A few other late-night links.

* Philip Roth has surrendered to television on behalf of the novel.

"I was being optimistic about 25 years really. I think it's going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them but it will be a small group of people. Maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range."

* Chris Ware in the New Yorker.

* If Harry Potter Was Made in the 1980s, and Starred David Bowie.

* 'Man who threw feces in courtroom draws 31-year sentence for robbery.' Live and learn.

* The Telegraph covers the laws of internet discourse.

7. Pommer’s Law
Proposed by Rob Pommer on rationalwiki.com in 2007, this states: “A person's mind can be changed by reading information on the internet. The nature of this change will be from having no opinion to having a wrong opinion.”

* Scientology convicted of fraud in France. See also.

* Will D.C. let J.J. Abrams have a crack at Superman? After the success of the Star Trek reboot this seems like an obvious move—and it would certainly be better than all their other attempts so far.

* Is your city recession-proof?

* Why your dryer sucks. More here.

* And Ezra Klein puts the politics behind the public option very well:

For the real liberals, the public option was already a compromise from single-payer. For the slightly less radical folks, the public option that's barred from partnering with Medicare to maximize the government's buying power was a compromise down from a Medicare-like insurance plan. For the folks even less radical than that, the public option that states can "opt out" of is a compromise from the straight public option. Access to the public option will be a political question settled at the state level. It is not a settled matter of national policy.

In many ways, this is a fundamentally conservative approach to a liberal policy experiment. It's only offered to individuals eligible for the insurance exchanges, which is a small minority of the population. The majority of Americans who rely on employer-based insurance would not be allowed to choose the exchanges. From there, it is only one of many options on the exchange, and only in states that choose to have it. In other words, it has been designed to preserve the status quo and be decided on the state level. Philosophically, these are major compromises liberals have made on this plan. They should get credit for that.

A few more links for today, as my brain is otherwise useless.

* io9 has your Disney/Marvel crossovers in the other direction. I too am looking forward to the Dark Mermaid Saga.

* Again with the Comics has scans from Chris Ware's extremely rare "Floyd Farland: Citizen of the Future." Get them before the C&D.

* Who's ruining air travel now?

* Biden breaks down 2010.

* Today in our awesome post-racial society.

* And could Jennifer's Body actually not be all that bad? Feministe reports.

Monday night!

* On the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing, Kotte catches Moon Fever (and there's only no cure). The Nation celebrates the Gil-Scott Heron way.

* 21 artists who changed mainstream comics (for better or worse).

17. Chris Ware
Though he’s philosophically more in line with the alt-comics community, Chris Ware draws so much media attention, and his books sell so well, that his work is arguably more mainstream than any current superhero title. Ware’s innovations in comic-page design—which include temporal shifts conveyed by complex diagrams and frames within frames—were inspired by Art Spiegelman’s ’70s experiments and by Richard McGuire’s seminal Raw story “Here.” But Ware marries his fetish for design with a singularly sardonic voice and a God’s-eye perspective on his characters, creating an overall tone that’s like a turn-of-the-century circus poster crossed with the post-war angst of literary lions like John Updike and Richard Yates. Ware’s influence is mostly seen among the younger alternative crowd and contemporary commercial artists, but his use of staccato pacing and visual repetition has popped up in a number of superhero comics over the past decade as well.

* Is Harry Potter no longer a ticket straight to Hell?

* Steve Benen remembers the day Medicare enslaved us all.

* Aliens in vintage postcards.

Monday night links.

* After a brief flirtation with "top five" status, Brüno is back to being a box-office disappointment.

* Top ten comics cities. #2: Chris Ware's Chicago. Via MetaFilter.

* xkcd tackles the frighteningly addictive power of TV Tropes.

* SF by the numbers. Via Boing Boing.

* Why are we so fat?

* Also in the New Yorker: profiles of Al Franken and Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, last seen ratifying nature's right to exist.

* And allow me to offer my heartiest gerrycanavan.blogspot.com welcome to North Carolina's newest resident.

When I was younger I would sometimes be seized, usually at night, by sudden intense depressions I usually thought of as "darkness." I haven't felt that way in a long time, not since before I was married, and I'm certain a lot of that has to do both with Jaimee and with the way my life has generally improved in all categories since I was younger. But tonight I feel something like that feeling, except totally benign, a kind of overpowering sense of nostalgia that has been caused in varying degrees by:

* my high school reunion, in process tonight a mere 600 miles from my current location;
* the fifth anniversary of my cousin Andrew's death, which puts his phantom self as old this year as I was when he died;
* a new diet that seems to be having immediate and positive effects on my energy and concentration;
* yesterday's rereading of Jimmy Corrigan;
* some eerily on-the-nose "nostalgia rock" recommended by Jacob B;
* my obsessive attention to the youth rebellion in Iran and hope at least for one night that the arc of history bends towards Utopia.

