US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 27, Catastrophic Failure: Enron, Katrina & Politics in the mid-2000s (Con't)

In the Titanic, the captain went down with the ship. And Enron looks to me like the captain first gave himself and his friends a bonus, then lowered himself and the top folks down the lifeboat and then hollered up and said, 'By the way, everything is going to be just fine.'

—Sen. Byron Dorgan (D - ND)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 2, 1973 - 1974: "America's Nervous Breakdown"

There is already some talk about what "the historians will say" — the historians, those unknown people who in the future will have the franchise to interpret what is going on now. We tend to assume that out of their years of accumulation of fact they will sift the truth—a truer truth than any we can hope to grasp. They will have many more facts. And they will have what is called "perspective" (which means they will not be trapped in the biases of our day and can freely write in the biases of their day—can find what they are looking for). But I wonder if they will really understand what it was like. Will they know how it felt to go through what we have gone through? Will they know how it felt to be stunned—again and again—as we learned what had been done by people in power? Will they know how it felt to be shocked, ashamed, amused by the revelations—will they understand the difficulty of sorting out the madcap from the macabre? (What, for example, was one really to think about someone in the pay of the White House putting on a red wig and traveling across the country to visit a sick, disgraced lobbyist?) Can they conceivably understand how it felt as we watched on our television screen, our President say, "I am not a crook"? Will they be able to understand why, almost two years ago, some very sensible people wondered whether it was the last election? Will they understand how it felt—as it did last fall at the time the President fired Special Prosecutor Cox, and on several later occasions—when it seemed that there were no checks on power? Will they understand how degrading it was to watch a President being run to ground? Will they know how it was to feel in the thrall of this strange man, who seemed to answer only to himself? Knowing the conclusion, as they will, will they understand how difficult, frightening, and fumbling the struggle really was?

— Elizabeth Drew, "A Reporter in Washington D.C. III-Summer Notes"
The New Yorker, October 28, 1974 (in an entry dated August 8, 1974)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

The Tale of Elizabeth and Hazel -- Updated and Longer

Four years ago I wrote a post plugging a magazine article about these two women:

The young African American girl is named Elizabeth Eckford, and she was one of the Little Rock Nine -- nine heroic high-school students who endured incredible things to integrate Little Rock Central High School (with the help of armed federalized troops) in 1957-1958. This incredibly famous picture of her is from what was supposed to be her first day at Little Rock Central High, when she got separated from her eight fellows and walked alone into a mob of segregationists. The young woman behind her, who was immortalized in this posture of hatred, is named Hazel Bryan Massery. It's one of the classic photos from the Civil Rights Movement, about one of the central events of that world-changing struggle.

In point of fact, it's two of the classic photos, because (although the fact is little-known), the incident in question was captured twice -- perhaps both by Will Counts, perhaps by two different news photographers. (Counts definitely took one of the two, which was named by the AP as one of the top 100 photos of the century, although I'm not certain which, because I've seen both of the images labeled as Counts's photo!) At any rate, here's the other version:

So far as I can tell, they were taken at almost the precise same moment -- note that the woman who turned to look behind her, clearly visible in the upper photograph to the left of the screaming Hazel, is also looking behind her in the lower photograph (half-hidden behind Elizabeth from the second angle). This seems to belie the claim I've seen made that Counts took both of them. On the other hand, maybe the woman behind Elizabeth, next to Hazel was simply carrying on a conversation with someone behind her, and turned around twice. And since it wasn't a planned event, the notion that one photographer happened to be there seems more plausible than that there were two. But I'm not sure. Anyone have any information on the provenance of these two images?

It's interesting to compare the two -- the subtle differences conveyed by different angles is fascinating. (Hazel's face in particular changes -- she's screaming and full of hate in both, but she looks wilder and closer to the edge of violence in the latter.) I think the top one is better purely as an image, but the latter one better captures Elizabeth's isolation and danger and bravery. I guess it's good to have both.

But life is odd, and it turns out that Hazel eventually apologized, became friends with Elizabeth -- and then had a falling out with her. The incredible, complex story was told in this incredible article in Vanity Fair by reporter David Margolick, which I recommend no less strongly today than I did four years ago when I first read it. It's a fabulous recounting of a key, powerful piece of the American story.

But I bring this up not just because the article is a perennial (although it is), nor because I'm about to start teaching my seminar on the 1960's in a month or so (although I am), but because its author, David Margolick, saw my post and was kind enough to write and tell me that he's expanded the article into a full-length book, which will be published by Yale University Press one month from today, under the title Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock. If the book is anything like as good as the article, it'll be a terrific read, one which will speak to the history both of the Civil Rights Movement and to the complex racial landscape of post-CRM America. I don't know too much about how the book was updated, although apparently Margolick was able to interview Hazel more than the first time around.

Anyway, check out the article. (Vanity Fair's site seems a bit twitchy, so if that link doesn't work, try here.) Then, if you're so inclined, you can pre-order the book from Amazon here, or Powells here. Margolick's official web site is here. It's a powerful tale in the shorter form, and I have high expectations that it will be even better in the long.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is Now Available for Preorder on DVD

A brief announcement: The DVD of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is now available for preorder on Amazon, with an estimated shipping date of December 19. (via)

Of course, you can watch it for free online if you watch some brief commercials... but the online version doesn't have the commentary, aka "Commentary! The Musical" which Joss Whedon describes thusly:

"Commentary! The Musical" is the most painstaking and exhausting piece of whimsey I have ever mistaken for a good idea. It has nearly twice as much music as Dr. Horrible itself -- since you can't really talk that much during a commentary musical or it sounds like a regular commentary. (Which we also have, with the stars and writers, plus making-of's, ELE applications, and a few items left lying around by a notorious Bunny...) I can say without hesitation that I hesitate to say it's great. And by great I mean ridiculous. It's sophmoric, solopsistic, silly and the most fun I've had being exhausted since the fabled Mushortio itself. And everyone sings beautifullly. Which enrages me. I a little bit hate my friends now.

As for the show itself, my comments are as follows: A) it's just as silly as you'd expect from the title; B) my wife and I have been singing it at each other for months; C) it's probably not for everyone; D) I'll be preordering a DVD post-haste.

Ok, announcement over. As you were.

50 Things That Every Comics Collection Truly Needs (Memes to Distract Myself as the World Burns, pt 2)

Today Tom Spurgeon presented his list of The 50 Things That Every Comics Collection Truly Needs. He invites readers to play along by replacing some items with others, but I thought I'd play along in a different way, by trying to turn it into a meme: accepting Spurgeon's categories as a given, how well does your comics collection stack up?

