The collaboration between Frank O’Hara and Italian artist Mario Schifano is fully realized in the eighteen-page-long Words & Drawings, just published in its entirety in a beautifully designed and printed edition by the Archivio Mario Schifano in Rome. Throughout the book, handwritten words—ranging from intensely lyrical poetic fragments to stray conversational fragments and lists of names—are O’Hara’s, stenciled words are Schifano’s—words that are also drawing. Life has been swallowed by art. The schematic quality of things is not cold, but melancholic.
Books
The Peculiar Business of Being Russian-American in Trump’s USA
On the campaign trail, Donald Trump praised Vladimir Putin’s “leadership,” called him “brilliant,” and said he would “get along” with him. For Russian-Americans like myself, this was when Russia came home. “Holy autocrats” and “Father Tsars” have ruled our motherland for centuries, so we can spot the type even when he comes in the guise of “Make America Great Again.” We agonized when our American friends told us Trump could not win. Our memories of totalitarianism were too fresh to discount gut feeling in favor of opinion polls.
The B&N Podcast: Reginald Hudlin on The Black Panther
Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.
In 2005 writer, director and producer Reginald Hudlin added comic book author to his resume, picking up the mantle of the first black superhero, the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby creation Black Panther. Hudlin’s run writing one of Marvel’s most iconic characters deepened and expanded the world of T’Challa’s family and kingship, and the history of his nation, Wakanda. This week, as moviegoers everywhere flock to see Black Panther make the leap from page to screen, B&N’s comics expert James Killen talks with Reginald Hudlin about his part in the history of the hottest character in comics.
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Deep in the heart of Africa is Wakanda, a technologically advanced civilization of great power and mystery. During the last ten centuries, Wakanda has stood alone as an unconquerable land inhabited by undefeatable warriors. Governing this nation is a lineage of warrior-kings possessing enhanced speed, strength and agility. Today, T’Challa is the latest in this famed family line, the great hero known worldwide as the Black Panther. Now, outsiders are once more assembling to invade Wakanda and plunder its riches. Leading this brutal assault is Klaw, a deadly assassin with the blood of T’Challa’s murdered father on his hands, who brings with him a powerful army of super-powered mercenaries. Even with Wakanda’s might and his own superhuman skills, can the Black Panther prevail against such a massive invading force..
Hollywood heavyweight Reginald Hudlin (House Party, Boomerang) and fan-favorite artist John Romita Jr. (Captain America, Amazing Spider-Man) team up to deliver a taut, politically charged thriller that Ain’t It Cool News has lauded as “better than watching a really great hour-long television drama.”
Collecting Black Panther (2005) #1-6, plus T’Challa’s historic first appearances from Fantastic Four (1961) #52-53.
EXCLUSIVE to Barnes & Noble Edition:
- The stage is set for a huge story in the near future of the Marvel Universe in Black Panther and the Crew #1, written by award-winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates
- A variant cover gallery featuring Black Panther 50 Anniversary variants from around the Marvel Universe
Hollywood heavyweight Reginald Hudlin takes on the Black Panther – and he’s brought the blockbuster visuals of John Romita Jr.! Together, they go back to the beginning to present T’Challa’s origin in cinematic scope! Who is the Black Panther – and what is the secret history of Wakanda? Social satire meets all-out action as T’Challa’s adventures continue! The Panther enters the House of M! An outbreak of strange, mutated animals brings Storm and the X-Men to Africa! The Panther teams up with Luke Cage, Blade, Brother Voodoo and Monica Rambeau to take on the undead! But every king needs a queen – and so T’Challa embarks on his most dangerous quest yet…to wed the love of his life! Which of the world’s greatest super hero women will say “I do”?
COLLECTING: BLACK PANTHER (2005) 1-18, X-MEN (1991) 175-176
A new era begins for the Black Panther! MacArthur Genius and National Book Award-winning writer T-Nehisi Coates (BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME) takes the helm, confronting T’Challa with a dramatic upheaval in Wakanda that will make leading the African nation tougher than ever before. When a superhuman terrorist group that calls itself The People sparks a violent uprising, the land famed for its incredible technology and proud warrior traditions will be thrown into turmoil. If Wakanda is to survive, it must adapt—but can its monarch, one in a long line of Black Panthers, survive the necessary change? Heavy lies the head that wears the cowl!
