Roman Muradov

Would You Want to Be Friends With Humbert Humbert?: A Forum on “Likeability”

Fri, 24 May 2013 11:23:54 -0700

newyorker: Our Page-Turner blog asked a group of novelists how often the question of likeability...

aencre: Roman Muradov vs Vincent Giard.

Thu, 23 May 2013 10:42:08 -0700

aencre:

Roman Muradov vs Vincent Giard.

TCAF! This weekend my frail bodifice will be wobbling in the...

Wed, 08 May 2013 11:07:45 -0700

TCAF!

This weekend my frail bodifice will be wobbling in the wind (what, the wind of chanSHUT UP) in the Wowee Zonk Small Press Room. A million thanks to the great A.Koyama and WZ for inviting me! Sophia will also be in the same room selling her stellar triptychs (also done on Ryan’s trusty risograph). You can identify me by my massive nose, round glasses and a mild air of despair. Also, now I have hair on my face!

I’ll also be in Montreal for a week after that, and then for another week in New York, so if you live in one (or more?SHh) of these places, please feel free to drop me a line.

For those of you who are not going to teacalf, but were kind enough to support my Kickstarter—bromancalf is coming to you! I’m on a demented mailing spree today and tomorrow, so hopefully you’ll get some comics presently. If not, as soon as I return!

PS. Some of the things I’m bringing.

Some of the stuff I’m bringing to TCAF this year....

Mon, 06 May 2013 12:30:05 -0700

Some of the stuff I’m bringing to TCAF this year. I’ll be in the Wowee Zonk Small Press Room, more details later this week!

PS. The Calvinosupplement flap in action.

A set of questionable riso prints I’ll have at TCAF in...

Thu, 02 May 2013 09:57:36 -0700

A set of questionable riso prints I’ll have at TCAF in addition to the zines & funnies (more details next week).

This is what they look like in manly pink and regular blue. Printed by Ryan Sands of Youth In Decline who’s bringing Frontier#1: Uno Morales to TCAF next week. I’ve been translating Ryan & Uno’s correspondences over the last few months—there’s a lot of love & thought put into this book, it will be a thing of beauty!

For an excerpt from Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 09:31:33 -0700

For an excerpt from Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle, Book Two” that you can read on the New Yorker’s Page Turner.

If you follow my work you’re probably no stranger to despair, loneliness and misery, so it’s a good read for you. The author is clearly influenced by Proust, and not just in terms of scale (there are 6 volumes of Min Kamp).

Thanks as usual to AD Jordan Awan!

Meep.

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 15:48:28 -0700

Meep.

Party pants on.

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 09:22:41 -0700

Party pants on.

As my most ardent instantgram followers must know, I recently...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 13:22:00 -0700

As my most ardent instantgram followers must know, I recently got obsessed with a lock that someone put on a fence (Ina Coolbirth Park) and made a short mini-comic about it.

I’ll bring some copies (risographed by Ryan Sands) to the opening of I See What You Say (Sunday, April 28th), a fantastic show at the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum. It features some of my favorite illustrators & cartoonists, and I also painted a lion & a bird on a wall. Bring your children, so they can sit next to a flat animal and draw things!

PS. If you’re the one who put that lock on that fence—please get in touch with me, I’d like to know why you did that.

Anonymous asked you: Hi. I read your post on book suggestions,...

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 21:30:18 -0700

Anonymous asked you:

Hi. I read your post on book suggestions, and I am kind of a huge bookworm, so anything with books is kind of interesting to me. I was wondering, since you’re from Russia (right?) do you still read books in Russian? When did you learn English? :)

Right. I had English at school, where we had to memorize “topics,” bits of text about sport (sports!), patriotism, finance and allsuch tedious garbage, memorize them by heart like some shit prose poems. I came to US around 2008 and things got a bit better thanks to the San Francisco Library. I still confuse “hands” & “arms” and I’ll probably never become proper fluent, but oh well. Also, I can ony count in Russian for some reason.

