What with the floods, the rains ...

... and the daughter's 17th birthday today (she's leaving us soon -- ack!), book/daddy has been extremely tardy in posting things the past two weeks, really ever since the depressing BookExpo in New York. He just hasn't felt in the swing of bookish things -- having to go out in the jungle humidity every day to clear fallen tree limbs, kill the hordes of tent caterpillars swarming over everything and race out when inspired to buy another gift for the Comic Book Queen.

So, before memory fades, book/daddy highly recommends Sarah Boxer's marvelous essay on George Herriman and Krazy Kat in the NYRB -- it has a lovely, light touch, a spirit like Herriman's own but unfortunately, it's an essay that requires a subscription to read in full -- as well as Ian Buruma's review of Steven Bach's Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl in the same NYRB. Much has been written about the book, but Buruma doesn't take the usual way out that has been film-school fodder for years ("Yes, she was a horrible person, a Nazi, but a genius filmmaker"). In something of an extension of Susan Sontag's famous "frozen eroticism" demolition of Riefenstahl, he argues that she was a bad artist, that Triumph of the Will for all of its supposedly seductive gloss and brilliance is mostly a technical achievement, ultimately a product of a lifeless and inhuman aestheticism, just as with the rest of her work.