The Enigma of Al Capp

Author: Alexander Theroux
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
ISBN: 1560973404
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 62

Book Description
The National Book Award-nominated author of Darconville's Cat and Three Wogs delivers this slender-yet-rich monograph on the controversial life of cartoonist Al Capp, creator of Li'l Abner. "The left eventually broke his heart," wrote John Updike of Capp. A genuine American mythmaker and celebrated funnyman, Capp used his strip for years to expose greed, corruption and social injustice, while bringing belly laughs and dramatic suspense to the lives of millions of people every day. Theroux, however, dives head-first into the often glossed-over side of Capp, delivering a keen (but not without compassion) analysis of Capp's degeneration into a bitter, disillusioned, conservative extremist, who began using his strip in later years to attack the very causes he once championed. This is a rich and compelling investigation into the psyche of a paradoxical American icon, who at the height of his fame was one of America's highest-paid and most well-known entertainers, gracing the cover of Time and other magazines, and franchising Li'l Abner into film, theater, radio, merchandising and more. Illustrated throughout with examples of Capp's cartoons.

Al Capp

Author: Michael Schumacher
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1608197859
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
More than thirty years have passed since Al Capp's death, and he may no longer be a household name. But at the height of his career, his groundbreaking comic strip, Li'l Abner, reached ninety million readers. The strip ran for forty-three years, spawned two movies and a Broadway musical, and originated such expressions as "hogwash" and "double-whammy." Capp himself was a familiar personality on TV and radio; as a satirist, he was frequently compared to Mark Twain. Though Li'l Abner brought millions joy, the man behind the strip was a complicated and often unpleasant person. A childhood accident cost him a leg-leading him to art as a means of distinguishing himself. His apprenticeship with Ham Fisher, creator of Joe Palooka, started a twenty-year feud that ended in Fisher's suicide. Capp enjoyed outsized publicity for a cartoonist, but his status abetted sexual misconduct and protected him from the severest repercussions. Late in life, his politics became extremely conservative; he counted Richard Nixon as a friend, and his gift for satire was redirected at targets like John Lennon, Joan Baez, and anti-war protesters on campuses across the country. With unprecedented access to Capp's archives and a wealth of new material, Michael Schumacher and Denis Kitchen have written a probing biography. Capp's story is one of incredible highs and lows, of popularity and villainy, of success and failure-told here with authority and heart.

The Hidden History of Coined Words

Author: Ralph Keyes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190466766
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 393

Book Description
"How do words get coined? That question is explored in Ralph Keyes's latest book, The Hidden History of Coined Words. Based on meticulous research, Keyes has determined that successful neologisms are as likely to be created by chance as by intention. A remarkable number of new words were coined whimsically, he's discovered, to taunt, even to prank. Knickers resulted from a hoax, big bang from an insult. Wisecracking produced software, crowdsource, and blog. More than a few neologisms weren't even coined intentionally: they resulted from happy accidents such as typos, mistranslations, and misheard words like bigly and buttonhole, or from an unintended coinage such as Isaac Asimov's robotics. Many of the word coiners Keyes writes about come from unlikely quarters. Neologizers (a Thomas Jefferson coinage) include not just learned scholars and literary lions but cartoonists, columnists, children's authors, and children as well. Wimp, Keyes tells us, originated with an early 20th century book series on The Wymps, goop from a series about The Goops, and nerd from a book by Dr. Seuss. Competing claims to have coined terms like gonzo, mojo, and booty call are assessed, as is epic battles fought between new word partisans, and those who think we have enough words already. A concluding chapter offers pointers on how to coin a word of one's own. Written in a reader-friendly manner, The Hidden History of Coined Words will appeal not just to word lovers but history buffs, trivia contesters, and anyone at all who is interested in a well-informed good read"--

Estonia

Author: Alexander Theroux
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
ISBN: 1606994654
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
Any journey with Alexander Theroux is an education. Possessed of a razor-sharp and hyperliterate mind, he stands beside Thomas Pynchon as one of the sharpest cultural commentators of our time. So when he decided to accompany his wife ― the artist Sarah Son-Theroux ― on her Fulbright Scholarship to Estonia, it occasioned this penetrating examination of a country that, for many, seems alien and distanced from the modern world. For Theroux, the country and its people become a puzzle. His fascination with their language, manners, and legacy of occupation and subordination lead him to a revelatory examination of Estonia’s peculiar place in European history. All the while, his trademark acrobatic allusions, quotations, and digressions ― which take us fromHamlet through Jean Cocteau to Married… with Children ― render his travels as much internal and psychical as they are external and physical. Through these obsessive references to Western culture, we come to appreciate how insular the country has become, yet also marvel at its fierce individuality and preternatural beauty ― such is the skill of Theroux’s gaze. This travelogue of his nine months abroad also brims with anecdotes of Theroux’s encounters with Estonian people and ― in some of its most bitterly comedic episodes ― his fellow Americans whom he at times feels more alienated from than the frosty, humorless Europeans. Estonia: A Ramble Through the Periphery is as biting and satirical as it is witty and urbane; as curious and lyrical as it is brash and irreverent. It marks a new highlight in an already stellar career and a book that continues Fantagraphics’ exceptional line of prose works.

