Eddie Campbell

Some reading:

First clown in space hosts show to save Earth's water

Guy Laliberte's two-hour performance event called "Moving Stars and Earth for Water" linked the International Space Station with singers, dancers and celebrity campaigners in 14 world cities in what organizers called the first event of its kind to be hosted from space.
"I see stars, I see darkness and emptiness. But planet Earth looks so great, and also so fragile," Laliberte said from the International Space Station, where he has spent the past week after paying 35ドル million to fly on a Russian spacecraft and become the world's seventh space tourist.

Marge Simpson makes cover of Playboy LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – "D'oh!" doesn't even start to cover it. Marge Simpson -- the blue beehived matriarch of America's most loved dysfunctional family - is Playboy magazine's November cover, the magazine said on Friday.
Simpson, tastefully concealing her assets behind a signature Playboy Bunny chair, is the first cartoon character ever to front the glossy adult magazine, joining the ranks of sex symbols like Marilyn Monroe and Cindy Crawford...

Labels: stuff2

Some reading:

Ghost Writers- Wall st. Journal, oct 2

A new wave of posthumous books by iconic authors is stirring debate over how publishers should handle fragmentary literary remains. Works by Vladimir Nabokov, William Styron, Graham Greene, Carl Jung and Kurt Vonnegut will hit bookstores this fall. Ralph Ellison and the late thriller writer Donald E. Westlake have posthumous novels due out in 2010.
The posthumous works may generate as much controversy as enthusiasm. Many are incomplete or appear in multiple drafts, raising thorny questions about author intent. Others, dug up from the archives of authors' early and less accomplished work, could be branded disappointing footnotes to otherwise lustrous literary legacies...
Vladimir Nabokov instructed his family to burn his final novel, "The Original of Laura," after his death. He had sketched out the novel on 138 index cards, a process he used to write "Lolita" and other works. Nobody, not even Mr. Nabokov's son and literary executor, Dmitri Nabokov, knows the exact order the author intended for the cards.

Why would you burn your life's work?-BBC News mag-oct 5

Along with David Bailey and Terence Donovan, Brian Duffy took many iconic images of the 1960s. Then, one day, he decided to set fire to his life's work.
Negatives don't burn quite as well as you might imagine.
If they did, Brian Duffy would have seen his life's work consumed by the flames. As it was, whole sections - but not all - of his images chronicling the 1960s and 1970s were lost.

The Job of the book editor- Daniel Menaker-Review,Barnes and Noble.com-sept14

Genuine literary discernment is often a liability in editors.

Review coverage means far less than it used to --when, for example, a front-page review in the New York Times Book Review usually guaranteed a certain level of recognition and sales.

Many books that do show a profit show a profit so small that it only minimally darkens a company's red ink.

Usually, writers, like anyone else who performs in public and desires wide recognition, no matter how successful they become, have an unslakeable thirst for attention and approval -- in my opinion (and, I'm embarrassed to say, in my own case) usually left over from some early-childhood deficit or perception of deficit in the attention-and-approval department.

Labels: stuff2, the editor's job

A couple of quotations:

Alexander McCall Smith:

"Stories have an effect in this world. They are part of our moral conversation as a society. They weigh in; they change the world because they become part of our cultural history. There never was an Anna Karenina or a Madame Bovary, even if there might have been models, but what happened to these characters has become part of the historical experience ofwomen."

Robert Young quoting Paul Theroux on the Comics Journal forum:

"They appeared in multi-issue sequences, like Victorian magazines Household Worlds or All The Year Round, which printed David Copperfield in installments over many months. Nana was one of these--not the Zola novel but thirty-five issues of a Japanese cartoon character and her picaresque and often sexual adventures. Other narratives concerned tough guys, schoolkids, gang-bangers, mobsters, adventurers, sports, fashion, motor racing, and of course hard-core porno--rape, strangulation, abduction. Even with declining sales, from a peak of 5ドル billion a year, graphic novels in some form are probably the future of popular literature. --increasingly they are being downloaded to cell phones. Purely pictorial pleasure, undemanding, without an idea or a challenge, yet obviously stimulating, a sugar high like junk food, another softener of the brain; they spell the end of the traditional novel, perhaps the end of writing itself."

