The Copacetic Comics Company Copacetic Select

Copacetic Select

Title	Author	Publisher	Price
Teenie Harris, Photographer: Image, Memory, History	Teenie Harris, Joe W. Trotter, Laurence Glasco, Cheryl Finley and more ...	University of Pittsburgh Press	$24.99 ($24.99 list)
Read more and comment...	Teenie Harris's star keeps burning brighter and brighter, and is now shining high in a massive show of his work currently on display at The Carnegie Museum of Art here in Pittsburgh through April 7, 2012. Teenie Harris, Photographer: Image, Memory, History is the catalogue to that show and it goes a long way to revealing the amazing social, cultural and spiritual riches of Pittsburgh's African-American community. Anyone wondering what makes Pittsburgh special can find a large part of their answer of display right here. Anyone who can, should attend this show – there's still plenty of time to make it. Those who can't should consider picking up a copy of the catalogue, as it does a great job of presenting it, with 100 full-page plates and another hundred supporting images along with a trio of excellent in-depth essays that situate and contextualize Harris's life and work. The printing and presentation is uniformly excellent and the book is a joy. At the very least, everyone should spend some time at the Carnegie's Teenie Harris Archives; it's a wonderful resource.
Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield	Robert Gober, Cynthia Burlingham, Charles Burchfield	Prestel	$44.44 ($49.95 list)
Read more and comment...	Charles Burchfield is an artist whom Copacetic customers, as a population, have a strong likelihood of connecting with. He spent a fifty-year career – first in his native Ohio, after studying at the Cleveland Institue of Art, and then in upstate New York – forging a startlingly original visual language. Working primarily in watercolors, Burchfield picked up where Van Gogh left off in creating artworks that manage to visually communicate non-visual perceptions. Heat Waves In a Swamp is the catalogue of an exhibition held at the Hammer in LA, the Whitney in NYC and the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY in 2009 and 2010 that was put together by independent curator, Robert Gober along with the Hammer's Cynthia Burlingham. This 184 page hardcover is edited by Burlingham and Gober, who both contribute essays along with a host of other Burchfield scholars that together work to heighten our appreciation and understanding of the artist and his work. And, it is, of course, the sterling reproductions of Burchfield's works that are the feature attraction here. The selection and its presentation are both excellent. One of the standout features of this catalogue is its inclusion of never before published notes and sketches taken from the voluminous Burchfield archives housed at the Burchfield Penney Art Center. This catalogue is far and away the best single-volume introduction to Burchfield currently available and we heartily encourage all to explore the wonders within – especially practicing artists, comics and otherwise, who stand the most to gain. Meanwhile, take a moment to explore a sample of his wide-ranging work online.
In the Penny Arcade	Steven Millhauser	Phoenix	$4.95
Read more and comment...	This collection of works from the early 1980s by Millhauser starts off with August Eschenburg, a prototypical tale which serves as the template for several later Millhauser works, most notably Martin Dressler (see below). The middle section is composed of three stylistically linked forays into the classic short story mode, each of which stages an elaborate wedding of location with season to produce an exquisite evocation of an exact yet unnameable emotion, and each of which manages to pull it off. The stories that will really having you reaching for the champagne to celebrate their success, however, are the three that close out the volume, and most especially the titular tale, In the Penny Arcade. This story reacheds the summit where so many others have fallen short in capturing that oh-so-elusive scene in which childhood ends. It distills this instant in an essence that is as momentous as it is bittersweet. This story is bracketed by a pair of equally successful distillations, first of childhood, and the other of tradition. This book is a treasure. import softcover
Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer	Steven Millhauser	Phoenix	$4.95
Read more and comment...	This Pulitzer Prize winning novel represents the apotheosis of Millhauser’s obsession with obsessives. In the character of Martin Dressler, Millhauser has found a character that fulfills both his personal needs as a writer and the novel’s needs for justification. Dressler serves as a synecdoche for both the American Way and the American Dream, or, perhaps, more properly, how these two overlap and even, at times -- such as during the 1990s, when this novel appeared, merge into an organic whole in which each are indistinguishable from one another. Millhauser’s inimitable style carries the reader through the life-cycle of Dressler’s dream of life that seems so real that at times its hard to believe that it’s only a dream; but then, the best of dreams are always like that, aren’t they? Import softcover
Just Kids	Patti Smith	Ecco	$14.44 ($16.00 list)