Note this is supposed to be things that you own, not things you have read -- consumption not literacy is the order of the day. I've read a number of items on this list that I don't happen to own copies of (e.g. Binky Brown and the Holy Virgin Mary, Raw, etc.), but those don't count.

Looking at Spurgeon's list, I went through and categorized each entry into one of four categories:

Plain = Things I don't have
Bold = Things I do have
Italics = I have some but probably not enough
Underline = Do collections count as runs? If so yes, if no no

If one is interested in comics primarily as an artistic medium, this is not a list to pay much attention to. But it's a very good list, IMHO, as far as comics as a cultural phenomenon is concerned, with a wide spread of different types, categories, various significant elements from a wide variety of places & times.

Counting "Things I Have" and "Collections", but not "Don't Have" and "Some But Not Enough", I have 28/50 items. Throw in all the "Somes" and it comes to 33/50. Guess I've got some buyin' to do.

My list below. If you have a comics collection and a blog, consider yourself tagged. (If you're missing either, they're both quite fun things to have, methinks.)

***

1. Something From The ACME Novelty Library
2. A Complete Run Of Arcade
3. Any Number Of Mini-Comics
4. At Least One Pogo Book From The 1950s
5. A Barnaby Collection
6. Binky Brown and the Holy Virgin Mary
7. As Many Issues of RAW as You Can Place Your Hands On
8. A Little Stack of Archie Comics
9. A Suite of Modern Literary Graphic Novels
10. Several Tintin Albums
11. A Smattering Of Treasury Editions Or Similarly Oversized Books
12. Several Significant Runs of Alternative Comic Book Series
13. A Few Early Comic Strip Collections To Your Taste
14. Several "Indy Comics" From Their Heyday
15. At Least One Comic Book From When You First Started Reading Comic Books
16. At Least One Comic That Failed to Finish The Way It Planned To
17. Some Osamu Tezuka
18. The Entire Run Of At Least One Manga Series
19. One Or Two 1970s Doonesbury Collections
20. At Least One Saul Steinberg Hardcover
21. One Run of A Comic Strip That You Yourself Have Clipped
22. A Selection of Comics That Interest You That You Can't Explain To Anyone Else
23. At Least One Woodcut Novel
24. As Much Peanuts As You Can Stand
25. Maus
26. A Significant Sample of R. Crumb's Sketchbooks
27. The original edition of Sick, Sick, Sick.
28. The Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics
29. Several copies of MAD
30. A stack of Jack Kirby 1970s Comic Books
31. More than a few Stan Lee/Jack Kirby 1960s Marvel Comic Books
32. A You're-Too-High-To-Tell Amount of Underground Comix
33. Some Calvin and Hobbes
34. Some Love and Rockets
35. The Marvel Benefit Issue Of Coober Skeber
36. A Few Comics Not In Your Native Tongue
37. A Nice Stack of Jack Chick Comics
38. A Stack of Comics You Can Hand To Anybody's Kid
39. At Least A Few Alan Moore Comics
40. A Comic You Made Yourself
41. A Few Comics About Comics
42. A Run Of Yummy Fur
43. Some Frank Miller Comics
44. Several Lee/Ditko/Romita Amazing Spider-Man Comic Books
45. A Few Great Comics Short Stories
46. A Tijuana Bible
47. Some Weirdo
48. An Array Of Comics In Various Non-Superhero Genres
49. An Editorial Cartoonist's Collection or Two
50. A Few Collections From New Yorker Cartoonists

Flying on September 11: A Rant

Written on September 11, although -- for reasons which will be clear when you read it -- I was away from an internet connection and couldn't publish it until now.

For various reasons, my wife and I don't fly very much: we don't travel much to begin with, and when we do we tend to go places within driving distance. But we do fly a handful of times a year, and, as it happens, this year we flew on September 11 -- seven years after the 9/11.

And, as I always do when I fly, I thought about how much worse it's gotten in the last (now seven) years, and how, if I had my druthers, I'd never fly again.

There are a lot of aspects to this, of which only some have to do with the terrorist attacks of seven years ago. The price of fuel, obviously, has a lot to do with it. That is the excuse, anyway, for charging per checked bag, which the airlines have now started to do. I'd read about this, of course, but since we don't fly much, and try not to check bags when we do, I hadn't focused on how much they were charging. On U.S. airways, anyway, it's $15 for the first bag, $25 for the second -- and $100 for a third.

That strikes me as beyond any reasonable fuel surcharge, and well into price gouging (simply going by the relationship of the price between the bags). Once my wife and I start to check (and for various personal reasons, I anticipate that if we fly next year we'll have to), this starts to be serious money -- and yet another reason to think, hmm, maybe a twelve hour drive doesn't sound so bad after all.

By itself it wouldn't: but there are other advantages to driving.

You get there, for instance.

I've lost count, now, of how many stories I've heard from friends and family and acquaintances and random strangers shouting in subways about trying to fly and simply not getting where you were planning to go in any reasonable amount of time (defined as getting there in time for whatever you're traveling for). At this point, it's begun to seem like even odds: if you buy a plane ticket, you've got a coin-flip chance of getting where you're going. -- Each way, of course, so that if you're going round trip that's a total of 25% chance of arrival. (Personally, for us, the results have been about that, I'd say. For people we know overall, it's been a bit better -- but not much.)

My wife recently made a business trip: living as we do in a small town, she had to take a flight with a connection. Of the four plane flights she was scheduled to be on, she ended up on one. She got where she was going and back only by taking, in addition, a train, a $100-inter-state taxi ride, and by ending up at an airport over an hour away from our house, where I had to go get her at midnight.

And that was a good story, because she made her meeting and got back on time.

And, I should note, that one of the reasons we don't fly much is that a number of years ago we stopped taking flights for reasonably short trips (drives of 6 hours or so). We stopped after I noticed, on maybe a half-dozen trips, that I would have gotten to my destination sooner if I had simply started driving there instead of the airport.

Now, I'm not claiming this as statistics: that's simply perceptions from anecdotes. But even people who I would think of as pro-flying have long since started to notice it: flying is no longer reliable.

I don't know, really, how much this has to do with the events of seven years ago -- probably fairly little directly, although more in indirect effects. But cost-cutting has lead airlines into things beyond price-gouging for bags. Cutting crews and planes to the bone means that there isn't the slightest margin of error: if anything goes wrong, the schedule goes off. (We had a connecting flight canceled last year because -- purportedly: of course they lie, which is frustrating in and of itself -- a flight attendant didn't show up. About eight hours after our flight was supposed to take off they put us all onto two busses and drove us where we were going (four and a half hours away, by bus). Welcome to the new Delta.)