Labels: stuff2

Today's reading:

Internet addiction center opens in US

FALL CITY, Wash. (AP) - Ben Alexander spent nearly every waking minute playing the video game "World of Warcraft." As a result, he flunked out of the University of Iowa.
Alexander, 19, needed help to break an addiction he calls as destructive as alcohol or drugs. He found it in this suburb of high-tech Seattle, where what claims to be the first residential treatment center for Internet addiction in the United States just opened its doors.

Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars
By Geoffrey Nunberg

For example the BISAC Juvenile Nonfiction subject heading has almost 300 subheadings, like New Baby, Skateboarding, and Deer, Moose, and Caribou. By contrast the Poetry subject heading has just 20 subheadings. That means that Bambi and Bullwinkle get a full shelf to themselves, while Leopardi, Schiller, and Verlaine have to scrunch together in the single subheading reserved for Poetry/Continental European. In short, Google has taken a group of the world's great research collections and returned them in the form of a suburban-mall bookstore.

(links thanks to that widely read scholar, my pal Bob Morales)

Labels: stuff2

i'm working on a painted cover for a book reprinting a couple of long continuities from an old 60's/'70s daily strip. It was another era, I'm thinking to myself, while simultaneously trying to finish a long post on certain peculiarities of my own era in my medium of choice. But I just can't make it come to an uplifting conclusion, so let's grab a couple of news items and procrastinate. The first is just in from my pal Mick Evans:

Shaun Tan's a winner with weird tales from the suburbs

A WRITER-ILLUSTRATOR whose books demolish both genre and age distinctions has received the highest honour from the Children's Book Council of Australia.
Shaun Tan's Tales from Outer Suburbia was named Book of the Year for Older Readers at a ceremony yesterday at Sea World on Queensland's Gold Coast.

Interestingly the report is written by a person who seemed to evince a disdain for both the medium of comics and Shaun Tan a couple of years back. (update: Mick adds that he is on page 5 of the actual newspaper rather than hidden in the Arts section).
In other news:
Woman sues zoo over splashing dolphins

Officials "recklessly and willfully trained and encouraged the dolphins to throw water at the spectators in the stands, making the floor wet and slippery," but failed to post warning signs or lay down protective mats or strips, the suit said, according to the reports.

Labels: stuff2

i have just finished working my way through all five seasons of the utterly marvellous Boston Legal, and something has now gone out of my life because there will never be a new episode to sit down to in the evening. I think it may very well be my favourite tv show of all time. My Talisker that Hayley Campbell sent has also run out coincidentally at the same time. I have nothing to say here today.

Let me just clear out my drafts folder:

Brock Clarke on MURIEL SPARK AND THE CASE FOR RUTHLESS AUTHORIAL MANIPULATION

For another, it teaches us that, in writing such a self-conscious book, one must constantly make sure that the novel is leading us toward something beyond its own artifice.

In other news:

LONDON (Reuters) – Visitors to London always have to be on the look out for pickpockets, but now there's another, more positive phenomenon on the loose -- putpockets.
Aware that people are suffering in the economic crisis, 20 former pickpockets have turned over a new leaf and are now trawling London's tourist sites slipping money back into unsuspecting pockets.
Anything from 5 pounds to 20 pound notes is being surreptitiously deposited in unguarded pockets or open handbags in Trafalgar Square, Covent Garden and other busy spots.

There's even a little picture in this here drafts folder. I can no longer remember what i intended to do with it or even whether I've already posted it.


Which reminds me, I noticed recently there's now a band named The Eyeball Kid. I bet mine goes back before any of them were born.

Eyeball Kid is a powerhouse teen band that just won the 14th annual WBCN-Berklee College of Music Battle of the High School Bands competition, beating 100 others for the prize.(24 April 2008)

Labels: Eyeball Kid, stuff2

a couple of observations following upon previous posts ( sun 9 aug, weds 5 aug).

