r crumb on bukowski (1 Viewer)

that was cool, reminded me I wanted to pick up that illustrated Genesis book and Friday is payday!
 
Absolutely! I've not regretted buying a copy, although the old testament is not my favorite reading. Crumb's done a good job illustrating it.
 
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Yep, it's a good one. And he even did some research and wrote an interesting essay at the end about it. I think he wanted to do a color version, right? But it was too expensive.
 
I have'nt heard about him wanting to do a color version but it might very well be true. The good thing about the black and white drawings is you can more easily study the details.
 
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Well, he and his publishers were obviously counting on protest and outrage to help sell the book. Looks like they are finally getting some. Great that they could say there is "gratuitous" violence, when it's all taken directly from the bible.

The genius of this project is that he took the text verbatim and just illustrated what was described. It's essentially a critique (whether he meant it as one or not, I really couldn't tell in a recent interview) without saying a critical word. Fucking amazing.
 
It was bound to stir up opinions. Just the very idea of someone like Crumb drawing his own version of the bible is enough for the fundamentalists to scream, "Sacrilege!"

The words, "religious" and "think" in the same sentence is a contradiction in terms. :D
 
yeah the guy's an f'n genius -

now if he'd just do a 'ham on rye' graphic novel - that's a genesis of sorts...
 
interesting remark:

The German translator of R. Crumb, Harry Rowohlt, who's also friends with Crumb and did fine jobs on some Irish authors and others (yes, a hard drinker and great entertainer!), doesn't like Bukowski at all.

More strange:
Crumb (in the translation of Rowohlt) is published by Zweitausendeins (where some important Bukowski-stuff in the 70s appeared) and Rowohlt is big friends with some other authors and the publishers of Zweitausendeins.

The guy had a reading in my hometown last week and I asked him about his thoughts on Bukowski.
[ Disclaimer/Spoiler: Don't read further if your feelings get hurt easily! ]
He said: "Bukowski is so boring and one-dimentional, that I [Harry Rowohlt] am happy, I don't have to translate him and can leave this to Carl Weissner, who doesn't know about either English nor German."

(I have this statement on video!)
 
That's some statement about Weissner, who's considered to be a great translator of Buk (I think).
(I hope Weissner did'nt use slang expressions where none were necessary, as the Danish translator did)
 
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The Bible is a very important text to many many people and should be treated with the respect it deserves.

"Representing it in your own way is all very well and good but it must be remembered that it is a matter of people's faith, their religion.

As long as it is the christian book of fairy tales, of course. These are the same kind of people that throw the Quaran in a urinal and piss on it. They see no problem disrespecting other people's fairy tales.

"It is turning the Bible into titillation," said Mike Judge, of the Christian Institute, a religious think-tank.

I liked him better when he was writing episodes of King of The Hill.

I love how people are outraged that he would dare illustrate the bible with (gasp) nudity. I think that he was TAME in his illustrated scenes of daughters getting their father drunk to have incest with them, a guy jacking off in the dirt, etc, etc.

Bill
 
The Bible is a very important text to many many people and should be treated with the respect it deserves.

I wonder if that goes for the part where it says it's okay to keep slaves, too. :rolleyes:
 
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Yes. According to a Christian fundamentalist I talked to on Monday, the bible is to be taken literally. Every word. I asked him if he was sure of that, and he said he was.
 
Sometimes on the way to work I listen to the gospel radio station - most of them, if not all are Baptist so King James version is the one. But what I hear more than once is, it doesn't matter how bad you are throughout your life - if you accept Jesus as your Saviour you will be forgiven regardless of your crimes. That explains their consistent support for Republicans and they are generally the back bone of the American Right.
 
Yes. According to a Christian fundamentalist I talked to on Monday, the bible is to be taken literally. Every word. I asked him if he was sure of that, and he said he was.

Right! You have to take it all literally. You can't pick and choose, because that would be like creating your own version of the bible, and then the fundamentalists would loose the power they have over people.

That explains their consistent support for Republicans and they are generally the back bone of the American Right.

Good one! It reminds me of an interview with American Disney artist, Don Rosa, in which he said the Republicans were actually evil:

...And even today, I am not so much political as... the Republicans have forced me to be anti-Republican. I mean, I didn't get into the matters of different political parties when Republicans were just the wrong political party. But in the George Bush administration they became actually evil and I really have lots of animated discussions with friends and I'm not a political cartoonist any more but if I felt as feverish about it then as I do now, I would have been a really devoted political cartoonist, I would have gotten a lot more fun out of it, because I just hate Republicans. I'm not really pro-Democrat, I'm just anti-Republican.
 
