THE WORLD GOES ON (Krasznahorkai, 2013/2017)

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There is an addictive and hypnotic quality to all of Krasznahorkai's work and this collection throws his gift for long, rambly sentences (ahem) into widescreen – sometimes for the best, sometimes not. Fortunately, the former outweighs the latter: particularly fond of how he switches characters and points of view and time and place within a single sentence (sometimes of 22 pages or more, but hey) and makes it work. As a former musician myself, I dig Krasznahorkai's approach to writing, but I do have something of a gripe with his use of commas when they don't make rhythmic sense (to me, a comma is a brief rest, an eighth or sixteenth): in his usage in some - not all- cases here, they feel instead like quarter or half rests, stand-ins for a period for lack of any other way to prolong the trip (in all senses of the word) through his sentence-world.

Favorite tale is the title story, by far, though the hallucinatory The Bankers, is a close second and, while I can't say that I would recommend Krasznahorkai to everyone, if you're looking for something different and outside your normal wheelhouse, pick up this collection and if it speaks to you, go for his best novel, SATANTANGO; my complete reading list, from 2013 to the present, lives here.

mycelial sarcophagi

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With life having made several attempts on my life over the last few years, I’m always fascinated by new ways that my disused husk can be disposed of responsibly. This is intriguing, though not enough to get me give up cremation / hydro cremation (or my dream of said husk being used as a prop for the wood chipper scene in a dinner theatre rendition of FARGO):

For those seeking to live in the most sustainable way, there now is an afterlife too.

A Dutch intrepid inventor is now “growing” coffins by putting mycelium, the root structure of mushrooms, together with hemp fiber in a special mold that, in a week, turns into what could basically be compared to the looks of an unpainted Egyptian sarcophagus. 

And while traditional wooden coffins come from trees that can take decades to grow and years to break down in the soil, the mushroom versions biodegrades and delivers the remains to nature in barely a month and a half.

DETECTIVE COMICS, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Daniel; DC, 2011)

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Every Wednesday morning, I make a blind pull from Siri's (randomized) choice of one of the 20 alphabetically-organized shortboxes that constitute my comics collection, (re-) read it, write about it, and publish the resultant review/memory/whatever. Earlier installments live here.

(Box08): For all of my consternation about the New 52, there were some solid exceptions, the Bat-family being among them – probably because, other than everyone being de-aged and Gordon's hair being red again, not much changed; this selective rebooting, while beneficial (bone=thrown?) in many ways was also a large part of the problem: if you're going to go for it, go for it all and don't waste time with half-measures. By the time the sun set on the New 52, we were left with little more than the sweat of an exercise in editoral bloodsucking, missed opportunities, and tarnished faith; IIRC, I checked out of comics for the second (or maybe third) time around here (though that had as much to do with relocation (read: lost first house) and burnout from writing ComicStoryworld - 300 pages in five months as anything), not to return in earnest until earlier this year.

But, the comic itself: Daniel is nothing if not a gifted visual storyteller and one of the rare artists (these days) to make the leap to writer-artist feeling as though they've always been writing. Doll-Maker is a fascinating villain and I dig the pulpier urban James Bond (New52 Bats got laid a lot, it seems) feel that Daniel brings to Bats – a far different vibe from Snyder's "grand stakes" storyweaving of The Court of Owls (excellent, too – though "Black Mirror" remains my favorite Snyder Bat-tale); not better, but different – complimentary in the best way possible.

One thing I want to add here about Daniel's art: I love how he constantly is evolving his style and changing it up: at some points, it's difficult to see that this was the same artist of Morrison's RIP storyline, just a couple of years earlier. Dark, kinetic movement on glorious display; might have to pick up all 12 issues of his run at some point.