Mike Sacks' Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers had a few leftover exclusions that have been showing at McSweeney's. I quoted from the one with Dan Clowes a few days back. Now I'm reading the one with Roz Chast (part1, part 2). My question is: If he's left out the funniest cartoonist of my generation, who on earth is included?

What was it about Addams's cartoons that appealed to a 9-year-old?
For one thing, I "got" them. I couldn't relate to some of the other New Yorker cartoons, like the ones in which grown-ups said witty things to each other at a cocktail party. That just didn't make any sense to me; I had no idea what a cocktail party was, really.

But with Addams, I understood the jokes. It was sick humor − very black. They were funny to me. Plus, there were kids in them! A few of his cartoons I've never forgotten. One had an entire family pouring boiling oil onto a group of holiday carolers. In another one, the Uncle Fester character is waving to the car behind him to pass, even though he knows an oncoming truck is approaching. Or the cartoon where Uncle Fester is grinning as he watches a movie, while everyone else sobs. So many great ones! Very transgressive.

Wolcott Gibbs, the New Yorker writer, once wrote that Addams's work was a denial of all of the spiritual and physical evolution in the human race. Maybe I related to that.

...I feel that on my deathbed, which is something I hope to eventually have, I'll probably look back and wish that I didn't always look on the dark side of everything. But how can you not? You could die at any time, for any reason. You're walking under an air conditioner, and kaboom! My parents actually know someone who was killed by a falling flowerpot. But we have to kind of go along and put one foot in front of the other and pretend that we don't know that everything could take a serious turn for the worse in the next second.

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On the problem with Hollywood movies being mostly that they are intended to be taken literally, my post was followed by a debate up the pub with my pal mr Duds, who often pops up in the comments here. I posited that The Village (2004) is my idea of a good Hollywood movie that has a lot going on above the literal level. I had forgotten that you can't mention this movie without starting an argument. The wikipedia page sums up the positions:

a) The movie received mostly negative reviews. Roger Ebert gave the film one star and wrote: "The Village is a colossal miscalculation, a movie based on a premise that cannot support it, a premise so transparent it would be laughable were the movie not so deadly solemn ... To call the ending an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes.

b) Philip Horne of The Daily Telegraph in a later review noted "this exquisitely crafted allegory of American soul-searching seems to have been widely misunderstood".

I watched the movie five times when i first came across it on a long flight and I'm with the second chap.
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In other news:

SYDNEY (Reuters) - A Dutchman and his grandson boarded a flight to Sydney, looking forward to visiting sunny Australia, but ended up in a much chillier Sydney -- in Nova Scotia, Canada.
Joannes Rutten, 71, and his 15-year-old grandson Nick booked the trip through a Dutch travel agency with plans to visit family living in Wollongong and Tallong, south of Sydney, according to local newspaper the Illawarra Mercury.
They set out from Amsterdam's Schiphol airport with Air Canada on Saturday but instead of arriving to views of the Sydney Harbor Bridge and Opera House, they touched down at Sydney in Cape Breton Island, off Canada's north east coast -

Labels: stuff2

thomas Pynchon's new novel is out. Sean Rogers in The Walrus looks at references to comics in Pynchon and references to Pynchon in comics.

In his new novel, Inherent Vice, released last week, there’s a part where Thomas Pynchon has a character say, "I am aware of the Freak Brothers’ dictum that dope will get you through times of no money better than vice versa...." Later, another says, "Listen, I came up in Temecula, which is Krazy Kat Kountry, where you always root for Ignatz and not Offisa Pup." Now, I haven’t finished the book just yet, but still I got to thinking about Pynchon and comics.
Ever attuned to the lower frequencies of American culture, the wavelengths where rock and roll and monster movies and The Tube all play out, Pynchon is an author who can ably salt away a few references to comics, too, throughout his works.

