How fortunate we are in this great land to have Free Comic Book Day. And woe to the nations that do not observe it! They do not know the despair they endure.

This year’s Free Comic Book Day might place in your hands free retro reprint editions of classic Marvel comics (Avengers #8, the first new Ant Man, the first Spider-Woman, an early Iron Fist, and so on), a great Simpsons comic starring Comic Book Guy (!), a new New Avengers / Dark Avengers mini, Sonic the hedgehog for younger boys and Betty & Veronica for stinky older sisters, and on and on. All for the cost of nothing!

Submitted for your perusal, photographic evidence of just some of the wonders available to you at your local comics store. These esteemed visitors were seen at House of Secrets in Burbank.

Mr. Incredible, defending my ability to secure free comic books.

My favorite artist, right, gets a sketch from comics artist Tony Fleecs.

My daughter Emma considers a future line of work. (After asking me why Supergirl had a navel piercing, which was “wrong.”)

Mr. Incredible trying to horn in on my action. Right after this pic, I dialed up Mrs. Incredible and that put an end to that. Still, I’m glad to be seen with four defenders of truth, justice, and the American way (the three heroes in the flesh and the hero depicted on my shirt).

Afraid you’ve missed out? There’s still time to discover similar wonders at your local comics shop. This link will direct you hither.

Just got my renewal order form for Portfolio magazine.

Four hours after Conde Nast announced they were shutting down the magazine.

I don’t think I’ll renew.

Here’s another reason it’s never good for any one concern to aggregate too much power. Amazon, bookseller to the world and inventor of print-slayer The Kindle, is censoring the “adult” books by removing their sales rankings. Without defining what “adult” means. And without copping to doing it. And while still selling sex toys online.

Please tell me this is accidental.

Bill O’Reilly recently added the Chicago Sun-Times to his “Hall of Shame.” No, that’s not the corridor that all the Bush apologists have disappeared into; it’s a place for “media operations [that] have regularly helped distribute defamatory, false or non-newsworthy information supplied by far left websites.” (In other words, the sort of thing that Fox News does for far-right nut jobs.)

Getting slandered by Bill O’Reilly is high praise for most of us. Roger Ebert thanks O’Reilly for the compliment (and reduces his manhood in the process).

Thanks to Paul Crist for alerting me to this fun piece of writing.

I’ll never forget the first time I started to read Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” in my late teens. Or the second time. Or the third time. Without finishing it. There had to be something to this book, its advocates were so legion, but whatever it was, I wasn’t finding it. Each time, I experienced the first 100 pages  as a cascade of names and items I couldn’t place or keep straight:  the Kwisatz Haderach, the Bene Gesserit, Feyd Rautha, various Atreides and Harkonnens, stillsuits, weirding modules, heighliners, and on and on. Now there’s a Wikipedia page covering just the technology. At the time, there was no such resource. There was just the lonely labor of trying again and again until something started to make sense. Three times, I bailed on this book, until finally one night, pruning in the tub, I made it past page 100 and actually got interested.

The other night my wife saw me hunkered down in front of the bookcase on my side of the bed, looking for the next novel to read. In general, I read two or three books (and multiple magazines) at the same time. I’m looking forward to finishing the history of Germany  under the Nazis (especially delightful because I know how it ends) and then returning to the account of Roman Empires, as well as finishing Julian Barnes’ meditation on death and that account of how censorship ended so many comic artists’ careers. But in the meantime, I was looking for a novel, having recently finished T.C. Boyle’s “A Friend of the Earth,” as noted here previously. My eye landed upon Cormac McCarthy’s border trilogy:  a one-volume compendium of “All the Pretty Horses,” “The Crossing,” and “Cities of the Plain.”

However overstylized his writing may be (or perhaps because of its trickery) I find McCarthy to be a wonderful writer. No matter his overuse of polysyndeton, he has a grasp of vocabulary and flow and scenic description that at times beggars belief. I get caught up and keep reading. In addition to “All the Pretty Horses,” I’ve read “No Country for Old Men” and “The Road,” and enjoyed them all immensely. But I got stopped cold about 160 pages into “The Crossing” by an endless monologue given by an old man unmoored from this life. This old man goes on about… something… for so long I felt trapped in purgatory with him. And finally freed myself by putting the book down. A quick check-in with my son revealed that, unprompted, he had stopped at precisely the same waystation. Neither of us knew what the old man was talking about, endlessly and with seemingly no purpose, and both of us had ditched.

