THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

I mean...Urdu? Seriously, Urdu . On an already eclectic and worldly album -- Pride , from 1983 -- "The Silver Gun" closes a chapter in Robert Palmer's career by singing a song about a horse in a language spoken daily by over 100 million people. The liquid bass line and propulsive electronics set out a bedrock for Palmer to ping phrasings rather out of place in Western music, askew astride even the peripatetic minimalism of the rest of the record. Somehow, in the middle of Michigan's Appalachia, I had this on vinyl a few years before the CD era officially commenced. It was an album of effort -- even the cover, a pointillism-and-bronze work, had Palmer's head barely above the water -- but the stitches didn't show to my pre-adolescent eyes and ears. In a career marked by zigs and zags, Pride and "The Silver Gun" were most certainly Other, and for a kid that felt like he didn't belong much of anywhere, it was nice to have those discrete feeling

When I was growing up, I read comic books by the score -- my favorites published monthly or bi-monthly, usually published by Marvel -- and the idea of a "graphic novel" hadn't yet permeated the culture at large. But slowly, in an attempt to court a more adult market for what my wife calls "picture books," the term "graphic novel" started popping up more and more. Now, to my understanding, a "graphic novel" is a larger non-serialized work, a la Persepolis (the Marjane Satrapi autobiography depicting her childhood up to her early adult years in Iran during and after the Islamic revolution, later turned into a motion picture). And while I read those from time to time, I find most of my current reading torn between monthly titles and collections of those titles, collections that typically go by the "trade paperback" designation. Anymore, I'm gravitating towards the trade paperbacks of titles as opposed to the monthly model. I assu