“Buy Me This If You Wanna Be My Pal for Life” Dept.

Just when I think “I’m strapped... can't look at another art book or my wallet will turn into a black hole and suck me bodily into the pits of bibliomania hell along with a few semi-innocent bystanders...” along comes this. A gargantuan hardcover tome of Winsor McKay's classic early 20th C. Sunday comics reproduced in the original tabloid proportions—lavish and precious and unexpected, but likely to be injurious to my tendons nonetheless. Likely to end up as ballast for my swaying IKEA bookcase—you know, just in case my cats decide to grow opposing thumbs and try pulling the damn thing over on its side once and for all. Of course it would be very pretty ballast, compared to that unread slab I've had for years, the one with the hundred and one views of the temple of Karnak.

Archaeology in the Age of Transparency, Part I

Pulled from the bookpile:
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
VALIS by Philip K. Dick
Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed

Let's begin with a deliciously sublime bit of hokum, concerning the Old Testament, deserts and rivers, the genesis of an art form and the end of a continent. In 1996, the ruined sphinxes of Rameses II saw daylight once again, in the burnt deserts of outer Los Angeles, gradually uncovered by the mute and inexorable elements, until discovered by roving bands of bored youths. “Ah,” say you, “That surely is a piece of hokum, and what, have I wandered onto some saucer nut’s website by mistake?” But, no, trust me, this is documented. The sphinxes themselves are the hokum, or as Ish Reed might put it, the Mumbo Jumbo in question. Whether those first discoverers assumed they were the lucky victims of a fabulous hoax I don’t know, but here we have crossed over from the realm of hoaxer to its close cousin, the Hollywood impresario.