readandbreathe:

<3

tatteredcover:

The book of the future: ♺ What goes around comes around.

A week… no wait, it could have been two weeks… well, just one week seems better…

SO, a week ago I received an envelope with a bag in it from my friend John Rice. He is a marvelous designer, expert guitar player and all around ruthlessly creative person. I couldn’t be happier to have been the recipient of such a funny little bag.

The funny little bag has funny little lumps because these suckers are in there:

My friend Bailey, another uncommonly talented and creative person, hand-carved these remarkably beautiful stamps for me. They’ll look perfect on our zines. Her timing was truly perfect because I am very nearly ready to publish a round of zines about such concerns as photography, vegan/gluten-free eating, and the atrocities of Whiteclay, NE. I know that last one seemed about jarring to throw in with the other more pleasant zines but this is a matter that is near and dear to Nebraskans and the zine will be released in conjunction with a larger project to help bring jobs and hope to the people of the Pine Ridge Reservation. So good things are afoot and ahand. Some other good things are aheart and abrain. Use them liberally. Oh and please look at both Bailey and John’s sites, they have amazing things to offer.

I have a friend who used to live just a block or so from me. Last summer I would visit him often and we’d spend evenings grilling on his porch and remarking on the lovely sunsets. Along with the sunsets we would remark on romance in like manner. We would remember our most recent attempts at securing romantic relationships and immediately following we typically concluded that our efforts and energies were least squandered when trained not on other humans but on, rather, romancing ourselves or spiritual entities. Or anything capable of love unconditional.

Although we attempted to assert that this was out of resolute wisdom and thoughtfulness but, in truth, it was usually out of dejected resignation without fervent conviction.  We tried to play it off as noble but it was really just pathetic.

Chester Brown, scholar, cartoonist extraordinaire and connoisseur of sex-workers, disavowed romantic love for far more sober and intellectual reasons.

I first found out about Brown’s pay-for-sex memoir during one of these nights with my friend. An article about a Jewish scholar cut from the New York Times Magazine was laying on his kitchen counter and on the adjacent side was a small article about a graphic novel with some very intriguingly titillating panels. I was aware of Chester Brown by reputation only but had not read any of the books that made him famous (I Never Liked You; Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography; and Ed, The Happy Clown).

Upon first examination I was honestly quite repulsed. All the associations I made with prostitution were based on my attitude that the whole phenomenon of prostitution was a mere coupling of misogynists and hopeless cases throughout all millennia. This was mainly gleaned from cop dramas, feminist literature and my own unsubstantiated biases. I thought of Brown, “well clearly he is an out-of-control pervert who doesn’t understand the value of masturbation and seems to think he has to devalue another person’s body to pleasure his own. Or perhaps he gets off on dominance. What an asshole.”

Although this was my initial reaction I was still fascinated because the article implied the book was actually a very even-handed chronicling of a very personal and oft misunderstood matter. I nearly lost my mind with ecstatic jubilation when I happened upon a copy in one of Nebraska’s greatest independent bookstores, Indigo Bridge Books in Lincoln. Never expecting to find a book with such a profoundly obvious capacity to offend in a bookstore in Nebraska, but my myopic perceptions were confounded once again. That very sentiment, in fact, is the principle reason I would recommend this book to absolutely everyone and anyone.

Due to it’s economic and effective drawing, simple layout (never more than six panels on a page) and saucy preoccupation I read the whole thing in only a couple sittings. This also includes the in depth appendices. I immediately handed the book off to my roommate desperate to have someone discuss the book with. I have not come across another book in a very long time that begged so earnestly to be mulled over with another person. After my roommate finished the book it took us about two weeks of very long, almost nightly colloquies before we began to grasp the full merit of Paying For It.

Instantly upon finishing the book we both respectively felt as though a curtain had been torn in two regarding not only the world’s oldest profession but also all the reasons why only discourse leads to understanding and true knowledge. When our concerns about prostitution were butted up against our permissiveness concerning casual sex or even consensual sex participated in for reasons other than love or passion we began to see that judgement and illiberality kept us from ever even engaging the question: why do I see things the way I see them? If the conversation never happens then there can be no progression towards truth whatsoever.

Now, both my roommate and I disagree wholeheartedly with Brown on many, many points he makes about romance and monogamy and his overtly libertarian ideologies, but the elucidation we have reached concerning our own paradigms was ridiculously illuminating.

I definitely gained a greater appreciation for loves unromantic because Brown is so affirming of the fact that there is such a cultural emphasis on romantic relationships as the most fulfilling and ultimately necessary. I didn’t go so far as to despise romance but this book allowed me to feel more content with my perspective that my somewhat recent singleness is not a hole to climb out of but just more verdant prairie to traipse through. I thought I knew that but Brown’s logic gave me permission to believe it.



So not only is Paying For It a remarkably well written graphic memoir it is perhaps chiefly an agent of some very informal yet possibly most crucial disquisition I have ever engaged in. For this reason I cannot recommend it enough. Read it and bring a friend.

One of dozens of broadsides printed to memorialize the destruction induced by the 2007 bombing of Al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad. This street has been the cultural epicenter of Baghdad for about as long as the lustrous city has existed. The bombing was a devastating and deadly (30 dead, over one hundred wounded) attack on people’s freedom to have a community dedicated to enrichment and knowledge. The Al-Mutanabbi Broadside Coalition project was instigated by Beau Beausoleil, a bookseller in San Fransisco, and has culled beautiful prints from all over the world to show support for intellectual discourse and to denounce anti-expression.

Please, please read this full article from the remarkably encouraging Les Femmes Folles blog. Denise Brady, bookmaker, printer and all around champion of printed arts, has put together a showcase of poetry to commemorate an horrific event five years ago in Baghdad when a bombing occurred in the city’s book selling district ostensibly waging a manifest war on the people’s access to culture, illumination and all the wonderful things books grant. The reading (in English and Arabic) is tonight from 6-7 at UNO’s Weber Fine Arts building. It is free and exhibits work commissioned by a bookseller in San Fransisco who has tried to build awareness concerning the bombing and those who lost their lives.

femmesfollesnebraska:

Denise Brady organized a reading to be held Monday March 5 in the UNO Art Gallery to honor the 2007 bombing of al-Mutanabbi Street, the booksellers’ street in Baghdad (details below). She generously shares with Les Femmes Folles about growing up in the country in a big family, her…