Nowhere Band News

So, David Foster Wallace. Wow, that was tough; I’ve rearranged a whole lot of my mental furniture in response to stuff he wrote. His story “Good Old Neon” fundamentally changed the way I think about depression.  Disturbingly, “Good Old Neon” is all about the suicide urge and how depression is really a weird sort of intense internal war, devastating to the person it’s internal to and generally kind of opaque and impenetrable to people on the outside. It’s a little disconcerting when the man whose opinion you respect the most on these matters dies by suicide. Read more

So, I’ll say this about bus commuting: you get a hell of a lot of reading done. With a pile this big, I thought I’d revive an old tradition and print out the list of what I’ve read so far, with brief comments. The thought of going through and doing proper italicization gives me hives, so we’ll just skip that.

1.    Complete Peanuts, volume 1 (Charles Schulz)- More interesting than fun, really. There’s good stuff, but the elements that made Peanuts so special aren’t anywhere near to gelling in this early stuff. It’s pretty amazing to see how rigid Schulz’s early style was, and how much more expressive he got when he loosened up and simplified.

2.    Cartoon History of the Universe, vol. 1 (Larry Gonick)- If anyone’s ever done a better job with nonfiction cartooning, I haven’t heard of it. Gonick serves up great, great stuff—this volume gets you as far as Alexander the Great, and it’s a really informative blast all the way.
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