Hm. He promotes the accepted thesis that concept albums killed punk and then aligns this somehow with current events in comics, and then he disses blogging:The Internet has displayed a related phenomenon, the open diaries called "blogs" (from "web logs"), which put their writers' daily lives up for public display in numbing detail.You wanted for a critic not simply to pass along received ideas? You were expecting the institution to change? Keep going. We're getting there.

Whoops. My blockquote didn't show. These words are not mine but Hajdu's:

The Internet has displayed a related phenomenon, the open diaries called "blogs" (from "web logs"), which put their writers' daily lives up for public display in numbing detail.

Agh I'm better off not using comments functions.

Concept albums killed rock; punk saved it. That's the standard issue thesis. Hajdu deploys it sans footnotes. I'm not that interested in reopening the issue -- but cor how my trust fades when the received ideas come beaning at it.

I should have mentioned also that concept albums, prog rock, even rock operas, made something of a comeback with Ween and Radiohead, and continues to mined for fresh ideas (as long as the songs stay under 3 minutes).

That is one of he most irresponsible reviews I've ever read.
Why no mention of so many other important, astute, innovative artists to give some real cultural context and history? What about Chester Brown, Chris Ware, Julie Doucet, Harvey Pekar, pete Boggs, Grant Morrison, Allan Moore (let alone the fabulous Hernandez brothers)? And he doesn't even mention Clowes's other amazing graphic novels such as Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron or Daniel Boring or his comic series Eightball where the Ghostworld stories were first serialized. Hadju so obviously doesn't know his stuff.
The whole thing really pissed me off. Thanks for writing such a reasoned reply.
And prog rock rules. There are hundreds of amazing albums by bands from Finland and Germany and Brazil (just to name a few) that would put both Yes and the Beatles to shame. Where do people get off critiquing something they know nothing about? Arghhhhhh.

How typical. It really pisses me off how the cultural establishment keeps publishing reviews by outspoken ignorants. I liked the fact he is unaware how "blogging" his attitude is by finishing his essay with that pathetic reference to his (also ignorant) daughter. When I was 17 I was already publishing graphic novel reviews in national newspapers in Mexico. Go figure.

Apparently the guy is writing a book on the early history of the comic book or something like that. (I read the review in the print version of the NYRB.) I agree that the beginning of the review comes off a snide, but what do you think of the actual reviews of the two books under consideration? Equally obnoxious, or does he settle down and give us a fair reading?

There are some decent observations in there but I wasn't terribly impressed - a lot of what he observes could have been written by any casual reader of the comic, such as his praise of Sacco's expressive use of individual features on the faces.

"His use of caricatures avoids the more realistic portraiture one might expect in books presented as journalism. Love-starved young Bosnian girls ogle at Sacco with ballooning fish eyes. The nose on a Palestinian man is bigger than another character's head. (In mainstream comics, there is little caricature, but only exaggeration; everything is enlarged equally and indiscriminately in a childish glorification of the idea of bigness.) Most of Sacco's characters are a bit grotesque, but funnily so—except for political leaders and his subjects' antagonists, whom Sacco renders with cold, meticulous contempt. Indeed, the comical ugliness of a character is visually a measure of Sacco's affection for him."

The first sentence here doesn't mean anything since he's already written that this method is sui generis - what conditions our expectations, since newspaper illustration died years ago? And what "mainstream comics" is he talking about here in the middle of the paragraph, the ones he disparage as junk (and yet underground) culture or the stuff from DC and Marvel?

What he doesn't mention is that only Sacco himself ever really comes off as funny looking in the book (at least in Safe Area). The other characters are usually lovingly drawn and relatively realistic.

But he's right about the portrayal of political figures and antagonists -- but I suspect that any political figure, even a good one, would be rendered quite "realistically" -- I'd have to check.

I think the issue is whether we know them from TV or from "life." Clinton's in there somewhere, I believe.

These secret identities serve a variety of purposes, and they help us to understand how variables work. In this lesson, we'll be writing a little less code than we've done in previous articles, but we'll be taking a detailed look at how variables live and work.

That gives us a pretty good starting point to understand a lot more about variables, and that's what we'll be examining next lesson. Those new variable types I promised last lesson will finally make an appearance, and we'll examine a few concepts that we'll use to organize our data into more meaningful structures, a sort of precursor to the objects that Cocoa works with. And we'll delve a little bit more into the fun things we can do by looking at those ever-present bits in a few new ways.

Our next line looks familiar, except it starts with an asterisk. Again, we're using the star operator, and noting that this variable we're working with is a pointer. If we didn't, the computer would try to put the results of the right hand side of this statement (which evaluates to 6) into the pointer, overriding the value we need in the pointer, which is an address. This way, the computer knows to put the data not in the pointer, but into the place the pointer points to, which is in the Heap. So after this line, our int is living happily in the Heap, storing a value of 6, and our pointer tells us where that data is living.

Note first that favoriteNumbers type changed. Instead of our familiar int, we're now using int*. The asterisk here is an operator, which is often called the "star operator". You will remember that we also use an asterisk as a sign for multiplication. The positioning of the asterisk changes its meaning. This operator effectively means "this is a pointer". Here it says that favoriteNumber will be not an int but a pointer to an int. And instead of simply going on to say what we're putting in that int, we have to take an extra step and create the space, which is what does. This function takes an argument that specifies how much space you need and then returns a pointer to that space. We've passed it the result of another function, , which we pass int, a type. In reality, is a macro, but for now we don't have to care: all we need to know is that it tells us the size of whatever we gave it, in this case an int. So when is done, it gives us an address in the heap where we can put an integer. It is important to remember that the data is stored in the heap, while the address of that data is stored in a pointer on the stack.

This will allow us to use a few functions we didn't have access to before. These lines are still a mystery for now, but we'll explain them soon. Now we'll start working within the main function, where favoriteNumber is declared and used. The first thing we need to do is change how we declare the variable. Instead of