And it's this feeling, that flying is no longer reliable, that you can't count on getting where you're going, that makes everything else so bad. The price gouging, the petty cheapness,* the seats the size of packing crates, the thoroughness of utterly useless security checks,** all of that, would be bearable if you could at least count on ending up where you're going. But when you start missing meetings, missing family events, having vacations turn to smoke and spending nights in random cities, you start to wonder why you're doing this at all.

_______________________
* On that flight I mentioned above -- the one that turned into a bus ride -- we were given dinner vouchers as we waited in JFK: five dollars each. An average dinner at the restaurants around was at least $7-8, if not more. Most couples got one good dinner for their combined two vouchers. There was a strong sense among all of us on that ill-fated flight that the vouchers were an out-and-out insult: giving us less than the cost of a meal was in some non-economic sense worse than doing nothing.

Then, on the business trip I mentioned, my wife (on the verge of spending a night in a stop-over city) was told that they wouldn't give her a hotel voucher because the cancellation wasn't their fault -- it was weather. (Somewhere. Sunny where she was.) Although, of course, it was their fault -- for not having any backup plans or slack in their system.

** This was the incident that set me off on this rant, although it was ultimately swamped by the main rant above which I've been hoarding for a while now. I have, as those of you who know me know, a serious medical skin problem. I use a lot of ointments and creams in my life. So the utterly pointless ban on "liquids" -- where I come from, toothpaste is not a liquid, and neither is vaseline or lubriderm -- hits me hard. If this helped prevent a repeat of the attacks seven years ago, I wouldn't really mind. But it's security theater, plugging a single hole in a leaking tanker because someone (inefficiently) tried to use it once in the intervening years -- and not very effectively at that. I suspect that a determined terrorist could get explosive liquid on a plane of he wanted to -- although I suspect a terrorist of even average intelligence would target something other than planes, since busses, trains, bridges, etc, are all wide open.

Talk about locking the barn door after the horse was stolen -- we're erecting a single, free-standing door on a vast field because the last horse we saw happened to run off in that particular direction.

While I'm talking about the "security", I noticed this time through the TSA's motto: "Your Security is Our Priority". At first it reminded me of Terry Gilliam's Brazil; but now I'm wondering if it isn't more similar to the ubiquitous motto used by the military in Dr. Strangelove, "Peace Is Our Profession".

Either way, it certainly gives a nice frisson of deception and sanctimoniousness to an otherwise pointless and aggravating process.

New Springsteen Song -- Free!

Starting today, and for a week, the first single from Bruce Springsteen's upcoming new studio album Magic -- "Radio Nowhere" -- is available for free on iTunes. (Yeah, it comes with iTunes' crappy DRM. But hey, it's free.)

If you want a direct link, there's one here, along with more information about the album.

Based on one listen, it's great. But hey, it's Springsteen, what do you expect?

Incidentally, while I'm sorta vaguely on the topic, I should mention that Springsteen's all-covers album We Shall Overcome: the Seeger Sessions, is one of my favorite of his albums, and one of my favorite albums period from the past few years. If you like either Pete Seeger, or Springsteen, or either folk or rock music at all (but I repeat myself), and you haven't heard it, do check it out.

But in the meantime, go download "Radio Nowhere" while the price is right.

(Via Altercation.)

An Amazing Deal on Some Amazing TV

On the short list of my all-time favorite TV shows (along with Buffy, Firefly, Veronica Mars, The Wire, and a few others) is an NBC show that ran for seven seasons (two of them unusually short), called Homicide: Life on the Street. (After it was canceled, a two-hour TV movie wrapped up the remaining plot points.)

Like the still-ongoing (and equally if not even more amazing) HBO show The Wire, Homicide arose out of the work of journalist David Simon. Simon was a Baltimore reporter who took a year off from his newspaper work to follow around the homicide unit of the Baltimore Police Department. Out of that experience came a nonfiction book, called Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. The book was turned into a fictional TV show, with characters based on their real-life counterparts, and plots (and even dialogue) taken directly from the book. Simon was not initially involved with the show, although he did get involved in the later seasons.

The Wire was created, executive produced, and so forth by Simon (along with his collaborator, ex-PBD cop Ed Burns. One way to look at The Wire is Simon's attempt to rewrite or rework what he didn't like about the TV version of Homicide; see, for example, this amazing blog essay by Marc Singer about how various Wire characters are rewrites of Homicide's Frank Pembleton.

Homicide is different from The Wire: for the most part the episodes are self-contained (unlike The Wire, where each season is a single film fairly arbitrarily divided for broadcast purposes); the show is just about the police, rather than also having the investigated people as co-equal characters; it's not an HBO show, and that effects a lot of elements; and it's not quite as grittily realistic in its refusal of narrative conventions as The Wire is, especially in its later seasons. Obviously Simon had his critiques of Homicide, notwithstanding his own involvement both as the author of the source material and, later, as a writer and executive producer on the show. But saying Homicide might not be quite as good as The Wire is like saying that Bush might not be quite as evil as Cheney: given the magnitudes involved, such distinctions ultimately don't mean much. (And some people like it better: some people reasonably like that you don't need to watch an entire 12 or 13-hour film to get the aesthetic pay-off, for instance.)

Despite all that, Homicide is some amazing television, unlike any other cop show (except, naturally, The Wire): gritty, realistic, fabulously dramatic and powerfully bleak, it's just superb. It is well-directed and well-acted -- Andre Braugher (playing Frank Pembleton) is widely (and correctly) seen as the show's anchor, but most if not all of the other actors are also astonishingly good. (Although Braugher's absence in season seven is one reason that Homicide's last season was its weakest (he returned for the wrap-up TV movie.)) It is, quite simply, great TV. If you don't know it, give it a try; if you like The Wire and don't know Homicide, you should definitely check it out; if you liked Homicide at the time, but don't remember it... read on.

Right now -- and I haven't a clue how long it will last -- Amazon has an amazing deal on something called the Homicide Life on the Street Complete Series Megaset. The set contains all seven seasons, the TV film, the three cross-over episodes that Homicide did with the vastly inferior (but vastly more popular) show Law & Order, which aren't included in the usual single-season sets; and a variety of documentaries and so forth. It's basically the entire show with all the trimmings -- for $97.49. Given that individual season sets run from $45 - $85, with the Amazon discount, this is really an incredible deal. Even if you have a few of the season sets already, this is still the cheapest way to get the others; and if you don't -- well, it's clearly the best way to get one of the best shows ever to air on American TV.

