Wednesday, April 18th, 2007

Ben Katchor launched right into his reading with zero small talk, while the corresponding illustrations from his Julius Knipl comic strip and books were projected onto the large screen next to his podium. He spoke in a deadpan, drone-y style, that perfectly complemented the witty banality of the vignettes; “Catsup please, and a little more butter over here.”

Katchor’s stories incorporate the everyday and practical with the fantastic. A man’s quest to find a hand-dryer in a restaurant leads to the discovery of a hidden back-room that holds a secret club. A barber shop holds untold secrets. In short, the finely drawn stories allow us to see the inner worlds of people’s compulsions, highly specialized/weird jobs, loneliness, idiosyncrasies, and it’s not a stretch to say that they contain notes of keen brilliance and attention to the most ordinary yet riveting details. He covers a lot of restaurant territory, in part because “my mission is to figure out where Jewish dietary laws meet up with the French idea of a restaurant and public eating.”

During the Q & A session, he talked about his idyllic Brooklyn upbringing. “My neighborhood was a kind of urban paradise with the Brooklyn Public Library and Brooklyn Museum. We played stickball on the street. It sounds like some kind of an ancient Egyptian world now but that’s what it was.” In grade school Katchor would begin drawing comics and handing them out to classmates; he later graduated to distributing his work via a fanzine.

Another audience member asked about what she called Katchor’s “antique” view of the American city, complete with family owned delis, pay telephones, and uniquely neighborhood-y, non-gentrified, or corporate settings. To this, Katchor shrugged. “Well, I do live in a building built in 1905 so maybe my view is weirdly antiquated,” he admitted, “but it’s as up-to-date as I can make it.”

The vintage overtones in his work are also due to his interest in “found literature” like old phone booths and instruction manuals. “I like things that were not meant to be read; things that were written under duress.”