Read more and comment...	OK, true believers, THIS IS IT! Just Kids is the most poetic evocation of the spirit of rock 'n' roll rebellion that we are likely ever to have. The story told here, of Patti and Robert, is a modern American version of the classic tragedy of the doomed lovers (think Troilus and Cressida, Pelléas and Mélisande, Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde – you get the idea). The intensity and historical importance (well, at least to the history of rock 'n' roll and the nexus at which it connects to art, at any rate) of the events related in the story are at times overwhelming. Whereas throughout Western history, the tragic paradigm has been for the tragedy to occur within the realm of history and to be later redeemed within the realm of art, here in Just Kids, Patti Smith spins the tale of how her and Robert Mapplethorpe have redeemed their own personal tragedies in the present through their own work, thus breaking on through to the other side by being both actors on history's stage and creating artists themselves. It's the American way. While, surely, they aren't the only couple to have done so, Just Kids is the purest and strongest literary embodiment by an actual living participant in such a story that we have come across. Do someone a favor and give them this. Patti Smith has a poet's eye, a poet's ear, a poet's tongue and a poet's pen, all animated by a rock 'n' roll soul.
Despite Everything: A Cometbus Anthology	Aaron Cometbus	Last Gasp	$15.25 ($16.95 list)
Read more and comment...	Review by Frankie Sirk <<<•>>> Those of you who know about Cometbus can understand how amazing it is that Last Gasp has published an anthology of Aaron’s best work. To me, it represents a passing of the torch, the old ringing in the new, a continuation of the San Francisco Bay area press. I think it is also a show of respect between two unique and original underground publishing forces. And really it’s just an amazing and truly enjoyable book to read. Those of you who don’t know about Cometbus, well, you’re in for a treat. I can tell you that this collection presents a rare opportunity to study the birth, growing pains, wasted youth and early old age of an incredible culture that most people have only heard about through mainstream media sources. Cometbus is a fanzine that has transcended its own label and even its own ambitions. Inspired by punk rock magazines of the late 70s, a teenaged Aaron began to edit and publish his own fanzine in order to add his own voice, and document the bay area music scene that he found himself participating in. A junkpile of ideas, Cometbus was refreshing in that it abandoned the general formula of record review, band interviews and the like. Acting mostly as an editor, Aaron crafted a remarkably original mag full of features focused on what didn’t even enter into most people’s peripheral vision, let alone center stage; things like dumpster diving, kids’ cereal reviews, and small time scams like how to reroute your one-way Greyhound ticket into a round-trip cross country bonanza--free of charge! Over the years Cometbus began to introduce more fiction pieces from its contributors and Aaron began to turn his rambling travel journals into digestible short stories. This is where Cometbus really began to take off and go beyond any expectations that were set up by the early issues. Aaron’s writing became sharp and quick yet subtle and tender- a counterpoint to the music he and his friends were documenting. I remember thinking then that-- finally!-- here was a voice that I could trust. He wrote stories that spoke to me and used my language, our language. He wrote about things, places, concerns, even people that I knew. Yet somehow he was able to make it-- write it-- in a way that didn’t seem insular or elitist. He wants his comrades to get his point, but he also wants his neighbor, the old guy with the cats to get it too. And that is why I think Aaron is one of the most valuable of young writers working today. He’s concerned with his milieu, but he also sees the big picture. Personally, I don’t know many youthful voices who do both and do it well. Aaron’s writing is about telling all the old stories with a new cast of characters. It isn’t about being clever and toying with the medium. Straight forward honesty is at work here, like Bob Dylan’s best songs or the Ramones’ first album. Cometbus holds a special place in the hearts of its readers because it is one of the few underground voices that hasn’t allowed itself to be watered down and filtered though bigger, generally corporate outfits. Aaron’s stories have appeared in other underground magazines and newspapers, but never in, say, the Utne Reader, Granta, or the New Yorker. At the end of Despite Everything Aaron addresses his botched and bungled dealings with publishers and magazines, including a hilarious episode with an editor from Harper’s. To put it simply, Aaron didn’t sell out when he had the chance back in the mid-90s. By teaming up now with Ron Turner’s Last Gasp-- the publisher and distributor which figured prominently in the birth of the underground comics movement, and has been at or near the center of the US underground press ever since-- Aaron has anchored his work to a strong counter-cultural tradition, and by doing so has simultaneously enabled this tradition to affirm its commitment to the next generation. Last Gasp’s decision to publish Despite Everything combined with Aaron’s choice to allow it to be published by someone other than himself is quite an event. I really think it embodies a changing of the guard: Ron Turner and Last Gasp have recognized that Cometbus is in fact the new regime-- the new model of the underground press. Despite everything, this anthology has found its way into print and onto the shelves of the Copacetic Comics Company. I can’t recommend it highly enough: It is truly indispensable. A real cup of coffee. No decaf.