But now I picked it back up and climbed into bed. Even if the plot didn’t advance — and clearly, that’s what I was missing, some action, some sense of forward movement, something that would pick me up and carry me along in the way that made “No Country for Old Men” utterly unputdownable — I figured I would find myself entranced again by some of the prose before quietly slipping off to sleep. Without the aid of a bookmark, I found where I had left off probably six months ago, near the terminus of the old man’s interminable monologue, and started up again. And then found myself reading for hours. Here’s what happens:  The existential treatise ends a mere page or so after I had quit, with the old man bidding our protagonist, 17-year-old Billy Parham, farewell. Billy rather speedily crosses the border from Mexico back into the U.S. (New Mexico; nice touch) and returns to his family’s ranch to discover that the ranch has been cleaned out and his parents murdered. He heads into town and gleans what information he can from the sheriff, then picks up his younger brother, who somehow escaped the onslaught, and returns with him to Mexico, where they seek their horses and, no doubt, the men responsible for the murders.

In other words, now the book is a page turner.

I related this to my son, getting up to the point of Billy’s return and what he finds, when my son called out, “Stop. Maybe now I want to finish reading it.” He’ll have to wait for me to finish it first.

Is all this a very long way of saying that story is important? Perhaps. Is it the most important element? Maybe not. I loved “The Incredibles” because I got so caught up in Mr. Incredible’s personal crisis (a hero forced to reject his heroism, and so subject to the predations of bureaucracy and the 9 to 5); by contrast I in no way care about Ginormica’s problem in “Monsters vs. Aliens” (a young woman supported in marrying the wrong man by her friends and family discovers her true family when she is imprisoned with friendly monsters, of which she now is one). (More about this later.) The key difference is not in the story elements, but in the thematic and character elements. But story is important, and it seems oddly irritating in 2009 to have to say this. It is especially irritating to have to say this with regard to the theatre, where somehow it has become laughable to suggest that we should care what happens, and that actions should have consequences, but here is Theresa Rebeck, in today’s LA Times, having to defend these notions for us. I have stood in her shoes too many times. It’s especially galling to have cut one’s teeth on Ionesco and Beckett and to have one’s view of theatre derided as “nostalgic.”

Audiences aren’t stupid and they don’t lie. With drama we can more easily fool ourselves, but comedy is the truest form because it exposes all falsehoods:  Either it is funny or it isn’t, and either the audience laughed or it didn’t.  It’s that simple. No, not all experiences are universal.  There were many who loved “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” but if I never see another newish Neil Simon play it will be far too soon. (Seeing “The Dinner Party” was for me a singular event; it was the very evening in which I swore I would forever after more cautiously guard my time. This after two hours of feeling my life drain away.)  Every play is not for every body; but many new plays are for nobody — nobody except the people who make them. If the language poets killed poetry, I’m afraid their ilk have now turned their sights onto the stage. Twenty-five years ago, an undergrad professor told me that if poetry lost the educated, the enlightened, the readers, the people it already had and should have, then the fault lay with the poets. I think about that every time I come across a new poem utterly inflated with its own word play and cleverness but resolutely impregnable of meaning. But where I feel worst about this is in the theatre, when audiences are left cold by something obtuse that the playwright and the director are so unjustly proud of. The underlying purpose of all theatre must remain catharsis — that frisson of fellow-feeling, when the emotional brutality of the event whether comic or dramatic is brought upon us. When language is made pre-eminent over feeling, all we’re left with is puns.

In England, a warehouse supplier to Amazon.com went belly up without clearing out the books. Pandemonium ensued. The English love their books, especially when they’re free.

Three weeks late, I come across this small memorial to John Updike by Garrison Keillor and I’m struck again by the economical virtues of Keillor’s writing. I also find more and more that I enjoy Keillor because of our shared values. Nothing so leads to agreeableness as agreement.