COLLECTING: Black Panther 1-4, Fantastic Four (1961) 52
Black Panther reinvented as a sharp and witty political satire? Believe it! T’Challa is the man with the plan, as Christopher Priest puts the emphasis on the Wakandan king’s reputation as the ultimate statesman, as seen through the eyes of the U.S. government’s Everett K. Ross. As the Panther investigates a murder in New York, Ross plays Devil’s Advocate in an encounter with Mephisto, and a new regime seizes control in Wakanda.
COLLECTING: Black Panther (1998) 1-17
Explore the powers, weapons, technology, and suits of the warrior, monarch, scientist, and Super Hero Black Panther, king of Wakanda—from his debut in 1966 to the present.
This comprehensive book showcases stunning Black Panther comic artwork and profiles iconic characters, such as T’Challa, and his friends and allies, including Luke Cage, The Falcon, and Storm. Meet the foes, too, like Ulysses Klaw, Erik Killmonger, Doctor Doom, and Sub-Mariner.
Packed full of information about Black Panther, the book includes an in-depth look at the characters, key issues, and iconic storylines, spotlighting pivotal moments and story arcs in the history of Black Panther, including “Panther’s Rage,” “Doomwar,” and “Secret Invasion,” and “A Nation Under Our Feet.”
Like this podcast? Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher to discover intriguing new conversations every week.
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The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border
Francisco Cantú, who worked for the U.S. Border Patrol for nearly four years, was not your typical agent. In The Line Becomes a River, his beautiful and devastating memoir of his time patrolling the border in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, he gives one migrant the actual shirt off his back before buying him a meal. Another migrant, abandoned by her group when she can’t keep up, can hardly walk when she’s apprehended by agents in the desert. Cantú, in an act rich with symbolism, tenderly washes her blistered feet.
Cantú is of Mexican heritage on his mother’s side; his maternal grandfather was brought across the border by his parents as a young boy. His mother never makes peace with her son’s job, and their searching conversations appear throughout the book. (The author eschews quotation marks when writing dialogue, giving these exchanges a dreamy, poetic feel.) He tells his mother that he’s taking the job because, after studying immigration and international relations in college, he yearns “to see the realities of the border” for himself. She wants him to find work that lets him “help people instead of pitting [him] against them.” His argument: “Good people will always be crossing the border, and whether I’m in the Border Patrol or not, agents will be out there arresting them. At least if I’m the one apprehending them, I can offer them some small comfort by speaking with them in their own language, by talking to them with knowledge of their home.”
He does exactly that, bringing a determined humanity to a brutal system. When he and his partner are searching the backpacks of two men they’ve found in the desert, they discover bags of grasshoppers and dried fish, which the men proudly tell the agents are typical Oaxacan cuisine. They urge the agents to sample the food, and while his partner is hesitant, Cantú immediately accepts, asking them about their village. “For a short time we stood together with the men, laughing and eating, listening to their stories from home.” At the station where the men will be processed for deportation, they notice Cantú throwing out their water bottle. One of the men whispers to Cantú that it’s not water, but homemade aged mezcal: “It’s at its best right now, he said, take it with you.”
Still, Cantú cannot escape being implicated in the border’s cruel realities. Migrants being pursued by Border Patrol often stash their heavy provisions, intending to come back for them, so that they can more easily evade the agents. “I wonder sometimes how I might explain certain things,” Cantú writes, “but it’s true that we slash their bottles and drain their water into the dry earth, that we dump their backpacks and pile their food and clothes to be crushed and pissed on and stepped over, strewn across the desert and set ablaze.” The idea is to hasten the migrants’ realization that there’s no point in continuing, that they will not survive the journey. Indeed, as Cantú also sees firsthand, many do perish during the difficult desert crossing.
