They were turned off because a) I rarely comment on other people’s blogs, and b) I figured most people read this in an RSS feed, and therefore don’t see the comment form in the first place. But I had a dream last night (seriously now) (you were in it, so pay attention) where a certain person took me to task for being too cool for comment school. So I have taken my own advice. This subconscious stand-in also dismissed my writing as banalities dressed up as revelations, but there’s not much I can do about that. My mind may just be a dope dressed up to play professor.
Also I redesigned the site, sort of. Rearranged, really. Just wanted it to be open and clean. Again, I assume most people browse the internet like I do, namely having websites delivered to them in Google Reader stripped of the page design, but that’s probably just solipsism.
Have moved from Black Jack to Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life. A nice jump, seeing as how Black Jack’s Osamu Tezuka figures prominently in Tatsumi’s autobiographical work.
—
—
Approaching manga anew is daunting. There’s just too much to encounter all at once. Though we can of course reframe that terror as thrill, that same giddy high offered to us by the library. Too much content! The internet promises the same, but hides everything out of sight, searched and revealed one chunk at a time.
It’s both pleasant and uncomfortable coming across people who do work that I’m sympathetic to — that I can imagine myself doing, in other words, as compared to the many people who do work that I merely like.
Purchased a fountain pen the other day. I should note here that I almost wrote “purchased my first fountain pen”, but killed it mid-sentence. Trying to watch out for unwitting tendencies towards object fetishization. But can I help it? My predictable taste, the favored scotch & the ideal camera & the correct pen. The correct pen! Come on.
But seriously, this pen is fantastic. It’s durable and it’s cheap, relatively speaking. And even if it wasn’t cheap all is forgiven, your taste is your taste and it’s yours because you can’t help it. If you could help it, it’d be an affectation.
But who’s to say I can’t help my taste in affectations?
This reminds me, somehow, of a conversation with Carl a while back. I had given him a Paolo Conte track.
“What’s he saying?”
I don’t know, I don’t speak Italian.
“How can you listen to it if you don’t know what it means?”
My god, so easily, probably easier still than if I knew the lyrics.
A friend once told me about translating a few Beatles songs into Italian for some Romans he knew. They were horrified. That was what they’d been listening to? With lyrics so terrible?
Today, a knock on the studio door: The King Cake has come by messenger, straight from New Orleans!
The King Cake is a moderately tasty sugarfeast, a stomach-puncher of a cake, sopped in cinnamon flavor and frosting. It is a traditional Mardi Gras cake, which means that it comes pre-packed with nudity-inducing beads, and a big plastic cup for your booze.
Inside the King Cake, there is a plastic baby. Does the baby symbolize the new year? Unwanted pregnancies? The baby Jesus? Nobody knows! (Baby Jesus.)
There’s a certain pleasure to be found in descriptions of unappealing things — summaries of sub-par romantic comedies, back-of-the-box praise for microwave dinners, copy written in SkyMall catalogs. All the more so when poorly written and full of spoilers. From an advertisement for a print-on-demand book, seen on the back cover of the London Review of Books:
ESCAPE FROM PARADISE
Walter F. Wild, Ph.D.
304 Pages
An alluring fusion of fabulous characters, witty dialogue, and memorable scenes that will give you a unique experience.
Escape from Paradise is a blend of action and suspense ignited by a clash of values that erupts in a battle between two psychologists in Hawaii. Dr. Carter, a psychologist, so strives to transform Oahu into a community of love and equality that, to conceal illegal methods, he resorts to terror and murder. Patients seeking protection from Carter rouse psychologist Dr. Steadman to oppose him. While Steadman seeks to expose Carter and protest his patients, Carter tries to kill Steadman. After skirmishes on streets, beaches, underwater, and in jungles, action culminates at a meeting to honour Carter. But beyond this scene ,there are more that you need to know through this engrossing book.
Through this book, you will immerse into a colourful new world brimming with surprises and entertainment.
