indie guilt spring '06

Fortunately, Reed Richards invented the Internet. Mile High Comics occasionally has 30% or 40% off TPB sales if you're on their... um, entertaining e-mail list, and it looks like Amazon has 34-36% off both volumes of Flight right now, etc.

My "lazy" reading habits (or, more appropriately, my "lazy" discussion habits) are just a result of routine - I'm a slave to the weekly grind, and tend to forget when / if irregularly-published low-visibility stuff is available. As for talking about stuff, maybe it's also me feeling a bit out of my league when it comes to non-spandex stuff. Also, for some idiot reason, while I have no problem buying 100+ comics per month, I worry about space considerations when it comes to buying A Book-Sized Book.

READ ACTION PHILOSOPHERS DAMN IT

likewise.

also, what are the odds that a thread titled "Chris Ware's Speed Dial" would be all that entertaining?

[xpost]

Dude, give ILC some credit!

(actually i don't get any!)

Extend this to spandex-stuff and that's me.

Image -- so not indie! (AoB would be like Wilkkko, and Fell = YYYs.)

Ray, I mostly only read spandex writers, not titles. But I am aberrationn.

Spawn = Sebadoh

and there's sort of a hedging of bets, y'know, hot spandex writers & artists tend to be assigned to hot spandex books, so the world will never know how a Johns-scripted, um, Congorilla series would sell, or a Jim Lee-drawed Omega Men or whatever.
Grant Morrison is maybe an extreme exception to this, though, obviously, Seaguy sales would indicate Ray's OTM.

(Is there anyone on this thread who's never read L&R, or dislikes it, & how come?)

No, really, start High Society. Today, if possible.

Me: So, uh, did you get the new Action Philosophers in?
Dude: Uh...
Me: Okay, gimme three Bludhaven Bloodbaths.

Okay, I'll try again.

more like Chris Ware's Slow Dial amirite?
(except OMG hot handjob action in this week's Building Stories! I missed last week's ep so it was all sudden)

Isn't part of the Great Indie/Spandex divide that indies read writers or artists, not titles?

OTM.

but also! mad important point! is that in the examples from Huk's quote, I'm not even citing "indie" comics - Millionaire has books on Dark Horse and Fanta, but he's mainly in newspapers and his next book is going to be from Hyperion. Jules Feiffer was in newspapers with the Spirit, then Playboy and The Village Voice for forty years, and his books are published by Random House and McGraw-Hill and Signet and and and (and his plays are on Broadway, and his movies are produced by AVCO Embassy and Paramount and Disney etc etc). & Raymond Briggs has never even smelt the comics industry, it's all Hamish Hamilton from the '60s to the '90s and Jonathan Cape these days (although nb alert v. comics-friendly division of RH there)


Thanks for the L&R review link Douglas! Now just come back every week and post the new ones so I know to read it*.

The Locas and Palomar ginormobooks are really good ways to start reading Love & Rockets if you don't mind missing the odd side-story! (I do, so it's really annoying that the paperbacks cost over A$250 for the same story pages as a A$60 hardcover.) The Cerebus rule applies to the paperbacks though, in that you should probably start with volume 3 or so unless you know you're going to keep going (first masterpiece for each: Human Diastrophism and Death Of Speedy, probably around the same number of pages in as High Society)


*DYS!

I have more tolerance for being disappointed by a $3 book that's a semi-known quantity than I do for a $12-15 book that I don't know much about at all.

Somebody said it before, but libraries libraries libraries are your friend in this regard. They tend to stock the Jules Feiffer kinda stuff and the Drawn and Quarterly stuff if they know what they're buying-- at least around here it isn't all superhero trades and manga for the kids by any means. I read my library's copy of Maus about a dozen times when I was a teen-- I didn't buy that kind of thing at comics shops.

xpost

Street Angel

I'm rereading my copy of this and liking it better this time around-- now I can see again what made me want it when I was browsing it in the shop. Libraries should be ordering this to go along with the teen manga, if they're not already.

