Author: George Hunka

The awful German language

A plaque just outside of the Hotel Ambassador, Vienna, Austria.

I’m making yet another valiant attempt to conquer the German language — a few years of high school German apparently not enough to set me off the language forever — and as a Mark Twain enthusiast of course I came across his memorable essay about his own experience in trying to learn it. Much of what he says rings true (you can read all of it here), but I understand that Twain became fairly fluent in German, especially during his two-year stay in Austria just at the end of the 19th century. This was, of course, fin de siècle Austria, and also walking those streets were the likes of Arthur Schnitzler, Arnold Schönberg, and Sigmund Freud, who is said to have attended at least one of Twain’s several lectures there. Carl Dolmetsch has detailed the extent to which his Austrian visit affected his work, including its influence on “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” and the still-neglected The Mysterious Stranger, as well as the essays “Stirring Times in Austria” and “Concerning the Jews.” I’ll be in Vienna myself later this month and look forward to making a small bow to the above plaque myself, the honor an acolyte pays to his master.

As I say, I can’t quibble with much of his essay, especially what Twain says about the dative case. “In the first place, I would leave out the Dative case,” he begins his suggestions for reformation. “It confuses the plurals; and, besides, nobody ever knows when he is in the Dative case, except he discover it by accident — and then he does not know when or where it was that he got into it, or how long he has been in it, or how he is going to get out of it again. The Dative case is but an ornamental folly — it is better to discard it.” But he is especially right, I think, about the language’s unique beauties. I quote the below, then will return to my homework, perfecting my use of the imperative case:

There are some German words which are singularly and powerfully effective. For instance, those which describe lowly, peaceful, and affectionate home life; those which deal with love, in any and all forms, from mere kindly feeling and honest good will toward the passing stranger, clear up to courtship; those which deal with outdoor Nature, in its softest and loveliest aspects — with meadows and forests, and birds and flowers, the fragrance and sunshine of summer, and the moonlight of peaceful winter nights; in a word, those which deal with any and all forms of rest, repose, and peace; those also which deal with the creatures and marvels of fairyland; and lastly and chiefly, in those words which express pathos, is the language surpassingly rich and affective. There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry. That shows that the SOUND of the words is correct — it interprets the meanings with truth and with exactness; and so the ear is informed, and through the ear, the heart.

From off the streets of Durham comes …

Cover of Mineshaft magazine, issue #44, by R. Crumb.

Now available for holiday giving, issue #44 of Mineshaft magazine dropped into my mailbox in a plain brown envelope a few weeks ago, and as usual it’s a magazine to spend a few thoughtful evenings with. (And you can impress your friends when you leave it on your coffee table.) Among the highlights are tributes to the late Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Diane Noomin from Bill Griffith and others; a new, haunting story called “Nostalgia” from Christoph Mueller; Mary Fleener‘s meditative “Between the Worlds” travelogue; a Skip James portrait from R. Crumb; co-editor Everett Rand’s ongoing saga of Mineshaft itself; and great new stuff from Simone Baumann, Glenn Head, Drew Friedman, and company. I wrote a little more descriptively about Mineshaft here.

Mr. Friedman has called Mineshaft “the best magazine being published in the 21st century,” and who am I to argue with Drew Friedman? Certainly it’s one of the few magazines to which I maintain a subscription (the others are Acoustic Guitar and The Syncopated Times, which shows you where my head is at these days). You can yourself join the illustrious Mineshaft community easily enough; the current issue is available here, and you can sign up for a subscription here. And while you’re there, why not give the gift of bemused alienation to someone close to you?

Below, The Mighty Millborough himself discovers Mineshaft, as told to Christoph Mueller in 2011:

Footnotes from Mueller’s life

Now available and shipping from Europe, Partial, a new chapbook series from Christoph Mueller, is billed as “Footnotes from the artist’s life.” The first issue looks to be a gorgeous miscellany of graphics, text, and typography from this unique comics artist; the inimitable Chris Ware, another of my favorite comics artists, says that Partial “captures something essential, buoying and truly life-sustaining” — surely high praise in these troubled times. Partial #1 is now available directly from the artist in a limited edition of 250 copies. More information here.

I wrote about Mueller’s work earlier; you can find those passages here.

The Mighty Millborough

A few more items from the cupboard, these concerning cartoonist Christoph Mueller and published here a few years ago.

