Dave Press

“Instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man, you pick up the journal as one might hold a baby’s beshatted diaper, as one might pinch a recently benutted condom. You glance at the offending passages. Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.”

—

Junot Diaz, in the story “Alma” from This Is How You Lose Her.

My mother kind of looked at me weird when I said that I wanted this book for Christmas. “Won’t it be depressing?” she asked. I said more than likely, but since I’m intensely interested in how comics have given back to literature, I said I needed to read it for research purposes. Really, though, it helped me think about my own actions in past relationships and I feel like I learned quite a bit. I wouldn’t call it depressing, but I would say it’s honest, which is, I think, the best thing a book can be.

What I discovered is Diaz’s colloquial style and how it’s like reading comic book captions or speech balloons. The language is like poetry, not quite a complete sentence, but it affects speech, like something Brubaker said recently with regard to comic book dialogue.

4 months ago 6 notes

What I Read This Year.

I was surprised that I came this close to reading nearly a book a week for the entire year, but I think that is mostly because of the summer break I enjoyed and I did an awful lot of catching up. I think there is a drawback to really being able to read what you want to read while you’re in school and only recently has that changed. For next year, I’m going to try to do what Joe Hill is doing and read a book a week. So in 2013, I’m going to read 52 books.

The other thing that I’ve noticed quite a bit this year, and it really bothers me, is how I don’t read women very much. Of the forty-nine books I read only three were by women. (I’ve since started reading Susan Sontag’s first journal and her book On Photography, but haven’t completed anything so she’s not on this list.) This is probably the closest thing I’ve got to a resolution this year, and I’m actually really disappointed with myself that I’ve fallen into this proclivity.

Oh yes, in this list I’m including the graphic novels I read as well. As always, please feel free to recommend something to me.

Here’s what I read this year:

John Carter of Mars series [A Princess of Mars, The Gods of Mars, the Warlord of Marsae] by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Screamland: Death of the Party by Harold Sipe, Christopher Sebela, and Lee Leslie
The Winter Men by Brett Lewis and John Paul Leon [re-read]
Graveyard of Empires by Mark Sable and Paul Azaceta
Richard Yates by Tao Lin
A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah
Lives on the Boundary by Mike Rose
What It Was by George Pelecanos
The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn
Alternative Comics by Charles Hatfield
The Complete Concrete by Paul Chadwick
OMAC by Jack Kirby
Memories of the Future, vol. 1 by Wil Wheaton
The Escapists by Brian K. Vaughan, Jason Alexander, and Philip Bond [re-read]
Pastoralia by George Saunders
Do The Gods Wear Capes by Ben Saunders
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers [re-read]
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers [re-read]
Cleveland by Harvey Pekar and Joseph Remnant
American Vampire, vol. 3 by Scott Snyder, Rafael Albuerque, Sean Murphy, and Danijel Zezelj
A Barthes Reader by Roland Barthes
Mythologies by Roland Barthes
Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton
Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
Superman: The High Flying History of the Man of Steel by Larry Tye
Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson
The Millionaire Rig Veda by Timothy James Brearton
Makebelieve by Caitlin Scholl
Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon
Immortality by Milan Kundera
Imagine by Jonah Lehrer
Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon [re-read]
Both Flesh and Not by David Foster Wallace
Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe
The League of Extraordinary Gentleman: Century 2009 by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neil.
King City by Brandon Graham
Morning Glories, vol. 2 by Nick Spencer and Joe Eisma
Saga, vol. 1 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
Fatale, vol. 1 by Ed Brubaker and Sean Philips
Prophet, vol. 1 by Brendan Graham, Simon Roy, and Farel Dalrymple
An Abundance of Katherines by John Green
The Magicians by Lev Grossman
Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon
How Music Works by David Byrne
This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz.

I’ve got January covered, I’m starting off next year with four books by men: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, Gun Machine by Warren Ellis, Habit by Tim Brearton, and American Vampire, vol. 4.

4 months ago 5 notes

Pretty much haven’t moved from this position all day.

4 months ago 3 notes

“We do express our emotions, our reactions to events, breakups and infatuations, but the way we do that—the art of it—is in putting them into prescribed forms or squeezing them into new forms that perfectly fit some emerging context. That’s part of the creative process, and we do it instinctively; we internalize it, like birds do. And it’s a joy to sing, like the birds do.”

