Barrie--

I enjoyed your note and also the cartoons you sent. I hope you won't mind my making a correction. It's Robert Crumb, not Art Spiegelman, who did the Book of Genesis that was excerpted in The New Yorker and was criticized by Bloom. Robert Alter, though, praised the book in The New Republic:

Scripture Picture

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/scripture-picture

Feminists--not all of them but a good many--have been on Crumb's case from the early days of Zap comix in the 1960s. It's worth noting, though, that both his wife and his daughter are cartoonists who often collaborate with him.

As for Spiegelman, he's discussed at some length in Brian Boyd's recent essay on comic strips, written from a literary Darwinist perspective:

On the Origins of Comics:
New York Double-take

http://aliceandrews.tumblr.com/

As for VN and comics, the essays by Brown and Shapiro are both well worth reading, along with all the pages on comics in Appel's wonderful Nabokov's Dark Cinema.

Thanks for putting us on to the Komar & Melamid stuff, which is indeed pretty far out, and for introducing the term "neosincerity." I found a discussion of it here:

http://www.nextbookpress.com/arts-and-culture/712/sincerity-now/

The article mentions an exhibition called Neosincerity: The Difference Between the Comic and the Cosmic Is a Single Letter--the subtitle being, obviously, a reference to VN.

Jim Twiggs

---

From: Barrie Karp <barriekarp@GMAIL.COM>

To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU

Sent: Fri, April 9, 2010 11:02:12 PM

Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] Cruelty

Fascinating discussion about cruelty and art.

Some obliquely-related items, perhaps—

The rendering in Art Spiegelman's Maus.

Regarding same author's recent Book of Genesis—I read the excerpt in The New Yorker earlier this year and loved it (it was just a few pages).  I sought some reviews and one by Harold Bloom simply dismissed and disparaged the book because he said the women in Genesis are “supposed” to be beautiful and he did not think Art Spiegelman's women in his Genesis were beautiful.  Some of us thought Spiegelman succeeded in commenting on certain received ideas of beauty and that his women are beautiful, and that Bloom’s view is sheer rigid prejudice.  Other feminists objected to all of Spiegelman's women and some to all of his work.  (The other review by someone who understood visual art was more intelligent about the visual aspects of the book.  I eventually bought the book but have not had time to read much or recently.)  (Also interesting are Spiegelman’s ideas about “neosincerity,” about which I heard him speak with Alex Melamid (formerly of Komar & Melamid—take a look at their art) and in re the Danish cartoons debates in recent years.)

Just some fragments.

And to follow up on those, the attached Mankoff cartoon published right when he died of course, with Henny Youngman’s obituary in a 1998 issue of The New Yorker, comes to mind.

And also the two attached Shanahan cartoons from The New Yorker.

Barrie

--
Barrie Karp, Ph.D., Philosophy
barriekarp@gmail.com
New York City!

On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 11:06 AM, Jansy <jansy@aetern.us> wrote:

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