The final section of The Line Becomes a River takes place after Cantú leaves the Border Patrol because he’s plagued by anxiety and nightmares. He’s in Arizona, working at a coffee shop while pursuing a graduate degree in writing to help him “make sense of what [he’d] seen.” He befriends a maintenance man named Jose, and every morning for almost two years Jose shares his breakfast with Cantú and Cantú offers him coffee in return. Jose, in the U.S. illegally and married with three American-born sons, returns to Mexico to see his dying mother and is arrested trying to get back into the country. Cantú, seeking to help his friend, perhaps seeking some form of redemption too, attends Jose’s court hearings, takes his sons to visit him in jail (a trip too risky for their mother, who also lacks legal status) and, along with Jose’s boss and his pastor, retains an attorney to represent him. Despite their efforts, Jose is deported to Mexico. “I shouldn’t have left the U.S.,” Jose — whose story is not at all unusual — tells Cantú. “I shouldn’t have left my family, but I couldn’t live without going to see my mother.”
There are complex political and economic dimensions to our current immigration debate, but Cantú’s deeply humane book forces us to ponder questions of conscience. How can we sanction a system in which the decision to see a dying mother one last time is the wrong choice, one that can cost a man his family? When Jose asks Cantú whether he’d arrested many drug smugglers while working for Border Patrol, Cantú replies that he had but confesses that he mostly arrested “people looking for a better life.” One man being processed for deportation after his arrest asks Cantú if he can clean the jail cells or take out the trash while he waits: “I want to show you that I’m here to work,” he pleads. Is there any enhanced border enforcement that will stop the irrepressible human drive for a better life?
Cantú visits Jose in a border town in Mexico, where he’s preparing to attempt another crossing. Jose tells the author matter-of-factly that “there are many dangers, but for me it doesn’t matter. I have to cross, I have to arrive to the other side . . . So you see, there is nothing that can keep me from crossing.” He, and many others like him, will continue to risk their lives to enter the United States. It’s difficult to imagine a wall high enough to stop them from trying.
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Ghost Whisperers
Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing honors paying attention: seeing, listening, and, finally, singing. The novel inspires me to think that we need new songs, new ways of seeing, new ways of listening.
Camping with Honest George
The American Revolution has returned to Philadelphia. After almost two decades of planning and fund-raising, the Museum of the American Revolution opened its doors last April 19, the anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord. Its thousands of artifacts, with the support of the latest interactive digital technology, recount a provocative story of how ordinary men and women of different races and ethnicities experienced military conflict and then, having achieved independence from Great Britain, created a republic that has survived for more than two centuries.
A Glimmer of Justice
The International Criminal Court’s inability to deal with crimes committed by the world’s superpowers, or by states protected by the superpowers, has caused resentment in some countries that have made themselves vulnerable to prosecutions by ratifying the treaty for the ICC and that do not enjoy protection by permanent members. The fact that only African leaders have been subject to prosecutions has greatly increased such resentment. Some African governments have come to regard the court as an instrument of the world’s superpowers for punishing African criminality.
Oh, Dizzy!
To the Editors: In his review of Rosemary Ashton’s One Hot Summer, Tim Flannery errs in crediting Benjamin Disraeli with enactment of Jewish emancipation in 1858, a bit of myth-making that most of Disraeli’s many biographers indulge in and that he himself practiced wholesale.
My Renoir
To the Editors: In “The Art of Pleasure,” Jed Perl praises Jean Renoir’s 1958 Renoir, My Father but denigrates my newly published biography, Renoir: An Intimate Biography.
Not Exactly Nothing
To the Editors: Geoffrey Wheatcroft is twice mistaken in stating that Americans “were resolutely united in their determination to have nothing to do with resisting Hitler, not only in September 1939 and June 1940 but until December 1941, when Hitler left them no choice by declaring war on the United States.” Instead, amid intense and often bitter debate, America abandoned its isolationism in favor of extensive aid to Hitler’s foes.
Sig Nordal 