Shawn Huelle

Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw

2026-09-29T00:00:00Z

McGuffins abound in this tour de force . . .

🤮

[So I think what I'm trying to do is review the books I've recently read, but in a way that isn't reviewing? Or at least said reviews aren't shaped like reviews as we generally know them?]

On the penultimate page of Alice Notley's epic poem Disobedience, she writes,

"Engaging" is an asshole word, / not quite as obnoxious a cliché as "ground-breaking."

The first sentence of the blurb on the back of Notley's book reads,

Paris-based Alice Notley has earned a reputation as one of the most challenging and engaging poets at work today [emphasis mine]

I think I hate the word "abound."

Continuation

The phrase "tour de force" appears on the back of Dash Shaw's 2008 book Bottomless Belly Button, and maybe it is that. I know what the French means, but I don't really know what any words in blurbs actually mean; blurbs are a kind of purely superficial language: they make the sounds we expect them to make, but mean nothing. Nobody buys a book based on the blurb?

The word "McGuffin" appears nowhere either in or on the book, but the story is full of them:

the three keys (unless the fourth key gives the first three meaning)
the drawing of the stairs
the secret passageways
the balloon chair
the tooth
the divorce itself (?)

If a McGuffin is a device that serves merely as a trigger for the plot, what is the plot of Bottomless Belly Button? What are all these McGuffins triggering?

Very quotidian, very normal, very very beautiful insight and change. That's all.

Bottomless Belly Button is the story of a family falling apart.

All families are falling apart.
All stories are about families falling apart.
"Any minor world that breaks apart falls together again."

I think my favorite panel was the one toward the end of part 2, where the reader finally sees what Peter actually looks like instead of what Peter thinks he looks like.

I think I like Peter's story best. But I liked all the characters and their stories.

Ultimately, I found Dash Shaw's Bottomless Belly Button highly engaging.

Alice Notley's Disobedience

2026-08-19T00:00:00Z

1.

I wrote my friend:

About halfway through Notley's Disobedience, and I still don't understand

a) what she's disobeying

b) where the poetry is? (which would imply she's writing notpoetry and that's the disobedience? but it's still poetry? I mean, even Maggie Nelson calls this out in The Argonauts)

2.

On p. 121 of The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson writes:

For the week after the man's visit to my work, campus security will assign an officer to stand outside the door of my classroom while I teach, in case he returns. On one of those days, I teach Alice Notley's grouchy epic poem Disobedience. A student complains, Notley says she wants a dailiness that is free and beautiful, but she's fixated on all the things she hates and fears the most, and then smashes her face and ours in them for four hundred pages. Why bother?

3.

I mean, I suppose I was just restating Nelson's student's complaint to my friend (maybe a little differently: Nelson's student just complains that Notley is hypocritical, which is fair; I was missing the poetry).

3.1.

But what, exactly was I missing? Disobedience is written in lines, deals with big abstract issues in abstractly concrete language, and . . . and is sometimes inscrutable (is this really the beginning of my definitions of poetry?!). It is not, however, written beautifully, or at least I didn't think so when I wrote my friend. I was missing the language! the lilt and the melody and the poetry of language! and, instead, I was reading lines like

The phone rang; we're meeting at 1:30.

and

. . . this was a pointless exercise to begin with. Firstly, looking back through a book to find one example of a feeling you had while reading it both diminishes the feeling (in that it was created by several things working together and not individual lines) and shows you that what you thought was missing was actually there all along, and secondly, since most people think of the book as one single poem (albeit broken into titled sections), maybe I should, you know, read the whole thing before declaring it void of poetry.

4.

Wait-- Is hypocrisy a form of disobeying oneself?

5.

I have finished reading the book and should, to save face (?), completely scrap the above. And yet.

At some point in all the years I spent on the receiving end of education, I learned how to read in books instead of reading entire books. This saved time and energy and "precious head space" (as though there were only a finite amount), and it was great for getting through a semester, and it was great for getting a feel for a book, and it was great for a minute, but of course I robbed myself of several experiences by not read the whole of X, Y, or Z.

It was important to have read the whole of Disobedience, to have seen and experienced its entire arc, to have found the beauty in its language (even in lines like the one quoted above), to have received Notley's argument whole, which I will now attempt to sum up (badly--my reading is mine and not yours, after all) with five very short passages:

my life as the shape of the ways I've been fucked / by prevailing thought & practice

and

Stop don't always try to say. Leave it resistant / and scary, exact.

and

The rifts in the world cannot be healed with language.

and

if you never quite let it be a poem / you might write one / but / there are a lot / of other / ways.

and

I've taken some / care that this poem not be a nice place.