So if you want to get the show on DVD at any point, now is the time to get it. And if you haven't wanted to in the past, but like watching great TV on DVD, consider getting it. It's really worth watching -- and rewatching.

Buying Comics in California: Three Tales

My oldest friend (i.e. friend of longest standing) got married last weekend. So, despite it being a rather busy time of year, my wife & I made a quick trip out to Berkeley so that we could go -- for my part, squeezing it in between my semester's last class and first exam.* We were only there for two days -- just long enough for the wedding, really -- but Berkeley is a Town of Very Good Bookstores (even with the loss of the Telegraph Avenue Cody's), and in what little spare time we had we, naturally, went to them. And since I've had comics on the brain recently, I made a special point of checking out both the graphic novels sections of general-purpose bookstores and a few comics stores. Herewith, three reports.

1. The Platonic Comics Shop

There are a number of comic book stores that are recognized by the cognoscenti as a step above the ordinary local comics stores that you can find all over the place. For instance, in the Boston area (where I lived for many years), there's the wonderful Million Year Picnic in Harvard Square. Well, the Bay Area, naturally, is also home to a few of these. I didn't have a chance to get into San Francisco, where a few famous ones are located, but I did get to a store in Berkeley which is widely well-regarded (hey, it says so on the internet, so it must be true...): Comic Relief on Shattuck Avenue.

And it's really quite extraordinary. While years of familiarity have made the Million Year Picnic dear to my heart, I have to admit it: Comic Relief is the best comics store I've ever seen. Indeed, I'll go farther, and say that it probably is pretty much the Platonic Ideal of a comic store.

What makes it so extraordinary?

Well, in every area that I could test in a brief, 30-45 minute browse, it not only got all the fundamentals right, but it did them extremely well. It has a superb selection -- broad, deep and rich. And the atmosphere is wonderful: it looks and feels like a bookstore, which is just what one would want -- not an ounce of the grimy feel that poorer comics stores can have, it has nice rugs, shelves with the books neatly placed, tasteful magazine racks for its floppies which don't feel crammed (and which don't overwhelm the book shelves). This is an extremely important aspect, one that it seems ought to be easy to get right, but must not be, since so many comics stores get it wrong. It doesn't feel like a toy store or magazine rack or game store or Den of Geeks** or anything. Things are clearly displayed, without stacks of dissimilar materials hiding each other. The store is, as Hemingway wrote in a rather different context, a "clean, well-lighted place". It's just a nice place to be. Which is a plus if you want people to, y'know, be there so they can shop.

(I didn't have time to test the knowledge, efficiency, politeness, etc, of the staff, although the brief interactions I had with them were favorable.)

But what really makes the store is the organization.

A lot of comics shops -- most of the ones I'm familiar with, even the really good ones -- organize their material by publisher. Now, in one sense, this makes a lot more sense than it would in most book stores: Marvel and DC aren't just publishers, they're brand names, associated with characters; they're linked stories, in many ways, so grouping them is like putting different issues of a serial together. Fantagraphics, Top Shelf and Drawn & Quarterly have more-or-less clearly defined aesthetic sensibilities, so that if one of their books appeal to a reader others are more likely to. And so forth.

Now all stores break this to some extent -- grouping together publications from big-name writers like Alan Moore or Brian K. Vaughan, say, even if they're from different companies. And good ones break it more.

But Comic Relief departed from it (almost) entirely.

They had a few big categories. The biggest and most interesting one was "Fiction and Literature". Yeah, I know: obvious. Practically every bookstore in the country has a section like that. But comics stores don't. They have an "independents" section, a Vertigo section, and so forth. But to put almost all the fiction, on bookshelves, spine out, in simple alphabetical order by author...

It felt like a revelation.

Next to it was a section -- a separate section! -- for journalism & other non-fiction.

I suppose it's a testimony to the sad state of the comics store that this was so impressive. But there it is.

Now they didn't go quite all the way with it. Manga, all-ages comics, books of cartoon strips, film-based books, erotica (and "underground" comics, although this was much narrower than equivalents in other stores that include anything that isn't PG-13), foreign-language comics, etc, each had their own section. But each of these makes sense in its own way. (I almost yelped with joy when I saw for sale a copy of the incredibly-hard-to-find but also incredibly-high-reputation David Mazzucchelli book Discovering America... until I noticed it was in Italian. Damn. But I had just walked in: in another minute I wouldn't have made that mistake, and that's a good thing.)

And they had some other sections too: new and notable books; art books (i.e. that aren't comics, or aren't primarily comics); a "weird culture" table (my term -- I don't recall what they called it) of quirky books that might appeal to comics fans (the example I remember is the (no longer the?) most recent issue of the McSweeney's Quarterly, with the Oulipo selection in it); and some others in a similar vein.

They have a charming little "undersized books" rack right over their "oversized books" rack: a wonderful idea, since the former are as prone to getting lost as the latter are to not fitting, and it's nice to see them set aside, for the same practical reasons.

And so on.

But the biggest departure from their scheme was one other separate section: superheroes.

Now, I've nothing against superhero comics as such; certain superhero comics are among some of my favorite comics. But as Warren Ellis famously said:

Fuck superheroes, frankly. The notion that these things dominate an entire genre is absurd. It's like every bookstore in the planet having ninety percent of its shelves filled by nurse novels. Imagine that. You want a new novel, but you have to wade through three hundred new books about romances in the wards before you can get at any other genre. A medium where the relationship of fiction about nurses outweighs mainstream literary fiction by a ratio of one hundred to one. Superhero comics are like bloody creeping fungus, and they smother everything else.

By "genre" in the second sentence he means "medium"; but otherwise he's right. It's not that superhero books can't be good or fun or even profound. But the proportions are wildly out of whack... and while, yes, I hope we've all come a long way in the last decade, comics are now taken very seriously by mainstream culture, and we no longer need to say "comics can be more than superheroes!" in every article...

Well, yes, we no longer need to say it, and graphic novels sections at mainstream bookstores look like we don't need to say it. But, more often than not, comics shops don't. And it can turn people off.

So yes, Comic Relief has all the superhero comics you could want... on the left side of the store. Not what you see when you first walk in. (And, as I've seen mentioned on the web before, their new comics racks are in back, where you have to walk to get them (except for the "new and noteworthy" table, which is a different kettle of crab), a much better idea than up front...). What you see are the, well, other sections. Y'know, fiction.

