Melvin Monster meets Daisy Chain
Interview by Daisy Chain
Melvin Monster Volume One by John Stanley
Drawn and Quarterly, $US 19.95
Thank you Melvin, it’s a privilege to talk with you – you’ve been in the wilderness for some time.
I have Daisy, fashion left me behind some time ago, but peace and quiet is not so easy for monsters to come by, so I do count my blessings. Read more
Amy Lockhart’s ‘Dirty Dishes’
Dirty Dishes by Amy Lockhart
Drawn & Quarterly - Petits Livres, $US 14.95.
Reviewed by Elizabeth Prater.
Slim, easily browsed and just about small enough to fit into the back pocket of your jeans, Dirty Dishes offers a compressed look at some of the less exposed aspects of Amy Lockhart’s practice. Drawn and Quarterly is a broad church, it has gathered together many independent, thoughtful and intellectually aspiring graphic novelists and comic artists. Read more
HEAT 21 - Without a Paddle
HEAT 21 - Without a Paddle.
Giramondo. $AU 24.95.
I lost my way. I forgot myself. I walked into a mirror.
In retracing my steps I’ve mapped out a journey that starts with primal self-assertion, passes through the ‘night-shadowed tundra’ and the ‘thin shadows of nothing’ and arrives, in one form or another, at a negotiated compromise with self-consciousness and the life of the mind. But first, let’s acknowledge the colours we’re travelling under. HEAT 21 is ‘Without a Paddle’ and Jon Campbell is ‘Up Shit Creek’. Popular vernacular, verbal and visual. A highly contrived naïvete. Nostalgia, romance - flat sign-writer surfaces, flat palette. Evocation of the hand-made and make-shift – simple signs - colour, text, composition - the primitive essence of vis. com. coercion (see right). Read more
Houdini’s Rectum - Are literary biographies bad for us?
- David Free
Late last year, Clive James published The Blaze of Obscurity, his fifth volume of memoirs. The book was an amusing enough diary of James’s working life in TV, but it confirmed one’s feeling that the Unreliable Memoirs are getting less and less personal as they proceed – to the point where they feel, at places in this latest volume, as if they’ve become a mechanism for shutting you out of the author’s inner life. As a long-time fan of the memoirs, I find it hard to be thrilled about their diminishing frankness. Read more