“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC”
– Kurt Vonnegut, Man Without A Country
My favorite living writer is dead.
God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut.
“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC”
– Kurt Vonnegut, Man Without A Country
My favorite living writer is dead.
God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut.
A short one:
No, this poem isn’t about my wife. She isn’t old.
My buddy Don sent me this quote by Douglas Hofstadter from I Am a Strange Loop, which makes me want to read it:
“In the end, what is the difference between actual, personal memories and pseudo-memories? Very little. I recall certain episodes from the novel or the movie Catcher in the Rye or the movie David and Lisa as if they had happened to me – and if they didn’t, so what? They are as clear as if they had. The same can be said of many episodes from other works of art. They are parts of my emotional library, stored in dormancy, waiting for the appropriate trigger to come along and snap them to life, just as my “genuine” memories are waiting. There is no absolute and fundamental distinction between what I recall from having lived through it myself and what I recall from others’ tales. And as time passes and the sharpness of one’s memories (and pseudo-memories) fades, the distinction grows ever blurrier.”
A few illustrations from the wonderful Olivier Kugler were featured in the NYTimes Book Review this Sunday. Dig also his trip to Cuba that he drew for the Guardian. Really, really, really great stuff.
“I remember great pleasure in cutting out Andy Cap and Flo with manicure scissors, and then cutting little slits in a magazine picture of a big bowl of Beef-a-Roni, and fitting Andy and Flo into them so it looked like they were rising out of the Beef-a-Roni. I remember laughing my head off at that one. I still love collage and I’ve always turned to it when I get stuck writing or drawing.”
—Lynda Barry
Today, obviously, I got stuck.
Supposedly, Chris Ware loved this particular Gasoline Alley strip by Frank King so much that he tore the page out of the Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics book and had it mounted on the wall of his studio. Given my fondness of the “style of the old woodcut pictures,” I had to rip it off, myself.
I got this great tear sheet scan from Roger Clark’s fantastic archive of annual Gasoline Alley “autumn walk” Sunday pages.
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