Word: babel
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...happy family," Camp Director Bobbi Zeno tells her flock in a keynote address. The girls emit a Babel of cheers. With that, U.S.A.'s handpicked cheerleader leaders--six Chippendaley boys and ten short-skirted girls--flapjack into view. The assembly lets out a Menudo-worthy squeal. "Hey," shouts one instructor. "If ever you feel the urge to shout or scream, remember: You're in cheer-leader camp. Go for it!" The congregation roars...
Where other cartoonists visualize the merely incredible, David B. visualizes the invisible. Two new works, "Babel" (32 pages; $10), a comic book released by Drawn and Quarterly, and "Epileptic," his extraordinary graphic novel just arriving from Pantheon Books, find visual metaphors for such elusive concepts as dreams, the forces of history, and illness. Both the comic and the novel find these metaphors through a powerful, moving account of his brother Jean-Christophe's debilitating epilepsy...
...Something of a coda to "Epileptic," "Babel" concentrates more on the dream life of the artist. As his brother first displays signs of illness the young Pierre-Francios dreams of his ancestors and of a character called The King of the World. Suddenly he feels permanently changed. As he becomes disillusioned with "doctors who can't heal" and "parents who know nothing," he seeks solace in the world of dreams, leading to a lifelong obsession. Excerpting various entries from his dream journal, Beauchard turns "Babel" into an explication of the birth of his interest...
...once unique in the way that it had made a single nation out of emigrants from everywhere else. But now every great city is an immigrant city. You don't have to go to New York City, as once you did, to find the shock of a happy Babel; you can enjoy it just as easily in London, Toronto, Hamburg or Sydney. Mass tourism, which has been the most important modernizing force in the world for the past 20 years, is hardly an American phenomenon at all. It is European tourists, not Americans, who have transformed every place with...
...shirts in Iran to T shirts and jeans in Europe. They will have to travel by foot, bus, truck, ship?never knowing how long the trek will last or if they'll be shot, arrested or suffocated en route?and speed-learn the rudiments of new languages in the babel of countries they pass through. There's a sweet, sad scene in which Jamal teaches Enayat a few English words (snow, mountain) that would be of little use in England. And all this for what? If they do make it to London, they may be reduced to selling their organs...