Henry and a gum machine

[Henry, July 18, 2012.]

Henrietta has just wondered what Henry would look like with a mustache. The mysterious streetside object last seen on July 19, 2011 is here revealed as a gum machine, complete with mirror.

I have never seen these gum machines outside the subway stations of my childhood. But then I have never lived in the comics.

Other Henry posts
Betty Boop with Henry
Henry, an anachronism
Henry buys liverwurst
Henry, getting things done
Henry’s repeated gesture

Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland

Harvey Pekar and Joseph Remnant. Cleveland. Introduction by Alan Moore. Scarsdale, NY, and Marietta, GA: Zip Comics and Top Shelf Productions, 2012. 128 pages. $21.99 (hardcover), $9.99 (digital).

                                The Best Location in the Nation.
                                Metropolis of the Western Reserve.
                                The Mistake on the Lake.

                                Three nicknames for Cleveland, Ohio

“From off the streets of Cleveland”: Harvey Pekar (1939–2010) is a writer whose work is stamped with the name of a city. There is nothing glamorous or sinister about Pekar’s Cleveland; it is not Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles. Nor is there anything mythic about the Cleveland landscape; it is not the Paterson of William Carlos Williams’s epic poem. But to borrow a phrase from Williams: Cleveland is “the local conditions,” the city of Pekar’s birth, a place in which to work, worry, and observe.


[Click for a larger view.]

Cleveland is two books really: a brief history of a city and the story of Pekar’s life there, through three marriages and thirty-odd years in a “flunky job” as a file clerk in a Veterans Affairs hospital. Pekar’s story of the city begins and ends on notes of hope: the Cleveland Indians’ 1948 World Series win over the Boston Braves (the Indians’ second and last Series win to date) and the development of a medical mart and convention center (scheduled to open in 2013). But the story of twentieth-century Cleveland is largely a story of decline, with years of industrial might (iron and steel, manufacturing, railroads) followed by unemployment, poverty, crime, and suburban flight. This story, alas, has become a quintessential American story, told again and again in empty storefronts and abandoned properties.

Pekar enters the story in 1939. He recounts a relatively pleasant childhood and adolescence: a far less violent picture of his early years than the one he gives in The Quitter (2005). Here we see young Harvey playing baseball, mastering public transit, discovering the joys of used-book stores, and savoring the “frosty malt” at Higbee’s (a locally-owned department store, now gone). In adulthood, Pekar finds security in a Civil Service job (one requiring little or no intellectual effort, which he reserves for his reading and writing). Pekar regulars Mr. Boats and Toby Radloff appear in scenes at work. Pekar’s first two marriages fail (he is less than generous in his depiction of his partners), but a third marriage, to Joyce Brabner, sticks. And thus the world familiar to readers of American Splendor comes into view. Chronology and continuity are sometimes off, as when Pekar recounts his second wife’s life after marriage and asks, one page later, “What happened to her?” before beginning to tell the story again. At other times, digressions are masterful, as when Pekar’s account of his daily routine makes room for commentaries on Cleveland radio personality Diane Rehm and bookseller John T. Zubal.

Pekar’s world comes into view through the labor of Joseph Remnant, who has become one of my favorite illustrators of Pekar’s stories. His style is reminiscent of Robert Crumb’s, with considerable crosshatching and much loving attention to the sometimes invisible clutter of city streets (chimney pipes, streetlights, telephone poles). For those who know Cleveland well, panel after panel will evoke familiar elements of the city: the Arcade, the Detroit-Superior Bridge, the Public Library, the Terminal Tower. The research that went into Remnant’s work must have been considerable. Here is one detail that for this non-Clevelander was decisive, a panel from Pekar’s account of the life of John T. Zubal:



I don’t know Cleveland, but I know the Bronx, and I know Fordham. Behind John and Marilyn stands the clocktower of Keating Hall, the centerpiece of Fordham’s Bronx campus. That Remnant would take the time to include this detail, one that just a handful of readers might recognize, says much about his approach to making art.

Remnant’s work also delights me in that it gets Harvey Pekar right — not that there is one proper way to draw him, but that there are many ways to go wrong. Remnant’s Pekar is cranky but not crazed, frayed but not frazzled. He wanders the streets of Cleveland in this volume at all ages and in all moods, bent forward in his later years, a man for all seasons and just one city.

What I find most moving in this book in Pekar’s idea of a good city: concerts, libraries, museums, parks, bookstores, and record stores. That’s very much my idea of a good city, and it’s an idea that grows more fragile by the day.

[Harvey Pekar by Joseph Remnant. From the title page.]

Thanks to the publishers for a review copy of the book.

