I read Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth a couple of years ago, but it's only now that I'm writing up my notes on it. The graphic novel tells the story of Jimmy, middle-aged Chicago schlemiel, his reconciliation with his father, and a meeting with an adoptive half-sister that he never knew he had. Through flashbacks we see the Corrigans settle the Midwest in the 19th century and build the 1893 Colombian Exposition. In Jimmy's fantasies and dreams we read of his unhappy childhood, sometimes attended by a not-too-powerful Superman figure, and his unhappier adulthood.

Ware's method with his images is one of unmatched subtle variation: sometimes finding the changes between two panels is like playing Where's Waldo? He almost completely eschews Western perspective to indicate depth, but rather uses an axonometric projection (often used by architects and urban planners). Along with a viewpoint that is often from a high angle, Jimmy is flattened against the landscape, and utterly alienated from human warmth and contact.

There is also something very Eastern in Ware's aesthetic and manner of storytelling. Sometimes an enigmatic red bird appears, fixed in the landscape like a piece of sculpture, while decades pass; we move from images of a Civil War hospital tent to a contemporary quick-service medical clinic.

A particularly astounding page consists of four panels in three rows each, illustrating an 1890s game of Hide and Seek played by an ancestral Jimmy and an older girl. The game sweeps across the half-acre homestead and across time. Yet the high-angle point of view remains the same for all twelve panels. The text reads:

FORTUNATELY, for these children (5...4...3...2...1...) A recent planting of trees, telephone poles, & houses on their bleak neighborhood landscape/ (Ready or not here I come!) helps to make their game much more exciting./ / After all, who'd want to play hide & go seek in a swamp? A half century earlier, the only place to secret yourself around here might've been in a depression in the ground/ or an indian on horseback. [image of a child hiding behind a horse]/[fourth image of Jimmy, near the roughed-in frame of the house]/But, with the inevitable forward march of progress/ /come new ways of hiding things,/ /and new things to hide. [first image of the girl, still unseen by Jimmy, hiding behind the again-completed house]

posted: 5:15:14 PM  

No power in the Town of Vienna, but Reston has juice. All those buried power lines (thanks, Robert Simon!) are good for something more than aesthetics.

With all the battered foliage scattered about, now drying in the sun, the air smells much greener, like a toasty basil pesto.

I drove in late-ish to work. We worked on debugging a problem at the customer site, using the remaining power in the UPS to drive a cell phone and a laptop.

Colin Lane was closed while a crew worked on a tree. In the bottomland where Lawyers Road crosses Angelico Run, two trees were leaning at a 45-degree angle across the road onto a power line, one of them partly supported by a bashed split rail fence. Lots of temporary 4-way stop intersections, of course.

We closed the office at noon and I returned home. A crew had already cleared the maple from my front walk! Gee, that takes away the afternoon project I had planned.

I got back online to find out that the community theater performance that I was planning on seeing this evening has been dinged.

posted: 1:19:09 PM  

Well my timbers have certainly been shivered! It's Talk Like a Pirate Day.

posted: 9:32:29 AM  

I had just settled into bed, to try to get some sleep. The wind was rushing around the house, but nothing I hadn't heard before. Most of the rain was showery, not a downpour. I didn't hear it pounding on the roof the way it does in a big thunderstorm.

The 20-year maple tree between my row of townhouses and the next was thrashing about. Tired of being whipped by the wind, it just wanted to crawl in my bedroom window to get out of the storm. There was a hubbub of voices in the parking lot; I guess someone was having a Hurricane Isabel party and people were outside to watch the goings-on.

Almost exactly at the turn of midnight, I heard a loud, long crack. I didn't think too much of it, but I heard, "I saw it!" "That was awesome!" "Hey, that's my car!"

So I looked out my window. The maple had given up on trying to get inside. A major branch, about a foot in diameter at its basal end, had separated from the trunk and had settled on the sidewalk running along the housefronts. The other end was resting lightly on Alberta and two other cars.

This morning I came out (through the back door) to snap some pictures and check the damage. The cars were unscathed. The tree took out the lamp post at my front steps. The remains of two other trees were lying at the end of the parking area. Neighbor Jeremy said that the water authority is recommending boiling tap water, so I'm making coffee with Brita water from the fridge.

I hear chain saws in the distance. I may need one myself to get out the front door.

Jeremy figures the whole tree will have to come down. It would have been planted when the houses were built. Now, it just casts too much shade, and we can't keep the grass under it alive. Its absence, if it comes to that, will be a souvenir of Isabel.

posted: 9:26:02 AM