{"id":74195,"date":"2025-08-07T10:40:22","date_gmt":"2025-08-07T14:40:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=74195"},"modified":"2025-08-08T10:52:42","modified_gmt":"2025-08-08T14:52:42","slug":"i-arrogantly-recommend-61-by-tom-bowden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2025\/08\/07\/i-arrogantly-recommend-61-by-tom-bowden\/","title":{"rendered":"i arrogantly recommend… #61 by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"

I arrogantly recommend… 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.<\/p>\n

Read more arrogantly recommended reviews at: i arrogantly recommend…<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Mostly Everything: The Art of Tucker Nichols<\/a>
\nTucker Nichols
\nMcSweeney\u2019s Publishing<\/p>\n

Mostly Everything<\/em> is a career retrospective by the artist Tucker Nichols, whose work I first became aware of as the illustrator for the children\u2019s book Crabtree<\/em> by Jon Nichols (whimsical and worthwhile for child and adult). Divided by topic rather than presented chronologically, the Mostly Everything<\/em> means Humans, Landscapes, Diagrams, Flora, Sculptures, Science and Technology, and more.<\/p>\n

Showing a wide range of interests in media used to express his ideas, Mostly Everything<\/em> includes Nichols\u2019s paintings, drawings, banners, signs, photographs, rocks, sculptures\/found objects, Post-its, charts, string-like objects, editorial cartoons, spot illustrations, and sand etchings. Working with primary and secondary colors, black and white, Nichols has a good eye for juxtaposing objects into visual balance. Nails, ear plugs, pleasantly shaped rocks, and other ephemera made the center of attention, suddenly encourage contemplation over color, shape, size, proportion, and harmony. And the works convey energy, too, even the still lifes.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

For instance, Nichols often deploys little nodules at the ends of skinny protrusions, colored to contrast with the picture\u2019s dominant color scheme, urging the eye to bounce from one nodule to another. The visual field it bounces over is anchored by the background forms and palette, which coheres the overall image, enhancing the contrasting colors and imbuing the image with palpable energy.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In a set of examples, Tucker has assembled of dozens of parti-colored Post-its pinned across memo boards (presumably) and other large, wall-like surfaces. Some Post-its are drawn on, others written on, with such notes as \u201cWORLD SERIES PROGRAM,\u201d \u201cBLACK AND WHITE PHOTO OF SUNSET,\u201d and \u201cDRIVERS LICENCES FROM WHEN I HAD GLASSES\u201d\u2014an imitation of a brain at work, a list of items held in storage, the items that pop up in the mind unbidden, the thing you\u2019re maybe trying to recall (\u201cPHONE NUMBER FOR A GUY NAMED PAUL\u201d)\u2014the various Post-it colors pinging the eye from one thought to another. Is this, perhaps, a 21st-century update of Rodin\u2019s \u201cThe Thinker\u201d?<\/p>\n

Well-edited and sequenced, Mostly Everything<\/em> is like the perfect date: beautiful, fun, and intelligent.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Turn Loose Our Death Rays and Kill Them All!: The Complete Works of Fletcher Hanks<\/a>
\nFletcher Hanks
\nFantagraphics<\/p>\n

Fletcher Hanks was the Ed Wood of superhero comic books. Easier to enumerate his shortcomings than his successes, his draftsmanship is stiff and his page designs don\u2019t guide the eye. Illustrations for his text-heavy tales seem like afterthoughts, and his stories lack drama and suspense: the conclusions are foregone because no force of evil is a match for his heroes. Stories six and seven pages long often allot their climaxes to whatever can be fit in the last half page. As a result, Fletcher\u2019s stories often end with visually anti-climactic pffts <\/em>rather than triumphant tada!s<\/em>, even when the stakes include destruction of planet Earth.<\/p>\n

Not that these qualities are necessarily bad.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As with Ed Wood\u2019s films, a lack of talent does not mean a lack of enthusiasm for telling stories, however ineptly imagined and relayed. Raw exposition only underscores the teller\u2019s earnestness; we can feel the sincerity of his commitment, although what we appreciate in the work may not be the achievement he hoped to have recognized.<\/p>\n

Writing under a surfeit of pseudonyms\u2014including Chas Netcher, Barclay Flagg, and Bob Jordan\u2014Fletcher\u2019s pantheon of heroes include The Super Wizard Stardust; \u201cSpace\u201d Smith; the eco-warrior Famtomah (\u201cmystery woman of the jungle\u201d); \u201cBig Red\u201d McLane, the small-batch capitalist lumberman; \u201cWhirlwind\u201d Carter; Buzz Crandall of the Space Patrol; and other excitingly named worthies. Fantomah rules over nature, while the space heroes rule over technology. Fantomah is white but her human beneficiaries are dark. Fletcher\u2019s male heroes\u2014jaws jutting two or three inches past their nose, their foreheads suggestive of acromegaly\u2014don skin-tight dry goods over muscular, V-shaped torsos \u00e0 la Tom of Finland, but modestly groined. When not fighting interstellar crime organizations, Stardust is usually found at either \u201chis observatory on his private asteroid\u201d or \u201ctraveling highly accelerated light waves in a tubular spacial.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Aliens arrive either in spacesuits or in the nude (or discrete loin covers). Because they are bad, the ETs frequently suffer from any given superhero\u2019s predilection for lifting creeps several stories in the air with anti-gravity forces, leaving them to hang until the hero can bring round a police force (using several other rays at his disposal). Fight scenes\u2014and there are always fight scenes\u2014are enlivened with such onomatopoeia as \u201csock!,\u201d \u201cbiff!,\u201d \u201cbang,\u201d and \u201cbong!\u201d<\/p>\n