Rogers even uses my drawing of Alan Moore intoning Pynchon's name, from How to be an Artist

Speaking of sea-dwelling creatures, John Coulthart is reading Moby Dick and has reached chapter 55 wherein Melville looks back at ancient depictions of the whale and describes their grotesque inaccuracies. "Now, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to be the whale’s, is to be found in the famous cavern-pagoda of Elephants, in India..." John attempts to find some of them in old engravings and illustrations. Here is my own favourite old whale. It's from Punch, either 1849 or 1850 (i have the books but today i don't have the time), and almost exactly contemporary with Moby Dick, drawn by Richard Doyle. A whale had beached at Margate and the Duke of Wellington was arguing with the locals over ownership of the carcass. The noble custom of putting the beast back in the water had not yet been invented.


Speaking of Wellington, in a town named after him:

WELLINGTON (Reuters) – An extremely drunk, naked man lost his way at a New Zealand hotel and ended up sleeping in the wrong room, forcing its female occupant to hide in the bathroom, local media reported.
The 29 year-old Australian man had gone back to the hotel with a woman, but got up in the night and wandered into a bedroom where a couple were sleeping.
"He was a bit surprised that there were two people in his room and he was butt naked," Sergeant Steve told the Southland Times...

Labels: John Coulthart, stuff2

steve Holland's obit for John Ryan quotes the man himself:

"I'm a lucky man, because I've managed to earn a living by doing what I love: drawing and painting every day! And I've been supported by my wonderful wife, children and grandchildren, who've helped keep Pugwash afloat, sailing the high seas for 57 years! No matter how many other characters I create, I always seem to come back to the Captain. Pugwash has two qualities which I believe are present in all of us to some degree: Cowardice and Greed. It is the conflict between these opposing emotions which make the stories work. It may be that the Captain is popular because we all have something in common with him. What would YOU do if you saw a delicious toffee on the nose of a crocodile"

Steve Bissette cracks me up:

As a lad, I couldn’t get past the ‘tamping rod through the skull’ trauma, and for years carried the manufactured image of one Phineas Gage having to live out his life with said rod still fixed in his face and brainpan. I reckoned (as youthful men do) that it must have been carefully, tenderly sawed off top and bottom, leaving only the unremoveable portion of the bar buried cheek-to-upper-forehead forever in his head, and pondered many a night how heavy such a head would lie upon a pillow, or how easily he might have broken his neck thereafter merely by sneezing, or crueller still, by nodding off in church, as young men must and do from time to time."

Leonard Pierce at the AV Club reccommends From Hell as a first read comic or graphic novel

I'm waiting for mine in the mail

Labels: stuff2

NEW YORK - Marilyn French, the writer and feminist whose novel The Women's Room sold more than 20 million copies and transformed her into a leading figure in the women's movement, has died at 79.
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From the blog 'A Journey round my skull', Poets ranked by beard weight: "Poets Ranked by Beard Weight is a classic of Edwardian esoterica, a privately printed leaflet offered by subscription to the informed man of fashion and as a divertissement au courant for reading bins and cocktail tables of parlor cars and libraries and smoking lounges of gentlemen's clubs."
(link via Dr jon)
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Grizzly bear is best man at wedding
"Casey Anderson, a modern-day Grizzly Adams, picked a half-ton bear to be best man at his wedding to Hollywood actress, Missi Pyle."
(link from Wayne Beamer, whom I once drew as a snoring grizzly bear)

Labels: stuff2

"An 18-year-old has secretly painted a 60ft drawing of a phallus on the roof of his parents' 1ドルmillion mansion in Berkshire. It was there for a year before his parents found out. They say he'll have to scrub it off when he gets back from travelling." (with ariel photo. thanks to Ben Smith in comments)