And fiction is all fiction that isn't in one of the other categories: if it's not erotica, manga,*** or superheroes, then it's there. The bleak realism of Chris Ware is cheek-by-jowl with the hip thrillers of Brian K. Vaughan. Everything from SF to what would in any other literary context be called "mainstream". Just not superheroes.

But that's not all. The real genius is that they apply the same system to their pamphlets. They have a "fiction and literature" rack that has non-superhero pamphlets of all sorts... and a separate rack for the superhero comics.

I can see why this might irritate superhero fans. And on some abstract level, I agree -- just as, on some abstract level, Affirmative Action is unfair to whites. But given the actual history in both cases, some positive discrimination is required to make up for the corrosion set in by a long history. And in the case of comics, that's against superheroes and for everything else.

Anyway, I trust you've gotten the point. It's not that other good stores don't do many of these things. It's that I've never seen any other store do them all, and do them so thoroughly or so well.

Before the trip, I'd tried, once or twice, to envision what a perfect comics store would be like -- perfect within the limits of the real world, I mean; I'm not talking Hicksville here -- just on a physical level, what it would look like, how it would be organized. I think I had a pretty good sense of what should be done.

And that's precisely how Comic Relief looked.

Which is to say: perfect.

If I ran a comics store, I'd want it to look like Comic Relief.

2. Free Comic Book Day

It just so happened that the day of the wedding was also free comic book day. Since FCDB began only six years ago, the only place I'd ever seen it was at my home-town comic book store, Comics for Collectors in Ithaca, New York. But the wedding wasn't until the afternoon, a free comic is a free comic, and hey, FCDB is the happiest day of the year. So I went to the handy-dandy comic shop locator and found a convenient comics shop to go to. Now, the actual wedding was in Benicia, California -- which was the state capital of California for two years in the mid-Nineteenth Century, and they don't let you forget it for a moment while you're there, believe me -- so rather than make the (longer and traffickier) drive back into Berkeley, I went to Flying Color Comics in Concord, California (which Tom Spurgeon also includes on his list of favorites, along with Comic Relief and the other stores mentioned or linked to in part one), which was supposedly only 20 minutes from Benicia.

Hmm, make that 30. Still, I got there at 11, right at the time the store opened; the owner had warned on his blog to get there early, and it's hard to get there earlier than opening, right?****

Now, at C-for-C here in NY, FCDB is a big day: which means you might have to stand in line behind a few people, maybe even two or three, to get your free comics. And the store is usually rather busy. Maybe not the best day to browse. But it honestly never occurred to me that it might take any significant amount of time to get the comics. I thought I pick up the ones I wanted, browse for half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes, drive back to the hotel, suit up, and be ready to go sheva some brachot. So I got to the store -- suburbs, yuck, big mall, parking lot, where's the store, oh there it is...

With a line down the block, around the corner, and halfway down the next block.

Damn.

I ask the owner at the door how long he thinks it'll take: about an hour, he guesses. Even assuming he's right, and even assuming I whiz through the store without any time to browse afterwards, and even forgetting about the pile of term papers back at my hotel room that need to be graded (that I didn't think to bring because, to repeat, it never occurred to me that I'd have to wait for as long as five minutes)... even with all that, I'd be stressed the entire hour, worried about the timing. It wasn't worth it.

So I went home.

Pressing my nose against the glass from outside, it did look like a pretty cool comics store, if not a genuine rival to Comic Relief. But I obviously can't testify to that with any real force.

It was rather a bummer, I must admit: an hour's round trip (and, though I didn't know before I set out, $4 in tolls) for nothing. But as a fan (and wanna-be creator) of this field of comics, I was pleased: clearly the promotion is working quite well, at least for somebody.

At least in California.

(Update: An actual, honest-to-God retailer's thoughts on FCDB's success as a promotion can be found at the aforelinked site (via my increassingly desperate need to procrastinate on the !@#$% exams I have to grade.))

3. The Pièce de Résistance

But none of those was the real jaw-dropper of the weekend (even restricting myself to comics-buying related program activities). The real jaw-dropper came at a regular-old bookstore, Moe's on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. Moe's is a mixed new & used book store, with new books down on the lower level and used books on the upper floors. I wandered in Friday afternoon, went up to the third floor, wandered about, looking for the graphic novels, where are they, probably stuck away on some small shelf some place...

But no. They had more than three full bookcases of used graphic novels. The best selection of used graphic novels I'd ever seen -- by an order of magnitude. I got a number of good deals on books I'd been wanting, and a few obscure items I hadn't had an opportunity to buy before -- and saw a few books I'd never even heard of, which frankly happens rarely enough in new comics stores -- but in all honesty most of the time I was there I just sat there, looking at the shelf, feeling totally stunned.

If you, Noble Reader, haven't spent much time in used bookstores looking at graphic novel sections (or sighing the lack of them), this may not seem like much to you. But far more than anything else I've ever read, graphic novels are hard to come by, price-wise. They're expensive, compared to prose -- particularly given that they take less time to read.***** Even though libraries are starting to carry more and more of them -- and even though our much-beloved local public library has a rather jaw-droppingly good selection of graphic novels itself -- you can't go to a library with the expectation that they'll have more-or-less any graphic novel that you want to read, except maybe very obscure ones, the way that you can with prose novels. (University libraries, which have very good prose collections obviously, have particularly bad graphic novel collections.)

And they're very hard to find used. Even very good used bookstores usually just have a handful of them -- and often not very interesting ones at that. Oh, you can order used graphic novels on line -- but shipping costs drive up the price considerably.

And here I was, with a selection that would put most new bookstores -- hell, would put a lot of comic book stores -- to shame. In a used bookstore.

I had never seen anything like it. I hadn't, really, thought that there was anything like it.

Now, having since been to Comic Relief, I can see that with stores like that in the area, perhaps Moe's selection was understandable. Still, I was floored.

And I should say that Shakespeare & Co., half a block away, had a very respectable 3+ shelf selection of graphic novels, too, plus some interesting floppies. I would probably have been extremely impressed with that selection if I hadn't just seen the one at Moe's.

So if you're in Berkeley, and you're a comics fan, go to Moe's and pick some used graphic novels up. And if you're in Berkeley, and you're not a comics fan, stop by Comic Relief: it's a good place to browse, and maybe get interested.

And always go early to Free Comic Book Day.

Update: Edited to fix those little typos that gremlins always -- and I mean awlays -- insert in a post after the final proofread and before it winds its ways through the wires to actually sit on my blog. (As I usually do without bothering to mention it. But I'm feeling procrastinatey (exam grading sucks!), so I thought I'd tell you this time.)