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Right! You have to take it all literally. You can't pick and choose, because that would be like creating your own version of the bible, and then the fundamentalists would loose the power they have over people.

Yes, you have to be a special breed of thinker to take literally a man living in the stomach of a fish for three days, people living 900 years, the Earth being only 8000 years old, a boat that could hold the millions of land and air animals that would need to be saved from a 40 day flood that covered the earth, etc

Then you have blaring discrepancies where it says one thing in one place in the bible and one COMPLETELY different thing in another part about the same event and both in the New Testament. Which one is it? Then you have the things that have been proven 100% impossible or wrong scientifically. The mustard seed is not the smallest seed, etc. If god wrote it, you would think that he knew more than 1st century scribes with their 1st century understanding of science.

Then you have the following scientifically ponderous chain of events:

Day 1: Made Heaven, Then the Earth, then Light, including day and night (he was still a couple days away from making the sun, but, eh...),

Day 2: created heaven (where was he hanging out before that?)

Day 3: Divided the land from the oddly NOT frozen water (without a sun, it would have been very, very cold). made plants (without a sun,

Day 4: FINALLY thought about making the Sun and Moon (which got thought actually made light, not reflected light...), made the stars, as a another light source for us (no other reason for making hundreds of trillions of stars that give us nearly zero light...,

Day 5: Created animals, sea monsters, every living creature that moves (but not humans...),

Day 6: Oopps, he forgot to make cows and bugs and people. Made cows, bugs and humans, Tells humans that they can eat all bugs, animals, and plants. They are all fine to be eaten by humans. No mention of the poisonous plants, animals, and insects...

Day 7: Takes a nap.

It is one thing to believe in religion, but to take every word in a book as literal truth requires talking yourself out of your sanity and accepting the ridiculous as true.

Bill
 
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The part about God creating light before creating the sun always baffled me. I once asked a so-called Born Again Christian about it, and instead of admitting it's not logical he instead began rambling about how the light must have been some other kind of light that we humans don't know about. Funny, how fundamentalists will rather entertain weird explanations than use the logic God equipped them with.
Everybody knows, including non-fundamentalist Christians, that it'just a myth. Every religion has a myth about how the world was created, and being a myth it's not meant to be taken literally, but I guess the fundamentalists are not interested in the history of religion, because if they were it would dismantle many of their illogical beliefs.
 
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It will only make you insane if you try to argue with people that use false logic to justify their stance. "It is true because it is written in the bible and god wrote the bible".

I once got into an argument and made a hardcore evangelical christian cry because I clued her in that Jesus was not called Jesus by anyone when he was alive (if he ever even existed). She though that since he is called Jesus in the bible, then he was called Jesus when he was alive. Telling people these things (like the fact that J & U were letters that were even in the Jewish Alphabet, the Romans did not have a U either, i believe), just makes them very upset. They do not want to know because knowing punches holes in their fairy tale. "If Genesis is not 100% literally true, then how do I know what is true?" They are told that the bible is the 100% literal word of god and that every letter is 100% TRUTH. Pointing out an obvious untruth is like waking a sleepwalker....

My favorite nonsense is the following TRUTHS, accepted as fact by evangelicals:

God is all powerful
God cannot lie

If he was all powerful, he could do anything that he wanted to. If he cannot lie, then he is not all powerful, is he?


Bill

p.s. Typecases for handsetting lead type are not even set up for capital J & U. On the UPPERCASE side, which is the right 1/3 of the case, the letters go ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPQRSTVWXYZJU. J & U were added much later.
 
Admit it! You guys are just a bunch of christiophobes and can't accept the superior intellects of people like Pat Robertson and Sarah Palin.
 
fact is that zealots like Pat Robertson drive more people from religion than to it. They are so removed the teachings of jesus. Foe people that claim to love jesus, they seem to hate just about everyone else.

Bill
 
All I know is God hates fags, and Gandhi is burning in the lake of fire.

That's according to Mr. Every Word Of The BIBLE Is Literal Truth. All he knows about Gandhi is the he "did some kind of protest," but he also seems to know that he didn't accept Jesus as his savior, so into the lake of fire with you, mister!

You can ask him about it yourself, he's one of the guys standing on a milk crate outside of subway stations in the valley yelling at people about JESUS. They are all the same, so it doesn't matter if you find the exact guy.
 
