Race to Death Valley

Mickey Mouse has long been known as the adorable mouse-hero, mascot of the Disney Media Corporation, a sweet, wholesome, safe and secure icon for kids and parents alike. For forty-five years however (1930 -1975) the daily Mickey Mouse strips portrayed a somewhat skewed version of the beloved character. Floyd Gottfredson, who wrote and illustrated these strips but was never allowed to sign his own name, depicted Mickey as a hero still of course, but also a bizarre and dynamic personality which was fully capable of misanthropy, socially irresponsible behavior, planning and executing dangerous ideas, and wrapping himself up in bizarre and potentially violent situations.

Only a small handful of Gottfredson's collected works have been published and most are out of print. He pioneered a trendsetting style of adventure comics, though in his lifetime remained largely unrecognized. His contributions to the Disney landscape were not made public until his identity was discovered by a fan in the mid 1960s, and even so it would not be until 2006 (twenty years after his death) that he would be honored, inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame.

Fantagraphics has kindly republished a bit of the Gottfredson Mickey run in their new book "Race to Death Valley," beautifully restored, repackaged and of course on display in Green Apple's main store as well as the annex. 'Bout time.

Just Two Things

ONE:(Wise words from your shelves: Modular Bookcase System from Saporiti)

TWO:
(As a big fan of Google's "doodles", I was pleasantly surprised to find this one on June 5th in celebration of what would be Richard Scarry's 92nd birthday)

All Moby, no -Dick

I generally turn a blind eye to "customized" ads on social media sites, but a few days ago the above (on Facebook) caught my attention for several reasons, not the least of which is the presumption on the part of the editor that he was capable, with his gentle hand, of making Moby-Dick more "enjoyable" than Mr. Melville intended it to be. (That missing hyphen in the Readable Classics edition of the book must've been the first stumbling block to enjoyment. Nothing sours my reading pleasure more quickly than a hyphen.) Of course, any editor willing to mash up Pride & Prejudice and Moby-Dick, and then give himself top-billing on the dust jacket, is obviously not lacking in presumption. Or, more charitably, gumption.

Here's a sample of the first chapter of the more readable novel, which at least keeps in tact the greatest opening sentence in American literature:

Call me Ishmael.

Some years ago, having no money in my purse and nothing to interest me on the shore, I thought I would sail around a little and see the watery part of the world.

It is my way of driving off the gloom. Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, or when I find myself following every funeral I see, and especially when I feel like stepping into the street and knocking people’s hats off--then I know it is high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

Instead of putting a pistol to my head, I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If men would only admit it, they would have nearly the same feelings toward the ocean as I.

And here's the opening of Melville's weird, digressive, and labyrinthine masterpiece, with the excised or emended--in other words, the less readable--bits faded:

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

I'm not going to get into the ethics or aesthetics (or lack thereof) of such bowdlerization--I'm sure there are a few philistines readers who find such abridgements helpful and time-saving. I will simply point out a project translator and author Damion Searls undertook a few years ago, published as a special issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, in which he composed a text of everything--words and punctuation--left out of a similar helpful abridgement of Moby-Dick (called Moby-Dick in Half the Time). As you can see below, Searls titled his edition ; or the Whale.

Who has time to learn what a semi-colon is, anyway.

Looks Like People Still Like Actual Books

I was watching the fifth inning of Ken Burns' great baseball documentary recently. Part of that episode covers the 1930's, and one of the controversies discussed in that episode was Cincinnati Reds owner Larry MacPhail's decision to broadcast all of the Reds' games on the radio. For Free! His fellow baseball owners said he was crazy, that nobody would pay to come to the games anymore when they could just switch on their radios and hear all of the action. What happened instead, of course, is that Reds' attendance grew, as the fan base expanded, and women began to take an interest in the game.

My Wikipedia says that it was a guy named Robert Englund who said, "What's old is new again." And what brings this all up is the hubbub surrounding the publication of Adam Mansbach's Go The Fuck to Sleep. The problem started when a pdf of the complete book, including pictures, spread around the internet. You can download it here if you want (or you could pay money and order it from us here). Even though the book could be viewed in its entirety for free, it shot to #1 on Am***n and stayed there. The publisher, Akashic Press, rushed the book out to capitalize on all of the interest. And now the book is on our shelves and, yes, it is selling.

Because the fact is, you may be able to view a book like this on your laptop or your tablet, but you're not going to leave those gadgets lying on the proverbial (or literal) coffee table, turned on, ready to be flipped through on the merest whim. Books are like that, no power source needed, waiting on the shelf, some of them even looking pretty snazzy, ready when you are.

Really?

From The Guardian:

"In an interview at the Royal Geographic Society on Tuesday about his career, V.S Naipaul, who has been described as the 'greatest living writer of English prose', was asked if he considered any woman writer his literary match. He replied: 'I don't think so.'

The author, who was born in Trinidad, said this was because of women's "sentimentality, the narrow view of the world. And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too," he said.

'I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.' "

Funny, even with my narrow view of the world I can tell from just one sentence if something was written by an asshole.