{"id":73662,"date":"2025-01-03T16:09:05","date_gmt":"2025-01-03T21:09:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=73662"},"modified":"2025-01-14T16:24:29","modified_gmt":"2025-01-14T21:24:29","slug":"i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-53","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2025\/01\/03\/i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-53\/","title":{"rendered":"i arrogantly recommend… #53 by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I arrogantly recommend…<\/a> is a monthly column of unusual, overlooked, ephemeral, small press, comics, and books in translation reviews by our friend, bibliophile, and retired ceiling tile inspector Tom Bowden, who tells us, “This platform allows me to exponentially increase the number of people reached who have no use for such things.”<\/p>\n

Links are provided to our Bookshop.org affiliate page<\/a>, our Backroom gallery page<\/a>, or the book’s publisher. Bookshop.org is an alternative to Amazon that benefits indie bookstores nationwide. If you notice titles unavailable online, please call and we’ll try to help. Read more arrogantly recommended reviews at: i arrogantly recommend…<\/a><\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>BardCode<\/a>
\nGregory Betts
\nPenteract Press<\/p>\n

In 2001, Steve Vitiello, composer of electronic music, released an album called Bright and Dusty Things<\/em>, which consisted of musical translations of light reflecting from buildings, billboards, and other stationary objects. Using a photocell, light vibrations were converted into sound vibrations (which underwent further signal processing). What does a building sound like on a cloudy day? There\u2019s a way to find out.<\/p>\n

In BardCode<\/em>, Gregory Betts does something similar with Shakespeare\u2019s sonnets: He takes the transcription into Roman letters of spoken sound and assigns the sound of each syllable a color. End rhymes, of course, are immediately easy to spot. But the matching interior colors\u2014are those internal rhymes? Clusters of consonants? Can the poems\u2019 semantic or emotional content be inferred from the colors? If a poem is sonically harmonious, will the colors harmonize, too, in some way\u2014that is, will certain ratios of color combinations occur that give the overall image a balance? Are colors and sounds separate from each other, or can the colors assigned syllables reinforce or somehow support the semantic content of each word by itself and taken in totality with each poem\u2019s theme? The poet Philip Terry, in his preface to BardCode<\/em>, calls Betts\u2019s work data poetry. And, yes, BardCode<\/em> does translate Shakespeare\u2019s poems into units of data, but that description is far too reductionist and dismissive of the rich possibilities, aesthetic and prosaic, of discovering or re-discovering the sheer fecundity of Shakespeare\u2019s sense of word-and-sound, which has always been rife with visual metaphor and analogy, to which a new way of seeing has been added. Highly recommended. [https:\/\/apothecaryarchive.com\/bardcode-projects<\/a>]<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>With Their Hearts in Their Boots<\/a>
\nJean-Pierre Martinet \/ Alex Andriesse
\nWakefield Press<\/p>\n

[Henri] Calet said it. Fucking life.
\nBecause this isn\u2019t the way it should have been.
\n\u2014Martinent\u2019s appreciation of Henri Calet, \u201cAt the Back of the Courtyard on the Right.\u201d<\/p>\n

A once-promising actor, Georges Maman, now a down-on-his-heels never-was in his early 40s, unable even to keep an erection for a porn film that would buy a week\u2019s worth of groceries (or booze, depending on priorities), wanders into a bar (priorities!) to lick the past two decades\u2019 worth of wounds. There, he is chanced upon by a man named Dagonard, an assistant TV-series director of the same age, employed but just, garrulous but unlikeable, a man who likes to treat others to a few drinks and who Maman can depend upon for a few hundred francs he will never repay. And of course, there is a woman\u2014Marie\u2014who broke Georges\u2019s heart once upon a time, and about whom Dagonard is repeatedly tactless enough\u2014aggressively so\u2014to not let Maman forget, even though her appearance on countless magazine covers would suffice to salt Maman\u2019s sore spots.<\/p>\n

A pair of bitter men without women, directionless drunks who, though still in early middle age, are well into their years of \u201cwhat ifs.\u201d Marie Beretta\u2014like the gun: the story starts and ends with her.<\/p>\n

The novella With Their Hearts in Their Boots<\/em> is accompanied by Martinet\u2019s essay on the French noir novelist Henry Calet, \u201cAt the Back of the Courtyard on the Right,\u201d which reads like a heterosexual version of William Burroughs describing life among the impoverished and seedy in New York, Mexico, and Tangiers, retailed in prose more infused with drunken delirium than hallucinogenic cut-ups, the effect\u2014a life deliberately at odds with itself\u2014remains the same. A pair of short jabs to the jaw, deftly aimed.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The High Life<\/a>
\nJean-Pierre Martinet \/ Henry Vale
\nWakefield Press<\/p>\n

