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The page was unscrollable for me, so for anyone who might be having a similar problem: https://web.archive.org/web/20220919190513/https://www.nytim...
I'll never forget how nine months before my PhD was due, I had to tell my supervisor that I'd not written a single line that could be kept, and that I'd come to the point of feeling 24/7 like R Crumb's "little guy that lives inside my brain" really was inside my brain.
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/0a/95/97/0a95973f25e055a10a4e29b03...
Check out R. Crumb’s “illustrated Book of Genesis”. I thought for sure it was going to be a spoof or parody. Nope, he plays it straight and it’s even creepier than his other work! I love it!
His illustrations make it enjoyable to read 30 men who beget each other in turn, or what look like endless log statements of various valuables, like 50 oxen, 30 gold ingots, 50 calfs, &cetera
https://theslingsandarrows.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Th...
As I recall, he started out intending to satirize it, then decided that no, this is just so grand and alien that it was better to just let it speak for itself.
It's a good match for Crumb. There's a lot of naked Id in Genesis, and of course a lot of shapely women and intense bearded men.
The thing he did on Kafka, and the one on Philip K. Dick, were good in the same way. Crumb is well placed to understand those guys in ways most of us (fortunately, really) aren't.
My wife went to seminary and that was on a recommended reading list for one class; maybe the only time she borrowed a book from me for school.
How did your supervisor react?
He was like, yeah, so I'm not going to lengthen the misery by giving you an extension. Start writing.
I managed to get the thing in, writing till the day of submission itself. Doing it this way at least kept it cohesive, and I passed my viva without corrections (bar numerous spelling mistakes!) Not recommended for the mental health though.
A picture is worth the first paragraph:
(Oddly, mid-way through the article is an image of six of the 12 panels but in black & white.)
I was wondering if there was a licensing thing that prevented them from publishing it. I thought it was kind of weird too.
I love Crumb. I have several t shirts from the official KOT site
https://www.kotapparel.com including the 'quest into the unknown' shirt that I wore a lot at the height of the pandemic, his genesis book and various other bits and pieces. The saddest thing for me is the whole 'just passing through' hippie/transient/hobo style hasn't aged well in an era of massive street living overwhelmingly caused by substance abuse and serious mental illness.
I'd love to see him address what he to some extent begat in the US before pushing off to live in rural, romantic France...
I am a Crumb fan and enjoyed this piece, although I guess I'm not surprised at some of his world views. The 1994 movie "Crumb" referenced in this article is really, really interesting. Fun fact: I've been through Winters, California many times on the way to Napa and had no idea he used to live there.
I'm not a Crumb fan but I highly recommend the "Crumb" documentary that you mention. It was very interesting hearing that he and his brothers were creating their own comic books, and there are some other useful insights to the creative process.
+1 for the film. I went to a showing in Atlanta where the director was doing a Q&A afterward. The ticket was free and I didn't have much interest in Crumb.
The documentary is absolutely fascinating, if just for the window into his family's life, if not for his work. Highly recommend.
Besides the movie, there was a musical stage play biography of Crumb and his characters about 40 years ago. The night it opened, he played in the orchestra whilst someone else played him on stage.
Just want to agree, the film Crumb is a wild documentary,and totally worth watching for adults who have any interest in counter culture.
Oh I wasn’t aware he no longer lived there
At the end of the movie "Crumb" he moves to France.
The article mentions Crumb living in France. He moved there right when he was being filmed for his biographical documentary "Crumb" (1994). It's considered one of the best documentaries ever made.
The film chronicles Crumbs rise to fame. As the film tries to understand Crumb's obsession with obscenities, it dives deeper through interviews with him and family members. There, we see a painful portrait of an American family; a temperamental father in the Marines traumatized from war, but conforming to the "pleasant" social decorum in 1950s American suburbia; a mother who becomes unstable after taking amphetamine for dieting. His brothers appear in the film, one of which take a cocktail of anti-depressants. (He committed suicide before the film completed.)
The NYT article touches upon his estrangement in France: "Crumb’s followed in the long line of artists and writers who have exiled themselves from America." Perhaps his emigration overseas is a way to distance himself from the place of painful memories.
> The article mentions Crumb living in France. He moved there right when he was being filmed for his biographical documentary "Crumb" (1994). It's considered one of the best documentaries ever made.