The Brief Wondrous LIfe of Oscar Wao	Junot Diaz		$12.75 ($14.00 list)
Read more and comment...	What can you say about a book that opens with a Galactus quote from Fantastic Four #49, drops more comics references -- particularly to the classics of the 1980s -- than any novel we've ever read, clearly shows the influence of Gilbert Hernandez's Palomar stories, AND won the Pulitzer Prize for best novel of 2007? We'd say, "This is a must read! Particularly suitable for fans of Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude and, although, perhaps, to a slightly lesser degree, of Michael Chabon's (also Pulitzer Prize winning) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay." And then we'd add: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a gigantic meditation on the inner life of the fanboy. Its subject is disguised in some ways and blatant in others, but it is on every level derived from and is filled with insights into the role that comics and its partners in geekdom -- SF & fantasy, videogaming, role playing, etc -- play in bearing the costs of the sins of the world, especially those sins of the father (figurative as well as literal) that are visited on the son. Clearly, most readers won't see it in this light to the same degree, but we feel compelled to harp on it as this book won the Pulitzer, and while its author, Junot Díaz, is clearly chock full of talent and developed a strong and engaging voice that made the novel a pleasure to read, and of course deserves all the credit for putting pen to paper and creating it, it owes its key insights to comics -- especially to Gilbert Hernandez, from whom he derived his narrative strategy, but also to Chris Ware (whom he intriguingly neglects to give any props to [unless we missed them], perhaps indicating a guilty conscience?) for providing the central insights into the soul of the fanboy. From these two he derived the deep structures that underpin the entire work, but its surface is peppered ceaselessly throughout with references to comics (and Tolkein, science fiction, etc.) and as a whole provides yet another example of how comics and other narrative sources of fantasy have infiltrated American culture at level after level (and in the context of this novel, it is fairly explicit that America should be considered the entirety of the "new world," extending outside of the borders of the USA). It's a fascinating fact that California, which became home to the dream factory par excellence, was named after a fictional land depicted in a Spanish novel which was at the height of its popularity when this land was first claimed by Spain, indicating the inextricable bonds between fantasy, reality and history. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao continues this long-running tradition.
Who Needs Donuts?	Mark Alan Stamaty		$15.25 ($16.95 list)
Read more and comment...	Stamaty’s cult masterpiece is now back in print after a thirty year hiatus, in a beautifully produced hardcover edition. Once you start looking at this book, it's really hard to stop. You just get sucked in. The appeal of this book lies in the neural connections between the eyes and the brain and the hand that draws, it’s pretty hard to explain... but those who are already familiar with Stamaty’s work from his many-year run on Washingtoons in the Village Voice, and, more recently, his endpage strip in the New York Times Book Review, Boox, will know what we’re talking about. This is technically a kids’ book -- and kids will dig it, especially those hyper-brainy types (this is the perfect book to save them from a life of video-game addiction before it’s too late), and was more than likely an inspiration to Martin Handford, the creator of the Where’s Waldo series as well as the team responsilbe for the I Spy book series -- but it will, perhaps, be most appreciated by obsessive-compulsive adults -- you can be sure that Ben Katchor has this book in his personal library. The level of detail in the drawings that fill this book has to be seen to be believed. Furthermore, it is not just detail, but detail with an agenda, and that agenda can perhaps best be summed up in the phrase, "reality is what you make it." Reality as Stamaty makes it, is, more than likely, not reality as seen by you or I, but Who Needs Donuts makes us realize that it doesn't have to be that way, that the possibilities are only limited by our imaginations. We really recommend this one!
