'The Year of Living Biblically'… so far
I have started reading The Year of Living Biblically, by AJ Jacobs, this weekend. The book has transfixed me. It is probably because I have always been a bit drawn to more extreme spirituality. I never do it. Maybe I should? I can say this though, when I hear about a crazy spiritual practice (like reciting a long prayer at several different specific times per day, fastening some odd piece of metal around your bicep or making the sign of the cross every time you hear an ambulance or a police car), I don’t think: that’s so weird.
At last, reading my 'toread' list
One of the real beauties of the website Delicious.com is keeping track of things that I want to look at in more detail later. Delicious.com, for the uninitiated, is a site that lets you log links that you like. You can make little notes about them, but, more usefully, you can make little tags on all of your links, and if you want to find a bunch of related links, you can just type in your delicious address plus a little “/tagname” at the end, and a page will pop up with all the tags you’ve given that name.
Mournful, astounding
The Drawn! blog has some new works up by Pablo Auladell today. I had never come across this artist’s work myself. This is the beauty of the internet. You have so much more exposure to what’s good out there. I think these two drawings speak for themselves, so I’ll let them do their thing.
Wim Delvoye tattoos pigs
Am I too sensitive or is this totally fucked up? This guy is tattooing pigs. In fact, he’s also skinning them and tanning the skin and mounting it, tattoos intact, and/or stuffing the tattooed pigs. There’s no artist statement on his site, so I don’t know anything more about it, but it strikes me as unethical work. I’m guessing they either have to restrain the pigs or knock them out to do this.
Comics and books
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is coming out in comic book form. You know, I’ve never read the book. I listened to it. I listened to a recording of Bradbury, himself, reading it, which also included a bit of an account of how he wrote it. Never forgot it. I went and read Ecclesiastes right after it was over. So since my only experience with the book is a sort of adaptation, I am pretty open to this one.
Fanboys and the creations they love to be seen loving: reading the Prologue to 'Looking for Calvin & Hobbes'
Nevin Martell is a rock and roll writer. You can check out his list of past books in the link. He’s covered The Dave Matthews Band and Beck and other bands, and now he released the prologue of his new book. I just read it. Martell set out to write the biography of the strip as much as he’s trying to write the biography of its creator, Bill Watterson, an artist who has famously hidden himself from public view after creating one of the most memorable single creative works in living memory.
Revelations from the last few weeks
There’s a book coming out about writing a book about Bill Watterson. It doesn’t look like it’s so much going to be a book about Bill Watterson because you can’t really write about someone who hides all the source material about himself. But you can write a book about trying, and that seems almost good enough. The artist who created Calvin and Hobbes is famously reclusive and has not really permitted interviews nor released new work since he left comics in 1995.
Greatest artistic collaboration in history. Both of them.
When it comes to artistic collaboration, two works top them all. They are the single largest, longest running, most consistent and most evolved two works of artistic collaboration in history. You might be scratching your head if you randomly stumbled across this headline just now, wondering what I might be talking about, but there really is no question. If anyone reads this, they are going to decry what I’m saying here and call it crazy, but it’s absolutely true.
Grant Morrison's Story Fu
The Beat quotes Grant Morrison on his crazy-and-getting-crazier approach to storywriting style. When he puts it this way, I sort of dig it. Maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe it’s just spin. But I do. Here: I’ve always liked to leave resonant spaces, gaps and hints in stories, where readers can do their own work and find clues or insert their own wild and often brilliant theories. I’m often trying to create a kind of fuzzy quantum uncertainty or narrative equivalent of a Rorschach Blot Test effect, which invites interpretation.
Hypothesis of the Geek Population Constant
Most of the time, I’m a bit of a geek. It’s okay to say that after 30. Geeks are cool now, or something. Anyway, it’s been that way all my life, but (ever since college) not quite all the time. In fact, some groups I find myself in these days actually think I’m kind of a cool guy. Don’t laugh. It’s true though. Sorta cool. Sometimes. I only bring it up, because, as a pretty socially mobile guy, I am acutely aware of the fact that in a lot of other circles I am just as uncool as I was back in Middle School.