Bilal and French comics
The cover to 32 decembre, Bilal's latest, just-published, comic album. Comic albums in France are generally larger than American comics. A French album measures 24cm by 32cm, or roughly 9 1/2 inches by 12 1/2 inches. An American comic measures 6 1/2 inches by 10 1/2.
Production values are usually better on these albums as well, meaning they're on better quality paper stock and use better printing techniques. So before you eve see the art or read the story, you realize you have a higher-quality product in your hands. Of course, it's entirely possible to print shit on pretty paper--I don't mean to say that French comics are by nature better than American. I'm only pointing out the differences.
I don't really know anything about this new work, 32 decembre. But the Bilal/Christin collaborations I mentioned earlier certainly aren't the sort of thing you'd find in most American comics. Black Order Brigade, for example, concerns two factions, on opposite sides of the Spanish Civil War, who take up arms again in the 1970s. French comics, like their Japanese counterparts, generally cover a much wider range of genres than do American comics, which focus on superhero, fantasy, and science-fiction.
Which means, unfortunately, that French comics haven't found much of a market here yet. Only a fraction are ever translated into English, and even the French-language originals don't make it into many American shops. I'm still investigating where I can buy the French books--can I order from a U.S. supplier, or do I have to order from Canadian or French merchants?
More on French for Reading, and Enki Bilal
Update on the French, which I first mentioned a week ago. I'm now in the tenth chapter of the book, and I think it's going pretty well. The book is set up in a way that makes learning the language pretty straightforward. The author introduces a point of grammar and some accompanying vocabulary, discusses it with some examples, and then provides translation exercises using the new grammar and vocab. The end of each chapter has a multiple-choice quiz, a passage to translate, and questions on the passage.
I'm pleased with my progress. I usually struggle through the exercises at first. I chunk them into groups of two or three and run through each group two or three times until I'm satisfied with what I've learned. I then move on the next group. When I reach the end of the chapter, I run through the exercises one more time before doing the multiple-choice and translation sections.
The book has twenty-one chapters, so I think after I finish this chapter, I'm going to run back through what I've covered to date as a kind of midterm. The review will do me well.
The next step is to start reading real stuff in French. I have an issue of Paris Match, and the funny thing is, it features an interview with Enki Bilal. Bilal is one reason I'm doing this; his work with Pierre Christin on The Hunting Party (Partie de Chasse) and Black Order Brigade (Les Phalanges de l'Ordre Noir) were the first comics I read (other than Tintin as a child) of French origin.
New York Public Library: Hat in hand
NY libraries putting out donation boxes in an attempt to offset deep budget cuts. [librarian.net]
NYT: Americans yawn at foreign fiction
Another reason to study a foreign language: Stephen Kinzer, writing in today's New York Times, discusses America's current apathy for works of foreign literature.
Writers, publishers and cultural critics have long lamented the difficulty of interesting American readers in translated literature, and now some say the market for these books is smaller than it has been in generations.
...
Readers in other developed countries still have appetites for translated literature. German publishers, for example, bought translation rights to 3,782 American books in 2002, while American publishers bought rights for only 150 German books.
Kinzer cites several reasons for the growing trend--among them, he mentions the concentration of ownership in publishing, which has resulted in a growing obsession with profits and best-sellers, at the expense of new or innovative writers and foreign authors. He also mentions that some publishers have no editors on staff who read foreign languages. I also thought this comment was telling:
"A lot of foreign literature doesn't work in the American context because it's less action-oriented than what we're used to, more philosophical and reflective," said Laurie Brown, senior vice president for marketing and sales at Harcourt Trade Publishers. "As with foreign films, literature in translation often has a different pace, a different style, and it can take some getting used to. The reader needs to see subtleties and get into the mood or frame of mind to step into a different place. Americans tend to want more immediate gratification. We're into accessible information. We often look for the story, rather than the story within the story. We'd rather read lines than read between the lines."
I've noticed this when watching European films. They're usually paced differently than American movies and they generally tend to be driven by character rather than plot. But instead of viewing that as a turnoff, I normally enjoy shifting my brain into another mode of viewing and thinking.
Learning French, sort of
In my latest demonstration of geekery, I've decided to teach myself to read French. I've been wanting to pick up another language for a long time, and some of you might remember the whole week, about two years ago, during which I was enrolled in a Japanese class at IU.
I have several reasons for doing this:
- I want the specific mental challenge of learning another language. It's unlike any other intellectual activity I've encountered, and it's been a decade since I've done it. (I know, that reason probably sounds really pompous.)
- I'm ashamed of myself for not having at least reading knowledge of a modern language. I took German in high school and in the first two years of college, but that was--oh christ--15 years ago. Aside from a week of Japanese, the only other language I've ever studied was classical and Biblical Greek. Not much call for that outside the academy, I'm afraid.
- I'd like to start reading books and magazines published in French, just to keep the skill up and also to read authors' thoughts in their original tongue--not filtered through a layer of translation.
- France is one of the world's largest publishers of comic books, most of which are never translated into English. French comics cover a much wider spectrum of interests than do American comics, and many of them are said to be brilliant. But I've never been able to read them.
So what I'm doing is, I'm working through a book called French for Reading, by Karl Sandburg. Sandburg wrote for graduate students who need reading knowledge of French for the purpose of study and research in their disciplines. He wrote his book to be used either individually or for classroom purposes.
I'm through about seven chapters so far, and it's going well. I'll check in from time to time to discuss how I'm doing with it.
Subway pet peeves
First in a random series of rude subway behaviors that get under my skin:
I hate jackasses who sit down between two people and open their knees like they're birthing a damn cow, crowding the people on either side of them. I hate it more when I've made room for them to have a seat in the first place.
Damn blank page
I assume some of you have seen a blank white page when you visited today. I think it's some kind of glitch in the software I use to post to my weblog, because it happens at random and I've never been able to isolate anything that I'm doing wrong.
So, this is kind of a test post, to make sure everything's groovy again. Sorry for the delay, but when I'm at work, I can't access the console for my weblog to fix the blank pages.
The three New Yorks
Dog-sick this weekend. Blargh. But it gave me a chance to read E. B. White's excellent little essay, "Here Is New York." If White's name seems familiar, you probably know him either through Strunk and White's The Elements of Style or through his own book, Charlotte's Web.
White writes of the City:
There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and aceepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter--the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last--the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is the third city that accounts for New York's high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.
Bands to iTunes: Don't kill the album format
Reuters reports that several bands--Metallica, Green Day, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers among them--are denying iTunes the right to distribute their music. The bands take issue with Apple's iTunes service for allowing users to download single tracks. Reuters talked to Mark Reiter, from Q Prime Management Co, which represents Metallica and the Chili Peppers. Reiter told Reuters that Apple requires artists to make singles available in addition to entire albums. Reiter then stated:
"If you download a single, you may ignore the other tracks on the album.... When our artists record a body of work, it's what they deem to be representative of their careers at that time."
Tim Maroney
Teresa Nielsen Hayden reports the death of Tim Maroney, a man I once knew vaguely via the Warren Ellis Forum on DelphiForums. Tim used to post learned commentary about scientific news items, but the main reason I remember him is due to a chat session one night. Tim, Jessica Linker, and I were the only ones in chat, and I was freaking out a little about my impending thirtieth birthday.
Tim talked me back from the edge by assuring me that his 30s were, to that point, the best decade of his life. When I finally met Tim in person a couple of years after this late-night chat, he remembered neither me nor the conversation.
But that's okay, because I'll never forget.
There's something strange about learning, via a weblog, of the death of a man I knew only on the Web anyway.