Labels: stuff2

i've been so lost in my own head for a few days that i seem to have missed all the world's important news.
Word in this morning's tv news: that really was fecal matter in the ice cream. We'll have to wait for the DNA tests to find out whether it was 'bullshit, monkeyshit or the well known human variety', to quote Henry Miller.
My pal White alerted me to that one. he tells me they went to the trouble of freezing the poo before burying it in the ice cream 'It was a proper job' he says.
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meanwhile:
"So for a "scandal" of such alleged magnitude, it's been a slow burn. The Radio 2 broadcast in which Brand and Wossy insulted that popular old trouper, Andrew Sachs – since playing Manuel in Fawlty Towers the 78-year-old actor has basked in beatified status – went out on October 18. It took a week to go viral, a Jurassic unit of time by modern media standards - when any mega-scandal less dramatic than murdering a baby on Blue Peter ("here's one I chopped up earlier") has usually come and gone in 48 hours. Yet here it is, on all our front pages today. Even Piers Morgan, a journalist synonymous with moronic behaviour for many of us, has joined the pompous chorus of outrage in the Daily Mail, widely echoed elsewhere..."

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And in the land of the loonies, where if a kid is given a comic book with willies in it there will be a public outrage, an eight year old kid gets to a have go in a shooting range with an uzi and accidentally kills himself:
"Why is an 8-year old child allowed into a gun show in the first place? Why is a little boy encouraged and allowed to test-shoot an Uzi sub-machine gun, or any gun for that matter? Shouldn't there be an age requirement to get into a place that is full of loaded guns? Though I don't presume to question the right of qualified adults to own a gun..."

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On more pleasant matters: while perusing Paul Gravett's site: "Ability to draw is not a requirement at Arvon, and, as graphic novelist Ben Katchor has found teaching at Parsons in New York, it may even be a hindrance. Katchor finds that his "writing students have the hand of a child coupled with the mind of an adult. With no facile conventions to fall back on, everything they draw must be invented. Many art students are trapped by their drawing habits and have to overcome an entire psychopathology of commercial art techniques and style to find their autographic voice."

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I've just noticed wee hayley campbell's been writing the blog for Gosh's comic store in London for the last month: "A big thank you to everyone who came along to the Jill Thompson signing on Saturday! A lovely time was had by all and Jill signed for well over the two hours, providing amazing and beautiful sketches for all in attendance while they told her all about sherbet lemons, Yorkshire pudding, and the Lewes bonfire night. Or maybe that was just me."

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thought for the day: "Do you want to trace your family tree? Run for office."- Patricia H. Vance.

Labels: stuff2

passing the law courts today I noticed that somebody has left a half pound bag of sugar in the scales of Themis.

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Paul Newman, a Magnetic Titan of Hollywood, Is Dead at 83- September 27, 2008
Paul Newman, one of the last of the great 20th-century movie stars, died Friday at his home in Westport, Conn. He was 83.
If Marlon Brando and James Dean defined the defiant American male as a sullen rebel, Paul Newman recreated him as a likable renegade, a strikingly handsome figure of animal high spirits and blue-eyed candor whose magnetism was almost impossible to resist, whether the character was Hud, Cool Hand Luke or Butch Cassidy.

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Make your own Jackson Pollock online
(press any key, move your mouse)

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The Geek Curmudgeon wants a Taboo retrospective in book form, and Steve Bissette responds to explain why it's unlikely to happen.

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Retronomatopeia:

Labels: stuff2

Robert Rauschenberg, Titan of American Art, Is Dead at 82 (NY Times- May 13)

"The irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died Monday night. He was 82. He died of heart failure, said Arne Glimcher, chairman of PaceWildenstein, the artist's gallery in Manhattan.
Mr. Rauschenberg’s work gave new meaning to sculpture. "Canyon," (left, lifted from his Wikipedia entry) for instance, consisted of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas. "Monogram" was a stuffed Angora goat girdled by a tire atop a painted panel. "Bed" entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint, as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. They all became icons of postwar modernism."

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and in stupider news, (All via wee hayley campbell):
Furtive Venice snapper arrested

"A man who allegedly photographed more than 3,000 women's bottoms as they toured Venice has been arrested. The man was stopped after police became suspicious of a large bag he was carrying as he followed women through St Mark's Square...
Police have refused to name him but Mario Marina of Venice police said he is married with two young children and has a professional job in the nearby town of Padua.
He might have some explaining to do when he gets home."

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What did you do on your last day at school?
Pupils sent home after turf prank.