6.

It was important to have written this attempt at a review. It was important to have attempted to write this review. If only because it helped me understand hypocrisy in a new way.

I mean everything is a little "fickig," right?

2026-08-16T00:00:00Z

Here is something from my work notebook:
"ein bisschen fickig"
which was used to mean "a little fiddly" but in a quite negative way (the literal translation would be "a little fucky").
My colleague asked me to look at the cyber security quiz she was taking. The question was about the definition of "smishing." One of the answers was something like "the new single from Smashing Pumpkins." My colleague thought that was very funny. I said it was a little odd because they hadn't released a single in years, and my colleague was SHOCKED to find out they were a real band.
Driving through Bad-Bergzabern, I saw the following inside of 30 seconds:
a. a man in a mobility scooter having trouble navigating a curb
b. 30 boys in red shirts jogging through town
c. a small group of people, 2/3 of whom were blind, crossing the street

Books read in 2025

2026-08-11T00:00:00Z

Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer
Neon Genesis Evangelion (Perfect Edition): Band 5 von Yoshiyuki Sadamoto
Neon Genesis Evangelion (Perfect Edition): Band 6 von Yoshiyuki Sadamoto
Neon Genesis Evangelion (Perfect Edition): Band 7 von Yoshiyuki Sadamoto
Berserk: Band 1 von Kentaro Miuras
The Secret Life of the Pencil: Great Creatives and Their Pencils by Alex Hammond & Mike Tinney
Bodyworld by Dash Shaw
Chainsaw Man: Band 10 von Tatsuki Fujimoto
The Wine-Dark Sea by Mathias Svalina
Chainsaw Man: Band 11 von Tatsuki Fujimoto
Berserk: Band 2 von Kentaro Miuras
Rancher by Selah Saterstrom
Beit by Eryn Green
The One: How an Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics by Heinrich Päs
A.L.I.E.E.N by Lewis Trondheim
Jene Tage, die Verschwinden von Timothé le Boucher
The Long Form by Kate Briggs
S P R A W L by Danielle Dutton
Farbleib von Saskia Warzecha
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Winter Journal by Paul Auster
Hen Na E (Seltsame Bilder) von Uketsu (übersetz von Heike Patzschke)
Eruv by Eryn Green
Grommets by Rick Remender, Brian Posehn, Brett Parson, and Moreno Dinisio (tans. into German by Katrin Aust)
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
A Solar Flare by Candace R. Nunag

hello again (again)

2026-08-09T00:00:00Z

What is this?

I have written this before, haven't I?

In March of 2005 (more than 20 years ago), I started writing a blog. I wrote there sometimes regularly and sometimes only intermittently for a little over ten years. That blog was called rocket to nowhere and was hosted first at blogger and then at rocket2nowhere.com/blahg. Quite a lot happened there. The thing that eventually became my doctoral dissertation started there. I wrote about books and film there. I posted a whole bunch of photos as well as the occasional mp3 there. I made and broke blogging rules for myself there. I published a lot of thoughts there.

I eventually abandoned that blog. It had been infected by some kind of fake pharma hack/virus thing, I felt as though the intermittently was becoming ever more intermittent, and blogs were dead or dying. (If you subscribe to the Dead Internet Theory, the whole internet was starting to die right around then.)

Just about six years later, I missed it. I missed having a public place to put words and ideas and photographs online that wasn't "social media" or overrun with/by algorithms (see "Dead Internet Theory" above). So I started another blog.

I called that one Any Minor World That Breaks Apart Falls Together Again. It still exists, but more on that in a moment. I wanted that blog to be a completely stripped down version of rocket to nowhere. There would be no "blogroll." There would be little to no styling. There would be writing (usually short form), and there would be photographs (without context or explanation).

That worked well for about two years, until I started a project that ended up taking the blog over. A description of that project (as well as the project itself which is slowly ongoing) can be found here, but the gist of the project is this: I am reading A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari one random page at a time and transcribing whatever I mark in the text.

I have not decided to abandon that blog. Or rather, I have decided to abandon the "blog" part of that blog and let that space simply be the Thousand Plateaus project. The project turned the space into its title even more than it already was its title.

To that end, I have removed all non-Thousand Plateaus posts from that space and put them here in this new blog. They are all collected under the tag "Any Minor World."

I also dug up the rocket to nowhere archives, converted them into ~650 markdown files, and then put them here in this new blog, too. They are (almost) all collected under the tag blahg.

