pinky, stinky and me
Jul. 19th, 2002 09:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
squamousWhat a lazy day. Since I was working at home today, I elected to sleep almost up til "starting time". The commute from my bed to my desk is a fine commute. I had various tasks lined up for today... and I did work on them... and I did get stuff done... but I was definitely no ball of fire.
One thing I did do today was read two of the comics mentioned yesterday, Pinky & Stinky and Epileptic.
Pinky & Stinky is, and clearly aims to be, unabashedly cute. If I were still hanging out with my buddies Cooper and Eliot (ages 6 and 4 - they are back in Illinois unfortunately) I would most definitely read this book to them. It tells of two pig astronauts (they are actual pigs, no metaphor) who are en route to Pluto when they crash land on the moon and run afoul of the human astronauts who are mining water on the moon. The book kept a kid-friendly tone throughout.
Epileptic is a very different animal. There are some pictures from it here, if anyone is interested... sadly they are too small to tell you much.
This book really blew me away overall. The focus of the story is, per the title, on the struggle of the author's family with his older brother's epilepsy. They pursue a macrobiotic lifestyle in hopes of relieving the symptoms, and also dabble in spiritualism, and even consider scary experimental surgery. The author sees the epilepsy in the context of his family's struggles over the years - ordeals in times of war primarily - so there are many pages devoted to family history. The book really takes amazing advantage of the comics form, with epilepsy personified as a sort of sneering snake demon (shown as a steed, a burden, a member of the family and more), character sizes shifting from panel to panel, and a gamut of emotions and fantasies given form to stand alongside the story's characters. The art is nothing but flat black and white, yet somehow always decorous and dynamic.
I was thinking about it after my first read of the volume, and to me this seemed like really effective autobiography. Off the top of my head I would say it is akin to the work R. Crumb has done, where he plays out weird fantasies, or gives comic form to obsessive thoughts... this is deeper, more meditative stuff though. I like autobiography in comics... I really love work where one person writes and illustrates everything, so autobiography is a natural for that. I am sure some of the earliest examples of autobiography that I saw would've been Harvey Pekar's legendary American Splendor, which I encountered back in the late 80s. Pekar's work is definitely worth a look, especially if you consider it from the standpoint of how do you make a "talking heads" story visually interesting (hint: have R. Crumb illustrate it). I tend to read for escapism or wild stories and cool ideas though, and Pekar definitely seemed to want to push his readers back into their daily lives, not help them escape from life. Later I saw Chester Brown's rather matter of fact, but very affecting, stories of his own childhood... Joe Matt's perverse tell-alls that come across almost like sociological experiments... Joe Sacco's fine first-person journalist pieces... other stuff I am sure I am forgetting. A Child's Life by Phoebe Gloeckner was the last really striking comics autobio that I read.
Epileptic layers escapist fantasies across ordinary life, twining childhood fantasies with the awful realities of disease. People around the family seem to think Jean-Christophe, the epileptic, should be institutionalized. The macrobiotic communities and gurus the family experiences are depicted pretty unsparingly. The book also features a depiction of spiritualism that I felt was, well, pretty much brilliant. I can be hyperbolic here right? Also my made up grammar is OK I hope. But really though, the sequences dealing with spiritualism are great. The story is heavy, sad, and this is only volume 1. For me the saddest, most "real" moment comes when Jean-Christophe is taken out of high school due to his seizures... "His illness has taken over. He is now handicapped, destined to live in a handicapped universe. This may be the moment when he gives up the idea of ever getting well." I can only give you the text here, sadly, but the accompanying illustrations reflect wonderfully on the text... I almost teared up. I recommend the book highly. Makes me wish I could read French so that I could check out other material by the same cartoonist, his work is amazing. And this is very much the sort of book that one might want to push onto others.
There wasn't much to my day other than this, although I continue to have some delightful online chats (including Blake lecturing me on buying American... I think he has won this argument with me, but I am sure Mike will counter-attack me on it next week). The Internet saves me from being an utter hermit I guess. I think tomorrow I should take a walk, make sure the natives up here know who they are dealing with. Not sure how hot it will be though. Probably having lunch with Jim again, that will be cool.
At work we have one more interview scheduled for Monday, then we have to make some decisions. It's amazing to me how huge this decision is. I don't know if we will succeed based on this hiring decision, but we could most definitely fail because of it. I am concerned that with programmers there is a culture that is used to brief (~ six month) undertakings that very often fizzle out. Probably I am wrong, but I think that means they are more casual towards things, more willing to just say, "Oh, sure I can code this thing, I'll give you world peace, no problem," just figuring it will wreck anyway, and then they can move on to something else once the market recovers. Yes, I am a paranoid and suspicious person.
Tarantula is on AMC tonight. I don't think this is the giant spider movie that used to really flip me out when I was a kid, that one had an image of the giant spider walking by outside a window... somehow that has stayed with me... looking out the window and seeing this giant thing strolling along... in that movie I believe they tracked the spider to some cave and electrocuted it in its web. Good old science. To steal a line from my guru Homer Simpson, "the cause of - and solution to - all of life's problems". In giant monster movies, anyway.
