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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!

(Source: bluebed.net)

itsspelledjon asked you:

(Source: bluebed.net)

Celebrate great Irish heroes with a pint of bitterness.

(Source: bluebed.net)

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An illustration from the YZ3 supplement zine that you can get (along with hand-drawn bookmarks and other important things) through my Kickstarter.

Each page of the supplement will be dedicated to a story from Italo Calvino’s “If on a winter’s night a traveler,” and hopefully drawn in somewhat different styles employing slight visual constraints.

“The thing I’d like most in the world,” I say to her, since at this point I might as well go on talking with her, “is to make clocks run backward.”

Barthelme sketch.

“There was a prolongued snappling of stiffened rods and stubborn shoots and the sharp agonies of fractured branches, the pitiless flogging against each other of green life-laden leaves, the thrashing and the scourging of a clump in torment, a jaggle of briar-braced tangly-brambled thorniness, incensed, with a demon in its beast. Crack crack crack.”

From “At Swim-Two-Birds” by Flann O’Brien, one of the most hilarious and inventive books I’ve read.

Also, here’s a recital of “A Pint Of Plain Is Your Only Man,” a pome by Jem Casey, “the Poet of the Pick.”

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(isnpired by) “I Am a Cat” by Natsume Sōseki, a damned darling epic about Meiji middle-class narrated by a nameless kitten.

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A little webspot did for a New Yorker essay on reading by Brad Leithauser. Thanks to AD Jordan Awan, it’s a personal time record too—I drew the final in 2-3 hours late at night after a delightful planetrip.

Speaking of the New Yorker, my old Bukowski illustration was recently approximated on a wall by some industrious Spaniard.

In other news, my š!#11 story will be in the Society of Illustrators book/show (if I find time/money to frame/ship it). It’s been over 3 months since the publication, so I uploaded it here for you to read (though I strongly recommend buying the actual book).

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”

T. S. Eliot

Happy Deathday, Alfred Jarry.

I recently finished reading the new biography by Alastair Brotchie, a wonderfully written & illustrated book that on top of all gives a great sense of the strange and dark period, a timely companion to Roger Shattuck’s “The Banquet Years.” City Lights bookstore is hosting a number of related events this weekend that I might even attend in my bodily person.