Christmas in Texas is full of single panel cartoons like his one.
Comfort and joy
In the December 23 entry from Tape For The Turn of the Year, A.R. Ammons writes, “release us from mental / prisons / into the actual / fact, the mere / occurrence—the touched, tasted, heard, seen.” For many, Christmas is a spiritual time, but it’s also a sensual time, of food, music, lights. It’s a mistake, I think, to elevate one over the other. The spirit and the senses are not disconnected. They are a two-way street.
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
This was a fun one. The top half is from an article about an opera singer. The bottom half is about the box office (“Transporter,” “Milk,” etc.).
Merry Christmas! Hope everybody gets what they want.
UPDATE: the poem as originally posted didn’t make any sense. I’ve updated it!
ON THE CHRISTMAS LEGEND
If we focus on Joseph, as Matthew does, and make this a legend of salvation, then Joseph becomes the second Adam. He is given a second chance, as we all are, constantly, a chance to reenact a life drama that we have wretchedly botched at least once before, and to do it right this time.
—Stephen Mitchell
Happy Christmas to everyone: here’s Stephen Mitchell from his book, The Gospel According to Jesus, on the Christmas Legend, Joseph, and the true meaning of Christmas: forgiveness.
Today I hope you’ll forgive yourself, and then forgive those who have wronged you.
Peace on earth!
WHEN THE DUST FINALLY SETTLED
After only a few weeks, I’ve decided to shut down the Newspaper Blackout Poems blog. With work, three different comics I’m working on, and doing my own poems, I just don’t have time for any other project. (I’ll still be posting some on this site now and then.) Thanks to everyone who sent me their poems, and I hope that those interested will go on doing their own.
GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS PAST
“Maybe I’m even extremely biased but, on my honor, there is something to this place! And this something can be sensed by a person with mettle who agrees that life is sad, monotonous — this is all very true — but still, nevertheless and despite everything it is exceedingly, exceedingly interesting.”
—Isaac Babel, “Odessa,” quoted in Joann Sfar’s Klezmer
Woke up this morning and finished “A Christmas Carol” at the kitchen table. Yesterday, I doodled my own ghosts of Christmas past on the living room floor with the help of Meg’s set of markers. As Scrooge says,
“I know nothing! I’m quite a baby….I will live in the past, the present, and the future!”
WILLIAM BLAKE AND UNCLE SCROOGE, HAGGLING OVER MONEY
This is an engraving by William Blake called “The Laocoon as Jehovah with Satan and Adam.” It was done around 1820, but to me, it looks like it could be a graphic for yesterday’s New York Times magazine.
The graffitti scrawl on this is really nutty: Blake is spouting off a manifesto about Christianity and art:
A Poet a Painter a Musician an Architect, the Man
Or Woman who is not one of these is not a Christian
You must leave Fathers & Mothers & Houses & Lands if they stand in the way of Art
A little extreme for my tastes. I think that pretty much all that stuff is more important than art. (That’s probably why nobody will be reading my comics in 200 years…) And what about weddings? He goes on to say, “For every Pleasure Money Is Useless.” Tell that to the cake baker!
Maybe it’s the huge bags of currency we’re throwing into the celebration fire for this wedding, maybe it’s the Christmas season, or maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been reading Dickens’ Christmas Carol in bed, but I’ve been thinking about money.
Jesus said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God!” (Luke 18:24) I guess that means that you should give everything away. Eat, drink, and be merry. Ebenezer’s life sure got better when he started burning through his savings…
And what about charity? What is our motivation for giving to others in need? It’s not necessarily the promise of getting into heaven. Dig this excerpt from an Nytimes article by Peter Singer, “What Should a Billionaire Give — and What Should You?”
Interestingly, neither [Bill] Gates nor [Warren] Buffett seems motivated by the possibility of being rewarded in heaven for his good deeds on earth. Gates told a Time interviewer, “There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning?? than going to church. Put them together with Andrew Carnegie, famous for his freethinking, and three of the four greatest American philanthropists have been atheists or agnostics. (The exception is John D. Rockefeller.) In a country in which 96 percent of the population say they believe in a supreme being, that’s a striking fact.
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Merry Christmas.