The Amazing Continuity: The Drawings of Stuart Davis	Lewis Kachur, Stuart Davis, Karen Wilken	Abrams	$22.22 ($24.95 list)
Read more and comment...	*The Amazing Continuity* provides an engaging introduction to the life and works of Stuart Davis, but it will be more truly valued by those already familiar with his work who would like to increase their appreciation of it, for it is in the material presented here -- in Davis’s drawings, sketchbooks, and notebooks -- that we get the most intimate look at the mind of the artist. Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name organized by the American Federation of Arts that toured the US from 1992 through 1994, The Drawings of Stuart Davis covers the entire length of Davis’s career: from 1909 pencil sketches of industry amidst domesticity through to his casein on paper roughs of the early 1960s. As with any overview of Davis, you can’t help but get caught up in watching his development unfold. The transitional developments are especially apparent in some of the drawings and studies for his paintings that are contained in this volume.
Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s	Ann Douglas	Noonday Press	$12.00 ($15.00 list)
Read more and comment...	This volume comes as close as any one book can to first uncovering and then diagraming the myriad ways which, in New York City, during the 1920s, the United States of America created and then defined a new way of organizing the intellectual civilization that apprehends the reality of our world. Up until this point the reality of the west that the United States saw itself as a part of had been built up through a gradual accretion of intellectual developments over the centuries in the "old world"-- primarily, but certainly not exclusively, Europe. A definitive break was made in the wake of the First World War, after which, as this book demonstrates, the "new world" of the United States forged ahead on its own, and Manhattan was the crucible of this transformation. The foundation of the United States had been constructed out of those elements of what its founders and guides perceived as best in contemporary, Christian, and classical European civilization, with, naturally enough, a large bias towards its British component. At the conclusion of WWI, however, the US found itself ascendant if not actually dominant in the western world and while the center of political power in the US was, of course, Washington, the cultural capital was unquestionably Manhattan, and it was here that, emboldened by their nation’s nascent position of growing power, a new way of being was erected upon this foundation that was carved out of the essence of America. And within the cultural sphere at that particular historical juncture nothing was more essentially American than the African-American culture that had risen in Harlem. Douglas demonstrates time and time again in the pages of Terrible Honesty that a key element in distinguishing American culture from European was-- and by extension clearly continues to be-- America’s inclusion of its African cultural heritage, whether intentionally or, as was more likely-- at least at first-- unconsciously. And let's not forget the epochal ninety page bibliographical essay that concludes the volume. It puts the knowledge of the ages at your fingertips. Read this and you're good to go. Terrible Honesty is -- or at least so we argue -- one of the most significant books of cultural history of our times, don't miss it!
Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943 - 1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright	Steven Millhauser	Vintage Books	$10.80 ($12.00 list)
Read more and comment...	Whether the point of this novel is to show us the adult that lies latent in the child or to reveal to us the child that the adult never manages to quite fully outgrow is a question that is difficult if not fruitless to answer. What is certain, however, is that the novel Edwin Mullhouse is brilliantly conceived. It is also shockingly well written, replete with uncannily accurate descriptions of childhood perceptions that can at times be overwhelmingly sympathetic. It is at turns funny, sad, insightful, and even profound; but above all else, it is deeply creepy: It reveals -- almost imperceptibly at first, but then slowly, incrementally, the inertia builds, like a snowball rolling down the hill of your neighborhood cemetery -- the dark, lurking, unconscious desires that shadow what we might otherwise simply take to be our bright, waking, thoughtful acts. >> Read our full length review by clicking on the image at left.
Romare Bearden in Black-and-White: Photomontage Projections 1964	Gail Gelburd, Thelma Golden, Albert Murray	Whitney Museum	$15.75 ($17.50 list)
Read more and comment...	Romare Bearden in Black-and-White is the catalogue of a show mounted by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1997. The show traveled for two years and made it as close to Pittsburgh as the Trout Gallery at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. The book contains an essay by each of the authors along with the transcript of a conversation between Ms. Gelburd and Albert Murray. Each of the essays combines a social-historical context for understanding the milieu out which the work emerged with an art-historical appreciation of the nature and degree of Bearden’s achievement, with Ms. Gelburd’s concentrating on the former while Ms. Golden’s is weighted toward the latter. The often fascinating conversation with Mr. Murray focuses on his theories relating to the centrality of ritual to art, and his inferences of Bearden’s own thoughts on ritual arising both from his friendship with Bearden and from the works themselves. It was, in fact, Murray who provided the phrase, "The Prevalence of Ritual," that has become closely associated with Bearden's work. Please click on the image at left to read our full length review.