I have a lovehate relationship with the native tongue. Though it’s no longer the primary vessel of despair in my life, certain words & phrases make me feel uncomfortable bezoutfail. In the last 3-4 years I pretty much entirely switched, though I’m sure my English speech & writing have traces of various Russianisms, hopefully not in the most banal & ignorant way. I recently re-read Heart of A Dog, before that Isaak Babel’s short stories, also I brought back books by Goncharov, Gogol, Bely and a few other.

I love English with some passion, partly because it’s the language of my favorite writers, partly because it’s still foreign and exciting to me. Maybe that’s why I take ages to finish a good book—I’d obsessively re-read every other sentence, sighing in admiration, probably wasting hours this way.

itsspelledjon asked you: Besides being a fabulous artist, you...

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 16:17:35 -0700

itsspelledjon asked you:

Besides being a fabulous artist, you seem like an extremely well-read person! Have any books you’d recommend reading?

Thanks! I’m not that well-read at all, but anyway…

My current favorites are Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Marcel Proust’s In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, George Perec’s Life A User’s Manual andNatsume Sōseki’s I Am A Cat. I’m probably forgetting lots of great titles, but anyway.

Right now I’m reading Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories and Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, both excellent.

Recently I read Stewart Lee’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate (great Wasteland-style deconstruction of his writing & performance), Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (with a lovely postscript), Christian Bök’s Eunoia (constrained poems, unreal) and I can’t remember what else.

The last Seth-illustrated Lemony Snicket book was delightful, a match made in bleak heaven (wish I had books like that as a child). My library just got the new Saul Steinberg biography, I suppose I’ll be reading that next. I also brought Andrei Bely’s Petersburg from Russia, so that’s also on my much-too-long readinglist.

Toot! The magic of self-love.

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 13:56:46 -0700

Toot! The magic of self-love.

Photo

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 09:42:29 -0700

Faux bilingual sez “have э good Uikwent. Glad!”

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 08:12:27 -0700

Faux bilingual sez “have э good Uikwent. Glad!”

Anonymous asked you: sometimes i wish you didn’t

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 11:11:48 -0700

Anonymous asked you:

sometimes i wish you didn’t

An unexpected foray into foodstuffs and political satire wraps...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 09:23:00 -0700

An unexpected foray into foodstuffs and political satire wraps up Yellow Zine 3. Relate, reader!

Ina Garden in a garden, in a garden, in a…

Here’s a constrained strip: took a 9-word line from a...

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 07:10:00 -0700

Here’s a constrained strip: took a 9-word line from a frustrating autobio thing (that I soon abandoned altogether), put it into the first panel of a 9-p grid, deleted a word in each subsequent panel and rearranged the words trying to make up a slightly different phrase each time (sometime compromising grammar, sorry). Then I drew the beloved bird gent to link the resulting phrases into a sort of story. Now that’s proper entertainment.

Anyway, it’s the last strip of YZ3, which I will soon start printing. If you missed my kickstarter, you can get it at TCAF (details later).

A greenroom for ЦЕХ’s флора.

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 08:22:18 -0700

A greenroom for ЦЕХ’s флора.

Photo

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 10:30:00 -0700

Like anyone who’s ever been asleep I strongly believe...

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 08:51:19 -0700

Like anyone who’s ever been asleep I strongly believe that my dreams are better than your dreams.

Reading Georges Perec’s demented dreamdiary La Boutique Obscure (lovingly translated by Daniel Levin Becker) inspired me to pay more attention to my nocturnal life, so I’m trying to keep a semi-regular diary now. I very rarely remember the dreams, most of them too bleak and depressing even by my standards, and yes, I die daily. I could never keep a daylight diary, mainly because my life is of no interest to me, but the vagueness of dreams and the difficulty I have in remembering and piecing their disjointed bits together is great fun.