For instance, this, about his young daughter’s score of 96 on a spelling test:

Having begotten a good speller is no small matter to a writer. Writing is an act of paying attention, and if you don’t care about the difference between “their” and “there” or “needle” and “noodle,” then I am sorry for you.

Just so. Keillor is a nice man. With others among us, blood squirts from our eyes when people who should know better confuse “their” and “there” (as well as “they’re”). On Facebook, someone who knows me well enough recommended that I join the group “Seriously, Learn the Fucking Difference Between Your and You’re.” I joined. Whoever started this group must be kin.

I also like this, from Keillor’s piece on Updike:

I saw him a year ago in New York, and my wife and I rode the subway with him from 155th Street down to 72nd, and he grinned all the way, a white-haired gent of 75 in a tan raincoat, like a boy going away to school, and a little nervous. As it turns out, that was my very last chance to tell him, standing above him, the train swaying, that “The Centaur” and the Rabbit Angstrom books are permanent masterpieces and also his Olinger stories, and I didn’t tell him that. I opted to be cool. And then a gaggle of college kids boarded and crowded around him, not recognizing him, and in all that chatter and attitude, Updike sat soaking it all up. Material.

The description of Updike as “a white-haired gent of 75 in a tan raincoat, like a boy going away to school,” matches what I’ve seen of him too; it just feels right.  Something like 14 verbs move that little paragraph, only two of them forms of the indolent “to be.” I enjoy the way Keillor uses “and” to string  you along until the final end note:  “Material.” He often employs “who” in the same way, appending clause after clause, building to a penultimate sentence launched with that conjunctive pronoun before coming to a full stop with a final brief line:

And I think of John Updike, who illuminated private lives and wrote so lovingly of the world, who called snowfall “an immense whispering” and compared a brilliant snowy day to overdeveloped film. Who re-created the backyards and clotheslines of small-town 1940s Pennsylvania and described the way a girl walked in the hall of high school carrying her books against her body, and in a great story, “My Father’s Tears,” three years ago in the New Yorker, he gave us his father bidding him goodbye on a train platform. Nothing was beneath his careful attention.

Keillor has a strong voice. I can hear him in this piece of writing, just as I hear him in “A Prairie Home Companion.” It flows from his phrasing and from his point of view. He has something to say and he says it simply and well.

In LA County, there’s an effort afoot to redub a mountaintop as “Ballard Mountain,” after one of its 19th century settlers. The peak’s current name? Negrohead Mountain.

John Ballard, by the way, was a “former Kentucky slave who had won his freedom and come to Los Angeles in 1859. In the sleepy, emerging city, he had a successful delivery service and quickly became a landowner. Soon he was active in civic affairs: He was a founder of the city’s first African Methodist Episcopal Church.” In other words, he’s an American success story.

Reading about this today took me back to a bit of my own history. I grew up in the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey (or, perhaps more accurately, Pine-Barrens-adjacent). That translates into lots of woods and great stretches of isolation. My family had (and still has) part ownership of a tract of land deep in the Pine Barrens where my father and some other men had a cabin. Somewhere in my mother’s house may be a photo of my father as a small boy in the 1920’s sitting on the crosspiece of the doorframe as that cabin is being built; if not, that image nevertheless lives in my mind as a memory shared to me by my father, because that’s one of the perches he claimed as he watched my grandfather and other men build that cabin. That cabin was at the corner of a triangular set of trails (or unpaved roads) deep into the woods known all through my own boyhood as “The Flat Iron,” because it was shaped like a traditional pressing iron for clothes. If you took the flat iron to its northerly corner and turned right (rather than left) and walked or rode your dirtbike the five miles or so toward the next actually paved road, you would pass the ruins of what looked to have been at one time a prosperous small ranch of sorts, with a ranch house and a farming area and a fenced field out back. The name of that road, leading to that farm? Nigger Farm Road.

This was the name by which it was called all my boyhood. This was the name by which it was called by previous generations. This was the name I once saw when I looked on an actual government-printed map of this rather remote area. “Nigger Farm Road.”

