October shows featuring Catholics

Catholics is included in two artist's book exhibitions this month: the Sheffield International Artist's Book Exhibition in the UK and words|matter in Chicago. words|matter, an artist's book library, is hosted by Arts on Elston through October 29 and is dedicated to facilitating hands on interactions with books by over 70 artists. And the Sheffield International Artist's Book Exhibition takes place at Bank Street Arts through October 30 and features over 200 books. To find out more about Catholics, a limited-edition memoir told through text + image, click here.

Three saints for the Caxton Club

The Caxton Club is celebrating their 120th anniversary this Wednesday, Feb 18 at the Newberry Library in Chicago. The celebration will be accompanied by a pop-up exhibit featuring artists funded by the organization. Last year the Caxton Club awarded me a grant for my artist's book-in-progress, Catholics, and the exhibit will include three drawings of saints (played by Joan Crawford and Tallulah Bankhead) I made for the project. In order from top to bottom, it's Joan of Arc, Saint Veronica, and Therese of Lisieux:

Material Culture in Print

I presented as part of a panel last weekend at the Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association National Conference in Chicago. The panel, titled Material Culture in Print: Graphics, Books, and Ephemera, explored several print and design-related subjects included in the conference's material culture topic area. My co-panelist Alyssa Anderson (Brown University) looked at Art Spiegelman's articulation of post-9/11 trauma through narrative disorientation in In the Shadow of No Towers. And William Coleman (UC, Berkeley) explored the significance of the racial other in a contemporary downhill skis design that incorporates nineteenth-century works of art. 

My paper looks at two twentieth-century narratives that originally appeared in serialized form—In Cold Blood and Twin Peaks—and the outside texts and material objects they spawned, which sometimes offered insight into questions their original texts left unanswered. The abstract is below:

Serials have traditionally occurred at moments of new media, claims Roger Hagedorn in 'Technology and Economic Exploitation: The Serial as a Form of Narrative Presentation.' Not only do new media use serialization to establish audiences, they often rely on tie-ins with established media formats to win over readers and viewers. This paper will examine two cases of twentieth-century serialized, intertextual narratives that complicate this model: Truman Capote’s novel In Cold Blood and David Lynch and Mark Frost’s TV series Twin Peaks. These two texts first appeared in serialized form in established media formats at moments when their venues were objects of both critical approval and wide public appeal—In Cold Blood in mid-century The New Yorker, and Twin Peaks on ABC at the threshold of the 1990s. Like many serials, they achieved mainstream success in part by appearing in installments that cultivated a sense of anticipation. And despite the lowbrow reputation the serial traditionally has, they were also met with enormous critical success. This essay will examine how their initial presentations were key in this: their publicly eccentric creators both played with generic conventions, and created tension between high and low culture. It will also discuss how the intrigue generated during these texts’ serialization outlived their seeming narrative resolutions (the hanging of the killers and the answer to “Who killed Laura Palmer?”), as both In Cold Blood and Twin Peaks went on to spawn extra-texts—to be supplemented, retold, and re-imagined in various media formats.

THREE #3 hot off the press!

I just got THREE #3 in the mail, and it looks beautiful! Edited by Rob Kirby, the third issue of this Ignatz-nominated anthology was funded by a grant from Prism Comics. It has three main features: a high-school memoir by Carrie McNinch; a hilarious all-star jam featuring Ivan Velez, Jr., Jennifer Camper, Howard Cruse, Diane DiMassa, Ellen Forney, Joan Hilty, and Rob Kirby; and a glimpse at three Wuvable Oaf characters' lives by Ed Luce (who also designed the cover!).

This issue also includes guest features by the fab MariNaomi, Marian Runk (no relation!), and a tribute to Dolly Parton by Janelle Hessig and me!

You can order yourself a copy postage-free here before June 10! OR, if you're in the Chicago area next weekend, Rob will be hawking copies at CAKE (Table 47). Stop by and pick one up!