Originally published on March 4, 2020

I’m in receipt of The Mighty Millborough, a fine self-published portfolio of work by Christoph Mueller, currently of Germany. I first came across his comics in Mineshaft and quickly sought out more.

Mueller’s elegant, carefully crafted comics seem simultaneously nostalgic and unsettling, an evocation of the mirrored images of the individual and the world. His Millborough comics are a study in isolation, solitude, and cynicism set in Sassafras County, an idealized small-town America of the 1930s. The main character’s name itself was inspired by the old-time-radio situation comedy The Great Gildersleeve, but Mueller’s absurdist, quotidian approach is even more reminiscent of Paul Rhymer’s great neglected Vic and Sade radio comedy of the same period.

The cartoonist’s craft is evident in every panel; a post-Crumbian attention to detail and careful, almost melancholy crosshatching lend contemplative depth to his backgrounds and, especially, his domestic interiors. Millington F. Millborough’s house, which boasts a warm if dark “Library of Drink,” is a textured expression of the character’s own interior life. But whereas Crumb’s characters explode with anxiety, Mueller’s bottle it up inside (an apt construction, that), and more frequently than not, that anxiety like Crumb’s is sexual.

It so happens that I share many affinities with Mueller and his work, not least an admiration of W.C. Fields and especially It’s a Gift. I’m only partway through the portfolio and may have more to say. You can read more about his work at his web site.

Originally published on June 24, 2020

Christoph Mueller‘s The “Mighty” Millborough: Les Choses De La Vie, published by 6 Pieds Sous Terre just last year, collects over a hundred of Mueller’s adventures of the contemplative isolate Millington F. Millborough, resident of Sassafras County in the 1930s. A polite middle-aged bachelor with a taste for drink, Millborough spends quite a lot of time alone, a solitude that leads him to contemplations about landscape and his place in it. “Some feelings words cannot express,” he muses, meditating on a hilly New England landscape. “Nor music, art or act — only landscape can.” Indeed, a great deal of Les Choses De La Vie considers how the man makes the landscape, and the landscape makes the man.

Mueller’s style seems the unholy love child of Little Nemo‘s Winsor McCay and Mutt and Jeff‘s Bud Fisher — backgrounds are lavishly detailed, and his human figures are vaguely ridiculous against it, especially Millborough’s, traipsing through Sassafras County with cigar in hand and lost in self-conscious thought. Of course, it’s this self-consciousness that renders Millborough ridiculous, if sympathetic; it’s the artist who draws character and background together, not the character himself. Although Millborough doesn’t have much luck with the modern world — his battle against automobiles especially is doomed to comic failure — he nonetheless values man-made architectural elegance and grace (more obvious in an earlier, full-color portfolio of Millborough’s adventures). The natural landscape in Millborough’s eyes is prone to surreal transfigurations, as is Millborough’s body in that landscape, the McCay influence; the comic loping bodies of the strip’s characters are straight from Bud Fisher. Millborough’s friends respect him if they don’t understand him — maybe a degree of tolerance we’ve lost in contemporary America, as we’ve lost valuable Millboroughs themselves. Mueller reminds us of what we’ve lost with them.

The “Mighty” Millborough: Les Choses De La Vie has no American publisher, alas, but is available from the French publisher here. It is a gorgeously made collection, inside and out. Pester your American publisher friends, please, about Mr. Mueller’s “Mighty” Millborough.

And an appreciation by the brilliant Chris Ware:

I believe him to be one of the most talented young cartoonists in Europe, and easily one of the most sensitive hand-lettering typographers in the world. I might be wrong about this, but European cartoonists seem to view the world and the self from the top down, or the outside in, whereas Americans seem to try to see from the inside out. Christoph seems capable of both. As well, there are few cartoonists, European or American, who have taken the incandescent example of Robert Crumb — the original inside-out cartoonist — and folded it into their own approach and sensibility so sensitively, self-critically and, most important of all, so warmly, than Christoph. He’s a careful observer and attentive draughtsman, and his sensitivity to craft and to turn of the century (i.e. the 19th to the 20th century) typography and ornament, back when the human hand still obviously contributed something to the world we see, is pretty close to unparalleled. He seems to understand letterforms the way botanists understand plants: where to sow them, how to shape them, and most especially, how to make them grow. Of all human hands, Christoph’s is one of the more elegant and sensitive I know.