One thing I did do today was read two of the comics mentioned yesterday, Pinky & Stinky and Epileptic.
Pinky & Stinky is, and clearly aims to be, unabashedly cute. If I were still hanging out with my buddies Cooper and Eliot (ages 6 and 4 - they are back in Illinois unfortunately) I would most definitely read this book to them. It tells of two pig astronauts (they are actual pigs, no metaphor) who are en route to Pluto when they crash land on the moon and run afoul of the human astronauts who are mining water on the moon. The book kept a kid-friendly tone throughout.
Epileptic is a very different animal. There are some pictures from it here, if anyone is interested... sadly they are too small to tell you much.
This book really blew me away overall. The focus of the story is, per the title, on the struggle of the author's family with his older brother's epilepsy. They pursue a macrobiotic lifestyle in hopes of relieving the symptoms, and also dabble in spiritualism, and even consider scary experimental surgery. The author sees the epilepsy in the context of his family's struggles over the years - ordeals in times of war primarily - so there are many pages devoted to family history. The book really takes amazing advantage of the comics form, with epilepsy personified as a sort of sneering snake demon (shown as a steed, a burden, a member of the family and more), character sizes shifting from panel to panel, and a gamut of emotions and fantasies given form to stand alongside the story's characters. The art is nothing but flat black and white, yet somehow always decorous and dynamic.
I was thinking about it after my first read of the volume, and to me this seemed like really effective autobiography. Off the top of my head I would say it is akin to the work R. Crumb has done, where he plays out weird fantasies, or gives comic form to obsessive thoughts... this is deeper, more meditative stuff though. I like autobiography in comics... I really love work where one person writes and illustrates everything, so autobiography is a natural for that. I am sure some of the earliest examples of autobiography that I saw would've been Harvey Pekar's legendary American Splendor, which I encountered back in the late 80s. Pekar's work is definitely worth a look, especially if you consider it from the standpoint of how do you make a "talking heads" story visually interesting (hint: have R. Crumb illustrate it). I tend to read for escapism or wild stories and cool ideas though, and Pekar definitely seemed to want to push his readers back into their daily lives, not help them escape from life. Later I saw Chester Brown's rather matter of fact, but very affecting, stories of his own childhood... Joe Matt's perverse tell-alls that come across almost like sociological experiments... Joe Sacco's fine first-person journalist pieces... other stuff I am sure I am forgetting. A Child's Life by Phoebe Gloeckner was the last really striking comics autobio that I read.
Epileptic layers escapist fantasies across ordinary life, twining childhood fantasies with the awful realities of disease. People around the family seem to think Jean-Christophe, the epileptic, should be institutionalized. The macrobiotic communities and gurus the family experiences are depicted pretty unsparingly. The book also features a depiction of spiritualism that I felt was, well, pretty much brilliant. I can be hyperbolic here right? Also my made up grammar is OK I hope. But really though, the sequences dealing with spiritualism are great. The story is heavy, sad, and this is only volume 1. For me the saddest, most "real" moment comes when Jean-Christophe is taken out of high school due to his seizures... "His illness has taken over. He is now handicapped, destined to live in a handicapped universe. This may be the moment when he gives up the idea of ever getting well." I can only give you the text here, sadly, but the accompanying illustrations reflect wonderfully on the text... I almost teared up. I recommend the book highly. Makes me wish I could read French so that I could check out other material by the same cartoonist, his work is amazing. And this is very much the sort of book that one might want to push onto others.
There wasn't much to my day other than this, although I continue to have some delightful online chats (including Blake lecturing me on buying American... I think he has won this argument with me, but I am sure Mike will counter-attack me on it next week). The Internet saves me from being an utter hermit I guess. I think tomorrow I should take a walk, make sure the natives up here know who they are dealing with. Not sure how hot it will be though. Probably having lunch with Jim again, that will be cool.
At work we have one more interview scheduled for Monday, then we have to make some decisions. It's amazing to me how huge this decision is. I don't know if we will succeed based on this hiring decision, but we could most definitely fail because of it. I am concerned that with programmers there is a culture that is used to brief (~ six month) undertakings that very often fizzle out. Probably I am wrong, but I think that means they are more casual towards things, more willing to just say, "Oh, sure I can code this thing, I'll give you world peace, no problem," just figuring it will wreck anyway, and then they can move on to something else once the market recovers. Yes, I am a paranoid and suspicious person.
Tarantula is on AMC tonight. I don't think this is the giant spider movie that used to really flip me out when I was a kid, that one had an image of the giant spider walking by outside a window... somehow that has stayed with me... looking out the window and seeing this giant thing strolling along... in that movie I believe they tracked the spider to some cave and electrocuted it in its web. Good old science. To steal a line from my guru Homer Simpson, "the cause of - and solution to - all of life's problems". In giant monster movies, anyway.
