaking I've seen, combining morbid, sinister horror and comedy.
  • Russian Doll, which Alanna and I devoured pretty quickly. Calling a modern version of Groundhog Day does a disservice to this dark and subtle, strange, eccentric series populated with complicated, funny characters.
• The Yager Museum and the Haan Fund for Native American Studies hosted a talk by Melanie Printup Hope, an artist of Tuscarora (Haudenosaunee) and European descent.Hope's work has been exhibited across North America, and makes really interesting juxtapositions of traditional and modern forms, in the service of focusing attention on issues of colonialism, memory, land, and community. Her talk, and her subsequent visits to classes here at Hartwick were really inspiring and I thank her for coming and for sharing her ideas and her wisdom.
• I continue to alternatively giggle and sigh at every new volume of Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky's Sex Criminals. Volume 4 is sad and sweet, and as usual, is asphyxiatingly funny.

Book Notes: Encyclopedia of Black Comics by Dr. Sheena Howard

Review/Notes on The Encyclopedia of Black Comics by Sheena C. Howard. Forward by Henry Louis Gates. Afterward by Christopher Priest (Link)

Date Finished: 2/13/19

It's a real treat to be able to read something about a subject you love and feel close to, and discover a whole other side to it that you never knew. This was definitely the case with The Encyclopedia of Black Comics, which (as with any book about race in America) held up a mirror to the world of comics and sequential art and provided an extended counter-narrative to the one I knew.

The real beating heart of this book is the amazing life-stories of the people who make up the biographical entries. Some of the most enlightening to me were:

-Orrin Cromwell Evans, who, with the publication of All-Negro Comics in 1947 became the first African-American publisher of comic books.

-Vernon E Grant, who helped introduce Manga to western audiences through his translations, after serving in the Vietnam war and living in Tokyo.

-Ollie Harrington, political cartoonist for many prominent African-American newspapers, for which he was eventually forced to leave the country for fear of his life and livelihood.

-Micheline Hess, an early colorist at Milestone comics who made the transition to web-comics and now writes amazing and gorgeous comics with Black female protagonists.

-Ariell Johnson, owner of Amalgam Comics & Coffeehouse, the first (?) Black woman to own a comic store

-Jackie Ormes, the first female African-American cartoonist who wrote some of the first positive representations of Black women in comics in the 1930s and 40s.

-Sanford Greene, who simultaneously drew Power Man and Iron Fist and also illustrated Hip-Hop album covers by MF Doom and other Hip-Hop artists.

This book has also given me lots of great comics to go and check out, and I'm glad to have such an evocative and informative springboard for new stuff to read. Huzzah Dr. Howard!

Quentin's Weeknotes 2/2/19-2/8/19

This Week:

• I started teaching again--MUST204: Collections Management
• I read this piece by Laurie Penny, outlining the cruel and grotesque class politics of Brexit. I'll read anything Penny writes--she's funny, and fierce, and incredibly smart. This long article makes clear that it was the Conservative (and New Labour) ideological long-commitment to austerity that spurred much of the anger that led to the Brexit vote and that weakness and indifference of the political class in England will keep it on schedule to happen in just under two months.
• I am so unhappy that the 2020 presidential season is already starting, and have actively tried to avoid thinking about it. Nevertheless, I read with great interest this piece on Cory Booker's long commitment to defunding and privatizing public education. I've always felt like Booker was a fairweather friend to causes I believe in, and this well-cited essay makes clear that he's no friend to public schools, teacher's unions, or anything like what I believe to be enriching public education.
• I watched, with ecstatic joy, the trailer for the upcoming TV series Good Omens, based on the novel by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. The book is laugh-out-loud funny and so incredibly smart, and the TV series has, so far, done all the things I'd want to make the show honor the book. I still remember how hard I laughed when I read the passage about Aziraphale's collection of misprinted Bibles:

And he had a complete set of the Infamous Bibles, individually named from error's in typesetting.

These Bibles included the Unrighteous Bible, so called from a printer's error which caused it to proclaim, in I Corinthians, "Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the Kingdom of God?"; and the Wicked Bible, printed by Barker and Lucas in 1632, in which the word not was omitted from the seventh commandment:, making it "Thou shalt commit Adultery." There were the Discharge bible, the Treacle Bible, the Standing Fishes Bible, the Charing Cross Bible and the rest. Aziraphale had them all.

•  As with Laurie Penny, I'll read basically anything Sady Doyle writes (except this). Her post-mortem on the grotesque misogyny of the State of the Union came as a welcome balm to the delicious but catty furor over Pelosi's shade.
  
• Yay! We have draft language for a Green New Deal! And, man...is it spicy. Decarbonization, a jobs guarantee, transition assistance for fossil fuel workers, and real fair/ethical trade, along with a whole lot more. David Roberts at Vox has a good breakdown of what's in it, and what's not. Here's a delightful, shocking, and hopeful takeaway of where we are:

the progressive movement has, in rather short order, thrust into mainstream US politics a program to address climate change that is wildly more ambitious than anything the Democratic Party was talking about even two years ago.

Quentin's Weeknotes 1/26/19-2/01/19

This Week:

• I read an explanation of a General Strike from America's most radical publication. This is increasingly relevant given that the recent shutdown seems to have inspired a growing informal general strike, and that General strikes get shit done.
• I listened to a recent WITH episode on Amazon. Instead of focusing on their atrocious labor relations, the episode instead talks about their business model and their long-term plans. The short version is that they rely pretty heavily on what we used to call predatory pricing (a crime under anti-trust laws), require massive government subsidies to operate, and are basically planning to supplant what we think of as the free market with a siloed portal between consumers and producers. I've had a growing distrust of Amazon for a long time, and this podcast inspired me to try and migrate some aspects of my life off of it.
  
• I read this profile of Jordan Peele. Get Out was amazing. Key and Peele was amazing. But this piece makes clear that Peele has both a grand agenda as a horror filmmaker, and the skill, depth of knowledge about horror, and fierce intellect to achieve it.
  

Quentin's Weeknotes 1/19/19-1/25/19

This Week:

• I browsed through the newly digitzed archive of Freedom, Paul Robeson and Louis Burnham's radical cold-war era newspaper.
• I read this interview with Brian K. Vaughan, creator of Saga, which remains one of the most inspiring pieces of fiction I'm currently reading. Here's the money quote:

Ninety percent of anything is mostly garbage and that remaining 10 percent is not only excellent but worth dying for. The only way to get there is to try to be excellent with your art.

• I discovered the website Fonts in Use, which provides font names for a whole host of historical magazines, books, albums, and other pieces of media. As someone whose job involves a bit of graphic design, I appreciate having a good repository of fonts for inspiration or assistance.
• I have been reading Viroconium,  M. John Harrison's masterful series of novels. While reading up on Harrison, a vitally important figure in the modern speculative fiction, I ran across this long post by illustrator Jonathan Coulthart entitled "Covering Viroconium", analyzing the (mostly failed) attempts to make decent cover art for his genre-bending, enigmatic books. Here's the example I've been reading from, which is, at best, loosely representative of the contents--as Coulthart points out, it makes the novel look Steampunk (which it's not, in any meaningful sense), and also depicts the hatching of a mechanical bird, an event that is not present in any of the text.
• I put the finishing touches on the syllabus for my Hartwick College Course "Collections Management." It's a two-credit practicum course designed to give students the basics of Museum object handling, inventory management, and on-going collections maintenance. I tweak it a bit every year, and this year, have front-loaded more practical stuff, while leaving more abstract questions towards the end.