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever	James Tiptree Jr.	Tachyon Publications	$13.55 ($15.95 list)
Read more and comment...	This is a moment we've been waiting for for quite awhile. In our opinion, the least appreciated and most misunderstood science fiction writer of modern times, James Tiptree, Jr. (the nom de plume of Alice Sheldon) is a writer of breathtaking originality who is still ahead of her time, nearly twenty years after her death. That all of her work -- with the exception of a single "loose ends" collection that was published three years ago -- has been out of print for years is, in our opinion, a negligence that borders on the criminal. Thankfully ("Thank you, Tachyon Publications, thank you."), this situation has now come to an end with the release of this 508 page volume, a paperback re-issue of the posthumous Arkham House collection which has to stand as the best single-volume edition of her work ever released, putting together eighteen of her most penetrating and insightful stories, all of which were originally published between 1969 and 1981. Click on the image to discover the contents of this volume and learn more in our full-length review of this essential classic. Recommended!
The Way of Chuang Tzu	Thomas Merton, Chuang Tzu	Shambhala	$11.75 ($16.95 list)
Read more and comment...	The writings of Chuang Tzu are the most rigorous classic articulations of Taoist thought, which had its beginnings with the Tao Te Ching, attributed to Lao Tzu. Taoism is, perhaps, the system of thought second only to Confucianism in defining the history and culture of Chinese civilization. In Merton's "readings" (which are his interpretations based on an assemblage of the then [1965] best available Western translations by China scholars), these brief but powerful texts become quite accessible to Western thought. Thomas Merton -- whose name at least should be familiar to Pittsburgh area residents through the work of the much lauded Thomas Merton Center -- was a Trappist monk and an important author in his own right, as his eloquent introduction to this volume makes abundantly clear. Merton's translation manages to successfully pull Chaung Tzu's thought through the difficult east/west mind-barrier and present contemporary American readers with 2500 year old writing that often seems uncannily appropriate to the tenor of our times. His introduction draws our attention to surprising parallels between these writings and those of the New Testament that, if more widely appreciated, could go a long way towards deepening the dialogue between east and west that, because of the spectacular growth of the Chinese economy and its integration into the global economy, becomes of more importance with each passing day. The Way of Chuang Tzu is a tastfully designed compact sturdy clothbound hardcover edition from the Shambala Library that is printed and bound in Germany, and comes with its own sewn in bookmark. A book that's suitable for a lifetime's worth of consultation that's built to last. We recently discovered a cache of these that we can offer at a great low price. Give the gift of eternal wisdom. We give his volume our highest recommendation.
Little Kingdoms	Steven Millhauser	Phoenix	$7.95
Read more and comment...	The lead story in this collection of three novellas by America's reigning master of the form, "The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne" is an amazing tour de force for which the life and work of Winsor McCay serves as a springboard into a hallucinatory trip inside the mind of a powerful and obsessive creativity. We believe that this work stands to be especially appreciated by comics aficionados, and as we just secured a large quantity of the UK edition at a special price (and as the US edition is now, while not, technically, out of print, available only in a print-on-demand edition) we felt it was appropriate to bring it to our customers' attention at this time. The two additional novellas that fill out this volume are every bit as original, unique and intense: "The Princecss, the Dwarf and the Dungeon" is a magnificent deconstruction of the fairy tale that reveals its origins and functions -- social as well as psychological; and "Catalogue of the Exhibition: The Art of Edmund Moorash (1810 - 1846)" is one of the most singular works in the annals of fiction -- a turbulently romantic tale presented in the form of, as the title has it, the catalogue for an exhibition of paintings. Recommended!

Mon - Thu	11 - 5
Fri & Sat	11 - 7
Sun	12 - 4