Related reading
Cleveland (Top Shelf Productions)
All Harvey Pekar posts (via Pinboard)

More Pekar and Remnant collaborations
“Autodidact” : “Back in the Day” : “Legendary Vienna” : “Muncie, Indiana” : “Reciprocity” : “Sweeping Problem”

Sydney Smith on tea and coffee

[Sydney Smith, Wit and Wisdom of the Rev. Sydney Smith, Being Selections from His Writing and Passages of His Letters and Table-Talk (New York: Redfield, 1858).]

Sydney Smith (1771–1845) was an Anglican cleric and, it would seem, delightful company. He created a rhyming recipe for salad dressing. He argued against slavery and for the education of women. One more point in his favor: in profile he strongly resembles the late Bill Youngren. You’ll have to take my word for it.

Donald J. Sobol (1924–2012)

Donald J. Sobol, the creator of Encyclopedia Brown, has died at the age of eighty-seven.

I caught on to the Encyclopedia Brown books in 2008. They’re wonderful. I’m not sure how I managed not to figure that out earlier.

Here’s a post that reproduces an illustration from the first Brown book, Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective (1963). Notice the orange crate.

Nancy meets Billy Wilder

From Nancy Ritz’s 1945 screen test for The Seven Year Itch (dir. Billy Wilder, 1955). In an orderly universe, the title would read The Seven-Year Itch and Marilyn Monroe would have had no competition for the role of The Girl.

Other Nancy posts
Charlotte russe
The greatest Nancy panel?
Nancy is here
Nancy meets Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo)
Nancy meets Stanley Kubrick (The Shining)

[Nancy panel by Ernie Bushmiller, February 12, 1945, from Nancy Is Happy: Complete Dailies 1943–1945 (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2012).]

Spam, glorious spam

Hello, i read your blog occasionally and i own a similar one and i was just wondering if you get a lot of spam remarks? If so how do you prevent it, any plugin or anything you can recommend? I get so much lately it's driving me insane so any assistance is very much appreciated.

Cory Doctorow received a spam comment gone awry, one that contained 100+ generic spam comments (a spam menu, as it were, from which the spammer was to choose). That’s one of the comments above.

Here’s a comment that Doctorow didn’t get, aimed at education-related content. This comment has appeared online at least 395 times (thank you, Google) and has been deleted, no doubt, many more times. Exactly as typed:

I have been a student at one of the High Speed Universities online since August 2009 and it has been an answer to my prayers. Their assessments and papers are NO easy task, so for those who say online schools are "dummed down" are highly mistaken.

Related reading
All spam-themed posts (via Pinboard)

Rule 7 and other rules

I have long been a fan of what is called, simply, Rule 7:

The only rule is work. If you work, it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.

As I wrote in a still mildly popular 2005 post, I found this rule in Learning by Heart, a book by the artist Corita Kent, where it appears in a list of rules for students and teachers in a college art department. Here’s the full list.

This morning Elaine showed me the same list, attributed to John Cage. Wha?

This 2010 post by Keri Smith and the comments that follow explore the question of attribution. I find Smith’s hypothesis plausible: that the quotation from Cage that forms Rule 10 led somehow to all the rules being identified as his work. If the list of rules is by Cage, I’d say it’s the best thing he ever wrote. But a comment on Smith’s post from the artist Jill Bell quotes correspondence from Richard Crawford that would seem to confirm a collaborative effort by Kent and her students. Crawford was one of Kent’s students.

[Thanks to Daughter Number Three for letting me know who Jill Bell is.]

Maria Cole (1922–2012)

Maria Cole, widow of Nat King Cole, has died at the age of eighty-nine. In the 1940s, as Marie Ellington, she sang with the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

Of course, I was very lucky to have three such singers as Kay Davis, Joya Sherrill, and Marie Ellington all at one time, but there is a sad corollary to be detailed: all three were pretty, all three married, and all three left me.

Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (New York: Doubleday, 1973).

Here is a recording of “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” with all three singers. Sherrill died in 2010; Davis, earlier this year. The singer Herb Jeffries may now be the last link to the 1940s Ellington orchestra.

Woody Guthrie centennial

[“Folk singer Woody Guthrie playing guitar w. sign on it reading THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS.” Photograph by Eric Schaal. New York, New York, 1943. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

Woody Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, one hundred years ago today. His songs were made for you and me.

Taco Bell’s Canon

Halfhazard work, Ivory League school : just-retired professor James Courter writes about the spelling habits of some of his students, the ones who would appear to do little reading: Teaching “Taco Bell’s Canon” (Wall Street Journal ).

Some of the more startling errors I’ve seen of late: and for an (from several writers), beast for best , retail for retell , scarface for sacrifice . The final item in this series might be the result of the Cupertino effect.

Related posts
No job too small
On “On the New Literacy”

(Thanks, Van Dyke.)