"The entire sixth year of a school was sent home on their last day after pupils turfed over the floor of their common room. Teachers at Banchory Academy took the step after it was discovered some pupils had been drinking."

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Aussie straps in beer, not child

"A car driver in Australia has been fined for strapping down his beer rather than his young child. Police said they were "shocked and appalled" when they pulled over the car south of Alice Springs in Australia's Northern Territory.

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This American Life. Four and a half minute Chris Ware animation.

Labels: art (2), stuff2

links:
Lesbos islanders dispute gay name- BBC News- 1 May 2008

Campaigners on the Greek island of Lesbos are to go to court in an attempt to stop a gay rights organisation from using the term "lesbian". The islanders say that if they are successful they may then start to fight the word lesbian internationally. The issue boils down to who has the right to call themselves Lesbians. Is it gay women, or the 100,000 people living on Greece's third biggest island - plus another 250,000 expatriates who originate from Lesbos?
The man spearheading the case, publisher Dimitris Lambrou, claims that international dominance of the word in its sexual context violates the human rights of the islanders, and disgraces them around the world.

I'm not certain that his next bit is relevant to the argument, but it is certainly relevant to the theme of my blog, being the fate of the artist, and the posthumous fate of his or her name, or in this case the name of her place of origin:

The term lesbian originated from the poet Sappho, who was a native of Lesbos. (and she) expressed her love of other women in poetry written during the 7th Century BC. ... new historical research has discovered that Sappho had a family, and committed suicide for the love of a man.

Meanwhile: vagina crockery

(links via wee hayley campbell)

Labels: stuff2

humphrey Lyttelton delivers swansong with giant kazoo band- Sunday Times - April 27, 2008

Humphrey Lyttelton, the jazz trumpeter who became doyen of the double entendre as chairman of the quiz show I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, is to make a bid from beyond the grave to enter the record books as leader of the world’s biggest kazoo band. Lyttelton, who died on Friday aged 86 after heart surgery, equipped every member of the 3,550-strong audience with a kazoo at a live version of the radio programme earlier this month at the Hammersmith Apollo in London and encouraged them to hum into the simple instrument.

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(via Heidi)

The Project has very simple parameters and it basically works like this: Men who are open to being given a swift kick in the balls need do nothing. Women will simply assume that any man not clearly indicating his position vis-a-vis being kicked in the balls with an approved OSSKBP badge or pin is open to being kicked in the balls, as any progressive, free-thinking, feminist man ought to be, by any woman who wishes to do so.
However, we also recognize and affirm that not all men will be so willing to serve. Therefore the OSSKBP provides two other options.
1. Men who would like to be asked for permission before a woman administers one or more swift kicks to their balls shall wear the offical OSSKBP "Ask First Pin" at all times...

Labels: music1, stuff2

your monitor is dirty. To clean it, click here.

Labels: stuff2

a few links:
In comments below, Barnaby Richards, whose work I mentioned here, tells me to check out his webcomic, Radbod, updated weekly


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Oregon man thinks his black Labrador is an impostor

LAKE OSWEGO, Ore. (AP) - Ken Griggs likes his new dog, but he preferred the old one. Then again, it might be the same dog. In a possible case of mistaken identity, Griggs said the black Labrador named Callie that he left at a Dundee kennel before spring break was not the same dog he picked up a week later.
"It's a sweet dog," Griggs said of the impostor living at his Lake Oswego house. "It's tough because now we've had the dog for 10-plus days, and the kids, especially the younger ones, start to get attached to the dog. I like it, but I want mine."

via Bob Morales, an old one just found by hayley campbell:
Hulk doll's monster willy

SHOCKED six-year-old Leah Lowland checked out a mystery bulge on her Incredible Hulk doll ? and uncovered a giant green WILLY. Curious Leah noticed a lump after winning the monster at a seaside fair. And when she peeled off the green comic-book character’s ripped purple shorts, she found the two-inch manhood beneath them.
"Considering the doll is only 12-inches tall it’s amazing how big his willy is.
"And it’s definitely not an extra piece of material left on by mistake."

Labels: stuff1, stuff2