As stated above, the thing you have to remember w/r/t L&R when approaching it for the first time is that the earlier stuff is, for the most part, quite different than where things end up. Not so much w/Beto's stuff (as contained in Palomar), but definitely w/Jaime's. The earlier Jaime work tends to literalize the title of the series a little too much. If you have the opportunity to read The Death of Speedy on it's own, that would be the best indicator of how much you'll like the rest of Jaime's work and whether you should shell out for Locas (I'd recommend it, personally). Beto's work is a whole 'nother animal, so it's possible that, if Jaime didn't do it for you, Beto still might.

I'm not buying much of anything regularly these days, spandex or no, but even so, indie stuff comes out so infrequently that it's kind of stretching to say I buy any indie singles regularly. But among those that I pick up on the occasion that something new does pop up: anything Los Bros Hernandez (obvs.), Rubber Necker, Tales Designed To Thrizzle, Or Else, Magic Whistle, THB, Flaming Carrot (which probably hasn't technically counted as an indie in a long time), Worn Tuff Elbow (which I can't say with certainty is going to be an ongoing...anything Marc Bell puts out, anyway), Dork, Schizo, Pogostick (although, since it's partly Al Columbia's baby, I'd expect to see the next issue around the time my first grandchild is born...). I'm a billion years behind on Stray Bullets (because I'm stubbornly and probably fruitlessly holding out for more hardcovers), but I used to get it all the time and enjoy it quite a bit. I'll also list Eightball and Acme Novelty Library, even though those only come out once every five years or so these days.

I guess that's technically a lot broader than my spandex-related pull list of late: Seven Soldiers, ASS, LoSH, Hellblazer (must stick it out...), and X-Factor. Which is composed of stuff that mostly exists outside of the Colossal Crossover Clusterfuck-age (a.k.a. the reason God invented CBRs) taking place elsewhere.

I usually recommend Wigwam Bam as a starting point for Jaime--you'll be baffled for a little bit as you figure out who all the characters are, but it all eventually becomes clear, plus the first chapter is so funny. But if you can afford Locas or get it from the library, that's kinda the way to go, with the understanding that it changes drastically about a quarter of the way through (I actually love both phases, but they're way different).

Other indie singles I buy regularly: Age of Bronze, Or Else, Ed the Happy Clown, Tales Designed to Thrizzle, Queen & Country.

Does Scott Pilgrim count? Does Finder?

Well, I was thinking of it as a gateway drug-- it's got Castle Radium in it, and the "Meanwhile" beginning isn't far removed from Grant Morrison's formalist self-referentiality.

Street Angel is sadly all hype.

I never read the hype, so it never had expectations to live up to for me, besides me thinking that the end of the Jesus issue was hilarious the first time I read it in the shop. It's fun.

Flaming Carrot (which probably hasn't technically counted as an indie in a long time)

It's basically a straight superhero title at this point, isn't it?

P.S. That said, the recent Flaming Carrot fumetti special was kind of lame.

REDUCTIVE FOOTNOTE

Jaime Hernandez = suburban stories of postpunk mexican teens, hanging out in scenes, queer love, starring maggie (the most sympathetic comic character ever?) and Hopey (sarcastic bouncy voice) in a glamorous Golden Age of Hollywood compositional style.

Gilbert Hernandez = stories set in either Palomar, fictional village somewhere in Latin America, or in a stereotype of LA. Expressive drawings and complex narratives.

Both storylines integrate incredibly intricate plot lines with goofy humor and goofball surrealism. Also: lots of sex. The conventional wisdom is: Gilbert tells better stories but Jaime draws better. The spin is: No, Jaime also tells complex stories and while Gilber'ts drawings are not as slick as Jaime's, they're very expressive and wonderful in their own way. Sad sociological analysis: Gilbert is brilliant, but thanks to reader identification, more people seem to like Jaime because the (sub)urban settings and teen hijinks are ones they can relate to.

================================

REASONS YOU SHOULD READ IT

Life itself! LR is the most lifelike comic most of us have read or at least the closest thing to, say, Tolstoy that indie comics have produced. Gilbert and Jaimie's characters do things that they normally don't do in comics: fart, make-out, fix cars, get yelled at by their mom, look for orange juice at parties, get fed-up by their best friend, etc. (Douglas's link points out how good Jaime at ventriloquizing the voice of a teenage girl.) The early Jaime stores are the best anything I've read for feeling like you're inside a community of real people, and the later ones are the best at captured the fallen, atomized, let down of adulthood.