I once got into an argument and made a hardcore evangelical christian cry...

You got off easier than I did when i had an argument with a fundamentalist Christian. He told me the devil was speaking through me (not because of any fault of mine, of course). How does one argue against that? It does'nt matter what you say. They only believe what they wanna believe, anyway.

If he was all powerful, he could do anything that he wanted to.

I wonder if he could create a stone so heavy he couldn't lift it? :)

...the fact that J & U were letters that were even in the Jewish Alphabet...

To complicate matters even further, they say Jesus spoke Aramaeic (spell?) and not Hebrew, a language which does'nt exist anymore.
The New Testament was written in ancient Greek. I don't know whether they had the letters J & U, or not.

As for Pat Robertson, believe it or not, but lots of non-fundamentalist Christians can't stand the guy. Of course, the soap box guys mjp talks about might not agree. :D
 
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To complicate matters even further, they say Jesus spoke Aramaeic (spell?) and not Hebrew, a language which does'nt exist anymore.
Aramaic. Not quite dead yet. Not to be confused with Amharic, which is spoken in Ethiopia.

The divinity of "the bible" falls apart when you realize how many languages it was written in. And what did the Romans do to it when they had it? I would think they may have, oh, made some alterations.

It's all so ridiculous, living your life based on some garbled middle ages voodoo (not that anyone actually follows all those rules). People are weird.
 
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The divinity of "the bible" falls apart when you realize how many languages it was written in. And what did the Romans do to it when they had it? I would think they may have, oh, made some alterations.

That's right, not to mention those church meetings back in the year 300 something where they decided which stories and gospels should be included in the bible and which should'nt. Talk about censorship!

It's all so ridiculous, living your life based on some garbled middle ages voodoo (not that anyone actually follows all those rules). People are weird.

Absolutely! They say the Old Testament alone contains 613 rules of what you must do and what you must not do. Who can remember over 600 rules, except for Pat Robertson maybe. :D
 
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Praise Jebus!

atheist-cartoon.gif
 
The part about God creating light before creating the sun always baffled me.

Smerdyakov made an impression on me inquiring about this very thing in The Brothers Karamazov. I'd inquired, too, about this and the explanation I received was that God himself is light and he was "revealing" himself to yet unmade creation. The one thing about the Old and New Testament I've completely failed to grasp is how the God of the Old is vastly different from the God of the New Testament. The God of the Old Testament is one nasty motherfucker. The Israelites laid waste to entire cities with God's divine blessing - He'd even join in the fun with a little Divine Fuck-You-Up. Eye for an eye, Judge. But the God of the New Testament is some sandaled hippie peacenik nattering on about Love thine enemy and turn the other cheek and other Godspell nonsense - the irony here is some of most intolerant people to have ever been hatched believe in this tolerant rube. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, Judge. The twain just don't meet.
 
Yes, the God of the Old Testament is a God of vengeance, while the God in the New Testament is a loving and forgiving God. It seems like the Christians created a God more to their liking than the one the Jews wrote about in the Old Testament. ;)
 
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, Judge.

this passage was not in the older versions of the bible. It was very much added hundreds of years after the original. There were a lot of people pulling the church in differnet directions. Some wanted to show jesus as more benevolent. truth is that this was 100% not in the earlier versions. There were also passages where Jesus got pissed at people for asking him for things. That was also changed to put him in a better light. it is fascinating that people base every waking moment of their existence on a book and do not know that it has been changed for political reasons. Anyone interested should read the book MISQUOTING JESUS by Bart Ehrman. It is a fascinating read for believers and skeptics.

Bill
 
"Jesus" was a mythological creation. Never existed, never said anything to be quoted or misquoted. There is no proof, anywhere outside of THE BIBLE, to contradict that.

People who believe that mythology base everything on a core belief that the book is not just stories, but historical fact. Considering that we can't even get history from 40 years ago right, there is no way anyone will ever convince me that some ancient stories are anything other than ancient stories.

So if someone is soft-headed enough to base their life on that, why should we waste our time trying to convince them otherwise?
 
found a great bukowski letter - in the ms section - to bill griffith
talking about r crumb -

"crumb, we know, IZ COMIX. the way he draws his people and the way they
step across the page, it holds all this wonderful juice and glow. i met him once
at liza william's when i was living with her, and he was one of the most
unaffected people i've ever met. it would be a most honorable magic high
for me to have him illustrate some of my fucked-up characters. i sure hope
something works."
 

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