The North

I present to you, my dear reader, a concrete poem inspired by an obscure memoir written by a former trapper.

Blank

I made a chapbook. Get the PDF here. Get physical object here.

Heritage Moment

A fake pamphlet. A sort of doodle and mind map of a research project on Gertrude Stein.

XEclogue Roaring Boy

I present to you, dear reader, an irredeemably childish and irrepressibly joyful cartoon that popped into my mind from as I read Lisa Robertson’s poetic narrative of revisionary sex-politics, XEclogue–a fantastic piece of work that deserves better than what you see above.

It features a set of characters called the Roaring Boys. Above is my (reductive) depiction of one. Don’t let his jaunty gaze fool you–he’s lying. Here is an excerpt from a section called “Cathexis”: 

How Should a Boy Behave? Now online at Narwhal Magazine!

My little comic is now viewable in its full, finished form in the new issue of Narwhal Magazine. The image above is an unused title page I created for it. The “gloss” referred to in the title page was mostly cut, but I’ve posting it below:

Jakob von Gunten is a naughty little pervert

I submit to you, dear patient reader, the first two pages of a partial comic adaptation of Jakob von Gunten, the full series of which will appear in the upcoming issue of the online literary magazine, Narwhal.

Jakob von Gunten, the titular character of Robert Walser’s early modernist novel, is a young aristocrat who runs away from home to enroll in a school for servants. His impish and masochistic antics, to a contemporary reader, seem subtly and, yet palpably, sexual, yet few reviewers make much of this aspect, focusing instead on Jakob as a prankster and a free spirit, who makes a mockery of power and subordination rather than truly falling in love with it.

My “Lessons” 1 through 10, along with an expanded commentary, will be available when the new issue of Narwhal Magazine is online. In the meantime…

Your homework, dear reader, is to create a comic adaptation, in whole or in part, of a text. Or, as always, submit anything on this text in particular.

How to cut yourself out of your own autobiography, Bolaño-style

I submit to you, my dear reader, a visualization (click to enlarge) of the structure of Roberto Bolaño’s novel, The Savage Detectives. This is an autobiographical novel, framed by a coming-of-age story of sex, poetry and violence. But it is a biography whose subjects–a pair of dadaist poets–are always disappearing.

McPoems are fast and tasty

To you, dear reader, I submit a painting–my first since high school art class–inspired by the poem, “The Unicorn” by Billeh Nickerson. But, as is always the case, the translation, through both error and intention, has resulted in something quite distinct from the original.

Tao Lin: barely even there

I submit to you, dear reader, a pair of pie charts showing the varieties of “facial expression” that appear in Tao Lin’s novella, Shoplifting from American Apparel. This ridiculously simple phrase, repeated over 25 times, never once dropping the redundant word, “facial”, is one of many signals that in this novella, the style is the story.

Put Tom Ford’s revolver into Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man (with this bookmark!)

One-sided version

Two-sided version

I submit to you, dear reader, a bookmark for Christopher Isherwood’s novel A Single Man, featuring the revolver Tom Ford placed in the protagonist’s hands in Ford’s film adaptation. A revolver that never appeared in the original book.