MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

My review of Jean-Philippe Toussain’s Running Away (translation: Dalkey Archive, 2009) is now up at Words Without Borders. Toussaint is one of my favorites, but, having read a lot of his work, I ended up talking more about the aspects that made this novel different than the others, rather than what I really love about [...]

Issac asked for clickable links, so I’ve added links to all the works I cited (or used) in my presentation to the post that has the audio version. I’ll also add, that Mike Wenthe made my day in his post where he refers to me as “cartoonist, critic, and comics theorist”. Issac also commented: It’d [...]

The latest Quarterly Conversation has an interview with Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint, who happens to be one of my favorite contemporary authors (though I seem to have only posted about him once): MR: Critics comment on your interest in the minutiae of daily experience. Do you feel that you have a particular interest in minutiae? [...]

Most readers when they think of the way a narrative (novel, comic, tv show) is ordered will think about plot: what Brian Richardson, in his “Beyond the Poetics of Plot: Alternative Forms of Narrative Progression and the Multiple Trajectories of Ulysses,” describes as “a teleological sequence of events linked by some principle of causation; that [...]

Works by the Author: (reverse chronological order) The Last Novel. 1st ed. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007. Vanishing Point : A Novel. 1st ed. Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004. This Is Not a Novel. 1st ed. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2001. Reader’s Block. 1st ed. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1996. Collected Poems. 1st [...]

(also see the Bibliography) “Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.Or of no describable genre?A seminonfictional semifiction? Cubist?Also in part a distant cousin innumerable times removed of A Skeleton’s Key to Finnegans Wake?Obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax in any case.” -Reader’s Block, p.140 David Markson’s novels are an erudite labyrinth of intertextuality, filled with allusions [...]

This is a week late, but I’m still without internet at home and adjusting to my new housing: 1. Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec (1978, Translated by David Bellos, 1987): This large novel alone took up a week of reading time. After all my reading of Oulipian works, I decided it was time [...]

The new issue of The Quarterly Conversation is up, including my review of Stefan Themerson’s novel The Mystery of the Sardine. Go check it out.

Bud Parr posted a list of his top ten works of fiction, and it seemed like a fun idea. In no particular order: 1. Recognitions, Gaddis (of course!) 2. Witchgrass/Bark Tree (Le Chiendent), Queneau 3. Jacques the Fatalist, Diderot 4. This is Not a Novel, Markson 5. Bouvard and Pecuchet, Flaubert 6. Peanuts, Charles Schulz [...]

The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker (1986). Vintage, 1990 (latest edition). 144 p., $11.95. Sometimes I buy books at used bookstore and then forget I have them. I forgot I even owned this book until I read something about in online and realized it was on my shelf. Am I glad I read this? Yes. What [...]

The latest round of selections and discussions from the Litblog Co-op, of which I am a member, starts today at the LBC blog. This season’s Read This! selection was nominated by yours truly and selected as the favorite of the round by the members. You can read my nomination post and an excerpt from the [...]

Last week over at the Litblog Co-op site saw a lot of interesting posts (including one by yours truly on novels and indexes) and a podcast on Anders Monson’s Other Electricities, a novel in stories I enjoyed quite a lot. Discussion continues this week with a second pick. Addition (8/23/09): Here’s the actually post I [...]

My review of Posy Simmonds’ Gemma Bovary, an interesting comic that combines comics panels with prose, is up in the new edition of Scott Esposito’s Quarterly Conversation.

Stephen at This Space wrote a couple posts indicating his doubt at “graphic novels” [GNs, from henceforth] ability to be great literary works. In a previous post he made this statement about literary fiction: I shall myself evade defining literary fiction right now. Let this entire blog stand for that endeavor. I will say this [...]

“Stick any two postcards to a wall and you’ve got a narrative. Unedited.” -Iain Sinclair and Dave McKean, Slow Chocolate Autopsy, p.88 This quote jumped out at me from a book that, for the most part, I was having a hard time keeping my interest in (after struggling through a couple chapters I ended up [...]

Duchamp: “I found some common points between chess and painting. Actually when you play a game of chess it is like designing something or constructing a mechanism of some kind by which you win or lose. The competitive side has no importance, but the thing itself is very, very plastic, and that is probably what [...]

Gaddis, William. Agape Agape. (Viking, 2002). (Originally apperaed in (now defunct) The Readerville Journal (Nov/Dec 2002). William Gaddis is known — at least by those who have actually heard of him — for long, dense novels such as The Recognitions (1955) and J R (1975). If you were to remove from those the complicated plots [...]