Kristian Williams

The past few years I’ve been working here and there on a book about Oscar Wilde and anarchism. As I don’t have a publisher — and therefore also, don’t have a deadline or an advance — my output has mostly taken the form of short pieces that I can publish in article form now and (I hope) somehow fit together later to create a complete whole.

My two most recent installments are:

“The Soul of Man Under. . . Anarchism?” New Politics. Winter 2011.

and

“The Anarchist Aphorist: Wilde and Gottesman, Paradox and Subversion.” Anarchist Studies. 2010.

The first is an examination of the few times that Wilde described himself as an anarchist, compared to his more common use of the socialist label.

The second is a comparison of Wilde’s aphorisms and some others published in Mother Earth, with attention to the use of paradox to create subversive meanings. (It’s not on the web; sorry.)

In relation to this Wilde project, I’ve also written:

“Why Does Your Lily Droop?” OutSmart. August 2010. (A review of Oscar Wilde in America: The Interviews.)

“Pictures of Dorian Gray, Images of Oscar Wilde.” The Comics Journal. May 2010. (A nine-part series on Wilde’s depiction in, influence on, and relationship to cartooning.)

“The Roots of Wilde’s Socialist Soul: Ibsen and Shaw, or Morris and Crane.” The Oscholars. Spring 2010. (An investigation into the inspiration for “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.”)

“Dorian Gray and the Moral Imagination.” The Common Review. Winter 2010. (A critical study of the ethical perspective of The Picture of Dorian Gray.)

“Reading Oscar’s Books.” Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed. 2010. (A review.)

and

“‘A Criminal with a Noble Face’: Oscar Wilde’s Encounters with the Victorian Gaol.” 2009. (A thorough look at Wilde’s prison writing, and his anti-prison writing.)

This last one was written thanks in part to a grant from the Institute for Anarchist Studies. Thanks are also owed to the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation for its support.

This month I have two articles out about policing.

The first, appearing in Against the Current, is an examination of policing and violence — both the violence cops face and the violence they use. I look at the narratives we build around particular instances of violence, the ways they serve to legitimize or delegitimize the use of force, and the emerging crisis in policing. My article focuses especially on the West Coast states, but since it came out there’s been a nationwide spike in attacks on the police.

The second is a review of three books, one about the criminal justice system and two about marriage. (They are: Queer (In)Justice by Joey L. Mogul, et al.; Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage by Nancy Polikoff; and the anthology Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage.) In the review, I compare two elements of the mainstream gay rights agenda — appeals for police protection and the demand for marriage rights — and point to the queer critiques of these demands and the institutions involved. The review is in the February issue of In These Times.

I’ve written a lot about war the past couple months — war and comics.

The most involved is a six-part series for The Comics Journal on Garth Ennis’s stories of ariel combat.

Also for The Comics Journal, I wrote a review of the latest installment of Weird War Tales.

Doonesbury turned forty a couple months ago. Garry Trudeau put out a retrospective collection. And I wrote an essay about it for The World and I. (It’s online, but you have to have a subscription to see it. Sorry.) The essay it not only, or even mainly, about war; but it does talk quite a bit about the ways that Trudeau’s depiction of war has changed, and the ways that the experience of war changed the character B.D.

And finally: The Anarcho-Syndicalist Review reprinted my four-part series on the Spanish Civil War in Comics. ASR isn’t online, but the original is at The Comics Journal. The new version is shorter, but it has a stronger conclusion.

In the last few months, I’ve posted a couple reviews at The Comics Journal of books that are simply (or at least, mostly) humorous.

One, “The Success of Failure,” takes a look at Shannon Wheeler’s latest collection, I Thought You Would Be Funnier. Some people (like me) think of Wheeler mainly in connection to his strip Too Much Coffee Man. But now he’s also doing cartoons for The New Yorker — or trying to: this book collects the ones they rejected.

The other review is of the latest Lio collection, There’s Corpses Everywhere. I compare it to the Calvin and Hobbes book, There’s Treasure Everywhere. This isn’t doing Lio‘s creator, Mark Tatulli any favors — but, hey, he started it.

Attentive readers may recall that in January I also beat up on Nevin Martell for his biography of Calvin creator Bill Watterson.

So I both began and ended 2010 with attacks on people trying to follow in the steps of Calvin and Hobbes. There’s probably a moral here somewhere, if we look for it.