Yep, obligatory recomendation for that movie (which was re-surfaced to the wide public by Jordan Peterson BTW, as a great opportunity for an in-depth look into certain psychopathologies, exhibited by members of the Crumb family). It's one of my favorite movies, documentary or not. His life story is more interesting than most fiction screenplays.
I like how there's a degree of "too old to cancel" and R. Crumb is in there. I don't think people who bring up how messed up a dude he is can get much social currency from cancelling him, so he just kinda persists.
To be cancelled you have to first be part of acceptable society and want to remain there, which Crumb never was and never wanted to be. He's a creep who likes to make interesting cartoons, even if they are filled with misogyny and bitterness. He comes from a creepy family, which the film "Crumb" makes clear with Crumb's blessing. He's doing alright considering.
> even if they are filled with misogyny
"This is not a fantasy. They dwell among us!" https://i.imgur.com/9tituT7.png
Phoebe Gloeckner, the author of the graphic novel “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” (2002) and an associate professor at the University of Michigan, was accused of “curriculum-based trauma” by students in a comics course, in part because she showed them Crumb’s work
As a society, we need to come together and move past things like curriculum-based trauma. Not good for anyone.
Broadly, I agree. I don't think removing a seminal artist like Crumb from a curriculum because some students are offended is at all good or appropriate.
However, when you read into the Gloeckner case it seems like the students weren't the only ones acting insufferable. The thing is if you're going to be teaching Crumb in an academic environment you have to be able to speak to the more challenging aspects of his work on an intellectual level. If even half of the allegations were true, Gloeckner wasn't justifying her curriculum academically, and she also wasn't behaving appropriately in and out of class for her position.
https://www.michigandaily.com/news/daily-investigation-finds...
Let's pray they didn't read Maus on that same course!
I'm not sure how you could "cancel" someone like Crumb. He is self-employed making independent comic books.
But with his oeuvre it is unlikely Disney will hire him any time soon.
Interestingly, Disney's new Chip 'n Dale movie actually features a cameo of Crumb's Mr. Natural character.
Yeah, I am thinking I don't even know what "cancelling" means.
I think it's totally possible today, because if you take away peoples' access to payment processors (Paypal, Venmo, Stripe, Mastercard, Visa) and platforms to grow (Instagram, Patreon, Kickstarter, etc) you keep them from getting to a point of gaining legacy, tenure, etc. Crumb can survive as self-employed because he has a name and value that supercedes canceling attempts.
An artist or creator that doesn't have that already is just as vulnerable because they have no weight to throw around. Independence or being underground doesn't matter when you need the same infrastructure as everyone else to survive.
There's little value in cancelling Crumb, because he's not influencing modern media or the impressionable youth, and he's not influencing neo facists. The whole point of cancel culture seems to be hitting the biggest problematic targets and avoiding the whole "don't meet your heroes" dilemma before fans naturally come to that crossroads. It's also a practicing example of "sunlight sanitizes" low ideologies.
Or that's my opinion of it. Good or bad it's here to stay for at least a few more years.
If you've ever read Crumb's comic books, he was fully cancelable in the 1970s. He has always existed outside the mainstream and thus has never relied on mainstream distribution or publicity. If anything, he's a little more acceptable to the mainstream now because hardcore pornography is more widespread and grudgingly accepted these days.
The NYT, masthead of the mainstream, appears to already be in the process of co-opting him for it.
> If anything, he's a little more acceptable to the mainstream now because hardcore pornography is more widespread and grudgingly accepted these days.
That seems like quite a stretch — and I would say built on a questionable premise.
It's not about age. It's about whether you piss off the people paying your bills and/or gatekeepers who can restrict your ability to reach the people who pay your bills. I'll hazard a guess that Crumb fans aren't overly invested in ideological purity.
"Too old"? He's younger than Bill Cosby...
Maybe "cancelling" is a cheap word for a more complex set of phenomenon than you're treating it as.
"canceling" means getting kicked off of social media platforms and fired. if you're not on social media platforms and self-employed then you can't really be "cancelled" at all.
Turns out that "cancel culture" is just a marketing slogan.
