With no complications,

Sixteen generations of mine,

All blogwatching Nature,

Until I arrived (with incredible style)…

Forager 23: In the middle of something else, Forager drops a reference to comics writers as “librettists,” and a quickie comparison of comics and opera. I found that striking. Not sure if I completely go for it (I’m wildly non-visual and even less musical; pay attention to–in this order–character, dialogue, page layout, plot, pictures; and get a real kick out of at least one series, New X-Men, whose art is at best mildly irritating; then again, I really can’t deal with operas with silly librettos either, no matter what the music is like…!). But I think the comics/opera parallel may have value, and help illuminate some of the recent wrangling over superheroics and highly exaggerated characters and situations.

Hey, interesting tangential question. I think my attention to page layout over pictures is related to a) my love of movies and b) more deeply, my strong verbal as opposed to visual orientation. For some reason, page layouts–the use and distortion of panels and shapes–seem more verbal to me than pictures, even representative pictures.

That’s odd, since I respond poorly to abstract art and abstraction generally. (I once gave a toast “to the concrete noun,” after being forced to read Herbert Marcuse for an art history class….) Possibly unusual layout choices make you think more about why the page looks that way? They’re more intellectual, less visceral? Or, better, less obviously visceral? (Perhaps the pictures keep the layout choices hooked on to a discernable symbolic language and meaning, rather than free-floating in the random air of the artist’s whim like so much abstract art?)

Any thoughts would be welcome, since this is one of those intuitions I’d like to be able to understand and explain. And, if it proves fitting, incorporate into my fiction–I think I’ve learned a lot from, for example, trying to write “Hitchcock”-style fiction. There’s no point in using one art form to do what another form does better; but there’s a great deal to be gained from finding out whether your art form can incorporate some of the best features of another form. I’d name Yukio Mishima, for example, as a deeply Hitchcockian writer: attuned to objects, to the meaning of physical things, to small gestures and moments, and to corruption and the impossibility of innocence.

Matthew Yglesias: Important post on Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Sorry if that sounds boring. It’s not. Go read! (Comments also worth your time.)

Mixolydian Mode: “You’re a mouse studying to be a rat.” And more words of wisdom.

Winds of Change: Roundup post from AfricaPundit on all kinds of Africa-news. In case you missed this when InstaPundit noted it.