The visuals in LR are remarkable in how they are both light and dense at the same time. Each character has a very recognizable look (enough so that they are recognizable when surrounded by 20 other characters or when aged forward or backwards 20 years). They also have distinctive ways of gesturing, so the panels are always psychologically dense but transparent in a way that makes other artists look like summarizers of the plot (spandex) or as brittle, psychologically boring portraitists (most other indie artists).

Also, as Clifford Shulz (sp?) wrote in an introduction to one of the volumes, LR is remarkable for building a habitable world. A typical volume might have 20 different characters all pursuing different goals. This makes it both incredibly intimate and impersonal. Another way to say this is--I can't think of any other comic that uses continuity in a good way or that immerses you in a network of different relationships. In this way, LR is really distinct from the twee self-aggrandizing indie comics (think Jeffrey Brown, Tomine, etc.), whose sensitive protagonists are atomized and self-aggrandized. The way LR always has 20 balls in the air, ready for juggling, enables it to use context in a really interesting way.

Finally, LR has usually been talked about in this way and maybe condescended to because it's so good at realism. (GM has said some unkind things about it.) But LR is a really formalistic comic, filled with tricks (characters heads cropped out of panels, sudden jumps in time, metafiction). Alan Moore even talks about stealing from it in his "How to write comics" seres in TCJ.

Anyways, if this doesn't convince you: sex!

Also: I bought the first few editions sort of just going along with it, not thinking it was that great, but when it hit maybe volume 8, I thought it was one of the best comics I've ever read. (LR dominates the TCJ top 100 comics poll.) So you might want to just skip ahead and then read backwards if you like them. I think the ones people think are Officially Great are:

Jaime: Death of Speedy, Chester Square, Wigwam Bam

Gilbert: Palomar, Duck Feet, Poison River

I'm probably forgetting something. Poison River, btw, is probably the densest comic book I've ever read.

Another thing about L&R: it's FUNNY a lot of the time--not really at all a humor comic, but I've laughed out loud at it a lot.

And: I would highly recommend the wholly unrelated Fear of Comics for anyone curious about Beto's work. It's a great place to see him exercise his craft outside of his usual linear narrative stuff. It's wacky and experimental and I love it to bits.

I'd count the Los Bros oeuvre, on the whole, among my top 5 favorite comics ever. Easily.

Magic Whistle is totally brilliant, though.

I think when people say LR is real, they don't mean that it's realist, gritty, or good at depicting a particular way of life. They mean the characters seem like real people, make gestures like real people, fart like real people, etc. (This realness even violates the conventions of realism: no one in fiction babble like the LR people do.) LR is really not realist--not just the superheroes, but I think almost every volume has some sort of magic vision, campy plot turn, Godard address to the camera, etc.

They mean the characters seem like real people

Exactly. Nothing goes to plan, the characters change and develop in surprising ways, and so on.

Hm.

Kenchen: I was responding more to the "real[istic]" than the "Tolstoy". It made me want to read Tolstoy even less, too.

I am just generally not interested in, and perhaps don't even believe in, the concept of "character development".

I'm certainly not going to suggest that Barthelme wasn't a hack with a cheap gimmick whose stories are pleasant enough in small, spread out doses but unreadably bland in packs of, say, forty or sixty.

But, character development: My thoughts aren't worked out in my head to the point where I can explain them easily. But: What does it mean for a character to behave in a "surprising" way? It means they are behaving out of character. But it is still their character, so you have to account for this. Either the author justifies the "change in character" or doesn't. An author who is interested in the concept of "character development" will cause such surprises to happen, and then find clever ways of justifying them, and there will be a coherent scheme to the justification, etc.

In "real life", when someone acts "out-of-character", I tend to just accept that it's a moment of acting "out-of-character", and that my sense of "character" is cobbled together, is shorthand, and is at best a statistical model that will never come close to giving accurate results. I don't put a lot of stock in that sense of "character" in the first place, so it's hard for me to be interested in the fact that it has "changed".

It means that they behave in a way that doesn't correspond to the received idea of how "character development" in a type of story should play out. It's still their character, but it isn't the "character" that you assume they had at the outset-- their character has changed, so to speak. It gives the illusion that these people are real people, with interior depths to explore that are (initially?) unseen by the audience.

there will be a coherent scheme to the justification, etc.