Laura Warholic

Author: Alexander Theroux
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
ISBN: 1560977981
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 889

Book Description
A brilliant satire from one of the great novelists of his time. In his first novel in nearly twenty years, Alexander Theroux, National Book Award Nominee, returns with a compendious satire, a bold and inquisitorial circuit-breaking examination of love and hate, of rejection and forgiveness, of trust and romantic disappointment, of the terrors of contemporary life. Eugene Eyestones, an erudite sex columnist for a Boston cultural magazine, becomes enmeshed in the messy life of a would-be artist named Laura Warholic, who, repulsing and fascinating him at the same time, becomes a mirror in which he not only sees himself but through which he is forced to face his own demons. Not only does she inadvertently supply him with material for his columns, but she exemplifies all that Eugene considers wrong with contemporary America (of which the publishing profession and its recognizable denizens serves as a microcosm)a garish and dunce-filled Babylon that Theroux scorches with inventive and relentless satire. Nostalgic for the old days and old manners, a way of life lost to grace, loving from afar a mysterious beauty named Rapunzel Wisht, Eugene fights against the rising tide of stupidity, focusing on Laura in the hope that by saving her he can validate his ethical beliefs. But feckless Laura and the colorful but bizarre cast of characters surrounding Eugenebrilliant bigots, nihilists, Generation-X slackers and zanies of all sexual persuasionsthreaten to pull him under, leading to the novel's unforgettable conclusion, a climax of betrayal and redemption of Dostoevskyan power.

The Grammar of Rock

Author: Alexander Theroux
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
ISBN: 1606996169
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
Novelist and critic Alexander Theroux analyzes the pop song. National Book Award nominee, critic and one of America’s least compromising satirists, Alexander Theroux takes a comprehensive look at the colorful language of pop lyrics and the realm of rock music in general in The Grammar of Rock: silly song titles; maddening instrumentals; shrieking divas; clunker lines; the worst (and best) songs ever written; geniuses of the art; movie stars who should never have raised their voice in song but who were too shameless to refuse a mic; and the excesses of awful Christmas recordings. Praising (and critiquing) the gems of lyricists both highbrow and low, Theroux does due reverence to classic word-masters like Ira Gershwin, Jimmy Van Heusen, Cole Porter, and Sammy Cahn, lyricists as diverse as Hank Williams, Buck Ram, the Moody Blues, and Randy Newman, Dylan and the Beatles, of course, and more outré ones like the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Patti Smith, the Fall (even Ghostface Killa), but he considers stupid rhymes, as well ― nonsense lyrics, chop logic, the uses and abuses of irony, country music macho, verbal howlers, how voices sound alike and why, and much more. In a way that no one else has ever done, with his usual encyclopedic insights into the state of the modern lyric, Theroux focuses on the state of language ― the power of words and the nature of syntax ― in The Grammar of Rock. He analyzes its assaults on listeners’ impulses by investigating singers’ styles, pondering illogical lunacies in lyrics, and deconstructing the nature of diction and presentation in the language. This is that rare book of discernment and probing wit (and not exclusively one that is a critical defense of quality) that positively evaluates the very nature of a pop song, and why one over another has an effect on the listener.

Cartoonists, Works, and Characters in the United States through 2005

Author: John Lent
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313083924
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 569

Book Description
This penultimate work in John Lent's series of bibliographies on comic art gathers together an astounding array of citations on American cartoonists and their work. Author John Lent has used all manner of methods to gather the citations, searching library and online databases, contacting scholars and other professionals, attending conferences and festivals, and scanning hundreds of periodicals. He has gone to great length to categorize the citations in an easy-to-use, scholarly fashion, and in the process, has helped to establish the field of comic art as an important part of social science and humanities research. The ten volumes in this series, covering all regions of the world, constitute the largest printed bibliography of comic art in the world, and serve as the beacon guiding the burgeoning fields of animation, comics, and cartooning. They are the definitive works on comic art research, and are exhaustive in their inclusiveness, covering all types of publications (academic, trade, popular, fan, etc.) from all over the world. Also included in these books are citations to systematically-researched academic exercises, as well as more ephemeral sources such as fanzines, press articles, and fugitive materials (conference papers, unpublished documents, etc.), attesting to Lent's belief that all pieces of information are vital in a new field of study such as comic art.

Why Gender?

Author: Jude Browne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108833373
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Book Description
World-famous scholars from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds each consider the same question - why is gender so important for understanding the world in which we live?

Collected Poems

Author: Alexander Theroux
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
ISBN: 1606998021
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 673

Book Description
This is a collection of the National Book Award-nominated author’s poems: sonnets, odes, ballads, and more. The publication of Alexander Theroux’s Collected Poems, a gathering of more than 660 poems, an astonishing creative output, will be among the major literary events of the year. Here is a full cornucopia of sonnets, odes, ballads, free verse, triolets, pure, satires, narratives, dramatic monologues, fanciful meditations, flytings and harangues, ruminations on death and lost love, and no end of lyrics both beautiful and fierce. Taken altogether they contrive to make up a record of the author’s deepest thoughts and reflect the dramatis personae of his life. Theroux captures in his work those rare, frail, but precious truths, inaccessible to the common run of men that would otherwise have vanished into nescience. Sardonic, astute, impertinent, tender, clever, warmhearted, delphic, truculent, comic, defiantly aggressive, and often achingly personal, he shows an intensity of observation and invention.

Peanuts Every Sunday Vol. 5

Author: Charles Schulz
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
ISBN: 1683960637
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
Since their original publication, Peanuts Sundays have almost always been collected and reprinted in black and white. But many who read Peanuts in their original Sunday papers remain fond of the striking coloring, which makes for a surprisingly different reading experience. Peanuts Every Sunday: 1971-1975 has been scrupulously re-colored to match the original syndicate coloring, and these early 1970s strips showcase Schulz at his philosophical and illustrative peak.