After finishing The Crying of Lot 49 I was unsure what to read next. I was on a pretty good streak with the Pynchon novels, but I don't own a copy of Gravity's Rainbow, so if I wanted to read them all in the order they were written I would have needed to go to the bookstore. There were literal piles of books I need or want to read scattered around, but none of them really appealed to me at the time, which is a problem I've found comes up often. I still haven't gotten into the mood to watch Barton Fink, for instance, even though I bought it months ago.
Essentially, I am too lazy to do even those things I enjoy doing, which sounds pretty negative, so starkly laid out like that. But I get a fair amount of satisfaction from sitting and doing nothing, so I imagine somewhere I've conducted a cost/benefit analysis and had it come out in favor of slack.
Eventually I did decide on a book, but I also wound up reading a graphic novel. Or a comic book. It depends on where your artistic loyalties lie.
(Technically, I didn't read either, since it was a series of .jpegs. But then, I read Cory Doctorow's first novel in the same way ((that is to say, electronically)).)
What I read was The Dark Knight Returns, which, for all my infatuation with certain nerd circles, I had never read before. In fact, it is very possible that DKR was the first Batman comic I've read, period. Now this introduces a certain interesting relation to the text, since DKR is, among other things, about Batman comics themselves, or at least their history. Can I appreciate it without having read what Frank Miller did? We take it for granted that art can outlast its cultural circumstances, at least for the most part. But not all art is heavily engaged in an examination of its own predecessors. Or, on the other hand, maybe it is. I am not sure. We haven't lost the cultural circumstances of, say, art of the Renaissance, or even ancient Roman and Greek stuff. But I am getting away from myself.
Basically, I'm wondering if I should include comics in my booklog. (We're taking it as given that I should keep a booklog at all, as I'm not entirely sure about that, but examining that would lead me quickly to the question of the worthwhileness of having a weblog, or indeed writing in general.) On the one hand, I'm in full support of the legitimacy of comics as literature. On the other, a book has a certain structure to it that crosses genres, or, even, indeed, physical forms. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is a book, even though it isn't, technically. But is a comic book the same? Well, that's perhaps why the term "graphic novel" was invented. (Unless you are uncharitable and think it is all about making people feel better about reading comic books. "Comic book" is a pretty poor name, though. I wish there was something available to replace it that didn't sound pretentious. Not that graphic novel is pretentious, but then it doesn't really apply to many comics, especially the ones that dominate the ((American)) market, which are all endless serials.)
Anyway, I'm having a hard time remembering where I was going with this. To sum up: I read The Dark Knight Returns, by Frank Miller, and it was neat. A little heavy-handed in places. I will be reading other comic books in the future. I may or may not have anything to say about them.
Someday I will start writing about something and finish it in a reasonable fashion.
(Also, I am turning comments on, I think. We'll see what happens.)