Only as much of one as there actually is in life, which is why L + R is so good.

my sense of "character" is cobbled together, is shorthand, and is at best a statistical model that will never come close to giving accurate results

Yes, exactly! That's what makes L + R so interesting-- you're not watching "change", you're watching change (or the lifelike simulacrum of same)!

To extend: I'm not sure that I'm convinced that there is such a thing as "out of character" behavior IRL. Every action or behavior is influenced by something, even if only a desperate need for attention or profound psychosis.

I'm around 40 pages into Locas and yes, it's not like Optic Nerve. As mentioned above, it actually reminds me of Archie comics, which I have even less of a desire to read than Optic Nerve.

I have to say that so far, while it's different than what I'd imagined, I don't like it very much.

I know it's supposed to get a lot better, or at least different, as it progresses. I'll try to keep reading.

Plow through. Or, better yet, skip ahead. Or, even better still, put Locas aside for the moment and read Duck Feet. The Locas stuff in there isn't a bad place to start from.

Chris F: What? I think we're talking at crossed paths. I think you're saying there that L&R has an especially lifelike sense of change, rather than an artificial one. I'm saying that the idea of exploring why characters/people change isn't interesting [or even meaningful] to me in real life or in art.

Here are my questions:

(1) Are you question-begging? This seems like you must already assume that (a) people do not change, are not dynamically interacting with their environments, (and therefore these points are stable) and (b) the instances of acting out of character are not emblematic of a larger pattern of character that is hard to discern.

(2) This reminds me of--though I am hardly even a novice in this field--the problems analytical philosophy has had with notions of vagueness. You seem to be troubled by the selfhood because it may incorporate contradictory actions (actions from sets that are "in character" and sets that are "out of character"). This is a deductive way of looking at a self ("The self is a self-contradicting thesis and therefore no thesis at all"), rather than the inductive way we usually build people up from social cues, which refer out to other social behaviors and are not analytical propositions. But it's not clear why "acting out of character" should vitiate selfhood. Couldn't people be fuzzy concepts, trends rather than coherent definitions? I know you've read Wittgenstein: just as we can't readily define what a game is, can't we say that certain behaviors in persons are exceptions or make sense as part of a family resemblance? Your problem seems to be more with pattern recognition than psychology.
(a) Your form of the self seems to be in binary code ("in character" and "out of character"), but doesn't this either already assert the existence of a character?
(b) You seem to assume that the data points are equally important. But isn't it possible that different actions signify with different degrees of importance? For example, let's say I open my office door with my right hand half the time and my left hand the other half, but I always treat my uncle cruelly. While the former set of actions is inconsistant, the second is consistant.
(c) Variations from a pattern do not necessarily disprove a pattern.
(d) Why are our interpretations of other people's personalities typically similar?
(e) You say people act of character ALL THE TIME. What does this mean?

(3) If it is the case that people do not change, but that we as social beings interpret change, then isn't that enough? That is, does it matter if what you're saying is empirically possible, if we must resolve our interactions as humans anyway?

(4) Application to narratives and humans. Regardless of whether you are correct or not, is it useful to apply this to narratives or to human interaction? How does the world look differently when this model is applied and when it isn't? It seems as though many realist storytellers do not fundamentally care if (a) the self is coherently defined; or (b) is the self changes. Here, Chekhov and Alice Munro seem to be good examples: it's not clear to me if their characters ever change or are knowable. (There's a great James Wood essay on this.)

(5) Let's say we don't call it the self. Why can't I just look at the statistically most probable actions and respond to that?

(6) Because of the above, exploring why characters change isn't interesting to you in life or art. However, if you are correct, why can't you look at the interpretation of change as a sort of "folk" theory of personality and then translate it into your static theory of selfhood. Is it only the inability of people to change that turns you off or just selfness in general?

Ken, I think an important distinction that needs to be reasserted is that the fictional characters don't have human psychology like humans do, and applying human traits is a bit of a red herring. Fictional characters are, as Chris F. said upthread, pure simulacra. What Chris Casuistry is talking about is a whole different ballgame.