In the ironically titled The High Life<\/em>, Adolphe Marlaud works for a \u201cfunerary shop\u201d in Paris where he tends to the needs of grieving families, families he disdains, so that his very desire to help is itself an act of hostility. (\u201cOh, I insist!\u201d one can imagine him saying.) Marlaud is one of Jim Thompson\u2019s Underground Men via Rainer Werner Fassbinder. He\u2019s four-and-a-half feet tall, in lifts, and weighs 85 pounds. During World War II, his father divorced his mother, who was then forced to take back her family name\u2014Jacob\u2014and thus had no protection from the Nazis who executed her after Marlaud\u2019s father turned her in\u2014\u201cJust to teach her some manners\u201d\u2014for having had an affair. During his off hours, Marlaud either tends his father\u2019s gravesite (which is near where he lives), reads, or watches movies. (Given the noir tone of the story, I\u2019m sure that\u2019s \u201cMarlaud\u201d as in \u201cPhilip Marlowe.\u201d) A neighbor, Madame C., takes a liking to Marlaud and intimidates him into have sex with her. At six-foot six and 200 pounds, her coupling with a man two feet shorter is difficult for us to imagine, but her demand for anal sex proves too much for the chronically asthmatic Marlaud to imagine, and he flees her apartment, going into hiding from for two weeks. Where does somebody who has vowed to \u201clive as little as possible so as to suffer as little as possible\u201d find the strength to carry on in such an overwhelming world? American readers won\u2019t be surprised to find Marlaud ultimately finds solace in owning a gun.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Ritual Machine<\/a>
\nToyoya Li
\nParadise Systems<\/p>\n

The first graphic novel from Beijing cartoonist Toyoya Li told and drawn as an \u201880s-era, 8-bit pixelation computer game, the premise of which is to \u201cEscape the matrix. Find the wizard\u2019s room. Free from the chains of the world.\u201d Keeping with in the minimalist constraints of early gaming and its visual representations, the game has only three characters\u2014Khan (\u201cadventure-loving horse rider\u201d), Tinan (\u201ca rebellious hacker and Khan\u2019s friend\u201d), and Virtual Wizard (\u201cwith mystical powers, a seer\u201d)\u2014and works within a color palette consisting largely of black, red, blue, and white, with the occasional grey and yellow. What passes for a storyline is the usual computer-game mayhem, expressed with surprising visual range and complexity, given the limitations of the medium imitated. Completing the book\u2019s presentation as an art object, too, the covers are comprised of laminated 3D gifs.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Unwholesome Love<\/a>
\nCharles Burns
\nPartner & Sons <\/p>\n

2024 was quite a year for fans of Charles Burns\u2019 comics: Final Cut<\/em> (collecting the three volumes originally released in French as D\u00e9dales), Kommix<\/em>, Sweet Dreams<\/em>, plus the stand-alone comic book Unwholesome Love<\/em> and the first volume of the new The Art of<\/em> series. Unwholesome Love<\/em> follows Burns\u2019s current interest in American romance comics from the mid-1950s involving torn lovers, disfiguring automobile crashes, and barely sublimated eroticism paired with na\u00efve ideals about love and romance. Three fragmented tales make up Unwholesome Love, a comic book that at first feels like an anthology of love stories but over time become apparent as one story with crucial elements missing, perhaps the result of memory loss inflicted by one of the book\u2019s car crashes. Because this is Burns, we\u2019re going to be given a story that, in addition to its absurdities, needs to be pieced together, more-or-less, while also assuring us with its circular narrative that we have all we need. The illustrations bear Burns\u2019s hallmark style: high-contrast black and white images drawn with simplified but realistic and dead-pan earnestness, all in service of unspooling a tale in which everyday normality confront the world\u2019s Lynchian irrational powers.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>The Art of<\/a>
\nBanza\u00ef Editions<\/p>\n

Banza\u00ef Editions is a French publisher of comic books and graphic novels for adults whose catalog includes works by American, French, and Japanese artists. Now going into its thirty-fourth year, Banza\u00ef has launched a new monthly series called The Art of<\/em>, each issue of which includes 32 pages of full-size images by a single artist (in color and black and white, depending on its original appearance), a poster by the artist, and a booklet in French and English providing a brief bio, bibliography, and essay about the artist, as well as an index of the images shown in The Art of<\/em> issue and their sources.<\/p>\n

The inaugural issue provides an overview of Charles Burns\u2019s career, including his contributions to RAW<\/em>, album covers, El Borbah<\/em>, Black Hole<\/em>, and the New Yorker<\/em> (his take on Eustace Tilly was a lost opportunity for the Cond\u00e9-Nast empire). While many of the images have originally appeared elsewhere, The Art of<\/em> edition also includes reproductions of original comic book pages. Upcoming issues will focus on the art of Moebius, Moon Patrol, Cristina Daura, Derf Backderf, Ryan Heshka, and Shintaro Kago. I don\u2019t know how easily available this series will be in the U.S., so I strongly urge fans of the medium to subscribe. Subscriptions are available in six- and twelve-month spans.<\/p>\n