Book with typographical gimmicks

[pynchonoid]

I believe Zak Smith did get permission from Pynchon,
although I'm not clear on the details and could have
it wrong.  Maybe Dave remembers. I thought his pix
were fun, but I like comics and that's his style. I
ordered a copy of the book version that's coming out
later this year; he  made the images available on a CD
a while back, too.

I'd be super-surprised if Pynchon agreed to an
illustrated edition of GR.  I've been thinking about
making one, cutting up an old Viking paperback version
and interleaving it with Smith's illos. But I've never
cut a book up like that. Seems extremely violent so I
haven't done it.

I liked the Maus books, comic books in general, the
new crop of graphic novels (there's a fine graphic
novel version of the first part of A la recherche,
from Delcourt, I think, in French; yes, I liked
Classic Comics too when I was a kid), illustrated
novels (something new from Japan coming called "light
novels" I read about the other day).  I think this is
where some creativity is to be found in publishing
these days (and admittedly a lot of crap, too),
especially that part of it that's still bubbling up
from underground or obscurity or whatever to call that
space, handmade magazines and books, art books,
comics, zines, I like the Web stuff, too, and like
that better when there's a hard copy or other
fleshworld component.  I'm not a gamer, but there
seems to be some fun geeky stuff going on in places
online like Second Life, which is all of a sudden
getting press it seems, guess they're mounting a pr
campaign.  A lot of the stuff that got going in the
interactive multimedia scene (on CD-ROM, then on the
Web when it became available in the early 90s) is now
bearing fruit online, where relatively easy to use
tools (blogs, photo manipulation & sharing, music 
creation & sharing, games & etc) and interfaces hook
into powerful back-end engines that grow out of the
work done in the 80s and 90s with rich media
databases, interactive authoring tools, C++, Java,
networking protocol stacks, all that boring stuff that
the computer science folks were cranking out for love
and stock options, there it is on Google and Yahoo and
MySpace and flickr and digg.com & etc, and other
places online where people share what they write,
photograph, video, I think something good's got to
come out of those places because so many people are
doing it and encouraging each other - a very hopeful
sign, I think, and from this kind of environment I
believe art worth spending time with will emerge.
Fewer people may be going into novelwriting because
these other creative outlets exist, while some writers
explore how to use these new tools, venues, etc. and
may be less interested in the 20th century get
discovered by an editor and become a literary lion
romance.  Keef's kid, my 19-year-old, Matt Foremski
(son of my buddy Tom, the guy who got the lonelygirl
scoop this week, mentioned in the NY Times, heady
stuff for a kid about 19, I forget exactly how old
Matt is), the ones who have grown up immersed in these
technologies (whether they're watching TV at home or
not, they're immersed, because they hear all about it
from their friends and watch at their house), they are
the ones who will figure out more elegant ways to use
these tools and do amazing things with it.   Again,
I'm an optimist on this score, maybe because I was
there as some of this was coming together in the 80s
and 90s here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley -
despite the dreck that inevitably emerges, cream
rises, too. My two cents.


--- Steven <mcquaryq at comcast.net> wrote:

> 	Gotcha.  That would be graphic novels, then.  Comic
> books we called  
> them back in the day.  Has anyone enjoyed the Maus
> books by Art  
> Spiegelman?  Pretty unique works of art, imo.
> 
> 	Also -- those Zacistrations are pretty horrible as
> works of art.
> 
> 	Lastly -- I don't imagine Pynchon would be very
> likely to have his  
> pages illuminated by anyone -- just a hunch.
> 
> 	Steve

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com