Later Update: So it seems that Comic Relief won the Eisner Spirit of Retailing Award in 1993 (the very first year it was offered, if that list's complete); Flying Colors Comics won in 1995. Million Year Picnic seems not to have ever won (which is too bad; it is quite a good store).

_____________________
* Why, since you asked, yes, it was a lovely wedding. It was a Catholic ceremony -- the first I've been to since I was too small to remember -- which, it turns out, is quite wonderful, very solemn and beautiful. (I was even asked to say a Hebrew blessing, to honor the Jewish side of my friend's heritage.) And my friend was glowing, which was good to see. And as my people say, the bride was beautiful and graceful. (True in this instance, although the problem with following Hillel's rule is that, since you're always supposed to say it, no one ever believes you really mean it! (...Yes, of course, the rule can be understood to mean that, really, all brides are beautiful and graceful. And in a sense that's true. But to the extent that it's necessarily true, it doesn't mean much to say it -- save as an emotional speech-act which boils down to: I was at a wedding. (What if I point out that the groom was beautiful and graceful? You're not required to say that, so maybe people will take me seriously...)))

** Not that there's anything wrong with that.

*** Arguably the least defensible separation -- the one most like keeping Vertigo and Fantagraphics separate, as other stores do -- but I guess nothin's perfect. Even Platonic perfection. Not in this crazy world.

**** I was already in the air by the time of his next post (I just saw it now looking for a link for this entry) and didn't think to check the blog in CA, or I might have been prepared for the day's events. Ah, well.

***** Which isn't a slur on them as an art form: films take less time to see than novels take to read, and (practically) no one thinks film is a lesser form. It simply has to do with the efficiency of human visual information processing versus linguistic processing. And there are compensations: graphic novels are much harder to skim, so I, at least, find I am more likely to read every word of one than of a prose book; and because they're swift, I'm more likely to reread them.

How to Buy Lost Girls for $15, Absolutely Legally

(Note: this post is entirely safe-for-work, but it is about a book that isn't, and links to reviews which may contain unsafe-for-work material. I'll try to indicate which, but no guarantees. Key:
* = link includes images, but work-safe ones
** = link includes images that are not work safe.)

The comic du jour -- probably, based on its buzz, the comic d'lannée (Or should that be "d'lan"? My French sucks) -- is Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's 16-year-in-the-making work of artistic pornography, Lost Girls.

Yes, I said pornography. By all accounts, it does for porn what, well, Watchmen did for superhero stories: elevates it to an artistic heights never before attained, while preserving the essence of the genre. It is, in other words, really art, and really porn. (To be clear: I haven't read it yet; according to Amazon, my copy has shipped, but it ain't gotten here so far. So this is all based on reviews, blog posts and other hearsay.)

If that bothers you, don't read further.

(And the word, incidentally -- or at least Alan Moore's preferred word -- is indeed "pornography" rather than "erotica", for reasons he has explained in various interviews*.)

I've seen something like a score of statements saying that it is a work of art, one of the best comics Moore has ever done (more or less unsurpassable praise in the comics medium), a must read, and so on and so forth. It's something that, unquestionably, anyone interested in graphic novels/comics or in pornography will want to read; if one believes some (many) of the reviews, that may extend to anyone interested in human sexuality. It is, in a word, supposed to be great. (A round-up of some reviews, interviews and link follow.)

What people have not been emphasizing, however, is that it is also extremely !@#$% expensive. As in $75.

As Neil Gaiman pointed out in his review, this is part of "the traditional approach of a respectable publisher when faced with the problem of bringing out pornography... to package it elegantly, expensively and beautifully, thus pricing, shaping, signaling and presenting it to the world, not as pornography, but as erotica." A reasonable choice, all things considered. But difficult for those of us who don't casually drop $75 on anything, let alone a graphic novel we haven't read yet. Its publisher, Top Shelf, compares it to DC/Wildstorm's "absolute" format for graphic novels, which publishes graphic novels as oversize hardcovers costing $75 (such as, for example, Absolute Watchmen and Absolute League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). But those are for well-established graphic novels -- not always "classics" of the still-young medium, but ones that publishers wish to present as such, anyway. And they are always available in cheaper editions. Whereas Lost Girls isn't yet -- and might well not ever be.

Never fear, Noble Readers. You can get it cheaper -- at least for $45, possibly even for $15. Absolutely legally -- not downloading a scanned copy or buying bootleg copies or anything.

Here's how.

Okay. Part one is that Amazon.com** -- yeah, I prefer neighborhood bookstores and local comic shops too, but when you're talking about a !@#$% $75 book, I'm willing to cut corners -- is selling the book for $45, or 40% off. That's already a lot better than $75. (When I pre-ordered it, some time ago, it was only 37% off -- $47.50. Bah, humbug. But the take-home point here is that the price can change -- and I doubt it will go lower than $45.)

How, then, to get down to $15?

Then the key is this: Amazon.com will -- or at least did recently, I don't know if the promotion is still active (since it knows I already did it and won't show me), but I think it probably is -- give you a $30 credit if you sign up for a free Amazon.com credit card. So you sign up for the card, put Lost Girls on it... and your first bill is only $15, once the credit has been factored in.

I'm pretty sure -- I'm hoping! -- that Top Shelf and Chris Staros don't get any less than full royalties on the $45 that Amazon charges. I believe that discounts such as that come out of the bookstore's pockets, not the publisher's. (Although maybe publishers give big bookstores like Amazon special deals that smaller bookstores don't get. I don't know.) And in any event the latter is clearly an Amazon promotion, and won't affect Top Shelf.

So that's how you do it: a new, legal copy of Lost Girls for $15. Bit of a pain, really. But it allows you to buy Alan Moore's latest work for more or less the price of a new, ordinary graphic novel. I mean, $15 is a very reasonable price for a major new Alan Moore graphic novel. Even one that isn't porn (if that's more your thing).

The cover of Lost Girls. The link is to a
photoset with review art**, including
some material that is not work safe.

And why would you want to buy Lost Girls? Here are some review samples, to answer that question -- to explain why I, at least, bought a copy.