In one story, Stardust is attacked by Emerald Men from another planet\/solar system\/galaxy\/time dimension, etc., whose \u201canti-star-metal acid bombs\u201d Stardust deflects with a \u201cscreen of acid-proof dust,\u201d after which he \u201cdraws a wave of film-rock gas from a nearby star and encases \u2018the Emerald Men\u2019 in a crystal cell.\u201d<\/p>\n

Want to suspend disbelief while reading Hanks? Wear a truss. But you\u2019ll take much more pleasure in reading this if you ignore the disbelief and truss. For everybody who grew up watching \u201850s-era low-budget SF and horror films on Saturday afternoon TV.<\/p>\n

\n

Four Works by R.G. Vasicek<\/a>:
\n(1) Writer
\n(2) I Am a Machine Poet
\n(3) Edge-of-the-Construct
\n(4) Amerika: A Sort of Pseudo-Reality
\nSelf-published<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A practitioner of what he calls lo-fi samizdat, R.G. Vasicek\u2019s works demonstrate what can be achieved by a writer with a DIY \/ Maker Faire ethos. For readers looking for media that speaks directly to them, Vasicek\u2019s works lack suspicion-inducing gloss and come without PR mediation. Vasicek\u2019s prose reads as if influenced by Bukowski\u2019s choice of unfussy vocabulary and Ginsburg\u2019s choice of spontaneous poetics (\u201cFirst thought, best thought\u201d), as well as his own tics and obsessions. Apart from the approach with which they were written and, with the photographs, sequenced and collaged, each work takes on a different theme, even though the narrative voice remains consistent.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Writer<\/em> reads like a writer\u2019s notebook accompanied by photographs, consisting of observations, questions, ideas, and statements about aspects of everyday existence. Writer<\/em>\u2019s black and white and negative photos buttress the emotional weight of the text, and giving sense to where the writer lives, what he sees on his walks through a post-industrial waystation that shapes his thoughts.<\/p>\n

every writer is a lonely
\ncreature \/\/
\ni call myself on a
\ntelephone
\nthere
\nis
\nno
\nanswer<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Although i am a machine poet<\/em> gives no indications of how it should be read\u2014as a single work, as a collection of prose poems and photographs, with each separate from the other, in combination, or both. I interpret i am a machine poet<\/em> as a series of (mostly) untitled vignettes about everyday life, whose themes are extended by but independent of the black and white photographs interspersed throughout. Its disjointed but coherent jump cuts between paragraphs and set pieces is reminiscent of the sudden switches in time and place in Burroughs\u2019s Naked Lunch<\/em>, a form of disorientation before he started employing cut-ups.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In another section, prefaced by a quotation from Wittgenstein, Vasicek parodies Wittgenstein\u2019s practice of numbering his arguments and sub-arguments down to the thousandths place, to explore the arena of sex and food. \u201cN+7 Machine\u201d tests an Oulipo-like constraint about word substitution via multiple iterations of a phrase and its output, and another story riffs on an assertion by Adorno that private life no longer exists.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u201cTell the truth but tell it slant,\u201d Emily Dickinson coached her readers. Edge-of-the-Construct<\/em> explores, indirectly but persistently, the conflict between free will and the notion that we might be inhabiting a simulation of reality, comprised of a mix of text and photography that, in this book feel to be working in greater tandem than Writer<\/em> and i am a machine poet<\/em>, shifting effortlessly from poetry to photo essay to prose to an overall work that is simultaneously all three. In Edge<\/em>, V includes among his own photography manipulated vintage porn from Jindrich Styrsky.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Vasicek\u2019s Amerika<\/em> could be as easily called \u201cQuiet Days in Queens,\u201d for its feral erotica \u00e0 la Henry Miller, as the more prosaic \u201cNotebook 1,\u201d which the narrator keeps reminding us we\u2019re reading\u2014discursive notes-to-self: observations, quips, tentative fictional scenarios (the narrator is a writer), questions about existence\u2014and the narrator\u2019s ultimate question to self: Can a coherent whole be made from notes on life\u2019s barrage of random incidents?<\/p>\n

Outside a concrete apartment block, I shake my fist at the sky: Why must I work in the factory!?
\nThe VW Beetle fails to ignite.
\nI walk to the tram stop.
\nLet me put things in order. What things? I do not know. Things. Objects. Subjects, The Universe. The Cosmos. Quite a mess, isn\u2019t it? Disorder. Chaos. Utterly utterly perfect.<\/p>\n

Each book is about a hundred pages, give or take\u2014pamphlet sized. Given the large sans-serif font and, for three of the books, the number of photographs, I can image these books being read by somebody\u2014a guy probably, but who knows?\u2014on his lunchbreak at a small machine shop located along an off-street in an industrial park. The weirdo who reads. Vasicek\u2019s books mull over ideas, goals, values, and what is sacrificed along the way. But\u2014before the thinking gets too highfalutin\u2014the narrator makes time to savor a nice piece of ass. And, like Vasicek\u2019s books, you can get through one in a lunchbreak.<\/p>\n

From his 404_Error Memoir at the PragueMicrofestival:<\/p>\n