The illustrious R. Crumb

I’m still going through the boxes in this blog’s attic and came across the below review of a 2019 R. Crumb exhibition at the David Zwirner Gallery, which was first published here on March 19, 2019. The exhibition catalog for the show was belatedly published two years later by David Zwirner Books under the title Crumb’s World.

For my birthday, Marilyn and I dropped in at Drawing for Print: Mind Fucks, Kultur Klashes, Pulp Fiction & Pulp Fact by the Illustrious R. Crumb, an exhibition at the David Zwirner Gallery that runs through April 13. The retrospective show, covering Crumb’s career from his earliest talking-animal cartoons through his LSD-soaked fantasies of the 1960s and 1970s to his more recent musings about art, life, and eroticism, is an excellent chance to enjoy an overview of the 75-year-old artist’s work — and, given its controversial nature, such an exhibition would be unlikely to find a home at the larger warehouses of contemporary work like the Museum of Modern Art.

Fortunately, the Zwirner Gallery and exhibition curator Robert Storr have no compunction about showing off Crumb’s shameless explorations of his culture’s and his own perversions. An opening room sets Crumb’s career in the context of the work of other graphic arts satirists, particularly James Gillray, William Hogarth, Thomas Nast, and Art Young. Their political interests do carry through to Crumb’s own work, but Crumb also plumbs his own worst impulses as well as those of his culture. Not a little of his art is in questionable taste, but then, taste is a social construct, and that taste inevitably reflects the deviancies of that society as well. Crumb is, after all, a satirist in the Swiftian mode more than anything else, and his devastating observations about the sexism and racism of his culture resemble the savagery of “A Modest Proposal” and Swift’s more scatalogical parodies and satires. That Crumb implicates himself in his satire as well is another similarity with his Augustan co-conspirator against the human race.

The primary joy of the exhibition is the exquisite craftsmanship of Crumb’s art (Crumb may have the greatest visual acuity of any cartoonist at work today, recalling the traditions of Walt Kelly and George Herriman) — exhibition specimens of his recent work, primarily the Art & Beauty series of publications, demonstrate that he may now be at the top of his form, the detail and texture of his cross-hatching technique most evident with close examination of these original drawings, an examination endlessly revealing.

Crumb is a satirist in the American vernacular tradition, perhaps among the last of them, joining Twain, Mencken, and Gaddis in his mastery of popular form and language. Like them, Crumb can brilliantly parody the varicolored lingo and patois of his nation; like them, too, he revitalizes and reinvents his chosen forms — the comic book, the popular novel, the newspaper column — and twists them to attack his own particular targets. (Crumb, along with being a great graphical artist, is also a great writer, with a rich feel for words and the verbal rhythms of a wide variety of Americans; as Twain once pointed out, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning,” and Crumb nearly always has access to the right word and the well-placed pause and ellipsis.)

Most of the Zwirner exhibition is composed of comic book ephemera, tearsheets, and sketchbook pages, and it only scratches the surface of Crumb’s career, leaning heavily towards his work of the 1970s and 1980s. Previous exhibitions here and elsewhere have thrown a spotlight on his work with his wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and a few samples of collaboration are on view, but they’re not the center of the exhibition’s project; nor is Crumb’s comic-book rendering of Genesis. Among the most interesting samples of his later work are the Art & Beauty drawings and, most recently, Crumb’s two-page evocation of a recent conversation he had with curator Robert Storr. Both reflect Crumb’s ongoing discomfort with his status in the culture as an icon of underground comics and, also, as a fine “artist,” a more contemplative version of the self-mockery with which he regards himself in the earlier stories for his fine Weirdo project of the 1980s.

Drawing for Print offers a portrait of a diseased mind in a diseased culture, which Crumb dissects with the acuity of an Otto Dix or George Grosz. These days, Crumb has entered a more meditative part of his life, and exhibitions like that at the Zwirner seem to be something of a last chance to consider his accomplishment. As Crumb himself told ArtNews in a recent interview to accompany the opening of the exhibition:

In my youth, I was constantly drawing. Drawing was the only thing I could do with competence. I was afraid of people. I hid behind my sketchbook. I don’t draw all the time anymore. Nowadays, I hide behind my ukulele. I guess I’m still afraid of people. I take the ukulele with me everywhere instead of the sketchbook. Fame has made me inhibited and self-conscious about drawing. I stopped enjoying it. Playing those pretty chords of old-time melodies, though, is relaxing and pleasurable.