"There’s no question it’s a stone masterpiece by both [Moore and Gebbie]... a stunning narrative achievement with a whole lot of fucking. It is unquestionably art: however explicit the drawings (and they sure are), they are, after all, still drawings. And there’s a level of artistic remove in the work that almost defies titillation. The weird thing is that Moore and Gebbie might very well have split the atom here. Filmmakers have for decades tried to make truly artistic smut and failed miserably. Moore and Gebbie succeed." -- Joe Gross

"LOST GIRLS is not only one of the best things Alan Moore has ever written, I also think it’s a fairly important work of art judged by any standard. It’s genuinely dangerous... I think it’s one of the most human and heartfelt pieces of work of his career, and his reputation as a dark genius will survive the truth of this piece... that he’s a fucking romantic deep at heart. It took writing about sex to bring out a passionate, soulful Moore that I’ve never seen before in print." -- Ain't It Cool News [second ellipsis in the original]

As an exercise in the formal bounds of pure comics, Lost Girls is remarkable, as good as anything Moore has done in his career... It is one of the tropes of pure pornography that events are without consequence. No babies, no STDs, no trauma, no memories best left unexamined. Lost Girls, however, is all about consequences. It's also about more things than sex – war, music, love, lust, repression and time, to pick a handful of subjects (I could pick more)... Lost Girls is a bitter-sweet, beautiful, problematic, exhaustive, occasionally exhausting work. It succeeded for me wonderfully as a true graphic novel. If it failed for me, it was only as smut; the book, at least in large black and white photocopy form, was not a one-handed read. It was too heady, dense and strange to appreciate or to experience on a visceral level. (Your mileage may vary; porn is, after all, personal.)
-- Neil Gaiman

"LOST GIRLS is about as sacred and profane as comics can get, and an absolutely essential piece of Alan Moore work comparable to From Hell, Watchmen, Voice of the Fire, or whatever your personal favourite Alan Moore work happens to be... about the most thoughtful rumination on sexuality and fantasy as I have ever experienced." -- Alan David Doane **

... and so forth. Top Shelf has a long list of reviews and interviews, which run from the impressed to the utterly blown away. The point is, it's a book that has impressed a lot of people. If you want to read it yourself, get a copy (it won't be at many libraries!). I hope this helps you get one a bit more reasonably priced than you otherwise might.

(If anyone knows any legal ways to get even cheaper copies, feel free to leave them in comments. But legal ways only, please! Top Shelf is putting itself on the line for this one; no one should download it or otherwise get royalty-free copies.)

Buying Books Online: Links and Notes

There are some things that one just assumes everyone knows. I've worked hard at learning not to do this over the years, but I still have a long ways to go (and I don't really ever expect to get all the way there). Chatting with a newly-made friend today, I found out that she didn't know about all sorts of online resources to buy books with that I sort of assumed everyone knew about. So here are a few links I know of that I find helpful when shopping for books. If anyone knows any I left out, please leave them in the comments!

The first and most basic tool I use are two sites which themselves aggregate other online search engines. There are more than these two sites, but in my experience checking too many one hits diminishing returns, since they all check more or less the same databases. But there isn't complete overlap -- sometimes one will have a surprising hole (e.g. not finding all editions of a book but just some, not finding a book on some site that the other metasearch engine will find it on, etc), so it's worth checking more than one. So I use these two:
http://www.allbookstores.com
http://www.anybook4less.com
These sites aren't perfect -- the errors mentioned above will sometimes occur on both -- but in general they do a fairly good job, I think.

Most of the rest of the sites I know of are ones which those two will point you towards. But still, for anyone who wants to check them directly, there are a number of sites which allow you to search many used book stores across the U.S. (and, often, in England & elsewhere -- pay attention to where it's coming from, as it may affect shipping time and/or price!). The biggest of these, I believe is:
http://www.abebooks.com/
--but another one is:
http://www.alibris.com/
And Amazon.com, of course, does the same thing, as well as selling you new books (and barbecue grills and underwear and probably short-range missiles). Finally, while not strictly speaking just for used books, a lot of used books appear on:
http://www.half.ebay.com/

The other thing to take into account, of course, is shipping cost. Most of these sites will give you a discount if you buy more than one book from the same store (i.e. the same actual, physical used book store, not just the same online portal) so it's worth searching around to see if you can combine books. In general, abebooks has somewhat higher shipping prices than alibris, which in turn is a bit higher than half.com; and if you find a book on one, it's worth checking the others since the same copy is often listed on multiple sites. On the other hand, I often find that ordering books from multiple stores is cheaper than combining orders, even factoring in multiple shipping costs.

For new books, overstock.com has Amazon-like prices on a lot of things, but only charges $1.40 per book for shipping, so if you're buying under $25 (the amount at which amazon will ship for free), it's worth trying that. In contrast, ebay often has outrageous shipping prices -- a lot of ebay sellers seem to fold a lot of their actual merchandise price into their shipping cost (presumably to hide it when sorting ebay by price or on search engines such as the above, or simply to try and sucker people who don't pay attention), so pay particular attention when buying books on ebay (this is even aside from the auction factor -- I'm talking now just about the ebay "stores" which sell you things immediately.)

Those are some of the web sites I use. Again, if anyone has any others, please leave them in comments!

Some Things Are Just !@#$%ed Up

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow (SF author and blogger of boing-boing fame) is available on Amazon.com in a variety of formats. That makes sense: if you want a dead-tree edition, Amazon will sell you one, in hard or soft covers.

But they also will sell you a copy for Microsoft Reader for $9.95.

Why is that !@#$%ed up?

Because Cory Doctorow has made the entire novel available for free on his web site. In a rather bewildering variety of formats. (Now, I have no idea if the Microsoft Reader format is among them... but if you can get to Amazon, you can read html, which is on Doctorow's site.)

So the question is... why would anyone buy the digital file from Amazon? A paper copy, sure -- there's reason to have a paper copy even if you can get a digital one free. But a digital one? Have they sold any? Who bought them?

(It is cool that Doctorow made the whole novel free; he's said that he thinks it increases his sales. In fact, all his novels and many of his short stories are available on his web site; check 'em out!)

The New Edition of the Oulipo Compendium is Out

The Oulipo Compendium -- the best one-volume introduction to the French literary group the Oulipo and various related works and ideas -- which has been out of print for several years now, is back in print. It's been promised for some time, but I know it's really out since I received my copy today. The Oulipo Compendium is a wonderful book, a true joy, and I commend it to any of you interested in (quirky and experimental) literature. Below is a very brief explanation of what the Oulipo is, some information on the book, and links to online excerpts from the book.

The Ou-whatsis?

