THE PORTABLE FRANK
Jim Woodring

A few months ago my friend Mario suggested I watch a documentary about Jim Woodring, and I did and it was great. It's mostly just him saying surprising things about art and perceptions of reality and his connections to Christianity and Vedanta Hinduism while meticulously drawing and correcting minute details of his comix. I wanted to know more about his spiritual beliefs and inclinations, and I was disappointed that I couldn't find much online beyond what he hinted at in the documentary. But I also got this book of his from the library, and it wasn't disappointing at all. Despite being completely bizarre, something about these stories' fixation on encounter and confusion and transformation has a type of primal emotional resonance that seems really rare. Every day Frank wakes up and walks out of his house and into a world where literally anything at all could happen, and something unexpected always does. These are some of the best depictions I've seen of the mystery and potential terror of being obligated to exist, and Woodring does this without even using any words. When I read other comix, I mentally "say" the words in my mind as I read them, but since the characters don't speak in this book, and there's no narration, I found myself physically imitating the characters' facial expressions and mentally making wordless sounds of surprise or delight or disgust or fear. A weird experience that I don't remember ever having with any other book. Don't know how I've been reading comix as long as I have without ever reading Woodring before now, but I'm glad I finally did. Thanks for recommending that movie, Mario.

THE LONG LONELINESS
Dorothy Day

I'd been intending to read this for years, and this summer suddenly seemed like the right time. Dorothy Day was one of the founders of the Catholic Worker movement, and in her autobiography she writes about early yearnings for God and terrors of God that baffled her non-religious parents, childhood memories of neighbors helping each other after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, cold winters in Chicago, her years as an activist, protesting and getting arrested for the rights of workers and for the right of women to vote.

These early chapters are vibrant and engaging; she presents herself and her friends as curious and restless, driven by compassion and a sense of justice to spend all day protesting, writing articles, providing coffee and sandwiches to the cold and hungry, and all night drinking and dancing and talking philosophy. I wanted to be there! Her slow conversion to Catholicism is also moving and fascinating: the thinkers and writers who influenced her, the beauty and solemnity of liturgy that drew her in, her own incredulity as she finds herself constantly praying as she walks, and her heartache when her friends and partner feel betrayed by her new belief.

But halfway through, after she becomes a publicly practicing Catholic, the book feels less alive and less interesting to me. There's more long descriptions of other people and projects connected to the Catholic Worker movement, and less of her own thoughts and feelings and insights. She's still writing impassioned newspaper articles, still living in poverty so that others don't have to, still imagining and practicing new forms of communal living in the face of relentless capitalism, but somehow in the second half of the book the urgency and excitement feels slightly lost. What I admire about her is that she brought activism and political radicalism with her into Catholicism, baptizing her abilities and inclinations instead of diluting them. But that also made her controversial, both during her lifetime and still today. I briefly wondered if when telling her own story, she consciously or subconsciously tried to present her post-conversion life in a way that would make it more palatable for more moderate fellow Catholics, but nothing else about her indicates that that's something she would care about. Maybe she just got tired of writing about herself after 150 pages? Whatever the case, she was a cool and complicated person, worth looking into if you don't know much about her, but I wish this could have been a Great book instead of just a Pretty Good one. Here are some quotes I liked:

Why was so much done in remedying social evils instead of avoiding them in the first place? ... Where the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves but to do away with slavery?

The scandal of businesslike priests, of collective wealth, the lack of a sense of responsibility for the poor, the worker, the Negro, the Mexican, the Filipino, and even the oppression of these, and the consenting to the oppression of them by our industrialist-capitalist order - these made me feel often that priests were more like Cain than Abel. "Am I my brother's keeper?" they seemed to ask in respect to the social order. There was plenty of charity but too little justice.

We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other.

other books I read this month:
THE SUMMER BOOK - Tove Jansson
HOT COMB - Ebony Flowers
INVISIBLE KINDGOM vol. 1 - G. Willow Wilson, Christian Ward
DRAUPADI: THE FIRE-BORN PRINCESS - Saraswati Nagpal, Chandu
MAGRITTE: THIS IS NOT A BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Campi, Vincent Zabus