So what is this going to be?

In the previous version of this post, I stated clearly (?) what I thought the blog was not going to be:

It will not have a theme [in that it will not be single-theme]. It will not attempt to monetize itself or anything else. It will not be concerned with SEO or number of visitors.

I would like to add two things: It will not be coherent, and it will not be consistent.

And while all of those things are and will hopefully remain true, they still don't really answer the question What is this blog going to be?

In terms of how it looks, this blog is already somewhere between rocket to nowhere's aughty aesthetic and Any Minor World's forced minimalism. In terms of content, this will hopefully be a continuation of what my blog has always been. Or, to make a gesture toward my personal (blogging) philosophy/aesthetic: This is going to be random. It's going to be stupid. It's going to be cheap. It's going to be shitty.

Stick around anyway.

and by the way . . .

If you would like to subscribe to this blog, copy the URL from this link and paste it into your favorite RSS reader (I use feedly).

Books Read in 2024

2025-01-08T00:00:00Z

The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin
Serenity: The Shepherd’s Tale by Joss Whedon, Zack Whedon and Chris Samnee
Demon Slave: Band 1 von Takahiro und illustriert von Yohei Takemura
Chainsaw Man: Band 1 von Tatsuki Fujimoto
Demon Slave: Band 2 von Takahiro und illustriert von Yohei Takemura
Dick Fight Island: Band 1 von Reibun Ike
All You Want, Whenever You Want von Omayu
Neon Genesis Evangelion (Perfect Edition): Band 1 von Yoshiyuki Sadamoto
Chainsaw Man: Band 2 von Tatsuki Fujimoto
MADK: Band 1 von Ryo Suzuri
Chainsaw Man: Band 3 von Tatsuki Fujimoto
MADK: Band 2 von Ryo Suzuri
Demon Slave: Band 3 von Takahiro und illustriert von Yohei Takemura
Chainsaw Man: Band 4 von Tatsuki Fujimoto
Demon Slave: Band 4 von Takahiro und illustriert von Yohei Takemura
Chainsaw Man: Band 5 von Tatsuki Fujimoto
MADK: Band 3 von Ryo Suzuri
Demon Slave: Band 5 von Takahiro und illustriert von Yohei Takemura
Demon Slave: Band 6 von Takahiro und illustriert von Yohei Takemura
Chainsaw Man: Band 6 von Tatsuki Fujimoto
Chainsaw Man: Band 7 von Tatsuki Fujimoto
Chainsaw Man: Band 8 von Tatsuki Fujimoto
Carnival of the Animals: The Fossil Record Lecture: 39 minutes: Links Hall, Chicago: Friday, October 27, 2023 by Matthew Goulish, Lin Hixson & Essi Kaussalainen
Uzumaki von Junji Ito
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Into the Desert, Across the Ice by Ursula K. Le Guin
Running Naked: Surviving the Legacy of Family in Rural Nebraska: A Coming of Age Memoir by Colby Coash
Fight Night by Miriam Toews
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Refuse to be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts by Matt Bell
Chainsaw Man: Band 9 von Tatsuki Fujimoto
His Cold Hands by J.L. Keyser (former student)
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
Die Kriegerin von Helene Bukowski
Neon Genesis Evangelion (Perfect Edition): Band 1 von Yoshiyuki Sadamoto
Neon Genesis Evangelion (Perfect Edition): Band 2 von Yoshiyuki Sadamoto
Neon Genesis Evangelion (Perfect Edition): Band 3 von Yoshiyuki Sadamoto
Neon Genesis Evangelion (Perfect Edition): Band 4 von Yoshiyuki Sadamoto

Books read in 2023

2024-01-04T00:00:00Z

I am pretending that this list got published in the previous blog. I have backdated it.

The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether by Jack Spicer
MONARCH by Candice Wuehle
Kinderland von Mawil
Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done? by Harold Schechter & Eric Powell
A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary by Brian Eno
Death Industrial Complex by Candice Wuehle
Behind the Wire by Andrea Myers
Atemwende/Breathturn von Paul Celan/Pierre Joris
Man wird doch wohl mal wütend werden dürfen von Toon Tellegen und Marc Boutavant (trans. Mirjam Pressler)
Letterlocking by Stephanie Staab
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
Their Four Hearts by Vladimir Sorokin
Madame X by Darcie Dennigan
Zorrie by Laird Hunt
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin

20230327

2023-03-27T00:00:00Z

20230309

2023-03-09T00:00:00Z

20230303

2023-03-03T00:00:00Z