Year in Review: 2019

This post will serve as a month in review for December as well as a year in review. December is the busiest month of the year at work; coming in early, working late. That said, I still got quite a bit done. I came close to finishing the six page comic. The last page is sketched and inked and nearly colored. I'm also nearly finished with an essay for Jesus the Imagination. I still have time and may finish one of these two items tonight.

Goals for 2020: 

1. Finish new comic project. Comic will be approximately 24 pages. Hope to finish 2 pages a month. That shouldn't be too hard, right?
2. Read 2-3 pages of Finnegans Wake a day and comment on it once a week. Again, not too hard, right?
3. Finish some of the books I started or hoped to read this past year (mostly on economics).


Books read in December:

Francis Spufford, Red Plenty
Matt Stoller, Goliath: The 100 Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy
IA Richards, How to Read a Page
Andrew Bacevitch, America’s War for the Greater Middle East

All four of these books were quite good. Red Plenty is a novel, very funny. Deserves a closer rereading. Goliath was a history of 20C America. Very good. Arguably one of the best books I've read this year. IA Richards' book is a classic and foundational text for New Criticism. It was also a pleasure. I'm using it as a framework for a pictorial lexicon that will work as a framework for my next comic project. The Bacevitch book was also very good. Essential reading.

Here is the list of books I read in 2019:

1. Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
2. Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom 
3. Jill Lapore, These Truths
4. Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Regan
5. Tony Judt, Thinking the Twentieth Century
6. Tony Judt, Postwar
7. Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: the United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age 1865 to 1896
8. Mark Blyth, Austerity
9. Paul Cartledge, Democracy: A Life
10. Goodstein, Georg Simmel (started, plan to finish later)
11. Buchanan, Frozen Desire (started, plan to finish later)
12. Erik Loomis, A History of America in Ten Strikes
13. Plato, Apology, Crito, Charmides, Laches, Lysis, Menexenus, Ion, Gorgias, Protagoras, Meno, Euthydemus, Lesser Hippias, Greater Hippias, The Republic
14. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years
15. Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour (didn’t finish, too depressing)
16. Alfred McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century
17. Pierson and Hacker, Winner Take All Politics
18. Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt
19. Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140
20. Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora
21. Joanna Russ, We Who Are About To
22. Michel Bernanos, The Other Side of the Mountain
23. Marianne Williamson, A Politics of Love 
24. Iain M. Banks, Player of Games
25. Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons
26. Shakespeare, Cymbeline
27. Walter Tevis, Mockingbird
28. Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus 
29. Emile Zola, Money
30. John Steinbeck, In Dubious Battle
31. Jefferson R. Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class
32. Kerascoet, Beauty
33. Kerascoet, Little Miss Don’t Touch Me 
34. Mandeville, Fable of the Bees
35. Daniel Defoe, Roxanna 
36. Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government 
37. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments 
38. David Harvey, Neoliberalism (started, plan to finish later)
39. Dostoyevsky, The Gambler 
40. David B., Black Paths
41. Dylan Horrocks, Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen
42. Francis Spufford, Red Plenty
43. Matt Stoller, Goliath: The 100 Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy
44. IA Richards, How to Read a Page
45. Andrew Bacevitch, America’s War for the Greater Middle East

Month in Review: November

I was converted August 31st. The change gave me an additional day off each week, sometimes more, because now I am given off holidays in addition to my standard days off, whereas before the holiday WAS my day off. This has been a blessing. Of course, Emily was born a month and a half later and so any free time I hoped to have was largely lost. Still, we are adjusting to these changes. I have still been doing some drawing, but not much reading. I have only two pages left of my short comic, "Simon on the Shores of Ruin." I hope to finish page 5 today and the last page sometime next week. I am not entirely happy with how the colors look and am considering doing another six page comic with water colors. If I'm satisfied with this I will go forward with the longer project.

My reading was scanty. I've been picking away at Dostoyevsky's novella, The Gambler, but still haven't finished it. I've also read about 50 pages of Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments. I read all of Matt Stoller's Goliath and I reread the second half of Jill Lepore's These Truths. I read Dylan Horrock's graphic novel Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen as well. I'm finishing up Francis Spufford's Red Plenty today.

I've set myself the goal of completing one drawing a week, whether it be a page of a comic book or an illustration. I have too many projects that I hope to do, but since my drawing is not quite at the level I want it to be, I don't see a problem with jumping between projects so long as I'm drawing and putting stuff out on a regular basis. One project I want to do is a lexicon of images, inspired by I.A. Richards 100 Most Important Words as found in How to Read a Page. I would make one picture for each of the 100 words. I've already made an outline for my next short comic. It is to be a framing story around which other projects can be inserted. My Simon story, for example, will be one of the stories contained within this collection. Unlike Simon this one will not have a title attached, although I'm already pretty sure what title I will ultimately give it. My larger project will also be a story within this story. My inspiration for this structure is Dickens' Pickwick Papers and Wordsworth's Prelude, but to be honest, there are many other examples I could give, including The 1001 Nights and Don Quixote.