I feel nostalgic and hypercontemplative, but not sad, except insofar as we all only live life once, and the portions are too small.

"Quimby the Mouse," a Chris Ware animation for the recent live This American Life.

Quimby The Mouse from This American Life on Vimeo.

As befits a gray-haired eminence, I have recently fallen in love with episodes of This American Life, which I now download and listen to constantly. Using a number of "Best Of" websites, I've had great results with Act V, Fiasco!, Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, and the two most recent shows on the economy (1, 2), with eight more episodes waiting on my iPod.

The best one I've listened to yet is naturally Superpowers, just wall-to-wall awesome with appearances from Chris Ware, John Hodgman, Zora, and Jonathan Morris from the Gone but Not Forgotten blog—and best of all it turned me on to this very early Chris Ware story once hosted on TAL's website. If you've never heard one of the *really good* TAL episode, start here.

Chris Ware has illustrated another short piece for season 2 of Showtime's This American Life. Here's the first one, too, from season one.





This guy's got to stop doing all these side projects and get back to work on those long, long awaited follow-ups to Jimmy Corrigan...

Comics Should Be Good has the Top 100 Comics Runs as chosen by their readers. I'm a little sad to see Chris Ware only scrapping by at #100—the ACME Novelty Library is a very good thing...

Via MeFi.

Friday night is random comics night.

* Chris Ware on how Rodolphe Töpffer invented the comic strip.

* Cracked on the five most insane celebrity comic cameos. At right: a panel from The Joker Meets Ayatollah Khomeini.

* Pathetic Geek Stories.

Chris Ware: Drawings for New York Periodicals is an art show running at Adam Baumgold Gallery until March 15. Unfortunately for me, I don't live in New York City. Thanks to blucarbnpinwheel, who does live there, for the pointer.

Here's a higher resolution scan of the "Unsolved Mysteries of the North American Comic Strip" one, which I love.

A few more links to soothe (or cause) the post-Christmas blues:

* More depressing news from the credit sector: the current credit and liquidity crisis could make 1929 look like 'walk in the park.'

* Via Srinivas, an apropos-of-nothing Jared Diamond profile in the New York Times tries to get at the heart of our complicated understanding of collapse and reemergence.

* Also in the Times, this review of Best American Comics 2007 preempts any review I might have written about the ways in which the book failed to quite live up to its promise this year, due in large part to Chris Ware's strange over-reliance on autobiographical comics (though, as the review notes, there are still as always some really good bits).

* Shankar points to this Daily Kos diary that nicely satirizes the recent, incomprehensible spate of anti-Obama rhetoric in the blogosphere, originating just in the moment that he started to gain traction against Hillary, proving once and for all that the Left wouldn't allow itself to be happy even if they did have a good candidate for once.

* And, in the Telegraph, we learn that the universe may be running down, presaging yet another possible end for everything: total stasis.

Unsolved Mysteries of the North American Comic Strip from the November 26th New Yorker, by America's greatest living folk hero, Chris Ware.

Hot on the heels of DFW comes Chris Ware's introduction to Best American Comics 2007, via Austin Kleon.

Art in the twentieth century (at least in the West) all but stomped out the idea of storytelling in pictures. Before that, a narrative, whether religious, military, or mythological, practically formed the raison d’être for visual art’s existence. Altarpieces, through repeated sequential images, told the story of the Stations of the Cross, and giant tapestries and paintings recounted battles and victories for citizens and subsequent generations to admire and fear. But as the notion of art as essentially conceptual sprouted and eventually grew all over the previous century’s museum walls and museum-goers’ eyes, paintings or drawings that “showed something” were increasingly dismissed as sentimental, or, even worse, “illustrative.” There’s a certain logic to this, especially if the urge is toward reducing a medium to its absolute barest skin-and-bones essentials in an attempt to discover its innate truth. Unfortunately, the truth of painting and drawing is that they’re actually really great for showing things. (Music, on the other hand, isn’t; think of how clunky and disturbing a concrete sound like a car horn is when introduced into a melody line that otherwise seems to be perfectly capturing the ebb and flow of the heart; I don’t think it’s wrong to think that certain art forms might be better at one thing or another.) Comics, on the third hand (and at about the same time all of this was in full swing in the world of visual art), were showing things, lots of things: rape, murder, and other violence—so much so that in the 1950s comic books were forced to self-censor as activist Fredric Wertham suggested that the corruption of American youth could be directly traced to such pictured acts of horror (the story of which, incidentally, is lyrically illuminated in Art Spiegelman’s as-of-yet-unproduced opera Drawn to Death). Because of the traditionally narrative basis of the language in which they work, cartoonists are almost always cornered into “showing something.” And how lucky we’ve been! And how lucky painters have been, too, ironically appropriating comic book imagery for decades because it was one of the few permitted territories for visual representation that the art world could stomach, sort of a “cake and eat it too” approach. (I, for one, am actually glad they let me eat cake, even if I had to choke down a little theory with it.)