lacunae

adjusting the diamond gauge

Hi, Salon readers (and other readers). It's been very quiet around here lately, I know, and for unexciting reasons. So let's just hit the highlights, shall we? Next time we can catch up for real.

*As regulars may have guessed, I just got linked from Salon, specifically a response to one of their questions in which I suggest asking Toby Keith for a favor. I also just started a new comics column there with a brief introduction to Steve Ditko. I only wish I could've included the Jaime Hernandez drawing of a stray dog lying under the huge piece of Ditkotech from Spider-Man #33.

*The new (music) issue of The Believer includes my rather long review of the Fall's Peel-sessions anthology.

*I'm in NYC right now, recuperating from Book Expo America this past weekend, and gearing up for next weekend's MoCCA festival. Comics news from Book Expo has been covered extensively elsewhere, so I won't say much about it here (short version: everybody's getting signed; comics publishers are getting whiplash adjusting to the long-range schedules of the book world; manga customers have finally developed functional crap detectors, but new manga publishers haven't noticed yet; librarians and book buyers desperately want more top-rank "literary" graphic novels right now this minute, but the damn things take forever to draw). And as for the non-comics galleys I'm most excited about: Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch is at the top of the pile, followed by the new Myla Goldberg novel and the memoir of a woman who cooked every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the space of a year.

*It took me about five months of gentle nagging from friends to read Bryan O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life. I will not be making that mistake again. The waiting, that is.

*Stone fruit are about to be in season. Soon they'll fill the delis with fragrant ripeness.

Posted by Douglas at June 6, 2005 10:12 PM | TrackBack