Anyway, since I haven't been playing close attention to this thread, I need a recommendation on where to start with L&R, or at least, which book to check out first from my library.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Wood_(critic)

http://themorningnews.org/images/jameswood-2.jpg

/=

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Woods

I'm saying they're more like scatter plots.

I suspect that, yes, context helps shape the scatter plots. And there are assorted implications to this.

Your problem seems to be more with pattern recognition than psychology.

Is psychology not all about pattern recognition? Anyway, yes, I am talking about people seeing a Mandelbrot set (or perhaps random noise) and calling it a circle. So to speak.

Why are our interpretations of other people's personalities typically similar?

I don't think they are at all! Have you ever read the Mod Request board?

You say people act of character ALL THE TIME. What does this mean?

This means that if you think of someone has having a "character", they will do something out of that character. If you think coworker X is a bitch, X will do all sorts of things that are non-bitchy, and you will either ignore them, or you will think X has changed. Maybe you will even think you were wrong all along, and that X wasn't such a bitch to begin with.

At best what you can say is, so far I've found more of X's actions bitchy than I do of most people.

Perhaps there is something awfully essentialist about theories of personality or character.

It seems as though many realist storytellers do not fundamentally care if (a) the self is coherently defined; or (b) is the self changes. Here, Chekhov and Alice Munro seem to be good examples: it's not clear to me if their characters ever change or are knowable.

I am, perhaps, arguing that a realist storyteller (or maybe just a "good" one) would behave in just such a way. Or, at any rate, that I think I would get more out of Chekhov than Tolstoy, based on just this thread.

It's more likely that I'm arguing that, as far as I'm concerned, there's no real difference between an author who focuses on having their characters be knowable and tracking their growth over time and an author whose characters never change or are never knowable. But if an author's goal is to explore how characters change, which is what people keep suggesting that L&R is so good at, that I am going to be bored with that.

But, you know, if it has intricately woven and oddly sprung plots, then I might be interested again. I like plots. I don't think they map to reality well, though, nor do I think they even try.

And "character development" is just an interpretive framework for seeing the world; it's one that I find barely useable, but clearly many people find it a good tool. I don't think any interpretive framework, including my own, can hold up to much scrutiny. There is no grand unified swiss army knife method of interpreting the countless quantities of information we're bombarded with every nanosecond. I have probably come off a little more strident than I intended on this thread; I'm pretty sure I warned that it was going to be a bit overblown.

Your questions deserve longer and better answers than this, but I have not yet worked out my thoughts well enough to say them without, well, without working them out, and that might take a few years. So.

xpost:

After all, it's fairly common to criticize charactization for being unreal or unbelievable. (What most book and movie reviews do.) This is the case even if the characters are believable but conflict with one's theoretical understanding of humans: for example, Pauline Kael's review of Amadeus faulted it for representing genius as romantic inspiration rather than perspiration.

Wait, I think that might be a bad example. That's not a problem with characterization (in the sense of the characters), that's a problem with representation of how the world works. A better example would be something where a critic said "But Darth Vader wouldn't do that" -- yours is more like "But you couldn't get from London to Beijing by train in three hours in 1902!"

I dunno, I might be wrong here, but that strikes me as an important difference. Vader does do that, so if you're saying he couldn't, you're wrong, because there is no "real" Vader to map him up against. But there is a real ability-to-get-from-London-to-Beijing-by-train-in-1902 to map it up against, and there is a real where-inspiration-comes-from to map Amadeus up against.

Those "real mappings" may still be totally moot and stupid, though.

I think it's wholly valid to approach fictional characters as functional psychological constructs. A good writer with a decent grasp on psychology can invest his/her characters with a rich sense of character that can be simultaneously surprising and logically coherent. One of the main reasons that I tend to favor long-form, serial narrative over shorter narrative bursts is the amount of space that an author has to work with characterization/psychology, often from multiple perspectives. Comics offer a really great opportunity to run with these themes and fully flesh out character, but it's such an infrequently well-done occurence, really, that one could be forgiven for dismissing it as a possibility. I think, though, that L&R makes a pretty solid case for the ability of an author to imbue his/her characters with a good deal of psychological validity (even if that psychological validity is just a projection of the author's own character or understanding of human psychology in general) when dealing with those characters over a long span of time.