I don't know what happens on other planes of existence, but here on earth, humans think with a brain made of flesh. We want that fleshy brain to find and use good facts to make good decisions. We live in an information age. It feels like we have access to good information and we can use that information to do good things. But we're stuck with humans with brains made of flesh.
Humans think in narratives. Narratives can have facts and opinions. They can come from people we trust or people we hate. When someone else has a narrative that you find disgusting, just remember they have a brain made of meat.
---
They're Made out of Meat - Terry Bisson
https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
“Know then that that race of the Galaxy originated in a manner as mysterious as it was obscene, for it resulted from the general pollution of a certain heavenly body. There arose noxious exhalations and putrid excrescences, and out of these was spawned the species known as paleface — though not all at once. First, they were creeping molds that slithered forth from the ocean onto land, and lived by devouring one another, and the more they devoured themselves, the more of them there were, and then they stood upright, supporting their globby substance by means of calcareous scaffolding” … “Whereupon the sage took a blob of oily filth, dust, crud and rancid grease obtained from the innards of the most decrepit mechanisms, and with this he befouled the prince’s vaulted chest, vilely caked his gleaming face and iridescent brow, and worked till all the limbs no longer moved with a musical sound, but gurgled like a stagnant bog. And then the sage took chalk and ground it, mixed in powdered rubies and yellow oil, and made a paste; with this he coated Ferrix from head to toe, giving an abominable dampness to the eyes, making the torso cushiony, the cheeks blastular, adding various fringes and flaps of the chalk patty here and there, and finally he fastened to the top of the knightly head a clump of poisonous rust. Then he brought him before a silver mirror and said: “Behold!” Ferrix peered into the mirror and shuddered, for he saw there not himself, but a hideous monster, the very spit and image of a paleface with an aspect as moist as an old spider-web soaked in the rain, flaccid, drooping, doughy—altogether nauseating.” from an English translation of Stanisław Lem’s The Cyberiad - Prince Ferrix and the Princess Crystal https://fb2.top/the-cyberiad-294133/read/part-7
The problem with human thought (whether it were based on meat or matrices) is the path dependencies. Our logic, facts, functions, and emotions come from our history, and we are yet poor at correcting flaws within ourself and our society.
A thing that modern, typically liberal people and journals don’t understand about people like Crumb is they come from a background of not trusting authority. And they conflate 1960s counter culture of not trusting Nixon and the mainstream conservative culture with trusting liberal authority. And for some, sure. But for many it’s about not trusting authority regardless of which side wields it.
So his Covid paranoia is totally consistent with a worldview of not trusting authority ever and never assuming that there’s a group of “good guys”. It’s difficult for The NY Times editor to understand because they are in fact part of the authority and want a particular side of it to be it.
When I was perusing Robert Crumb I assumed he was part of a movement called "Underground Comics". It was about breaking the norms of what Disney would publish. The "normal" in those days was Nixon and Vietnam war. Pot-smoking was a terrible unpatriotic crime.
There wasn't really much other comics for adults. I don't mean sexually explicit but just something serious which wouldn't appeal to kids. But there was some sex which was refreshing. Still it was always (?) not about being pornographic but being thought-provoking, questioning the sexual mores of the post-war puritan America. Even questioning the misogynic world-view I would say. Crumb put a spotlight on it, not promote it.
I get it fine in the sense that it's a consistent and easy to understand viewpoint.
I don't get it in the sense that I think it's a terribly stupid way to approach the world, with an excess of dogmatism to the point it cripples your own ability to function like a normal person. We live in a society, trust is absolutely a requirement. If you can't trust any authority, either something is wrong with you, or you live in a really badly broken place and should consider moving at the earliest opportunity.
And sure, conspiracies exist, but you need to run some sort of analysis and try and figure out whether a conspiracy in the given situation would be at all viable. Eg, covid19 would be an absolutely terrible way of doing a world-wide conspiracy. Eg, if medical companies wanted to make lots of cash there are far easier and less noticeable ways of doing it.
Well put. It's a shame but also an appreciable motivator of careful thought that this explanation, one which many understand intuitively, seems on the edge of what many will tolerate to think.
Funny, I first heard of him from friends who live une the same village. I have met his daughter but not him.
I don't agree with him on some things, but somehow I do enjoy the blatant streak of femdom in his work.
He moved to France in 1991 yet he doesn't speak french. Shocking.