—

David Byrne in How Music Works. This is a book everyone should read.

He’s like the Zen Master of the creative process. What else is there to say? Like Cory Doctorow [via Austin Kleon] said, you could replace “music” with just about any other creative process and this book could be used as a framework for that as well. I feel like every book I’ve been reading this year has been better than the last.

5 months ago 9 notes

“I had three secretaries to myself, and I kept them busy. I used to dictate stories in the office. I was a show-off, in my early twenties, as I look back at it. I’d quickly dictate a page of one story to one girl, and while she was transcribing I’d dictate a page of another story to another girl, and then maybe a third one to a third girl. I had this great feeling of power, that I was keeping three secretaries busy with three stories, and I knew that occasionally people were watching—and I was so proud…I got a kick out of playing to the crowd.”

—	Stan Lee, in Sean Howe’s magnificent and interesting Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.

7 months ago 2 notes

Arrived today. I’m so excited to dive into this.

7 months ago 3 notes

Currently reading Christopher Hitchens’s somewhat pompous memoir, because Reamde just couldn’t keep my attention.

7 months ago 1 note

“The papers have taken to calling them the Bridge People which he thinks makes sense in another way because they are a bridge between what passes for normal human beings and animals. They’re like chimpanzees or Neanderthals who eventually would have evolved into normal human beings if it it weren’t for their DNA having got scrambled somehow making them forget how they’re supposed to act when it comes to sex so what seems natural to them seems unnatural to everyone else even though everyone else has the same DNA except it isn’t scrambled the same way theirs is. The Kid wonders if all across America ther is some kind of strange invisible radioactive leakage like from high-tension wires or cell phones or road and mall parking lot asphalt that is turning thousand of American men young and old of all races into sex offenders so that instead of being attracted to grown women their own age they’re attracted to young girls and little children.”

—

From Russell Banks’s Lost Memory of Skin.

This is quite a brave piece of writing about a young (early twenties) sex offender and how he is taken in by a sociology professor. Banks, a writer to whom a crop of us owe our respect when it comes to writing and being from the area, is someone I can’t help but hear my own voice whenever I read him. Sarah and I went to see him read at the Paul Smith’s VIC and after taking the book out of the library, I commented to her that it had been a while since I read something of his, but after getting a few pages in I can’t help but feel like I’m reading my own voice in this text.

“I see a lot of my tics reading this,” I mentioned to her over text message.

“That’s a sign of a great writer,” she replied, referring to Banks. “When the voice they’re using comes off as your own.”

That’s not what I meant. What I meant was that from a stylistic standpoint, I feel like I’m probably very close to him and no that doesn’t make me sound too big-headed and still unpublished. Lord, my ego. Jesus.

Since it had been so long since I read either Banks or Chabon, I noticed that Chabon started a Tumblr a year ago, while reading it I took both of them in considering for a second how much of an influence these two are. They are my favorite living writers and I can’t help but try to figure out who I am more like from a style standpoint. I suppose I’m slightly more like Banks, but I would like the finesse—I guess (hey!)—of Chabon. So I tell myself I’m like neither. I’m myself, which when I get into these circular conversations with myself late at night in bed I tend to get upset at myself for even thinking this way. There is a self-assurance to a writing style, I think, a voice that is specific to a writer that I am constantly questioning. Do I even have a voice that is unique? A style besides sloppy and honest and more than a little nerdy?

I suppose this is my biggest problem: confidence. I’ve never really had any. I’m not sure if anything about me from a prose point of view is particularly original or fresh. Just standard, perhaps below average. Serviceable. Gah. Sad face. I need to lose this attitude. Sorry to be a downer.

7 months ago 1 note

From “Reamde” by Neil Stephenson.

This is my first Stephenson book, and I am completely taken by his ability to go from RPG lingo and familial struggle to techno thriller all in a DFW-sized tome. What are some of your thoughts on Stephenson? Did I start with the right book?

8 months ago 2 notes

From Russell Banks’s LOST MEMORY OF SKIN. (Taken with Instagram)

8 months ago 0 notes

#books I read in 2012

What I Read This Year.

Dave Press