In short: yeah, fictional characters are simulacra, but that doesn't mean that the same psychological rules can't apply to them. IMO.

Also: I know I've made L&R beginners' suggestions at least twice in this thread. Just browse my messages, if nothing else.

Yeah, you didn't answer everything, but it's probably easier this way. While I have some other issues, which I detailed kinda turgidly above, my main concern is this: whether or not the distribution of points is a mandelbrot, random noise, or a circle is an empirical issue, one that you're sort of assuming into existence. You're basing your theory on how you've anecdotally experienced people behaving A when they're generally thought of as B, but it's not clear to me how an exception to a pattern either disproves the pattern or makes it unuseful. Let's analogize the self to an aesthetic: we'd typically say that a band has a given style, even though they may vary from it (a pop band performing the blues, let's say), but we don't see this difference as vitiating the entire idea of style, since the previous characterization would be mostly but not entirely accurate. Even if the arrangement of character-points does not form a circle and we are generally deluded, one's character is not thereby necessarily a random shape. Variation or inaccuracy do not entail indeterminacy.

It really does seem like you're writing against generalization, rather than character. See: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n02/print/rort01_.html. I don't think anyone says that an outside observor's views on charactization are comprehensively accurate. Generalizations are heuristics that we use to process the world into comprehensible inaccuracies. I agree that character development is a pragmatic interpretive tool, but I don't know how you could navigate the world without forming generalizations about people. So I'm skeptical when you make these sort of pronouncements.

And I think I was put off by your brusqueness, but you're theory is interesting, so I'm enjoying this. Though I think we can agree that using it to bash realism isn't entirely successful? Maybe to move this forward: what "realist" authors do you like? What's your reaction to the modernists (not Joyce, but Proust, Woolf, James) who are obsessed with character in ways that may or may not implicate abstraction?

Also, while we are saying it's "realist," it's also very weird and postmodern, etc. The characters often address the camera or the narrator, fly to other planets, or travel in time.

I think you could say "Darth Vader would never do that," not b/c there's a real Vader to map him against but because he's part of the set of HUMANS and you can allow and disallow certain believable actions attached to that set.

I added my second comment about Amadeus, actually, to tie it into your theory. Your theory seems to be a general empirical claim about the world that makes you disatisfied with depictions of psychology--therefore, it's much more like London-to-Beijing than "Darth would never to that!"

I would still worry that saying a band is a [pop] band can obscure what they're actually doing more than it can clarify it. When I make a statement such as "that band is a pop band" I immediately start thinking about all the nonpop aspects of the band, and it seems like it was a bad judgment.

Which isn't to say that it's never useful, but eep, it's something I'm wary of.

Anyway, yes, kenchen, I see "character" as an act of generalization. Against a person. Yes. And a generalization GENERALLY obscures as much as it reveals.

although your definition of character development certainly holds true in many works of narrative hackery

I wasn't thinking just in terms of works of hackery, but in terms of any sort of structured myth or setup that you know certain things are going to have to happen on the way, The Hero with a Thousand Faces style. L + R is not one of those either. I'll try to get back to the rest of this later. Chris P., I worried that we were talking at cross-purposes again, but what I wrote was what I seemed to be wanting to write at the time, so I went with it. Oh, and:

I have to write a paper on Wittgenstein and "family resemblances" in two weeks. Mua-ha-ha.

No shit? I didn't know you were a student. I almost took a course in Wittgenstein this semester, but real life intervened so no school for me right now (And given the development of my thought as of late, I'm rather glad that I haven't spent the year so far just exploring his stuff. I dabbled in him a bit at the outset though, as I mentioned on ILB. The Tractatus gets surprisingly technical surprisingly quickly for such a small book, so I stopped before I got too far into it.) So you're a philosophy person also? Found a sympathetic reading of Plato yet?

I should (I will) read the whole thread in detail later, but basically I know experientially that I am not who I was 10 years ago, and as a rule I'd be wary of people who claim they are. Apart from anything else, my range of possible reactions has changed.

So you're a philosophy person also?

I'll just repeat, out of context, what I said on an ILE thread: The more you know about philosophy, the less impressed you are with it.

Found a sympathetic reading of Plato yet?