The Oulipo (an acronym of their full name, "Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle", which translates as "Workshop for Potential Literature") is a French literary group founded in 1960 by writer Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais; noteworthy members have included Italo Calvino, Georges Perec and Harry Mathews (the only American in the group and one its primary ambassadors to the English-speaking world). It is dedicated to the study of literary constraints and new literary techniques. Reviews of many Oulipian works can be found here. There seems to be fairly few good English-language introductory web sites on the Oulipo, but the wikipedia entry is a good place to start. If you read French, the group's official web home is here.

Information on the Book:

The new edition is being published jointly by Atlas Press in the UK and Make Now Press in the US. The latter's web site is, unfortunately, still listing the book as "coming soon" with the price and ISBN unavailable. (Those at least I can help with: it's $36, and the ISBN is 0974355437.) Make Now seems to be a rather new, rather small press, and they are clearly a bit behind in their web presence. Atlas Press is an older, more established small press -- they published the first edition in 1998 -- and their web site is up and running. (And if your order from them before November 27, it's only £15 (although shipping from the UK is steep.)) Thus far the UK edition (ISBN 1900565188) seems to be available, while the US edition is not -- it's not listed on the US amazon.com, for instance. (I got mine from an ebay auction offered by one of the people associated with Make Now Press -- I don't know why they auctioned off one copy but haven't yet started selling others.) Still, given that the US edition has been printed (and there's no question mine is the US edition, not the UK one), I can only presume that it too will be available in short order.

(Update: The U.S. publisher says in the comments: "The web site will be up and running in no time. You can not order the book from Atlas because they will direct you to me, As I hold the US/Canada sales rights.... The books are still on the sea, a week away from getting to me for sale.") (Further Update: The web site for Make Now Press has been updated, and you can now buy the new edition of the Oulipo Compendium from them directly (scroll down); it's unclear if it is being sold anywhere else.)

There are informative reviews of the first edition by James Sallis, Warren Motte and the Complete Review; the third of these is the most comprehensive, and has links to more reviews and resources. A brief interview with the Alastair Brochie, one of the editors of the book (and one of the editors of Atlas Press) describing the new edition is here; the gist (from the "directions for use" in the new edition) is that "the factual parts (such as membership and bibliographies)" have been updated, while the "literary contents" are the same as in the first edition.

Selections, Excerpts and Included Texts Available Online:

While the book is wonderful, and I encourage you all to buy a copy, a generous number of selections, excerpts and included texts are online in various places. Here are some links.

There was a web site associated with the first edition (www.oulipocompendium.com) which has online the introduction as well as a handful of abridged versions of some of the literature entries, including: N+7, Definitional Literature, Elementary Morality, Eye-Rhyme, Larding, Lipogram, Measures, Perverb, Poetic Redundancy, Rhetorical Repetition, Slenderizing, Univocalism. (A table of contents for these is here.) These are probably the best introduction to the tone and feel of the Compendium: if you like these, you'll probably enjoy the book.

The first item in the Compendium is Stanley Chapman's translation of Raymond Queneau's "Cent mille milliards de poèmes" ("A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems"); this is available online here, as are other translations by Bev Rowe (this site also has the French), an anonymous translator (another site with the French) and yet another anonymous translator. Of these versions, I think that Bev Rowe's site has the best layout/introduction to the concept, though Chapman's translation was approved by Queneau so might be preferred for that reason. This site only has the French text, but contains a good brief description of the work.

Ian Monk, a British member of the Oulipo, has a page of his Oulipian Writings online. Several of these are included in the Compendium, including his univocal translation of George Perec's "What a Man!" and his brief univocal essay, "Perec's Letterless Texts", which discusses three of Perec's works -- including La Disparition, a novel written entirely without the letter e, "The Exeter Text" a univocalism in e (which has been translated by Monk himself) and "What a Man!". This essay is a virtuoso performance; my favorite bit is where he quotes from La Disparition, transforming a passage which was a lipogram in e to a passage which is a univocalism in e. To give you a bit of the flavor, here is that passage in three forms:

On acquitta Rosa sous l'acclamation du public qui, par moult bravos bruyants, montra son approbation. Glupf s'avoua vaincu, mais jura qu'il aurait son tour, qu'un jour on allait voit qui commandait, qu'il vous foutrait tout ça à Auschwitz sitôt q'il aurait l'occasion.

(Georges Perec, La Disparition p. 294)

So, to a standing ovation, with a host of "hurrahs" and "bravos" and "attababys" from an approving public, Rosa is found not guilty. Poor Glupf admits to loosing -- promising, though, that only a fight and not a war is lost, that a day will dawn, a day on which Rosa will find out who is truly in command, a day on which Auschwitz will turn up its gas -- and strolls out whistling a military march.

(Trans. Gilbert Adair, A Void, p. 269)

Endless fevered cheers met Nell when she'd been freed. Glepf knew he'd been bested. He nevertheless yelled he'd be revenged. The bleeders'd see he led them. Whenever he felt he held the pretext, he'd see her sentenced then penned between Bergen-Belsen's cells.

(Univocalized by Ian Monk)

Also of note on Monk's site, although not in the Compendium, is "On G. Adair's A Void", Monk's lipogrammatic review of Gilbert Adair's lipogrammatic translation of Perec's lipogrammatic novel -- a basically negative review, which critiques it for insufficient accuracy (a critique which I can't judge, not knowing enough French, but which Monk makes a good case for.) Monk's English review was, in its turn, translated into lipogrammatic French here.

The Oulipo Papers:

One thing I am excited about is the announcement, in the new edition of the Compendium, of a series entitled the "Oulipo Papers". These will, apparently, be translations of various installments of the Oulipo's in-house pamphlet series, the Biblithèque oulipienne. These are limited edition pamphlets containing essays, poems, stories, etc, by members of the group. The French versions are collected and republished in facsimile editions, but so far English translations have been limited. Excerpts from some are translated in the Compendium. Atlas Press (the UK publisher of the Compendium) has also put out two volumes of translations, the Oulipo Laboratory, which contains a sample of six, and Winter Journeys*, which collect a series of variations on a short story by Georges Perec that various members of the Oulipo did which were published in the BO. But otherwise they've not been available. (I'm lucky insofar as the Cornell library subscribes to the series, and so has many (of the later ones) in their pamphlet form; but my French isn't really up to reading them (although a handful are actually in English, and I've read those.)) Details about the project are few; it's just mentioned briefly in the new edition (and here), but otherwise nothing seems to be released, not even on Atlas Press's web site. Still, something to look forward to!

* Perec's original story is online here; but the Atlas Press volume contains nine other stories by other members of the Oulipo too. Note that only the Atlas Press edition has the other stories: the Penguin Classics edition (which is called The Winter Journey, in the singular) contains just Perec's short story.