My father told me once that the man, or “nigger,” after whom the farm and therefore the road was named was a man who had come back from the war (a war, whatever war this was) and who had achieved a high rank and who had bought this parcel of land to make his own and to be left alone upon it. I remember thinking that this man was a colonel, but at this remove of almost 40 years later, I cannot remember if that’s for certain what my father said, or if it’s something I invented, or even if he was right in any case. But I do know that everyone all about knew this road as Nigger Farm Road. And that I saw it printed as such on a map. I can’t speak for the other men, but I don’t believe my father meant any ill by that name. It was just the name of the road.

I noted today that Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, a public official I respect, gave deference to the era in which Negrohead Mountain was named, as I make allowance for the unenlightened but well-meaning people who gave me directions by way of Nigger Farm Road:

“I believe in not altering history, but in this case the way to honor [Ballard] is to do it appropriately. The mountain wasn’t named that because of its shape. It was named after him,” Yaroslavsky said. “I’m certain that some people back then thought they were honoring him by using that name, as strange as it seems.”

Strange indeed. And it’s just one of the things I was reflecting upon tonight as a good friend and I sat in a bar drinking drinks and toasting our friendship, white men both, and  looking at the television with our new president on it and being awfully glad to see him up there rather than the gang that just left. We don’t care if he’s white or black or purple.

…by the time most people have heard of it, it’s over.

And then it’s a drag.

I first noticed this phenomenon back when there was something called the magazine industry. In particular with regard to these magazines that were called Time and Newsweek. (Are they still published?) By the time something made it onto the cover of Time or Newsweek, especially if it was one of their “cultural trend” covers, it was over.  In fact, I often wondered if it wasn’t the act of putting said cultural trend on the cover of Time or Newsweek that killed it:  “Uh-oh. Now it’s on the cover of Time or Newsweek. I am outta here.”

So it goes with the recent — and now over — Facebook phenomenon called 25 Random Things You Should Know About Me. According to Slate, the shelf life of this internet flash mob was slightly more than that of a mayfly:  about two months.

In those two months, here’s what I learned about some Friends:

1. that one had had an earlier marriage
2. that one wished he’d dated more when younger, but now thinks that door is closed
3. a whole lot of favorite colors (mine is/was red)
4. a whole lot of favorite movies (I couldn’t be bothered)
5. a whole lot of favorite bands (this one I bit on in yet another feeble attempt to jump-start Pere Ubu’s CD sales and help pay for, well, their meals)
6. not a whole lot that was truly interesting and memorable

I think the last item is because these “Random Things” tend to dwell in the realm of facts. And y’know, if facts were interesting to us, we’d all sit down and read the white pages of the telephone book. It’s full of facts. No, what’s interesting is stories. And stories come from conversation.

I’ve got something like 600 Facebook “Friends.” I even know some of them. I don’t think this Friend relationship is a substitute for friendship, and 25 Random Things are no replacement for a bottle of wine and some time spent together.

Bloomberg gives a good overview of the cuts at the LA Times — and the ever-shifting management lineup of recent years.

Which only served to remind me that I had forgotten to indict Tribune Company in all this. My mistake. Consider them blamed as well.

The LA Weekly’s Jill Stewart adds this:

We’ve heard back from several top journalists at the Los Angeles Times, who are still in shock over the stunningly bad news that, amidst more layoffs, the California Section, previously known as Metro, will be wiped out and tucked somewhere in the A Section of the recession-whacked newspaper.

This is a big deal, the news quickly appearing in Variety and dozens of other sites. One of the journos I respect the most in Los Angeles, Times reporter and education expert Howard Blume, who is also a former editor and writer at LA Weekly, had this to say in an email to me a short time ago:

“I don’t really know how this is going to work. The discussions have taken place well above my pay grade. There will still be a newspaper, and some of us will still be working here. And those folks will still do their darndest to put out a quality, relevant newspaper. And the rest of us will be looking for alternative employment. This is Journalism 2009.”

As we continue to follow the decline of the Los Angeles Times, remember: It didn’t have to be like this. They can blame new tech for rendering their quaint ways obsolete — but greed and mismanagement left them unprepared for the tides of change.