I'm not sure what you mean by this. But I enjoy reading Plato. I feel sad for him. It seems like he had to wait until he was very old before he found someone who could meaningfully respond to him (i.e., that he could talk to) (and presumably that was Aristotle, though who knows).

I suspect he was better as a poet/tragedian than as a philosopher, but he did have some clever ideas and methods, sure.

On the bus today, this occurred to me, and it's already been covered, and might not be relevant, but I thought it would perhaps at least amuse kenchen: What is the personality [character] of the English?

Not concentrating on philosophy, but reading Wittgenstein anyway? This is some postmodern literature sort of thing? I'm basically only reading ILC at the moment, so I had no idea about this.

The more you know about philosophy, the less impressed you are with it.

Well, you are named "Casuistry" after all. But this is pretty much what I took away from Easter Shaman Weekend 2006, in a different way-- hence the quote on my userinfo page. Wait, I thought that this thread was about indie guilt!

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

That you can see where he's coming from-- the thing that duder caned me over on the "Flailing" thread a few months ago. No disrespect, but I take it from what you say that the answer is no. That's OK, I wouldn't claim to be an expert in the shit either-- that's what grad school is for, which I start investigating Thursday when I talk to my one of my old profs after work.

This is too reductive though-- what's the structure that prompts a need for attention (psychoanalysis aside, what about a primate's innate need for affiliation, which in turn is driven by evolutionary mechanisms that promote survival oriented behaviors?) or whatever a "psychosis" is supposed to be (an interior reality moving out of line with "consensus" reality? But you have no idea what consensus reality is supposed to be, aside from your individual received idea of it.) Every action and behavior is part of an organic flow, one that doesn't make perfect sense when analyzed only from one level or angle (which is what my "psychosis" was all about, aside from reliving my childhood and driving around town to visit some of my favorite haunts. Oh, and seeing the moon rise over the lake at night to form a bridge of light that followed me as I walked along the break wall, Orion to the west directly over downtown Milwaukee, and the "barbelith" device which I stole from the bit about the flashing lights at the end of GM's Animal Man, but didn't realize I was about to encounter until I got to the end of the trail. I stole my whole weekend from the end of Animal Man in one sense, as well as the card "Honor thy hidden intention". And now I think that I've said all that I'm going to say on that subject.).

I'm saying they're more like scatter plots.

Perhaps there is something awfully essentialist about theories of personality or character.

I wish I'd had sleep-- this is all interesting as hell. I agree with you that it might take years to sort out though. There's something very limiting about sticking to received notions of character in practice, but I'm wondering if you're denying too much that there's a real organism operating beneath those received notions, and I'm starting to wish that this was a real life conversation and not a message board thread because then it might be easier to come to some sense on these things. Argh-- me posting at all today was probably a mistake. Carry on without me, gents.

No-- this itself is too false, too reified. "Consensus reality" is in the organism beneath the skin of what you think of as you. OK, whatever, again ignore please.

I'm a "liberal arts" major -- an ex-creative writing major who has all these credits and doesn't want to do English majoring any more but has decided, perhaps foolishly, to finally get the damn BA. So I'm just studying whatever I find interesting. Which is as it should be.

I'm still not sure what you mean re: Plato, though. But that's OK.

I went to a zine shop today but didn't see anything I wanted, indie comics-wise, even though I wanted some indie comics to read. Oh well.

Anyone remember that concordance that tied half of the shows on US television to St Elsewhere, based on guest appearances? Turn that up to a million, and you've got comics.

Last weekend I picked up the latest issue of L&R plus Luba: The Story of Ofelia. I haven't heard anyone mention that one and I don't know if it's at all representative, but I'm into it even though I can hardly keep the characters straight at this point.

I also got an A on that Wittg paper, rah rah.

So, where should I go next to fill in the gaps?

At this point I've read most of the Gilbert stuff (Palomar and a couple of the later trades, and I've got Poison River waiting at the comic store) and loved it.

I got Locas at the library and I'm 100 some pages in. At this point I'm not feeling it like was with Palomar, but it's getting better. At first I couldn't resolve the basic paradox of "there are dinosaurs and hover bikes...but the stories without them are better?!?"

I enjoyed it much more than the chunk of Epileptic I read (which I liked).

However, I still feel guilty.