My baby's got it all... baby. Not only is she sweet and supple, but she's got brains to compliment her beauty and prowess. She gives gives gives. And listens.

I was talking to her on the phone the other night and I was telling her about how I ahd just finished a bunch of books (Mailroom, Post Office, An Artist of the Floating World, Hard-Boiled and the End of the World, and am kinda sick of Disney Wars) and she was sympathetic, but wasn't that helpful. She is a big reader, and she reads good books. She is the one that introduced me to Raymond Chandler and Post Office, a Bukowski that I had never gotten around to reading, and she is always open to ideas. But she herself was in a reading slump. So to expand her horizons I passed her along Scott Pilgrim, which is mostly my second favorite thing in the world. The first is Lynda. Then probably the new CD's I got of music that was used in 60's and 70's italian porno. It's been a good week.

Anyway, this was probably Sunday night that I was talking to her. When I met up with her tonight she had a book for me. It's called "Fortress of Solitude" by Jonathon Lethem. It's a story of a kid growing up in Brooklyn in the 70's whose crazy hippy mother is nutso and gives him a screwed, but strangely enlightened world view, albeit completely scewed. Oh, and there is a shit load of talk about early comics in it. Jack Kirby, and Black Bolt, and Gwen Stacy, all used to illustrate points in the boys life and process to reach understanding. "Spider-man's girlfriend, Gwen, had been killed by the Goblin, it wasn't funny in the least. That's why Spider-man was so depressed all the time." Fucking brilliant. But he can totally separate the reality of what was happening in comics then in a way that a 10 year old wouldn't normally. "Captain Marvel wasn't Shazam, it was confusing. He'd been revived to assert a copyright on the name, and nobody could say whether he really fit into the Marvel Universe all that well. DC Comics, Marvel's Comics' antithesis, presented a laughable, flattened reality -- Superman and Batman were jokes, ruined by television."

Lethem gets it. And so does Lynda. She's a peach. Now she is reading Scott Pilgrim. You all should.

Oh, that picture is from a web-site, www.superdickery.com which tries to show, through classic covers, what an asshole Superman is. Hilarious.